produced from images produced by core historical literature in agriculture (chla), cornell university) guano: a treatise of practical information for farmers; containing plain directions how to apply peruvian guano to the various crops and soils of america, with a brief synopsis of its history, locality, quantity, method of procuring, prospect of continued supply, and price; analysis of its composition, and value as a fertilizer, over all other manures. "if the experience of the last few years has taught us one thing more certainly than another, it is the unfailing excellence of guano for every kind of crop which requires manure." prepared and published by solon robinson, for messrs. f. barreda & brother, agents for the peruvian government at baltimore; and theodore w. riley, esq., their agent in new york. new york: . entered according to act of congress, in the year , by solon robinson, in the clerks office of the district court of the united states for the southern district of new york. introduction the rapidly increasing use of guano, in the united states, and the growing conviction upon the public mind, that it is the cheapest and best purchasable manure in the world, together with the fact of a great want of information among american farmers, as to the best mode of applying it to the soil, has induced the agents of the peruvian government for the sale of guano in the united states, to employ the author of this pamphlet to collect and publish such information. it is hoped the favorably and well known name of the author, as an agricultural writer and traveller, together with his extended opportunities of witnessing the application and effect of guano upon the various soils and climates of this country, will give this work such a character, as to induce every improving farmer, gardener, or horticulturist, in america to give it a careful perusal. the author believes it will be found to contain all and much more than its title imports, and be of great value to every person using or dealing in guano; as the analysis, not only of the pure article is given, but that of several specimens of adulterated samples, so as to enable the farmer to avoid being cheated by base counterfeits. the author will be much obliged to any gentleman who will furnish him for publication in future editions of this work, or in the columns of the agricultor, any details of experiments in the use of peruvian guano, which will be useful to the farmers of this country, as it is his desire, as well as the guano agents, to give them useful facts; not only to increase the sale, but the fertility of the land, and wealth of the owners. with assurances to my friends that i have no other interest in the increased consumption of guano, i am most sincerely and respectfully your old friend, solon robinson. _new york, october ._ a treatise on guano. peruvian guano--its uses and benefits. of all manures procurable by the american farmer, guano from the rainless islands of peru, is perhaps not only the most concentrated--the most economical to the purchaser--but by its composition, as we will show by analysis, the best adapted to all the crops cultivated in this country requiring manure. for wheat, especially, it is the one thing needful. the mineral constituents of cultivated plants, as will also be shown by analysis, are chiefly lime, magnesia, potash, soda, chlorine, sulphuric and phosphoric acid; all of which will be found in peruvian guano. nitrogen, the most valuable constituent of stable or compost manures, exists in great abundance in guano, in the exact condition required by plants to promote rapid vegetation. the concentration of all these valuable properties in the small bulk of guano, renders it particularly valuable to farms situated in districts unprovided with facilities of cheap transportation. in some hilly regions, it would be utterly impossible to make any ordinary manure pay for transportation. with guano the case is very different--one wagon will carry enough with a single pair of horses to dress or acres; while of stable manure it would require as many or more loads to each acre to produce the same effect. but this is not the greatest advantage in the use of this fertilizer; the first application puts the land in such condition, that judicious after cultivation renders it continuously fertile by its own action of productiveness and reproductiveness of wheat, clover and wheat, by turning in the clover of one year for the wheat of the next, and by returning the straw back to the ground where it grew, spread open the surface to shade the plants of clover and manure its roots, which in turn manure the corn or wheat. as a source of profit alone, we should recommend the continuous application of guano; knowing as we do, from our extensive means of observation, that no outlay of capital ever made by the farmer, is so sure and certain to bring him back good returns for his money, as when he invests it in this invaluable fertilizer for his impoverished soil. in proof of this, we shall give the reader of this little work a number of experiments made by some of the most improving farmers in virginia and other states. effects produced by the use of guano in virginia. in no other part of the world, perhaps, can the beneficial effects of guano be more plainly seen than in the tide-water region of virginia. in the counties of king george, westmoreland, richmond, northumberland, lancaster, in the northern neck, as the peninsula between the potomac and rappahanock is termed; thousands of acres of land so poor and worthless a few years ago, it was barely rated as property, are now annually producing beautiful crops of wheat, corn and clover, solely by the application of guano. in the meantime, the discovery of such an easy means of improving a worn out and barren soil, has increased the money value of land three or four hundred per cent. this is not all. heretofore, the only part of this district considered worth cultivation was the bottom land bordering the rivers and creeks; the forest land yielding scanty crops for two or three years after being cleared, scarcely paying for the labor, while its value was rated at from $ to $ per acre, and unsaleable at that. since the introduction of guano, it is found these forest lands, which are of a sandy, loamy character, and much more pleasant than the bottom lands to till, can be cultivated with equal or greater profit than the stiff lands upon the bottoms. the writer has seen repeatedly in the counties mentioned, luxuriant fields of wheat, corn and clover, while directly alongside of such crops, the ground was almost as bare of vegetation as the sea-shore sands, too poor, as the common expression is there, to bear poverty grass. and what produced this change? simply a dressing of lbs. of guano to the acre. dr. fairfax's experiments with guano. in april the writer was on the farm of dr. fairfax of king george county, who was one of the first, if not quite the first person in that part of the state who ever made use of this substance as a manure; and his wheat was then so large that a good sized dog was hidden from view in running through the field; while upon a neighboring piece of land of exactly the same quality, sowed at the same time, the ground scarcely looked green; in fact, it was remarked at the time by way of contrast to the one field hiding a dog, that the other would not hide a chicken--indeed, an egg might have been seen as far as though no wheat was growing upon the ground. both fields were just alike, both plowed and sowed alike, without manure, except lbs of peruvian guano upon one, and that sure to bring fifteen or twenty bushels to the acre, while the other would not exceed three bushels. one of his first trials was with the african, of which he applied lbs. to the acre upon acres, which would not produce three bushels of wheat to the acre, in its natural condition, but with this application, notwithstanding it was per cent. water, and, consequently, had lost much of it ammonia, he made an average of - / bushels to the acre on the whole field. upon another, he increased the usual average yield from to bushels, while, in his opinion, the permanent improvement of the land was of greater value than the increased yield of the first crop; for now clover will grow where none would grow before; another advantage arising from guano is, the wheat ripens so much earlier ( th of june) it escapes the rust, so apt to blight that which is late coming to maturity. he now sows wheat in the fore part of september, three pecks to the acre, after having previously plowed in lbs. of peruvian guano to the acre, and after the first harrowing sows the clover seed. the land is a yellow clay loam, uneven surface, very much worn; in fact, without the guano, and with all the manure that could be made upon the farm--for no straw no manure--not worth cultivating. dr. f. had been using guano three years, at the date of our visit, and thought his prospect good for a thousand bushels of wheat upon the same ground, which, without guano would not produce one hundred and fifty. mr. newton's experiments. the hon. willoughby newton, of westmoreland county, was one of the earliest and most successful experimenters in the use of guano in virginia. he owns large and productive farms on the potomac, but on account of the forest land being more healthy for a residence, he bought a tract of it for that purpose; not having any design of ever putting it into cultivation. in fact, it was so poor he could not. the manure of the farm, if it had not been wanted there, was several miles distant--too far to haul; and so the land lay an uncultivated, unprofitable barren waste around his fine mansion; but it did not lay so very long after he discovered the renovating power of guano. it is now annually covered with broad fields of wheat, from which he has realized upwards of twenty bushels to the acre; and the most luxuriant growths of clover upon which he can pasture any amount of stock he pleases, where three years previous a goat would have found difficulty in sustaining life. mr. newton's first experiment--what was then an experiment is now a certainty--was made with african guano. but we will give the account of his operations in his own straight-forward, easily understood, farmer-like language. "in the effect of _guano_, especially the peruvian, i have never been disappointed. i have used it now for four years, with entire satisfaction having each year been induced to enlarge my expenditure, until last year it reached eight hundred dollars, and for the crop of wheat this fall it exceeds one thousand. i have observed with astonishment its effect in numerous instance on the poor "forest lands" alluded to in a former part of this address. what the turnip and sheep husbandry have done for the light lands of great britain, the general use of guano promises to do for ours. lands a few years ago deemed entirely incapable of producing wheat, now produce the most luxuriant crops. from to bushels for one sowed, is the ordinary product on our poorest lands, from the application of lbs. of peruvian guano. i may remark, it is not usual, in eastern virginia, to sow more than a bushel of wheat to the acre, and that i deem amply sufficient. upon this subject i hope a few details may not be considered tedious or uninteresting. i applied last fall $ worth of guano, partly peruvian and partly patagonian, on a poor farm "in the forest," which cost a few years ago four dollars an acre, and reaped bushels of beautiful wheat from sowed. forty-six bushels were sowed on fallow, (both guano and wheat put in with the cultivator, followed by a heavy harrow,) and yielded bushels or over - / for one. a considerable part of this was dressed with patagonian guano, and was much inferior to the other portion. a lot on which bushels was sowed, and dressed with peruvian guano, was threshed separately, and yielded bushels, or over for one. the whole cost of the farm was $ , and i have good reason to expect with a favorable season from the crop now sowed and dressed with guano, a bushel of wheat for every dollar of the prime cost of the farm. many other instances of profit from the use of guano, equally striking have occurred among my neighbors and friends, but i confine myself to those stated, because having come under my immediate observation, i can vouch for their entire accuracy. it has been frequently objected to the use of guano, that it is not permanent. it would be unreasonable to expect great permanent improvement from a manure so active, and which yielded go large a profit on the first crop. yet i have seen some striking evidences of its permanency in heavy crops of clover, succeeding wheat, and in the increase of the crop of wheat on a second application. as an instance, i may mention that two years ago i sowed upon a single detached acre of "forest land," one bushel of wheat and dressed it with a barrel of african guano, costing $ , and the yield was seventeen bushels. last fall the same land, after remaining one year in clover, was again sowed with one bushel of wheat and dressed with lbs. of peruvian guano, costing $ , and the product was bushels. yet i would advise no one to rely upon guano exclusively. its analysis shows that it contains salts of ammonia, alkaline phosphates and the other mineral elements necessary to produce the grain of wheat, but is deficient in most of the elements of the straw and roots of the plants. hence, (says liebig) 'a rational agriculturist, in using guano, cannot dispense with stable dung.' we should, therefore, be careful not to exhaust the soil of organic manures, but by retaining the straw of the wheat, and occasionally a crop of clover, which plant contains a large percentage of the alkaline carbonates, which are entirely wanting in guano, furnish all the elements necessary to the entire wheat plant. in this view of the subject, and for many other reasons that i cannot stop to enumerate, there cannot be, when guano is extensively used, a more judicious rotation than the pamunky five field system, in which clover occupies a prominent place. i have now enumerated some of the most prominent means by which you may "keep your land rich." i would not discourage the use of others. science is daily making discoveries in the art of enriching the earth, and we should discard nothing, without a trial, which promises to be useful; always bearing in mind that the wisest economy is entirely consistent with the most liberal expenditure, in the purchase of manures, provided we take care, by judicious experiments and observation, to ascertain their efficacy, and that we get back our capital, with an actual _net_ profit _in cash_, on all our investments. this latter caution is indispensable, in our country, where new lands are so abundant and cheap, that highly improved farms can never be rated in the market at their true value." "the various manures compounded by chemists and manufacturers, should also engage your careful attention. they should not be recklessly thrown aside as humbugs, without trial or investigation, nor adopted and extensively used with blind confidence in their efficacy. i have used many of these manures by way of experiment, and the profit realized upon them has not justified me in enlarging my operations. poudrette, manufactured in baltimore; bommers manure, chappel's fertilizer and kentish & co.'s prepared guano, (used, it is true, upon a small scale,) have not realized the promises made in their behalf. yet i would by no means discourage the praiseworthy efforts of the manufacturers, and hope they will persevere until, by lessening the bulk and increasing the power of their compounds, they may be able to prepare an article that for cheapness, convenience of application and efficacy, shall equal or surpass the best peruvian guano." that desideratum, professor mapes believes he has already attained by the addition of superphosphate of lime to the guano, making a compound of two-thirds of the latter to one of the former, more valuable by weight than the pure article. that being the case will greatly increase the consumption of guano, and greatly improve the condition of all that class of farmers who desire to make their poor lands rich. of the use of lime, mr. newton has the following testimony, which we embody here for its great practical value. "calcareous matter is the great want of most of our lands, and in some form is essential to permanent improvement. it should be regarded as the basis of all our operations, and never to be dispensed with for any substitute. from long experience in the use of lime, i am satisfied that the french plan, of light and frequent dressings, is not only much more economical, but much safer, in our climate, than the heavy dressings common in great britain. fifty bushels of slaked lime to the acre, i have found amply sufficient for any of our lands, and a greater quantity often attended with injury to the soil and crops, whilst twenty-five bushels will answer every purpose on thin lands, deficient in vegetable matter. ashes, bone dust, and the various marine manures that abound on the shores of the chesapeake and its tributaries, will be found important auxiliaries in the work of 'keeping your lands rich,' whilst the necessity of clover and the proper grasses, to any system of permanent improvement, is too obvious to require comment." although caustic lime should never be used in connection, or so as to come in contact with the guano, there is no doubt of its being a valuable auxiliary. upon land limed this year, guano may be used next, and if mixed with charcoal or plaster, or plowed in and thoroughly incorporated with the soil, especially if it contains a considerable portion of clay, no loss of ammonia will occur, in consequence of the action of the lime. on the contrary, the effect will be to make the action of the guano more active, and the immediate benefit greater; though, of course the succeeding crops would not receive as great a share. but, as mr. newton says, ought we to ask for great advantages to succeeding crops, from a manure which gives us such great profits from the present one. from our notes taken upon the spot, we give a few items more in detail of mr. newton's operations, than he has done in the preceding quotations. the tract of land he speaks of is gently undulating; of a sandy loam, with a greater amount of clay in the subsoil; had been literally _worn out_ in former years by the shallow plowing, skinning system of farming, until it would produce no more, when it was abandoned and suffered to grow up again in forest timber, principally pine of the "old field" species. no land could offer less inducements to the cultivator or give smaller hope of renovation, than these old fields of virginia. such was the conviction of impossibility to raise a crop upon this kind of land, that mr. newton's first essay was looked upon by his neighbors with a conviction that the fool and his money would soon part company. one sensible old servant told us he thought his master "for sartain was done gone crazy, cause he nebber seed no nothing grow on dat land, no how could fix him." the negroes, wherever guano has been introduced, have been violently opposed to using it; not alone from its disagreeable odor and effect upon the throat and nostrils while handling it in a dry state; but because they could not be persuaded that such a small measure of stuff-- lbs. measures about three bushels--could possibly produce any effect upon the crop. their astonishment and consequent extravagant laudation of the effect produced, has often afforded us hours of amusement while listening to their recital of "massa's big crop," of perhaps ten bushels to the acre, which was at least double that of any one ever seen upon the same field, "fore he put dem little pinch of snuff on him." _the increase of wheat from guano_ may be safely calculated upon at five bushels for each hundred weight of guano used, one year with another, and up to what may be considered a fair judicious amount to be applied, which may be set down at an average of lbs to the acre, upon all light soils, similar to those of that part of the country we are writing about. guano vs. manure--effects upon heavy land. mr. newton related to us an anecdote of some value upon this point. on one of his potomac farms, a portion of the land is exceedingly heavy--pewtery land, as it is termed from its tendency when wet to run together, presenting a glistening appearance somewhat resembling that metal. his overseer was about as unbelieving as the negroes, and declared he could beat the guano by expending the same value in manure upon a given quantity of surface. to test this and also to try its effect upon the stiff land, he applied a little short of one ton of peruvian, which cost $ upon ten acres, and promised a premium to the overseer if he could make a greater crop by the use of all the manure, men and teams he saw fit to apply to another ten acres lying right along side, and of the same quality of soil. of course he spared no labor, using both lime and manure freely, but in the spring finding the appearance of his crop unequal to that guanoed, he gave it a top dressing of fine manure and a good working with the harrow. at harvest the guanoed portion was ready for the sickle several days earlier than the other, and yielded bushels of a quality so very superior, it was all reserved for seed for himself and neighbors. the product of the other was bushels; difference in favor of the guano, bushels-- bushels to the acre--while the value of extra manuring, probably exceeded the cost of guano, without any material advantage in the effect upon succeeding crops. in fact, it is probable, that the additional growth of straw and clover would be worth more to the next crop on the guanoed portion, than the undecomposed manure and lime would be in the other. it is needless to say both overseer and servants, were fully convinced of the virtue of guano after this experiment. according to our notes, mr. newton first used guano in --one ton of ichaboe at $ , on acres, with bushels of seed, upon land so deadly poor, that an old negro we conversed with said; "him so done gone massa, wouldn't grow poverty grass nuff to make hen's nest for dis nigger." no attempt had been made for years to grow any crop, not even oats or rye, the last effort of expiring nature to yield sustenance to man upon one of those old worn out virginia farms. think of the astonishment of the poor negro, who thought his master crazy to sow wheat there _without manure_, to see bushels harvested from the acres. in , he used $ worth of patagonian upon same kind of land and reaped bushels. in , $ worth of patagonian and chilian at $ and $ a ton, gave bushels, which sold at $ , mostly for seed, on account of its superior quality. in each case the advantage to the land of equal value as to the crop. in , he applied tons peruvian at $ , and tons patagonian at $ , upon acres, from to lbs. to the acre. when we saw this crop the next spring, the appearance in favor of the peruvian, was fully per cent. upon the same cost of each kind per acre. in he applied tons, of course, all peruvian, with equal success to former years. mr. newton says, the second application of guano to the same land produces the best result--that notwithstanding the profit of the first application in the increased crop, the profit to the land is always greater. before leaving mr. newton, we will place on record one expression highly creditable to him, and convincing in its palpable truth of the value put upon this fertilizer, by a gentlemen of sound judgment and candor of speech, equal to any other within the circle of our acquaintance. "i look upon the introduction of guano and the success attending its application to our barren lands, in the light of a special interposition of divine providence, to save the northern neck of virginia from reverting entirely into its former state of wilderness and utter desolation. until the discovery of guano--more valuable to us than the mines of california--i looked upon the possibility of renovating our soil, of ever bringing it up to a point capable of producing remunerating crops as utterly hopeless. our up-lands were all worn out, and our bottom lands fast failing, and if it had not been for guano, to revive our last hope, a few years more and the whole country must have been deserted by all who desired to increase their own wealth, or advance the cause of civilization by a profitable cultivation of the earth." we are satisfied that the above opinion will be considered of more value--more conclusive in favor of guano, by all who are acquainted with the character of willoughby newton, than all else contained in the pages of this pamphlet. other witnesses in virginia in favor of guano. as our principal object is to convince the skeptical, or induce unbelievers in its efficacy and value, to try experiments themselves by which they will be convinced and enriched, we offer the names of a few more gentlemen of high standing, who have been very fortunate in the use of this essential element of successful cultivation in virginia, as witnesses, whose testimony ought to be, and will be, where they are known entirely conclusive. _col. robert w. carter, of sabine hall_, on the rappahanock, whose land is principally of that kind of clayey loam common upon that river, once rich but badly worn by cultivation, is so well satisfied that it is profitable to make rich lands still more rich, he buys annually or tons of the best in market. he says he cannot afford to sow wheat without guano--it is foolish and unprofitable. he sows it broad cast, lbs. to the acre, with no other preparation than breaking the lumps; plows it in; sows wheat and harrows that; in some cases has sown clover, and in others, followed wheat after wheat with increasing productiveness every year; clearly proving the effect of one application, to be beneficial to the succeeding crop. without guano, or very high manuring, wheat will deteriorate year after year, if sown upon the same soil, until the product would not pay for the labor of sowing and harvesting. upon one upland field, which without manure would not pay for cultivation, he sowed one bushel of wheat and lbs. peruvian guano and made fifteen bushels. plowed down the stubble with same application, and when we saw the crop, should have been willing to insure it at twenty-five bushels. col. c. has nearly , acres in cultivation, which within his recollection was cultivated entirely with hoes--his grandfather would not use a plow--was as much set against that great land improver as some modern, but no more wise farmers, are against guano. col. c. uses the best of plows; sows lbs. guano to the acre and plows it in six inches deep, and sows one bushel of wheat and harrows thoroughly, but not deep enough to disturb the guano. his gain has been eight bushels average upon lbs. guano. thinks peruvian at $ a ton preferable to any other at current prices. his land is mostly clayey loam and was so much exhausted by a hundred years hard usage, it was barely able to support the servants, until the colonel commenced his system of improvements by draining, deep plowing, rotation of crops, lime, plaster, clover, and guano; the latter of which he looks upon as the salvation of lower virginia; while his large sales of eight or ten hundred acres of corn and wheat, sufficiently attest its value upon that location. his actual annual profits upon the use of guano, cannot be less than two thousand dollars. doctor brockenborough, doctor gordon, messrs. dobyn, micou, garnett and others of tappahannock and vicinity, have all found the application even upon the bottom lands, profitable, though not to so great an extent as upon the poor old field-pine lands of mr. newton; but simply from the reason that his land was utterly worthless before, but after the application of the guano, was increased in value more than its whole cost, besides the profit derived from the crop. wm. d. nelson, a neighbor of mr. newton, bought a tract of land for a residence, at $ an acre, which in its natural condition was not worth cultivating; but with guano will pay all expenses of that and the cultivation and the cost of the land the first crop. upon a portion of this land, a poor sandy loam, he applied lbs. peruvian guano and one bushel of wheat per acre, and made bushels, while a strip through the field, purposely left without guano, did not produce the seed, and remained as destitute of clover as though it never had been sown, forming a very striking contrast to the luxuriant growth upon each side. in another trial he made bushels from one sowed, with lbs. of patagonian guano, of a very good quality. this is about in proportion to the current price of the two kinds, though the latter cannot be so certainly depended upon for good quality as the peruvian. another trial was made with , lbs. peruvian and , lbs. patagonian, and bushels of seed upon acres which made bushels of wheat of very fine quality, and large growth of straw. upon acres, same kind of soil, well manured in the previous crop of corn, sowed bushels and made . the first had not been manured. the evidence in favor of guano in this case, needs no comment. by an outlay of $ , a much more valuable crop was made from the acres than from the ; the permanent improvement to the land from guano was much greater than from the manure. in this case the guano was plowed in about four inches deep. mr. nelson thinks the yield of wheat will average in that neighborhood, an increase of bushels for lbs. of peruvian guano. h. chandler, westmoreland court house, bought a farm at a price for the whole below the cost of the mansion house alone, because the land was so utterly and hopelessly worn out, as to be past the ability of supporting those engaged in its tillage. when we saw it, we should have been willing to insure the growing crop of wheat at bushels, the result of lbs. of peruvian guano to the acre; while the clover upon the stubble of the previous year could not be excelled in point of luxuriousness upon the richest field in the state of new york, where the land was valued at $ an acre. mr. chandler first commenced with lbs. african guano, measuring - / bushels, to the acre, upon which he sowed one bushel of wheat. the result bushels to the acre upon land which only gave - / bushels in any previous crop. cost of guano $ ; profit, $ . the next year he gained an increase of bushels to the acre over previous years, by the use of lbs of patagonian guano; while the clover, mr. chandler thinks, worth more than the whole cost of the application. a still better result was produced last year from lbs. of peruvian. the soil is a yellow clayey loam, which in its unimproved condition looks about as unpromising for a crop, as the middle of a hard beaten road. mr. c. tried guano upon river bottom land, but the improvement was not so remarkable. we were assured by mr. c., that many persons who had long been accustomed to look upon the hopeless barrenness of this land, were wont to stop as they rode past this field of clover, and look at it with utter astonishment. some could not be satisfied with looking, but would drive to the house to inquire what magical power had been used to produce such a strange metamorphosis in the appearance of the place. when assured it was all effected by guano, they went away--not satisfied--but unbelieving. what tends much to increase the effect of this improvement, is the fact, that directly opposite lies another tract, still in its barren condition, lately purchased by dr. spence, a very enterprising gentleman, imbued with the spirit of improvement, which will soon be brought into the same condition, notwithstanding its unforbidding appearance. mr. s. b. atwell who owns an adjoining farm, has been equally successful in the use of guano. before using it, his wheat upon acres was hardly sufficient to pay for harvesting. the first crop after using it, bushels. he has also increased the crop of corn from to barrels by lime, guano and clover. in the meantime, the land has increased in value in about the same ratio. in lancaster county, we saw a field of wheat on the farm of dr. leland, sown upon corn ground, one part with lbs. of peruvian guano to the acre, the other with a full dressing of hog-pen manure, by the side of which the ground was seen in its natural barrenness, scarcely making a show of greenness; while the rank growth of the guanoed portion made as great a contrast with that manured upon the opposite side. guanoed wheat upon the farm of col. downing in the same county showed as great a contrast with land both limed and manured; while directly alongside of this luxuriant growth, the land was as destitute of vegetation as a brick pavement. the effect of guano upon strawberries, col. d. found to excel anything else ever tried. a neighbor of col. downing had a fine show for a wheat crop on exceedingly poor land from the application of only lbs. peruvian guano to the acre. capt wm. harding, northumberland, c. h., assured us he made bushels per acre upon only tolerably fair land, by the use of lbs. peruvian guano, plowed in and followed by clover, worth more than the guano cost. col. richard a. claybrook, in the same neighborhood, made bushels--the land along side almost as bare as the surface of the guano islands. we might mention a dozen others in the same place, in fact in most of the places mentioned, whose testimony would be as strong as those we have named. col. edward tayloe of king george co., having been very successful in the use of guano, induced his neighbor, wm. roy mason, esq. to test its powers by the most severe experiment we have ever known it subjected to. he selected a point of a hill, from which every particle of soil had been washed away, until nothing in the world would grow there. it would not produce, said he, a peck of wheat to the acre, but with a dressing of lbs. african guano, it gave me thirteen bushels, and now while that is covered with clover, other, so called, rich parts of the field are almost bare. a field which had never produced for years, over four bushels of wheat to the acre, was dressed with lbs. of guano and one bushel of plaster at a cost of $ to the acre, which gave thirteen bushels of a quality greatly improved, and a very large growth of straw, which he esteems highly as a top dressing for the clover, which far exceeded upon the guanoed land that which was highly manured. the success of mr. mason was so flattering, he immediately purchased six tons for the next experiment. if all the faithless would pursue the course indicated in the following _experiment with guano_, by mr. richard rouzee of essex co. va., they would probably be as well convinced as he, that the greatest "humbugging" about guano, is in neglecting to profit by its use. he says:--"i must confess that i have been skeptical in relation to the various accounts of the fertilizing properties of guano, especially in these times of humbuggery, and therefore determined to subject it to the most rigid test." in view of this, on the d of october last, i selected two acres of land by actual measurement, proverbially poor, never having yielded in a course of ten years cultivation more than three bushels per acre, and in consequence, was called by way of derision, "old kentuck." to the two acres lbs. of guano were applied in the most injudicious manner by strewing it on the top of the corn bed--the consequence was, when the wheat was ploughed in, and came up, a small girth was only seen on the top and a space between each row at least one third of its width; in this condition it remained until about the middle of november, when it had so sensibly disappeared, that it attracted the attention of one of my neighbors, who remarked to me, that at least one half of it had been destroyed, in which opinion i concurred; in examining that which remained, we were of opinion that three-fourths of it had from three to ten flies in the maggot state on each stalk; in this state of things i surrendered all hope of any tolerable return, more especially as the rust made its appearance in it a short time before it ripened.--now for the result-- the acres of land yielded me / bushels of wheat at $ per bushel, $ deduct for average yield of the above, acres, bushels at $ per bushel, $ deduct for cost of lbs. guano, $ ------- $ ------- $ add for additional straw, ------- clear profit, $ . here is a clear profit of $ upon $ . invested, and acknowledged to be applied in the most injudicious manner. it is easy to judge what would have been the profit under different circumstances. in the vicinity of this city where straw sells for $ per hundred little bundles, instead of a credit of cents it would have been at least half the cost of the guano. guano in north carolina. _henry k. burgwyn's first trial with guano. its effect on grass sown with wheat._--the name and farm of this gentleman is so widely known as a successful renovator of miserably poor worn out fields, that we are delighted to have it in our power to have his testimony to our impregnable array of witnesses in favor of the most valuable substance for the improvement of such land, ever given by an overruling power for the benefit of those who ought to be exceedingly thankful for so good a gift. but hear what this writer has to say upon this interesting subject. "having about acres of my wheat, this year sown upon last year's corn ground, and the land being rather light and not too rich, i feared lest i should fail with my grass sown on _this_ wheat, because of the two successive cereal crops; i therefore bought guano, mixed it with its bulk of plaster, then added fine charcoal, the same, and to this mixture double the whole bulk of deposit of the roanoke river, a rich alluvial earth, and sowed the whole broadcast in february and march, and harrowed it in, on the top of the wheat i sowed at the rate of lbs. of guano to the acre; the value of which, no doubt, was doubled by the mixture with the absorbents of the ammonia, which is so exceedingly volatile even when left for a few hours, is easily dissipated by the march winds. on this land, i had sown in october previous, clover, timothy, kentucky blue grass, and italian ray grass. my harvest has now been over, three weeks, and i have never had a finer stand of all these, even on our rich bottoms. the ray grass matured its seed, rather sooner than the wheat was two-thirds as tall, and where _very thickly sown_, materially injured the product of the wheat, _i have reaped an increased product from my wheat, amply sufficient to repay my outlay for the guano, plaster, &c., and have my grass as my profit on the investment_; this in turn will shade and improve my land, fatten my stock, increase my crops, and cheer my eye with 'grassy slopes,' in place of 'galled hill sides;' this is profit sufficient for the most greedy if turned to a proper account;--be it remembered, too, this was a light and rather poor soil, but based on a good clay subsoil." to this we beg leave to add from our own knowledge of this land, which is situated on the roanoke river or miles below halifax, that it was before being improved by mr. burgwyn, about as unpromising a tract as can be found upon all the "cottoned to death," poor old fields of that sadly abused state. in the condition it was when we first saw it, while undergoing the operation of putting a four horse plow through the broom straw and old field pines, notwithstanding our strong faith in the ability of such men as the messrs. burgwyns to redeem such land from its condition of utter and apparently hopeless barrenness, we must own, that if mr. b. had made the assertion while we were riding over this very tract, that within two years he would reap a remunerating crop of wheat from the barren waste, and coat the ground with a carpet of luxuriant grass, we should have told him the day of miracles had passed away. but we had not then seen as much as we have since of the miraculous power of peruvian guano. we might continue to cite hundreds of similar cases but propose to pass over into maryland, and after showing its application there has produced equally beneficial results, travel northward, calling here and there a witness as we proceed. among others, we may call to the stand in maryland, will be the editor of the american farmer, whose testimony we consider almost invaluable, having devoted much attention to the subject, and to whom, and his able correspondents, we desire to award full credit, in this general manner, to save repetition, for much of the information we shall give the readers of several of the succeeding pages. the testimony of witnesses of such high standing, cannot be too highly estimated by those who are anxious to learn how to renovate their worn out farms, or make the rich ones richer. experiments in maryland. _effects of guano upon the crop to which it is applied._--edward stabler, in the american farmer, thus speaks of an experiment he made in , soon after the introduction of guano to any extent into this country. "in a field of some acres, one acre was selected near the middle, and extending through the field, so as to embrace any difference of soil, should there be any. on this acre lbs. of peruvian guano, at a cost of about $ was sown with the wheat. adjoining the guano on one side, was manure from the barn yard, at the rate of cart loads to the acre; and on the opposite side (separated by an open drain the whole distance;) ground bones were applied on the balance of the field, at a cost of $ to the acre; the field equally limed two years preceding. there was no material difference in the time or manner of seeding; except that the manure was lightly cross-ploughed in, and the guano and bones harrowed in with the wheat. "the yield on the guanoed acre was bushels; the adjoining acre with bone, as near as could be estimated by dozens, and compared with the guano, was about bushels; and the manured, about bushels. the season was unusually dry; and the manured portion suffered more from this cause than either of the others; the land being considerably more elevated, and a south exposure." in our opinion mr. s. is in error in regard to the manured land suffering most from drouth. in our experience we have always found the best effects from guano, in wet seasons, or upon irrigated land. he says also, "this is one of the most active of all manures; and although he thinks the effect evanescent, it might aid materially in renovating worn out lands." since that time a great many other maryland farmers have, undoubtedly come to the same conclusion, for notwithstanding the price, which he thinks too high to justify its extensive use, has not been materially reduced, there is more guano sold in baltimore than any, or perhaps all the ports in the united states; and the benefits derived from its use upon the worn out lands of maryland, have been of the most satisfactory character. in speaking of the after crop of grass upon the land above mentioned, he says: "the field has since been mowed three times; the first crop of grass was evidently in favor of the boned part; the second, and third, were fully two to one over the guano, and also yielding much heavier crops of clover seed. on a part of one land, bushels to the acre of the finest of the bone were used; on this, the wheat was as heavy as on the guanoed, and the grass generally lodges before harvest, as it also does on much of the adjoining land with bushels of bone." this is all right; it should never be mixed with lime, and it should be plowed in. in his experiments, the lime in the soil had the effect to disengage the ammonia, and not being sufficiently buried or mixed up with the earth to prevent its escape during a very dry season, much of its value went afloat in the atmosphere. if he had given a bushel of plaster as a top dressing, there is no doubt the effect upon the grass crop would have been entirely different. the action of guano is very variable upon different soils, as well as upon the same kinds of soil in different seasons, or from the different manner of applying it; but there is one thing in its favor, it seldom fails to pay for itself, as mr. newton remarks, in the first crop; and if properly applied, that is, plowed in with wheat, upon poor, sandy, "worn out land," and followed by clover, and that dressed with plaster, it will pay far better in the succeeding years than the first. this has been fully proved in a hundred cases, since mr. stabler tried his experiments; for two years after, in writing upon the same subject, he says "harrowing in the guano with the wheat will generally produce a better crop; but its fertilizing properties are more evanescent. i prefer plowing it in for all field crops; and when attainable, would always use it in conjunction with ground bones, for the benefit of succeeding grass crops. this is pre-supposing that you determine to improve more land than the resources of the farm will accomplish, and are willing to do it by the aid of foreign manures; and being 'far removed from lime.' if the object is to realize the most in a single crop, and to obtain the quickest return for the outlay, use the guano alone, and harrow it in with the wheat; but the land, according to my experience, will derive but little benefit from the application, unless the amount is large. by plowing it in, particularly if mixed with one third its bulk of plaster, the effect is decidedly more durable; nor is it then necessary that the seeding should so immediately follow its application. if, however, the object is to improve the land at the same time; and surely it should be a primary object with every tiller of the soil--and lime, from your location, or the price, is unattainable, i would advise about half the amount determined on, to be expended for ground bones. this may be harrowed in with the wheat." it is surprising what an effect a few bushels of ground bones to the acre will produce; reference is made to a single experiment, and not an isolated one either. some six years since, we applied ten to twelve bushels of coarsely ground bones to the acre, on about half of a twelve acre field; on two lands adjoining, was guano, at the rate of pounds to the acre, (the cost of each about the same,) and extending nearly through the field; both were applied in the spring, on the oat crop--and which was decidedly better, by the eye, on the two lands with guano. in the fall, the field was sown with wheat, manuring heavily from the barn yard, adjoining the guano, but not spread on the two lands, or on the boned portion of the field. there was but little difference perceived in the wheat, except from the manure, which was the best--the field having been limed for the preceding corn crop, bushels to the acre. the experiment was made to test the comparative durability of the three kinds of manure; the guano, ground bones, and manure from the barn yard; and the ultimate profit to be derived from each, in a full rotation. after the first crop of grass, and perhaps the second, which was in favor of the manured portion, the succeeding crops of hay and clover seed, have been decidedly better on the boned part of the field. at the present time, and also the past season, this being the fourth year in grass, the guanoed lands present about the same appearance, that does a small adjoining space, purposely left without manure of any kind, lime excepted. the manured part affords good pasture, but is quite inferior to the boned, which would give a fair crop of hay, and probably three times as much grass as the two lands with guano. it is believed that the increased crop of clover seed on the boned, over the guanoed portion, paid for the former; and that the two crops of clover since taken from the field, have paid, or nearly so, for the lime or other manures applied. this evidence corresponds with the opinion of professor mapes; that is, that the value of an application of guano is greatly enhanced by the addition of phosphate of lime, in some shape; the guano acting immediately and producing a direct profit, while the slow action, for which some farmers cannot wait, keeps up the fertility for years, or until the owner may find time to profit by another application of guano. we quote again a few more of the very sensible remarks of friend stabler. "i am an advocate for the liberal use of all kinds of manure, guano included, if the price will justify it. a farmer had better buy manure than to buy grain, if compelled to do either; for we cannot expect much from nothing, or reasonably calculate upon improving very poor land without manure of some description, unless plaster will act with effect; nor is this generally the case without the land possesses naturally, some particular source of fertility, not wholly exhausted by bad or improvident tillage. "it is probable those will be disappointed who expect to do everything with guano--make fine crops and improve the land, while they take everything off, and dispense almost, if not entirely, with the more permanent manures, all equally within their reach. true, we may exist for a time, only half fed and half clothed; but it is just as reasonable to expect to improve under such a regimen, as to calculate upon continued, not to say increased fertility of the soil, without an ample supply, of the right kind of manure. "with all its acknowledged advantages, it may be questioned whether there is not one drawback to the introduction of guano. it is used with less profit in direct connexion with lime, than with most kinds of manure; and its facility of application, and quick return, has induced many to give up the lime entirely, if not also to some extent, to neglect the resources of the farm. others again, in improving poor land, advise the guano first, and the lime afterwards. this may do very well; but is often better in theory than in practice, for the lime is omitted altogether, and perhaps at some risk of loss, in both time and money, as regards permanent improvement. to use a figure of speech--the prudent architect will first secure a solid foundation to build upon, and with materials of known durability; this accomplished, he need have no fears of the stability of the structure, and may, at pleasure add thereto, either for ornament or utility." "that thin lands may be brought to a very productive state, by the liberal and repeated applications of guano, there is no doubt; but at what cost and how durable the improvements might be, i am not prepared to say. in two instances, from to lbs. were applied at one time to an acre; but in neither did the results correspond with the expense, or induce a repetition of the experiment. my own experience so far, is in favor of more limited applications, say to lbs. to the acre, (taking in consideration the price of both grain and guano,) and also used in connection with other manures, which is found to be the most profitable, and probably more durable in its effect; in two experiments, with from to lbs. of guano to the acre applied three years since with barnyard manure, for wheat, the effect on the grass crop at this time, is quite marked; applied in this way, it hastens maturity--thus, in a degree, guarding against rust--renders the grain more perfect, and is believed to be one of the most profitable modes of using guano." nothing could be more sensible than the advice of this gentleman, not to rely upon guano alone. to waste or neglect stable and home made manures, or throw away bones or other valuable fertilizers, because we could buy guano, would be as insensible as it would for a man to throw away a handful of bank bills, because he happened to have just then a pocket full of gold and silver coin. we never have, nor shall we recommend guano to the exclusion of everything else; but we do recommend every farmer in america, to whom an additional quantity of manure would be an object, to buy guano; because he will be almost sure to derive a certain and immediate profit from the investment. it will make poor lands rich, and rich lands richer. evidence of the durable effects of guano. upon this point, we have the following testimony of thomas p. stabler, of montgomery county, md., a gentleman of the highest degree of intelligence and integrity; one of the society of friends, who are rather noted for not being extravagant in their expressions or encomiums of an article, without good grounds therefor. we make these remarks, because, as every good lawyer will tell you, the character and standing of your witnesses is of more importance than their language, to make a strong impression in your favor. in speaking of the means within reach of farmers, by which they can renovate their worn out lands, of which maryland has an ample share, friend stabler says, "in some districts the distance from lime is so great, that the man with small means can scarcely be expected to use it upon a large scale--but in regions of country where bone, guano and poudrette act favorably, none need be without important aid from their use. under a judicious system of cultivation and correct management, either of these will make bountiful returns the first year, and the strongest and most conclusive evidence exists of their durability as manures. proofs of this abound in my neighborhood. reference to the 'facts' in a single case in point may suffice for an example. in the summer of , i prepared seventeen acres and a few perches of land for wheat about five sixths of this was extremely poor--upon a portion of the field, was put ox-cart loads of manure from the barn yard and stable, on what i considered about an average quality of the land. on the th of the th month, (september,) i sowed seven bushels of wheat on this part of the ground and plowed the manure and wheat in together with the double shovel plow--very soon after the balance was sowed with pounds of good african guano per acre, for which i paid $ per ton, and plowed this in with the wheat, immediately after sowing, in the same manner as the other. during the succeeding winter and spring, the appearance of my wheat field became the subject of much notice and remark on the part of my neighbors, as well as others from several adjoining counties who saw it, many of whom supposed that this application of guano could not possibly produce such a crop as its then present appearance indicated--in this, however, they were disappointed--there were two small pieces left without manure of any kind. one of these upon the best part of the field, and the other upon a part of medium quality. "it may be recollected that the crop of wheat that season was generally most inferior, both in quality and quantity. upon the parts left without manure, it was scarcely worth cutting, and men of integrity and good judgment, were of the opinion that without the aid of the guano, i could not have saved more than or bushels of wheat from the field. the product was bushels, that weighed lbs. to the bushel. the guanoed portion continued at harvest to be decidedly better than that manured from the barn yard and stable. this field was sown with clover in the spring of , and to this time its appearance affords as strong evidence of great improvement in the land, as it did during the growth of wheat. it has now been pastured freely during two summers, and been exposed to the action of the frosts of two winters, and upon the guanoed portion i have not yet seen a single clover root thrown out of the ground, while from the part manured from the barn yard, it has almost entirely disappeared. good farmers have frequently remarked during the present summer that the appearance of this field warrants the conclusion that it is now capable of producing largely of any crop common to our country. "thus 'worn out land' is renovated, and ample means produced for increasing its fertility. similar instances of improvement exist in very many examples that can be seen in this portion of our country, resulting from the application of lime, bone and poudrette, as well as from guano." _guano prevents clover from being thrown out by frost._--we wish to call back the attention of the reader to this reliable statement of mr. stabler, not only for its importance to farmers, but because the same thing has been remarked by other gentlemen who have used guano. it can only be accounted for from the fact, that guano seems to be peculiarly adapted, more than any other manure, to give the young clover a vigorous start, so that in its early stages it acquires a growth too strong to be affected by the usual course of freezing and thawing, by which less vigorous plants are thrown out. for this reason alone, if guano had no other value, farmers in some sections of the country where the soil is peculiarly affected by this difficulty, would find their account in the use of an article which would enable them to grow clover, for clover is manure, and it should be a sine qua non with every farmer to avail himself of all the means within his reach to increase the supply of manure from the products of his farm. let him not depend alone upon the purchase of guano, but rather upon the means which that brings within his reach of increasing his home supply by the growth of clover, and largely increased production of straw. those who are interested pecuniarily, which the writer is not, in the increased sale of guano in the united states, have no fears that our recommendations to make manure at home--to use lime, plaster, bones, clover, and every other source of fertility within their reach, will decrease the sale of guano. on the contrary, those who are most disposed to use all these sources of fertility, are the very men most disposed to use a substance which all experience has proved superior to all others. besides, there is, and probably always will be, enough "worn out lands" which can be profitably renovated, to use up all the guano which will ever find its way into this country. so our earnest recommendation is, where lime is available, let no man claiming the honorable title of farmer, fail to make the application. let him also gather up all the fragments--let nothing be lost--make all the manure at home he possibly can, and then he will not only have the means, but a disposition also to buy that which a beneficent providence sends him from the coast of peru; of the good effect of which we will prove by further testimony--that of the hon. james a. pearce, senator from maryland, and a farmer of no small note in that state. he says--"in april , i applied lbs., probably of african or patagonian guano to an acre of growing wheat, the land being entirely unimproved and very poor. it was applied as a top dressing, of course, but mixed with plaster." (in what proportion he does not say, but we will by and bye; but he does say)--"_the wheat was doubled in quantity at least_--fine clover succeeded it--and in two crops, one of corn and one of small grain, three and four years afterwards, the effects are still apparent." now this effect was produced by the use of the guano as a top dressing; a method universally acknowledged to be the most unfavorable to the development of the full value of the application. the editor of the farmer in answer to an inquiry whether a combination of charcoal, plaster, and guano would make a profitable _top dressing_ in spring for wheat, says, "yes"--but thinks if it had been plowed in with the seed in the fall, the result would have been much better. however, says he, "we entertain not the slightest doubt, that, if his wheat field be top dressed with the mixture next spring, it will greatly increase the yield of his wheat crop, unless the season should prove a very dry one, as the charcoal, and plaster, will each tend to prevent the escape of the ammoniacal gases of the guano, and as it were, offer them up as food to the wheat plants. "in april , i applied lbs. of guano to an acre of growing wheat, the land being entirely unimproved and very poor. of course it was applied as a top-dressing, _mixed, however, with plaster_. the wheat was doubled in quantity at least; fine clover succeeded it; and in two crops, one of corn, and the other of small grain, last year and the present, the effects are still apparent." if our correspondent would _mix_, in the proportion of lbs. of _guano_, one bushel of _charcoal_, and half a bushel of plaster per acre, and sow the mixture on his wheat field next spring, after the frost is entirely out of the ground, then seed each acre with clover seed, and roll his land, we have no doubt that his wheat crop would be increased five or six bushels to the acre, perhaps more, and that he would have a good stand of clover plants, and a luxuriant crop of the latter next year. "our opinion is, that _guanoed_ land should always be sowed to clover, or clover and orchard grass." in this, particularly the opinion of the last paragraph, we fully concur--to obtain the full value of guano it must either be mixed with plaster or charcoal, or what is better, plowed in and thoroughly incorporated with the soil, and the land always sown with clover, peas or some other plant of equal value for green manure. it is true col. carter has been successful with wheat after wheat; while many continue successful, by carefully retaining all the straw; the guano being sufficient to keep up the everlasting ability of the soil to produce an annual crop of grain. the five field system and guano. we look upon this as the most preferable of all other systems of farming ever adopted in the south--it is the system of edmund ruffin, to whom virginia owes a debt of gratitude beyond her power to pay. it will be seen from the following extract from a letter of mr. newton that that eminent agriculturist is of opinion that improvement of poor land is unlimited, if guano in connection with this system is perseveringly applied. he says--"the "five field system," which is now rapidly extending over all the poor and worn lands that are now under improvement by marl, lime, or guano, originated, or at least was first extensively introduced in lower virginia, on the pamunkey, and has there wrought wonders, aided by marl and judicious farming. the rotation is corn,--wheat,--clover--wheat, or clover fallow,--and pasture, and after pasture one year, commencing the round again with corn. this system, if guano be applied to both crops of wheat, on corn land and fallow, or alternately with lime or marl, when calcareous manures are required, will readily increase the crops and permanent improvement of the land. in the commencement of the rotation, lime had better be applied with the putrescent manures to the corn crop, to be followed by guano on wheat. if this system be perseveringly, pursued, i can scarcely see any reasonable limits to the improvement of poor lands and the increase of the profits of agriculture." disappointment will result from the application of lime, marl, salt potash, guano, or any special and highly concentrated substance as a fertilizer, to the neglect of organic manures. we lay down this fact as incontrovertible, that no soil, however fertile it may be made for the time being by any of these special manures, can remain permanently so, unless care is used to maintain a healthful supply of organic matter,--rich mould--good soil upon the land cultivated. if this is done, we never shall hear of guano failing to bring increased crops or of the "land running out," where it has been applied. special manures of any kind may fail to produce crops, where this essential requisite to good farming is neglected. guano, in our opinion, should always be followed by crops of clover, grass, peas, or some crop that will shade the earth, and can be turned under with the plow, to keep up the necessary supply of nitrogenous food for cereal crops. _the effect of lime and salt_ upon land is to _dissolve_ the inert portions of organic matters in the soil, so that plants can suck up their substance into their own composition. both are highly beneficial, but insufficient to add permanent fertility. _the effect of guano_, is greater than any other highly concentrated manure ever discovered and applied to any soil. its benefits are immediate continuous, and unlike lime, without exhausting the soil of its organic matter. yet its benefits will be increased by the addition of organic manures derived from green crops, straw, or the stable, and the value of these will be greatly increased by the addition of lime, salt and plaster, while any deficiency of phosphates must be supplied by powdered bones or another application of guano. _the effect of plaster with guano_ is to arrest the excursive disposition of the volatile parts of the guano, and imprison them in the earth until called forth by the growing plants to do the state some service. the following question to the editor of the american farmer, and his reply, are to the point in this matter:-- a correspondent says--"as to the question of mixing plaster with guano, there is one question i should like to propose to the editor, viz.--'what will be the effect of sowing guano upon land by itself, and then, the seed being in the ground, giving it a heavy top-dressing of plaster, so as to arrest the 'excursion,' of which so much is said?" _reply by the editor._--"the effect of such application of guano and plaster would be, to prevent the waste of the ammonia of the former, as every rain would decompose more or less of the plaster, separate the sulphuric acid from the lime, and the sulphuric acid when liberated, would unite with the ammonia, form a sulphate of ammonia, and hold the latter in reserve to be taken up by the roots of the plants. the presence of plaster with all _organic_ manures, either directly mixed with them, or broadcasted after they may be applied, tends to prevent the escape of their volatile parts. we prefer them together for two reasons,--_first_, because, by bringing the two into _immediate contact_, the action of the plaster is more direct; and _secondly_, because the time and expense of one sowing is thereby saved. we go for saving every way, as time and labor costs money, and we look upon economy as a virtue, which should be practised by all, and especially by husbandmen." if the plaster and guano is mixed together, lbs. of the former to lbs. of the latter, will be found a proper proportion, and sufficient to prevent the ammonia from making an "excursion." unless the soil be very poor, lbs. of good peruvian guano is as much as we should recommend for wheat. in this we have the concurrence of the editor of the farmer, and perhaps a hundred gentlemen whom we have conversed with upon this subject. all agree in the opinion, whether mixed with plaster or not, that a judicious application of guano will more certainly restore productiveness to worn out land, or add fertility to that already productive, than any other substance ever applied. _want of faith in the efficacy of guano._--whatever doubts may have existed in the minds of careful men, there is no room for doubts now, that peruvian guano possesses regenerating properties beyond belief, without evidence, and capacity to increase the productiveness of lands in sound condition, in such an eminent degree, that any farmer who has the power to obtain it, evinces great folly and perverse obstinacy, if he continue to cultivate his land without applying it; either for want of faith, or pretended disbelief in its efficacy; or because he thinks the price fixed upon it by the peruvian government, "unjustifiably high;" or because although he has no doubt it will answer in the moist climate of england, is sure it will never answer in this dry climate; or because he is afraid the luxuriant crops produced by the application of guano will exhaust his land; or because his neighbor jones killed all his seed corn by putting only a handful in the hill; while mrs. jones killed all her flowers and fifty kinds of roses with the "pisen stuff;" and therefore he don't want any more to do with it; or because it has failed to give remuneration under the most injudicious application, made contrary to all instructions or experience of those who have used it; or for any and all the other thousand and one objections raised by those who have never used it, and seem determined they never will; probably because when the almost miraculous accounts of its operations were first published, they had cried out "humbug" so loudly they are determined no after evidence shall convince them the only humbug in the case was in their own disbelief. it is for the benefit of these unbelievers we are now writing. our object is to present such an array of facts guaranteed by such respectable names, they shall have no hook to hang a doubt upon--no reason--no justifiable excuse for any sane man longer to neglect to apply an article of such positive, certain benefit to his hungry soil. ed. reynolds esq., of baltimore, on the value of guano. writing on the subject of "bought manures," as everything is termed not produced upon the farm, and how dubiously they are looked upon by some persons calling themselves good farmers, for fear of being humbugged, mr. reynolds says, in a letter dated july, , "since , i have been trying to find out which is the best of all these 'new things,' and have now, after having been very considerably humbugged, settled down upon bones and guano--although, even the last named in a very dry year, has also 'cheated me'; but this is by no means its character, as i am constrained to admit, that after having tried it on all sorts of soil, and perhaps as long if not longer than any other person in the state, it is my opinion that when properly applied, with an average fair season, it is a very powerful fertilizer. my mode of using it is, when applied to tobacco, to mix one and a half bushels of the peruvian, (which is ordinarily lbs.) with one bushel rich earth, and one bushel of plaster, which admits about the fifth part of a gill of the mixture to each hill for every , hills--and putting it in the center of the check before being scraped--so that when the hill is made, it lies beneath the plant. on wheat, i apply three bushels of peruvian guano equal to lbs. mixed with one bushel of plaster, one bushel rich earth to the acre, sowing on the surface and plowing it in as soon and as deep as possible, after it is sowed. the past spring i have put lbs. to the acre, on acres of corn, being half of a field, on a farm in calvert, mixing with it the same quantity of rich earth and plaster, and sowing on the surface, plowing in at once very deep, using the cultivator only in working it afterwards. i do not intend to use it at all with corn, hereafter, but not because i do not think it also a good fertilizer with this crop, (as my corn on my calvert farm, upon which it has been used, now shows very fair,) but only because it has never failed to pay me three fold better on wheat, than on anything else. in order to test its virtue, it is essentially necessary to plow it in deeply, and stir it as little as possible afterwards." _bones._--of these i have used both ground and crushed, and always to advantage at ten to twelve bushels per acre; bought from manufacturers here, and agents of houses in new york; but i am using the crushed dissolved by oil of vitriol, as prepared by myself on my farm in calvert in the following way: the bones, (which we buy in the neighborhood at cents per lbs.) after breaking them with a small sledge hammer on an old anvil, we put at the rate of three bushels in half a hogshead, and apply to that quantity lbs. oil of vitriol, filling up the half hogshead to within eight inches of the top with water, letting them remain, (but stir the contents occasionally with a stick,) say two to five weeks, according to the quality and strength of the vitriol; then start the contents of the half hogshead into a large iron kettle, apply a slight fire and the whole contents will in less than an hour be reduced to a perfect jelly. we use two half hogsheads at once, to prepare it expeditiously. we then mix the contents of each kettle, with a horse cart load of rich earth, or ashes, throwing in a half barrel of plaster, mix or compost it handsomely, and use at pleasure, on an acre of land with any crop you choose, and you will have permanently improved two acres at the following cost, viz: bones, $ . , vitriol, $ . , plaster, $ . , making $ . , or $ . per acre, and this may be repeated so as with proper attention, as much lasting improvement may be made each year as many farmers derive from their barn yards. bones in any form never fails to show their striking effects on clover and other grasses--but either bones or guano will scarcely ever fail to produce a better crop of clover, which, with the increased quantity of straw, (particularly when guano is used,) will enable and encourage the saving of larger quantities of barn yard manure, and which must inevitably cause a lasting improvement. this coincides with our views exactly, as we have in all these pages endeavored to impress upon our readers, that the increased growth of straw from the use of guano, will increase the manure pile, and "inevitably cause a lasting improvement." _poudrette._--"i have used also, to good advantage, particularly on clayey lands, at the rate of six to eight barrels per acre. it is a first rate top dressing on young clover in spring, at two to three barrels per acre; this article has been prepared so badly heretofore, that a great quantity of it was really worthless." we also concede to poudrette as much credit as mr. reynolds but as will be seen, it will cost more to improve land with it than with guano. _prepared guano--agricultural salts--generators and regenerators._--of these, the testimony of mr. reynolds is exactly to the point, concise and strong, and exactly in accordance with all the facts we have been able to collect upon the same subject. he says, "i have tried them on corn, wheat, oats, clover and tobacco; but have yet to discover that they ever generated anything for me, though i have heard them sometimes well spoken of." want of room in this pamphlet alone prevents us from inserting the names and operations of many other gentlemen in this rapidly improving state--a state now undergoing the process of renovation by the use of guano, to a greater extent, perhaps, than any other in the union. guano in delaware. _hon. john m. clayton's farm._--no one who looks upon this highly improved farm now, with its most luxuriant crops, can be made to believe it was a barren waste seven years ago--hardly worth fencing or cultivating. this great change, so far beyond the power of human belief, has been effected by lime, plaster and guano. the railroad from frenchtown to new castle, passes through this farm, four miles from the latter place. it is well worthy a visit from any one anxious to make personal observations of the effects of "bought manures," upon a soil too poor to support a goose per acre. _effect of guano on oats._--during a visit to mr. clayton, in , we saw the most luxuriant growth of oats upon one of the fields of this farm, which we have ever witnessed, and it has been our fortune to see some tall specimens of this crop on the bottom lands of ohio, indiana, and illinois. the seed he had obtained from england, and the means of making it grow, from peru. the guano was plowed in with the oats, at the rate of lbs. to the acre. the soil is a yellow clayey loam. the effect upon other crops had been equally beneficial. the growth of clover was so great he had purchased thirty bullocks to fatten, for the purpose of trying to consume some of his surplus feed. the effect upon wheat, corn, potatoes, turnips, garden vegetables and fruit trees, was almost as astonishing as upon the oats and grass. _c. p. holcomb_, esq., one of the most improving farmers of one of the most improving counties in the u.s., has met with great success in the use of lime, plaster, and guano. his beautiful highly improved home farm is near newcastle; but that upon which he has met with great success in the use of guano, lies about four miles from dover. before he purchased it had become celebrated for its miserable poverty. it is now equally celebrated for its productiveness. the use of guano in that part of the state has now reached a point far beyond what the most sanguine would have dared to predict four years ago; and the benefits are of the most flattering kind. lands have been increased in value to a far greater extent than all the money paid for guano; while the increased profit from the annual crops, has produced corresponding improvements in the condition and happiness of the people. no greater blessing, said an intelligent gentleman to me, ever was bestowed upon the people of delaware. _extensive use of guano by a delaware farmer._ maj. jones, whose name is extensively known as a very enterprising farmer, purchased in the summer of , of messrs. a.b. allen & co. new york, sixty tons of peruvian guano, for his own use. with this he dressed acres of wheat, upon the farm at his residence on the bohemia manor; plowing in part of it and putting in part of it by a drilling machine at the rate of lbs. to the acre, sowing the wheat all in drills. part of the ground was clover, part corn, and perhaps one half wheat and oat stubble. the earth at the time of sowing was so dry, doubts were entertained whether it would ever vegetate; and that and other causes extended the work so late, upon a portion of the ground, there was scarcely any appearance of greenness when it froze up. with all these disadvantages, the crop was estimated at harvest at twenty bushels to the acre. without guano no one acquainted with the farm would have estimated the crop at an average of ten bushels. this gives an undoubted increase of five bushels for each hundred weight of guano; and as the soil contains a good deal of clay with which the guano was well mixed, it will retain much of the value of the application, for the next crop. maj. jones has heretofore derived very great benefits from the use of guano, as might safely be adjudged from the fact of his risking $ , in one purchase of the same article. _lasting effects of guano._--maj. jones is well satisfied upon this point. in , he used tons, half peruvian and half patagonian, sowed with a lime-spreading machine and plowed in deep, say eight inches on clayey loam--planted corn and made bushels per acre on acres; which was an increase of bushels per acre over any former year. next spring the weeds grew as high as his head on horseback. rolled them down and plowed under and sowed wheat, five pecks to the acre, and made a heavier crop than ever before made on same land, which he attributes entirely to the guano. thinks the third crop of wheat is benefitted from guano plowed in three years previous. the extent to which guano is used in the state of delaware may be inferred from the fact that it is not at all unusual for merchants in small country villages to purchase from to tons at a time for their retail trade. among other successful users of guano in that state, we may mention governor ross, who, if as good a ruler as he is farmer, ought to be continued in office to the end of life. the soil to which guano has been mostly applied in this state is a sandy loam, and the process of applying it, by sowing broadcast from to lbs. per acre, and plowing in from four to six inches deep, previous to sowing wheat, which is always followed by clover, by every one who understands his own true interest; for wherever that course has been pursued, there has been a certain profit derived from the application, even when the wheat has failed. the improvements in farming in delaware within the last ten years, will probably exceed in proportion to acres and people, any other state in the union. nearly all the northern part of the state has been whitened with lime, and the southern part is rapidly following the same path; while the sale of guano in all parts will exceed any other section of the country, if not in quantity, certainly in numbers of persons making use of this sure means of restoring the lands of an almost ruined state, to their pristine fertility. guano in pensylvania. there has probably been less guano used in this great state, than in her little sister, of which we have just been speaking. this may be owing to the fact that great improvements have been made by the use of lime, and that pensylvania farmers generally are not much inclined to leave the path their fathers trod before them; or that they are skeptical as to what they hear of the miraculous powers of guano; hence, its use has been in a great measure confined to market gardeners, or experiments in a small way; the sales at philadelphia, for home consumption, so far as we have noticed, are mostly in small lots of one to ten bags. among all with whom we have conversed, however, who have used peruvian guano in that state, we have never heard a doubt expressed of its value, though the idea, strangely enough seems to prevail, that it will only be profitable for gardners and small farmers, and that it is of no benefit to succeeding crops. no doubt the progress of improvement by the use of guano in that vicinity has been greatly retarded, in consequence of the sale of considerable quantities of "cheap guano," which however low in the scale of prices, is still lower in the scale of values. in fact, there is but one thing connected with the spurious stuff, lower in any scale, and that is the honesty of those who manufacture or knowingly sell such a villainous compound to farmers, who are utterly ignorant upon the subject, under solemn assurances, that it "is equal to any guano in market, and only a little more than half price." mr. landreth, the celebrated seedsman of philadelphia, applied $ worth of peruvian guano last spring, principally on the bean crop--he thinks guano admirably adapted to all the brassica tribe, including turnips, cabbages, rutubaga, radishes and all cruciform plants. upon a lawn which appeared to be running out, he applied guano, and the grass is now green and vigorous. the character of his soil may be judged from its location; it is on the delaware river above bristol, and had been awfully skinned before he came in possession. now, with a liberal expenditure for manures, he gets two crops a year. _guano for grass lands._--the germantown telegraph says: "the application of guano broadcast to grass lands has been found to produce a decided difference in the crop. in several instances this season, where peruvian guano has been applied at the rate of lbs. per acre, about the middle of april, the yield of hay has been double in quantity, over the intermediate lands not so treated; and in every instance noticed, it is believed that the difference in quantity produced will amply repay the cost of the guano." guano in new jersey. guano has not been extensively used in new jersey, owing to the abundance of green sand marl, which is a very valuable fertilizer, abounding in that part of the state most in need of artificial manures. guano has, wherever used, produced the most astonishing results. one of these we witnessed upon the farm of mr. edward harris, a gentleman well known for his enterprising spirit of improvement and intelligence in agriculture, who resides at moorestown, which lies in the sandy region east of philadelphia. he sowed lbs. to the acre, plowed in with double plow, sowed oats and seeded with timothy, which upon similar soil often "burns out" for want of shade, after the oats are harvested. not so in this case. the shattered oats from a remarkably fine crop, vegetated and grew with such a dark green luxuriance, there was more danger of the young grass being smothered out; so he had to put the mowers at work, who cut heavy swaths of this second crop of oats, for hay. if it had been situated so it could have been fed off, the amount of pasture would have been almost incalculable. it is needless to say the effect of guano upon this land, was not evanescent. other trials made by mr. harris, have convinced him of its value to jersey farmers, and that good as "squankum marl" undoubtedly is, farmers would do better to expend part, at least, of their money in guano. the name of james buckalew is known, perhaps, more extensively than any other in new jersey, as one of her most enterprising, rapidly improving, money making farmers, whose testimony in favor of guano may be easily obtained by any one who will take the trouble to go and see what beautiful farms he has made out of the barren sands near the jamestown station, on the camden & amboy railroad, by the use of lime, plaster, marl, manure and guano. it is a pity that every one who doubts the feasibility of profitably improving the worst land in that state, by the power of such an agent as peruvian guano, could not see what has been done by mr. buckalew. let them also look at what were once bare sand hills around the residence of commodore stevens, at south amboy, a gentleman who ought to be more renowned for his improvements on land than water, notwithstanding his world wide reputation, in connection with the yacht america. go ask how it is that these drifted sand hills have been covered with rank grass, clover, corn, turnips and other luxuriant crops; the very echo of the question will be, guano. look at the astonishing crops of professor mapes, at newark. peruvian guano, in combination with his improved superphosphate of lime, hath wrought the miracle, aided as it has been, by the deepest plowing ever done in that state. mr. samuel allen, at morristown, has now growing upon a poor barren, gravelly knoll, a crop of corn which might put to blush the owner of a rich and well manured field, and which ought to put to blush some of the unbelievers in the power of guano to produce such a growth upon such a soil; rather where there was no soil, hardly enough to grow a respectable crop of mullen stalks. mr. allen has tried guano for several years upon every kind of garden vegetable, with the most wonderful success. a crop of lima beans now growing exhibit its wonderful power in the strongest manner. the application has been made by a small dose at planting and two sprinklings hoed in during their growth. a great many other persons in this state have produced most wonderful effects upon land almost utterly worthless, while in the immediate benefits, those who have applied it to lands in good condition, have profited more than with double the cost of manure. _guano for peach trees._--a new jersey nurseryman assured us of his firm conviction in the power of guano to cure the yellows in peach trees--that no grub or worm can be found alive in the roots of a tree where guano is applied--that young trees can be brought into bearing by the use of guano, a year earlier than by any other forcing process with which he is acquainted. guano on long island.[ ] one gentleman assures us he tried an experiment very carefully, and found an application of guano at two and a half cents a pound, lbs. to the acre, more economical than hauling his own manure one mile. the fair value of team work and cost of labor hired, was more to the acre than the guano, and the first crop quite inferior, the second no difference, and the third slightly in favor of the manure. he thinks buying city manure, particularly street sweepings, about the poorest use to which he could put his money, as he certainly could make per ct. more upon the same amount expended in peruvian guano. professor mapes entertains the same opinion, about hauling manure, where guano, or rather with him, guano improved by the addition of his "improved superphosphate of lime," can be procured. dr. peck, a gentleman well known for his philanthropic motives in settling and improving the "long island barrens," has proved that every acre of that long neglected, and until quite recently considered worthless portion of the island, can be rendered fertile, so as to be cultivated with great profit, either in farms or market gardens, by the aid of this greatest blessing ever bestowed by providence upon an unfertile land. several of the messrs. smith, of smithtown, could show any long island farmer who still has doubts upon the subject, that guano is the greatest worker of miracles in this age--that it is just as capable of producing great crops on the barren sands of the island, as it is on the tide water shores of virginia, upon soil of the same character. a great deal has been said in deprecation of the waste of fertilizing matters in the city of new york, in which the writer of this pamphlet has conscientiously joined; because, he thought it wicked to commit such waste, while we were surrounded by lands lying idle, for the want of these very substances. precious, however, as they would be to the farmer, he cannot afford to use them. that is, it would be poor economy for a long island farmer, no matter how near the city, to expend money in the hire of men, vessels and teams, to save, carry, haul and apply to his farm, the immense amount of fertilizing substances now wasted; because the same capital expended in purchasing and applying guano, will produce a much greater profit. the difference in cartage is enough to astonish one who has never thought upon the subject. one man with a pair of horses can easily carry guano enough in one day, thirty miles into the country, to manure ten acres of ground. to carry an equivalent of city manure, in the same time, would require pair of horses and men. who can wonder that barren lands have remained barren? who will not wonder if they still continue so, with such fertilizers as their owners might possess to render them otherwise? but few of the residents in the interior of long island, if the manure was given to them, can afford the time and team work to haul loads for ten acres, while all can afford the time for one load; and they may be morally certain the capital invested in that load will be returned in the first crop. the great advantage of guano over all other manures is, the concentration of immense fertilizing power in such small bulk. _guano in new york and connecticut_, generally, has been less used than any sound reason will justify. a comparatively small portion of the market gardeners--a few gentlemen in the improvement of rural homes, and here and there a nurseryman, have derived immense benefits; but the bulk of the farmers are still either faithless, or ignorant; in most cases the latter, of the benefits they might derive from a liberal expenditure in the means, and the only means within their reach, of rendering their lands productive. _effect of guano on garden seeds._--from the society of shakers, at lebanon, so justly celebrated for growing garden seeds, we receive the most positive assurance that no manure ever applied by them, has had such an effect as guano. the production of seeds of all descriptions, is not only increased, but the quality is improved to an astonishing degree. the same effect has been noted upon wheat, particularly in our account of mr. newton's operations. so also has it in england. this view of the case should give an additional value to guano to the farmer, as not only an improver of the quantity of his products, but by the gradual improvement in the quality of the seed, calculated to be of vast benefit to him in that respect. garden seeds raised by guano, as soon as their superiority becomes known, will be in such demand that no other can be sold. another advantage will arise from the fact that such seeds will be found entirely free from weeds, as none grow after a few years upon land manured only with guano. the beautiful residence of mr. edwin bartlett, near tarrytown, exhibits strong evidence of the fertilizing power of guano upon the poor, unproductive hill sides of westchester co. that place, now so luxuriant, was noted a few years ago, as too poor to support grasshoppers. it was the poverty stricken joke of the neighborhood. [footnote : for interesting letters from long island, see appendix.] guano in massachusetts. we have heard a good many assertions that guano, however valuable it might be upon the warm sandy soils of the south, would not answer in the cold land and climate of the new england states. to refute this fallacy, we have some strong testimony. seven years ago, while the very name of guano, and much more its virtues were unknown to half the farmers of america, mr. s. s. teschemacher, of boston, a gentleman of science and practical skill in gardening, became so fully convinced of its value to the cultivators of american soil, he published a pamphlet for the purpose of inducing others to profit by its use. from that pamphlet we make a few extracts. he says--"one of the numerous objections to this manure is, that, although it may answer well in the humid atmosphere of england, it cannot produce equal benefit in the hot, sandy soils of this country. in reply to this, it may be observed, that the sandy soils of south america are more hot than they are here; and, on the coast of peru, where it is most used, it scarcely ever rains at all. the truth is, that it certainly requires moisture to decompose it, and enable it to enter into the juices of the plant; by no means, however, so much as is usually supposed; but, once absorbed by the roots and plants, it imparts that strength and solidity which enable them to resist both drought and cold. "it is beyond dispute that guano contains the chief ingredients required for the growth of plants. the instances hereafter adduced will show that the combination and form of these ingredients are such as to promote not only its immediate action, but clearly to accelerate considerably the progress of vegetation." the chief ingredients, then, of guano, are, ammonia, in various forms and combinations; phosphate and oxalate of lime and magnesia; salts of potash and soda; animal organic matter; sand and moisture. besides the evidence we have given of the value of an application of such a compound, it contains evidence within itself to every mind embued with any knowledge of agricultural chemistry, that it will not only promote immediate growth of vegetation, but produce a lasting benefit to the soil. it contains all the materials necessary for the growth of cereal or esculent vegetation in the exact form required--that is an impalpable powder--to promote rapid, certain, large growth, and abundant fruitfulness, and consequent profit. experiments by mr. teschemacher. to indian corn, applied one teaspoonful to the hill, well mixed with earth, at time of planting. when twelve or fifteen inches high, hoed in three tea spoons full around the corn, and covered two inches deep and watered. soil--a poor, sandy, sterile one. product--one seed produced three main stalks with eight perfect ears and five suckers, weighing - / lbs. the best plant without guano, weighed - / lbs. and only had one ear.--"i find the best mode of applying guano is to hollow out the hill, put in one teaspoonful and a half of guano, and mix it well with the soil. spread even, then put on this about one or one and a half inch depth of light soil, on which sow the seed and cover up. when the corn is about twelve inches high, or the time of first hoeing, begin with the hoe about four inches from the stems, and make a trench the width of the hoe about two or three inches deep. spread in this trench about three or four teaspoonfuls guano, stir it in, and cover the trench as quickly as possible. if this last operation can be performed just before or during rain, the action will be quicker and more effectual." four or five teaspoonfuls of dry powder producing such an effect, is what staggers the belief of those who see with their own eyes. so great is the luxuriance of growth from such an insignificant application, it is necessary to increase the space nearly double between the hills. in a country where fodder is so valuable as it is in massachusetts, the great increase of stalks is of equal importance with the increase of grain. indian corn requires both phosphate of lime and magnesia which it finds in guano, in combination with ammonia, in a state just ready to be absorbed by the growing plant, wherever brought in contact, with its roots. mr. t. found the guanoed corn planted may d, ripened sooner than that planted may st. with manure. this alone on account of the difficulty from frost, is sufficient to give it great claim upon northern farmers. _effect on grass._--"the application of this manure to grass land already laid down is for many reasons often attended with uncertain results. the best mode is, to spread broadcast about lbs. per acre of the peruvian guano as soon as the snow is off the ground. it would be very advantageous if, after it was spread on, some light loam could be put over it, in the manner of a top dressing. i state the peruvian guano is the best for this operation, as it contains what dr. ure calls _potential ammonia_, or ammonia in a more permanent form; whereas the ammonia from the ichaboe guano evaporates more easily, and this valuable ingredient is therefore lost in the atmosphere when it is spread on the surface. "most excellent crops have been obtained, where the grass is sown and laid down in the autumn, on light, sandy soils, by sowing the guano evenly broadcast, then harrowing twice, sowing the grass seed, and rolling." the best mode of applying it, however, is to sow broadcast and plow it in--at the south, on sandy soils, no matter how deep--at the north on soils more clayey, plow it in about four inches deep--the real object being to so mix it with the soil as to prevent the escape of ammonia, which is exceedingly volatile. remember, _guano_ should never be used as a top dressing, except in combination with plaster, or some other substance which will prevent the escape of the most valuable portion of its composition. in several case, where sods have been laid down for lawns or embankments round houses, the most surprising growth has been obtained by strewing the surface with guano previous to laying on the sod. e. baylies, of taunton, sowed lbs. african guano per acre, with grass seed, which yielded, this year, one ton per acre more than that without; and the appearance of the guanoed grass is now much more thick, luxuriant, and promising, for next year than the other. "another friend of mine sowed grass in sandy soil with a full quantity of manure, and an adjoining acre, with lbs. ichaboe guano. the guanoed acre grew stronger, and retained its full verdure the whole winter; the manured piece, on the contrary, became, as usual, brown by the action of the frost." mr. t. as well as nearly all the english writers upon the subject, has noticed the improvement in quality as well as quantity of grain and garden vegetables. it is a well authenticated fact, that birds wont touch the manured wheat, while they can obtain that which is much more plump and rich where guano has been applied. _effects on trees and grape vines._--"the experiments with guano on trees which have come under my observation, including exotics number about one hundred and fifty. the action has invariably been to produce large foliage, of a deep healthy green." the best mode of applying guano to fruit-trees, or flowering shrubs, is to dig it into the earth at such distance from the trunk as will be likely to meet the largest number of fibrous roots. "for instance, round an apple-tree of ten years' standing, dig a trench one or one and a half foot deep, at about the same distance from the stem that the branches extend; let this trench be about one foot wide; then put at the bottom one and a half inch depth of guano, dig it well in, and incorporate it with the soil; then cover up carefully and press the earth down. the effect of this application will unquestionably be felt for several years." on grape vines, the action of guano has been proved exceedingly beneficial; increasing the growth of vines and fruit, improving the flavor and hastening the ripening, so as to escape early frosts. in planting young trees, put about a pint in the bottom of the hole covering with soil so the roots will not touch it. no insects or grubs will disturb the roots of such a tree. "several friends, who have tried guano this year on their pear-trees, have reported to me the result to be greater crops, and of a much larger size, than they ever had previously." _guano on peas_--_method of applying._--the kinds on which i experimented were prince albert, shilling's early grotto, (a dwarf pea,) blue imperial, and marrowfat. draw a deep trench with a hoe, strew guano in the trench, mix it up with the soil, over this put about one inch and a half of earth, then sow the seed, and cover up. the quantity used should about equal the quantity of seed. the produce of the three first kinds of peas, was five full pecks to the quart of seed, besides a full quart of seed gathered for next year. from the marrowfats i obtained only four pecks and a half, and no seed. the growth of all was extremely luxuriant. the marrowfats were six and a half feet high, the stems from one to one and a quarter inch in circumference. guano should be placed at such a depth that the natural moisture of the earth will decompose it and render it fit for the plant. in the lightest soils--plow and bury guano a little deeper than in others more heavy; the guano itself retains moisture, and absorbs it naturally. _guano on beans_, doubled the yield of a paralel row, while the improved flavor was perceptible to those who had no idea of the cause which produced it. in drouth, the power given plants by guano, to resist the scorching rays of the sun, is remarkable. _on melons_, the effect was equally favorable, giving a large increase of highly flavored fruit. _on potatoes._--we give out of many equally favorable, only one experiment, just to show the ability of farmers to grow this crop in the most unsuitable soil, by a small expenditure for guano, twenty per cent. better than with manure. here it is. "soil, very sandy and light; quantity, lbs. african (per ship samos) to the acre; cost, $ . same soil, with twenty-two loads fine compost manure, cost $ . yield, as eleven to nine, or twenty-two per cent. in favor of guano, the potatoes with which were larger than the others." _on turnips_, no manure is equal to guano. the crop has been doubled in numerous instances. mr. t. says of one experiment he made, "the plants on this portion are now twice as large as those which have not had any. it is perfectly beautiful to see the luxuriance of all these guanoed vegetables compared with the others." _on strawberries_, nothing has ever been applied equal to guano, provided the plants are plentifully watered. the best mode of application is in solution. one pound is enough for ten gallons of water. _on cauliflowers._--two experiments, one with guano, the other with a solution. the first are fine strong plants, particularly one to which i gave a larger share than the other; it is heading finely. but those with the solution are much larger and finer. i have been accustomed to observe the cultivation of this vegetable, and never saw such a luxuriant growth. they are now, (sept. th) beginning to show flower; and, if the season is favorable, i expect the heads will be very fine. the plants are at least four times larger than those on the same piece without guano, or any manure at all, planted on the same day, from the same seed bed. _on rhubarb or pie plant_, guano has the most decided beneficial effect, increasing the size, flavor and tenderness of the stalk; besides the very great advantage of bringing it forward some two or three weeks earlier in the spring. fork it in all over the bed, just as early as the frost will permit, at the rate of lbs. to the acre. _on asparagus_, the same treatment will more than double the quantity of this excellent, healthy vegetable. in the fall, give a dressing of salt equal to or bushels to the acre. with the guano, nothing else need be applied, if it is thoroughly mixed with the soil. _for vegetables, plants, trees, and shrubbery generally_, where fruit is an object, apply the guano as above, in powder. where flowers of rare size and beauty are desired, apply it in solution, or by frequently stirring in small dressings just before a shower. another important observation on this subject is, that guano, or its solution, should never be applied except at that period of the season when the growth of wood is proper and natural. _in forcing houses_, nothing can be equal to guano. one thing, it produces no weeds, or insects; this is enough to insure its favor wherever it may be tried. _on roses_, the beneficial effect is already well known. if tea roses are cut down when the bloom is over, repotted in fresh earth, and well watered twice or thrice a week, with guano water, they will immediately throw out luxuriant shoots, and be covered with their fragrant blossoms. the cactus tribe will bear a larger quantity and stronger solution of guano, without injury, than most other plants. "during the progress of my experiments," says mr. t., "i have been delighted with the unfailing and extraordinary luxuriance of growth and produce on a miserable spot of land, induced by the use of this manure, and struck with the numerous instances which have come to my knowledge of erroneous applications of it. on a stiff clay, guano would be of little value, except on the surface, or an inch or two deep, unless it were considerably lightened by the addition of sand, or well broken up by exposure, in ridges, to frost, as every clay soil should be. a light, porous, sandy soil would require lbs. peruvian, or lbs. best ichaboe; and for this soil i think the peruvian best adapted, as it retains the ammonia longer, and, being less soluble in water than the ichaboe, its qualities are not so soon washed out." in a soil already much enriched with manure, and at the same time abounding in phosphate of lime, i have found the guano to produce less visible effects than on a poor, sandy soil. most excellent effects have been produced by steeping seeds in guano water of moderate strength for eight to twelve hours, dependent on the kind of seeds, and then planting with one to three inches soil between the seed and the guano. the steep encourages the growth of the young plant, whose roots, in a more advanced stage, find the guano, which continues the stimulus. _quantity for a steep._--put one, one and a half, or two teaspoonfuls of guano, according to quality, in a quart bottle, shake up, and when settled, use; then refill and use two or three times, previous to putting in fresh guano. or, in the large way, from fifteen to twenty gallons of water to one pound; mix in a barrel, stir up and leave it to settle, taking care, however, to put a cover on, to prevent the escape of ammonia. directions as to quantity and manner of applying guano to various crops and soils. the best action of guano is undoubtedly upon naturally poor or worn out light sandy soils. next sandy loam--then loam proper--then clayey loam or exhausted gravelly soil, and lastly cold stiff clay, or land naturally wet. upon the first particularly at the south, it should always be plowed in from four to six inches deep; and will always afford the greatest profit when applied to wheat land and that sown with clover. _preparation of guano for use._--until some ingenious yankee invents a cheap mill by which he will make a fortune and the lumps be easily ground, the following method may be pursued. take the bags on the barn floor or in some close room with tight floor and sift the guano over a box, through a / mesh sieve, putting the fine back in the bags and lumps on the floor. these may be mashed with a stout hoe or shovel, or with a block like a pavier's rammer. sift and break again until all is fine. lay the dust with a very slight sprinkle from the nose of a watering pot; of a solution of copperas, at the rate of lbs. to the cwt. of guano, or with plaster or loamy earth--woods mould or dry fine clay. many persons prefer to mix plaster with the guano in the first instance at the rate of a peck of plaster to a bushel of guano--others use an equal weight of each. where plaster is not to be had, from five to ten bushels of pulverized charcoal or dust from the coal pit, or pulverized peat, to each hundred weight of guano may be used to fix the ammonia and prevent loss. sulphuric acid lb. to of water, with which to sprinkle the mass may be used as a fixer. but if it is kept in the bags, in a dry room, until ready for use, and then prepared, sown and plowed in at once with as little exposure to the air as possible, very little of the ammonia will escape. the true axiom to be observed in the use of guano, is to plow it in as soon as possible after it is sown and before it is moistened with dew or rain; and to plow it in deep, or in some way thoroughly incorporate it with the soil, so that rains will not wash it away, or hot sunshine cause it to evaporate. we hold all top-dressings with guano, to be wasteful, on account of its volatile character, and because it needs the moisture in the earth to fit the substance of which it is composed so its fertilizing properties can be taken up by the roots of the plants. if spread upon the surface, it must wait for a dissolving shower to carry it down to the roots; in the meantime, it is moistened by dews and evaporated by the sun, and carried off to enrich your neighbor's crops half as much as your own. _preparing land and sowing._--when ready to plow the land for wheat, measure an acre and lay it off in lands feet wide; put the guano in a pail and walk up one side and down the other with a moderate step throwing handfulls across at each step, and you will find you do not vary much from two hundred pounds to the acre. never sow in a windy day if it can be avoided, nor faster than it can be plowed in the same day. _to prevent guano from getting into the mouth and nostrils._--take a thin piece of sponge and wet it and tie over the mouth and nose. whenever the dust accumulates, wash it out. if you must sow while the wind is blowing, mix earth enough with guano to prevent blowing away. _depth it should be plowed in._--on light sandy land, there is no danger of its ever being plowed in too deep. on sandy loam, it ought to be plowed under at least six inches--eight inches would be better. on true loam, a less depth will answer, though we are strong advocates of deep plowing. on clayey loam, four inches will answer, and on clay, particularly in the northern states, if well harrowed or put in with the cultivator, there will be no great loss of ammonia, as the clay is a great absorber of that volatile substance. this rule may in general be observed; upon the light lands of the south, it cannot be too deeply buried; in the clay lands, or in the more heavy, cold, or moist lands of the north, it may be covered too deep to benefit the first crop; but, if the after cultivation is good, whatever is planted will be sure to be benefitted. upon granite soils, it will be of less value than silicious or aluminous ones. though most valuable on poor sandy or worn out old fields like those of virginia, already described, still it must not be rejected by the owner of any land which can be improved by manure, because this is a manure of the very best and most concentrated kind; containing more of the ingredients necessary to promote vegetable growth, in the exact proportion and combination, ready prepared for use, than any other substance in the known world. it is a fertilizing substance which none will reject who once learn its value, unless very deeply prejudiced. it is idle to reject it because the peruvian government wont let us have it at our own price, because we can profit by it at theirs. it is nonsense to say, it will answer in the moist climate of england, but not in our dry one. truth deduced from experience, in several states, in various climates and soils, refutes all such sayings. besides, it has been used with continued success in the burning sun and soils of peru, ever since the conquest by the spaniards, and, according to tradition for ages untold previous to that time. _guano on wheat._--we repeat, sow broadcast and plow in upon all light lands, _deep_; at the rate of to lbs. to the acre, as you can afford, or as the land requires--we believe in the small quantity and repeat the next sowing, to be by far the most judicious. on heavy lands you may harrow or cultivate it in, but the plow is better. it will do well on lands previously limed, but should never be mixed with lime or ashes, unless mixed with plaster or charcoal. if you must use it as a top dressing in the spring, mix a bushel of plaster with every hundred of guano, sow and harrow in--don't be afraid of injuring the wheat always sow clover or grass on guanoed grain. _on indian corn._--follow the same directions as for wheat, or if the land is already rich, and you wish to give the corn an early start, scatter at the rate of to lbs. guano in the furrow, and cover it two inches deep with another furrow and then drill the corn. be sure and never let the seed come in contact with the guano, or you will kill it most certainly. guanoed corn should be sowed in wheat, particularly whenever it has been dressed with a large quantity. _to growing corn_, if it is desirable to apply it, turn a furrow away from the row on each side and scatter in the bottom at the rate of lbs. per acre, and turn back the earth immediately. _green corn_--roasting ears--are improved in taste by guano beyond anything ever conceived of by the lovers of this luscious food. _quantity per acre._--thomas s. pleasants of petersburg, va., a well-known writer upon agriculture, and who has had much practical experience ever since the first introduction of guano into this country, says:--"_corn_ is a gross feeder and will take up a greater quantity of guano than perhaps any other crop. i have known as much as lbs. applied to the acre and the product was in proportion. each hundred pounds will give an average product of ten bushels as various experiments have proved from the above mentioned application of lbs. a product of bushels was obtained, which left bushels as the product of the soil alone. for corn, guano may be spread broadcast on the land and ploughed in as deeply as it is desirable to break the soil; or it may be strewed along deep furrows to be afterwards ridged over and the cultivation to be in only one direction. the best result i ever obtained was from this latter mode, when from land not capable of producing five bushels, i harvested a crop that could not have been less than bushels to the acre. "the furrows were opened deep and wide by passing the plow both ways and the guano strewed along these at the rate lb. per every ten yards. they were then covered over and the land thereby thrown into beds. but in whatever way it is used, the roots of the corn will be sure to find it all, and between these two modes, i think there is little or no choice. i would certainly advise against putting it in the hill, though i have sometimes seen good results. it is difficult, however, in such a case, to prevent the guano and seed from coming into close contact; and, unless there are two or three inches of earth interposed between them the seed will be certainly destroyed." _for wheat_, the guano should be spread broadcast at the time of seeding the wheat, at the rate of lbs. to lbs. per acre and ploughed in. if the land has been previously fallowed, it will be sufficient to plow it in with a one horse plow; if broken up for the first time, there will be no objection to using a larger plough. the best depth for getting it in, however, is, i think, from four to six inches. it always acts more powerfully on clean land; indeed if there is much crude vegetable matter in the soil, there is frequently little or no advantage derived from its application. experience, therefore goes to show that the most economical application is to corn land; that is, to land that has just produced a crop of corn, no matter how poor it may be. if it is intended to be put on land that has been lying in grass, it would be advisable to fallow it as early in the season as practicable, and afterwards to get it in with a small plow as already suggested. the same direction will apply to oats and also to rye. but for oats, to lbs of guano will be as much as can be used to advantage. a. b. allen of new york, one of the earliest, and most strenuous advocates of using guano, who, long before he ever thought of being engaged in its sale, used to distribute small parcels among farmers and gardeners to enable them to try experiments and learn its value, in a letter to the southern cultivator, says:--"never put guano in the hill with corn, no matter if covered two or three inches deep; for the roots will be certain to find it, and so sure as they touch the guano, so caustic is it, that it will certainly kill the corn; the same with peas, beans, melon vines, in fact most vegetable crops. wheat and other small grains have so many roots, and tiller so well, there is no danger of guano killing them, when sown directly with the seed. still, as before remarked, it is better to plough it in before sowing the seed. "after corn is up, you may apply a table spoonful, at the first time hoeing; dig it an inch or two deep six inches from each stalk. a table spoonful to the hill will take to lbs., per acre, according to the distance the hills are apart. if the soil be rather poor, a second dose at the time the corn first shows its silk, will add considerably to the yield in grain, if followed by rains, but little or nothing to the growth of stalk. guano increases the size of grain more than stalks; hence one must be content to wait till the grain is fully matured before giving an opinion of the virtues of guano. "before applying the guano, it is better to mix it well with an equal quantity of plaster of paris or charcoal dust. either of these substances help to retain the ammonia and prevent its evaporation. "the genuine unadulterated peruvian guano, is so much superior to any other kind, it is in reality the _cheapest_, though the price is considerable higher than that of the other qualities." _guano on oats._--mr. allen says, "i am satisfied from experience and observation in the use of guano, for the past twelve years, that the best method, decidedly, of applying it to crops in our dry climate, is to plow or spade it into the ground; and autumn is the best time for doing this, as it gives time for the pungent salts contained in the guano, to get thoroughly mixed with the soil before spring planting. do not fear to loose the guano by plowing it in as deep as you please--it will not run away, depend upon it. at the south, it loses half its virtue if not plowed in at least three inches deep; six or twelve inches would be still better." because "autumn is, for many reasons, the best season" for applying guano, as a general thing, we do not recommend an application to this crop, notwithstanding our full conviction it will increase the product upon any light, poor soil, from ten to twenty bushels to the acre, for each cwt. applied. as some however, will find it more convenient and profitable to manure the oat than wheat crop, we recommend them to plow in from to lbs. to the acre, on ground that was clean tilled the previous year, and sow the oats in drills, three or four bushels to the acre and seed with clover, herds, or ray grass. if not to be followed with grass, we would use a much less quantity; say or lbs. to the acre. as may be seen in the account of mr. harris' crop, not one half of the lbs. was taken up by the oats. with wheat, on the contrary, the guano is dissolved more slowly by winter rains, giving the crop a vigorous growth in fall, and sometimes all winter, so it sends out double the number of stalks in spring. the sun too, is so much less powerful at that season, evaporation does not take place so easily as in summer. _great crops from guano._--in england, bushels of wheat and of oats have been made from an acre dressed with lbs. of guano. a late english writer, in detailing his own experiments, and urging others to the same course, says; "the reason guano is serviceable to all plants arises from its containing every saline and organic matter required as food. it is used beneficially on all soils; for, as it contains every element necessary to plants, it is independent of the quality of the soil. so far as the experiments in england and scotland may be adduced, one cwt. of guano is equal to about five tons of farm-yard manure, on an average; but it is much higher for turnips than for grass." _guano on grass._--as we are opposed to using it as a top dressing, of course we shall not recommend its application to this crop. generally, by using it on wheat and other crops, the farmer will save manure enough to top dress his meadows. nevertheless, in combination with proper ingredients, we do say it is a good and profitable manure for grass. for each acre mix from to lbs. with as many bushels of plaster, or ten to one of charcoal, or twenty to one of dry swamp muck or peat, woods mould or fine clay, and sow upon the meadow or pasture early in spring. if the season is moist, the benefit will be very great; if dry, it will probably be said, as it has been before; "oh, this guano is good for nothing--i tried it once on grass and it never done a bit of good." _on potatoes_, lbs. to the acre, broadcast, may be used to good advantage, if it is plowed in deep enough, on clean land. as it is a caustic manure, and requires a good deal of moisture, as well as potatoes, it is not suitable for the hill or surface dressing. a less quantity will pay a greater profit to the immediate crop, without much after benefit, if it is drilled in the bottom of a deep furrow and then covered by turning two furrows, one from each side, so as to leave a slight depression between them, and directly over the guano. upon these beds plant the tubers in drills. after hoeing, scatter a mixture of equal parts of lime, salt, ashes and plaster, a large handful every yard, all over the rows, and we will warrant the crop free from the potato rot. _on turnips_, nothing can exceed guano, unless the phosphate of lime in bones could be rendered equally pulverulent. use to lbs. per acre, and plow it in at the last plowing, and top dress with five bushels of ashes and two of salt as soon as the turnips are up. follow with wheat or rye and grass. one half the above quantity and five bushels of bone dust dissolved in sulphuric acid, will produce a wonderful crop of turnips, or ruta bagas. guano may be used to equal advantage upon all kinds of root crops. _benefits to the dairy farmer._--the beneficial use of guano in the manufacture of butter and cheese, is unquestionable. in many districts in england, and in some in this country, the continual cropping of grass and conversion of it into cheese, has so exhausted the soil of its phosphates, the milk will no longer produce the quantity of casein necessary to make cheese making profitable. when this is the case, you will find the cows seeking to supply the deficiency by eating bones. wherever guano has been used upon pasture land, it is found that cows eat the increased luxuriant grass most greedily, and improve not only in quantity but quality of their milk. we cannot, therefore, recommend too earnestly, to all dairy farmers, to give their pasture lands an immediate dressing of guano. if you have not full faith in what we are telling you, try an experiment for yourself. mix or lbs. of guano with two or three bushels of plaster, and that with two or three loads of charcoal dust from the bottom of some coal pit, or from burnt peat, or swamp muck; or, if the charcoal is not attainable, use woods mold, or powdered clay or fine loam, to any extent you can afford; and if you can afford nothing but the guano and plaster, don't fail to afford a dressing of that, because it will afford you a rich return. no other manure can be used upon pasture land, to produce the same effect. cattle never reject the grass of guanoed land, as they do that lately manured. _on flax._--experiments in england have proved guano superior to any other substance ever applied to this crop. with the aid of this manure, farmers will never complain of flax exhausting the soil. with lbs. per acre, successive large crops can be grown upon the same ground. it should be plowed in, but not so deeply as for some other crops, as it is not expected to benefit succeeding ones as much as the present. as soon as the "flax cotton" movement now progressing is fully understood, there will be immense fields of flax grown for that purpose, and the best and most economical fertilizing material, and for which there will be a large demand, will be peruvian guano; for no good farmer will attempt to grow a crop without it. a top dressing of or bushels of ashes to the acre will be found beneficial; but farmers ought to try which is best, more guano and less or no ashes, or the reverse. we cannot advise rotation with this crop, where guano is used, because the ground becomes so clean and free from weeds, it is of great advantage, and so far as we are informed, continuous good crops result from the annual application of the same quantity of guano, year after year. _on cabbages._--field culture. after the ground is well prepared, lay it off in checks three to four feet square. with a spade, throw out a deep spit at each check and put in a spoonful of guano, or at the rate of lbs. per acre, and cover with soil. set the plants immediately and water if possible. after the first hoeing, throw a handful of ashes on each plant. _for carrots, beets and parsnips_, plow in lbs. per acre, twelve to eighteen inches deep. top dress with ashes, salt, and fine manure in compost, to assist the young plants; the long roots will find the guano and it will produce such a crop as you never saw before. _on hops._--make a mixture of three cwt. of guano, one of salt, one and a half of saltpetre, and one of gypsum, for each acre; sow broadcast and plow in about four inches deep, and you will find your manure well paid for, and no exhaustion of the soil, as is usually the case wherever this crop is cultivated, as it is a very gross feeder, and requires very rich land or great deal of manure; for which reason it is not as much cultivated as it will be as soon as the virtues of the above application become fully known. _for tobacco_, guano has been found to possess superior qualities, particularly in obviating the difficulty heretofore experienced in getting plants sufficiently early. we have the testimony of several witnesses to prove that burning a seed bed is quite unnecessary, if guano at the rate of to lbs. to the acre be mixed with an equal amount of ashes, and plaster and well raked in previous to sowing. of the effect upon the crop, we give the testimony of a virginia planter. "in the spring of , i applied lbs. to the acre, on eight acres of land, which had been manured three years before for tobacco, and the same quantity, on three acres which had never been manured, and was very poor. on the last i also turned in some half rotted straw, raked up in the barn yard, after all the farm yard manure had been hauled out. between these two pieces of land, acres were heavily manured. the whole acres had been well broken with four horses, early in the winter. the last year was the worst i have ever known for tobacco. nevertheless, the first eight acres produced a very fine crop--the last three acres brought much better tobacco than the adjoining manured land, i should say not less than lbs. to the acre." _wheat on guanoed tobacco land._--this field was sown with wheat, and the writer says--"i measured from these acres next year upwards of bushels of wheat of very fine quality; both pieces of guanoed land being _above_ the average of the whole lot. adjoining the _three_ acres is an equal quantity of land of the same quality, which did not yield five bushels to the acre." of the effect upon another crop of wheat, the same gentleman says--"two years ago i purchased three tons, two of which i applied to acres of a james river hill, which though not gullied, had been a good deal worn by hard croppings, or bad cultivation, or both combined. the guano was sowed _dry_, and on the wide rows laid off for sowing wheat, and ploughed in with two horses, the wheat then harrowed in. i forgot to say that the land had been fallowed in with three horses in the month of august, and the wheat sowed in october. in consequence of the dryness of the guano, and the width of the rows, the wheat was very much striped, being very luxuriant where the guano fell in the largest quantities. the product did not exceed bushels, or bushels to the acre, but the quality was so superior that i saved it all for seed." "the land sowed two years ago, is now _striped with clover_, as it was with wheat." this land is a tenacious red clay formation, from which the soil we presume has all been washed away "long time ago." no planter, he says, would have put such land in tobacco without heavy manuring; and yet it produced a fair crop of tobacco. owing to distance from navigation, he could not use lime, or any heavy manure, and without guano he could not make crops, and, consequently could not make manure at home. the editor of the american farmer, in a note says--"our correspondent appears to desire that his land should be brought to a state of fertility by the _quickest_ practicable process, and from the beautiful results of his experiments with guano, we know of no agent to which he could look with so much certainty of success as to that very manure." _the quantity per acre for tobacco._--we should recommend at least lbs. sown broadcast and plowed in, on such land as described, not over four inches deep. the tobacco to be followed with wheat, the wheat with clover, the clover after one year with corn and then tobacco and guano again. the clover should have a bushel of plaster fall and spring. whoever tries this will find the benefit of guano on tobacco. but there is one still greater benefit; we have been assured that the tobacco worm which it was supposed from his natural taste, nothing could nauseate, actually gets sick of guano, and refuses his accustomed food. _another mode of applying_ it to tobacco has been practised successfully as follows:--mark off the land in checks and put a small spoonful in each check, and cover up directly under the bed where the plant is to stand, three or four inches deep. to this a handful of ashes and plaster may be advantageously added. guano does not give tobacco the rank flavor that is often acquired from high manuring. mr. pleasants, although many experiments have failed, principally, as he believes, from improper application, says in a recent letter--"there is no actual reason why guano should not act as well on tobacco as any other crop. the failures are doubtless to be ascribed to the injudicious manner in which it has been applied. i can conceive of only one mode in which it can be used to advantage, and that is by strewing it along a deep furrow as described for corn; then bedding upon it and confining the cultivation to one direction. this has been my way of cultivating cabbages for the market for several years, and the guano has always acted promptly and powerfully. if chopped in at the base of the hill it would require a great quantity of rain to dissolve it and make it available to the young plants, for the conical shape of the hill has a tendency to shed the rain instead of absorbing it. i expect soon to receive very accurate results of a crop grown with guano, which judge nash represented to me as splendid. if i cultivated tobacco, i should have every confidence of success by planting it on ridges with the guano buried at a considerable depth, say from four to six inches beneath the surface of the ridge-- lb. to ten yards would be a sufficient quantity. "in short, i consider guano good for any crop. for potatoes (that is irish potatoes) i regard it as a specific manure. the quantity i apply is / lbs. to every ten yards put in the furrows as recommended for corn and tobacco, and then covered over about one inch with earth drawn from the sides of the furrows. after this the potato cuttings are planted and covered over with the plough or hoe. the quantity recommended is about right as far as my experience goes (which is of several years duration) if the cuttings are placed about two inches apart." _guano for cotton._--but few trials upon this crop have come to our knowledge, but such as have, indicate that it will prove one of the most valuable promoters of the growth of this staple product of america ever discovered. the analysis of cotton--stalk, seed and lint--compared with that of guano, is sufficient to prove the latter to be the very matter required to produce the former. we are assured upon the most reliable authority that guano will give an average increase of pound for pound upon any soil producing less than a bale per acre so that every pound of guano costing two and a half cents, will give a pound of cotton averaging at least - / cents. _mode of applying on cotton land._--open a deep furrow and drill in the bottom at the rate of lbs. to the acre, upon land usually producing to lbs. seed cotton, and less for a better quality of land, down to one-fourth the quantity. bed on this as deep as you please; the moisture of the earth will disengage the ammonia and phosphates, and send their fertilizing properties up to the roots. never use guano as a top-dressing for cotton. the seed will be found better matured, and consequently more valuable to manure another crop, besides being so much easier separated from the lint, which will be found as much improved in quality as quantity. for sea island planters, where manure is so valuable and so hard to obtain, we would earnestly recommend a thorough trial of guano. as the land for this crop is mostly prepared with hoes, care must be taken that the servants do not neglect to bury it at the very bottom of a good bed. from the knowledge the writer has of the culture and value of long staple cotton, and the price and value of guano, he has no hesitation in expressing his honest conviction that a clear profit of two to four hundred per cent. may be made upon every dollar expended in the purchase and proper application of guano to that crop. guano, for all staple crops in the united states, is no longer an experiment. it has been clearly demonstrated, to be the cheapest and most valuable fertilizer, particularly for all poor, worn out, hard used and exhausted soils ever discovered; which no sensible man will neglect to profit by, as soon as he learns its value, unless prevented by deep prejudice or strong circumstances. _application to miscellaneous crops._--under this head we will give the experience of several individuals in various sections, soils and climates, in hopes it may encourage the doubtful, and direct those who are disposed to emerge from darkness into the light of scientific agriculture. a gentleman from warsaw, virginia, where the soil is generally a sandy loam, badly worn by long years of bad tillage, says, "my wheat looks finely, especially where i applied guano last fall. i put it in with the seed furrow about three inches deep, and also with double plow six inches deep, harrowing in the wheat frequently side by side. at this time i can see no difference in the wheat crop. i use a large wooden toothed harrow extending over the bed of ten feet, and an even soil, free from stone; they do admirable work and drill the wheat as if put in with the drill." willoughby newton, whose operation we have already spoken of, says; "i do not believe it possible to improve a farm, on the old three shift system, of corn, wheat and pasture, without a large supply of foreign manures. if clover can be substituted for pasture in the summer, then the land, if not naturally poor, may be rapidly improved by the use of lime alone, in addition to the putrescent manures that may, by proper care, be made on the farm. on other land of less fertility, and drier, i greatly prefer the five field system, under which, with the use of lime, guano and clover, a rapid improvement may be effected at the same time that heavy crops of wheat are reaped." another writer in speaking of how to improve worn out lands, says; "let whatever little surplus he can spare from supplying the necessary wants of his family be laid out in the purchase of some one of the reliable concentrated manures. [guano is by far the cheapest, and therefore the best for him, if he will plow it in well]. and my observation and experience have convinced me that he may make such improvement as will bring him a quick return, and soon enable him to get his farm well set in grass. this once effected, his facilities for its further improvement will assuredly increase in a ratio just in proportion as he is careful to pursue the course indicated. if a farmer can succeed in getting his fields well set in grass, a large and long array of facts and experience have proved that he may then, under a judicious course of management, render them more and more fertile without foreign aid of any kind whatever." the editor of the american farmer, in deprecating the price of guano says, "of the efficacy of guano, in restoring worn out lands to productiveness--of its capacity to increase the yield of any lands in a sound condition--there cannot be a doubt; but even with all its regenerating properties, we do think that its market value is too high. forty-eight dollars for a ton of , lbs. of peruvian guano is more than it is intrinsically worth, and should it be continued thus high, must, we should think, limit its use, for the obvious reason, that farmers cannot afford to pay a price for it which is so disproportionate to its real value." yet they do continue to pay, and make it pay a greater profit than any other manure ever purchased. we hold to have done as much as any other individual to reduce the price of guano, and wish as heartily as does the editor of the am. farmer, it was only half the price it now is; yet, we must counsel our readers not to wait for that cheap time coming. it is now cheaper than it was then, and probably as low as it will be for years; and in the hands of the present agents, the public may depend upon a regular supply, and of genuine quality, at what the peruvian government deem a fair price. _guano for melons and other vines._--mr. pleasants, of whom we have before spoken, and whose long experience in the use of guano in connection with a market garden, entitle him to a high degree of credit, says, "i have been in the habit of using it for several years, and can testify to its value, not only using it for melons, but for the whole tribe of cucurbitacæ. the mode of application which i prefer is this; when the ground is prepared and checked off, remove the loose soil at the intersections of the furrows, leaving clear spaces on the substratum of not less than eighteen inches in diameter. upon these spaces sprinkle guano, at the rate one pound to eight hills. follow with a hilling or grubbing hoe, and incorporate the guano with the subsoil; then draw the loose earth back, and finish by chopping a small quantity, a spadeful or less, of well rotted manure into the hill near the surface. guano placed near the surface, will remain almost inert, and buried deep, as i recommended, it will be too remote from the seed to give the young plants the quick start which is indispensable to an early crop of melons. the small quantity of manure near the top of the hill answers the purpose of immediate forcing, and enables the roots to strike rapidly into the guano, when the growth of the vines will be stimulated to such a degree as to cause them to mature their fruit a week or ten days earlier than they would do from either guano or manure alone. melons equally fine may be raised from nothing but guano, applied in the manner directed; but they will not be an early crop, from the fact that the plants remain almost stationary until the roots reach the guano. last year, from such a preparation as is now recommended, i had as fine a crop of melons as i ever saw; and they began to ripen at a very early period in the season. two years ago, i had them nearly or quite as good from guano alone; but they were late. this year the crop was almost a failure, from the wetness of the season, which caused the vines to die. cantelope melons, however, have produced abundantly, grown entirely with the aid of guano. where manure is scarce, i have no doubt an admirable compost might be prepared, consisting of guano and rich earth. it should be made several weeks, or even months, before it is wanted for use; and the heap worked over frequently in order to bring it into a suitable condition. such a compost would doubtless supply the place in the hill which i have assigned to the manure. for pumpkins, squashes, cymblins and cucumbers, when it is not particularly desirable to have them early, nothing more is necessary than to prepare the hills with guano." the following extract from a letter of e. g. booth, to f. c. stainbrook, written in that plain familiar style of one friend to another, which characterises the man, with an evident intent to do good; though it was not designed for publication, we give it because we believe it will do others good, as well as the recipient. mr. booth confirms our opinion often expressed, that the poor old barren fields of lower virginia, are really more valuable than the rich lands of the west; because, owing to facilities of intercourse with commercial cities by water, these lands can be bought, and cultivated by aid of guano, with more profit than the richest prairie farm in illinois. mr. booth's testimony upon the durability of this manure, is enough to contradict all the assertions that "it is of no use for only one crop." on his land, strangers can easily tell where guano was applied four years previous. "yours of the third has been received, and it affords me pleasure to give you any information in my power. the wheat crop during the the winter was very unpromising. there was a general complaint that it was too thin. the poland wheat (most generally sown in this neighborhood,) is said to branch more than other kinds, and i regard the present prospect of the wheat crop as flattering, particularly where guano was used. it is now a fixed fact, that no poor land ought to be cultivated without guano, by any person who can command the money or credit to buy it. it is remarkable that it pays a much better profit, or per cent. on the investment, on poor land, than rich. i was inclined for some time to believe that the difference was really in appearance alone. the difference of five bushels increase on land which without it would bring only fifteen--or in other words, an increase from fifteen to twenty bushels to the acre, would not be very perceptible, while an increase of five bushels on land previously making only five, would be very evident. still, the real increase would be five bushels in each case. i am now however, decidedly of the opinion that it pays a much larger per cent. on poor than rich land; because it supplies that in which poor land is deficient, and of which rich land may have enough. i have it now in strips on a clover fallow, scarcely showing any difference. i last applied it on about the poorest land on my plantation, and the product was remarkable. this circumstance much reduces the difference between the value of poor and rich land, and admonishes us that there is not a plot in our wide extended surface, which need be abandoned or neglected. we can, if we manage properly, support a population which will out vote the west in . there is another fact which experience confirms, that is it is much more durable than at first supposed. my visitors have been able to point out the strips of land on which it was sown, four years after its application. i noticed a very evident effect on the farm of mr. william fitzgerald, a few days ago. he last year put it in drills, and hilled on them for tobacco, in the fall the whole surface was sown in wheat, which is now growing in ridges corresponding with the furrows where it was placed. "while on the subject i will mention another fact different from first impressions, viz: that it is more productive, (the first crop, at least,) when harrowed in with the grain, on the surface, than when turned in very deep. i have yet to satisfy myself which is most durable. in the experiment which lasted four years, i think it was turned in. the purchases the ensuing fall will be very large. those who were most incredulous are now going in largely. a very intelligent and enterprising friend of mine, who has been improving his land judiciously and profitably in this way, related to me an anecdote which occurred to him. he had two neighbors remarkable for their judgment and success in farming as well as other things, who, however, were inclined to underrate his expenditure of money in these elements of improvement. they knew he had purchased and used a ton of guano, and thought they knew where he had used the whole of it. they went, not exactly by night, but rather privately, to examine into the result. they made their observations and calculations, and agreed that he had got his money back, but no profit worthy consideration, and were only confirmed in their opposition to such an expenditure. the truth was, however, that only about one eighth of the ton had been used where they calculated for the whole. one of these gentlemen, i am informed, is now about the largest purchaser of such articles in the county; and perhaps the other also, though i have not been informed." plaster with guano. a virginia farmer, in a letter of december , in speaking of using plaster with guano, and the effect says--"i am a firm believer in the merits of the mixture, and always use it. i have used it on turnips with decided effect, as decided as that following any application of guano i ever saw. several farmers of my acquaintance used the mixture of guano and plaster, and stable manure and plaster habitually, like myself, and one told me he used it half and half, producing the most marked effect on wheat, and that a neighbor of his had used it in the same proportion with the same effect--the usual surprising effect of guano. for myself, i used some $ worth of guano on wheat this fall, the whole of it mixed with plaster. i believe the effect of the mixture will not be so vigorous on the first crop, as guano by itself--the plaster husbanding the ammonia for succeeding crops, upon which the mixture, (if the theory be correct,) will have more effect than guano unmixed, that being exhausted by the first crop." a gentleman after making sundry careful experiments with plaster and carbonate of ammonia, thus expresses his conclusions--"these experiments prove to me that no matter in what state, (whether _wet_, _moist_, or _dry_,) plaster is presented to guano, or any other manure from which the carbonate of ammonia is escaping, it must retain a certain amount of ammonia that would otherwise be lost in the atmosphere." the editor of the american farmer says--"if the soil be poor, and it be desired to permanently improve it, at least four hundred pounds of guano, without respect to the fixer used, should be spread _broadcast_, on every acre of it, and plowed in to the full depth of the furrow. if the land be in moderate heart, three hundred pounds will be enough per acre. where the soil may be good, two hundred will be sufficient. these quantities, as the reader will observe, have relation to broadcast applications, as all should be where general improvement is contemplated; if compelled to confine his experiments on corn to applications in the hill, a form of manuring, we have ever disapproved, two hundred pounds, or even one hundred of guano, will manure an acre, mixed with a bushel of plaster, five bushels of slaked ashes, and a double horse cart of wood mould more effective than ten loads of manure applied in the hill." yes, as has been proved by careful experiment made in england, more than fourteen tons of manure. the editor also says, what we have so often repeated--"we hold these to be agricultural truths--that guano is most beneficially applied, when ploughed in as spread on the the earth, never less than four inches deep--and better, for permanent effect, to be ploughed in deeper, say six to eight inches--where it may be desirable only to bury it four inches deep, the land should be previously ploughed as deep as the furrow can be turned up, and the guano applied at a second ploughing--that all top-dressings with guano are wasteful, inasmuch, as from the volatile nature of the more active parts of the manure, great loss must inevitably result from all such applications, and because, more moisture than is to be found on the surface, is necessary to excite, and carry on, that healthful progressive state of decomposition, which is required to render guano most available for present production and future improvement. "we do not hesitate to express the opinion, that when properly used, as an adjunct to lime or marl, that it will bring up any sound worn out land, to at least its original degree, if not a greater degree of fertility; provided its application be followed by clover. we believe that, when properly applied to land, either limed or marled the previous year, it will add twenty-five, thirty, and, in some instances, forty per cent. to the product of wheat; besides infusing into the soil, the capacity to grow luxuriant crops of clover, and thus fit it for profitable future culture. if it will do this, and we are certain it will, then it will achieve all that any agriculturist can reasonably expect of it, or of any other fertilizing agent; and we are very sure there is no other manure equally efficacious, within the reach of farmers and planters. "guano differs much in quality; that from peru, is confessedly best of any which has yet been submitted to actual experiment by agriculturists, or tested by the analysis of chemists, being much richer in its nitrogenous element, than either the patagonian or african variety." he also says--" lbs. of guano and bushel of plaster, will ensure a good crop of corn, so will lbs. guano and eight bushels of bone earth, or bushels of bone earth, bushels of ashes and bushel of plaster. each to be ploughed in." much more might be said in favor of using plaster with guano, or some other fixer of ammonia, wherever it is exposed, on or near the surface. we add a few more extracts mainly to show that deep ploughing, and plentiful manuring, are the sure guarantee of bountiful crops. bone-dust, except when used in the drill, should always be harrowed in. it should be put in bulk with other matters, and excited into an incipient state of decomposition before being used. guano should always be ploughed in, if practicable. harrowing and cultivating in guano "have been practised both in this country and in england, by intelligent farmers; and in various instances have been spoken approvingly of, success having attended such applications in single crops; but we doubt whether much, if any permanent benefit were done to the soil, in qualifying it for the production of the subsequent crops of a course of rotation. in peru it is used topically, but such applications are always followed by immediate irrigations of the soils to which it is applied, the peruvians acting upon the philosophical principal, whether they comprehend its theory or not, that to secure the nutrient properties of this active fertilizer to their growing crops, it is essential that they provide an absorbent, and that they find in the water furnished by their processes of irrigation. experience, practice, and irrigation have taught them, that unless they cause the carbonate of ammonia, and the various compound substances with which it exists in the guano, to descend speedily to the roots of their plants, that from the volatility of its more active and efficient elements, they will be expelled by the heat of the sun, escape into the air, and be lost for all the purposes of vegetable growth. "but in view of the whole ground, taking into consideration the evanescent nature of any ammonia in guano in the compounds in which it exists, to be converted into that form, we honestly believe, that so far as lasting benefit to the land may be concerned, guano should be ploughed in. "in all tolerably good guano, there is a sufficiency of the carbonate already formed to carry on healthful vegetation, and therefore, it is best to place it sufficiently deep to prevent the waste of an element so essential to the growth of plants, and so liable to loss. "it is possible where the soil had been, by repeated harrowings, reduced to a state of very fine tilth, that guano may be covered sufficiently deep with the cultivator to become mixed with, and consequently be absorbed by the vegetable remains of the earth, and thus be prevented from loss by escape of its volatile gases; especially would this be the case, if the process of cultivating it in, were soon after followed by penetrating rains. in admitting this, we still adhere to the opinion, that so far as permanent benefits are concerned, the most economical mode of applying guano to the earth, is by the plough. "as soon as the guano is ploughed in, the wheat should be sowed and harrowed in, in the usual way. in our climate we can sow wheat on the poorest corn ground late in november and have as fine a crop, and harvest it as soon, as we can obtain from well prepared and fallowed without guano sowed early in the season, for every lbs. of guano, not exceeding lbs. we calculate on reaping of an average season from six to seven bushels, sometimes eight. from a greater quantity though the product will be increased, yet it will not be increased in the same proportion, and lbs will also be sufficient for the production of two good grass crops following the wheat and will then leave the land in an improved condition." _charcoal and guano._--the benefit of charcoal with guano will be understood from the following extract from "scientific agriculture," on the nature of charcoal and its use as a manure.--"charcoal on account of its power of absorbing gases and destroying offensive odors, is a valuable addition to the soil; its operation as a manure is not so direct as some other manures; that is, it is not so useful on account of any element it furnishes to plants, as by the intermediate office which it performs, of absorbing and retaining in the soil those volatile matters which plants require, and which would otherwise escape and be lost. it is beneficial as a top-dressing, and as an ingredient in composts; it evolves carbonic acid in its decomposition, and is in this way directly useful to plants. its powerful antiseptic properties render it very useful to young and tender plants, by keeping the soil free of putrifying substances, which would otherwise destroy their spongioles and prevent their growth." and its capacity to absorb many times its bulk of gaseous matter, will always give it value as an absorbent of escaping ammonia from surface dressings of guano. the editor of the farmer also says--"in our climate, we should be opposed to all topical applications of any strongly concentrated manure like guano by itself,--and, indeed we should, under all circumstances, prefer to have it ploughed in, if practicable; but as we presume our correspondent has been prevented by circumstances, from using guano at the time of ploughing for wheat; and of course, must avail himself of the next best plan of deriving benefit from its use, we would advise, him next spring, as soon as the frost is out of the ground, and it is in a state to bear a team; to mix, in the proportion of lbs. of guano, one bushel of fine charcoal, and one peck of plaster per acre, then to sow the mixture over his wheat field, lightly harrow the ground, and finish by rolling; and we have no hesitation in saying, that his wheat crop will be benefitted more than twice the cost of the manure. we say to him farther that he need not fear injuring his wheat plants by the operation of harrowing and rolling; for, on the contrary, it will act as a working, and prove of decided advantage. we feel very certain that the admixture of charcoal and plaster with guano, together with the covering it will receive by the harrowing, will prevent any material loss of the ammoniacal principles of the latter; as independent of the affinity existing between charcoal, plaster, and all nitrogeneous bodies, they will be greatly aided by the vital principle of the plants themselves. we are not, however, left to the lights of theory alone, in this matter, but have the experience of the honorable mr. pearce, of kent county, of this state, to guide us to a practical result,--he used, some years since, a top-dressing of guano and plaster upon his wheat field, and was rewarded by a large increase of crop." a correspondent says--"i am satisfied from experience and observation in the use of guano for the last twelve years, that the best method, decidedly, of applying it to our crops in this dry climate, is to plow and spade it into the ground; and autumn is the best season for doing this, as it gives time for the pungent salts contained in the guano to get thoroughly mixed with the soil before spring planting. do not fear to lose the guano, by plowing it as deep as you please--it will not run away, depend upon it. at the south it loses half its virtue if not plowed in at least three inches deep; six to twelve inches would be still better. "spread broadcast on grass land, late in the fall or early in the spring, if not plowed in before sowing buckwheat, rye or wheat, then spread it broadcast after sowing the grain, and harrow well and roll the land. this last operation is quite important." _value of guano on account of its phosphates._--he who wishes to have the best grazing grounds, where he can present the richest and most nutritious herbage to his cattle, will keep his ground well supplied or manured with guano that abounds in phosphates, knowing that it will supply the needed nutriment to the grass, and by the grass to the cattle; and thus his stock will be kept in a high condition and full flesh, either for the farm or the market. again; he who raises wheat, corn, or other grains, has an equal inducement to look to it that his manures are abundantly impregnated with these essential elements. phosphates, so available to the raiser of stock, are equally so to the producer of grain; because the size, richness, and nutritious qualities of the grain depend largely on the presence of these in the soil. a farmer, therefore, has a vital interest in this matter, and should obtain what best suits his purpose. the most intelligent english farmers are so well convinced on this point, that substances containing only ten per cent. of phosphate of lime, are sought after, dissolved in sulphuric acid and water, and sprinkled on the soil. bone dust also is used, and to a certain extent, is available, because one of the principal constituents of bones, is phosphate of lime. but the article in which the phosphates are the most convenient, because the most minutely distributed, is guano; and this, when judiciously used, must find favor wherever it can be obtained. that which contains a large proportion of phosphates, in combination with ammonia, nitrogen and alkaline salts, apparently in the exact proportion required by nature, such as analysis and experience proves is the case with peruvian guano, will be sought after by every farmer who reads the evidence of its value which we have given in these pages. it is idle to talk of bones to restore the waste of phosphates in the soil that is being constantly carried away in grass and grain, beef, pork, mutton, milk and cheese, much of which passes into the sea from the sewers of cities, to be there retained in that great reservoir for the future use of men. it is from that we are now drawing our present supplies. happily for mankind in all civilized countries, the discovery of guano has, in a providential manner, met the very wants of the times, in reference to the reinvigoration of certain kinds of soil, since this manure furnishes the elements most needed to supply the waste arising from cultivation, and to develop vegetation. the impossibility of procuring bones enough to supply the wants of the comparative few now engaged in using guano, may be readily learned by any farmer who uses ten tons of guano per annum, if he will undertake to "pick up bones" enough to furnish him the same amount of phosphates contained in that quantity of guano. then if all who are now using it, would drop guano and take to bones, it would soon be found to be hard picking. save all the bones and apply them to the soil, is a standing text with us; upon the same soil use all the guano your can procure and you will not need to pick bones--you will grow bones to pick. it may be very patriotic to talk about expending the money at home, for bones, instead of sending it to peru, for guano; but that talk is all for buncombe, there is not a particle of sound reason in it. if all the bones in the united states could be saved and applied to the land again, we should still fall short of a supply, and be obliged to do as england did before the introduction of guano; go about and ransack grave yards of great battlefields, for more bones. with all the guano imported, or that will be imported, and all the bones that will be saved, there will still be room for more phosphates in the millions of acres of hungry soil in america. what would be the effect if a few such farms as willoughby newton's, and col. carter's, who each use to tons per annum of guano, should come all at once into the bone market for their supplies. in our opinion there would be such a rattling among the dry bones, we should hear no more about substituting them for guano. the fact is an incontrovertible one, that nothing on earth nor under the earth, or in the sea, has ever been discovered, which can be used as a substitute for guano. its small bulk is alone sufficient to commend it to favor. the royal agricultural society of england offers a prize of £ , and the gold medal of the society, for the discovery of a manure with equal fertilizing properties to the guano, of which an unlimited supply can be furnished in england, at £ per ton. "_analogy between bones and guano._--there is a striking analogy in composition between bones and guano, which is, for other reasons interesting to the practical man. the following table exhibits the composition of bones compared with guano, supposing both in the dry state. bones, as they are applied to to the land contain about per cent. of water. ichaboe guano from to per cent. _bones._ _guano._ organic animal matter, phosphates of lime and magnesia, carbonate of lime, salts of soda, salts of potash, trace trace silicious matter ---- ---- " and these substances are found in guano already in a pulverulent state, while bones have to be reduced by mechanical or chemical means to the same condition before they are of any use as manure. do not, we again repeat most emphatically, do not waste a bone; dissolve all you can get in sulphuric acid and mix with guano--save and make all the manure possible, both by the stable, compost heap and green crops, and then you will have money to buy guano, by which you can save the immense labor of hauling to distant fields, and still have the satisfaction of seeing them as fertile as those highly manured near home. when the farmer raises crops for sale, and removes his grain and grasses from the land, he sells a portion of his soil; and if he does not renew in some way the saline matters taken away in his crops, he invariably impoverishes his farm. this work of exhaustion is now going on to an alarming extent, and the prolific wheat lands are to be searched for farther and farther westward as the operation proceeds. every one knows the superiority of wheat grown on newly cultivated lands, and most farmers are aware of the fact that soils become exhausted of something, they know not what, but of something essential to the most favorable production of grain. this something is found in guano, and by it the original fertility of land can be more easily, more certainly and cheaply restored than by any other means as yet discovered. professor mapes in one of his letters of advice says; "as no farm, under ordinary usage, will supply as much manure as may be used upon it with profit, i am glad you intend to use guano, as it is an admirable manure, replete with many requirements of plants. the ammonia of the guano is in the form of a carbonate, and therefore so volatile as to escape from the soil into the atmosphere before plants can use it. "you will readily perceive, therefore, that the sulphuric and phosphoric acids require amendments, and the ammonia should be changed from a carbonate to a sulphate of ammonia, which is not volatile. all this may be readily done by dissolving bone dust in dilute sulphuric acid, mixing it with the guano, and then with a sufficient amount of charcoal dust to render the mass dry and pulverulent. the more charcoal dust the better, as it absorbs and retains ammonia, and after it is in the soil, will continue to perform similar offices for many years, only yielding up ammonia as required by plants, and receiving new portions from rains, dews, &c." if used as a top dressing, this change from a carbonate to a sulphate may be necessary; but not so if well mixed with the soil, particularly one in which clay predominates. in such a soil it is not even necessary to adhere to the direction to plow the guano deeply under. if it is but slightly harrowed in, the nature of the clay is such it will prevent the escape of the ammonia. if you require phosphates, more than ammonia, add the superphosphate of lime; but in no case omit the guano. _use of salt with guano._--common salt at the rate of a bushel to lbs. of guano, well mixed, may be used to good advantage either as a top dressing, or when plowed in. the effect of the muriatic acid of the salt upon the guano will be, as both are dissolved in the earth, or by dews and rains, to form muriate of ammonia, which is not volatile; consequently the salt prevents loss by exhaustion, which is sure to take place when the guano is used as a top dressing, unless prevented by something to act as a fixer of the ammonia. the wisdom of this law of nature in making the most precious saline manure a fixed and difficultly soluble salt, is at once obvious; for it is thus kept always ready in the soil for the plants to act upon according to their need. if we cut plants down before the seeds form, we have all the phosphates the plants contain diffused throughout them, and if we allow the seed to ripen, the phosphates, as before observed, will be found mostly in the seed. we find them in the state of phosphate of potash, phosphate of soda, phosphate of magnesia, and phosphate of lime, and probably, also, phosphate of ammonia. now all these salts are essential to the growth and sustenance of animals, and without them grain would cease to be sufficient. the necessity of restoring inorganic substances to the soil, may be better understood by examining the following table: mr. prixdeaux states that the following quantities (of inorganic matters) are removed from an acre of soil by a crop of wheat, of bushels of grain, and lbs. of straw-- _by the grain._ _by the straw._ _total._ lbs. lbs. lbs. potash, . . . soda, . . . magnesia, . . . phosphoric acid, . . . sulphuric acid, . . . chlorine . . . ---- ---- ---- . . gross weight to be returned to an acre, . professor johnson says--"soils are barren either from the presence of a noxious principle or the absence of a necessary element. it is therefore highly important to be able to distinguish between the two cases. "the art of culture is almost entirely a chemical art. its processes are explained on chemical principals in part, but partly on mechanical and natural ones. "all forms of matter may be divided into one of the two great groups--organic or inorganic matter." in peruvian guano, both these substances exist in a better and cheaper form than can be obtained from any other source. the editor of the genesee farmer, whose scientific information none can dispute, strongly corroborates this opinion. in a late number he says--if we admit that phosphate of lime is a necessary ingredient in a special manure for wheat--peruvian guano would at present be much the cheapest source of it; for, in addition to the per cent. of ammonia, it contains per cent. of phosphate of lime in first-rate condition for assimilation by the plant, as well as other fertilizing ingredients of minor importance. as a manure for wheat, therefore, we greatly prefer good peruvian guano, even to the _improved_ superphosphate of lime. _difference in favor of guano over bone dust._--robert monteith, england, dressed oat ground with lbs. guano per acre, cost shillings, produce bushels, value £ s d. same quality of land with bushels bone dust, cost shillings and fourpence, produced bushels value £ s d, which gives a balance in favor of guano of £ s d, or about $ per acre. _difference in favor of guano over manure._--the yorkshire agricultural society of england, instituted a series of experiments several years ago for the purpose of working out practical facts in relation to guano, through a series of crops, upon different soils, by different persons, upon whose report the utmost reliance might be placed, so as to determine the value, or advantage to british farmers, who might use this extraordinary fertilizer. this report has just been published, and the following is a synopsis of the results. the experiments were arranged under the following heads-- . to show the natural produce of the land, one part was to have no manure whatever. . was to have twelve tons per acre of farm-yard dung. . was to have six tons of dung, and one cwt. each of guano and dissolved coprolites; and . was to have two cwt. of guano and two cwt. of the coprolites. other substances might be tried as additions, but these were to be the standard experiments. mr. cholmeley's turnips, grown on a loamy soil had the heaviest crop on no. , the dung, coprolite, and guano, beating the farm-yard manure by some - / tons per acre. mr. johnson's experiments were tried with various manures singly; and his peruvian guano gave the greatest weight of the class of substances tried; but cubic yards of farm-yard manure had previously been applied to the whole land. mr. maulevere's heaviest weight, also applied singly, was with the tons of dung; but only cwt. more than the dressing with cwt. of coprolites. this soil was a light clay. mr. newham's on a limestone soil, were the heaviest with no. --the same as mr. cholmeley's--and were cwt. heavier than an application of dung alone. mr. outhwaite's, on a hungry gravel, were the heaviest, with - / tons of dung and cwt. of guano, for all the land had been dunged at this rate, and exceeded - / tons of dung by tons cwt. per acre. mr. scott's were the heaviest on no. ,--the guano and coprolites, and ton cwt. more than tons of dung,--his soil was a strong loam. mr. wailes's were the heaviest, with cwt. of coprolites, showing an increase over tons of dung of tons cwt. per acre; the soil is a useful loam. the first fact which strikes the observer, is, that as a general rule, there is not only an addition to the crop by the addition of those artificial manures, but there is, in some cases, more absolute crop produced by them than by farm-yard manure alone. now to bring this to the test of figures, the coprolites at £ per ton, and the guano at £ per ton, will be at the rate of cwt of each, £ s per acre. now assuming this to be equal to tons of dung per acre, we should require to be able to produce the dung at s d per ton to cost us the same money. but it can be neither produced nor purchased at any such money. in the whole of the cases referred to, the manure is most costly, and yet we find hardly any case where there is not an addition to the crop, of say two to three tons of turnips per acre, by such an increase of manure as the guano. now, if a ton of turnips be worth s., or even s, there is at once an element of repayment; for, if a soil be in a condition to give a large crop of turnips, it is almost certain to be capable of giving a large crop of any other plant to succeed. mr. charnock gives it as the result of his practical experience, that cwt. of peruvian guano, without manure, is the cheapest and best mode of growing turnips; but the general testimony seems to be decidedly in favor of what all farmers find it the best and easiest to do, viz., to add a small quantity of artificial manure to that which the farm will supply, and so to spread the whole over the land, rather than put all the dung in one place, and all the artificial manure in another. no one can doubt the true statement of this report, which proves $ . worth of guano equal to tons of manure--reducing the worth of that to one shilling and sixpence--about cents--per ton, or one dollar a cord. now, as manure is often estimated in this country by the cord, and valued at about $ , and applied at the rate of cords per acre, it follows that a saving of $ per acre may be made by using lbs. of guano instead of purchasing the manure. this yorkshire experiment exactly corresponds with those made in this country, some of which we have detailed, and which proves that a farmer cannot buy manure at the common selling prices; and if he hauls his own the distance of a mile, he will expend more value of time, than it is worth to him on the land; because the same value of time--"time is money"--expended for guano, will bring him better returns. in this, as before stated, we are confirmed by professor mapes; and here is the opinion of mr. hovey of boston, the eminent horticulturist, which we find in the august no. of his magazine, as follows-- "if, after such evidence as this, farmers will continue to buy ashes at eight cents a bushel, or manure at three to six dollars a cord, including carting, and use them alone, then let them do so, but they should not complain that their crop cost more than it comes to. to orchardists and fruit growers, this information is of the greatest value, and we trust they will not let it pass unheeded." this opinion is valuable because it has been stoutly asserted, that however well guano might answer at the south, it was of no use in the hard soil and cold climate of new england. this is a fallacy which will soon be cured by knowledge, and self-interest is a very strong prompter towards the acquisition of the knowledge, that guano is the best, cheapest, most suitable, convenient and productive manure ever used by a new england farmer, and just as suitable for that climate and soil as it is for virginia. we assert, without fear of successful contradiction, that there is not a farm--not a field--covered with five-finger vines and mullens, in the state of massachusetts, which may not be made to produce as profitable crops, by the use of guano, as any connecticut river farm. farmers are about the hardest class of men in the world to learn new doctrines; or that science has anything to do with the business of this life, and what all other life in a civilized country is dependent upon. yet science teaches, by unerring truths, that the plants the farmer cultivates, are composed of carbon, obtained by plants chiefly from the soil and atmosphere; oxygen and hydrogen, obtained by plants chiefly from water, carbonic acid, &c.; nitrogen obtained by plants chiefly from manure, and also from rain and snow; silicium, in combination with oxygen, called _silicia_ or sand; lime in combination with phosphoric and other acids; potash and soda in combination with acids; magnesia, in combination with acids, and various oxides of metals, the presence of which, however, is not very important, as they exist in an exceedingly small quantity. and that guano is composed of ammonia (formed of nitrogen and hydrogen,) combined with carbonic, oxalic, phosphoric, and other acids; lime, combined with phosphoric oxalic, and other acids; potash and soda, combined with muriatic and sulphuric acids; magnesia, combined with phosphoric and other acids; animal organic matter, containing carbon, and also nitrogen. now, is it not enough to prove that all the ingredients, with the exception of the metallic oxides, exist in guano, which are required by the plants grown for the sustenance of man. putting guano into the soil, therefore, as a manure, is clearly restoring to the earth those substances which plants abstract from it, and which are absolutely necessary for their growth. the questions, then, which the farmer should now ask are, "which is best for me to buy, guano or coarse manure?" the evidence just given answers that question. "i have manure, teams, and men to haul it; my fields are from one to three miles distant, is it economy for me to let my teams lay idle and buy guano?" by no means. but you can probably employ men and teams in other improvements to much better advantage. with your manure make all your home lots exceedingly rich. with your men and teams clear off stones, dig ditches to put them into, drain your land, or build fence--bring bog meadows and swamps into dry cultivation--send every little brook through artificial channels for irrigation--send water up from lowland springs and streams by hydraulic rams for the same purpose, and for stock on the hills; or bring it down from hillsides if you are so situated; and buy guano for those distant fields, instead of wasting time in the laborious operation of hauling manure. those who use guano, are enabled by the saving of time, to say nothing of their increased profits, to make improvements which are utterly impossible to accomplish under the old system. _how to choose guano._--as we are satisfied no sensible reader can have perused the preceding pages, without having come to the determination to make a trial for himself, we will give him some general instructions about buying guano. in the first place, we lay it down as an incontrovertible axiom, that the peruvian guano, at the current price for years of that and all other, is the cheapest and best, because it contains the largest amount of ammonia, in a perfectly dry state; as a carbonate, true, but because dry, it is permanent and not likely to loose by volatilization by long keeping. if other varieties contain a larger proportion of phosphates, and are sold at a less price, experience proves they are not cheaper. if an additional quantity of phosphates is desirable, it can be obtained in a cheaper form from dissolved bones, or bone dust and shavings of bone workers; or from mineral phosphates of lime. recollect, guano under no other name, has ever equalled the peruvian, in the results as compared with the quality or cost. therefore buy none but peruvian. to guard against deception, be careful of whom you buy. if you cannot buy directly from the agents, be sure the character of your merchant is a sufficient guarantee against adulteration. _to test the quality of guano._--the best test is the price. unlike other merchandise, this article is not subject to fluctuations. being a government monopoly, the price at which the agents are to sell here is fixed in peru, and that price may be easily known; therefore, if any dealer offers you peruvian guano at "a reduced price," you may be sure the quality is reduced also. remember, that the lowest price by the ship load, it can be procured for of the agents in baltimore or new york is $ per ton of lbs. to this, every fair, honest dealer, must add freight, insurance and profit. every man who sells without such addition, you may be sure will make his profit by short weight or adulteration. the next best test is its appearance. good peruvian guano is an impalpable powder, perfectly dry to the touch, of a uniform brownish yellow color, with a strong smell, like that of spirits of hartshorn, contained in ammoniacal smelling bottles. but the smell is no test; that which smells strongest may be worst, as the ammonia may be disengaged by moisture or by the addition of lime or salt. _the adulteration of guano_ is carried to a great extent in england, and probably will be in this country. the principal adulterations are made by the addition of loam, marl, sand, plaster, old lime, ashes, chalk, salt, moisture, and by mixture with other guano of a cheaper quality. the farmer need not depend upon the assertion, "this is a genuine article--here is the inspector's certificate." we would not give a straw for a corn basket full of certificates of analysis. the buyer must analyse for himself. mr. nesbit, analytical chemist, london, has just published a pamphlet from which we have condensed some very plain, short, simple rules for testing the quality of guano. as the adulterating substances are generally heavier than the guano, they may be detected by a comparison of weight and measure. to do this, get a small glass tube closed at one end, and weigh accurately an ounce of pure guano, put it in the tube and carefully mark the hight it fills--try several samples--if there is any difference, mark it. now weigh an ounce from a sample adulterated with one fourth its bulk of any or all the preceding list of articles used for that purpose, and you will find the difference of bulk between that and the genuine, very perceptible. _test by burning._--guano burnt to ashes at a red heat will leave an ash of a pearly white appearance, not varying in weight from to per cent. of the quantity burnt. if it is adulterated with marl, sand, clay, &c., the ash will be about or per cent, of the weight tested, and be colored with the iron always present in the adulterating substances, and which is never found in pure guano. this test, to be accurate, must be done with a nice pair of scales and a platinum cup, which may be heated over a spirit lamp. ten grains of the guano are placed in the platinum cup, which is held by the tongs in the flame of the spirit lamp for several minutes, until the greater part of the organic matter is burnt away. it is allowed to cool for a short time, and a few drops of a strong solution of nitrate of ammonia added, to assist in consuming the carbon in the residue. the cup is again heated, (taking care to prevent its boiling over, or losing any of the ash,) until the moisture is quite evaporated. a full red heat must then be given it, when, if the guano be pure, the ash will be pearly white, and will not exceed - / grains in weight. if adulterated with sand, marl, &c., the ash will always be colored, and will weigh more than - / grains. even the simple burning of a few grains of guano, on a red hot shovel, will often indicate by the color whether a fraud has been committed; but we cannot particularly recommend this method, as the iron of the shovel itself will sometimes give a tinge to the ash. this might be obviated by burning the sample on a common earthen plate. if the adulteration of guano has been made by sand, it can be detected by dissolving the ashes in muriatic acid. the sand will remain--if it is more than one per cent., it has probably been added fraudulently. as iron exists in loam, it will show in the color of the ash if that is the substance used for adulteration. if lime has been added, it can be detected by dissolving the ash in muriatic acid and separating the sand, loam and iron, if present, by filtration, and then adding oxalate of ammonia to the liquid. if it shows more than a mere trace of lime, it has been falsified. _test by salt._--saturate a quart of water and strain it; pour some in a saucer and sprinkle guano upon the surface. good guano sinks immediately, leaving only a slight scum. if it has been adulterated by any light or flocculent matters, they will be seen upon the surface of the brine. _test by acid._--put a teaspoonful of guano in a wine glass and add a little vinegar or dilute muriatic acid. if ground limestone or chalk have been added, the effervessence will show it. a genuine article will only show a few bubbles. _test by water._--the following simple plan will easily detect all the ordinary adulterations of guano. procure a wide mouthed bottle, with solid glass stopper; fill with water and insert the stopper; let the exterior be well dried. in one pan of accurate scales, place the bottle; counterpoise by shot, sand or gravel. pour out two thirds of the water, and put in four ounces avoirdupois of guano. agitate the bottle, add more water; let it rest a couple of minutes, and fill with water, so the froth all escapes; insert the stopper, wipe dry, and replace the bottle in the scale. add now to the counterpoised scale, one and a half ounces avoirdupois, and a fourpenny piece; if the bottle prove the heavier, the guano is, in all probability, adulterated. add in addition a three-penny piece, and if the bottle is still heaviest the guano is undoubtedly adulterated. by this simple experiment, a very small amount of sand, marl, &c., is detected. if farmers will not use some of these simple tests, or employ a chemist to detect suspected adulteration; or if they will buy guano of men who have no character to lose, and who offer to sell below a price to afford them a living profit, they cannot be pitied if they are cheated. _prepared guano._--never buy anything bearing that name, unless you wish to verify the adage of "the fool and his money are soon parted." _analysis of prepared guano._--we give an analysis of one sample of domestic manufacture, and two british. no. . was offered in london and actually sold as peruvian guano, to farmers in the south of england; just because they were so neglectful of their own interests as not to inform themselves that an article sold for $ a ton, could not be genuine, while the regular government price remained fixed at $ . it may readily be seen by the analysis, how they were cheated into paying that price for an article of which per cent. is plaster, and only half of one per cent. ammonia. no. . gypsum, . phosphate of lime, . sand, . moisture and loss, . ------ . ------ ammonia, . the other sample is still worse. this was sold as saldana bay guano, at $ to $ a ton. it was composed of sand, . phosphate of lime, . gypsum, . chalk, . moisture, . ------ . ------ ammonia, a trace it would have been dear at half the price. but why? perhaps you inquire, do you give these samples of rascality in england? just to show you what men are capable of doing there, they will probably do here--nay, have done. here is the analysis of an article which was sold in the city of new york, under the name of _prepared guano_. the analysis was made by the lately deceased, highly respected, and eminent analytic chemist, professor norton, of yale college, showing the following result. water, . alumina and phosphate of lime, . organic matter, . insoluble matter, . carbonate of lime, . magnesia, alkalies, and loss, . ------ . this analysis was made by the request of the editor of the genesee farmer, by whom it is not only endorsed, but proof given of its utter worthlessness upon the land where it was applied. professor norton made the following remarks upon the subject. "this is indeed a _prepared_ article. you will observe that three tenths of the whole are water, or matter insoluble in acid, or nothing more than water and sand. more than another three tenths is organic matter; this contains scarcely a trace of ammonia or nitrogen in any form, being worth no more than common muck from a swamp. thus we have six tenths of the guano made up of a mixture that as a gift, would not be worth carting. nearly another three tenths is carbonate of lime, a valuable article it is true, but one which can be bought far more cheaply by the barrel, bushel or ton, than as guano. the remaining tenth contains a small quantity of phosphates, but not enough to make the mixture of much value. the parties engaged in this manufacture, should be widely exposed, for it is one of the most outrageous impositions i have ever known. farmers should avoid everything of this nature unless it is certified to be equal to a copy of analysis shown. this stuff is not worth transporting any distance for your land. j. p. norton." we will now give the analysis of peruvian, patagonian, and chilian guano, as determined by dr. anderson, chemist of the royal agricultural society of scotland, to be a fair average deduced, from a careful examination of many samples. the same results have been obtained in this country by such eminent chemists as professor norton, dr. antisell, and dr. higgins. we only give analysis of these three kinds, for the reason, no other of any consequence is now offered for sale in this country. analysis of guano. peruvian. chilian chilian patagonian fine. inferior. water, . . . . organic matter and} . . . . ammonical salts, } phosphates . . . . lime, ---- . . . sulphuric acid, ---- ---- ---- . alkaline salts, . . . . sand, . . . . ------- ------- ------- ------- , , , , ammonia, . . . . it will readily be seen there is a vast difference in the value of the chilian, and though not stated, there is as great a difference in the patagonian, while that from peru, owing to the fact that it never rains upon the depository, is of a uniform quality. as the principal value of guano consists of the ammonia and phosphates, it is easily calculated. per cent. of ammonia is equal to lbs. in a ton of , at - / cents, $ . . per cent. of phosphates is equal to lbs. in a ton at - / cents, . alkaline salts, . ______ value of a ton of peruvian guano, $ . to this may be added the advantage of having these valuable substances in the best possible condition, so finely pulverized they are ready prepared for the use of plants. it may be taken as an incontrovertible fact then, that guano is a cheap and good manure for any land and any crop which would be benefitted by the best quality of farm yard manure and ground bones. it is most beneficial on poor sandy loam, absolutely unproductive; and most profitable when applied to any land which cannot be otherwise manured on account of distance and transportation of grosser articles. the better the land is kept in tilth, the better will be the effect of an application of guano. the public may also be assured of another fact; if the guano is bought direct from the agents of the peruvian government in this country, or of reliable merchants, who get their supplies direct from them, it will be of a uniform quality and value, as indicated by the analysis just given. they may also rest assured, and the author of this pamphlet believes his reputation will warrant the assertion and belief, that he could not be hired to puff an unworthy article, or write a book to induce american farmers, to purchase an article which would not prove highly beneficial to their best interests. the author does know that the introduction of guano into this country is a blessing to the nation. its general use will not only increase the wealth of individuals, but that of the body politic. let us illustrate this point by a statement of an english writer of its advantages to that country. he says--"the importance of this question may be easily illustrated. we grow in this country about , , acres of wheat annually. an application of two hundred weight of guano to each acre would increase the produce by six bushels, or raise the average of england from to bushels an acre, giving a total increase to our home produce of , , quarters of wheat, which is of itself equivalent to a larger sum than the whole diminution of rent stated by the chancellor of the exchequer to have been occasioned by free trade in corn. but this is only one use to which guano would be applied, for its effects are even more valuable to green crops than to corn." the proportionate advantage to this country would be almost inconceivably greater as our average product is far less, and the increased number of bushels per acre, far more; the produce of land as stated by mr. newton and others, having been raised from to or bushels per acre. the estimation in which it is held by some of the best farmers in the world may be judged by the increased demand in england. the quantity of peruvian guano annually imported has risen from , tons in to , tons in , but has increased during the last year to about , tons. if the price were reduced by £ to £ a ton, even the present large supply would be found greatly short of the increased demand. in a single season, in , when the price of ichaboe guano ranged from £ to £ a-ton, the importation with an open trade rose to , tons. a reduction of £ to £ a ton would be followed by an extraordinarily increased consumption. twice the present importation might be taken advantageously for the wheat crops alone. it seems to be held by the government that the right of peru to the lobos islands is unquestionable. it is, in that case, only by friendly negotiation that anything can be done. considerations should be pressed on the present ministry, pledged as they are to promote the landed and shipping interests. if they can persuade the peruvian government, by friendly negotiation, that the interests of that country as well as ours will be benefited by opening the guano trade, they will confer an important service on this country; a full supply would contribute materially to restore the prosperity of the landed interest by increasing their produce at diminished cost; and it would give regular employment to about one-tenth of the whole mercantile navy of england. undoubtedly! an increased supply, or rather an increased consumption, would tend materially to restore, in england and in america, to build up the landed interest, by increasing the product of the land at diminished cost. if farmers could buy guano at lower prices, it is argued all would use it. undoubtedly again! because their profits would be greater. so great in fact, the temptation to make money out of the purchase and use of guano few could withstand "such a chance for a speculation." but as they cannot induce the peruvians to let them have it at a lower price, and as they can make money out of it at the present price, is it not a suicidical measure upon the part of the owners of unprofitable land, to refuse to use guano, because they cannot get it at their own price, while they can certainly profit by its use at present prices. _the guano monopoly._--much prejudice has been excited against the agents and principal dealers in this country by the cry of monopoly. are those who cry _wolf_ the loudest, entirely clear themselves, of a fondness for fat mutton? the following extract from a letter of edward stabler of maryland, gives a more fair, impartial view of the subject. he says; "odious and grinding as monopolies usually become, and hard as this one seems to bear upon the agriculturist's interests, it still appears to be about as fair as ordinary mercantile transactions. the peruvians may be considered the producers, and like our farmers and planters, may at times require advances from the commission merchant; and in proportion to the prices obtained, are his profits increased; nor does any one censure the merchant for selling at the highest price he can. dealers, or speculators, if you please, are always censured for raising the price of guano. is not the same thing done every day, and every hour in the day, by the purchase and sale of flour, wheat, corn, and tobacco--and is not the price of almost every article of commerce regulated in a great degree by the supply and demand? most certainly; and so long as there is a probability of profit by the purchase and sale of this article, and just so long, and no longer, will the 'trade in second hands' continue. if the present supply is inadequate to the demand, by an almost undeviating rule in commerce, the price is enhanced, until at a point to drive the consumer from the market. this however, is not quite so soon attained with guano, under the present excitement, as with many other things. i have viewed this matter in a different light from some others, though erroneous as some may suppose, and do not think that censuring the dealers will cover the true ground of complaint, or at all tend to remove the existing difficulty. their agency is, if i may use the term--but in no offensive sense--a kind of necessary evil; for the importer will not retail, and it suits but few of the consumers comparatively, to club together, and purchase in large quantities. the price of guano is owing mainly, if not entirely, to this monopoly in the import trade; and it would be the same thing, and a monopoly still, whether in the hands of english or american merchants; with also, about the same amount of liberality to be looked for, from one as from the other." is there anything so unfair in this, that we should cry out "wicked monopoly." the peruvian government, after the revolution, finds itself deeply in debt, and greatly in want of money, and in possession of one of the most valuable fertilizing substances in the world, which the people of other governments are in want of, or rather, may profit by the use of, which she offers to sell at what she deems a fair price; and for the purpose of enabling her to borrow money for immediate necessities, as well as to pay the war debt, she has given some of her citizens--rich merchants, who can advance money, certain privileges and advantages in the guano trade, upon condition that they will send a supply to all the countries where it can be sold, and in as great quantities as they will buy at fixed prices. this is the monopoly. a parallel case can be found nearer home. the government of the united states, also incurred a revolutionary war debt, and also came in possession of an article which the people of all other countries want, and unlike that possessed by peru, an article which they must have. upon this necessity of life, our government has fixed a price, which any one may pay or let it alone--buy or not, just as he pleases. the government will neither sell to citizens or strangers at half price, nor let them have the use of it without pay; in fact, will not let us carry away anything of value from this property, although it might not materially injure the sale of the principal and most valuable portion, which is immovable. such is the "guano monopoly" of one government, and such is the "land monopoly" of the other. which is most wicked? of the right of each government, no honest man will dispute. that peru has as much right to the guano upon her desert islands, as the united states has to the live oak timber in the deserts of florida; or as england has to the codfish in the waters of newfoundland, seems to be as clear as any right ever exercised by any power on earth. each protect their own by hired agents, so far as they are able, to prevent dishonest men from carrying away that which each considers valuable. if english and united states citizens have a right to go and seize upon the guano and bring it off in defiance of peru, because the guano islands are not inhabited, then have we a right to seize all the codfish in the waters of the sea, because nobody lives there--they cannot live there--they only live on the lands adjacent, and therefore have no right to anything except what they stand upon. then by the same rule may the lands of the united states be seized upon, because they are unoccupied. by virtue of decrees now in force, no vessel, either under the national or any foreign flag, has a right to go to the peruvian guano deposits, without first obtaining permission from the peruvian government under penalty of confiscation. foreign vessels, furnished with government licences, are allowed to load at the chinche islands only. finally, any attempt to load vessels without the proper licences, would subject them to be seized by the government vessels appointed to cruise off, and visit the different guano deposits, in order to prevent not only the illegal extraction of guano by foreign trading vessels, but also to prevent the natives of peru from violating the government orders against visiting those localities, and destroying or disturbing the birds. notwithstanding this cuts off the free trade in the article, it goes to show what we have always endeavored to impress upon the minds of american farmers, that the supply is inexhaustible--at least in this age and generation--and as every one grows wiser and wiser, it is probable the next will have no occasion to use such an old fashioned article as bird dung for manure. during the present, however, our advice is to every person occupying land which needs something to improve its fertility, to use guano--genuine peruvian guano--purchased of reliable merchants--and the fewer the better between the importer and consumer. _the quantity inexhaustible._--by those surveys, the quantity was ascertained to be upwards of twenty millions of tons. as this must appear so enormous as to be almost incredible, we present the annexed cut, supposed to represent a vertical section of one of the chincha islands and the depth of the deposit according to the government surveys. the paralel lines at the bottom represent the level of the water--the crooked line above, the surface of the rock; its position having been ascertained by boring and observations of the surveyors. the rounded line is the surface of the island as it now appears; all between that and the rock being guano. the almost perpendicular line at the left hand, feet high, is the rock at which ships lay to take in cargo. the space under the dotted line show a comparison of the quantity taken away, as it relates to the whole upon the island. the well hole represented in that section was dug some fifty feet deep to prove the guano was of equal quality at the bottom. the chincha islands are three in number; not remote from each other or differing very materially in size or general feature. the geological formation presents the appearance of masses of rock jutting out above the surface of the ocean--and occasionally rising nearly perpendicularly to a height of from to feet. at a distance, the islands present to the eye a somewhat conical form; owing probably to the greater deposits of guano in the centre; and all appear equally rich in quantity and quality. the "north island" is estimated to be about feet at its greatest elevation; it is about - / miles in length, and from / to / of a mile average width. in sailing round them, the guano appears to many places to extend to the water's edge. [illustration: sectional view of the north chincha island.] all the guano islands are uninhabited, except by the laborers, mostly indians or poor chinamen, who are employed in the work of digging, carrying and loading the guano into the ships. when a vessel is ready to take in cargo, she is moored alongside of the rocks almost mast head high, from the top of which the guano is sent down through a canvass shute directly into the hold of the ship. thus several hundred tons can be put on board in a day. the trimming of the cargo is a very unpleasant part of the labor. the dust and odor is almost overpowering; so the men are obliged to come often on deck for fresh air. the rule is to remain below as long as a candle will burn; when that goes out, the air is considered unfit for respiration. if the labor had to be performed by a yankee, he would think it unfit at first; and thereupon set his ready wit at work to construct a machine to spread the guano as it fell, from one end of the hold to the other. the guano in position upon the island, is so compact it has to be dug up with picks. it is then carried to a contrivance made of cane, at the edge of the rock, which conveys it into the canvass conductors. the mass is cut down in steps, receding and rising from the point of commencement, and has not yet attained a depth of feet, and with all the labor of hundreds of men digging, and numerous ships carrying away to the several countries using it, there is but a bare beginning of removal made upon the mass upon one island only, as may be seen by reference to the diagram. supposing like many others, the supply of peruvian guano was like the ichaboe, destined to run out--that is all be dug up and carried away; we inquired of an intelligent captain of a ship just returned with a load, how long it would be before the supply would be exhausted. "exhausted!" said he, with a look over the gangway, as much as to say how long would it take to exhaust the ocean with a pint cup; "why not in one hundred years, if every ship afloat should go into the trade, and load and unload as fast as it would be possible to perform the labor; no, not from the chincha islands alone. exhausted! they never will be exhausted." with due allowance for the captain's enthusiasm, we may be very certain from the government surveys, the quantity is so great, that no probability exists of the supply being exhausted until all the present inhabitants of this earth have ceased to move upon its surface. we may be certain of another fact; that unless we commit a great national wrong upon peru, by seizing upon some of her guano territory; a thing which the sober second thought of this nation will never sanction; we shall not be able to obtain the article only through her government agents, at such prices as her rulers think proper to affix to it. while the demand and the result of the use of guano continues as at present, there is not much probability of any material change. the peruvian government are, of course, anxious to sell all that the world want, and are willing to pay for at remunerating prices. the peruvian minister, in reply to the secretary of state at washington says:--"the peruvian government, in leasing out its rights and interests, as a proprietor of the article, adopted the only system that was supposed likely to create a demand for guano; while, on the other side, it was bound to leave the consignment as security, in the hands of those persons who had hazarded their capital in meeting the heavy expenses attending the process of freighting, and in making the advances which were required to facilitate the exportation and construct the depots. far from establishing a selfish monopoly, which would have proved injurious to its own interests, or fix a high, deliberate, and conventional price upon the article, it has only aimed to secure a net profit, reduced to the lowest possible standard, exceeding very little the actual amount of expenses; and there have been accounts of sales rendered exhibiting both loss and damage. "the guano, therefore, is not monopolized; the government as the proprietor, has forwarded it, on its own responsibility, to those markets where it was in demand; selecting as consignees, as it was natural and proper it should do, those persons or houses who have advanced the capital necessary to defray the expenses; and, as these are much greater in all cases of remittances to england, and it follows that the sale of the article in this country is at the rate of ten pounds sterling per ton, the net profit has been less than what is realized in the united states, where the farmers obtain it at lesser prices. nor has my government imposed any restrictions, duties, or determinate value on the exportation of guano, although it might and could do so with perfect propriety; because such action would have militated to the detriment of its own interests as the proprietor of the article. its object has been to send it to those markets where it was in demand; because, as it had not yet become an object of decided and positive interest to the consuming world, and there being no certainty of its attaining saleable prices, to create a market as it was impossible for individuals to send to peru for supplies, with any prospect of even moderate profit." this is a fair statement of the case; and ought to be perfectly satisfactory to the consumers. the disposition of some men to create prejudice against the government of peru, or the agents who sell guano in this country, because the price is too high, is a wicked one. men can make money by purchasing at the present prices; and the owners of the article think they cannot make it by selling at a lower price. we have heard it urged as a reason why it should be sold at lower prices, that the agents and merchants engaged in its sale are making fortunes. so are flour merchants--so are farmers who grow the wheat--but that is no reason why it should be sold lower. with all our heart, we wish the peruvians would give us guano at half price; but because they will not, there is no reason why the people of this country should refuse to use an article which will most assuredly make them grow rich faster than those who are engaged in selling it. what is guano?--its history and locality.--amount and value. guano is the concentrated essence of fish-eating birds excrements. it, is found in the condition of a dry powder, of a brownish yellow color, not unlike in appearance to scotch snuff; with a pungent strong smell of ammonia, distinguishing it from any other substance. it is found in various parts of the world, upon desert headlands and islands of the atlantic and pacific oceans, where the birds have had undisputed possession for countless ages of time. the island of ichaboe, on the coast of africa, furnished a good many cargoes, a few years since, most of which were taken to england; a small supply was imported into the united states, and sold and known as african guano. the quality was fair the deposit upon that island is quite exhausted--in fact it was all carried away within a few months after it became generally known--some of the last cargoes being of little more value than rich earth. it is said that a new deposit, which is nothing more than dry bird dung, has already been gathered and taken to england. no doubt cargoes of similar manure might gathered from the florida keys; and although it would be a valuable manure, it is not guano--that is formed by the chemical action of a dry atmosphere, during time's long ages. _anagamos guano._--this is also of a character similar to "new ichaboe." it is rich in ammonia, but contains no lime or sulphuric acid, and less phosphates and alkaline substances than peruvian, and more sand. the supply of this must be very limited, as it is a recent deposit and has to be gathered by hand from the rocks. _bolivian guano._--this as its name indicates, is from the coast of bolivia, on the west side of south america. it was thought at one time to be fully equal in value to peruvian, but some subsequent importations of almost worthless cargoes, have proved the deposit to be very variable in quality, or else purposely adulterated, which has had the effect to destroy confidence in all bearing that name. the belief of the writer is, that it was not adulterated, but owing to the fact that it is found in a latitude where it does sometimes rain, or where it is liable to be drenched by sea spray, that portions of it are injured in that way; so that a ship may have one portion of her cargo of the best kind, while the remainder is hardly worth the freight. the deposit is not large. _chilian guano._--the most of that imported into this country under this name, has been of a very inferior quality, and having been recommended by those interested in its sale, as having come from the same coast as that of peru, and of equal value, and proving almost worthless, has deterred many from making another trial. although there is a small supply of chilian guano, which is gathered from the rocks in pale yellow masses, some of which has been sent to england and this country, which is equal to any ever discovered in any part of the world, yet the great bulk of the deposit is so inferior that chilian guano will never meet with universal favor. in fact, some of the stuff which has been sold under that name, is unworthy to be called guano. _patagonian guano._--of this kind, larger quantities have been imported than any other beside peruvian; and it has generally been sold at higher prices than its value as a fertilizer would warrant. owing to the fact of its being deposited in a latitude of sunshine and showers, both of the utmost intensity; it never comprises the valuable qualities always found in that where rain never was known to fall. besides the deterioration of the elements, samples of some cargoes of this guano have been found to contain upwards of per cent of sand--in one case per cent. it is said, however, that some of the deposits contain considerable quantities of crystalized salts of ammonia, magnesian phosphates, rich in ammonia, but which have been rejected by masters of vessels taking in cargoes, under the supposition of its being sea salt and calculated to injure the sale and value of the guano. it is believed that there is a a larger supply of this than any other guano, except peruvian, but as no certain reliance can be placed upon its quality or value, it never will be extensively imported into the united states. _saldana bay guano._--considerable quantities of guano under this name have been taken to england, and upon land and crops requiring phosphates more than ammonia, has been pronounced a superior article. but the fact is, it is found in a climate similar to the patagonian, and, consequently, like that, must have a great portion of its ammonia washed out, leaving almost its only value as fertilizer, in its phosphates; which undoubtedly exist in large proportions, but not as cheap as may be procured from other sources. the foregoing comprises all the kinds of guano known in commerce, except the peruvian, to which we shall devote an entire chapter. peruvian guano--its location--ownership--quantity--value--how procured. this is not only the most valuable, but is found in the largest quantities of any other guano known. that which has been sent to this country and england, in such quantities within the last ten years, was taken from the chincha islands, which are situated between latitude ° and °, and at about twelve miles from the coast of peru, in the bay of pisco. the great value of the peruvian guano, arises from the fact, _that rain never falls upon the islands where guano is found_. the air is always dry, and the sun shines with intense power, sufficient to evaporate all the juices from flesh, so that meat can be preserved sweet without salt. the waters surrounding these islands may be said to be literally alive, so full are they of fish. almost as numerous as the fish, are the birds which satisfy their voracious appetites upon this finny multitude, until they can gorge no more, when they retire to the islands to deposit their excrement, composed of the oily flesh and bones of their only food, until the mass which has been accumulating for thousands of years, is so great as almost to exceed human belief. humbolt, in his history of south america, states, some of these deposits are or feet thick. many have thought this the "romance of history," but the actual surveys made by the peruvian government five or six years ago, have proved that the guano in many places is more than twice that depth; and as there is good reason to believe, and as may be seen by the diagram on page , it is probably feet thick in some of the depressions of the natural surface. and this has been accumulated by an annual aggregation, so slow as to be scarcely visible from year to year, until the quantity now exceeds , , of tons. as before stated, the chincha islands are three in number; the lobos islands two; these are situated off the north part of the coast of peru. if the right of peru to the guano is to be disputed, let it be done by national vessels and not by armed privateers. if farmers are convinced that we have made true statements of the value of guano in renovating the poor and worn out fields of america, let them purchase at once. the only question to ask is not whether we can go to the lobos islands to get guano--nor whether it would be better to buy it of government agents, or speculators on private account, but does guano pay? because, if it does pay, that is, if the farmer can buy guano at present prices, and realise an increase of crops more than enough to pay the expense, it does pay. we think we have shown this fact by incontrovertible evidence. if the first crop pays for the guano and no more, the farmer has a certain profit in the improved condition of the land. if the first crop does not pay, the land will be enough better to pay cost. upon this point, mr. mechi, of england, whose name has become world wide known as an improver of the soil, says; "whether guano will pay, depends upon the condition of the soil. on poor exhausted soil it is a ready and cheap mode of restoring fertility. i used it extensively when i first began farming, and when applied to the grain crops at the rate of two to three cwt. per acre, it paid well; but now it has lost favor with my bailiff, which is easily accounted for; my land being at present so well filled with manure, nitrogen or ammonia, that we can grow ample crops without it. when the land only yielded two to two and a half quarters of wheat per acre, it was grateful for guano; but now, with a produce of five quarters, there is no necessity for its use. or rather, the increased supply of farm manure supplies that necessity." this is exactly what we have aimed to impress upon our readers; that it will pay in the crop to which it is applied--it will more than pay in the soil, because it will bring it into a condition of permanent fertility. it will pay best upon the poorest soil; because that which was absolutely barren, becomes fruitful as soon as dressed with guano. it will always pay whenever and wherever applied to any soil in a fit condition to be benefitted by manure. it will make not only the soil rich, but whoever uses it to any considerable extent. it will pay best when used in the condition in which you buy it, with no additional labor or expense except breaking the lumps. if it is sown broadcast, not to exceed lbs. per acre, and plowed in so deep it will not be disturbed by any subsequent cultivation of the crop to which it is applied, it will most certainly pay in that crop or the succeeding one. it will pay upon all plants to which it has ever been applied. notwithstanding it will pay best _in_ the soil, it will pay well _on_ it as a top dressing, if combined with absorbents of ammonia as directed in these pages.[ ] that it has paid in ninety nine cases out of every hundred where it has been used, the author is well convinced, and equally well convinced that many may profit by reading what he has here said upon the subject, and with that feeling, these pages are commended to all the cultivators of american soil. [footnote : upon this point, see mr. burgwyn's letter in the appendix.] * * * * * appendix. successful experiments with guano on long island. since the body of this work was in type, the following letters have been placed in our hands. they contain so much valuable information we are induced to append them. it will be seen by the dates, that they give the results of the most recent experiments. the names of the writers will be recognized as those of reliable, practical men. letter from seth chapman esq., of jamaica.-- lbs. of guano to the acre, profitable--lasting benefits of one application--advantage of top dressing grass lands with guano--benefit of guano to all long island soil--great benefit on turnips. "_jamaica, l. i., sept. , ._ mr. theo. riley, esq., dear sir:--in reply to your inquiry relative to the use of peruvian guano on long island, i would say, forming my opinion from experience and observation that the mode of tillage--the rotation of crops, and the way of applying guano--are about as follows: commence with corn, which is usually on green sward, after being mowed and pastured from four to six years. first, plow in the spring as soon as the frost is out of the ground, which is generally about the th of march. prepare the ground for planting the st of may, by harrowing well two or three times. before the last time harrowing, apply about or lbs. of guano to the acre, sown broadcast, and then mark out with plow, or lace, about four and a half feet apart, each way; apply a small quantity to the hill, one third of a gill is as much as will be safe, and that should be in the form of a ring about a foot in diameter, and the corn dropped in the center, otherwise it will be likely to kill the corn by the sprouts coming in contact with the guano when they first start. it will not do to put the guano in the hill and plant the corn upon it. it was not uncommon for farmers to have to plant their corn all over before they become acquainted with its effects; but as using it in the hill, in a pure state, is generally attended with some risk, it is the practice in this vicinity to use yard manure, at the rate of one third or half a shovelful to the hill; but as that manure is generally weak, they have adopted the very excellent plan of sprinkling say lbs. of guano to a wagon load ( bushels) of manure. as we cart the manure in the fall to the field where it is intended to be used the following spring, ( ) the guano can be mixed through it with but little trouble, when it is turned and broken up just before use. it adds very much to the value of the manure, as the difference of harvesting plainly shows. muck or pond dirt could be used in the same way, in place of manure. some apply it about the hill at the time of hoeing. it should not be thrown on top, but sprinkled around the corn at the rate of half a gill per hill. after corn, we sow oats, or barley, or plants potatoes; if oats, plow once, sow or lbs. of guano, and two bushels of oats to the acre, and harrow in together. it pays well to use guano for oats, as the crop of oats will be doubled on ordinary lands; and bushels is frequently obtained, and the difference in the straw, is worth the expense of the guano.[ ] barley is not much sown; it would require a little more guano, say lbs. additional. potatoes, (mercers) we plant from middle of march to first of may, after sowing broadcast from to lbs. of guano per acre, plowed in and harrowed over; then mark out with plow three feet apart, drop in drills about a foot apart. some prefer it in the drills, at the rate of what they can grasp in one hand to a pace of two and a half feet; it should be sprinkled so too much will not come in contact with the seed. after oats or potatoes, sow wheat, about first of october; if on oats, plow as soon as the oats are off; when ready to sow, apply from to lbs. of guano per acre, cross plow, and your ground is ready for the seed. as to the varieties of wheat, there are several kinds used; the mediterranean is the most popular at present--one and a half bushels is generally sown to the acre, and the land laid down to grass, with timothy and clover. some apply less at time of sowing, and add or lbs. per acre in the spring, just as the grass is starting, say first of april. if wheat is sown after potatoes, about the same treatment is given, except lbs. less guano will answer. some harrow in guano, instead of plowing it under; but experience shows that it is much the best to plow it in, as the virtue remains in the ground much longer, by being covered deep. peruvian guano will produce the best wheat of anything we can use, even if we should go to double the expense with other manures. crops of and sometimes bushels have been obtained to the acre with guano. the average crop of wheat on the island, is not over bushels per acre, and with lbs. of guano plowed in pretty deep, the land can be mowed about as long as from an application of stable manure. but as hay is a most important crop, after it has been mowed for two or three years, it is considered profitable to top dress with about lbs. per acre; this will increase the crop from one ton to two per acre, if a fair season, and can be mowed two or three years longer. rye is sown in many instances, in place of wheat; it gets the same treatment, except half the quantity of guano is only used. buckwheat requires about lbs. of guano to the acre, more or less, according to the state of the land. for ruta baga turnips, there should be lbs. sown to the acre; plow twice and harrow well after sown. after you have hoed them out, give them a light top dressing of more guano. i have raised at the rate of bushels, managed in that way, to the acre. we have had one of the most extreme drouths the present season i ever remember. crops on which guano was used, have suffered less, and are now yielding better than where stable manure has been used. this is quite different from the opinion that some have formed, as to guano requiring a wet season. to prepare guano for use, it should first be sifted, to separate the lumps, so that they may be pulverized, then dampen by sprinkling with water, and mixed through with a shovel. this should be done a few days before you wish to use it, so as to allow the dampness to strike through uniform. ( ) i have not had any experience with compost, or using it on garden vegetables, or plants, except i know it should be used in homeopathic doses, or it will destroy more than it will produce. as to the soil, guano answers well anywhere on long island, although some parts of the island has a very different soil from others, with one exception; that is, it is all hungry for manure. i therefore do not know the kind of soil it is most applicable to, since it seems to suit all kinds. seth chapman." note . this practice of hauling manure to the field in the fall, is the worst of all the foolish old fashions of farmers. to preserve the virtue, of manure, it requires housing about as much as hay. in fact, it is doubtful which would lose virtue fastest, a pile of hay or a pile of manure, exposed to the storms of winter. it is no wonder that it becomes necessary to mix guano with it, to replace that which has evaporated during its long exposure to sun and storm. note . this increase of straw, is seldom taken into account in speaking of the advantage of an application of guano; yet, as mr. chapman says, it is worth enough in the vicinity of a market, to pay the whole expense. it is also valuable in the interior for forage and manure. note . this is an error. guano should not be damped unless with water saturated with salt, copperas, or a liberal sprinkle of plaster over the pile. letter from seth ravnor, of manorville to mr. chapman.--successful experiments on grass, oats, corn, wheat and rye. "_manorville, sept._ , . s. chapman, esq.--dear sir;--i have received your circular proposing to gather information from practical farmers of the results from the use of guano, and to have the same published for general circulation. conceiving the object to be a very laudable one, i will give the result of a few experiments tried with peruvian guano by myself, and others which have come under my observation; but in doing so i think it would be of great utility to state what kind of soil the guano was applied to. not being a professor of geology, i can only use such terms as are familiar with farmers generally. the soils in this vicinity are heavy loam, sandy loam, sandy, and occasionally some heavy clayey soils. first, as to the nature of guano. it is generally considered to be more of a stimulant than an enricher of the soil, if applied in its natural state, and much more durable to be plowed in than to be harrowed in; and as far as i have tried it, i have not found it to be injurious to soils--or as some call it, 'kill the soil.' in the year ' i applied on the first of april, lbs. per acre on sandy loam grass ground--yield, about half a ton more than the acre adjoining. same year applied about lbs. to the acre, on four acres of oats, same kind of soil, and the estimated increase was bushels to the acre. in plowed under pounds per acre, for corn, estimated increase, bushels of ears. the season was rather unfavorable for corn. in ' composted six bushels charcoal dust to lbs. guano, and plowed under for wheat, at the rate of lbs. of guano so composted, to the acre, and top dressed with bushels of leached ashes--yield, bushels. one of my neighbors applied for three years in succession, lbs. harrowed in with rye, on two acres light sand--yield, bushels to the acre; bushels more than the acre adjoining. on the fourth year he sowed the same ground without guano--- yield, bushels to the acre. we see by this, that the crop used the whole strength of the guano. another neighbor applied one ton to two acres, heavy loam; plowed under and sowed with turnips (common russian)--yield, , bushels--estimated increase from the guano, bushels. people in this section of the island are agreed in this--plow under guano for durability, and harrow in for present benefit, or present crop. for wheat, lbs. plowed in is considered a full dressing per acre. the same for corn. for oats, lbs. harrowed in. for buckwheat, lbs., and for barley. one tablespoonful applied in a hill, for corn, is quite enough, and that requires to be put some six inches from the seed; otherwise it will kill it. some have lost acres by putting their corn on that little quantity; the only safe way to apply in the hill for potatoes, is the same as for corn. i have come to the conclusion from what experience i have had with the article, that it answers the best purpose to use it for spring crops, in the manner above stated, or compost it with charcoal dust, or well decomposed pond mud, to absorb and retain the ammonia, it being very volatile in its nature. i have not written this for publication; i have only thrown out a few hints for you to embody. seth raynor." although the above was not written for publication, we prefer to give it just as it was written, in the plain style of one farmer to another. interesting letter from edward h. seaman, esq., sec. of queens co. ag. soc.--successful experiments since --great increase of straw and wheat--harrowing in guano, lbs. to the acre, produced bushels of wheat. increase, seven bushels for each lbs--thirty bushels of wheat per acre on an old worn out buckwheat field--advantage of guano in drouth--astonishing effects from top dressing grass. _cherrywood, sept. th, ._ mr. seth chapman--dear sir,--i forward according to request, the results of several years use of peruvian guano, upon my farm at jerusalem, long island. the first decisive benefit from guano that i shall notice, was obtained from using it for wheat, as a top-dressing. in , october st, i took a field containing acres of oat stubble, on which i used some manure, all over the field; top-dressed with peruvian guano, at the rate of lbs. per acre, sown (fortunately just before a storm,) upon the furrow and harrowed in with the wheat. four acres of the field were sown with the old-fashioned red flint wheat, which requires more manure than any other kind among us. the rest of the field was sown with a soft white hulled wheat, the name of which i do not remember. july , .--harvested said field--red wheat yielded well from straw, sheaves to the bushel--white wheat sheaves to the bushel--straw very large and thick. had bushels of wheat, or bushels per acre; and bushels of white wheat or bushels per acre; without the guano i think i could not have obtained much over bushels per acre.-- , oct. . again sowed wheat upon a six acre lot of oat stubble; seed red flint wheat--manured about the same as previous year--used lbs. guano per acre, as top-dressing for acres and moss bunker fish dirt at the rate of , per acre upon the two acres, sowed upon the furrow, and harrowed in just previous to a storm--harvested the th of july . the straw very large, and wheat heads long, but grain very much injured by fly or weevil--very little difference between fish and guano top-dressing; yield shocks-- bushels; not quite bushels per acre. same ground would not have produced more than to bushels wheat per acre without the guano--or some other more expensive manure. . oct. . sowed wheat upon oat stubble field; soil thin and gravelly upon part of the field--used some barnyard manure, but not as much as previous year. top-dressed with lbs. guano and bushels ground bones per acre--harvested th july --yield of - / acres shocks; injured some by weevil, and shrunken, but had bushels or twenty-six bushels per acre. this ground would not have yielded fifteen bushels per acre without the guano. but the most decisive result was obtained the next year, upon an oat stubble field of six acres, a part of which had been cropped, for perhaps years, nearly alternately with rye and buckwheat; (sometimes a crop of each in one year.) the whole field seemed so far exhausted that we had failed to get a crop of corn or oats from it after two different trials; and i underwent no small share of ridicule from my neighbors, while preparing it for wheat. remarks like the following were of daily occurrence--"ah! seaman you will fail this time." "you have not got your old highly manured fields to exhaust this time by your stimulating stuff!" "we shall now see whether guano is good for anything--this will be a fair test, because the land will not produce anything without it, &c." "you may get about bushels of wheat per acre; we shall see." all agreed however, that if wheat did grow, guano should have the credit for it. well, we prepared the ground in about the usual manner, except perhaps plowing a little deeper than in former years. a small quantity of manure was plowed under, and a top dressing of ground bones given and sowed about the last of september-- acres with mediterranean and acres with the red flint wheat--but owing to a scarcity of the article, could only get about lbs. of guano, which was sown across the field upon not quite acres, covering some of each kind of wheat; it was sown upon the furrow, and harrowed in with the wheat as usual. in , april th, top dressed the whole field with guano, at about lbs. per acre; harvested about the th july. the acres of mediterranean yielded bushels; flint wheat straw very large, and thick upon the ground, but grain much injured by the weevil; yielding an average of bushels per acre. i may remark, that where the guano was applied in the autumn, the crop was quite one third greater than where it only received the spring dressing. the last year i managed much in the same way, except that i fell short of manure, and depended entirely upon guano and bone upon a part of the field, from which part, though i have not yet threshed it, i think i shall get to bushels. the rest of the field was very large and considered the best between this place and brooklyn, on a road of miles in length. my _good luck_( ) at wheat growing is now a conceded point. now for other crops--for corn i have not been very successful; generally mixing some guano with earth in the hill at the time of planting and getting but few plants to stand; these, however, generally have been heavily eared. by mixing previously with charcoal dust i think this burning of the seed might be avoided.( ) for buckwheat, i used to lbs. per acre, sown upon the furrow and harrowed in with the grain. for barley, to lbs. per acre; oats to lbs; turnips, to lbs. plowed under a short depth, previously to forming the drill; and i find a decided profit in using guano for all the above crops. i have seen a field of corn the present season very greatly improved in earing by the application of about lbs. of guano, mixed with parts charcoal dust, and thrown around the hills a few weeks since during a rain storm. i have also used guano and charcoal dust, five parts coal to one of guano, in my garden, the past season, and found the beds thus dressed stood the extreme drought better than other parts of the garden. one more case of my own and i am done. in , i sowed about lbs. of guano, on a piece of meadow or mowing ground, covering a little more than half an acre, from which the timothy and clover was nearly gone; i took lands across the lot, leaving about feet between each land. where the guano was sown, the timothy grew large and thick and bore the drought, and yielded about one and a half tons per acre; while the rest of the field did not produce more than half that amount, and that of an inferior quality of grass. the corn upon the same field the present season, shows plainly a better yield from the above top-dressing. from observation and experience, i would recommend the mixing of guano with charcoal dust, equal parts, or five parts coal to one guano, it is much more pleasant to handle when thus mixed, being completely deodorized and rendered much more enduring as a manure, by retaining the ammonia for several years, instead of allowing the greater part to pass off the first season, as is the case when applied in a crude state, especially as a top dressing. prepared or decomposed muck if used with guano as a retainer of the volatile gases, in all cases where it can be conveniently obtained especially in soils where evaporation is so rapid as it is in most parts of long island, will pay. that like produces like, is a favorite maxim with me--that it is necessary to replace the matter, both organic and inorganic, which we take from the soil in the form of crops, of various kinds--that by supplying the necessary chemical ingredients, we shall be able to draw a great proportion of our crops from atmospheric agents--that the necessity for using such an immense amount of organic matter as we now use in the shape of barn yard and stable manure will be partially overcome--that a great saving of expense will thereby ensue--that guano is one of the most active agents to effect such a result i am fully satisfied, not sufficient perhaps of itself, but highly useful even in a crude state--and capable when skillfully combined with others, to effect an entire revolution in our system of agriculture. if you think the above worth an insertion in the pamphlet you spoke of, you are at liberty to insert it--if not, you will please return the letter to me, as soon as convenient, and if you think it will pass off any better, you may affix the following signature to the communication. edward h. seaman, recording secretary, queen's co. agricultural society. note .--yes, that is the word--_good luck_--it is all good luck. it is astonishing how many farmers there are in this country who will stand with their hands in their breeches pockets, fumbling idle dollars, while a neighbor expends his for guano, and produces a fine crop of wheat upon an old worn out buckwheat field; at which they stare in stupid wonder at the good luck of the thing. what a pity it had not been the good luck of such men to have been born with common sense enough to profit themselves by their neighbors good luck. note .--it would be far better to sow the guano broadcast and plow it in, or scatter it in drills and turn a light furrow on it before planting. "_hempstead, aug. , ._ seth chapman, esq.--dear sir:--i believe i was the first person in queens county using guano; having imported some from england in the ship yorkshire, in . this was from the ichaboe islands. i have since used nearly all the varieties, and consider the peruvian the cheapest and best. in applying guano, i think by making a compost, the greatest benefit is derived; say one peck of plaster, one bushel of loam, two of saw dust, mixed up a month or six weeks before using. from to lbs. of guano is enough for a crop of oats or buckwheat. i have not found it to succeed with corn or potatoes; probably from being accompanied by a dry season. the best wheat i ever raised was from using lbs. to the acre, composted. this was on a light soil, and returned bushels to the acre, on seven acres, weighing lbs. the grass was poor after it. as a top dresser, i have used lbs. per acre, very early in the spring, on half a lot, which mowed more than half as much again as the part not dressed. one of my neighbors has used lbs. per acre, plowed in for potatoes; the yield, good, so far, having just commenced digging. john harold." we might give much more evidence of the same kind, to prove that every barren acre upon long island, might be made productive by a judicious and profitable application of guano; but if there are any persons, who, after reading these pages, are still doubting, we must say they are most incorrigably determined not to profit by the experience of others. to such it would be useless to say more. _successful experiment with guano as a top dressing on wheat, in north carolina._--on page , we gave some account of the application of guano by henry k. burgwyn, esq., since which, we have been favored with the following letter from his brother, t. pollock burgwyn, written, as will be seen, not for publication, but simply to give the party from whom he purchased the guano, a detail of his success. "_new york, sept._ , . messrs. a. b. allen &. co.--dear sir:--having promised that i would furnish you with the result of my application of the tons of guano which i purchased of you last winter, i proceed now to do so, and give you full liberty to quote my experience in favor of the use of that most invaluable manure, to all who are anxious to profit by the experience of others without incurring any risk of their own. my object, and it should be that of every one who has used guano, is to extend the knowledge of its great value to any owner of poor soil, like the worn out plantations of north carolina. i applied tons of this guano as a top dressing to a field of acres, which had been seeded in wheat under most unfavorable circumstances. at the time of application, so unpromising was the appearance of the growing wheat, that my manager and myself thought it almost a waste of money and labor to try this experiment,( ) but as the rest of my crop did not require any manure, i resolved to see what would be the effect. i am confident the field would not have averaged, without the top dressing, seven bushels per acre--it yielded rather over bushels, besides securing to me a full setting of clover.( ) my mode of application was as follows; to each lbs of guano i added two bushels of ashes and a bushel of plaster mixed intimately, and then sown broadcast, at the rate of six and a half bushels per acre, harrowed in with a light harrow. this application was made in march, and the early part of april, and in less than three weeks after the application, the wheat had undergone an entire change, from a yellow, sickly color, to a dark luxuriant green. the application had evidently infused new life and vigor into the plants, and as the result proved, very nearly or quite doubled its product. so much for the crop of wheat; but what was still more valuable to me, in my system of farming, it likewise secured for me a full crop of clover, which would certainly have failed but for this application. i also applied one ton of this guano mixed in the same way, to a small field of oats. i plowed this under with a small plow, together with the oats; the result was equally gratifying. my chief object in this last experiment, was to secure me a small field of clover, near my stables, and in this i fully succeeded; which i feel assured i should not have done but for the guano. my brother and myself have made various experiments of late years, with guano, and concur in the testimony of all those who have tested its value, carefully and judiciously, in pronouncing it to be the most expeditious renovater of the soil within the farmer's reach; and exclusive of the farm yard, the most economical of all manures. in proof of my conviction of its value to me, i shall this fall give you an order for or tons more. i will only add that i consider every wheat grower who would study his own interest, will find it by trying similar experiments. t. pollock burgwyn." note . in a subsequent conversation with mr. burgwyn, he stated a fact which makes this point much stronger. after ordering the guano, he left home, giving his farm manager orders to apply if to that particular piece of wheat as soon as it arrived. owing to the fact that the seed was injured--that the land was in a very unfit condition from poverty and drouth to produce a crop of wheat, it had assumed such a miserable appearance before the arrival of the guano, that the manager wrote to mr. b. his opinion of the utter folly of applying anything so expensive to a crop already struck with death. not imagining how very unpromising was the prospect of success, mr. b. immediately wrote to him to go ahead as directed. before the application was completed he returned home, and his first impression was to stop the work at once and give up the field as lost; but on examining the effect upon that part where the guano was first applied, he found it had already infused new vigor into the plants, for they had put off their sickly yellow color, and taken on a vigorous green; and therefore he decided at once to go on, which as will be seen by the result, was a most valuable decision. note . from personal knowledge of this very field, we are confident it would not have yielded without the guano, one half of seven bushels. it is a flat surface, clayey loam, and badly affected by winter rains, and such freezing and thawing as it had during the last severe winter. besides it was a few years since, when it came into the possession of mr. burgwyn, one of those old worn out, skinned-to-death places, so common in that state, which all the deep plowing and good farming of that gentleman had not been able to restore, until he luckily hit upon guano; which notwithstanding the most unfavorable circumstances, has given him conclusive proof of its inestimable value. to say nothing of the ten bushels of wheat per acre, which we are confident he gained, the clover is worth more than the guano cost; and without it, one might almost as soon expect to grow clover upon coney island beach, as upon that field. this letter contains testimony of inestimable value. it comes from a gentleman of intelligence and careful observation, who is devoted to his profession of a farmer, and who has been one of the most successful renovators of worn out plantations in the south, and it comes very opportunely to give our work an appropriate finale. lessons on soil by e. j. russell, d.sc. (lond.) goldsmith company's soil chemist, rothamsted experimental station cambridge: at the university press [transcriber's note: page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. { }. they have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with project gutenberg's faq-v- . in the html version of this book, page numbers are placed in the left margin.] {v} preface the syndics of the cambridge university press propose to issue a nature study series of which this is the first volume. we count ourselves fortunate in securing dr e. j. russell as author and soil as subject. the subject is fundamental, for, just as the soil lies beneath the plant and animal life we see, so is a knowledge of the soil necessary for all understanding of flora and fauna. the real complexity of the apparently simple element "earth," and the variety of methods required for exploring it, are typical of the problems which the _tout ensemble_ of the outdoor world presents to the naturalist. dr e. j. russell has not only acquired a first-rate and first-hand knowledge of his subject at wye and at rothamsted; his own researches have recently extended our knowledge of the micro-organisms in the soil and their influence on fertility. further, what is very much to our purpose, he has himself had practical experience in teaching at an elementary school in wye and at a secondary school in harpenden. just at the present moment, county councils are trying to push rural education and to awaken the intelligence of country children by interesting them in their surroundings. it is, therefore, a favourable opportunity to offer these pages as a concrete suggestion in model lessons and object lessons, showing exactly what can be done under existing conditions. {vi} the book is intended to help children to study nature; there is no attempt to substitute book study for nature study. hence, whilst there are passages of continuous reading, it is not a mere "reader." many teachers, myself among them, have felt the difficulty of organising practical work for large classes. dr russell has written so that, whilst nominally showing the pupil how to learn, he is secretly scattering hints for the teacher who is learning how to teach. abundant and varied practical exercises have been suggested, and careful instructions have been given so that the book shall seem intelligible even in the absence of a teacher. the proposed practical work is not only what might be done by eager boys and girls on half-holidays, but what can be done by every scholar in the course of ordinary school work. the pictorial illustrations are intended as aids to observation, not as substitutes. drawing is one form of practical exercise, and the preparation of corresponding illustrations in the scholars' notebooks from the apparatus used in the classroom and the fields around the school may afford exercises in artistic work with pen, brush or camera. sufficient directions are given for the supply of necessary materials and apparatus. the apparatus proposed is of the simplest character. it is suggested that the book will be found most useful in the higher standards of elementary schools, in preparatory schools and in the lower forms of secondary schools, that is, where the ages of scholars average from to . hugh richardson york, january {vi} contents chap. page i. what is the soil made of? . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii. more about the clay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii. what lime does to clay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv. some experiments with the sand . . . . . . . . . . . v. the part that burns away . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi. the plant food in the soil . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii. the dwellers in the soil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii. the soil and the plant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix. cultivation and tillage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x. the soil and the countryside . . . . . . . . . . . . xi. how soil has been made . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [transcriber's note: the page numbers below are those in the original book. however, in this e-book, to avoid the splitting of paragraphs, the illustrations may have been moved to the page preceding or following.] list of illustrations figure page . soil and subsoil in st george's school garden . . . . . columns showing what parts of soil and subsoil were made of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . columns showing what parts of dried soil and subsoil were made of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . clay shrinks when it dries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . clay swells up when it is placed in water . . . . . . . landslip in the isle of wight. _phot._ valentine & son . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . clay does not let water run through . . . . . . . . . . sand allows air to pass through but clay does not . . . a brick allows both air and water to pass through it . lime added to turbid clay water soon makes the clay settle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . sand dunes, penhale, cornwall. _phot._ geological survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . blowing sand covering up meadows and ruining them. _phot._ geological survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . model of a spring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . foot of chalk hill at harpenden where a spring breaks out. _phot._ lionel armstrong . . . . . . . . . . . . the little pool and the spring. _phot._ lionel armstrong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . water spouting up from a bore hole, old cateriag quarry, dunbar. _phot._ geological survey . . . . . . sandy soils in wet and in dry positions . . . . . . . . map of the roads round wye . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . peat bog in hoy, orkney: peat is being cut for fuel. _phot._ valentine & son . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . rye growing in surface soil, subsoil, and sand . . . . . mustard growing in surface soil, subsoil, and sand . . . mustard growing in soil previously cropped with rye, and in soil previously uncropped . . . . . . . . . . . pieces of grass, leaves, etc. change to plant food in the surface soil lint not in the subsoil . . . . . . soil in which earthworms have been living and making burrows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . fresh soil turns milk bad, but baked soil does not . . . soil contains tiny living things that grow on gelatine . our breath makes lime water turn milky . . . . . . . . . something in the soil uses up air and makes lime water turn milky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . soils are able to stick to water: clay or loam soils do this better than sands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . water can pass from wet to dry places in the soil, it can even travel upwards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . plants growing in soils supplied from below with water. all the water the plants get has to travel upwards . mustard growing in soils supplied with varying quantities of water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . wheat growing in moist and in dry soils . . . . . . . _a_ and _b_. plants found on a dry soil had narrow leaves, those on a moist soil had wider leaves. _phot._ s. t. parkinson . . . . . . . . . , . plants give out water through their leaves . . . . . . . stephen hales's experiment in . . . . . . . . . . . hill slope near harpenden showing woodland at top and arable land lower down. _phot._ lionel armstrong . view further along the valley; woodland and arable above, rough grassland near the river. _phot_. lionel armstrong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . rough grass pasture near the river. higher up is arable land. _phot._ lionel armstrong . . . . . . . . after harvest the farmer breaks up his land with a plough and then leaves it alone until seed time. _phot._ lionel armstrong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . rolling in mangold seed on the farm. _phot._ h. b. hutchinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . soil sampler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cultivation and mulching reduce the loss of water from soils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _a_ and _b_. maize cannot compete successfully with weeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . a plot of wheat left untouched since at rothamsted has now become a dense thicket. _phot._ lionel armstrong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a badly drained wheat field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . highly cultivated sandy soil in kent . . . . . . . . . . a surrey heath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . woodland and heather on high sandy land, wimbledon common. _phot._ r. h. carter . . . . . . . . . . . . poor sandy soil in surrey, partly cultivated but mainly wood and waste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . open chalk cultivated country, thanet . . . . . . . . . cliffs at the seaside, manorbier. _phot._ geological survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cliffs in inland district, arthur's seat, edinburgh. _phot._ geological survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . model of a stream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the bend of a river . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the winding river--the stour at wye. _phot._ r. h. carter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . sketch map showing why godmersham and wye arose where they did on the stour . . . . . . . . . . . . . ford at coldharbour near harpenden. _phot._ lionel armstrong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the photographs of the pot experiments are by mr lionel armstrong. {xi} introduction the following pages contain the substance of lessons given at the village school at wye to the th, th, th and th standards (mixed) and at st george's school, harpenden, to the rd form. there is, however, an important difference between the actual lessons and the book. the lessons had reference to the soils round about the village, and dealt mainly with local phenomena, general conclusions being only sparingly drawn; while in the book it has been necessary to throw the course into a more generalised form. the teacher in using the book will have to reverse the process, he must find local illustrations and make liberal use of them during the course; it is hoped that the information given will help him over any difficulties he may experience. this necessity for finding local illustrations constitutes one of the fundamental differences between nature study subjects and other subjects of the school curriculum. the textbooks in some of the others may be necessary and sufficient; in nature study it is at most only subsidiary, serving simply as a guide to the thing that is to be studied; unless the thing itself be before the class it is no better than a guide to a cathedral would be without the cathedral. and just as the guide is successful only when he directs the attention of the stranger to the important features of the place, and fails directly he becomes garrulous and distracts attention, so a nature study book succeeds {xii} only in as far as it helps in the study of the actual thing, and fails if it is used passively and is substituted for an active study. no description or illustration can take the place of direct observation; the simplest thing in nature is infinitely more wonderful than our best word pictures can ever paint it. the author recommends the teacher to look through the chapter before it has to be taken in class and then to make a few expeditions in search of local illustrations. it is not strictly necessary that the chapters should be taken in the order given. the local phenomena must be dealt with as they arise and as weather permits, or the opportunity may pass not to return again during the course. in almost any lane, field, or garden a sufficient number of illustrations may be obtained for our purpose; if a stream and a hill are accessible the material is practically complete, especially if the children can be induced to pursue their studies during their summer holiday rambles. of course this entails a good deal of work for the teacher, but the results are worth it. children enjoy experimental and observation lessons in which they take an active part and are not merely passive learners. the value of such lessons in developing their latent powers and in stimulating them to seek for knowledge in the great book of nature is a sufficient recompense to the enthusiastic teacher for the extra trouble involved. it is not desirable to work through a chapter in one lesson. children unaccustomed to make experiments or to see experiments done, will probably require three or four lessons for getting through each of the first few chapters, and two or three lessons for each of the others. {xiii} the pot experiments of chaps. vi., vii. and viii. should be started as early in the course as possible. twenty flower pots are wanted for the set; they should be of the same size, about eight inches being a convenient diameter, and should be kept together in a warm place. three are filled with sand, seven with subsoil, and the remaining ten with surface soil. three of the subsoil pots are uncropped, two being stored moist and one dry. four pots of the surface soil are uncropped and moist, a fifth and sixth are uncropped and dry, one of these contains earthworms (p. ). four glazed pots, e.g. large jam or marmalade jars, are also wanted (p. ). mustard, buckwheat, or rye make good crops, but many others will do. leguminous crops, however, show certain abnormal characters, while turnips and cabbages are apt to fail: none of these should be used. it is highly desirable that the pots should be duplicated. the plots also should be started in the school garden as early as convenient. eight are required for the set: their treatment is described in chap. ix. plots two yards square suffice. a supply of sand, of clay, and of lime will be wanted, but it is not necessary to have fresh material for each lesson. the sand may be obtained from a builder, a sand pit, the sea shore or from a dealer in chemical apparatus. the clay may be obtained from a brick yard; it gives most satisfactory results after it has been ground ready for brick making. modelling clay is equally satisfactory. a supply of rain water is desirable. for a class of twelve children working in pairs at the experiments the following apparatus is wanted for the whole course:-- {xiv} six tripods and bunsen burners or spirit lamps [ ] twelve pipe-clay triangles [ ] twelve crucibles or tin lids [ ] sixteen gas jars [ ] twelve beakers c.c. capacity [ ] two beakers c.c. two beakers c.c. six egg-cups [ ] twelve funnels [ ] six funnel stands [ ] six perforated glass disks [ ] two tubulated bottles c.c., four corks to fit cork borers lbs. assorted glass tubing pestle and mortar twelve erlenmeyer flasks c.c. [ ] six saucers twelve flatbottomed flasks c.c., six fitted with india rubber stoppers bored with one hole [ ], and six with ordinary corks [ ] box as in fig. six glass tubes / " diameter, " long [ ] six lamp chimneys [ ] six test tubes, corks to fit three thermometers soil sampler (p. ) balance and weights two retort stands with rings and clamp. the figures given in square brackets are the quantities that suffice when the teacher alone does the experiments, it not being convenient for the scholars to do much. {xv} in conclusion the author desires to tender his best thanks to the rev. cecil grant of st george's school, and to mr w. j. ashby of the wye school, for having allowed him the use of their schools and appliances during the progress of these lessons. especially are his thanks due to mr lionel armstrong for much help ungrudgingly rendered in collecting material, taking photographs, and supervising the experiments. e. j. r. harpenden, february, . { } chapter i what is the soil made of? apparatus required. _soil and subsoil from a hole dug in the garden. clay. six tripods and bunsen burners or spirit lamps [ ]. six crucibles or tin lids and pipe-clay triangles [ ]. twelve glass jars or gas cylinders [ ]. six beakers [ ] [ ]._ if we talk to a farmer or a gardener about soils he will say that there are several kinds of soil; clay soils, gravel soils, peat soils, chalk soils, and so on, and we may discover this for ourselves if we make some rambles in the country and take careful notice of the ground about us, particularly if we can leave the road and walk on the footpaths across the fields. when we find the ground very hard in dry weather and very sticky in wet weather we may be sure we are on a clay soil, and may expect to find brick yards or tile works somewhere near, where the clay is used. if the soil is loose, drying quickly after rain, and if it can be scattered about by the hand like sand on the sea shore, we know we are on a sandy soil and can look for pits where builder's sand is dug. but it may very likely happen that the soil is something in between, and that neither sand pits nor { } clay pits can be found; if we ask what sort of soil this is we are told it is a loam. a gravel soil will be known at once by its gravel pits, and a chalk soil by the white chalk quarries and old lime kilns, while a peat soil is black, sometimes marshy and nearly always spongey to tread on. [illustration: fig. . soil and subsoil in st george's school garden] we want to learn something of the soil round about us, and we will begin by digging a hole about three feet deep to see what we can discover. at harpenden this is what the scholars saw:--the top eight inches of soil was dark in colour and easy to dig; the soil below was reddish brown in colour and very hard to dig; one changed into the other so quickly that it was easy to see where the top soil ended and the bottom soil began; no further change could, however, be seen below the eight inch line. a drawing was made to show these things, and is given in fig. . you may find something quite different: sand, chalk, or solid rock may occur below the soil, but you should enter whatever you see into your notebooks and make a drawing, like fig. , to be kept for future use. before filling in the hole some of the dark coloured top soil, and some of the lighter coloured soil lying below (which is called the subsoil), { } should be taken for further examination; the two samples should be kept separate and not mixed. first look carefully at the top soil and rub some of it between your fingers. we found that our sample was wet and therefore contained water; it was very sticky like clay and therefore contained clay; there were a few stones and some grit present and also some tiny pieces of dead plants--roots, stems or leaves, but some so decayed that we could not quite tell what they were. a few pieces of a soft white stone were found that marked on the blackboard like chalk. lastly, there were a few fragments of coal and cinders, but as these were not a real part of the soil we supposed they had got in by accident. the subsoil was also wet and even more sticky than the top soil, it contained stones and grit, but seemed almost free from plant remains and from the white chalky fragments. a few experiments will show how much of some of these things are present. the amount of water may be discovered by weighing out ten grams of soil, leaving it to dry in a warm place near the fire or in the sun, and then weighing it again. in one experiment the results were:-- weight of top soil before drying ... grams = decigrams " " " after " ... . " = " ---- --- water lost ... . " = " a column millimetres long was drawn to represent the decigrams of soil, and a mark was drawn millimetres up to show the amount of water (see fig. ). weight of bottom soil before drying ... grams = decigrams " " " after " ... . " = " water lost ... . " = " { } another column should be drawn for the subsoil. on drying the soil it becomes lighter in colour and loses its stickiness, but it has not permanently changed because as soon as water is added it comes back to what it was before. [illustration: fig. . columns showing what parts of soil and subsoil were made of] the dried lumps of soil are now to be broken up finely with a piece of wood, but nothing must be lost. it is easy to see shrivelled pieces of plant, but not easy to pick them out; the simplest plan is to burn them away. the soil must be carefully tipped on to a tin lid, or into a crucible, heated over a flame and stirred { } with a long clean nail. first of all it chars, then there is a little sparkling, but not much, finally the soil turns red and does not change any further no matter how much it is heated. the shade of red will at once be recognised as brick red or terra cotta, indeed "terra cotta" means "baked earth." when the soil is cold it should be examined again; it has become very hard and the plant remains have either disappeared or have changed to ash and crumble away directly they are touched. on weighing a further loss is discovered, which was in our experiment:-- weight of top soil after drying but before burning ... decigrams " " " " " " after " ... " -- the part that burnt away weighed ... " weight of subsoil after drying but before burning ... decigrams " " " " " after " ... " -- the part that burnt away weighed ... " these results are entered on the column in fig. . the surface soil is seen to contain more material that will burn away than the subsoil does. when the burnt soil is moistened it does not become dark and sticky like it did before, it has completely changed and cannot be made into soil again. it is more like brick dust than soil. for further experiments we shall want a fresh portion of the original soil. on a wet afternoon something was noticed that enabled us to get a little further with our studies. the rain water ran down a sloping piece of ground in a tiny channel it had made; the streamlet was very muddy, and at first it was thought that all the soil was washed away. but we soon saw that the channel was lined { } with grit, some of which was moving slowly down and some not at all. grit can therefore be separated from the rest of the soil by water. this separation can be shown very well by the following experiment. rub ten grains of finely powdered soil with a little water (rain water is better than tap water), and carefully pour the muddy liquid into a large glass jar. add more water to the rest of the soil, shake, and again pour the liquid into the jar; go on doing this till the jar is full. then get some more jars and still keep on till the liquid is no longer muddy but nearly clear. the part of the soil that remains behind and will not float over into the jars is at once seen to be made up of small stones, grit, and sand. set the jars aside and look at them after a day or so. the liquid remains muddy for some time, but then it clears and a thick black sediment gathers at the bottom. if now you very carefully pour the liquid off you can collect the sediments: they are soft and sticky, and can be moulded into patterns like clay. in order to see if they really contain clay we must do the experiment again, but use pure clay from a brick yard, or modelling clay, instead of soil. the muddy liquid is obtained as before, it takes a long time to settle, but in the end it gives a sediment so much like that from the soil, except in colour, that we shall be safe in saying that the sediments in the jars contain the clay from the soil. and thus we have been able to separate the sticky part of the soil--the clay--from the gritty or sandy part which is not at all sticky. we may even be able to find out something more. if we leave the soil sediment and the clay sediment on separate tin lids to dry, and then examine them carefully we may find that the { } soil sediment is really a little more gritty than the clay. although it contains the clay it also contains something else. when the experiment is made very carefully in a proper way this material can be separated from the pure clay. it is called silt, but really there are a number of silts, some almost like clay and some almost like sand; they shade one into the other. if there is enough grit it should be weighed: we obtained decigrams of grit from grams of our top soil and decigrams from grams of bottom soil. we cannot separate the clay from the silt, but when this is done in careful experiments it is found that the subsoil contains more clay than the top soil. we should of course expect this because we have found that the subsoil is more sticky than the top soil. these results are put into the columns as before so that we can now see at once how much of our soil is water, how much can burn away, how much is grit, and how much is clay and other things. what would have happened if the sample had been dug out during wetter or drier weather? the quantity of water would have been different, but in other respects the soil would have remained the same. it is therefore best to avoid the changes in the amount of water by working always with grams of _dried_ soil. the results we obtained were:-- top soil subsoil weight of dry soil before burning ... decigrams " " " after " ... " --- --- the part that burned away weighed ... weight of grit from grams of dried soil " the columns are given in fig. . { } [illustration: fig. . columns showing what parts of dried soil and subsoil were made of] summary. the experiments made so far have taught us these facts:-- . soil contains water, grit or sand, silt, clay, a part that burns away, and some white chalky specks. . the top layer of soil to a depth of about eight inches is different from the soil lying below, which is called the subsoil. it is less sticky, easier to dig, and darker in colour. it contains more of the material that burns away, but less clay than the subsoil. . when soil is dried it is not sticky but hard or crumbly; as soon as it is moistened it changes back to what it was before. but when soil is burnt it completely alters and can no longer be changed back again. [ ] see p. xiv for explanation of the figures in square brackets. { } chapter ii more about the clay apparatus required. _clay, about lbs.; a little dried, powdered clay; sand, about lbs. six glass jars or cylinders [ ]. six beakers [ ]. six egg-cups [ ]. six funnels and stands [ ]. six perforated glass or tin disks [ ]. six glass tubes [ ]. two tubulated bottles fitted with corks. some seeds. six small jars about in. x in. [ ]. bricks. the apparatus in fig. . pestle and mortar._ we have seen in the last chapter that clay will float in water and only slowly settles down. is this because clay is lighter than water? probably not, because a lump of clay seems very heavy. further, if we put a small ball of clay into water it at once sinks to the bottom. only when we rub the clay between our fingers or work it with a stick--in other words, when we break the ball into very tiny pieces--can we get it to float again. we therefore conclude that the clay floated in our jars (p. ) for so long not because it was lighter than water, but because the pieces were so small. clay is exceedingly useful because of its stickiness. dig up some clay, if there is any in your garden, or procure some from a brick works. you can mould it into any shape you like, and the purer the clay the { } better it acts. enormous quantities of clay are used for making bricks. make some model bricks about an inch long and half an inch in width and depth, also make a small basin of about the same size, then set them aside for a week in a warm, dry place. they still keep their shape; even if a crack has appeared the pieces stick together and do not crumble to a powder. if you now measure with a ruler any of the bricks that have not cracked, you will find that they have shrunk a little and are no longer quite an inch long. this fact is well known to brickmakers; the moulds in which they make the bricks are larger than the brick is wanted to be. but what would happen if instead of a piece of clay one inch long you had a whole field of clay? would that shrink also, and, if so, what would the field look like? we can answer this question in two ways; we may make a model of a field and let it dry, and we can pay a visit to a clay meadow after some hot, dry weather in summer. the model can be made by kneading clay up under water and then rolling it out on some cardboard or wood as if it were a piece of pastry. cut it into a square and draw lines on the cardboard right at the edges of the clay. then put it into a dry warm place and leave for some days. fig. is a picture of such a model after a week's drying. the clay has shrunk away from the marks, but it has also shrunk all over and has cracked. if you get an opportunity of walking over a clay field during a dry summer, you will find similar but much larger cracks, some of which may be two or three inches wide, or even more. sometimes the cracking is so bad that the roots of plants or of trees are torn by it, and even buildings, in some instances, have suffered through their foundations shrinking away. { } we can now understand why some of our model bricks cracked. the cracks were caused by the shrinkage just as happens with our model field. as soon as the clay becomes wet it swells again. a very pretty experiment can be made to show this. fill a glass tube or an egg-cup with dry powdered clay, scrape the surface level with a ruler, and then stand in a glass jar full of rain water so that the whole is completely covered. after a short time the clay begins to swell and forces its way out of the egg-cup as shown in fig. , falling over the side and making quite a little shower. in exactly the same way the ground swells after heavy rain and rises a little, then it falls again and cracks when it becomes dry. darwin records some careful measurements in a book called _earthworms and vegetable mould_--"a large flat stone laid on the surface of a field sank . millimetres[ ] whilst the weather was dry between may th and june th, { } and rose . millimetres between september th and th of the same year, much rain having fallen during the latter part of this time. during frosts and thaws the movements were twice as great." [illustration: fig. . clay was plastered over a square piece of board and completely covered it. after drying for a week the clay had shrunk and cracked] you must have found out by now how very slippery clay becomes as soon as it is wet enough. it is not easy to walk over a clay field in wet weather, and if the clay forms part of the slope of a hill it may be so slippery that it becomes dangerous. sometimes after very heavy rains soil resting on clay on the side of a hill has begun to slide downwards and moves some distance before it stops. fortunately these land slips as they are called, are not common in england, but they do occur. fig. shows one in the isle of wight, and another is described by gilbert white in _the natural history of selborne_. [illustration: fig. . clay swelling up when placed in water and overflowing from the egg-cup into which it was put] [illustration: fig. . landslip in the isle of wight] another thing that you will have noticed is that anything made of clay holds water. a simple way of testing this is to put a round piece of tin perforated { } with holes into a funnel, press some clay on to it and on to the sides of the funnel (fig. ), and then pour on rain water. the water does not run through. pools of water may lie like this on a clay field for a very long time in winter before they disappear, as you will know very well if you live in a clay country. so when a lake or a reservoir is being made it sometimes happens that the sides are lined with clay to keep the water in. [illustration: fig. . a thin layer of clay _a_ entirely prevents the water running through] if water cannot get through can air? this is very easily discovered: plug a glass tube with clay and see if you can draw or blow air through. you cannot. clay can be used like putty to stop up holes or cracks, and so long as it keeps moist it will neither let air nor water { } through. take two bottles like those in fig. , stop up the bottom tubes, and fill with water. then put a funnel through each cork and fit the cork in tightly, covering with clay if there is any sign of a leak. put a perforated tin disk into each funnel, cover one well with clay and the other with sand. open the bottom tubes. no water runs out from the first bottle because no air can leak in through the clay, but it runs out very quickly from the second because the sand lets air through. these properties of clay and sand are very important for plants. sow some seeds in a little jar { } full of clay kept moist to prevent it cracking, and at the same time sow a few in some moist sand. the seeds soon germinate in the sand but not in the clay. it is known that seeds will not germinate unless they have air and water and are warm enough. they had water in both jars, and they were in both cases warm, but they got no air through the clay and therefore could not sprout. pure clay would not be good for plants to grow in. air came through the sand, however, and gave the seeds all they wanted for germination. [illustration: fig. . sand allows air to pass through it, and so water runs out of the bottle. clay does not let air pass, and the water is therefore kept in, even though the tube is open.] this also explains something else that you may have noticed. if you tried baking one of your model bricks in the fire you probably found that the brick exploded and shattered to pieces: the water still left in the brick changed to steam when it was heated, but the steam could not escape through the clay, and so it burst the clay. in a brick works the heat is very gradually applied and the steam only slowly forms, so that it has time to leak away, then when it has all gone the brick can be heated strongly. you should try this with one of your model bricks; leave it in a hot place near the stove or on the radiator for a week or more and then see if you can bake it without mishap. let us now compare a piece of clay with a brick. the differences are so great that you would hardly think the brick could have been made from clay. the brick is neither soft nor sticky, and it has not the smooth surface of a piece of clay, but is full of little holes or pores, which look as if they were formed in letting the steam out. a brick lets air through; some air gets into our houses through the bricks even when the windows are shut. water will get through bricks more easily than it does through clay. after heavy rain you { } can often find that water has soaked through a brick wall and made the wall paper quite damp. a pretty experiment can be made with the piece of apparatus shown in fig. : bore in a brick a hole about an inch deep and a quarter of an inch wide, put into the hole the piece of bent glass tubing, and fix it in with some clay or putty, then pour some water blackened with ink into the tube, marking its position with a label. stand the brick in a vessel so full of water that the brick is entirely covered. water soaks into the brick and presses the air out: the air tries to escape through the tube and forces up the black liquid. [illustration: fig. . a brick standing in water. the air in the brick is driven inwards by the water and forces the liquid up the tube in order to escape] one more experiment may be tried. can a brick be changed back into clay? grind up the brick and it forms a gritty powder. moisten it, work it with your fingers how you please, but it still remains a gritty powder and never takes on the greasy, sticky feeling of { } pure clay. indeed no one has ever succeeded in making clay out of bricks. all these experiments show that clay is completely altered when it is burnt. we also found that soil is completely altered by burning, and if you look back at your notes you will see that the changes are very much alike, so much so that we can safely put down some of the changes in the burnt soil--the red colour, the hard grittiness, and the absence of stickiness--to the clay. let us now examine a piece of dry, but unburnt, clay. it is very hard and does not crumble, it is neither sticky nor slippery. directly, however, we add some water it changes back to what it was before. drying therefore alters clay only for the time being, whilst baking changes it permanently. [ ] a little more than one-eighth of an inch. { } chapter iii what lime does to clay apparatus required. _clay, about lbs. some of the clay from chapter ii may, if necessary, be used over again. lime, about / lb. six funnels, stands and disks [ ]. twelve glass jars [ ]. lime water[ ]._ if you are in a clay country in autumn or early winter you will find some of the fields dotted with white heaps of chalk or lime, and you will be told that these things "improve" the soil. we will make a few experiments to find out what lime does to clay. put some clay on to a perforated tin disk in a funnel just as you did on p. , press it down so that no water can pass through. then sprinkle on to the clay some powdered lime and add rain water. soon the water begins to leak through, though it could not do so before; the addition of the lime, therefore, has altered the clay. if you added lime to a garden or a field on which water lay about for a long time in winter you would expect the water to drain away, especially if you made drains or cut some trenches along which the water could pass. there are large areas in england where this has been done with very great advantage. { } the muddy liquid obtained by shaking clay with water clears quickly if a little lime is stirred in. fill two jars a and b (fig. ) with rain water, rub clay into each and stir up so as to make a muddy liquid, then add some lime water to _b_ and stir well. leave for a short time. flocks quickly appear in _b_, then sink, leaving the liquid clear, but a remains cloudy for a long time. but why should the liquid clear? we decided in our earlier experiments that the clay floated in the water because it was in very tiny pieces; when we took a larger lump the clay sank. the lime has for some reason or other, which we do not understand, made the small clay particles stick together to form the large flocks, and these can no longer float, but sink. if we look at the limed clay in our funnel experiment we shall see that the same change has gone on there; the clay has become rather loose and fluffy, and can therefore no longer hold water back. [illustration: fig. . addition of lime to turbid clay water now makes the clay settle and leaves the water quite clear] lime also makes clay less sticky. knead up one piece of clay with rain water alone and another piece { } with rain water and about / its weight of lime. the limed clay breaks easily and works quite differently from the pure clay. summary. this, then, is what we have learnt about clay. clay is made up of very, very, tiny pieces, so small that they float in water. they stick together when they are wetted and then pressed, and they remain together; a piece of clay moulded into any pattern will keep its shape even after it is dried and baked. clay is therefore made into bricks, earthenware, pottery, etc., whilst white clay, which is found in some places, is made into china. wet clay shrinks and cracks as it dries; these cracks can easily be seen in the fields during dry weather. this shrinkage interferes with the foundations of houses and other buildings, causing them to settle. dry clay is different from wet clay, it is hard, not sticky and not slippery, but it at once becomes like ordinary clay when water is added. after baking, however, clay permanently alters and cannot again be changed back to what it was before. clay will not let water pass through; a clay field is therefore nearly always wet in winter and spring. nor can air pass through until the clay dries or cracks. lime has a remarkable action on clay. it makes the little, tiny pieces stick together to form feathery flocks which sink in water; lime therefore causes muddy clay water to become clear. the flocks cannot hold water back, and hence limed clay allows water to pass through. limed clay is also less sticky than pure clay. a clay field or garden is improved by adding lime because the soil does not remain wet so long as it did before; it is also less sticky and therefore more easily cultivated. [ ] lime water is made by shaking up lime and water. it should be kept in a well-corked bottle. { } chapter iv some experiments with the sand apparatus required. _sand, about lbs.; clay, about lbs. six funnels, stands and disks [ ]. six glass jars [ ]. one box with glass front shown in fig. filled with clay and sand, as indicated. quarry chalk (about lbs.). six beakers [ ]. six egg-cups [ ]._ if there is a sand pit near you, or a field of sandy soil, you should get a supply for these experiments; if not, some builder's sand can be used. when the sand is dry you will see that the grains are large and hard. further, they are all separate and do not stick together; if you make a hole in a heap of the sand, the sides fall in, there is nothing solid about it, and you can easily see the mistake of the foolish man who built his house upon the sand. when the sand is wet it sticks better and can be made into a good many things; at the seaside you can make a really fine castle with wet sand. but as soon as the sand dries it again becomes loose and begins to fall to pieces. [illustration: fig. . sand dunes, penhale sands, cornwall] strong winds will blow these fragments of dry sand about and pile them up into the sand hills or dunes common in many seaside districts (fig. ). blowing sands can also be found in inland districts; in the northern part of surrey, in parts of norfolk and many { } other places are fields where so much of the soil is blown away by strong winds that the crops may suffer injury. in central asia sand storms do very much harm and have in the course of years buried entire cities. fig. shows the penhale sands in cornwall gradually covering up some meadows and ruining them. [illustration: fig. . sand from penhale sand dunes blowing on to and covering up meadows] sand particles, being large, do not float in water. if we shake up sand in water the sand sinks, leaving the water entirely clear. so running water does not carry sand with it unless it is running very quickly: the sand lies at the bottom. unlike clay, sand does not hold water. pour some water on to sand placed on the tin disk in a funnel (fig. ); it nearly all runs through at once. we should therefore expect a sandy field or a sandy road to dry up very quickly after rain and not to remain wet like a clay field. so much is this the case that people prefer to live on a sandy soil rather than on a clay. the most desirable residential districts round london, hampstead on the north, and the stretch running from haslemere on the south-west to maidstone on the south-east, and other favoured regions, are all high up on the sand. at the foot of a hill formed of sand you often find a spring, especially if clay or solid rock lies below. it is easy to make a model that will show why the spring forms at this particular place. fill the lower part of the box shown in fig. with wet clay, smoothing it out so that it touches all three sides and the glass front; then on top of the clay put enough sand to fill the box. bore four holes in the side as shown in the picture, one at the bottom, one at the top, one just above the junction of the sand and clay, the fourth half way up the sand, and fix in glass tubes with clay or putty. pour { } water on to the sand out of a watering can fitted with the rose so as to imitate the rain. at first nothing seems to happen, but if you look closely you will notice that the water soaks through and does not lie on the surface; it runs right down to the clay; then it comes out at the tube there (_c_ in the picture). none goes through the clay, nor does enough stay in the sand to flow out through either the top or the second tube; of the four tubes only one is discharging any water. the discharge does not stop when the supply of water stops. the rain need only fall at intervals, but the water will flow all the time. [illustration: fig. . model spring. a box with glass front contains a layer of clay and one of sand. water that falls on the sand runs right down to the clay but can get no further, and therefore flows out through the tube _c_ at the junction of the clay and the sand. the same result is obtained when chalk takes the place of sand] the experiment should now be tried with some chalk from a quarry; it gives the same results and shows that chalk, like sand, allows water readily to pass. [illustration: fig. . foot of a chalk hill at harpenden where a spring breaks out just under the bush at the right-hand side of the gate] just the same thing happens out of doors in a sandy or chalky country; the rain water soaks through the sand or chalk until it comes to clay or solid rock that it cannot pass, then it stops. if it can find a way out it { } does so and makes a spring, or sometimes a whole line of springs or wet ground. rushes, which flourish in such wet places, will often be found growing along this line, and may, indeed, in summer time be all you can see, the water having drained away. but after much rain the line again becomes very wet. fig. shows the foot of a chalk hill near harpenden, where a spring breaks out just under the bush at the right-hand side of the gate. in fig. the bush itself is seen, with the little pool of water made by the spring. here the water flows gently, but elsewhere it sometimes happens, as in fig. , that the spring breaks out with great force. [illustration: fig. . "the little pool below the tree"] now stop up the glass tubes so that the water cannot get out. soon the sand becomes flooded and is no better than clay would be. a second model will show this very well. make a large saucer of clay and fill with sand: { } pour water on. the water stays in the sand, because it cannot pass through the clay. a sandy field saturated like this will therefore not be dry, but wet, and will not make a good position for a house. we must therefore distinguish the two cases illustrated in fig. . _a_ shows sand on a hill, dry because the water runs through until it comes to clay or rock, when it stops and breaks out as a spring, a tiny stream, or pond; this is a good building site and you may expect to find large houses there. _b_ shows the sand in a basin of clay, where the water cannot get away: here the cellars and downstairs rooms are liable to be wet, and in a village the wells give impure water. matters could be improved if a way out were cut for the water, but then the foundations of the buildings might move a little. [illustration: fig. . water bursting out from an underground spring, old cateriag quarry, dunbar] it often happens that villages are situated at the junction of sand and clay, or chalk and clay, because the springs furnish forth a good water supply. on the other hand large tracts of clay which remain wet and sticky during a good part of the year are not very attractive to live in, and even near london they were the last to be populated: hither green in the south-cast and the clay districts of the north-west have only of late years been built on; while the sands and gravels of highgate, chiswick, brentford and other places had long been occupied. elsewhere, villages on the clay do not grow quickly unless there is much manufacturing or mining; the parishes are large, the roads even now are not good while they used to be very bad indeed. macaulay tells us that at the end of the seventeenth century in some parts of kent and sussex "none but the strongest horses could in winter get through the bog, in which at every step they sank { } deep. the markets were often inaccessible during several months. . . the wheeled carriages were, in this district, generally pulled by oxen. when prince george of denmark visited the stately mansion of petworth in wet weather, he was six hours in going nine miles; and it was necessary that a body of sturdy hinds should be on each side of his coach to prop it up. of the carriages which conveyed his retinue several were upset and injured. a letter from one of the party has been preserved in which the unfortunate courier complains that, during fourteen hours, he never once alighted, except when his coach was overturned or stuck fast in the mud." the romans knew how to make roads anywhere, and so they made them run in a straight line between the two places they wished to connect, but the art was lost in later years, and the country roads made in england since their time usually had to follow the sand or the chalk, avoiding the clay as much as possible. these roads we still use. fig. shows the roads round wye; you should in your rambles study your own roads and see what soil they are on. [illustration: fig. . two positions of sand. _a_ is dry because the water can drain away and break out as a spring at _c_. _b_ is wet because the water cannot drain away] there are several other ways in which sand differs from clay. it does not shrink on drying nor does it { } swell on wetting, and you will find nothing happens when you try with sand the experiment with the model field (p. ) or the egg-cup (p. ). [illustration: fig. . the roads round wye. as far as possible they keep off the clay (the plain part of the map) and keep on the chalk or the sand (the dotted part of the map)] { } chapter v the part that burns away apparatus required. _leaf mould. mould from a tree. peat. about lb. soil from a wood, a well-manured garden and a field; also some subsoil. six crucibles or tin lids. six tripods, pipe-clay triangles, and bunsen burners or spirit lamps. six beakers and egg-cups [ ]._ in the autumn leaves fall off the trees and form a thick layer in the woods. they do not last very long; if they did they would in a few years almost bury the wood. you can, in the springtime or early summer find out what has happened to them if you go into a wood or carefully search under a big hedge in a lane where the leaves were not swept away. here and there you come across skeleton leaves where only the veins are left, all the rest having disappeared. but generally where the leaves have kept moist they have changed to a dark brown mass which still shows some of the structure of a leaf. this is called leaf mould. the top layer of soil in the wood is soft, dark in colour, and is evidently leaf mould mixed with sand or soil. leaf mould is highly prized by gardeners, indeed gardeners will often make a big heap of leaves in autumn and let them "rot down" and change into mould. if you can in autumn collect enough leaves to make a heap you { } should do so and leave it somewhere where the rain can fall on it, but cover it with a few small branches of trees to prevent the wind blowing the leaves away. the heap shrinks a great deal during the first few months, and in the end it gives a supply of mould that will be very useful if you want to grow any plants in pots. some of the little hollows in the bank under a hedge, especially on chalky soils, are filled with leaf mould which has sometimes changed to a black powder not looking at all like leaves. you can also find mould in holes in decayed trees; here it has formed from the wood of the tree. it appears, then, that dead leaves, etc., slowly change into a black or brown substance, shrinking very much as they do so. for this reason they do not go on piling up year after year till finally they fill the wood; instead they decay or "rot down" to form leaf mould: the big pile of the autumn has changed by the next summer to a thin layer which mixes with the soil. we want now to see what happens on a common or a piece of waste ground that is not cultivated. grass and wild plants grow up in summer and die during winter; their stems and roots are not taken away, but clearly they do not remain where they are, because next year new plants grow up. we may suppose that the dead roots and stems decay like the leaves did, and change to a brown or black mould. it looks as if we are right, because on digging a hole or examining the side of a freshly cut ditch we shall find that the top layer of soil, just so far as the living roots go, is darker in colour than the layer below. we must, however, try and get some more proof, and to do this we must study some of our specimens a little { } more closely. we will take some leaf mould, some black mould from a hollow in the bank, some from a tree, soils from a wood, a well-manured garden, a field and some subsoil. all except the subsoil have a dark colour, but the wood and garden soils are probably darker than the field soil. now weigh out grains of each of these and heat in a dish as you did the soil on p. ; notice that all except the subsoil go black and then begin to smoulder, but the moulds smoulder more than the soils. then weigh again and calculate how much has burnt away in each case. here are some results that have been obtained at harpenden:-- amount percentage colour before of loss on colour of burning smouldering burning residue leaf mould dark brown much . light grey mould from dead tree black much . light grey soil from wood dark brown less . [ ] white soil from garden almost black less . red soil from field brownish still less . red subsoil red none . red the mould nearly all burns away and its dark colour entirely goes, so also does the dark colour of the soil. our supposition explains why, in the case of soils, the less the blackness, the less the loss on burning. if the { } brown or black combustible part is really mould formed by the decay of plant roots, etc., then we should expect that as the percentage of mould in the soil increased, so its blackness would increase and its loss on burning would become greater. this actually happens. this, then, is our idea. we suppose that the plants that have lived in past years have decayed to form a black material like leaf mould which stops in the soil, giving it a darkish colour. the more mould there is, the darker the colour of the soil. we know that along with this decay there is a great deal of shrinkage. as the black material is formed from the plant, it only extends as far into the soil as the plant roots go, so that there is a sharp change in colour about inches below the surface (see also p. ). like the plant the black material all burns away when the soil is heated sufficiently. thus we can explain all the facts we have observed, and in what seems a very likely way. this does not show that our supposition is correct, but only that it is useful. when you come to study science subjects you will find such suppositions, or hypotheses as they are called, are frequently used so long as they are found to be helpful. in our present case we could only get absolute proof that the black combustible part of the soil really arose from the decay of plants by watching the process of soil formation. we shall turn later to this subject. the black material is known as humus. farmers and gardeners like a black soil containing a good deal of humus because they find it very rich, and we shall see later on why this is so. vast areas of such soils occurring in manitoba, in russia, and in hungary are used for { } wheat growing, while there are also areas in the fen districts of england. there is something known as peat that looks rather like mould, but is really so different that you must be careful not to confuse the two. peat is not good for plants, and does not make the soil fertile, but quite the reverse. you can see it being formed on a moor or bog, and you should at the first opportunity go and examine it. there was a peat bog near wye that was examined with the following results. the peat was very fibrous and had evidently been formed from plants. it made a layer about feet thick and underneath it was a bed of clay; this was discovered by examining the ditches, some of which cut right through the peat into the clay below. a sample of the clay put into a funnel, as on p. , did not allow water to pass through; this was also evident from the very wet nature of the ground. the peat bed was below the level of the surrounding land and was in a sort of basin; the water draining from the higher land could all collect there but could not run away, indeed it might very well have been a shallow lake. it was quite clear that the plants as they died would _decay in very wet soil_, and so the conditions are very different from those we have just been studying where the plants _decay in soil that is only moist_. this difference at once shows itself in the fact that peat generally forms a thick layer, while mould only rarely does so. in the north of england the moors lie high, but here again the peat bed is like a saucer or basin, and there is soil or rock below that does not let the rain water pass through. for a great part of the year the beds are very wet. { } look at a piece of peat and notice how very fibrous it is, quite unlike leaf mould. when it is dry peat easily burns and is much used as fuel in parts of scotland, wales and ireland. it is cut in blocks during the spring, left to dry in heaps during summer, and then carried away in autumn. fig. shows a peat bog with cutting going on. peat does not easily catch light and the fires are generally kept burning all night; there is no great flame such as you get with a coal fire, but still there is quite a nice heat. peat has a remarkable power of absorbing water. fill an egg-cup with peat, packing it as tightly as you possibly can, and then put it under water and leave for some days. the peat becomes very wet and swells considerably, overflowing the cup just like the clay did on p. . after long and heavy rains peat in bogs swells up so much that it may become dangerous; if the bog is on the side of a hill, the peat may overflow and run down the hill like a river, carrying everything before it. such overflows sometimes occur in ireland and they used to occur in the north of england; you can read about one on pendle hill in harrison ainsworth's _lancashire witches_. but they do not take place when ditches are cut in the bog so that the water can flow away instead of soaking in; this has been done in england. this great power of absorbing water and other liquids, so terrible when it leads to overflows, enables peat to be put to various uses, and a good deal of it is sold as peat-moss, for use in stables. [illustration: fig. . cutting and carrying peat for fuel, hoy, orkney] in the ditches of a peat bog red slimy masses can often be found. they look just like rusty iron, and in fact they do contain a good deal of iron, but there are also a number of tiny little living things present. the { } stones and grit just under the peat are usually white, all the red material from them having been washed out by the water which has soaked through the peat. then at the ditch these tiny living things take up the red material because it is useful to them. peat or "moorland" water can also dissolve lead from lead pipes and may therefore be dangerous for drinking purposes unless it is specially purified. when you study chemistry you will be able to show that both peat itself and moorland waters are "acid" while good mould is not. that is why peat is not good for cultivated plants (see also p. ). other things besides peat are formed when plants decay under water. if you stir up the bottom of a stagnant pond with a stick bubbles of gas rise to the surface and will burn if a lighted match is put to them. this gas is called marsh gas. very unpleasant and unwholesome gases are also formed. [ ] the top two inches of soil only were collected here, and there were many leaves, twigs, etc. mixed in. soils from different woods vary considerably. if the sample is taken to a greater depth the loss on burning is much less, and may be only or per cent. { } chapter vi the plant food in the soil apparatus required. _the pot experiments (p. xiii)._ it is a rare sight in england to see land in a natural uncultivated state devoid of vegetation. the hills are covered with grasses and bushes, the moors with ling and heather, commons with grass, bracken and gorse, a garden tends to become smothered in weeds, and even a gravel path will not long remain free from grass. it is clear that soil is well suited for the growth of plants. we will make a few experiments to see what we can find out about this property of soil. we have seen that a good deal of the soil is sand or grit, and we shall want to know whether this, like soil, can support plant life. we have also found that the subsoil is unlike the top soil in several ways, and so we shall want to see how it behaves towards plants. fill a pot with soil taken from the top nine inches of an arable field or untrenched part of the garden; another with subsoil taken from the lower depth, to inches, and a third with clean builder's sand or washed sea-sand. sow with rye or mustard, and thin out when the seeds are up. keep the pots together and equally well supplied with water; the plants then have as good a chance of growth in one pot as in any other. { } [illustration: fig. . rye growing in surface soil (pot ), subsoil (pot ), and sand (pot )] { } figs. and are photographs of sets of plants grown in this way; the weights in grains were:-- green weight after drying rye mustard rye mustard plants grown in top soil (pot ) . . . . " " " subsoil (pot ) . . . . " " " sand (pot ) . . . . [illustration: fig. . mustard growing in surface soil (pot ), subsoil (pot ), sand (pot )] the plants in the soil remained green and made steady growth. those in the sand never showed any signs of getting on, their leaves turned yellow and { } fell off; in spite of the care they received, and the water, warmth and air given them, they looked starved, and that, in fact, is what they really were. nor did those in the subsoil fare much better. the experiment shows that the top soil gives the plant something that it wants for growth and that it cannot get either from sand or from the subsoil; this something we will call "plant food." further proof is easily obtained. at a clay or gravel pit little or no vegetation is to be seen on the sloping sides or on the level at the bottom, although the surface soil is carrying plants that shed innumerable seeds. a heap of subsoil thrown up from a newly made well, or the excavations of a house, lies bare for a long time. the practical man has long since discovered these facts. a gardener is most particular to keep the top soil on the top, and not to bury it, when he is trenching. in levelling a piece of ground for a cricket pitch or tennis court, it is not enough to lift the turf and make a level surface; the work has to be done so that at every point there is sufficient depth of top soil in which the grass roots may grow. how much plant food is there in the top soil? to answer this question we must compare soil that has been cropped with soil that has been kept fallow, i.e. moist but uncropped. tip out some of the soil that has been cropped with rye, and examine it. remove the rye roots, then replace the soil in the pot and sow with mustard; sow also a fallow pot with mustard. keep both pots properly watered. the soil that has carried a crop is soon seen to be much the poorer of the two. fig. shows the plants, while their weights in grams were:-- { } green weight after drying mustard growing in soil previously cropped with rye, pot . . mustard growing in soil previously uncropped, pot . . [illustration: fig. . mustard growing in surface soil previously cropped with rye (pot ) and in surface soil previously uncropped (pot )] { } the rye has taken most of the plant food that was in pot leaving very little for the second crop. our soil therefore contained only a little plant food, not more, in fact, than will properly feed one crop. but yet it did not seem to have altered in any way, even in weight, in consequence of the plant food being taken out. in our experiment the soil was dried and weighed before and after the mustard was grown; the results were:-- pot pot _a_ lbs. oz. lbs. oz. weight of dried soil before the experiment " " " after " " ------ ------ difference the experiment is not good enough to tell us exactly how much plant food was present at the beginning. but we can say that the amount of plant food in the soil is too small to be detected by such weighing as we can do. here is an account of a similar experiment made years ago by van helmont in brussels, and it is interesting because it is one of the first scientific experiments on plant growth:-- "i took an earthen vessel in which i put pounds of soil dried in an oven, then i moistened with rain water and pressed hard into it a shoot of willow weighing pounds. after exactly five years the tree that had grown up weighed pounds and about ounces. but the vessel had never received anything but rain water or distilled water to moisten the soil (when this was necessary), and it remained full of soil which was still tightly packed, and lest any dust from outside should have got into the soil it was covered with a sheet { } of iron coated with tin but perforated with many holes. i did not take the weight of the leaves that fell in the autumn. in the end i dried the soil once more, and got the same pounds that i started with, less about two ounces. therefore the pounds of wood, bark and root arose from the water alone." the experiment is wonderfully good and shows how very little plant food there is in the soil. the conclusion is not quite right, however, although it was for many years accepted as proof of an ancient belief, which you will find mentioned in kingsley's _westward ho!_, that all things arose from water. it is now known that the last sentence should read, "therefore the pounds of wood, bark and root arose chiefly from the water _and air_, but a small part came from the soil also." but to return to our experiment with pots and . they had been kept moist before the mustard was sown. did this moisture have any effect on the soil? take two of the pots that have been kept dry and uncropped, and two that have been kept moist and uncropped, also one of dry uncropped subsoil and one of moist uncropped subsoil. sow rye or mustard in each pot and keep them all equally supplied with water. it is soon evident that the top soil is richer in plant food than the subsoil, and the soil stored moist is rather richer than that stored dry, although the difference here is less marked. in an experiment in which the soils were put up early in july and sown at the end of september the weights of crops in grams obtained were:-- { } green weight after drying plants grown in top soil stored in . . moist condition (pots & ) . . plants grown in top soil stored in . . dry condition (pots & ) . . plants grown in subsoil stored in moist condition (pot ) . . plants grown in subsoil stored in dry condition (pot ) . . the crops on pots and ought of course to weigh the same, and so should the crops on pots and . the differences arise from the error of the experiment. in all experimental work, however carefully carried out or however skilful the operator, there is some error. there is clearly an increase in crop as a result of storing the surface soil in a moist condition, showing that additional plant food has been _made_, since these pots were put up. on the other hand it does not appear that much plant food has been made in the subsoil during this time. further evidence on this point is given by an experiment similar to that in fig. , but where mustard is grown in _subsoil_ kept moist, but uncropped for some time, and in _subsoil_ previously cropped with rye. the results in grams were:-- green weight after drying mustard growing in subsoil previously cropped with rye . . mustard growing in subsoil previously uncropped . . { } these should be compared with the figures on p. . although the subsoil lay fallow for a long time it produced no plant food but is just as poor as the subsoil that has been previously cropped. these observations give us a clue that must be followed up in answering our next question. what has the plant food been made from? clearly it is not made from the sand, the clay or the chalk since all these occur in the subsoil. we have seen (chap. i.) that the top soil differs from the subsoil in containing a quantity of material that will burn away and is in part at any rate made up of plant remains. it will be easy to find out whether these remains furnish any appreciable quantity of plant food. fill one pot with surface soil and another with the same weight of surface soil well mixed up with grams of plant remains--pieces of grass, or stems and leaves of other plants cut up into fragments about half an inch long. at the same time put up two pots of subsoil, one of which, as before, is mixed with grains of plant remains, and also put up two pots of sand, one containing grams of plant remains and the other none. sow all six pots with mustard and keep watered and well tended. the result of one experiment is shown in fig. and the weights of the crop in grams were:-- green weight after drying top soil and pieces of plants (pot ) . . top soil alone (pot ) . . difference in top soil . . { } green weight after drying subsoil and pieces of plants (pot ) . . subsoil alone (pot ) . . difference in subsoil . . [illustration: fig. . pieces of grass, leaves, etc. change into plant food in the surface but not to any great extent in the subsoil. mustard is growing in surface soil (pot ), in surface soil and pieces of grass (pot ), in subsoil (pot ), and in subsoil and grass (pot )] now let us look at these results carefully. the experiment with surface soil shows that the pieces of stem and leaf have furnished a good deal of food to the mustard and have caused a gain of . grams in the crop. if we knew what the pieces were made of we { } could push the experiment still further and find out more about plant food, but this involves chemical problems and must be left alone for the present. we can, however, say that plant remains are an important source of plant food, and since we suppose the black material of the soil to be made of plant remains (see p. ), it will be quite fair to say also that this black material, the humus, is a source of plant food. we have therefore answered the question we set, and we can explain some at any rate of the differences between the surface soil and the subsoil. the surface soil contains a great deal of the black material, which forms plant food, while the subsoil does not. thus plants grow well on the surface soil and starve on the subsoil. we can also explain why gardeners and farmers speak of black soils as rich soils; they contain more than other soils of this black material that makes plant food. still further, we can explain why the farmer often sows plants like mustard, tares or clover, and then ploughs them into the ground. they are not wasted, but they make food for the next crop that goes in. now let us turn to the results of the subsoil experiments. the leaves and stems have increased the crop, but only by . grams: they have not been nearly so effective as in the surface soil. it is evident that the mustard did not feed directly on the leaves and stems put in; if it had there should have been an equal gain in both cases. the leaves and stems clearly have to undergo some change before they are made into plant food and the soil has something to do with this change. after the crops are cut the soils should be tipped out and examined. more of the original pieces of leaf and stem are found in the subsoil than in the surface { } soil. that is to say, there has been more change in pot containing surface soil than in pot containing subsoil. the "something," whatever it may be, that changes plant remains like leaves, stems, pieces of grass, roots, etc. into plant food therefore acts better in the surface soil than in the subsoil. here then we have another difference between surface and subsoils. summary. the experimental results obtained in this chapter may now be summed up as follows:-- ( ) plant food is present in the top soil only and not to any extent in the subsoil. ( ) there is not much present, so little indeed that we could not detect it by weighing. ( ) it is, however, always being made in the top soil, if water is present. only little is made from the subsoil. ( ) the remains of leaves, stems, roots, etc. furnish an important source of plant food. ( ) but they have first to undergo some change, and the agent producing this change is more active in the top soil than in the subsoil. ( ) the top soil is much the most useful part of the soil and should never be buried during digging or trenching, but always carefully kept on top. { } chapter vii the dwellers in the soil apparatus required. _garden soil. six bottles and corks [ ]. twelve erlenmeyer flasks, c.c. capacity [ ]. cotton wool. milk (about half a pint). leaf gelatine. soil baked in an oven. six saucers [ ]. the apparatus in fig. (two lots). wash bottle containing lime water (fig. , also p. )._ in digging a garden a number of little animals are found, such as earthworms, beetles, ants, centipedes, millipedes and others. there are also some very curious forms of vegetable life. by carefully looking about it is not difficult to find patches of soil covered with a greenish slimy growth; they are found best under bushes where the soil is not disturbed, or else where the soil has been pressed down by a footmark and not touched since. any good soil left undisturbed for a time shows this growth. put some fresh moist garden soil into a bottle and cork it up tightly so that it keeps moist. write the date on the bottle and then leave it in the light where you can easily see it. after a time--sometimes a long, sometimes a shorter time--the soil becomes covered with a slimy growth, greenish in colour, mingled here and there with reddish brown. the longer the { } soil is left the better. often after several months something further happens; little ferns begin to grow and they live a very long time indeed. there is at rothamsted a bottle of soil that was put up just like this as far back as . for a number of years past a beautiful fern has been growing inside the bottle, and even now it is very healthy and vigorous. if, instead of being kept moist, the rich garden soil is left in a dry shed during the whole of the winter so that it gradually loses its moisture, it will generally show quite a lot of white fluffy growth. all of these living things are very wonderful, and some, especially earthworms, are very useful to gardeners and farmers. after a shower of rain look carefully in the garden or else on a lawn, common, or pasture field where the grass is closely grazed by cattle or does not naturally grow long, and you will find numbers of tiny heaps of soil scattered about. carefully brush away a heap and a little hole is seen, now hit the ground near it a few times with a stick or stamp on it with your foot and the worm, if he is near the top, comes up. when he is safely out of the way dig carefully down with a knife or trowel so as to examine the hole or "burrow." at the top you generally find it lined with pieces of grass or leaves that the worm has pulled in; lower down the lining comes to an end, but the colour of the burrow is redder than that of the rest of the soil wherever the soil has a greenish tinge. these holes are useful because they let air and water down into the soil. [illustration: fig. . soil in which earthworms have been living and making burrows] the following experiment shows what earthworms can do. fill a pot with soil from which all the worms have been carefully picked out and another { } with soil to which earthworms have been added, one worm to every pound of soil. leave them out of doors where the rain can fall on to them. you can soon see the burrows and the heaps of soil or "casts" thrown up by the worms: these casts wash or blow over the surface of the soil, continually covering it with a thin layer of material brought up from below. consequently the soil containing earthworms always has { } a fresh clean look. after some time the other soil becomes very compact and is covered with a greenish slimy growth. when this happens carefully turn the pots upside down, knock them so as to detach the soil and lift them off. the soil where the earthworms had lived is full of burrows and looks almost like a sponge. fig. shows what happened in an experiment lasting from june to october. the other soil where there were no earthworms shows no such burrows and is rather more compact than when it was put in. earthworms therefore do three things:-- ( ) they make burrows in the ground and so let in air and water. ( ) they drag leaves into the soil and thus help to make the mixture of soil and leaf mould. ( ) they keep on bringing fresh soil up to the surface, and they disturb the surface so much that it is always clean and free from the slimy growth. all these things are very useful and so a gardener should never want to kill worms. the great naturalist, darwin, spent a long time in studying earthworms at his home in kent and wrote a very interesting book about them, called _earthworms and vegetable mould_. he shows that each year worms bring up about / th of an inch of soil, so that if you laid a penny on the soil now and no one took it, in years it might be covered with an inch of soil. pavements that were on the surface when the romans occupied britain are now covered with a thick layer of soil. [illustration: fig. . fresh soil turns milk bad, but baked soil does not] but besides these there are some living things too small to see, that have only been found by careful experiments, but you can easily repeat some of these { } experiments yourselves. divide a little rich garden soil into two parts and bake one in the kitchen oven on a patty tin. pour a little milk into each of two small flasks, stop up with cotton wool (see fig. ) and boil for a few minutes very carefully so that the milk does not boil over, then allow to cool. next carefully take out the stopper from one of the flasks and drop in a little of the baked soil, label the flask "baked soil" and put back the stopper. into the other flask drop a little of the untouched soil and label it; leave both flasks in a warm place till the next day. carefully open the stoppers and smell the milk: the baked soil has done nothing and the milk smells perfectly sweet; the unbaked soil, on the other hand, has made the milk bad and it smells like cheese. if you have a good microscope you can go further: look at a drop of the liquid from each flask and you find in each case the { } round fat globules of the milk, but the bad milk contains in addition some tiny creatures, looking like very short pins, darting in and out among the fat globules. these living things must have come from the unbaked soil or they would have been present in both flasks: they must also have been killed by baking in the oven. [illustration: fig. . soils contain tiny things that grow on gelatine] another experiment is easy but takes a little longer to show. mix two sheets of leaf gelatine with a quarter { } of a pint of boiling water, pour into each of three saucers, and cover over with plates. then stir up some baked soil in a cup half full of cold boiled water, and quickly put a teaspoonful of the liquid into a second cup, also half full of cold boiled water. stir quickly and put a spoonful on to the jelly, tilting it about so that it covers the whole surface and label the saucer "baked soil." do the same with the "unbaked soil," labelling the saucer; leave the third jelly alone and label it "untouched." cover all three with plates and leave in a warm place. after a day or so little specks begin to appear on the jelly containing the unbaked soil, but not on the others (fig. ); they grow larger, and before long they change the jelly to a liquid. the other jellies { } show very few specks and are little altered. these creatures making the specks came from the soil because so few are found on the jelly alone; they were killed in the baking and so do not occur on the baked soil jelly. [illustration: fig. . bottle containing lime water, used to show that breath makes lime water milky] you can also show that breathing is going on in the soil even after you have picked out every living thing that you can see. first of all you must do a little experiment with your own breathing so that you may know how to start. shake up a little fresh lime with water and leave it to stand for hours. pour a little of the clear liquid into a flask or bottle fitted with a cork and two tubes, one long and one short like that shown in fig. . then breathe in through the tube _a_ so that the air you take in comes through the lime water: notice that no change occurs. next breathe out through the tube _b_ so that your breath passes through the lime water; this time the lime water turns very milky. you therefore alter in some way the air that you breathe: you know also that you need fresh air. now we can get on with our soil experiments. take two small flasks of equal size fitted with corks and joined by a glass tube bent like a u with the ends curled over. put some lime water into each flask and a little water in the u-tube. now make a small muslin bag like a sausage: fill it with moist fresh garden soil, tie it up with a silk thread and hang it in one of the flasks by holding the end of the thread outside and pushing in the cork till it is held firmly (see fig. ). fix on the other flask, and after about five minutes mark the level of the liquid with a piece of stamp paper; leave in a warm place but out of the sun. { } in one or two days you will see that the water in the u-tube has moved towards the soil flask, showing that some air has been used up by the soil; further, the lime water has turned milky. but in the other flask, where there is no soil, the lime water remains quite clear. this proves, then, that some of the tiny creatures want air just as much as we do. the air readies them through passages in the soil, through the burrows of earthworms and other animals, or by man's efforts in digging and ploughing. [illustration: fig. . a bag of soil is fixed into a flask containing lime water. in a few days some of the air has been used up, and the lime water has turned milky] now try the experiment with very dry garden soil: little or no change takes place. as soon as you add water, however, breathing begins again, air is absorbed and the lime water turns milky just as before. water is therefore wanted just as much as air. if you had very magnifying eyes and could see things so enlarged that these little creatures seemed to { } you to be an inch long, and if you looked down into the soil, it would seem to you to be an extraordinarily wonderful place. the little grains of soil would look like great rocks and on them you would see creatures of all shapes and sizes moving about, and feeding on whatever was suitable to them, some being destroyed by others very much larger than themselves, some apparently dead or asleep, yet waking up whenever it becomes warmer or there was a little more moisture. you would see them changing useless dead roots and leaves into very valuable plant food; indeed it is they that bring about the changes observed in the experiments of chap. vi. occasionally you would see a very strange sight indeed--a great snake-like creature, over three miles long and nearly half a mile round, would rush along devouring everything before it and leave behind it a great tunnel down which a mighty river would suddenly pour, and what do you think it would be? what you now call an earthworm and think is four inches long, going through the soil leaving its burrow along which a drop of water trickles! that shows you how tiny these little soil creatures are. these busy little creatures are called micro-organisms because of their small size. but they are not all useful. some can turn milk bad as we have already seen, and therefore all jugs and dishes must be kept clean lest any of them should be present. others can cause disease. it has happened that a child who has cut its finger and has got some soil into the cut, and not washed it out at once, has been made very ill. you may sometimes notice sheep limping about in the fields, especially in damp fields; an organism gets into the foot and causes trouble. { } summary. the soil is full of living things, some large like earth worms, others very small. earthworms are very useful: they make burrows in the soil, thus allowing air and water to get in: they drag in leaves and they keep on covering the surface with soil from below. besides these and the other large creatures, there are micro-organisms so small that they cannot be seen without a very good microscope: they live and breathe and require air, water and food. some are very useful and change dead parts of plants or animals into valuable plant food. almost anything that can be consumed by fire can be consumed by them. others are harmful. { } chapter viii the soil and the plant apparatus required. _dry powdered soil, sand, clay, leaf mould, seeds. six funnels, disks, stands and glass jars [ ]. six glass tubes about / in. diameter and in. long [ ]. muslin, string, three beakers. six lamp chimneys standing in tin lids [ ]. pot experiments (p. xiii), growing plant. two test tubes fitted with split corks (fig. )._ if you have ever tried to grow a plant in a pot you must have discovered that it needs much attention if it is to be kept alive. it wants water or it withers; it must be kept warm enough or it is killed by cold; it has to be fed or it gets yellow and starved; also it needs fresh air and light. these five things are necessary for the plant: water, warmth, food, fresh air, light. we may add a sixth: there must be no harmful substance present in the soil. wild plants growing in their native haunts get no attention and yet their wants are supplied. we will try and find out how this is done. { } [illustration: fig. . loam and sand both retain water, but loam better than sand] water comes from the rain, but the rain does not fall every day. how do the plants manage to get water on dry days? a simple experiment will show you one way. put about four tablespoonsful of dry soil on to the funnel shown in fig. and then pour on two tablespoonsful of water. measure what runs through. you will find it very little; most of the water sticks to the soil. even after several days the soil was still rather moist. soil has the power of keeping a certain amount of water in reserve for the plant, it only allows a small part of the rain to run through. do the experiment also with sand, powdered clay, and leaf mould. some water always remains behind, but less in the case of sand than in the others. in one { } experiment cubic centimetres of water were poured on to grains of soil but only cubic centimetres passed through, but when an equal amount was poured on to grains of sand no less than cubic centimetres passed through. very sandy soils, therefore, possess less power of storing water than do soils with more clay or mould in them, such as loams, clays or black soils. [illustration: fig. . water can rise upwards in soil. it can, in fact, travel in any direction, from wet to dry places] further, water has a wonderful power of passing from wet places to dry places in the soil. tie a piece of muslin over the end of a tube and fill with dry soil, tapping it down as much as you can, then stand the tube in water as in fig. . fill another with sand { } and place in water. notice that the water at once begins to rise in both tubes and will go on for a long time, always passing from the wet to the dry places. it rises higher in the soil than it does in the sand. enough water may pass up the tube in this way to supply the needs of a growing plant. fill a glass lamp chimney with dry soil, packing it down tightly, put into water and then sow with wheat. the plants grow very well. a longer tube may be made from two chimneys fastened together by means of a tin collar stuck on with canada balsam or sealing wax (fig. ). our plants grew well in this also, but on a sandier soil, where the water could not rise so high, it might happen that they would not. [illustration: fig. . wheat growing in soils supplied from below with water. all the water the plant gets has to travel upwards] thus we shall expect great differences in the moisture of various soils. in some districts there is much more rain than in others, and therefore the soils get a larger supply of water. sandy soils allow water to run through while a loam holds it like a sponge, in a loam also the water readily moves from wet to dry places. further, water runs down hills and collects in low-lying hollows or valleys; here, therefore, the soil is moister than it is somewhat higher up. what will be the effect of these moisture differences on plants? you must find out in two ways. visit a soil that you know is dry--a sandy, gravelly or chalky soil in a high situation--and look carefully at the plants there, then go to some moister, lower ground and see what the plants show. you cannot be quite certain, however, that anything you see is simply due to water supply, because there may be other differences in the soil as well. so you must try the second method, and that is to find out by experiments what is the effect of varying { } quantities of water on the plant growth. both methods must be used, but it may be more convenient to start the experiments first, and while they are going on to collect observations in your rambles. [illustration: fig. . mustard growing in soils supplied with varying quantities of water. very little water, a nice amount of water, too much water] fill four glazed pots with dry soil: keep one dry; one only just moist; the third is to be very moist and should be watered more frequently than the second; and the fourth is to be kept flooded with water, any way out being stopped up. sow wheat or mustard in all four and keep out of the rain. the result of one experiment with mustard is shown in fig. . where no water was supplied there was no growth and the seeds remained unaltered. where only little water was supplied (pot ) the plants made some growth, but not very much: the leaves were small and showed no great vigour; { } where sufficient water was given (pot ) the plants grew very well and had thick stems and large leaves; where too much water was given (pot ) the plants were very sickly and small. the weights were:-- green weight after drying plants with too much water . . " " too little water . . " " a nice quantity of water . . fig. shows two pots of wheat, one kept only just sufficiently moist for growth, the other kept very moist but not too wet. you can see what a difference there is; in the drier pot the leaves are rather narrow and the plants are small, in the moister pot the leaves are wide and the plants big. but there was also another difference that the photograph does not bring out very well--the plants in the rather dry soil were, as you can see, in full ear, ripe and yellow, while those in the very moist soil were still green and growing. we see then ( ) that on moist soils there is greater growth than on dry soils, but the plants do not ripen so quickly; ( ) in very wet soils mustard--and many other plants also--will not grow. water is not itself harmful. it is easy to grow many plants in water containing the proper food, but _air must be blown through the water at frequent intervals_. in the water-logged soil of pot the trouble arose not from too much water but from too little air. air is wanted because plants are living and { } breathing in every part, in the roots as well as in the leaves. [illustration: fig. . this wheat growing on very moist soil was still green and growing vigorously, whilst this wheat growing on rather dry soil was yellow and ripe] now turn to what you have seen in your walks. you would probably notice that on the drier, sandy or gravel ground there was nothing like as great a growth of grass or of other plants as on the moister soil. this is so much like what we found in the pot experiments that we shall not be wrong in supposing that the difference in water supply largely accounted for the difference in growth. but you may also have noticed something else. plants in the drier soil have generally { } narrow leaves and the grasses are rolled up and fine, whilst those on the damp soil, including the grasses, have usually broad leaves. thus in the dry sandy soil you may find broom, spurrey, sheep's fescue, pine trees, all with narrow leaves; whilst on the moister soil you may find burdock, primroses, cocksfoot and other broad-leaved plants. figs. _a_ and _b_ show some plants we found on a dry, gravelly patch on harpenden common, and on a moist loam in the river valley below. [illustration: fig. _a_. plants collected on dry sandy soil. broom, sheep's fescue, crested dogstail and gorse, all with narrow leaves] { } before we can account for this observation, we must ascertain a little more closely what becomes of the water the plant takes up. it certainly does not all stay in the plant, and the only way out seems to be through the leaves. put a test tube on the leaf of a growing plant and fix a split cork round the stem: leave in sunlight for a few hours and notice that water begins to collect in the test tube (fig. ). the experiment shows that water passes out of the plant through the leaves. [illustration: fig. _b_. plants collected on moist loam. all have wide leaves] this experiment was first made by stephen hales, and described by him thus in : "having by many { } evident proofs in the foregoing experiments seen the great quantities of liquor that were imbibed and perspired by trees, i was desirous to try if i could get any of this perspiring matter; and in order to do it, i took several glass chymical retorts, _b a p_ [fig. ] and put the boughs of several sorts of trees, as they were growing with their leaves on, into the retorts, stopping up the mouth _p_ of the retorts with bladder. by this means i got several ounces of the perspiring matter of vines, figtrees"--and other trees, which "matter" hales found to be almost pure water. the test tube experiment should now be made with a narrow-leaved grass like sheep's fescue and with a wide-leaved grass like cocksfoot. you will find that wide-leaved plants pass out more water than those with narrow leaves, and hence wide-leaved plants occur in damp situations or on damp soils like loams and clays, while narrow-leaved plants can grow on dry, sandy soils. [illustration: fig. . plants give out water through their leaves] another thing you will notice is that fields lying at the side of a river and liable to be flooded, and fields { } high up in wet hill districts, are covered with grass. in a clay country there is also a great deal of grass land and not much ploughed land; if you live where there is much clay you can easily discover the reason. clay becomes very wet and sticky when rain falls, and very hard in dry weather: it is, therefore, difficult to cultivate. farmers cannot afford to spend too much money on cultivation, and so they prefer grass, because once it is established it goes on indefinitely and does not want ploughing up and re-sowing. and besides, farmers have learned by experience that grass can tolerate more water and less warmth than most other english crops. there is much more grass land in those parts of england where the rainfall is high and the temperature rather { } low--e.g. the northern parts of england--than in the eastern counties where the rainfall is low. [illustration: fig. . stephen hales's experiment (from _vegetable staticks_, vol. i. )] the difference in water supply, therefore, leads us to expect the following differences between sandy soils and clays or loams:-- on sandy soils (the water content being small) the wild plants and trees usually have small leaves. cultivated plants do not give very heavy crops, but they ripen early. on clay soils (the water content being good) wild plants and trees usually have larger leaves. cultivated plants give good crops, but they ripen rather late. if the water content is too good or the clay is too sticky the land is generally put into grass. [illustration: fig. . hill slope near harpenden. woodland at the top, arable land lower down. in the valley there is grass land but this is hidden by the cottages] plants require to be sufficiently warm. some like tropical heat and can only be grown in hot houses; others can withstand a certain amount of cold and will grow up on the mountains. our common cultivated crops come in between and will not grow in too cold or exposed a situation; thus you find very little cultivated land ft. above sea level, and not usually much above ft. at this height it is left as grass land, and higher up as woodland, moor, or waste land. grass requires less warmth and can therefore grow at greater heights than many other crops. if you start at the top of a hill in derbyshire, and walk down, you will see that the top is moorland, lower down comes grass land, still lower you may find arable land, and if the valley is damp you will find more grass at the bottom. figs. and show typical views of the hill slopes further south: they are taken near harpenden. the top of the hill in each case is over ft. above sea level, and has never been thought worth cultivating, but has always been left as { } wood because it is too exposed for farm crops. on the lower slopes the arable fields are seen, while at the bottom bordering the river is rough grass land, shown in fig. . the top is too cold and windy, and the bottom too wet, to be worth cultivating. [illustration: fig. . view further along the valley, woodland and arable above rough grass land near the river] as the plant root is alive it wants air. the effect of keeping air out can be seen by sowing some barley or onion seeds in the ground and then pouring a lot of water on and plastering the soil down with a spade. sow another row in nicely crumbled soil, not too wet, press the seeds well in, but do not plaster the soil. this second lot will generally do much better than the first. if the ground round a plant is frequently trodden so that it becomes very hard the plant makes much less growth than if the soil were kept nice and loose. a good gardener takes very great pains in preparing his ground before he sows his seeds, and he is careful that no one should walk on his beds lest his plants should suffer. summary. we may now collect together the various things we have learnt in this chapter. plants require water, air, warmth, food, and light, and they will not grow if harmful substances are present. the rain-water that falls remains for some time in the soil, and does not at once run away or dry off: water can also move from wet to dry places in the soil. therefore the plant does not need rain every day, but can draw on the stock in the soil during dry weather. a sandy soil is usually drier than a loam or a clay, especially if it lies rather high: plants growing on a sandy soil make less growth and have narrower and smaller leaves than those on a moister soil. situations more than five or six hundred feet above sea level are, in england, as a rule, too bleak and { } exposed for the ordinary cultivated crops. such land is, therefore, either grass land, moorland, downland or woodland. the roots of plants are living and require air. the soil must not be trodden too hard round them or air cannot get in, nor can it if too much water is present. grass can put up with more water and less warmth than most cultivated crops. [illustration: fig. . rough grass pasture near the river, above that is arable land and still higher is woodland] instances of these facts may be found in going down any hill ft. or more in height: the top is usually wood or waste, being too cold for crops, below this may come grass land, lower still arable land. it is both warmer and moister in the valley (since water runs down hill), and so we can account for the proverbial fertility of valleys. but just near the river, if there is one, the ground may be too wet for crops, and therefore grass is grown. clay land that is rather too wet to plough is usually left in grass. { } chapter ix cultivation and tillage apparatus required. _plot experiments, hoeing and mulching. thermometer. soil sampler (fig. , p. ). this tool consists of a steel tube in. in diameter and in. long, with a slit cut along its length and all the edges sharpened. the tube is fixed on to a vertical steel rod, bent at the end to a ring in. in diameter, through which a stout wooden handle passes. it is readily made by a blacksmith._ farmers and gardeners throughout the spring, summer and autumn, are busy ploughing or digging, hoeing or in other ways cultivating the soil. unless all this is well done the soil fails to produce much; the sluggard's garden has always been a by-word and a reproach. in trying to understand why they do it we must remember that plant roots need water, warmth and air; if the soil is too compact or if there is too much water the plant suffers, as we have seen. [illustration: fig. . after harvest the farmer breaks up his land with a plough and then leaves it alone until seed time] one great object of cultivation is, therefore, to prevent the soil being too compact and too wet. after the harvest the farmer breaks up his ground with a plough and then leaves it alone till seed time (fig. ). a gardener does the same thing with a fork in his kitchen garden--he cannot very well elsewhere, or the plant roots might { } become too cold. if there is frost during the winter both farmer and gardener are pleased because they say the frost "mellows" the ground; you can see what they mean if you walk on a frosty morning over a ploughed field. the large clods of earth are no longer sticky, they already show signs of breaking up, and if they are not frozen too hard can easily be shattered by a kick. the change has been brought about in exactly the same way as the bursting of water-pipes by frost. when water freezes it expands with enormous force and bursts open anything that confines it; water freezing in the pores of the soil forces the little fragments apart. this action is so important that further illustrations should be looked for. a piece of wet chalk left out on a frosty night often crumbles to pieces. it is dangerous { } to climb cliffs in the early spring because pieces of rock that have been split off during the winter frosts by the expanding water may easily give way. frost plays havoc with walls built of flints and with old bricks that are beginning to wear. if there are several frosts, with falls of rain or snow and thaws coining in between, the soil is moved about a good deal by the freezing and melting water. bulbs and cuttings are sometimes forced out of the ground, whilst grass and young wheat may be so loosened that they have to be rolled in again as soon as the weather permits. when the ground has been dug in autumn and left in a very rough state all this loosening work of the frost is very much helped, because so much of the soil may become frozen. if in spring you dig a piece of land that has already been dug in autumn, and then try digging a piece that has not, you will find the first much easier work than the second in all but very sandy soils. a little before the seeds are sown, the soil has to be dug or cultivated again so that it may become more level and broken into smaller pieces. the farmer then harrows and the gardener rakes it, and it becomes still finer. very great care is bestowed on the preparation of the seed bed, and it will take you longer to learn this than any other part of outdoor gardening. the soil has to be made fine and dry, and no pains must be spared in getting it so. when at last the soil is fine enough the seed is put in. but it is not enough simply to let the seed tumble into the ground. it has to be pressed in gently with a spade or a roller, not too hard or the soil becomes too sticky. fig. shows this operation being carried out on the farm. then the soil should be left alone. [illustration: fig. . rolling in mangold seeds on the farm] { } if you watch an allotment holder who grows onions really well working away at his seed-bed you will see what a beautifully fine tilth he gets. if you try to do the same you will probably fail; his seeds will be up before yours and will grow into healthier plants. only after long practice will you succeed, and then you will have mastered one of the great mysteries of gardening. as soon as the plants are up they have to be hoed, and the more often this is done the better. hoeing has several useful effects on the soil; during summer time some experiments may be made to find out what these are. a piece of ground is wanted that has got no crop on it. set out three strips each six feet wide and six feet long, leave one entirely alone, hoe the second once a week, and the third three times a week; put labels on so that no mistake can arise. the surface of the untouched plot becomes very compact and glazed in appearance; the other soils look nice and crumbly. take the temperature of the soils by placing a thermometer into it at various depths--half inch, three inches, and six inches--also take the temperature of the air; enter up the results as in the table, which shows what happened at harpenden. air date temperature soil temperature hoed hoed untouched once three times weekly weekly june th / inch . . inches . . . inches . june th / inch . inches . . . inches . . . { } the thermometer readings are in degrees centigrade. remarks. june th: hot sunny day, there had been no rain since june th. june th: cold, cloudy day, several cold, wet days during the past week. on the cold day there was very little difference between the plots, but on the hot day the hoed plots were cooler than the others. now only the top inch is touched by the hoe, and so it appears that the layer thus loosened shields the rest of the soil from the sun's heat. if this is the case we ought to find that any other loose material would act in just the same way. we must, therefore, set out a fourth plot alongside the others, cover it with straw or cut grass (a cover like this is called a mulch), and take the temperature there. some of the results were as follows:-- air date temperature soil temperature hoed plot mulched plot sept. th / inch . . inches . . inches . . oct. th / inch . inches . inches . . remarks. sept. th: warm day after a rather cold spell. oct. th: after a long spell of dry, warm weather. the untouched plot had become smothered in weeds and could no longer be used for this experiment. the mulched soil is, however, cooler even than the hoed soil, and our expectation that mulching would keep the soil cool has turned out to be correct. { } [illustration: fig. . soil sampler. (see p. for description)] it may be expected that the hotter soil--the unhoed plot--will also be drier than the others, and this can be found out by a simple experiment. take a sample by making a hole six indies deep with straight and not with sloping sides: this is best done by driving a tube two inches wide into the soil (fig. ): if you have not got such a tool you may use a trowel, but you will have to be very quick and very careful. weigh the soil--or a part of it if you have got a great deal--then set it to dry in a warm place for three or four days. weigh again when it is dry: the difference gives the loss of water: find what it would be in a hundred parts. our results were:-- { } date percentage of water in the untouched soil soil hoed once soil hoed three weekly times weekly june th . . . june th . . . june th . . . remarks. june th; the weather is still cold and the summer has not yet begun. june th: hot day following on some hot, dry weather. june th: rain had recently fallen. when hoeing is done in the early part of the summer it dries the soil, and the more frequent the hoeing the drier the soil (see june th results). but later on, when the hot weather begins, the hoed soil loses much less moisture than the untouched plot; the latter lost . per cent. in days in the top six inches, whilst the soil hoed once weekly lost . per cent., and the one hoed three times weekly lost only . ; the two hoed soils are now equal, and are both moister than the untouched soil. when more rain comes they get just as wet as the others: hoeing does not prevent water from sinking in, but it does prevent water from getting lost. our experiment has, therefore, shown us that hoeing makes a loose layer of soil which shields the rest of the soil from the sun's heat, and prevents it getting too hot or too dry. a hoed soil is cooler and moister, and therefore better suited for the growth of plant roots than an unhoed soil. { } the mulch of straw or dried grass was found to have the same effect in conserving the water as the loose layer of soil obtained by hoeing. some results were:-- percentage of moisture in date hoed soil mulched soil sept. th . . [illustration: fig. . cultivation and mulching reduce the loss of water from soils] these results are so important that some indoor experiments should be made to furnish more proof. fix up three inverted bell jars with corks and bent tubes as shown in fig. , fill all with dry soil well pressed down, then add water carefully till it appears in the glass tubes. next day mark with stamp paper the level of liquid in each tube and then leave one jar { } untouched, carefully cultivate with a penknife every two or three days the top quarter of an inch of the second, and cover the third with a layer of grass. after a week notice again the levels of the liquid and mark with paper; you find that the water has fallen most in the untouched jar, showing that more has been lost from this than from the jars covered with a mulch either of soil or of dry grass. a slate or flat stone acts like a mulch; if you leave one on the soil for a few days in hot weather and then lift it up on a hot day you will see that the soil underneath is quite moist; you may also find several slugs or other animals that have gone there for the sake of the coolness and the moisture. plants and trees also keep off the sun's heat and so make the soil cold and moist. grass land is in summer and autumn, and even in early winter, cooler near the surface than bare land. at harpenden we found:-- soil temperature date grass land bare land sept. th / inch . inches . . inches . . oct. th / inch . inches . inches . . even if the ground is not covered a certain amount of protection is still possible. trees are often planted round ponds to prevent evaporation of the water. the wind helps to dry the soil very much, and a hedge { } that shields from the wind not only protects the crop but also keeps the soil moist: a road with high hedges at each side remains wet for a long time after more exposed parts have dried. the effect on the temperature can be well seen on a day when a n.e. wind is blowing. fix up on a piece of the experimental ground a little hedge made of small pea-stakes or brushwood, and take the soil temperature at one inch depth, both on the windward and on the leeward side. two results were:-- temperature at inch depth--sheltered side . " " " " windward side we have already seen that on the hot day, june th, the top half-inch of soil was hotter than the air: the mercury in the thermometer rose directly it was put into the soil. there is nothing very unusual about this; if you touch a piece of iron lying on the soil you find it hotter than the air. lower down the soil had the same temperature as the air, and still lower it was cooler[ ]. the sun's heat travels so slowly into the soil in summer that months pass before it gets far down, but then, as it takes so long to get in, it also takes a long time to get out, and it takes still longer to get either in or out if there is a mulch or if grass is growing. during the early winter you may notice that the first fall of snow soon melts on the arable land but remains longer on the grass; towards the end of the winter, however, the reverse happens and the snow melts first on the grass. there is no difficulty in explaining this. the arable land is, as we have seen, warmer in autumn and early winter than grass land, { } and so it melts the snow more rapidly. but during winter the grass land loses its heat more slowly, and therefore it is warmer at the end of the winter than the arable land, hence the snow melts more quickly. in chap. v. it was pointed out that dark coloured soils rich in humus are greatly favoured by gardeners and farmers. the value of humus can easily be shown: take a sample of soil from a garden that has for a long time been well manured and another from a field close by--next to it if you can--and find the amounts of moisture present. two soils at rothamsted gave the following results:-- date april th may th july th oct. th moisture in dark soil rich in humus . . . . moisture in lighter soil poor in humus . . . . humus, therefore, keeps the water in the soil and saves it from being lost. another beneficial effect of hoeing is to keep down weeds. weeds overcrowd the plant, shut out light, take food and water, and occupy space. few plants can compete against weeds, some fail very badly in the struggle. sow two rows of maize two yards apart; keep one well hoed for a yard on each side and leave the other alone to struggle with the weeds that will grow. fig. shows the result of this experiment at st george's school. at rothamsted a piece of wheat was left unharvested in , and the plot has not been touched since; the wheat was allowed to shed its seed { } and to grow up without any attention. weeds flourished, but the wheat did not; the next year there was but little wheat, and by only a few plants could be seen, so stunted that one would hardly recognise them. the ground still remains untouched, and is now the dense thicket seen in fig. . most of our land would become like this if it were neglected for a few years. [illustration: fig. _a_. the hoed plot, no weeds. maize cannot compete successfully against weeds] { } farmers occasionally leave their ground without a crop for a whole year and cultivate it as often as they can to kill the weeds. this practice is called "fallowing," and is very ancient; it is much less common now that crops like mangolds and swedes are grown, which can, if necessary, be hoed all the summer. [illustration: fig. _b_. untouched plot, many weeds] we have already seen (p. ) that ordinary cultivated plants will not live in a water-logged soil. { } wherever there is an excess of water it must be removed before satisfactory results can be obtained. fig. shows a field of wheat in may where the crop is all but killed and only certain weeds survive on a patch of undrained land that lay wet all the winter. draining land is difficult and somewhat expensive; trenches are first cut to a proper depth, and drain pipes are laid on the bottom, taking care that there is a gentle slope all the way to the ditch. the rain soaks into the soil and gets into the pipes, for they are not joined together like gas or water pipes, but left with little spaces in between; it then runs out into the ditch. usually only clay soils need drainage, but occasionally sandy soils do also (see pp. , ). a great deal of drainage was carried out in england between and , and it led to a marked improvement in agriculture and in country life generally. there is, however, a great deal that wants doing now. [illustration: fig. . a plot of wheat left untouched since at rothamsted has now become a dense thicket] the addition of chalk or lime to soil was found in chap. iii. to improve it very much by making it less sticky and less impervious to air and water. chalk or lime does more than this. it puts out of action certain injurious substances or acids that may be formed, and thus makes the conditions more favourable for plants and for the useful micro-organisms; farmers and gardeners express this by saying that it "sweetens the soil." a united states proverb runs: "a lime country is a rich country." very many soils in england are improved by adding lime or chalk. there are considerable areas in the south-eastern and eastern counties where the soil is very chalky; here you find a wonderfully rich assortment of flowers and shrubs. where there is too much chalk the soil is not fertile, because it lets water { } through too easily, as was shown on p. : but for this very reason it is admirable for residential purposes. there are some exceptions to the rule that plants need lime. some plants will not tolerate it at all; such are rhododendrons, azaleas, foxgloves, spurrey, and broom; wherever you see these growing you may be sure that lime is absent. lime really differs from chalk, but changes into it so quickly in the soil that the action of both is almost, though not quite, the same. [illustration: fig. . a wheat field in may. the large patch in the centre where the crop is doing badly lay under water for much of the winter because of the bad drainage] summary. the various things we have learnt in this chapter are:-- autumn and winter cultivation are needed to loosen the soil so that rain can soak in and not lie about in pools, and also to facilitate working in spring. the soil has to be broken down very finely and made rather dry for a seed bed. the seed has to be rolled in and then left entirely alone. as soon as the little plants are up the soil must be hoed, and the more often this is done the better. hoeing keeps the soil cool and moist in hot weather, the loose layer acting like a mulch of straw. anything else that shields the soil from the sun or the wind has the same action but is not so effective as the mulch. further, hoeing keeps down weeds, which successfully compete against almost any cultivated plants. humus also prevents the loss of moisture from soils. drainage may be necessary to remove excess of water. liming or chalking the soil is beneficial, not only because of the improvements mentioned in chap. iii., but also because certain injurious substances are thereby removed. there are, however, some plants that will not tolerate lime. [ ] at great depths below the surface the temperature rises again from quite another cause. { } chapter x the soil and the countryside in this chapter we want to put together much of what we have learned about the different kinds of soil, so that as we go about the country we may know what to look for on a clay soil, a sandy soil, and so on. we have seen that clay holds water and is very wet and sticky in winter, while in summer it becomes hard and dry, and is liable to crack badly. "it greets a' winter and girns a' summer," as one of dr john brown's characters said of his soil. clay soils are therefore hard to dig and expensive to cultivate: the farmer calls them heavy and usually prefers to put them into grass because once the grass is up it lasts as long as it is wanted and never needs to be resown. but in the days when we grew our own wheat, before we imported it from the united states and other countries, this clay land was widely cultivated for wheat and beans. so long as wheat was /- to /- a quarter it was a very profitable crop, but, when some forty years ago it fell to /- and then lower still, the land either went out of cultivation like the "derelict" farms of essex, or it was changed to grass land and used for cattle grazing. great was the distress that followed; some districts indeed were years in recovering. but new methods came in: the land near london was used for dairy { } farming, and elsewhere it was improved for grazing, and the clay districts, although completely changed, are now more prosperous again. many of the fields still show the ridges or "lands" in which, when they grew wheat, they were laid up to let the water run away, and many of them keep their old names, but these are the only relics of the old days. the land is not, and never was, very valuable. the roads are wide, and on either side have wide waste strips cut up roughly by horse tracks, cart ruts and ant hills. bracken, gorse, rushes, thistles and brambles grow there, and you may find many fine blackberries in september. the coarse aira grass is found with its leaves as rough as files. the villages are often built round greens which serve as the village playground, where the boys and young men now play cricket and football, and their forefathers practised archery, played quoits and other games. on a few village greens the maypole can still be seen, whilst the stocks in which offenders were placed are also left in some places. the hedges are often high and straggling, and there are numerous woods and plantations containing much oak. some of the woods are very ancient and probably form part of the primeval forests that once largely covered england. epping forest in essex, the forest of blean and the king's wood in kent, have probably never been cultivated land. in the days when ships were made of oak these woods and hedges were very valuable, but now they are of little use as sources of timber. instead they are valued for quite another reason: they afford shelter for foxes and for game birds. the clay districts are and always have been famous for fox hunting; the pytchley, quorn, belvoir, { } and other celebrated packs have their homes in the broad, clay, grassy vales of the midlands. the vale of blackmoor and other clay regions are equally famous. the plantations and hedgerows are fine places for primroses and foxgloves, while in the pastures, and especially the poor pastures, are found the ox-eyed daisy and quaking grass, that make such fine nosegays, as well as that sure sign of poverty, the yellow rattle. but many of these poor pastures have been improved by draining, liming, and the use of suitable manures. although the roads are better than they were (see p. ) they are still often bad and lie wet for weeks together in winter, especially where the hedges are high. numerous brick and tile yards may be found and iron ore is not uncommon; in some places it is worked now, in others it is no longer worked and nothing remains of the lost industry save only a few names of fields, of ponds, or of cottages. [illustration: fig. . highly cultivated sand in kent. gooseberries are growing in the foreground, vegetables behind, and hops in background] a sandy soil is in so many ways the opposite of a clay soil that we shall expect to find corresponding differences in the look of the country. a sandy soil does not hold water: it may get water up from the subsoil to supply the plant (see p. ), or, if it happens to lie in a basin of clay, it may even be very wet: otherwise it is likely to be too dry for ordinary plants. we may therefore look out for two sorts of sand country, the one cultivated because there is enough water for the crops, and the other not cultivated because the water is lacking. these can readily be found. we will study the cultivated sands first. as sand is not good plant food (p. ) these soils want a lot of manure, and so are not good for ordinary farmers. but they are very easy to cultivate--for which reason they { } are called light soils--and can be dug at any time; seeds can be sown early, and early crops can be got. consequently these soils are very useful for men doing special work like fattening winter and spring sheep, or producing special crops like fruit or potatoes, and for market gardeners who grow all sorts of vegetables, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, peas, and so on. fig. is a view of a highly cultivated sandy region in kent showing gooseberries in the foreground, vegetables behind, and a hop garden behind that again. [illustration: fig. . a surrey heath] the uncultivated sands are sometimes not really so very different, and some of them, perhaps many of them, might be improved or reclaimed and made to grow these special crops if it were worth while. but they always require special treatment and therefore they have been left alone. in days of old our ancestors disliked them very much; "villanous, rascally heaths" cobbett always called them. there were practically no villages and few cottages, because the land was too barren to produce enough food; the few dwellers on the heath, or the "heathen," were so ignorant and benighted that the name came to stand generally for all such people and has remained in our language long after its original meaning was lost. as there were so few inhabitants the heaths used to be great places for robbers, highwaymen, and evil-doers generally; gad's hill on the watling st. between rochester and gravesend, finchley common, hounslow heath and others equally dreaded by travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were barren sandy tracts. but in our time we no longer need to dread them; we can enjoy the infinite charm of the breezy, open country with its brown vegetation, the pink blossom of the bell-shaped heath and the lilac blossom of the { } heather, the splashes of yellow from the ragwort or the gorse and the dark pine and larch plantations. in the spring the young shoots of bracken lend a beautiful light green colour to the scene, while in the autumn the faded growth covers it all with a rich brown. people now like to live amid such surroundings, and so these heaths, that have been untouched for so long and are part of the original primeval england as it was in the days of the britons, are becoming dotted with red bricked and red tiled villas, and are fast losing their ancient character. the heaths are not everywhere dry; there are numerous clay basins where the sand lies wet, where peat forms (see p. ), and where marsh plants like the bog asphodel, sundew, or cotton grass can be found. in walking over a heath you soon learn to find these wet places by the colour of the grass and the absence of heather. in some places there is a good deal of wood, especially pines, larches, and silver birches: all these are very common on the surrey sands, willows also grow in the damp places. fig. shows a surrey heath--blackheath--with heather, gorse and bracken; with pine-woods in the distance and everywhere some bare patches of sand. much of the new forest is on the sand, as also is bournemouth, famous for its fine pine woods. fig. is a view of such woods on wimbledon common. but elsewhere there is no wood: the peasants burn the turf, and so you find their cottages have huge fireplaces: instead of fences round their gardens or round the plantations there are walls made of turf. such are the dorchester heaths so finely described by hardy in _the return of the native_ and other novels. other sands, however, are covered with grass and not with heather, and many of these have a special value { } for golf links, especially some of the dry, invigorating sands by the seaside. the famous links at st andrews, and at littlestone, are examples. [illustration: fig. . woodland and heather on light sandy soil, wimbledon common] in between the fertile and the barren sands come a number that are cultivated without being very good. they are much like the others, carrying a vegetation that is usually of the narrow leaved type (p. ), and not very dense. on the road sides you see broom, heather, heath, harebells, along with gorse and bracken with milkwort nestling underneath: crested dog's tail and sheep's fescue are common grasses, while spurrey, knotwood, corn marigold, are a few of the numerous weeds in the arable fields. gardens are easily dug, but it is best to put into them only those plants that, like the native vegetation, can withstand drought: vegetable gardens must be well manured and well limed. fig. shows some of this kind of country in surrey, the barley field is surrounded by wood and very poor grass on the higher slopes. [illustration: fig. . poor sandy soil in surrey, partly cultivated but mainly wood and waste] it is easy to travel in a sand country because the roads dry very quickly after rain, although they may be dusty in summer. sometimes the lanes are sunk rather deeply in the soft sand, forming very pretty banks on either side. loams, as we have seen (p. ), lie in between sands and clays: they are neither very wet nor very dry: not too heavy nor yet too light: they are very well suited to our ordinary farm crops, and they form by far the best soils for general farming; wheat, oats, barley, sheep, cattle, milk, fruit and vegetables can all be produced: indeed the farmer on a good loam is in the fortunate position of being able to produce almost anything he finds most profitable. in a loam district that does not { } lie too high the land is generally all taken up, even the roads are narrow and there are few commons. the hedges are straight and cut short, the farm houses and buildings are well kept, and there is a general air of prosperity all round. good elms grow and almost any tree that is planted will succeed. loams shade off on one side into sand; the very fertile sands already described might quite truly be called sandy loams. on the other side they shade off into clays; the heavy loams used to be splendid wheat soils, but are now, like clays, often of little value. but they form pleasant, undulating country, nicely wooded, and dotted over with thatched cottages; the fields are less wet and the roads are rather better than on the clays. when properly managed they make excellent grass land. chalky soils stand out quite sharply from all others: their white colour, their lime kilns now often disused, their noble beech trees, and, above all, the great variety of flowering plants enable the traveller at once to know that he is on the chalk. many plants like chalk and these may be found in abundance, but some, such as foxgloves, heather, broom or rhododendrons cannot tolerate it at all, and so they will not grow. chalk, like sand, is dry, and the roads can be traversed very soon after rain. they are not very good, however; often they are only mended with flints, which occur in the chalk and are therefore easily obtainable, and the sharp fragments play sad havoc with bicycle tyres. the bye roads and lanes are often narrow, winding, and worn deep especially at the foot of the hills, so that the banks get a fair amount of moisture and carry a dense vegetation. among the profusion of flowers you can find scabious, the bedstraws, vetches, ragwort, { } figwort, and many a plant rare in other places, like the wild orchids; while the cornfields are often yellow with charlock. in the hedgerows are hazels, guelder roses, maples, dogwood, all intwined with long trails of bryony and traveller's joy. in the autumn the traveller's joy produces the long, hairy tufts that have earned for it the name of old man's beard, while the guelder roses bear clusters of red berries. the great variety of flowers attracts a corresponding variety of butterflies, moths and other insects; there are also numbers of birds and rabbits--indeed a chalk country teems with life in spite of the bare look of the downs. the roads running at the foot of the chalk downs and connecting the villages, and farmhouses built there for the good water supply, are particularly rich in plants because they sometimes cut into the chalk and sometimes into the neighbouring clay, sand or rock. now and then a spring bursts out and a little stream takes its rise: if you follow it you will generally find watercress cultivated somewhere. besides the beech trees you also find ash, sycamore, maples, and, in the church yards, some venerable yews. usually the chalk districts were inhabited very early: they are dry and healthy, the land can be cultivated and the heights command extensive views over the country, so that approaching enemies could easily be seen. on the chalk downs and plains are found many remains of tribes that lived there in the remote ages of the past, whose very names are now lost. strange weapons and ornaments are sometimes dug up in the camps where they lived and worked; the barrows can be seen in which they were buried, and the temples in which they worshipped; stonehenge itself, the best known of all these, lies on the chalk. { } several of the camps still keep the name the ancient britons gave them--the _mai-dun_, the encampment on the hill, changed in the course of years to maiden, as in maiden hill, near dorchester, in dorset, maiden bower, near dunstable, and so on. some of their roads are still in use to this day, the icknield way (the way of the iceni, a belgic tribe), the pilgrim's way of the southern counties and others. even the present villages go back to very ancient times, and the churches are often seven or eight hundred years old. in places the land is too steep or too elevated to be cultivated, and so it is left as pasture for the sheep or "sheep walk"; where cultivation is possible the fields are large and without hedges, like those shown in fig. ; during autumn, winter and spring there are many sheep about, penned or "folded" on the arable land, eating the crops of swedes, turnips, rape, vetches or mustard grown for them, or grazing on the aftermath of sainfoin or grass and clover. so important are sheep in chalk districts that the whole scheme of farming is often based on their requirements, but corn is also a valuable crop, and, especially in dry districts, barley, so that chalk soils are often spoken of as "sheep and barley" soils. although the pastures are very healthy there is not generally much food or "keep" for the animals during the summer because of the dryness. [illustration: fig. . open chalk cultivated country, isle of thanet] the black soil of the fen districts and elsewhere is widely different from any of the preceding. it contains, as its colour shows, a large quantity of combustible material (chap. v.), which has a great power of holding water. these fens are therefore very wet; until they were drained they were desolate wastes: you may { } read in kingsley's _hereward the wake_ what they used to be like in old days, and even as late as dugdale writes that here "no element is good. the air cloudy, gross and full of rotten harrs[ ]; water putrid and muddy, yea, full of loathsome vermin; the earth spongy and boggy; and the fire noisome by the stink of smoking hassocks[ ]." but during the stuart period wide ditches or drains were dug, into which the water could flow and be pumped into rivers. this reclamation has been continued to the present time, and the black soils as well as the others in the fen districts can be made very productive. we have seen that a change in the soil produces a change in the plants that grow on it. the flora (i.e. the collection of plants) of a clay soil is quite different from that of a sandy soil, and both are different from that of a chalk or of a fen soil. in like manner draining a meadow or manuring it alters its flora: some of the plants disappear and new ones come in. even an operation like mowing a lawn, if carried on sufficiently regularly, causes a change. in all these cases the plants favoured by the new conditions are enabled to grow rather better than those that are less favoured; thus in the regularly mown lawn the short growing grasses have an advantage over those like brome that grow taller, and so crowd them out. when land is drained those plants that like a great quantity of water no longer do quite so well as before, while those that cannot put up with much water now have a better chance. in the natural state there is a great deal of competition among { } plants, and only those survive that are adapted to their surroundings. you should remember this on your rambles and when you see a plant growing wild you should think of it as one that has succeeded in the competition and try to find out why it has been enabled to do so. [ ] harr is an old word meaning sea-fog. [ ] hassock is the name given to coarse grass which forms part of the turf burnt in the cottages. { } chapter xi how soil has been made apparatus required. _the apparatus in fig. . the under surface, of the lips of the beakers should be vaselined to prevent the water trickling down the sides._ it is not uncommon to find cliffs or crags in inland places, but they usually show one very striking difference from seaside cliffs. the seaside cliffs may be nearly vertical, but the inland cliffs are not, excepting for a little way at the top; lower down a heap of stones and soil lies piled against the face of the cliff and makes a slope up which you can climb. if you look at the cliff you can find loose fragments of it split off either by the action of freezing water (p. ) or by other causes ready to roll down if sufficiently disturbed. so long has this been going on that a pile has by now accumulated, and has been covered with plants growing on the soil of the heap. our interest centres in this soil; no one has carried it there; it must have been made from the rock fragments. when you get an opportunity of studying such a heap, do so carefully; you can then see how, starting from a solid rock, soil has been formed. this breaking down of the rock is called weathering. [illustration: fig. . cliffs at the seaside, manorbier, pembrokeshire] the same change has gone on at the top of the cliff. fragments have split off and the rock has broken { } down into soil which stops where it is unless the rain can wash it away. if there are no cliffs where you live you can see the same kind of action in the banks of the lanes, in a disused quarry, gravel pit or clay pit. wherever a vertical cutting has been made this downward rolling begins and a heap quickly forms, making the vertical cut into a slope. plants soon begin to grow, and before long it is clear that soil has been made out of the fragments that have rolled down. this process is known as soil formation, but there is another always going on that we must now study. the heap does not invariably lie at the foot of the cliff. if there is a stream, river, or sea at the foot the fragments may be carried away as fast as they roll down: the differences shown in figs. and between a cliff at the seaside and a cliff inland arise simply in this way. in inland districts great valleys are in course of time carved out, and at the seaside large areas of land have been washed away. what becomes of the fragments thus carried away by the water? the best way of answering the question would be to explore one of these mountain streams and follow it to the sea, but we can learn a good deal by a few experiments that can be made in the classroom. we want to make a model stream and see what happens to little fragments of soil that fall into it. [illustration: fig. . inland cliff. salisbury crags, arthur's seat, edinburgh] fix up the apparatus shown in fig. . the small beaker a is to represent the narrow mountain stream, the larger one _b_ stands for the wide river, and the glass jar _c_ for the mouth of the river or the sea. run water through them; notice that it runs quickly through _a_, slowly through _b_, and still more slowly through _c_: we want it to do this, because the stream flows quickly and the river slowly. { } now put some soil into _a_. at once the soil is stirred up, the water becomes muddy, and the muddy liquid flows into _b_. but very soon a change sets in, the liquid in _a_ becomes clear, and only the grit and stones are left in the bottom: all the mud--the clay and the silt--is washed into _b_. there it stops for a long time, and some of it will never wash out. the liquid flowing into _c_ is clearer than that flowing into _b_. if you keep on putting fresh portions of soil into _a_ you can keep _b_ always muddy, although _a_ is usually clear. at the end of the experiment look at the sediment in each beaker: in _a_ it is clear and gritty, in _b_ it is muddy. if you can get hold of some sea water put some of the liquid from _c_ into it: very soon this liquid clears and a deposit falls to the bottom, the sea water thus acting like the lime water on p. . [illustration: fig. . model of a stream. in _a_, where the stream flows quickly, the water is clear and the sediment free from mud. in _b_, where it flows slowly, the water is turbid and the sediment muddy] { } the experiment shows us that the fine material washed away by a quickly flowing stream is partly deposited when the river becomes wider and the current slower, and a good deal more is deposited by the action of the salt water when the river flows into the sea. the rock that crumbles away inland is spread out on the bed of the river or at its mouth. [illustration: fig. . the two sides of the river at the bend] the river stour at wye showed all these things so clearly that i will describe it; you must then compare it with a river that you know, and see how far the same features occur. at the bridge the stream was shallow and flowed quickly: the bottom was gritty and pebbly, free from mud, and formed a safe place for paddling. before the bridge was built there had been { } a ford here. but further away, either up or down, the stream was deeper and wider, flowed more slowly, had a muddy bottom, and so was not good for paddling. at one place about a mile away some one had widened out the river to form a lake, but this made the stream flow so slowly (as it was now so much wider) that the silt and clay deposited and the lake became silted up, i.e. it became so shallow that it was little more than a lake of mud. the same facts were brought out at the bend of the river. on its convex side, fig. , the water has rather further to go in getting round the bend than on its concave side _b_, it therefore flows more quickly, and carries away the soil of the bank and mud from the bottom. but on its concave aide where it flows more slowly it deposits material. there is at the bend a marked difference in depth at the two sides. on its convex side the stream is rapid and deep, and scours away the bank; on its concave side it is slower, shallower, and tends to become silted up. thus the bend becomes more and more pronounced unless the bank round _a_ is protected (the other bank of course needs no protection) and the whole river winds about just as you see in fig. , and is perpetually changing its course, carrying away material from one place, mixing it up with material washed from somewhere else, and then deposits it at a bend or in a pool where it first becomes a mud flat and then dry land. some, however, is carried out to sea. we need not follow the stour to the sea; reference to an atlas will show what happens to other rivers. some of the clay and silt they carry down is deposited at their mouths, and becomes a bar, gives rise to shoals and banks, or forms a delta. the rest is carried away and deposited on the floor of the sea. { } material washed away by the sea from the coast is either deposited on other parts of the coast, or is carried out and laid on the floor of the sea. thus a thick deposit is accumulating, and if the sea were to become dry this deposit would be soil. this has actually happened in past ages. the land we live on, now dry land, has had a most wonderful history; it has more than once lain at the bottom of the sea and has been covered with a thick layer of sediment carried from other places. then the sea became dry land and the sediment became pressed into rock, which formed new soil, but it at once began to get washed away by streams and rivers into new seas, and gave rise to new sediments on the floor of these seas. and so the rock particles have for untold ages been going this perpetual round: they become soil; they are carried away by the rivers, in time they reach the sea; they lie at the bottom of the sea while the sediment gradually piles up: then the sea becomes dry land and the sediments are pressed into rocks again. the eating away of the land by water is still going on: it is estimated that the whole of the thames valley is being lowered at the rate of about one inch in eight hundred years. this seems very slow, but eight hundred years is only a short time in geology, the science that deals with these changes. [illustration: fig. . the winding river stour. the river winds from the right to the left of the picture, then back again, and then once more to the left, passing under the white bridge and in front of the barn.] water does more than merely push the rock particles along. it dissolves some of them, and in this way helps to break up the rock. spring water always contains dissolved matter, derived from the rocks, some of which comes out as "fur" in the kettles when the water is boiled. rocks are also broken up by other agents. there is nearly always some lichen living on the rock, and if you { } peel it off you can see that it has eaten away some of the rock. when the lichen dies it may change into food for other plants. we have learnt these things about soil formation. first of all the rocks break up into fragments through the splitting action of freezing water, the dissolving action of liquid water, and other causes. this process goes on till the fragments are very small like soil particles. then plants begin to grow, and as they die and decay they give rise to the black humus that we have seen is so valuable a part of the soil (p. ). this is how very many of our soils have been made. but the action of water does not stop at breaking the rock up into soil; it goes further and carries the particles away to the lower parts of the river bed, or to the estuary, to form a delta, and mud flats that may be reclaimed, like romney marsh in england and many parts of holland have been. many of our present soils have been formed in this way. finally the particles may be carried right away to sea and spread out on the bottom to lie there for many ages, but they may become dry land again and once more be soil. one thing more we learnt from the river stour. why did it flow quickly at the bridge and slowly elsewhere? we knew that the soil round the bridge was gravelly, whilst up and down the stream it was clayey. the river had not been able to make so wide or so deep a bed through the gravel as it had through the clay, and it could therefore be forded here. we knew also that there was a gravel pit at the next village on the river, where also there was a bridge and had been a ford, and so we were able to make a rough map like fig. , showing that fords had occurred at the gravel { } patches, but not at the clay places. now it was obvious that an inn, a blacksmith's forge, and a few shops and cottages would soon spring up round the ford, especially as the gravel patch was better to live on than the clay round about, and so we readily understood why our village had been built where it was and not a mile up or down the stream. almost any river will show the same things: on the lea near harpenden we found the river flowed quickly at the ford (fig. ), where there was a hard, stony bottom and no mud: whilst above and below the ford the bottom was muddy and the stream flowed more slowly. at the ford there is as usual a small village. the thames furnishes other examples: below oxford there are numerous rocky or gravelly patches where fords were possible, and where villages therefore grew up. above oxford, however, the possibilities of fording were fewer, because the soil is clay and there is less rock; the roads and therefore the villages grew up away from the river. [illustration: fig . sketch map showing why godmersham and wye arose where they did on the stour. at _a_, the gravel patch, the river has a hard bed and can be forded. a village therefore grew up here. at _b_, the clay part, the river has a soft bed and cannot be forded. the land is wet in winter, and the banks of the stream may be washed away. it is therefore not a good site for a village] [illustration: fig. . ford and coldharbour, near harpenden] { } appendix the teacher is advised to procure, both for his own information and in order to read passages to the scholars: gilbert white, _natural history of selborne_. charles darwin, _earthworms and vegetable mould_ (murray). a. d. hall, _the soil_ (murray). mr hugh richardson has supplied me with the following list of questions, through many of which his scholars at bootham school, york, have worked. they are inserted here to afford hints to other teachers and to show how the lessons may be varied. they should also prove useful for revising and testing the scholars' knowledge. . collect samples of the different soils in your neighbourhood--garden soil, soil from a ploughed field, from a mole-hill in a pasture field, leaf mould from a wood, etc. collect also samples of the sub-soils, sand, gravel, clay, peat. . supplement your collection by purchasing from a gardener's shop some mixed potting soil and also the separate ingredients used to form such a mixture--silver sand, leaf mould, peat. . how many different sorts of peat can you get samples of? peat mould, peat moss litter, sphagnum moss, turf for burning, dry moor peat? . find for what different purposes sand is in use, such as mortar making, iron founding, scouring, bird cages, and obtain samples of each kind. { } analysis of garden soil. about a handful of soil will be required by each pupil. . describe the appearance of the soil. is it fine or in lumps? does it seem damp or dry? can you see the separate particles of mineral matter? how large are these? is there any evidence of vegetable matter in the soil? . put some of the soil in an evaporating basin and over this place a dry filtering funnel. warm the basin gently. is any moisture given off? . dry some of the soil at a temperature not greater than that of boiling water, e.g. by spreading it out on a biscuit tin lid, and laying this on a radiator. how have the appearance and properties of the soil been changed by drying? . crumble some of the dried soil as finely as you can with your fingers. then sift it through a sheet of clean wire gauze. what fraction of the soil is fine enough to go through the gauze? describe the portion which will not pass through the gauze. count the number of wires per linear inch in the gauze. . mix some of the soil with water in a flask. let it stand. how long does it take before the water becomes quite clear again? . mix some more soil with water. let it settle for seconds only. pour off the muddy water into a tall glass cylinder. add more water to the remaining soil, and pour off a second portion of muddy water, adding it to the first, and so on until all the fine mud is removed from the soil. allow this muddy water ample time to settle. . when the fine mud has settled pour off the bulk of the water; stir up the mud with the rest of the water; transfer it to an evaporating basin, and evaporate to dryness. . does this dried mud consist of very tiny grains of sand or of some material different from sand? can you find out with a microscope? . if the mud consists of real clay and not of sand it should be possible to burn it into brick. moisten the dried mud again. roll it if you can into a round clay marble. leave this to dry slowly for a day. then bake it either in a chemical laboratory furnace or in an ordinary fire. . return to the soil used in question , from which only the fine mud has been washed away. pour more water on to it, shake it { } well, and pour off all the suspended matter without allowing it more than seconds to settle. repeat the process. collect and dry the poured off material as before. what is the material this time, sand or clay? . wash the remaining portion of the soil in question clean from all matter which does not settle promptly. are there any pebbles left? if so, how large are they, and of what kind of stone? . take a fresh sample of the soil. mix it with distilled water in a flask. boil the mixture. allow it to settle. filter. divide the filtrate into two portions. evaporate both, the larger portion in an evaporating basin over wire gauze, the smaller portion in a watch glass heated by steam. is any residue left after heating to dryness? . take a fresh sample of soil. spread it on a clean sand bath and heat strongly with a bunsen flame. does any portion of the soil burn? is there any change in its appearance after heating? . to a fresh sample of soil add some hydrochloric acid. is there any effervescence? if so, what conclusions do you draw? . make a solution of soil in distilled water, and filter as before. is this solution acid, alkaline or neutral? are you quite certain of your result? did you test the distilled water with litmus paper? and are you sure that your litmus does not contain excess of free acid or free alkali? peat. . examine different varieties of peat collected (see question ) and describe the appearance of each. . burn a fragment of each kind of peat on wire gauze. what do you notice? . boil some peat with distilled water and filter the solution. what colour is it? can you tell whether it is acid, neutral or alkaline? evaporate some of the solution to dryness. out-of-doors. . describe the appearance of the soil in the flower beds (_a_) during hard frost, (_b_) in the thaw which follows a hard frost, (_c_) after an april shower, (_d_) in drought at the end of summer, (_e_) in damp october weather when the leaves are beginning to fall. . is the soil equally friable at different times of the year? { } . in what way do dead leaves get carried into the soil? . can you find the worm holes in a garden lawn? in a garden path? . take a flower bed or grass plot of small but known area (say yards by yards) and a watering can of known capacity (say gallons). find how much water must be added to the soil before some of the water will remain on the surface. what has been the capacity of the soil in gallons per square yard? . take two thermometers. lay one on the soil, the other with its bulb inches deep in the soil. compare their temperatures at morning, noon and night. . find from the -inch ordnance map the reference numbers of the fields near your school. make a list of the fields, showing for what crop or purpose each field is being used. { } index acid waters, air in soil, , , bars in estuaries, black soils, blowing sands, bricks, , - chalk, , chalk soils, - clay, , - clay soils, , - cliffs, - darwin's experiments, , deltas, drainage, , dwellers in the soil, - earthworms, - error of experiment, fallow, , fens, flora, fords, frost, action of, on soil, grassland, grit, hales's experiment, heaths, heavy soils, hoeing, - humus, , , , hypotheses, land slips, leaf mould, light soils, lime, action of, on clay and soil, - , - lime water, loams, , , marsh gas, micro-organisms, - moorland, mulch, , peat, - , peat bogs, overflow of, perspiration of plants, plant food, - , plant requirements, ploughing, pot experiments, - , , , roads, - , - rolling the soil, sand, , - , sand dunes, sandy soils, - , - shrinkage of clay, silt, soil sampler, , sowing seed, springs, - , subsoil, , , , - swelling of clay, swelling of peat, temperature of soil, - tilth, van helmont's experiment, villages, situation of, , , wastes, , water content of soil, - water, movement of in soils, - water supply and plant growth, - weathering, weeds, , woodland, , this file is gratefully uploaded to the pg collection in honor of distributed proofreaders having posted over , ebooks. agriculture for beginners by charles william burkett editor of the _american agriculturist_ formerly director of agricultural experiment station kansas state agricultural college frank lincoln stevens professor of plant pathology, university of illinois formerly teacher of science in high school columbus, ohio and daniel harvey hill formerly president of the north carolina college of agriculture and mechanic arts _revised edition_ ginn and company boston · new york · chicago · london atlanta · dallas · columbus · san francisco copyright, , , , by charles william burkett, frank lincoln stevens and daniel harvey hill all rights reserved printed in the united states of america . the athenæum press ginn and company · proprietors · boston · u.s.a. [illustration: getting ready for winter] preface since its first publication "agriculture for beginners" has found a welcome in thousands of schools and homes. naturally many suggestions as to changes, additions, and other improvements have reached its authors. naturally, too, the authors have busied themselves in devising methods to add to the effectiveness of the book. some additions have been made almost every year since the book was published. to embody all these changes and helpful suggestions into a strictly unified volume; to add some further topics and sections; to bring all farm practices up to the ideals of to-day; to include the most recent teaching of scientific investigators--these were the objects sought in the thorough revision which has just been given the book. the authors hope and think that the remaking of the book has added to its usefulness and attractiveness. they believe now, as they believed before, that there is no line of separation between the science of agriculture and the practical art of agriculture. they are assured by the success of this book that agriculture is eminently a teachable subject. they see no difference between teaching the child the fundamental principles of farming and teaching the same child the fundamental truths of arithmetic, geography, or grammar. they hold that a youth should be trained for the farm just as carefully as he is trained for any other occupation, and that it is unreasonable to expect him to succeed without training. if they are right in these views, the training must begin in the public schools. this is true for two reasons: . it is universally admitted that aptitudes are developed, tastes acquired, and life habits formed during the years that a child is in the public school. hence, during these important years every child intended for the farm should be taught to know and love nature, should be led to form habits of observation, and should be required to begin a study of those great laws upon which agriculture is based. a training like this goes far toward making his life-work profitable and delightful. . most boys and girls reared on a farm get no educational training except that given in the public schools. if, then, the truths that unlock the doors of nature are not taught in the public schools, nature and nature's laws will always be hid in night to a majority of our bread-winners. they must still in ignorance and hopeless drudgery tear their bread from a reluctant soil. the authors return hearty thanks to professor thomas f. hunt, university of california; professor augustine d. selby, ohio experiment station; professor w. f. massey, horticulturist and agricultural writer; and professor franklin sherman, jr., state entomologist of north carolina, for aid in proofreading and in the preparation of some of the material. contents chapter i. the soil section page i. origin of the soil ii. tillage of the soil iii. the moisture of the soil iv. how the water rises in the soil v. draining the soil vi. improving the soil vii. manuring the soil chapter ii. the soil and the plant viii. roots ix. how the plant feeds from the soil x. root-tubercles xi. the rotation of crops chapter iii. the plant xii. how the plant feeds from the air xiii. the sap current xiv. the flower and the seed xv. pollination xvi. crosses, hybrids, and cross-pollination xvii. propagation by buds xviii. plant seeding xix. selecting seed corn xx. weeds xxi. seed purity and vitality chapter iv. how to raise a fruit tree xxii. grafting xxiii. budding xxiv. planting and pruning chapter v. horticulture xxv. market-gardening xxvi. flower-gardening chapter vi. the diseases of plants xxvii. the cause and nature of plant disease xxviii. yeast and bacteria xxix. prevention of plant disease xxx. some special plant diseases chapter vii. orchard, garden, and field insects xxxi. insects in general xxxii. orchard insects xxxiii. garden and field insects xxxiv. the cotton-boll weevil chapter viii. farm crops xxxv. cotton xxxvi. tobacco xxxvii. wheat xxxviii. corn xxxix. peanuts xl. sweet potatoes xli. white, or irish, potatoes xlii. oats xliii. rye xliv. barley xlv. sugar plants xlvi. hemp and flax xlvii. buckwheat xlviii. rice xlix. the timber crop l. the farm garden chapter ix. feed stuffs li. grasses lii. legumes chapter x. domestic animals liii. horses liv. cattle lv. sheep lvi. swine lvii. farm poultry lviii. bee culture lix. why we feed animals chapter xi. farm dairying lx. the dairy cow lxi. milk, cream, churning, and butter lxii. how milk sours lxiii. the babcock milk-tester chapter xii. miscellaneous lxiv. growing feed stuffs on the farm lxv. farm tools and machines lxvi. liming the land lxvii. birds lxviii. farming on dry land lxix. irrigation lxx. life in the country appendix glossary index to the teacher teachers sometimes shrink from undertaking the teaching of a simple textbook on agriculture because they are not familiar with all the processes of farming. by the same reasoning they might hesitate to teach arithmetic because they do not know calculus or to teach a primary history of the united states because they are not versed in all history. the art of farming is based on the sciences dealing with the growth of plants and animals. this book presents in a simple way these fundamental scientific truths and suggests some practices drawn from them. hence, even though many teachers may not have plowed or sowed or harvested, such teachers need not be embarrassed in mastering and heartily instructing a class in nature's primary laws. if teachers realize how much the efficiency, comfort, and happiness of their pupils will be increased throughout their lives from being taught to coöperate with nature and to take advantage of her wonderful laws, they will eagerly begin this study. they will find also that their pupils will be actively interested in these studies bearing on their daily lives, and this interest will be carried over to other subjects. whenever you can, take the pupils into the field, the garden, the orchard, and the dairy. teach them to make experiments and to learn by the use of their own eyes and brains. they will, if properly led, astonish you by their efforts and growth. you will find in the practical exercises many suggestions as to experiments that you can make with your class or with individual members. do not neglect this first-hand teaching. it will be a delight to your pupils. in many cases it will be best to finish the experiments or observational work first, and later turn to the text to amplify the pupil's knowledge. although the book is arranged in logical order, the teacher ought to feel free to teach any topic in the season best suited to its study. omit any chapter or section that does not bear on your crops or does not deal with conditions in your state. the united states government and the different state experiment stations publish hundreds of bulletins on agricultural subjects. these are sent without cost, on application. it will be very helpful to get such of these bulletins as bear on the different sections of the book. these will be valuable additions to your school library. the authors would like to give a list of these bulletins bearing on each chapter, but it would soon be out of date, for the bulletins get out of print and are supplanted by newer ones. however, the united states department of agriculture prints a monthly list of its publications, and each state experiment station keeps a list of its bulletins. a note to the secretary of agriculture, washington, d.c., or to your own state experiment station will promptly bring you these lists, and from them you can select what you need for your school. agriculture for beginners chapter i the soil section i. origin of the soil the word _soil_ occurs many times in this little book. in agriculture this word is used to describe the thin layer of surface earth that, like some great blanket, is tucked around the wrinkled and age-beaten form of our globe. the harder and colder earth under this surface layer is called the _subsoil_. it should be noted, however, that in waterless and sun-dried regions there seems little difference between the soil and the subsoil. plants, insects, birds, beasts, men,--all alike are fed on what grows in this thin layer of soil. if some wild flood in sudden wrath could sweep into the ocean this earth-wrapping soil, food would soon become as scarce as it was in samaria when mothers ate their sons. the face of the earth as we now see it, daintily robed in grass, or uplifting waving acres of corn, or even naked, water-scarred, and disfigured by man's neglect, is very different from what it was in its earliest days. how was it then? how was the soil formed? learned men think that at first the surface of the earth was solid rock. how was this rock changed into workable soil? occasionally a curious boy picks up a rotten stone, squeezes it, and finds his hands filled with dirt, or soil. now, just as the boy crumbled with his fingers this single stone, the great forces of nature with boundless patience crumbled, or, as it is called, disintegrated, the early rock mass. the simple but giant-strong agents that beat the rocks into powder with a clublike force a millionfold more powerful than the club force of hercules were chiefly ( ) heat and cold; ( ) water, frost, and ice; ( ) a very low form of vegetable life; and ( ) tiny animals--if such minute bodies can be called animals. in some cases these forces acted singly; in others, all acted together to rend and crumble the unbroken stretch of rock. let us glance at some of the methods used by these skilled soil-makers. heat and cold are working partners. you already know that most hot bodies shrink, or contract, on cooling. the early rocks were hot. as the outside shell of rock cooled from exposure to air and moisture it contracted. this shrinkage of the rigid rim of course broke many of the rocks, and here and there left cracks, or fissures. in these fissures water collected and froze. as freezing water expands with irresistible power, the expansion still further broke the rocks to pieces. the smaller pieces again, in the same way, were acted on by frost and ice and again crumbled. this process is still a means of soil-formation. running water was another giant soil-former. if you would understand its action, observe some usually sparkling stream just after a washing rain. the clear waters are discolored by mud washed in from the surrounding hills. as though disliking their muddy burden, the waters strive to throw it off. here, as low banks offer chance, they run out into shallows and drop some of it. here, as they pass a quiet pool, they deposit more. at last they reach the still water at the mouth of the stream, and there they leave behind the last of their mud load, and often form of it little three-sided islands called _deltas_. in the same way mighty rivers like the amazon, the mississippi, and the hudson, when they are swollen by rain, bear great quantities of soil in their sweep to the seas. some of the soil they scatter over the lowlands as they whirl seaward; the rest they deposit in deltas at their mouths. it is estimated that the mississippi carries to the ocean each year enough soil to cover a square mile of surface to a depth of two hundred and sixty-eight feet. [illustration: fig. . rock marked by the scraping of a glacier over it] the early brooks and rivers, instead of bearing mud, ran oceanward either bearing ground stone that they themselves had worn from the rocks by ceaseless fretting, or bearing stones that other forces had already dislodged. the large pieces were whirled from side to side and beaten against one another or against bedrock until they were ground into smaller and smaller pieces. the rivers distributed this rock soil just as the later rivers distribute muddy soil. for ages the moving waters ground against the rocks. vast were the waters; vast the number of years; vast the results. glaciers were another soil-producing agent. glaciers are streams "frozen and moving slowly but irresistibly onwards, down well-defined valleys, grinding and pulverizing the rock masses detached by the force and weight of their attack." where and how were these glaciers formed? once a great part of upper north america was a vast sheet of ice. whatever moisture fell from the sky fell as snow. no one knows what made this long winter of snow, but we do know that snows piled on snows until mountains of white were built up. the lower snow was by the pressure of that above it packed into ice masses. by and by some change of climate caused the masses of ice to break up somewhat and to move south and west. these moving masses, carrying rock and frozen earth, ground them to powder. king thus describes the stately movement of these snow mountains: "beneath the bottom of this slowly moving sheet of ice, which with more or less difficulty kept itself conformable with the face of the land over which it was riding, the sharper outstanding points were cut away and the deeper river cañons filled in. desolate and rugged rocky wastes were thrown down and spread over with rich soil." the joint action of air, moisture, and frost was still another agent of soil-making. this action is called _weathering_. whenever you have noticed the outside stones of a spring-house, you have noticed that tiny bits are crumbling from the face of the stones, and adding little by little to the soil. this is a slow way of making additions to the soil. it is estimated that it would take , years to wear away limestone rock to a depth of thirty-nine inches. but when you recall the countless years through which the weather has striven against the rocks, you can readily understand that its never-wearying activity has added immensely to the soil. in the rock soil formed in these various ways, and indeed on the rocks themselves, tiny plants that live on food taken from the air began to grow. they grew just as you now see mosses and lichens grow on the surface of rocks. the decay of these plants added some fertility to the newly formed soil. the life and death of each succeeding generation of these lowly plants added to the soil matter accumulating on the rocks. slowly but unceasingly the soil increased in depth until higher vegetable forms could flourish and add their dead bodies to it. this vegetable addition to the soil is generally known as _humus_. [illustration: fig. . ground rock at end of a glacier] in due course of time low forms of animal life came to live on these plants, and in turn by their work and their death to aid in making a soil fit for the plowman. thus with a deliberation that fills man with awe, the powerful forces of nature splintered the rocks, crumbled them, filled them with plant food, and turned their flinty grains into a soft, snug home for vegetable life. section ii. tillage of the soil a good many years ago a man by the name of jethro tull lived in england. he was a farmer and a most successful man in every way. he first taught the english people and the world the value of thorough tillage of the soil. before and during his time farmers did not till the soil very intelligently. they simply prepared the seed-bed in a careless manner, as a great many farmers do to-day, and when the crops were gathered the yields were not large. jethro tull centered attention on the important fact that careful and thorough tillage increases the available plant food in the soil. he did not know why his crops were better when the ground was frequently and thoroughly tilled, but he knew that such tillage did increase his yield. he explained the fact by saying, "tillage is manure." we have since learned the reason for the truth that tull taught, and, while his explanation was incorrect, the practice that he was following was excellent. the stirring of the soil enables the air to circulate through it freely, and permits a breaking down of the compounds that contain the elements necessary to plant growth. you have seen how the air helps to crumble the stone and brick in old buildings. it does the same with soil if permitted to circulate freely through it. the agent of the air that chiefly performs this work is called carbonic acid gas, and this gas is one of the greatest helpers the farmer has in carrying on his work. we must not forget that in soil preparation the air is just as important as any of the tools and implements used in cultivation. [illustration: fig. . slope to water shows soil weathered from face of cliff] if the soil is fertile and if deep plowing has always been done, good crops will result, other conditions being favorable. if, however, the tillage is poor, scanty harvests will always result. for most soils a two-horse plow is necessary to break up and pulverize the land. a shallow soil can always be improved by properly deepening it. the principle of greatest importance in soil-preparation is the gradual deepening of the soil in order that plant-roots may have more comfortable homes. if the farmer has been accustomed to plow but four inches deep, he should adjust the plow so as to turn five inches at the next plowing, then six, and so on until the seed-bed is nine or ten inches deep. this gradual deepening will not injure the soil but will put it quickly in good condition. if to good tillage rotation of crops be added, the soil will become more fertile with each succeeding year. [illustration: fig. . mixed grasses grown for forage] the plow, harrow, and roller are all necessary to good tillage and to a proper preparation of the seed-bed. the soil must be made compact and clods of all sizes must be crushed. then the air circulates freely, and paying crops are the rule and not the exception. tillage does these things: it increases the plant-food supply, destroys weeds, and influences the moisture content of the soil. =exercise= . what tools are used in tillage? . how should a poor and shallow soil be treated? . why should a poor and shallow soil be well compacted before sowing the crop? . explain the value of a circulation of air in the soil. . what causes iron to rust? . why is a two-horse turning-plow better than a one-horse plow? . where will clods do the least harm--on top of the soil or below the surface? . do plant roots penetrate clods? . are earthworms a benefit or an injury to the soil? . name three things that tillage does. section iii. the moisture of the soil did any one ever explain to you how important water is to the soil, or tell you why it is so important? often, as you know, crops entirely fail because there is not enough water in the soil for the plants to drink. how necessary is it, then, that the soil be kept in the best possible condition to catch and hold enough water to carry the plant through dry, hot spells! perhaps you are ready to ask, "how does the mouthless plant drink its stored-up water?" the plant gets all its water through its roots. you have seen the tiny threadlike roots of a plant spreading all about in fine soil; they are down in the ground taking up plant food and water for the stalk and leaves above. the water, carrying plant food with it, rises in a simple but peculiar way through the roots and stems. the plants use the food for building new tissue, that is, for growth. the water passes out through the leaves into the air. when the summers are dry and hot and there is but little water in the soil, the leaves shrink up. this is simply a method they have of keeping the water from passing too rapidly off into the air. i am sure you have seen the corn blades all shriveled on very hot days. this shrinkage is nature's way of diminishing the current of water that is steadily passing through the plant. a thrifty farmer will try to keep his soil in such good condition that it will have a supply of water in it for growing crops when dry and hot weather comes. he can do this by deep plowing, by subsoiling, by adding any kind of decaying vegetable matter to the soil, and by growing crops that can be tilled frequently. the soil is a great storehouse for moisture. after the clouds have emptied their waters into this storehouse, the water of the soil comes to the surface, where it is evaporated into the air. the water comes to the surface in just the same way that oil rises in a lamp-wick. this rising of the water is called _capillarity_. [illustration: fig. . an enlarged view of a section of moist soil, showing air spaces and soil particles] it is necessary to understand what is meant by this big word. if into a pan of water you dip a glass tube, the water inside the tube rises above the level of the water in the pan. the smaller the tube the higher will the water rise. the greater rise inside is perhaps due to the fact that the glass attracts the particles of water more than the particles of water attract one another. now apply this principle to the soil. [illustration: fig. . the right way to plow] the soil particles have small spaces between them, and the spaces act just as the tube does. when the water at the surface is carried away by drying winds and warmth, the water deeper in the soil rises through the soil spaces. in this way water is brought from its soil storehouse as plants need it. [illustration: fig. . apparatus for testing the holding of water by different soils] of course when the underground water reaches the surface it evaporates. if we want to keep it for our crops, we must prepare a trap to hold it. nature has shown us how this can be done. pick up a plank as it lies on the ground. under the plank the soil is wet, while the soil not covered by the plank is dry. why? capillarity brought the water to the surface, and the plank, by keeping away wind and warmth, acted as a trap to hold the moisture. now of course a farmer cannot set a trap of planks over his fields, but he can make a trap of dry earth, and that will do just as well. when a crop like corn or cotton or potatoes is cultivated, the fine, loose dirt stirred by the cultivating-plow will make a mulch that serves to keep water in the soil in the same way that the plank kept moisture under it. the mulch also helps to absorb the rains and prevents the water from running off the surface. frequent cultivation, then, is one of the best possible ways of saving moisture. hence the farmer who most frequently stirs his soil in the growing season, and especially in seasons of drought, reaps, other things being equal, a more abundant harvest than if tillage were neglected. =exercise= . why is the soil wet under a board or under straw? . will a soil that is fine and compact produce better crops than one that is loose and cloddy? why? . since the water which a plant uses comes through the roots, can the morning dew afford any assistance? . why are weeds objectionable in a growing crop? . why does the farmer cultivate growing corn and cotton? section iv. how the water rises in the soil [illustration: fig. . using lamp-chimneys to show the rise of water in soil] when the hot, dry days of summer come, the soil depends upon the subsoil, or undersoil, for the moisture that it must furnish its growing plants. the water was stored in the soil during the fall, winter, and spring months when there was plenty of rain. if you dig down into the soil when everything is dry and hot, you will soon reach a cool, moist undersoil. the moisture increases as you dig deeper into the soil. now the roots of plants go down into the soil for this moisture, because they need the water to carry the plant food up into the stems and leaves. you can see how the water rises in the soil by performing a simple experiment. =experiment= take a lamp-chimney and fill it with fine, dry dirt. the dirt from a road or a field will do. tie over the smaller end of the lamp-chimney a piece of cloth or a pocket handkerchief, and place this end in a shallow pan of water. if the soil in the lamp-chimney is clay and well packed, the water will quickly rise to the top. by filling three or four lamp-chimneys with as many different soils, the pupil will see that the water rises more slowly in some than in others. now take the water pan away, and the water in the lamp-chimneys will gradually evaporate. study for a few days the effect of evaporation on the several soils. section v. draining the soil a wise man was once asked, "what is the most valuable improvement ever made in agriculture?" he answered, "drainage." often soils unfit for crop-production because they contain too much water are by drainage rendered the most valuable of farming lands. drainage benefits land in the following ways: . it deepens the subsoil by removing unnecessary water from the spaces between the soil particles. this admits air. then the oxygen which is in the air, by aiding decay, prepares plant food for vegetation. . it makes the surface soil, or topsoil, deeper. it stands to reason that the deeper the soil the more plant food becomes available for plant use. . it improves the texture of the soil. wet soil is sticky. drainage makes this sticky soil crumble and fall apart. . it prevents washing. . it increases the porosity of soils and permits roots to go deeper into the soil for food and moisture. . it increases the warmth of the soil. . it permits earlier working in spring and after rains. [illustration: fig. . laying a tile drain] . it favors the growth of germs which change the unavailable nitrogen of the soil into nitrates; that is, into the form of nitrogen most useful to plants. . it enables plants to resist drought better because the roots go into the ground deeper early in the season. a soil that is hard and wet will not grow good crops. the nitrogen-gathering crops will store the greatest quantity of nitrogen in the soil when the soil is open to the free circulation of the air. these valuable crops cannot do this when the soil is wet and cold. sandy soils with sandy subsoils do not often need drainage; such soils are naturally drained. with clay soils it is different. it is very important to remove the stagnant water in them and to let the air in. when land has been properly drained the other steps in improvement are easily taken. after soil has been dried and mellowed by proper drainage, then commercial fertilizers, barnyard manure, cowpeas, and clover can most readily do their great work of improving the texture of the soil and of making it fitter for plant growth. [illustration: fig. . a tile in position] =tile drains.= tile drains are the best and cheapest that can be used. it would not be too strong to say that draining by tiles is the most perfect drainage. thousands of practical tests in this country have proved the superiority of tile draining for the following reasons: . good tile drains properly laid last for years and do not fill up. . they furnish the cheapest possible means of removing too much water from the soil. . they are out of reach of all cultivating tools. . surface water in filtering through the tiles leaves its nutritious elements for plant growth. =experiments= =to show the effect of drainage.= take two tomato cans and fill both with the same kind of soil. punch several holes in the bottom of one to drain the soil above and to admit air circulation. leave the other unpunctured. plant seeds of any kind in both cans and keep in a warm place. add every third day equal quantities of water. let seeds grow in both cans and observe the difference in growth for two or three weeks. =to show the effect of air in soils.= take two tomato cans; fill one with soil that is loose and warm, and the other with wet clay or muck from a swampy field. plant a few seeds of the same kind in each and observe how much better the dry, warm, open soil is for growing farm crops. section vi. improving the soil we hear a great deal about the exhaustion or wearing out of the soil. many uncomfortable people are always declaring that our lands will no longer produce profitable crops, and hence that farming will no longer pay. now it is true, unfortunately, that much land has been robbed of its fertility, and, because this is true, we should be most deeply interested in everything that leads to the improvement of our soils. when our country was first discovered and trees were growing everywhere, we had virgin soils, or new soils that were rich and productive because they were filled with vegetable matter and plant food. there are not many virgin soils now because the trees have been cut from the best lands, and these lands have been farmed so carelessly that the vegetable matter and available plant food have been largely used up. now that fresh land is scarce it is very necessary to restore fertility to these exhausted lands. what are some of the ways in which this can be done? [illustration: fig. . clover is a soil-improver] there are several things to be done in trying to reclaim worn-out land. one of the first of these is to till the land well. many of you may have heard the story of the dying father who called his sons about him and whispered feebly, "there is great treasure hidden in the garden." the sons could hardly wait to bury their dead father before, thud, thud, thud, their picks were going in the garden. day after day they dug; they dug deep; they dug wide. not a foot of the crop-worn garden escaped the probing of the pick as the sons feverishly searched for the expected treasure. but no treasure was found. their work seemed entirely useless. [illustration: fig. . increasing the productive power of the soil second crop of cowpeas on old, abandoned land] "let us not lose every whit of our labor; let us plant this pick-scarred garden," said the eldest. so the garden was planted. in the fall the hitherto neglected garden yielded a harvest so bountiful, so unexpected, that the meaning of their father's words dawned upon them. "truly," they said, "a treasure was hidden there. let us seek it in all our fields." the story applies as well to-day as it did when it was first told. thorough culture of the soil, frequent and intelligent tillage--these are the foundations of soil-restoration. along with good tillage must go crop-rotation and good drainage. a supply of organic matter will prevent heavy rains from washing the soil and carrying away plant food. drainage will aid good tillage in allowing air to circulate between the soil particles and in arranging plant food so that plants can use it. but we must add humus, or vegetable matter, to the soil. you remember that the virgin soils contained a great deal of vegetable matter and plant food, but by the continuous growing of crops like wheat, corn, and cotton, and by constant shallow tillage, both humus and plant food have been used up. consequently much of our cultivated soil to-day is hard and dead. there are three ways of adding humus and plant food to this lifeless land: the first way is to apply barnyard manure (to adopt this method means that livestock raising must be a part of all farming); the second way is to adopt rotation of crops, and frequently to plow under crops like clover and cowpeas; the third way is to apply commercial fertilizers. to summarize: if we want to make our soil better year by year, we must cultivate well, drain well, and in the most economical way add humus and plant food. =experiment= select a small area of ground at your home and divide it into four sections, as shown in the following sketch: on section _a_ apply barnyard manure; on section _b_ apply commercial fertilizers; on section _c_ apply nothing, but till well; on section _d_ apply nothing, and till very poorly. _a_, _b_, and _c_ should all be thoroughly plowed and harrowed. then add barnyard manure to _a_, commercial fertilizers to _b_, and harrow _a_, _b_, and _c_ at least four times until the soil is mellow and fine. _d_ will most likely be cloddy, like many fields that we often see. now plant on each plat some crop like cotton, corn, or wheat. when the plats are ready to harvest, measure the yield of each and determine whether the increased yield of the best plats has paid for the outlay for tillage and manure. the pupil will be much interested in the results obtained from the first crop. [illustration: fig. ] now follow a system of crop-rotation on the plats. clover can follow corn or cotton or wheat; and cowpeas, wheat. then determine the yield of each plat for the second crop. by following these plats for several years, and increasing the number, the pupils will learn many things of greatest value. section vii. manuring the soil in the early days of our history, when the soil was new and rich, we were not compelled to use large amounts of manures and fertilizers. yet our histories speak of an indian named squanto who came into one of the new england colonies and showed the first settlers how, by putting a fish in each hill of corn, they could obtain larger yields. if people in those days, with new and fertile soils, could use manures profitably, how much more ought we to use them in our time, when soils have lost their virgin fertility, and when the plant food in the soil has been exhausted by years and years of cropping! to sell year after year all the produce grown on land is a sure way to ruin it. if, for example, the richest land is planted every year in corn, and no stable or farmyard manure or other fertilizer returned to the soil, the land so treated will of course soon become too poor to grow any crop. if, on the other hand, clover or alfalfa or corn or cotton-seed meal is fed to stock, and the manure from the stock returned to the soil, the land will be kept rich. hence those farmers who do not sell such raw products as cotton, corn, wheat, oats, and clover, but who market articles made from these raw products, find it easier to keep their land fertile. for illustration: if instead of selling hay, farmers feed it to sheep and sell meat and wool; if instead of selling cotton seed, they feed its meal to cows, and sell milk and butter; if instead of selling stover, they feed it to beef cattle, they get a good price for products and in addition have all the manure needed to keep their land productive and increase its value each year. [illustration:fig. . relation of humus to growth of corn , clay subsoil; , same, with fertilizer; , same, with humus] if we wish to keep up the fertility of our lands we should not allow anything to be lost from our farms. all the manures, straw, roots, stubble, healthy vines--in fact everything decomposable--should be plowed under or used as a top-dressing. especial care should be taken in storing manure. it should be watchfully protected from sun and rain. if a farmer has no shed under which to keep his manure, he should scatter it on his fields as fast as it is made. [illustration: fig. . the cotton plant with and without food in left top pot, no plant food; in left bottom pot, plant food scanty; in both right pots, all elements of plant food present] he should understand also that liquid manure is of more value than solid, because that important plant food, nitrogen, is found almost wholly in the liquid portion. some of the phosphoric acid and considerable amounts of the potash are also found in the liquid manure. hence economy requires that none of this escape either by leakage or by fermentation. sometimes one can detect the smell of ammonia in the stable. this ammonia is formed by the decomposition of the liquid manure, and its loss should be checked by sprinkling some floats, acid phosphate, or muck over the stable floor. many farmers find it desirable to buy fertilizers to use with the manure made on the farm. in this case it is helpful to understand the composition, source, and availability of the various substances composing commercial fertilizers. the three most valuable things in commercial fertilizers are nitrogen, potash, and phosphoric acid. the nitrogen is obtained from ( ) nitrate of soda mined in chile, ( ) ammonium sulphate, a by-product of the gas works, ( ) dried blood and other by-products of the slaughter-houses, and ( ) cotton-seed meal. nitrate of soda is soluble in water and may therefore be washed away before being used by plants. for this reason it should be applied in small quantities and at intervals of a few weeks. potash is obtained in germany, where it is found in several forms. it is put on the market as muriate of potash, sulphate of potash, kainite, which contains salt as an impurity, and in other impure forms. potash is found also in _unleached_ wood ashes. phosphoric acid is found in various rocks of tennessee, florida, and south carolina, and also to a large extent in bones. the rocks or bones are usually treated with sulphuric acid. this treatment changes the phosphoric acid into a form ready for plant use. these three kinds of plant food are ordinarily all that we need to supply. in some cases, however, lime has to be added. besides being a plant food itself, lime helps most soils by improving the structure of the grains; by sweetening the soil, thereby aiding the little living germs called _bacteria_; by hastening the decay of organic matter; and by setting free the potash that is locked up in the soil. chapter ii the soil and the plant section viii. roots [illustration: fig. . root-hairs on a radish] you have perhaps observed the regularity of arrangement in the twigs and branches of trees. now pull up the roots of a plant, as, for example, sheep sorrel, jimson weed, or some other plant. note the branching of the roots. in these there is no such regularity as is seen in the twig. trace the rootlets to their finest tips. how small, slender, and delicate they are! still we do not see the finest of them, for in taking the plant from the ground we tore the most delicate away. in order to see the real construction of a root we must grow one so that we may examine it uninjured. to do this, sprout some oats in a germinator or in any box in which one glass side has been arranged and allow the oats to grow till they are two or more inches high. now examine the roots and you will see very fine hairs, similar to those shown in the accompanying figure, forming a fuzz over the surface of the roots near the tips. this fuzz is made of small hairs standing so close together that there are often as many as , on a single square inch. fig. shows how a root looks when it has been cut crosswise into what is known as a cross section. the figure is much increased in size. you can see how the root-hairs extend from the root in every direction. fig. shows a single root-hair very greatly enlarged, with particles of sand sticking to it. [illustration: fig. . a slice of a root highly magnified] these hairs are the feeding-organs of the roots, and they are formed only near the tips of the finest roots. you see that the large, coarse roots that you are familiar with have nothing to do with _absorbing_ plant food from the soil. they serve merely to _conduct_ the sap and nourishment from the root-hairs to the tree. when you apply manure or other fertilizer to a tree, remember that it is far better to supply the fertilizer to the roots that are at some distance from the trunk, for such roots are the real feeders. the plant food in the manure soaks into the soil and immediately reaches the root-hairs. you can understand this better by studying the distribution of the roots of an orchard tree, shown in fig. . there you can see that the fine tips are found at a long distance from the main trunk. [illustration: fig. . a root-hair with particles of soil sticking to it] you can now readily see why it is that plants usually wilt when they are transplanted. the fine, delicate root-hairs are then broken off, and the plant can but poorly keep up its food and water supply until new hairs have been formed. while these are forming, water has been evaporating from the leaves, and consequently the plant does not get enough moisture and therefore droops. [illustration: fig. . distribution of apple-tree roots] would you not conclude that it is very poor farming to till deeply any crop after the roots have extended between the rows far enough to be cut by the plow or cultivator? in cultivating between corn rows, for example, if you find that you are disturbing fine roots, you may be sure that you are breaking off millions of root-hairs from each plant and hence are doing harm rather than good. fig. shows how the roots from one corn row intertangle with those of another. you see at a glance how many of these roots would be destroyed by deep cultivation. stirring the upper inch of soil when the plants are well grown is sufficient tillage and does no injury to the roots. [illustration: fig. . corn roots reach from row to row] a deep soil is much better than a shallow soil, as its depth makes it just so much easier for the roots to seek deep food. fig. illustrates well how far down into the soil the alfalfa roots go. [illustration: fig. alfalfa root] =exercise= dig up the roots of several cultivated plants and weeds and compare them. do you find some that are fine or fibrous? some fleshy like the carrot? the dandelion is a good example of a tap-root. tap-roots are deep feeders. examine very carefully the roots of a medium-sized corn plant. sift the dirt away gently so as to loosen as few roots as possible. how do the roots compare in area with the part above the ground? try to trace a single root of the corn plant from the stalk to its very tip. how long are the roots of mature plants? are they deep or shallow feeders? germinate some oats or beans in a glass-sided box, as suggested, and observe the root-hairs. section ix. how the plant feeds from the soil plants receive their nourishment from two sources--from the air and from the soil. the soil food, or mineral food, dissolved in water, must reach the plant through the root-hairs with which all plants are provided in great numbers. each of these hairs may be compared to a finger reaching among the particles of earth for food and water. if we examine the root-hairs ever so closely, we find no holes, or openings, in them. it is evident, then, that no solid particles can enter the root-hairs, but that all food must pass into the root in solution. an experiment just here will help us to understand how a root feeds. [illustration: fig. . experiment to show how roots take up food] =experiment= secure a narrow glass tube like the one in fig. . if you cannot get a tube, a narrow, straight lamp-chimney will, with a little care, do nearly as well. from a bladder made soft by soaking, cut a piece large enough to cover the end of the tube or chimney and to hang over a little all around. make the piece of bladder secure to the end of the tube by wrapping tightly with a waxed thread, as at b. partly fill the tube with molasses (or it may be easier in case you use a narrow tube to fill it before attaching the bladder). put the tube into a jar or bottle of water so placed that the level of the molasses inside and the water outside will be the same. fasten the tube in this position and observe it frequently for three or four hours. at the end of the time you should find that the molasses in the tube has risen above the level of the liquid outside. it may even overflow at the top. if you use the lamp-chimney the rise will not be so clearly seen, since a greater volume is required to fill the space in the chimney. this increase in the contents of the tube is due to the entrance of water from the outside. the water has passed through the thin bladder, or membrane, and has come to occupy space in the tube. there is also a passage the other way, but the molasses can pass through the bladder membrane so slowly that the passage is scarcely noticeable. there are no holes, or openings, in the membrane, but still there is a free passage of liquids in both directions, although the more heavily laden solution must move more slowly. a root-hair acts in much the same way as the tube in our experiment, with the exception that it is so made as to allow certain substances to pass in only one direction, that is, toward the inside. the outside of the root-hair is bathed in solutions rich in nourishment. the nourishment passes from the outside to the inside through the delicate membrane of the root-hair. thus does food enter the plant-root. from the root-hairs, foods are carried to the inside of the root. from this you can see how important it is for a plant to have fine, loose soil for its root-hairs; also how necessary is the water in the soil, since the food can be used only when it is dissolved in water. this passage of liquids from one side of a membrane to another is called _osmosis_. it has many uses in the plant kingdom. we say a root takes nourishment by osmosis. section x. root-tubercles tubercle is a big word, but you ought to know how to pronounce it and what is meant by root-tubercles. we are going to tell you what a root-tubercle is and something about its importance to agriculture. when you have learned this, we are sure you will want to examine some plants for yourself in order that you may see just what tubercles look like on a real root. root-tubercles do not form on all kinds of plants that farmers grow. they are formed only on those kinds that botanists call _legumes_. the clovers, cowpeas, vetches, soy beans, and alfalfa are all legumes. the tubercles are little knotty, wart-like growths on the roots of the plants just named. these tubercles are caused by tiny forms of life called, as you perhaps already know, bacteria, or _germs_. [illustration: fig. . tubercles on clover roots the specimen at the right was grown in soil inoculated with soil from an old clover field. the one at the left was grown in soil not inoculated] instead of living in nests in trees like birds or in the ground like moles and worms, these tiny germs, less than one twenty-five thousandth of an inch long, make their homes on the roots of legumes. nestling snugly together, they live, grow, and multiply in their sunless homes. through their activity the soil is enriched by the addition of much nitrogen from the air. they are the good fairies of the farmer, and no magician's wand ever blessed a land so much as these invisible folk bless the land that they live in. just as bees gather honey from the flowers and carry it to the hives, where they prepare it for their own future use and for the use of others, so do these root-tubercles gather nitrogen from the air and fix it in their root homes, where it can be used by other crops. [illustration: fig. . soy beans and cowpeas, two great soil-improvers] in the earlier pages of this book you were told something about the food of plants. one of the main elements of plant food, perhaps you remember, is nitrogen. just as soon as the roots of the leguminous plants begin to push down into the soil, the bacteria, or germs that make the tubercles, begin to build their homes on the roots, and in so doing they add nitrogen to the soil. you now see the importance of growing such crops as peas and clover on your land, for by their tubercles you can constantly add plant food to the soil. now this much-needed nitrogen is the most costly part of the fertilizers that farmers buy every year. if every farmer, then, would grow these tubercle-bearing crops, he would rapidly add to the richness of his land and at the same time escape the necessity of buying so much expensive fertilizer. =experiment= take a spade or shovel and dig carefully around the roots of a cowpea and a clover plant; loosen the earth thoroughly and then pull the plants up, being careful not to break off any of the roots. now wash the roots, and after they become dry count the nodules, or tubercles, on them. observe the difference in size. how are they arranged? do all leguminous plants have equal numbers of nodules? how do these nodules help the farmer? section xi. the rotation of crops doubtless you know what is meant by rotation, for your teacher has explained to you already how the earth rotates, or turns, on its axis and revolves around the sun. when we speak of crop-rotation we mean not only that the same crop should not be planted on the same land for two successive years but that crops should follow one another in a regular order. many farmers do not follow a system of farming that involves a change of crops. in some parts of the country the same fields are planted to corn or wheat or cotton year after year. this is not a good practice and sooner or later will wear out the soil completely, because the soil-elements that furnish the food of that constant crop are soon exhausted and good crop-production is no longer possible. why is crop-rotation so necessary? there are different kinds of plant food in the soil. if any one of these is used up, the soil of course loses its power to feed plants properly. now each crop uses more of some of the different kinds of foods than others do, just as you like some kinds of food better than others. but the crop cannot, as you can, learn to use the kinds of food it does not like; it must use the kind that nature fitted it to use. not only do different crops feed upon different soil foods, but they use different quantities of these foods. now if a farmer plant the same crop in the same field each year, that crop soon uses up all of the available plant food that it likes. hence the soil can no longer properly nourish the crop that has been year by year robbing it. if that crop is to be successfully grown again on the land, the exhausted element must be restored. [illustration: fig. . grass following corn] this can be done in two ways: first, by finding out what element has here been exhausted, and then restoring this element by means either of commercial fertilizers or manure; second, by planting on the land crops that feed on different food and that will allow or assist kind mother nature "to repair her waste places." an illustration may help you to remember this fact. nitrogen is, as already explained, one of the commonest plant foods. it may almost be called plant bread. the wheat crop uses up a good deal of nitrogen. suppose a field were planted in wheat year after year. most of the available nitrogen would be taken out of the soil after a while, and a new wheat crop, if planted on the field, would not get enough of its proper food to yield a paying harvest. this same land, however, that could not grow wheat could produce other crops that do not require so much nitrogen. for example, it could grow cowpeas. cowpeas, aided by their root-tubercles, are able to gather from the air a great part of the nitrogen needed for their growth. thus a good crop of peas can be obtained even if there is little available nitrogen in the soil. on the other hand wheat and corn and cotton cannot use the free nitrogen of the air, and they suffer if there is an insufficient quantity present in the soil; hence the necessity of growing legumes to supply what is lacking. [illustration: fig. . cowpeas and corn--august] let us now see how easily plant food may be saved by the rotation of crops. if you sow wheat in the autumn it is ready to be harvested in time for planting cowpeas. plow or disk the wheat stubble, and sow the same field to cowpeas. if the wheat crop has exhausted the greater part of the nitrogen of the soil, it makes no difference to the cowpea; for the cowpea will get its nitrogen from the air and not only provide for its own growth but will leave quantities of nitrogen in the queer nodules of its roots for the crops coming after it in the rotation. [illustration: fig. . cowpeas and corn--october] if corn be planted, there should be a rotation in just the same way. the corn plant, a summer grower, of course uses a certain portion of the plant food stored in the soil. in order that the crop following the corn may feed on what the corn did not use, this crop should be one that requires a somewhat different food. moreover, it should be one that fits in well with corn so as to make a winter crop. we find just such a plant in clover or wheat. like the cowpea, all the varieties of clover have on their roots tubercles that add the important element, nitrogen, to the soil. from these facts is it not clear that if you wish to improve your land quickly and keep it always fruitful you must practice crop-rotation? an illustration of crop-rotation here are two systems of crop-rotation as practiced at one or more agricultural experiment stations. each furnishes an ideal plan for keeping up land. ---------------------++----------------------++---------------------- ---------------------++----------------------++---------------------- first year || second year || third year ----------+----------++-----------+----------++-----------+---------- summer | winter || summer | winter || summer | winter ----------+----------++-----------+----------++-----------+---------- corn | crimson || cotton | wheat || cowpeas | rye for | clover || | || | pasture ----------+----------++-----------+----------++-----------+---------- or ----------+----------++-----------+----------++-----------+---------- summer | winter || summer | winter || summer | winter ----------+----------++-----------+----------++-----------+---------- corn | wheat || clover | clover || grass | grass for | || and grass | and grass|| |pasture or | || | || | meadow ----------+----------++-----------+----------++-----------+---------- ----------+----------++-----------+----------++-----------+---------- in these rotations the cowpeas and clovers are nitrogen-gathering crops. they not only furnish hay but they enrich the soil. the wheat, corn, and cotton are money crops, but in addition they are cultivated crops; hence they improve the physical condition of the soil and give opportunity to kill weeds. the grasses and clovers are of course used for pasturage and hay. this is only a suggested rotation. work out one that will meet your home need. =exercise= let the pupils each present a system of rotation that includes the crops raised at home. the system presented should as nearly as possible meet the following requirements: . legumes for gathering nitrogen. . money crops for cash income. . cultivated crops for tillage and weed-destruction. . food crops for feeding live stock. chapter iii the plant section xii. how a plant feeds from the air if you partly burn a match you will see that it becomes black. this black substance into which the match changes is called _carbon_. examine a fresh stick of charcoal, which is, as you no doubt know, burnt wood. you see in the charcoal every fiber that you saw in the wood itself. this means that every part of the plant contains carbon. how important, then, is this substance to the plant! you will be surprised to know that the total amount of carbon in plants comes from the air. all the carbon that a plant gets is taken in by the leaves of the plant; not a particle is gathered by the roots. a large tree, weighing perhaps , pounds, requires in its growth carbon from , , cubic yards of air. perhaps, after these statements, you may think there is danger that the carbon of the air may sometime become exhausted. the air of the whole world contains about , , , , pounds of carbon. moreover, this is continually being added to by our fires and by the breath of animals. when wood or coal is used for fuel the carbon of the burning substance is returned to the air in the form of gas. some large factories burn great quantities of coal and thus turn much carbon back to the air. a single factory in germany is estimated to give back to the air daily about , , pounds of carbon. you see, then, that carbon is constantly being put back into the air to replace that which is used by growing plants. the carbon of the air can be used by none but green plants, and by them only in the sunlight. we may compare the green coloring matter of the leaf to a machine, and the sunlight to the power, or energy, which keeps the machine in motion. by means, then, of sunlight and the green coloring matter of the leaves, the plant secures carbon. the carbon passes into the plant and is there made into two foods very necessary to the plant; namely, starch and sugar. sometimes the plant uses the starch and sugar immediately. at other times it stores both away, as it does in the irish and the sweet potato and in beets, cabbage, peas, and beans. these plants are used as food by man because they contain so much nourishment; that is, starch and sugar which were stored away by the plant for its own future use. =exercise= examine some charcoal. can you see the rings of growth? slightly char paper, cloth, meat, sugar, starch, etc. what does the turning black prove? what per cent of these substances do you think is pure carbon? section xiii. the sap current the root-hairs take nourishment from the soil. the leaves manufacture starch and sugar. these manufactured foods must be carried to all parts of the plant. there are two currents to carry them. one passes from the roots through the young wood to the leaves, and one, a downward current, passes through the bark, carrying needed food to the roots (see fig. ). if you should injure the roots, the water supply to the leaves would be cut off and the leaves would immediately wither. on the other hand, if you remove the bark, that is, girdle the tree, you in no way interfere with the water supply and the leaves do not wither. girdling does, however, interfere with the downward food current through the bark. [illustration: fig. movement of the sap current] if the tree be girdled the roots sooner or later suffer from lack of food supply from the leaves. owing to this food stoppage the roots will cease to grow and will soon be unable to take in sufficient water, and then the leaves will begin to droop. this, however, may not happen until several months after the girdling. sometimes a partly girdled branch grows much in thickness just above the girdle, as is shown in fig. . this extra growth seems to be due to a stoppage of the rich supply of food which was on its way to the roots through the bark. it could go no farther and was therefore used by the tree to make an unnatural growth at this point. you will now understand how and why trees die when they are girdled to clear new ground. [illustration: fig. . a thickening above the wire that caused the girdling] it is, then, the general law of sap-movement that the upward current from the roots passes through the woody portion of the trunk, and that the current bearing the food made by the leaves passes downward through the bark. =exercise= let the teacher see that these and all other experiments are performed by the pupils. do not allow them to guess, but make them see. girdle valueless trees or saplings of several kinds, cutting the bark away in a complete circle around the tree. do not cut into the wood. how long before the tree shows signs of injury? girdle a single small limb on a tree. what happens? explain. section xiv. the flower and the seed some people think that the flowers by the wayside are for the purpose of beautifying the world and increasing man's enjoyment. do you think this is true? undoubtedly a flower is beautiful, and to be beautiful is one of the uses of many flowers; but it is not the chief use of a flower. you know that when peach or apple blossoms are nipped by the spring frost the fruit crop is in danger. the fruit of the plant bears the seed, and the flower produces the fruit. that is its chief duty. [illustration: fig. . parts of the pistil] do you know any plant that produces seed without flowers? some one answers, "the corn, the elm, and the maple all produce seed, but have no flower." no, that is not correct. if you look closely you will find in the spring very small flowers on the elm and on the maple, while the ear and the tassel are really the blossoms of the corn plant. every plant that produces seed has flowers, although they may sometimes seem very curious flowers. [illustration: fig. . a buttercup] let us see what a flower really is. take, for example, a buttercup, cotton, tobacco, or plum blossom (see figs. and ). you will find on the outside a row of green leaves inclosing the flower when it is still a bud. these leaves are the _sepals_. next on the inside is a row of colored leaves, or _petals_. arranged inside of the petals are some threadlike parts, each with a knob on the end. these are the _stamens_. examine one stamen closely (fig. ). on the knob at its tip you should find, if the flower is fully open, some fine grains, or powder. in the lily this powder is so abundant that in smelling the flower you often brush a quantity of it off on your nose. this substance is called _pollen_, and the knob on the end of the stamen, on which the pollen is borne, is the _anther_. [illustration: fig. . a plum blossom] the pollen is of very great importance to the flower. without it there could be no seeds. the stamens as pollen-bearers, then, are very important. but there is another part to each flower that is of equal value. this part you will find in the center of the flower, inside the circle of stamens. it is called the _pistil_ (fig. ). the swollen tip of the pistil is the _stigma_. the swollen base of the pistil forms the _ovary_. if you carefully cut open this ovary you will find in it very small immature seeds. [illustration: fig. . stamens _a_, anther; _f_, filament] some plants bear all these parts in the same flower; that is, each blossom has stamens, pistil, petals, and sepals. the pear blossom and the tomato blossom represent such flowers. other plants bear their stamens and pistils in separate blossoms. stamens and pistils may even occur in separate plants, and some blossoms have no sepals or petals at all. look at the corn plant. here the tassel is a cluster of many flowers, each of which bears only stamens. the ear is likewise a cluster of many flowers, each of which bears only a pistil. the dust that you see falling from the tassel is the pollen, and the long silky threads of the ear are the stigmas. [illustration: fig. . a tomato blossom] now no plant can bear seeds unless the pollen of the stamen falls on the stigma. corn cannot therefore form seed unless the dust of the tassel falls upon the silk. did you ever notice how poorly the cob is filled on a single cornstalk standing alone in a field? do you see why? it is because when a plant stands alone the wind blows the pollen away from the tassel, and little or none is received on the stigmas below. [illustration: fig. . cucumber blossoms] in the corn plant the stamens and pistils are separate; that is, they do not occur on the same flower, although they are on the same plant. this is also true of the cucumber (see fig. ). in many plants, however, such as the hemp, hop, sassafras, willow, and others, the staminate parts are on one plant and the pistillate parts are on another. this is also true in several other cultivated plants. for example, in some strawberries the stamens are absent or useless; that is, they bear no good pollen. in such cases the grower must see to it that near by are strawberry plants that bear stamens, in order that those plants which do not bear pollen may become _pollinated_; that is, may have pollen carried to them. after the stigma has been supplied with pollen, a single pollen grain sends a threadlike sprout down through the stigma into the ovary. this process, if successfully completed, is called _fertilization_. =exercise= examine several flowers and identify the parts named in the last section. try in the proper season to find the pollen on the maple, willow, alder, and pine, and on wheat, cotton, and the morning-glory. how fast does the ovary of the apple blossom enlarge? measure one and watch it closely from day to day. can you find any plants that have their stamens and ovaries on separate individuals? section xv. pollination nature has several interesting ways of bringing about pollination. in the corn, willow, and pine the pollen is picked up by the wind and carried away. much of it is lost, but some reaches the stigmas, or receptive parts, of other corn, willow, or pine flowers. this is a very wasteful method, and all plants using it must provide much pollen. many plants employ a much better method. they have learned how to make insects bear their pollen. in plants of this type the parts of the blossom are so shaped and so placed as to deposit pollen from the stamen on the insect and to receive pollen from the insect on the stigmas. when you see the clumsy bumblebee clambering over and pushing his way into a clover blossom, you may be sure that he is getting well dusted with pollen and that the next blossom which he visits will secure a full share on its stigmas. when flowers fit themselves to be pollinated by insects they can no longer use the wind and are helpless if insects do not visit them. they therefore cunningly plan two ways to invite the visits of insects. first, they provide a sweet nectar as a repast for the insect visitor. the nectar is a sugary solution found in the bottom of the flower and is used by the visitor as food or to make honey. second, flowers advertise to let each insect know that they have something for it. the advertising is done either by showy colors or by perfume. insects have wonderful powers of smell. when you see showy flowers or smell fragrant ones, you will know that such flowers are advertising the presence either of nectar or of pollen (to make beebread) and that such flowers depend on insects for pollination. [illustration: fig. . bees carrying pollen] a season of heavy, cold rains during blossoming-time may often injure the fruit crop by preventing insects from carrying pollen from flower to flower. you now also understand why plants often fail to produce seeds indoors. since they are shut in, they cannot receive proper insect visits. plants such as tomatoes or other garden fruits dependent upon insect pollination must, if raised in the greenhouse where insects cannot visit them, be pollinated by hand. =exercise= exclude insect visitors from some flower or flower cluster, for example, clover, by covering with a paper bag, and see whether the flower can produce seeds that are capable of growing. compare as to number and vitality the seeds of such a flower with those of an uncovered flower. observe insects closely. do you ever find pollen on them? what kinds of insects visit the clover? the cowpea? the sourwood? the flax? is wheat pollinated by insects or by the wind or by some other means? do bees fly in rainy weather? how will a long rainy season at blossoming-time affect the apple crop? why? should bees be kept in an orchard? why? section xvi. crosses, hybrids, and cross-pollination in our study of flowers and their pollination we have seen that the seed is usually the descendant of two parents, or at least of two organs--one the ovary, producing the seed; the other the pollen, which is necessary to fertilize the ovary. it happens that sometimes the pollen of one blossom fertilizes the ovary of its own flower, but more often the pollen from one plant fertilizes the ovary of another plant. this latter method is called _cross-pollination_. as a rule cross-pollination makes seed that will produce a better plant than simple pollination would. cross-pollination by hand is often used by plant-breeders when, for purposes of seed-selection, a specially strong plant is desired. the steps in hand pollination are as follows: ( ) remove the anthers before they open, to prevent them from pollinating the stigma (the steps in this process are illustrated in figs. , - ); ( ) cover the flower thus treated with a paper bag to prevent stray pollen from getting on it (see fig. ); ( ) when the ovary is sufficiently developed, carry pollen to the stigma by hand from the anthers of another plant which you have selected to furnish it, and rebag to keep out any stray pollen which might accidentally get in; ( ) collect the seeds when they are mature and label them properly. hand pollination has this advantage--you know both parents of your seed. if pollination occur naturally you know the maternal but have no means of judging the paternal parent. you can readily see, therefore, how hand pollination enables you to secure seed derived from two well-behaved parents. sometimes we can breed one kind of plant on another. the result of such cross-breeding is known as a _hybrid_. in the animal kingdom the mule is a common example of this cross-breeding. plant hybrids were formerly called mules also, but this suggestive term is almost out of use. [illustration: fig. the bud on right at top is in proper condition for removal of anthers; the anthers have been removed from the buds below] it is only when plants of two distinct kinds are crossed that the result is called a hybrid; for example, a blackjack oak on a white oak, an apple on a pear. if the parent plants are closely related, for example, two kinds of apples, the resulting plant is known simply as a _cross_. hybrids and crosses are valuable in that they usually differ from both parents and yet combine some qualities of each. [illustration: fig. . orange blossom prepared for crossing first, bud; second, anthers unremoved; third, anthers removed] [illustration: fig. . tomato blossom ready to cross first, bud; second, anthers unremoved; third, anthers removed] [illustration: fig. . first, blossom bagged to keep out stray pollen; second, fruit bagged for protection] they often leave off some of the qualities of the parent plants and at other times have such qualities more markedly than did their parents. thus they often produce an interesting new kind of plant. sometimes we are able by hybridization to combine in one plant the good qualities of two other plants and thus make a great advance in agriculture. the new forms brought about by hybridization may be fixed, or made permanent, by such selection as is mentioned in section xviii. hybridization is of great aid in originating new plants. it often happens that a plant will be more fruitful when pollinated by one variety than by some other variety. this is well illustrated in fig. . a fruit-grower or farmer should know much about these subjects before selecting varieties for his orchard, vineyard, etc. =exercise= with the help of your teacher try to cross some plants. such an experiment will take time, but will be most interesting. you must remember that many crosses must be attempted in order to gain success with even a few. section xvii. propagation by buds it is the business of the farmer to make plants grow, or, as it is generally called, to propagate plants. this he does in one of two ways: by buds (that is, by small pieces cut from parent plants), or by seeds. the chief aim in both methods should be to secure in the most convenient manner the best-paying plants. many plants are most easily and quickly propagated by buds; for example, the grape, red raspberry, fig, and many others that we cultivate for the flower only, such as the carnation, geranium, rose, and begonia. [illustration: fig. . brighton pollinated by , salem; , creveling; , lindley; , brighton; , self-pollinated; , nectar; , jefferson; , niagara] in growing plants from cuttings, a piece is taken from the kind of plant that one wishes to grow. the greatest care must be exercised in order to get a healthy cutting. if we take a cutting from a poor plant, what can we expect but to grow a poor plant like the one from which our cutting was taken? on the other hand, if a fine, strong, vigorous, fruitful plant be selected, we shall expect to grow just such a fine, healthy, fruitful plant. we expect the cutting to make exactly the same variety of plant as the parent stock. we must therefore decide on the variety of berry, grape, fig, carnation, or rose that we wish to propagate, and then look for the strongest and most promising plants of this variety within our reach. the utmost care will not produce a fine plant if we start from poor stock. [illustration: fig. . geranium cutting dotted line shows depth to which cutting should be planted] what qualities are most desirable in a plant from which cuttings are to be taken? first, it should be productive, hardy, and suited to your climate and your needs; second, it should be healthy. do not take cuttings from a diseased plant, since the cutting may carry the disease. cuttings may be taken from various parts of the plant, sometimes even from parts of the leaf, as in the begonia (fig. ). more often, however, they are drawn from parts of the stem (figs. - ). as to the age of the twig from which the cutting is to be taken, professor bailey says: "for most plants the proper age or maturity of wood for the making of cuttings may be determined by giving the twig a quick bend; if it snaps and hangs by the bark, it is in proper condition. if it bends without breaking, it is too young and soft or too old. if it splinters, it is too old and woody." some plants, as the geranium (fig. ), succeed best if the cuttings from which they are grown are taken from soft, young parts of the plant; others, for example, the grape or rose, do better when the cutting is made from more mature wood. [illustration: fig. grape cutting showing depth to which cutting should be planted] [illustration: fig. . carnation cutting] cuttings may vary in size and may include one or more buds. after a hardy, vigorous cutting is made, insert it about one half or one third of its length in soil. a soil free from organic matter is much the best, since in such soil the cuttings are much less liable to disease. a fine, clean sand is commonly used by professional gardeners. when cuttings have rooted well--this may require a month or more--they may be transplanted to larger pots. sometimes, instead of cutting off a piece and rooting it, portions of branches are made to root before they are separated from the parent plant. this method is often followed, and is known as _layering_. it is a simple process. just bend the tip of a bough down and bury it in the earth (see fig. ). the black raspberry forms layers naturally, but gardeners often aid it by burying the over-hanging tips in the earth, so that more tips may easily take root. strawberries develop runners that root themselves in a similar fashion. grafts and buds are really cuttings which, instead of being buried in sand to produce roots of their own, are set on the roots of other plants. [illustration: fig. . rose cutting] grafting and budding are practiced when these methods are more convenient than cuttings or when the gardener thinks there is danger of failure to get plants to take root as cuttings. neither grafting nor budding is, however, necessary for the raspberry or the grape, for these propagate most readily from cuttings. it is often the case that a budded or grafted plant is more fruitful than a plant on its own roots. in cases of this kind, of course, grafts or buds are used. the white, or irish, potato is usually propagated from pieces of the potato itself. each piece used for planting bears one eye or more. the potato itself is really an underground stem and the eyes are buds. this method of propagation is therefore really a peculiar kind of cutting. since the eye is a bud and our potato plant for next year is to develop from this bud, it is of much importance, as we have seen, to know exactly what _kind_ of plant our potato comes from. if the potato is taken from a small plant that had but a few poor potatoes in the hill, we may expect the bud to produce a similar plant and a correspondingly poor crop. we must see to it, then, that our seed potatoes are drawn from vines that were good producers, because new potato plants are like the plants from which they were grown. of course when our potatoes are in the bin we cannot tell from what kind of plants they came. we must therefore _select our seed potatoes in the field_. seed potatoes should always be selected from those hills that produce most bountifully. be assured that the increased yield will richly repay this care in selecting. it matters not so much whether the seed potato be large or small; it must, however, come from a hill bearing a large yield of fine potatoes. [illustration: fig. . begonia-leaf cutting] sweet-potato plants are produced from shoots, or growing buds, taken from the potato itself, so that in their case too the piece that we use in propagating is a part of the original plant, and will therefore be like it under similar conditions. just as with the irish potato, it is important to know how good a yielder you are planting. you should watch during harvest and select for propagation for the next year only such plants as yield best. we should exercise fully as much care in selecting proper individuals from which to make a cutting or a layer as we do in selecting a proper animal to breed from. just as we select the finest jersey in the herd for breeding purposes, so we should choose first the variety of plant we desire and then the finest individual plant of that variety. if the variety of the potato that we desire to raise be early rose, it is not enough to select _any_ early rose plants, but the very best early rose plants, to furnish our seed. [illustration: fig. . layering] it is not enough to select large, fine potatoes for cuttings. a large potato may not produce a bountifully yielding plant. _it will produce a plant like the one that produced it._ it may be that this one large potato was the only one produced by the original plant. if so, the plant that grows from it will tend to be similarly unproductive. thus you see the importance of _selecting in the field a plant that has exactly the qualities desired in the new plant_. one of the main reasons why gardeners raise plants from buds instead of from seeds is that the seed of many plants will not produce plants like the parent. this failure to "come true," as it is called, is sometimes of value, for it occasionally leads to improvement. for example, suppose that a thousand apple or other fruit or flower seeds from plants usually propagated by cuttings be planted; it may be that one out of a thousand or a million will be a very valuable plant. if a valuable plant be so produced, it should be most carefully guarded, multiplied by cuttings or grafts, and introduced far and wide. it is in this way that new varieties of fruits and flowers are produced from time to time. sometimes, too, a single bud on a tree will differ from the other buds and will produce a branch different from the other branches. this is known as _bud variation_. when there is thus developed a branch which happens to be of a superior kind, it should be propagated by cuttings just as you would propagate it if it had originated from a seed. [illustration: fig. . currant cutting] mr. gideon of minnesota planted many apple seeds, and from them all raised one tree that was very fruitful, finely flavored, and able to withstand the cold minnesota winter. this tree he multiplied by grafts and named the wealthy apple. it is said that in giving this one apple to the world he benefited mankind to the value of more than one million dollars. it will be well to watch for any valuable bud or seed variant and never let a promising one be lost. plants grown in this way from seeds are usually spoken of as seedlings. [illustration: a luscious and easily grown berry] plants to be propagated from buds the following list gives the names and methods by which our common garden fruits and flowers are propagated: _figs_: use cuttings to inches long or layer. _grapes_: use long cuttings, layer, or graft upon old vines. _apples_: graft upon seedlings, usually crab seedlings one year old. _pears_: bud upon pear seedlings. _cherries_: bud upon cherry stock. _plums_: bud upon peach stock. _peaches_: bud upon peach or plum seedlings. _quinces_: use cuttings or layer. _blackberries_: propagate by suckers; cut from parent stem. _black raspberries_: layer; remove old stem. _red raspberries_: propagate by root-cuttings or suckers. _strawberries_: propagate by runners. _currants_ and _gooseberries_: use long cuttings (these plants grow well only in cool climates; if attempted in warm climates, set in cold exposure). _carnations_, _geraniums_, _roses_, _begonias_, etc.: propagate by cuttings rooted in sand and then transplanted to small pots. =exercise= propagate fruits (grape, fig, strawberry) of various kinds; also ornamental plants. how long does it take them to root? geraniums rooted in the spring will bloom in the fall. do you know any one who selects seed potatoes properly? make a careful selection of seed at the next harvest-time. section xviii. plant seeding in propagating by seed, as in reproducing by buds, we select a portion of the parent plant--for a seed is surely a part of the parent plant--and place it in the ground. there is, however, one great difference between a seed and a bud. the bud is really a piece of the parent plant, but a piece of _one_ plant only, while a seed comes from the parts of two plants. you will understand this fully if you read carefully sections xiv-xvi. since the seed is made of two plants, the plant that springs from a seed is much more likely to differ from its mother plant, that is, from the plant that produces the seed, than is a plant produced merely by buds. in some cases plants "come true to seed" very accurately. in others they vary greatly. for example, when we plant the seed of wheat, turnips, rye, onions, tomatoes, tobacco, or cotton, we get plants that are in most respects like the parent plant. on the other hand the seed of a crawford peach or a baldwin apple or a bartlett pear will not produce plants like its parent, but will rather resemble its wild forefathers. these seedlings, thus taking after their ancestors, are always far inferior to our present cultivated forms. in such cases seeding is not practicable, and we must resort to bud propagation of one sort or another. while in a few plants like those just mentioned the seed does not "come true," most plants, for example, cotton, tobacco, and others, do "come true." when we plant king cotton we may expect to raise king cotton. there will be, however, as every one knows, some or even considerable variation in the field. some plants, even in exactly the same soil, will be better than the average, and some will be poorer. now we see this variation in the plants of our field, and we believe that the plant will be in the main like its parent. what should we learn from this? surely that if we wish to produce sturdy, healthy, productive plants we must go into our fields and _pick out just such plants to secure seed from as we wish to produce another year_. if we wait until the seed is separated from the plant that produced it before we select our cotton seed, we shall be planting seed from poor as well as from good plants, and must be content with a crop of just such stock as we have planted. by selecting seed from the most productive plants _in the field_ and by repeating the selection each year, you can continually improve the breed of the plant you are raising. in selecting seed for cotton you may follow the plan suggested below for wheat. [illustration: figs. and . chrysanthemums and asparagus] the difference that you see between the wild and the cultivated chrysanthemums and between the samples of asparagus shown in figs. and was brought about by just such continuous seed-selection from the kind of plant wanted. [illustration: fig. . two varieties of flax from one parent stock] by the careful selection of seed from the longest flax plants the increase in length shown in the accompanying figure was gained. the selection of seed from those plants bearing the most seed, regardless of the height of the plant, has produced flax like that to the right in the illustration. these two kinds of flax are from the same parent stock, but slight differences have been emphasized by continued seed-selection, until we now have really two varieties of flax, one a heavy seed-bearer, the other producing a long fiber. you can in a similar way improve your cotton or any other seed crop. sugar beets have been made by seed-selection to produce about double the percentage of sugar that they did a few years ago. preparing and tilling land costs too much in money and work to allow the land to be planted with poor seed. when you are trying by seed-selection to increase the yield of cotton, there are two principles that should be borne in mind: first, seed should be chosen only from plants that bear many well-filled bolls of long-staple cotton; second, seed should be taken from no plant that does not by its healthy condition show hardihood in resisting disease and drouth. the plan of choosing seeds from selected plants may be applied to wheat; but it would of course be too time-consuming to select enough single wheat plants to furnish all of the seed wheat for the next year. in this case adopt the following plan: in fig. let _a_ represent the total size of your wheat field and let _b_ represent a plat large enough to furnish seed for the whole field. at harvest-time go into section _a_ and select the best plants you can find. pick the heads of these and thresh them by hand. the seed so obtained must be carefully saved for your next sowing. [illustration: fig. .] in the fall sow these selected seeds in area _b_. this area should produce the best wheat. at the next harvest cull not from the whole field but from the finest plants of plat _b_, and again save these as seed for plat _b_. use the unculled seed from plat _b_ to sow your crop. by following this plan continuously you will every year have seed from several generations of choice plants, and each year you will improve your seed. it is of course advisable to move your seed plat _b_ every year or two. for the new plat select land that has recently been planted in legumes. always give this plat unwearying care. in the selection of plants from which to get seed, you must know what kind of plants are really the best seed plants. first, _you must not regard single heads or grains, but must select seed from the most perfect plant_, looking at the plant as a whole and not at any single part of it. a first consideration is yield. select the plants that yield best and are at the same time resistant to drouth, resistant to rust and to winter, early to ripen, plump of grain, and nonshattering. what a fine thing it would be to find even one plant free from rust in the midst of a rusted field! it would mean a _rust-resistant plant_. its offspring also would probably be rust-resistant. if you should ever find such a plant, be sure to save its seed and plant it in a plat by itself. the next year again save seed from those plants least rusted. possibly you can develop a rust-proof race of wheat! keep your eyes open. in england the average yield of wheat is thirty bushels an acre, in the united states it is less than fifteen bushels! in some states the yield is even less than nine bushels an acre. let us select our seed with care, as the english people do, and then we can increase our yield. by careful seed-selection a plant-breeder in minnesota increased the yield of his wheat by one fourth. think what it would mean if twenty-five per cent were added to the world's supply of wheat at comparatively no cost; that is, at the mere cost of careful seed-selection. this would mean an addition to the world's income of about $ , , each year. the united states would get about one fifth of this profit. it often happens that a single plant in a crop of corn, cotton, or wheat will be far superior to all others in the field. such a plant deserves special care. do not use it merely as a seed plant, but carefully plant its seeds apart and tend carefully. the following season select the best of its offspring as favorites again. repeat this selection and culture for several years until you fix the variety. this is the way new varieties are originated from plants propagated by seed. in mr. abraham fultz of pennsylvania, while passing through a field of bearded wheat, found three heads of beardless, or bald, wheat. these he sowed by themselves that year, and as they turned out specially productive he continued to sow this new variety. soon he had enough seed to distribute over the country. it became known as the fultz wheat and is to-day one of the best varieties in the united states and in a number of foreign countries. think how many bushels of wheat have been added to the world's annual supply by a few moments of intelligent observation and action on the part of this one man! he saw his opportunity and used it. how many similar opportunities do you think are lost? how much does your state or country lose thereby? =exercise= select one hundred seeds from a good, and one hundred from a poor, plant of the same variety. sow them in two plats far enough apart to avoid cross-pollination, yet try to have soil conditions about the same. give each the same care and compare the yield. try this with corn, cotton, and wheat. select seeds from the best plant in your good plat and from the poorest in your poor plat and repeat the experiment. this will require but a few feet of ground, and the good plat will pay for itself in yield, while the poor plat will more than pay in the lesson that it will teach you. write to the department of agriculture, washington, d.c., and to your state experiment station for bulletins concerning seed-selection and methods of plant-improvement. section xix. selecting seed corn if a farmer would raise good crops he must, as already stated, select good seed. many of the farmer's disappointments in the quantity and quality of his crops--disappointments often thought to come from other causes--are the result of planting poor seed. seeds not fully ripened, if they grow at all, produce imperfect plants. good seed, therefore, is the first thing necessary for a good crop. the seed of perfect plants only should be saved. by wise and persistent selection, made in the field before the crop is fully matured, corn can be improved in size and made to mature earlier. gather ears only from the most productive plants and save only the largest and best kernels. [illustration: fig. . the kind of ear to select] you have no doubt seen the common american blackbirds that usually migrate and feed in such large numbers. they all look alike in every way. now, has it ever occurred to you to ask why all blackbirds are black? the blackbirds are black simply because their parents are black. now in the same way that the young blackbirds resemble their parents, corn will resemble its parent stock. how many ears of corn do you find on a stalk? one, two, sometimes three or four. you find two ears of corn on a stalk because it is the nature of that particular stalk to produce two ears. in the same way the nature of some stalks is to produce but one ear, while it is the nature of others sometimes to produce two or more. this resemblance of offspring to parent is known to scientists as heredity, or as "like producing like." some southern corn-breeders take advantage of this law to improve their corn crop. if a stalk can be made to produce two ears of corn just as large as the single ear that most stalks bear, we shall get twice as much corn from a field in which the "two-eared" variety is planted. in the north and west the best varieties of corn have been selected to make but one ear to the stalk. it is generally believed that this is the best practice for the shorter growing seasons of the colder states. [illustration: fig. . select seed from a stalk like that on left] these facts ought to be very helpful to us next year when our fathers are planting corn. we should get them to plant seed secured only from stalks that produced the most corn, whether the stalk had two or more ears or only one. if we follow this plan year by year, each acre of land will be made to produce more kernels and hence a larger crop of corn, and yet no more work will be required to raise the crop. in addition to enlarging the yield of corn, you can, by proper selection of the best and most productive plants in the field, grow a new variety of seed corn. to do this you need only take the largest and best kernels from stalks bearing two ears; plant these, and at the next harvest again save the best kernels from stalks bearing the best ears. if you keep up this practice with great care for several years, you will get a vigorous, fruitful variety that will command a high price for seed. =experiment= [illustration: fig. . improvement of corn by selection boone county white corn on left, and original type, from which it was developed by selection, on right] every school boy and girl can make this experiment at leisure. from your own field get two ears of corn, one from a stalk bearing only one ear and the other from a stalk bearing two well-grown ears. plant the grains from one ear in one plat, and the grains from the other in a plat of equal size. use for both the same soil and the same fertilizer. cultivate both plats in the same way. when the crop is ready to harvest, husk the corn, count the ears, and weigh the corn. then write a short essay on your work and on the results and get your teacher to correct the story for your home paper. section xx. weeds have you ever noticed that some weeds are killed by one particular method, but that this same method may entirely fail to kill other kinds of weeds? if we wish to free our fields of weeds with the greatest ease, we must know the nature of each kind of weed and then attack it in the way in which we can most readily destroy it. [illustration: fig. . pigweed] the ordinary pigweed (fig. ) differs from many other weeds in that it lives for only one year. when winter comes, it must die. each plant, however, bears a great number of seeds. if we can prevent the plant from bearing seed in its first year, there will not be many seeds to come up the next season. in fact, only those seeds that were too deeply buried in the soil to come up the previous spring will be left, and of these two-year-old seeds many will not germinate. during the next season some old seeds will produce plants, but the number will be very much diminished. if care be exercised to prevent the pigweed from seeding again, and the same watchfulness be continued for a few seasons, this weed will be almost entirely driven from our fields. a plant like the pigweed, which lives only one year, is called an _annual_ and is one of the easiest weeds to destroy. mustard, plantain, chess, dodder, cockle, crab grass, and jimson weed are a few of our most disagreeable annual weeds. the best time to kill any weed is when it is very small; therefore the ground in early spring should be constantly stirred in order to kill the young weeds before they grow to be strong and hardy. [illustration: fig. . wild carrot] the wild carrot differs from an annual in this way: it lives throughout one whole year without producing seeds. during its first year it accumulates a quantity of nourishment in the root, then rests in the winter. throughout the following summer it uses this nourishment rapidly to produce its flowers and seeds. then the plant dies. plants that live through two seasons in this way are called _biennials_. weeds of this kind may be destroyed by _cutting the roots below the leaves_ with a grubbing-hoe or spud. a spud may be described as a chisel on a long handle (see fig. ). if biennials are not cut low enough they will branch out anew and make many seeds. among the most common biennials are the thistle, moth mullein, wild carrot, wild parsnip, and burdock. [illustration: fig. . a spud] [illustration: fig. . hound's tongue] a third group of weeds consists of those that live for more than two years. these weeds are usually most difficult to kill. they propagate by means of running rootstocks as well as by seeds. plants that live more than two seasons are known as _perennials_ and include, for example, many grasses, dock, canada thistle, poison ivy, passion flower, horse nettle, etc. there are many methods of destroying perennial weeds. they may be dug entirely out and removed. sometimes in small areas they may be killed by crude sulphuric acid or may be starved by covering them with boards or a straw stack or in some other convenient way. a method that is very effective is to smother the weeds by a dense growth of some other plant, for example, cowpeas or buckwheat. cowpeas are to be preferred, since they also enrich the soil by the nitrogen that the root-tubercles gather. [illustration: fig. . canada thistle] weeds do injury in numerous ways; they shade the crop, steal its nourishment, and waste its moisture. perhaps their only service is to make lazy people till their crops. =exercise= you should learn to know by name the twenty worst weeds of your vicinity and to recognize their seeds. if there are any weeds you are not able to recognize, send a sample of each to your state experiment station. make a collection, properly labeled, of weeds and weed seeds for your school. section xxi. seed purity and vitality seeds produce plants. the difference between a large and a small yield may depend upon the kind of plants we raise, and the kind of plant in turn is dependent upon the seeds that we sow. two things are important in the selection of seeds--purity and vitality. seeds should be _pure_; that is, when sown they should produce no other plant than the one that we wish to raise. they should be able to grow. the ability of a seed to grow is termed its _vitality_. good seed should be nearly or quite pure and should possess high vitality. the vitality of seeds is expressed as a per cent; for example, if seeds out of germinate, or sprout, the vitality is said to be . the older the seed the less is its vitality, except in a few rare instances in which seeds cannot germinate under two or three years. cucumber seeds may show per cent vitality when they are one year old, per cent when two years old, and per cent when three years old--the per cent of vitality diminishing with increase of years. the average length of life of the seeds of cultivated plants is short: for example, the tomato lives four years; corn, two years; the onion, two years; the radish, five years. the cucumber seed may retain life after ten years; but the seeds of this plant too lose their vitality with an increase in years. it is important when buying seeds to test them for purity and vitality. dealers who are not honest often sell old seeds, although they know that seeds decrease in value with age. sometimes, however, to cloak dishonesty they mix some new seeds with the old, or bleach old and yellow seeds in order to make them resemble fresh ones. it is important, therefore, that all seeds bought of dealers should be thoroughly examined and tested; for if they do not grow, we not only pay for that which is useless but we are also in great danger of producing so few plants in our fields that we shall not get full use of the land, and thus we may suffer a more serious loss than merely paying for a few dead seeds. it will therefore be both interesting and profitable to learn how to test the vitality of seeds. to test vitality plant one hundred seeds in a pot of earth or in damp sand, or place them between moist pieces of flannel, and take care to keep them moist and warm. count those that germinate and thus determine the percentage of vitality. germinating between flannel is much quicker than planting in earth. care should be used to keep mice away from germinating seeds. (see fig. .) [illustration: fig. . a seed-germinator consisting of two soup plates, some sand, and a piece of cloth] sometimes the appearance of a package will show whether the seed has been kept in stock a long time. it is, however, much more difficult to find out whether the seeds are pure. you can of course easily distinguish seeds that differ much from those you wish to plant, but often certain weed seeds are so nearly like certain crop seeds as not to be easily recognized by the eye. thus the dodder or "love vine," which so often ruins the clover crop, has seeds closely resembling clover seeds. the chess, or cheat, has seeds so nearly like oats that only a close observer can tell them apart. however, if you watch the seeds that you buy, and study the appearance of crop seeds, you may become expert in recognizing those that have no place in your planting. one case is reported in which a seed-dealer intentionally allowed an impurity of per cent to remain in the crop seeds, and this impurity was mainly of weed seeds. there were , of one kind and , of another in each pound of seed. think of planting weeds at that rate! sometimes three fourths of the seeds you buy are weed seeds. in purchasing seeds the only safe plan is to buy of dealers whose reputation can be relied upon. it not seldom happens that seeds, like corn, are stored in open cribs or barns before the moisture is entirely dried out of the seeds. such seeds are liable to be frozen during a severe winter, and of course if this happens they will not sprout the following spring. the only way to tell whether such seeds have been killed is to test samples of them for vitality. testing is easy; replanting is costly and often results in a short crop. [illustration: fig. . impurities in seeds tube represents one pound of redtop grass as bought; tube , amount of pure redtop grass seeds in tube ; tube , amount of chaff and dirt in tube ; tube , amount of weed seeds in tube ; tube , amount of total waste in tube ; tube , amount of pure germinable seeds in tube ] =exercise= examine seeds both for vitality and purity. write for farmers' bulletins on both these subjects. what would be the loss to a farmer who planted a ten-acre clover field with seeds that were per cent bad? can you recognize the seeds of the principal cultivated plants? germinate some beet seeds. what per cent comes up? can you explain? collect for your school as many kinds of wild and cultivated seeds as you can. chapter iv how to raise a fruit tree let each pupil grow an apple tree this year and attempt to make it the best in his neighborhood. in your attempt suppose you try the following plan. in the fall take the seed of an apple--a crab-apple is good--and keep it in a cool place during the winter. the simplest way to do this is to bury it in damp sand. in the spring plant it in a rich, loose soil. great care must be taken of the young shoot as soon as it appears above the ground. you want to make it grow as tall and as straight as possible during this first year of its life, hence you should give it rich soil and protect it from animals. before the ground freezes in the fall take up the young tree with the soil that was around it and keep it all winter in a cool, damp place. now when spring comes it will not do to set out the carefully tended tree, for an apple tree from seed will not be a tree like its parent, but will tend to resemble a more distant ancestor. the distant ancestor that the young apple tree is most likely to take after is the wild apple, which is small, sour, and otherwise far inferior to the fruit we wish to grow. it makes little difference, therefore, what kind of apple seed we plant, since in any event we cannot be sure that the tree grown from it will bear fruit worth having unless we force it to do so. [illustration: fig. . a young fruit-grower] section xxii. grafting by a process known as _grafting_ you can force your tree to produce whatever variety of apple you desire. many people raise fruit trees directly from seed without grafting. thus they often produce really worthless trees. by grafting they would make sure not only of having good trees rather than poor ones but also of having the particular kind of fruit that they wish. hence you must now graft your tree. first you must decide what variety of apple you want to grow on the tree. the magnum bonum is a great favorite as a fall apple. the winesap is a good winter apple, while the red astrachan is a profitable early apple, especially in the lowland of the coast region. the northern spy, Æsop, and spitzenburg are also admirable kinds. possibly some other apple that you know may suit your taste and needs better than any of these varieties. if you have decided to raise an Æsop or a magnum bonum or a winesap, you must now cut a twig from the tree of your choice and graft it upon the little tree that you have raised. choose a twig that is about the thickness of the young tree at the point where you wish to graft. be careful to take the shoot from a vigorous, healthy part of the tree. [illustration: fig. . tongue grafting] there are many ways in which you may join the chosen shoot or twig upon the young tree, but perhaps the best one for you to use is known as _tongue grafting_. this is illustrated in fig. . the upper part, _b_, which is the shoot or twig that you cut from the tree, is known as the _scion_; the lower part, _a_, which is the original tree, is called the _stock_. cut the scion and stock as shown in fig. . join the cut end of the scion to the cut end of the stock. when you join them, notice that under the bark of each there is a thin layer of soft, juicy tissue. this is called the _cambium_. to make a successful graft the cambium in the scion must exactly join the cambium in the stock. be careful, then, to see that cambium meets cambium. you now see why grafting can be more successfully done if you select a scion and stock of nearly the same size. [illustration: fig. . a completed graft showing scion and stock from which it was made] after fitting the parts closely together, bind them with cotton yarn (see fig. ) that has been coated with grafting wax. this wax is made of equal parts of tallow, beeswax, and linseed oil. smear the wax thoroughly over the whole joint, and make sure that the joint is completely air-tight. [illustration: fig. . to make a root graft, cut along the slanting line] the best time to make this graft is when scion and stock are dormant, that is, when they are not in leaf. during the winter, say in february, is the best time to graft the tree. set the grafted tree away again in damp sand until spring, then plant it in loose, rich soil. since all parts growing above the graft will be of the same kind as the scion, while all branches below it will be like the stock, it is well to graft low on the stock or even upon the root itself. the slanting double line in fig. shows the proper place to cut off for such grafting. [illustration: fig. . a completed root graft] if you like you may sometime make the interesting and valuable experiment of grafting scions from various kinds of apple trees on the branches of one stock. in this way you can secure a tree bearing a number of kinds of fruit. you may thus raise the bonum, red astrachan, winesap, and as many other varieties of apples as you wish, upon one tree. for this experiment, however, you will find it better to resort to _cleft grafting_, which is illustrated in fig. . [illustration: fig. . cleft grafting] luther burbank, the originator of the burbank potato, in attempting to find a variety of apple suited to the climate of california, grafted more than five hundred kinds of apple scions on one tree, so that he might watch them side by side and find out which kind was best suited to that state. section xxiii. budding if, instead of an apple tree, you were raising a plum or a peach tree, a form of propagation known as _budding_ would be better than grafting. occasionally budding is also employed for apples, pears, cherries, oranges, and lemons. budding is done in the following manner. a single bud is cut from the scion and is then inserted under the bark of a one-year-old peach seedling, so that the cambium of the bud and stock may grow together. [illustration: fig. . how to cut a bud from a scion] [illustration: fig. . the steps in budding] cut scions of the kind of fruit tree you desire from a one-year-old twig of the same variety. wrap them in a clean, moist cloth until you are ready to use them. just before using cut the bud from the scion, as shown in fig. . this bud is now ready to be inserted on the north side of the stock, just two or three inches above the ground. the north side is selected to avoid the sun. now, as shown at _a_ in fig. , make a cross and an up-and-down incision, or cut, on the stock; pull the bark back carefully, as shown in _b_; insert the bud _c_, as shown in _d_; then fold the bark back and wrap with yarn or raffia, as shown in _e_. as soon as the bud and branches have united, remove the wrapping to prevent its cutting the bark and cut the tree back close to the bud, as in fig. , so as to force nourishment into the inserted bud. [illustration: fig. . sloping line shows where to cut tree] budding is done in the field without disturbing the tree as it stands in the ground. the best time to do budding is during the summer or fall months, when the bark is loose enough to allow the buds to be easily inserted. trees may be budded or grafted on one another only when they are nearly related. thus the apple, crab-apple, hawthorn, and quince are all related closely enough to graft or bud on one another; the pear grows on some hawthorns, but not well on an apple; some chestnuts will unite with some kinds of oaks. [illustration: fig. . lines show where to trim] by using any of these methods you can succeed in getting with certainty the kind of tree that you desire. [illustration: both busy storing apples] section xxiv. planting and pruning the apple tree that you grafted should be set out in the spring. dig a hole three or four feet in diameter where you wish the tree to grow. place the tree in the hole and be very careful to preserve all the fine roots. spread the roots out fully, water them, and pack fine, rich soil firmly about them. place stakes about the young tree to protect it from injury. if the spot selected is in a windy location, incline the tree slightly toward the prevailing wind. [illustration: fig. . present shape comes from pruning] [illustration: fig. . correct shape] you must prune the tree as it grows. the object of pruning is to give the tree proper shape and to promote fruit-bearing. if the bud at the end of the main shoot grows, you will have a tall, cone-shaped tree. if, however, the end of the young tree be cut or "headed back" to the lines shown in fig. , the buds below this point will be forced to grow and make a tree like that shown in fig. . the proper height of heading for different fruits varies. for the apple tree a height of two or three feet is best. cutting an end bud of a shoot or branch always sends the nourishment and growth into the side buds. trimming or pinching off the side buds throws the growth into the end bud. you can therefore cause your tree to take almost any shape you desire. the difference between the trees shown in figs. and is entirely the result of pruning. fig. illustrates in general a correctly shaped tree. it is evenly balanced, admits light freely, and yet has enough foliage to prevent sun-scald. figs. and show the effect of wisely thinning the branches. [illustration: fig. . unthinned] [illustration: fig. . properly thinned] the best time to prune is either in the winter or before the buds start in the spring. winter pruning tends to favor wood-production, while summer pruning lessens wood-production and induces fruitage. each particular kind of fruit requires special pruning; for example, the peach should be made to assume the shape illustrated in fig. . this is done by successive trimmings, following the plan illustrated in figs. , , . you will gain several advantages from these trimmings. first, nourishment will be forced into the peach bud that you set on your stock. this will secure a vigorous growth of the scion. by a second trimming take off the "heel" (fig. , _h_) close to the tree, and thus prevent decay at this point. one year after budding you should reduce the tree to a "whip," as in fig. , by trimming at the dotted line in fig. . this establishes the "head" of the tree, which in the case of the peach should be very low,--about sixteen inches from the ground,--in order that a low foliage may lessen the danger of sun-scald to the main trunk. [illustration: fig. . the customary way of pruning a peach] [illustration: fig. . two-year-old tree cut off heel, _h_] in pruning never leave a stump such as is shown in fig. , _h_. such a stump, having no source of nourishment, will heal very slowly and with great danger of decay. if this heel is cleanly cut on the line _ch_ (fig. ), the wound will heal rapidly and with little danger of decay. leaving such a stump endangers the soundness of the whole tree. fig. shows the results of good and poor pruning on a large tree. when large limbs are removed it is best to paint the cut surface. the paint will ward off fungous disease and thus keep the tree from rotting where it was cut. pruning that leaves large limbs branching, as in fig. , _a_, is not to be recommended, since the limbs when loaded with fruit or when beaten by heavy winds are liable to break. decay is apt to set in at the point of breakage. the entrance of decay-fungi through some such wound or through a tiny crevice at such a crotch is the beginning of the end of many a fruitful tree. [illustration: fig. . three-year-old tree cut back] sometimes a tree will go too much to wood and too little to fruit. this often happens in rich soil and may be remedied by another kind of pruning known as _root-pruning_. this consists in cutting off a few of the roots in order to limit the food supply of the plant. you ought to learn more about root-pruning, however, before you attempt it. [illustration: fig. . refuses to heal--heals promptly] how is a peach tree made? first, the blossom appears. then pollination and fertilization occur. the fruit ripens. the pit, or seed, is saved. in the spring of the next year the seed is planted. the young tree, known as the stock, comes up quickly. in august of that year a bud of the variety which is wanted is inserted in the little stock, near the ground. one year later, in the spring, the stock is cut off just above the bud. the bud throws out a shoot, which grows to a height of about six feet, and in the fall this little peach tree is sold as a one-year-old tree. however, as is seen, the root is two years old. [illustration: fig. . ready to bear] how is an apple tree made? the seeds are saved in the fall of one year and planted the following year. the seedlings of the apple do not grow so rapidly as those of the peach. at the end of the year they are taken up and sorted, and in the following spring they are planted. in july or august they are budded. in the spring of the next year the stock is cut off above the bud, and the bud-shoot grows three or four feet. one year later the shoot branches and the top begins to form; and in the fall of the following year the tree may be sold as a two-year-old, although most persons prefer to buy it a year later as a three-year-old. in some parts of the country, particularly in the west, the little seedling is grafted in the second winter, in a grafting room, and the young grafts are set in the nursery row in the spring to complete their growth. the planting in the orchard of the young peach and the young apple tree is done in practically the same way. after the hole for the tree has been dug and after proper soil has been provided, the roots should be spread and the soil carefully packed around them. =exercise= do you know any trees in your neighborhood that bear both wild and budded or grafted fruit? what are the chief varieties of apples grown in your neighborhood? grapes? currants? plums? cherries? figs? what is a good apple tree worth? is there any land near by that could support a tree and is not now doing so? examine several orchards and see whether the trees have the proper shape. do you see any evidence of poor pruning? do you find any heels? can you see any place where heels have resulted in rotten or hollow trees? how could you have prevented this? has the removal of branches ever resulted in serious decay? how is this to be prevented? if your home is not well stocked with all the principal kinds of fruit, do you not want to propagate and attend to some of each kind? you will be surprised to find how quickly trees will bear and how soon you will be eating fruit from your own planting. growing your own trees will make you feel proud of your skill. chapter v horticulture section xxv. market-gardening the word _horticulture_ is one of those broad words under which much is grouped. it includes the cultivation of orchard fruits, such as apples and plums; of small fruits, such as strawberries and raspberries; of garden vegetables for the table; of flowers of all sorts, including shrubbery and ornamental trees and their arrangement into beautiful landscape effects around our homes. horticulture then is a name for an art that is both far-reaching and important. the word _gardening_ is generally given to that part of horticulture which has for its chief aim the raising of vegetables for our tables. flower-gardening, or the cultivation of plants valued for their bloom in making ornamental beds and borders and furnishing flowers for the decoration of the home, is generally called _floriculture_. landscape-gardening is the art of so arranging flower-beds, grass, shrubbery, and trees as to produce pleasing effects in the grounds surrounding our homes and in great public parks and pleasure grounds. landscape-gardening, like architecture, has developed intoll as the artist makes them on canvas, but uses natural objects in his pictures instead of paint and canvas. =market-gardening.= formerly market-gardening was done on small tracts of land in the immediate vicinity of large cities, where supplies of stable manure could be used from the city stables. but with the great increase in the population of the cities, these small areas could no longer supply the demand, and the introduction of commercial fertilizers and the building of railroads enabled gardeners at great distances from city markets to grow and ship their products. hence the markets, even in winter, are now supplied with fresh vegetables from regions where there is no frost. then, as spring opens, fruits and vegetables are shipped from more temperate regions. later vegetables and fruits come from the sections nearer the great cities. this gradual nearing of the supply fields continues until the gardens near the cities can furnish what is needed. [illustration: fig. . strawberry-growing is an art] the market-gardeners around the great northern cities, finding that winter products were coming from the south and from warmer regions, began to build hothouses and by means of steam and hot-water pipes to make warm climates in these glass houses. many acres of land in the colder sections of the country are covered with heated glass houses, and in them during the winter are produced fine crops of tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, cauliflowers, eggplants, and other vegetables. the degree of perfection which these attain in spite of having such artificial culture, and their freshness as compared to the products brought from a great distance, have made winter gardening under glass a very profitable business. but it is a business that calls for the highest skill and the closest attention. [illustration: fig. . setting plants in a cold-frame] no garden, even for home use, is complete without some glass sashes, and the garden will be all the more successful if there is a small heated greenhouse for starting plants that are afterwards to be set in the garden. =hotbeds.= if there is no greenhouse, a hotbed is an important help in the garden. the bed is made by digging a pit two feet deep, seven feet wide, and as long as necessary. the material for the hotbed is fresh horse manure mixed with leaves. this is thrown into a heap to heat. as soon as steam is seen coming from the heap the manure is turned over and piled again so that the outer part is thrown inside. when the whole is uniformly heated and has been turned two or three times, it is packed firmly into the pit already dug. a frame six feet wide, twelve inches high on the north side and eight inches on the south side and as long as the bed is to be, is now made of plank. this is set upon the heated manure, thus leaving six inches on each side outside the frame. more manure is then banked all around it, and three or four inches of fine light and rich soil are placed inside the frame. [illustration: fig. . the gladiolus] the frame is then covered with hotbed sashes six feet long and three feet wide. these slide up and down on strips of wood let into the sides of the frame. a thermometer is stuck into the soil and closely watched, for there will be too much heat at first for sowing seed. when the heat in the early morning is about °, seeds may be sowed. the hotbed is used for starting tomato plants, eggplants, cabbage plants, and other vegetables that cannot stand exposure. it should be made about eight or ten weeks before the tender plants can be set out in the locality. in the south and southwest it should be started earlier than in the north. for growing the best tomato plants, and for such hardy plants as lettuce and cabbage, it will be better to have cold-frames in addition to the hotbed; these need not be more than two or three sashes. =cold-frames.= a cold-frame is like the frame used for a hotbed, but it is placed on well-manured soil in a sheltered spot. it is covered with the same kind of sashes and is used for hardening the plants sowed in the hotbed. the frame must be well banked with earth on the outside, and the glass must be covered on cold nights with straw, mats, or old carpets to keep out frost. [illustration: fig. . frame to carry the sash of a hotbed or cold-frame] =care of hotbed and cold-frame.= if the sun be allowed to shine brightly on the glass of a cold-frame or hotbed, it will soon raise the temperature in the hotbed to a point that will destroy the plants. it is necessary, then, to pay close attention to the bed and, when the sun shines, to slip the sashes down or raise them and place a block under the upper end to allow the steam to pass off. the cold-frame also must be aired when the sun shines, and the sashes must be gradually slipped down in mild weather. finally, they may be removed entirely on sunshiny days, so as to accustom the plants to the open air, but they must be replaced at night. for a while before setting the plants in the open gardens, leave the sashes off night and day. [illustration: fig. . greenhouse and cold-frames] while the hotbed may be used for starting plants, it is much better and more convenient to have a little greenhouse with fire heat for this purpose. a little house with but four sashes on each side will be enough to start a great many plants, and will also give room for some flowers in pots. with such a house a student can learn to manage a more extensive structure if he gives close attention to airing, watering, and keeping out insects. =sowing.= the time for sowing the different kinds of seeds is an important matter. seeds vary greatly in their requirements. all need three conditions--a proper degree of heat, moisture, and air. some seeds, like english peas, parsnips, beets, and radishes, will germinate and grow when the soil is still cool in the early spring, and peas will stand quite a frost after they are up. therefore we plant english peas as early as the ground can be worked. but if we should plant seeds like corn, string (or snap) beans, squashes, and other tender plants before the ground is warm enough, they would decay. seeds cannot germinate in soil that is perfectly dry, for there must be moisture to swell them and to start growth. the oxygen of the air is also necessary, and if seeds are buried so deeply that the air cannot reach them, they will not grow, even if they are warm and moist. [illustration: fig. . gathering and shipping celery] the depth of planting must vary with the character and size of the seed. english peas may be covered six inches deep and will be all the better for such covering, but if corn be covered so deep, it hardly gets above the ground. in planting small seeds like those of the radish, cabbage, turnip, lettuce, etc., a good rule is to cover them three times the thickness of the seed. in sowing seeds when the ground is rather dry, it is a good plan, after covering them, to tramp on the row so as to press the soil closely to the seeds and to help it to retain moisture for germination, but do not pack the soil if it is damp. in spring never dig or plow the garden while it is still wet, but always wait until the soil is dry enough to crumble freely. =what crops to grow.= the crops to be raised will of course depend upon each gardener's climate, surroundings, and markets. sometimes it may pay a grower, if his soil and climate are particularly suited to one crop, to expend most of his time and energy on this crop; for example, in some sections of new york, on potatoes; in parts of michigan, on celery; in georgia, on watermelons; in western north carolina, on cabbage. if circumstances allow this sort of gardening, it has many advantages, for of course it is much easier to acquire skill in growing one crop than in growing many. [illustration: fig. . a large yield of cabbages] on the other hand, it often happens that a gardener's situation requires him to grow most of the crops known to gardening. each gardener then must be guided in his selection of crops by his surroundings. =care of crops.= the gardener who wishes to attain the greatest success in his art must do four things: first, he must make his land rich and keep it rich. much of his success depends on getting his crops on the market ahead of other growers. to do this, his crops must grow rapidly, and crops grow rapidly only in rich soil. then, too, land conveniently situated for market-gardening is nearly always costly. hence the successful market-gardener must plan to secure the largest possible yield from as small an area as is practicable. the largest yield can of course be secured from the richest land. second, the gardener must cultivate his rich land most carefully and economically. he crowds his land with products that must grow apace. therefore he, least of all growers, can afford to have any of his soil go to feed weeds, to have his land wash, or to have his growing crops suffer for lack of timely and wise cultivation. to cultivate his land economically the gardener must use the best tools and machines and the best methods of soil management. third, to get the best results he must grow perfect vegetables. to do this, he must add to good tillage a knowledge of the common plant diseases and of the ways of insects and bacterial pests; he must know how and when to spray, how and when to treat his seed, how and when to poison, how and when to trap his insect foes and to destroy their hiding-places. fourth, not only must the gardener grow perfect vegetables, but he must put them on the market in perfect condition and in attractive shape. who cares to buy wilted, bruised, spoiling vegetables? gathering, bundling, crating, and shipping are all to be watched carefully. baskets should be neat and attractive, crates clean and snug, barrels well packed and well headed. careful attention to all these details brings a rich return. among the gardener's important crops are the following: =asparagus.= this is a hardy plant. its seed may be sowed either early in the spring or late in the fall. the seeds should be planted in rows. if the plants are well cultivated during the spring and summer, they will make vigorous roots for transplanting in the autumn. in the fall prepare a piece of land by breaking it unusually deep and by manuring it heavily. after the land is thoroughly prepared, make in it furrows for the asparagus roots. these furrows should be six inches deep and three feet apart. then remove the roots from the rows in which they have been growing during the summer, and set them two feet apart in the prepared furrows. cover carefully at once. [illustration: fig. . a crate of asparagus] in the following spring the young shoots must be well cultivated. in order to economize space, beets or lettuce may be grown between the asparagus rows during this first season. with the coming of cold weather the asparagus must again be freely manured and all dead tops cut off. some plants will be ready for market the second spring. if the bed is kept free from weeds and well manured, it will increase in productiveness from year to year. =beans.= the most generally planted beans are those known as string, or snap, beans. of the many varieties, all are sensitive to cold and hence must not be planted until frost is over. another widely grown kind of bean is the lima, or butter, bean. there are two varieties of the lima bean. one is large and generally grows on poles. this kind does best in the northern states. the other is a small bean and may be grown without poles. this kind is best suited to the warmer climates of the southern states. =cabbage.= in comparatively warm climates the first crop of cabbage is generally grown in the following way. the seeds are sowed in beds in september, and the plants grown from this sowing are in november transplanted to ground laid off in sharp ridges. the young plants are set on the south side of the ridges in order that they may be somewhat protected from the cold of winter. as spring comes on, the ridge is partly cut down at each working until the field is leveled, and thereafter the cultivation should be level. [illustration: fig. . cabbage ready for shipment] early cabbages need heavy applications of manure. in the spring, nitrate of soda applied in the rows is very helpful. seeds for the crop following this early crop should be sowed in march. of course these seeds should be of a later variety than the first used. the young plants should be transplanted as soon as they are large enough. early cabbages are set in rows three feet apart, the plants eighteen inches apart in the row. as the later varieties grow larger than the earlier ones, the plants should be set two feet apart in the row. in growing late fall and winter cabbage the time of sowing varies with the climate. for the northern and middle states, seeding should be done during the last of march and in april. south of a line passing west from virginia it is hard to carry cabbages through the heat of summer and get them to head in the fall. however, if the seeds are sowed about the first of august in rich and moist soil and the plants set in the same sort of soil in september, large heads can be secured for the december market. [illustration: fig. . celery trimmed, washed, and bunched] =celery.= in the extreme northern part of our country, celery seeds are often sowed in a greenhouse or hotbed. this is done in order to secure plants early enough for summer blanching. this plan, however, suits only very cool climates. in the middle states the seeds are usually sowed in a well-prepared bed about april. the young plants are moved to other beds as soon as they need room. generally they are transplanted in july to rows prepared for them. these should be four feet apart, and the plants should be set six inches apart in the row. the celery bed should be carefully cultivated during the summer. in the fall, hill the stalks up enough to keep them erect. after the growing season is over dig them and set them in trenches. the trenches should be as deep as the celery is tall, and after the celery is put in them they should be covered with boards and straw. in the more southern states, celery is usually grown in beds. the beds are generally made six feet wide, and rows a foot apart are run crosswise. the plants are set six inches apart, in september, and the whole bed is earthed up as the season advances. finally, when winter comes the beds are covered with leaves or straw to prevent the plants from freezing. the celery is dug and bunched for market at any time during the winter. by means of cold-frames a profitable crop of spring celery may be raised. have the plants ready to go into the cold-frames late in october or early in november. the soil in the frame should be made very deep. the plants should make only a moderately rapid growth during the winter. in the early spring they will grow rapidly and so crowd one another as to blanch well. as celery grown in this way comes on the market at a time when no other celery can be had, it commands a good price. in climates as warm as that of florida, beds of celery can be raised in this way without the protection of cold-frames. a slight freeze does not hurt celery, but a long-continued freezing spell will destroy it. some kinds of celery seem to turn white naturally. these are called self-blanching kinds. other kinds need to be banked with earth in order to make the stalks whiten. this kind usually gives the best and crispest stalks. =cucumbers and cantaloupes.= although cucumbers and cantaloupes are very different plants, they are grown in precisely the same way. some gardeners plant them in hills. however, this is perhaps not the best plan. it is better to lay the land off in furrows six feet apart. after filling these with well-rotted stable manure, throw soil over them. then make the top flat and plant the seeds. after the plants are up thin them out, leaving them a foot or more apart in the rows. cultivate regularly and carefully until the vines cover the entire ground. it is a good plan to sow cowpeas at the last working of cantaloupes, in order to furnish some shade for the melons. as both cucumbers and cantaloupes are easily hurt by cold, they should not be planted until the soil is warm and all danger of frost is past. cucumbers are always cut while they are green. they should never be pulled from the vine, but should always be cut with a piece of the stem attached. cantaloupes should be gathered before they turn yellow and should be ripened in the house. [illustration: fig. . striped cucumber beetle and larva all magnified] in some sections of the country the little striped cucumber-beetle attacks the melons and cucumbers as soon as they come up. these beetles are very active, and if their attacks are not prevented they will destroy the tender plants. bone dust and tobacco dust applied just as the plants appear above the ground will prevent these attacks. this treatment not only keeps off the beetle, but also helps the growth of the plants. =eggplants.= eggplants are so tender that they cannot be transplanted like tomatoes to cold-frames and gradually hardened to stand the cold spring air. these plants, started in a warm place, must be kept there until the soil to which they are to be transplanted is well warmed by the advance of spring. after the warm weather has fully set in, transplant them to rich soil, setting them three feet apart each way. this plant needs much manure. if large, perfect fruit is expected, the ground can hardly be made too rich. eggplants are subject to the same bacterial blight that is so destructive to tomatoes. the only way to prevent this disease is to plant in ground not lately used for tomatoes or potatoes. [illustration: fig. . an onion harvest] =onions.= the method of growing onions varies with the use to which it is intended to put them. to make the early sorts, which are eaten green in the spring, little onions called _sets_ are planted. these are grown from seeds sowed late in the spring. the seeds are sowed thickly in rows in rather poor land. the object of selecting poor land is that the growth of the sets may be slow. when the sets have reached the size of small marbles, they are ready for the fall planting. in the south the sets may be planted in september. plant them in rows in rich and well-fertilized soil. they will be ready for market in march or april. in the more northerly states the sets are to be planted as early as possible in the spring. to grow ripe onions the seeds must be sowed as early in the spring as the ground can be worked. the plants are thinned to a stand of three inches in the rows. as they grow, the soil is drawn away from them so that the onions sit on top of the soil with only their roots in the earth. [illustration: fig. . hotbed for starting tomato plants] as soon as the tops ripen pull the onions and let them lie in the sun until the tops are dry. then put them under shelter. as onions keep best with their tops attached, do not remove these until it is time for marketing. =peas.= the english pea is about the first vegetable of the season to be planted. it may be planted as soon as the ground is in workable condition. peas are planted in rows, and it is a good plan to stretch wire netting for them to climb on. however, where peas are extensively cultivated they are allowed to fall on the ground. there are many sorts of peas, differing both in quality and in time of production. the first to be planted are the extra-early varieties. these are not so fine as the later, wrinkled sorts, but the seeds are less apt to rot in cold ground. following these, some of the fine, wrinkled sorts are to be planted in regular succession. peas do not need much manure and do best in a light, warm soil. =tomatoes.= there is no vegetable grown that is more widely used than the tomato. whether fresh or canned it is a staple article of food that can be served in many ways. by careful selection and breeding, the fruit of the tomato has in recent years been much improved. there are now many varieties that produce perfectly smooth and solid fruit, and the grower can hardly go amiss in his selection of seeds if he bears his climate and his particular needs in mind. early tomatoes are started in the greenhouse or in the hotbed about ten weeks before the time for setting the plants in the open ground. they are transplanted to cold-frames as soon as they are large enough to handle. this is done to harden the plants and to give them room to grow strong before the final transplanting. in kitchen gardens tomatoes are planted in rows four feet apart with the plants two feet apart in the rows. they are generally trained to stakes with but one stalk to a stake. when there is plenty of space, however, the plants are allowed to grow at will and to tumble on the ground. in this way they bear large crops. during the winter the markets are supplied with tomatoes either from tropical sections or from hothouses. as those grown in the hothouses are superior in flavor to those shipped from florida and from the west indies, and as they command good prices, great quantities are grown in this way. in the south the bacterial blight which attacks the plants of this family is a serious drawback to tomato culture. the only way to escape this disease is to avoid planting tomatoes on land in which eggplants, tomatoes, or potatoes have been blighted. lime spread around the plants seems to prevent the blight for one season on some soils. at the approach of frost in the fall, green tomatoes can easily be preserved by wrapping them in paper. gather them carefully and wrap each separately. pack them in boxes and store in a cellar that is close enough to prevent the freezing of the fruit. a few days before the tomatoes are wanted for the table unpack as many as are needed, remove the paper, and allow them to ripen in a warm room. tomatoes require a rich soil. scattering a small quantity of nitrate of soda around their roots promotes rapid growth. =watermelons.= as watermelons need more room than can usually be spared in a garden, they are commonly grown as a field crop. a very light, sandy soil suits watermelons best. they can be grown on very poor soil if a good supply of compost be placed in each hill. the land for the melons should be laid off in about ten-foot checks; that is, the furrows should cross one another at right angles about every ten feet. a wide hole should be dug where the furrows cross, and into this composted manure should be put. the best manure for watermelons is a compost of stable manure and wood-mold from the forest. pile the manure and wood-mold in alternate layers for some time before the planting season. during the winter cut through the pile several times until the two are thoroughly mixed and finely pulverized. be sure to keep the compost heap under shelter. compost will lose in value if it is exposed to rains. at planting-time, put two or three shovelfuls of this compost into each of the prepared holes, and over the top of the manure scatter a handful of any high-grade complete fertilizer. then cover fertilizer and manure with soil, and plant the seeds in this soil. in cultivating, plow both ways of the checked rows and throw the earth toward the plants. some growers pinch off the vines when they have grown about three feet long. this is done to make them branch more freely, but the pinching is not necessary. a serious disease, the watermelon wilt, is rapidly spreading through melon-growing sections. this disease is caused by germs in the soil, and the germs are hard to kill. if the wilt should appear in your neighborhood, do not allow any stable manure to be used on your melon land, for the germs are easily scattered by means of stable manure. the germs also cling to the seeds of diseased melons, and these seeds bear the disease to other fields. if you treat melon seeds as you are directed on page to treat oat seeds, the germs on the seeds will be destroyed. by crossing the watermelon on the citron melon, a watermelon that is resistant to wilt has recently been developed and successfully grown in soils in which wilt is present. the new melon, inferior in flavor at first, is being improved from season to season and bids fair to rival other melons in flavor. [illustration: fig. . dewberries] section xxvi. flower gardening the comforts and joys of life depend largely upon small things. of these small things perhaps none holds a position of greater importance in country life than the adornment of the home, indoors and outdoors, with flowers tastefully arranged. their selection and planting furnish pleasant recreation; their care is a pleasing employment; and each little plant, as it sprouts and grows and develops, may become as much a pet as creatures of the sister animal kingdom. a beautiful, well-kept yard adds greatly to the pleasure and attractiveness of a country home. if a beautiful yard and home give joy to the mere passer-by, how much more must their beauty appeal to the owners. the decorating of the home shows ambition, pride, and energy--important elements in a successful life. [illustration: fig. . an easy way to beautify the home] plant trees and shrubs in your yard and border your masses of shrubbery with flower-beds. do not disfigure a lawn by placing a bed of flowers in it. use the flowers rather to decorate the shrubbery, and for borders along walks, and in the corners near steps, or against foundations. if you wish to raise flowers for the sake of flowers, not as decorations, make the flower-beds in the back yard or at the side of the house. [illustration: fig. . a back yard to refine the children of the family] plants may be grown from seeds or from bulbs or from cuttings. the rooting of cuttings is an interesting task to all who are fond of flowers. those who have no greenhouse and who wish to root cuttings of geraniums, roses, and other plants may do so in the following way. take a shallow pan, an old-fashioned milk pan for instance, fill it nearly full of clean sand, and then wet the sand thoroughly. stick the cuttings thickly into this wet sand, set the pan in a warm, sunny window, and keep the sand in the same water-soaked condition. most cuttings will root well in a few weeks and may then be set into small flower-pots. cuttings of tea roses should have two or three joints and be taken from a stem that has just made a flower. allow one of the rose leaves to remain at the top of the cutting. stick this cutting into the sand and it will root in about four weeks. cuttings of cape jasmine may be rooted in the same way. some geraniums, the rose geranium for example, may be grown from cuttings of the roots. [illustration: fig. . repotting] bulbs are simply the lower ends of the leaves of a plant wrapped tightly around one another and inclosing the bud that makes the future flower-stalk. the hyacinth, the narcissus, and the common garden onion are examples of bulbous plants. the flat part at the bottom of the bulb is the stem of the plant reduced to a flat disk, and between each two adjacent leaves on this flat stem there is a bud, just as above-ground there is a bud at the base of a leaf. these buds on the stem of the bulb rarely grow, however, unless forced to do so artificially. the number of bulbs may be greatly increased by making these buds grow and form other bulbs. in increasing hyacinths the matured bulbs are dug in the spring, and the under part of the flat stem is carefully scraped away to expose the base of the buds. the bulbs are then put in heaps and covered with sand. in a few weeks each bud has formed a little bulb. the gardener plants the whole together to grow one season, after which the little bulbs are separated and grown into full-sized bulbs for sale. other bulbs, like the narcissus or the daffodil, form new bulbs that separate without being scraped. [illustration: fig. . a clematis] there are some other plants which have underground parts that are commonly called bulbs but which are not bulbs at all; for example, the gladiolus and the caladium, or elephant's ear. their underground parts are bulblike in shape, but are really solid flattened stems with eyes like the underground stem of the irish potato. these parts are called _corms_. they may be cut into pieces like the potato and each part will grow. the dahlia makes a mass of roots that look greatly like sweet potatoes, but there are no eyes on them as there are on the sweet potato. the only eyes are on the base of the stem to which they are joined. they may be sprouted like sweet potatoes and then soft cuttings made of the green shoots, after which they may be rooted in the greenhouse and later planted in pots. there are many perennial plants that will bloom the first season when grown from the seed, though such seedlings are seldom so good as the plants from which they came. they are generally used to originate new varieties. seeds of the dahlia, for instance, can be sowed in a box in a warm room in early march, potted as soon as the plants are large enough to handle, and finally planted in the garden when the weather is warm. they will bloom nearly as soon as plants grown by dividing the roots or from cuttings. [illustration: fig. . outdoor-grown chrysanthemums] in growing annual plants from seed, there is little difficulty if the grower has a greenhouse or a hotbed with a glass sash. even without these the plants may be grown in shallow boxes in a warm room. the best boxes are about four inches deep with bottoms made of slats nailed a quarter of an inch apart to give proper drainage. some moss is laid over the bottom to prevent the soil from sifting through. the boxes should then be filled with light, rich soil. fine black forest mold, thoroughly mixed with one fourth its bulk of well-rotted manure, makes the best soil for filling the seed-boxes. if this soil be placed in an oven and heated very hot, the heat will destroy many weeds that would otherwise give trouble. after the soil is put in the boxes it should be well packed by pressing it with a flat wooden block. sow the seeds in straight rows, and at the ends of the rows put little wooden labels with the names of the flowers on them. [illustration: fig. . the carnation (eldorado)] seeds sowed in the same box should be of the same general size in order that they may be properly covered, for seeds need to be covered according to their size. after sowing the seed, sift the fine soil over the surface of the box. the best soil for covering small seeds is made by rubbing dry moss and leaf-mold through a sieve together. this makes a light cover that will not bake and will retain moisture. after covering the seeds, press the soil firm and smooth with a wooden block. now sprinkle the covering soil lightly with a watering-pot until it is fairly moistened. lay some panes of glass over the box to retain the moisture, and avoid further watering until moisture becomes absolutely necessary. too much watering makes the soil too compact and rots the seed. as soon as the seedlings have made a second pair of leaves, take them up with the point of a knife and transplant them into other boxes filled in the same way. they should be set two inches apart so as to give them room to grow strong. they may be transplanted from the boxes to the flower-garden by taking an old knife-blade and cutting the earth into squares, and then lifting the entire square with the plant and setting it where it is wanted. there are many flower-seeds which are so small that they must not be covered at all. in this class we find begonias, petunias, and chinese primroses. to sow these prepare boxes as for the other seeds, and press the earth smooth. then scatter some fine, dry moss thinly over the surface of the soil. sprinkle this with water until it is well moistened, and at once scatter the seeds thinly over the surface and cover the boxes with panes of glass until the seeds germinate. transplant as soon as the young plants can be lifted out separately on the blade of a penknife. [illustration: fig. . the poet's narcissus] many kinds of flower-seeds may be sowed directly in the open ground where they are to remain. the sweet pea is one of the most popular flowers grown in this way. the seeds should be sowed rather thickly in rows and covered fully four inches deep. the sowing should be varied in time according to the climate. from north carolina southward, sweet peas may be sowed in the fall or in january, as they are very hardy and should be forced to bloom before the weather becomes hot. late spring sowing will not give fine flowers in the south. from north carolina northward the seeds should be sowed just as early in the spring as the ground can be easily worked. when the plants appear, stakes should be set along the rows and a strip of woven-wire fence stretched for the plants to climb on. morning-glory seeds are also sowed where they are to grow. the seeds of the moonflower are large and hard and will fail to grow unless they are slightly cut. to start their growth make a slight cut just through the hard outer coat of the seed so as to expose the white inside. in this way they will grow very readily. the seeds of the canna, or indian-shot plant, are treated in a similar way to start them growing. [illustration: fig. . a cyclamen] [illustration: fig. . a modern sweet pea] the canna makes large fleshy roots which in the north are taken up, covered with damp moss, and stored under the benches of the greenhouse or in a cellar. if allowed to get too dry, they will wither. from central north carolina south it is best to cover them up thickly with dead leaves and let them stay in the ground where they grew. in the early spring take them up and divide for replanting. [illustration: fig. . dahlias] perennial plants, such as our flowering shrubs, are grown from cuttings of the ripe wood after the leaves have fallen in autumn. from north carolina southward these cuttings should be set in rows in the fall. cuttings ten inches long are set so that the tops are just even with the ground. a light cover of pine leaves will prevent damage from frost. farther north the cuttings should be tied in bundles and well buried in the ground with earth heaped over them. in the spring set them in rows for rooting. in the south all the hardy hybrid perpetual roses can be grown in this way, and in any section the cuttings of most of the spring-flowering shrubs will grow in the same manner. the japanese quince, which makes such a show of its scarlet flowers in early spring, can be best grown from three-inch cuttings made of the roots and planted in rows in the fall. [illustration: fig. . four-o'clocks set in a good place] many of our ornamental evergreen trees, such as the arbor vitæ, can be grown in the spring from seeds sowed in a frame. cotton cloth should be stretched over the trees while they are young, to prevent the sun from scorching them. when a year old they may be set in nursery rows to develop until they are large enough to plant. arbor vitæ may also be grown from cuttings made by setting young tips in boxes of sand in the fall and keeping them warm and moist through the winter. most of them will be rooted by spring. the kinds of flowers that you can grow are almost countless. you can hardly make a mistake in selecting, as all are interesting. start this year with a few and gradually increase the number under your care year by year, and aim always to make your plants the choicest of their kind. of annuals there are over four hundred kinds cultivated. you may select from the following list: phlox, petunias, china asters, california poppies, sweet peas, pinks, double and single sunflowers, hibiscus, candytuft, balsams, morning-glories, stocks, nasturtiums, verbenas, mignonette. [illustration: fig. . a window box] of perennials select bleeding-hearts, pinks, bluebells, hollyhocks, perennial phlox, perennial hibiscus, wild asters, and goldenrods. from bulbs choose crocus, tulip, daffodil, narcissus, lily of the valley, and lily. some climbers are cobæa, honeysuckle, virginia creeper, english ivy, boston ivy, cypress vine, hyacinth bean, climbing nasturtiums, and roses. to make your plants do best, cultivate them carefully. allow no weeds to grow among them and do not let the surface of the soil dry into a hard crust. beware, however, of stirring the soil too deep. loosening the soil about the roots interrupts the feeding of the plant and does harm. climbing plants may be trained to advantage on low woven-wire fences. these are especially serviceable for sweet peas and climbing nasturtiums. do not let the plants go to seed, since seeding is a heavy drain on nourishment. moreover, the plant has served its end when it seeds and is ready then to stop blossoming. you should therefore pick off the old flowers to prevent their developing seeds. this will cause many plants which would otherwise soon stop blossoming to continue bearing flowers for a longer period. [illustration: fig. . a window-garden] =window-gardening.= growing plants indoors in the window possesses many of the attractions of outdoor flower-gardening, and is a means of beautifying the room at very small expense. especially do window-gardens give delight during the barren winter time. they are a source of culture and pleasure to thousands who cannot afford extended and expensive ornamentation. the window-garden may vary in size from an eggshell holding a minute plant to boxes filling all the available space about the window. the soil may be in pots for individual plants or groups of plants or in boxes for collections of plants. you may raise your flowers inside of the window on shelves or stands, or you may have a set of shelves built outside of the window and inclosed in glazed sashes. the illustration on page gives an idea of such an external window-garden. [illustration: fig. . an inside window box in its full glory] the soil must be rich and loose. the best contains some undecayed organic matter such as leaf-mold or partly decayed sods and some sand. raise your plants from bulbs, cuttings, or seed, just as in outdoor gardens. some plants do better in cool rooms, others in a warmer temperature. [illustration: fig. . making the outside of a window bloom] if the temperature ranges from ° to °, averaging about °, azaleas, daisies, carnations, candytuft, alyssum, dusty miller, chrysanthemums, cinerarias, camellias, daphnes, geraniums, petunias, violets, primroses, and verbenas make especially good growths. [illustration: a beautiful window flower] if the temperature is from ° to °, averaging °, try abutilon, begonia, bouvardia, caladium, canna, cape jasmine, coleus, fuchsia, gloxinia, heliotrope, lantana, lobelia, roses, and smilax. if your box or window is shaded a good part of the time, raise begonias, camellias, ferns, and asparagus sprengeri. [illustration: fig. . ferns for both indoors and outdoors] when the soil is dry, water it; then apply no more water until it again becomes dry. beware of too much water. the plants should be washed occasionally with soapsuds and then rinsed. if red spiders are present, sponge them off with water as hot as can be borne comfortably by the hand. newspapers afford a good means of keeping off the cold. chapter vi the diseases of plants section xxvii. the cause and nature of plant disease plants have diseases just as animals do; not the same diseases, to be sure, but just as serious for the plant. some of them are so dangerous that they kill the plant; others partly or wholly destroy its usefulness or its beauty. some diseases are found oftenest on very young plants, others prey on the middle-aged tree, while still others attack merely the fruit. whenever a farmer or fruit-grower has disease on his plants, he is sure to lose much profit. you have all seen rotten fruit. this is diseased fruit. fruit rot is a plant disease. it costs farmers millions of dollars annually. a fruit-grower recently lost sixty carloads of peaches in a single year through rot which could have been largely prevented if he had known how. many of the yellowish or discolored spots on leaves are the result of disease, as is also the smut of wheat, corn, and oats, the blight of the pear, and the wilt of cotton. many of these diseases are contagious, or, as we often hear said of measles, "catching." this is true, among others, of the apple and peach rots. a healthy apple can catch this disease from a sick apple. you often see evidence of this in the apple bin. so, too, many of the diseases found in the field or garden are contagious. sometimes when the skin of a rotten apple has been broken you will find in the broken place a blue mold. it was this that caused the apple to decay. this mold is a living plant; very small, certainly, but nevertheless a plant. let us learn a little about molds, in order that we may better understand our apple and potato rots, as well as other plant diseases. if you cut a lemon and let it stand for a day or two, there will probably appear a blue mold like that you have seen on the surface of canned fruit. bread also sometimes has this blue mold; at other times bread has a black mold, and yet again a pink or a yellow mold. these and all other molds are tiny living plants. instead of seeds they produce many very small bodies that serve the purpose of seeds and reproduce the mold. these are called _spores_. fig. shows how they are borne on the parent plant. [illustration: fig. . tangled threads of blue mold the single stalk on the left shows how spores are borne] it is also of great importance to decide whether by keeping the spores away we may prevent mold. possibly this experiment will help us. moisten a piece of bread, then dip a match or a pin into the blue mold on a lemon, and draw the match across the moist bread. you will thus plant the spores in a row, though they are so small that perhaps you may not see any of them. place the bread in a damp place for a few days and watch it. does the mold grow where you planted it? does it grow elsewhere? this experiment should prove to you that molds are living things and can be planted. if you find spots elsewhere, you must bear in mind that these spores are very small and light and that some of them were probably blown about when you made your sowing. when you touch the moldy portion of a dry lemon, you see a cloud of dust rise. this dust is made of millions of spores. [illustration: fig. . magnified rose mildew] if you plant many other kinds of mold you will find that the molds come true to the kind that is planted; that like produces like even among molds. [illustration: fig. . a mildewed rose] you can prove, also, that the mold is caused only by other mold. to do this, put some wet bread in a wide-mouthed bottle and plug the mouth of the bottle with cotton. kill all the spores that may be in this bottle by steaming it an hour in a cooking-steamer. this bread will not mold until you allow live mold from the outside to enter. if, however, at any time you open the bottle and allow spores to enter, or if you plant spores therein, and if there be moisture enough, mold will immediately set in. [illustration: fig. . a highly magnified section of diseased pear leaf showing how spores are borne] the little plants which make up these molds are called _fungi_. some fungi, such as the toadstools, puffballs, and devil's snuff-box, are quite large; others, namely the molds, are very small; and others are even smaller than the molds. fungi never have the green color of ordinary plants, always reproduce by spores, and feed on living matter or matter that was once alive. puffballs, for example, are found on rotting wood or dead twigs or roots. some fungi grow on living plants, and these produce plant disease by taking their nourishment from the plant on which they grow; the latter plant is called the _host_. the same blue mold that grows on bread often attacks apples that have been slightly bruised; it cannot pierce healthy apple skin. you can plant the mold in the bruised apple just as you did on bread and watch its rapid spread through the apple. you learn from this the need of preventing bruised or decayed apples from coming in contact with healthy fruit. [illustration: fig. . spores of the pear scab the spores are borne on stalks] just as the fungus studied above lives in the apple or bread, so other varieties live on leaves, bark, etc. fig. represents the surface of a mildewed rose leaf greatly magnified. this mildew is a fungus. you can see its creeping stems, its upright stalk, and numerous spores ready to fall off and spread the disease with the first breath of wind. you must remember that this figure is greatly magnified, and that the whole portion shown in the figure is only about one tenth of an inch across. fig. shows the general appearance of a twig affected by this disease. mildew on the rose or on any other plant may be killed by spraying the leaves with a solution of liver of sulphur; to make this solution, use one ounce of the liver of sulphur to two gallons of water. the fungus that causes the pear-leaf spots has its spores in little pits (fig. ). the spores of some fungi also grow on stalks, as shown in fig. . this figure represents an enlarged view of the pear scab, which causes so much destruction. you see, then, that fungi are living plants that grow at the expense of other plants and cause disease. now if you can cover the leaf with a poison that will kill the spore when it comes, you can prevent the disease. one such poison is the bordeaux (_bôr-do_') mixture, which has proved of great value to farmers. since the fungus in most cases lives within the leaves, the poison on the outside does no good after the fungus is established. the treatment can be used only to _prevent_ attack, not to cure, except in the case of a few mildews that live on the outside of the leaf, as does the rose mildew. =exercise= why do things mold more readily in damp places? do you now understand why fruit is heated before it is canned? try to grow several kinds of mold. do you know any fungi which may be eaten? transfer disease from a rotten apple to a healthy one and note the rapidity of decay. how many really healthy leaves can you find on a strawberry plant? do you find any spots with reddish borders and white centers? do you know that this is a serious disease of the strawberry? what damage does fruit mold do to peaches, plums, or strawberries? write to your experiment station for bulletins on plant diseases and methods for making and using spraying mixtures. section xxviii. yeast and bacteria can you imagine a plant so small that it would take one hundred plants lying side by side to equal the thickness of a sheet of writing-paper? there are plants that are so small. moreover, these same plants are of the utmost importance to man. some of them do him great injury, while others aid him very much. you will see their importance when you are told that certain of them in their habits of life cause great change in the substances in which they live. for example, when living in a sugary substance they change the sugar into a gas and an alcohol. do you remember the bright bubbles of gas you have seen rising in sweet cider or in wine as it soured? these bubbles are caused by one of these small plants--the yeast plant. as the yeast plant grows in the sweet fruit juice, alcohol is made and a gas is given off at the same time, and this gas makes the bubbles. [illustration: fig. . yeast plants _a_, a single plant; _b_, group of two budding cells; _c_, group of several cells] later, other kinds of plants equally small will grow and change the alcohol into an acid which you will recognize as vinegar by its sour taste and peculiar odor. thus vinegar is made by the action of two different kinds of little living plants in the cider. that these are living beings you can prove by heating the cider and keeping it tightly sealed so that nothing can enter it. you will find that because the living germs have been killed by the heat, the cider will not ferment or sour as it did before. the germs could of course be killed by poisons, but then the cider would be unfit for use. it is this same little yeast plant that causes bread to rise. when you see any decaying matter you may know that in it minute plants much like the yeast plant are at work. since decay is due to them, we take advantage of the fact that they cannot grow in strong brine or smoke; and we prepare meat for keeping by salting it or by smoking it or by both of these methods. you see that some of the yeast plants and _bacteria_, as many of these forms are called, are very friendly to us, while others do us great harm. some bacteria grow within the bodies of men and other animals or in plants. when they do so they may produce disease. typhoid fever, diphtheria, consumption, and many other serious diseases are caused by bacteria. fig. , _e_, shows the bacterium that causes typhoid fever. in the picture, of course, it is very greatly magnified. in reality these bacteria are so small that about twenty-five thousand of them side by side would extend only one inch. these small beings produce their great effects by very rapid multiplication and by giving off powerful poisons. [illustration: fig. . forms of bacteria _a_, grippe; _b_, bubonic plague; _c_, diphtheria; _d_, tuberculosis; _e_, typhoid fever] bacteria are so small that they are readily borne on the dust particles of the air and are often taken into the body through the breath and also through water or milk. you can therefore see how careful you should be to prevent germs from getting into the air or into water or milk when there is disease about your home. you should heed carefully all instructions of your physician on this point, so that you may not spread disease. section xxix. prevention of plant disease in the last two sections you have learned something of the nature of those fungi and bacteria that cause disease in animals and plants. now let us see how we can use this knowledge to lessen the diseases of our crops. farmers lose through plant diseases much that could be saved by proper precaution. first, you must remember that every diseased fruit, twig, or leaf bears millions of spores. these must be destroyed by burning. they must not be allowed to lie about and spread the disease in the spring. see that decayed fruit in the bin or on the trees is destroyed in the same manner. never throw decayed fruit into the garden or orchard, as it may cause disease the following year. second, you can often kill spores on seeds before they are planted and thus prevent the development of the fungus (see pp. - ). third, often the foliage of the plant can be sprayed with a poison that will prevent the germination of the spores (see pp. - ). fourth, some varieties of plants resist disease much more stoutly than others. we may often select the resistant form to great advantage (see fig. ). fifth, after big limbs are pruned off, decay often sets in at the wound. this decay may be prevented by coating the cut surface with paint, tar, or some other substance that will not allow spores to enter the wound or to germinate there. sixth, it frequently happens that the spore or fungus remains in the soil. this is true in the cotton wilt, and the remedy is so to rotate crops that the diseased land is not used again for this crop until the spores or fungi have died. section xxx. some special plant diseases =fire-blight of the pear and apple.= you have perhaps heard your father speak of the "fire-blight" of pear and apple trees. this is one of the most injurious and most widely known of fruit diseases. do you want to know the cause of this disease and how to prevent it? first, how will you recognize this disease? if the diseased bough at which you are looking has true fire-blight, you will see a blackened twig with withered, blackened leaves. during winter the leaves do not fall from blighted twigs as they do from healthy ones. the leaves wither because of the diseased twig, not because they are themselves diseased. only rarely does the blight really enter the leaf. sometimes a sharp line separates the blighted from the healthy part of the twig. this disease is caused by bacteria, of which you have read in another section. the fire-blight bacteria grow in the juicy part of the stem, between the wood and the bark. this tender, fresh layer (as explained on page ) is called the _cambium_, and is the part that breaks away and allows you to slip the bark off when you make your bark whistle in the spring. the growth of new wood takes place in the cambium, and this part of the twig is therefore full of nourishment. if this nourishment is stolen the plant of course soon suffers. the bacteria causing fire-blight are readily carried from flower to flower and from twig to twig by insects; therefore to keep these and other bacteria away from your trees you must see to it that all the trees in the neighborhood of your orchard are kept free from mischievous enemies. if harmful bacteria exist in near-by trees, insects will carry them to your orchard. you must therefore watch all the relatives of the pear; namely, the apple, hawthorn, crab, quince, and mountain ash, for any of these trees may harbor the germs. [illustration: fig. . a resistant variety of sea island cotton all the other plants in this field died. this one row lived because it could resist the cotton wilt] when any tree shows blight, every diseased twig on it must be cut off and burned in order to kill the germs, and you must cut low enough on the twig to get all the bacteria. it is best to cut a foot below the blackened portion. if by chance your knife should cut into wood containing the living germs, and then you should cut into healthy wood with the same knife, you yourself would spread the disease. it is therefore best after each cutting to dip your knife into a solution of carbolic acid. this will kill all bacteria clinging to the knife-blade. the surest time to do complete trimming is after the leaves fall in the autumn, as diseased twigs are most easily recognized at that time, but the orchard should be carefully watched in the spring also. if a large limb shows the blight, it is perhaps best to cut the tree entirely down. there is little hope for such a tree. a large pear-grower once said that no man with a sharp knife need fear the fire-blight. yet our country loses greatly by this disease each year. [illustration: fig. . fire-blight bacteria magnified] it may be added that winter pruning tends to make the tree form much new wood and thus favors the disease. rich soil and fertilizers make it much easier in a similar way for the tree to become a prey to blight. =exercise= ask your teacher to show you a case of fire-blight on a pear or apple tree. can you distinguish between healthy and diseased wood? cut the twig open lengthwise and see how deep into the wood and how far down the stem the disease extends. can you tell surely from the outside how far the twig is diseased? can you find any twig that does not show a distinct line of separation between diseased and healthy wood? if so, the bacteria are still living in the cambium. cut out a small bit of the diseased portion and insert it under the bark of a healthy, juicy twig within a few inches of its tip and watch it from day to day. does the tree catch the disease? this experiment may prove to you how easily the disease spreads. if you should see any drops like dew hanging from diseased twigs, touch a little of this moisture to a healthy flower and watch for results. cut and burn all diseased twigs that you can find. estimate the damage done by fire-blight. farmers' bulletins on orchard enemies are published by the department of agriculture, washington, d.c., and can be had by writing for them. they will help your father much in treating fire-blight. =oat smuts.= let us go out into a near-by oat field and look for all the blackened heads of grain that we can find. how many are there? to count accurately let us select an area one foot square. we must look carefully, for many of these blackened heads are so low that we shall not see them at the first glance. you will be surprised to find as many as thirty or forty heads in every hundred so blackened. these blackened heads are due to a plant disease called _smut_. [illustration: fig. . loose smut of oats the glumes at _a_ more nearly destroyed than the glumes at _b_] when threshing-time comes you will notice a great quantity of black dust coming from the grain as it passes through the machine. the air is full of it. this black dust consists of the spores of a tiny fungous plant. the fungous smut plant grows upon the oat plant, ripens its spores in the head, and is ready to be thoroughly scattered among the grains of the oats as they come from the threshing-machine. these spores cling to the grain and at the next planting are ready to attack the sprouting plantlet. a curious thing about the smut is that it can gain a foothold only on very young oat plants; that is, on plants about an inch long or of the age shown in fig. . when grain covered with smut spores is planted, the spores develop with the sprouting seeds and are ready to attack the young plant as it breaks through the seed-coat. you see, then, how important it is to have seed grain free from smut. a substance has been found that will, without injuring the seeds, kill all the smut spores clinging to the grain. this substance is called _formalin_. enough seed to plant a whole acre can be treated with formalin at a cost of only a few cents. such treatment insures a full crop and clean seed for future planting. try it if you have any smut. [illustration: fig. . a crop from oats treated with formalin] fig. illustrates what may be gained by using seeds treated to prevent smut. the annual loss to the farmers of the united states from smut on oats amounts to several millions of dollars. all that is needed to prevent this loss is a little care in the treatment of seed and a proper rotation of crops. =exercise= count the smutted heads on a patch three feet square and estimate the percentage of smut in all the wheat and oat fields near your home. on which is it most abundant? do you know of any fields that have been treated for smut? if so, look for smut in these fields. ask how they were treated. do you know of any one who uses bluestone for wheat smut? can oats be treated with bluestone? at planting time get an ounce of formalin at your drug store or from the state experiment station. mix this with three gallons of water. this amount will treat three bushels of seeds. spread the seeds thinly on the barn floor and sprinkle them with the mixture, being careful that all the seeds are thoroughly moistened. cover closely with blankets for a few hours and plant very soon after treatment. try this and estimate the per cent of smut at next harvest-time. write to your experiment station for a bulletin on smut treatment. [illustration: fig. . a scabby seed potato] [illustration: fig. . a healthy seed potato] =potato scab.= the scab of the white, or irish, potato is one of the commonest and at the same time most easily prevented of plant diseases. yet this disease diminishes the profits of the potato-grower very materially. fig. shows a very scabby potato, while fig. represents a healthy one. this scab is caused by a fungous growth on the surface of the potato. of course it lessens the selling-price of the potatoes. if seed potatoes be treated to a bath of formalin just before they are planted, the formalin will kill the fungi on the potatoes and greatly diminish the amount of scab at the next harvest. therefore before they are planted, seed potatoes should be soaked in a weak solution of formalin for about two hours. one-half pint of formalin to fifteen gallons of water makes a proper solution. [illustration: fig. from a scabby potato, like the one in fig. , this yield was obtained] [illustration: fig. from a healthy potato, like the one in fig. , this yield was obtained] [illustration: fig. . effect of spraying sprayed potatoes on left; unsprayed on right] one pint of formalin, or enough for thirty gallons of water, will cost but thirty-five cents. since this solution can be used repeatedly, it will do for many bushels of seed potatoes. =late potato blight.= the blight is another serious disease of the potato. this is quite a different disease from the scab and so requires different treatment. the blight is caused by another fungus, which attacks the foliage of the potato plant. when the blight seriously attacks a crop, it generally destroys the crop completely. in the year a potato famine extending over all the united states and europe was caused by this disease. [illustration: fig. . yield from two fields of the same size the one at the top was sprayed; the one at the bottom was unsprayed] spraying is the remedy for potato blight. fig. shows the effect of spraying upon the yield. in this case the sprayed field yielded three hundred and twenty-four bushels an acre, while the unsprayed yielded only one hundred bushels to an acre. fig. shows the result of three applications of the spraying mixture on the diseased field. figs. and show how the spraying is done. [illustration: fig. . spraying machine] [illustration: fig. . spraying machine] =exercise= watch the potatoes at the next harvest and estimate the number that is damaged by scab. you will remember that formalin is the substance used to prevent grain smuts. write to your state experiment station for a bulletin telling how to use formalin, as well as for information regarding other potato diseases. give the treatment a fair trial in a portion of your field this year and watch carefully for results. make an estimate of the cost of treatment and of the profits. how does the scab injure the value of the potato? the late blight can often be recognized by its odor. did you ever smell it as you passed an affected field? [illustration: fig. . club root] =club root.= club root is a disease of the cabbage, turnip, cauliflower, etc. its general effect is shown in the illustration (fig. ). sometimes this disease does great damage. it can be prevented by using from eighty to ninety bushels of lime to an acre. =black knot.= black knot is a serious disease of the plum and of the cherry tree. it attacks the branches of the tree; it is well illustrated in fig. . since it is a contagious disease, great care should be exercised to destroy all diseased branches of either wild or cultivated plums or cherries. in many states its destruction is enforced by law. all black knot should be cut out and burned some time before february of each year. this will cost little and save much. [illustration: fig. . black knot] =peach leaf curl.= peach leaf curl does damage amounting to about $ , , yearly in the united states. it can be almost entirely prevented by spraying the tree with bordeaux mixture or lime-sulphur wash before the buds open in the spring. it is not safe to use strong bordeaux mixture on peach trees when they are in leaf. [illustration: fig. . moldy peaches] =cotton wilt.= cotton wilt when it once establishes itself in the soil completely destroys the crop. the fungus remains in the soil, and no amount of spraying will kill it. the only known remedy is to cultivate a resistant variety of cotton or to rotate the crop. [illustration: fig. . peach mummies] =fruit mold.= fruit mold, or brown rot, often attacks the unripe fruit on the tree, and turns it soft and brown and finally fuzzy with a coat of mildew. fig. shows some peaches thus attacked. often the fruits do not fall from the trees but shrivel up and become "mummies" (fig. ). this rot is one of the most serious diseases of plums and peaches. it probably diminishes the value of the peach harvest from to per cent. spraying according to the directions in the appendix will kill the disease. [illustration: fig. . half of tree sprayed to prevent peach curl note the difference in foliage and fruit on the sprayed and unsprayed halves of the tree, and the difference in yield shown below] chapter vii orchard, garden, and field insects section xxxi. insects in general the farmer who has fought "bugs" on crop after crop needs no argument to convince him that insects are serious enemies to agriculture. yet even he may be surprised to learn that the damage done by them, as estimated by good authority, amounts to millions and millions of dollars yearly in the united states and canada. [illustration: fig. . ants] every one thinks he knows what an insect is. if, however, we are willing in this matter to make our notion agree with that of the people who have studied insects most and know them best, we must include among the true insects only such air-breathing animals as have six legs, no more, and have the body divided into three parts--head, thorax, and abdomen. these parts are clearly shown in fig. , which represents the ant, a true insect. all insects do not show the divisions of the body so clearly as this figure shows them, but on careful examination you can usually make them out. the head bears one pair of feelers, and these in many insects serve also as organs of smell and sometimes of hearing. less prominent feelers are to be found in the region of the mouth. these serve as organs of taste. [illustration: fig. . parts of an insect] [illustration: fig. . compound eye of dragon fly] the eyes of insects are especially noticeable. close examination shows them to be made up of a thousand or more simple eyes. such an eye is called a _compound eye_. an enlarged view of one of these is shown in fig. . attached to the thorax are the legs and also the wings, if the insect has wings. the rear portion is the abdomen, and this, like the other parts, is composed of parts known as segments. the insect breathes through openings in the abdomen and thorax called _spiracles_ (see fig. ). an examination of spiders, mites, and ticks shows eight legs; therefore these do not belong to the true insects, nor do the thousand-legged worms and their relatives. [illustration: fig. . the house fly _a_, egg; _b_, larva, or maggot; _c_, pupa; _d_, adult male. (all enlarged)] the chief classes of insects are as follows: the flies, with two wings only; the bees, wasps, and ants, with four delicate wings; the beetles, with four wings--two hard, horny ones covering the two more delicate ones. when the beetle is at rest its two hard wings meet in a straight line down the back. this peculiarity distinguishes it from the true bug, which has four wings. the two outer wings are partly horny, and in folding lap over each other. butterflies and moths are much alike in appearance but differ in habit. the butterfly works by day and the moth by night. note the knob on the end of the butterfly's feeler (fig. ). the moth has no such knob. it is important to know how insects take their food, for by knowing this we are often able to destroy insect pests. some are provided with mouth parts for chewing their food; others have a long tube with which they pierce plants or animals and, like the mosquito, suck their food from the inside. insects of this latter class cannot of course be harmed by poison on the surface of the leaves on which they feed. [illustration: fig. . a typical bug _a_, adult; _b_, side view of sucking mouth-part both _a_ and _b_ are much enlarged] [illustration: fig. . beetle _a_, larva; _b_, pupa; _c_, adult; _d_, burrow] many insects change their form from youth to old age so much that you can scarcely recognize them as the same creatures. first comes the egg. the egg hatches into a worm-like animal known as a grub, maggot, or caterpillar, or, as scientists call it, a _larva_. this creature feeds and grows until finally it settles down and spins a home of silk, called a _cocoon_ (fig. ). if we open the cocoon we shall find that the animal is now covered with a hard outside skeleton, that it cannot move freely, and that it cannot eat at all. the animal in this state is known as the _pupa_ (figs. and ). sometimes, however, the pupa is not covered by a cocoon, sometimes it is soft, and sometimes it has some power of motion (fig. ). after a rest in the pupa stage the animal comes out a mature insect (figs. and ). from this you can see that it is especially important to know all you can about the life of injurious insects, since it is often easier to kill these pests at one stage of their life than at another. often it is better to aim at destroying the seemingly harmless beetle or butterfly than to try to destroy the larvæ that hatch from its eggs, although, as you must remember, it is generally the larvæ that do the most harm. larvæ grow very rapidly; therefore the food supply must be great to meet the needs of the insect. [illustration: fig. . moth and cocoon] some insects, the grasshopper for example, do not completely change their form. fig. represents some young grasshoppers, which very closely resemble their parents. [illustration: fig. . butterfly] [illustration: fig. . structure of the caterpillar] [illustration: fig. . moth pupa in cocoon] insects lay many eggs and reproduce with remarkable rapidity. their number therefore makes them a foe to be much dreaded. the queen honeybee often lays as many as eggs in twenty-four hours. a single house fly lays between and eggs in one day. the mosquito lays eggs in quantities of from to . the white ant often lays , in a day, and so continues for two years, probably laying no less than , , eggs. in one summer the bluebottle fly could have , , descendants if they all lived. the plant louse, at the end of the fifth brood, has laid in a single year enough eggs to produce , , young. of course every one knows that, owing to enemies and diseases (for the insects have enemies which prey on them just as they prey on plants) comparatively few of the insects hatched from these eggs live till they are grown. [illustration: fig. . a butterfly pupa note outline of the butterfly] the number of insects which are hurtful to crops, gardens, flowers, and forests seems to be increasing each season. therefore farm boys and girls should learn to recognize these harmful insects and to know how they live and how they may be destroyed. those who know the forms and habits of these enemies of plants and trees are far better prepared to fight them than are those who strike in the dark. moreover such knowledge is always a source of interest and pleasure. if you begin to study insects, you will soon find your love for the study growing. [illustration: fig. . the growth of a grasshopper] =exercise= collect cocoons and pupæ of insects and hatch them in a breeding-cage similar to the one illustrated in fig. . make several cages of this kind. collect larvæ of several kinds; supply them with food from plants upon which you found them. find out the time it takes them to change into another stage. write a description of this process. the plant louse could produce in its twelfth brood , , , , , , , offspring. each louse is about one tenth of an inch long. if all should live and be arranged in single file, how many miles long would such a procession be? [illustration: fig. . plant lice] [illustration: fig. . cage in which to breed insects flower-pot, lamp-chimney, and cloth] section xxxii. orchard insects =the san jose scale.= the san jose scale is one of the most dreaded enemies of fruit trees. it is in fact an outlaw in many states. it is an unlawful act to sell fruit trees affected by it. fig. shows a view of a branch nearly covered with this pest. although this scale is a very minute animal, yet so rapidly does it multiply that it is very dangerous to the tree. never allow new trees to be brought into your orchard until you feel certain that they are free from the san jose scale. if, however, it should in any way gain access to your orchard, you can prevent its spreading by thorough spraying with what is known as the lime-sulphur mixture. this mixture has long been used on the pacific coast as a remedy for various scale insects. when it was first tried in other parts of the united states the results were not satisfactory and its use was abandoned. however, later experiments with it have proved that the mixture is thoroughly effective in killing this scale and that it is perfectly harmless to the trees. until the lime-sulphur mixture proved to be successful the san jose scale was a most dreaded nursery and orchard foe. it was even thought necessary to destroy infected trees. the lime-sulphur mixture and some other sulphur washes not only kill the san jose scale but are also useful in reducing fungous injury. [illustration: fig. san jose scale] [illustration: fig. . single san jose scale magnified] there are several ways of making the lime-sulphur mixture. it is generally best to buy a prepared mixture from some trustworthy dealer. if you find the scale on your trees, write to your state experiment station for directions for combating it. [illustration: fig. . the codling moth _a_, burrow of worm in apple; _b_, place where worm enters; _c_, place where worm leaves; _e_, the larva; _d_, the pupa; _i_, the cocoon; _f_ and _g_, moths; _h_, magnified head of larva] =the codling moth.= the codling moth attacks the apple and often causes a loss of from twenty-five to seventy-five per cent of the crop. in the state of new york this insect is causing an annual loss of about three million dollars. the effect it has on the fruit is most clearly seen in fig. . the moth lays its egg upon the young leaves just after the falling of the blossom. she flies on from apple to apple, depositing an egg each time until from fifty to seventy-five eggs are deposited. the larva, or "worm," soon hatches and eats its way into the apple. many affected apples ripen too soon and drop as "windfalls." others remain on the tree and become the common wormy apples so familiar to growers. the larva that emerges from the windfalls moves generally to a tree, crawls up the trunk, and spins its cocoon under a ridge in the bark. from the cocoon the moth comes ready to start a new generation. the last generation of the larvæ spends the winter in the cocoon. [illustration: fig. . spraying the orchard brings luscious fruit the picture in the corner at the top shows the right time to spray for codling moth] _treatment._ destroy orchard trash which may serve as a winter home. scrape all loose bark from the tree. spray the tree with arsenate of lead as soon as the flowers fall. a former method of fighting this pest was as follows: bands of burlap four inches wide tied around the tree furnished a hiding-place for larvæ that came from windfalls or crawled from wormy apples on the tree. the larvæ caught under the bands were killed every five or six days. we know now, however, that a thorough spraying just after the blossoms fall kills the worms and renders the bands unnecessary. furthermore, spraying prevents wormy apples, while banding does not. follow the first spraying by a second two weeks later. it is best to use lime-sulphur mixture or the bordeaux mixture with arsenate of lead for a spray. thus one spraying serves against both fungi and insects. [illustration: fig. . plum curculio larva, pupa, adult, and mark on the fruit. (enlarged)] =the plum curculio.= the plum curculio, sometimes called the plum weevil, is a little creature about one fifth of an inch long. in spite of its small size the curculio does, if neglected, great damage to our fruit crop. it injures peaches, plums, and cherries by stinging the fruit as soon as it is formed. the word "stinging" when applied to insects--- and this case is no exception--means piercing the object with the egg-layer (ovipositor) and depositing the egg. some insects occasionally use the ovipositor merely for defense. the curculio has an especially interesting method of laying her egg. first she digs a hole, in which she places the egg and pushes it well down. then with her snout she makes a crescent-shaped cut in the skin of the plum, around the egg. this mark is shown in fig. . as this peculiar cut is followed by a flow of gum, you will always be able to recognize the work of the curculio. having finished with one plum, this industrious worker makes her way to other plums until her eggs are all laid. the maggotlike larva soon hatches, burrows through the fruit, and causes it to drop before ripening. the larva then enters the ground to a depth of several inches. there it becomes a pupa, and later, as a mature beetle, emerges and winters in cracks and crevices. [illustration: fig. . leaf galls of phylloxera on clinton grape leaf] _treatment._ burn orchard trash which may serve as winter quarters. spraying with arsenate of lead, using two pounds of the mixture to fifty gallons of water, is the only successful treatment for the curculio. for plums and peaches, spray first when the fruit is free from the calyx caps, or dried flower-buds. repeat the spraying two weeks later. for late peaches spray a third time two weeks after the second spraying. this poisonous spray will kill the beetles while they are feeding or cutting holes in which to lay their eggs. [illustration: fig. . the cankerworm] fowls in the orchard do good by capturing the larvæ before they can burrow, while hogs will destroy the fallen fruit before the larvæ can escape. =the grape phylloxera.= the grape phylloxera is a serious pest. you have no doubt seen its galls upon the grape leaf. these galls are caused by a small louse, the phylloxera. each gall contains a female, which soon fills the gall with eggs. these hatch into more females, which emerge and form new galls, and so the phylloxera spreads (see fig. ). _treatment._ the clinton grape is most liable to injury from this pest. hence it is better to grow other more resistant kinds. sometimes the lice attack the roots of the grape vines. in many sections where irrigation is practiced the grape rows are flooded when the lice are thickest. the water drowns the lice and does no harm to the vines. =the cankerworm.= the cankerworm is the larva of a moth. because of its peculiar mode of crawling, by looping its body, it is often called the looping worm or measuring worm (fig. , _c_). these worms are such greedy eaters that in a short time they can so cut the leaves of an orchard as to give it a scorched appearance. such an attack practically destroys the crop and does lasting injury to the tree. the worms are green or brown and are striped lengthwise. if the tree is jarred, the worm has a peculiar habit of dropping toward the ground on a silken thread of its own making (fig. ). [illustration: fig. . the spring cankerworm _a_, egg mass; _b_, egg, magnified; _c_, larva; _d_, female moth; _e_, male moth] in early summer the larvæ burrow within the earth and pupate there; later they emerge as adults (fig. , _d_ and _e_). you observe the peculiar difference between the wingless female, _d_, and the winged male, _e_. it is the habit of this wingless female to crawl up the trunk of some near-by tree in order to deposit her eggs upon the twigs. these eggs (shown at _a_ and _b_) hatch into the greedy larvæ that do so much damage to our orchards. nearly all the common birds feed freely upon the cankerworm, and benefit the orchard in so doing. the chickadee is perhaps the most useful. a recent writer is very positive that each chickadee will devour on an average thirty female cankerworm moths a day; and that if the average number of eggs laid by each female is one hundred and eighty-five, one chickadee would thus destroy in one day five thousand five hundred and fifty eggs, and, in the twenty-five days in which the cankerworm moths crawl up the tree, would rid the orchard of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand seven hundred and fifty. these birds also eat immense numbers of cankerworm eggs before they hatch into worms. [illustration: fig. . eggs of the fall cankerworm] _treatment._ the inability of the female to fly gives us an easy way to prevent the larval offspring from getting to the foliage of our trees, for we know that the only highway open to her or her larvæ leads up the trunk. we must obstruct this highway so that no crawling creature may pass. this is readily done by smoothing the bark and fitting close to it a band of paper, and making sure that it is tight enough to prevent anything from crawling underneath. then smear over the paper something so sticky that any moth or larva that attempts to pass will be entangled. printer's ink will do very well, or you can buy either dendrolene or tanglefoot. [illustration: fig. . apple-tree tent caterpillar _a_, eggs; _b_, cocoon; _c_, caterpillar] encourage the chickadee and all other birds, except the english sparrow, to stay in your orchard. this is easily done by feeding and protecting them in their times of need. =the apple-tree tent caterpillar.= the apple-tree tent caterpillar is a larva so well known that you only need to be told how to guard against it. the mother of this caterpillar is a reddish moth. this insect passes the winter in the egg state securely fastened on the twigs as shown in fig. , _a_. _treatment._ there are three principal methods, ( ) destroy the eggs. the egg masses are readily seen in winter and may easily be collected and burned by boys. the chickadee eats great quantities of these eggs. ( ) with torches burn the nests at dusk when all the worms are within. you must be very careful in burning or you will harm the young branches with their tender bark. ( ) encourage the residence of birds. urge your neighbors to make war on the larvæ, too, since the pest spreads rapidly from farm to farm. regularly sprayed orchards are rarely troubled by this pest. [illustration: fig. . the twig girdler at its destructive work _a_, the girdler; _b_, the egg-hole; _c_, the groove cut by girdler; _e_, the egg] =the twig girdler.= the twig girdler lays her eggs in the twigs of pear, pecan, apple, and other trees. it is necessary that the larvæ develop in dead wood. this the mother provides by girdling the twig so deeply that it will die and fall to the ground. _treatment._ since the larvæ spend the winter in the dead twigs, burn these twigs in autumn or early spring and thus destroy the pest. =the peach-tree borer.= in fig. you see the effect of the peach-tree borer's activity. these borers often girdle and thereby kill a tree. fig. shows the adult state of the insect. the eggs are laid on peach or plum trees near the ground. as soon as the larva emerges, it bores into the bark and remains there for months, passing through the pupa stage before it comes out to lay eggs for another generation. [illustration: fig. . borer signs around base of peach tree] _treatment._ if there are only a few trees in the orchard, digging the worms out with a knife is the best way of destroying them. you can know of the borer's presence by the exuding gum often seen on the tree-trunk. if you pile earth around the roots early in the spring and remove it in the late fall, the winter freezing and thawing will kill many of the larvæ. =exercise= how many apples per hundred do you find injured by the codling moth? collect some cocoons from a pear or an apple tree in winter, place in a breeding-cage, and watch for the moths that come out. do you ever see the woodpecker hunting for these same cocoons? can you find cocoons that have been emptied by this bird? estimate how many he considers a day's ration. how many apples does he thus save? [illustration: fig. . peach-tree borers, male and female female with broad yellow band across abdomen] watch the curculio lay her eggs in the plums, peaches, or cherries. what per cent of fruit is thus injured? estimate the damage. let the school offer a prize for the greatest number of tent-caterpillar eggs. watch such trees as the apple, the wild and the cultivated cherry, the oak, and many others. make a collection of insects injurious to orchard fruits, showing in each case the whole life history of the insect, that is, eggs, larva, pupa, and the mature insects. [illustration: the troublesome chinch bug (enlarged) , bugs on plant; , eggs; , young bug; and , older bugs; , long-winged bug; and , short-winged bug] section xxxiii. garden and field insects =the cabbage worm.= the cabbage worm of the early spring garden is a familiar object, but you may not know that the innocent-looking little white butterflies hovering about the cabbage patch are laying eggs which are soon to hatch and make the dreaded cabbage worms. in fig. _a_ and _b_ show the common cabbage butterfly, _c_ shows several examples of the caterpillar, and _d_ shows the pupa case. in the pupa stage the insects pass the winter among the remains of old plants or in near-by fences or in weeds or bushes. cleaning up and burning all trash will destroy many pupæ and thus prevent many cabbage worms. in fig. _e_ and _f_ show the moth and zebra caterpillar; _g_ represents a moth which is the parent of the small green worm shown at _h_. this worm is a common foe of the cabbage plant. [illustration: fig. . the dreaded chinch bug] _treatment._ birds aid in the destruction of this pest. paris green mixed with air-slaked lime will also kill many larvæ. after the cabbage has headed, it is very difficult to destroy the worm, but pyrethrum insect powder used freely is helpful. =the chinch bug.= the chinch bug, attacking as it does such important crops as wheat, corn, and grasses, is a well-known pest. it probably causes more money loss than any other garden or field enemy. in orange county, north carolina, farmers were once obliged to suspend wheat-growing for two years on account of the chinch bug. in one year in the state of illinois this bug caused a loss of four million dollars. [illustration: fig. . cabbage worms and butterflies] _treatment._ unfortunately we cannot prevent all of the damage done by chinch bugs, but we can diminish it somewhat by good clean agriculture. destroy the winter homes of the insect by burning dry grass, leaves, and rubbish in fields and fence rows. although the insect has wings, it seldom or never uses them, usually traveling on foot; therefore a deep furrow around the field to be protected will hinder or stop the progress of an invasion. the bugs fall into the bottom of the furrow, and may there be killed by dragging a log up and down the furrow. write to the division of entomology, washington, for bulletins on the chinch bug. other methods of prevention are to be found in these bulletins. [illustration: fig. . a plant louse colony] =the plant louse.= the plant louse is very small, but it multiplies with very great rapidity. during the summer the young are born alive, and it is only toward fall that eggs are laid. the individuals that hatch from eggs are generally wingless females, and their young, born alive, are both winged and wingless. the winged forms fly to other plants and start new colonies. plant lice mature in from eight to fourteen days. the plant louse gives off a sweetish fluid of which some ants are very fond. you may often see the ants stroking these lice to induce them to give off a freer flow of the "honey dew." this is really a method of milking. however friendly and useful these "cows" may be to the ant, they are enemies to man in destroying so many of his plants. _treatment._ these are sucking insects. poisons therefore do not avail. they may be killed by spraying with kerosene emulsion or a strong soap solution or with tobacco water. lice on cabbages are easily killed by a mixture of one pound of lye soap in four gallons of warm water. [illustration: fig. . a cheap spraying outfit] =the squash bug.= the squash bug does its greatest damage to young plants. to such its attack is often fatal. on larger plants single leaves may die. this insect is a serious enemy to a crop and is particularly difficult to get rid of, since it belongs to the class of sucking insects, not to the biting insects. for this reason poisons are useless. [illustration: fig. . a squash bug] _treatment._ about the only practicable remedy is to pick these insects by hand. we can, however, protect our young plants by small nettings and thus tide them over the most dangerous period of their lives. these bugs greatly prefer the squash as food. you can therefore diminish their attack on your melons, cucumbers, etc. by planting among the melons an occasional squash plant as a "trap plant." hand picking will be easier on a few trap plants than over the whole field. a small board or large leaf laid beside the young plant often furnishes night shelter for the bugs. the bugs collected under the board may easily be killed every morning. =the flea-beetle.= the flea-beetle inflicts much damage on the potato, tomato, eggplant, and other garden plants. the accompanying figure shows the common striped flea-beetle which lives on the tomato. the larva of this beetle lives inside of the leaves, mining its way through the leaf in a real tunnel. any substance disagreeable to the beetle, such as plaster, soot, ashes, or tobacco, will repel its attacks on the garden crops. [illustration: fig. . flea-beetle and larva _a_, larva; _b_, adult. lines on sides show real length of insects] =the weevil.= the weevil is commonly found among seeds. its attacks are serious, but the insect may easily be destroyed. _treatment._ put the infected seeds in an air-tight box or bin, placing on the top of the pile a dish containing carbon disulphide, a tablespoonful to a bushel of seeds. the fumes of this substance are heavy and will pass through the mass of seeds below and kill all the weevils and other animals there. the bin should be closely covered with canvas or heavy cloth to prevent the fumes from being carried away by the air. let the seeds remain thus from two to five days. repeat the treatment if any weevils are found alive. fumigate when the temperature is ° fahrenheit or above. in cold weather or in a loose bin the treatment is not successful. _caution:_ do not approach the bin with a light, since the fumes of the chemical used are highly inflammable. =the hessian fly.= the hessian fly does more damage to the wheat crop than all other insects combined, and probably ranks next to the chinch bug as the second worst insect enemy of the farmer. it was probably introduced into this country by the hessian troops in the war of the revolution. [illustration: fig. . the hessian fly] in autumn the insect lays its eggs in the leaves of the wheat. these hatch into the larvæ, which move down into the crown of the plant, where they pass the winter. there they cause on the plant a slight gall formation, which injures or kills the plant. in the spring adult flies emerge and lay eggs. the larvæ that hatch feed in the lower joints of the growing wheat and prevent its proper growth. these larvæ pupate and remain as pupæ in the wheat stubble during the summer. the fall brood of flies appears shortly before the first heavy frost. _treatment._ burn all stubble and trash during july and august. if the fly is very bad, it is well to leave the stubble unusually high to insure a rapid spread of the fire. burn refuse from the threshing-machine, since this often harbors many larvæ or pupæ. follow the burning by deep plowing, because the burning cannot reach the insects that are in the base of the plants. delay the fall planting until time for heavy frosts. =the potato beetle; tobacco worm.= the potato beetle, tobacco worm, etc., are too well known to need description. suffice it to say that no good farmer will neglect to protect his crop from any pest that threatens it. the increase, owing to various causes, of insects, of fungi, of bacterial diseases, makes a study of these pests, of their origin, and of their prevention a necessary part of a successful farmer's training. tillage alone will no longer render orchard, vineyard, and garden fruitful. protection from every form of plant enemies must be added to tillage. [illustration: fig. . spraying the orchard one way of increasing the yield of fruit] in dealing with plants, as with human beings, the great object should be not the cure but the prevention of disease. if disease can be prevented, it is far too costly to wait for it to develop and then to attempt its cure. men of science are studying the new forms of diseases and new insects as fast as they appear. these men are finding ways of fighting old and new enemies. young people who expect to farm should early learn to follow their advice. =exercise= how does the squash bug resemble the plant louse? is this a true bug? gather some eggs and watch the development of the insects in a breeding-cage. estimate the damage done to some crops by the flea-beetle. what is the best method of prevention? [illustration: fig. . an apple tree showing proper care] do you know the large moth that is the mother of the tobacco worm? you may often see her visiting the blossoms of the jimson weed. some tobacco-growers cultivate a few of these weeds in a tobacco field. in the blossom they place a little cobalt or "fly-stone" and sirup. when the tobacco-worm moth visits this flower and sips the poisoned nectar, she will of course lay no more troublesome eggs. section xxxiv. the cotton-boll weevil so far as known, the cotton-boll weevil, an insect which is a native of the tropics, crossed the rio grande river into texas in and . it settled in the cotton fields around brownsville. since then it has widened its destructive area until now it has invaded the whole territory shown by the map on page . [illustration: fig. . adult cotton-boll weevil enlarged] this weevil is a small gray or reddish-brown snout-beetle hardly over a quarter of an inch in length. in proportion to its length it has a long beak. it belongs to a family of beetles which breed in pods, in seeds, and in stalks of plants. it is a greedy eater, but feeds only on the cotton plant. the grown weevils try to outlive the cold of winter by hiding snugly away under grass clumps, cotton-stalks, rubbish, or under the bark of trees. sometimes they go down into holes in the ground. a comfortable shelter is often found in the forests near the cotton fields, especially in the moss on the trees. the weevils can stand a good deal of cold, but fortunately many are killed by winter weather. moreover birds destroy many; hence by spring the last year's crop is very greatly diminished. in the spring, generally about the time cotton begins to form "squares," the weevils shake off their long winter sleep and enter the cotton fields with appetites as sharp as razors. then shortly the females begin to lay eggs. at first these eggs are laid only in the squares, and generally only one to the square. the young grub hatches from these eggs in two or three days. the newly hatched grub eats the inside of the square, and the square soon falls to the ground. entire fields may at times be seen without a single square on the plants. of course no fruit can be formed without squares. [illustration: fig. . eggs among the anthers of a square at the point indicated by the arrow] [illustration: fig. . cross section showing anthers of a square with egg of weevil, and showing the hole where the egg was deposited greatly enlarged] in from one to two weeks the grub or larva becomes fully grown and, without changing its home, is transformed into the pupa state. then in about a week more the pupæ come out as adult weevils and attack the bolls. they puncture them with their snouts and lay their eggs in the bolls. the young grubs, this time hatching out in the boll, remain there until grown, when they emerge through holes that they make. these holes allow dampness to enter and destroy the bolls. this life-round continues until cold weather drives the insects to their winter quarters. by that time they have increased so rapidly that there is often one for every boll in the field. [illustration: fig. . the larva of the cotton-boll weevil injuring a square] this weevil is proving very hard to destroy. at present there seem but few ways to fight it. one is to grow cotton that will mature too early for the weevils to do it much harm. a second is to kill as many weevils as possible by burning the homes that shelter them in winter. [illustration: fig. . pupa of cotton-boll weevil from above and below greatly enlarged] [illustration: fig. . the pupa of the cotton-boll weevil in a square] the places best adapted for a winter home for the weevil are trash piles, rubbish, driftwood, rotten wood, weeds, moss on trees, etc. a further help, therefore, in destroying the weevil is to cut down and burn all cotton-stalks as soon as the cotton is harvested. [illustration: fig. . a cotton boll with feeding-holes of weevil, and bearing three specimens of the insect] [illustration: fig. . the mexican cotton-boll weevil, showing structure] this destroys countless numbers of larvæ and pupæ in the bolls and greatly reduces the number of weevils. in addition, all cornstalks, all trash, all large clumps of grass in neighboring fields, should be burned, so as to destroy these winter homes of the weevil. also avoid planting cotton near trees. the bark, moss, and fallen leaves of the tree furnish a winter shelter for the weevils. [illustration: fig. . a series of full grown weevils, showing variations in size] a third help in destroying the weevil is to rotate crops. if cotton does not follow cotton, the weevil has nothing on which to feed the second year. [illustration: fig. . map showing distribution of the cotton-boll weevil in ] in adopting the first method mentioned the cotton growers have found that by the careful selection of seed, by early planting, by a free use of fertilizers containing phosphoric acid, and by frequent plowing, they can mature a crop about thirty days earlier than they usually do. in this way a good crop can be harvested before the weevils are ready to be most destructive. chapter viii farm crops every crop of the farm has been changed and improved in many ways since its forefathers were wild plants. those plants that best serve the needs of the farmer and of farm animals have undergone the most changes and have received also the greatest care and attention in their production and improvement. while we have many different kinds of farm crops, the cultivated soil of the world is occupied by a very few. in our country the crop that is most valuable and that occupies the greatest land area is generally known as the _grass crop_. included in the general term "grass crop" are the grasses and clovers that are used for pasturage as well as for hay. next to grass in value come the great cereal, corn, and the most important fiber crop, cotton, closely followed by the great bread crop, wheat. oats rank fifth in value, potatoes sixth, and tobacco seventh. (these figures are for .) success in growing any crop is largely due to the suitableness of soil and climate to that crop. when the planter selects both the most suitable soil and the most suitable climate for each crop, he gets not only the most bountiful yield from the crop but, in addition, he gets the most desirable quality of product. a little careful observation and study soon teach what kinds of soil produce crops of the highest excellence. this learned, the planter is able to grow in each field the several crops best adapted to that special type of soil. thus we have tobacco soils, trucking soils, wheat and corn soils. dairying can be most profitably followed in sections where crops like cowpeas, clover, alfalfa, and corn are peculiarly at home. no one should try to grow a new crop in his section until he has found out whether the crop which he wants to grow is adapted to his soil and his climate. [illustration: fig. . alfalfa in the stack this is the second cutting of the season] the figures below give the average amount of money made annually an acre on our chief crops: flowers and plants, $ ; nursery products, $ ; onions, $ ; sugar cane, $ ; small fruits, $ ; hops, $ ; vegetables, $ ; tobacco, $ ; sweet potatoes, $ ; hemp, $ ; potatoes, $ ; sugar beets, $ ; sorghum cane, $ ; cotton, $ ; orchard fruits, $ ; peanuts, $ ; flax-seed, $ ; cereals, $ ; hay and forage, $ ; castor beans, $ (united states census report). section xxxv. cotton although cotton was cultivated on the eastern continent before america was discovered, this crop owes its present kingly place in the business world to the zeal and intelligence of its american growers. so great an influence does it wield in modern industrial life that it is often called king cotton. thousands upon thousands of people scan the newspapers each day to see what price its staple is bringing. from its bounty a vast army of toilers, who plant its seed, who pick its bolls, who gin its staple, who spin and weave its lint, who grind its seed, who refine its oil, draw daily bread. does not its proper production deserve the best thought that can be given it? in the cotton belt almost any well-drained soil will produce cotton. the following kinds of soil are admirably suited to this plant: red and gray loams with good clay subsoil; sandy soils over clay and sandstone and limestone; rich, well-drained bottom-lands. the safest soils are medium loams. cotton land must always be well drained. cotton was originally a tropical plant, but, strange to say, it seems to thrive best in temperate zones. the cotton plant does best, according to newman, in climates which have ( ) six months of freedom from frost; ( ) a moderate, well-distributed rainfall during the plant's growing period; and ( ) abundant sunshine and little rain during the plant's maturing period. [illustration: fig. . growth of cotton from day to day in america the southern states from virginia to texas have these climatic qualities, and it is in these states that the cotton industry has been developed until it is one of the giant industries of the world. this development has been very rapid. as late as the cotton plant was grown as an ornamental flowering plant in many front yards; in , , , bales of cotton were grown in the south. in recent years the soil and climate of lower california and parts of arizona and new mexico have been found well adapted to cotton. [illustration: fig. . cotton in the growing season] there are a great many varieties of cotton. two types are mainly grown by the practical american farmer. these are the short-stapled, upland variety most commonly grown in all the southern states, and the beautiful, long-stapled, black-seeded sea-island type that grows upon the islands and a portion of the mainland of georgia, south carolina, and florida. the air of the coast seems necessary for the production of this latter variety. the seeds of the sea-island cotton are small, smooth, and black. they are so smooth and stick so loosely to the lint that they are separated from it by roller-gins instead of by saw-gins. when these seeds are planted away from the soil and air of their ocean home, the plant does not thrive. many attempts have been made and are still being made to increase the length of the staple of the upland types. the methods used are as follows: selection of seed having a long fiber; special cultivation and fertilization; crossing the short-stapled cotton on the long-stapled cotton. this last process, as already explained, is called _hybridizing_. many of these attempts have succeeded, and there are now a large number of varieties which excel the older varieties in profitable yield. the new varieties are each year being more widely grown. every farmer should study the new types and select the one that will best suit his land. the new types have been developed under the best tillage. therefore if a farmer would keep the new type as good as it was when he began to grow it, he must give it the same good tillage, and practice seed-selection. [illustration: fig. . cotton ready for picking] the cotton plant is nourished by a tap-root that will seek food as deeply as loose earth will permit the root to penetrate; hence, in preparing land for this crop the first plowing should be done at least with a two-horse plow and should be deep and thorough. this deep plowing not only allows the tap-root to penetrate, but it also admits a circulation of air. on some cotton farms it is the practice to break the land in winter or early spring and then let it lie naked until planting-time. this is not a good practice. the winter rains wash more plant food out of unprotected soil than a single crop would use. it would be better, in the late summer or fall, to plant crimson clover or some other protective and enriching crop on land that is to be planted in cotton in the spring. this crop, in addition to keeping the land from being injuriously washed, would greatly help the coming cotton crop by leaving the soil full of vegetable matter. in preparing for cotton-planting, first disk the land thoroughly, then break with a heavy plow and harrow until a fine and mellow seed-bed is formed. do not spare the harrow at this time. it destroys many a weed that, if allowed to grow, would have to be cut by costly hoeing. thorough work before planting saves much expensive work in the later days of the crop. moreover, no man can afford to allow his plant food and moisture to go to nourish weeds, even for a short time. the rows should be from three to four feet apart. the width depends upon the richness of the soil. on rich land the rows should be at least four feet apart. this width allows the luxuriant plant to branch and fruit well. on poorer lands the distance of the rows should not be so great. the distribution of the seed in the row is of course most cheaply done by the planter. as a rule it is best not to ridge the land for the seed. flat culture saves moisture and often prevents damage to the roots. in some sections, however, where the land is flat and full of water, ridging seems necessary if the land cannot be drained. [illustration: fig. . picking cotton] the cheapest way of cultivating a crop is to prevent grass and weeds from rooting, not to wait to destroy them after they are well rooted. to do this, it is well to run the two-horse smoothing-harrow over the land, across the rows, a few days after the young plants are up. repeat the harrowing in six or eight days. in addition to destroying the young grass and weeds, this harrowing also removes many of the young cotton plants and thereby saves much hoeing at "chopping-out" time. when the plants are about two inches high they are "chopped out" to secure an evenly distributed stand. it has been the custom to leave two stalks to a hill, but many growers are now leaving only one. the number of times the crop has to be worked depends on the soil and the season. if the soil is dry and porous, cultivate as often as possible, especially after each rain. never allow a crust to form after a rain; the roots of plants must have air. cultivation after each rain forms a dry mulch on the top of the soil and thus prevents rapid evaporation of moisture. if the fiber (the lint) only is removed from the land on which cotton is grown, cotton is the least exhaustive of the great crops grown in the united states. according to some recent experiments an average crop of cotton removes in the lint only . pounds of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potash, lime, and magnesia per acre, while a crop of ten bushels of wheat per acre removes . pounds of the same elements of plant food. inasmuch as this crop takes so little plant food from the soil, the cotton-farmer has no excuse for allowing his land to decrease in productiveness. two things will keep his land in bounteous harvest condition: first, let him return the seeds in some form to the land, or, what is better, feed the ground seeds to cattle, make a profit from the cattle, and return manure to the land in place of the seeds; second, at the last working, let him sow some crop like crimson clover or rye in the cotton rows to protect the soil during the winter and to leave humus in the ground for the spring. the stable manure, if that is used, should be broadcasted over the fields at the rate of six to ten tons an acre. if commercial fertilizers are used, it may be best to make two applications. to give the young plants a good start, apply a portion of the fertilizer in the drill just before planting. then when the first blooms appear, put the remainder of the fertilizer in drills near the plants but not too close. many good cotton-growers, however, apply all the fertilizer at one time. [illustration: fig. . weighing a day's picking of cotton] _relation of stock to the cotton crop_. on many farms much of the money for which the cotton is sold in the fall has to go to pay for the commercial fertilizer used in growing the crop. should not this fact suggest efforts to raise just as good crops without having to buy so much fertilizer? is there any way by which this can be done? the following suggestions may be helpful. raise enough stock to use all the cotton seed grown on the farm. to go with the food made from the cotton seed, grow on the farm pea-vine hay, clover, alfalfa, and other such nitrogen-gathering crops. this can be done at small cost. what will be the result? first, to say nothing of the money made from the cattle, the large quantity of stable manure saved will largely reduce the amount of commercial fertilizer needed. the cotton-farmer cannot afford to neglect cattle-raising. the cattle sections of the country are likely to make the greatest progress in agriculture, because they have manure always on hand. [illustration: fig. . modern cotton bales] second, the nitrogen-gathering crops, while helping to feed the stock, also reduce the fertilizer bills by supplying one of the costly elements of the fertilizer. the ordinary cotton fertilizer consists principally of nitrogen, of potash, and of phosphoric acid. of these three, by far the most costly is nitrogen. now peas, beans, clover, and peanuts will leave enough nitrogen in the soil for cotton, so that if they are raised, it is necessary to buy only phosphoric acid and sometimes potash. section xxxvi. tobacco the tobacco plant connects indian agriculture with our own. it has always been a source of great profit to our people. in the early colonial days tobacco was almost the only money crop. many rich men came to america in those days merely to raise tobacco. although tobacco will grow in almost any climate, the leaves, which, as most of you know, are the salable part of the plant, get their desirable or undesirable qualities very largely from the soil and from the climate in which they grow. the soil in which tobacco thrives best is one which has the following qualities: dryness, warmth, richness, depth, and sandiness. commercial fertilizers also are almost a necessity; for, as tobacco land is limited in area, the same land must be often planted in tobacco. hence even a fresh, rich soil that did not at first require fertilizing soon becomes exhausted, and, after the land has been robbed of its plant food by crop after crop of tobacco, frequent application of fertilizers and other manures becomes necessary. however, even tobacco growers should rotate their crops as much as possible. [illustration: fig. . a leaf of tobacco] deep plowing--from nine to thirteen inches--is also a necessity in preparing the land, for tobacco roots go deep into the soil. after this deep plowing, harrow until the soil is thoroughly pulverized and is as fine and mellow as that of the flower-garden. unlike most other farm crops the tobacco plant must be started first in a seed-bed. to prepare a tobacco bed the almost universal custom has been to proceed as follows. carefully select a protected spot. over this spot pile brushwood and then burn it. the soil will be left dry, and all the weed seeds will be killed. the bed is then carefully raked and smoothed and planted. some farmers are now preparing their beds without burning. a tablespoonful of seed will sow a patch twenty-five feet square. a cheap cloth cover is put over the bed. if the seeds come up well, a patch of this size ought to furnish transplants for five or six acres. in sowing, it is not wise to cover the seed deeply. a light raking in or an even rolling of the ground is all that is needed. [illustration: fig. . a promising crop of tobacco] the time required for sprouting is from two to three weeks. the plants ought to be ready for transplanting in from four to six weeks. weeds and grass should of course be kept out of the seed-bed. the plants, when ready, are transplanted in very much the same way as cabbages and tomatoes. the transplanting was formerly done by hand, but an effective machine is now widely used. the rows should be from three to three and a half feet apart, and the plants in the rows about two or three feet apart. if the plants are set so that the plow and cultivator can be run with the rows and also across the rows, they can be more economically worked. tobacco, like corn, requires shallow cultivation. of course the plants should be worked often enough to give clean culture and to provide a soil mulch for saving moisture. [illustration: fig. . topping tobacco] in tobacco culture it is necessary to pinch off the "buttons" and to cut off the tops of the main stalk, else much nourishment that should go to the leaves will be given to the seeds. the suckers must also be cut off for the same reason. the proper time for harvesting is not easily fixed; one becomes skillful in this work only through experience in the field. briefly, we may say that tobacco is ready to be cut when the leaves on being held up to the sun show a light or golden color, when they are sticky to the touch, and when they break easily on being bent. plants that are overripe are inferior to those that are cut early. the operations included in cutting, housing, drying, shipping, sweating, and packing require skill and practice. section xxxvii. wheat wheat has been cultivated from earliest times. it was a chief crop in egypt and palestine, and still holds its importance in the temperate portions of europe, asia, africa, australia, and america. [illustration: fig. . a hand] [illustration: fig. . wheat heads] this crop ranks third in value in the united states. it grows in cool, in temperate, and in warm climates, and in many kinds of soil. it does best in clay loam, and worst in sandy soils. clogged and water-soaked land will not grow wheat with profit to the farmer; for this reason, where good wheat-production is desired the soil must be well drained and in good physical condition--that is, the soil must be open, crumbly, and mellow. clay soils that are hard and lifeless can be made valuable for wheat-production by covering the surface with manure, by good tillage, and by a thorough system of crop-rotation. cowpeas and other legumes make a most valuable crop to precede wheat, for in growing they add atmospheric nitrogen to the soil, and their roots loosen the root-bed, thereby admitting a free circulation of air and adding humus to the soil. moreover, the legumes leave the soil with its grains fairly close packed, and this is a help in wheat growing. one may secure a good seed-bed after cotton and corn as well as after cowpeas and other legumes. they are summer-cultivated crops, and the clean culture that has been given them renders the surface soil mellow and the undersoil firm and compact. they are not so good, however, as cowpeas, since they add no atmospheric nitrogen to the soil, as all leguminous crops do. [illustration: fig. . roots of a single wheat plant] from one to two inches is the most satisfactory depth for planting wheat. the largest number of seeds comes up when planted at this depth. a mellow soil is very helpful to good coming up and provides a most comfortable home for the roots of the plant. a compact soil below makes a moist undersoil; and this is desirable, for the soil water is needed to dissolve plant food and to carry it up through the plant, where it is used in building tissue. there are a great many varieties of wheat: some are bearded, others are smooth; some are winter and others are spring varieties. the smooth-headed varieties are most agreeable to handle during harvest and at threshing-time. some of the bearded varieties, however, do so well in some soils and climates that it is desirable to continue growing them, though they are less agreeable to handle. no matter what variety you are accustomed to raise, it may be improved by careful seed-selection. [illustration: fig. . selecting wheat seed] the seed-drill is the best implement for planting wheat. it distributes the grains evenly over the whole field and leaves the mellow soil in a condition to catch what snow may fall and secure what protection it affords. [illustration: fig. . adjoining wheat fields the yield of the lower field, forty-five bushels per acre, is due to intelligent farming] in many parts of the country, because not enough live stock is raised, there is often too little manure to apply to the wheat land. where this is the case commercial fertilizers must be used. since soils differ greatly, it is impossible to suggest a fertilizer adapted to all soils. the elements usually lacking in wheat soils are nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash. the land may be lacking in one of these plant foods or in all; in either case a maximum crop cannot possibly be raised. the section on manuring the soil will be helpful to the wheat-grower. [illustration: fig. . a bountiful crop of wheat] it should be remembered always in buying fertilizers for wheat that whenever wheat follows cowpeas or clover or other legumes there is seldom need of using nitrogen in the fertilizer; the tubercles on the pea or clover roots will furnish that. hence, as a rule, only potash and phosphoric acid will have to be purchased as plant food. the farmer is assisted always by a study of his crop and by a knowledge of how it grows. if he find the straw inferior and short, it means that the soil is deficient in nitrogen; but on the other hand, if the straw be luxuriant and the heads small and poorly filled, he may be sure that his soil contains too little phosphoric acid and potash. =exercise= let the pupils secure several heads of wheat and thresh each separately by hand. the grains should then be counted and their plumpness and size observed. the practical importance of this is obvious, for the larger the heads and the greater the number of grains, the larger the yield per acre. let them plant some of the large and some of the small grains. a single test of this kind will show the importance of careful seed-selection. [illustration: fig. a widely grown crop] section xxxviii. corn when the white man came to this country he found the indians using corn; for this reason, in addition to its name _maize_, it is called _indian corn_. before that time the civilized world did not know that there was such a crop. the increase in the yield and the extension of the acres planted in this strictly american crop have kept pace with the rapid and wonderful growth of our country. corn is king of the cereals and the most important crop of american agriculture. it grows in almost every section of america. there is hardly any limit to the uses to which its grain and its stalks are now put. animals of many kinds are fed on rations into which it enters. its grains in some form furnish food to more people than does any other crop except possibly rice. its stalk and its cob are manufactured into many different and useful articles. a soil rich in either decaying animal or vegetable matter, loose, warm, and moist but not wet, will produce a better crop of corn than any other. corn soil should always be well tilled and cultivated. the proper time to begin the cultivation of corn is before it is planted. plow well. a shallow, worn-out soil should not be used for corn, but for cowpeas or rye. after thorough plowing, the harrow--either the disk or spring-tooth--should be used to destroy all clods and leave the surface mellow and fine. the best results will be obtained by turning under a clover sod that has been manured from the savings of the barnyard. when manure is not available, commercial fertilizers will often prove profitable on poor lands. careful trials will best determine how much fertilizer to an acre is necessary, and what kinds are to be used. a little study and experimenting on the farmer's part will soon enable him to find out both the kind and the amount of fertilizer that is best suited to his land. the seed for this crop should be selected according to the plan suggested in section xix. [illustration: fig. . corn shocked for the shredder] the most economical method of planting is by means of the horse planter, which, according to its adjustment, plants regularly in hills or in drills. a few days after planting, the cornfield should be harrowed with a fine-tooth harrow to loosen the top soil and to kill the grass and the weed seeds that are germinating at the surface. when the corn plants are from a half inch to an inch high, the harrow may again be used. a little work before the weeds sprout will save many days of labor during the rest of the season, and increase the yield. [illustration: fig. . the difference is due to tillage] corn is a crop that needs constant cultivation, and during the growing season the soil should be stirred at least four times. this cultivation is for three reasons: . to destroy weeds that would take plant food and water. . to provide a mulch of dry soil so as to prevent the evaporation of moisture. the action of this mulch has already been explained. . because "tillage is manure." constant stirring of the soil allows the air to circulate in it, provides a more effective mulch, and helps to change unavailable plant food into the form that plants use. deep culture of corn is not advisable. the roots in their early stages of growth are shallow feeders and spread widely only a few inches below the surface. the cultivation that destroys or disturbs the roots injures the plants and lessens the yield. we cultivate because of the three reasons given above, and not to stir the soil about the roots or to loosen it there. [illustration: fig. .] in many parts of the country the cornstalks are left standing in the fields or are burned. this is a great mistake, for the stalks are worth a good deal for feeding horses, cattle, and sheep. these stalks may always be saved by the use of the husker and shredder. corn after being matured and cut can be put in shocks and left thus until dry enough to run through the husker and shredder. this machine separates the corn from the stalk and husks it. at the same time it shreds tops, leaves, and butts into a food that is both nutritious and palatable to stock. for the amount that animals will eat, almost as much feeding value is obtained from corn stover treated in this way as from timothy hay. the practice of not using the stalks is wasteful and is fast being abandoned. the only reason that so much good food is being left to decay in the field is because so many people have not fully learned the feeding value of the stover. =exercise= to show the effect of cultivation on the yield of corn, let the pupils lay off five plats in some convenient field. each plat need consist of only two rows about twenty feet long. treat each plat as follows: plat . no cultivation: let weeds grow. plat . mulch with straw. plat . shallow cultivation: not deeper than two inches and at least five times during the growing season. plat . deep cultivation: at least four inches deep, so as to injure and tear out some of the roots (this is a common method). plat . root-pruning: ten inches from the stalk and six inches deep, prune the roots with a long knife. cultivate five times during the season. observe plats during the summer, and at husking-time note results. section xxxix. peanuts this plant is rich in names, being known locally as "ground pea," "goober," "earthnut," and "pindar," as well as generally by the name of "peanut." the peanut is a true legume, and, like other legumes, bears nitrogen-gathering tubercles upon its roots. the fruit is not a real nut but rather a kind of pea or bean, and develops from the blossom. after the fall of the blossom the "spike," or flower-stalk, pushes its way into the ground, where the nut develops. if unable to penetrate the soil the nut dies. in the united states, north and south carolina, virginia, and tennessee have the most favorable climates for peanut culture. suitable climate and soil, however, may be found from new jersey to the mississippi valley. a high, porous, sandy loam is the most suitable. stiffer soils, which may in some cases yield larger crops than the loams, are yet not so profitable, for stiff soils injure the color of the nut. lime is a necessity and must be supplied if the soil is deficient. phosphoric acid and potash are needed. greater care than is usually bestowed should be given to the selection of the peanut seed. in addition to following the principles given in section xviii, all musty, defective seeds must be avoided and all frosted kernels must be rejected. before it dries, the peanut seed is easily injured by frost. the slightest frost on the vines, either before or after the plants are dug, does much harm to the tender seed. [illustration: fig. . a peanut plant] in growing peanuts, thorough preparation of the soil is much better than later cultivation. destroy the crop of young weeds, but do not disturb the peanut crop by late cultivation. harvest before frost, and shock high to keep the vines from the ground. the average yield of peanuts in the united states is twenty-two bushels an acre. in tennessee the yield is twenty-nine bushels an acre, and in north carolina and virginia it reaches thirty bushels an acre. section xl. sweet potatoes the roots of sweet potatoes are put on the market in various forms. aside from the form in which they are ordinarily sold, some potatoes are dried and then ground into flour, some are canned, some are used to make starch, some furnish a kind of sugar called glucose, and some are even used to make alcohol. the fact that there are over eighty varieties of potatoes shows the popularity of the plant. now it is evident that all of these varieties cannot be equally desirable. hence the wise grower will select his varieties with prudent forethought. he should study his market, his soil, and his seed (see section xviii). [illustration: fig. . sweet potatoes] four months of mild weather, months free from frost and cold winds, are necessary for the growing of sweet potatoes. in a mild climate almost any loose, well-drained soil will produce them. a light, sandy loam, however, gives a cleaner potato and one, therefore, that sells better. the sweet potato draws potash, nitrogen, and phosphoric acid from the soil, but in applying these as fertilizers the grower must study and know his own soil. if he does not he may waste both money and plant food by the addition of elements already present in sufficient quantity in the soil. the only way to come to reliable conclusions as to the needs of the soil is to try two or three different kinds of fertilizers on plats of the same soil, during the same season, and notice the resulting crop of potatoes. sweet potatoes will do well after almost any of the usual field crops. this caution, however, should be borne in mind. potatoes should not follow a sod. this is because sods are often thick with cutworms, one of the serious enemies of the potato. it is needless to say that the ground must be kept clean by thorough cultivation until the vines take full possession of the field. in harvesting, extreme care should be used to avoid cutting and bruising the potato, since bruises are as dangerous to a sweet potato as to an apple, and render decay almost a certainty. lay aside all bruised potatoes for immediate use. for shipment the potatoes should be graded and packed with care. an extra outlay of fifty cents a barrel often brings a return of a dollar a barrel in the market. one fact often neglected by southern growers who raise potatoes for a northern market is that the northern markets demand a potato that will cook dry and mealy, and that they will not accept the juicy, sugary potato so popular in the south. the storage of sweet potatoes presents difficulties owing to their great tendency to decay under the influence of the ever-present fungi and bacteria. this tendency can be met by preventing bruises and by keeping the bin free from rotting potatoes. the potatoes should be cleaned, and after the moisture has been dried off they should be stored in a dry, warm place. the sweet-potato vine makes a fair quality of hay and with proper precaution may be used for ensilage. small, defective, unsalable potatoes are rich in sugar and starch and are therefore good stock food. since they contain so much water they must be used only as an aid to other diet. section xli. white, or irish, potatoes maize, or indian corn, and potatoes are the two greatest gifts in the way of food that america has bestowed on the other nations. since their adoption in the sixteenth century as a new food from recently discovered america, white potatoes have become one of the world's most important crops. [illustration: fig. . cultivating and ridging potatoes] no grower will harvest large crops of potatoes unless he chooses soil that suits the plant, selects his seed carefully, cultivates thoroughly, feeds his land sufficiently, and sprays regularly. the soil should be free from potato scab. this disease remains in land for several years. hence if land is known to have any form of scab in it, do not plant potatoes in such land. select for this crop a deep and moderately light, sandy loam which has an open subsoil and which is rich in humus. the soil must be light enough for the potatoes, or tubers, to enlarge easily and dry enough to prevent rot or blight or other diseases. potato soil should be so close-grained that it will hold moisture during a dry spell and yet so well-drained that the tubers will not be hurt by too much moisture in wet weather. if the land selected for potatoes is lacking in humus, fine compost or well-rotted manure will greatly increase the yield. however, it should be remembered that green manure makes a good home for the growth of scab germs. hence it is safest to apply this sort of manure in the fall, or, better still, use a heavy dressing of manure on the crop which the potatoes are to follow. leguminous crops supply both humus and nitrogen and, at the same time, improve the subsoil. therefore such crops are excellent to go immediately before potatoes. if land is well supplied with humus, commercial fertilizers are perhaps safer than manure, for when these fertilizers are used the amount of plant food is more easily regulated. select a fertilizer that is rich in potash. for gardens unleached wood ashes make a valuable fertilizer because they supply potash. early potatoes need more fertilization than do late ones. while potatoes do best on rich land, they should not be overfed, for a too heavy growth of foliage is likely to cause blight. be careful to select seed from sound potatoes which are entirely free from scab. get the kinds that thrive best in the section in which they are to be planted and which suit best the markets in which they are to be sold. seed potatoes should be kept in a cool place so that they will not sprout before planting-time. as a rule consumers prefer a smooth, regularly shaped, shallow-eyed white or flesh-colored potato which is mealy when cooked. therefore, select seed tubers with these qualities. it seems proved that when whole potatoes are used for seed the yield is larger than when sliced potatoes are planted. it is of course too costly to plant whole potatoes, but it is a good practice to cause the plants to thrive by planting large seed pieces. [illustration: fig. . gathering potatoes] like other crops, potatoes need a thoroughly prepared seed-bed and intelligent cultivation. break the land deep. then go over it with an ordinary harrow until all clods are broken and the soil is fine and well closed. the rows should be at least three feet from one another and the seeds placed from twelve to eighteen inches apart in the row, and covered to a depth of three or four inches. a late crop should be planted deeper than an early one. before the plants come up it is well to go over the field once or twice with a harrow so as to kill all weeds. do not fail to save moisture by frequent cultivation. after the plants start to grow, all cultivation should be shallow, for the roots feed near the surface and should not be broken. cultivate as often as needed to keep down weeds and grass and to keep the ground fine. allow potatoes to dry thoroughly before they are stored, but never allow them to remain long in the sunshine. never dig them in damp weather, for the moisture clinging to them will cause them to rot. after the tubers are dry, store them in barrels or bins in a dry, cool, and dark place. never allow them to freeze. among the common diseases and insect pests that attack the leaves and stems of potato vines are early blight, late blight, brown rot, the flea-beetle, and the potato beetle, or potato bug. spraying with bordeaux mixture to which a small portion of paris green has been added will control both the diseases and the pests. the spraying should begin when the plants are five or six inches high and should not cease until the foliage begins to die. scab is a disease of the tubers. it may be prevented ( ) by using seed potatoes that are free from scab; ( ) by planting land in which there is no scab; and ( ) by soaking the seed in formalin (see page ). section xlii. oats the oat plant belongs to the grass family. it is a hardy plant and, under good conditions, a vigorous grower. it stands cold and wet better than any other cereal except possibly rye. oats like a cool, moist climate. in warm climates, oats do best when they are sowed in the fall. in cooler sections, spring seeding is more generally practiced. there are a great many varieties of oats. no one variety is best adapted to all sections, but many varieties make fine crops in many sections. any variety is desirable which has these qualities: power to resist disease and insect enemies, heavy grains, thin hulls, good color, and suitability to local surroundings. as oats and rye make a better yield on poor land than any other cereals, some farmers usually plant these crops on their poorest lands. however, no land is too good to be used for so valuable a crop as oats. oats require a great deal of moisture; hence light, sandy soils are not so well adapted to this crop as are the sandy loams and fine clay loams with their closer and heavier texture. if oats are to be planted in the spring, the ground should be broken in the fall, winter, or early spring so that no delay may occur at seeding-time. but to have a thoroughly settled, compact seed-bed the breaking of the land should be done at least a month before the seeding, and it will help greatly to run over the land with a disk harrow immediately after the breaking. [illustration: fig. . oats common oats at left; side oats at right] oats may be planted by scattering them broadcast or by means of a drill. the drill is better, because the grains are more uniformly distributed and the depth of planting is better regulated. the seeds should be covered from one and a half to two inches deep. in a very dry season three inches may not be too deep. the amount of seed needed to the acre varies considerably, but generally the seeding is from two to three bushels an acre. on poor lands two bushels will be a fair average seeding; on good lands as much as three bushels should be used. [illustration: fig. . harvesting oats] this crop fits in well, over wide areas, with various rotations. as the purpose of all rotation is to keep the soil productive, oats should alternate every few years with one of the nitrogen-gathering crops. in the south, cowpeas, soy beans, clovers, and vetches may be used in this rotation. in the north and west the clovers mixed with timothy hay make a useful combination for this purpose. spring-sowed oats, since they have a short growing season, need their nitrogenous plant food in a form which can be quickly used. to supply this nitrogen a top-dressing of nitrate of soda or sulphate of lime is helpful. the plant can gather its food quickly from either of these two. as fall-sowed oats have of course a longer growing season, the nitrogen can be supplied by well-rotted manure, blood, tankage, or fish-scrap. use barnyard manure carefully. do not apply too much just before seeding, and use only thoroughly rotted manure. it is always desirable to have a bountiful supply of humus in land on which oats are to be planted. the time of harvesting will vary with the use which is to be made of the oats. if the crop is to be threshed, the harvesting should be done when the kernels have passed out of the milk into the hard dough state. the lower leaves of the stalks will at this time have turned yellow, and the kernels will be plump and full. do not, however, wait too long, for if you do the grain will shatter and the straw lose in feeding value. on the other hand, if the oats are to be cut for hay it is best to cut them while the grains are still in the milk stage. at this stage the leaves are still green and the plants are rich in protein. oats should be cured quickly. it is very important that threshed oats should be dry before they are stored. should they on being stored still contain moisture, they will be likely to heat and to discolor. any discoloring will reduce their value. nor should oats ever be allowed to remain long in the fields, no matter how well they may seem to be shocked. the dew and the rain will injure their value by discoloring them more or less. oats are muscle-builders rather than fat-formers. hence they are a valuable ration for work animals, dairy cows, and breeding-stock. section xliii. rye rye has the power of gathering its food from a wider area than most other plants. of course, then, it is a fine crop for poor land, and farmers often plant it only on worn land. however, it is too good a cereal to be treated in so ungenerous a fashion. as a cover-crop for poor land it adds much humus to the soil and makes capital grazing. [illustration: fig. . rye ready for cutting] there are two types of rye--the winter and the spring. the winter type is chiefly grown in this country. rye seeds should be bought as near home as possible, for this plant thrives best when the new crop grows under the same conditions as the seed crop. rye will grow on almost any soil that is drained. soils that are too sandy for wheat will generally yield good crops of rye. clay soils, however, are not adapted to the plant nor to the grazing for which the plant is generally sowed. for winter rye the land should be broken from four to six inches. harrows should follow the plows until the land is well pulverized. in some cold prairie lands, however, rye is put in with a grain-drill before a plow removes the stubble from the land. the purpose of planting in this way is to let the stubble protect the young plants from cold, driving winds. rye should go into the ground earlier than wheat. in cold, bleak climates, as well as on poor land, the seeding should be early. the young plant needs to get rooted and topped before cold weather sets in. the only danger in very early planting is that leaf-rust sometimes attacks the forward crop. of course the earlier the rye is ready for fall and winter pasturage, the better. if a drill is used for planting, a seeding of from three to four pecks to the acre should give a good stand. in case the seeds are to be sowed broadcast, a bushel or a bushel and a half for every acre is needed. the seed should be covered as wheat seed is and the ground rolled. rye is generally used as a grazing or as a soiling crop. therefore its value will depend largely on its vigorous growth in stems and leaves. to get this growth, liberal amounts of nitrogenous fertilizer will have to be applied unless the land is very rich. put barnyard manure on the land just after the first breaking and disk the manure into the soil. acid phosphate and kainite added to the manure may pay handsomely. a spring top-dressing of nitrate of soda is usually helpful. rye has a stiff straw and does not fall, or "lodge," so badly as some of the other cereals. as soon as rye that is meant for threshing is cut, it should be put up in shocks until it is thoroughly dry. begin the cutting when the kernels are in a tough dough state. the grain should never stand long in the shocks. section xliv. barley barley is one of the oldest crops known to man. the old historian pliny says that barley was the first food of mankind. modern man however prefers wheat and corn and potatoes to barley, and as a food this ancient crop is in america turned over to the lower animals. brewers use barley extensively in making malt liquors. barley grows in nearly all sections of our country, but a few states--namely, minnesota, california, wisconsin, iowa, and north and south dakota--are seeding large areas to this crop. for malting purposes the barley raised on rather light, friable, porous soil is best. soils of this kind are likely to produce a medium yield of bright grain. fertile loamy and clay soils make generally a heavier yield of barley, but the grain is dark and fit only to be fed to stock. barley is a shallow feeder, and can reach only such plant food as is found in the top soil, so its food should always be put within reach by a thorough breaking, harrowing, and mellowing of the soil, and by fertilizing if the soil is poor. barley has been successfully raised both by irrigation and by dry-farming methods. it requires a better-prepared soil than the other grain crops; it makes fine yields when it follows some crop that has received a heavy dressing of manure. capital yields are produced after alfalfa or after root crops. this crop usually matures within a hundred days from its seeding. [illustration: fig. . barley] when the crop is to be sold to the brewers, a grain rich in starch should be secured. barley intended for malting should be fertilized to this end. many experiments have shown that a fertilizer which contains much potash will produce starchy barley. if the barley be intended for stock, you should breed so as to get protein in the grain and in the stalk. hence barley which is to be fed should be fertilized with mixtures containing nitrogen and phosphoric acid. young barley plants are more likely to be hurt by cold than either wheat or oats. hence barley ought not to be seeded until all danger from frost is over. the seeds should be covered deeper than the seeds of wheat or of oats. four inches is perhaps an average depth for covering. but the covering will vary with the time of planting, with the kind of ground, with the climate, and with the nature of the season. fewer seeds will be needed if the barley is planted by means of a drill. like other cereals, barley should not be grown continuously on the same land. it should take its place in a well-planned rotation. it may profitably follow potatoes or other hoed crops, but it should not come first after wheat, oats, or rye. barley should be harvested as soon as most of its kernels have reached the hard dough state. it is more likely to shatter its grain than are other cereals, and it should therefore be handled with care. it must also be watched to prevent its sprouting in the shocks. be sure to put few bundles in the shock and to cap the shock securely enough to keep out dew and rain. if possible the barley should be threshed directly from the shock, as much handling will occasion a serious loss from shattering. section xlv. sugar plants in the united states there are three sources from which sugar is obtained; namely, the sugar-maple, the sugar-beet, and the sugar-cane. in the early days of our country considerable quantities of maple sirup and maple sugar were made. this was the first source of sugar. then sugar-cane began to be grown. later the sugar-beet was introduced. =maple products.= in many states sirup and sugar are still made from maple sap. in the spring when the sap is flowing freely maple trees are tapped and spouts are inserted. through these spouts the sap flows into vessels set to catch it. the sap is boiled in evaporating-pans, and made into either sirup or sugar. four gallons of sap yield about one pound of sugar. a single tree yields from two to six pounds of sugar in a season. the sap cannot be kept long after it is collected. practice and skill are needed to produce an attractive and palatable grade of sirup or of sugar. =sugar-beets.= the sugar-beet is a comparatively new root crop in america. the amount of sugar that can be obtained from beets varies from twelve to twenty per cent. the richness in sugar depends somewhat on the variety grown and on the soil and the climate. so far most of our sugar-beet seeds have been brought over from europe. some of our planters are now, however, gaining the skill and the knowledge needed to grow these seeds. it is of course important to grow seeds that will produce beets containing much sugar. [illustration: fig. . catching maple sap] these beets do well in a great variety of soils if the land is rich, well prepared, and well drained, and has a porous subsoil. beets cannot grow to a large size in hard land. hence deep plowing is very necessary for this crop. the soil should be loose enough for the whole body of the beet to remain underground. some growers prefer spring plowing and some fall plowing, but all agree that the land should not be turned less than eight or ten inches. the subsoil, however, should not be turned up too much at the first deep plowing. too much care cannot be taken to make the seed-bed firm and mellow and to have it free from clods. if the soil is dry at planting-time and there is likelihood of high winds, the seed-bed may be rolled with profit. experienced growers use from ten to twelve pounds of seeds to an acre. it is better to use too many rather than too few seeds, for it is easy to thin out the plants, but rather difficult to transplant them. the seeds are usually drilled in rows about twenty inches apart. of course, if the soil is rather warm and moist at planting-time, fewer seeds will be needed than when germination is likely to be slow. [illustration: fig. . sugar-beet] a good rotation should always be planned for this beet. a very successful one is as follows: for the first year, corn heavily fertilized with stable manure; for the second year, sugar-beets; for the third year, oats or barley; for the fourth year, clover; then go back again to corn. in addition to keeping the soil fertile, there are two gains from this rotation: first, the clean cultivation of the corn crop just ahead of the beets destroys many of the weed seeds; second, the beets must be protected from too much nitrogen in the soil, for an excess of nitrogen makes a beet too large to be rich in sugar. the manure, heavily applied to the corn, will leave enough nitrogen and other plant food in the soil to make a good crop of beets and avoid any danger of an excess. when the outside leaves of the beet take on a yellow tinge and drop to the ground, the beets are ripe. the mature beets are richer in sugar than the immature, therefore they should not be harvested too soon. they may remain in the ground without injury for some time after they are ripe. cold weather does not injure the roots unless it is accompanied by freezing and thawing. [illustration: fig. . sugar-beets on the way to a factory] the beets are harvested by sugar-beet pullers or by hand. if the roots are to be gathered by hand they are usually loosened by plowing on each side of them. if the roots are stored they should be put in long, narrow piles and covered with straw and earth to protect them from frost. a ventilator placed at the top of the pile will enable the heat and moisture to escape. if the beets get too warm they will ferment and some of their sugar will be lost. =sugar-cane.= sugar-cane is grown along the gulf of mexico and the south atlantic coast. in mississippi, in alabama, florida, georgia, south carolina, northern louisiana, and in northern texas it is generally made into sirup. in southern louisiana and southern texas the cane is usually crushed for sugar or for molasses. [illustration: fig. . stalk of sugar-cane _a-b_, joints of cane showing roots; _b-c_, stem; _c-d_, leaves] the sugar-cane is a huge grass. the stalk, which is round, is from one to two inches in thickness. the stalks vary in color. some are white, some yellow, some green, some red, some purple, and some black, while others are a mixture of two or three of these colors. as shown in fig. the stalk has joints at distances of from two to six inches. these joints are called nodes, and the sections between the nodes are known as internodes. the internodes ripen from the roots upward, and as each ripens it casts its leaves. the stalk, when ready for harvesting, has only a few leaves on the top. [illustration: fig. . stick of sugar-cane _a_, buds, or eyes; _c_, nodes; _d_, internodes; _x_, semi-transparent dots in rows] under each leaf and on alternate sides of the cane a bud, or "eye," forms. from this eye the cane is usually propagated; for, while in tropical countries the cane forms seeds, yet these seeds are rarely fertile. when the cane is ripe it is stripped of leaves, topped, and cut at the ground with a knife. the sugar is contained in solution in the pith of the cane. cane requires an enormous amount of water for its best growth, and where the rainfall is not great enough, the plants are irrigated. it requires from seventy-five to one hundred gallons of water to make a pound of sugar. cane does best where there is a rainfall of two inches a week. at the same time a well-drained soil is necessary to make vigorous canes. the soils suited to this plant are those which contain large amounts of fertilizing material and which can hold much water. in southern louisiana alluvial loams and loamy clay soils are cultivated. in georgia, alabama, and florida light, sandy soils, when properly fertilized and worked, make good crops. [illustration: fig. . planting sugar-cane] [illustration: fig. . loading sugar-cane] cane is usually planted in rows from five to six feet apart. a trench is opened in the center of the row with a plow and in this open furrow is placed a continuous line of stalks which are carefully covered with plow, cultivator, or hoe. from one to three continuous lines of stalks are placed in the furrow. from two to six tons of seed cane are needed for an acre. in favorable weather the cane soon sprouts and cultivation begins. cane should be cultivated at short intervals until the plants are large enough to shade the soil. in louisiana one planting of cane usually gives two crops. the first is called plant cane; the second is known as first-year stubble, or ratoon. sometimes second-year stubble is grown. [illustration: fig. . a common type of sirup factory] in louisiana large quantities of tankage, cotton-seed meal, and acid phosphate are used to fertilize cane-fields. each country has its own time for planting and harvesting. in louisiana, for example, canes are planted from october to april. in the united states cane is harvested each year because of frost, but in tropical countries the stalks are permitted to grow from fifteen to twenty-four months. on many farms a small mill, the rollers of which are turned by horses, is used for crushing the juice out of the cane. the juice is then evaporated in a kettle or pan. this equipment is very cheap and can easily be operated by a small family. while these mills rarely extract more than one half of the juice in the cane, the sirup made by them is very palatable and usually commands a good price. costly machinery which saves most of the juice is used in the large commercial sugar houses. section xlvi. hemp and flax in the early ages of the world, mankind is supposed to have worn very little or no clothing. then leaves and the inner bark of trees were fashioned into a protection from the weather. these flimsy garments were later replaced by skins and furs. as man advanced in knowledge, he learned how to twist wool and hairs into threads and to weave these into durable garments. still later, perhaps, he discovered that some plants conceal under their outer bark soft, tough fibers that can be changed into excellent cloth. flax and hemp were doubtless among the first plants to furnish this fiber. =flax.= among the fiber crops of the world, flax ranks next to cotton. it is the material from which is woven the linen for sheets, towels, tablecloths, shirts, collars, dresses, and a host of other articles. fortunately for man, flax will thrive in many countries and in many climates. the fiber from which these useful articles are made, unlike cotton fiber, does not come from the fruit, but from the stem. it is the soft, silky lining of the bark which lies between the woody outside and the pith cells of the stem. the old world engages largely in flax culture and flax manufacture, but in our country flax is grown principally for its seed. from the seeds we make linseed oil, linseed-oil cake, and linseed meal. flax grows best on deep, loamy soils, but also makes a profitable growth on clay soils. with sufficient fertilizing material it can be grown on sandy lands. nitrogen is especially needed by this plant and should be liberally supplied. to meet this demand for nitrogen, it pays to plant a leguminous crop immediately before flax. [illustration: fig. . flax] after a mellow seed-bed has been made ready and after the weather is fairly warm, sow, if a seed crop is desired, at the rate of from two to three pecks an acre. a good seed crop will not be harvested if the plants are too thick. on the other hand, if a fiber crop is to be raised, it is desirable to plant more thickly, so that the stalks may not branch, but run up into a single stem. from a bushel to two bushels of seed is in this case used to an acre. flax requires care and work from start to finish. when the seeds are full and plump the flax is ready for harvesting. in america a binder is generally used for cutting the stalks. our average yield of flax is from eight to fifteen bushels an acre. =hemp.= like flax, hemp adapts itself wonderfully to many countries and many climates. however, in america most of our hemp is grown in kentucky. [illustration: fig. . cutting hemp] hemp needs soil rich enough to give the young plants a very rapid growth in their early days so that they may form long fibers. to give this crop abundant nitrogen without great cost, it should be grown in a rotation which includes one of the legumes. rich, well-drained bottom-lands produce the largest yields of hemp, but uplands which have been heavily manured make profitable yields. the ground for hemp is prepared as for other grain crops. the seed is generally broadcasted for a fiber crop and then harrowed in. no cultivation is required after seeding. if hemp is grown for seed, it is best to plant with a drill so that the crop may be cultivated. the stalks after being cut are put in shocks until they are dry. then the seeds are threshed. large amounts of hemp seed are sold for caged birds and for poultry; it is also used for paint-oils. section xlvii. buckwheat buckwheat shares with rye and cowpeas the power to make a fairly good crop on poor land. at the same time, of course, a full crop can be expected only from fertile land. the three varieties most grown in america are the common gray, the silver-hull, and the japanese. the seeds of the common gray are larger than the silver-hull, but not so large as the japanese. the seeds from the gray variety are generally regarded as inferior to the other two. this crop is grown to best advantage in climates where the nights are cool and moist. it matures more quickly than any other grain crop and is remarkably free from disease. the yield varies from ten to forty bushels an acre. buckwheat does not seem to draw plant food heavily from the soil and can be grown on the same land from year to year. in fertilizing buckwheat land, green manures and rich nitrogenous fertilizers should be avoided. these cause such a luxuriant growth that the stalks lodge badly. the time of seeding will have to be settled by the height of the land and by the climate. in northern climates and in high altitudes the seeding is generally done in may or june. in southern climates and in low altitudes the planting may wait until july or august. the plant usually matures in about seventy days. it cannot stand warm weather at blooming-time, and must always be planted so that it may escape warm weather in its blooming period and cold weather in its maturing season. the seeds are commonly broadcasted at an average rate of four pecks to the acre. if the land is loose and pulverized, it should be rolled. [illustration: fig. . buckwheat in shock] buckwheat ripens unevenly and will continue to bloom until frost. harvesting usually begins just after the first crop of seeds have matured. to keep the grains from shattering, the harvesting is best done during damp or cloudy days or early in the morning while the dew is still on the grain. the grain should be threshed as soon as it is dry enough to go through the thresher. buckwheat is grown largely for table use. the grain is crushed into a dark flour that makes most palatable breakfast cakes. the grain, especially when mixed with corn, is becoming popular for poultry food. the middlings, which are rich in fats and protein, are prized for dairy cows. section xlviii. rice the united states produces only about one half of the rice that it consumes. there is no satisfactory reason for our not raising more of this staple crop, for five great states along the gulf of mexico are well adapted to its culture. [illustration: fig. . threshing rice] there are two distinct kinds of rice, upland rice and lowland rice. upland rice demands in general the same methods of culture that are required by other cereals, for example, oats or wheat. the growing of lowland rice is considerably more difficult and includes the necessity of flooding the fields with water at proper times. a stiff, half-clay soil with some loam is best suited to this crop. the soil should have a clay subsoil to retain water and to give stiffness enough to allow the use of harvesting-machinery. some good rice soils are so stiff that they must be flooded to soften them enough to admit of plowing. plow deeply to give the roots ample feeding-space. good tillage, which is too often neglected, is valuable. careful seed-selection is perhaps even more needed for rice than for any other crop. consumers want kernels of the same size. be sure that your seed is free from red rice and other weeds. drilling is much better than broadcasting, as it secures a more even distribution of the seed. the notion generally prevails that flooding returns to the soil the needed fertility. this may be true if the flooding-water deposits much silt, but if the water be clear it is untrue, and fertilizers or leguminous crops are needed to keep up fertility. cowpeas replace the lost soil-elements and keep down weeds, grasses, and red rice. red rice is a weed close kin to rice, but the seed of one will not produce the other. do not allow it to get mixed and sowed with your rice seed or to go to seed in your field. section xlix. the timber crop forest trees are not usually regarded as a crop, but they are certainly one of the most important crops. we should accustom ourselves to look on our trees as needing and as deserving the same care and thought that we give to our other field crops. the total number of acres given to the growth of forest trees is still enormous, but we should each year add to this acreage. unfortunately very few forests are so managed as to add yearly to their value and to preserve a model stand of trees. axmen generally fell the great trees without thought of the young trees that should at once begin to fill the places left vacant by the fallen giants. owners rarely study their woodlands to be sure that the trees are thick enough, or to find out whether the saplings are ruinously crowding one another. disease is often allowed to slip in unchecked. old trees stand long after they have outlived their usefulness. the farm wood-lot, too, is often neglected. as forests are being swept away, fuel is of course becoming scarcer and more costly. every farmer ought to plant trees enough on his waste land to make sure of a constant supply of fuel. the land saved for the wood-lot should be selected from land unfit for cultivation. steep hillsides, rocky slopes, ravines, banks of streams--these can, without much expense or labor, be set in trees and insure a never-ending fuel supply. [illustration: fig. . wood lot before proper treatment] the most common enemies of the forest crop are: first, forest fires. the waste from forest fires in the united states is most startling. many of these fires are the result of carelessness or ignorance. most of the states have made or are now making laws to prevent and to control such fires. second, fungous diseases. the timber loss from these diseases is exceedingly great. third, insects of many kinds prey on the trees. some strip all the leaves from the branches. others bore into the roots, trunk, or branches. some lead to a slow death; others are more quickly fatal. fourth, improper grazing. turning animals into young woods may lead to serious loss. the animals frequently ruin young trees by eating all the foliage. hogs often unearth and consume most of the seeds needed for a good growth. [illustration: fig. . wood lot after proper treatment] the handling of forests is a business just as the growing of corn is a business. in old forests, dead and dying trees should be cut. trees that occupy space and yet have little commercial value should give way to more valuable trees. a quick-growing tree, if it is equally desirable, should be preferred to a slow grower. an even distribution of the trees should be secured. in all there are about five hundred species of trees which are natives of the united states. probably not over seventy of these are desirable for forests. in selecting trees to plant or to allow to grow from their own seeding, pick those that make a quick growth, that have a steady market value, and that suit the soil, the place of growth, and the climate. section l. the farm garden every farmer needs a garden in which to grow not only vegetables but small fruits for the home table. the garden should always be within convenient distance of the farmhouse. if possible, the spot selected should have a soil of mixed loam and clay. every foot of soil in the garden should be made rich and mellow by manure and cultivation. the worst soils for the home garden are light, sandy soils, or stiff, clayey soils; but any soil, by judicious and intelligent culture, can be made suitable. in laying out the garden we should bear in mind that hand labor is the most expensive kind of labor. hence we should not, as is commonly done, lay off the garden spot in the form of a square, but we should mark off for our purpose a long, narrow piece of land, so that the cultivating tools may all be conveniently drawn by a horse or a mule. the use of the plow and the horse cultivator enables the cultivation of the garden to be done quickly, easily, and cheaply. each vegetable or fruit should be planted in rows, and not in little patches. beginning with one side of the garden the following plan of arrangement is simple and complete: two rows to corn for table use; two to cabbages, beets, radishes, and eggplants; two to onions, peas, and beans; two to oyster-plants, okra, parsley, and turnips; two to tomatoes; then four on the other side can be used for strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, currants, and gooseberries. [illustration: fig. . where delicious garden vegetables grow] the garden, when so arranged, can be tilled in the spring and tended throughout the growing season with little labor and little loss of time. in return for this odd-hour work, the farmer's family will have throughout the year an abundance of fresh, palatable, and health-giving vegetables and small fruits. the keynote of successful gardening is to stir the soil. stir it often with four objects in view: . to destroy weeds. . to let air enter the soil. . to enrich the soil by the action of the air. . to retain the moisture by preventing its evaporation. corn corn cabbage beets radishes cabbage beets eggplants onions peas beans onions peas beans oyster-plants okra parsley parsnips oyster-plants okra parsley parsnips tomatoes tomatoes strawberries currants raspberries blackberries strawberries currants raspberries blackberries strawberries currants raspberries blackberries strawberries currants raspberries blackberries [illustration: fig. . how to lay out the garden[ ]] this illustration shows that practically every garden vegetable and all the small fruits can be included in the farm garden, and all the work be done by horse-drawn tools. [footnote : the number of rows and arrangement of the vegetables in the outline above are merely suggestive. they should be changed to meet the needs and the tastes of each particular family.] chapter ix feed stuffs section li. grasses under usual conditions no farmer expects to grow live stock successfully and economically without setting apart a large part of his land for the growth of mowing and pasture crops. therefore to the grower of stock the management of grass crops is all-important. in planting either for a meadow or for a pasture, the farmer should mix different varieties of grass seeds. nature mixes them when she plants, and nature is always a trustworthy teacher. in planting for a pasture the aim should be to sow such seeds as will give green grass from early spring to latest fall. in seeding for a meadow such varieties should be sowed together as ripen about the same time. even in those sections of the country where it grows sparingly and where it is easily crowded out, clover should be mixed with all grasses sowed, for it leaves in the soil a wealth of plant food for the grasses coming after it to feed on. nearly every part of our country has some clover that experience shows to be exactly suited to its soil and climate. study these clovers carefully and mix them with your grass seed. the reason for mixing clover and grass is at once seen. the true grasses, so far as science now shows, get all their nitrogen from the soil; hence they more or less exhaust the soil. but, as several times explained in this book, the clovers are legumes, and all legumes are able by means of the bacteria that live on their roots to use the free nitrogen of the air. hence without cost to the farmer these clovers help the soil to feed their neighbors, the true grasses. for this reason some light perennial legume should always be added to grass seed. [illustration: fig. . single plant of giant millet] it is not possible for grasses to do well in a soil that is full of weeds. for this reason it is always best to sow grass in fields from which cultivated crops have just been taken. soil which is to have grass sowed in it should have its particles pressed together. the small grass seeds cannot take root and grow well in land that has just been plowed and which, consequently, has its particles loose and comparatively far apart. on the other hand, land from which a crop of corn or cotton has just been harvested is in a compact condition. the soil particles are pressed well together. such land when mellowed by harrowing makes a splendid bed for grass seeds. a firm soil draws moisture up to the seeds, while a mellow soil acts as a blanket to keep moisture from wasting into the air, and at the same time allows the heated air to circulate in the soil. in case land has to be plowed for grass-seeding, the plowing should be done as far as possible in advance of the seeding. then the plowed land should be harrowed several times to get the land in a soft, mellow condition. if the seed-bed be carefully prepared, little work on the ground is necessary after the seeds are sowed. one light harrowing is sufficient to cover the broadcast seeds. this harrowing should always be done as soon as the seeds are scattered, for if there be moisture in the soil the tiny seeds will soon sprout, and if the harrowing be done after germination is somewhat advanced, the tender grass plants will be injured. there are many kinds of pasture and meadow grasses. in new england, timothy, red clover, and redtop are generally used for the mowing crop. for permanent pasture, in addition to those mentioned, there should be added white clover and either kentucky or canadian blue grass. in the southern states a good meadow or pasture can be made of orchard grass, red clover, and redtop. for a permanent pasture in the south, japan clover, bermuda, and such other local grasses as have been found to adapt themselves readily to the climate should be added. in the middle states temporary meadows and pastures are generally made of timothy and red clover, while for permanent pastures white clover and blue grass thrive well. in the more western states the grasses previously suggested are readily at home. alfalfa is proving its adaptability to nearly all sections and climates, and is in many respects the most promising grass crop of america. [illustration: fig. . bermuda] it hardly ever pays to pasture meadows, except slightly, the first season, and then only when the soil is dry. it is also poor policy to pasture any kind of grass land early in the spring when the soil is wet, because the tramping of animals crushes and destroys the crowns of the plants. after the first year the sward becomes thicker and tougher, and the grass is not at all injured if it is grazed wisely. [illustration: fig. . alfalfa the wonderful the first crop of the season is being cut and stored for winter] the state of maturity at which grass should be harvested to make hay of the best quality varies somewhat with the different grasses and with the use which is to be made of the hay. generally speaking, it is a good rule to cut grass for hay just as it is beginning to bloom or just after the bloom has fallen. all grasses become less palatable to stock as they mature and form seed. if grass be allowed to go to seed, most of the nutrition in the stalk is used to form the seed. [illustration: fig. . harvesting alfalfa] hence a good deal of food is lost by waiting to cut hay until the seeds are formed. pasture lands and meadow lands are often greatly improved by replowing and harrowing in order to break up the turf that forms and to admit air more freely into the soil. the plant-roots that are destroyed by the plowing or harrowing make quickly available plant food by their decay, and the physical improvement of the soil leads to a thicker and better stand. in the older sections of the country commercial fertilizer can be used to advantage in producing hay and pasturage. if, however, clover has just been grown on grass land or if it is growing well with the grass, there is no need to add nitrogen. if the grass seems to lack sufficient nourishment, add phosphoric acid and potash. however, grass not grown in company with clover often needs dried blood, nitrate of soda, or some other nitrogen-supplying agent. of course it is understood that no better fertilizer can be applied to grass than barnyard manure. section lii. legumes often land which was once thought excellent is left to grow up in weeds. the owner says that the land is worn out, and that it will not pay to plant it. what does "worn out" mean? simply that constant cropping has used up the plant food in the land. therefore, plants on worn-out land are too nearly starved to yield bountifully. such wearing out is so easily prevented that no owner ought ever to allow his land to become poverty-stricken. but in case this misfortune has happened, how can the land be again made fertile? on page you learned that phosphoric acid, potash, and nitrogen are the foods most needed by plants. "worn out," then, to put it in another way, usually means that a soil has been robbed of one of these plant necessities, or of two or of all three. to make the land once more fruitful it is necessary to restore the missing food or foods. how can this be done? two of these plant foods, namely, phosphoric acid and potash, are minerals. if either of these is lacking, it can be supplied only by putting on the land some fertilizer containing the missing food. fortunately, however, nitrogen, the most costly of the plant foods, can be readily and cheaply returned to poor land. [illustration: fig. . alfalfa ready for the third cutting] as explained on page the leguminous crops have the power of drawing nitrogen from the air and, by means of their root-tubercles, of storing it in the soil. hence by growing these crops on poor land the expensive nitrogen is quickly restored to the soil, and only the two cheaper plant foods need be bought. how important it is then to grow these leguminous plants! every farmer should so rotate his planting that at least once every two or three years a crop of legumes may add to the fruitfulness of his fields. moreover these crops help land in another way. they send a multitude of roots deep into the ground. these roots loosen and pulverize the soil, and their decay, at the end of the growing season, leaves much humus in the soil. land will rarely become worn out if legumes are regularly and wisely grown. from the fact that they do well in so many different sections and in so many different climates, the following are the most useful legumes: alfalfa, clovers, cowpeas, vetches, and soy beans. =alfalfa.= alfalfa is primarily a hay crop. it thrives in the far west, in the middle west, in the north, and in the south. in fact, it will do well wherever the soil is rich, moist, deep, and underlaid by an open subsoil. the vast areas given to this valuable crop are yearly increasing in every section of the united states. alfalfa, however, unlike the cowpea, does not take to poor land. for its cultivation, therefore, good fertile land that is moist but not water-soaked should be selected. good farmers are partial to alfalfa for three reasons. first, it yields a heavy crop of forage or hay. second, being a legume, it improves the soil. third, one seeding lasts a long time. this length of life may, however, be destroyed by pasturing or abusing the alfalfa. [illustration: fig. . sheep fattening on alfalfa stubble] alfalfa is different from most plants in this respect: the soil in which it grows must have certain kinds of bacteria in it. these cause the growth of tubercles on the roots. these bacteria, however, are not always present in land that has not been planted in alfalfa. hence if this plant is to be grown successfully these helpful bacteria must sometimes be supplied artificially. there are two very easy ways of supplying the germs. first, fine soil from an alfalfa field may be scattered broadcast over the fields to be seeded. second, a small mass of alfalfa tubercle germs may be put into a liquid containing proper food to make these germs multiply and grow; then the seeds to be planted are soaked in this liquid in order that the germs may fasten on the seeds. before the seeds are sowed the soil should be mellowed. over this well-prepared land about twenty pounds of seed to the acre should be scattered. the seed may be scattered by hand or by a seed-sower. cover with a light harrow. the time of planting varies somewhat with the climate. except where the winters are too severe the seed may be sowed either in the spring or in the fall. in the south sow only in the fall. [illustration: fig. . herd of dairy cattle grazing on alfalfa stubble] during the first season one mowing, perhaps more, is necessary to insure a good stand and also to keep down the weeds. when the first blossoms appear in the early summer, it is time to start the mower. after this the alfalfa should be cut every two, three, or four weeks. the number of times depends on the rapidity of growth. this crop rarely makes a good yield the first year, but if a good stand be secured, the yield steadily increases. after a good stand has been secured, a top-dressing of either commercial fertilizer or stable manure will be very helpful. an occasional cutting-up of the sod with a disk harrow does much good. =clovers.= the different kinds of clovers will sometimes grow on hard or poor soil, but they do far better if the soil is enriched and properly prepared before the seed is sowed. in many parts of our country it has been the practice for generations to sow clover seed with some of the grain crops. barley, wheat, oats, and rye are the crops with which clover is usually planted, but many good farmers now prefer to sow the seed only with other grass seed. circumstances must largely determine the manner of seeding. crimson clover, which is a winter legume, usually does best when seeded alone, although rye or some other grain often seems helpful to it. this kind of clover is an excellent crop with which to follow cotton or corn. it is most conveniently sowed at the last cultivation of these crops. common red clover, which is the standard clover over most of the country, is usually seeded with timothy or with orchard grass or with some other of the grasses. in sowing both crimson and red clover, about ten to fifteen pounds of seed for each acre are generally used. to make good pastures, white and japan clover are favorites. white clover does well in most parts of america, and japan clover is especially valuable in warm southern climates. both will do well even when the soil is partly shaded, but they do best in land fully open to the sun. careful attention is required to cure clover hay well. the clover should always be cut before it forms seed. the best time to cut is when the plants are in full bloom. [illustration: fig. . crimson clover] let the mower be started in the morning. then a few hours later run over the field with the tedder. this will loosen the hay and let in air and sunshine. if the weather be fair let the hay lie until the next day, and then rake it into rows for further drying. after being raked, the hay may either be left in the rows for final curing or it may be put in cocks. if the weather be unsettled, it is best to cock the hay. many farmers have cloth covers to protect the cocks and these often aid greatly in saving the hay crop in a rainy season. in case the hay is put in cocks, it should be opened for a final drying before it is housed. =cowpeas.= the cowpea is an excellent soil-enricher. it supplies more fertilizing material to turn into the soil, in a short time and at small cost, than any other crop. moreover, by good tillage and by the use of a very small amount of fertilizer, the cowpea can be grown on land too poor to produce any other crop. its roots go deep into the soil. hence they gather plant food and moisture that shallow-rooted plants fail to reach. these qualities make it an invaluable help in bringing worn-out lands back to fertility. the cowpea is a warm-weather legume. in the united states it succeeds best in the south and southwest. it has, however, in recent years been grown as far north as massachusetts, new york, ohio, michigan, and minnesota, but in these cold climates other legumes are more useful. cowpeas should never be planted until all danger of frost is past. some varieties make their full growth in two months; others need four months. there are about two hundred varieties of cowpeas. these varieties differ in form, in the size of seed and of pod, in the color of seed and of pod, and in the time of ripening. they differ, too, in the manner of growth. some grow erect; others sprawl on the ground. in selecting varieties it is well to choose those that grow straight up, those that are hardy, those that fruit early and abundantly, and those that hold their leaves. the variety selected for seed should also suit the land and the climate. the cowpea will grow in almost any soil. it thrives best and yields most bountifully on well-drained sandy loams. the plant also does well on clay soils. on light, sandy soils a fairly good crop may be made, but on such soils, wilt and root-knot are dangerous foes. a warm, moist, well-pulverized seed-bed should always be provided. few plants equal the cowpea in repaying careful preparation. [illustration: fig. . cowpeas] if this crop is grown for hay, the method of seeding and cultivating will differ somewhat from the method used when a seed crop is desired. when cowpeas are planted for hay the seeds should be drilled or broadcasted. if the seeds are small and the land somewhat rich, about four pecks should be sowed on each acre. if the seeds are comparatively large and the soil not so fertile, about six pecks should be sowed to the acre. it is safer to disk in the seeds when they are sowed broadcast than it is to rely on a harrow to cover them. in sowing merely for a hay crop, it is a good practice to mix sorghum, corn, soy beans, or millet with the cowpeas. the mixed hay is more easily harvested and more easily cured than unmixed cowpea hay. shortly after seeding, it pays to run over the land lightly with a harrow or a weeder in order to break any crust that may form. mowing should begin as soon as the stalks and the pods have finished growing and some of the lower leaves have begun to turn yellow. an ordinary mower is perhaps the best machine for cutting the vines. if possible, select only a bright day for mowing and do not start the machine until the dew on the vines is dried. allow the vines to remain as they fell from the mower till they are wilted; then rake them into windrows. the vines should generally stay in the windrows for two or three days and be turned on the last day. they should then be put in small, airy piles or piled around a stake that has crosspieces nailed to it. the drying vines should never be packed; air must circulate freely if good hay is to be made. as piling the vines around stakes is somewhat laborious, some growers watch the curing carefully and succeed in getting the vines dry enough to haul directly from the windrows to the barns. never allow the vines to stay exposed to too much sunshine when they are first cut. if the sun strikes them too strongly, the leaves will become brittle and shatter when they are moved. when cowpeas are grown for their pods to ripen, the seeds should be planted in rows about a yard apart. from two to three pecks of seeds to an acre should be sufficient. the growing plants should be cultivated two or three times with a good cultivator. cowpeas were formerly gathered by hand, but such a method is of course slow and expensive. pickers are now commonly used. some farmers use the cowpea crop only as a soil-enricher. hence they neither gather the seeds nor cut the hay, but plow the whole crop into the soil. there is an average of about forty-seven pounds of nitrogen in each ton of cowpea vines. most of this valuable nitrogen is drawn by the plants from the air. this amount of nitrogen is equal to that contained in pounds of stable manure. in addition each ton of cowpea vines contains ten pounds of phosphoric acid and twenty-nine pounds of potash. there is danger in plowing into the soil at one time any bountiful green crop like cowpeas. as already explained on page , a process called capillarity enables moisture to rise in the soil as plants need it. now if a heavy cowpea crop or any other similar crop be at one plowing turned into the soil, the soil particles will be so separated as to destroy capillarity. too much vegetation turned under at once may also, if the weather be warm, cause fermentation to set in and "sour the land." both of these troubles may be avoided by cutting up the vines with a disk harrow or other implement before covering them. the custom of planting cowpeas between the rows at the last working of corn is a good one, and wherever the climate permits this custom should be followed. =vetches.= the vetches have been rapidly growing in favor for some years. stock eat vetch hay greedily, and this hay increases the flow of milk in dairy animals and helps to keep animals fat and sleek. only two species of vetch are widely grown. these are the tare, or spring vetch, and the winter, or hairy, vetch. spring vetch is grown in comparatively few sections of our country. it is, however, grown widely in england and northern continental europe. what we say here will be confined to hairy vetch. after a soil has been supplied with the germs needed by this plant, the hairy vetch is productive on many different kinds of soil. the plant is most vigorous on fertile loams. by good tillage and proper fertilization it may be forced to grow rather bountifully on poor sandy and clay loams. acid or wet soils are not suited to vetch. lands that are too poor to produce clovers will frequently yield fair crops of vetch. if this is borne in mind, many poor soils may be wonderfully improved by growing on them this valuable legume. [illustration: fig. . vetch] vetch needs a fine well-compacted seed-bed, but it is often sowed with good results on stubble lands and between cotton and corn rows, where it is covered by a cultivator or a weeder. the seeds of the vetch are costly and are brought chiefly from germany, where this crop is much prized. the pods ripen so irregularly that they have to be picked by hand. in northern climates early spring sowing is found most satisfactory. in southern climates the seeding is best done in the late summer or early fall. as the vetch vines have a tendency to trail on the ground, it is wisest to plant with the vetch some crop like oats, barley, rye, or wheat. these plants will support the vetch and keep its vines from being injured by falling on the ground. do not use rye with vetch in the south. it ripens too early to be of much assistance. if sowed with oats the seeding should be at the rate of about twenty or thirty pounds of vetch and about one and a half or two bushels of oats to the acre. vetch is covered in the same way as wheat and rye. few crops enrich soil more rapidly than vetch if the whole plant is turned in. it of course adds nitrogen to the soil and at the same time supplies the soil with a large amount of organic matter to decay and change to humus. as the crop grows during the winter, it makes an excellent cover to prevent washing. many orchard-growers of the northwest find vetch the best winter crop for the orchards as well as for the fields. =soy, or soja, bean.= in china and japan the soy bean is grown largely as food for man. in the united states it is used as a forage plant and as a soil-improver. it bids fair to become one of the most popular of the legumes. like the cowpea, this bean is at home only in a warm climate. some of the early-ripening varieties have, however, been planted with fair success in cold climates. while there are a large number of varieties of the soy bean, only about a dozen are commonly grown. they differ mainly in the color, size, and shape of the seeds, and in the time needed for ripening. some of the varieties are more hairy than others. soy beans may take many places in good crop-rotations, but they are unusually valuable in short rotations with small grains. the grains can be cut in time for the beans to follow them, and in turn the beans can be harvested in the early fall and make way for another grain crop. it should always be remembered that soy beans will not thrive unless the land on which they are to grow is already supplied, or is supplied at the time of sowing, with bean bacteria. [illustration: fig. . chinese soy beans] the plant will grow on many different kinds of soil, but it needs a richer soil than the cowpea does. as the crop can gather most of its own nitrogen, it generally requires only the addition of phosphoric acid and potash for its growth on poor land. when the first crop is seeded, apply to each acre four hundred pounds of a fertilizing mixture which contains about ten per cent of phosphoric acid, four per cent of potash, and from one to two per cent of nitrogen. if the crop is planted for hay or for grazing, mellow the ground well, and then broadcast or drill in closely about one and a half bushels of seed to each acre. cover from one to two inches deep, but never allow a crust to form over the seed, for the plant cannot break through a crust well. when the beans are planted for seeds, a half bushel of seed to the acre is usually sufficient. the plants should stand in the rows from four to six inches apart, and the rows should be from thirty to forty inches from one another. never plant until the sun has thoroughly warmed the land. the bean may be sowed, however, earlier than cowpeas. a most convenient time is just after corn is planted. the rows should be cultivated often enough to keep out weeds and grass and to keep a good dust mulch, but the cultivation must be shallow. [illustration: fig. . soy beans] as soy beans are grown for hay and also for seed, the harvesting will, as with the other legumes, be controlled by the purpose for which the crop was planted. in harvesting for a hay crop it is desirable to cut the beans after the pods are well formed but before they are fully grown. if the cutting is delayed until the pods are ripe, the fruit will shatter badly. there is a loss, too, in the food value of the stems if the cutting is late. the ordinary mowing-machine with a rake attached is generally the machine used for cutting the stalks. the leaves should be most carefully preserved, for they contain much nourishment for stock. [illustration: fig. . soy beans in corn] whenever the beans are grown for seeds, harvesting should begin when three fourths of the leaves have fallen and most of the pods are ripe. do not wait, however, until the pods are so dry that they have begun to split and drop their seeds. a slight amount of dampness on the plants aids the cutting. the threshing may be done with a flail, with pea-hullers, or with a grain-threshing machine. the beans produce more seed to the acre than cowpeas do. forty bushels is a high yield. the average yield is between twenty and thirty bushels. descriptive table adaptation as crop food for animals life remarks alfalfa hay perennial all animals like it; hogs eat it even when it is dry. red clover hay and pasture perennial best of the clovers for hay. alsike clover hay and pasture perennial seeds itself for twenty years. this clover is a great favorite with bees. mammoth clover hay and pasture perennial best for green manure. white clover pasture perennial excellent for lawns and bees. japan clover pasture perennial excellent for forest and old soils. cowpea hay and grain annual used for hay, green manure, and pastures. soy bean hay and grain annual often put in silo with corn. vetches hay and soiling annual pasture for sheep and swine. with cereals it makes excellent hay and soiling-food. chapter x domestic animals the progress that a nation is making can with reasonable accuracy be measured by the kind of live stock it raises. the general rule is, poor stock, poor people. all the prosperous nations of the globe, especially the grain-growing nations, get a large share of their wealth from raising improved stock. the stock bred by these nations is now, however, very different from the stock raised by the same nations years ago. as soon as man began to progress in the art of agriculture he became dissatisfied with inferior stock. he therefore bent his energies to raise the standard of excellence in domestic animals. by slow stages of animal improvement the ugly, thin-flanked wild boar of early times has been transformed into the sleek berkshire or the well-rounded poland-china. in the same manner the wild sheep of the old world have been developed into wool and mutton breeds of the finest excellence. by constant care, attention, and selection the thin, long-legged wild ox has been bred into the bounteous milk-producing jerseys and holsteins or into the shorthorn mountains of flesh. from the small, bony, coarse, and shaggy horse of ancient times have descended the heavy norman, or percheron, draft horse and the fleet arab courser. the matter of meat-production is one of vital importance to the human race, for animal food must always supply a large part of man's ration. live stock of various kinds consume the coarser foods, like the grasses, hays, and grains, which man cannot use. as a result of this consumption they store in their bodies the exact substances required for building up the tissues of man's body. when the animal is used by man for food, one class of foods stored away in the animal's body produces muscle; another produces fat, heat, and energy. the food furnished by the slaughter of animals seems necessary to the full development of man. it is true that the flesh of an animal will not support human life so long as would the grain that the animal ate while growing, but it is also true that animal food does not require so much of man's force to digest it. hence the use of meat forces a part of man's life-struggle on the lower animal. when men feed grain to stock, the animals receive in return power and food in their most available forms. men strengthen the animal that they themselves may be strengthened. one of the great questions, then, for the stock-grower's consideration is how to make the least amount of food fed to animals produce the most power and flesh. section liii. horses while we have a great many kinds of horses in america, horses are not natives of this country. just where wild horses were first tamed and used is not certainly known. it is believed that in early ages the horse was a much smaller animal than it now is, and that it gradually attained its present size. where food was abundant and nutritious and the climate mild and healthful, the early horses developed large frames and heavy limbs and muscles; on the other hand, where food was scarce and the climate cold and bleak, the animals remained as dwarfed as the ponies of the shetland islands. [illustration: fig. . the family pet] one of the first records concerning the horse is found in genesis xlix, , where jacob speaks of "an adder that biteth the horse heels." pharaoh took "six hundred chosen chariots" and "with all the horses and chariots" pursued the israelites. the greeks at first drove the horse fastened to a rude chariot; later they rode on its back, learning to manage the animal with voice or switch and without either saddle or bridle. this thinking people soon invented the snaffle bit, and both rode and drove with its aid. the curb bit was a roman invention. shoeing was not practiced by either greeks or romans. saddles and harnesses were at first made of skins and sometimes of cloth. among the tartars of middle and northern asia and also among some other nations, mare's milk and the flesh of the horse are used for food. old and otherwise worthless horses are regularly fattened for the meat markets of france and germany. various uses are made of the different parts of a horse's body. the mane and tail are used in the manufacture of mattresses, and also furnish a haircloth for upholstering; the skin is tanned into leather; the hoofs are used for glue, and the bones for making fertilizer. [illustration: fig. . percheron horse (a draft type)] climate, food, and natural surroundings have all aided in producing changes in the horse's form, size, and appearance. the varying circumstances under which horses have been raised have given rise to the different breeds. in addition, the masters' needs had much to do in developing the type of horses wanted. some masters desired work horses, and kept the heavy, muscular, stout-limbed animals; others desired riding and driving horses, so they saved for their use the light-limbed, angular horses that had endurance and mettle. the following table gives some of the different breeds and the places of their development: [illustration: fig. . diagram shows the proper shape of the fore and hind legs of a horse. when the straight lines divide the legs equally, the leg action is straight and regular] i. _draft, or heavy, breeds_ . percheron, from the province of perche, france. . french draft, developed in france. . belgian draft, developed by belgian farmers. . clydesdale, the draft horse of scotland. . suffolk punch, from the eastern part of england. . english shire, also from the eastern part of england. ii. _carriage, or coach, breeds_ . cleveland bay, developed in england. . french coach, the gentleman's horse of france. . german coach, from germany. . oldenburg coach, oldenburg, germany. . hackney, the english high-stepper. iii. _light, or roadster, breeds_ . american trotter, developed in america. . thoroughbred, the english running horse. . american saddle horse, from kentucky and virginia. there is a marked difference in the form and type of these horses, and on this difference their usefulness depends. [illustration: fig. . wide hock this horse stands great strains and is not fatigued easily] [illustration: fig. . narrow hock this horse becomes exhausted very easily] the draft breeds have short legs, and hence their bodies are comparatively close to the ground. the depth of the body should be about the same as the length of leg. all draft horses should have upright shoulders, so as to provide an easy support for the collar. the hock should be wide, so that the animal shall have great leverage of muscle for pulling. a horse having a narrow hock is not able to draw a heavy load and is easily exhausted and liable to curb-diseases (see figs. and ). [illustration: fig. . the roadster type] the legs of all kinds of horses should be straight; a line dropped from the point of the shoulder to the ground should divide the knees, canon, fetlock, and foot into two equal parts. when the animal is formed in this way the feet have room to be straight and square, with just the breadth of a hoof between them (fig. ). roadsters are lighter in bone and less heavily muscled; their legs are longer than those of the draft horses and, as horsemen say, more "daylight" can be seen under the body. the neck is long and thin, but fits nicely into the shoulders. the shoulders are sloping and long and give the roadster ability to reach well out in his stride. the head is set gracefully on the neck and should be carried with ease and erectness. every man who is to deal with horses ought to become, by observation and study, an expert judge of forms, qualities, types, defects, and excellences. [illustration: fig. . side view of legs the diagram shows how the straight lines ought to cross the legs of a properly shaped horse] the horse's foot makes an interesting study. the horny outside protects the foot from mud, ice, and stones. inside the hoof are the bones and gristle that serve as cushions to diminish the shock received while walking or running on hard roads or streets. when shoeing the horse the frog should not be touched with the knife. it is very seldom that any cutting need be done. many blacksmiths do not know this and often greatly injure the foot. since the horse has but a small stomach, the food given should not be too bulky. in proportion to the horse's size, its grain ration should be larger than that of other animals. draft horses and mules, however, can be fed a more bulky ration than other horses, because they have larger stomachs and consequently have more room to store food. [illustration: fig. . how to measure a horse] the horse should be groomed every day. this keeps the pores of the skin open and the hair bright and glossy. when horses are working hard, the harness should be removed during the noon hour. during the cool seasons of the year, whenever a horse is wet with sweat, it should on stopping work, or when standing for awhile, be blanketed, for the animal is as liable as man to get cold in a draft or from moisture evaporating rapidly from its skin. exercise if the pupil will take an ordinary tape measure, he can make some measurements of the horse that will be very interesting as well as profitable. let him measure: . the height of the horse at the withers, to . . the height of the horse at croup, to . . length of shoulder, to . . length of back, . . length of head, . . depth of body, to . . daylight under body, to . . distance from point of shoulder to quarter, to . . width of forehead. . width between hips. note. many interesting comparisons can be made ( ) by measuring several horses; ( ) by studying the proportion between parts of the same horse. proportions of a horse . how many times longer is the body than the head? do you get the same result from different horses? . how does the height at the withers compare with the height at the croup? . how do these compare with the distance from quarter to shoulder? . how does the length of the head compare with the thickness of the body and with the open space, or "daylight," under the body? section liv. cattle all farm animals were once called _cattle_; now this term applies only to beef and dairy animals--neat cattle. our improved breeds are descended from the wild ox of europe and asia, and have attained their size and usefulness by care, food, and selection. the uses of cattle are so familiar that we need scarcely mention them. their flesh is a part of man's daily food; their milk, cream, butter, and cheese are on most tables; their hides go to make leather, and their hair for plaster; their hoofs are used for glue, and their bones for fertilizers, ornaments, buttons, and many other purposes. [illustration: fig. . a prize-winner] there are two main classes of cattle--beef breeds and dairy breeds. the principal breeds of each class are as follows: i. _beef breeds_ . aberdeen-angus, bred in scotland, and often called _doddies_. . galloway, from scotland. . shorthorn, an english breed of cattle. . hereford, also an english breed. . sussex, from the county of sussex, england. ii. _dairy breeds_ . jersey, from the isle of jersey. . guernsey, from the isle of guernsey. . ayrshire, from scotland. . holstein-frisian, from holland and denmark. . brown swiss, from switzerland. other breeds of cattle are devon, dutch belted, red-polled, kerry, and west highland. in general structure there is a marked difference between the beef and dairy breeds. this is shown in figs. , . the beef cow is square, full over the back and loins, and straight in the back. the hips are covered evenly with flesh, the legs full and thick, the under line, or stomach line, parallel to the back line, and the neck full and short. the eye should be bright, the face short, the bones of fine texture, and the skin soft and pliable. [illustration: fig. . aberdeen-angus cow (a beef type)] the dairy cow is widely different from the beef cow. she shows a decided wedge shape when you look at her from front, side, or rear. the back line is crooked, the hip bones and tail bone are prominent, the thighs thin and poorly fleshed; there is no breadth to the back, as in the beef cow, and little flesh covers the shoulders; the neck is long and thin. the udder of the dairy cow is most important. it should be full but not fleshy, be well attached behind, and extend well forward. the larger the udder the more milk will be given. the skin of the dairy cow, like that of the beef breeds, should be soft and pliable and the bones fine-textured. =the dairy type.= because of lack of flesh on the back, loins, and thighs, the cow of the dairy type is not profitably raised for beef, nor is the beef so good as that of the beef types. this is because in the dairy-animal food goes to produce milk rather than beef. in the same way the beef cow gives little milk, since her food goes rather to fat than to milk. for the same reasons that you do not expect a plow horse to win on the race track, you do not expect a cow of the beef type to win premiums as a milker. [illustration: fig. . jersey cow (a dairy type)] "scrub" cattle are not profitable. they mature slowly and consequently consume much food before they are able to give any return for it. even when fattened, the fat and lean portions are not evenly distributed, and "choice cuts" are few and small. by far the cheapest method of securing a healthy and profitable herd of dairy or beef cattle is to save only the calves whose sires are pure-bred animals and whose mothers are native cows. in this way farmers of even little means can soon build up an excellent herd. =improving cattle.= the fact that it is not possible for every farmer to possess pure-bred cattle is no reason why he should not improve the stock he has. he can do this by using pure-bred sires that possess the qualities most to be desired. scrub stock can be quickly improved by the continuous use of good sires. it is never wise to use grade, or cross-bred, sires, since the best qualities are not fixed in them. [illustration: fig. . head of a galloway cow] moreover, it is possible for every farmer to determine exactly the producing-power of his dairy cows. when the cows are milked, the milk should be weighed and a record kept. if this be done, it will be found that some cows produce as much as five hundred, and some as much as ten hundred, gallons a year, while others produce not more than two or three hundred gallons. if a farmer kills or sells his poor cows and keeps his best ones, he will soon have a herd of only heavy milkers. ask your father to try this plan. read everything you can find about taking care of cows and improving them, and then start a herd of your own. =conclusions.= ( ) a cow with a tendency to get fat is not profitable for the dairy. ( ) a thin, open, angular cow will make expensive beef. ( ) "the sire is half the herd." this means that a good sire is necessary to improve a herd of cattle. the improvement from scrubs upward is as follows: the first generation is one-half pure; the second is three-fourths pure; the third is seven-eighths pure; the fourth is fifteen-sixteenths pure, etc. ( ) by keeping a record of the quantity and quality of milk each cow gives you can tell which are profitable to raise from and which are not. ( ) good food, clean water, kindness, and care are necessary to successful cattle-raising. [illustration: fig. . holstein cow] the ownership of a well-bred animal usually arouses so much pride in the owner that the animal receives all the care that it merits. the watchful care given to such an animal leads to more thought of the other animals on the farm, and often brings about the upbuilding of an entire herd. section lv. sheep the sheep was perhaps the first animal domesticated by man, and to-day the domesticated sheep is found wherever man lives. it is found domesticated or wild in almost every climate, and finds means to thrive where other animals can scarcely live; it provides man with meat and clothing, and is one of the most profitable and most easily cared-for of animals. [illustration: fig. . a young shepherd] sheep increase so rapidly, mature at such an early age, and have flesh so wholesome for food that nearly every farm should have its flock. another consideration that may be urged in favor of sheep-raising is that sheep improve the land on which they are pastured. sheep are docile and easily handled, and they live on a greater diversity of food and require less grain than any other kind of live stock. in mixed farming there is enough food wasted on most farms to maintain a small flock of sheep. [illustration: fig. . sheep have long been called the golden-hoofed animals] sheep may be divided into three classes: i. _fine-wooled breeds_ . american merino. . delaine merino. . rambouillets. . hampshire down. . oxford down. . cheviot. ii. _medium-wooled breeds_ . southdown. . shropshire. . horned dorset. iii. _long-wooled breeds_ . leicester. . lincoln. . cotswold. [illustration: fig. . in the pasture] the first group is grown principally for wool, and mutton is secondary; in the second group, mutton comes first and wool second; in the third group both are important considerations. wool is nature's protection for the sheep. have you ever opened the fleece and observed the clean skin in which the fibers grow? these fibers, or hairs, are so roughened that they push all dirt away from the skin toward the outside of the fleece. wool is valuable in proportion to the length and evenness of the fiber and the density of the fleece. exercise . how many pounds ought a fleece of wool to weigh? . which makes the better clothing, coarse or fine wool? . why are sheep washed before being sheared? . does cold weather trouble sheep? wet weather? section lvi. swine the wild boar is a native of europe, asia, and africa. the wild hogs are the parents from which all our domestic breeds have sprung. in many parts of the world the wild boar is still found. these animals are active and powerful, and as they grow older are fierce and dangerous. in their wild state they seek moist, sandy, and well-wooded places, close to streams of water. their favorite foods are fruits, grass, and roots, but when pressed by hunger they will eat snakes, worms, and even higher animals, like birds, fowls, and fish. [illustration: fig. . which will you raise?] man captured some of these wild animals, fed them abundant and nutritious food, accustomed them to domestic life, selected the best of them to raise from, and in the course of generations developed our present breeds of hogs. the main changes brought about in hogs were these: the legs became shorter, the snout and neck likewise shortened, the shoulders and hams increased their power to take on flesh, and the frame was strengthened to carry the added burden of flesh. as the animal grew heavier it roamed less widely, and as it grew accustomed to man its temper became less fierce. [illustration: fig. . a pair of porkers] meat can be more cheaply obtained from hogs than from any other animal. when a hog is properly fed and cared for it will make the farmer more money in proportion to cost than any other animal on the farm. the most profitable type of hog has short legs, small bones, straight back and under line, heavy hams, small well-dished head, and heavy shoulders. the scrub and "razorback" hogs are very unprofitable, and require an undue amount of food to produce a pound of gain. it requires two years to get the scrub to weigh what a well-bred pig will weigh when nine months old. scrub hogs can be quickly changed in form and type by the use of a pure-bred sire. a boy whose parents were too poor to send him to college once decided to make his own money and get an education. he bought a sow and began to raise pigs. he earned the food for the mother and her pigs. his hogs increased so rapidly that he had to work hard to keep them in food. by saving the money he received from the sale of his hogs he had enough to keep him two years in college. suppose you try his plan, and let the hog show you how fast it can make money. [illustration: fig. . a good type] we have several breeds of swine. the important ones are: i. _large breeds_ . chester white. . improved yorkshire. . tamworth. ii. _medium breeds_ . berkshire. . poland-china. . duroc-jersey. . cheshire. iii. _small breeds_ . victoria. . suffolk. . essex. . small yorkshire. hogs will be most successfully raised when kept as little as possible in pens. they like the fields and the pasture grass, the open air and the sunshine. almost any kind of food can be given them. unlike other stock, they will devour greedily and tirelessly the richest feeding-stuffs. the most desirable hog to raise is one that will produce a more or less even mixture of fat and lean. where only corn is fed, the body becomes very fat and is not so desirable for food as when middlings, tankage, cowpeas, or soy beans are added as a part of the ration. [illustration: fig. . dinner is over] when hogs are kept in pens, cleanliness is most important, for only by cleanliness can disease be avoided. section lvii. farm poultry our geese, ducks, turkeys, and domestic hens are all descendants of wild fowls, and are more or less similar to them in appearance. the earliest recorded uses of fowls were for food, for fighting, and for sacrifice. to-day the domestic fowl has four well-defined uses--egg-production, meat-production, feather-production, and pest-destruction. [illustration: standard-bred fowls barred plymouth rocks, male and female; white wyandottes, female and male] hens of course produce most of our eggs. some duck eggs are sold for table use. goose and duck body-feathers bring good prices. as pest-destroyers turkeys and chickens are most useful. they eat large numbers of bugs and worms that are harmful to crops. a little proper attention would very largely increase the already handsome sum derived from our fowls. they need dry, warm, well-lighted, and tidily kept houses. they must have, if we want the best returns, an abundant supply of pure water and a variety of nutritious foods. in cold, rainy, or snowy weather they should have a sheltered yard, and in good weather should be allowed a range wide enough to give them exercise. their bodies and their nests must be protected from every form of vermin. for eggs, the leghorn varieties are popular. some hens of this breed have been known to lay more than two hundred eggs in a year. specially cared-for flocks have averaged eleven or even twelve dozen eggs a year. farm flocks of ordinary breeds average less than eight dozen. other excellent egg breeds are the spanish, andalusian, and minorca. [illustration: fig. . cock] the principal so-called meat breeds are the brahma, cochin, and langshan. these are very large, but rather slow-growing fowls, and are not noted as layers. they are far less popular in america, even as meat-producers, than the general-purpose breeds. the plymouth rock, wyandotte, rhode island red, and orpington are the leading general-purpose breeds. they are favorites because they are at once good-sized, good layers, tame, and good mothers. the chicks of these breeds are hardy and thrifty. in addition to these breeds, there are many so-called fancy breeds that are prized for their looks rather than for their value. among these are the hamburg, polish, sultan, silkie, and the many bantam breeds. the leading duck breeds are the pekin, aylesbury, indian runner, muscovy, rouen, and cayuga. the principal varieties of geese are the toulouse, emden, chinese, and african. among the best breeds of turkeys are the bronze, white holland, narragansett, bourbon, slate, and buff. geese, ducks, and turkeys are not so generally raised as hens, but there is a constant demand at good prices for these fowls. [illustration: fig. . brooder] the varieties of the domestic hen are as follows: i. _egg breeds_ . leghorn. . minorca. . spanish. . blue andalusian. . anconas. ii. _meat breeds_ . brahma. . cochin. . langshan. . dorking. . cornish. iii. _general-purpose breeds_ . plymouth rock. . wyandotte. . rhode island red. . orpington. iv. _fancy breeds_ . polish. . game. . sultan. . bantam. [illustration: fig. . breeding yards] [illustration: fig. . incubator] as the price of both eggs and fowls is steadily advancing, a great many people are now raising fowls by means of an incubator for hatching, and a brooder as a substitute for the mother hen. the use of the incubator is extending each year and is now almost universal where any considerable number of chicks are to be hatched. doubtless it will continue to be used wherever poultry-production is engaged in on a large scale. the brooder is employed to take care of the chickens as soon as they leave the incubator. section lviii. bee culture stock-raisers select breeds that are best adapted to their needs. plant-growers exercise great care in their choice of plants, selecting for each planting those best suited to the conditions under which they are to be grown. undoubtedly a larger yield of honey could be had each year if similar care were exercised in the selection of the breed of bees. [illustration: fig. . a carniolan worker] to prove this, one has only to compare the yield of two different kinds. the common east indian honey bee rarely produces more than ten or twelve pounds to a hive, while the cyprian bee, which is a most industrious worker, has a record of one thousand pounds in one season from a single colony. this bee, besides being industrious when honey material is plentiful, is also very persevering when such material is hard to find. the cyprians have two other very desirable qualities. they stand the cold of winter well and stoutly defend their hives against robber bees and other enemies. the italian is another good bee. this variety was brought into the united states in . while the yield from the italian is somewhat less than from the cyprian, the italian bees produce a whiter comb and are a trifle more easily managed. the common black or brown bee is found wild and domesticated throughout the country. when honey material is abundant, these bees equal the italians in honey-production, but when the season is poor, they fall far short in the amount of honey produced. the purchase of a good cyprian or italian hive will richly repay the buyer. such a colony will cost more at the outset than an ordinary colony, but will soon pay for its higher cost by greater production. [illustration: fig. . a carniolan drone] a beehive in the spring contains one queen, several hundred drones, and from thirty-five to forty thousand workers. the duty of the queen is to lay all the eggs that are to hatch the future bees. this she does with untiring industry, often laying as many as four thousand in twenty-four hours. the worker bees do all the work. some of them visit the flowers, take up the nectar into the honey-sac, located in their abdomens, and carry it to the hive. they also gather pollen in basketlike cavities in their hind legs. pollen and nectar are needed to prepare food for the young bees. in the hive other workers create a breeze by buzzing with their wings and produce heat by their activity--all to cause the water to evaporate from the nectar and to convert it into honey before it is sealed up in the comb. after a successful day's gathering you may often hear these tireless workers buzzing till late into the night or even all through the night. you know that the bees get nectar from the flowers of various plants. some of the chief honey plants are alfalfa, buckwheat, horsemint, sourwood, white sage, wild pennyroyal, black gum, holly, chestnut, magnolia, and the tulip tree. the yield of honey may often be increased by providing special pasturage for the bees. the linden tree, for example, besides being ornamental and valuable for timber, produces a most bee-inviting flower. vetch, clover, and most of the legumes and mints are valuable plants to furnish pasture for bees. catnip may be cultivated for the bees and sold as an herb as well. [illustration: fig. . a carniolan queen] in spraying fruit trees to prevent disease you should always avoid spraying when the trees are in bloom, since the poison of the spray seriously endangers the lives of bees. the eggs laid by the queen, if they are to produce workers, require about twenty-one days to bring forth the perfect bee. the newly hatched bee commences life as a nurse. when about ten days old it begins to try its wings in short flights, and a few days later it begins active work. the life of a worker bee in the busy season is only about six weeks. you may distinguish young exercising bees from real workers by the fact that they do not fly directly away on emerging from the hive, but circle around a bit in order to make sure that they can recognize home again, since they would receive no cordial welcome if they should attempt to enter another hive. they hesitate upon returning from even these short flights, to make sure that they are in front of their own door. [illustration: fig. . good form of hive] there are several kinds of enemies of the bee which all beekeepers should know. one of these is the robber bee, that is, a bee from another colony attempting to steal honey from the rightful owners, an attempt often resulting in frightful slaughter. much robbery can be avoided by clean handling; that is, by leaving no honey about to cultivate a taste for stolen sweets. the bee moth is another serious enemy. the larva of the moth feeds on the wax. keep the colonies of bees strong so that they may be able to overcome this moth. [illustration: fig. . anti-robbing entrance _st_, stationary piece; _s_, slide; _p_, pin, or stop] queenless or otherwise weak colonies should be protected by a narrow entrance that admits only one bee at a time, for such a pass may be easily guarded. fig. shows a good anti-robbery entrance which may be readily provided for every weak colony. mice may be kept out by tin-lined entrances. the widespread fear of the kingbird seems unfounded. he rarely eats anything but drones, and few of them. this is also true of the swallow. toads, lizards, and spiders are, however, true enemies of the honeybee. exercise can you recognize drones, workers, and queens? do bees usually limit their visits to one kind of blossom on any one trip? what effect has the kind of flower on the flavor of the honey produced? what kinds of flowers should the beekeeper provide for his bees? is the kingbird really an enemy to the bee? section lix. why we feed animals in the first place, we give various kinds of feed stuffs to our animals that they may live. the heart beats all the time, the lungs contract and expand, digestion is taking place, the blood circulates through the body--something must supply force for these acts or the animal dies. this force is derived from food. in the next place, food is required to keep the body warm. food in this respect is fuel, and acts in the same way that wood or coal does in the stove. our bodies are warm all the time, and they are kept warm by the food we eat at mealtime. then, in the third place, food is required to enable the body to enlarge--to grow. if you feed a colt just enough to keep it alive and warm, there will be no material present to enable it to grow; hence you must add enough food to form bone and flesh and muscle and hair and fat. in the fourth place, we feed to produce strength for work. an animal poorly fed cannot do so much work at the plow or on the road as one that receives all the food needed. both food and the force produced by it result from the activity of plants. by means of sunlight and moisture a sprouting seed, taking out of the air and soil different elements, grows into a plant. then, just as the plant feeds on the air and soil to get its growth, so the animal feeds on the plant, to get its growth. hence, since our animals feed upon plants, we must find out what is in plants in order to know what animal food consists of. plants contain protein, carbohydrates, fat, mineral matter, water, and vitamins. you have seen protein compounds like the white of an egg, lean meat, or the gluten of wheat. the bodies of plants do not contain very much protein. on the other hand, all plant seeds contain a good deal of this substance. animals make use of protein to form new blood, muscles, and organs. because of the quality of protein, milk is the best food for children and young animals. the protein in some foods is of poor quality. to insure a well-balanced supply of protein a variety in foods is desirable. do not rely on a single kind of mill feed, but combine several kinds, such as cotton-seed meal, linseed meal, wheat bran and middlings, gluten, and similar grain by-products. tankage for young pigs and meat scraps for chickens are high-grade proteins and are of animal origin. it is no less important to get the necessary vitamins--those mysterious substances that keep the body healthy and promote growth and well-being. scientists claim that many diseases are food-deficiency diseases--the body gets out of order because these peculiar vitamins are lacking in the food. children require about one or two quarts of milk a day, fresh fruits, cereal breakfast foods, leafy vegetables as salads, and cooked vegetables. farm animals require the vitamins also. the legume pasture or hay, milk, grain concentrates when supplied in variety, pasture grass, and green forage crops are basic foods for farm animals. very young animals should have milk also. let us next consider the carbohydrates. sometimes the words _starchy foods_ are used to describe the carbohydrates. you have long known forms of these in the white material of corn and of potatoes. the carbohydrates are formed of three elements--carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. the use of these carbohydrates is to furnish to animal bodies either heat or energy or to enable them to store fat. in the next place, let us look at the fat in plant food. this consists of the oil stored up in the seeds and other parts of the plant. the grains contain most of the oil. fat is used by the animal to make heat and energy or to be stored away in the body. the next animal food in the plant that we are to think about is the mineral matter. the ashes of a burnt plant furnish a common example of this mineral matter. the animal uses this material of the plant to make bone, teeth, and tissue. the last thing that the plant furnishes the animal is water--just common water. young plants contain comparatively large quantities of water. this is one reason why they are soft, juicy, and palatable. but, since animals get their water chiefly in another way, the water in feed stuffs is not important. what these compounds do in the body _protein_ . forms flesh, bone, blood, internal organs, hair, and milk. . may be used to make fat. . may be used for heat. . may be used to produce energy. _carbohydrates_ . furnish body heat. . furnish energy. . make fat. _fat_ . furnishes body heat. . furnishes energy. . furnishes body fat. _mineral matter_ furnishes mineral matter for the bones in the body. _water_ supplies water in the body. chapter xi farm dairying section lx. the dairy cow success in dairy farming depends largely upon the proper feeding of stock. there are two questions that the dairy farmer should always ask himself: am i feeding as cheaply as i can? and, am i feeding the best rations for milk and butter production? of course cows can be kept alive and in fairly good milk flow on many different kinds of food, but in feeding, as in everything else, there is an ideal to be sought. [illustration: fig. . milking-time] what, then, is an ideal ration for a dairy cow? before trying to answer this question the word _ration_ needs to be explained. by ration is meant a sufficient quantity of food to support properly an animal for one day. if the animal is to have a proper ration, we must bear in mind what the animal needs in order to be best nourished. to get material for muscle, for blood, for milk, and for some other things, the animal needs, in the first place, food that contains protein. to keep warm and fat, the animal must, in the second place, have food containing carbohydrates and fats. these foods must be mixed in right proportions. [illustration: fig. . a dairy] with these facts in mind we are prepared for an answer to the question, what is an ideal ration? first, it is a ration that, without waste, furnishes both in weight and bulk of dry matter a sufficient amount of digestible, nutritious food. second, it is a ration that is comparatively cheap. third, it is a ration in which the milk-forming food (protein) is rightly proportioned to the heat-making and fat-making food (carbohydrates and fat). any ration in which this proportion is neglected is badly balanced. now test one or two commonly used rations by these rules. would a ration of cotton-seed meal and cotton-seed hulls be a model ration? no. such a ration, since the seeds are grown at home, would be cheap enough. however, it is badly balanced, for it is too rich in protein; hence it is a wasteful ration. would a ration of corn meal and corn stover be a desirable ration? this, too, since the corn is home-grown, would be cheap for the farmer; but, like the other, it is badly balanced, for it contains too much carbohydrate food and is therefore a wasteful ration. a badly balanced ration does harm in two ways: first, the milk flow of the cow is lessened by such a ration; second, the cow does not profitably use the food that she eats. the following table gives an excellent dairy ration for the farmer who has a silo. if he does not have a silo, some other food can be used in place of the ensilage. the table also shows what each food contains. as you grow older, it will pay you to study such tables most carefully. =============================================================== | digestible matter |---------------------------------- feed stuffs | dry |protein|carbohydrates| fat |matter| | | --------------------------------------------------------------- cowpea hay = pounds[ ] | . | . | . | . corn stover = pounds | . | . | . | . corn ensilage = pounds | . | . | . | . cotton-seed meal = pounds | . | . | . | . --------------------------------------------------------------- total = pounds | . | . | . | . =============================================================== [footnote : alfalfa or clover hay may take the place of cowpea hay.] =care of the cow.= as the cow is one of the best money-makers on the farm, she should, for this reason, if for no other, be comfortably housed, well fed and watered, and most kindly treated. in your thoughts for her well-being, bear the following directions in mind: . if you are not following a balanced ration, feed each day several different kinds of food. in this way you will be least likely to waste food. . feed at regular hours. cows, like people, thrive best when their lives are orderly. . milk at regular hours. . brush the udder carefully with a moist cloth before you begin to milk. cleanliness in handling makes the milk keep longer. . always milk in buckets or cups that have been scalded since the last using. the hot water kills the bacteria that collect in the dents or cracks of the utensil. . never let the milk pail remain in the stable. milk rapidly absorbs impurities. these spoil the flavor and cause the milk to sour. . never scold or strike the cow. she is a nervous animal, and rough usage checks the milk flow. [illustration] [illustration: three generations of high-bred cows] section lxi. milk, cream, churning, and butter =milk.= milk is, as you know, nature's first food for mammals. this is because milk is a model food--it contains water to slake thirst, ash to make bone, protein to make flesh and muscle, and fat and sugar to keep the body warm and to furnish energy. =the different kinds of milk.= whole, or unskimmed, milk, skimmed milk, and buttermilk are too familiar to need description. when a cow is just fresh, her milk is called _colostrum_. colostrum is rich in the very food that the baby calf needs. after the calf is a few days old, colostrum changes to what is commonly known as milk. the following table shows the composition of each of the different forms of milk: ======================================================= | digestible matter in pounds |---------------------------------- composition of milk | dry |protein|carbohydrates| fat |matter| | | ------------------------------------------------------- colostrum | . | . | . | . milk (unskimmed) | . | . | . | . skimmed milk | . | . | . | . buttermilk | . | . | . | . ======================================================= a noticeable fact in this table is that skimmed milk differs from unskimmed mainly in the withdrawal of the fat. hence, if calves are fed on skimmed milk, they should have in addition some food like corn meal to take the place of the fat withdrawn. a calf cannot thrive on skimmed milk alone. the amount of nourishing fat that a calf gets out of enough milk to make a pound of butter can be bought, in the form of linseed or corn meal, for a very small amount, while the butter-fat costs, for table use, a much larger sum. of course, then, it is not economical to allow calves to use unskimmed milk. some people undervalue skimmed milk; with the addition of some fatty food it makes an excellent ration for calves, pigs, and fowls. along with its dry matter, its protein, its carbohydrates, and its fats, milk and its products possess another most important property. this property is hard to describe, for its elements and its powers are not yet fully understood. we do, however, know certainly this much: milk and the foods made from it have power to promote health and favor growth in a more marked degree than any other foods. it is generally agreed that this is due to the health-promoting and health-preserving substances which are called vitamines. men of science are working with much care to try to add to our knowledge of these vitamines, which have so marvelous an influence on the health of all animals. unless food, no matter how good otherwise, contains these vitamines, it does not nourish the body nor preserve bodily health as it should. a complete lack of vitamines in our food would cause death. since, then, milk and its products--butter, cheese, curds--are rich in vitamines, these health-giving and health-preserving foods should form a regular part of each person's diet. [illustration: fig. . airing the cans] =cream.= cream is simply a mixture of butter-fat and milk. the butter-fat floats in the milk in little globe-shaped bodies, or globules. since these globules are lighter than milk, they rise to the surface. skimming the milk is a mere gathering together of these butter-fat globules. as most of the butter-fat is contained in the cream, pains should be taken to get all the cream from the milk at skimming time. after the cream has been collected, it must be allowed to "ripen" or to "sour" in order that it may be more easily churned. churning is only a second step to collect in a compact shape the fat globules. it often happens that at churning-time the cream is too warm for successful separation of the globules. whenever this is the case the cream must be cooled. [illustration: fig. . a hand separator] =the churn.= revolving churns without inside fixtures are best. hence, in buying, select a barrel or a square box churn. this kind of churn "brings the butter" by the falling of the cream from side to side as the churn is revolved. never fill the churn more than one-third or one-half full of cream. a small churn is always to be avoided. =churning.= the proper temperature for churning ranges from ° to ° fahrenheit. test the cream when it is put into the churn. if it be too cold, add warm water until the proper temperature is reached; if too warm, add cold water or ice until the temperature is brought down to °. do not churn too long, for this spoils butter. as soon as the granules of butter are somewhat smaller than grains of wheat, stop the churn. then draw off the buttermilk and at a temperature as low as ° wash the butter in the churn. this washing with cold water so hardens the granules that they do not mass too solidly and thus destroy the grain. =butter.= the butter so churned is now ready to be salted. use good fine dairy salt. coarse barrel salt is not fit for butter. the salt can be added while the butter is still in the churn or after it is put upon the butter-worker. never work by hand. the object of working is to get the salt evenly distributed and to drive out some of the brine. it is usually best to work butter twice. the two workings bring about a more even mixture of the salt with the butter and drive off more water. but one cannot be too particular not to overwork butter. delicate coloring, attractive stamping with the dairy owner's special stamp, and proper covering with paper cost little and of course add to the ready and profitable sale of butter. [illustration: fig. . a power churn] dairy rules _stable and cows_ . whitewash the stable once or twice each year; use land plaster, muck, or loam daily in the manure-gutters. . on their way to pasture or milking-place, do not allow the cows to be driven at a faster gait than a comfortable walk. . give abundance of pure water. . do not change feed suddenly. . keep salt always within reach of each cow. _milking_ . milk with dry hands. . never allow the milk to touch the milker's hands. . require the milker to be clean in person and dress. . milk quietly, quickly, thoroughly. never leave a drop of milk in the cow's udder. . do not allow cats, dogs, or other animals around at milking-time. _utensils_ . use only tin or metal cans and pails. . see that all utensils are thoroughly clean and free from rust. . require all cans and pails to be scalded immediately after they are used. . after milking, keep the utensils inverted in pure air, and sun them, if possible, until they are wanted for use. . always sterilize the churn with steam or boiling water before and after churning. this prevents any odors or bad flavors from affecting the butter. all cans, pails, and bottles should also be sterilized daily. [illustration] section lxii. how milk sours [illustration: fig. . microscopic appearance of pure and impure milk at the left, pure milk; at the right, milk after standing in a warm room for a few hours in a dirty dish, showing, besides the fat-globules, many forms of bacteria] on another page you have been told how the yeast plant grows in cider and causes it to sour, and how bacteria sometimes cause disease in animals and plants. now you must learn what these same living forms have to do with the souring of milk, and maybe you will not forget how you can prevent your milk from souring. in the first place, milk sours because bacteria from the air fall into the milk, begin to grow, and very shortly change the sugar of the milk to an acid. when this acid becomes abundant, the milk begins to curdle. as you know, the bacteria are in air, in water, and in barn dust; they stick on bits of hay and stick to the cow. they are most plentiful, however, in milk that has soured; hence, if we pour a little sour milk into a pail of fresh milk, the fresh milk will sour very quickly, because we have, so to speak, "seeded" or "planted" the fresh milk with the souring germs. no one, of course, ever does this purposely in the dairy, yet people sometimes do what amounts to the same thing--that is, put fresh milk into poorly cleaned pails or pans, the cracks and corners of which are cozy homes for millions of germs left from the last sour milk contained in the vessel. it follows, then, that all utensils used in the dairy should be thoroughly scalded so as to kill all germs present, and particular care should be taken to clean the cracks and crevices, for in them the germs lurk. in addition to this thorough cleansing with hot water, we should be careful never to stir up the dust of the barn just before milking. such dusty work as pitching hay or stover or arranging bedding should be done either after or long before milking-time, for more germs fall into the milk if the air be full of dust. to further avoid germs the milker should wear clean overalls, should have clean hands, and, above all, should never wet his hands with milk. this last habit, in addition to being filthy, lessens the keeping power of the milk. the milker should also moisten the parts of the cow which are nearest him, so that dust from the cow's sides may not fall into the milker's pail. for greater cleanliness and safety many milkmen curry their cows. the first few streams from each teat should be thrown away, because the teat at its mouth is filled with milk which, having been exposed to the air, is full of germs, and will do much toward souring the other milk in the pail. barely a gill will be lost by throwing the first drawings away, and this of the poorest milk too. the increase in the keeping quality of the milk will much more than repay the small loss. if these precautions are taken, the milk will keep several hours or even several days longer than milk carelessly handled. by taking these steps to prevent germs from falling into the milk, a can of milk was once kept sweet for thirty-one days. the work of the germ in the dairy is not, however, confined to souring the milk. certain kinds of germs give to the different sorts of cheeses their marked flavors and to butter its flavor. if the right germ is present, cheese or butter gets a proper flavor. sometimes undesirable germs gain entrance and give flavors that we do not like. such germs produce cheese or butter diseases. "bitter butter" is one of these diseases. to keep out all unpleasant meddlers, thoroughly cleanse and scald every utensil. exercise what causes milk to sour? why do unclean utensils affect the milk? how should milk be cared for to prevent its souring? prepare two samples, one carefully, the other carelessly. place them side by side. which keeps longer? why? section lxiii. the babcock milk-tester it is not sufficient for a farmer or a dairyman to know how much milk each of his cows yields. he should also know how rich the milk is in butter-fat. wide-awake makers of butter and cheese now buy milk, not by the pound or by the gallon, but by the amount of butter-fat contained in each pound or gallon of milk. a gallon of milk containing four and a half per cent of fat will consequently be worth more than a gallon containing only three per cent of fat. so it may happen that a cow giving only two gallons of milk may pay a butter-maker more than a cow giving three gallons of milk. of course it is easy to weigh or measure the quantity of milk given by a cow, and most milkers keep this record; but until recent years there was no way to find out the amount of fat in a cow's milk except by a slow and costly chemical test. dairymen could only guess at the richness of milk. in dr. s. m. babcock of the wisconsin experiment station invented a wonderful little machine that quickly and cheaply measures the fat in milk. few machines are more useful. so desirous was dr. babcock of helping the farmers that he would not add to the cost of his machine by taking out a patent on his invention. his only reward has been the fame won by the invention of the machine, which bears his name. this most useful tester is now made in various sizes so that every handler of milk may buy one suited to his needs and do his own testing at very little cost. the operation of the machine is very simple. suppose that the members of the class studying this book have been asked to take a babcock machine and test the milk of a small herd of cows. they can readily do so by following these directions: while the milk is still warm from the first cow to be tested, mix it thoroughly by pouring it at least four times from one vessel to another. a few ounces of this mixed milk is then taken for a sample, and carefully marked with the name of the cow. a number is also put on the sample, and both the cow's name and the number entered in a notebook. a small glass instrument, called a pipette, comes with each machine. put one end of the pipette into the milk sample and the other end into the mouth. suck milk into the pipette until the milk comes up to the mark on the side of the pipette. as soon as the mark is reached, withdraw the pipette from the mouth and quickly press the forefinger on the mouth end. the pressure of the finger will keep the milk from running out. then put the lower end of the pipette into one of the small long-necked bottles of the machine, and, lifting the finger, allow the milk to flow gently into the bottle. expel all the milk by blowing through the pipette. the next step is to add a strong, biting acid known as sulphuric acid to the test-bottle into which you have just put the milk. a glass marked to show just how much acid to use also comes with the machine. fill this glass measure to the mark. then pour the acid carefully into the test-bottle. be sure not to drop any of the acid on your hands or your clothes. as the acid is heavier than the milk, it will sink to the bottom of the bottle. with a gentle whirling motion, shake the bottle until the two fluids are thoroughly mixed. the mixture will turn a dark brown and become very warm. now fill the other bottles in the same way with samples drawn from different cows. treat all the samples precisely as you did the first. do not forget to put on each sample the name of the cow giving the milk and on each test-bottle a number corresponding to the name of the cow. you are now ready to put the test-bottles in the sockets of the machine. arrange the bottles in the sockets so that the whirling frame of the machine will be balanced. fit the cover on the machine and turn the handle slowly. gradually gain in speed until the machine is whirled rapidly. continue the turning for about seven minutes at the speed stated in the book of directions. after this first turning is finished, pour enough hot water into each test-bottle to cause the fat to rise to the neck of the bottle. re-cover the machine and turn for one minute. again add hot water to each bottle until all the fat rises into the neck of the bottle and again turn one minute. there remains now only the reading of the record. on the neck of each bottle there are marks to measure the amount of fat. if the fat inside the tube reaches only from the lowest mark to the second mark, then there is only one per cent of fat in this cow's milk. this means that the owner of the cow gets only one pound of butter-fat from each hundred pounds of her milk. such a cow would not be at all profitable to a butter-seller. if the fat in another test-bottle reaches from the lowest mark to the fourth mark, then you put in your record-book that this cow's milk contains four per cent of butter-fat. this record shows that the second cow's milk yields four pounds of fat to every hundred pounds of milk. this cow is three times more valuable to a butter-maker than the first cow. in the same way add one more per cent for each higher mark reached by the fat. four and one-half per cent is a good record for a cow to make. some cows yield as high as five or six per cent but they do not generally keep up this record all the year. [illustration: fig. . babcock tester and how to use it the tester, acid, acid measure, test-bottle, and thermometer at bottom; filling the pipette on right; adding the acid and measuring the fat at top] the babcock tester shows only the amount of pure butter-fat in the milk. it does not tell the exact amount of finished butter which is made from pounds of milk. this is because butter contains a few other things in addition to pure butter-fat. finished and salted butter weighs on an average about one sixth more than the fat shown by the tester. hence to get the exact amount of butter in every pounds of milk, you will have to add one sixth to the record shown by the tester. suppose, for example, you took one sample from pounds of milk and that your test showed per cent of fat in every pounds of milk. then, as you had pounds of milk, you would have pounds of butter-fat. this fat, after it has been salted and after it has absorbed moisture as butter does, will gain one sixth in weight. as one sixth of is , this new pounds must be added to the weight of the butter-fat. hence the pounds of milk would produce about pounds of butter. exercise . find the number of pounds of butter in pounds of milk that tests per cent of butter-fat. . a cow yields pounds of milk in a year. her milk tests per cent of butter-fat. find the total amount of butter-fat she yields. find also the total amount of butter. . the milk of two cows was tested: one yielded in a year pounds of milk that tested per cent of fat; the other yielded pounds that tested per cent. which cow yielded the more butter-fat? what was the money value of the butter produced by each if butter-fat is worth twenty-five cents a pound? chapter xii miscellaneous section lxiv. growing feed stuffs on the farm economy in raising live stock demands the production of all "roughness" or roughage materials on the farm. by roughness, or roughage, of course you understand that bulky food, like hay, grass, clover, stover, etc., is meant. it is possible to purchase all roughage materials and yet make a financial success of growing farm animals, but this certainly is not the surest way to succeed. every farm should raise all its feed stuffs. in deciding what forage and grain crops to grow we should decide: . the crops best suited to our soil and climate. . the crops best suited to our line of business. . the crops that will give us the most protein. . the crops that produce the most. . the crops that will keep our soil in the best condition. . _the crops best suited to our soil and climate._ farm crops, as every child of the farm knows, are not equally adapted to all soils and climates. cotton cannot be produced where the climate is cool and the seasons short. timothy and blue grass are most productive on cool, limestone soils. cowpeas demand warm, dry soils. but in spite of climatic limitations, nature has been generous in the wide variety of forage she has given us. our aim should be to make the best use of what we have, to improve by selection and care those kinds best adapted to our soil and climate, and to secure, by better methods of growing and curing, the greatest yields at the least possible cost. . _the crops best suited to our line of business._ a farmer necessarily becomes more or less of a specialist; he gathers those kinds of live stock about him which he likes best and which he finds the most profitable. he should, on his farm, select for his main crops those that he can grow with the greatest pleasure and with the greatest profit. [illustration: fig. . filling the barn with roughage from the farm] the successful railroad manager determines by practical experience what distances his engines and crews ought to run in a day, what coal is most economical for his engines, what schedules best suit the needs of his road, what trains pay him best. these and a thousand and one other matters are settled by the special needs of his road. ought the man who wants to make his farm pay be less prudent and less far-sighted? should not his past failures and his past triumphs decide his future? if he be a dairy farmer, ought he not by practical tests to settle for himself not only what crops are most at home on his land but also what crops in his circumstances yield him the largest returns in milk and butter? if swine-raising be his business, how long ought he to guess what crop on his land yields him the greatest amount of hog food? should a colt be fed on one kind of forage when the land that produced that forage would produce twice as much equally good forage of another kind? all these questions the prudent farmer should answer promptly and in the light of wise experiments. . _the crops that will give us the most protein._ it is the farmer's business to grow all the grass and forage that his farm animals need. he ought never to be obliged to purchase a bale of forage. moreover, he should grow mainly those crops that are rich in protein materials, for example, cowpeas, alfalfa, and clover. if such crops are produced on the farm, there will be little need of buying so much cotton-seed meal, corn, and bran for feeding purposes. . _the crops that produce the most._ we often call a crop a crop without considering how much it yields. this is a mistake. we ought to grow, when we have choice of two crops, the one that is the best and the most productive on the farm. average corn, for instance, yields on an acre at least twice the quantity of feeding-material that timothy does. . _the crops that will keep our soil in the best condition._ a good farmer should always be thinking of how to improve his soil. he wants his land to support him and to maintain his children after he is dead. since cowpeas, clover, and alfalfa add atmospheric nitrogen to the soil and at the same time are the best feeding-materials, it follows that these crops should hold an important place in every system of crop-rotation. by proper rotating, by proper terracing, and by proper drainage, land may be made to retain its fertility for generations. exercise . why are cowpeas, clover, and alfalfa so important to the farmer? . what is meant by the protein of a food? . why is it better to feed the farm crops to animals on the farm rather than to sell these crops? section lxv. farm tools and machines the drudgery of farm life is being lessened from year to year by the invention or improvement of farm tools and machines. perhaps some of you know how tiresome was the old up-and-down churn dasher that has now generally given place to the "quick-coming" churns. the toothed, horse-drawn cultivator has nearly displaced "the man with the hoe," while the scythe, slow and back-breaking, is everywhere getting out of the way of the mowing-machine and the horserake. the old heavy, sweat-drawing grain-cradle is slinking into the backwoods, and in its place we have the horse-drawn or steam-drawn harvester that cuts and binds the grain, and even threshes and measures it at one operation. instead of the plowman's wearily making one furrow at a time, the gang-plows of the plains cut many furrows at one time, and instead of walking the plowman rides. the shredder and husker turns the hitherto useless cornstalk into food, and at the same time husks, or shucks, the corn. the farmer of the future must know three things well: first, what machines he can profitably use; second, how to manage these machines; third, how to care for these machines. [illustration: fig. . properly protected tools and machines] [illustration: fig. . unprotected tools and machines] [illustration: fig. . the harvester at work] [illustration: fig. . in need of improvement] the machinery that makes farming so much more economical and that makes the farmer's life so much easier and more comfortable is too complicated to be put into the hands of bunglers who will soon destroy it, and it is too costly to be left in the fields or under trees to rust and rot. if it is not convenient for every farmer to have a separate tool-house, he should at least set apart a room in his barn, or a shed for storing his tools and machines. as soon as a plow, harrow, cultivator--indeed any tool or machine--has finished its share of work for the season, it should receive whatever attention it needs to prevent rusting, and should be carefully housed. such care, which is neither costly nor burdensome, will add many years to the life of a machine. section lxvi. liming the land occasionally, when a cook puts too much vinegar in a salad, the dish becomes so sour that it is unfit to eat. the vinegar which the cook uses belongs to a large group of compounds known as acids. the acids are common in nature. they have the power not only of making salads sour but also of making land sour. frequently land becomes so sour from acids forming in it that it will not bear its usual crops. the acids must then be removed or the land will become useless. the land may be soured in several ways. whenever a large amount of vegetable matter decays in land, acids are formed, and at times sourness of the soil results. often soils sour because they are not well drained or because, from lack of proper tillage, air cannot make its way into the soil. sometimes all these causes may combine to produce sourness. since most crops cannot thrive on very sour soil, the farmer must find some method of making his land sweet again. so far as we now know, liming the land is the cheapest and surest way of overcoming the sourness. in addition to sweetening the soil by overcoming the acids, lime aids the land in other ways: it quickens the growth of helpful bacteria; it loosens stiff, heavy clay soils and thereby fits them for easier tillage; it indirectly sets free the potash and phosphoric acid so much needed by plants; and it increases the capillarity of soils. however, too much must not be expected of lime. often a farmer's yield is so increased after he has scattered lime over his fields that he thinks that lime alone will keep his land fertile. this belief explains the saying, "lime enriches the father but beggars the son." the continued use of lime without other fertilization will indeed leave poor land for the son. lime is just as necessary to plant growth as the potash and nitrogen and phosphoric acid about which we hear so much, but it cannot take the place of these plant foods. its duty is to aid, not to displace them. we can tell by the taste when salads are too sour; it is more difficult to find out whether land is sour. there are, however, some methods that will help to determine the sourness of the soil. in the first place, if land is unusually sour, you can determine this fact by a simple test. buy a pennyworth of blue litmus paper from a drug store. mix some of the suspected soil with a little water and bury the litmus paper in the mixture. if the paper turns red the soil is sour. in the second place, the leguminous crops are fond of lime. clover and vetch remove so much lime from the soil that they are often called lime plants. if clover and vetch refuse to grow on land on which they formerly flourished, it is generally, though not always, a sign that the land needs lime. in the third place, when water grasses and certain weeds spring up on land, that land is usually acid, and lime will be helpful. moreover, fields adjoining land on which cranberries, raspberries, blackberries, or gallberries are growing wild, may always be suspected of more or less sourness. four forms of lime are used on land. these, each called by different names, are as follows: first, quicklime, which is also called burnt lime, caustic lime, builders' lime, rock lime, and unslaked lime. second, air-slaked lime, which is also known as carbonate of lime, agricultural lime, marl, and limestone. third, water-slaked, or hydrated, lime. fourth, land plaster, or gypsum. this form of lime is known to the chemists as sulphate of lime. do not forget that this last form is never to be used on sour lands. we shall therefore not consider it further. air-slaked lime is simply quicklime which has taken from the air a gas called carbon dioxide. this is the same gas that you breathe out from your lungs. water-slaked lime is quicklime to which water has been added. in other words, both of these are merely weakened forms of quicklime. one hundred pounds of quicklime is equal in richness to pounds of water-slaked lime and to pounds of air-slaked lime. these figures should be remembered by a farmer when he is buying lime. if he can buy a fair grade of quicklime delivered at his railway station for $ . a ton, he cannot afford to pay more than $ . a ton for water-slaked lime, nor more than $ . for air-slaked lime of equal grade. quicklime should always be slaked before it is applied to the soil. as a rule lime should be spread broadcast and then harrowed or disked thoroughly into the soil. this is best done after the ground has been plowed. for pastures or meadows air-slaked lime is used as a top-dressing. when air-slaked lime is used it may be spread broadcast in the spring; the other forms should be applied in the fall or in the early winter. section lxvii. birds what do birds do in the world? is an important question for us to think about. first, we must gain by observation and by personal acquaintance with the living birds a knowledge of their work and their way of doing it. in getting this knowledge, let us also consider what we can do for our birds to render their work as complete and effective as possible. think of what the birds are doing on every farm, in every garden, and about every home in the land. think of the millions of beautiful wings, of the graceful and attractive figures, of the cunning nests, and of the singing throats! do you think that the whole service of the birds is to be beautiful, to sing charmingly, and to rear their little ones? by no means is this their chief service to man. aside from these services the greatest work of birds is to destroy insects. it is one of the wise provisions of nature that many of the most brilliantly winged and most enchanting songsters are our most practical friends. not all birds feed on insects and animals; but even those that eat but a small amount of insect food may still destroy insects that would have damaged fruit and crops much more than the birds themselves do. as to their food, birds are divided into three general classes. first, those that live wholly or almost wholly on insects. these are called insectivorous birds. chief among these are the warblers, cuckoos, swallows, martins, flycatchers, nighthawks, whippoorwills, swifts, and humming-birds. we cannot have too many of these birds. they should be encouraged and protected. they should be supplied with shelter and water. birds of the second class feed by preference on fruits, nuts, and grain. the bluebird, robin, wood thrush, mocking-bird, catbird, chickadee, cedar-bird, meadow lark, oriole, jay, crow, and woodpecker belong to this group. these birds never fail to perform a service for us by devouring many weed seeds. [illustration: fig. . a kingbird] the third class is known as the hard-billed birds. it includes those birds which live principally on seeds and grain--the canary, goldfinch, sparrow, and some others. birds that come early, like the bluebird, robin, and redwing, are of special service in destroying insects before the insects lay their eggs for the season. the robins on the lawn search out the caterpillars and cutworms. the chipping sparrow and the wren in the shrubbery look out for all kinds of insects. they watch over the orchard and feed freely on the enemies of the apple and other fruit trees. the trunks of these trees are often attacked by borers, which gnaw holes in the bark and wood, and often cause the death of the trees. the woodpeckers hunt for these appetizing borers and by means of their barbed tongues bring them from their hiding-places. on the outside of the bark of the trunk and branches the bark lice work. these are devoured by the nuthatches, creepers, and chickadees. during the winter the bark is the hiding-place for hibernating insects, which, like plant lice, feed in summer on the leaves. throughout the winter a single chickadee will destroy great numbers of the eggs of the cankerworm moth and of the plant louse. the blackbirds, meadow larks, crows, quail, and sparrows are the great protectors of the meadow and field crops. these birds feed on the army worms and cutworms that do so much injury to the young shoots; they also destroy the chinch bug and the grasshopper, both of which feed on cultivated plants. [illustration: fig. . a warbler] a count of all the different kinds of animals shows that insects make up nine tenths of them. hence it is easy to see that if something did not check their increase they would soon almost overrun the earth. our forests and orchards furnish homes and breeding-places for most of these insects. suppose the injurious insects were allowed to multiply unchecked in the forests, their numbers would so increase that they would invade our fields and create as much terror among the farmers as they did in pharaoh's egypt. the birds are the only direct friends man has to destroy these harmful insects. what benefactors, then, these little feathered neighbors are! it has been estimated that a bird will devour thirty insects daily. even in a widely extended forest region a very few birds to the acre, if they kept up this rate, would daily destroy many bushels of insects that would play havoc with the neighboring orchards and fields. do not imagine, however, that to destroy insects is the only use of birds. the day is far more delightful when the birds sing, and when we see them flit in and out, giving us a glimpse now and then of their pretty coats and quaint ways. by giving them a home we can surround ourselves with many birds, sweet of song and brilliant of plumage. [illustration: fig. . the hairy woodpecker] if the birds felt that man were a friend and not a foe, they would often turn to him for protection. during times of severe storm, extreme drought, or scarcity of food, if the birds were sufficiently tamed to come to man as their friend, as they do in rare cases now, a little food and shelter might tide them over the hard time and their service afterwards would repay the outlay a thousandfold. if the boys in your families would build bird-houses about the house and barn and in shade trees, they might save yearly a great number of birds. in building these places of shelter and comfort, due care must be taken to keep them clear of english sparrows and out of the reach of cats and bird-dogs. whatever we do to attract the birds to make homes on the premises must be done at the right time and in the right way. think out carefully what materials to provide for them. bits of string, linen, cotton, yarn, tow and other waste material, all help to induce a pair to build in the garden. [illustration: fig. . protecting our friends] it is an interesting study--the preparation of homes for the birds. trees may be pruned to make inviting crotches. a tangled, overgrown corner in the garden will invite some birds to nest. wrens, bluebirds, chickadees, martins, and some other varieties are all glad to set up housekeeping in man-made houses. the proper size for a bird-room is easily remembered. give each room six square inches of floor space and make it eight inches high. old, weathered boards should be used; or, if paint is employed, a dull color to resemble an old tree-trunk will be most inviting. a single opening near the top should be made two inches in diameter for the larger birds; but if the house is to be headquarters for the wren, a one-inch opening is quite large enough, and the small door serves all the better to keep out english sparrows. the barn attic should be turned over to the swallows. small holes may be cut high up in the gables and left open during the time that the swallows remain with us. they will more than pay for shelter by the good work they do in ridding the barn of flies, gnats, and mosquitoes. section lxviii. farming on dry lands almost in the center of the western half of our continent there is a vast area in which very little rain falls. this section includes nearly three hundred million acres of land. it stretches from canada on the north into texas on the south, and from the missouri river (including the dakotas and western minnesota) on the east to the rocky mountains on the west. in this great area farming has to be done with little water. this sort of farming is therefore called "dry-farming." the soil in this section is as a rule very fertile. therefore the difference between farming in this dry belt and farming in most of the other sections of our country is a difference mainly due to a lack of moisture. as water is so scarce in this region two things are of the utmost importance: first, to save all the rain as it falls; second, to save all the water after it has fallen. to save the falling rain it is necessary for the ground to be in such a condition that none of the much-needed rain may run off. every drop should go into the soil. hence the farmer should never allow his top soil to harden into a crust. such a crust will keep the rain from sinking into the thirsty soil. moreover the soil should be deeply plowed. the deeper the soil the more water it can hold. the land should also be kept as porous as possible, for water enters a porous soil freely. the addition of humus in the form of vegetable manures will keep the soil in the porous condition needed. second, after the water has entered the soil it is important to hold it there so that it may supply the growing crops. if the land is allowed to remain untilled after a rain or during a hot spell, the water in it will evaporate too rapidly and thus the soil, like a well, will go dry too soon. to prevent this the top soil should be stirred frequently with a disk or smoothing harrow. this stirring will form a mulch of dry soil on the surface, and this will hold the water. other forms of mulch have been suggested, but the soil mulch is the only practical one. it must be borne in mind that this surface cultivation must be regularly kept up if the moisture is to be retained. [illustration: fig. . the disk harrow] some experiments in wheat-growing have shown how readily water might be saved if plowing were done at the right time. wheat sowed on land that was plowed as soon as the summer crops were taken off yielded a very much larger return than wheat sowed on land that remained untilled for some time after the summer crops were gathered. this difference in yield on lands of the same fertility was due to the fact that the early plowing enabled the land to take up a sufficient quantity of moisture. [illustration: fig. . red kafir corn in shock] in addition to a vigilant catching and saving of water, the farmer in these dry climates must give his land the same careful attention that lands in other regions need. the seed-bed should be most carefully prepared. it should be deep, porous, and excellent in tilth. during the growing season all crops should be frequently cultivated. the harrow, the cultivator, and the plow should be kept busy. the soil should be kept abundantly supplied with humus. some crops need a little different management in dry-farming. corn, for example, does best when it is listed; that is, planted so that it will come up three or four inches beneath the surface. if planted in this way, it roots better, stands up better, and requires less work. just as breeders study what animals are best for their climates, so farmers in the dry belt should study what crops are best suited to their lands. some crops, like the sorghums and kafir corn, are peculiarly at home in scantily watered lands. others do not thrive. experience is the only sure guide to the proper selection. to sum up, then, farmers can grow good crops in these lands only when four things are done: first, the land must be thoroughly tilled so that water can freely enter the soil; second, the land must be frequently cultivated so that the water will be kept in the soil; third, the crops must be properly rotated so as to use to best advantage the food and water supply; fourth, humus must be freely supplied so as to keep the soil in the best possible condition. section lxix. irrigation irrigation is the name given to the plan of supplying water in large quantities to growing crops. since the dawn of history this practice has been more or less followed in asia, in africa, and in europe. the spanish settlers in the southwestern part of america were probably the first to introduce this custom into our country. in new mexico there is an irrigating trench that has been in constant use for three hundred years. [illustration: fig. . pumping water for irrigation] the most common source of water for irrigating purposes is a river or a smaller stream. artesian wells are used in some parts of the country. windmills are sometimes used when only a small supply of water is needed. engines, hydraulic rams, and water-wheels are also employed. the water-wheel is one of the oldest and one of the most useful methods of raising water from streams. there are thousands of these in use in the dry regions of the west. small buckets are fastened to a large wheel, which is turned by the current of a stream. as the wheel turns, the buckets are filled, raised, and then emptied into a trough called a flume. the water flows through the flume into the irrigating ditches, which distribute it as it is needed in the fields. in some parts of california and other comparatively dry sections, wells are sunk in or near the beds of underground streams, and then the water is pumped into ditches which convey it to the fields to be irrigated. engines are often used for pumping water from streams and transferring it to ditches or canals. the canals distribute the water over the land or over the growing crops. [illustration: fig. . the main ditch of an irrigation plant] none of these methods, however, can be used for watering very large areas of land. hence, as the value of farm lands increased other methods were sought. shrewd men began to turn longing eyes on the wide stretches of barren land in the west. they knew that these waste lands, seemingly so unfertile, would become most fruitful as soon as water was turned on them. could water enough be found? new plans to pen up floods of water were prepared, and immense sums were spent in carrying out these plans. enormous dams of cemented stone were thrown across the gorges in the foothills of the mountains. behind these solid dams the water from the rains and the melting snow of the mountains was backed for miles, and was at once ready to change barrenness into fruitfulness. the stored water is led by means of main canals and cross ditches wherever it is needed, and countless acres have been brought under cultivation. water is generally applied either by making furrows for its passage through the fields or by flooding the land. the latter plan is the cheaper, but it can be used only on level lands. where the land is somewhat irregular a checking system, as it is called, is used to distribute the water. it is taken from check to check until the entire field has been irrigated. [illustration: fig. . the process of irrigating corn] the furrow method is usually employed for fruits and for farm and garden crops. in many places the grass and grain crops are now supplied with water by furrows instead of by flooding. irrigated lands should be carefully and thoroughly tilled. the water for irrigation is costly, and should be made to go as far as possible. good tillage saves the water. moreover, all cultivated crops like corn, potatoes, and orchard and truck crops ought to be cultivated frequently to save the moisture, to keep the soil in fit condition, and to aid the bacteria in the soil. it was a wise farmer who said, "one does not need to grow crops many years in order to learn that nothing can take the place of stirring the soil." methods of irrigating crops _tree fruits._ water is conducted through very narrow furrows from three to five feet apart, and allowed to sink about four feet deep, and to spread under the ground. then the supply is cut off. the object is to wet the soil deeply, and then by tillage to hold the moisture in the soil. _small fruits._ the common practice is to run water on each side of the row until the rows are soaked. _potatoes._ a thorough soaking is given the land before planting-time, and then no more than is absolutely necessary until blossoming-time. after the blossoms appear keep the soil moist until the crop ripens. _garden crops._ any method may be employed, but the vital point is to cultivate the ground as early as it can be worked after it has been irrigated. _meadows and alfalfa._ flooding is the most common method in use. the first irrigation comes early in the spring before growth has advanced much, and the successive waterings after the harvesting of each crop. section lxx. life in the country as ours is a country in which the people rule, every boy and every girl ought to be trained to take a wide-awake interest in public affairs. this training cannot begin too early in life. a wise old man once said, "in a republic you ought to begin to train a child for good citizenship on the day of its birth." [illustration: fig. . beauty from flowers and grass] [illustration: fig. . a country road in mecklenburg county, north carolina] happy would it be for our nation if all the young people who live in the country could begin their training in good citizenship by becoming workers for these four things: first, attractive country homes. second, attractive country schoolhouses and school grounds. third, good country schools. fourth, good roads. if the thousands on thousands of pupils in our schools would become active workers for these things and continue their work through life, then, in less than half a century, life in the country would be an unending delight. one of the problems of our day is how to keep bright, thoughtful, sociable, ambitious boys and girls contented on the farm. every step taken to make the country home more attractive, to make the school and its grounds more enjoyable, to make the way easy to the homes of neighbors, to school, to post-office, and to church, is a step taken toward keeping on the farm the very boys and girls who are most apt to succeed there. not every man who lives in the country can have a showy or costly home, but as long as grass and flowers and vines and trees grow, any man who wishes can have an attractive house. not every woman who is to spend a lifetime at the head of a rural home can have a luxuriously furnished home, but any woman who is willing to take a little trouble can have a cozy, tastefully furnished home--a home fitted with the conveniences that diminish household drudgery. even in this day of cheap literature, all parents cannot fill their children's home with papers, magazines, and books, but by means of school and sunday-school libraries, by means of circulating book clubs, and by a little self-denial, earnest parents can feed hungry minds just as they feed hungry bodies. [illustration: the queen of flowers for the home] [illustration: fig. . an attractive country home] agricultural papers that arouse the interest and quicken the thought of farm boys by discussing the best, easiest, and cheapest ways of farming; journals full of dainty suggestions for household adornment and comfort; illustrated papers and magazines that amuse and cheer every member of the family; books that rest tired bodies and open and strengthen growing minds--all of these are so cheap that the money reserved from the sale of one hog will keep a family fairly supplied for a year. [illustration: fig. . an unimproved schoolhouse] [illustration: fig. . an improved schoolhouse] [illustration: fig. . the same road after and before improvement] if the parents, teachers, and pupils of a school join hands, an unsightly, ill-furnished, ill-lighted, and ill-ventilated school-house can at small cost be changed into one of comfort and beauty. in many places pupils have persuaded their parents to form clubs to beautify the school grounds. each father sends a man or a man with a plow once or twice a year to work a day on the grounds. stumps are removed, trees trimmed, drains put in, grass sowed, flowers, shrubbery, vines, and trees planted, and the grounds tastefully laid off. thus at scarcely noticeable money cost a rough and unsightly school ground gives place to a charming school yard. cannot the pupils in every school in which this book is studied get their parents to form such a club, and make their school ground a silent teacher of neatness and beauty? [illustration: fig. . washington's country home] life in the country will never be as attractive as it ought to be until all the roads are improved. winter-washed roads, penning young people in their own homes for many months each year and destroying so many of the innocent pleasures of youth, build towns and cities out of the wreck of country homes. can young people who love their country and their country homes engage in a nobler crusade than a crusade for improved highways? appendix spraying mixtures for biting insects dry paris green paris green lb. lime or flour to lb. wet paris green paris green / to lb. lime / to / lb. water gal. for soft-bodied sucking insects kerosene emulsion hard soap (in fine shavings) / lb. soft water gal. kerosene gal. dissolve soap in boiling water, add kerosene to the hot water, churn with spraying pump for at least ten minutes, until the mixture changes to a creamy, then to a soft, butterlike, mass. this gives three gallons of -per-cent oil emulsion, which may be diluted to the strength desired. to get -per-cent oil emulsion add ten and one-half gallons of water. for fungous diseases copper sulphate copper sulphate lb. water to gal. use only before foliage opens, to kill wintering spores. bordeaux mixture copper sulphate (bluestone) to lb. lime (good, unslaked) to lb. water gal. dissolve the copper sulphate (bluestone) in twenty-five gallons of water. slake the lime slowly so as to get a smooth, thick cream. never cover the lime with too much water. after thorough slaking add twenty-five gallons of water. when the lime and the bluestone have dissolved, pour the two liquids into a third vessel. be sure that each stream mixes with the other before either enters the vessel. strain through a coarse cloth. mix fresh for each time. use for molds and fungi generally. apply in fine spray with a good nozzle. bordeaux-paris-green mixture ordinary bordeaux mixture gal. paris green oz. to lb. use for both fungi and insects on apple, potato, etc. bordeaux-arsenate-of-lead mixture ordinary bordeaux mixture gal. arsenate of lead to lb. used for fungous and insect enemies of the potato, and of the apple when bitter rot is troublesome. commercial lime-sulphur arsenate of lead commercial lime-sulphur - / gal. arsenate of lead to lb. water gal. use for spraying apples. ammoniacal copper carbonate copper carbonate oz. ammonia ( ° baumé) about pt. water gal. dissolve the copper carbonate in the smallest possible amount of ammonia. this solution may be kept in stock and diluted to the proper strength as needed. use this instead of the bordeaux mixture after the fruit has reached half or two thirds of the mature size. it leaves no spots as does the lime-sulphur wash or the bordeaux mixture. sprays for both fungous and insect pests home-made lime-sulphur wash lime lb. sulphur lb. water gal. the lime, the sulphur, and about half of the water required are boiled together for forty-five minutes in a kettle over a fire, or in a barrel or other suitable tank by steam, strained, and then diluted to gallons. this is the wash regularly used against the san jose scale. it may be substituted for bordeaux mixture when spraying trees in the dormant state. commercial lime-sulphur may also be used in place of this homemade wash. use one gallon of the commercial lime-sulphur to nine gallons of water in the dormant season. self-boiled lime-sulphur wash the self-boiled lime-sulphur wash is a combination of lime and sulphur boiled only by the heat of the slaking lime, and is used chiefly for summer spraying on peaches, plums, cherries, etc. as a substitute for the bordeaux mixture. lime lb. sulphur to lb. water gal. the lime should be placed in a barrel and enough water poured on it to start it slaking and to keep the sulphur off the bottom of the barrel. the sulphur, which should first be worked through a sieve to break up the lumps, may then be added, and, finally, enough water to slake the lime into a paste. considerable stirring is necessary to prevent caking on the bottom. after the violent boiling which accompanies the slaking of the lime is over, the mixture should be diluted ready for use, or at least enough cold water added to stop the cooking. from five to fifteen minutes are required for the process. if the hot mass is permitted to stand undiluted as a thick paste, a liquid is produced that is injurious to peach foliage and, in some cases, to apple foliage. the mixture should be strained through a sieve of twenty meshes to the inch in order to remove the coarse particles of lime, but all the sulphur should be worked through the strainer. glossary to enable young readers to understand the technical words necessarily used in the text only popular definitions are given. =abdomen=: the part of an insect lying behind the thorax. =acid=: a chemical name given to many sour substances. vinegar and lemon juice owe their sour taste to the acid in them. =adult=: a person, animal, or plant grown to full size and strength. =ammonia= (_ammonium_): a compound of nitrogen readily usable as a plant food. it is one of the products of decay. =annual=: a plant that bears seed during the first year of its existence and then dies. =anther=: the part of a stamen that bears the pollen. =atmospheric nitrogen=: nitrogen in the air. great quantities of this valuable plant food are in the air; but, strange to say, most plants cannot use it directly from the air, but must take it in other forms, as nitrates, etc. the legumes are an exception, as they can use atmospheric nitrogen. =available plant food=: food in such condition that plants can use it. =bacteria=: a name applied to a number of kinds of very small living beings, some beneficial, some harmful, some disease-producing. they average about one twenty-thousandth of an inch in length. =balanced ration=: a ration made up of the proper amounts of carbohydrates, fats, and protein, as explained in text. such a ration avoids all waste of food. =biennial=: a plant that produces seed during the second year of its existence and then dies. =blight=: a diseased condition in plants in which the whole or a part of a plant withers or dries up. =bluestone=: a chemical; copper sulphate. it is used to kill fungi, etc. =bordeaux mixture=: a mixture invented in bordeaux, france, to destroy disease-producing fungi. =bud= (noun): an undeveloped branch. =bud= (verb): to insert a bud from the scion upon the stock to insure better fruit. =bud variation=: occasionally one bud on a plant will produce a branch differing in some ways from the rest of the branches; this is bud variation. the shoot that is produced by bud variation is called a _sport_. =calyx=: the outermost row of leaves in a flower. =cambium=: the growing layer lying between the wood and the bark. =canon=: the shank bone above the fetlock in the fore and hind legs of a horse. =carbohydrates=: carbohydrates are foods free from nitrogen. they make up the largest part of all vegetables. examples are sugar, starch, and cellulose. =carbolic acid=: a chemical often used to kill or prevent the growth of germs, bacteria, fungi, etc. =carbon=: a chemical element. charcoal is nearly pure carbon. =carbon disulphide=: a chemical used to kill insects. =carbonic acid gas=: a gas consisting of carbon and oxygen. it is produced by breathing, and whenever carbon is burned. it is the source of the carbon in plants. =cereal=: the name given to grasses that are raised for the food contained in their seeds, such as corn, wheat, rice. =cobalt=: a poisonous chemical used to kill insects. =cocoon=: the case made by an insect to contain its larva or pupa. =commercial fertilizer=: an enriching plant food bought to improve soil. =compact=: a soil is said to be compact when the particles are closely packed. =concentrated=: when applied to food the word means that it contains much feeding value in small bulk. =contagious=: a disease is said to be contagious when it can be spread or carried from one individual to another. =cross=: the result of breeding two varieties of plant together. =cross pollination=: the pollination of a flower by pollen brought from a flower on some other plant. =croup=: the top of the hips. =culture=: the art of preparing ground for seed and raising crops by tillage. =curb disease=: a swelling on the back part of the hind leg of a horse just behind the lowest part of the hock joint. it generally causes lameness. =curculio=: a kind of beetle or weevil. =dendrolene=: a patented substance used for catching cankerworms. =digestion=: the act by which food is prepared by the juices of the body to be used by the blood. =dormant=: a word used to describe sleeping or resting bodies,--bodies not in a state of activity. =drainage=: the process by which an excess of water is removed from the land by ditches, terraces, or tiles. =element=: a substance that cannot be divided into simpler substances. =ensilage=: green foods preserved in a silo. =evaporate=: to pass off in vapor, as a fluid often does; to change from a solid or liquid state into vapor, usually by heat. =exhaustion=: the state in which strength, power, and force have been lost. when applied to land, the word means that land has lost its power to produce well. =fermentation=: a chemical change produced by bacteria, yeast, etc. a common example of fermentation is the change of cider into vinegar. =fertility=: the state of being fruitful. land is said to be fertile when it produces well. =fertilization=: the act which follows pollination and enables a flower to produce seed. =fetlock=: the long-haired cushion on the back side of a horse's leg just above the hoof. =fiber=: any fine, slender thread or threadlike substance, as the rootlets of plants or the lint of cotton. =filter=: to purify a liquid, as water, by causing it to pass through some substance, as paper, cloth, screens, etc. =formalin=: a forty per cent solution of a chemical known as formaldehyde. formalin is used to kill fungi, bacteria, etc. =formula=: a recipe for the making of a compound; for example, fertilizer or spraying compounds. =fungicide=: a substance used to kill or prevent the growth of fungi; for example, bordeaux mixture or copper sulphate. =fungous=: belonging to or caused by fungi. =fungus= (plural =fungi=): a low kind of plant life lacking in green color. molds and toadstools are examples. =germ=: that from which anything springs. the term is often applied to any very small organism or living thing, particularly if it causes great effects such as disease, fermentation, etc. =germinate=: to sprout. a seed germinates when it begins to grow. =girdle=: to make a cut or groove around a limb or tree. =glacier=: an immense field or stream of ice formed in the region of constant snow and moving slowly down a slope or valley. =globule=: a small particle of matter shaped like a globe. =glucose=: a kind of sugar very common in plants. the sugar from grapes, honey, etc. is glucose. that from the sugar cane is not. =gluten=: a vegetable form of protein found in cereals. =graft=: to place a living branch or stem on another living stem so that it may grow there. it insures the growth of the desired kind of plant. =granule=: a little grain. =gypsum=: land plaster. "=head back=": to cut or prune a tree so as to form its head, that is, the place where the main trunk first gives off its branches. =heredity=: the resemblance of offspring to parent. =hibernating=: to pass the winter in a torpid or inactive state in close quarters. =hock=: the joint in the hind leg of quadrupeds between the leg and the shank. it corresponds to the ankle in man. =host=: the plant upon which a fungus or insect is preying. =humus=: the portion of the soil caused by the decay of animal or vegetable matter. =hybrid=: the result of breeding two different kinds of plants together. =hydrogen=: a chemical element. it is present in water and in all living things. =individual=: a single person, plant, animal, or thing of any kind. =inoculate=: to give a disease by inserting the germ that causes it in a healthy being. =insectivorous=: anything that eats insects. =kainit=: salts of potash used in making fertilizers. =kernel=: a single seed or grain, as a kernel of corn. =kerosene emulsion=: see appendix. =larva= (plural =larvæ=): the young or immature form of an insect. =larval=: belonging to larva. =layer=: to propagate plants by a method similar to cutting, but differing from cutting in that the young plant takes root before it is separated from the parent plant. =legume=: a plant belonging to the family of the pea, clover, and bean; that is, having a flower of similar structure. =lichen=: a kind of flowerless plant that grows on stones, trees, boards, etc. =loam=: an earthy mixture of clay and sand with organic matter. =magnesia=: an earthy white substance somewhat similar to lime. =magnify=: to make a thing larger in fact or in appearance; to enlarge the appearance of a thing so that the parts may be seen more easily. =membrane=: a thin layer or fold of animal or vegetable matter. =mildew=: a cobwebby growth of fungi on diseased or decaying things. =mold=: see mildew. =mulch=: a covering of straw, leaves, or like substances over the roots of plants to protect them from heat, drought, etc., and to preserve moisture. =nectar=: a sweetish substance in blossoms of flowers from which bees make honey. =nitrate=: a readily usable form of nitrogen. the most common nitrate is saltpeter. =nitrogen=: a chemical element, one of the most important and most expensive plant foods. it exists in fertilizers, in ammonia, in nitrates, and in organic matter. =nodule=: a little knot or bump. =nutrient=: any substance which nourishes or promotes growth. =organic matter=: substances made through the growth of plants or animals. =ovary=: the particular part of the pistil that bears the immature seed. =ovipositor=: the organ with which an insect deposits its eggs. =oxygen=: a gas present in the air and necessary to breathing. =particle=: any very small part of a body. =perennial=: living through several years. all trees are perennial. =petal=: a single leaf of the corolla. =phosphoric acid=: an important plant food occurring in bones and rock phosphates. =pistil=: the part of the blossom that contains the immature seeds. =pollen=: the powdery substance borne by the stamen of the flower. it is necessary to seed production. =pollination=: the act of carrying pollen from stamens to pistils. it is usually done by the wind or by insects. =porosity=: the state of having small openings or passages between the particles of matter. =potash=: an important part of plant foods. the chief source of potash is kainit, muriate of potash, sulphate of potash, wood ashes, and cotton-hull ashes. =propagate=: to cause plants or animals to increase in number. =protein=: the name of a group of substances containing nitrogen. it is one of the most important of feeding stuffs. =pruning=: trimming or cutting parts that are not needed or that are injurious. =pulverize=: to reduce to a dustlike state. =pupa=: an insect in the stage of its life that comes just before the adult condition. =purity= (of seed): seeds are pure when they contain only one kind of seed and no foreign matter. =ration=: a fixed daily allowance of food for an animal. =raupenleim=: a patented sticky substance used to catch the cankerworm. =resistant=: a plant is resistant to disease when it can ward off attacks of the disease; for example, some varieties of the grape are resistant to the phylloxera. =rotation= (of crops): a well-arranged succession of different crops on the same land. =scion=: a shoot, sprout, or branch taken to graft or bud upon another plant. =seed bed=: the layer of earth in which seeds are sown. =seed selection=: the careful selection of seed from particular plants with the object of keeping or increasing some desirable quality. =seedling=: a young plant just from the seed. =sepal=: one of the leaves in the calyx. =set=: a young plant for propagation. =silo=: a house or pit for packing away green food for winter use so as to exclude air and moisture. =sire=: father. =smut=: a disease of plants, particularly of cereals, which causes the plant or some part of it to become a powdery mass. =spike=: a lengthened flower cluster with stalkless flowers. =spiracle=: an air opening in the body of an insect. =spore=: a small body formed by a fungus to reproduce the fungus. it serves the same use as seeds do for flowering plants. =spray=: to apply a liquid in the form of a very fine mist by the aid of a spraying pump for the purpose of killing fungi or insects. =stamen=: the part of the flower that bears the pollen. =stamina=: endurance. =sterilize=: to destroy all the germs or spores in or on anything. sterilizing is often done by heat or chemicals. =stigma=: the part of the pistil that receives the pollen. =stock=: the stem or main part of a tree or plant. in grafting or budding the scion is inserted upon the stock. =stover=: as used in this book the word means the dry stalks of corn from which the ears have been removed. =subsoil=: the soil under the topsoil. =sulphur=: a yellowish chemical element; brimstone. =taproot=: the main root of a plant, which runs directly down into the earth to a considerable depth without dividing. =terrace=: a ridge of earth run on a level around a slope or hillside to keep the land from washing. =thorax=: the middle part of the body of an insect. the thorax lies between the abdomen and the head. =thermometer=: an instrument for measuring heat. =tillage=: the act of preparing land for seed, and keeping the ground in a proper state for the growth of crops. =transplant=: a plant grown in a bed with a view to being removed to other soil; a technical term used by gardeners. =tubercle=: a small, wart-like growth on the roots of legumes. =udder=: the milk vessel of a cow. =utensil=: a vessel used for household purposes. =variety=: a particular kind. for example, the winesap, bonum, Æsop, etc., are different varieties of apples. =ventilate=: to open to the free passage of air. =virgin soil=: a soil which has never been cultivated. =vitality= (of seed): vitality is the ability to grow. seed are of good vitality if a large per cent of them will sprout. =weathering=: the action of moisture, air, frost, etc. upon rocks. =weed=: a plant out of place. a wheat plant in a rose bed or a rose in the wheat field would be regarded as a weed, as would any plant growing in a place in which it is not wanted. =wilt= (of cotton): a disease of cotton in which the whole plant droops or wilts. =withers=: the ridge between the shoulder bones of a horse, at the base of the neck. =yeast=: a preparation containing the yeast plant used to make bread rise, etc. index acid phosphate, , , alfalfa, , , , , , , - alfalfa root, animals, domestic, - why we feed, annual, , , , ant, , anther, apple, , , , , - , fire-blight of, apple-tree tent caterpillar, , arsenate of lead, , ashes, asparagus, babcock milk-tester, bacteria, , , , , , balanced ration, - barley, - beans, , bee, - beehive, anti-robbing entrance of, beet, , sugar-, - beet sugar, beetle, , cucumber, potato, biennials, bird homes, birds, - black knot, blackberry, blight, eggplant, pear and apple, potato, , tomato, bordeaux mixture, , , , , borer, peach, , breeding-cage, insect, buckwheat, - bud variation, budding, , - buds, , bug, bulbs, , , burbank, luther, butter, , butterfly, , , cabbage, , , , cabbage worm, , caladium, cambium, , cankerworm, , canna, cantaloupes, cape jasmine, capillarity, carbohydrates, , , carbon, , , carbon disulphide, carbonic acid gas, , caterpillar, , , cattle, - beef type of, dairy type of, improving of, cauliflower, , celery, , cherries, , , chinch bug, , churn, the, , , churning, cleft grafting, clover, , - club root, cocoon, , , , codling moth, , , cold-frame, - , colostrum, consumption, germ of, corms, corn, - blossom of, freezing of seed, roots of, , selection of seed, , , cotton, - resistant variety of, sea island, , short-stapled, cotton wilt, cotton-boll weevil, cotton-seed meal, , , cow aberdeen angus, galloway, holstein, jersey, care of, the dairy, - cowpeas, - cream, , crop-rotation, - crops, - rotation of, , , , , , , value of, per acre, cross section, crosses, cross-pollination, cucumber, , cucumber beetle, curculio, plum, currant, cuttings, , , , , cyclamen, dahlia, , , dairy rules, dairying, - dendrolene, diphtheria, germ of, diseases of plants, - domestic animals, - drainage, benefits of, dry farming, - ducks, eggplants, , ensilage, farm crops, - farm garden, - farm tools, - farming on dry lands, - fats, , , feed stuffs, - digestible nutrients in, - growing, on the farm, - feeding animals, reasons for, , fertilization, fertilizers, - field insects, - figs, , fire-blight, flax, - flea-beetle, , , floriculture, , flower, the, , flower box, flower gardening, - fly, , formalin, , , fowls, - fruit mold, , fruit rot, fruit tree, how to raise a, - fultz, abraham, fungi, , , garden, - garden insects, - gardening, market-, - geese, geranium, , , , germs, , , , , ; _see also_ bacteria girdler, girdling, glacier, , , gladiolus, , gooseberries, grafting, , - cleft, root, time for, tongue, , grafting wax, grape, , , , grape cutting, grape phylloxera, , grape pollination, , grasses, - grasshopper, , greenhouse, - heading back, hemp, - hens, - heredity, hessian fly, homes, country, - honey dew, horse, - diagrams by which to judge, - percheron, proportions of, roadster, horticulture, - host, hotbed, - how to raise a fruit tree, - humus, , , , , , husker and shredder, hybrids, , , , insects, cage for breeding, classes of, eggs of, eyes of, field, , garden, - general, how they feed, , orchard, parts of, irish, or white, potato, - propagation of, , irrigation, - method of, kafir corn, , kainite, kerosene emulsion, land, improvement of, , , , , landscape-gardening, larva, , layering, , legumes, , , - lettuce, , , life in the country, - lime, lime-sulphur wash, , , , , liming land, - louse, plant, , , , machines, farm, - maize, manures, , - maple sugar, market-gardening, , meadows, , melons, , mildew, how to prevent, milk, sours, how, milk-tester, babcock, mineral matter, , moisture, mold, , , moonflower, morning-glory, moth, codling, , , mosquito, mulch, narcissus, nectar, , nitrate of soda, , , , nitrogen, , , , , , , , , , , nitrogen-gathering crops, , , - nodules, oats, - oat smut, onion, , orchard insects, osmosis, ovary, ovipositor, paris green, , parsnips, pasture grasses, - peach, , , , , , , , peach curl, , peach mold, peach mummies, peach tree, how made, - peach-tree borer, , peanuts, - pear, , , , , pear fire-blight, peas, , , - perennials, , , , , petal, phosphoric acid, , , , , , , , phylloxera, , pipette, pistil, , plant, the, , plant disease, cause of, nature of, prevention of, , plant food, , , , , from air, from soil, kinds of, plant louse, , , , plant seeding, , planting a tree, - plant-propagation, - by buds, plants grown from seed, from bulbs, plow, right way to, plum curculio, , plums, , , , pollen, , , pollination, - by hand, cross-, , grape, , potash, , , , , , , , , , potato, sweet, , white, or irish, , , - potato beetle, , potato blight, , potato scab, , , potato seed, , poultry, - prevention of plant diseases, , propagation of plants by buds, by cuttings, protein, , , , , pruning, , - root, , pupa, , , purity of seed, - pyrethrum powder, quince, radish, raspberry, ration, balanced, , ratoon, red raspberry, rice, - roads, , root-hairs, , , , , root-pruning, roots, , , , root-tubercles, , rose, , , rot of fruit, rotation of crops, , , , - , , , , , rye, - san jose scale, , sap current, the, scab, , schoolhouses, scion, , , seed, seed purity, - seed vitality, - seed-germination, seed-germinator, seeding, , seed-selection, , , , in the field, , , of corn, of cotton, , of potatoes, , of wheat, , seed-selection plat, , selection of seed. _see_ seed-selection sepal, sheep, - silo, smuts, , soil, bacteria in, deepening of, definition of, drainage of, soil, how formed, , how water rises in, improving, manuring of, moisture of, origin of, particles of, magnified, and plant, retention of water by, tillage of, virgin, , sowing seed, soy beans, - spiders, red, spiracles, spores, , , , , prevention of, spraying, , , , , , , spraying outfit, , , , squanto, squash, , squash bug, stamen, - starch, starchy food, stigma, - stock, , strawberry, , , , style, subsoil, subsoiling, sugar, sugar plants, sugar-beet, - sugar-cane, sugar-maple, sulphate of ammonia, sun-scald, sweet pea, , sweet potato, , , , - swine, - tent caterpillar, tile drain, , benefits of, tillage, - , , , timber, - enemies of, tobacco, - tobacco worm, , tomato, , tongue grafting, , tools, topping tobacco, trap plant, tree, manuring of, truck crops, - tubercle, , tull, jethro, turkeys, turnip, twig girdler, typhoid fever, germ of, vetches, - vitality of seed, - vitamines, wasp, water, absorption of, by plants, retention of, by soil, rise of, in soil, saved by plants, saved by soils, watermelons, wax, weathering, , weeds, , annual, biennial, perennial, weevil, cotton-boll, - plum, wheat, - selection of seed, yield of, why feed animals, wilt cotton, watermelon, window box, window-garden, - window-gardening, worn-out land, reclaiming of, , yeast, , file was produced from scans of public domain works at the university of michigan\\\'s making of america collection.) transcriber's note minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. printer errors have been changed and are listed at the end. all other inconsistencies are as in the original. address delivered by hon. henry h. crapo, governor of michigan, before the central michigan agricultural society, at their sheep-shearing exhibition, held at the agricultural college farm, on thursday, may th, . lansing: john a. kerr & co., steam book and job printers. . address. _mr. president, and members of the "central mich. ag'l society:"_ ladies and gentlemen: remote from the theatre of action in the late rebellion, michigan has experienced comparatively few of the evils that followed immediately in its path. the usual pursuits of peaceful life, were here scarcely disturbed, and by the permission of a gracious providence, the industry of the inhabitants of our state was but little diverted from its legitimate channels. nevertheless, while so many of her patriot sons were engaged in the deadly strife of southern battle-fields, and the result of the struggle was in the uncertain future, a sombre cloud could not fail to brood over our daily life, interfering with the full enjoyment of the blessings we retained. now, however, the roar of cannon and the noise and tumult of war is no longer heard in our land; the scenes of carnage and blood which our once peaceful and happy country has recently witnessed are at an end; the turmoil and strife of armed hosts in deadly conflict have ceased; the public mind is no longer excited, and the hearts of the people are no longer pained, by the fearful news of battles fought, and of the terrible slaughter of kindred and friends. social order again invites us to renewed efforts in our respective labor and callings; and we are permitted "to beat our swords into plow-shares and our spears into pruning-hooks." like the calm and quiet repose of peace when it follows the clamor and din of war, so is the delightful, cheering and invigorating approach of spring, as it succeeds the chilling blasts and pelting storms of dreary winter. the truth of this is verified to us on the present occasion. we have come together at this delightful spot, and on this beautiful spring day, not only for the enjoyment of a festive season, but also for the improvement of our minds and the increase of our present stock of knowledge on subjects with which our several interests and our respective tastes are more or less identified. at your request and upon your kind invitation, i am here to contribute my share--small though it be--to the general fund. i should, however, have much preferred the position of a quiet learner to that of an incompetent teacher--to have _listened_ rather than to have _spoken_. but being here, it will be my purpose--by your indulgence--to speak, in general terms, upon such topics as seem to me appropriate to the occasion. i shall not presume to theorize, or to speculate; neither shall i travel through unexplored fields with no other guide than imagination; nor shall i attempt to entertain you with any rhetorical flourishes, or figures of speech; but in a simple manner endeavor to give briefly my own views on the several subjects discussed. the occasion is undoubtedly one affording a wide field for profitable discussion; yet the space which your greatest indulgence can be expected to allow me will render it necessary that i confine myself to a very few topics, and will barely permit a hasty glance at some of those only which may be considered appropriate in this address. you will therefore, i trust, remember that in case i do not refer to subjects which you may deem of importance, it will be from this reason, and not because i may have considered them unimportant. * * * * * in the first place, then, permit me a brief reference to this association, under whose auspices, and by whose directions--acting in connection with the officers of the agricultural college--this festival is held. your society, i understand, extends over the counties of ingham, eaton, clinton, livingston and shiawassee, and has been formed for the purpose of combining and concentrating a wider scope of individual action than could otherwise be attained, with a view to an increased interest in the subject of agriculture and of agricultural fairs; thereby recognizing the principle that "in union there is strength." the effort is not only laudable, but will, i have no doubt, be productive of the most beneficial results. in fact we have in this very effort to bring into notice and give an increased interest to one of our most important branches of husbandry in our state--the growth and production of wool--abundant evidence that such will be the result. by coming together, as on the present occasion, in the spirit of a free, frank and social interchange of ideas, an increased interest cannot fail of being awakened, as well as an extensive inquiry instituted, among farmers generally, not only as to the most desirable breed of sheep, but also as to the best modes of tending and keeping and feeding the different kinds, with a view to the greatest profits. the influence of such a gathering as this is of much value--not only in encouraging a desire for excellence and creating a spirit of competition and of laudable emulation, but as furnishing the means for an active exchange of the more desirable specimens. those who assemble are enabled to enjoy a season not merely of relaxation from toil, but also for mutual consultation and discussion; and a healthy and growing interest in everything pertaining to agriculture, in all its varied forms and branches, is thereby induced. in this connection i may be permitted to make a few remarks in relation to the salutary influence which our agricultural societies cannot fail to exert upon the farmers of michigan, and of the _benefits_ which are certain to flow from them. there is no employment which keeps man so isolated as that of agriculture; and these societies serve, in a very great degree, to counteract the bad effects of this by bringing mind into intercourse with mind. they should receive the united and cordial support of every farmer. whilst professional men are brought into frequent contact with each other--and the trader is in constant intercourse with his customers--and the mechanic is associated with those employed with him in the shops--the farmer spends most of his time with his family, and with his flocks and herds, and sees comparatively little of others. the agricultural fair brings--or should bring--all the farmers together, with their wives and daughters, where a healthy, social intercourse is enjoyed. there a higher standard of excellence in everything is formed. he there learns that what of his own he had been led to believe was the best--whether in flocks or herds, or farm products--may be greatly improved, and his ambition and pride, as well as his interest, are at once excited to make an advance. at the same time the industrious housewife, and the blushing miss, by an examination of the cloths and flannels--the carpets and quilts--the embroidered skirts and capes--the collars and slippers, discover that these articles are worthy not only of their admiration but of their emulation, and they, too, resolve to copy from a standard of merit higher than their own. thus is excited among those so brought together a spirit of competition, and a desire in their turn to excel. another important benefit resulting from agricultural fairs, is a more rapid and general diffusion of knowledge among the farmers in regard to the advantages and practical utility of new inventions, for the saving of time and labor in agricultural operations. this is illustrated very clearly by the exhibition of mr. parish's "stump and grub extractor," on exhibition here. this machine, i understand, was patented on the first day of the present month, and _now_ all in attendance at this fair have had an opportunity of witnessing its operations and judging for themselves of its merits. an effective machine of this kind is of incalculable value to the farmer in removing _at once_ from his fields the unsightly stumps that disfigure them, and which adds so much to the labor of cultivating those fields. of the machine itself, i may be permitted to say, by way of digression, that it surpasses in the effectiveness of its operations anything of the kind which i have yet had an opportunity of witness. but this is not all. the mutual consultation and discussion consequent upon agricultural fairs, begets a spirit of inquiry and a desire for information in relation to every subject connected with the farmer's calling, and to gratify which he has recourse to periodicals and other works in which its various branches are discussed and explained. he will there learn what agricultural chemistry has done for him, and the importance and value of the analysis of the different kinds of soil. he will also find the result of the various systems of husbandry practiced by others as well as the effects of experiments made, and thereby secure to himself their benefits without incurring their cost. and although no amount of reading alone can make a man a farmer, yet the knowledge derived from a perusal of agricultural papers devoted to the interests of the tillers of the soil will be of incalculable value to him. sheep-husbandry. it will undoubtedly be expected that "sheep-husbandry," not only from the importance of the subject itself, but because of its being the principal feature in this exhibition, should receive at my hands a due share of consideration. i am free to confess, however, that the subject will be approached with no small degree of hesitancy and distrust on my part, not only because of my want of practical knowledge in regard to it, but also because it may be fairly regarded, i think, in many respects at least, as a sort of debatable ground. different views are undoubtedly entertained by equally intelligent and experienced men, upon this as well as upon other equally important subjects; and the fact i believe is well established that "doctors" not only _may_ but _do_ very often "disagree," and that, too, sometimes very tenaciously. should i advance opinions at variance with those entertained by well-informed and practical men who may listen to me, i will simply remark that i am not here to lay down rules and establish principles for the guidance of any one, but to discuss principles and rules of action, as well as practical questions, with a view to lead others the more carefully to inquire into and investigate the same. the subject of sheep-husbandry with us is certainly an important one--wool being a great, leading staple product of our state; and very much attention is now being paid to it, which is fully justified by the advantages of our soil and climate for the keeping of sheep. the farmers of michigan are fully aroused to the importance of this interest, and have labored zealously, and at much expense and cost, to improve their breeds of sheep, and to foster and develop this great interest. they have certainly done much in this direction; but more--very much more, i apprehend--remains yet to be done. it must, however, be remembered that a blind zeal, without that knowledge which is the result of experience, observation and study, will do very little in the right direction. sheep, like cattle, should be selected for specific purposes, and in reference to affording the greatest profit under existing, and probable future circumstances. the exclusive cultivation of this or that breed--of the fine or coarse, or of the long or short wools--whether kept exclusively for their wool, or both for their wool and the shambles, should never be practiced, unless under special and unusual circumstances. the farmer in this, as in every other agricultural department, must endeavor to see his relation to the merchant, and adopt a practice having in view the chances of ultimately reaching the most certain as well as the most profitable market; for, after all, the connection between the producer and the manufacturer and merchant, is but a partnership for loss and gain. the merchant will call upon the manufacturer for such woolen goods as his market demands, irrespective of the mere opinion which any one may entertain in favor of this or that kind of wool; and the manufacturer, in his turn, will call upon the farmer for just what is wanted. the farmer should therefore, in the selection of his flocks, have in view the market upon which he is to rely for the sale of his wool; the texture and weight of fleece; the health and vigor of body and constitution, as well as the habits and economy of the animal. he should sedulously seek to bring his sheep to a high degree of perfection in every respect. in seeking to obtain quality of fleece it is a self-evident fact that he should not overlook quantity; and that quantity should also be considered in connection with quality. it is a patent fact, of which if we needed evidence it may be found in this exhibition as well as in the numerous county exhibitions of similar character, which have recently been held, where very rarely any other class of sheep are seen, that a strong preference for fine-wooled merinos is very generally, if not almost exclusively, entertained at the present time among the farmers of this state, and money in the purchase of that class is of but little account. it is well known that very high prices are being paid not only for single specimens but for whole flocks of this breed. this is probably all right, so far as it is necessary for the purpose of attaining excellence in flocks, upon points already spoken of. to such a preference there should be no objection, if it be not carried so far as to superinduce an unprofitable reaction--and provided that the demand for the grade of wool produced by these sheep is to have no limit, and that all which can be grown is sure always to command a remunerative price. but will this probably be so? let us consider. as i have already intimated, the demand for any particular quality or kind of wool will not depend upon the fact that farmer a or farmer b has such wool to sell, taken from sheep for which he paid very large prices, and of which he has now a very large flock; but rather because that particular kind and quality of wool is called for by the manufacturer simply to fill the orders of the merchant, who in his turn is only desirous to supply the demands of the consumer. from an examination of our imports, it appears that in , of _sixty millions_ of woolen goods, about _forty millions_ were manufactured of the longer worsted wool. this wool is required to make a fabric of lustrous appearance for imitations of alapaca, and for a supply of which our manufacturers now depend mostly on foreign countries the price of combing wool has been for some time increasing rapidly, in comparison with other wool, in consequence of its consumption gaining upon its growth. and i saw recently that the british farmer had been urged to increase the production of this article to its fullest extent, both from a consideration of duty as well as of interest. the manufacturer of alapaca cloths--a most beautiful fabric of recent introduction--and their extensive use, has not only led to this increased demand, but has enhanced the price of this kind of wool, which will undoubtedly be maintained, as new fabrics requiring to be made from long wools, especially for the garments of ladies, are now being introduced in great variety, and are becoming daily more popular and of more general use. another cause for the continued and increasing demand for these wools is the facility with which they can be used for the purpose of making imitations of lama fabrics and alapacas; and i have no doubt that factories for the manufacture of these goods will rapidly multiply in new england and elsewhere, and will soon, to a very great extent take the place of those now consuming the fine wools. in support of these views, permit me to give the following extracts from the work of mr. randall, the well known and enthusiastic champion of the merinos. he says: "in the american market there is a much larger demand for medium than fine wools, and the former commands much the best price in proportion to its cost of production." again he says: "american producers of very fine wool have ever fed an expectation, but never obtained the fruition of their hopes." these are significant admissions, coming as they do from such a quarter. * * * * * the south downs are a variety of sheep of decided merit; but have never, i think, been fully appreciated by the farmers of michigan. they are of large size and symmetrically formed, with hardy and robust constitutions, and their wool is fine, short and curled, and destitute of fibrous spires that give to it the felting properties. it is neither a short nor a long staple, but ranks in this country as "middle wool." the shorter staples are made into flannels and light woolen goods; and the longer are extensively used for combing. their mutton is unsurpassed; its flavor is delicate, and the flesh juicy and well intermixed with fat. they are the most prolific breeders--the proportion of ewes bringing twins being at least fifty per cent. i recently saw a fine flock of south down ewes in the state of new york of which more than three-fourths of the whole flock had twins. among the more desirable varieties or families, for the production of long wool, in this climate, are, perhaps, the cotswolds, noble specimens of which you have had an opportunity of inspecting on this occasion; and have, i trust, with me, been highly gratified at their weight of carcass, combined with their fine forms and apparent hardiness of constitution, as well as the superior fleeces they have now yielded. my purpose, however, is not to advocate the claims of this or that class of sheep at the expense of any other, but to present such views for your consideration as may lead to a more thorough and candid investigation of the whole matter. let me say in continuation of this subject, that in a comparison between the cotswold and other long wool varieties, with the fine wool merinos the _advantage as to weight of fleece_ is decidedly with the former; and especially so when their respective fleeces are thoroughly cleansed and scoured; for whilst the loss of the long wools very rarely reaches _twenty per cent._, that of the merinos generally much exceed _fifty per cent._, and the fleeces of prize rams often more than _seventy per cent._ manufacturers are already beginning to make a discrimination between wool that is clean and that which is not so. suppose they buy the south down, cotswold and leicester wools, and their grades, from which is lost by scouring twenty per cent. only, whilst upon the finest michigan wool there is lost _fifty_ per cent. and more--making the cost of the latter, at ordinary prices, one-third more per pound than the former, how long will it be before they will study to increase their consumption of long wool when they can make from _thirty_ to _forty_ per cent. more cloth with the same money? they will certainly seek to avoid, in some way, the necessity of buying with their wool so very large a per centage of grease and dirt, as they claim they are now doing in the purchase of fine wools. the south downs, as i have already stated, as well as the long wool sheep, have a decided advantage in the quantity and value of meat which they yield for the shambles; for no one, i apprehend, will deny the fact they not only yield more wool but very much more flesh to the live weight than do the merinos. and this is a fact worthy the serious consideration of farmers, and certainly a strong argument in favor of the more general breeding of long wool sheep. the war, and perhaps other causes, have very seriously reduced our supply of meats, the waste of which cannot soon be repaired. many of our soldiers will not again return to rural life, which will be quite too tame for them after the long, protracted excitement of war. they will seek other occupations, and be consumers rather than producers of meats. in addition to this a tide of foreign immigration is setting in upon our shores, where they will continue to swarm for years to come as never before, hungry for meat; and it has been conclusively demonstrated that the ratio of our ordinary increase of population far exceeds the production of cattle and sheep, which deficiency in beef and mutton must hereafter be supplied in some way. i will again quote from mr. randall's work. he says: "i am strongly impressed with the opinion that the production of mutton has been too much disregarded as a concomitant of the production of wool. near large meat markets mutton is the _prime consideration_, and wool but the accessory." here, then, is a potent combination of circumstances, which were never before brought together, guaranteeing an abundant remuneration, as i believe, to those who may engage in this particular branch of husbandry; and the field, although now new, will nevertheless, i have little doubt, be very soon successfully occupied. i cannot but hope that our ambitious and enterprising stock breeders will secure to themselves their full share. perhaps i have already exhausted your patience by dwelling so long upon this subject; but regarding it--as i most certainly do--as a very important one, and this being an appropriate occasion for its discussion, you will, i trust, bear with me a moment longer, whilst i venture to make a few practical suggestions, before taking leave of it. let me then say, in this matter of sheep husbandry, in addition to what has already been said, that you should guard against extreme views of any kind. merinos are undoubtedly a valuable and a very desirable breed of sheep, as witness the noble specimens exhibited on this occasion; but you do not want them and nothing else, unless they will pay a better profit than any other sheep; nor should you pay an extravagantly high price for them merely to enrich the sheep-breeders of another state; nor because it is fashionable to do so. you should remember that the south downs, the leicesters, the cotswolds, as well as some others perhaps, also have their respective claims to favor and are worthy of your consideration. my own opinion is that a grade of sheep may be produced by a cross between the cotswolds and some other varieties, which will furnish a staple of fine, long, combing wool of lustrous appearance, that will prove--all things considered--quite as remunerative as fleeces from the choicest merinos and their grades. you should, also, avoid the too common error of overstocking with sheep when the price of wool is high. sheep husbandry has been a very profitable branch of business for the farmers of this state; but like every other business it may be overdone, and is liable to fluctuations and changes. sheep must be well fed and cared for in order to produce heavy fleeces; and there is certainly a limit to the number which may profitably be kept upon any farm; and it not unfrequently happens that a flock of fifty sheep on a small farm, will yield a larger net profit than would a flock of five hundred if kept upon the same farm. when the price of wool is high, the farmers are too reluctant to sell off their sheep, and thus become liable to an overstock. in fact, this is now the great danger of the wool-growers of michigan. the best economy, and the most judicious management, will be to keep down the number of your flocks to your means of pasturage and feed; and constantly aim to improve the grade and quality of those you retain by disposing of the less desirable specimens for mutton. your motto should be to elevate the standard of your flocks, rather than to increase their number beyond your means of feeding. another evil is also to be guarded against,--that of giving your attention to sheep to the exclusion of cattle. i am aware that in the past there have been--in this state--few advocates for the raising of cattle, and that the sound judgment of any man would at once be brought into question who should attempt to do so. but i think there has been more of prejudice than reason in this. the farmer, as a mere matter of policy, should not confine himself to any one thing, as thereby the fluctuations and changes incident to any branch of business, may very possibly--nay very probably--disappoint his hopes and expectations. if he has only sheep on which to rely, a sudden fall in the price of sheep and wool, or a general prevalence of any of the diseases to which sheep are always liable, would be a serious disaster to him; whereas, if his attention is directed to both sheep and cattle, as well as to horses, swine, &c., his chances of certain and continued success are very greatly multiplied. in fact, cattle are already commanding enormous prices in consequence of a general scarcity everywhere, not only for the shambles, but for the dairy, and this deficiency will not, i apprehend, be very soon supplied. i have recently visited some of the more highly cultivated portions of the state of new york, where i found good fair cows were worth _one hundred dollars_ each and not easily to be had at that. good sized, first quality working oxen, are now worth here $ per pair; and a large lot of cattle has recently been sold for beef in flint, at seven cents per pound, live weight. horses, too, are scarce, and must continue to be so for a long time, as their destruction by the late war was very great, and years will be required to replace those so destroyed, especially in the rebel and border states, which must be supplied from the north. swine, also, are now deficient, and principally because, a few years since, for a time the price of pork was very low, and their growth was in consequence, at once almost abandoned. the farmer should take a broader view of things, and pursue a steady, onward course, avoiding all extremes, as well as sudden changes. as a large portion of his farm products are more adapted to the feed of cattle, horses and swine than to sheep, he should, if for no other reason, keep a due proportion of these animals, any excitement in favor of sheep notwithstanding. my own opinion most decidedly is, that the time has come when the best interests of the farmers of michigan require that a portion of the attention now being devoted to sheep husbandry should be directed to that of other kinds of stock. but, to return again from this digression to the subject of sheep and wool. one of the most serious difficulties with which the farmers have to contend, is the combinations that are too often sought to be made by purchasers to secure their wool at the lowest possible figures. the manufacturers and wool buyers, undoubtedly act in concert,--at least to some considerable extent,--to depress the price, and especially so, before and about the time the new clip is coming in. they are well drilled in this, and many of their operations are systematic and efficient. at such time they pretend not to be in want of wool,--that the demand will be light, &c. purchases are made very sparingly, and temporary supplies are procured from other sources, even at a higher cost than the farmers ask. this is done upon the ground that an occasional sacrifice of this kind pays well in the end, if thereby they are able to keep down the price of the great bulk of domestic wool. sometimes fictitious sales are reported, and various other means are employed to this end, with the view that a few holders, at least,--either from necessity or timidity,--may be induced to sell, and thus aid their efforts to establish low prices. it thus becomes the duty of the farmers to act with much consideration, study and wisdom; and purely as a matter of self-defense, to adopt some concert of action among themselves for the protection of their own interests. when the price is low and the market dull at the time of shearing, there should not be too much haste in making sales. in , i think it was, the farmers were over anxious to sell, for no other reason than because at that time the price of wool was very low and the market dull. they then overlooked the well established commercial fact that depressed markets generally advance, rather than retrograde, and that government disbursements then certain to be made would create funds and a higher market, and that the demand for the staple would increase. they consequently sold for _twenty-five cents_ per pound, fleeces, that in less than three months commanded _forty-five_ to _fifty_ cents. they also, in many instances, offered to sell their fleeces for less than half the sum they would bring in a very few weeks. on the other hand, as is too common, when wool at the time of shearing commands a high price and the market is brisk, the farmers are inclined to hold on for still higher prices. but this is another mistake in the opposite direction. the rule should be,--"_sell_" when the market is quick, and prices are good;--and "_hold on_" when the market is dull and prices are low. before leaving this subject, permit me to call your attention to another important matter in connection with sheep husbandry in this state. sufficient care has not heretofore been taken to clean and otherwise properly prepare this great and important staple for market, and the consequence has been that the character and representation of "michigan wool," i am sorry to discover, has been very seriously lowered in the market, and a great loss to the producers has thereby been sustained. it is a fact, perhaps not generally known, that from this cause alone, "ohio wool" sells for about _five_ to _ten cents_ per pound more than "michigan wool." in an interview which i recently had with an extensive eastern manufacturer, who was induced last season for the first time to purchase a lot of "michigan wool," he expressed his surprise that the michigan wool growers should be so heedless of their own interests as to overlook this important fact. from his statements i learned that the prejudice of the manufacturers against "michigan wool" was so great that many of them would not buy it at hardly any price when they could get "ohio wool." he said a large proportion of our wool was poorly washed, and that this was true of a great proportion of our finest and best lots; and that it was not only sent to market in this condition, but was badly and slovenly put up, with much larger twine than they use in ohio,--the fleeces, also having a torn and jagged appearance; and many of them, when opened, were found to contain the _unwashed_ tags. he, however, expressed himself highly pleased with the quality of the wool he had purchased, and said it compared favorably in that respect with any he had ever received from ohio; and he believed if our wool could be sent to market as clean and in as good condition otherwise as the ohio wool,--and the prejudice which has been created against it, in consequence of this not having been the case heretofore, could once be removed, he doubted not that "michigan wool" would command in the market the highest prices and the most ready sales. this is certainly a serious matter, and prompt and efficient measures, of some kind, should at once be taken to remedy the evil; and every wool-grower should feel, as he really is, personally interested in the work. i commend this subject, gentlemen, to your serious consideration, and trust some concert of action will be had to prevent a continuance of this great evil, and to place "michigan wool" where it should most certainly stand, at the head of the list. if this can be done in no other way, i would suggest the formation of a "wool-growers board of trade," or some other efficient organization for the purpose--if for no other--of tracing out and holding up to scorn every individual who shall aid in inflicting so serious an injury to this great interest, and of doing so great a wrong to his neighbors and fellow-citizens, and that, too, from the base and fraudulent motive of selling dirt and tags as fine wool--for be assured that any imposition of this sort, practiced upon manufacturers, will recoil upon our own heads; and where _one_ cent will thus be saved, thousands, yes, tens of thousands of dollars, will, as a necessary consequence, be indirectly lost to the farmers of michigan. and the loss they have sustained from this cause during the last three or four years will undoubtedly exceed the enormous sum of two millions of dollars. but i must take leave of this subject. the state agricultural college. permit me now to occupy your attention for a brief space whilst i speak of this institution--the state agricultural college--upon whose grounds we are now assembled, and where by the kindness and courtesy of its officers, we have been so cordially welcomed and so pleasantly entertained. it is not, i think, inappropriate to the occasion that i should do so. let me remind you then, in the outset of my remarks on this subject, that this institution is in its early infancy; and that notwithstanding the beautiful landscape which is spread out before us; with its verdant fields just springing into luxuriance, dotted with the finest specimens of the choicest breeds of sheep and cattle, with the college grounds skillfully laid out and now in process of being tastefully adorned by art, a few years only have been numbered with the past since not only this spot, but all the surrounding country, as well as almost the entire territory of our young, but noble and now highly prosperous state, was an unbroken wilderness, covered with the primeval forest, the entangled woods giving shelter and concealment to wild and ferocious beasts, as well as to the wandering and savage red man. what a change has thus been wrought in a few short years! the result of the toil and privation of the adventurous pioneers, of whom many have already become intelligent, enterprising and forehanded farmers. and more than this: michigan, although but recently settled, and one of the youngest in the great sisterhood of states, has been the first to establish a professional school for the agricultural education of her sons, in which is not only taught the sciences and their application to agriculture, but also agriculture as an art, with such experiments as are calculated to impart a more thorough and practical knowledge of the same; and connected with the study of these a department of manual labor; the legitimate effect of all which is to increase the student's desire for knowledge as well as his love of study, and to remove the barrier too often existing between the educated and laboring classes--which can only be done by giving a better education to those who labor, and by removing the prejudices of the educated against labor. but i propose to speak more definitely of the aims and objects of this institution, as well as its claims to the favor and support of the farmers of michigan. they need not be told, i think, that its design is to promote their benefit. but have the farmers of this state, as a class, heretofore recognized this fact? and have they in return for the advantages which it proposes to them, given it that countenance and encouragement which it claims at their hands? i fear not. there are, it is true, noble exceptions to this; yet it is also true that a large proportion of their number have looked upon it with suspicion and distrust, as though its purpose was to do them a wrong--to inflict upon them an evil. they have not merely withheld from it their aid and support, but their active influence has too often been exerted to its disadvantage and prejudice. this is certainly wrong--very wrong! let us look a little into this matter. is knowledge--a knowledge of those sciences which are intimately connected with agriculture as an art--of no value to the farmer? is it necessary that he should be a dolt in order to be fitted for his vocation? will ignorance and bad husbandry increase his crops or enable him to find a better market for his products? or, will his enjoyment, in his daily round of toil, be any greater because unconscious that he is groping his way along in the dark? no! for however that may have been in the past it is certainly not the case now. and although "ignorance," as it is said, may be "bliss," yet in these days, at least, it must be a sort of negative bliss. ignorance is certainly not power; nor does it lead to wealth as a means of comfortable support and enjoyment--which is the legitimate end of all labor. will _ignorance_ give respectability, or sweeten the toil of the husbandman? will it elevate his thoughts and desires to higher and nobler aims, or inspire him to "look from nature up to nature's god?" will it lead him instead of a fixed stolid gaze upon the earth over which he walks, to engage in the study of those great and omnipotent laws which regulate all matter, and which so wonderfully, yet certainly control both the animal and vegetable kingdoms? no! it will accomplish none of these desirable ends, but the very reverse of them all. this proposition is so self-evident to intelligent men, that to advance it to such an audience as the one before me--except as the basis of an argument--must be entirely superfluous. but what was the social position of the farmers, let me ask--even in this highly favored country--fifty or sixty years ago? were they not then regarded as men without knowledge--devoid almost of sensibilities--unfitted for anything except the mere routine of daily labor and toil--and capable only of delving in the soil day by day? and were they not then considered, even by themselves as well as by others, as occupying the very lowest position in the scale of society? such were the facts. every person who was regarded as too ignorant and uncultivated for other pursuits, was, by common consent, considered as having a prescriptive right to farming as a vocation. in fact ignorance was regarded as the proper and sufficient diploma for the farmer. and as a consequence he was not only poor and without influence, but too often considered by others as without respectability merely because he was a farmer; and all that was conceded to him--in fact all that he claimed for himself--was a simple subsistence upon the hardest fare, without any of the luxuries, and very often with a scarcity of the necessaries of life. remember, i am speaking of the farmers, as a class, _fifty_ or _sixty_ years ago--before there were any county fairs, or agricultural colleges, newspapers or magazines, and when agriculture was the result of labor without knowledge, system or calculation. but although the farmers have emerged from this condition very slowly, yet what is their position now? are they not regarded as being on a level at least with those of other callings in social importance? do they not occupy positions of confidence and trust in society? are they not found in our legislative halls in fair proportion with men of different pursuits? this is certainly true: and the advance alone is the result of a higher mental culture--of a wider range of thought--and of an increased fund of knowledge, and consequently of an improved system of farming. and if the advance of agriculture and the condition of the farmer have been tardy, as compared with the improvement in other departments of labor--in other avocations of life--it is solely because science and study have not as soon been applied to agriculture--and because also the farmer has not been permitted the advantages resulting from so early a development of facts connected with his calling as have other classes of men. but the great work is now fairly in progress of elevating the farmer to his true position in the social order of society--of teaching him that his vocation, instead of being the dull, unintellectual lot of the ignorant, is the most noble and dignified, as well as the most conducive to men's happiness in which he can be engaged; and nothing is now wanting to secure the steady advancement of this work, but for the farmers to do justice to themselves and to their calling, by laying hold of the means for that end which are placed within their reach. assuming all this to be undeniably true, where can be found more potent agencies in the work of elevation than agricultural colleges? and why, then, should any farmer in this state hold back from giving this institution his cordial and hearty support? and stranger still--why should he put himself in antagonism to its success? such an attitude, to my mind, is not merely unwise, but preposterous--yes, suicidal. if the college is not what it should be, the more his self-interest should prompt him to bestow upon it his aid. it is the _farmers' institution_--founded for _his_ benefit, at much cost; and if _he_ does not feel an interest in it and labor to make it a success, who will? who should? but why have a portion of the farmers of michigan seemed to look with distrust upon this institution, and in some cases, i regret to say, seemed to regard it as a sort of wrong to themselves; and if they have not actually opposed, have, at least, withheld from it their support? i must confess, that should i give what seemed to me to be the true answer to these questions, it might be regarded by some who have not very carefully looked into the subject, as an assumption on my part unwarranted by facts. would that it were so; that i were mistaken. but having given the subject some little thought and investigation, you will, i trust, permit me the honest expression of my own views upon this important matter. it is for that purpose and none other, that i am here. but you, mr. president, as well as all those now present, can certainly take no personal exception to these views, as the very fact of such presence shows that you are not of the class to which i may allude; and i am gratified in being able to say that i believe there are very many others, not present, who are the warm and devoted friends of this institution; and who, with you, i most certainly hope, constitute the rule and not the exception. but the answer: and in giving which, i will avail myself of the privilege conceded to a certain class of men,--that of answering one question by asking another. why then do men ever oppose or neglect their own interests? to my mind, only from want of knowledge, from prejudice or self-will--or some other of the same brood of enemies to man's success in laudable undertakings; and of which _ignorance_ is the chief, and may be regarded as the prolific source of all the others. in this case, undoubtedly, as in others, some are opposed from a mere notion of opposition, or from a mere whim; others again, simply to agree with, or differ from, some, who are either in favor or opposed; whilst some must oppose whatever they themselves do not originate;--and, others again, have no doubt been led honestly to entertain a distrust which has finally grown into an opposition, through the influence of misrepresentations, or from a perversion of facts by those whose interests, from some cause, are at variance with its success. but i am quite certain that the whole opposition and indifference to this institution, so far as it may come from the farmers themselves, is unnatural and fictitious, and will soon pass away as does everything else which is built upon such foundation. it is said by some that "the institution has been a mistake from the beginning;" that it "was located wrong;" that it "was not started right;" that it "has been badly managed;" and that it "is an expensive concern, and will never pay;" and a great deal more. but it is very easy to say all this, and yet there may be very little reality in it, and still less reason. let me here say to the objectors and fault-finders,--suppose all this be true? who _then_ is to blame? is the institution itself responsible for all these mistakes? or, are they not rather the consequences of unavoidable and untoward circumstances, magnified and aggravated by _your_ opposition, and over which its friends and managers could have no possible control. i admit the probability that the early success of the college would have been more certainly secured, had an old and highly cultivated farm been purchased for the purpose; but for this the means were wanting. you say, perhaps, that college students should not be required to _clear land and dig stumps_. true; but when the officers and managers of such an institution are _compelled_ to do this, and to reach the end desired as best they may through such means, they are certainly entitled to all praise, and richly deserve the meed of commendation for even partial success, and which should be all the dearer to us because of being reached under such adverse circumstances. that the facilities which the college now possesses are inadequate to the proper accommodation of those who wish to avail themselves of its advantages, and even to the extent of the limited number of students now belonging to it, is certainly to be regretted. but this is an evil to be overcome by the patient and persistent efforts of its friends, and not by the antagonism and opposition of its enemies; by making the most out of the limited means at command, and not by abandoning the whole because the means are not now all we could desire. that its management may have been a matter of criticism with those who have known but little about it, or who have taken little or no pains to investigate the facts, is not strange; yet, for one, i am clearly of the opinion that--when all the difficulties with which it has had to contend, are duly considered--its management, thus far, has been all that any person could reasonably hope for or expect; and more--that its officers and professors are entitled to great credit and much praise, for securing under so much discouragement, that degree of success which is apparent here even to the casual observer; and claim of us, and are entitled to receive at our hands, a proper and just recognition of their valuable services, and the fidelity with which they have been rendered. * * * * * farmers of michigan! be not led astray by such objections as i have stated, or by any others of a similar import. you have here a noble institution, in faithful and competent hands--one that will soon be of incalculable value to you--and one, too, that will reflect much credit not only upon you, but upon the whole state. and although it may not now be all you could wish or desire, yet when we consider what it now is in view of the difficulties with which it has had to contend, we have a sure guarantee, that it will yet be a success and will realize all your reasonable expectations. let me ask of you, in all earnestness and candor, to give it now your warm, your hearty support, so that you may not only assist in securing for yourselves and the public the great end of its establishment, but that you may, by and by, safely, and without the fear of successful contradiction, lay claim to the honor of being among its early friends and upholders. there is something noble and magnanimous in rendering substantial aid and support to a cause in the hour of its weakness and in the time of its need; whilst there is something not only selfish but mean, in stepping forward with proffers of assistance, and with spurious claims of imaginary or intended favor, when such assistance is no longer needed, and when the heat and burden of the day has been borne by others; for, be assured, that the time is coming when no farmer will covet the distinction of having been among the number of the enemies of this institution. the advantages of our agricultural college, in connection with an experimental farm, are too obvious to every intelligent mind to require that i should occupy your time in dwelling upon them. and, when i speak of an experimental farm, i do not mean a mere model farm, by which a specimen of good farming only is exhibited; but, like this, a farm embracing a variety of soils--adapted to an extensive range of experiments--and where the value of the different kinds of grain may be tested, as well as the relative advantages of different modes of tillage; the relative effect and value, by actual trial, as well as by analysis, of various manures as fertilizers; and the economy of labor; as well as the comparative value of the different breeds of cattle, sheep, horses, swine, &c., &c., with a view to the introduction and dissemination among the farmers of the state, of such as should prove the most profitable; or of such as could be most successfully used for obtaining the most desirable grades. such a farm as this, under the efficient and skillful management of its present able and persevering superintendent, cannot fail to be of very great benefit to the farmers of this state, and should, both as a matter of duty to others and of interest to themselves, receive their united and generous support. and i am firmly of the opinion that when they shall afford this institution such aid, it will soon become one of the first among our noble institutions of learning, and will be a just cause of pride, not merely to the farmers themselves, but to every intelligent person throughout the whole extent of our noble state. and now let me invoke, for the future prosperity and success of this college, not merely the liberality of the farmers--or what they may regard as such--in the payment of a trifling tax for its maintenance, but what is of equal importance, and which it has a right to demand in justice to itself--their earnest advocacy of its claims. agricultural college students. but i have already, i fear, trespassed quite too far upon your patience, and should, perhaps, before this, have relieved you from further infliction. yet seeing before me, many--if not all--of the students of this college, i must beg your indulgence for a moment longer, whilst i address to them a very few remarks. let me say, then, to you, young gentlemen, that you are now in the enjoyment of privileges for the acquisition of that knowledge so essential to success in after life, which were denied to me--and the absence of which i have felt as a great and serious loss through the whole period of my existence. see to it that you place a just value upon these privileges, and that you do not abuse them. whilst most of you, i trust, are fitting yourselves for the employment of farming as an avocation, some, perhaps, may be looking forward to other professions and pursuits. i, however, on this occasion, must confine my remarks to those of the former class. and to such i would briefly remark, that the value and importance of an agricultural education to the youth whose lives are to be devoted to the highly reputable occupation of farming, begin now to be admitted, and happy will it be for our common country, when such education shall be regarded as a necessity. labor is no longer degrading, but is creditable and dignified; and agricultural pursuits are no longer regarded as disgraceful or ignoble by any except the fop and the coxcomb, but are of all employments the most honorable in which men can be engaged. nor is it, as has been too often supposed, a cheerless life of toil and fatigue, but has many substantial and endearing charms. it is also the fountain-head for the supply of all our wants; and when contrasted with other employments, its advantages cannot fail to be appreciated. whilst those who seek a profession must be content to spend many weary years of wasting study--of constant struggle--before they can begin to live, the farmer has at once before him, health and quiet, ease and contentment, as well as the enjoyment of sober pleasures which do not cloy, and whilst the chances of those who engage in commercial pursuits are, that about _ninety-five_ out of every _one hundred_ are destined to failure, the farmer is exempt from such a hazard, for the chances of failure with him are found to be only about _four_ in every _one hundred_. i do not, of course, in this comparison, include those who, having no land of their own, are obliged to toil for others as laborers, and who cannot therefore be ranked as farmers. to the farmer, if each day does bring its labors, it also brings its pleasures; and even as he toils in his dusty fields, he can derive unalloyed pleasures, not only from the study and care of his bleating flocks and lowing herds, but from the prospect of an abundant harvest as he looks over his fields of waving grain or contemplates his orchards of rich and luscious fruits. and each day renews to him these pure and substantial pleasures, which afford not only gratification, but health. with the farmer there are no all-absorbing cares, no corroding anxieties, no vitiating excitement. he is measurably freed from the seductions of enervating pleasures. from the green fields and fresh air he drinks constant draughts of inspiration. his great study is, or should be, nature and nature's god. to him each season has its profits and its pleasures; for he knows that while he rests or sleeps his fields are working for him. he is also freed, in a great measure, from the baleful influences which attend that false ambition so often excited by other pursuits. my young friends, when you leave your "alma mater" and fix upon your route for life's journey, let your choice of a profession be carefully and wisely made; and then, with undeviating course, pursue it steadily and persistently to the end, for in this only will be found your reasonable chances of ultimate success. * * * * * mr. president, i have already detained you and this audience quite too long; and with many thanks for your kind and patient attention, i will now bring my remarks to a close. * * * * * transcriber's note the following changes have been made to the text: page : "recently visted" changed to "recently visited". page : "not generally kown" changed to "not generally known". page : "knowlege so essential" changed to "knowledge so essential". the prairie farmer a weekly journal for the farm, orchard, and fireside. established in . entire series: vol. --no. . chicago, saturday, january , . price, $ . per year, in advance. [transcriber's note: the table of contents was originally located on page of the periodical. it has been moved here for ease of use.] the contents of this number. agriculture--the corn root worm, page ; biographical sketch of patrick barry, ; compiled correspondence, ; illinois tile-makers convention report, ; farmers advice, ; cisterns on the farm, ; field and furrow items, . live stock--iowa wool-men, page ; polled cattle-breeders, ; merino sheep-breeders, ; cattle diseases, ; the horse and his treatment - ; cost of pork on corn, . veterinary--grease, so-called, page ; foul in the foot, ; founder, ; question answered, . the dairy--curing cheese, page ; items, . horticulture--southern ills. hort. society, page ; notes on current topics, ; pear blight, ; treatment of tree wound, ; the tomato pack of , ; sweating apples, ; prunings items, . floriculture--smilax and its uses, page . editorial--will you? page ; items, ; the wealth of the nation, ; contagious animal disease, , ; iowa state fair, ; still another fat stock show, ; questions answered, ; letter from champaign, ; wayside notes, . poultry notes--chicken chat, page ; business still running, . the apiary--the best hive, page . scientific--some gossip about darwin, page . household--"going up head" (poetry), page ; too fat to marry, ; ornaments for homes, . young folks--chat about a bear, page ; a fairy story, by little johnnie, . literature--for those who fail (poetry), page ; a singular philosopher, . humorous--the donkey's dream, page ; tom typo ; courtship of a vassar girl, ; items, . news of the week--page . markets--page . the corn-root worm. editor prairie farmer--i write you in regard to the corn question. i would like to know if angle-worms damage corn. eight years ago i came to the conclusion that i could raise double the number of bushels of corn that i was then raising. i then commenced experimenting on a small scale. i succeeded very well for the first three or four years. i got so that i could raise over ninety bushels per acre. in one year i got a few pounds over bushels per acre. three years ago my crop began to fail, and has continued to fail up to the present year, with the same treatment. last year it was so bad that i concluded to examine the roots of the corn plants. i found both angle-worms and grubs in the roots. this year i went into a thorough examination and found nothing there but angle-worms, with a wonderful increase. they were right at the end of the stalk where the roots were thick, but the worms thicker. the corn at first seems to do very well, but long before the grain gets ripe the leaves begin to get dry and the stalks commence falling. the consequence is that over one-half the corn is loose on the cob and the ears very short. i am entirely headed in the corn line. is it the angle-worms? if so, what is the remedy? i plant my corn every year on the same ground. i allow no weeds to grow in my cornfield. farmers can not afford to raise weeds. i remove all weeds and put corn in their places. i have plowed my land for the next year's crop of corn and put on twenty loads of manure to the acre and plowed it under. i have no faith in planting the ground next year unless i can destroy the worms that i call angle-worms. i have consulted several of my brother farmers, and they say that the angle-worms never destroy a crop of corn. i thought last year that my seed corn was poor and run out, so i went to chicago and got sibley's "pride of the north," but that was no better. if you will kindly inform me how to remedy this looseness of the kernel i will agree to show you how bushels of corn can be raised on one acre every good corn year. horace hopkins. desplaines, ill., jan. . * * * * * we sent this communication to professor forbes, state entomologist and received the following reply: editor prairie farmer--there can be hardly a shadow of a doubt that the injury which your correspondent so graphically describes is due to the corn root-worm (diabrotica longicornis), a full account of which will be found in my report for , published last november. the clue to his whole difficulty lies in the sentence, "i plant my corn every year on the same ground." as the beetles from which the root-worms descend lay their eggs in corn fields in autumn, and as these eggs do not hatch until after corn planting in the following spring, a simple change of crops for a single year, inevitably starves the entire generation to death in the ground. i inclose a slip, giving a brief account of this most grievous pest; but the article in my last report already referred to will be found more satisfactory. s. a. forbes. normal, ill., january . p.s.--you will probably remember that i published a paper on this insect in the prairie farmer for december , . * * * * * the following is the description referred to: _from the "crop report" for ._ "the corn-root worm, in the form in which it affects the roots of corn, is a slender white grub, not thicker than a pin, from one fourth to three-eighths of an inch in length, with a small brown head, and six very short legs. it commences its attack in may or june, usually at some distance from the stalk, towards which it eats its way beneath the epidermis, killing the root as fast as it proceeds. late in july or early in august it transforms in the ground near the base of the hill, changing into a white pupa, about fifteen-hundredths of an inch long and two-thirds that width, looking somewhat like an adult beetle, but with the wings and wing-covers rudimentary, and with the legs closely drawn up against the body. a few days later it emerges as a perfect insect, about one-fifth of an inch in length, varying in color from pale greenish-brown to bright grass-green, and usually without spots or markings of any kind. the beetle climbs up the stalk, living on fallen pollen and upon the silk at the tip of the ear until the latter dies, when a few of the beetles creep down between the husks, and feed upon the corn itself, while others resort for food to the pollen of such weeds in the field as are at that time in blossom. in september and october the eggs are laid in the ground upon or about the roots of the corn, and most of the beetles soon after disappear from the field. they may ordinarily be found upon the late blooming plants, feeding as usual upon the pollen of the flowers, and also to some extent upon molds and other fungi, and upon decaying vegetation. there can be no further doubt that the insect is single-brooded, that it hibernates in the egg as a rule, and that this does not hatch until after the ground has been plowed and planted to corn in the spring probably in may or june. "although the adult beetles, when numerous, do some harm by eating the silk before the kernels are fertilized by the pollen, and also destroy occasionally a few kernels in the tip of the ear, yet the principal injury is done by the larva in its attack upon the roots. the extent of this injury depends not only upon the number of the worms, but also upon the soil and weather and the general condition of the crop, being worst on high land and in dry weather. under specially unfavorable circumstances the loss due to the insect may amount to from one-fourth to one-half or even three-fourths of the crop; but when the conditions are generally favorable, it rarely amounts to more than ten or twenty per cent, and frequently even to less. although the roots penetrated by the larvæ die and decay, thrifty corn will throw out new ones to replace those lost. the hold of the stalk upon the ground is often so weakened that a slight wind is sufficient to prostrate the corn. under these circumstances it will often throw out new roots from the joints above the ground, thus rallying to a certain extent against serious injury. "as the result of numerous observations and comparisons, it is clearly to be seen that little or no mischief is done except in fields that have been in corn during the year or two preceding, and a frequent change of crops is therefore a complete preventive. beyond this, the life history of the insect gives us little hope of fighting it effectually except at too great expense, as the eggs and worms are scattered and hidden in the ground, and the perfect beetle is widely dispersed throughout the field." * * * * * california has about eighty thousand tons of wheat to ship to europe. besides this a large amount is already stowed in ships. * * * * * patrick barry. [illustration: patrick barry] our portrait this week is of patrick barry, esq., the noted nurseryman and horticulturist of rochester, n. y. mr. barry was born near belfast, ireland, in . his father was a small farmer, but he gave the boy a good education, and at eighteen he was appointed to teach in one of the national schools. at the age of twenty he resigned this position, and came to america, where he began clerking in the linnæan nurseries, at flushing, l. i. during his stay of four years here he mastered the principles of the nursery business. in he moved to rochester, and forming a partnership with mr. ellwanger, started the famous mount hope nurseries. they began on a tract of but seven acres. in he issued the "fruit garden," which is to this day a standard work among horticulturists. previous to this he had written largely for the agricultural and horticultural press. in he also began editing the horticulturist, then owned by mr. james vick. mr. barry's second great work, and the one involving most time and labor was the catalogue of the american pomological society. mr. barry has long been president of the western new york horticultural society. he is also a member of the board of control of the new york experiment station. he has served several terms in the city council of rochester and in the board of supervisors of the country. mr. barry is an active business man and besides his great labor in conducting the nursery affairs, he discharges the duties of president of many corporate enterprises in which he has large financial interests. mr. barry was happily married in , and the amiable sharer of his hardships and his successes is still living. compiled correspondence. hancock co., dec. .--weather very disagreeable; snow six inches deep, and from rain and sleet and thaw and freeze, has formed a hard crust, so as to make bad traveling--in the roads icy and slippery. to-day cloudy, damp and cool. a few days ago the mercury reached degrees below zero, the lowest of the season. it is very hard on stock, and many of the cattle are without shelter, as usual. accept new year greetings for all the prairie farmer family. l. t. * * * * * mills co., mo., jan. .--since the first of january we have had hard winter weather. an old weather prophet says we are to have just such weather for forty days. i sincerely hope not. on friday night, january th and th, all the thermometers commonly used by farmers went clear down out of sight. as they only mark about degrees below zero it was uncertain how cold it really was. unsheltered stock suffered terribly. a few farmers were caught without wood, and suffered from the storm in securing a supply. we have had five days of snow so that there is a heavy coat all over. a. j. l. * * * * * st. louis, mo., january .--advices from mobile say the late cold snap caused immense damage in that section. the loss to the orange groves is estimated at nearly a $ , , , and the value of vegetables killed in mobile county alone will reach the same sum. great damage was also done to orange groves in florida, but many orange growers profited by the signal service warning and built fires in their groves, and thus saved their trees. news from the michigan peach belt is that the fruits are uninjured. * * * * * strawberries are sold in new york city at fifteen cents each. * * * * * [illustration] agricultural farmers, write for your paper. illinois tile-makers. the illinois state tile-makers' convention at springfield, last week, was more largely attended than in any previous year since the association was formed. nearly one hundred joined the association. the convention was welcomed to the city by governor hamilton in an appropriate address in which he expressed his deep sympathy with and interest in all the manufacturing enterprises that are giving employment to the people and adding wealth to the state. he announced himself as in favor of protection and encouragement to the manufacturing interests. he thought the tile men were greatly adding to the wealth and productiveness of illinois, and that they were also indirectly improving the health of the people. the president's address was brief but full of information and good sense. he pointed out at length the improvements in tile kilns, and in various appliances, which have been made in recent years, and declared that valuable as these all are, they can not make up for the lack of skill and experience. he believed the increased interest in terra cotta, and in useful ornamental and out tiling points to the great source of supply as the timber of the country decreases in quantity. the drain-tile manufacture was simply the beginning of an era of skillful clay working, which would not only add greatly to the fertility of the soil, but to the means of the beauty and endurance in numerous forms of building. of the statistics of the business, he said the latest information is that there are in the state factories, built at an average cost of $ , each, employing about , men seven months each year, who receive about $ , and their board. the total annual capacity of these factories he estimates at , miles annually. he estimates the amount invested in the industry, including the value of tile already laid, at $ , , , and the increased value of land drained at $ , , . the secretary's report gave the general condition of the society. in it was composed of forty-five members; in , of thirty-five; in , of twenty-eight; in , fifty-three; in , of eighty-three, and in , of eighty-six. the first meetings of the association were necessarily crude, the programme having been prepared after the association met. now, however, they were in working harness, and met with a regularly prepared programme. the proceedings of the meetings and a summary of the papers read and discussed, are now published in the report of the state board of agriculture. the treasurer, john mccabe, esq., of rushville, made his report of which the following is the summary: amount on hand at last report $ received from members last year ------- $ paid out last year ------- balance in the treasury $ these reports were followed by an essay by mr. c. g. elliott, which is of so much merit that we give it in full deferring a further report of proceedings until next week. mistakes in drainage. to speak of our successes rather than our mistakes, is far more agreeable to ourselves and also to others. we all take pride in giving our experience in any work when we have been successful, but our errors and mistakes we often carefully hide from public gaze. the transactions of our industrial conventions are largely made up of the successful parts of the experiences of members. our tile manufacturers fail to speak of their losses in correcting mistakes the number of kilns they have rebuilt, the number of tile they weekly commit to the waste pile, the percentage of good and poor tile in each kiln, and many other things that your humble servant will probably never suspect until he attempts to manufacture tile. a similar statement may be made with reference to drainage mistakes. how many dry weather drains do we hear mentioned in our conventions, or see described in our newspapers. by such drains, i mean those which in favorable seasons so operate as to permit the land to produce a heavy crop--one worth publishing--while in wet years, merely a total loss results. cases of such drainage can be numbered by the score. how many miles of drain tile have been taken up and relaid during the past year because of some mistake in plan, size of tile, or execution of the work? much might be said of drainage mistakes in a general way, but it is proposed in this paper to treat the subject in a specific and practical manner. it may be encouraging to remember that it is only by comparing success with mistakes that we make progress in any valuable science or art. great skill and success rest upon a foundation of corrected mistakes. mistake no. --lack of information on drainage. we might more properly call this the cause of many mistakes. "knowledge is power," says the old adage, and we might add that knowledge in drainage is success. this knowledge may be obtained in three ways: first, from reliable books; second, by inquiring of others who have had experience; third, by our own experience. the first is of prime importance to the beginner, for in books are found statements of the general principles and philosophy of drainage, together with the best methods and practice known. the second is often unreliable, for the reason that the error of one is often copied by another and becomes wide spread before it is detected. the third, though valuable is costly, and discouraging to the learner. gleanings from all of these sources will, perhaps, give the most complete satisfaction. tile drainage began to be practiced in my own neighborhood about seven years ago. those who were about to begin knew nothing about drainage, except from hearsay knowledge that had crept into the community. not a single book upon the subject was consulted or even inquired for. even now they are as rare in farmers libraries as the classic poets. farmer a. wished to drain and consulted farmer b., who had put in some tile the year before. did he think it paid? yes. what kind of tile did he use and how was the work done? so a. planned and did his work in accordance with information obtained from b. neighbor c. followed a., and so the work spread. it is now found that mistakes were made in the beginning which were handed from one to the other, until now, no alternative remains but to remove the whole work, and no little trouble and expense. this case is but one out of many which might be stated illustrating the lack of information at the beginning of drainage work. my observation upon this point has been that those have availed themselves of information given in books and papers upon drainage matters made fewer mistakes and did better work than those who relied upon the general wave of progress to push them along in the footsteps of their nearest neighbor. the theory, as well as the art, of drainage should be studied, and all knowledge adapted to the peculiarities of each case. mistake no. --not planning for future drainage. a mistake often made by the novice is, that at first, drains are located without reference to the future drainage of other parts of the farm. drains are put in as experiments, very much as we would plant a new variety of fruit or grain, expecting that probably the chances are against their success. subsequently, when plans for more extended drainage are made, the drains already in operation were found to poorly serve the desired purpose. in order to guard against this mistake, have faith in drainage. put it down on the whitest page of your memorandum, and with your best pen and ink, that drainage will pay, and the fewer mistakes made about it the better it will pay. put it down that the time will come when you will drain all of your wet land, and make your plans accordingly. many times have i heard this objection to locating a drain so as to benefit a certain field, "o no; i'll never drain that field. it's all right as it is. if i can only get this wet over here dry i shall be satisfied." in two years this same farmer was planning how he could drain the rejected field, and regretting that he had not made provision for it from the beginning. i have in mind several miles of tile that will be taken up during the coming season and relaid with reference to the drainage of all land having a natural slope in that direction. mistake no. --not beginning at the right place. many of the drains first put in are at the head of the water shed instead of at the lower part or outlet. they discharge improperly and fail to fit into a more thorough system, where plans for better drainage are laid out. to avoid this error, begin at the outlet and work with reference to ultimately draining the whole section naturally sloping toward this outlet. if a surface ditch is necessary, make it. if tile can be used, lay them, even if only a fraction of the entire work is done each year. drain laterally toward the main as it is carried upward. the outlay at first, rod for rod, will be greater, but the final cost will be less, and yearly profits greater. i have in mind several cases of unsatisfactory drainage growing out of a desire to avoid difficulty and expense in making a sufficient outlet. among them may be named the following: putting a drain across one side of a pond because sufficient depth can not be had to admit of its being run through the center. placing drains each side of a slough, parallel to its center line, leaving the center undrained. draining cultivated fields and allowing the water to discharge upon land occupying a lower level. all of these are make-shifts for the purpose of avoiding the expense of a good outlet. there is in this connection a difficulty which can not be overlooked, one which is beyond the control of the individual farmer, and that is, when the drainage section is owned by two or more parties. the adjustment of such cases has occupied the attention of our legislators, and some progress has been made in framing laws to meet the case, yet many difficulties remain unprovided for. if all parties agree to accept such awards and assessments as a commission may make, then the matter of drainage outlets can be satisfactorily adjusted, but if any party is disposed to resist, the desired drainage can be practically defeated. i may, at present, be justified in saying that where only a few neighbors are concerned, it is a mistake to attempt to use the law at all. arrange the matter by mutual agreement or by leaving it to disinterested men to decide. mistake no. --too small tile. no mistake has become apparent sooner than this. the following observations will account for this, and also aid in correcting it. the whole area of land which naturally discharges toward the drain is not always taken into account. it is generally thought that land lying at some distance from the drain, though sloping toward it, does not affect the capacity required for the drain, whereas in times of heavy rains, when drains are taxed to their utmost, water flows from those more distant parts over the surface to the ground acted upon by the tile drain. we must then provide for the drainage not only of land contiguous to the drains but for an additional amount of water coming from adjoining slopes. another popular error is that the diameter of the tile is the measure of its capacity, whereas the grade upon which it is laid is as important as the size of the tile. the extreme porosity of many of our soils, and the lack of thorough lateral drainage is another thing by reason of which main drains become over-taxed, simply because drainage water is not held in check by close soils, or distributed by lateral drains, but is brought in large quantities over the surface to the drain line, and must be taken away in a short time or injury is done to the land. in making mains or sub-mains it is better to err in making them too large than too small. mistake no. --not lateral enough. we expect too much from a single line of tile. we often see a line of tile put through a fifteen or twenty acre field with the expectation that the field will be drained, and thanks to our tractable soil, and the magic influence of tile, a great work is done for the field. it is, however, the dry weather drains previously alluded to. put in the lateral drains so that the whole flat will come under the direct influence of tile, and you will have a garden spot instead of a field periodically flooded. your sleep will not then be disturbed by fears that the morning will reveal your tiled field covered with water, and your corn crop on the verge of ruin. we often see a single line laid through a pond containing from one half to three acres. ponds with such drainage always get flooded. put in an abundance of laterals and the difficulty is overcome. i am glad to say that the tendency now among farmers who have practiced random drainage is toward more thorough work in this direction. the loss of an occasional crop soon demonstrates in favor of more thorough work. mistake no. --inattention to details. farmers have been too much under the rule of professional ditchers. having no well defined ideas of good drainage work, they have left the matter largely to the judgment, or rather the cupidity of the ditcher and the layer. there are many first-class, conscientious workmen, but it is to be regretted that the average ditcher does work far below the standard of excellence. if by some magic means the conditions of many of the drains in our state could be spread out before us in open view, it would be a wonder to this convention that tile drainage has wrought out such favorable results as it has. we would see tile laid on the siphon plan, good and poor joints, faulty connections, ditches crooked enough to baffle the sagacious mole should he attempt to follow the line. patience would scarcely hold out to enumerate the exasperating defects of much of our drainage work. nothing can overcome the egotism and self-confidence of the average ditcher except the constant supervision of the employer. such work is so soon covered, and errors placed beyond immediate detection that nothing else will suffice. to guard against such mistakes, know what work you want and how you want it done, and then look after it yourself or employ some one in whom you have confidence to superintend it. when any mistake is guarded against, from beginning to end, the work will not be too well done. the cut-and-cover, hurry-scurry methods of doing things, common on some western farms, will not do in drainage work. carefulness in regard to every detail is the only safe rule to adopt. mistake no. --failure to make open ditches for water courses. the farmers of illinois have, in many sections, been avoiding the main question in the drainage of our rich prairies, and that is the improvement of the natural water courses so that they will carry off the drainage water of sections for which they afford outlets. every feasible plan and device has been used to circumvent the forces of nature and relieve valuable farm lands from surplus water. in the flat sections of our state nothing will serve this purpose but the deepening of our large sloughs by constructing capacious open ditches. our land can not be properly drained without them. they must be of ample depth and width, and well made in every respect. no problem connected with the drainage interests of our state should, at present, receive more careful attention than this. nature, has, in most cases, marked out the line for work, and says, "let man enlarge and complete for his undivided use according to his strength and skill." when such work is done, the demand for tile to supplement the drainage thus made possible will be unprecedented. the drainage of our roads will be facilitated, and the greatest difficulty thus far encountered in the drainage of our flat prairies will be overcome. much has been attempted in this direction in some portions of the state, but many open ditches are too shallow, too small, and too carelessly made to serve the desired purpose. in pointing out some of the mistakes made in drainage, i am well aware that there are differences of opinion as to what may be properly considered a mistake. the aim of drainage is to fit the wet land of the entire farm for the successful cultivation of all the field crops at the least expense consistent with thoroughness. now, if experiments must be tried by tiling here and there, and afterward take the tile up and remold the whole work, there is a loss which, were it not for the large profit resulting from the use of tile, would be disastrous. should a board of public works build several bridges of insufficient capacity in order to find out the necessary dimensions and strength of one which will serve their purpose, we should at once regard them incompetent and wasteful. i know of tile which have been taken up at three different times, larger tile being used each time. this farmer discards the use of lateral drains and rests his success upon single lines of large tile. he will probably be disappointed in this and, perhaps, finally hit upon the correct method. would it not have been the part of wisdom to have obtained some reliable information upon that matter at first from books, from inquiring of others of longer experience, from a competent engineer, or from all of these sources? anything which needlessly adds to the expense, or detracts from the efficiency of the work, should be regarded as a mistake. as a summary of what has been said regarding mistakes and how to avoid them, i append here a few drainage maxims. . become informed upon the theory and best methods known and used. . do not literally copy the methods of others, but carefully adapt them to your own case. . provide good outlets and large mains. . have faith in good tile and thorough work. . study economy and efficiency in locating drains. . in difficult cases, or where you have doubt about the success of your plans, submit the case to a good engineer before expending money or labor. . employ good help by the day, and work it under a competent superintendent, rather than job out the work by the rod. . drain as you would plant fruit trees--for the future as well as the present. i have been prosy and practical enough and now have used my allotted time and space. it may not be wholly out of place to further tax your time and patience, and ask you to lift your eyes from taking a critical view of defective drains, muddy ditches, and unattractive detail work, and look at the result of careful and thorough labor. as the years come and go with their changing seasons, your drained fields are ever your friends, always cheering you with a bountiful harvest, always answering to every industrious touch you may bestow upon them. "no excellence without labor," says the scholar to the discouraged student. "no excellence without labor," says the soil to the farmer, as he drains and plows and digs, and so we all learn that success in dealing with nature is brought about by thorough and honest work. our enthusiasm scarcely knows bounds when we see that by our drainage work the apparently obstinate soil is made to reflect the sunlight from a covering of golden grain; when gardens and orchards bloom and yield fruit where once the willows dipped their drooping branches in the slimy fluid below, and frogs regaled the passer-by with their festive songs. roses now twine over the rural cottage and send their fragrance into the wholesome air, where once the beaver reared his rude dwelling, and disease lurked in every breath, ready to seize his unsuspecting victim. think you that these changes can be wrought without earnest and careful effort? i have but little sympathy with the glittering generalities and highly colored pictures of success in industrial pursuits, held before the public gaze by unpractical but well meaning public teachers. we need the dissemination of ideas of thoroughness and the knowledge necessary to put those ideas into practical use in order that the farmers of illinois may make the fewest possible mistakes in drainage. farmers advice. farmers get plenty of advice. were we able to work as easy and as well as the advice generally given to us would seem to indicate we could how easy and independent our occupation would become. in no other line of business is advice so freely given, and so much blame attached because the advice is not followed. the great trouble is that nearly everybody imagines they know how to farm. although these same people may never have been practical farmers, they yet seem to think that anybody can farm, and, of course, they know as much about it as any one, and can tell at least how it ought to be done. theoretical farming is always very fine--more so than any other calling. very few believe in theory in other branches in business. as a rule, to be successful in other occupations, a long training is necessary; step by step must one go until each detail is learned. and it is only by industry, experience, and hard work that these are fully mastered. advice is offered sparingly, because it is known that experience is the only true guide. but in farming theories are supposed to take the place of experience, and men who have very little, if any, practical knowledge can tell us how to farm. the fact is there is hardly a business or occupation that practically requires more study and experience than farming. a practical farmer, who makes his farm and farm work a study, learns something every day, and unless he is willing to learn not only by his own experience, but by that of others, he will soon discover that he is falling behind. such a man is able to discriminate between the practical experience of one and the theory of the other. if new plans or new methods are presented, he can, in some degree, judge whether they are in any way practical, and if they are, he is willing to give them a trial. he knows that what might prove just the right thing to plant in one section of country, under certain conditions, and in some soils would, under a different climate and soil, result far from satisfactory. the large per cent of this kind of real practical knowledge can only be gained by experience. whenever we meet a man who will not learn, we can not help but conclude that he will never make a successful farmer. we want to learn, too, not only by our successes, but by our failures. if we try a new plan and fail, we want to be able to know why we failed--just as much as to know why we succeeded. one great trouble with us in learning is that we are too apt to keep in mind our successes and forget the failures. this is the great fault of theoretical farming. if by a combination of favorable conditions success is obtained, it is given out as a fact--no exception being given or allowed for the very favorable conditions under which the method was tried. such things may rightly be compared to the many specifics given to cure the various ills of life. a remedy is tried which, under favorable conditions, effects a cure, and forthwith the cure is given out as a specific. others, with the same complaint but under different conditions, try the same remedy and fail to receive the least benefit. no mention is made of these failures, and, of course, others are induced to give the remedy a trial. for this reason it is always interesting to hear of failures as well as successes, provided the real cause can be stated. miller co., mo. n. j. shepherd. cisterns on the farm. there is hardly any one thing on a well-regulated farm so much needed as a cistern near the kitchen door, so the farmer's wife will have to go but a little distance for water, and no man knows how much is used in a farmer's kitchen, unless he carries it for his wife for six months or a year, and if he has to carry it a hundred yards or so from the spring, he will wonder what in the world his wife does with so much water. the cistern should be a large one and hold not less than barrels, and well built, that is, walled up with brick and scientifically plastered. all of the pipes from the roof should lead into one hopper, and one pipe leading from the bottom of the hopper (under ground is the best) into the cistern. in the bottom of the hopper should be fitted a piece of woven wire, which can be readily taken out and put in again; the meshes of the wire should not be larger than one-eighth of an inch. this piece of woven wire should never be in its place except when water is running into the cistern, when it will serve as a strainer to keep leaves or trash of any kind from running into the cistern. a waste-water pipe should be attached to the down pipe (all of the down pipes should lead into one) which leads into the hopper, to waste all the water that comes from the roof until the water is perfectly clear and free from leaves or trash of any kind; then the waste-water pipe should be taken off and a pipe of proper length slipped onto the down pipe conducting the water, pure and clean, into the hopper. but before letting the water into the hopper, the piece of woven wire should be put in its place in the bottom of the hopper, and after the rain is over it should be taken out and hung up in a dry place until wanted again, and the waste-water pipe put on. if the piece of woven wire is left in the hopper the meshes will get filled up, and the hopper will fill with leaves and trash of all kinds and run over, and no water get into the cistern--and if it does it will not be pure. by this arrangement only pure water will run into the cistern; but even then it ought to be cleaned out very fall or early in the spring. farmers will find a cistern in their house lots or inside the barn a great convenience--but the one near the kitchen is of the greatest importance because the men will not carry water if they can help it, and the farmer's wife, if she has any spunk, will insist upon the water being carried for her or raise the roof off the house, and i don't blame her--the hair on the top of my head is very thin--and scarce. hike's point, ky. e. f. c. field and furrow. mass. ploughman: farm accounts, even when kept in the most simple form, not only afford great satisfaction, but they do much to aid the farmer in his efforts to success. if at the end of the season he is able to strike the balance, and thus learn the cost of his principal crops, he is in a position to correctly judge what crops will promise the most profit another year. the farm economist has this to say in regard to marketing corn. while it is contrary to general opinion, it is nevertheless true, as facts and figures are capable of proving: "farmers in discussing their declining markets should remember that every bushel of corn sold in the form of whisky cuts off the sale of ten bushels in the form of meat. it might be well to consider this in discussing how the market for farm products can be improved." this same paper further remarks, "where's the sense in a farmer growling because he is not represented in the government when he won't go to a convention and see that he is represented. quit your growling and do your duty. one good vote in the primaries or in the convention is worth , , growls afterward." the wisconsin tobacco reporter states that the new phase to the sumatra question has brought out considerable discussion among dealers in the edgerton market and that the prevailing impression appears to be that even if the recent decision be upheld, under the jugglery by which sumatra is run into the country, prices for wisconsin leaf will not be materially affected, as it can not entirely supplant its use and there will be a good demand for all our product. the editor adds: the scarecrow argument will doubtless be used by some buyers in bearing the market, but we are inclined to look upon it more as a bugaboo than many others, whatever the effect may be on future crops. we know of no good reason why wisconsin should sell for lower prices than have ruled thus far this season and the report from eastern markets seem to warrant this view. a. b. allen, in n. y. tribune: my cistern is about five feet in diameter and five feet deep. after cleaning it out in spring, i put about one bushel of sand in the bottom, and then let the rain-water come in. this keeps the water sweet and clear for a whole year. i have tried charcoal and various things for this purpose, but find pure clear sand best of all. it must not have other soil mixed with it, or any vegetable matter. the kind i use is white, and very like such as is found at the sea shore. of course the roof end of the pipe should have wire gauze fastened over it so that no foul stuff can be carried down, and the eaves-troughs must be kept clean, the roof and chimneys also, and never be painted, or the latter even whitewashed. the sand is an excellent absorber of even the finest of foul stuff, and this is the reason, in addition to its own purity, of its keeping the water so free from generating the smell of ammonia. peoria transcript: during some of the comparatively idle days of winter, the farmer may combine pleasure with profit by hitching up, taking his family, and driving to some one of his successful farm neighbors for a friendly visit. such an act may be looked upon by the man-of-toil as a poor excuse to get out of doing a day's work, but we venture that he who tries the experiment once will be very apt to repeat it as often as time or opportunity will justify. in our neighborhood, and we presume the same condition of affairs exists in nearly every locality, there are farmers who have lived within a mile or two of each other for years, who hardly know their neighbors from a stranger when they meet upon the public highway or at town meeting, and as for going to the house, nothing short of death in the family or some event of great importance will ever bring them into the friendly relations which should exist between neighboring farmers. a new jersey correspondent of the rural new yorker writes: my clear water carp pond covers an area of about three-fourths of an acre, and is located about eighty feet below springs in the hillside, which furnish a never-failing supply of pure, clear water. the normal temperature of these springs, where they empty into the pond, varies but little according to season, but maintains an average of fifty degrees, fah. several times through the summer i found the water in the pond indicated an average of degrees, fah. the pond is so constructed that the water is constantly drawn from the bottom, thus keeping the surface at this high temperature. about one-half the pond is covered with mud to the depth of two feet or more--an essential in all carp ponds for hibernating. a limited supply of pure german carp fingerlings to place in the pond was sent me by prof. s. f. baird, united states commissioner of fish and fisheries, washington, d. c., and placed therein on april th last. no food was given besides that which grew in the pond. i saw them at rare intervals during the summer, and was agreeably surprised, when i drew the pond november th last past, to find that they had grown to be sixteen inches in length, and a pair weighed eight pounds. * * * * * the monarch lightning sawing machine. on our th page appears the advertisement of the new improved monarch lightning sawing machine, manufactured by the monarch mfg. co., randolph. st., chicago. the result of long experience in the manufacture of implements for cutting up wood is the superior and valuable machine which is advertised in our paper. such of our readers who live in a timbered district, and who need such a machine, should send for their large illustrated free catalogue. this company is the largest and most successful corporation in this city engaged in manufacturing one man power drag saws. the monarch lightning sawing machine has been sold all over the western states, and always gives satisfaction. it is a first-class firm, thoroughly reliable, and their machine is of superior excellence.--farm, field and fireside, january, . see their advertisement on another page of this issue. * * * * * farm machinery, etc. [illustration: dederick's hay presses.] dederick's hay presses. are sent any where on trial to operate against all other presses, the customer keeping the one that suits best. order on trial, address for circular and location of western and southern storehouses and agents. take notice.--as parties infringing our patents falsely claim premiums and superiority over dederick's reversible perpetual press. now, therefore, i offer and guarantee as follows: first. that baling hay with one horse, dederick's press will bale to the solidity required to load a grain car, twice as fast as the presses in question, and with greater ease to both horse and man at that. second. that dederick's press operated by one horse will bale faster and more compact than the presses in question operated by two horses, and with greater ease to both man and beast. third. that there is not a single point or feature of the two presses wherein dederick's is not the superior and most desirable. dederick press will be sent any where on this guarantee, on trial at dederick's risk and cost. p. k. dederick & co., albany, n. y. * * * * * great saving for farmers. the lightning hay knife! (weymouth's patent.) [illustration] awarded "first order of merit" at melbourne exhibition, . was awarded the first premium at the international exhibition in philadelphia, , and accepted by the judges as superior to any other knife in use. it is the best knife in the _world_ to cut _fine feed_ from bale, to cut down _mow_ or _stack_, to cut _corn-stalks_ for feed, to cut _peat_, or for ditching in marshes, and has no equal for cutting ensilage from the silo. try it. it will pay you. manufactured only by hiram holt & co., east wilton, me., u.s.a. _for sale by hardware merchants and the trade generally_ * * * * * the chicago double hay and straw press [illustration] guaranteed to load more hay or straw in a box car than any other, and bale at a less cost per ton. send for circular and price list. manufactured by the chicago hay press co., nos. to state st., chicago. take cable car to factory. mention this paper. * * * * * sawing made easy monarch lightning sawing machine! sent on days test trial. a great saving of labor & money. [illustration] a boy years old can saw logs fast and easy. miles murray, portage, mich. writes, "am much pleased with the monarch lightning sawing machine. i sawed off a -inch log in minutes." for sawing logs into suitable lengths for family stove-wood, and all sorts of log-cutting, it is peerless and unrivaled. illustrated catalogue, free. agents wanted. mention this paper. address monarch manufacturing co., n. randolph st., chicago, ill. * * * * * chicago scale co. ton wagon scale, $ . ton, $ . ton $ , beam box included. lb. farmer's scale, $ . the "little detective," / oz. to lb. $ . other sizes. reduced price list free. forges, tools, &c. best forge made for light work, $ , lb. anvil and kit of tools. $ . farmers save time and money doing odd jobs. blowers, anvils, vices & other articles at lowest prices, wholesale & retail. * * * * * [illustration] the profit farm boiler is simple, perfect, and cheap; the best feed cooker; the only dumping boiler; empties its kettle in a minute. over , in use; cook your corn and potatoes, and save one-half the cost of pork. send for circular. d. r. sperry & co., batavia, illinois. * * * * * champion baling presses. [illustration] a ton per hour. run by two men and one team. loads to tons in car. send for descriptive circular with prices, to gehrt & co., , and maine st., quincy, ill. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; $ . pays for it from this date to january , . for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * [illustration] live stock department. stockmen, write for your paper. iowa wool men. the iowa wool-growers' association met at des moines last week. the attendance was light. the general sentiment expressed was that sheep growing was profitable in iowa, if the dogs could be got rid of. the legislature will be importuned to abolish the curs. the session the last evening was devoted to the tariff on wool. the petition of the ohio sheep-growers, presented to congress, asking a restoration of the tariff law of on wool, was read and unanimously accepted. officers for the ensuing year were elected as follows: s. p. mcneil, gordon grove, president; j. c. robinson, albia, samuel russell, west grove, and a. n. stewart, grove station, vice-presidents; a. j. blakely, grinnell, secretary. polled cattle-breeders. twenty-seven head of galloway and angus cattle, belonging to a. b. matthews, kansas city, were sold at auction at des moines, iowa, january th, at prices ranging from $ to $ . the sale aggregated $ , , or $ per head. in the evening of the same day some twenty-five polled cattle-breeders met and organized a state association. an address was read by abner graves, of dow city, in which the breed was duly extolled. an interesting discussion followed, in the course of which it was stated that the polled breeds have two anatomical peculiarities in common with the american bison, indicating a close relation to, or possible descent from the buffalo family. the officers elected were: president, abner graves, of dow city; vice-presidents, messrs. bryan, of montezuma, d. j. moore, of dunlop, and charles farwell, of montezuma; secretary and treasurer, h. g. gue, of des moines. liberal subscriptions were made to the articles of incorporation which were formed inside the organization, after the meeting adjourned. merino sheep breeders. the sixth annual meeting of the northern illinois merino sheep breeders' association was held at elgin, january th. the meeting was well attended and enthusiastic. george e. peck presided. the annual report of secretary vandercook showed the association to be in a growing condition. the discussion of the day was mainly on the tariff question. a communication from columbus delano, president of the national wool-growers association was read, asking for the co-operation of the society in a move upon congress for the restoration of duties on imported wools as they were established by the act of met with a hearty reception. thomas mcd. richards delivered an interesting address on wool-growing and the merino as a mutton sheep. he argued that a prevailing idea to the effect that good mutton could not come from fine-wool sheep was entirely erroneous. touching on the tariff question he said the past year had been an unprofitable one to mere wool-growers, and that sheep had been unsalable at paying prices. the removal of the duty on wool had paralyzed the industry, and the tariff must be restored. there was an abundance of competition among the wool-growers of our own land without compelling them to compete with the stockmen of south america and australia. the farmers had not clamored for a removal of the duty on wool. if the tariff was not restored the wool interests of the country would be ruined. already legislation had lowered the price of wool several cents, and had depreciated the value of sheep at least $ per head. the tariff was also dilated upon by col. john s. wilcox, of elgin, daniel kelley, of wheaton, and asa h. crary. the conclusion arrived at was that energetic and united action for the restoration of the duty was the thing desired. v. p. richmond read an interesting essay on "merinos; their characteristics and attributes." the annual election of officers resulted as follows: president, george e. peck, geneva; vice-presidents, thomas mcd. richards, woodstock, and daniel kelley, wheaton; secretary and treasurer, w. c. vandercook, cherry valley. it was decided to hold the association's annual public sheep-shearing at richmond, mchenry county, april and , and c. r. lawson, l. h. smith, and a. s. peck were designated a committee to represent the association at the annual sheep-shearing of the wisconsin association. cattle disease. the house committee on agriculture last week discussed in a general way the subject of pleuro pneumonia in cattle. mr. loring, commissioner of agriculture, expressed his views upon the subject in a short speech. mr. grinnell, of iowa, chairman of the committee appointed by the convention of cattle men, in chicago, to visit washington to influence legislation in reference to diseased cattle, was present. it was arranged that a sub-committee, consisting of congressmen hatch, dibrell, williams, winans, wilson, and ochiltree, should meet the representatives of the cattle interests at the agricultural department. pleuro-pneumonia among cattle will be the first subject considered. the house committee on agriculture will report a bill at an early day. the assistant secretary of the treasury has transmitted to the house the report of the cattle commission, consisting of james law, e. f. thayer, and j. h. sanders, for the past year. the commission recommended that the national government prevent the shipment northward, out of the area infected with texas fever, of all cattle whatsoever, excepting from the beginning of november to the beginning of march. special attention is invited by the assistant secretary to the recommendation of the commission that the secretary of the treasury be empowered to order the slaughter and safe disposal of all imported herds that may be found infected on their arrival in the united states, or may develop a dangerous or contagious disease during quarantine; and that he be also empowered to have all ruminants (other than cattle) and all swine imported into the united states, subjected to inspection by veterinary surgeons, and if necessary to prevent the spread of contagious diseases, slaughtered or submitted to quarantine until they shall be considered uninfected; and that an appropriation of $ , , be made to defray the expenses of preventing a further spread of the lung plague among cattle in this country, and for stamping out the plague now existing. a supplemental report of the majority of commission, submitted by law and thayer, and of a later date than the first report is also submitted. this report deals especially with the inadequacy to the end sought to be accomplished of the inspection of cattle at ports of export, and recommends that such inspection and guarantee be delayed. their reason for doubting the adequacy of the inspection at ports of exports is that neither lung plague nor texas fever can be certainly detected by such examination, because those diseases pass through an average stage of incubation for thirty days, during which it is impossible for the most accomplished expert to detect the presence of the germ in the system. the result would be, if such an inspection were the only thing relied upon, that cattle which had been exposed to infection in the stock yards several days before inspection would pass that inspection, but three weeks later, when they arrived at a foreign port, would show marked symptoms of the disease. this result destroys absolutely the efficacy of the certificates of inspection as to guarantees to foreign imported cattle. the report closes with the statement that so long as the infected districts in this country can not be secluded, the landing of infected cattle in england from this country can not be prevented, and so long as american cattle show these diseases on their arrival in england we can hope for no modification of the present restrictions that country places against american cattle. * * * * * at the conference between house sub-committee on agriculture and the chicago convention committee a general discussion on contagious diseases among cattle was indulged in. the committee of cattle men, in answer to the inquiries of representatives, said diseases existed in delaware, the district of columbia, maryland, pennsylvania, virginia, connecticut, new york, and possibly in other places. in new york a few counties are reported infected. mr. hunt, of new jersey, said if congress would appropriate an adequate amount payable to the order of the authorities of the different states and protect new jersey for six months from the importation of diseased cattle, the state in that time would stamp out pleuro-pneumonia in its territory. dr. law, of the cattle commission of the treasury department, said the disease was undoubtedly the result of importation. he said that with plenty of money and a federal law it could be eradicated in twelve months. new york city had at one time stamped it out in three months. he advocated the burning of buildings where the disease occurred. judge carey, of wyoming, gave the history of the disease, saying it was like asiatic cholera spreading through europe and reaching new york forty years ago. it existed on the continent of europe, in great britain, australia, new zealand, and this country. he said $ , , was invested in the cattle business of the united states. representative hatch said that mr. singleton, of illinois, had offered $ , reward for an animal afflicted with pleuro-pneumonia, but no one had accepted. several members of the cattle committee at once offered to show the disease to any one doubting its existence. representative weller gave notice that he would offer a bill appropriating $ , , by the government for suppressing contagious diseases among cattle, to be distributed among the states and territories in the ratio of representation in congress, provided that each state appropriated a sum equal to the amount given by the government. the legislation proposed is to make the shipment of cattle known to be diseased a penal offense; to establish a cattle bureau in the department of agriculture; increase the power of the commissioner of agriculture; provide funds for an elaborate investigation of the diseases of cattle; and provide an appropriation to purchase diseased cattle so they can be destroyed. an appropriation will be asked the first year of $ , . the horse and his treatment. number two. first, as regards food. the horse is naturally a wild animal and therefore, though domesticated, he demands such food as nature would provide for him. but man seems to forget this. nature's food would be largely of grass. it is true that when domesticated and put to hard work he needs some food of a more concentrated and highly nutritious nature than grass; but while labor may necessitate grain, the health of his system yet demands a liberal allowance of grass. in direct opposition to this many farmers keep their horses off pasture while they are at work, which comprises almost the entire season of green pasture. i have frequently heard farmers say that their horses did best during the spring and summer, if kept in the stable at night. i can only say that i have found the very opposite to be true and i believe i have carefully and faithfully tested the matter. i have found that when the horses were allowed the range of a blue grass pasture at night, they endured work the best because they digested their grain and hay better, and good digestion made good appetites. in fact, i consider pasture the best food and the best medicine a horse can be given. if his coat is rough, if he is stiff and lifeless, if he is losing flesh and strength, turn him on pasture and he will soon grow better. some grasses make far better pasture than others. all in all, i consider blue grass the best. it comes earliest in the spring, and while very palatable and easily digested, seems to possess more substance than other grasses. next i would place timothy. clover is good medicine for a sick horse, but because of its action on the salivary glands is apt to make work horses "slobber" at certain seasons. for winter, hay is provided. but how is it provided in a majority of cases? the grass is cut out of season; is cured negligently, very likely is exposed to rain; and then piled up to mold and rot. a few tarpaulins to put over the cocks in case of rain, and barracks or mow to protect and preserve the hay would give the horse good hay, and be one of the very best of investments. it should be remembered that the digestive organs of none other of our farm animals are so easily deranged as those of the horse. musty, moldy hay is the moving cause of much disease. the man who can not provide a good mow should sell his horses to some farmer who can manage better. though blue grass is the best for pasture, timothy is the best for hay. clover makes better hay than blue grass. corn fodder has substance, and pound for pound contains about two-thirds as much nutriment as hay. but it is not good forage for the horse. where hay is procurable corn fodder should never be fed. i am convinced that the great majority of farmers do nor feed their horses enough forage. i know of farmers who do not feed hay at all when their horses are at work, which is more than half the year. grain is fed exclusively. yet they wonder why their horses lose flesh and have rough coats. feeding a horse all grain is like feeding a man all meat. the food is so oily and difficult of digestion that it soon deranges the digestive organs. the horse should have all the hay he wishes to eat, at all seasons of the year. this brings me to another error in his treatment. when at work the horse should have at least ninety minutes for each meal. my observation convinces me that a large number of farmers do not give him this much time. their reason for neglecting to do so is, that it would be a loss of time. but the very opposite of this is the case. time is gained. the horse has opportunity to eat slowly, which is essential to complete digestion; can eat all he wishes; and has time to rest after eating, giving the organs of digestion a chance to work. give your horse an hour and a half to eat his noon-day meal, at least, and at the end of the season you will find that by so doing you have gained time. he may not have walked before the plow and harrow so many hours, but he has stepped faster and pulled more energetically. another error is the feeding of too much grain. some farmers have grain in the feeding troughs all the time during the spring and summer. the horse is sated. this manner may do for a hog, whose only business is to lie around, grunt, and put on fat; but for a horse it will not do. a horse should never be given all the grain he will eat. at every meal he should clean out his box, and then be ready to eat hay for at least fifteen minutes. another error is in confining the grain feed almost altogether to corn. corn is a heavy, gross diet. it contains a large proportion of oil, and tends to produce lymph and fat, which are inimical to health, and destructive of vigor and endurance. oats is a much better food; yet it is very rarely fed in the south, and not half of the farmers of the north feed it. corn heats the blood, and on this account should not be fed in hot weather. oats is a lighter, easier diet, does not heat the blood, and makes muscle, rather than fat. all in all, oats is the most economical food, at least for horses at work in hot weather. one more error which i shall notice in feeding is the giving of too much dry food. the horse does best upon moist food, or that which has a large percentage of water in its composition. carrots, turnips, beets, pumpkins, etc., may be given in small quantities with decided advantage, especially in the winter. in summer the hay should be sprinkled with water, and the oats soaked. this will not only make the food more palatable and easily digested, but will obviate the necessity of watering after meals. many object to watering after the horse has eaten, because the fluid carries the grain into the intestines where it can not be digested. but if grain and forage are dampened, the horse will not require watering after a meal. he will rarely drink if water is offered him, and the moisture will aid digestion. this is surely better and more humane than to give a horse dry food and then work him for six or seven hours in the hot sun, afterward, without any drink. of the quality of water given to the horse there is not much to condemn. he generally gets better water than the hog, or sheep, because he is very fastidious in this matter and will not drink foul water unless driven to do so by dire necessity. but i believe that three times is not often enough to water a horse at work in hot weather, though this is the common and time honored practice. the stomach of the horse is small--very small in proportion to the size of his body. when he has labored in summer for half a day his thirst is intense, and when he is permitted to slake it he drinks too much, producing really serious disorders. no valid objection can be urged against watering five times per day. the arguments are all in its favor. the errors in stabling are fully as grievous as any we have noticed. i have lately written of the evils of lack of light and proper ventilation in these columns, and also discussed the problem of currying in various phases, so shall not repeat here what i have heretofore written. one of the other evils of stable management often allowed, is the accumulation of manure. it is not within the scope of this article to notice the evil the neglect to save manure works to the farm and the farmer. but that the accumulation of the manure in the stable is a hurt to the horse, no sensibly reasoning person can doubt. its fermentation gives off obnoxious gases which pollute and poison the air the horse is compelled to breathe, and thus in turn poison the animal's blood. this is a more fruitful cause of disease than is generally supposed. the gases prove injurious to the eye, and when we consider the accumulation of manure and the exclusion of light, we are not apt to wonder much at the prevalence of blindness among horses. the manure should be cleaned out in the morning, at noon, and again at night. use sawdust or straw liberally for bedding. it will absorb the urine, and as soon as foul, should be removed to the compost heap with the dung, where it will soon be converted into fine, excellent manure. another thing that deserves attention is the stable floor. i unhesitatingly say that a composition of clay and fine gravel is best. pavement is the worst, and planks are next. the clay and gravel should be put in just moist enough to pack solidly. stamp till very firm and then allow to dry and harden for a week. the stable floor should be kept perfectly level. do not make the horse stand in a strained, unnatural position. the stall should be large enough for him to move around--at least six feet wide. narrow stalls are a nuisance but very common. john m. stahl. cost of pork on corn. about three weeks ago the "man of the prairie" wanted to know how many pounds of pork a bushel of corn would make this year. as i wanted to know the same thing i have weighed my hogs every week and also the corn i fed them, and for the benefit of your readers i will give the results: december -- hogs, weight , " --" " " , ate lbs corn. " --" " " , " " " --" " " , " " this gives a gain, in twenty-one days, of lbs, and they ate in that time , lbs., or - / bu. corn. the corn was planted about the eighth of may; was the large white variety; is quite loose on the cob, and a good many of the ears are mouldy. a common bushel basket holds of it in ear lbs. the hogs were fed the corn in ear twice a day, and had all the water they wanted to drink. this gives - / lbs. pork to the bushel. at the present price of pork ($ . ) it would make the corn worth about - / cts. per bushel. g. w. powess. winnebago co., ill. p.s. the weight of corn given is its weight shelled, as it shells out lbs from lbs. in ear. g. f. p. veterinary grease, so-called. this ailment occurs sometimes in the fore feet, but oftener in the hind feet; and though neither contagious nor epizootic, it not unfrequently appears about one time or within a brief period, on most or all of the horses in a stable. it essentially consists in a stoppage of the normal secretions of the skin, which is beneficially provided for maintaining a soft condition of the skin of the heel, and preventing chapping and excoriation; and it usually develops itself in redness, dryness, and scurfiness of the skin; but in bad or prolonged cases, it is accompanied with deep cracks, an ichorous discharge, more or less lameness, and even great ulceration, and considerable fungus growth; and in the worst cases it spreads athwart all the heel, extends on the fetlock, or ascends the leg, and is accompanied with extensive swelling and a general oozing discharge, of a peculiar strong, disagreeable odor. most of the causes of grease are referable to bad management, especially in regard to great and sudden changes in the exterior temperature of the heels. the feet of the horse may be alternately heated by the bedding and cooled by draft from the open stable door; or they may first be made hot and sensitive by the irritating action of the urine and filth on the stable floor, and then violently reacted on by the cold breezes of the open air, or they may be moist and reeking when the horse is led out to work, and then chilled for a long period by the slow evaporation of the moisture from them amid the clods and soil of the field; or they may be warm and even perspiring with the labor of the day, and next plunged into a stream or washed with cold water, and then allowed to dry partly in the open air and partly in the stable; and in many of these ways, or of any others which occasion sudden changes of temperature in the heels, especially when those changes are accompanied or aggravated by the irritating action of filth, grease is exceedingly liable to be induced. want of exercise, high feeding, and whatever tends to accumulate or to stagnate the normal greasy secretion in the skin of the heels, also operate, in some degree, as causes. by mere good management and by avoiding these known causes, horse owners might prevent the appearance of this disease altogether. in the early, dry, scurfy stage of grease, the heels may be well cleaned with soft soap and water, and afterwards thoroughly dried, and then treated with a dilution of goulard's extract--one part to eight parts of water, or one part with six parts of lard oil. in the mildest form of the stage of cracks and ichorous discharge, after cleansing, some drying powder, such as equal quantities of white lead and putty (impure protoxide of zinc), may be applied, or simply the mixture of goulard's extract with lard oil may be continued. in the virulent form of cracks, accompanied with ulceration, the heels ought to be daily washed clean with warm water, and afterwards bathed with a mild astringent lotion, and every morning and evening thinly poulticed or coated with carbolized ointment; and the whole system ought to be acted on by alteratives, by nightly bran mash, and, if the animal be in full condition, with a dose of purgative medicine. in the worst and most extensively spread cases, poultices of a very cooling kind, particularly poultices of scraped carrots or scraped turnips, ought to be used day and night, both for the sake of their own action, and as preparatives to the action of the astringent application; and the whole course of treatment ought to aim at the abatement of the inflammatory action, previous to the stopping of the discharge. nothing tends so much to prevent grease and swelling of the legs as frequent hand rubbing and cleansing the heels carefully as soon as a horse comes in from exercise or work. in inveterate cases of grease, where the disease appears to have become habitual, in some degree, a run at grass, when in season, is the only remedy. if a dry paddock is available, where a horse can be sheltered in bad weather, it will be found extremely convenient; as in such circumstances, he may perform his usual labor, and at the same time be kept free from the complaint. foul in the foot. this name is given to a disease in cattle, which presents a resemblance to foot rot in sheep, but is different from this. it appears to be always occasioned by the neglect and aggravation of wounds and ulcers originating in mechanical injury--particularly in the insinuating of pieces of stone, splinters of wood, etc., between the claws of the hoof, or in the wearing, splitting, or bruising of the horn, and consequent abrasion of the sensible foot; by walking for an undue length of time, or a long distance upon gravelly or flinty roads, or other hard and eroding surfaces. it is sometimes ascribed, indeed, to a wet state of the pasture; but moisture merely predisposes to it, by softening the hoof and diminishing its power of resisting mechanical injury. the ulcers of foul in the foot usually occur about the coronet and extend under the hoof, causing much inflammatory action, very great pain, and more or less separation of the hoof; but they often originate in uneven pressure upon the sole, and rise upward from a crack between the claws, and are principally or wholly confined to one side or claw of the foot. a fetid purulent discharge proceeds from the ulcers, and a sinus may sometimes be discovered by means of a probe to descend from the coronet beneath the hoof. the affected animal is excessively lame, and may possibly suffer such a degree of pain as to lose all appetite and become sickly and emaciated. if the disease is of a mild form, or be merely in the initiatory stage, it may be readily cured by cleaning, fomentation, and rest; if it be of a medium character, between mild and violent, it may be cured by cleaning, by carefully paring away loose and detached horn, by destroying any fungus growth, and by applying, with a feather, a little butyr of antimony; and if it be of a very bad form, or has been long neglected, it will require to be probed, lanced, or otherwise dealt with according to the rules of good surgery, and afterwards poulticed twice a day with linseed meal, and frequently, but lightly, touched with butyr of antimony. founder. this disease consists in inflammation of the laminæ and of the vascular parts of the sensible foot. it sometimes attacks only one foot, sometimes two, and sometimes all four; but, in a great majority of cases, it attacks either one or both of the front feet. a chronic form sometimes occurs, and exhibits symptoms somewhat similar to those of contraction of the hoof; but acute inflammation of the laminæ is what is generally called founder. this disease is occasioned by overstraining of the laminæ from long standing, by prolonged or excessive driving over hard roads, by congestion from long confinement, by sudden reaction from standing in snow after being heated, or from covering with warm bedding after prolonged exposure to cold, by sudden change of diet from a comparatively cool to a comparatively heating kind of food, and by translation of inflammatory action from some other part of the body, particularly after influenza. in the early stages of founder, a horse evinces great pain, shows excessive restlessness of foot, and tries to lighten the pressure of his body on the diseased feet. in the more advanced stages he is feverish, breathes hard, has violent throbbing in the arteries of the fetlock, lies down, stretches out his legs, and sometimes gazes wistfully upon the seat of the disease; and in the ulterior stages, if no efficacious remedies have been applied, the diseased feet either naturally recover their healthy condition, or they suppurate, slough, cast part or all of the hoof, and gradually acquire a small, weak, new hoof, or they undergo such mortification and change of tissues as to render the animal permanently useless. the shoe of a foundered foot must be removed; the hoof should be pared in such a manner that the sole and central portion of the same alone come to sustain the weight of the body. therefore, the wall of the hoof, or that portion of the hoof which, under normal conditions, is made to bear upon the shoe, should be pared or rasped away, all around, to such an extent that it does not touch the ground when the animal stands upon the foot. a well-bedded shed, or a roomy, well-bedded box-stall, should be provided, with a view of allowing ample room for stretching out, as well as for changing position on a floor which should not be slanting, and which conveniences can not be had in a single stall, or when the animal is kept tied up in a confined space. fomentations, evaporating lotions, wet cloths, and moist poultices should be applied to the feet. the animal ought to have light and spare diet, and bran mashes. when much fever exists febrifuges and diuretics should be given. questions answered. cow drying up unevenly. d. w., auburn, ill.-- . what is the cause of a cow going dry in one teat? she dropped her calf the th of may, and it sucked till it was three months old two teats on one side; that was her third calf; her next one will be due the last of april next. for some six weeks past the quantity of milk has been diminishing, till now she does not give more than a gill from one teat, while the opposite one gives more than double that of either of the others. can any thing be done to remedy the difficulty? . if a cow gives more milk on one side than the other, does it indicate the sex of the coming calf? reply.--most likely the cow will give milk from all four quarters after calving. she should be allowed to gradually dry up now, and toward the time of calving, she should not be fed exclusively on dry food. . no. [illustration] the dairy. dairymen, write for your paper. curing cheese. the curing of cheese develops not only flavor, but texture and digestibility. as a rule, says an english exchange, no american cheese is well cured, and this is for want of suitable curing houses. dr. h. reynolds, of livermore falls, me., remarks upon this subject as follows: "increased attention needs to be given by cheese-makers to this matter of curing cheese. cheese factories should be provided with suitable curing rooms, where a uniform temperature of the required degree can be maintained, together with a suitable degree of moisture and sufficient supply of fresh air. the expense required to provide a suitable curing room would be small compared to the increased value of the cheese product thereby secured. small dairymen and farmers, having only a few cows, labor under some difficulties in the way of providing suitable curing room for their cheese. yet if they have a clear idea of what a curing room should be, they will generally be able to provide something which will approximate to what is needed. good curing rooms are absolutely needed in order to enable our cheese-makers to produce a really fine article of cheese. the nicer the quality of cheese produced, the higher the price it will bring, and the more desirable will it become as an article of food. in the curing of cheese certain requisites are indispensable in order to attain the best results. free exposure to air is one requisite for the development of flavor. curd sealed up in an air-tight vessel and kept at the proper temperature readily breaks down into a soft, rich, ripe cheese, but it has none of the flavor so much esteemed in good cheese. exposure to the oxygen of the air develops flavor. the cheese during the process of curding takes in oxygen and gives off carbonic acid gas. this fact was proved by dr. s. m. babcock, of cornell university, who, by analyzing the air passing over cheese while curding, found that the cheese was constantly taking in oxygen and giving off carbonic acid gas. the development of flavor can be hastened by subjecting the cheese to a strong current of air. the flavor is developed by the process of oxidation. if the cheese is kept in too close air during the process of curding, it will be likely to be deficient in flavor." * * * * * an anonymous writer very truly remarks that the dairyman, by the force of circumstances, has to become versed in the breeding and management of stock, especially that of dairy breeds; hence, in the very nature of things, he becomes a thoughtful, studious, observing man, and, what is better, he attains a higher intelligence. the advantages of dairying call out, among other things, enhanced revenues, because butter and cheese have become necessities; it enriches the farm, and is perfectly adapted to foster the breeding and raising of better and more stock. it embodies thrift, progress, and prosperity. under "new methods" it makes fine butter and choice beef, not by any means less, but even more, and affords better grain. it does not imply farm houses with added burdens, but, on the contrary, relieved of drudgery, and the time thus gained can be spent in cultivating the refining graces, and thus making farmers' homes abodes of culture, refinement, and education, placing the dairy farmer upon a level financially, socially, and intellectually with any other class or profession. * * * * * miscellaneous. the rural new-yorker the great national farm and garden journal of america, with its celebrated free seed distribution, and the prairie farmer one year, post-paid, all for only $ . . it is a rare chance. specimen copies cheerfully sent gratis. compare them with other rural weeklies, and then subscribe for the best. apply to park row, new york. * * * * * for sale or rent. farm of four hundred and eighty acres situated in marlon county, illinois, two and a half miles from tonti station, and six miles from odin, on branch of illinois central r. r., and o. & m. road-- acres under plow, acres timber. the latter has never been culled and is very valuable. farm is well fenced into seven fields. has an orchard on it which has yielded over two thousand dollars worth of fruit a year. no poor land on the farm, and is called the best body of land in marion county. it was appraised by the northwestern insurance co. for a loan at $ , and a loan made of six thousand. buildings are not very good. will sell for $ , --$ , cash, $ , may , , and $ , feb. , , deferred payments to bear per cent interest, or, to a first-class party, having a few thousand dollars to put into stock, a liberal arrangement will be made to rent it for a term of years. property belongs to an estate. address j. e. young, park avenue, chicago. * * * * * henry davis, dyer, ind. [illustration] breeder of light brahmas, plymouth rocks, bronze turkeys, toulouse geese, and pekin ducks. stock for sale. eggs in season. have won prizes at leading shows, including st on toulouse geese at st. louis and chicago shows. write for prices. * * * * * [illustration] your name printed on cards all new designs of _gold floral_, _remembrances_, _sentiment_, _hand floral_, etc., with _love_, _friendship_, and _holiday mottoes_. c. pks. and this elegant ring, c., pks. & ring, $ . new "concealed name" cards (name concealed with hand holding flowers with mottoes) c. pks. and this ring for $ . agents sample book and full outfit, c. over new cards added this season. blank cards at wholesale prices. northford card co. northford, conn. * * * * * seeds our large garden guide describing _cole's reliable seeds_ is mailed free to all. we offer the _latest novelties_ in seed potatoes, corn and oats, and the _best collection_ of vegetable, flower, grass and tree seed. everything is tested. cole & bro., seedsmen, pella, iowa * * * * * agents wanted, male and female, for spence's blue book, a most fascinating and salable novelty. every family needs from one to a dozen. immense profits and exclusive territory. sample mailed for cts in postage stamps. address j. h. clarson, p.o. box , philadelphia, pa. * * * * * patent procured or no charge. p. book patent-law free. add. w. t. fitzgerald f st., washington, d.c. * * * * * cards satin finish cards, new imported designs, name on and present free for c. cut this out. clinton bros. & co., clintonville, ct. * * * * * agents wanted everywhere to solicit subscriptions for this paper. write prairie farmer publishing co., chicago, for particulars. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _one year, and the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ [illustration] horticultural horticulturists, write for your paper. southern ill. horticultural society. the members of the southern illinois horticultural society recently held a meeting at alton, and resolved to put a little more life into the organization. a new constitution was adopted, and the following officers were elected for the ensuing year: president--e. a. riehl, alton. first vice-president--g. w. endicott, villa ridge. second vice-president--wm. jackson, godfrey. secretary and treasurer--e. hollister, alton. the following select list of fruits was recommended for the district, or southern grand division of the state: apples--summer--red astrachan, keswick codlin, benoni, saps of wine, and maiden's blush. fall--it was unanimously agreed that fall apples were not profitable for market purposes. winter--ben davis, rome beauty, jonathan, wine-sap, winter may, gilpin, and janet. apples for family use--summer--early harvest, red astrachan, carolina red june, benoni, maiden's blush, bailey sweet and fameuse. fall--fall wine, rambo, grimes' golden, yellow belleflower. winter--jonathan, rome beauty, winesap, ben davis, janet, gilpin, moore's sweet, sweet vandevere. peaches for market--bartlett, howell, and duchess. pears for family use--bartlett, seckel, howell, white doyenne, d'anjou, and sheldon. peaches--for family use and market--alexander, mountain rose, l. e. york, oldmixon free, crawford's late stump, picquet's late, smock, salway, and heath cling. grapes--home use and market--worden or concord, cynthiana or norton's va., mo. reisling, noah, ives. strawberries--home and market--capt. jack, downing, and wilson. raspberries--black caps--doolittle and gregg. reds--cuthbert, brandywine, and turner for home use only. notes on current topics. farm economy. now, if one wants to ascertain how many agricultural implements are used by the farmers of the west, let him take a trip across the country for a day or two, and he will see reapers and mowers, and hay rakes and cultivators, and plows and seeders, standing in the fields and meadows, at the end of the rows where they had last been used. a stranger might think that this is not the place for them at this particular time of year. but in this he shows his ignorance of western farm economy--for it is the very place for them; the identical locality where a great many of our farmers choose to keep their costly implements. besides--don't you see, our farmers believe in fostering the manufactures of our country; and this place of caring for their tools after using them adds or per cent to the business of the manufacturers. about the borer. i referred to the fact that i had lately been cutting away, digging up, and making stove-wood of a number of dead and decaying apple trees. some of them had been dead and dying for two or three years. in splitting up the body and roots of one of these, i dislodged scores of the borers, of all ages and sizes--making quite a dinner for a hen and chickens that happened to be nigh. this fact brought forcibly to my mind what i should have thought of before, namely--that these dead and dying trees ought not to be allowed to remain a day after their usefulness has departed; but should be removed bodily and consigned to the flames. otherwise they remain as breeding places for the pests, to the great detriment of the rest of the orchard. cut away your decaying trees at once. coal ashes. now that coal has become so common as a substitute for wood for fuel, not only on the railroads and manufactories, but in the villages and on the farms, wood ashes will still be harder to procure. though not near so valuable for the purposes for which wood ashes is chiefly used in horticulture, it is believed that ashes from the coal has too great a value to be wasted. it should all be saved and applied to some good purpose on the garden or orchard. has any one tried it as a preventive to pear blight? or mildew on the gooseberry? or the grape rot? or for the yellows or leaf-curl in peach trees? or for the rust in the blackberry and raspberry? in any or all of these it may have a decided value, and should be faithfully experimented with. as an absorbent alone it ought to be worth saving, to use in retaining the house slops and other liquid manures that are too often wasted. one cause of failure in our orchard trees, of which we read and hear so much in late years, is doubtless to be found in the fact that we fail to feed them properly. a hog will fail to put on fat if he is not fed; a hen will not lay eggs if she is starved for food; and is it more reasonable to expect an apple or a peach or a pear tree to thrive and grow and yield of its luscious fruit in perfection while it is being starved? our fresh soils--some of them at least--contain a fair proportion of the food needed to support the life of a tree; we plant our orchards, and for some years, more or less, they give us paying returns for our investments. but that food will not always last; it is gradually exhausted, and we fail to feed them again, or in that proportion their necessities require. they languish and die; a disease seizes them, and we complain and grumble at the dispensations of providence. think of it, fellow fruit-growers; let us begin to treat our fruit trees as we do our hogs and our hens, and see if we can not be favored with corresponding results. it is doubtless true that many of the diseases to which our trees are subject are caused by starvation, or by improper feeding; and a sickly tree is much more certain to be attacked by insects than a healthy one. rare, indeed, is the case where a tree is carefully fed and cared for, and its wants regularly and bountifully supplied, that it does not repay as bountifully in its life-giving fruits. t. g. pear blight. the two theories with regard to its cause, and their practical value. it is assumed that this pest has cost agriculturists many millions of dollars during the past decade; not only in the loss of trees, but the time--as it seldom appears until after the first crop--consequently the land, manure, labor, enclosure, and taxes are not insignificant items. climate, soil, and cultivation have utterly failed, so also the nostrums, such as "carbonate of lime" suggested by the best authority, and the experts now admit that parasites (such as cause the rust or smut in our cereals) are the cause of this mischief. the only question is whether they act directly or indirectly: this question determines whether it is remediable. if these parasites accomplish all this mischief by direct contact, as in the case of rust, their ubiquitous character is so demonstrated that we are utterly discouraged; whereas, if we prove that their indirect action is the only one that is to be dreaded, and that indirect action is remediable we are encouraged to cultivate the pear, though we have lost more than five hundred of one variety and almost all of the other varieties before we discovered the real cause of the failure. "where you lose you may find;" success does not indicate merit, and "fools never learn by experience." as a celebrated surgeon said in his lecture. "a good oculist is made at the expense of a hatful of eyes." the celebrated johnson who wrote the encyclopedia of agriculture a few years since, is now regarded as an old fogy, because he assumed that the spores of smut travel from the manure and seed of the previous crop in the circulation of the plant to the capsule, and thus convert the grain into a puff-ball, so also the ears of corn, the oats, and rye. this monstrosity on the rye grains is called ergot, or spurred rye, and when it is eaten by chickens or other fowls their feet and legs shrivel or perish with dry gangrene, not because the spores of the fungus which produced the spurred rye circulate in the blood of the chicken, nor that the spawn or mycelium thus traverses the fowl, but the peculiar and specific influence acts upon the whole animal precisely like the poison of the poison oak, producing its specific effect on the most remote parts of the system, and not as mustard confined to the part it touches. the mustard acts directly, but the "poison ivy" acts indirectly; so also the virus of cow-pox poisons the whole system, but usually appears in but one spot unless the lymphatics of the whole arm are weak, and in that case crops of umbilicated pustules precisely like the original, may recur on all parts of the arm for several months. the specific effect of ergot or the fungus when indirect is manifested by contracting and even strangulating the tubes or capillaries causing them to pucker up (as a persimmon acts directly on the mouth), but in this case permanently though indirectly, so that rye bread sometimes causes dry gangrene in the human subject; the shins and feet shrivel precisely as those parts of the limbs of the pear do, moreover a dark fluid exudes (as the circulation is arrested where a patch occurs) in both cases alike, consequently if the remedy in both cases is based on the same principles, and is demonstrated to be equally effectual, the cause and the disease are similar. i have seen dry gangrene in the human subject originate apparently from an old "frost bite;" which means merely chronic debility of the capillaries of the foot or shin. thus the extremities of the pear, or the weakest part, always succumb first, and the most vigorous trees never manifest it until they are weakened by their first crop of fruit. all are familiar with the fact that an old frost bite will swell or succumb to a temperature which will be innocuous to any other part of the body. the microscope may invariably reveal fungi in the patch of pear blight precisely as the housewife discovers the mold plant in her preserves and canned fruit, and even in the eggs of fowls, the mycelium (or spawn) penetrating the fruit or preserve though it be covered while boiling hot. if so, the reason why all parts of the tree are not attacked at the same time, is not because the fungus is not ubiquitous. we first notice the action of strychnia in the legs, or in paralyzed limbs exclusively, because they are weaker and become subject to its influence more easily; so also the same tree may escape for a long time after the limb which has succumbed is removed. moreover the grafts, however numerous, may all be blighted, but the standard seedling on which so many varieties were grafted has survived more than fifty winters, and it fruited last year. david stewart, m. d. port penn, del. treatment of tree wounds. valuable trees that have been wounded or mutilated are often sacrificed for lack of the discreet surgery which would repair the injury they have suffered; and professor c. a. sargent, of the bussey institution, has done good service to farmers, fruit-raisers, and landscape-gardeners, by translating from the french the following practical hints, which we give with slight abridgment: bark once injured or loosened can never attach itself again to the trunk; and whenever wounds, abrasures, or sections of loose bark exist on the trunk of a tree, the damaged part should be cut away cleanly, as far as the injury extends. careful persons have been known to nail to a tree a piece of loosened bark, in hope of inducing it to grow again, or at least of retaining on the young wood its natural covering. unfortunately the result produced by this operation is exactly opposite to that intended. the decaying wood and bark attract thousands of insects, which find here safe shelter and abundant food, and, increasing rapidly, hasten the death of the tree. in such cases, instead of refastening the loosened bark to the tree, it should be entirely cut away, care being taken to give the cut a regular outline, especially on the lower side; for if a portion of the bark, even if adhering to the wood, is left without direct communication with the leaves, it must die and decay. a coating of coal-tar should be applied to such wounds. loosened bark.--it is necessary to frequently examine the lower portions of the trunk, especially of trees beginning to grow old; for here is often found the cause of death in many trees, in large sheets of bark entirely separated from the trunk. this condition of things, which often can not be detected, except by the hollow sound produced by striking the trunk with the back of the iron pruning-knife, arrests the circulation of sap, while the cavity between the bark and the wood furnishes a safe retreat for a multitude of insects, which hasten the destruction of the tree. the dead bark should be entirely removed, even should it be necessary, in so doing, to make large wounds. cases of this nature require the treatment recommended for the last class. cavities in the trunk.--very often, when a tree has been long neglected, the trunk is seriously injured by cavities caused by the decay of dead or broken branches. it is not claimed that pruning can remove defects of this nature; it can with proper application, however, arrest the progress of the evil. the edge of the cavity should be cut smooth and even; and all decomposed matter, or growth of new bark formed in the interior, should be carefully removed. a coating of coal-tar should be applied to the surface of the cavity, and the mouth plugged with a piece of well-seasoned oak securely driven into the place. the end of the plug should then be carefully pared smooth and covered with coal-tar, precisely as if the stump of a branch were under treatment. if the cavity is too large to be closed in this manner, a piece of thoroughly seasoned oak board, carefully fitted to it, may be securely nailed into the opening, and then covered with coal-tar. it is often advisable to guard against the attacks of insects by nailing a piece of zinc or other metal over the board in such a way that the growth of the new wood will in time completely cover it. coal-tar, a waste product of gas-works, can be applied with an ordinary painter's brush, and may be used cold, except in very cold weather, when it should be slightly warmed before application. coal-tar has remarkable preservative properties, and may be used with equal advantage on living and dead wood. a single application, without penetrating deeper than ordinary paint, forms an impervious coating to the wood-cells, which would, without such covering, under external influences, soon become channels of decay. this simple application then produces a sort of instantaneous cauterization, and preserves from decay wounds caused either in pruning or by accident. the odor of coal-tar drives away insects, or prevents them, by complete adherence to the wood, from injuring it. after long and expensive experiments, the director of the parks of the city of paris finally, in , adopted coal-tar, in preference to other preparations used, for covering tree wounds. in the case of stone fruit trees it should, however, be used with considerable caution, especially on plum trees. it should not be allowed to needlessly run down the trunk; and it is well to remember, that the more active a remedy is the greater should be the care in its application. the practice of leaving a short stump to an amputated branch, adopted by some to prevent the loss of sap, although less objectionable in the case of coniferous trees than in that of others, should never be adopted. such stumps must be cut again the following year close to the trunk, or cushions of wood will form about their base, covering the trunk with protuberances. these greatly injure the appearance and value of the tree, and necessitate, should it be found desirable, the removal, later on, of such excrescences, causing wounds two or three times as large as an original cut close to the trunk would have made. the tomato pack of . through the co-operation of packers in all parts of the united states, the american grocer was enabled to present its annual statement of the pack of tomatoes some weeks earlier than usual. despite a cold, backward spring, unusually low temperature throughout the summer, with cool nights in august and september, drouth in some sections, early and severe frosts in others, the trade is called upon to solve the question: can the demand absorb a supply of three million cases? the pack of is heavily in excess of that of , due to an increase in the number packers, and to an unusually heavy yield in new jersey and delaware. in detail, the result in the different states is as follows: cases, two doz. each. maryland , , new jersey , delaware , california , ohio , indiana , virginia , kansas , new york , iowa , missouri , michigan , massachusetts , canada , connecticut , illinois , pennsylvania , --------- total , , the above total of , , cases, of two dozen tins each represents seventy million, six hundred and forty-five thousand, eight hundred and ninety-six cans, as the minimum quantity of canned tomatoes packed in the united states this year. never in recent years have the holdings of the jobbers been as light as at present. undoubtedly there is an unusually large stock of tomatoes in packers' hands, but there are innumerable parties in all the great centers of trade ready to take hold freely at cents. at no time has the stock of extra brands been equal to the inquiry, and hence we have seen the anomaly of a range in prices of from cents to $ . per dozen. there is room for improvement in quality, as well as for methods of marketing the large production of harford county. a move in the right direction has been started by the forming of associations, which seek to build extensive warehouses and aid weak packers to carry stock, instead of forcing it upon a dull market. three million cases or seventy-two million cans means a supply of only one and two-fifths cans per capita per annum, or seven cans per annum for every family of five persons. with tomatoes retailing from to cents per can, the consumption could reach three times that quantity, and then each family would only find tomatoes upon its bill of fare once every fortnight. while many packers have failed to secure a fair return for their work, others have been well paid. some few have made heavy losses, and will, in the future, be less inclined to bet against wet weather, drought and frost. if general business is good during the first half of , the grocer can see no good reason why the stock of tomatoes should not go into consumption between cents and $ per dozen for standards. any marked advance would be sure to check demand, and, therefore, low prices must rule if the stock is absorbed prior to the receipt of packing. the year closes with maryland packed obtainable from to cents; new jersey and delaware, to cents; fancy brands, $ . to $ . , delivered on dock in new york. sweating apples. according to the popular science news, apples do not sweat after they are gathered in the autumn. here is an account of what takes place with them. the skin of a sound apple is practically a protective covering, and designed for a two-fold purpose: first, to prevent the ingress of air and moisture to the tender cellular structure of the fruit; and, second, to prevent the loss of juices by exudation. there is no such process as sweating in fruits. when men or animals sweat, they become covered with moisture passing through the skin; when an apple becomes covered with moisture, it is due to condensation of moisture from without. apples taken from trees in a cool day remain at the temperature of the air until a change to a higher temperature occurs, and then condensation of moisture from the warmer air circulating around the fruit occurs, just as moisture gathers upon the outside of an ice-pitcher in summer. this explains the whole matter; and the vulgar notion of fruits "sweating" should be dispelled from the mind. it is almost impossible to gather apples under such conditions of temperature that they will not condense moisture after being placed in barrels. it would be better if this result could be avoided, as dryness of fruit is essential to its protracted keeping. our northern autumns are characterized by changes from hot to cold, and these occur suddenly. the days are hot, and the nights cool, and this favors condensation. apples picked on a moderately cool day, and placed in a moderately cool shed, protected from the sun, will not gather moisture, and this is the best method to pursue when practicable. prunings. mr. n. atwell, one of the michigan commissioners, whose duty it is to look after the peach districts of that state and check if possible the ravages of the destructive disease known as "yellows," claims that there is no known remedy, and that the only safe plan is to uproot and burn the trees upon the first appearance of the disease. * * * * * if you are going to set a new orchard this spring, remember that it is an excellent thing to prepare a plan of the orchard, showing the position of each tree, its variety, etc. if a tree dies it can be replaced by one of the same sort. some fruit-raisers keep a book in which they register the age and variety of every tree in the orchard, together with any items in regard to their grafting, productiveness, treatment, etc., which are thought to be desirable. * * * * * cor. california rural press: the first generation of codling moth begins to fly about the first of may. to make sure gather some in the chrysalis state in march or april, put in a jar, and set the jar in a place where you will see it every day. when they begin to have wings, prepare your traps thus: the half of a kerosene can with the tin bent in at the top an inch; a half inch of kerosene in the can, a little flat lamp near the oil. the light reflected from the bright tin will draw the moth five rods at least. if your orchard is forty rods square, sixteen traps will do the work. the moth will fly about the light until it touches the oil. this will end it. * * * * * the industrial south has the following in relation to albemarle and nelson (virginia) apple orchards in the space of fifteen square miles: "what would you think of an orchard planted, if not since the war, as i think it was, a very short time before, and away up on the side of the blue ridge, that to look from below you would think of insuring your neck before setting out to it, producing eighteen hundred barrels? this was the produce of picked fruit, to say nothing of the fallen--enough to keep a big drying establishment running for months. these are true figures--and it is the property of a worthy citizen of richmond, who, in its management, has cause to exclaim "ab imo pectore," save me from my friends. then there is another from which the owner, with a dryer of his own, has sold five thousand dollars of the proceeds besides cider, vinegar, and brandy. there is yet another, that the lady-owner sold as the fruit hung in the orchard, for forty-five hundred dollars. the fruit in the area referred to brought over fifty thousand dollars, bought by the agent of a new york house, and doubtless much of it will reach europe." * * * * * prof. cook in the new york tribune: the rev. w. w. meech writes that he has seen in several papers of high standing "the beetle saperdabivitati, parent of the borer," described as a "a miller"--"a mistake very misleading to those who are seeking knowledge of insect pests." he adds that among hundreds of quince trees growing he has had but three touched by this enemy in eight years. he simply takes the precaution to keep grass and weeds away from the collar of the tree, "so that there is no convenient harbor for the beetle to hide in while at the secret work of egg-laying." he thinks a wrap of "petroleum paper around the collar" would be found a preventive, as it is not only disagreeable but hinders access to the place where the eggs are deposited. it is an unfortunate error to refer to a beetle as a moth. it would be better if all would recognize the distinction between "bug" and "beetle," and between "worms" and "larva," in writing popular articles. i notice that some of the editors of medical journals are referring to bacteria as "bugs." surely reform is needed. i am not so sure of mr. meech's remedy. i imagine that fortune, not his pains, is to be thanked for his grubless trees. i have known this borer to do very serious mischief where the most perfect culture was practised. the caustic wash is much safer than a petroleum wrap. the eggs are often laid high up on the trunk or even on the branches. nothing is better for the borers than the soap and carbolic acid mixture. [illustration] floriculture. gleanings by an old florist. smilax and its uses. smilax, as now used by florists, is but a very recent affair. although introduced first into europe from the cape of good hope as early as , it remained for the florist of our time to find out its great adaptability for decoration and other uses in his art or calling. to boston florists belong the credit of its first extensive culture and use, and for several years they may be said to have had the monopoly of its trade, and boston smilax, along with boston tea roses, which was pre-eminently the variety called the bon silene, was, for years, shipped to this and other cities. it is scarcely a decade of years ago, in this city, when a batch of one hundred strings could not be bought here, home-grown; now there would be no difficulty in getting thousands. like everything else of like character, the first introducers reaped a golden harvest, so far as price is concerned, having often obtained a dollar a string; while now, the standard price, even in mid winter, is $ per dozen, and often in quantity, it can be obtained at less. but where there was one string used then, there are now thousands. in olden times the florist was often put to his wits to find material to go around his made-up pieces and for relief as a green; now, everything green is smilax, and it must be confessed, that with the choice ferns, begonia leaves, and the like, that he used to have to prepare with, his work then was really often in better taste, so far as relief to flowers is concerned, with the old material than the new. but for the purpose of festooning buildings, churches, and the like, smilax is by all odds the very thing wanted, and as much ahead of the old-time evergreen wreathing, that we had to use, as the methods now in use for obtaining cut flowers are ahead of the old. it is hard to say what the florist could do without smilax, so indispensable has it become. there are now probably twenty of the principal growers of this city that have at least one house in smilax, who will cut not less than three thousand strings in a winter, while of the balance of smaller fry enough to make up the total to , strings per year. in times of scarcity of material, it is cut not over three feet long; again, when the supply exceeds the demand, the buyer will often get it six to nine feet long, and at a lower price than he can buy the short--supply and demand ruling price, as a rule, between $ and $ per dozen. the plant now under consideration is called, botanically, myrsiphyllum asparagoides; by common usage it is called smilax, although not even a member of the true smilax family, some of which are natives of this country. the plant seeds readily, hence every one who grows smilax may, by leaving two or three strings uncut, grow his own seed; it is then sure to be fresh--which is sometimes not the case when purchased. the seed is more likely to germinate if soaked twelve hours in warm water or milk before sowing. a bed may be formed any time of the year, but the usual custom is to prepare it so as to be ready to cut, say, in the fall, for the first time. take a pan or shallow box and sow the seed any time during the winter before march. when well up, so they can be handled, transplant into small pots, and from these shift into larger, say to three or four inch pots. keep the shoots pinched back so as to form a stout, bushy plant. during winter they will require an artificial temperature of not less than degrees. when summer comes they may be kept in the house or stand out of doors until the bed in which they are to grow is ready. this may be prepared any time most desirable, but if to cut first in the fall, so manage it that they may have two or three months to perfect their growth. the common practice is to give the whole house to the use of the plant, but this may be varied at pleasure, growing either the center bunch, the front bunch, or both, as may be desirable. the best soil is decayed sod from a pasture enriched with cow manure. it requires no benches to grow this plant; all that is necessary is to inclose the space designed by putting up boards one foot high to form a coping to hold the soil. into this the plants are set evenly over the entire space, in rows nine inches to one foot apart. at the time of planting, a stake is driven into and even with the soil at each plant, being careful to have them in true lines both ways, and driven deep enough to be quite firm; on the top of this stake is driven a small nail or hook. directly over each nail, in the rafter of the house, or a strip nailed to them for the purpose, is placed another nail, and between the two a cord similar to that used by druggists or the like--but green, if possible, in color, for obvious reasons--is stretched as taught as may be, so that when finished the whole house or space used is occupied by these naked strings, on which, as the growth proceeds, the plants entwine themselves. some care will be required at first to get them started, after which they will usually push on themselves. the most convenient height of the rafters above the soil is from four to ten feet, which will give long enough strings, and, what is important for quick growth, keep the plants when young not too far from the glass. in planting, some make a difference of a month or two in the time, so that the crop may not come in all at once; but usually the plants will vary some in their growth, and hence, by cutting the largest first, the same result is obtained. if a heat of degrees can be obtained as a minimum, and care is taken in keeping a moist, growing temperature, a crop can be taken off every three months at least. so as soon as ready to cut and a market can be obtained for the crop, strings should be strung again at once, leaving some of the smaller shoots when cutting for a starter of the next crop. like everything else, heavy cropping requires heavy manuring, and hence a rich compost should be added to the soil at each cutting. some plant their beds fresh every year, others leave them longer. the root is perennial in character, and consists of fleshy tubers, not unlike asparagus, and may be divided for the new beds; but the general practice is to grow new plants. always beware of buying old, dry roots, as they will sometimes refuse to grow, even if they look green and fresh. with many, in cutting, the practice is to cut clear through at the bottom, string and all, then by a deft movement of the hands the smilax is slipped from the string which, with the addition of a foot or two to tie again, is at once ready for the next, while others bring to market string and all, these being simply matters of practice or convenience. edgar sanders. * * * * * was noah's voyage an arktic expedition? * * * * * our new clubbing list for . the prairie farmer in connection with other journals. we offer more liberal terms than ever before to those who desire to take, in connection with the prairie farmer, either of the following weekly or monthly periodicals. in all cases the order for the prairie farmer and either of the following named journals must be sent together, accompanied by the money; but we do not require both papers to be sent to the same person or to the same post-office. we send specimen copies only of the prairie farmer. our responsibility for other publications ceases on the receipt of the first number; when such journals are not received within a reasonable time, notify us, giving date of your order, also full name and address of subscriber. weeklies. price of the two the two. for harper's weekly $ $ harper's bazar harper's young people new york tribune toledo blade chicago times chicago tribune chicago inter-ocean chicago journal peck's sun milwaukee sentinel western farmer (madison, wis.) burlington hawkeye the continent (weekly magazine) detroit free press, with supplement detroit free press, state edition louisville courier-journal st. louis globe-democrat st. louis republican scientific american interior (presbyterian) standard (baptist) advance (congregational) alliance new york independent christian union boston pilot (catholic) american bee journal florida agriculturist breeder's gazette witness (n. y.) methodist (n. y.) chicago news globe (boston) youth's companion weekly novelist ledger (chicago) american bee journal monthlies. harper's monthly $ $ atlantic monthly appleton's journal the century north american review popular science monthly lippincott's magazine godey's lady's book st. nicholas vick's illustrated magazine am. poultry journal (chicago) american bee journal gardener's monthly wide awake phrenological journal american agriculturist poultry world arthur's home magazine andrews' bazar frank leslie's popular monthly frank leslie's sunday magazine frank leslie's ladies' magazine our little ones peterson's magazine art amateur demorest's magazine dio lewis' monthly for clubbing price with any publication in the united states not included in the above list send us inquiry on postal card. * * * * * miscellaneous. one cent invested in a postal card and addressed as below will give to the writer full information as to the best lands in the united states now for sale; how he can buy them on the lowest and best terms, also the full text of the u. s. land laws and how to secure acres of government lands in northwestern minnesota and northeastern dakota. address: james b. power, land and emigration commissioner, st. paul, minn. * * * * * consumption. i have a positive remedy for the above disease; by its use thousands of cases of the worst kind and of long standing have been cured. indeed, so strong is my faith in its efficacy, that i will send two bottles free, together with a valuable treatise on this disease, to any sufferer. give express & p. o. address, dr. t. a. slocum, pearl st., n. y. * * * * * now is the time to subscribe for the prairie farmer. price only $ . per year is worth double in money. * * * * * publishers' notice. _the prairie farmer is printed and published by the prairie farmer publishing company, every saturday, at no. monroe street._ _subscription, $ . per year, in advance, postage prepaid. subscribers wishing their addresses changed should give their old as well as new addresses._ _advertising, cents per line on inside pages; cents per line on last page--agate measure; lines to the inch. no less charge than $ . ._ _all communications, remittances, etc., should be addressed to_ the prairie farmer publishing company, _chicago, ill._ * * * * * the prairie farmer entered at the chicago post office as second-class matter. chicago, january , . * * * * * when subscriptions expire. we have several calls for an explanation of the figures following the name of subscribers as printed upon this paper each week. the first two figures indicate the volume, and the last figure or figures the number of the last paper of that volume for which the subscriber has paid: example: john smith, -- . john has paid for the prairie farmer to the first of july of the present year, volume . any subscriber can at once tell when his subscription expires by referring to volume and number as given on first page of the paper. * * * * * [transcriber's note: original location of table of contents.] * * * * * . . the prairie farmer prospectus for . see inducements offered subscribe now. for forty-three years the prairie farmer has stood at the front in agricultural journalism. it has kept pace with the progress and development of the country, holding its steady course through all these forty-three years, encouraging, counseling, and educating its thousands of readers. it has labored earnestly in the interest of all who are engaged in the rural industries of the country, and that it has labored successfully is abundantly shown by the prominence and prestige it has achieved, and the hold it has upon the agricultural classes. its managers are conscious from comparison with other journals of its class, and from the uniform testimony of its readers, that it is foremost among the farm and home papers of the country. it will not be permitted to lose this proud position; we shall spare no efforts to maintain its usefulness and make it indispensable to farmers, stock-raisers, feeders, dairymen, horticulturalists, gardeners, and all others engaged in rural pursuits. it will enter upon its forty-fourth year under auspices, in every point of view, more encouraging than ever before in its history. its mission has always been, and will continue to be-- to discuss the most approved practices in all agricultural and horticultural pursuits. to set forth the merits of the best breeds of domestic animals, and to elucidate the principles of correct breeding and management. to further the work of agricultural and horticultural organization. to advocate industrial education in the correct sense of the term. to lead the van in the great contest of the people against monopolies and the unjust encroachments of capital. to discuss the events and questions of the day without fear or favor. to provide information concerning the public domain, western soil, climate, water, railroads, schools, churches, and society. to answer inquiries on all manner of subjects coming within its sphere. to furnish the latest and most important industrial news at home and abroad. to give full and reliable crop, weather, and market reports. to present the family with pure, choice, and interesting literature. to amuse and instruct the young folks. to gather and condense the general news of the day. to be, in brief, an indispensable and unexceptionable farm and home companion for the people of the whole country. the style and form of the paper are now exactly what they should be. the paper used is of superior quality. the type is bold and clear. the illustrations are superb. the departments are varied and carefully arranged. the editorial force is large and capable. the list of contributors is greatly increased, and embraces a stronger array of talent than is employed on any similar paper in this country. we challenge comparison with any agricultural journal in the land. the prairie farmer is designed for all sections of the country. in entering upon the campaign of , we urge all patrons and friends to continue their good works in extending the circulation of our paper. on our part we promise to leave nothing undone that it is possible for faithful, earnest work--aided by money and every needed mechanical facility--to do to make the paper in every respect still better than it has ever been before. * * * * * special notice to each subscriber who will remit us $ . between now and february st, , we will mail a copy of the prairie farmer for one year, and one of our new standard time commercial maps of the united states and canada--showing all the counties, railroads, and principal towns up to date. this comprehensive map embraces all the country from the pacific coast to eastern new brunswick, and as far north as the parallel of deg., crossing hudson's bay. british columbia; manitoba, with its many new settlements; and the line of the canadian pacific railway, completed and under construction, are accurately and distinctly delineated. it extends so far south as to include key west and more than half of the republic of mexico. it is eminently adapted for home, school, and office purposes. the retail price of the map alone is $ . . size, × inches. scale, about sixty miles to one inch. * * * * * read this. another special offer. [illustration] "the little detective." weighs / oz. to lbs. every housekeeper ought to have this very useful scale. the weight of article bought or sold may readily be known. required proportions in culinary operations are accurately ascertained. we have furnished hundreds of them to subscribers, and they give entire satisfaction. during january, , to any person sending us three subscribers, at $ . each, we will give one of these scales, and to each of the three subscribers ropp's calculator, no. . * * * * * renew! renew!! remember that every yearly subscriber, either new or renewing, sending us $ , receives a splendid new map of the united states and canada-- × inches--free. or, if preferred, one of the books offered in another column. it is not necessary to wait until a subscription expires before renewing. * * * * * we want agents in every locality. we offer very liberal terms and good pay. send for sample copies and terms to agents. * * * * * will you read about patrick barry, about the corn-root worm, about mistakes in drainage, about the change in prize rings at the fat stock show, about improvement in horses, about the value of corn for pork making, about fanny field's plymouth rocks, about the way to make the best bee hive, about that eccentric old fellow cavendish, about the every day life of the great darwin, about making home ornaments and nice things for the little folks? will you read the poems, the jokes, the news, the markets, the editorials, the answers to correspondents? in short, will you read the entire paper and then sit down and think it all over and see if you do not conclude that this single number is worth what the paper has cost you for the whole year? then tell your neighbors about it, show it to them and ask them to subscribe for it. tell them that they will also get for the $ a copy of our superb map. by doing this you can double our subscription list in a single week. will you? * * * * * the illinois state board of agriculture will hold a meeting at the sherman house in chicago, on the th of march next. the principal business of the meeting will be to complete arrangements for the next state fair and the fat stock show. * * * * * the annual meeting of the northern illinois horticultural society will be held at elgin tuesday, january d and continuing three days. kindred societies are invited to send delegates, and a large general attendance is solicited. further particulars will be gladly received by s. m. slade, president, elgin, or d. wilmot scott, secretary, galena. * * * * * the brooklyn board of health petitions congress to appropriate a sufficient amount of money to stamp out contagious pleuro-pneumonia and provide for the appointment of a number of veterinarians to inspect all herds in infected districts, to indemnify owners for cattle slaughtered by the government, and to forbid the movement of all cattle out of any infected state which will not take measures to stamp out the disease. * * * * * secretary l. a. goodman, of the missouri state horticultural society writes the prairie farmer that on the th of january the mercury at westport, wis., indicated degrees below zero, the lowest point ever recorded there. he adds: "the peaches are killed, as are the blackberries. cherries are injured very much and the raspberries also. the dry september checked the growth of the berries and sun-burned them some, and now the cold hurts them badly. apples are all right yet and prospects for good crop are excellent." * * * * * it may be of interest to many readers to know that the i. & st. l. r. r. will sell tickets from indianapolis and intermediate points to st. louis, to persons attending the meeting of the mississippi valley horticultural society, at one and one-third rates. mr. ragan informs us that this is the only railroad line from central indiana that offers a reduction of fare. the missouri pacific system of roads, including the wabash, and embracing about ten thousand miles of road, extending as far north and east as chicago, detroit and toledo, and as far south and west as new orleans, galveston and el paso, will return members in attendance, who have paid full fare over these lines, at one cent a mile, upon the certificate of the secretary of the society. the chicago & alton, c., b. & q., keokuk, st. l. & n. w., chicago, b. & k. c., illinois central, cairo short line, and hannibal & st. joe roads will return members on the same terms. the ohio & mississippi will sell tickets to st. louis and return at one and one-third fare, to members indorsed by the secretary. the louisville and nashville will give reduced rates to members applying to its general passenger agent, c. p. atmore, of louisville, ky. the wealth of the nation. the census bureau and bradstreet's agency have made from the most accurate examination possible an estimate of the wealth and business of the nation: aggregate wealth of the united states in was $ , , , (forty thousand and a half billions); the total amount of capital invested in business was $ , , , (over eight billions); and the number of persons engaged in commercial business was , . twenty-two per cent of all the business capital of the country is credited to the state of new york. massachusetts ranks second, pennsylvania third, ohio fourth, illinois fifth, and michigan sixth. the aggregate business capital of these six states was $ , , , , leaving to all the other states $ , , , . the total recorded number of traders in the united states in june, --those having distinctive position in the commercial or industrial community--was , ; a trifle over per cent were in the western states. for the united states as a whole the average amount of capital employed to each venture--as indicated by the aggregate of capital in the country invested in trade (as explained in the table compiled from the forthcoming census work) and the total number of individuals, firms, and corporations engaged in business--is, in round numbers, $ , . the wealth of the country is, or was june , , distributed as follows: millions. farms $ , residence and business real estate, capital employed in business, including water-power , railroads and equipment , telegraphs, shipping, and canals live stock, whether on or off farms, farming tools and machinery , household furniture, paintings, books, clothing, jewelry, household supplies of food, fuel, etc. , mines (including petroleum wells) and quarries, together with one-half of the annual product reckoned as the average supply on hand three-quarters of the annual product of agriculture and manufactures, and of the annual importation of foreign goods, assumed to be the average supply on hand , churches, schools, asylums, public buildings of all kinds, and other real estate exempt from taxation , specie miscellaneous items, including tools of mechanics ------- total $ , it will thus be seen that the farms of the united states comprise nearly one-fourth of its entire wealth. they are worth nearly double the combined capital and equipments of all the railroads, telegraphs, shipping, and canals; more than double all the household furniture, paintings, books, clothing, jewelry, and supplies of food, fuel, etc. the live stock is more valuable than all the church property, school houses, asylums, and public buildings of all kinds; more than all the mines, telegraph companies, shipping, and canals combined. it would take more than three times as much "hard" money as the nation possesses to purchase all these domestic animals. the farms and live stock together exceed the value of any two other interests in the country. contagious animal diseases. congress seems bound to act at once upon the question of protection to domestic animals from contagious diseases. the pressure brought to bear upon members is enormous, and cannot be ignored. the action of european states on swine importation from america, the restrictions on the landing of american cattle in england, and the strong effort being made there to prohibit their introduction altogether, the known existence of pleuro-pneumonia in several of the atlantic states, the unceasing clamor of our shippers and growers of live stock, all conspire to open the eyes of the average congressman to the fact that something must be done. mr. singleton, of illinois, must be something above or below the average congressman, if the report is correct that he does not believe pleuro-pneumonia exists anywhere within the borders of the united states, and that he is willing to back his non-belief by a thousand dollars forfeit, if an animal suffering from the disease can be shown him. the former owner of silver heels, and breeder of fine horses and cattle at his quincy farm, must have his eyes shaded and his ears obstructed by that broad brimmed hat, that has so long covered his silvered head and marble brow. "the world do move," nevertheless, and pleuro-pneumonia does prevail in this country to such an extent as to furnish a reasonable excuse for unfriendly legislation abroad, and we gain nothing by denying the fact, the allerton and singleton assertions to the contrary, notwithstanding. iowa state fair. at the late meeting of the iowa state agricultural society, president smith strongly advocated the permanent location of the state fair. he thought it had been hawked about long enough for the purpose of giving different cities a chance to skin the people. the legislature should aid the society in purchasing grounds. ample ground should be purchased, as the fair is growing, and they should not be governed solely by our present demands. secretary shaffer touched briefly on the weather of last summer, the acreage and yield of crops, the demonstration of the futility of trying to acclimatize southern seed-corn in the north, and the appointment of a state entomologist. he thought the state should assist the society in distributing its publications. the improvement of the mississippi river was briefly handled. the state of the corn during the past year, the seeding, the yield, etc., were summarized by months. the corn crop was a failure. the sorghum industry in its various bearings was discussed. iowa will yet, he said, produce its own sugar. the question was raised whether the state should not encourage the growth of northern cane. the sheep industry and its peril from worthless dogs was duly treated. this society was the first to insist on the necessity of legislation on this subject looking to the extermination of worthless dogs. the society proceeded to locate the fair for the next year. des moines offered the present grounds for per cent of the gate money. dubuque offered free grounds and $ , in money. the first ballot resulted in seventy-one votes for des moines and twenty-three for dubuque. officers were elected as follows: president, william l. smith, of oskalossa; vice-president, h. c. wheeler, of sac; secretary, john shaffer, of fairfield; treasurer, george h. marsh, of des moines. still another fat stock show. at the meeting of the indiana state board of agriculture last week, it was decided to hold a fat stock show at indianapolis some time in december of the present year. liberal premiums will be offered. the matter elicited a discussion of considerable length, and it was generally believed that the show, if properly managed, could be made a success. even if it failed to realize expenses the first year, the exhibition would be incalculably beneficial to the state. the election of new members to the board resulted as follows: first district, robert mitchell, of gibson county; second, samuel hargrave, of pike; third, j. q. a. seig, of harrison; fourth, w. b. seward, of monroe; eighth, w. s. dungan, of johnson; fourteenth, l. b. custer, of cass; fifteenth, w. a. banks, of la porte; sixteenth, r. m. lockhart, of dekalb. three fat stock shows in the west! true, the success of the chicago exhibit is having a wide influence. the live stock interests of the country are fully awakened to the important results from these shows. they are, indeed, educators of the highest character, and they stimulate to excellence unthought of by most farmers, ten years ago. chicago, kansas city, toronto, and now indianapolis! is there not room for a similar exhibition in the great stock state of iowa? why do we not hear from west liberty or cedar rapids? questions answered. f. j. st. clair, ursa, ill.--who was the first president to issue a thanksgiving proclamation? answer.--washington, in , on the adoption by the states of the constitution of the united states. subscriber, peotone, ill.--how many kinds of soils are there, and what crops are best suited to bottom and what to upland soils? answer.--there are really but two soils, agriculturally considered, fertile soils and barren soils. generally speaking, fertile soils are the result of the disintegration of mechanical forces and chemical agencies of limestone rocks; and barren soils--sandy soils--are produced by similar means, from rocks largely or wholly composed of silex or quartz. the mixture of these two give rise to soils of an infinite variety, almost, having many differing degrees of fertility, down to barrenness. but you have practically but one soil to deal with, a true limestone soil of high fertility, which has received considerable accessions from silicious rocks. your bottom lands do not differ materially from the upland, except that the former have received considerable vegetable matter, which the latter have lost. for the lowlands, corn, grass, and potatoes are the best crops; for the highlands, the small grains, sorghum, beans, etc. but provide as much vegetable matter for the highlands as your lowlands possess, and make the sum of mixture in both alike, and your highlands will grow corn, grass, and potatoes as well as the low. charles van meter, springfield, mo.--what is the best work on grape culture? my means are small, and i can not, of course, buy a work costing ten or twelve dollars, however good it may be. recommend, for this latitude, something good and cheap. answer.--for your needs you will find nothing better than hussman's grapes and wine, a single volume, which will be sent you from the prairie farmer office, on remittance of $ . . but there is something cheaper still, and very good, indeed, but covering different grounds from hussman. the grape catalogue of bush & son & meissner. you may obtain it by sending twenty-five cents to bush & son & meissner, bushberg, missouri. constant reader, chicago, ill.--i am thinking of going down, one of these days, to florida, with a view to go into oranges and make more money than i have, or lose it all. i have read a good deal about the seductive business, in florida, though but little of the details of cultivation in other countries. tell me where i can find something about how they manage in spain and the south of europe. answer.--most of the really valuable works on this subject are in foreign languages--french, spanish, or italian. however, for a wonder, a late publication of the department of state, at washington--reports from the consuls of the united states, no. --contains a valuable and lengthy paper on orange growing at valencia, spain, contributed by the consul there, which you may perhaps obtain through your member of congress. j. d. slade, columbus, ga.--i am interested in a large plantation near this city with a friend who is a practical farmer. we have decided to abandon the planting of cotton to a great extent and adopt some other crops. having concluded to try the castor bean, i wish to ask some information. . will you give me the names of parties engaged in the cultivation of the crop in illinois and wisconsin? . where can i get the beans for planting? . describe the soil, mode of preparation, planting, and cultivation, and give me such other information as we may need. answer.-- . winter wheat and corn have, to a very large extent, taken the place of castor beans and tobacco in the agriculture of southern illinois. as for wisconsin, we question whether a bushel of castor beans was grown there last year. the two sections where they are now mostly cultivated are in southwestern missouri, by the old settlers, and in middle and southern kansas, by the first comers. for information on the whole subject, write the secretary of the kansas state board of agriculture for the quarterly report issued two or three years ago, which was mostly devoted to castor-bean culture. the secretary's address is topeka, kansas. . of the plant seed company, st. louis, and also valuable information--that city being the chief market for the castor beans. . the soil best suited to the crop is a light, rich, sandy loam, though any dry and fertile soil will yield good crops. for some reason not clearly understood, the castor bean has been found a powerful and energetic agent in improving some, if not all soils, the experience in kansas being, that land which previously refused to yield good crops of wheat or corn either, after being cultivated two or three years in castor beans has borne great crops. this has been attributed to the completeness and the long time the crop shades the ground, and also to the long tap root of the plant, which makes it a crop of all others, suited to dry soils, and hot climate. after preparing the land as for corn, it should be laid off so the plants will stand, for your latitude, five feet each way. three or four seeds are usually planted, but when the beans are five to six inches high, and out of the way of cut-worms, they are thinned to one. the cultivation is after the manner of indian corn, and the planting should be at the same time. the beans for your latitude will begin to ripen late in july, and continue to the end of the season, when the plants are killed by severe frosts, light frosts doing scarcely any damage. in harvesting, a spot of hard ground is prepared and the pods as gathered are thrown on the ground and dried out in the sun. and here is where the trouble with making a successful and profitable crop comes in. the beans must be kept in the dry from the time of gathering the pods--one soaking rain always seriously damaging, and frequently destroying the merchantable value of so much of the harvest as happens to be on the ground. as in the case of broom corn, the hot, dry, and protracted late summer and fall months of that state, afford the kansas farmer something like a monopoly of the castor bean crop. it is nevertheless giving place to corn and wheat. letter from champaign. the snow continues to accumulate, the last having fallen before midnight the th. there were only about two inches, but it is drifting this morning, for all it is worth, before a gale from the west. the first and second snows stay where they were put at first, but the subsequent ones are in drifts or scattered all abroad, in the many snows and the excellence of the sleighing, this winter resembles ' -' , but there is more snow and the temperature is very much more severe. i suppose there is well-nigh eighteen inches now on the ground, something quite unusual in this latitude. let us hope it will stay sometime longer yet, and save the fall wheat. the intensely cold weather of last week was rough on stock of all kinds and in all conditions, and particularly hard on that portion having short rations. but i have seen many worse storms and much harder weather for stock; none however in which the fruits, small or large, suffered worse. at least that is the general judgment at the present. peach buds are killed of course, and it will be lucky if the trees have escaped. all blackberries, but the snyder, are dead down to the snow line--and some think the snyder has not escaped, for reasons given further on. examinations made of the buds of bartlett, duchess, howell, tyson, bigarreau, seckel, buffum, easter buerre, and others yesterday, showed them all to be about equally frosted and blackened, and probably destroyed. last year our pears suffered a good deal from the sleet of the second of february, which clung to the trees ten days, and the crop was a light one. this year, if appearances can be trusted, there will be less. in the many intense freezes of the last twenty-five years, i have never known pear buds to be seriously injured; last year being a marked exception and this still more so. hardy grapes have probably suffered as much, and the tender varieties are completely done for. how well the may cherry has resisted the low temperature remains to be seen. as for the sweet cherries, it is probably the end of them. there were buds set for an unusually abundant crop of apples in --the presidential year. the hardy varieties have escaped material damage, no doubt, but some of the tender eastern varieties, like the baldwin, roxbury russet, in all reasonable probability, have not only lost their buds but their lives also. * * * * * the disasters following the very low temperature of last week have no doubt been increased by the immaturity of the wood, due to the cool, moist summer. if summers like those of - are not warm enough to ripen the corn crop, buds and wood of fruit trees will not acquire a maturity that resists intense cold as we see by our experience with pears, grapes, and peaches in the fruit season of , and which is almost sure to be repeated with aggravations in . possibly the ground being but lightly frozen and protected by a good coat of snow, may save the apple trees and others from great disaster following thirty to thirty-five degrees below zero, when falling on half ripened wood, but the reasonable fear is that orchards on high land in northern and central illinois, have been damaged more than last year. if so perhaps it were better after all, since it will open the eyes of a great many to the mistakes in location heretofore made, and lead them to put out future orchards where they ought to be. * * * * * if my word of warning could reach those engaged in taking measures at washington to prevent the spread of epidemic and infectious diseases in our stock, it would be "go slow." if the wishes of a few veterinarians are met and the demands of a raft of pauper lawyers and politicians are complied with, it will result in the creation of a half dozen commissions. each one of them, as previous ones have done, will find sufficient reason for their continuance and reports will be made that half the live stock in the country, south and west, is either in danger from or suffering under some of the many forms of epidemic or infectious diseases--and by the way, what justice is there in putting detmers out of the way, and clinging to salmon and laws, both of whom indorsed nearly every thing the former did? beware of commissions, and above all of putting men upon them whose bread and butter is of more consequence to them than the stock interest, vast as it is. b. f. j. wayside notes. by a man of the prairie. of the , , packages of seeds distributed by the united states agricultural department during last year more than , , packages were furnished to congressmen, and i notice that some of the papers are making unfavorable comments on the fact. now i do not discover anything that seems to me radically wrong in this practice of the department of agriculture, or rather in the instructions under which the practice prevails. there are some men, mostly seedsmen, and some publishers, mostly those interested in securing patronage through seed premiums, or which are run in the interest of seed dealers, who grumble a great deal about this matter, and who sneer at the department and derisively call it the "government seed store." but i imagine if the public was thoroughly informed of the good the department has done by its seed distributions, it would have a great deal better opinion of this branch than it now has, and i wish mr. dodge, or some other efficient man, who knows all about it from the beginning would give to the country a complete history of what has been done in the way of introducing and disseminating new seeds, plants, and cuttings. i believe if the whole truth were told it would put an end to ridicule and denunciation. i am aware that there have been some things connected with this work that were not exactly correct. there may have been some helping of friends in the purchase of seeds; there may have been some noxious weed seeds sent out to the detriment of the country; congressmen may have used their quota of seeds for the purpose of keeping themselves solid with their constituents. but, after all, it is my candid opinion the seed distributing branch of the department has been an untold blessing to the farmers of this country. as to this matter of giving a large proportion of the seeds to congressmen, i have not much fault to find about that either, though perhaps a better system of distribution might be devised. i have yet to learn that an application to a congressman for seed has been disregarded, if the seeds were to be had, whether that application came from a political friend or a political foe. and i do wish that farmers generally would make more frequent application to the members from their respective districts than they do. it will be money in their pockets if they will keep posted in what the department has to distribute which is valuable, or new and promising, and solicit samples either from congressmen or direct from the commissioner of agriculture. * * * * * "put your thumb down there," said an experienced orchardist to me the other day. we were talking about the recently started theory that the best bearing orchards are to be found on the low lands of the prairies. "you just wait and see if these brag orchards ever bear another crop! it will be as it was after the severe winter of and ' , when the following autumn many of our orchards bore so profusely. the succeeding year the majority of the trees were as dead as smelts, and the balance never had vigor enough afterward to produce a decent crop. once before," said he, "we had a similar experience in illinois. put your thumb down at this place and watch for results. do not say anything about this in your wayside blusterings, at least as coming from me," and of course i don't. but i wanted the readers of the prairie farmer to help me watch with fear and trembling for the fulfillment of this horticultural prophesy, so i straightway make a note of it and ask you all to "put your thumbs down here" and wait. my friend's theory is that the severe cold of last winter destroyed a large portion of the roots of these trees; that the root pruning caused the extra fruitfulness, but proved too severe for the vitality of the trees to withstand, and that next year the bulk of the trees will not leaf out at all; and further that the old theory as taught by kennecott, whitney, edwards, and the rest of the "fathers," that apple trees cannot thrive with wet feet, was the correct theory then and is the correct theory now. he would still plant on high, well drained land. * * * * * my neighbor up at the "corners" has a large flock of grade cotswold sheep--cotswolds crossed on large native merinos. he keeps them to produce early lambs for the chicago market. for the last three or four years he has received, on an average, four dollars per head for his lambs, taken at his farm. it is a profitable and pleasant sort of farming. some day i may tell how he manages, in detail. * * * * * remember _that_ $ . _pays for_ the prairie farmer _one year, and the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ [illustration] poultry notes. poultry-raisers. write for your paper. chicken chat. let me see--it was sometime during the month of december that the "man of the prairie" went wandering all over the village, and even scoured the country round about the village in search of an extra dozen eggs, and went home mad, and, man fashion, threatened to kill off every hen on the place if they didn't proceed to do their duty like hens and fellow citizens. it was also during that same december that the fifty plymouth rock hens that we are wintering in the barn cellar, laid, regardless of the weather, eggs--an average of nearly fifteen eggs apiece. "is it a fact that the corn is too poor for manufacture into eggs?" i don't know anything about the corn in your locality, but i do know that our plymouth rocks had whole corn for supper exactly thirty-one nights during the month of december--not western corn, but sound, well-ripened, northern corn, that sells in our market for twenty cents more per bushel than western corn. i also know that hens fed through the winter on corn alone will not lay enough to pay for the corn, but in our climate the poultry-raiser may feed corn profitably fully one-half the time. when the morning feed consists of cooked vegetable and bran or shorts, and the noon meal of oats or buckwheat, the supper may be of corn. i believe the analytical fellows tell us that corn won't make eggs, and i am sure i don't know whether it will or not, and i don't much care; but i know that hens will eat corn, when they can get it, in preference to any other grain, and i know that it "stands by" better than anything else, and that it is a heat-producing grain, and consequently just the thing to feed when the days are short and the nights long, and the mercury fooling around degrees below zero. hens need something besides egg material; they must have food to keep up the body heat, and the poultry-raiser who feeds no corn in winter blunders just as badly as the one who feeds all corn. * * * * * talking about corn for fowls reminds me that the agricultural papers are full of wails from farmers who were taken in last season on seed corn. if they had followed the plan of an old farmer of my acquaintance they would not now be obliged to mourn a corn crop cut off by frost. when this old chap went to farming forty years ago he bought a peck of seed corn of the northern yellow flint variety, and as he "don't believe in running after all the new seeds that are advertised in the papers," he is still raising the same variety--only it ripens some three weeks earlier than it did then. every fall he does through his field and selects his seed corn from the best of the earliest ripened ears; when these ears are husked one or two husks are left on each ear, and then the husks, with the ears attached, are braided together until there are fifteen or twenty ears in a string. these strings of seed corn are hung up in the sun for a fortnight or so, and then hung from the rafters in a cool, dry loft over the wood-shed; there it remains till seed time comes again, and it never fails to grow. fanny field. business still running. "my own hens closed out business six weeks ago," not long since said "man of the prairie." he mentioned also, that he had not much faith in pure bred poultry. now he severely complains that no eggs can be found among the farmers nor in village stores. i will not say that pure strains of poultry are better layers than common, but, when one pays a good price for poultry, it is an incentive to provide good shelter and bestow upon them some manifestations of interest which would not be done with the common fowls. herein may lay in part the secret of better returns from pure strains. years ago our chickens 'closed out business' for several months. of late this procedure is unknown. we crossed our best common hens with plymouth rock stock, paying a good price. we furnished comfortable quarters, gave variety of feed, and at present writing the lady-like biddies furnish enough eggs for our own use and some to sell to stores and neighbors. we still have a few common hens (not caring to have all pure) yet we find that with same care and attention, the purer strains give best returns. skeptical, like a good many others, we were loth to experiment. thanks to fanny field for her wise and instructive poultry writings. in a recent number she seemed to be in doubt whether her writings were heeded or doing any one good. let me say in behalf of myself and a few others, that a few married ladies now have pin money by following her instructions, who, before, had to go to their lords (husbands) when they wanted a little money, which was sometimes begrudgingly given, and often times not at all. bachelor & maid. council bluffs, iowa. [illustration] the apiary. the best hive. in answer to many inquiries as to the best hive, we will here state that is a mere matter of choice. many good movable frame hives are now in use, free from patents, and while we prefer the langstroth, there may be others just as good. apiarists differ as to what constitutes the best hive. novices in bee culture generally think that they can invent a better hive than any in use, but after trying their invention for awhile, conclude that they are not as wise as they thought they were. many hives are patented yearly by persons ignorant of the nature of the honey-bee, and few, if any, are received with favor by intelligent apiarists. the requisites for a good hive are durability, simplicity, ease of construction and of working, and pleasing to the eye. we think the langstroth embodies these. it was invented by the father of modern bee-culture. he gave to the world the movable frame; without its use, we might as well keep our bees in hollow logs, as our fathers did. different sizes of movable frames are now in use, but two-thirds of the apiarists prefer the langstroth. upon many farms, bees may be found in salt barrels, nail-kegs, etc., doing little good for their owner, while if they were put into hives, where the surplus could be obtained in good shape, they would become a source of income. specialists either manufacture their own hives, or buy them in the flat, in the lumber region. as the farmer may need but a few hives, he may find leisure in winter to make them. every farmer needs a workshop, and if he has none, should provide himself with one. it need not be large, and can be made quite inexpensively. in his barn, if it is large, partition off a room for a workshop × feet, and if he not be blessed with a good large barn, why a thousand feet of common boards, and a load of good stout saplings, with a little mechanical skill and some muscle, will provide a very good farm workshop. get a few tools, such as a saw, square, plane, hatchet, a brace, and a few bits, and before twelve months pass away you will wonder how you ever managed to do without one before; many a singletree or doubletree can be made, or broken implements repaired during leisure, or the rainy days of late winter or spring, and the boys will go there to try their hands, and develop their mechanical skill; exercising both brain and muscle. remember that the school of industry is second to no university in the land. now for the hives; in the first place you need a pattern. purchase of some dealer or manufacturer of apiarian supplies, a good langstroth hive complete with section boxes. then get a couple of hundred feet (more or less) of ten inch stock boards, mill dressed on both sides, then with your pattern hive, workshop, and tools, you are master of the situation. after your hives are made, don't forget to paint them; it is economy to paint hives as well as dwelling houses. langstroth hive. for the benefit of those who may not be able to obtain a pattern hive, or frame, we will give the dimensions. the sides of the langstroth hive are inches wide, by inches long, the ends are inches long, the back end the same width as the sides; front end, / inches narrower, and recesses or sets back - / inches from portico, all / inches thick. the langstroth frame is - / × - / inches outside measure. the length of top bar of frame is - / inches, the frame stuff is all / wide, the top bar is / × / , and is v shaped on the under side for a comb guide--the upright pieces / × / , the bottom pieces / × / . the above are the dimensions of an eight frame hive. strips / × / inches are nailed on the outside of the hive / inch from the upper edge, and the cap or upper hive rests upon them. we make the cap - / inches long by - / inches wide in the clear, and ten inches high. some apiarists omit the porticos, but we like them, and the bees appear to enjoy them. right angled triangle blocks, made right and left, are used to regulate the entrance. by changing the position of these blocks on the alighting board the size of the entrance may be varied, and the bees always directed to it by the shape of the block, without any loss of time in searching for it--in case of robbing the hive, the hive can be entirely closed with them. a board was formerly used to cover the frames, but is now generally abandoned, apiarists preferring duck, enameled cloth, or heavy muslin. mrs. l. harrison. * * * * * no safer remedy can be had for coughs and colds, or any trouble of the throat, than "_brown's bronchial troches_." price cents. _sold only in boxes._ * * * * * miscellaneous. arm & hammer brand to farmers.--it is important that the soda or saleratus they use should be _white_ and _pure_, in common with all similar substances used for food. [illustration: church & co's soda & saleratus] in making bread with yeast, it is well to use about half a teaspoonful of the "arm and hammer" brand soda or saleratus at the same time, and thus make the bread rise better and prevent it becoming sour by correcting the natural acidity of the yeast. dairymen and farmers should use only the "arm and hammer" brand for cleaning and keeping milk-pans sweet and clean. _to insure obtaining only the_ "arm and hammer" _brand soda or saleratus, buy it in_ "pound _or_ half-pound packages," _which bear our name and trade-mark, as inferior goods are sometimes substituted for the_ "arm and hammer" _brand when bought in bulk._ * * * * * "the best is the cheapest." engines saw mills, threshers, horse powers, (for all sections and purposes.) write for free pamphlet and prices to the aultman & taylor co., mansfield, ohio. * * * * * the famous easy-running monarch lightning sawing machine it beats the world for sawing logs or family stove wood. sent on days' test trial. [illustration] the boy in the picture on the left is sawing up logs into -inch lengths, to be split into stovewood for family use. this is much the best and cheapest way to get out your firewood, because the -inch blocks are very easily split up, a good deal easier and quicker than the old-fashioned way of cutting the logs into -feet lengths, splitting it into cordwood, and from that sawing it up with a buck saw into stovewood. we sell a large number of machines to farmers and others for just this purpose. a great many persons who had formerly burned coal have stopped that useless expense since getting our machine. most families have one or two boys, years of age and up, who can employ their spare time in sawing up wood just as well as not. the monarch lightning sawing machine will save your paying money and board to one hired man and perhaps two men. the boy at the right in the picture is sawing up cordwood in a buck frame. you can very easily use our machine in this way if you have cordwood on hand that you wish to saw up into suitable lengths for firewood. a boy sixteen years old can work the machine all day and not get any more tired than he would raking hay. the machine runs very easily, so easily, in fact, that after giving the crank half a dozen turns, the operator may let go and the machine will run itself for three or four revolutions. farmers owning standing timber cannot fail to see the many advantages of this great labor-saving and money-saving machine. if you prefer, you can easily go directly into the woods and easily saw the logs into -inch lengths for your family use, or you can saw them into -foot lengths, to be split into cordwood, when it can be readily hauled off to the village market. many farmers are making a good deal of money with this machine in employing the dull months of the year in selling cordwood. it makes a great difference in labor and money both in using our machine, because you get away with a second man. it takes two men to run the old-fashioned cross-cut saw, and it makes two backs ache every day they use it. not so with our saw. we offer $ , for a sawing machine that is easier operated and faster running than ours. every farmer should own our machine. it will pay for itself in one season. easily operated by a sixteen-year-old boy. lumbermen and farmers should get the best--get the cheapest--get the monarch lightning sawing machine. e. dutter, hicksville, o., writes:--it runs so easy that it is just fun to saw wood. c. a. cole, mexico, n. y., writes:--with this machine i sawed off an elm log, twenty-one inches in diameter, in one minute, forty-three seconds. z. g. hege, winston, n. c., writes:--i have shown your machine to several farmers, and all pronounce it a perfect success. wm. dillenback, dayton, tex., writes:--i am well pleased with the monarch lightning sawing machine. my boys can saw with all ease. l. w. yost, seneca, kan., writes:--i will bet $ that i can saw as much with this machine as any two men can with the old-fashioned cross-cut saw. t. k. buck, mt. vernon, ill., writes:--i have given the monarch a fair trial, and can truly say it is all you claim for it, a complete success, enabling a boy to do the work of two strong men, and indeed, more. i would not take $ for the monarch and be deprived of the privilege of having another like it. i sawed off a twenty-inch solid water oak log twelve times yesterday in forty-five minutes. j. m. crawford. columbia, s. c., writes:--i tried the monarch on an oak log to-day before twenty farmers. all said it worked perfectly. n. b.--we are selling six times as many machines as any other firm, simply because our machine gives perfect satisfaction. our factory is running day and night to fill orders. send in your order at once. the best is the cheapest. our agent sold four machines in one day. another sold twenty-eight in his township. another agent cleared $ in one week. be sure and mention this paper. we wish a live, wide-awake agent in every county in the united states and canada. write for latest illustrated catalogue giving special terms and scores of testimonials. monarch manufacturing co. e. randolph street, chicago, ill. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ scientific. some gossip about darwin. the last number of the american naturalist presents the following from david s. jorden, of bloomington, indiana. it is one of those gossipy bits about the great scientist that every body enjoys reading. in a recent visit to england, the writer strolled into the village of down in kent, and talked with some of the villagers in regard to mr. darwin, whose beautiful home is just outside the little town. some of this talk, although in itself idle and valueless, may have an interest to readers, as showing how a great man looks to his smaller neighbors. the landlord of the "george inn" said that "all the people wished to have mr. darwin buried in down, but the government would not let them. it would have helped the place so much. it would have brought hosts of people down to see his grave. especially it would have helped the hotel business which is pretty dull in winter time. "mr. darwin was a very fine-looking man. he had a high forehead and wore a long beard. still, if you had met him on the street, perhaps, you would not have taken much notice of him unless you knew that he was a clever man." "sir john lubbock (darwin's friend and near neighbor) is a very clever man, too, but not so clever nor so remarkable-looking as mr. darwin. he is very fond of hants (ants), and plants, and things." at keston, three miles from down, the landlady of the grayhound had never heard of mr. darwin until after his death. there was then considerable talk about his being buried in westminster, but nothing was said of him before. several persons had considerable to say of mr. darwin's extensive and judicious charity to the poor. to mr. parslow, for many years his personal servant, mr. darwin gave a life pension of £ , and the rent of the handsome "home cottage" in down. during the time of a water famine in that region, he used to ride about on horseback to see who needed water, and had it brought to them at his own expense from the stream at st. mary's cray. "he was," said mr. parslow, "a very social, nice sort of a gentleman, very joking and jolly indeed; a good husband and a good father and a most excellent master. even his footmen used to stay with him as long as five years. they would rather stay with him than take a higher salary somewhere else. the cook came there while young and stayed there till his death, nearly thirty years later. "mrs darwin is a pleasant lady, a year older than her husband. their boys are all jolly, nice young fellows. all have turned out so well, not one of them rackety, you know. seven children out of the ten are now living. "george darwin is now a professor in oxford. he was a barrister at first; had his wig and gown and all, but had to give it up on account of bad health. he would have made a hornament to the profession. "francis darwin is a doctor, and used to work with his father in the greenhouse. he is soon to marry a lady who lectures on botany in oxford. "for the first twenty years after mr. darwin's return from south america, his health was very bad--much more than later. he had a stomach disease which resulted from sea-sickness while on the voyage around the world. mr. parslow learned the watercure treatment and treated mr. darwin in that system, for a long time, giving much relief. "mr. darwin used to do his own writing but had copyists to get his work ready for the printer. he was always an early man. he used to get up at half past six. he used to bathe and then go out for a walk all around the place. then parslow used to get breakfast for him before the rest of the family came down. he used to eat rapidly, then went to his study and wrote till after the rest had breakfast. then mrs. darwin came in and he used to lie half an hour on the sofa, while she or someone else read to him. then he wrote till noon, then went out for an hour to walk. he used to walk all around the place. later in life, he had a cab, and used to ride on horseback. then after lunch at one, he used to write awhile. afterwards he and mrs. darwin used to go to the bedroom, where he lay on a sofa and often smoked a cigarette while she read to him. after this he used to walk till dinner-time at five. before the family grew up, they used to dine early, at half-past one, and had a meat-tea at half-past six. "sometimes there were eighteen or twenty young darwins of different families in the house. four-in-hand coaches of young darwins used sometimes to come down from london. mr. darwin liked children. they didn't disturb him in the least. there were sometimes twenty or thirty pairs of little shoes to be cleaned of a morning, but there were always plenty of servants to do this. "the gardener used to bring plants into his room often of a morning, and he used to tie bits of cotton on them, and try to make them do things. he used to try all sorts of seeds. he would sow them in pots in his study. "there were a quantity of people in westminster abbey when he was buried. mr. parslow and the cook were among the chief mourners and sat in the jerusalem chamber. the whole church was as full of people as they could stand. there was great disappointment in down that he was not buried there. he loved the place, and we think that he would rather have rested there had he been consulted." * * * * * miscellaneous. to our readers. the prairie farmer is the oldest, most reliable, and the leading agricultural journal of the great northwest, devoted exclusively to the interests of the farmer, gardener, florist, stock breeder, dairyman, etc., and every species of industry connected with that great portion of the people of the world, the producers. now in the forty-second year of its existence, and never, during more than two score years, having missed the regular visit to its patrons, it will continue to maintain supremacy as a standard authority on matters pertaining to agriculture and kindred productive industries, and as a fresh and readable family and fireside journal. it will from time to time add new features of interest, securing for each department the ablest writers of practical experience. the prairie farmer will discuss, without fear or favor, all topics of interest properly belonging to a farm and fireside paper, treat of the most approved practices in agriculture, horticulture, breeding, etc.; the varied machinery, implements, and improvements in same, for use both in field and house; and, in fact, everything of interest to the agricultural community, whether in field, market, or home circle. it will give information upon the public domain, western soils, climate, etc.; answer inquiries on all manner of subjects which come within its sphere; give each week, full and reliable market, crop, and weather reports; present the family with choice and interesting literature; amuse and instruct the young folks: and, in a word, aim to be, in every respect, an indispensable and unexceptionable farm and fireside companion. terms of subscription and 'club rates': one copy, year, postage paid $ . two copies, " " " . five " " sent at one time . ten " " sent at one time, and one to club getter . twenty " " sent at one time, and one to club getter . address the prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. ill. * * * * * this elegant ring given away [illustration] this elegant k rolled gold wedding ring, equal in appearance to a $ ring, free to all. wishing to at once secure a large number of new subscribers to our well known literary and family paper, backlog sketches, and knowing that all who once read it will become regular subscribers, we make this most liberal offer to induce all to subscribe, firmly believing that in the future we shall be benefited in the increased business it will bring us. for only cents we will send backlog sketches three months on trial, and we will send every subscriber, absolutely free, this elegant k rolled gold ring. for $ , we send backlog sketches a year and send every subscriber free, a beautiful ring, warranted solid gold. backlog sketches is a large, page, illustrated literary paper, size harper's weekly, every issue being filled with the most charming stories and sketches and choicest miscellany. it is alone worth double the subscription price. subscribe now. sample paper for stamp. address backlog publishing co., augusta, maine cut this out. it will not appear again. the above liberal offer, by a reliable firm, gives all a chance to get a valuable ring free. subscribe now, before you forget it. * * * * * gold medal, paris, . [illustration] baker's breakfast cocoa. warranted _absolutely pure cocoa_, from which the excess of oil has been removed. it has _three times the strength_ of cocoa mixed with starch, arrowroot or sugar, and is therefore far more economical. it is delicious, nourishing, strengthening, easily digested, and admirably adapted for invalids as well as for persons in health. sold by grocers everywhere. w. baker & co., dorchester, mass. * * * * * a dangerous ambuscade. discovered barely in time--the most deceptive and luring of modern evils graphically described. (_syracuse journal._) something of a sensation was caused in this city yesterday by a rumor that one of our best-known citizens was about to publish a statement concerning some unusual experiences during his residence in syracuse. how the rumor originated it is impossible to say, but a reporter immediately sought dr. s. g. martin, the gentleman in question, and secured the following interview: "what about this rumor, doctor, that you are going to make a public statement of some important matters?" "just about the same as you will find in all rumors--some truth; some fiction. i had contemplated making a publication of some remarkable episodes that have occurred in my life, but have not completed it as yet." "what is the nature of it, may i inquire?" "why, the fact that i am a human being instead of a spirit. i have passed through one of the most wonderful ordeals that perhaps ever occurred to any man. the first intimation i had of it was several years ago, when i began to feel chilly at night and restless after retiring. occasionally this would be varied by a soreness of the muscles and cramps in my arms and legs. i thought, as most people would think, that it was only a cold and so paid as little attention to it as possible. shortly after this i noticed a peculiar catarrhal trouble and my throat also became inflamed. as if this were not variety enough i felt sharp pains in my chest, and a constant tendency to headache." "why didn't you take the matter in hand and check it right where it was?" "why doesn't everybody do so? simply because they think it is only some trifling and passing disorder. these troubles did not come all at once and i thought it unmanly to heed them. i have found, though, that every physical neglect must be paid for and with large interest. men can not draw drafts on their constitution without honoring them sometime. these minor symptoms i have described, grew until they were giants of agony. i became more nervous; had a strange fluttering of the heart, an inability to draw a long breath and an occasional numbness that was terribly suggestive of paralysis. how i could have been so blind as not to understand what this meant i can not imagine." "and did you do nothing?" "yes, i traveled. in the spring of i went to kansas and colorado, and while in denver, i was attacked with a mysterious hemorrage of the urinary organs and lost twenty pounds of flesh in three weeks. one day after my return i was taken with a terrible chill and at once advanced to a very severe attack of pneumonia. my left lung soon entirely filled with water and my legs and body became twice their natural size. i was obliged to sit upright in bed for several weeks in the midst of the severest agony, with my arms over my head, and constant fear of suffocation." "and did you still make no attempt to save yourself?" "yes, i made frantic efforts. i tried everything that seemed to offer the least prospect of relief. i called a council of doctors and had them make an exhaustive chemical and microscopical examination of my condition. five of the best physicians of syracuse and several from another city said i must die! "it seemed as though their assertion was true for my feet became cold, my mouth parched, my eyes wore a fixed glassy stare, my body was covered with a cold, clammy death sweat, and i read my fate in the anxious expressions of my family and friends." "but the _finale_?" "came at last. my wife, aroused to desperation, began to administer a remedy upon her own responsibility and while i grew better very slowly, i gained ground surely until, in brief, i have no trace of the terrible bright's disease from which i was dying, and am a perfectly well man. this may sound like a romance, but it is true, and my life, health and what i am are due to warner's safe cure, which i wish was known to and used by the thousands who i believe, are suffering this minute as i was originally. does not such an experience as this justify me in making a public statement?" "it certainly does. but then bright's disease is not a common complaint, doctor." "not common! on the contrary it is one of the most common. the trouble is, few people know they have it. it has so few marked symptoms until its final stages that a person may have it for years, each year getting more and more in its power and not suspect it. it is quite natural i should feel enthusiastic over this remedy while my wife is even more so than i am. she knows of its being used with surprising results by many ladies for their own peculiar ailments, over which it has singular power." the statement drawn out by the above interview is amply confirmed by very many of our most prominent citizens, among them being judge reigel, and col. james s. goodrich, of the times, while gen. dwight h. bruce and rev. prof. w. p. coddington, d. d., give the remedy their heartiest indorsement. in this age of wonders, surprising things are quite common, but an experience so unusual as that of dr. martin's and occurring here in our midst, may well cause comment and teach a lesson. it shows the necessity of guarding the slightest approach of physical disorder and by the means which has been proven the most reliable and efficient. it shows the depth to which one can sink and yet be rescued and it proves that few people need suffer if these truths are observed. * * * * * to preserve the health use the magneton appliance co.'s magnetic lung protector! price only $ . they are priceless to ladies, gentlemen, and children with weak lungs; no case of pneumonia or croup is ever known where these garments are worn. they also prevent and cure heart difficulties, colds, rheumatism, neuralgia, throat troubles, diphtheria, catarrh, and all kindred diseases. will wear any service for three years. are worn over the under-clothing. catarrh, it is needless to describe the symptoms of this nauseous disease that is sapping the life and strength of only too many of the fairest and best of both sexes. labor, study, and research in america, europe, and eastern lands, have resulted in the magnetic lung protector, affording cure for catarrh, a remedy which contains no drugging of the system, and with the continuous stream of magnetism permeating through the afflicted organs, must restore them to a healthy action. we place our price for this appliance at less than one-twentieth of the price asked by others for remedies upon which you take all the chances, and we especially invite the patronage of the many persons who have tried drugging the stomachs without effect. how to obtain this appliance. go to your druggist and ask for them. if they have not got them, write to the proprietors, enclosing the price, in letter at our risk, and they will be sent to you at once by mail, post paid. send stamp for the "new departure in medical treatment without medicine," with thousands of testimonials, the magneton appliance co., state street, chicago, ill. note.--send one dollar in postage stamps or currency (in letter at our risk) with size of shoe usually worn, and try a pair of our magnetic insoles, and be convinced of the power residing in our magnetic appliances. positively _no cold feet where they are worn, or money refunded_. * * * * * [illustration] agents make over one hundred per cent. profit selling the reflecting safety lamp which can be sold in every family. gives more light than three ordinary lamps. sample lamp sent for fifty cents in stamps. we have other household articles. send for circulars. forsee & mcmakin, cincinnati, o. * * * * * publications. marshall m. kirkman's books on railroad topics. do you want to become a railroad man if you do, the books described below point the way. the most promising field for men of talent and ambition at the present day is the railroad service. the pay is large in many instances, while the service is continuous and honorable. most of our railroad men began life on the farm. of this class is the author of the accompanying books descriptive of railway operations, who has been connected continuously with railroads as a subordinate and officer for years. he was brought up on a farm, and began railroading as a lad at $ per month. he has written a number of standard books on various topics connected with the organization, construction, management and policy of railroads. these books are of interest not only to railroad men but to the general reader as well. they are indispensable to the student. they present every phase of railroad life, and are written in an easy and simple style that both interests and instructs. the books are as follows: "railway expenditures--their extent, object and economy."--a practical treatise on construction and operation. in two volumes, pages. $ . "hand book of railway expenditures."--practical directions for keeping the expenditure accounts. . "railway revenue and its collection."--and explaining the organization of railroads. . "the baggage parcel and mail traffic of railroads."--an interesting work on this important service; pages. . "train and station service"--giving the principal rules and regulations governing trains; pages. . "the track accounts of railroads."--and how they should be kept. pamphlet. . "the freight traffic way-bill."--its uses illustrated and described. pamphlet. . "mutual guarantee."--a treatise on mutual suretyship. pamphlet. . any of the above books will be sent post paid on receipt of price, by prairie farmer publishing co., monroe st. chicago, ill. money should be remitted by express, or by draft check or post office order. * * * * * [illustration] only one dollar a year. look at this magnificent offer for . one of these beautiful cluster regard rings or beautiful oil chromos, and these handsome solitaire parisian diamond ear drops. this is no humbug, but a chance that will never be offered again, as it appears but once. so do not let this chance slip by when you can get any of these beautiful articles by subscribing for the leading family story paper, household and farm, providing your order is received on or before march th, . as we wish to introduce our illustrated family paper, the household and farm, in fifty thousand new homes, and in order to do so we make this wonderful offer. the household and farm (subscription price only $ . per year), is a sixteen page family paper, illustrated, cut and bound, and same size as harper's weekly, and brimful of interesting reading for the household. this offer is only extended to one member of each family, and will not be made again. postage stamps taken. address, [illustration] household & farm, spruce street, p. o. box . new york. household. for nothing lovelier can be found in woman than to study _household_ good.--_milton._ "going up head." an old soldier's story. the low school-house stood in a green wabash wood lookin' out on long levels of corn like a sea-- a little log-house, hard benches, and we, big barefooted boys and rough 'uns, we stood in line with the gals and tried to get 'head at spellin' each day when the lessons was said. but one, bally dean, tall, bony, and green as green corn in the milk, stood fast at the foot-- stood day after day, as if he'd been put a soldier on guard there did poor bally dean. and stupid! god made him so stupid i doubt-- but i guess god who made us knows what he's about. he'd a long way to walk. but he wouldn't once talk of that, nor the chores for his mother who lay a shakin' at home. still, day after day he stood at the foot till the class 'gan to mock! then to master he plead, "oh i'd like to go head!" now it wasn't so much, but the way it was said. then the war struck the land! why the barefooted band it just nailed up that door: and the very next day, with master for cap'en, went marchin' away; and bally the butt of the whole wabash band. but he bore with it all, yet once firmly said, "when i get back home, i'm agoin' up head!" oh, that school-house that stood in the wild wabash wood! the rank weeds were growin' like ghosts through the floor. the squirrels hulled nuts on the sill of the door. and the gals stood in groups scrapin' lint where they stood. and we boys! how we sighed; how we sickened and died for the days that had been, for a place at their side. then one fever-crazed and his better sense dazed and dulled with heart-sickness all duty forgot; deserted, was taken, condemned to be shot! and bally dean guardin' his comrade half crazed, slow paced up and down while he slept where he lay in the tent waitin' death at the first flush of day. and bally dean thought of the boy to be shot, of the fair girl he loved in the woods far away; of the true love that grew like a red rose of may; and he stopped where he stood, and he thought and he thought then a sudden star fell, shootin' on overhead. and he knew that his mother beckon'd onto the dead. and he said what have i? though i live though i die. who shall care for me now? then the dull, muffled drum struck his ear, and he knew that the master had come with the squad. and he passed in the tent with a sigh, and the doomed lad crept forth, and the drowsy squad led with low trailin' guns to the march of the dead. then with face turned away tow'rd a dim streak of day, and his voice full of tears the poor bowed master said, as he fell on his knees and uncovered his head: "come boys it is school time, let us all pray." and we prayed. and the lad by the coffin alone was tearless, was silent, was still as a stone. "in line," master said, and he stood at the head; but he couldn't speak now. so he drew out his sword and dropped the point low for the last fatal word. then the rifles rang out, and a soldier fell dead! the master sprang forward. "great heaven," he said, "it is bally, poor bally, and he's gone up head!" --_joaquin miller._ too fat to marry. a very fat young woman came to my office and asked to see me privately. when we were alone she said: "are you sure no one can overhear us?" "quite sure." "you won't laugh at me, will you?" "madam, i should be unworthy of your confidence if i could be guilty of such a rudeness." "thank you, sir; but no one ever called upon you on such a ridiculous errand. you won't think me an idiot, will you?" "i beg of you to go on." "you don't care to know my name or residence?" "certainly not, if you care to conceal them." "i have called to consult you about the strangest thing in the world. i will tell you all. i am twenty-three years old. when i was nineteen i weighed pounds; now i weigh ; i am all filling up with fat. i can hardly breathe. the best young man that ever lived loves me, and has been on the point of asking me to marry him, but of course he sees i am growing worse all the time and he don't dare venture. i can't blame him. he is the noblest man in the world, and could marry any one he chooses. i don't blame him for not wishing to unite himself to such a tub as i am. why, doctor, you don't know how fat i am. i am a sight to behold. and now i have come to see if any thing can be done. i know you have studied up all sorts of curious subjects, and i thought you might be able to tell me how to get rid of this dreadful curse." she had been talking faster and faster, and with more and more feeling (after the manner of fat women, who are always emotional), until she broke down in hysterical sobs. i inquired about her habits--table and otherwise. she replied: "oh, i starve myself; i don't eat enough to keep a canary bird alive, and yet i grow fatter and fatter all the time. i don't believe anything can be done for me. we all have our afflictions, and i suppose we ought to bear them with fortitude. i wouldn't mind for myself, but it's just breaking his heart; if it wasn't for him i could be reconciled." i then explained to her our nervous system, and the bearing certain conditions of one class of nerves has upon the deposition of adipose tissue. i soon saw she was not listening, but was mourning her sorrow. then i asked her if she would be willing to follow a prescription i might give her. "willing? willing?" she cried. "i would be willing to go through fire, or to have my flesh cut off with red-hot knives. there is nothing i would not be willing to endure if i could only get rid of this horrible condition." i prepared a prescription for her, and arranged that she should call upon me once a week, that i might supervise her progress and have frequent opportunities to encourage her. the prescription which i read to her was this: . for breakfast eat a piece of beef or mutton as large as your hand, with a slice of white bread twice as large. for dinner the same amount of meat, or, if preferred, fish or poultry, with the same amount of farinaceous or vegetable food in the form of bread or potato. for supper, nothing. . drink only when greatly annoyed with thirst; then a mouthful of lemonade without sugar. . take three times a week some form of bath, in which there shall be immense perspiration. the turkish bath is best. you must work, either in walking or some other way, several hours a day. "but, doctor, i can't walk; my feet are sore." "i thought that might be the case, but if the soles of your shoes are four inches broad, and are thick and strong, walking will not hurt your feet. you must walk or work until you perspire freely, every day of the week. of course, you are in delicate health, with little endurance, but, as you have told me that you are willing to do anything, you are to work hard at something six or seven hours every day." . you must rise early in the morning, and retire late at night. much sleep fattens people. . the terrible corset you have on, which compresses the center of the body, making you look a great deal fatter than you really are, must be taken off, and you must have a corset which any dress maker can fit to you--a corset for the lower part of the abdomen, which will raise this great mass and support it. "this is all the advice i have to give you at present. at first you will lose half a pound a day. in the first three months you will lose from twenty to thirty pounds. in six months, forty pounds. you will constantly improve in health, get over this excessive emotion, and be much stronger. every one knows that a very fat horse weighing , pounds, can be quickly reduced to , pounds with great improvement to activity and health. it is still easier with a human being. that you may know exactly what is being done, i wish you to be weighed; write the figures in your memorandum, and one week from now, when you come again, weigh yourself and tell me how much you have lost." i happened to be out of the city and did not see her until her second visit, two weeks from our last meeting. it was plain when she entered that already her system was being toned up, and when we were again in my private office, she said: "i have lost six and a half pounds; not quite as much as you told me, but i am delighted, though nearly starved. i have done exactly as you prescribed, and shall continue to if it kills me. you must be very careful not to make any mistakes, for i shall do just as you say. at first the thirst was dreadful. i thought i could not bear it. but now i have very little trouble with that." about four months after our first meeting this young woman brought a handsome young man with her, and after a pleasant chat, she said to me: "we are engaged; but i have told my friend that i shall not consent to become his wife until i have a decent shape. when i came to you i weighed pounds; i now weigh pounds. i am ten times as strong, active, and healthy as i was then, and i have made up my mind, for my friend has left it altogether to me, that when i have lost ten or fifteen pounds more, we shall send you the invitations." as the wedding day approached she brought the figures on a card, and exclaimed, with her blue eyes running over: "i am the happiest girl in the world, and don't you think i have honestly earned it? i think i am a great deal happier than i should have been had i not worked for it." the papers said the bride was beautiful. i thought she was, and i suppose no one but herself and husband felt as much interested in that beauty as i did. i took a sort of scientific interest in it. we made the usual call upon them during the first month, and when, two months after the wedding, they were spending the evening with us, i asked him if his wife had told him about my relations with her avoirdupois? he laughed heartily, and replied: "oh, yes, she has told me everything, i suppose: but wasn't it funny?" "not very. i am sure you wouldn't have thought it funny if you could have heard our first interview. it was just the reverse of funny; don't you think so madam?" "i am sure it was the most anxious visit i ever paid any one. doctor, my good husband says he should have married me just the same, but i think he would have been a goose if he had." "yes," said the husband, "it was foreordained that we two should be one." "to be sure it was," replied the happy wife, "because it was foreordained that i should get rid of those horrid fifty-seven pounds. i am going down till i reach one hundred and forty pounds, and there i will stop, unless my husband says one hundred and thirty. i am willing do anything to please him."--_dio lewis' monthly._ ornaments for homes. it is not the most expensively furnished houses that are the most homelike, besides comparatively few persons have the means to gratify their love of pretty little ornaments with which to beautify their homes. it is really painful to visit some houses; there naked walls and cheerless rooms meet you yet there are many such, and children in them too. how much might these homes be brightened by careful forethought in making some little ornaments that are really of no expense, save the time. comb cases, card receivers, letter holders, match safes, paper racks, cornucopias, and many other pretty and useful things can easily be made of nice clean paste board boxes (and the boxes are to be found in a variety of colors). for any of these cut out the parts and nicely sew them together, and the seams and raw edges can be covered with narrow strips of bright hued paper or tape. ornament them with transfer or scrap pictures. i have seen very pretty vases for holding dried flowers and grasses, made of plain dark brown pasteboard, and the seams neatly covered with narrow strips of paper. pretty ottomans can be made by covering any suitable sized box with a bit of carpeting, and stuffing the top with straw or cotton. or, if the carpeting is not convenient, piece a covering of worsteds. a log cabin would be a pretty pattern. to amuse the children during the long winter months, make a scrap-book of pictures. collect all the old illustrated books, papers, and magazines, and cut out the pictures and with mucilage nicely paste them in a book, first removing alternate leaves so it will not be too bulky. perhaps this last remark is slightly wandering from my subject, but i can't help it, i love the little folks and want them happy. cares and trouble will come to them soon enough. autograph albums are quite the rage nowadays, and children get the idea and quite naturally think it pretty nice, and want an album too. for them make a pretty album in the form of a boot. for the outside use plain red cardboard; for the inside leaves use unruled paper; fasten at the top with two tiny bows of narrow blue ribbon. a lady sent my little girl an autograph album after this pattern for a birthday present and it is very neat indeed. any of the little folks who want a pattern of it can have it and welcome by sending stamp to pay postage. for the wee little girl make a nice rag doll; it will please her quite as well as a boughten one, and certainly last much longer. i have a good pattern for a doll which you may also have if you wish it. a nice receptacle for pins, needles, thread, etc., can be made in form of an easy chair or sofa. cut the part of pasteboard and cover the seat, arms, and back with cloth, and stuff with cotton. brackets made of pasteboard will do service a long time. mrs. f. a. warner south saginaw, mich. * * * * * railroads. [illustration] a man who is unacquainted with the geography of this country will see by examining this map that the chicago, rock island & pacific r'y by the central position of its line, connects the east and the west by the shortest route, and carries passengers, without change of cars, between chicago and kansas city, council bluffs, leavenworth, atchison, minneapolis and st. paul. it connects in union depots with all the principal lines of road between the atlantic and the pacific oceans. its equipment is unrivaled and magnificent, being composed of most comfortable and beautiful day coaches, magnificent horton reclining chair cars, pullman's prettiest palace sleeping cars, and the best line of dining cars in the world. three trains between chicago and missouri river points. two trains between chicago and minneapolis and st. paul, via the famous "albert lea route." a new and direct line, via seneca and kankakee, has recently been opened between richmond norfolk, newport news, chattanooga, atlanta, augusta, nashville, louisville, lexington, cincinnati indianapolis and lafayette, and omaha, minneapolis and st. paul and intermediate points. all through passengers travel on fast express trains. tickets for sale at all principal ticket offices in the united states and canada. baggage checked through and rates of fare always as low as competitors that offer less advantages. for detailed information, get the maps and folders of the great rock island route, at your nearest ticket office, or address r.r. cable, vice-pres. & gen'l m'g'r, e. st. john, gen'l tkt. & pass. agt. chicago. * * * * * maps. rand, mcnally & co.'s new railroad --and-- county map --of the-- united states --and-- dominion of canada. size, × - / feet, mounted on rollers to hang on the wall. this is an entirely new map, constructed from the most recent and authentic sources. --it shows-- _all the railroads,_ --and-- every county and principal town --in the-- united states and canada. a useful map in every one's home, and place of business. price, $ . . agents wanted, to whom liberal inducements will be given. address rand, mcnally & co., chicago, ill. by arrangements with the publishers of this map we are enabled to make the following liberal offer: to each person who will remit us $ . we will send copy of the prairie farmer one year and this map postpaid. address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago, ill. * * * * * miscellaneous. "facts about arkansas and texas." a handsome book, beautifully illustrated, with colored diagrams, giving reliable information as to crops, population, religious denominations, commerce, timber, railroads, lands, etc., etc. sent free to any address on receipt of a -cent stamp. address h.c. townsend, gen. passenger agt., st. louis, mo. * * * * * virginia farms & mills for sale and exchange. write for free real estate journal. r.b. chaffin & co., richmond, virginia. * * * * * the prairie farmer is the cheapest and best agricultural paper published. only $ . per year. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ our young folks chat about a bear. as i promised you last week, i will try and tell you about the bear i saw a few months ago away down in nova scotia, not many miles from that quaint old city of halifax. do i hear some of the prairie farmer boys and girls exclaim, as a real grown-up lady did just before i left chicago: "halifax! why, yes, i have heard tell of the place, but did not think that anybody ever really went there." people do go there, however, by the hundreds in the summer time, and a most delightful, hospitable, charming class of inhabitants do they find the blue noses, as they are called--that is, when one goes to them very well introduced. but we will have a little talk about halifax and surroundings when you have heard about the bear. well, in the first place i did not, of course, see the bear in the city, but in a place called sackville--a section of country about five miles long, and extending over hill and dale and valley; through woods and across streams. my host owned a beautiful farm--picturesquely beautiful only, not with a money-making beauty--situated upon the slope of a hill, where one could stand and look upon the most tender of melting sunsets, away off toward the broad old ocean. one morning as we were all gathered upon the front stoop, grandpa, mamma, baby, kitten and all, we looked down the valley and saw coming up the hill, led by two men, an immense yellow bear. one of the farm hands was sent to call the men and the bear up to the house. the men, who were swiss, were glad enough to come, as they were taking bruin through the country to show off his tricks and make thereby a little money. the children were somewhat afraid at first, but soon felt quite safe when they saw he was firmly secured by a rope. old bruin's keeper first gave him a drink of water, then poured a pailful over him, which he seemed to enjoy very much, as the day was a warm one. one of the men said something in swiss, at which the bear gave a roar-like grunt and commenced to dance. around and around the great lumbering fellow went on his two hind legs, holding his fore paws in the air. it was not what one would call a very "airy waltz," however. again the keeper spoke, and immediately bruin threw himself upon the ground and turned somersaults, making us all laugh heartily. he then told him to shake hands (but all in swiss), and it was too funny to see the great awkward animal waddle up on his hind legs and extend first one paw and then the other. but what interested us all most, both big and little, was to hear the man say, "kisse me," and then to watch the bear throw out his long tongue and lick his keeper's face. we then gave the bear some milk to drink, when suddenly he gave a bound forward toward the baby. but he was securely tied, as we well knew. the milk roused all the beast's savage instincts, one of the men said. but what will interest you most of all will be the fact that on the farm (which consisted of five hundred acres, nearly all woodland) there were seen almost every morning the footprints of a real savage bear. the sheep were fast disappearing, and the farmers about were not a little worried. one day i went for a walk into these same woods, and such woods! you western boys and girls could not possibly imagine them--the old moss-covered logs, and immense trees cut down years ago and left to lie there until all overgrown with mosses and lichens. i never before experienced such a feeling of solitude as in that walk of over a mile in length through those deep dark woods, where sometimes we had literally to cut our way through with our little hatchets (we always carried them with us when in the forest). as i sauntered on, those lines of longfellow's in evangeline, came unconsciously to my mind, so exactly did they describe the place: this is the forest primeval. the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, stand like druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic. stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. loud from its rocky caverns, the deep voiced neighboring ocean speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest. nova scotia is, as you all know the acadian country of which our own fireside poet writes so beautifully. it was but a few miles from where i was visiting that the scene of evangeline, that exquisitely tender romance which so thrills the hearts of both old and young, was laid. as i drove through the country, coming ever and anon unexpectedly upon one of the many beautiful lakes from half a mile to two miles in length, in fancy i pictured the fair evangeline and her guide, the good father felician, skirting these lakes in a light canoe as they traversed the whole and through in the sad and fruitless search for the lost lover gabriel. no wonder the soul of the poet was filled with such strange, mystic beauty which thus found expression in rhythm and song, for acadia has an enchantment all its own and can best be interpreted by the diviner thought of the poet. but i am afraid, boys and girls, that i have chatted with you so long now that there will be scarcely room this week to touch upon halifax. but, however, if you wish, i will try and talk to you about it next week, and tell you of some of the winter sports the little blue noses indulge in in the winter time. mary howe. a fairy story by little johnny. me an billy we ben readn fairy tales, an i never see such woppers. i bet the feller wich rote em will be burnt every tiny little bit up wen he dies, but billy says they are all true but the facks. uncle ned sed cude i tell one, and i ast him wot about, and he sed: "wel johnny, as you got to do the tellin i'le leav the choice of subjeck entirely to you; jest giv us some thing about a little boy that went and sook his forten." so i sed: "one time there was a little boy went out for to seek his forten, and first thing he see was great big yello posy on a punkin vine." then uncle ned he sed: "johnny, was that the punkin vine wich your bed once had a bizness connection with?" but i didn't anser, only went on with the story. "so the little boy he wocked into the posy, and crold down the vine on his hands and kanees bout ten thousan hundred miles, till he come bime bi to a door, wich he opened an went in an found hisself in a grate big house, ofle nice like a kings pallows or a hotell. but the little boy dident find any body to home and went out a other door, where he see a ocion with a bote, and he got in the bote." then uncle ned he sed a uther time: "johnny, excuse the ignance of a man wich has been in injy an evry were, but is it the regular thing for punkin vines to have sea side resorts in em?" but i only sed: "wen the little boy had saild out of site of land the bote it sunk, and he went down, down, down in the water, like he was tied around the neck of a mill stone, till he was swollowed by a wale, cos wales is the largest of created beings wich plows the deep, but lions is the king of beests, an the american eagle can lick ol other birds, hooray! wen the boy was a seekn his forten in the stummeck of the wales belly he cut to a fence, an wen he had got over the fence he found hisself in a rode runin thru a medder, and it was a ofle nice country fur as he cude see." uncle ned sed: "did he put up at the same way side inn wich was patternized by jonah wen he pennitrated to that part of the morl vinyerd?" but i said: "bimebi he seen a rope hangin down from the ski, and he begin for to clime it up, a sayin, 'snitchety, snatchety, up i go,' 'wot time is it old witch?' 'niggers as good as a white man,' 'fee-faw-fum,' 'chinese mus go,' 'all men is equil fore de law,' 'blitherum, blatherum, boo,' and all the words of madgick wich he cude think of. after a wile it got reel dark, but he kep on a climeing, and pretty sune he see a round spot of dalite over his hed, and then he cum up out of a well in a grate city." jest then my father he came in, and he said: "johnny, you get the bucket and go to the wel and fetch sum water for your mother to wash the potatoes." but i said it was billy's tern, and billy he sed twasent no sech thing, and i said he lide, and he hit me on the snoot of my nose, and we fot a fite, but victery percht upon the banners of my father, cos he had a stick. then wile me and billy was crying uncle ned he spoke up and begun: "one time there was a grate north american fairy taler--" but i jest fetched mose a kick, wich is the cat, and went out and pitcht into sammy doppy, which licked me reel mean. * * * * * breeders directory. the following list embraces the names of responsible and reliable breeders in their line, and parties wishing to purchase or obtain information can feel assured that they will be honorably dealt with: cattle. jersey. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois horses. clydesdales. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois swine. berkshire. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois chester whites. w.a. gilbert......................wauwatosa wis. sheep. cotswold. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois * * * * * live stock, etc. jersey bulls. jersey breeders desiring young bulls of the most approved form and breeding, and representing the families most noted for large yields of butter, will serve their interests by addressing the undersigned. stock recorded in a. j. c. c. h. r. * * * * * cotswold sheep. choice representatives of this large and popular breed of sheep for sale at prices satisfactory to buyers. ewes and rams of different ages. breeding stock recorded in the american cotswold record. chas. f. mills, springfield, ill. * * * * * victoria swine. [illustration] falstaff. winner of first prize chicago fat stock show . originators of this famous breed. also breeders of pekin ducks and light brahma fowls. stock for sale. send for circular a. schiedt & davis, dyer, lake co. ind. * * * * * [illustration] we will send you a watch or a chain by mail or express, c. o. d., to be examined before paying any money and if not satisfactory, returned at our expense. we manufacture all our watches and save you per cent. catalogue of styles free. every watch warranted. address standard american watch co., pittsburgh, pa. * * * * * medical. weak nervous men [illustration:] whose debility, exhausted powers, premature decay and failure to perform life's duties properly are caused by excesses, errors of youth, etc., will find a perfect and lasting restoration to robust health and vigorous manhood in the marston bolus. neither stomach drugging nor instruments. this treatment of nervous debility and physical decay is uniformly successful because based on perfect diagnosis, new and direct methods and absolute thoroughness. full information and treatise free. address consulting physician of marston remedy co., w. th st., new york. * * * * * two ladies met one day. one said to the other "by the way how is that catarrh of yours?" "why it's simply horrid, getting worse every day." "well, why don't you try 'dr. sykes' sure cure,' i know it will cure you!" "well, then i will, for i've tried everything else." just six weeks afterward they met again and no. said. "why, how much better you look, what's up! going to get married, or what?" "well, yes, and it's all owing to 'dr. sykes' sure cure for catarrh;' oh, why didn't i know of it before? it's simply wonderful." send cents to dr. c.r. sykes, monroe street, chicago, for valuable book of full information, and mention the "two ladies." * * * * * days' trial dr. dye's [illustration] electro voltaic belt, and other electric appliances. we will send on thirty days' trial, to men, young or old, who are suffering from nervous debility, lost vitality, and those diseases of a personal nature resulting from abuses and other causes. speedy relief and complete restoration to health, vigor and manhood guaranteed. send at once for illustrated pamphlet free. address voltaic belt co., marshall, mich. * * * * * i cure fits! when i say cure i do not mean merely to stop them for a time and then have them return again, i mean a radical cure. i have made the disease of fits, epilepsy or falling sickness a life-long study. i warrant my remedy to cure the worst cases. because others have failed is no reason for not now receiving a cure. send at once for a treatise and a free bottle of my infallible remedy. give express and post office. it costs you nothing for a trial, and i will cure you. address dr. h. g. root, pearl st., new york. * * * * * best quality. [illustration] cards new designs in satin and gold finish, with name, cts. we offer $ for a pack of cards any nicer work, or prettier styles. _samples free_. eagle card works, new haven, ct. * * * * * miscellaneous. diamonds free! we desire to make the circulation of our paper , during the next six months. to accomplish which we will give absolutely free a genuine first water diamond ring, and the home companion for one year, for only $ . . our reasons for making this unprecedented offer are as follows; a newspaper with , subscribers can get c. per line per , of circulation for its advertising space, or $ , per issue more than it costs to produce and mail the paper. with but , or , subscribers, its advertising revenues do not pay expenses. only the papers with mammoth circulations make fortunes for their owners, derived from advertising space. for these and other reasons, we regard , subscribers as being of more financial benefit to a paper than the paper is to the subscribers. with , or , bona-fide subscribers, we make $ , to $ , a year clear profit from advertising, above cost of publishing. without a large circulation, we would lose money. therefore, to secure a very large circulation, and thus receive high rates and large profits from advertising space, this only equitable plan of conducting business is adopted. the first question to be answered is,--is the diamond pure--a genuine stone? our answer is yes. the stone is guaranteed to be no alaska diamond, rhine pebble, or other imitation, but a warranted genuine and pure diamond. if it is not found so by the most careful and searching tests, we will refund the money, enter the subscriber's name on our list, and have the paper mailed to him free during its existence. to the publisher of this paper has been sent a guarantee from the manufacturing jeweler, from whom we obtain these rings, that they are just as represented, so that readers may rely upon the promises being fulfilled to the letter. the second question is, is the paper a desirable family journal? yes. it contains contributions from the first writers of the times: fiction, choice facts, intellectual food of the most interesting, instructive and refined character. it is one of the leading papers of the progressive west. we are determined to make it the most desirable and reliable paper in the united states; will spare no effort or money to achieve that object. sample copies sent free on application. remit by draft, express, or new postal note, to the home companion. n.w. cor. fourth and race streets, cincinnati, o. don't fail to name the paper in which you see this advertisement. * * * * * don't be humbugged with poor, cheap coulters. [illustration] all farmers have had trouble with their coulters. in a few days they get to wabbling, are condemned and thrown aside. in our "boss" coulter we furnish a tool which can scarcely be worn out; and when worn, the wearable parts, a prepared wood journal, and movable thimble in the hub (held in place by a key) can be easily and cheaply renewed. we guarantee our "boss" to plow more acres than any other three coulters now used. our "o. k." clamp attaches the coulter to any size or kind of beam, either right or left hand plow. we know that after using it you will say it is the best tool on the market. ask your dealer for it. manufactured by the boss coulter co., bunker hill, ills. literature. for those who fail. "all honor to him who shall win the prize," the world has cried for a thousand years, but to him who tries and who fails and dies i give great honor and glory and tears. give glory and honor and pitiful tears to all who fail in their deeds sublime, their ghosts are many in the van of years, they were born with time in advance of time. oh, great is the hero who wins a name, but greater many and many a time some pale-faced fellow who dies in shame and lets god finish the thought sublime. and great is the man with a sword undrawn, and good is the man who refrains from wine; but the man who fails and yet still fights on, lo, he is the twin-born brother of mine. --_joaquin miller._ a singular philosopher. hon. henry cavendish was born in england, oct. , , and died feb. , . cavendish was the son of lord charles cavendish, a son of the duke of devonshire; and his mother was lady anne grey, daughter of henry, duke of kent. it is thus seen that the subject of this sketch belonged to two of the two most aristocratic, noble families in england, having for grandfathers the dukes of kent and devonshire. this man, who became one of the most distinguished chemists and physicists of the age, born in high life, of exalted position and wealth, passed through the period of his boyhood and early manhood in utter obscurity, and a dense cloud rests upon his early life. indeed, the place of his birth has been in dispute; some of his biographers asserting that he was born in england, others that he was born in france or italy. it is now known that he was born at nice, whither his mother had gone for the sake of health. it seems incredible that one highly distinguished, who lived and died so recently, should have almost entirely escaped observation until he had reached middle life. from fragments of his early history which have been collected, we learn that he was a peculiar boy,--shy, reticent, fond of solitary walks, without playfellows, and utterly insensible to the attractions of home and social life. he was born with inflexible reserve; and the love of retirement so manifest in in later life mastered all his instincts even when a boy. if he had been of poor and obscure parentage, it would not seem so strange that one who for nearly fifty years was a fellow of the royal society, and for a lengthened period a member of the institute of france, and an object of european interest to men of science, had no one to record the incidents of his early life. but he lost his mother when almost an infant, and this sad event probably influenced greatly his early career, and isolated him from the world in which he lived. we find him at dr. newcome's school at hackney in , and from this school he went directly to cambridge, where he remained until . he did not graduate, true to his odd instincts, although he spent the full period for a degree at cambridge. no records of his college life have been preserved, and, as he went to london, it is wonderful that the next ten years of his life remain a blank. he joined the royal society in , but contributed nothing until , when he published his first paper on "factitious airs." cavendish was a great mathematician, electrician, astronomer, meteorologist, and as a chemist he was equally learned and original. he lived at a time when science was to a large extent but blank empiricism; even the philosophy of combustion was based on erroneous and absurd hypotheses, and the speculation of experimenters were wild and fantastic. he was the first to submit these speculations to crucial tests, to careful and accurate experiment; and the results which were given to the world introduced a new era in scientific knowledge. we have so much to say regarding the man, that we can only present a brief outline of his great discoveries. alone, in a spacious house on clapham common, outside of london, did this singular man work through many long years, until he filled it with every possible device capable of unfolding or illustrating principles in science. at the time of a visit to london in this famous house was standing, and remained as it was when the owner left it, about a half century before. the exterior of the house would not attract special attention; but within, the whole world could not, perhaps, furnish a parallel. anvils and forges, files and hammers, grindstones and tempering-troughs, furnaces and huge bellows, had converted the panelled and wall-frescoed drawing-room into the shop of a blacksmith. in the spacious dining-room chemical apparatus occupied the place of furniture. electrical machines, leyden-jars, eudiometers, thermometric scales, philosophical instruments, were distributed through the chambers. the third story, save two bed-chambers,--one for the housekeeper, the other for the footman,--had been fitted up for an observatory. the lenses and achromatic glasses, tubes and specula, concave mirrors, and object-prisms, and the huge, rough old telescope, peering through the roof, were still there as their owner had left them. all appliances of housekeeping were absent, and cavendish house was destitute of all comforts, for which the owner had no taste. in this house cavendish lived for nearly half a century, totally isolated from the world and all human sympathies. he seldom or never visited relatives, and they were never guests at his house. he had several servants, all of whom were males, with one exception. he was shy of women, and did not like to have them come in his way. if he saw his female servant in any of the rooms, he would order her away instantly, or fly himself to other quarters. rarely, during all the years of his solitary life, did a woman cross his threshold; and, when one did, he would run from her as if she brought the plague. his servants were all trained to silence, and in giving his orders the fewest words possible were used. his meals were served irregularly, whenever in the intervals of absorbing labors, he could snatch a fragment of time. he uniformly dined upon one kind of meat,--a joint of mutton; and he seemed to have no knowledge that there were other kinds in the market. upon one occasion he had invited a few scientific friends to dinner at cavendish house, and when his servant asked him what he should provide, "a leg of mutton!" said cavendish. "it will hardly be enough," said the servant. "well, then get two." "anything else, sir?" "yes, get four legs of mutton." his dress was peculiar,--a snuff-colored coat reaching to his knees, a long vest of the same color, buff breeches, and a three-cornered hat. with him the fashion never changed; he had but one suit; not an extra coat, hat, or even two handkerchiefs. when his wardrobe gave out, and he was forced to see his tailor, he became very nervous. he would walk the room in agony, give orders to have the tailor sent for, and then immediately countermand the same. his shoes for fifty years were of one pattern; and when he took them off they were put in one place behind a door, and woe to the servant who accidentally displaced them. he hung his old three-cornered hat on one peg at his house, and when he attended the meetings of the royal society he had a peg in the hall known as "cavendish's peg." if, through accident, it was taken by some member before his arrival, he would stop, look at the occupied peg, and then turn on his heel, and go back to his house. when he went to the meetings, he walked in the middle of the street, never on the sidewalk; and he invariably took the same route. upon reaching the steps leading to the rooms, he would stop, hesitate, put his hand on the door-handle, and look about timidly, and sometimes return at a rapid pace. his cane, which he carried for fifty years, he placed upright in his left boot, which he took off at the door, covering his foot with a slipper. once inside the rooms of the royal society, and surrounded by the most distinguished men of england and the world, he became excessively shy, and read his wonderful papers in an awkward manner. applause of any kind he could not bear; and if in conversation any one praised his researches or papers, he would turn away abruptly, as if highly indignant. if he was appealed to as authority upon any point, he would dart away, and perhaps quit the hall for the evening. this man of great genius and vast acquirements was incapable of understanding or enduring praise or flattery. he sought in every possible way to escape recognition or notice, listened attentively to conversation, but seldom asked questions; never spoke of himself, or of what he had accomplished in the world of science. cavendish was a man possessed of vast wealth, and, when he died, he was the richest bank-owner in all england. "at the age of forty, a large accession came to his fortune. his income already exceeded his expenditure. pecuniary transactions were his aversion. other matters occupied his attention. the legacy was therefore paid in to his bankers. it was safe there, and he gave it no more heed. one of the firm sought to see him at clapham. in answer to the inquiries of the footman as to his business, the banker replied to see mr. cavendish personally. 'you must wait, then,' responded the servant, 'till he rings his bell.' the banker tarried for hours, when the long-expected bell rang. his name was announced. 'what does he want?' the master was heard to ask. 'a personal interview.' 'send him up.' the banker appeared. "'i am come, sir, to ascertain your views concerning a sum of two hundred thousand pounds placed to your account.' "'does it inconvenience you?' asked the philosopher. 'if so, transfer it elsewhere.' "'inconvenience, sir? by no means,' replied the banker. 'but pardon me for suggesting that it is too large a sum to remain unproductive. would you not like to invest it?' "'invest it? eh? yes, if you will. do as you like, but don't interrupt me about such things again. i have other matters to think about.'" with all his wealth it never occurred to him that others were in need, and that he might do good by benefactions. solicited on one occasion to contribute to a charitable object, he exclaimed, "give, eh! what do you want? how much?" "give whatever you please, sir," said the solicitor. "well, then, will ten thousand pounds do?" on another occasion he was forced, from circumstances, to attend a christening in a church; and, when it was intimated to him that it was customary to bestow some little present upon the attending nurse, he ran up to her, and poured into her lap a double handful of gold coins, and hastily departed. this was the only occasion on which he was known to cross the threshold of a church. cavendish died possessed of five million dollars of property, and yet at no time had he the slightest knowledge of how much he had, and how it was invested. he despised money, and made as little use of it as possible. as regards matters of religion, he never troubled himself about them. he would never talk upon the subject, and probably never gave it a thought. all days of the week were alike to him: he was as busy on sunday as on any other day. when asked by a friend what his views were of god, he replied, "don't ask me such questions: i never think of them." the circumstances of cavendish's death are as remarkable as his career in life. "without premitory disease or sickness, or withdrawal from daily duties, or decadence of mental powers, or physical disability, he made up his mind that he was about to die. closing his telescopes, putting his achromatic glasses in their several grooves, locking the doors of his laboratories, destroying the papers he deemed useless, and arranging those corrected for publication, he ascended to his sleeping-apartment and rang his bell. a servant appeared. "'edgar,' said cavendish, addressing him by name, 'listen! have i ever commanded you to do an unreasonable thing?' "the man heard the question without astonishment, for he knew his master's eccentricities, and replied in the negative. "'and that being the case,' continued the old man, 'i believe i have a right to be obeyed.' "the domestic bowed his assent. "'i shall now give you my last command,' cavendish went on to say, 'i am going to die. i shall, upon your departure, lock my room. here let me be alone for eight hours. tell no one. let no person come near. when the time has passed, come and see if i am dead. if so, let lord george cavendish know. this is my last command. now, go.' "the servant knew from long experience that to dispute his master's will would be useless. he bowed, therefore, and turned to go away. "'stay--one word!' added cavendish. 'repeat exactly the order i have given.' "edgar repeated the order, promised obedience once more, and retired from the chamber." the servant did not keep his promise, but called to his master's bedside sir everard home, a distinguished physician. "sir everard inquired if he felt ill. "'i am not ill,' replied cavendish; 'but i am about to die. don't you think a man of eighty has lived long enough? why am i disturbed? i had matters to arrange. give me a glass of water.' "the glass of water was handed to him; he drank it, turned on his back, closed his eyes, and died. "this end of a great man, improbable as are some of the incidents narrated, is no fiction of imagination. sir everard home's statement, read before the royal institution, corroborates every particular. the mental constitution of the philosopher, puzzling enough during his life, was shrouded certainly in even greater mystery in his death." it is as a chemist that cavendish stands preeminent. without instructors, without companionship, in the solitary rooms of his dwelling, he meditated and experimented. the result of his researches he communicated in papers read to the royal society, and these are quite numerous. he was the first to demonstrate the nature of atmospheric air and also of water. he was the discoverer of nitrogen and several gaseous bodies. he did much to overthrow the phlogiston theory, which was universally accepted in his time; and his researches upon arsenic were of the highest importance. there is scarcely any department of chemistry which he did not enrich by his discoveries. he was a close student of electrical phenomena, and made many discoveries in this department of research. he was also an astronomer and observed the heavens with his telescopes with the deepest interest. some of his most important discoveries were unknown until after his death, as they were hidden in papers, which, for some reason, he would not publish. the life of this singular man was morally a blank, and can only be described by negations. he did not love; he did not hate; he did not hope; he did not worship. he separated himself from his fellow-men and from his god. there was nothing earnest, enthusiastic, heroic, in his nature, and as little that was mean, groveling, or ignoble. he was passionless, wholly destitute of emotion. everything that required the exercise of fancy, imagination, faith, or affection, was distasteful to cavendish. he had a clear head for thinking, a pair of eyes for observing, hands for experimenting and recording, and these were all. his brain was a calculating engine; his eyes, inlets of vision, not fountains of tears; his heart, an anatomical organ necessary for the circulation of the blood. if such a man can not be loved, he can not be abhorred or despised. he was as the almighty made him, and he served an important end in the world. such a man manifestly would never sit for his portrait. and he never did. it was taken by borrow the painter, unobserved by cavendish, while at a dinner-party given for the express purpose of securing the likeness. it is now in the british museum. cuts of this painting are rare.--_popular science news._ * * * * * the prairie farmer and youth's companion one year, $ for the two. it is not required that both papers be sent to one address, nor to the same post-office. address prairie farmer pub. co., monroe street, chicago. * * * * * seeds, etc. buist's seeds are the best. warranted to give satisfaction or money returned, special-inducements for market gardeners. our valuable catalogue of pages free to all. seed grower robert buist, jr. philadelphia, pa. * * * * * [illustration: ferry's seed annual for ] will be mailed free to all applicants and to customers of last year without ordering it. it contains illustrations, prices, descriptions and directions for planting all vegetable and flower seeds, plants, etc. invaluable to all. d.m. ferry & co. detroit, mich. * * * * * j. b. root & co.'s [illustration] illustr'd garden manual of vegetable and flower seeds, ready for all applicants. market gardeners seeds a specialty. write for wholesale price-list, sent free rockford, illinois. * * * * * seed-potatoes and seeds. [illustration] newest varieties of potatoes. garden seeds. seed grain, etc., at lowest prices. illustrated catalogue and treatise on potato culture, free. _j. w. wilson, austin, ill._ * * * * * seeds! plants--catalogue free. a. e. spalding, ainsworth, iowa. humorous the donkey's dream. a donkey laid him down to sleep, and as he slept and snored full deep, he was observed (strange sight) to weep, as if in anguished mood. a gentle mule that lay near by, the donkey roused, and, with a sigh, in kindly voice inquired why those tears he did exude. the donkey, while he trembled o'er and dropped cold sweat from every pore, made answer in a fearful roar: "_i dreamed i was a dude!_" tom typo. tom typo was a printer good, a merry, cheerful elf; and whatsoever care he had, he still "composed" himself. where duty called him he was found still working in his place; but nothing tempted from his post-- which really was the "case." he courted pretty emma grey, one of earth's living gems-- the sweetest em, he used to say, among a thousand "ems." so "chased" was emma's love for tom, it met admiring eyes; she "proved" a "copy" to her sex. and wanted no "revise." and tom, he kept his "pages" clear and grew to be a "type" of all that manhood holds most dear, when he with age was ripe. he made his last "impression" here while yet his heart was warm, just in the "nick" closed his career, and death "locked up his form." he sank into his final rest without one sigh or moan; his latest words--"above my breast place no 'imposing stone.'" courtship of a vassar girl. the parents and the old relatives are chatting over their darling's future. meanwhile the fiances have escaped into the back parlor. virginia--where are you leading me to, john? john--i wish to tell you, while others forget us, how happy i am to marry you--you, so winning, so witty, the gem of vassar college. virginia--oh! how many compliments to a poor graduate who only won the premium of rhetoric, and was second best in geometry. john--i love you, and worship you just as you are. v.--oh, my friend, how anaphorical, and especially how epanaletical. j.--i don't understand. v.--i mean that you repeat yourself. it is the custom of lovers to abuse of the gorgiaques figures from the very protasis and exordium. j.--i love you because you are accomplished and perfect. v.--did i not know you, i should think that you favored asteisin and ethossoia. j. (somewhat abashed.)--ah! do you see * * * v.--why this aposiopesis? j.--aposiopesis! v.--this reticence? j.--that is clearer. i acknowledge that the expressions you use annoy and trouble me. v.--you, on your side, speak a language stamped with schematism, while to be correct, even in making love, your language should be discursive. allow me to tell you so frankly. j.--anyhow, you do not doubt my love? v.--i pardon this epitrope, but pray use less metaphor and more litotes in the prosopography you dedicate to my modest entity-- j.--what will you? men love women; i am a man; therefore, i love you. v.--your syllogism is perfect in its premises, but the conclusion is false. j.--oh! you are a cruel angel! v.--i like that catachresis, but once again i repeat, i am practical, and prefer synedoche. j. [very much perplexed.]--will you continue the conversation in the garden? v.--yes. (they go into the garden.) look, here is a very lovely parallelogram of green surrounded by petasites. let us sit under those maritamboues will you? j.--willingly! ah! here i am happy! my heart fills with joy; it seems to me it contains the universe. v.--you are speaking pure spinozism. j.--when i think that you will be my wife, and i your husband! what will be our destiny! v.--the equation being given you are looking for the unknown quantity. like you, i shall await the co-efficient. j. (who is determined to follow out his own thoughts)--with the world of constellations above us, and nature surrounding us, admire with me those orbs sending us their pure light. look up there at that star. v.--it is allioth, neighbor to the polar star. they are nearing the cosmical moment, and if we remain here a few moments longer the occultation will take place. j. (resignedly.)--and there those thousands of stars. v.--it is the galaxy. admire also the syzygy of those orbs. j. (exhausted.)--and the moon; do you see the moon? v.--it is at its zenith; it will be at its nadir in fifteen days, unless there are any occultations in the movements of that satellite. j.--how happy i am! (they go indoors.) * * * * * the owner of a soap factory, who had been complained of for maintaining a nuisance, was terribly put out at the charge and explained to the court: "your honor, the odors complained of can not exist!" "but here are twenty complaints." "yes, but i have worked in my factory for the last fifteen years, and i'll take my oath i can not detect any smells." "as a rule, prisoner," replied the judge, as he sharpened his spectacles on his bootleg, "the best noses are on the outside of soap factories. you are fined $ and costs." moral: where a soap factory and a school-house are at loggerheads the school should be removed. * * * * * the prairie farmer and youth's companion one year, $ for the two. it is not required that both papers be sent to one address, nor to the same post-office. address prairie farmer pub. co., monroe street, chicago. * * * * * illinois central railroad. the elegant equipment of coaches and sleepers being added to its various through routes is gaining it many friends. its patrons fear no accidents. its perfect track of steel, and solid road-bed, are a guarantee against them. * * * * * medical. disease cured without medicine. _a valuable discovery for supplying magnetism to the human system. electricity and magnetism utilized as never before for healing the sick._ the magneton appliance co.'s magnetic kidney belt! for men is warranted to cure _or money refunded._ the following diseases without medicine:--_pain in the back_, _hips_, _head_, _or limbs_, _nervous debility_, _lumbago_, _general debility_, _rheumatism_, _paralysis_, _neuralgia_, _sciatica_, _diseases of the kidneys_, _spinal diseases_, _torpid liver_, gout seminal emissions, impotency, asthma, heart disease, dyspepsia, constipation, erysipelas, indigestion, hernia or rupture, catarrh, piles, epilepsy, dumb ague, etc. when any debility of the generative organs occurs, lost vitality, lack of nerve force and vigor, wasting weakness, and all those diseases of a personal nature, from whatever cause, the continuous stream of magnetism permeating through the parts, must restore them to a healthy action. there is no mistake about this appliance. to the ladies:--if you are afflicted with lame back, weakness of the spine, falling of the womb, leucorrhoea, chronic inflammation and ulceration of the womb, incidental hemorrhage or flooding, painful, suppressed, and irregular menstruation, barrenness, and change of life, this is the best appliance and curative agent known. for all forms of female difficulties it is unsurpassed by anything before invented, both as a curative agent and as a source of power and vitalization. price of either belt with magnetic insoles, $ , sent by express c. o. d., and examination allowed, or by mail on receipt of price. in ordering send measure of waist, and size of shoe. remittance can be made in currency, sent in letter at our risk. the magneton garments are adapted to all ages, are worn over the under-clothing (not next to the body like the many galvanic and electric humbugs advertised so extensively), and should be taken off at night. they hold their power forever, and are worn at all seasons of the year. send stamp for the "new departure in medical treatment without medicine," with thousands of testimonials. the magneton appliance co., state street. chicago, ill. note.--send one dollar in postage stamps or currency (in letter at our risk) with size of shoe usually worn, and try a pair of our magnetic insoles, and be convinced of the power residing in our other magnetic appliances. positively no cold feet when they are worn, or money refunded. * * * * * self cure free nervous lost weakness debility manhood and decay a favorite prescription of a noted specialist (now retired.) druggists can fill it. address dr. ward & co., louisiana, mo. * * * * * scales. u.s. standard scales, manufactured expressly for the prairie farmer _every scale guaranteed by the manufacturers, and by us, to be perfect, and to give the purchaser satisfaction._ the prairie farmer sent two years free to any person ordering either size wagon scale at prices given below. [illustration] -ton wagon or farm scale (platform × feet), $ ; -ton ( × ), $ ; -ton ( × ), $ . beam box, brass beam, iron levers, steel bearings, and full directions for setting up. the prairie farmer sent year free! to any person ordering either of the following scales, at prices named below. [illustration] the housekeeper's scale--$ . weighing accurately from / oz. to lbs. this is also a valuable scale for offices for weighing mail matter. tin scoop, c. extra; brass c. extra. [illustration] the family scale--$ . . weighs from / oz. to lbs. small articles weighed in scoop, large ones on platform. size of platform, - / × - / in. [illustration] the prairie farmer scale--$ . weighs from oz. to lbs. size of platform × inches. a convenient scale for small farmers, dairymen, etc. [illustration] platform scales-- sizes. lbs., $ ; lbs., $ ; lbs., $ ; , lbs., $ ; wheels and axles, $ extra. in ordering, give the price and description given above. all scales boxed and delivered at depot in chicago. give full shipping directions. send money by draft on chicago or new york post office order or registered letter. address the prairie farmer publishing company, chicago, ill. * * * * * miscellaneous seeds for the garden, farm & field. established . our annual catalogue, mailed free on application, published first of every january, contains full description and prices of reliable vegetable, tree, field and flower seed, seed grain, seed corn, seed potatoes, onion sets, etc; also garden drills, cultivators, fertilizers, etc., with full information for growing and how to get our seeds. address plant seed company, nos. & n. th st., st. louis, mo. * * * * * [illustration] the standard remington type-writer is acknowledged to be the only rapid and reliable writing machine. it has no rival. these machines are used for transcribing and general correspondence in every part of the globe, doing their work in almost every language. any young man or woman of ordinary ability, having a practical knowledge of the use of this machine may find constant and remunerative employment. all machines and supplies, furnished by us, warranted. satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded. send for circulars. wyckoff, seamans & benedict, east madison st., chicago, ill. * * * * * seeds albert dickinson, dealer in timothy, clover, flax, hungarian, millet, red top, blue grass, lawn grass, orchard grass, bird seeds, &c. pop corn. warehouses { , & kinzie st. { , , & michigan st. office. kinzie st. chicago, ill. general news. the state tax of florida this year is but three mills. hog cholera is again raging in champaign county, ill. a cat show is to be held in new york, beginning on the d inst. ice harvesters along the hudson river are on a strike for higher wages. the ohio river is rapidly rising from the melting of heavy bodies of snow. several heavy failures among grain dealers of new york occurred last week. senator anthony is unable to attend to the duties as president pro tem of the senate. the glucose works at buffalo n. y., have been removed to peoria, ill., and levenworth, kansas. on friday last one murderer was hung in virginia, another in south carolina, and still another in california. a very heavy snow storm prevailed in western and northern n. y., last week. it also extended to new england. the state senate of texas has passed a bill giving the public domain, except homesteads to actual settlers, to the public schools. there were over four thousand suicides in paris last year, which is attributed to the tremendous pace at which the people live in france. the starch-sugar industry of the country consumes forty thousand bushels of corn per day, and the product is valued at about $ , , per year. in attempting to slaughter a flock of prairie chickens near fort sill, a party of eight hunters grew so careless that three of their number were badly wounded. the employes in three of the nail-mills at wareham, mass., struck, saturday, against reducing their wages ten per cent. the nailers and puddlers of plymouth also struck. canada is raising a standing army of , men to serve for three years. the full number applied at the recruiting office in montreal, where the quota was only one hundred. the grand orient of france has issued an appeal to all the lodges of freemasons in the world asking a renewal of unity between the grand orient and all other branches of the masonic rite. the situation in tonquin effectually ties the hands of france. the announcement of the blocking of canton harbor is the only important event of the week in the franco-chinese struggle. dr. tanner, the famous faster, is practicing medicine in jamestown, n. y. the physicians of that city have made a fruitless attempt to secure his indictment by the grand jury as an illegal practitioner. the french press are advocating an organized effort against the prohibition of the importation of american pork. the prohibition, it is estimated, will cost the french ports , , francs, and deprive the working people, besides, of cheap and wholesome food. articles of incorporation were filed at springfield, saturday, for the building of a railroad from a point within five miles of the northeast corner of cook county to a point in rock island county, on the mississippi, opposite muscatine, iowa. the capital is $ , , , and among the incorporators are joseph r. reynolds, edgar terhune holden, and josiah browne, of chicago. congressional. senator edmunds has again been chosen president pro tem of the senate. mr. anthony, of rhode island, declares himself too ill to perform the duties of the position. on monday nearly bills were introduced into the house. the total number of bills introduced and referred since the session began, reaches nearly , . there are many important measures among them, while there are more that are of somewhat doubtful import, especially those which look to a still further increase of the pension appropriations. there are bills for the regulation of banks and banking; several new bankruptcy acts; one reducing the fees on patents as follows: the fee upon filing original application for a patent is reduced from $ to $ . the minimum fees for a design patent shall be $ instead of $ and the minimum term for which granted shall be five instead of three and a half years; a bill to reorganize the infantry branch of the army; for reorganizing and increasing the navy; several to revise the tariff; to look after the forfeiture of land grants; to restrict importation of foreign adulterated goods; to stamp out contagious diseases of animals; to establish a department of commerce; to repeal the act prohibiting ex-confederate officers from serving in the united states army; to relieve fitz john porter, and hundreds of bills for the relief or benefit of individuals in different parts of the country. there are also bills for the regulation of transportation companies and for the establishment of a system of government telegraph. as yet no appropriation bills have been reported and the ways and means committee has but recently organized into subcommittees and has not begun the consideration of any subject. there is already business enough before this congress to keep it in continuous session for years. markets. financial and commercial. office of the prairie farmer, chicago. jan , . there is an increased financial activity over last week. bankers, on monday, felt quite certain of a brisk week and were correspondingly cheerful. interest rates are unchanged, being and per cent. eastern exchange sold between banks at @ c per $ , premium, and closed firm. there is no change in government securities. the new york stock market was weak, and it is reported that the new york millionaires such as gould, vanderbilt, sage, etc., have suffered to the extent of several millions each by the late general shrinkage in the value of stocks. nevertheless, it is in such times as these that the vanderbilts of the country reap their richest harvests. they have money to buy depressed stock with, and when the wheel turns their investments again add to their wealth. the little fellows have to sacrifice all their cash and then go to the wall. government securities are as follows: 's coupons, q. apr. - / 's reg., q. apr. - / - / 's coupon, q. mar. - / - / 's registered, q. mar. - / 's registered q. mar. grain and provisions. there was more of a speculative feeling in the chicago grain and provision markets yesterday than for some time. there was something of a recovery from the panicky feeling of saturday, when the bulls had complete charge of the prices, but there was no advance. flour was unchanged, the article not yet feeling the uncertain condition of the wheat market. choice to favorite white winters $ @ fair to good brands of white winters @ good to choice red winters @ prime to choice springs @ good to choice export stock, in sacks, extras @ good to choice export stock, double extras @ fair to good minnesota springs @ choice to fancy minnesota springs @ patent springs @ low grades @ wheat.--red winter, no. , @ c; car lots of spring. no. , sold at @ - / c; no. , do. - / @ c. corn.--moderately active. car lots no , @ - / c; rejected, - / ; new mixed, c. oats.--no. in store, closed - / @ - / . rye.--may, in store @ - / . barley.--no. , in store; no. , - / c. flax.--closed at $ on track. timothy.--$ @ per bushel. little doing. clover.--quiet at $ @ for prime. provisions.--mess pork, february, $ @ per bbl; green hams, - / c per lb. short ribs, $ - / per cwt. lard.--january, $ ; february, $ . lumber. lumber unchanged. quotations for green are as follows: short dimension, per m $ @ long dimension, per m @ boards and strips, no. @ boards and strips, medium @ boards and strips, no. choice @ shingles, standard @ shingles, choice @ shingles, extra @ lath @ country produce. note.--the quotations for the articles named in the following list are generally for commission lots of goods and from first hands. while our prices are based as near as may be on the landing or wholesale rates, allowance must be made for selections and the sorting up for store distribution. beans.--hand picked mediums $ @ . hand picked navies, $ @ . butter.--dull and without change. choice to extra creamery, @ c per lb.; fair to good do @ c; fair to choice dairy, @ c; common to choice packing stock fresh and sweet, @ c; ladle packed @ c; fresh made, streaked butter, @ c. bran.--quoted at $ - / @ per ton; extra choice $ . broom-corn--good to choice hurl - / @ - / c per lb; green self-working @ c; red-tipped and pale do @ c; inside and covers @ c; common short corn - / @ - / c; crooked, and damaged, @ c, according to quality. cheese.--choice full-cream cheddars @ - / c per lb; medium quality do @ c; good to prime full cream flats @ - / c; skimmed cheddars @ c; good skimmed flats @ c; hard-skimmed and common stock @ c. eggs.--in a small way the best brands are quotable at @ c per dozen; @ c for good ice house stock; @ c per pickled. hay.--no timothy $ @ per ton; no do $ @ ; mixed do $ @ ; upland prairie $ @ ; no prairie $ @ ; no do $ @ . small bales sell at @ c per ton more than large bales. hides and pelts.--green-cured light hides - / c per lb; do heavy cows c; no damaged green-salted hides c; green-salted calf @ - / cents; green-salted bull c; dry-salted hides cents; no. two-thirds price; no. dry flint @ - / c. sheep pelts salable at @ c for the estimated amount of wash wool on each pelt. all branded and scratched hides are discounted per cent from the price of no. . hops.--prime to choice new york state hops @ c per lb; pacific coast of @ c; fair to good wisconsin @ c. poultry.--prices for good to choice dry picked and unfrozen lots are: turkeys @ c per lb; chickens @ c; ducks @ c; geese @ c. thin, undesirable, and frozen stock @ c per lb less than these figures; live offerings nominal. potatoes.--good to choice @ c per bu. on track; common to fair @ c. illinois sweet potatoes range at $ @ per bbl for yellow. baltimore stock at $ @ , and jerseys at $ . red are dull and nominal. tallow and grease.--no country tallow @ - / c per lb; no do - / @ - / c. prime white grease @ - / c; yellow - / @ - / c; brown - / @ . vegetables.--cabbage, $ @ per ; celery, @ c per doz bunches; onions, $ @ per bbl for yellow, and $ for red; turnips, $ @ per bbl for rutabagas, and $ for white flat. wool.--from store range as follows for bright wools from wisconsin, illinois, michigan, indiana, and eastern iowa--dark western lots generally ranging at @ c per lb. less. coarse and dingy tub @ good medium tub @ unwashed bucks' fleeces @ fine unwashed heavy fleeces @ fine light unwashed heavy fleeces @ coarse unwashed fleeces @ low medium unwashed fleeces @ fine medium unwashed fleeces @ fine washed fleeces @ coarse washed fleeces @ low medium washed fleeces @ fine medium washed fleeces @ colorado and territory wools range as follows: lowest grades @ low medium @ medium @ fine @ wools from new mexico: lowest grades @ part improved @ best improved @ burry from c to c off: black c to c off. live stock markets. the total receipts and shipments for last week were as follows: received. shipped. cattle , , calves hogs , , sheep , , cattle.--notwithstanding a reported advance in england, cattle did not improve in prices over saturday. indeed, there was a decline of a few cents per hundred. the supplies were large and the quality inferior. indeed few really fat cattle came in during the week. eastern markets were reported as over stocked. shippers and dressed meat operators bought rather freely of common lots. we may quote as follows: fancy fat cattle $ @ choice to prime steers @ fair to good shipping steers @ common to medium steers @ butcher's steers @ cows and bulls, common to good @ inferior cows and bulls @ stockers @ feeders @ milch cows, per head @ veal calves, per lbs. @ hogs.-there were fair receipts on saturday and monday--an aggregate of , head or some , more than for the same days last week. as city packers are at work again, the market was quite active. they bought about , head, and shippers took nearly all that were left. prices advanced from to cents. it may be said in general that the quality of the hogs now coming in is poor. heavy lots were sold at $ @ ; light hogs brought $ @ . skips and culls $ @ . note.--all sales of hogs are made subject to a shrinkage of lbs for piggy sows and lbs for stags. dead hogs sell for - / c per lb for weights of and over and [transcriber's note: blank in original] for weights of less than lbs. sheep.--the supply was sufficient to meet the demand, though considerably less than on monday of last week. really choice animals were scarce. shippers and butchers bought freely. common lots were dull, bringing $ @ , while fancy lots sold at $ . @ . very inferior sheep sold at $ . * * * * * commission merchants. j.h. white & co., produce commission water st., chicago. refers to this paper. * * * * * miscellaneous. first-class plants of best varieties of small fruits. catalogues free. address o. b. galusha, peoria, ill. * * * * * [illustration] print your own cards labels, envelopes, etc. with our $ printing press. larger sizes for circulars, etc., $ to $ . for pleasure, money making, young or old. everything easy, printed instructions. send stamps for catalogue of presses, type, cards, etc., to the factory. kelsey & co., meriden, conn. * * * * * for sale. pure bred bronze turkeys and pekin ducks. also eggs in season. mrs. j. f. fulton, petersburg. ills. * * * * * marlboro red raspberry send to the originators for history and terms. a. s. caywood & son, marlboro, n. y. * * * * * pig extricator to aid animals in giving birth. send for free circular to wm. dulin, avoca, pottawattamie co., ia. * * * * * educational. university of the state of new york american veterinary college, west th st., new york city. the regular course of lectures commences in october each year. circular and information can be had on application to a. liautard, m.d.v.s., dean of the faculty. * * * * * special offer. $ for $ ! [illustration] a superb new family sewing machine! combining all the most recent improvements, and now selling for $ , is offered by the prairie farmer publishing company to subscribers to the prairie farmer for $ , including one year's subscription to the paper. this exceptional offer will remain open for a few days only. * * * * * sewing silk. corticelli sewing silk, [illustration] ladies, try it! the best sewing silk made. every spool warranted. full length, smooth and strong. ask your storekeeper for corticelli silk. * * * * * miscellaneous. . _now is the time to subscribe._ harper's periodicals. per year: harper's magazine $ harper's weekly harper's bazar harper's young people harper's franklin square library, one year ( numbers) _postage free to all subscribers in the united states or canada._ * * * * * the volumes of the weekly and bazar begin with the first numbers for january, the volumes of the young people with the first number for november, and the volumes of the magazine with the numbers for june and december of each year. subscriptions will be entered with the number of each periodical current at the time of receipt of order, except in cases where the subscriber otherwise directs. specimen copy of harper's young people sent on receipt of four cents in stamps. * * * * * harper's franklin square library: a weekly publication, containing works of travel, biography, history, fiction, and poetry, at prices ranging from to cents per number. full list of _harper's franklin square library_ will be furnished gratuitously on application to harper & brothers. * * * * * remittances should be made by post-office money order or draft, to avoid risk of loss. address harper & brothers, franklin square, n. y. * * * * * --> harper's catalogue, of between three and and four thousand volumes, mailed on receipt of ten cent in postage stamps. * * * * * a new thing every farmer will have it. saves them large sums of money; saves labor; pays a profit; honest business; agents clear $ to $ a week introducing it; no risk to you; terms easy; full satisfaction; a harvest for live men with small capital. address f. c. renner, new midway, frederick co., md. the fat of the land [illustration] the fat of the land the story of an american farm by john williams streeter new york the macmillan company london: macmillan & co., ltd. _all rights reserved_ copyright, . by the macmillan company. set up, electrotyped, and published february, . reprinted march, april, may, . norwood press j.s. cushing & co.--berwick & smith co. norwood, mass., u.s.a. to polly contents chapter page i. my excuse ii. the hunting of the land iii. the first visit to the farm iv. the hired man v. boring for water vi. we take possession vii. the horse-and-buggy man viii. we plat the farm ix. house-cleaning x. fenced in xi. the building line xii. carpenters quit work xiii. planning for the trees xiv. planting of the trees xv. polly's judgment hall xvi. winter work xvii. what shall we ask of the hen? xviii. white wyandottes xix. fried pork xx. a ration for product xxi. the razorback xxii. the old orchard xxiii. the first hatch xxiv. the holstein milk machine xxv. the dairymaid xxvi. little pigs xxvii. work on the home forty xxviii. discounting the market xxix. from city to country xxx. autumn reckoning xxxi. the children xxxii. the home-coming xxxiii. christmas eve xxxiv. christmas xxxv. we close the books for ' xxxvi. our friends xxxvii. the headman's job xxxviii. spring of ' xxxix. the young orchard xl. the timothy harvest xli. strike at gordon's mine xlii. the riot xliii. the result xliv. deep waters xlv. dogs and horses xlvi. the skim-milk trust xlvii. naboth's vineyard xlviii. maids and mallards xlix. the sunken garden l. the headman generalizes li. the grand-girls lii. the third reckoning liii. the milk machine liv. bacon and eggs lv. the old time farm-hand lvi. the syndicate lvii. the death of sir tom lviii. bacteria lix. match-making lx. "i told you so" lxi. the belgian farmer lxii. home-coming lxiii. an hundred fold lxiv. comfort me with apples lxv. the end of the third year lxvi. looking backward lxvii. looking forward the fat of the land chapter i my excuse my sixtieth birthday is a thing of yesterday, and i have, therefore, more than half descended the western slope. i have no quarrel with life or with time, for both have been polite to me; and i wish to give an account of the past seven years to prove the politeness of life, and to show how time has made amends to me for the forced resignation of my professional ambitions. for twenty-five years, up to , i practised medicine and surgery in a large city. i loved my profession beyond the love of most men, and it loved me; at least, it gave me all that a reasonable man could desire in the way of honors and emoluments. the thought that i should ever drop out of this attractive, satisfying life, never seriously occurred to me, though i was conscious of a strong and persistent force that urged me toward the soil. by choice and by training i was a physician, and i gloried in my work; but by instinct i was, am, and always shall be, a farmer. all my life i have had visions of farms with flocks and herds, but i did not expect to realize my visions until i came on earth a second time. i would never have given up my profession voluntarily; but when it gave me up, i had to accept the dismissal, surrender my ambitions, and fall back upon my primary instinct for diversion and happiness. the dismissal came without warning, like the fall of a tree when no wind shakes the forest, but it was imperative and peremptory. the doctors (and they were among the best in the land) said, "no more of this kind of work for years," and i had to accept their verdict, though i knew that "for years" meant forever. my disappointment lasted longer than the acute attack; but, thanks to the cheerful spirit of my wife, by early summer of that year i was able to face the situation with courage that grew as strength increased. fortunately we were well to do, and the loss of professional income was not a serious matter. we were not rich as wealth is counted nowadays; but we were more than comfortable for ourselves and our children, though i should never earn another dollar. this is not the common state of the physician, who gives more and gets less than most other men; it was simply a happy combination of circumstances. polly was a small heiress when we married; i had some money from my maternal grandfather; our income was larger than our necessities, and our investments had been fortunate. fate had set no wolf to howl at our door. in june we decided to take to the woods, or rather to the country, to see what it had in store for us. the more we thought of it, the better i liked the plan, and polly was no less happy over it. we talked of it morning, noon, and night, and my half-smothered instinct grew by what it fed on. countless schemes at length resolved themselves into a factory farm, which should be a source of pleasure as well as of income. it was of all sizes, shapes, industries, and limits of expenditure, as the hours passed and enthusiasm waxed or waned. i finally compromised on from two hundred to three hundred acres of land, with a total expenditure of not more than $ , for the building of my factory. it was to produce butter, eggs, pork, and apples, all of best quality, and they were to be sold at best prices. i discoursed at some length on farms and farmers to polly, who slept through most of the harangue. she afterward said that she enjoyed it, but i never knew whether she referred to my lecture or to her nap. if farming be the art of elimination, i want it not. if the farmer and the farmer's family must, by the nature of the occupation, be deprived of reasonable leisure and luxury, if the conveniences and amenities must be shorn close, if comfort must be denied and life be reduced to the elemental necessities of food and shelter, i want it not. but i do not believe that this is the case. the wealth of the world comes from the land, which produces all the direct and immediate essentials for the preservation of life and the protection of the race. when people cease to look to the land for support, they lose their independence and fall under the tyranny of circumstances beyond their control. they are no longer producers, but consumers; and their prosperity is contingent upon the prosperity and good will of other people who are more or less alien. only when a considerable percentage of a nation is living close to the land can the highest type of independence and prosperity be enjoyed. this law applies to the mass and also to the individual. the farmer, who produces all the necessities and many of the luxuries, and whose products are in constant demand and never out of vogue, should be independent in mode of life and prosperous in his fortunes. if this is not the condition of the average farmer (and i am sorry to say it is not), the fault is to be found, not in the land, but in the man who tills it. ninety-five per cent of those who engage in commercial and professional occupations fail of large success; more than fifty per cent fail utterly, and are doomed to miserable, dependent lives in the service of the more fortunate. that farmers do not fail nearly so often is due to the bounty of the land, the beneficence of nature, and the ever-recurring seed-time and harvest, which even the most thoughtless cannot interrupt. the waking dream of my life had been to own and to work land; to own it free of debt, and to work it with the same intelligence that has made me successful in my profession. brains always seemed to me as necessary to success in farming as in law, or in medicine, or in business. i always felt that mind should control events in agriculture as in commercial life; that listlessness, carelessness, lack of thrift and energy, and waste, were the factors most potent in keeping the farmer poor and unreasonably harassed by the obligations of life. the men who cultivate the soil create incalculable wealth; by rights they should be the nation's healthiest, happiest, most comfortable, and most independent citizens. their lives should be long, free from care and distress, and no more strenuous than is wholesome. that this condition is not general is due to the fact that the average farmer puts muscle before mind and brawn before brains, and follows, with unthinking persistence, the crude and careless traditions of his forefathers. conditions on the farm are gradually changing for the better. the agricultural colleges, the experiment stations, the lecture courses which are given all over the country, and the general diffusion of agricultural and horticultural knowledge, are introducing among farming communities a more intelligent and more liberal treatment of land. but these changes are so slow, and there is so much to be done before even a small percentage of our six millions of farmers begin to realize their opportunities, that even the weakest effort in this direction may be of use. this is my only excuse for going minutely into the details of my experiment in the cultivation of land. the plain and circumstantial narrative of how four oaks grew, in seven years, from a poor, ill-paying, sadly neglected farm, into a beautiful home and a profitable investment, must simply stand for what it is worth. it may give useful hints, to be followed on a smaller or a larger scale, or it may arouse criticisms which will work for good, both to the critic and to the author. i do not claim experience, excepting the most limited; i do not claim originality, except that most of this work was new to me; i do not claim hardships or difficulties, for i had none; but i do claim that i made good, that i arrived, that my experiment was physically and financially a success, and, as such, i am proud of it, and wish to give it to the world. i was fifty-three years old when i began this experiment, and i was obliged to do quickly whatever i intended to do. i could devote any part of $ , to the experiment without inconvenience. my desire was to test the capacity of ordinary farm land, when properly treated, to support an average family in luxury, paying good wages to more than the usual number of people, keeping open house for many friends, and at the same time not depleting my bank account. i wished to experiment in _intensive farming_, using ordinary farm land as other men might do under similar or modified circumstances. i believed that if i fed the land, it would feed me. my plan was to sell nothing from the farm except finished products, such as butter, fruit, eggs, chickens, and hogs. i believed that best results would be attained by keeping only the best stock, and, after feeding it liberally, selling it in the most favorable market. to live on the fat of the land was what i proposed to do; and i ask your indulgence while i dip into the details of this seven years' experiment. you may say that few persons have the time, inclination, taste, or money to carry out such an experiment; that the average farmer must make each year pay, and that the exploiting of this matter is therefore of interest to a very limited number. admitting much of this, i still claim that there is a lesson to every struggling farmer in this narrative. it should teach the value of brain work on the farm, and the importance of intelligent cultivation; also the advantages of good seed, good tilth, good specimens of well-bred stock, good food, and good care. feed the land liberally, and it will return you much. permit no waste in space, product, time, tools, or strength. do in a small way, if need be, what i have done on a large scale, and you will quickly commence to get good dividends. i have spent much more money than was really necessary on the place, and in the ornamentation of four oaks. this, however, was part of the experiment. i asked the land not only to supply immediate necessities, but to minister to my every want, to gratify the eye, and please the senses by a harmonious fusion of utility and beauty. i wanted a fine country home and a profitable investment within the same ring fence. will you follow me through the search for the land, the purchase, and the tremendous house-cleaning of the first year? after that we will take up the years as they come, finding something of special interest attaching naturally to each. i shall have to deal much with figures and statistics, in a small way, and my pages may look like a school book, but i cannot avoid this, for in these figures and statistics lies the practical lesson. theory alone is of no value. practical application of the theory is the test. i am not imaginative. i could not write a romance if i tried. my strength lies in special detail, and i am willing to spend a lot of time in working out a problem. i do not claim to have spent this time and money without making serious mistakes; i have made many, and i am willing to admit them, as you will see in the following pages. i do claim, however, that, in spite of mistakes, i have solved the problem, and have proved that an intelligent farmer can live in luxury on the fat of the land. chapter ii the hunting of the land the location of the farm for this experiment was of the utmost importance. the land must be within reasonable distance of the city and near a railroad, consequently within easy touch of the market; and if possible it must be near a thriving village, to insure good train service. as to size, i was somewhat uncertain; my minimum limit was acres and the maximum. the land must be fertile, or capable of being made so. i advertised for a farm of from two hundred to four hundred acres, within thirty-five miles of town, and convenient to a good line of transportation. fifty-seven replies came, of which forty-six were impossible, eleven worth a second reading, and five worth investigating. my third trip carried me thirty miles southwest of the city, to a village almost wholly made up of wealthy people who did business in town, and who had their permanent or their summer homes in this village. there were probably twenty-seven or twenty-eight hundred people in the village, most of whom owned estates of from one to thirty acres, varying in value from $ , to $ , . these seemed ideal surroundings. the farm was a trifle more than two miles from the station, and acres in extent. it lay to the west of a north-and-south road, abutting on this road for half a mile, while on the south it was bordered for a mile by a gravelled road, and the west line was an ordinary country road. the lay of the land in general was a gentle slope to the west and south from a rather high knoll, the highest point of which was in the north half of the southeast forty. the land stretched away to the west, gradually sloping to its lowest point, which was about two-thirds of the distance to the western boundary. a straggling brook at its lowest point was more or less rampant in springtime, though during july and august it contained but little water. westward from the brook the land sloped gradually upward, terminating in a forest of forty to fifty acres. this forest was in good condition. the trees were mostly varieties of oak and hickory, with a scattering of wild cherry, a few maples, both hard and soft, and some lindens. it was much overgrown with underbrush, weeds, and wild flowers. the land was generally good, especially the lower parts of it. the soil of the higher ground was thin, but it lay on top of a friable clay which is fertile when properly worked and enriched. the farm belonged to an unsettled estate, and was much run down, as little had been done to improve its fertility, and much to deplete it. there were two sets of buildings, including a house of goodly proportions, a cottage of no particular value, and some dilapidated barns. the property could be bought at a bargain. it had been held at $ an acre; but as the estate was in process of settlement, and there was an urgent desire to force a sale, i finally secured it for $ per acre. the two renters on the farm still had six months of occupancy before their leases expired. they were willing to resign their leases if i would pay a reasonable sum for the standing crops and their stock and equipments. the crops comprised about forty acres of corn, fifty acres of oats, and five acres of potatoes. the stock was composed of two herds of cows (seven in one and nine in the other), eleven spring calves, about forty hogs, and the usual assortment of domestic fowls. the equipment of the farm in machinery and tools was meagre to the last degree. i offered the renters $ and $ , respectively, for their leasehold and other property. this was more than their value, but i wanted to take possession at once. chapter iii the first visit to the farm it was the th of july, , when i contracted for the farm; possession was to be given august st. on july th, polly and i boarded an early train for exeter, intending to make a day of it in every sense. we wished to go over the property thoroughly, and to decide on a general outline of treatment. polly was as enthusiastic over the experiment as i, and she is energetic, quick to see, and prompt to perform. she was to have the planning of the home grounds--the house and the gardens; and not only the planning, but also the full control. a ride of forty-five minutes brought us to exeter. the service of this railroad, by the way, is of the best; there is hardly a half-hour in the day when one cannot make the trip either way, and the fare is moderate: $ . for twenty-five rides,--thirty-five cents a ride. we hired an open carriage and started for the farm. the first half-mile was over a well-kept macadam road through that part of the village which lies west of the railway. the homes bordering this street are of fine proportions, and beautifully kept. they are the country places of well-to-do people who love to get away from the noise and dirt of the city. some of them have ten or fifteen acres of ground, but this land is for breathing space and beauty--not for serious cultivation. beyond these homes we followed a well-gravelled road leading directly west. this road is bordered by small farms, most of them given over to dairying interests. presently i called polly's attention to the fact that the few apple trees we saw were healthy and well grown, though quite independent of the farmer's or the pruner's care. this thrifty condition of unkept apple orchards delighted me. i intended to make apple-growing a prominent feature in my experiment, and i reasoned that if these trees did fairly well without cultivation or care, others would do excellently well with both. as we approached the second section line and climbed a rather steep hill, we got the first glimpse of our possession. at the bottom of the western slope of this hill we could see the crossing of the north-and-south road, which we knew to be the east boundary of our land; while, stretching straight away before us until lost in the distant wood, lay the well-kept road which for a good mile was our southern boundary. descending the hill, we stopped at the crossing of the roads to take in the outline of the farm from this southeast corner. the north-and-south road ran level for yards, gradually rose for the next , and then continued nearly level for a mile or more. we saw what jane austen calls "a happy fall of land," with a southern exposure, which included about two-thirds of the southeast forty, and high land beyond for the balance of this forty and the forty lying north of it. there was an irregular fringe of forest trees on this southern slope, especially well defined along the eastern border. i saw that polly was pleased with the view. "we must enter the home lot from this level at the foot of the hill," said she, "wind gracefully through the timber, and come out near those four large trees on the very highest ground. that will be effective and easily managed, and will give me a chance at landscape gardening, which i am just aching to try." "all right," said i, "you shall have a free hand. let's drive around the boundaries of our land and behold its magnitude before we make other plans." we drove westward, my eyes intent upon the fields, the fences, the crops, and everything that pertained to the place. i had waited so many years for the sense of ownership of land that i could hardly realize that this was not another dream from which i would soon be awakened by something real. i noticed that the land was fairly smooth except where it was broken by half-rotted stumps or out-cropping boulders, that the corn looked well and the oats fair, but the pasture lands were too well seeded to dock, milkweed, and wild mustard to be attractive, and the fences were cheap and much broken. the woodland near the western limit proved to be practically a virgin forest, in which oak trees predominated. the undergrowth was dense, except near the road; it was chiefly hazel, white thorn, dogwood, young cherry, and second growth hickory and oak. we turned the corner and followed the woods for half a mile to where a barbed wire fence separated our forest from the woodland adjoining it. coming back to the starting-point we turned north and slowly climbed the hill to the east of our home lot, silently developing plans. we drove the full half-mile of our eastern boundary before turning back. i looked with special interest at the orchard, which was on the northeast forty. i had seen it on my first visit, but had given it little attention, noting merely that the trees were well grown. i now counted the rows, and found that there were twelve; the trees in each row had originally been twenty, and as these trees were about thirty-five feet apart, it was easy to estimate that six acres had been given to this orchard. the vicissitudes of seventeen years had not been without effect, and there were irregular gaps in the rows,--here a sick tree, there a dead one. a careless estimate placed these casualties at fifty-five or sixty, which i later found was nearly correct. this left trees in fair health; and in spite of the tight sod which covered their roots and a lamentable lack of pruning, they were well covered with young fruit. they had been headed high in the old-fashioned way, which made them look more like forest trees than a modern orchard. they had done well without a husbandman; what could not others do with one? the group of farm buildings on the north forty consisted of a one-story cottage containing six rooms--sitting room, dining room, kitchen, and a bedroom opening off each--with a lean-to shed in the rear, and some woe-begone barns, sheds, and out-buildings that gave the impression of not caring how they looked. the second group was better. it was south of the orchard on the home forty, and quite near the road. why does the universal farm-house hang its gable over the public road, without tree or shrub to cover its boldness? it would look much better, and give greater comfort to its inmates, if it were more remote. a lawn leading up to a house, even though not beautiful or well kept, adds dignity and character to a place out of all proportion to its waste or expense. i know of nothing that would add so much to the beautification of the country-side as a building line prohibiting houses and barns within a hundred yards of a public road. a staring, glaring farm-house, flanked by a red barn and a pigsty, all crowding the public road as hard as the path-master will permit, is incongruous and unsightly. with all outdoors to choose from, why ape the crowded city streets? with much to apologize for in barn and pigsty, why place them in the seat of honor? moreover, many things which take place on the farm gain enchantment from distance. it is best to leave some scope for the imagination of the passer-by. these and other things will change as farmers' lives grow more gracious, and more attention is given to beautifying country houses. the house, whose gables looked up and down the street, was two stories in height, twenty-five feet by forty in the main, with a one-story ell running back. without doubt there was a parlor, sitting room, and four chambers in the main, with dining room and kitchen in the ell. "that will do for the head man's house, if we put it in the right place and fix it up," said polly. "my young lady, i propose to be the 'head man' on this farm, and i wish it spelled with a capital h, but i do not expect to live in that house. it will do first-rate for the farmer and his men, when you have placed it where you want it, but i intend to live in the big house with you." "we'll not disagree about that, mr. headman." the barns were fairly good, but badly placed. they were not worth the expense of moving, so i decided to let them stand as they were until we could build better ones, and then tear them down. we drove in through a clump of trees behind the farm-house, and pushed on about three hundred yards to the crest of the knoll. here we got out of the carriage and looked about, with keen interest, in every direction. the views were wide toward three points of the compass. north and northwest we could see pleasant lands for at least two miles; directly west, our eyes could not reach beyond our own forest; to the south and southwest, fruitful valleys stretched away to a range of wooded hills four miles distant; but on the east our view was limited by the fringe of woods which lay between us and the north-and-south road. "this is the exact spot for the house," said polly. "it must face to the south, with a broad piazza, and the chief entrance must be on the east. the kitchens and fussy things will be out of sight on the northwest corner; two stories, a high attic with rooms, and covered all over with yellow-brown shingles." she had it all settled in a minute. "what will the paper on your bedroom wall be like?" i asked. "i know perfectly well, but i shan't tell you." seating myself on an out-cropping boulder, i began to study the geography of the farm. in imagination i stripped it of stock, crops, buildings, and fences, and saw it as bald as the palm of my hand. i recited the table of long measure: sixteen and a half feet, one rod, perch, or pole; forty rods, one furlong; eight furlongs, one mile. eight times is ; there are rods in a mile, but how much is - / . times ? "polly, how much is - / times ?" "don't bother me now; i'm busy." (just as if she could have told in her moment of greatest leisure!) i resorted to paper and pencil, and learned that there are feet in each and every mile. my land was, therefore, feet long and feet wide. i must split it in some way, by a road or a lane, to make all parts accessible. if i divided it by two lanes of twenty feet each, i could have on either side of these lanes lots feet deep, and these would be quite manageable. i found that if these lots were feet long, they would contain ten acres minus the ten feet used for the lane. this seemed a real discovery, as it simplified my calculations and relieved me of much mental effort. "polly, i am going to make a map of the place,--lay it out just as i want it." "you may leave the home forty out of your map; i will look after that," said the lady. in my pocket i found three envelopes somewhat the worse for wear. this is how one of them looked when my map was finished. [illustration:] i am not especially haughty about this map, but it settled a matter which had been chaotic in my mind. my plan was to make the farm a soiling one; to confine the stock within as limited a space as was consistent with good health, and to feed cultivated forage and crops. in drawing my map, the forty which polly had segregated left the northeast forty standing alone, and i had to cast about for some good way of treating it. "make it your feeding ground," said my good genius, and thus the wrath of polly was made to glorify my plans. this feeding lot of forty acres is all high land, naturally drained. it was near the obvious building line, and it seemed suitable in every way. i drew a line from north to south, cutting it in the middle. the east twenty i devoted to cows and their belongings; the west twenty was divided by right lines into lots of five acres each, the southwest one for the hens and the other three for hogs. looking around for polly to show her my work, i found she had disappeared; but soon i saw her white gown among the trees. joining her, i said,-- "i have mapped seven forties; have you finished one?" "i have not," she said. "mine is of more importance than all of yours; i will give you a sketch this evening. this bit of woods is better than i thought. how much of it do you suppose there is?" "about seven acres, i reckon, by hook and by crook; enough to amuse you and furnish a lot of wild-flower seed to be floated over the rest of the farm." "you may plant what seeds you like on the rest of the farm, but i must have wild flowers. do you know how long it is since i have had them? not since i was a girl!" "that is not very long, polly. you don't look much more than a girl to-day. you shall have asters and goldenrod and black-eyed susans to your heart's content if you will always be as young." "i believe time will turn backward for both of us out here, mr. headman. but i'm as hungry as a wolf. do you think we can get a glass of milk of the 'farm lady'?" we tried, succeeded, and then started for home. neither of us had much to say on the return trip, for our minds were full of unsolved problems. that evening polly showed me this plat of the home forty. [illustration:] chapter iv the hired man modern farming is greatly handicapped by the difficulty of getting good help. i need not go into the causes which have operated to bring about this condition; it exists, and it has to be met. i cannot hope to solve the problem for others, but i can tell how i solved it for myself. i determined that the men who worked for me should find in me a considerate friend who would look after their interests in a reasonable and neighborly fashion. they should be well housed and well fed, and should have clean beds, clean table linen and an attractively set table, papers, magazines, and books, and a comfortable room in which to read them. there should be reasonable work hours and hours for recreation, and abundant bathing facilities; and everything at four oaks should proclaim the dignity of labor. from the men i expected cleanliness, sobriety, uniform kindness to all animals, cheerful obedience, industry, and a disposition to save their wages. these demands seemed to me reasonable, and i made up my mind to adhere to them if i had to try a hundred men. the best way to get good farm hands who would be happy and contented, i thought, was to go to the city and find men who had shot their bolts and failed of the mark; men who had come up from the farm hoping for easier or more ambitious lives, but who had failed to find what they sought and had experienced the unrest of a hand-to-mouth struggle for a living in a large city; men who were pining for the country, perhaps without knowing it, and who saw no way to get back to it. i advertised my wants in a morning paper, and asked my son, who was on vacation, to interview the applicants. from noon until six o'clock my ante-room was invaded by a motley procession--delicate boys of fifteen who wanted to go to the country, old men who thought they could do farm work, clerks and janitors out of employment, typical tramps and hoboes who diffused very naughty smells, and a few--a very few--who seemed to know what they could do and what they really wanted. jack took the names of five promising men, and asked them to come again the next day. in the morning i interviewed them, dismissed three, and accepted two on the condition that their references proved satisfactory. as these men are still at four oaks, after seven years of steady employment, and as i hope they will stay twenty years longer, i feel that the reader should know them. much of the smooth sailing at the farm is due to their personal interest, steadiness of purpose, and cheerful optimism. william thompson, forty-six years of age, tall, lean, wiry, had been a farmer all his life. his wife had died three years before, and a year later, he had lost his farm through an imperfect title. understanding machinery and being a fair carpenter, he then came to the city, with $ in his pocket, joined the carpenter's union, and tried to make a living at that trade. between dull business, lock-outs, tie-ups, and strikes, he was reduced to fifty cents, and owed three dollars for room rent. he was in dead earnest when he threw his union card on my table and said:-- "i would rather work for fifty cents a day on a farm than take my chances for six times as much in the union." this was the sort of man i wanted: one who had tried other things and was glad of a chance to return to the land. thompson said that after he had spent one lonesome year in the city, he had married a sensible woman of forty, who was now out at service on account of his hard luck. he also told of a husky son of two-and-twenty who was at work on a farm within fifty miles of the city. i liked the man from the first, for he seemed direct and earnest. i told him to eat up the fifty cents he had in his pocket and to see me at noon of the following day. meantime i looked up one of his references; and when he came, i engaged him, with the understanding that his time should begin at once. the wage agreed upon was $ a month for the first half-year. if he proved satisfactory, he was to receive $ a month for the next six months, and there was to be a raise of $ a month for each half-year that he remained with me until his monthly wage should amount to $ ,--each to give or take a month's notice to quit. this seemed fair to both. i would not pay more than $ a month to an untried man, but a good man is worth more. as i wanted permanent, steady help, i proposed to offer a fair bonus to secure it. other things being equal, the man who has "gotten the hang" of a farm can do better work and get better results than a stranger. the transient farm-hand is a delusion and a snare. he has no interest except his wages, and he is a breeder of discontent. if the hundreds of thousands of able-bodied men who are working for scant wages in cities, or inanely tramping the country, could see the dignity of the labor which is directly productive, what a change would come over the face of the country! there are nearly six million farms in this nation, and four millions of them would be greatly benefited by the addition of another man to the working force. there is a comfortable living and a minimum of $ a year for each of four million men, if they will only seek it and honestly earn it. seven hundred millions in wages, and double or treble that in product and added values, is a consideration not unworthy the attention of social scientists. to favor an exodus to the land is, i believe, the highest type of benevolence, and the surest and safest solution of the labor problem. besides engaging thompson, i tentatively bespoke the services of his wife and son. mrs. thompson was to come for $ a month and a half-dollar raise for each six months, the son on the same terms as the father. the other man whom i engaged that day was william johnson, a tall, blond swede about twenty-six years old. johnson had learned gardening in the old country, and had followed it two years in the new. he was then employed in a market gardener's greenhouse; but he wanted to change from under glass to out of doors, and to have charge of a lawn, shrubs, flowers, and a kitchen garden. he spoke brokenly, but intelligently, had an honest eye, and looked to me like a real "find." polly, who was to be his immediate boss, was pleased with him, and we took him with the understanding that he was to make himself generally useful until the time came for his special line of work. we now had two men engaged (with a possible third) and one woman, and my _venire_ was exhausted. two days later i again advertised, and out of a number of applicants secured one man. sam jones was a sturdy-looking fellow of middle age, with a suspiciously red nose. he had been bred on a farm, had learned the carpenter's trade, and was especially good at taking care of chickens. his ambition was to own and run a chicken plant. i hired him on the same terms as the others, but with misgivings on account of the florid nose. this was on the th or th of july, and there were still ten days before i could enter into possession. the men were told to report for duty the last day of the month. chapter v boring for water the water supply was the next problem. i determined to have an abundant and convenient supply of running water in the house, the barns, and the feeding grounds, and also on the lawn and gardens. i would have no carrying or hauling of water, and no lack of it. there were four wells on the place, two of them near the houses and two stock wells in the lower grounds. near the well at the large house was a windmill that pumped water into a small tank, from which it was piped to the barn-yard and the lower story of the house. the supply was inadequate and not at all to my liking. my plan involved not only finding, raising, and distributing water, but also the care of waste water and sewage. inquiring among those who had deep wells in the village, i found that good water was usually reached at from to feet. as my well-site was high, i expected to have to bore deep. i contracted with a well man of good repute for a six-inch well of feet (or less), piped and finished to the surface, for $ a foot; any greater depth to be subject to further agreement. it took nearly three months to finish the water system, but it has proved wonderfully convenient and satisfactory. during seven years i have not spent more than $ for changes and repairs. we struck bed-rock at feet, drilled feet into this rock, and found water which rose to within feet of the surface and which could not be materially lowered by the constant use of a three-inch power-pump. the water was milky white for three days, in spite of much pumping; and then, and ever after, it ran clear and sweet, with a temperature of ° f. well and water being satisfactory, i cheerfully paid the well man $ for the job. meantime i contracted for a tank twelve by twelve feet, to be raised thirty feet above the well on eight timbers, each ten inches square, well bolted and braced, for $ ,--i to put in the foundation. this consisted of eight concrete piers, each five feet deep in the clay, three feet square, and capped at the level of the ground with a limestone two feet square and eight inches thick. these piers were set in octagon form around the well, with their centres seven feet from the middle of the bore, making the spread of the framework fourteen feet at the ground and ten at the platform. the foundation cost $ . a rider eight-inch, hot-air, wood-burning, pumping engine (with a two-inch pipe leading to the tank, and a four-inch pipe from it), filled the tank quickly; and it was surprising to see how little fuel it consumed. it cost $ . i have now to confess to a small extravagance. i contracted with a carpenter to build an ornamental tower, fifty-five feet high, twenty feet across at the base, and fifteen feet at the top, sheeted and shingled, with a series of small windows in spiral and a narrow stairway leading to a balcony that surrounded the tower on a level with the top of the tank. this tower cost $ ; but it was not all extravagance, because a third of the expense would have been incurred in protecting the engine and making the tank frost-proof. to distribute the water, i had three lines of four-inch pipe leading from the tank's out-flow pipe. one of these went feet to the house, with one-inch branches for the gardens and lawn; another led east feet, past the proposed sites of the cottage, the farm-house, the dairy, and other buildings in that direction; while the third, about feet long, led to the horse barn and the other projected buildings. from near the end of this west pipe a - / -inch pipe was carried due north through the centre of the five-acre lot set apart for the hennery, and into the fields beyond. this pipe was about feet long. altogether i used feet of four-inch, and about feet of smaller pipe, at a total cost of $ . all water pipes were placed - / feet in the ground to be out of the reach of frost, and to this day they have received no further attention. the trenches for the pipes were opened by a party of five italians whom a railroad friend found for me. these men boarded themselves, slept in the barn, and did the work for seventy-five cents a rod, the job costing me $ . opening the sewer trenches cost a little more, for they were as deep as those for the water, and a little wider. eight hundred feet of main sewer, a three-hundred-foot branch to the house, and short branches from barns, pens, and farm-houses, made in all about fourteen hundred feet, which cost $ to open. the sewer ended in the stable yard back of the horse barn, in a ten-foot catch-basin near the manure pit. a few feet from this catch-basin was a second, and beyond this a third, all of the same size, with drain-pipes connecting them about two feet below the ground. these basins were closely covered at all times, and in winter they were protected from frost by a thick layer of coarse manure. they were placed near the site of the manure pit for convenience in cleaning, which had to be done every three months for the first one, once in six months for the second and rarely for the third; indeed, the water flowing from the third was always clear. this waste water was run through a drain-pipe diagonally across the northwest corner of the big orchard to an open ditch in the north lane. opening this drain of forty rods cost $ . later i carried this closed drain to the creek, at an additional expense of $ . the connecting of the water pipes and the laying of the sewer was done by a local plumber for $ ; the drain-pipe and sewer-pipe cost $ ; and the three catch-basins, bricked up and covered with two-inch plank, cost $ . the filling in of all these trenches was done by my own men with teams and scrapers, and should not be figured into this expense account. it must be borne in mind that while this elaborate water system was being installed, no buildings were completed and but few were even begun; the big house was not finished for more than a year. the sites of all the buildings had been decided on, and the farm-house and the cottage had been moved and remodelled, by the middle of october, at which date the water plant was completed. an abundant supply of good water is essential to the comfort of man and beast, and the money invested in securing it will pay a good interest in the long run. my water plant cost me a lot of money, $ ; but it hasn't cost me $ a year since it was finished. chapter vi we take possession my barn was full of horses, but none of them was fit for farm work; so i engaged a veterinary surgeon to find three suitable teams. by the th of the month he had succeeded, and i inspected the animals and found them satisfactory, though not so smooth and smart-looking as i had pictured them. when i compared them, somewhat unfavorably, with the teams used for city trucks and delivery wagons, he retorted by saying: "i did not know that you wanted to pay $ a pair for your horses. these six horses will cost you $ , and they are worth it." they were a sturdy lot, young, well matched, not so large as to be unwieldy, but heavy enough for almost any work. the lightest was said to weigh pounds, and the heaviest not more than a hundred pounds more. two of the teams were bay with a sprinkling of white feet, while the other pair was red roan, and, to my mind, the best looking. four of these horses are still doing service on the farm, after more than seven years. one of the bays died in the summer of ' , and one of the roans broke his stifle during the following winter and had to be shot. the bereaved relicts of these two pairs have taken kindly to each other, and now walk soberly side by side in double harness. i sometimes think, however, that i see a difference. the personal relation is not just as it was in the old union,--no bickerings or disagreements, but also no jokes and no caresses. the soft nose doesn't seek its neighbor's neck, there is no resting of chin on friendly withers while half-closed eyes see visions of cool shades, running brooks, and knee-deep clover; and the urgent whinney which called one to the other and told of loneliness when separated is no longer heard. it is pathetic to think that these good creatures have been robbed of the one thing which gave color to their lives and lifted them above the dreary treadmill of duty for duty's sake. the kindly friendship of each for his yoke-fellow is not the old sympathetic companionship, which will come again only when the cooling breezes, running brooks, and knee-deep pastures of the good horse's heaven are reached. a horse is wonderfully sensitive for an animal of his size and strength. he is timid by nature and his courage comes only from his confidence in man. his speed, strength, and endurance he will willingly give, and give it to the utmost, if the hand that guides is strong and gentle, and the voice that controls is firm, confident, and friendly. lack of courage in the master takes from the horse his only chance of being brave; lack of steadiness makes him indirect and futile; lack of kindness frightens him into actions which are the result of terror at first, and which become vices only by mismanagement. by nature the horse is good. if he learns bad manners by associating with bad men, we ought to lay the blame where it belongs. a kind master will make a kind horse; and i have no respect for a man who has had the privilege of training a horse from colt-hood and has failed to turn out a good one. lack of good sense, or cruelty, is at the root of these failures. one can forgive lack of sense, for men are as god made them; but there is no forgiveness for the cruel: cooling shades and running brooks will not be prominent features in their ultimate landscapes. for harness and farm equipments, tools and machinery, i went to a reliable firm which made most and handled the rest of the things that make a well-equipped farm. it is best to do much of one's business through one house, provided, of course, that the house is dependable. you become a valued customer whom it is important to please, you receive discounts, rebates, and concessions that are worth something, and a community of interest grows up that is worth much. my first order to this house was for three heavy wagons with four-inch tires, three sets of heavy harness, two ploughs and a subsoiler, three harrows (disk, spring tooth, and flat), a steel land-roller, two wheelbarrows, an iron scraper, fly nets and other stable equipment, shovels, spades, hay forks, posthole tools, a hand seeder, a chest of tools, stock-pails, milk-pails and pans, axes, hatchets, saws of various kinds, a maul and wedges, six kegs of nails, and three lanterns. the total amount was $ ; but as i received five per cent discount, i paid only $ . the goods, except the wagons and harnesses, were to go by freight to exeter. polly was to buy the necessary furnishings for the men's house, the only stipulation i made being that the beds should be good enough for me to sleep in. on the th of july she showed me a list of the things which she had purchased. it seemed interminable; but she assured me that she had bought nothing unnecessary, and that she had been very careful in all her purchases. as i knew that polly was in the habit of getting the worth of her money, i paid the bills without more ado. the list footed up to $ . most of the housekeeping things were to be delivered at the station in exeter; the rest were to go on the wagons. on the afternoon of the th the wagons and harnesses were sent to the stable where the horses had been kept, and the articles to go in these wagons were loaded for an early start the following morning. the distance from the station in the city to the station at exeter is thirty miles, but the stable is three miles from the city station, the farm two and a half miles from exeter station, and the wagon road not so direct as the railroad. the trip to the farm, therefore, could not be much less than forty miles, and would require the best part of two days. the three men whom i had engaged reported for duty, as also did thompson's son, whom we are to know hereafter as zeb. early on the last day of the month the men and teams were off, with cooked provisions for three days. they were to break the journey twenty-five miles out, and expected to reach the farm the next afternoon. polly and i wished to see them arrive, so we took the train at p.m. august st, and reached four oaks at . , taking with us mrs. thompson, who was to cook for the men. before starting i had telephoned a local carpenter to meet me, and to bring a mason if possible. i found both men on the ground, and explained to them that there would be abundant work in their lines on the place for the next year or two, that i was perfectly willing to pay a reasonable profit on each job, but that i did not propose to make them rich out of any single contract. the first thing to do, i told them, was to move the large farm-house to the site already chosen, about two hundred yards distant, enlarge it, and put a first-class cellar under the whole. the principal change needed in the house was an additional story on the ell, which would give a chamber eighteen by twenty-six, with closets five feet deep, to be used as a sleeping room for the men. i intended to change the sitting room, which ran across the main house, into a dining and reading room twenty feet by twenty-five, and to improve the shape and convenience of the kitchen by pantry and lavatory. there must also be a well-appointed bathroom on the upper floor, and set tubs in the kitchen. my men would dig the cellar, and the mason was to put in the foundation walls (twelve inches thick and two feet above ground), the cross or division walls, and the chimneys. he was also to put down a first-class cement floor over the whole cellar and approach. the house was to be heated by a hot-water system; and i afterward let this job to a city man, who put in a satisfactory plant for $ . we had hardly finished with the carpenter and the mason when we saw our wagons turning into the grounds. we left the contractors to their measurements, plans, and figures, while we hastened to turn the teams back, as they must go to the cottage on the north forty. the horses looked a little done up by the heat and the unaccustomed journey, but thompson said: "they're all right,--stood it first-rate." the cottage and out-buildings furnished scanty accommodations for men and beasts, but they were all that we could provide. i told the men to make themselves and the horses as comfortable as they could, then to milk the cows and feed the hogs, and call it a day. while the others were unloading and getting things into shape, i called thompson off for a talk. "thompson," i said, "you are to have the oversight of the work here for the present, and i want you to have some idea of my general plan. this experiment at farming is to last years. we won't look for results until we are ready to force them, but we are to get ready as soon as possible. in the meantime, we will have to do things in an awkward fashion, and not always for immediate effect. we must build the factory before we can turn out the finished product. the cows, for instance, must be cared for until we can dispose of them to advantage. half of them, i fancy, are 'robber cows,' not worth their keep (if it costs anything to feed them), and we will certainly not winter them. keep your eye on the herd, and be able to tell me if any of them will pay. milk them carefully, and use what milk, cream, and butter you can, but don't waste useful time carting milk to market--feed it to the hogs rather. if a farmer or a milkman will call for it, sell what you have to spare for what he will give, and have done with it quickly. you are to manage the hogs on the same principle. fatten those which are ready for it, with anything you find on the place. we will get rid of the whole bunch as soon as possible. you see, i must first clear the ground before i can build my factory. let the hens alone for the present; you can eat them during the winter. "now, about the crops. the hay in barns and stacks is all right; the wheat is ready for threshing, but it can wait until the oats are also ready; the corn is weedy, but it is too late to help it, and the potatoes are probably covered with bugs. i will send out to-morrow some paris green and a couple of blow-guns. there is not much real farm work to do just now, and you will have time for other things. the first and most important thing is to dig a cellar to put your house over; your comfort depends on that. get the men and horses with plough and scraper out as early as you can to-morrow morning, and hustle. you have nothing to do but dig a big hole seven feet deep inside these lines. i count on you to keep things moving, and i will be out the day after to-morrow." the mason had finished his estimate, which was $ . after some explanations, i concluded that it was a fair price, and agreed to it, provided the work could be done promptly. the carpenter was not ready to give me figures; he said, however, that he could get a man to move the house for $ , and that he would send me by mail that night an itemized estimate of costs, and also one from a plumber. this seemed like doing a lot of things in one afternoon, so polly and i started for town content. "those people can't be very luxurious out there," said polly, "but they can have good food and clean beds. they have all out-doors to breathe in, and i do not see what more one can ask on a fine august evening, do you, mr. headman?" i could think of a few things, but i did not mention them, for her first words recalled some scenes of my early life on a backwoods farm: the log cabin, with hardly ten nails in it, the latch-string, the wide-mouthed stone-and-stick chimney, the spring-house with its deep crocks, the smoke-house made of a hollow gum-tree log, the ladder to the loft where i slept, and where the snows would drift on the floor through the rifts in the split clapboards that roofed me over. i wondered if to-day was so much better than yesterday as conditions would warrant us in expecting. chapter vii the horse-and-buggy man august found me at four oaks in the early afternoon. a great hollow had been dug for the cellar, and thompson said that it would take but one more full day to finish it. piles of material gave evidence that the mason was alert, and the house-mover had already dropped his long timbers, winch, and chains by the side of the farm-house. while i was discussing matters with thompson, a smart trap turned into the lot, and a well-set-up young man sprang out of the stylish runabout and said,-- "dr. williams, i hear you want more help on your farm." "i can use another man or two to advantage, if they are good ones." "well, i don't want to brag, but i guess i am a good one, all right. i ain't afraid of work, and there isn't much that i can't do on a farm. what wages do you pay?" i told him my plan of an increasing wage scale, and he did not object. "that includes horse keep, i suppose?" said he. "i do not know what you mean by 'horse keep.'" "why, most of the men on farms around here own a horse and buggy, to use nights, sundays, and holidays, and we expect the boss to keep the horse. this is my rig. it is about the best in the township; cost me $ for the outfit." "see here, young man, this is another specimen of farm economics, and it is one of the worst in the lot. let me do a small example in mental arithmetic for you. the interest on $ is $ ; the yearly depreciation of your property, without accidents, is at least $ ; horse-shoeing and repairs, $ ; loss of wages (for no man will keep your horse for less than $ a month), $ . in addition to this, you will be tempted to spend at least $ a month more with a horse than without one; that is $ more. you are throwing away $ every year without adding $ to your value as an employee, one ounce of dignity to your employment, or one foot of gain in your social position, no matter from what point you view it. "taking it for granted that you receive $ a month for every month of the year (and this is admitting too much), you waste more than half on that blessed rig, and you can make no provision for the future, for sickness, or for old age. no, i will not keep your horse, nor will i employ any man whose scheme of life doesn't run further than the ownership of a horse and buggy." "but a fellow must keep up with the procession; he must have some recreation, and all the men around here have rigs." "not around four oaks. recreation is all right, but find it in ways less expensive. read, study, cultivate the best of your kind, plan for the future and save for it, and you will not lack for recreation. sell your horse and buggy for $ , if you cannot get more, put the money at interest, save $ out of your wages, and by the end of the year you will be worth over $ in hard cash and much more in self-respect. you can easily add a year to your savings, without missing anything worth while; and it will not be long before you can buy a farm, marry a wife, and make an independent position. i will have no horse-and-buggy men on my farm. it's up to you." "by jove! i believe you may be right. it looks like a square deal, and i'll play it, if you'll give me time to sell the outfit." "all right, come when you can. i'll find the work." that day being saturday, i told thompson that i would come out early monday morning, bringing with me a rough map of the place as i had planned it, and we would go over it with a chain and drive some outlining stakes. i then returned to exeter, found the carpenter and the plumber, and accepted their estimates,--$ and $ , respectively. the farm-house moved, finished, furnished, and heated, but not painted or papered, would cost $ . painting, papering, window-shades, and odds and ends cost $ , making a total of $ . it proved a good investment, for it was a comfortable and convenient home for the men and women who afterward occupied it. it has certainly been appreciated by its occupants, and few have left it without regret. we have always tried to make it an object lesson of cleanliness and cheerfulness, and i don't think a man has lived in it for six months without being bettered. it seemed a good deal of money to put on an old farm-house for farm-hands, but it proved one of the best investments at four oaks, for it kept the men contented and cheerful workers. chapter viii we plat the farm on monday i was out by ten o'clock, armed with a surveyor's chain. thompson had provided a lot of stakes, and we ran the lines, more or less straight, in general accord with my sketch plan. we walked, measured, estimated, and drove stakes until noon. at one o'clock we were at it again, and by four i was fit to drop from fatigue. farm work was new to me, and i was soft as soft. i had, however, got the general lay of the land, and could, by the help of the plan, talk of its future subdivisions by numerals,--an arrangement that afterward proved definite and convenient. we adjourned to the shade of the big black oak on the knoll, and discussed the work in hand. "you cannot finish the cellar before to-morrow night," i said, "because it grows slower as it grows deeper; but that will be doing well enough. i want you to start two teams ploughing wednesday morning, and keep them going every day until the frost stops them. let sam take the plough, and have young thompson follow with the subsoiler. have them stick to this as a regular diet until i call them off. they are to commence in the wheat stubble where lots six and seven will be. i am going to try alfalfa in that ground, though i am not at all sure that it will do well, and the soil must be fitted as well as possible. after it has had deep ploughing it is to be crossed with the disk harrow; then have it rolled, disk it again, and then use the flat harrow until it feels as near like an ash heap as time will permit. we must get the seed in before september." "we will need another team if you keep two ploughing and one on the harrow," said thompson. "you are right, and that means another $ , but you shall have it. we must not stop the ploughs for anything. numbers , , , , , , , , and much of the home lot, ought to be ploughed before snow flies. that means about acres,-- odd days of steady work for the ploughmen and horses. you will probably find it best to change teams from time to time. a little variety will make it easier for them. as soon as and are finished, turn the ploughs into the acres which make lots to . all that must be seeded to pasture grass, for it will be our feeding-ground, and we'll be late with it if we don't look sharp. "we must have more help, by the way. that horse-and-buggy man, judson, is almost sure to come, and i will find another. some of you will have to bunk in the hay for the present, for i am going to send out a woman to help your wife. six men can do a lot of work, but there is a tremendous lot of work to do. we must fit the ground and plant at least three thousand apple trees before the end of november, and we ought to fence this whole plantation. speaking of fences reminds me that i must order the cedar posts. have you any idea how many posts it will take to fence this farm as we have platted it? i suppose not. well, i can tell you. twenty-two hundred and fifty at one rod apart, or at twenty feet apart. these posts must be six feet above and three feet below ground. they will cost eighteen cents each. that item will be $ , for there are seven miles of fence, including the line fence between me and my north neighbor. i am going to build that fence myself, and then i shall know whose fault it is if his stock breaks through. of course some of the old posts are good, but i don't believe one in twenty is long enough for my purpose." "what do you buy cedar posts for, when you have enough better ones on the place?" asked thompson. "i don't know what you mean." "well, down in the wood yonder there's enough dead white oak, standing or on the ground, to make three thousand, nine-foot posts, and one seasoned white oak will outlast two cedars, and it is twice as strong." "well, that's good! how much will it cost to get them out?" "about five cents apiece. a couple of smart fellows can make good wages at that price." "good. we will save thirteen cents each. they will cost $ instead of $ . i don't know everything yet, do i, thompson?" "you learn easy, i reckon." "keep your eyes and ears open, and if you find any one who can do this job, let him have it, for we are going to be too busy with other things at present. it's time for me to be off. i cannot be out again till thursday, for i must find a man, a woman, and a team of horses and all that goes with them. i'll see you on the th at any rate." i was dead tired when i reached home; but there wasn't a grain of depression in my fatigue,--rather a sense of elation. i felt that for the first time in thirty years real things were doing and i was having a hand in them. the fatigue was the same old tire that used to come after a hard day on my father's farm, and the sense was so suggestive of youth that i could not help feeling younger. i have never gotten away from the faith that the real seed of life lies hidden in the soil; that the man who gives it a chance to germinate is a benefactor, and that things done in connection with land are about the only real things. i have grown younger, stronger, happier, with each year of personal contact with the soil. i am thankful for seven years of it, and look forward to twice seven more. i have lost the softness which nearly wilted me that th day of august, and with the softness has gone twenty or thirty pounds of useless flesh. i am hard, active, and strong for a man of sixty, and i can do a fair day's work. to tell the truth, i prefer the moderate work that falls to the lot of the headman, rather than the more strenuous life of the husbandman; but i find an infinite deal to thank the farm for in health and physical comfort. chapter ix house-cleaning after dinner i telephoned the veterinary surgeon that i wanted another team. he replied that he thought he knew of one that would suit, and that he would let me know the next day. i also telephoned two "want ads." to a morning paper, one for an experienced farm-hand, the other for a woman to do general housework in the country. polly was to interview the women who applied, and i was to look after the men. that night i slept like a hired man. out of the dozen who applied the next day i accepted a swede by the name of anderson. he was about thirty, tall, thin, and nervous. he did not fit my idea of a stockman, but he looked like a worker, and as i could furnish the work we soon came to terms. a few words more about anderson. he proved a worker indeed. he had an insatiable appetite for work, and never knew when to quit. he was not popular at the farm, for he was too eager in the morning to start and too loath in the evening to stop. his unbridled passion for work was a thing to be deplored, as it kept him thin and nervous. i tried to moderate this propensity, but with no result. anderson could not be trusted with horses, or, indeed, with animals of any kind, for he made them as nervous as himself; but in all other kinds of work he was the best man ever at four oaks. he worked for me nearly three years, and then suddenly gave out from a pain in his left chest and shortness of breath. i called a physician for poor anderson, and the diagnosis was dilatation of the heart from over-exercise. "a rare disease among farm-hands, dr. williams," said dr. high, but my conscience did not fully forgive me. i asked anderson to stay at the farm and see what could be done by rest and care. he declined this, as well as my offer to send him to a hospital. he expressed the liveliest gratitude for kindnesses received and others offered, but he said he must be independent and free. he had nearly $ in a savings bank in the city, and he proposed to use it, or such portion of it as was necessary. i saw him two months later. he was better, but not able to work. hearing nothing from him for three years, a year ago i called at the bank where i knew he had kept his savings. they had sent sums of money to him, once to rio janeiro and once to cape town. for two years he had not been heard from. whether he is living or dead i do not know. i only know that a valuable man and a unique farm-hand has disappeared. i never think of anderson without wishing i had been more severe with him,--more persistent in my efforts to wean him from his real passion. peace to his ashes, if he be ashes. that same day i telephoned the agricultural implement company to send me another wagon, with harness and equipment for the team. the veterinary surgeon reported that he had a span of mares for me to look at, but i was too much engaged that day to inspect the team, and promised to do so on the next. when i reached home, polly said she had found nothing in the way of a general housework girl for the country. she had seen nine women who wished to do all other kinds of work, but none to fit her wants. "what do they come for if they don't want the place we described? do they expect we are to change our plans of life to suit their personal notions?" she asked. "it's hard to say what they came for or what they want. their ways are past finding out. we will put in another 'ad.' and perhaps have better luck." wednesday, the th, i went to see the new team. i found a pair of flea-bitten gray flemish mares, weighing about twenty-eight hundred pounds. they were four years old, short of leg and long of body, and looked fit. the surgeon passed them sound, and said he considered them well worth the price asked,--$ . i was pleased with the team, and remembered a remark i had heard as a boy from an itinerant methodist minister at a time when the itinerant minister was supposed to know all there was to know about horse-flesh. this was his remark: "there was never a flea-bitten mare that was a poor horse." in spite of its ambiguity, the saying made an impression from which i never recovered. i always expected great things from flea-bitten grays. the team, wagon, harness, etc., added $ to the debit account against the farm. polly secured her girl,--a green german who had not been long enough in america to despise the country. "she doesn't know a thing about our ways," said polly, "but mrs. thompson can train her as she likes. if you can spend time enough with green girls, they are apt to grow to your liking." on thursday i saw anderson and the new team safely started for the farm. then polly, the new girl, and i took train for the most interesting spot on earth. soon after we arrived i lost sight of polly, who seemed to have business of her own. i found the mason and his men at work on the cellar wall, which was almost to the top of the ground. the house was on wheels, and had made most of its journey. the house mover was in a rage because he had to put the house on a hole instead of on solid ground, as he had expected. "i have sent for every stick of timber and every cobbling block i own, to get this house over that hole; there's no money in this job for me; you ought to have dug the cellar after the house was placed," said he. i made friends with him by agreeing to pay $ more for the job. the house was safely placed, and by saturday night the foundation walls were finished. sam and zeb had made a good beginning on the ploughing, the teams were doing well for green ones, and the men seemed to understand what good ploughing meant. thompson and johnson had spent parts of two days in the potato patches in deadly conflict with the bugs. "we've done for most of them this time," said thompson, "but we'll have to go over the ground again by monday." the next piece of work was to clear the north forty (lots to ) of all fences, stumps, stones, and rubbish, and all buildings except the cottage. the barn was to be torn down, and the horses were to be temporarily stabled in the old barn on the home lot. useful timbers and lumber were to be snugly piled, the manure around the barns was to be spread under the old apple trees, which were in lot no. , and everything not useful was to be burned. "make a clean sweep, and leave it as bare as your hand," i told thompson. "it must be ready for the plough as soon as possible." judson, the man with the buggy, reported at noon. he came with bag and baggage, but not with buggy, and said that he came to stay. "thompson," said i, "you are to put judson in charge of the roan team to follow the boys when they are far enough ahead of him. in the meantime he and the team will be with you and johnson in this house-cleaning. by to-morrow night anderson and the new team will get in, and they, too, will help on this job. i want you to take personal charge of the gray team,--neither johnson nor anderson is the right sort to handle horses. the new team will do the trucking about and the regular farm work, while the other three are kept steadily at the ploughs and harrows." the cleaning of the north forty proved a long job. four men and two teams worked hard for ten days, and then it was not finished. by that time the ploughmen had finished and , and were ready to begin on no. . judson, with the roans and harrows, was sent to the twenty acres of ploughed ground, and zeb and his team were put at the cleaning for three days, while sam ploughed the six acres of old orchard with a _shallow-set_ plough. the feeding roots of these trees would have been seriously injured if we had followed the deep ploughing practised in the open. by august about two hundred loads of manure from the barn-yards, the accumulation of years, had been spread under the apple trees, and i felt sure it was well bestowed. manuring, turning the sod, pruning, and spraying, ought to give a good crop of fruit next year. we had several days of rain during this time, which interfered somewhat with the work, but the rains were gratefully received. i spent much of my time at four oaks, often going every day, and never let more than two days pass without spending some hours on the farm. to many of my friends this seemed a waste of time. they said, "williams is carrying this fad too far,--spending too much time on it." polly did not agree with them, neither did i. time is precious only as we make it so. to do the wholesome, satisfying thing, without direct or indirect injury to others, is the privilege of every man. to the charge of neglecting my profession i pleaded not guilty, for my profession had dismissed me without so much as saying "by your leave." i was obliged to change my mode of life, and i chose to be a producer rather than a consumer of things produced by others. i was conserving my health, pleasing my wife, and at the same time gratifying a desire which had long possessed me. i have neither apology to make nor regret to record; for as individuals and as a family we have lived healthier, happier, more wholesome, and more natural lives on the farm than we ever did in the city, and that is saying much. chapter x fenced in on the th, when i reached the station at exeter, i found thompson and the gray team just starting for the farm with the second load of wire fencing. i had ordered fifty-six rolls of page's woven wire fence, forty rods in each roll. this fence cost me seventy cents a rod, $ a mile, or $ for the seven miles. add to this $ for freight, and the total amounted to $ for the wire to fence my land. i got this facer as i climbed to the seat beside thompson. i did not blink, however, for i had resolved in the beginning to take no account of details until the st day of december, and to spend as much on the farm in that time as i could without being wasteful. i did not care much what others thought. i felt that at my age time was precious, and that things must be rushed as rapidly as possible. i was glad of this slow ride with thompson, for it gave me an opportunity to study him. i wondered then and afterward why a man of his general intelligence, industry, and special knowledge of the details of farming, should fail of success when working for himself. he knew ten times as much about the business as i did, and yet he had not succeeded in an independent position. some quality, like broadness of mind or directness of purpose, was lacking, which made him incapable of carrying out a plan, no matter how well conceived. he was like hooker at chancellorsville, whose plan of campaign was perfect, whose orders were carried out with exactness, whose army fell into line as he wished, and whose enemy did the obvious thing, yet who failed terribly because the responsibility of the ultimate was greater than he could bear. as second in command, or as corps leader, he was superb; in independent command he was a disastrous failure. thompson, then, was a joe hooker on a reduced plane,--good only to execute another man's plans. thompson might have rebutted this by saying that i too might prove a disastrous failure; that as yet i had shown only ability to spend,--perhaps not always wisely. such rebuttal would have had weight seven years ago, but it would not be accepted to-day, for i have made my campaign and won my battle. the record of the past seven years shows that i can plan and also execute. thompson told me that he had found two woodsmen (by scouting around on sunday) who were glad to take the job of cutting the white-oak posts at five cents each, and that they were even then at work; and that nos. and would be fitted for alfalfa by the end of the week. he added that the seed ought to be sown as soon thereafter as possible and that a liberal dressing of commercial fertilizer should be sown before the seed was harrowed in. "i have ordered five tons of fertilizer," i said, "and it ought to be here this week. sow four bags to the acre." "four bags,--eight hundred pounds; that's pretty expensive. costs, i suppose, $ to $ a ton." "no; $ ." "how's that?" "friend at court; factory price; $ for five tons; $ freight, making in all $ . we must use at least eight hundred pounds this fall and five hundred in the spring. alfalfa is an experiment, and we must give it a show." "never saw anything done with alfalfa in this region, but they never took no pains with it," said thompson. "i hope it will grow for us, for it is great forage if properly managed. the seed will be out this week, and you had best sow it on monday, the d." "how are you going to seed the north forty?" "timothy, red top, and blue grass; heavy seeding, to get rid of the weeds. these lots will all be used as stock lots. small ones, you think, but we will depend almost entirely upon soiling. i hope to keep a fair sod on these lots, and they will be large enough to give the animals exercise and keep them healthy. i hope the carpenter is pushing things on the house. i want to get you into better quarters as soon as possible, and i want the cottage moved out of the way before we seed the lot." "they're pushing things all right, i guess; that man nelson is a hustler." when i reached the farm i found johnson and anderson tearing down the old fence that was our eastern boundary. none of the posts were long enough for my purpose, so all were consigned to the woodpile. my neighbor on the north owned just as much land as i did. he inherited it and a moderate bank account from his father, who in turn had it from his. the farm was well kept and productive. the house and barns were substantial and in good repair. the owner did general farming, raised wheat, corn, and oats to sell, milked twenty cows and sent the milk to the creamery, sold one or two cows and a dozen calves each year, and fattened twenty or thirty pigs. he was pretty certain to add a few hundred dollars to his bank account at the end of each season. he kept one man all the time and two in summer. he was a bachelor of twenty-eight, well liked and good to look upon: five feet ten inches in height, broad of shoulder, deep of chest, and a very hercules in strength. his face was handsome, square-jawed and strong. he was good-natured, but easily roused, and when angry was as fierce as fire. he had the reputation of being the hardest fighter in the country. his name was william jackson, so he was called bill. i had met jackson often, and we had taken kindly to each other. i admired his frank manner and sturdy physique, and he looked upon me as a good-natured tenderfoot, who might be companionable, and who would certainly stir up things in the neighborhood. i went in search of him that afternoon to discuss the line fence, a full mile of which divided our lands. "i want to put a fence along our line which nothing can get over or under," i said. "i am willing to bear the expense of the new fence if you will take away the old one and plough eight furrows,--four on your land and four on mine,--to be seeded to grass before the wires are stretched. we ought to get rid of the weeds and brush." "that is a liberal proposition, dr. williams, and of course i accept," said jackson; "but i ought to do more. i'll tell you what i'll do. you are planning to put a ring fence around your land,--three miles in all. i'll plough the whole business and fit it for the seed. i'll take one of my men, four horses, and a grub plough, and do it whenever you are ready." this settled the fence matter between jackson and me. the men who cut the posts took the job of setting them, stretching the wire, and hanging the gates, for $ . this included the staples and also the stretching of three strands of barbed wire above the woven wire; two at six-inch intervals on the outside, and one inside, level with the top of the post. thus my ring fence was six feet high and hard to climb. i have a serious dislike for trespass, from either man or beast, and my boundary fence was made to discourage trespassers. i like to have those who enter my property do so by the ways provided, for "whoso climbeth up any other way, the same is a thief and a robber." the ring fence was finished by the middle of october. the interior fences were built by my own men during soft weather in winter and spring; and, as i had already paid for the wire and posts, nothing more should be charged to the fence account. in round numbers these seven miles of excellent fence cost me $ . a lot of money! but the fence is there to-day as serviceable as when it was set, and it will stand for twice seven years more. one hundred dollars a year is not a great price to pay for the security and seclusion which a good fence furnishes. there was no need of putting up so much interior fence. i would save a mile or two if i had it to do again; however, i do not dislike my straight lanes and tightly fenced fields. chapter xi the building line before leaving four oaks that day i had a long conversation with nelson, the carpenter. i had taken his measure, by inquiry and observation, and was willing to put work into his hands as fast as he could attend to it. the first thing was to put him in possession of my plan of a building line. two hundred feet south of the north line of the home lot a street or lane was to run due west from the gate on the main road. this was to be the teaming or business entrance to the farm. commencing three hundred feet from the east end of this drive, the structures were to be as follows: on the south side, first a cold-storage house, then the farm-house, the cottage, the well, and finally the carriage barn for the big house. on the north side of the line, opposite the ice-house, the dairy-house; then a square with a small power-house for its centre, a woodhouse, a horse barn for the farm horses, a granary and a forage barn for its four corners. beyond this square to the west was the fruit-house and the tool-house--the latter large enough to house all the farm machinery we should ever need. i have a horror of the economy that leaves good tools to sky and clouds without protection. this sketch would not be worked out for a long time, as few of the buildings were needed at once. it was made for the sake of having a general design to be carried out when required; and the water and sewer system had been built with reference to it. i told nelson that a barn to shelter the horses was the first thing to build, after the house for the men, and that i saw no reason why two or even three buildings should not be in process of construction at the same time. he said there would be no difficulty in managing that if he could get the men and i could get the money. i promised to do my part, and we went into details. i wanted a horse barn for ten horses, with shed room for eight wagons in front and a small stable yard in the rear; also a sunken manure vat, ten feet by twenty, with cement walls and floor, the vat to be four feet deep, two feet in the ground and two feet above it. a vat like this has been built near each stable where stock is kept, and i find them perfectly satisfactory. they save the liquid manure, and thus add fifty per cent to the value of the whole. open sheds protect from sun and rain, and they are emptied as often as is necessary, regardless of season, for i believe that the fields can care for manure better than a compost heap. i also told nelson to make plans and estimates for a large forage barn, by feet, feet from floor to rafter plate, with a driving floor through the length of it and mows on either side. a granary, with a capacity of twenty thousand bushels, a large woodhouse, and a small house in the centre of this group where the fifteen horse-power engine could be installed, completed my commissions for that day. plans for these structures were submitted in due time, and the work was pushed forward as rapidly as possible. the horse barn made a comfortable home for ten horses, if we should need so many, with food and water close at hand and every convenience for the care of the animals and their harness. the forage barn was not expensive,--it was simply to shelter a large quantity of forage to be drawn upon when needed. the woodhouse was also inexpensive, though large. wood was to be the principal fuel at four oaks, since it would cost nothing, and there must be ample shelter for a large amount. the granary would have to be built well and substantially, but it was not large. the power-house also was a small affair. the whole cost of these five buildings was $ . the itemized amount is, horse barn, $ , forage barn, $ , granary, $ , woodhouse, $ , power-house, $ . chapter xii carpenters quit work on friday, august , i was obliged to go to a western city on business that would keep me from four to ten days. i turned my face away from the farm with regret. i could hardly realize that i had spent but one month in my new life, the old interests had slipped so far behind. i was reluctant to lose sight, even for a week, of the intensely interesting things that were doing at four oaks. polly said she would go to four oaks every day, and keep so watchful an eye on the farm that it could not possibly get away. "you're getting a little bit maudlin about that farm, mr. headman, and it will do you good to get away for a few days. there are _some other_ things in life, though i admit they are few, and we are not to forget them. i am up to my ears in plans for the house and the home lot; but i can't quite see what you find so interesting in tearing down old barns and fences and turning over old sods." "every heart knoweth its own sorrow, polly, and i have my troubles." friday evening, september , i returned from the west. my first greeting was,-- "how's the farm, polly?" "it's there, or was yesterday; i think you'll find things running smoothly." "have they sowed the alfalfa and cut the oats?" "yes." "finished the farm-house?" "no, not quite, but the painters are there, and nelson has commenced work on two other buildings." "what time can i breakfast? i must catch the . train, and spend a long day where things are doing." things were humming at four oaks when i arrived. ten carpenters besides nelson and his son were pounding, sawing, and making confusion in all sorts of ways peculiar to their kind. the ploughmen were busy. thompson and the other two men were shocking oats. i spent the day roaming around the place, watching the work and building castles. i went to the alfalfa field to see if the seed had sprouted. disappointed in this, i wandered down to the brook and planned some abridgment of its meanderings. it could be straightened and kept within bounds without great expense if the work were done in a dry season. polly had asked for a winding brook with a fringe of willows and dogwood, but i would not make this concession to her esthetic taste. this farm land must be useful to the sacrifice of everything else. a winding brook would be all right on the home lot, if it could be found, but not on the farm. a straight ditch for drainage was all that i would permit, and i begrudged even that. no waste land in the cultivated fields, was my motto. i had threshed this out with polly and she had yielded, after stipulating that i must keep my hands off the home forty. over in the woods i found two men at work splitting fence posts. they seemed expert, and i asked them how many they could make in a day. "from to , according to the timber. but we must work hard to make good wages." "that applies to other things besides post-splitting, doesn't it?" closer inspection of the wood lot gratified me exceedingly. little had been done for it except by nature, but she had worked with so prodigal a hand that it showed all kinds of possibilities, both for beauty and for utility. before leaving the place, i had a little talk with nelson. "everything is going on nicely," he said. "i have ten carpenters, and they are a busy lot. if i can only hold them on to the job, things will go well." "what's the matter? can't you hold them?" "i hope so, but there is a hoisters' strike on in the city, and the carpenters threaten to go out in sympathy. i hope it won't reach us, but i'm afraid it will." "what will you do if the men go out?" "do the best i can. i can get two non-union men that i know of. they would like to be on this job now, but these men won't permit it. my son is a full hand, so there will be four of us; but it will be slow work." "see here, nelson, i can't have this work slack up. we haven't time. cold weather will be on before we know it. i'm going to take this bull by the horns. i'll advertise for carpenters in the sunday papers. some of those who apply will be non-union men, and i'll hold them over for a few days until we see how the cat jumps. if it comes to the worst, we can get some men to take the place of thompson and sam, who are carpenters, and set them at the tools. i will not let this work stop, strike or no strike." "if you put non-union men on you will have to feed and sleep them on the place. the union will make it hot for them." "i will take all kinds of care of every man who gives me honest work, you may be sure." when i returned to town i sent this "ad." to two papers: "wanted: ten good carpenters to go to the country." the sunday papers gave a lurid account of the sentiment of the carpenters' union and its sympathetic attitude toward the striking hoisters. the forecast was that there would not be a nail driven if the strike were not settled by tuesday night. it seemed that i had not moved a day too soon. on monday thirty-seven carpenters applied at my office. most of them had union tickets and were not considered. thirteen, however, were not of the union, and they were investigated. i hired seven on these conditions: wages to begin the next day, tuesday, and to continue through the week, work or no work. if the strike was ordered, i would take the men to the country and give them steady work until my jobs were finished. they agreed to these conditions, and were requested to report at my office on wednesday morning to receive two days' pay, and perhaps to be set to work. i did not go to the farm until tuesday afternoon. there was no change in the strike, and no reason to expect one. the noon papers said that the carpenters' union would declare a sympathetic strike to be on from wednesday noon. on reaching four oaks i called nelson aside and told him how the land lay and what i had done. "i want you to call the men together," said i, "and let me talk to them. i must know just how we stand and how they feel." nelson called the men, and i read the reports from two papers on the impending strike order. "now, men," said i, "we must look this matter in the face in a businesslike fashion. you have done good work here; your boss is satisfied, and so am i. it would suit us down to the ground if you would continue on until all these jobs are finished. we can give you a lot of work for the best part of the year. you are sure of work and sure of pay if you stay with us. that is all i have to say until you have decided for yourselves what you will do if the strike is ordered." i left the men for a short time, while they talked things over. it did not take them long to decide. "we must stand by the union," said the spokesman, "but we'll be damned sorry to quit this job. you see, sir, we can't do any other way. we have to be in the union to get work, and we have to do as the union says or we will be kicked out. it is hard, sir, not to do a hit of a hammer for weeks or months with a family on one's hands and winter coming; but what can a man do? we don't see our way clear in this matter, but we must do as the union says." "i see how you are fixed," said i, "and i am mighty sorry for you. i am not going to rail against unions, for they may have done some good; but they work a serious wrong to the man with a family, for he cannot follow them without bringing hardships upon his dependent ones. it is not fair to yoke him up with a single man who has no natural claims to satisfy, no mouth to feed except his own; but i will talk business. "you will be ordered out to-morrow or next day, and you say you will obey the order. you have an undoubted right to do so. a man is not a slave, to be made to work against his will; but, on the other hand, is he not a slave if he is forced to quit against his will? freedom of action in personal matters is a right which wise men have fought for and for which wise men will always fight. do you find it in the union? what shall i do when you quit work? how long are you going to stay out? what will become of my interests while you are following the lead of your bell-wethers? shall my work stop because you have been called out for a holiday? shall the weeds grow over these walls and my lumber rot while you sit idly by? not by a long sight! you have a perfect right to quit work, and i have a perfect right to continue. "the rights which we claim for ourselves we must grant to others. one man certainly has as defensible a right to work as another man has to be idle. in the legitimate exercise of personal freedom there is no effort at coercion, and in this case there shall be none. if you choose to quit, you will do so without let or hindrance from me; but if you quit, others will take your places without let or hindrance from you. you will be paid in full to-night. when you leave, you must take your tools with you, that there may be no excuse for coming back. when you leave the place, the incident will be closed so far as you and i are concerned, and it will not be opened unless i find some of you trying to interfere with the men i shall engage to take your places. i think you make a serious mistake in following blind leaders who are doing you material injury, for sentimental reasons; but you must decide this for yourselves. if, after sober thought, any of you feel disposed to return, you can get a job if there is a vacancy; but no man who works for me during this strike will be displaced by a striker. you may put that in your pipes and smoke it. nelson will pay you off to-night." the strike was ordered for wednesday. on the morning of that day the seven carpenters whom i had engaged arrived at my office ready for work. i took them to the station and started for four oaks. at a station five miles from exeter we quitted the train, hired two carriages, and were driven to the farm without passing through the village. we arrived without incident, the men had their dinners, and at one o'clock the hammers and saws were busy again. we had lost but one half day. the two non-union men whom nelson had spoken of were also at work, and three days later the spokesman of the strikers threw up his card and joined our force. we had no serious trouble. it was thought wise to keep the new men on the place until the excitement had passed, and we had to warn some of the old ones off two or three times, but nothing disagreeable happened, and from that day to this four oaks has remained non-unionized. chapter xiii planning for the trees the morning of september th a small frost fell,--just enough to curl the leaves of the corn and show that it was time for it to be laid by. thompson, johnson, anderson, and the two men from the woods, who were diverted from their post-splitting for the time being, went gayly to the corn fields and attacked the standing grain in the old-fashioned way. this was not economical; but i had no corn reaper, and there was none to hire, for the frost had struck us all at the same time. the five men were kept busy until the two patches--about forty-three acres--were in shock. this brought us to the th. in the meantime the men and women moved from the cottage to the more commodious farm-house. polly had found excuses for spending $ more on the furnishings of this house,--two beds and a lot of other things. sunday gave the people a chance to arrange their affairs; and they certainly appreciated their improved surroundings. the cottage was moved to its place on the line, and the last of the seeding on the north forty was done. ten tons of fertilizer were sown on this forty-acre tract (at a cost of $ ), and it was then left to itself, not to be trampled over by man or beast, except for the stretching of fences or for work around some necessary buildings, until the middle of the following may. we did not sow any wheat that year,--there was too much else to be done of more importance. there is not much money in wheat-farming unless it be done on a large scale, and i had no wish to raise more than i could feed to advantage. wheat was to be a change food for my fowls; but just then i had no fowls to feed, and there were more than two hundred bushels in stacks ready for the threshers, which i could hold for future hens. the ploughmen were now directed to commence deep ploughing on no. ,--the forty acres set apart for the commercial orchard. this tract of land lay well for the purpose. its surface was nearly smooth, with a descent to the west and southwest that gave natural drainage. i have been informed that an orchard would do better if the slope were to the northeast. that may be true, but mine has done well enough thus far, and, what is more to the point, i had no land with a northeast slope. the surface soil was thin and somewhat impoverished, but the subsoil was a friable clay in which almost anything would grow if it was properly worked and fed. it was my desire to make this square block of forty acres into a first-class apple orchard for profit. seven years from planting is almost too soon to decide how well i have succeeded, but the results attained and the promises for the future lead me to believe that there will be no failure in my plan. the three essentials for beginning such an orchard are: prepare the land properly, get good stock (healthy and true to name), and plant it well. i could do no more this year than to plough deep, smooth the surface, and plant as well as i knew how. increased fertility must come from future cultivation and top dressing. the thing most prominent in my plan was to get good trees well placed in the ground before cold weather set in. at my time of life i could not afford to wait for another autumn, or even until spring. i had, and still have, the opinion that a fall-planted tree is nearly six months in advance of one planted the following spring. of course there can be no above-ground growth during that time, but important things are being done below the surface. the roots find time to heal their wounds and to send out small searchers after food, which will be ready for energetic work as soon as the sun begins to warm the soil. the earth settles comfortably about these roots and is moulded to fit them by the autumn rains. if the stem is well braced by a mound of earth, and if a thick mulch is placed around it, much will be done below ground before deep frosts interrupt the work; and if, in the early spring, the mulch and mound are drawn back, the sun's influence will set the roots at work earlier by far than a spring tree could be planted. other reasons for fall planting are that the weather is more settled, the ground is more manageable, help is more easily secured, and the nurserymen have more time for filling your order. any time from october until december will answer in our climate, but early november is the best. i had decided to plant the trees in this orchard twenty-five feet apart each way. in the forty acres there would be fifty-two rows, with fifty-two trees in each row,--or twenty-seven hundred in all. i also decided to have but four varieties of apples in this orchard, and it was important that they should possess a number of virtues. they must come into early bearing, for i was too old to wait patiently for slow-growing trees; they must be of kinds most dependable for yearly crops, for i had no respect for off years; and they must be good enough in color, shape, and quality to tempt the most fastidious market. i studied catalogues and talked with pomologists until my mind was nearly unsettled, and finally decided upon jonathan, wealthy, rome beauty, and northwestern greening,--all winter apples, and all red but the last. i was helped in my decision, so far as the jonathans and rome beauties were concerned, by the discovery that more than half of the old orchard was composed of these varieties. there is little question as to the wisdom of planting trees of kinds known to have done well in your neighborhood. they are just as likely to do well by you as by your neighbor. if the fruit be to your liking, you can safely plant, for it is no longer an experiment; some one else has broken that ground for you. in casting about for a reliable nurseryman to whom to trust the very important business of supplying me with young trees, i could not long keep my attention diverted from rochester, new york. perhaps the reason was that as a child i had frequently ridden over the plank road from henrietta to rochester, and my memory recalled distinctly but three objects on that road,--the house of frederick douglass, mount hope cemetery, and a nursery of young trees. everything else was obscure. i fancy that in fifty years the douglass house has disappeared, but mount hope cemetery and the tree nursery seem to mock at time. the soil and climate near rochester are especially favorable to the growing of young trees, and my order went to one of the many reliable firms engaged in this business. the order was for thirty-four hundred trees,--twenty-seven hundred for the forty-acre orchard and seven hundred for the ten acres farthest to the south on the home lot. polly had consented to this invasion of her domain, for reasons. she said:-- "it is a long way off, rather flat and uninteresting, and i do not see exactly how to treat it. apple trees are pretty at most times, and picturesque when old. you can put them there, if you will seed the ground and treat it as part of the lawn. i hate your old straight rows, but i suppose you must have them." "yes, i guess i shall have to have straight rows, but i will agree to the lawn plan after the third year. you must give me a chance to cultivate the land for three years." your tree-man must be absolutely reliable. you have to trust him much and long. not only do you depend upon him to send you good and healthy stock, but you must trust, for five years at least, that this stock will prove true to name. the most discouraging thing which can befall a horticulturist is to find his new fruit false to purchase labels. after wait, worry, and work he finds that he has not what he expected, and that he must begin over again. it is cold comfort for the tree-man to make good his guarantee to replace all stock found untrue, for five years of irreplaceable time has passed. when you have spent time, hope, and expectation as well as money, looking for results which do not come, your disappointment is out of all proportion to your financial loss, be that never so great. in the best-managed nurseries there will be mistakes, but the better the management the fewer the mistakes. pay good prices for young trees, and demand the best. there is no economy in cheap stock, and the sooner the farmer or fruit-grower comprehends this fact, the better it will be for him. i ordered trees of three years' growth from the bud,--this would mean four-year-old roots. perhaps it would have been as well to buy smaller ones (many wise people have told me so), but i was in such a hurry! i wanted to pick apples from these trees at the first possible moment. i argued that a sturdy three-year-old would have an advantage over its neighbor that was only two. however small this advantage, i wanted it in my business--my business being to make a profitable farm in quick time. the ten acres of the home lot were to be planted with three hundred yellow transparent, three hundred duchess of oldenburg, and one hundred mixed varieties for home use. i selected the transparent and the duchess on account of their disposition to bear early, and because they are good sellers in a near market, and because a fruit-wise friend was making money from an eight-year-old orchard of three thousand of these trees, and advised me not to neglect them. my order called for thirty-four hundred three-year-old apple trees of the highest grade, to be delivered in good condition on the platform at exeter for the lump sum of $ . the agreement had been made in august, and the trees were to be delivered as near the th of october as practicable. apple trees comprised my entire planting for the autumn of . i wanted to do much other work in that line, but it had to be left for a more convenient season. hundreds of fruit trees, shade trees, and shrubs have since been planted at four oaks, but this first setting of thirty-four hundred apple trees was the most important as well as the most urgent. the orchard was to be a prominent feature in the factory i was building, and as it would be slower in coming to perfection than any other part, it was wise to start it betimes. i have kicked myself black and blue for neglecting to plant an orchard ten years earlier. if i had done this, and had spent two hours a month in the management of it, it would now be a thing of beauty and an income-producing joy forever,--or, at least, as long as my great-grandchildren will need it. there is no danger of overdoing orcharding. the demand for fruit increases faster than the supply, and it is only poor quality or bad handling that causes a slack market. if the general farmer will become an expert orchardist, he will find that year by year his ten acres of fruit will give him a larger profit than any forty acres of grain land; but to get this result he must be faithful to his trees. much of the time they are caring for themselves, and for the owner, too; but there are times when they require sharp attention, and if they do not get it promptly and in the right way, they and the owner will suffer. fruit growing as a sole occupation requires favorable soil, climate, and market, and also a considerable degree of aptitude on the part of the manager, to make it highly profitable. a fruit-grower in our climate must have other interests if he would make the most of his time. while waiting for his fruit he can raise food for hens and hogs; and if he feeds hens and hogs, he should keep as many cows as he can. he will then use in his own factory all the raw material he can raise. this will again be returned to the land as a by-product, which will not only maintain the fertility of the farm, but even increase it. if his cows are of the best, they will yield butter enough to pay for their food and to give a profit; the skim milk, fed to the hogs and hens, will give eggs and pork out of all proportion to its cost; and everything that grows upon his land can thus be turned off as a finished product for a liberal price, and yet the land will not be depleted. the orchard is better for the hens and hogs and cows, and they are better for the orchard. these industries fit into each other like the folding of hands; they seem mutually dependent, and yet they are often divorced, or, at best, only loosely related. this view may seem to be the result of _post hoc_ reasoning, but i think it is not. i believe i imbibed these notions with my mother's milk, for i can remember no time when they were not mine. the psalmist said, "comfort me with apples"; and the psalmist was reputed a wise man. with only sufficient wisdom to plant an orchard, i live in high expectation of finding the same comfort in my old age. chapter xiv planting of the trees september proved as dry as august was wet,--only half an inch of water fell; and the seedings would have been slow to start had they depended for their moisture upon the clouds. by october , however, green had taken the place of brown on nearly all the sixty acres we had tilled. the threshers came and threshed the wheat and oats. of wheat there were bushels, of oats, . we stored this grain in the cottage until the granary should be ready, and stacked the straw until the forage barn could receive it. my plan from the first has been to shelter all forage, even the meanest, and bright oat straw is not low in the scale. on the th the horse stable was far enough advanced to permit the horses to be moved, and the old barn was deserted. a neighbor who had bought this barn at once pulled it down and carted it away. in this transaction i held out several days for $ , but as my neighbor was obdurate i finally accepted his offer. the first entry on the credit side of my farm ledger is, by one old barn, $ . the receipts for october, november, and december, were:-- by one old barn $ . by apples on trees ( trees at $ . each) . by bushels of potatoes at cents per bushel . by five old sows, not fat . one cow . three cows . two cows . three cows, two heifers, nine calves . forty-three shoats and gilts, average lb., at cents per lb . total $ . the young hogs had eaten most of my small potatoes and some of my corn before we parted with them in late november. these sales were made at the farm, and at low prices, for i was afraid to send such stuff to market lest some one should find out whence it came. the four oaks brand was to stand for perfection in the future, and i was not willing to handicap it in the least. top prices for gilt-edged produce is what intensive farming means; and if there is money in land, it will be found close to this line. the potatoes had been dug and sold, or stored in the cellar of the farm-house; the apples from the trees reserved for home use had been gathered, and we were ready for the fall planting. while waiting for the stock to arrive, we had time to get in all the hay and most of the straw into the forage barn, which was now under roof. on saturday, the th, word came that sixteen immense boxes had arrived at exeter for us. three teams were sent at once, and each team brought home two boxes. three trips were made, and the entire prospective orchard was safely landed. monday saw our whole force at work planting trees. small stakes had been driven to give the exact centre for each hole, so that the trees, viewed from any direction, would be in straight lines. sam, zeb, and judson were to dig the holes, putting the surface dirt to the right, and the poor earth to the left; i was to prune the roots and keep tab on the labels; johnson and anderson were to set the trees,--anderson using a shovel and johnson his hands, feet, and eyes; while thompson was to puddle and distribute the trees. the puddling was easily done. we sawed an oil barrel in halves, placed these halves on a stone boat, filled them two-thirds full of water, and added a lot of fine clay. into this thin mud the roots of each tree were dipped before planting. my duty was to shorten the roots that were too long, and to cut away the bruised and broken ones. the top pruning was to be done after the trees were all set and banked. the stock was fine in every respect,--fully up to promise. watching johnson set his first tree convinced me that he knew more about planting than i did. he lined and levelled it; he pawed surface dirt into the hole, and churned the roots up and down; more dirt, and he tamped it; still more dirt, and he tramped it; yet more dirt, and he stamped it until the tree stood like a post; then loose dirt, and he left it. i was sure johnson knew his business too well to need advice from a tenderfoot, so i went back to my root pruning. we were ten days planting these thirty-four hundred trees, but we did it well, and the days were short. we finished on the th of november. the trees were now to be top pruned. i told johnson to cut every tree in the big orchard back to a three-foot stub, unless there was very good reason for leaving a few inches (never more than six), and i turned my back on him and walked away as i said these cruel words. it seemed a shame to cut these bushy, long-legged, handsome fellows back to dwarfish insignificance and brutish ugliness, but it had to be done. i wanted stocky, thrifty, low-headed business trees, and there was no other way to get them. the trees in the lower, or ten-acre, orchard, were not treated so severely. their long legs were left, and their bushy tops were only moderately curtailed. we would try both high and low heading. on the night of november the shredders came and set up their great machine on the floor of the forage barn, ready to commence work the next morning. there were ten men in the shredding gang. i furnished six more, and bill jackson came with two others to change work with me; that is, my men were to help him when the machine reached his farm. we worked nineteen men and four teams three and a half days on the forty-three acres of corn, and as a result, had a tremendous mow of shredded corn fodder and an immense pile of half-husked ears. for the use of the machine and the wages of the ten men i paid $ . poor economy! before next corn-shredding time i owned a machine,--smaller indeed, but it did the work as well (though not as quickly), and it cost me only $ , and was good for ten years. the weather had favored me thus far. the wet august had put the ground into good condition for seeding, and the dry september and october had permitted our buildings to be pushed forward, but now everything was to change. a light rain began on the morning of the th (i did not permit it to interrupt the shredding, which was finished by noon), and by night it had developed into a steady downpour that continued, with interruptions, for six weeks. november and december of gave us rain and snow fall equal to twelve and a half inches of water. plans at four oaks had to be modified. there was no more use for the ploughs. nos. and , and much of the home lot were left until spring. i had planned to mulch heavily all the newly set trees, and for this purpose had bought six carloads of manure (at a cost of $ ); but this manure could not be hauled across the sodden fields, and must needs be piled in a great heap for use in the spring. the carpenters worked at disadvantage, and the farm men could do little more than keep themselves and the animals comfortable. they did, however, finish one good job between showers. they tile-drained the routes for the two roads on the home lot,--the straight one east and west through the building line, about feet, and the winding carriage drive to the site of the main house, about feet. the tile pipe cost $ . they also set a lot of fence posts in the soft ground. building progressed slowly during the bad weather, but before the end of december the horse barn, the woodshed, the granary, the forage barn, and the power-house were completed, and most of the machinery was in place. the machinery consisted of a fifteen horse-power engine, with shafting running to the forage barn, the granary, and the woodshed. a power-saw was set in the end of the shed, a grinding mill in the granary, and a fodder-cutter in the forage barn. the cost of these items was:-- engine and shafting $ . saw . mill . feed-cutter and carrier . total $ . i gave the services of my two carpenters, thompson and sam, during most of this time to nelson, for i had but little work for them, and he was not making much out of his job. the last few days of turned clear and cold, and the barometer set "fair." the change chirked us up, and we ended the year in good spirits. chapter xv polly's judgment hall before closing the books, we should take account of stock, to see what we had purchased with our money. imprimis: acres of good land, satisfactory to the eye, well fenced and well groomed; apple trees, so well planted as to warrant a profitable future; a water and sewer system as good as a city could supply; farm buildings well planned and sufficient for the day; an abundance of food for all stock, and to spare; an intelligent and willing working force; machinery for more than present necessity; eight excellent horses and their belongings; six cows, moderately good; two pigs and two score fowls, to be eaten before spring, and _a lot of fun_. what price i shall have to put against this last item to make the account balance, i can tell better when i foot the other side of the ledger. but first i must add a few items to the debit account. moving the cottage cost $ . i paid $ for grass seed and seed rye. the wage account for six men and two women for five months was $ . their food account was $ . of course the farm furnished milk, cream, butter, vegetables, some fruit, fresh pork, poultry, and eggs. there were also some small freight bills, which had not been accounted for, amounting to $ , and $ had been spent in transportation for the men. then the farm must be charged with interest on all money advanced, when i had completed my additions. the rate was to be five per cent, and the time three months. on the last day of the year i went to the farm to pay up to date all accounts. i wished to end the year with a clean score. i did not know what the five months had cost me (i would know that evening), but i did know that i had had "the time of my life" in the spending, and i would not whine. i felt a little nervous when i thought of going over the figures with polly,--she was such a judicious spender of money. but i knew her criticism would not be severe, for she was hand-in-glove with me in the project. i tried to find fault with myself for wastefulness, but some excellent excuse would always crop up. "your water tower is unnecessary." "yes, but it adds to the landscape, and it has its use." "you have put up too much fencing." "true, but i wanted to feel secure, and the old fences were such nests of weeds and rubbish." "you have spent too much money on the farm-house." "i think not, for the laborer is worthy of his hire, and also of all reasonable creature comforts." and thus it went on. i would not acknowledge myself in the wrong; nor, arguing how i might, could i find aught but good in my labors. i devoutly hoped to be able to put the matter in the same light when i stood at the bar in polly's judgment hall. the day was clear, cool, and stimulating. a fair fall of snow lay on the ground, clean and wholesome, as country snow always is. i wished that the house was finished (it was not begun), and that the family was with me in it. "another christmas time will find us here, god willing, and many a one thereafter." i spent three hours at the farm, doing a little business and a lot of mooning, and then returned to town. the children were off directly after dinner, intent on holiday festivities, so that polly and i had the house to ourselves. i felt that we needed it. i invited my partner into the den, lighted a pipe for consolation, unlocked the drawer in which the farm ledger is kept, gave a small deprecatory cough, and said:-- "my dear, i am afraid i have spent an awful lot of money in the last five months. you see there is such a quantity of things to do at once, and they run into no end of money. you know, i--" "of course i know it, and i know that you have got the worth of it, too." wouldn't that console you! how was i to know that polly would hail from that quarter? i would have kissed her hand, if she would have permitted such liberty; i kissed her lips, and was ready to defend any sum total which the ledger dare show. "do you know how much it is?" said polly. "not within a million!" i was reckless then, and hoped the total would be great, for had not polly said that she knew i had got the worth of my money? and who was to gainsay her? "it is more than i planned for, i know, but i do not see how i could use less without losing precious time. we started into this thing with the theory that the more we put into it, without waste, the more we would ultimately get out of it. our theory is just as sound to-day as it was five months ago." "we will win out all right in the end, mr. headman, for we will not put the price-mark on health, freedom, happiness, or fun, until we have seen the debit side of the ledger." "how much do you want to spend for the house?" said i. "do you mean the house alone?" "no; the house and carriage barn. i'll pay for the trees, shrubs, and kickshaws in the gardens and lawns." "you started out with a plan for a $ , house, didn't you? well, i don't think that's enough. you ought to give me $ , for the house and barn and let me see what i can do with it; and you ought to give it to me right away, so that you cannot spend it for pigs and foolish farm things." "i'll do it within ten days, polly; and i won't meddle in your affairs if you will agree to keep within the limit." "it's a bargain," said polly, "and the house will be much more livable than this one. what do you think we could sell this one for?" "about $ , or $ , , i think." "and will you sell it?" "of course, if you don't object." "sell, to be sure; it would be foolish to keep it, for we'll be country folk in a year." "i have a theory," said i, "that when we live on the farm we ought to credit the farm with what it costs us for food and shelter here,--providing, of course, that the farm feeds and shelters us as well." "it will do it a great deal better. we will have a better house, better food, more company, more leisure, more life, and more everything that counts, than we ever had before." "we'll fix the value of those things when we've had experience," said i. "now let's get at the figures. i tell you plainly that i don't know what they foot up,--less than $ , , i hope." "don't let's worry about them, no matter what they say." this from prudent, provident polly! "certainly not," said i, as bold as a lion. "there are thirty-five items on the debit side of the ledger and a few little ones on the credit side. hold your breath while i add them. "i have spent $ , and have received $ , which leaves a debit balance of $ , ." "that isn't so awfully bad, when you think of all the fun you've had." "fun comes high at this time of the year, doesn't it, polly?" "much depends on what you call high. you have waited and worked a long time for this. i won't say a word if you spend all you have in the world. it's yours." "mine and yours and the children's; but i won't spend it all. seventy or seventy-five thousand dollars, besides your house and barn money, shall be my limit. there is still an item of interest to be added to this account. "interest! why, john williams, do you mean to tell me that you borrowed this money? i thought it was your own to do as you liked with. have you got to pay interest on it?" "it was mine, but i loaned it to the farm. before i made this loan i was getting five per cent on the money. i must now look to the farm for my five per cent. if it cannot pay this interest promptly, i shall add the deferred payment to the principal, and it shall bear interest. this must be done each year until the net income from the farm is greater than the interest account. whatever is over will then be used to reduce the principal." "that's a long speech, but i don't think it's very clear. i don't see why a man should pay interest on his own money. the farm is yours, isn't it? you bought it with your own money, didn't you? what difference does it make whether you charge interest or not?" "not the least difference in the world to us, polly, but a great deal to the experiment." "oh, yes, i forgot the experiment. and how much interest do you add?" "five hundred and forty-two dollars. also, $ to the lawyer and $ for recording the deed, making the whole debt of the farm to me $ , even." "does it come out just even $ , ? i believe you've manipulated the figures." "not on your life! add them yourself. they were put down at all sorts of times during the past five months. my dear, i wish you a good-night and a happy new year. you have given me a very happy ending for the old one." chapter xvi winter work the new year opened full of all sorts of interests and new projects. there were so many things to plan for and to commence at the farm that we often got a good deal mixed up. i can hardly expect to make a connected narrative of the various plans and events, so will follow each one far enough to launch it and then leave it for future development. little snow fell in january and february ' . the weather was average winter weather, and a good deal of outdoor work was done. on the d i went to the farm to plan with thompson an outline for the two months. i had decided to make thompson the foreman, for i had watched him carefully for five months and was satisfied that i might go farther and fare a great deal worse. indeed, i thought myself very fortunate to have found such a dependable man. he was temperate and good-natured, and he had a bluff, hearty way with the other men that made it easy for them to accept his directions. he was thorough, too, in his work. he knew how a job should be done, and he was not satisfied until it was finished correctly. he was not a worker for work's sake, as was anderson, but he was willing to put his shoulder to the wheel for results. "wait till i get my shoulder under it," was a favorite expression with him, and i am frank to say that when this conjunction took place there was apt to be something doing. thompson is still at four oaks, and it will be a bad day for the farm when he leaves. "thompson," said i, "you are to be working foreman out here, and i want you to put your mind on the business and keep it there. i cannot raise your wages, for i have a system; but you shall have $ as a christmas present if things go well. will you stay on these terms?" "i will stay, all right, dr. williams, and i will give the best i've got. i like the looks of this place, and i want to see how you are going to work it out." that being settled, i told thompson of some things that must be done during january and february. "you must get out a great lot of wood, have it sawed, and store it in the shed, more than enough for a year's use. the wood should be taken from that which is already down. don't cut any standing trees, even though they are dead. use all limbs that are large enough, but pile the brushwood where it can be burned. we must do wise forestry in these woods, and we will have an unlimited supply of fuel. i mean that the wood lot shall grow better rather than worse as the years go by. we cannot do much for it now, but more in time. you must see to it that the men are not careless about young trees,--no breaking or knocking down will be in order. another thing to look after is the ice supply. i will get nelson to build an ice-house directly, and you must look around for the ice. have you any idea as to where it can be had?" "a big company is getting ice on round lake three miles west, and i suppose they will sell you what you want," said thompson, "and our teams can haul it all right." "what do you suppose they will charge per ton on their platform?" "from twenty-five to forty cents, i reckon." "all right, make as good a bargain as you can, and attend to it at the best time. when the teams are not hauling ice or wood, let them draw gravel from french's pit. it will be hard to get it out in the winter, but i guess it can be done, and we will need a lot of it on these roads. have it dumped at convenient places, and we will put it on the drives in the spring. "another thing,--we must have a bridge across the brook on each lane. you will find timbers and planks enough in the piles from the old barns to make good bridges, and the men can do the work. then there is all that wire for the inside fences to stretch and staple; but mind, no barbed wire is to be put on top of inside fences. "these five jobs will keep you busy for the next two months, for there'll be only four men besides yourself to do them. i am going to set sam at the chicken plant. i'll see you before long, and we'll go over the cow and hog plans; but you have your work cut out for the next two months. by the way, how much of an ice-house shall i need?" "how many cows are you going to milk?" "about forty when we run at full speed; perhaps half that number this year." "well, then you'd better build a house for four hundred tons. that won't be too big when you are on full time, and it's a mighty bad thing to run short of ice." i saw nelson the same day and contracted with him for an ice-house capable of holding four hundred tons, for $ . the walls of the house to be of three thicknesses of lumber with two air spaces (one four inches, the other two) without filling. as a result of the conference with thompson, i had, before the first of march, a wood-house full of wood, which seemed a supply for two years at full steam; an ice-house nearly full of ice; two serviceable bridges across the brook; the wire fencing almost completed; and eighty loads of gravel,--about one-third of what i needed. the whole cash outlay was,-- tons of ice at cents per ton $ . tons of gravel at cents per load . fence staples . ------ total $ . the conference with sam jones, the hen man, was deferred until my next visit, and my plans for the cow barn, dairy-house, and hog-house were left to nelson for consideration, he promising to give me estimates within a few days. chapter xvii what shall we ask of the hen? sam jones, the chicken-loving man, was as pleased as a boy with a new top when i began to talk of a hen plant. he had a lot of practical knowledge of the business, for he had _failed_ in it twice; and i could furnish any amount of theory, and enough money to prevent disaster. in his previous attempts he had invested nearly all his small capital in a plant that might yield two hundred eggs a day; he had to buy all foods in small quantities, and therefore at high prices; and he had to give his whole time to a business which was too small and too much on the hand-to-mouth order to give him a living profit. my theory of the business was entirely different. i could plan for results, and, what was more to the point, i could wait for them. mistakes, accidents, even disasters, were disarmed by a bank account; my bread and butter did not depend upon the temper of a whimsical hen. the food would cost the minimum. all grains and green food, and most of the animal food, in the form of skim milk, would be furnished by the farm. i meant also to develop a plant large enough to warrant the full attention of an able-bodied man. i felt no hesitation about this venture, for i did not intend to ask more of my hens than a well-disposed hen ought to be willing to grant. i do not ask a hen to lay a double-yolk every day in the year. that is too much to expect of a creature in whom the mother instinct is prominent, and who wishes also to have a new dress for herself at least once in that time. i do not wish a hen to work overtime for me. if she will furnish me with eight dozen of her finished product per annum, i will do the rest. whatever she does more than that shall redound to her credit. two-hundred-eggs-a-year hens are scarcer than hens with teeth, and i was not looking for the unusual. a hen can easily lay one hundred eggs in three hundred and sixty-five days, and yet find time for domestic and social affairs. she can feel that she is not a subject for charity, while at the same time she retains her self-respect as a hen of leisure. i have the highest regard for this domestic fowl, and i would not for a great deal impose a too arduous task upon her. i feel like encouraging her in her peculiar industry, for which she is so eminently fitted, but not like forcing her into strenuous efforts that would rob her of vivacity and dull her social and domestic impulses. no; if the hen will politely present me with one hundred eggs a year, i will thank her and ask no more. some one will say: "how can you make hens pay if they don't lay more than eight dozen eggs a year? eggs sometimes sell as low as twelve cents per dozen." four oaks hens never have laid one-cent eggs, and never will. they would quit work if such a price were suggested. ninety per cent of the eggs from four oaks have sold for thirty cents or more per dozen, and the demand is greater than the supply. the four oaks certificate that the egg is not thirty-six hours old when it reaches the egg cup, makes two and a half cents look small to those who can afford to pay for the best. to lack confidence in the egg is a serious matter at the breakfast table, and a person who can insure perfect trust will not lack patronage. if, therefore, a hen will lay eight dozen eggs, she is welcome to say to an acquaintance: "i have just handed the headman a two-dollar bill," for she knows that i have not paid fifty cents for her food. of course the wages of the hen man and his food and the interest on the plant must be counted, but i do not propose to count them twice. four oaks is a factory where several things are made, each in a measure dependent on, and useful to, the others, and we cannot itemize costs of single products because of this mutual dependence. i feel certain that i could not drop one of the factory's industries without loss to each of the others. for this reason i kept a very simple set of books. i charged the farm with all money spent for it, and credited it with all moneys received. even now i have no very definite knowledge of what it costs to keep a hen, a hog, or a cow; nor do i care. such data are greatly influenced by location, method of getting supplies, and market fluctuations. i furnish most of my food, and my own market. my crops have never entirely failed, and i take little heed whether they be large or small. they are not for sale as crops, but as finished products. i am not willing to sell them at any price, for i want them consumed on the place for the sake of the land. corn has sold for eighty cents a bushel since i began this experiment, yet at that time i fed as much as ever and was not tempted to sell a bushel, though i could easily have spared five thousand. when it went down to twenty-eight cents, i did not care, for corn and oats to me are simply in transition state,--not commodities to be bought or sold. they cost me, one year with another, about the same. an abundant harvest fills my granaries to overflowing; a bad harvest doesn't deplete them, for i do not sell my surplus for fear that i, too, may have to buy out of a high market. i have bought corn and oats a few times, but only when the price was decidedly below my idea of the feeding value of these grains. i can find more than twenty-eight cents in a bushel of corn, and more than eighteen cents in thirty-two pounds of oats. but i am away off my subject. i began to talk about the hen plant, and have wandered to my favorite fad,--the factory farm. chapter xviii white wyandottes "sam," said i, "i am going to start this poultry plant from just as near the beginning of things as possible. i want you to dispose of every hen on the place within the next twenty days, and to burn everything that has been used in connection with them. we've cleared this land of disease germs, if there were germs in it, by turning it bottom-side up; now let's start free from the pestiferous vermin that make a hen's life unhappy. no stock, either old or young, shall be brought here. when we want to change our breeding, we'll buy eggs from the best fanciers and hatch them in our own incubators. it will then be our own fault if we don't keep our chickens comfortable and free from their enemies. this is sound theory, and we'll try how it works out in practice. certainly it will be easier to keep clean if we start clean. not one board or piece of lumber that has been used for any other purpose shall find place in my hen-houses. eternal vigilance makes a full egg basket; and a full egg basket means a lot of money at the year's end. i will never find fault with you for being too careful attend to the details in such way as suits you best, provided the result is thorough and everlasting cleanliness. nothing less will win out, and nothing less will meet the requirements of our factory rules. "the first thing to do is to get the incubating cellar made. it ought to be four feet in the ground and four feet out of it. make it ten feet by fifteen, inside measure, and you can easily run five two-hundred-egg incubators. build it near the south fence in no. ,--that's the lot for the hens. the walls are to be of brick, and we'll have a brick floor put in, for it's too cold to concrete it now. gables are to point east and west, and each is to have a window; put the door in the middle of the south wall, and shingle the roof. digging through three feet of frost will be hard, but it must be done, and done quickly. i want you to start your incubator lamps before the d of february." "i can dig the hole without much trouble,--big fire on the ground for two or three hours will help,--and i can put on the roof and do all the carpenter work, but i can't lay the brick." "i'll look out for that part of the job, but i want you to see that things are pushed, for i shall have a thousand eggs here by february st and another thousand by the th, and these eggs mean money." "what do you have to pay for them?" "ten cents apiece,--$ for two thousand eggs." "well, i should say! are they hand-painted? i wouldn't have had to quit business if i could have sold my eggs at a quarter of that price." "that's all right, sam, but you didn't sell white wyandotte eggs for hatching. i've contracted with two of the best-known fanciers of wyandottes in the country to send me five hundred eggs apiece february st and th. i don't think the price is high for the stock." "have you decided to keep 'dottes? i hoped you would try leghorns; they're great layers." "yes, they're great summer layers, but the american birds will beat them hollow in winter; and i must have as steady a supply of eggs as possible. my customers don't stop eating eggs in winter, and they'll be willing to pay more for them at that season. the leghorn is too small to make a good broiler, and as half the chicks come cockerels, we must look out for that." "why do you throw down the plymouth rocks? they're bigger than 'dottes, and just as good layers." "i threw down the barred plymouth rocks on account of color; i like white hens best. it was hard to decide between white rocks and wyandottes, for there's mighty little difference between them as all-around hens. i really think i chose the 'dottes because the first reply to my letters was from a man who was breeding them." "they are 'beauts,' all of them, and i'll give them a good chance to spread themselves," said sam. "what percentage of hatch may we expect from purchased eggs?" "about sixty chicks out of every hundred eggs, i reckon." "that would be doing pretty well, wouldn't it? if we had good luck with the sixty chicks, how many would grow up?" "fifty ought to." "of these fifty, can we count on twenty-five pullets?" "yes." "that's what i was getting at. you think we might, by good luck, raise twenty-five pullets from each hundred eggs. i'll cut that in the middle and be satisfied with twelve, or even with ten. at that rate the two thousand eggs that cost $ will give me two hundred pullets to begin the egg-making next november. that's not enough; we ought to raise just twice that number. i'll spend as much more on eggs to be hatched by the middle of april or the first of may, and then we can reasonably expect to go into next winter with four hundred pullets. they will cost the farm a dollar apiece, but the farm will have four hundred cockerels to sell at fifty cents each, which will materially reduce the cost." "i think you put that pretty low, sir; we ought to raise more than four hundred pullets out of four thousand eggs." "everything more will be clear gain. i shall be satisfied with four hundred. we must also get at the brooder house. this is the order in which i want the buildings to stand in the chicken lot: first, the incubating house, feet from the south line; feet north of this, the brooder house; and feet north of that, the first hen-house, with runs feet deep. we'll build other houses for the birds as we need them. they are all to face to the south. if the brooder house is feet long and feet wide, it can easily care for the eight hundred chicks, and for half as many more, if we are lucky enough to get them. "we'll have a five-foot walk against the north wall of this house, and a ten-foot space north and south through the centre for heating plant and food. this will leave a space at each side ten by twenty feet, to be cut into five pens four feet by ten, each of which will mother a hundred chicks or more. there must be plenty of glass in the south wall, and we'll use overhead water pipes in each hover. "there's no hurry about the poultry-houses. you can build one in the early summer, and perhaps another in the fall. i expect you to do the carpenter work on these houses. i'll see the mason at once and have him ready by the time you've dug the hole. the incubators will be here in good time, and we want everything ready for work as soon as the eggs arrive." sam was pleased with his job; it was exactly to his liking. he took real delight in caring for fowls, and he was especially anxious to prove to me that it was not so much lack of knowledge as lack of capital that had caused the downfall of his previous efforts. sam could not then understand why one man could sell his eggs at thirty-six cents a dozen when his neighbor could get only sixteen; he found out later. the mason's work for the incubator house and the foundation wall for the brooder house cost $ . the lumber bill for these two, including doors and windows, was $ . the five incubators, $ , and the hot-water heater for the brooder house, $ , made the total $ . add to this $ paid during two months for eggs, and we have $ as the cost of starting the poultry plant. chapter xix fried pork i had given nelson this sketch as a guide in working out the plan for the cow barn: length over all, feet; width, feet. this parallelogram was to be divided lengthwise into three equal spaces, one in the centre for a driveway, and one on each side for the cow platforms and feeding mangers. twenty feet at the west end of the barn was partitioned off, one corner for a small granary, the other for a kitchen in which the food was to be prepared. these rooms were each thirteen feet by twenty. at the other end of the building, ten feet on each side was given over to hospital purposes,--a lying-in ward ten feet by thirteen being on each side of the driveway. the foundation for this building was to be of stone, and the entire floor of cement; and the walls were to be sealed within and sheeted without, and then covered with ship lap boards, making three thicknesses of boards. it was to be one story high. an east-and-west passage, cutting the main drive at right angles, divided the barn at its middle. at the south end of this passage was a door leading to the dairy-house, which was on the building line feet away. the four spaces made by these passages were each subdivided into ten stalls five feet wide. two doors on the north and two on the south gave exit for the cows. i had placed my limit at forty milch cows, and i thought this stable would furnish suitable quarters for that number. if i had to rebuild, i would make some modifications. experience is a good teacher; but the stable has served its purpose, and i cannot quarrel with the results. the chief defect is in the distribution of water. the supply is abundant, but it is let on only in the kitchen, whence it is supplied to the cows by means of a hose or a barrel swung between wheels. [illustration] in the kitchen are appliances for mixing and cooking food, and for warming the drinking water in winter. nelson and i discussed the sketch plan given below, and he found some fault with it. i would not be dissuaded from my views, however, and nelson had to yield. i was as opinionated in those days as a theoretical amateur is apt to be; and it was hard to give up my theories at the suggestion of a person who had only experience to guide him. the best plan, as i have long since learned, is to mix the two and use the solid substance that results from their combination. we located the site of the building, and talked plans until the low sun of january th disappeared in the west. then we adjourned to the sitting room of the farm-house to finish the matter so far as was possible. an hour and a half passed, and we were in fair accord, when mrs. thompson came into the room to say that supper was ready, and to ask us to join the men at table before starting homeward. i was glad of the opportunity, for i was curious to know if mrs. thompson set a good table. we went into the dining room just as the farm family was ready to sit down. there were ten of us,--two women, six men, nelson, and myself; and as we sat down, i noticed with pleasure that each had evidently taken some thought of the obligations which a table ought to impose. the table was clothed in clean white, and there was a napkin at each plate. nelson and i had the only perfectly fresh ones, and this i took as evidence that napkins were usual. the food was all on the table, and was very satisfactory to look at. thompson sat at one end, and before him, on a great platter, lay two dozen or more pieces of fried salt pork, crisp in their shells of browned flour, and fit for a king. on one side of the platter was a heaping dish of steaming potatoes. a knife had been drawn once around each, just to give it a chance to expand and show mealy white between the gaping circles that covered its bulk. at the other side was a boat of milk gravy, which had followed the pork into the frying-pan and had come forth fit company for the boiled potatoes. i went back forty years at one jump, and said,-- "i now renew my youth. is there anything better under the sun than fried salt pork and milk gravy? if there is, don't tell me of it, for i have worshipped at this shrine for forty years, and my faith must not be shaken." such a supper twice or thrice a week would warm the cockles of my old heart; but polly says, "no modern cook can make these things just right; and if not just right, they are horrid." that is true; it takes an artist or a mother to fry salt pork and make milk gravy. there were other things on the table,--quantities of bread and butter, apple sauce (in a dish that would hold half a peck), stacks of fresh ginger-bread, tea, and great pitchers of milk; but naught could distract my attention from the _pièce de résistance_. thrice i sent my plate back, and then could do no more. that meal convinced me that i could trust mrs. thompson. a woman who could fry salt pork as my mother did, was a woman to be treasured. i left the farm-house at , and reached home by . . polly was not quite pleased with my late hours; she said it did not worry her not to know where i was, but it was annoying. "can't you have a telephone put into the farm-house? it would be convenient in a lot of ways." "why, of course; i don't see why it can't be done at once. i'll make application this very night." it was six weeks before we really got a wire to the farm, but after that we wondered how we ever got along without it. chapter xx a ration for product nelson was to commence work on the cow-house at once; at least, the mason was. i left the job as a whole to nelson, and he made some sort of contract with the mason. the agreement was that i should pay $ for the barn complete. the machinery we put into it was very simple,--a water heater and two cauldrons for cooking food. all three cost about $ . thompson had selected six cows, from those bought with the place, as worth wintering. they were now giving from six to eight quarts each, and were due to come in in april and may. an eight-quart-a-day cow was not much to my liking, but thompson said that with good care they would do better in the spring. "four of those cows ought to make fine milkers," he said; "they are built for it,--long bodies, big bags, milk veins that stand out like crooked welts, light shoulders, slender necks, and lean heads. they are young, too; and if you'll dehorn them, i believe they'll make your thoroughbreds hump themselves to keep up with them at the milk pail. you see, these cows never had more than half a chance to show what they could do. they have never been 'fed for milk.' farmers don't do that much. they think that if a cow doesn't bawl for food or drink she has enough. i suppose she has enough to keep her from starving, and perhaps enough to hold her in fair condition, but not enough to do this and fill the milk pail, too. i read somewhere about a ration for 'maintenance' and one for 'product,' and there was a deal of difference. most farmers don't pay much attention to these things, and i guess that's one reason why they don't get on faster." "you've got the whole matter down fine in that 'ration for product,' thompson, and that's what we want on this farm. a ration that will simply keep a cow or a hen in good health leaves no margin for profit. cows and hens are machines, and we must treat them as such. crowd in the raw material, and you may look for large results in finished product. the question ought always to be, how much can a cow eat and drink? not, how little can she get on with? grain and forage are to be turned into milk, and the more of these foods our cows eat, the better we like it. if these machines work imperfectly, we must get rid of them at once and at any price. it will not pay to keep a cow that persistently falls below a high standard. we waste time on her, and the smooth running of the factory is interrupted. i'm going to place a standard on this farm of nine thousand pounds a year for each matured cow; i don't think that too high. if a cow falls much below that amount, she must give place to a better one, for i'm not making this experiment entirely for my health. the standard isn't too high, yet it's enough to give a fine profit. it means at least three hundred and fifty pounds of butter a year, and in this case the butter means at least thirty cents a pound, or more than $ a year for each cow. this is all profit, if one wishes to figure it by itself, for the skimmed milk will more than pay for the food and care. but why did you say dehorn the cows?" "well, i notice that a man with a club is almost sure to find some use for it. if he isn't pounding the fence or throwing it at a dog, he's snipping daisies or knocking the heads off bull-thistles. he's always doing something with it just because he has it in his hand. it's the same way with a cow. if she has horns, she'll use them in some way, and they take her mind off her business. no, sir; a cow will do a lot better without horns. there's mighty little to distract her attention when her clubs are gone." "what breeds of cows have you handled, thompson?" "not any thoroughbreds that i know of; mostly common kinds and grade jerseys or holsteins." "i'm going to put a small herd of thorough bred holsteins on the place." "why don't you try thoroughbred jerseys' they'll give as much butter, and they won't eat more than half as much." "you don't quite catch my idea, thompson. i want the cow that will eat the most, if she is, at the same time, willing to pay for her food. i mean to raise a lot of food, and i want a home market for it. what comes from the land must go back to it, or it will grow thin. the holstein will eat more than the jersey, and, while she may not make more butter, she will give twice as much skimmed milk and furnish more fertilizer to return to the land. fresh skimmed milk is a food greatly to be prized by the factory-farm man; and when we run at full speed, we shall have three hundred thousand pounds of it to feed. "i have purchased twenty three-year-old holstein cows, in calf to advanced registry bulls, and they are to be delivered to me march . i shall want you to go and fetch them. i also bought a young bull from the same herd, but not from the same breeding. these twenty-one animals will cost, by the time they get here, $ . i shall give the bull to my neighbor jackson. he will be proud to have it, and i shall be relieved of the care of it. be good to your neighbor, thompson, if by so doing you can increase the effectiveness of the factory farm. we will start the dairy with twenty thoroughbreds and six scrubs. i shall probably buy and sell from time to time; but of one thing i am certain: if a cow cannot make our standard, she goes to the butcher, be she mongrel or thoroughbred. what do you think of judson as a probable dairyman?" "i shouldn't wonder if he would do first-rate. he's a quiet fellow, and cows like that. he has those roans tagging him all over the place; and if a horse likes a man, it's because he's nice and quiet in his ways. i notice that he can milk a cow quicker than the other men, and it ain't because he don't milk dry--i sneaked after him twice. the cow just gives down for him better than for the others." chapter xxi the razorback we have now launched three of the four principal industries of our factory farm. the fourth is perhaps the most important of all, if a single member of a group of mutually dependent industries can have this distinction. there is no question that the farmer's best friend is the hog. he will do more for him and ask less of him than any other animal. all he asks is to be born. that is enough for this non-ruminant quadruped, who can find his living in the earth, the roadside ditch, or the forest, and who, out of a supply of grass, roots, or mast, can furnish ham and bacon to the king's taste and the poor man's maintenance. the half-wild razorback, with never a clutch of corn to his back, gives abundant food to the mountaineer over whose forest he ranges. the cropped or slit ear is the only evidence of human care or human ownership. he lives the life of a wild beast, and in the autumn he dies the death of a wild beast; while his flesh, made rich with juices of acorns, beechnuts, and other sweet masts, nourishes a man whose only exercise of ownership is slaughter. the hog that can make his own living, run like a deer, and drink out of a jug, has done more for the pioneer and the backwoodsman than any other animal. take this semi-wild beast away from his wild haunts, give him food and care, and he will double his gifts. add a hundred generations of careful selection, until his form is so changed that it is beyond recognition, and again the product will be doubled. the spirit of swine is not changed by civilization or good breeding; such as it was on that day when the herd "ran down a steep place and was drowned in the sea," such it is to-day. a fixed determination to have its own way dominated the creature then, and a pig-headed desire to be the greatest food-producing machine in the world is its ruling passion now. that the hog has succeeded in this is beyond question; for no other food animal can increase its own weight one hundred and fifty fold in the first eight months of its life. all over the world there is a growing fondness for swine flesh, and the ever increasing supply doesn't outrun the demand. since the dispersion of the tribes of israel there has been no persistent effort to depopularize this wonderful food maker. pig has more often been the food of the poor than of the rich, but now rich and poor alike do it honor. old ben jonson said:-- "now pig is meat, and a meat that is nourishing and may be desired, and consequently eaten: it may be eaten; yea, very exceedingly well eaten." hundreds have praised the rasher of ham, and thousands the flitch of bacon; it took the stroke of but one pen to make roast pig classical. the pig of to-day is so unlike his distant progenitor that he would not be recognized; if by any chance he were recognized, it would be only with a grunt of scorn for his unwieldy shape and his unenterprising spirit. gone are the fleet legs, great head, bulky snout, terrible jaws, warlike tusks, open nostrils, flapping ears, gaunt flanks, and racing sides; and with these has gone everything that told of strength, freedom, and wild life. in their place has come a cuboidal mass, twice as long as it is broad or high, with a place in front for mouth and eyes, and a foolish-looking leg under each corner. a mighty fall from "freedom's lofty heights," but a wonderfully improved machine. the modern hog is to his progenitor as the man with the steam-hammer to the man with the stone-hammer,--infinitely more useful, though not so free. it is not easy to overestimate the value of swine to the general farmer; but to the factory farmer they are indispensable. they furnish a profitable market for much that could not be sold, and they turn this waste material into a surprising lot of money in a marvellously short time. a pig should reach his market before he is nine months old. from the time he is new-born until he is days old, he should gain at least one pound a day, which means five cents, in ordinary times. during this time he has eaten, of things which might possibly have been sold, perhaps five dollars' worth. at days, with a gain of one pound a day, he is worth, one year with another, $ . . this is putting it too low for my market, but it gives a profit of not less than $ a head after paying freight and commissions. it is, then, only a question of how many to keep and how to keep them. to answer the first half of this question i would say, keep just as many as you can keep well. it never pays to keep stock on half rations of food or care, and pigs are not exceptions. in answering the other half of the question, how to keep them, i shall have to go into details of the first building of a piggery at four oaks. as in the case of the hens, i determined to start clean. hogs had been kept on the farm for years, and, so far as i could learn, there had been no epizoötic disease. the swine had had free range most of the time, and the specimens which i bought were healthy and as well grown as could be expected. they were not what i wanted, either in breed or in development, so they had been disposed of, all but two. these i now consigned to the tender care of the butcher, and ordered the sty in which they had been kept to be burned. i had planned to devote lot no. to a piggery. there are five acres in this lot, and i thought it large enough to keep four or five hundred pigs of all sizes in good health and good condition for forcing. some of the swine, not intended for market, would have more liberty; but close confinement in clean pens and small runs was to be the rule. to crowd hogs in this way, and at the same time to keep them free from disease, would require special vigilance. the ordinary diseases that come from damp and draughts could be fended off by carefully constructed buildings. cleanliness and wholesome food ought to do much, and isolation should accomplish the rest. i have established a perfect quarantine about my hog lot, and it has never been broken. after the first invoices of swine in the winter and spring of , no hog, young or old, has entered my piggery, save by the way of a sixty-day quarantine in the wood lot, and very few by that way. my pigs are several hundred yards from the public roads, and my neighbor, jackson, has planted a young orchard on his land to the north of my hog lots, and permits no hogs in this planting. i have thus secured practical isolation. i have rarely sent swine to fairs or stock shows. in the few instances in which i have broken this rule i have sold the stock shown, never returning it to four oaks. isolation, cleanliness, good food, good water, and a constant supply of ashes, charcoal, and salt, have kept my herd (thus far) from those dreadfully fatal diseases that destroy so many swine. if i can keep the specific micro-organism that causes hog-cholera off my place, i need not fear the disease. the same is true of swine plague. these diseases are of bacterial origin, and are communicated by the transference of bacteria from the infected to the non-infected. i propose to keep my healthy herd as far removed as possible from all sources of infection. i have carried these precautions so far that i am often scoffed at. i require my swineherd, when returning from a fair or a stock show, to take a full bath and to disinfect his clothing before stepping into the pig-house. this may seem an unnecessary refinement in precautionary measures, but i do not think so. it has served me well: no case of cholera or plague has shown itself at four oaks. what would i do if disease should appear? i do not know. i think, however, that i should fight it as hard as possible at close quarters, killing the seriously ill, and burning all bodies. after the scourge had passed i would dispose of all stock as best i could, and then burn the entire plant (fences and all), plough deep, cover the land white as snow with lime, leave it until spring, plough again, and sow to oats. during the following summer i would rebuild my plant and start afresh. a whole year would be lost, and some good buildings, but i think it would pay in the end. there would be no safety for the herd while a single colony of cholera or plague bacteria was harbored on the place; and while neither might, for years, appear in virulent form, yet there would be constant small losses and constant anxiety. one cannot afford either of these annoyances, and it is usually wise to take radical measures. if we apply sound business rules to farm management, we shall at least deserve success. i chose to keep thoroughbred swine for the reason that all the standard varieties are reasonably certain to breed true to a type which, in each breed, is as near pork-making perfection as the widest experience can make it. most of our good hogs are bred from english or chinese stock. modifications by climate, care, crossing, and wise selection have procured a number of excellent varieties, which are distinct enough to warrant separate names, but which are nearly equal as pork-makers. in color one could choose between black, black and white, and white and red. i wanted white swine; not because they are better than swine of other colors, for i do not think they are, but for æsthetic reasons. my poultry was to be white, and white predominated in my cows; why should not my swine be white also,--or as white as their habits would permit? i am told on all sides that the black hog is the hardiest, that it fattens easier, and that for these reasons it is a better all-round hog. this may be true, but i am content with my white ones. when some neighbor takes a better bunch of hogs to market, or gets a better price for them, than i do, i may be persuaded to think as he talks. thus far i have sold close to the top of the market, and my hogs are never left over. perhaps my hogs eat more than those of my neighbors. i hope they do, for they weigh more, on a "weight for age" scale, and i do not think they are "air crammed," for "you cannot fatten capons so." i am more than satisfied with my chester whites. they have given me a fine profit each year, and i should be ungrateful if i did not speak them fair. i wished to get the hog industry started on a liberal scale, and scoured the country, by letter, for the necessary animals. i found it difficult to get just what i wanted. perhaps i wanted too much. this is what i asked for: a registered young sow due to farrow her second litter in march or april. by dint of much correspondence and a considerable outlay of money, i finally secured nineteen animals that answered the requirements. i got them in twos and threes from scattered sources, and they cost an average price of $ per head delivered at four oaks. a young boar, bred in the purple, cost $ . my foundation herd of chester whites thus cost me $ ,--too much for an economical start; but, again, i was in a hurry. the hogs began to arrive in february, and were put into temporary quarters pending the building of the house for the brood sows, which house must now be described. it was a low building, by feet, divided by a six-foot alley-way into halves, each by feet. each of these halves was again divided into fifteen pens by feet, with a by run for each pen. this was the general plan for the brood-house for thirty sows. at the east end of this house was a room by feet for cooking food and storing supplies for a few days. the building was of wood with plank floors. it stands there yet, and has answered its purpose; but it was never quite satisfactory. i wanted cement floors and a more sightly building. i shall probably replace it next year. when it was built the weather was unfavorable for laying cement, and i did not wish to wait for a more clement season. the house and the fences for the runs cost $ . on the th of march thompson called me to one of the temporary pens and showed me a family of the prettiest new-born animals in the world,--a fine litter of no less than nine new-farrowed pigs. i felt that the fourth industry was fairly launched, and that we could now work and wait. chapter xxii the old orchard march was unusually raw even for that uncooked month. the sun had to cross the line before it could make much impression on the deep frost. after the th, however, we began to find evidences that things were stirring below ground. the red and yellow willows took on brighter colors, the bark of the dogwood assumed a higher tone, and the catkins and lilac buds began to swell with the pride of new sap. if our old orchard was to be pruned while dormant, it must be done at once. thompson and i spent five days of hard work among the trees, cutting out all dead limbs, crossing branches, and suckers. we called the orchard old, but it was so only by comparison, for it was not out of its teens; and i did not wish to deal harshly with it. a good many unusual things were being done for it in a short time, and it was not wise to carry any one of them too far. it had been fertilized and ploughed in the fall, and now it was to be pruned and sprayed,--all innovations. the trees were well grown and thrifty. they had given a fair crop of fruit last year, and they were well worth considerable attention. they could not hereafter be cultivated, for they were all in the soiling lot for the cows, but they could be pruned and sprayed. the lack of cultivation would be compensated by the fertilization incident to a feeding lot. the trees would give shade and comfort to the cows, while the cows fed and nourished the trees,--a fair exchange. the crop of the year before, though half the apples were stung, had brought nearly $ . with better care, and consequently better fruit, we could count on still better results, for the varieties were excellent (baldwins, jonathans, and rome beauties); so we trimmed carefully and burned the rubbish. this precaution, especially in the case of dead limbs, is important, for most dead wood in young trees is due to disease, often infectious, and should be burned at once. i bought a spraying-pump (for $ ), which was fitted to a sound oil barrel, and we were ready to make the first attack on fungus disease with the bordeaux mixture. this was done by johnson and anderson late in the month. another vigorous spraying with the same mixture when the buds were swelling, another when the flower petals were falling, and still another when the fruit was as large as peas (the last two sprayings had paris green added to the bordeaux mixture), and the fight against apple enemies was ended for that year. thompson had gone for the cows. he left march , and returned with the beauties on friday the th. they were all my fancy had painted them,--large, gentle-eyed, with black and white hair over soft butter-yellow skin, and all the points that distinguish these marvellous milk-machines. they were bestowed as needs must until the cow barn was completed. one of them had dropped a bull calf two days before leaving the home farm. the calf had been left, and the mother was in an uncomfortable condition, with a greatly distended udder and milk streaming from her four teats, though thompson had relieved her thrice while _en route_. i was greatly pleased with the cows, but must not spend time on them now, for things are happening in my factory faster than i can tell of them. johnson had built some primitive hotbeds for early vegetables out of old lumber and oiled muslin. he had filled them with refuse from the horse stable and had sown his seeds. chapter xxiii the first hatch on february the incubator lamps were lighted under the first invoice of one thousand eggs. the incubating cellar was to sam's liking, and he felt confident that three weeks of strict attention to temperature, moisture, and the turning of eggs, would bring results beyond my expectations. after the seventh day, on which he had tested or candled the eggs, he was willing to promise almost anything in the way of a hatch, up to seventy-five or eighty per cent. in the intervals of attendance on the incubators he was hard at work on the brooder-house, which must be ready for its first occupants by the th. everything went smoothly until the th. that morning sam met me with a long face. "something went wrong with one of my lamps last night," said he. "i looked at them at ten o'clock and they were all right, but at six this morning one of the thermometers was registering °, and the whole batch was cooked." "not the whole thousand, sam!" "no, but fertile eggs, and that spoils a twenty-dollar bill and a lot of good time. what in the name of the black man ever got into that lamp of mine is more than i know. it's just my luck!" "it's everybody's luck who tries to raise chickens by wholesale, and we must copper it. don't be downed by the first accident, sam; keep fighting and you'll win out." the brooder-house was ready when the first chicks picked the shells on the th, and within thirty-six hours we had little white balls of fluff to transfer from the four incubators to the brooder-house. we put about a hundred together in each of five brooders, fed them cut oats and wheat with a little coarse corn meal and all the fresh milk they could drink, and they throve mightily. the incubators were filled again on the th, and from that hatch we got chicks. on the st of march they were again filled, and on the th of april we had more to add to the colony in the brooder-house. for the last time we started the lamps april th, and on the th of may we closed the incubating cellar and found that chicks had been hatched from the eggs. the last hatch was the best of all, giving . i don't think we have ever had as good results since, though to tell the truth i have not attempted to keep an exact count of eggs incubated. my opinion is that fifty per cent is a very good average hatch, and that one should not expect more. in september, when the young birds were separated, the census report was pullets and cockerels, showing an infant mortality of , or twenty-nine per cent. the accidents and vicissitudes of early chickenhood are serious matters to the unmothered chick, and they must not be overlooked by the breeder who figures his profits on paper. after the first year i kept no tabs on the chickens hatched; my desire was to add each year pullets to my flock, and after the third season to dispose of as many hens. it doesn't pay to keep hens that are more than two and a half years old. i have kept from to laying hens for the past six years. i do not know what it costs to feed one or all of them, but i do know what moneys i have received for eggs, young cockerels, and old hens, and i am satisfied. there is a big profit in keeping hens for eggs if the conditions are right and the industry is followed, in a businesslike way, in connection with other lines of business; that is, in a factory farm. if one had to devote his whole time to the care of his plant, and were obliged to buy almost every morsel of food which the fowls ate, and if his market were distant and not of the best, i doubt of great success; but with food at the lowest and product at the highest, you cannot help making good money. i do not think i have paid for food used for my fowls in any one year more than $ ; grits, shells, meat meal, and oil meal will cover the list. i do not wish to induce any man or woman to enter this business on account of the glowing statements which these pages contain. i am ideally situated. i am near one of the best markets for fine food; i can sell all the eggs my hens will lay at high prices; food costs the minimum, for it comes from my own farm; i utilize skim-milk, the by-product from another profitable industry, to great advantage; and i had enough money to carry me safely to the time of product. in other words, i could build my factory before i needed to look to it for revenue. i do not claim that this is the only way, but i do claim that it is the way for the fore-handed middle-aged man who wishes to change from city to country life without financial loss. younger people with less means can accomplish the same results, but they must offset money by time. the principle of the factory farm will hold as well with the one as with the other. to intensify farming is the only way to get the fat of the land. the nations of the old world have nearly reached their limit in food production. they are purchasers in the open market. this country must be that market; and it behooves us to look to it that the market be well stocked. there is land enough now and to spare, but will it be so fifty or a hundred years hence? our arid lands will be made fertile by irrigation, but they will add only a small percentage to the amount already in quasi-cultivation. our future food supplies must be drawn largely from the six million farms now under fences. these farms must be made to yield fourfold their present product, or they will fall short, not only of the demands made upon them, but also of their possibilities. that is why i preach the gospel of intensive farming, for grain, hay, market, and factory farm alike. i will put the chickens out of the way for the present, referring to them from time to time and indicating their general management, the cost of their houses and food, and the amount of money received for eggs and fowls. i do not think my plant would win the approval of fanciers, and it is not in all ways up to date; but it is clean, healthy, and commodious, and the birds attend as strictly to business as a reasonable owner could wish. i shall be glad to show it to any one interested enough to search it out, and to go into the details of the business and show how i have been able to make it so remunerative. sam is with me no longer. for three years he did good service and saved money, and the lurid nose grew dim. there is, however, a limit to human endurance. like victims of other forms of circular insanity, the dipsomaniac completes his cycle in an uncertain period and falls upon bad times. for a month before we parted company i saw signs of relapse in sam. he was loquacious at times, at other times morose. he talked about going into business for himself, and his nose took on new color. i labored with him, but to no purpose; the spirit of unrest was upon him, and it had to work its own. i held him firm long enough to secure another man, and then we parted, he to do business for himself, i to get on as best i could. sam painted his nose and raised chickens and other things until his savings had flown; then he got a position with a woman who runs a broiler plant, and for two years he has given good service. he will probably continue in ways of well-doing until the next cycle is complete, when the beacon light will blaze afresh and he will follow it on to the rocks. such a man is more to be pitied than condemned, for his anchor is sure to drag at times. chapter xxiv the holstein milk machine during the month of march the teams hauled more gravel. they also distributed the manure that had been purchased in the fall for mulching the trees. while the ground was still frozen this mulch was placed near the trees, to be used as soon as the sun had warmed the earth. the mound of dirt at the base of each tree was of course levelled down before this dressing was applied. i never afterward purchased stable or stock-yard manure, though i could often have used it to advantage; for i did not think it safe to purchase this kind of fertilizer for a farm where large numbers of animals are kept. the danger from infection is too great. large quantities of barnyard manure were furnished yearly out of my own pits, and i supplemented it with a good deal of the commercial variety. i try to turn back to the land each year more than i take from it, but i do not dare to go to a stock-yard for any part of my supply. it was not until i had mentally established a quarantine for my hogs that i realized the danger from those six carloads of manure; and i promised myself then that no such breach of quarantine should again occur. the cows arrived on st. patrick's day. our herd was then composed of the twenty holstein heifers (coming three years old), and six of the best of the common cows purchased with the farm. within forty days the herd was increased by the addition of twenty-three calves. twenty-five were born, but two were dead. of this number, eighteen were holsteins eligible for registration, ten heifers, and eight bulls. each calf was taken from its mother on the third day and fed warm skim-milk from a patent feeder three times a day, all it would drink. when three weeks old, seven of the holstein calves and the five from the common cows were sent to market. they brought $ . each above the expense of selling, or $ for the bunch. the ten holstein heifer calves were of course held; and one bull calf, which had a double cross of pieterje d and pauline paul, and which seemed an unusually fair specimen, was kept for further development. the cow barn was finished about april st, and shortly after that the herd was established in permanent quarters. as the dairy-house was unfinished, and there was no convenient way of disposing of the milk which now flowed in abundance, i bought a separator (for $ ) and sent the cream to a factory, using the fresh skim-milk for the calves and young pigs and chickens. from march , when i began to sell, until may , when my dairy-house was in working order, i received $ for cream. thompson had sold milk from the old cows, from august to december, , to the amount of $ . this item should have been entered on the credit side for the last year, but as it was not, we will make a note of it here. these are the only sales of milk and cream made from four oaks since i bought the land. the milk supply from my herd started out at a tremendous rate, considering the age of the cows. it must be borne in mind that none of the thoroughbreds was within three years of her (probable) best; yet they were doing nobly, one going as high as fifty-two pounds of milk in one day, and none falling below thirty-six as a maximum. the common cows did nearly as well at first, four of them giving a maximum of thirty-two pounds each in twenty-four hours. it was easy to see the difference between the two sorts, however. the old ones had reached maturity and were doing the best they could; the others were just beginning to manufacture milk, and were building and regulating their machinery for that purpose. the holsteins, though young, were much larger than the old cows, and were enormous feeders. a third or a half more food passed their great, coarse mouths than their less aristocratic neighbors could be coaxed to eat. food, of course, is the one thing that will make milk; other things being equal, then the cow that consumes the most food will produce the most milk. this is the secret of the holsteins' wonderful capacity for assimilating enormous quantities of food without retaining it under their hides in the shape of fat. they have been bred for centuries with the milk product in view, and they have become notable machines for that purpose. they are not the cows for people to keep who have to buy feed in a high market, for they are not easy keepers in any sense; but for the farmer who raises a lot of grain and roughage which should be fed at his own door, they are ideal. they will eat much and return much. as to feeding for milk, i have followed nearly the same plan through my whole experiment. i keep an abundance of roughage, usually shredded corn, before the cows all the time. when it has been picked over moderately well, it is thrown out for bedding, and fresh fodder is put in its place. the finer forages, timothy, red-top, clover, alfalfa, and oat straw, are always cut fine, wetted, and mixed with grain before feeding. this food is given three times a day in such quantities as will be eaten in forty-five minutes. green forage takes the place of dry in season, and fresh vegetables are served three times a week in winter. the grain ration is about as follows: by weight, corn and cob meal, three parts; oatmeal, three parts; bran, three parts; gluten meal, two parts; linseed meal, one part. the cash outlay for a ton of this mixture is about $ ; this price, of course, does not include corn and oats, furnished by the farm. a holstein cow can digest fifteen pounds of this grain a day. this means about two and a half tons a year, with a cash outlay of $ per annum for each head. fresh water is always given four times a day, and much of the time the cows have ready access to it. in cold weather the water is warmed to about ° f. the cows are let out in a twenty-acre field for exercise every day, except in case of severe storms. they are fed forage in the open when the weather is fine and insects are not troublesome, and they sometimes sleep in the open on hot nights; but by far the largest part of their time is spent in their own stalls away from chilling winds and biting flies. in their stables they are treated much as fine horses are,--well bedded, well groomed, and well cared for in all ways. a quiet, darkened stable conduces rumination. loud talking, shouting, or laughing are not looked upon with favor in our cow barn. on the other hand, continuous sounds, if at all melodious, seem to soothe the animals and increase the milk flow. judson, who has proved to be our best herdsman, has a low croon in his mouth all the time. it can hardly be called a tune, though i believe he has faith in it, but it has a fetching way with the herd. i have never known him to be quick, sharp, or loud with the cows. when things go wrong, the crooning ceases. when it is resumed, all is well in the cow world. the other man, french, who is an excellent milker, and who stands well with the cows, has a half hiss, half whistle, such as english stable-boys use, except that it runs up and down five notes and is lost at each end. the cows like it and seem to admire french for his accomplishment even more than judson, for they follow his movements with evident pleasure expressed in their great ox eyes. rigid rules of cleanliness are carried out in every detail with the greatest exactness. the house and the animals are cared for all the time as if on inspection. before milking, the udders are carefully brushed and washed, and the milker covers himself entirely with a clean apron. as each cow is milked, the milker hangs the pail on a spring balance and registers the exact weight on a blackboard. he then carries the milk through the door that leads to the dairy-house, and pours it into a tank on wheels. this ends his responsibility. the dairymaid is then in charge. chapter xxv the dairymaid of course i had trouble in getting a dairymaid. i was not looking for the bouncing, buxom, red-cheeked, arms-akimbo, butter-colored-hair sort. i didn't care whether she were red-cheeked and bouncing or not, but for obvious reasons i didn't want her hair to be butter-colored. what i did want was a woman who understood creamery processes, and who could and would make the very giltest of gilt-edged butter. i commenced looking for my paragon in january. i interviewed applicants of both sexes and all nationalities, but there was none perfect; no, not one. i was not exactly discouraged, but i certainly began to grow anxious as the time approached when i should need my dairymaid, and need her badly. one day, while looking over the _rural new yorker_ (i was weaned on that paper), i saw the following advertisement. "wanted: employment on a dairy-farm by a married couple who understand the business." if this were true, these two persons were just what i needed; but, was it true? i had tried a score of greater promise and had not found one that would do. was i to flush two at once, and would they fall to my gun? a small town in one of the middle western states was given as the address, and i wrote at once. my letter was strong in requirements, and asked for particulars as to experience, age, references, and nationality. the reply came promptly, and was more to my liking than any i had received before. name, french; americans, newly married, twenty-eight and twenty-six respectively; experience four and three years in creamery and dairy work; references, good; the couple wished to work together to save money to start a dairy of their own. i was pleased with the letter, which was an unusual one to come from native-born americans. our people do not often hunt in couples after this manner. i telegraphed them to come to the city at once. it was late in april when i first saw the frenches. the man was tall and raw-boned, but good-looking, with a frank manner that inspired confidence. he was a farmer's son with a fair education, who had saved a little money, and had married his wife out of hand lest some one else should carry her off while he was building the nest for her. "i took her when i could get her," he said, "and would have done it with a two-dollar bill in my pocket rather than have taken chances." the woman was worthy of such an extreme measure, for she looked capable of caring for both. she was a fine pattern of a country girl, with a head full of good sense, and very useful-looking hands and arms. her face was good to look upon; it showed strength of character and a definite object in life. she said she understood the creamery processes in all their niceties, and that she could make butter good enough for queen victoria. the proposition offered by this young couple was by far the best i had received, and i closed with them at once. i agreed to pay each $ a month to start with, and explained my plan of an increasing wage of $ a month for each period of six months' service. they thought they ought to have $ level. i thought so, too, if they were as good as they promised. but i had a fondness for my increasing scale, and i held to it. these people were skilled laborers, and were worth more to begin with than ordinary farm hands. that is why i gave them $ a month from the start. six hundred dollars a year for a man and wife, with no expense except for clothing, is good pay. they can easily put away $ out of it, and it doesn't take long to get fore-handed. i think the frenches have invested $ a year, on an average, since they came to four oaks. it is now time to get at the dairy-house, since the dairy and the dairymaid are both in evidence. the house was to be on the building line, and both polly and i thought it should have attractive features. we decided to make it of dark red paving brick. it was to be eighteen feet by thirty, with two rooms on the ground. the first, or south room, ten feet by eighteen, was fitted for storing fruit, and afforded a stairway to the rooms above, which were four in number besides the bath. the larger room was of course the butter factory, and was equipped with up-to-date appliances,--aërator, pasteurizer, cooler, separator, babcock tester, swing churn, butter-worker, and so on. the house was to have steep gables and projecting eaves, with a window in each gable, and two dormer windows in each roof. the walls were to be plastered, and the ground floor was to be cement. it cost $ . as motive power for the churn and separator, a two-sheep-power treadmill has proved entirely satisfactory. it is worked by two sturdy wethers who are harbored in a pleasant house and run, close to the power-house, and who pay for their food by the sweat of their brows and the wool from their backs. they do not appear to dislike the "demnition grind," which lasts but an hour twice a day; they go without reluctance to the tramp that leads nowhere, and the futile journey which would seem foolish to anything wiser than a sheep. this sheep-power is one of the curios of the place. my grand-girls never lose their interest in it, and it has been photographed and sketched more times than there are fingers and toes on the sheep. the expenditure for equipment, from separator to sheep, was $ . i made an arrangement with a fancy grocer in the city to furnish him thirty pounds, more or less, of fresh (unsalted) butter, six days in the week, at thirty-three cents a pound, i to pay express charges. i bought six butter-carriers with ice compartments for $ . each, $ in all, and arranged with the express company to deliver my packages to the grocer for thirty cents each. the butter netted me thirty-two cents a pound that year, or about $ a week. in july i bought four thoroughbred holsteins, four years old, in fresh milk, and in october, six more, at an average price of $ a head,--$ in all. these reënforcements made it possible for me to keep my contract with the middleman, and often to exceed it. the dairy industry was now fairly launched and in working order. it had cost, not to be exact, $ , and it was reasonably sure to bring back to the farm about $ a week in cash, besides furnishing butter for the family and an immense amount of skim-milk and butter-milk to feed to the young animals on the place. chapter xxvi little pigs by april st all my sows had farrowed. there was much variation in the number of pigs in these nineteen litters. one noble mother gave me thirteen, two of which promptly died. three others farrowed eleven each, and so down to one ungrateful mother who contributed but five to the industry at four oaks. the average, however, was good; pigs on april th were all that a halfway reasonable factory man could expect. these youngsters were left with their mothers until eight weeks old; then they were put, in bunches of thirty, into the real hog-house, which was by that time completed. it was feet long and feet wide, with a -foot passageway through the length of it. on either side were pens feet by , each connected with a run feet by . the house stood on a platform or bed of cement by feet, which formed the floor of the house and extended feet outside of each wall, to secure cleanliness and a dry feeding-place in the open. the cement floor was expensive ($ as first cost), but i think it has paid for itself several times over in health and comfort to the herd. the structure on this floor was of the simplest; a double wall only five feet high at the sides, shingled roof, broken at the ridge to admit windows, and strong partitions. it cost $ . as in the brood-sow house, there is a kitchen at the west end. the little pigs made but a small showing in this great house, which was intended to shelter six hundred of all sizes, from the eight-weeks-old baby pig to the nine-months-old three-hundred-pounder ready for market. pigs destined for market never leave this house until ripe for killing. at six or seven months a few are chosen to remain on the farm and keep up its traditions; but the great number live their ephemeral lives of eight months luxuriously, even opulently, until they have made the ham and bacon which, poor things, they cannot save, and then pass into the pork barrel or the smoke-house without a sigh of regret. they toil not, neither do they spin; but they have a place in the world's economy, and they fit it perfectly. so long as one animal must eat another, the man animal should thank the hog animal for his generosity. now that my big hog-house seemed so empty, i would gladly have sent into the highways and byways to buy young stock to fill it; but i dared not break my quarantine. i could easily have picked up one hundred or even two hundred new-weaned pigs, within six or eight miles of my place, at about $ . each, and they would have grown into fat profit by fall; but i would not take a risk that might bear ill fruit. i had slight depressions of spirits when i visited my piggery during that summer; but i chirked up a little in the fall, when the brood sows again made good. but more of that anon. chapter xxvii work on the home forty april and may made amends for the rudeness of march, and the ploughs were early afield. thompson, zeb, johnson, and sometimes anderson, followed the furrows, first in and , and lastly in . number had a fair clover sod, and was not disturbed. we ploughed in all about acres, but we did not subsoil. we spent twenty days ploughing and as many more in fitting the ground for seed. the weather was unusually warm for the season, and there was plenty of rain. by the middle of may, oats were showing green in nos. , , , , and ,--sixty-two acres. the corn was well planted in and the west three-quarters of ,--eighty-two acres. the other ten acres in the young orchard was planted to fodder corn, sown in drills so that it could be cultivated in one direction. the ten-acre orchard on the south side of the home lot was used for potatoes, sugar beets, cabbages, turnips, etc., to furnish a winter supply of vegetables for the stock. the outlook for alfalfa was not bright. in the early spring we fertilized it again, using five hundred pounds to the acre, though it seemed like a conspicuous waste. the warm rains and days of april and may brought a fine crop of weeds; and about the middle of may i turned anderson loose in the fields with a scythe, and he mowed down everything in sight. after that things soon began to look better in the alfalfa fields. as the season was favorable, we were able to cut a crop of over a ton to the acre early in july, and nearly as much in the latter part of august. we cut forty tons from these twenty acres within a year from seeding, but i suspect that was unusual luck. i had used thirteen hundred pounds of commercial fertilizer to the acre, and the season was very favorable for the growth of the plant. i have since cut these fields three times each year, with an average yield of five tons to the acre for the whole crop. i like alfalfa, both as green and as dry forage. when we use it green, we let it lie in swath for twenty-four hours, that it may wilt thoroughly before feeding. it is then fit food for hens, hogs, and, in limited quantities, for cows, and is much relished. when used dry, it is always cut fine and mixed with ground grains. in this shape it is fed liberally to hens and hogs, and also to milch cows; for the latter it forms half of the cut-food ration. while the crops are growing, we will find time to note the changes on the home lot. nearly in front of the farm-house, and fifty yards distant, was a space well fitted for the kitchen garden. we marked off a plat two hundred feet by three hundred, about one and a half acres, carted a lot of manure on it, and ploughed it as deep as the subsoiler would reach. this was done as soon as the frost permitted. we expected this garden to supply vegetables and small fruits for the whole colony at four oaks. an acre and a half can be made exceedingly productive if properly managed. along the sides of this garden we planted two rows of currant and gooseberry bushes, six feet between rows, and the plants four feet apart in the rows. the ends of the plat were left open for convenience in horse cultivation. ten feet outside these rows of bush fruit was planted a line of quince trees, thirty on each side, and twenty feet beyond these a row of cherry trees, twenty in each row. near the west boundary of the home lot, and north of the lane that enters it, i planted two acres of dwarf pear trees--bartlett and duchess,--three hundred trees to the acre. i also planted six hundred plum trees--abundance, wickson, and gold--in the chicken runs on lot . after may , when he was relieved from his farm duties, johnson had charge of the planting and also of the gardening, and he took up his special work with energy and pleasure. the drives on the home lot were slightly rounded with ploughs and scraper, and then covered with gravel. the open slope intended for the lawn was now to be treated. it comprised about ten acres, irregular in form and surface, and would require a good deal of work to whip it into shape. a lawn need not be perfectly graded,--in fact, natural inequalities with dips and rises are much more attractive; but we had to take out the asperities. we ploughed it thoroughly, removed all stumps and stones, levelled and sloped it as much as pleased polly, harrowed it twice a week until late august, sowed it heavily to grass seed, rolled it, and left it. polly had the house in her mind's eye. she held repeated conversations with nelson, and was as full of plans and secrets as she could hold. by agreement, she was to have a free hand to the extent of $ , for the house and the carriage barn. i never really examined the plans, though i saw the blue prints of what appeared to be a large house with a driving entrance on the east and a great wide porch along the whole south side. i did not know until it was nearly finished how large, convenient, and comfortable it was to be. a hall, a great living-room, the dining room, a small reception room, and an office, bedroom, and bath for me, were all on the ground floor, besides a huge wing for the kitchen and other useful offices. above stairs there was room for the family and a goodly number of friends. we had agreed that the house should be simple in all ways, with no hard wood except floors, and no ornamentation except paint and paper. it must be larger than our needs, for we looked forward to delightful visits from many friends. we were to have more leisure than ever before for social life, and we desired to make the most of our opportunities. a country house is by all odds the finest place to entertain friends and to be entertained by them. they come on invitation, not as a matter of form, and they stay long enough to put by questions of weather, clothes, and servant-girls, and to get right down to good old-fashioned visiting. real heart-to-heart talks are everyday occurrences in country visits, while they are exceptional in city calls. we meant to make much of our friends at four oaks, and to have them make much of us. we have discovered new values even in old friends, since we began to live with them, weeks at a time, under the same roof. their interests are ours, and our plans are warmly taken up by them. there is nothing like it among the turmoils and interruptions of town life, and the older we grow the more we need this sort of rest among our friends. the guest book at the farm will show very few weeks, in the past six years, when friends haven't been with us, and polly and i feel that the pleasure we have received from this source ought to be placed on the credit side of the farm ledger. another reason for a company house was that jack and jane would shortly be out of school. it was not at all in accord with our plan that they should miss any pleasure by our change. indeed, we hoped that the change would be to their liking and to their advantage. chapter xxviii discounting the market we broke ground for the house late in may, and nelson said that we should be in it by thanksgiving day. soon after the plans were settled polly informed me that she should not spend much money on the stable. "can't do it," she said, "and do what i ought to on the house. i will give you room for six horses; the rest, if you have more, must go to the farm barn. i cannot spend more than $ or $ on the barn." polly was boss of this department, and i was content to let her have her way. she had already mulcted me to the extent of $ for trees, plants, and shrubs which were even then grouped on the lawn after a fashion that pleased her. i need not go into the details of the lawn planting, the flower garden, the pergola, and so forth. i have a suspicion that polly has in mind a full account of the "fight for the home forty," in a form greatly better than i could give it, and it is only fair that she should tell her own story. i am not the only one who admires her landscape, her flower gardens, and her woodcraft. many others do honor to her tastes and to the evidence of thought which the home lot shows. she disclaims great credit, for she says, "one has only to live with a place to find out what it needs." as i look back to the beginning of my experiment, i see only one bit of good luck that attended it. building material was cheap during the months in which i had to build so much. nothing else specially favored me, while in one respect my experiment was poorly timed. the price of pork was unusually low. for three years, from , the price of hogs never reached $ per hundred pounds in our market,--a thing unprecedented for thirty years. i never sold below three and a half cents, but the showing would have been wonderfully bettered could i have added another cent or two per pound for all the pork i fattened. the average price for the past twenty-five years is well above five cents a pound for choice lots. corn and all other foods were also cheap; but this made little difference with me, because i was not a seller of grain. in i was, however, a buyer of both corn and oats. in september of that year corn sold on 'change at - / cents a bushel, and oats at - / . these prices were so much below the food value of these grains that i was tempted to buy. i sent a cash order to a commission house for five thousand bushels of each. i stored this grain in my granary, against the time of need, at a total expense of $ ,-- cents a bushel for corn and for oats. i had storage room and to spare, and i knew that i could get more than a third of a cent out of each pound of corn, and more than half a cent out of each pound of oats. i recalled the story of a man named joseph who did some corn business in egypt a good many years ago, much in this line, and who did well in the transaction. there was no dream of fat kine in my case; but i knew something of the values of grains, and it did not take a reader of riddles to show me that when i could buy cheaper than i could raise, it was a good time to purchase. as i said once before, there have been no serious crop failures at four oaks,--indeed, we can show better than an average yield each year; but this extra corn in my cribs has given me confidence in following my plan of very liberal feeding. with this grain on hand i was able to cut twenty acres of oats in nos. and for forage. this was done when the grain was in the milk, and i secured about sixty tons of excellent hay, much loved by horses. we got from no. a little less than twelve tons of clover,--alfalfa furnished forty tons; and there was nearly twenty tons of old hay left over from that originally purchased. with all this forage, good of its kind, there was, however, no timothy or red top, which is by all odds the best hay for horses. i determined to remedy this lack before another year. as soon as the oats were off lots and , they were ploughed and crossed with the disk harrow. from then until september , these fields were harrowed each week in half lap, so that by the time we were ready to seed them they were in excellent condition and free from weeds. about september they were sown to timothy and red top, fifteen pounds each to the acre, top-dressed with five hundred pounds of fertilizer, harrowed once more, rolled, and left until spring, when another dose of fertilizer was used. i wished to establish twenty acres of timothy and as much alfalfa, to furnish the hay supply for the farm. with one hundred tons of alfalfa and sixty of timothy, which i could reasonably expect, i could get on splendidly. from the first i have practised feeding my hay crop for immediate returns. the land receives five hundred pounds of fertilizer per acre when it is sown, a like amount again in the spring, and, as soon as a crop is cut, three hundred pounds an acre more. this usually gives a second crop of timothy about september , if the season is at all favorable. the alfalfa is cut at least three times, and for each cutting it receives three hundred pounds of plant food per acre. in the course of a year i spend from $ to $ an acre for my grass land. in return i get from each acre of timothy, in two cuttings, about three and a half tons; worth, at an average selling price, $ a ton. the alfalfa yields nearly five tons per acre, and has a feeding value of $ a ton. i have sold timothy hay a few times, but i feel half ashamed to say so, for it is against my view of justice to the land. i find oat hay cheaper to raise than timothy, and, as it is quite as well liked by the horses, i have been tempted to turn a part of my timothy crop into money directly from the field. chapter xxix from city to country in early july i went through my young orchard, which had been cut back so ruthlessly the previous autumn, and carefully planned a head for each tree. quite a bunch of sprouts had started from near the top of each stub, and were growing luxuriantly. out of each bunch i selected three or four to form the head; the rest were rubbed off or cut out with a sharp knife or pruning shears. it surprised me to see what a growth some of these sprouts had made; sixteen or eighteen inches was not uncommon. big roots and big bodies were pushing great quantities of sap toward the tops. of course i bought farm machinery during this first season,--mower, reaper, corn reaper, shredder, and so on. in october i took account of expenditures for machinery, grass seed, and fertilizer, and found that i had invested $ . i had also, at an expense of $ , built a large shed or tool-house for farm implements. it is one of the rules at four oaks to grease and house all tools when not in actual use. i believe the observation of this rule has paid for the shed. in october i had a good offer for my town house, and accepted it. i had purchased the property eleven years before for $ , , but, as it was in bad condition, i had at once spent $ on it and the stable. i sold it for $ , , with the understanding that i could occupy it for the balance of the year if i wished. after selling the house, i calculated the cost of the elementary necessities, food and shelter, which i had been willing to pay during many years of residence in the city. the record ran about like this:-- interest at % on house valued at $ , $ . yearly taxes on same . insurance . fuel and light . wages for one man and three women . street sprinkling, watchman, etc. . food, including water, ice, etc. . ________ making a total of $ . it cost me $ a week to shelter and feed my family in the city. this, of course, took no account of personal expenses,--travel, sight-seeing, clothing, books, gifts, or the thousand and one things which enter more or less prominently into the everyday life of the family. if the farm was to furnish food and shelter for us in the future, it would be no more than fair to credit it with some portion of this expenditure, which was to cease when we left the city home. what portion of it could be justly credited to the farm was to be decided by comparative comforts after a year of experience. i did not plan our exodus for the sake of economy, or because i found it necessary to retrench; our rate of living was no higher than we were willing and able to afford. our object was to change occupation and mode of life without financial loss, and without moulting a single comfort. we wished to end our days close to the land, and we hoped to prove that this could be done with both grace and profit. i had no desire to lose touch with the city, and there was no necessity for doing so. four oaks is less than an hour from the heart of town. i could leave it, spend two or three hours in town, and be back in time for luncheon without special effort; and polly would think nothing of a shopping trip and friends home with her to dinner. the people of exeter were nearly all city people who were so fortunate as not to be slaves to long hours. they were rich by work or by inheritance, and they gracefully accepted the _otium cum dignitate_ which this condition permitted. social life was at its best in exeter, and many of its people were old acquaintances of ours. a noted country club spread its broad acres within two miles of our door, and i had been favorably posted for membership. it did not look as though we should be thrust entirely upon our own resources in the country; but at the worst we had resources within our own walls and fences that would fend off all but the most violent attacks of ennui. we were both keenly interested in the experiment. nothing that happened on the farm went unchallenged. the milk product for the day was a thing of interest; the egg count could not go unnoted; a hatch of chickens must be seen before they left the incubator; a litter of new-born pigs must be admired; horses and cows were forever doing things which they should or should not do; men and maids had griefs and joys to share with mistress or headman; flowers were blooming, trees were leafing, a robin had built in the black oak, a gopher was tunnelling the rose bed,--a thousand things, full of interest, were happening every day. as a place where things the most unexpected do happen, recommend me to a quiet farm. but we were not to depend entirely upon outside things for diversion. books we had galore, and we both loved them. many a charming evening have i spent, sometimes alone, more often with two or three congenial friends, listening to polly's reading. this is one of her most delightful accomplishments. her friends never tire of her voice, and her voice never tires of her friends. we all grow lazy when she is about; but there are worse things than indolence. no, we did not mean to drop out of anything worth while; but we were pretty well provisioned against a siege, if inclement weather or some other accident should lock us up at the farm. to keep still better hold of the city, i suggested to tom and kate that they should keep open house for us, or any part of us, whenever we were inclined to take advantage of their hospitality. this would give us city refuge after late functions of all sorts. the plan has worked admirably. i devote $ a year out of the $ of food-and-shelter money to the support of our city shelter at kate's house, and the balance, $ , is entered at the end of each year on the credit side of the farm ledger. nor do i think this in any way unjust. we do not expect to get things for nothing, and we do not wish to. if the things we pay for now are as valuable as those we paid for six or eight years ago, we ought not to find fault with an equal price. i have repeatedly polled the family on this question, and we all agree that we have lost nothing by the change, and that we have gained a great deal in several ways. our friends are of like opinion; and i am therefore justified in crediting four oaks with a considerable sum for food and shelter. we have bettered our condition without foregoing anything, and without increasing our expenses. that is enough. chapter xxx autumn reckoning we harvested the crops in the autumn of , and were thankful for the bountiful yield. nearly sixteen hundred bushels of oats and twenty-seven hundred bushels of corn made a proud showing in the granary, when added to its previous stock. the corn fodder, shredded by our own men and machine, made the great forage barn look like an overflowing cornucopia, and the only extra expense attending the harvest was $ paid for threshing the oats. three important items of food are consumed on the farm that have to be purchased each year, and as there is not much fluctuation in the price paid, we may as well settle the per capita rate for the milch cows and hogs for once and all. at each year's end we can then easily find the cash outlay for the herds by multiplying the number of stock by the cost of keeping one. my holstein cows consume a trifle less than three tons of grain each per year,--about fifteen pounds a day. taking the ration for four cows as a matter of convenience, we have: corn and cob meal, three tons, and oatmeal, three tons, both kinds raised and ground on the farm, and not charged in this account; wheat bran, three tons at $ , $ ; gluten meal, two tons at $ , $ ; oil meal, one ton, $ ; total cash outlay for four cows, $ , or $ per head. this estimate is, however, about $ too liberal. we will, hereafter, charge each milch cow $ , and will also charge each hog fattened on the place $ for shorts and middlings consumed. this is not exact, but it is near enough, and it greatly simplifies accounts. as i kept twenty-six cows ten months, and ten more for an average of four and a half months, the feeding for would be equivalent to one year for thirty cows, or $ . to this add $ for swine food and $ for grits and oyster shells for the chickens, and we have $ paid for food for stock. shoeing the horses for the year and repairs to machinery cost $ . the purchased food for eight employees for twelve months and for two additional ones for eight months, amounted to $ . the wage account, including $ extra to thompson, was $ . a second hen-house, a duplicate of the first, was built before october. it was intended that each house should accommodate four hundred laying hens. we have now on the place five of these houses; but only two of them, besides the incubator and the brooder-house, were built in . as offset to the heavy expenditure of this year, i had not much to show. seven hundred cockerels were sold in november for $ . in october the pullets began laying in desultory fashion, and by november they had settled down to business; and that quarter they gave me dozen eggs to sell. as these eggs were marketed within twenty-four hours, and under a guarantee, i had no difficulty in getting thirty cents a dozen, net. november eggs brought $ , and the december out-put, $ . i sold bushels of potatoes for $ , and the apples from of the old trees (which, by the way, were greatly improved this year) brought $ on the trees. the cows did well. in the thirty-three weeks from may to december , i sold a little more than pounds of butter, which netted me $ . we had young hogs to sell in december. they had been crowded as fast as possible to make good weight, and they went to market at an average of pounds a head. the price was low, but i got the top of the market,--$ . a hundred, which amounted to $ after paying charges. i had reserved twenty-five of the most likely young sows to stay on the farm, and had transferred eight to the village butcher, who was to return them in the shape of two barrels of salt pork, thirty-two smoked hams and shoulders, and a lot of bacon. the old sows farrowed again in september and early october, and we went into the winter with young pigs. i get these details out of the way now in order to turn to the family and the social side of life at four oaks. chapter xxxi the children the house did not progress as fast as nelson had promised, and it was likely to be well toward christmas before we could occupy it. as the days shortened, polly and i found them crowded with interests. life at four oaks was to mean such a radical change that we could not help speculating about its influence upon us and upon the children. would it be satisfactory to us and to them? or should we find after a year or two of experiment that we had been mistaken in believing that we could live happier lives in the country than in town? a year and a half of outdoor life and freedom from professional responsibilities had wrought a great change in me. i could now eat and sleep like a hired man, and it seemed preposterous to claim that i was going to the country for my health. my medical adviser, however, insisted that i had not gotten far enough away from the cause of my breakdown, and that it would be unwise for me to take up work again for at least another year. in my own mind there was a fixed opinion that i should never take it up again. i loved it dearly; but i had given long, hard service to it, and felt that i had earned the right to freedom from its exacting demands. i have never lost interest in this, the noblest of professions, but i had done my share, and was now willing to watch the work of others. in my mind there was no doubt about the desirability of the change. i have always loved the thought of country life, and now that my thoughts were taking material shape, i was keen to push on. polly looked toward the untrammelled life we hoped to lead with as great pleasure as i. but how about the children? would it appeal to them with the same force as to us? the children have thus far been kept in the background. i wanted to start my factory farm and to get through with most of its dull details before introducing them to the reader, lest i should be diverted from the business to the domestic, or social, proposition. the farm is laid by for the winter, and most of the details needed for a just comprehension of our experiment have been given. from this time on we will deal chiefly with results. we will watch the out-put from the factory, and commend or find fault as the case may deserve. the social side of life is quite as important as the commercial, for though we gain money, if we lose happiness, what profit have we? let us study the children to see what chances for happiness and good fellowship lie in them. kate is our first-born. she is a bright, beautiful woman of five-and-twenty, who has had a husband these six years, one daughter for four years, and, wonderful to relate, another daughter for two years. she is quick and practical, with strong opinions of her own, prompt with advice and just as prompt with aid; a woman with a temper, but a friend to tie to in time of stress. she has the education of a good school, and what is infinitely better, the cultivation of an observing mind. she is quick with tongue and pen, but her quickness is so tempered by unquestioned friendliness that it fastens people to her as with a cord. she overflows with interests of every description, but she is never too busy to listen sympathetically to a child or a friend. she is the practical member of the family, and we rarely do much out of the ordinary without first talking it over with kate. tom hamilton, her husband, is a young man who is getting on in the world. he is clever in his profession, and sure to succeed beyond the success of most men. he is quiet in manner, but he seems to have a way of managing his quick, handsome wife, which is something of a surprise to me, and to her also, i fancy. they are congenial and happy, and their children are beings to adore. tom and kate are to live in town. they are too young for the joys of country life, and must needs drag on as they are, loved and admired by a host of friends. they can, and will, however, spend much time at four oaks; and i need not say they approved our plans. jack is our second. he was a junior at yale, and i am shy of saying much about him lest i be accused of partiality. enough to say that he is tall, blond, handsome, and that he has gentle, winning ways that draw the love of men and women. he is a dreamer of dreams, but he has a sturdy drop of puritan blood in his veins that makes him strong in conviction and brave in action. jack has never caused me an hour of anxiety, and i was ever proud to see him in any company. concerning jane, i must be pardoned in advance for a father's favoritism. she is my youngest, and to me she seems all that a father could wish. of fair height and well moulded, her physique is perfect. good health and a happy life had set the stamp of superb womanhood upon her eighteen years. any effort to describe her would be vain and unsatisfactory. suffice it to say that she is a pure blonde, with eyes, hair, and skin just to my liking. she is quiet and shy in manner, deliberate in speech, sensitive beyond measure, wise in intuitive judgment, clever in history and literature, but always a little in doubt as to the result of putting seven and eight together, and not unreasonably dominated by the rules of orthography. she is fond of outdoor life, in love with horses and dogs, and withal very much of a home girl. every one makes much of jane, and she is not spoiled, but rather improved by it. she was in her second year at farmington, and, like all farmington students, she cared more for girls than for boys. these were the children whom i was to transport from the city, where they were born, to the quiet life at four oaks. after carefully taking their measures, i felt little hesitation about making the change. they, of course, had known of the plan, and had often been to the farm; but they were still to find out what it really meant to live there. a saddle horse and dogs galore would square me with jane, beyond question; but what about jack? time must decide that. his plan of life was not yet formed, and we could afford to wait. we did not have much time in which to weigh these matters, for the christmas holidays were near, and the youngsters would soon be home. we planned to be settled in the new house when they arrived. chapter xxxii the home-coming in arranging to move my establishment i was in a quandary as to what it was best to do for a coachman. lars had been with me fifteen years. he came a green swedish lad, developed into a first-class coachman, married a nice girl--and for twelve years he and his wife lived happily in the rooms above my stable. two boys were born to them, and these lads were now ten and twelve years of age. shortly after i bought the farm lars was so unfortunate as to lose his good wife, and he and the boys were left forlorn. a relative came and gave them such care as she could, but the mother and wife was missed beyond remedy. in his depression lars took to drink, and things began to go wrong in the stable. he was not often drunk, but he was much of the time under the influence of alcohol, and consequently not reliable. i had done my best for the poor fellow, and he took my lectures and chidings in the way they were intended, and, indeed, he tried hard to break loose from the one bad habit, but with no good results. his evil friends had such strong hold on him that they could and would lead him astray whenever there was opportunity. polly and i had many talks about this matter. she was growing timid under his driving, and yet she was attached to him for long and faithful service. "let's chance it," she said. "if we get him away from these people who lead him astray, he may brace up and become a man again." "but what about the boys, polly?" said i. "we ought to be able to find something for the boys to do on the farm, and they can go to school at exeter. can't they drive the butter-cart out each morning and home after school? they're smart chaps, you know, and used to doing things." polly had found a way, and i was heartily glad of it, for i did not feel like giving up my hold on the man and the boys. lars was glad of the chance to make good again, and he willingly agreed to go. he was to receive $ a month. this was less than he was getting in the city, but it was the wage which we were paying that year at the farm, and he was content; for the boys were each to receive $ a month, and to be sent to school eight months a year for three years. this matter arranged, we began to plan for the moving. i had five horses in my stable,--a span of blacks for the carriage and three single drivers. besides the horses, harness, and equipment, there was a large carriage, a brougham, a goddard phæton, a runabout, and a cart. i exchanged the brougham and the goddard for a station wagon and a park phæton, as more suitable for country use. the barn equipment was all sent in one caravan, thompson and zeb coming into town to help lars drive out. our lares and penates were sent by freight on december . polly had managed to coax another thousand dollars out of me for things for the house; and these, with the furniture from our old home, made a brave showing when we gathered around the big fire in the living room, december , for our first night in the country. tom, kate, and the grand-girls were with us to spend the holidays, and so, too, was the lady whom we call laura. i shall not try to say much about laura. she was a somewhat recent friend. how we ever came to know her well, was half a mystery; and how we ever got on before we knew her well, was a whole one. roaring fires and shaded lamps gave an air of homelike grace to our new house, and we decided that we would never economize in either wood or oil; they seemed to stir the home spirit more than ever did coal or electricity. the day had been a busy one for the ladies, but they were pleased with results as they looked around the well-ordered house and saw the work of their hands. before separating for the night, kate said:-- "i'm going to town to-morrow, and i'll pick up jane and jack in time to take the four o'clock train out. papa will meet us at the station, and momee will greet us at the doorstep. make an illumination, momee, and we will carry them by storm. tom will have to take a later train, but he will be here in time for dinner." the afternoon of the d, the children came, and there was no failure in kate's plan. the youngsters were delighted with everything. jane said:-- "i always wanted to live on a farm. i can have a saddle horse now, and keep as many dogs as i like, can't i, dad?" "you shall have the horse, and the dogs, too, when you come to stay." "daddy," said jack, "this will be great for you. let me finish at an agricultural college, so that i can be of some practical help." "not on your life, my son! what your daddy doesn't know about farming wouldn't spoil a cup of tea! while you are at home i will give you daily instruction in this most wholesome and independent business, which will be of incalculable benefit to you, and which, i am frank to say, you cannot get in any agricultural college. college, indeed! i have spent thousands of hours in dreaming and planning what a farm should be like! do you suppose i am going to let these visions become contaminated by practical knowledge? not by a long way! i have, in the silent watches of the night, reduced the art to mathematical exactness, and i can show you the figures. don't talk to me about colleges!" after supper we took the children through the house. every part was inspected, and many were the expressions of pleasure and admiration. they were delighted with their rooms, and apparently with everything else. we finally quieted down in front of the open fire and discussed plans for the holidays. the children decided that it must be a house party. "florence marcy is with an aunt for whom she doesn't particularly care, and minnie will just jump at the chance of spending a week in the country," said jane. "you can invite three girls, and jack can have three men. of course jessie gordon will be here. we will drive over in the morning and make sure of her." "jack, whom will you ask? get some good men out here, won't you?" "the best in the world, little sister, and you will have to keep a sharp lookout or you will lose your heart to one of them. frank howard will count it a lark. he has stuck to the "business" as faithfully as if he were not heir to it, and he will come sure to-morrow night. dear old phil--my many years' chum--will come because i ask him. these two are all right, and we can count on them. the other one is jim jarvis,--the finest man in college." "tell us about him, jack." "jarvis's father lives in montana, and has a lot of gold mines and other things to keep him busy. he doesn't have time to pay much attention to his son, who is growing up after his own fashion. jim's mother is dead, and he has neither brother nor sister,--nothing but money and beauty and health and strength and courage and sense and the stanchest heart that ever lifted waistcoat! he has been on the eleven three years. they want him in the boat, but he'll not have it; says it's not good work for a man. he's in the first division, well toward the front, too, and in the best society. he's taken a fancy to me, and i'm dead gone on him. he's the man for you to shun, little woman, unless you wish to be led captive." "there are others, jack, so don't worry about me. but do you think you can secure this paragon?" "not a doubt of it! i'll wire him in the morning, and he'll be here as soon as steam can bring him; he's my best chum, you know." this would make our party complete. we were all happy and pleased, and the evening passed before we knew it. chapter xxxiii christmas eve the next day was a busy one for all of us. polly and jane drove to the gordons and secured miss jessie, and then jane went to town to fetch her other friends. jack went with her, after having telegraphed to jim jarvis. they all came home by mid-afternoon, just as a message came from jarvis: "will be on deck at six." florence marcy and minnie henderson were former neighbors and schoolmates of jane's. they were fine girls to look at and bright girls to talk with; blondes, eighteen, high-headed, full of life, and great girls for a house party. phil and frank were good specimens of their kinds. frank was a little below medium height, slight, blond, vivacious to a degree, full of fun, and the most industrious talker within miles; he would "stir things up" at a funeral. phil stone was tall, slender, dark, quiet, well-dressed, a good dancer, and a very agreeable fellow in the corner of the room, where his low musical voice was most effective. jessie gordon came at five o'clock. we were all very fond of jessie, and who could help it? she was tall (considerably above the average height), slender, straight as an arrow, graceful in repose and in motion. she carried herself like a queen, with a proud kind of shyness that became her well. her head was small and well set on a slender neck, her hair dark, luxurious, wavy, and growing low over a broad forehead, her eyes soft brown, shaded by heavy brows and lashes. she had a grecian nose, and her mouth was a shade too wide, but it was guarded by singularly perfect and sensitive lips. her chin was pronounced enough to give the impression of firmness; indeed, save for the soft eyes and sensitive mouth, firmness predominated. she was not a great talker, yet every one loved to listen to her. she laughed with her eyes and lips, but rarely with her voice. she enjoyed intensely, and could, therefore, suffer intensely. she was a dear girl in every way. all was now ready for the début of jack's paragon. jack had driven to the station to fetch him, and presently the sound of wheels on the gravel drive announced the arrival of the last guest. i went into the hall to meet the men. "daddy, i want you to know my chum, jim jarvis,--the finest all-round son of old eli. jarvis, this is my daddy,--the finest father that ever had son!" "i'm right glad to meet you, mr. jarvis; your renown has preceded you." "i fear, doctor, it has _exceeded_ me as well. jack is not to be trusted on all subjects. but, indeed, i thank you for your hospitality; it was a godsend to me." as we entered the living room, polly came forward and i presented jarvis to her. "you are more than welcome, mr. jarvis! jack's 'best friend' is certain of a warm corner at our fireside." "madam, i find no word of thanks, but i _do_ thank you. i have envied jack his home letters and the evidences of mother care more than anything else,--and god knows there are enough other things to envy him for. i have no mother, and my father is too busy to pay much attention to me. i wish you would adopt me; i'll try to rival jack in all that is dutiful." she did adopt him then and there, for who could refuse such a son! brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin, a frank, rugged, clean-shaven face, features strong enough to excite criticism and good enough to bear it; broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong in arm and limb, he carried his six feet of manhood like an apollo in tweeds. he was introduced to the girls,--the men he knew,--but he was not so quick in his speeches to them. our hercules was only mildly conscious of his merits, and was evidently relieved when jack hurried him off to his room to dress for dinner. when he was fairly out of hearing there was a chorus of comments. the girls all declaimed him handsome, and the boys said:-- "that isn't the best of it,--he's a _trump_! wait till you know him." jane was too loyal to jack to admit that his friend was any handsomer or in any way a finer fellow than her brother. "who said he was?" said frank, "jack williams is out and out the finest man i know. we were sizing him up by such fellows as phil and me." "jack's the most popular man at yale," said phil, "but he's too modest to know it; jarvis will tell you so. he thinks it's a great snap to have jack for his chum." these things were music in my ears, for i was quite willing to agree with the boys, and the mother's eyes were full of joy as she led the way to the dining room. that was a jolly meal. nothing was said that could be remembered, and yet we all talked a great deal and laughed a great deal more. city, country, farm, college, and seminary were touched with merry jests. light wit provoked heavy laughter, and every one was the better for it. it was nine o'clock before we left the table. i heard jarvis say:-- "miss jane, i count it very unkind of jack not to have let me go to farmington with him last term. he used to talk of his 'little sister' as though she were a miss in short dresses. jack is a deep and treacherous fellow!" "rather say, a very prudent brother," said jane. "however, you may come to the elm tree inn in the spring term, if jack will let you." "i'll work him all winter," was jarvis's reply. chapter xxxiv christmas christmas light was slow in coming. there was a hush in the air as if the earth were padded so that even the footsteps of nature might not be heard. out of my window i saw that a great fall of snow had come in the night. the whole landscape was covered by fleecy down--soft and white as it used to be when i first saw it on the hills of new england. no wind had moved it; it lay as it fell, like a white mantle thrown lightly over the world. great feathery flakes filled the air and gently descended upon the earth, like that beautiful spirit that made the plains of judea bright two thousand years ago. it seemed a fitting emblem of that nature which covered the unloveliness of the world by his own beauty, and changed the dark spots of earth to pure white. it was an ideal christmas morning,--clean and beautiful. such a wealth of purity was in the air that all the world was clothed with it. the earth accepted the beneficence of the skies, and the trees bent in thankfulness for their beautiful covering. it was a morning to make one thoughtful,--to make one thankful, too, for home and friends and country, and a future that could be earned, where the white folds of usefulness and purity would cover man's inheritance of selfishness and passion. for an hour i watched the big flakes fall; and, as i watched, i dreamed the dream of peace for all the world. the brazen trumpet of war was a thing of the past. the white dove of peace had built her nest in the cannon's mouth and stopped its awful roar. the federation of the world was secured by universal intelligence and community of interest. envy and selfishness and hypocrisy, and evil doing and evil speaking, were deeply covered by the snowy mantle that brought "peace on earth and good will to men." my dream was not dispelled by any rude awakening. as the house threw off the fetters of the night and gradually struggled into activity, it was in such a fresh and loving manner and with such thoughtful solicitude for each member of our world, that i walked in my dream all day. the snow fell rapidly till noon, and then the sun came forth from the veil of clouds and cast its southern rays across the white expanse with an effect that drew exclamations of delight from all who had eyes to see. no wind stirred the air, but ever and anon a bright avalanche would slide from bough or bush, sparkle and gleam as the sun caught it, and then sink gently into the deep lap spread below. the bough would spring as if to catch its beautiful load, and, failing in this, would throw up its head and try to look unconcerned,--though quite evidently conscious of its bereavement. the appearance of the sun brought signs of life and activity. the men improvised a snow-plough, the strong horses floundering in front of it made roads and paths through the two feet of feathers that hid the world. after lunch, the young people went for a frolic in the snow. two hours later the shaking of garments and stamping of feet gave evidence of the return of the party. stepping into the hall i was at once surrounded by the handsomest troupe of esquimaux that ever invaded the temperate zone. the snow clung lovingly to their wet clothing and would not be shaken off; their cheeks were flushed, their eyes bright, and their voices pitched at an out-of-doors key. "away to your rooms, every one of you, and get into dry clothes," said i. "don't dare show yourselves until the dinner bell rings. i'll send each of you a hot negus,--it's a prescription and must be taken; i'm a tyrant when professional." we saw nothing more of them until dinner. the young ladies came in white, with their maiden shoulders losing nothing by contact with their snow-white gowns. all but miss jessie, whose dress was a pearl velvet, buttoned close to her slender throat. i loved this style best, but i could never believe that anything could be prettier than jane's white shoulders. the table was loaded, as christmas tables should be, and, as i asked god's blessing on it and us, the thought came that the answer had preceded the request and that we were blessed in unusual degree. after dinner the rugs in the great room were rolled up, and the young folks danced to laura's music, which could inspire unwilling feet. but there were none such that night. tom and kate led off in the newest and most fantastic waltz, others followed, and polly and i were the only spectators. an hour of this, and then we gathered around the hearth to hear polly read "the christmas carol." no one reads like polly. her low, soft voice seems never to know fatigue, but runs on like a musical brook. when the reading was over, a hush of satisfied enjoyment had taken possession of us all. it was not broken when miss jessie turned to the piano and sang that glorious hymn, "lead, kindly light." jack was close beside her, his blue eyes shining with an appreciation of which any woman might be proud, and his baritone in perfect harmony with her rich contralto. the young ladies took the higher part, frank added his tenor, and even phil and i leaned heavily on jarvis's deep bass. my effort was of short duration; a lump gathered in my throat that caused me to turn away. polly was searching fruitlessly for something to dry the tears that overran her eyes, and i was able to lend her aid, but the accommodation was of the nature of a "call loan." as we separated for the night, jarvis said: "lady mother, this day has been a revelation to me. if i live a hundred years, i shall never forget it." i was slow in bringing it to a close. as i loitered in my room, i heard the shuffling of slippered feet in the hall, and a timid knock at polly's door. it was quickly opened for jane and jessie, and i heard sobbing voices say:-- "momee, we want to cry on your bed," and, "oh, mrs. williams, why can't all days be like this!" polly's voice was low and indistinct, but i know that it carried strong and loving counsel; and, as i turned to my pillow, i was still dreaming the dream of the morning. chapter xxxv we close the books for ' the morning after christmas broke clear, with a wind from the south that promised to make quick work of the snow. the young people were engaged for the evening, as indeed for most evenings, in the hospitable village, and they spent the day on the farm as pleased them best. there were many things to interest city-bred folk on a place like four oaks. everything was new to them, and they wanted to see the workings of the factory farm in all its detail. they made friends with the men who had charge of the stock, and spent much time in the stables. polly and i saw them occasionally, but they did not need much attention from us. we have never found it necessary to entertain our friends on the farm. they seem to do that for themselves. we simply live our lives with them, and they live theirs with us. this works well both for the guests and for the hosts. the great event of the holiday week was a new year eve dance at the country club. every member was expected to appear in person or by proxy, as this was the greatest of many functions of the year. sunday was warm and sloppy, and little could be done out of doors. part of the household were for church, and the rest lounged until luncheon; then polly read "sonny" until twilight, and laura played strange music in the half-dark. the next day the men went into town to look about, and to lunch with some college chums. as they would not return until five, the ladies had the day to themselves. they read a little, slept a little, and talked much, and were glad when five o'clock and the men came. tea was so hot and fragrant, the house so cosey, and the girls so pretty, that jack said:-- "what chumps we men were to waste the whole day in town!" "and what do you expect of men, mr. jack?" said jessie. "yes, i know, the old story of pearls and swine, but there are pearls and pearls." "do you mean that there are more pearls than swine, mr. jack? for, if you do, i will take issue with you." "if i am a swine, i will be an æsthetic one and wear the pearl that comes my way," said jack, looking steadily into the eyes of the high-headed girl. "will you have one lump or two?" "one," said jack, as he took his cup. the last day of the year came all too quickly for both young and old at four oaks. polly and i went into hiding in the office in the afternoon to make up the accounts for the year. as polly had spent the larger lump sum, i could face her with greater boldness than on the previous occasion. here is an excerpt from the farm ledger:-- expended in $ , interest on previous account , _______ total $ , receipts , _______ net expense $ , previous account , _______ $ , the farm owes me a little more than $ , . "not so good as i hoped, and not so bad as i feared," said polly. "we will win out all right, mr. headman, though it does seem a lot of money." "like the irishman's pig," quoth i. "pat said, 'it didn't weigh nearly as much as i expected, but i never thought it would.'" there was little to depress us in the past, and nothing in the present, so we joined the young people for the dance at the club. chapter xxxvi our friends after our guests had departed, to college or school or home, the house was left almost deserted. we did not shut it up, however. fires were bright on all hearths, and lamps were kept burning. we did not mean to lose the cheeriness of the house, though much of the family had departed. for a wonder, the days did not seem lonesome. after the fist break was over, we did not find time to think of our solitude, and as the weeks passed we wondered what new wings had caused them to fly so swiftly. each day had its interests of work or study or social function. stormy days and unbroken evenings were given to reading. we consumed many books, both old and new, and we were not forgotten by our friends. the dull days of winter did not drag; indeed, they were accepted with real pleasure. our lives had hitherto been too much filled with the hurry and bustle inseparable from the fashionable existence-struggle of a large city to permit us to settle down with quiet nerves to the real happiness of home. so much of enjoyment accompanies and depends upon tranquillity of mind, that we are apt to miss half of it in the turmoil of work-strife and social-strife that fill the best years of most men and women. it is a pity that all overwrought people cannot have a chance to relax their nerves, and to learn the possibilities of happiness that are within them. most of the jars and bickerings of domestic life, most of the mental and moral obliquities, depend upon threadbare nerves, either inherited or uncovered by friction incident to getting on in the world. i never understood the comforts that follow in the wake of a quiet, unambitious life, until such a life was forced upon me. when you discover these comforts for the first time, you marvel that you have foregone them so long, and are fain to recommend them to all the world. polly and i had gotten on reasonably well up to this time; but before we became conscious of any change, we found ourselves drawn closer together by a multitude of small interests common to both. after twenty-five years of married life it will compensate any man to take a little time from business and worry that he may become acquainted with his wife. a few fortunate men do this early in life, and they draw compound interest on the investment; but most of us feel the cares of life so keenly that we take them home with us to show in our faces and to sit at our tables and to blight the growth of that cheerful intercourse which perpetuates love and cements friendship in the home as well as in the world. there were no serious cares nowadays, and time passed so smoothly at four oaks that we wondered at the picnic life that had fallen to us. the village of exeter was alive in all things social. the city families who had farms or country places near the village were so fond of them that they rarely closed them for more than two or three months, and these months were as likely to come in summer as in winter. our friends the gordons made homestead farm their permanent residence, though they kept open house in town. beyond the gordons' was the modest home of an irish baronet, sir thomas o'hara. sir tom was a bachelor of sixty. he had run through two fortunes (as became an irish baronet) in the racing field and at homburg, and as a young man he had lived ten years at limmer's tavern in london. when not in training to ride his own steeple-chasers, he was putting up his hands against any man in england who would face him for a few friendly rounds. he was not always victorious, either in the field, before the green cloth, or in the ring; but he was always a kind-hearted gentleman who would divide his last crown with friend or foe, and who could accept a beating with grace and unruffled spirit. he could never ride below the welter weight, and after a few years he outgrew this weight and was forced to give up the least expensive of his diversions. the green cloth now received more of his attention, and, as a matter of course, of his money. things went badly with him, and he began to see the end of his second fortune before he called a halt. bad times in ireland seriously reduced his rents, and he was forced to dispose of his salable estates. then he came to this country in the hope of recouping himself, and to get away from the fast set that surrounded him. "i can resist anything but temptation," this warm-hearted irishman would say; and that was the keynote of his character. though sir tom was only sixty years old, he looked seventy. he was much broken in health by gout and the fast pace of his early manhood. but his spirit was untouched by misfortune, disease, or hardship. his courage was as good as when he served as a subaltern of the guards in the trenches before sebastopol, or presented his body as a mark for the sledge-hammer blows of tom sayers, just for diversion. his constitution must have been superb, for even in his decrepitude he was good to look upon: five feet ten, fine body, slightly given to rotundity, legs a little shrunken in the shanks, but giving unmistakable signs of what they had been ("not lost, but gone before," as he would say of them), hands and feet aristocratic in form and well cared for, and a fine head set on broad shoulders. his hair was thin, and he parted it with great exactness in the middle. his eyes were brown, large, and of exceeding softness. his nose was straight in spite of many a contusion, and his whole expression was that of a high-bred gentleman somewhat the worse for wear. sir tom was perfectly groomed when he came forth from his chamber, which was usually about ten in the morning. those of us who had access to his rooms often wondered how he ever got out of them looking so immaculate, for they were a perfectly impassable jungle to the stranger. such a tangle of trunks, hand-bags, rug bundles, clothes, boots, pajamas, newspapers, scrap-books, b. & s. bottles, could hardly be found anywhere else in the world. he had a fondness for newspaper clippings, and had trunks of them, sorted into bundles or pasted in scrap-books. old volumes of bell's _life_ filled more than one trunk, and on one occasion when he and i were spending a long evening together, in celebration of his recent recovery from an attack of gout, and when he had done more than usual justice to the b. & s. bottles and less than usual justice to his gout, he showed me the record of a long-gone year in which this same bell's _life_ called him the "first among the gentlemen riders in the united kingdom," and proved this assertion by showing how he had won most of the great steeple-chases in england and ireland, riding his own horses. this was the nearest approach to boasting that ever came to my knowledge in the years of our close friendship, and i would never have thought of it as such had i not seen that he regarded it as unwarrantable self-praise. i have never known a more simple, kind-hearted, agreeable, and lovable gentleman than this broken-down sporting man and gambler. i loved him as a brother; and though he has passed out of my life, i still love the memory of his genial face, his courtesy, his unselfish friendship, more than words can express. a tender heart and a gentle spirit found strange housing in a body given over to reckless prodigality. the combination, tempered by time and exhaustion, showed nothing that was not lovable; and it is scant praise to say that sir thomas was much to me. he was just as acceptable to polly. no woman could fail to appreciate the homage which he never failed to show to the wife and mother. many winter evenings at four oaks were made brighter by his presence, and we grew to expect him at least three nights each week. his plate was placed on our round table these nights, and he rarely failed to use it; and the b. & s. bottles were near at hand, and his favorite brand of cigars within easy reach. "i light a 'baccy' by your permission, mrs. williams," and a courtly bow accompanied the words. at . william came to bring sir tom home. the leave-taking was always formal with polly, but with me it was, "ta-ta, williams--see you later," and our guest would hobble out on his poor crippled feet, waving his hand gallantly, with a voice as cheery as a boy's. another family whom i wish the reader to know well is the kyrles. for more than twenty-five years we have known no joys or sorrows which they did not feel, and no interests that touched them have failed to leave a mark on us. we could not have been more intimate or better friends had the closest blood tie united us. the acquaintance of young married couples had grown into a friendship that was bearing its best fruit at a time when best fruit was most appreciated. we do not consider a pleasure more than half complete until we have told it to will and frances kyrle, for their delight doubles our happiness. they were among the earliest of my patients, and they are easily first among our friends. i have watched more than a half-dozen of their children from infancy to adult life, and this alone would be a strong bond; but in addition to this is the fact that the whole family, from father to youngest child, possess in a wonderful degree that subtle sense of true camaraderie which is as rare as it is charming. the kyrles lived in the city, but they were foot-free, and we could count on having them often. four oaks was to be, if we had our way, a country home for them almost as much as for us. indeed, one of the rooms was called the kyrles' room, and they came to it at will. enough about our friends. we must go back to the farm interests, which are, indeed, the only excuse for this history. chapter xxxvii the headman's job our life at four oaks began in earnest in january, . even during the winter months there was no lack of employment and interest for the headman. i breakfasted at seven, and from that time until noon i was as busy as if i were working for $ a month. the master's eye is worth more than his hand in a factory like mine. my men were, and are, an unusual lot,--intelligent, sober, and willing,--but they, like others, are apt to fall into routine ways, and thereby to miss points which an observing proprietor would not overlook. the cows, for instance, were all fed the same ration. fifteen pounds of mixed grains was none too much for the big holstein milk-makers, who were yielding well and looking in perfect health; but the common cows were taking on too much flesh and falling off in milk. i at once changed the ration for these six cows by leaving out the corn entirely and substituting oat straw for alfalfa in the cut feed. the change brought good results in five of the cows; the other one did not pick up in her milk, and after a reasonable trial i sold her. the herd was doing excellently for mid-winter,--the yield amounted to a daily average of pounds throughout the month, and i was able to make good my contract with the middleman. i could see breakers ahead, however, and it behooved me to make ready for them. i decided to buy ten more thoroughbreds in new milk, if i could find them. i wrote to the people from whom i had purchased the first herd, and after a little delay secured nine cows in fresh milk and about four years old. this addition came in february, and kept my milk supply above the danger point. since then i have bought no cows. thirty-four of these thoroughbreds are still at four oaks--two of them have died, and three have been sold for not keeping up to the standard--and are doing grand service. their numbers have been reënforced by twenty of their best daughters, so there are at this writing fifty-four milch cows and five yearling heifers in the herd. most of the calves have been disposed of as soon as weaned. i have no room for more stock on my place, and it doesn't pay to keep them to sell as cows. four oaks is not a breeding farm, but a factory farm, and everything has to be subordinated to the factory idea. my thoroughbred calves have brought me an average price of $ each at four to six weeks, sold to dairymen, and i am satisfied to do business in that way. the nine milch cows which i bought to complete the herd cost, delivered at four oaks, $ . all the grain fed to cows, horses, and hogs, and a portion of that fed to chickens, is ground fine before feeding. the grinding is done in the granary by a mill with a capacity of forty bushels an hour. we make corn meal, corn and cob meal, and oatmeal enough for a week's supply in a few hours. all hay and straw is cut fine, before being fed, by a power cutter in the forage barn, and from thence is taken by teams in box racks to the feeding rooms, where it is wetted with hot water and mixed with the ground feed for the cows and horses, and steamed or cooked with the ground feed for the hogs and hens. alfalfa is the only hay used for the hens, and wonderfully good it is for them. besides feed for the hogs, we have to provide ashes, salt, and charcoal for them. these three things are kept constantly before them in narrow troughs set so near the wall that they cannot get their feet into them. we carefully save all wood ashes for the hogs and hens, and we burn our own charcoal in a pit in the wood lot. five cords of sound wood make an abundant supply for a year. i think this side dish constantly before swine goes a long way toward keeping them healthy. clean pens, well-balanced and well-cooked food, pure water, and this medicine can be counted on to keep a growing and fattening herd healthy during its nine months of life. it is claimed that it is unnatural and artificial to confine these young things within such narrow limits, and so it is; but the whole scheme is unnatural, if you please. the pig is born to die, and to die quickly, for the profit and maintenance of man. what could be more unnatural? would he be better reconciled to his fate after spending his nine months between field and sty? i wot not. the chester white is an indolent fellow, and i suspect he loves his comfortable house, his cool stone porch, his back yard to dig in, his neighbors across the wire fence to gossip with, and his well-balanced, well-cooked food served under his own nose three times a day. at least he looks content in his piggery, and grows faster and puts on more flesh in his days than does his neighbor of the field. if the hog's profitable life were twice or thrice as long, i would advocate a wider liberty for the early part of it; but as it doesn't pay to keep the animal after he is nine months old, the quickest way to bring him to perfection is the best. one cannot afford to graze animals of any kind when one is trying to do intensive farming. it is indirect, it is wasteful of space and energy, and it doesn't force the highest product. grazing, as compared with soiling, may be economical of labor, but as i understand economics that is the one thing in which we do not wish to economize. the multiplication of well-paid and well-paying labor is a thing to be specially desired. if the soiling farm will keep two or three more men employed at good wages, and at the same time pay better interest than the grazing farm, it should be looked upon as much the better method. the question of furnishing landscape for hogs is one that borders too closely on the æsthetic or the sentimental to gain the approval of the factory-farm man. what is true of hogs is also true of cows. they are better off under the constant care of intelligent and interested human beings than when they follow the rippling brook or wind slowly o'er the lea at their own sweet pleasure. the truth is, the rippling brook doesn't always furnish the best water, and the lea furnishes very imperfect forage during nine months of the year. a twenty-acre lot in good grass, in which to take the air, is all that a well-regulated herd of fifty cows needs. the clean, cool, calm stable is much to their liking, and the regular diet of a first-class cow-kitchen insures a uniform flow of milk. what is true of hogs and cows is true also of hens. the common opinion that the farm-raised hen that has free range is healthier or happier than her sister in a well-ordered hennery is not based on facts. freedom to forage for one's self and pick up a precarious living does not always mean health, happiness, or comfort. the strenuous life on the farm cannot compare in comfort with the quiet house and the freedom from anxiety of the well-tended hen. the vicissitudes of life are terrible for the uncooped chicken. the occupants of air, earth, and water lie in wait for it. it is fair game for the hawk and the owl; the fox, the weasel, the rat, the wood pussy, the cat, and the dog are its sworn enemies. the horse steps on it, the wheel crushes it; it falls into the cistern or the swill barrel; it is drenched by showers or stiffened by frosts, and, as the english say, it has a "rather indifferent time of it." if it survive the summer, and some chickens do, it will roost and shiver on the limb of an apple tree. its nest will be accessible only to the mink and the rat; and, like rachel, it will mourn for its children, which are not. no, the well-yarded hen has by all odds the best of it. the wonder is that, with three-fourths of the poultry at large and making its own living, hens still furnish a product, in this country alone, $ , , greater in value than the whole world's output of gold. our annual production of eggs and poultry foots up to $ , , ,--$ apiece for every man, woman, and child,--and yet people say that hens do not pay! each flock of forty hens at four oaks has a house sixteen feet by twenty, and a run twenty feet by one hundred. i hear no complaints of close quarters or lack of freedom, but i do hear continually the song of contentment, and i see results daily that are more satisfactory than those of any oil well or mine in which i have ever been interested. chapter xxxviii spring of ' sam began to make up his breeding pens in january. he selected of his favorites, divided them into flocks of , added a fine cockerel to each pen (we do not allow cocks or cockerels to run with the laying hens), and then began to set the incubator house in order. he filled the first incubator on saturday, january , and from that day until late in april he was able to start a fresh machine about every six days. sam reports the total hatch for the year as chicks, out of which number he had, when he separated them in the early autumn, pullets to put in the runs for laying hens, and cockerels to go to the fattening pens. these figures show that sam was a first-class chicken man. we secured tons of ice at the side of the lake for $ , having to pay a little more that year than the last, on account of the heavy fall of snow. the wood-house was replenished, although there was still a good deal of last year's cut on hand. we did not fell any trees, for there was still a considerable quantity of dead wood on the ground which should be used first. i wanted to clear out much of the useless underbrush, but we had only time to make a beginning in this effort at forestry. we went over perhaps ten acres across the north line, removing briers and brush. everything that looked like a possible future tree was left. around oak and hickory stumps we found clumps of bushes springing from living roots. these we cut away, except one or possibly two of the most thrifty. we trimmed off the lower branches of those we saved, and left them to make such trees as they could. i have been amazed to see what a growth an oak-root sprout will make after its neighbors have been cut away. there are some hundreds of these trees in the forest at four oaks, from five to six inches in diameter, which did not measure more than one or two inches five years ago. as the underbrush was cleared from the wood lot, i planned to set young trees to fill vacant spaces. the european larch was used in the first experiment. in the spring of i bought four thousand seedling larches for $ , planted them in nursery rows in the orchard, cultivated them for two years, and then transplanted them to the forest. the larch is hardy and grows rapidly; and as it is a valuable tree for many purposes, it is one of the best for forest planting. i have planted no others thus far at four oaks, as the four thousand from my little nursery seem to fill all unoccupied spaces. fresh mulching was piled near all the young fruit trees, to be applied as soon as the frost was out of the ground. several hundreds of loads of manure were hauled to the fields, to be spread as soon as the snow disappeared. i always return manure to the land as soon as it can be done conveniently. the manure from the hen-house was saved this year to use on the alfalfa fields, to see how well it would take the place of commercial fertilizer. i may as well give the result of the experiment now. it was mixed with sand and applied at the rate of eight hundred pounds an acre for the spring dressing over a portion of the alfalfa, against four hundred pounds an acre of the fertilizer : : . after two years i was convinced that, when used alone, it is not of more than half the value of the fertilizer. my present practice is to use five hundred pounds of hen manure and two hundred pounds of fertilizer on each acre for the spring dressing, and two hundred pounds an acre of the fertilizer alone after each cutting except the last. we have ten or twelve tons of hen manure each year, and it is nearly all used on the alfalfa or the timothy as spring dressing. it costs nothing, and it takes off a considerable sum from the fertilizer account. i am not at all sure that the scientists would approve this method of using it; i can only give my experience, and say that it brings me satisfactory crops. there was much snow in january and february, and in march much rain. when the spring opened, therefore, the ground was full of water. this was fortunate, for april and may were unusually dry months,--only . inches of water. the dry april brought the ploughs out early; but before we put our hands to the plough we should make a note of what the first quarter of brought into our strong box. sold: butter . . . . $ . eggs . . . . . cow . . . . . two sows . . . . total . . . $ . fifteen of the young sows farrowed in march, and the other in april, as also did old ones. the young sows gave us pigs, and the old ones , so that the spring opened with an addition to our stock of head of young swine. between march and may were born calves, which were all sold before july . the population of our factory farm was increasing so rapidly that it became necessary to have more help. we already had eight men and three women, besides the help in the big house. one would think that eight men could do the work on a farm of acres, and so they can, most of the time; but in seed-time and harvest they are not sufficient at four oaks. we could not work the teams. up to march, , sam had full charge of the chickens, and also looked after the hogs, with the help of anderson. judson and french had their hands full in the cow stables, and lars was more than busy with the carriage horses and the driving. thompson was working foreman, and his son zeb and johnson looked after the farm horses during the winter and did the general work. from that time on sam gave his entire time to the chickens, anderson his entire time to the hogs, and johnson began gardening in real earnest. this left only thompson and zeb for general farm work. again i advertised for two farm hands. i selected two of the most promising applicants and brought them out to the farm. thompson discharged one of them at the end of the first day for persistently jerking his team, and the other discharged himself at the week's end, to continue his tramp. once more i resorted to the city papers. this time i was more fortunate, for i found a young swede, square-built and blond-headed, who said he had worked on his father's farm in the old country, and had left it because it was too small for the five boys. otto was slow of speech and of motion, but he said he could work, and i hired him. the other man whom i sent to the farm at the same time proved of no use whatever. he stayed four days, and was dismissed for innocuous desuetude. still another man whom i tried did well for five weeks, and then broke out in a most profound spree, from which he could not be weaned. he ended up by an assault on otto in the stable yard. the swede was taken by surprise, and was handsomely bowled over by the first onslaught of his half-drunk, half-crazed antagonist. as soon, however, as his slow mind took in the fact that he was being pounded, he gathered his forces, and, with a grunt for a war-cry, rolled his enemy under him, sat upon his stomach, and, flat-handed, slapped his face until he shouted for aid. the man left the farm at once, and i commended the swede for having used the flat of his hand. in spite of bad luck with the new men we were able to plough and seed acres by may . lots nos. , , , and were planted to corn, and no. sowed to oats, and the acres on the home lot were divided between sweet fodder corn, potatoes, and cabbage. the abundant water in the soil gave the crops a fair start, and june proved an excellent growing month, a rainfall of nearly four inches putting them beyond danger from the short water supply of july and august. indeed, had it not been for the generosity of june we should have been in a bad way, for the next three months gave a scant four inches of rain. the oats made a good growth, though the straw was rather short, and the corn did very well indeed,--due largely to thorough cultivation. twelve acres of oats were cut for forage, and the rest yielded bushels to the acre,--a little over bushels. the alfalfa and timothy made a good start. from the former we cut, late in june, ¼ tons to the acre, and from the timothy, in july, ½ tons,-- tons of timothy and of alfalfa. each of these fields received the usual top-dressing after the crop was cut; but the timothy did not respond,--the late season was too dry. we cut two more crops from the alfalfa field, which together made a yield of a little more than tons. the alfalfa in that dry summer gave me tons of good hay, proving its superiority as a dry-weather crop. johnson started the one-and-one-half-acre vegetable and fruit garden in april, and devoted much of his time to it. his primitive hotbeds gradually emptied themselves into the garden, and we now began to taste the fruit of our own soil, much to the pleasure of the whole colony. it is surprising what a real gardener can do with a garden of this size. by feeding soil and plants liberally, he is able to keep the ground producing successive crops of vegetables, from the day the frost leaves it in the spring until it again takes possession in the fall, without doing any wrong to the land. indeed, our garden grows better and more prolific each year in spite of the immense crops that are taken from it. this can be done only by a person who knows his business, and johnson is such a person. he gave much of his time to this practical patch, but he also worked with polly among the shrubs on the lawn, and in her sunken flower garden, which is the pride of her life. we shall hear more about this flower garden later on. the accounts for the second quarter of the year show these items on the income side:-- butter $ . eggs . twenty-five calves . -------- total $ . chapter xxxix the young orchard one of the most enjoyable occupations of a farmer's life is the care of young trees. until your experience in this work is of a personal and proprietary nature, you will not realize the pleasure it can afford. the intimate study of plant life, especially if that plant life is yours, is a never failing source of pleasurable speculation, and a thing upon which to hang dreams. you grow to know each tree, not only by its shape and its habit of growth, but also by peculiarities that belong to it as an individual. the erect, sturdy bearing of one bespeaks a frank, bold nature, which makes it willing to accept its surroundings and make the most of them; while the crooked, dwarfish nature of another requires the utmost care of the husbandman to keep it within the bounds of good behavior. and yet we often find that the slow-growing, ill-conditioned young tree, if properly cared for, will bring forth the finest fruit at maturity. to study the character and to watch the development of young trees is a pleasing and useful occupation for the man who thinks of them as living things with an inheritance that cannot be ignored. that seeds in all appearance exactly alike should send forth shoots so unlike, is a wonder of nature; and that young shoots in the same soil and with the same care should show such dissimilarity in development, is a riddle whose answer is to be found only in the binding laws of heredity. that a tiny bud inserted under the bark of a well-grown tree can change a sour root to a sweet bough, ought to make one careful of the buds which one grafts on the living trunk of one's tree of life. the young orchard can teach many lessons to him who is willing to be taught; in the hands of him who is not, the schoolmaster has a very sorry time of it, no matter how he sets his lessons. the side pockets of my jacket are usually weighted down with pruning-shears, a sharp knife, and a handled copper wire,--always, indeed, in june, when i walk in my orchard. june is the month of all months for the prudent orchardist to go thus armed, for the apple-tree borer is abroad in the land. when the quick eye of the master sees a little pile of sawdust at the base of a tree, he knows that it is time for him to sit right down by that tree and kill its enemy. the sharp knife enlarges the hole, which is the trail of the serpent, and the sharp-pointed, flexible wire follows the route until it has reached and transfixed the borer. this is the only way. it is the nature of the borer to maim or kill the tree; it is for the interest of the owner that the tree should live. the conflict is irrepressible, and the weakest must go to the wall. the borer evil can be reduced to a minimum by keeping the young trees banked three or four inches high with firm dirt or ashes; but borers must be followed with the wire, once they enter the bark. the sharp knife and the pruning-shears have other uses in the june orchard. limbs and sprouts will come in irregular and improper places, and they should be nipped out early and thus save labor and mutilation later on. sprouts that start from the eyes on the trunk can be removed by a downward stroke of the gloved hand. all intersecting or crossing boughs are removed by knife or scissors, and branches which are too luxuriant in growth are cut or pinched back. careful guidance of the tree in june will avoid the necessity of severe correction later on. a man ought to plant an orchard, if for no other reason, that he may have the pleasure of caring for it, and for the companionship of the trees. this was the second year of growth for my orchard, and i was gratified by the evidences of thrift and vigor. fine, spreading heads adorned the tops of the stubs of trees that had received such (apparently) cruel treatment eighteen months before. the growth of these two seasons convinced me that the four-year-old root and the three-year-old stem, if properly managed, have greater possibilities of rapid development than roots or stems of more tender age. i think i made no mistake in planting three-year-old trees. as i worked in my orchard i could not help looking forward to the time when the trees would return a hundred-fold for the care bestowed upon them. they would begin to bring returns, in a small way, from the fourth year, and after that the returns would increase rapidly. it is safe to predict that from the tenth to the fortieth year a well-managed orchard will give an average yearly income of $ an acre above all expenses, including interest on the original cost. a fifty-acre orchard of well-selected apple trees, near a first-class market and in intelligent hands, means a net income of $ , taking one year with another, for thirty or forty years. what kind of investment will pay better? what sort of business will give larger returns in health and pleasure? i do not mean to convey the idea that forty years is the life of an orchard; hundreds of years would be more correct. as trees die from accident or decrepitude, others should take their places. thus the lease of life becomes perpetual in hands that are willing to keep adding to the soil more than the trees and the fruit take from it. comparatively few owners of orchards do this, and those who belong to the majority will find fault with my figures; but the thinking few, who do not expect to enjoy the fat of the land without making a reasonable return, will say that i am too conservative,--that a well-placed, well-cared-for, well-selected, and well-marketed orchard will do much better than my prophecy. nature is a good husbandman so far as she goes, but her scheme contemplates only the perpetuation of the tree, by seeds or by other means. nature's plan is to give to each specimen a nutritive ration. anything beyond this is thrown away on the individual, and had better be used for the multiplying of specimens. when man comes to ask something more than germinating seeds from a plant, he must remove it from the crowded clump, give it more light and air, _and feed it for product_. in other words, he must give it more nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash than it can use for simple growth and maintenance, and thus make it burst forth into flower-or fruit-product. nature produces the apple tree, but man must cultivate it and feed it if he would be fed and comforted by it. people who neglect their orchards can get neither pleasure nor profit from them, and such persons are not competent to sit in judgment upon the value of an apple tree. only those who love, nourish, and profit by their orchards may come into the apple court and speak with authority. chapter xl the timothy harvest on friday, the th, the children came home from their schools, and with them came jim jarvis to spend the summer holidays. our invitation to jarvis had been unanimous when he bade us good-by in the winter. jack was his chum, polly had adopted him, i took to him from the first, and jane, in her shy way, admired him greatly. the boys took to farm life like ducks to water. they were hot for any kind of work, and hot, too, from all kinds. i could not offer anything congenial until the timothy harvest in july. when this was on, they were happy and useful at the same time,--a rare combination for boys. the timothy harvest is attractive to all, and it would be hard to find a form of labor which contributes more to the æsthetic sense than does the gathering of this fragrant grass. at four o'clock on a fine morning, with the barometer "set fair," thompson started the mower, and kept it humming until . , when zeb, with a fresh team, relieved him. zeb tried to cut a little faster than his father, but he was allowed no more time. promptly at nine he was called in, and there was to be no more cutting that day. at eleven o'clock the tedder was started, and in two hours the cut grass had been turned. at three o'clock the rake gathered it into windrows, from which it was rolled and piled into heaps, or cocks, of six hundred or eight hundred pounds each. the cutting of the morning was in safe bunches before the dew fell, there to go through the process of sweating until ten o'clock the next day. it was then opened and fluffed out for four hours, after which all hands and all teams turned to and hauled it into the forage barn. the grass that was cut one morning was safely housed as hay by the second night, if the weather was favorable; if not, it took little harm in the haycocks, even from foul weather. it is the sun-bleach that takes the life out of hay. this year we had no trouble in getting fifty tons of as fine timothy hay as horses could wish to eat or man could wish to see. we began to cut on tuesday, the th of july, and by saturday evening the twenty-acre crop was under cover. the boys blistered their hands with the fork handles, and their faces, necks, and arms with the sun's rays, and claimed to like the work and the blisters. indeed, tossing clean, fragrant hay is work fit for a prince; and a man never looks to better advantage or more picturesque than when, redolent with its perfume, he slings a jug over the crook in his elbow and listens to the gurgle of the home-made ginger ale as it changes from jug to throat. there may be joys in other drinks, but for solid comfort and refreshment give me a july hay-field at p.m., a jug of water at forty-eight degrees, with just the amount of molasses, vinegar, and ginger that is polly's secret, and i will give cards and spades to the broadest goblet of bubbles that was ever poured, and beat it to a standstill. add to this a blond head under a broad hat, a thin white gown, such as grasshoppers love, and you can see why the emptying of the jug was a satisfying function in our field; for jane was the one who presided at these afternoon teas. often jane was not alone; florence or jessie, or both, or others, made hay while the sun shone in those july days, and many a load went to the barn capped with white and laughter. the young people decided that a hay farm would be ideal--no end better than a factory farm--and advised me to put all the land into timothy and clover. i was not too old to see the beauties of haying-time, with such voluntary labor; but i was too old and too much interested with my experiment to be cajoled by a lot of youngsters. i promised them a week of haying in each fifty-two, but that was all the concession i would make. laura said:-- "we are commanded to make hay while the sun shines; and the sun always shines at four oaks, for me." it was pretty of her to say that; but what else would one expect from laura? the twelve acres from which the fodder oats had been cut were ploughed and fitted for sugar beets and turnips. i was not at all certain that the beets would do anything if sown so late, but i was going to try. of the turnips i could feel more certain, for doth not the poet say:-- "the th day of july, sow your turnips, wet or dry"? as the th fell on sunday, i tried to placate the agricultural poet by sowing half on the th and the other half on the th, but it was no use. whether the turnip god was offended by the fractured rule and refused his blessing, or whether the dry august and september prevented full returns, is more than i can say. certain it is that i had but a half crop of turnips and a beggarly batch of beets to comfort me and the hogs. some little consolation, however, was found in polly's joy over a small crop of currants which her yearling bushes produced. i also heard rumors of a few cherries which turned their red cheeks to the sun for one happy day, and then disappeared. cock robin's breast was red the next morning, and on this circumstantial evidence polly accused him. he pleaded "not guilty," and strutted on the lawn with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and his suspected breast as much in evidence as a pouter pigeon's. a jury, mostly of blackbirds, found the charge "not proven," and the case was dismissed. i was convinced by the result of this trial that the only safe way would be to provide enough cherries for the birds and for the people too, and ordered fifty more trees for fall planting. i found by experience, that if one would have bird neighbors (and who would not?), he must provide liberally for their wants and also for their luxuries. i have stolen a march as to the cherries by planting scores of mulberry trees, both native and russian. birds love mulberries even better than they do cherries, and we now eat our pies in peace. to make amends for this ruse, i have established a number of drinking fountains and free baths; all of which have helped to make us friends. in august i sold, near the top of a low market, young hogs. at $ . per hundred, the bunch netted me $ . they did not weigh quite as much as those sold the previous autumn, and i found two ways of accounting for this. the first and most probable was that fall pigs do not grow so fast as those farrowed in the spring. this is sufficient to account for the fact that the herd average was twenty pounds lighter than that of its predecessor. i could not, however, get over the notion that anderson's nervousness had in some way taken possession of the swine (we have holy writ for a similar case), and that they were wasted in growth by his spirit of unrest. he was uniformly kind to them and faithful with their food, but there was lacking that sense of cordial sympathy which should exist between hog and man if both would appear at their best. even when anderson came to their pens reeking with the rich savor of the food they loved, their ears would prick up (as much as a chester white's ears can), and with a "woof!" they would shoot out the door, only to return in a moment with the greatest confidence. i never heard that "woof" and saw the stampede without looking around for the "steep place" and the "sea," feeling sure that the incident lacked only these accessories to make it a catastrophe. anderson was good and faithful, and he would work his arms and legs off for the pigs; but the spirit of unrest entered every herd which he kept, though neither he nor i saw it clearly enough to go and "tell it in the city." with other swineherds my hogs averaged from fifteen to eighteen pounds better than with faithful anderson, and i am, therefore, competent to speak of the gross weight of the spirit of contentment. chapter xli strike at gordon's mine frank gordon owned a coal mine about six miles west of the village of exeter, and four miles from four oaks. a village called gordonville had sprung up at the mouth of the mine. it was the home of the three hundred miners and their families,--mostly huns, but with a sprinkling of cornishmen. the houses were built by the owner of the mine, and were leased to the miners at a small yearly rental. they were modest in structure, but they could be made inviting and neat if the occupants were thrifty. no one was allowed to sell liquor on the property owned by the gordons, but outside of this limit was a fringe of low saloons which did a thriving business off the improvident miners. there had never been a strike at gordonville, and such a thing seemed improbable, for gordon was a kind master, who paid his men promptly and looked after their interests more than is usual for a capitalist. it was, therefore, a distinct surprise when the foreman of the mine telephoned to gordon one july morning that the men had struck work. gordon did not understand the reason of it, but he expressed himself as being heartily glad, for financial reasons, that the men had gone out. he had more than enough coal on the surface and in cars to supply the demand for the next three months, and it would be money in his pocket to dispose of his coal without having to pay for the labor of replacing it. during the day the reason for the strike was announced. from the establishment of the mine it had been the custom for the miners to have their tools sharpened at a shop built and run by the property. this was done for the accommodation of the men, and the charge for keeping the tools sharp was ten cents a week for each man, or $ a year. for twenty years no fault had been found with the arrangement; it had been looked upon as satisfactory, especially by the men. a walking delegate, mousing around the mine, and finding no other cause for complaint, had lighted upon this practice, and he told the men it was a shame that they should have to pay ten cents a week out of their hard-earned wages for keeping their tools sharp. he said that it was the business of the property to keep the tools sharp, and that the men should not be called upon to pay for that service; that they ought, in justice to themselves and for the dignity of associated labor, to demand that this onerous tax be removed; and, to insure its removal, he declared a strike on. this was the reason, and the only reason, for the strike at gordon's mine. three hundred men quit work, and three hundred families suffered, many of them for the necessities of life, simply because a loud-mouthed delegate assured them that they were being imposed upon. things went on quietly at the mine. there was no riot, no disturbance. gordon did not go over, but simply telephoned to the superintendent to close the shaft houses, shut down the engines, put out the fires, and let things rest, at the same time saying that he would hold the superintendent and the bosses responsible for the safety of the plant. the men were disappointed, as the days went by, that the owner made no effort to induce them to resume work. they had believed that he would at once accede to their demand, and that they would go back to work with the tax removed. this, however, was not his plan. weeks passed and the men became restless. they frequented the saloons more generally, spent their remaining money for liquor, and went into debt as much as they were permitted for more liquor. they became noisy and quarrelsome. the few men who were opposed to the strike could make no headway against public opinion. these men held aloof from the saloons, husbanded their money, and confined themselves as much as possible to their own houses. things had gone on in this way for six weeks. the men grew more and more restless and more dissipated. again the walking delegate came to encourage them to hold out. mounted on an empty coal car, he made an inflammatory speech to the men, advising them not only to hold out against the owner, but also to prevent the employment of any other help. if this should not prove sufficient, he advised them to wreck the mining property and to fire the mine,--anything to bring the owner to terms. jack and jarvis went for a long walk one day, and their route took them near gordonville. seeing the men collected in such numbers around a coal car, they approached, and heard the last half of this inflammatory speech. as the walking delegate finished, jack jumped up on the car, and said:-- "mcginnis has had his say; now, men, let me have mine. there are always two sides to a question. you have heard one, let me give you the other. i am a delegate, self-appointed, from the amalgamated order of thinkers, and i want you to listen to our view of this strike,--and of all strikes. i want you also to think a little as well as to listen. "you have been led into this position by a man whose sole business is to foment discords between working-men and their employers. the moment these discords cease, that moment this man loses his job and must work or starve like the rest of you. he is, therefore, an interested party, and he is more than likely to be biassed by what seems to be his interest. he has made no argument; he has simply asserted things which are not true, and played upon your sympathies, emotions, and passions, by the use of the stale war-cries--'oppression,' 'down-trodden working-man,' 'bloated bond-holders,' and, most foolish of all, 'the conflict between capital and labor.' you have not thought this matter out for yourselves at all. that is why i ask you to join hands for a little while with the order of thinkers and see if there is not some good way out of this dilemma. mcginnis said that the company has no right to charge you for keeping your tools sharp. in one sense this is true. you have a perfect right to work with dull tools, if you wish to; you have the right to sharpen your own tools; and you also have the right to hire any one else to do it for you. you work 'by the ton,' you own your pickaxes and shovels from handle to blade, and you have the right to do with them as you please. "there are three hundred of you who use tools; you each pay ten cents a week to the company for keeping them sharp,--that is, in round numbers, $ a year. there are two smiths at work at $ a month (that is $ ), and a helper at $ a month ($ more), making just $ paid by the company in wages. if you will think this matter out, you will see that there is a dead loss to the company of the coal used, the wear and tear of the instruments, and the interest, taxes, insurance, and degeneration of the plant. is the company under obligation to lose this money for you? not at all! the company does this as an accommodation and a gratuity to you, but not as a duty. just as much coal would be taken from the gordon mine if your tools were never sharpened, only it would require more men, and you would earn less money apiece. you could not get this sharpening done at private shops so cheaply, and you cannot do it yourselves. you have no more right to ask the company to do this work for nothing than you have to ask it to buy your tools for you. it would be just as sensible for you to strike because the company did not send each of you ten cents' worth of ice-cream every sunday morning, as it is for you to go out on this matter of sharpening tools. "but, suppose the company were in duty bound to do this thing for you, and suppose it should refuse; would that be a good reason for quitting work? not by any means! you are earning an average of $ a day,--nearly $ , a month. you've 'been out' six weeks. if you gain your point, it will take you fifteen years to make up what you've already lost. if you have the sense which god gives geese, you will see that you can't afford this sort of thing. "but the end is not yet. you are likely to stay out six weeks longer, and each six weeks adds another fifteen years to your struggle to catch up with your losses. is this a load which thinking people would impose upon themselves? not much! you will lose your battle, for your strike is badly timed. it seems to be the fate of strikes to be badly timed; they usually occur when, on account of hard times or over-supply, the employers would rather stop paying wages than not. that's the case now. four months of coal is in yards or on cars, and it's an absolute benefit to the company to turn seventy or eighty thousand dollars of dead product into live money. don't deceive yourselves with the hope that you are distressing the owner by your foolish strike; you are putting money into his pockets while your families suffer for food. there is no great principle at stake to make your conduct seem noble and to call forth sympathy for your suffering,--only foolishness and the blind following of a demagogue whose living depends upon your folly. "mcginnis talked to you about the conflict between capital and labor. that is all rot. there is not and there cannot be such a conflict. labor makes capital, and without capital there would be no object in labor. they are mutually dependent upon each other, and there can be no quarrel between them, for neither could exist after the death of the other. the capitalist is only a laborer who has saved a part of his wages, --either in his generation or in some preceding one. any man with a sound mind and a sound body can become a capitalist. when the laborer has saved one dollar he is a capitalist,--he has money to lend at interest or to invest in something that will bring a return. the second dollar is easier saved than the first, and every dollar saved is earning something on its own account. all persons who have money to invest or to lend are capitalists. of course, some are great and some are small, but all are independent, for they have more than they need for immediate personal use. "i am going to tell you how you may all become capitalists; but first i want to point out your real enemies. the employer is not your enemy, capital is not your enemy, but the saloonkeeper is,--and the most deadly enemy you can possibly have. in that fringe of shanties over yonder live the powers that keep you down; there are the foes that degrade you and your families, forcing you to live little better than wild beasts. your food is poor, your clothing is in rags, your children are without shoes, your homes are desolate, there are no schools and no social life. year follows year in dreary monotone, and you finally die, and your neighbors thrust you underground and have an end of you. misery and wretchedness fill the measure of your days, and you are forgotten. "this dull, brutish condition is self-imposed, and to what end? that some dozen harpies may fatten on your flesh; that your labor may give them leisure; that your suffering may give them pleasure; that your sweat may cool their brows, and your money fill their tills! "what do you get in return? whiskey, to poison your bodies and pervert your minds; whiskey, to make you fierce beasts or dull brutes; whiskey, to make your eyes red and your hands unsteady; whiskey, to make your homes sties and yourselves fit occupants for them; whiskey, to make you beat your wives and children; whiskey, to cast you into the gutter, the most loathsome animal in all the world. this is cheap whiskey, but it costs you dear. all that makes life worth living, all that raises man above the brute, and all the hope of a future life, are freely given for this poor whiskey. the man who sells it to you robs you of your money and also of your manhood. you pay him ten times (often twenty times) as much as it cost him, and yet he poses as your friend. "i'm not going to say anything against beer, for i don't think good beer is very likely to hurt a man. i will say this, however,--you pay more than twice what it is worth. this is the point i would make: beer is a food of some value, and it should be put on a food basis in price. it isn't more than half as valuable as milk, and it shouldn't cost more than half as much. you can have good beer at three or four cents a quart, if you will let whiskey alone. "i promised to tell you how to become capitalists, each and every one of you, and i'll keep my word if you'll listen to me a little longer." while jack had been speaking, some of the men had shown considerable interest and had gradually crowded their way nearer to the boy. thirty or forty cornishmen and perhaps as many others of the better sort were close to the car, and seemed anxious to hear what he had to say. back of these, however, were the large majority of the miners and the hangers-on at the saloons, who did not wish to hear, and did not mean that others should hear, what the boy had to say. led by mcginnis and the saloon-keepers, they had kept up such a row that it had been impossible for any one, except those quite near the car, to hear at all. now they determined to stop the talk and to bounce the boy. they made a vigorous rush for the car with shouts and uplifted hands. a gigantic cornishman mounted the car, and said, in a voice that could easily be heard above the shouting of the crowd:-- "wait--wait a bit, men! the lad is a brave one, and ye maun own to that! there be small 'urt in words, and mebbe 'e 'ave tole a bit truth. me and me mates 'ere are minded to give un a chance. if ye men don't want to 'ear 'im, you don't 'ave to stay; but don't 'e dare touchen with a finger, or, by god! tom carkeek will kick the stuffin' out en 'e!" this was enough to prevent any overt act, for tom carkeek was the champion wrestler in all that county; he was fiercer than fire when roused, and he would be backed by every cornishman on the job. jack went on with his talk. "the 'order of thinkers' claim that you men and all of your class spend one-third of your entire wages for whiskey and beer. there are exceptions, but the figures will hold good. i am going to call the amount of your wages spent in this way, one-fourth. the yearly pay-roll of this mine is, in round numbers, $ , . fifty thousand of this goes into the hands of those harpies, who grow rich as you grow poor. you are surprised at these figures, and yet they are too small. i counted the saloons over there, and i find there are eleven of them. divide $ , into eleven parts, and you would give each saloon less than $ a year as a gross business. not one of those places can run on the legitimate percentage of a business which does not amount to more than that. do you suppose these men are here from charitable motives or for their health? not at all. they are here to make money, and they do it. five or six hundred dollars is all they pay for the vile stuff for which they charge you $ . they rob you of manhood and money alike. "now, what would be the result if you struck on these robbers? i will tell you. in the first place, you would save $ , each year, and you would be better men in every way for so doing. you would earn more money, and your children would wear shoes and go to school. that would be much, and well worth while; but that is not the best of it. i will make a proposition to you, and i will promise that it shall be carried out on my side exactly as i state it. "this is a noble property. in ten years it has paid its owner $ , ,--$ , a year. it is sure to go on in this way under good management. i offer, in the name of the owner, to bond this property to you for $ , for five years at six per cent. of course this is an unusual opportunity. the owner has grown rich out of it, and he is now willing to retire and give others a chance. his offer to you is to sell the mine for half its value, and, at the same time, to give you five years in which to pay for it. i will add something to this proposition, for i feel certain that he will agree to it. it is this: mr. gordon will build and equip a small brewery on this property, in which good, wholesome beer can be made for you at one cent a glass. you are to pay for the brewery in the same way that you pay for the other property; it will cost $ , . this will make $ , which you are to pay during the next five years. how? let me tell you. "the property will give you a net income of $ , or $ , , and you will save $ , more when you give up whiskey and get your beer for less than one-fourth of what it now costs you. the general store at which you have always traded will be run in your interests, and all that you buy will be cheaper. the market will be a cooperative one, which will furnish you meat, fattened on your own land, at the lowest price. your fruit and vegetables will come from these broad acres, which will be yours and will cost you but little. you will earn more money because you will be sober and industrious, and your money will purchase more because you will deal without a middleman. you will be better clothed, better fed, and better men. your wives will take new interest in life, and there will be carpets on your floors, curtains at your windows, vegetables behind your cottages, and flowers in front of them. "all these things you will have with the money you are now earning, and at the same time you will be changing from the laborer to the capitalist. the mine gives you a profit of $ , , and you save one-fourth of your wages, which makes $ , more,--$ , in all. what are you to do with this? less than $ , will cover the interest. you will have $ , to pay on the principal. this will reduce the interest for the next year more than $ . each year you can do as well, and by the time the five years have passed you will own the mine, the land, the brewery, the store, the market, and this blessed blacksmith shop about which you have had so much fuss, and also a bank with a paid-up capital of $ , . you are capitalists, every one of you, at the end of five years, if you wish to be, and if you are willing to give up the single item,--whiskey. "do you like the plan? do you like the prospect? turn it over and see what objections you can find. if you are willing to go into it, come over to four oaks some day and we will go more into details. mcginnis gave you one side of the picture: i have given you the other. you are at liberty to follow whichever you please." jack and jarvis jumped off the car and struck out for home. carkeek and his cornishmen followed the lads until they were well clear of the village, to protect them, and then carkeek said:--"me and the others like for to hear 'e talk, mister, and we like for to 'ear 'e talk more." "all right, goliath," said jack. "come over any time and we'll make plans." chapter xlii the riot two days later the boys, returning from the city, were met by jane and jessie in the big carriage to be driven home. halfway to four oaks the carriage suddenly halted, and a confused murmur of angry voices gave warning of trouble. jack opened the door and stood upon the step. "fifteen or twenty drunken miners block the way,--they are holding the horses," said he. "let me out; i'll soon clear the road," said jarvis, trying to force his way past jack. "sit still, hercules; i am slower to wrath than you are. let me talk to them," and jack took three or four steps forward, followed closely by jarvis. "well, men, what do you want? there is no good in stopping a carriage on the highroad." "we want work and money and bread," said a great bearded hun who was nearest to jack. "this is no way to get either. we have no work to offer, there is no bread in the carriage, and not much money. you are dead wrong in this business, and you are likely to get into trouble. i can make some allowance when i remember the bad whiskey that is in you, but you must get out of our way; the road is public and we have the right to use it." "not until you have paid toll," said the hun. "that's the rooster who said we drank whiskey and didn't work. he's the fellow who would rob a poor man of his liberty," came a voice in the crowd. "knock his block off!" "break his back!" "let me at him," and a score of other friendly offers came from the drunken crowd. jack stood steadily looking at the ruffians, his blue eyes growing black with excitement and his hands clenched tightly in the pockets of his reefer. "slowly, men, slowly," said he. "if you want me, you may have me. there are ladies in the carriage; let them go on; i'll stay with you as long as you like. you are brave men, and you have no quarrel with ladies." "ladies, eh!" said the hun, "ladies! i never saw anything but _women_. let's have a look at them, boys." this speech was drunkenly approved, and the men pressed forward. jack stood firm, his face was white, but his eyes flamed. "stand off! there are good men who will die for those ladies, and it will go hard but bad men shall die first." the hun disregarded the warning. "i'll have a look into--" "hell!" said the slow-of-wrath jack, and his fist went straight from the shoulder and smote the hun on the point of the jaw. it was a terrible blow, dealt with all the force of a trained athlete, and inspired by every impulse which a man holds dear; and the half-drunken brute fell like a stricken ox. catching the club from the falling man, jack made a sudden lunge forward at the face of the nearest foe. "now, jim!" he shouted, as the full fever of battle seized him. his forward lunge had placed another miner _hors de combat_, and jarvis sprang forward and secured the wounded man's bludgeon. "back to back, jack, and mind your guard!" the odds were eighteen to two against the young men, but they did not heed them. back to back they stood, and the heavy clubs were like feathers in their strong hands. their skill at "single stick" was of immense advantage, for it built a wall of defence around them. the crazy-drunk miners rushed upon them with the fierceness of wild beasts; they crowded in so close as to interfere with their own freedom of movement; they sought to overpower the two men by weight of numbers and by showers of blows. jack and jim were kept busy guarding their own heads, and it was only occasionally that they could give an aggressive blow. when these opportunities came, they were accepted with fierce delight, and a miner fell with a broken head at every blow. two fell in front of jack and three went down under jarvis's club. the battle had now lasted several minutes, and the strain on the young men was telling on their wind; they struck as hard and parried as well as at first, but they were breathing rapidly. the young men cheered each other with joyous words; they felt no need of aid. "beats football hollow!" panted jarvis. "go in, old man! you're a dandy full-back!" came between strokes from jack. let us leave the boys for a minute and see what the girls are doing. when jarvis got out of the carriage, he said:-- "lars, if there is trouble here, you drive on as soon as you can get your horses clear. never mind us; we'll walk home. get the ladies to four oaks as soon as possible." when the battle began, the miners left the horses to attack the men. this gave a clear road, and lars was ready to drive on, but the girls were not in the carriage. they had sprung out in the excitement of the first sound of blows; and now stood watching with glowing eyes and white faces the prowess of their champions. for minutes they watched the conflict with fear and pride combined. when seven or eight minutes had passed and the champions had not slain all their enemies, some degree of terror arose in the minds of the young ladies,--terror lest their knights be overpowered by numbers or become exhausted by slaying,--and they looked about for aid. lars, remembering what jarvis had said, urged the ladies to get into the carriage and be driven out of danger. they repelled his advice with scorn. jane said:--"i won't stir a step until the men can go with us!" jessie said never a word, but she darted forward toward the fighting men, stooped, picked up a fallen club, and was back in an instant. mounting quickly to the box, she said:--"i can hold the horses. don't you think you can help the men, lars?" "i'd like to try, miss," and the coachman's coat was off in a trice and the club in his hand. he was none too soon! jane, who had mounted the box with jessie, cried, "look out, jack!" just as a heavy stone crashed against the back of his head. some brute in the crowd had sent it with all his force. the stone broke through the derby hat and opened a wide gash in jack's scalp, and sent him to the ground with a thousand stars glittering before his eyes. jane gave a sob and covered her eyes. jessie swayed as though she would fall, but she never took her eyes from the fallen man; her lips moved, but she said nothing; and her face was ghastly white. jarvis heard the dull thud against jack's head and knew that he was falling. whirling swiftly, he stopped a savage blow that was aimed at the stricken man, and with a back-handed cut laid the striker low. "all right, jack; keep down till the stars are gone." he stood with one sturdy leg on each side of jack's body and his big club made a charmed circle about him. it was not more than twenty seconds before the wheels were out of jack's head and he was on his feet again, though not quite steady. jack's fall had given courage to the gang, and they made a furious attack upon jarvis, who was now alone and not a little impeded by the friend at his feet. as jack struggled to his legs, a furious blow directed at him was parried by jarvis's left arm,--his right being busy guarding his own head. the blow was a fearful one; it broke the small bone in the forearm, beat down the guard, and came with terrible force upon poor jack's left shoulder, disabling it for a minute. at the same time jarvis received a nasty blow across the face from an unexpected quarter. he was staggered by it, but he did not fall. jack's right arm was good and very angry; a savage jab with his club into the face of the man who had struck jarvis laid him low, and jack grinned with satisfaction. things were going hard with the young men. they had, indeed, disqualified nine of the enemy; but there were still eight or ten more, and through hard work and harder knocks they had lost more than half their own fighting strength. at this rate they would be used up completely while there were still three or four of the enemy on foot. this was when they needed aid, and aid came. no sooner had lars found himself at liberty and with a club in his hands than he began to use it with telling effect. he attacked the outer circle, striking every head he could reach, and such was his sprightliness that four men fell headlong before the others became aware of this attack from the rear. this diversion came at the right moment, and proved effective. there were now but six of the enemy in fighting condition, and these six were more demoralized by the sudden and unknown element of a rear attack than by the loss of their thirteen comrades. they hesitated, and half turned to look, and two of them fell under the blows of jack and jarvis. as the rest turned to escape, the swede's club felled one, and the other three ran for dear life. they did not escape, however, for the long legs of the young men were after them. young blood is hot, and the savage fight that had been forced upon these boys had aroused all that was savage in them. in an instant they overtook two of the fleeing men, but neither could strike an enemy in the back. throwing aside their clubs, each seized his enemy by the shoulder, turned him face to face and smote him sore, each after his fashion. then they laughed, took hold of hands, and walked wearily back to the carriage. jarvis's face was covered with blood, and jack's neck and shoulders were drenched,--his wound had bled freely. lars had relieved the ladies on the box after administering kicks and blows in generous measure to the dazed and crippled miners, who were crawling off the road or staggering along it. the swede had a strain of fierce north blood which was not easily laid when once aroused, and he glared around the battle-field, hoping to find signs of resistance. when none were to be seen, he donned his coachman's coat and sat the box like a sphinx. the girls went quickly forward to meet the men. they said little, but they put their hands on their battered champions in a way to make the heart of man glad. the men were flushed and proud, as men have been, and men will be, through all time, when they have striven savagely against other savages in the sight of their mistresses, and have gained the victory. their bruises were numb with exultation and their wounds dumb with pride. there was no regret for blows given or received,--no sympathy for fallen foe. the male fights, in the presence of the female, with savage delight, from the lowest to the highest ranks of creation, and we must forgive our boys for some cruel exultation as they looked on the field of strife. better feelings will come when the blood flows less rapidly in their veins! "we must hurry home," said jane, "and let papa mend you." then she burst into tears. "oh, i am so sorry and so frightened! do you feel _very_ bad, jack? i know you are suffering dreadfully, mr. jarvis. can't i do something for you?" "my arm is bruised a bit," said jarvis; "if you don't mind, you can steady it a little." jane's soft hands clasped themselves tenderly over jarvis's great fist, and she felt relieved in the thought that she was doing something for her hero. she held the great right hand of hercules tenderly, and jarvis never let her know that it was the _left_ arm that had been broken. she felt certain that he must be suffering agony, for ever and anon his fingers would close over hers with a spasmodic grip that sent a thrill of mixed joy and pain to her heart. while i was bandaging the broken arm i saw the young lady going through some pantomimic exercises with her hands, as if seeking to revive the memory of some previous position; then her face blazed with a light, half pleasure and half shame, and she disappeared. when the carriage arrived at four oaks, the story was told in few words, and i immediately set to work to "mend" the boys. jack insisted that jarvis should receive the first attention, and, indeed, he looked the worse. but after washing the blood off his face, i found that beyond a severe bruise, which would disfigure him for a few days, his face and head were unhurt. his arm was broken and badly contused. after i had attended to it, he said:-- "doctor, i'm as good as new; hope jack is no worse." i carefully washed the blood off jack's head and neck, and found an ugly scalp wound at least three inches long. it made me terribly anxious until i fairly proved that the bone was uninjured. after giving the boy the tonsure, i put six stitches into the scalp, and he never said a word. perhaps the cause of this fortitude could be found in the blazing eyes of jessie gordon, which fixed his as a magnet, while her hands clasped his tightly. miss jessie was as white as snow, but there was no tremor in hand or eye. when it was all over, her voice was steady and low as she said:-- "jack williams, in the olden days men fought for women, and they were called knights. it was counted a noble thing to take peril in defence of the helpless. i find no record of more knightly deed than you have done to-day, and i know that no knight could have done it more nobly. i want you to wear this favor on your hand." she kissed his hand and left the room. jack didn't seem to mind the wound in his head, but he gave great attention to his hand. chapter xliii the result as soon as the first report of the battle reached me, i telephoned to bill jackson, asking him to come at once to four oaks and to bring a man with him. when he arrived, attended by his big irishman, my men had already put one of the farm teams to a great farm wagon, and had filled the box nearly full of hay. we gave jackson a hurried account of the fight and asked him to go at once and offer relief to the wounded,--if such relief were needed. jackson was willing enough to go, but he was greatly disappointed that he had missed the fight; it seemed unnatural that there should be a big fight in his neighborhood and he not in it. "i'd give a ten-acre lot to have been with you, lads," said the big farmer as he started off. word had been sent to dr. high to be ready to care for some broken heads. two hours later i drove to the inn at exeter and found the doctor just commencing the work of repair. thirteen men had been brought in by the wagon, twelve of them more or less cut and bruised about the head, and all needing some surgical attention. the thirteenth man was stone dead. a terrific blow on the back of the head had crushed his skull as if it had been an egg-shell, and he must have died instantly. after looking this poor fellow over to make sure that there was no hope for him, we turned our attention to the wounded. the barn had been turned into a hospital, and in two hours we had a dozen sore heads well cared for, and their owners comfortably placed for the night on soft hay covered by blankets from the inn. mrs. french brought tea and gruels for the thirsty, feverish fellows, and we placed otto and the big irishman on duty as nurses for the night. the coroner had been summoned, and arrived as we finished our work. he was an energetic official, and lost no time in getting a jury of six to listen to the statements which the wounded men would give. to their credit be it said that every one who gave testimony at all, gave it to the effect that the miners were crazy-drunk, that they stopped the carriage, provoked the fight, and did their utmost to disable or destroy the enemy. the coroner would listen to no further testimony, but gave the case to the jury. in five minutes their verdict was returned, "justifiable and commendable homicide by person unknown to the jury." the news of a fight and the death of a miner had reached gordonville, where it created intense excitement. by the time the inquest was over a crowd of at least fifty miners had collected near the barn. much grumbling and some loud threats were heard. jackson took it upon himself to meet these angry men, and no one could have done better. stepping upon a box which raised him a foot or two above the crowd, he said:-- "see here, fellows, i want to say a word to you. my name's jackson--bill jackson; perhaps some of you know me. if you don't, i'll introduce myself. i wasn't in this fight,--worse luck for me! but i am wide open for engagements in that line. some one inside said that this gang must be conciliated, and i thought i would come out and do it. i understand that you feel sore over this affair,--it's natural that you should,--but you must remember that those boys out at four oaks couldn't accommodate all of you. if you wouldn't mind taking me for a substitute, i'll do my level best to make it lively for you. you don't need cards of introduction to me; you needn't be american citizens; you needn't speak english; all you have to do is to put up your hands or cock your hats, and i'll know what you mean. if any of you thinks he hasn't had his share of what's been going on this afternoon, he may just call on bill jackson for the balance. i want to conciliate you if i can! i'm a good-tempered man, and not the kind to pick a quarrel; but if any of you low-lived dogs are looking for a fight, i'm not the man to disappoint you! i came out here to satisfy you in this matter and to send you home contented, and, by the jumping jews! i'll do it if i have to break the head of every dog's son among you! they told me to speak gently to you, and by thunder, i've done it; but now i'm going to say a word for myself! "a lot of your dirty crowd attacked two of the decentest men in the county when they were riding with ladies; one of the gang got killed and the rest got their skulls cracked. would these boys fight for the girls they had with them? hell's blazes! i'll fight for just thinking of it! just one of you duffers say 'boo' to me! i'm going right through you!" jackson sprang into the crowd, which parted like water before a strong swimmer. he cocked his hat, smacked his fists, and invited any or all to stand up to him. he was crazy for a fight, to get even with jack and jarvis; but no one was willing to favor him. he marched through the gang lengthways, crossways, and diagonally, but to no purpose. in great disgust he returned to the barn and reported that the crowd would not be "conciliated." when we left, however, there were no miners to be seen. it was after one o'clock in the morning when i reached home. going directly to the room occupied by the boys, i met polly on the stairs. "i'm glad you've come," said she, "for i can't do a thing with those boys; they are too wild for any use." entering the room, i found the lads in bed, but hilarious. they had sent for lars and had filled him full of hot stuff and commendation. he was sitting on the edge of a chair between the two beds, his honest eyes bulging and his head rolling from the effects of unusual potations. the lads had tasted the cup, too, but lightly; their high spirits came from other sources. victories in war and in love deserve celebration; and when the two are united, a bit of freedom must be permitted. they sat bolt upright against the heads of their beds with flushed faces and shining eyes. they shouted greek and latin verse at the bewildered swede; they gave him the story of lars porsena in the original, and then in bad swedish. they called him lars porsena,--for had he not fought gallantly? then he was gustavus adolphus,--for had he not come to the aid of the protestants when they were in sore need? and then things got mixed and the "royal swede" was lars adolphus or gustavus porsena viking all in one. the honest fellow was more than half crazed by strong waters, incomprehensible words, and "jollying up" which the young chaps had given him. "see here, boys, don't you see that you're sending your noble swede to his lutzen before his time,--not dead, indeed, but dead drunk? this isn't the sort of medicine for either of you; you should have been asleep three hours ago. i'll take your last victim home." we heard no more from any of the fighters until nine in the morning. in looking them over i found that the swede had as sore a head as either of the others, though he had never taken a blow. many friends came to see the boys during the days of their seclusion, to congratulate them on their fortunate escape, and to compliment them on their skill and courage. the lads enjoyed being made much of, and their convalescence was short and cheerful. of course sir tom was the most constant and most enthusiastic visitor. the warm-hearted irishman loved the boys always, but now he seemed to venerate them. the successful club fight appealed to his national instincts as nothing else could have done. "with twenty years off and a shillalah in me hand i would have been proud to stand with you. by the lord, i'm asking too much! i'll yield the twenty years and only ask for the stick!" and his cane went whirling around his head, now guarding, now striking, and now with elaborate flourishes, after the most approved donny-brook fashion. "but, me friend jarvis, what is this you have on your face? pond's extract! oh, murder! what is the world coming to when fresh beef and usquebaugh are crowded to the wall by bad-smelling water! look at me nose; it is as straight as god made it, and yet many a time it has been knocked to one side of me face or spread all over me features. nothing but whiskey and raw beef could ever coax it back! it's god's mercy if you are not deformed for life, me friend. such privileges are not to be neglected with impunity. let me bathe your face with whiskey and put a beef-steak poultice after it, and i'll have you as handsome as a girl in three days." "give me the steak and whiskey inside and i'll feel handsome at once," said jarvis. "oh, the rashness of youth!" said sir tom. "but i'll not say a word against it. youth is the greatest luck in the world, and i'll not copper it." and then our sporting friend grew reminiscent and told of a time at limmer's when the marquis and he occupied beds in the same room, not unlike our boys' room--only smoky and dingy--and poulticed their battered faces with beef, and used usquebaugh inside and outside, after ten friendly rounds. "queensbary's nose never resumed entirely after that night, but mine came back like rubber. maybe it was the beef--maybe it was usquebaugh; me own preference is in favor of the latter." sir tom came every day so long as the boys were confined to the place, and each day he was able to develop some new incident connected with the battle which called for applause. after hearing lars tell his story for the fourth time, he gave him a ten-dollar note, saying:-- "you did nobly for a swede, mr. gustavus adolphus, but i would give ten tenners to have had your place and your shillalah,--a swede for a match-lock, but an irishman for a stick." jack had hardly recovered when he was waited on by a committee from the mine with a request that he would make another speech. he was asked to make good his offer of bonding the property, and also to formulate a plan of cooperation for the guidance of the men. jack had the plans for a cooperative mining village well digested, and was anxious to get them before the miners. as soon as he was fit he went to gordonville to try to organize the work. jarvis of course went with him, and bill jackson and sir tom would not be denied; they did not say so, but they looked as if they thought some diversion might be found. in spite of the influence of strong whiskey, however, the meeting passed off peacefully. the results that grew from this effort at reformation were so great and so far-reaching that they deserve a book for their narration. chapter xliv deep waters for sharp contrasts give me the dull country. the unexpected is the usual in small and in great things alike as they happen on a farm, and i make no apology to the reader for entering them in my narrative. i only ask him, if he be a city man, to take my word for the truth as to the general facts. to some elaboration and embellishment i plead guilty, but the groundwork is truth, and the facts stated are as real as the foundations of my buildings or the cows in my stalls. if the fortunate reader be a country man, he will need no assurance from me, for his eyes have seen and his ears have heard the strange and startling episodes with which the quiet country-side is filled. i do not dare record all the adventures which clustered around us at four oaks. people who know only the monotonous life of cities would not believe the half if told, and i do not wish to invite discredit upon my story of the making of the factory farm. the incidents i have given of the strike at gordon's mine are substantially correct, and i would love to follow them to their sequel,--the coöperative mine; but as that is a story by itself, i cannot do it now. i promise myself, however, the pleasure of writing a history of this innovation in coal-mining at an early date. it is worth the world's knowing that a copartnership can exist between three hundred equal partners without serious friction, and that community in business interests on a large scale can be successfully managed without any effort to control personal liberty, either domestic, social, or religious. indeed, i believe the success of this experiment is due largely to the absence of any attempt to superintend the private interests of its members,--the only bond being a common financial one, and the one requisite to membership, ability to save a portion of the wages earned. but to go back to farm matters. in august the ground was stirred for the second time around the young trees. to do this, the mulch was turned back and the surface for a space of three feet all around the tree was loosened by hoe or mattock, and the mulch was then returned. the trees were vigorous, and their leaves had the polish of health, in spite of the dry july and august. the mulching must receive the credit for much of this thrift, for it protected the soil from the rays of the sun and invited the deep moisture to rise toward the surface. few people realize the amount of water that enters into the daily consumption of a tree. it is said that the four acres of leaf surface of a large elm will transpire or yield to evaporation eight tons of water in a day, and that it takes more than five hundred tons of water to produce one ton of hay, wheat, oats, or other crop. this seems enormous; but an inch of rain on an acre of ground means more than a hundred tons of water, and precipitation in our part of the country is about thirty-six inches per annum, so that we can count on over thirty-six hundred tons of water per acre to supply this tremendous evaporation of plant life. water-pot and hose look foolish in the face of these figures; indeed, they are poor makeshifts to keep life in plants during pinching times. a much more effective method is to keep the soil loose under a heavy mulch, for then the deep waters will rise. in our climate the tree's growth for the year is practically completed by july , and fortunately dry times rarely occur so early. we are, therefore, pretty certain to get the wood growth, no matter how dry the year, since it would take several years of unusual drought to prevent it. of course the wood is not all that we wish for in fruit trees; the fruit is the main thing, and to secure the best development of it an abundant rainfall is needed after the wood is grown. if the rain doesn't come in july and august, heavy mulching must be the fruit-grower's reliance, and a good one it will prove if the drought doesn't continue more than one year. after july the new wood hardens and gets ready for the trying winter. if july and august are very wet, growth may continue until too late for the wood to harden, and it consequently goes into winter poorly prepared to resist its rigors. the result is a killing back of the soft wood, but usually no serious loss to the trees. the effort to stimulate late summer growth by cultivation and fertilization is all wrong; use manures and fertilizers freely from march until early june, but not later. the fall mulch of manure, if used, is more for warmth than for fertility; it is a blanket for the roots, but much of its value is leached away by the suns and rains of winter. i felt that i had made a mistake in not sowing a cover crop in my orchard the previous year. there are many excellent reasons for the cover crop and not one against it. the first reason is that it protects the land from the rough usage and wash of winter storms; the second, that it adds humus to the soil; and the third, if one of the legumes is used, that it collects nitrogen from the air, stores it in each knuckle and joint, and holds it there until it is liberated by the decay of the plant. as nitrogen is the most precious of plant foods, and as the nitrate beds and deposits are rapidly becoming exhausted, we must look to the useful legumes to help us out until the scientists shall be able to fix the unlimited but volatile supply which the atmosphere contains, and thus to remove the certain, though remote, danger of a nitrogen famine. that this will be done in the near future by electric forces, and with such economy as to make the product available for agricultural purposes, is reasonably sure. in the meantime we must use the vetches, peas, beans, and clovers which are such willing workers. the legumes fulfil the three requisites of the cover crop: protection, humus, and the storing of nitrogen. that was why, when the corn in the orchard was last cultivated in july, i planted cow peas between the rows. the peas made a fair growth in spite of the dry season, and after the corn was cut they furnished fine pasture for the brood sows, that ate the peas and trampled down the vines. in the spring ploughing this black mat was turned under, and with it went a store of fertility to fatten the land. cow peas were sowed in all the corn land in , and the rule of the farm is to sow corn-fields with peas, crimson clover, or some other leguminous plant. as my land is divided almost equally each year between corn and oats, which follow each other, it gets a cover crop turned under every two years over the whole of it. great quantities of manure are hauled upon the oat stubble in the early spring, and these fields are planted to corn, while the corn stubble is fertilized by the cover crop, and oats are sown. the land is taxed heavily every year, but it increases in fertility and crop-making capacity. for the past two years my oats have averaged forty-seven bushels and my corn nearly sixty-eight bushels per acre. there is no waste land in my fields, and we have made such a strenuous fight against weeds that they no longer seriously tax the land. the wisdom of the work done on the fence rows is now apparent. the ploughing and seeding made it easy to keep the brush and weeds down; hay gathered close to the fences more than pays us for the mowing; and we have no tall weed heads to load the wind with seeds. this is a matter which is not sufficiently considered by the majority of farmers, for weeds are allowed to tax the land almost as much as crops do, and yet they pay no rent. fence lines and corners are usually breeding beds for these pests, and it will pay any landowner to suppress them. chapter xlv dogs and horses it was definitely decided in august that jane was not to go back to farmington. we had all been of two minds over this question, and it was a comfort to have it settled, though i always suspect that my share of it was not beyond the suspicion of selfishness. jane was just past nineteen. she had a fair education, so far as books go, and she did not wish to graduate simply for the honor of a diploma. indeed, there were many studies between her and the diploma which she loathed. she could never understand how a girl of healthy mind could care for mathematics, exact science, or dead languages. english and french were enough for her tongue, and history, literature, and metaphysics enough for her mind. "i can learn much more from the books in your library and from the dogs and horses than i can at school, besides being a thousand times happier; and oh, dad, if you will let me have a forge and workshop, i will make no end of things." this was a new idea to me, and i looked into it with some interest. i knew that jane was deft with her fingers, but i did not know that she had a special wish to cultivate this deftness or to put it to practical use. "what can you do with a forge?" said i. "you can't shoe the horses or sharpen the ploughs. can you make nails? they are machine-made now, and you couldn't earn ten cents a week, even at horse-shoe nails." "i don't want to make nails, dad; i want to work in copper and brass, and iron, too, but in girl fashion. mary town has a forge in hartford, and i spent lots of saturdays with her. she says that i am cleverer than she is, but of course she was jollying me, for she makes beautiful things; but i can learn, and it's great fun." "what kind of things does this young lady make, dear?" "lamp-shades, paper-knives, hinges, bag-tops, buckles, and lots of things. she could sell them, too, if she had to. it's like learning a trade, dad." "all right, child, you shall have a forge, if you will agree not to burn yourself up. do you roll up your sleeves and wear a leather apron?" "why, of course, just like a blacksmith; only mine will be of soft brown leather and pinked at the edges." so jane was to have her forge. we selected a site for it at once in the grove to the east of the house and about yards away, and set the carpenter at work. the shop proved to be a feature of the place, and soon became a favorite resort for old and young for five o'clock teas and small gossiping parties. the house was a shingled cottage, sixteen by thirty-two, divided into two rooms. the first room, sixteen by twenty, was the company room, but it contained a work bench as well as the dainty trappings of a girl's lounging room. in the centre of the wall that separated the rooms was a huge brick chimney, with a fireplace in the front room and a forge bed in the rear room, which was the forge proper. i suppose i must charge the $ which this outfit cost to the farm account and pay yearly interest on it, for it is a fixture; but i protest that it is not essential to the construction of a factory farm, and it may be omitted by those who have no daughter jane. there were other things hinging on jane's home-staying which made me think that, from the standpoint of economy, i had made a mistake in not sending her back to farmington. it was not long before the dog proposition was sprung upon me; insidiously at first, until i had half committed myself, and then with such force and sweep as to take me off my prudent feet. my own faithful terrier, which had dogged my heels for three years, seemed a member of the family, and reasonably satisfied my dog needs. that jane should wish a terrier of some sort to tug at her skirts and claw her lace was no more than natural, and i was quite willing to buy a blue blood and think nothing of the $ or $ which it might cost. we canvassed the list of terriers,--bull, boston, fox, irish, skye, scotch, airedale, and all,--and had much to say in favor of each. one day jane said:-- "dad, what do you think of the russian wolf-hound?" "fine as silk," said i, not seeing the trap; "the handsomest dog that runs." "i think so, too. i saw some beauties in the seabright kennels. wouldn't one of them look fine on the lawn?--lemon and white, and so tall and silky. i saw one down there, and he wasn't a year old, but his tail looked like a great white ostrich feather, and it touched the ground. wouldn't it be grand to have such a dog follow me when i rode. say, dad, why not have one?" "what do you suppose a good one would cost?" "i don't know, but a good bit more than a terrier, if they sell dogs by size. may i write and find out?" "there's no harm in doing that," said i, like the jellyfish that i am. jane wasted no time, but wrote at once, and at least seventeen times each day, until the reply came, she gave me such vivid accounts of the beauties of the beasts and of the pleasure she would have in owning one, that i grew enthusiastic as well, and quite made up my mind that she should not be disappointed. when the letter came, there was suppressed excitement until she had read it, and then excitement unsuppressed. "dad, we can have alexis, son of katinka by peter the great, for $ ! see what the letter says: 'eleven months old, tall and strong in quarters, white, with even lemon markings, better head than marksman, and a sure winner in the best of company.' isn't that great? and i don't think $ is much, do you?" "not for a horse or a house, dear, but for a dog--" "but you know, dad, this isn't a common dog. we mustn't think of it as a dog; it's a barzoi; that isn't too much for a barzoi, is it?" "not for a barzoi, or a yacht either; i guess you will have to have one or the other." "the seabright man says he has a girl dog by marksman out of katrina that is the very picture of alexis, only not so large, and he will sell both to the same person for $ ; they are such good friends." "break away, daughter, do you want a steam launch with your yacht?" "but just think, dad, only $ for this one. you save $ , don't you see?" "dimly, i must confess, as through a glass darkly. but, dear, i may come to see it through your eyes and in the light of this altruistic dog fancier. i'm such a soft one that it's a wonder i'm ever trusted with money." the natural thing occurred once more; the fool and his money parted company, and two of the most beautiful dogs came to live on our lawn. to live on our lawn, did i say? not much! such wonderful creatures must have a house and grounds of their own to retire to when they were weary of using ours, or when our presence bored them. the kennel and runs were built near the carriage barn, the runs, twenty by one hundred feet, enclosed with high wire netting. the kennel, eight by sixteen, was a handsome structure of its kind, with two compartments eight by eight (for jane spoke for the future), and beds, benches, and the usual fixtures which well-bred dogs are supposed to require. the house for these dogs cost $ , so i was obliged to add another $ to the interest-bearing debt. "if jane keeps on in this fashion," thought i, "i shall have to refund at a lower rate,"--and she did keep on. no sooner were the dogs safely kennelled than she began to think how fine it would look to be followed by this wonderful pair along the country roads and through the streets of exeter. to be followed, she must have a horse and a saddle and a bridle and a habit; and later on i found that these things did not grow on the bushes in our neighborhood. i drew a line at these things, however, and decided that they should not swell the farm account. thus i keep from the reader's eye some of the foolishness of a doting parent who has always been as warm wax in the hands of his, nearly always, reasonable children. in my stable were two kentucky-bred saddlers of much more than average quality, for they had strains of warm blood in their veins. there is no question nowadays as to the value of warm blood in either riding or driving horses. it gives ability, endurance, courage, and docility beyond expectation. one-sixteenth thorough blood will, in many animals, dominate the fifteen-sixteenths of cold blood, and prove its virtue by unusual endurance, stamina, and wearing capacity. the blue-grass region of kentucky has furnished some of the finest horses in the world, and i have owned several which gave grand service until they were eighteen or twenty years old. an honest horseman at paris, kentucky, has sold me a dozen or more, and i was willing to trust his judgment for a saddler for jane. my request to him was for a light-built horse; weight, one thousand pounds; game and spirited, but safe for a woman, and one broken to jump. everything else, including price, was left to him. in good time jane's horse came, and we were well pleased with it, as indeed we ought to have been. my paris man wrote: "i send a bay mare that ought to fill the bill. she is as quiet as a kitten, can run like a deer, and jump like a kangaroo. my sister has ridden her for four months, and she is not speaking to me now. if you don't like her, send her back." but i did like her, and i sent, instead, a considerable check. the mare was a bright bay with a white star on her forehead and white stockings on her hind feet, stood fifteen hands three inches, weighed pounds, and looked almost too light built; but when we noted the deep chest, strong loins, thin legs, and marvellous thighs, we were free to admit that force and endurance were promised. jane was delighted. "dad, if i live to be a hundred years old, i will never forget this day. she's the sweetest horse that ever lived. i must find a nice name for her, and to-morrow we will take our first ride, you and tom and aloha and i--yes, that's her name." we did ride the next day, and many days thereafter; and aloha proved all and more than the kentuckian had promised. chapter xlvi the skim-milk trust the third quarter of the year made a better showing than any previous one, due chiefly to the sale of hogs in august. the hens did well up to september, when they began to make new clothes for themselves and could not be bothered with egg-making. there were a few more than seven hundred in the laying pens, and nearly as many more rapidly approaching the useful age. the chief advantage in early chickens is that they will take their places at the nests in october or november while the older ones are dressmaking. this is important to one who looks for a steady income from his hens,--october and november being the hardest months to provide for. a few scattered eggs in the pullet runs showed that the late february and early march chickens were beginning to have a realizing sense of their obligations to the world and to the headman, and that they were getting into line to accept them. more cotton-seed meal was added to the morning mash for the old hens, and the corn meal was reduced a little and the oatmeal increased, as was also the red pepper; but do what you will or feed what you like, the hen will insist upon a vacation at this season of the year. you may shorten it, perhaps, but you cannot prevent it. the only way to keep the egg-basket full is to have a lot of youngsters coming on who will take up the laying for october and november. we milked thirty-seven cows during july, august, and september, and got more than a thousand pounds of milk a day. the butter sold amounted to a trifle more than $ a month. i think this an excellent showing, considering the fact that the colony at four oaks never numbered less than twenty-four during that time, and often many more. i ought to say that the calves had the first claim to the skim-milk; but as we never kept many for more than a few weeks, this claim was easily satisfied. it was like the bonds of a corporation,--the first claim, but a comparatively small one. the hens came next; they held preferred stock, and always received a five-pound, semi-daily dividend to each pen of forty. the growing pigs came last; they held the common stock, which was often watered by the swill and dish-water from both houses and the buttermilk and butter-washing from the dairy. i hold that the feeding value of skim-milk is not less than forty cents a hundred pounds, as we use it at four oaks. this seems a high price when it can often be bought for fifteen cents a hundred at the factories; but i claim that it is worth more than twice as much when fed in perfect freshness,--certainly $ a day would not buy the skim-milk from my dairy, for it is worth more than that to me to feed. this by-product is essential to the smooth running of my factory. without it the chickens and pigs would not grow as fast, and it is the best food for laying hens,--nothing else will give a better egg-yield. the longer my experiment continues, the stronger is my faith that the combination of cow, hog, and hen, with fruit as a filler, are ideal for the factory farm. with such a plant well-started and well-managed, and with favorable surroundings, i do not see how a man can prevent money from flowing to him in fair abundance. the record of the fourth quarter is as follows:-- butter $ . eggs . hogs . -------- total $ . chapter xlvii naboth's vineyard >one hazy, lazy october afternoon, as my friend kyrle and i sat on the broad porch hitting our pipes, sipping high balls, and watching the men and machines in the corn-fields, as all toiling sons of the soil should do, he said:-- "doctor, i don't think you've made any mistake in this business." "lots of them, kyrle; but none too serious to mend." "yes, i suppose so; but i didn't mean it that way. it was no mistake when you made the change." "you're right, old man. it's done me a heap of good, and polly and the youngsters were never so happy. i only wish we had done it earlier." "do you think i could manage a farm?" "why, of course you can; you've managed your business, haven't you? you've grown rich in a business which is a great sight more taxing. how have you done it?" "by using my head, i suppose." "that's just it; if a man will use his head, any business will go,--farming or making hats. it's the gray matter that counts, and the fellow that puts a little more of it into his business than his neighbor does, is the one who'll get on." "but farming is different; so much seems to depend upon winds and rains and frosts and accidents of all sorts that are out of one's line." "not so much as you think, kyrle. of course these things cut in, but one must discount them in farming as in other lines of business. a total crop failure is an unknown thing in this region; we can count on sufficient rain for a moderate crop every year, and we know pretty well when to look for frosts. if a man will do well by his land, the harvest will come as sure as taxes. all the farmer has to do is to make the best of what nature and intelligent cultivation will always produce. but he must use his gray matter in other ways than in just planning the rotation of crops. when he finds his raw staples selling for a good deal less than actual value,--less than he can produce them for, he should go into the market and buy against higher prices, for he may be absolutely certain that higher prices will come." "but how is one to know? corn changes so that one can't form much idea of its actual value." "no more than other staples. you know what fur is worth, because you've watched the fur market for twenty years. if it should fall to half its present price, you would feel safe in buying a lot. you know that it would make just as good hats as it ever did, and that the hats, in all probability, would give you the usual profit. it's the same with corn and oats. i know their feeding value; and when they fall much below it, i fill my granary, because for my purpose they are as valuable as if they cost three times as much. last year i bought ten thousand bushels of corn and oats at a tremendously low price. i don't expect to have such a chance again; but i shall watch the market, and if corn goes below thirty cents or oats below twenty cents, i will fill my granary to the roof. i can make them pay big profits on such prices." "will you sell this plant, williams?" "not for a song, you may be sure." "what has it cost you to date?" "don't know exactly,--between $ , and $ , , i reckon; the books will show." "will you take twenty per cent advance on what the books show? i'm on the square." "now see here, old man, what would be the good of selling this factory for $ , ? how could i place the money so that it would bring me half the things which this farm brings me now? could i live in a better house, or have better food, better service, better friends, or a better way of entertaining them? you know that $ or $ a year would not supply half the luxury which we secure at four oaks, or give half the enjoyment to my family or my friends. don't you see that it makes little difference what we call our expenses out here, so long as the farm pays them and gives us a surplus besides? the investment is not large for one to get a living from, and it makes possible a lot of things which would be counted rank extravagance in the city. here's one of them." a cavalcade was just entering the home lot. first came jessie gordon on her thoroughbred mare lightfoot, and with her, laura on my jerry. laura's foot is as dainty in the stirrup as on the rugs, and she has jerry's consent and mine to put it where she likes. following them were jane and bill jackson, with jane's slender mare looking absolutely delicate beside the big brown gelding that carried jackson's pounds with ease. the horses all looked as if there had been "something doing," and they were hurried to the stables. the ladies laughed and screamed for a season, as seems necessary for young ladies, and then departed, leaving us in peace. jackson filled his pipe before remarking:-- "i've been over the ridge into the dunkard settlement, and they have the cholera there to beat the band. joe siegel lost sixty hogs in three days, and there are not ten well hogs in two miles. what do you think of that?" "that means a hard 'fight mit siegel,'" said kyrle. "it ought to mean a closer quarantine on this side of the ridge," said i, "and you must fumigate your clothes before you appear before your swine, jackson. it's more likely to be swine plague than cholera at this time of the year, but it's just as bad; one can hardly tell the difference, and we must look sharp." "how does the contagion travel, doctor?" "on horseback, when such chumps as you can be found. you probably have some millions of germs up your sleeve now, or, more likely, on your back, and i wouldn't let you go into my hog pen for a $ note. i'm so well quarantined that i don't much fear contagion; but there's always danger from infected dust. the wind blows it about, and any mote may be an automobile for a whole colony of bacteria, which may decide to picnic in my piggery. this dry weather is bad for us, and if we get heavy winds from off the ridge, i'm going to whistle for rain." "i say, williams, when you came out here i thought you a tenderfoot, sure enough, who was likely to pay money for experience; but, by the jumping jews! you've given us natives cards and spades." "i _was_ a tenderfoot so far as practical experience goes, but i tried to use the everyday sense which god gave me, and i find that's about all a man needs to run a business like this." "you run it all right, for returns, and that's what we are after; and i'm beginning to catch on. i want you to tell me, before kyrle here, why you gave me that bull two years ago." "what's the matter with the bull, jackson? isn't he all right?" "sure he's all right, and as fine as silk; but why did you give him to me? why didn't you keep him for yourself?" "well, bill, i thought you would like him, and we were neighbors, and--" "you thought i would save you the trouble of keeping him, didn't you?" "well, perhaps that did have some influence. you see, this is a factory farm from fence to fence, except this forty which polly bosses, and the utilitarian idea is on top. keeping the bull didn't exactly run with my notion of economy, especially when i could conveniently have him kept so near, and at the same time be generous to a neighbor." "that's it, and it's taken me two years to find it out. you're trying to follow that idea all along the line. you're dead right, and i'm going to tag on, if you don't mind. i was glad enough for your present at the time, and i'm glad yet; but i've learned my lesson, and you may bet your dear life that no man will ever again give me a bull." "that's right, jackson. now you have struck the key-note; stick to it, and you will make money twice as fast as you have done. have a mark, and keep your eye on it, and your plough will turn a straight furrow." jackson sent for his horse, and just before he mounted, i said, "are you thinking of selling your farm?" "i used to think of it, but i've been to school lately and can 'do my sums' better. no, i guess i won't sell the paternal acres; but who wants to buy?" "kyrle, here, is looking for a farm about the size of yours, and to tell you the truth i should like him for a neighbor. it's dollars to doughnuts that i could give him a whole herd of bulls." "indeed, you can't do anything of the kind! i wouldn't take a gold dollar from you until i had it tested. i'm on to your curves." "but seriously, jackson, i must have more land; my stock will eat me out of house and home by the time the factory is running full steam. what would you say to a proposition of $ , for one hundred acres along my north line?" "a year ago i would have jumped at it. now i say 'nit.' i need it all, doctor; i told you i was going to tag on. but what's the matter with the old lady's quarter across your south road?" "nothing's the matter with the land, only she won't sell it at any price." "i know; but that drunken brute of a son will sell as soon as she's under the sod, and they say the poor old girl is on her last legs,--down with distemper or some other beastly disease. i'll tell you what i'll do. i'll sound the renegade son and see how he measures. some one will get it before long, and it might as well be you." jackson galloped off, and kyrle and i sat on the porch and divided the widow's -acre mite. it was a good strip of land, lying a fair mile on the south road and a quarter of a mile deep. the buildings were of no value, the fences were ragged to a degree, but i coveted the land. it was the vineyard of naboth to me, and i planned its future with my friend and accessory sitting by. i destroyed the estimable old lady's house and barns, ran my ploughshares through her garden and flower beds, and turned the home site into one great field of lusty corn, without so much as saying by your leave. thus does the greed of land grow upon one. but in truth, i saw that i must have more land. my factory would require more than ten thousand bushels of grain, with forage and green foods in proportion, to meet its full capacity, and i could not hope to get so much from the land then under cultivation. again, in a few years--a very few--the fifty acres of orchard would be no longer available for crops, and this would still further reduce my tillable land. with the orchards out of use, i should have but acres for all crops other than hay. if i could add this coveted , it would give me acres of excellent land for intensive farming. "i should like it on this side of the road," said i, "but i suppose that will have to do." "what will have to do?" asked kyrle. "the acres over there." "you unconscionable wretch! have you evicted the poor widow, and she on her deathbed? for stiffening the neck and hardening the heart, commend me to the close-to-nature life of the farmer. i wouldn't own a farm for worlds. it risks one's immortality. give me the wicked city for pasturage--and a friend who will run a farm, at his own risk, and give me the benefit of it." chapter xlviii maids and mallards we have so rarely entered our house with the reader that he knows little of its domestic machinery. so much depends upon this machinery that one must always take it into consideration when reckoning the pleasures and even the comforts of life anywhere, and this is especially true in the country. we have such a lot of people about that our servants cannot sing the song of lonesomeness that makes dolor for most suburbanites. they are "churched" as often as they wish, and we pay city wages; but still it is not all clear sailing in this quarter of polly's realm. i fancy that we get on better than some of our neighbors; but we do not brag, and i usually feel that i am smoking my pipe in a powder magazine. there is something essentially wrong in the working-girl world, and i am glad that i was not born to set it right. we cannot down the spirit of unrest and improvidence that holds possession of cooks and waitresses, and we needs must suffer it with such patience as we can. two of our house servants were more or less permanent; that is, they had been with us since we opened the house, and were as content as restless spirits can be. these were the housekeeper and the cook,--the hub of the house. the former is a norwegian, tall, angular, and capable, with a knot of yellow hair at the back of her head,--ostensibly for sticking lead pencils into,--and a disposition to keep things snug and clean. her duties include the general supervision of both houses and the special charge of store-rooms, food cellars, and table supplies of all sorts. she is efficient, she whistles while she works, and i see but little of her. i suspect that polly knows her well. the cook, mary, is small, irish, gray, with the temper of a pepper-pod and the voice of a guinea-hen suffering from bronchitis, but she can cook like an angel. she is an artist, and i feel as if the seven-dollar-a-week stipend were but a "tip" to her, and that sometime she will present me with a bill for her services. my safeguard, and one that i cherish, is an angry word from her to the housekeeper. she jeeringly asserted that she, the cook, got $ a week more than she, the housekeeper, did. as every one knows that the housekeeper has $ a week, i am holding this evidence against the time when mary asks for a lump sum adequate to her deserts. the number of things which mary can make out of everything and out of nothing is wonderful; and i am fully persuaded that all the moneys paid to a really good cook are moneys put into the bank. i often make trips to the kitchen to tell mary that "the dinner was great," or that "mrs. kyrle wants the receipt for that pudding," or that "my friend kyrle asks if he may see you make a salad dressing;" but "don't do it, mary; let the secret die with you." the cook cackles, like the guinea-hen that she is, but the dishes are none the worse for the commendation. the laundress is just a washerwoman, so far as i know. she undoubtedly changes with the seasons, but i do not see her, though the clothes are always bleaching on the grass at the back of the house. the maids are as changeable as old-fashioned silk. there are always two of them; but which two, is beyond me. i tell polly that four oaks is a sprocket-wheel for maids, with two links of an endless chain always on top. it makes but little difference which links are up, so the work goes smoothly. polly thinks the maids come to four oaks just as less independent folk go to the mountains or the shore, for a vacation, or to be able to say to the policeman, "i've been to the country." their system is past finding out; but no matter what it is, we get our dishes washed and our beds made without serious inconvenience. the wage account in the house amounts to just $ a week. my pet system of an increasing wage for protracted service doesn't appeal to these birds of passage, who alight long enough to fill their crops with our wild rice and celery, and then take wing for other feeding-grounds. this kind of life seems fitted for mallards and maids, and i have no quarrel with either. from my view, there are happier instincts than those which impel migration; but remembering that personal views are best applied to personal use, i wish both maids and mallards _bon voyage_. chapter xlix the sunken garden extending directly west from the porch for feet is an open pergola, of simple construction, but fast gaining beauty from the rapid growth of climbers which polly and johnson have planted. it is floored with brick for the protection of dainty feet, and near the western end cluster rustic benches, chairs, tables, and such things as women and gardeners love. facing the west feet of this pergola is polly's sunken flower garden, which is her special pride. it extends south feet, and is built in the side of the hill so that its eastern wall just shows a coping above the close-cropped lawn. of course the western wall is much higher, as the lawn slopes sharply; but it was filled in so as to make this wall-enclosed garden quite level. the walls which rise above the flower beds ½ feet, are beginning to look decorated, thanks to creeping vines and other things which a cunning gardener and polly know. flowers of all sorts--annuals, biennials (triennials, perhaps), and perennials--cover the beds, which are laid out in strange, irregular fashion, far indeed from my rectangular style. these beds please the eye of the mistress, and of her friends, too, if they are candid in their remarks, which i doubt. while excavating the garden we found a granite boulder shaped somewhat like an egg and nearly five feet long. it was a big thing, and not very shapely; but it came from the soil, and polly wanted it for the base of her sun-dial. we placed it, big end down, in the mathematical centre of the garden (i insisted on that), and sunk it into the ground to make it solid; then a stone mason fashioned a flat space on the top to accommodate an old brass dial that polly had found in boston. the dial is not half bad. from the heavy, octagonal brass base rises a slender quill to cast its shadow on the figured circle, while around this circle old english characters ask, "am i not wise, who note only bright hours?" a plat of sod surrounds the dial, and polly goes to it at least once a day to set her watch by the shadow of the quill, though i have told her a hundred times that it is seventeen minutes off standard time. i am convinced that this estimable lady wilfully ignores conventional time and marks her cycles by such divisions as "catalogue time," "seed-buying time," "planting time," "sprouting time," "spraying time," "flowering time," "seed-gathering time," "mulching time," and "dreary time," until the catalogues come again. i know it seemed no time at all until she had let me in to the tune of $ for the pergola, walls, and garden. she bought the sun-dial with her own money, i am thankful to say, and it doesn't enter into this account. i think it must have cost a pretty penny, for she had a hat "made over" that spring. polly has planted the lawn with a lot of shade trees and shrubs, and has added some clumps of fruit trees. few trees have been planted near the house; the four fine oaks, from which we take our name, stand without rivals and give ample shade. the great black oak near the east end of the porch is a tower of strength and beauty, which is "seen and known of all men," while the three white oaks farther to the west form a clump which casts a grateful shade when the sun begins to decline. the seven acres of forest to the east is left severely alone, save where the carriage drive winds through it, and polly watches so closely that the foot of the philistine rarely crushes her wild flowers. its sacredness recalls the schoolgirl's definition of a virgin forest: "one in which the hand of man has never dared to put his foot into it." polly wanders in this grove for hours; but then she knows where and how things grow, and her footsteps are followed by flowers. if by chance she brushes one down, it rises at once, shakes off the dust, and says, "i ought to have known better than to wander so far from home." she keeps a wise eye on the vegetable garden, too, and has stores of knowledge as to seed-time and harvest and the correct succession of garden crops. she and johnson planned a greenhouse, which nelson built, for flowers and green stuff through the winter, she said; but i think it is chiefly a place where she can play in the dirt when the weather is bad. anyhow, that glass house cost the farm $ , and the interest and taxes are going on yet. i as well as polly had to do some building that autumn. three more chicken-houses were built, making five in all. each consists in ten compartments twenty feet wide, of which each is intended to house forty hens. when these houses were completed, i had room for forty pens of forty each, which was my limit for laying hens. in addition was one house of ten pens for half-grown chickens and fattening fowls. it would take the hatch of another year to fill my pens, but one must provide for the future. these three houses cost, in round numbers, $ ,--five times as much as polly's glass house,--but i was not going to play in them. i also built a cow-house on the same plan as the first one, but about half the size. this was for the dry cows and the heifers. it cost $ , and gave me stable room enough for the waiting stock, so that i could count on forty milch cows all the time, when my herd was once balanced. forty cows giving milk, six hundred swine of all ages, putting on fat or doing whatever other duty came to hand, fifteen or sixteen hundred hens laying eggs when not otherwise engaged, three thousand apple trees striving with all their might to get large enough to bear fruit,--these made up my ideal of a factory farm; and it looked as if one year more would see it complete. no rain fell in october, and my brook became such a little brook that i dared to correct its ways. we spent a week with teams, ploughs, and scrapers, cutting the fringe and frills away from it, and reducing it to severe simplicity. it is strange, but true, that this reversion to simplicity robbed it of its shy ways and rustic beauty, and left it boldly staring with open eyes and gaping with wide-stretched mouth at the men who turned from it. we put in about two thousand feet of tile drainage on both sides of what polly called "that ditch," and this completed the improvements on the low lands. the land, indeed, was not too low to bear good crops, but it was lightened by under drainage and yielded more each after year. the tiles cost me five cents per foot, or $ for the whole. the work was done by my own men. chapter l the headman generalizes jackson's prophecy came true. the old lady died, and before the ground was fairly settled around her the improvident son accepted a cash offer of $ per acre for his homestead, and the farm was added to mine. this was in november. i at once spent $ for - / miles of fencing to enclose it in one field, charging the farm account with $ , for the land and fence. this transaction was a bargain, from my point of view; and it was a good sale, from the standpoint of the other man, for he put $ , away at five per cent interest, and felt that he need never do a stroke of work again. a lazy man is easily satisfied. in december i sold hogs. it was a choice lot, as much alike as peas in a pod, and gave an average weight of pounds; but the market was exceedingly low. i received the highest quotation for the month, $ . per hundred, and the lot netted $ . it seems hard luck to be obliged to sell fine swine at such a price, and a good many farmers would hold their stock in the hope of a rise; but i do not think this prudent. when a pig is days old, if he has been pushed, he has reached his greatest profit-growth; and he should be sold, even though the market be low. if one could be certain that within a reasonable time, say thirty days, there would be a marked advance, it might do to hold; but no one can be sure of this, and it doesn't usually pay to wait. market the product when at its best, is the rule at four oaks. the young hog is undoubtedly at his best from eight to nine months old. he has made a maximum growth on minimum feed, and from that time on he will eat more and give smaller proportionate returns. there is danger, too, that he will grow stale; for he has been subjected to a forcing system which contemplated a definite time limit and which cannot extend much beyond that limit without risks. force your swine not longer than nine months and sell for what you can get, and you will make more money in the long run than by trying to catch a high market. i sold in december something more than four hundred cockerels, which brought $ . the apples from the old trees were good that year, but not so abundant as the year before, and they brought $ ,--$ . per tree. the hens laid few eggs in october and november, though they resumed work in december; but the pullets did themselves proud. sam said he gathered from fourteen to twenty eggs a day from each pen of forty, which is better than forty per cent. we sold nearly eighteen hundred dozen eggs during this quarter, for $ . the butter account showed nearly twenty-eight hundred pounds sold, which brought $ , and the sale of eleven calves brought $ . these sales closed the credit side of our ledger for the year. apples $ . calves . cockerels . doz. eggs . lb. butter . hogs . -------- total $ . in making up the expense account of that year and the previous one, i found that i should be able in future to say with a good deal of exactness what the gross amount would be, without much figuring. the interest account would steadily decrease, i hoped, while the wage account would increase as steadily until it approached $ ; that year it was $ . each man who had been on the farm more than six months received $ more that year than he did the year before, and this increase would continue until the maximum wage of $ a month was reached; but while some would stay long enough to earn the maximum, others would drop out, and new men would begin work at $ a month. i felt safe, therefore, in fixing $ as the maximum wage limit of any year. time has proven the correctness of this estimate, for $ is the most i have paid for wages during the seven years since this experiment was inaugurated. the food purchased for cows, hogs, and hens may also be definitely estimated. it costs about $ a year for each cow, $ for each hog, and thirty cents for each hen. everything else comes from the land, and is covered by such fixed charges as interest, wages, taxes, insurance, repairs, and replenishments. the food for the colony at four oaks, usually bought at wholesale, doesn't cost more than $ a month per capita. this seems small to a man who is in the habit of paying cash for everything that enters his doors; but it amply provides for comforts and even for luxuries, not only for the household, but also for the stranger within the gates. in the city, where water and ice cost money and the daily purchase of food is taxed by three or four middlemen, one cannot realize the factory farmer's independence of tradesmen. i do not mean that this sum will furnish terrapin and champagne, but i do not understand that terrapin and champagne are necessary to comfort, health, or happiness. let us look for a moment at some of the things which the factory farmer does not buy, and perhaps we shall see that a comfortable existence need not demand much more. his cows give him milk, cream, butter, and veal; his swine give roast pig, fresh pork, salt pork, ham, bacon, sausages, and lard; his hens give eggs and poultry; his fields yield hulled corn, samp, and corn meal; his orchards give apples, pears, peaches, quinces, plums, and cherries; his bushes give currants, gooseberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries; his vines give grapes; his forests give hickory nuts, butternuts, and hazel nuts; and, best of all, his garden gives more than twenty varieties of toothsome and wholesome vegetables in profusion. the whole fruit and vegetable product of the temperate zone is at his door, and he has but to put forth his hand and take it. the skilled housewife makes wonderful provision against winter from the opulence of summer, and her storehouse is crowded with innumerable glass cells rich in the spoils of orchard and garden. there is scant use for the grocer and the butcher under such conditions. i am so well convinced that my estimate of $ a month is liberal that i have taxed the account with all the salt used on the farm. chapter li the grand-girls the click of jane's hammer began to be heard in november, and hardly a day passed without some music from this "forge in the forest." sir tom made a permanent station of the workshop, where he spent hours in a comfortable chair, drawing nourishment from the head of his cane and pleasure from watching the girl at the anvil. i suspect that he planted himself in the corner of the forge to safeguard jane; for he had an abiding fear that she would take fire, and he wished to be near at hand to put her out. he procured a small babcock extinguisher and a half-dozen hand-grenades, and with these instruments he constituted himself a very efficient volunteer fire department. he made her promise, also, that she would have definite hours for heavy work, that he might be on watch; and so fond was she of his company, or rather of his presence, for he talked but little, that she kept close to the schedule. laura had a favorite corner in the forge, where she often turned a hem or a couplet. she was equally dexterous at either; and sir tom watched her, too, with an admiring eye. i once heard him say:-- "milady laura, it is the regret of me life that i came into the world a generation too soon." laura sometimes went away--she called it "going home," but we scoffed the term--and the doldrums blew until she returned. sir tom dined with us nearly every evening through the fall and early winter; and when he, and kate and tom and the grand-girls, and the kyrles, and laura were at four oaks, there was little to be desired. the grand-girls were nearly five and seven now, and they were a great help to the headman. my terrier was no closer to my heels from morning to night than were these youngsters. they took to country life like the young animals they were, and made friends with all, from thompson down. they must needs watch the sheep as they walked their endless way on the treadmill night and morning; they thrust their hands into hundreds of nests and placed the spoils in sam's big baskets; they watched the calves at their patent feeders, which deceived the calves, but not the girls; they climbed into the grain bins and tobogganed on the corn; they haunted the cow-barn at milking time and wondered much; but the chiefest of their delights was the beautiful white pig which anderson gave them. a little movable pen was provided for this favorite, and the youngsters fed it several times a day with warm milk from a nursing-bottle, like any other motherless child. the pig loved its foster-mothers, and squealed for them most of the time when it was not eating or sleeping; fortunately, a pig can do much of both. it grew playful and intelligent, and took on strange little human ways which made one wonder if darwin were right in his conclusion that we are all ascended from the ape. i have seen features and traits of character so distinctly piggish as to rouse my suspicions that the genealogical line is not free from a cross of _sus scrofa_. the pig grew in stature and in wisdom, but not in grace, from day to day, until it threatened to dominate the place. however, it was lost during the absence of its friends,--to be replaced by a younger one at the next visit. "do _your_ pigs get lost when you are away?" asked no. . "not often, dear." "it's only pet pigs that runds away," said no. , "and i don't care, for it rooted me." the pet pig is still a favorite with the grand-girls, but it always runs away in the fall. kate loved to come to four oaks, and she spent so much time there that she often said:-- "we have no right to that $ ; we spend four times as much time here as you all do in town." "that's all right daughter, but i wish you would spend twice as much time here as you do, and i also wish that the $ were twice as much as it is." time was running so smoothly with us that we "knocked on wood" each morning for fear our luck would break. the cottage which had once served as a temporary granary, and which had been moved to the building line two years before, was now turned into an overflow house against the time when jack should come home for the winter vacation. polly had decided to have "just as many as we can hold, and some more," and as the heaviest duties fell upon her, the rest of us could hardly find fault. the partitions were torn out of the cottage, and it was opened up into one room, except for the kitchen, which was turned into a bath-room. six single iron beds were put up, and the place was made comfortable by an old-fashioned, air-tight, sheet-iron stove with a great hole in the top through which big chunks and knots of wood were fed. this stove would keep fire all night, and, while not up to latter-day demands, it was quite satisfactory to the warm-blooded boys who used it. the expense of overhauling the cottage was $ . tom, kate, and the grand-girls were to be with us, of course, and so were the kyrles, sir tom, jessie gordon, florence, madeline, and alice chase. jack was to bring jarvis and two other men besides frank and phil of last year's party. the six boys were bestowed in the cottage, where they made merry without seriously interrupting sleep in the main house. the others found comfortable quarters under our roof, except sir tom, who would go home some time in the night, to return before lunch the next day. with such a houseful of people, the cook was worked to the bone; but she gloried in it, and cackled harder than ever. i believe she gave warning twice during those ten days; but polly has a way with her which mary cannot resist. i do not think we could have driven that cook out of the house with a club when there was such an opportunity for her to distinguish herself. her warnings were simply matters of habit. the holidays were filled with such things as a congenial country house-party can furnish--the wholesomest, jolliest things in the world; and the end, when it came, was regretted by all. i grew to feel a little bit jealous of jarvis's attentions to jane, for they looked serious, and she was not made unhappy by them. jarvis was all that was honest and manly, but i could not think of giving up jane, even to the best of fellows. i wanted her for my old age. i suspect that a loving father can dig deeper into the mud of selfishness than any other man, and yet feel all the time that he is doing god service. it is in accord with nature that a daughter should take the bit in her teeth and bolt away from this restraining selfishness, but the man who is left by the roadside cannot always see it in that light. chapter lii the third beckoning on the afternoon of december i called a meeting of the committee of ways and means, and polly and i locked ourselves in my office. it was then two and a half years since we commenced the experiment of building a factory farm, which was to supply us with comforts, luxuries, and pleasures of life, and yet be self-supporting: a continuous experiment in economics. the building of the factory was practically completed, though not all of its machinery had yet been installed. we had spent our money freely,--too freely, perhaps; and we were now ready to watch the returns. polly said:-- "there are some things we are sure of: we like the country, and it likes us. i have spent the happiest year of my life here. we've entertained more friends than ever before, and they've been better entertained, so that we are all right from the social standpoint. you are stronger and better than ever before, and so am i. credit the farm with these things, mr. headman, and you'll find that it doesn't owe us such an awful amount after all." "are these things worth $ , ?" "now, john, you don't mean that you've spent $ , ! what in the world have you done with it? just pigs and cows and chickens--" "and greenhouses and sunken gardens and pergolas and kickshaws," said i. "but seriously, polly, i think that we can show value for all that we have spent; and the whole amount is not three times what our city house cost, and that only covered our heads." "how do you figure values here?" "we get a great deal more than simply shelter out of this place, and we have tangible values, too. here are some of them: acres of excellent land, so well groomed and planted that it is worth of any man's money, $ per acre, or $ , ; buildings, water-plant, etc., all as good as new, $ , ; cows, $ ; heifers nearly two years old, $ ; horses, $ ; brood sows, $ ; young pigs, $ ; laying hens, $ ; tools and machinery, $ ; that makes well over $ , in sight, besides all the things you mentioned before." "you haven't counted the six horses in my barn." "they haven't been charged to the farm, polly." "or the trees you've planted?" "no, they go with the land to increase its value." "and my gardens, too?" "yes, they are fixtures and count with the acres. you see, this, land didn't cost quite $ an acre, but i hold it $ better for what we've done to it; i don't believe bill jackson would sell his for less. i offered him $ , for a hundred acres, and he refused. we've put up the price of real estate in this neighborhood, mrs. williams." "well, let's get at the figures. i'm dying to see how we stand." "i have summarized them here:-- "to additional land and development of plant $ , . to interest on previous investment , . wages , . food for twenty-five people , . food for stock , . taxes and insurance . shoeing and repairs . ---------- "making in all $ , . spent this year. "the receipts are:-- "first quarter $ , . second quarter , . third quarter , . fourth quarter , . --------- "making $ , . "but we agreed to pay $ a year to the farm for our food and shelter, if it did as well by us as the town house did. shall we do it, polly?" "why, of course; we've been no end more comfortable here." "well, if we don't expect to get something for nothing, i think we ought to add it. adding $ will make the returns from the farm $ , , leaving $ , to add to the interest-bearing debt. last year this debt was $ , . add this year's deficit, and we have $ , . a good deal of money, polly, but i showed you well over $ , in assets,--at our own price, to be sure, but not far wrong." "will you ever have to increase the debt?" "i think not. i believe we shall reduce it a little next year, and each year thereafter. but, supposing it only pays expenses, how can you put on as much style on the interest of $ , anywhere else as you can here? it can't be done. when the fruit comes in and this factory is running full time, it will earn well on toward $ , a year, and it will not cost over $ , to run it, interest and all. it won't take long at that rate to wipe out the interest-bearing debt. you'll be rich, polly, before you're ten years older." "you are rich now, in imagination and expectation, mr. headman, but i'll bank with you for a while longer. but what's the use of charging the farm with interest when you credit it with our keeping?" "there isn't much reason in that, polly. it's about as broad as it is long. i simply like to keep books in that way. we charge the farm with a little more than $ interest, and we credit it with just $ for our food and shelter. we'll keep on in this way because i like it." chapter liii the milk machine in opening the year i was faced by a larger business proposition than i had originally planned. when i undertook the experiment of a factory farm, i placed the limit of capital to be invested at about $ , . now i found that i had exceeded that amount by a good many thousand dollars, and i knew that the end was not yet. the factory was not complete, and it would be several years before it would be at its best in output. while it had cost me more than was originally contemplated, and while there was yet more money to be spent, there was still no reason for discouragement. indeed, i felt so certain of ultimate profits that i was ready to put as much into it as could possibly be used to advantage. the original plan was for a soiling farm on which i could milk thirty cows, fatten two hundred hogs, feed a thousand hens, and wait for thirty-five hundred fruit trees to come to a profitable age. with this in view, i set apart forty acres of high, dry land, for the feeding-grounds, twenty acres of which was devoted to the cows; and i now found that this twenty-acre lot would provide an ample exercise field for twice that number. it was in grass (timothy, red-top, and blue grass), and the cows nibbled persistently during the short hours each day when they were permitted to be on it; but it was never reckoned as part of their ration. the sod was kept in good condition and the field free from weeds, by the use of the mowing-machine, set high, every ten or twenty days, according to the season. following the mower, we use a spring-tooth rake which bunched the weeds and gathered or broke up the droppings; and everything the rake caught was carted to the manure vats. our big holsteins do not suffer from close quarters, so far as i am able to judge, neither do they take on fat. from thirty minutes to three hours (depending on the weather), is all the outing they get each day; but this seems sufficient for their needs. the well-ventilated stable with its moderate temperature suits the sedentary nature of these milk machines, and i am satisfied with the results. i cannot, of course, speak with authority of the comparative merits of soiling _versus_ grazing, for i have had no experience in the latter; but in theory soiling appeals to me, and in practice it satisfies me. when i found i could keep more cows on the land set apart for them, i built another cow stable for the dry cows and the heifers, and added four stalls to my milk stable by turning each of the hospital wards into two stalls. the ten heifers which i reserved in the spring of were now nearly two years old. they were expected to "come in" in the early autumn, when they would supplement the older herd. the cows purchased in were now five years old, and quite equal to the large demand which we made upon them. they had grown to be enormous creatures, from thirteen hundred to fourteen hundred pounds in weight, and they were proving their excellence as milk producers by yielding an average of forty pounds a day. we had, and still have, one remarkable milker, who thinks nothing of yielding seventy pounds when fresh, and who doesn't fall below twenty-five pounds when we are forced to dry her off. i have no doubt that she would be a successful candidate for advanced registration if we put her to the test. for ten months in each year these cows give such quantities of milk as would surprise a man not acquainted with this noble dutch family. my five common cows were good of their kind, but they were not in the class with the holsteins. they were not "robber" cows, for they fully earned their food; but there was no great profit in them. to be sure, they did not eat more than two-thirds as much as the holsteins; but that fact did not stand to their credit, for the basic principle of factory farming is to consume as much raw material as possible and to turn out its equivalent in finished product. the common cows consumed only two-thirds as much raw material as the holsteins, and turned out rather less than two-thirds of their product, while they occupied an equal amount of floor space; consequently they had to give place to more competent machines. they were to be sold during the season. why dairymen can be found who will pay $ apiece for cows like those i had for sale (better, indeed, than the average), is beyond my method of reckoning values. twice $ will buy a young cow bred for milk, and she would prove both bread and milk to the purchaser in most cases. the question of food should settle itself for the dairyman as it does for the factory farmer. the more food consumed, the better for each, if the ratio of milk be the same. my holsteins are great feeders; more than tons of grain, - / tons of hay, and or tons of corn fodder, in addition to a ton of roots or succulent vegetables, pass through their great mouths each year. the hay is nearly equally divided between timothy, oat hay, and alfalfa; and when i began to figure the gross amount that would be required for my holstein gourmands, i saw that the widow's farm had been purchased none too quickly. to provide tons of grain, tons of hay, and or tons of corn fodder for the cows alone, was no slight matter; but i felt prepared to furnish this amount of raw material to be transmuted into golden butter. the four oaks butter had made a good reputation, and the four oak leaves stamped on each mould was a sufficient guarantee of excellence. my city grocer urged a larger product, and i felt safe in promising it; at the same time, i held him up for a slight advance in price. heretofore it had netted me cents a pound, but from january , , i was to have - / cents for each pound delivered at the station at exeter, i agreeing to furnish at least pounds a day, six days in a week. this was not always easily done during the first eight months of that year, and i will confess to buying pounds to eke out the supply for the colony; but after the young heifers came in, there was no trouble, and the purchased butter was more than made up to our local grocer. it will be more satisfactory to deal with dairy matters in lump sums from now on. the contract with the city grocer still holds, and, though he often urges me to increase my herd, i still limit the supply to pounds a week,--sometimes a little more, but rarely less. i believe that to cows in full flow of milk will make the best balance in my factory; and a well-balanced factory is what i am after. i am told that animals are not machines, and that they cannot be run as such. my animals are; and i run them as i would a shop. there is no sentiment in my management. if a cow or a hog or a hen doesn't work in a satisfactory way, it ceases to occupy space in my shop, just as would an imperfect wheel. the utmost kindness is shown to all animals at four oaks. this rule is the most imperative one on the place, and the one in which no "extenuating circumstances" are taken into account. there are two equal reasons for this: the first is a deep-rooted aversion to cruelty in all forms; and the second is, _it pays_. but kindness to animals doesn't imply the necessity of keeping useless ones or those whose usefulness is below one's standard. if a man will use the intelligence and attention to detail in the management of stock that is necessary to the successful running of a complicated machine, he will find that his stock doesn't differ greatly from his machine. the trouble with most farmers is that they think the living machine can be neglected with impunity, because it will not immediately destroy itself or others, and because it is capable of a certain amount of self-maintenance; while the dead machine has no power of self-support, and must receive careful and punctual attention to prevent injury to itself and to other property. if a dairyman will feed his cows as a thresher feeds the cylinder of his threshing-machine, he will find that the milk will flow from the one about as steadily as the grain falls from the other. intensive factory farming means the use of the best machines pushed to the limit of their capacity through the period of their greatest usefulness, and then replaced by others. pushing to the limit of capacity is in no sense cruelty. it is predicated on the perfect health of the animal, for without perfect condition, neither machine nor animal can do its best work. it is simply encouraging to a high degree the special function for which generations of careful breeding have fitted the animal. that there is gratification in giving milk, no well-bred cow or mother will deny. it is a joyous function to eat large quantities of pleasant food and turn it into milk. heredity impels the cow to do this, and it would take generations of wild life to wean her from it. as well say that the cataleptic trance of the pointer, when the game bird lies close and the delicate scent fills his nostrils, is not a joy to him, or that the dalmatian at the heels of his horse, or the foxhound when reynard's trail is warm, receive no pleasure from their specialties. do these animals feel no joy in the performance of service which is bred into their bones and which it is unnatural or freakish for them to lack? no one who has watched the "bred-for-milk" cow can doubt that the joys of her life are eating, drinking, sleeping, and giving milk. pushing her to the limit of her capacity is only intensifying her life, though, possibly, it may shorten it by a year or two. while she lives she knows all the happiness of cow life, and knows it to the full. what more can she ask? she would starve on the buffalo grass which supports her half-wild sister, "northers" would freeze her, and the snow would bury her. she is a product of high cow-civilization, and as such she must have the intelligent care of man or she cannot do her best. with this care she is a marvellous machine for the making of the only article of food which in itself is competent to support life in man. if my holsteins are not machines, they resemble them so closely that i will not quarrel with the name. what is true of the cow, is true also of the pork-making machine that we call the hog. his wild and savage progenitor is lost, and we have in his place a sluggish animal that is a very model as a food producer. his three pleasures are eating, sleeping, and growing fat. he follows these pleasures with such persistence that days are enough to perfect him. it can certainly be no hardship to a pig to encourage him in a life of sloth and gluttony which appeals to his taste and to my profit. custom and interest make his life ephemeral; i make it comfortable. from the day of his birth until we separate, i take watchful care of him. during infancy he is protected from cold and wet, and his mother is coddled by the most nourishing foods, that she may not fail in her duty to him. during childhood he is provided with a warm house, a clean bed, and a yard in which to disport himself, and is fed for growth and bone on skim-milk, oatmeal, and sweet alfalfa. during his youth, corn meal is liberally added to his diet, also other dainties which he enjoys and makes much of; and during his whole life he has access to clean water, and to the only medicine which a pig needs,--a mixture of ashes, charcoal, salt, and sulphur. when he has spent happy days with me, we part company with feelings of mutual respect,--he to finish his mission, i to provide for his successor. my early plan was to turn off of this finished product each year, but i soon found that i could do much better. one can raise a crop of hogs nearly as quickly as a crop of corn, and with much more profit, if the food be at hand. there was likely to be an abundance of food. i was more willing to sell it in pig skins than in any other packages. my plan was now to turn off, not hogs each year, but or more. i had well-bred sows, young and old, and i could count on them to farrow at least three times in two years. the litters ought to average each, say pigs in two years; times are , and half of is . yes, at that rate, i could count on about finished hogs to sell each year. but if my calculations were too high, i could easily keep more brood sows, for i had sufficient room to keep them healthy. the two five-acre lots, nos. and , had been given over to the brood sows when they were not caring for young litters in the brood-house. comfortable shelters and a cemented basin twelve feet by twelve, and one foot deep, had been built in each lot. the water-pipe that ran through the chicken lot (no. ) connected with these basins, as did also a drain-pipe to the drain in the north lane, so that it was easy to turn on fresh water and to draw off that which was soiled. through this device my brood sows had access to a water bath eight inches deep, whenever they were in the fields. my hogs, young or old, have never been permitted to wallow in mud. we have no mud-holes at four oaks to grow stale and breed disease. the breeding hogs have exercise lots and baths, but the young growing and fattening stock have neither. they are kept in runs twenty feet by one hundred, in bunches of from twenty to forty, according to age, from the time they are weaned until they leave the place for good. this plan, which i did not intend to change, opened a question in my mind that gave me pause. it was this: can i hope, even with the utmost care, to keep the house for growing and fattening swine free from disease if i keep it constantly full of swine? the more i thought about it the less probable it appeared. the pig-house had cost me $ . another would cost as much, if not more, and i did not like to go to the expense unless it were necessary. i worked over this problem for several days, and finally came to the conclusion that i should never feel easy about my swine until i had two houses for them, besides the brood-house for the sows. i therefore gave the order to nelson to build another swine-house as soon as spring opened. my plan was, and i carried it out, to move all the colonies every three months, and to have the vacant house thoroughly cleaned, sprayed with a powerful germicide, and whitewashed. the runs were to be turned over, when the weather would permit, and the ground sown to oats or rye. the new house was finished in june, and the pigs were moved into it on july st with a lease of three months. my mind has been easy on the question of the health of my hogs ever since; and with reason, for there has been no epizoötic or other serious form of disease in my piggery, in spite of the fact that there are often more than pigs of all degrees crowded into this five-acre lot. the two pig-houses and the brood-house, with their runs, cover the whole of the lot, except the broad street of sixty feet just inside my high quarantine fence, which encloses the whole of it. chapter liv bacon and eggs each hog turned out from my piggery weighing pounds or more, has eaten of my substance not less than pounds of grain, pounds of chopped alfalfa, pounds of roots or vegetables, and such quantities of skimmed milk and swill as have fallen to his share. i could reckon the approximate cost of these foods, but i will not do so. all but the middlings and oil meal come from the farm and are paid for by certain fixed charges heretofore mentioned. the middlings and oil meal are charged in the "food for animals" account at the rate of $ a year for each finished hog. the truth is that a large part of the food which enters into the making of each pounds of live pork, is of slow sale, and that for some of it there is no sale at all,--for instance, house swill, dish-water, butter-washings, garden weeds, lawn clippings, and all sorts of coarse vegetables. a hog makes half his growth out of refuse which has no value, or not sufficient to warrant the effort and expense of selling it. he has unequalled facilities for turning non-negotiable scrip into convertible bonds, and he is the greatest moneymaker on the farm. if the grain ration were all corn, and if there were a roadside market for it at cents a bushel, it would cost $ . ; the alfalfa would be worth $ . , and the vegetables probably cents, under like conditions, making a total of $ . as a possible gross value of the food which the hog has eaten. the gross value of these things, however, is far above their net value when one considers time and expense of sale. the hog saves all this trouble by tucking under his skin slow-selling remnants of farm products and making of them finished assets which can be turned into cash at a day's notice. to feed the hogs on the scale now planned, i had to provide for something like bushels of grain, chiefly corn and oats, tons of alfalfa, and an equal amount of vegetables, chiefly sugar beets and mangel-wurzel. certainly the widow's land would be needed. the poultry had also outgrown my original plans, and i had built with reference to my larger views. there were five houses on the poultry lot, each feet long, and each divided into ten equal pens. four of these houses were for the laying hens, which were divided into flocks of each; while the other house was for the growing chickens and for cockerels being fattened for market. there were now on hand more than pullets and hens, and i instructed sam to run his incubator overtime that season, so as to fill our houses by autumn. i should need or pullets to make our quota good, for most of the older hens would have to be disposed of in the autumn,--all but about , which would be kept until the following spring to breed from. i believe that a three-year-old hen that has shown the egg habit is the best fowl to breed from, and it is the custom at four oaks to reserve specially good pens for this purpose. the egg habit is unquestionably as much a matter of heredity as the milk or the fat producing habit, and should be as carefully cultivated. with this end in view, sam added young cockerels to four of his best-producing flocks on january , and by the th he was able to start his incubators. breeding and feeding for eggs is on the same principle as feeding and breeding for milk. it is no more natural for a hen to lay eggs for human consumption than it is for the robin to do so, or for the cow to give more milk than is sufficient for her calf. man's necessity has made demands upon both cow and hen, and man's intelligence has converted individualists into socialists in both of these races. they no longer live for themselves alone. as the cow, under favorable conditions, finds pleasure in giving milk, so does the hen under like conditions take delight in giving eggs,--else why the joyous cackle when leaving her nest after doing her full duty? she gloats over it, and glories in it, and announces her satisfaction to the whole yard. it is something to be proud of, and the cackling hen knows it better than you or i. it can be no hardship to push this egg machine to the limit of its capacity. it adds new zest to the life of the hen, and multiplies her opportunities for well-earned self-congratulation. our hens are fed for eggs, and we get what we feed for. i said of my hens that i would not ask them to lay more than eight dozen eggs each year, and i will stick to what i said. but i do not reject voluntary contributions beyond this number. indeed, i accept them with thanks, and give biddy a word of commendation for her gratuity. eight dozen eggs a year will pay a good profit, but if each of my hens wishes to present me with two dozen more, i slip cents into my pocket and say, "i am very much obliged to you, miss," or madam, as the case may be. most of my hens do remember me in this substantial way, and the white wyandottes are in great favor with the headman. the houses in which my hens live are almost as clean as the one i inhabit (and polly is tidy to a degree); their food is as carefully prepared as mine, and more punctually served; their enemies are fended off, and they are never frightened by dogs or other animals, for the five-acre lot on which their houses and runs are built is enclosed by a substantial fence that prevents any interloping; book agents never disturb their siestas, nor do tree men make their lives hideous with lithographs of impossible fruit on improbable trees. whether i am indebted to one or to all of these conditions for my full egg baskets, i am unable to say; but i do not purpose to make any change, for my egg baskets are as full as a reasonable man could wish. as nearly as i can estimate, my hens give thirty per cent egg returns as a yearly average--about eggs for each hen in days. this is more than i ask of them, but i do not refuse their generosity. every egg is worth, in my market, - / cents, which means that the yearly product of each hen could be sold for $ . something more than two thousand dozen are consumed by the home colony or the incubators; the rest find their way to the city in clean cartons of one dozen each, with a stencil of four oaks and a guarantee that they are not twenty-four hours old when they reach the middleman. in return for this $ a year, what do i give my hens besides a clean house and yard? a constant supply of fresh water, sharp grits, oyster shells, and a bath of road dust and sifted ashes, to which is added a pinch of insect powder. twice each day five pounds of fresh skim-milk is given to each flock of forty. in the morning they have a warm mash composed of (for hens) pounds of alfalfa hay cut fine and soaked all night in hot water, pounds of corn meal, pounds of oat meal, pounds of bran, and pounds of either meat meal or cotton-seed meal. at noon they get pounds of mixed grains--wheat and buckwheat usually--with some green vegetables to pick at; and at night to pounds of whole corn. there are variations of this diet from time to time, but no radical change. i have read much of a balanced ration, but i fancy a hen will balance her own ration if you give her the chance. milk is one of the most important items on this bill of fare, and all hens love it. it should be fed entirely fresh, and the crocks or earthen dishes from which it is eaten should be thoroughly cleansed each day. four ounces for each hen is a good daily ration, and we divide this into two feedings. our hens eat about tons of grain a year. add to this the tons which cows will require, tons for the swine, and tons for the horses, and we have tons of grain to provide for the stock on the factory farm. nearly a fourth of this, in the shape of bran, gluten meal, oil meal, and meat meal, must be purchased, for we have no way of producing it. for the other tons we must look to the land or to a low market. three hundred tons of mixed grains means something like , bushels, and i cannot hope to raise this amount from my land at present. fortunately the grain market was to my liking in january of ; and though there were still more than bushels in my granary, i purchased bushels of corn and as much oats against a higher market. the corn cost cents a bushel and the oats , delivered at exeter, the , bushels amounting to $ , to be charged to the farm account. i was now prepared to face the food problem, for i had more than , bushels of grain to supplement the amount the farm would produce, and to tide me along until cheap grain should come again, or until my land should produce enough for my needs. the supply in hand plus that which i could reasonably expect to raise, would certainly provide for three years to come, and this is farther than the average farmer looks into the future. but i claim to be more enterprising than an average farmer, and determined to keep my eyes open and to take advantage of any favorable opportunity to strengthen my position. in the meantime it was necessary to force my trees, and to secure more help for the farm work. to push fruit trees to the limit of healthy growth is practical and wise. they can accomplish as much in growth and development in three years, when judiciously stimulated, as in five or six years of the "lick-and-a-promise" kind of care which they usually receive. a tree must be fed first for growth and afterward for fruit, just as a pig is managed, if one wishes quick returns. to plant a tree and leave it to the tenderness of nature, with only occasional attention, is to make the heart sick, for it is certain to prove a case of hope deferred. in the fulness of time the tree and "happy-go-lucky" nature will prove themselves equal to the development of fruit; but they will be slow in doing it. it is quite as well for the tree, and greatly to the advantage of the horticulturist, to cut two or three years out of this unprofitable time. all that is necessary to accomplish this is: to keep the ground loose for a space around the tree somewhat larger than the spread of its branches; to apply fertilizers rich in nitrogen; to keep the whole of the cultivated space mulched with good barn-yard manure, increasing the thickness of the mulch with coarse stuff in the fall, so as to lengthen the season of root activity; and to draw the mulch aside about st. patrick's day, that the sun's rays may warm the earth as early as possible. moderate pruning, nipping back of exuberant branches, and two sprayings of the foliage with bordeaux mixture, to keep fungus enemies in check, comprise all the care required by the growing tree. this treatment will condense the ordinary growth of five years into three, and the tree will be all the better for the forcing. as soon as fruit spurs and buds begin to show themselves, the treatment should be modified, but not remitted. less nitrogen and more phosphoric acid and potash are to be used, and the mulch should _not_ be removed in the early spring. the objects now are, to stimulate the fruit buds and to retard activity in the roots until the danger from late frosts is past. as a result of this kind of treatment, many varieties of apple trees will give moderate crops when the roots are seven, and the trunks are six years old. fruit buds showed in abundance on many of my trees in the fall of , especially on the duchess and the yellow transparent, and i looked for a small apple harvest that year. chapter lv the old time farm-hand with all my industries thus increasing, the necessity for more help became imperative. french and judson had their hands more than full in the dairy barns, and had to be helped out by thompson. anderson could not give the swine all the attention they needed, and was assisted by otto, who proved an excellent swineherd. sam had the aid of lars's boys with the poultry, and very efficient aid it was, considering the time they could give to it. they had to be off with the market wagon at . , and did not return from school until p.m. lars was busy in the carriage barn; and though we spared him as much as possible from driving, he had to be helped out by johnson at such times as the latter could spare from his greenhouse and hotbeds. zeb took care of the farm teams; but the winter's work of distributing forage and grain, getting up wood and ice, hauling manure, and so forth, had to be done in a desultory and irregular manner. the spring work would find us wofully behindhand if i did not look sharp. i had been looking sharp since january set in, and had experienced, for the first time, real difficulties in finding anything like good help. hitherto i had been especially fortunate in this regard. i had met some reverses, but in the main good luck had followed me. i had nine good men who seemed contented and who were all saving money,--an excellent sign of stability and contentment. even lars had not fallen from grace but once, and that could hardly be charged against him, for jack and jarvis had tempted him beyond resistance; while sam's nose was quite blanched, and he was to all appearances firmly seated on the water wagon. really, i did not know what labor troubles meant until , but since then i have not had clear sailing. from my previous experience with working-men, i had formed the opinion that they were reasoning and reasonable human beings,--with peculiarities, of course; and that as a class they were ready to give good service for fair wages and decent treatment. in early life i had been a working-man myself, and i thought i could understand the feelings and sympathize with the trials of the laborer from the standpoint of personal experience. i was sorely mistaken. the laboring man of to-day is a different proposition from the man who did manual labor "before the war." that he is more intelligent, more provident, happier, or better in any way, i sincerely doubt; that he is restless, dissatisfied, and less efficient, i believe; that he is unreasonable in his demands and regardless of the interests of his employer, i know. there are many shining exceptions, and to these i look for the ultimate regeneration of labor; but the rule holds true. i do not believe that the principles of life have changed in forty years. i do not believe that an intelligent, able-bodied man need be a servant all his life, or that industry and economy miss their rewards, or that there is any truth in the theory that men cannot rise out of the rut in which they happen to find themselves. the trouble is with the man, not with the rut. he spends his time in wallowing rather than in diligently searching for an outlet or in honestly working his way up to it. heredity and environment are heavy weights, but industry and sobriety can carry off heavier ones. i have sympathy for weakness of body or mind, and patience for those over whom inheritance has cast a baleful spell; but i have neither patience nor sympathy for a strong man who rails at his condition and makes no determined effort to better it. the time and money wasted in strikes, agitations, and arbitrations, if put to practical use, would better the working-man enough faster than these futile efforts do. i have no quarrel with unions or combinations of labor, so far as they have the true interests of labor for an object; but i do quarrel with the spirit of mob rule and the evidences of conspicuous waste, which have grown so rampant as to overshadow the helpful hand and to threaten, not the stability of society--for in the background i see six million conservative sons of the soil who will look to the stability of things when the time comes--but the unions themselves. i remember my first summer on a farm. it lasted from the first day of april to the thirty-first day of october, and on the evening of that day i carried to my father $ , the full wage for seven months. i could not have spent one cent during that time, for i carried the whole sum home; but i do not remember that i was conscious of any want. the hours on the farm were not short; an eight-hour day would have been considered but a half-day. we worked from sun to sun, and i grew and knew no sorrow or oppression. the next year i received the munificent wage of $ a month, and the following year, $ . in after years, in brick-yards, sawmills, lumber woods, or harvest fields, there was no arbitrary limit put upon the amount of work to be done. if i chose to do the work of a man and a half, i got $ . for doing it, and it would have been a bold and sturdy delegate who tried to hold me from it. i felt no need of help from outside. i was fit to care for myself, and i minded not the long hours, the hard work, or the hard bed. this life was preliminary to a fuller one, and it served its use. i know what tired legs and back mean, and i know that one need not have them always if he will use the ordinary sense which god gives. genius, or special cleverness, is not necessary to get a man out of the rut of hard manual labor. just plain, everyday sense will do. but before i had secured the three men for whom i was in search, i began to feel that this common sense of which we speak so glibly is a rare commodity under the working-man's hat. i advertised, sent to agencies and intelligence offices, interviewed and inspected, consulted friends and enemies, and so generally harrowed my life that i was fit to give up the whole business and retire into a cave. by actual count, i saw more than one hundred men, of all ages, sizes, and colors. eight of these were tried, of whom five were found wanting. early in february i had settled upon three sober men to add to our colony. as none of these lasted the year out, i may be forgiven for not introducing them to the reader. they served their purpose, and mine too, and then drifted on. chapter lvi the syndicate i do not wish to take credit for things which gave me pleasure in the doing, or to appear altruistic in my dealings with the people employed at four oaks. i tell of our business and other relations because they are details of farm history and rightfully belong to these pages. if i dealt fairly by my men and established relations of mutual confidence and dependence, it was not in the hope that my ways might be approved and commended, but because it paid, in more ways than one. i wanted my men to have a lively interest in the things which were of importance to me, that their efforts might be intelligent and direct; and i was glad to enter into their schemes, either for pleasure or for profit, with such aid as i could give. cordial understanding between employee and employer puts life into the contract, and disposes of perfunctory service, which simply recognizes a definite deed for a definite compensation. uninterested labor leaves a load of hay in the field to be injured, just because the hour for quitting has come, while interested labor hurries the hay into the barn to make it safe, knowing that the extra half-hour will be made up to it in some other way. it pays the farmer to take his help into a kind of partnership, not always in his farm, but always in his consideration. that is why my farm-house was filled with papers and magazines of interest to the men; that is why i spent many an evening with them talking over our industries; that is why i purchased an organ for them when i found that mrs. french, the dairymaid, could play on it; that is why i talked economy to them and urged them to place some part of each month's wage in the exeter savings bank; and that is why, early in , i formulated a plan for investing their wages at a more profitable rate of interest. i asked each one to give me a statement of his or her savings up to date. they were quite willing to do this, and i found that the aggregate for the eight men and three women was $ . anderson, who saved most of his wages, had an account in a city savings bank, and did not join us in our syndicate, though he approved of it. the money was made up of sums varying from $ , lena's savings, to $ owned by judson, the buggy man. my proposition was this: pool the funds, buy chicago, rock island, and pacific stock, and hold it for one or two years. the interest would be twice as much as they were getting from the bank, while the prospect of a decided advance was good. i said to them:-- "i have owned chicago, rock island, and pacific stock for more than three years. i commenced to buy at fifty-seven, and i am still buying, when i can get hold of a little money that doesn't have to go into this blessed farm. it is now eighty-one, and it will go higher. i am so sure of this that i will agree to take the stock from each or all of you at the price you pay for it at any time during the next two years. there is no risk in this proposition to you, and there may be a very handsome return." they were pleased with the plan, and we formed a pool to buy thirty shares of stock. thompson and i were trustees, and the certificate stood in our names; but each contributor received a pro-rata interest; lena, one thirtieth; judson, five-thirtieths; and the others between these extremes. the stock was bought at eighty-two. i may as well explain now how it came out, for i am not proud of my acumen at the finish. a little more than a year later the stock reached , and i advised the syndicate to sell. they were all pleased at the time with the handsome profit they had made, but i suspect they have often figured what they might have made "if the boss hadn't been such a chump," for we have seen the stock go above two hundred. this was not the only enterprise in which our colony took a small share. the people at four oaks are now content to hold shares in one of the great trusts, which they bought several points below par, and which pay ¾. per cent every three months. even lena, who held only one share of the c., r.i., & p. five years ago, has so increased her income-bearing property that she is now looked upon as a "catch" by her acquaintances. if i am correctly informed, she has an annual income of $ , independent of her wages. chapter lvii the death of sir tom at . on the morning of march , dr. high telephoned me that sir thomas o'hara was seriously ill, and asked me to come at once. it took but a few minutes to have jerry at the door, and, breasting a cold, thin rain at a sharp gallop, i was at my friend's door before the clock struck eight. dr. high met me with a heavy face. "sir tom is bad," said he, "with double pneumonia, and i am awfully afraid it will go hard with him." i remembered that my friend's pale face had looked a shade paler than usual the evening before, and that there had been a pinched expression around the nose and mouth, as if from pain; but sir tom had many twinges from his old enemy, gout, which he did not care to discuss, and i took little note of his lack of fitness. he touched the brandy bottle a little oftener than usual, and left for home earlier; but his voice was as cheery as ever, and we thought only of gout. he was taken with a hard chill on his way home, which lasted for some time after he was put to bed; but he would not listen to the requests of william and the faithful cook that the doctor be summoned. at last he fell into a heavy sleep from which it was hard to rouse him, and the servants followed their own desire and called dr. high. he came as promptly as possible, and did all that could be done for the sick man. a hurried examination convinced me that dr. high's opinion of the gravity of the case was correct, and we telephoned at once for a specialist from the city, and for a trained nurse. after a short consultation with dr. high i reëntered my friend's room, and i fear that my face gave me away, for sir tom said:-- "be a man, williams, and tell the whole of it." "my dear old man, this is a tough proposition, but you must buck up and make a game fight. we have sent for dr. jones and a nurse, and we will pull you through, sure." "you will try, for sure, but i reckon the call has come for me to cash in me checks. when that little devil frost hit me right and left in me chest last night, i could see me finish; and i heard the banshee in me sleep, and that means much to a sligo man." "not to this sligo man, i hope," said i, though i knew that we were in deep waters. the wise man and the nurse came out on the . train, the nurse bringing comfort and aid, but the physician neither. after thoroughly examining the patient, he simply confirmed our fears. "serious disease to overcome, and only scant vital forces; no reasonable ground for hope." sir tom gave me a smile as i entered the room after parting from the specialist. "i've discounted the verdict," said he, "and the foreman needn't draw such a long face. i've had my fling, like a true irishman, and i'm ready to pay the bill. i won't have to come back for anything, williams; there's nothing due me; but i must look sharp for william and the old girl in the kitchen,--faithful souls,--for they will be strangers in a strange land. will you send for a lawyer?" the lawyer came, and a codicil to sir thomas's will made the servants comfortable for life. all that day and the following night we hung around the sick bed, hoping for the favorable change that never came. on the morning of the th it was evident that he would not live to see the sun go down. we had kept all friends away from the sick chamber; but now, at his request, polly, jane, and laura were summoned, and they came, with blanched faces and tearful eyes, to kiss the brow and hold the hands of this dear man. he smiled with contentment on the group, and said:-- "me friends have made such a heaven of this earth that perhaps i have had me full share." "sir tom," said i, "shall i send for a priest?" "a priest! what could i do with a priest? me forebears were on the orange side of boyne water, and we have never changed color." "would you like to see a clergyman?" "no, no; just the grip of a friend's hand and these angels around me. asking pardon is not me long suit, williams, but perhaps the time has come for me to play it. if the good god will be kind to me i will thank him, as a gentleman should, and i will take no advantage of his kindness; but if he cannot see his way clear to do that, i will take what is coming." "dear sir tom," said jane, with streaming eyes, "god cannot be hard with you, who have been so good to every one." "if there's little harm in me life, there's but scant good, too; i can't find much credit. me good angel has had an easy time of it, more's the pity; but janie, if you love me, le bon dieu will not be hard on me. he cannot be severe with a poor irishman who never stacked the cards, pulled a race, or turned his back on a friend, and who is loved by an angel." i asked sir tom what we should do for him after he had passed away. "it would be foine to sleep in the woods just back of janie's forge, where i could hear the click of her hammer if the days get lonely; but there's a little castle, god save the mark, out from sligo. me forebears are there,--the lucky ones,--and me wish is to sleep with them; but i doubt it can be." "indeed it can be, and it shall be, too," said polly. "we will all go with you, sir tom, when june comes, and you shall sleep in your own ground with your own kin." "i don't deserve it, mrs. williams, indeed i don't, but i would lie easier there. that sod has known us for a thousand years, and it's the greenest, softest, kindest sod in all the world; but little i'll mind when the breath is gone. i'll not be asking that much of you." "my dear old chap, we won't lose sight of you until that green sod covers the stanchest heart that ever beat. polly is right. we'll go with you to sligo,--all of us,--polly and jane and jack and i, and kate and the babies, too, if we can get them. you shall not be lonesome." "lonesome, is it? i'll be in the best of company. me heart is at rest from this moment, and i'll wait patiently until i can show you sligo. this is a fine country, mrs. williams, and it has given me the truest friends in all the world, but the ground is sweet in sligo." his breath came fainter and faster, and we could see that it would soon cease. after resting a few minutes, sir tom said:-- "me lady laura, do you mind that prayer song, the second verse?" laura's voice was sobbing and uncertain as it quavered:-- "other refuge have i none," but it gained courage and persuasiveness until it filled the room and the heart of the man with,-- "cover my defenceless head, with the shadow of thy wing." a gentle smile and the relaxing of closed hands completed the story of our loss, though the real weight of it came days and months later. it was long before we could take up our daily duties with anything like the familiar happiness. something had gone out of our lives that could never be replaced, and only time could salve the wounds. the dear man who had gone was no friend to solemn faces, and living interests must bury dead memories; but it was a long time before the click of jane's hammer was heard in her forge; not until laura had said, "it will please _him_, jane." chapter lviii bacteria january, february, and march passed with more than the usual snow and rain,--fully ten inches of precipitation; but the spring proved neither cold nor late. during these three months we sold butter to the amount of $ , and $ worth of eggs; in all, $ . the ploughs were started in the highest land on the th of april, and were kept going steadily until they had turned over nearly acres. i decided to put the whole of the widow's field into corn, lots , , and ( acres) into oats, and acres of the orchards into roots and sweet fodder corn. number was to be sown with buckwheat as soon as the rye was cut for green forage. i decided to raise more alfalfa, for we could feed more to advantage, and it was fast gaining favor in my establishment. it is so productive and so nutritious that i wonder it is not more generally used by farmers who make a specialty of feeding stock. it contains as much protein as most grains, and is wholesome and highly palatable if properly cured. it should be cut just as it is coming into flower, and should be cured in the windrow. the leaves are the most nutritious part of the plant, and they are apt to fall off if the cutting be deferred, or if the curing be _done carelessly_. lot no. was to be fitted for alfalfa as soon as the season would permit. first, it must receive a heavy dressing of manure, to be ploughed under. the ordinary plough was to be followed in this case by a subsoiler, to stir the earth as deep as possible. when the seed was sown, the land was to receive five hundred pounds an acre of high-grade fertilizer, and one hundred pounds an acre of infected soil. the peculiar bacterium that thrives on congenial alfalfa soil is essential to the highest development of the plant. without its presence the grass fails in its chief function--the storing of nitrogen--and makes but poor growth. when the alfalfa bacteria are abundant, the plant flourishes and gathers nitrogen in knobs and bunches in its roots and in the joints of its stems. i sent to a very successful alfalfa grower in ohio for a thousand pounds of soil from one of his fields, to vaccinate my field with. this is not always necessary,--indeed, it rarely is, for alfalfa seed usually carry enough bacteria to inoculate favorable soils; but i wished to see if this infected soil would improve mine. i have not been able to discover any marked advantage from its use; the reason being that my soil was so rich in humus and added manures that the colonies of bacteria on the seeds were quite sufficient to infect the whole mass. under less favorable conditions, artificial inoculation is of great advantage. wonderful are the secrets of nature. the infinitely small things seem to work for us and the infinitely large ones appear suited to our use; and yet, perhaps, this is all "seeming" and "appearing." we may ourselves be simply more advanced bacteria, working blindly toward the solution of an infinite problem in which we are concerned only as means to an end. "why should the spirit of mortal be proud," until it has settled its relative position with both sirius and the micro-organisms, or has estimated its stature by view-points from the bacterial world and from the constellation of lyra. until we have been able to compare opinions from these extremes, if indeed they be extremes, we cannot expect to make a correct estimate of our value in the economy of the universe. i fancy that we are apt to take ourselves too seriously, and that we will sometime marvel at the shadow which we did not cast. chapter lix match-making the home lot took on a home look in the spring of . the lawn lost its appearance of newness; the trees became acquainted with each other; the shrubs were on intimate terms with their neighbors, and broke into friendly rivalry of blossoms; the gardens had a settled-down look, as if they had come to stay; and even the wall flowers were enjoying themselves. these efforts of nature to make us feel at ease were thankfully received by polly and me, and we voted that this was more like home than anything else we had ever had; and when the fruit trees put forth their promise of an autumn harvest in great masses of blossoms, we declared that we had made no mistake in transforming ourselves from city to country folk. "aristocracy is of the land," said polly. "it always has been and always will be the source of dignity and stability. i feel twice as great a lady as i did in the tall house on b---- street." "so you don't want to go back to that tall house, madam?" "indeed i don't. why should i?" "i don't know why you should, only i remember lot's wife looked back toward the city." "don't mention that woman! she didn't know what she wanted. you won't catch me looking toward the city, except once a week for three or four hours, and then i hurry back to the farm to see what has happened in my garden while i've been away." "but how about your friends, polly?" "you know as well as i that we haven't lost a friend by living out here, and that we've tied some of them closer. no, sir! no more city life for me. it may do for young people, who don't know better, but not for me. it's too restricted, and there's not enough excitement." "country life fits us like paper on the wall," said i, "but how about the youngsters? if we insist on keeping children, we must take them into our scheme of life." "of course we must, but children are an unknown quantity. they are _x_ in the domestic problem, and we cannot tell what they stand for until the problem is worked out. i don't see why we can't find the value of _x_ in the country as easily as in the city. they have had city and school life, now let them see country life; the _x_ will stand for wide experience at least." "jane likes it thus far," said i, "and i think she will continue; but i don't feel so sure about jack." "you're as blind as a bat--or a man. jane loves country life because she's young and growing; but there's a subconscious sense which tells her that she's simply fitting herself to be carried off by that handsome giant, jim jarvis. she doesn't know it, but it's the truth all the same, and it will come as sure as tide; and when it does come, her life will be run into other moulds than we have made, no matter how carefully." "i wonder where this modern hercules is most vulnerable. i'll slay him if i find him mousing around my jane." "you will slay nothing, mr. headman, and you know it; you will just take what's coming to you, as others have done since the world was young." "well, i give fair warning; it's 'hands off jane,' for lo, these many years, or some one will be brewing 'harm tea' for himself." "you bark so loud no one will believe you can bite," said this saucy, match-making mother. "how about jack?" said i. "have you settled the moulds he is to be run in?" "not entirely; but i am not as one without hope. jack will be through college in june, and will go abroad with us for july and august; he will be as busy as possible with the miners from the moment he comes back; he is much in love with jessie, the gordon's have no other child, the property is large, homestead farm is only three miles, and--" "slow up, polly! slow up! your main line is all right, but your terminal facilities are bad. jack is to be educated, travelled, employed, engaged, married, endowed with homestead farm, and all that; but you mustn't kill off the gordons. i swing the red lantern in front of that train of thought. let jack and jessie wait till we are through with four oaks and the gordons have no further use for homestead farm, before thinking of coupling that property on to this." "don't be a greater goose than you can help," said polly. "you know what i mean. men are so short-sighted! laura says, 'the headman ought to have a small dog and a long stick'; but no matter, i'll keep an eye on the children, and you needn't worry about country life for them. they'll take to it kindly." "well, they ought to, if they have any appreciation of the fitness of things. did you ever see weather made to order before? i feel as if i had been measured for it." "it suits my garden down to the ground," said polly, who hates slang. "it was planned for the farmer, madam. if it happens to fit the rose-garden mistress, it is a detail for you to note and be thankful for, but the great things are outside the rose gardens. look at that corn-field! a crow could hide in it anywhere." "what have crows hiding got to do with corn, i'd like to know?" "when i was a boy the farmers used to say, 'if it will cover a crow's back on the fourth of july, it will make good corn,' and i am farmering with old saws when i can't find new ones." "it's all of three weeks yet to the fourth of july, and your corn will cover a turkey by that time." "i hope so, but we shan't be here to see it, more's the pity, as sir tom would say." "do you know, kate says she won't go over. she doesn't think it would pay for so short a trip. why do you insist upon eight weeks?" "well, now, i like that! when did i ever insist on anything, mrs. williams? not since i knew you well, did i? but be honest, polly. who has done the cutting down of this trip? you and the youngsters may stay as long as you please, but i will be back here september st unless the _normania_ breaks a shaft." "i wish we could go _over_ on a german boat. i hate the cunarders." "so do i, but we must land at queenstown. we must put sir tom under the sod at that little castle out from sligo. then we can do holland and belgium, and have a week or ten days in london." "that will be enough. i do hope johnson will take good care of my flowers; it's the very most important time, you know, and if he neglects them--" "he won't neglect them, polly; even if he does, they can be easily replaced. but the hay harvest, now, that's different; if they spoil the timothy or cut the alfalfa too late!" "bother your alfalfa! what do i care for that? kate's coming out with the babies, and i'm going to put her in full charge of the gardens. she'll look after them, i'm sure. i'll tell you another bit of news: jim jarvis is bound to go with us, jack says, and he has asked if we'll let him." "how long have you had that up your sleeve, young woman? i don't like it a little bit! that is why you talked so like an oracle a little while ago! what does jane say?" "she doesn't say much, but i think she wouldn't object." "of course she can't object. you sick a big brute of a man on to a little girl, and she don't dare object; but i'll feed him to the fishes if he worries her." "to be sure you will, mr. ogre. anybody would be sure of that to hear you talk." "don't chaff me, polly. this is a serious business. if you sell my girl, i'm going to buy a new one. i'll ask jessie gordon to go with us and, if jack is half the man i take him to be, he'll replenish our stock of girls before we get back." "who is match-making now?" "i don't care what you call it. i shall take out letters of marque and reprisal. i won't raise girls to be carried off by the first privateer that makes sail for them, without making some one else suffer. if jarvis goes, jessie goes, that's flat." "i think it will be an excellent plan, mr. bad temper, and i've no doubt that we can manage it." "don't say 'we' when you talk of managing it. i tell you i'm entirely on the defensive until some one robs me, then i'll take what is my neighbor's if i can get it. if it were not for my promise to sir tom, i wouldn't leave the farm for a minute! and i would establish a quarantine against all giants for at least five years." "you know you like jarvis. he is one of the best." "that's all right, polly. he's as fine as silk, but he isn't fine enough for our jane yet." chapter lx "i told you so" it may be the limitless horizon, it may be the comradery of confinement, it may be the old superstition of a plank between one and eternity, or it may be some occult influence of ship and ocean; but certain it is that there is no such place in all the world as a deck of a transatlantic liner for softening young hearts, until they lose all semblance of shape, and for melting them into each other so that out of twain there comes but one. i think polly was pleased to watch this melting process, as it began to show itself in our young people, from the safe retreat of her steamer chair and behind the covers of her book. i couldn't find that she read two chapters from any book during the whole voyage, or that she was miserable or discontented. she just watched with a comfortable "i told you so" expression of countenance; and she never mentioned home lot or garden or roses, from dock to dock. it is as natural for a woman to make matches as for a robin to build nests, and i suppose i had as much right to find fault with the one as with the other. i did not find fault with her, but neither could i understand her; so i fretted and fumed and smoked, and walked the deck and bet on everything in sight and out of sight, until the soothing influence of the sea took hold of me, and then i drifted like the rest of them. no, i will not say "like the rest of them," for i could not forgive this waste of space given over to water. in other crossings i had not noted the conspicuous waste with any feeling of loss or regret; but other crossings had been made before i knew the value of land. i could not get away from the thought that it would add much to the wealth of the world if the mountains were removed and cast into the sea. not only that, but it would curb to some extent the ragings of this same turbulent sea, which was rolling and tossing us about for no really good reason that i could discover. the atlantic had lost much of its romance and mystery for me, and i wondered if i had ever felt the enthusiasm which i heard expressed on all sides. "there she spouts!" came from a dozen voices, and the whole passenger list crowded the port rail, just to see a cow whale throwing up streams of water, not immensely larger than the streams of milk which my cow holsteins throw down. the crowd seemed to take great pleasure in this sight, but to me it was profitless. i have known the day when i could watch the graceful leaps and dives of a school of porpoises, as it kept with easy fin, alongside of our ocean greyhound, with pleasure unalloyed by any feeling of non-utility. but now these "hogs of the sea" reminded me of my chester whites, and the comparison was so much in favor of the hogs of the land, that i turned from these spectacular, useless things, to meditate upon the price of pork. even mother carey's chickens gave me no pleasure, for they reminded me of a far better brood at home, and i cheerfully thanked the noble wyandottes who were working every third day so that i could have a trip to europe. to be sure, i had european trips before i had wyandottes; to have them both the same year was the marvel. before we reached queenstown, jarvis had gained some ground by twice picking me out of the scuppers; but as i resented his steadiness of foot and strength of hand, it was not worth mentioning. i could see, however, that these feats were great in jane's eyes. the double rescue of a beloved parent, from, not exactly a watery grave, but a damp scupper, would never be forgotten. the giant let her adore his manly strength and beauty, and i could only secretly hope that some wave--tidal if necessary--would take him off his feet and send him into the scuppers. but he had played football too long to be upset by a watery wave, and i was balked of my revenge. jack and jessie were rather a pleasure to me than otherwise. they settled right down to the heart-softening business in such matter-of-fact fashion that their hearts must have lost contour before the voyage was half over. polly dismissed them from her mind with a sigh of satisfaction, and i then hoped that she would find some time to devote to me, but i was disappointed. she assured me that those two were safely locked in the fold, but that she could not "set her mind at rest" until the other two were safe. after that she promised to take me in hand; whether for reward or for punishment left me guessing. the six and a half days finally came to an end, and we debarked for queenstown. the journey across ireland was made as quickly as slow trains and a circuitous route would permit, and we reached sligo on the second day. sir thomas's agent met us, and we drove at once to the "little castle out from sligo." it proved to be a very old little castle, four miles out, overlooking the bay. it was low and flat, with thick walls of heavy stone pierced by a few small windows, and a broad door made of black irish oak heavily studded with iron. from one corner rose a square tower, thirty feet or more in height, covered with wild vines that twined in and out through the narrow, unglazed windows. within was a broad, low hall, from which opened four rooms of nearly equal size. there was little evidence that the castle had been inhabited during recent years, though there was an ancient woman care-taker who opened the great door for us, and then took up the irish peasant's wail for the last of the o'haras. she never ceased her crooning except when she spoke to us, which was seldom; but she placed us at table in the state dining room, and served us with stewed kid, potatoes, and goat's milk. the walls of the dining room were covered with ancient pictures of the o'haras, but none so recent as a hundred years. we could well believe sir tom's words, "the sod has known us for a thousand years," when we looked upon the score of pictures, each of which stood for at least one generation. the agent told us that our friend had never lived at the castle, but that he had visited the place as a child, and again just before leaving for america. a wall-enclosed lot about two hundred feet square was "the kindest sod in all the world to an o'hara," and here we placed our dear friend at rest with the "lucky ones" of his race. no one of the race ever deserved more "luck" than did our sir tom. the young clergyman who read the service assured us that he had found it; and our minds gave the same evidence, and our hearts said amen, as we turned from his peaceful resting-place by the green waters of sligo bay. two days later we were comfortably lodged at the hague, from which we intended to "do" the little kingdom of holland by rail, by canal, or on foot, as we should elect. chapter lxi the belgian farmer leaving holland with regret, we crossed the schelde into belgium, the cockpit of europe. it is here that one sees what intensive farming is like. no fences to occupy space, no animals roaming at large, nothing but small strips of land tilled to the utmost, chiefly by hand. little machinery is used, and much of the work is done after primitive fashions; but the land is productive, and it is worked to the top of its bent. the peasant-farmer soils his cows, his sheep, his swine, in a way that is economical of space and food, if not of labor, and manages to make a living and to pay rent for his twenty-acre strip of land. his methods do not appeal to the american farmer, who wastes more grain and forage each year than would keep the netherlander, his family, and his stock; but there is a lesson to be learned from this subdivision and careful cultivation of land. belgian methods prove that mother earth can care for a great many children if she be properly husbanded, and that the sooner we recognize her capacity the better for us. abandoned farms are not known in belgium and france, though the soil has been cultivated for a thousand years, and was originally no better than our new england farms, and not nearly so good as hundreds of those which are practically given over to "old fields" in virginia. it is neglect that impoverishes land, not use. intelligent use makes land better year by year. the only way to wear out land is to starve and to rob it at the same time. food for man and beast may be taken from the soil for thousands of years without depleting it. all it asks in return is the refuse, carefully saved, properly applied, and thoroughly worked in to make it available. if, in addition to this, a cover crop of some leguminous plant be occasionally turned under, the soil may actually increase in fertility, though it be heavily cropped each year. it would pay the young american farmer to study belgian methods, crude though they are, for the insight he could gain into the possibilities of continuous production. the greatest number of people to the square mile in the inhabited globe live in this little, ill-conditioned kingdom, and most of them get their living from the soil. it has been the battle-field of europe: a thousand armies have harrowed it; human blood has drenched it from liège to ostend; it has been depopulated again and again. but it springs into new life after each catastrophe, simply because the soil is prolific of farmers, and they cannot be kept down. like the poppies on the field of waterloo, which renew the blood-red strife each year, the belgian peasant-farmer springs new-born from the soil, which is the only mother he knows. after two weeks in holland, two in belgium, and two in london, we were ready to turn our faces toward home. we took the train to southampton, and a small side-wheel steamer carried us outside southampton waters, where we tossed about for thirty minutes before the _normania_ came to anchor. the wind was blowing half a gale from the north, and we were glad to get under the lee of the great vessel to board her. the transfer was quickly made, and we were off for new york. the wind gained strength as the day grew old, but while we were in the solent the bluff coast of devon and cornwall broke its force sufficiently to permit us to be comfortable on the port side of the ship. as night came on, great clouds rolled up from the northwest and the wind increased. darkness, as of egypt, fell upon us before we passed the lizard, and the only things that showed above the raging waters were the beacon lights, and these looked dim and far away. occasionally a flash of lightning threw the waters into relief, and then made the darkness more impenetrable. as we steamed beyond the lizard and the protecting cornish coast, the full force of the gale, from out the irish sea, struck us. we were going nearly with it, and the good ship pitched and reared like an angry horse, but did not roll much. pitching is harder to bear than rolling, and the decks were quickly vacated. i turned into my stateroom soon after ten o'clock, and then happened a thing which will hold a place in my memory so long as i have one. i did not feel sleepy, but i was nervous, restless, and half sick. i lay on my lounge for perhaps half an hour, and then felt impelled to go on deck. i wrapped myself in a great waterproof ulster, pulled my storm cap over my ears, and climbed the companionway. two or three electric bulbs in sheltered places on deck only served to make the darkness more intense. i crawled forward of the ladies' cabin, and, supporting myself against the donkey-engine, peered at the light above the crow's-nest and tried to think that i could see the man on watch in the nest. i did see him for an instant, when the next flash of lightning came, and also two officers on the bridge; and i knew that captain bahrens was in the chart house. when the next flash came, i saw the other lookout man making his short turns on the narrow space of bow deck, and was tempted to join him; why, i do not know. i crept past the donkey-engine, holding fast to it as i went, until i reached the iron gate that closes the narrow passage to the bow deck. with two silver dollars in my teeth i staggered across this rail-guarded plank, and when the next flash came i was sitting at the feet of the lookout man with the two silver dollars in my outstretched hand. he took the money, and let me crawl forward between the anchors and the high bulwark of the bows. the sensations which this position gave me were strange beyond description. darkness was thick around me; at one moment i was carried upward until i felt that i should be lost in the black sky, and the next moment the downward motion was so terrible that the blacker water at the bottom of the sea seemed near. i cannot say that i enjoyed it, but i could not give it up. when the great bow rose, i stood up, and, looking over the bulwark, tried to see either sky or water, but tried in vain, save when the lightning revealed them both. when the bow fell, i crouched under the bulwark and let the sea comb over me. how long i remained at this weird post, i do not know; but i was driven from it in such terror as i hope never to feel again. an unusually large wave carried me nearer the sky than i liked to be, and just as the sharp bow of the great iron ship was balancing on its crest for the desperate plunge, a glare of lightning made sky and sea like a sheet of flame and curdled the blood in my veins. in the trough of the sea, under the very foot of the immense steamship, lay a delicate pleasure-boat, with its mast broken flush with its deck, and its helpless body the sport of the cruel waves. the light did not last longer than it would take me to count five, but in that time i saw four figures that will always haunt me. two sailors in yachting costume were struggling hopelessly with the tiller, and the wild terror of their faces as they saw the huge destruction that hung over them is simply unforgettable. the other two were different. a strong, blond man, young, handsome, and brave i know, stood bareheaded in front of the cockpit. with a sudden, vehement motion he drew the head of a girl to his breast and held it there as if to shut out the horrible world. there was no fear in his face,--just pain and distress that he was unable to do more. i am thankful that i did not see the face of the girl. her brown hair has floated in my dreams until i have cried out for help; what would her face have done? in the twinkling of an eye it was over. i heard a sound as when one breaks an egg on the edge of a cup,--no more. i screamed with horror, ran across the guarded plank, climbed the gate, and fell headlong and screaming over the donkey-engine. picking up my battered self, i shouted: "bahrens! bahrens! for god's sake, help! man overboard! stop the ship!" i reached the ladder to the bridge just as the captain came out of the chart house. "for god's sake, stop the ship! you've run down a boat with four people! stop her, can't you!" "it can't be done, man. if we've run down a boat, it's all over with it and all in it. i can't risk a thousand lives without hope of saving one. this is a gale, doctor, and we have our hands full." i turned from him in horror and despair. i stumbled to my stateroom, dropped my wet clothing in the middle of the floor, and knew no more until the trumpet called for breakfast. the rush of green waters was pounding at my porthole; the experience of the night came back to me with horror; the reek of my wet clothes sickened my heart, and i rang for the steward. "take these things away, gustav, and don't bring them back until they are dry and pressed." "what things does the herr doctor speak for?" "the wet things there on the floor." "excuse me, but i have seen no things wet." "you dutch chump!" said i, half rising, "what do you mean by saying--well, i'll be damned!" there were my clothes, dry and folded, on the couch, and my ulster and cap on their hook, without evidence of moisture or use. "gustav, remind me to give you three rix-dollars at breakfast." "danke, herr doctor." of such stuff are dreams made. but i will know those terror-stricken sailors if i do not see them for a hundred years; and i am glad the dark-haired girl did not realize the horror, but simply knew that the man loved her; and i often think of the man who did the nice thing when no one was looking, and whose face was not terrorized by the crack of doom. chapter lxii home-coming even polly was satisfied with our young people before we entered new york bay. if anything in their "left pulmonaries" had remained unsoftened during the voyage out and the comradery of the netherlands, it was melted into non-resistance by the homeward trip. i could not long hold out against the evidence of happiness that surrounded me, and i gave a half-grudging consent that jarvis and jane might play together for the next three or four years, if they would not ask to play "for keeps" until those years had passed. they readily gave the promise, but every one knows how such promises are kept. the children wore me out in time, as all children do in all kinds of ways, and got their own ways in less than half the contract period. i cannot put my finger on any punishment that has befallen them for this lack of filial consideration, and i am fifteen-sixteenths reconciled. i was downright glad that jack "made good" with jessie gordon. she was the sort of girl to get out the best that was in him, and i was glad to have her begin early. try as i might, i could not feel unhappy that beautiful september morning as we steamed up the finest waterway to the finest city in the world. deny it who will, i claim that our empire city and its environments make the most impressive human show. there is more life, vigor, utility, gorgeousness about it than can be found anywhere else; and it has the snap and elasticity of youth, which are so attractive. no man who claims the privilege of american citizenship can sail up new york bay without feeling pride in his country and satisfaction in his birthright. one doesn't disparage other cities and other countries when he claims that his own is the best. we were not specially badly treated at the custom-house,--no worse, indeed, than smugglers, thieves, or pirates would have been; and we escaped, after some hours of confinement, without loss of life or baggage, but with considerable loss of dignity. how can a self-respecting, middle-aged man (to be polite to myself) stand for hours in a crowded shed, or lean against a dirty post, or sit on the sharp edge of his open trunk, waiting for a superior being with a gilt band around his hat, without losing some modicum of dignity? and how, when this superior being calls his number and kicks his trunk, is he to know that he is a free-born american citizen and a lineal descendant of roger williams? the evidence is entirely from within. how is he to support a countenance and mien of dignity while the secrets of his chest are laid bare and the contents of his trunk dumped on the dirty floor? and how must his eyes droop and his face take on a hang-dog look when his second-best coat is searched for diamonds, and his favorite (though worn) pajamas punched for pearls. there are concessions to be made for one's great and glorious country, and the custom-house is one of them. perhaps we will do better sometime, and perhaps, though this is unlikely, the customs inspectors of the future will disguise themselves as gentlemen. we finally passed the inquisition, and, with stuffed trunks and ruffled spirits, took cabs for the station, and were presently within the protecting walls at four oaks, there to forget lost dignities in the cultivation of land and new ones. chapter lxiii an hundred fold kate declared that she had had the time of her life during her nine weeks' stay at four oaks. "people here every day, and the house full over sunday. we've kept the place humming," said she, "and you may be thankful if you find anything here but a mortgage. when tom and i get rich, we are going to be farm people." "don't wait for that, daughter. start your country home early and let it grow up with the children. it doesn't take much money to buy the land and to get fruit trees started. if tom will give it his care for three hours a week, he will make it at least pay interest and taxes, and it will grow in value every year until you are ready to live on it. think how our orchards would look now if we had started them ten years ago! they would be fit to support an average family." "there, dad, don't mount your hobby as soon as ever you get home. but we _have_ had a good time out here. do you really think farming is all beer and skittles?" "it has been smooth sailing for me thus far, and i believe it is simply a business with the usual ups and downs; but i mean to make the ups the feature in this case." "are you really glad to get back to it? didn't you want to stay longer?" "i had a fine trip, and all that, but i give you this for true; i don't think it would make me feel badly if i were condemned to stay within forty miles of this place for the rest of my life." "i can't go so far as that with you, dad, but perhaps i may when i'm older." "yes, age makes a difference. at forty a man is a fool or a farmer, or both; at fifty the pull of the land is mighty; at sixty it has full possession of him; at seventy it draws him down with other forces than that which newton discovered, and at eighty it opens for him and kindly tucks the sod around him. mother earth is no stepmother, but warm and generous to all, and i think a fellow is lucky who comes to her for long years of bounty before he is compelled to seek her final hospitality." "but, dad, we can't all be farmers." "of course not, and there's the pity of it; but almost every man can have a plot of ground on which each year he can grow some new thing, if only a radish or a leaf of lettuce, to add to the real wealth of the world. i tell you, young lady, that all wealth springs out of the ground. you think that riches are made in wall street, but they are not; they are only handled and manipulated. stop the work of the farmer from april to october of any year, and wall street would be a howling wilderness. the street makes it easier to exchange a dozen eggs for three spools of silk, or a pound of butter for a hat pin, but that's all; it never created half the intrinsic value of twelve eggs or sixteen ounces of butter. it's only the farmer who is a wealth producer, and it's high time that he should be recognized as such. he's the husbandman of all life; without him the world would be depopulated in three years. you don't half appreciate the profession which your dad has taken up in his old age." "that sounds all right, but i don't think the farmer would recognize himself from that description. he doesn't live up to his possibilities, does he?" "mighty few people do. a farmer may be what he chooses to be. he's under no greater limitations than a business or a professional man. if he be content to use his muscle blindly, he will probably fall under his own harrow. so, too, would the merchant or the lawyer who failed to use his intelligence in his business. the farmer who cultivates his mind as well as his land, uses his pencil as often as his plough, and mixes brains with brawn, will not fall under his own harrow or any other man's. he will never be the drudge of soil or of season, for to a large extent he can control the soil and discount the season. no other following gives such opportunity for independence and self-balance." "almost thou persuadest me to become a farmer," said kate, as we left the porch, where i had been admiring my land while i lectured on the advantages of husbandry. polly came out of the rose garden, where she had been examining her flowers and setting her watch, and said:-- "kate, you and the grand-girls must stay this month out, anyway. it seems an age since we saw you last." "all right, if dad will agree not to fire farm fancies and figures at me every time he catches me in an easy-chair." "i'll promise, but you don't know what you're missing." four oaks looked great, and i was tempted to tramp over every acre of it, saying to each, "you are mine"; but first i had a little talk with thompson. "everything has been greased for us this summer," said thompson. "we got a bumper crop of hay, and the oats and corn are fine! i allow you've got fifty-five bushels of oats to the acre in those shocks, and the corn looks like it stood for more than seventy. we sold nine more calves the end of june, for $ . mr. tom must have a lot of money for you, for in august we sold the finest bunch of shoates you ever saw,-- of them. they were not extra heavy, but they were fine as silk. mr. tom said they netted $ . per hundred, and they averaged a little over pounds. i went down with them, and the buyers tumbled over each other to get them. i was mighty proud of the bunch, and brought back a check for $ ." "good for you, thompson! that's the best sale yet." "some of the heifers will be coming in the last of this month or the first of next. don't you want to get rid of those five scrub cows?" "better wait six weeks, and then you may sell them. do you know where you can place them?" "jackson was looking at them a few days ago, and said he would give $ apiece for them; but they are worth more." "not for us, thompson, and not for him, either, if he saw things just right. they're good for scrubs; but they don't pay well enough for us, and if he wants them he can have them at that price about the middle of october." the credit account for the second quarter of stood:-- calves . . . . . $ . eggs . . . . . . . butter . . . . . . . total. . . . . . $ . chapter lxiv comfort me with apples september added a new item to our list of articles sold; small, indeed, but the beginning of the fourth and last product of our factory farm,--fruit from our newly planted orchards. the three hundred plum trees in the chicken runs gave a moderate supply for the colony, and the dwarf-pear trees yielded a small crop; but these were hardly included in our scheme. i expected to be able, by and by, to sell $ or $ worth of plums; but the chief income from fruit would come from the fifty acres of young apple orchards. i hope to live to see the time when these young orchards will bring me at least $ a year for each tree; and if i round out my expectancy (as the life-insurance people figure it), i may see them do much better. in the interim the day of small things must not be despised. in our climate the yellow transparent and the duchess do not ripen until early september, and i was therefore at home in time to gather and market the little crop from my six hundred trees. the apples were carefully picked, for they do not bear handling well, and the perfect ones were placed in half-bushel boxes and sent to my city grocer. not one defective apple was packed, for i was determined that the four oaks stencil should be as favorably known for fruit as for other products. the grocer allowed me fifty cents a box. "the market is glutted with apples, but not your kind," said he. "can you send more?" i could not send more, for my young trees had done their best in producing ninety-six boxes of perfect fruit. boxes and transportation came to ten cents for each box, and i received $ for my first shipment of fruit. i cannot remember any small sum of money that ever pleased me more,--except the $ which i earned by seven months of labor in my fourteenth year; for it was "first fruits" of the last of our interlacing industries. thirty-eight dollars divided among my trees would give one cent to each; but four years later these orchards gave net returns of ninety cents for each tree, and in four years from now they will bring more than twice that amount. at twelve years of age they will bring an annual income of $ each, and this income will steadily increase for ten or fifteen years. at the time of writing, february, , they are good for $ a year, which is five per cent of $ . would i take $ apiece for these trees? not much, though that would mean $ , . i do not know where i could place $ , so that it would pay five per cent this year, six per cent next year, and twenty per cent eight or ten years from now. of course, $ , would be an exorbitant price to pay for an orchard like mine; but it must be remembered that i am old and cannot wait for trees to grow. if a man will buy land at $ or $ an acre, plant it to apple trees (not less than sixty-five to the acre), and bring these trees to an age when they will produce fruit to the value of $ . each, they will not have cost more than $ . per tree for the land, the trees, and the labor. i am too old to begin over again, and i wish to see a handsome income from my experiment before my eyes are dim; but why on earth young men do not take to this kind of investment is more than i can see. it is as safe as government bonds, and infinitely safer than most mercantile ventures. it is a dignified employment, free from the ordinary risks of business; and it is not likely to be overdone. all one needs is energy, a little money, and a good bit of well-directed intelligence. this combination is common enough to double our rural population, relieve the congestion in trades and underpaid employments, and add immensely to the wealth of the country. if we can only get the people headed for the land, it will do much toward solving the vexing labor problems, and will draw the teeth of the communists and the anarchists; for no one is so willing to divide as he who cannot lose by division. to the man who has a plot of ground which he calls his own, division doesn't appeal with any but negative force. neither should it, until all available lands are occupied. then he must move up and make room for another man by his side. the sales for the quarter ending september were as follows:-- half-bushel boxes of apples $ . calves . eggs . butter . hogs . -------- total $ . this was the best total for any three months up to date, and it made me feel that i was getting pretty nearly out of the woods, so far as increasing my investment went. including my new hog-house and ten thousand bushels of purchased grain, the investment, thought i, must represent quite a little more than $ , , and i hoped not to go much beyond that sum, for polly looked serious when i talked of six figures, though she was reconciled to any amount which could be stated in five. my buildings were all finished, and were good for many years; and if they burned, the insurance would practically replace them. my granary was full enough of oats and corn to provide for deficits of years to come; and my flocks and herds were now at their maximum, since sam had turned more than eight hundred pullets into the laying pens. i began to feel that the factory would soon begin to run full time and to make material returns for its equipment. it would, of course, be several years before the fruit would make much showing, but i am a patient man, and could wait. chapter lxv the end of the third year "polly," said i, on the evening of december , "let's settle the accounts for the year, and see how much we must credit to 'experience' to make the figures balance." "aren't you going to credit anything to health, and good times generally? if not, you don't play fair." "we'll keep those things in reserve, to spring on the enemy at a critical moment; perhaps they won't be needed." "i fancy you will have to bring all your reserves into action this time, mr. headman, for you promised to make a good showing at the end of the third year." "well, so i will; at least, according to my own estimate; but others may not see it as i do." "don't let others see it at all, then. the experiment is yours, isn't it?" "yes, for us; but it's more than a personal matter. i want to prove that a factory farm is sound in theory and safe in practice, and that it will fit the needs of a whole lot of farmers." "i hardly think that 'a whole lot of farmers,' or of any other kind of people, will put $ , into a farm on any terms. don't you think you've been a little extravagant?" "only on the home forty, polly. i will expound this matter to you some time until you fall asleep, but not to-day. we have other business on hand. i want to give you this warning to begin with: you are not to jump to a conclusion or on to my figures until you have fairly considered two items which enter into this year's expense account. i've built an extra hog-house and have bought ten thousand bushels of grain, at a total expense of about $ . neither of these items was really needed this year; but as they are our insurance against disease and famine, i secured them early and at low prices. they won't appear in the expense account again,--at least, not for many years,--and they give me a sense of security that is mighty comforting." "but what if anderson sets fire to your piggery, or lightning strikes your granary,--how about the expense account then?" "what do you suppose fire insurance policies are for? to paper the wall? no, madam, they are to pay for new buildings if the old ones burn up. i charge the farm over $ a year for this security, and it's a binding contract." "well, i'll try and forget the $ if you'll get to the figures at once." "all right. first, let me go over the statement for the last quarter of the year. the sales were: apples, from old trees at $ per tree, $ ; calves, $ ; hens and cockerels, $ ; cows (the common ones, to jackson) at $ each, $ ; eggs, $ ; butter, $ ; and hogs, rushed to market in december when only about eight months old and sold for $ . per hundred to help swell this account, $ ; making a total for the fourth quarter of $ . "the items of expense for the year were:-- "interest on investment $ , . new hog-house , . , bu. of grain , . food for colony , . food for stock , . seeds and fertilizers , . insurance and taxes . shoeing and repairs . replenishments . "total $ , . "the credit account reads: first quarter, $ ; second quarter, $ ; third quarter, $ ; fourth quarter, $ ; total, $ , . "if we take out the $ for the extra piggery and the grain, the expense account and the income will almost balance, even leaving out the $ which we agreed to pay for food and shelter. i think that's a fair showing for the three years, don't you?" "possibly it is; but what a lot of money you pay for wages. it's the largest item." "yes, and it always will be. i don't claim that a factory farm can be run like a grazing or a grain farm. one of its objects is to furnish well-paid employment to a lot of people. we've had nine men and two lads all the year, and three extra men for seven months, three women on the farm and five in the house,--twenty-two people to whom we've paid wages this year. doesn't that count for anything? how many did we keep in the city?" "four,--three women and a man." "then we give employment to eighteen more people at equally good wages and in quite as wholesome surroundings. do you realize, polly, that the maids in the house get $ out of the $ ,--one quarter of the whole? possibly there is a suspicion of extravagance on the home forty." "not a bit of it! you know that you proved to me that it cost us $ a year for board and shelter in the city, and you only credit the farm with $ . that other $ would more than pay the extra wages. i really don't think it costs as much to live here as it did on b----street, and any one can see the difference." "you are right. if we call our plant an even $ , , which at five per cent would mean $ a year,--where can you get house, lawns, woods, gardens, horses, dogs, servants, liberty, birds, and sun-dials on a wide and liberal scale for $ a year, except on a farm like this? you can't buy furs, diamonds, and yachts with such money anyhow or anywhere, so personal expenditures must be left out of all our calculations. no, the wage account will always be the large one, and i am glad it is so, for it is one finger of the helping hand." "you haven't finished with the figures yet. you don't know what to add to our _permanent_ investment." "that's quickly done. _nineteen thousand five hundred and ninety-five dollars_ from twenty-two thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars leaves three thousand one hundred and sixty-five dollars to charge to our investment. i resent the word 'permanent,' which you underscored just now, for each year we're going to have a surplus to subtract from this interest-bearing debt." "precious little surplus you'll have for the next few years, with jack and jane getting married, and--" "but, polly, you can't charge weddings to the farm, any more than we can yachts and diamonds." "i don't see why. a wedding is a very important part of one's life, and i think the farm ought to be _made_ to pay for it." "i quite agree with you; but we must add $ to the old farm debt, and take up our increased burden with such courage as we may. in round figures it is $ , . does that frighten you, polly?" "a little, perhaps; but i guess we can manage it. _you_ would have been frightened three years ago if some one had told you that you would put $ , into a farm of less than five hundred acres." "you're right. spending money on a farm is like other forms of vice,--hated, then tolerated, then embraced. but seriously, a man would get a bargain if he secured this property to-day for what it has cost us. i wouldn't take a bonus of $ , and give it up." "you'll hardly find a purchaser at that price, and i'm glad you can't, for i want to live here and nowhere else." chapter lxvi looking backward with the close of the third year ends the detailed history of the factory farm. all i wish to do further is to give a brief synopsis of the debit and credit accounts for each of the succeeding four years. first i will say a word about the people who helped me to start the factory. thompson and his wife are still with me, and they are well on toward the wage limit. johnson has the gardens and lars the stables, and otto is chief swineherd. french and his wife act as though they were fixtures on the place, as indeed i hope they are. they have saved a lot of money, and they are the sort who are inclined to let well enough alone. judson is still at four oaks, doing as good service as ever; but i fancy that he is minded to strike out for himself before long. he has been fortunate in money matters since he gave up the horse and buggy; he informed me six months ago that he was worth more than $ . "i shouldn't have had five thousand cents if i'd stuck to that darned old buggy," said he, "and i guess i'll have to thank you for throwing me down that day." zeb has married lena, and a little cottage is to be built for them this winter, just east of the farm-house; and lena's place is to be filled by her cousin, who has come from the old country. anderson and sam both left in ,--poor, faithful anderson because his heart gave out, and sam because his beacon called him. lars's boys, now sixteen and eighteen, have full charge of the poultry plant, and are quite up to sam in his best days. of course i have had all kinds of troubles with all sorts of men; but we have such a strong force of "reliables" that the atmosphere is not suited to the idler or the hobo, and we are, therefore, never seriously annoyed. of one thing i am certain: no man stays long at our farm-house without apprehending the uses of napkin and bath-tub, and these are strong missionary forces. through careful tilth and the systematic return of all waste to the land, the acres at four oaks have grown more fertile each year. the soil was good seven years ago, and we have added fifty per cent to its crop capacity. the amount of waste to return to the land on a farm like this is enormous, and if it be handled with care, there will be no occasion to spend much money for commercial fertilizers. i now buy fertilizers only for the mid-summer dressing on my timothy and alfalfa fields. the apple trees are very heavily mulched, even beyond the spread of their branches, with waste fresh from the vats, and once a year a light dressing of muriate of potash is applied. the trees have grown as fast as could be desired, and all of them are now in bearing. the apples from these young trees sold for enough last year to net ninety cents for each tree, which is more than the trees have ever cost me. in these orchards yielded $ ; in , $ ; in , $ ; in , $ . seven years from the date of planting these trees, which were then three years old, i had received in money $ , or $ more than i paid for the fifty acres of land on which they grew. if one would ask for better returns, all he has to do is to wait; for there is a sort of geometrical progression inherent in the income from all well-cared-for orchards, which continues in force for about fifteen years. there is, however, no rule of progress unless the orchards are well cared for, and i would not lead any one to the mistake of planting an orchard and then doing nothing but wait. cultivate, feed, prune, spray, dig bores, fight mice, rabbits, aphides, and the thousand other enemies to trees and fruit, and do these things all the time and then keep on doing them, and you will win out. omit all or any of them, and the chances are that you will fail of big returns. but orcharding is not unique in this. every form of business demands prompt, timely, and intelligent attention to make it yield its best. the orchards have been my chief care for seven years; the spraying, mulching, and cultivation have been done by the men, but i think i have spent one whole year, during the past seven, among my trees. do i charge my orchards for this time? no; for i have gotten as much good from the trees as they have from me, and honors are easy. a meditative man in his sixth lustrum can be very happy with pruning-hook and shears among his young trees. if he cannot, i am sincerely sorry for him. i have not increased my plant during the past four years. my stock consume a little more than i can raise; but there are certain things which a farm will not produce, and there are other things which one had best buy, thus letting others work their own specialties. if i had more land, would i increase my stock? no, unless i had enough land to warrant another plant. my feeding-grounds are filled to their capacity from a sanitary point of view, and it would be foolish to take risks for moderate returns. if i had as much more land, i would establish another factory; but this would double my business cares without adding one item to my happiness. as it is, the farm gives me enough to keep me keenly interested, and not enough to tire or annoy me. so far as profits go, it is entirely satisfactory. it feeds and shelters my family and twenty others in the colony, and also the stranger within the gates, and it does this year after year without friction, like a well-oiled machine. not only this. each year for the past four, it has given a substantial surplus to be subtracted from the original investment. if i live to be sixty-eight years of age, the farm will be my creditor for a considerable sum. i have bought no corn or oats since january, . the seventeen thousand bushels which i then had in my granary have slowly grown less, though there has never been a day when we could not have measured up seven thousand or eight thousand bushels. i shall probably buy again when the market price pleases me, for i have a horror of running short; but i shall not sell a bushel, though prices jump to the sky. i have seen the time when my corn and oats would have brought four times as much as i paid for them, but they were not for sale. they are the raw material, to be made up in my factory, and they are worth as much to me at twenty cents a bushel as at eighty cents. what would one think of the manager of a silk-thread factory who sold his raw silk, just because it had advanced in price? silk thread would advance in proportion, and how does the manager know that he can replace his silk when needed, even at the advanced price? when corn went to eighty cents a bushel, hogs sold for $ . a hundred, and my twenty-cent corn made pork just as fast as eighty-cent corn would have done, and a great deal cheaper. once i sold some timothy hay, but it was to "discount the season," just as i bought grain. on july , , a tremendous rain and wind storm beat down about forty acres of oats beyond recovery. the next day my mowing machines, working against the grain, commenced cutting it for hay. before it was half cut, i sold to a livery-stable keeper in exeter fifty tons of bright timothy for $ . the storm brought me no loss, for the horses did quite as well on the oat hay as they ever had done on timothy, and $ more than paid for the loss of the grain. during the first three years of my experiment hogs were very low,--lower, indeed, than at any other period for forty years. it was not until that prices began to improve. during that year my sales averaged $ . a hundred. in the average was $ . , in it was $ . , and in it was just $ . it will be readily appreciated that there is more profit in pork at seven cents a pound than at three and a half cents; but how much more is beyond me, for it cost no more to get my swine to market last year than it did in . i charge each hog $ for bran and shorts; this is all the ready money i pay out for him. if he weighs three hundred pounds (a few do), he is worth $ . at $ . a hundred, or $ at $ a hundred; and it is a great deal pleasanter to say $ from $ , leaves $ , than to say $ from $ . leaves $ . . of course, $ a head is but a small part of what the hog has cost when ready for market, but it is all i charge him with directly, for his other expenses are carried on the farm accounts. the marked increase in income during the past four years is wholly due to the advance in the price of pork and the increased product of the orchards. the expense account has not varied much. the fruit crop is charged with extra labor, packages, and transportation, before it is entered, and the account shows only net returns. i have had to buy new machinery, but this has been rather evenly distributed, and doesn't show prominently in any year. in i lost my forage barn. it was struck by lightning on june , and burned to the ground. fortunately, there was no wind, and the rain came in such torrents as to keep the other buildings safe. i had to scour the country over for hay to last a month, and the expense of this, together with some addition to the insurance money, cost the farm $ before the new structure was completed. i give below the income and the outgo for the last four years:-- income expenses to the good $ , . $ , . $ , . , . , . , . , . , . , . , . , . , . ----------- making a total to the good of $ , . these figures cover only the money received and expended. they take no account of the $ per annum which we agreed to pay the farm for keeping us, so long as we made it pay interest to us. four times $ are $ , which, added to $ , , makes almost $ , to charge off from the $ , of original investment. polly was wrong when she spoke of it as a _permanent_ investment. four years more of seven-dollar pork and thrifty apple growth will make this balance of $ , look very small. the interest is growing rapidly less, and it will be but a short time before the whole amount will be taken off the expense account. when this is done, the yearly balance will be increased by the addition of $ , and we may be able to make the farm pay for weddings, as polly suggested. chapter lxvii looking forward i am not so opinionated as to think that mine is the only method of farming. on the contrary, i know that it is only one of several good methods; but that it is a good one, i insist. for a well-to-do, middle-aged man who was obliged to give up his profession, it offered change, recreation, employment, and profit. my ability to earn money by my profession ceased in , and i must needs live at ease on my income, or adopt some congenial and remunerative employment, if such could be found. the vision of a factory farm had flitted through my brain so often that i was glad of the opportunity to test my theories by putting them into practice. fortunately i had money, and to spare; for i had but a vague idea of what money would be needed to carry my experiment to the point of self-support. i set aside $ , as ample, but i spent nearly twice that amount without blinking. it is quite likely that i could have secured as good and as prompt returns with two-thirds of this expenditure. i plead guilty to thirty-three per cent lack of economy; the extenuating circumstances were, a wish to let the members of my family do much as they pleased and have good things and good people around them, and a somewhat luxurious temperament of my own. polly and i were too wise (not to say too old) to adopt farming as a means of grace through privations. we wanted the good there was in it, and nothing else; but as a secondary consideration i wished to prove that it can be made to pay well, even though one-third of the money expended goes for comforts and kickshaws. it is not necessary to spend so much on a five-hundred-acre farm, and a factory farm need not contain so many acres. any number of acres from forty to five hundred, and any number of dollars from $ to $ , , will do, so long as one holds fast to the rules: good clean fences for security against trespass by beasts, or weeds; high tilth, and heavy cropping; no waste or fallow land; conscientious return to the land of refuse, and a cover crop turned under every second year; the best stock that money can buy; feed for product, not simply to keep the animals alive; force product in every way not detrimental to the product itself; maintain a strict quarantine around your animals, and then depend upon pure food, water, air, sunlight, and good shelter to keep them healthy; sell as soon as the product is finished, even though the market doesn't please you; sell only perfect product under your own brand; buy when the market pleases you and thus "discount the seasons"; remember that interdependent industries are the essence of factory farming; employ the best men you can find, and keep them interested in your affairs; have a definite object and make everything bend toward that object; plant apple trees galore and make them your chief care, as in time they will prove your chief dependence. these are some of the principles of factory farming, and one doesn't have to be old, or rich, to put them into practice. i would exchange my age, money, and acres for youth and forty acres, and think that i had the best of the bargain; and i would start the factory by planting ten acres of orchard, buying two sows, two cows, and two setting hens. youth, strength, and hustle are a great sight better than money, and the wise youth can have a finer farm than mine before he passes the half-century mark, even though he have but a bare forty to begin with. i do not take it for granted that every man has even a bare forty; but millions of men who have it not, can have it by a little persistent self-denial; and when an able-bodied man has forty acres of ground under his feet, it is up to him whether he will be a comfortable, independent, self-respecting man or not. a great deal of farm land is distant from markets and otherwise limited in its range of production, but nearly every forty which lies east of the hundredth meridian is competent to furnish a living for a family of workers, if the workers be intelligent as well as industrious. farm lands are each year being brought closer to markets by steam and electric roads; telephone and telegraphic wires give immediate service; and the daily distribution of mails brings the producer into close touch with the consumer. the day of isolation and seclusion has passed, and the farmer is a personal factor in the market. he is learning the advantages of coöperation, both in producing and in disposing of his wares; he has paid off his mortgage and has money in the bank; he is a power in politics, and by far the most dependable element in the state. like the wrestler of old, who gained new strength whenever his foot touched the ground, our country gains fresh vigor from every man who takes to the soil. in preaching a hejira to the country, i do not forget the interests of the children. let no one dread country life for the young until they come to the full pith and stature of maturity; for their chances of doing things worth doing in the world are four to one against those of children who are city-bred. four-fifths of the men and women who do great things are country-bred. this is out of all proportion to the birth-rate as between country and city, and one is at a loss to account for the disproportion, unless it is to be credited to environment. is it due to pure air and sunshine, making redder blood and more vigorous development, to broader horizons and freedom from abnormal conventions? or does a close relation to primary things give a newness to mind and body which is granted only to those who apply in person? whatever the reason, it certainly pays to be country-bred. the cities draw to themselves the cream of these youngsters, which is only natural; but the cities do not breed them, except as exotics. if the unborn would heed my advice, i would say, by all means be born in the country,--in ohio if possible. but, if fortune does not prove as kind to you as i could wish, accept this other advice: choose the, country for your foster-mother; go to her for consolation and rejuvenation, take her bounty gratefully, rest on her fair bosom, and be content with the fat of the land. the rural science series includes books which state the underlying principles of agriculture in plain language. they are suitable for consultation alike by the amateur or professional tiller of the soil, the scientist or the student, and are freely illustrated and finely made. the following volumes are now ready: the soil. by f.h. king, of the university of wisconsin. pp. illustrations. cents. the fertility of the land. by i.p. roberts, of cornell university. second edition. pp. illustrations. $ . . the spraying of plants. by e.g. lodeman, late of cornell university. pp. illustrations. $ . . milk and its products. by h.h. wing, of cornell university. third edition. pp. illustrations. $ . . the principles of fruit-growing. by l.h. bailey. third edition. pp. illustrations. $ . . bush-fruits. by f.w. card, of rhode island college of agriculture and mechanic arts. second edition. pp. illustrations. $ . . fertilizers. by e.b. voorhees, of new jersey experiment station. second edition. pp. $ . . the principles of agriculture. by l.h. bailey. third edition. pp. illustrations. $ . . irrigation and drainage. by f.h. king, university of wisconsin. pp. illustrations. $ . . the farmstead. by i.p. roberts. pp. illustrations. $ . . rural wealth and welfare. by george t. fairchild, ex-president of the agricultural college of kansas. pp. charts. $ . . the principles of vegetable-gardening. by l.h. bailey. pp. illustrations. $ . . the feeding of animals. by w.h. jordan, of new york state experiment station. $ . _net_. farm poultry. by george c. watson, of pennsylvania state college. $ . _net_. care of animals. by n.s. mayo, of connecticut agricultural college. $ . _net_. new volumes will be added from time to time to the rural science series. the following are in preparation: physiology of plants. by j.c. arthur, purdue university. breeding of animals. by w.h. brewer, of yale university. plant pathology. by b.t. galloway and associates of u.s. department of agriculture. comprises practical hand-books for the horticulturist, explaining and illustrating in detail the various important methods which experience has demonstrated to be the most satisfactory. they may be called manuals of practice, and though all are prepared by professor bailey, of cornell university, they include the opinions and methods of successful specialists in many lines, thus combining the results of the observations and experiences of numerous students in this and other lands. they are written in the clear, strong, concise english and in the entertaining style which characterize the author. the volumes are compact, uniform in style, clearly printed, and illustrated as the subject demands. they are of convenient shape for the pocket, and are substantially bound in flexible green cloth. the horticulturist's rule-book. by l.h. bailey. fourth edition. pp. cts. the nursery-book. by l.h. bailey. fourth edition. pp. illustrations. $ . . plant-breeding. by l.h. bailey. pp. illustrations. $ . . the forcing-book. by l.h. bailey. pp. illustrations. $ . . garden making. by l.h. bailey. third edition. pp. illustrations. $ . . the pruning-book. by l.h. bailey. second edition. pp. illustrations. $ . . the practical garden-book. by c.e. hunn and l.h. bailey. pp. many marginal cuts. $ . . the garden of a commuter's wife recorded by the gardener with eight photogravure illustrations cloth mo $ . "in brief, the book is delightfully sketchy and chatty, thoroughly feminine and entrancing. the writer represents herself as a doctor's daughter in a country town, who has married an englishman, and after two years abroad has come home to live. both husband and wife prefer the country to the city, and they make of their modest estate a mundane paradise of which it is a privilege to have a glimpse. surely it is no exaggeration to characterize this as one of the very best books of the holiday season, thus far."--_providence journal._ "it is written with charm, and is more than a mere treatise on what may be raised in the small lot of the suburban resident. "the author has not only learned to appreciate nature from intimate association, but has achieved unusual power of communicating these facts to others. there is something unusually attractive about the book."--_the philadelphia inquirer._ * * * * * a woman's hardy garden by helena rutherford ely with many illustrations from photographs taken in the author's garden by professor c.f. chandler cloth mo $ . net "it is never for a moment vague or general, and mrs. ely is certainly inspiring and helpful to the prospective gardener."--_boston herald._ "mrs. ely gives copious details of the cost of plants, the exact dates of planting, the number of plants required in a given space for beauty of effect and advantage to free growth, the protection needed from sun and frost, the precautions to take against injury from insects, the satisfaction to be expected from the different varieties of plants in the matter of luxuriant bloom and length of time for blossoming, and much information to be appreciated only by those who have raised a healthy garden by the slow teachings of personal experience."--_new york times saturday review._ * * * * * the macmillan company fifth avenue, new york [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from _agriculture in virginia, - _ as published in . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] agriculture in virginia, - by lyman carrier professor of agriculture, ferrum junior college virginia th anniversary celebration corporation williamsburg, virginia copyright©, by virginia th anniversary celebration corporation, williamsburg, virginia jamestown th anniversary historical booklet number agriculture in virginia, - various events in the latter years of the sixteenth century did much to shape the future destiny of the english nation. with the destruction of the spanish armada in , england rose from a minor position in world affairs to one of major importance. one of the first changes was reflected in her attitude towards trade and commerce. england was no longer penned up on her "tight little isle," and her ships could sail the high seas in comparative safety. expansion of her foreign trade seemed the only answer to her ambitions, but foreign trade required a two way transfer of products. in order to sell goods, it was necessary to buy in exchange. world commerce had already become well stabilized among friendly nations making it difficult for outside businessmen to share in these established commitments. so england was soon to direct her attentions toward america. it was with eyes focused on future trade that the businessmen who composed the london company contributed the huge sums that were required to finance the settlement at jamestown, virginia. agriculture was not of prime importance. at that time england was self-sufficient so far as the production of grains and livestock was concerned. ordinary farm products would not pay the cost of transportation across the ocean. of course, it was expected that the colonists would eventually produce their own food stuffs; however, until that stage of development occurred it was expected that the london company would supply the needs of the colony direct from england. the men of the first expedition were not farmers and took little interest in farming. a good many came, hoping to share in riches, that their imagination had created. fantastic tales about the americas had been circulated in europe during the century following their discovery. the most authentic of these foreign travel journals had been translated into english and published around the turn of the sixteenth century. reports also of rich prizes, laden with gold, captured on the spanish main by english privateers, had inflamed the english mind. if the spaniards could find such vast treasures in america, why should not the english do the same? then too, as the first colony of virginia lay between and degrees north-latitude, the same approximately as italy and spain, it was expected that the much desired warm weather products enjoyed by the mediterranean people, such as oranges, lemons, sugar, and spices could be produced equally as well in america. jamestown eventually contributed great financial benefits to the mother country from agricultural accomplishments. these benefits could not in be visualized. to understand the vicissitudes which beset the colonists in the early years of the settlement, one should be familiar with the agricultural practices of both the old world and the new, for it was by combining the farming wisdom of both sides of the atlantic into a new agriculture, that the colony became firmly established. old world agriculture european agriculture reached a high degree of efficiency two thousand years ago in the scrub-forest region around the mediterranean sea. to the greeks that part of the world alone was considered fit for habitation by human beings. farming by the romans was regarded as a highly respectable and honorable occupation. some of their most learned scholars wrote books on husbandry. the romans have given us by far the most complete and satisfactory accounts of their agriculture of any ancient people. during the "revival of learning," these old masterpieces were rediscovered, constituting the principal agricultural literature of europe, prior to the eighteenth century. most of the early english books on husbandry were mere translations of the roman books on that subject, with a few original observations added. agriculture in england the northern or colder parts of europe were many centuries behind the mediterranean nations in agricultural achievement. at the time of the discovery of america, england and most of the nations of europe were controlled by the feudal system. the arable land was owned in large estates or manors by feudal barons, the actual labor on the farms being performed by serfs. these farm laborers belonged to the land and were exchanged with it when there was a change in ownership of the real estate. farming was looked upon as necessary to existence, but not as a business enterprise. since trade and transportation in farm products were extremely limited, consumption took place near the fields of production. it was more economical for a baron to move his family and retinue of servants to different parts of his domain than it was to transport the food stuffs to one central habitation. the possibility of serfs becoming land owners was too remote for consideration. continental influences farming practices in england before the eighteenth century were largely adaptations from other european countries. the romans, about the beginning of the christian era, took their husbandry to the british isles. the anglo-saxons in the fifth century, brought in from the mainland their farm practices. likewise the normans in the eleventh century brought over their methods of tillage. owing to the close proximity to france, flanders and holland, agricultural innovations in those countries were not long in gaining attention and trial by the british farmers. the long hours of sunlight during short summers, with the opposite conditions prevailing in the winters, have influenced the development of plant species in all northern latitudes. such seasonal conditions have also made necessary a distinct type of farming. many crops of the mediterranean region do not survive in north european countries. people in the colder regions also require a different diet than do those living in the warmer climates. by the seventeenth century an agriculture adapted to northern europe had come into general practice. the implements used in farm work were, by modern standards, very crude and were customarily made by the local smith. a few hoes and mattocks, scythes, reaping hooks, spades and wooden plows with iron points and shares complete the list. the entire supply of tools for an average sized farm could have been hauled in one load on one of their two-wheeled carts. crops grown the chief grains of northern europe were wheat, rye, oats, barley, and buckwheat. the common grasses, clover and turnips, were raised for forage. it should be noted that all of these crops were broad-cast seeded, none required row planting or intertillage. a few american products had been brought to england prior to the settlement at jamestown. they apparently came by the way of asia. maize was first called turkey wheat. the great american bird was named turkey. thomas tusser in in his "five hundred pointes of good husbandrie" enumerates the meats suitable for a christmas dinner with the following verse: "beef, mutton and pork. shred pies of the best pig, veal, goose and capon and turkey well drest." no earlier mention of anything strictly american in english literature has come to light. indian agriculture let us turn now and take a look at the farming accomplishments of the american indians. the oft repeated statement that the indians lived mainly by hunting and fishing so far as it pertains to the virginia tribes is far from the truth. the bitter struggles between the white men and the indians during the colonial period created animosities and prejudices which have overshadowed the beneficial contributions the red men have made to civilization. as plant breeders, the american indians rank with the most skillful of the world. take for instance, maize or indian corn. there is nothing closely comparable to it known to botanists. it has been domesticated so long that its wild prototype is unknown. maize, now, could not exist anywhere in the world without the aid of man. the indians had all the varieties that are now known, such as dent, flint, sweet, early, late, pop, and other special sorts which are no longer grown. they had developed varieties that matured all the way from the tropics to the st. lawrence river in canada. the indians also practiced a mixed culture such as corn, beans, and squashes all in the same hill; they had created a large number of varieties of beans (_phaseolus genus_): the white, red, black, and spotted sorts now so commonly grown, and many others. indian tillage the indians were able to clear fields, of several hundred acres in extent, without the aid of metal tools, using fire as their chief agent. trees, too large to be cut with their stone hatchets, were killed either by building a fire at the base or by girdling the bark. the trees in dying furnished fire wood for domestic use. planting began among the dead trees wherever enough loose dirt could be scraped together to make a hill for seeding. in the course of time the fields became entirely free from forest growth. these fields were cropped in most cases until their fertility was exhausted and then abandoned. if there was no more available fertile land in the vicinity, the tribe moved to a new location. the early white settlers on the atlantic coast found many of these abandoned clearings. because of their unproductiveness they were called "poisoned fields." the indians had only the crudest sorts of farming tools. near the coast, sea shells were the most efficient implements they possessed. the fresh-water clam-shells came next in usefulness. where these natural scrapers were not available, pointed sticks, and pieces of flat rock served the purpose. one writer describing the illinois indians' method of farming says: this tillage consists in breaking up just the surface of the earth with a sort of wooden instrument, like a little pickaxe, which they make by splitting the end of a thick piece of wood, that serves for a handle, and putting another piece of wood, sharp pointed at one end into the slit. this instrument serves them instead of a hoe or spade, for they have no iron tools. indian vs. old world culture attention has been called to the fact that all of the field crops of great britain, at the time of the english settlements in america, were broad-cast seeded. the indians had developed a far different cultural treatment for their crops. in their most common method, that of hill planting, the soil in the intervening spaces was not broken. the hills, two to four feet apart, were from to or more inches in diameter. the soil in these hills was all that was stirred or loosened. all weeds, both in the hills and the intervals between them, were kept cut or pulled out. four to six grains of maize and two or three beans were seeded in each hill, separately spaced. squashes and pumpkins were sometimes seeded with the corn and beans. this mixed seeding is a unique feature of american agriculture. the indians were fortunate in not having to contend with many of the weeds, insects and plant-diseases which now plague farmers and gardeners. practically all of these pests, some of quite recent date, are of old world origin and have been introduced by white men, into america. birds and small animals gave the indians more concern than all their other pests combined. it was customary to build in their gardens small watch-houses in which the young folks took turns in staying to scare away crows and other troublesome birds. the same hills were used year after year and became in time quite sizable mounds, remains of which have persisted, in some localities, until modern times. in the southwestern parts of michigan, the early settlers found large tracts of ridged land, evidently relics of indian agriculture. it is now thought that these areas were corn fields in which the seeding was made in continuous rows instead of hills. a french artist in florida in pictured the indians seeding their crops in rows. after a few years of failure in their attempts to grow american crops, the english colonists adopted the indian method of seeding, but usually neglected the weeding, and were subjected to ridicule for their shiftlessness by the painstaking squaws. in using work-animals for cultivating corn, it was found advantageous to destroy the weeds by stirring the ground in the intervening spaces. the settlement of jamestown on the th day of april, , three small ships carrying colonists passed between cape charles and cape henry into chesapeake bay for the purpose of founding a colony in the land called virginia. the voyagers took seventeen days to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of that region for such an undertaking. first consideration for selecting the site was its possibilities for defense against a foreign foe, especially the spaniards, in florida and the west indies. this was no idle fear. spain and england had for many years been in conflict. moreover, spain claimed all of the americas by the right of discovery. the second most important thing for consideration was adequate harbor facilities. in both of these particulars, the site selected about thirty miles up the james river left little to be desired. the jamestown peninsula jutted out into the river far enough to give an unobstructed view for several miles. the character of the land on either side of the river would have made difficult any attempt at an overland attack. the james was sufficiently deep to take care of any ocean going vessels of that time. the heavily forested surroundings furnished protection from violent storms. the channel ran near the shore. ships could be moored by cables to trees on the land. from the standpoint of raising food stuffs, the colonists could hardly have picked a more unfavorable situation. the peninsula was connected with the shore to the north by a narrow neck of land "thirty yards over." as this narrow strip of land was usually flooded during times of high water, the peninsula was for most purposes an island by which designation it is generally known. there were about eight hundred and fifty acres of heavily timbered forest lands on the island and about eight hundred acres of marsh covered with coarse reedy grasses but there was no cleared land ready for seeding. clearing forest lands even with modern tools and equipment is a slow laborious process. cutting down the trees is only a beginning. the stumps with their interlocking root systems have to be removed. it takes many years for hardwood stumps to rot to a condition that they may be easily destroyed. although the trees on jamestown island were large, they could be cut, and those with straight grained boles rived into clapboards, or the logs rolled into piles and burned for their ashes, a product that was in demand in england for use in the manufacture of soap. the soil on the island may not have been very fertile. the fact that the indians had never cleared any of the land indicates they did not consider it of the best quality. first attempts at farming captain newport assigned a third of the settlers, or about thirty-five men, to husbandry. nothing came from their labors. at one of their first attempts to plant corn, probably english grain, they were assaulted by a few venturesome indians which so discouraged the settlers, that they made no further efforts to provide crops for food that season. one of the colonists complained about the difficulties of preparing land for corn. another mentions that some made gardens. the growing season was too far spent when they finally settled at jamestown to allow for clearing land for spring-seeded grains. by mid-summer their food supply was becoming seriously depleted. fortunately the indians remained friendly. captain john smith informs us that in july: it pleased god to move the indians to bring us corn ere it was halfe ripe to refresh us and in september they "brought us great store both of corne and bread ready made." they had four acres of ground prepared the following year which they seeded to "corn" (wheat, barley or peas). no details are given except that nothing came from their efforts. two growing seasons had passed and not a bushel of grain had been produced for their sustenance. livestock greater success came from their attempts to raise animals than attended their efforts to grow crops. a few animals were brought in. reverend w. simmonds states that: "three sowes in eighteene moneths, increased sixty and odd piggs. and neere chickens brought up themselves without having any meat given them." more livestock was evidently brought in the two supplies which arrived in as it was reported, at the time smith left the colony in the fall of , that they had "six mares and a horse; five or sixe hundred swine; as many hennes and chickens; some goats some sheepe." captain john smith during his two years with the colony was remarkably successful in obtaining from the indians several hundred bushels of corn and beans in exchange for english manufactured goods. the fertile bottom lands of the rivers north of the james yielded bountiful harvests for the indians as they have since for virginians. glass beads and tinkling bells intrigued the natives. the white man's clothing was also a source of wonderment. it was smith's contention that the white laborers should devote their time to getting out clapboards, pitch and soap-ashes to ship to england and depend on the indians to keep the colony supplied with food. smith was not a farmer. he little realized that the indians' desire for trinkets would soon be satisfied. then, too, public opinion in england, aroused by the las casas exposures of spanish cruelties in the west indies would not sanction forced enslavement of the natives. with the departure of smith, in october, , the lucrative indian trade came to an end. no other member of the colony had the courage, for sometime, to visit the tribes along the york and rappahannock rivers for the exchange of products. first white farmer in virginia the first experienced english farmer to come to the colony was william spence, who arrived on the _phoenix_, april , . he was variously described as a laborer, gentleman, and ensign. ralph hamor certified to his character as "an honest, valiant, and industrious man." spence survived the ordeals of the early years and was a member of the first house of burgesses, in . he probably lost his life in the indian massacre of . five persons, names not given, were killed at that time on the spence farm. alexander brown states that ensign spence is reported lost in but he may have been living in captivity. it appears from this meager evidence that william spence lived on his farm outside of the fortified area. if such were the case, he may have set a precedent that has had a pronounced influence on the development of this country. it was the belief of the authorities in the london company that the colonists would all live in small communities for mutual protection and perform their tillage operations, if any, outside the settlement. these communities, sometimes under the name of "particular plantations" and sometimes "hundreds" were necessary in the early days. but from the beginning there were a few independent plantations, or farms, like that of william spence. mention has been made of the impossibility of a farm laborer in the old country ever attaining land ownership. but, here in america with its boundless acres, that great boon seemed within their reach. when allotments of land were finally made to individuals it was found advantageous for the owner to live on his farm, rather than to operate it from a remote village. freedom, independence, and the importance of the individual, which are characteristics of the american farmers, came into existence. the common storehouse for provisions, tried at first in jamestown, created friction and illwill and in a few years was abandoned. the members of the council were accused of favoritism and self indulgence in using the food and other products in the storehouse. to have and to hold a parcel of land and to enjoy the fruits of one's own labors has been a compelling force in changing a wilderness into a mighty nation. that force had its inception in the infant colony at jamestown. a change in policy the two years of failure to produce crops was convincing evidence that english methods of farming were not suited to virginia conditions. the colonists were ready to try something else. they turned to the indians to learn the secret of their successful farming operations. a fortunate event occurred in the early spring of . two young indians, by the names of kemps and tussore were taken prisoners in retaliation for the depredations of other indians. at the time of their arrest they were described as "the two most exact villaines in the countrie, that would have betrayed both their king and kindred for a piece of copper." that this statement was not deserved was proven later. these two young indians liked the englishmen and the english way of living. it is also stated that while they were fettered prisoners they "did double taske and taught us how to order and plant our fields." food scarcity became in a serious problem. the eagerly looked for supply ships from england did not come. to relieve the tension "many were billetted among the salvages, whereby we knewe all their passages, fields and habitations; how to gather and use their fruits as well as themselves." kemps and tussore were given their liberty soon after corn planting time. "but so well they liked our companies they did not desire to goe from us." nothing further is recorded as to the fate of tussore, sometimes called kinsock. strachey, secretary of the colony who was in virginia - , mentions having obtained certain information from one kemps, an indian, who died the last year of the scurvye at jamestown, after he had dwelt with us almost one whole year, much made of by our lord generall and who could speake a pretty deale of english, and came orderly to church every day to prayers, and observed with us the keeping of the sabaoth both by ceassing from labour and repairing to church. starving time dire disaster finally struck the colony. food supplies were exhausted. starvation became a reality. a general drought blanketed eastern virginia. the indians too were on short rations. smith, the provider, who had been injured by an explosion of gunpowder, had returned to england. it was one of the most cruel experiences ever endured by a group of men. the climax came during the winter of - . a few quotations from the records of that period paint the picture in its most terrible colors. lord de la warr who arrived in just in time to save the colony from abandonment reported to the london company: our people, together with the indians (not to friend), had the last winter destroyed and kild up all our hoggs, insomuch as of five or six hundred (as it is supposed), there was not above one sow, that we can heare of, left alive; not a henn nor a chick in the forte (and our horses and mares they had eaten with the first). [illustration: a new instrvction of plowing and setting of corne, handled in manner, of a dialogve betweene a ploughman and a _scholler_. _wherein is proved plainely that plowing and_ setting, is much more profitable and lesse chargeable, than plowing and sowing. by edvvard maxey. gent. _he that withdraweth the corne, the people will curse him: but blessing shall be upon the head of him that selleth corne._ prou. . . imprinted at london by _felix kyngston_, dwelling in pater noster rowe, over against the signe of the checker, . photo by thomas l. williams] [illustration: indians boiling maple sap below and planting corn above. picture by lafitau, .] [illustration: the earliest picture of maize. copied from leonhard fuchs .] and reverend william simmonds states in regard to this same starving time of the winter of - : as for our hogs, hens, goats, sheepe, horse, or what lived; our commanders and officers did daily consume them: some small proportions (sometimes) we tasted, till all was devoured. thus after three years they had nothing of a material nature to show for their efforts. their most valuable achievement had been their acquired knowledge of the indians' methods of farming. to make a bad situation worse the indians began to make trouble. lord de la warr speaks of their "late injuries and murthering of our men." it was not until that real farming got under way at jamestown. then corn planting and fence building began in earnest. governor dale takes charge sir thomas dale with "three ships, men, and cattell ( kine, swine)" arrived in virginia may , . dale had seen military service in the old world and was a severe and strict disciplinarian. the surviving colonists received a jolt in their manner of living. from habits of indolence into which they had fallen, owing to the hot climate and lack of food, after the departure of captain john smith, they were with little ceremony put to work. "his first care therefore was to imploy all hands in the setting of corne at the two forts at kecoughtan, henry and charles," wrote ralph hamor "and about the end of may wee had an indifferent crop of good corne." this corn was planted near what is now hampton where strachey says, "so much ground is there cleared and open; enough with little labour alreddy prepared to receive corne or make viniards of two or three thowsand acres." with corn planting completed, two palisaded forts were built for the protection of a few men left to care for the crops. they made another planting across chesapeake bay on the virginia cape. they had learned the hard way that clearing the heavily timbered land at jamestown was hopeless for immediate results. dale then returned to jamestown "where the most companie were, and their daily and usual works, bowling in the streets." this game was interrupted and the men put to work felling timber, repairing their houses and providing pointed pickets for fencing a new town, which dale proposed to build, eighty miles above jamestown. henrico settled in august, , sir thomas gates arrived with "six tall ships with three hundred men, and one hundred kine and other cattel." gates thoroughly approved of dale's plans and policies and let him select about three hundred of the best workers in the colony to build at henrico, now farrar's island, at dutch gap. within ten or twelve daies he had invironed it with a pale, and in honour of our noble prince _henry_, called it _henrico_. the next worke he did, was building at each corner of the towne a high commanding watch-house, a church, and store-houses: which finished, hee began to thinke upon convenient houses for himselfe and men, which, with all possible speed hee could, he effected to the great content of his companie, and all the colonie. this towne is situated upon a necke of a plaine rising land, three parts invironed with the maine river, the necke of land well impaled, makes it like an ile; it hath three streets of well framed houses, a handsome church, and the foundation of a better laid (to bee built of bricke), besides store-houses, watch-houses, and such like. upon the verge of the river there are five houses, within live the honester sort of people, as farmers in england, and they keepe continuall centinell for the townes securitie. about two miles from the towne, into the maine, is another pale, neere two miles in length, from river to river, guarded with severall commanders, with a good quantitie, of corne-ground impailed, sufficiently secured to maintaine more than i suppose will come this three yeeres. appomattox lands seized the appomattox indians, at the time of the jamestown settlement, were located on a neck of land lying between the james and appomattox rivers. dale wanted this land. it was cleared, fertile, and easy to fence, so we are told: about christmas following in this same year in regard of the injury done us ... without the losse of any except some few salvages tooke it and their corne. this newly acquired land he named new bermudas and he divided it into several tracts known as "hundreds." the term hundred was a relic of the feudal system. it meant a political subdivision smaller than a county. it appears to have been dale's intention that these hundreds or group plantations, often referred to as "particular plantations," should include the land that could be worked conveniently by the farmers from their homes in a village or a town. this plan was not popular. as has been previously stated the colonial pioneers much preferred to live on the land they tilled. the term "hundred" lost its significance. ralph hamor described the operations at new bermudas in the following: in the nether hundred he [dale] first began to plant, for there is the most corne-ground and with a pale of two miles cut over from river to river, whereby we have secured eight english miles in compasse.... rochdale, by a crosse pale wel nigh foure miles long, is also planted with houses along the pale, in which hundred our hogs and cattell have twentie miles circuit to graze in securely. outstanding were the accomplishments of this taskmaster, governor dale, in one year, with men many of whom were unaccustomed to manual labor. while some were engaged in fence building and the construction of houses, others were employed in getting out clapboards. still others were gathering pitch and tar from the pine trees and burning logs to make soap-ashes. the london company had incurred heavy expense in the settlement and was asking for something in return. products from the forests were all that were available. it is no wonder that the colonists complained bitterly about their hardships in their letters to the folks back home. it was not gov. dale's purpose to develop an agricultural colony. surplus from food products would not pay the cost of shipment across the ocean. his plantings of corn were purely for local consumption. he limited the number engaged in farming, and to each of those so engaged, he allotted three acres of corn land. these farmers were not allowed to devote their entire time to crop-raising. the livestock as we have seen was allowed to run at large in the fenced ranges. in a letter dated june , , gov. dale reported that he had set the colonists to the task of "husbanding our corne securely, whereof wee have above five-hundred acres set, and god be praised in more forwardness than any of the indians that i have seen or heard of this yeare." when capt. argall, as deputy governor superseded dale in may, , george yeardley having been acting governor from april , , he reported that the colony had about four hundred people but not over fit for husbandry and tillage. as for livestock, they had cattle, goats, and a large number of hogs. as to cattle there were about "fortie bulls and oxen but they wanted men to bring them to labour and irons for the ploughs and harnesse for the cattell." they had tried again to grow some small grains. thirtie or fortie acres wee had sowne with one plough, but it stood so long on the ground before it was reaped it was most shaken. this was a pitiful showing for the ten years that had elapsed since capt. newport established the colony. it had been a decade of frustration and heart-breaking disappointments, a decade of gruelling toil and misery. no blame should be attached to the colonists. they were thrust into a situation for which they were woefully unprepared. virginia was destined to develop agriculturally. attempts to suppress that industry only served to prolong the colony's troubles. there were no natural resources except the forests in the tidewater region; no indian trade of any great value; no gems to be picked up at will; no minerals to be exploited. when the situation seemed most hopeless, the culture of a crop new to english farming completely changed their mental and pecuniary outlook. despair changed to violent optimism. john rolfe is generally credited with having been, in , the first virginia planter to engage in the growing of tobacco. governor dale at the time frowned on its culture and ruled that two of each man's allotment of three acres of land should be seeded to corn. hence the change in governorship was a momentous event. change in policy when sir thomas dale left, in , george yeardley took over the management of the colony as acting governor. he lost no time in putting an end to the restrictions on tobacco culture. the next year, , saw a remarkable transformation in the colonists' way of life. inertia gave way to frantic activity. "the market-place and streets and all other spare places were set with the crop and the colonie dispersed all about planting tobacco." nor is this surprising. tobacco alone promised them surcease from poverty and want. hope for a bountiful harvest spurred them on as it has spurred farmers in all generations. tobacco in england many fantastic tales have been written about the introduction of the use of tobacco in england. some of the most authentic historical items follow: the spaniards found the natives in the west indies using the plant both for chewing and smoking. they took seed to europe where its use soon spread to other countries around the mediterranean sea. the first englishman to report on the addiction of the american indians to the use of tobacco appears to have been john sparke who wrote the account of the voyage of sir john hawkins who, in the course of his travels, spent some months, in , with an ill-fated french colony in florida. sparke reported "the floridians when they travell, have a kinde of herbe dried, who with a cane and an earthen cup in the end, with fire, and the dried herbs put together, doe sucke thorow the cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger, and therewith they live foure or five dayes without meat or drinke, and this the frenchmen used for this purpose." it is quite likely that the sailors under hawkins command acquired the habit and took some of the "dried herbs" back to england. sir walter raleigh is often credited with the introduction of the use of tobacco in england. while he may not have been responsible for its introduction, he apparently played an important role in the spread of the tobacco habit among the english aristocracy. raleigh's interest in tobacco was no doubt aroused by the report of his protégé, the famous sixteenth century mathematician, thomas hariot. hariot spent a year, june, -june, , with the raleigh colony on roanoke island. on his return to england he reported on the indians' farming operations in eastern north carolina. for tobacco he wrote in part "we ourselves, during the time we were there, used to sucke it after their manner, as also since our returne, and have found many rare and wonderful experiments of the virtues thereof, of which the relation would require a volume by itselfe: the use of it by so many, of late, men and women of great calling, as els, and some physicians also, is sufficient witnesse." raleigh later made a voyage to the island of trinidad and the orinoco river in south america from whence had come the most desirable sorts. spain and portugal monopolized the european tobacco trade with these mild varieties since the tobacco grown by the virginia indians had a sharp, biting taste. plantings of these better sorts were made in england. a violent controversy was soon raging. king james i who detested raleigh and all his activities, issued a _counter blaste_ against tobacco. this was a most bitter tirade as the following quotation shows: a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. since the days of king james, millions of words have been written condemning the use of the "tawny weed." the opposition of king james to tobacco led to the imposition of taxes on its import into england: that from spain and portugal was d a pound; that from virginia s. d. in spite of all this array of evidence as to the detrimental effects of tobacco on the human body its consumption has steadily increased and spread over the entire world. colossal fortunes have been made in its processing and trade. no product of the soil with the exception of grains used in the manufacture of alcoholic beverages has ever returned such bounteous revenues to the united states government. in the fiscal year ending june , there was paid into the treasury of the united states, the gigantic sum of $ , , , from taxes on various tobacco products. of this vast total, virginia tobacco manufacturers that year contributed , , dollars. municipal and other local taxes are not included in these figures. tobacco culture in america was a highly profitable enterprise for england. the colonists produced and sold the raw product. very little tobacco is used in the raw state. before tobacco is ready for the market it must be processed into the various forms demanded by the trade. it was estimated that one man engaged in tobacco growing in virginia kept three englishmen employed, that is, sailors engaged in transportation, processors and tradesmen. the english government also derived considerable revenue on the surplus tobacco products resold on the european market. tobacco became money one of the needs of the colony was a medium of exchange: something that could be used for money. as the balance of trade was heavily in favor of the mother country, there was no opportunity for an accumulation of english money in america. so tobacco became acceptable for goods, services, and the payment of debts. salaries were fixed in pounds of tobacco. fluctuating prices the value placed on tobacco in england varied with the supply and demand. with the introduction of negroes in , and the greatly increased immigration from england, the acreage devoted to the culture of tobacco expanded rapidly. the first serious effects of over-production occurred in , when the price fell from three shillings, six pence to one penny a pound. this calamity proved to be a blessing in disguise. the next year, a boat of " tons burden," loaded with corn and tobacco disposed of its cargo at salem, massachusetts, then but recently settled. the corn brought six shillings a bushel. this started a brisk trade and a dutch ship, in , took , bushels of corn from virginia to new england. in , it was estimated that , bushels of corn from virginia were sold in massachusetts besides a number of beef cattle, goats, and hogs. in spite of the ruinously low prices which sometimes prevailed, the amount of tobacco shipped overseas continued to increase. in , , , pounds were exported from virginia alone. growth of the colony captain john smith summarized the condition of the colony in in these words: master hutchins saith, they have , cattle, and about , people; but master floud, john davis, william emerson, and divers others, say about five thousand people, and five thousand kine, calves, oxen, and bulls; for goats, hogs, and poultry; corne, fish, deere, and many sorts of other wild beasts; and fowle in their season, they have so much more than they spend, they are able to feed three or foure hundred men more than they have. starving times as a rule were over. periods of short rations occurred infrequently and then only in times of disaster such as the aftermath of the indian massacre of or when the planters became so engrossed in growing tobacco that they neglected to plant maize or other grains. each succeeding crop was new wealth, something that had not existed before. gradually, harvest after harvest, the colonists were able to add to their possessions additional tools and equipment. he was a shiftless man indeed who could not provide ample food for his own needs. the history of virginia during colonial times was intimately connected with the tobacco crop. the general welfare of the people rose and fell with the value placed on the leaf in england. efforts to sustain higher prices with the over supply of tobacco the english market became extremely discriminating in regard to the quality of the leaf it would purchase. the colonial government from time to time resorted to legislative expedients to prevent the shipment of inferior grades. governor wyatt, in ordered that "for every head they should plant but , plants of tobacco and upon each plant nine leaves." john rolfe also stated, in , that, "an industrious man not otherwaies imploied may well tend foure akers of corne, and , plants of tobacco." a thousand plants would give each worker about pounds of tobacco a year. in , an inspection law was enacted and in , it was ordered that all bad tobacco and half the good should be destroyed. governor berkeley, in , made several ineffectual attempts to form agreements, with the planters of maryland and north carolina, to restrict the production of tobacco. the planters of each colony were willing for those of the other to stop planting, or to destroy as much tobacco as they pleased; but looking to their own selfish interests they would increase rather than decrease their crop. the virginia general assembly, in , prohibited all culture of tobacco but the maryland authorities complained that the law was ignored by the virginia planters. the virginia colonists developed a keen rivalry among themselves in efforts to improve the quality of the leaf grown. reverend john clayton, in , says: "for there is not only two distinct sorts of sweet-scented and aranoko tobacco but of these be several sorts, much different, the seeds whereof are known by distinct names, of those gentlemen most famed for such sort of tobacco, as of prior seed etc." the aranoko, probably from the orinoco river region in south america, was grown on the heavy clay soils. the product was a strong tobacco that was most in demand in germany and other north european countries. the sweet-scented was grown on the lighter sandy soils and although the yield was less it brought a better price on the market. hugh jones, in his _present state of virginia_, in , mentions one of the many localities in virginia which became noted for a particular variety of tobacco grown there. to quote: "for on york river in a small tract of land called digges neck, which is poorer than a great deal of other land in the same latitude, by a particular seed and management, is made the famous crop known by the name of e dees, remarkable for its mild taste and fine smell." topping the growing tobacco plants was a practice originated by the colonists. the main purpose was to limit the production to the large lower leaves and to do away with the small immature leaves at the top of the stem. the general assembly often specified the number of leaves which could be left; the number, varying with the value placed on the leaf in england, ranged usually from six to nine. tobacco is a soil exhausting crop. the jamestown planters soon learned that continuous crops of tobacco, on the same land, soon reduced both the quantity and quality of the leaf. the only resource left to the tobacco farmers was to clear new fields. the more well-to-do planters began to seek favorable locations of uncleared land. the depleted fields were abandoned and the task of restoring their productivity was usually left to nature. much of the best tobacco soils of virginia have been cropped and then allowed to go back to brush and tress and again cleared several times. finding the remains of old tobacco rows out in dense woods is not an uncommon experience. this exhaustion of tobacco lands had a beneficial influence on the agricultural development of virginia. by the time the fields were abandoned, most of the stumps had decayed and the soil could be prepared for seeding to other crops with plow and harrows. it was found that these depleted fields were still capable of producing satisfactory crops of grain. many of the colonists who were not financially able to clear new grounds could often buy or rent these abandoned fields for a nominal price. crops other than tobacco while tobacco played a very important part in building a prosperous colony at jamestown, there were several other staples that also contributed to this result. of prime importance should be rated maize or indian corn. maize saved the colony from starvation on several occasions. maize became an export commodity to the new england and west indian colonies when the price for tobacco fell below the cost of transportation to europe. maize aided the colonists in the production of valuable livestock products. this crop has done more to promote the wealth and welfare of this country than all the natural resources, water-power, and forests put together. in order to increase the production of grain in , the general assembly ordered: "for the encouragement of men to plant store of corne, the prise shall not be stinted but it shall be free for every man to sell it as deere as he can." this law had a wholesome effect. it so increased the production of maize that seven years later as has already been noted, the colonists had a surplus of this product to export to new england. this is perhaps the first law passed in america for the direct benefit of the producers. it stands out in strong contrast to some legislative enactments. there were many other grain laws put on the statute books but the majority of them either fixed the maximum price for which the grain could be sold or else prohibited its exportation. the authorities in england were continually clamoring for products to supplement the tobacco exports. until , each succeeding governor as he sailed to virginia was instructed to "use every means in his power to encourage the production of silk, wine, hemp, flax, pitch and potashes." the reason for finally omitting this clause is interesting. the king was concerned about the revenue the government was deriving from tobacco and did not wish for the colonists to engage in any enterprise that might diminish the volume of leaf that was coming to england. the omission of this clause marked a new era in the relation of the colony to the mother country. during the sixty years the clause was in force, several governors, notably wyatt, harvey and berkeley, had tried to comply with the wishes of the authorities in england, with extremely meager results to show for their efforts. silk culture there is very little justification for including silk culture as an enterprise in the agricultural history of the jamestown colony. it was one product that was usually placed first in recommendations of the authorities who sponsored the settlement of virginia. in keeping with the improved status of the social and economic life of england, in the latter years of the sixteenth century, came a desire for finer and more lustrous fabrics in their articles of dress. serges and tweeds, woven from the fleeces of their coarse-wooled sheep, no longer satisfied the fastidious tastes of the ruling aristocracy. even calicos from far-away calcutta were esteemed fit for royal inaugural gowns. silk was the last word in luxurious garb. silkworms had been reared in the orient from ancient times. these moths had been domesticated for so many years they had become fully dependent on human aid for existence. they could crawl but could not fly. while silk brought fabulous prices on the world's market there were numerous reasons why its culture never succeeded in america. the handling of the creeping, crawling, ill-smelling worms was objectionable to anyone not accustomed from childhood to the task. old people and young girls who were the ones employed in rearing silkworms in the orient received the equivalent of a few cents a day for their labor. such cheap help was not available in virginia. perhaps, the most serious objection of all was the lack of a suitable food supply for the worms. a silkworm from the time it hatches from the egg till it spins its cocoon devours a mass of green forage. leaves of the mulberry tree are its favorite diet. in fact, without a supply of mulberry trees, successful silk culture is out of the question. growing a crop of trees had to precede the rearing of worms. this took several years. nevertheless, the directions of the london company urged in season and out that the colonists should produce silk. governor wyatt, in , was instructed: "not to permit any, but the council and heads of hundreds, to wear gold in the clothes, or to wear silk till they make it themselves." nothing came from this order. in , the agitation for silk became so intense, the general assembly was forced to take action. first, an experienced silk grower, an armenian by the name of george, was sent to the colony, and the general assembly was ordered to give him four thousand pounds of tobacco to keep him in the country. another law, passed that year, ordered that each planter set out ten mulberry trees for each one hundred acres of land he owned. these trees were to be fenced, to protect them from horses and cattle, and to be kept weeded. this law was repealed, two years later, as it "seems rather troublesome and burthensome than any waies advantageous to the country." the law was re-enacted in but given a three years delay as it was impossible to get mulberry trees. the general assembly, in , voted a bounty of pounds of tobacco to any planter producing pounds of wound silk. there were no claimants. two years later, the bounty was increased to , pounds of tobacco and the amount of silk required was reduced to pounds. again the results were negative. then a bounty of fifty pounds of tobacco for each pound of silk was ordered. the effects from all these orders are summed up in an act of the general assembly in which reads: george, the armenian, having proved the making of ten pounds of wound silk, it is ordered there be paid him for his encouragement in the levy according to act. it is assumed that george received pounds of tobacco. what became of the silk is not recorded. a few years later the price per pound of wound silk was fixed by the general assembly at shillings or two hundred pounds of tobacco. hemp and flax two plants, the culture of which was strongly urged by the english authorities, were hemp and flax. in this case, greater success was realized than occurred with most of the demands that came from across the ocean. it had been ordered in , by the general assembly: "that what person or persons, soever, shall at any time hereafter make, in this colonie, so much silke, flax, hopps or any other staple commodities (except tobacco) as is worth two hundred pounds sterling, or english wheate to the value of five hundred pounds stirling in one yeare, and exporte the same or cause the same to be exported, or shall first make two tunne of wine raized out of a vineyard made in this collonie, shall have given him by this country, for an encouragement, ten thousand pounds of virginia tobacco." apparently no one qualified for the bounty on flax for, in , provision was made for importing some flax seed from england. no price was fixed, in , on "flax by reason of the uncertainty of the quality." in , bounties were offered: "for every peck of flax seeds, four and twentie pounds of tobacco, and for every peck of hemp seed twenty pounds of tobacco." bounties were also offered for hemp and flax woven into cloth. it was also ordered that every tithable person should produce one pound of dressed hemp and one pound of dressed flax or two pounds of either annually. from that time on considerable hemp and flax were raised in virginia, but most of the crop was used at home. linen cloth was highly prized. there was also a demand for cordage made of hemp fibers for ships. english grain as already noted, the initial attempts of the colonists to grow the grains with which they had been accustomed in england came to naught. they were familiar with wheat, rye, barley and oats. to make satisfactory yields, these grains had to be broadcasted on well prepared seed beds. newly cleared forests left the soil full of stumps and roots. the wooden plows of those days were useless on these newly cleared lands. preparation of the soil, for tobacco or maize, could be accomplished with a hand hoe or shovel. these plants required space in which to develop their full growth. a tobacco plant could be set or a hill of corn planted wherever a little loose dirt could be found. some english grains were seeded in the cleared land near hampton and newport news but these old fields, abandoned by the indians, were also near to exhaustion. an "indifferent crop" was reported. in , abraham piersey had acres each in wheat and barley. from these crops he was able to furnish food daily to sixty persons. how much of this seeding was on land that had been abandoned for tobacco, or was old indian fields, is not stated. when devries visited virginia in , he found the planters putting down, in english grain, lands which had been exhausted by successive crops of tobacco. the general assembly had ruled in , that corn (probably wheat and maize) could be exported whenever the price fell below twelve shillings a bushel. large exports of this valuable cereal were then being made to the near-by colonies of maryland, manhattan, carolina and the west indies. it was estimated by edward williams, in , that two able-bodied laborers could seed sixty acres in wheat in the course of one season and reap the grain when it was ripe. the yield from such an area had a market value of four hundred and eighty pounds sterling. it was reported that these fields which no longer produced the best grades of tobacco were better for wheat than newly cleared land. as these exhausted fields could be rented or purchased at moderate cost compared with prime tobacco new ground, many poorly financed colonists were able to get a start towards prosperity without resorting to the almost universal practice of growing tobacco. livestock as already shown, the domestic animals brought to the colony, in the first few years of its settlement, were turned out in the woods to fend for themselves. the original breeding stocks were of ordinary quality and the lack of care given them contributed to their inferiority. predatory animals such as wolves, bears, panthers and wild cats exacted a heavy annual toll of young animals. until governor dale constructed his miles of picket fences there was nothing to keep the animals from wandering up into the highlands where the colonists did not dare to venture. in spite of the handicaps all classes of domestic animals increased in numbers when not slaughtered for food. this was especially true of swine. [illustration: _hoscyamin perimianus._ tabaco or henbane of peru. _sana sancta indorum._ tabaco of trinidada. two varieties of tobacco as pictured by gerard in . the seeds of these two varieties were taken to virginia by the jamestown settlers.] [illustration: photo by thomas l. williams trenching implements, seventeenth century] [illustration: thomas l. williams, photo seventeenth century plows] swine hogs contributed more to the material welfare of the jamestown colony than historians have generally recognized. hogs have many advantages over other breeds of livestock. they multiply much faster than any other domestic animal except poultry. they make faster gains and double the weight for the food consumed than do cattle, sheep or goats. when slaughtered, hogs dress out about percent edible meat, as compared with to percent for cattle. when given wide open range in humid climates such as prevailed in the tidewater, they do fairly well without other feed than what they can find for themselves. in summer, at jamestown, they obtained most of their living in the numerous fresh-water swamps. tuckahoe, a flag-like swamp plant, with an enormous root system, was their favorite hot weather forage. the roots of tuckahoe, often as large as a man's arm, contain a crystalline acid that burns the mouth of a human being like fire. after a few trials, hogs seem to relish it. while tuckahoe is not a fattening feed, hogs eating it make satisfactory gains in weight. in the fall when the acorns and nuts ripened, the hogs put on weight at a rapid pace. the woods were stocked with oak, hickory, chestnut, beech, chinquapin, and persimmon trees and shrubs, the fruits of which were all grouped under the general term _mast_. there is one difference between pork produced from grain-fed hogs and those fattened on mast. the lard of the latter group melts at a temperature of about ten degrees below that of those fed corn. to the connoisseur of well cured hams and bacon this low melting point is not a detriment but a distinct improvement. the colonists adapted the indian practice of using smoke to aid in the curing of meat. the natives built platforms of poles supported by posts about six feet from the ground. the meat to be cured was salted and spread on these poles. a small fire was built underneath to furnish the smoke. this arrangement was called by the taino indians, a _barbacoa_ from which we get the english equivalent, _barbecue_. by , hogs, sheep and goats had increased in such numbers that ships coming to jamestown could supply their needs for meat from the colony's surplus. this was advantageous to shipmasters and furnished a market for a product of a growing industry in the colony. prior to that time ships coming to america from europe had to take on food stuffs for the round trip. another benefit accrued to the colony. the combined curing process of salt and smoke imparts a delicious flavor to hams and bacon that has never been excelled by any other method. this applies especially to meat from hogs fattened on mast or peanuts. virginia hams and bacon soon became noted for their excellence all over the world. the fame of these products has never waned. unfortunately, most hotels and restaurants in the united state now use the term "virginia ham" on their menus to designate this sort of meat regardless of its origin or cure. new england ships, plying a coastwise traffic with the caribbean countries, frequently stopped in jamestown for cargoes of salted meats. this trade was especially desirable during times when the price of tobacco fell to ruinous levels. most of the hogs ran wild. some planters marked their animals by ear-cuts, and then could claim an entire drove, if they had a number of their branded hogs in it. cattle neat animals were kept near jamestown in the early years, but they, like the swine, had to gather their own living. a few were trained for draft purposes. in new grounds where stumps and roots prevail, oxen are more useful than horses. they do not get in a panic when obstacles interfere. then too, they can be slaughtered for beef when they become too old for work. during the period under study, cattle, in virginia, often brought good prices. many were purchased by the new england colonists as it was cheaper to buy animals, in america, than to go to the expense and loss of animals by shipping them across the ocean. there was a market for oxen in the caribbean region, where they were used for power, in the sugar mills. in the first thirty years, some of the cattle went wild in the back country, but many of the cows were kept in the vicinity of the jamestown headquarters. while not notable as dairy cows, they produced enough milk so that virginia gained a reputation among ship crews for its excellent butter and cheese. in it was estimated that there were twenty thousand cattle in the colony. goats and sheep flocks of goats and sheep became noticeable to visitors about the middle of the century. many were brought to virginia. in the early years the numbers killed by wolves made them unprofitable. heavy bounties paid for wolf heads eventually reduced the depredations of this predator until sheep and goats were fairly safe. as producers of meat and wool for clothing sheep contributed to the general welfare of the colony. by , the number of sheep was estimated at three thousand; and of goats at five thousand. horses of all the domestic animals brought from england to jamestown in the early days of the settlement, the most expensive to transport and the most useless after they arrived in virginia were horses. the estimate of the number in the colony in is . there was no purpose for them to serve. the fragile wooden plows of the seventeenth century were of no use among the stumps and roots in newly cleared forest lands. horses were of no value for transportation as there were no roads through the forests or bridges over the rivers. they were of little use as beasts of burden as there were few burdens to carry. a horse was no match for an able-bodied man on indian trails through timbered country. as late as , the batts and fallam expedition, consisting of five white men and seven indians, who were the discoverers of new river, had horses for the white men when they left petersburg. all of these animals were dead before they reached the mountains. the colonists did all they could afford to do with the horses brought to them and that was to turn them loose to shift for themselves. in a very few years there was a band of wild horses roaming the woods in the back country. eventually these wild horses provided a great deal of recreation for the younger planters. capturing and breaking to the saddle wild horses became a popular sport. as soon as a horse was caught and accustomed to a rider the most natural thing was to try it for speed. horse-racing began with local contests but developed into a major sport. king charles ii is credited with having imported turk and arabian horses to england. some of this blooded stock may have been shipped to jamestown. at any rate virginia saddle-horses at an early date began to attract attention because of their speed. two other colonies, rhode island and new york were famous for their fast horses. racing became an inter-colonial sport. the first regular race course was the new market on hempstead plains, long island. there the fleetest horses of long island were brought together to settle all arguments by actual trial. this famous race course was described in by a contemporary, daniel denton: "toward the middle of long island lyeth a plain sixteen miles long and four broad, upon which plain grows very fine grass, that makes exceeding good hay, and is very good pasture for sheep or other cattel; where you shall find neither stick nor stone to hinder the horse heels or endanger them in their races, and once a year the best horses in the island are brought hither to try their swiftness, and the swiftest rewarded with a silver cup, two being annually procured for that purpose." horse-racing became of economic importance to these colonies. the sugar planters, in the caribbean region, also became interested in this "sport of kings" and sent agents to buy the fastest horses they could find. high prices were sometimes paid for prize winning animals. governor francis nicholson in , "gave prizes to those that should excell in riding, running, wrestling and cudgeling." of these sports, riding became by far the most popular. interest in horse-racing, fox-chasing, steeple-chasing, and riding tournaments has never entirely died out in virginia. conclusion a great deal has been written about the events that occurred during the ninety-two years that elapsed, from the settlement of the colony on jamestown island, and the change of capital site to williamsburg. judging from the recorded observations of visitors during that period, no great difference in the general appearance of the landscape had taken place. it still looked very much like a wilderness. much forest land had been cleared, farmed for a few years, and then turned back to nature. the mammoth trees with scanty undergrowth, that the firstcomers found, had been replaced with a luxuriant second or third growth. if the top-soil is not eroded away a new forest can be produced in virginia in thirty or forty years. one of the most noticeable improvements was in the dwelling houses. substantial brick and frame buildings had replaced the hurriedly constructed shacks of the early days. the accumulated wealth from the surplus products resulting from their farming activities was reflected in their flocks and herds of horses, cattle, sheep, goats, swine, and poultry. dire famine no longer stared them in face. through insistence that only the best quality products should be shipped abroad, favorable trade relations had been established in the commerce of the world. perhaps the greatest achievement of all was the creation of the farm home where a family could own, in fee simple, the land they tilled, live in peace, and enjoy the fruits of their own labor. bibliography . beverley, robert. _history of virginia_ ... reprinted from the author's nd. rev. ed., london, . richmond, virginia, . . brown, alexander. _the genesis of the united states._ boston and new york, . vols. . bruce, p. a. _economic history of virginia in the seventeenth century._ new york, . vols. . bullock, william. _virginia impartially examined_ ... london, . . campbell, charles. _history of the colony and ancient dominion of virginia_ ... philadelphia, . . clayton, rev. john. _a letter_ ... may , . _giving an account of several observables in virginia_ ... reprint in force, peter. tracts ... washington, - . vol. . . devries, david peterson. _voyages from holland to america._ new york, . . force, peter. _tracts and other papers_, relating principally to the origin, settlement, and progress of the colonies of north america. washington. vols. gray, lewis c. history of agriculture in the southern united states to . washington, d. c. vols. . hakluyt, richard. _collection of early voyages, travels and discoveries of the english nation._ london, - . vols. also edinburgh, - . vols. . hamor, ralph. _a true discourse of the present state of virginia_ ... london, . albany, j. munsell, . . hariot, thomas. _narrative of the first english plantation of virginia._ london, . reproduced after debry's illustrated edition printed in frankfort in , the illustrations having been designed in virginia in by john white. london, b. quaritch, . . hening, w. w. _virginia statutes at large_, - . vols. . jefferson, thomas. _notes on the state of virginia._.richmond, j. w. randolph, . . purchas, samuel. _purchas his pilgrims._ london, . vols. . smith, captain john. _works._ edited by arber, . also edinburgh . vols. . spotswood, alexander. _official letters_, - . ed. by r. a. brock. virginia historical society collections. richmond, - . vols. . strachey, william. _the historie of travaile into virginia britannia_ ... london. printed for the hakluyt society, . . swem, e. g. _virginia historical index._ roanoke, virginia. - . vols. . _virginia company of london. abstract of the proceedings of the company_ ... - . by conway robinson. edited by r. a. brock. virginia historical society, - . . _virginia truly valued._ in force's tracts, vol. . appendix i a plowman's day this is an extract from markham's _farewell to husbandry, or the enriching of all sorts of barren and steril grounds in our kingdome_, a well-known book on farming as carried on in england in the early years of the th century; it is presented here in order to show what the daily tasks of a farmer were at that time, and what might be expected, according to this standard, of a settler coming to virginia. the author, gervase markham, issued several editions of the work. this extract is from the fourth edition, printed in , of which a title-page is reproduced in this booklet, from the copy in the william and mary college library. markham's book has an additional interest, for the reason that in the supplies sent by ship _supply_ in to berkeley hundred, a copy of the current edition was included. having thus generally runne over (in a short computation) the labours of the husbandman, i will now briefly as i can, goe over the particular daies labours of a farmer or plowman, shewing the particular expence of every houre of the day, from his first rising, till his going to bed, as thus for example: we will suppose it to be after christmas, and about plow-day (which is the first letting out of the plough) and at what time men either begin to fallow, or to break up pease earth, which is to lie to bait, according to the custome of the country; at this time the plough-man shall rise before foure of the clocke in the morning, and after thankes given to god for his rest, and the successe of his labours he shall go into his stable, or beaste-house, and first he shall fodder his cattell, then cleanse the house, and make the booths cleane, rub downe the cattell, and cleanse their skins of all filth, then he shall curry his horses, rub them with clothes and wisps, and make both them and the stable as cleane as may be, then he shall water both his oxen and horses, and housing them againe, give them more fodder, and to his horse by all meanes provender, as chaffe and dry pease or beanes, or oat-hulls, pease or beanes or cleane oates, or clean garbage (which is the hinder ends of any kinde of graine but rye) with the straw chop'd small amongst it, according as the ability of the husbandman is. and whilst they are eating their meat, he shall make ready his collars, hames, treats, halters, mullens, and plough-geares, seeing everything fit, and in his due place, and to these labours i will also allow full two houres, that is, from foure of the clocke till sixe, then hee shall come in to breakfast, and to that i allow him halfe an houre; and then another halfe houre to the gearing and yoaking of his cattell, so that at seven of the clocke hee may set forward to his labour, and then he shall plow from seven of the clock in the morning, till betwixt two and three in the afternoone, then he shall unyoke, and bring home his cattell, and having rubb'd them, drest them, and cleansed away all durt and filth, he shall fodder them, and give them meate, then shall the servants goe in to their dinner, which allowed halfe an houre; it will then be towards foure of the clocke, at what time hee shall goe to his cattell againe, and rubbing them downe, and cleansing their stalls, give them more fodder, which done, he shall go into the barnes, and provide and make ready fodder of all kinds for the next day, whether it be hay, straw, or blend fodder, according to the ability of the husbandman: this being done, and carried into the stable, oxe-house, or other convenient place, he shall then goe water his cattell, and give them more meate, and to his horse provender, as before shewed; and by this time it will draw past sixe of the clocke, at which time he shall come in to supper, and after supper, he shall either by the fire side, mend shooes both for himselfe and their family, or beat and knock hemp, or flaxe, or picke and stampe apples, or crabs for cider or verdjuce, or else grind malt on the quernes, picke candle rushes, or do some husbandly office within dores, till it be full eight a clocke: then shall he take his lanthorne and candle, and goe to his cattell, and having cleansed the stalls and plankes, litter them downe, looke that they be safely tied, and then fodder and give them meate for all night, then giving god thankes for benefits received that day, let him and the whole household goe to their rest till the next morning. [illustration: markhams farewell to hvsbandry; or, the enriching of all sorts of barren and steril grounds in our kingdome, to be as fruitfull in all manner of graine, pulse, and grasse, as the best grounds whatsoever. together with the annoyances, and preservation of all graine and seed, from one yeare to many yeares. as also a husbandly computation of men and cattels daily labours, their expeences, charges, and utmost profits. the fourth time, revised, corrected, and amended, together with many new additions, and cheape experiments: for the bettering of arable pasture, and wooddy grounds. of making good all grounds againe, spoiled with overflowing of salt water by sea-breaches: as also, the enriching of the hop-garden; and many other things never published before. _london_, printed by edvvard griffin for iohn harison, at the signe of the golden vnicorne in pater-noster-row. . photo by thomas l. williams] now it may be intended, that there may be in the houshold more servants than one; and so you will demand of mee, what the rest of the servants shall be imployed in before and after the time of plowing: to this i answer, that they may either goe into the barne and thrash, fill or empty the maltfat, load and unload the kilne, or any other good and necessary work that is about the yard, and after they come from plowing, some may goe into the barne and thrash, some hedge, ditch, stop gaps in broken fences, dig in the orchard or garden, or any other out-worke which is needfull to be done, and which about the husbandman is never wanting, especially one must have a care every night to looke to the mending or sharpening of the plough-irons, and the repairing of the plough and plough-geares, if any be out of order, for to deferre them till the morrow, were the losse of a daies worke, and an ill point of husbandry. appendix ii the transport of grain in the early years at jamestown, much grain was shipped from england for the use of the colonists. the extract, which follows, is from markham's _farewell to husbandry_, th edition, . the term "corn" as used by markham does not mean maize (indian corn), but wheat, barley, rye, or oats. and first for transportation of graine by sea, it is two waies to be done, as either in great quantities for trade and the victuallyng of other nations, or in smaller quantity for victualling the men in the ship, prepared for a long and tedious voyage. for the transporting of graine for trade in great quantities, it is to be intended the voyage is seldom long, but from neighbor to neighbor, and therefore commonly they make close decks in the ships to receive the graine, faire and even boorded, yet if such decks be matted and lined both under and on each side, it is much the better, and this matting would be strong and thinne; there bee some which make the decks only of mats, and sure it is sweet, but not so strong as the boord, therefore the best way of transportation is to have strong boorded deckes well matted, and then spreading the corne of a reasonable thicknesse, to cover it with matting againe, and then to lay corne on it againe, and then mats againe, that betweene every reasonable thicknesse of graine a mat may lie, the profit whereof is, that when the corne with his owne heate and the working of the sea shall beginne to sweate, which sweat for want of aire to drie it up, would turne to putrifaction, then the mats thus lying betweene, will not only exhale and sucke up the sweate, but also keep the corne so coole and dry, that no imperfection shall come unto it: and here is to be noted, that these mats should rather be made of dry white bents, than of flagges and bulrush, for the bent is a firme, dry, crispe thing, and will not relent or sweat of it selfe, but the flag or bulrush is a spungy and soft substance which is never empty of his own and other moystures. now for transporting of graine, for victualls for the ship, which is in much smaller quantity, because it is best for the private use of a few within the ship; the only best and safest way, is, to take salt-fish barrells, or any caske in which any salt-fish hath beene piled, as cod, herrings, salmon, sprats, or any other powdred [_i.e._, _salted_] fish; and whilest the vessels are sweet, you shall calke them both, within and without, plaster [and] daubing them all over; then into them put your graine of what kinde soever it be, and head them up close, and then stow them in such convenient dry place of the ship, as you shall thinke fit; and questionlesse, if beliefe may be given to the worthiest authors, which hath writ in this kinde, you may thus keepe your graine sweet, sound and in full perfection from one yeere to an hundred and twenty yeers; but certainly daily experience shows us, that all kind of graine thus put up and kept, will remaine sound and sweet, three, foure, and as some say, seven yeeres, for so far hath lately been try'd; and what here i speake of [on] ship-boord, the like may be done in any town of war or garrison, whether besieged, or not besieged, or in any other place, where any necessity shall compell; the proofe of this manner of piling or putting up of graine, serveth as well for land as sea. the prairie farmer a weekly journal for the farm, orchard, and fireside. established in . entire series: vol. --no. . chicago, saturday, january , . price, $ . per year, in advance. [transcriber's note: the table of contents was originally located on page of the periodical. it has been moved here for ease of use.] the contents of this number. agriculture--raising onions, page ; royalist d, , ; illinois tile-makers' convention, - ; better management needed, ; seed corn from south, ; field and furrow items, . live stock--items, page ; herd books and records, ; competing for sweepstake prizes, ; raising young mules, . the dairy--wisconsin dairymen, page . veterinary--impaction of the paunch, page ; horticulture--lessons of , page ; illinois hort. society, ; diogenes in his tub, - ; possibilities of cherry growing, ; prunings, . floriculture--gleanings by an old florist, page . editorial--items, page ; the cost of cold winds, ; good work at washington, - ; wisconsin meetings, ; answers to correspondents, ; wayside notes, ; letter from champaign, . poultry notes--chicken chat, page ; chicken houses, ; items, . forestry--items, page . scientific--official weather wisdom, page ; a remarkable electrical discovery, ; items, . household--christian charity (poetry), page ; items, ; the night cap, ; how to treat a boy, ; pamphlets, etc., received, ; compiled correspondence, . young folks--jule fisher's rescue, page . literature--between the two lights, poem, page ; the two overcoats, . humorous--bait of the average fisherman, page ; whose cold feet, ; changed relations, ; it makes a difference, ; items, . question answered, . news of the week--page . markets--page . raising onions. there are two causes of failure to make this crop uncertain. one is because the soil is not kept clear of weeds, and the other is that it is not properly enriched. to raise a good crop of onions requires a light, loamy soil, worked into as fine a condition as possible, to render cultivation easy. the greater part of the preparation should be done in the fall, and especially the application of the manure. well rotted manure is the best, and that which is free from grass, oats, or weed seeds, should always be selected. of course, if the manure is properly rotted the vitality of the larger portion of the seed in it will be killed, but unless this is done it will render the cultivation much more difficult. stiff, clayey, or hard, poor land can be made a great deal better for the onion crop by a heavy application of ashes or well rotted bagasse. i prefer to apply ashes as a top dressing in the spring, working it in the surface, as i find by experience that they are not only valuable as a fertilizer when used in this way, but are also of great benefit in keeping down the weeds. a plot of ground that is seeded with crab-grass should not be selected, as the pulling up of the grass injures the growth of the onions. onions feed near the surface; in fact, the larger portion of the bulb grows on top of the soil, and as a natural consequence the plant food should be well worked in the surface. of course it is too late now to talk about fall preparation. if we want a crop of onions from seed this spring, whatever preparation there is must be done between now and seeding. i should plow or spade up the soil as soon as possible, if there is a thaw out either the last of this or any part of next month. if you can save up and rot a supply of poultry manure and leaves, you can have the very best manure for a good onion crop. another important point in raising a good crop of onions is to have good seed and sow it early. the first favorable time in the spring must be taken advantage of, if you would have the best success with your crop. as good seed is necessary in any crop, so it is with onions. test your seed before risking your entire crop, as by the time you plant once and fail, and procure seed and plant again, it will be too late to make a good crop. i always take advantage of the first chance in march to sow my onion seed. we usually have a few warm days sometime about the middle of the month when this work can be done. of course i do not say that this is the case every year. the first favorable opportunity should be taken advantage of, is what i want to impress upon those who expect to make a crop; let this time come when it will, any time early in the spring. if the ground has been plowed or spaded well during the winter, a good harrowing or raking should be given. if you have the poultry manure, now is the best time to apply it, working it on top of the soil with a rake. if you have not the poultry manure and have ashes, give a good strong dressing of ashes, raking evenly over the surface. mark off in drills twelve inches apart, and not more than one inch deep; lay off the drills as narrow and as straight as possible, and then drill the seed evenly. try to keep them in a straight row, as it will aid much in the cultivation. cover lightly, but press the soil firmly upon the seed. they will withstand considerable cold, damp weather before rotting. last year i sowed my onion seed on the d of march; the next ten days were cold, rainy, dark, dismal days, with two or three freezes. yet my onions came up all right and made a good crop. as soon as the shoots make their appearance above the ground a good raking with a fine steel rake can be given. this will give them a good start and destroy the young weeds that will begin to make their appearance at the same time. after the onions start to grow, cultivation is the making of the crop, and the cleaner they are kept and the oftener the surface is stirred the better will be the crop. as to varieties, the old red wethersfield and the danvers yellow are my favorites. the yellow strasburg is a good yellow variety, and there are quite a number of others that are good. in cultivating i keep the surface level, as they do better if kept in this way than if they are hilled up. thin out so that the plants do not crowd each other--they should stand two or three inches apart--if you want large onions at maturity. n. j. shepherd miller co., mo. royalist d, . [illustration: royalist ^{rd} elmwood stock farm property of col. c. f. mills, springfield, illinois.] the bull royalist d, , here portrayed, stands at the head of the superb jersey herd owned by col. charles f. mills, springfield, illinois. he was bred by mr. samuel stratton; dropped december , ; got by imp. royalist ; dam imp. nelly . royalist received the first prize over all jersey in ; first prize and silver cup at st. saviour's show in ; first prize at the great st. louis fair as a three-year-old, and grand sweepstakes at st. louis fair in as the best jersey bull of any age. her sire, duke ( ), won first prize over the island, herd book parochial prize, and first herd book prize at royal jersey show in . merry boy ( ), i. h. b., grandsire of royalist , won first prize at st. mary's show in . stockwell ii ( ), i. h. b., great-great-grandsire of royalist , won third prize over the island and second herd book prize at the royal jersey show, ; the bronze medal at the channel island exhibition in , and third prize at the royal jersey show in . nelly, the dam of royalist d, , has produced pounds of butter in seven days since importation, and mr. stratton is authority for the statement that she received the special prize at the farmers' club, island of jersey, for the best butter cow, having made pounds jersey weight of ounces to the pound, or avoirdupois pounds, in seven days. her sire, lemon ( ), is the grandsire of mr. c. easthope's celebrated nancy lee (test lbs. - / oz. unsalted butter in days), and daisy of st. peters (test lbs. - / oz. unsalted butter in seven days). taking all things into consideration, we doubt if there is a better jersey bull in the world than royalist d. certainly he has no superior in this country. mr. mills' jersey herd is a model in all respects, and the popular chief clerk in the state agricultural rooms may well be proud of it. * * * * * the northwestern importers' and breeders' association, minneapolis, minn., have bought $ , worth of fresian stock of the unadilla company, west edmeston, n. y. * * * * * [illustration] agricultural farmers, write for your paper. illinois tile-makers' convention. business of the year. (_continued from last week._) an interesting feature of the proceedings of the tile-makers' convention was the brief reports of members regarding their business last year. about forty manufacturers reported. in the majority of cases the demand has been fair; in a few very brisk; in quite a number it was said that sales could be made only at a reduction in prices. it was easy to see that in some sections of the state the work of tile-making was overdone, that is, the supply is in excess of the demand. it was the general expression that prices could not be greatly reduced and leave a reasonable profit to the manufacturer. how to increase the demand was the question this year. last year at this convention the talk was upon "how shall we supply the demand?" the answers to the question of how to increase the demand were various. some advocated a rigid adherence to fair living prices, and thus teach farmers that it is useless to wait for cheaper tile; make a first-class article and the cheap tile that is hurting the trade will be forced out of the market. there was a general advocacy of a wider dissemination of a knowledge of the benefits of drainage. show farmers and fruit-growers that they can add new acres to their farms, and take from tiled land a sufficiently increased yield the first year to pay for tiling, and that their land is worth more dollars per acre after tiling than the expense amounts to, and the demand will multiply many fold. teach the farmers how to lay their drains properly, so that no disappointment will result, and every acre drained will advertise the profits from drainage. circulate facts in regard to drainage as contributed to the agricultural papers, and even the newspapers. subscribe for these papers and distribute them. circulate the essays read at tile-makers' conventions. talk drainage everywhere and at all times. these were among the means sensibly advocated for increasing the demand for tile. winter tile-making. it is but recently that the manufacture of tile has been carried on in winter, but now many establishments are running the year round. it was not claimed that the business can be prosecuted as advantageously in winter as in summer. but it gives employment to men, and the manufactories are thus enabled to keep skilled labor always on hand. it was thought that though the profits are small it is really better to run in winter where there is a demand for tile. in most cases it is better to make brick a portion of the year. there is always a demand for good brick at paying prices. if it will not pay to produce all tile, or so much tile as may be turned out, this will afford relief and keep the machine in motion. tile machinery. mr. billingsby, whose position allows him an excellent opportunity of judging, said there has been rapid improvement in the machinery for tile-making. great advance has been made in machines for preparing clay, especially in the rapidity of handling it. the buildings for drying tile were a great deal better than five years ago. the means of ventilation are becoming excellent. the kilns are better and can be more satisfactorily managed. there is yet need for a cheaper tile factory--one where the investment of only a few hundred dollars will answer. protecting drains. it was generally conceded that it is best to have some device at the end of the drains to keep out rabbits, water animals, etc. wires stretched across did pretty well but must be carefully looked after to clear away the roots and refuse that come through the drains. two or three devices to take the place of wire were exhibited and were generally thought to be greatly superior. open ditches. an interesting feature of this convention was the introduction, for the first time, of the discussion of tile ditching by machinery in a paper prepared by hon. f. plumb, of streator, ill. mr. plumb has been experimenting for several years with tile ditches, using both animal and steam power. he gave it as his conclusion that the machine of the future would be a machine that would perfect the ditch by one passage over the ground. he has perfected and is now manufacturing a steam power machine, at streator, ill., which is spoken of very highly by all who have seen it at work in the field. mr. plumb claims that the machine will cut twenty rods of three-foot ditch in an hour, and give a grade and finish to the bottom of the ditch equal to the very best hand work. the capacity of the machine is varied to any depth up to four feet, and for any sized tile up to nine-inch. two men can operate the machine. the cost of cutting ditches, laying and covering tile is reduced to about ten cents per rod. he has already sold several of his machines, and is to be congratulated on the success he has attained in securing a good tile ditcher. we can conceive of no one thing that will conduce to the sale and use of tile so much as such a machine as the plumb steam tile ditcher. the machine is indorsed by c. g. elliott, of tonica, drainage engineer; by mr. pike, president of the convention, and others who have seen it at work in the field. laying tile by machinery. there was nothing among the devices exhibited at this convention that attracted more attention or received more favorable private comment than a model of chamberlin brothers' patent apparatus for tiling. the model only was shown, but working machines are in operation in iowa, and they are giving excellent satisfaction, as attested by such men as thos. b. wales, jr., of iowa city, and daniel h. wheeler, secretary of the nebraska state board of agriculture. the apparatus is upon the old principle of the mole ditcher requiring the same capstan power. one team is sufficient to run it. the apparatus is composed of a beam or sill, horizontal in position, and a coulter seven feet long at the rear end of the beam, and perpendicular to it a spirit level attached to the beam, aids in regulating. the coulter can be run anywhere from one to five feet deep. the front end of the beam is provided with a mud or stone boat to prevent sinking in the mud, and with a jack screw for regulating on uneven ground. attached to it, and following the mole, is a carrier feet long, made concave in form. on this the tile are laid and carried into the ground. a start is made at an open ditch or hole of required depth; when the carrier is drawn in full length a hole is dug just back of the coulter, two by three feet, down to the tile, a stop placed in front of the tile, the machine is started which draws the carrier from under the tile, when it is again located as before, and so on. different sized moles are used according to the size of the tile to be laid. any one can easily count up the advantages of this mode of laying tile, provided the machine can do the work it is claimed to do, and of this there seems to be no question, if we may believe the testimony of those who have seen it in operation. drainage laws. the following by senator whiting, of bureau county, was read by the secretary: illinois is a good state as nature made her, and drainage is destined to add wealth almost inestimable. drainage enterprises are everywhere seen--in extent from the small work beginning and ending in the same field, to the levees of sny carte, and the canal-like channels through the winnebago swamps. drainage is naturally divided into two classes: . individual drainage, where the land-owner has his own outlet independent of others. . combined drainage where one can not drain without joining with others. the smallest of these combined works is where two only are concerned. the hickory creek ditch now in progress in bureau and henry counties is thirteen miles long, has a district of about , acres, owned by over seventy-five persons. this combined drainage partakes of the nature of public works. for this class the constitution has been twice amended, and many elaborate laws have been enacted. these laws have had their vicissitudes, and are not yet free from complications. the first drainage legislation commenced forty years ago, by a special act, to drain some wet lands near chicago. in two special acts were passed for lands on the american bottoms. in a general act was passed. all these enactments were under the constitution of which was silent on drainage, and the courts annulled most of these as unconstitutional. in the new constitution was framed containing a brief provision on drainage. the late mr. browning, a leading member of that convention, drafted a drainage bill which was enacted into a law without change. large enterprises were organized and got well started; but again some complaining person appealed to the courts, and this law too, was declared too big for the constitution. the constitution was then enlarged to meet if possible, the views of the court. two elaborate laws on the main question were passed in , and these with several amendments since made rest undisturbed on the statutes. one of these is generally known as the "levee law," and the other as the "farm drainage act." they cover nearly the same subject matter, and were passed to compromise conflicting views. these laws relate to "combined drainage." "individual drainage" was not discussed. as the law does not undertake to define how deep you may plow or what crop you shall raise, so it was thought unnecessary to make any provisions about the drainage of your own land. court decision.--to the public surprise the appellate court at ottawa in two decisions pronounced individual drainage unlawful. as this decision is notable, and the subject of controversy, its history should be known. in , mr. c. pilgrim, of bureau county, laid about sixty rods of two-inch tile up a slight depression in his corn-field, discharging the same under a box culvert in the public road. this depression continued into a pasture field of mr. j. h. mellor, of stark county, about eighteen rods to a running stream. mr. mellor sued mr. pilgrim for trespass, and the case was twice tried successively in the circuit courts of stark and bureau counties. the juries each time decided for mr. pilgrim, but the appellate court each time reversed the decision; and finally worried mr. pilgrim into yielding to a judgment of one cent damages. the material part of that decision is as follows: mellor vs. pilgrim.--"the appellant had the right to own and possess his land free from the increased burden arising from receiving the surface water from the land of appellee through artificial channels made by appellee, for the purpose of carrying the surface water therefrom more rapidly than the same would naturally flow; and the appellant having such right for any invasion thereof the law gives him an action. * * * if, as we have seen, the appellee by making the drain in question collected the surface water upon his own land and discharged the same upon the lands of the appellant in increased quantity and in a different manner than the same would naturally run, the act was unlawful because of its consequences, and the subjecting of appellant's lands to such increased and different burden than would otherwise attach to it, was an invasion of appellant's rights from which the law implies damages, and in such case proof of the wrongful act entitles the plaintiff to recover nominal damages at least." under this decision it is not easy to see how a man can lawfully cut a rod of ditch or lay tile on his own land, unless he can contrive some way to stop the flow of water. . the lower man may recover without proving that he is damaged because to drain is "wrongful." . such drainage being a continuing trespass, subjects the perpetrator to never ending law suits and foredoomed defeats. . the lower man may forbid you to drain, or exact such tribute as he may dictate. . as the first man below must be consulted, why not the second, and how far this side of the gulf is the limit of this trespass? here, as i have elsewhere, i challenge this as bad law. it reverses the order of nature, as well as custom, and can not be endured as the public policy of illinois. let us contemplate the exact opposite principle. "a land owner may drain his land for agricultural purposes by tile or open ditch, in the line of natural drainage, into any natural outlet on his own land or into any drainage depression leading to some natural outlet." this proposition is generally regarded as self evident, but out of respect to the court, let us give some of the considerations on which it rests: . improved agriculture is an element in civilization. . drainage belongs to good agriculture, is extensively practiced and must often precede the plow. . the surplus water can not be stored or annihilated, and the course of drainage is indicated, in most places determined by nature, in the drainage depressions which are nature's outlets. . the law of gravity, with or without man's work, is constant and active in moving the waters to the lower level. the ditcher's art is to remove the obstacles to a freer flow. . excessive water is a foe to agriculture; and for the general good it should be collected into channels, and as speedily as possible passed along on its inevitable journey. objections answered.--it is said to be a universal law maxim, "that you may use your own as you will, but not to the detriment of your neighbor," and that this principle forbids this kind of drainage. this maxim may be general, but it is not universal. my neighbor may have built his house and other domestic arrangements in the lee of a natural grove of timber on my land. the removal of this grove may be a real grievance by giving the wind too free a sweep; yet my right to change this waste into a grain field will not be questioned. my warranty deed is my right thus to improve my land, though it be "to the detriment of my neighbor." he should have foreseen the contingency of a removal of these woods. on like principles a land owner may remove an excess of water so as to raise corn and not rushes. in the removal of woods my neighbor may not have an immediate remedy for his ills, but the effect of my ditches may be turned to good account by continuing them, and thus improving his land as i have mine. my warranty deed is my right to cultivate my own land, and this right carries the right to cultivate it in the best manner. the lower man should have taken judicial notice that water runs down hill, and that in this progressive age ditches may be cut and tiles laid. but it is said that this court decision follows the english common law; and now being settled by a decision, it is not open for further consideration. in this progressive age nothing is settled until it is settled right. judge taney once judicially settled the status of the african race. the common law was held to forbid the bridging of navigable streams. harbors could only be made where the water was salt and affected by the tides. the dartmouth college decision was held to so cover railroad corporations as to shield them from legislative control. these have all been overturned by the march of events, and this appellate court decision is not necessarily immortal. for fifty years the farmers of illinois knew no such rule. the public roads have been improved by side ditches which dropped the water into the first depression. in there was placed in the road law a provision that a land owner may drain on the public road by giving timely notice, and this stands through all revisions. blackstone in his commentaries does not class this kind of drainage as a nuisance or trespass to lower lands, but he does its opposite, where the lower man neglects to "scour" a ditch, and thus sets back the water to the harm of the upper man. if this court rule is common law, as claimed, then it may be further said that a rule for the dark ages when drainage was exceptional, is not necessarily the true rule, since drainage has become so large a part of good agriculture. action of the general assembly.--early in the last session, bills were introduced into each house to overturn this court decision. these were defeated, but late in the session there passed with much unanimity a bill of the following title, which became a law: "an act to permit owners of land to construct drains for agricultural purposes." sec. of this act reads as follows: "that the owner or owners of land in this state shall be permitted to construct drains for agricultural purposes, only, into any natural water-course or any natural depression whereby the water will be carried into any natural water-course, or any drain on the public highway, if the road commissioners consent thereto, for the purpose of securing proper drainage to such land, without being liable in damages therefor to any other person or persons or corporation." this was intended to establish the right of "individual drainage." but we are told that the courts will not respect this law, for the reason that it seeks to legalize trespass. here we join issue with our objectors and stand by this declaratory law. it embodies the general opinion and practice of the people; it is plainly conformable to the physical laws of nature and the requirements of civilization. lands are held subject to laws thus grounded, and these considerations will not tolerate laws or decisions the very opposite. these declarations are not much more radical than a declaration that we stand by the law of gravity as constitutional. the public are busy in overturning this court decision by everywhere disregarding it. the few who stopped draining in deference to the court, have resumed under shelter of the statute. if all violators should be prosecuted with vigor, tile-making might decline, but courting would be lively. courts and judges must be multiplied, and every lawyer in the state would have fat business for the next ten years. some judge will soon give us a precedent in accordance with reason, and this will settle the matter as effectually as did one taste of the tree of knowledge reveal good and evil. it will soon be seen that individual interest is best promoted by general and free drainage--that presumption should be in its favor, and that one man should not be clothed with power to stop others from making improvements. new laws.--the next legislative work on drainage should be to revise and consolidate the law. on some points the law is duplicate, and on one triplicate. it is generally demanded that the law shall be less cumbrous and more summary. this can be done to some extent when it shall be found that the courts favor drainage. so far they have had a very tender feeling for complaints. when drainage shall be acknowledged to be lawful, laudable, and necessary, like plowing, laws may be greatly simplified and made more effectual. river districts.--illinois being generally level, many of our inland streams waste a large amount of land by overflow and drift. roads, crops, and bridges are insecure. to a large extent this may be remedied by straightening the channels, and hereafter keeping them in repair and clear of drift wood. if the lands along these rivers, which would receive benefits from this work, were made into a district and classified according to benefits, the burden on them for proper improvement would not be great, and it is believed that dollars would be realized for cents expended. this waste is growing worse year by year. enough land could be reclaimed along the kaskaskia, little wabash, big muddy, saline, and henderson to more than make a new england state. the state may well afford to do the engineering and give an enabling act, that the people interested may organize as they decide to improve their respective rivers. when so improved, it will become practicable to more effectually drain the district by lateral works. illinois being so generally level, and much of our black soil resting on clay, here is to be the favorite field for the ditcher and tile-maker. invention has an inviting field, and already foreshadows rich results. your association, though a private one, touches the public interest very broadly. you reveal and make possible new sources of wealth, which promises to agriculture a new era of development. you may do much to settle true principles and proper public policy, so that this great drainage enterprise may move along harmoniously. the law-maker and the tile-maker are necessary factors in this grand march of improvement. other valuable papers were read which we shall take occasion to publish at some future time. better management needed. a little forethought on a farm is a good thing. it saves time, money, and much of the vexation that is liable to come without it. like the watchman on a ship a good farmer must always be looking ahead. he must be quick in his judgment of what should be done at the present time, and he should have a good perception to show him the best thing to do for the future. it is a mistaken idea that many possess who think there is no brain work needed on a farm. farmers are usually looked upon as an ignorant class of people, especially by many of the city friends who often do not see the large, sympathizing feelings that lie hidden beneath the rough exterior of country people. they are in many cases better educated than they look to be, and they have a chance to use all the education they have at their command in the performance of the many and different kinds of duties that are to be done in the occupation of agriculture. there is much work to be done and it requires to be done at the right time to give a profitable return for the labor. to have things done properly a farm requires a good manager to eke out the labor force in the way it will do the greatest amount of work. most farmers are willing to work, and take pleasure in doing so. all perform the harder parts of farming with an energy that is surpassed by no other laboring class in the world. farmers deserve praise for this, i think, for it requires a great deal of pluck to work as hard as many of them do. it is not, however, the actual hard manual labor that pays the best. the hardest part of the work may be done and there still remain enough to render the job far from complete. the minute parts of an occupation are the ones that distinguish it from others. these parts constitute trades. they require a special training to perform them, and the more perfectly they can be performed by any one, the more successful will that person be considered as a tradesman. a fine workman receives more pay for less work than one who does rougher work, simply because it is the minute parts that bring in the profit. this is so in the mechanical trades; it is so also in farming and yet many seem to be unaware of the fact. how numerous are those who leave out the minutia; mechanics learn a trade in a short time at least well enough to make a living by it. many farmers have spent their whole lives upon farms and are still scarcely able to make a decent living; and the reason of it is because they have left undone those parts which would, if performed, bring in profit. it is not the lack of an education that causes so much poor success. it is a lack of care in action and a want of observation in seeing. a man's experience is what makes him wise. he gains this experience by coming in contact with and observing those things which he meets. in schools children are taught from the works of men. these works are arts, and since art is but the imitation of nature, all education is but imitation of that which the farmer boy has the chance of seeing before it becomes second hand. there is no place that has greater facilities to give observation its full scope than a farm. all farmers can, with the aid of the right kind of books and papers, be reasonably well educated, and most of them have a better comparative knowledge than they think they have. many of the city cousins are superficially educated. city people can talk, but the greater part of the talk of many of them might be more properly called chattering. no farmer need feel below them because he is more retired and has a greater amount of modesty. it is true, perhaps, that one can not seem more insignificant than he really is. great men are constantly dying, but the living move on just the same. each person's position seems valuable to few, and yet there is almost an entire dependence of man to man. every one can not fill the highest positions, but they should make the best possible use of the faculties that are given them. if this is done there will be no regrets in the future in regard to what might have been done in the past. life will then be thought worth living and much more happiness will cluster around it than now does. there is no greater lack of education, perhaps, in agriculture than in the other vocations of man, and most farmers have a good share of well developed muscle to aid them in their work. the requisites are supplied. how many use them, at least in the way they should be used. all of the work could be done, but there is too small a number of good managers to oversee and carry out the performance of the little jobs that require to be performed at the right time. there are some people in every business who, in the race for success, far outrun their competitors. this may be noticed on a farm. it takes but a short time to tell by the work a man does whether he is a good farmer or not. if a person is a good farmer and unites that quality to that of business management he will be successful in his attainments. through success he will be honored by the members of his profession. he will be praised by all other people, and above all he will in the silent thoughts of his own mind have the satisfaction and pleasure of knowing that he is not a cipher in the vast human family. he will be pointed out as an example to those who are perhaps bowed down by discouragement. he will in all probability be called lucky when his success is really due to decisions that are arrived at by the experience and close observation of the past. if more farmers would be content to give their thoughts, as well as time, to farming, there would be more success and happiness in the occupation that depends above all others on good management. s. lawrence. quincy, ill. seed corn from south. i am an interested reader of the prairie farmer, and knowing that thousands of farmers take the advice they get from its pages and act upon it, i wish to say that the suggestions of b. f. j., champaign, ill., regarding seed corn from portions of the country south of us will not do. last spring hundreds of farmers in western iowa planted seed corn that came from kansas and nebraska, and the result was that none of that from kansas ripened, while but little of the nebraska seed did any better. it all grew nicely, but was still green and growing when the frost came. it may be claimed that much of that grown from native seed was no better, but it was better and considerable of it ripened, and from this native seed we have the only promise of seed for next year's planting. if farmers expect a good crop of corn they should not get seed from a southern latitude. no iowa farmer would buy seed corn now that grew in kentucky, kansas, or missouri. the only seed corn on which our farmers rely implicitly is that which they have gathered before frost came and hung up near the fire to be thoroughly dried before it froze. that corn will grow. s. l. w. manning, iowa. field and furrow. all manures deposited by nature are left on or near the surface. the whole tendency of manure is to go down into the soil rather than to rise from it. there is probably very little if any loss of nitrogen from evaporation of manure, unless it is put in piles so as to foment. rains and dews return to the soil as much ammonia in a year as is carried off in the atmosphere. rice contains more starch than either wheat, rye, barley, oats or corn. of these grains oats carry the least starch, but by far the largest proportion of cellulose. in nitrogenous substances wheat leads, followed by barley, oats, rye and corn, while rice is most deficient. corn leads in fat, and oats in relative proportion of water. wheat leads in gum and rice in salt. convenience of farm buildings is an important aid to good farming, especially where much stock is kept and there are many chores. water should always be provided in the barn-yard, the feeding boxes should be near where the feed is kept, and the buildings should not be very far removed from the house. if this results in more neatness about barns and barnyards than has been thought necessary, it will be another important advantage gained. the president of the elmira farmers' club tells the husbandman that his crop of sorghum got caught by the frost, and too much injured to be of value as a sirup-producing substance. but he fed it to his cows which ate it greedily, and soon began to gain in milk. he thinks he got about as much profit from the crop as if it had been devoted to the original intent. governor glick, in a short address before the state board of agriculture, last week, stated that kansas history is the most remarkable on record; that in her people had more money to the head than any other people under heaven; that the state had received , immigrant population in ; that it will receive , in ; that in ten years it will have , , people, and that thereafter kansas will not care anything about bureaus of immigration--it will have people enough to work with, and the rest will come as fast as they are needed. farmers' call: the experiments conducted during the last season at the missouri state agricultural college fully demonstrate the advisability of mulching potatoes. we believe every experiment so far reported gave a similar result. the cost of the materials for mulching is usually very small, leaves or straw being plentiful and cheap upon the farm. the materials manure the ground; and mulching saves hoeing. the potato requires a cooler climate and moister soil than our latitude affords. mulching tends to secure both. the result in every case has been largely increased yields of superior quality. the old saying, no grass no cattle, no cattle no manure, no manure no crops, is as true to-day as when first spoken. grass takes care of him who sows it. the meadow is the master mine of wealth. strong meadows fill big barns. fat pastures make fat pockets. the acre that will carry a steer carries wealth. flush pastures make fat stock. heavy meadows make happy farmers. up to my ears in soft grass laughs the fat ox. sweet pastures make sound butter. soft hay makes strong wool. these are some of the maxims of the meadow. the grass seed to sow depends upon the soil and here every man must be his own judge. not every farmer, however, knows the grass adapted to his soil. if he does and seeds by the bushel, or other measures, he is apt to be misled. including millet and hungarian there were in kansas this year , , acres of land devoted to the raising of hay. the yield per acre was . tons, or a total product of , , tons. none of the tame grasses have as yet attained a large area in this state, the most extensively grown being timothy which has an area of , acres. the great bulk of the grass lands mentioned above is the prairie, protected by fence. the eastern third of the state probably contains four fifths of the tame grass area. the question of the growing of tame grasses in kansas is receiving much attention from farmers, it becoming of vast importance as people increase the number of their farm animals. the question no doubt will be satisfactorily solved within a few years, and the tame grass area will increase to its just proportion. the agricultural changes in great britain continue to be of a marked character. the area devoted to grain crops the past year was , , acres, which is , acres less than in . potatoes were planted on , acres, and turnips and swedes on , , acres--all showing a slight increase; but mangolds, vetches and other green crops have declined by , acres on the figures for the previous year. clover and the grasses show an increase of , acres. the change from tilth to permanent pasturage is again conspicuous, there being , , acres as compared with , , last year. ten years ago grass covered , , acres, while arable land has fallen during that period from , , to , , acres. orchards are on the increase, and also market gardening. in the matter of live stock there is an improvement which leads to the hope that the heavy losses of recent years will be made up. * * * * * illinois central railroad. the elegant equipment of coaches and sleepers being added to its various through routes is gaining it many friends. its patrons fear no accidents. its perfect track of steel, and solid road-bed, are a guarantee against them. * * * * * farm machinery, etc. nichols & murphy's centennial wind mill. [illustration] contains all the valuable features of his old "nichols' mills" with none of their defects. this is the only balanced mill without a vane. it is the only mill balanced on its center. it is the only mill built on correct scientific principles so as to govern perfectly. all vanes are mechanical devices used to overcome the mechanical defect of forcing the wheel to run out of its natural position. a wind wheel becomes its own vane if no vane if used, hence, vanes--save only to balance the wheel--are useless for good, and are only useful to help blow the mill down. this mill will stand a heavier wind, run steadier, last longer, and crow louder than any other mill built. our confidence in the mill warrants us in offering the first mill in each county where we have no agent, at agents' prices and on days' trial. our power mills have per cent more power than any mill with a vane. we have also a superior feed mill adapted to wind or other power. it is cheap, durable, efficient. for circulars, mills, and agencies, address nichols & murphy, elgin, ill. (successors to the batavia manf. co., of batavia, ill.) * * * * * sawing made easy monarch lightning sawing machine! sent on days test trial. a great saving of labor & money. [illustration] a boy years old can saw logs fast and easy. miles murray, portage, mich. writes, "am much pleased with the monarch lightning sawing machine. i sawed off a -inch log in minutes." for sawing logs into suitable lengths for family stove-wood, and all sorts of log-cutting, it is peerless and unrivaled. illustrated catalogue, free. agents wanted. mention this paper. address monarch manufacturing co., n. randolph st., chicago, ill. * * * * * chicago scale co. [illustration] ton wagon scale, $ . ton, $ . ton $ , beam box included. lb. farmer's scale, $ . the "little detective," / oz. to lb. $ . other sizes. reduced price list free. forges, tools, &c. best forge made for light work, $ , lb. anvil and kit of tools. $ . farmers save time and money doing odd jobs. blowers, anvils, vices & other articles at lowest prices, wholesale & retail. * * * * * the profit farm boiler [illustration] is simple, perfect, and cheap; the best feed cooker; the only dumping boiler; empties its kettle in a minute. over , in use; cook your corn and potatoes, and save one-half the cost of pork. send for circular. d. r. sperry & co., batavia, illinois. * * * * * hoosier auger tile mill. [illustration: mills on hand. prompt delivery.] for prices and circulars, address nolan, madden & co., rushville, ind. * * * * * miscellaneous. evaporating fruit [illustration] full treatise on improved methods, yields, profits, prices and general statistics, free. american m'fg co. waynesboro franklin county, pa. * * * * * self cure free nervous lost weakness debility manhood and decay a favorite prescription of a noted specialist (now retired.) druggists can fill it. address dr. ward & co., louisiana, mo. * * * * * ( ) chromo cards, no alike, with name, c., pks, $ . george i. reed & co., nassau, n.y. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * [illustration] livestock department. stockmen. write for your paper. american breeders imported from scotland head of polled cattle last year. * * * * * w. c. vandercook, secretary of the northern illinois merino sheep breeders' association, recently took merino sheep to his recently purchased ranch in norton county, kansas. * * * * * mr. estill, of estill, mo., passed through chicago, a few days ago, with forty head of angus-aberdeen and hereford cattle. estill & elliott now own one of the best polled herds in the west. * * * * * the second regular annual meeting of the kansas state short-horn breeders' association will be held in the senate chamber of the capitol, topeka, kan., during february and , beginning at p. m. of the th. * * * * * the seventh annual meeting of the dutch-fresian association of america will be held at the butterfield house, utica, n. y., february , . essays and addresses are expected from a number of distinguished stock breeders. * * * * * the lafayette county thoroughbred live stock breeders' association was recently organized at higginsville, mo. they will hold annual public sales and otherwise advance the improved stock interest. their first sale will be held at higginsville, october and , . * * * * * the following is a list of jerseys exported from the island during the past year: mr. francis le brocq exported cows, bulls, --total, . mr. eugene j. arnold sent out cows, bulls--total, . sundry shippers sold cows and bulls--total, . grand total, , head. * * * * * our readers will not fail to notice the public sale ad. of mr. wm. yule, of somers, wis., who will, on the th day of march, disperse his entire herd of thoroughbred short-horn cattle. the herd numbers forty head, and is the opening sale of the season, and will be one of the most attractive ones of the year. they are all of his own breeding. send for catalogue, which will be ready about february . * * * * * horse-stealing seems to be as prevalent in england as in this country. a late london live-stock journal says there is as much of it going on as there was half a century ago. a gang has recently been operating in kent, essex, and surrey quite extensively. the thieves are no respecters of breeds, taking hunters, cart horses and carriage horses with equal boldness. arrests are becoming frequent, and it seems likely the gang will soon be broken up. herd books and records. the following addresses may be of use to many readers of the prairie farmer who may wish to record stock or purchase books: american short-horn herd book--w. t. bailey, secretary, montauk block, chicago, ill. national register of norman horses--t. butterworth, secretary, quincy, ill. american clydesdale stud book--charles f. mills, secretary, springfield, ill. american hereford record--breeders' live stock association, beecher, ill. holstein herd book--thos. b. wales, secretary, iowa city, iowa. herd register--american jersey cattle club, geo. e. waring, secretary, newport, r. i. american poland-china record--john gilmore, secretary, vinton, iowa. central poland-china record, mr. morris, secretary, indianapolis, ind. competing for sweepstake prizes. our readers will remember that we last week made mention of a change in the sweepstakes rings at the next illinois state fair. this was a slight error. the change was made with reference to the fat stock show. in this connection we present the argument of hon. john p. reynolds, on the subject before the board and which governed the board in its action. the argument. _to the state board of agriculture._ gentlemen.--the undersigned, superintendent of class a., respectfully submits the following report for the past year, including the fair in september, and the fat stock show in november. the fair. it was perfectly apparent to any one familiar with the displays of previous years in this department, that the breeding of fine cattle in this country is, at the present time, attracting the attention and commanding the best and most intelligent care of not alone the farmers who have been bred to their avocation, but of capitalists, who comprehend the great money values involved, and who either of themselves or through their sons have set out to identify themselves with this great interest. as the result of the fact the display of cattle was more varied as to breeds and greater as to number, if not superior as to quality, than at any fair, while the visitors in attendance seeking to purchase and studying the question of breeds with a view to purchase for breeding purposes, were never so numerous nor so much in earnest. under such circumstances, it may easily be imagined that the awards of prizes, not for the money value of the prizes themselves, but for the bearing of such honors upon the interests of exhibitors in regard to sales, assumed an unusual importance and involved a corresponding responsibility on the part of this board. impressed, as i think, with a proper sense of that responsibility, and of the embarrassment which always surround that position, as your representative i discharged the duty to the best of my ability. the most serious and perhaps, the only embarrassment which i should refer to in this report, was the absence of so large a proportion of the members of awarding committees originally selected, rendering it necessary to fill the places of the absentees by selections from the by-standers after the cattle had been called to the rings. some of you "have been there" and have a realizing sense of the difficulties involved in the effort to make these substitutions intelligently and with conscientious care, on the spur of the moment. to do so in all cases with satisfaction to one's self is simply impossible, and to do it in all cases with satisfaction to unlucky competing exhibitors is not to be expected. if i could do the first and feel sure that the talisman had been wisely selected, it would be easy to disregard complaints, if any, which are known to be unjust. the question of so modifying our committee system as to avoid the embarrassment i have referred to and thus to secure a better deserved confidence in the justice of the awards is one i hope to hear discussed at this meeting as it has been probably at every meeting of our predecessors for the past thirty years. possibly we are in the light of our own experience, with a different system at the fat stock shows prepared to try something else at the fairs; but of this i do not feel certain. the fat stock show. the remarks i have made in regard to the display at the fair and the great interest it excited apply with, if possible, still greater force to the fat stock show. your record shows all material facts in respect to numbers and quality of the stock on exhibition, and i need not enlarge. the importance of this enterprise, in its relation to the meat supply of the world, can hardly be over-stated, and its direct results to the producers of the meat producing breeds of stock as well as to the consumers, are too apparent to require discussion. the rules and methods adopted by the board for conducting this show seems to need but little change--some slight modifications of the requirements of the premium list will be proposed when that subject shall come up for consideration, but beyond these there is but one subject which i regard as of sufficient importance to demand a suggestion from me at this time. i refer to the number of and division of duties among the awarding committees. the method of selecting judges seems to me all right and there was much less difficulty in securing their attendance than at the fair. a few did not respond, but their places were filled satisfactorily in most cases. the wisdom of the appointment of your committee to decide upon the age of all animals on exhibition, prior to the commencement of the work of the judges and entirely independent of any suggestion or wish on the part of exhibitors, was practically demonstrated so that there is probably now no desire to discontinue it. in this case their discussions corroborated and established the statements and good faith of the exhibitors themselves in every instance except one, in which one the result was unimportant. the special feature to which i desire to call your attention may perhaps be best understood if i express my own views in regard to it. at present it is the practice for one committee of judges to make the awards on the animals of each breed in their several rings of yearlings, two-year-olds, and three-year-olds. after that has been done it is the practice for another committee to select the sweepstakes animals from among all the entries of all ages of that breed without regard to the prizes which the former committee may have awarded. now it not infrequently happens, and is always liable to occur, that the latter committee selects as the best animal of any age one which the former committee did not deem worthy of any prize at all or at least not a first prize, when judged by them in competition with these of its own age only. evidently there is a mistake somewhere. both decisions can not be correct. both committees, we are bound to assume are equally honest, disinterested, and competent, because the members of both committees considered in making up a decision such discrepancy of judgment and the system which renders it possible may be almost excusable, perhaps, but in the fat stock show, where we deal so fully in details and exact figures, and where we pretend to use our best efforts in every practical manner to get at and publish for the benefit of a confiding world the reliable, bottom facts obtained by the labors of paid experts, reach a conflicting record is not, in any judgement, one to be greatly proud of. there is one plain, just and proper remedy for this, to wit: restrict the award of sweepstakes prizes in the several breed rings to such animals as have taken first premiums in the rings for ages, and restrict competition for _grand sweepstakes_ to such animals as have taken _sweepstake_ prizes in the breed rings as have not otherwise competed at all. the awards of all special prizes should follow the decisions in the regular rings when not offered for animals not included in the regular rings. under this rule every animal competing for a sweepstakes prize, with possible exceptions in the grand sweepstakes, would have received the highest indorsement of the committees, and hence there could be no pretense of prejudice on the part of the judges and hence, too, it would matter very little whether a new competent committee were called for the grand sweepstakes or that committee was composed of judges who served in the rings, the latter, in my opinion, being preferable, because of their larger opportunity in becoming familiar with the points of difference between the competing animals. i am persuaded that no objection to the remedy as i have stated it, would or could properly be made except by those whose animals were not included in the first prize or sweepstakes winners, and the only objection i have ever heard to the adoption of the rule, even at the fairs, is based on the idea that those animals (or the owners) failing to take prizes in the rings for ages, should have a "new trial" before an entirely new jury in sweepstakes. but how about those who won the verdict in the first trial! is there any justice in requiring them to submit to another trial between themselves and those they have once vanquished? and if there is any propriety in that, why not in still another new trial and more new trials before new juries until every animal in the show has received a first prize, or the treasury has been exhausted or the community fails to furnish any more jurymen? if it were simply the "consolation stakes" to non-prize winners, some loose practice might seem justifiable, but it is not the best policy in conducting the competitions of the fat stock show to be influenced by any considerations except those which relate to fair, impartial and intelligent decisions, and no decisions can be fair, impartial and intelligent which conflict with each other and which, as a whole, fail to form a consistent record. john p. reynolds, supt. class a. * * * * * james f. scott purchased mares and one and two year old colts to be delivered on the th of march at the san antonio viego ranch. * * * * * raising young mules. where land is not too high, and pasturage good as well as cheap, keeping good mares from which young mules can be raised is certainly a profitable business; especially so where corn and hay are grown on the farm, and the mares can be profitably worked at least part of the year. with a liberal supply of corn fodder for winter feeding, and a good pasture, with hay and corn during the coldest weather, and when at work, this branch of farming is not only easy, but certain and profitable. a mare in good condition, not counting pasturage, can be kept for eight dollars a year. service of jack here is generally six dollars, making keeping of mare and service cost fourteen. there has been no time since i came to this part of the state when a mule colt would not bring all the way from twenty-five to fifty dollars, depending, of course, upon the size, form, and general condition at weaning time. allowing nothing for the work the mare would be able to do, which certainly ought to be sufficient to pay for her keep, there is left a good margin for profit. or if we count the interest on the money invested in the mare, still we have a good profit left. the difference paid for young mules shows two facts: first, the importance of a good sire, or jack, and the other of a well-formed mare. it certainly costs no more money to keep a well-formed animal than it does to keep a poor one. of course, at the start, one may require a somewhat larger outlay of money, and in this way, if we count the interest on the money invested, cause young mules to cost a trifle more than if cheaper animals were used. but this is more than compensated for by the larger price the colt will bring. the difference between a mare that will bring a mule that only sells for the lowest price here at weaning time, twenty-five dollars, and one that brings a mule that will sell for fifty, the highest generally obtained, would make quite an item in the amount of profit to be derived from her keep, and especially where the same animals are kept quite a number of years for this purpose, as is often the case. and this is not all; the mule will himself pay handsomely for keeping. mules a year old, that are broken to the halter, so that they can be led, bring from eighty to one hundred dollars. when two years old, and broken to to the wagon as well as saddle, one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five dollars is the general price. of course a pair of well matched mules, well broken to harness, at three or four years, will sell all the way from three to five hundred dollars, depending upon their color, form, size, etc. and this difference is, in nearly all cases the result of the difference between good and poor jacks, as well as good and poor mares. one other point must always be taken into account in this work, and that is in having mares that are sure breeders. i find that those who have made most money out of this line of farming or stock-raising are those who, when they have secured a valuable brood mare that is sure of bringing a first-class mule colt, they not only keep her, but they take good care of her; and in this way they secure the very best results and realize the largest profits. where proper care is taken not to overwork or strain them, mares can always be profitably worked in planting and cultivating the corn crop, as well as cribbing it in the fall; fully enough work can be done to pay for what they eat and the pasturage. so that the cost of service and interest on the money invested is what the mule costs at weaning time. after that time, of course, they cost something more, as weaning time generally comes in the fall at about the time that pastures fail, and corn fodder, wheat straw, and hay, with a small amount of grain during the winter must be fed to keep the colt growing in good condition. many farmers who do not care to go to the trouble of breaking young mules, dispose of them at weaning time; while others find it profitable to buy these up at whatever prices they are obtainable, and keep until they are two or three years old; during this time they are broken to lead, to ride, and to work. to be sure, there is some risk connected with this, but, on the whole, it is considered very remunerative--so much so that many young men who manage to get enough cash ahead will buy one or two mule colts in the fall at weaning time and keep them until well broken in, and they sell at a profit, and in this way make a good start for themselves. as compared with other branches of stock-raising, there is less risk in this than in almost any other branch of farm stock. n. j. shepherd. miller co., mo. [illustration] the dairy dairymen, write for your paper. wisconsin dairymen. the convention of wisconsin dairymen, at lake mills, last week, was an excellent one. it was largely attended by the most prominent and experienced dairymen of this wonderful dairy state. the people of lake mills did their utmost to make the visit of delegates pleasant, and they succeeded admirably. the crowning feature of their hospitality was the banquet on thursday night. the feast was prepared by the ladies of the m. e. church. the supper, the toasts and responses, the music and all were enjoyable in the highest degree. wisconsin dairymen believe in banquets. a leading member of the convention declared that the prosperous history of the association began with its first banquet. governor rusk was in attendance at this convention, and his address was one calculated to encourage and help on the association. he assured the members that if they thought the association needed legislative aid, all they have to do is to ask for it. if they ask for $ , , he will do his best to have the appropriation bill passed, and he will sign the enactment promptly when it reaches him for signature. he believes wisconsin one of the foremost of dairy states, and he wants it to retain its position. among other prominent gentlemen present who participated in the discussions were prof. henry, of the agricultural department of the state university; hon. clinton babbitt, secretary of the state agricultural society; hon. hiram smith, chester hazen, s. favile, j. m. smith, j. h. smith, j. b. harris, inspector of dairy factories, canada, and t. d. curtis, syracuse, n. y. the election of officers resulted in retaining the incumbents of last year for another year's service. these gentlemen are: w. h. morrison, elkhorn, president; d. w. curtis, fort atkinson, secretary; h. k. loomis, treasurer. one of the prominent papers read was on co-operative dairying, by j. b. harris, esq., of antwerp, n. y., who is employed by the canadian government as inspector of cheese and butter factories. we will give it in full, and follow next week with some account of the discussions. co-operative cheese-making. in all human efforts, grand results have been attained chiefly by concert of action. in our own time, everything is done by co-operation. railways across continents, canals uniting oceans and seas, bridges almost of fabulous proportions, enterprises in engineering and commerce, never before known, evince the extent to which modern genius is availing itself of concert of effort in testing human capacity. there is a visible tendency in all branches of business toward co-operation and centralization. in looking down upon a large city, the unity visible even in the diversity of human affairs manifests itself in a manner truly wonderful. the air is literally filled with a vast net-work of wire, crossing and re-crossing in every conceivable direction, and over these, backward and forward, the thoughts of men are made to vibrate with the speed of lightning, in the elaboration and consummation of thousands of business schemes, and the air, as well as the buildings and streets, is full of human activity and enterprise. the lawyer, sitting comfortably at his desk in his office, talks with his banker, physician, grocer, a hundred clients, and his family, all seated like him himself at home, or at their various places of business. thus is the telephone made the instrument of human co-operation and concert of action. it is now less than thirty years since dairymen stumbled into the practice of co-operation in the business of making-cheese. previous to that time cheese-making in this country was, to say the least, a crude affair. every farmer ran his own factory, according to his own peculiar notion, and disposed of his products as he could "light on" chaps. in that day, cheese-making was guess work and hap-hazard. to-day it is a science. then there were as many rules and methods as there were men. to-day the laws which nature has enacted, to govern the process of converting milk into cheese, are codified, and cheese-making has become a profession. in that day the accumulated results of the cheese industry of a neighborhood or township was a sight to behold--all manner of circular blocks, of concentrated error, large and small, thick and thin, when heaped together presented a spectacle that would now bring a smile upon the countenance of the most sober and dignified cheese-maker in the state. the condition of the market at that time was quite as crude and irregular as the system, or rather the want of system, in manufacturing. there was no cable, no regular reports from the great business centers of the land, no regularly organized boards of trade, railroads not as numerous, less daily papers were in circulation, and many other circumstances which left the seller comparatively at the mercy of the buyer, and the purchase and sale of a dairy was conducted upon principles similar to those usually practiced in a horse trade. the great changes which since that day have taken place in the dairying world are due chiefly to a division of labor, the introduction of system and co-operation. our machinery, we are sorry to say, is not yet quite perfect in all its parts, and does not move with the precision and harmony of the orchestra, to which we have already alluded. yet, although still in its infancy, it has already produced and does annually produce results grand indeed. if we take a glance at the various industries at which men are to-day engaged, intellectual, commercial, and mechanical, the painstaking exactitude everywhere practiced will be found to be a growing subject of wonder and admiration. the secret of this lies in the fact that perfection in any department of business not only enlarges that business but also enriches those engaged in it. for example: there are perhaps ten times as many watches manufactured in the world to-day as at any other period in its history. it is a profitable business, or men would not engage in it, and the superhuman effort that is being continually put forth to increase the value, by making as perfect an article as human power can produce, establishes conclusively the assertion that there is always a profit in doing well. i am glad to observe that in the cheese industry of the united states and canada, the light of this truth has to some extent aroused the slumbering dairymen. to quote from the utica herald of sept. , : "it is estimated that about , men are employed in this business, in one capacity or another, and that about , , cows are used to furnish the one product of milk. the returns from this product are over $ , , . the total amount of capital invested in dairying in the united states is estimated to reach the enormous sum of $ , , , ." in consulting these figures we hope there is no person so dense of understanding as to entertain for a moment the idea that had the old system of every man his own cheese-maker prevailed that anything approaching this grand result would ever have been attained. never. the concert or effort attained in the factory system is the key note to this grand, soul-inspiring chorus. but an experience of twenty-five years in the dairy industry leads me to the conclusion that in the music of our business there is yet much discord. the dairymen and factorymen fail to understand the spirit of the piece we are attempting to perform, and fail to catch the idea that individual profit and prosperity depend upon the success of the business as a whole. no chain is stronger than its weakest link, and so long as there remains a slovenly dairyman in the business just so long our system will be incomplete and the working of co-operation remain imperfect. perfect concert of effort, unbroken unity of hand with hand, in all the various details of the business, reaching down to the most unimportant items in the production of milk and the making of cheese, will produce in the long run the most profitable and permanent results to the individual as well as to the community. "but," say some, "there is too much of the millennium, too much of theory, too much of the unattainable, in all this." to such i answer that there is much of the millennium, much of theory, and much of the unattainable in the sermon on the mount, and yet our divine master preached it, nevertheless. it may perhaps be considered chimerical and theorizing to talk of a time when there will be no such persons among dairymen as what are known to the cheese-maker as a skimmer or stripper, but we hope such a time will come, nevertheless. to what purpose do a., b., and c., and a score of other industrious, honest, painstaking fellows, exert themselves to collect a model dairy, sparing neither time nor expense in providing themselves with perfect sets of improved appurtenances for those dairies, from rich, well-watered pastures down to good, substantial three-legged milking stools, and labor incessantly from sunrise until sundown, that their barns may be in perfect order and everything connected with the business neat and clean, in order that their material may come into the hands of the manufacturer in a perfect condition--if heedless, lazy, shiftless, dishonest, ignorant, good-for-nothing d. keeps about him a herd of sick, disconsolated racks-of-bones, to wander over his arid and desolate fields in search of food and drink in summer, or with backs humped up, hover together for shelter under the lea of a wheat-straw stack, their only food in winter, and using a kit of dairying tools, the very best article of which is an old, water-soaked, dirty wooden pail, drawing his whey from the factory in the old, rusty, time-embattled milk cans, in which it is allowed to stand until the next milking, and which, after an imperfect washing, and refilled and returned to the factory, freighted with a compound sufficiently poisoned to nullify and undo the best efforts of a hundred a., b., and c's. it may be theorizing and visionary to talk of a time when the spirit of co-operation shall have driven such fellows out of the dairying business, to betake themselves with a pick-ax and spade to the ditch, but that such a time may come ought to be the earnest prayer of every thorough-going friend of co-operation in the land. it may seem like castle building and an unprofitable waste of time to indulge in theories and construct plans by which the rivalry among factorymen may be kept within a limit sufficiently circumscribed to prevent the fear of loss of patronage from interfering with, and lowering the standard of, our cheese. it is too often the case, nowadays, that factorymen are deterred from a full and complete discharge of their duty to themselves, their patrons, and the world in general, by a fear, by no means groundless, that a bold and upright course with regard to the material brought to them will result in a damaging, if not entire loss, of their occupation. the unwise extent to which men have gone in the erection of cheese factories, has increased competition to an extent decidedly prejudicial to the interest of the cheese-consuming world. a., having invested his entire capital in the construction and equipment of a factory, will be quite likely, when b., c., and d. erect factories in his immediate neighborhood, to hold his peace when sundry varieties of swill milk are offered at his door, instead of speaking out an equivocal protest against the insult thus offered to his professional pride and sense of decency. to the dairyman naturally given to slovenly and careless habits, the restraint to which he might otherwise be subjected is practically removed when nearly equi-distant from his place of abode there are three or four factories, instead of one, and he knows that if rejected at one place, he can without inconvenience go to another, and thus it transpires that at five factories in every ten there will be found a conspicuous absence of thorough and inexorable discriminations which ought always to prevail in the receipt of milk for factory purposes. for this abuse there is, in our estimation, a remedy however theoretical and visionary it may appear, and that is concert of action and co-operation among factorymen. men in all branches of business, nowadays, associate with each other, and form themselves into bodies for the purpose of closer union and mutual protection, and when this is done for the general good, as well as individual advancement, the purpose is laudable and universally successful. we know of no business in which the necessity of combination is so great as that of cheese-making, and, what, let me ask, could be more desirable and praiseworthy than an association of cheese-makers, for the purpose of sending the swill milk of the country to the hogs, where it belongs, instead of making it up, as at present, for human consumption. we have an idea that such an association might be successfully formed, and that, when once in effectual operation, it might ask the legislative body of its country to enact a law, entitled "an act for the suppression of swill milk, and for the general good of mankind," in which it should be provided, among other things, that in every case where a dairyman has left a factory on account of having had his milk rejected for cause traceable to his negligence, that in all such cases, the factory or factory company knowingly receiving the milk of such rejected party, shall be liable to some appropriate penalty. the extreme sensitiveness of milk in the absorption of taint from the atmosphere, or any substance with which it comes in contact, ought to be thoroughly understood by all persons engaged in handling it, but, we believe, that but few comparatively are alive to the true facts of the case. i herewith present several paragraphs clipped from journals of recent date: "there are seventy-five cases of typhoid fever in the town of port jarvis. dr. mcdonald attributes the spread of the disease to the use of milk from the farm of mrs. thomas cuddebach, in whose family there have been several typhoid cases, holding that the milk conveyed the disease germs. nearly all of the parties now sick had used milk from the farm." "a dairyman from dundee has been apprehended and fined for allowing his wife and daughter to milk cows and assist in the sale of milk, after they had been engaged in nursing a child suffering from scarlet fever. no less than nineteen cases of fever, four of which resulted fatally, were traced to this act of carelessness." with these facts in view, how can it be expected that any amount of diligence on the part of a cheese-maker can atone for the unpardonable sin committed, day after day, by the heedless and unobserving patrons, of leaving a can of freshly drawn milk standing all night in an unwholesome barn or yard, until it has absorbed a whole family of pestilential odors, and then to carry it to the factory to corrupt and poison everything with which it comes in contact. some may suppose it a mere theory to speak of a condition of things in which abuses of this character can not be found, but during an experience of five years as cheese instructor, in the province of ontario, during which i superintended the making of cheese in about different factories, and during the last year inspected the milk from about , cows, the property of about , dairymen, i occasionally made up vats in which there was no discoverable taint and which, i was pretty certain, came from the farms of well drilled, well posted dairymen, and, from a circumstance of this character, i am led to the conclusion that what has been done once can be done again, and i make such facts a text upon which i found my plea for more thorough co-operation and diligent painstaking in the work of producing milk for factory purposes. * * * * * there may be times when peculiar atmospheric conditions will exert unfavorable influences, and seasons when drought and wet weather will produce changes, over which human efforts have no control, and for these sufficient allowance must be made. we quarrel with the stupidity, shiftlessness, and ignorance of men, and not with the providence of god. in this day and age of the world there is no excuse for ignorance upon the points to which we have alluded. wisdom uttereth her voice in the streets, and he who will not hear her ought to be drummed out of the camp of dairymen. as a rule, a common carpenter puts more thought into his business in a month than many dairymen do in a year. indeed, it would be difficult to point out a single branch of human industry, of one-half the magnitude which the manufacture and sale of cheese has reached, carried on in a manner so slipshod and slovenly as dairying. the banker, the columns of whose ledger fail by one cent of balancing, spares neither time nor money in searching out and correcting the error; the merchant brings to bear upon his business a care and insight so unceasing and laborious that his locks are soon sprinkled with premature silver; the machinist works to plans from which the variation of a thousandth part of an inch can not be allowed to pass uncorrected; but the dairyman too often stumbles along through his work without thought, or employs the little intellect he has in putting in and harvesting his crops, leaving the dairy in the meantime to take care of itself. there are too many men engaged in dairying who can see nothing in the business beyond the factory dividend; men to whom filling the milk pail and the can are the alpha and omega of life. to such men such a thing as an ambition that their county, town, or neighborhood shall attain and hold a reputation for being the banner cheese district of the state or nation, is as thoroughly unknown as the configuration of the bottom of the dead sea. in saying what we have about the patrons of cheese factories, and the closer and more thorough co-operation among them, we have been actuated by no feelings of unkindness or ill will, nor have we arraigned them upon trivial or imaginary charges. the indictments we have found against them are all true bills, against which too many of them will be unable to sustain the plea of not guilty. we have been constrained to our present course by an overmastering sense of the importance of greater care, deeper thought, and closer union in pushing forward one of the greatest industries of the day. i am confident that before another step can be taken in advance it must be preluded by a correction of the errors which we have feebly attempted to portray, all of which lie outside and prior to the factory. as a body, cheese-makers can do little better than they are now doing, until there is some improvement in the material upon which they are called upon to exercise their skill, and the practice of crimination and recrimination, the factorymen tossing the blame upon the dairymen and the dairymen upon the factorymen, which is made use of to conceal the real source of our mistakes, will continue to shield him from the eyes of a discriminating public until the care and diligence of dairymen strip him of this shelter and drive him forward on the march to improvement. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * [illustration] veterinary impaction of the paunch. impaction of the paunch (the first stomach or rumen) in cattle, sometimes also called grainsick or mawbound, differs from bloating or hoove, mainly thereby that the distention is more solid than gaseous, it being either with food alone, or with food and gas. symptomatically it differs also from hoove by the absence of eructation, and by the hardness of the flanks and the smaller volume of the swelling. it arises from gorging with almost any kind of food, even with grain or with chaff, at a sudden change of diet; but it is particularly liable to arise from a surfeit of turnips, fresh grass, or any other succulent food at the commencement of the season. the instrument called a probang ought to be introduced, either to decide whether the case be one of hoove or one of mawbound, or to ascertain the degree in which the latter disease exists. if the probang bring on a sudden rush of gas, the disease is wholly or chiefly hoove; and if it encounter a solid resistance, the disease mawbound, and exists in a degree of aggravation proportioned to the nearness of the point at which the resistance is felt. in mild cases of impaction of the paunch, when the animal does not seem to suffer much pain, and is not materially fevered, but merely ceases rumination or chewing of the cud, refuses to eat, and lies long and indolently in one posture, a dose of oil, or a little forced walking, are frequently sufficient to effect a cure. in cases which, though on the whole mild, are accompanied with a kind of inertia, or with an insuperable reluctance to rise or to move about, stimulants, such as ether diluted with alcohol and water, may be required to rouse the paunch into renewed action; but whenever such remedies are necessary, they must be given in cautious doses, and always accompanied with some gentle purgatives. in very bad cases, when the animal seems sinking through inertness into death, or in which moans, swells at the sides, becomes almost as a board in the flanks, appears to suffer great and increasing pain, and seems eventually to be overwhelmed with anguish and to be passing into unconsciousness, it must be promptly decided whether we have sufficient time and encouragement to try the effect of stimulants, purgatives, the stomach pump, and other comparatively gentle measures; and if not, we should, without much delay, cut through the left flank into the paunch, and with the hands withdraw the contents. the cutting operation itself is attended or followed with little danger; but in the extracting of the food, no matter how carefully performed, some small portion is liable to drop into the abdominal cavity; and this, in consequence of its indigested condition, resists absorption or expulsion, undergoes an irritating decomposition, and may very probably originate some serious inflammatory disorder. any animal which has suffered a very bad case of impaction of the paunch, ought, immediately after complete restoration to health, to be sent to the shambles; for, independently of the lurking danger consequent on the artificial extraction of the food, or even upon the relaxation which follows the administration of a stimulant, the paunch is so much overstretched and injured by the mechanical effects of the distension as to be temporarily incapacitated for the proper discharge of its functions. queries answered. probably ringbone.--w. b. s., sciola, iowa. in the absence of any information to the contrary, the lameness may be regarded as due to the development of ringbone. there is no certain cure for this disease. all that may be expected from treatment is to retard or stay its progress or development; but in all cases more or less stiffness or lameness will remain, depending upon the extent of its development. then, subsequent hard work, or any cause of renewed irritation, will be apt to further aggravate the case, and cause additional enlargement and increasing lameness. the usual course of treatment in such cases consists in blistering or firing, or both combined, with subsequent long rest or a season's liberty on pasture. * * * * * uneasiness is a species of sagacity; a passive sagacity. fools are never uneasy. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * [illustration] horticultural horticulturists, write for your paper. lessons of . by o. b. galusha. progress in all arts and sciences is the one grand aim of all associations and of all agricultural and horticultural societies and journals; and to study the results of each year's experiences and observations, comparing them with those of previous years, and also with the ideal of perfection which each laborer in these several departments of industry has pictured in his own mind, is the best preparation for achieving desired results in the future. in the present paper we will take a brief retrospect of the fruit crops of , and inquire into the causes of successes and failures. strawberries. we begin with the strawberry, which, though small and unpretentious, has been from year to year rising in importance until it has become second only to the apple in the estimation of a majority of consumers. the past year's experience has taught, as does that of each year, that great care should be taken in selecting varieties adapted to each particular soil and situation. this may be said to be the important thing in strawberry growing. it is a difficult thing to find such varieties by the ordinary means of selecting; namely, recourse to the catalogues of growers. man has a wonderful amount of selfishness in his composition. i say wonderful, for it is a wonder when we consider how much better he would enjoy life were all selfishness eliminated from it, and benevolence, coupled with true self love, were substituted. "each crow thinks its own young the blackest," and each (almost) originator or "exclusive owner" of a new variety of plant or tree, labors hard to convince himself and others that he has the best of his kind; but, owing to the weakness of human nature, even the sincere among these are liable to be biased, and thus mislead others. the only safety, therefore, lies in planting such varieties as you know to succeed well near you in similar soil, while new varieties, commended as superior by persons of known integrity and experience, for similar soil and climatic condition, should be tried only on a small scale as an experiment. if they succeed, you can soon have plenty of plants of your own growing--if you prefer to grow them. this advice, though often before given will bear frequent repetition--for the desire for "something new" is as prevalent with us now as it was with the athenians in st. paul's time. we have seen big bobs, great americans, and other monstrosities dwindle to pigmies in the hands of ordinary cultivators, and the demand for sharpless become less sharp through its sensitiveness to the influence of jack frost; and hosts of other sorts, really good and valuable somewhere, and under peculiarly favorable conditions to be comparatively valueless for general cultivation. therefore every person designing to plant should repeat to himself this injunction--"go slow on new varieties." it is not desirable for persons who plant for their own use solely to select the pistillate varieties; for these, although the most profusely productive when well fertilized, are liable to overrun their staminate neighbors, and soon render the "strawberry patch" unproductive, or productive only of small or imperfect fruit. the leading pistillates offered in the catalogues now are crescent, col. cheney, windsor chief, jersey queen, big bob, manchester, green prolific, golden defiance, champion, park beauty, gipsey, and some others. there are a few sorts, having perfect blossoms, which give profitable returns on a variety of soils, and which may be considered safe to plant. these are charles downing, miner, bidwell (kept in single rows or single plants), piper, cumberland triumph, phelps ("old iron clad"), sucker state, finch, capt. jack (acid), longfellow (with good, rich culture), mt. vernon (late), and for sandy soil, kentucky (late). this list may be said to constitute the cream of the thousand and one varieties offered which have been well tested. of course those who grow strawberries for market will plant largely of some of the pistillate sorts, owing to their great productiveness. the past year has taught the folly of too great haste in removing the covering from strawberry plants; as those which bloomed early were badly damaged by the frost. plantations, also, which were partially screened by rows and belts of evergreens produced twice to three times the quantity of fruit that was obtained from the same varieties fully exposed. plants in orchards also escaped to a great degree, for the trees were in leaf when the destructive frost occurred, and thus gave partial protection. strawberries are at home in a young orchard; the cultivation given the plants is good for the trees, and the slight shade of the young trees is no perceptible detriment to the plants or fruit. the general crop was about one-third an average--the chief damage being done by the frost--though the tarnished plant-bug was very destructive in southern illinois, and did some damage in other localities. prices were from fifty to a hundred per cent higher than usual--supply and demand being the factors, in the fruit trade, as well as in all others, which regulate prices. spring is better than summer or autumn for planting strawberries. in thirty years' experience in strawberry culture i have never, except in two instances, found any advantage in summer or fall planting, and in these pot-plants were used, which are too expensive for general planting and not always preferable. three or four of the varieties named, of each, planted as early in spring as the ground is in good condition, in rows three to three and a half feet apart, and confined, as they run, to narrow strips, will give an abundance of fruit for two or three years for a large family. certainly such planting and care is as good an investment as can be made upon any farm or in any garden. raspberries and blackberries were more nearly a failure, generally, as a crop, in , than strawberries, but owing to a different cause, namely, the severe cold of the previous winter. none of the cultivated varieties escaped unharmed wherever the mercury sank lower than degrees below zero, and degrees below was marked nearly everywhere north of the latitude of peoria and bloomington, in illinois, and in many places degrees below was recorded. blackberries also suffered; even the hardy snyder not escaping; and a similar disaster threatens the crops of these species in , for as i write, on a clear, sunny day, the mercury has not risen higher than degrees below zero, and this morning (january ,) was degrees below here in peoria, and degrees below in bloomington. the canes went into the winter in good order, however, and, if no intense cold prevails hereafter, the damage may be less than last winter when they were not as well hardened. since we can not prevent the recurrence of these polar region down-pours, we can prepare our canes of raspberries and blackberries for enduring such extreme cold, by commencing cultivation early in the spring and discontinuing by the middle of june, also by stopping the growth of young canes, by pinching or chopping off, when not more than two and a half feet high, and again, as soon as another foot in length is made, stopping both uprights and laterals. if all weak canes are kept cut out, and those shortened for fruiting the next year not allowed to stand nearer than eight or ten inches of each other, they will become "ripe" and firm in texture before cold weather overtakes them. the hardiest of the red varieties are turner, thwack, and cuthbert; and of the black-caps, the soughegan (earliest), tyler, and gregg (latest). the black-caps named endured the winter fully as well as the hardy red varieties. of blackberries the snyder still heads the list for hardiness and general value north of the latitude named, though early harvest bids fair to be of value. taylor was damaged a little more than snyder, while barnard, ancient briton, and stone's hardy rank with snyder for hardiness. raspberries and blackberries should be planted early in the spring, if not done in late autumn, in rows six to eight feet apart. red raspberries may be set two feet apart in the rows, and black-caps and blackberries wider--two and one-half to four feet, according to stock of plants or desire for quick returns; for all will bear the next year after planting. give good cultivation the first year and mulch in the fall, along the rows of both raspberries and blackberries, with manure free from grass seeds, and cover the entire surface between the rows of blackberries with old prairie hay, corncobs, or straw; or, if cultivation the next year is intended, the inter-row of mulch may be omitted. the intense cold of these two consecutive winters should not deter land owners from planting these fruits. these extremes come in cycles; and, though old jupiter is now, and was last winter, exerting an unusual disturbing influence upon our planet, he will this year calm his temper and give us nine or ten years of respite from his powerful magnetic sway. currants, gooseberries, and grapes were less affected by the severity of the winter of ' -' than by the late frosts of spring, which destroyed the young shoots of grapes and the blossoms and young fruit of the berries. currants are yearly growing in favor and the price of the fruit advancing; and now currant culture is profitable and likely to continue so for a series of years. ground can not well be made too rich for currants and gooseberries. plant in rows four feet apart and plants three feet apart in the rows; give thorough culture or deep mulch over the entire surface, cut out all wood of three years' growth (or after first crop is often considered better), and a good crop is almost certain. red dutch, white grape, victoria, and versailles are still the favorites; and american seedling (or cluster) and houghton are usually the most profitable gooseberries. every one who can raise corn and potatoes can as easily raise, with little trouble and expense, grapes enough for a family's use. plant such hardy sorts as moore's early, worden, concord, and martha, in rows seven or eight feet apart, and same distance in the row, give good cultivation the first year, cut back to two or three feet in autumn, lay the short canes on the ground and hold down with a spadeful of earth. plant posts four feet high and stretch two no. wires along them--the upper one on top--and in the spring, as the vines grow, tie to the wires, keeping one cane only for fruit this year and two new ones for next year's fruiting; and a crop is as certain as a crop of corn. cut out weak canes every year, and encourage those starting nearest the ground, cutting back each autumn one-half or two-thirds the growth; cut out old canes. it is not necessary to lay the canes down and hold them to the ground or cover in this latitude, though this work will pay well. in two weeks orchards will be discussed. illinois horticultural society. the annual meeting of the executive board of the state horticultural society was held in the agricultural rooms at springfield, january th. present: john m. pearson, godfrey, president; a. c. hammond, warsaw, secretary; s. m. slade, elgin, arthur bryant, princeton, dr. a. g. humphrey, galesburg, h. m. dunlap, champaign, and e. a. reihl, alton. a large amount of routine business was transacted, not of public interest, after which the board proceeded to arrange for a grand fruit exhibition, to be made by the society at the next state fair. this collection will not be entered for a premium, but only to show the diversified horticultural products of the state. the public-spirited citizens of illinois, and particularly of chicago, have decreed that the state fair of shall eclipse anything of the kind ever held in the northwest, and the state horticultural society, desiring to keep abreast of the times, will make a display of fruit that the state may well be proud of. it was also decided to offer liberal premiums for horticultural products to be exhibited at the next winter meeting, which will be held in the industrial university, at champaign, the first or second week in december. after some discussion as to the best method of interesting the students in our work, it was decided to offer premiums, first and second, for the best essays on horticultural subjects. the board and members of the society hope that this offer will be the means of bringing out a number of papers from the young gentlemen and ladies of the institution. there seems to be a determination evinced by the members of the board and society to make an aggressive, vigorous campaign the present year, and to bring our work more prominently before the people than ever before. the following are the standing committees for the year: orchard culture--b. f. johnson, champaign; henry mortimore, manteno. forestry--thomas gregg, hamilton; l. c. francis, springfield. vegetable gardening--a. l. hays, jacksonville. grapes and grape culture--ayres, villa ridge; m. a. baldwin, jacksonville; d. j. piper, foreston. strawberries--j. g. bubach, princeton; henry wallace, villa ridge; o. b. galusha, peoria. raspberries, blackberries, currants, and gooseberries--h. g. vickroy, normal; wm. jackson, godfrey; d. wilmot scott, galena. pears--c. n. dennis, hamilton; parker earle, cobden; w. t. nelson, wilmington. peaches--j. b. spaulding, riverton; h. c. freeman, alto pass. plums and cherries--dr. a. h. sanborn, anna; l. c. francis, springfield. new fruits, trees, and plants--j. t. johnson, warsaw; e. hollister, alton. gathering and marketing fruits and vegetables--r. w. hunt, galesburg; ed. rogers, upper alton. utilizing fruits--g. h. clayson, crystal lake; ---- roberts, godfrey. floriculture--thomas franks, champaign; joseph heinl, jacksonville. landscape gardening--j. p. bryant, princeton; prof. standish, galesburg. vegetable physiology--prof. burrill, champaign; g. h. french, carbondale. entomology and ornithology--prof. s. a. forbes, normal; miss alice walton, muscatine, iowa; miss emily a. smith, peoria. geology and soils, as affecting plant life--wm. mcadams, alton; henry m. bannister, kankakee; henry m. shaw, mt. carrol. horticultural adornment of home--mrs. lavina s. humphrey. galesburg; mrs. h. n. roberts, alton; mrs. p. v. hathaway, damascus. the appointment of ad-interim committees was referred to the members of the board from each horticultural district. a portion of them asked time for consultation, which was granted. when the entire committee in appointed, the names will be reported to the prairie farmer. a. c. hammond, sec'y. diogenes in his tub. and first, diogenes would discourse of that remarkable polar wave that struck us on saturday the th of the year, and its probable effect on the fruit product. great fear is manifested on all sides, and not without grounds: yet the conditions, it seems to me, have been so favorable that there is cause for hope. remember that there was no very sudden change, the temperature having been low for two or three weeks before, and no sudden rise since. the sudden changes seem to be the ones--coming in the midst of winter--that are the most destructive to our fruits. so i conclude there is ground yet for hope; and unless some future disaster should occur, dio., if living, will expect to eat of several sorts of fruit this year grown on his own grounds. keep in good heart, brethren; providence will send us all we deserve. but hasn't that man at cape girardeau a level head? dio. himself could not have given as many sensible suggestions concerning farmers' libraries, as he did in no. . all farmers and horticulturists can not go as deeply into periodicals as he, but they can profitably go much deeper than they do. take a farmer's home provided on his plan, and then imagine, if you can, sensible sons running off to breaking on freight trains, or selling soap and candies behind counters! improbable. and then, again, in no. , his thoughts on naming country houses. how suggestive! the editor in no. , favors interdiction of french liquors, etc., as retaliation for their interdiction of american pork. dio. says interdict them as a matter of protection to ourselves, without regard to hog or hominy. "man of the prairie" was looking out for a little colder weather. did he find it--and is he satisfied? an extremely suggestive paper that, of prof. budd's on the "cherry possibilities." further investigation in the wide field of european horticulture is demanded, not only in regard to this but to most other fruits. even unpromising sorts, not prized there, transplanted here, may turn out to be the most valuable of any. i fear the agricultural colleges are not taking as much interest in this matter as they ought. our state society ought, and doubtless does, feel thankful to prof. b., for his presence and wise counsel at its late bloomington meeting. his remarks will be found valuable reading in the forth-coming volume of transactions. seedsmen's catalogues will soon be floating around thick as autumn leaves, and planters will be puzzled what to buy. my experience may be worth something: of tomatoes, i know nothing better than acme and trophy, and i think favorably of the golden trophy--though with some the color is objectionable. the short-horn carrot can't be beat for table use, nor the egyptian beet. of the former, planted pretty thick in good soil, in rows two feet apart, bushels per acre can easily be grown; and besides being good for stock, they are mighty good for men and women. in squashes the hubbard and boston marrow are standbys, and that little perfect gem is likely to prove a no. . and give me the stowell evergreen sweet corn and the winningstadt cabbage yet all the time. but dio. will not be fooled with so many new sorts in as he has been in former years. yes--increase the tax on dogs, and collect it; so say the iowa stock-breeders, and so echoes every sensible friend of the farmer and his interests. next time dio. proposes to call up a subject of much importance to everybody, and one that badly needs ventilating. dio. possibilities of cherry growing. the insertion of one little word gives too unfavorable an idea of the best varieties of the griotte cherries, grown all over the interminable steppes north and east of the carpathian mountains in europe. as printed the paragraph reads: "some of the thin-twigged griottes, with dark skins and colored juice, are as large as the morello and nearly or quite as sweet." the copy reads--or should read--"as large as the english morello and nearly or quid sweet." as you say my object in talking the matter up is the hope of interesting some of the large nurserymen, like those at bloomington, in the desirable work of importing and propagating the griottes, amarells, and the asiatic sweet cherries known as "spanish," of the east plain, on a large scale. why should our western propagators permit our importing of fruits, ornamental trees and shrubs, to be done by the nurserymen of the eastern states. if we turn to a good map of europe we will see at a glance that the importing of fruits so far has been from the west coast of france, belgium, and holland, or from the south of england. as with our west coast, this whole region has been made a land of verdure by the soft, humid air of the gulf stream. tracing on the map the line of the carpathian and caucasus mountains, we find three-fourths of all europe, north and east of these ranges, without a mountain or hill traced on the great expanse except the valdai hills, and these are only bluffs not as high or extensive as those of our rivers and dividing ridges. it is the greatest plain section of the world, and is the ancient home of the best fruits of the temperate zones. common sense should lead us to give trial to the horticultural products of this plain. to find apples, pears, cherries, and plums as hardy, and as well adapted to the hot summers and cold winters of illinois and iowa as the fameuse apple, we need not enter the empire of russia. northeastern austria has a variable summer and winter climate, which will not permit the growing of apples of the grade of hardiness of the ben davis, stark, jonathan, and dominie; of pears of the grade of flemish beauty, or of cherries of the grade of early richmond as to foliage and ability to endure low temperature. the commercial nursery-man who will visit the "king's pomological institute," at proskau, in north silesia, will see at a glance, as he wanders over the ground, that the fruits, forest trees, ornamental trees and shrubs of the nurseries of england, france, belgium, etc., suddenly disappear with the carpathians on the edge of the great steppes. j. l. budd, ag. college, ames, iowa. prunings. the soil for window boxes is the same as for plant culture in pots; the best is that formed by rotted sods with a little well decomposed stable manure mixed with it. rhubarb requires deep, rich soil. a good dressing of well-rotted manure, put on the ground this winter when it is not frozen, will start off the plants briskly in the spring. the same is true for asparagus. mr. russel heath, carpenteria, cal., has an "english walnut orchard" of two hundred acres of rich, level land, near the sea-shore. the trees are from ten to twenty-five years planted. his crop in was sacks of pounds each; this season he expects the harvest will aggregate about one-third more. gardener's monthly: the writer found among the gardeners in canada, when in that country recently, that the english plan of preserving grapes in bottles of water was in not uncommon use. the bunches are cut with pieces of stems, and then so arranged that the ends are in bottles of water. by this plan the grapes can be preserved far into the spring season. the american cultivator: "can you tell we what kind of weather we may expect next month?" wrote a farmer to the editor of his paper, and the editor replied: "it is my belief that the weather next month will be like your subscription bill." the farmer wondered for an hour what the editor was driving at, when he happened to think of the word "unsettled," and he sent a postal note forthwith. the farmer and fruit grower: mr. willis, lamer, a prominent fruit grower of the cobden region, says he very distinctly remembers that the freeze of killed young fruit trees to the snow line, and that he cut his peach trees to that line, and saved that much. in the temperature was about the same as it was on january , --in the neighborhood of degrees below zero. mr. lamer thought no damage was done to strawberry plants. a pomologist gives the following excellent advice in regard to maintaining the fertility of fruit lands: "encourage the utmost variety of vegetable growth near and upon your orchard lands, and never rob the soil of its honest dues. give judicious and thorough cultivation and pruning; and with our generous soils and climate, i do not believe the child is yet born that will live to see our orchards languish on account of poverty of soil, or any necessity arise for the importation of fertilizers." the country gentleman says two things are necessary for the growing of good asparagus, namely, plenty of room for the plant to grow, and copious manuring. the latter is best applied to thick beds by covering the whole surface with manure two or three inches thick, late in autumn, and forking it in very early in spring, before the new shoots start. thick beds, however, should not be planted, but the plants allowed three or four feet each way to each. three by five is a common and suitable distance, and large stalks may be obtained in this way. charles merritt, of battle creek, has been very successful with strawberries. his plan is to plant rows about two and one-half feet apart and plants nine inches in the row; he prefers the spring time. he manures highly, cultivates thoroughly and mulches with clean straw late in the autumn. the next season he gets a large crop, and, while he is taking it off, another patch is being treated in a similar manner for the next year's crop. the second year with any bed he simply pulls out the weeds, and after picking turns it under. this plan proves to be satisfactory. t. f. leeper, of warsaw horticultural society, says: i have been greatly interested in the condition of orchards this season, and have examined quite a number. one orchard in my neighborhood died during the summer--i supposed it was winter-killed, but an investigation showed that the roots had been destroyed by mice. last spring i reported a number of trees in my orchard, winter-killed. these trees have been dug up and it appears that they too, were killed by mice. in my orchard the greatest injury by winter-killing has occurred in the draws or low places and i would not plant another orchard without tile drawing such places. [illustration] floriculture gleanings by an old florist. the pansy. gray, in his manual, says: "viola tricolor (pansy or heart's-ease) is common in dry or sandy soil. from new york to kentucky and southward, doubtless only a small portion of the garden pansy runs wild. naturalized from europe." seen in this condition the flowers are very small, not more than one-half an inch across and oblong in shape. cultivated at its best it has a flower two inches in diameter, almost an exact circle in outline. all this has been brought about by lovers of flowers during a long period of years, by saving the seed of only the best, a sort of survival of the fittest, and only to be kept up by rich soil and constant cultivation, for if left to itself the pansy dwindles back into its original nature. it has another peculiarity also: the young plants always bring the largest flowers, so that if the extra large flowers are wanted they can be obtained only by seed annually, or a division of the old roots by cuttings. the latter is too much trouble for most cultivators in the country, and named kinds are never thought of, while in the old they used to be; perhaps it is still common for the pansy grower to name his pets, and reproduce them each year by cuttings or division of the roots. the seed that brings the largest and best flowers generally come from germany, although some of our own florists save them themselves for several consecutive years. i was a long time before any fixed character was maintained in color in this flower, but now seed from certain kinds will mainly reproduce its like, hence are often so used for massing kinds of a color. the plant being a native of the cooler and moister parts of europe is better adapted to their climate than ours, and hence as our spring weather is more nearly like their original climate than our other seasons, they luxuriate in it; it is the only season in which the florist finds much of a market for his goods, and even then he receives some round abuse for selling very large noble flowers that quickly deteriorate after leaving his hands. this, however, is not his fault, the hot weather being one cause, the other that the plant refuses to produce large flowers except in its young state. there are two methods adopted by a florist in the preparation of his stock; one, by sowing the seed in the fall and wintering the young plants in cold frames, or even by means of a slight protection of brush. the other by sowing the seed on a bench in the green-house in january. if sown in the fall early enough to get well into rough leaf, if they do not flower in the fall, which they usually will do, they are ready to do so at the first peep of spring, as they flower at a comparatively low temperature. if sown in january, they are transplanted once on other benches, from which they are lifted and transferred either to the outside borders or to other cold frames as the case may be. it is not best to keep them in a green-house longer than necessary, say the first of march, as the conditions of a green-house will bring about the small flowers similar to the hot weather of the summer. [illustration: the pansy.] by the different systems the market florist can have his goods always at their best during the selling season, which ranges from the first of march up to the first of june. they are so easily grown he can afford to sell cheap, even if his goods are of the very best, and will usually bring about seventy-five cents by the single dozen, down to as low as three dollars by the hundred. enough sod should hang to the roots to keep them fresh, and they will, after planting, go on flowering just as though they had never been disturbed. nothing can be done with this plant, at least worthy of the name, in the window, hence it should not be attempted. to enjoy the large flowers as long as possible during summer, if there is any choice of position, give them the coolest and moistest place in the garden, not forgetting plenty of watering in dry spells. a rich, loamy soil, inclined to be porous, will give the best satisfaction, but almost any garden soil will grow them. edgar sanders. * * * * * drainage. practical farm drainage. why, when, and how to tile-drain --and the-- manufacture of drain-tile. by c.g. elliott and j.j.w. billingsley price, one dollar. for sale by the prairie farmer publishing co., monroe st., chicago, ill. * * * * * the shepherd's manual a practical treatise on the sheep. designed especially for american shepherds by henry stewart. finely illustrated price, $ . , by mail, postpaid. address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. * * * * * $ . . for this amount we will send a copy of the prairie farmer for one year, also a handsome colored map of the united states and canada--size, Ã� - / feet. * * * * * our new clubbing list for . the prairie farmer in connection with other journals. we offer more liberal terms than ever before to those who desire to take, in connection with the prairie farmer, either of the following weekly or monthly periodicals. in all cases the order for the prairie farmer and either of the following named journals must be sent together, accompanied by the money; 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by its use thousands of cases of the worst kind and of long standing have been cured. indeed, so strong is my faith in its efficacy, that i will send two bottles free, together with a valuable treatise on this disease, to any sufferer. give express & p.o. address. dr. t.a. slocum, pearl st., n.y. * * * * * "the best is the cheapest." engines saw mills, threshers, horse powers, (for all sections and purposes.) write for free pamphlet and prices to the aultman & taylor co., mansfield, ohio. * * * * * publishers' notice. _the prairie farmer is printed and published by the prairie farmer publishing company, every saturday, at no. monroe street._ _subscription, $ . per year, in advance, postage prepaid. subscribers wishing their addresses changed should give their old as well as new addresses._ _advertising, cents per line on inside pages; cents per line on last page--agate measure; lines to the inch. no less charge than $ . ._ _all communications, remittances, etc., should be addressed to_ the prairie farmer publishing company, _chicago, ill._ * * * * * the prairie farmer entered at the chicago office as second-class matter. chicago, january , . * * * * * when subscriptions expire. we have several calls for an explanation of the figures following the name of subscribers as printed upon this paper each week. the first two figures indicate the volume, and the last figure or figures the number of the last paper of that volume for which the subscriber has paid: example: john smith, - . john has paid for the prairie farmer to the first of july of the present year, volume . any subscriber can at once tell when his subscription expires by referring to volume and number as given on first page of the paper. * * * * * [transcriber's note: original location of table of contents.] * * * * * . . the prairie farmer prospectus for . see inducements offered subscribe now. for forty-three years the prairie farmer has stood at the front in agricultural journalism. it has kept pace with the progress and development of the country, holding its steady course through all these forty-three years, encouraging, counseling, and educating its thousands of readers. it has labored earnestly in the interest of all who are engaged in the rural industries of the country, and that it has labored successfully is abundantly shown by the prominence and prestige it has achieved, and the hold it has upon the agricultural classes. its managers are conscious from comparison with other journals of its class, and from the uniform testimony of its readers, that it is foremost among the farm and home papers of the country. it will not be permitted to lose this proud position; we shall spare no efforts to maintain its usefulness and make it indispensable to farmers, stock-raisers, feeders, dairymen, horticulturalists, gardeners, and all others engaged in rural pursuits. it will enter upon its forty-fourth year under auspices, in every point of view, more encouraging than ever before in its history. its mission has always been, and will continue to be-- to discuss the most approved practices in all agricultural and horticultural pursuits. to set forth the merits of the best breeds of domestic animals, and to elucidate the principles of correct breeding and management. to further the work of agricultural and horticultural organization. to advocate industrial education in the correct sense of the term. to lead the van in the great contest of the people against monopolies and the unjust encroachments of capital. to discuss the events and questions of the day without fear or favor. to provide information concerning the public domain, western soil, climate, water, railroads, schools, churches, and society. to answer inquiries on all manner of subjects coming within its sphere. to furnish the latest and most important industrial news at home and abroad. to give full and reliable crop, weather, and market reports. to present the family with pure, choice, and interesting literature. to amuse and instruct the young folks. to gather and condense the general news of the day. to be, in brief, an indispensable and unexceptionable farm and home companion for the people of the whole country. the style and form of the paper are now exactly what they should be. the paper used is of superior quality. the type is bold and clear. the illustrations are superb. the departments are varied and carefully arranged. the editorial force is large and capable. the list of contributors is greatly increased, and embraces a stronger array of talent than is employed on any similar paper in this country. we challenge comparison with any agricultural journal in the land. the prairie farmer is designed for all sections of the country. in entering upon the campaign of , we urge all patrons and friends to continue their good works in extending the circulation of our paper. on our part we promise to leave nothing undone that it is possible for faithful, earnest work--aided by money and every needed mechanical facility--to do to make the paper in every respect still better than it has ever been before. * * * * * special notice to each subscriber who will remit us $ . between now and february st, , we will mail a copy of the prairie farmer for one year, and one of our new standard time commercial maps of the united states and canada--showing all the counties, railroads, and principal towns up to date. this comprehensive map embraces all the country from the pacific coast to eastern new brunswick, and as far north as the parallel of deg., crossing hudson's bay. british columbia; manitoba, with its many new settlements; and the line of the canadian pacific railway, completed and under construction, are accurately and distinctly delineated. it extends so far south as to include key west and more than half of the republic of mexico. it is eminently adapted for home, school, and office purposes. the retail price of the map alone is $ . . size, Ã� inches. scale, about sixty miles to one inch. * * * * * read this. another special offer. [illustration] "the little detective." weighs / oz. to lbs. every housekeeper ought to have this very useful scale. the weight of article bought or sold may readily be known. required proportions in culinary operations are accurately ascertained. we have furnished hundreds of them to subscribers, and they give entire satisfaction. during january, , to any person sending us three subscribers, at $ . each, we will give one of these scales, and to each of the three subscribers ropp's calculator, no. . * * * * * our premium list. revised, extended, and properly illustrated will this week be sent to every subscriber. there must be something offered in it that every one needs or would like to have. the terms are the most liberal ever offered. all readers are hereby constituted agents to solicit subscriptions to the prairie farmer. if those who can not enlist in the work will hand the premium list to some person who will do so, they will confer a great favor upon the publishers and editors. what we all want is to double our present list before the first day of april. * * * * * renew! renew!! remember that every yearly subscriber, either new or renewing, sending us $ , receives a splendid new map of the united states and canada-- Ã� inches--free. or, if preferred, one of the books offered in another column. it is not necessary to wait until a subscription expires before renewing. * * * * * we want agents in every locality. we offer very liberal terms and good pay. send for sample copies and terms to agents. * * * * * the adams county (ill.) fair at camp point will be held the first week in september. the premium list is out. * * * * * the seventh annual fair at jerseyville, ill., will be held commencing tuesday, october , , and continue four days, with $ , premiums. * * * * * at the cape of good hope agricultural society's trials, november , , the johnston harvester company were st in the trial field, and also for the machine best adapted for the colony. * * * * * the growth of the western live stock business has stimulated parties to organize a union stock yards company at sioux city, iowa. the company has a capital of $ , . the shipping of dressed beef may become a branch of its business. * * * * * one of the most popular and instructive essays at the late wisconsin dairymen's convention was entitled "the farmer's garden," contributed by j. m. smith, esq., of green bay. this essay will appear, in full, in the next issue of the prairie farmer. * * * * * french papers declare that the government crop reports for are exaggerations. if land has risen in value and stock doubled in price, the extra cost of running a farm more than makes up for it. the impost duty on all agricultural products has also alarmingly increased. * * * * * mr. merritt, united states consul general at london, directs attention to the falling off in the value of exports from great britain to the united states during the fiscal year ended september , . the total value of declared exports from the various united states consular districts in great britain and ireland during the year was $ , , , a reduction from the figures for the preceding year of $ , , . * * * * * mr. calkins, member of congress from indiana, succeeded on monday in getting a suspension of the rules and the passage of a bill providing that in any suit against an innocent purchaser of an article manufactured in violation of the patent law, if the plaintiff shall not recover twenty dollars or over, he shall recover no costs. this bill is a blow aimed at the drive-well patent agents, and others of that ilk who are perambulating the country to the annoyance of farmers. if the bill passes the senate, and there appears no valid reason why it shall not, it will put an end to this species of robbery now so prevalent. * * * * * the only general advices we have regarding winter wheat come through the extensive grain commission house of w. t. baker & co., chicago. they have private reports which indicate that the crop maintains a very high average, and, with the exception of a few points in southern illinois, kentucky, and tennessee, is doing as well as could be expected at this season of the year. in kentucky and tennessee the ground is quite bare of snow, but north of the ohio river, from kansas to ohio, the wheat, as a general thing, is well covered. the crop, however, was generally sown late, and in many quarters fears are entertained of the final outcome. * * * * * the nebraska state farmers' alliance held a meeting at kearney on wednesday of last week. a platform was adopted declaring in favor of national legislation to regulate railway traffic, demanding the abolition of national banks and the substitution of government currency, demanding a tariff for revenue only, expressing sympathy with labor, asking protection to labor organizations, recommending the abolition of convict labor, asking congress to reclaim all unclaimed land grants and reserve the public domain for actual settlers, and opposing the acquisition of public land by foreigners. * * * * * do not forget that the annual farmers' institute, or agricultural lecture course, at the illinois industrial university will be held from tuesday, january th, to friday, february , . four lectures will be given each day, at a.m., a.m., p.m. and p.m., by dr. peabody, regent of the university, professors burrill, jillson, mcmurtrie, morrow and others. the topics discussed will be: _soils_--their origin, physical characteristics, chemical composition, drainage, cultivation, fertilization; _plants_--their structure, growth, nutrition, seeds, movement of sap, development and distribution, economic products. addresses will be given in the evenings by dr. peabody, governor hamilton and others. these lectures and addresses are given as a part of the work of the college of agriculture of the university. no fees or examinations are required. all interested are cordially invited to attend. the cost of cold winds. prof. shelton, of the kansas agricultural college, puts the question of sheltering stock in an exceedingly pointed manner. he has lately been feeding ten steers in an experimental way. he found that for the period of ten days ending december , the average gain per head was thirty-one and one-tenth pounds. the weather was warm and sunny. the steers were fed in an unbattened board shed. during the succeeding ten days, when the cold was intense almost the entire time, the same steers, fed on the same rations, and in the same shed, gained but six and six-tenths pounds per head. about a year ago the professor fed a lot of pigs for three weeks of the coldest weather, in open yards, and found them to consume more than three times the amount of food to pound of increase than the same number of pigs in the warm basement of the barn. he has a cow kept in a bleak "kansas barn" which shrinks in her milk from one-fourth to one-half after twenty-four hours of very severe weather. from all this the conclusion is what we have so often taught in these columns, though not as forcibly as the professor teaches by his careful experiments, that you can not burn feed as fuel to support the body of an animal and at the same time have the animal stow it away in the form of muscle and fat. the fact is that our farmers throw away one-half their feed in furnishing animal heat that they might just as well save by paying a small lumber bill and expending a moderate amount of labor. good work at washington. surely the house of representatives is getting down to solid work since the holiday vacation. mr. holman, for instance, found no great difficulty in getting a resolution passed declaring that in the judgment of the house all public lands heretofore granted to states and corporations in aid of the construction of railroads, so far as the same is subject to forfeiture by reason of the nonfulfillment of the conditions on which the grants were made, ought to be declared forfeited by the united states, and restored to the public domain. this was good work, but mr. holman's second resolution, also passed, was fully as much in accordance with public feeling and desire. it is to the effect that our laws relating to public lands should be so framed and administered as to ultimately secure freeholds to the greatest number of _citizens_, and to this end all laws facilitating speculation in public lands authorizing or permitting entry or purchase in large bodies ought to be repealed, and all public lands adapted to agriculture, subject to bounty grants, and those in aid of education ought to be reserved for the benefit of actual and bona fide settlers, and disposed of only under the provisions of the homestead law. there was some opposition to this resolution. mr. kasson feared such a law might work injury to the cattle industry. mr. bedford, however, neutralized mr. kasson's influence by declaring that he did not propose that four or five cattle kings should own the west as four or five railway kings own the east. it may be that our readers would like to take down the names of members who voted against the resolutions. here they are: barksdale, bingham, bisbee, george, horr, kean, libbey, lyman, morse, muldrow, poland, ranney, reed, rice, russell, stone, van eaton, whiting. now that the representatives have resolved that these things ought to be done let us see if they will stand up to the rack and attend to their part of the doing. wisconsin meetings. feb. and --the state horticultural society in senate chamber, madison. feb. --the wisconsin cane-growers association, madison. prof. wiley of the department of agriculture will be present. feb. , , and --farmers' state convention, under the auspices of the state society, at capitol. feb. and -- th annual meeting of the southern wisconsin cane-growers' and manufacturers' association at whitewater. feb. --the wisconsin swine breeders will hold a meeting at the capitol, for the transaction of such business as may come before them and the discussion of subjects appertaining to successful breeding and feeding of swine. all interested in this subject are invited to attend. answers to correspondents. j. c. mcconaughy, rochelle, ill.-- . how can i secure a blue-grass pasture? . how much seed to acre? . can blue-grass be grown successfully mixed with other grasses? . what season and what soil is best adapted to secure a good catch? . can it be grown on low, wet land? answer.-- . there are almost as many ways to obtain a blue-grass pasture as there are men who undertake the job, though essentially the practices are alike. the usual method is to sow the seed in the spring or fall, either alone or with clover or timothy. . the seed is very light and chaffy, and weighs only fourteen pounds to the bushel, and the amount sown varies from five to seven pounds to the acre. . yes, though after a few years blue-grass, on a true blue-grass soil, roots every other grass out and reigns with a divided empire with white clover. . any good corn or wheat soil will produce good blue-grass--the usual method of obtaining a blue-grass pasture is as follows: to one bushel of good timothy seed one quart of red clover is added, and this quantity is made to cover from five to six acres. the seeding may be done in the fall with fall grain, in the spring with oats, or on stubble or wheat land on the snow in february. after, in the month of august from a peck to a half bushel of blue-grass is sown upon the young timothy and clover. but little or nothing can be seen of the blue-grass for the first year and it does not show vigorously until the third year. thereafter if the soil is a true blue-grass one and the land is pastured, blue-grass and white clover dominate to the exclusion of everything else. perhaps the surest way to obtain a stand of timothy and thereafter a set of blue-grass, is to prepare the land carefully and sow rye in october. on this sow timothy and red clover as above on the snow in february or march; pasture the rye, but not too closely, to th of may. harvest the rye at the usual time, and the yield will be all the better for the pasturing, and sow the blue-grass seed on the stubble in august. . no, but red top will in spite of your best efforts to the contrary unless you till and thoroughly break up the land. john zimmerman, cameron, mo.-- . has setting trees on a fence line as posts for barb-wire been a success? . if so what kind of tree is the best? . will the hardy catalpa do, if so what distance apart? answer.-- . barb-wire has not been introduced and used long enough for trees set for the purpose of posts to grow to a sufficient size. but in many cases aged osage orange hedges, which have been suffered to grow up, have been thinned out so as to leave a tree every ten, twelve, or fifteen feet, and on these barbed-wires have been strung and made a fence, which so far has proved satisfactory. the same success was obtained where fruit and shade trees standing in a line have had barbed-wire attached to them. but the precaution must be taken to nail a strip--a common fence picket will answer--to the tree and then the barb-wire to that. if this is not done, and the wire is fastened by a staple to the tree, the wood soon overgrows, cracks and increases the strain on the wire, damages the tree and spoils the fence. . almost any fast growing tree will do, but hard wood varieties are preferable. . the hardy catalpa may do, but for low land we would just as soon have the common willow. eight feet apart is a good distance. the wires may be fastened to these when they have acquired a diameter of four or five inches, and later every other post may be removed. for high and dry land in your latitude one osage orange is worth a half-dozen catalpas, because it is just as easily grown--and when grown it furnishes the strongest and most lasting timber known. we may add here, that where a fence is wanted across sloughs, or through permanently wet or moist land, posts large enough for barbed-wire may be grown in a couple of years or so--this by cutting stakes six or seven feet long and from three to five inches in diameter from the common willow, and setting them in march. the stakes require attention the first summer, in case of dry weather or drouth, but nothing more than that the moist earth shall be pressed up against them to prevent the young roots from drying out. m. d. vincent, springfield, mo.-- . can you tell me how badly oranges were frosted during the late cold spell in florida? . is there a record of colder weather at charleston, s. c., savannah, ga., if so when was it? answer.-- . it is hard getting at the facts. one report is that neither oranges nor the trees were injured at palatka, fifty miles south of jacksonville, while another just as credible says the fruit was badly frozen on the trees as far south as enterprise, miles south of jacksonville. the probabilities are, that there was a good deal of damage done to fruit on the trees, but no permanent or serious injury to the orchards. . the mercury may not have been lower for years at charleston or savannah than the late cold spell, but during the winter of - the weather was so severe the orange trees were killed to the ground miles south of jacksonville. snow to a foot in depth fell at millidgeville, ga., lat. , and several inches over all northern florida. some apprehensions are felt that these southern sections are not safe from severe frosts for this winter and the next, since it is pretty well known that these extreme cold periods return about every half-century--the winters of near fifty and one hundred years ago having been made remarkable by terribly severe and protracted cold. j. h. j. watertown, wis.--give us the best remedy for chillblains? answer.--tincture of iodine painted over the parts; or grains of salicylic acid extended in an ounce of half water and half alcohol. both to be applied with great caution, and largely diluted where the skin is broken and ulcers have formed. charles c. peters, olney, ill.--if you were about to plant an orchard on levelish, but at the same time naturally well drained land, would you advise throwing up ridges as the common custom is in some sections? answer.--it might be advantageous to throw up ridges so as to secure permanent moisture; but the trees should be set in the depression between them instead of on the ridges. thoroughbred, lexington, ky.--there is a belief or an opinion current among a class of breeders, always ready to accept and experiment with new fangled notions, that the draft breeds imported from abroad, especially the high priced french horses, are fed from birth on a more or less regular ration of bone or flesh meal. this they claim is for the purpose of developing bone and muscle. what do you know of the facts? answer.--not much. some of the foreign journals contain accounts of experiments in feeding soluble phosphates of lime, but no two agree on results, except that when the salt is judicially fed, no harm is done. the subject is worthy of investigation and especially by kentucky breeders, since it would establish the claim that their soil, being especially rich in the phosphates and nitrogen, produces grain, hay, and forage of superior strength for feeding purposes, which appear again, in their high bred stock of horses, sheep, and cattle. * * * * * the fourth national agricultural convention, under the auspices of the american agricultural association, will be held at the grand central hotel, new york city, wednesday and thursday, february th and th, . addresses will be delivered and papers read by leading thinkers and writers on topics of general interest, and all identified with agriculture and kindred pursuits are cordially invited to be present and participate in the proceedings. delegates will be present from all sections of the country, and arrangements for reduced rates of fare are being made with the railroads leading into new york. the annual meeting for the election of officers and the transaction of other business, including the matter of a national agricultural fair, will be held at m. of the first day of the convention. wayside notes. by a man of the prairie. i notice that mr. sanders, of the treasury cattle commission, thinks it beneath the dignity of congress to adopt retaliatory measures against france and germany for prohibiting american pork products from entering those countries. he thinks it a far better scheme to appoint a small army of inspectors to examine all the pork before it is shipped from this country. this might be more dignified, and after a time effectual, but how shall we make france and germany stop shipping their poisoned goods to this country? will they be equally "dignified" and appoint inspectors on their side that will be satisfactory to our people. probably they would after a few months of prohibition; never before. dignity is a good thing, but protection to the health and wealth of the people is better. besides, government inspectors are expensive luxuries, and by no means always efficient. a fat government appointment is a nice thing--for the appointee, as mr. sanders is aware, but it is not profitable to the tax-payers of the country to multiply them too extensively. in my opinion the easiest way out of the muddle is to strike back and to hit where it will hurt worst. * * * * * clinton babbitt, secretary of the wisconsin state agricultural society, is reported to have said at the late meeting of the state dairymen's association that he had a very poor opinion of editors. in fact, that he held them in about the same esteem as ben butler does. now i don't suppose it makes an iota of difference to any editor under the sun what butler or babbitt think of him; what ben and clint need to look out for is what the editors think of them. big ben got an inkling of this a few weeks ago; little clint's turn may come next. * * * * * for some time i have been noticing the advanced style of writing in the two or three "down east" agricultural papers that come under my notice. they bear evidences of "culcha" that are truly encouraging, but here is a case that is actually exhilarating, or would be were it not somewhat bewildering. it is from an article about the jersey lily, mrs. langtry: "who ever vocalized such a word with a more complex intonation, or with a more marvellously intimate union with a more inextricably intertwined relationship to the most exquisite sensibilities that accompany and mark the infinite flights and reachings of the soul, as within its human casement it burns with fire divine?" now, i call that decidedly fine, and were i the owner of a whole herd of jerseys i should endeavor to engage this genius to write them up for me. at any rate i think he should be brought west to help on the jersey boom. * * * * * i sent the editors of the prairie farmer, the other day, from springfield, where i was paying a flying visit to the agricultural rooms, a copy of the reynolds argument for a change in the awarding of sweepstakes prizes on cattle. mr. r. applied it to the fat stock show alone, and i believe the state board adopted the suggestions. but for the life of me i can not see why the principle is not equally applicable to the state fair premiums, and indeed to similar exhibits at all our fairs. next year i hope the state board will extend the innovation to the state fair, and from this it may be it will extend to similar organizations of lesser magnitude. * * * * * i notice that the national academy of sciences have decided that glucose is not injurious to health. well, this is good news, at any rate, but it does not follow that manufacturers and merchants have the right to mix it with cane sugar or sell it to us for genuine cane sirups, or real honey, or pure sugar candy, or in any of the other ways in which we are made to pay two or three times what it is really worth. it does not do away with the great need of a rigorous food adulteration act, though there is great satisfaction in knowing that when we eat it we are not taking in a mild death-dealing potion. but, come to think of it, there are other great scientists in the country besides those composing the national academy. some of them have decided in a contrary manner. is it not best to have the question decided by a majority vote of reputable chemists, and then stick to the good old things, whichever way the decision may be? on principle i don't object to suine, oleo, or any of the objectionable articles. all i want is to know when i am buying, and paying for them in real genuine dollars. bogus dollars are every whit as respectable as bogus butter or bogus honey, though the law makes it a little unhealthy to use them with any degree of liberality. letter from champaign. a light rain yesterday (the th) was the first for five weeks, and the first sign of a january thaw we have had. but it began to snow at dark, continued lightly all night, and has been snowing, blowing, and drifting to-day up to this hour, p. m. coming soft at first, that part of it will lay where it fell, and the uncovered portion of the wheat has got a new blanket, which we hope will out-last january. we have had but one so long uninterrupted spell of sleighing for these many years, and that was in the winter of ' -' . with the exception of the few very cold days before and after the th, the month has been quite favorable for stock and all the labors of the farm. * * * * * the damage done by the cold wave of january th to th is believed to be greater than first reported. growers tell me that snyder blackberries are killed down to the frost line, which proves it is not iron-clad, as some believe. accounts from the cobden fruit region are of the gloomiest character, everything being given up for lost but the strawberries. the fruit-grower says they will have to rely on them and their truck patches this year, and advises an extension of early potatoes, tomatoes, and japan melons. according to local records at anna, there has been nothing like it since the first week in january, ; and the estimate of the damage done in ' is computed from what followed in ' , rather than from what is absolutely known. let us hope that they are mistaken, and that the cobden fruit region will sustain its well-earned character as the source of a perennial fruit supply. * * * * * it appears the cold wave did not reach its minimum in central florida, lat. , till the night of the th, ice having been found on the morning of the th, near enterprise, three-fourths of an inch thick. oranges on the trees were frozen through, and the leaves killed so they will drop. but though here and there a branch may be frosted and will die and have to be removed, little permanent damage to the groves has probably resulted. central florida is distant, as the crow flies, from central illinois, about one thousand miles. suppose the cold wave moved steadily southwest, it follows, then, its rate of speed was not far from miles every twenty-four hours. it is easy to comprehend how a complete signal service might warn of the approach of cold waves in time to take every necessary precaution to meet and disarm them. * * * * * but as much of a stinger as the late cold turn was, it was a mere cool breeze compared with that which fell on florida and the entire southwest in the winter of - . then snow covered all northern florida, and in central georgia it lay on the ground some days, a foot deep. the young orange trees were all killed to the ground, and few of the aged trees escaped without the loss of most of their branches. but they soon recovered--sprouting from the roots and stumps with great vigor, as they will again do after the late freeze. and this is one of the strong points of the orange. it will sprout from the stump or root when the trunk is removed, as surely as the young hickory or chestnut, and when transplanted young and trees of considerable size, will bear mutilation with about as much indifference as the osage orange or soft maple. * * * * * those who expect congress to do anything that will hurt german and french importers, by way of retaliation for prohibiting pork and pork products, will be pretty sure to be disappointed. senator williams is responsible for the statement that the reason why agriculture is treated with so much contempt, is it sustains no lobby. but you may be sure the importers will not fail in that respect, as millions will be spent to prevent legislation which will seriously interfere with the enormous profits of the foreign importing houses in new york. perhaps senator williams will inform us what it will cost to keep up a well appointed lobby in washington, and how much the average one-horse lawyers in congress expect, in money down, in the way of a retainer. huntington could tell, and so could jay gould; but both are silenced for the present, and villard too. * * * * * "put your thumb down there." that the trees on low lands which bore big crops in - , are just the trees which bore crops equally in ' , and the very trees also which have made the most vigorous growth both previously and last year. the whole matter is a question of nutrition. b. f. j. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * [illustration] poultry notes. poultry-raisers, write for your paper. chicken chat. somebody says that "plymouth rock pullets are not always early layers, for they often grow for ten or twelve months before laying, though some lay as early as six months after hatching." well that's news to us, and we have kept plymouth rocks quite a while, too. we have had rock pullets commence laying at six months, and once we had a few that didn't do a thing toward earning their own living till they were almost eight months old; but seven months is nearer the average, and that is what we count on when selecting the pullets that are to be kept for winter layers. the pullets that are hatched from the first of march up to the first of may, commence laying all along from the middle of september to the first of december. pullets that we want to commence laying in february, are selected from those hatched in july. it would really be very gratifying to me if the people who know no more about the plymouth rocks than they do about the fate of charlie ross, would keep their twaddle out of print. * * * * * one of my correspondents is very anxious to know if the langshans are the "coming fowls." hardly. fanciers who have tried them pronounce them the "best birds that were ever imported from china," which is pretty high praise, but all the same they are not popular with farmers. they will never hold the place that the plymouth rocks hold. since you wish to buy fowls of the breeds for which there will be the greatest demand next season, i should advise you get plymouth rocks and wyandottes. these, in addition to the light brahmas and brown leghorns that you already have, will give you the four breeds that are the most popular, and if you have good stock, and let people know that you have eggs to sell for hatching, you will probably have orders for all the eggs that you will care to sell. * * * * * another correspondent wants to know the meaning of the word "strain," as applied to fowls, and i don't wonder that he asks the question, for the word is used "promiscuous like" by every tyro in poultry breeding. when any poultry-raiser has bred fowls of any breed long enough to fix his notion of what constitutes a standard fowl of that breed upon them permanently, he may claim a "strain." for instance: smith believes that the light brahmas should have very short legs, and he breeds for short legs until they are permanently fixed, and everybody who knows anything about light brahmas knows one of smith's short-legged brahmas at sight; then, but not before, smith may claim a strain of his own, and it is proper for others to speak of "smith's strain" of light brahmas. but johnson, who buys of smith, or of some one who has light brahmas of smith's strain, this year, should not next year talk about "my own strain" of light brahmas. it takes years of steady, judicious breeding after a certain type to establish what may truthfully be called a strain, and it can only be done by breeders of rare skill and long experience in mating fowls for breeding. fanny field. chicken houses. i often read inquiries about the best plan for building hen houses. my plan is, for fowls, to build a house for them to roost in, eight or even ten feet wide and sixteen feet long, one story high with tight floor of yellow pine flooring. i prefer a tight floor because it is easily cleaned out, and every time it is cleaned out and swept the floor should be well covered with slaked lime; one cleaning a week is often enough. a building of the same size should be built with a dirt floor, or close one, as preferred, about ten or fifteen feet from the roosting house for the hens to lay and sit in. a petition may be made of laths dividing the house into two compartments, the front arranged for the laying hens and the back compartments for sitting hens; then the laying hens will not disturb the sitting hens. a closed passway should be made, say one and one half or two feet square leading from the roosting house to the laying house with a sliding door at each end to be used at pleasure. as it often happens in cold, snowy weather in winter it is not desirable to let the fowls out, then the slides at each end of the passway can be opened and feed and water placed in the laying house (because the floor in that house will always be cleanest), and all the fowls will soon learn to go in there to eat and drink, and lay if they want to. it is, i think, bad policy to force fowls to roost, lay, and sit all in the same room. the boxes that contain the nests should be made so that they can be at any time taken out and the nests turned out in a pile, set on fire and the boxes held over the fire to kill any lice that may be sticking to them. b. f. c. hike's point, ky. * * * * * a person signing himself a "nobleman's gardener," says in an english paper that it is a mistake to use poultry manure as a top-dressing for garden crops; for farm crops also, if the poultry and pigeon dung were in any considerable bulk. this, however, is not usually the case, and a hundred weight or two would not make much of an impression on a farm. the manure in question is a powerful fertilizer, containing ammonia, phosphates, and carbonate of lime in considerable quantity, also uric acid, all of which are valuable ingredients for the support of crops. the simplest method of preparing the manure for use is to partially dry it, then mix it with perfectly dry sifted soil or ashes in sufficient quantity that will enable the entire mixture to be rubbed through a half-inch sieve. a man can do this comfortably with the hand inclosed in a thick leather glove. in this finely powdered state it can be stored in a dry shed till wanted for use. it is an excellent top-dressing for onions, strawberries, and, in fact, for all vegetable crops that need assistance, also for fruit trees and lawns. it is best applied in showery weather in the spring--for lawns at the rate of two ounces, vegetable crops and strawberries three ounces, and fruit trees four ounces per square yard. if in very large bulk and needed for use in fields it would scarcely be necessary to pulverize it, as mixing it with dry soil, etc., and turning the heap over a few times would suffice for its ready application. * * * * * the strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence. * * * * * miscellaneous. cheapest farms for sale in illinois. best fruit region in the state. send for my list of farms and timbered lands for sale. dewitt c. smith, land agent. stone fort, saline co., illinois. when you write mention the prairie farmer. * * * * * market gardeners, and all others who want the best cabbage, onion, beet, carrot, parsnip, cucumber, tomato, and other seeds, direct from the farm, at the lowest prices, can now get them at wholesale rates. catalogue, with directions for cultivation, free. address joseph harris, moreton farm, rochester, n. y. seeds for the children, per cent discount. if you do not want the catalogue, let the children send for it, and send at once, as this advertisement will not be repeated. when you write mention the prairie farmer. * * * * * blue stem spring wheat!!! the best variety of prairie wheat known. yields largely and is less liable to blight than any other variety. also celebrated judson oats for sale in small lots. samples, statement of yield, and prices sent free upon application to sampson & french. woodstock, pipestone co., minn., or storm lake, ia. when you write mention the prairie farmer. * * * * * europe educational excursions combining unequalled advantages. send for descriptive circular, free. _register early._ e. tourjee, franklin sq., boston. when you write mention the prairie farmer. * * * * * for sale--one-half interest in a thoroughly equipped creamery located in one of the best dairy districts of wis. j. g. snyder & son., mt. hope, wis. when you write mention the prairie farmer. * * * * * cut this out & return to us with ten cts. & you'll get by mail a golden box of goods that will bring you in more money, in one month, than anything else in america. absolute certainty. need no capital. m. young, greenwich st. n. york. * * * * * farm implements. etc. the "new" birdsell clover huller. [illustration: monitor junior] saves all the seed, cleans ready for market as threshed. [illustration: the birdsell combination spring wagon.] besides manufacturing the "new" birdsell clover huller, for which we have the sole right, we make a specialty of half platform and three-spring wagons. send for illustrated catalogue and prices. address birdsell manf'g co. south bend indiana. --> when you write, please mention this paper. <-- * * * * * seed corn for sale. a large quantity of first-class, selected iowa seed corn, in large or small quantities. address _mitchell, vincent._ onawa, iowa. please state you saw ad in this paper. * * * * * [illustration] the standard remington type-writer is acknowledged to be the only rapid and reliable writing machine. it has no rival. these machines are used for transcribing and general correspondence in every part of the globe, doing their work in almost every language. any young man or woman of ordinary ability, having a practical knowledge of the use of this machine may find constant and remunerative employment. all machines and supplies, furnished by us, warranted. satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded. send for circulars. wyckoff, seamans & benedict, east madison st., chicago, ill. * * * * * seeds albert dickinson, dealer in timothy, clover, flax, hungarian, millet, red top, blue grass, lawn grass, orchard grass, bird seeds, &c. pop corn. warehouses { , & kinzie st. { , , & michigan st. office. kinzie st. chicago, ill. * * * * * fay grapes currant headquarters all best new and old. small fruits and trees. low to dealers and planters. stock first-class. free catalogues. geo. s. josselyn, fredonia, n.y. * * * * * --> a chance of a lifetime! this offer holds good until march th only. $ , in presents, given away. no blanks! every subscriber gets a present. the proprietors of the well-known and popular weekly paper, the golden argosy, being desirous of introducing their paper into every home where it is not now taken, have organized a stock company with an authorized capital of $ , for the purpose of pushing the argosy extensively, and have decided to give away to all who subscribe before march , , $ , in presents. read our great offer. for only fifty cents we will enter your name on our subscription books and mail the golden argosy regularly for three months, (thirteen numbers), and immediately send a printed numbered receipt, which will entitle the holder to one of the following magnificent presents. partial list of presents to be given away: cash presents of $ , each $ , cash presents of $ each , cash presents of $ each , cash presents of $ each , cash presents of $ each elegant upright pianos, $ each elegant cabinet organs, $ each sewing machines, $ each gents' solid gold watches, $ ea. ladies' solid gold watches, $ ea. beautiful diamond rings, $ ea.. gents' solid silver watches, $ ea. ladies' chatelaine watches, $ ea. boys' silver watches, $ each waterbury watches, $ . each gents' solid gold chains, $ each ladies' gold neck chains, $ each solid gold bracelets, $ each elegant bicycles, 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something needed in every home, and is well worth five dollars in any family; millions have been sold at one dollar each. being owners and manufacturers we can afford to give , to our subscribers, believing that you will be so well pleased that you will always be patrons of the argosy;--besides all this you have a chance to get one of the most valuable presents offered in our list. the award of presents will positively take place march , ' . the golden argosy is a weekly paper for the father, the mother, the boys, and the girls. it is the most beautiful, useful, entertaining, instructive, and popular weekly published. it has the best corps of first-class authors in the united states, including such as horatio alger jr., edward s. ellis, oliver optic, harry castlemon, frank h. converse, rev. edward everett hale, and a host of others too numerous to mention. it is beautifully illustrated, and its reading matter is all original from the pens of noted authors. its regular subscription 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presents. a few hours' work will give you a subscription free and a chance to win one of the most valuable presents. sample copies free. the golden argosy is a well established weekly paper and is backed by half a million dollars capital, so that every subscriber may be sure of getting just what we promise. list of the awards will be forwarded to all subscribers immediately after mar. th. how to send money. send small sums, from cents to one or two dollars by postal note, cash or stamps; larger sums should be sent by registered mail or post office order. address all orders to the argosy publishing co., warren street, new york. remember, the above presents are given absolutely free to our subscribers. cut this out and show it to your friends, neighbors and acquaintances. --> it will not appear again. <-- agents wanted everywhere. what subscribers say. i cannot speak too highly of the argosy, my boys think they could never do without it. mrs. m. e. axtell, west richfield, ohio. the argosy has been so good this year i must have it another; enclosed is $ . . dan. w. huntington, boston. i like the argosy very much, and think it greatly in advance of the usual style of papers for the young--the boys like it. mrs. agnes s. armstrong. ephraim, utah ter. i have taken a number of papers, but i never had one i like as well as the argosy. to sit before the fire these cold evenings and read it is the best enjoyment i know of. to-night i am reading my old papers over again. w. s. knowlton, portland, me. i should take the argosy another year if i had to sit up nights to earn the money to pay for it: enclosed is $ . . ed. l. pemberton, ansonia, conn. i am so deeply interested in the argosy i should be lost without it; please extend my subscription another year. winnie s. moore, audubon, ia. i have been a reader of the argosy the last year, and cannot now do without it, let it cost what it will. d. e. brothwell, wakefield, kan. the argosy is the very best paper of the kind published. i would not do without it for twice $ . . frank g. johnson, painesville, o. i prize the argosy above all youth's papers. its high moral tone and instructive reading is sure to leave a lasting impression with its readers. mrs. ida austin, fort halleck, wy. the character of the argosy commends itself to all. wm s. clark, washington, d. c. i have read the _golden days_, _youth's companion_, and _wide-awake_, for boys and girls, but give me the argosy; i would not give it for any other paper i ever saw. a. b. willis, brooklyn, ill. notices from the press. the golden argosy is handsomely printed on tinted paper, and is freighted with reading matter that can be safely placed in the hands of our youth.--_herald_, norristown, pa. it is sparkling and pure, interesting and high-toned. the best authors in america contribute to its columns.--_journal_, lewistown, me. parents and guardians who would place fascinating as well as instructive, reading before their children, would do well to subscribe to it.--_church union_, n. y. the golden argosy has eclipsed, in every respect, its older but less enterprising contemporaries.--_daily transcript_, peoria, ill. full of life and vim, it commends itself to those desiring to be entertained and instructed. the illustrations are superb. we commend it to the reading public.--_vanity fair_, san francisco, cal. it has taken a leading place among the best papers of its class. the publisher evidently understands boys' tastes.--_times_, indianapolis, ind. the golden argosy is a bright, sparkling paper for boys and girls; neither sensational on the one hand nor dull on the other.--_press_, philadelphia, pa. the golden argosy is a youths' paper, and contains more interesting reading matter than any other similar publication in the country.--_telegraph_, dubuque, iowa. it is a first-class paper, fully equalling the _youth's companion_, and, being once introduced into the home, will be sure to remain.--_herald_, camden, me. the golden argosy is as far removed from the prosy inanity of sunday-school literature as it is from the demoralizing sensationalism of the half-dime dreadfuls.--_n. y. world._ the golden argosy is not only beautiful in appearance, but every way commendable in the character of its contents. it is one of the few papers for young people that judicious fathers and mothers care to put in the hands of their children.--_detroit free press._ * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * forestry. henry stuart writes the new york times: a wise and careful system of agriculture might have left our fields still fertile and productive, so an economical use of the forests might have made them a perennial source of wealth. fortunately the injury is not beyond a remedy, for it is easier to restore a growth of timber than it is to bring back fertility to a barren soil. it is easy to care for what is left and to replant and renew the growth, and even to do this better and more quickly and with more and quicker profit than nature has done it. it is easy, too, by a wise and practical use of the forests that are left, to so husband them as to take regular harvests from them as the farmer regularly harvests his fields or selects the fatlings from his flocks. he does not gather in all these at one fell swoop, taking the fat and the lean and the young and the old, as the fisherman gathers all into his nets, and as the lumberman has felled the woods, but he selects those that are ripe and carefully rears the rest until they are ready. had the timber been culled in this way from the forests year by year there would have been a periodical harvest, and as the mature trees were cut out a new growth would spring up. but, on the contrary, as in the old fable, the goose has been killed for its golden eggs, and the source of a lasting profit has been recklessly sacrificed. fortunately the land is left, and can be put to its proper use as soon as it can be controlled. and still fortunately, by a wise administration, the forests may be made a profitable source of public income, instead of, as heretofore, the prey of the spoilers. it is useless to complain of past mistakes. they have been, as we have pointed out, mere incidents of our system, and possibly unavoidable. but the time has come when the system must be changed, and the necessity for a change has become so apparent that it can not be long delayed. it is not only the commerce of the country that must suffer by a continuance of the system, but agriculture suffers still more; and it is not only the public who will gain by a change, but the example will be followed by the farmers, who will doubtless soon learn to take care of their own timber lands and plant more, and so the benefit will be general. besides, the farmers will not be long in discovering the profit in growing timber, and would plant groves as one of the most profitable crops that could be grown upon their rougher lands, or as a resting and restorative crop for their worn soil. * * * * * before the new york academy of science a few days ago, professor albert r. leeds gave some "facts gathered from eight years of personal inspection as to the alleged destruction of the adirondack forests." he said that a rapid course of spoilation was going on in the outskirts of the forest, and the effect of it would soon be felt in the flow of the hudson. the impression that the adirondacks were pine-producing was a false one. pine trees were seldom seen and the mountains were covered with spruce and hemlock. but the spruces, owing to a disease which attacked them a few years ago, are rapidly dying off. on the ausable river and along the shores of lake champlain the destruction of the forest is especially great. persons living about the forest start fires in the woodland which spread rapidly and are more destructive to the trees than the lumbermen. professor leeds thought that the railways which are making their way through the forests would be an important element in their destruction, for the sparks of the locomotives would originate forest fires. he said that the purchase of the forests by the state might not require so great an expenditure of money as was anticipated. * * * * * in closing an article on "forestry and farming," the germantown telegraph maintains that the idea that farmers and land-owners generally entertain that they may not live to enjoy the advantages of the tree-planting, should be utterly banished from their minds. it will require only about twenty years to realize the most liberal hopes of success; at least it will add to the value of the farm by the fact that the amount of timber is to be increased instead of diminished. we all know how anxious every purchaser of a tract of land is to know whether there is any and how much timber upon a farm offered for sale. in fact, there is no greater mistake made than to cut down the wood upon a farm when purchased, with a view to meet the second payment; and this mistake is invariably brought home to everyone in a few years. it is like taking the life-blood out of the land. scientific. official weather wisdom. almost from its invention the barometer has been vaunted an indicator of impending weather, and now we are in possession of numberless rules for interpreting its indications, mostly of a vague and indefinite purport, few, if any, pretending to accuracy and certainty. as mankind are always desirous of attaining weather wisdom, these rules have tended to give the barometer its widely recognized reputation, rather than any really infallible principles, clearly formulated. with no other philosophical instrument have people so deluded themselves as with the barometer. meteorology having become almost an official monopoly, the officials seem to have made the readiest and largest amount of reputation out of the barometer as a weather glass; for all that they have had to do is to compile rules from a number of authors, without any necessity of acknowledgment, print as much as they please at the government expense, give it away freely, and the notoriety of authorship is secured easily and expeditiously. thus the british nation has been officially supplied with about eighteen different editions of the barometer manual, widely differing from each other according to the views of the authors; for although the book remains the self-styled authors change, much the same as with the cambridge books on mathematics. a study of the edition, "coast or fishery barometer manual," teaches that the barometer foretells coming weather; that it does not always foretell coming weather; that only few are able to understand much about what it does tell us; that it may be used by ordinary persons without difficulty; that its indications are sometimes erroneous: that any one observing it once a day may be always weatherwise; that its warnings do not apply always to the locality of the instrument; that storms frequently occur without its giving any warning; that barometer depressions happen with and without gales; and similar ambiguous or contradictory assertions ad nauseam. it is perfectly astounding to contemplate that official authority sanctions such inconsistent teaching, and moreover disseminates it far and wide, forcing its circulation by giving it away gratuitously on humane and eleemosynary grounds. where only such confusing advice and direction can be given is it becoming to stamp it as official? it is lamentable inconsiderateness to expect fishermen to be able to dodge the weather by such guidance; and it is time to stop this easily concocted nostrum for notoriety; for it is vague and inconclusive in every precept, and has scarcely an assertion which is not contradicted by some other.--_engineering._ a remarkable electrical discovery. the london times of recent date states that a new electrical contrivance has been perfected by mr. a. st. george, the inventor of the telephone which bears his name. this invention, which is really supplemental to the telephone, will enable every description of conversation carried on through the instrument to be not only recorded but reproduced at any future time. briefly stated, mr. st. george's invention may be thus described: a circular plate of glass is coated with collodion and made sensitive as a photographic plate. this is placed in a dark box, in which is a slit to admit a ray of light. in front of the glass is a telephone diaphragm, which, by its vibrations, opens and closes a small shutter through which a beam of light is constantly passing and imprinting a dark line on the glass. vibrations of the shutter cause the dark line to vary in thickness according to the tones of the voice. the glass plate is revolved by clock work, and the conversation as it leaves the telephone is recorded on the sensitive plate, the imprinted words spoken being fixed as is done in photography. the plate can be brought forward afterwards, and when replaced in the machine and connected with a distant telephone, will, when set in motion, give back the original conversation. * * * * * on october , , a gentleman in newburgh, n. y., inclosed a spider in a small paper box. he carefully guarded and watched it, and affirms that for days it partook of no food or water. it showed no emaciation, and appeared as active and strong as at first until within a very few days of its death on may , . tamerlane learned patience from a spider; perhaps tanner was taught by them how to fast. the hour, from which we take this item, also has the following: another spider story is sent from california by the rev. dr. mccook, of honey-ant fame. he found a small cocoon of eggs and young spiders, which had no less than five other kinds of insects living in and about it. these intruders consisted of small red ants, a diminutive beetle, and a series formed by a minute chalcid, parasitic on a larger chalcid, which was parasitic on an ichneumon, which was parasitic on the spider. all were seeking to devour the eggs and spiderlings, yet the whole cocoonful, victims included, seemed to be living on most amicable terms. * * * * * various methods for hastening the conversion of cider into vinegar have been recommended. a french method is as follows: scald three barrels or casks with hot water, rinse thoroughly and empty. then scald with boiling vinegar, rolling the barrels and allowing them to stand on their sides two or three days until they become thoroughly saturated with the vinegar. the barrels are then filled about one-third full with strong pure cider vinegar and two gallons of cider added. every eighth day thereafter two gallons of cider are added until the barrels are two-thirds full. the whole is allowed to stand fourteen days longer, when it will be found to be good vinegar, and one-half of it may be drawn and the process of filling with cider be begun again. in summer the barrels are allowed to stand exposed to the sun and in cold weather kept where the temperature is degrees. * * * * * a party of the united states geological survey have found it practicable to ride to the highest peak of mount shasta, and suggest the establishment there of a third elevated station for weather observations, similar to those on pike's peak and mount washington. * * * * * a herring produces from , to , eggs, and the eggs are so small in size that , can be put one layer thick on a square foot of glass. * * * * * coughs and hoarseness.--the irritation which induces coughing immediately relieved by use of "_brown's bronchial troches_." sold only in boxes. * * * * * miscellaneous. to our readers. the prairie farmer is the oldest, most reliable, and the leading agricultural journal of the great northwest, devoted exclusively to the interests of the farmer, gardener, florist, stock breeder, dairyman, etc., and every species of industry connected with that great portion of the people of the world, the producers. now in the forty-fourth year of its existence, and never, during more than two score years, having missed the regular visit to its patrons, it will continue to maintain supremacy as a standard authority on matters pertaining to agriculture and kindred productive industries, and as a fresh and readable family and fireside journal. it will from time to time add new features of interest, securing for each department the ablest writers of practical experience. the prairie farmer will discuss, without fear or favor, all topics of interest properly belonging to a farm and fireside paper, treat of the most approved practices in agriculture, horticulture, breeding, etc.; the varied machinery, implements, and improvements in same, for use both in field and house; and, in fact, everything of interest to the agricultural community, whether in field, market, or home circle. it will give information upon the public domain, western soils, climate, etc.; answer inquiries on all manner of subjects which come within its sphere; give each week, full and reliable market, crop, and weather reports; present the family with choice and interesting literature; amuse and instruct the young folks; and, in a word, aim to be, in every respect, an indispensable and unexceptionable farm and fireside companion. terms of subscription and 'club rates': one copy, year, postage paid $ . two copies, " " " . five " " sent at one time . ten " " sent at one time, and one to club getter . twenty " " sent at one time, and one to club getter . address the prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. ill. * * * * * standard books. ropp's calculator and diary. practical arithmetic made easy, simple, and convenient for all, by this unique and wonderful work. is worth its weight in gold to everyone not quick in figures. contains nearly , business calculations, simple and practicable rules and original methods--the cream of this great and useful science--which makes it possible and easy for any one, even a child, to make correct and instantaneous computations in grain, stock, hay, coal, cotton, merchandise. interest, percentage, profit and loss, wages, measurement of lumber, logs, cisterns, tanks, granaries, wagon-beds, corn-cribs, cordwood, hay-stacks, lands, carpenters', plasterers', and masons' work, besides thousands of other practical problems which come up every day in the year. will prove of great benefit, almost a necessity, in the hands of every farmer, mechanic, and tradesman. it is neatly printed, elegantly bound, accompanied by a renewable diary, silicate slate, perpetual calendar, and valuable pocket-book, all combined, for the price of a common diary. fine english cloth $ . fine english cloth, with flap . fine roan leather, with flap . sent postpaid to any address on receipt of price. address prairie farmer pub. co., chicago ill. * * * * * how to paint a new work by a practical painter, designed for the use of tradesmen, mechanics, merchants, farmers, and as a guide to professional painters. containing a plain, common-sense statement of the methods employed by painters to produce satisfactory results in plain and fancy painting of every description, including formulas for mixing paint in oil or water, tools required, etc. this is just the book needed by any person having anything to paint and makes "every man his own painter." full directions for using white lead lamp black--ivory black-- prussian blue--ultramarine--green--yellow--brown--vermillion-- lake--carmine--whiting--glue--asphaltum--pumice stone, and spirits of turpentine--oils--varnishes--furniture varnish--milk paint--preparing calcimine. paint for outbuildings --whitewash--paste for paper hanging--hanging paper--graining in oak, maple, mahogany, rosewood, black walnut--staining--gilding-- bronzing--transferring--decalcomania--making rustic pictures-- painting flower-stand--mahogany polish--rosewood polish-- varnishing furniture--waxing furniture--cleaning paint-- paint for farming tools for machinery, and for household fixtures to paint a farm wagon --to re-varnish a carriage--to make plaster casts. the work is neatly printed, with illustrations wherever they can serve to make the subject plainer, and it will save many times its cost yearly. every family should possess a copy. price, by mail, postpaid, $ . forwarded free to any sender of two subscribers to this paper at $ each. address prairie farmer publishing co. chicago. * * * * * standard works. by peter henderson gardening for profit, a well-known work on market and family gardening gardening for pleasure a guide to the amateur in the fruit, vegetable, and flower garden, with full directions for the green-house, conservatory, and window garden. practical floriculture, a guide to successful propagation and cultivation of florists' plants. price, $ . each, by mail, postpaid. address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. * * * * * talks on manures by joseph harris, m. s. author of "_walks and talks on the farm_," "_farm crops_," "_harris on the pig_," _etc._ while we have no lack of treatises upon artificial fertilizers, there is no work in which the main stay of the farm--the manure made upon the farm is treated so satisfactorily or thoroughly as in this volume. starting with the question, "what is manure?" the author, well known on both sides of the water by his writings, runs through in sufficient detail every source of manure on the farm, discussing the methods of making rich manure; the proper keeping and applying it, and especially the uses of manure, and the effects of different artificial fertilizers, as compared with farm-yard manure, upon different crops. in this he makes free use of the striking series of experiments instituted years ago, and still continued, by lawes and gilbert, of rothamsted, england. the remarkable tables in which the results of these experiments are given, are here for the first time made accessible to the american farmer. in fact, there is scarcely any point relating to fertilizing the soil, including suitable manures for special crops, that is not treated, and while the teachings are founded upon the most elaborate scientific researches, they are so far divested of the technical language of science as to commend themselves to farmers as eminently "practical." it is not often that the results of scientific investigations are presented in a manner so thoroughly popular. mo. price, postpaid, $ . . prairie farmer publishing co. chicago. * * * * * house plans for everybody. by s. b. reed, architect. one of the most popular architectural books ever issued, giving a wide range of design from a dwelling costing $ up to $ , , and adapted to farm, village, and town residences. it gives an estimate of the quantity of every article used in the construction, and probable cost of constructing any one of the buildings presented. profusely illustrated. price, postpaid, $ . . address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago * * * * * now is the time to subscribe for the prairie farmer. price only $ . per year is worth double the money. * * * * * [illustration] household. for nothing lovelier can be found in woman than to study _household_ good.--_milton._ christian charity. o stay not thine hand when the winter's wind rude blows cold through the dwellings of want and despair, to ask if misfortune has come to the good, or if folly has wrought the sad wreck that is there. when the savior of men raised his finger to heal, did he ask if the sufferer was gentile or jew? when thousands were fed with a bountiful meal, was it given alone to the faithful and true? if the heart-stricken wanderer asks thee for bread, in suffering he bows to necessity's laws; when the wife moans in sickness, the children unfed, the cup must be bitter, o ask not the cause. then scan not too closely the frailties of those whose bosoms may bless on a cold winter's day: and give to the wretched who tells thee his woes, and from him that would borrow, o turn not away! --_dr. reynell coates._ * * * * * a correspondent writes: will give the readers of the prairie farmer the favor of telling us all about making sandwiches. how thick should they be when complete? best made of bread or biscuit? and if chicken or ham, how prepared? please don't say shred the meat and sprinkle in salt, pepper, and mustard, but tell us how to shred the meat. do you chop it, and how fine? and how much seasoning to a given quantity? or do cooks always guess at it? mrs. c. h. --will not some of our lady readers tell us how they make sandwiches. the question is an important one for city as well as country, where so many thousands of "lunches" have to be prepared daily.--[ed. * * * * * a correspondent writes the lady readers of the prairie farmer concerning a new line of work, which we hope many of them may find profitable: much has been written regarding proper and remunerative employment for women. silk culture, poultry raising, and various other themes have been thoroughly ventilated, and the result has no doubt been very beneficial; but there are many ladies who have no opportunity to raise silk worms, or follow any business of that kind. to that class i wish to open what to me was an entirely new field. some three months ago an uncle of mine from albany, n. y., was visiting at our house, and we were talking of plated ware, which he is engaged in manufacturing, and to gratify my curiosity he made a plating machine and replated our knives, forks, spoons and caster. it only cost $ , and it did the work perfectly. some of our neighbors saw what we had plated, and wanted me to do some plating for them. since then i have worked twenty-two days, clearing in that time $ . . at almost every house i got from $ to $ worth of plating to do, and such work is most all profit. this business is as nice for ladies as it is for gentlemen, being all indoor work, and any one can do it. my brother, although he worked two days longer than i did, only made $ . . i am getting up a collection of curiosities, and to any of your readers that will send me a specimen i will send them full directions for making and using a plating machine like mine that will plate gold, silver and nickel. send small pieces of stones, ores, shells, wood, leaves of trees, plants, etc. anything small will do. what i want to get is as many different specimens from as many different places all over the country as i can. address miss m. f. cassey. oberlin, ohio. the night cap. in a late letter to the august constitution jas. r. randall discourses thus pleasantly of the efficiency of the night cap in producing sleep: about o'clock at night we boarded the sleeping coach for washington. just before retiring for the night my mind, somehow or other, reverted to an editorial article recently published in the new york times, half serious, half earnest, concerning the latest theory of an english physician as to the prepotent cause of insomnia and nervous disorders generally. it may be remembered that to the abandonment of the night cap of our grandfathers (the cotton or flannel article, not the alcoholic) was attributed the modern tendency of sleeplessness that make even a philosopher like herbert spencer more or less of a crank. what i wanted, and wanted as the fellow did his pistol in texas, was first-class slumber, just such unmitigated repose as occasionally comes to a highly organized baby, unvexed by colic or pure cussedness. i began to think that perhaps that british doctor was right, and that, if it were possible, i would return to the neglected custom of my ancestors. just at that moment i plunged my hand into my coat pocket and pulled out a silk smoking-cap--a pretty thing, wrought for me long ago by the dainty, delicate, deft fingers of one who now rests in the graveyard at augusta. this cap was the very thing. i placed it reverently upon my head, with an act of faith, and lay down. the result was magical. never since i was a boy can i remember to have experienced so perfect and delicious a repose. not a dream rippled the surface of my calm brain, and i awakened hours afterward with a sense of satisfaction that must be a foretaste of heaven itself. an incipient headache had vanished. powers of mind that had been dulled were restored to animation and keenness. not a trace of irascibility remained; but in its place came trooping the sweet angels that father faber says continually hover over the good-humored man. i declare that the metamorphosis was so complete that i almost needed an introduction to my new self. and this prodigy was created by one grand, complete and unusual slumber, when wearing a nightcap! subsequent experiments have been relatively successful; so i am getting to be an enthusiast on the subject. some folks say that it is a delusion, a mere freak of the imagination. be it so. if a nightcap can extinguish my imagination at bed-time, thank god for the discovery! my good old mother tells me that when i was a little fellow she used to tie a nightcap under my chin, and that i was a famous sleeper in those times. she is a firm believer in the efficacy. likely enough if a man eats pickled pig's feet at midnight or drinks unlimited whisky, even a silk or cotton nightcap may not consign him to the arms of morpheus; but it may work wonders for a sober person who is cursed with the pestilent habit of conjuring up all manner or odd fancies when his head touches the pillow, instead of dismissing the workmen who hammer on the forges of the brain. the majority of the men will rather suffer nocturnal horrors than be laughed at for wearing nightcaps; just as the majority of women will prefer to wear shoes that are instruments of disease and torture rather than have their feet shod comfortably and sensibly. i have a clear idea as to which is the course of wisdom and which the alternative of folly. but this is a diversion which you, readers, may smile at or not as the whim seizes you. how to treat a boy. get hold of the boy's heart. yonder locomotive comes like a whirlwind down the track, and a regiment of armed men might seek to arrest it in vain. it would crush them, and plunge unheeding on. but there is a little lever in the mechanism that at the pressure of a man's hand will slacken its speed, and in a moment bring it panting and still, like a whipped spaniel, at your feet. by the same little lever the vast steamer is guided hither and yonder upon the sea, in spite of the adverse winds or current. that sensitive and responsive spot by which a boy's life is controlled is his heart. with your grasp gently and firmly on that helm, you may pilot him whither you will. never doubt that he has a heart. bad and willful boys very often have the tenderest hearts hidden somewhere beneath incrustations of sin or behind barricades of pride. and it is your business to get at that heart, keep hold of it by sympathy, confiding in him, manifestly working only for his good by little indirect kindnesses to his mother or sister, or even his pet dog. see him at his home, or invite him into yours. provide him some little pleasures, set him at some little service of trust for you; love him; love him practically. anyway and every way rule him through his heart. * * * * * "etiquette now admits of a second plate of soup." that is all right, but if a man's appetite will not admit of a second plate of soup, etiquette is nothing to him. and if he has the appetite, he will have the soup, etiquette or no etiquette. * * * * * rand, avery, & co., boston, announce a new story--a thrilling and powerful tale--involving the pregnant question of mormonism. the book will be amply illustrated and sold by subscription. the publishers say that in their opinion this book will serve a purpose not unlike uncle tom's cabin (of which, by the way, four hundred thousand copies--eight hundred thousand volumes--were issued in this country, every one of which bore their imprint). it will hasten the day for the uprising of an indignant nation, and their verdict will be as in the case of slavery--this disgrace must cease--the mormon must go! pamphlets, etc., received. honey, as food and medicine. presented by j. l. harris, w. lake st., chicago. this little work contains many valuable recipes showing how honey can be made useful medicinally and as an appetizer. for housekeepers in the country who have bees it will be found especially useful. spring catalogue and price list of the eclectic small fruit nursery. o. b. galusha, morris, ill. new state fair grounds: statement by the executive committee, together with the rejoinder of the ohio state board of agriculture to the franklin county society's reply. this pamphlet will be interesting to the farmers of that state. landreth's companion for the garden and farm, philadelphia, pa. price cents. this book is, as usual, handsomely gotten up, and is truly a "companion." the prettily colored cover is but an index to the many colored pages within. it also contains many interesting plates showing the manner and extent of work carried on by this enterprising firm. the book is replete with valuable information. supplemental report of the department of agriculture of georgia, for the year , circular no. , new series. shows the yield of the leading crops of the state as compared with ; the average yield per acre, and other matters of interest to the farmers of georgia. descriptive catalogue of c. a. hiles & co.'s saws and ice tools, south water street, chicago. descriptive catalogue and price list of h. f. dernell & co.'s ice tools, athens, n. y. a. e. spaulding's annual descriptive catalogue and price list of flower seeds, plants, and tools, ainsworth, iowa. report no. of the department of agriculture, division and statistics, december, , washington. this report is full of very useful statistical information. foreign press opinions of madame marcella sembrich in mr. henry e. abbey's grand italian opera company. these opinions are very flattering, and if true, the madame deserves to be well patronized. chicago medical times, edited by w. h. davis, m.d. $ . per annum, cents a single copy. special report no. of the department of agriculture, miscellaneous, washington. this report is given up to the discussion of mississippi, its climate, soil, productions, and agricultural capabilities. by a. b. hurt, special agent. the american naturalist for january contains the usual number of well-written articles, and is finely illustrated. this magazine is devoted to the natural sciences in the broadest sense of that term. the silver dollar: the original standard of payment of the united states of america, and its enemies. by henry carey baird, philadelphia, pa., walnut street. the twenty-first and twenty-second quarterly report of the pennsylvania board of agriculture, . harrisburg, pa. the storrs & harrison co.'s catalogue (no. ) for . painesville, ohio. this catalogue is fully illustrated with cuts of flowers and vegetables of almost every known description, so that the purchaser can see just what he is buying before sending order. ohio crop report, december, . with analyses and valuations of fertilizers, meteorological reports, etc. compiled correspondence. kane co., ill., jan. .--cold weather continues. on eight days of this month the thermometer has been below zero. it has been above the freezing point only on one morning, the th. sleighing is good, except on some of the graveled roads. cattle are in good condition. the horse distemper prevails in some localities among colts. hay is plenty. a few fat hogs were sold last week. one farmer, in kaneville, sold hogs, averaging pounds each, at $ . per cwt. there are but very few fat hogs left. the cold, dry weather has improved the condition of corn in the cribs. coarse feed is scarce. considerable corn has been shipped here from kansas. bran and middlings are coming in from minneapolis, and sell at $ and and $ per ton. cheese factory dividends for november from $ . to $ . per cwt. large quantities of milk are daily shipped into chicago from this county. j. p. b. * * * * * i see that you request items in regard to the cold wave that swept over our country during the first week in this month. there is no doubt the cold was as intense over the country generally as it has been known for many years, or perhaps ever before, but so far as i can learn the damage to fruit trees, etc., is very slight. on the morning of the th of december we had our first snow, but the weather was quite pleasant to the end of the year, with occasionally slight freezing, but thermometer never down to zero. the result of this favorable weather was the thorough ripening up of the wood of all fruit and ornamental trees, so that when on the th of the present month the mercury ran down to degrees below zero, and in some parts of the country far below that even, the damage was very slight. the writer has been extensively engaged in cutting scions, and knows whereof he speaks. i have also examined some peach trees and find the wood slightly discolored but not dead. i did not thoroughly examine the fruit buds of the peach, but suppose, of course, they are all killed. had this intense cold weather occurred early in december, there is no doubt but the damage would have been immense. there has been a great loss of potatoes in cellars and pits, as most people had worked themselves into the belief that we were to have a mild winter, and had not prepared their cellars to resist cold at the rate of degrees below zero. the result is that thousands of bushels of potatoes are frozen and ruined, and although the largest crop of potatoes was raised last year that ever was raised in the united states, yet potatoes will be high priced before planting time. h. a. terry. crescent city, ia., jan. . seed corn famine. probably nineteen farmers in twenty must buy seed corn for next spring's planting, on account of the failure of the ' crop to ripen. we must look sharp to the seeds we buy, that they are better than our own, as many unreliable parties will offer inferior stocks, to take advantage of the demand. we suggest that every corn grower should send to hiram sibley & co., the reliable seedsmen at rochester, n. y., and chicago, ill., for their catalogue and seed-corn circulars. this house makes a specialty of seed-corn and we believe that they will do what they say they will. * * * * * maps. rand, mcnally & co.'s new railroad --and-- county map --of the-- united states --and-- dominion of canada. size, Ã� - / feet, mounted on rollers to hang on the wall. this is an entirely new map, constructed from the most recent and authentic sources. --it shows-- _all the railroads,_ --and-- every county and principal town --in the-- united states and canada. a useful map in every one's home, and place of business. price, $ . . agents wanted, to whom liberal inducements will be given. address rand, mcnally & co., chicago, ill. by arrangements with the publishers of this map we are enabled to make the following liberal offer: to each person who will remit us $ . we will send copy of the prairie farmer one year and this map postpaid. address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago, ill. * * * * * miscellaneous. to preserve the health use the magneton appliance co.'s magnetic lung protector! price only $ . they are priceless to ladies, gentlemen, and children with weak lungs; no case of pneumonia or croup is ever known where these garments are worn. they also prevent and cure heart difficulties, colds, rheumatism, neuralgia, throat troubles, diphtheria, catarrh, and all kindred diseases. will wear any service for three years. are worn over the under-clothing. catarrh, it is needless to describe the symptoms of this nauseous disease that is sapping the life and strength of only too many of the fairest and best of both sexes. labor, study, and research in america, europe, and eastern lands, have resulted in the magnetic lung protector, affording cure for catarrh, a remedy which contains no drugging of the system, and with the continuous stream of magnetism permeating through the afflicted organs; must restore them to a healthy action. we place our price for this appliance at less than one-twentieth of the price asked by others for remedies upon which you take all the chances, and we especially invite the patronage of the many persons who have tried drugging the stomachs without effect. how to obtain this appliance. go to your druggist and ask for them. if they have not got them, write to the proprietors, enclosing the price, in letter at our risk, and they will be sent to you at once by mail, post paid. send stamp for the "new departure in medical treatment without medicine," with thousands of testimonials, the magneton appliance co., state street, chicago, ill. note.--send one dollar in postage stamps or currency (in letter at our risk) with size of shoe usually worn, and try a pair of our magnetic insoles, and be convinced of the power residing in our magnetic appliances. positively _no cold feet where they are worn, or money refunded._ [illustration] our young folks jule fisher's rescue. it had been an unusually severe winter, even for northern aroostook. snow-fall had succeeded snow-fall, with no interval that could really be called "thaw," till the "loggers" had finished their work; and as they come plodding home on snow shoes, they all agreed that the snow lay from ten to twelve feet deep on a level in the woods. no wonder, then, that the warm march sun came to shine upon it day after day, and the copious spring showers fell, there should have been a very unusual "flood," or freshet. every one predicted that when the ice should break in the river, there would be a grand spectacle, and danger, too, as well; and all waited with some anxiety for the "break" to come. one morning, we at the village were awakened by a deep, roaring, booming, crashing noise, and sprang from our beds, crying: "the ice has broken up! the ice is running out!" in hardly more time than it takes to tell it, we were dressed and at the back windows, which looked down upon the river! it was indeed a grand sight! huge cakes of ice of every shape and size were driving, tumbling, crashing past, as if in a mad race with each other. the river, filled to overflowing, seemed in angry haste to hurl its icy burden down the falls below. but after a few days the river ran clear, save for the occasional breaking of some "jam" above. along the margin of the broad stream, however, there were here and there slight indentures, or notches, in the banks, where the ice had escaped the mad rush of waters and still clung in considerable patches. it was upon one of these still undisturbed patches that "jule" fisher, a rough boy of fourteen, with several of his equally rough comrades, was playing on the lovely morning upon which my story opens. these lads were not the sons of the steady, intelligent, church-going inhabitants of this quiet northern hamlet, but were from the families of "lumbermen," "river-drivers" and "shingle-shavers." for some time they had been having boisterous sport, venturing out upon the extreme edges of the ice and with long poles pushing about the stray cakes which occasionally came within their reach. at length they grew tired of this, and began to jump upon ticklish points of ice; and as these began to crack and show signs of breaking away, the boys would run, with wild whoops, back to shore, the very danger seeming to add to their enjoyment. then, with poles and "prys," they would work upon the cracking mass until it floated clear and went whirling down the rapid current. "ahoy, boys!" called jule, who was seemingly their leader. "up yender's a big cake that only wants a shove! come on! let's set 'er a-going!" no sooner said than done. away went the noisy fellows to the projecting point of ice. a few smart jumps sent it creaking and groaning, as though still unwilling to quit its snug winter bed. one more jump, and the boys all ran with a shout beyond the place where the ice was cracking off--all save jule. it had not broken clear, and he was determined to set it going, when he would spring on the firm ice beyond, as he had done once or twice before. but this time he was over-bold and not sufficiently watchful. a large cake of ice had come floating down the river unnoticed either by him or his friends, and striking the edge of the nearly loosened mass, shoved it out into the swift, black water. poor jule! he ran quickly to the freshly-broken edge--but, alas! too late for the intended spring. the swiftly-rushing current had borne him many yards from the shore and from his companions. there he stood--for an instant in dumb amaze--balancing himself upon his rocking raft with the pole he had been using. to attempt to swim ashore would have been useless. he was a clumsy swimmer at best; and the cold, rushing waters and floating ice cakes made swimming almost impossible. he could not get off. to stay seemed sure death. dumb with fright, for a moment he stood in speechless terror. then there rang across the wild, black river and through the quiet streets of the village, such a yell of abject fear as only a lusty lad of that age can give. it was a cry that chilled the heart of every one who heard it. a "four-days' meeting" was in session. the village church-goers were just issuing from their houses in answer to the church bell, when that pitiful cry and the shouts of "help! help! a boy in the stream!" reached them, and drew them all quickly to the river bank. in a few minutes the shore was lined with excited men and women. yet all stood helplessly staring, while poor jule on his ice-raft was floating steadily down toward the falls. never shall i forget how he looked as he stood there in the middle of his floating white throne! there was something almost heroic in his calm helplessness. for after the first wild cry, he had not once opened his lips. downward he floated, drawn swiftly and surely on by the deep, mighty rush of waters setting into the throat of the cataract. the heavy roar from far below sounded like the luckless lad's knell. he stood but a single chance--and that was hardly a chance--of his ice-raft lodging against a tilted-up "jam" of cakes and logs which had piled against a jagged ledge that rose in mid-stream, just above the brink of the precipice. this "jam" had hung there, wavering in the flood, for thirty-six hours. every moment it seemed about to go off--yet still it clung, in tremor, as it seemed, at the fatal plunge which would dash it to pieces in the thundering maelstrom below. good fortune--providence, perhaps--so guided jule's ice-raft that it struck and lodged against the "jam," just as the horrified watchers on shore expected to lose sight of the lad forever in the falls. "if it will only hang there!" muttered scores, scarcely daring as yet to speak a loud word. they could see the cake, with jule on it, heaving up and down with the mighty rhythmic motion of the surging torrent; and all ran along down the banks, to come nearer. the boy stood in the very jaws of death. beneath, the cataract roared and hurled up white gusts of spray. just at this moment, a short, thick-set man, with a round, good-natured face, joined the crowd. for a moment he stood looking out at the lad, then slapping another young man on the shoulder, said, hurriedly, "isn't there an old bateau stowed away in your shed, lanse?" "yes," was the reply. "quick, then!" exclaimed the first speaker. "there isn't a moment to lose." "but, mac," answered lanse, as he hurried after him. "i'm afraid she's no good; she's old and she's been stowed away all winter. ten to one the old thing leaks like a riddlin' sieve. "but we mustn't lose a chance!" exclaimed mac. "that jam will go out within half an hour, if it doesn't within ten minutes!" by this time the two had reached the shed. they quickly drew the bateau from its wintering place, and taking the long, light boat upon their shoulders, ran rapidly through the village and down to the river. meantime, two or three other men had run to fetch "dog warps" and "towing-lines," a large number of which are always kept in these backwoods lumbering hamlets, for use on the rivers and lakes, when logs are rafted out in the spring. acting under mac's prompt orders, a six-hundred foot warp was at once made fast to a ring in the stern of a bateau, and another line laid ready to bend to the first. jumping into the bateau, paddle in hand, and a boat-hook laid ready for instant use, the bold young fellow now ordered the men to shove off the skiff into the river and then pay out the line, as he should direct--thus lowering him, yard by yard, down toward the "jam" where jule stood. rod by rod, they let him down toward the roaring abyss of furious waters, till the bateau--guided by the paddle, and held back now by the main strength of twenty men--touched the ice-cake. but even as it touched, the cake began to slide off the jam; and jule was thrown on his hands and knees. quick as thought, however, his courageous rescuer struck his boat-hook into the ice and held fast while jule, stiff with fright, tumbled in at the bow of the bateau. he was hardly in the boat when the whole mass of ice and logs went over the falls. a shout arose, and when a few minutes later the bateau was drawn safely back up the stream, and mac stepped ashore with a rather bashful smile on his round, fresh face, every one joined in long and prolonged cheers. as for jule, he had to be helped out of the boat and led home; for he was, as they said, "limp as a rag;" and it was noticed that after this perilous adventure he was a much more sober and thoughtful boy. pray do not imagine, reader, that i have been telling you a "made-up" story, for what i have related is true, the writer herself being an eye-witness to the incident while a teacher in a backwoods school-district on the banks of the aroostook. * * * * * live stock, etc. public sale of short-horn cattle at _somers, kenosha co., wis._ on wednesday, march , . i will sell at public sale, at my farm near somers, wis., at above time and place, my entire herd of thoroughbred short-horn cattle, numbering forty head. among them are many of the choicest families. included in the sale will be the grand young bull orpheus th, bred at bow park, a beautiful red, and one of the finest bulls in the west. the cows are all breeders, and will have calves by their sides, or be safe in calf. i offer this grand herd of cattle with reluctance, solely on account of my advanced age and failing health. catalogues ready about feb. . lunch at . sale to begin at . free conveyances will meet the trains on morning of sale at somers, on c. m. & st. paul, and at kenosha for c. & n. w. r. r. wm. yule, somers, kenosha co., wis. j. w. judy, auctioneer. * * * * * jersey bulls for sale, all of fine quality, solid color and bk. points. ages, from six to eighteen months. sons of mahkeenae, ; brother of eurotus, , who made lbs. butter in a year, and out of cows of the best butter blood, some having records of fourteen and fifteen lbs. per week. no fancy prices. a. h. cooley, little britain, orange co., n. y. n. b.--if i make sales as formerly will send a car with man in charge to cleveland, getting lowest rates. * * * * * scotch collie shepherd pups, --from-- imported and trained stock --also-- newfoundland pups and rat terrier pups. concise and practical printed instruction in training young shepherd dogs, is given to buyers of shepherd puppies; or will be sent on receipt of cents in postage stamps. for printed circular, giving full particulars about shepherd dogs, enclose a -cent stamp, and address n.h. paaren, p.o. box , chicago. ill. * * * * * _seeds_ our new catalogue, best published, free _to all_. , _varieties_, _illustrations_. you ought to have it. benson, maule & co., philadelphia, pa. breeders directory. the following list embraces the names of responsible and reliable breeders in their line, and parties wishing to purchase or obtain information can feel assured that they will be honorably dealt with: swine. chester whites. w. a. gilbert wauwatosa wis. scheidt & davis, dyer, lake co., ind., breeders of victoria swine. originators of this famous breed. stock for sale. write for circular a. * * * * * railroads. [illustration] a man who is unacquainted with the geography of this country will see by examining this map that the chicago, rock island & pacific r'y by the central position of its line, connects the east and the west by the shortest route, and carries passengers, without change of cars, between chicago and kansas city, council bluffs, leavenworth, atchison, minneapolis and st. paul. it connects in union depots with all the principal lines of road between the atlantic and the pacific oceans. its equipment is unrivaled and magnificent, being composed of most comfortable and beautiful day coaches, magnificent horton reclining chair cars, pullman's prettiest palace sleeping cars, and the best line of dining cars in the world. three trains between chicago and missouri river points. two trains between chicago and minneapolis and st. paul, via the famous "albert lea route." a new and direct line, via seneca and kankakee, has recently been opened between richmond norfolk, newport news, chattanooga, atlanta, augusta, nashville, louisville, lexington, cincinnati indianapolis and lafayette, and omaha, minneapolis and st. paul and intermediate points. all through passengers travel on fast express trains. tickets for sale at all principal ticket offices in the united states and canada. baggage checked through and rates of fare always as low as competitors that offer less advantages. for detailed information, get the maps and folders of the great rock island route, at your nearest ticket office, or address r.r. cable, vice-pres. & gen'l m'g'r, e. st. john, gen'l tkt. & pass. agt. chicago. * * * * * miscellaneous. don't be humbugged with poor, cheap coulters. [illustration] all farmers have had trouble with their coulters. in a few days they get to wabbling, are condemned and thrown aside. in our "boss" coulter we furnish a tool which can scarcely be worn out; and when worn, the wearable parts, a prepared wood journal, and movable thimble in the hub (held in place by a key) can be easily and cheaply renewed. we guarantee our "boss" to plow more acres than any other three coulters now used. our "o. k." clamp attaches the coulter to any size or kind of beam, either right or left hand plow. we know that after using it you will say it is the best tool on the market. ask your dealer for it. manufactured by the boss coulter co., bunker hill, ills. * * * * * [illustration: new vegetables a specialty gregory's seed catalogue. - ] my vegetable and flower seed catalogue for , the result of thirty years experience as a seed grower, will be sent free to all who apply. all my seed is warranted to be fresh and true to name, so far that should it prove otherwise, i agree to refill orders gratis. my collection of vegetable seed, one of the most extensive to be found in any american catalogue, is a large part of it of my own growing. as the original introducer of eclipse beet, burbank potatoes, marblehead early corn, the hubbard squash, and scores of other new vegetables, i invite the patronage of the public. in the gardens and on the farms of those who plant my seed will be found my best advertisement. james j. h. gregory, seed grower, marblehead, mass. * * * * * send for catalogue and prices. atlas engine works [illustration] indianapolis, ind., u.s.a. manufacturers of steam engines and boilers. carry engines and boilers in stock for immediate delivery * * * * * sibley's tested seeds, for all climates, for all soils, all plants. every sack tested for vitality. all tested in gardens for purity and value. catalogue and price list of all tested varieties, free. mail order promptly filled, making a seed store at home. send for catalogue. hiram sibley & co., rochester, n y. and chicago, ill. * * * * * [illustration] literature. between the two lights. no use talking, missy--no use talking 'bout de daylight and dat kind ob ting 'tween the two lights--sunset and sunrising-- dis ole nigger happier dan a king. dis ole nigger don got all he want to, all he want, and more 'an he can say; gib him night, de darker and de better, white folks more 'an welcome to de day. in de day him ole and pore and wretched, got to tote de load and swing de hoe, got to do jest what de white folks tole him, got to trabel when dey tole him go. don't own nothing but an empty cabin; got no wife, no chillen at him knee; got no nothing but a little pallet, and a pot to bile him hominy. in de day him gits no 'spectful notice, him is only "dat ole nigger brown;" in de night him tells you, little missy, things git mightily turned upside down. den somehow him's young and rich and happy, den him own more acres dan him see: den him got a powerful lot ob hosses, den de white folks stop an speak to he. den him hab a big house like ole massa's, dan melinda is him lubly wife; den de little chillen call him pappy, den him see de bery best ob life. den sometimes him talking in de meeting. an' him feel de biggest in de town, for at night him neber "dat ole nigger," him the reberend mister isaac brown. "dreaming," is him? dreaming, do you call it? then him s'pose it's living in de day. well, him likes de night-time and de dreaming, for him griefs wid sunshine go away. no use talking, missy, no use talking 'bout de sunshine and dat kind ob ting; 'tween de two lights--sunset and sunrising-- dis ole nigger happier dan a king. the two overcoats. when amos derby came out of levi rosenbaum's pawnshop, the richer by five dollars, but leaving his overcoat in the hands of the jew, he made his way directly to sillbrook's saloon, where, he felt sure, he should meet half a dozen at least of his boon companions. he was not mistaken. the bar-room was crowded, and a general shout of welcome greeted him as he entered, for amos was a generous fellow, and was always willing to treat. the five dollar bill was quickly broken by the jovial bar-keeper, and two hours later when amos waked rather unsteadily out of the saloon, he had not a cent in his pocket. but this did not trouble him in the least. he had spent too much money in sillbrook's during the last two years to think anything of squandering in one evening such a paltry sum as five dollars. as he left the saloon by the main entrance, he saw a man emerge from a side door of the building, and cross the street with rapid strides; a tall man, well dressed, and bearing about him a look of prosperity. he wore a very handsome overcoat with sealskin cuffs and collar, a sealskin cap, and well fitting gloves. drunk as amos was he recognized him at once; it was sillbrook himself. "been in the back room countin' up his gains, most likely," he muttered thickly. "he's above standin' behind the bar nowadays." amos could well remember when sillbrook had been only a mill-hand like himself, earning twelve dollars a week. but he had been a prudent, saving man always, and had early made up his mind to be rich, no matter at what cost of conscience and principle. with this end in view he had purchased a saloon, and cordially invited his former fellow workers at the mill to patronize him. this they were very willing to do, for sillbrook knew how to make his saloon attractive; and he soon had as much custom as he could well attend to. at length he hired a bar-keeper, and after a couple of years was never seen behind the bar himself. he had grown rich very rapidly, and now owned one of the finest houses in the town, and was able to gratify every taste and whim, while those who had helped him to his wealth by drinking his liquors were as poor as ever--many of them poorer. amos derby had been one of sillbrook's best customers ever since the saloon had been opened, and as a natural consequence had had little to spend in comforts for his wife and children. he still lived in the small cottage he had bought on first moving to the town, and had seen it grow more and more dilapidated every year without making any attempt to repair it. but though the outside was far from attractive, the inside was always neat and clean, for, whatever her faults of temper, jane derby was a woman who believed thoroughly in abiding by heaven's first law, and who labored early and late to make both ends meet, something she would not have been able to accomplish had she not possessed skill as a dressmaker, for amos seldom gave her any of his earnings. she was sitting in the kitchen sewing when her husband came in, and a bitter expression crossed her face as she saw his condition. "drunk, as usual," she said, harshly, "when were you anything else?" "when you was kinder spoken, perhaps," answered amos, with spirit. "this is the sort of welcome i get every night in the week. 'tain't much wonder i go to sillbrook's." he dropped into a chair as he spoke, and began to pull off his boots. "if you didn't have one excuse you'd make another," said jane, flushing, and bending closer over her sewing. "perhaps you think i ought to feel pleasant when you come home in this state. well! it ain't human nature, that it ain't! i mind the time you brought home your wages reg'lar, every sat'day night, and i was willin' enough then to speak kind to you. now the children would starve if it wasn't for me. where's your overcoat?" a sudden pallor creeping into her face as she asked the question. "yes! where is that overcoat?--what have you done with it that you haven't it on--where is it?" "where d'ye s'pose?" said amos, roughly. "down at the pawn-shop, of course," cried his wife, angrily, "where every decent coat you ever had has gone. but you promised me you'd never part with this one, amos derby, and you've broke your word. i might have known you would! and to think how i worked for it, and let the children do without shoes! it's too bad! i declare it is! i gave twelve dollars for it only a month ago, and i'll wager you let levi have it for half o' that. it's a shame, a dreadful shame." "stop that. i won't have it," said amos in a threatening tone. "there's no use whining over it now. if you say another word about it i'll go out again, right off." "go!" said jane, fiercely, "and i wish it was forever! i wish i was never to look on your face again! you're naught but a trouble and a disgrace to us all!" "all right," said amos, as he pulled on his boots again, "i'm goin'. i'll take you at your word. you won't see me again in a hurry; now you just mark that. a trouble and a disgrace, am i?" "yes, you are!" said jane, her anger increasing as her mind dwelt upon the loss of the coat she had worked so hard to earn. "i mean all i've said, and more, too! go! go to sillbrook's! ask him to show you the overcoat he's wearin'. i saw it yesterday, and yours wasn't a circumstance to it! go! give him every penny you've got! he needs it!" with a bitter little laugh. "his children's feet are all out on the ground, and his wife hasn't a decent dress to her name," with a glance at her faded calico gown. "help him all you can, amos derby, he's in need o' charity." amos made no answer. he was considerably more sober than when he had left the saloon, for the walk home through the fresh winter air had done him good, and he felt the force of his wife's words. they rung in his ears as he slammed the kitchen door behind him, and, taking the road which led by the mill, walked rapidly away. he was soon in the heart of the town, but he did not think or care where he was going. his only idea was to get away from the sound of jane's sharp voice, and he turned down first one street and then another, without pausing, until he came to elm avenue, on which were situated the handsomest houses in the town. there was a large, square brick house on the corner, with stables in the rear, a conservatory on one side, and a beautiful lawn in front, and this place seemed to possess some strange fascination for amos, for he stopped suddenly at the gate and stood there for fully five minutes, admiring, perhaps, the mansion's air of solid comfort and wealth. the iron gate was open, and presently, as if impelled by some impulse he could not resist, he entered, and walking softly up the graveled path, looked in at one of the long windows. the room upon which he gazed was very handsomely furnished. the chairs were luxuriously cushioned, a large mirror hung over the mantel, the carpet was of velvet, a crystal chandelier depended from the ceiling, and a bright fire burned in the open grate, before which sat a lady richly dressed, reading aloud to three children, sitting on ottomans at her feet. for a long, long time amos derby stood by the window, his eyes wandering from one article of luxury to another, a dark frown on his face, and his teeth set hard together. "my money," he muttered, when at last he turned away. "i've given it to him, cent by cent, and dollar by dollar, and i've naught to show for it, while he! he's got his fine house, and his rich carpets, and his handsome clothes. it's the same money, only i've spent it in one way, and he in another." as the last words left his lips a hand fell heavily upon his shoulder, and a voice--the voice of sillbrook--asked him harshly what he wanted. "a look into your fine parlor," answered amos roughly. "strange i wanted to see it, wasn't it? it ought not to matter to me, of course, what use you make o' my money." "your money!" said sillbrook, with a loud laugh. "that's a crazy joke! come, my man, you're drunk. get out of here, or i'll have you put where you can make your jokes to yourself." "you think you're rich enough now to speak to me as you choose," said amos hotly. "time was when you wouldn't have dared. but i tell you, jason sillbrook, i've come to my senses to-night. it's a poor bargain where the gain's all on one side. we started even, and you've got all and i nothin'. but i tell you now, that, heaven helpin' me, you'll never have another dollar o' mine to spend. you'll never buy another coat like this out o' my money," and he struck in sudden passion the seal-trimmed garment which covered sillbrook's ample proportions. "be off with you," said the saloon-keeper. "you're too drunk to know what you're talking about." "and who made me drunk? answer that question, jason sillbrook," screamed amos. "i'll answer nothing," said sillbrook, and, tearing his coat from the grasp amos had laid upon it, he strode up the path and disappeared within the house. the next morning, when the superintendent made his round of the mill, he missed one of the machine hands. "where's derby?" he asked, angrily. no one could answer his question. no one had seen derby that day. and no one at the mill saw him for many a day to come. "i might have been kinder to him," thought jane, when at last she became convinced that her husband had in truth left her. "perhaps i did say more'n i should at times. poor amos! he was no more to blame than i was, after all. perhaps he would have kept out o' that saloon if i'd only coaxed 'stead o' railing at him. he wasn't bad-hearted, an' he never meant more'n half he said." and as the days went by, and she forgot her past sorrows, she had only kind thoughts of her absent husband, and blamed only herself for their mutual misery. she wished with all her heart that she could "begin all over again," and try the effect of kindness and forbearance on amos. but no such opportunity was given her, and she had little time for bitter thoughts or unavailing regret. the superintendent of the mill gave her eldest child, a lad of fourteen, a situation where he could earn $ a week, and a girl a year younger found work in a millinery store. thus jane was relieved of much anxiety, and she was so skilful with her needle that she soon found herself able to "lay by something for a rainy day," as she expressed it. gradually the children were provided with comfortable clothes and were sent to church and to sunday-school, from which they had been debarred for several years, owing to a lack of decent apparel; the house was repaired, new furniture bought, a flower garden laid out in front of the cottage, and a new fence erected. people began to speak of jane as a surprisingly smart woman, and to say that her husband's desertion had been a blessing in disguise. but in spite of her prosperity there was an ache ever at jane's heart, and a regret which no good fortune could stifle. "if i'd only been kinder!" she would say to herself, as she lay awake at night and thought of her absent husband. "it was my fault he drank; i see that now. he was always telling me that my temper'd ruin him in the end, and now his word's come true." she felt as if she ought to make some atonement for her past sin, even though she was never to see her husband again, and with this end in view she determined to cure herself of the habit of scolding and fault-finding about which poor amos had complained so bitterly. after a few struggles at first, she found her new path very pleasant to her feet, and was encouraged to persevere by the artless comments made by her children on the improvement in her temper. "you're so good, now, mother," they would say, when, instead of the sharp rebuke they had expected on the commission of some childish folly, came very kind words of regret and gentle reproof. "you are so different from what you used to be. if father could only come home and live with us now how happy we would all be." but amos did not come. year after year passed, and he sent no word or sign; and at length both wife and children grew to think of him as dead. seven years! seven years to a day had passed since amos derby had left his home, and up the street and past the mill came a tall man, with a cap of sealskin pulled low over his eyes, and handsome overcoat trimmed with the same costly fur over his arm. he whistled as he walked, and seemed in great good humor, for occasionally he would break out into a loud laugh. but as he came near the cottage where jane derby lived, he became more quiet, and an anxious expression stole into his face. "i wonder if she'll know me," he muttered. going up to the window of the kitchen, he shaded his eyes with one hand and looked in. jane was setting at supper, her five children about her. the room looked warm and comfortable. a bright fire burned in the stove, the kettle sang merrily, and a big maltese cat dozed among some plants on the broad window seat. fred, the eldest son, a muscular young man of twenty-one now, was speaking, and his words came distinctly to the ears of the watcher outside. "brooks goes to-morrow," he said, "and we are to have a new superintendent from ----. i hope he'll have a better temper than brooks, and i wish----who's that?" as a sudden knock came upon the door. "the new superintendent," said the tall man, as he walked into the room and threw his overcoat on a chair. "jane, don't you know me?" with a glad cry that was almost a sob, jane sprang forward, and was folded in the stranger's arms. "children," she said, when she could speak, "this is your father, come back to us at last." "and to stay, please god," said amos derby, fervently, as in turn he embraced his children affectionately. "jane, you shall have no room to complain of me in the future. i mean to make up to you for all i made you suffer before i found out what a fool i was to think more of my appetite than of my wife and children. do you know what taught me my lesson?--sillbrook's overcoat; and i've got one just like it. it will be a reminder, you know. and i've something better still--the place of superintendent at the mills here. i've worked hard, jane, but my reward has come at last. when i left here i resolved never to come back until i could make myself worthy of you and the children. i found a place in the mills at ----, and worked my way up to be superintendent. where there's a will, there's always a way, you know. i learned that you didn't need my help, so i waited on year after year, and now----" "we are together, never to part again this side the grave," finished jane, "amos, god rules us all for the best. let us thank him for the blessings he has bestowed upon us; and then--suppose you let us see how you look in the overcoat you've come by so justly." the news that amos derby was the new superintendent soon flew about the town, and great was the surprise thereat. no one was more astonished, perhaps, at the turn affairs had taken than jason sillbrook, and he wondered greatly at the good fortune of the man he had once so despised; but he never knew that it was largely due to the lesson amos had learned from the saloon-keeper's overcoat.--_the christian at work._ * * * * * consumption cured. an old physician, retired from practice, having had placed in his hands by an east india missionary the formula of a simple vegetable remedy for the speedy and permanent cure of consumption, bronchitis, catarrh, asthma and all throat and lung affections, also a positive and radical cure for nervous debility and all nervous complaints, after having tested its wonderful curative powers in thousands of cases, has felt it his duty to make it known to his suffering fellows. actuated by this motive and a desire to relieve human suffering, i will send free of charge, to all who desire it, this recipe, in german, french, or english, with full directions for preparing and using. sent by mail by addressing with stamp, naming this paper. w. a. noyes, _ power's block, rochester, n. y._ * * * * * honesty of purpose must not be held as evidence of ability. * * * * * [illustration] humorous bait of the average fisherman. h. c. dodge. this is the bait the fishermen take, the fishermen take, the fishermen take, when they start out the fish to wake so early in the morning. they take a nip before they go--a good one, ah! and long and slow, for fear the chills will lay them low so early in the morning. another when they're on the street, which they repeat each time they meet for "luck"--for that's the way to greet a fisher in the morning. and when they are on the river's brink again they drink without a wink--to fight ma- laria they think it proper in the morn- ing. they tip a flask with true delight when there's a bite; if fishing's light they "smile" the more till jolly tight, all fishing they are scorning. an- other nip as they depart: one at the mart and one to part, but none when in the house they dart, ex- pecting there'll be mourning. this is the bait the fisher- men try who fishes buy at prices high and tell each one a bigger lie of fish- ing in the morning. whose cold feet? "are you troubled with cold feet on retiring?" asked yeast of crimsonbeak, saturday night, as they were returning from market freighted with provender. "i should say i was!" replied crimsonbeak emphatically, while a regular chills-and-fever shudder was seen to distribute itself over his frame at the recollection which the question recalled. "i suppose you would like to learn how to avoid them?" replied the philanthropist, smiling at the thought of an opportunity to fire off one of his pet theories. "i would give almost anything to be fortunate enough to escape them," said the despairing crimsonbeak, in all truthfulness. "well it is easy enough done," went on his companion; "soak your feet in cold water the first thing when you get up in the morning; towards night run about three-quarters of a mile, and then soak your feet again in cold water on retiring." "well, i can't see how that is going to keep her feet from troubling me." "her cold feet from troubling you!" repeated yeast, a little confused. "what do you mean?" "mean? why, i mean that my wife's cold feet are the ones that chill me with an arctic region touch. whose feet did you suppose i meant, my mother-in-law's?" shouted the excited crimsonbeak, darting into his gate and leaving his neighbor to his own reflections. changed relations. "now that we are engaged," said miss pottleworth, "come and let me introduce you to papa." "i believe that i have met him," replied young spickle. "but in another capacity than that of son-in-law." "yes--er, but i'd rather not meet him to-night." "oh, you must," and despite the almost violent struggles of the young fellow, he was drawn into the library, where a large, red-faced man, with a squint in one eye, and an enlargement of the nose, sat looking over a lot of papers. "father," said the girl. "hum," he replied, without looking up. "i wish to present to you--" "what?" he exclaimed, looking up and catching sight of young spickle. "have you the impudence to follow me here? didn't i tell you that i would see you to-morrow?" "why, father, you don't know mr. spickle, do you?" "i don't know his name, but i know that he has been to my office three times a day for the past week with a bill. i know him well enough. i can't pay that bill to-night, young man. come to my office to-morrow." "i hope," said spickle, "that you do not think so ill of me. i have not come to collect the bill you have referred to, but--" "what? got another one?" "you persist in misunderstanding me. i did not come to collect a bill, i can come to-morrow and see you about that. to-night i proposed to your daughter, and have been accepted. our mission is to acquaint you with the fact and gain your consent to our marriage." "well," said the old fellow, "is that all? blamed if i didn't think you had a bill. take the girl, if that's what you want, but say, didn't i tell you to bring the bill to-morrow?" "yes, sir." "well, you needn't. our relations are different now. wish i had a daughter for every bill collector in town." it makes a difference. "so you have been fighting again on your way home from school!" "y-yes, sir." "didn't i tell you this sort of business had got to stop?" "yes, pa, but--" "no excuses, sir! you probably provoked the quarrel!" "oh, no! no! he called me names!" "names? what of it? when a boy calls you names walk along about your business. take off that coat!" "but he didn't call me names!" "oh, he didn't? take off that vest!" "when he called me names i never looked at him, but when he pitched into you, i--i had to fight!" "what! did he call me names?" "lots of 'em, father! he said you lied to your constituents, and went back on the caucus and had!"-- "william, put on your coat and vest, and here's a nickel to buy peanuts! i don't want you to come up a slugger, and i wish you to stand well with your teacher, but if you can lick the boy who says i ever bolted a regular nomination or went back on my end of the ward, don't be afraid to sail in!"--_free press._ * * * * * one of the harvard students has fitted up his room at a cost of $ , . we suspect that the young man's room is better than his company. * * * * * "don't be afraid," said a snob to a german laborer: "sit down and make yourself my equal." "i would haff to blow my brains out," was the reply of the teuton. * * * * * "yes," said mrs. egomoi, "i used to think a great deal of mrs. goode, she was always so kind to me; but then, i've found out that she treats everybody just the same." * * * * * jerrold said to an ardent young gentleman, who burned with a desire to see himself in print: "be advised by me, young man: don't take down the shutters before there is something in the window." * * * * * arthur--"i say, what do you mean by fighting my hog all the time?" bismarck--"i means nodding in de vorld; i vash not fighting dot pig. we vash choost playing mit one anudder." * * * * * "yes," said a fashionable lady, "i think mary has made a very good match. i heard her husband is one of the shrewdest and most unprincipled lawyers in the profession, and of course he can afford to gratify her every wish." printer's ink. little drops of printer's ink, a little type "displayed," make our merchant bosses and all their big parade. little bits of stinginess, discarding printer's ink, busts the man of business, and sees his credit sink. * * * * * "jump on the scale," the butcher said unto a miss one day, "i'm used to weighing, and," said he, "i'll tell you what you weigh." "ah, yes," came quick the sweet reply from lips seemed made to kiss, "i'm sure, sir, that it would not be first time you've weighed amiss." the butcher blushed; he hung his head and knew not what to say; he merely wished to weigh the girl-- himself was given away. * * * * * "what did that lady say?" asked mr. buyem of his confidential clerk. "i'd rather not repeat her words, sir," replied the clerk. "but i must know, mr. blume--must know, sir." "oh! if you insist upon it, sir, i suppose i must tell you. she said you were all business, but you lacked culture." "so?" exclaimed mr. buyem, in astonishment. "lack culture, eh? look here, mr. blume, d'ye know you' oughter told me that long ago? let's have some right away before scribe & blowhard can get ahead of us." out of the depths. our correspondent's researches and a remarkable occurrence he describes. st. albans, vt., jan. , . messrs. editors: the upper portion of vermont is one of the pleasantest regions in america during the summer, and one of the bleakest during the winter. it affords ample opportunity for the tourist, providing he chooses the proper season, but the present time is not that season. still there are men and women here who not only endure the climate, but praise it unstintingly, and that, too, in the face of physical hardships the most intense. the writer heard of a striking illustration of this a few days since which is given herewith: mr. joseph jacques is connected with the vermont central railroad in the capacity of master mason. he is well advanced in years, with a ruddy complexion and hale appearance, while his general bearing is such as to instantly impress one with his strict honor and integrity. several years ago he became afflicted with most distressing troubles, which prevented the prosecution of his duties. he was languid, and yet restless, while at times a dizziness would come over him which seemed almost blinding. his will power was strong, and he determined not to give way to the mysterious influence which seemed undermining his life. but the pain and annoying symptoms were stronger than his will, and he kept growing gradually worse. about that time he began to notice a difficulty in drawing on his boots, and it was by the greatest effort that he was able to force his feet into them. in this manner several weeks passed by, until finally one night, while in great agony, he discovered that his feet had in a short while, swollen to enormous proportions. the balance of the narrative can best be described in his own words. he said: "when my wife discovered the fact that i was so bloated, she sent for the doctor immediately. he made a most careful examination and pronounced me in a very serious condition. notwithstanding his care, i grew worse, and the swelling of my feet gradually extended upward in my body. the top of my head pained me terribly; indeed, so badly that at times it seemed almost as if it would burst. my feet were painfully cold, and even when surrounded with hot flannels and irons felt as if a strong wind were blowing on them. next my right leg became paralyzed. this gave me no pain, but it was exceedingly annoying. about this time i began to spit blood most freely, although my lungs were in perfect condition, and i knew it did not come from them. my physicians were careful and untiring in their attentions, but unable to relieve my sufferings. my neighbors and friends thought i was dying and many called to see me, fully twenty-five on a single sunday that i now recall. at last my agony seemed to culminate in the most intense, sharp pains i have ever known or heard of. if red hot knives sharpened to the highest degree had been run through my body constantly they could not have hurt me worse. i would spring up in bed, sometimes as much as three feet, cry out in my agony and long for death. one night the misery was so intense that i arose and attempted to go into the next room, but was unable to lift my swollen feet above the little threshold that obstructed them. i fell back upon the bed and gasped in my agony, but felt unable even to breathe. it seemed like death. "several years ago rev. dr. j. e. rankin, now of washington, was stationed here as pastor of the congregational church. we all admired and respected him, and my wife remembered seeing somewhere that he had spoken in the highest terms of a preparation which had cured some of his intimate friends. we determined to try this remedy, accordingly sent for it, and, to make a long story short, it completely restored my health, brought me back from the grave, and i owe all i have in the way of health and strength to warner's safe cure, better known as warner's safe kidney and liver cure. i am positive that if i had taken this medicine when i felt the first symptoms above described, i might have avoided all the agony i afterward endured, to say nothing of the narrow escape i had from death." in order that all possible facts bearing upon the subject might be known, i called on dr. oscar f. fassett, who was for nineteen years united states examining surgeon, and who attended mr. jacques during his sickness. he stated that mr. jacques had a most pronounced case of albuminuria or bright's disease of the kidneys. that an analysis showed the presence of albumen and casts in great abundance and that he was in a condition where few if any ever recover. his recovery was due to warner's safe cure. mr. john w. hobart, general manager of the vermont central railroad, stated that mr. jacques was one of the best and most faithful of his employes, that his sickness had been an exceedingly severe one and the company were not only glad to again have his services, but grateful to the remedy that had cured so valuable a man. mr. james m. foss, assistant superintendent and master mechanic of the vermont central railroad, is also able to confirm this. i do not claim to be a great discoverer, but i do think i have found in the above a most remarkable case and knowing the unusual increase of bright's disease feel that the public should have the benefit of it. it seems to me a remedy that can accomplish so much in the last stages ought do even more for the first approach of this deceptive yet terrible trouble. f. b. * * * * * to be ruined your own way is some comfort. when so many people would ruin us, it is a triumph over the villany of the world to be ruined after one's own pattern. * * * * * miscellaneous. one cent invested in a postal card and addressed as below will give to the writer full information as to the best lands in the united states now for sale; how he can buy them on the lowest and best terms, also the full text of the u.s. land laws and how to secure acres of government lands in northwestern minnesota and northeastern dakota. address: james b. power, land and emigration commissioner, st. paul, minn. * * * * * medical. disease cured without medicine. _a valuable discovery for supplying magnetism to the human system. electricity and magnetism utilized as never before for healing the sick._ the magneton appliance co.'s magnetic kidney belt! for men is warranted to cure _or money refunded_, the following diseases without medicine:--_pain in the back, hips, head, or limbs, nervous debility, lumbago, general debility, rheumatism, paralysis, neuralgia, sciatica, diseases of the kidneys, spinal diseases, torpid liver_, gout seminal emissions, impotency, asthma, heart disease, dyspepsia, constipation, erysipelas, indigestion, hernia or rupture, catarrh, piles, epilepsy, dumb ague, etc. when any debility of the generative organs occurs, lost vitality, lack of nerve force and vigor, wasting weakness, and all those diseases of a personal nature, from whatever cause, the continuous stream of magnetism permeating through the parts, must restore them to a healthy action. there is no mistake about this appliance. to the ladies:--if you are afflicted with lame back, weakness of the spine, falling of the womb, leucorrhoea, chronic inflammation and ulceration of the womb, incidental hemorrhage or flooding, painful, suppressed, and irregular menstruation, barrenness, and change of life, this is the best appliance and curative agent known. for all forms of female difficulties it is unsurpassed by anything before invented, both as a curative agent and as a source of power and vitalization. price of either belt with magnetic insoles, $ , sent by express c.o.d., and examination allowed, or by mail on receipt of price. in ordering send measure of waist, and size of shoe. remittance can be made in currency, sent in letter at our risk. the magneton garments are adapted to all ages, are worn over the under-clothing (not next to the body like the many galvanic and electric humbugs advertised so extensively), and should be taken off at night. they hold their power forever, and are worn at all seasons of the year. send stamp for the "new departure in medical treatment without medicine," with thousands of testimonials. the magneton appliance co., state street. chicago, ill. note.--send one dollar in postage stamps or currency (in letter at our risk) with size of shoe usually worn, and try a pair of our magnetic insoles, and be convinced of the power residing in our other magnetic appliances. positively no cold feet when they are worn, or money refunded. * * * * * publications. marshall m. kirkman's books on railroad topics. do you want to become a railroad man if you do, the books described below point the way. the most promising field for men of talent and ambition at the present day is the railroad service. the pay is large in many instances, while the service is continuous and honorable. most of our railroad men began life on the farm. of this class is the author of the accompanying books descriptive of railway operations, who has been connected continuously with railroads as a subordinate and officer for years. he was brought up on a farm, and began railroading as a lad at $ per month. he has written a number of standard books on various topics connected with the organization, construction, management and policy of railroads. these books are of interest not only to railroad men but to the general reader as well. they are indispensable to the student. they present every phase of railroad life, and are written in an easy and simple style that both interests and instructs. the books are as follows: "railway expenditures--their extent, object and economy."--a practical treatise on construction and operation. in two volumes, pages. $ . "hand book of railway expenditures."--practical directions for keeping the expenditure accounts. . "railway revenue and its collection."--and explaining the organization of railroads. . "the baggage parcel and mail traffic of railroads."--an interesting work on this important service; pages. . "train and station service"--giving the principal rules and regulations governing trains; pages. . "the track accounts of railroads."--and how they should be kept. pamphlet. . "the freight traffic way-bill."--its uses illustrated and described. pamphlet. . "mutual guarantee."--a treatise on mutual suretyship. pamphlet. . any of the above books will be sent post paid on receipt of price, by prairie farmer publishing co., monroe st. chicago, ill. money should be remitted by express, or by draft check or post office order. * * * * * map of the united states and canada, printed in colors, size Ã� - / feet, also a copy of the prairie farmer for one year. sent to any address for $ . . * * * * * general news. florida farmers are now planting irish potatoes. the st. charles hotel, paducah, ky., was burned sunday night. another relief party for the greeley arctic expedition is to be sent out. wm. h. guion, of the steamship firm of williams has failed for $ , , . music hall, in whitechapel, london, burned on monday; loss $ , . ice has prevented the ferry boats from crossing the st. clair river at port huron. the prohibitionists declare that they will place a presidential ticket in the field next fall. lowell manufacturers have given employes notice that there will be a reduction of ten per cent in wages beginning feb. . an elevated road, adapted both to passengers and freight, is to be constructed along the levee at new orleans within two years. there was a railway wreck, caused by a broken rail, on the wabash road near macon, mo., on monday; several persons were injured. it is estimated that the united states senate is the wealthiest deliberative body in the world, the seventy-six members of that body representing $ , , . a rumor is in circulation at ottawa, canada, that the canadian pacific road has asked the government for additional assistance to the amount of $ , , . a colored base-ball club of professionals has been formed at chicago, and will be ready to take the road may . they are backed by a stock company. it is claimed that there is at the present time between and foreign vessels engaged in the oyster traffic on the virginia coast without right or authority. the people of ouray, col., lynched mike cuddigan and wife saturday, on suspicion of having murdered a child whom they took from a catholic asylum at denver. it is said that the buffaloes have come north of the missouri river, in montana, and the indians killed eleven hundred in one day not far from the mouth of the musselshell. the horror of the week was the wrecking of the steamer city of columbus off martha's vineyard, january th. there were persons on board of whom ninety-seven were lost. a seal was discovered in the track of the steamer armstrong, at morristown, n. y., on the st. lawrence river. this was the third or fourth seal seen in that vicinity in the last half-dozen years. the candle factory of e. l. schneider & co., located on the corner of wallace and mcgregor streets, chicago, was sunday swept away by fire. the loss is $ , , and the insurance $ , . the friends of mr. hintz, the unsuccessful candidate for postmaster at elgin, illinois, threaten to defeat the re-election of representative ellwood in the next campaign, who is held responsible for his defeat. two irish members of the british parliament, matthew arnold and p. j. sheridan,--the latter supposed to be the mysterious no. of the phoenix park assassination scheme--are in chicago the present week. mrs. dukes, a sister of the murdered zura burns, has left her home in dakota, in company with her father, to give what she claims is damaging evidence against o. a. carpenter, before the grand jury at lincoln, ill. the matter of the final disposition of the assets of the estate of b. f. allen is being heard by a register at des moines. a firm which has purchased a large share of the claims at per cent offers $ , for the property remaining, but other creditors hold out for $ , . judge shepard, in the superior court of chicago, saturday, dismissed three bills for divorce, holding that when a wife separated from her husband her residence as well as her domicile follows his, and that the illinois statutes excludes from its courts all suits for divorce in behalf of persons not legal residents. the onondaga (new york) indians have held another council, at which it was shown that a majority of the nation is opposed to dividing the lands in severally, but is willing to agree to a division of such timber lands as can not be protected against depredations. the christian party is to be represented at the next conference with the state commissioners. nearly one-fourth of the business portion of leipsic, o., was burned friday night, and flames swept away , bales of cotton at murrell's point, la., and twenty-one buildings at lowell, mich. a boiler explosion at cincinnati, in the corrugating company's manufactory, saturday, led to the destruction of $ , in property. [illustration] markets. financial and commercial. office of the prairie farmer.} chicago. jan , . } papers devoted to finance and trade inform us that the number of business failures in was , against , in the hard times of . the fear is, that the worst is not yet come, but this feeling happily is not by any means universal among most far seeing business men. the transactions at the chicago banks were a trifle slower than last week. the regular loan market was quotable on monday at @ per cent. eastern exchange was firm at c per $ , . the stock markets at the east were a little feverish and here the same feeling was noticeable. there are rumors of financial embarrassment in high places, and mr. gould himself is said to be a little nervous over the weakness in many of his stocks. government securities are as follows: 's coupon, |q. apr. | - / 's reg., |q. apr. | - / - / 's coupon, |q. mar. | - / - / 's registered, |q. mar. | - / 's registered |q. mar. | grain and provisions. the receipts of flour at this point for the forty-eight hours ending monday morning were greatly in excess of those for the corresponding week last year. in wheat last year the receipts were , bushels; this year , . corn last year , ; this year , . flour was unchanged, the article not yet feeling the uncertain condition of the wheat market. choice to favorite white winters $ @ fair to good brands of white winters @ good to choice red winters @ prime to choice springs @ good to choice export stock, in sacks, extras @ good to choice export stock, double extras @ fair to good minnesota springs @ choice to fancy minnesota springs @ patent springs @ low grades @ wheat.--red winter, no. , ; car lots of spring, no. , sold at - / c; no. , do. @ . corn.--moderately active. car lots no , @ c; rejected, @ ; new mixed, @ - / c. oats.--no. in store, closed - / @ - / . rye.--may, in store @ - / . barley.--no. , in store; no. , f. o. b. - / c. flax.--closed at $ on track. timothy.--$ - / @ per bushel. little doing. clover.--quiet at $ @ for prime. provisions.--mess pork, february, $ @ per bbl; green hams, - / c per lb. short ribs, $ per cwt. lard.--february, $ . lumber. lumber unchanged. quotations for green are as follows: short dimension, per m $ @ long dimension, per m @ boards and strips, no. @ boards and strips, medium @ boards and strips, no. choice @ shingles, standard @ shingles, choice @ shingles, extra @ lath @ country produce. note.--the quotations for the articles named in the following list are generally for commission lots of goods and from first hands. while our prices are based as near as may be on the landing or wholesale rates, allowance must be made for selections and the sorting up for store distribution. bran.--quoted at $ @ per ton; beans.--hand picked mediums $ @ . hand picked navies, $ @ . butter.--dull and without change. choice to extra creamery, @ c per lb.; fair to good do @ c; fair to choice dairy, @ c; common to choice packing stock fresh and sweet, @ c; ladle packed @ c; fresh made, streaked butter, @ c. broom-corn.--good to choice hurl - / @ - / c per lb; green self-working @ c; red-tipped and pale do @ c; inside and covers @ c; common short corn - / @ - / c; crooked, and damaged, @ c, according to quality. cheese.--choice full-cream cheddars @ - / c per lb; medium quality do @ c; good to prime full cream flats @ - / c; skimmed cheddars @ c; good skimmed flats @ c; hard-skimmed and common stock @ c. eggs.--in a small way the best brands are quotable at @ c per dozen; @ c for good ice house stock; @ c per pickled. hay.--no timothy $ @ per ton; no do $ @ ; mixed do $ @ ; upland prairie $ @ ; no prairie $ @ ; no do $ @ . small bales sell at @ c per ton more than large bales. hides and pelts.--green-cured light hides - / c per lb; do heavy cows c; no damaged green-salted hides c; green-salted calf @ - / cents; green-salted bull c; dry-salted hides cents; no. two-thirds price; no. dry flint @ - / c. sheep pelts salable at @ c for the estimated amount of wash wool on each pelt. all branded and scratched hides are discounted per cent from the price of no. . hops.--prime to choice new york state hops @ c per lb; pacific coast of @ c: fair to good wisconsin @ c. poultry.--prices for good to choice dry picked and unfrozen lots are: turkeys @ c per lb; chickens @ c; ducks @ c; geese @ c. thin, undesirable, and frozen stock @ c per lb less than these figures; live offerings nominal. potatoes.--good to choice @ c per bu. on track; common to fair @ c. illinois sweet potatoes range at $ @ per bbl for yellow. tallow and grease.--no country tallow @ - / c per lb; no do - / @ - / c. prime white grease @ - / c; yellow - / @ - / c; brown - / @ . vegetables.--cabbage, $ @ per ; celery, @ c per doz bunches; onions, $ @ per bbl for yellow, and $ for red; turnips, $ @ per bbl for rutabagas, and $ for white flat. wool.--from store range as follows for bright wools from wisconsin, illinois, michigan, indiana, and eastern iowa--dark western lots generally ranging at @ c per lb. less. coarse and dingy tub @ good medium tub @ unwashed bucks' fleeces @ fine unwashed heavy fleeces @ fine light unwashed heavy fleeces @ coarse unwashed fleeces @ low medium unwashed fleeces @ fine medium unwashed fleeces @ fine washed fleeces @ coarse washed fleeces @ low medium washed fleeces @ fine medium washed fleeces @ colorado and territory wools range as follows: lowest grades @ low medium @ medium @ fine @ wools from new mexico: lowest grades @ part improved @ best improved @ burry from c to c off; black c to c off. live stock markets. the total receipts and shipments for last week were as follows: received. shipped. cattle , , calves hogs , , sheep , , cattle.--very few choice lots are coming in. receipts have fallen off some , head. of those that arrive the "unripe" predominate. some of our feeders are undoubtedly inclined to market too young. some cattle by experienced breeders and feeders may be "ripened" at two years, but in the majority of cases, especially with anything else than high grade short-horns, this can not be done. there is more money in holding common stock a few months longer. the feeling on monday was very firm, and prices advanced considerably. good heavy cattle brought as high as $ , though the majority sold at less. six steers averaging , lbs brought $ . cattle for shippers and canners went at $ @ ; bulls $ @ ; cows $ @ ; stockers and feeders scarce at $ @ with some of the latter at $ @ . hogs.--the hogs now arriving are light and the number is not large. since november st, chicago packers have put up , less hogs than for the corresponding period last year, and the total packing of the country has fallen off , head. our packing houses are now running to about one half their capacity. prices are firm. common to fair stock $ @ ; good to choice heavy $ @ ; skips and culls $ @ . note.--all sales of hogs are made subject to a shrinkage of lbs for piggy sows and lbs for stags. dead hogs sell for - / c per lb for weights of and over and [transcriber's note: blank in original] for weights of less than lbs. sheep.--arrivals are large. several carloads from texas came in on monday. common to good $ @ - / ; fancy head $ . * * * * * commission merchants. j.h. white & co., produce commission s. water st., chicago. refers to this paper. * * * * * miscellaneous. [illustration] your name printed on cards all new designs of _gold floral. remembrances, sentiment, hand floral_, etc., with _love, friendship_, and _holiday mottoes_, c. pks. and this elegant ring, c., pks. & ring, $ . 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(this file was produced from images produced by core historical literature in agriculture (chla), cornell university) principles of manuring manures and the principles of manuring by c. m. aikman, m.a., d.sc., f.r.s.e., f.i.c. formerly professor of chemistry, glasgow veterinary college, and examiner in chemistry, glasgow university; author of 'farmyard manure,' etc. third impression william blackwood and sons edinburgh and london mcmx d. van nostrand company new york _all rights reserved_ to sir john bennet lawes, bart., d.c.l., ll.d., f.r.s., of rothamsted, and sir j. henry gilbert, m.a., ll.d., f.r.s., formerly sibthorpian professor of rural economy, university of oxford, whose famous investigations during the last fifty years have so largely contributed to build up the science of manuring, this work, embodying many of the rothamsted results, is dedicated. preface. when the present work was first undertaken there were but few works in english dealing with its subject-matter, and hardly any which dealt with the question of manuring at any length. during the last few years, however, owing to the greatly increased interest taken in agricultural education, the demand for agricultural scientific literature has called into existence quite a number of new works. despite this fact, the author ventures to believe that the gap which the present treatise was originally designed to fill is still unfilled. of the importance of the subject all interested in agriculture are well aware. it is no exaggeration to say that the introduction of the practice of artificial manuring has revolutionised modern husbandry. indeed, without the aid of artificial manures, arable farming, as at present carried out, would be impossible. fifty years ago the practice may be said to have been unknown; yet so widespread has it now become, that at the present time the capital invested in the manure trade in this country alone amounts to millions sterling. it need scarcely be pointed out, therefore, that a practice in which such vast monetary interests are involved is worthy of the most careful consideration by all students of agricultural science, as well as, it may be added, by political economists. the aim of the present work is to supply in a concise and popular form the chief results of recent agricultural research on the question of soil fertility, and the nature and action of various manures. it makes no pretence to be an exhaustive treatise on the subject, and only contains those facts which seem to the author to have an important bearing on agricultural practice. in the treatment of its subject it may be said to stand midway between professor storer's recently published elaborate and excellent treatise on 'agriculture in some of its relations to chemistry'--a work which is to be warmly recommended to all students of agricultural science, and to which the author would take this opportunity of acknowledging his indebtedness--and dr j. m. h. munro's admirable little work on 'soils and manures.' in order to render the work as intelligible to the ordinary agricultural reader as possible, all tabular matter and matter of a more or less technical nature have been relegated to the appendices attached to each chapter. the author's somewhat wide experience as a university extension lecturer, and as a lecturer in connection with county council schemes of agricultural education, during the last few years, induces him to believe that the work may be of especial value to those engaged in teaching agricultural science. he has to express the deep obligation he is under, in common with all writers on agricultural chemistry, to the classic researches of sir john bennet lawes, bart., and sir j. henry gilbert, now in progress for more than fifty years at sir john lawes' experiment station at rothamsted. his debt of gratitude to these distinguished investigators has been still further increased by their kindness in permitting him to dedicate the work to them, and for having been good enough to read portions of the work in proof. in addition to the free use which has been made throughout the book of the results of these experiments, the last chapter contains, in a tabular form, a short epitome of some of the more important rothamsted researches on the action of different manures. to the numerous german and french works on the subject, more especially to professor heiden's encyclopædic 'lehrbuch der düngerlehre' and the various writings of dr emil von wolff, the author is further much indebted. among english works he would especially mention the assistance he has derived from the writings of mr r. warington, f.r.s., professor s. w. johnson, professor armsby, the late dr augustus voelcker, and others. he would also tender his acknowledgments to the new edition of stephens' 'book of the farm,' and he has to thank its editor, his friend mr james macdonald, secretary to the highland and agricultural society of scotland, for having read parts of his proof-sheets. it is also his pleasing duty to thank his friends dr bernard dyer, hon secretary of the society of public analysts, dr a. p. aitken, chemist to the highland and agricultural society of scotland; professor douglas gilchrist of bangor; mr f. j. cooke, late of flitcham; mr hermann voss of london; and professor wright of glasgow, for having assisted him in the revision of proof-sheets. analytical laboratory, wellington street, glasgow, _january_ . contents. part i.--historical introduction. page beginning of agricultural chemistry early theories regarding plant-growth van helmont digby duhamel and stephen hales jethro tull charles bonnet's discovery of source of plants' carbon researches of priestley, ingenhousz, sénébier, on assimilation of carbon - publication of first english treatise by earl dundonald publication of theodore de saussure, 'chemical researches on vegetation,' theories on source of plant-nitrogen early experiments on this subject sir humphry davy's lectures ( - ) state of agricultural chemistry in beginning of boussingault's researches ( ) publication of liebig's first report to the british association refutation of "humus" theory liebig's mineral theory liebig's theory of source of plants' nitrogen publication of liebig's second report to british association liebig's services to agricultural chemistry development of agricultural research in germany the rothamsted experiment station sir j. b. lawes and sir j. h. gilbert, the nature and value of their experiments review of the present state of our knowledge of plant-growth proximate composition of the plant fixation of carbon by plants action of light on plant-growth, dr siemens' experiments source of oxygen and hydrogen in the plant - source of nitrogen in the plant relation of the free nitrogen to leguminous plants - relation of nitrogen in organic forms, as ammonia salts, and nitrates to the plant - nitrification and its conditions ash constituents of the plant methods of research for ascertaining essentialness of ash constituents of plants (_a_) artificial soils, (_b_) water-culture - method in which plants absorb their food-constituents endosmosis retention by soils of plant-food causes of retention by soils of plant-food manuring "field" and "pot" experimentation part ii.--principles of manuring. chapter i.--fertility of the soil. what constitutes fertility in a soil i. physical properties of a soil kinds of soils absorptive power for water of soils absorptive power for water of sand, clay, and humus fineness of particles of a soil limit of fineness of soil-particles importance of retentive power power of plants for absorbing water from a soil experiments by sachs how to increase absorptive power of soils amount of water in a soil most favourable for plant growth hygroscopic power of soils capacity of soils for absorbing and retaining heat explanation of dew heat of soils heat in rotting farmyard manure causes of heat of fermentation influence of colour on heat-retaining power power of soils for absorbing gases gases found in soils variation in gas-absorbing power of soils absorption of nitrogen by soils requirements of plant-roots in a soil influence of tillage on number of plants in a certain area comparison of english and american farming ii. chemical composition of a soil fertilising ingredients of a soil importance of _nitrogen, phosphoric acid_, and _potash_ in a soil chemical condition of fertilising ingredients in soils amount of soluble fertilising ingredients in soils value of chemical analysis of soils iii. biological properties of a soil bacteria of the soil recapitulation of chapter i appendix to chapter i. note i. table of absorptive power of soil substances by schübler ii. table of rate of evaporation of water in different soils by schübler iii. table of hygroscopic power of soils dried at ° f. (davy) iv. gases present in soil v. amount of plant-food in soils vi. chemical composition of the soil vii. forms in which plant-foods are present in the soil chapter ii.--functions performed by manures. etymological meaning of word manure definition of manures different classes of manures action of different classes of manures chapter iii.--position of nitrogen in agriculture. the rothamsted experiments and the nitrogen question different forms in which nitrogen exists in nature relation of "free" nitrogen to the plant combined nitrogen in the air amount of combined nitrogen falling in the rain nitrogen in the soil nitrogen in the subsoil nitrogen of surface-soil amount of nitrogen in the soil soils richest in nitrogen nature of the nitrogen in the soil organic nitrogen in the soil differences of surface and subsoil nitrogen nitrogen as ammonia in soils amount of ammonia in soils nitrogen present as nitrates in the soil position of nitric nitrogen in soil amount of nitrates in the soil amount of nitrates in fallow soils amount of nitrates in cropped soils amount of nitrates in manured wheat-soils the sources of soil-nitrogen accumulation of soil-nitrogen under natural conditions accumulation of nitrogen in pastures gain of nitrogen with leguminous crops the fixation of "free" nitrogen influence of manures in increasing soil-nitrogen sources of loss of nitrogen loss of nitrates by drainage prevention of loss of nitrogen by permanent pasture and "catch-cropping" other conditions diminishing loss of nitrates amount of loss of nitrogen by drainage loss of nitrogen in form of "free" nitrogen total amount of loss of nitrogen loss of nitrogen by retrogression artificial sources of loss of nitrogen amount of nitrogen removed in crops losses of nitrogen incurred on the farm loss in treatment of farmyard manure nitrogen removed in milk economics of the nitrogen question loss of nitrogen-compounds in the arts loss due to use of gunpowder loss due to sewage disposal our artificial nitrogen supply nitrate of soda and sulphate of ammonia peruvian guano bones other nitrogenous manures oil-seeds and oilcakes other imported sources of nitrogen conclusion appendix to chapter iii. note i. determination of the quantity of nitrogen supplied by rain, as ammonia and nitric acid, to an acre of land during one year ii. nitrogen in soils at various depths iii. nitrogen as nitrates in cropped soils receiving no nitrogenous manures, in lb. per acre (rothamsted soils) iv. nitrogen as nitrates in rothamsted soils v. examples of increase of nitrogen in rothamsted soils laid down in pasture vi. loss by drainage of nitrates vii. examples of decrease of nitrogen in rothamsted soils viii. amount of drainage and nitrogen as nitrates in drainage-water from unmanured bare soil, and inches deep chapter iv.--nitrification. process of nitrification occurrence of nitrates in the soil nitre soils of india saltpetre plantations cause of nitrification ferments effecting nitrification appearance of nitrous organisms nitric organism difficulty in isolating them nitrifying organisms do not require organic matter conditions favourable for nitrification-- presence of food-constituents presence of a salifiable base only takes place in slightly alkaline solutions action of gypsum on nitrification presence of oxygen temperature presence of a sufficient quantity of moisture absence of strong sunlight nitrifying organisms destroyed by poisons denitrification denitrification also effected by bacteria conditions favourable for denitrification takes place in water-logged soils distribution of the nitrifying organisms in the soil depth down at which they occur action of plant-roots in promoting nitrification nature of substances capable of nitrification rate at which nitrification takes place nitrification takes place chiefly during summer process goes on most quickly in fallow fields laboratory experiments on rate of nitrification certain portions of soil-nitrogen more easily nitrifiable than the rest rate of nitrification deduced from field experiments quantity of nitrates formed in the soils of fallow fields position of nitrates depends on season nitrates in drainage-waters amount produced at different times of year nitrification of manures ammonia salts most easily nitrifiable sulphate of ammonia the most easily nitrifiable manure rate of nitrification of other manures soils best suited for nitrification absence of nitrification in forest-soils important bearing of nitrification on agricultural practice desirable to have soil covered with vegetation permanent pasture most economical condition of soil nitrification and rotation of crops appendix to chapter iv. note i. old theories of nitrification ii. nitrification takes place in solutions devoid of organic matter iii. oxidising power of micro-organisms in soils iv. effect of urine on nitrification in soils v. solution used by professor frankland in cultivating nitrificative micro-organisms vi. experiments by boussingault on rate of nitrification vii. nitrogen as nitrates in rothamsted soils after bare fallow in lb. per acre chapter v.--position of phosphoric acid in agriculture. occurrence of phosphoric acid in nature mineral sources of phosphoric acid apatite and phosphorite coprolites occurrence of phosphoric acid in guanos universal occurrence in common rocks occurrence in the soil condition in which phosphoric acid occurs in the soil occurrence in plants occurrence in animals sources of loss of phosphoric acid in agriculture loss of phosphoric acid by drainage artificial sources of loss of phosphoric acid amount of phosphoric acid removed in milk loss of phosphoric acid in treatment of farmyard manure loss of phosphoric acid in sewage sources of artificial gain of phosphoric acid appendix to chapter v. note i. composition of apatite (voelcker) ii. percentage of phosphoric acid in the commoner rocks chapter vi.--position of potash in agriculture. potash of less importance than phosphoric acid occurrence of potash felspar and other potash minerals stassfurt salts occurrence of saltpetre occurrence of potash in the soil potash chiefly in insoluble condition in soils percentage of potash in plants and plant-ash occurrence of potash in animal tissue sources of loss of potash amount of potash removed in crops amount of potash removed in milk potash manures appendix to chapter vi. note i. amount of potash in different minerals ii. quantity of potash obtained from lb. of different kinds of vegetation in the manufacture of potashes part iii.--manures. chapter vii.--farmyard manure. variation in its composition made up of three classes of constituents _solid excreta_-- its nature difference in composition of the solid excreta of the different farm animals causes of this difference percentage of manurial ingredients in solid excreta of different animals _urine_-- its nature variation in its composition causes of this variation manurial value of the urine of the different farm animals percentage of the _organic matter_, _nitrogen_, and _mineral substances_ in the food, voided in the solid excreta and urine comparison of manurial value of total excrements of the different farm animals nature of changes undergone by food in process of digestion _litter_-- its uses _straw_ as litter, and its qualifications composition of different kinds of straw _loam_ as litter _peat_ as litter comparison of properties of _peat-moss_ and _straw_ the _bracken-fern_ as litter _dried leaves_ as litter manures produced by the different animals-- _horse-manure_-- amount produced its nature and composition amount of straw used for litter sources of loss on keeping how to prevent loss use of "fixers," and the nature of their action _cow-manure_-- amount produced its nature and composition amount of straw used as litter sources of loss on keeping advantages of _short dung_ _pig-manure_-- amount produced its nature and composition amount of straw used as litter _sheep-manure_-- amount produced nature and composition amount of straw used as litter methods of calculating amount of manure produced on the farm , note fermentation of farmyard manure-- action of _micro-organic_ life in producing fermentation two classes of _bacteria_ active in this work, _aerobies_ and _anaerobies_ conditions influencing fermentation-- _temperature_ _openness to the air_ _dampness_ _composition of manure_ products of fermentation analyses of farmyard manure-- dr voelcker's experiments variation in composition amounts of _moisture_, _organic matter_ (containing _nitrogen_), and _mineral matter_ its manurial value compared with _nitrate of soda_, _sulphate of ammonia_, and _superphosphate_ comparison of fresh and rotten manure-- the nature and amount of loss sustained in the process of _rotting_ ought manure to be applied _fresh_ or _rotten_? relative merits of _covered_ and _uncovered_ manure-heaps methods of application of farmyard manure to the field-- merits and demerits of the different methods setting it out in _heaps_ spreading it _broadcast_, and letting it lie ploughing it in immediately value and function of farmyard manure-- as a supplier of the necessary elements of plant-food as a "universal" manure proportion in which _nitrogen_, _phosphoric acid_, and _potash_ are required by crops proportion in which they are present in farmyard manure farmyard manure _poor in nitrogen_ lawes' and gilbert's experiments how it may be best reinforced by the use of "artificials" indirect value of farmyard manure as a supplier of _humus_ to the soil its influence on soil-texture its influence in setting free inert fertilising matter in the soil rate at which farmyard manure ought to be applied lasting nature of farmyard manure its economic value appendix to chapter vii. note i. difference in amount of excreta voided for food consumed ii. solid excreta voided by sheep, oxen, and cows iii. urine voided by sheep, oxen, and cows iv. percentage of food voided in the solid and liquid excrements v. pig excrements vi. manurial constituents in parts of ordinary foods vii. analyses of stable-manure, made respectively with peat-moss litter and wheat-straw viii. analyses of bracken ix. analyses of horse-manure x. the nature of the chemical reactions of ammonia "fixers" xi. analyses of cow-manure xii. composition of fresh and rotten farmyard manure xiii. comparison of fresh and rotten manure xiv. lord kinnaird's experiments xv. drainings of manure-heaps xvi. amounts of potash and phosphoric acid removed by rotation from a prussian morgen (. acre) xvii. composition of farmyard manure (fresh) xviii. the urine (quantity voided) chapter viii.--guano. importance in agriculture influence on british farming influence of guano not wholly good value of guano as a manure origin and occurrence of guano variation in composition of different guanos i. nitrogenous guano-- (_a_) peruvian guano different deposits of peruvian guano appearance, colour, and nature of peruvian guano composition of peruvian guano (_b_) other nitrogenous manures: angamos, ichaboe ii. phosphatic guanos-- occurrence of phosphatic guanos inequality in composition of phosphatic guanos "dissolved" phosphatic guano "equalised" or "rectified" guano the action of phosphatic guanos as manures proportion of fertilising constituents in guano mode of application of guanos quantity of guano to be used adulteration of guano so-called guanos-- fish-guano value of fish-guano meat-meal guano value of meat-meal guano bat guano pigeon and fowl dung appendix to chapter viii. note i. peruvian guano imported into united kingdom, - ii. guano deposits of the world iii. composition of concretionary nodules iv. table showing gradual deterioration of peruvian guano, - v. composition of different guanos vi. liebig's theory as to the action of oxalic acid in guano vii. analyses of dung of fowls, pigeons, ducks, and geese chapter ix.--nitrate of soda. amount of exports date of discovery of nitrate deposits the origin of nitrate deposits forbes and darwin on the theory of their origin source of nitric acid in nitrate of soda guano theory of origin of nitrate of soda nitric acid in nitrate of soda probably derived from sea-weed appearance of nitrate-fields the method of mining the nitrate of soda composition of _caliche_ extent of the nitrate deposits composition and properties of nitrate of soda nitrate applied as a top-dressing nitrate of soda encourages deep roots is nitrate of soda an exhausting manure? crops for which nitrate of soda is suited method of application of nitrate of soda importance of having a sufficiency of other fertilising constituents conclusions drawn appendix to chapter ix. total shipments from south america, - total imports into europe and united kingdom, - chapter x.--sulphate of ammonia. value of ammonia as a manure sources of sulphate of ammonia ammonia from gas-works other sources composition, &c., of sulphate of ammonia application of sulphate of ammonia appendix to chapter x. production of sulphate of ammonia in united kingdom, - chapter xi.--bones. early use of bones different forms in which bones are used composition of bones the organic matter of bones the inorganic matter of bones treatment of bones action of bones dissolved bones crops suited for bones bone-ash bone-char or bone-black appendix to chapter xi. note i. analysis of bone-meal ii. analysis of dissolved bones iii. composition of bone-ash iv. composition of bone-char chapter xii.--mineral phosphates. coprolites canadian apatite or phosphorite estremadura or spanish phosphates norwegian apatite charlestown or south carolina phosphate belgian phosphate somme phosphate florida phosphate lahn phosphate bordeaux or french phosphate algerian phosphate crust guanos value of mineral phosphates as manures appendix to chapter xii. imports of phosphates chapter xiii.--superphosphates. discovery of superphosphate by liebig manufacture of superphosphate nature of the reaction taking place phosphates of lime reverted phosphate value of reverted phosphate composition of superphosphates action of superphosphates action of superphosphate sometimes unfavourable application of superphosphate value of insoluble phosphates rate at which superphosphate is applied appendix to chapter xiii. note i. the formulæ, and molecular and percentage composition, of the different phosphates ii. reactions of sulphuric acid and phosphate of lime iii. table for conversion of soluble phosphate into insoluble phosphate iv. action of iron and alumina in causing reversion v. relative trade values of phosphoric acid in different manures chapter xiv.--thomas-phosphate or basic slag. its manufacture not at first used discovery of its value as a manure composition of basic slag processes for preparing slag solubility of basic slag darmstadt experiments with basic slag results of other experiments soils most suited for slag rate of application method of application appendix to chapter xiv. analysis of basic slag chapter xv.--potassic manures. relative importance scottish soils supplied with potash sources of potassic manures stassfurt potash salts relative merits of sulphate and muriate of potash application of potash manures soils and crops suited for potash manures rate of application chapter xvi.--minor artificial manures. scutch shoddy and wool-waste soot chapter xvii.--sewage as a manure. irrigation effects of continued application of sewage intermittent irrigation crops suited for sewage treatment of sewage by precipitation, &c. value of sewage sludge chapter xviii.--liquid manure chapter xix.--composts. farmyard manure a typical compost other composts chapter xx.--indirect manures. lime antiquity of lime as a manure action of lime lime a necessary plant-food lime of abundant occurrence lime returned to the soil in ordinary agricultural practice different forms of lime caustic lime lime acts both mechanically and chemically i. mechanical functions of lime action on soil's texture lime renders light soils more cohesive ii. chemical action of lime iii. biological action of lime action of lime on nitrogenous organic matter recapitulation chapter xxi.--indirect manures--gypsum, salt, etc. gypsum mode in which gypsum acts salt antiquity of the use of salt nature of its action salt not a necessary plant-food can soda replace potash? salt of universal occurrence special sources of salt the action of salt mechanical action on soils solvent action best used in small quantities along with manures affects quality of crop rate of application chapter xxii.--the application of manures. influence of manures in increasing soil-fertility influence of farmyard manure on the soil farmyard manure _v._ artificials farmyard manure not favourable to certain crops conditions determining the application of artificial manures nature of the manure nitrogenous manures phosphatic manures potash manures nature of soil nature of previous manuring nature of the crop amounts of fertilising ingredients removed from the soil by different crops capacity of crops for assimilating manures difference in root-systems of different crops period of growth variation in composition of crops absorption of plant-food fertilising ingredients lodge in the seed forms in which nitrogen exists in plants bearing of above on agricultural practice influence of excessive manuring of crops chapter xxiii.--manuring of the common farm crops. cereals especially benefited by nitrogenous manures power of absorbing silicates barley period of growth most suitable soil farmyard manure not suitable importance of uniform manuring of barley norfolk experiments on barley proportion of grain to straw wheat rothamsted experiments continuous growth flitcham experiments oats a very hardy crop require mixed nitrogenous manuring arendt's experiments avenine quantities of manures grass effect of manures on herbage of pastures influence of farmyard manure influence of soil and season on pastures manuring of meadow land bangor experiments norfolk experiments manuring of permanent pastures roots influence of manure on composition nitrogenous manures increase sugar amount of nitrogen recovered in increase of crop norfolk experiments manure for swedes highland society's experiments manuring for rich crops of turnips experiments by the author on turnips potatoes highland society's experiments the rothamsted experiments effect of farmyard manure manuring of potatoes in jersey the influence of manure on the composition leguminous crops leguminous plants benefit by potash nitrogenous manures may be hurtful clover sickness alternate wheat and bean rotation beans manure for beans relative value of manurial ingredients gypsum as a bean manure effect of manure on composition of crop peas hops cabbages appendix to chapter xxiii. experiments on bean-manuring chapter xxiv.--on the method of application, and on the mixing of manures. equal distribution of manures mixing manures risks of loss in mixtures loss of ammonia effects of lime on ammonia loss of nitric acid reversion of phosphates manurial ingredients should be applied separately chapter xxv.--on the valuation and analysis of manures. value of chemical analysis interpretation of chemical analysis nitrogen phosphoric acid importance of mechanical condition of phosphate potash other items in the chemical analysis of manures fertilisers and feeding stuffs act different methods of valuing manures unit value of manurial ingredients intrinsic value of manures field experiments educational value of field experiments value of manures deduced from experiments value of unexhausted manures potential fertility of a soil tables of value of unexhausted manures. appendix to chapter xxv. note i. factors for calculating compounds from manurial ingredients ii. units for determining commercial value of manures and cash prices of manures , iii. manurial value of nitrogen and potash in different substances iv. comparative manurial value of different forms of nitrogen and potash v. lawes' and gilbert's tables for calculating unexhausted value of manures chapter xxvi.--the rothamsted experiments. nature of experiments on crops and manures soil of rothamsted table i. list of rothamsted field experiments wheat experiments-- unmanured plots wheat grown continuously on same land (unmanured) table ii. results of first eight years table iii. results of subsequent forty years table iv. wheat grown continuously with farmyard manure ( tons per annum) table v. wheat grown continuously with artificial manures table vi. experiments on the growth of barley, forty years, - table vii. experiments on the growth of oats, - table viii. experiments on root crops--swedish turnips , table ix. experiments on mangel-wurzel , table x. experiments with different manures on permanent meadow-land, thirty-six years, - table xi. experiments on the growth of potatoes--average for five seasons, - table xii. experiments on growth of potatoes (continued)-- average for twelve seasons, - * * * * * index part i. historical introduction manures and the principles of manuring. historical introduction. agricultural chemistry, like most branches of natural science, may be said to be entirely of modern growth. while it is true we have many old speculations on the subject, they can scarcely be said to possess much scientific value. the great questions which had first to be solved by the agricultural chemist were,--what is the food of plants? and,--what is the source of that food? the second of these two questions more easily admitted of answer than the first. the source of plant-food could only be the atmosphere or the soil. as the composition of the atmosphere, however, was not discovered till the close of last century, and the chemistry of the soil is a question which is still requiring much work ere we shall be in possession of anything like a full knowledge of it, it will be at once obvious that the very fundamental conditions for a solution of the question were awanting. the beginning, then, of a true scientific agricultural chemistry may be said to date from the brilliant discoveries associated with the names of priestley, scheele, lavoisier, cavendish, and black--that is, towards the close of last century. _early theories on source of plant-food._ while this is so, and while we must regard the early attempts made towards solving this question as being, for the most part, of little scientific value, it is not without interest, from the historical point of view, to glance briefly at some of these old interesting speculations. the aristotelian doctrine, regarding the possibility of dividing matter into the so-called four primary elements, _fire_, _air_, _earth_, and _water_, which obtained in one form or another till the birth of modern chemistry, had naturally an important influence on these early theories. _van helmont's theory._ among the earliest and most important attempts made to solve the problem of plant-growth was that by jean baptiste van helmont, one of the best known of the alchemists, who flourished about the beginning of the seventeenth century. van helmont believed that he had proved by a conclusive experiment that all the products of vegetables were capable of being generated from water. the details of this classical experiment were as follows:-- "he took a given weight of dry soil-- lb.--and into this soil he planted a willow-tree that weighed lb., and he watered this carefully from time to time with pure rain-water, taking care to prevent any dust or dirt falling on to the earth in which the plant grew. he allowed this to go on growing for five years, and at the end of that period, thinking his experiment had been conducted sufficiently long, he pulled up his tree by the roots, shook all the earth off, dried the earth again, weighed the earth and weighed the plant. he found that the plant now weighed lb. ounces, whereas the weight of the soil remained very nearly what it was--about lb. it had only lost ounces in weight."[ ] the conclusion, therefore, come to by van helmont was that the source of plant-food was _water_.[ ] _digby's theory._ some fifty years later an extremely interesting book was published bearing the following title: 'a discourse concerning the vegetation of plants, spoken by sir kenelm digby, at gresham college, on the d of january . (at a meeting of the society for promoting philosophical knowledge by experiments. london: printed for john williams, in little britain, over against st botolph's church, .)' the author attributes plant-growth to the influence of a _balsam_ which the air contains. this book is especially interesting as containing the earliest recognition of the value of saltpetre as a manure. the following is an extract from this interesting old work:-- "the sickness, and at last the death of a plant, in its natural course, proceeds from the want of that balsamick saline juice; which, i have said, makes it swell, germinate, and augment itself. this want may proceed either from a destitution of it in the place where the plant grows, as when it is in a barren soil or bad air, or from a defect in the plant itself, that hath not vigour sufficient to attract it, though it be within the sphere of it; as when the root has become so hard, obstructed and cold, as that it hath lost its vegetable functions. now, both these may be remedy'd, in a great measure, by one and the same physick.... the watering of soils with cold hungray springs doth little good; whereas muddy saline waters brought to overflow a piece of ground enrich it much. but above all, well-digested dew makes all plants luxuriate and prosper most. now what may it be that endues these liquors with such prolifick virtue? the meer water which is common to them all, cannot be it; there must be something else enclosed within it, to which the water serves but for a vehicle. examine it by spagyric art, and you will find that it is nothing else than a _nitrous salt_, which is dilated in the water. it is this salt which gives foecundity to all things: and from this salt (rightly understood) not only all vegetables, but also all minerals draw their origine. by the help of plain _salt-peter_, dilated in water and mingled with some other fit earthy substance, that may familiarize it a little with the corn into which i endeavoured to introduce it, i have made the barrenest ground far out-go the richest, in giving a prodigiously plentiful harvest. i have seen hemp-seed soaked in this liquor, that hath in due time made such plants arise, as, for the tallness and hardness of them, seemed rather to be coppice-wood of fourteen years' growth at least, than plain hemp. the fathers of the christian doctrine at paris still keep by them for a monument (and indeed it is an admirable one) a plant of barley consisting of stalks, springing from one root or grain of barley; in which they counted above , grains or seeds of barley. but do you think that it is barely the salt-peter, imbibed into the seed or root, which causeth this fertility? no: that would be soon exhausted and could not furnish matter to so vast a progeny. the salt-peter there is like a magnet, which attracts a like salt which foecundates the air, and gave cause to the cosmopolite to say there is in the air a hidden food of life."[ ] _duhamel and hales._ the names of the french writer, duhamel, and of the english, stephen hales, may be mentioned in passing as authors of works bearing on the question of vegetable physiology. both of these writers flourished about the middle of the eighteenth century. the writings of the former contained much valuable information on the effects of grafting, motion of sap, and influence of light on vegetable growth, and also the results of experiments which the author had carried out on the influence of treating plants with certain substances. 'statical essays, containing vegetable staticks; or an account of some statical experiments on the sap of vegetables, by stephen hales, d.d.' ( vols.), was published in london in ; and contained, as will be seen from its title, records of experiments of very much the same nature as those of duhamel. _jethro tull's theory._ some reference may be made to a theory which created a considerable amount of interest when it was first published--viz., that of jethro tull. the chief value of tull's contribution to the subject of agricultural science was, that he emphasised the importance of tillage operations by putting forward a theory to account for the fact, universally recognised, that the more thoroughly a soil was tilled, the more luxuriant the crops would be. as tull's theory had a very considerable influence in stirring up interest in many of the most important problems in agricultural chemistry, and as it contained in itself much, the value of which we have only of late years come to understand, a brief statement of this theory may not be without interest. according to tull the food of plants consists of the particles of the soil. these particles, however, must be rendered very minute before they become available for the plant, which absorbs them by means of its rootlets. this pulverisation of the soil goes on in nature independently of the farmer, but only very slowly, and the farmer has therefore to hasten it on by means of tillage operations. the more efficiently these operations are carried on, the more abundant will the supply of plant-food be rendered in the soil. he consequently introduced and advocated the system of horse-hoe husbandry. this theory, he informs us, was suggested to him by the custom, which he had noticed on the continent, of growing vines in rows, and hoeing the intervals between these rows from time to time. the excellent results which followed this mode of cultivation induced him to adopt it in england for his farm crops. he accordingly sowed his crops in rows or ridges, wide enough apart to admit of thorough tillage of the intervals by ploughing as well as by hand-hoeing. this he continued until the plant had reached maturity. as to the exact width of the interval most suitable, he made a large number of experiments. at first, in the cultivation of wheat, he made this interval six feet wide; but latterly he adopted an interval of lesser width, that finally arrived at being between four and five feet. he likewise experimented on each separate ridge as to which was the best number of rows of wheat to be sown, latterly adopting, as most convenient, two rows at ten inches apart. the great success which he met with in this system of cultivation induced him to publish the results of his experiments in his famous work, 'horse-hoeing husbandry.' while tull's theory was based on principles at heart thoroughly sound, he was carried away by his personal success into drawing unwarrantable deductions. thus he came to the conclusion that rotation of crops was unnecessary, provided that a thorough system of tillage was carried out. manures also, according to him, might be entirely dispensed with under his system of cultivation, for the true function of all manures is to aid in the pulverisation of the soil by fermentation. the first really valuable scientific facts contributed to the science were made by priestley, bonnet, ingenhousz, and sénébier. _discovery of the source of plants' carbon._ to charles bonnet ( - ), a swiss naturalist, is due the credit of having made the first contribution to a discovery of very great importance--viz., the true source of the _carbon_, which we now know forms so large a portion of the plant-substance. bonnet, who had devoted himself to the question of the function of leaves, noticed that when these were immersed in water bubbles were seen, after a time, to collect on their surface. de la hire, it ought to be pointed out, had noticed this same fact about sixty years earlier. it was left to priestley, however, to identify these bubbles with the gas he had a short time previously discovered--viz., oxygen. priestley had observed, about this time, the interesting fact that plants possessed the power of purifying air vitiated by the presence of animal life.[ ] the next step in this highly interesting and important discovery was taken by john ingenhousz ( - ), an eminent physician and natural philosopher. in , ingenhousz published a work in london entitled 'experiments on vegetables.' in it he gives the results of some important experiments he had made on the question already investigated by bonnet and priestley. these experiments proved that plant-leaves only gave up their oxygen in the presence of sunlight. in he published another work on 'the influence of the vegetable kingdom on the animal creation.'[ ] the source of the gas, which bonnet had first noticed to be given off from plant-leaves, priestley had identified as oxygen, and ingenhousz had proved to be only given off under the influence of the sun's rays, was finally shown by a swiss naturalist, jean sénébier[ ] ( - ), to be the _carbonic acid gas_ in the air, which the plant absorbed and decomposed, giving out the oxygen and assimilating the carbon. _publication of first english treatise on agricultural chemistry._ in , a book dealing with the relations between chemistry and agriculture was published. this work was written by a scottish nobleman, the earl of dundonald, and possesses especial interest from the fact that it is the first book in the english language on agricultural chemistry. the full title is as follows: 'a treatise showing the intimate connection that subsists between agriculture and chemistry.' in his introduction the author says: "the slow progress which agriculture has hitherto made as a science is to be ascribed to a want of education on the part of the cultivators of the soil, and to a want of knowledge, in such authors as have written on agriculture, of the intimate connection that subsists between the science and that of chemistry. indeed, there is no operation or process not merely mechanical that does not depend on chemistry, which is defined to be a knowledge of the properties of bodies, and of the effects resulting from their different combinations." in quoting this passage professor s. w. johnson remarks:[ ] "earl dundonald could not fail to see that chemistry was ere long to open a splendid future for the ancient art that had always been and always will be the prime supporter of the nations. but when he wrote, how feeble was the light that chemistry could throw upon the fundamental questions of agricultural science! the chemical nature of the atmosphere was then a discovery of barely twenty years' standing. the composition of water had been known but twelve years. the only account of the composition of plants that earl dundonald could give was the following: 'vegetables consist of mucilaginous matter, resinous matter, matter analogous to that of animals, and some proportion of oil.... besides these, vegetables contain earthy matters, formerly held in solution in the newly-taken-in juices of the growing vegetables.' to be sure, he explains by mentioning in subsequent pages that starch belongs to the mucilaginous matter, and that on analysis by fire vegetables yield soluble alkaline salts and insoluble phosphate of lime. but these salts, he held, were formed in the process of burning, their lime excepted; and the fact of their being taken from the soil and constituting the indispensable food of plants, his lordship was unacquainted with. the gist of agricultural chemistry with him was, that plants 'are composed of gases with a small proportion of calcareous matter; for although this discovery may appear to be of small moment to the practical farmer, yet it is well deserving of his attention and notice.'" _de saussure._ the year witnessed the publication of by far the most important contribution made to the science up till this time. this was 'recherches chimique sur la végétation,' by theodore de saussure, one of the most illustrious agricultural chemists of the century. de saussure was the first to draw attention to the mineral or ash constituents of the plant; and thus anticipate, to a certain extent, the subsequent famous "mineral" theory of the great liebig. the french chemist maintained that these ash ingredients were essential; and that without them plant-life was impossible. he also adduced fresh experiments of his own in support of the theory, based on the experiments of bonnet, priestley, ingenhousz, and sénébier, that plants obtain their carbon from the carbonic acid gas in the air, under the influence of the sunlight. he was of opinion that the _hydrogen_ and _oxygen_ of the plant were, probably, chiefly derived from water. he showed that by far the largest portion of the plant's substance was derived from the air and from water, and that the ash portion was alone derived from the soil. to saussure we owe the first definite statement on the different sources of the plant's food. it may be said that the lapse of nearly a century has shown his views to be, in the main, correct. _source of plant-nitrogen._ there was one question, which, even at that remote period in the history of the subject, engaged the attention of agricultural chemists--viz., the question of the source of the plant's _nitrogen_--a question which may be fitly described at the present hour as still the burning question of agricultural chemistry.[ ] as soon as it was discovered that nitrogen was a constituent of the plant's substance; speculations as to its source were indulged in. the fact that the air furnished an unlimited storehouse of this valuable element, and the analogy of the absorption of carbon (from the same source by plant-leaves), naturally suggested to the minds of early inquirers that the free nitrogen of the air was the source of the plant's nitrogen. as, however, no direct experiments could be adduced to prove this theory, and as, moreover, nitrogen was found in the soil, and seemed to be a necessary ingredient of all fertile soils, the opinion that the soil was the only source gradually supplanted the older theory. little value, however, must be attached to these early theories, as they can scarcely be said to have been based on experiments of serious value. indeed it may be safely affirmed, in the light of subsequent experiments, that it was impossible for this question to be decided at this early period, from the fact that analytical apparatus, of a sufficiently delicate nature, was then wholly unknown. indeed it is only within the last few years that it has been possible to carry out experiments which may be regarded as at all crucial. a short sketch of the development of our knowledge of the relation of nitrogen to the plant will be given further on. _sir humphry davy's lectures._ a series of lectures on agricultural chemistry, delivered by sir humphry davy during the years - , for the board of agriculture, and subsequently published in book form in the year ,[ ] affords us an opportunity of gauging, pretty accurately, the state of knowledge on the subject at the time. _position of agricultural chemistry at beginning of century._ in his opening lecture davy says: "agricultural chemistry has not yet received a regular and systematic form. it has been pursued by competent experimenters for a short time only. the doctrines have not as yet been collected into any elementary treatise, ... and," he adds, "i am sure you will receive with indulgence the first attempt made in this country to illustrate it by a series of experimental demonstrations." he further on remarks: "it is evident that the study of agricultural chemistry ought to be commenced by some general inquiries into the composition and nature of material bodies, and the law of their changes. the surface of the earth, the atmosphere, and the water deposited from it, must either together, or separately, afford all the principles concerned in vegetation, and it is only by examining the chemical nature of these principles that we are capable of discovering what is the food of plants, and the manner in which this food is supplied and prepared for their nourishment." davy goes on further to say: "no general principles can be laid down respecting the comparative merits of the different systems of cultivation and the various systems of crops adopted in different districts, unless the chemical nature of the soil, and the physical circumstances to which it is exposed, are fully known." he recognises the enormous importance of experiments. "nothing is more wanting in agriculture than experiments, in which all the circumstances are minutely and scientifically detailed." in dealing with the composition of plants he says: "it is evident that the most essential vegetable substances consist of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, in different proportions, generally alone; but in some few cases combined as carbon and nitrogen. the acids, alkalies, earths, metallic oxides, and saline compounds, though necessary in the vegetable economy, must be considered as of less importance, particularly in their relation to agriculture, than the other principles." further on: "it will be asked, are the pure earths in the soil merely active as mechanical or indirect chemical agents, or do they actually afford food to the plant?" this question he answers by saying that "water, and the decomposing animal and vegetable matter existing in the soil, constitute the true nourishment of plants; and as the earthy parts of the soil are useful in retaining water, so as to supply it in the proper proportion to the roots of the vegetables, so they are likewise efficacious in producing the proper distribution of the animal or vegetable matter. when equally mixed with it, they prevent it from decomposing too rapidly; and by their means the soluble parts are supplied in proper proportions." _value of davy's lectures._ the chief value of these lectures is due to the fact that they form the first attempt to connect in a systematic manner the various scattered facts, up to that time ascertained, and to interpret their bearing on agricultural practice. we have in them, it is true, a strange mixture of facts belonging rather to botany and physiology than to agricultural chemistry; still they undoubtedly furnished a great impetus to inquiry, and at the same time they did much to popularise the science. but not merely did davy summarise and systematise the various results arrived at by others, he also made many valuable contributions to the science himself. the conclusions he drew from the results he obtained were, no doubt, in many cases false, and in other cases exaggerated; still the results possess a permanent interest. he may be said to have worked out many of the most important _physical_ or _mechanical_ properties of a soil, although exaggerating the importance of the influence of these properties on the question of fertility.[ ] these experiments had to do with the heat- and water-absorbing powers of a soil. he experimented on a brown fertile soil, and a cold barren clay, and found at what rate they lost heat. "nothing," he says, "can be more evident than that the genial heat of the soil, particularly in spring, must be of the highest importance to the rising plant; ... so that the temperature of the surface, when bare and exposed to the rays of the sun, affords at least one indication of the degree of the fertility." again he says: "the power of soils to absorb water from air is much connected with fertility.... i have compared the absorbent powers of many soils, with respect to atmospheric moisture, and i have always found it greatest in the most fertile soils; so that it affords one method of judging of the productiveness of land." where he erred was in overestimating the functions of the mechanical properties of a soil, and in considering fertility to be due to them alone. during the next thirty years or so, little progress seems to have been made in the way of fresh experimentation. _boussingault._ in , boussingault,[ ] the most distinguished french agricultural chemist of the century, began that series of brilliant chemico-agricultural experiments on his estate at bechelbronn, in alsace, the results of which have added so much to agricultural science. it was the first instance of the combination of "science with practice," of the institution of a laboratory on a farm; a combination peculiarly fitted to promote the interests of agricultural science, and an example which has been since followed with such magnificent results in the case of sir john lawes's famous rothamsted experiment station, and other less known research stations. boussingault's first paper appeared in , and was entitled, "the amount of nitrogen in different kinds of foods, and on the equal value of foods founded on these data." in the year following other papers were published on such subjects as the amount of gluten in different kinds of wheat; on the meteorological considerations of how far various agricultural operations--such as extensive clearings of wood, the draining of large swamps, &c.--influence of climate on a country; and on experiments on the culture of the vine. boussingault was the first observer to study the scientific principles underlying the system of _rotation of crops_. in he published the results of some very elaborate experiments he had carried out on this subject. he also was the first chemist to carry out elaborate experiments with a view to deciding the question of the assimilation by plants of free atmospheric nitrogen. his first contribution to the subject was published in , but can scarcely be regarded as possessing much scientific value, except in so far as it stimulated further research. some thirteen years later he returned to this question; and during the years - carried out most elaborate experiments, the results of which, until quite recently, were generally regarded as having, along with the experiments of messrs lawes, gilbert, and pugh, definitely settled the question.[ ] in boussingault was elected a member of the french institute, an honour paid to him in recognition of his great services to agricultural chemistry.[ ] the foregoing is a brief epitome of the history of the development of agricultural chemistry up to the year , the year which witnessed the publication of one of the most memorable works on the subject, which has appeared during the present century--liebig's first report to the british association, a work which may be described as constituting an epoch in the history of the science. liebig's position as an agricultural chemist was so prominent, and his influence as a teacher so potent, that a few biographical facts may not be out of place before entering upon an estimate of his work. _liebig._ liebig was born at darmstadt in the year . he was the son of a drysalter, and early devoted himself to the study of chemistry in the only way at first at his disposal--viz., in an apothecary's shop. soon finding, however, his opportunities of study limited, he left the apothecary's shop for the university of bonn. he did not remain long at bonn, but in a short time left that university for erlangen, where he studied for some years, taking his ph.d. degree in . his subsequent studies were carried on at paris under gay-lussac, thénard, dulong, and other distinguished chemists. through the influence of a. humboldt, who was at that time in paris, and whose acquaintance he was fortunate enough to make, he was received into gay-lussac's private laboratory. in --that is, when he was only twenty-one years of age--he was appointed professor _extraordinarius_ of chemistry at the university of giessen. two years later he was appointed to the post of professor _ordinarius_--an appointment which he held for twenty-five years. in he was created baron, and in appointed professor at munich. he died in . _his first report to british association._ the report above referred to was made by liebig at the request of the chemical section of the british association. it was read to a meeting of the association held in glasgow in , and was subsequently published in book form, under the title of 'chemistry in its application to agriculture and physiology,' liebig's position, past training and experience were such as to peculiarly fit him for the part of pioneer in the new science. as sir j. h. gilbert has remarked,[ ] "in the treatment of his subject he not only called to his aid the previously existing knowledge directly bearing upon his subject, but he also turned to good account the more recent triumphs of organic chemistry, many of which had been won in his own laboratory." in his dedication to the british association at the beginning of the book, liebig says: "perfect agriculture is the true foundation of all trade and industry--it is the foundation of the riches of states. but a rational system of agriculture cannot be formed without the application of scientific principles; for such a system must be based on an exact acquaintance with the means of nutrition of vegetables, and with the influence of soils and actions of manure upon them. this knowledge we must seek from chemistry, which teaches the mode of investigating the composition and of studying the characters of the different substances from which plants derive their nourishment." _his criticism of the "humus" theory._ the first subject which liebig discusses is the scientific basis of the so-called "humus" theory. the humus theory seems to have been first promulgated by einhof and thaer towards the close of last century. thaer held that humus was the source of plant-food. he stated in his published writings that the fertility of a soil depended really upon its humus; for this substance, with the exception of water, is the only source of plant-food. de saussure, however, by his experiments--the results of which he had published in --had shown the fallacy of this humus theory; and his statements had been further developed and substantiated by the investigations of the french chemist braconnot and the german chemist sprengel. despite, however, the experiments of saussure, braconnot, and sprengel, the belief that plants derived the carbonaceous portion of their substance from humus still seemed to be commonly held in . while liebig, therefore, can scarcely be said to have been the first to controvert the humus theory, he certainly dealt it its death-blow. he reasserted de saussure's conclusions, and by some simple calculations showed very clearly that it was wholly untenable. one of the most striking of the arguments he brought forward was the fact that the humus of the soil itself consisted of the decayed vegetable matter of preceding plants. this being so, how, he asked, could it be the original source of the carbon of plants? to reason thus was simply to reason in a circle. he pointed out, further, that the comparative insolubility of humus in water, or even in alkaline solutions, told against its acceptance as correct. _his mineral theory._ having thus controverted the humus theory, he then goes on to deal with the question of the source of the various plant constituents. in treating of the relation of the soil to the plant, he puts forward his "mineral" theory. it cannot be doubted that, while the advance of science since liebig's time has induced us to considerably modify his mineral theory, it contained the statement of one of the most important facts in the chemistry of plant physiology. he was the first to fully estimate the enormous importance of the mineral portion of the plant's food, and point the way to one of the chief sources of a soil's fertility. up to this period the ash constituents had been generally considered to be of minor importance. by emphasising the contrary opinion, and insisting upon their essentialness to plant-life, he gave to agricultural research a fresh impetus upon the right lines. his statement of his mineral theory was in the main true, but was not the whole truth. de saussure, as has already been pointed out, to a certain extent, anticipated liebig's mineral theory. he was of the opinion that whatever might be the case with some of the mineral constituents of plants, others were necessary, inasmuch as they were always found in the ash. of these he instanced the alkaline phosphates. "their small quantity does not indicate their inutility," he sagaciously remarks. sir humphry davy, as has already been pointed out, missed recognising the true importance of the ash constituents. it was left to liebig, then, to restate the important doctrine of the essentialness of the mineral matter, already implied to some extent by de saussure. liebig says: "carbonic acid, water, and ammonia are necessary for the existence of plants, because they contain the elements from which their organs are formed; but other substances are likewise necessary for the formation of certain organs destined for special functions, peculiar to each family of plants. plants obtain these substances from inorganic nature." while insisting on the importance of the mineral constituents, he did so in a more or less general way not sufficiently distinguishing one mineral constituent from another. as all plants contained certain organic acids, and as these organic acids were nearly always found in a neutral state--_i.e._, in combination with bases, such as potash, soda, lime, and magnesia--the plant must be in a position to take up sufficient of these alkaline bases to neutralise these acids. hence the necessity of these mineral constituents in the soil. according to him, however, the exact nature of the bases was a point of not so much importance. he assumed, in short, as has been pointed out by sir j. h. gilbert, a greater amount of mutual replaceability amongst the bases than can be now admitted. passing on to a consideration of the difference of the mineral composition of different soils, he attributes this to the difference in the rocks forming the soils. "weathering" is the great agent at work in rendering available the otherwise locked-up stores of fertility. he attributes the benefits of fallow exclusively to the increased supply of these incombustible compounds which were thus rendered available to the plant. treating of this subject, he says: "from the preceding part of this chapter" (in which he has been explaining weathering) "it will be seen that fallow is that period of culture when the land is exposed to progressive disintegration by the action of the weather, for the purpose of liberating a certain quantity of alkalies and silica, to be absorbed by future plants." _his theory of manures._ treating of manures, he showed how the most important constituents of manures were _potash_ and _phosphates_. in the first edition of his work he also insisted on the value of _nitrogen_ in manures, condemning the want of precautions, in the treatment of animal manures, against loss of nitrogen. in the later editions of his work he seems to have receded from that opinion, and considered that there was no necessity for supplying nitrogen in manures, since the ammonia washed down in rain was a sufficient source of all the nitrogen the plant required. it was here that liebig went astray, first in denying the importance of supplying nitrogen as a manure; and secondly, in overestimating the amount of ammonia washed down in rain, which has subsequently been shown to be entirely inadequate to supply plants with the whole of their nitrogen.[ ] _his theory of rotation of crops._ in explaining the benefits of the rotation of crops, liebig propounded a very ingenious theory, but one which was largely of a speculative nature, and which has since been shown to be unfounded on any scientific basis. it was to the effect that one kind of crop excreted matters which were especially favourable to another kind of crop. he did not say whether he considered such excretion positively injurious to the crop which excreted them; but he inferred that what was excreted by the crop was what was not required, and what could, therefore, be of little benefit to a crop of the same nature following it. the second portion of liebig's report dealt with the processes of fermentation, decay, and putrefaction. _publication of liebig's second report to british association._ in liebig contributed his second famous report to the british association, subsequently published under the title of 'animal chemistry; or, organic chemistry in its applications to physiology and pathology.' the publication of this report created even greater interest than the publication of his first work. in it he may be said to have contributed as much to animal physiology, as, in his first, he did to agricultural chemistry. his subsequent principal works on agricultural chemistry were--'principles of agricultural chemistry,' published in , and 'on theory and practice in agriculture,' . _liebig's services to agricultural chemistry._ an attempt has been made to sketch in the very briefest manner some of the main points in liebig's teaching, as contained in his famous report to the british association in . agricultural chemistry up till that year can scarcely be described as having a distinct existence as a branch of chemistry. much valuable work, it is true, had already been done, especially by his two great predecessors, de saussure and boussingault; but it was, down to the year , a science made up of isolated facts. liebig's genius formed it into an important branch of chemistry, supplied the necessary connection between the facts, and by a series of brilliant generalisations formed the principles upon which all subsequent advance has been built. as has already been indicated, liebig's chief claim to rank as the greatest agricultural chemist of the century does not rest upon the number or value of his actual researches, but on the formative power he exercised in the evolution of the science. his master-mind surveyed the whole field of agricultural chemistry, and saw laws and principles where others saw simply a confusion of isolated, and, in many cases, seemingly contradictory facts. but great as the direct value of liebig's work was, it may be questioned whether its indirect value was not even greater. the publication of his famous work had the effect of giving a general interest to questions which up till then had possessed a special interest, and that for comparatively few. both on the continent and in england a very large amount of discussion took place regarding his various theories. _development of agricultural research in germany._ it was especially in germany, however, that liebig's work bore its greatest and most immediate fruit. thanks to the great chemist, the german government recognised the importance of forwarding scientific research by state aid. agricultural departments were added to some of the universities, largely at state expense, while agricultural research stations were, one after another, instituted in different parts of the country. the first of the agricultural research stations to be founded was the now famous one of möckern, near leipzig. it was instituted in the year . others followed, until at the present day there are some seventy to eighty of these _versuchs-stationen_ scattered throughout germany, all well equipped and doing excellent work. some idea of the activity of the german stations may be inferred when it is stated that up to the year the total number of papers embodying the results of their experiments published by them amount to over .[ ] to trace the development of agricultural chemistry, subsequent to liebig's time, in the way it has been done prior to the year , is no longer possible. this is due to the enormous increase in the number of workers in the field, as also to the overlapping nature of their work, which renders a strict chronological record wellnigh an impossibility. it will be better, therefore, to attempt to give a brief statement of our present knowledge on the subject, naming the chief workers in the various departments of the subject. _the rothamsted experiments._ before doing so, it is fitting that reference should be made to the work and experiments of two living english chemists, who have done much to contribute to our knowledge in every branch of the science--viz., sir john lawes, bart., and sir j. h. gilbert, f.r.s. the fame of the rothamsted experiments is now world-wide; and no single experiment station has ever produced such an amount of important work as the magnificently equipped research station at rothamsted. the rothamsted station may be said to date from , although sir john lawes was engaged in carrying out field experiments for ten years previous to that date.[ ] in sir john lawes associated with himself the distinguished chemist sir j. h. gilbert, and the numerous papers since published have almost invariably borne the two names. the expense of working the station has been borne entirely by sir john lawes himself; who has further set aside a sum of £ , , the laboratory, and certain areas of land, for the continuance of the investigations after his death. the fields under experimentation amount to about fifty acres. by a trust-deed, which was signed on february , , sir john lawes has made over the rothamsted experimental station to the english nation, to be managed by trustees. it is impossible to enter, in any detail, into the nature and scope of the rothamsted experiments.[ ] it may be stated that, since the year , some eighty papers have been published on field experiments, and experiments on vegetation; while thirty papers have been published recording experiments on the feeding of animals.[ ] what has all along characterised these valuable experiments has been their practical nature. while their aim has been entirely scientific, the scale of the experiments and the conditions under which they have been carried out, have been such as to render them essentially _technical_ experiments. for this reason their results possess, and will always possess, a peculiar interest for every practical farmer. the greatest services the rothamsted experiments have rendered agricultural chemistry have been the valuable contributions they have made to our knowledge of the function of nitrogen in agriculture; its relation in its different chemical forms to plant-life; and the sources of the nitrogen found in plants. researches of a most elaborate nature have been carried out on what is still one of the most keenly debated questions of the present hour--viz., the relation of the "free" nitrogen in the atmosphere to the plant. of the very highest value also have been the elaborate researches of mr r. warington, f.r.s., on the important question of _nitrification_, which have been in course in the rothamsted laboratory for the last fifteen years, and to which full reference will be made in the chapter on nitrification. to the rothamsted experiments also we owe the refutation of liebig's mineral theory. in fact it may safely be said that no experimenters in the field of agricultural chemistry have made more numerous or valuable contributions to the science than these illustrious investigators. _review of our present knowledge of agricultural chemistry._ some attempt may now be made to indicate briefly our present knowledge of the more important facts regarding plant physiology, agronomy, and manuring. _proximate composition of the plant._ the great advance made in the direction of the improvement of the accuracy of old analytical processes and the discovery of numerous new ones have furnished us with elaborate analyses of the composition of plants. we now know that the plant-substance is made up of a large number of complex organic substances, formed out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen,[ ] and that these substances form, on an average, about per cent of the dry vegetable matter; the other per cent being made up of mineral substances. as to the source of these different substances, our knowledge is, on the whole, pretty complete. with regard to the carbon of green-leaved plants, which amounts to from to per cent, subsequent research has confirmed sénébier and de saussure's conclusions, that its source is the carbonic acid gas of the air. the decomposition of the carbonic acid gas is effected by the leaves under the influence of sunlight. that a certain quantity of carbon may be obtained from the carbonic acid absorbed by plant-roots, is indeed probable. especially during the early stages of plant-growth this source of carbon may be of considerable importance. generally speaking, however, it may be said of all green-leaved plants, that the chief source of their carbon is the carbonic acid gas in the atmosphere. _carbon fixation by plants._ the exact way in which this decomposition of carbonic acid gas is effected by the leaves is not yet clear. it seems to be directly dependent, in some way or other, on the chlorophyll, or green colouring matter. this decomposition of carbonic acid, and the fixation of the carbon by the plant with the formation of starch, takes place only under the influence of sunlight. during the night a reflex action takes place, which is commonly known as _respiration_, and which is exactly analogous to animal respiration.[ ] the rate at which the fixation of carbon takes place depends on the strength of the sun's rays. it seems to take place very rapidly under a strong tropical sun.[ ] the action of sunlight on the absorption of carbon has been studied by a number of observers, among others by sachs, draper, cloez, gratiolet, caillet, prillieux, lommel, &c. _action of light on plant-growth._ experiments made by several observers, more especially pfeffer, have shown that the yellow rays of the solar spectrum are the most potent in inducing this decomposition. some interesting experiments have been carried out by different observers on the possibility of growing plants under the influence of artificial light. while it would seem that the light from oil-lamps or gaslight is unable to promote growth, except in very exceptional cases, the electric light, or other strong artificial light, seems to be capable of taking the place of sunlight. heinrich was the first to show that sunlight could be replaced by the magnesium light. experiments with the electric light have been carried out by hervé-mangon in france and dr siemens in england. the plants grown under the influence of the electric light were observed to be of a lighter green colour than those grown under normal conditions, thus indicating a feebler growth; in fact, siemens was of the opinion that the electric light was about half as effective as daylight.[ ] these experiments are interesting from an industrial point of view; for it is conceivable that at some distant time electricity might be called to the aid of the agriculturist. _source of plants' oxygen._ with regard to the source of the oxygen, which, next to carbon, is the element most largely present in the plant's substance--amounting to, roughly speaking, about per cent--all evidence seems to indicate that it is chiefly derived from water, which is also the source of the plant's hydrogen. in addition to water, carbonic acid and nitric acid may also furnish small quantities. it has been pretty conclusively proved that the atmospheric oxygen, while necessary to plant-growth, and promoting the various chemical vital processes, is not a direct source of the plant's oxygen. the important function played by atmospheric oxygen in certain stages of the plant's growth has been long recognised. malpighi, nearly two hundred years ago, observed that for the process of germination atmospheric air was necessary; and shortly after the discovery of the composition of the air was made, oxygen was identified as the important gas in promoting this process. oxygen is also especially necessary during the period of ripening. _source of plants' hydrogen._ hydrogen, which amounts to about per cent, is, as has already been pointed out, chiefly derived from water. it is possible that ammonia also may form a source. _source of plants' nitrogen._ when we come to treat of the source of the nitrogen, which is found in the plant's substance to an extent varying from a fraction of a per cent to about per cent, we enter on a much more debated question. what is the source, or, what are the sources, of plant-nitrogen? is a question to the solution of which more time and more research have been devoted than to the solution of any other question connected with agricultural chemistry. the most obvious source is the free nitrogen, which forms four-fifths of the atmospheric air. reference has already been made to this question.[ ] priestley was the first of the long list of experimenters on this interesting question. as far back as he affirmed that certain plants had the power of absorbing free nitrogen; and this opinion he supported by the results of certain experiments he had made on the subject. eight years later,--viz., in --ingenhousz further supported this conclusion, and stated that all plants could absorb, within the space of a few hours, noticeable quantities of nitrogen gas. the first to oppose this theory was de saussure, who, in , carried out experiments which showed that plants were unable to utilise free nitrogen. subsequent experiments, carried out by woodhouse and sénébier, supported de saussure's conclusions. mention has already been made of boussingault's elaborate researches on the subject.[ ] his first experiments were carried out in . he concluded that plants did not absorb free nitrogen. georges ville was the first to reassert the older theory, put forward by priestley and ingenhousz. his opinion was founded on experiments he had carried out during the years - . the subject created so much interest at the time, that a committee of the french academy--consisting of dumas, regnault, péligot, chevreul, and decaisne--were appointed to investigate ville's experiments. the result of the investigation of the commission was to confirm ville's experiments. it is a significant fact, however, that the plant experimented with by the commission was _cress--a non-leguminous plant_. it has been commonly assumed that the results of recent experiments have confirmed ville's experiments. it is only proper to point out that this is not a necessary inference. the assimilation of free nitrogen by the _leguminosæ_, so far as modern research has revealed, only takes place under the influence of micro-organic life. ville's experiments, however, were supposed to be conducted under _sterilised_ conditions. in the meantime the results of boussingault's second series of experiments, carried out between the years and , were published, and confirmed his earlier experiments. the results of a large number of experiments subsequently carried out were in support of boussingault's conclusions. among them may be mentioned mène, harting, gunning, lawes, gilbert and pugh, roy, petzholdt, and bretschneider. such an amount of overwhelming evidence might naturally have been regarded as conclusively proving that the free nitrogen of the air is not an available source of nitrogen to the plant. the question, however, was not decided. in berthelot reopened it. from experiments he had carried out, he concluded that free nitrogen was fixed by various organic compounds, under the influence of silent electric discharges. in he carried out further experiments, from which he concluded that argillaceous soils had the power of fixing the free nitrogen of the atmosphere. this they effected, he was of opinion, through the agency of micro-organisms. schloesing has recently shown that this fixation of free nitrogen by soils is extremely doubtful.[ ] the gain of nitrogen observed under such conditions can be explained by the absorption by the soil of combined nitrogen--viz., ammonia--from the air. berthelot's early experiments in had the effect of stimulating a number of other experiments, with the result that we now possess the solution of this long-debated and most important problem. the names of the better known investigators on this subject, in addition to berthelot's, are those of hellriegel, wilfarth, dehérain, joulie, dietzell, frank, emil von wolff, atwater, woods, nobbe, ward, breal, boussingault, wagner, schultz-lupitz, fleischer, pagnoul, schloesing, laurent, petermann, pradmowsky, beyrenick, lawes, and gilbert. it is impossible to enter into the details of these most important experiments. an attempt may be made, instead, briefly to epitomise them. _recent experiments on nitrogen question._ in the first place, it may be asked, how is it possible that the previous elaborate experiments, published prior to , should now prove unreliable? a satisfactory explanation may be found in the fact, as lawes and gilbert have recently pointed out, that the fixation of the free nitrogen by the plant, or within the soil, takes place, if at all, through the agency of electricity or of micro-organisms, or of both. the earlier experiments, however, were so arranged as to exclude the influence of either of those agencies. the question has further been limited in its scope. it is now supposed that only plants of the _leguminous_ order have the power of drawing upon the free atmospheric nitrogen. of the experiments above referred to, those of hellriegel and wilfarth are the most striking and important. they found in their experiments, that while the legumes have the power of obtaining their nitrogen from the air, cereals have not. similar experiments by atwater in america, and others, support this conclusion. their conclusions may be briefly epitomised as follows:-- (_a_) that the leguminous plants--such as peas, &c.--have the power of drawing their nitrogen supplies from the free nitrogen of the air in a way not possessed by other plants; and that they thus possess two sources of nitrogen--the soil and the air. (_b_) that this absorption of free nitrogen is not effected directly by the plant, but is the result, so to speak, of the joint action of certain micro-organisms present in certain soils and in the plant itself, (_symbiosis_). (_c_) that this fixation is connected with the formation of minute tubercles on the roots of the plants of the leguminous class; and that these tubercles may be the home of the fixing organism. (_d_) that these fixing micro-organisms are not present in all soils.[ ] while the relation of free nitrogen to the plant has long been, and still is, a very obscure problem, it was early recognised that the combined nitrogen present in soils and manures was an important source of plant-food. reference has already been made to the early theory of sir kenelm digby regarding the value of nitrates.[ ] de saussure, as we have also already seen, was fully impressed with the importance of applying nitrogen to the soil as a manure. liebig's early attitude on this question was to the effect, that to apply nitrogen in manures was quite unnecessary, as the plant had a sufficient source in the ammonia present in the air, which he erroneously supposed was sufficient in quantity to supply all the needs of the crops. despite this early recognition of the value of combined nitrogen to the plant, it is only of recent years that we have obtained any definite knowledge as to the respective value of its different compounds as manures, or as to the form in which it is assimilated by the plant. it exists in three forms--( ) as organic nitrogen; ( ) as ammonia salts; ( ) as nitrates and nitrites. much experimental work has during late years been devoted to studying the comparative action and merits of these three forms. _relation of organic nitrogen to the plant._ first, as to the relation of organic nitrogen to the plant. there is a large number of different organic compounds which contain nitrogen. that the plant is able to assimilate certain of these organic compounds, seems, from several experiments, to be extremely probable. from certain researches, carried out as far back as the year , sir charles cameron concluded that the plant could assimilate one of them--viz., _urea_. from what, however, we have subsequently learned regarding the process of "nitrification," it is quite probable that the nitrogen in these experiments was first converted into nitrates before being assimilated. at any rate, as the plants were not tested for urea, the experiments must be regarded as leaving the problem unsolved. other experiments were carried out of a similar nature by professor s. w. johnson, the different kinds of nitrogen experimented with being _uric acid_, _hippuric acid_, and _guanine_. but here, again, no definite conclusion can be drawn, as no analyses were made of the plants. more recently, however, dr hampe has carried out experiments with _urea_, _uric acid_, _hippuric acid_, and _glycocoll_. these experiments may be held as demonstrating the fact that at least one organic compound of nitrogen is capable of being assimilated, as urea was actually identified as being present in the plants experimented with. from further experiments, carried out by dr paul wagner and wolff, _glycin_, _tyrosin_, and _kreatin_ are able to be assimilated by the plant. _plants able to absorb certain forms of organic nitrogen._ we may conclude, then, from these interesting experiments, that plants are able to absorb certain organic forms of nitrogen. that they do so in nature to any extent is extremely improbable, such organic forms of nitrogen being rarely present in the soil, or if present, being converted into ammonia or nitrate salts before assimilation. _nature of humus in the soil._ while on the subject of organic nitrogen, reference may be briefly made to that substance known as _humus_,--the name applied to the organic portion of soils,--a substance which figures so largely in early theories of plant-nutrition. the most elaborate investigation of the composition of humus has been carried out by mulder. according to mulder, it is composed of a number of organic bodies, and he has identified the following substances--ulmin, humin, ulmic, humic, geic acids, &c. these bodies are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, which are invariably associated with nitrogen. detmer and simon have further investigated the subject. the true function of humus, it would seem, in addition to its numerous mechanical properties, is to furnish, by its decomposition, carbonic acid and nitrogen--in the form of ammonia and nitric acid--to the soil; the former acting as a solvent of the mineral food, the latter as the source of the plant's nitrogen. the old theory, therefore, that the presence of humus in a soil is a condition of fertility, is not so far removed from the truth. where there is an abundance of humus in the soil there is likely also to be an abundance of nitrogen. _relation of ammonia to the plant._ it seems to be beyond doubt that nitrogen is directly absorbed by plants in the form of ammonia. liebig, as we have seen, concluded that this was the great source of nitrogen for the plant, and that the ammonia compounds present in the air were an all-sufficient supply. subsequent research, while confirming his belief so far as regards the capability of plants to assimilate nitrogen in the form of ammonia, has proved that the amount of ammonia present in the air is very minute, and utterly inadequate to supply the plant with the whole of its nitrogen. investigations have been made on this subject by graeger, fresenius, pierre, bineau, and ville. according to ville's researches, which are among the most recent, the amount does not exceed _parts per thousand million parts of air_.[ ] some conception of the value of this source of nitrogen may be gained by estimating the quantity falling, dissolved in rain, on an acre of soil throughout the year. various estimations of the total amount of combined nitrogen, which is in this way brought to the soil, have been made. a certain amount of discrepancy, it is true, is to be found in these various estimations, no doubt largely due to the difference in the circumstances under which the investigations were carried out. mr warington has made several investigations at rothamsted, and, according to his most recently published figures, the total quantity only amounts to . lb. per acre per annum--of which only . lb. is as ammonia itself.[ ] as already mentioned, there can be little doubt that plants can absorb nitrogen in the form of ammonia. the question of how far plant-leaves are able to absorb ammonia is a much debated one. it is probable that if they can do so, it is only to a very small extent.[ ] the question as to whether the plant's roots can absorb ammonia or not, is also a very keenly debated one. the point is a very difficult one to decide, and is much complicated by the consideration that ammonia, when applied to the the soil, is so speedily converted into nitric acid. despite, however, these difficulties, and the vast amount of controversy on the point, the experiments of ville, hosäus and lehmann, seem to indicate beyond doubt that ammonia is a direct source of nitrogen. lehmann's experiments would seem, further, to indicate that there are certain periods of a plant's growth when its preference for ammonia salts seems to be greater than at other times. the point, however, it must be confessed, is still an obscure one. the great difficulty in deciding it, as has just been said, lies in the fact that ammonia salts, when applied to a soil, are, by the process of nitrification, converted into nitrates. in experimenting, therefore, with ammonia, and noting the results, it is wellnigh impossible to say, except by subsequent analyses, whether the nitrogen in the ammonia salts has not been converted into nitrates before assimilation. _relation of nitric acid to the plant._ thirdly, as to nitrogen in the form of nitrates. while it is true that plants can absorb nitrogen in certain organic forms and as ammonia salts, it is now a well-known fact that the chief, and by far the most important, source of nitrogen is nitric acid. probably more than per cent of the nitrogen absorbed by green-leaved plants from the soil is absorbed as nitrates. the tendency of all nitrogen compounds in the soil is towards conversion into nitric acid. it is the final form of nitrogen in the soil. the precise method in which this conversion takes place is a discovery of only a few years' standing. the great economic importance of this discovery, made by the french chemists schloesing and müntz, and associated in this country with the names of warington, munro, and p. f. frankland, is only gradually being appreciated. it is without doubt one of the most interesting made in the domain of agricultural chemistry of late years. _nitrification._ it was in the year that the two french chemists above referred to published the results of some experiments they had carried out, which proved that nitrification--the name given to the process by which ammonia or other nitrogen salts are converted in the soil into nitric acid--was due to the action of micro-organic life. the basis of the theory rests upon the fact that dilute solutions of ammonia salts or urine, containing all the necessary constituents of plant-food, if previously sterilised, may be kept for an indefinitely long period of time, provided the air supplied be filtered through cotton wool,--so as to prevent the entrance of micro-organisms--without any formation of nitrates. introduce, however, into such a solution a little fresh soil, and nitrification will soon follow. the conditions under which the nitrification ferment acts, as well as the nature of the ferment, or rather ferments, have subsequently been carefully studied by schloesing and müntz, winogradsy, dehérain, kellner, and other continental observers, and especially by warington, munro, and p. f. frankland in this country. these conditions cannot be gone into here. they will be fully discussed in the chapter on nitrification. briefly stated, they are a certain range of temperature (between slightly above freezing-point and ° c., the maximum activity taking place, according to schloesing and müntz, at about ° c.); a plentiful supply of atmosphere oxygen (hence the fact observed by warington, that nitrification is chiefly limited to the surface-soil); a certain amount of moisture; and the presence of certain of the necessary mineral plant constituents, and the presence of carbonate of lime. the light which these discoveries throw upon the extremely complicated question of the fertility of the soil is considerable, as it follows that no soil can be regarded as really a fertile one in which the process of nitrification does not freely take place. they furthermore explain many facts, hitherto observed but not well understood, with regard to the action of different nitrogenous manures. _ash constituents of the plant._ we now come to consider the present state of our knowledge on the essentialness of the ash or mineral portion of the plant. while a portion of the plant's substance which, up to liebig's time, had obtained little notice, it has, since the publication of his famous "mineral" theory, obtained an ever-increasing amount of investigation. up till practically nothing was known of the function of the ash constituents. in de saussure wrote that it was unknown whether the constituents of many plants were due to the soils on which they grew, or whether they were the products of vegetable growth. some two years later, however, he was enabled to carry out a number of experiments which really placed the subject on a firm scientific basis. the essentialness of the ash constituents was only, however, placed beyond all doubt by wiegmann and polstorff's researches, carried out in . reference has already been made to the great stimulus given to research by the promulgation of liebig's mineral theory. _methods of research._ in epitomising the vast amount of work carried on since , with the view of ascertaining the essentialness of the various substances found in the ash of plants, two methods of experimentation have been followed. _artificial soils._ the first of these two methods was that adopted in the famous experiments, carried out by prince salm-horstmar, which have done so much to further our knowledge on this question. it consisted in growing plants on an artificial soil--formed out of sugar-charcoal, pulverised quartz or purified sand--to which were added the different food constituents. _water-culture._ while the results obtained by prince salm-horstmar by this method were of a most valuable nature, subsequent experimenters have abandoned his method for the other method--viz., "water-culture." the medium used in this process is pure water; and it is from experiments carried out in water-culture that much of our present knowledge, in regard to the relation of the ash constituents to the plant, is due. the names of those who have worked in this department are very numerous. among them may be mentioned knop, sachs, stohmann, nobbe, rautenberg, kühn, lucanus, w. wolff, hampe, beyer, e. wolff, p. wagner, bretschneider and lehmann. the results obtained by these and other experimenters have demonstrated the following facts. the substances which have been found in the ash of plants are: _potash_, _soda_, _lime_, _magnesia_, _oxide of iron_, _oxide of manganese_, _phosphoric acid_, _sulphuric acid_, _silica_, _carbonic acid_, _chlorine_, _lithia_, _rubidia_, _alumina_, _oxide of copper_, _bromine_, _iodine_, and occasionally even other substances. of these, however, only six are probably absolutely necessary for plant-growth--viz., _potash_, _lime_, _magnesia_, _oxide of iron_, _phosphoric acid_, and _sulphuric acid_. three other substances seem also to be almost invariably present, and may possibly be essential--in very minute quantities at any rate--viz., _chlorine_, _soda_, and _silica_. with regard to _alumina_ and _oxide of copper_, these constituents must be regarded as accidental; while _iodine_ and _bromine_ only occur in the ash of marine plants. _method of absorption of plant-food._ a department of vegetable physiology which has had much work devoted to it is the method in which plant-roots absorb their food. the plant's nourishment is absorbed in solution by means of the roots. its absorption takes place, according to fischer and dutrochet, who have investigated the subject at great length, by the process known as _endosmosis_. it has also been established by numerous experiments, that different plants require different constituents in different proportions. _water as a carrier of plant-food._ the function performed by water, as the carrier of plant-food, and the motion of the sap of the plant, are questions which have also received much attention. the motion of the plant's sap seems to have attracted a great deal of attention at a very early stage of the study of plant physiology. as far back as , marriotte studied it. among other old experimenters were hales, guettard, sénébier, saint-martin, de candolle, and miguel. in more recent times, it has been investigated by schübler, lawes and gilbert, knop, sachs, unger, and hosäus. some idea of the enormous amount of water transpired by plant-leaves may be gained by the statement that from lb. to lb. of water are transpired for every pound of plant-tissue formed.[ ] _agronomy._ when we come to deal with questions relating to the chemistry of the soil, we find that so much investigation has been devoted to this one branch of agricultural chemistry as to constitute it a special branch by itself--known in france under the name of _agronomie_--and being taught in the large agricultural colleges by special professors of the subject. the value of studying the properties of soils was recognised at an early period. this study was for long largely confined to their _physical_, or, what are popularly known as their _mechanical_ properties. thus sir humphry davy ascertained many important facts with regard to the heat and water absorbing and retaining properties of soils. _retention by soil of plant-food._ it was not till a later period that the power soils possess of fixing from their watery solutions various plant-foods, both organic and inorganic, was discovered. the earliest recognition of this most important property of soils was made by gazzeri, who, in , called attention to the fact that the dark fluid portion of farmyard manure was purified on passing through clay. he concluded that soils, more especially clayey soils, possessed the property of being able to fix from their watery solutions the necessary plant-food constituents, and fix them beyond risk of loss, only affording a gradual supply to the plant as required. the first experiments carried out on this subject were those by huxtable and thompson in . the liquid portion of farmyard manure was filtered through soil and subsequently examined, when it was found to have not only lost its colour, but also to have lost its smell. ammonia and ammonia salts were also experimented with, and it was found that soils possessed the power of fixing ammonia. to thomas way, however, we are indebted for the most valuable contribution on this important subject made by any one single investigator. his experiments were not merely carried out with regard to ammonia, but also with regard to other bases--such as potash, lime, magnesia, soda, &c. since way's experiments much work has been done by liebig, stohmann, henneberg, and heiden, as also by voelcker, eichhorn, knop, rautenberg, pochwissnew, warington, beyer, bretschneider, sestini, laskowsky, strehl, pillnitz, peters, w. wolff, lehmann, and biedermann. _bases and acids fixed by soil._ from these experiments it may be taken as proved beyond doubt that soils have the power of fixing, to a greater or less extent, the following bases: ammonia, potash, lime, magnesia and soda; as well as the two acids, phosphoric and silicic. the order in which the different bases are fixed is an important point. it would seem that the soil has a greater affinity for the more valuable manurial substances, such as ammonia, potash, and lime, and that these substances are first fixed. that in fixing any one of the above-mentioned bases from its solution, it can only do so at the expense of another base. thus, in fixing potash, either lime, magnesia, or soda must be given up. further, when a base in solution, as sulphate or chloride, is absorbed by a soil, the base is alone fixed, while the sulphuric acid or chlorine is left in solution. lastly, the amount of base absorbed by a soil depends on the concentration of its solution, on the nature of its combination, and the temperature. way found in his experiments that a clay soil has more power than a peaty soil, and that a peaty soil has more power than a sandy soil. _causes of this fixation._ so much for the fact of soil absorption; as to the cause or causes of this absorption, a great number of theories have been put forward. those may be divided into two classes--those accounting for it as due to physical properties of the soil; and those, on the other hand, explaining it as due to chemical action. to the latter class way's belonged. he explained it as due to the formation in the soil of hydrated double silicates, consisting of a silicate of alumina, along with a silicate of the base fixed. brüstlein and peters, on the other hand, were of the opinion that it was purely physical in its nature. a theory has been advanced that it is due to the formation of insoluble ulmates and humates, formed by the union of ulmic and humic acids, along with the bases fixed. among others who devoted investigation to this interesting question, may be mentioned rautenberg and heiden. on reviewing the evidence, it seems to be pretty well established that it really is mainly a chemical act, due chiefly to the formation of double silicates, and doubtless to a certain extent to the formation of insoluble humates and ulmates. heiden's experiments would seem to indicate, however, that it is also partly of a physical nature. with regard to the absorption of phosphoric acid, this has been shown to be a chemical act, and depends on the formation of insoluble phosphates of calcium, iron, aluminium, and magnesium, the percentage of iron especially determining this. much analytical work has been accomplished of late years with a view of ascertaining the amount of ash in different kinds of plants, and in the different parts of the plant. _action of manures._ the department of agricultural chemistry which has been most largely developed of late years is that connected with the problems of _manuring_. it is, from a practical point of view, of most value. it is some considerable time since we have recognised that the only three ingredients it is, as a rule, expedient to apply as artificial manures, are _nitrogen_, _phosphoric acid_, and _potash_. the nature, mode of action of the different compounds, and properties of these three substances, and their comparative influence in fostering plant-growth, together with the economic question of which form is, under various circumstances, the most economical for the farmer to use, have together given rise to a large number of "field" and "pot" experiments. as the principles underlying this practice form the subject of the following treatise, any further discussion of the question must be left to the following chapters. _note._--the reader interested in the historical development of agricultural chemistry is referred to sir j. h. gilbert's presidential address to the chemical section of the british association, . footnotes: [ ] the history of the chemical elements. by sir henry e. roscoe, f.r.s. (wm. collins, sons, & co.) [ ] van helmont's science was, however, of an extremely rudimentary nature, as may be evidenced by the belief he entertained that the smells which arise from the bottom of morasses produce frogs, slugs, leeches, and other things; as well as by the following recipe which he gave for the production of a pot of mice: "press a dirty shirt into the orifice of a vessel containing a little corn, after about twenty-one days the ferment proceeding from the dirty shirt, modified by the odour of the corn, effects a transmutation of the wheat into mice." the crowning point in this recipe, however, lay in the fact that he asserted that he had himself witnessed the fact, and, as an interesting and corroborative detail, he added that the mice were born full-grown. see 'louis pasteur: his life and labours.' by his son-in-law. translated by lady claud hamilton. (longmans, green, & co.) p. . [ ] he then goes on to relate a number of experiments by cornelius drebel and albertus magnus, showing the refreshing power of this balsam, and then those of quercitan with roses and other flowers, and his own with nettles. [ ] priestley, however, did not realise that _carbonic acid gas_ was a necessary plant-food; on the contrary, he considered it to have a deleterious action on plant-growth. percival was really the first to point out that carbonic acid gas was a plant-food. [ ] it is recorded as an instance of the scientific enthusiasm of the man, that he was wont to carry about with him bottles containing oxygen, which he had obtained from cabbage-leaves, as also coils of iron wire, with which he could illustrate the brilliant combustion which ensued on burning the latter in oxygen gas. [ ] for a full account of sénébier's researches, see 'physiologie végétale, contenant une description des organes des plantes, et une exposition des phénomenes produits par leur organisation, par jean sénébier.' ( tomes. genève, .) [ ] how crops grow. by professor s. w. johnson. macmillan & co. (introduction, p. .) [ ] see p. to . [ ] elements of agricultural chemistry, in a course of lectures for the board of agriculture. by sir humphry davy. (london, .) [ ] this department of agricultural research was subsequently carried on by sprengel, schübler, and others. [ ] born in paris, ; died th may . [ ] see p. . [ ] while much of boussingault's work was carried out previous to the year , he continued to enrich agricultural chemistry with numerous valuable contributions up till the time of his death. it may be well here to mention the names of his most important contributions to agricultural science, made subsequent to . in he published, in a work entitled 'economie rurale,' the results of his numerous experiments and researches. this work is well known to english agriculturists from an english translation which appeared in (boussingault's 'rural economy,' translated by g. law. h. ballière, london). in appeared the first volume of his last great work, 'agronomie chimie agricole et physiologie' this work, which consisted of seven volumes, was not finished till . he died on the th of may . it may be added that the royal society of london awarded him the copley medal in . [ ] see british association proceedings, , p. . [ ] it may be pointed out that, while the amount of ammonia washed down by the rain is small, schloesing has found in some recent experiments that a damp soil may absorb from the air in the course of a year lb. of combined nitrogen, chiefly ammonia, per acre. see p. . [ ] the example, set by germany, has been followed by other countries in which well-equipped research stations now exist. perhaps the most striking example of the rapid development of the means of agricultural research is furnished by the united states of america. at present over fifty agricultural experiment stations, more or less well equipped, exist at present in that country, all liberally supplied by state aid. the earliest to be founded, it may be added, was that at middletown, connecticut, the date of its institution being . [ ] it may thus claim to be the second oldest experimental station, that instituted by boussingault at bechelbronn in alsace being the oldest. [ ] for an account of the rothamsted experiments, and a short biography of sir john lawes, the reader is referred to a pamphlet by the present writer, entitled 'sir j. b. lawes, bart., ll.d., f.r.s., and the rothamsted experiments' ('scottish farmer' office, hope street, glasgow). [ ] of these numerous elaborate experiments, perhaps those which have attracted the most widespread interest amongst agriculturists have been those carried out on the growth of wheat on the same land year after year for a period of nearly fifty years. the important light which this series of experiments has thrown upon the theory of the rotation of crops, and the subject of the manuring of cereals, is very great. [ ] associated in some cases with phosphorus and sulphur. [ ] it must be pointed out that plant-respiration does not take place _only_ during the night-time. it probably goes on at all times, but it is only during the night-time that its action is apparent, as the reverse process of carbon assimilation, which goes on at an incomparably greater rate, masks its action during the daytime. [ ] the length of the day has an important influence on plant-growth, as is evidenced by the rapid growth of vegetation in norway and sweden. in these countries there is a late spring, and a short and by no means hot summer, but a very long period of daylight. [ ] a point of great interest which these experiments elucidated is that nocturnal repose is not absolutely necessary for the growth and development of all plants. [ ] see pp. and . [ ] see p. . [ ] see chapter iii., pp. and . [ ] further reference is made to this subject in chapter iii., p. . [ ] see p. . [ ] see phil. trans., part ii., , pp. - . lawes & gilbert. schloesing has found in the air in the neighbourhood of paris lb. of ammonia in , , cubic yards; while müntz found only about half that amount in a similar quantity of air on the top of the pic du midi. [ ] see chapter iii., pp. , ; appendix, p. . [ ] some recent experiments by dyer and smetham would seem to show that comparatively small quantities of ammonia in the air prove actually hurtful to plant-life. thus they found that one volume of ammonia in volumes of air was fatal to hardy plants; while one volume in volumes killed tender ones. [ ] according to the experiments of hellriegel and wollny. the quantity, it may be added, varies with the leaf-surface and the length of the period of growth of the plant. it is greatest with clovers and grasses, and least in the potatoes and roots. part ii. principles of manuring chapter i. fertility of the soil. it is necessary to clearly understand to what the fertility of a soil is due ere we can hope to master the theory of manuring. _what constitutes fertility in a soil._ the question, what constitutes fertility in a soil? is by no means an easy one to answer. if we say, the presence of a plentiful supply of the constituents which form the plant's food, our answer will be incomplete. similarly, if we reply, a certain physical condition of the soil--here, again, it will be found equally unsatisfactory; for fertility of a soil depends both on its physical condition and on its chemical composition, and indeed even on other circumstances. it may be well, then, before proceeding to treat of the nature and action of the different manures, to offer a brief statement of the conditions of fertility so far, at any rate, as we at present know them. for it may be well to warn the reader that, despite the great amount of work carried out on this subject by experimenters, we still have much to learn before we shall be in a position fully and clearly to understand the subject of soil-fertility in all its bearings. apart altogether from the influence exerted by climate, latitude, altitude, and exposure, the fertility of a soil may be said to depend on the following properties. these we may divide into three groups or classes:-- . physical or mechanical. . chemical. . biological. =i. physical properties of a soil.=--the physical properties of a soil are generally admitted to have a very important bearing on its fertility. this has been long practically recognised, and perhaps has in the past been unduly exalted in importance, at the expense of the no less important functions of the chemical.[ ] the reason of this is doubtless to be ascribed to the fact that it is much easier to study the physical properties of a soil than it is to study the chemical; and that, while we are in possession of a very large amount of useful information with regard to the former, we are at present only on the threshold of our knowledge of the latter. _variety of soils._ it is a matter of common observation that soils differ widely in their mechanical nature. the early recognition of this fact is evidenced by the large number of technical terms which have been long in vogue among farmers descriptive of these differences. thus soils are in the habit of being described as "heavy," "light," "stiff," "strong," "warm," "cold," "wet," "damp," "peaty," "clayey," "sandy," "loamy," &c., &c. _absorptive power for water._ one of the most important of the physical properties of a soil is its power to absorb water. water to the plant economy is just as important and necessary as it is to the animal economy. consequently it is of primary importance to examine into the conditions which regulate the absorption of this important plant-food by the soil. by the absorptive power of a soil is meant its capacity for drinking in any water with which its particles may come in contact. this power depends, first, on the predominance of its proximate constituents--viz., _sand_, _clay_, _carbonate of lime_, and _humus_; and secondly on the fineness of the soil-particles. _absorptive power of sand, clay, humus._ first, then, with regard to the absorptive power of sand, clay, and humus. of these, sand possesses this power to the least extent, clay to a greater extent, while humus possesses it most of all.[ ] the extent, therefore, of the absorptive power of a soil depends very much on the proportions in which it possesses these three ingredients. the more sandy a soil is, the less will its power be of absorbing water; and this, there is little doubt, is one of the reasons why a sandy soil is, as a rule, an unfertile soil. of course there are other and even more important reasons; but that this absorptive power has an important bearing on the question is conclusively proved by the fact that sandy soils are more fertile in a climate where rain is frequent than in one where much dry weather prevails. the incapacity of a sandy soil to absorb a large quantity of moisture is not fraught with such evil effects to the crops in the former case, because it is counteracted by the climatic conditions, which obviate the necessity, in a soil, of possessing great absorptive powers. the converse, of course, we may mention in passing, holds good of clayey soils. _fineness of soil-particles._ the second quality in a soil on which its absorptive power depends is the fineness of its particles. the great benefit which a soil derives from a good tilth, in this respect, was one of the reasons why tull's system of horse-hoeing husbandry was so successful in its results.[ ] the finer the soil-particles, it may be said generally, the greater is the absorptive power of the soil. _limit to fineness._ there is, however, a limit to the fineness to which the particles of a soil ought to be reduced; for it has been found by experiment that when a certain degree of fineness is reached, the absorptive power decreases with any further pulverisation. a german experimenter found, for example, that a garden loam, capable of absorbing per cent of water in its natural state, when pulverised very fine was able to absorb only per cent of water. here, clearly, the limit to which it is advisable to pulverise a soil had been exceeded. _reason of the above._ it is not difficult to see why this should be so. the amount of water that a soil can soak up is due to the number of pores, or air-spaces, it contains of a certain size. if these pores are large and few in number, the amount of water absorbed will be naturally less than when they are numerous and smaller in size. up to a certain extent, the more a soil is broken the greater will be the number of pores created, of a size to permit the water to soak in. beyond that point the pores become too minute, and the soil becomes too compact, each particle clinging together too closely. _retentive power of soils for water._ now closely connected with this absorptive power of soils, which we have just been considering, is the power soils possess of holding or retaining the water they absorb. this power, it will be seen at a glance, must have an important bearing on the fertility of a soil. _importance of retentive power._ as a considerable interval often elapses between the periods of rainfall, soils, if they are to support vegetable growth, must be able to store up their water-supply against periods of drought. this is all the more necessary when we remember that, in the case of heavy crops, the rainfall would often be inadequate to supply the water necessary for their growth. in fact, it has been estimated that the average evaporation from soils bare of any cultivation is equal to the rainfall. that the evaporation from soils covered with vegetation is very much greater, has been strikingly shown by a calculation made by the late eminent american botanist, professor asa gray, who calculated that a certain elm-tree offered a leaf-surface, from which active transpiration constantly went on, of some five acres in extent; while it has further been calculated that a certain oak-tree, within a period of six months, transpired during the daytime eight and a half times more water than fell as rain on an area equal in circumference to the tree-top.[ ] just as the state of the fineness of the soil-particles has an important influence on the absorptive power of soils, so, too, it is found, it has an important bearing on the rate at which evaporation takes place. evaporation goes on to the greatest extent in soils whose particles are compacted together, capillary action in this case taking place more freely, and effecting evaporation from a greater depth of soil. the stirring of the surface portion of the soil, as for example by hoeing or harrowing, has for this reason an important influence in lessening the amount of evaporation, and minimising the risks of drought, by breaking the capillary attraction. the amount of evaporation which takes place from a soil covered with a crop, depends largely on the nature of the crop; a deep-rooted crop, since it draws its moisture from a wider area of soil, being more effective in drying a soil than a shallow-rooted crop. the difference in the amounts evaporated from a cropped and a bare fallow soil has been shown at rothamsted to equal a rainfall of nine inches, the crop being barley. the increase, of course, is due to the water which the crop transpires.[ ] it may be generally said that the greater the absorptive power of a soil, the greater is its retentive power; for soils that most largely absorb water are the most reluctant to part with it. while these properties are undoubtedly necessary for fertile soils, it is needless to add that they may be possessed by a soil to too great an extent. the soil that is unable to throw off any excess of water becomes cold and damp, and does not admit of proper tillage. its pores become entirely choked up, and the circulation of air, which, as we shall see, is of so much importance, is rendered impossible. plants in such a soil are apt to sicken and die, the water becomes stagnant, and certain chemical actions are caused which give rise to poisonous gases, such as sulphuretted hydrogen, &c. a stiff clayey soil offers a good example of the disadvantage of over-retentiveness. owing to the difficulty such soils experience in throwing off their excessive water, they are extremely difficult to till; and sowing operations are on that account apt to be delayed. _power plants have of absorbing water from a soil._ it is a strange fact, and one worth noticing in this connection, that the power plant-roots have of drawing their moisture from a soil, seems to depend on the retentive power of the soil. by this is meant that plants have not the means of exhausting the water in a retentive soil to such an extent as in a non-retentive soil. in some extremely interesting experiments, carried out by the well-known german botanist sachs, it was found that plants wilted in a loamy soil, whose water-holding capacity was per cent, when its moisture reached per cent; while in a sandy soil--water-holding capacity per cent--the same species of plant did not wilt until its moisture reached - / per cent. here, then, we see that on one kind of soil the plant was able to live, and obtain sufficient water for its needs, while it died of thirst in another soil, although that soil contained quite as much moisture. speaking generally, we may say that hellriegel's experiments have shown that any soil can supply plants with all the water they need so long as its moisture is not reduced below one-third of the whole amount it can hold.[ ] _how to increase absorptive power of soils._ the absence or presence, in excess, of the above properties, suggests a word or two on how these natural defects may, to a certain extent, be remedied artificially. it stands to reason, that if organic matter in a soil renders its absorptive power greater, a simple method of improving a soil defective in this property is by the addition of organic matter. one of the benefits of ploughing-in green crops on sandy soils is undoubtedly due to this fact; the addition of farmyard manure having also a similar effect. the absence of a sufficient amount of retentiveness, such as is found in sandy soils, in the same way suggests, as a remedy, the addition of clay; and, _vice versâ_, where the soil is too clayey, the natural method of improvement will be the addition of sand.[ ] _shrinkage of soils._ in drying, soils shrink. those which shrink least are sandy and chalky soils. humus soils, on the other hand, shrink most. _most favourable amount of water in a soil._ the amount of water in a soil most favourable for plant-growth is a question of considerable difficulty. too great an amount of moisture renders the land cold; air cannot obtain access to the soil-particles, and the plants sicken and die. hellriegel has found that as much as per cent of what the soil can hold is hurtful to plants, and that from to per cent is the best amount.[ ] _hygroscopic power._ a property possessed by soils in relation to water, which is quite distinct from absorptive power, is their hygroscopic power. by this is meant their power of absorbing water from the air where it is present in the gaseous form. this property is identical with the property which will be adverted to immediately--viz., capacity for absorbing gases. the extent to which soils possess this hygroscopic property seems to be regulated very much by the same conditions as regulate their ordinary absorptive power.[ ] this property is considered to be of great importance in the case of soils in hot climates, where their agricultural value may be said to depend to a large extent upon it. the amount of water, however, absorbed in this way is, comparatively speaking, insignificant. lastly, it may be observed that there are certain methods of drying soils afflicted with too much moisture. these consist in making open ditches, and thus relieving them of their superabundance of water, or in planting certain kinds of trees, such as willows and poplars. the amount of green surface presented by the large number of leaves of trees, from which the constant evaporation of water goes on, is very great. the consequence is that trees may be regarded as pumping-engines. it is from this cause that foresters have noticed that clay lands are apt to become wetter after the trees growing upon them have been cut down.[ ] _capacity for heat in soils._ a property which depends largely on those we have just been considering is the capacity soils possess of absorbing and retaining heat.[ ] the temperature of a soil, of course, largely depends on the temperature of the air; but this, we must not forget, depends also on the soil itself. the heat given forth by the sun's rays strikes the soil, with the result that, while so much of its heat is absorbed, a certain portion--and this will vary according to the nature of the soil--of its heat is radiated into the air. the changes in the temperature of the soil naturally take place more slowly than the changes in the temperature of the air; the depth of soil thus affected by those changes varies also in different climes. it has been calculated that in temperate climes the changes of temperature occurring from day to night are not felt much below three feet down. _the explanation of dew._ we have, it may be stated, generally two processes going on. during the day the soil is engaged in absorbing its heat from the sun's rays; when night comes, and the sun goes below the horizon, the air is chilled below the temperature of the soil, which radiates out its stored-up heat into the air. the result is that the temperature of the soil is soon reduced below the temperature of the air, and the moisture, present in the air in the form of vapour, coming in contact with the cold surface of the earth, is condensed into dew, which is deposited, and is seen best early in the morning before the sun has had time to evaporate it again. dew is most abundant in summer-time, for the reason that the difference in temperature of the day and night is then greatest. in winter-time it is seen as hoar-frost. _heat of soils._ the temperature of a soil, however, is due to other sources than the sun's rays. whenever vegetable matter decays, there is always a certain amount of heat generated. soils, therefore, in which there is a large amount of decaying vegetable matter, are certain to receive more heat from this source than soils of more purely mineral nature. _heat in farmyard manure._ a good example of the amount of heat that accompanies fermentation, or decay of vegetable matter, is seen in the case of rotting farmyard manure. the danger of loss of the volatile ammonia from this cause is often great, and care must be taken to prevent fermentation going on too quickly, and the temperature from becoming too high.[ ] the actual increase in the temperature of a soil effected by the addition of certain bulky organic manures, such as farmyard manure, may thus be considerable. in some experiments carried out at tokio, japan, it was found that the application of tons of farmyard manure per acre increased the temperature of the soil to a depth of five inches, for a period of nearly a month, on an average, one and a half degrees fahrenheit. the amount of water present in a soil, it may be noticed in passing, will have a considerable effect in regulating its temperature, a damp soil being, as a rule, a cold soil. _the cause of the heat of fermentation._ it may be asked, how is the decay, or fermentation, of vegetable matter, such as farmyard manure, caused? or rather, to what is it due? decay of any substance is just its slow combustion or burning. when a substance unites with the active chemical element in air--the oxygen gas--it is said to be oxidised. now, this union of a substance with oxygen is the explanation of burning, and the phenomena of burning and decay are explained by the same chemical operation. when bodies decay, or when they burn, they unite with oxygen: when this union of a body and oxygen takes place very quickly, and the result is a flame and very great heat, then we call it burning; when, however, it takes place slowly, it is not called burning, but simply oxidation or decay. the ultimate products are the same, however, whether the body burns or decays; and the process of decay is always accompanied by heat, as well as the process of burning.[ ] it is not, of course, only the vegetable or organic matter in a soil that decays, but also the mineral matter. the oxidation, however, of the mineral matter in the soil takes place so slowly, and the amount of heat generated by this oxidation is so slight, that the temperature of the soil can scarcely be said to be much affected by it. _influence of colour of a soil._ there is still another quality of a soil on which its temperature depends, and that is its colour. this may seem at first sight to be scarcely worth taking into account, and yet it has been shown to have a very striking influence on the temperature of a soil. this naturally is best seen in climates where there is a good deal of sun. dark-coloured soils have a greater heat-absorbing capacity than light-coloured soils; and experiments carried out for the purpose of determining the extent of this influence have shown that under certain conditions the difference between a soil covered with a black substance, and one covered with a white substance, amounted to from ° to ° fahr. other things being equal, a crop on a dark-coloured soil will be sooner ripened than one on a light-coloured soil. a soil covered by a crop is cooler than one without any crop. _the power soils have for absorbing gases._ we have just seen that one cause of the heat of soils is the oxidation which is constantly going on in all soils, but more rapidly in soils containing a large quantity of vegetable matter. this suggests a word or two on the power soils have of absorbing gases. the chief gases in the atmosphere are oxygen and nitrogen. both these gases are absorbed by soils, although not in similar proportions.[ ] with regard to the former, it is well known that a plentiful supply of oxygen in the pores of the soil is a necessary condition of fertility. this was long ago experimentally proved by de saussure, who showed that plants absorbed oxygen through their roots. at certain periods of their growth this demand for oxygen on the part of the plant is greater than at other times. for example, seeds in the process of germination require to have free access to a plentiful supply of oxygen. this fact emphasises the enormous importance of providing a good seed-bed, and of seeing that the seed is not buried too deeply. _carbonic acid and ammonia._ in addition to oxygen and nitrogen, the air contains other gases which are absorbed by the soil. of these, carbonic acid is the most abundant. by far the largest portion of the carbonic acid which the soil obtains from the air, is washed down in solution in the rain.[ ] of the other constituents of the atmosphere, the combined forms of nitrogen--viz., _ammonia_, _nitric_, and _nitrous acids_--are the most important. these are all absorbed by the soil, but, like carbonic acid, they are chiefly washed down by the rain. the amount of ammonia which may be absorbed by a soil from the air, is very much greater than was formerly supposed. some recent experiments by schloesing, referred to in a following chapter,[ ] show this. a damp soil may in the course of a year absorb far more ammonia than that washed down in rain. _gas-absorbing power of soils varies._ the power of different soils to absorb these gases varies. this variation depends not only on their physical properties, but also on their chemical as well. soils containing much organic matter have a greater capacity for absorbing gases than the more purely mineral ones. _absorption of nitrogen._ the absorption of nitrogen by the soil is a question of considerable importance. it will be referred to later on under the heading of the biological properties of soils, as it is fixed by the agency of micro-organisms.[ ] to recapitulate, the chief physical or mechanical properties of a soil are its absorptive and retentive powers for water; its capacity for heat; and its power of absorbing gases. it will be easily seen how tillage operations are calculated to influence these physical properties of a soil. thus, in the case of a stiff soil, tillage increases its power for absorbing the atmospheric gases, chiefly oxygen, which are so necessary for rendering its fertilising matters available. on the other hand, in a light and too open soil it may exert quite a contrary effect. it may be also well to refer here to the important influence these physical properties exercise on the growth of the plant. _plant-roots require a certain openness in the soil._ one of the functions of the soil is to support the plant in an upright position, and this is a function which requires in the soil a certain amount of compactness or firmness. on the other hand, however, a soil must not possess too great compactness, otherwise the plant-roots will experience a difficulty in pushing their way downwards. this is especially the case during the earlier periods of growth, when the plant-roots are as yet extremely tender, and experience great difficulty in overcoming much resistance. the importance of preparing a mellow seed-bed will be thus at once seen to be based on sound scientific principles; and this for a double reason. not only does the young plant require every facility for developing its roots, but also, as has just been pointed out, an abundant supply of oxygen is of paramount importance during the process of germination. _soil and plant-roots._ the whole question of the influence of the mechanical condition of the soil on the development of plant-roots is one of the highest importance and interest, and is not so generally recognised as it ought to be. _natural tendency of plant-roots to grow downwards._ it may be taken as certain that the tangled condition of plant-roots is due to the resistance offered by the soil-particles, and that the natural tendency of the plant-root is to grow downwards. the roots, in short, would probably grow in as symmetrical a form as do the stalks or branches, were it not that they are hindered from so doing by the soil-particles. where, then, the soil is such as to offer much hindrance, the growth of the plant cannot but be retarded. some extremely interesting experiments have been performed by the eminent german chemist hellriegel on the influence which the closeness of the soil-particles has on root-development. in these experiments peas and beans were grown in moistened sawdust, more or less compactly compressed. it was found that when the sawdust was compressed to any extent, plant-growth took place very slowly, or entirely ceased. the importance of having plant-roots as widely developed in the soil as possible, will be at once seen when we reflect that this means that the area of soil from which the plant derives its soil-food is thereby greatly increased. another important consideration is, that the deeper plant-roots can penetrate in a soil, the more able--other conditions being equal--is the plant to withstand the action of drought, as it can draw water for its needs from the deeper layers of the soil, long after a plant, whose roots do not penetrate so deeply, has wilted. _plants require room._ another important bearing tillage has on plant-growth may here be discussed. a problem of considerable difficulty is presented in the question, how many individual plants will a certain piece of soil support in a healthy way? for as plants require room, it is imperative that they be not too closely crowded together. the question resolves itself pretty much into one of quality against quantity. experiments on this subject have shown that a certain area of soil is only able to support the healthy growth of a certain number of plants. if the limit be exceeded, the result is imperfect development. _number of plants on certain area increased by tillage._ it is obvious, however, that the more thoroughly tilled a soil is, the greater will be the number of plants it will be possible to grow on it. the roots, instead of being forced to spread themselves along the surface-soil, and thus take up a large amount of room, will find no difficulty in striking downwards. two or three plants may thus be enabled to grow in a thoroughly tilled soil in the same space as only one could before tillage. _american and english farming._ the above considerations throw considerable light on what seems to many farmers a strange anomaly--viz., the fact that the return of farm produce per acre on american farms is, as a rule, very much less than that from our own impoverished soils in this country. to many, at first sight, this seems to be in direct contradiction to our common belief, and to point to the conclusion that the virgin soils of america are, after all, actually inferior in fertility to the soils of britain. it is not, however, necessary to draw this conclusion, as the facts of the case admit of another explanation. the inferior returns obtained from american farms are due, not to the fact that the american soil is less fertile than the british--for this is not true--but to the fact that it is less _intensively_ cultivated. in america land is cheap and labour is dear; it is consequently found to be more economical to cultivate a large tract of land less thoroughly than a small area more thoroughly. in britain the reverse is the case, labour being cheap and land being dear. it is thus necessary to make the land go as far as possible, and produce as heavy a crop as it is possible to produce. there can be little doubt, that were american farming to be carried on as intensively as is british farming, the present yield would be at least probably doubled. we have now to consider the second class of properties which influence the fertility of a soil. these are _chemical_. =ii. chemical composition of a soil.=--chemically considered, the soil is a body of great complexity. it is made up of a great variety of substances. the relations existing between these substances and the plant are not all of equal importance; some--and these form by far the largest proportion of the soil-substance--are concerned in acting simply as a mechanical support for the plant, and in helping to maintain those physical properties in the soil which, as we have just seen, exercise such important functions in the plant's development. _fertilising ingredients._ a small portion of the soil-substance, however, takes a very much more active part in promoting plant-growth, by acting as direct food of the plant. as we have already seen in the introductory chapter,[ ] the substances which have been found in the ash of plants are the following: _potash_, _lime_, _magnesia_, _oxide of iron_, _phosphoric acid_, _sulphuric acid_, soda, silica, chlorine, oxide of manganese, lithia, rubidia, alumina, oxide of copper, bromine, and iodine. the general presence of some of these substances is doubtful; the presence of others, again, probably purely accidental; while some are only found in plants of a special nature, as, for instance, iodine and bromine, which are only found in the ash of marine plants. of these ash constituents, only the first six substances--those marked in italics--are absolutely necessary to plant-growth. in addition to these six ash constituents, the plant also derives its _nitrogen_, which is a necessary plant-food, chiefly from the soil.[ ] _importance of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash._ but of these seven constituents of the soil which are necessary to plant-growth, some have come to be regarded by the agriculturist with very much greater interest than others. this is due to the fact that they are normally present in the soil in very much smaller quantities than is the case with the other equally necessary food ingredients; that, in short, they are nearly invariably present in the soil, in a readily available form, in lesser quantities than the plant is able to avail itself of, and often, as in impoverished or barren soils, in quantities too small for even normal growth. these ingredients are _nitrogen_, _phosphoric acid_, and _potash_.[ ] the importance of seeing that all the necessary plant ingredients are present in a soil in proper quantities will be at once properly estimated when it is stated that the absence or insufficiency in amount of one single ingredient is capable of preventing the growth of the plant, although the other necessary ingredients may be even abundantly present. with lime, magnesia, iron, and sulphuric acid, most soils are abundantly supplied. the substances with which the farmer has to concern himself, then, are nitrogen, phosphates, and potash. it is these substances therefore, that, as a rule, are alone added as manures. _chemical condition of fertilising ingredients in soil._ but in considering the chemical properties of a soil, a simple consideration of the quantity of the different ingredients present is not enough. a very important consideration is their chemical condition. ere any plant-food can be assimilated by the plant's roots, it must first be rendered soluble. the quantity of soluble, or, as it is known, _available_, plant-food in a soil is very small. it is, of course, being steadily added to each day by the process of disintegration constantly going on in soils. _amount of soluble fertilising ingredients._ the exact nature and dissolving capacity of the soil-water, charged as it is, to a greater or less extent, with different acids and salts, as well as the dissolving power of the sap of the rootlets of the plant itself, render the exact estimation of the available fertilising constituents wellnigh impossible. an approximate estimate, however, may be obtained by treating the soil with pure water and dilute acid solutions. the treatment of the soil with dilute acid solutions is for the purpose of simulating, as nearly as may be done, the conditions it is submitted to in the soil. by treating a soil with water, we obtain a certain amount of plant-food dissolved in the water. this can only be regarded as indicating approximately the amount available at that moment to the plant. but every day, thanks to the numberless complicated reactions going on in the soil, this soluble plant-food is constantly being added to. considerations such as the above, together with our ignorance as to the exact combinations in which the necessary minerals enter the plant, will serve to indicate the great difficulty of this part of the subject.[ ] _value of chemical analysis of soils._ it is largely for these reasons that a chemical analysis of a soil is from one point of view of little value in giving evidence of its actual fertility. what it demonstrates more satisfactorily is its potential fertility. it is useful in revealing what there is present in it, not necessarily, however, in an available condition. under certain circumstances it may be made of great value, as, for example, when we are anxious to know what will be the result of certain kinds of treatment, such as the application of lime, &c. it is hardly advisable, therefore, to place before the reader a number of soil analyses. that he may obtain an approximate idea of the composition of a soil, one or two representative analyses will be found in the appendix,[ ] along with a short account of the chief minerals out of which soils are formed. a point of considerable interest is the quantity per acre different soils contain of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash. although the amount of these ingredients when stated in percentage seems very trifling, yet when calculated in lb. per acre, it is seen to be in large excess of the amount removed by the different crops. this question will be dealt with in succeeding chapters. a point of further interest is the chemical form in which the necessary plant constituents are present in the soil. for information on this point the reader is referred to the appendix.[ ] the third class of properties which affect the fertility of a soil are those which have been termed the _biological_. =iii. biological properties of a soil.=--the important functions which modern discoveries have shown to be discharged by minute organic life in the terrestrial economy are nowhere more strikingly exemplified than in the important _rôle_ they perform in the soil. _bacteria of the soil._ the soil of every cultivated field is teeming with bacteria whose function is to aid in supplying plants with their necessary food. the nature of, and the functions performed by, these organisms differ very widely. regarding many of them we know very little; every day, however, our knowledge is being extended by the laborious researches of investigators in all parts of the world, and it is to be anticipated that ere long we shall be in possession of many facts regarding the nature and the method of the development of these most interesting agents in terrestrial economy. that they are present, however, in enormous numbers in all soils we have every reason to believe, one class of organism connected with the oxidation of carbonic acid gas being estimated to be present to the extent of over half a million in one gramme of soil[ ] (wollny and adametz). one class--and their importance is very great in agriculture--prepare the food of plants by decomposing the organic matter in the soil into such simple substances as are easily assimilated by the plant. the so-called "ripening" of various organic fertilisers is effected, we now know, entirely through the agency of bacteria of this class. plant-life is unable to live upon the complex nitrogenous compounds of the organic matter of the soil, and were it not for bacteria these substances would remain unavailable. attention will be drawn in the chapter on farmyard manure to this question more in detail. of these bacteria, among the most important are those which are the active agents in the process known as "nitrification"--_i.e._, the process whereby organic nitrogen and ammonia salts are converted into nitrites and nitrates. the presence of these organisms, it would appear, is indispensable to the fertility of any soil. there are organisms, on the other hand, which have the power of reversing the work of the nitrification bacteria by converting nitrates into other forms of nitrogen. the reduction of nitrates in the soil is often the source of much loss of valuable nitrogen, which escapes in the free state, so that the action of bacteria is not altogether of a beneficial nature. _three classes of organisms in the soil._ so far as the subject has been at present studied, the micro-organisms in the soil may be divided into three classes.[ ] _first class of organisms._ we have, first of all, those whose function it is to oxidise the soil ingredients. organisms of this class may act in different ways. they may assimilate the organic matter of the soil and convert it into carbonic acid gas and water; or, on the other hand, they may oxidise it by giving off oxygen. some of these organisms, whose action is of the first kind, choose most remarkable materials for assimilation. one has been found to require ferrous carbonate for its development, which it oxidises into the oxide (winogradsky); while another,[ ] the so-called sulphur organism, converts sulphur into sulphuretted hydrogen according to some, and according to others into sulphates. to this class of organism the nitrifying organisms belong. as will be seen more fully in a subsequent chapter, two distinct organisms connected with this process have already been isolated and studied--one of these effecting the formation of nitrites from organic nitrogen or ammonia salts, and the other the conversion of nitrites into nitrates. the second method in which these oxidising organisms act is by giving off oxygen. there is much interest attaching to this fact, as it was supposed till quite recently that all evolution of oxygen in vegetable physiology was dependent on the presence of light, and also intimately connected with chlorophyll, or the green colouring matter of plants. it would seem, however, that among the soil organisms these conditions are not necessary, and the evolution of oxygen may be carried on in the case of colourless organisms as well as in the case of light. with organisms of this kind every soil is probably teeming. a typical example is the organism which is the active agent in the oxidation of carbonic acid gas, and which has already been referred to as existing in the soil in such numbers.[ ] _the second class of organisms in the soil._ the second class of organisms are those which reduce or destroy the soil constituents. the most important of these, from the agricultural point of view, are those which effect the liberation of nitrogen from its compounds. in the putrefaction of organic matter the organisms chiefly act, it is probable, in the entire absence of atmospheric oxygen; but it would seem, however, that they may also act in the presence of oxygen. it is through their agency that the soil may lose some of its nitrogen in the "free" form. to this class belong the denitrifying organisms already referred to which reduce the nitrates and nitrites in the soil.[ ] _third class of organisms._ the third class of organisms are those by whose agency the soil is enriched. of this class those fixing the free nitrogen from the air are the most important. the nature of these organisms is still somewhat obscure, but that leguminous plants have the power of drawing upon this source of nitrogen is now a firmly established fact. further reference to these interesting organisms may be delayed to another chapter. the important point to be emphasised is, that for the healthy development of these organisms, which are so necessary in every fertile soil, certain conditions must exist. these necessary conditions will be treated more in detail later on. it is sufficient to notice that they have to do with the physical properties as well as the chemical composition of the soil. this furnishes a further reason for the necessity of having the mechanical condition of a soil satisfactory. _recapitulation._ from what we have said, it will be seen that the question of soil-fertility is a very complicated one, and depends on numerous and varied conditions; that the properties which constitute fertility, while seemingly very widely different in their nature, in reality influence one another to a very great extent; that not merely is the presence in a soil of the necessary plant constituents necessary to fertility, but that the possession by the soil of certain physical or mechanical properties is equally necessary; while, lastly, we have seen that the presence of certain micro-organic life is bound up with the problem of fertility in a very direct and practical manner. the importance of the conditions, other than those of a purely chemical nature, have been thus far somewhat prominently emphasised, for the reason that in what follows attention will be almost exclusively devoted to the purely chemical conditions of fertility. it is well, then, to realise that, while the latter conditions are by far the most important, so far as the farmer is practically concerned, inasmuch as they are most under his control, they are not the only conditions, and are not by themselves able to control fertility. footnotes: [ ] this statement perhaps needs qualification. while the important _rôle_ played by the physical qualities of the soil were in the early years of the science recognised, of more recent years the chemical composition of the soil has been engaging almost exclusive investigation. physical properties of the soil have recently acquired a further importance in the eyes of the agricultural chemist, from the important influence they exert on what we have here called the biological properties of a soil--viz., the development of those fermentative processes whereby plant-food is prepared to a large extent. [ ] a good example of the absorptive capacity of a soil containing a large quantity of vegetable matter is furnished by peat-bogs, which, sponge-like, can absorb enormous quantities of water. (see appendix, note i., p. .) [ ] jethro tull, an early well-known agricultural writer, who lived about the middle of last century, propounded the theory, that as the food of plants consisted of the minute earthy particles of the soil, all that was required by the skilful farmer was to see that his soil was properly tilled. he accordingly published a work entitled 'horse-hoeing husbandry,' in which he advocated a system of thorough tillage. (see historical introduction, p. .) [ ] see introduction, p. . [ ] see introductory chapter, p. . [ ] it is not exactly known why excess of water should prevent normal growth in the plant. probably it is on account of the fact that free access of oxygen is hindered in such a case. the roots are thus not freely enough exposed to this necessary gas, and fermentative processes of the nature of nitrification are not promoted. it may be also due to the fact that the solution of plant-food is too dilute when such excess of water prevails. [ ] see appendix, note ii., p. . [ ] some experiments by e. wollny show this. he found, when experimenting with _summer rape_, that the best results were obtained when the soil contained only per cent of its total water-holding power; when the amount was either lessened or increased the results obtained fell off. the effect of either too little or too much water is seen in the development of the different organs of the plant as well as on its period of growth, much water seeming to retard the growth. the quality of the plant seems also to be influenced by this condition. experiments on cereal grains by wollny show that not merely is the texture of the grain influenced, but that much moisture lessens the percentage of nitrogen. wollny is of the opinion that for crops generally, the best amount is from to per cent of the total water-holding capacity of the soil. [ ] see appendix, note iii., p. . [ ] see p. . [ ] the effect of the temperature of the soil on the development of the plant is most important. this is especially marked at the period of germination, but is felt at subsequent periods of growth. up to a certain temperature the warmer the soil the more rapid the plant's development. in this country the temperature most favourable to growth is rarely exceeded, or indeed reached. [ ] see chapter on farmyard manure. [ ] as will be seen further on, the fermentation of organic substances is caused by the action of micro-organic life. [ ] see appendix, note iv., p. . [ ] of course it must be remembered that a large amount of carbonic acid in soils comes from the decay of vegetable matter. soils are twenty to one hundred times richer in carbonic acid than the air. [ ] see chapter iii., p. . [ ] see introduction, p. . [ ] see introductory chapter, p. . [ ] see pp. and . [ ] occasionally also _lime_. [ ] see appendix, notes v. and vi., pp. , . [ ] note vi., p. . [ ] note vii., p. . [ ] even larger estimates of the number of germs in a gramme of soil have been made--from three-quarters to one million (koch, fülles, and others). [ ] these organisms consist of molds, yeast, and bacteria, the last-named being most abundant. in the surface-soil, among the bacteria, bacilli are most abundant. micrococei are not abundant. [ ] investigated by winogradsky, olivier, de rey pailhade, and others. [ ] organisms of this kind have been investigated among others by heraüs, hueppe, and e. wollny. according to the two first-mentioned investigators, certain colourless bacteria effect the formation in the absence of light from humus and carbonates a body resembling in its nature cellulose. [ ] investigated by springer, gayon and dupetit, dehérain, and marguenne. appendix to chapter i. note i. (p. ). the following determinations by schübler show the absorptive power of different kinds of soil-substances. these were obtained by soaking weighed quantities of the soil in water, and allowing the excess of liquid to drain away, and weighing the wet earth. per cent of water absorbed by parts of earth. siliceous sand gypsum calcareous sand sandy clay strong clay arable soil fine calcareous garden-earth humus it has been calculated that the absorptive power of a mixture of different substances is not simply equal to the sum of their separate ingredients. note ii. (p. ). evaporation. the retentive property of a soil for water tends to retard evaporation. the following table by schübler shows the rate at which evaporation proceeds in different soils. the experiment was conducted in the following way. the soil experimented upon was saturated with water and spread over a disc, and allowed to evaporate for four hours, when it was weighed. the amount of time required for the evaporation of per cent of the water was also estimated. of parts of water in the wet soil there evaporated, at ° fahr.-- time required to in four hours-- evaporate per cent. from-- per cent. hours. minutes. quartz limestone sandy clay stiffish clay loamy clay pure grey clay loam fine calcium carbonate humus magnesium carbonate note iii. (p. ). hygroscopic power of soils. davy found the hygroscopic power of soils to be as follows. he found that parts by weight of three samples of different sands absorbed , , and parts of water, respectively, in one hour; while three loams absorbed similarly . , . , and . parts. the following samples of soil were dried at ° fahr., and exposed to an atmosphere saturated with water and a temperature of ° fahr., when it was found they absorbed the following amounts in twelve hours' time:-- quartz sand . limestone sand . lean clay . fat clay . clay soil. . pure clay. . garden-loam . humus . note iv. (p. ). gases present in soils. the air which we find enclosed in the pores of the soil is distinctly _poorer_ in oxygen than ordinary air. boussingault found the percentage of oxygen in a sandy soil, freshly manured and wet with rain, to be as low as . per cent; while the air in forest-soil contained . per cent of oxygen, and . per cent of carbonic acid. the percentage of oxygen in soils depends on the rate of decay of the organic portions. the depth of the soil-layer also determines the quantity. this is owing to the fact that diffusion takes place more slowly deep down than near the surface. note v. (p. ). amount of soluble plant-food in the soil. two of the most reliable methods of ascertaining an approximation of the quantity of soluble soil constituents are ( ) by treating the soil with distilled water, and ( ) by analysing the drainage-water. with regard to the former of these two methods, it has been found that even the amount of fertilising matter dissolved out by pure distilled water varies. this variation depends on the amount of distilled water used, as well as the length of time the soil is left in contact with the solvent. by washing the soil with different quantities of water, different amounts of soluble soil ingredients will be found to have been washed out; for although the first washings contain by far the greater portion of the soluble matter, each subsequent washing will be found to contain further quantities. a number of experiments have shown that parts of distilled water dissolved out from different soils from one half to one and a half parts of soluble constituents; or from . to . per cent. of this soluble matter from to per cent is mineral in its nature, and from to per cent organic. poor sandy soils yield the minimum quantity, while peaty soils yield the maximum. the quantity of soluble matter in a regular peaty soil may vary from . to . per cent; this consists chiefly, however, of organic matter. (see johnson's 'how crops feed,' p. .) perhaps a more satisfactory method is by analysing the drainage-water of a soil. this has been found to vary very considerably in composition. the average of a large number of analyses are . to . per cent of dissolved matter. of this dissolved matter the largest proportion is made up of organic matter, nitric acid, lime, and soda salts. it must be borne in mind, however, that even the drainage-water does not furnish an exact indication of the amount of dissolved matter in a soil. much, perhaps the largest proportion of dissolved matter, never finds its way into the drainage-water. that contained by the drainage-water really represents the surplus quantity of dissolved matter which the soil is unable to retain, and which is thus washed by the rain into the drains. the composition of drainage-water is interesting, as it shows that, practically speaking, all the necessary plant ingredients are in a state of solution in the soil. note vi. (p. ). chemical composition of the soil. the most important substances present in soils are as follows: silica, alumina, lime, magnesia, potash, soda, ferric oxide, manganese oxide, sulphuric acid, phosphoric acid, and chlorine. of these substances the presence of alumina, silica, lime, and, in certain cases, magnesia, along with the organic portion of the soil--the humus--has the chief influence in determining the nature and the physical properties of a soil. in order to clearly understand to what it is soils owe the nature of their chemical composition, it is necessary to consider the composition of some of the chief minerals out of the disintegration of which soils are formed. while we know of some seventy elements present in the earth's crust, it is practically made up of only some sixteen. these sixteen are--oxygen, silicon, carbon, sulphur, hydrogen, chlorine, phosphorus, iron, aluminium, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, fluorine, manganese, and barium.[ ] of these, oxygen is by far the largest constituent, forming, roughly speaking, about per cent. the main mass of the rocks consists of silica, and this is generally combined with alumina, as in clay, forming aluminium silicate, and with the commoner alkalies and alkaline earths. another extremely abundant compound is carbonate of lime, which, as limestone, chalk, and marl, forms one-sixth of the earth's total rocks. the word "mineral" means a definite chemical compound of natural occurrence. the number of minerals is very great, and it is impossible to go into the subject here. reference can only be made to a few of the more prominent ones, which are chiefly concerned in the formation of soils. those formed out of silicates are, from the agricultural point of view, the most important, as they form a very large group; and it is by their disintegration that soils are chiefly formed. they consist of silica and alumina, along with various other substances, chiefly alkalies and alkaline earths. it is important to note one peculiarity about the solubility of silicates. we have two classes of silicates: the one, which is called "acid," and contains an excess of silica; the other, "basic," and which contains an excess of base. now, while the former of these is more or less insoluble, the second is soluble. this fact has an important signification in the process of the disintegration of the silicate minerals we are about to consider. the first and most important class are the _felspars_. felspar is not really a definite mineral, with a definite chemical composition, but rather the name of a class of minerals of which there are several different kinds. the felspars are composed of silica and alumina, along with potash, soda, and lime, with traces of iron and magnesia. their principal constituents, however, are silica and alumina, along with either potash, soda, or lime. according as the base potash, soda, or lime predominates, the felspar is known as orthoclase, albite, and oligoclase, respectively. the following are the analyses of the three minerals (by the late dr anderson):-- --------------------+-----------------+-----------------+----------------- | orthoclase. | albite. | oligoclase. +--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+-------- | . | . | . | . | . | . --------------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+-------- silica | . | . | . | . | . | . alumina | . | . | . | . | . | . peroxide of iron | traces | . | . | . | . | none oxide of manganese | traces | . | none | none | none | none lime | . | . | . | . | . | . magnesia | . | . | none | . | . | . potash | . | . | none | . | . | . soda. | . | . | . | . | . | . --------------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+-------- | . | . | . | . | . | . --------------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+-------- according as these various felspars are present in a soil, so will the quality of the soil be. it stands to reason that as the presence of potash in a soil is one of the distinguishing features of its fertility, much will depend on the extent to which the orthoclase felspar is present; and also, not only on the extent, but on the state and degree of its disintegration. it is important to note the method of this disintegration. it is effected by the absorption of water. this water is not merely absorbed mechanically, but actually enters into the composition of the mineral. it is not present as moisture merely, capable of being expelled at ordinary boiling temperature, but it forms what is known as water of composition. in this process of hydration, the mineral loses its lustre and crystalline appearance, crumbles away into a more or less--according to its state of disintegration--powdery mass. a very great change is also effected in its chemical composition; it loses nearly all its base. this is effected in the following way. as water enters into the mineral's composition, it sets free a certain portion of the base; there is thus formed a basic silicate, which, being soluble in water, is washed away in solution. this change may be illustrated by quoting the analysis of a kaolin clay formed by the disintegration of orthoclase felspar. _kaolin clay formed by disintegration of orthoclase._ silica . alumina . peroxide of iron . carbonate of lime . potash . water . ------ . ------ the chief difference here is the almost total loss of potash and a portion of the silica, and the gain of water. the other constituents practically remain insoluble. another important mineral is _mica_. its composition is not unlike felspar. it contains silica, alumina, and iron, in considerable quantities, also magnesia and potash. there are two kinds of mica--that containing potash, and that containing magnesia, in excess. the analyses of these two kinds are as follows (by the late dr anderson):-- micas. (_a_) potash. (_b_) magnesia. silica . . alumina . . peroxide of iron . none protoxide of iron none . oxide of manganese . . magnesia none . potash . . hydrofluoric acid . . water . . ----- ----- . . ----- ----- the decomposition of mica is very slow, however, as it is a peculiarly hard mineral. other important minerals are _hornblende_ and _augite_. these are composed of silica, alumina, iron oxide, manganese oxide, lime and magnesia. these are the chief minerals out of which soils are formed. it is scarcely necessary to say that few soils are made up out of any of these three minerals alone. nearly all rocks are formed out of a mixture of these minerals. where, however, any one mineral predominates over the rest, the nature of the soil will be thereby affected. in order to illustrate this, it may be well to mention the composition of one or two of the commoner rocks. . _granite_, which is so abundant in certain parts of the north of scotland, and which gives rise to the soils in the neighbourhood of aberdeen, is made up of a mixture of quartz, felspar, and mica. it depends on the felspar present--_i.e._, whether it is orthoclase, oligoclase, or albite--whether the soil will be rich in potash or not. granite containing orthoclase felspar produces a fairly fertile soil. an important consideration, which is apt to complicate this question, is the situation of such soils. they are generally so high above sea-level, that their fertility is seriously impaired on these grounds. . _gneiss_, another common rock, is similar in composition, only that it contains very little felspar, and a correspondingly greater amount of mica. . _syenite_ contains quartz, felspar, and hornblende. the rocks of which greenstone and trap are types, are found very largely scattered over the country. they are of two kinds, diorite and dolorite. . _limestone_ is of two great classes. we have ( ) common, ( ) magnesian. the following are the analyses of these two classes by dr anderson:-- ----------------------+---------------------------+------------------------ | common. | magnesian. +-------------+-------------+-------------+---------- | mid-lothian | sutherland. | sutherland. | dumfries. ----------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+---------- silica | . | . | . | . iron oxide and alumina| . | . | . | . carbonate of lime | . | . | . | . carbonate of magnesia | . | . | . | . phosphate of lime | . | - | - | - sulphate of lime | . | - | - | - organic matter | . | - | - | - water | . | - | - | - | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | . | . | . | . ----------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+---------- clays are formed by the disintegration of any of the crystalline rocks; the purest clays being formed from felspar. a pure clay consists simply of silica and alumina, all the other constituents having been washed out. disintegration, however, seldom reaches such an extent; otherwise clay soils would be completely barren, which they are notably not. the impurities present in clay, which consist of alkalies, especially potash and other mineral ingredients of the plant, are what confer on clay soils their fertility. clays differ, however, very considerably in their composition. the following is an analysis of a clay soil by dr anderson:-- silica . alumina . peroxide of iron . lime . magnesia . potash . soda . water and carbonic acid . ----- . ----- note vii. (p. ). forms in which plant-foods are present in soil. the forms in which the bases necessary for plant-food are present in the soil, are chiefly as _hydrated silicates_, and in combination with organic acids, forming humates, &c., as well as in the form of sulphates and chlorides. phosphoric acid is present in combination with iron, alumina, or lime, or possibly also as magnesium-ammonium-phosphate. sulphuric acid is generally present in a more or less insoluble condition, in combination with iron and lime; whereas chlorine is combined with the alkali bases in an easily soluble form. an important point is as to the form in which the plant absorbs these food constituents. in this connection reference may be made to a theory put forward by a very distinguished french agricultural chemist, professor grandeau. his theory is that the necessary ingredients of plant-food are absorbed into the plant as humates, or, at any rate, that the medium of this transference is humic acid, and organic acids of a similar nature. this theory, however, while ingenious, has not yet been supported by sufficient evidence to make its acceptance advisable. it is probable that it is only in the form of soluble salts that the plant can absorb its food. it is quite probable, however, at the same time, that the exact form in which the different food substances enter the plant may be largely determined by circumstances. according to nobbe, chloride of potassium is the most suitable form of potassium salts, although the plant may absorb its potassium as sulphate, phosphate, or even silicate. footnotes: [ ] composition of the earth's solid crust in parts by weight:-- oxygen . to . | calcium . to . silicon . to . | magnesium . to . aluminium . to . | sodium . to . iron . to . | potassium . to . (roscoe's 'lessons in elementary chemistry,' p. .) chapter ii. functions performed by manures. having now considered the general conditions on which fertility of soil depends, we are in a position to deal with the nature and function of manures. manures may be classified in several different ways, and a considerable amount of confusion is sometimes caused by the variety of classification adopted by different writers on this subject. _etymological meaning of the word manure._ let us, in the first place, clearly understand what we mean by a manure. the word manure comes from the french word _manoeuvrer_, which simply means "to work with the hand," hence "to till," and this etymological meaning of the word illustrates the old belief in the function of manures. we have already seen in the historical introduction that, according to tull, the true and only function of manures was to aid in the pulverisation of the soil by fermentation. in advancing his system of _thorough tillage_, he claimed that since tillage effected the pulverisation of the soil, where it was practised, manures could be dispensed with. _definition of manures._ we no longer, of course, attach this old meaning to the word. the word manure is now applied to any substance which by its application contributes to the fertility of a soil. as has been shown in the previous chapter, the substances necessary for plant-growth which are apt to be lacking in a soil, are only generally three in number--viz., _nitrogen_, _phosphoric acid_, and _potash_. a manure, therefore, is understood to be any substance containing these ingredients, either singly or together, and its commercial value is determined by the amount it contains of these substances. but while this is so, it must not be forgotten that if we define a manure to be a substance which contributes in any way to the fertility of the soil, substances other than these above mentioned may be fairly regarded as manures. the fertility of a soil, we have seen, depends not merely on the presence of certain constituents, but also on their chemical condition--_i.e._, whether they are easily soluble or not. it further depends, as we have also seen, on the possession by the soil of certain mechanical and biological properties. thus there are substances which act upon the soil's inert fertilising matter, and by their action convert it into a more speedily available form. there are other substances which by their application exert a considerable effect on the texture of the soil, and thereby influence its physical and biological properties. all such substances, according to the above definition of a manure, must be included under the term. it will thus be seen that since fertility in a soil can be promoted in a variety of ways, and the functions performed by manures are of different kinds, we can divide them into different classes, according to their respective action. _different classes of manures._ in the first place, we can divide manures into two great classes,--( ) those supplying to the soil necessary plant-food constituents, and thus contributing directly to fertility; and ( ) those influencing soil-fertility in an indirect manner. the first class we may call _direct_ manures, and the second _indirect_. those two classes admit further of being subdivided into other smaller classes. among the direct manures we have a number of subdivisions in use. they may be divided into _general_ manures and _special_ manures, according as they contain all the elements necessary for plant-growth, or only some of them; or they may be divided according to their source into _natural_ and _artificial_, _mineral_ and _vegetable_. similarly we have a number of subdivisions among the second class, depending on the special nature of the action they exert. some manures act in both capacities--both directly and indirectly--and in order that their value be fully appreciated must be studied under both heads. the most striking example of such a manure is farmyard manure. there are other manures which may in certain circumstances act in two different ways. such a substance is lime. there are soils which are actually lacking in a sufficiency of lime for the needs of crops. on such soils an application of lime would act both as a direct and also as an indirect manure. there may also be cases of an exceptional nature, in which magnesia salts or even iron salts may act as direct manures. many manures commonly regarded as purely direct manures would exert an indirect influence were the quantities in which they were applied sufficiently large. this is the case, indeed, with many artificial manures, such as guano, bones, nitrate of soda, and basic slag. it has been claimed for nitrate of soda that it not merely promotes fertility by supplying nitrogen in its most available form to the soil, but that the soda it contains exerts a valuable indirect influence in consolidating the soil and increasing its absorptive powers. when we reflect, however, on the small quantity of this manure which is applied per acre, its mechanical influence must be insignificant. the same applies to basic slag, which contains a considerable quantity of free lime in its composition. as this manure, however, is sometimes applied in considerable quantities, it is reasonable to suppose that its indirect value may not be altogether insignificant. indeed we have proof of this in the fact that its most favourable action has been found to be on soils rich in organic matter.[ ] the action of bones and guano, and indeed of all other manures containing a large percentage of decomposable organic matter, is likewise of a double nature, inasmuch as their decomposition or putrefaction in the soil gives rise to the formation of carbonic and organic acids, which are capable of exerting a chemical action on the soil ingredients. there is one point in connection with the action of these manures which is worthy of notice, and it is that, however slight their indirect value may be, their action as a direct manure is very much accelerated by the way in which their organic matter putrefies. in short, they may be described as providing, to a certain extent, the solvents which render them available for the requirements of the plant. it may be here convenient to classify the manures which we intend subsequently to deal with. i. manures, action of which is both direct and indirect--_e.g._, _green manures_, _farmyard manure_, _composts_, and _sewage_. ii. manures which may be regarded as having only a direct action--_e.g._, _guano_ of all kinds, _bones_ in all forms, _nitrate of soda_, _sulphate of ammonia_, _dried blood_, _superphosphates_, _mineral phosphates_ of all kinds, _horns_ and _hoofs_, _shoddy_, _wool-waste_, _fish-guano_, _muriate of potash_, _sulphate of potash_, and _kainit_. iii. manures which may be regarded as having only an indirect value--_e.g._, _lime_, _mild_ and _caustic_, _marl_, _gypsum_, _salt_, &c. we shall now proceed to discuss the nature and action of these different manures, starting with those exercising both a _direct_ and _indirect_ influence. before doing so it may be well to consider the occurrence and natural sources of the three important soil constituents, nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, with a view of seeing to what extent these are being removed from our soils by the various natural processes constantly going on, as well as by the crops, and how far their natural sources are capable of making good this loss--in short, to clearly understand the economic reasons for the application of artificial manures. footnotes: [ ] see chapter on basic slag. chapter iii. the position of nitrogen in agriculture. of manurial ingredients, nitrogen is by far the most important, and on the presence and character of the nitrogen it contains, the fertility of a soil may be said to be most largely dependent. most soils, as a rule, are better supplied with available ash ingredients than with available nitrogen compounds. the expensive nature of most artificial nitrogenous manures also gives to nitrogen the first position from an economic point of view. a thorough study, therefore, of the different forms in which it exists in nature, of the numerous and complicated changes it undergoes in the soil, by which it is prepared for the plant's needs, of the relation of its different forms to plant-life, and of the natural sources of its loss and gain, is of the highest importance if we are to hope to understand the difficult question of soil-fertility. _the rothamsted experiments and the nitrogen question._ the position of nitrogen in agriculture is a question of great difficulty and complexity. it has engaged much attention, and has had devoted to its elucidation much elaborate and painstaking research. to the rothamsted experiments we owe most of the information we possess on the subject, and the facts contained in this chapter are almost entirely derived from the results of these famous experiments, as embodied in the memoirs and writings of messrs lawes, gilbert, and warington. _different forms in which nitrogen exists in nature._ we have already referred to the nitrogen question in the historical introduction. in order, however, to have a comprehensive view of the subject, it may be well to recapitulate some of the facts there mentioned. nitrogen, as we have already seen, exists in the "free" or elementary condition, as nitrates and nitrites, as ammonia, and in a large number of different organic forms. _nitrogen in the air._ it occurs in greatest abundance (amounting to about per cent) in the first of these forms in the air. that this free nitrogen, which is practically unlimited in quantity,[ ] has originally been the source of all its other forms, is of course obvious. but this conversion of free nitrogen into the various compound forms in which it occurs throughout the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, has been a process effected by a variety of indirect methods, and only at the expense of a vast amount of time. for practical purposes, the free nitrogen of the air may be regarded chiefly as a non-available source for most bodies containing it. it may be described as of all forms of nitrogen the least active, as far as plant-life is concerned. _relation of "free" nitrogen to the plant._ the relation of the "free" nitrogen to the plant has formed the subject of much research, more especially during the last few years, and a brief epitome of the main results arrived at has already been given in the introductory chapter.[ ] that this source of nitrogen is not so inaccessible to the plant as was formerly believed, has now been abundantly proved. as the considerations which have led to this conclusion, and have suggested the very recent elaborate experiments on the fixation of free nitrogen by the plant--the results of which bid fair, it would seem, to largely revolutionise our agricultural practice--have been due to the study of the relation of the soil-nitrogen to the plant, it will be best to defer further discussion of this question till we have dealt with the other sources of nitrogen. _combined nitrogen in the air._ in addition to nitrogen in the free state, air contains very small quantities of this element in combined forms. we have it in minute traces as nitrates and nitrites, as ammonia,[ ] and also in still smaller traces as organic nitrogen in the minute dust-particles which modern researches have revealed as being present in such enormous numbers in our atmosphere. what the sources of these nitrates and nitrites (which exist in quantities so minute that accurate determination of their amount is rendered extremely difficult) are is a disputed point. that nitrogen and oxygen unite together to form nitric and nitrous oxides under the influence of intense heat, such as the electric spark, has been proved beyond doubt. one source, therefore, is probably the electrical discharges which are taking place more or less frequently on different parts of the earth's surface. nitrates may also be formed in the combustion of nitrogenous bodies.[ ] in the burning of coal-gas, for example, it is probable that small quantities of nitrates may be produced. similarly the slow combustion or decay of nitrogenous organic matter, which constantly takes place all over the earth's surface, may be regarded as another source of this form of combined nitrogen. ammonia may be similarly formed by the combustion, either quick or slow, of nitrogenous organic matter. it exists in the air as nitrate or nitrite of ammonia, and also as carbonate of ammonia.[ ] _amount of combined nitrogen falling in the rain._ the importance of the combined nitrogen in the air as a source of soil-nitrogen is best gauged by the amount falling annually on the soil dissolved in rain. this has been found to vary considerably. in the rain falling in the vicinity of large towns the amount is greater than in rain falling in the country. thus at rothamsted, in england, the average amount for several years was only . lb. nitrogen per annum per acre, of which . lb. were as ammonia,. being as nitric acid. at lincoln, in new zealand, . lb. fell annually per acre--as ammonia,. , as nitric acid, . ; while at barbadoes the amount was . lb., of which . was as ammonia, and . as nitric acid.[ ] that the combined nitrogen derived from the air by the soil may be considerably in excess of this is highly probable. soils, especially when damp, may absorb much larger quantities from the air of the combined nitrogen it contains. we must remember that the air in contact with the soil-surface is constantly being changed, and that there is thus a constant renewal of the air passed over the ground. the result is that the amount of air from which combined nitrogen may be removed is very great.[ ] _nitrogen in the soil._ it has been remarked as a fact worthy of notice that nitrogen is essentially a superficial element. by this is meant that it is only found, as a rule, on the earth's immediate surface. this statement can only be admitted to be true within certain limits. the chief source of nitrogen, in addition to the atmosphere, is, of course, vegetable and animal tissue.[ ] as vegetable and animal tissue are only found to any extent on the earth's surface, nitrogen is therefore chiefly found there. the natural deposits of nitrogen salts, such as the nitrate-fields of chili and the saltpetre soils of india, &c., also only occur superficially. notwithstanding these facts, however, the amount of nitrogen which exists at probably considerable depths from the surface must be very great. there are few sedimentary rocks which do not contain it. at rothamsted a sample of calcareous clay, taken from a depth of feet, contained . per cent--that is, as much as is found, on an average, in the rothamsted clay subsoils. _nitrogen in the subsoil._ on the whole, however, as we have said, nitrogen is chiefly found in the surface-soil. the amount found in the subsoil at rothamsted seems to vary very slightly at different depths, the percentage amounting to from . to . .[ ] unlike the nitrogen of the surface-soil, that in the subsoil seems to be of very ancient origin, being probably derived from the remains of animal and vegetable life in the mud deposited at the bottom of the ocean. it is more abundant in the case of a clay subsoil than in a sandy subsoil. _nitrogen of surface-soil._ nitrogen has a tendency to collect on the top layers of the surface-soil, the first inches or foot containing by far the largest proportion of it. in the table given in the appendix,[ ] the rate at which it decreases in amount the further down we go is clearly shown. determinations of the respective amounts of nitrogen in every inches of the soil, taken to a depth of one foot of the experimental wheat-field at rothamsted, showed that the percentage between the first inches and the second inches varied very slightly. a more marked difference, however, was shown to exist between the nitrogen in the second and third inches; while the fourth inches were distinctly poorer--differing very little in their percentage of nitrogen from the subsoil. this was the case in unmanured soil. in the case of heavily manured soil, the increase in the soil's percentage, due to manure, was shown to be felt to the depth of a foot, but not much below it.[ ] a careful perusal of the tables in the appendix will show that the quantity of nitrogen in the case of both arable and pasture soils steadily decreases for the first feet, but that below this depth little decrease is seen, the percentage evidently becoming fairly constant. _the amount of nitrogen in the soil._ very considerable difference exists in the amount of nitrogen present in different soils. the majority of analyses refer only to the amount found in the surface-soil--generally in the first or inches. as the soil, further, is not a body exactly homogeneous in its character, very considerable difficulty exists in obtaining reliable results. a great deal depends, therefore, on the method of sampling and the basis of calculation adopted; and it may be that this may occasionally explain, to some extent at least, the great discrepancies in the estimation of the quantities of nitrogen present in different soils as found by different investigators. _peat-soils richest in nitrogen._ of all soils, peat-soils are richest in nitrogen. professor s. w. johnson found the nitrogen in fifty separate samples of peat to range from . per cent to . per cent, the average being . per cent. on the other hand, marls and sandy soils are poorest, the analyses of a number of these soils showing only from . to . per cent for the former, and . to . for the latter. as a general rule most arable soils contain over one-tenth per cent of nitrogen, or, say, over lb. per acre. a good pasture-soil, taken to a depth of inches at rothamsted, was found to contain about a quarter per cent. in ten samples of soil, taken to a depth of inches, from different parts of great britain and ireland, munro found from . to . per cent of nitrogen, the average being . per cent. the rothamsted soils, it may be pointed out, are probably poor in nitrogen compared with most soils. a. müller's investigations showed that in some of the soils he has analysed, the nitrogen amounted to little short of one per cent, while for the others the average was over half a per cent; even the poorer soils he examined contained about one quarter per cent on an average. anderson's analyses of scottish wheat-soils showed a variation of from . to . in the surface-soil, while he found in their subsoil from . to . per cent. boussingault's results are also very much higher. the amount of nitrogen in a number of loams coming from widely different localities he examined contained from to , lb. per acre--the soil taken to a depth of inches.[ ] _nature of the nitrogen in the soil._ when we compare the amount of nitrogen removed by different crops (which, even in the case of those most exhaustive of nitrogen, does not often amount to more than lb. per acre), with the amount contained in the soil, the former amount seems very insignificant when compared to the latter. such being the case, it would seem at first sight that the addition of nitrogen in the form of manures is quite superfluous. we must remember, however, that while the _total_ amount of nitrogen is relatively large when compared to that removed by crops, only a very small proportion is in a condition _available_ to the plant. this leads us to consider the different forms in which nitrogen is present in the soil, and their respective quantities. _organic nitrogen in the soil._ nitrogen occurs in the soil as organic nitrogen, nitric acid, nitrous acid, and ammonia. by far the largest proportion is present in the first of these forms. this is a wise provision, for otherwise the soil would be apt to become very speedily impoverished in nitrogen; for that present as nitrates it has scarcely any power to retain, while that present as ammonia is soon converted into nitrates by the process of _nitrification_. the organic nitrogen of the soil, although we are apt to think of it as such, is by no means of a homogeneous character, or of equal value as a source of plant-food. some of it, it would seem from recent investigations, is in a condition more susceptible of being converted into an available form than the rest. thus in the process of nitrification, a process which we shall consider at length immediately, there seems to be generally a certain small proportion more ready to undergo this change than the rest; so that when this small amount is used up nitrification proceeds more slowly. in short, although we as yet know very little of the nature of the organic nitrogen of soils, we cannot doubt but that there is a constant series of changes in its composition taking place, resulting in the gradual elaboration of more available forms, until ultimately these are converted into ammonia and nitrates. the great bulk of the organic nitrogen, however, in the soil must be regarded as in an _inert_ condition, and by no means available for the crop. what the exact chemical form of this nitrogen is it is extremely difficult to say. mulder was of the opinion that a considerable proportion was in the form of humate of ammonia. this opinion, as we shall have occasion to see immediately, was based on false grounds. it is highly probable that it may be in some form approximating to amide nitrogen. its inert character is against the belief that it long remains as albuminoid nitrogen. _different character of surface and subsoil nitrogen._ a point of very considerable importance to notice is, that the nitrogenous organic matter of the surface-soil is very different from that found in the subsoil. this difference is shown by the variation in the ratio of nitrogen to carbon, which points to the fact that, just as we should naturally suppose, the origin of the latter is very much more ancient than the origin of the former. thus in the first inches of old pasture-soil at rothamsted, the ratio was : ; while in the subsoil, feet from the surface, it was only : . in the surface-soil it thus approaches more nearly in composition ordinary vegetable matter. _nitrogen as ammonia in soils._ the second form in which nitrogen is present in soil is as ammonia. a very considerable misapprehension has existed in the past as to the amount of nitrogen in this form in soils. this mistake was due to the method adopted in estimating it, which consisted in treating the soil with boiling caustic alkalies and counting as ammonia what was given off as such. it is now known that certain forms of organic nitrogen--as, for example, amides--if treated in this way are slowly converted into ammonia. statements, therefore, which are found in the older text-books, representing the amount of ammonia in soils as at over a tenth per cent, must be regarded as utterly unreliable. indeed it is highly probable that ammonia only occurs in most soils in very minute traces. from what we know of the process of nitrification, we see how it is wellnigh impossible that ammonia should exist to any extent in the soil except under very exceptional circumstances. _amount of ammonia present in the soil._ in ordinary soils it probably does not amount to more than from . per cent to . per cent, or an average of . per cent.[ ] in rich soils, or in garden-soils, the amount may be considerably more. thus boussingault found in a garden-soil . per cent. in peat and in peat-mould even a higher percentage has been found--viz.,. for the former and . for the latter. _nitrogen present as nitrates in the soil._ the third form of nitrogen in the soil is nitric acid. it is more abundant in this form than as ammonia; but still, compared with the organic nitrogen, its amount is trifling. probably not more than per cent of the total nitrogen of a soil is ever present as nitrates. the reason of this is twofold. first, as we have already remarked, the soil has very little power to retain nitrogen in this form; and secondly, where the soil is covered with growing vegetation the nitrates are quickly assimilated by the plant as they are formed. it is for this reason that we find the quantity of nitrogen as nitrates very much greater in fallow soils than in those covered with a crop. _position of nitric nitrogen in soil._ as we shall have occasion to see more fully in the following chapter on nitrification, the formation of nitrates is chiefly limited to the surface-soil, the largest proportion being formed within the first or inches. for this reason we find the largest quantity of nitrates in the surface-soil. but inasmuch as they are easily washed into the lower layers of the soil after formation, we often find a considerable proportion beyond the first inches. the position of nitrates in the soil thus depends very considerably on the season of the year and the weather. in dry weather, where the evaporation of the soil-water takes place at a considerable rate, the tendency will be to concentrate the nitrates in the superficial portion of the soil. in wet weather, on the other hand, the tendency will be to wash the nitrates into the lower layers. _amount of nitrates in the soil._ the determination of the amount of nitrates in a soil is not of very great economic importance; as this varies so much, and depends on such a number of different conditions, such as the season, the condition of the land, and prevailing weather. a point of very much greater economic importance is the total amount formed in the year, and the rate at which nitrification takes place. these questions will be discussed elsewhere, and therefore need not here be referred to. some interesting analyses made at rothamsted, however, of the amount of nitrates in soils at different depths, merit careful consideration. _nitrates in fallow soils._ in the appendix to the chapter on nitrification,[ ] will be found a table containing the amounts of nitrates found in the first inches of fallow soils. the amounts vary from . lb. to . lb. per acre. the analyses were made in september or october. in four out of the six analyses, it will be found that by far the largest proportion is found in the first inches. in these cases the preceding summer had been dry, and thus the nitrates had not been washed down to any depth. in the other two cases the largest amount is found in the second inches of soil, and a considerable amount is also found in the third inches. _nitrates in cropped soils._ in the case of cropped soils we find the amount of nitrates very much less. a table containing an elaborate series of determinations of nitrates in cropped soils, receiving, however, no manure, and taken to a depth of feet, will be found in the appendix.[ ] the first inches only contain some to lb. per acre, and the most of that is found in the first inches. this shows how speedily nitrates are assimilated by the growing crop. an interesting point shown by these analyses is that nitrates almost entirely cease in cropped soils a certain depth down, but that at a still lower depth they again occur in small quantities. _nitrates in manured wheat-soils._ lastly, we give in the appendix[ ] the amount of nitrates found in wheat and barley soils, differently manured, at rothamsted. from a perusal of these tables, it will be seen that the amount (under various conditions of manuring) of nitrates in the first inches varies from . lb. per acre to . lb. for the wheat-soils, and . to . lb. per acre for the barley-soils. the sources of soil-nitrogen. we shall now consider the sources of soil-nitrogen, the conditions which determine its increase, and the amount of that increase, as well as the sources of loss, and the conditions which determine this loss. _that dissolved in rain._ the natural sources of the soil-nitrogen are several. we have first of all the atmospheric nitrogen. of this let us first consider that present as combined nitrogen. this, as we have already seen, consists chiefly of nitrates, nitrites, and ammonia, and reaches the soil dissolved in rain or in other meteoric forms of water, such as snow, hail, fog, hoar-frost, &c. _that absorbed by the soil from the air._ it is also absorbed by the soil from the air, especially when the soil is in a damp condition, as has been proved by schloesing's experiments, already referred to. the total amount which falls dissolved in the rain, per acre per annum, varies very considerably in different parts of the world, but in any case only amounts yearly to a few pounds per acre.[ ] that absorbed by the soil from the air may be probably very much more considerable. schloesing in his experiments found that this latter might amount to lb. per acre per annum. these results, however, were obtained under circumstances most favourable for absorption--viz., with a damp soil and in the vicinity of paris, where the air is presumably richer in combined nitrogen than it is in the country. the nitrogen absorbed, it may be mentioned, was almost entirely in the form of ammonia. it is to be noted that the nitrogen the soil obtains in this way from the combined nitrogen of the air is not all pure gain. with regard to the nitrates and nitrites, no doubt most of these are formed by electrical discharge, although a small portion of them may be formed by the oxidation of ammonia by means of ozone and peroxide of hydrogen. with regard to the ammonia and the combined nitrogen present in the organic particles in the air, a not inconsiderable proportion is probably derived from the soil. schloesing considers the chief source of the ammonia present in the air to be the tropical ocean; but we must remember that the source of much of the nitrogen in the tropical ocean is, after all, the soil. leaving aside for a moment the question of the availability of the free nitrogen of the air, let us consider the other sources of soil-nitrogen. _accumulation of soil-nitrogen under natural conditions._ the chief source is of course the remains of vegetable and animal tissue.[ ] plants are the great conservers of soil-nitrogen. by assimilating such available forms of it as nitrates, and converting them into organic nitrogen, they prevent the loss of this most valuable of all soil constituents that would otherwise take place. they also serve to collect the nitrogen from the lower soil-layers and concentrate it in the surface portion. in a state of nature, where the soil is constantly covered with vegetation, the process going on, therefore, will be one of steady accumulation of nitrogen in the surface-soil. to what extent this accumulation goes on, and how far it is limited by the conditions of loss, will be considered immediately. that it may go on to a very great extent is amply proved by the existence of the so-called _virgin_ soils of countries like america and australia. there are cases, also, where the accumulation of nitrogen is practically unlimited, although the result in such cases is not necessarily a fertile soil. such cases are peat-bogs. but let us pass on to the accumulation of soil-nitrogen under the ordinary conditions of husbandry. _accumulation of nitrogen in pastures._ the case which, under the conditions of ordinary farming, most resembles a state of nature, is that of permanent pasture. it will be best, therefore, to study first the conditions under which gain of nitrogen takes place in this case. _increase of nitrogen in the soil of pasture-land._ that there is a steady increase of nitrogen in the soil of land under pasture is a fact of universal experience. the older a pasture is the richer is its soil in nitrogen. the comparison of the analyses of the soil of arable land with the soil of pastures of different ages shows this in a striking way.[ ] thus at rothamsted it was found that while the amount of nitrogen in an ordinary arable soil was . per cent, that in pastures eight, eighteen, twenty-one, and thirty years old was respectively . , . , . , and . per cent. in the last two analyses we have a record of the actual gain in nitrogen made by the same pasture, this being . per cent in nine years' time. from these statistics it may be inferred that the surface-soil of a pasture may increase at the rate of lb. per acre per annum. a point of great interest in connection with this subject is the fact that there seems to be a limit to the accumulation of nitrogen in pastures; for it would seem that pastures centuries old are not any richer in nitrogen than those thirty to forty years old. _gain of nitrogen with leguminous crops._ another case where the gain of nitrogen to the surface-soil is very striking is in that of leguminous crops, such as clover, beans, peas, &c. this fact has been long recognised--especially with regard to clover--by farmers, and has been largely instrumental in leading to the investigation of the "free" nitrogen question. that a soil bearing a leguminous crop increases in nitrogen at a very striking rate is a problem that requires to be solved. a partial explanation of the phenomenon is found in the extraordinary capacity such a crop as clover has, by means of its multitudinous and ramifying roots, for collecting nitrogen from the subsoil. this, however, would only account for the increase in nitrogen to a certain extent. there must be some other source, and the only other source is the air. that the free nitrogen of the air is, after all, available for the plant's needs, is a supposition which has long seemed extremely probable, and which, within the last few years, has been proved beyond doubt to be a fact in the case of leguminous plants. _the fixation of "free" nitrogen._ the method in which these plants are able to make use of the free nitrogen is still a point requiring much research. so far as the question is at present investigated, it would seem that the fixation is effected by means of micro-organisms present in tubercles or root excrescences found on the roots of leguminous plants.[ ] not merely has this been placed beyond doubt, but attempts have been made to isolate and study the bacteria effecting this fixation. from nobbe's exceedingly interesting experiments, recently carried out, it would seem that the different kinds of leguminous plants have different bacteria. thus the bacteria in the tubercle on the pea seems to be of a different order from the bacteria in the tubercles of the lupin, and so on. this discovery is of great importance, it need scarcely be pointed out, as it throws much light on the principles of the rotation of crops. _influence of manures in increasing soil-nitrogen._ it may be doubted, however, if under any other conditions there is a positive gain of soil-nitrogen. in other cases the amount in the soil is only _maintained_ under liberal manuring. in connection with this point a very striking fact has been observed with regard to the effect of continuous large applications of farmyard manure. it has been found at rothamsted that in such a case, after a while, the manure does not seem to increase the soil-nitrogen, although where the nitrogen goes to remains a mystery. in the case of the application of artificial manures, there does not seem to be almost any appreciable gain to the soil-nitrogen. the soil-nitrogen is only increased by means of the residue of crops. in this way, of course, by increasing the amount of this crop-residue, artificial manures may be said indirectly to increase the soil-nitrogen.[ ] sources of loss of nitrogen. we now come to consider the sources of loss. the chief source, of course, is that by drainage. land under cultivation will suffer very much more from this source of loss than in a state of nature. our modern system of husbandry, involving as it does thorough drainage, can scarcely fail to very considerably increase this source of loss. _loss of nitrates by drainage._ the form in which nitrogen is lost in this way is as nitrates. it is a somewhat striking fact, and one worthy of note, that of the three important manurial ingredients--nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, the first of these, in its final and most valuable form, is alone incapable of being fixed by the soil, and thus retained from loss by drainage. as nitrates are constantly being formed in the soil, the loss to its total nitrogen must be considerable. it is due to the fact of the great solubility of nitrates, as well as to the fact, as already mentioned, of the incapacity of the soil-particles to fix them. to this one exception must be made. according to knop, small quantities of nitric acid are held in the _insoluble_ condition in soils in the form of highly _basic nitrates of iron and alumina_. the quantity, however, of these insoluble compounds probably amounts to a very minute trace indeed. _permanent pasture and "catch-cropping" prevents loss._ the amount of loss varies, and will depend on a number of different circumstances--thus the nature of the soil, climate, and season of the year will all influence its quantity. the way in which the soil is cultivated is also another important factor. where it is constantly covered with vegetation, as in the case of permanent pasture, the loss will be at a minimum. under such conditions, plant-roots are always there ready to fix, in the insoluble organic form, the soluble nitrates as they are formed. a consideration of this fact forms one of the strongest arguments in favour of the practice of what is known as "catch-cropping." the practice consists in sowing some quickly-growing green crop--_e.g._, _mustard_, _vetches_, &c.--so as to occupy the soil immediately after harvest, and subsequently to plough it in. the nitrates, which it is known are most abundantly formed towards the end of summer,[ ] and which are allowed to accumulate in the soil from the period at which the active growth of, and consequently assimilation of nitrates by, the cereal crop have ceased, are thus fixed in the organic matter of the plant, and removed from danger of loss by drainage incidental to autumn rains. _other conditions diminishing loss of nitrates._ the nature of the soil is another important condition regulating this loss. some soils are very much opener and more porous than others; in such soils, of course, the loss by drainage will be greatest. we are apt at first sight, however, knowing the great solubility of nitrates, to overrate this source of loss. we have to remember that while nitrates are constantly being washed down to the lower layers of the soil, there is likewise an upward compensating movement of the soil-water constantly taking place. this is due to the evaporation of water from the surface of the soil, which induces an upward capillary movement of water from its lower to its higher layers.[ ] this upward movement of water is very much increased, in the case of soil covered with vegetation, by the transpiration of the plants. the climate and the season of the year will affect the extent of this upward movement. where there is a heavy rainfall it will be very much less than in dry climates. after a long period of drought the nitrates will be found to be concentrated in the top few inches of the soil; and in hot climates this sometimes takes place to such an extent that the surface of the soil has been actually covered with a saline crust, caused by the rapid evaporation of soil-water under the influence of a burning tropical sun. from this point of view it will be seen how very much less powerful a single shower of rain is--even although at the time it is heavy--in causing loss of nitrates by drainage, than a continuance of wet weather. in the former case, where the showers are separated by an interval of dry weather, the nitrates washed down into the lower layers of the soil are slowly brought up again by the capillary action caused by evaporation. _amount of loss by drainage._ what the actual amount of loss is which takes place in this way it is wellnigh impossible to say. what it amounts to under certain definite circumstances has been discovered by actual experiment at rothamsted. taking the circumstances most favourable to extreme loss--viz., unmanured fallow land--the highest amount registered at rothamsted for a year is . lb. per acre from soil inches deep, while the smallest amount is . lb. in the former case, the drainage-water was equivalent to . inches, while in the latter, to . inches. the average for thirteen years on unmanured fallow soil has been . lb. (for inches), . lb. (for inches), . lb. (for inches). the point of especial interest in this connection is that an annual loss of nitrogen, equal to over cwt. of nitrate of soda, may take place from a comparatively poor arable soil lying fallow. the loss on cropped soils is of course very much less--in short, should amount to very little--especially in permanent pasture, where it is reduced to a minimum. taking an average, mr warington is of opinion that the loss in england may be put at lb. per annum per acre.[ ] _loss in form of free nitrogen._ the other chief natural source of loss of nitrogen is due to its escape from the soil in its "free" state. this source of loss is very much less important than that by drainage, and probably amounts to very little. that, however, it takes place is beyond a doubt; and that it may--as we shall see by-and-by--under certain circumstances amount to something very considerable is also proved. where large quantities of nitrogenous organic matter decay, and where, consequently, the supply of atmospheric oxygen is insufficient to effect complete oxidation, "free" nitrogen may be evolved in considerable quantities. similarly, it may be evolved in the case of vegetable matter decaying under water. in soils rich in organic matter the reduction of even nitrates may take place, accompanied with the evolution of free nitrogen, which is thus lost. _total amount of loss of nitrogen._ what the rate of total loss of nitrogen is from these different sources does not admit of easy calculation. sir john lawes, in dealing with the question of soil-fertility, estimated some years ago, by comparing the soil of old pasture at rothamsted with that which had been under arable culture for years, that during that period some lb. of nitrogen per acre had disappeared from the arable land. examples of decrease of nitrogen in rothamsted soils, under various conditions of culture, will be found in the appendix.[ ] _loss of nitrogen by retrogression._ a source of loss of nitrogen may be here mentioned which has to do with diminution of amount of available nitrogen, rather than absolute loss of nitrogen to the soil, and which we may term _loss by retrogression_. nitrogen in an available form, such as nitrates, has been found to be converted into a less available form. this retrogression may be effected, as in the case of nitrates, by reduction--_i.e._, by removal of the oxygen in combination with the nitrogen, which in many cases may be set free, and thus partially although not necessarily entirely lost. such reduction is due to the action of bacteria of the denitrifying order.[ ] or, on the other hand, nitrogen may be converted into some kind of insoluble form which seems to resist decomposition and lies in an inert condition in the soil utterly unavailable for the plants' needs. a striking example of this retrogression of nitrogen seems to be afforded in the case of farmyard manure. it has been found in the rothamsted experiments, as has been pointed out in the preceding pages, that when farmyard manure is applied, year after year, to the same land in large quantities, a very considerable percentage of its nitrogen does not (_i.e._, within a reasonable number of years) become available for the crop's uses. what, indeed, becomes of the nitrogen is a mystery; but it is highly probable that some such kind of retrogression as that above referred to, whereby the nitrogen is converted into some inert organic form, takes place. _artificial sources of loss of nitrogen._ so far, the sources of loss of nitrogen considered have been what we may term _natural_ sources. by this is meant that the loss of nitrogen from the above sources takes place in a state of nature, and not merely under conditions of cultivation. no doubt the loss due to drainage is very much greater under arable farming than would be the case where artificial drainage does not obtain; still, under any conditions, this loss must be reckoned with. on the other hand, by _artificial_ sources of loss are meant those entirely dependent on our modern system of agriculture and our modern system of sewage disposal, whereby the nitrogen contained in that portion of the produce of the farm which goes to supply our food is not returned to the soil, but is totally lost. _amount of nitrogen removed in crops._ the modern tendency towards centralisation in large towns has rendered this loss--despite all that has been said to the contrary--a necessity. it is extremely difficult, however, to form any estimate of its amount. we know, of course, the amount of nitrogen removed from the soil by different crops. we cannot, however, estimate how much of this may find its way back again to the soil. the amount of nitrogen contained in the different crops will be fully dealt with in the chapter on the manuring of different crops. it may be, however, not without interest to give here some approximate indication of the amount of this loss, in order to render the view of the subject as comprehensive as possible. recent agricultural returns for great britain give the total produce of _wheat_ at over million bushels, that of _barley_ at over million, and that of _oats_ at over million. calculating the amount of nitrogen, these quantities of wheat, barley, and oats respectively and collectively contain, and calculating also how much _sulphate of ammonia_ and _nitrate of soda_ these amounts of nitrogen represent, the following are the results:-- nitrogen. sulphate of nitrate of ammonia. soda. bushels. tons. tons. tons. wheat , , , , , barley , , , , , oats , , , , , ----------- ------- ------- ------- total , , , , , =========== ======= ======= ======= of course these figures, so far as the amounts of nitrogen are concerned, can only be regarded as approximate, as it is only possible in such calculations to obtain approximate results. accepting these calculations as merely approximate, they are, nevertheless, of the highest interest and importance. it is of great importance to understand that in the annual produce of our three common cereal crops--supposing them to be all consumed off the farm--there is removed from the soil a quantity of nitrogen equal to that contained in over _half a million tons of sulphate of ammonia, and three quarters of a million tons of nitrate of soda._ as has already been remarked, it is impossible to estimate exactly what proportion of this total nitrogen finds its way back to the soil. in the case of wheat, it may be pointed out that the portion which is used as a feeding-stuff--viz., _bran_--is very much richer in nitrogen than the flour. while, then, we are unable to estimate with any exactitude this source of loss of nitrogen, it cannot for a moment be doubted that it is enormous, from what has been already stated. we must remember that the portion of the crop richest in nitrogen is that which is generally removed--the straw which is grown in producing a bushel of wheat, barley, or oats, containing less than half the amount of nitrogen contained by a bushel of the grain itself. _losses of nitrogen incurred on the farm._ in addition to the loss due to removal of crops from the farm, there are one or two other sources of loss which it may be well to briefly refer to. _loss in treatment of farmyard manure._ there can be little doubt that in the past a very considerable source of loss was the improper treatment of farmyard manure. the way in which this loss may take place will be fully considered in the chapter on farmyard manure. suffice it to say here, that this may take place by volatilisation of the nitrogen as carbonate of ammonia, caused by carelessness in allowing the temperature of the manure-heap to rise too high; or by drainage of the soluble nitrogen compounds, caused by allowing the rich black liquor of the manure-heap to be washed away, and not properly conserved. _nitrogen removed in milk._ another source of loss which is apt to be overlooked is the amount of nitrogen removed in milk. professor storer has calculated that in the case of a cow giving quarts, or lb., of milk in a year, and the milk being all sold as such, there would be carried away from the farm lb. of nitrogen.[ ] _economics of the nitrogen question._ and here, before concluding our survey of the different sources of loss of nitrogen, it may be well to regard for a moment the subject from a somewhat wider standpoint than that from which we have been considering it. the total supply of nitrogen in a combined form is limited. as we have pointed out, it may be regarded as the element on which, more than any other, life, animal as well as vegetable, depends. to animal life it is alone available in combined form; to vegetable life it is chiefly also only available in combined form. in the air we have an unlimited quantity of nitrogen, but it is almost entirely in an _uncombined_ form, and therefore largely unavailable. the conversion of nitrogen from the free state to a combined form is a process which takes place only very slowly. any source which diminishes the sum-total of our already all too limited supply of combined nitrogen must be regarded as worthy of most serious consideration. the question, therefore, of the artificial waste of nitrogen daily taking place around us, is one which ought to possess for economists a very great interest indeed. this waste has, of late years, enormously increased, and would seem to threaten us at no very distant date with a nitrogen famine. it is incidental to the use of certain nitrogenous substances in the manufacture of various articles, and to our present system of sewage disposal. _loss of nitrogen-compounds in the arts._ the articles referred to are such as explosives, starch, textile substances, malt liquors, &c. the question is strikingly dealt with in an able paper on "the economy of nitrogen" in the 'quarterly journal of science.'[ ] _loss due to use of gunpowder._ the explosives--more particularly gunpowder--are the most important of these articles. gunpowder contains per cent of saltpetre, which in its turn contains about per cent of nitrogen. when gunpowder explodes, practically the whole of this nitrogen is converted into "free" nitrogen. the loss is thus in a sense irreparable. in the paper above, referred to, our total annual exports of this substance are estimated at , , lb.; while the total annual production of the world is estimated at not less than , , lb. the annual loss of nitrogen due to this source alone would amount to about , , lb.[ ] similarly, loss of nitrogen, although to a less extent, is caused by the use of other explosives, as well as in the manufacture of the other articles above mentioned. _loss due to sewage disposal._ the loss due to our present system of sewage disposal has been already taken into account in dealing with the loss due to removal of crops. it may be well, however, to treat it from the sewage aspect. taking the amount of nitrogen in the excreta of every individual as, on an average, half an ounce, the annual amount voided in the excreta of the total population of the british isles would amount to , , lb.[ ]--of this, the amount in the london sewage alone being , , lb.[ ] by the water system, which is almost universally adopted in this country, the above quantity of nitrogen is entirely lost to the soil. a small portion of it, it may be argued, is eventually recovered in sea weed and fish, which may be used for manure. this, however, is to argue too much _sub specie æternitatis_. not all the nitrogen originally present in the excreta finds its way into the sea; for it is highly probable that a considerable quantity escapes in the process of the decomposition of the sewage as "free" nitrogen. from the above statement of the sources of loss and gain of nitrogen taking place in the soil, it may be pretty safe to conclude that while in a state of nature the gain balances the loss, if indeed it does not do more, under conditions of arable farming such is very far from being the case; and that if fertility of the land is to be maintained, recourse to nitrogenous manures must be had,--in short, that the application of artificial nitrogenous manures is a necessary condition of modern husbandry. _our artificial nitrogen supply._ before concluding this chapter, it may be interesting to enumerate very briefly the chief sources of our artificial nitrogen supply. _nitrate of soda and sulphate of ammonia._ the most important artificial nitrogenous manures in use at present are nitrate of soda and sulphate of ammonia. of the former, the annual exportation from chili is close on one million tons, of which quantity about , tons is imported into the united kingdom. of sulphate of ammonia, on the other hand, the total production in this country is about , tons per annum,[ ] the greater proportion of which is exported, leaving only from , to , tons for consumption. nitrate of soda, it must be remembered, is not entirely used for manurial purposes, a small proportion of the above imports being used for chemical manufacturing purposes. _peruvian guano._ peruvian guano is another important nitrogenous manure very much less abundant now than formerly, as the different guano-beds have become nearly exhausted. while the imports of this important manure into the united kingdom amounted in to nearly , tons, at present not more than , tons are being imported. _bones._ a further source of nitrogen is bones, which, of course, are chiefly valuable as a phosphatic manure, but which contain also some to per cent of nitrogen. of this valuable manure we import at present about , tons, while about , tons are collected in this country, bringing up our total consumption to , tons. _other nitrogenous manures._ the above mentioned are the most important of nitrogenous manures; there are, however, a number of other nitrogenous manures used in this country in very much smaller quantities. as most of these substances are made in this country, it is very difficult to estimate the amount of their annual production with exactness. these substances are as follows: fish-guano, meat-meal guano, dried blood, shoddy, scutch, horns and hoofs, hair, bristles, feathers, leather-scrap, &c. of fish-guano, the total consumption per annum may be put down at about tons, of which a fourth is imported into this country, the remaining tons being manufactured at home. of meat-meal guano, dried blood, hoof-guano, &c., about tons are annually imported, the home production bringing up the total amount to some , tons. of shoddy, some , tons are manufactured in this country; while scutch--the name given to a manure manufactured from the waste products incidental to the manufacture of glue and the dressing of skins--is produced only to the extent of a few thousand tons annually. it is a fact worthy of notice, that while the use of phosphatic manures has increased very considerably of late years, the same cannot be said of nitrogen. according to mr hermann voss, some , [ ] tons of nitrogen were used in the form of artificial manures in , while now only about , tons are used--_i.e._, some tons less. _oil-seeds and oilcakes._ there still remains a very important source of nitrogen which has not yet been mentioned, in the shape of oil-seeds and oilcakes, used for feeding purposes. oilcakes are both manufactured in this country and imported in large quantities. recent agricultural returns show the total imports of oilcakes at , tons; that of linseed at , tons; that of rape-seed at , tons; and that of cotton-seed at , tons. _other imported sources of nitrogen._ we have further, in considering this question, to take into account the large amount of maize, peas, beans, wheat, and oats which are imported into this country, a certain quantity of which is used as cattle-food, and will therefore go to enrich their manure. also the imported straw used for purposes of litter must not be forgotten. in this amounted to , tons. _conclusion._ in conclusion, it may be asked how far are the artificial sources of nitrogen able to make good the loss? in the opinion of such a reliable authority as sir john lawes, they do not. there are some soils which depend almost entirely upon imported fertility, and could not be cultivated without it. upon some of them it is possible that the imports of nitrogen are in excess of the exports. taking the agricultural acreage as a whole, however, he is of opinion that there is a decided loss of nitrogen, which he estimates at _from lb. to lb. per acre per annum_.[ ] footnotes: [ ] the total amount of nitrogen in the air has been estimated approximately at four million billion tons. [ ] see introductory chapter, pp. to . [ ] although ammonia is more abundant than nitrates and nitrites, it only amounts to a few parts per million of air. according to müntz, the air at great heights contains more ammonia than in its lower strata. the opposite, however, is the case with regard to nitrates, which are only found in air near the surface of the earth. see p. . [ ] nitric acid may also be formed by the oxidation of ammonia by ozone, or peroxide of hydrogen. [ ] according to schloesing, the chief source of the ammonia present in the air is the tropical ocean, which yields gradually to the atmosphere, under the action of the powerful evaporation constantly going on, a large amount of nitrogen in this form. the sources of the nitrogen of the ocean are the nitrates which it receives from the drainage of land, animal and vegetable matter, sewage, &c. [ ] see appendix, note i., p. . [ ] to illustrate this point, it may be mentioned that on the least windy of days, when the wind is only moving at the rate of two miles an hour--and this, it may he added, is so slow as to be scarcely noticeable--the air in a space of feet is changed over five hundred times in an hour. the combined nitrogen thus absorbed is probably entirely in the form of ammonia. it would seem so at any rate, from some experiments by schloesing. see p. . [ ] no vegetable or animal cell exists which does not contain nitrogen. [ ] this is less on the whole than what has been found in subsoils by continental investigators. thus, for example, a. müller found the average of a number of analyses of subsoils to be . per cent., and the late dr anderson found the nitrogen in the subsoil of different scottish wheat-soils to run from . per cent to . per cent. [ ] see appendix, note ii., p. . [ ] "under prolonged kitchen-garden culture the subsoil becomes enriched with nitrogenous matter to a far more considerable depth; this has been shown by the analyses of the soil of the old kitchen-garden at rothamsted. this is doubtless due to the practice of deep trenching employed by gardeners."--r. warington, 'lectures on rothamsted experiments.' u.s.a. bulletin, p. . [ ] the comparatively insignificant effect the addition of various nitrogenous manures have in increasing the total soil-nitrogen is strikingly illustrated in the tables given in the appendix, note iv., p. . [ ] see storer's agric. chem., vol. i. p. . [ ] see chapter iv., appendix, note vii., p. . [ ] see appendix, note iii., p. . [ ] see appendix, note iv., p. . [ ] see appendix, note i., p. . [ ] the original source of the nitrogen in the soil must have been the nitrogen in the air. when plants first begin to grow on a purely mineral soil, they must obtain nitrogen from some source. the small traces washed down in the rain will supply sufficient nitrogen to enable a scanty growth of the lower forms of vegetable life; whereas these by their decay furnish their successors with a more abundant source, which rapidly increases, until we have a fair percentage of humus accumulated. [ ] see appendix, note v., p. . [ ] see historical introduction, pp. - . [ ] the evidence demonstrating this is to be found in the fact that the amount of carbon found in different soils rises or falls in proportion to the nitrogen. see p. . [ ] see chapter iv. on nitrification. [ ] diffusion as well as capillary attraction is a means of bringing nitrates again to the surface-soil after rain. [ ] see appendix, note vi., p. , and note viii., p. ; also p. . [ ] see appendix, note vii., p. . [ ] see following chapter on nitrification, p. . [ ] according to the agricultural returns for , the number of cows in milk in great britain amounted to , , . if we multiply this number by the result is , , lb., or in tons , . this quantity represents , tons of ordinary commercial nitrate of soda. [ ] for (p. _et seq._) the reader interested in the subject is referred to the paper itself. [ ] in tons , and represents , tons of nitrate of soda. [ ] this in tons , , which represents , , tons of nitrate of soda. [ ] this in tons , , which represents , tons of nitrate of soda. see paper in 'journal of science' already referred to. [ ] europe's total production may be stated at , tons. [ ] , tons of which were as guano. [ ] mr warington estimates this at about lb. see p. . appendix to chapter iii. note i. (p. ). determinations of the quantity of nitrogen supplied by rain, as ammonia and nitric acid, to an acre of land, during one year. (_from dr fream's 'soils and their properties_,' p. .) ----------------------+----------------+---------+----------------+-------- | | | nitrogen per | | | | million, as | total | | +--------+-------+nitrogen | year. |rainfall.| | | per | | |ammonia.| nitric| acre. | | | | acid. | ----------------------+----------------+---------+--------+-------+-------- | | | | | lb. kuschen | - | . | . | . | . " | - | . | . | . | . insterburg | - | . | . | . | . " | - | . | . | . | . dahme | | . | . | . | . regenwalde | - | . | . | . | . " | - | . | . | . | . " | - | . | . | . | . ida-marienhütte, mean | | | | | of six years | - | . | | | . proskau | - | . | . | . | . florence | | . | . | . | . " | | . | . | . | . " | | . | . | . | . vallombrosa | | . | . | . | . montsouris, paris | - | . | . | . | . " | - | . | . | . | . " | - | . | . | . | . | | | | | | +---------+--------+-------+-------- | | | | | |mean of years| . | | | . | | | | | ----------------------+----------------+---------+--------+-------+-------- note ii. (p. ). nitrogen in soils at various depths. ( ) _rothamsted soils._ ------------------+---------------------------+--------------------------- depth. | arable soil. | old pasture soil. ------------------+-----------+---------------+------------+-------------- | per cent. | lb. per acre. | per cent. | lb. per acre. st inches | . | , | . | , d " | . | , | . | , d " | . | , | . | , th " | . | , | . | , th " | . | , | . | , th " | . | , | . | , | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- total, inches | - | , | - | , |-----------+---------------+------------+-------------- th inches | . | , | - | - th " | . | , | - | - th " | . | , | - | - th " | . | , | - | - th " | . | , | - | - th " | . | , | - | - | ----- | ------ | ----- | ----- total, feet | | , | | ------------------+-----------+---------------+------------+-------------- ( ) _manitoba soils._ ----------+----------|-------------+-----------+---------- depth. | brandon. | niverville. | winnipeg. | selkirk. ----------+----------+-------------+-----------+---------- | per cent.| per cent. | per cent. | per cent. st foot | . | . | . | . d " | . | . | . | . d " | . | . | . | . th " | . | . | . | . ----------+----------+-------------+-----------+---------- note iii. (p. ). nitrogen as nitrates in cropped soils receiving no nitrogenous manure, in lb. per acre (_rothamsted soils_). -------------+----------------+---------+---------+---------+-------- | wheat. | | | | +-------+--------+ bokhara | | | white | after | after | clover, | vetches,| lucern, | clover, depth. |fallow,|clover, | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | | -------------+-------+--------+---------+---------+---------+-------- | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. st inches| . | . | . | . | . | . d " | . | . | . | . | . | . d " | . | . | . | . | . | . th " | . | . | . | . | . | . th " | . | . | . | . | . | . th " | . | . | . | . | . | . th " | . | . | | . | . | . th " | . | . | | . | . | . th " | . | . | | . | . | . th " | . | . | | . | . | . th " | . | . | | . | . | . th " | . | . | | . | . | . -------------+-------+--------+---------+---------+---------+-------- note iv. (p. and p. ). nitrogen as nitrates in wheat-soils variously manured, october , in lb. per acre (_rothamsted soils_). ----+----------------------------------+------+------+------+--------+------- | | | | | |excess | | | | | |over plot| manuring. | st | nd | rd |total |plots | |inches|inches|inches|inches | and ----+----------------------------------+------+------+------+--------+------- | | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. |no manure, years | . | . | . | . | | " " | . | . | . | . | a | " " | . | . | . | . | . a |ash constituents, years | . | . | . | . | . a | " " year | . | . | . | . | . a | " and ammonium salts, lb. | . | . | . | . | . a | " " " | . | . | . | . | . a | " " " | . | . | . | . | . a |ash and sodium nitrate, " | . | . | . | . | . b |sodium nitrate, " " | . | . | . | . | . a |ammonium salts, " | . | . | . | . | . a |superphosphate and ammonium salts,| | | | | | lb. | . | . | . | . | . |rape-cake, lb. | . | . | . | . | . |farmyard manure, tons-- years| . | . | . | . | . ----+----------------------------------+------+------+------+--------+------- nitrogen as nitrates in barley-soils variously manured, march , in lb. per acre (_rothamsted soils_). -------+------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------- | | | | | total | excess | | st | d | d | | over plot. | manuring. |inches.|inches.|inches.|inches.|plot . -------+------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------- | | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. |no manure | . | . | . | . | - - |ash constituents (mean) | . | . | . | . | . a |ammonium salts, lb. | . | . | . | . | . a- a |ammonium and ash | | | | | | constituents (mean) | . | . | . | . | . aa |sodium nitrate, lb. | . | . | . | . | . aa- aa|sodium nitrate and ash | | | | | | constituents (mean) | . | . | . | . | . c |rape-cake, lb. | . | . | . | . | . c- c |rape-cake and ash | | | | | | constituents (mean) | . | . | . | . | . - |no manure, years-- | | | | | | formerly dung | . | . | . | . | . - |farmyard manure, tons| . | . | . | . | . -------+------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------- note v. (p. ). examples of increase of nitrogen in rothamsted soils laid down in pasture. --------------------+----------+--------------- | age of | nitrogen in | pasture. | st inches. --------------------+----------+--------------- | years. | per cent. arable land | - | . barn-field pasture | | . apple-tree pasture | | . dr gilbert's meadow | | . dr gilbert's meadow | | . --------------------+----------+--------------- note vi. (p. ). in connection with the loss by drainage of nitrogen in the form of nitrates, it may be mentioned that the water of many of the famous rivers contains large quantities of nitrates. thus the water of the seine has been found to contain fifteen parts of nitrates per million of water, and the rhine eight parts per million. some idea of what this amounts to per annum may be obtained by the statement that "the rhine discharges daily tons of saltpetre into the ocean, the river seine , and the nile tons."--(storer's agric. chem., vol. i. p. .) note vii. (p. ). examples of decrease of nitrogen in rothamsted soils. --------------------------------------+---------------- | nitrogen in | st inches. --------------------------------------+---------------- | per cent. old pasture | . arable land in ordinary culture | . wheat unmanured, years | . wheat and fallow unmanured, years | . barley unmanured, years | . turnips unmanured, years | . --------------------------------------+---------------- manuring, produce of wheat, and alteration in the composition of the soil in broadbalk field, rothamsted, from to . -----+----------------------------------+----------------+---------------------- | | average | nitrogen per acre | | produce | in st inches plot.| manures per acre, | per acre. | of soil. | annually applied, +-------+--------+------+-----+--------- | years, - . | | | | | gain or | |dressed| total | . | .| loss in | |grain. |produce.| | | years. -----+----------------------------------+-------+--------+------+-----+--------- | | bush. | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. |unmanured | - / | | | | - _a_|mixed mineral manure | - / | | | | - _a_|ammonium salts, lb. | - / | | | | - _ _|ammonium salts, with | | | | | | superphosphate | - / | | | | - _a_|ammonium salts, with mixed mineral| | | | | | manure | | | | | + _a_|nitrate of soda, lb., and | | | | | | mixed mineral manure | | | | | + _a_|unmanured* | - / | | | | - |farmyard manure, tons | - / | | | | + -----+----------------------------------+-------+--------+------+-----+--------- * during - received annually ammonium salts, lb., with mixed mineral manure, and yielded an average product of - / bushels of grain and - / cwt. of straw. note viii. (p. ). $ $ --------------+--------+-----------------+---------------------------------- | | | nitrogen as nitrates. | | +-----------------+---------------- | | amount of | per million of | per acre. |rainfall| drainage. | water. | | +--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+------- | | -inch | -inch | -inch | -inch | -inch | -inch | |gauge. |gauge. |gauge. |gauge. |gauge. |gauge. --------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+------- |inches. |inches. |inches. | | | lb. | lb. march | . | . | . | . | . | . | . april | . | . | . | . | . | . | . may | . | . | . | . | . | . | . june | . | . | . | . | . | . | . july | . | . | . | . | . | . | . august | . | . | . | . | . | . | . september | . | . | . | . | . | . | . october | . | . | . | . | . | . | . november | . | . | . | . | . | . | . december | . | . | . | . | . | . | . january | . | . | . | . | . | . | . february | . | . | . | . | . | . | . +--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+------- march-june | . | . | . | . | . | . | . july-september| . | . | . | . | . | . | . october-feb. | . | . | . | . | . | . | . +--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+------- whole year | . | . | . | . | . | . | . --------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+------- chapter iv. nitrification. the most important compound of nitrogen for the plant is _nitric acid_. it is as nitrates that most plants absorb the nitrogen they require to build up their tissue. in nature the nitrogen, present in the soil as ammonia and different organic forms, is constantly being converted into nitric acid. this conversion of nitrogen into nitrates, known as _nitrification_, is a process of very great importance, and, as has been already pointed out in the introductory chapter, is effected through the agency of micro-organisms (ferments).[ ] the process of nitrification, as well as the nature of the other changes taking place in the soil between the various compounds of nitrogen, are as yet but most imperfectly understood, but much light has been thrown on this most interesting department of agricultural research during the last few years; and it cannot be doubted that the increased attention which it is receiving from different investigators, both on the continent and in this country, will be fraught with most important results for practical agriculture. _occurrence of nitrates in the soil._ the occurrence of nitre,[ ] or potassium nitrate, in soils has been long known, although it is only within the last few years that we have obtained any precise knowledge with regard to the mode of its production. while its amount in most soils, especially in this country,[ ] is very minute, there are certain parts of the world where nitrates are found in large quantities. the nitrate fields of chili and peru are the chief natural sources of nitrates, and they are referred to in the chapter on nitrate of soda. we have other parts of the world, however (in china and india), where soils rich in nitre occur, and which in the past have formed a source of the commercial article.[ ] _nitre soils of india._ the most important of these nitre soils are those found in the north-west of india, in the province of bengal. in these districts the soil is of a light porous texture, rich in lime, and situated at a considerable height above water-level. they are the sites of old villages, and the nitre is found in the form of an efflorescence on the surface of different parts of the soil. the occurrence of nitre under such conditions is due, partly to the natural richness of the soil in nitrogen, and partly to its artificial enrichment through receiving the nitrogenous excrements of the inhabitants of the villages and their cattle. the constant process of evaporation going on in such a warm climate has the effect of inducing an upward tendency of the soil-water, the result being a concentration of all the nitre the soil contains in its surface layer. this goes on until a regular incrustation is formed, and the soil is covered by a white deposit of nitre. whenever this becomes apparent, the surface portion of the soil is scraped off by the _sorawallah_, or native manufacturer, and collected and treated for the purpose of recovering, in a pure state, the saltpetre. _saltpetre plantations._ the large demand for saltpetre, larger than could be supplied by these nitre soils, soon gave rise to the semi-artificial method of production, formerly so largely practised in switzerland, france, germany, sweden, and in many other parts of the continent, by means of the so-called "nitre beds," "nitraries," or "saltpetre plantations." previous to the introduction of this method of manufacture, the demand for saltpetre for gunpowder had become so great, that every source of nitre was eagerly sought for. thus, when it was discovered that the earth from the floors of byres, stables, and farmyards were particularly rich in nitre, and when mixed with wood-ashes formed an important source of it, the right to remove these in france was vested in the government under the saltpetre laws, which obtained till the french revolution. this great scarcity soon led, however, to a careful investigation being made into the conditions under which potassium nitrate was formed in nitre soils.[ ] these conditions, which included the presence of rich nitrogenous matter, warmth, free aeration of the soil, and a certain proportion of moisture, became, in the course of years, more and more thoroughly understood, and the result was the institution of numerous "saltpetre plantations." these generally consisted of heaps of mould, rich in nitrogen, mixed with decomposing animal matter, rubbish of various kinds, manurial substances, ashes, road-scrapings, and lime salts.[ ] the heap was interlaid with brushwood, and was watered from time to time with liquid manure from stables, consisting chiefly of dilute urine. in forming the heap care was taken to keep the mass porous, so as to admit of the free access of air. the heap was further protected from the rain by covering it with a roof. in course of time considerable quantities of nitrates were developed, and the nitre was occasionally collected by scraping it from the surface, where it became concentrated just as in the nitre soils. in all cases, however, the heaps, when considered rich enough in nitre, were treated from time to time with water which, by subsequent evaporation, yielded the nitre in a more or less pure condition.[ ] this mode of obtaining nitre is no longer practised to any extent, since it is now more conveniently obtained from the treatment of nitrate of soda with potassium chloride. _cause of nitrification._ we have adverted to these nitre plantations as showing how the conditions most favourable for the development of nitrification were recognised long before anything was known as to the true nature of the process. it was only in that the formation of nitrates in the soil was proved to be due to the action of micro-organic life,[ ] by the two french chemists, schloesing and müntz, who discovered the fact when carrying out experiments to see if the presence of humic matter was essential to the purification of sewage by soil. in these experiments sewage was made to filter slowly through a certain depth of soil (the time occupied in this filtration being eight days). it was found that nitrification of the sewage took place. by treating the soil with chloroform[ ] it was found that it no longer possessed the power of inducing the nitrification of the sewage. when, however, a small portion of a nitrifying soil was added, the power was regained. from this it was naturally inferred that nitrification was effected by some kind of ferment. this conclusion was soon confirmed by subsequent experiments by warington at rothamsted, who showed that the power of nitrification could be communicated to media, which did not nitrify, by simply seeding them with a nitrifying substance, and that light was unfavourable to the process. since then the question has formed the subject of a number of researches by mr warington at rothamsted, as well as by schloesing and müntz, munro, dehérain, p. f. frankland, winogradsky, gayon and dupetit, kellner, plath, pichard, landolt, leone, and others. from these researches we have obtained the following information with regard to the nature of the organisms concerned in this process, and the conditions most favourable for their development. _ferments effecting nitrification._ the importance of isolating and studying them microscopically was recognised at an early period in these researches. messrs schloesing and müntz were the first to attempt this. they reported that they had successfully accomplished this, and described the organism as consisting of very small, round, or slightly elongated corpuscles, occurring either singly or two together. according, however, to the most recent researches of warington, winogradsky, and p. f. frankland, nitrification is not effected by a _single_ micro-organism, but by _two_, both of which have been successfully isolated and studied.[ ] the first of these to be discovered and isolated was the _nitrous_ organism, which effects the conversion of ammonia into nitrous acid; the second, which has only been lately isolated by warington and winogradsky, effects the conversion of nitrous acid into nitric acid. each of these ferments thus has its distinctive function to perform in this most important process, the nitric ferment being unable to act on ammonia, as the nitrous ferment is unable to convert nitrites into nitrates. both ferments occur in enormous quantities in the soil, and seem to be influenced, so far as is at present known, by the same conditions. their action will thus proceed together. nearly all we know as yet on the subject of their nature is with regard to the nitrous ferment. _appearance of nitrous organism._ mr warington[ ] thus describes the appearance of the nitrous organism: "as found in suspension in a freshly nitrified solution, it consists largely of nearly spherical corpuscles, varying extremely in size. the largest of these corpuscles barely reaches a diameter of / th of a millimeter; and some are so minute as to be hardly discernible in photographs, although shown there with a surface one million times greater than their own. the larger ones are frequently not strictly circular. these forms are universally present in nitrifying cultures. the larger organisms are sometimes seen in the act of dividing." _nitric organism._ so far as at present known, the nitric organism is very similar in appearance to the nitrous organism, so much so that it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other. as the same conditions influence their development, the process may be regarded as a whole. _difficulty in isolating them._ a great difficulty has been experienced in the attempt to isolate these micro-organisms for the purpose of studying their nature. this arises from the fact that they refuse to grow on the ordinary solid cultivating media used by bacteriologists. winogradsky, however, has recently succeeded in cultivating them in _a purely mineral_ medium--viz., _silica-jelly_.[ ] _nitrifying organisms do not require organic matter._ the fact that they can develop in media destitute of organic matter, is one of very great interest and importance to vegetable physiology. it implies that they can derive their carbon from carbonic acid--a power which it was believed was possessed by green plants alone among living structures. for organisms destitute of chlorophyll, the source of their protoplasmic carbon, it has been hitherto commonly believed, must be _organic matter_ of some sort. while it would appear that the nitrifying organisms can, when opportunity affords, feed upon organic matter, yet it has been proved beyond doubt that they can also freely develop in media entirely devoid of it, and are capable, under such circumstances, of deriving their carbon from a purely mineral source.[ ] this fact, which is subversive of what was believed to be a fundamental law of vegetable physiology, is one of the most important of the many important and interesting facts which these nitrification researches have elicited.[ ] conditions favourable for nitrification. we may now proceed to discuss the conditions favourable for nitrification. _presence of food-constituents._ among these conditions the first is the presence of certain food-constituents. to both animal and vegetable life alike a certain amount of mineral food is absolutely necessary. among these phosphoric acid is one of the most important, and in the experiments on nitrification it has been found that the nitrifying organisms will not develop in any medium destitute of it. that other mineral food-constituents are necessary is highly probable, although the influence of their absence on the development of the process has not been similarly studied. probably potash, magnesia, and lime salts are necessary. in the cultivating solutions used in the experiments on the subject, the mineral food-constituents added consisted of lime, magnesia, and potash salts and phosphoric acid.[ ] as we have seen above, the presence of organic matter is not necessary for the process. in this respect these organisms are differentiated from all other ferments hitherto discovered. _presence of a salifiable base._ the presence of a sufficient quantity of a base in the soil with which the nitric acid may combine, when it is formed, is another necessary condition.[ ] the process only goes on in a slightly alkaline solution. the substance which acts as this salifiable base is _lime_. the presence of a sufficient quantity of carbonate of lime in the soil will thus be seen to be of first-rate importance. this furnishes an explanation of one of the many benefits conferred by lime on soils. the activity of nitrification in many soils may be hindered by the absence of a sufficiency of lime salts, and in such cases most striking results may follow the application of moderate dressings of chalk. the absence of the nitrifying organisms in certain soils, such as peaty and forest soils, may be thus accounted for. in such soils humic acids are present and the requisite alkalinity is thus awanting. _only takes place in slightly alkaline solutions._ but while a certain slight amount of alkalinity is necessary, this must not exceed a certain strength, otherwise the process is retarded. this is the reason why strong urine solutions do not nitrify. the amount of carbonate of ammonia generated in them by putrefaction renders the development of nitrification impossible by rendering the alkalinity of the solution too great.[ ] the practical importance of this fact is considerable, as it shows the importance of diluting urine very considerably before applying it as a manure. similarly, when large quantities of lime, especially burnt lime, are applied to soils, the result will be to arrest the action of nitrification for the time. the presence of alkaline carbonates in the soil, unless in minute quantities, is apt, therefore, to seriously interfere with the process.[ ] _action of gypsum on nitrification._ it has been found by pichard that the action of certain mineral sulphates is extremely favourable to the process, and among these _gypsum_. warington has carried out some experiments on the action of gypsum in promoting nitrification. the reason of its favourable action is probably because it neutralises the alkalinity of nitrifying solutions. it thus permits the process to go on in unfavourable conditions. where, therefore, too great alkalinity exists for the maximum development of nitrification, the best specific will be found to be gypsum.[ ] the practical value of gypsum as an adjunct to certain manurial substances, where nitrification is desired to be promoted as rapidly as possible, such as sewage and farmyard manure, will thus at once become apparent. so far as there is a proper degree of alkalinity maintained, the presence of large quantities of saline matter does not seem to interfere with the process. _presence of oxygen._ the nitrification bacteria belong, it would seem, to the aerobic[ ] class of ferment--_i.e._, they cannot develop without a free supply of oxygen. exclusion of the air is sufficient to kill them, and in those portions of the soil where access of air is not freely permitted, nitrification will be found to be correspondingly feeble. thus it has been found in experiments with different portions of soils, that but little signs of nitrification occur in the lower soil layers. according to experiments by schloesing on a moist soil, in atmospheres respectively containing no oxygen and varying quantities of it, the action of oxygen in promoting nitrification was strikingly demonstrated. in an atmosphere of pure nitrogen, entirely devoid of oxygen, the process no longer took place, but the nitrates already present in the soil were reduced and free nitrogen was evolved. in an atmosphere, on the other hand, containing . per cent of oxygen, a considerable amount of nitrification took place; while in the presence of per cent, nitrification took place to double the extent. an addition of to per cent again doubled the quantity. when the amount of moisture added was increased, the effect of larger percentages of oxygen was found to be less marked. the reason of this is that the oxygen probably acts as dissolved oxygen; the addition of water meaning at the same time an addition of available oxygen. this condition exemplifies the value of tillage operations. the more thoroughly a soil is tilled the more thoroughly will the aeration of its particles take place, and consequently the more favourable will this necessary condition of nitrification be rendered. the benefits conferred on clayey soils by tillage will in this respect be especially great. _temperature._ another of the conditions determining the rate at which nitrification takes place, and one which is most important, is _temperature_. according to schloesing and müntz the temperature at which maximum development takes place is ° c.[ ] ( ° f.), at which temperature it is ten times as active as at ° c. ( ° f.) below ° c. ( ° f.) the action is extremely feeble. it is clearly appreciable at ° c. ( ° f.), and from there up to ° c. ( ° f.) it rapidly increases. from ° c. ( ° f.) to ° c. ( ° f.), at which temperature no nitrification takes place, its activity decreases; at ° c. ( ° f.) it is less active than at ° c. ( ° f.), and at ° c. ( ° f.) it is very slight. these results by schloesing and müntz have not been exactly confirmed by warington. he has found that a considerable amount of nitrification goes on at a temperature between ° and ° c. ( ° and ° f.), while the highest temperature at which he has found it to take place is considerably lower than ° c. ( ° f.) thus he was unable to start nitrification in a solution maintained at ° c. ( ° f.) it would thus seem that the nitrifying ferments are able to develop at lower temperatures than most organisms; and although nitrification entirely ceases during frost, yet in a climate such as our own there must be a considerable proportion of the winter during which nitrification is moderately active. _presence of a sufficient quantity of moisture._ the presence of moisture in a soil is another of the necessary conditions of nitrification. it has been shown that it is at once arrested, and indeed destroyed, by desiccation. other conditions being equal, and up to a certain extent, the more moisture a soil contains the more rapid is the process. too much water, however, is unfavourable, as it is apt to exclude the free access of air, which, as we have just shown, is so necessary, as well as to lower the temperature. during a period of drought the rate at which nitrification takes place will, therefore, be apt to be seriously diminished. _absence of strong sunlight._ it has been found that the process goes on much more actively in darkness; indeed warington has found in his experiments that nitrification could be arrested by simply exposing the vessel in which it was going on to the action of sunshine. _nitrifying organisms destroyed by poisons._ it has already been pointed out that nitrification is arrested by the action of antiseptics, such as chloroform, bisulphide of carbon, and carbolic acid. another substance which has been found to have an injurious action is ferrous sulphate or "copperas," a substance which is apt to be present in badly drained soils, or soils in which there is much actively putrefying organic matter. maercker has found that in moor soils containing ferrous sulphate, no nitrates, or mere traces of nitrates, could be found. a substance such as gas-lime, unless submitted to the action of the atmosphere for some time, would also have a bad effect in checking nitrification, owing to the poisonous sulphur compounds it contains. common salt, it would seem, also arrests the process; and this antiseptic property which salt exercises on nitrification throws a certain amount of light on the nature of its action when applied, as it is often done, along with artificial nitrogenous manures. _denitrification._ in connection with the process of nitrification, it is of interest to notice that a process of an opposite nature may also take place in soils--viz., _denitrification_--a process which consists in reducing the nitrates to nitrites, nitrous oxide, or free nitrogen. that a reduction of nitrates takes place in the decomposition of sewage with the evolution of free nitrogen, was a fact first observed by the late dr angus smith in ; and the reduction of nitrates to nitrites, and nitric and nitrous oxides in putrefactive changes has been subsequently noticed by different experimenters, who have further observed that such reduction takes place in the case of putrefaction going on in the presence of large quantities of water or where there is much organic matter. _denitrification also effected by bacteria._ this change was supposed to be of a purely chemical nature, and it has only been recently discovered that it is effected, like nitrification, by means of bacteria. it has been surmised by some that the action of denitrification may be effected by the same organisms that effect nitrification, and that it depends on merely external conditions which process goes on. there is no reason, however, to suppose that this is so, and several of the denitrifying organisms have been identified. _conditions favourable for denitrification._ that it is a process that goes on to any extent in properly cultivated soils is not to be supposed. the conditions which favour denitrification are exactly the opposite of those which favour nitrification. it is only when oxygen is excluded, or, which practically means the same thing, when large quantities of organic matter are in active putrefaction, and the supply of oxygen is therefore deficient, that denitrification takes place. schloesing, as we have already seen, found that in the case of a moist soil, kept in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen, a reduction of its nitrates to free nitrogen took place. _takes place in water-logged soils._ the exclusion of oxygen from a soil may be effected by saturating the soil with water; and warington has found in experiments carried out in an arable soil, by no means rich in organic matter, that complete reduction of nitrates may be effected in this way. it would thus seem that the process of denitrification will take place in water-logged soils, or in the putrefaction of sewage matter in the presence of large quantities of water. whether this reduction will result in the production of nitrites, nitrous oxide, or free nitrogen, depends on different conditions. this process is one of great importance from an economic point of view, as it reveals to us a source of loss which may take place in the fermentation of manures. in the rotting of our farmyard manure it is possible that the denitrifying organisms may be more active than we have hitherto suspected, and that a considerable loss of nitrogen may in this way be effected. _distribution of the nitrifying organisms in the soil._ the nitrifying organisms are probably chiefly confined to the soil, and do not usually occur in rain or in the atmosphere. that, however, they are found in spots which we might be inclined to think extremely unlikely, is shown by some recent interesting researches carried out by müntz, who discovered that the bare surfaces of felspathic, calcareous, schistose, and other rocks at the summit of mountains in the pyrenees, alps, and vosges, yielded large numbers of them, and that they occurred to a considerable depth in the cracks and fissures of the rocks. the nitrifying organisms are also found in river-water, in sewage, and well-waters. _depth down at which they occur._ in warington's earlier experiments, the conclusion he arrived at was that the occurrence of the nitrifying organisms was almost entirely limited to the superficial layers of the soil, and that they were seldom to be met with much below a depth of inches. his subsequent experiments, however, considerably modified this conclusion, and showed that nitrification may take place to a depth of at least feet.[ ] but although it may take place at this depth, it probably, as a general rule, is limited to the surface-soil, as it is only there the conditions for obtaining circulation of air are sufficiently favourable. a great deal, of course, will depend on the nature of the soil--_i.e._, as to its texture. in a clayey subsoil the principal hindrance to nitrification will be the difficulty of obtaining sufficient aeration. in clay soils it is probable, therefore, that nearly all the nitrification goes on in the surface layer; in sandy soils it may take place to a greater depth.[ ] _action of plant-roots in promoting nitrification._ in this connection the action of plant-roots in permitting a more abundant access of air to the lower layers of the soil, and thus promoting nitrification, is worth noticing. this has been observed in the case of different crops. thus the action of nitrification has been found to be more marked in the lower layers of a soil on which a leguminous crop was growing than on that on which a gramineous. "the conditions which would favour nitrification in the subsoil are such as would enable air to penetrate it, as artificial drainage, a dry season, the growth of a luxuriant crop causing much evaporation of the water in the soil. such conditions, by removing the water that fills the pores of the subsoil, will cause the air to penetrate more or less deeply and render nitrification possible. subsoil nitrification will thus be most active in the drier periods of the year" (warington). _nature of substances capable of nitrification._ what kinds of nitrogenous substances are capable of undergoing this process of nitrification are not yet well known. the question is, of course, one of great importance, as the rapidity with which a nitrogenous body nitrifies will be an important factor in determining its value as a manure. unfortunately, on this subject we know, as yet, very little. we are well aware that the nitrogen present in the humic matter of the soil is readily nitrifiable. in the experiments on nitrification the nitrogenous bodies used have been chiefly ammonia salts, so that it is difficult to say whether, in the case of other nitrogenous substances, micro-organic life of a different sort has not also been active and has converted the nitrogen into ammonia, and thereby prepared the way for the process of nitrification. that various manures, such as bones, horn, wool, and rape-cake are readily nitrifiable, has been shown by experiment. laboratory experiments have also been carried out on such different nitrogenous substances as ethylamine, thiocyanates, gelatin, urea, asparagin, and albuminoids of milk. but in all these experiments, how far these bodies have been directly acted upon by the nitrifying organisms, or how far they have first undergone a preparatory change in which their nitrogen has been first converted into ammonia, is impossible to say. it is at least quite probable that all the organic forms of nitrogen have first to be converted into ammonia ere they are nitrified. _rate at which nitrification takes place_. a question which is practically of no little importance is the rate at which nitrification takes place. from what has been already said as to the nature of the conditions favourable for the process, it will be at once seen that this will depend on how far these conditions are present in the soil. in point of fact the rate at which nitrification takes place will vary very much in different soils. a greater difference, however, in the rate at which it takes place, will be found even in the same soils at different periods of the year. in this country, where the most favourable temperature for its development is seldom reached, it never goes on at the same rate as in tropical climates. one of the causes of the greater fertility of tropical soils is due, doubtless, to the very much longer duration of the period of nitrification, as well as to its greater intensity. as, however, temperature is not the only condition, and the presence of moisture is quite as necessary, it may be that its development is seriously retarded in many tropical climates by the extreme dryness of the soil during long periods. _takes place chiefly during the summer months_. although in this climate, as has already been pointed out, nitrification probably goes on during most of the winter months, owing to the fact that the temperature of our soils is only occasionally below the minimum temperature at which the process takes place, yet there can be little doubt that the great bulk of the soil-nitrates are produced during a few months in summer. a fair conception of this amount is afforded by the interesting experiments on the composition of drainage-waters made at rothamsted, which we shall have occasion to refer to immediately. it may be pointed out, however, that it is not always safe to take the amount of nitrates found in drainage-waters as an infallible indication of this rate, for this amount will depend to a certain extent on the amount of rainfall, and would be misleading in the case of a long period of drought. on the whole, however, it furnishes us with extremely useful data for the elucidation of this important problem. _process goes on most quickly in fallow fields._ it has been shown in the rothamsted experiments that the process goes on best in fields lying in bare fallow; and in this fact lies the explanation of one of the many reasons why the practice of leaving fields in bare fallow, so common in past times, and still practised in the case of clay soils in some parts of the country, was so beneficial to the land thus treated. but despite this fact, the practice of leaving soils in bare fallow can scarcely be justified from this point of view, as the loss of nitrates through the action of rain is very great in our moist climate. _laboratory experiments on rate of nitrification._ several interesting experiments have been carried out with the object of affording data for estimating the rate at which the process may go on in our soils under certain conditions. an old experiment, carried out by boussingault, illustrates, in a general way, how rapid the process is under favourable circumstances. a small portion of rich soil was placed on a slab protected by a glass roof, and was moistened from time to time with water. the amount of nitrate of potash formed under these circumstances was estimated from time to time during a period of two months. during the first month (august) the percentage was increased from . to . (equal to about cwt. of nitrate of potash per acre). the increase during the second month (september) was very much less,--indeed only about a seventh of the amount.[ ] the soil experimented with was an extremely rich garden soil, and all the conditions for nitrification were most favourable. of recent experiments on the rate of nitrification, the most striking, perhaps, are those by schloesing. he mixed sulphate of ammonia with a quantity of soil fairly rich in organic matter, and containing per cent of water. during the twelve days of active nitrification no less than parts of nitrogen per million of soil were nitrified per day. taking the soil to a depth of inches, this would be equal to more than cwt. per acre--an amount of nitrogen equal to that contained in cwt. of commercial nitrate of soda. these experiments are interesting as showing what is probably the maximum rate of nitrification under the most favourable circumstances, and where there is an abundant supply of easily nitrifiable nitrogen. that nitrification ever takes place in our soils to this extent is not to be for a moment supposed. warington, in his rothamsted experiments, has found that the greatest rate, working with ordinary arable soil (first inches) from the rothamsted farm, was . parts per million of air-dried soil per day--_i.e._, . lb. per acre (equal to about lb. of nitrate of soda). similar soil, when supplied with ammonia salts, showed nearly double this quantity. higher results were obtained by lawes and gilbert with rich manitoba soils, the average rate being . parts per million per day. the last of these interesting laboratory experiments on the rate of nitrification we shall refer to, are those by dehérain. he experimented with soils containing different amounts of nitrogen and moisture. with a soil containing . per cent of nitrogen he obtained, during a period of days, rates of nitrification varying from . to . per million parts of soil. the maximum quantity was formed when the soil contained per cent of moisture. on a soil considerably richer--viz.,. per cent of nitrogen--a higher rate of nitrification took place-- . parts per million. the highest rate obtained in these experiments showed, when calculated to pounds per acre, about - / , taking the soil to a depth of inches. when the soil was alternately dried and moistened the process was most rapid. _portion of soil-nitrogen more easily nitrifiable than the rest._ lastly, it may be noticed that in the above-cited experiments, and others of a similar kind, the process goes on most rapidly at first, and steadily diminishes thereafter. this is due to the fact, that there is generally a certain quantity of nitrogen in most soils in a more easily nitrifiable condition than the rest, so that when this becomes oxidised nitrification proceeds more slowly. it would further seem that the nitrogen of the subsoil is less easily nitrified than that of the surface-soil. _rate of nitrification deduced from field experiments._ while the above experiments throw much light on the question of the rate at which nitrification may go on under different circumstances, the results furnished by actual analyses of soils and their drainage-waters are of still more practical value; and the rothamsted experiments fortunately furnish us with a number of these valuable results. _quantity of nitrates formed in the soils of fallow fields._ these researches had to be carried out on soil taken from fields lying in bare fallow; for no true estimate of the amount of nitrates formed could have been obtained from _cropped_ fields. in the first inches of soil of six separate fields, nitrate-nitrogen was found to vary from . lb. to . lb. per acre. in four of these fields the largest proportion was found in the first inches of soil; in the remaining two, in the second inches; while the third inches in two fields showed almost as large a proportion as the first inches.[ ] _position of nitrates depends on season._ the position of nitrates in the soil depends largely on the season; for, as has been already pointed out, their production is almost entirely limited to the surface-soil, and it is only by being washed down in rain that they find their way to the lower layers. a wet season, therefore, has the effect of increasing their percentage in the lower soil-layers. _nitrates in drainage-waters._ as there is a certain proportion of nitrates that finds its way even below the first inches of soil, the above results do not show their total production. to accurately estimate this amount we must ascertain the quantity escaping in drainage-water. here, again, the rothamsted experiments furnish us with valuable data. the amount found in drainage-waters of course naturally varies very much, and depends largely on the rainfall; but taking an average of twelve years, this has been found to amount to between and lb. per acre--an amount not so very far short of that found in the first inches of the soil itself. this was from comparatively poor soil, it must be remembered, and a much larger quantity would undoubtedly be produced in the case of richer soils. adding then the results together, we find that in soils like those at rothamsted, when in bare fallow, between and lb. of nitrogen are converted into nitrates in some fourteen months' time--an amount equal to about cwt. of nitrate of soda. it is a fact of no little practical significance that nearly one-half of this large quantity is found in the drainage-water. _amount produced at different times of the year._ some indication of the rate at which nitrification takes place during the different months of the year is obtained from a study of the results of the analyses of drainage-waters which we have just referred to. this, however, it must be remembered, only furnishes us with a very approximate indication. the month showing the greatest amount of nitrates in the drainage-water must not necessarily be regarded as that during which nitrification has been most active, for the amount chiefly depends on the rainfall. in illustration of this it will be found that the drainage-water during the autumn and early winter months contains most nitrates, not because nitrification is most active then, but because the rainfall is greatest, and a large proportion of the nitrates formed during the drier summer months is being only then washed from the soil. the amount of nitrates in drainage-waters steadily diminishes from autumn through the winter months, and is least in spring. the total amount of nitrates found in the drainage-water is, therefore, not a safe guide. what, however, does furnish us with a more reliable indication is the _percentage_ of nitrates in the drainage-water. regarding the results of the analyses of drainage-water (see appendix) from this point of view, it will be seen that this is greatest during the month of september, and least during april.[ ] _nitrification of manures._ a subject which has not yet been specially referred to, but which is of great practical importance, is the nitrification of manurial substances. it is unfortunate that the amount of research hitherto devoted to this important question has been slight, and that the knowledge we possess is therefore very limited. _ammonia salts most easily nitrifiable._ one fact, however, about which there can be little doubt, is that nitrogen in the form of ammonia salts is, of all compounds of nitrogen, the most easily nitrifiable. indeed, as we have already indicated, it is highly probable that the conversion of the different forms of organic nitrogen into ammonia is an intermediate stage in the nitrification of these bodies. at any rate it seems to be invariably the case that when a mixture of nitrogen compounds, including ammonia salts, are allowed to nitrify, the nitrogen in the form of ammonia is the first to become nitrified. _sulphate of ammonia most easily nitrifiable manure._ it follows from this that sulphate of ammonia, the most common of ammoniacal manures, is one of the most speedily nitrified when applied to the soil. the rate at which the nitrification of this manure takes place naturally varies according to the quantity applied, and other circumstances, such as the nature of the soil and the weather, &c. that, under favourable circumstances, the conversion of ammonia into nitrates is very rapid, has been shown by a number of experiments. dehérain has found that when sulphate of ammonia was mixed with soil at the rate of cwt. per acre, nitrification took place at the rate of / th of its nitrogen per day. _rate of nitrification of other manures._ of other nitrogenous manures, guano, it would seem, comes next to sulphate of ammonia in the rate at which it becomes nitrified in the soil; while next to guano stand green manures, dried blood, meat-meal, &c. as we should expect, such a manure as shoddy is very slowly nitrified. the rate at which the nitrogen compounds in farmyard manure become nitrified, when incorporated with the soil, vary very much according to circumstances. it goes on probably at a greater rate than the ordinary nitrification of soil-nitrogen. it is a somewhat striking fact that the effect of adding nitrate of soda to the soil may be at first to check nitrification. that the addition of common salt, even in small quantities, has this result, is at any rate certain. the presence of salt to the extent of one-thousandth of the weight of the soil, has a prejudicial effect. _soils best suited for nitrification._ to recapitulate, then, nitrification is effected through the agency of micro-organisms, which are present to a greater or less extent in all soils. it requires for its favourable development air, warmth, moisture, absence of strong light, presence of a salifiable base--viz., carbonate of lime--the presence of certain mineral food-constituents, such as phosphates, and a certain amount of alkalinity. it consequently takes place to the least extent in barren sandy soils. soils rich, light, well ventilated, uniformly moist, warm, and chalky, are best suited for its development. other things being equal, it develops better in a fine-grained soil than in a coarse-grained soil, because, in the case of the former, aeration and uniform moistening of the soil are best secured. _absence of nitrification in forest-soils._ a point of considerable interest is the practical absence of the process in forest-soils. the absence, or occurrence in the most minute traces, of nitrates in forest-soils has been accounted for by the lowness of the normal temperature of such soils and their extreme dryness. this latter condition is accounted for by the enormous transpiration of water which takes place through the trees, especially in summer-time, which is such as to render the soil almost air-dry. lastly, it may be accounted for by the want of mineral food ingredients. _important bearing of nitrification on agricultural practice._ before concluding this chapter, it may be well to draw attention to the important bearing which nitrification has on agricultural practice. the light which our present knowledge--imperfect as it is--of this most interesting process throws on the theory of the rotation of crops is very striking, for it shows how the adoption of a skilful rotation may be made to prevent the loss of enormous quantities of the most valuable of all our soil-constituents,--the one on the presence of which fertility may be said most to depend--viz., nitrogen. _desirable to have soil covered with vegetation._ the constant production of nitrates going on in the soil, the inability of the soil to retain them, and the consequent risk of their being removed in drainage, furnish a strong argument in favour of keeping our soils as constantly covered with vegetation as possible. _permanent pasture most economical condition of soil._ from the point of view of conservation of soil-nitrates, permanent pasture may be said to be the most economical condition for the soil to be in. in such a case the nitrates are assimilated as they are formed, and, by being converted in the plant into organic nitrogen, they are at once removed from all risk of loss. a consideration, therefore, of the process of nitrification furnishes many arguments in favour of laying down land in permanent pasture--a practice which of late years has been increasingly followed in many parts of the country. as, however, it is not possible or desirable to carry out this practice beyond certain limits, the rotation which most nearly conforms to the condition of keeping the soil covered with vegetation, and most approximates in this respect to permanent pasture, is most to be recommended. _nitrification and rotation of crops._ the chief risk of loss of nitrates is in connection with a cereal crop such as wheat. where turnips follow wheat, there is a period during which the soil is left uncovered, and during which most serious loss of nitrates is apt to ensue. the risk of loss is enhanced by the fact that the assimilation of nitrates by cereals ceases before the season of their maximum production in the soil. the soil is then left bare of vegetation during the autumn, which is the most critical period of all, and the result must be serious loss. in order to minimise this loss, the practice of growing catch-crops has been had recourse to. as, however, this practice will be dealt with elsewhere, nothing further need here be said. footnotes: [ ] as the formation of nitrites is a stage in the process, the term _nitrification_ includes the formation of nitrites as well as nitrates. [ ] nitre seems to have been known as early as the thirteenth century. [ ] lawes and gilbert, for example, have shown that in the rothamsted soils it only amounts to a few parts per million of soil. [ ] see appendix, note i., p. . [ ] the artificial production of nitre seems to have been first effected by glauber in the seventeenth century. [ ] the lime-rubbish from old buildings, especially those parts which have come in contact with the earth, or plastering from the walls of damp cellars, barns, stables, &c., have been found to be rich in nitrate of lime, and, as has been long well known, constitute by themselves a valuable manure. the formation of the nitrate of lime can be accounted for by the contact of the lime with nitrogenous matter of different kinds. [ ] as much of the nitric acid in this solution was present as nitrate of lime, it was usually treated with a solution of potassium carbonate, the result being the precipitation of the lime as carbonate, pure saltpetre being left in solution, according to the following equation-- k_{ }co_{ } + ca(no_{ })_{ } = kno_{ } + caco_{ }. under the french mode of manufacture, the process was considered to have developed satisfactorily when lb. of earth, at the expiration of two years, yielded lb. of nitre. [ ] pasteur had already in expressed the opinion that nitrification might probably be in some way connected with ferments. a. müller (see 'journal of chemical society,' , p. ) was the first to advance the opinion that nitrification was due to the action of a ferment. this conclusion he was led to by the observation that while the ammonia in sewage was converted into nitric acid, no change took place in solutions of ammonia or urine prepared in the laboratory. [ ] bisulphide of carbon and phenol (carbolic acid) have also been experimented with in connection with their antiseptic action on nitrification. in these experiments the former had a similar effect to chloroform; the phenol, however, while hindering it did not entirely suspend it, due probably to the difficulty of bringing the phenol vapour into thorough contact with the soil-particles. [ ] winogradsky has named the nitrous organism _nitrosomonas_, and the nitric organism _nitrobaeter_. [ ] from a series of lectures delivered by him in connection with lawes agricultural trust, in the united states. [ ] this silica-jelly consists of dialysed silicic acid, ammonium sulphate, potassium phosphate, magnesium sulphate, calcium chloride, and magnesium carbonate. [ ] this fact is all the more striking when we remember that this decomposition of carbonic acid is best effected in the dark, since light is prejudicial to nitrification. [ ] see appendix, note ii., p. , and note iii., p. . [ ] see appendix, note v., p. . [ ] this is shown by the fact that nitrification will only continue in a solution of carbonate of ammonia till one-half the ammonia is nitrified. it then stops. the base, with which the nitrous acid combines as it is formed, being at that stage entirely used up, nitrification is no longer possible. with regard to urine solutions the same is the case. nitrification thus will only take place where there is a sufficiency of base. [ ] see appendix, note iv., p. . [ ] it would seem that an alkalinity much exceeding four parts of nitrogen per million is prejudicial to the process. [ ] according to warington, solutions containing per cent of urine become nitrifiable when sufficient gypsum is added. the gypsum neutralises the alkalinity of nitrifying solutions by converting the alkaline ammonium carbonate into neutral ammonium sulphate, the calcium carbonate being precipitated. [ ] see chapter on farmyard manure. [ ] as practically illustrating this fact, a solution kept at ° c. required ten days, while a solution kept at ° c. required only eight days for nitrification. [ ] in sixty-nine trials no failure to produce nitrification by seeding with soil from a depth, of feet was experienced. similarly in eleven trials only one failure took place with soil from a depth of feet. with clay soil from a depth of feet success took place to the extent of per cent. no nitrification was obtained with clay from a depth of feet. entire failure was experienced with chalk subsoil. the process thus diminishes in activity the lower down we go. [ ] koch has found that in soils he has examined few organisms were found at a depth below feet. [ ] see appendix, note vi., p. . [ ] for full analytical results see appendix, note vii., p. . [ ] we find the least amount in the month of april. in the water, from a -and -inch gauge respectively, the amounts were . lb. and . lb. per acre (rainfall . inches). from then on to november the amount steadily increases. in the latter month it reaches its maximum--viz., . lb. ( -inch gauge) and . lb. ( -inch gauge) per acre (rainfall . inches). see appendix to chapter iii., note viii, p. . appendix to chapter iv. note i. (p. ). old theories of nitrification. according to the old theories, nitrification was regarded as a simple case of the oxidation of nitrogen by the oxygen of the air, or by ozone. the union of nitrogen and oxygen, however, probably takes place only at very high temperatures, such as are formed during electric discharges. it is needless to point out that the union of nitrogen and oxygen in this way is not likely to occur in soils. according to other theories, nitrification was effected by means of the oxidation of ammonia. ammonia, however, can only be oxidised to nitric acid by means of certain powerful oxidising agents, such as ozone or hydrogen peroxide. as, however, these substances are not found in the soil, it is much to be doubted whether nitric acid is ever formed in the soil in this way. it is possible, however, as held by some, that ferric oxide is capable of inducing this conversion. on the whole, however, most evidence points to the conclusion that all nitric acid produced in the soil is formed through the agency of micro-organic life. note ii. (p. ). the important fact that nitrification can take place in solutions practically devoid of organic matter, was first shown by dr j. h. m. munro ('chemical society journal,' august , p. ). it was further corroborated by warington and p. f. frankland. winogradsky, however, has carried out the most conclusive experiments on the subject. "he prepared vessels and solutions, carefully purified from organic matter, and these solutions he sowed with the nitrifying organism. finding that under these conditions the nitrifying organism increased enormously and displayed its full vigour, he proceeded further to determine the amount of carbonaceous organic matter formed in solutions after the introduction of the organism. by making the nitrification intensive, he was able to obtain considerable quantities of carbon from the nitrified solutions by the process of wet combustion. in his third memoir he publishes figures which apparently show a close relation between the amount of nitrogen oxidised, and the amount of carbon assimilated; the ratio is about : ."--see bulletin of u.s. department of agriculture, no. , containing lectures on rothamsted experiments by r. warington, f.r.s., p. . note iii. (p. ). the oxidising power of the micro-organisms of soil is not confined to the oxidation of ammonia or of organic matter. müntz has shown that soil is capable of oxidising iodides to hypo-iodides and iodates, and bromides to hypo-bromides and bromates. this is a very important result, and seems to indicate that nitrification is part of a general oxidising action, and that we must not assume that nitrites or nitrates are produced because they are in themselves of advantage to the organism. note iv. (p. ). "when urine in different degrees of dilution was treated with soil, gram of soil being added to c.c. of diluted urine, nitrification commenced in the -per-cent solution in days, in the -per-cent solution in days, in the -per-cent solution in days, in the -per-cent solution in days. the alkalinity of the last-named solution when nitrification commenced was equal to mgs. of ammonia per litre. a solution with an alkalinity of mgs. of ammonia per litre is apparently unnitrifiable."--american department of agriculture bulletin, warington's lectures on rothamsted experiments, p. . note v. (p. ). professor p. f. frankland in his experiments used the following solutions:-- grms. nh_{ }cl . } h_{ }po_{ } . } mgso_{ } . > in c.c. of distilled water. cacl_{ } . } caco_{ } . } note vi. (p. ). experiment by boussingault on rate of nitrification. percentage of nitrate . of potash. = lb. per acre. august . august . september . september . october . note vii. (p. ). nitrogen as nitrates in rothamsted soils after bare fallow in lb. per acre. ------------+-----------+---------------------------+-----------+---------- | alternate | four-course rotation. | | | wheat +-----------+---------------+ | depth of | and | super- | | claycroft | foster's soil. | fallow. | phosphate | mixed manure. | field. | field. | | only. | | | +-----------+-----------+-------+-------+-----------+---------- | . | . | . | . | . | . ------------+-----------+-----------+-------+-------+-----------+---------- | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. | lb. st ins. | . | . | . | . | . | . d ins. | . | . | . | . | . | . d ins. | - | - | - | . | . | . ------------+-----------+-----------+-------+-------+-----------+---------- total | . | . | . | . | . | . ------------+-----------+-----------+-------+-------+-----------+---------- chapter v. the position of phosphoric acid. we now come to consider the position of phosphoric acid in agriculture. the question is, however, very much simpler in its nature than that of nitrogen, and may be consequently discussed in a much shorter space. most soils, as we have already had occasion to point out, are better supplied with available ash-plant ingredients than available nitrogen compounds. the quantity of phosphoric acid absorbed by the plant is also less than that of nitrogen; and lastly, the different chemical compounds of phosphoric acid occurring in the soil are not nearly so numerous as those of nitrogen. phosphoric acid, however, must be regarded as ranking next to nitrogen in its importance as a soil-constituent. _occurrence of phosphoric acid in nature._ that phosphoric acid is of universal occurrence may be assumed from the fact of the almost universal occurrence of vegetable life on the earth's surface; for plants are unable to grow without it. while thus of practically universal occurrence, its amount in most soils is very trifling. as the only source of it in the soil is from the disintegration of the different rocks, a short description of its occurrence in the mineral kingdom may first be given. _mineral sources of phosphoric acid._ it was first discovered in the mineral kingdom towards the close of last century; but we have only of late years ascertained any exact knowledge of its percentage in the different rocks out of which soils are formed. this has been shown in many cases to be very trifling. it most abundantly occurs as _apatite_, a mineral consisting of calcium phosphate, with small quantities of calcium fluoride or calcium chloride. this apatite, or phosphorite, is found in certain parts of the world in large masses; but as a rule, it only occurs in small quantities in most rocks. it may be stated that the older rocks are, as a general rule, richer in it than those of more recent formation; and daubeny has drawn attention to this fact as furnishing a useful guide in estimating the probable richness of a soil in phosphoric acid. the older, therefore, a rock is, the richer it is likely to be in phosphoric acid. _apatite and phosphorite._ of apatite there are a variety of kinds, which differ in their appearance as well as in their composition. it occurs chiefly in a crystalline form, and is found sometimes in regular crystals, but it also occurs in the amorphous form. in colour it may be white, yellow, brown, red, green, grey, or blue. two classes of apatite are found. the first consists of calcium phosphate along with calcium fluoride; and in other kinds of apatite the calcium fluoride is replaced by calcium chloride. phosphorite is another name for apatite, but is chiefly applied to impure amorphous apatite. the percentage of phosphate of lime in different kinds of apatite may be stated at from to per cent. it occurs in very large quantities in canada, the canadian apatite being very rich in phosphate of lime-- to per cent. in many parts of the world it forms portions of mountain-masses, and is quarried, crushed, and used for artificial manurial purposes. further details of its occurrence and chemical composition will be found in the appendix.[ ] _coprolites._ in many parts of the world round nodules, largely consisting of phosphate of lime, have been found, to which the name "coprolites" has been given, on the assumption that they consisted of fossilised animal excrements. these coprolites, or osteolites as they have also been called, vary in the percentage of phosphate of lime they contain. sometimes this amounts to per cent, but as a rule it is very much less. they also in the past have formed an important source of manure, and will be referred to subsequently. _guano._ we have, lastly, phosphoric acid occurring in large quantities in guano-deposits, chiefly found on the west coast of south america. these deposits, which have been of enormous importance as a source of artificial manure, are of animal origin, and will be discussed at considerable length in a chapter specially devoted to the subject; so that we need do no more than mention them here. phosphoric acid is also found in the form of phosphate of lime in certain rocks as "layers" and "pockets." _universal occurrence in common rocks._ but while it is thus found in considerable quantities in various parts of the world, and while no anxiety need thus be felt as to its abundance for artificial manurial purposes, its occurrence in the common rocks, which, as we have already pointed out, is practically universal, is in many cases very minute. fownes first identified it in the felspathic rocks in ; and since then its percentage in granite, lava, trachyte, basalt, porphyry, dolomite, gneiss, syenite, dolerite, diorite, and a number of other rocks, has been determined by numerous investigators. for analyses of these rocks the reader is referred to the appendix.[ ] _occurrence in the soil._ that no soil is actually without phosphoric acid is highly probable, but in many soils it is present in the merest traces, and even in fertile soils it is rarely present in quantities over two-tenths of a per cent; while half that amount may be taken as an average for most fairly fertile soils. this would be about lb. per acre, calculating the soil to a depth of inches. in exceptional cases it has been found to the extent of . per cent; and in the famous russian _black earth_ it has been found to amount to . per cent.[ ] like nitrogen, it is found in greatest amount in the surface portion of the soil, but its amount at different depths does not vary to the same extent as we have found to be the case with nitrogen. _condition in which phosphoric acid is present in the soil._ unlike nitrogen, phosphoric acid occurs in the soil almost entirely in an _insoluble_ form; and when applied to the soil in a soluble form, is speedily converted into an insoluble condition. its most commonly occurring forms are as phosphates of lime, iron, and alumina. these facts are of importance to remember, as they explain why phosphoric acid is not found in drainage-water in any quantity. it also shows how little the risk of loss from drainage is in the application of artificial phosphatic manure to the soil. _occurrence in plants._ the percentage of phosphoric acid in plants, like other ash-constituents, is subject to considerable variation, and depends on a variety of conditions, such as the state of the plant's development, nature of soil, climate, season, treatment with manures, &c. all these conditions have a certain influence. the different parts of the plant have been found to contain it in different quantities. the tendency of phosphoric acid is to travel up to the higher portions of the plant with the progress of growth, and to finally accumulate in the seed. as illustrating this, it may be mentioned that the inner portion of the stalk of a ripe oat-plant has been found to contain only a seventeenth of the amount of phosphoric acid found in the same portion of the stalk of a young oat-plant. similarly it may be mentioned that, while the ash of the grain of rye and wheat contains nearly half their weight of phosphoric acid, the percentage present in the ash of other parts of the plant amounts only to from to per cent. the percentage of phosphorus is greater in young plants than in mature plants; it is greater also in quickly developed plants than in slowly developed plants. in the plant, phosphorus is present chiefly in the albuminoids; and its absorption from the soil takes place in greatest quantity during the period of maximum growth. in beans and peas an oil containing phosphorus has been found. _occurrence in animals._ that phosphorus in different forms exists in animal tissue is well known. it is found both in the brain and in the nerves, as well as in nearly all the fluids of the animal body. it is, however, in the bones that it is most abundant, the mineral portion of which is almost entirely made of phosphate of lime,--a fact which renders bones such a valuable artificial manure. altogether, phosphoric acid occurs in the animal body to the extent of . per cent. there is a point which we shall have occasion to draw the student's attention to further on in discussing the nature of farmyard manure--and that is, that the urine of the common farm animals is practically devoid of phosphoric acid. _sources of loss of phosphoric acid in agriculture._ as we have already done in the case of nitrogen, we may now attempt to form some conception of the sources of loss and gain of phosphoric acid in the soil. the sources of loss may be divided into natural and artificial. of natural sources of loss we have only one, and that is loss by drainage. _loss of phosphoric acid by drainage._ we have already seen that the condition in which phosphoric acid is present in the soil is as insoluble phosphate. in drainage-water it occurs in mere traces. minute though the amount seems when stated as percentage, and small as it appears beside the loss (from the same source) of nitrogen, it is yet, if considered for large areas, sufficiently striking. thus it has been estimated that in the river elbe there is carried off by drainage from the fields of bohemia - / million pounds ( tons) of phosphoric acid annually. this, it is true, is a very trifling amount compared with the annual loss of nitrogen from an equal area; but then it must be remembered, on the other hand, the sources of gain to the soil of this ingredient are not so numerous as are those of nitrogen, the only sources of phosphoric acid being in the manure applied to the soil, and that coming from the gradual disintegration of phosphatic minerals. _artificial sources of loss._ the other sources of loss may be classed under the term artificial, and are connected with agricultural practice. just as we have seen that in the case of nitrogen enormous quantities of that substance are constantly being removed from the soil in those crops which are consumed off the farm, so, too, enormous quantities of phosphoric acid are being removed in the same way. as illustrating this fact, it may be mentioned that professor grandeau has recently estimated that in the entire crops grown in france in one year there are about , tons of phosphoric acid; while the amount returned in the dung of farm animals is only , , or only about one-half of what is removed in the crops, leaving a deficit of , tons to be made good by the addition of artificial phosphatic manures, if the fertility of the soil is to be maintained. the same authority has calculated that in the bones of the entire farm animals in france there is no less a quantity than , tons of phosphoric acid. as an example of how, in many cases, the amount of phosphoric acid removed from the farm is very often much greater than that restored, a case quoted by crusius may be cited. this was a farm of acres (saxon) which had received only farmyard manure, and from which, during sixteen years, . cwt. of phosphoric acid had been sold off in the crops; while only . cwt. had been restored in the manure, leaving a loss of . cwt. _phosphoric acid removed in milk._ a further source of loss is the phosphoric acid removed in milk. in the total annual yield of milk from one cow there may be from to lb. of phosphoric acid. _loss in treatment of farmyard manure._ the risks of loss of phosphoric acid in the treatment of farmyard manure are not so great as in the case of nitrogen. there is, however, a considerable risk, through want of proper precautions, of the soluble phosphates being washed away by rain. _loss in sewage._ the loss of phosphoric acid incurred by the present method of sewage disposal is not so large as the loss of nitrogen, inasmuch as the quantity of phosphoric acid contained in human excreta is very much less. roughly speaking, it may be said to amount to a little less than one-third of the nitrogen lost in this way. _sources of artificial gain of phosphoric acid._ to balance these losses, we have a practically unlimited supply of mineral phosphates for application as artificial manure, as well as large quantities of other manures, many of them already mentioned in connection with nitrogen, such as bones and guanos of all kinds. quite recently, also, a large source of phosphoric acid has been opened up in the basic slag, a rich phosphatic bye-product obtained in considerable quantity in steel-works from the basic process of steel manufacture. we have also large quantities of phosphoric acid in the imported feeding-stuffs, for statistics regarding which we would refer our readers to a previous chapter. the question of the actual amount contained in these sources is not of the same interest as in the case of nitrogen, and need not therefore detain us. we have sufficiently indicated the importance of phosphoric acid in agriculture by the statements above given. all further consideration of phosphoric acid must therefore be deferred to future chapters. footnotes: [ ] see appendix, note i., p. . [ ] see appendix, note ii., p. . [ ] these results, as indeed all soil percentages, are calculated on the soil in a dry condition. appendix to chapter v note i. (p. ). composition of apatite (voelcker). (_krageröe, norway._) lime . phosphoric acid . chlorine . fluorine . oxide of iron . alumina . potash and soda . water . ------ . ====== apatite is found in considerable quantities in america, germany, france, spain, hungary, norway, and great britain. according to rose, apatite is made up of three molecules of tribasic calcium phosphate (ca(po_ )_ ), combined with one molecule of calcium fluoride (ca f_ ) or one molecule of calcium chloride (cacl_ ) respectively. the composition of the pure mineral should be-- _chlorapatite._ per cent. calcium phosphate . calcium chloride . _fluorapatite._ calcium phosphate . calcium fluoride . note ii. (p. ). the following is a list of the commoner rocks in which the percentage of phosphoric acid has been determined. the results are taken from analyses by nesbit, schramm, bergemann, rose, dehérain, handtke, petersen, nessler, muth, fleischmann, storer, and others:-- per cent. felspar . granite . . . . lava . . trachyte . . basalt . . porphyry . marl . . . calcareous stones . . dolomite . lias chalk . gneiss . . . syenite . dolerite . . . diorite . . chapter vi. the position of potash in agriculture. we may, lastly, consider the position of _potash_ in agriculture, the only ash ingredient of the plant, in addition to phosphoric acid, which it is as a rule necessary to add as a manure. _potash of less importance than phosphoric acid._ it is of far less importance than phosphoric acid, from the fact of its much more abundant occurrence in the soil, as well as from the fact that under the ordinary conditions of agriculture, although removed from the soil in considerable quantities by crops, it finds its way back again in the farmyard manure; for it has not the same tendency to accumulate in large quantities in the grain or seed as we have seen to be the case with phosphoric acid. on this account straw contains a much greater proportion of potash than phosphoric acid, and hence farmyard manure may be regarded as fairly rich in potash. _occurrence of potash._ of all sources of potash the ocean must be regarded as the chief. millions and millions of tons are present in a state of solution in the salt water of the ocean.[ ] like phosphoric acid, its occurrence in the rocks forming the earth's crust may be said to be practically universal. many of the commonly occurring rocks and minerals are extremely rich in it, and by their disintegration furnish large quantities to the soil. some of these rocks contain it in such abundance that they have been tried as potash manures; and were other more valuable sources less available than they actually are, such a practice might well be recommended. a volcanic rock known as _palagonite_, and that most commonly occurring of all potash minerals--viz., felspar--have both been experimented with in this way with considerable success. _felspar and other potash minerals._ that felspar should prove, when finally ground, a valuable source of potash, is not to be wondered at when we remember that some varieties of it contain over per cent. it has been calculated that a single cubic foot of this mineral is sufficient to supply an oak-wood, covering a surface of , square feet, with potash for a period of no less than five years.[ ] some idea of the enormous _potential_ fertility of a soil containing felspar, so far as potash is concerned, may be obtained from this statement. it must be remembered, however, that it is only the orthoclase or potash felspars which contain large quantities of potash--other felspathic rocks, such as oligoclase and labradorite, being comparatively poor in it. another commonly occurring mineral which is rich in potash is mica, which has been found to contain from to per cent. from this it follows that rocks which have large amounts of these minerals in their composition--such as granite, for example, which often contains or per cent of potash--form by their disintegration soils rich in this ingredient. _stassfurt salts._ but in addition to the sources of potash already mentioned, it exists in other forms in the earth's surface. till within recent years it was obtained for commercial purposes from the ashes of plants, which, as we shall immediately see, are extremely rich in this ingredient; from salt water--this source giving rise to the so-called "salt gardens" on the coast of france; and from nitre soils in different parts of india, referred to already at considerable length. large mineral deposits, however, have been recently discovered in the neighbourhood of stassfurt in germany, and have since their discovery supplied all the potash required for manurial and other purposes. in these deposits (similar ones have also been found at kalusz in the carpathian mountains) there are no less than five different minerals which contain potash. the form in which it is present is as sulphate or chloride, so that it is readily available for plants, and is of altogether very much greater value than the form in which it occurs in the minerals already mentioned--viz., as an insoluble silicate. of the stassfurt potash salts, the best known as a manure is _kainit_, which contains about per cent of sulphate of potash. a list of the other potash minerals, with the particulars of their composition and the percentage of potash they contain, will be found in the appendix.[ ] _occurrence of saltpetre._ we have already had occasion, in chapter iv., when discussing the question of nitrification, to refer to the occurrence of nitrate of potash in certain soils in india, which have formed a large source of saltpetre used in commerce in the past. _occurrence of potash in the soil._ from what has been said regarding the richness in potash of certain commonly occurring minerals, such as felspar, it is only natural to infer that most soils must contain large quantities of this substance; and this is so. the wonder is that potash, when applied as an artificial manure, should have such a marked effect in increasing the fertility of the soil, as is often the case. we must remember, however, that although a soil may contain large quantities of potash, there may be a very small percentage of the whole in an available form for the plant's needs. _potash chiefly in insoluble condition in soils._ potash occurs almost entirely in soils in a very insoluble form--viz., combined with silica as a silicate of potash. it is only by the slow disintegration of potash rocks that the potash they contain is set free for plant uses. when it is applied as an artificial manure, on the other hand, it is in a soluble form. in most soils the amount soluble in water probably lies between . and . per cent; that soluble in dilute acid solutions from . to . per cent; and that insoluble from . to . per cent of the soil. it is highly probable that a certain quantity of potash in the soil may exist in combination with humic and ulmic acids, forming insoluble potassium humates and ulmates. _potash in plants._ of all the ash ingredients of plants, potash is the most abundant, as it forms on an average about per cent of the total ash of plants--about per cent of the alkalies. the ash of plants, indeed, was for long the chief source of potash. certain plants remove very large quantities from the soil. of these roots, potatoes, the vine, the tobacco-plant, and hops may be mentioned as examples. it is present in large quantities in the grain of cereals, although, as we have already pointed out, not to the same proportional extent as phosphoric acid. it is found in the plant's extremities, such as twigs and new leaves, in greatest abundance.[ ] _potash in the animal tissue._ it is also found in all parts of the animal body. especially rich in potash salts are the blood corpuscles, which contain about ten times the amount contained in the serum. it is found in especial abundance in the fleece of sheep, which may contain more potash than that in the whole body of the sheep. animal urine also contains potash in considerable quantities. _sources of loss of potash._ the capacity of the soil to retain soluble potash compounds, while not equal to its capacity for retaining phosphoric acid, is yet very much in excess of its capacity for retaining nitrates. the result is, that potash is only found in comparatively minute traces in drainage water.[ ] taking the same example as we already cited in illustration of the loss of phosphoric acid, we find that the amount carried away in the course of a year in the waters of the elbe from bohemia is , , lb. ( , tons). _potash removed in crops._ the amount of potash removed by the different crops from the soil will be considered in a subsequent chapter. we need only say here that the class of crops which remove the largest quantity are the root crops, especially mangels. the loss is least in the case of the cereals. the amount of potash contained in the straw of cereals is about three times the amount of that removed in the grain. _potash removed in milk._ lastly, we may refer to the potash removed in milk, which, on an average, may be taken at lb. per annum for each cow. _potash manures._ of potash manures the chief are the sulphate and the chloride, or, as it is commercially known, the "muriate." the chief source of potash manures are the stassfurt deposits already referred to. wood-ashes have also been used in large quantities in the past (chiefly as a potash manure), and in some parts of the world are still used. a considerable source of artificial potassic manures is the refuse manufacture of sugar-beet, such a large industry in germany. potash occurs as a constituent of certain other manures, more valuable for nitrogen and phosphoric acid, such as guano and dried blood. footnotes: [ ] according to boguslawski and dittmar, the total amount of potash calculated as sulphate of potash in salt water equals × ^{ } tons. [ ] see storer's 'agricultural chemistry,' vol. ii. p. . [ ] see appendix, note i., p. . [ ] see appendix, note ii., p. . [ ] according to way, different samples of drainage waters were found only to contain from . to . per cent. appendix to chapter vi. note i. (p. ). amount of potash in different minerals. felspars-- percentage of potash. (_a_) orthoclase { . . . . . { . . . . (_b_) oligoclase . (_c_) labradorite . mica { . . . . . { . . . . amphibole . . pyroxene . . leucite . . zeolites . . . . stassfurt potash salts-- per cent. (_a_) polyhallite, _potassium sulphate_ (_b_) karnallite (kcl.mgcl_{ } h_{ }), _potassium chloride_ to (_c_) sylvin, pure _potassium chloride_. (_d_) kainit (k_{ }so_{ }mgso_{ }mgcl_{ } h_{ }o), _potassium sulphate_ (_e_) schoenite (k_{ }so_{ }, mgso_{ }, h_{ }o), pure _potassium magnesium sulphate_. note ii. (p. ). the quantity of potash obtainable from various plants in the manufacture of potashes on a large scale is illustrated by the following statements. lb. of the following vegetative products yield the following quantities of potashes:-- lb. old spruce-wood / old poplar-wood / old oak-wood - / corn-stalks - / bean-stalks grape-vine twigs (storer, 'agricultural chemistry,' vol. ii. p. .) part iii. manures chapter vii. farmyard manure farmyard manure is the oldest, and is still undoubtedly the most popular, of all manures. it has stood the test of long experience, and has proved its position as one of the most important of all our fertilisers. it is highly desirable, therefore, to make a somewhat detailed examination of its composition, and to see on what the variation in this depends; and, finally, to examine into the mode of its action as a manure. that it should prove a valuable manure is scarcely to be wondered at, as it is originally formed from vegetable substance, and as it therefore contains all the elements present in the plant itself. its composition is very variable, and probably no two samples would yield exactly similar analyses. in this fact lies one of the chief difficulties of the treatment of the subject, and all statements made in the following pages as to its chemical composition must be taken as only _approximate_. we may divide its constituents into three classes. . that portion due to _solid excreta_. . the liquid portion, largely made up of dilute _urine_. . the _straw_, or other material, which is used as litter. the composition of the manure will vary according to the proportion in which these three substances are present, as well as according to the composition of the substances themselves. it will consequently tend to a clearer apprehension of the subject if we first examine briefly the chemical composition of the solid excreta and urine of the farm animals. . _solid excreta._ the manurial value of the solid excreta of animals--_i.e._, the proportion they contain of _nitrogen_, _phosphoric acid_, and _potash_--depends on a variety of conditions. the solid excreta of horses, sheep, cows, and pigs, are well known to possess different properties, as well as to vary in their composition. what, however, has a still greater influence is the nature of the food. this is owing to the fact that the solid excreta are made up of undigested food. we can scarcely expect the same quality of solid excreta from an animal fed on poor diet as from an animal fed on very much richer diet. again, the percentage of the food voided in the solid excreta varies in the case of different animals.[ ] another consideration which enters into the question is the age, as well as the treatment, of the animal. a young animal, during the period of its growth, absorbs from its food into its system a larger quantity of the three fertilising substances, nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, than is the case with an adult animal whose weight is neither increasing nor diminishing. a working horse, similarly, will return more of the nitrogen, phosphates, and potash in its dung than one not at work and which is permitted to gain in weight. the nature of the composition of the solid excreta, therefore, will depend on the nature of the _food_, _age_, _breed_, _condition_, and _treatment_ of the animal. let us now investigate shortly the influence of the above considerations. the solid excrements of the common farm animals are generally distinguished from one another according to the rate at which they decompose or ferment on keeping. thus horse-dung is generally known as a "hot" dung; while cow-dung, on the other hand, is known as "cool." why this should be so is not absolutely clear. probably it is owing to the fact that the former contains less water, as well as to the fact (and this probably has more to do with it) that it contains a larger percentage of fertilising matter, especially nitrogen, thus affording conditions more favourable for rapid fermentation than in the case of the more moist and less rich cow-dung. the composition of the solid excreta of various animals, as we have just said, varies with the nature of their food; so that it is impossible to take any analyses as absolutely representing its composition. it may be interesting, however, to compare the analyses of samples of horse-dung with those of some other of the commoner farm animals, with a view to obtaining an _approximate_ idea of this difference. stoeckhardt has found that in lb. of the fresh solid excreta of the animals below mentioned, there were the following amounts of _nitrogen_, _phosphoric acid_, and _alkalies_:-- -----------------------+----------+-------------+-------------+----------- | | | phosphoric | | | nitrogen. | acid. | alkalies. | water. |-----+-------+-----+-------+---+------- | | |reduced| |reduced| |reduced | | | to | | to | | to -----------------------+----+-----+-----+-------+-----+-------+---+------- |lb. | per | lb. | per | lb. | per |lb.| per | |cent.| | cent. | | cent. | | cent. horses (winter food) | | | | . | - / | . | | . cows (winter food) | | | | . | - / | . | | . swine (winter food) | | | | . | - / | . | | . sheep ( lb. hay per | | | | | | | | diem) | | | - / | . | | . | | . -----------------------+----+-----+-----+-------+-----+-------+---+------- from the above table it will be seen that the sheep's dung contains the least percentage of _water_, and is richer in _nitrogen_ and _phosphoric acid_ than any of the other three. the percentage of alkalies, of which the most important is potash, is, however, not so large. this may be accounted for by the interesting and well-known fact that a large percentage of potash is to be found in the wool of sheep.[ ] the solid excrement of the sheep is, therefore, weight for weight, the most valuable as a manure, as it contains more nitrogen and phosphates than the others, and at the same time is much drier. if, however, we compare the composition of the solid excreta in a dry state, we shall find that the following are the results (basing our calculation on stoeckhardt's analyses):-- nitrogen, phosphoric acid, alkalies, per cent. per cent. per cent. horse . . . cow . . . pig . . . sheep . . . it will be seen from the above that the dry substance of the solid excreta of the pig is richest in fertilising substances. too much stress, however, as has already been pointed out, must not be put on any single analysis, as so much depends on various conditions, especially the food.[ ] the most reliable method of studying this question, therefore, is to study it in its relation to the food consumed. wolff has calculated from numerous investigations that, with regard to the amount of solid excreta produced by the food, the following percentage of _organic matter_, _nitrogen_, and _mineral substances_, originally present in the dry matter of the food, is voided in the dung:-- cow. ox. sheep. horse. average. organic matter . . . . . nitrogen . . . . . mineral substances . . . . . there is one fact to be borne in mind in estimating the manurial value of the dung of different animals--viz., that the quantity of dung voided by one animal is much greater than that voided by another. thus the amount voided by the cow, for example, is much greater than that voided by the horse; so that, in this way, the inferior quality of the former is, to some extent, compensated for by its greater quantity. . _urine._ the solid excreta possess, however, very much less manurial value than the urine. the former, as already stated, are undigested food-substances: any fertilising matters which they contain are such as have failed to be digested or absorbed into the animal system. the urine, on the other hand, contains those fertilising substances which have been digested. the amount of nitrogen and mineral matter, however, in the urine, does not represent necessarily the total amount of these substances. thus, in the case of a growing or fattening animal, there is always a certain amount of these substances being absorbed to build up the animal tissue and put on flesh. in this respect it will be seen that the composition of urine will vary in the same way as that of the dung. in the case of the urine, however, there is a compensating influence to be taken into account. urine is a waste product, and there is more waste in a young than in an adult animal. another very important condition which determines the composition of urine is the nature of the food, especially the quantity of water drunk. this, of course, is obvious: the more water drunk, the poorer must the composition of the urine be. but here again, as in the case of the dung, this is largely compensated for by the total quantity voided--the more dilute the urine, the larger will its quantity be; so that the inferior quality is in this way made up for by its increased quantity. keeping in mind, then, the fact we have just stated--viz., that the composition of urine will vary according to different conditions--we may obtain an approximate idea of what its composition is from the following results of analyses by stoeckhardt. in parts the following quantities of _water_, _nitrogen_, _phosphoric acid_, and _alkalies_ were found to be present. from the following table it will be seen that the urine of swine (containing per cent of water) is much poorer in nitrogen and alkalies than is the case with the urine of the sheep, horse, or cow.[ ] while this is the case, the amount of phosphoric acid it contains is greater than that contained in the sheep's urine. -------------------+------------+-------------------------+------------ | | | phosphoric | | water. | nitrogen. | acid. | alkalies. +------+-----+------+-----+------+-----+------+----- | per | per | per | per | per | per | per | per | |cent.| |cent.| |cent.| |cent. |parts.| |parts.| |parts.| |parts.| -------------------+------+-----+------+-----+------+-----+------+----- sheep ( lb. hay }| | . | | . | . | . | | . per diem) }| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | swine (winter food)| | . | | . | . | . | | . | | | | | | | | horses (hay and }| | . | | . | - | - | | . oats) }| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | cows (hay and }| | . | | . | - | - | | . potatoes) }| | | | | | | | -------------------+------+-----+------+-----+------+-----+------+----- phosphoric acid is present in the urine of the farm animals in the most minute traces: practically, it may be considered to be wanting in the urine of the horse and the cow, and is present only in small quantities in sheep's urine. the pig's urine, indeed, contains it in larger quantities; but the percentage is still so small as to justify the statement that the urine of the common farm animals is not a complete manure, and must be supplemented by phosphates, if it is to be used alone. the incomplete nature of urine as a manure constitutes a strong argument in favour of its being applied along with the solid excreta, which contain, as we have seen, considerable quantities of phosphoric acid. it is on this account that the drainings of rotten manure-heaps are more valuable, from a manurial point of view, than urine itself, since these contain the soluble portion of the phosphates in the solid excreta.[ ] the urine of all animals, however, is not equally poor in phosphates. in the case of flesh-eating animals, such as the dog, the urine is found to contain them in considerable quantities. the above tables show that the most valuable urine, weight for weight, is that of the sheep, as it contains the largest amount of alkalies (including potash) and nitrogen; that the urine of the horse comes next; then that of the cow; while, as has already been pointed out, that of the pig is the poorest. in order to make our survey of the composition of urine uniform with that of the dung, let us see how the urine of the common farm animals compares in the matter of the composition of its dry substance. the following results (basing our calculations on stoeckhardt's figures, previously given) show this:-- nitrogen, phosphoric acid, alkalies, per cent. per cent. per cent. pig . horse . trace . sheep . . . cow . trace . from these figures we see that the dry substance of the urine of the pig is richest in nitrogen and phosphoric acid, but poorest in alkalies, of the four common farm animals; that of the horse comes next in the amount of nitrogen it contains, but that, on the whole, there is very little difference between the horse, cow, and sheep in this respect.[ ] as in the case of the dung, this subject is best studied in relation to the food consumed. we are again indebted to wolff's investigations for valuable information on this point. he has found that the following percentages of _organic matter_, _nitrogen_, and _mineral substances_, originally present in the dry matter of the food, are voided in the urine:-- cow. ox. sheep. horse. average organic matter . . . . . nitrogen . . . . . mineral substances . . . . . [ ] we have now considered briefly the composition of the solid excrements and urine of the common farm animals, and have also enumerated some of the principal causes of the variation in their composition. the solid excreta consist, as we have seen, of _undigested_ food, while the urine contains the manurial ingredients of the food which have been _digested_ by the animal system.[ ] the latter is, weight for weight, as a rule, very much more valuable as a manure than the former. from the table given in the appendix[ ] it will be seen that the proportions of the nitrogen and ash-constituents originally present in the food consumed, which are voided in the excrements, vary with different circumstances. wolff, in summarising his results, points out that, as a rule, the solid and liquid excrements will contain about per cent of the organic matter, . of the nitrogen, and . of mineral matter; while the experiments of lawes and gilbert at rothamsted show that, with fattening oxen and sheep and with horses, more than per cent of the nitrogen and per cent or more of the ash-constituents are voided in the manure. the pig retains a larger proportion of the nitrogen--about per cent appearing in the manure--while in the milking-cow only about per cent is returned in the excrements. generally speaking, we may say that the nitrogen originally present in the food suffers very little loss in passing through the animal system, and that, practically speaking, the ash-constituents suffer no loss whatever. as to the distribution of the manurial ingredients, much will depend on the nature of the food. almost invariably more than a _half_ of the total nitrogen excreted will be found in the urine, in many cases very much more.[ ] of the mineral constituents, about a third on the average may be said to be excreted in the urine. of this mineral matter it may be noted that nearly all the alkalies (potash and soda), or about per cent, are found in the urine. of phosphoric acid and lime, on the other hand, there are the merest traces in the urine. horse-urine, however, is an exception with regard to lime, as it contains about per cent of the lime consumed in the food. for information on the subject of pig-manure the reader is referred to appendix, note v.[ ] before passing from this part of the subject, it may be desirable to place before our readers the composition of the dung and urine taken together, so that we may be able to form some idea of their relative value, weight for weight. as the nitrogen constitutes by far the most valuable portion of the manurial ingredients, it will be sufficient if we compare them as to their percentage of this ingredient. water, nitrogen, calculated on per cent. per cent. dry substance, analyses by per cent. sheep . . jürgensen. horse . . boussingault. pig . . boussingault. cow . . boussingault. from these figures we see that, in their natural condition, the excreta of the sheep are the most valuable; those of the horse and pig coming next; while those of the cow are the poorest, containing one-third as much nitrogen as those of the sheep, and one-half as much as those of the horse and pig. this difference, however, is due almost entirely to the different percentage of water the excreta of the various animals contain in their natural state; for in the dry state they are seen to contain, with the single exception of the pig, practically the same amount. in conclusion, then, the important points to be noticed are-- . that in the passage of the food through the system of the common farm animals, only a very small percentage of the fertilising substances, nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, is assimilated and retained in the animal body; and that, therefore, theoretically at least, the excreta should contain nearly the same amount of fertilising matter as the food originally did. . that even in the case of a fattening animal, the loss of fertilising matter sustained by the food in passing through the system is not great. . that with regard to the total amount of solid excreta and urine voided, the latter contains, as a rule, more nitrogen than the former; the nitrogen in the urine, further, being more valuable, as it is in a soluble condition. . that as regards the distribution of the ash-constituents, _lime_, _phosphoric acid_, and _magnesia_ are almost entirely found in the solid excrements; while the urine contains nearly all the _potash_. . that the best results can be expected only when the liquid and solid excreta are used together as a manure. as the composition of the manure depends so largely on the nature of the food, a table will be found in the appendix, note vi.,[ ] containing the manurial composition of some of the commoner feeding-stuffs. . _litter._ we have now to consider the third constituent of farmyard manure--viz., the _litter_, which generally consists of straw. the uses of the litter, in addition to providing a dry and comfortable bed for the animal, may be briefly summed up as follows:-- . to absorb and retain the liquid portion of the excreta. . to increase the quantity of the manure, and thus secure its more equal distribution when applied to the field than could otherwise be done. . to add to its value as a manure, both physically and chemically. . to retard and regulate the decomposition of the excreta. of course litter also performs a very useful function sanitarily, inasmuch as it serves to keep the stall or byre fresher and cleaner, and more free from noxious gases, which it absorbs, than would otherwise be the case. _straw_ is almost universally used for this purpose. besides being one of the bye-products of the farm, it is admirably suited in many ways, both owing to its peculiar shape--its tubular structure being excellently adapted for this purpose--as well as on account of its composition, being largely composed of cellulose, a very absorptive substance. straw thus possesses considerable absorptive power. in manurial ingredients it is not very rich; for, of the various parts of the ripened plant, straw contains the least percentage of nitrogen and phosphates. this is due to the fact that, as the straw ripens, a considerable proportion of these ingredients passes up from the stalk to the seeds, where they are retained. generally speaking, straw may be said to contain not more than _a half per cent_ of nitrogen--_i.e._, . lb. per ton. its percentage of nitrogen varies, of course; the recorded analyses[ ] for wheat-straw ranging from . to . per cent, or furnishing an average of . per cent--_i.e._, . lb. per ton. barley-straw is somewhat richer in nitrogen, the recorded analyses ranging from . to . per cent, or giving an average of . per cent--_i.e._, . lb. per ton; while oat-straw is the richest of the commoner straws, ranging from . to . per cent, an average of . per cent--_i.e._, . lb per ton. of mineral matter, however, straw contains a very much larger percentage, proportionally, than of nitrogen; for, with the exception of phosphates, there is a considerable quantity of inorganic fertilising matter, in the shape of potash, lime, &c., present in composition of straw.[ ] -----------------+---------------+------------------------+-------- | ash. | composition of ash. | +------+--------+------------------------+ | | | lb. per ton. | | | lb. |-------+----------+-----| number | per | per |potash.|phosphoric|lime.| of | cent.| ton. | | acid | |analyses -----------------+------+--------+-------+----------+-----+-------- wheat (winter) | . | . | . | . | . | wheat (summer) | . | . | . | . | . | rye (winter) | . | . | . | . | . | rye (summer) | . | . | . | . | . | barley | . | . | . | . | . | oats | . | . | . | . | . | -----------------+------+--------+-------+----------+-----+-------- it. of total ash ingredients, on an average, there are generally about per cent--or lb. per ton. the largest percentage of the fertilising matter in this per cent is potash, which varies in the ashes of the straws of the commoner crops from to per cent. the above table will show the variation in composition of the straws of some of the commoner farm crops, and may be valuable for purposes of reference. the crops are wheat (winter and summer), barley, oats, and rye (winter and summer), and the amount is also calculated in lb. per ton. the results represent the average of a number of analyses.[ ] from the table it will be seen that the percentage of phosphates is, as has already been noticed, very small. but while straw is well adapted for the purposes for which litter is used, it is not the only substance. its almost exclusive use as litter is largely owing to the fact that it is a bye-product of the farm. _loam as litter._--generally speaking, any substance which has great absorptive as well as retentive powers for nitrogen and the soluble fertilising matters present in farmyard manure, and whose price is nominal, is well suited for acting as litter. ordinary loamy soil possesses the above qualifications, and is, besides, a substance to be had for nothing, and, under certain circumstances and in certain countries, is actually used for this purpose, often along with straw. a great objection against loam, however, is that it forms a dirty litter. moreover, it possesses a very small percentage of fertilising matter. the tendency, consequently, in using ordinary loam, would be to dilute the manure too much, besides retarding fermentation to an undesirable extent. except, therefore, under very exceptional circumstances, loam is not to be regarded as a good litter. _peat as litter._--some kinds of soil, however, are well suited for this purpose. of these, the best are those rich in organic matter, the so-called peaty soils. peat, when dried and freed from any earthy matter, forms an excellent absorbent of the liquid portion of the manure, surpassing in this respect straw itself. it is, further, generally very much richer in nitrogen--some peats having been found to contain between and per cent of nitrogen. in some thirty samples of peat analysed by professor s. w. johnson, the percentage of nitrogen varied from . to . , giving an average of . per cent. while it has a very great capacity for absorbing liquids, it possesses in an unequalled degree the power of retaining the soluble nitrogen compounds. this is undoubtedly one of the most important properties which recommend peat for the purposes of litter.[ ] some interesting experiments on the value of peat-moss as a litter have been recently carried out by dr bernard dyer.[ ] from these experiments mr dyer has found that both its liquid-absorbing and liquid-retaining powers are very much greater than those of straw. while straw was only able to absorb three times its weight of water, peat-moss was found to absorb nearly ten times its weight. with regard to its water-retaining power, this was also found to be in excess of that of straw. both these properties are, it need scarcely be pointed out, of very great value in a litter. another point of interest in these experiments was the respective amounts of nitrogen absorbed and retained by the peat-moss and the straw. it was found that, in this respect, the peat-moss had again an advantage over the straw. lastly, the manure produced by the peat-moss was shown to be richer in fertilising matter than that produced by the use of straw.[ ] these experiments are interesting as demonstrating the fact that in peat-moss we have a substance which is capable of acting as an excellent substitute for the more costly straw, and which might increasingly be used as a fodder with great benefit to the farmer. another substance which has been suggested as an excellent litter is the common _bracken-fern_. according to some analyses made by mr john hughes, the bracken, especially if cut in a young state, is a substance of considerable manurial value. when dried, it is very much richer in nitrogen, potash, and lime than straw. its absorbent properties, however, are probably not so great. where it can easily and cheaply be had, as in many parts of scotland and ireland, it might well be used for littering purposes.[ ] _dried leaves_ have also been used as a litter. autumn leaves, however, contain a very small percentage of fertilising matter. this is due to the fact that the most of their potash, phosphoric acid, and nitrogen pass into the body of the trees at the approach of winter. according to professor storer, dried leaves only contain from . to . per cent potash,. to . per cent phosphoric acid, and about . per cent of nitrogen. leaves, however, besides being poor in manurial ingredients, make a bad litter, as they ferment but slowly. there is in this fermentation a large quantity of cold sour humic acid formed, which seriously impairs the value of the manure.[ ] having now considered the composition of the three separate ingredients of farmyard manure--viz., the _dung_ or _solid excreta_, the _urine_, and the _litter_--we are in a position to consider the composition of farmyard manure. in this connection it will be well to consider separately the manures produced by the different farm animals. . _horse-manure._ the composition of horse-manure is perhaps the most uniform of all the manures produced by the different farm animals. this is due to the fact that the food of the horse is generally of the same kind, consisting of oats, hay, and straw. the total excrements voided by a horse in a day have been calculated, according to the average of experiments by boussingault and hofmeister, at . lb., of which only . lb. consisted of dry matter.[ ] these . lb. contained . lb. of nitrogen and . lb. of mineral matter. the amount of straw necessary to absorb this amount of excrement may be stated at from to lb. the amounts of nitrogen and mineral matter in lb. of straw are . and . lb. respectively. the total amount of nitrogen and ash, therefore, in the farmyard manure produced by a horse in one day, would be . lb. nitrogen and . lb. mineral matter; or, if we take the larger quantity of straw, somewhat more. taking these figures, we find that the amount of manure produced by a horse in a year will be from , to , lb. (_i.e._, from - / to - / tons),[ ] containing from to lb. nitrogen, and from to lb. mineral matter.[ ] a word or two may be of value regarding the treatment in the stable of horse-manure. the great object to be aimed at is the prevention of loss of valuable fertilising constituents. this loss may be due to two causes. it may be, in the first place, caused by drainage of the soluble matter of the manure; or secondly, it may be due to volatilisation of the volatile constituents. the first of these two sources of loss depends on the precautions taken in the way of providing a proper impervious flooring to the stable. this source of loss is extremely difficult to prevent, inasmuch as nearly all materials used for flooring absorb a certain percentage of urine. the judicious use of litter, however, will minimise this loss to within a trifling extent. dr heiden states that the amount of straw used as litter for the horse in germany is from to lb. per day. the quantity should be regulated according to the percentage of water the excreta contain; the more watery excreta requiring naturally a larger quantity of litter. the most eminent authorities on this subject recommend that the amount of litter should equal one-fourth of the food in its natural state, or about one-third of its dry substance. the second source of loss, which is due to volatilisation of the volatile ingredients, may be largely prevented by the use of certain preservatives. horse-dung being, comparatively speaking, of a dry nature, it is extremely difficult to effect its thorough mixture with the litter. for this reason the manure formed from horse excreta is particularly liable to rapid fermentation.[ ] in the process of fermentation, as will be seen more in detail further on, the nitrogen is converted into carbonate of ammonia. as nitrogen in this form is of an extremely volatile nature, the risks of loss from this source are considerable. as illustrating this fact, it may be mentioned that boussingault has found by experiment that the total percentage of nitrogen contained by fresh horse-manure might be reduced in the process of fermentation to one-half of its original amount by loss from this source. the preservatives used to prevent this volatilisation are technically known as "fixers." this they do by chemically combining with the volatile ammonia and forming non-volatile compounds with it. of the acid fixers, hydrochloric and sulphuric acids have been recommended. the former, however, is not well suited for this purpose. it is a strongly fuming acid, and when brought into contact with ammonia forms dense white fumes. the use of sulphuric acid is not open to this objection. sulphate of ammonia, the salt formed in this case, is one of the most stable (or least volatile) of the compounds of ammonia. if used, it should be largely diluted with water, and the whole mixed with sand. such a mixture, when sprinkled over the stable-floor in even very small quantities, has been found to effectually prevent any loss of the volatile carbonate of ammonia. it is not, however, on the whole advisable to use an acid substance as a fixer, since such a substance may act deleteriously on the horses' hoofs. such substances as _gypsum_, _copperas_, and _sulphate of magnesia_, while equally efficient, are not open to this objection. the above-mentioned substances owe their efficacy to the fact that they are compounds of sulphuric acid, which, by combining with the volatile ammonia and forming sulphate of ammonia, prevent its escape. gypsum, or sulphate of lime, although, comparatively speaking, an insoluble substance, when brought in contact with carbonate of ammonia has been proved to effect the conversion of the ammonia into sulphate of ammonia. it is also believed to retard the decomposition of the manure.[ ] copperas, or ferrous sulphate, while a soluble salt, and while thus acting in a more speedy manner in fixing the ammonia, is not so well suited, owing to the hurtful influence it is well known to possess on plant-life. it is only right to remember that there may be circumstances in which copperas may, in small quantities, act even beneficially as a manure, as griffiths' experiments would seem to indicate. the above objection, however, cannot be urged against sulphate of magnesia. in addition to fixing the ammonia, sulphate of magnesia may very probably fix the soluble phosphoric acid. kainit, which consists of a mixture of sulphates and chlorides of potassium and magnesium, has also been suggested for this purpose. by using such a fixer, the value of the resulting manure would be much enhanced. in conclusion, it must be remembered that all the above-named fixers act very much in the same way--viz., by converting the volatile carbonate of ammonia into sulphate of ammonia.[ ] . _cow-manure._ the composition of the manure formed from the excrementitious matter of the cow is very much less constant than is the case in the horse-manure. an average statement of that composition is therefore very much more difficult to obtain. the number of analyses available for the purpose of forming this average is, however, very large. the manure produced by cows contains a large percentage of water. this is due to the large quantity of water they drink. it has been estimated that milch-cows drink along with their winter food, for every pound of dry substance, lb. of water, and in summer about lb. according to some experiments by boussingault, the excrements of a cow in a day amounted to . lb., of which only . lb. were dry matter.[ ] these excrements contained . lb. of nitrogen and . lb. of mineral matter. the amount of straw necessary to use as litter for this amount of excrements may be taken at to lb. the manure, therefore, formed by a cow per day, would contain from . to . lb. of nitrogen, and from . to . lb. of mineral matter. in a year this would amount to from to . lb. of nitrogen, and from . lb. to . lb. of mineral matter; or from cwt. lb. to cwt. lb. cow-dung is, owing to its more watery nature and poorer quality, very much slower in its fermentation than horse-dung. when applied alone, cow-manure is very slow in its action, and makes its influence felt for at least three or four years. it is difficult to spread it evenly over the soil, owing to the fact that, when somewhat dried, it has a tendency to form hard masses, which, when buried in the soil, may resist decomposition for a very long period. the cause of this is due to the presence of a considerable amount of mucilaginous and resinous matter in the solid excreta, which prevents the entrance of moisture and air into the centre of the mass. this tendency of cow-manure to resist decomposition will be greatly lessened in the case of the excrements of a cow richly fed. the risks of loss of volatile ammonia are, therefore, in its case not so great as we have seen them to be in the case of the "hot" horse-dung. notwithstanding this fact, much of what has been said on the use of preservatives for horse-manure may be also applied to the cow-dung. this is owing to the fact that the dung is allowed to accumulate in the court for some time. the amount of straw it is advisable to use as litter varies, as has been said, from to lb. per day. the best method of calculating this amount, according to dr heiden, is by taking one-third of the total weight of the dry substance of the food. the above authority also recommends that the straw is best applied in blocks of about one foot in length; and this for the following reasons:-- . the strewing of it is more convenient. . the absorption of the fluid portion is more complete. . the cleaning out of the manure from the byre is easier. . the manure is more easily distributed when applied to the field. among the advantages incidental to allowing the manure to accumulate in the court may be mentioned the following:-- . the more thorough absorption of the urine by the straw, and, consequently, the more uniform mixture which will be thus effected of the more valuable urine with the less valuable solid excreta. . a certain retardation of decomposition effected by the treading under foot of the manure. . the protection of the manure from rain and wind, and the securing of a uniform temperature. against those advantages must be placed the risk of seriously affecting the health of the animal. although this is a point of very great importance, it scarcely falls within the scope of this work. it may be pointed out, however, that the judicious use of some of the chemical fixers previously referred to may do much to keep the air of the byre or court free of noxious gases.[ ] . _pig-manure._ the food of the pig is so very variable in its character that it is wellnigh impossible to obtain anything like an average analysis of its excrements. when the food of the pig is rich, then the manure may be quite equal in quality to the other manures. according to boussingault, the total amount of excrements, on an average, voided by a pig in twenty-four hours is about . lb., of which . lb. is dry matter.[ ] the amount of nitrogen these excrements contain is only . lb., and of mineral ingredients . lb. if we take the amount of straw most suitable for absorbing this quantity of excrementitious matter at from to lb., then we shall find that the manure produced by a pig will contain from . to . lb. nitrogen and . to . lb. mineral matter. these quantities, calculated for a year, give from to lb. of nitrogen, and from cwt. lb. to cwt. lb. of mineral matter. that is about as much nitrogen as would be contained in - / to - / cwt. of nitrate of soda ( per cent purity); or from slightly less than cwt. to slightly over cwt. of sulphate of ammonia ( per cent purity). as has already been pointed out, the excrements of the pig are, as a rule, very poor in nitrogen. this accounts for the fact that pig-manure is a "cold" manure, slow in fermenting.[ ] . _sheep-manure._ the dung and the urine of the sheep, as we have already seen, are, weight for weight, the most valuable of any of the common farm animals. the total weight of the excrements voided by a sheep in a day may be taken, on an average,[ ] at . lb., of which . lb. is dry matter. these excrements contain . lb. of nitrogen and . lb. mineral matter. taking the amount of straw most suitable for absorbing this quantity of excrementitious matter at three-fifths of a pound, then the manure produced by a sheep in a day will contain . lb. nitrogen and . lb. mineral matter. that is, in a year the quantities of nitrogen and mineral matter in the manure produced by a sheep would be . lb. of nitrogen and . lb. of mineral matter. from its richness in nitrogen, and from its dry condition, sheep-dung is peculiarly liable to ferment. while richer in fertilising substances than horse-manure, it is not so rapid in its fermentation. this is due to the harder and more compact physical character of the solid excreta. the risks of loss of volatile ammonia are, in its case, exceptionally great. the use of artificial "fixers" is therefore to be strongly recommended.[ ] _fermentation of farmyard manure._ having now considered the nature of the different manures produced by the four common farm animals separately, it is of importance to consider the exact nature of the fermentation, decomposition, or putrefaction which takes place in the manure-heap. it is now more than thirty years since pasteur showed that the fermentation which ensued on keeping a sample of urine was due to the action of a minute organism, for the propagation of which a certain amount of warmth, air, and moisture, as well as the presence of certain food-constituents, especially nitrogenous bodies, were necessary. subsequent researches by pasteur and others have conclusively demonstrated that the micro-organic life instrumental in effecting the putrefaction or decay of organic matter of any kind, may be divided into two great classes:-- . those which require a plentiful supply of oxygen for their development, and which, when bereft of oxygen, die--known as _aerobies_. . those which, on the contrary, develop in the complete absence of oxygen, and which, when exposed to oxygen, die--known as _anaerobies_. in the fermentation of the manure-heap, therefore, we must conceive of the two classes of organisms as the active agents. in the interior portion of the manure-heap, where the supply of oxygen is necessarily limited, the fermentation going on there is effected by means of the anaerobic organism--_i.e._, the organism which does not require oxygen; while on the surface portion, which is exposed to the air, the aerobic (or oxygen-requiring) organism is similarly active. gradually, as decay progresses, the aerobic organisms increase in number. it is through their instrumentality that the final products of decomposition are largely produced. the functions of the anaerobic organisms may be, on the contrary, regarded as largely preparatory in their nature. by breaking up the complex organic substances in the manure into new and simpler forms, they advance the process of putrefaction through the initial stages; and when this is accomplished, they die and give place to the aerobic, which, as we have just seen, effect the final transformation of the organic matter into such simple substances as _water_ and _carbonic acid gas_. the conditions influencing the fermentation of farmyard manure may be summed up as follows:[ ]-- . _temperature._--the higher the temperature the more rapidly will the manure decay. . _openness to the air._--of course it will be seen that the effect of exposing the manure to the action of the air is to induce the development of the aerobic type of organism, and thus to promote more rapid fermentation. if, on the other hand, the manure be impacted, the slower but more regular fermentation, due to the anaerobic type of organism, will be chiefly promoted. it must be remembered that in the proper rotting of farmyard manure both kinds of fermentation should be fostered. it is, in fact, on the careful regulation of the two classes of fermentation that the successful rotting of the manure depends. it must further be remembered that, even with a certain amount of openness in a manure-heap, anaerobic fermentation may take place. this is due to the fact that the evolution of carbonic acid gas, in such a case, is so great as to exclude the access of the atmospheric oxygen into the pores of the heap. . the _dampness_ of the manure-heap is another important influence. this, of course, will act in two ways. first, by lowering the temperature. where the manure-heap is found to be suffering from "fire-fang," the common method in practice is to lower the temperature by moistening the heap with water. secondly, it acts as a retarder of fermentation by limiting the supply of atmospheric oxygen, and thus preventing, as we have just seen, aerobic fermentation. . the fourth chief influence in regulating fermentation of the manure-heap is its _composition_, and more especially the amount of nitrogen it contains in a soluble form. the rate at which fermentation takes place in any organic substance may be said chiefly to depend on the percentage of soluble nitrogenous matter it contains: the greater this is in amount, the more quickly does fermentation go on. there are always a number of soluble nitrogenous bodies in farmyard manure. these are chiefly found in the urine, such as _urea_, _uric_ and _hippuric acids_, and _ammonia_ salts. _products of decomposition of farmyard manure._ the most important of the changes which take place in the rotting of farmyard manure may be briefly enumerated as follows:-- . the gradual conversion into gases of a large portion of the organic elements in the manure. of these gaseous products the most abundant is _carbonic acid gas_ (co_ ). it is in this form that the carbonaceous matter which constitutes the chief portion of the manure escapes into the air. carbon also escapes into the air, combined with hydrogen, in the form of _carburetted hydrogen_ or _marsh-gas_ (ch_ ), a product of the decomposition of organic matter in the presence of a large quantity of water. this gas is consequently found bubbling up through stagnant water. next to carbonic acid gas, _water_ (h_ o) is the most abundant gaseous product of decomposition. the nitrogen present in the manure, in different forms, is converted by the process of decomposition chiefly into _ammonia_, which, combining with the carbonic acid, forms carbonate of ammonia, a very volatile salt. it is to this fact that one of the great sources of loss in the decomposition of farmyard manure is due. if the temperature of the manure-heap be permitted to rise too high, the carbonate of ammonia volatilises. it is probable, also, that a not inconsiderable portion of the nitrogen escapes into the air in the free state. the last of the most important gaseous products of decomposition are _sulphuretted_ and _phosphoretted hydrogen_. it is to these gases that much of the smell of rotting farmyard manure is due. . the second class of substances formed are _soluble organic acids_, such as _humic_ and _ulmic acids_. the function performed by these acids is a very important one. they unite with the ammonia and the alkali substances in the mineral portion of the manure, forming humates and ulmates of ammonia, potash, &c. it is these ulmates that form the black liquor which oozes out from the manure-heap. in very rotten farmyard manure traces of _nitric acid_ may be found; but it must be remembered that the formation of nitrates is practically impossible under the ordinary conditions of active fermentation of farmyard manure, except perhaps in its very last stages. . the third class of changes taking place have to do with the mineral portion of the manure. the result of the formation of so much carbonic and other organic acids is to increase the amount of _soluble_ mineral matter very considerably. _analyses of farmyard manure._ it is chiefly to the valuable researches of the late dr augustus voelcker that we owe our knowledge of the composition of old and fresh farmyard manure. all interested in this important question should peruse the original papers on this subject contributed to the 'journal of the royal agricultural society' by dr voelcker. typical analyses illustrating the variation in the composition of farmyard manure at different stages of decomposition will be found in the appendix.[ ] from what has been already said, it is obvious chat the composition of farmyard manure is of a very variable nature. the quantity of moisture naturally varies most, and this variation will depend on the age of the manure, and the conditions under which it is permitted to decay. it may be taken at from a minimum of per cent in fresh to per cent in well-rotted manure. the total organic matter may be taken at from to per cent, containing nitrogen . to . per cent. the total mineral matter will range from about to . per cent, containing of potash from . to . per cent, and of phosphoric acid from . to . per cent.[ ] as mr warington[ ] has pointed out, one ton of farmyard manure would thus contain to lb. of nitrogen, about the same quantity of potash, and to lb. of phosphoric acid. these quantities of nitrogen and phosphoric acid, calculated to ( per cent) nitrate of soda, and ( per cent) sulphate of ammonia, and ( per cent) superphosphate, give respectively . to lb. nitrate of soda, to lb. sulphate of ammonia, and to lb. superphosphate. that is, in order to apply as much nitrogen to the soil as is contained in one ton of nitrate of soda, we should require to use from to tons of farmyard manure: similarly one ton of sulphate of ammonia contains as much nitrogen as to tons farmyard manure. in the same way one ton of superphosphate of lime contains as much phosphoric acid as to tons farmyard manure. the value of rotten manure is, weight for weight, greater than that of fresh manure. this is due to the fact that, while the water increases in amount, the loss of organic matter of a non-nitrogenous nature more than counterbalances the increase in water. the manure, therefore, becomes more concentrated in quality. the loss on the total weight, according to wolff, in the rotting of farmyard manure, should not exceed in two or three months' time to per cent--viz., a sixth to a fifth of its entire weight. not only, however, does the manure become richer in manurial ingredients, but the forms in which the manurial ingredients are present in rotten manure are more valuable, as they are more soluble. these statements must not be taken as proving that it is more economical to apply farmyard manure in a rotten condition than in a fresh one. the distinction must not be lost sight of which exists between relative increase--increase in the percentage of valuable constituents--and absolute increase. the increase in the value of the manure by the changes of the manurial ingredients from the insoluble to the soluble condition may be effected at the expense of a considerable amount of absolute loss of these valuable ingredients. this is a point which is probably too often left out of account in discussing the relative merits of fresh and rotten farmyard manure; and it is important that it should be clearly understood. in the words of the late dr voelcker: "direct experiments have shown that cwt. of fresh farmyard manure are reduced to cwt. if allowed to lie till the straw is half rotten; cwt. of fresh farmyard manure are reduced to cwt. if allowed to ferment till it becomes 'fat or cheesy'; cwt. of fresh farmyard manure are reduced to - cwt. if completely decomposed. this loss not only affects the water and other less valuable constituents of farmyard manure, but also its most fertilising ingredients. chemical analysis has shown that cwt. of common farmyard manure contain about lb. of nitrogen, and that during fermentation in the first period lb. of nitrogen are dissipated in the form of volatile ammonia; in the second, lb.; in the third, lb. completely decomposed common manure has thus lost about one-half of its most valuable constituent."[ ] while, of course, a very great amount of absolute loss of the valuable constituents--the nitrogen and ash-constituents--of farmyard manure may take place through volatilisation and drainage, by taking requisite precautions this loss may be very much minimised. as regards the total loss, this, in two or three months' time, should only amount to to per cent--or one-sixth to one-fifth of the weight.[ ] the use of fixers, to which reference has already been made, will greatly minimise this loss. the application of fixers is best made to the manure when still in the stall or byre. the health of the animal benefits by so doing, while the manure is at once guarded against loss from this source. as to the relative merits of covered and uncovered manure-heaps, much difference of opinion exists. it is one of those questions which does not admit of final decision one way or another, as it depends so largely on the individual circumstances of each case. that manure produced under cover is more valuable than manure made in the open is readily granted. the question, however, is as to whether the increase in its value is sufficiently great to warrant the extra expense involved in building covered courts. this depends on the individual circumstances of each case, and cannot be decided in a general way. for experiments on the relative value of manure made under cover and in the open, see appendix.[ ] the method of applying farmyard manure to the field is a question which belongs more to the practical farmer than, to the scientist, and must be largely decided by economic considerations. there is an aspect, however, of the question which may well be treated here. the first point in the production of good manure is in connection with its even distribution. it is of great importance that the excrements of the different farm animals be thoroughly mixed together. by the intimate incorporation of the "hot" horse-dung with the "cold" cow and pig dung, uniform fermentation is secured. fire-fang--or too rapid fermentation--may occur from this not being properly done, and from the manure becoming too dry. it is important, also, as we shall see immediately, to have the manure uniform in quality when applied to the field. the manure ought to be firmly trodden down, to moderate the rate of fermentation. where the manure-heap is exposed to rain, the quantity of water it will naturally receive will probably be quite sufficient, if indeed not too much, to ensure a proper rate of fermentation--except, perhaps, in very warm weather. the great point to be aimed at is to ensure regular fermentation. what has to be especially avoided is any sudden exposure of the manure to large quantities of water. the result of such a washing-out of the soluble nitrogen is to retard fermentation, besides incurring the risk of great actual loss by drainage.[ ] _application of farmyard manure to the field._ in applying the manure to the field, and before ploughing it in, two methods of procedure may be pursued. first, the manure may be set out in heaps, larger or smaller, over the field, and be allowed to remain in these heaps some time before being spread; and secondly, it may be directly spread broadcast over the field, and thus allowed to lie for some time. lastly, the manure may be ploughed in immediately; and it may be stated that such a method is, where circumstances permit, the safest and most economical method.[ ] in discussing the merits and demerits of these two methods, dr heiden points out, first, with regard to the distribution of the manure in small heaps over the field, that this is not to be recommended, on the following grounds:-- . because the chances of loss by volatilisation are thereby increased. the manure is distributed several times instead of only once or twice. . it is apt to ensure unequal distribution. the separate heaps run the risk of losing their soluble nitrogenous matter, which soaks into the ground beneath the heaps. the other portions of the field not covered by the manure-heaps are thus manured with washed-out farmyard manure, bereft of its most valuable constituents. the result is, that while certain portions of the field are too strongly manured, other portions are too weakly manured. . the proper fermentation of the manure is apt to be interfered with by the loss of that which is its most important agent--viz., the soluble nitrogenous matter--and also by the drying action of the wind. the same objections hold good to a large extent with regard to the setting out in the fields of the manure in large heaps. the risks of loss, in one respect, may be said to be less, owing to the smaller surface presented. on the other hand, they may be greater, owing to fermentation taking place more quickly. agricultural practice, however, often renders this custom necessary; and if precautions are taken not to let the heap lie too long, and to cover it over with earth, the risk of serious loss may be rendered inconsiderable. with regard to the second method of procedure--viz., the spreading of the manure broadcast over the field, and allowing it thus to lie--dr heiden is of opinion that this should only be done when the field is level. in the case of uneven ground the risks are, of course, obvious. it has been affirmed that, by allowing farmyard manure thus to lie exposed for some time, an important loss of volatile ammonia--carbonate of ammonia--is apt to take place. this could only take place where the former treatment of the farmyard manure had been bad. hellriegel has shown that in the case of properly prepared farmyard manure there is no danger of loss in this way. the absorptive power of the soil for ammonia, it must be remembered, is very great, and the amount of volatile ammonia in farmyard manure is relatively so small that it is scarcely possible that any could escape in this way. hellriegel's experiments have demonstrated this in a very striking way. he has found that in the case of a chalky soil, and during the summer and autumn months, practically no loss of ammonia takes place. the following considerations may be further urged in support of this method of application, as against immediately ploughing in the manure, viz.:-- . that fermentation takes place more quickly. . that it results in a more equable distribution of the manurial constituents in the dung, by gradually and thoroughly incorporating the liquid portion of the manure with the soil-particles. against, however, these undoubted advantages, one serious disadvantage may be urged--viz., that the manure, before being ploughed in, becomes robbed to a large extent of its soluble nitrogenous compounds, which, as we have repeatedly observed, are so necessary for fermentation; and that, therefore, when it is ploughed in, it does not so readily ferment. this being so, it is highly advisable, in the case of light or sandy soils, not to follow such a practice, but to plough the manure directly in. as to the depth to which it is advisable to plough the manure in, it may be here noticed that it should not be too deep, so as to permit of the access of sufficient moisture to ensure proper fermentation, and to prevent rapid washing down of nitrates to the drains. lastly, it need scarcely be pointed out that it is highly important to have the manure evenly and thoroughly incorporated with the soil-particles. where the manure is permitted to cake together in lumps, it may successfully resist the action of fermentation for several years. _value and function of farmyard manure._ practical experience has long demonstrated the fact that farmyard manure is, taking it all round, the most valuable, and admits of the most universal application, of all manures; and science has done much to explain the reason of this. the influence of farmyard manure is so many-sided that it is difficult even to enumerate its different functions. as has already been pointed out, its indirect value as a manure is probably as great as, if indeed even not greater than, its direct value. in concluding our study of farmyard manure, we shall endeavour to summarise, in as brief a manner as possible, its chief properties. first, as to its value as a supplier of the necessary elements of plant-food. this, there can be little doubt, has been, and still is, grossly exaggerated by the ordinary farmer. much has been claimed for it as a "general" manure. how far it merits pre-eminence on this score among other manures will be seen in the sequel. it is true that, since it is composed of vegetable matter, it contains all the necessary plant ingredients.[ ] as has been shown in the introduction, there is practically in the case of most soils no necessity to add to a manure any more than the three ingredients, _nitrogen_, _phosphoric acid_, and _potash_. its value, then, as a direct manure, must depend on the quantity and proportion in which these three ingredients are present. these substances, as we have already seen, it contains only in very small quantities. it is, judged from this point of view, a comparatively poor manure. furthermore, only a certain percentage of these substances is in a soluble or immediately available condition,--in this respect the rotten manure being very much more valuable than the fresh manure. again, a point of great importance in a universal manure is the proportion in which the necessary plant-foods are present. if it be asked, are the nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash in farmyard manure present in the proportion in which crops require these constituents? the answer must be in the negative. heiden[ ] has very strikingly illustrated this point, in so far as the relations between the two ash ingredients are concerned, by some computations as to the amount which would be removed from the soil in the course of different rotations.[ ] in the case of five different rotations it was found that the ratio between the potash and phosphoric acid removed was as follows:[ ] ( ) . to ; ( ) . to ; ( ) . to ; ( ) . to ; ( ) . to . this would give a mean of . to . this is not the ratio in which these ingredients are generally present in farmyard manure. farmyard manure may be said to be much richer in the mineral constituents of plants than in nitrogen. professor heiden found that in the case of a farm at waldau, the crops in the course of ten years removed from a _morgen_ (. of an acre) the following quantities:-- lb. nitrogen potash phosphoric acid in order to supply these amounts the following quantities of manure would require to be supplied:-- . for the nitrogen, or tons (manure containing . per cent nitrogen). . for the potash, to tons (manure containing . per cent potash). . for the phosphoric acid, to tons (manure containing . per cent phosphoric acid). from the above it will be seen that farmyard manure contains too little nitrogen in proportion to its ash ingredients. it is not merely the amount of fertilising ingredients removed by the crop we have to take into account in estimating the value of certain manurial ingredients for the different crops. two other considerations have to be remembered--viz., the amount of the constituents already present in the soil, and the ability of the different crops to obtain the ingredients from the soil. if we take into account these two considerations in estimating the value of farmyard manure as a general manure, we shall find that they accentuate the inadequacy of the ratio existing between the nitrogen and the mineral ingredients. messrs lawes and gilbert have found in the rothamsted experiments with farmyard manure, that while it restored the mineral ingredients, it was inadequate as a sufficient source of nitrogen. nitrogen is, of all manurial ingredients, in least abundance in soils. it is consequently found that the ingredient in which farmyard manure requires to be reinforced is nitrogen. with regard to phosphoric acid and potash, it has already been shown that the ratio between them is probably greater than that in a good average manure. we should, arguing from this alone, be inclined to think that farmyard manure would be best reinforced with potash. the reverse is the case, however, as every farmer knows. this is due, first, to the fact that the potash, unlike the phosphoric acid, is entirely of a soluble nature, and therefore immediately available for the plant's needs; and secondly, to the fact that the necessity for the application of potash as a manure is generally not nearly so great as in the case of phosphoric acid. the result is, that farmyard manure will be, as a rule, more valuably supplemented by phosphoric acid than by potash. another point of great importance, in estimating the value of farmyard manure as a chemical manure, is the inferior value possessed by much of the nitrogen it contains, as compared with the nitrogen in such artificial manures as nitrate of soda and sulphate of ammonia. according to the rothamsted experiments, weight for weight, the nitrogen in farmyard manure is not half so valuable as it is in sulphate of ammonia. much of the nitrogen becomes only very slowly available; not a little of it perhaps actually takes years to be converted into nitrates.[ ] thus, with regard to the direct value of farmyard manure as a manure, we have seen-- . that it contains a very small quantity of the three fertilising ingredients. . that the proportion in which these three ingredients are present is not the best proportion for the requirements of crops. . that the form in which a portion of these ingredients--nitrogen and phosphoric acid--is present is not of the most valuable kind. it is consequently not as a direct chemical manure that farmyard manure is pre-eminently valuable. we must seek for perhaps its most valuable properties in its indirect influence. it adds to the soil a large quantity of organic matter. most soils are improved by the addition of _humus_. the water-absorbing and retaining powers of a soil are increased by this addition of _humus_, while it enables the soil to attract an increased amount of moisture from the air. this is often of great importance, as in the period of germination of seed.[ ] the influence it exerts on the texture of the soil in the process of fermentation is also very great. this is especially so in soils whose texture is too close, such as heavy clayey soils. it opens up their pores to the air, and renders them more friable. where such an influence is most required, as in clayey soils, the manure ought to be applied in a fresh condition, so that the maximum influence exerted by the manure in this direction may be experienced. on light soils, on the contrary, whose friability and openness are already too great, and which do not require to be increased, the manure will be best applied in a rotten condition. it adds, further, greatly to the heat of the soils by its decomposition. thus on cold damp soils it effects one very marked benefit. the influence it exerts in its decomposition upon the fertilising ingredients present in the soil is also by no means inconsiderable. in the process of its fermentation large quantities of carbonic acid gas are generated. this carbonic acid probably acts in a double capacity. it will, in the first place, greatly increase the solvent power of the soil-water, and thus enable it to set free an increased amount of mineral plant-food; and secondly, it will help to conserve a certain quantity of the soil-nitrogen, by preventing its conversion into nitrates. as its indirect and mechanical properties are greatest when in its fresh condition, it will be better to apply it in that condition to soils most lacking in these mechanical properties. we may therefore say that farmyard manure is best applied in a rotted condition to light sandy soils, and to soils in a high state of cultivation, where its mechanical properties are not so much required. an important point still remains to be discussed--viz., the rate at which the farmyard manure should be applied. this, of course, should naturally depend on a variety of circumstances--the amount of artificial manures used as supplementary to the farmyard manure, the frequency of its application, and the nature of the soil. these considerations naturally vary so much, that the quantities of farmyard manure it is advisable to apply in different cases are widely different. there is a strong probability that the rate at which farmyard manure has been applied in the past has been grossly in excess of what could be profitably employed. opinion is gaining ground among practical farmers, that smaller and more frequent applications of farmyard manure to the soil would be fraught with better results than the older custom of applying a large dressing at a time. this is an opinion in the support of which science can urge strong arguments. it is only of late years that we have come to recognise sufficiently the various risks which all fertilisers are subject to in the soil, and the importance, therefore, of minimising these risks as much as possible by putting into the soil at one time only as much manure as it is safely able to retain. "the famous old german writer thaer regarded or tons as an abundant dressing; tons he called good, and or tons light. other german authorities speak of to tons as light, to tons as usual, or more tons as heavy, and tons as a very heavy application."[ ] in the new edition of stephens' 'book of the farm,'[ ] from to tons per acre for roots, and from to tons for potatoes, along with artificials, which may cost from s. to s. per acre additional, are quoted as general dressings. the majority of recent experiments with farmyard manure would seem to indicate that, even in the case of what are considered small dressings, the extra return in crop the first year after application is not such as to cover the expense of the manure. of course, as is commonly pointed out, the effect of farmyard manure is of a lasting nature, and is probably felt throughout the whole rotation, or even longer. this, to a certain extent, is no doubt true; still it may be strongly doubted whether farmyard manure is, after all, an economical manure, as compared with artificial manures. the desirability of manuring the soil and not the crop is, in this age of keen competition, no longer believed in; and the rothamsted experiments have shown that it is highly doubtful whether even the soil benefits to anything like a commensurate extent by the application of large quantities of farmyard manure. this is of course assuming for farmyard manure the value that it would fetch when sold, or, to put it rather differently, the price it would cost if the farmer had to purchase it. farmyard manure is a necessary bye-product of the farm, and can scarcely be regarded, therefore, in the same light as the artificial manures which the farmer buys.[ ] footnotes: [ ] see appendix, note i., p. . [ ] "the large amount of potash in unwashed wool is very remarkable: a fleece must sometimes contain more potash than the whole body of the shorn sheep."--warington's 'chemistry of the farm,' p. . [ ] see appendix, note ii., p. . [ ] the urine of the pig, from the nature of its food, is, as a general rule, a very poor nitrogenous manure. [ ] see appendix, note xv., p. . [ ] see appendix, note iii., p. . [ ] see appendix, note xviii., p. . [ ] the nitrogen present in the urine, it may be well to point out, is derived from the waste of nitrogenous tissue as well as from nitrogenous matter of the food digested. [ ] note iv., p. . [ ] warington puts this matter admirably in the following words: "if the food is nitrogenous and easily digested, the nitrogen in the urine will greatly preponderate. if, on the other hand, the food is one imperfectly digested, the nitrogen in the solid excrement may form the larger quantity. when poor hay is given to horses, the nitrogen in the solid excrement will exceed that contained in the urine. on the other hand, corn, cake, and roots yield a large excess of nitrogen in the urine." ('chemistry of the farm,' p. ). [ ] see p. . [ ] see p. . [ ] see heiden's 'düngerlehre,' vol. ii. p. . [ ] heiden's 'düngerlehre,' vol. i. p. . [ ] the following quantities of nitrogen are found in rye, pea, and bean straw:-- ranging from average lb. per cent. per cent. per ton. rye-straw . to . . . pea-straw . to . . . bean-straw . to . . . [ ] dr j. m. h. munro recommends the sprinkling of a little finely sifted peat-powder in addition to straw, as an excellent means of preventing loss of volatile ammonia in the fermentation of manure. [ ] see 'mark lane express,' october , , p. . [ ] see appendix, note vii., p. . [ ] for analyses see appendix, note viii., p. . [ ] according to storer, in a ton of autumn leaves of the best quality there would be lb. of potash, less than lb. of phosphoric acid, and or lb. of nitrogen. another substance that may be used as a litter is sawdust. this substance is a good absorbent, but is of little value as a manurial substance. [ ] heiden's 'düngerlehre,' vol. ii. pp. , . in boussingault's experiments the food consisted of lb. _hay_, . lb. _oats_, and lb. water; the total excrements amounting to . lb., containing . lb. dry matter. in hofmeister's experiments the food consisted of . lb. _hay_, . lb. _oats_, lb. _chopped straw_, and . lb. water; the excrements amounting to . lb., containing . lb. dry matter. [ ] this is taking no account of the amount of water which the manure will absorb, and which will probably double the quantity. [ ] see appendix, note ix., p. . [ ] the rapid fermentation of horse-manure is due to its mechanical as well as its chemical nature. the horse does not reduce its food to such small pieces, and its urine is rich in nitrogen. [ ] schulze recommends one-third of a pound per day of sulphate of lime for each horse. [ ] see appendix, note x., p. . [ ] the food consisted of lb. _potatoes_, lb. _hay_, and lb. _water_. [ ] for further analyses of cow-manure, see appendix, note xi., p. . [ ] this is for a pig of six to eight months old, and fed on potatoes. [ ] it has been asserted that the use of pig-manure, when applied alone, is apt to give an unpleasant taste to the produce grown. [ ] taken from a very large number of analyses by a number of experimenters. see heiden's 'düngerlehre,' vol. i. p. . [ ] see storer, 'agricultural chemistry,' vol. ii. p. . a question of great importance is as to the amount of farmyard manure produced on a farm in a year, and its value. this is a question which is extremely difficult to satisfactorily deal with. various methods of calculating this amount have been resorted to. it may be well to state these pretty fully. some practical authorities estimate the amount by calculating that every ton of straw should produce tons of manure. another method consists in estimating the amount from the size of the farm. sir john lawes has calculated the composition of farmyard manure which should be produced in the case of a farm of acres, farmed on the four-course system. he assumes that half of the roots and tons of hay are consumed at the homestead; that the whole of the straw of the corn crops is retained at home as food and litter; that twelve horses have corn equal to lb. of oats per head per day; and that about ten shillings per acre are expended in the purchase of cake for feeding stock. under these conditions the amount of farmyard manure should be tons (or an average of - / tons for each of the acres of root-crop) of _fresh undecomposed dung_. (for composition, see appendix, note xvii., p. .) another method is by taking, as the data of calculation, the number of cattle, horses, sheep, &c., producing the manure. lloyd considers that a fattening animal requires tons of straw in the year, and makes about tons of manure. a farmer, therefore, should make tons of manure for every acre of that part of his land which, in the four-course rotation, is put down to turnips. the last method consists in taking as the data the amount of food consumed and litter used in the production of the manure. of these methods heiden considers the last as alone satisfactory and trustworthy. applying this method to the horse, he shows, from experiments, that a little over per cent of the dry matter of its food has been proved to be voided in the solid and liquid excreta. taking the average percentage of water in the excreta as about . , the percentage of dry matter in the excreta will be . . that is, every pound of dry matter in the food eaten by the horse yields a little over lb. of excrementitious matter. to this of course must be added the amount of straw used as litter, which may be taken at . lb. from these data we may calculate the amount of manure produced in a year by a horse, making certain assumptions as to the amount of work performed. this heiden does by assuming that a horse works days, of twelve hours each, in the course of a year, or whole days, spending days in the stall. calculating from the above data, he estimates that a well-fed working horse will produce about lb. of manure in a day, or . tons in a year. of course this does not necessarily represent all the manure actually produced by the horse, but how much of the remaining portion of the manure actually finds its way to the farm it is impossible to say. according to the 'book of the farm,' division iii. p. , a farm-horse makes about tons of manure in a year. it has been calculated that cows void about per cent of the dry matter of their food in the solid and liquid excreta, which contain of water, on an average, . per cent. that is, every pound of dry matter will furnish . lb. of total excreta. by adding the necessary amount of straw for litter (which may be taken at one-third the weight of the dry matter of the fodder), heiden calculates that an ox weighing lb. should produce lb. of manure in a day, or tons in a year. the 'book of the farm,' division iii. p. , gives the annual amount at from to tons. according to wolff, one may assume that on an average the fresh excrements (both liquid and solid) of the common farm animals (with the exception of the pig) contain of every lb. of dry matter in the food consumed about lb., or a half. estimating the dry matter in the litter used at equal to about / of the dry matter of the food, this would mean that for every lb. of dry matter consumed in food there would be lb. of dry manure (viz., lb. dry excrements + lb. dry litter), which would yield lb. of farmyard manure in the wet state--_i.e._, with per cent water. the amount of food daily required per every lb. of live-weight of the common farm animals may be taken, roughly speaking, at lb. dry food material and lb. of straw as litter. the daily production of manure for lb. of live-weight would amount, therefore, to lb. of dry, or lb. wet manure. (see appendix, note xvii., p. .) according to j. c. morton and evershed, oxen feeding in boxes require lb. of straw per head per day as litter. an ox, therefore, will make tons of fresh dung in six months, using cwt. of litter. this means that each ton of litter gives tons of fresh dung. it is calculated that nearly twice as much litter must be used in open yards. [ ] it has been calculated that under ordinary circumstances sheep-dung, when allowed to ferment by itself, should do so in about four months, horse-dung in six months, and cow-dung in eight months. [ ] see appendix, note xii., p. . [ ] see heiden's 'düngerlehre,' vol. ii. p. . [ ] warington, 'chemistry of the farm,' p. . [ ] recent experiments by müntz and girard in france have shown that the loss in sheep excreta from volatilisation of the carbonate of ammonia amounted to over per cent. by the use of straw litter this was reduced to about a half less, and with earth litter one quarter less. [ ] see appendix, note xiii., p. . [ ] see appendix, note xiv., p. . [ ] see appendix, note xv., p. . [ ] for spring application rotten farmyard manure is generally used, because in this condition its fertilising matter is more quickly available. on light land it is best to apply it in the rotten condition shortly before it is likely to be used. (see p. .) [ ] the total amount of plant-food in a ton of farmyard manure is together less than / th of its total weight. [ ] see heiden's 'düngerlehre,' vol. ii. p. . [ ] for full details see appendix, note xvi., p. . [ ] storer reproduces these results in his 'agricultural chemistry,' vol. ii. p. . [ ] this aspect of farmyard manure has been ably stated by mr f. j. cooke, a well-known norfolk farmer. in commenting on the results of the rothamsted experiments, he says: "it is clear enough that the faith of the farmer in the soil-enriching character of his home-made manure is amply justified; the only question being, indeed, if this quality be not too highly appreciated. it is not, after all, so much by the fattening of our land as by the bounty of the crop grown upon it that we reap the fruit of our exertions. the man of scientific mind keeps his purpose fixed on the _production of good crops_ mainly, and the cheapest way to grow them. the experiments under consideration show that richness of land may be purchased much too dearly, and that richness of crop by no means bears the necessary relation to richness of soil which has sometimes been imagined. we may boast of the 'lasting qualities' of our dung, but the answer of science by these experiments is, that so great is the last that the life of one man may not be long enough to exhaust it. in the extravagant use of dung, therefore, such considerations, amongst many others, as length of purse, as well as length and character of tenure, must clearly be taken into account." [ ] see paper on "manurial experiments with turnips" by author, in 'transactions of the highland and agricultural society of scotland;' . [ ] storer's 'agricultural chemistry,' vol. i. p. . [ ] division iii. p. . [ ] mr f. j. cooke, who has already been quoted, has kindly furnished the author with his views on the peculiar functions of farmyard manure as a manure. he says: "i look upon it, broadly speaking, as chiefly of value in restoring to good land, after cropping, those particular advantages which good land alone can give, and in helping better than any other manure, when applied to poor land, to bring it up to the level of good land in those particular merits which belong alone to fine soils. i speak now of an inherent value in good soils, beyond that attaching to them as mere reservoirs of abundant plant-food. for instance, one may supply a poor soil by artificial manure with much more food--and in a highly soluble condition--than is needed by the crop to be grown upon it, and yet not get so good a crop as upon a naturally richer but otherwise similar soil less abundantly filled with immediately available food. this may arise from a more perfect distribution of the plant-food in the rich soil, or from the steady way in which it becomes available to the crop, as well as for other reasons. but whatever the cause, there, i think, is the broad fact of the power of farmyard manure to enrich poor soils, so to speak, more naturally--that is, in a way which makes them more nearly correspond to better soils than artificial manures can." hence the indirect benefit to the farmer from farmyard manure is probably greater than its direct value as a mere manure. and the usual provision and use of it amongst all straw-growing farmers is sufficiently justified. the extent, however, to which that course may be beneficially carried, is one of the most important of the many difficult economic and scientific problems which the farmer has to face. on the economic side must of course be considered the cost of manufacture in individual instances, as ruled by the market value of the straw, and the different circumstances and conditions under which the various farm animals are kept and fed (i have the figures by me of one well-known farmer, which show the cost to him of every ton of home-made manure to be s. or more); the price the resultant crops may be expected to command; the cost at the moment of artificial manures, &c., &c. whilst on the scientific side must be considered the nature of the soil, the particular rotation of crops, &c. it was, amongst others, just these scientific and yet very definite and practical problems we have tried to throw light on in the series of field experiments conducted for several years by the norfolk chamber of agriculture. (see reprint of summary of same in last year's report of the board of agriculture.) appendix to chapter vii. note i. (p. ). difference in amount of excreta voided for food consumed. with regard to the difference in the composition of the solid excreta voided by different fattening animals fed on the same amount of food, see warington's 'chemistry of the farm,' p. , where it is shown that for equal amount of live-weight, the sheep produces on the same weight of dry food very much more manure than the pig, while the ox produces even more than the sheep. of course this does not refer to the total amount of manure produced by the different animals, but only to the amount of manure produced from the consumption of equal quantities of food. this would seem to be owing to the greater capacity the pig has for assimilating its food. note ii. (p. ). solid excreta voided by sheep, oxen, and cows. to contrast with the analyses given by stoeckhardt, it may be well to cite those based on lawes and gilbert's experiments, and quoted by warington ('chemistry of the farm,' p. ):-- i.--sheep (fed on _meadow-hay_). solid excrement. fresh. dry. water . - organic matter . . ash . . ---- ---- nitrogen . . ii.--oxen (fed on _clover-hay_ and _oat-straw_, with lb. _beans_ per day). fresh. dry. water . - organic matter . . ash . . ---- ---- nitrogen . . iii.--cows (fed on _mangels_ and _lucerne hay_). mangels. lucerne hay. water . . nitrogen . . phosphoric acid . . potash . . note iii. (p. ). urine voided by sheep, oxen, and cows. the following are the results for urine, the animals being fed as in note ii.:-- sheep. oxen. fresh. dry. fresh. dry. water . - . - organic matter . . . . ash . . . . ---- ---- ---- ---- nitrogen . . . . cows. mangels. lucerne hay. water . . nitrogen . . phosphoric acid . . potash . . note iv. (p. ). percentage of food voided in the solid and liquid excrements. according to wolff, the following table shows the percentage of the dry substance of the food which is voided in the solid and liquid excrements of the cow, ox, sheep, and horse:-- cow. ox. sheep. horse. average. solid excreta . . . . . urine . . . . . ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- total . . . . . note v. (p. ). pig excrements. the excrements voided by pigs are poor in manurial constituents, because the food on which they are fed is generally of a very poor nature. in their case the urine is always very much richer in manurial ingredients than the solid excreta. the relative composition of the solid excreta and the urine will be best illustrated by quoting some experiments carried out by wolff on this subject. the experiments were carried out with two pigs nine and a half months old, and each . kilogrammes (a kilogramme is equal to about - / lb.) in weight. the first consumed daily grammes of barley, grammes of potatoes, and grammes of sour-milk. the second one consumed the same quantities of potatoes and sour-milk as the first, and grammes of peas. the following table gives the results of excreta and urine daily voided, in grammes:-- dry nitrogen. ash. potash. lime. magnesia. phosphoric substance acid. solid { i. . . . . . . . excreta { ii. . . . . . . . urine { i. . . . . . . . { ii. . . . . . . . note vi.(p. ). manurial constituents in parts of ordinary foods. based on lawes and gilbert's analyses. (warington's 'chemistry of the farm,' p. .) -----------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+------------ | dry | nitrogen. | potash. | phosphoric | matter. | | | acid. -----------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+------------ cotton-cake, decorticated | | . | . | . rape-cake | | . | . | . linseed-cake | | . | . | . cotton-cake, undecorticated | | . | . | . linseed | | . | . | . palm-kernel meal, english | | . | . | . beans | | . | . | . peas | | . | . | . malt-dust | | . | . | . bran | | . | . | . oats | | . | . | . rice-meal | | . | . | . wheat | | . | . | . rye | | . | . | . barley | | . | . | . maize | | . | . | . brewers' grains | | . | . | . clover-hay | | . | . | . meadow-hay | | . | . | . bean-straw | | . | . | . oat-straw | | . | . | . barley-straw | | . | . | . wheat-straw | | . | . | . potatoes | | . | . | . swedes | | . | . | . carrots | | . | . | . mangels | | . | . | . turnips | | . | . | . -----------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+------------ note vii. (p. ). analyses of stable-manure, made respectively with peat-moss litter and wheat-straw (by bernard dyer, b.sc.) peat-moss litter. wheat-straw. per cent. per cent. total nitrogen . . equal to ammonia . . phosphoric acid . . equal to tribasic phosphate of lime (or tricalcic phosphate) . . potash . . note viii. (p. ). analyses of bracken (by j. hughes, f.c.s.) no. no. young fern. old fern. per cent. per cent. water . . * organic matter . . + mineral matter . . ------ ------ . . ------ ------ containing-- * nitrogen . . + silica . . potash . . soda . . lime . . magnesia . . phosphoric acid . . note ix. (p. ). analyses of horse-manure. for a fuller discussion of this question, the reader is referred to heiden's 'düngerlehre,' vol. ii. p. , and also to storer's 'agricultural chemistry,' vol. i. p. . the statements in the different text-books as to the quantity of manure produced by the horse are such as naturally to perplex the student. this discrepancy is due, however, to the different methods adopted by different writers of calculating this amount. the subject is further discussed in the footnote to p. . the following analyses of horse-manure may be valuable for reference. they are taken from storer's 'agricultural chemistry,' vol. i. p. :-- ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+--------- | . | . | . | . | . | average. ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+--------- water | . | . | . | . | . | . dry matter | . | . | . | . | . | . ash ingredients | . | . | . | . | . | . potash | . | . | . | . | . | . lime | . | . | . | . | . | . magnesia | . | . | . | . | . | . phosphoric acid | . | . | . | . | . | . ammonia | . | . | . | . | - | . total nitrogen | . | . | . | . | . | . ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+--------- note x. (p. ). the nature of the chemical reactions of ammonia "fixers." for the student, the exact nature of the chemical reactions taking place may be of interest. in the first place, it must be distinctly understood that the form in which ammonia escapes from the manure-heap is not, as is so commonly erroneously stated in agricultural text-books, as "free" ammonia. whenever ammonia is brought into contact with carbonic acid, carbonate of ammonia is formed. when it is remembered that carbonic acid is by far the most abundant of the gaseous products of the decomposition of organic matter, it will be at once seen that free ammonia could not exist under such circumstances. . in the case of _hydrochloric acid_, the following chemical equation will represent the nature of the reaction-- hcl + (nh_{ })_{ }co_{ } = nh_{ }cl + h_{ }o+co_{ } (hydrochloric (carbonate of ammonia,) (sal-ammoniac,) (carbonic acid.) acid,) . in the case of _sulphuric acid_, the equation will be-- h_{ }so_{ } + (nh_{ })_{ }co_{ } = (nh_{ })_{ }so_{ } + h_{ }o+co_{ } (sulphuric (carbonate of (sulphate of ammonia,) (carbonic acid.) acid,) ammonia,) . with _gypsum_ (caso_{ })-- caso_{ } + (nh_{ })_{ }co_{ } = caco_{ } + (nh_{ })_{ }so_{ } (gypsum,) (carbonate of (calcium (sulphate of ammonia.) ammonia,) carbonate,) . with _copperas_ (feso_{ })-- feso_{ } + (nh_{ })_{ }co_{ } = feco_{ } + (nh_{ })_{ }so_{ } (sulphate of (carbonate of (ferrous (sulphate of ammonia.) iron,) ammonia,) carbonate,) . with _sulphate of magnesia_ (mgso_{ })-- mgso_{ } + (nh_{ })_{ }co_{ } = mgco_{ } + (nh_{ })_{ }so_{ } (sulphate of (carbonate of (carbonate of (sulphate of magnesia,) ammonia,) magnesia,) ammonia.) reference has been made to the fact that magnesium sulphate may probably not only fix the ammonia, but the phosphoric acid. when magnesium sulphate, soluble phosphoric acid, and ammonia are brought in contact with one another, the double insoluble phosphate of ammonium and magnesium (mgnh_{ }po_{ } aq) is formed. while such a reaction is possible, it is highly improbable that it takes place to any extent. the double phosphate is a crystalline salt which only separates after a considerable time, and in the presence of a large excess of ammonia. note xi. (p. ). analyses of cow-manure.[ ] ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------- | . | . | . | . | . | . |average. +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------- water | . | . | . | . | . | . | . dry matter | . | . | . | . | . | . | . ash ingredients | . | . | . | . | . | . | . potash | . | . | . | . | . | . | . lime | . | . | . | . | . | . | . magnesia | . | . | . | - | . | . | - phosphoric acid | . | . | . | . | . | . | . ammonia | . | . | . | - | . | - | . total nitrogen | . | . | . | . | . | . | . ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------- note xii. (p. ). composition of fresh and rotten farmyard manure (voelcker). composition of fresh manure, composed of horse, cow, and pig dung, about fourteen days old:-- water . * soluble organic matter . soluble inorganic matter . + insoluble organic matter . insoluble inorganic matter . ------ . ------ * containing nitrogen . equal to ammonia . + containing nitrogen . equal to ammonia . total percentage of nitrogen . equal to ammonia . ammonia in a volatile state . ammonia in form of salts . composition of the whole ash:-- soluble in water, . per cent:-- soluble silica . phosphate of lime . lime . magnesia . potash . soda . chloride of sodium . sulphuric acid . carbonic acid and loss . insoluble in water, . per cent:-- soluble silica . insoluble silicious matter . oxide of iron and alumina with phosphates . (containing phosphoric acid, . per cent.) (equal to bone-earth, . per cent.) lime . magnesia . potash . soda . sulphuric acid . carbonic acid and loss . ------ . ------- composition of rotten dung, six months old, is as follows:-- water . * soluble organic matter . soluble inorganic matter . + insoluble organic matter . insoluble inorganic matter . ------ . ------ * containing nitrogen . equal to ammonia . + containing nitrogen . equal to ammonia . total amount of nitrogen . equal to ammonia . ammonia in a volatile state . ammonia in form of salts . composition of the whole ash:-- soluble in water, . per cent:-- soluble silica . phosphate of lime . lime . magnesia . potash . soda . chloride of sodium . sulphuric acid . carbonic acid and loss . insoluble in water, . per cent:-- soluble silica . insoluble silica . phosphate of lime - oxides of iron alumina with phosphates . (containing phosphoric acid, . per cent.) (equal to bone-earth, . per cent.) lime . magnesia . potash . soda . chloride of sodium - sulphuric acid . carbonic acid and loss . ------ . ------ note xiii. (p. ). comparison of fresh and rotten manure (wolff). fresh. moderately rotten (taking the quantity of dry matter as the same.) dry matter . . ash . . nitrogen . . potash . . lime . . magnesia . . phosphoric acid . . sulphuric acid . . silica . . note xiv. (p. ). lord kinnaird's experiments.[ ] "lord kinnaird has given the particulars of a very careful experiment. he tried to test the comparative value of manure kept in an open court with that kept under cover. he selected the same kind of cattle, gave them the same kind and quantity of food, and bedded them with the same kind of straw. a field of acres of uniform land was selected. this having been equally divided, acres out of each gave the following results:-- _potatoes grown with uncovered manure._ tons. cwt. lb. first measurement-- acre produced. second do. do. do. _potatoes grown with covered manure._ first measurement-- acre produced. second do. do. do. this shows an increase of about tons of potatoes per acre with the covered manure. "the next year the weather was wet, grain soft and not in very good order, but the following was the amount of produce:-- _wheat grown with uncovered manure._ weight per produce in grain. bushel. produce in straw. acre. bushels. lb. lb. stones. lb. first - / of second - / of _wheat grown with covered manure._ first of second of " note xv. (pp. , ). drainings of manure-heaps. the importance of not separating the liquid portion from the solid portion has already been pointed out in dealing with the composition of the solid excreta and the urine. these two constituents of the manure are complementary to one another, and the value of farmyard manure as a general manure is very much impaired if the liquid portion is not applied along with the solid. in one important respect do the drainings of manure-heaps differ from urine--that is, in the percentage of phosphates they contain, the latter being practically devoid of phosphoric acid. the following is an analysis of drainings from a manure-heap (wolff):-- dry substance . | magnesia . ash . | _phosphoric acid_ . nitrogen . | sulphuric acid . potash . | silica . lime . | note xvi. (p. ). amounts of potash and phosphoric acid removed by the following rotations from a prussian morgen (. acre). potash. phosphoric acid. lb. lb. . wheat . . oats . . potatoes . . hay . . ------ ----- . . ------ ----- the ratio of potash to phosphoric acid is . to . . wheat . . barley . . potatoes . . hay . . ------ ----- . . ------ ----- the ratio of potash to phosphoric acid is . to . . rye . . oats . . potatoes . . hay . . ------ ----- . . ------ ----- the ratio of potash to phosphoric acid is . to . . wheat . . oats . . mangels . . hay . . ------ ----- . . ------ ----- the ratio of potash to phosphoric acid is . to . . rye . . barley . . mangels . . hay . . ------ ----- . . the ratio of potash to phosphoric acid is . to . note xvii. (pp. , ). composition of farmyard manure (fresh), (calculated by sir john lawes). phosphoric acid total dry total mineral calculated as potash. nitrogen. matter. matter. phosphate of lime. percent . . . . . per ton (in lb.) . . . . . note xviii. (p. ). the urine. an important consideration we have omitted to take note of in the text is the quantity of the urine voided. it is this consideration that renders the urine so much more valuable than the solid excreta. in the case of a man it has been estimated that the urine voided is fifteen times as much, is twelve times as rich in nitrogen, three times in potash, and two in phosphoric acid, as the solid excreta (munro). the relation of solid matter in the case of the farm animals is not exactly similar. the urine of the ox is about twice the weight of its solid excreta. both the horse and the sheep, however, void as a rule more solid excreta than urine. munro, in his work on 'soils and manures,' contrasts the composition of the urine and solid excreta of the different farm animals by the following statement:-- ton of urine contains ton of solid excreta in lb.: contains in lb.: nitrogen. potash. nitrogen. cow horse sheep footnotes: [ ] storer's 'agricultural chemistry,' vol. i. p. . [ ] scott's 'manures and manuring,' p. . chapter viii. guano. _importance in agriculture._ in the consideration of _artificial_ manures, guano deserves the first place. this it does mainly on historical grounds, as it is now largely a manure of the past. not merely has it been used in agriculture to an extent to which no other artificial manure has as yet ever approximated, but its influence on agricultural practice has been enormous. introduced into this country about the middle of the present century, it was the first of artificial manures to be used in large quantities.[ ] it may be thus described as having introduced the modern system of _intensive_ cultivation, and given rise to the now almost universal practice of artificial manuring. _influence on british farming._ it is, indeed, difficult to over-estimate the important influence which the introduction of this most valuable fertiliser has exercised on british as well as, to a large extent, on european husbandry. before its introduction the farmer was almost completely dependent on his farmyard manure. he was tied down to a great extent, by the exigencies of the then prevailing agricultural customs, to certain rotations of crops. he could do little in the way of enriching barren soils or of ensuring a heavy yield of crop. by the use of this very potent fertiliser, he quickly discovered that the most wonderful results ensued--results which must have seemed to him at first little short of miraculous. he found that by the application of a few hundredweights per acre, poor soils could be made to yield large returns, and that barren patches in a field could be brought up to the average of the surrounding portions by sprinkling merely a few handfuls of it; that by its means a good start could be ensured to every crop, and one slow of coming away could be hastened on. in short, in this wonderful brown powder, with such a characteristic odour, the astonished farmer discovered a manure which, for the speed of its action, and for the increase of crop it gave, completely threw into the shade both farmyard manure and bones. what wonder, then, that its fame as a manure should have become so quickly known and its use so extensive! it thus gave a most powerful impetus to intelligent farming by bringing home to the minds of those who used it the important position nitrogen and phosphates occupied as constituents of the soil, and the influence they exercised on plant-growth. it furnished, in fact, on an enormously large scale, a practical demonstration of the principles of manuring. the educational value which the use of guano thus exercised may be said to have been very great. it also led the way to the use of the various artificial manures so much used during the last fifty years. impressed by the value of guano, farmers were favourably disposed towards the use of other fertilisers; and, largely owing to its widespread popularity, the new practice speedily gained ground. _influence not wholly for good._ but its influence, it must be admitted, was not wholly for good. in its very popularity lay the danger of its abuse. had its value and the method of its action been more widely understood, and had the principles upon which the practice of artificial manuring depends been better realised, agriculturists would have been spared much of the needless pecuniary losses they sustained by being imposed upon by unscrupulous manure-dealers. among the farming community the word guano soon became a name to conjure with, and under this title many spurious and worthless manures were attempted to be palmed off on the unwary farmer. even the genuine article, there can be little doubt, was at one time largely adulterated; and as the farmer was almost invariably content to purchase the article not on any guaranteed chemical analysis, but simply on the ground of its appearance, colour, and more especially smell, every facility was given for the successful perpetration of such fraudulent imposition. guano, it was very soon found, varied in its composition, but this variation in quality the farmer did not recognise. in the early days of its use all guano was in his eyes of the same value. too often, as we have just pointed out, provided it had a good colour and a strong odour, it was all right. under such conditions, it can scarcely be wondered at that its introduction should have proved not an unmixed blessing to agriculture. _its value as a manure._ guano derives its value as a manure from the nitrogen, phosphates, and the small amount of potash it contains. this at any rate is true of the great bulk of guano which has been used in the past. there are, as we shall immediately see, certain kinds of guano, known as phosphatic guanos, which only contain phosphates. the amount of such purely phosphatic guano directly used as a manure in this country is, however, inconsiderable, and guano may truly be described as owing its value chiefly to its nitrogen. not a little of its value and popularity as a manure may be said to be due to the fact that it contains all of the three important manurial constituents, and that in this respect it may be regarded in a sense as a _general_ manure, thus resembling most nearly, of all artificial manures, farmyard manure. although its sources are now, to a very large extent, exhausted, and its total annual imports into this country are at present considerably less than what they were thirty or forty years ago,[ ] it may be well, on account of its historical importance, to give a somewhat detailed account of its origin, occurrence, and value as a manure. _origin and occurrence._ guano (which means _dung_)--or huano, as it is spelt in the spanish language--was first used in peru. it seems to have been used there long before that country was discovered by the spaniards--probably as early as the twelfth century. regarding its origin there can be little doubt. it is almost entirely derived from the excrements of sea-birds, such as pelicans, penguins, and gulls, as well as from the remains of the birds themselves, and of seals, walruses, and various other animals.[ ] under the influence of a tropical sun, and in a region in which rain scarcely ever falls, these excrements are soon dried, and remain little changed in their composition through centuries. many of the peruvian deposits must be extremely old, as they are covered up with sand and other _débris_, and are of considerable depth. especially is this the case with deposits occurring on the mainland, such as those at pabellon de pica, where the layer of sand or conglomerate covering up the deposit varies in depth from a few feet to over a hundred. the effect of this superficial covering has been to protect the guano, to a certain extent, from loss of nitrogen. although guano of the best class has been derived from the neighbourhood of peru, deposits have also been found in many other parts of the world--viz., in north america, west indies, australia, asia, africa, and among the islands of the pacific.[ ] _variation in the composition of different guanos._ the guano found in these different deposits varies very considerably in composition. this is due to the difference in the nature of the prevailing climate of the places where these deposits occur. where the climate is dry and warm, as is the case in chili and peru, the excrements dry quickly and remain very little changed, as one very important condition of fermentation--viz., moisture--is absent.[ ] in a damp climate, on the other hand, speedy fermentation ensues, resulting in the loss of nearly all the organic matter, including nitrogen, in such volatile forms as carbonate of ammonia, carbonic acid gas, water, &c. the soluble alkalies, the most important of which is potash, as well as the soluble phosphates, are also, under such conditions, lost to the guano by being washed out by the rain. we have thus a wide difference in the quality of the different deposits, depending on the extent to which decomposition has taken place. guano thus ranges from the rich nitrogenous peruvian kind, which has undergone little or no change from the time of its deposit, to the purely phosphatic kind (such as those of malden and baker islands), in which everything of manurial value has been lost except the insoluble phosphate of lime. even among the nitrogenous guanos we find a considerable difference in quality, some deposits being partially impoverished by the action of the atmospheric moisture, dew, spray or sea-water, but still containing a considerable proportion of their nitrogen. other deposits, again, are largely admixed with sand, which has been blown in upon them to such an extent as to make them unsaleable. we can divide guano, therefore, into two great classes--viz., _nitrogenous_ and _phosphatic_. i.--nitrogenous guanos. (_a_) peruvian. by far the most valuable and abundant deposits as yet discovered have been those on the peruvian and chilian coasts. as already pointed out, guano seems to have been used in this country from a very early period; and so impressed were the incas with its importance as a manure, that the penalty of death was imposed on any one guilty of killing the sea-fowl during the breeding season in the vicinity of the deposits. the occurrence of guano in peru seems first to have been made known in europe in the beginning of the eighteenth century. it was not, however, till the beginning of the present century--viz., --that a. humboldt, the great german traveller, brought some of the wonderful fertiliser home with him, and that its composition was able to be investigated by chemical analysis. shortly afterwards, its practical value was demonstrated by experiments carried out on potatoes by general beatson in st helena. to lord derby is due the credit of having first introduced it into this country, the earliest importation into liverpool being in . experiments were shortly afterwards instituted in different parts of the country, prominent among which were those by sir john lawes and sir james caird; and so striking were the results obtained, that the manure rapidly found favour with the farming community--so much so, that ten years later the importations into this country amounted to no less than , tons, while in the total exports from the west coast of south america reached the enormous amount of , tons. in all, it has been estimated that since the year over , , tons of peruvian guano have been imported into this country. _different deposits._ peruvian guano has been derived from various deposits occurring in different parts of the coast, and from a number of small adjacent islands. the richest of these was that found on angamos, a rocky promontory on the coast of bolivia. samples of this guano contained as high as per cent of nitrogen (equal to per cent ammonia).[ ] unfortunately, however, the quantity of this deposit was extremely limited, and became rapidly exhausted. next to this deposit in quality was the guano found on the chincha islands, three little islands off the coast of peru. these deposits were the largest which have ever been discovered, and for a period of nearly thirty years were almost the sole source of the peruvian guano sold in commerce, over , , tons having been exported from them alone. some of this guano contained per cent of nitrogen (equal to per cent ammonia); and although part of the guano shipped from these islands was not quite so rich, yet it was all of a high-class order. the deposits on these islands were in many cases to feet in depth, and rested on rocks of granite. the lower layers were consequently found to be poorer in quality, and mixed with pieces of granite. the chincha island deposits have been long exhausted,[ ] and the chief deposits of peruvian guano since worked have been those on guanape and macabi islands--a considerably inferior guano, containing only to per cent of nitrogen (equal to to per cent of ammonia)--which in their turn have become exhausted; from ballestas, almost as rich as the chincha island guano, also now exhausted; and from pabellon de pica, punta de lobos, huanillos, independence bay, and lobos de afuera. quite recently a deposit of very high-class guano was discovered in corcovado, and a good many cargoes have already been shipped to this country. it is found to contain nitrogen equal to from to per cent ammonia, to per cent phosphates, and some potash, being thus a most valuable guano. _appearance, colour, and nature._ in colour it varies from a very light to a very dark brown, the richer samples being generally lighter. samples taken from even the same deposit have been found to differ very considerably in appearance, those taken from the lower and older layers being usually darker than those taken from the more recent upper layers. it was soon found also to vary very much in composition. after a deposit had been worked for some time, the quality of guano it yielded was found to be inferior and coarser, and in many cases mixed with pebbles or pieces of granite, porphyry, &c. this led to the custom of screening it on arrival in this country, before it was used as a manure. in the richer qualities--_e.g._, in the chincha guano--little round concretionary nodules, varying in colour from pure white to dark brown, were occasionally found. analysis showed these nodules[ ] to be composed chiefly of potash salts. sometimes, also, little crystals of almost pure ammonia salts were found. it soon became customary, therefore, to prepare guano for the market by separating the stones and reducing the whole to a fine uniform powder. one of its most characteristic properties, and the one which seems to have impressed the public most, was its pungent odour. undue importance was attached to this property, in the belief that it was caused by the ammonia it contained. it may be doubted, however, whether the characteristic smell of guano is due so much to its ammonia as to certain fatty acids. _composition._ in composition it is of a most complex nature. it contains its nitrogen in a great variety of forms, the chief of these being urate, oxalate, ulmate, humate, sulphate, phosphate, carbonate, and muriate of ammonia; and also in a rare form of organic nitrogen peculiar to guano, called guanine. according to boussingault, some guanos contain small quantities of nitrates. its phosphoric acid is present both in the soluble state--viz., as phosphates of the alkalies (ammonia and potash)--and in the insoluble state as phosphate of lime; and lastly, its potash is present as sulphate and phosphate. the proportion in which these different forms of nitrogen and phosphoric acid are present varies considerably in different samples. the richer a sample, as a rule, the more nitrogen in the form of uric acid it contains. the most of the nitrogen is present as uric acid and ammonia. damp guanos contain more of their nitrogen as ammonia than dry ones, this being due to the fermentation which goes on in the former. on an average, about a third of its total nitrogen is soluble in water. of its phosphates, on the other hand, only about a fourth are soluble in water. the following analyses of a sample of chincha island guano by karmrodt[ ] will illustrate this. (sample dried at ° fahr.):-- . _constituents easily soluble in water._ urate of ammonium . oxalate of ammonium . nitrogenous and sulphurous organic substances . ammonium-magnesium phosphate . ammonium phosphate . ammonium sulphate . ammonium chloride . potassium sulphate . sodium chloride . ----- . ----- . _difficultly soluble in water, soluble in acids, alcohol, and ether._ uric acid . resin . fatty acids . nitrogenous and sulphurous organic substances . calcium phosphate . phosphate of iron . silica . ----- . ----- in the above analysis it will be noticed that none of the ammonia is present as carbonate. in most samples, however, of peruvian guano, the ammonia in this form amounted to from to per cent. in the inferior qualities, chiefly those which had been subjected to the action of water, and consequently of fermentation, to a certain extent, this form of ammonia was found to be most abundant. such guanos were most liable to loss of nitrogen by volatilisation. the older peruvian guano contained as high as per cent of nitrogen (equal to per cent of ammonia), and of phosphoric acid to per cent (equal to to per cent of phosphate of lime). it, however, gradually deteriorated in quality as the deposits became worked out, the percentage of nitrogen becoming year by year less, until latterly peruvian guano, as imported, contains only from to per cent of nitrogen (equal to to per cent of ammonia). this guano is, however, richer in phosphates, containing often to per cent of phosphate of lime, and to per cent of potash.[ ] (_b_) other nitrogenous guanos. the guanos, other than those which come from peru, are chiefly purely phosphatic guanos, so that the term peruvian has not unfrequently in the past been used as a generic term synonymous with the term nitrogenous, and consequently applied to all nitrogenous guanos independent of their source. there are, however, a few deposits other than the peruvian which have yielded considerable quantities of valuable nitrogenous guano. of those, the richest in quality--in fact, the richest of any deposits hitherto discovered--was the angamos guano, which came from a rocky promontory on the coast of bolivia. the few samples of this which have been analysed showed over per cent of nitrogen. unfortunately, the deposit proved to be comparatively insignificant in amount, and has long been exhausted. poorer in quality, but more abundant in quantity, were the deposits found on the ichaboe and other islands off the south-west coast of africa. these deposits were discovered shortly after the introduction of peruvian guano, and for a few years supplied considerable quantities of valuable manure. the deposits first discovered were soon exhausted, so that for a number of years ichaboe guano ceased to be procurable. fresh deposits, however, were subsequently found, and considerable quantities have of late years been used in agriculture.[ ] ichaboe guano is inferior in value to peruvian. it exemplifies the influence of small quantities of rain on guano deposits in impoverishing them in their nitrogen. in much of the ichaboe guano imported into this country a large amount of feathers is found. it also contains an abnormally large quantity of insoluble matter. among the other nitrogenous guanos may be mentioned the patagonian, falkland, and saldanha bay. they are, like the ichaboa, of comparatively recent origin, and are collected in small quantities after the breeding season every year. ii.--phosphatic guanos. phosphatic guanos, as already pointed out, are similar in origin to nitrogenous guanos. in their case, however, the nitrogen, alkalies, and soluble phosphates which they originally contained have been almost entirely lost by the decomposition of their organic matter and the action of water.[ ] most of them still contain very small quantities of nitrogen, amounting to a fraction of a per cent. of these deposits there are very many occurring on islands in different parts of the world. in appearance the guano obtained from them is very different from nitrogenous guano, being much lighter in colour, and of a fine powdery nature. it forms a very rich phosphatic guano, containing in many cases between and per cent of insoluble phosphate of lime. such guanos are largely used in the manufacture of high-class superphosphates, by treating them with sulphuric acid. being of an insoluble nature, they are not very suitable for direct application to the soil. of these phosphatic guanos the following are the chief--those marked in italics being still unexhausted:-- . _baker_, jarvis, howland, starbuck, flint, _enderbury_, _malden_, lacepede, _browse_, _huon_, _chesterfield_, _sydney_, _phoenix_, _arbrohlos_, _shark's bay_, and _timor_--all found on islands in the pacific ocean. . _mejillones_, on the coast of bolivia. . aves, _tortola_, _mona_, and other deposits in the west indies. . _kuria muria_ islands, in the arabian gulf. for further particulars as to the composition of these different guanos, the reader is referred to the appendix, note v., p. . _inequality in composition._ that guano was a substance of by no means uniform composition was a fact early recognised in the history of the trade. not only did guano from different deposits show on analysis different percentages of the manurial ingredients, but different samples of guano from the same deposit were often found to differ very considerably from one another. it soon became the custom, therefore, to sell it on chemical analysis, each separate cargo being carefully analysed. but this custom did not wholly obviate the difficulty, as the guano in even one cargo might differ. in the case of the older and richer guanos, there was certainly more uniformity in quality, but they were liable to differ in their percentage of nitrogen.[ ] as, however, the deposits became gradually worked out, their lower layers were found more or less largely admixed with stony and earthy matter, and their composition was naturally rendered very variable. this state of matters was unsatisfactory to buyers and sellers, and led to much friction between the two, as it was found wellnigh impossible on the part of the seller to guarantee the composition of his manure. the custom of preparing the material by reducing it to a fine powder before sending it into the market, and the custom, subsequently introduced, of treating it with sulphuric acid, have done away with this difficulty to a large extent. _"dissolved" guano._ the treatment of guano with sulphuric acid was first had recourse to in the case of cargoes damaged with water. in such guano, as has been already pointed out, fermentation has been permitted to take place, with the result of the formation of volatile carbonate of ammonia in greater or less quantity. by the addition of sulphuric acid the ammonia was fixed, and the guano was prevented from losing its most valuable constituent. it was soon found, however, that guano so treated possessed greater activity as a manure. the result of the sulphuric acid was to increase very materially the amount of its soluble phosphates, and also its soluble nitrogen compounds.[ ] it had, moreover, the effect of producing a guano of uniform composition. the custom, first introduced in by messrs ohlendorff & co., was soon largely practised. the guano is treated with to per cent sulphuric acid (sp. gr. . ). after a short time the resulting hard mass is, by means of disintegrators, reduced to a uniform powder. _"equalised" or "rectified" guano._ as guano decreased in its quality the demand for a high-class article became more and more difficult to meet. this led to the custom of "fortifying" or "rectifying"--as it is variously called--the natural material with sulphate of ammonia. a manure closely resembling in the percentage of its manurial constituents the older rich guanos is thus obtained. of these so-called "equalised" guanos, two qualities are at present sold, the first being guaranteed to contain nitrogen equal to to per cent ammonia, to per cent phosphates, and to per cent of potash; the second quality containing only about half as much nitrogen, but more phosphates. however valuable this fortified guano may be--and it is, undoubtedly, a most valuable manure--its action cannot be supposed to be exactly similar to the old peruvian guano, which it resembles in the percentage of its nitrogen, phosphates, and potash. much of the distinctive value of guano as a manure, as will be pointed out immediately, lies in the fact that it contains its manurial ingredients in a variety of differently soluble compounds, which are gradually rendered available in the soil for the plant's needs. this undoubtedly is one of the reasons why the action of guano among manures is quite unique; and there are other reasons which we probably do not clearly understand. however skilfully the composition of the guano may be artificially simulated, it still remains an undoubted fact that the "equalised" guano is not exactly similar in its action to the genuine article. nevertheless, that it is superior in its results to the poorer classes of guano at present available, and to ordinary compound manures, there can be little doubt. a great merit of the equalised guano is, however, that it is sold at a lower price than guano as imported; and as the guano is sold on a guaranteed analysis, the practice has done much to advance the true interests of agriculture. _its action as a manure._ next to farmyard manure, guano may be regarded as the most "general" of all the commonly used manures; for in addition to nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, it contains nearly all the other plant ingredients, such as lime, magnesia, &c. its special value as a manure, however, does not merely consist in the amount of valuable plant-food it contains. like farmyard manure, it owes much of its characteristic action to the state of the intimate mixture of its manurial constituents, and also, as has already been pointed out, to the fact that it contains those constituents in a great variety of chemical forms, each of which differs in its solubility, and consequently availability for the plant's needs. take, for example, the great number of different forms of nitrogen it contains. some are in the condition in which plants can immediately absorb them, while the rest are in a series of less and less available forms, which, however, are gradually converted into available forms as the plant requires them. like farmyard manure, again, it may be applied with almost equally good results to all kinds of crops and on all kinds of soils. we have in guano, in short, an admirable example of the value of applying our manurial ingredients in different forms. that this is no mere theory is abundantly proved by the large number of different experiments which have in the past been carried out with guano, more especially the well-known experiments made by grouven, the german chemist. in those well-known experiments, guano was tested against a large variety of different fertilisers, and the tests were so arranged that in most cases the amounts of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash were the same in the other manures used. in short, these experiments prove in a very striking manner that a manure artificially made up out of most valuable fertilisers, such as nitrate of soda, sulphate of ammonia, superphosphate, &c., so as to closely resemble in its composition guano, is by no means similar in its effects to the genuine article. as in farmyard manure, so in guano: we must look to the complexity of the composition of both these fertilisers in order to fully estimate their worth. there is in the action of both manures much that we cannot explain, or even, as yet, understand. the action of guano is merely one of many problems in the science of manuring which illustrate how unsatisfactory, despite the great amount of research already carried out, is our knowledge of this most important department of agriculture.[ ] _proportion of fertilising constituents in guano._ guano must be regarded as a nitrogenous and phosphatic manure, as the quantity of potash it generally contains is small. in many soils, more especially in such a country as scotland, this deficiency in potash is not of so much importance, as the value of potash as an artificial manure is less than is the case with the other two ingredients. in soils, however, lacking potash, guano ought to be supplemented with some potash manure. with regard to the nitrogen and phosphoric acid, we may ask if these two constituents are in the best proportions. this question does not admit of a direct answer. in the first place, the proportion in which these two ingredients are present is variable. in the old rich peruvian guanos, as we have above shown, the nitrogen was more abundant than is the case at present. such guanos, it was found, were best supplemented with phosphatic manure when applied to the field. in the "equalised" and "dissolved" guanos, which are now so largely sold, manufacturers attempt to adjust the percentage of nitrogen and phosphoric acid to what is considered the best proportion in most cases. as, however, we have again and again to point out, regard must be had both to the soil and the crop in determining what is the best proportion of the manurial ingredients in a manure. for cereals it may be well supplemented by nitrogenous manures, while for roots it may be well supplemented by phosphatic manures. _mode of application._ like all manures, it is desirable to apply it in as fine a condition as possible, so as to ensure as thorough a mixture with the soil-particles as practicable. in order, furthermore, to prevent any risk of loss through volatilisation of the ammonia, as well as to ensure even distribution, it is best applied mixed with dry earth, ashes, sand, or some other substance,--not lime, however. the custom of applying along with the guano common salt, has been proved by numerous experiments to be highly beneficial to the action of the guano as a manure. the exact nature of the action of salt as an adjunct to manures is a point which has elicited much discussion. its action is probably to be ascribed to a number of causes. for one thing, it probably acts as an antiseptic in retarding the fermentative action which has a tendency to go on so rapidly in such manures as guano. it further increases the power of the manure to attract moisture from the air--a most important property in the case of drought. some experiments by dr voelcker illustrate this in a striking manner. two lots of guano--one pure and one mixed with salt--were exposed to the action of the air for a month, and were then tested as to the amount of water they contained, when it was found that the lot containing the salt had absorbed per cent more water than the other. much stress has been laid on the importance of having the guano buried a certain depth in the soil; and many experiments have been carried out to prove how much better it acts when so applied. this is probably due to the prevention of any loss of volatile ammonia, and the mixture of the manure with the soil-particles before it comes in contact with the plant-roots. this last precaution is an important one, for it has been found that the raw material is apt to have a bad effect on the seed or the plant's roots. this has been found to be especially the case in regard to potatoes, the quality of which has been found to suffer when the guano is brought into direct contact with the tubers. as guano is a manure which is speedily available, it is desirable to apply it as shortly before it is required by the plant as possible. it is therefore generally best applied in spring, shortly before seed-time, or indeed at the same time. where farmyard manure is used, the guano has been recommended to be used as a top-dressing in small quantities. in the majority of cases it will be advisable, however, not to apply it as a top-dressing, for the various reasons above-mentioned. _quantity to be used._ as to the quantity to be used, this of course will depend on the soil, the crop, and the amount and nature of the other manures employed: to cwt. per acre have been the usual limits, but even heavier dressings have been commonly resorted to, especially in scotland, where to or even cwt. for turnips are often used. sir j. b. lawes and sir james caird long ago, shortly after the introduction of guano, estimated, from the experiments they carried out, that the application of cwt. per acre to the wheat crop gave an increase of to bushels in grain, and added a fourth to the quantity of straw. the former authority recommends to cwt. per acre for wheat, to be sown broadcast and harrowed into the land before sowing the seed. we have already stated that it may be used in all soils and for all kinds of crops. while this is so, it has been found to have specially favourable results when applied to the turnip crop, when it may be used in larger quantities than in the case of cereals. when applied to the turnip crop, it is well to use the more phosphatic guanos or to supplement it with superphosphates. by applying it in two lots, the larger portion before seed-time and the rest between the drills after the turnips are up, excellent results have been obtained. it has also proved an admirable manure for mangels. on the whole, it gives best results on heavy soils and in a dampish climate. _adulteration of guano._ probably no artificial manure has been subjected to greater adulteration in the past than guano. this has been due to the fact that the practice of selling guano on analysis--especially among retail buyers--did not largely obtain in the early years of the trade. a good deal of this adulteration was probably caused by ignorant prejudice on the part of the farmer, to whom the pungency of its smell and its colour were too apt to be ranked as its most important properties. the variation in the quality of different kinds of guano was too often not sufficiently realised by the buyer, who not unfrequently was made to pay as high a price for guano of an inferior quality as he ought to have paid for that of the best quality. indeed no manure illustrates the importance of chemical analysis more than guano. among the different forms of adulteration practised may be mentioned the addition of such substances as sawdust, rice-meal, chalk, sulphates of lime and magnesia, common salt, sand, earth, peat, ashes of various kinds, and water. there can be no doubt, however, that such adulteration has now long ceased to be practised to any extent. nevertheless, it may be of use to draw attention to one or two of the tests by means of which some of the commoner forms of adulteration may be detected. one or two are extremely easily detected--as, for example, adulteration with sand or other mineral substances. in such a case, the percentage of ash left on burning a small portion of the guano will be found to be excessive. the percentage of ash in a sample of genuine peruvian guano should not exceed from to per cent. the colour of the ash is another important point, and may serve as a further indication of adulteration. in the case of genuine guano, this should be whitish or greyish. red-coloured ash generally points to the adulteration of the guano with some mineral substance containing iron--such, _e.g._, as redonda phosphate, a mineral phosphate of iron and alumina. where the ash is white, but excessive in quantity, adulteration with common salt, sulphate of magnesia, gypsum, or chalk, may be suspected. the last-named substance is easily detected by treating it with any of the common acids, when brisk effervescence, due to the liberation of the carbonic acid, will ensue.[ ] a further point of importance with regard to the ash is its solubility in water and in acids. a large insoluble residue may be taken as indicating adulteration with sand. adulteration with water is also easily detected by heating a sample to the boiling temperature and determining the loss it sustains. of course the amount of water varies in different samples. the appearance of the guano will serve fairly well to detect whether it is abnormally moist. it may be added, in conclusion, that peruvian guano is extremely light; and while this by itself is not a sufficient test of genuineness, it may serve to confirm other tests. iii.--so-called guanos. before concluding this chapter, reference may be made to certain manures which are commonly known under the name of guanos--such as "fish-guano," "flesh-guano," "meat-meal-guano," and "bat-guano,"--as well as to manures which may more conveniently be described here--viz., "fowl and pigeon dung." _fish-guano._ the application of fish, not suited for other purposes, to the fields as a manure is a practice which has obtained in certain parts of the country for a number of years. in many districts on the sea-coast, where fishing is the chief industry, the only way in the past of disposing of a superabundant catch of herrings, for example, has been to utilise them as a manure. from such a practice has sprung up what is now an important and ever-increasing trade--viz., the manufacture of fish-guano. this manufacture was first started, and is still most largely practised, in norway. the guano obtained varies very considerably in quality according to the nature of the process employed, and as to whether the guano is made from whole fish or merely from fish-offal. the latter source is the common one. the manufacture is carried on at the fish-curing stations, and the quality of the guano made from this source is somewhat different from that made from whole fish, as a large proportion of the fish-offal is made up of bones and heads. large quantities of norwegian fish-guano are exported to various parts of europe. the best quality of this guano may contain as much as per cent of nitrogen, but as a rule it is nearer per cent. a very considerable variation in the amount of phosphoric acid occurs for the reason above stated, the guano made from fish-scrap being naturally much richer in this ingredient than whole-fish guano. the phosphoric acid may be said to range from to per cent, and there is also a small quantity of potash present. guano is also manufactured in norway from the carcasses of whales. such guano contains from - / to - / per cent of nitrogen, and about - / per cent of phosphoric acid. in america fish-guano is manufactured to a considerable extent--one important source being the menhaddo, a coarse sort of herring. this fish is caught for the sake of its oil, which is extracted by boiling, the residue being manufactured, after pressing and drying, into guano. in this country the manufacture of fish-guano is carried out to a considerable and increasing extent. formerly it was imported from norway to a larger extent than is now the case, the present annual imports amounting only to or tons. the total annual production in the united kingdom is probably or tons. _value of "fish-guano."_ that fish-guano is a valuable manure there can be no doubt. what, however, impairs its value is the fact that, as a rule, it contains a certain amount of oil. the effect of this oil is to retard fermentation and decomposition when the guano is applied to the soil, and thus render its action slower than would otherwise be the case. when applied to the soil, therefore, every opportunity ought to be given to promote its fermentation. it is best applied some time before it is likely to be used. it ought to be well mixed with the soil-particles, and not allowed to lie on the top of the soil. its best effect will be on light well-cultivated soils, which permit of the access both of sufficient moisture and of sufficient air for rapid fermentation. its value as a manure for hops, vines, grass, and strawberries has been found to be considerable. it has been recommended to be applied along with farmyard manure; and such a mode of application is no doubt well suited to promote its decomposition. it has also been used for mixing with superphosphate of lime. professor storer has advocated a more general use of fish as a manure than is at present the case. he suggests that even fish not suitable for edible purposes might be caught for the purpose of conversion into manure. the difficulty of preserving fish, however, is considerable; and he suggests the use of potash salts, such as muriate of potash, or lime for this purpose. the benefit of using potash would be twofold. in addition to acting as a preservative, it would considerably enhance the value of the resulting guano as a manure. there is much truth in professor storer's views; and no doubt, as our sources of artificial nitrogenous manures grow more limited, the manufacture of fish-guano will be carried on in the future on a larger and more systematic scale than hitherto. _meat-meal guano._ what is called "meat-meal guano" is generally that made from the refuse of the carcasses of cattle after they have been treated for their meat-extract according to liebig's process. the meat-meal is used both for feeding and manurial purposes. considerable quantities[ ] of this guano are imported annually into this country from south america, queensland, and new zealand,--that coming from frey bentos, in uruguay, being best known. it is a valuable manure, especially so for its nitrogen, which varies from to per cent, while it contains of phosphoric acid from to per cent. some meat-meal guanos contain as much nitrogen as per cent. in some parts of the world, more especially in germany, the carcasses of horses, as well as cattle, dogs, pigs, &c., which have died of disease, are converted into a guano. they are subjected to treatment by steam in digestors, by which means the fat and gelatine are separated and utilised, while the remaining portion of the animal is converted into guano. other processes are also employed. the resulting manure contains from to per cent of nitrogen, and from to per cent of phosphoric acid. _value of meat-meal guano._ meat-meal guano is a valuable nitrogenous manure. the same remarks apply to it as to fish-guano, although it ferments probably very much more quickly than the latter, and is undoubtedly a more valuable manure. _bat guano._ in conclusion, we may consider bat guano. bat guano, which is really a very rare curiosity, has been found accumulated in hot climates in caves. the samples which have been analysed have differed very much in quality, some containing as much as per cent of nitrogen and per cent of phosphoric acid. provided it could be obtained in any quantity, and of a quality even approximating to the above analysis, it need scarcely be pointed out that bat guano would be a most valuable manure. a singular point about its composition is, that it has been found to contain a considerable proportion of its nitrogen (as much as per cent) in the form of nitrates. _pigeon and fowl dung._ pigeon dung is a manure which historically is of great importance. the dung of pigeons was used as a manure by the ancient romans; and even in modern times, more especially in france, it was considered a most important fertiliser. despite these facts, pigeon dung is by no means a rich manure, and its composition compares most unfavourably with that of the guanos we have just been considering. according to storer,[ ] it only contains from - / to - / per cent of nitrogen, and from - / to per cent of phosphoric acid, and a little over per cent of potash. the dung of poultry is just about as poor, fowl dung containing from . to per cent of nitrogen, - / to per cent of phosphoric acid, and a little under per cent of potash; while that of ducks and geese is even poorer.[ ] from these statements it will be seen that the excrements of pigeons, hens, and ducks do not form a rich manure. one thing about pigeon dung which is to be noticed, is the fact that it ferments very quickly. none of the pseudo-guanos, however rich they may be in manurial ingredients, can be regarded as equal in their action to the genuine article, for reasons which we have gone into already when considering the action of guano. footnotes: [ ] bones, it is true, were in use long before guano; but popular as they deservedly were, they had not been used, at the time of the importation of guano, to any very considerable extent. [ ] the total annual imports at present may be taken at under , tons, whereas in they amounted to over , tons. for statistics on this point the reader is referred to the appendix, note i., p. . [ ] with regard to the origin of certain guano deposits, which are of very recent date--_e.g._, _angamos_ and _ichaboe_--there can be no doubt whatever, because we can witness the process of formation still taking place. it is not so, however, with regard to older deposits, for which some have been inclined to claim mineral origin. the best proof that such deposits owe their origin mainly to bird excrements is the comparatively large quantity of _uric acid_ they contain. on the other hand, the evidence in support of the belief that they are also formed from the remains of the birds themselves and other animals, is to be found in the large proportion of phosphates they contain, and the presence in the deposits of feathers and the fossilised skeletons of the animals above mentioned. [ ] a complete list of the various deposits will be found in the appendix, note ii., p. . it may be noticed that nearly all the deposits lie within ° to ° north and south of the equator. [ ] see chapter on farmyard manure, p. . [ ] according to nesbit, some of the cargoes of this guano contained hard saline lumps of very little manurial value--over per cent being common salt. [ ] the salt exports were made in . [ ] for analyses of these nodules and crystals, see appendix, note iii., p. . [ ] see heiden, vol. ii. p. . [ ] see appendix, note iv., p. . [ ] the ichaboe guano at present exported is a fresh deposit, and is annually collected for shipment. [ ] further chemical changes have occurred in certain cases between the guano and the limestone rock beneath, resulting in the formation of what is called a "crust" guano. such guanos form a soft phosphatic rock, and are extremely rich in phosphates. as examples of these "crust" guanos may be mentioned sombrero, curaçao, aruba, mexico, and navassa phosphates. [ ] the presence in the old peruvian guano of concretionary nodules has already been referred to. [ ] according to vogel the nitrogen as urates is converted by the sulphuric acid into ammonia salts. [ ] see appendix, note vi. p. . [ ] it must be remembered, however, that even genuine guano contains a certain quantity of carbonate of lime, and will give a slight amount of effervescence when so treated. [ ] the annual imports may be stated at from to tons. [ ] agricultural chemistry, vol. i. p. . [ ] see appendix, note vii., p. . appendix to chapter viii. note i. (p. ). peruvian guano imported into the united kingdom, - . year. tons. | year. tons. , | , , | , , | , , | , , | - , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , note ii. (p. ). guano deposits of the world. south america-- _peru._--in various islands off the coast--viz., chincha, guanape, ballestas, macabi, lobos, and patillos; and on different parts of the coast--viz., pabellon de pica, chipana, huanillos, punta de patillos, independence bay, and lobos de afuera. _columbia._--in different parts of the states of venezuela, new granada, and ecuador. guano coming from these parts is often known as columbian guano, or according to the name of the state in which it is found. maracaïbo and monks guanos come from the coast of venezuela. deposits are also found on the galapagos islands, to the west of ecuador. _bolivia._--mejillones, patagonia, leon's. north america--deposits have been found on the coasts of mexico and california; on the raza and patos islands; and on the coasts of labrador. they have also been found on the islands of curaçao, aruba, and navassa in the gulf of mexico. africa--on the west coast deposits have been found at algoa bay, saldanha bay, and on the island of ichaboe. australia--shark's bay and swan island. west indies--sombrero, aves, and cuba. pacific ocean--on the islands of baker, jarvis, howland, malden, starbuck, fanning, enderbury, lacepede, browse, huon, and surprise. asia--deposits at kuria muria on the arabian coast, and on the sandwich islands. (see heiden's 'düngerlehre,' vol. ii. p. .) note iii. (p. ). composition of concretionary nodules. (_analyses by karmrodt._) no. . potassium sulphate . " phosphate . sodium " . ammonium " . calcium sulphate . ammonium urate . " oxalate . nitrogenous organic matter . water . ----- . ------ nitrogen . no. . potassium sulphate . sodium " . ammonium " . " oxalate . basic ammonium phosphate . precipitated ammonium phosphate . organic matter . insoluble . water . ------ . ------ note iv. (p. ). the following analyses, being the average of a large number of different samples analysed from time to time in the chemical laboratory of the pommritz agricultural experimental station, show the gradual deterioration of peruvian guano, as regards its percentage of nitrogen, during the years - :-- nitrogen. nitrogen. . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . . | . note v. (p. ). composition of different guanos. the following is a list of the more common nitrogenous and phosphatic guanos which have been used in the past or are at present in use. those printed in italics are still being worked. as their value depends on their nitrogen and phosphoric acid, these alone have been given. the percentages must be taken as mere approximations, as the quality of different cargoes from the same deposits varies very much. the table may be found useful for reference. _nitrogenous guanos._ phosphoric } { tricalcic nitrogen = ammonia. acid } = { phosphate. per cent. per cent. per cent. per cent. angamos chincha ballestas egyptian guanape - - macabi corcovado _saldanha bay_ _ichaboe_ independence bay _pabellon de pica_ _punta de lobos_ _huanillos_ penguin patagonian falkland islands _phosphatic guanos._ phosphoric } { tricalcic acid } = { phosphate. per cent. per cent. maracaïbo, or monks raza island curaçao _baker island_ starbuck _enderbury_ californian _aves_ fanning island howland _sidney island_ mejillones lacepede island _malden island_ sombrero _browse island_ _huon island_ patos island jarvis island cape vert note vi. (p. ). it may be of interest to refer to a theory put forward by liebig as to the action of oxalic acid in guano. this, he considered, had the effect of gradually rendering the insoluble calcium phosphate soluble, and giving rise to the formation of ammonium phosphate and calcium oxalate. such an action would probably take place were the guano allowed to ferment by itself. we know, however, that when it is brought in contact with the soil-particles, all its soluble phosphate is converted into precipitated phosphate. note vii. (p. ). analyses of dung of fowls, pigeons, ducks, and geese. (storer's 'agricultural chemistry,' vol. i. p. .) fowls. pigeons. ducks. geese. water . . . . organic matter . . . . nitrogen . . . . phosphoric acid . - . . - . . . potash . -. . - . . . lime . - . . - . . . magnesia . . . . according to a computation by a belgian farmer, a pigeon yields about lb. of dung in a year, a hen about lb., a turkey or goose about lb., and a duck lb. chapter ix. nitrate of soda. nitrate of soda,[ ] or, as it is more correctly designated from a chemical point of view, sodium nitrate, now forms the chief artificial nitrogenous manure in use. along with sulphate of ammonia, it has taken the place once held in the manure markets by the older peruvian guano, and may without doubt be reckoned, at present prices, one of the cheapest and most valuable of the artificial sources of nitrogen for the plant. it is some sixty-two years ago since it was first exported from south america into this country. the total exports in that year amounted to about tons, and some indication of the enormous extent to which the use of this valuable fertiliser has been developed since then will be obtained from the statement that the total exports at present amount to little less than , , tons per annum, representing a monetary value of to millions sterling. of this quantity about , tons are imported into britain.[ ] while its chief use is for manurial purposes, it must not be imagined that it is only used for this purpose. a certain amount is used in connection with various chemical manufactures--for instance, that of nitric and sulphuric acid--and also in the manufacture of saltpetre, the chief constituent of gunpowder. _date of discovery of nitrate deposits._ the exact date of the discovery of the nitrate deposits seems to be a point of considerable dubiety. the earliest published description of them was written by bollaert about the year , in which year, it is stated, the first shipment was made to england. it was not, however, till some ten or twelve years later that the peruvian government, to whom they then belonged,[ ] seems to have recognised their value. the most important deposits are found in the vicinity of the town of iquique, which is the chief nitrate port of south america. it is a somewhat striking fact that this substance, which has conclusively proved itself to be the most potent of all known artificial agents in the promotion of vegetable growth, should be found in a district utterly lacking the slightest traces of vegetation of any kind. lest such a statement should seem to savour of irony, we hasten to explain that the singular barrenness of this part of the country is largely due to the character of its climate, the deposits occurring in the midst of sandy deserts,[ ] on which rain never falls. _their origin._ the origin of these nitrate-fields is a geological problem of very considerable interest, the difficulty of which is greatly enhanced by their altitude-- to feet above the sea-level--and their distance inland, which amounts in some cases to eighty or ninety miles from the sea-coast. the nitrate deposits are not the only saline deposits found in chili. according to the late david forbes,[ ] they are not to be confused with other saline formations, which appear at intervals scattered over the whole of that portion of the western coast, on which no rain falls. the latter stretch from north to south for a distance of more than miles--their greatest development being between latitudes ° and ° south. the depth to which they extend downwards varies considerably. most of them, however, are of a very superficial character, and "they always show signs of their existence by the saline efflorescence seen on the surface of the ground, which often covers vast plains as a white crystalline incrustation, the dust from which, entering the nostrils and mouth of the traveller, causes much annoyance, whilst at the same time the eyes are equally suffering from the intensely brilliant reflection of the rays of a tropical sun." these saline incrustations, or _salinas_, as they are generally called, are chiefly composed of salts of lime, soda, magnesia, alumina, and of boracic acid. their composition would lead one to attribute their origin to the evaporation of salt water; for, with the single exception of boracic acid,[ ] all the mineral substances are such as would be obtained by the evaporation of sea-water, or by the mutual reactions of its salts with the constituents of the adjacent rocks. as there is "indisputable evidence of the recent elevation of the whole of this coast," volcanic upheaval might be reasonably held to explain their altitude. their comparative proximity to the coast would seem further to favour this theory. on these grounds, therefore, forbes is inclined to think that they owe their origin to the evaporation, under the influence of a tropical sun, of lagoons of salt water, the communication of which with the sea had been cut off by the rising of the land. _forbes and darwin on the theory of their origin._ the obvious difficulty of accounting for the formation of the larger deposits by such a theory he meets by saying that it is only necessary to suppose that, even after the partial isolation of the lagoons by the elevations of the coast, they might still have maintained tidal or occasional communication with the sea by means of lateral openings in the chain of hills separating them from the ocean. in such cases there would be a gradual accumulation of salts, very much greater in amount than that due simply to the evaporation of the water originally contained in the lagoons. the above theory of the origin of the lower saline deposits may go to explain the mode of formation of the nitrate-fields; but in this case several difficulties present themselves. one is the much greater altitude of the latter, as well as their greater distance inland. this difficulty, however, may be met by assuming that they are of older origin than the lower deposits, and have been subjected to a correspondingly greater amount of volcanic upheaval. there is abundance of proof that this part of the continent has been the scene in the past of such volcanic upheaval. forbes is of opinion that there is the fullest evidence to prove that, even since the arrival of the spaniards, a very considerable elevation of the land has taken place over the greater part, if not the whole extent, of the line of coast; while darwin states that he has convincing proof that this part of the continent has been elevated from to feet since the epoch of existing shells. furthermore, elevations of the coast-line, amounting in many cases to several feet, are known to have happened within recent times, while earthquakes and volcanic disturbances of a less striking nature are still of common occurrence. successive lines, indicative of old sea-beaches, can be distinctly traced stretching inland, one behind the other; and patches of sea-sand and water-worn stone, found at a great distance from the coast, both in valleys and at altitudes much greater even than feet, point to the same conclusion.[ ] the difficulty, therefore, of altitude and distance from the coast cannot be regarded as insuperable. _source of nitric acid._ a difficulty, however, which is not so easily met, is afforded by the presence of the nitric acid which, in combination with the soda, forms the nitrate of soda. it is scarcely necessary to inform our readers that nitrogen--except, of course, in small quantities in the free state--is not a normal constituent of salt water. the question, therefore, of greatest interest in connection with the formation of these nitrate-beds is, whence has the nitric acid been derived? several theories have been put forward to account for it. _guano theory._ one is to the effect that it owes its origin to huge guano deposits, originally covering the shores of the large salt lakes which, by the subsequent overflowing of their shores, effected the mixture of the guano with the salts. in this way, by a slow process of decomposition, nitrate of soda would be ultimately formed.[ ] this theory, apart from other considerations, seems at first sight extremely plausible, more especially when we remember that it is on this very coast that the greatest guano deposits have been found, and that the famous chincha islands, which alone have yielded over million tons of this valuable fertiliser, are comparatively near the scene of the nitrate deposits. what seems further to support this theory, is the actual occurrence in the nitrate-fields themselves of small quantities of guano. but however plausible it may appear at first sight, it does not bear closer criticism. one very serious objection is the absence in these deposits of phosphate of lime, which is the largest constituent of guano. if they were really due to guano, how does it happen that the insoluble phosphate of lime should have disappeared, while the easily soluble nitrate of soda should alone be preserved? again, assuming this theory to be correct, we should naturally expect to be still able to find evidence of the chemical changes which would under such circumstances have taken place, in the shape of portions of the guano in the transition stage. such evidence, however, the most careful investigations have failed to detect. apart, however, from the above objections, there seems to be little doubt, from evidence afforded by traces of birds' nests, &c., that the guano found in the nitrate-beds was deposited subsequent to the formation of the nitrate of soda. _nitric acid derived from sea-weed._ the most probable theory seems to be that put forward by nöllner. the origin of the nitric acid is, according to him, to be ascribed to the decay of great masses of sea-weed, which, by means of hurricanes such as are still prevalent in these districts, were driven into the lagoons. the chief difficulty in the way of accepting this theory is the enormous quantity of sea-weed required to produce the millions of tons of nitric acid these deposits contain. it must be remembered, however, as bearing upon this point, that the occurrence of gigantic masses of sea-weed in the pacific ocean[ ] is by no means uncommon even at the present time. if, to understand the formation of coal, we must suppose the carboniferous period to be one during which exceptionally luxuriant growth of vegetation took place, we may be permitted to suppose a similar luxuriant growth of sea-weed during the formation of the nitrate deposits. very strong confirmation of the truth of this theory is further afforded by the presence in large quantities, in the raw nitrate of soda, of iodine, a substance characteristic of sea-weed; while pieces of sea-weed still undecomposed are met with here and there. on the whole, therefore, this theory, while not free from difficulties, seems to be the most worthy of acceptance as regards the origin of the nitrate deposits.[ ] _appearance of nitrate-fields._ having thus discussed the origin of the nitrate-fields, we may now give a more detailed description of their appearance. the chief deposits at present being worked are those lying in the pampa de tamarugal, in the province of tarapaca. they stretch to a distance of thirty or forty miles inland, from pisagua southwards to somewhat beyond the town of iquique. this huge desert, as has been already indicated, seems to be entirely destitute of all vegetation and animal life. even in the immediately adjoining country the only kind of vegetation that seems to grow is a species of _acacia_. the few streams that are found in this neighbourhood are entirely fed by the melting snow from the cordilleras. darwin describes the appearance presented by these pampas as resembling "a country after snow, before the last dirty patches are thawed." the _caliche_, or raw nitrate of soda, is not equally distributed over the pampas. the most abundant deposits are situated on the slopes of the hills which probably formed the shores of the old lagoons. an expert can tell from the external appearance of the ground where the richest deposits are likely to be found. the _caliche_ itself is not found on the surface of the plain, but is covered up by two layers. the uppermost, known technically as _chuca_, is of a friable nature, and consists of sand and gypsum; while the lower, the _costra_, is a rocky conglomerate of clay, gravel, and fragments of felspar. the _caliche_ varies in thickness from a few inches to or feet, and rests on a soft stratum of earth called _cova_. _the method of mining the nitrate._ the mode in which the _caliche_ is excavated is as follows: a hole is bored through the _chuca_, _costra_, and _caliche_ layers till the _cova_ or soft earth is reached below. it is then enlarged until it is wide enough to admit of a small boy being let down, who scrapes away the earth below the _caliche_ so as to form a little hollow cup. into this a charge of gunpowder is introduced, and subsequently exploded. the _caliche_ is then separated by means of picks from the overlying _costra_ and carried to the refinery. _composition of caliche._ both in appearance and composition it varies very much. in colour it may be snow-white, sulphur, lemon, orange, violet, blue, and sometimes brown like raw sugar. the _caliche_ found in the pampa de tamarugal contains generally about to per cent pure nitrate of soda; that in the province of atacama contains from to per cent. the subsequent refining processes, which consist in crushing it by means of rollers and then dissolving it, need not here be described. it may be sufficient to mention that the process used is that known as systematic lixiviation, and is analogous to the method introduced by shanks in the manufacture of soda. the chief impurity in the raw material is common salt: gypsum, sulphates of potassium, sodium, and magnesium, along with insoluble matters, are the other impurities. the manufacture of iodine, which, as has been already noticed, is found in the nitrate-beds, is also carried on at these _oficinas_. _extent of the nitrate deposits._ the question of the extent of the nitrate of soda deposits is naturally one of very great interest, especially from the agricultural point of view. m. charles legrange, a french writer, estimated a few years ago that they still contained about , , tons of pure nitrate of soda. opinions on this point differ very considerably, and it seems wellnigh impossible to arrive at any very accurate estimate. the number of years they will last will depend, of course, on the amount of annual exportation. this, at present, falls little short of , , tons. if this amount is maintained, they should last, according to experts, some twenty or thirty years at least. a consideration which has an important influence on this question, is the price obtained for the article. if this should be increased, it may be possible to treat the larger quantities of the inferior raw material (which at present prices are allowed to accumulate) at a profit. undoubtedly this is what will ultimately take place, when the richer quality of the _caliche_ has been exhausted. _composition and properties of nitrate of soda._ as has already been pointed out, commercial nitrate of soda contains about per cent of pure nitrate of soda, or about - / per cent of nitrogen, which, if calculated as ammonia, would equal per cent. it is, next to sulphate of ammonia (which contains - / per cent of ammonia), the most concentrated nitrogenous manure, and further, contains its nitrogen in the form most readily available for the plant's use. its most characteristic property is its great solubility, and consequent speedy diffusion in the soil, and the inability of the soil-particles to fix its nitrogen. in the latter respect it differs very considerably from other forms of nitrogen. ammonia salts, though practically quite as soluble, do not diffuse in the soil so rapidly as nitrate of soda does; for the ammonia is more or less tenaciously fixed by the soil-particles, and retained till converted by the process of _nitrification_ into nitrates. _nitrate of soda applied as a top-dressing._ on this account nitrate of soda is chiefly employed--and rightly so--as a top-dressing. the risk of loss by drainage is thus minimised, and the valuable nitrogen finds its rightful destination--viz., in the plant's roots. _encourages deep roots._ a special benefit which the diffusibility of nitrate of soda has been held to confer on the plant, is to encourage the growth of deep roots, by inducing the growing plant to send down its roots into the lower layers of the soil after the nitrate of soda. the benefit of deep roots is, of course, very great. they enable the plant to withstand the action of drought, and at the same time increase the area whence the plant may derive its nourishment. although the value of the manure is practically entirely due to the nitrogen it contains, it has been urged that the soda exercises a beneficial effect on the mechanical properties of the soil, by increasing its power of absorbing moisture, and in also rendering it more compact. this would partly explain how its results in dry seasons are so much better than those obtained from sulphate of ammonia. this mechanical action of nitrate can scarcely be very great when we remember the comparatively small quantity applied. even in the driest of seasons there will always be sufficient moisture to secure the diffusion of the nitrate of soda, while the risk of loss by drainage will be reduced to a minimum. much ignorance, as well as prejudice, has existed in the past as to the true nature of the action of nitrate of soda. nor is this prejudice even yet entirely dispelled. _is nitrate an exhausting manure?_ the common charge brought against it is, that it is what has been termed an exhausting manure. this objection, to have any weight, must mean that nitrate of soda produces a crop which takes out of the soil an _abnormal_ quantity of fertilising matter. but, so far as the writer is aware, no scientific evidence has ever been brought forward to support this contention. that the indiscriminate use of a manure may produce a crop in which the stem and leaves are unduly developed at the expense of the grain, or in which the quality of the crop may suffer from too rapid growth, is, of course, a well-known fact. but as this could also be produced by an overdose of soluble phosphoric acid as well as ammonia salts, it is not a property that belongs exclusively to nitrate of soda. probably nitrate of soda has in the past been often used in this indiscriminate way so as to produce such results. the fault, therefore, lies not in the manure, but in the mode of its application. a few remarks, therefore, on this most important subject may prove serviceable. _crops for which it is suited._ opinions will naturally differ as to the crops to which it is profitable to apply nitrate of soda. its value as a manure for cereals is pretty generally admitted. its value as a manure for roots is not, however, so universally admitted. experiments would seem to show that such a crop as the mangold derives just as much benefit as do the cereals; while in germany practical experience on a very large scale has demonstrated its value as a manure for beetroots. it may be generally recommended as a manure for all crops, except, perhaps, the so-called leguminous crops, such as clover, beans, peas, &c, whose ability to obtain nitrogen for themselves renders the application of expensive artificial nitrogenous manures unadvisable. an interesting point with regard to nitrate of soda is the curious effect it seems to have on the colour of the leaves of plants. this interesting fact has been strikingly demonstrated at the rothamsted experimental station, in the contrast in the colour of the leaves of different experimental grass-plots, manured with nitrate of soda and sulphate of ammonia respectively--the plots manured with nitrate of soda being distinctly darker in hue, obviously owing to the greater production of chlorophyll or green matter. such a depth of colour would seem to indicate a more healthy development. _method of application._ while opinions, therefore, will naturally differ as to the crops to which nitrate of soda will be most profitably applied, little difference of opinion exists as to the method of its application. the inability of the soil-particles to retain it, the frequency of rain, the costly nature of the manure itself, and its immediate availability as a plant-food, all point to the extreme advisability of using it as a top-dressing. even when used as a top-dressing, it may be advisable not to apply the entire quantity all at one time. by applying it in instalments, little risk is run that, through inclemency of weather, the manure will be lost. another point of importance in applying nitrate of soda is to secure uniform distribution. this of course is applicable to all artificial manures, but in a very special degree to nitrate of soda, because of its great value and the comparatively small quantity applied. as the uniform distribution of one cwt. of any material over an acre of soil is by no means an easy task, the mixing of nitrate of soda with some diluent, such as dry loam, is consequently highly advisable. common salt is often applied along with nitrate of soda. the indirect value of salt as a manure is considerable, and when applied along with nitrate, ensures its more speedy diffusion in the soil, by increasing the soil's capacity for absorbing moisture from the air. _must be a sufficiency of other fertilising constituents._ a third point of importance in applying nitrate of soda, is to see that the soil is sufficiently supplied with the other plant-foods--phosphates and potash. this is a _sine qua non_, if the nitrate is to get a fair chance. if it is desired to apply nitrate of soda along with superphosphate of lime, a word of caution is necessary against making the mixture long before it is used. the reason of this is, that a chemical action is apt to ensue, resulting in the loss of the nitric acid in the nitrate of soda. the nature of the soil is another important consideration to be taken into account. in the case of extremely loose and sandy soils, it is scarcely to be recommended as the most suitable form in which to apply nitrogen. if applied to such soils, especial care ought to be taken to minimise risk of loss. no hard-and-fast rules can be laid down as to the quantity in which it ought to be applied. this must be regulated very much by the crop, the nature of the soil, and the quantity of other manures employed. from to - / cwt. may be recommended as a suitable quantity for corn crops which are otherwise liberally manured. on strong clay soils this quantity may be judiciously increased up to cwt. dr bernard dyer, who has experimented largely on its use as a manure for mangolds, is of opinion that an application of from to cwt. an acre is likely to prove thoroughly profitable; and the present writer has found in his experiments with turnips that a top-dressing of cwt. amply repaid itself. _conclusions drawn._ in conclusion, the nature and characteristics of nitrate of soda as a manure may be briefly summed up as follows:-- . it is a whitish, crystalline salt, extremely soluble, and is quickly diffused in the soil. it should contain per cent of pure nitrate of soda--_i.e._, - / per cent of nitrogen, equal to about per cent of ammonia. . next to sulphate of ammonia, it is the most concentrated nitrogenous manure; the relative quantities of nitrogen these two manures contain being as three is to four. . it contains its nitrogen in the most valuable and readily assimilable form--_i.e._, as _nitric acid_, the form into which all other forms of nitrogen have first to be converted before they become available for the plant's uses. . that, at present market prices, nitrate of soda may be safely affirmed to be the cheapest form of nitrogenous manure. . that nitrate of soda, in addition to its direct value as a manure, probably exercises a slight influence on the mechanical properties of the soil, by increasing its compactness and water-absorbing capacities; that it further tends to promote deep roots, and thus to increase the soil area whence the plant may derive its nourishment, at the same time rendering the plant more able to withstand the injurious influence of drought. . that a plentiful supply of the other manurial constituents should be present in the soil, if nitrate of soda is to exercise its full value. . that it may be profitably applied in the case of nearly all kinds of crops, but that great care should be taken as to the mode of its application. that this should be almost invariably as a top-dressing, and that it should be applied in several doses if possible. . that its effects can be regarded as lasting only during the first year after application. footnotes: [ ] this substance is also largely known under the name chili saltpetre, to distinguish it from potassium nitrate or common saltpetre. [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] we may remind our readers that these nitrate deposits were largely the cause of the late war between chili and peru, which resulted in the cession to chili by peru of the province of tarapaca, where the most important deposits are situated. [ ] the other nitrate deposits are found in the provinces of antofagasta and atacama, and a certain amount of the refined article is exported from these places. the amount, however, is inconsiderable as compared with that which comes from the province of tarapaca. [ ] see his elaborate article on the geology of bolivia and peru, published in the 'quarterly journal of the geological society' for november . [ ] the source of the boracic acid is probably volcanic. [ ] a friend of the present writer, who has visited this part of the west coast of south america, informs him that at one point of the coast at mejillones (in bolivia) he could trace the remains of no fewer than twelve distinct sea-beaches, situated at different distances from the sea, and rising to an altitude of feet. [ ] in this change, lime derived from the sea-shells would play an important part. modern researches have shown, as we have already said in a previous chapter, that, in the conversion of organic nitrogen into nitrates, the presence of carbonate of lime is a necessary condition. [ ] the gulf weed is an instance in point. huge masses of floating sea-weed are sometimes found, to miles in length, forming the so-called saragossa sea. [ ] a difficulty which has not been referred to is the belief entertained by geologists that "there has been a change of climate in northern chili, and that there must have been more rain there formerly than there is at present. traces of human habitations are found high up in the cordilleras to-day. cobs of indian corn, axes and knives of copper tempered to exceeding sharpness, arrow-heads of agate, even pieces of cloth, are dug up in arid plains now without any trace of water for many leagues in or around them" (russell, 'the nitrate-fields of chili,' p. ). appendix to chapter ix. nitrate of soda. _total shipments from south america, - ._ year. tons. | year. tons. | year. tons. | , | , , | , | , , | , | , , | , | , , | , | , , , | , | , , | , | , , | , | the following tables exhibit the total imports into europe, and into the united kingdom from the years - :-- nitrate of soda, - . _imports into europe._ _imports into united kingdom._ year. tons. | year. tons. , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , chapter x. sulphate of ammonia. _value of ammonia as a manure._ the value of ammonia salts as a manure has been long recognised; indeed till recently ammonia was thought to be the most valuable form in which nitrogen could be applied as a plant-food--a view, we may mention, held by liebig. while the plant, no doubt, can absorb its nitrogen in the form of ammonia,[ ] as well as in other forms, as we have already pointed out in previous chapters, it is now fully recognised that ammonia salts, when applied to the soil, are converted into nitrates. nitric acid, then, must be regarded as the most valuable, inasmuch as it is the most rapidly assimilated form of nitrogen for the plant; but next to nitric acid in value comes ammonia. of the different forms of ammonia available for manurial purposes, the only one used to a large extent is sulphate. _sources of sulphate of ammonia._ the oldest, and what is still the chief source of this valuable salt, is the gas-works, where it is obtained as one of the bye-products in the manufacture of gas. it is also obtained to a lesser extent from shale, iron, coke, and carbonising works. bones, horn, leather, and certain other animal substances rich in nitrogen, when subjected to dry distillation, as is the case in certain manufactures, such as the manufacture of bone-charcoal for use in sugar-refineries, and the distillation of horn, &c., in the manufacture of prussiate of potash, also constitute less abundant sources. _ammonia from gas-works._ coal contains on an average from a half to one and a half per cent of nitrogen. when it is subjected to dry distillation, as is done in the gas-works, the nitrogen which it contains is chiefly converted into ammonia, and, in the process of purification of the gas, is removed in the "gas-liquor,"[ ] which contains about one per cent of ammonia. the ammonia recovered from this liquor by distillation is then absorbed in sulphuric acid. it may be pointed out that nothing like all the nitrogen contained in the coal is recovered as sulphate of ammonia. it has been calculated that only from a fifth to a tenth is actually recovered, and many processes have been patented with a view to increasing the yield of ammonia in gas manufacture. the total production of ammonia from gas-works may be placed at little over , tons per annum for great britain. mr l. mond, f.r.s., recently drew attention to the possibility of largely increasing our supply of sulphate of ammonia from coal. as indicating what an enormous source of sulphate of ammonia we have in coal, mr mond calculated that its annual consumption in this country (estimated at , , tons) would yield as much as , , tons of sulphate of ammonia. _other sources._ while the ammonia produced in the manufacture of gas has long been collected, it is only of recent years that the other sources of ammonia have been developed. next to the gas-works, the shale-works of scotland form in this country the chief source of this valuable manure. in these works the ammonia is obtained in distilling the paraffin shale by a method somewhat similar to that in use in the gas-works. the amount of sulphate of ammonia obtained from this source is between , and , tons per annum. recently the ammonia has been recovered from the blast-furnace gases in iron-works--some tons being annually obtained in this way; while from coke and carbonising works the annual production is about half that amount. the combined annual production from all these sources may be put down at , tons, the total production in europe being probably little more than , tons. in the appendix further statistics will be found.[ ] _composition, &c., of sulphate of ammonia._ pure sulphate of ammonia is a whitish crystalline salt, extremely soluble in water. the commercial article, however, is generally greyish or brownish in colour, owing to the presence of slight quantities of impurities. the pure salt should contain . per cent of ammonia; but the commercial article is generally sold on a basis of . per cent. a useful test of its purity is the fact that when subjected to a red-heat it should almost entirely volatilise, leaving very little residue. the chief impurities which it is likely to contain are an excess of moisture, free acid, or the presence of insoluble matter. certain samples contain small quantities of ammonium sulphocyanate, an extremely poisonous substance for plants. the presence of this dangerous impurity is easily detected by adding ferric chloride, which, in presence of the sulphocyanate, produces a blood-red colour. sulphate of ammonia is thus the most concentrated of all nitrogenous manures in common use, and is for that reason the most expensive. _application._ for this reason, as well as from the fact that it contains a speedily available form of nitrogen, sulphate of ammonia should only as a rule be applied in comparatively small quantities-- to lb. per acre.[ ] it should also be applied before, but not too long before, the crop is likely to require it. the reason of this is to give it time to be converted into nitrates. the ability of the soil to retain ammonia has already been pointed out. it is not safe, however, to rely too much on the retentive power of the soil for ammonia, the conversion of ammonia into nitrates going on very quickly under favourable circumstances. it is most profitably used as a manure for cereals, and it has been found by lawes and gilbert in their experiments, that an increase of one bushel of wheat and a corresponding increase of straw have been obtained for every lb. of ammonia added to the soil. as has been pointed out in the previous chapter, the respective merits of sulphate of ammonia and nitrate of soda depend largely on the nature of the season during which they are used. in wet seasons the sulphate is rather more favourable than the nitrate, but, on an average, nitrate of soda is probably the more valuable manure--_i.e._, due regard being had to the quantity of nitrogen the two manures respectively contain. in one respect sulphate of ammonia is a much more useful manure than nitrate of soda, as the nature of its action when applied to the soil permits of it being used as an ingredient of mixed manures. like nitrate of soda, but even to a greater extent, its most favourable action is obtained when it is applied along with other manurial ingredients. it should be applied at least a month earlier than nitrate. it has been shown that in the case of chalky soils a certain loss of ammonia in sulphate of ammonia is apt to take place, due to the action of the lime; and this leads us to point out that, in preparing mixed manures, care ought to be taken that it is not mixed with any compound containing free lime or caustic alkali, as otherwise loss of ammonia will ensue. it should never, for example, be used along with basic slag. footnotes: [ ] from experiments by lehmann and others with buckwheat and maize, it would seem that certain plants may prefer, at certain stages of their growth, ammonia to nitrates. in the case of maize, ammonia may be preferred in the early stages of growth, while nitrates are preferred as it becomes more mature. in view, however, of our present knowledge of nitrification, it may well be doubted whether the conclusions arrived at from lehmann's experiments can be accepted. [ ] as the expense of converting the ammonia present in the ammoniacal liquor is considerable, the practice of using the liquor itself as a manure has been advocated; but as an objection to this it must be urged that, besides being so bulky a manure, the liquor contains various substances poisonous to plant-life. [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] some crops, however, may with advantage be treated with larger quantities of sulphate of ammonia, such as mangels and potatoes. appendix to chapter x. note (p. ). the following table will exhibit the production of sulphate of ammonia in this country from to :-- year. tons. | year. tons. , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , the following table exhibits the sources, and the respective quantities from each source, of the last seven years' production:-- . . . . . . . gas-works , , , , , , , iron-works , , , , , , , shale-works , , , , , , , coke and carbonising works , , , , , , , chapter xi. bones _early use of bones._ a most important manure, and one to the history of which very peculiar interest attaches, is bones. employed first in , their use has steadily increased ever since, and their popularity as a phosphatic manure is among farmers in this country quite unrivalled. like guano, although to a less extent, the early practice of using bones has done much to arouse interest in the problems of manuring, and to bring home to farmers the principles underlying that practice. it was from bones that liebig first made superphosphate of lime, and the distinguished veteran experimenter, sir john bennet lawes, has told us that the benefit accruing from the use of bones on the turnip crop first drew his attention to the interesting problem connected with the application of artificial manures. bones were first used in yorkshire. shortly afterwards they were applied to exhausted pastures in cheshire. soon their use became so popular that the home supply was found inadequate; and they were imported from germany and northern europe, hull being the port of disembarkation. so largely were they used by english farmers, that baron liebig considered it necessary to raise a warning protest against their lavish application. "england is robbing all other countries of the condition of their fertility. already, in her eagerness for bones, she has turned up the battle-fields of leipzig, of waterloo, and of the crimea; already from the catacombs of sicily she has carried away the skeletons of many successive generations. annually she removes from the shores of other countries to her own the manurial equivalent of three millions and a half of men, whom she takes from us the means of supporting, and squanders down her sewers to the sea. like a vampire, she hangs upon the neck of europe--nay, of the entire world!--and sucks the heart-blood from nations without a thought of justice towards them, without a shadow of lasting advantage to herself."[ ] _different forms in which bones are used._ it may be pointed out that bones have done much to alter our system of farming, by helping to develop turnip culture. used at first in comparatively large pieces, experience gradually showed that a finer state of division facilitated their action. yet it was long before the prejudice in favour of rough bones disappeared; and it was not till that mr anderson of dundee introduced machinery for preparing / -inch and / -inch bones and bone-dust. in the early days of their use, bones were fermented before being used, in order to render their action more speedy when applied to the soil; and this practice still obtains to the present day in some parts of the country among farmers. this fermentation was often effected simply by mixing the bones with water, and allowing the heap to lie for a week or two. in other cases the bones were mixed with urine or other refuse matter. the most important step, however, in the history of the treatment of bones for manure was the discovery in , by liebig, of the action of sulphuric acid on them--a discovery which led to the institution of the manufacture of superphosphate of lime by sir john lawes. the nature of this action will be explained in the following chapter, so that we need only say here that the efficacy of the manure by treatment with sulphuric acid is more than doubled. bones have thus been used, and still are used, in a variety of conditions, such as in the raw or green state, bruised, boiled, steamed, fermented, burned, dissolved, and broken or ground into various states of fineness, to which the names of / -inch, / -inch bones, bone-meal, bone-dust, and floated bones are given. we shall now proceed to discuss the composition of bones, and investigate more exactly the nature of their action. _composition of bones._ the composition of bone-tissue varies considerably, and depends on the age and kind of animal to which it belongs, as well as to the part of the animal frame from which it is taken. bones are made up of an organic and an inorganic part. by steeping a piece of bone in a dilute acid solution, the inorganic portion of the bone is dissolved out, and the organic portion, which forms the framework of the bone, is alone left. on the other hand, by submitting a bone to the action of great heat, the organic portion of the bone is driven off, and all that remains is a quantity of ash. the proportion of the organic to the inorganic matter varies considerably in different bones. the bones of young animals contain more organic matter than those of old animals. in compact bones, also, the organic matter is greater than in spongy bones. the thigh-bone, of all the bones, contains most inorganic matter. in short, bones which have to bear the greatest strain are richest in inorganic matter. of the bones of animals, fish-bones exhibit the greatest variety of composition, some being almost entirely made up of organic matter, while others are similar in their composition to the bones of quadrupeds. _the organic matter of bones._ the organic portion of bones is almost entirely made up of a substance to which the name _ossein_ has been given, and which, when boiled for a long time, is converted into gelatine. this ossein, which forms on an average from to per cent of the weight of bones, is extremely rich in nitrogen, containing over per cent. _inorganic portion of bones._ the inorganic portion, which forms about per cent, is made up chiefly of phosphate of lime. the dry leg-bones of oxen and sheep, according to heintz, have the following percentage composition:-- per cent. phosphate of lime to carbonate of lime to phosphate of magnesia to fluoride of calcium organic matter to according to payen and boussingault, raw bones contain - / per cent of nitrogen and per cent of water. pure bones are thus seen to contain about per cent of phosphoric acid and - / per cent of nitrogen. the composition of the commercial article, however, differs very widely. this is due to the fact that bones collected from india and america, where they have been long exposed to atmospheric influences, have lost much of their organic matter. the amount of sand and earthy impurities also varies very considerably. _treatment of bones._ bones are used for the manufacture of glue and gelatine. these are extracted from them by steaming the bones. the bones after treatment are used as a manure. the improvement noted in the action of the bones thus treated led to the introduction of the use of steamed bones as a manure. raw bones are now rarely used. the fat present in raw bones retards their decomposition in the soil. probably, as has been suggested, it forms along with lime an insoluble soap which prevents the mineral matter in the bone being dissolved by the carbonic acid of the soil. in the process of boiling or steaming a certain loss of nitrogen takes place, greater or less, according to the length of time they are boiled or steamed, and in the latter case the pressure applied. a more economical method for extracting the fat has been introduced by using benzine, but this process is not used to any extent. the loss of nitrogen in the former case is more than compensated for by their more speedy action as a manure when applied to the soil. bone-meal of good quality contains from to [ ] per cent of phosphate of lime, and - / per cent of nitrogen. our present total consumption of bones is probably little less than , tons per annum, of which about half is obtained from home collections, over , tons being annually collected in and around london alone. _action of bones._ it is well known that bones are a slow-acting manure. they may be said to possess both a mechanical and chemical action when applied to the soil. when they putrefy, their nitrogen is slowly converted into ammonia, and carbonic acid as well as various organic acids are formed, which, acting upon the insoluble mineral matter in the bones, renders it available for plant uses. bones thus, when applied in large quantities, may not merely act directly as suppliers of plant-food, but in the course of their putrefaction may act upon a certain amount of the inert fertilising matter of the soil and render it available. the more readily, then, bones putrefy, the more speedy will be their effect. as we have already pointed out, bones, in order to increase their efficiency, are often fermented before application. the removal of the fat is another means of increasing the rate of their action, but the fineness to which they are ground determines this more than anything else. much ingenuity has been expended in perfecting machinery for grinding bones. at one time in germany they were pounded in stamps similar to those used for ore. in america what has been called "floated bone" has been prepared. this bone is so fine that it actually floats in the air like flour-dust, and is made by whirling the bones against one another. the action of bones prepared in this way is of course very speedy, but the difficulty of applying a manure in such a fine state of division to the soil is great. the expense of the process also is considerable. the ease with which bones when ground into a fine state of division putrefy, is evidenced by the fact that bone-flour has to be salted in order to enable it to keep. another condition which determines the rate at which the fertilising matters in bones become available is the nature of the soil. fermentation, as we have already seen, requires a plentiful supply of air, and a certain amount, but not too much, of moisture. consequently bones act best in medium soils--soils which are "neither too light and dry, nor too close and wet." there can be no doubt that what gives to bones a peculiar value in the eyes of the farmer is the fact that they form a manure of a lasting character. they give what has been termed backbone to a soil. but the tendency of modern agricultural practice is to use quick-acting manures rather than slow. this has been admirably put by professor storer in the following words: "the old notion, that those manures are best which make themselves felt through a long series of years, is now recognised to be an error. the adage, that 'one cannot eat the cake and have the cake' is conspicuously true in agriculture; and just as it is the part of prudence in household or maritime economy to abstain from laying in at any one time more provisions than can be properly disposed of in a year or during a voyage, so should the farmer refrain from bringing to the land an unnecessary excess of plant-food. such food is liable to spoil withal in the soil, as well as other kinds of provisions that are kept too long in store. a just proportion of food, properly prepared, is the point to be aimed at always." in view, therefore, of what has just been said, it might seem best to use bones in the form in which they are most speedily available--viz., as dissolved bones. this would be so if bones were the only source we possessed for the manufacture of superphosphate of lime; but we now have, in the various mineral phosphates, abundant and cheaper sources of this valuable manure. the opinion of leading agriculturists and agricultural chemists is rather in favour of applying bones in the undissolved condition. for one thing, it seems far from economical to utilise an expensive material such as bones for manufacturing an article which can be equally well manufactured from cheaper materials; for once the phosphate of lime is dissolved, it is equally valuable from whatever source it may be derived. of course this is not tantamount to saying that dissolved bones as a manure are no more valuable than superphosphate. in dissolved bones we have, in addition to soluble phosphate, a considerable proportion of undissolved bone-tissue, containing a certain quantity of nitrogen and organic matter; but so far as the soluble phosphate is concerned, it seems only rational to conclude that its efficacy is equally great, whether it be derived from bone or mineral phosphate. another reason is, that much of the characteristic action of bones is lost by treating them with sulphuric acid. as dr aitken has pointed out, the germ life in the soil and in the bones gradually converts them into a form available for the nourishment of plants; but to dissolve bones with sulphuric acid is to kill out the germ life and retard the decay of any nucleus of bone in the dissolved manure. _dissolved bones._ dissolved bones, however, are still manufactured. formerly the manure called dissolved bones was often a mixture of mineral superphosphate along with undissolved bone-meal, but recent legislation has stopped the continuance of this practice. the composition of dissolved bones varies somewhat, the percentage of soluble phosphate being about to per cent, the insoluble amounting to from to per cent, and the nitrogen from - / to - / per cent.[ ] another reason against dissolving bones is to be found in the difficulty experienced in dissolving their phosphate. bones, especially when raw, are not easily acted upon by acids. _crops suited for bones._ bones are commonly regarded as being specially beneficial to pasture-land, to which they are applied as a top-dressing. turnips, tobacco, potatoes, vines, and hops are also much benefited by the application of bones. in america, mixed with wood-ashes (the chief manurial constituent of which is potash), they have been extensively used as a substitute for farmyard manure, and have been applied at the rate of to cwt. per acre. in saxony, according to professor storer, cwt. of fine bone-meal is worth as much as to cwt. of farmyard manure. _bone-ash._ the ash which is left on burning bones used to be an article of considerable manurial importance. it is still imported from south america in some quantity, and is used chiefly in the pottery industry. it is occasionally still used to a limited extent for the manufacture of high-class superphosphates. it is extremely rich in phosphate of lime, of which it contains between and per cent; but of course it is devoid of nitrogen.[ ] bone-ash is best used in the dissolved form, as it possesses no characteristic action such as is possessed by bones. _bone-char or bone-black._ when heated in a closed retort, bones are not converted into bone-ash, but into a body called bone-char. this body is similar in composition to bone-ash, except for a certain percentage of charcoal--amounting, on an average, to per cent. it contains but little nitrogen and other organic matter. bone-black or bone-char is an article which is prepared in enormous quantities for use in sugar-refineries, where it is used in the purification of sugar. after use it may be renovated by submitting it to heat; but as this process gradually lessens the percentage of carbon it contains, after a certain period it becomes too poor in this substance for efficiently acting as a filter. when this takes place it is technically known as spent char, and is used for the manufacture of superphosphates. spent char is a highly phosphatic substance, being very little poorer than bone-ash, and containing about per cent of phosphate of lime.[ ] footnotes: [ ] it is only fair to liebig to say that when he wrote these words the practically boundless supply of mineral phosphates which we now know to exist in many parts of the world was little dreamt of. [ ] see appendix, note i., p. . [ ] see appendix, note ii., p. . [ ] see appendix, note iii., p. . [ ] see appendix, note iv., p. . appendix to chapter xi. note i. (p. ). the following analysis will serve to show the composition of bone-meal:-- moisture . *organic matter . phosphate of lime . carbonate of lime, magnesia, &c. . insoluble siliceous matter . ------ . ------ *containing:-- nitrogen . equal to ammonia . note ii. (p. ). composition of dissolved bones. the accompanying analysis may be taken as representing the average composition of dissolved bones:-- moisture . *organic matter and water of combination . monobasic phosphate of lime . (equal to tricalcic phosphate rendered "soluble" . ) phosphate soluble in ammonium citrate . insoluble phosphate of lime . calcium sulphate, magnesia, alkalies, &c. . sand . ------ . ------ *containing:-- nitrogen . equal to ammonia . composition of compound bones. the following analysis illustrates the composition of compound bones:-- moisture . *organic matter and water of combination . monobasic phosphate of lime . (equal to tricalcic phosphate rendered "soluble" . ) insoluble phosphate of lime . calcium sulphate, magnesia, alkalies, &c. . sand . ------ . ------ *containing:-- nitrogen . equal to ammonia . note iii. (p. ). as showing the composition of bone-ash, the following analysis may be quoted:-- moisture . organic matter . *phosphoric acid . lime . magnesia, alkalies, &c. . sand . ------ . ------ *equal to tricalcic phosphate . note iv. (p. ). composition of bone-char (on dry sample):-- carbon . calcium and magnesium phosphates, calcium fluoride, &c. . calcium carbonate . calcium sulphate . ferric oxide . silica . alkaline salts . ------ . ------ chapter xii. mineral phosphates. in this chapter we shall give an account of the more commonly occurring mineral phosphates. in chapter v., where we discussed the position of phosphoric acid in agriculture, it was pointed out that mineral phosphates were very abundant, and that large deposits of them were found in many parts of the world. _coprolites._ reference may first be made to the so-called coprolites or phosphatic nodules which have been found in great abundance in the greensand formation, in the crag of the eastern counties, and in the chalk formation of the southern counties. these coprolites are rounded nodules, and are composed of the fossil excrements and remains of ancient animals. they are found in large quantities in cambridgeshire, and were discovered by dr buckland many years ago. the history of their discovery is not a little curious. the manurial properties of road-scrapings in parts of cambridgeshire were noticed, and on being examined were found to be in part composed of phosphate of lime, derived from phosphatic nodules dug out of the underlying greensand, and used for the purpose of repairing roads. professor henslow first drew attention to them at a meeting of the british association held in cambridge in , and pointed out that they contained about per cent of phosphate of lime. they were also found in enormous quantities in suffolk, norfolk, bedfordshire, and essex, and were for a long time largely used in the manufacture of superphosphate, but of late years have not been used to anything like the same extent, owing to the fact that there are richer and cheaper sources of phosphate of lime available. in about , tons of coprolites were raised. the richest were those obtained in cambridge, while those got from bedfordshire were about the poorest. deposits have also been found in france and other countries. the average amount of phosphate of lime in english coprolites is between and per cent, while the french contain about per cent. _canadian apatite or phosphorite._ we have already referred in chapter v. to large deposits of apatite or phosphorite found in canada. the canadian mines commenced to be worked about fifteen years ago, and the output now amounts to nearly , tons per annum.[ ] a portion of this goes to the united states; the rest, amounting to about , tons, being shipped to england, whence it is again exported to hamburg and other places.[ ] it contains from to per cent of phosphate. deposits are also found at estremadura in spain, and in norway. _estremadura or spanish phosphates._ large deposits of phosphate have long been known to exist at estremadura in spain, and the mines at caceres have been worked on a large scale for seventeen years, and about half a million tons have been raised. in the imports into this country amounted to over , tons; but latterly they have only been about a fourth of this amount. dr dauberry visited the deposits in , and wrote a most interesting account of them. they do not seem, however, to have been imported for purposes of superphosphate manufacture till a number of years afterwards. of estremadura phosphate there are three classes, containing respectively , , and per cent of phosphate of lime, the lowest quality being the commonest.[ ] _norwegian apatite._ this apatite has ceased to be imported of late years, owing to a duty on exportation. _charleston or south carolina phosphate._ for a number of years these deposits have formed the chief source of phosphate of lime used in the manufacture of mineral superphosphates in this country (in fact they have furnished two-thirds of our phosphate supply during recent years). discovered twenty-five years ago, some four to five million tons have already been shipped. about half a million tons were raised in from these mines, which are the most abundant in the world. there are two kinds--the so-called "land" and "river" phosphates. the former contains more oxide of iron and alumina, and is therefore less pure than the latter, in which the iron and alumina do not exceed per cent. the river phosphate is dredged from the bull, coosaw, and beaufort rivers. of phosphate of lime it contains from to per cent. it is generally sold in three grades-- to per cent, to per cent, and to per cent of phosphate of lime. it will thus be seen to be incapable of producing very high-class superphosphates --_i.e._, containing more than per cent "soluble" phosphate. this point will be more intelligible when we describe the manufacture of superphosphate. the demand for these phosphates in the united states has increased enormously in recent years, owing to the increase in the quantity of manure used. _belgian phosphate._ another very important source of mineral phosphates are deposits discovered some years ago in belgium near mons. these phosphates are of different qualities, and are found, some in layers near the surface in pockets forming the richest class, and containing from to per cent of phosphate, and some in the form of a friable phosphatic rock, the so-called _craie-grise_ (phosphatic chalk), containing from to per cent of phosphate of lime. the higher quality of belgian phosphate is pretty well exhausted, and it is the second class that forms the bulk of the ordinary belgian phosphate at present exported. the commercial article contains about to per cent of phosphate, and about per cent of carbonate of lime. the fact of its poor quality, together with the large percentage of carbonate of lime it contains, renders its adoption alone in the manufacture of superphosphate unsuitable. attempts have been made to get rid of a portion of this carbonate of lime and to raise the percentage of phosphate. for this purpose the phosphate has been calcined, but this was soon found to be a great mistake. other means have been adopted, with the result that the percentage has been increased to per cent. it is consequently used in small quantities as a drier, for which it is peculiarly suited on account of its carbonaceous nature, along with the higher-class phosphates. in the year about , tons of this phosphate were raised, of which about , tons were imported into the united kingdom. _somme phosphate._ still more recently a discovery of phosphate deposits has been made in the somme and pas de calais departments in the north of france, adjoining, and similar in character to, the belgian deposits. the only difference between belgian and french phosphates is, that the latter is of a higher quality, and contains from to per cent of phosphate of lime. a very large demand for these phosphates sprang up, and in , although they had only been worked for some two years, no less than , tons had been raised, of which about one-half contained from to upwards of per cent. there are four grades in the market, containing to , to , to , and to per cent of phosphate of lime. the highest quality furnishes the chief material for the manufacture of high-grade superphosphates. _florida phosphate._[ ] during the last few years large quantities of phosphates have been imported from florida. these are of different qualities, the land rocks now imported containing from to per cent of phosphate of lime, and the river phosphate about per cent. the latter class are similar in composition to the best south carolina river-phosphates, which they much resemble. _lahn phosphate._ phosphate deposits were found at nassau in germany in ; but as the phosphate contained a considerable proportion of iron and alumina, they are not used in this country now, although they are in germany for double superphosphate manufacture. _bordeaux or french phosphate._ similar in quality to lahn phosphate is that obtained in the neighbourhood of bordeaux. _algerian phosphate._ excellent phosphates are now being sent from algeria--some cargoes being as rich as per cent. _crust guanos._ we have already referred to the guanos in the chapter on guano. they are also known under the name of caribbean phosphates, and come from the west india islands. the chief kinds are aruba, curaçao, sombrero, and navassa, the great cayman, redonda, and alta vela. most of them are of high quality, containing from to per cent of phosphate, and are thus suited for the manufacture of high-class superphosphates. some of them, however, contain a considerable proportion of iron and alumina, and are not suitable for this purpose. the redonda and alta vela phosphates consist chiefly of phosphate of alumina. _value of mineral phosphates as a manure._ while it is commonly regarded as unadvisable to use mineral phosphates directly as phosphatic manures, it may well be questioned how far such an opinion is warranted by actual experience. professor jamieson of aberdeen, in his interesting and valuable experiments, has drawn attention to the fact that coprolites in a fine state of division are an extremely valuable source of phosphoric acid for crops, and are a more quickly available source than is commonly supposed. experiments conducted elsewhere with ground coprolites and other mineral phosphates corroborate professor jamieson's conclusions. the successful use of thomas-phosphate has drawn attention to the possibility of profitably applying undissolved mineral phosphate to the soil; and no doubt the practice may in future years be increased. at present, however, with the exception of thomas-phosphate, mineral phosphates alone are used for conversion into superphosphate. footnotes: [ ] since the discovery of the florida deposits of phosphate, the working of the canadian mines has been practically abandoned. [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] these phosphates are now no longer worked. [ ] these deposits were discovered a few years ago; and as they are of considerable extent and high quality, have entirely revolutionised the phosphate market. about , tons are now annually raised in florida. appendix to chapter xii. note (p. ). the following table shows the imports of phosphates into the united kingdom, and the countries of production, during the years - . -----------------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+ | . | . | . | . | . | -----------------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+ | tons. | tons. | tons. | tons. | tons. | united states | , | , | , | , | , | canada | , | , | , | , | , | dutch west indies | | | | | | (curaçao, aruba) | , | , | , | , | , | british west indies | | | | | | (sombrero, &c.) | , | , | , | , | , | spain and portugal | , | , | , | , | , | belgium | , | , | , | , | , | holland | | , | , | , | , | france | , | , | , | , | , | australia | - | | | - | , | germany | | - | - | - | - | hayti (san domingo) | - | , | , | , | , | brazil | - | - | , | - | - | venezuela and guiana | - | - | | - | - | norway | - | - | - | - | - | other countries | | , | , | , | | | | | | | | *florida phosphate. | - | - | - | - | - | carolina phosphate. | - | - | - | - | - | -----------------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+ -----------------------+---------+----------+---------- | . | . | . -----------------------+---------+----------+---------- | tons. | tons. | tons. united states | , | * , | * , canada | , | , | , dutch west indies | | | (curaçao, aruba) | , | , | , british west indies | | | (sombrero, &c.) | , | , | , spain and portugal | - | | belgium | , | , | , holland | , | , | , france | , | , | , australia | - | - | - germany | - | - | - hayti (san domingo) | | , | , brazil | - | - | - venezuela and guiana | - | | - norway | , | , | other countries | , | , | , | | | *florida phosphate. | - | , | , carolina phosphate. | - | , | , -----------------------+---------+----------+---------- chapter xiii. superphosphates. as was mentioned in the chapter on bones, liebig in the year discovered that the effect of adding oil of vitriol, or sulphuric acid, to bones was to render the phosphate they contain soluble. this discovery marked an epoch in the history of artificial manures, and laid the foundation of the now enormous manufacture of superphosphate. in the juries of the london international exhibition published an elaborate report containing an interesting article on the manure trade of great britain, in which it was stated that the annual quantity of superphosphate then made amounted to from , to , tons. now it may be placed not far short of a million tons. probably that made in the united states is considerably more. in the first instance, superphosphate was manufactured by sir john lawes from spent bone-char. this was superseded by coprolites and estremadura phosphorite, suffolk coprolites being for many years the chief material employed. this in turn was succeeded by the richer cambridge coprolites, but of late years coprolites have practically ceased to be a source of superphosphate, the other mineral phosphates mentioned in the previous chapter--such as the south carolina, belgian, somme, &c., phosphates--taking their place. _manufacture of superphosphate._ the manufacture of superphosphate is of too technical a nature to permit of discussion in a work of this kind. it is important, however, that the general principles underlying the process of manufacture and the chemical changes in the phosphate taking place during the process be clearly understood. in the first place, great importance attaches in the manufacture of the superphosphate to the fineness of division of the raw material, and much ingenuity has been spent on apparatus designed for this purpose. the difficulty of grinding the phosphate varies, of course, with the nature of the material used--apatite, for example, being much more difficult to reduce to the necessary fineness than phosphatic guano. the finer the state of division, the more complete will be the decomposition of the phosphate by the acid. mr warington recommends that for first-class work the powder should be so fine as to admit of it passing through a sieve of eighty wires to the inch. after the phosphate is reduced to powder, it is mixed with acid. this takes place in the mixer, which is generally in the form of an iron cylinder furnished in the centre with a revolving shaft, the sulphuric acid used being the ordinary chamber acid (sp. gr. . ). whatever strength of acid is used, there must be a certain quantity of water present to form gypsum. it is to the formation of gypsum in the resulting product that the dryness of the superphosphate is due. the proportion of sulphuric acid used depends on the composition of the phosphate; and here it may be pointed out that the presence of much carbonate of lime is a most important factor in determining the quantity of acid required. the reason of this is, that where carbonate and phosphate of lime are present together, sulphuric acid first acts upon the carbonate, and it is not till this is wholly decomposed that the phosphate can be acted upon. hence mineral phosphates with a large percentage of carbonate of lime do not constitute such an economical material for the manufacture of superphosphate as those in which the percentage of carbonate is small.[ ] a certain amount of heat is necessary for the purpose of enabling a quick decomposition to take place. for this purpose the sulphuric acid added has been previously heated. in the ordinary manufacture of superphosphate, however, this is not considered necessary, as the heat developed by the chemical action between the phosphate and the acid is sufficiently great. the phosphate, after being thoroughly mixed with the acid, is discharged into what is technically known as the pit, a chamber built of brick or concrete. the mixture, which is in a fluid state when it enters the pit, very soon hardens, and is dug out in a day or two. it is next reduced to powder in a disintegrator, and is then ready for use as a manure. _nature of the reaction taking place._ in order to clearly understand the nature of the reaction which takes place when sulphuric acid is added to a phosphatic material, it may be well to say a word or two on the composition of the different compounds of lime and phosphoric acid. _phosphates of lime._ in the various phosphatic manures used in agriculture there are four different kinds of phosphates. in the commonest form, popularly called bone-phosphate, which is the form in which lime and phosphoric acid are combined in bones, guano, and the ordinary mineral phosphates, the lime and phosphoric acid are combined in the form of what is known as tribasic phosphate of lime, or tricalcic phosphate--that is to say, for every equivalent of phosphoric acid there are three equivalents of lime. this may be represented as follows:-- lime } lime > phosphoric acid. lime } or we may also say that for every parts by weight of phosphoric acid there are parts by weight of lime in this form of phosphate. this is the least soluble form of phosphoric acid,[ ] and is the form generally referred to in commercial analyses as insoluble phosphate. when this phosphate is acted upon with sulphuric acid, a soluble phosphate is formed, as liebig first showed, to which the name superphosphate has been given, and which is also known as monobasic phosphate of lime, or monocalcic phosphate. this compound may be represented as containing, instead of three equivalents of lime, only one, the other two equivalents being replaced by water. this compound may be represented as follows:-- lime } water > phosphoric acid. water } in it, for every parts of phosphoric acid, there are only parts of lime. it is soluble in water, and gives to the commercial article known as superphosphate of lime its value. intermediate in composition between these two phosphates there is another known as precipitated phosphate of lime, or dicalcic phosphate (the same as reverted phosphate), which contains two equivalents of lime and one equivalent of water as follows:-- lime } lime > phosphoric acid. water } this compound contains, for every parts of phosphoric acid, parts of lime; and in solubility occupies an intermediate position. lastly, there is a fourth compound of lime and phosphoric acid, which only occurs in one phosphatic manure--viz., phosphatic slag, in which indeed it was first discovered--which consists of four equivalents of lime to one of phosphoric acid, to which the name tetrabasic phosphate of lime or tetracalcic phosphate has been given. its composition may be illustrated as follows:-- lime } lime > phosphoric acid. lime > lime } or, for every parts of phosphoric acid, there are parts of lime. contrary to what we might expect, this phosphate is less insoluble than the ordinary tribasic or bone phosphate. this may be owing to the fact that, in the tetrabasic phosphate, there is more lime present than that which the phosphoric acid can retain with strong chemical affinity.[ ] in the manufacture of superphosphate the tribasic phosphate is converted into the soluble phosphate--the lime, which was formerly in combination with the phosphoric acid, uniting with the sulphuric acid, and forming gypsum.[ ] it was till recently supposed that soluble phosphate and gypsum were the only two resulting products of this decomposition. it has been recently shown, however, by ruffle and others, that this is not, strictly speaking, the case, and that probably a large proportion of free phosphoric acid is formed; in fact, it seems probable that in the first stage of the reaction, only phosphoric acid is produced, and that this subsequently acts upon the undecomposed phosphate, with the production of monocalcic phosphate.[ ] the amount of sulphuric acid which experience has shown it is necessary to add for the successful and economical manufacture of superphosphate, depends on the composition of the raw material employed. the larger the percentage of tribasic phosphate, the larger the quantity of sulphuric acid required for its decomposition; but sometimes even a poor phosphate consumes a large amount of sulphuric acid. this is the case where much calcium carbonate or fluoride is present in the raw phosphate, as both of these compounds require a quantity of acid for their decomposition, which takes place before the decomposition of the phosphate. hence phosphates rich in carbonate of lime are not well suited as economical materials from which to manufacture superphosphate. _reverted phosphates._ a change which is apt to take place in superphosphate after its manufacture is what is known as reversion of the soluble phosphate. thus it is found that on keeping superphosphate for a long time the percentage of soluble phosphate becomes less than it was at first. the rate at which this deterioration of the superphosphate goes on varies in different samples. in a well-made article it is practically inappreciable, whereas in some superphosphates, made from unsuitable materials, it may amount to a considerable percentage. the causes of this reversion are twofold. for one thing, the presence of undecomposed phosphate of lime may cause it. this source of reversion, however, is very much less important than the other, which is the presence of iron and alumina in the raw material. when a soluble phosphate reverts, what takes place is the conversion of the monocalcic phosphate into the dicalcic. now in the first case, where reversion is due to the presence of undecomposed phosphate, the action taking place may be represented as follows:-- lime } } { lime } } lime } phosphoric acid } { water} phosphoric acid } lime } } + { water} } = (one molecule of insoluble } { (one molecule of soluble} phosphate) } { phosphate) } lime } } { lime } lime } phosphoric acid } { lime } phosphoric acid. water} } + { water} (one molecule of reverted } { (one molecule of reverted phosphate) } { phosphate.) it may be mentioned, however, that reversion from this cause probably takes place to a very slight extent in practice.[ ] where reversion is due to the presence of iron and alumina in the raw material, the nature of the reaction is not well understood, and is consequently not so easily demonstrated as in the former case. where iron is present in the form of pyrites, or ferrous silicate, it does not seem to cause reversion. it is only when it is present in the form of oxide--and in most raw phosphatic materials it is generally in this latter form[ ]--that it causes reversion in the phosphate. _value of reverted phosphate._ the value of reverted phosphate is a subject which has given rise to much dispute among chemists. that it has a higher value than the ordinary insoluble phosphate is now admitted; but in this country, in the manure trade, this is not as yet recognised. at first it was thought that it was impossible to estimate its quantity by chemical analysis. this difficulty, however, has been overcome, and it is generally admitted that the ammonium citrate process furnishes an accurate means of determining its amount. both on the continent and in the united states reverted phosphate is recognised as possessing a monetary value in excess of that possessed by the ordinary insoluble phosphate. the result is, that raw phosphates containing iron and alumina to any appreciable extent are not used in this country, although they do find a limited application in america and on the continent. _composition of superphosphates._ superphosphates as manufactured may be divided, generally speaking, into three classes--viz., low class, medium, and high class. the ordinary or medium class contains from to per cent of soluble phosphate; and here it may be pointed out that by soluble phosphate is meant the percentage of tribasic phosphate which has been dissolved--not, as might at first sight be supposed, the percentage of monocalcic phosphate. the lower-class superphosphates are those containing less than per cent, generally to per cent, of soluble phosphate; while the high-class superphosphate may contain from to per cent. for the manufacture of high-class superphosphate only a certain number of raw phosphates are available, such as curaçao and somme phosphates, phosphatic guanos, bone-char, &c. certain processes have been patented for the manufacture of even more concentrated superphosphates, and by them phosphates containing as much as per cent of soluble phosphoric acid--_i.e._, equal to per cent of soluble phosphate--have been prepared. to this class belongs the so-called double superphosphate, manufactured at wetzlar in germany. such a concentrated form of manure is naturally very expensive to manufacture, and is hardly to be recommended for home consumption. where, however, manures have to be conveyed long distances, and the freight is consequently very high, such a concentrated article may be found most economical. _action of superphosphates._ when superphosphate is applied to the soil it is converted into an insoluble state. in short, the process of reversion is carried on on a wholesale scale. this is due to the lime, iron, and alumina salts which the soil contains. in all probability the phosphate is finally converted into a hydrated ferric or aluminic phosphate, in which form it is gradually acted upon by the sap of the plant-roots as required. this being the case, it may be asked, why is superphosphate so much more rapid in its action than insoluble phosphate; or why should we be at the trouble and expense of dissolving the phosphate if it has to become insoluble again in the soil? this question is one of very great importance, for the answer to it furnishes, in our opinion, the key to the whole phosphate question. when superphosphate is added to the soil, being soluble in water, it is soon dissolved and carried down by the rain into its pores, and becomes thoroughly mixed with the soil-particles. it is thus soon fixed in the soil, beyond the risk of being washed away. the result is, that the phosphate is obtained in a state of division infinitely more minute than could ever be obtained by mechanical grinding, and is, further, most intimately mixed with the particles of the soil. it is this intimate mixture of the phosphate with the particles of the soil, and its minute state of division, that constitute the only reason for rendering superphosphate superior in its action to even the most finely ground insoluble phosphates. this opinion is supported by the fact, that although the chemist has imitated nature in this matter so far as to manufacture precipitated phosphate, he has failed, as a rule, in getting as favourable results with it as with superphosphate. although the mechanical state of division of the manufactured precipitated phosphate is probably as fine as that obtained by nature from the superphosphate, it is impossible to obtain so intimate a mixture with the soil-particles, and hence the results obtained are different. for these reasons it will be easily seen that the rate of action of the superphosphate must always be quicker than that of any other form of phosphatic manure. the phosphate is everywhere distributed in the soil. the plant-roots are thus furnished with a continuous supply throughout their growth, and micro-organisms, which require for their development a supply of this necessary plant-food, are propagated. a regularity in the plant's growth is thus secured, which is of great importance. but while admitting this, there are many cases in which this greater quickness of action does not render soluble phosphate the most economical form. the nature of the crop, as well as the nature of the soil, may in many cases be such as to render the application of the cheaper insoluble phosphate more economical. it is imperative that the early growth of some crops be hastened as much as possible by a ready supply of easily assimilable plant-food, in order to enable them to successfully sustain the attack of certain pests to which they are liable to succumb. this, for example, is notably the case with turnips. in such a case there can be no doubt that the value of soluble phosphate to the young plants is very great, as it enables them to survive this critical period. _action of superphosphate sometimes unfavourable._ but even in this case there may be other conditions which render insoluble phosphate a preferable manure. such a case is where the soil is of a very light nature and is deficient in lime. in this case the acid superphosphate, not having the necessary base to combine with, may prove even hurtful to the young plants. according to the late dr voelcker, a concentrated superphosphate may produce a smaller crop than a fertiliser containing only a quarter as much soluble phosphoric acid, when applied to root-crops on sandy soils, greatly deficient in lime. cases such as the above, however, are extremely rare; and we may say that, in the case of root-crops generally, superphosphate must be regarded as of special value. _application of superphosphate._ in any case, superphosphate ought to be applied to a soil some time before it is likely to be assimilated by the plant, in order to allow neutralisation of its acid character to be fully effected before the plant's roots come in contact with it. thus professor s. w. johnson, one of the greatest living american authorities, states it as his opinion that recent investigations tend to show that soluble and reverted (or precipitated) phosphates are, upon the whole, about equally valuable as plant-food, and of nearly equal commercial value. but as sir john lawes, in quoting professor johnson to the above effect, remarks, this opinion is based on an experience of american agriculture, in which country soluble phosphate is chiefly applied to cereal crops, while in this country it is chiefly applied to turnips. in the case of cereal crops, the importance of a speedy early growth is not so great, as we have already pointed out, as it is in turnips, where the danger to the young plants from the ravages of the turnip-fly is such that the growth of even a day or two may make a very considerable difference. _value of insoluble phosphate._ a consideration of the action of superphosphate, then, throws a good deal of light on the conditions which determine the value of insoluble phosphates when applied to the soil, and shows that the state of division, intimacy of mixture with soil-particles, and the nature of the soil, are the determining factors. insoluble phosphates, as we shall have occasion to see when discussing basic slag, have their best action on soils poor in lime and rich in organic matter. tables have been drawn up with a view to furnishing a guide for the value of phosphoric acid in different manures. in the appendix[ ] we give those of wolff for , and an american table, drawn up for . the comparative values of mineral phosphates, as well as peruvian guano and bone-dust, will be further referred to in the following chapter. _rate at which superphosphate is applied._ the rate at which superphosphate is applied to the soil varies in different parts of the country. in england to cwt. per acre is considered an average dressing; whereas in many parts of scotland it is applied in as large quantities as to cwt. per acre to the turnip crop. the reason why so much heavier dressings can be advantageously given in northern parts of this country is owing to the much longer period of unchecked growth. in the more southern districts, where the rainfall is less, mildew is almost certain to appear when the sowing is as early as required for a maximum crop. with it, as with other manures, the quantity must be determined by the conditions of its application, and the amount of other manure applied. footnotes: [ ] this holds true, it may be mentioned, with regard to the application of certain manures, such as bone-char, to the soil. bone-char was for a long time used in france as a manure without being dissolved. the action of such a manure, containing a considerable percentage of carbonate of lime, is slower than its action would be were it pure phosphate of lime, as the carbonate of lime is first acted upon (as in the case of superphosphate manufacture) by the soil acids. [ ] the solubility of tribasic phosphate, of course, is not always equal in different manures. for example, the phosphate in apatite, owing to the crystalline structure of that mineral, is not nearly so soluble as the phosphate in phosphatic guanos, although in both cases its chemical composition is practically the same. [ ] for formulæ of the different phosphates, see appendix, note i., p. . [ ] for chemical formulæ, showing reaction, see appendix, note ii., p. . [ ] of course it is well known that free phosphoric acid is obtained by acting upon phosphate of lime with an excess of sulphuric acid; but the point above referred to as having been recently discovered is, that when phosphate of lime is acted upon, even by a small quantity of sulphuric acid, free phosphoric acid is formed. [ ] for chemical formulæ showing this reversion, see appendix, note iii., p. . [ ] for chemical theories on reversion of soluble phosphate by iron and alumina, see appendix, note iv., p. . [ ] see appendix, note v., p. . appendix to chapter xiii. note i. (p. ). the formulæ, and molecular and percentage composition, of the different phosphates, are given in the following table:-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | composition in terms of-- +--------------------------+------------------- | molecular weight. | per cent. ---------------+-------------+-----+------+------+------+-----+------+------ | | | |phos- | | | |phos- name. | symbol. |lime.|water.|phoric|total.|lime.|water.|phoric | | | |acid. | | | |acid. ---------------+-------------+-----+------+------+------+-----+------+------ tri- or bone- | cao, | | | | | | | phosphate. | p_{ }o_{ } | | | | | . | . | . bi- or di- | cao, h_{ }o,| | | | | | | phosphate. | p_{ }o_{ } | | | | | . | . | . mono- or super-|cao, h_{ }o,| | | | | | | phosphate. | p_{ }o_ | | | | | . | . | . ---------------+-------------+-----+------+------+------+-----+------+------ note ii. (p. ). when sulphuric acid is added to tricalcic phosphate, the following reaction takes place:-- ( .) cao, p_{ }o_{ } + (h_{ }o, so_{ }) (tricalcic phosphate), (sulphuric acid), = (cao, so_ ) + cao, h_{ }o, p_{ }o_{ } (gypsum), (monocalcic phosphate). ( .) cao, p_{ }o_{ } + (h_{ }o, so_{ }) = cao, so_{ } + h_{ }o, p_{ }o_{ }, or h_{ }po_{ }. note iii. (p. ). this equation gives the chemical reaction taking place when soluble phosphate is reverted, owing to the presence of undissolved phosphate:---- cao, p_{ }o_{ } + cao, h_{ }o, p_{ }o_{ } (tricalcic phosphate), monocalcic phosphate, = cao, h_{ }o, p_{ }o_{ } + cao, h_{ }o, p_{ }o_{ } (dicalcic phosphate), (dicalcic phosphate). note iv. (p. ). "just what the reactions are which are produced by the iron and alumina compounds has never been made out very clearly. but some idea of them may be gained from the following suggestions, which were thrown out by the english chemist patterson. suppose the sulphuric acid has dissolved a quantity of iron or alumina, then we may have the reaction:---- fe_{ }o_{ }, so_{ } + cao, h_{ }o, p_{ }o_{ } = fe_{ }o_{ }, p_{ }o_{ } + cao, so_{ } + (h_{ }o, so_{ }), and the free acid thus formed would proceed to dissolve more iron or alumina from the rock that had previously escaped decomposition, and the reaction here formulated would occur again and again. here we have a cumulative process continually increasing the quantity of insoluble fe_{ }o_{ }, p_{ }o_{ }, and diminishing in the same proportion the soluble p_{ }o_{ }. again, we may have simply---- fe_{ }o_{ } + (cao, h_{ }o, p_{ }o_{ }) = (fe_{ }o_{ }, p_{ }o_{ }) + cao, p_{ }o_{ }; where three molecules of the soluble phosphoric acid are made to revert to the insoluble state at one blow. "in case the iron in the original rock were in the state of ferrous oxide, perhaps the following reaction might occur:---- (feo, so_{ }) + o + cao, h_{ }o, p_{ }o_{ } + cao, p_{ }o_{ } = (fe_{ }o_{ }, p_{ }o_{ }) + (cao, so_{ }). in all these equations, except the last, alumina would serve as well as oxide of iron."--(_vide_ storer's 'agricultural chemistry,' vol. i. pp. , .) note v. (p. ). the following table shows the relative trade values of phosphoric acid in different manures:-- i.--wolff, . phosphate soluble in water (as in super) precipitated phosphate, peruvian guano reverted phosphate, finest steamed bone-dust fish-guano, poudrette phosphatic guanos (baker island), wood-ashes coarser bone-dust, powdered animal charcoal, bone-ash coarse fragments of bone, powdered phosphorite and coprolite, thomas-slag, farmyard manure ii.--american, . phosphate soluble in water phosphate soluble in ammonium citrate fine bone-dust, powdered fish fine medium bone medium bone coarse bone chapter xiv. thomas-phosphate or basic slag. in this substance we have a most important addition to our phosphatic manures. it has been in the market since , and the consumption alone in germany in amounted to nearly , tons. in this country it is only now beginning to be used to any extent. _its manufacture._ _thomas-slag_ is a bye-product obtained in the manufacture of steel by what is known as the "basic" process. in the year an improvement in the well-known "bessemer" process was patented by messrs gilchrist & thomas. it must be explained that in the manufacture of steel from pig-iron certain impurities in the raw material have to be got rid of in order to produce a good steel. among these impurities one of the most important is _phosphorus_. this is owing to the fact that even a very small percentage of phosphoric acid in steel has the effect of rendering it brittle. the extraction of the phosphorus from the raw material was formerly, however, attended with very serious difficulties, and had the effect naturally of rendering steel a costly article, inasmuch as only the purer kinds of pig-iron could be used for the purpose. by the introduction in , however, of the "thomas-gilchrist" or "basic" process, these difficulties were very largely overcome, and the employment of even such impure irons as the cleveland (containing comparatively a large percentage of phosphorus) was rendered possible, and the price of steel consequently generally very much reduced. the process consists of submitting the molten pig-iron to a very great heat in a pear-shaped vessel (known technically as the "converter"). this is open at the top, and is supported on hinges, which permit of its being moved so as to pour off the scum which rises to the surface at the end of the operation, and which, we may explain, consists of "basic slag." in the original process the sides of the "converter" were lined with fire-bricks, consisting largely of silica. this process was known as the "acid" process. in the "thomas-gilchrist" process, however, the sides of the "converter" are lined with _lime_ (dolomitic limestone being largely used), lime being also added to the pig-iron. an air-blast is injected through the molten mass, and the impurities are burnt, or oxidised as it is chemically termed. the phosphorus in the iron is thus converted into phosphoric acid, and, uniting with the lime, forms phosphate of lime, which rises, as we have already said, to the surface in the form of a scum, and is separated from the steel by being poured off. _not at first used._ this, then, is how the _thomas-slag_ is obtained. it did not seem, however, for some years after the introduction of this ingenious process, to have struck any one that this rich phosphatic bye-product might prove a valuable addition to our artificial fertilisers. the result was, that the thomas-slag was treated as another of the only too numerous valueless bye-products which seem to be necessarily incidental to most of our chemical and other manufactures, and was allowed to accumulate in large quantities without being used for any purpose. _discovery of its value._ in some short articles published in germany on the subject were the means of first drawing the attention of the public to its importance as a manure. during the years and numerous experiments were carried out on the subject in the same country; and from then up till the present hour it has become more and more extensively used in germany, till in , as already stated, its consumption amounted to nearly , tons. _composition._ it consists mainly of phosphate of lime, silicate of lime, free lime, free magnesia, and oxides of iron and manganese. its composition, of course, naturally varies; but the following may be taken as an average analysis:[ ]-- per cent. *phosphoric acid lime in combination with phosphoric, silicic, sulphuric, and carbonic acids free lime oxides of iron *equal to tricalcic phosphate as a rule, the phosphoric acid varies considerably, ranging from to per cent--that is, from to per cent tricalcic phosphate. this is owing to the difference in the percentage of phosphorus in the raw material and the quantity of lime added. attempts have been made in germany during the last two or three years to obtain a slag richer in phosphoric acid than that obtained heretofore, and a process for this purpose has been patented by professor scheibler. this consists of a slight modification in the ordinary process. instead of treating the pig-iron with an excessive quantity of lime, the amount added is not sufficient to effect the complete dephosphorisation of the iron. the resulting slag is very rich in phosphoric acid, and is correspondingly poor in iron. the iron is then again treated with fresh lime, and the phosphorus completely removed, while the same lime may be used over again. such slag forms a very much more concentrated phosphatic manure than the ordinary slag, and is known as _patent phosphate meal_. a point which not only renders the slag a product of peculiar interest from a chemical point of view, but has a most important bearing on its value as a manure, is the nature of the compound formed by the union of the lime with the phosphoric acid. in the ordinary so-called raw phosphates, such as bone-meal, bone-ash, coprolites, &c., the lime and phosphoric acid are combined in the form of what is known, in chemical phraseology, as _tribasic phosphate of lime_. that is to say, that for every equivalent of phosphoric acid there are three equivalents of lime. now it was naturally concluded at first that the tribasic phosphate was the form in which these two substances existed in the slag. this, however, was found out not to be the case, in the following way. on allowing the slag to cool, it was found that small but perfectly defined crystals were formed. these crystals, by careful analysis, were shown, first by hilgenstock, to consist of a form of phosphate of lime hitherto unknown, in which four equivalents of lime were combined with one equivalent of phosphoric acid, and which was therefore called "tetrabasic phosphate." _processes for preparing slag._ as soon as the idea of utilising the slag as a manure was suggested, various plans for extracting its phosphoric acid, and rendering it available as plant-food, were devised. these were deemed necessary, it was thought, by the very insoluble nature of the phosphates in the slag, as well as by the supposed injurious action which would be exerted on plant-life by the protoxide of iron it contained. accordingly, a large number of patents were taken out, "covering almost every conceivable method for treating the slag, whether practicable or not. they all in the main are combinations or variations of the following processes:-- " . _preliminary preparation of the slag._ (_a_) by treating molten, or otherwise, with superheated steam, or cooling when hot with water, to reduce it to small pieces or to a fragile state. (_b_) grinding. (_c_) treating with water to wash out free lime, or with sugar solution. (_d_) roasting in the air, or with some oxidising agent. " . _solution of the slag._ (_a_) _completely_ in weak or strong acids (hydrochloric, sulphuric, &c.) (_b_) _partially_, so as to dissolve the phosphates and silicates of lime, and leave most of the iron and manganese oxides. " . _precipitation_ of the phosphoric acid, with lime or iron salts: or, "processes in which the slag is smelted with charcoal, to reduce phosphates to phosphides, treated with acid, and the phosphuretted hydrogen burnt to phosphoric acid; and, "processes in which the slag is fused with soda or potash salts,--caustic, chlorides, sulphates, carbonates,--with or without steam being forced through, to form soluble alkaline phosphates."[ ] many of these processes were tried; but it was found by experiment that the best and most economical way was by applying the slag direct to the ground in a state of very fine powder. experiments further showed that it had _not_ the injurious effect on vegetation which it was feared it would have from the protoxide of iron it contained. the discovery that its phosphoric acid existed, as has been already explained, as a tetrabasic phosphate of lime, has strengthened the opinion that this is the best method of application. a good deal has been found to depend upon the fineness of the ground slag, with the result that it is now commonly sold on a mechanical as well as a chemical analysis--_i.e._, the slag is guaranteed to pass through a sieve of a certain fineness. _solubility of slag._ professor wagner of darmstadt has carried out some extremely interesting experiments on the solubility of slag. he found that very finely powdered slag was dissolved in carbonic acid water to the extent of per cent, while, similarly treated, phosphorite only dissolved to the extent of per cent.[ ] another very important solvent is _citrate of ammonia_. reverted (or precipitated) phosphate is entirely soluble in it, and phosphate soluble in it ought to be valued as worth more than that which is not. now, the solubility of thomas-slag in citrate of ammonia was found by professor wagner to be no less than per cent, while that of phosphorite only amounted to per cent. these results were corroborated by professor s. w. johnson, who found that of the . per cent of phosphoric acid contained in a sample of basic slag, no less than . per cent was soluble in ammonium citrate, while a finely ground sample of phosphatic rock yielded, on analysis, only . per cent soluble in citrate of ammonia, of a total of . per cent phosphoric acid which it contained. professor fleischer has also tested the comparative solubility of basic slag and phosphorite, by boiling them in a solution of acetic acid. the former was found to have been dissolved to the extent of per cent, while the latter to only per cent. a highly interesting and most important experiment was performed by mr heinrich albert, of biebrich. one gramme of basic slag and grammes of peat were mixed together in a litre of water, and it was found that, after standing for fourteen days, per cent of the phosphoric acid contained in the slag was rendered soluble. in the above experiments it was found that the _fineness of grinding_ had a marked effect on the solubility of the slag, and that the finer it was ground the greater was its solubility. this has been further demonstrated in professor wagner's practical experiments. from these it was found that finely ground slag has an action _four times_ as quick as coarse slag; but that, as far as practical results were concerned, there seemed to be a limit to the fineness to which it was advisable to grind the slag, as slag above a certain fineness did not give better results than a coarser slag. at any rate, he found that slag of a fineness so great that it all passed through a gauze sieve, gave no better results in his experiments than slag which left per cent behind. we may say, however, that the _finer the slag is ground, the greater will its activity as a manure be_; and that a certain degree of fineness is absolutely necessary to constitute it an active fertiliser. as professor wagner's experiments are among the most valuable and complete carried out on basic slag, we shall give a somewhat detailed account of them. _darmstadt experiments._ professor wagner's experiments were carried out on such different kinds of crops as flax, rape, wheat, rye, barley, peas, and white mustard, and the object of the experiments was to ascertain the comparative activity as fertilisers of superphosphate, basic slag of different degrees of fineness, peruvian guano, damped bone-meal, and very finely ground coprolites. in order to obtain a correct estimate of the relative value of these different forms of phosphatic manures, it was necessary to render the nitrogen in the bone-meal and the nitrogen and potash contained by the peruvian guano inactive--_i.e._, to limit the test strictly to phosphoric acid. this was done by adding to the super, basic slag, and coprolites, quantities of nitrogen and potash equal to those contained by the other manures. there was further added to all the experiments (the unmanured ones, of course, as well) an excess of nitrogen and potash. in this way the increase in returns could only be due to the phosphoric acid. the general results obtained from these experiments may be summed up as follows: taking the activity of "super" to be represented by , then the relative activity of-- basic slag of no. [ ] fineness is basic slag, no. [ ] peruvian guano basic slag, no. [ ] bone-meal coprolites from these results the value of the commercial article has been attempted to be ascertained. as it contains per cent or thereby of fine meal and per cent of coarse, its activity may be stated to be , or half as active as super. thus cwt. of basic slag is equal to cwt. of super. this only refers to the first year's effect. professor wagner has made further experiments as to the after-effects of the different manures, with the result that he has found that the after-effects of the basic slag are even _better_ than those of the "super." this stands to reason, for if twice as much phosphoric acid be added in the form of basic slag as is added in the form of "super," and the effect of the first year is similar--that is, the same quantity of phosphoric acid is assimilated by the plant from the soil in both cases--there is naturally more phosphoric acid left behind in the soil manured with basic slag than in that manured with superphosphate of lime. for example, if lb. of super has the same effect in the first year as lb. of basic slag, and it is found that only lb. of the super and the basic slag have been assimilated the first year by the plant, it is only natural to conclude that the remaining lb. of the basic slag will have a better after-effect than the remaining lb. of super. this has been actually proved to have been the case in professor's wagner's experiments. the following are the results of some experiments which professor wagner has carried out on the after-effects of different manures:-- out of parts of phosphoric acid, there was removed by the first year's crop-- super peruvian guano bone-meal coprolites thomas-meal-- no. fineness no. " no. " out of parts of phosphoric acid left by the first crop, there was removed by the three succeeding crops-- super peruvian guano bone-meal coprolites thomas-meal-- no. fineness no. " no. " numerous other experiments have been carried out by various experimenters in different parts of germany which it is unnecessary to cite here. none, however, are so complete as those of professor wagner. _results of other experiments._ in this country experiments have been carried out at rothamsted, cirencester, downton, bangor, and by dr aitken at the highland and agricultural society's stations, as well as elsewhere. the results of these various experiments naturally differ considerably, this being owing to the difference in the nature of the soils upon which the experiments were carried out, as well as the different degrees of fineness of the slag used. they all, however, serve to confirm professor wagner's general results. the results obtained in scotland by dr aitken at the highland society's stations were especially favourable to basic slag as a phosphatic manure. the experiments were carried out on turnips, and it was found that the thomas-slag was, weight for weight, superior to superphosphate. it may be added that the slag used in these experiments was rich in phosphoric acid, and was in an unusually fine state of division. experiments carried out by the author have proved slag to be, on various scottish soils, one of the most economical phosphatic manures to apply to turnips.[ ] we will sum up, in conclusion, the deductions which may be fairly drawn from the results of all the above-mentioned experiments as to the value of basic cinder as a manure. _soils most suited for slag._ although its action is undoubtedly more favourable on some soils than others, it may be broadly stated that generally its phosphoric acid is _half as valuable_ as that in soluble phosphate. the soils on which it will have the most marked effect will be those of a _peaty_ nature, _poor_ in lime, but _rich_ in _organic matter_. the beneficial results obtained by an application of lime to peaty soils are well known. as the slag contains a large percentage of free lime, it thus performs on such soils a double function. on meadow-lands, all kinds of pasture-lands (if not of too dry a character), and clay soils poor in lime, its action has been shown to be especially favourable. of different kinds of crops, those best suited to benefit from the slag as a phosphatic manure are those of the leguminous kind. this arises from the fact that their period of growth is longer than that of most other crops. _rate of application._ as to the rate per acre at which the slag ought to be applied, there will naturally be a difference of opinion. professor wrightson, of downton agricultural college, recommends that it should be applied at the rate of from to cwt. per acre. this, of course, is very liberal manuring. we must remember, however, that phosphatic manures, unlike nitrogenous manures, and to some extent potash manures, may be applied in even excessive quantities without any risk of loss. it is impossible to measure out our phosphate manures in the same accurate manner as we measure out our nitrogen. it is safer, therefore, and on that account more economical in the long-run, to apply our phosphate in excessive quantity than the reverse. the reason of this may be shortly explained. the phosphoric acid which is naturally present in most soils is with difficulty soluble. only a small quantity is yielded daily to the plant. this quantity may, under favourable climatic conditions, be sufficient; but these favourable influences never last very long at a time. for three weeks, perhaps, the plant may experience drought, and during this period it takes up no phosphoric acid, and its growth practically comes to a standstill; but this period of drought is followed by rain and warm weather, and the plant, if it is to be ripe by harvest-time, must make up for lost time. it must grow as much the next few days under these favourable climatic conditions as it would have grown under normal conditions in double or treble the time. in order to do so, however, it must be able to obtain plenty of phosphoric acid, and this is only possible where there is a decided excess of phosphoric acid present in the soil. the richness of a soil, therefore, in phosphoric acid, must be such that it is not only able to supply the ordinary wants of the plant, but to provide an excess when such an excess will be needed; for one must remember that the amount of plant-substance formed in the course of a few days under favourable conditions is very great, and that the amount consequently of phosphoric acid which plants assimilate during that period must also be very considerable. _method of application._ in conclusion, as to the method of application of the slag, agriculturists must be _warned against mixing it with sulphate of ammonia_; for if this is done, a _considerable loss of ammonia_ will ensue, set free from the sulphate by the action of the free lime which the thomas-slag contains. with nitrate of soda and potash salts it may be freely mixed. such mixtures, however, are apt to form themselves into little balls, which soon become very hard. they should therefore only be mixed shortly before use. to overcome this difficulty, professor wagner recommends the mixture of a little peat or sawdust with the slag. footnotes: [ ] see appendix, p. . [ ] _vide_ paper on "basic slag: its formation." by stead and ribsdale. 'journal of the iron and steel institute,' , p. . [ ] _vide_ professor wagner's pamphlet, 'der düngewerth und die rationelle verwendung der thomas schlacke,' darmstadt, . [ ] no. fineness was such as passed entirely through a fine gauze sieve of wires to the linear inch. [ ] no. fineness was such as passed entirely through the regular standard sieve--_i.e._, containing wires to the linear inch. [ ] no. was what would not pass through the standard sieve. [ ] 'transactions of the highland and agricultural society,' ; 'chemical news,' . appendix to chapter xiv. note (p. ). for those more particularly interested, we append a full analysis of the slag, taken from messrs stead and ribsdale's paper in the 'journal of the iron and steel institute,' , vol. i. p. :-- lime . magnesia . alumina . peroxide of iron . protoxide of iron . protoxide of manganese . protoxide of vanadium . silica . sulphur } . calcium } . sulphuric anhydride . phosphoric acid . ----- . chapter xv. potassic manures. _relative importance._ in chapter vi. we pointed out that of the three manurial ingredients potash was the one most abundantly occurring, and that, consequently, the necessity of adding it in the form of an artificial manure existed less frequently than in the case of nitrogen or phosphoric acid. it was further pointed out that, under the ordinary conditions of agriculture, a greater restoration to the soil of the potash removed in the crops was made in the straw used in farmyard manure than was the case with regard to the other two ingredients. despite these facts, there are many cases where the addition of potassic manures is of the highest importance in increasing plant-growth. it will be well, therefore, to devote a little space to considering our different potassic manures and their respective action. _scottish soils supplied with potash._ potassic manures are not so valuable in this country since experience has shown that most scottish soils are abundantly supplied with this manurial ingredient. moreover, under the conditions of most european farming, there seems to be a steady gain to the soil of potash. in america, however, the action of potash as a manure seems to be more strikingly illustrated. indeed, wherever forage crops or straw are sold off the farm in large quantities, or where beets, cabbages, carrots, potatoes, onions, &c., are also grown in large quantities, the necessity for potash manuring generally arises. _sources of potassic manures._ the value of potash as a manure first came to be recognised from the favourable action of wood-ashes. of course their favourable action is not due solely to potash, as they contain, in addition to the other ash ingredients of the plant, phosphates; and their value as a manure may also be said to depend not a little on their indirect action. they contain a certain percentage of caustic alkali, which promotes the decomposition of the nitrogenous matter of the soil. but making due allowance for these other valuable properties, the chief value of wood-ashes is undoubtedly due to the potash they contain. hence the use of the commercial article called _potash_, which is a mixture of potassium carbonate and hydrate, and which is obtained from wood-ashes, was formerly common to a considerable extent as a manure, especially for clover. _barilla_, a rich potassic manure prepared by burning certain strand plants, especially the saltwort, was also in the past largely exported from sicily and spain. _kelp_, a product got by burning sea-weed in scotland, is also a rich potassic manure. since, however, the discovery of the stassfurt mines, all potassic manures have come from these. _stassfurt potash salts._ huge salt deposits exist at stassfurt in germany. they have been formed by the evaporation of an inland sea. salt was first discovered in these deposits in , but for long the presence of potash salts was little suspected, and it was not until that the potash salts were worked. we have already, in the appendix to chapter vi., given a list of the chief potash minerals occurring in the stassfurt deposits. these minerals are found in layers, the lowest layer consisting of almost pure salt; while immediately above this we have a layer of salt mixed with the mineral polyhallite (containing potassium sulphate) of about feet thick. above this last layer there is a layer of about feet, containing kieserite (magnesium sulphate) mixed with potassium and magnesium chlorides; and above this again is a layer ( feet) of carnallite, which furnishes the chief source of the potash salts used for manurial purposes. at first the crude salts, as obtained direct from the deposits, were sold as manures under the name of _abraum_ salts. now, however, they are purified. of potash salts in some , tons were exported from stassfurt for manurial purposes. of these salts there may be mentioned, viz., kainit, an impure form of the sulphate, containing on an average about per cent of potash, and the muriate and the sulphate--both salts, in a more or less pure form, being used. a word or two may be added on the effect of the two forms of potash--viz., as the sulphate and as the muriate. _relative merits of sulphate and muriate of potash._ it is a well-known fact that muriate of potash, far from having a beneficial effect on certain crops, is actually harmful. of these, sugar-beets, potatoes, and tobacco may be mentioned. in the case of beets it seems to have an effect in lessening the percentage of crystallisable sugar, while potatoes are rendered waxy. with regard to the tobacco-plant, it seems to impair the value of the leaf from the smoker's point of view. that this deleterious action is due to the form in which the potash is present, and not to the potash itself, seems to be pretty clear, since potash in the form of sulphate has not this deleterious effect on these plants. another objection which has been urged against muriate of potash is that, when applied as a manure, it is apt to give rise to the formation of calcium chloride,--a compound which is distinctly hurtful to many plants. a similar charge cannot be brought against sulphate of potash, since gypsum, which is the chief compound it is likely to give rise to, is of much value, as we have already pointed out, as an indirect manure. on the whole, therefore, sulphate of potash seems to be the safest form in which to add potash. unfortunately, however, most of the commercial sulphates are very impure, and contain generally considerable quantities of muriate. in favour of the muriate, it may be said that it is the more concentrated manure, and that it diffuses better in the soil than the sulphate--a point of great importance. it has, moreover, been used without any bad effect for clover, corn, grass, and some root crops. _application of potash manures._ the extreme tenacity with which the soil-particles fix potash salts, when applied as manures, is a point which ought to be borne in mind in their application. this, as we have just noticed, is greater in the case of the sulphate than in the case of muriate, and it has been observed that certain other fertilisers seem to exercise a considerable influence in hindering their fixation. among these may be mentioned bone-meal and farmyard manure. nitrate of soda also seems to increase the diffusibility of potash salts. conversely, potash salts seem to help to fix ammonia. for the above reasons potash manures ought to be applied to the soil a considerable period before they are likely to be used by the crop. there is little risk of any serious loss taking place owing to rain. autumn application is generally recommended. even in very light soils it has been proved in the norfolk experiments that autumn application has an immense advantage over spring application. it has been found that where potash is applied as sulphate, little sulphuric acid is absorbed by the plant. _soils and crops suited for potash manures._ of soils best suited for potash manures, it has been found that light soils, and those largely charged with peaty organic matter (such as the moorland soils of germany), are most benefited; while on heavy clayey soils the percentage of potash which these latter contain is already sufficiently abundant for the needs of plants. at flitcham the value of potash on chalk soils has been strikingly demonstrated. of crops, it is now pretty generally acknowledged that those of the leguminous order are most benefited by potash. especially in the case of clover has potash always proved itself a manure worth applying. _rate of application._ potash is best applied in small quantities. from to cwt. of the muriate or sulphate is a common amount, and from to cwt. of kainit. chapter xvi. minor artificial manures. in addition to the manures which have been discussed in previous chapters, there are a number of minor manures which are used to a very much smaller extent--dried blood, hoofs, horns, &c. among these one of the most valuable is dried blood. fresh blood, containing per cent of water, has from . to per cent of nitrogen, about . per cent of phosphoric acid, and about . per cent of alkalies. when dried it forms a very concentrated and valuable nitrogenous manure, which has long been used in france. the commercial article contains, on an average, about per cent of nitrogen, and slightly over per cent of phosphoric acid. when mixed with the soil it ferments, and the nitrogen it contains is converted into ammonia. although not so quick-acting a manure as nitrate of soda or sulphate of ammonia, it can by no means be described, as is done in ordinary agricultural text-books, as a slow-acting manure. its nitrogen may be regarded as of equal value to that in peruvian guano. it is peculiarly suited for horticulture, and is chiefly used in this country as a manure for hops. it has also been used with beneficial results for wheat, grass, and turnips. as a manure it is best suited for sandy or loamy soils. considerable quantities are exported to the sugar-growing colonies as a manure for sugar-cane. manures are made from other animal refuse. it may be mentioned that lean flesh (containing per cent of water) has about to per cent of nitrogen,. per cent of alkalies, and . per cent of phosphoric acid; that is to say, a ton of lean flesh would contain about lb. of nitrogen and lb. of phosphoric acid. in air-dried flesh, according to payen and boussingault (containing - / per cent of moisture), there is per cent of nitrogen. flesh, therefore, is, when properly composted, a valuable nitrogenous manure. dried flesh is generally made into a manure called meat-meal guano, the composition of which we have already referred to in the chapter on guano.[ ] hoofs, horns, hair, bristles, and wool, wool-waste and the intestines of animals, have been used as manures. hoofs and horns form a regular source of artificial nitrogenous manure; the latter being obtained as a bye-product in the manufacture of combs and other articles. they are in the form of a fine powder; and in order to increase their rate of action, which is very slow, they are often composted in america with horse-manure before use. they have also been composted with slaked lime. there can be no doubt that such treatment increases very considerably their value. their percentage of nitrogen seems to vary very much according to the kind of animal from which they are derived. in nine samples of horn the nitrogen was found to vary from - / to - / per cent; giving an average of - / per cent. the nitrogen seems rarely to exceed per cent. the amount of phosphoric acid they contain has been found by various investigators to range from to per cent. s. w. johnson found only from . to . per cent in buffalo-horn shavings. in france what is known as "torrefied" horn has been used. this is horn which has been subjected to the action of steam. the nitrogen in this material is considered to be more active than in ordinary horn. according to way, horns have been used for the hop crop with good results. ground hoof is very similar in composition to horn, and contains about to per cent of nitrogen. considerable quantities are now used. it must be remembered, however, that horns, hoofs, hair, bristles, &c., although rich in nitrogen, possess a comparatively low manurial value. the home production of these articles may be estimated at to tons. _scutch._ scutch is the name given to a manure made from the waste products incidental to the manufacture of glue and the dressing of skins. it contains about per cent of nitrogen, and is manufactured in london to the extent of several thousand tons annually. _shoddy and wool-waste._ shoddy, which is a manure made from waste-wool products, is a material largely manufactured in this country, and which was formerly (it is now used to a considerably less extent) used to a large extent as a manure. its annual production amounts to about , tons. there are three qualities,--the first containing to per cent of nitrogen; the second, to per cent; and the third, to per cent. shoddy is by no means a very valuable manure. woollen-waste products were formerly much richer in nitrogen than is now the case. this is due to the fact of the adulteration with cotton, now so prevalent in the manufacture of woollen goods. pure woollen rags should contain to per cent of nitrogen. it has been strongly recommended to treat woollen waste with caustic alkali before being used as a manure, in order to render their nitrogen more quickly available; and there is a good deal to recommend this treatment. when wool-waste is applied as a manure, it should in every case be in autumn, so as to allow as long a period as possible to elapse before it is required for the plant's growth. leather has also been used as a manure. its nitrogen may be stated at from to per cent; and it may safely be described as of all materials used as nitrogenous manures the least valuable. leather is, from its very nature, admirably adapted to resist decomposition when applied to the soil, and unless it is reduced to a very fine condition, might be trusted to remain undecomposed for a long period. torrefied leather, however, is probably of greater value. it is obtained in the same way as torrefied horn, already referred to--namely, by treatment with steam. the grease and fatty matters which so largely aid it in resisting decomposition being extracted, it is much better suited for manurial purposes than ordinary leather. torrefied leather contains from to per cent of nitrogen. _soot._ a manure which has long been used and highly esteemed is soot. obtained in the usual way, it generally contains some per cent of nitrogen, chiefly in the form of sulphate of ammonia, and small quantities of potash and phosphates. a varying proportion of the nitrogen is present in the form of ammonia salts; and this undoubtedly confers upon soot its manurial value. it has long been used as a top-dressing for young grain and grass, and has been applied at the rate of from to bushels per acre. it has an indirect value as a slug-destroyer. many of the above-mentioned manures, of comparatively low value, will probably be less used in the future than they have been in the past, owing to the more abundant supplies of nitrate of soda and ammonia salts which are now available. many of these substances have probably been used in mixed manures. footnotes: [ ] see p. . chapter xvii. sewage as a manure. the value of sewage as a manure has been in the past enormously overrated, and much misunderstanding has existed on the part of the public on the question of the profitableness of the disposal of town sewage as an agricultural manure. not a few of the erroneous opinions prevalent in the past regarding sewage have been due to statements made by scientific and other writers as to the enormous wealth lost to the world by many of the present methods of sewage disposal. fortunately, however, the sewage question is now increasingly regarded as a question, in the first instance, of sanitary interest. as much has been written on the subject, and many schemes have been devised, at the expense of much ingenuity, for utilising its manurial properties, it may be desirable here to say a few words on the purely agricultural side of the question. the two most important points about sewage are its enormous abundance and its extremely poor quality. if the most important consideration were not the sanitary one, but its manurial value, then indeed our water system, so universally used in towns, must be regarded as a most wasteful one; for by its means the value of the excrementitious matter from which it derives its manurial ingredients is tremendously lessened. when we reflect that a ton of sewage, such as is produced in many european cities, contains only or lb. of dry matter, and that the total amount of nitrogen in this is only an ounce or two, while the phosphoric acid is considerably less, and that it is on those two ingredients that its value as a manure entirely depends, we see very strikingly how poor a manurial substance sewage is. various methods have been devised and experimented with for extracting these manurial ingredients, and many methods are in operation in different parts of the world. the methods of utilising sewage for agricultural purposes may be broadly divided into two classes. _irrigation._ one of these, which may be classed under the heading of irrigation, consists in pouring the sewage on to certain kinds of coarse green crops. sometimes the land is made to filter large quantities of sewage by special arrangements of drains and ditches. the land is first carefully and evenly graded down a gentle incline. at the top of the field the sewage is conducted along an open ditch from which it is permitted to escape, by the force of gravity, by several smaller ditches running at right angles from the main ditch. by means of stops which may be shifted at will, the sewage can be directed to flow over different parts of the field. modifications in this plan may be made so as to suit the nature of the ground. in the case, for example, of a steep incline, the field may be sewaged by means of what are known as "catch-work" trenches running horizontally along the hill. in this way the sewage is allowed to pass over the whole of the field, and is caught at the bottom in a deep ditch, whence it is allowed to flow into the nearest river or stream. this is the system which has been employed at the famous beddington meadows, near croydon. another method of distributing the sewage is by means of underground pipes, which are laid in a sort of network over the ground to be manured. at certain intervals pipes with couplings for hose are fitted on, and by keeping a certain amount of pressure on the main pipes the sewage may be distributed over the different parts of the field as it is required. a third modification is subsoil irrigation. this resembles the last-named system, with this difference, that the pipes used are either porous or perforated with small holes. total submersion can only be applied in the case of absolutely level lands, and is practised to an enormous extent in piedmont and lombardy. there has been little dispute as to the thorough efficiency of irrigation--when conducted under favourable conditions--as a method of purifying sewage and utilising to the full its constituents of manurial value. it is the only method which has been conclusively shown to extract from sewage that to which it owes most largely its value as a manure--viz., ammonia; and from this fact it deserves a first place in the consideration of agriculturists. for however admirable other methods may be from a sanitary point of view, it is obvious that a method which would allow the ammonia in sewage wholly, or at least to over per cent, to be lost, cannot claim the same place in the judgment of agriculturists as a method which can extract for the soil not only the whole of this valuable constituent, but all else in the sewage which in any way is of value to plant-life. _effects of continued application of sewage._ when sewage is continuously applied to the same land, what generally takes place is this: at first the sewage is purified, and the soil derives corresponding benefit from the valuable fertilising ingredients it thus extracts. after a time, however, the land becomes what has been termed "sewage-sick." the pores in the soil become choked up by the slimy matter the sewage contains in suspension; the aeration of the soil, which, as we have already mentioned, is so necessary, is consequently to a large extent stopped; and the result is, that the land rapidly deteriorates, and the sewage is no longer purified. _intermittent irrigation._ this is obviated to some extent by intermittent irrigation. the land, instead of receiving sewage continuously, only receives it at intervals, and is allowed some time to recover between each dose. it is, however, the opinion of those who have given the subject much attention, that land, even although intermittently sewaged, never recovers its original efficacy. irrigation, therefore, under favourable conditions, is a most successful method of utilising the manurial value of sewage; but the great difficulty in practice is to obtain those favourable conditions. it has long been known that if soil is properly to discharge its function as a purifier of sewage water, it must be properly aerated; and we now know that in every fertile soil the process of nitrification must be permitted free development. now the application of large quantities of sewage to a soil is apt to prevent this free development. as we have already seen, absence of air and the lowering of the temperature of the soil distinctly tend to retard nitrification; and these two conditions accompany the application of large quantities of sewage. _crops suited for sewage._ another objection to irrigation has been found in the alleged limited number of crops sewaged land is suited to yield. it has been repeatedly stated that rye-grass is about the only crop it is profitable to grow on it. in opposition to this statement, however, is the opinion expressed in the conclusions arrived at by the committee appointed by the british association for the consideration of the sewage question. a vast number of experiments were carried out by them between the years - , and the result they arrived at was as follows: "it is certain that all kinds of crops may be grown with sewage, so that the farmer can grow such as he can best sell; nevertheless, the staple crops must be cattle food, such as grass, roots, &c., with occasional crops of kitchen vegetables and of corn." while, therefore, it is probably a mistake to say that rye-grass is the only crop sewaged land is capable of growing profitably, the bulk of experience goes to show that such a crop is best suited for such land. this being so, the question naturally arises, what is the farmer who uses sewage as a manure to do with the large green crops he obtains from his land? he is, in most cases, unable to use them himself or dispose of them at the time. and while this has hitherto proved to be a most important drawback, now that we have in ensilage a means of preserving our green crops in a condition suitable as fodder for as long a time as is necessary, the grounds on which this objection rests are almost entirely removed. it will be obvious, of course, that some soils are naturally much better fitted to perform purification of sewage than others; but it must be frankly admitted that even the best of soils can only deal with a certain quantity of sewage. various calculations have been indulged in as to the amount of sewage an acre of land can successfully deal with. according to one of these, an acre can purify some gallons per day, or that produced by persons; while other calculations estimate it at persons; and others, again, at . the capacity of a sandy soil in this respect will be much greater than that of a heavier soil; and at dantzic an acre of the sand-dunes is regarded as being capable of purifying the sewage of persons. the late dr wallace has calculated that, in order to treat the sewage of glasgow, over twelve square miles of land would be required. of course, if the sewage is subjected to previous treatment, which is often the case, by the method immediately about to be described--namely, precipitation--the amount of sewage the soil is capable of purifying will be correspondingly increased. a difficulty which may also be pointed out in connection with irrigation as a means of disposing of sewage, is the impossibility of carrying it on during frosty weather, when the land is frost-bound. in warm climates irrigation has much to recommend it as a means of sewage disposal. in damp and cold climates, on the other hand, there are many objections. _treatment of sewage by precipitation, &c._ we now come to consider the methods grouped under this second heading. mechanical filtration, of course, only aims at purifying sewage to the extent of removing all insoluble suspended matter which it contains. different substances have been used as filters, the most generally used being charcoal. charcoal mixed with burnt clay, gravel, sand, &c., has also been used. in chemical precipitation, however, we have a method which claims to do more. beyond the extracting of all solid matters in suspension, it removes (at any rate most chemical precipitants do) nearly all the phosphoric acid, which, next to the ammonia, is the most valuable constituent the sewage contains. of all precipitants, lime has been the most universally used; and on the whole, it is perhaps the best, for it is both cheap and obtainable almost anywhere. according to an analysis by the late professor way, the difference in the percentages of phosphoric acid, potash, and ammonia, before and after treatment with lime, in a sample of sewage, was as follows:-- _grains per gallon._ before. after. phosphoric acid . . potash . . ammonia . . from the above we see that while sludge caused by lime as a precipitant contains nearly all the phosphoric acid, there is not a trace of the potash or ammonia removed. sulphate of alumina has also been used, both alone and in conjunction with lime. the advantage claimed by it over lime is, that the resulting precipitate is much less bulky. in other respects, however, it does not seem to be any more efficient as a precipitant. in the well-known a, b, c process, a mixture of alum, clay, lime, charcoal, blood, and alkaline salts, in different proportions, has been used. this mixture is said to extract, in addition to the phosphoric acid, a certain proportion of the ammonia; but the amount is so small as scarcely to be worth considering. numerous other chemical substances have been used, alone and also in conjunction with one another, such as perchloride of iron, copperas, manganese, &c. all alike, however, have failed to do more than effect partial purification,--the best results, it may be added, being obtained when the sewage thus treated was fresh. with regard to the manurial value of the resulting sludges, much difference of opinion has existed. the small percentage of phosphoric acid and nitrogen they contain has prevented them from being used to any extent as a manure, as their value did not admit of carriage beyond the distance of a few miles. by the introduction a few years ago of the filter-press, their value has been considerably enhanced. the old method of dealing with the sludge at precipitation-works was to allow it to dry gradually by exposure to the atmosphere. the result, however, of leaving sewage-sludge with over per cent of water in it to dry in the air, was to encourage the rapid decomposition and putrefaction of its organic matter, so that in many cases the decomposing sludge proved to be as great a nuisance as the unpurified sewage itself would have been. by the use of johnson's filter-press, however, a sludge containing per cent of water was at once reduced to per cent or even less. by this means the percentage of its valuable constituents was very much increased, and the sludge-cake, besides being much more portable, was neither so objectionable nor so liable to decomposition as before. _value of sewage-sludge._ as to the value of this sludge-cake as a manure, we are happily in possession of some very interesting and valuable experiments by professor munro of downton agricultural college. the sludge experimented upon was that produced by sulphate of alumina, lime, and sulphate of iron, and contained, after being subjected to johnson's filter-press, from . to . per cent of nitrogen, and over per cent of phosphoric acid. it was found that the benefit resulting from the application of the sludge was far from what in theory might have been expected. the experiments were made with turnips; and the results obtained with superphosphate and farmyard manure respectively, in the same field and under exactly the same conditions, were contrasted with those obtained with sludge. thus it was found that lb. of phosphoric acid as superphosphate, or lb. as farmyard manure, produced a considerably larger crop than lb. of phosphoric acid in the sludge. that is to say, that the phosphoric acid in the sludge did not exert more than one-fifth of its theoretical effect. the explanation of this somewhat strange result dr munro finds in the unsuitable physical character of the sludge-cakes. in farmyard manure we have a loose texture and a large amount of soluble constituents when well rotted. it thus quickly distributes its fertilising elements throughout the soil. in the case of the sludge, on the other hand, its composing particles are closely compacted together, and thus offer the greatest resistance to mechanical and chemical disintegration. "as a matter of fact," says dr munro, "the sludge-plots in my experimental series were all readily identified, when the roots were pulled, by the presence of unbroken and undecomposed clods of cake, which had evidently given up, at most, a small portion of their valuable ingredients to the soil." briefly stated, therefore, the objections to chemical precipitation as a means of dealing with sewage are these--viz., that while it relieves sewage of all its organic matter, and to a large extent of its phosphoric acid, it fails to extract any ammonia, which is thus lost; that the resulting sludge is consequently so poor in fertilising matters as scarcely to make it worth while to remove it any distance for manuring purposes; and that, further, owing to its unfavourable physical character, as at present made, even the small percentage of plant-food it contains is not realisable, within, at any rate, anything like a reasonable time, to its full theoretical extent. the most profitable method of treating sewage must be determined by various local conditions; and it must be clearly understood that the question of sewage disposal is primarily a sanitary one, and that it must be dealt with from the sanitary aspect. the most profitable way of applying sewage as a manure, however, will doubtless be found by combining chemical precipitation and land irrigation. chapter xviii. liquid manure. the adoption of irrigation as a means of utilising sewage, suggests a short consideration of the value of liquid manures. it has been a custom on many farms to apply the liquid manure got from the oozings of manure-heaps, the drainings of the farmyard, byres, stables, piggeries, &c., directly to the soil. indeed, so strongly has the belief in the superiority of liquid manure over other manure been held by certain farmers, that they have washed the solid animal excreta with water, in order to extract from it its soluble fertilising constituents. the late mr mechi was one of the foremost exponents of the value of liquid manure. his farm of tiptree hall was fitted up with iron pipes for the distribution of the manure over the different fields. superphosphate, it may also be added, as first made from bones by baron liebig, was applied in a liquid form. as to the general merits of liquid manure, there can be no doubt that it is the most valuable form in which to apply manure. it secures for the manurial ingredients it contains a speedy and uniform diffusion in the soil; but, on the other hand, the expense of distributing it makes its application far from economical. the chief ingredient in liquid manure is urine. now the removal of urine from the farmyard manure-heap entails a severe loss of the ingredient which is most potent in promoting fermentation. separation of the urine from the solid excreta is on this very account not to be recommended. urine, when applied alone, is lacking in phosphoric acid, of which it contains mere traces. it is not, therefore, suitable as a general manure. it has to be pointed out, however, that the drainings from a manure-heap in this respect are superior to pure urine, since they contain the soluble phosphates washed out of the solid excreta. the objections against using liquid manure may be summed up as follows:-- first, it is too bulky a form in which to apply the manure, and hence too expensive; secondly, it is not advisable to deprive the solid excreta of the liquid excreta, as the one supplements the other; thirdly, fermentation is largely fostered in the solid excreta by the presence of the liquid excreta--hence fermentation will not take place properly in the solid excreta when deprived of the liquid excreta. if, however, the production of liquid manure on the farm is in excess of what can be used for the proper fermentation of farmyard manure, it will be best to utilise it for composts. no better addition to a compost can be made than liquid manure, as it induces speedy fermentation in nearly all kinds of organic matter. chapter xix. composts. the use of composts is an old one. before artificial manures were so plentiful as they are at present, much attention was paid by farmers to their preparation. a compost is generally made by mixing some substance of animal origin which is rich in manurial ingredients with peat or loam, and often along with lime, alkali salts, common salt, and indeed any sort of refuse which may be regarded as possessing a manurial value. composting, in short, may be looked upon as a useful method of turning to profitable use refuse of various kinds which accumulate on the farm. the object of composting is to promote fermentation of the materials forming the compost, and to convert the manurial ingredients they contain into an available condition for plant needs. composts often serve a useful purpose in retaining valuable volatile manurial ingredients, such as ammonia, formed in easily fermentable substances like urine. in fact, we may say that farmyard manure is the typical compost, and its manufacture serves to illustrate the principles of composting. _farmyard manure a typical compost._ farmyard manure as ordinarily made is not generally regarded as a compost, but in the past it has been widely used for the purpose of making composts. thus the practice of mixing farmyard manure with large quantities of peat has been in some parts of the world a common one. peat, as has already been pointed out in a previous chapter, is comparatively rich in nitrogen. when it is mixed with urine or some other putrescible substance, the peat undergoes fermentation, with the result that its nitrogen is to a greater or less extent converted into ammonia. the effect, therefore, of mixing peat with farmyard manure is beneficial to both substances mixed: the escape of ammonia is rendered impossible by the fixing properties of the peat, while the inert nitrogen of the peat is largely converted by fermentation into an available form. the proportion of peat which it is advisable to add in composting farmyard manure will depend on the richness of the quality of the manure: the richer the quality of the manure, the greater the amount of peat it will be able to ferment. composts of this kind are generally made by piling up the manure in heaps, consisting of alternate layers of peat and farmyard manure. from one to five parts of peat to every one part of farmyard manure is a common proportion. the use of such a manure, containing so much organic matter, will exercise its best effect on light sandy soils. _other composts._ but instead of farmyard manure, or in addition to farmyard manure, various other substances may be added, as bones, flesh, fish-scrap, and the offal of slaughter-houses. sometimes leaves and the dried bracken-fern are used for the manufacture of composts. some of these substances contain much nitrogen or phosphoric acid, but in their natural condition ferment when applied to the soil at a slow rate. if mixed together before application in pits with peat, leaves, bracken-fern, or some other absorbent material, fermentation proceeds evenly and rapidly. the addition of lime, potash, and soda salts has been found to have a most beneficial effect in promoting fermentation. these substances, as is well known, hasten putrefaction of organic matter. lime seems especially to be valuable in composting. this is no doubt due to the fact that lime plays a valuable part in promoting the action of various ferments, as has already been illustrated in the case of nitrification. the effect of large quantities of sour organic acids (humic and ulmic), which are the invariable products of the decomposition of organic matter like peat, leaves, &c., is inimical to micro-organic life. the action of lime is to neutralise these acids. there can be no doubt that composting is a useful process for increasing the fertilising properties of different more or less inert manurial substances. but in view of the abundant supply of concentrated fertilisers, the use of composts may considerably decrease in future. chapter xx. indirect manures. lime. we now come to discuss those manures which we may class under the term _indirect_, because their value is due, not to their direct action as suppliers of plant-food--like those manures we have hitherto been engaged in discussing--but to their indirect action. of these by far the most important is lime. _antiquity of lime as a manure._ lime is one of the oldest and one of the most popular of all manures. it is mentioned, and its wonderful action commented on, in the works of several ancient writers, more especially pliny. of late years, perhaps, its use has become restricted; and, as we shall point out by-and-by, it is well that it is so. _action of lime not thoroughly understood._ despite the fact of the long-established and almost universal use of lime, it can scarcely be said that we as yet clearly understand the exact nature of its action. much light, however, has been thrown of late years on the subject by the great advance which has been made in our knowledge of agricultural chemistry. nevertheless, there are many points connected with the action of lime on the soil which are still obscure. perhaps one reason for the conflicting ideas prevalent with regard to the value of this substance in agriculture is to be found in the fact that it acts in such a number of different ways, and that the nature of the changes it gives rise to in the soil is most complicated. the experience of agriculturists with lime in one part of the country often seems contradictory to the experience of those in other parts of the country. its action on different soils is very dissimilar. for these reasons, therefore, the discussion of the value of lime as a manure is by no means an easy one. _lime a necessary plant-food._ lime, as we have already pointed out in a former chapter, is a necessary plant-food, and were it present in the soil to a less extent than is actually the case, would be just as valuable a manure as the different nitrogenous and phosphatic manures; and in certain circumstances this is the case. there are soils, though they are by no means of common occurrence, which actually lack sufficient lime for supporting plant-growth, and to which its addition directly promotes the growth of the crop. poor sandy soils are often of this nature. another class of soils are also apt to be lacking in lime--at any rate their surface-soil is. these are permanent pasture-soils. originally there may have been an abundance of lime in the surface portion of the soil; but, as is well known to every practical farmer, lime has a tendency to sink down in the soil. this tendency in ordinary arable soils is largely counteracted by ordinary tillage operations, such as ploughing, &c., by means of which the lime is again brought to the surface. in permanent pasture-soils, however, no such counteracting action takes place, hence impoverishment of the surface-soil in lime eventually results. it is for this reason--partly at any rate--that permanent pasture benefits in an especial degree by the application of lime. we say _partly_, for there are other important reasons. one is, that lime seems to have a striking effect in improving the quality of pastures by inducing the finer grasses to predominate. it has also a very favourable action in promoting the growth of white clover. another reason for the favourable effect of lime on pasture-soils is doubtless on account of the action it has in setting potash free from its compounds. soils, however, which directly benefit from the application of lime in the same way as they benefit from the application of nitrogenous manures, may be safely said to be rare. in the great majority of soils lime exists, so far as the demands of plant-life are concerned, in superabundance. _lime of abundant occurrence._ indeed limestone is one of the most abundant of all rock substances, and it has been calculated that it forms not less than one-sixth of the rock-mass of the earth's crust. nearly all the commonly occurring minerals contain it, and in the course of their disintegration furnish it to the soil. vast tracts of country are composed of nothing but limestone; and we have examples, even in this country, of so-called chalk-soils, where it is the most abundant constituent. nor can it be classed amongst the insoluble mineral constituents of the soil; for although insoluble in pure water, it is soluble in water--such as the soil-water--which contains carbonic acid. this is proved by the fact that it is the chief dissolved mineral ingredient in all natural waters. _lime returned to the soil in ordinary agricultural practice._ it may be further pointed out, as bearing upon the true function of lime when applied as a manure, that in ordinary agricultural practice nearly all the lime removed from the soil in crops finds its way back again to the farm in the straw of the farmyard manure. for these reasons, then, it is clear that the true function of lime is as an indirect manure. let us now proceed to discuss its action. before doing so, however, it is important that we should clearly understand the different chemical forms in which it occurs. _different forms of lime._ lime occurs chiefly as carbonate of lime in the forms of limestone, marble, or chalk, which are all chemically the same. it occurs also as sulphate of lime or gypsum, as well as in the forms of phosphate and fluoride. in agriculture it is only used--if we except the phosphate, which is applied not on account of its lime, but its phosphoric acid--in the form of the carbonate or _mild_ lime as it is commonly called, burnt, caustic, or quick lime, and as gypsum. as the value of gypsum as a manure is of such importance, and depends not entirely on its being a compound of lime, we shall consider it by itself. hence we have only to consider here the action of mild and caustic lime. _caustic lime._ when limestone or mild lime is submitted to a great heat, such as is practically done on a large scale in lime-kilns, it is converted into caustic lime or lime proper. limestone is made up, as we have just mentioned, of lime and carbonic acid. the latter ingredient is expelled in the form of a gas, and the lime is left behind. lime never occurs naturally as caustic lime, for the simple reason that it is impossible for it to remain in this state, owing to the great affinity it has both for water and carbonic acid. when lime is burnt, and before it is applied to the field, some time is allowed to elapse in order to permit of its absorbing moisture--or becoming slaked, as it is technically called. this it does more or less slowly by absorbing moisture from the air. as, however, the process would take too long, and as, moreover, the absorption of carbonic acid gas would also take place at the same time, lime is generally slaked in another way. this can be done by simply adding water. an objection to this method is, that the lime is not so uniformly slaked as is desirable. it becomes gritty. the usual method is to cover it up with damp earth in heaps, and allow the moisture of the earth to effect the slaking. when lime absorbs water a new chemical compound is formed, known as lime hydrate; and so rapidly does the lime unite with water, that a great deal of heat is evolved in the operation, the temperature produced being considerably above that of boiling-water. the conversion of slaked lime into carbonate of lime or mild lime is a slower process. sooner or later, however, it takes place, whether the lime is left on the surface of the soil or buried in it. a knowledge of these elementary chemical facts is necessary in order clearly to understand the nature of the action of lime in agriculture. the respective action of quicklime and mild lime is, on the whole, similar, although the former is in every case very much more powerful in its effects than the latter. _lime acts both mechanically and chemically._ lime may be said to act on the soil both mechanically and chemically. it alters the texture of the soil, and affects its mechanical properties, such as its absorptive, retentive, and capillary powers with regard to water. it acts upon its dormant fertility, and decomposes its mineral substances as well as its organic matter. lastly, its influence on the micro-organic life of the soil, which plays such an important part in the preparation and elaboration of plant-food, is of the highest importance. we cannot do better, therefore, than discuss its properties under the headings _mechanical_, _chemical_, and _biological_. i. mechanical functions of lime. _action on soil's texture._ the effect of lime upon the texture of a soil is among its most striking properties. every farmer knows well what a transformation is effected in the texture of a stiff clay soil by the application of a dressing of lime. the adhesive property of the soil--its objectionable tendency to puddle when mixed with water--is greatly lessened, and the soil is rendered very much more friable when it becomes dry. several reasons exist for this change. in the first place, the tendency to puddle in a clayey soil is due to the fine state of division of the soil-particles. the way in which lime counteracts this adhesive property is by causing a coagulation of the fine soil-particles. this flocculation or aggregation of the fine clay-particles, when mixed with water by lime, is strikingly demonstrated by adding to some muddy water a little lime-water. the result will be that the water will speedily be rendered clear, the fine clay-particles coming together and sinking to the bottom of the vessel. even a very small quantity of lime will effect this change. this property possessed by lime, we may mention, is utilised in the treatment of sewage. as it is the fine clay-particles that are the chief cause of the puddling of clay soils, their flocculation does much to destroy this objectionable property. another reason why lime renders a clay soil more friable when dry is, that lime does not undergo any shrinkage in dry weather. as clay soils shrink very much in drying, the mixture with such a substance as lime tends to minimise this tendency to cake in hard lumps. the effect of even a very small addition of lime to a clay soil, in the way of increasing its friable nature, is very striking, and can be easily illustrated by taking two portions of clay, into one of which a small percentage of lime is introduced, and working both into a plastic mass with water, and then allowing them to dry. it will be found that while the one is hard and resists disintegration, that portion to which the lime has been added crumbles away easily to a powder. this effect which lime has in "lightening" heavy soils has been known to last for years. the disintegrating effect of quicklime when applied to heavy soils is also due, it may be added, to the change undergone by the lime itself from the caustic state to the mild state. _lime renders light soils more cohesive._ although it may seem somewhat paradoxical, lime, it would appear, in some cases exercises an effect upon the soil exactly the reverse of what has just been stated. that lime should act as a binding agent is only natural when we reflect on the way in which it acts when used as mortar. it is quite to be understood, therefore, that its action on light friable soils should be to increase their cohesive powers, and at the same time to increase the capillary power of the soil to absorb water from the lower layers. the extent of this action, of course, would depend on the form in which the lime is applied, and the amount. a striking example of the binding power of lime is to be found in certain soils extremely rich in lime, in which what is known as a lime-pan has been formed at some distance from the surface. ii. chemical action of lime. but more important probably than even its mechanical action is the chemical action of lime. it is a most important agent in unlocking the inert fertility of the soil. this it does by decomposing different minerals and setting free the potash they contain. the disintegrating power of lime in this respect depends, of course, on its chemical condition, the caustic form being much more potent than the other forms. its action in decomposing vegetable matter and rendering the inert nitrogen it contains available for the plant's use, is also one of its most important properties, and accounts for its beneficial action when applied to soils, such as peaty soils, rich in organic matter. again, its use as a corrective for sour lands has long been practically recognised. the presence of acidity in a soil is hurtful to vegetable life. lime, by neutralising this acidity, removes the sourness of the land, and does much to restore it to a condition suitable for the growth of cultivated crops. the generation of sourness in a soil is almost sure to give rise to certain poisonous compounds. lime, therefore, in sweetening a soil, prevents the formation of these poisonous compounds. badly drained and sour meadow-lands, as every farmer knows, are immensely benefited by the application of this useful manure; for not merely is their sourness removed and their general condition ameliorated, but many of the coarser and lower forms of plant-life, which alone flourish on such soils, are killed out, and the more nutritive grasses are allowed to flourish instead. the action of lime in promoting the formation of a class of compounds of great importance in the soil--viz., hydrated silicates--is worthy of notice. according to the commonly accepted theory, much of the available mineral fertilising matter of the soil is retained in the form of these hydrated silicates. hence lime, by increasing these compounds, not merely adds to the amount of the available fertility in the soil, but also increases its absorptive power for food-constituents. iii. biological action of lime. the last way in which lime acts is what we have termed biological. by this we mean the important _rôle_ lime plays in promoting or retarding, as the case may be, the various kinds of fermentative action which go on so abundantly in all soils. the presence of carbonate of lime in the soil is a necessary condition for the process of nitrification. lime is the base with which the nitric acid, when it is formed, combines; and as we have seen, when discussing nitrification, soils of a chalky nature are among those best suited to promote the natural formation of nitrates. this is one of the reasons for the beneficial effects produced by lime when applied to peaty soils. not merely does it help to decompose the organic matter so abundant in such soils, but it also furnishes the base with which the nitric acid may combine when it is formed. but while the action of lime is to promote fermentation, it must not be forgotten that there may be cases in which its action is rather the reverse of this. fermentation of organic matter goes on when there is a certain amount of alkalinity present; while, on the other hand, the presence of acidity seems to retard and check it. too great an amount of alkalinity, however, would, in the first instance, retard fermentation as much as too great acidity. it has been claimed that the addition of caustic lime to fresh urine may act in this way; and if this were so, the addition of lime to farmyard manure might, to a certain extent, be defended. the experiment, however, would be a hazardous one and not to be recommended, as loss of ammonia would most likely ensue. _action of lime on nitrogenous organic matter._ the action of lime on nitrogenous organic matter is of a very striking kind, and is by no means very clearly understood. as we have pointed out, it sometimes acts as an antiseptic or preservative; and this antiseptic or preservative action has been explained on the assumption that insoluble albuminates of lime are formed. its action in such industries as calico-printing, where it has been used along with casein for fixing colouring matter; or in sugar-refining, where it is used for clarifying the sugar by precipitating the albuminous matter in solution in the saccharine liquor; or lastly, in purifying sewage,--has been cited in support of this theory. while, however, there may be circumstances in which lime, especially in its caustic form, acts as an antiseptic, its general tendency is to promote these fermentative changes, such as nitrification, so important to plant-life. an important use of lime in agriculture is in preventing the action of certain fungoid diseases, such as "rust," "smut," "finger-and-toe," &c., as well as in killing, as every horticulturist and farmer knows, slugs, &c. _recapitulation._ we may, in conclusion, sum up in a single paragraph the different ways in which lime acts. its action is mechanical, chemical, and biological. it acts on the texture of the soil, rendering clay soils more friable, and exerting a certain binding effect on loose soils. it decomposes the minerals containing potash and other food-constituents, and renders them available for the plant's needs. it further decomposes organic matter, and promotes the important process of nitrification. it increases the power of a soil to fix such valuable food-constituents as ammonia and potash. it neutralises sourness, and prevents the formation of poisonous compounds in the soil. it increases the capillary condition of the soil, prevents fungoid diseases, and promotes the growth of the more nutritive herbage in pasture-land. chapter xxi. indirect manures--gypsum, salt, etc. gypsum. in the previous chapter mention was made of gypsum as a compound of lime, but no reference to its action as a manure was made. in the past, gypsum was used extensively and highly valued. it was found to be of especial value for clover; and there is a story told of benjamin franklin which illustrates the very striking nature of its action on this crop. it is related that he once printed with gypsum the words "this has been plastered" on a field of clover, and that for a long time afterwards the legend was plainly discernible on account of the luxuriance of the clover on the parts of the field which had been thus treated. _mode in which gypsum acts._ despite the fact that gypsum is a most ancient manure, it is only of late years that we have come to understand the true nature of its action. for long it was believed that the reason of its striking effect in promoting clover was due to the fact that, as clover was a lime-loving plant, the action of gypsum was owing to the lime it contained. that, however, the action of gypsum is not due to the fact that it supplies lime to the plant, seems evident when it is stated that were this so, any other form of lime would have the same beneficial effect. it is well known, however, that this is not so. besides, as we have already pointed out, lime is not a constituent which most soils lack, so far as the needs of the crop are concerned. there is a certain amount of truth in the old belief that gypsum enriches the soil in ammonia by fixing it from the air. the power that gypsum has as a fixer of ammonia has already been referred to in the chapter on farmyard manure; but in this case the gypsum is brought in contact with the ammonia. the origin of this old belief was due to a misconception as to the amount of ammonia in the atmosphere. no doubt gypsum greatly increases the power of a soil to absorb ammonia from the air; but the quantity of ammonia in the air is so very trifling, that its action in this respect is hardly worth considering. the true explanation of the action of gypsum is to be found in its effect on the double silicates, which it decomposes, the potash being set free. its action is similar to that of other lime compounds, only more characteristic. as a manure, therefore, its action is indirect, and its true function is to oust the potash from its compounds. its peculiarly favourable action on clover is due to the fact that clover specially benefits by potash, and that adding gypsum practically amounts to adding potash. of course it should be borne in mind that the soil must contain potash compounds if gypsum is to have its full effect. now, however, that potash salts suitable for manuring purposes are abundant, it may well be doubted whether it is not better to apply potash directly. further, it must be borne in mind that gypsum is applied to the soil whenever it receives a dressing of superphosphate of lime, as gypsum is one of the products formed by treating insoluble phosphate of lime with sulphuric acid. it is possible that gypsum may act as an oxidising agent in the soil, just as iron in the ferric condition does. it has a large quantity of oxygen in its composition, and under certain conditions may act as a carrier of oxygen to the lower layers of the soil. when it is used, it should be applied some months before the crop is sown. gypsum, therefore, although it contains two necessary plant-constituents, lime and sulphuric acid, cannot be regarded as a direct manure; and as its action comes to be more fully understood, its use, which was never very abundant in this country, will probably decrease. we have already, in the chapter on nitrification, referred to the action of gypsum in promoting nitrification. salt. the action of salt as a manure presents a problem which is at once of the highest interest and surrounded with the greatest difficulties. in view of the large quantities now used for agricultural purposes, a somewhat detailed examination of the nature of its action is not out of place in a work such as the present. _antiquity of the use of salt._ the recognition of the manurial functions of salt dates back to the very earliest times. its use among the ancients is testified by numerous allusions in the old testament; while, according to pliny, it was a well-known manure in italy. the persians and the chinese seem also to have used it from time immemorial, the former more especially for date-trees. _nature of its action._ despite, however, the great antiquity of its use, much difference of opinion seems always to have existed as to the exact method of its action, and as to its merits as a manure in promoting vegetable growth. it furnishes, in fact, a good example of the difficulty which exists in the case of many manures, whose action is chiefly indirect, of fully understanding their influence on the soil and on the crop. in fact, the action of salt is probably more complicated than that of any other manurial substance. _salt not a necessary plant-food._ we have already seen that neither sodium nor chlorine--the two constituent elements of salt--are in all probability absolutely necessary plant-foods. if they are necessary, the plant only requires them in minute quantities. despite this fact, soda is an ash-constituent of nearly every plant, and in many cases one of the most abundant. in amount it is one of the most variable of all the ash-constituents, being present in some plants only in minute quantities, while in others it occurs in large quantities. mangel and plants of the cabbage tribe may be cited as examples of plants containing large amounts of soda in their composition. but the plants which contain it in largest quantity are those which thrive on the sea-coast, and it has been thought that for them at least salt is a necessary manure. this, however, does not seem to be the case. in fact, the amount of soda in a plant seems to be largely a matter of accident. it may be added that the succulent portions of a plant are generally richest in soda. _can soda replace potash?_ again, it has been believed that soda is capable of replacing potash in the plant; but this does not seem to be the case to any extent. the view that soda is able to replace potash, it has been thought, is supported by the variation which exists in the proportion of soda and potash in different plants. it must be remembered, however, that it is highly probable that most plants contain a larger quantity of ash-constituents than is absolutely necessary for their healthy growth. especially is this the case with such a necessary plant-food as potash, of which there is generally present, in all likelihood, an excess. the variation in the quantity of potash and soda present in many plants under different circumstances can scarcely, therefore, be regarded as furnishing a proof of the replacement of potash by soda. incidentally we may mention, as a fact worthy of notice, that cultivated plants have more potash and less soda in their composition than wild plants. what has been said of soda may be held to apply equally to chlorine, as it seems to be chiefly in the form of common salt that soda enters the plant. the amount of salt, therefore, present in plants must be regarded as largely accidental and dependent on external circumstances, such as the nature of the soil, &c. _salt of universal occurrence._ but even were salt a necessary plant-food, its occurrence in the soil is already of sufficient abundance to obviate any necessity for its application. it may be said to be of almost universal occurrence. even the air contains it in traces. that this is the case in the neighbourhood of the sea-coast is well known; but even in air far inland, accurate analysis of the air would probably demonstrate its presence in greater quantity than is commonly believed. it is a wise provision that plants absorb salt, for it increases their efficiency as food,--the function of salt as a constituent of animal food being of the very highest importance. it is an indispensable food-ingredient for animal life. with regard to ordinary farm-stock, the amount of salt which naturally occurs in their food is quite sufficient. in the case, however, of pastures in countries far removed from the sea, the custom of specially supplying stock with salt is common. this is done by placing a piece of rock-salt in the fields. _special sources of salt._ the salt of commerce is obtained from various sources. besides the sea, we have ample sources of salt in the large saline deposits found in many parts of europe, especially in austria, and in england in cheshire. _the action of salt indirect._ from what has been said above, it is clear that the action of salt as a manure is indirect and not direct. what the nature of that indirect action is we shall now proceed to discuss. in considering the evidence of the manurial value of salt, we are at once brought face to face with the fact that the experience of its action in the past has as often been unfavourable as favourable. salt, it is well known, is both an antiseptic and a germicide. it is, indeed, one of the most commonly used of preservatives. when applied in large quantities to the soil, it has a most deleterious action on vegetation. this hurtful action of salt has long been known; and it is as often mentioned in the writings of antiquity on account of its unfavourable as on account of its favourable action. thus, for example, among the ancient jews it was customary, after the conquest of a hostile town, to strew salt on the enemy's fields, for the purpose of rendering them barren and unfertile. and again, among the romans, for the same purpose, salt was often spread on a spot where some great crime had been committed. while, therefore, its unfavourable action has long been known, the fact that there are circumstances under which its action is, on the contrary, favourable for promoting vegetable growth has also been long recognised. the difficulty for the agricultural student is to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory experiences. for the english agriculturist the subject possesses especial interest, since in england it has been in the past most generally used and its action most discussed since the time of lord bacon, who discusses in his writings the action of solutions of it on different plants. the true explanation of salt being so different in its action is to be found in the quantity applied, the nature of the soil, the crop to which it is applied, and the conditions under which it is applied--_i.e._, whether it is applied alone or along with other manures. _mechanical action on soils._ in the first place, it must be noted that salt exerts a mechanical action on the soil of a very similar kind to that exercised by lime. when applied to clay soils it causes a flocculation or coagulation of the fine clay-particles, and thus prevents the soil from puddling to the same extent as would otherwise be the case. in fact, an example of this action of salt when in solution causing the precipitation of fine suspended clayey matter, is afforded by the formation of deltas at the mouths of rivers. the power of clarifying muddy water is common indeed to saline solutions. schloesing attributes the clarifying power of a soil to the presence of the saline matters it contains; and from this point of view it would appear that manures containing any saline substance may exert an important mechanical influence on the soil. _solvent action._ but a much more important property of salt is its solvent action on the plant-food present in the soil. its action in decomposing the minerals containing lime, magnesia, potash, &c., is similar to the action of gypsum. by acting upon the double silicates it liberates these necessary plant-foods. it is not only on the basic substances upon which it acts, but also on the phosphoric and silicic acids, which it sets free. its power of dissolving ammonia from the soil is considerable. experiments with a weak solution of salt on a soil by peters and eichhorn to test its solvent power, showed that the salt solution dissolved more than twice as much potash and nearly thirty times as much ammonia as an equal quantity of pure water did. when applied to the soil, it seems chiefly to liberate lime and magnesia. the exact nature of the chemical action taking place is a point of some dubiety. according to some, it is changed into nitrate of soda; according to others, into carbonate of soda. the latter theory seems to be the more probable one. its action on the lime and magnesia compounds is to convert them into chlorides; and this chemical reaction explains the action that salt has in increasing the water-retaining and water-absorbing power of the soil; for the chlorides of magnesia and lime are salts which have a great power of attracting water from the air. again, the very fact that salt acts as an antiseptic may serve to explain its beneficial action in certain cases where it prevents rankness of growth. no doubt this was its function when applied along with peruvian guano. this it might do by preventing too rapid fermentation (nitrification) of the manure, or by actually weakening the plant. its action when applied with farmyard manure may also be similar. but while its effect in many cases may be towards retarding fermentation, on the other hand its action, when applied along with lime to compost-heaps, is towards promoting more rapid decomposition. probably a reaction takes place between the lime and the salt, the result of which is the formation of caustic soda. such are some of the ways in which salt may act. it must at once be seen how its action in one case will be favourable and in another case unfavourable. there must be fertilising matter present in the soil if it is to act favourably. again, it will only be under such circumstances, where rankness of growth is likely to ensue, that its antiseptic properties will act favourably and not unfavourably. _best used in small quantities along with manures._ probably it is for these reasons that its action has been found to be most favourable when applied along with other manures and not alone. applied along with nitrate of soda, as is commonly done, it doubtless increases the efficiency of the nitrate. some plants seem to be undoubtedly benefited by salt: of these flax may be mentioned. the application of salt to plants of the cabbage tribe seems also to be highly beneficial. on mangels, along with other manures, it has also been found to have a very favourable effect. but with many crops its action has been proved to be less favourable. _affects quality of crop._ although salt has often been found to increase the quantity of a crop, the quality of the crop has been made to suffer. its action on beetroot has been more especially studied. the effect of its application is to lessen the total quantity of dry matter and sugar in the plant. this has been found to be the case both when the salt was applied alone and along with nitrate of soda and other manures. on potatoes, again, its action has been found to be deleterious, lessening their percentage of starch. the deleterious action of chlorides on the quality of potatoes is also seen when potassium chloride is applied. it is for this reason that potash should never be applied to the potato crop in the form of chloride. in the late dr voelcker's opinion, the conditions under which salt had the most favourable action on the mangel crop was in the case of a light sandy soil, and applied at the rate of to cwt. per acre. its action when applied to clay soils was not so favourable. _rate of application._ lastly, the rate at which it may be applied will naturally vary. from cwt. and even less, up to cwt. or even more, has been the rate at which it has been commonly applied in the past. from what has been said, it will be seen that it is more likely to exert a favourable influence when applied only in small quantities. chapter xxii. the application of manures. the conditions which regulate the application of manures are many and varied, and the subject, it must be admitted, despite the large amount of investigation already carried out, is most imperfectly understood. for these reasons it is impossible to do little more than lay down certain general principles which may be of service to the agriculturist in guiding him in carrying out the manuring of his crops. _influence of manures in increasing soil-fertility._ in the first place it may be asked, how far can what we may call the permanent fertility of a field be influenced by the application of manures? and to this question the answer must be made, that the influence of manuring in increasing soil-fertility is very slight and only very gradually felt. this is illustrated by the difficulty experienced in attempting to restore to a fertile condition a soil which has long been treated by an exhaustive system of cultivation. in such a case it will be found impossible to restore the fertility of the soil, except very gradually. farmers who farm in new countries, and in rich virgin soils, little realise sometimes how quickly they may impoverish the fertility of their soils by exhaustive treatment, and how slow the process of restoration is. nor is this strange when we reflect on the relatively small quantities of fertilising ingredients we are in the habit of adding to the soil by the application of manures, and the nature of their action. the small rate at which they are applied, and the impossibility of distributing them equally in the soil, explain how comparatively limited their action must necessarily be. some manures, it is true--viz., those which are soluble--are more equally distributed; but then such manures, from their very nature, are little likely to affect the permanent fertility of the soil. _influence of farmyard manure on the soil._ of manures which have the best effect in improving a soil's permanent fertility, farmyard manure is undoubtedly the most important. this is owing partly to the fact that it is applied in such large quantities, and partly on account of its composition. liberal manuring with farmyard manure, systematically carried out, will in time do much to build up a soil's fertility. but liberal manuring with artificial manures will also effect the same end. this it does in an indirect manner by means of the increased crop residues obtained under such treatment. indeed one of the speediest methods of bringing a soil into good condition is by heavily manuring certain green crops, and then ploughing them in. _farmyard manure v. artificials._ the question how far farmyard manure may be supplanted by artificials is one often discussed. we have already referred to this question in the chapter on farmyard manure. it is possible that, with our increasing knowledge of agricultural science, we may in the future be able to dispense with farmyard manure, and make shift to do with artificials alone. at present, however, all our experience points to the fact that the most satisfactory results are obtained from manures by using artificials in conjunction with farmyard manure. it is better both for farmyard manure and artificial manures to be applied together,[ ] so that they may mutually act as supplementary the one to the other. while this is so, there may be circumstances in which it will be best to use artificials alone. where, for example, fields, owing to their situation, are inaccessible, and where the expense of conveying the bulky farmyard manure would be very considerable, it may be found more economical to apply the more concentrated artificial manures. with few exceptions, however, it will be found most desirable to use artificial manures as supplementary to farmyard manure, and not as substitutes for it. _farmyard manure not favourable to certain crops._ while the above is true, it may be well to point out one or two facts regarding the nature of the influence of farmyard manure on certain crops. for instance, it has long been recognised as inadvisable in strong rich soils to apply it directly to certain grain crops, such as barley and wheat, since such a practice is apt to encourage rankness of growth--an undue development of straw at the expense of the grain. it is consequently customary to apply farmyard manure to the preceding crop. the direct application of farmyard manure to wheat, however, according to sir j. b. lawes, is not fraught with unfavourable results where the soil is a light one; it is only when the soil is of a heavy nature that it is best to apply it to the preceding crop. potatoes are another crop to which it is best not to apply it directly. on the other hand, many are of the opinion that mangels seem to be able to benefit from large applications of farmyard manure. _conditions determining the application of artificial manures._ in the application of artificial manures a large number of considerations have to be taken into account. among these may be mentioned the nature of the manure itself, and its mechanical and chemical condition; the nature of the soil and its previous treatment with manures, as well as the nature of the climate, the nature of the crop, and the previous cropping. it may be well, therefore, to examine somewhat in detail some of these considerations. _nature of the manure._ nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash exist in the common manures, as has already been pointed out, in different states of availability. nitrogen, for example, may exist in a soluble or insoluble condition, as nitrates, as ammonia, or in various organic forms. phosphoric acid, similarly, may exist in a soluble form, as it does in superphosphate of lime, or in an insoluble form, as it does in bones or basic slag. potash, on the other hand, exists--or should exist--in artificial manures only in a soluble form. now a correct knowledge of the behaviour of these different forms of the common manurial ingredients when applied to the soil is, in the first place, necessary for their successful and economical use. _nitrogenous manures._ thus our knowledge of the inability of the soil-particles to retain nitrogen in the form of nitric acid, as well as our knowledge of the fact that nitrogen is in this form immediately available for the plant's needs, teaches us that nitrate of soda should never be applied before the plant is ready to utilise it--in short, that it should only be applied as a top-dressing; and further, that the use of such a fertiliser in a damp season is less likely to be economical than in a dry one. again, with regard to nitrogen in the form of ammonia salts, our knowledge of the fact that ammonia is retained by the soil-particles, and that before it becomes available for the plant's needs it has to undergo the process of nitrification, teaches us the desirability of applying it a short time before it is likely to be used. while, lastly, with regard to the nitrogen in the various organic forms in which it occurs, our knowledge of the rate at which these are converted into an available form in the soil will determine when they are best applied. some forms of organic nitrogen are in a soluble condition, and are quite as speedy in their action as sulphate of ammonia. this is the case with a considerable proportion of the different organic forms of nitrogen present in guano. other forms of organic nitrogen are only slightly less so--as, for example, dried blood, which ferments very speedily. with regard, therefore, to nitrates and ammonia salts, as well as the more quickly available organic forms of nitrogen, they should either be applied as a top-dressing after the plant has started growth, or only shortly before seed-time. bones, shoddy, and the various so-called native guanos, should be applied a considerable period before they are likely to be required--not later than the previous autumn. _phosphatic manures._ with regard to phosphatic manures the same considerations hold good. inasmuch as phosphoric acid, whether applied in the soluble condition, as in superphosphate, or the insoluble form, as in bones, basic slag, &c., is not liable to be washed out of the soil, the risk of loss is very slight, and need not be taken into account. as we have pointed out in considering the action of superphosphate, phosphoric acid in this latter form is more speedily available to the crop, and the necessity of applying it much before it is likely to be used does not exist. hence superphosphate and manures which contain any appreciable amount of soluble phosphoric acid, such as guano, should only be applied shortly before seed-time. bones, basic slag, or mineral phosphate ought to be applied, on the other hand, a long time before they are likely to be used. hence an autumn application is to be recommended in the case of such manures. _potash manures._ lastly, with regard to potash manures, as these are soluble, there is no necessity for applying them much before they are likely to be absorbed by the plant. some are of the opinion that potash is, except in the case of sandy soils, best applied some little time before it is likely to be used, so as to permit of its being washed down into the soil--a process which takes place only comparatively slowly. as potash manures have often been found to give a better result on pastures during the second year than during the first, they are best applied in the autumn. the above statement as to the behaviour of the different fertilisers when applied to the soil, has a not unimportant bearing on the quantities in which they may safely be respectively applied. the rate at which manures may be applied depends, as we shall immediately see, on other conditions; but what it is here desirable to point out is, that it is not safe to apply such manures as nitrate of soda, or, for that matter, sulphate of ammonia, in large quantities at a time. in fact these manures, especially the former, will best be applied in very small quantities, and rather in several doses. with regard to other manures, more especially phosphatic manures, the same reasons for small application do not exist. the truth of the above statements is so obvious that it may be regarded as superfluous to make them. as, however, their clear apprehension is essential to understanding the conditions of successful manuring, no apology need be made for making them. _nature of soil._ another condition which has to be taken into account in considering the application of manures is the nature of the soil, as well as its previous treatment. soils poor in organic matter are those which are most likely to be benefited by the application of nitrogenous manures. soils of a dry light character require less phosphoric acid than they do of nitrogen and potash; while on a damp and heavy soil phosphatic manures are more likely to be beneficial than nitrogenous or potassic manures. lastly, a soil rich in organic matter generally requires phosphates, and possibly potash. a point of considerable importance to notice is, that a soil rich in lime can stand a larger application of phosphoric acid than one poor in lime. as a rule, it will be found that the best results with potash will be obtained when applied to a sandy soil. the nature of the soil is an important consideration in determining how far it is advisable to apply readily soluble manures. to a very light and non-retentive soil the risk of loss in applying an easily soluble manure is considerably increased. the nature of the climate is also of importance. thus, in a dry climate, manures of a soluble nature will have a better effect than in a wet climate, while the opposite will be the case with the more slowly acting manures. _nature of previous manuring._ a consideration of equal importance is the previous treatment of the soil with manure. for example, where a soil has been liberally treated with farmyard manure, it has been found that mineral manures have a very inferior effect to that obtained by nitrogenous manure. lawes and gilbert have found this to be strikingly the case in their experiments on the growth of wheat. in these experiments it was found that the application of mineral manures was accompanied with little or no benefit to the crop, whereas very striking results followed the application of nitrogen. this they attributed to the fact that the supply of mineral fertilisers in the straw of the farmyard manure is largely in excess of the supply of nitrogen. the nature of the action of the manure previously applied is also to be taken into account in determining how long its influence may probably last. where, for example, the manure has been nitrate of soda or sulphate of ammonia, it may be safely concluded that its direct influence is no longer felt a year after application. the influence of superphosphate of lime, while scarcely so temporary, may be said to last only for a comparatively short time.[ ] on the other hand, when the manure applied is of a slow-acting nature, such as bones or basic slag, its influence will probably be felt for a number of years. _nature of the crop._ but more important than any of the above-mentioned conditions is the nature of the crop itself. our knowledge of the requirements of the different farm crops is still very imperfect. a very wide experience, however, of the effect of different manures on different crops, has conclusively proved that their manurial requirements differ very considerably. the subject is complicated by other considerations, such as the nature of the soil, &c.; but notwithstanding this fact, certain points seem to be pretty well established. in seeking to understand the respective requirements of the different crops for different fertilisers, two important considerations must be borne in mind. these are--( ) _the quantities of the three fertilising ingredients--nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash--which different crops remove from the soil;_ and ( ) _the different power crops possess of assimilating these ingredients._ _amounts of fertilising ingredients removed from the soil by different crops._ the most convenient way of instituting a comparison between the requirements of the different crops in this respect is by calculating the amount, in pounds, of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, which average amounts of the different crops remove per acre. the following table shows this for the common crops:-- fertilising ingredients removed from soil. ----------------------------+-----------+------------+---------- | nitrogen. | phosphoric | potash. | | acid. | ----------------------------+-----------+------------+---------- mangels {root, tons | | . | . {leaf | | . | . |-----------|------------|---------- total crop | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- turnips {root, tons | | . | . {leaf | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- total crop | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- beans {grain, bushels | | . | . {straw | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- total crop | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- red clover hay, tons | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- swedes {root, tons | | . | . {leaf | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- total crop | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- oats {grain, bushels | | . | . {straw | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- total crop | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- meadow hay, - / ton, | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- wheat {grain, bushels | | . | . {straw | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- total crop | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- barley {grain, bushels | | . | . {straw | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- total crop | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- potatoes, tons | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- maize {grain, bushels | | . | . {stalks, &c. | | . | . |-----------+------------+---------- total crop | | . | . ----------------------------+-----------+------------+---------- from the table it will be seen that the crops which remove the largest quantities of all three fertilising ingredients are the root crops--mangels and turnips; that beans remove twice as much nitrogen as the cereals--oats, barley, and wheat--which, in this respect, practically differ very little from one another; while potatoes remove about the same quantity of nitrogen as the cereals. it will further be noticed that the amounts of phosphoric acid removed by the different crops differ very much less than those of nitrogen and potash. mangels remove slightly more, and turnips slightly less, than double the amount removed by cereals. meadow-hay, it will be seen, of all crops removes the least phosphoric acid. in looking at the amounts of potash, we are at once struck by their great discrepancy. such a crop as mangels removes more than six times as much potash from the soil as the cereals. turnips also make large demands on this ingredient, removing over four times as much as the cereals. leguminous crops, such as red clover and beans, remove about twice as much. _capacity of crops for assimilating manures._ instructive though these figures undoubtedly are, _they must not be regarded, as often erroneously they are, as furnishing by themselves sufficient data upon which to base the practice of manuring_. a consideration which is of much greater importance is the capacity that different crops possess for assimilating the various manurial ingredients from the soil. considered from the point of view of absolute amount, there is in most soils an abundant supply of plant-food; but of this amount only a small proportion is available. further, the amount of this available plant-food will vary with different crops--one crop being able to grow where another crop would starve. as illustrative of this, in the norfolk experiments it was found that the turnip was able to assimilate potash from a soil on which the swede was practically starved. it is on this fact more than any other that the principles of manuring are based. several explanations of the different capacities crops possess of assimilating their food may be put forward. and we may here point out that crops belonging to the same class exhibit, on the whole, a certain amount of similarity in their manurial requirements. thus, for example, we may say that _gramineous crops_ so far resemble one another in possessing _small capacity for assimilating nitrogen_, _root crops for assimilating phosphoric acid_, and _leguminous crops for assimilating potash_, and that, consequently, these crops are generally most benefited by the application, respectively, of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash. but while a certain general resemblance exists, crops belonging to the same class differ in many cases very considerably, as we shall immediately see. _difference in root systems of different crops._ one explanation of the different capacity possessed by different crops for absorbing plant-food from the soil is to be found in the difference of their root systems. every agriculturist knows that crops in this respect differ very widely. crops having deep roots will naturally have a larger surface of soil from which to draw their food-supplies than crops having shallower roots. such crops as red clover, wheat, and mangels are able to draw their food-supplies from the subsoil to an extent not possessed by shallower-rooted crops, such as barley, turnips, and grass. crops having surface-roots, on the other hand, have often greater capacity for assimilating nitrogen,--this ingredient, as has already been pointed out, being chiefly located in the surface-soil. the tendency of growing shallow-rooted crops will therefore be towards impoverishing the surface-soil; whereas the occasional growth of a deep-rooted crop brings the plant-food in the subsoil into requisition. in this connection it may be well to draw attention to the singular capacity possessed by certain crops for absorbing nitrogen. of these the case of clover is the most striking, and has long puzzled agriculturists. the discovery, which has been repeatedly referred to in these pages, that the leguminous order of crops, to which clover belongs, have the power of absorbing the free nitrogen of the air through the agency of micro-organic life in the plant and in the soil, has furnished an explanation of this long-debated problem. _period of growth._ a further reason is the difference in the period of a crop's growth. a crop which grows quickly, and consequently occupies the ground during a comparatively short period, will naturally require a richer soil, and therefore a more liberal treatment with manure, than one whose growth is more gradual. another consideration is the season of the year during which active growth of the crops takes place. for example, in the case of the wheat crop, active growth takes place in spring and ceases early in the summer. since, however, nitrification goes on right through the summer, and nitrates are most abundant in the soil in late summer and autumn, such a crop as wheat is ill suited to obtain any benefit from this bountiful provision of nature, and is consequently particularly benefited by the application of nitrogenous manures. root crops, on the other hand, sown in summer, continue their active growth into autumn, and are thus enabled to utilise the nitrates formed in the process of nitrification. the custom of sowing a quickly growing green crop, such as rye, mustard, rape, &c., after a wheat crop, is a practice which aims at conserving the nitrates and preventing their loss by autumn and winter rains. the name "catch crop" has been applied to such a crop. by ploughing under the green crop, the nitrogen removed from the soil in the form of easily soluble nitrates is restored in an insoluble organic form, and the soil is at the same time enriched by the addition of much valuable organic matter.[ ] it is chiefly the above facts that form the scientific basis of the long-pursued practice of the rotation of crops. _variation in composition of crops._ a point of considerable interest is the influence exerted by manures on the composition of crops. it has been assumed in the preceding pages that the composition of crops of the same plant is uniform; but this is not strictly the case, as it has been proved that not merely the manure and soil have an appreciable influence on the crop's composition, but so also has the climate. _absorption of plant-food._ the laws regulating the absorption of plant-food are most interesting, although, unfortunately, very imperfectly understood as yet. the fertilising ingredients are capable of considerable movement in the plant, and are only absorbed up to a certain period of growth. this in many plants is reached when they flower. after this period they are no longer capable of absorbing any more food. the popular belief that plants in ripening exhaust the soil of its fertilising matters is consequently a fallacy. _fertilising ingredients lodge in the seed._ the tendency of fertilising matters is to move upward in the plant as it matures, and finally to become lodged in the seed. it is for this reason that the cereals prove such an exhaustive crop. that nature, however, can in certain cases be very economical of her food-supplies, is strikingly illustrated by the fact that much of the fertilising matter contained in the mature leaves in autumn passes back into the tree before the leaves fall from it. _forms in which nitrogen exists in plants._ the form in which nitrogen is present in the plant is chiefly as albuminoids. as, however, albuminoids belong to that class of bodies known as colloids, which cannot easily pass through porous membranes like those forming the walls of plant-cells, they are changed during certain periods of the plant's growth into amides, which are crystalloids, and consequently able to move freely about in the plant. amides are most abundant in young plants during the period of their most active growth, and as the plant ripens the amides seem to be largely converted into albuminoids. while the subject is not very clearly understood, it would seem to be pretty conclusively proved that there is a direct relation between the amount of the phosphoric acid and of the nitrogen absorbed. _bearing of above facts on agricultural practice._ the bearing of these facts upon practice is obvious. in the first place, they show how important it is that plants should be well fed when they are young, and that in the practice of green manuring it is best to plough in the crop when it is in flower, as no additional benefit is gained by allowing it to ripen, seeing that no further absorption of fertilising ingredients takes place after the period of flowering. _influence of excessive manuring of crops._ the influence of large quantities of manures is seen in the case of certain root crops. it is found, in such a case, that while the roots are larger, they are more watery in composition and of less nutritive value. again, it seems to be a fact pretty generally known to practical men, that nitrate of soda seems to have a bad effect on the quality of hay. it would seem, further, that the influence of nitrogenous fertilisers on cereals is to increase the percentage of nitrogen in the grain, but that they have no such influence in the case of leguminous crops. phosphatic manures, on the other hand, in the case of leguminous crops, seem to have the effect of diminishing the amount of nitrogen in the seed. footnotes: [ ] though not necessarily at the same time or to each succeeding crop. there may be comparatively long intervals between the applications of farmyard manure in many cases. [ ] of course what is meant here is the direct influence of such manures. their indirect value may be shown in the soil by the increased crop residues they give rise to. [ ] this is very concisely and clearly put in mr warington's admirable 'chemistry of the farm.' chapter xxiii. manuring of the common farm crops. in this chapter we shall attempt to summarise briefly the results of experiments on the manuring of some of the commoner crops, and we shall start with the manuring of cereals. cereals. as we have already pointed out, a certain similarity in the manurial requirements of the different members of this class exists. they are characterised, for one thing, by the comparatively small quantity of nitrogen they remove from the soil--less than either leguminous or root crops. of this nitrogen the larger proportion--amounting to two-thirds--is contained in the grain, the straw only containing about a quarter of the total amount of nitrogen in the plant. the amount of phosphoric acid they remove from the soil is not much less than that removed by the other two classes of crops; but this, again, is also chiefly in the grain. it is on this account that the cereals may be regarded, in a sense, as exhaustive crops, seeing that the grain is almost invariably sold off the farm. but, on the other hand, owing to the comparatively small demands they make on fertilising ingredients, cereals will continue to grow on poor land for a longer period than most crops,--a fact of very great importance for mankind. _especially benefited by nitrogenous manures._ despite the fact that cereals remove comparatively little nitrogen from the soil, it is somewhat striking to find that they are chiefly benefited by the application of nitrogenous manures. this fact may be explained by the shortness of the period of their growth, and the fact that they assimilate their nitrogen in spring and early summer, and are thus unable to utilise to the full the nitrates which accumulate in the soil during later summer and autumn. as they seem to absorb their nitrogen almost exclusively in the form of nitrates, they are especially benefited by the application of nitrate of soda. _power of absorbing silicates._ a characteristic feature in the composition of cereals is the large amount of silica they contain. in common with the grasses, they seem to possess a power, not possessed by other crops, of feeding upon silicates. the special manure, therefore, required for cereals is a nitrogenous manure, and that, as a rule, of a speedily available character, such as nitrate of soda or sulphate of ammonia. furthermore, certain members of the group are also specially benefited by phosphatic manures. we shall now consider individually a few of the more important cereal crops. barley. of cereal crops barley deserves to be considered first, owing to the fact that it is, of all grain crops, the most widely distributed. in england, in amount, it comes next to wheat among cereals. its habits have also been studied in a very elaborate and careful manner, and have been made the subject of many experiments, both in this country and abroad. _period of growth._ the first point to notice about barley is the fact that its period of growth is a short one. this has a most important bearing on its treatment with manure. it may be said to ripen, on an average, in thirteen or fourteen weeks in this country; although in norway and sweden its period of growth is much less--viz., from six to seven weeks. indeed no fewer than three crops have been obtained in one year in certain districts in these countries, and two crops are common. with regard to the period of its growth, it differs from wheat, which in its general manurial requirements it resembles. wheat, which is largely sown in autumn, has four or five months' start of barley. from the fact that it is a short-lived crop, and that its roots are shallower than wheat, and draw their nourishment chiefly from the surface-soil, it benefits to a greater extent from liberal manuring than wheat, which is more independent of artificial supplies of fertilisers. _most suitable soil._ again, while wheat does well on a heavy soil, and does not require a fine surface-tilth, barley does best on a light, rich, friable soil. it has, however, been very successfully grown on a heavy soil after wheat. barley benefits more than wheat does from the application of superphosphate of lime, or some other readily available phosphatic manure. this may be accounted for by its shorter period of growth and shallower root system, which thus prevent it drawing much mineral sustenance from the subsoil. in fact, spring-sown crops, as a rule, benefit more from superphosphate than autumn-sown crops. the exhaustion of a soil under barley is essentially, as in the case of wheat, one of nitrogen, as sir j. henry gilbert has pointed out.[ ] _farmyard manure not suitable._ it has been urged, with some show of reason, that farmyard manure is not suitable for barley, as its action is too slow to have much influence on so short-lived a plant, and that only quick-acting manures should be used. where farmyard manure is applied, it should be to the preceding crop; and this is advisable for more reasons than one. _importance of uniform manuring of barley._ the use to which barley is put--viz., for malting purposes--renders the uniformity of its composition a point of great importance. since its quality is very largely influenced by its treatment with manures, special care has to be exercised in their application. grown as it generally is after roots, fed off with sheep, its quality, it is alleged, is apt to suffer from the unequal distribution of the manure applied in this way. it has consequently been recommended, in order to avoid this inequality, rather to grow a wheat crop immediately preceding the barley. _norfolk experiments on barley._ mr cooke, in summing up the results of the interesting norfolk experiments on barley, points out that in these experiments barley always was benefited by nitrogenous manures, sometimes by superphosphate of lime, and more rarely by potash; that of nitrogenous manures those of quickest action exerted the best influence. on an average it was found that cwt. nitrate of soda per acre gave an increase of bushels of barley, and cwt. gave bushels; while / cwt. sulphate of ammonia (_i.e._, the amount containing the same quantity of nitrogen as cwt. nitrate of soda) gave only - / bushels of an increase, and - / cwt. (= cwt. nitrate of soda) gave bushels. mr cooke recommends the following manures for the barley crop. from / to cwt. of nitrate of soda, according to previous treatment of soil; from to cwt. super; and where it is required, from / to cwt. muriate of potash. _proportion of grain to straw._ professor hellriegel, the distinguished german investigator, has carried out most elaborate experiments on a small scale, with a view to investigating the habits of the barley plant. in the most perfectly developed of these plants, grown under the most favourable conditions, he found that the grain and straw were about equal in weight. such a proportion of grain is, however, never realised in practice, the proportion of of grain to of straw being probably the common one. wheat. wheat occupies the first position amongst cereals, in respect of extent of cultivation, in england. as a rule it is sown in autumn, although it is also sown in spring. it is generally taken after rotation grasses or a leguminous crop, such as peas or beans, or after potatoes or roots. unlike barley, it does best on a clay soil, or at any rate on a firm soil, and requires a moist seed-bed. from the fact that wheat is often sown after such a crop as potatoes or a root crop to which a liberal application of manure has been given, it is not so necessary to manure it except with a top-dressing of nitrate of soda. in short, it is usually considered highly desirable to get land into "good heart" before wheat, so that the wheat may obtain its nourishment from the residue of the previous crop and the farmyard manure previously applied. although, therefore, as a rule, the only manure it will be found necessary to add to wheat is a nitrogenous manure, such as nitrate of soda or sulphate of ammonia, still there are circumstances in which it will be well to supplement these by phosphatic or even potassic manures. on a light soil it may be advisable to add superphosphate of lime, guano, or bone-meal, in quantities of to cwt. per acre, in addition to a nitrogenous manure. _rothamsted experiments on wheat._ of experiments carried out on the growth of wheat, those which have now been in progress for over half a century at rothamsted are the most valuable and famous. in these experiments the comparative value of nitrogen and mineral manures on this crop was strikingly exemplified. the former gave a most marked increase in the crop, while with the latter little or no increase was obtained. a combination of nitrogenous and mineral manures, on the other hand, gave the most striking results. an explanation of these results may be afforded by the fact that in ordinary farming an excess of mineral matter, as compared with nitrates, is returned to the soil in the crop residues and in the straw of the farmyard manure. of nitrogenous manures, nitrate of soda, on the whole, showed better results than sulphate of ammonia. _continuous growth of wheat._ the possibility of growing fair crops of wheat year after year for fifty years on the same land, and that without any manure whatever, is among the most striking of the results of these famous rothamsted wheat experiments. _flitcham experiments._ in conclusion, we may refer to mr cooke's flitcham experiments. these were carried out for the purpose of ascertaining the most suitable manure for the wheat crop under different conditions. it will be sufficient here to give the recommendations made by mr cooke as the practical outcome of these experiments. he recommends the application of tons of farmyard manure on light or mixed soils, after rotation seeds, ploughed in in the autumn, with from / to cwt. of nitrate of soda, sown in the spring. in certain cases farmyard manure will be sufficient without the nitrate of soda. when farmyard manure is not available, the most effective and economical substitute is cwt. per acre of rape-cake, ploughed in in the autumn, or cwt. of sulphate of ammonia, sown in the spring, with, in either case, cwt. of nitrate of soda as a spring top-dressing. in addition to the above, on land in doubtful agricultural condition, or exceptionally deficient in one or other of these ingredients, mr cooke recommends the addition of cwt. superphosphate, or cwt. muriate of potash, or both of these manures, ploughed or harrowed in in autumn. oats. like barley, oats are generally sown in spring, and, like barley, may be described as a shallow-rooted crop. they require, therefore, manures which are readily available, and their demands on the different fertilising ingredients are very similar to barley. the manures which will pay best, consequently, for oats, are nitrate of soda, used as a top-dressing, and superphosphate of lime, applied along with the seed. probably upon no other crop is nitrate of soda so safe and so effective as upon oats. in some respects, however, oats differ strikingly from barley. _a very hardy crop._ in the first place, oats are a much hardier crop than barley or wheat. they can grow on a wonderfully wide range of soil, and under comparatively adverse circumstances, both of climate and situation. they are better suited for a damp climate such as our own than a warm climate. they may be described as of all crops the least fastidious, and will flourish on sandy, peaty, or clayey soils. while this is so, they show a preference for soils rich in decayed vegetable matter. it is for this reason that they flourish so well on soils freshly broken up from pasture, and are often the first crop to be grown on such soils. _require mixed nitrogenous manuring._ stoeckhardt has found, in experiments on the manuring of the oat crop, that they greedily absorb nitrogen during nearly the whole period of their growth, and that, consequently, it is desirable to manure them with a mixed nitrogenous manure which shall contain nitrogen, both in a readily available form to supply the plant during the early stages of its growth, and in a less available form for the later stages of growth. he was of the opinion that in this way a continuous and satisfactory growth of the crop would be promoted. _arendt's experiments._ the oat-plant has been made the subject of many elaborate investigations. of these, those carried out by arendt are the most elaborate and best known. in these experiments the composition of the oat-plant at different stages of growth was investigated. it was found that the oat-plant increased during the whole period of its life, and that two-thirds of the nitrogen absorbed was absorbed during the later period of growth. it has since been shown, however, that the absorption of nitrogen is very much influenced by circumstances. indeed its composition is peculiarly susceptible to the influence of manures, and especially the influence of weather. thus arendt found that the assimilation of nitrogen is checked by cold wet weather; while, on the other hand, it is promoted by warm dry weather. the grain of oats grown in warm seasons is better developed, and in composition more nutritious (_i.e._, contains more nitrogen), than that of oats grown in wet seasons, while the reverse is the case with the straw. "_avenine._" a point of considerable interest in connection with the composition of oats is the fact that it contains a body which exerts a strikingly stimulating effect on the nervous system of the animal, and to which the name "avenine" has been given. _quantities of manures._ the quantities of manures which may be applied to the oat crop are similar in amount to those which ought to be applied to barley--from / to cwt. of nitrate of soda, and from to cwt. superphosphate of lime. very often, however, the oat crop receives directly little or no manure. in the highland and agricultural society of scotland's experiments, sulphate of ammonia was found to be of very much less value than nitrate of soda as a manure for oats. potash manures, especially muriate of potash, had a very beneficial effect. the general conclusions drawn from these experiments were, that the treatment of the land should be such as to accumulate organic matter in it, to prevent too great a loss of moisture, and to provide the young plant with manures that come speedily into operation. grass. the manuring of grass is a question of very great interest and importance, but is, at the same time, beset with peculiar difficulties. grass is grown under two conditions--first, that grown on soils exclusively set apart for its continuous growth (permanent pasture); and secondly, that grown for the purpose of being converted into hay and of providing pasture in the ordinary rotation of crops (rotation seeds). the manuring of the former is somewhat different from the manuring of the latter. _effect of manure on herbage of pastures._ the nature of the herbage growing on pasture is very much influenced by the manure applied. this, indeed, is one of the most noteworthy features connected with the manuring of grass, and has been especially observed in the rothamsted experiments, where the influence of the different manures on the various kinds of herbage has been investigated with great care. the herbage constituting pasture is, as every farmer knows, of a varied description. we have in pastures a mixture of plants belonging both to the gramineous and leguminous classes, as well as a variety of weeds. now the result of the application of different manures tends respectively to foster the different kinds of grasses. thus when one kind of manure is applied, grasses of one kind tend to predominate and crowd out grasses of another. it has been found that _the more highly pasture-land is manured the simpler is the nature of its herbage_ (that is, the fewer are the different kinds of herbage growing on it). _unmanured pasture, on the other hand, is more complex in its herbage._ the result is, that the application of manure to pasture-land is attended with certain dangers. to maintain good pasture it is desirable to effect a proper balance between the different kinds of grasses. for this reason permanent pasture may be said to be, of all crops, the least commonly manured. as a rule it is only manured by the droppings of the cattle and sheep feeding upon it. _influence of farmyard manure._ it is found that the influence of farmyard manure upon the composition of the pasture does not tend, to the same extent, to the undue development of one type of herbage over another; and in this respect it is probably to be preferred to artificial manures. the same reasons, however, do not hold with regard to rotation seeds, where an abundant growth is desired, and complexity of herbage is not so important. a further reason which exists for the manuring of meadow-land is the greater impoverishment of the soil taking place under such conditions. as illustrating the influence of different manures on different kinds of herbage, it may be mentioned that in new england wood-ashes, a manure commonly used there, have been observed, when applied to pasture, to bring in white clover, and that the application of gypsum had the same effect. an explanation of this fact may be found in the influence of potash on leguminous crops. the chief value of wood-ashes as a manure is due to the large percentage of potash they contain, while the value of gypsum is probably to be accounted for by the fact that it has an indirect action, and sets free potash from its inert compounds in the soil. in the rothamsted experiments this point has been verified, and potash has been shown to increase the proportion of leguminous plants on a grass-field. nitrogenous manures, on the other hand, more especially sulphate of ammonia, have been found to increase the proportion of grasses proper, and to diminish the proportion of leguminous plants. the effect of farmyard manure, while less marked in inducing simplicity of herbage, has a similar effect to sulphate of ammonia; while phosphates and other mineral manures exercise an influence similar to that of potash. mixtures of mineral and nitrogenous manures gave the largest returns obtained, but their influence was to increase the proportion of grasses proper. sewage irrigation also tends chiefly to develop grasses. _influence of soil and season on pastures._ manures are not the only factors influencing the quality of pastures. the nature of the soil, as well as the age of the pasture and the character of the season, exert a very considerable influence. grass growing on damp or badly drained soil is invariably of poor quality, the coarser grasses predominating. old pastures, again, are generally of better quality than new ones. manuring of meadow-land. nitrate of soda is a common manure for grass grown for hay. it is often applied at the rate of or cwt. per acre. it is best, however, to apply it in smaller doses. on soils where lime is abundant, superphosphate may be applied, if necessary, at the rate of or cwt. per acre, or bones at a similar rate. basic slag has been found to meet with good results as a manure for grass-land, especially where the soil is rich in organic matter. _bangor experiments._ mr gilchrist of university college, bangor, as a result of numerous experiments carried out in different parts of wales, recommends for rye-grass and clover hay on land in good condition cwt. of nitrate of soda or sulphate of ammonia per acre, the former being applied about the middle of april, the latter during march. for land in poor condition, the addition of cwt. of superphosphate is recommended--this to be applied some time between december and march. farmyard manure may be usefully applied to young grass and clover seeds in the autumn, more especially on light soils. for meadow-land which is growing hay every year, mr gilchrist further recommends the following -course rotation of manuring:-- first year, tons farmyard manure, applied in the autumn. second year, cwt. nitrate of soda. third year, cwt. basic slag or cwt. superphosphate and cwt. nitrate of soda. fourth year, cwt. nitrate of soda. _norfolk experiments._ mr cooke, from his norfolk experiments, recommends the following manures for rotation seeds:-- one to - / cwt. nitrate of soda as a top-dressing in early spring. where the clover plant is a good one, and it is particularly desired to cultivate it, he recommends as a dressing cwt. of muriate of potash per acre, to be applied immediately after the clover is sown. the practice of dressing growing seeds in their first winter has, so far as the experiments in norfolk go, less to recommend it than the earlier dressing. manuring of permanent pastures. in this case the manure should be applied so as not to impair the quality of the herbage. slow-acting manures are consequently best, such as basic slag or bones, which have been found to be of special value. on wet or marshy land after draining, lime is perhaps one of the best manures to apply in the first instance. as we have already said, farmyard manure will do more to maintain the quality of pasture than any kind of artificial manure. mr cooke is of opinion that no system of manuring yet discovered will both thicken and improve the herbage at all equally in success to the careful and regular feeding upon the grass of cattle or sheep, the animals having a good allowance of decorticated cotton-cake, or even of linseed-cake. roots. of all crops roots may be said to require the most liberal application of manure, and to respond most freely to it. they contain large quantities of the fertilising ingredients--nitrogen, phosphates, and potash--and may be regarded as exceedingly exhaustive crops. this is especially the case with regard to mangels, which make particularly large demands on a soil's fertilising ingredients. turnips are characterised by the large amount of sulphur they contain; and, according to some, this explains the beneficial effect which gypsum has when applied to them as a manure. this, however, is more probably to be explained by the indirect action of gypsum in setting free the potash of the soil. the fact that the successful cultivation of root crops depends on the application of large quantities of manure, is recognised in practice, as they receive the most manure of any crop of the rotation. roots flourish best on a light soil which is neither too wet nor too dry; but with liberal manuring and careful tillage, they may be said to do well on any soil. mangels are generally more benefited by the application of nitrogenous manures than are turnips or swedes, which, it would seem, have a greater power of absorbing nitrogen from the soil than the first-named crop; but it is a mistake to suppose that any of the root crops are not dependent on a ready supply of nitrogen; and the fact that large crops of turnips can often be grown by the application of superphosphate alone, may be taken as a proof that the soil contains plenty of nitrogen. mangels are, from their deeper roots, more capable of drawing their supply of phosphoric acid from the soil than turnips. they respond, therefore, as a rule, less freely than turnips or swedes to an application of superphosphate. generally speaking, we may say that the characteristic manure for turnips is superphosphate, and that for mangels is a nitrogenous manure such as nitrate of soda or sulphate of ammonia. a special reason for manuring root crops is the fact that they are more liable to disease than other crops; and this is especially the case in the early stages of their growth. one of the great benefits conferred on the turnip crop by an application of superphosphate, is the help it gives the crop to pass safely the critical period of its growth. the superphosphate is best drilled in with the seed, in quantities varying from to cwt. in scotland, it may be well to point out, the manure applied to this crop is very much in excess of the amount customarily applied in england; for in the former country larger applications of manure may be profitably employed. roots generally receive a large dressing of farmyard manure. salt has been found in some districts to have a very good effect on the mangel crop, and potash is often found to amply repay application. _influence of manure on composition._ a most interesting point in connection with the manuring of roots is the effect of manure on their composition. this has been most elaborately investigated at rothamsted and elsewhere. thus it has been found that the effect of the application of excessive quantities of nitrogenous manures is to produce too great a development of leaves at the expense of the roots. _nitrogenous manures increase sugar in roots._ nitrogenous manures also tend to increase the proportion of sugar and diminish the proportion of nitrogenous matter in roots. this has an important bearing on the treatment of roots which are cultivated for their sugar, such as beets, in the growth of which nitrate of soda is the chief artificial manure applied.[ ] the leaf, it may be pointed out, contains a larger percentage of dry matter, both in swedes and in turnips, than the root. _amount of nitrogen recovered in increase of crop._ with regard to the amount of nitrogen recovered in the increased crop of mangel and roots when manured with different nitrogenous manures, it was found at rothamsted, as an average of six years, that the following percentages of nitrogen were recovered: when nitrate of soda was applied, per cent of the nitrogen it contained was recovered in the increased crop; when ammonia salts were applied, per cent; when rape-cake was used, per cent; and when a mixture of rape-cake and ammonia salts was used, per cent. it may be pointed out that the influence of season and climate on the composition of root crops is very great--greater, indeed, than on any other crop. like oats, turnips grow better in scotland than in england, the moister climate of the former country being more suitable for their maximum development, and hence the economy of maximum dressings in scotland. _norfolk experiments._ in conclusion, a few words may be said on the norfolk experiments, carried out under the direction of mr cooke for the purpose of ascertaining the best and most economical manure for mangels and swedes on different norfolk soils. in most of these experiments it was found that superphosphate had not much effect in producing increase of crop in the case of mangels; that the best nitrogenous manure was nitrate of soda; and that on the whole it was not economical to apply farmyard manure at the rate of more than tons per acre. it was further found that, although either potash or common salt gave a decided increase in weight of roots, it was not necessary to give both these manures at once, either of them being about as effective as the other. mr cooke recommends the following manures as best suited for mangels--viz., cwt. nitrate, cwt. common salt, and cwt. superphosphate. upon certain soils peculiarly adapted to mangels, and in warm localities where larger crops than to tons per acre are habitually grown, it would probably pay to increase or to double the above quantity of nitrate of soda. ten tons of farmyard manure may, if preferred, be substituted for all or a part of the nitrate of soda, or may even be used in addition to it, according to the resources of the farmer in respect of it, and the return he desires to get from the dung in the first year of application or in future ones. it is best to apply the nitrate of soda in two instalments--half at the time of seeding, and half as a top-dressing immediately after the first hand-hoeing of the roots. a third dressing may often be given with advantage a month later. _manure for swedes._ as a complete and economical dressing for swedes in norfolk, mr cooke recommends to cwt. superphosphate, cwt. sulphate of ammonia, and / cwt. of muriate of potash. occasionally it may be found advisable to reduce the quantity of sulphate of ammonia, or to leave it out altogether; and in other cases the potash may be judiciously omitted. the entire mixture should be sown at the time of drilling the turnips. if farmyard manure is used--and if used it should be applied in a well-decomposed state--no other manure than cwt. of superphosphate will be required. _highland society's experiments._ valuable experiments have been carried out on the subject of manuring of turnips by dr a. p. aitken, for the highland and agricultural society of scotland. the following are some of the results to be gathered from these experiments. the effect of a dissolved phosphate as compared with a ground phosphate is to produce a turnip of less feeding value. superphosphate had a better effect when applied in april than when applied with the seed in june. it was further found that when the nitrogenous manure was given entirely in the form of nitrate of soda or sulphate of ammonia, the latter produced a denser and sounder turnip. lastly, with regard to the application of potash, it was found that the best way was to apply it several months before sowing. the effect of potash manures is to increase the amount of turnips, but to retard the ripening of the bulbs. the effect of excessive potash manuring is to greatly injure the crop. _manuring for rich crops of turnips._ in dr aitken's own words: "in order to grow a large and at the same time a healthy and nutritious crop of turnips, such a system of manuring or treatment of the soil, by feeding or otherwise, should be practised as will result in the general enriching and raising of the condition of the land, so that the crop may grow naturally and gradually to maturity. for that purpose a larger application of slowly acting manures, of which bone-meal may be taken as the type, is much better suited than smaller applications of the more quickly acting kind. a certain amount of quickly acting manure is very beneficial to the crop, especially in its youth; but the great bulk of the nourishment which the crop requires should be of the slowly rotting or dissolving kind, as uniformly distributed through the soil as possible." _experiments by the author._ experiments by the author on turnip-manuring, carried out in different parts of the south and west of scotland, showed that while farmyard manure is valuable in giving the crop a good start and bringing it well forward during the period of germination and early growth, by supplying a certain amount of easily assimilable plant-food, and in the case of dry weather attracting a quantity of moisture, its application in quantities of or even tons per acre can scarcely be regarded as profitable, giving to farmyard manure a nominal value of a few shillings a ton. in these experiments slag proved itself a most valuable manure, indeed one of the most economical of all the manures experimented with. they further showed that heavy dressings with superphosphate, amounting to as much as cwt. per acre, are, from an economical point of view, as a rule justifiable in scotland; and that nitrate of soda and sulphate of ammonia possess practically equal value as a manure for turnips. in almost every one of the experiments the benefit of supplementing superphosphate with nitrogenous manure was shown. potash was also found in many cases to be a thoroughly paying manure for the turnip crop, when it was applied along with nitrogen and phosphates; but when applied alone, far from exercising any appreciable benefit, it seemed to exert an injurious action. potatoes. potatoes are often classed along with the root crops, and in their manurial requirements they offer many points of similarity. next to root crops, they may be said to make the most exhaustive demands on the soil, and therefore require a liberal general manuring. a point of importance in the manuring of potatoes is a good tilth in the soil, so as to enable a free expansion of the tubers to take place. they may be said to grow best on deep warm soils; but, like roots, if liberally manured, they may be successfully grown on any kind of soil. farmyard manure has long been regarded as specially valuable for the potato crop. in many parts of scotland it is applied in enormous quantities, ranging from to even tons per acre. there can be little doubt that the value of farmyard manure, as well as other bulky manures, for the potato crop, is partly due to their mechanical influence on the soil. potatoes are surface-feeders, and require their food in a readily available condition. it is found desirable, therefore, to supplement farmyard manure by readily available artificial manures. potatoes repay the application of a mixed manure containing all the fertilising ingredients--nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash--better than most crops. _highland society's experiments on potatoes._ the nitrogen is, according to the highland society's experiments, best applied in the form of nitrate of soda. sulphate of ammonia does not seem, when farmyard manure is also applied, to have an equally valuable effect, as it influences the size of the tuber, producing an undue proportion of small potatoes. when no farmyard manure is applied, however, sulphate of ammonia seems to have a good effect, especially in wet seasons. with regard to the nature of the phosphatic manure to be applied, superphosphate is to be preferred. potatoes make large demands on potash, and consequently require potassic manures. in consequence of the fact that they receive large applications of farmyard manure, the necessity for adding potash in the form of artificial manures does not generally exist. potash, if applied in too large quantities, has been found to exert a deleterious effect. we have already pointed out that muriate of potash tends to produce a waxy potato. _the rothamsted experiments with potatoes._ the rothamsted experimenters have very fully investigated the conditions of the manurial requirements of potatoes. in these experiments potatoes were grown year after year in the same field. it was found that the effect of mineral manures alone was greater than the effect of nitrogenous manures alone, and that of mineral manures phosphates, as a rule, had a better effect than potash; that under the action of the growth of potatoes a greater exhaustion of phosphates than of potash takes place in the soil; and lastly, that it is essential to have an abundant supply of the different fertilising ingredients in order to grow successful crops. in the rothamsted experiments, the slow action of farmyard manure in supplying fertilising ingredients to the potatoes is strikingly demonstrated. thus, although farmyard manure was applied at such a rate that more than lb. of nitrogen were added to the soil, the result was inferior to that obtained from the application of lb. of nitrogen applied in the form of readily available artificial manure. _effect of farmyard manure on potatoes._ it may be said, in this respect, that the potato is less able to utilise the fertilising ingredients of farmyard manure than any other of the farm crops. yet, despite this fact, farmyard manure has been found to be one of the best manures to apply. the reconciliation of these seemingly contradictory statements depends on the influence exerted by the farmyard manure on the mechanical condition of the soil, rendering it more porous and easily permeable to the surface-roots, upon the development of which the success of the crop so much depends. the beneficial effect of farmyard manure is also doubtless due to the increased temperature which large applications of it produce in a soil. sir j. henry gilbert, in his well-known cirencester lecture on the growth of potatoes, cites several examples of the manurial treatment of potatoes in different parts of the country. in forfarshire, farmyard manure or stable manure is largely employed (at the rate of to tons, and in some cases even tons per acre), and it is also largely supplemented by artificial manures. these latter are applied to the extent of about cwt., and consist of superphosphate, dissolved bones, and potash salts. six tons of potatoes are considered a fair crop. in east lothian the manuring is similar, with the exception that farmyard manure is applied in even larger quantities-- to tons being often used. sometimes potatoes are grown with artificial manures alone. it would seem that the usual crop of potatoes ranges from to tons per acre. _manuring of potatoes in jersey._ the manuring of the potato crop, so largely grown in jersey in the channel islands, is of interest. potatoes are there grown two or three years, then corn, then grass for a few years, then potatoes again, no special rotation of crops being followed. either farmyard manure or sea-weed is applied at the rate of to tons per acre, supplemented by to cwt. of artificial manures. these statements show how prevalent the practice of heavily manuring the potato crop is. _the influence of manure on the composition of the potato._ the influence of manure on the composition of the potato crop is of much interest. potatoes grown without manure, just as in the case of roots, are found to have a larger percentage of nitrogen than potatoes grown with manure. the effect of manuring, therefore, is to increase the proportion of starch, which is the most important constituent of the potato. mineral manures have a greater effect in increasing the percentage of starch than purely nitrogenous manures; but when used together, a still greater increase is obtained than when used singly. the effect of nitrogenous manures on the composition of roots and potatoes is thus seen to be similar. in the case of both crops the effect is to increase the proportion of the characteristic carbohydrate constituent, which in roots is sugar, and in potatoes starch. potatoes, like roots, are also much influenced by the season. the effect of season and manuring on the potato disease is worthy of notice. wet seasons are favourable to the development of the disease. it has been found that in a highly nitrogenous manured crop the proportion of diseased tubers is greater than in a non-manured crop. leguminous crops. we have already referred to the manuring of crops of the leguminous class in discussing the manuring of meadows and permanent pasture. it was there pointed out that the tendency of certain manures was to encourage the growth of the leguminous plants of the herbage, while other manures had the effect of encouraging those of the gramineous class. it was pointed out that a manure which had this effect was potash, or any manure which owed its characteristic action to the fact that it supplied potash to the soil or set it free in the soil. _leguminous plants benefit by potash._ this is one of the most important points to notice in manuring leguminous plants. just as we can say that nitrogenous manures are specially beneficial to cereals, and phosphatic manures to roots, so potash is the special manure for leguminous crops. _nitrogenous manures may actually be hurtful._ but we have, further, an even more striking characteristic of leguminous crops to notice. we have seen that, with regard to the crops already discussed, while there are cases in which a fertilising ingredient may be of no value, or may positively exert a hurtful action on the crops, such cases are only exceptional. with regard to leguminous crops, however, we find that almost invariably they derive little or no benefit from the use of artificial nitrogenous manures. and this is all the more striking since they contain large quantities of nitrogen in their composition--twice as much as the cereals. the fact, which has long been noticed with regard to certain members of this class of plants, such as clover, that not only do they contain a large amount of nitrogen, but that by growing them on a soil the soil is largely enriched in this valuable fertilising constituent, has long waited for a satisfactory explanation, which at last has been forthcoming. the discovery that leguminous crops can draw on the boundless store of nitrogen present in the air has done much to clear up the mystery. there are, however, other problems with regard to the growth of leguminous plants which still await solution. _clover-sickness._ one of these is the fact that land on which a leguminous crop like clover has been growing for a number of years becomes unfit to support its growth any longer. such a soil is termed "clover-sick"; and many have been the theories put forward to explain the phenomenon, but none of them can be regarded as satisfactory. the knowledge that leguminous plants have the power of deriving their nitrogen from the air, furnishes us with an economical means of enriching our soils in nitrogen. by growing leguminous crops alternately with cereals, for example, the air should be made to furnish the necessary nitrogenous manure. as a matter of fact, modified forms of such a practice have long been in use--indeed the ordinary rotations of crops are, to a certain extent, adaptations of this practice. _alternate wheat and beans rotation._ an interesting experiment carried out at rothamsted may be here cited which illustrates in a striking manner the truth of the above statement. wheat and the leguminous crop beans were grown alternately. it was found that almost as much wheat (containing nearly as much nitrogen) was yielded in eight crops of wheat so grown as was yielded by sixteen crops of wheat grown consecutively in an adjoining field. the most commonly cultivated leguminous crops are clover, beans, and peas. clover having been already discussed, we need only say a word or two on the manuring of beans and peas. beans. beans do best on strong land, and, unlike some of the crops considered, do not require a particularly fine tilth. they are generally grown after cereals, and as a rule are sown in spring. more rarely, however, they are sown in autumn. spring-sown beans take about seven months to come to maturity. they are much affected, like other crops, but to a greater extent, by the nature of the season--a wet season inducing an undue development of straw. _manure for beans._ in common practice the manure used for the bean crop is farmyard manure, applied to the soil in autumn after the harvest of the wheat, barley, or other cereal crop grown. so common is this practice, that the belief commonly exists that farmyard manure is necessary for a successful bean crop. but experiments conducted at the highland society's experiment station at pumpherston show that full crops of beans may be grown with the aid of artificial manures on soils which have received no application of farmyard manure for ten years. _relative value of manurial ingredients._ in the appendix[ ] will be found a table giving the results of manurial experiments with the nitrogenous, phosphatic, and potash manures on beans, carried out by dr a. p. aitken at the highland society's experiment station. from these experiments it will be seen that the application of phosphates and nitrogenous manures, either alone or together, exerted a comparatively small effect in increasing the yield of beans compared with that obtained with potash, either alone or combined with phosphates. as dr aitken says, "without potash in the manure, the other two ingredients are of very little use, unless, indeed, the land be very rich in potash." _gypsum._ gypsum has a good effect on the bean crop, both on account of the lime it contains, and of its indirect action in setting free potash. superphosphate is a much better manure than insoluble phosphates, and similarly, in the few cases where nitrogenous manures are beneficial, the speediest acting are best. hence nitrate of soda is to be preferred to other nitrogenous manures. when it is applied, it should be applied in small quantities. a slow-acting nitrogenous manure is positively injurious; so also, according to dr aitken, is nitrate of soda, applied as a top-dressing to the crop. of potash manures, the muriate seems to be more effective than the sulphate. _effect of manure on composition of crop._ lastly, we may refer to the effect of manures on the composition of the crop. this is, on the whole, very slight, especially when compared with the effect manures exert on the composition of such crops as turnips or potatoes. it is the quantity and not the quality of the crop which the manure affects in the case of beans. peas. peas are not grown to anything like the same extent as beans. as a rule, when they are cultivated it is along with beans, when they are necessarily manured in a similar manner. if grown alone, however, it may be well to point out that peas do best, unlike beans, on light, friable, chalky loam. when grown in clay they tend to develop an undue amount of straw. the effect of season on the crop is similar to that exerted on the bean crop. in conclusion, it may be pointed out that it is alleged that the effect of farmyard manure on peas is to force the straw. in concluding this chapter a word or two may be said on the manuring of two other crops which are cultivated to a considerable extent in this country--viz., hops and cabbages. hops. the requirements of the hop crop in the matter of manures are rather singular. it has been pointed out that in the case of most crops quick-acting manures are to be preferred to slow-acting manures. with hops, however, the case is very different; for they require, and cannot be successfully cultivated without, slow-acting manures. hops are especially benefited by bulky nitrogenous manures--such as shoddy, horn-meal, hide-scraps, hoofs, rape-dust, &c.; and it is only when quick-acting manures are applied along with such slow-acting manures that they will exercise their full influence. it is best to manure hops twice a-year,--in spring with farmyard manure, supplemented by a slow-acting nitrogenous manure, such as shoddy; and again in summer with a more quickly acting manure. the dressings applied to hops are enormous relatively to those used on other farm crops. cabbages. cabbages belong to that class of crops known as gross feeders, to which any sort of manure, applied in almost any quantities, does not come amiss. cabbages grow best on good loams with a well-drained porous subsoil, although they also do well on clay soils. the quantity of fertilising ingredients, especially potash, which a large crop of cabbage removes from the soil is very great. they consequently require large quantities of manure, and are especially benefited by saline manures--such as kainit and common salt--and liberal doses of nitrate of soda, which may be regarded as the most effective of manures for all the cabbage tribe. farmyard manure may be applied with benefit in larger quantities than it would be applied to any other crop. footnotes: [ ] see his lecture on the growth of barley. [ ] small roots are found to contain a larger proportion of sugar than large roots. [ ] see note i., p. . appendix to chapter xxiii. note i. (p. ). experiments on the manuring of beans. experiments with beans carried out at the highland and agricultural society's experiment station at pumpherston, showing the effect of potash:-- no. of bushels dressed plots. kind of manure. grain, per acre. . no manure - / . phosphate (bone-ash) - / . nitrate - / . phosphate and nitrate - / . _potash_ - / . _potash_ and phosphate - / . _potash_, phosphate, and nitrate - / . _potash_, phosphate, nitrate, and gypsum chapter xxiv. on the method of application and on the mixing of manures. having considered the manuring of the different crops, we may now pass on to the consideration of some points in the method of application and on the mixing of manures. _equal distribution of manures._ a most important object in applying manures is to effect equal distribution of the manure in the soil. this is often, however, unusually difficult to do, especially in the case of artificial manures, where the quantity to be spread over a large area of the soil is extremely small. the difficulty in the case of farmyard or other very bulky manure is not so great. in order to overcome this difficulty in the case of artificial manures, it is often advisable to mix them with some such substance as sand, ashes, loam, peat, or salt. the manure is thus diluted in strength, and a very much larger bulk of substance is obtained to work with. circumstances must decide which of these substances to use. if the soil be a heavy clay, the addition of sand or ashes may have an important mechanical effect in improving its texture; while, on the other hand, if it be a light soil, the addition of peat may improve its mechanical condition. it must also be remembered that peat itself contains a large amount of nitrogen, and thus forms a manure of some value. in using loam or peat to mix with artificial manures, they should be first dried and then riddled; while if ashes be used, they should be previously reduced to a fine state. wood-ashes, however, must be used with caution, and ought not to be mixed with ammoniacal manures, as they are apt to contain caustic alkali, which would tend to drive off the ammonia in a volatile state. it has been recommended, in order to save trouble and effect equal distribution, that the manure to be applied should always be made up to the same amount, so that the farmer by experience may ascertain the rate at which to apply it. and here it may be well to say a word or two on the subject of mixing manures--a subject with which the farmer is not always so conversant as it is desirable in the interests of his own pocket he should be. _mixing manures._ it is to be feared that not unfrequently indiscriminate mixing may cause very serious loss in the most valuable constituent of a manure. it may be well, therefore, to point out one or two of the causes of the loss that is apt to ensue on the mixing of different kinds of manures together. as the subject depends for its clear comprehension on certain chemical elementary principles, it may be well for the benefit of non-chemical readers to state these pretty fully. _risks of loss in mixtures._ the risks of loss which may occur from the mixing of artificial manures together may be of different kinds. one is the risk of actual loss of a valuable ingredient through volatilisation; another is the risk of the deterioration of the value of a mixture through change of the chemical state of a valuable ingredient. undoubtedly the most common and most serious source of loss is the former. of the three valuable manurial ingredients--nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash--only the first is liable to loss by volatilisation, and this generally only when the nitrogen is either in the form of ammonia or nitric acid. _loss of ammonia._ ammonia, when uncombined, is a very volatile gas with a pungent smell, a property which enables its escape from a manure mixture to be very easily detected. it belongs to a class of substances which are known chemically as bases, and which have the power of combining with acids and forming salts. sulphate of ammonia is a salt formed--as its name indicates--by the union of the base, ammonia, with the acid, sulphuric acid. now when ammonia unites with sulphuric acid and forms sulphate of ammonia, it is no longer volatile and liable to escape as a gas, but becomes "fixed," as it is called. although most salts are more or less stable bodies--not liable to change--if left alone, and not submitted to a high temperature or chemical action, they can be easily decomposed if they are heated or brought into contact with some other substance which will give rise to chemical action. sulphate of ammonia is a salt that is very easily decomposed. this is due to the fact that its base, ammonia, is very volatile, and not capable of being held very firmly by an acid, even by sulphuric, which is among the least volatile of all the common acids. if, therefore, sulphate of ammonia be heated above the boiling-point of water, or brought in contact with any other substance which will give rise to chemical action, it is easily decomposed. now a salt may be acted upon by a base or an acid or another salt. when it is brought in contact with a base, if the base with which it is brought in contact be a stronger base than the base of the salt, the salt is decomposed, and a new salt is formed. the acid, in short, exchanges its old base for the new one. _effect of lime on ammonia salt._ this is exactly what takes place when the base lime comes in contact with an ammonium salt, such as sulphate of ammonia. the sulphuric acid exchanges its old base, ammonia, for the stronger base, lime, and sulphate of lime is formed, and ammonia is set free as a gas, and escapes and is lost. sulphate of ammonia, or any substance in which there is an ammonia salt, must never be brought in contact with free lime, otherwise the ammonia will be lost, and should be harrowed in on chalky soils for this reason. it is different entirely with gypsum--which is sulphate of lime--or phosphate of lime, both of which may be safely mixed with sulphate of ammonia without any danger of escape of ammonia. it follows from the above that a mixture which must on no account be tried is slag phosphate and sulphate of ammonia. this is because the slag phosphate contains a large percentage of free lime, which would at once, on being brought in contact with the sulphate of ammonia, decompose it, and cause the ammonia to be lost. for this same reason guano must not be mixed with slag. it is perhaps unnecessary, however, to warn one against so doing, as it is not likely such a mixture would be made, as the ratio of phosphoric acid to nitrogen in guanos is generally greater than is required. if it be desired to mix the slag with a quickly available form of nitrogen, nitrate of soda is not liable to loss; although for other reasons it is not desirable to apply nitrate of soda along with the slag, as the former manure should be applied almost always as a top-dressing. _loss of nitric acid._ the risks of the loss of nitrogen in the form of nitric acid, although not so great as they are in the case of ammonia, are still considerable. as nitric acid is not a base but an acid, what is to be avoided in mixing nitrates is bringing them in contact with any other manure which contains another free and stronger acid--as, for example, superphosphate. the free acid present in superphosphate has the tendency to drive out the nitric acid from the nitrate and usurp its place. the risk of loss of expulsion in the above cases is always augmented by the rise of temperature which invariably accompanies chemical action of any kind; and although the loss of nitrogen, in the form of nitric acid, caused by mixing superphosphate and nitrate of soda, might, under ordinary circumstances, amount to very little, yet, if the mixture were to be allowed to stand any time, and the temperature of the mass to be heightened, the loss which would undoubtedly then ensue would be considerable. the nitrogen salt which it is safe to mix with superphosphate is sulphate of ammonia. _reversion of phosphates._ but, as has already been mentioned, there is another loss which may result from the mixing of manures. this is the deterioration of the value of an ingredient by reason of change of chemical condition. this is a source of loss that was little suspected a number of years ago, but it is now well known that superphosphate of lime, under certain conditions, is changed from its soluble to an insoluble form. we have already referred to the reversion of phosphate in the chapter on the manufacture of superphosphates.[ ] it was there pointed out that reversion is often caused by the presence of iron and alumina or undissolved phosphate, and that the risk of reversion is therefore very much less in a well-made article, made from pure raw material, than in one made from a raw phosphate containing much iron and alumina. superphosphates containing a large percentage of insoluble phosphates ought not to be kept too long before being used as a manure, otherwise much of the labour and expense involved in their manufacture will be lost by the reversion of their soluble phosphate. further, it is highly inadvisable to mix superphosphates with basic slag, which contains a large percentage of both iron and free lime. lastly, if it is desired to mix superphosphate with insoluble phosphate, the mixture ought to be made just previous to application. _manurial ingredients should be applied separately._ the question of applying manure in mixtures is one on which considerable difference of opinion may exist. for many reasons manures are often better applied in the unmixed condition. for example, a mixture of a quickly acting nitrogenous manure with a slowly acting phosphatic manure is not suitable. in such a case either the nitrogenous manure will be applied too long before it is required by the plant, and thus suffer from risk of loss, or the phosphatic manure will not be applied long enough before it is likely to be used. by applying manures in an unmixed condition the chances are that a more economical use of them is made than would otherwise be the case. on the other hand, while the application of the separate constituents may be desirable from the scientific point of view, it involves a considerable amount of extra trouble. of course a further consideration is the desirability in many cases of having a complete manure. the above hints, therefore, on the risks of loss which exist in mixing manures, may be of service to the agricultural student. footnotes: [ ] see p. . chapter xxv. on the valuation and analysis of manures. _value of chemical analysis._ the value of a manure to the farmer depends on the proportion of _nitrogen_, _phosphoric acid_, and _potash_ it contains, as well as--and this is hardly less important--the condition in which the ingredients are present. since these facts can alone be determined by a chemical analysis, it is obvious that manures should always be purchased with a chemical analysis. it is unfortunate, however, that very often a chemical analysis, even when procured, is unintelligible. it may be of advantage, therefore, to say a word or two on the correct interpretation of the significance of the data furnished in the ordinary chemical analysis of manures. _interpretation of chemical analysis._ the first thing that the farmer ought to look for in the analysis of a manure is the amount of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash which the manure contains. _nitrogen._ the percentage of nitrogen in a manure is generally stated as equal to its equivalent percentage of ammonia. very often, indeed, in the older analyses, its equivalent of ammonia was alone stated. now this statement does not necessarily imply that the nitrogen in a manure is actually present in the form of ammonia. thus, for example, when it is stated in an analysis of bone-meal that it contains . per cent of nitrogen, equal to . per cent of ammonia, it is not to be inferred that bone-meal actually contains nitrogen in the form of ammonia. in point of fact the nitrogen is present in an insoluble, slowly available, organic form, which possesses a manurial value very inferior to that possessed by ammonia. this custom is a most unfortunate one, and is much to be regretted, as it is often liable to give rise to serious misunderstanding. it must be remembered, therefore, that an ordinary chemical analysis does not always specify the exact form in which nitrogen is actually present. it is nevertheless of importance for the farmer to know this, of which the nature of the manure analysed is generally a good indication. unfortunately this is not shown in the case of _mixed_ manures; and this constitutes one of the reasons why mixed manures are sometimes to be regarded with suspicion. _phosphoric acid._ the amount of phosphates present in a manure is usually stated in its analysis as so much phosphoric acid, while in a footnote the quantity of tricalcic (or ordinary bone) phosphate this amount is equivalent to is also given, this being the unit of valuation. when the phosphates are in a soluble condition they are stated as such, and at the same time a statement is made as to the quantity of tricalcic phosphate which would be required to furnish this amount by treatment with sulphuric acid. thus, for example, in an analysis of a superphosphate of lime, the statement, _monocalcic phosphate, . per cent, equal to tricalcic phosphate rendered "soluble," . per cent_, means that it would require . per cent of tricalcic phosphate to furnish . per cent of soluble phosphate. paradoxically enough, the former amount is called _"soluble" phosphate_, and such a superphosphate as the above would be described as containing . per cent of "soluble" phosphate. again, there are different forms of the so-called "insoluble" phosphates,[ ] although they are often not distinguished in a chemical analysis. as we have already pointed out in the chapter on basic slag, phosphoric acid occurs in the slag in the form of tetrabasic phosphate of lime, although it is invariably stated in analysis as so much tricalcic phosphate. then we have the so-called dibasic phosphate of lime, the form into which soluble phosphate in superphosphate is converted when "reversion" takes place. hitherto it has not been customary in this country--although the custom is prevalent both on the continent and in america--to distinguish in the analysis of a superphosphate the "reverted" phosphate from the undissolved phosphate; since the superior value of the former as a manure is not recognised in the manure-trade.[ ] _importance of mechanical condition of phosphate._ a further point to which it is desirable to draw attention is the _mechanical_ condition of the different insoluble phosphates, which has an important influence on their value. a very wide difference, for example, exists between the value of phosphate of lime in such a manure as malden guano and in the crystalline mineral apatite; although, chemically considered, the form in which the phosphoric acid is present is the same in both substances. _potash._ potash ought only to occur in a soluble form in manures. it is generally stated as so much potash, and in a footnote the equivalent amount of muriate or sulphate of potash is given, the former being the more concentrated form of potash. for purposes of reference a table will be found in the appendix[ ] giving some useful factors for converting different forms of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash into one another. _other items in the chemical analysis of manures._ the other items in the analysis of a manure are of comparatively secondary importance compared with those already named. among them may be mentioned the _moisture_, the _insoluble matter_, and the _organic matter_. the amount of moisture and the amount of sand are two items of importance, since, if these are excessive, they afford presumption that the manure has been adulterated. _fertilisers and feeding stuffs act._ an act was passed, and came into operation in january , for the purpose of compelling every vendor of manure manufactured in this country or imported from abroad to give to the purchaser "an invoice stating the name of the article, and whether it is an artificially compounded article or not, and what is at least the percentage of the nitrogen, soluble and insoluble phosphates, and potash, if any, contained in the article, and this invoice shall have the same effect as a warranty by the seller of the statements contained therein." _different methods of valuing manures._ the monetary value of a manure depends upon a number of more or less complicated commercial considerations, such as the questions of supply and demand, &c., which need not here be discussed, and which similarly regulate the monetary value of any other article of commerce. _"unit" value of manurial ingredients._ for the purpose of affording data for ascertaining the approximate value of a manure, tables have been drawn up giving what is called the "unit" value of the different manurial ingredients in various manures. this is obtained by dividing the market value of a manure per ton by the percentage of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash it contains. thus, for example, sulphate of ammonia of per cent purity contains per cent of ammonia, and at present (dec. ) is valued at £ , s. per ton. in order to obtain the unit value of ammonia in sulphate of ammonia, we have only to divide £ , s. by , which gives us s. the value of such tables depends on the competence of those drawing them up, and they require to be subjected to constant revision. in the appendix will be found two of these tables, taken from the 'transactions of the highland and agricultural society of scotland.'[ ] _intrinsic value of manures._ but there is another way of valuing manures, and that is by attempting to ascertain what their intrinsic worth is in producing an increase in the returns of the crops. of course it may be said that the intrinsic worth of manure affects directly its market value. this is doubtless true, but it is not the only factor in determining the market value of a manure. again, the intrinsic worth of a manure may be said to vary according to the soil to which it is applied and the climatic conditions. this being so, it is important for every farmer to try and ascertain for himself what the intrinsic value of different manures is on the soil of his farm; and this can only be done by carrying out manuring experiments for himself. this leads us to say a word or two on the important subject of _field experiments._ it is impossible that every farm should be able to support an experiment station for the purpose of carrying out elaborate experiments on the effect of different manures on different crops. nevertheless it is possible and highly desirable for _every_ farmer who is engaged in arable farming on any scale to carry out simple experiments for the purpose of ascertaining the characteristic manurial requirements of his soil. this can be done at the expenditure of a little time and trouble, and should be carried out in the following way. the field on which it is desired to carry out the experiments should be divided into the requisite number of experiment plots. these, which may be the tenth, twentieth, or fortieth of an acre in extent, should be, if possible, on a level piece of ground--all of them equally free from the shelter of hedge or tree, and otherwise subjected to the same conditions. the nature of the soil of the different plots, as well as its past treatment, should be similar. it is desirable, in order to minimise experimental error as much as possible, to carry out the experiments in duplicate, or even triplicate. in the first place, there should be what is called a _nothing_ plot--_i.e._, a plot receiving no manure. the produce obtained from this plot, compared with the produce obtained from the other manured plots, will thus furnish data for estimating the respective amounts of increase obtained by different manures. one very simple kind of experiment is what is called the "seven-plot" test. it consists in testing the results obtained by using nitrogenous, phosphatic, and potash manures alone and in different combinations. thus the plots would be manured respectively as follows:-- no. no. . nothing plot. | . nitrogen and phosphates. . nitrogen. | . nitrogen and potash. . phosphates. | . phosphates and potash. . potash. the subjects of other experiments might be such as the respective values of nitrogen in the different forms of sulphate of ammonia and nitrate of soda; phosphoric acid as superphosphate, and in an undissolved form as thomas-slag; the relative importance of artificial and farmyard manure; the effect of manures applied at different times, as well as the effect of different quantities of the same manure; the most economical manures for different kinds of crops; and numerous other interesting problems connected with the practical application of manures. in carrying out these experiments, care should be taken not to have the experimental plots _immediately_ adjoining one another, as the manure applied to the one plot may, by soaking through the soil, affect the result on the adjoining plot. especial note ought to be taken of the weather during the progress of the experiment. in order to make such experiments as valuable as possible, they ought to be continued year after year. at the conclusion of the experiment the produce obtained from each plot should be carefully weighed. _educational value of field experiments._ the educative value of such experiments is very great, and in this connection the remarks made by mr f. j. cooke, in a recent lecture delivered to the london farmers' club, are worthy of most careful consideration. "local experiments," he says, "teach the simple principles which should determine the selection of manures, as well as scientific accuracy and method in their use. the value of experiments is thus brought home to men who would not go far to discover it; and the practice of a few simple trials upon a correct system, each on his own farm, is encouraged. that such trials may be conducted with very little expense to the farmer, or other difficult qualifications, and yet to his great practical advantage, i will venture to assert on the ground of my own personal experience. for some twenty years i have annually conducted private experiments on a very humble scale, and am not aware of any other separate practice which has been so useful to me. it has been pursued upon two light-land farms in different parts of the same county. yet, in respect of manurial requirements, the proper treatment for one of them has differed so essentially from the other that a common practice upon both would have been simply ruinous." _value of manures deduced from experiments._ tables have been constructed for the purpose of showing the comparative value of different kinds of manures as deduced from such experiments, and may be fittingly compared with the tables giving the trade prices. we have already quoted some of these tables in the appendix to the chapter on mineral phosphates. these tables show the relative intrinsic value of different forms of phosphatic manures. in the appendix[ ] to this chapter tables showing the relative value of different kinds of nitrogenous and potash manures will be found. _value of unexhausted manures._ a subject which has had much attention devoted to it of late years is the question of the value of unexhausted manures in the soil. in the agricultural holdings act special provision is made for giving compensation to the out-going tenant of a farm for unexhausted manures in the soil. the act has given rise to endless disputes between landlord and tenant, owing to the extreme difficulty of arriving at a satisfactory estimate of what the value of the unexhausted manures in reality is. the difficulty arises from the fact that we have not sufficient data available for guiding us in estimating this value, which further varies under different conditions. the fertilising ingredients of a soil are present in the soil for the most part in an inert condition, from which they are only slowly converted into an available form. _potential fertility of a soil._ as indicating the total amount of the more important mineral ingredients present in a soil, it may be mentioned that it has been calculated, in the case of a poor sandy soil, _that the amount of potash it contains_ (_provided it were in an available condition_) would be sufficient to yield three or four average crops of potatoes; of phosphates, nineteen average crops; and of lime, seventy-three. but then only a very small amount of this fertilising matter is in a readily available form. it is for this reason that artificial manures, although added in such small amounts, exercise so striking an influence in increasing plants' growth. their effect, however, is to a large extent only of a temporary nature; and in attempting to assess the unexhausted value of a manure a year or two after its application, we must remember this fact. some manures are very speedily taken up by plants, and some are very easily washed out of the soil. others, again, it would seem highly probable, have a tendency to become converted into a more or less inert condition after a while. this remark may be especially applied to the fertilising constituents (chiefly nitrogen) in farmyard manure.[ ] the whole question, however, is little understood. one or two points may be drawn attention to. in the first place, it may be safely affirmed that little direct effect can be expected from such quickly available and easily soluble forms of nitrogenous manures as nitrate of soda and sulphate of ammonia a year after application. potash and phosphates, on the other hand, may exercise an effect for a considerably longer period; and what the length of this period may be will depend on their amount and condition. thus it is not likely that superphosphate will have much effect more than two years after application. on the other hand, such manures as bones, basic slag, and farmyard manure may exert an appreciable influence for a number of years. how long exactly, it is wellnigh impossible to say, the rate at which they are applied and the nature of the soil having an important influence. _tables of value of unexhausted manures._ numerous tables have been drawn up for the purpose of guiding farmers in estimating this unexhausted value at different periods after application, and in the case of different manures. such tables, as a rule, furnish only very rough approximations, and are little better than mere guess-work. still more complicated is the attempt to assess the manurial value of foods consumed by the stock of the farm. lawes and gilbert have devoted much attention to the elucidation of this difficult question, and have drawn up most elaborate and valuable tables, furnishing data for calculating unexhausted manure value in the case of commonly used foods. these tables are given in the appendix.[ ] in them will be found the manurial value of different cattle-foods, calculated on the basis of numerous experiments carried out at rothamsted. thus these experiments have demonstrated that, on an average, probably not more than _one-tenth_ of the nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash a food contains is removed from the food in its passage through the animal system. the exact amount will obviously depend on a variety of conditions, referred to already in a previous chapter.[ ] in explanation of these tables, it may be pointed out that table i. gives the total quantities of the three fertilising ingredients in various foods; while table ii. shows the proportion retained in the animal body and the proportion voided in the manure, as well as the manurial value of the food, assuming that it exercises its full theoretical effect. as this, however, is never fully realised, it is necessary to make some deduction. the deduction suggested by the rothamsted experimenters, on the basis of their wide experience, is per cent for food consumed within the last year. that is to say, the manurial value of food consumed during the last year is _only one-half its theoretical value_. for food consumed within the last year but one, they suggest a deduction of one-third of the allowance for last year; while for food consumed three years back, a deduction of one-third from this latter sum should be made; and so on for whatever number of years, down to eight, may be taken. footnotes: [ ] the term _insoluble phosphates_ is an unfortunate one, as the word insoluble is purely relative in its significance. _undissolved_ phosphates would be a better term. [ ] the amount of "reverted" phosphate is estimated by _the ammonium citrate process_. [ ] see note i., p. . [ ] see note ii., p. . [ ] see note iii., p. . [ ] see chapter on farmyard manure, p. . [ ] see note iv., p. . [ ] see chapter on farmyard manure, pp. - . appendix to chapter xxv. note i. (p. ). useful factors for calculating the percentage of important manurial ingredients in a manure into their different compounds. (from the 'transactions of the highland and agricultural society.') ----------------------------+------------+---------------------- | multiplied | gives corresponding amount of | by | amount of ----------------------------+------------+---------------------- nitrogen | . | ammonia. " | . | albuminoid matter. ammonia | . | nitrogen. " | . | sulphate of ammonia. " | . | muriate of ammonia. " | . | nitric acid. " | . | nitrate of soda. potash (anhydrous) | . | sulphate of potash. " | . | muriate of potash. phosphoric acid (anhydrous) | . | phosphate of lime. " " | . | biphosphate. " " | . | soluble phosphate. soluble phosphate | . | phosphate of lime. biphosphate | . | " lime | . | " " | . | carbonate of lime. chlorine | . | chloride of sodium. ----------------------------+------------+---------------------- notes ii. (p. ). units to be used in determining the commercial value of manures. _for season ._ a: ichaboe. b: peruvian (riddled). c: fish guano. d: frey bentos guano. e: steamed bone-flour. f: dissolved or vitriolated bones. g: superphosphates. h: genuine. i: genuine. j: average. -----------------+-----------+-----------------+-----------+ | guanos. | scrap manures. | | items to be +-----+-----+-----+-----------+ bone-meal.| valued. | a | b | c | d | | -----------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ classes | h | i | |_a._ |_b._ |_a._ |_b._ | -----------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ phosphates | | | | | | | | dissolved | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | undissolved-- | /-| /-| / | / | / | / | / | ammonia | /-| / | /-| / | /-| /-| / | potash | - | / | - | - | - | - | - | | | | | | | | | prices per ton, | | | | | | | | march -- | | | | | | | | from | /-| /-| /-| /-| /-| /-| /-| to | /-| /-| /-| /-| /-| /-| /-| -----------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ -----------------+-----+-----+-----+----------------- | | | | items to be | e | f | g | dissolved valued. | | | | compounds. -----------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- classes |_a._ | | | from| to | j -----------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- phosphates | | | | | | dissolved | - | / | - | /-| / | / undissolved-- | / | / | / | / | / | / ammonia | /-| / | - | /-| /-| /- potash | - | - | - | / | / | / | | | | | | prices per ton, | | | | | | march -- | | | | | | from | /-| /-| /-| - | - | - to | /-| /-| /-| - | - | - -----------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- cash prices of different manures, march . ---------------------------------+-----------+----------+-------------- | |price per | manures. | guarantee.| ton. | unit. ---------------------------------+-----------+----------+-------------- | per cent. |_£ s. d._| sulphate of ammonia, per cent | am. | | am. = / nitrate of soda, per cent | " | | " = / castor-cake dust | . " | | " = / horn-dust | " | | " = / dried blood | " | | " = / muriate of potash, per cent | pot | | pot.= / sulphate of potash, per cent | " | | " = / kainit, per cent | " | | " = / nitrate of potash, per cent | { am.} | | {am. = /} | { pot.} | | {pot.= / } ground charleston phosphate | phos. | | phos.= / belgian phosphate | " | | " = / thomas-slag (fine) scotch | " | | " = / thomas-slag (fine) english | " | | " = / phosphatic guano | { " } | | {" = / } | { am. } | | {am. = /} ---------------------------------+-----------+----------+-------------- note iii. (p. ). tables showing relative manurial value of nitrogen and potash in different substances. _wolff, ._ nitrogen in form of ammonia and nitrates, and easily decomposable organic compounds, as dried blood, flesh-meal, meat-meal, peruvian guano, and as urate " in fine steamed bone-meal, fish-guano, oilcakes, and better kinds of artificial guano " in fine bone-meal and horn-meal " in coarse bones and horn-shavings, woollen refuse, farmyard manure, and poudrette _american, ._ " in ammonia salts " as nitrates " in dry and fine-ground fish, meat, and blood " in cotton-seed meal, and castor pomace " in fine bone and tankage " in medium bone and tankage " in coarser bone and tankage " in hair and horn-shavings, and coarse fish scrap potash as high-grade sulphate, and in forms free from muriates (or chlorides) " as muriate professor wagner has drawn up, from numerous experiments, the relative manurial values of different nitrogenous manures, which he rates as follows:-- nitrate of soda sulphate of ammonia blood-meal, horn-meal, and green vegetable matter finely ground steamed bone-meal, fish-meal, and meat-meal guano farmyard manure shoddy leather-meal note iv. (p. ). table i.--average composition, per cent and per ton, of cattle-foods. -----+-------------------+-----------------------------------------------+ | | per cent. | no. | foods. +---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+ | | dry | nitro- | mineral | phos- | potash. | | | matter. | gen. | matter | phoric | | | | | | (ash). | acid | | -----+-------------------+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+ | | per | per | per | per | per | | | cent. | cent. | cent. | cent. | cent. | | linseed | . | . | . | . | . | | linseed-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | decorticated | | | | | | | cotton cake | . | . | . | . | . | | palm-nut-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | undecorticated | | | | | | | cotton-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | cocoa-nut-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | rape-cake | . | . | . | . | . | -----+-------------------+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+ | peas | . | . | . | . | . | | beans | . | . | . | . | . | | lentils | . | . | . | . | . | | tares (seed) | . | . | . | . | . | -----+-------------------+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+ | indian corn | . | . | . | . | . | | wheat | . | . | . | . | . | | malt | . | . | . | . | . | | barley | . | . | . | . | . | | oats | . | . | . | . | . | | rice-meal* | . | . | . | ( . ) | ( . ) | | locust-beans* | . | . | . | - | - | -----+-------------------+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+ | malt-combs | . | . | . | . | . | | fine pollard | . | . | . | . | . | | coarse pollard | . | . | . | . | . | | bran | . | . | . | . | . | -----+-------------------+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+ | clover-hay | . | . | . | . | . | | meadow-hay | . | . | . | . | . | -----+-------------------+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+ | pea-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | oat-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | wheat-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | barley-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | bean-straw | . | . | . | . | . | -----+-------------------+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+ | potatoes | . | . | . | . | . | | carrots | . | . | . | . | . | | parsnips | . | . | . | . | . | | swedish turnips | . | . | . | . | . | | mangel-wurzels | . | . | . | . | . | | yellow turnips* | . | . | . | ( . ) | ( . ) | | white turnips | . | . | . | . | . | -----+-------------------+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+ -----+-------------------+------------------------------- | | per ton. | +-----------+---------+--------- no. | foods. | nitrogen. | phos- | potash. | | | phoric | | | | acid | -----+-------------------+-----------+---------+--------- | | lb. | lb. | lb. | linseed | . | . | . | linseed-cake | . | . | . | decorticated | | | | cotton cake | . | . | . | palm-nut-cake | . | . | . | undecorticated | | | | cotton-cake | . | . | . | cocoa-nut-cake | . | . | . | rape-cake | . | . | . -----+-------------------+-----------+---------+--------- | peas | . | . | . | beans | . | . | . | lentils | . | . | . | tares (seed) | . | . | . -----+-------------------+-----------+---------+--------- | indian corn | . | . | . | wheat | . | . | . | malt | . | . | . | barley | . | . | . | oats | . | . | . | rice-meal* | . | ( . ) | ( . ) | locust-beans* | . | - | - -----+-------------------+-----------+---------+--------- | malt-combs | . | . | . | fine pollard | . | . | . | coarse pollard | . | . | . | bran | . | . | . -----+-------------------+-----------+---------+--------- | clover-hay | . | . | . | meadow-hay | . | . | . -----+-------------------+-----------+---------+--------- | pea-straw | . | . | . | oat-straw | . | . | . | wheat-straw | . | . | . | barley-straw | . | . | . | bean-straw | . | . | . -----+-------------------+-----------+---------+--------- | potatoes | . | . | . | carrots | . | . | . | parsnips | . | . | . | swedish turnips | . | . | . | mangel-wurzels | . | . | . | yellow turnips* | . | ( . ) | ( . ) | white turnips | . | . | . -----+-------------------+-----------+---------+--------- * in the case of neither rice-meal, locust-beans, nor yellow turnips have records of ash analyses been found. for rice-meal the same percentages of phosphoric acid and potash as in indian corn, and for yellow turnips the same as in swedes, are provisionally adopted; but in all the tables the assumed results are given in parentheses. for locust-beans no figure has been assumed, and the columns are left blank. note iv. table ii.--lawes' & gilbert's tables for calculating unexhausted value of manures. key: a - fattening increase in live weight (oxen or sheep). b - in food. c - in fattening increase (at . per cent). d - in manure. e - food to increase. f - increase per ton of food. g - per cent. h - per ton. i - from ton of food. j - per cent of total consumed. k - total remaining for manure. l - nitrogen equal ammonia. m - value of ammonia at d per lb. ---+---------------+-----------+----------------------------------------------+ | | | nitrogen. | | | |------------+-----------+---------------------| | | a | b | c | d | | description |-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-----+------+-----+--------| no.| of food. | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | ---+---------------+-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-----+------+-----+--------+ | | | lb. | % | lb. | lb. | % | lb. | lb. |£ s. d. | |linseed | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |linseed-cake | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |decorticated | | | | | | | | | | | cotton-cake | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |palm-nut-cake | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |undecorticated | | | | | | | | | | | cotton-cake | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |cocoa-nut-cake | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |rape-cake |( ) |( )| . | . | . | . | . | . | | | |-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-----+------+-----+--------+ |peas | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |beans | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |lentils | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |tares (seed) | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | |-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-----+------+-----+--------+ |indian corn | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |wheat | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |malt | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |barley | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |oats | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |rice-meal | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |locust-beans | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | |-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-----+------+-----+--------+ |malt-combs | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |fine pollard | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |coarse pollard | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |bran | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | |-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-----+------+-----+--------+ |clover-hay | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |meadow-hay | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | |-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-----+------+-----+--------+ |pea-straw | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |oat-straw | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |wheat-straw | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |barley-straw | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |bean-straw | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | |-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-----+------+-----+------- + |potatoes | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |carrots | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |parsnips | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |swedish turnips| . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |mangel-wurzels | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |yellow turnips | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | |white turnips | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | ---+---------------+-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-----+------+-----+--------+ key: n - in food. o - in fattening increase at ( . per cent). p - in manure. q - in food. r - in fattening increase at ( . per cent). s - in manure. t - per cent. u - per ton. v - from ton of food. w - per cent of total consumed. x - total remaining for manure. y - value at d per lb. z - per cent. aa - per ton. bb - from ton of food. cc - per cent of total consumed. dd - total remaining for manure. ee - value at - / d. per lb. ff - total original manure value per ton of food consumed. ---+---------------+------------------------------------------+ | | phosphoric acid. | |---------------+--------------+------------+--------------+ | | n | o | p | | description |------+-------+----+-------+-------+------+ no.| of food. | t | u | v | w | x | y | ---+---------------+------+-------+----+-------+-------+------+ | | % | lb. | lb.| % | lb. |s. d. | |linseed | . | . | . | . | . | | |linseed-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | |decorticated | | | | | | | | cotton-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | |palm-nut-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | |undecorticated | | | | | | | | cotton-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | |cocoa-nut-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | |rape-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | | |------+-------+----+-------+-------+--- --+ |peas | . | . | . | . | . | | |beans | . | . | . | . | . | | |lentils | . | . | . | . | . | | |tares (seed) | . | . | . | . | . | | | |------+-------+----+-------+-------+--- --+ |indian corn | . | . | . | . | . | | |wheat | . | . | . | . | . | | |malt | . | . | . | . | . | | |barley | . | . | . | . | . | | |oats | . | . | . |( . )| . | | |rice-meal |( . )|( . )| . |( . )|( . )|( )| |locust-beans | - | - | . | - | - | - | | |------+-------+----+-------+-------+------+ |malt-combs | . | . | . | . | . | | |fine pollard | . | . | . | . | . | | |coarse pollard | . | . | . | . | . | | |bran | . | . | . | . | . | | | |------+-------+----+-------+-------+------+ |clover-hay | . | . | . | . | . | | |meadow-hay | . | . | . | . | . | | | |------+-------+----+-------+-------+------+ |pea-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | |oat-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | |wheat-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | |barley-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | |bean-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | | |------+-------+----+-------+-------+------+ |potatoes | . | . | . | . | . | | |carrots | . | . | . | . | . | | |parsnips | . | . | . | . | . | | |swedish turnips| . | . | . | . | . | | |mangel-wurzels | . | . | . | . | . | | |yellow turnips |( . )| ( . )| . |( . )| ( . )|( )| |white turnips | . | . | . | . | . | | ---+---------------+------+-------+----+-------+-------+------+ ---+---------------+---------------------------------------+--------- | | potash. | |---------------+-------------------------+-------------+ | | q | r | s | | description |------+------+----+------+------+------+ no.| of food. | z | aa | bb | cc | dd | ee | ff ---+---------------+------+------+----+------+------+------+--------- | | % | lb. | lb.| % | lb. |s. d. | £ s. d. |linseed | . | . | . | . | . | | |linseed-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | |decorticated | | | | | | | | cotton-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | |palm-nut-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | |undecorticated | | | | | | | | cotton-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | |cocoa-nut-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | |rape-cake | . | . | . | . | . | | | |------+------+----+------+------+------+--------- |peas | . | . | . | . | . | | |beans | . | . | . | . | . | | |lentils | . | . | . | . | . | | |tares (seed) | . | . | . | . | . | | | |------+------+----+------+------+------+--------- |indian corn | . | . | . | . | . | | |wheat | . | . | . | . | . | | |malt | . | . | . | . | . | | |barley | . | . | . | . | . | | |oats | . | . | . | . | . | | |rice-meal |( . )|( . )| . |( . )|( . )|( )|( ) |locust-beans | - | - | . | - | - | - | - | |------+------+----+------+------+------+--------- |malt-combs | . | . | . | . | . | | |fine pollard | . | . | . | . | . | | |coarse pollard | . | . | . | . | . | | |bran | . | . | . | . | . | | | |------+------+----+------+------+------+--------- |clover-hay | . | . | . | . | . | | |meadow-hay | . | . | . | . | . | | | |------+------+----+------+------+------+--------- |pea-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | |oat-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | |wheat-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | |barley-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | |bean-straw | . | . | . | . | . | | | |------+------+----+------+------+------+--------- |potatoes | . | . | . | . | . | | |carrots | . | . | . | . | . | | |parsnips | . | . | . | . | . | | |swedish turnips| . | . | . | . | . | | |mangel-wurzels | . | . | . | . | . | | |yellow turnips |( . )|( . )| . |( . )|( . )|( )|( ) |white turnips | . | . | . | . | . | | ---+---------------+------+------+----+------+------+------+--------- chapter xxvi the rothamsted experiments. reference has been so repeatedly made in the preceding pages to the rothamsted experiments on manures, that it may form a fitting conclusion to the present treatise to give a short account of these famous experiments. in describing these experiments, the author has remarked elsewhere[ ] "that, in respect of their wide scope, dealing as they have done with almost every department of farming, the elaborate care and accuracy with which they have been carried out, the length of time they have been in progress, and, lastly, in respect of the important bearing their results have had on agricultural practice, these famous experiments may be justly described as unrivalled by any other similar ones." started on a small scale in by sir john (then mr) lawes, they were placed on a systematic basis in , in which year sir john lawes associated with himself sir (then dr) j. henry gilbert. they have thus been in progress for a period of fifty years--a fact which was celebrated a few months ago by the presentation of numerous congratulatory addresses from various learned and agricultural societies to the distinguished investigators, and the erection of a memorial granite slab at rothamsted. what increases the feeling of gratitude due to sir john lawes by the agricultural community, is the fact that the entire expense of conducting these experiments has been borne by himself, and he has further most generously handed over to the nation a large sum of money and a certain area of land for carrying them on in perpetuity. _nature of experiments on crops and manures._ the earliest systematic experiments were on turnips, and since then almost every common crop has been experimented on. table i. (p. ) is a list of the different experiments, with their duration, area, and number of plots. _soil of rothamsted._ before describing the more striking results of these experiments, it may be advisable to say that the elevation of the land at rothamsted is about feet above sea-level; that the average rainfall is about inches per annum; and that the surface-soil is a heavy loam, and the subsoil a stiff clay, resting on chalk. table i.--list of rothamsted field experiments. ----------------------------------+------------+----------+------------ crops. | duration. | area. | plots. ----------------------------------+------------+----------+------------ | years. | acres. | wheat (various manures) | | | (or ) wheat alternated with fallow | | | wheat (varieties) | | - | about barley (various manures) | | - / | oats (various manures) | [ ] | - / | beans (various manures) | [ ] | - / | beans (various manures) | [ ] | | beans, alternated with wheat | [ ] | | clover (various manures) | [ ] | | various leguminous plants | | | | | | turnips (various manures) | [ ] | | sugar-beet (various manures) | | | mangel-wurzel (various manures) | | | +------------+ | total root crops | | | +------------+ | | | | potatoes (various manures) | | | rotation (various manures) | | | permanent grass (various manures) | | | ----------------------------------+------------+----------+------------ . including one year fallow. . including one year wheat and five years fallow. . including four years fallow. . including two years fallow. . clover, twelve times sown (first in ), eight yielding crops, but four of these very small, one year wheat, five years barley, twelve years fallow. . including barley without manure three years (eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth seasons). wheat experiments. the first experiments we shall refer to are those on _wheat_, since they are among the oldest, and their results the most striking of any. _unmanured plots._ wheat has been continuously grown year after year on three plots for fifty years, without the application of any manure whatever. we shall first give the results of the first eight years as illustrating the effect of season, which accounts for the irregular results obtained. but for the difference in seasons, we should expect to find a steady decrease in the amount of produce; and this is shown in taking the average of groups of years, as we shall do in the next table. wheat grown continuously on same land (unmanured). table ii.--(a.) _remits of first eight years ( to )._ year. bushels. | year. bushels. | . - / - / | . - / | . - / - / | ------ - / | average of years - / | ------ table iii.--(b.) _results of subsequent forty years ( to )._ grain weight per straw (bushels). bushel. (cwts.) years ( - ) - / - / " ( - ) - / - / - / " ( - ) - / - / th season ( ) - / - / - / it is interesting to notice the comparatively slight decrease which has taken place in the yield of wheat during these fifty years. with such wide variations, due to season, it is extremely difficult, as sir j. henry gilbert has pointed out, to estimate rate of decline due to exhaustion. excluding the very bad seasons, this may be reckoned at from one-fourth to one-third of a bushel per acre per annum. _the return of the first year is bushels, while the yield of the forty-ninth season is - / bushels._ the average of the returns obtained during these fifty years is really in _excess of the average yield of the principal wheat-producing countries in the world_. this is truly a most astounding result. the next experiments we shall describe are those on the influence of farmyard manure on the wheat crop when grown continuously. table iv.--wheat grown continuously with farmyard manure ( tons per annum). weight per bushels. bushel straw (lb.) (cwts.) years ( - ) - - " ( - ) - / - / " ( - ) - / - / - / " ( - ) - / - / - / it will be seen from the above results, which contain merely a selection from a very much greater number of experiments, that farmyard manure gives as good an average over the forty years as most of the artificial mixtures do. that this is due to the nitrogen it contains, is strikingly illustrated by the fact that mixed mineral manures alone give less than half the return, and also by the fact that ammonia salts alone give a return twice as great as mineral mixtures; while, lastly, the mixture of mineral manures and ammonia salts gives but a slight increase over that obtained with ammonia salts alone. the remaining results, selected from a much larger number, need no comment, and we shall give them in tabular form. table v.--wheat grown continuously with artificial manures, farmyard manure, and unmanured. _average of forty years ( - )._ -------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+ | produce per acre--average per annum. | +--------------------------------------+ | dressed grain. | manures per acre per annum. +--------------------------------------+ | quantity. | +------------+------------+------------+ | years, | years, | years, | | - . | - . | - . | -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------+ | bush. | bush. | bush. | farmyard manure, tons per annum | | | | since | - / | - / | - / | unmanured continuously | - / | - / | | mixed mineral manures[ ] and - / | | | | cwt. superphosphate | | - / | | mixed mineral manures, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate, lb. ammonium | | | | salts | - / | - / | - / | mixed mineral manures and - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate, lb. ammonium | | | | salts | - / | - / | - / | mixed mineral manures, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate, lb. nitrate | | | | of soda | - / | | - / | lb. nitrate of soda | | - / | - / | lb. ammonium salts every year | | | | since | - / | | - / | lb. ammonium salts, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate | | - / | - / | mineral manure, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate, lb. ammonium | | | | salts in autumn | - / | - / | - / | -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------+ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | produce per acre--average per annum. | +--------------------------------------+ | dressed grain. | manures per acre per annum. +--------------------------------------+ | quantity. | +------------+------------+------------+ | years, | years, | years | | - . | - . | - . | -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------+ | lb. | lb. | lb. | farmyard manure, tons per annum | | | | since | | - / | - / | unmanured continuously | - / | - / | - / | mixed mineral manures and - / | | | | cwt. superphosphate | - / | | - / | mixed mineral manures, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate, lb. ammonium | | | | salts | - / | | - / | mixed mineral manures and - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate, lb. ammonium | | | | salts | | | - / | mixed mineral manures, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate, lb. nitrate of | | | | soda | - / | - / | | lb. nitrate of soda | - / | - / | - / | lb. ammonium salts every year | | | | since | | - / | - / | lb. ammonium salts, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate | - / | | - / | mineral manure, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate, lb. ammonium | | | | salts in autumn | - / | | - / | -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------+ -------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- | produce per acre--average per annum. +-------------------------------------- manures per acre per annum. | total straw. +-------------------------------------- | years, | years, | years | - . | - . | - . -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------ | cwt. | cwt. | cwt. farmyard manure, tons per annum | | | since | - / | - / | - / unmanured continuously | | - / | - / mixed mineral manures and - / | | | cwt. superphosphate | | - / | - / mixed mineral manures, - / cwt. | | | superphosphate, lb. ammonium | | | salts | - / | - / | - / mixed mineral manures and - / cwt. | | | superphosphate, lb. ammonium | | | salts | - / | - / | - / mixed mineral manures, - / cwt. | | | superphosphate, lb. nitrate of | | | soda | - / | - / | - / lb. nitrate of soda | - / | - / | - / lb. ammonium salts every year | | | since | - / | - / | - / lb. ammonium salts, - / cwt. | | | superphosphate | - / | | - / mineral manure, - / cwt. | | | superphosphate, lb. ammonium | | | salts in autumn | - / | - / | - / -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------ . by the term mixed mineral manures is meant a mixture of mineral fertilisers, not including phosphates. table vi.--experiments on the growth of barley for forty years, - . -------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+ | produce per acre--average per annum. | +--------------------------------------+ | dressed grain. | manures per acre per annum. +--------------------------------------+ | quantity. | +------------+------------+------------+ | years, | years, | years, | | - . | - . | - . | -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------+ | bush. | bush. | bush. | unmanured continuously | | - / | - / | - / cwt. superphosphate of lime | - / | - / | - / | mixed mineral manures | - / | - / | | mixed mineral manures, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | - / | lb. ammonium salts | - / | - / | | lb. ammonium salts, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate | | - / | - / | lb. ammonium salts, | | | | mixed mineral manures | | - / | - / | manures, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate of lime | - / | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda | | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda, | | | | mixed mineral manures. | - / | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda, | | | | mixed mineral manures, | | | | - / cwt. superphosphate | - / | - / | - / | lb. rape-cake | - / | - / | - / | lb. rape-cake, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate | - / | | - / | lb. rape-cake, | | | | mixed mineral manures | - / | - / | - / | lb. rape-cake, | | | | mixed mineral manures, and | | | | - / cwt. superphosphate | - / | | - / | farmyard manure, tons every year | - / | | - / | -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------+ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | produce per acre--average per annum. | +--------------------------------------+ | dressed grain. | manures per acre per annum. +--------------------------------------+ | quantity. | +------------+------------+------------+ | years, | years, | years | | - . | - . | - . | -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------+ | lb. | lb. | lb. | unmanured continuously | - / | - / | | - / cwt. superphosphate of lime | - / | | - / | mixed mineral manures | | - / | - / | mixed mineral manures, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | | lb. ammonium salts | - / | | | lb. ammonium salts, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | - / | lb. ammonium salts, | | | | mixed mineral manures | - / | - / | - / | manures, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate of lime | | - / | | lb. nitrate of soda | | - / | | lb. nitrate of soda, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda, | | | | mixed mineral manures. | - / | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda, | | | | mixed mineral manures, | | | | - / cwt. superphosphate | - / | | - / | lb. rape-cake | - / | - / | - / | lb. rape-cake, - / cwt. | | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | - / | lb. rape-cake, | | | | mixed mineral manures | - / | - / | | lb. rape-cake, | | | | mixed mineral manures, and | | | | - / cwt. superphosphate | - / | - / | - / | farmyard manure, tons every year | - / | - / | - / | -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------+ -------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- | produce per acre--average per annum. +-------------------------------------- manures per acre per annum. | total straw. +-------------------------------------- | years, | years, | years | - . | - . | - . -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------ | cwt. | cwt. | cwt. unmanured continuously | - / | - / | - / - / cwt. superphosphate of lime | - / | - / | - / mixed mineral manures | - / | | - / mixed mineral manures, - / cwt. | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | - / lb. ammonium salts | - / | - / | lb. ammonium salts, - / cwt. | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | - / lb. ammonium salts, | | | mixed mineral manures | - / | - / | manures, - / cwt. | | | superphosphate of lime | - / | - / | - / lb. nitrate of soda | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda, - / cwt. | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda, | | | mixed mineral manures. | - / | - / | - / lb. nitrate of soda, | | | mixed mineral manures, | | | - / cwt. superphosphate | - / | - / | - / lb. rape-cake | - / | | - / lb. rape-cake, - / cwt. | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | - / lb. rape-cake, | | | mixed mineral manures | - / | - / | - / lb. rape-cake, | | | mixed mineral manures, and | | | - / cwt. superphosphate | - / | - / | - / farmyard manure, tons every year | - / | - / | -------------------------------------+------------+------------+------------ table vii. experiments on the growth of oats, - . -------------------------------------------+---------------------------- | average per annum. | years, - . +---------------------------- manures per acre per annum. | dressed grain. | +----------+--------+ total | quantity.| weight | straw. | | per | | | bushel.| -------------------------------------------+----------+--------+-------- | bushels. | lb. | cwt. unmanured | - / | - / | - / lb. sulphate potash, lb. sulphate | | | soda, lb. sulphate magnesia, and | | | - / cwt. superphosphate of lime | - / | | - / lb. ammonium salts | | - / | - / lb. ammonium salts, lb. sulphate | | | potash, lb. sulphate soda, lb. | | | sulphate magnesia, and - / cwt. | | | superphosphate | | | - / lb. nitrate of soda | - / | - / | - / lb. nitrate of soda, lb. sulphate | | | potash, lb. sulphate soda, lb. | | | sulphate magnesia, and - / cwt. | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | -------------------------------------------+----------+--------+-------- | average per annum. | years, - . -------------------------------------------+---------------------------- | bushels. | lb. | cwt. unmanured | - / | - / | lb. sulphate potash, lb. sulphate | | | soda, lb. sulphate magnesia, and | | | - / cwt. superphosphate of lime | - / | - / | - / lb. ammonium salts. | - / | - / | - / lb. ammonium salts, lb. sulphate | | | potash, lb. sulphate soda, lb. | | | sulphate magnesia, and - / cwt. | | | superphosphate | | - / | lb. nitrate of soda | - / | - / | - / lb. nitrate of soda, lb. sulphate | | | potash, lb. sulphate soda, lb. | | | sulphate magnesia, and - / cwt. | | | superphosphate | - / | - / | -------------------------------------------+----------+--------+-------- table viii.--experiments on root crops: swedish turnips. _fifteen seasons_, - .[ ] roots and leaves carted off the land. -----+--------------------------------------------+---------------------+ | | series . | | | | | | standard manures | | | only. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | plot.| standard manures. | | -----+--------------------------------------------+---------------------+ | | roots. | leaves. | | |----------+----------+ | |tons. cwt.|tons. cwt.| |farmyard manure, tons | | | |farmyard manure, tons, and superphosphate| | | |without manure, , and since | | | |superphosphate, each year; sulphate potash, | | | | soda, and magnesia, - | | | |superphosphate, each year | | | |superphosphate, each year; sulphate potash, | | | | - | | | |superphosphate, each year; sulphate, potash,| | | | and - / lb. ammonium salts, - | | | |unmanured , and since; previously part | | | | unmanured; part superphosphate | | | -----+--------------------------------------------+----------+----------+ _note._--sulphate of ammonia is estimated to contain per cent ammonia, and muriate of ammonia per cent. ammonium salts, in each case, equal parts sulphate and muriate of ammonia of commerce; and the mixture is estimated to contain per cent ammonia. the lb. nitric acid (sp. gr. . ) mixed with sawdust, and used as a cross-dressing on the plots of series from - , were estimated to contain nitrogen = lb. ammonia. . the crops of and failed, and were ploughed in; but as the manures were applied, and there would be accumulation with the soil for the succeeding crops, the average produce is calculated as for fifteen years--that is, the produce of the thirteen years is, in each case, divided by . -----+-----------------------+----------------------- | series . | series . | | | standard manures, | standard manures, | and cross-dressed | and cross-dressed | with-- | with-- | | | years, - , | years, - , | lb. sawdust, and | lb. ammonium | lb. nitric acid. |salts | | | years, - , | years, - , | lb. nitrate soda. | lb. ammonium salts. plot.| | -----+-----------+-----------+-----------+----------- | roots. | leaves. | roots. | leaves. +-----------+-----------+-----------+----------- |tons. cwt.|tons. cwt.|tons. cwt.|tons. cwt. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+-----------+-----------+-----------+----------- -----+-----------------------+----------------------- | series . | series . | | | standard manures, | standard manures, | and cross-dressed | and cross-dressed | with-- | with-- | | | years, - , | years, - , | lb. ammonium salts,| lb. sawdust. |and lb. sawdust. | | | years, - , | years, - , | lb. rape-cake. | lb. ammonium salts,| plot.|and lb. rape-cake.| -----+-----------+-----------+-----------+----------- | roots. | leaves. | roots. | leaves. +-----------+-----------+-----------+----------- |tons. cwt.|tons. cwt.|tons. cwt.|tons. cwt. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+-----------+-----------+-----------+----------- table ix.--experiments on mangel-wurzel. _average of sixteen seasons_, - . manures per acre per annum. -----+--------------------------------------------+--------------------- | | series . | | | | standard manures | | only. | | | | plot.| standard manures. | -----+--------------------------------------------+----------+---------- | | roots. | leaves. | |----------+---------- | |tons. cwt.|tons. cwt. |farmyard manure, tons | | |farmyard manure, tons, and - / cwt. | | | superphosphate | | |without manure, , and since | | | - / cwt. superphosphate, lb. sulphate | | | of potash and lb. mixed mineral manure| | | - / cwt. superphosphate | | | - / cwt. superphosphate, and lb. | | | sulphate of potash | | | - / cwt. superphosphate, lb. sulphate | | | of potash, and - / lb. ammonium salts | | -----+--------------------------------------------+----------+---------- -----+-----------------------+-----------------------+ | series . | series . | | | | |standard manures, |standard manures, | |and cross-dressed |and cross-dressed | |with lb. |with lb. | |nitrate of soda. |ammonium salts. | plot.| | | -----+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | roots. | leaves. | roots. | leaves. | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ |tons. cwt.|tons. cwt.|tons. cwt.|tons. cwt.| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ -----+-----------------------+----------------------- | series . | series . | | |standard manures, |standard manures, |and cross-dressed |and cross-dressed with |with lb. rape | lb. rape-cake. |cake, and lb. | plot.|ammonium salts. | -----+-----------+-----------+-----------+----------- | roots. | leaves. | roots. | leaves. +-----------+-----------+-----------+----------- |tons. cwt.|tons. cwt.|tons. cwt.|tons. cwt. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+-----------+-----------+-----------+----------- table x.--experiments with different manures on permanent meadow-land. _thirty-six years_, - . -------------------------------+--------------------------+-------------------- | produce per acre, weighed as hay. +--------------------------+-------------------- | average per annum, | average per annum, | years, - | years, - | ( st crops only). | ( st and d crops). manures per acre per annum. +--------+--------+--------+------+------+------ | years| years| years| st | d | | - .| - .| - .|crops.|crops.|total. -------------------------------+--------+--------+--------+------+------+------ | cwt. | cwt. | cwt. | cwt. | cwt. | cwt. unmanured continuously | - / | | - / | | - / | - / - / cwt. superphosphate of | | | | | | lime | - / | - / | - / | | | - / - / cwt. superphosphate of | | | | | | lime, and lb. ammonium | | | | | | salts | - / | - / | - / | - / | - / | - / lb. ammonium salts | - / | | - / | - / | - / | - / lb. nitrate of soda, - / | | | | | | cwt. superphosphate, and | | | | | | mixed mineral manure | - / | - / | - / | - / | - / | - / lb. nitrate of soda | - / | - / | - / | - / | | - / -------------------------------+--------+--------+--------+------+------+------ table xi.--experiments on the growth of potatoes. _average of five seasons, - ._[ ] ----+-------------------------------+------------------------------------------- | | produce per acre--tubers. plot| manure per acre per annum. |----------+----------+----------+---------- | | good. | small. | diseased.| total. ----+-------------------------------|----------+----------+----------+---------- plot| |tons cwt. |tons cwt. |tons cwt. |tons cwt. |unmanured | | - / | - / | - / |farmyard manure ( tons) | - / | - / | - / | - / |farmyard manure ( tons), and | | | | | - / cwt. superphosphate | - / | | - / | - / |farmyard manure ( tons), | | | | | - / cwt. superphosphate, | | | | | and lb. nitrate of soda | | | - / | - / | lb. ammonium salts | - / | - / | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda | - / | - / | - / | | lb. ammonium salts, - / | | | | | cwt. superphosphate, lb. | | | | | sulphate potash, lb. | | | | | sulphate soda, lb. | | | | | sulphate magnesia | - / | - / | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda, - / | | | | | cwt. superphosphate, lb. | | | | | sulphate potash, lb. | | | | | sulphate soda, lb. | | | | | sulphate magnesia | - / | - / | - / | - / | - / cwt. superphosphate | - / | | - / | - / | - / cwt. superphosphate, | | | | | lb. sulphate potash, lb. | | | | | sulphate soda, and lb. | | | | | sulphate magnesia | - / | - / | - / | - / ----+-------------------------------+----------+----------+----------+---------- . in each year the tops were spread on the respective plots. table xii.--experiments on the growth of potatoes--_continued_. _average of twelve seasons, - ._ ----+------------------------------+------------------------------------------- | | produce per acre--tubers. plot| manure per acre per annum. |----------+----------+----------+---------- | | good. | small. | diseased.| total. ----+------------------------------|----------+----------+----------+---------- | |tons cwt. |tons cwt. |tons cwt. |tons cwt. |unmanured in , and each | | | | | year since | - / | - / | - / | - / |unmanured in , and since; | | | | | previously farmyard manure | | | | | ( tons) | - / | - / | | |farmyard manure ( tons) | | | | | alone, , and since; | | | | | previously - / cwt. | | | | | superphosphate also | - / | - / | - / | |farmyard manure ( tons) | | | | | alone, , and since. in | | | | | and previously - / | | | | | cwt. superphosphate, and in | | | | | and previously lb. | | | | | nitrate of soda also | - / | - / | - / | - / | lb. ammonium salts | - / | - / | - / | | lb. nitrate of soda | - / | - / | - / | - / | lb. ammonium salts, - / | | | | | cwt. superphosphate, lb.| | | | | sulphate of potash, and | | | | | lb. mixed mineral manure | - / | | - / | - / | lb. nitrate of soda, - / | | | | | cwt. superphosphate, lb.| | | | | sulphate of potash, and | | | | | lb. mixed mineral manure | - / | - / | - / | - / | - / cwt. superphosphate | - / | - / | | | - / cwt. superphosphate, | | | | | lb. sulphate of potash, and | | | | | lb. mixed mineral manure| - / | - / | - / | - / ----+------------------------------+----------+----------+----------+---------- footnotes: [ ] see sir john bennet lawes, bart., and the rothamsted experiments. by c. m. aikman. ('scottish farmer' office, glasgow.) index. abraum salts, . absorptive power of soils for water, , ; how to increase, . acidity in soils neutralised by lime, . acids fixed by soil, . adametz on organisms in soil, . adulteration of guano, - . africa, guano from, , . agricultural chemistry, historical introduction to, - ; liebig's researches on, - ; liebig's services to, . agronomy, . air, ammonia in, , ; nitrates in, ; nitrites in, ; nitrogen in, ; organic nitrogen in, . aitken, dr, experiments with basic slag, --with beans, , ; on germ-life in bones, ; on manuring of turnips, . albert, heinrich, on solubility of basic slag, . albite, composition of, . albuminates, . albuminoids, in plants, ; of milk, nitrification in, ; phosphorus in, . algerian phosphate, . algoa bay, guano deposits at, . alkalies, in cow-dung, , --cow-urine, --horse-dung, , --horse-urine, --pig-dung, , --pig-urine, --sheep-dung, , --sheep-urine, . alkalinity necessary for nitrification, . alumina, in ash of plants, ; compounds, reversion caused by, , ; salts, in _salinas_, . america, virgin soils of, . american farming, . amides, . ammonia, absorbed by soil, ; amount dissolved in rain, ; amount in air, ; amount in soil, ; amount supplied to soil by rain, ; converted into nitrates in soil, ; converted into nitrous acid, ; fixed by soil, ; from decomposition of farmyard manure, ; from gas-works, ; lost in mixing manures, ; relation of, to plants, - ; salts, most easily nitrifiable, ; salts of, in farmyard manure, ; sulphate of, - ; value of, as a manure, . ammonium chloride in chincha guano, . ammonium-magnesium phosphate in chincha guano, . ammonium oxalate in concretionary nodules, . ammonium phosphate, in chincha guano, ; in concretionary nodules, . ammonium sulphate, - ; in chincha guano, ; in concretionary nodules, . ammonium sulphocyanate, . ammonium urate in concretionary nodules, . amphibole, potash in, . analysis, of manures, - ; of soils, value of, . anderson, dr, analyses of minerals by, , - ; on nitrogen in soil, , . angamos, guano from, , . animals, phosphoric acid in, ; potash in, ; solid excreta of, ; urine of, . apatite, canadian, , ; composition of, ; most abundant form of phosphoric acid, ; varieties of, . application of manures, - . arabian coast, guano deposits on, . arable soil, absorptive power of, . arbrohlos island guano, . arendt, experiments on oats by, . aristotelian doctrine of chemical elements, . artificial soil, . aruba phosphate, , , . ash, constituents of plants, - ; of rye, phosphoric acid in, ; of wheat, phosphoric acid in, ; of farmyard manure, composition of, , . ashes, an adulterant of guano, ; mixed with manures, . asia, guano from, . asparagin, nitrification in, . atacama, nitrate of soda deposits at, . atmosphere, ammonia in, , ; relation of, to plants, . atwater on nitrogen in plants, . augite, . australia, guano from, ; virgin soils of, . avenine in oats, . aves guano, , ; phosphoric acid in, . bacilli, . bacon, lord, on salt as a manure, . bacteria, in soil, ; different classes of, - . baker island guano, , ; phosphoric acid in, . ballestas, guano from, , ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . barilla, potash in, . barley, farmyard manure not suited for, ; fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; manurial constituents in, ; manuring of, , ; nitrogen removed in crop of, ; norfolk experiments on, ; period of growth of, ; period of ripening of, ; rothamsted experiments on growth of, ; soils suited for, ; uniform manuring of, . barley soils, amount of nitrates and nitrogen in, . barley-straw, composition of, ; manurial constituents in, . basalt, phosphoric acid in, , . bases fixed by soil, . basic ammonium phosphate in concretionary nodules, . basic process of steel-smelting, . basic silicates, . basic slag, - ; after-effects of, ; application of, method of, --rate of, ; compared with other manures, - ; composition of, , ; darmstadt experiments with, ; discovery of value of, ; manufacture of, ; preparation of, processes for, ; relative activity of, ; soils best suited for, ; solubility of, ; wagner's experiments with, - . bat guano, , ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . beans, fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; good effect of gypsum on, ; manurial constituents in, ; manuring of, - ; phosphorus in, ; relative value of manurial ingredients to, ; source of nitrogen, . bean-straw, manurial constituents in, . beatson, general, experiments of, with peruvian guano, . beddington meadows, irrigation at, . bedfordshire, coprolites from, . belgian phosphate, . berthelot on sources of plant-nitrogen, . biological properties of soil, - . blood corpuscles, potash in, . blood, dried, ; composition of, ; manure for sugar-cane, ; potash in, , ; rate of nitrification in, ; source of nitrogen, ; suited for horticulture, . bohemia, phosphoric acid removed from, . bolivia, guano deposits at, . bollaert on nitrate deposits, . bone-ash, ; composition of, . bone-black, ; composition of, . bone-char, ; composition of, . bone-dust, . bone-meal, , ; composition of, ; condition of nitrogen in, . bone-phosphate, . bones, - ; action of, ; boiled, ; bruised, ; capable of nitrification, ; collected in britain, , ; composition of, , ; compound, ; crops suited for, ; dissolved, , ; early use of, ; fermentation of, ; floated, ; forms of, ; grinding of, ; imports of, ; inorganic matter in, ; nitrogen in, ; organic matter in, ; putrefaction of, , ; raw, ; source of nitrogen, ; treatment of, . bonnet, charles, discovery of source of plant's carbon by, . boracic acid in _salinas_, . bordeaux phosphate, . boussingault, on dry matter in horse-manure, ; early researches of, in agricultural chemistry, ; experiments by, on nitrification, , ; on excrements of pig, ; on nitrates in guano, ; on nitrogen in plants, , ; on nitrogen in soil, ; on nitrogen in excreta, ; on nitrogen lost during fermentation, . bracken-fern, analyses of, ; as litter, . bran, manurial constituents in, . bretschneider on sources of plant-nitrogen, . brewers' grain, manurial constituents in, . bromine in ash of plants, . browse island guano, , ; phosphoric acid in, . brüstlein and peters on fixation of bases and acids by soil, . buckland, dr, discovery of coprolites by, . buckwheat absorbs ammonia, . bull river, phosphates from, . cabbages, benefited by saline manures, ; manuring of, - ; soils suited for, . caird, sir james, experiments by, with peruvian guano, . calcareous earth, absorptive power of, ; stones, phosphoric acid in, . calcium phosphate in chincha guano, . calcium sulphate in concretionary nodules, . _caliche_, composition of, ; occurrence of, . california, guano deposits at, . cambridgeshire, coprolites from, . cameron, sir charles, on assimilation of urea by plants, . canadian apatite, , . cape vert guano, phosphoric acid in, . carbolic acid, action of, on nitrifying organisms, . carbon, fixation of, by plants, ; in plants, discovery of source of, . carbon bisulphide, effect of, on nitrification, , . carbonate of ammonia formed in fermentation of dung, , . carbonic acid, absorbed by plants, --by soil, ; in ash of plants, ; oxidation of, by bacteria, ; produced in decomposition of farmyard manure, . carbonising-works, ammonia from, , . carburetted hydrogen, produced in decomposition of farmyard manure, . caribbean phosphates, . carnallite, . carolina phosphate, . carrots, manurial constituents in, . catacombs, bones from, . catch-cropping, , . cattle foods, average composition of, . caustic lime, . cereals, manuring of, - ; nitrogenous manures benefit, ; potash in, ; silicates absorbed by, ; value of nitrate of soda as manure for, . chalk, an adulterant of guano, ; lias, phosphoric acid in, . charcoal, a filter for sewage, . charleston phosphate, . chemical analysis of manures, interpretation of, ; value of, . chemical composition of soil, - . cheshire, bones used in, . chesterfield island guano, . chili and peru, chief source of nitrate of soda, . chincha island guano, , , ; composition of, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . chipana, guano deposits at, . chlorapatite, composition of, . chlorine in ash of plants, . chloroform prevents nitrification, , . chlorophyll, organisms destitute of, ; produced by nitrate of soda, ; relation of, to fixation of carbon by plants, . chuca, . citrate of ammonia, solubility of phosphates in, . clay, absorptive power of, ; analysis of, ; grey, evaporation of water from, ; loamy, evaporation of water from, ; sandy, absorptive power of, --evaporation of water from, ; soils, benefited by basic slag, --puddling in, ; stiffish, evaporation of water from, ; strong absorptive power of, . clover-hay, fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; manurial constituents in, ; manuring of, . clover-sickness, . coal, nitrogen in, . coke-works, ammonia from, , . colloids, . colour of soil, ; difference in temperature due to, . columbia, guano deposits at, . composts, , - ; farmyard manure a typical, ; manufacture of, ; object of, ; purposes served by, ; substances used for, . compound bones, . concretionary nodules, composition of, . conglomerate, . connecticut, experimental station at, . cooke, f. j., on, farmyard manure, , ; field experiments. ; manuring of barley, --of mangels, --of meadow-land, --of swedes, --of wheat, . copper, oxide of, in plants, . copperas, as a fixer, , . coprolites, ; percentage of phosphates in, : occurrence of, , . corcovado guano, nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . cordilleras, , . costra, . cotton-cake, decorticated, manurial constituents in, . cotton-cake, undecorticated, manurial constituents in, . cotton-seeds, imports of, . cova, . covered manure, potatoes grown with, ; wheat grown with, . cow-dung, alkalies in, ; composition of, in dry state, ; cool, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; water in, . cow-manure, ; amount voided per day, ; amount voided per year, ; analysis of, ; dry matter in, ; fermentation in, slow, ; mineral matter in, ; mucilaginous matter in, ; nitrogen in, ; resinous matter in, . cow-urine, alkalies in, ; composition of, in dry state, ; fertilising ingredients in, for food consumed, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; water in, . cows, percentage of food voided in excrements of, ; solid excrements of, ; urine voided by, . cress, experiments with, . crimea, bones from, . cropped soils, nitrates in, --lost by drainage in, . crops, capacity of, for assimilating manures, ; difference in root-systems of, ; manuring of common farm, - ; period of growth of, ; potash removed in, ; suited for sewage, ; variation in composition of, . crusius on phosphoric acid removed from the farm, . crust guanos, , . crystalloids, . curaçao phosphates, , , . darmstadt experiments with basic slag, - . darwin on origin of nitrate-fields, . daubeny on mineral sources of phosphoric acid, . davy, sir humphry, lectures of, on agricultural chemistry, - ; on heat and water absorbing and retaining properties of soils, ; on hygroscopic power of soils, . dehérain, on nitrification, ; on nitrification in sulphate of ammonia, ; on rate of nitrification, . denitrification, ; conditions favourable for, ; effected by bacteria, . derby, lord, introduction of peruvian guano by, . detmer on humus in soil, . dew, action of, on guano, ; explanation of, ; most abundant in summer, . dicalcic phosphate, ; formula of, ; molecular composition of, ; percentage composition of, . digby, sir kenelm, on value of nitrates to plants, ; theory of, on plant-food, - . diorite, phosphoric acid in, , . direct manures, . dissolved-bone compound, . dissolved bones, ; composition of, . dissolved guano, . dolerite, phosphoric acid in, , . dolomite, phosphoric acid in, , . downton experiments on sewage-sludge, . drainage, average of thirteen years, ; nitrates in, ; nitrates lost by, ; phosphoric acid lost by, ; potash lost by, . drainings of manure-heaps, analysis of, . dried blood, ; composition of, ; manure for sugar-cane, ; potash in, ; rate of nitrification in, ; source of nitrogen, ; suited for horticulture, . dried flesh, ; nitrogen in, . dried leaves, as litter, ; composition of, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; potash in, . ducks' dung, analysis of, . duhamel and hales, theory of, on plant-growth, . dundonald, earl, treatise by, on agricultural chemistry, . dung and urine, composition of, . dutrochet on absorption of plant-food, . dyer, dr bernard, analyses of stable manure by, ; experiments on peat as litter, ; on nitrate of soda as manure for mangolds, . earth, an adulterant of guano, ; composition of solid crust of, . ecuador, guano deposits at, . egyptian guano, nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . elbe, waters of, phosphoric acid in, ; potash in, . elm-tree, water transpired by, . enderbury island guano, , ; phosphoric acid in, . endosmosis, . english farming, . equalised guano, . essex, coprolites from, . estremadura phosphate, . ethylamine, nitrification in, . evaporation from soil, , , . excreta, amount of nitrogen in, , ; composition of, , ; difference in amount of, for food consumed, ; liquid, in farmyard manure, ; solid, in farmyard manure, ; solid, undigested food in, ; solid, voided by cows, , ; solid, voided by horse, ; solid, voided by oxen, ; solid, voided by sheep, , . factors for calculating manurial ingredients into their different compounds, . falkland guano, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . fallow-fields, nitrates formed in, . fanning island guano, ; phosphoric acid in, . farmyard manure, - ; action of, on soils, ; ammonia in, ; amount produced on farm per year, ; analyses of, , ; application of, ; ash of, , ; carbonic acid gas in, ; classes of constituents of, ; compared with artificials, ; composition of, ; denitrification in, ; depth to plough to, ; effect of, on potatoes, ; fertilising matter in, ; fire-fang in, ; fresh, composition of, , ; functions of, ; heat in fermentation of, , ; humates in, ; humic acid in, ; inadequate source of nitrogen to soil, ; indirect influence of, ; influence of, on soil, ; lawes, sir john, on composition of, ; lord kinnaird's experiments with, ; marsh-gas in, ; mineral matter in, ; moisture in, ; nitric acid in, ; nitrogen in, ; ratio of, to ash ingredients, ; organic matter in, ; phosphoretted hydrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; potash in, ; products of decomposition of, ; rate of application of, ; retrogression of nitrogen in, ; rotten, composition of, , --value of, ; rotting, effects of, on, ; solid excreta in, ; sulphuretted hydrogen in, ; supplemented with nitrogen, ; supplemented with phosphoric acid, ; temperature, effect of, on soil, , ; typical compost, ; ulmates in, ; ulmic acid in, ; unfavourable to certain crops, ; urine in, ; value of, ; variation in composition of, ; water in, . fatty acids in guano, . felspars, ; albite, ; composition of, ; labradorite, ; oligoclase, , , ; orthoclase, , , ; phosphoric acid in, ; potash manures, ; potash in, percentage of, , . ferment, aerobic, , ; anaerobic, . fermentation, ammonium carbonate formed during, ; in bones, ; heat of, ; of farmyard manure, ; of guano, ; temperature of, . fern, bracken, as litter, . ferric chloride, test for sulphocyanates, . fertilisers and feeding stuffs act, . fertilising ingredients, amount of soluble, in soil, ; amounts removed by different crops, , ; chemical condition of, in soil, ; lodge in seed, ; in soil, . fertility, of the soil, - ; potential, of soil, , ; properties necessary for, ; supply of oxygen necessary for, . field experiments, , ; educational value of, ; on rate of nitrification, . finger-and-toe prevented by lime, . fire-fang in farmyard manure, . fischer on absorption of plant-food, . fish-guano, - ; application of, ; consumption of, ; manufacture of, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; production of, ; source of nitrogen, ; value of, . fixers, ; chemical reactions with, . fleece, potash in, . fleischer, professor, on solubility of phosphates, . flesh-guano, . flint island guano, . flitcham experiments on growth of wheat, . floated bones, , . florida phosphate, . fluorapatite, composition of, . food, consumed by pigs, ; dry matter of, voided in dung, ; percentage of, in excrements, . food-constituents, plant, necessary for nitrification, . forbes, david, on nitrate-fields of chili, . forest-soils, absence of nitrification in, . fowl-dung, , ; analysis of, . fownes on phosphoric acid in rocks, . frankland, p. f., experiments on nitrification, , , . franklin, benjamin, experiment of, with gypsum, . frey bentos, meat-meal guano from, . galapagos islands, guano deposits at, . garden earth, absorptive power of, ; ammonia in, . gas-liquor, ammonia in, . gas-works, ammonia from, , . gases, absorbed by soils, ; present in soil, . gazzeri on retention by soil of plant-food, . geese-dung, analysis of, . geic acid in humus, . gelatin, nitrification in, ; from bones, . germany, agricultural research in, ; bones imported from, ; manufacture of meat-meal guano in, . germination, influence of temperature on, ; oxygen necessary for, . gilbert, sir j. henry, on barley-manuring, ; on liebig's mineral theory, ; on manuring of potatoes, ; presidential address of, ; and see lawes and gilbert. glauber on artificial production of nitre, . glue, . glycin, assimilated by plants, . glycocoll, experiments with, . gneiss, ; phosphoric acid in, . grandeau, professor, on forms of plant-food in soil, ; on loss of phosphoric acid, . granite, ; in guano, ; phosphoric acid in, , ; potash in, . grass, bangor experiments on, ; effect of manure on, ; influence of farmyard manure on, ; manuring of, - . gray, asa, on transpiration by plants, . great cayman guano, . green manures, . grouven on guano, . guanape island guano, , ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . guanine, ; experiments with, . guano, - ; action of, as a manure, ; adulteration of, ; application of, ; bat, ; composition of, , ; crust, ; deposits of the world, ; dissolved, ; equalised, ; fermentation of, ; fertilising constituents in, ; fish, - ; importance of, in agriculture, ; inequality in composition of, ; influence of, on farming, ; meat-meal, ; mode of application of, ; nitrification in, rate of, ; nitrogenous, - ; origin of, ; peruvian, - ; phosphatic, ; quantity to apply, ; rectified, ; so-called, ; source of phosphoric acid, ; source of potash, ; value of, as a manure, ; variation in composition of, . gulf of mexico, guano deposits at, . gulls, guano from, . gunning on sources of plant-nitrogen, . gunpowder, exports of, ; nitrogen lost in, ; production, annual, of, ; saltpetre in, , . gypsum, - ; absorptive power of, ; action of, mode of, --on nitrification, ; an adulterant of guano, ; as a fixer, , , ; decomposes double silicates, ; favourable to clover, ; as an oxidising agent, . hales, stephen, theory of, on plant-growth, . hampe, dr, on nitrogen in plants, . harting on sources of plant-nitrogen, . heat, of soils, - ; of fermentation, . heiden, dr, on application of farmyard manure, ; on fixation of bases and acids by soil, ; on loss of ammonia from dung, ; on percentage of food voided by animals, ; on straw as litter, , . hellriegel, on amount of water in soils, ; on barley, ; on nitrogen in plants, . helmont, van, theory of, on source of plant-food, . henslow, professor, on coprolites, . heraüs on organisms in soil, . herbage, effect of manure on, . herrings as manure, . hervé-mangon, experiments on action of light on plants by, . hilgenstock on tetracalcic phosphate, . hippuric acid, experiments with, ; in farmyard manure, . hire, de la, on evolution of gases by plants, . hofmeister on horse excrements, . hoof-guano, source of nitrogen, . hoofs and horns, manure from, . hops, manuring of, ; potash removed by, ; slow-acting manures benefit, . horn, capable of nitrification, ; as manure, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . hornblende, . horse-dung, alkalies in, ; composition of, in dry state, ; hot, ; nitrogen in, , ; phosphoric acid in, ; water in, , . horse-manure, ; amount produced per day, ; amount produced per year, ; analyses of, ; dry matter in, ; dry nature of, ; fermentation rapid in, ; mineral matter in, ; nitrogen in, , . horse-urine, alkalies in, ; composition of, in dry state, ; fertilising ingredients in, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; water in, . hosäus on assimilation of ammonia, . howland island guano. , ; phosphoric acid in, . huanillos, guano from, , ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . huano, . hueppe on organisms in soil, . hughes, john, on bracken-fern as litter, ; on composition of bracken, . humates in farmyard manure, . humboldt, a., discovery of peruvian guano by, . humic acid in farmyard manure, ; in humus, . humin in humus, . humus, absorptive power of, , ; evaporation from, ; nature of, in soil, ; soils improved by addition of, . huon island guano, , ; phosphoric acid in, . huxtable and thompson on retention of plant-food by soil, . hydrated silicates, , . hydrochloric acid as a fixer, . hydrogen, amount of, in plants, ; source of, in plants, . hygroscopic power of soils, . ichaboe guano, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . independence bay guano, , ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . india, nitre soils of, . indirect manures, , , - . ingenhousz, john, experiments by, on nitrogen in plants, ; on oxygen evolved by plants, . insoluble phosphate, ; value of, . iodine, in ash of plants, ; in nitrate of soda, , . iquique, nitrate of soda from, . iron in ash of plants, ; necessary for plant-growth, ; reversion in superphosphates caused by, , . iron-works, ammonia from, , , . irrigation, - ; intermittent, ; subsoil, . jamieson, professor, experiments with coprolites, . jarvis island guano, , ; phosphoric acid in, . jersey, manuring of potatoes in, . johnson, professor s. w., on application of superphosphate, ; on earl dundonald, ; on nitrogen in buffalo-horn shavings, ; on nitrogen in soils, ; on solubility of basic slag, ; value of organic nitrogen to plant, . jürgensen on nitrogen in excreta, . kainit, as a fixer, ; potash in, percentage of, , , ; rate of application of, . kaolin clay, analysis of, . karmrodt, analysis of chincha island guano, ; of concretionary nodules, . karnallite, potash in, . kellner, experiments on nitrification by, . kelp, potash in, . kieserite, . kinnaird, lord, experiments by, with farmyard manure, . kitchen-garden soil, nitrogenous matter in, . knop on condition of nitrates in soil, . koosaw river, phosphates from, . kreatin assimilated by plants, . kuria muria guano, , . labrador, guano deposits at, . labradorite, ; potash in, . lacepede island guano, , ; phosphoric acid in, . lahn phosphate, . lava, phosphoric acid in, , . lawes, sir j. b., and gilbert, early researches of, at rothamsted, ; experiments with farmyard manure, ; experiments with peruvian guano, ; inauguration of rothamsted experiments by, ; on composition of farmyard manure, ; on manuring of wheat, ; on motion of plant's sap, ; on percentage of food in excreta, ; on rate of nitrification, ; on sources of plant-nitrogen, ; on sulphate of ammonia, ; on unexhausted manures, , - . lawes, sir j. b., experiments with guano by, ; manufacture of superphosphate by, ; on application of superphosphate, ; on bones, ; on composition of farmyard manure, ; on farmyard manure, ; on loss of nitrates, ; on sources of nitrogen, . leather, as manure, ; nitrogen in, . leaves, dried, as litter, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; potash in, . legrange, charles, on extent of nitrate-fields, . leguminous plants, benefited by basic slag, --by potash, ; fixation of free nitrogen by, ; gain of nitrogen with, ; manuring of, - , ; nitrogenous manures hurtful to, . lehmann on ammonia as plant-food, , . leipzig, bones from, . leones, guano deposits at, . leucite, potash in, . lias chalk, phosphoric acid in, . liebig, criticism of humus theory by, ; dissolved bones discovered by, ; first report to british association, ; manufacture of superphosphate from bones by, ; mineral theory of, - ; on ammonia as a manure, ; on importation of bones by britain, ; researches of, in agricultural chemistry, - ; services of, to agricultural chemistry, ; theory of manures by, ; theory of, on rotation of crops, . light, action of, on plant-growth, . lime, - ; abundant occurrence of, ; action of, --contradictory, --not thoroughly understood, --on nitrogenous organic matter, --on soil's texture, ; antiquity of, as a manure, ; binding effect of, ; biological action of, ; caustic, ; chemical action of, ; decomposes minerals, ; different forms of, ; effect of, on soils, ; fixed by soils, ; in ash of plants, ; mechanical functions of, ; mild, ; necessary for nitrification, , --for plant-growth, , ; neutralises acidity in soils, ; phosphates of, - ; pig excrements contain, ; prevents clay puddling, ; returned to soil, ; soils contain, - . limestone, analyses of, ; evaporation of water from, ; occurrence of, . linseed, imports of, ; manurial constituents of, . linseed-cake, manurial constituents of, . liquid manure, - . lithia in ash of plants, . litter, loam as, ; peat as, ; straw as, ; uses of, . lloyd on fattening animals, . loam, as litter, ; evaporation of water from, ; poor in fertilising matter, . lobos, guano deposits at, . lobos de afuera guano, , . macabi island guano, , ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . maercker, professor, on destruction of nitrifying organisms, . magnesia, fixed by soils, ; in ash of plants, ; in pig excrements, ; necessary for nitrification, ; necessary for plant-growth, ; sulphate of, as a fixer, , . maize, absorbs ammonia, ; fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; manurial constituents in, ; source of nitrogen, . malden island guano, , ; phosphoric acid in, . malpighi on importance of atmospheric air for germination, . malt-dust, manurial constituents in, . manganese, oxide of, in ash of plants, . mangels, fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; guano a manure for, ; manurial constituents in, ; manuring of, , , , ; rothamsted experiments on growth of, . manitoba soils, nitrogen in, at various depths, ; rate of nitrification in, . manure, cow, ; farmyard, - ; horse, ; liquid, - ; meaning of word, ; pig, ; sewage, - ; sheep, ; stable, from peat-moss, --wheat-straw, . manures, action of, ; analysis of, interpretation of, - ; application of, - ; method of, - ; cash prices of, ; equal distribution of, ; functions of, , increase soil-fertility, ; intrinsic value of, ; lasting effects of, ; methods of valuing, ; minor artificial, - ; mixing of, - ; nitrogenous, - ; phosphatic, - ; potassic, - ; quantities of, applied to oats, ; unexhausted, - , ; units for determining commercial value of, ; valuation of, - ; value of, deduced from experiments, ; various classes of, - . manurial constituents of various foods, . manurial ingredients, unit value of, . manuring of, barley, - ; beans, - , ; cabbages, ; cereals, - ; clover, ; common farm crops, - ; grass, - ; hops, ; leguminous crops, - ; mangels, , , ; oats, - ; peas, ; potatoes, - ; roots, - ; turnips, , , - ; wheat, - . maracaïbo guano, nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . marl, phosphoric acid in, . marsh-gas from farmyard manure, . meadow-hay, fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; manurial constituents in, ; rothamsted experiments on manuring of, . meadow-land, benefited by basic slag, , ; manuring of, ; norfolk experiments on, . meat-meal guano, , ; composition of, ; imports of, ; manufacture of, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; rate of nitrification in, ; source of nitrogen, ; value of, . mechi on liquid manure, . mejillones guano, , ; phosphoric acid in, . mène, on sources of plant-nitrogen, . menhaddo, guano manufactured from, . mexico phosphate, , . mica, analysis of, ; potash in, , . micro-organisms, convert ammonia into nitrous acid, ; convert nitrous acid into nitric acid, ; effect fermentation, ; effect fixation of free nitrogen, ; effect nitrification, ; oxidising power of, . mild lime, . milk, nitrification in albuminoids of, ; nitrogen removed in, ; phosphoric acid removed in, ; potash removed in, . mineral phosphates, - ; value of, as a manure, . mineral salts necessary for nitrification, . minor artificial manures, - . mixing manures, - ; ammonia lost in, ; nitric acid lost in, ; phosphates reverted in, . moisture, atmospheric, action on guano, ; in farmyard manure, ; in manures, ; necessary for nitrification, , . molds, . mona guano, . mond, ludwig, on nitrogen in coal, . monks guano, ; phosphoric acid in, . monocalcic phosphate, ; formula of, ; molecular composition of, ; percentage composition of, ; reversion of, with iron and alumina compounds, --with tricalcic phosphate, . mulder on humus in soil, , . müller, a., on nitrogen in soil, , . munro, dr j. m. h., on nitrification, ; on sewage-sludge as manure, ; on urine voided, . müntz, on ammonia in air, ; on nitrifying organisms in soil, ; on oxidising power of micro-organisms, . muriate of potash, application of, ; forms calcium chloride, ; harmful effects of, ; more concentrated than sulphate, . mustard, . navassa phosphate, , , . nesbit on composition of guano, . new granada, guano deposits at, . new zealand, meat-meal guano from, . nile, nitrates in waters of, . "nitraries," . nitrate-fields, appearance of, ; origin of, . nitrate of soda, - ; amount exported from chili, , , ; amount imported into britain, , ; appearance of fields of, ; application of, ; chili and peru chief source of, ; composition of, ; crops suited by, ; discovery of deposits of, ; extent of deposits of, ; encourages deep roots, ; formation of fields of, - ; method of applying, ; method of mining, ; nitric acid in, source of, ; nitrogen in, percentage of, ; not an exhausting manure, ; origin of fields of, ; properties of, ; quantity to apply, ; shipments of, ; soils benefited by, ; source of nitrogen, ; top-dressing with, . nitrates, amount lost by drainage, ; amount produced at different times, ; amount in soil, ; conditions diminishing loss of, ; constantly formed in soil, ; in barley-soils, ; in cropped soils, , ; in drainage-waters, , ; in fallow-soils, ; in manured wheat-soils, , ; in soil, , ; lost by drainage, ; most formed in summer, ; nitrogen as, in rothamsted soils, ; position of, in soil, ; quantity formed in fallow-fields, . nitre, beds, ; occurrence of, ; soils of india, . nitric acid, amount of, supplied to soil by rain, ; derived from sea weed, ; formed from ammonia, ; formed from nitrous acid, ; in farmyard manure, ; in soil, ; lost in mixing manures, ; most important nitrogen compound for plants, ; relation of, to plants, ; source of, in nitrate of soda, . nitrification, , , - ; action of gypsum on, ; alkalinity necessary for, ; in asparagin, ; bearing of, on agriculture, ; in bones, ; cause of, ; conditions favourable for, ; denitrification, - ; effected by micro-organisms, , ; in ethylamine, ; in fallow-fields, ; food-constituents necessary for, ; field experiments on rate of, ; in gelatin, ; in horn, ; laboratory experiments on rate of, ; in manures, , ; in milk albuminoids, ; mineral salts necessary for, ; moisture necessary for, , ; old theories on, ; organic matter not necessary for, , ; oxygen necessary for, , ; plant-roots promote, ; in rape-cake, ; rate of, ; rotation of crops, bearing of, on, ; soil best suited for, ; in subsoils, conditions favourable for, ; substances capable of, ; in summer, ; sunlight, effect of, on, ; temperature necessary for, , ; in thiocyanates, ; in urea, ; in wool, . nitrifying organisms, depth found at in soil, ; distribution of, in soil, ; effect of poisons on, ; organic matter not required by, . _nitrobaeter_, . nitrogen, - ; absorbed by soil, , ; accumulates in pastures, ; in air, ; as ammonia in soils, ; amount of, in plants, ; amount of, in soil, ; artificial supply of, ; in bat guano, ; in bones, , ; combined, in air, ; combined, in rain, , ; condition of, in manures, ; converted into nitrates in soil, ; in cow-dung, - ; in cow excrements, ; in cow-urine, ; difference between surface and subsoil, ; different forms of, , ; dissolved in rain, ; in dried blood, ; in farmyard manure, ; in fish-guano, ; fixation of free, ; forms of, in plants, ; free, relation of, to plant, ; gain of, with leguminous crops, ; in guanos, ; in hoofs and horns, ; in horse-dung, - ; in horse-manure, ; in horse-urine, ; importance of, in soil, ; in lean flesh, ; in leather, ; least abundant of manurial ingredients in soil, ; loss of, artificial sources of, ; loss of, by crops, ; loss of, on farm, ; loss of, sources of, - ; loss of, total amount of, ; lost in the arts, ; lost in free condition, ; lost in treating farmyard manure, ; lost in milk, ; lost by retrogression, ; in manitoba soils, ; in meat-guano, ; nature of, in soil, ; as nitrates in soil, ; as nitrates in cropped soils, , ; as nitrates in rothamsted soils, ; as nitrates in wheat-soils, ; in nitrate of soda, ; nitric, in soil, ; organic, absorbed by plants, ; organic, in soil, ; original source of, in soil, ; in oxen excrements, ; in pasture-lands, ; peat-soils richest in, ; in peruvian guano, , , , ; in pig-dung, - ; position of, in agriculture, - ; relative manurial value of, ; rothamsted experiments on, ; in scutch, ; in sewage, ; in sewage-sludge, ; in sheep-dung, - ; in sheep excrements, ; in sheep-urine, ; in soil, ; in soil, portion of, easily nitrifiable, ; in soils at various depths, ; in soot, ; source of, in plants, , , - ; sources of soil, - ; in straw, , ; in subsoil, ; in surface-soil, ; in swine-urine, ; in woollen rags, . nitrogenous guano, - , . nitrogenous manures, application of, ; benefit cereals, ; hurtful to leguminous crops, . nitrogenous organic substances, in chincha guano, ; in concretionary nodules, . _nitrosomonas_, . nitrous acid, converted into nitric acid, ; formed from ammonia, . nobbe, on fixation of free nitrogen, ; on potash in soil, . nöllner on origin of nitrate-fields, . norfolk, coprolites from, ; experiments on barley, --on meadow-land, --on turnips, . north america, guano from, , . norwegian apatite, . oak-tree, water transpired by, . oat-straw, composition of, ; manurial constituents in, . oats, arendt's experiments with, ; avenine in, ; fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; hardy crop, ; manurial constituents in, ; manuring of, - ; nitrogen removed in crop of, ; require mixed nitrogenous manures, ; source of nitrogen, ; rothamsted experiments on growth of, . _oficinas_, . ohlendorff, introduction of dissolved guano by, . oilcakes, imports of, ; source of nitrogen, . oil-seeds, source of nitrogen, . oligoclase felspars, , ; composition of, ; potash in, . organic matter, in bones, ; in dung, , ; in manures, ; not necessary for nitrifying organism, . orthoclase felspars, , ; composition of, ; potash in, . ox-dung, fertilising ingredients in, for food consumed, . ox-urine, fertilising ingredients in, . oxalic acid in guano, action of, . oxen, excrements of, ; food aided by, ; solid excreta voided by, ; urine voided by, . oxidation, ; products of, , . oxygen, absorbed by plant-roots, ; absorbed by soil, ; evolved by plants, ; necessary for fertility, ; necessary for nitrification, , ; percentage of, in plants, ; source of, in plants, . pabellon de pica, guano from, , , ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . pacific islands, guano from, . pacific ocean, sea-weed in, . palagonite as potash manure, . palm-kernel meal, manurial constituents in, . pasteur, on fermentation in urine, ; on nitrification, . pastures, accumulation of nitrogen in, ; benefited by basic slag, ; deficient in lime, ; effect of manure on herbage of, ; nitrogen in, ; permanent, , --manuring of, ; season influences, ; soil influences, . patagonian guano, , ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . patent phosphate meal, . patillos, guano deposits at, . patos island, guano deposits at, ; phosphoric acid in, . patterson on superphosphate, . payen and boussingault on composition of dried flesh, . peas, manurial constituents in, ; manuring of, ; phosphorus in, ; source of nitrogen, . peat, absorbing properties of, ; adulterant of guano, ; analysis of stable-manure from, ; litter, ; nitrogen in, ; retaining properties of, ; soils, . pelicans, guano from, . penguin island guano, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . penguins, guano from, . percival on carbonic acid in plants, . peru, guano deposits in, ; guano first used in, ; nitrate of soda from, , . peruvian guano, - ; appearance of, ; composition of, - ; deposits of, ; imports of, , ; source of nitrogen, . peters and eichhorn on solvent power of salt, . petzholdt on sources of plant's nitrogen, . pfeffer on action of light on plant-growth, . phoenix island guano, . phosphate of iron in chincha guano, . phosphate of lime, in algerian phosphate, ; in apatite, ; in belgian phosphate, ; in bones, ; in cambridge coprolites, ; in carolina phosphates, ; in crust guanos, ; in estremadura phosphate, ; in florida phosphate, ; in french phosphates, ; in lahn phosphates, ; in somme phosphate, ; reverted in mixing manures, . phosphates of lime, - , ; importance of mechanical condition of, . phosphates, mineral, - ; imports of, ; value as a manure, . phosphatic guano, , . phosphatic manures, application of, . phosphoretted hydrogen in farmyard manure, . phosphoric acid, - ; in ash of plants, ; in basic slag, ; in bat guano, ; in bones, ; condition of, in soil, ; in cow-dung, - ; in cow excrements, ; in cow-urine, ; in farmyard manure, ; in fish-guano, ; fixed by soils, ; gain of, ; in guano, percentage of, , ; guano a source of, ; in hoofs and horns, ; in horse-dung, - ; in horse-urine, ; importance of, ; loss of, artificial sources of, --by drainage, --in farmyard manure, --in milk, --in sewage, --sources of, in agriculture, ; in meat-guano, ; mineral sources of, ; necessary for plant-growth, ; occurrence of, in animals, --in nature, --in plants, --in soil, ; in oxen excrements, ; in pig-dung, , ; in pig excrements, ; in pig-urine, ; position of, in agriculture, - ; relative trade values of, in manures, ; in rocks, , ; in sewage-sludge, ; in sheep-dung, - ; in sheep excrements, ; in sheep-urine, ; statement of, in analyses of manures, . phosphorite, , . phosphorus, in albuminoids, ; in animals, ; in beans, ; in peas, ; in plants, ; in pig-iron, . physical properties of soils, - . pichard on action of gypsum on nitrification, . pig-dung, composition of, ; in dry state, . pig excrements, ; composition of, . pig-manure, ; amount produced per day, ; mineral matter in, ; nitrogen in, ; poor in nitrogen, . pig-urine, composition of, --in dry state, . pigeon-dung, , ; analysis of, . pigs, excrements of, ; food consumed by, . pisagua, nitrate-fields at, . plant, action of light on, ; amount of hydrogen in, --nitrogen in, --oxygen in, ; ash constituents of, - ; carbon fixed by, , ; food, absorption of, by, ; phosphoric acid in, ; potash in, ; proximate composition of, ; relation of ammonia to, - ; source of hydrogen in, --nitrogen in, - --oxygen in, , . plant-food, absorption of, ; amount of soluble, in soil, ; early theories on source of, ; retained by soil, . plant-roots, grow downwards, ; nitrification promoted by, ; openness required by, ; room required by, ; soil in relation to, . pliny, on lime as a manure, ; on salt as a manure, . pockets a source of phosphoric acid, . poisons, effect of, on nitrifying organisms, . polstorff on ash constituents of plants, . polyhallite, potash in, , . porphyry, in guano, ; phosphoric acid in, , . potash, - , - ; in ash of plants, ; in barilla, ; chloride of, ; condition of, in soil, ; in cows' excrements, ; in drainage-waters, ; in farmyard manure, ; in felspars, ; in fleece, ; fixed by soils, ; importance of, in soil, ; in kelp, ; less important than phosphoric acid, ; manures, , - ; muriate of, , ; necessary for nitrification, ; necessary for plant-growth, ; occurrence of, ; in ocean, ; in oxen excrements, ; in pig excrements, ; in plants, ; position of, in agriculture, - ; relative manurial value of, ; scottish soils supplied with, ; in sheep excrements, ; soda replaces, ; sources of loss of, ; in stassfurt salts, ; statement of, in analyses of manures, ; in sugar-beet refuse, ; sulphate of, , ; in wood-ashes, , , . potash manures, , - ; application of, , --rate of, ; barilla as, ; crops suited for, ; relative importance of, ; soils suited for, ; sources of, ; stassfurt salts as, ; wood-ashes a source of, . potassium phosphate in concretionary nodules, . potassium sulphate, in chincha guano, ; in concretionary nodules, . potatoes, effect of farmyard manure on, ; fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; grown with covered manure, ; highland society's experiments on, ; manurial constituents in, ; manuring of, - --in jersey, --influences composition of, ; potash removed in, ; rothamsted experiments on, , . precipitated ammonium phosphate in concretionary nodules, . precipitated phosphate, , . precipitation, treatment of sewage by, . priestley, discovery of evolution of oxygen by plants, ; on nitrogen in plants, . prussiate of potash, manufacture of, . pugh on sources of plant-nitrogen, . punta de lobos guano, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . punta de patillos, guano deposits at, . pyroxene, potash in, . quartz, evaporation of water from, . queensland, meat-meal guano from, . quercitan, experiments of, with roses, . rape-cake, capable of nitrification, ; manurial constituents in, . rape-seeds, imports of, . raza island guano, ; phosphoric acid, . rectified guano, . relative trade values of phosphoric acid, . resin in guano, . retentive power of soils for water, - . retrogression, nitrogen lost by, . reverted phosphates, - ; determination of amount of, ; formation of, ; value of, . rhine, nitrates in waters of, . rice-meal, an adulterant of guano, ; manurial constituents of, . rocks, phosphoric acid in, . roots, influence of manures on composition of, ; manuring of, - ; norfolk experiments on, ; potash removed in, . rotation of crops, bearing of, on nitrification, . rotations, phosphoric acid in, ; potash removed in, . rothamsted, alternate wheat and bean rotation at, ; ammonia in rain at, ; barley experiments at, ; broadbalk field, alteration in composition of, --manuring of, --produce of wheat on, ; early experiments at, - ; experiments, - ; experiments with nitrate of soda at, ; experiments on nitrogen question at, --mangel-wurzel, --oats, --potatoes at, --value of nitrogen in farmyard manure, ; increase of nitrogen with manures at, , ; nitrates in barley-soils of, ; nitrates in cropped soils of, , ; nitrates in drainage of, ; nitrates in wheat-soils of, , ; nitrogen as nitrates in soils of, , ; nitrogen, decrease of, in soils, ; nitrogen in pasture at, ; pasture, increase of nitrogen in, ; retrogression of nitrogen at, ; soil, nature of, --nitrogen in, at various depths, ; total amount of nitrogen lost at, ; turnip experiments at, ; unmanured fallow-land loses nitrogen by drainage at, ; wheat experiments at, , - . roy on sources of plant-nitrogen, . rubidia in ash of plants, . ruffle, john, on superphosphate, . rye, manurial constituents in, . rye-grass suited for sewage, . rye-straw, summer, composition of, ; winter, composition-of, . st helena, experiments at, with peruvian guano, . saldanha bay guano, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, . _salinas_, . salm-horstmar, prince, on water-culture, . salt, - ; action of, on crops, ; adulterant of guano, ; amount applied, ; antiquity of use of, ; an antiseptic, ; application of, ; clarifies water, ; coagulates clay, ; decomposes minerals, ; a germicide, ; indirect action of, ; mechanical action of, ; nature of action of, ; not a necessary plant-food, ; occurrence of, ; prevents rapid fermentation, ; quantity to apply, ; solvent action of, ; sources of, . saltpetre, formation of, ; occurrence of, ; plantations, . sand, absorptive power of, ; an adulterant of guano, ; calcareous, absorptive power of, ; siliceous, absorptive power of, . sandy soils deficient in lime, . sandwich islands, guano deposits at, . saragossa sea, sea-weed in, . saussure, de, on absorption of gases by soil, ; on nitrogen in plants, ; researches on plant-food by, . sawdust an adulterant of guano, . scheibler, professor, on basic slag, . schloesing and müntz, on nitrification, , ; experiments on rate of nitrification by, ; on denitrification, ; on ferments effecting nitrification, ; on fixation of free nitrogen, ; on ammonia in air, , ; on nitrogen absorbed by soil from air, ; on temperature favourable for nitrification, . schoenite, potash in, . schübler, on absorptive power of soils, ; on retentive power of soils, . schulze on fixers, . scutch, ; manufacture of, ; nitrogen in, . sea-weed, nitric acid in, . seals, guano from, . seed, fertilising ingredients lodge in, . seine, nitrates in waters of, . sénébier, jean, on carbon in plants, ; on nitrogen in plants, . sewage, - ; charcoal a filter for, ; crops suited for, ; denitrification in, ; dry matter in, ; effects of continued applications of, ; filters for, ; irrigation with, - ; nitrification in, ; nitrogen lost in, ; phosphoric acid lost in, ; purified by soils, ; treatment of, by precipitation, ; value of, as a manure, . sewage-sick land, . sewage-sludge, - ; as a manure, experiments with, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; profitable treatment of, ; value of, ; water in, . shale-works, sulphate of ammonia, from, . shark's bay guano, , . sheep, excrements of, , ; solid excreta voided by, ; urine voided by, . sheep-dung, alkalies in, ; composition of, in dry state, ; most valuable excrement, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; water in, . sheep-manure, ; amount produced per day, --per year, ; dry matter in, ; mineral matter in, ; nitrogen in, . sheep-urine, alkalies in, ; composition of, in dry state, ; most valuable urine, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; water in, . shoddy, ; production of, , ; nitrogen in, , . sicily, bones from, . sidney island guano, phosphoric acid in, . siemens, dr, experiments by, with light on plants, . silica, in ash of plants, ; in chincha guano, ; jelly, ; necessary for plant-growth, . silicates, ; absorbed by cereals, . silicic acid fixed by soils, . simon on humus in soil, . slaked lime, . slugs killed by lime, . smut prevented by lime, . soda, in ash of plants, ; fixed by soils, ; necessary for plant-growth, ; nitrate of, - ; in _salinas_, ; replaces potash, . sodium chloride in chincha island guano, . sodium phosphate in concretionary nodules, . sodium sulphate in concretionary nodules, . soil, - ; absorptive power of, for water, , ; acids fixed by, - ; action of lime on, ; ammonia absorbed by, ; amount of soluble plant-food in, ; artificial, ; barley, nitrates in, ; bases fixed by, - ; best suited for nitrification, ; biological properties of, - ; capacity for heat, - ; carbonic acid absorbed by, ; chemical composition of, - , - ; colour of, ; cropped, nitrates in, ; denitrification in, ; evaporation from, , ; farmyard manure, action of, on, ; fertilising ingredients in, ; fertility of, - ; fineness of, - ; gases in, ; hygroscopic power of, - , ; improved by humus, ; influence of farmyard manure on, ; on nitrification, ; manures increase fertility of, ; nitrates in, amount of, - ; nitrifying organisms in, ; distribution of, ; nitrogen absorbed by, , , ; nitrogen accumulates, ; nitrogen in, amount of, - ; nitrogen least abundant of manurial ingredients in, ; nitrogen at various depths in, ; oxygen absorbed by, ; phosphoric acid in, --condition of, in, --occurrence of, in, ; peat, ; possesses power of fixing ammonia, ; potash in, --condition of, in, ; potential fertility of, ; power of, for absorbing gases, ; relation of, to plant-roots, ; retention of plant-food by, ; retentive power of, for water, - ; sewage purified by, ; shrinkage of, ; variation in absorbing powers of, ; varieties of, ; virgin, ; water in, most favourable amount of, ; water-logged, ; wheat, nitrates in, . soluble phosphate, . sombrero phosphate, , , , ; phosphoric acid in, . somme phosphate, . soot, ; application of, rate of, ; crops suited by, ; nitrogen in, . south america, guano deposits in, ; meat-meal guano from, . starbuck island guano, , ; phosphoric acid in, . stassfurt salts, ; potash in, , . stead and ribsdale on formation of basic slag, . stoeckhardt, on composition of solid excreta, ; on composition of urine, . storer, professor, on composition of birds' dung, ; on composition of leaves, ; on fish-guano, ; on nitrogen removed in milk, . straw, composition of, ; imports of, ; as litter, , ; mineral matter in, , ; nitrogen in, , ; variation in composition of, . subsoil, conditions favourable for nitrification in, . suffolk coprolites, . sugar-beet refuse, potash in, . sulphate of alumina, a precipitant of sewage, . sulphate of ammonia, - ; ammonia in, ; application of, ; composition of, ; a concentrated nitrogenous manure, ; converted into nitrates, ; from gas-works, ; from iron-works, ; from shale-works, ; manure for cereals, ; most easily nitrifiable manure, ; production of, , ; properties of, ; source of nitrogen, ; sources of, , , ; sulphocyanate of ammonia in, . sulphate of lime a fixer, . sulphate of magnesia, an adulterant of guano, ; as a fixer, . sulphate of potash, application of, --rate of, ; compared with muriate, ; sources of, , . sulphuretted hydrogen from farmyard manure, . sulphuric acid, action of, on bones, --on guano, --on tricalcic phosphate, ; in ash of plants, ; as a fixer, , ; necessary for plant-growth, ; superphosphate manufactured with, , . superphosphate, - ; action of, - --sometimes unfavourable, ; application of, --rate of, ; composition of, ; discovery of, ; hastens early growth, ; high-class, ; low-class, ; manufacture of, - --phosphates suitable for, ; medium-class, ; production of, ; reversion in, , , --causes of, , ; reverted in soil, . surprise island guano, . swan island guano, . swedes, fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; manurial constituents in, ; manuring of, . swine-dung, alkalies in, ; composition of, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; water in, . swine-urine, alkalies in, ; composition of, ; nitrogen in, ; phosphoric acid in, ; water in, . sydney island guano, . syenite, ; phosphoric acid in, , . sylvin, potash in, . _symbiosis_, . tamarugal, pampa de, nitrate deposit in, . tarapaca, nitrate deposits in, . temperature necessary for nitrification, , . tetracalcic phosphate, ; occurrence of, , ; solubility of, . thaer on application of farmyard manure, . thiocyanates, nitrification in, . thomas-gilchrist process of steel-smelting, . thomas-slag. see basic slag. tillage increases number of plants, . timor island guano, . tobacco, potash in, . torrefied horn, . torrefied leather, . tortola guano, . trachyte, phosphoric acid in, , . transpiration, by elm-tree, ; by oak-tree, . trees, as pumping-engines, ; water transpired by, . tricalcic phosphate, , . tubercles on roots of plants, . tull, jethro, theory of, on plant-growth, - , , . turkey, dung produced by, . turnips, fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; manurial constituents in, ; manuring of, , , - ; rothamsted experiments on growth of, . twigs, potash in, . tyrosin, assimilated by plants, . ulmates in farmyard manure, . ulmic acid, in farmyard manure, ; in humus, . ulmin in humus, . uncovered farmyard manure, , . unexhausted manures, valuation of, - , . unit value of manurial ingredients, . units for determining commercial value of manures, . urate of ammonium in chincha island guano, . urea, assimilated by plants, ; in farmyard manure, ; nitrification in, . uric acid, experiments with, ; in chincha island guano, . urine, ; amount voided, ; composition of, varies, ; contains digested manurial ingredients, , ; devoid of phosphoric acid, ; and dung, composition of, ; influence of food on, ; nitrification in, ; nitrogen in, ; potash in, ; voided by cows, ; voided by oxen, ; voided by pigs, ; voided by sheep, . uruguay, meat-meal guano from, . valuation of manures, - . vegetation, desirable to have soil covered with, . venezuela, guano deposits at, . ville, georges, on assimilation of ammonia, ; theory of, on source of plant-nitrogen, . vine, potash removed by, . virgin soils, . voelcker, dr, analysis of apatite, --of farmyard manure, ; on action of superphosphate, ; on fresh and rotted dung, , ; on guano, ; on salt as a manure, . voss, hermann, on manures used, . wagner, professor, on, application of basic slag, ; assimilation of organic nitrogen, ; experiments with basic slag, - ; fineness of basic slag, ; manures, ; relative manurial value of nitrogen compounds, ; solubility of basic slag, . wallace, dr, on sewage purification, . walruses, guano from, . warington, r,., on ammonia in rain, ; on appearance of nitrous organisms, ; on conditions favourable for nitrification, ; experiments on rate of nitrification, ; on composition of farmyard manure, ; on manufacture of superphosphate, ; on manurial constituents of foods, ; on nitrification in alkaline solutions, ; on nitrogen in excrements, ; on nitrogen in soil, ; on potash in wool, ; researches of, on nitrification, , , - , , . water, absorbed by plants, ; amount of, transpired by plant-leaves, ; an adulterant of guano, ; a carrier of plant-food, ; in cow-dung, --cow-urine, ; from decomposition of farmyard manure, ; in horse-dung, --horse-urine, ; necessary for plant, ; in pig-dung, --pig-urine, --sheep-dung, --sheep-urine, ; transpired by elm-tree, --oak-tree, . water-culture, . water-logged soils, . waterloo, bones from, . way, thomas, on retention of plant-food by soil, , ; on sewage, . west indies, guano from, . whales, guano from, . wheat, fertilising ingredients removed from soil by, ; flitcham experiments on, ; manurial constituents in, ; manuring of, - nitrogen removed in crop of, ; requires nitrogenous manures, ; rothamsted experiments on, , - ; a source of nitrogen, . wheat soils, nitrates in, . wheat-straw, analysis of stable manure made from, ; composition of, ; manurial constituents in, . white clover, growth of, promoted by lime, . wiegmann on ash constituents of plants, . wilfarth on nitrogen in plants, . wilting, . winogradsky, on nitrification, , , , ; on organisms in soil, . wolff on, analysis of manure-heap drainings, ; composition of fresh and rotten dung, ; assimilation of organic nitrogen by plants, ; relative manurial value of manurial compounds, ; urine, . wood-ashes as potash manure, , . woodhouse, researches of, on nitrogen in plants, . wool, capable of nitrification, ; potash in, . wool-waste, ; nitrogen in, . woolney, on organisms in soils, , ; on water in soils, . wrightson, professor, on application of basic slag, . yeast, . yorkshire, bones first used in, . zeolites, potash in, printed by william blackwood and sons. +---------------------------------------------------+ | transcriber's note: | | | | carats (^) signify superscript figures. | | underscores (_) followed by a number in curly | | brackets signify subscript figures. | | | | typographical errors corrected in the text: | | | | page eichorn changed to eichhorn | | page diferent changed to different | | page superposphate changed to superphosphate | | page biophosphate changed to biphosphate | | page gallopagos changed to galapagos | +---------------------------------------------------+ prairie farmer a weekly journal for the farm, orchard, and fireside. established in . entire series: vol. --no. . chicago, saturday, january , . price, $ . per year, in advance. [transcriber's note: some pages in the original had the corner torn off. missing text has been marked [***].] [transcriber's note: the table of contents was originally located on page of the periodical. it has been moved here for ease of use.] the contents of this number. agriculture--tall meadow oat-grass, page ; the barbed-wire business, - ; a rambler's letter, ; let us be sociable, ; seed corn again, ; field and furrow, . live stock--mr. grinnell's letter, page ; prices of , ; docking horses, ; items, . the dairy--lessons in finance for the creamery patron, page . veterinary--fever, page . horticulture--ill. hort. society, page ; a short sermon on a long text, ; prunings, - . floriculture--gleanings by an old florist, page ; am i a scot or am i not, poetry, ; primitive northwest, . editorial--items, page ; seed samples, ; the pork question in europe, ; corn, wheat, and cotton, ; chicago in , ; strong drink, ; questions and answers, ; wayside notes, ; champaign letter, . poultry notes--chat with correspondents, page ; feather ends, . the apiary--keep bees, page ; the new bees, ; hive and honey hints, . silk culture--women in silk culture, page . household--the schoolmarm's story, poem, page ; a chat about the fashions, ; a kitchen silo, ; items, . young folks--talk about the lion, page ; a jack-knife genius, ; little johnny, . book notices--page . literature--robin, dear robin, poetry, page ; mrs. wimbush's revenge, . humorous--the carpenter's wooing, poetry, page ; where the old maids come from, ; items, . news of the week--page . markets--page . tall meadow oat-grass. prof. john w. robson, state botanist of kansas, sends the prairie farmer an extract from his last report, concerning a tame grass for hay and pasturing which is new to that state. the grass has been on trial on an upland farm for two years, during which time he has watched it very closely. the professor says, "it possesses so many excellent qualities as to place it in the front rank of all cultivated grasses." he enumerates from his notes: st. the seed will germinate and grow as easily as common oats. d. it maintains a deep green color all seasons of the year. d. its roots descend deeply into the subsoil, enabling this grass to withstand a protracted drouth. th. its early growth in spring makes it equal to rye for pasturage. th. in the next year after sowing it is ready to cut for hay, the middle of may--not merely woody stems, but composed in a large measure of a mass of long blades of foliage. the crop of hay can be cut and cured, and stowed away in stack or barn, long before winter wheat harvest begins. th. it grows quickly after mowing, giving a denser and more succulent aftermath than any of the present popular tame grasses. for several years, he says, we have been looking for a grass that would supply good grazing to our cattle and sheep after the native grasses have become dry and tasteless. in the early portion of , his attention was called to a tame grass which had been introduced into the state of michigan from west virginia. this forage plant was causing some excitement among the farmers in the neighborhood of battle creek. so he entered into a correspondence with a friend living there, and obtained ten pounds of seed for trial. the result has been satisfactory in every respect. the seed was sown april , . it germinated quickly, and the young plants grew vigorously. during the whole summer they exhibited a deep-green color, and did not become brown, like blue-grass, orchard grass, or timothy. as soon as the spring of opened, growth set in rapidly, and continued till the latter end of may, at which period it stood from three to four feet high. at this time it was ready for the mower; but as the production of seed was the object in view, it was not cut till the second week in june. the plot of ground of about half an acre, on which ten pounds of seed were sown, produced three barrels of seed. he exhibited a little sheaf of this grass at the semi-annual meeting of the kansas state horticultural society, where it excited much attention--the height, softness of the stem, length of blade, and sweet aroma surprised every one present. on the last day of august, he went into the plot with a sickle, and cut two handfuls of aftermath which measured twenty inches in growth. this he tied to a sheaf of the june cutting, and exhibited the same at the state fair, where it attracted much attention and comment. here, then, we have, he continues, a grass that will insure a "good catch" if the seed is fresh; that can endure severe drouth; that produces an abundant supply of foliage; that is valuable for pasture in early spring, on account of its early and luxuriant growth; that makes a valuable hay; that shoots up quickly after being cut; and affords a fine crop of aftermath for grazing during the late fall and winter months. the professor is very anxious that the farmers of kansas should test this grass during the season of . still, his advice is not to invest too largely in the experiment. purchase from five to ten pounds of seed, and give it a fair trial, and he is confident that the experiment will be satisfactory. the name given to this valuable grass in the state of michigan is "evergreen," but this is only a local synonym. its scientific name is avena elatior; its common name, "tall meadow oat-grass." fearing that he might be mistaken in its nomenclature, he sent a specimen to professor carruth, state botanist. this is his reply: "mr. j.w. robson--dear sir: yours mailed on the d, i received last evening. i do not get my mail every day. the specimen of grass you sent agrees perfectly with the avena elatior, of wood, and the arrenatherrum avenaceum, of gray; but i have never seen this grass before. i agree with you in the scientific name, and also in the common name, 'tall meadow oat-grass.' yours truly, j.h. carruth." the ground should be plowed in the fall, and early in the spring, as soon as the soil is in good tilth; sow broadcast two bushels (or twenty-eight pounds) of seed to the acre; cover well with the harrow, both lengthways and across the piece of ground sown. should the ground prove weedy, cut the weeds down with the mowing machine in june, and leave them upon the surface, and they will afford shade to the young plants. this grass is extensively grown in eastern tennessee, and is very popular in that portion of the state. in some portions of western virginia it is largely grown for hay and for grass. it is known as tall meadow oat-grass in each of the states we have mentioned above. * * * * * the main building for the new orleans cotton centennial exposition next year will be , feet long and feet wide, with , , square feet of floor space, including music hall in the center, with a seating capacity of , persons. the design also provides for main offices, telegraph office, newspaper department, fire department, police, hospital, waiting-rooms, and life saving apparatus. the building will be the largest exposition building ever erected, except the one in london in . the design adopted was the work of g.m. jorgenson, of meridian, mississippi. there were ten competitors. joseph f. glidden. the barb-wire industry--some facts in its early history not generally known--its growth. joseph farwell glidden, "the father of the barb-wire business" of this country, is now a hale and hearty man of seventy-one. he was born at charleston, n.h. when about one year old the family came west, to clarendon, orleans county, new york, and engaged in farming. the young lad, besides mastering the usual branches taught in the common schools, gave some time to the higher mathematics and latin, intending to take a college course, an idea that he finally abandoned. he taught in the district schools for a few terms. in he came to illinois and purchased a quarter section of land a mile west of what is now the site of the pleasant and prosperous town of dekalb. with the exception of three years his life since then has been passed upon this farm and at dekalb. he has from time to time added to his homestead, his farm now embracing acres. his land is under excellent cultivation, a considerable portion of it having been thoroughly tiled, and his farm buildings are first-class. mr. glidden has been twice married. two children were born of the first union, both dying in infancy. by his second marriage he has one daughter, now the wife of a chicago merchant. [illustration: joseph farwell glidden.] mr. glidden has held several local offices of trust and honor and enjoys in a marked degree the esteem and confidence of the citizens of his neighborhood and county. the rapid accumulation of property of late years, through his barb-wire patents and business, gave him the means to gratify his feelings of public spirit, and in consequence the town of dekalb has benefited greatly at his hands. its leading hotel and many other buildings are the work of his enterprise. mr. glidden has never lost the simple manners of the farm. he is unostentatious, quiet, genial, and at his hotel makes everybody feel as much at home as though enjoying the hospitalities of his private house. his kindly, firm, and intelligent face is well shown in the accompanying portrait, though, as is usually the case, the hand of the artist has touched his features more lightly than has the hand of time. * * * * * few names are now more widely known among the land holders of the country than that of joseph f. glidden, the unpretending gentleman whose life we have briefly sketched. it was his fortune to seize upon an idea, and push it to development, which has not only given him fame and fortune, but which has enriched many others and saved many millions of dollars to the farmers of america. he has not only founded a mammoth industry, but he has revolutionized an economic system of the world. by his ingenuity and perseverance the fencing system of a pastoral continent has been reduced to a minimum of expense and simplicity. not that he individually has accomplished all this, but as the patentee of the first really successful barb-wire fence, he laid the solid foundation for it all. * * * * * the first application for a patent for the glidden barb was filed october , . for some weeks previous to this date mr. glidden had had in his mind the idea of a barb of wire twisted about the main wire of the fence, leaving two projecting points on opposite sides. he made some of these by hand with the aid of pinchers and hammer. he strung two wires between two trees and twisted them together with a stick placed between them. a pair of cutting nippers was the next addition to his "kit" of tools. his next means for twisting the two wires together was the grindstone--attaching one end of the wire to shaft and crank, the others being fastened to the wall of the barn. and here, as in most things great and small in this world, woman furnished the motor power. the strong arm of the good helpmeet, mrs. glidden, turned the grindstone that twisted the first wire that made the first glidden barb fence that kept stock at bay in illinois or the world. then followed a device for twisting and barbing, and the application of horse power. business expanded, and steam took the place of the horse, and inventive genius modified and improved the entire machinery, it being estimated that at least the sum of $ , , has been expended in bringing the machinery for barb-wire making to its present state of perfection. * * * * * at about the same time that mr. glidden was wrestling with his ideas and devices, mr. i.l. ellwood was experimenting to accomplish a like result with a thin band of metal, the barbs cut and curved outward from the strip. in the meantime mr. glidden had put up a few rods of his hand-made barb-wire along the roadside at his farm. and here again the good genius of woman enters upon the scene. one sunday mr. ellwood and his wife were driving along this road and attracted by the wire fence stopped to examine it. mrs. ellwood, much to the chagrin of her husband, remarked: "this seems to me a better device than your own, don't it to you?" it did not then, for the remark disappointed and angered him. but it set him to thinking and before the next morning he was of the same opinion. the two men meeting the next day it did not take long to compromise and unite. mr. ellwood dropped his own plans and accepted a half interest in the glidden patents, and assumed the management of the business end of the concern, in which position he developed ability and tact possessed by few business men in this country. * * * * * the barb-wire fence met an unexpected and general demand. we know of few things like it in the history of manufactures. from this small beginning, scarce ten years ago more than fifty large establishments are now turning out this wire to meet an ever insatiate demand. the establishment of i.l. ellwood (making the glidden wire) at dekalb is the most complete and extensive of them all. the building is feet in length, and is supplied with about machines for twisting and barbing the wire. it gives, when running full force, employment to about men, and turns out a car-load of wire each hour for ten hours per day, on an average, though this amount is considerably increased at certain times of the year. these figures, though not given us by mr. ellwood, we are satisfied do not overstate the production of this one factory. the progress of the barb-wire industry of the whole country is shown by the following record of the past nine seasons. in there were , lb made and sold. there were , lb made and sold. there were , , lb made and sold. there were , , lb made and sold. there were , , lb made and sold. there were , , lb made and sold. there were , , lb made and sold. there were , , lb made and sold. there were about , , lb. the record for is not yet made up, but will probably show a corresponding increase. in mr. glidden disposed of his half interest in the concern of glidden & ellwood to the washburn & moen (wire) manufacturing company, of massachusetts, receiving therefor $ , in cash and a royalty on the future goods manufactured, mr. ellwood retaining his interest. the new concern began the purchase of prior unused and conflicting patents involving itself in extensive litigation, but, sustained by the courts, soon gained control of almost the entire barb-wire business of the country. nearly all wire-making companies are now running under license from the parent concern. the following is a list of the licensees of last year: pittsburg hinge co.--limited, beaver falls, pa. h.b. scutt & co., buffalo, n.y. hawkeye steel barb fence co., burlington, iowa. james ayers and alexander c. decker, bushnell, ill. indiana wire fence co., crawfordsville, ind. cedar rapids barb wire co., cedar rapids, iowa. cincinnati barbed wire fence co., cincinnati, ohio. cleveland barb fence co., cleveland, ohio. ohio steel barb fence co., cleveland, ohio. edwin a. beers & co., chicago, ill. crandal manufacturing co., chicago, ill. chicago galvanized wire fence co., chicago, ill. lyman manufacturing co., chicago, ill. daniel s. marsh, chicago, ill. oscar f. moore, chicago, ill. national wire co., chicago, ill. herman e. schnabel, chicago, ill. aaron k. stiles and john w. calkins, chicago, ill. thorn wire hedge co., chicago, ill. baker manufacturing co., des moines, iowa. superior barbed wire co., dekalb, ill. jacob haish, dekalb, ill. frentress barbed wire fence co., east dubuque, ill. grinnell manufacturing co., grinnell, iowa. janesville barb wire co., janesville, wis. iowa barb wire co., johnstown, pa. william j. adam, joliet, ill. lock stitch fence co., joliet, ill. lambert & bishop wire fence co., joliet, ill. alfred van fleet & a.h. shreffler, joliet, ill. david g. wells, joliet, ill. southwestern barb wire co., lawrence, kan. arthur h. dale, leland, ill. union barb wire co., lee, ill. lockport wire fence co., lockport, ill. norton & dewitt, lockport, ill. iowa barb steel wire fence co., marshaltown, iowa. omaha barb wire co., omaha, neb. h.b. scutt & co.--limited, pittsburg, pa. missouri wire fence co., st. louis, mo. st. louis wire fence co., st. louis, mo. j.h. lawrence & co., sterling, ill. north western barb wire co., sterling, ill. novelty manufacturing co., sterling, ill. sandwich enterprise co., sandwich, ill. robinson & hallidie, san francisco, cal. the hazard manufacturing co., wilkes barre, pa. worcester barb fence co., worcester, mass. * * * * * when glidden & ellwood first began the sale of the glidden fence, which was confined to the vicinity of dekalb, they received cents per pound for the barbed wire. since then, as production has increased and the facilities for manufacturing have been multiplied and perfected, the price has gradually dropped, until now a farm can be well fenced for forty-five cents, or less, per rod, and to the incalculable advantage of the country over fencing by posts and boards, hedges or rails, as any one may see by a simple dollar and cent comparison of materials at his own door. * * * * * barb-wire has done much for the city of dekalb. it has built its fine business blocks and residences, and it has peopled it with industrious, thrifty citizens. it has made a home market for many of the products of the country 'round about. it should give a new name, "barb city," to the bustling, busy town. there are three concerns now making barb-wire at this point. the one spoken of is the largest. next is that of jacob haish, an extensive establishment, turning out an excellent wire, and the superior, run by mr. hiram ellwood, mr. glidden having a considerable interest in it. * * * * * mr. i.l. ellwood is the owner of some , acres of land in the vicinity of dekalb. much of this land is naturally low and wet. the proprietor, with his accustomed energy and intelligence, has set vigorously to work to reclaim it. to this end he has already laid eighty miles of tile. he last year expended nearly $ , in this work. his poorest land is rapidly becoming his most productive. mr. ellwood has also turned his attention somewhat to horse-breeding, and he is now the owner of a fine stud of draft-horses, the equal of many better-known establishments of the kind in the state. of his drainage operations we hope to speak more in detail in a future number. * * * * * mr. glidden told the writer that his first trial of his fence with stock was not undertaken without some misgivings. but he thought to himself, "it will stop them, at any rate, whether it kills them or not." so he took down an old board fence from one side of his barn-yard, and towards night when his stock came up, turned them into the yard as usual. the first animal to investigate the almost invisible barrier to freedom was a strong, heavy grade durham cow. she walked along beside the wires for a little put her nose out and touched a barb, withdrew it and took a walk around the yard, approached the wires again and gave the barbs a lap with her tongue. this settled the matter, and she retired, convinced that the new-fangled fence was a success. * * * * * barb-wire is now sent from this country to mexico, south america, and australia. it is also being manufactured in england under american auspices. * * * * * mr. glidden, associating with himself a mr. sanborn, a young man of push and enterprise, has opened up an extensive cattle ranch in potter and randall counties, texas. they have fenced with wire a tract thirty miles long by about fifteen miles broad, and have now upon it , head of cattle. two twisted no. wires were used for this fence, and the posts are the best that could be procured. the wire was taken miles on wagons. the total cost of the completed fence was about $ , . * * * * * messrs. glidden & ellwood put up the first barb-wire ever used by a railway company--the northwestern. so great was the caution of the company that the manufacturers built it themselves, agreeing to remove it if it proved unsatisfactory. the railway folks feared it would injure stock, the damages for which they would be forced to pay. it is needless to say that the fence was not removed. more than one hundred railway companies are now using the glidden wire, and it stretches along many thousands of miles of track. a rambler's letter. i would like to call your attention to the fact that there is considerable cholera among swine in dewey township, ill., west from joliet. mr. cooter lost about hogs. other farmers have suffered equally. i have been looking over the stock in this part of the country and find it excellent, as a general thing. many of the farmers are breeders of fine hereford cattle. they also own first-class horses. some of them whom i called upon would like to know the address of state veterinary surgeon dr. paaren, and i should be pleased if you will give it in the prairie farmer.[a] i have often thought, why is it that so many sons of wealthy farmers leave their homes for the purpose of either studying in some classical college, to learn a trade, or to become book-keepers and clerks in mercantile business. i think if farmers would take more interest in agricultural papers, instead of having their children fooling away their time on novels or comic stories and pictures, it would be better for both old and young. let the parents buy a microscope and let the young folks examine insects and fungi of all kinds, and let them write their experiences down in a book whenever there is leisure time. or let them write to the prairie farmer something in the line of farming, be it agriculture, horticulture, or about raising and caring for stock. in so doing the boys of our farming country will become proud of their noble profession and of their homes. they will gradually be, as every farmer should be, educated up to the times. there are few farmers who can afford to let their sons study in an agricultural university, but every one can surely afford to subscribe for an agricultural paper, it being one of the most profitable investments for himself and family. the ground is covered with snow to a small extent, and the roads are in a fine condition. the crops are all good here except corn, which is very poor indeed, even the crop in most cases is small. farmers are not at all satisfied, and times are not at all encouraging. h.a.p. weissberger. will co., ill. [a] western avenue (south), chicago. a farmer's library. as this is the season to make up our list of papers and magazines for the ensuing year, i will take a glance around my own cosy room set apart for a library. it is here that i do the most of my reading, writing, and planning; and although i pretend to be deeply engaged while ensconced in the large willow rocker, strictly forbidding entrance to my farmer office, yet the children and "spot," my gordon setter, will intrude, making things lively for awhile, driving my thoughts wool-gathering and breaking many a thread of thought that i had fondly hoped would place my name high on the roll of scribblers. it is a good thing to have the little innocent children and the dog to blame for these shortcomings, as they can not take issue with us on the question. but i started to talk about a farmer's library; and taking my own for a small sample, let us see how it looks. for the purpose of keeping my papers in order, i have prepared thin laths of tough wood dressed with the draw knife to a thin edge, the back being one fourth of an inch thick, leaving the lath one and a quarter inch broad; these are cut in lengths to suit the paper they are intended to hold. take for instance the prairie farmer. i cut the lath just two inches longer than the paper is long, then cut notches half of an inch from each end, in which i tie the ends of a cord; this forms a loop to hang up the file. in this i file each paper so soon as read, by which means they are never lost or mislaid. when at the end of each three months the papers are taken from off the file, the oldest number is laid face down on a broad piece of plank and the number that follows laid face down on the top of the first, then they are squared evenly and a strong awl pierces three holes in the back edge through which a strong twine string is laced and tied firmly; this finishes the job, and the book thus simply and quickly made is placed on the shelf with its mates. this done the file is returned to its hook to await the next number. this is a simple plan for filing papers of any size, and any farmer can do it, there being no expense or outlay for material. on glancing up from the stand on which i am writing, the first objects that attract my notice are my breach loader, cartridge belt, and game-bag hanging on the wall; then by the side of the stove hangs the file of the prairie farmer, within easy reach of my left hand; next it swings the country gentleman, then comes the forest and stream, then colman's rural world, then the drainage journal; next harper's weekly, then harper's bazar. this is my wife's paper and she persists in hanging it among mine. then comes harper's monthly and the century, not forgetting the sanitary journal. on the other side of the room we find the inter ocean, democrat, and several other political papers fairly representing both sides, also some standard books of valuable information; and last but not least, the prairie farmer map which you sent for my club. now, this may be considered a pretty large outlay for a common farmer to make, but outside of life insurance, i consider it my best investment. in this selection i get the cream of all matters of practical importance to the farmer. from the prairie farmer i get the latest and most reliable information of the great central ruling markets of the west chicago, which has saved me sundry times from three to five cents per bushel on wheat, sometimes paying the price of the paper twenty times over in one transaction. from the c.g. i get the eastern markets, while colman gives the st. louis; and by a close study of the three a farmer can always make enough to pay for twenty or thirty dollars worth of good current literature for the use of his family. then the f. and s. is always full of delightful reading for the boys, refining their cruel propensities, and teaching them to be kind to the feathered tribe which are the farmer's friends. by reading it they soon lay aside their traps, nets, and snares, with which they capture whole covies of the dear little bob-whites, and disdain to touch a feather, only when on the wing, and then with their light, hammerless breach loader. such reading as that ties the farmer's boys to country life, and makes them contented under the parental roof-tree until they are ready to build up homes of their own. the journal tells them all about tile making and drainage, a very necessary accomplishment when they get their own homestead. the pictures in h.w. furnish a fountain of amusement for the little folks, and teach them--with a little help--many things that will be useful to them in life. as a matter of course the "bezar" is for mother and the girls, and [***] consultations [***] before the fair, a [***] daughters, your [***] good when she insisted [***] be put on the list. a boy or a girl with [***] the century in their hands, [***] room, with a bright clear lamp [***] has no thought of city life, or [***] in those bright pages the [***] outer world painted in all its various [***] so interesting and so fascinating [***] have no desire to see it in reality; in [***] they bring the brightest and best thought, [***] historic, and romantic to our hearth and home; furnishing food for the youthful minds, leaving no room for evil or discontented thoughts to enter. then i say to every farmer who has children, get the magazines for them, they will save you a mountain of trouble. then to balance things have one or two spicy news papers, which picture in horrid colors the blackest side of human life. this is necessary to guard the young against the riff-raff of humanity, such as tramps, sharpers, sewing machine and book agents, the lightning rod man, and a dozen other sharp swindlers that prey on the farmer and his family for an existence. the sanitary journal treats of health, purity, and cleanliness, and ought to be read and studied by all. ah, i had almost forgotten the prairie farmer map which hangs by the door. what can i say about it? that it is a handsome ornament for a living room or library? yes, but that is not all, it is useful. when it arrived i took it to the railroad office and compared it with the best map they had, also with a map made by the u.s. land office. i came away satisfied that it was reliable; it ought to be in the home of every farmer in this great country of ours, so that their children can learn and know what a grand heritage they have got. there is no excuse for being without it, as a few pounds of butter or dozens of eggs will procure it and a paper that will gladden the hearts of both old and young. alex ross. cape girardeau, mo. let us be sociable. a happy new year to all of the readers of the prairie farmer, and may your labors of be crowned with success. mr. granger, what are you doing these long winter evenings? can't you find time to write a few lines to the readers of the prairie farmer? you can send a little report from your county, at least. come, let us be a little more sociable and talk more to each other through the columns of our paper. we can learn something by reading each other's views on different subjects. in my next i shall try and tell some of the careless fellows how to run a farm to make it pay. if i fail to give a little light on the subject perhaps some one else will try it. we are having what you might call winter, now. snow is about six inches deep, but the weather is not very cold. the thermometer has not been below zero but once. nearly all of the corn is gathered; only about one-third of the crop is sound enough to keep until next summer. farmers are feeding their soft corn to hogs and cattle. in that way the soft corn will pay pretty well after all, for fat stock brings a good price. stock cattle are wintering well, for feed in the fields is good, and most farmers have got plenty of good hay. the weather was so nice the first part of this month that the farmers did a large amount of plowing. potatoes are plenty and cheap; worth from to cents. apples are scarce, and good ones bring a big price. butter is worth from to cents. s.o.a. knox co., ill. seed corn again. there has been much complaint of soft corn in this section on account of planting foreign seed last spring, but it is all solid since the late cold spell. those who planted seed of their own raising and got a stand have fair corn, while much of that which was raised from kansas and nebraska seed was caught by the frost when in the milk. now we will be in just the same "fix" about seed next spring that we were last. this county has lost thousands of dollars this year in the corn crop alone, all of which might have been avoided by going through the fields before freezing weather and selecting seed and properly drying it before it froze. and now right here i want to say that the great secret of good farming is simply being punctual in attending to the small matters, and i "guess" fanny field would say the same about poultry. z.l. thompson. iroquois co., ill. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * field and furrow. says the iowa register: one hundred bushels of corn will shrink to ninety in the crib, and to an extent more than that, depending on the openness of the crib and the honesty of the neighbors. the agricultural editor of the new york times says that no doubt many farmers who are intending to underdrain their farms would save money by employing an expert at the first to lay out the whole system and make a good beginning, and so avoid any possible mistake, which might cost ten dollars for every one paid for skilled advice. the new york times says that lime seems to be a preventive of rot in potatoes in the cellar. some potatoes that were rotting and were picked out of a heap of forty or fifty bushels were put into a corner and well dusted with air-slaked lime. they stopped rotting at once, and the decayed parts are now dried up. there is no disagreeable smell about them. cincinnati gazette: it is remarked that when young hogs are fed mainly on corn they stop growing at an early age and begin to grow fat; but that green food makes them thriftier and larger than dry grain. in fact, it is better to prevent all domestic animals from becoming very fat until they have attained a fair natural size, particularly breeding animals. a member of the elmira farmers' club recently expressed the opinion that bad results would always be found with wheat sown on land into which the green growth of any crop had just been turned, although it was believed that buckwheat was the worst green manure. all green growth incorporated with the soil near the time of seeding will in all cases be found prejudicial to wheat. it is announced that robert clarke, of cincinnati will have ready, in february, an extensive work on sorghum, containing the results of the latest experiments and experience of the most successful growers, as to the best varieties and their culture, and also the details of the latest and best machinery used in the economical manufacture of sirups and sugars therefrom. the work is by prof. peter collier, whose name is a guarantee of the value of the book. it will be very fully illustrated. a michigan man writes the michigan farmer: i have noticed tarred twine and willows recommended for binding corn stalks. i think i can propose a better substitute than either for those who are using a twine binder: save the strings from straw stacks this winter. they are less trouble than grass and never slip. tie a knot in the end of the twine with your knee on the bundle, then slip the other end through in the form of a bow, take off your knee and the spring of the bundle will draw the knot tight. pull the bow and use again. "human labor," says dr. zellner, of ashville, ala., "is the most costly factor that enters into the production of cotton, and every consistent means should be adopted to dispense with it." and then the doctor, who has the reputation of having raised some of the finest samples ever grown in the south, describes how, by planting at proper distances, in checks five by three apart, one-half of the after labor of cultivating may be saved. about the same amount of plow work is said to be necessary, but not more than one-fourth as much work with the hoe as is required by cotton in drills. prof. j.w. sanborn: "deep tillage in times of drought of surface-rooted crops, like corn, is an erroneous practice, founded on erroneous views. 'plowing out corn' not only involves too deep tillage in drought but adds to the mischief by severing the roots of corn, needed at such times. our double-shovel plows work too deeply. our true policy, in drought, for corn is frequent and shallow tillage. for this we now have after the corn gets beyond the smoothing harrow, no suitable implement on our markets, with a possible exception." correspondent new york tribune: of the use of oatmeal for cows mention is not often made in this country; but when spoken of it is always with praise. that it is better than corn meal there can be no doubt; it is richer in both albuminoids and fat; and the usefulness of these two nutriments, and especially the former, for making milk is shown not only by the results of numerous careful experiments, but by the acknowledged usefulness of oil-cake meal. where this meal is used freely there would be less use for oatmeal; but under some circumstances it might be advantageously substituted for the bran in the favorite mixture for cows of indian meal and bran. the following paragraph appears in an english cotemporary: the introduction of a new industry connected with farming into ireland will be hailed by everybody, and therefore we rejoice to learn that a company has been formed with the design of purchasing or renting nearly a million and a quarter acres of land in ireland, and devoting them to beet culture, from which the sugar will be extracted in a manufactory erected on the land. the promoters of the new company expect that from the , acres which they propose cultivating they will produce , tons of sugar in the year. immense quantities of sugar extracted from the beet-root are manufactured on the continent and imported into these countries, and there is no reason whatever why ireland should not have her finger in the sugar pie. in a paper before the oxford (ohio) farmers' club, on the subject "the morality of the system of grain gambling," mr. wetmore said: there is a difference between speculation and investment. putting money into an established industry is an investment. putting it into a doubtful or untried business, with the hope of gaining much or risk of losing all, is speculation. the latter is infatuating as it increases the risk and yet turns to profit. investments pay no high per cents. speculations may pay much or lose all. hence it is unsafe; and the farmer who makes his gains only by a yearly turn of his crops, should not try speculation, but may judiciously invest his surplus year by year in things of real value, as land or chattels. invest the last dollar, but speculate only with loose change. no man can safely invest in a business with which he is not familiar. a lawful wire fence in georgia is described by legislative enactment as composed of not less than six horizontal strands of barbed wire tightly stretched from post to post. the first wire no more than four and a half nor less than three and a half inches from the ground; the second wire not more than nine and a half nor less than eight and a half inches from the ground; the third wire not more than fifteen and a half nor less than fourteen and a half inches from the ground; the fourth wire not more than twenty-two and a half nor less than twenty-one and a half inches from the ground; the fifth wire not more than thirty-two nor less than thirty-one inches from the ground; the sixth wire not over fifty-five nor less than fifty-three inches from the ground. posts to be not over ten feet apart, and every alternate post to be securely set in the ground. provided, a plank not less than ten inches wide shall be used instead of two strands of wire at bottom of fence, it is also required that a railing shall be placed at equal distance between the two top wires, which shall answer the same purpose as a wire, and to extend from post to post in like manner. correspondent country gentleman: i notice that your journal recently gave currency to the "saltpetre method" of extracting stumps, and w.h. white also recommends it in your columns. his method is to bore a hole in the stump in the fall of the year, fill in the hole with saltpetre, plug up till the following summer, then fill the hole with kerosene and fire the stump. it is alleged that the saltpetre and kerosene will so saturate the stump that it will be entirely consumed, roots and all. this recipe has been floating around the press for years. it is usually credited to the scientific american, but that paper has several times denied its paternity. the uselessness of the process can easily be learned by trial. there are few more inflammable substances than pitch and turpentine. the roots of pine stumps are saturated with these, but it is impossible to burn them out. the addition of saltpetre would not help much. yet there are seasons when the soil and air are so dry that hard wood stumps may be burned out without either saltpetre or kerosene. we had such a year in , when corn and clover standing uncut in the field were burned. in some instances the curbing was burned out of wells during terrible forest fires that raged in michigan. if tried in such a season the recipe would undoubtedly be successful. in any ordinary season it is "no good." * * * * * no matter how wretched a man may be, he is still a member of our common species, and if he possesses any of the common specie his acquaintance is worth having. * * * * * [illustration] farm machinery, etc. great saving for farmers. the lightning hay knife! (weymouth's patent.) [illustration] awarded "first order of merit" at melbourne exhibition, . was awarded the first premium at the international exhibition in philadelphia, , and accepted by the judges as superior to any other knife in use. it is the best knife in the _world_ to cut _fine feed_ from bale, to cut down _mow_ or _stack_, to cut _corn-stalks_ for feed, to cut _peat_, or for ditching in marshes, and has no equal for cutting ensilage from the silo. try it. it will pay you. manufactured only by hiram holt & co., east wilton, me., u.s.a. _for sale by hardware merchants and the trade generally_ * * * * * sedgwick steel wire fence [illustration] it is the only general-purpose wire fence in use, being a strong net work without barbs. it will turn dogs, pigs, sheep and poultry, as well as the most vicious stock, without injury to either fence or stock. it is just the fence for farms, gardens stock ranges, and railroads, and very neat for lawns, parks, school lots and cemeteries. covered with rustproof paint (or galvanized) it will last a life time. it is superior to boards or barbed wire in every respect. we ask for it a fair trial, knowing it will wear itself into favor. the sedgwick gates, made of wrought iron pipe and steel wire, defy all competition in neatness, strength, and durability. we also make the best and cheapest all iron automatic or self-opening gate, also cheapest and neatest all iron fence. best wire stretcher and post auger. for prices and particulars ask hardware dealers, or address, mentioning paper, sedgwick bros. manf'rs. richmond. ind. * * * * * [illustration] chicago scale co. ton wagon scale, $ . ton, $ . ton $ , beam box included. lb. farmer's scale, $ . the "little detective," / oz. to lb. $ . other sizes. reduced price list free. forges, tools, &c. best forge made for light work, $ , lb. anvil and kit of tools. $ . farmers save time and money doing odd jobs. blowers, anvils, vices & other articles at lowest prices, wholesale & retail. * * * * * five-ton wagon scales $ [illustration] all iron and steel, double brass tare beam. jones _he_ pays the freight. all sizes equally low, for free book, address jones of binghamton, binghamton, n.y. * * * * * [illustration] the profit farm boiler is simple, perfect, and cheap; the best feed cooker; the only dumping boiler; empties its kettle in a minute. over , in use; cook your corn and potatoes, and save one-half the cost of pork. send for circular. d.r. sperry & co., batavia, illinois. * * * * * farm implements, etc. the chicago double hay and straw press [illustration] guaranteed to load more hay or straw in a box car than any other, and bale at a less cost per ton. send for circular and price list. manufactured by the chicago hay press co., nos. to state st., chicago. take cable car to factory. mention this paper. * * * * * sawing made easy monarch lightning sawing machine! sent on days test trial. a great saving of labor & money. [illustration] a boy years old can saw logs fast and easy. miles murray, portage, mich. writes, "am much pleased with the monarch lightning sawing machine. i sawed off a -inch log in minutes." for sawing logs into suitable lengths for family stove-wood, and all sorts of log-cutting, it is peerless and unrivaled. illustrated catalogue, free. agents wanted. mention this paper. address monarch manufacturing co., n. randolph st., chicago, ill. * * * * * best market pear. [illustration: kieffer] , peach trees all _best varieties_ of new and old strawberries, currants, grapes, raspberries, etc. early cluster new blackberry, early, hardy, good. single hill yielded quarts at one picking. send for free catalogue. j.s. collins, moorestown, n.j. * * * * * champion baling presses. [illustration] a ton per hour. run by two men and one team. loads to tons in car. send for descriptive circular with prices, to gehrt & co., , and maine st., quincy, ill. * * * * * "the best is the cheapest." engines saw mills, threshers, horse powers, (for all sections and purposes.) write for free pamphlet and prices to the aultman & taylor co., mansfield, ohio. * * * * * now ready for distribution. volumes one and two of the national register norman horses the most reliable, concise, and exhaustive history of the horse in general, and by far the most complete and authentic one of the norman horse in particular, ever published in the united states. prices: volume i.........................................$ . volume ii........................................ . when the two volumes are sent in one package to one address, $ . . sent, postpaid, on receipt of price. address your orders to prairie farmer publishing co., chicago * * * * * the modern horse doctor. containing practical observations on the causes nature and treatment of diseases and lameness in horses, by geo. h. dadd, m.d. will be sent upon receipt of price, $ . ; or free to any sender of three subscribers to this paper, at $ each, by prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. * * * * * miscellaneous. diamonds free! we desire to make the circulation of our paper , during the next six months. to accomplish which we will give absolutely free a genuine first water diamond ring, and the home companion for one year, for only $ . . our reasons for making this unprecedented offer are as follows; a newspaper with , subscribers can get c. per line per , of circulation for its advertising space, or $ , per issue more than it costs to produce and mail the paper. with but , or , subscribers, its advertising revenues do not pay expenses. only the papers with mammoth circulations make fortunes for their owners, derived from advertising space. for these and other reasons, we regard , subscribers as being of more financial benefit to a paper than the paper is to the subscribers. with , or , bona-fide subscribers, we make $ , to $ , a year clear profit from advertising, above cost of publishing. without a large circulation, we would lose money. therefore, to secure a very large circulation, and thus receive high rates and large profits from advertising space, this only equitable plan of conducting business is adopted. the first question to be answered is,--is the diamond pure--a genuine stone? our answer is yes. the stone is guaranteed to be no alaska diamond, rhine pebble, or other imitation, but a warranted genuine and pure diamond. if it is not found so by the most careful and searching tests, we will refund the money, enter the subscriber's name on our list, and have the paper mailed to him free during its existence. to the publisher of this paper has been sent a guarantee from the manufacturing jeweler, from whom we obtain these rings, that they are just as represented, so that readers may rely upon the promises being fulfilled to the letter. the second question is, is the paper a desirable family journal? yes. it contains contributions from the first writers of the times: fiction, choice facts, intellectual food of the most interesting, instructive and refined character. it is one of the leading papers of the progressive west. we are determined to make it the most desirable and reliable paper in the united states; will spare no effort or money to achieve that object. sample copies sent free on application. remit by draft, express, or new postal note, to the home companion. n.w. cor. fourth and race streets, cincinnati, o. don't fail to name the paper in which you see this advertisement. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; $ . pays for it from this date to january , . for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * live stock department. [illustration] stockmen. write for your paper. mr. grinnell's letter. last week we briefly noted the fact that hon. j.b. grinnell, of iowa, secretary of the committee of the national cattle-growers' convention, appointed to secure legislation for the protection of live stock from contagious diseases, had issued a circular letter to the public. in this letter he discusses with his usual intelligence and ability the important question in hand. as it will form the basis of congressional discussion and prove an important factor in shaping legislation, we give the letter space in our columns. mr. grinnell says: to find a legitimate market for our surplus products is a question of grave concern. after meeting home demands the magnitude of foreign consumption determines in a large degree the net profits of production. it thus becomes the especial concern of the american agriculturist and statesman to find the best market for meat products. the profits in grain-raising for exportation, which impoverishes the soil, are exceptional, while our animal industries enrich it, augmenting the rural population in the line of true economy, the promotion of good morals, and the independence and elevation of the citizen. under the laws of domestic animal life gross farm products and rich, indigenous grasses are condensed into values adapted to transportation across oceans and to various climes with little waste or deterioration; thus the brute a servant, becomes an auxiliary to the cunning hand of his master, blending the factors which determine our facilities for acquisition in rural life, and attractions which stimulate enterprise, adventure, individual independence, and contribute to national wealth. the meat products. no nation has so large a relative portion of its wealth in domestic animals, and none can show such strides in material advancement during the present century. but what is our foreign trade? the exports of provisions from the united states during the last fiscal year were in value about $ , , . those in amounted to $ , , , equal to a falling off in a single year of $ , , . our exports of manufactured articles for the last year aggregate $ , , , against $ , , , a gain of $ , , in a single year. it was a reasonable expectation that our animal exports would have increased in like ratio as the manufactures, which would have enhanced the value of all domestic animals and furnished, instead of a mortifying fact, a proud exhibit. the causes of a decline are not found in high prices at home nor in inferior product; rather in suspicions of diseases, and the clamor of interested parties which led to arbitrary restrictions, oppressive quarantine regulations, and forbidding beeves which were ripened for the highest markets to pass beyond the shambles; and the egress of young immature cattle on the english pastures. pork products up to the chicago meeting were prohibited by france, and they are inhibited now from germany, our long-time valuable customer. it was their whims, caprices, jealousies, commercial restrictions and bans which decreased our exports and led the commissioner of agriculture to call the chicago meeting of november. the convention developed facts and was fruitful in results: that there were solitary cases of pleuro-pneumonia, and limited to the eastern border states; that western herdsmen had just cause of alarm on account of the shipment of young stock west from the narrow pastures and dairy districts of the east. it was shown that across the ocean there was a morbid appetite for suspicions and facts which would justify severe restrictions and an absolute inhibition of our products. the cattle commission formed by the treasury department gave decided opinions and imparted valuable information, but they were constrained to admit that they were powerless in an emergency to stop the spread of contagious diseases, and that it was a vain hope that there would be an increased foreign demand for our cattle and meat without radical congressional enactment. skilled veterinarians, fancy breeders, political economists, and savants from the east met the alarmed ranchmen, enterprising breeders, and delegations and officials from many agricultural and state associations, representing millions of cattle and hundreds of millions of dollars, resolved that a meeting should be held at washington, and a committee was appointed to secure appropriate legislation. in the discharge of duties assigned to the secretary i at once repaired to washington for consultation and to gather pertinent facts. the heads of the state treasury and agricultural departments were awake to the necessity of early and radical legislation. president arthur evinced great cordiality, and gave good proof of his interest by calling attention in the annual message to the approaching meeting in washington, which i have called the th of january. facts. i have sent out in a circular to the committee the following "head-land" facts of startling import, which should be well considered: . that there is an investment of $ , , , in cattle as estimated by the department of agriculture, representing , , animals. that of swine is $ , , , representing over , , animals. . that losses annually on exportation of cattle and beef, consequent upon restrictive regulations and the decreased relative consumption of our beef, aggregates many millions of dollars. we reach an approximate estimate by these facts relative to our foreign trade as follows: the exports of - were , animals. those of - were , --a loss of , animals, and in value a loss of $ , , in two years. the exports of fresh beef for two years were less by , , pounds, and by a value of $ , , . the value of pork products decreased in the same time to the extent of $ , , . this shows a falling off of about $ , , per annum for two years, as compared with the receipts for the two preceding years. contagion to be averted. it should be known that the pleuro-pneumonia often mentioned as a scare or a myth by the thoughtless and optimist is a stern reality. its journeys and track of destruction among cattle have been as marked as that of small pox and cholera--contagious diseases which have so tearfully decimated the human family. lung diseases of the modern type were known before the christian era, and were considered by columella and other latin writers. australia resigned her great herds to flocks of sheep, as did south africa, never yet recovered from the blow to her cattle industries. england has been tardy in the publication of her losses by lung-fever, yet it is a fact which forbids secrecy that calamity has reached the enterprising breeders, and colossal fortunes have been swept away by the cattle-plague. in our own country it has been no more the policy of secretive owners to publish facts than that of city authorities to proclaim the prevalence of small-pox in the town. still, startling facts have sprung from original sources of inquiry. a town meeting is called in the state of connecticut, terror-stricken owners in new jersey, maryland, and pennsylvania meet for council. massachusetts had a governor twenty years ago bold in telling truth, which led to searching investigations by experts and officers of the state. with autocratic power they made a diagnosis of diseases, which led to the stamping out of the infection by law, and a truthful proclamation that the plague was stayed. the sacrifice of , brutes at a cost to the commonwealth of about $ , was a trivial sum compared to the perils that beset a state valuation of $ , , , for bovines, and the cattle of the nation, numbering , , , and worth nearly $ , , , . the monarchies of the old world have set us an example; even denmark, norway, and sweden have pioneered for the world by sagacious acts and the stern enforcement of law in prevention. an american policy worthy of us is not secrecy, but boldness--sacrifice commensurate with exposure. this will lead to the formulation of a bill by the washington convention, which congress will enact in the interest of individuals, the state, and for the national protection. if state-rights theorists bring objections, the law may be so equitable to the states that its ratification may be asked on the ground of a just national policy and a right which inheres to the general government under the constitution in the regulation of commerce between the states. this implies a power to destroy a contagious disease which if allowed to spread would arrest all commerce in bovines between the states. a state may and ought to waive the question of damage if it is fixed by a neutral commissioner, and the general government and not the state meets the losses to which unfortunate cattle owners maybe subject. this will be the touchstone--trust by the state and statesmanlike generosity by the nation--that means courage for the now fearful ranchman of the unfenced domain, and the furnishing of a "clean bill of health" for our products seeking a foreign market. having evinced zeal in doing justice, it can ask for justice--that the rights of our meat-producers be respected under our commercial treaties. commerce means a mutual exchange, and having performed our home duty will be in no mood to tolerate a whim or a caprice. non-intercourse has been proposed in congress. that may be a final resort when a conference, practical discussion, and even arbitration have failed. a graver subject measured by dollars may yet engage the statesman diplomat than the geneva arbitration, and we shall have no fair status in discussion or arbitration until our meat and cattle are made healthy by prevention and the best sanitary laws known to civilized countries. the time is auspicious. cattle-raising as an attractive and profitable vocation is now exciting a deep interest. a lull in politics forbids the wants of our agriculturists, numbering per cent of the population, being waived out of notice and their voiced demands drowned by partisan clamor. the treasury has hundreds of millions in its vaults and a fraction of per cent of our surplus will only be required, under a just disbursement, to isolate and destroy the diseases which fetter our commerce and repress home enterprise. a full and able convention at washington is assured by the responsive letters received. the state of iowa will make her requests to congress by fine-stock meeting and other associations, as becomes the state with $ , , invested in domestic animals. who can be indifferent in the face of our great perils, and recounting the losses by foreign restrictions and inhibition? we are emphatically a nation of beef-eaters, and by the extent of our domain and healthful climate are justly entitled to the honored designation of the first producer among civilized nations. it is the question of healthful food for the masses, of profitable tonnage for the railways, and of deep concern in cultivating fraternal relations abroad, not less than a question for the political economist in maintaining a good trade balance-sheet. if we can impress our congressional delegations with the necessity of early and decisive legislation, we shall have accomplished a noble work and have earned the warm commendation of millions of citizens whose interests have been neglected and whose vocation and property have been imperiled. for the committee by request of the chicago convention. j.b. grinnell. * * * * * during the first eleven months of , no less than , animals in great britain were attacked by by foot-and-mouth disease. december opened with a greater number of ailing animals than did november. * * * * * an iowa farmer is experimenting with steamed clover hay for feeding hogs. prices of . the average price of short-horns at the public sales in this country in , as reported by the auctioneers, was $ . . the breeder's gazette figures up the number of cattle of the different breeds disposed of at public sales as follows: breeds. | number. | totals. | average. short-horns | , | $ , | $ . herefords | | , | . aberdeen-angus | | , | . galloways | | , | . angus and galloways | | , | . holsteins | | , | . jerseys | , | , | . guernseys | | , | . red polled | | , | . ------------------------------------- totals | , |$ , , | $ . of the above short-horns, , were sold in illinois, in kentucky, and , in other states. in illinois the average price received was $ . ; in kentucky, $ . , and in other states, $ . . of the beef breeds there were sold $ , , the total receipts were $ , , , making the general average $ . . of the dairy breeds , were sold at an average of $ . . it will be seen that the average for short-horns is less than that for either of the other breeds though, of course, the number sold is greatly in excess of the others. in the average for short-horns was but $ . , and in but $ , so that on the whole the breeders are perfectly satisfied with the way the business is running. the dairy breeds did remarkably well in , the holsteins coming up well to the jerseys, but the latter leads greatly in point of numbers. the pure bred cattle business of the country as indicated by these sales is exceedingly prosperous. in great britain the short-horn sales were less numerous than last year, or, in fact, any year since , but the average was better than since . in the average for , head was $ , while in and the average further declined to $ . in the average was close upon $ , but, upon the other hand, the number of animals sold fell to , . the highest price paid was , guineas, for a four-year-old cow of the fashionable duchess blood, which was purchased by the earl of bective at the sale of mr. holford's herd in dorsetshire. the australians purchased largely at the duke of devonshire's annual sale in , and this year american and canadian buyers bid briskly for animals of the oxford blood. these were the only two sales at which the average reached three figures, the next best being that of a selection from mr. green's herd in essex, when forty-one lots averaged $ each, or less than half secured by the duke of devonshire's short-horns. docking horses. an english veterinary society has lately been discussing the question of docking the tails of horses. the president looked upon docking as an act of cruelty. by docking, the number of accidents from the horse holding the rein under the tail was greatly increased, for the horse has less power of free motion over the tail. if a short dock is put over the rein, the animal has so little control of the tail that he can not readily liberate the rein. the "stump" is sensitive, the same as the remaining part of an amputated finger. in the majority of cases he considered docking entirely unnecessary. on the contrary, doctor axe (rather a suggestive name for an advocate of docking) thought the practice improved the looks of a horse, thus rendering it more salable. his sentimentality did not allow him to argue this question of increased value. he did not think docking increased accidents. statistics, not assertions, were needed to establish facts of this kind. as to the remark of the president, that the shortened tail could not be so easily freed from the rein, he said it would depend on who was driving; an expert would more quickly disengage the rein from a docked tail. it may be true, he said, that there was more flexibility in an uncut tail because its more flexible portion had not been removed; but the docked tail had not the same power of covering and fixing down the rein that the long tail possessed. the long retention of a certain degree of sensibility after amputation was a known fact, but neither this, nor the operation itself, involved much pain. he detailed the structures divided, and said that they possessed a low degree of sensation. he would be glad to see horses have the free use of all their members, if practicable, and would leave them their tails if the removal of them could not increase the animal's comfort, value, or power of being safely used, but he would not do anything to lessen the value of horses without good reason. it seems that prosecutions for docking, under the cruelty to[***] common in england [***] convictions are not [***] in the discussion [***] vigorous prosecutions are [***] we notice that with [***] and docking are on the increase [***] of this country. fortunately [***] beasts, public sentiment in this [***] against the barbarous act; still [***] is it that fashion has not yet so [***] the taste of the majority of people [***] convince them that docking adds to [***] beauty of the noble animal. but the rage is now to imitate the english in nearly all manners and customs, and it may not be long before the miserable fashion will gain new headway with us. * * * * * too much care can hardly be taken in packing pork so as to have it keep through the season. the chief requisites are pure salt and freeing the meat from every taint of blood. the pieces of pork should be packed as closely as possible. after a few weeks if any scum rises on the surface of the brine it should be cleaned out and the brine boiled so that all impurities may be removed. if pork is to be kept all summer twice boiling the brine may be necessary. for some reason a barrel that has once held beef will never do for a pork barrel, though the rule may be reversed with impunity. * * * * * one of the firm of galbraith brothers janesville, wis., is now in scotland to make selection for an early spring importation of clydesdales. while making mention of this we may say that messrs. galbraith though disposing of twenty-one head of clydesdales at the late sale in chicago, have yet on hand an ample supply of superior horses of all ages from sucklings upward. they will be pleased to receive a visit from intending purchasers of this class of stock, and from all interested in the breed. * * * * * the first lot of dr. w.a. pratt's holsteins, from quarantine, recently arrived at elgin. the doctor informs us that the animals are in prime condition and choice in every respect. he says he is preparing to open a ranch near manhattan, kansas, for the breeding of high grade holsteins and short-horns. he will also keep on this ranch a choice herd of pure-bred holsteins for supplying the growing western demand for this very popular dairy stock. publications. _the free seed distribution alone of the rural new yorker is worth at catalogue prices more than $ . . this journal and the rural, including its seed distribution, will be sent for $ . . for free specimen copies, apply to park row, new york. the rural new-yorker is the leading national journal of agriculture and horticulture._ * * * * * _the rural new-yorker has over contributors, among them the most distinguished writers of america and england. it is the complete journal for the country home and for many city homes as well. free specimen copies park row, n.y._ * * * * * the rural new-yorker the great national farm and garden journal of america, with its celebrated free seed distribution, and the prairie farmer one year, post-paid, all for only $ . . it is a rare chance. specimen copies cheerfully sent gratis. compare them with other rural weeklies, and then subscribe for the best. apply to park row, new york. * * * * * the dairy. dairymen, write for your paper. lessons in finance for the creamery patron.[a] any business to be permanent must make reasonable returns for the capital employed and give fair compensation for the labor bestowed upon it, otherwise it will be abandoned, or if continued at all it will be done under the protest of economic law. in addition to the ordinary circumstances attaching to business enterprise, the creamery business is essentially and peculiarly co-operative. it thrives with the thrift of all concerned--owner and patrons. it fails only with loss to all. the conditions of success, therefore, to the patrons are included in the conditions of success to the creamery, and vice versa. the object of this paper is to suggest some of these conditions and some of the instances of violation of them. it is hardly necessary to discuss the case in which peculiarity of soil or climate, the greater profitableness of some other kind of industry, or other reason, would so restrict the size and number of dairy herds as to make the locality a barren dairy region. notwithstanding the splendid achievements of the dairy industry it is safe to say that it may not be profitable in any and every locality. given the soil, the climate, the water, the people intelligent and disposed toward the exacting duties of this business, there are still many questions to be considered and many mistakes to be avoided. it has been a pet idea in this country that competition is the corrective of all industrial evils. competition without doubt holds an important place among the industrial forces, but may be carried so far as to defeat the very objects it is adapted to subserve, when intelligently encouraged. carried to the extent of employing two persons or more to do the work of one, of absorbing capital without the full employment of it, it becomes destructive and expensive. we find, for instance, in many towns, a large number of commercial establishments doing business at an immense profit on single transactions, but the transactions are so few and so divided up among struggling competitors, that neither secures a profitable, nor even a respectable, business. with choice cuts of meat from twelve to eighteen cents a pound and butcher's stock at three and four cents, we often see butcher shops multiply, but the price of meat usually remains the same. indeed, the very increase of middle man establishments beyond the employment of these to their full capacity, and the consequent full utilization of the capital and labor employed, is a sure loss to somebody, and if it does not all go to the producer it is almost always shared by him. one of the greatest burdens which the creamery business has to carry to-day is the excessive number of its creameries beyond legitimate demands. the co-operative idea, so far as it enters into this business, implies the most profitable use possible of the resources employed in it both of patron and creamery owner, and a fair and equitable distribution of the profits. said a large creamery owner to me recently, "i find the comparative value of my butter steadily decreasing from year to year. i have the same territory, the same butter-makers, the same patrons, substantially, but my butter is not up in quality and price as it used to be. i ascribe it to the excessive competition prevailing in it, i.e., it is one of its results. i have lost my influence over patrons in securing the best quality of cream. if i make any criticism of their modes or practices they say to me, 'mr. ----, if you do not want my cream i will let the other creamery have it. do just as you like about it; take it or leave it.'" but the loss of one or two cents a pound on the net proceeds of a season means five or ten per cent of its value, or of the entire season's results enough difference to make any community in a few years rich or poor, thrifty or unthrifty, according to the circumstances in the case. further: the idea of co-operation implies the doing of equal and exact justice to all included within the co-operative limits. this, an excessive and unprincipled competition greatly interferes with. it can properly be demanded by every fair and honest patron of a creamery that every other patron should be as fair and honest as himself. indeed, this is an essential part of the implied contract. but in the case of excessive competition no restraints can be imposed and no penalties can be made to follow attempts to violate the principles of equity, except the possible inconvenience of changing from one creamery to another. the straight and honorable patron is powerless; the owner of the creamery is powerless; and the co-operative element is rendered a nullity. further: the co-operative element, in the relations of creamery and patrons, requires that the price of milk or cream shall vary with the market price of the finished product. contracts for the future are mere speculation, as a rule. if the transaction is large and the turn of the market unfavorable to the creamery, ruin is liable to come to the business, and loss and disaster follow to all concerned. if the turn of the market should be the other way, among the numerous patrons there is sure to be more or less dissatisfaction and a more or less breaking up of the condition of friendly reciprocity which should exist between creamery and patron. patrons may damage their own interest by exacting too much from the creamery as well as by accepting too little, and a greedy grasping after an unreasonable share of the profit on the part of the creamery owner is sure to bring retaliation, disturb cordiality of feeling, and bring loss to all concerned. the remedy for most of these evils can only come from intelligent and wise action on the part of the creamery patrons of a given locality. they should study to prevent an unseemly and expensive competition. they, as the encouraging source, will surely in the end pay the expense of it. it has been said that no people in the world enjoy paying taxes like americans, provided they are only indirect, sugar coated, and with some plausible pretense. it would seem, however, that even american dairymen could see that the maintenance of superfluous creameries, superfluous teams for hauling cream and milk, superfluous men for manufacturing and handling the product is an extra expense of which they will surely bear their full share; if not at once, they will do so before the outcome is reached. another thing the patrons of creameries may properly take note of is that the expense of manufacturing butter in all well regulated creameries is nearly the same, and the value of the product does not widely differ. when a creamery therefore claims large and peculiar advantages, and offers a price for milk or cream markedly above the ordinary price paid for it by other creameries, you may be sure there is something illegitimate about it. it may be done to drum up business, to beat a rival, or it may be a downright swindle, it surely will not be lasting, and the operator intends at some time to recoup for himself. it is to be remembered that the dairy business is not one which can be taken up and laid down hastily without greater or less inconvenience, expense, and loss. like most other branches of agriculture, it must be engaged in with the purpose of a steady, long, strong pull in order to be a success. it has the advantage of springing directly from the earth without fictitious help, props, or governmental protection, so-called. it taxes no other industry for its own benefit, and has expanded to its present magnificent proportions in spite of the burdens laid upon it from outside sources. but it is written "and satan came also." nothing could more aptly describe the full influence of adulteration which has come upon this industry. it has come clothed in deceit and fraud, the very habiliments of the devil. it can be exterminated no more than sin itself. it must be fought by exposing its nature; by stamping upon it its own features. wise legislation, i believe, will be in the direction of government inspection and the sure and prompt punishment of fraud. the interest of the creamery patron is more deeply involved in this matter than that of any other class, just as in other branches of production the perils and losses by fraud, deterioration, and adulteration ultimately fall back upon the producer of the raw product. the apathy now existing among the producers of milk and cream is ominous of evil, and discouraging to those who are working in the interest of unadulterated goods. we have no doubt that the time will come when not only the adulteration of butter, but the adulteration of other food products as well, will only be carried on under the stamp and inspection of government supervision. the thoughts i have presented are intended to be suggestive rather than dogmatic, and i leave the subject with the hope that the intelligence of the average dairyman may be as active in tracing and comprehending the subtler principles of trade and commerce relating to the products of his labor as he is in comprehending the more immediate facts of his calling, such as breeding, seeding, and the handling of the raw products of his herd. [a] paper read before the illinois dairymen's convention by c.c. buell, of rock falls. veterinary. fever. many kinds of horse fevers have been described by antiquated veterinary writers; but most exist only in the imagination of the writers, or have been manufactured out of the mistaken analysis of human fevers. all the real fevers of the horse may be comprised in two,--the idiopathic, pure or simple fever, constituting of itself an entire disease, and the symptomatic fever, occasioned by inflammatory action in some particular part of the body, and constituting rather the attendant of a disease than the disease itself. though idiopathic fever is comparatively infrequent in occurrence, it unquestionably meets the attention of most persons who have extensive stable management of horses, and its general tendency to degenerate into local inflammation and symptomatic fever, seems to arise far less from its own nature than from foul air, vicissitudes of temperature, and general bad management. if idiopathic fever is not easily reduced, the blood accumulates in the lungs, the viscera, or some other internal part of the body, and provokes inflammation; or, if a horse, while suffering under this fever, be kept in a foul or ill-ventilated stable, or be exposed to alternations of heat and cold, he speedily becomes locally inflamed from the action of the filth or exposure. the symptoms of idiopathic fever are shivering, loss of appetite, dejected appearance, quick pulse, hot mouth, and some degree of debility; generally, also, costiveness and scantiness of urine; sometimes, likewise, quickness of breathing, and such pains of the bowels as accompany colic. idiopathic fever, if it does not pass into inflammation, never kills, but is generally always curable. cattle are subject to both idiopathic and symptomatic fever, very nearly in the same manner as the horse, and require, when suffering them, to be very similarly treated. the idiopathic fever of cattle has, in many instances, an intermitting character, which may easily be subdued by means of ordinary care; and, in other instances, has a steady and unintermitting character, and is exceedingly liable to resolve itself into pleurisy, enteritis, or some other inflammatory disease. the symptomatic fever of cattle is strictly parallel to the symptomatic fever of horses, and is determined by the particular seat and nature of the exciting inflammation. but besides these fevers, cattle are subject to two very destructive and quite distinct kinds of fever, both of an epizootic nature, the one of a virulent and the other of a chronic character,--the former inflammatory and the latter typhoid. numerous modifications of these fevers, or particular phases of them, are more or less extensively known among our readers as black-leg, bloody murrain, etc. the fever which in many instances follows parturition, particularly in the cow, is familiarly known as calving fever, or milk fever; and the ordinary fevers of sheep, swine, dogs, upon the whole, follow the same general law as the ordinary fevers of the horse, and are classifiable into idiopathic and symptomatic. * * * * * miscellaneous. 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[illustration] new "concealed name" cards (name concealed with hand holding flowers with mottoes) c. pks. and this ring for $ . agents' sample book and full outfit, c. over new cards added this season. blank cards at wholesale prices. northford card co. northford, conn. * * * * * [illustration] print your own cards labels, envelopes, etc. with our $ printing press. larger sizes for circulars, etc., $ to $ . for pleasure, money making, young or old. everything easy, printed instructions. send stamps for catalogue of presses, type, cards, etc., to the factory. kelsey & co., meriden, conn. * * * * * [illustration] we will send you a watch or a chain by mail or express, c.o.d., to be examined before paying any money and if not satisfactory, returned at our expense. we manufacture all our watches and save you per cent. catalogue of styles free. every watch warranted. address standard american watch co., pittsburgh. pa. * * * * * agents wanted everywhere to sell the best family knitting machine ever invented. will knit a pair of stockings with heel and toe complete, in minutes. it will also knit a great variety of fancy-work for which there is always a ready market. send for circular and terms to the twombly knitting machine co., tremont street, boston, mass. * * * * * virginia farms & mills for sale and exchange. write for free real estate journal. r.b. chaffin & co., richmond, virginia. * * * * * the biggest thing out. illustrated book sent free. (new) e. nason, & co., fulton st., new york. * * * * * a mystery of the sea. the fate which overtook the "city of boston."--captain murray's ideas and experiences. a few years ago, the city of boston sailed from harbor, crowded with an expectant throng of passengers bound for a foreign shore. she never entered port. the mystery of her untimely end grows deeper as the years increase, and the atlantic voyager, when the fierce winds howl around and danger is imminent on every hand, shudders as the name and mysterious fate of that magnificent vessel are alluded to. our reporter, on a recent visit to new york, took lunch with captain george siddons murray, on board the alaska, of the guion line. captain murray is a man of stalwart built, well-knit frame and cheery, genial disposition. he has been a constant voyager for a quarter of a century, over half of that time having been in the trans-atlantic service. in the course of the conversation over the well-spread table, the mystery of the city of boston was alluded to. "yes," remarked the captain, "i shall never forget the last night we saw that ill-fated vessel. i was chief officer of the city of antwerp. on the day we sighted the city of boston a furious southeast hurricane set in. both vessels labored hard. the sea seemed determined to sweep away every vestige of life. when day ended the gale did not abate, and everything was lashed for a night of unusual fury. our good ship was turned to the south to avoid the possibility of icebergs. the city of boston, however, undoubtedly went to the north. her boats, life-preservers and rafts were all securely lashed; and when she went down, everything went with her, never to re-appear until the sea gives up its dead." "what, in your opinion, captain, was the cause of the loss of the city of boston?" "the city of limerick, in almost precisely the same latitude, a few days later, found the sea full of floating ice; and i have no doubt the city of boston collided with the ice, and sunk immediately." captain murray has been in command of the alaska ever since she was put in commission and feels justly proud of his noble ship. she carries thousands of passengers every year, and has greatly popularized the williams & guion line. remarking upon the bronzed and healthy appearance of the captain, the reporter said that sea life did not seem to be a very great physical trial. "no? but a person's appearance is not always a trustworthy indication of his physical condition. for seven years i have been in many respects very much out of sorts with myself. at certain times i was so lame that it was difficult for me to move around. i could scarcely straighten up. i did not know what the trouble was, and though i performed all my duties regularly and satisfactorily, yet i felt that i might some day be overtaken with some serious prostrating disorder. these troubles increased. i felt dull and then, again, shooting pains through my arms and limbs. possibly the next day i would feel flushed and unaccountably uneasy and the day following chilly and despondent. this continued until last december, when i was prostrated soon after leaving queenstown, and for the remainder of the voyage was a helpless, pitiful sufferer. in january last, a friend who made that voyage with me, wrote me a letter urging me to try a new course of treatment. i gladly accepted his counsel, and for the last seven months have given thorough and business-like attention to the recovery of my natural health; and to-day i have the proud satisfaction of saying to you that the lame back, the strange feeling, the sciatic rheumatism which have so long pursued me, have entirely disappeared through the blood purifying influence of warner's safe rheumatic cure which entirely eradicated all rheumatic poison from my system. indeed, to me, it seems that it has worked wonders, and i therefore most cordially commend it." "and you have no trouble now in exposing yourself to the winds of the atlantic?" "not the least. i am as sound as a bullet and i feel specially thankful over the fact because i believe rheumatic and kidney disease is in the blood of my family. i was dreadfully shocked on my last arrival in liverpool to learn that my brother, who is a wealthy china tea merchant, had suddenly died of bright's disease of the kidneys, and consider myself extremely fortunate in having taken my trouble in time and before any more serious effects were possible." the conversation drifted to other topics, and as the writer watched the face before him, so strong in all its outlines, and yet so genial, and thought of the innumerable exposures and hardships to which its owner had been exposed, he instinctively wished all rheumatic cure which entirely eradicated who are suffering from the terrible rheumatic troubles now so common might know of captain murray's experience and the means by which he had been restored. pain is a common thing in this world, but far too many endure it when they might just as well avoid it. it is a false philosophy which teaches us to endure when we can just as readily avoid. so thought the hearty captain of the alaska, so thinks the writer, and so should all others think who desire happiness and a long life. * * * * * the prairie farmer and youth's companion one year, $ for the two. it is not required that both papers be sent to one address, nor to the same post-office. address prairie farmer pub. co., monroe street, chicago. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * horticultural horticulturists, write for your paper. illinois horticultural society. the ad-interim committee of the illinois state horticultural society for the northern part of the state reported through mr. o.w. barnard and arthur bryant, jr. mr. barnard had found the orchards thrifty and healthy. the yield of apples had not been large this season, but orchardists generally felt encouraged in regard to the future of their orchards. he had found the high clay soils preferable for the apple. mr. bryant reported the apple crop small. some orchards had borne good crops, especially of the ben davis. in others, this variety had failed. orchard culture. mr. w.t. nelson, of the committee on orchard culture, recommended the planting of orchards on high, sloping ground. in the rather low and level country in which he lived (will county) orchard trees lasted but fifteen or twenty years. but few varieties seem to do well in any locality. he would advise men about to set out orchards to ascertain what varieties do well in their particular locality, and then plant no others. he would not prune young orchards. he recommended the tiling of orchards. high or low, land. mr. nelson's report opened up the subject of high or low lands for orchards. mr. robinson got more apples from trees on low lands than from elevated sites. prof. budd did not commit himself to either theory, but remarked that some varieties do best on low lands, while others preferred the higher situations. parker earle thought that this theory of low lands for our apple orchards was contrary to the past teachings of the society. in his opinion high grounds are preferable. the subject was a complicated one for prof. burrill. he had seen many low ground orchards that bore good crops this year. there are many modifications that effect the crop. it is not merely the elevation of orchard sites. it was his belief that high ground, all things considered, is the best. mr. robinson was not enthusiastic about the tile drainage of orchards. our trees need more water than they usually get. they do not suffer from too much water, but from dry summers and rolling land. mr. spalding, of sangamon county, had found his nursery trees poorest when planted on a depressed surface. he tiled extensively. his subsoil was a clay loam. nine years ago he laid tile - / feet deep and feet apart. he did not believe in manuring young trees. too rapid growth is not wanted. trees in illinois grow as much in one year as they do in two years in the state of new york, where they raise more fruit than we do. the most rapid growing trees are the tenderest. he does not force the growth of his orchard trees. he is satisfied nurserymen have manured their young stock too much. the question of high or low land was not settled. it was hard for members to give up the old theory that high lands are best for orchards in illinois; but it may be set down as a fact that the matter, as first brought to public discussion through the prairie farmer by b.f. johnson, esq., of champaign, is having wide discussion among our fruit men. it will result in close future observation and closer scrutiny of past results. without doubt this is the leading new horticultural question of the day. it requires a careful collection of facts and a broad generalization. the theories and teachings of the past are nothing if facts are opposed to them. fruit growers and fruit sellers. mr. ragan, of indiana, read a suggestive paper upon the relation of the fruit-grower to the commission man and the transportation companies. the paper led to considerable discussion. mr. earle always sells his fruit through a commission house. without the commission men market-fruit growers could not do business. he found no difficulty in getting honorable men to do business with. when he got a good man he stuck to him. the commission man is just as important a factor in the fruit business as the grower or consumer. he believes in a liberal percentage for commissions. dealers can not do an honest business for nothing. he is willing to pay ten per cent to the man who sells his fruit to the best possible advantage, and who makes prompt and honest returns. the cheap commission man is to be avoided. the proper handling of fruit by intelligent dealers at fair rates is what we want. he ships small fruits in full quart boxes. uses new boxes every time. wants no returned crates. to get best returns we must have neat packages. stained drawers, baskets, old barrels, and the like do not help to sell fruit. he would advise shipping black and red raspberries in pint boxes; blackberries and strawberries in quart boxes. he picks his berry plantations every day during the ripening season. sundays not excepted. no man who is not prepared to work seven days in the week during the picking season, or who can not get help to do the same, will succeed in the raising and marketing of small fruits. he has this year paid two cents per quart for picking blackberries and strawberries, and the same for pints of raspberries. it requires from five to ten pickers to the acre. he likes women or grown-up girls to do this work. as to varieties he likes longfellow and sharpless. they ripen slowly and everyday picking is not so necessary. mr. pearson said the apple growers in his locality find that judgment must be used in marketing apples. the lord made little apples and we must do the best we can with them. a neighbor had small apples and the shippers grumbled at them. the neighbor would not stand this and shipped his apples to chicago and had them sold on their merits. the result was satisfactory. an iowa buyer came down there and offered cents per bushel for apples without regard to size, etc., and he got them and shipped them in boxes to muscatine where they were made into jelly, dried fruit, etc. we can have no cast iron rules in regard to marketing, but must be governed by circumstances. this year it was better for his people to sell as they come, without the trouble of hand picking, sorting, and careful packing. we must act like intelligent men in this business as in all others. circumstances alter cases. good common sense is a prime requisite. mr. miller agreed with mr. earle about packages for marketing fruit. he uses white wood boxes from michigan. mulching and manuring. mr. earle was questioned about the use of castor bean pomace for strawberries. he uses it mixed with wood ashes. it is capital on poor land. he likes unleached ashes in both strawberry and orchard culture. he pays six cents per bushel for them. the castor bean pomace is good for anything in the poor soils of southern illinois. he uses about half a ton to the acre. spreads with a kemp spreader. five hundred pounds per acre will show excellent results. has tried a tablespoonful of the mixture to the strawberry plant when setting out. has tried salt to kill grubs in asparagus beds, but found it to kill the weeds and most of the asparagus, while the grubs seemed to enjoy the application. did not find it of much value as a manure. bone dust had shown no particular results. superphosphates acted much like the bean pomace. does not think coal ashes of much value. he uses the pomace as early in the spring as possible. sometimes he plows it under and sometimes applies after the plants are set, and cultivates it in. one application answers for two years' cropping. he fruits a strawberry plantation but two years, and he sometimes thinks one year sufficient. he does not agree with some of his neighbors that mulching has resulted unfavorably. does not think the mulch has increased the noxious insects. knows of a plantation not mulched at all, that suffered more than any other this year from the tarnished plant bug. central districts. mr. vickroy reported for central illinois. in august of the present year he visited the orchards in the vicinity of champaign, among them the noted hall fruit farm, near savoy. he found the orchards in fair condition. many were sheltered by belts of trees. he observed that in the lower or bottom land he found in connection with drainage, the best orchards and the healthiest trees, and that on the more rolling or higher grounds the trees were not as hardy nor did not bear as well. his observations led him to believe in the draining of orchards, although it was opposed to his previous education and of the teachings he had received in this society. he regarded the experimental orchard which he visited at champaign a failure, for the very reason that it was on too high ground; that the trees were dying, and many were not bearing. there were, however, some varieties that showed good fruit. in his visit referred to, he found the following varieties of apples did well in this latitude: fall varieties--first, snow; second, standard; third, maiden blush; fourth, colvert; fifth, baker sweet; sixth, pound sweet; seventh, fall romanite. winter varieties--first, minkler; second, rawles' genet; third, willow twig; fourth, little romanite; fifth, english russet; sixth, ben davis; seventh, michael henry pippin; eighth, jonathan; ninth, gravenstein; tenth, rome beauty. in varieties in pears he gave the howell and the bartlett. in grapes he recommended the martha in white grapes. grapes. mr. e.a. riehl, of alton, read a very exhaustive and complete report on grapes and grape culture, including the so-called grape rot. the suggested remedies were bagging and training vines up on elevated wires, so the sun and air could get freely to the fruit. this point was combated by dr. shroeder. grapes ripen best in the shade. another gentleman suggested that with the wire system as suggested by mr. riehl, the grapes are shaded by the foliage in all the hottest part of the day. insects. prof. forbes gave a learned and scientific dissertation on contagious diseases of insects, and a number of germinal diseases, and experimental and successful attempts to kill them. the professor showed that nausea is contagious and may be transferred by diseased worms, and that therefore the spread of disease in worms would considerably lessen the danger to plants and fruits from their inroads. these facts, said the professor, give us reason to hope that we have discovered another means of defense from destructive insects. mr. earle will try pyrethrum next season for the tarnished bug. prof. budd gave a brief sketch of latest methods of killing off noxious insects as followed by j.n. dixon, of the state of iowa, one of the greatest fruit farmers in that state or in the northwest. he destroys the insect by sprinkling the trees with water diluted with arsenic, using one pound of white arsenic to gallons of water. this has proven a great success and is not at all expensive. some members objected to the use of arsenic on account of its poisonous properties. london-purple or paris-green were recommended by some. some members did not like to have hogs running in their orchards; others found them a benefit if but few were permitted. they did a good work. if the orchard is overstocked with them they do harm. they root about the trees and rub against them. it is not an uncommon thing for them to kill the trees in the course of a couple of years. fruit committees. dr. schroeder, member of the committee on pear culture, made no formal report, but in brief remarks urged the general planting and raising of the kind of fruit as being profitable and productive. mr. samuel edwards, of mendota, chairman of committee on currants, read a very interesting report on currants and gooseberries, in which it appeared that the cultivation of this fruit was neglected and was on the decline. dr. a.l. small, of kankakee, made a report on plums, in which he recommended the general planting of this fruit, he making a specialty of plum trees, and regarded the plum as a fruit that was coming more in demand and popular, and one that readily adapts itself to the many kinds of climates and soils. mr. weir also read a paper on plums and plum culture. he recommended the chickasaw because it is hardy and not liable to have its blossoms injured by a late spring, like many fruits. he named the newman and wild goose among other so-called seedlings that were very good. he expressed the opinion that there was but one distinct species of plum in the united states. floriculture. mrs. mary j. barnard, of manteno, from the committee on floriculture, strongly urged the cultivation of house-plants, not only as beautifiers, but to give the most pleasant occupation to every lady of the family. she referred to the earlier flowers of summer especially--the crocus, snow-drop, lily of the valley, tulips. next to these came the annuals; with little trouble these could be had for months. the wild flowers of the prairies were spoken of, and she suggested that we should obtain seed of the flowers and raise such as we wish. the paper was a good one and was well received. mr. baller, a florist of bloomington, said that of late the demand for plants had fallen off. the reason given was that there was an increased general knowledge among the people. at the present, the chief demands are for hot-house, cut flowers, and monthlies. the reason given for the falling off of the demand for plants was the fact that plants were more easily raised since the introduction of base-burners. this, he thought, could be still further increased by having a double sash, and the building of bay windows on the south and east of the houses. he reported, however, that there was still a good market for hot-house flowers among the rich for decorating purposes, funerals, etc. the prairie farmer will, from time to time, consider other papers and discussions at this meeting, for there was much more of interest said and done than can be condensed into a simple running report. we advise farmers to send one dollar to the secretary and receive therefor a copy of the transactions when issued. a short sermon on a long text. the text will be found in leviticus : - - ; but whether its application can be found is uncertain. horticulturists are prone to find scape-goats to carry their sins of omission and commission; and they load these--a great burden--upon them, and send them off to be lost in the wilderness. providence is most usually chosen by them for this purpose. most of their mistakes and failures--sins, let us call them--are ascribed to providence; and he is expected to carry the burden. but i strongly urge they remain our own after all. i am led to these conclusions by the fact that among the many failures in fruit culture there are some splendid successes; and that these successes occur with those, as a rule, who are guiltless of these sins; and that just in proportion to the magnitude of the guilt is the success insured. in other words--that almost invariably are our failures to be attributed to our own want of skill and our neglect--most generally the latter. here and there we note cases of marked success--of heavy crops and large returns for care and labor invested. these are mostly on a small scale; as for instance, one man produces from at the rate of to bushels of strawberries per acre, on a few rods of ground. another, his neighbor, gets about as many quarts. the conditions of soil and climate are about the same. now is providence to be charged with this disparity? certainly not. the same care, the same intelligent management, and the same amount of labor bestowed, would have produced as favorable results in the one case as in the other. and so, as to larger tracts. i hold that what my neighbor can do on a dozen square rods, he and i both ought to be equally able to do on five or ten, or twenty times as large a tract. but, you say, these large yields are the results of extraordinary care. true, they are; and that proves my theory--that extraordinary care will produce extraordinary results. what one man can do once, he can do again and all the time; and we all can do the same. extraordinary care may be defined as the care necessary to produce good results, and if that care were always applied it would cease to be extraordinary. i myself saw in my neighbor's field a crop of strawberries, on two rows, which at the safest and closest calculation i could make, yielded at the rate of over bushels per acre. he had but the two rows; had given them extraordinary care--had kept them clear of grass and weeds--and the ground mellow--and had mulched them with forest leaves. those two rows were in a field of several acres in size. the same care in planting, in cultivating, in mulching, and the whole tract would have produced corresponding results. that same year, my crop, on soil equally as good, reached a yield of less than one-fifth in amount. why this difference? providence favored him and didn't favor me, i might say, if i felt disposed to make a scape-goat of providence for my misdeeds. but i do not believe that providence did anything of the sort. the fault was my own; and i have no right to attempt to shift the responsibility. and it was not want of knowledge either. we, none of us, do as well as we know how. our failures are mostly the results of sheer neglect. mistakes, we incline to call them. let us call them sins, and repent of them; and not endeavor to do as aaron did, pack them off into the wilderness. when we bring ourselves to thus correct our mistakes, our crops will be increased threefold, and providence will no longer be made a scape-goat for us. t.g. prunings. the strawberry was introduced into england from flanders in . gardeners in london, england, are always ready to buy toads. the regular market price for them ranges from $ to $ per hundred. soap-suds are a valuable fertilizer for all forms of vegetation; especially serviceable for small fruits, and in the fruit garden proper will never be wasted. an italian claims to have discovered that by drenching the foliage of grapevines with a solution of soda the filaments of the mildew fungus will be shriveled, while the leaves will remain uninjured. a wisconsin nurseryman, however, advises the use of flowers of sulphur, which he believes a good remedy, also, when applied to the vines and when added to the soil surrounding them. a correspondent of the germantown telegraph says that he has found salt a valuable remedy for rust on blackberry vines, and concludes: "i have applied two or three handfuls on the surface of the ground, immediately over the roots, when the plants were badly rusted; in two or three weeks the disease had disappeared, and the plants had made a good growth. i believe moderate applications of salt, sown broadcast over a blackberry patch, would be of great benefit as a fertilizer and health renewer." gardener's monthly: in the discussions on forest culture, little is said of the willow, which forms a very interesting department. the white willow, salix candida, is often used for coarse work. s. vinnunatis and s. russelliana, are the most commonly used in the eastern united states, under the name of osier, or basket willow, and s. forbyana, a variety of s. rubra, or the red willow is often used for fine work. in the editor's recent visit to the northwest a number of fine species were noted which would evidently be worth introducing for basket-making purposes. the germantown telegraph says: "to grow good crops of blackberries the soil should be good and especially deep, for the roots run down wonderfully when possible for them to do so; and as the growing fruit requires its greatest nourishment in the usually dry month of august, it is an advantage to have deep soil for the roots to draw a supply from. a deep, sandy soil will generally grow the best crop of berries, while a clay soil tends to produce rust. good cultivation, good soil, and a judicious use of manure make stout and vigorous canes, with a crop of berries in increased ratio." indiana correspondent orange county farmer: i have had a good deal of experience in propagating currants. i always plant my currant cuttings in the fall as soon as the leaves fall off. they will make durable roots two to four inches long the same fall, while the buds remain dormant. they will make double the growth the next season if set in the fall, and they should be set in ground that will not heave them out by the effects of frost and should be covered just before winter sets in with coarse litter. remove the covering early in the spring and examine the cuttings to see if any of them hove, and if so, press them down again. should they heave up an inch or more, if well pressed down, they will start and make better growth than cuttings set in the spring. in either case, however, the cuttings should always be made in the fall. a rural new yorker correspondent gets down to the real art of grape eating. hear him tell how to manipulate the fruit: no! the man who holds the grape between his thumb and dexter finger and squeezes or shoots the pulp into his throat, does not know how to enjoy the fruit, and is not likely to appreciate the good qualities of a fine grape. let the berries follow each other into the mouth in rapid succession until three or four are taken, while with each insertion the teeth are brought together upon the seeds without breaking them. the acid of the pulp is thus freed to mingle with the saccharine juice next the skin, and a slight manipulation by the tongue separates the seeds and skins from the delicious winey juices; after this has tickled the palate, skins and seeds may be ejected together. close to the skin lies a large part of the good flavor of the grape. on the subject of protecting trees from mice, r.w. rogers, in ohio farmer says: "as the season is near at hand when farmers will have to look to the protection of their young fruit trees from ground mice, i send you my method if you deem it worthy of publishing. it is as follows: take old tin fruit cans, put them on the fire until the parts that are soldered have become heated, when they will come apart. take the body of the can and encircle it around the tree, letting the sides lap each other, and press firmly in the ground before it has become frozen. the mice coming in contact with the tin will turn them in another direction. it is far better than mounding up or tramping snow about them. most any farmer can gather up enough for a good sized orchard, and make them pay compound interest, which otherwise would be a nuisance or pitched out of the back window." floriculture. gleanings by an old florist. artificial manures and other matters. the successful raisers of many kinds of flowers use, more or less, some kind of what might be called artificial stimulants other than the ordinary manuring of the soil at the time the plant is set out, whether it be in pot culture or in the open benches. this is no new thing under the sun; not a few who have been in the habit, and found great results, have tried to keep a monopoly, and have been more or less close-mouthed in the matter. perhaps one of the oldest forms of this feeding extra stimulants to their pets was in the form of liquid manure made from various materials, as horse, sheep, cow, and other manures. they are sometimes prepared with ever so much mystery in the matter of quantity, time of preparation, quantity given, etc., all of which was supposed to have its influence. of one thing, however, there was certain, tangible evidence that many of these persons managed, if for exhibition, to carry off the best premiums; and if for the market were pretty sure to command the best prices, and what is more, obtain the greater results financially. soot, guano, ammonia, and in later years, material obtained from the immense slaughter-houses, such as blood and other offal in a highly concentrated form, find, perhaps, nowadays, more advocates; principally because the first-mentioned list contains articles that give off very offensive odors while being applied, so that the more fastidious are loath to use them. what may not be very offensive to the plodding florist would be highly so to the more refined, or when the general public comes more into contact with the crops while being so applied. in almost all of the cases where the ingredients mentioned are used they are diluted with a large quantity of water, except in the case of the droppings of the animals; the latter are often used by florists in the form of a very heavy mulch, depending upon the ordinary watering to carry down to the roots such parts of the dressing as would dissolve in the water, and thus give extra stimulant, and at a time when it would do the most good, because, ordinarily, the more water necessary the greater the growth going on, and vice versa, if plants are in a state of rest, either from a finished growth or from lowness of temperature, but little water would be needed, and but little benefit from the mulch, except such as undoubtedly arises from the ammonia itself in the manure permeating the atmosphere, which again, however, would be the most active when heavy watering was necessary, simply because of the high and humid temperature. for obvious reasons the votaries of window gardening will use those giving off little or no unpleasant odors. others again make the soil so rich in the first instance that much less of what may be called artificial manures are required during growth. but without some skill in this matter it is not safe, for if much of the material is not thoroughly decayed (which, however, has then lost most of its volatile ingredients) it is, in the common vernacular of the gardener, too rank to give good growth and results, whether it be in fruits, flowers, or foliage. for example, in henderson's horticulture he recommends, as the best soil for potting, loam and hops. he says, "not the least simple of these operations is the preparation of our potting soil. we have, we may say, only one heap--a big one it is--but it contains only two ingredients, rotted sods, from a loamy pasture, and rotted refuse hops from the breweries, in about the proportion of two of the sods to one of hop. one-year-old rotted manure, if the hops cannot be obtained." it is evident upon its face that so large a proportion as one-third of a fresh manure or hops would be disastrous; but well rotted, and with care otherwise in temperature and other desiderata, it would be a highly stimulating soil. this was in . we well recollect the commotion the hop business caused in the horticultural world at the time, as henderson recommended it for plunging pots in, setting pots on mulching outdoors, and almost every purpose. and did he not grow the best of stuff and himself practice what he preached. spent hops in this city were eagerly sought after and used, apparently with great success, in almost every florist's establishment as well as market garden. what before was a nuisance to the breweries was eagerly sought after; like most things, however, it had its day, and is now seldom seen again. we might, however, say that its decline undoubtedly arose from its unpleasant features, as it drew myriads of insects in its train and often emitted a very unpleasant odor. its great value consists in that it is the seed of the hop plant, all seeds contributing by far the greatest value in manures. in the green-house the object aimed at, is the greatest possible results from limited area. of the atmosphere the gardener has almost absolute control--no siroccos, biting frost, or destructive winds interfere. he can beat nature all to pieces in growing plants faultless in shape and in quantity of flowers, but his soil is of limited extent for the roots to wander in. to counteract this, he can give in other forms just as much and no more nutrition as is necessary to effect his purpose, and here comes in this artificial supply of manurial agents. mr. devrey, the successful superintendent of lincoln park, uses horn shavings. this is the cleanest and most pleasant material that we ever recollect to have seen used for the purpose, it is the refuse in the factories where the horns from the slaughterhouse are steamed and manipulated into the numerous objects they are applied to, not the least being into knife and fork handles, and the like. it is in the form of thin shaving of half an inch to an inch in length, quite dry and light, entirely free from odor. he takes all they make, and this year has a ton of the material for which he pays at the rate of three cents per pound. the method of using is simply to mix with the soil at the time of potting, giving it, to the common eye, as oil specked all through with a white flaky substance. its effect is very visible in a clear, healthy growth, given off gradually, and as it is quite common where vast quantities of plants are required to be grown in small pots, when there appears to be a necessity of some new stimulant, it should be given by the amateur in a larger pot. this is done by shaking nearly all the soil from the roots and re-potting again if possible in the same sized pots, thus doing away with all artificial watering, and yet having healthy, luxuriant growth all the time. a pound of the material, which is light, will be enough for a wheelbarrow of potting soil. after all, the question is not so much the exact material employed of a number of similar agents, as it is with the intelligence brought to bear so as to apply at the right time the right quantity, and under the best possible circumstances. edgar sanders. scientific. am i a scot, or am i not? if i should bring a wagon o'er from scotland to columbia's shore, and by successive wear and tear the wagon soon should need repair: thus, when the tires are worn through, columbia's iron doth renew; likewise the fellies, hubs, and spokes should be replaced by western oaks; in course of time down goes the bed, but here's one like it in its stead. so bit by bit, in seven years, all things are changed in bed and gears, and still it seems as though it ought to be the one from scotland brought; but when i think the matter o'er, it ne'er was on a foreign shore, and all that came across the sea is only its identity. i came, a scotchman, understand, by choice, to live in this free land, wherein i've dwelt, from day to day, 'till sixteen years have passed away. if physiology be true, my body has been changing too; and though at first it did seem strange, yet science doth confirm the change; and since i have the truth been taught, i wonder if i'm now a scot? since all that came across the sea is only my identity. --_wm. taylor, in scientific american._ primitive northwest. mr. c.w. butterfield contributes an article on the primitive northwest, to last number of the american antiquarian. he says that early in the seventeenth century french settlements, few in number, were scattered along the wooded shores of the river st. lawrence in canada. to the westward, upon the ottowa river, and the georgian bay, were the homes of indian nations with whom these settlers had commercial relations, and among some of whom were located jesuit missionaries. in the year , lake huron was discovered. to it was given the name of the fresh sea (mer douce). but, as yet, no white man had set foot upon any portion of what now constitutes the states of ohio, indiana, illinois, michigan, wisconsin, and eastern minnesota. and thereafter, for nearly a score of years this whole region remained, so far as the visitation of white men was concerned, an undiscovered country; and such it continued down to the year . however, previous to this date, something had been learned by the french settlers upon the st. lawrence, of this (to them) far off land; but the information has been obtained wholly from the indians. this knowledge was of necessity crude and, to a considerable extent, uncertain. such of it as has been preserved is properly treated of under the following heads: first, as to what had been gleaned concerning the physical aspects of the country; second, as to what had been brought to light relative to the various tribes inhabiting this region. previous to , nothing had been learned of lake erie, lake st. clair, or lake michigan although it was understood there was some kind of a water-way connecting the fresh sea (lake huron) with ontario. a little knowledge had been gained of a great body of fresh water lying beyond the "mer douce," "a grand lac," so called by the french--now known as lake superior. the length of this superior lake with that of the fresh sea (lake huron), the indians declared was a journey of full thirty days in canoes. at the outlet of the great lake was what was described by the savages, as a considerable rapid, to which the french gave the name of "sault de gaston," the present sault st. marie, in the st. mary's river, the stream, which, it is well known, flows from lake superior into lake huron. accounts also had been received from the indians prior to the year last mentioned, of a lake of no great size, through which flowed a river discharging its waters into the fresh sea (lake huron). these were reports of lake winnebago and fox river, in what is now the state of wisconsin. as the french upon the st. lawrence had no knowledge as yet of lake michigan, they imagined the location of this small lake, and its river was beyond, and to the northwest of lake huron and that they emptied into it; green bay into the head of which fox river really flows, being (like lake michigan) wholly unknown to them. it had further been reported by the indians before this date that there was a mine of copper on an island in what has been mentioned as probably lake winnebago; doubtless, however, this island should have been located in lake superior. a specimen of native copper had as early as , been exhibited by an indian to an interested frenchman upon the st. lawrence, and an account given by him as to the rude method employed by the savages in melting that metal. but other islands besides the one containing the copper mine had been brought to the knowledge of the french settlers. a large one southeast of the "sault de gaston" being described, and two smaller ones, to the south of it. these islands were, it is suggested, the great manitoulin, drummond, and little manitoulin, of the present day. * * * * * dr. leeds has said that spices were adulterated to a great extent, but only such substances were added as were purely non-poisonous. mustards were never found to be pure. vinegars were also highly adulterated. competent officers, who shall be specialists, should be appointed in each state to examine manufactured and natural foods to detect adulteration. so far these examinations have been made by college professors. the state boards of health should take the matter in hand and see that it has the proper attention. * * * * * a french periodical, la culture, gives the following simple method for testing the purity of water. in an ordinary quart bottle three parts filled with water dissolve a spoonful of pure white sugar, cork it well and put it in a warm place. if at the end of forty-eight hours the water becomes turbid and milky there can be no doubt of its impurity, but if it remains limpid it may be considered safely drinkable. * * * * * the prairie farmer and youth's companion one year, $ for the two it is not required that both papers be sent to one address, nor to the same post-office. address prairie farmer pub. co., monroe street chicago. * * * * * political talk is generally very eloquent, but it lacks the insignificant element of truthfulness. a great deal of the buncombe of politics reminds us of the lines of lord neaves, not long since deceased: [transcriber's note: this is where the article ends in the original and the lines in question are not to be found in the rest of the periodical.] publishers' notice. _the prairie farmer is printed and published by the prairie farmer publishing company, every saturday, at no. monroe street._ _subscription, $ . per year, in advance, postage prepaid. subscribers wishing their addresses changed should give their old as well as new addresses._ _advertising, cents per line on inside pages; cents per line on last page--agate measure; lines to the inch. no less charge than $ . ._ _all communications, remittances, etc., should be addressed to_ the prairie farmer publishing company, _chicago, ill._ * * * * * the prairie farmer entered at the chicago office as second-class matter. chicago, january , . * * * * * [transcriber's note: original location of table of contents.] * * * * * renew! renew!! remember that every yearly subscriber, either new or renewing, sending us $ , receives a splendid new map of the united states and canada-- Ã� inches--free. or, if preferred, one of the books offered in another column. it is not necessary to wait until a subscription expires before renewing. * * * * * . . the prairie farmer prospectus for . see inducements offered subscribe now. for forty-three years the prairie farmer has stood at the front in agricultural journalism. it has kept pace with the progress and development of the country, holding its steady course through all these forty-three years, encouraging, counseling, and educating its thousands of readers. it has labored earnestly in the interest of all who are engaged in the rural industries of the country, and that it has labored successfully is abundantly shown by the prominence and prestige it has achieved, and the hold it has upon the agricultural classes. its managers are conscious from comparison with other journals of its class, and from the uniform testimony of its readers, that it is foremost among the farm and home papers of the country. it will not be permitted to lose this proud position; we shall spare no efforts to maintain its usefulness and make it indispensable to farmers, stock-raisers, feeders, dairymen, horticulturalists, gardeners, and all others engaged in rural pursuits. it will enter upon its forty-fourth year under auspices, in every point of view, more encouraging than ever before in its history. its mission has always been, and will continue to be-- to discuss the most approved practices in all agricultural and horticultural pursuits. to set forth the merits of the best breeds of domestic animals, and to elucidate the principles of correct breeding and management. to further the work of agricultural and horticultural organization. to advocate industrial education in the correct sense of the term. to lead the van in the great contest of the people against monopolies and the unjust encroachments of capital. to discuss the events and questions of the day without fear or favor. to provide information concerning the public domain, western soil, climate, water, railroads, schools, churches, and society. to answer inquiries on all manner of subjects coming within its sphere. to furnish the latest and most important industrial news at home and abroad. to give full and reliable crop, weather, and market reports. to present the family with pure, choice, and interesting literature. to amuse and instruct the young folks. to gather and condense the general news of the day. to be, in brief, an indispensable and unexceptionable farm and home companion for the people of the whole country. the style and form of the paper are now exactly what they should be. the paper used is of superior quality. the type is bold and clear. the illustrations are superb. the departments are varied and carefully arranged. the editorial force is large and capable. the list of contributors is greatly increased, and embraces a stronger array of talent than is employed on any similar paper in this country. we challenge comparison with any agricultural journal in the land. the prairie farmer is designed for all sections of the country. in entering upon the campaign of , we urge all patrons and friends to continue their good works in extending the circulation of our paper. on our part we promise to leave nothing undone that it is possible for faithful, earnest work--aided by money and every needed mechanical facility--to do to make the paper in every respect still better than it has ever been before. * * * * * special notice to each subscriber who will remit us $ . between now and february st, , we will mail a copy of the prairie farmer for one year, and one of our new standard time commercial maps of the united states and canada--showing all the counties, railroads, and principal towns up to date. this comprehensive map embraces all the country from the pacific coast to eastern new brunswick, and as far north as the parallel of deg., crossing hudson's bay. british columbia; manitoba, with its many new settlements; and the line of the canadian pacific railway, completed and under construction, are accurately and distinctly delineated. it extends so far south as to include key west and more than half of the republic of mexico. it is eminently adapted for home, school, and office purposes. the retail price of the map alone is $ . . size, Ã� inches. scale, about sixty miles to one inch. * * * * * read this. another special offer. [illustration] "the little detective." weighs / oz. to lbs. every housekeeper ought to have this very useful scale. the weight of article bought or sold may readily be known. required proportions in culinary operations are accurately ascertained. we have furnished hundreds of them to subscribers, and they give entire satisfaction. during january, , to any person sending us three subscribers, at $ . each, we will give one of these scales, and to each of the three subscribers ropp's calculator, no. . * * * * * a meeting of farmers interested in ensilage will be held at beekman street, new york, wednesday, january , at o'clock. all interested in the subject are invited to attend. the iowa state horticultural society will hold its annual meeting at des moines, january - . prof. j.l. budd, ames, will forward programmes on application. the usual reductions in railway and hotel fares are expected. professor s.r. thompson, superintendent of the nebraska agricultural college farm, has been chosen to represent nebraska at the meeting to be held at washington, d.c., next week, for the purpose of taking action in regard to contagious diseases of cattle. he requests stock men and all others interested in the cattle industries of his state to correspond with him, and make such suggestions as they may think proper for guidance at the meeting. since its organization in to inclusive, the managers of the illinois state fair have offered the following amounts in premiums for live stock: cattle, $ , ; horses and mules, $ , ; sheep, $ , ; swine, $ , ; poultry, $ , ;--total $ , , which must be considered pretty substantial encouragement. the total offered in premiums for all classes of exhibits has been $ , . thus a little more than two thirds of the entire amount has been given to the breeders and importers of stock. the officers of the northwestern dairymen's association say that every indication warrants the conclusion that the coming convention at mankato, minn., commencing february , will prove the grandest success in the history of the association. a full array of the best dairy talent of the entire northwest will be present. the purpose is both in the arrangement of the programme and in the conduct of the discussions, to make of the coming convention an institute for study and instruction which no intelligent and progressive farmer can afford to miss. the missouri state board of agriculture asks the aid of one competent man in every township in the state to give it estimates of crops, etc., in his vicinity. the aim is to give as full and reliable statistics for crop reports as it is possible to collect. the state provides but $ , for the general expenses of the board, and it is thus dependent upon voluntary aid in the matter. the board will defray all expenses of postage and stationery. competent persons willing to undertake this work for the public good should address j.w. sanborn, secretary, columbus, mo. such persons will receive, free, the monthly and annual reports of the board. in march of last year secretary fisher, of the illinois state board of agriculture, submitted his report for to gov. hamilton. this report has just made its appearance. it has taken the state printer ten months to get the volume printed and bound for distribution, a work that any respectable job office in chicago would have turned out in four weeks without any extra exertion. the report is valuable, of course, but it would have been worth a deal more had it appeared last april. such papers as the report of prof. forbes, state entomologist, for instance, might have been of immense benefit to the people of the state if the information it contains regarding noxious insects had reached them in early spring. seed samples. we have letters from several parties desiring us to publish an offer they make to send packages of seed corn and other seeds to any one applying and inclosing stamps to pay for trouble and postage. some of these parties also send samples of the seed. there is one great difficulty in the way of publishing this class of communications. once we begin, the door is open to the practice of petty frauds upon our readers which we have no right to encourage or allow. now we are almost certain that all these writers, thus far, are honorable men, who wish to confer a favor upon their brother farmers, and who do not wish to gain a farthing in the transaction. but some of them are personally unknown to us, and we do not feel like vouching for their responsibility, still less so because it is difficult to tell who will next propose a similar scheme. there is to be a brisk trade in seed corn during the next four months, and parties having a well tested article will find no difficulty in disposing of it at good prices, providing they can convince people they have exactly what they claim. the way to do is to advertise the seed corn in the regular way, giving as references such men as the postmaster, justice of the peace, banker, etc., as may be most convincing and convenient. we are as anxious as any one can be to see the people supplied with well ripened and well cared-for corn grown in the proper latitude, and we are equally anxious to guard them against imposition. the pork question in europe. the question of admitting american pork into france is not yet settled. the corps legislatif is again "all tore up" by rash statements made by member m. paul bert, who has published a letter at paris in which he argues that the use of our pork must result in disease, and that a general outbreak may be feared at any moment, so long as the products of diseased swine are offered in french markets. he endeavors to strengthen his position by pretending to quote from dr. detmers, department of agriculture inspector at the chicago stock yards. he alleges that detmers has reported that diseased and dying hogs are sold daily in chicago, and then shipped as pork, bacon, and lard to havre and bordeaux. to this audacious or mendacious charge dr. detmers replies as follows: the statement made by m. paul bert, as contained in a cable dispatch from paris, is not only a perversion of facts, but a falsehood cut from whole cloth. i never certified, wrote, or said that dead hogs are shipped to packing-houses, or that these carcasses are shipped abroad. all i ever said in regard to transportation of diseased or dead hogs is contained in my official reports to the commissioner of agriculture, washington, and can be found in his annual reports of and , on pages and respectively, where it is accessible to everyone. i simply called attention to the transportation of diseased and dead hogs to the rendering tanks--entirely distinct from packing houses--as affording a means of spreading the then prevailing disease--swine plague, or so-called hog cholera. m. paul bert seems to be a true demagogue, otherwise he would not resort to a falsehood to please his constituents. i never in any manner, directly or indirectly, stated or intimated that packers are or ever were in collusion with dealers in diseased live stock. moreover, the laws and regulations of the chicago stock yards are such as to render it absolutely impossible that a dead hog should be smuggled into them, and if an animal should die while in the yards it is at once delivered to a soap-grease rendering establishment outside of the stock yards, and can not possibly get into a packing-house. this reply came too late to have any effect upon french legislation, and the decree of prohibition has been re-enacted. so far we notice no marked effect upon the prices of pork products in this country, but later it must result in depression. we notice the leading papers of the united states are advocating the retaliatory measures proposed months ago by the prairie farmer against european states interdicting the importation of our meat products. we refer to the prohibition of french and german adulterated and poisonous wines and liquors, and dry goods and silk goods colored with poisonous dyes. it must come to this at last if such totally unreasonable legislation against american products is to continue in those countries. corn, wheat, and cotton. the preliminary crop estimates by the statistician of the department of agriculture have been completed. he says the average yield of corn per acre for was within a fraction of twenty-three bushels, which is per cent less than the average for a series of several years past. the quality is another thing. it is doubtless true, mr. dodge says, that the quality of the corn north of parallel forty is worse than for many years, increasing practically the amount of shortage indicated by the number of bushels. as the whole corn grown in in michigan, wisconsin, minnesota, and dakota, added to half that grown in ohio, indiana, illinois, iowa, and nebraska, would make , , bushels only--a fourth of the whole crop--so that the possible depreciation of per cent in all of it would be equivalent to a per cent reduction in the value of the entire crop. the illinois department agents make the quality per cent less than the average in this state. an effort will be made later, after the worst of the crop has been fed, to ascertain the feeding value of the year's product. it is not proposed, however, to reduce the product to the equivalent of merchantable corn, or "sound" corn, as no crop ever is free from immaturity or imperfection. there always are some northern fields caught by frost, some neglected acres, some choked with weeds or flooded by over-flows, and so on--corn, which is mainly "nubbins." what is intended without reference to panic or exaggeration is to find out the exact truth and then tell it. there is nothing gained, be it to farmers or consumers, the statistician adds, in suppressing truth on the one hand or exaggerating the losses on the other. one feature of corn-growing in should prove a lesson to the farmers of the country; that is, the general use of seed corn in the west, grown in lower latitudes. the planting of nebraska seed in minnesota and kansas seed in illinois, has demonstrated the folly of attempting to acclimatize the southern maize in the more northern districts. much loss from frost would have been avoided had the seed been carefully selected from the best corn grown in the immediate neighborhood. the wheat crop is estimated, as before, slightly in excess of , , bushels. the cotton product, as shown by the december returns, is about , , bales. there will be another investigation after the close of the cotton harvest and the shipment of a large portion of the crop, when precise results will be approached more nearly than has been possible hitherto. the department evidently feels a little "nettled" over the criticisms that have been made upon its estimates of the last two corn crops. again we must protest that the amount of harvested corn in the west will fall considerably below mr. dodge's figures. whether or not the department sees fit to "reduce the product to the equivalent of merchantable corn" such an estimate would be of interest, and when it gives the result of the feeding quality of the corn, there will be something of a basis furnished for such a calculation, especially as we shall have by that time a pretty accurate account of the exported corn of the crop of and the amount "in sight," as the grain merchants say. it is true that there is nothing gained to consumers by "suppressing truth on the one hand or exaggerating losses on the other" but there is something lost to consumers by overestimating yields at about the time the harvest is ready and when speculators can use government estimates to force down prices. the statistical machinery of the department of agriculture is far from perfect, but it is the best the government has supplied it with, and it is not wise or fair to criticise its estimates too severely, based, as they often must be, upon inadequate returns. the most that can be said is that the department should be exceedingly careful not to err on the side that may result in injury to the producers, for, as we understand it, it was created solely to advance their interests. chicago in . compared with the other great cities of the union, and even with previous years in her own history, chicago had a prosperous business year in . the total trade of the year foots up $ , , , , which is a slight gain over that of . the receipts of flour were , , barrels; wheat, , , bushels; corn, , , bushels; oats, , , bushels; rye, , , ; barley, , , . of cattle there were received , , head; hogs, , , ; sheep, , ; horses, , ; dead hogs, , . of seeds, , tons; broom corn, , tons; butter, , tons; hides, , tons; wool, , tons; potatoes, , , bushels; coal, , , tons; hay, , tons; lumber, , , , ft.; shingles, , , m.; salt, , , barrels; cheese , tons. the total value of farm products of all kinds is estimated at $ , , , which is $ , , above the valuation of that of . the products of chicago manufactures are valued at $ , , . in the receipts of hogs amounted to , , head, and in , , , head. the wholesale mercantile trade has fallen off somewhat, as it has all over the country, owing to depression that seems to be universal. in manufactures the city is making wonderful development. in growth she is still unchecked and without a rival in the world among large cities and business centres. strong drink. we often see in the papers the amount in dollars and cents, that strong drink costs the people of this country. some one has been making out similar statistics for great britain, and finds that if the total house rent is added to the rent of farms in the three divisions of the kingdom the total is $ , , less than is usually spent for drink. add together the cost of the linen goods, cotton goods, coal, tea, coffee, sugar, milk, butter and cheese and the total is only $ , , in excess of the sum spent in drink. and this is only the direct cost. the indirect expense of drink--the crime and misery entailed, the cost of prisons and almshouses, criminal courts and trials, the loss from idleness, incapacity, blunders, sickness--towers above these figures in colossal magnitude. counting all these things it may be said of both countries that strong drink costs more than sufficient to supply the personal needs--food, clothing, and homes--of all the people. it is indeed a fearful showing. answers to correspondents. charles de long, artesia, miss.--the prairie farmer has the reputation of knowing all about the prairies, north and south, and, therefore, i appeal to it to tell me whether the japan persimmon will be likely to be hardy in this section, some portions of which is, as you probably know, a prairie country? answer.--the japan persimmon, diospyros kaki, is, as we understand it, an evergreen of sub-tropical origin, and will not be likely to fruit satisfactorily far north of the region of the orange. like the fig, in your latitude, it may stand what frosts you have and, like it, attain considerable growth, but you will seldom get a crop. we know enterprising nurserymen are telling us it will grow and fruit as far north as washington; but we were told the same story about the eucalyptus, which proved to be no more hardy than the orange. our authorities for these opinions may be regarded as first-class--no less than lebon jardinier, who says it can not be grown and successfully fruited outside the region of the orange. recently, at a horticultural exhibition at nice, france, there was a fine show of the kakis contributed by a gardener in the vicinity of toulon, of which the official report gives this account: "among the newer exotics were the kakis, of japan, grown at toulon. the fruit is about the size of an average apple, a bright, orange-red in color, and the tree is very productive. the japanese make a great account of it, both as a fruit, when ripe, and as a source for obtaining tannin, in its green state. it appears to accommodate itself remarkably well to the climate of provence, and especially merits to be introduced into algeria, where it will even do better in all reasonable probability.". in respect to the appearance of the fruit, it more nearly resembles in shape and size a bell pepper, than an apple, but the color is orange-red, as described. it is pretty sure to cut a great figure among the fruit products of florida, where its successful cultivation will lend additional attractions to that already seductive state. mrs. sarah y. staples, dallas, texas.--i do not ask you for a remedy for the roup, with which my fowls have been recently affected; but for a course of treatment to follow to prevent its return? answer--the roup may be brought upon healthy fowls if they are shut up in narrow and unventilated quarters at night, and of days turned out in cold or wet weather. and it will almost certainly follow if they are confined under glass, as they sometimes are in winter, in abandoned green-houses. in the first place, see fowls have a dry and airy roosting place, but where they will be out of a draft or cold currents. feed once daily in the morning, the following compounded rations. raw onions one part, pork-cracklins one part, and bread or boiled potatoes one part, chopped tolerably fine, but do not wet the mixture before feeding. if you can substitute a few bits of garlic for twice the measure of onions, it will be all the better for the health of the fowls, but they might taint the taste of the eggs. if fowls are fed this mixture once daily, it don't matter much what the other food is, whether corn or small grain, though for laying mill-screenings or shrunken wheat is best. asa gray, rockford, ill.--i have seen it stated the daily rations of the cowboys of the southwest, in certain sections and during some months, was confined to raw beef, rock salt, and red peppers. how is it? answer.--we don't know. will someone familiar with cowboys and their manner of living report. however, all things considered, the ration is not a bad one, for the reason that raw beef digests in half the time of beef well cooked, and the large, sweet pepper of the southwest deprived of its seeds is not near as hot in the mouth as it is commonly represented. r. root, clarksville, iowa. . does the basket willow have to be cultivated like a field crop? . is there more than one kind, and if so which is best? . what kind of soil is best adapted to its cultivation? answer.-- . in some respects, yes; the land having to be given over to them exclusively. in france the cuttings are planted from twelve to fifteen inches apart in order to obtain long and slender shoots. . there are half a dozen cultivated in europe, the best two being the salix rubra or red osier, and the salix vitellina or yellow osier. but a hardier variety, salix viminalis, is commonly preferred in this country where the cultivation, though often undertaken, has never been very successful, from the fact that american labor can not compete with the labor of women and children in europe. . in cool climates having a moist atmosphere the osier willow is successfully grown where ordinary crops thrive, but in warmer and drier sections low and moist land must be chosen. indeed the whole tribe of willows love cool, moist situations, and the richer the soil the stronger and quicker the growth. we should be glad to hear from correspondents who cultivate, or who live where the osier is grown and prepared for market, the details of the whole industry. b.f.j. wayside notes. by a man of the prairie. i don't know that i really ought to take any credit to myself for it, but i hope i have done something toward increasing the number of farmer correspondents for the hale old prairie farmer. i can't help noticing, as i do with pleasure, that the number is increasing. furthermore, the correspondents all write well, i mean, simply; they seem to have something to say, and say it in a manner that can be readily understood. their writings are instructive, too. well, i hope this writing fever, like most others, will prove highly contagious, and have a run through the entire prairie farmer family. i know from experience the malady is not a dangerous one. at least it don't do the writers any harm; if the readers can stand what i say, i am satisfied. the editor may boil down our communications, or chop them up and serve them in any style he chooses, so that he presents all the good we mean to say, and we will be satisfied. will we not, fellow-contributors? * * * * * rufus blanchard, for many years a leading map publisher of chicago, told me the other day, that in he was farming in union county, ohio. that year he grew about , bushels of oats, some bushels of wheat, and raised hogs. he sold his oats for eleven cents per bushel, his wheat for twenty-five cents, and his hogs for one cent and a quarter per pound. he hauled his grain to columbus, forty miles, to market, and took his pay in salt. i remarked that this was pretty rough farming. "on the contrary," said he, "in those days we were happy as clams. we had all the pork we wanted without cost, for our hogs fattened themselves on the mast of the woods. we paid by toll for grinding our wheat into flour. the woods supplied us with deer, turkeys, and many other kinds of game. our clothing was homespun. we had plenty of corn meal and cheaply grown vegetables, and helped each other in sickness or accident. if a neighbor's log house burned down, we all joined together in putting him up a better one than he had before. we had pretty good schools and interesting religious meetings without expensive pew rents or style in dress. we visited each other and had plenty of sound amusement. i never was so happy or so well contented in my life," he added, and i believe him, for his face is wrinkled with care and saddened by misfortune. it don't do, you see, to get too far removed from this simple, natural life. * * * * * i am looking out for a little colder weather. the pond is not yet frozen sufficiently for us to cut ice as we want it. but both my neighbor and myself have gotten all things in readiness for the harvest. i like an open winter pretty well, but i do want ice. * * * * * it seems to me that dr. detmers is always going off "half-cocked." he once did the foreign cattle shipping interest great harm by an ill-advised and unwarranted dispatch concerning the prevalence of pleuro-pneumonia at the chicago stock yards, and now i notice that his alleged statements regarding diseased hogs and the disposal of them at the same point have furnished the french corps legislatif an excuse for enacting the decree prohibiting the introduction of american pork products into france. isn't it about time the department of agriculture at washington sat a little down on this man who writes too much with his pen? not that i would silence any man who sticks to facts, no matter whose soap-bubble he pricks; but a simple alarmist who rushes into print mainly for the pleasure it gives him to see his name in print, and to know that he is talked about, deserves to be squelched. for aught i know, though, dr. detmers has been misrepresented by the wily frenchmen. what has dr. loring to say on the subject? * * * * * but, after all, as i think the editor of the prairie farmer himself said some months ago, this foreign agitation of the live stock question may result in great good, inasmuch as it must lead to proper legislation in this country against the introduction and spread of contagious diseases among animals. it is without doubt the basis of the proceedings at the chicago cattle-growers' convention in november last, and of the present movement for immediate congressional action upon the matter. the difficulty abroad will, i believe, prove short-lived. letter from champaign. with the exception of two days, the d and d, which were stormy and gave us ten to twelve inches of snow, followed by a little sleet and rain, the latter half of december has been as delightful as the first half was, though a good deal colder. the sleighing since the th has never been better; and as there is ten inches to a foot of solid snow now lying on the ground, it is likely to last some time longer. the sleet and rain formed a crust an inch and a half thick, and though it is not very strong, it, together with the compact snow, makes getting down to the grass beneath quite out of the question, and stock have to depend on the stalk fields or be fed hay and corn. * * * * * this will make a heavier draft upon the grain and hay in reserve than has been anticipated by those who depend on carrying their stock through mostly on grass, and be sure to lessen the surplus and raise the price of corn, oats, and hay accordingly. corn in the field is drying out so fast under the influence of the dry, cold weather, stock do not refuse soft corn as they did after the first sharp frost in november and december. it is now seen that it would have been better to have left all the soft and some of the immature corn in the field, than to have husked and cribbed it as many did and lost more than would be believed, if reported, by mould and rot. * * * * * at any rate the fall wheat is safe so long as the present covering of snow lasts, and this more than compensates for the loss of winter pasture. the snow, as near as i can learn, covers all illinois, except a few counties on the west, and as usual, is quite as heavy in the timbered regions of which vandalia is near the center, as in northern illinois. so far the cold season considerably resembles the winter of - , and let us hope it will continue to the end, that we may have light snows and many of them, good sleighing and moderate temperature through january and february. * * * * * it has mystified me, as i have do doubt it has many others, why european governments have had so much to say about trichinæ in the hog, of which we have had scarcely any, and so little of hog cholera, of which we have had a good deal. but the mystery is now cleared up. the sickness and losses from hog cholera, have either by error or intention been reported to the several european governments as results of almost universal trichiniasis, and they have acted accordingly. that it should be so, seems surprising, but that it is so, we have the proof in the following paragraph from a late number of the journal d'agriculteur pratique. the writer, dr. hector george, one of the regular contributors, in a long article opposing rescinding the order prohibiting the importation of american pork products into france, first quotes the report of the chicago board of health, that per cent of hogs slaughtered in chicago are afflicted with trichinæ, goes on to say: "this per cent, however considerable it may be, is far inferior to the reality if we judge from an official dispatch addressed to earl granville by mr. crump, english consul at philadelphia." in trichiniasis destroyed , hogs in illinois alone. according to an official report by dr. detmers to the government of the united states, the hogs sick or dead from trichiniasis are hurried to the packing houses and are thereafter prepared and immediately sent off to europe. * * * * * m. paul bert, from whom we have recently heard on the same subject and in the same strain, no doubt got his inspiration from the article in the journal d'agriculteur pratique after which he probably read the official report of dr. detmers, to whom he refers, and like dr. george, either did not understand or intentionally misconstrued it for political purposes. perhaps what dr. detmers did report was bad enough and extravagant enough, but it had exclusive reference to hog cholera then prevalent, as any one can satisfy himself who will turn to the reports or the department of agriculture for the several years , , and . b.f.j. * * * * * a record of unfashionable crosses in short-horn cattle pedigrees; a book of pages; the only work of the kind in existence. send for a circular. f.p. & o.m. healy, bedford, taylor co., iowa. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , ; for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * poultry notes poultry-raisers. write for your paper. chat with correspondents. notwithstanding the fact that i have repeatedly said i would not answer questions unless they came through the prairie farmer the people who, by ways and means best known to themselves, have managed to obtain my address, keep right on asking questions by mail at a rate that would drive me frantic if anything could. but nothing ever troubles me long at a time, so i take your disregard of my wishes good naturedly, as i take everything else that i can't help, and in the future i will answer all questions whether they come through the prairie farmer or not, sometime. to be sure "sometime" is not very definite, but it is the best i can do. my poultry letters are "too numerous to mention" and it requires no small amount of time to answer them all; but i won't growl about that if you will only be patient and not grumble if you don't get an answer "by return mail," or "in the next paper." all questions of general interest will be answered in these columns as soon as possible, while those that require an immediate answer will be attended to by mail. poultry raisers who desire information that i can give, and who have not my address, can address the prairie farmer. however, let me ask you not to write except when necessary, and then please put your questions as plainly as possible, and "be as brief as the nature of the subject will permit." and when you are writing to me don't use postal cards. postal cards are only intended for the briefest of business messages, but lots of people use them for nearly all their correspondence. i know one man who writes love letters on postal cards. most women and some men manage to make one side of a Ã� inch postal card do duty for four pages of commercial note. they will write up and down and across lots and on the bias until the whole thing is so hopelessly mixed and tangled up that if the mystery of a woman's ways, or the fate of charlie ross were solved upon one of these cards all the "experts" in the world could not unravel it. a penny saved may be as good as a penny earned, and i have no objections to your saving it in a legitimate way, but when it comes to saving it at the expense of my time, patience, and eye-sight, i object most decidedly. hereafter i will not answer postals; i will not even read them. an iowa woman writes: "if it is true that vaccination prevents chicken cholera, how does it happen that fowls which had the genuine chicken cholera last season took the disease again this season and died from the effects of it? this happened on our place." i have puzzled my brains on the same thing but i am not scientific enough to explain things that i don't know anything about, so i leave that conundrum to be answered by some of the learned people who have the whole theory of chicken cholera at their tongues' end. several correspondents want to know how to get rid of rats in poultry-houses. one man says that he firmly believes that there are more rats than chickens in his poultry-house, and although he has tried half a dozen different kinds of rat-traps he rarely catches anything in them. i never found rat-traps much good; some of them would catch one or two, but after that the rest of the tribe would fight shy of all such devices for their undoing. a well trained rat terrier proved to be the best rat-trap we ever had on the premises, and for the poultry raiser who likes dogs a good ratter would be a good investment. or you can use some one of the "exterminators" that may be obtained at the drug stores. remove your fowls to some other building, prepare the poison according to directions, and place it in the poultry-house. the best kinds to use are those that make the rats thirsty and cause them to die immediately after drinking; water can then be left in the hen house and the dead rats will be found close by. when you have rat poison in the house see that it is properly marked and put out of reach of children and careless hired girls; and always see that all remnants of bait are taken care of. a nebraska man wants to know why his hens don't lay. says they are mostly early pullets, have a fairly comfortable poultry house, all the grain they will eat twice a day, and plenty of fresh water at all times. it seems to me that "all the grain they will eat twice a day" is rather overdoing the grain business. have some of that grain ground, mix with boiled vegetables and feed warm every morning; also give green food and raw bone, and my word for it your hens will soon "lay like sixty." fanny field. feather ends. plymouth rock pullets are not always early layers, for they often grow for ten or twelve months before laying, though some say as early as six months after being hatched. the best plan the keep plymouth rocks is to get the pullets hatched as early as possible. april is as late as should be desired, but a plymouth rock cock crossed on common hens will produce pullets that may be hatched later. n.y. times: a poultry-house should be large enough to be airy, but if it is kept strictly clean and sweet it will do no harm to be somewhat crowded. a house feet long, feet wide, feet high behind and feet in front, and having four roosting poles, all on a level and only a foot from the floor, will hold to fowls. this manner of arranging the roosts prevents a good deal of quarreling to get on the top perch. poultry-rearing for export appears to be largely on the increase in germany; and rummelsburg, near berlin, boasts of the largest goose market probably in the world. there arrive daily at that station on an average forty cars with geese and ducks. every car contains about , , thus making about , birds shipped every week, or an annual total of , , . the largest portion of these birds are reared and fattened in the surrounding provinces, and thence dispatched to all parts of germany, england, belgium, france, switzerland, and other european countries. farmers' call: turkeys do not require as warm quarters in winter as do other fowls. they will rest on a cherry tree when the mercury is frozen solid in the thermometer bulb, and then fly down in the morning and wade through the snow to cool off. this is a hint to the turkey raiser. do not confine the turkeys in quarters too warm and close, and be sure that they have three or four hours' exercise each day in the open air. the turkey is really a hardy fowl and easily wintered if you do not pet it too much. be a little unkind to it in cold weather. about all the shelter they will need is a wind-break. give them plenty of highly nutritious food. mr. harrison weir writes: "what the farmers should do is this--they should produce their poultry of the finest quality, poultry of the stamp of the old dorking--plump birds, thick-skinned birds, small-boned birds, and birds with little offal--fat them well, truss them well, and send them to market. the white-legged beauties would take the highest price, and, if well seen to, would very soon drive the foreign fowls from our markets, and english gold would gladden the home of the english henwife. i may mention that a neighboring farmer intends rearing , chickens next spring, all to be off his ground before the beginning of may, when the cattle will come out. he expects to get c. a head, and i believe he will, and it will pay him if he does." poultry houses should be whitewashed inside and out. for the inside we add two tablespoonfuls of carbolic acid or a pound of sulphur to a pailful of the wash (to kill vermin); do not be afraid of putting on too much, but apply the wash to every corner and crevice in the building. if you have plank floors, clean them off nicely and put on three or four inches of fresh earth. dirt floors should be dug up the depth of one foot. wash your windows (if you have any in your house, and if not you ought to have them), so that the fowls can see daylight, and in bad weather they will enjoy the confinement of the poultry houses much better. wash off the roosts with kerosene oil at least once a week. take every nest box and wash inside and out, and put in clean straw, sprinkling upon it some sulphur or loose tobacco. observe these rules, and your fowls will do better and keep healthier. we find this good advice floating about and do not know its source. the hints are worth remembering. * * * * * the throat.--"_brown's bronchial troches_" act directly on the organs of the voice. they have an extraordinary effect in all disorders of the throat. * * * * * the apiary [illustration] keep bees. the beginning of the new year is a general time of settling accounts and making resolutions for the future. the head of many a family is overcast with gloom as he ascertains the true state of his affairs, and perceives how little he has to show from the past year of toil. his family may have been industrious in a general way, and yet been consumers only, and not producers. we knew a farmer's family where there were three daughters just budding into womanhood. on inquiring of the mother what she had to sell to clothe her daughters with, she answered, not a thing. have you no butter, eggs, fowls, honey, or bees-wax to sell from this good farm? no, nothing. these girls were not idle! oh no. they pounded the organ, and the result was music as sweet as filing a saw; crocheted, darned lace, and helped mother. when their father went to town they asked him to bring them a pair of shoes, a bustle, or a necktie, with no thought or care. and all the while the neighbors said "he was hard run." there are few farmers' families that are so situated that they can not care for a few colonies of bees. they not only need the sweets they gather, but these industrious insects help to fertilize the bloom of their orchards and meadows. nature has appointed this insect, and it alone, to do this work for her. honey can be used in many ways as a substitute for sugar--in canning fruit, making cookies, and for other culinary purposes. we would advise all those contemplating bee-keeping to start on a small scale, if they have had no previous training. two colonies are plenty, and then let their knowledge increase in the same ratio as do their bees. the next thing in order, after purchasing bees, should be a good standard work on apiculture; and study it well. a person should be full of theory, and then they are ready for practice. those who are energetic, willing to work, intelligent and willing, eager to learn, observing, persevering, and attentive to their work, will rarely ever fail in apiculture. we have heard farmers say that bees will not flourish with the same care given to other farm stock, and that they have not time to attend to them. we would recommend to all such to try the experiment of procuring a colony or two of beautiful italians, in some good movable frame hive, and present them to the family, with abundance of bee literature, and see if they are not taken care of, especially if the almighty dollar puts in an appearance. mrs. l. harrison. the new bees. prof. cook, at the late michigan convention of bee-keepers, spoke in this wise on the topic of the new bees: "i have had no experience with the cyprian bees, but i think more and more of the syrian. i find no trouble to handle them, and take my large class of students, new to the business, right into the apiary. these thirty or forty students daily manipulate the bees, doing everything that the bee-keeper ever needs to do, and rarely ever get stung. i find that the comb honey of the syrians is excellent, that the bees go readily into the sections. we did not get all our sections so that they could be crated without the use of the separators; but i am not sure but that it was more our fault than the fault of the bees. they are very prolific, breeding even when there is no nectar to gather, and they often gather when other bees are idle. i have this fall secured from mr. frank benton a carniolan queen, and shall try crossing the carniolans with the syrians. perhaps we can thus secure a strain with the amiability of the carniolan, and the business of the syrians." hive and honey hints. mr. willingford, of carlingford, ontario, who had a crop of several tons of honey this year, has taken it to england for sale. manufacturers of tobacco, of pickles, of cakes and cookies, confectioners, and pork-packers are now using honey more extensively than ever in the preparation of their specialties. a singular instance of bee-swarming occurred a short time ago in singapore harbor, on board the british steamer antonio, which at the time was lying entirely outside the shipping in the roads. a swarm of wild bees from the shore suddenly located themselves directly under the sternpost of a boat lying above the deck, and all attempts to drive them away proved unavailing, the chief officer being very severely stung in endeavoring to get rid of them. they held to their position for several days, and were eventually destroyed after the steamer had hauled alongside the wharf. rev. l.l. langstroth recently said: when i commenced bee-keeping, a sting caused much swelling, but in time this trouble passed away. several years passed, during which i handled no bees, and when i again attempted it, i found myself more susceptible to the poison than ever, but by continuing to work with the bees, disregarding the stings, my former indifference returned. ohio bee-keepers will discuss the following questions at the columbus meeting on the - : how to winter bees successfully. how many brood-frames are necessary in one hive? what can be done to prevent adulteration of honey? how to create a home market for honey. how many colonies can be kept in one locality? can we do without separators? what shall we do with second swarms? which is the most salable section--one-half, one, or two pounds? which are best--deep or shallow frames? is it advisable to have a standard-size frame for all bee-keepers? many are inquiring the proper way to let bees out on shares, so as to have both parties satisfied. i do not know any such way, for the most i have known in regard to letting bees out on shares resulted in both parties being dissatisfied. but it all depends on what the agreement is; and perhaps you had better have it down in writing. one case i have recently heard of, the agreement was to divide the profits. well, it so happened that there was no profit, but there was a pretty big loss; and as no provision had been made for this state of affairs, each one felt disposed to put the loss on to the shoulders of the other. i decided it would be about fair to divide the loss; but very likely circumstances might make this not the right way after all. so says the editor of gleanings. it strikes us that he is all right, but if he had said to bee-keepers "use the same common sense as to contracts that people do in other kinds of business," he would have covered the whole ground. * * * * * the prairie farmer and youth's companion one year, $ for the two. it is not required that both papers be sent to one address, nor to the same post-office. address prairie farmer pub. co., monroe street, chicago. * * * * * railroads. [illustration] a man who is unacquainted with the geography of this country will see by examining this map that the chicago, rock island & pacific r'y by the central position of its line, connects the east and the west by the shortest route, and carries passengers, without change of cars, between chicago and kansas city, council bluffs, leavenworth, atchison, minneapolis and st. paul. it connects in union depots with all the principal lines of road between the atlantic and the pacific oceans. its equipment is unrivaled and magnificent, being composed of most comfortable and beautiful day coaches, magnificent horton reclining chair cars, pullman's prettiest palace sleeping cars, and the best line of dining cars in the world. three trains between chicago and missouri river points. two trains between chicago and minneapolis and st. paul, via the famous "albert lea route." a new and direct line, via seneca and kankakee, has recently been opened between richmond norfolk, newport news, chattanooga, atlanta, augusta, nashville, louisville, lexington, cincinnati indianapolis and lafayette, and omaha, minneapolis and st. paul and intermediate points. all through passengers travel on fast express trains. tickets for sale at all principal ticket offices in the united states and canada. baggage checked through and rates of fare always as low as competitors that offer less advantages. for detailed information, get the maps and folders of the great rock island route, at your nearest ticket office, or address r.r. cable, vice-pres. & gen'l m'g'r, e. st. john, gen'l tkt. & pass. agt. chicago. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _from this date to january , : for $ . you get it for one year and a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * silk culture. women in silk culture. the feminine portion of our population is getting to be mighty independent. instead of waiting, micawber-like, for something (a man) to turn up they are going to work to turn it up themselves. they would rather make a living for themselves than have a man to make it for them. they are teaching schools, operating telegraph instruments and telephones, clerking, keeping books of account, type-writing, doing short-hand reporting, lecturing, preaching, practicing law, and some have so far fallen from grace as to be editing papers. but many of these occupations present closed doors to our country girls and women. many of these can not leave their country homes, and these occupations, with the exception of school teaching, can not be carried on in the country. others, who could leave home, are chary of braving the wiles and temptations of the city, and their friends are still more loth to have them go. the great need is some work, light, respectable, and yet fairly remunerative, which our country lassies can carry on at home. school teaching is possible, but teaching country district schools is the most thankless of all drudgery, and, besides, a majority of our young women are not able to endure the worry and close confinement. if it can be made successful, sericulture offers by far the best opportunity to country girls to earn their own pin money, or even their own living. it can be engaged in at home; it is light, pleasant, and interesting work; and there is no doubt that american silk can be produced of such a quality that there will be a brisk demand for it at good prices. but if all this be true the question at once presents itself, why have not american women engaged largely in sericulture? the answer is that they have been appalled at the very outset by the alleged expense of the undertaking. the promoters of the enterprise took to writing books. there was an excuse for this amounting almost to a necessity. to engage in silk culture, a person must be possessed of some special knowledge. it is no harder than poultry or bee-keeping, but a person to succeed at these must have some expert knowledge, and as sericulture was a new thing, beginners must have books containing what they needed. but these authors made the business much more difficult and expensive than it should be. first of all, they laid it down as one of the medes and persian laws of sericulture, that the worms must have mulberry leaves to subsist upon. mulberry sprouts are costly to begin with; then the trees must grow at least two years, and should grow five years, before the leaves are used. this, of itself, was enough to deter but a very few from silk culture. but they made it appear, also, that very expensive appliances for a cocoonery were necessary, and only the most costly breeds of worms should be used, entailing greater expense and difficulty. the books were, and for that matter are, filled with dry scientific details of the internal construction of the worm and of its habits--details which only confused the learner and which, though giving an author material from which to deduce rules of instruction, should have been omitted from the book and their place supplied with the rules deduced. in short, it seemed to be the prime object to make sericulture as hard and forbidding as possible, and to deter the people from it rather than to induce them to engage in the work. for this very reason there has been considerable popular indifference to it, and from the agricultural press it has not received that attention which so promising an industry deserves. i would not be so unjust as to leave the reader to infer that all authors on sericulture have been thus guilty. there have been some very few who from the very start have presented it in as easy and practicable a light as was consistent with successful work. nor would i be ready to assert that those who have said it could not be made financially profitable without mulberry groves, fancy priced worms, and expensive appliances, have done so from base motives. yet it would appear as if not a few could be justly indicted of this; for they have mulberry sprouts, fancy priced worms, and costly appliances to sell. and perhaps it occurred to them that if they deterred the people generally from taking hold of it, they would have less opposition and competition. but be this as it may, the fact is that it is not necessary to have mulberry groves, costly appliances, or even fancy priced worms (though good worms only should be reared), in order to profitably engage in sericulture. i know of no business presenting so promising an opening that requires less capital. and i say this, having no axe to grind in any way, simply for the sake of those girls and women who might make money by it, and who would do so if they only knew the facts. i have no book, no sprouts, no worms, nothing whatever, to sell. i have said that the leaves of the mulberry are not essential to silk growing. if this be true the greatest obstacle in the way of sericulture becoming a great national industry will have been removed. and that it is true is proven by the experience of not a few practical silk-growers. without exception those who have tested the matter say that the leaves of the osage-orange are equal to those of the mulberry, and some say they are better. my position brings me into correspondence with the leading specialists in agricultural pursuits, and among others with many practical silk-growers. to-day i received letters from three silk-growers, one in illinois, one in kansas, and one in california. each had fed the leaves of the osage-orange exclusively for the last two years, and with the best results. one said there was no doubt that they were at least equal to the leaves of the mulberry, and the other two pronounced them superior. one of our best authorities on sericulture, prof. barricelli, has shown by means of chemical analyses and other scientific data, that as nourishment for silk-worms the osage is superior to the mulberry. in fact, nine-tenths of the practical silk-growers of the west, those who are making it not only practicable but profitable, are now feeding osage leaves exclusively. this should be known by the people at large. there can be no monopoly of the osage-orange. no one can demand of the expectant silk culturist exorbitant prices for osage sprouts. in very few localities will it be necessary to plant the osage even. we have an abundance of osage hedges, particularly in the west. in such localities the silk culturist will be at no expense whatever for food for the worms, and will not be under even the necessity of waiting a couple of years for it to grow. when this is more fully understood by the girls and women of the country, we may expect silk culture to assume the importance of a profitable national industry. john m. stahl. * * * * * medical. weak nervous men [illustration:] whose debility, exhausted powers, premature decay and failure to perform life's duties properly are caused by excesses, errors of youth, etc., will find a perfect and lasting restoration to robust health and vigorous manhood in the marston bolus. neither stomach drugging nor instruments. this treatment of nervous debility and physical decay is uniformly successful because based on perfect diagnosis, new and direct methods and absolute thoroughness. full information and treatise free. address consulting physician of marston remedy co., w. th st., new york. * * * * * two ladies met one day. one said to the other "by the way how is that catarrh of yours?" "why it's simply horrid, getting worse every day." "well, why don't you try 'dr. sykes' sure cure,' i know it will cure you!" "well, then i will, for i've tried everything else." just six weeks afterward they met again and no. said. "why, how much better you look, what's up! going to get married, or what?" "well, yes, and it's all owing to 'dr. sykes' sure cure for catarrh;' oh, why didn't i know of it before? it's simply wonderful." send cents to dr. c.r. sykes, monroe street, chicago, for valuable book of full information, and mention the "two ladies." * * * * * days' trial dr. dye's [illustration] electro voltaic belt, and other electric appliances. we will send on thirty days' trial, to men, young or old, who are suffering from nervous debility, lost vitality, and those diseases of a personal nature resulting from abuses and other causes. speedy relief and complete restoration to health, vigor and manhood guaranteed. send at once for illustrated pamphlet free. address voltaic belt co., marshall, mich. * * * * * consumption. i have a positive remedy for the above disease; by its use thousands of cases of the worst kind and of long standing have been cured. in deed, so strong is my faith in its efficacy, that i will send two bottles free, together with a valuable treatise on this disease, to any sufferer. give express & p.o. address. dr. t.a. slocum, pearl st., n.y. * * * * * publications the youth's companion for . the companion presents below the announcement of its fifty-seventh volume. its unusual character, both in the range of its topics, and its remarkably brilliant list of contributors, will, we trust, be accepted as a grateful recognition of the favor with which the paper has been received by more than , subscribers. * * * * * illustrated serial stories. a story of english rustic life, by thomas hardy. the foundling of paris, by alphonse daudet. a boys' story, by j.t. trowbridge. the covenanter's daughter, by mrs. oliphant. a story of adventure, by c.a. stephens. my school at orange grove, by marie b. williams. * * * * * science and natural history. eccentricities of insanity, by dr. w.a. butler. common adulterations of food, by dr. j.c. draper. the home life of oysters, and other natural history papers, by arabella b. buckley. wonders in ourselves; or the curiosities of the human body, by dr. austin flint, jr. insect enemies of the garden, the orchard and the wheat-field, by a.s. packard, jr. demons of the air and water. a fascinating series of papers on sanitary science, by r. ogden doremus. the youth of the brain, "speech in man," "animal poisons and their effects," and other papers, by dr. w.a. hammond. strange ways of curing people. a description of curious sanitaria,--the peat, mud, sand, whey, and grape cures, by william h. rideing. * * * * * encouragement and advice. hints for poor farmers, by c.e. winder. the failures of great men, by james parton. a dietary for nervous people, by dr. w.a. hammond. hints for country house-builders, by calvert vaux. the gift of memory, and other papers, giving instances of self-help, by samuel smiles. a new profession for young men. the opportunities for young men as electrical engineers, by thomas a. edison. at the age of twenty-one. a series of papers showing what great men had accomplished, and what they proposed doing, at that period of their lives, by edwin p. whipple. * * * * * original poems. by alfred tennyson, victor hugo, the earl of lytton, j.c. whittier, t.b. aldrich, dr. charles mackay, and many others. * * * * * illustrated adventure and travel. shark-hunting, by t.b. luce. four amusing stories, by c.a. stephens. outwitted. an indian adventure, by lieut. a. chapin. a honeymoon in the jungle, by phil. robinson. wrecked upon a volcanic island, by richard heath. stories of the cabins in the west, by e.j. marston. adventures in the mining districts, by h. fillmore. the capture of some infernal machines, by william howson. breaking in the reindeer, and other sketches of polar adventure, by w.h. gilder. an american in persia, by the american minister resident, teheran, s.g.w. benjamin. china as seen by a chinaman, by the editor of the chinese american, wong chin foo. stories of menageries. incidents connected with menagerie life, and the capture and taming of wild beasts for exhibition, by s.s. cairns. boys afoot in italy and switzerland. the adventures of two english boys travelling abroad at an expense of one dollar a day, by nugent robinson. * * * * * reminiscences and anecdotes. stage-driver stories, by rose terry cooke. stories of saddle-bag preachers, by h.l. winckley. my first visit to a newspaper office, by murat halstead. queen victoria's household and drawing-rooms, by h.w. lucy. child friendships of charles dickens, by his daughter, mamie dickens. our herbariums; adventures in collecting them, by a young lady. my pine-apple farm, with incidents of florida life, by c.h. pattee. bigwigs of the english bench and bar, by a london barrister, w.l. woodroffe. at school with sir garnet wolseley, and the life of a page of honor in the vice-regal court of dublin, by nugent robinson. student waiters. some humorous incidents of a summer vacation in the white mountains, by child mcpherson. * * * * * the editorials of the companion, without having any bias, will give clear views of current events at home and abroad. the children's page will sustain its reputation for charming pictures, poems, and stories for the little ones. issued weekly. subscription price, $ . . specimen copies free. special offer.--to any one who subscribes now, and sends us $ . , we will send the companion free to january st, , and a full year's subscription from that date. address, perry mason & co., temple place, boston, mass. _please mention where you read this advertisement._ * * * * * household. for nothing lovelier can be found in woman than to study _household_ good.--_milton._ the school-marm's story. a frosty chill was in the air-- how plainly i remember-- the bright autumnal fires had paled, save here and there an ember; the sky looked hard, the hills were bare, and there were tokens everywhere that it had come--november. i locked the time-worn school-house door, the village seat of learning. across the smooth, well trodden path my homeward footstep turning; my heart a troubled question bore, and in my mind, as oft before, a vexing thought was burning. "why is it up hill all the way?" thus ran my meditations: the lessons had gone wrong that day and i had lost my patience. "is there no way to soften care, and make it easier to bear life's sorrows and vexations?" across my pathway through the wood a fallen tree was lying; on this there sat two little girls, and one of them was crying. i heard her sob: "and if i could, i'd get my lessons awful good, but what's the use of trying?" and then the little hooded head sank on the other's shoulder. the little weeper sought the arms that opened to enfold her. against the young heart, kind and true, she nestled close, and neither knew that i was a beholder. and then i heard--ah! ne'er was known such judgment without malice, nor queenlier council ever heard in senate, house or palace!-- "i should have failed there, i am sure, don't be discouraged; try once more, and i will help you, alice." "and i will help you." this is how to soften care and grieving; life is made easier to bear by helping and by giving. here was the answer i had sought, and i, the teacher, being taught the secret of true living. if "i will help you" were the rule. how changed beyond all measure life would become! each heavy load would be a golden treasure; pain and vexation be forgot; hope would prevail in every lot, and life be only pleasure. --_wolstan dixey._ a chat about the fashions. although the lady readers of the prairie farmer have probably by this time made up the heavier part of their winter wardrobe, still a few suggestions may not be out of place, for the "fashions" is a subject of which we seldom tire. in discussing the subject of silk and silk-culture at the late woman's congress, mrs julia ward howe said that "although silk is said to be depreciating in value, and is not quite as popular as formerly, yet we must confess it lies very near the feminine heart," at which statement an audible smile passed over the audience, as each one acknowledged to herself its truth. we are glad to see that wrappers are becoming quite "the thing" for afternoon home wear, and a lady now need not feel at all out of place receiving her callers in a pretty, gracefully made wrapper. the watteau wrapper is made of either silk or brocaded woolen goods, conveniently short, the back cut square at the neck, and folded in a handsome watteau plait at the center, with a full ruche effect. a yolk portion of silk fills in the open neck and is sewed flatly underneath to the back. the side seams are curved so that a clinging effect is produced at the sides. jabbots of lace extending down the front, and a prettily bowed ribbon at the right shoulder, with a standing collar at the neck, and a linen choker collar give the finishing touches to the toilette. velvets and velveteens seem to be taking the place of silk, and are really quite as cheap. in fact, velveteens are cheaper, as they are so much wider. a suit of velveteen is fashionable for any occasion--for receptions, church or street costume. the redingote or polonaise is very stylish and pretty, especially for a tall, rather slight person. for a young miss the close-fitting frock coat, with pointed vest effectively disclosed between the cut-away edges of the coat fronts, is much worn. the latter curve away from the shoulders and are nicely rounded off at their lower front corners. an underarm dart gives a smooth adjustment over each hip, and in these darts are inserted the back edges of the vest. buttons and buttonholes close the vest, but the coat fronts do not meet at all. the coat and long-pointed overskirt can be made of any heavy material, but the vest should be of silk; a deep box-plait on the bottom of the underskirt made of silk to match the vest will make the suit very stylish and pretty. there ought to be great satisfaction among the wearers of bonnets and hats this season, because they can so easily have what they want--big or little, plain or decorated, as they please. for a person with dark hair, gold braid loosely put around the edge of a velvet capote is very becoming. bunches of tips are worn much more than the long, drooping plumes, though both are fashionable; while birds--sometimes as many as three on a hat--are often preferred to either. we notice upon the street a great many elegantly dressed ladies with but a single band of wide velvet ribbon fastened somewhat carelessly around the bonnet and tied in a bow under the chin. unique it may be, but undoubtedly the taste of the wearer, would be the verdict of the passer by. in fact, one can scarcely be out of the fashion in the choice of a bonnet or hat, but care should be taken that it be just the thing for the wearer, and that it be properly put on. i firmly believe in the doctrine that "good clothes tendeth toward grace." what woman can not talk better when she knows she looks well? she can then forget herself and lose all self-consciousness, which is a state most devoutly to be desired by all women--particularly our young women. so, girls, study your costumes, especially the "superfluities," or "furbelows," as they are wont to be called; make yourselves look as pretty as you possibly can--and then forget yourselves. i wish all our lady readers might have been here the holiday week, for the stores were perfect bowers of beauty. it was a pretty sight in itself to watch the crowds of happy-faced children, with their little pocket-books in their hands, at the various counters buying presents for father, mother, brothers, and sisters. children always enjoy christmas more when they can make, as well as receive, presents. so i hope all our little readers were made happy by both giving and receiving. i am sorry i could not give you a more satisfactory talk on the fashions, but our space is limited this week. i hope the ladies will not forget that our "household" department is open to them, and that they will contribute anything that may be of interest to the others. mary howe. a kitchen silo. the farmer's wife in the netherlands has long been using a sort of a silo. probably she had been doing so for long years before m. geoffrey began experimenting with preserved stock food in france. the netherland housewife's silo consists of an earthenware jar about two feet tall. into one of these jars in summer time she places the kidney bean; in another shelled green peas; in another broad beans, and so on. making a layer about six inches deep in each. she sprinkles a little salt on top and presses the whole firmly down. then she adds another layer and more salt. she leaves a light weight on top to keep all well pressed down and exclude the air, in the intervals between pickings for often the harvest of a single day will not fill the jar. when full, she puts on a heavier weight, and covers all with brown paper. she thus has green vegetables preserved for winter. the ensilage is said to be "more or less good, according to taste." * * * * * chicken salad: two common sized fowls, one teacup of good salad oil, half a jar of french sweet mustard, the hard-boiled yolks of ten eggs, half a pint of vinegar, one teaspoonful of cayenne pepper, eight heads of celery, one teaspoon of salt or a little more if required. cut and mix the chicken and celery and set away in a cool place. mash the eggs to a paste with the oil, then add the vinegar and other things, mix thoroughly, but do not pour it over the salad until about half an hour before serving, as the celery may become wilted. * * * * * soft gingerbread: one cup butter and two cups sugar well worked together, three eggs well beaten in, one cup new orleans molasses, one cup good sweet milk and five cups of flour into which has been stirred one teaspoonful baking powder, not heaped, two tablespoonfuls ground cinnamon and one tablespoonful ground ginger. bake in small dripping pans not too full, as they will rise. * * * * * mixture of two parts of glycerine, one part ammonia, and a little rose water whitens and softens the hands. * * * * * our books. books free! good books are valued by intelligent men and women more than silver and gold. they are treasures in every home. they are to the mind what light and heat are to plants. they _store the mind with useful knowledge_; the mind directs the hands. an intelligent man has an advantage over one who is ignorant, whether he is a farmer, or mechanic, or merchant, and is surer of success in his occupation. think how _losses of time and money may be saved_ by having some book at hand containing just the information desired in some line of the rural industries. we offer an excellent opportunity for any one to obtain books free for himself or family, and also for societies, farmers' clubs, and associations to make additions to a library, or to start one. these books comprise standard works, and the latest and best books for farmers, stockmen, dairymen, fruit-growers, gardeners, florists, poultrymen, apiarists, silk-culturists, housekeepers, architects, etc., etc. the prairie farmer publishing company will give to any person, association, or club, who will obtain and send subscribers to the prairie farmer (including both new subscribers and renewals), at the regular price of the paper ($ ) each, any of the books contained in our book list on the following terms: for three subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . for four subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . for five subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . for six subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . for seven subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . for eight subscribers, books to the amount of $ . for ten subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . _for twelve subscriptions and upward_, a dollar's worth of books for every two subscriptions sent at $ . each. all books given under these offers will be delivered at our office, no. monroe street. if it is desired that they shall be forwarded by express, they will be packed and delivered at the express office by us, the receiver to pay cost of carriage. sent by mail to any part of the united states or canada, the postage will be seven cents on each dollar's worth of books. it is necessary that parties to whom the books are given shall remit us the postage before the books are sent. * * * * * a dictionary free! this is no catchpenny affair, but a valuable lexicon. it is the popular american dictionary, on the basis of webster, worcester, johnson, and other eminent american and english authorities. it contains over , words, with accurate definitions, proper spelling, and exact pronunciation; to which is added a mass of valuable information. it is enriched with illustrations. remember, every subscriber at the regular price of the prairie farmer gets this dictionary free, if preferred to our commercial map. * * * * * here is another. ropp's calculator and account book for . this is the most useful thing in the way of a memorandum book and calculator ever issued. it is a work of nearly pages of printed matter and an equal number of blank leaves, ruled, for keeping accounts. the contents include a vast array of practical calculations, , or more in number, arranged for reference like a dictionary, so that a farmer or business man may turn to the figures, and find the answer to any problem in business. there are three kinds. we use no. . full leather; assorted colors, with flap, slate pocket, and a renewable account book, ruled with divisions or headings especially adapted to farmers' use. the retail price of this book in leather is $ . we will send it free to every subscriber to the prairie farmer who sends us $ . or we will send three copies of no. , the cheaper issue. * * * * * and yet another. american etiquette and rules of politeness. it is the latest and best standard work recommended and endorsed by all who have read it. the acknowledged authority. beautifully and appropriately illustrated; handsomely and substantially bound. it contains chapters, treating on all subjects relating to etiquette. we send this book--plain edition, to any subscriber desiring it who sends $ . for the prairie farmer year, or for two subscribers to the prairie farmer at $ each, we will send american etiquette bound in english cloth, burnished edges. our large and varied premium list will be issued in a few days. send for it. * * * * * miscellaneous. to preserve the health use the magneton appliance co.'s magnetic lung protector! price only $ . they are priceless to ladies, gentlemen, and children with weak lungs; no case of pneumonia or croup is ever known where these garments are worn. they also prevent and cure heart difficulties, colds, rheumatism, neuralgia, throat troubles, diphtheria, catarrh, and all kindred diseases. will wear any service for three years. are worn over the under-clothing. catarrh, it is needless to describe the symptoms of this nauseous disease that is sapping the life and strength of only too many of the fairest and best of both sexes. labor, study, and research in america, europe, and eastern lands, have resulted in the magnetic lung protector, affording cure for catarrh, a remedy which contains no drugging of the system, and with the continuous stream of magnetism permeating through the afflicted organs; must restore them to a healthy action. we place our price for this appliance at less than one-twentieth of the price asked by others for remedies upon which you take all the chances, and we especially invite the patronage of the many persons who have tried drugging the stomachs without effect. how to obtain this appliance. go to your druggist and ask for them. if they have not got them, write to the proprietors, enclosing the price, in letter at our risk, and they will be sent to you at once by mail, post paid. send stamp for the "new departure in medical treatment without medicine," with thousands of testimonials, the magneton appliance co., state street, chicago, ill. note.--send one dollar in postage stamps or currency (in letter at our risk) with size of shoe usually worn, and try a pair of our magnetic insoles, and be convinced of the power residing in our magnetic appliances. positively _no cold feet where they are worn, or money refunded._ * * * * * club rates. to our readers. the prairie farmer is the oldest, most reliable, and the leading agricultural journal of the great northwest, devoted exclusively to the interests of the farmer, gardener, florist, stock breeder, dairyman, etc., and every species of industry connected with that great portion of the people of the world, the producers. now in the forty-second year of its existence, and never, during more than two score years, having missed the regular visit to its patrons, it will continue to maintain supremacy as a standard authority on matters pertaining to agriculture and kindred productive industries, and as a fresh and readable family and fireside journal. it will from time to time add new features of interest, securing for each department the ablest writers of practical experience. the prairie farmer will discuss, without fear or favor, all topics of interest properly belonging to a farm and fireside paper, treat of the most approved practices in agriculture, horticulture, breeding, etc.; the varied machinery, implements, and improvements in same, for use both in field and house; and, in fact, everything of interest to the agricultural community, whether in field, market, or home circle. it will give information upon the public domain, western soils, climate, etc.; answer inquiries on all manner of subjects which come within its sphere; give each week, full and reliable market, crop, and weather reports; present the family with choice and interesting literature; amuse and instruct the young folks: and, in a word, aim to be, in every respect, an indispensable and unexceptionable farm and fireside companion. terms of subscription and 'club rates': one copy, year, postage paid $ . two copies, " " " . five " " sent at one time . ten " " sent at one time, and one to club getter . twenty " " sent at one time, and one to club getter . address the prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. ill. * * * * * self cure free nervous lost weakness debility manhood and decay a favorite prescription of a noted specialist (now retired.) druggists can fill it. address dr. ward & co., louisiana, mo. * * * * * our young folks a talk about the lion. we wonder how many of the prairie farmer boys and girls have seen the lion, "king of beasts," as he is called. perhaps not all of you as yet, though many of you doubtless will as the years roll on--and, by the way, you will find that the older you grow the more quickly will they speed away. so be careful in this, the beautiful springtime of your lives, to so cultivate and make ready the garden of your minds that the coming manhood and womanhood may not only find you with well developed arms and limbs and muscles, ready to face the world and to help lift some of its burdens, but also with a mind that has kept even pace with the body--because of constant _growth_. we think we will have to depart from our usual natural history articles some day, and have a talk with the boys and girls on this subject of growth--growth in its largest, broadest sense, the mind, soul, and body all growing together into the stature of a perfect man. but to return to the lion. this animal is the largest of the cat family and is found, only in asia and africa. the asiatic lion is not so large nor so fierce as the african, and has a much smaller mane. the mane of the african lion is long and thick, and gives the animal a very noble appearance; the female, however, has no mane. the lion is always of one color, that is, without spots or stripes, generally tawny, though the mane is dark sometimes nearly black. the lion gets its full growth when seven or eight years old, and lives usually about twenty-five years, though some have been known to live much longer in menageries. these animals see much better in the night than in the day, so they generally hide away during the day and search for food in the gray dawn of the morning. they feed chiefly on antelopes, zebras, giraffes, and wild cattle. it is said that the lion rarely attacks man, only in cases of extreme hunger; indeed, they seem somewhat afraid of man. dr. livingstone says that when the lion meets a man in daylight it will stop two or three seconds to stare at him, then turn slowly round and walk off a few steps, looking over its shoulder, then begin to trot, and when at last he thinks he is no longer seen will bound away like a hare. the doctor says also, that the roar of the lion is very like the cry of the ostrich, but the former roars only at night, however, while the latter cries only by day. did you not think it wonderful when you saw for the first time, perhaps, a keeper walk boldly into the lions' cage, when in their natural state they are so very fierce and wild? well, we think it is wonderful, although the keepers tell us that they are easily tamed. in ancient times they were used in many more ways than they are now. hanno, the carthaginian general, had a lion to carry his baggage, and mark antony often rode through the streets of rome in a chariot drawn by lions. a short time ago we read a story of a slave named androclus, who, while hiding away from his master in the deserts of africa, cured a lion of lameness by pulling a thorn out of its foot. the slave was afterward caught, carried to rome, and condemned to be eaten by the wild beasts. he was thrown into a lion's den, but the beast, instead of killing him fawned upon him and showed the greatest delight at seeing him; androclus was surprised to find that it was the same lion whose foot he had cured in the desert. the emperor, it is said, was so much pleased at the sight that he gave the slave his pardon, and presented him also with the lion, after which he used to lead the great beast tamely through the streets, held simply by a little chain. in modern times, also, lions have been known to exhibit strong friendship for man. in , two lions in the jardin des plantes (garden of plants), at paris, became so fond of their keeper that when he was taken sick they gave signs of the greatest sorrow, and when he recovered and came back to them they rushed to meet him, roaring with joy, meanwhile licking his hands and face. perhaps you have read of theodorus, king of abyssinia (he killed himself in ), who used to keep several tame lions in his palace and treated them almost like dogs. travelers tell us, too, that these great animals often show fondness for other animals, as, for instance, an old lioness belonging to the dublin zoological gardens was taken sick, and was greatly annoyed by the rats. at last a little terrier dog was put into the cage, but was received by the lioness with a surly growl; finally when the old animal saw the little dog could kill her enemies, the rats, she coaxed him to her, and petted and fondled him, so that they soon became great friends. the lion is a mammal of the order carnivora, or flesh-eating animals. the word lion comes from the latin leo, greek leon, lion. would you like me to tell you next week about a bear i saw upon the hills of nova scotia, near the scene of longfellow's beautiful evangeline, a few months ago? mary howe. a jack-knife genius. st. louis post-dispatch: william yohe claims to be the champion jack-knife artist of the day, although he was born in st. louis and not yankeedom. a reporter heard of this professional lacerator of pine sticks and sought him out. it was not until the inside of an unused methodist church at kirkwood, this county, was reached that mr. yohe and his knife was cornered. the knife was slashing cigar-boxes to pieces at railway speed when the reporter opened up with: "are you the man who makes an automatic world's fair and st. louis exposition with a knife?" "no, that isn't what i call it. i am making what i call the missouri pacific and strasburg cathedral automatic wonder, with the golden ark of the covenant. it will contain over , pieces and will have , moving and working figures." all around the gaunt and dismantled church were piles of cigar-boxes and laths and myriads of nicely-carved pieces of wood, apparently portions of models of buildings. the whittler was a small man, with keen eyes and ready tongue and about thirty-six years of age. in the course of an hour's conversation he said in substance: "i didn't know that i was anything extra of a whittler until about , when, in a small way, i made some models. i was in texas working at millwrighting. the first large piece i ever made was a model of a bermuda castle. afterward i made balmoral castle, bingen castle, miramar castle, and the texas state capitol at austin. solomon's temple contained , pieces and had , windows. it is now on exhibition in texas. the austin capitol building has , pieces and moving people. every room and department in the building was given, with all the officers and legislators. everybody was represented, down to the man sawing wood in the basement for the furnaces. all the figures were moved by a wooden engine, which was run by sand falling on an overshot wheel. i made this piece at odd moments in . "i have just hired this church and begun steady work. i shall sleep and eat in this church until about may , next. the material? yes, it does take considerable. i have already used up cigar boxes and laths. it will take in all , cigar boxes, laths, and feet of lumber. the cigar boxes i get for one cent each. i used no tools except my knife." * * * * * little johnny botts found a garter snake in the park the other day and he brought it home and hid it in the piano. when his sister's young man opened the instrument that evening to play "for goodness sake" he thought he had 'em and yelled like a piute on the war-hath. they won't believe in johnny's innocence somehow, and his father said that after dinner he'd attend to his case. when the family sat down to table johnny solemnly entered the room in his stocking feet and carrying a pillow which he placed on his chair before sitting down. "what new monkey shine is that?" growled old botts. "s-s-s-h, pa," said johnny anxiously; "i was playing fireworks with billy simson this afternoon and i swallowed a torpedo." "did, eh?" "yes, and if anything should touch me kinder hard i might go off and all bust up." * * * * * three thousand dollars in prizes is offered by the youth's companion for the best short stories either for boys, for girls, humorous stories, or stories of adventure, to be sent them before may th, . the terms and conditions of the competition are issued in a circular--for which all who desire to compete are invited to send. * * * * * sin is very much like the ordinary north american mule. it may be very tame and docile at the front, but in the rear there is always a sly kick hidden away and you'd better be on your guard. our book table books received. arius the libyan: an idyl of the primitive church. author unknown. new york: d. appleton & co. chicago: jansen, mcclurg & co. mo. cloth. price, $ . . this is a romance of the church in the latter part of the third and the beginning of the fourth centuries. the scene is laid near cyrene, a.d. . it is an exquisitely written idyl of primitive christian life, and can not fail to attract a great deal of attention, especially now that the public mind is being turned in the direction of early church history. it deals in a powerful, yet simple, manner with that subtle question, the trinity of the godhead, and gives the reader many new thoughts in connection with it. the characters portrayed awaken an unusual degree of interest, being as they are, persons eminent in history, both secular and religious. as one follows the story to its close he can not but agree with the author, that arius, the hero and arch-heretic of the nicene age, was "one of the grandest, purest, least understood, and most systematically misrepresented characters in human history." the latter portion of the book brings out, prominently, the real character of constantine, stigmatized by arius as "that unbaptised pagan, the flamen of jupiter." the noble plan of the book and the grave importance of the questions that agitate the characters, combine to make it a valuable production to both believer and skeptic. the organs of speech. by g.h. von meyer, professor in ordinary of anatomy at the university of zurich. new york: d. appleton & co. chicago: jansen, mcclurg & co. mo. cloth. price $ . . this book is the forty-sixth volume in the international scientific series, and needs no better introduction than the well-known name of the author. the subject of the organs of speech and their application in the formation of articulate sounds is treated in a masterly and exhaustive manner. the object of the author has been not merely "to enter into the field of discussion upon the various modifications of sounds, * * but to bring forward a sufficient number of examples in confirmation of the laws explained," in which purpose he has most admirably succeeded. the work contains forty-seven wood cuts, and will be a valuable addition to any library. we would recommend it especially to teachers of vocal music and declamation. fifty years' recollections. by jeriah bonham peoria, ill.: j.w. franks & sons. sold by subscription. this is a carefully compiled work, giving the author's observations and reflections on the historical events of illinois for the past fifty years, it also gives very interesting and full biographical sketches of many of the prominent men who have, during this time, figured in the affairs of the state, so far as mr. bonham's personal acquaintanceship and recollections extend. the sketches, condensed, yet complete, of the sixteen governors of illinois, from shadrach bond, the first governor, down to the present time are especially interesting. the book will be enjoyed by the old settlers of the state on account of its personal reminiscences, which are all true, not drawn from the imagination. * * * * * the youth's companion, boston, is another famous, and deservedly so, american juvenile publication. it has attained an immense circulation. among its contributors are a score or more of the most talented american authors. it is edited with great care and ability. see advertisement on another page. * * * * * from w.d. hoard, a report of the proceedings of the eleventh annual dairymen's association of wisconsin, held at elk horn, january and february - , . the pamphlet was compiled by d.w. curtis, secretary of the association, fort atkinson, wis. the second edition of bee-keeping for profit: a new system of bee management, by mrs. lizzie e. cotton, west gorham, me. illustrated. price, $ . . seventeenth annual report of the northwestern dairymen's association, with addresses and discussions delivered at the meeting held at mankato, minn., february - , . r.p. mcglincy, secretary, elgin, ill. the florida annual. edited by c.k. munroe, nassau st., new fork. price, cts. how to become a good mechanic. the industrial publication co., new york. price, cents. tennessee crop report for november, , with the report of the tennessee weather service. south market st., nashville, tenn. from c.v. riley, bulletin no. of u.s. department of agriculture: division of entomology. contains reports of observations and experiments in the practical work of the division, made under the direction of the entomologist. with plates. landreth's rural register and almanac. philadelphia, penn. * * * * * breeders directory. the following list embraces the names of responsible and reliable breeders in their line, and parties wishing to purchase or obtain information can feel assured that they will be honorably dealt with: cattle. jersey. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois horses. clydesdales. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois swine. berkshire. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois chester whites. w.a. gilbert......................wauwatosa wis. sheep. cotswold. mills, charles f. ............. springfield, illinois * * * * * live stock, etc. dr. w.a. pratt. importer and breeder of thoroughbred holstein cattle head on hand oct. st. dr. w.a. pratt, elgin, ill. * * * * * scotch collie shepherd pups, --from-- imported and trained stock --also-- newfoundland pups and rat terrier pups. concise and practical printed instruction in training young shepherd dogs, is given to buyers of shepherd puppies; or will be sent on receipt of cents in postage stamps. for printed circular, giving full particulars about shepherd dogs, enclose a -cent stamp, and address n.h. paaren, p.o. box , chicago. ill. * * * * * miscellaneous. i cure fits! when i say cure i do not mean merely to stop them for a time and then have them return again, i mean a radical cure. i have made the disease of fits, epilepsy or falling sickness a life-long study. i warrant my remedy to cure the worst cases. because others have failed is no reason for not now receiving a cure. send at once for a treatise and a free bottle of my infallible remedy. give express and post office. it costs you nothing for a trial, and i will cure you. address dr. h.g. root, pearl st., new york. * * * * * cards best quality. new designs in satin and gold finish, with name, cts. we offer $ for a pack of cards any nicer work, or prettier styles. _samples free._ eagle card works, new haven, ct. * * * * * miscellaneous. seeds for the garden, farm & field. established . our annual catalogue, mailed free on application, published first of every january, contains full description and prices of reliable vegetable, tree, field and flower seed, seed grain, seed corn, seed potatoes, onion sets, etc; also garden drills, cultivators, fertilizers, etc., with full information for growing and how to get our seeds. address plant seed company, nos. & n. th st., st. louis, mo. * * * * * fay grapes currant headquarters all best new and old. small fruits and trees. low to dealers and planters. stock first-class. free catalogues. geo. s. josselyn, fredonia, n.y. * * * * * literature [illustration] robin, dear robin! robin, dear robin, could you come back to me, back to the hame you'll never mair see, could you sit down at evening and crack wi' me, oh, what a proud, happy woman i'd be! on the white hearth the fire should burn clearly, nothing of comfort or rest you should lack, and i would always be kindly and cheery, could you come back to me--could you come back. oh, robin, robin, i've miss'd you fu' sairly, morning, and evening, and a' the day long; many have treated me unca unfairly: o for your arm so tender and strong: if once again in your love i could hide me, little i'd care though all else i should lack sairly i'm needing your wisdom to guide me, oh, my lost darling, if you could come back! never again with frowns would i greet you; never again to your love be unkind; ever with kisses and smiles i would meet you; oh, in the days that are gone i was blind! oh, i was selfish, and foolish, and fretful, now i remember--remember in vain; but i would never be cross or forgetful, could you come back to me, darling, again! no, you will never come back to me--never! but i shall come to you, robin, some day. then you will ken a' my loving endeavor, just to grow better since you went away. yes, you will ken, in that happy to-morrow, i hae been true to you, darling--sae true! asked my heart always, in joy or in sorrow, "will it please robin, the thing that i do?" oh, in that wonderfu', wonderfu' meeting, what shall i say to him? what will he say? we shallna weary life's story repeating, seeing the end o' the sorrowfu' way. with such a hope, then, how could i say truly, "robin, dear robin, come back unto me!" heart, answer the thought sae wild and unruly, "robin, dear robin, i shall come unto thee!" --_harper's weekly._ mrs. wimbush's revenge. (_concluded from last week._) it was a large picnic party. mr. charles brookshank had drawn mrs. wimbush's arm through his own, and strolled away from the rest. "how delightful it would be if one could know the language of birds, as folks did in the old hindu fairy tales! would it not, mr. brookshank?" "my dear mrs. wimbush, they do nothing the whole day long but make love and cry 'sweet, sweet!' i would i were a bird, to make love in music." the widow sighed, but it was more like a purr of pleasure. "what did i know of love till you came here?" continued mr. charles. "absolutely nothing--except," he added, with reservation, "in a professional way. and then we lawyers generally see the dark side of the picture--the damages and the decrees nisi. but your visit has brightened my whole life. o mrs. wimbush, you can not have been blind to my secret! you have seen it written legibly in my face, and have not interposed to check its development. i see you understand me, just as by intuitive fine feeling you can penetrate the meaning of mendelssohn's songs without words. mrs. wimbush, you have already far advanced toward learning the birds' language. i may rely upon your consent?" "charles, this happiness is indeed too much," ejaculated the widow. "you need never be separated from your daughter carry. a home for one is a home for both; and i will cherish her while i live." "but, charles dear, she may marry." "marry, ma'am? bless my soul, of course she will! she will marry me! she has said so, don't you see?" mrs. wimbush never said another word, but fell flat down upon the grass. "what on earth has got the woman?" thought mr. charles. "she couldn't have taken it worse if i had proposed to murder her daughter." in their walk they had strayed through the trees close to the outskirts of another picnic party. mr. charles immediately ran to ask some fair volunteer to come to the assistance of mrs. wimbush, who had fainted. at hearing the name, an active middle-aged lady sprang up and followed him. it was mrs. marrables. the sight of her mother brought mrs. wimbush round quicker than any smelling bottle could have done. she sat up. "mother, mr. brookshank; mr. brookshank, my mother, mrs. marrables." they bowed. "have the goodness to leave us together, mr. charles." he bowed and obeyed. "mother," said mrs. wimbush, "what on earth brought you here? i thought you were at taunton." "no, dear. i have been at bournemouth three weeks, i came merely for change. only last week i heard of your being here, and should have called, but have been so much occupied, and i felt sure of meeting you somewhere, and thought the surprise might be the more agreeable. we've had a most delightful picnic with the mount stewart folks. but what was all this fainting about? one would think mr. brookshank had been proposing to you." "he certainly made me a proposal mother, but i was quite unprepared for it, and was overcome." "what an imaginative and sensitive-minded girl you must be, matilda! you make me feel quite young. when will you be old enough to attend to business? you will accept him, of course? well, do as you please; you may reckon on my consent, you know. but i must get back to my party, and perhaps you had better rejoin yours. ta-ta." jilted for her daughter! it wasn't pleasant. when mrs. wimbush got home, she blew up carry for being so sly. "well, mamma," said carry, "of course i thought you knew all about it. i never made any secret of the affair. i knew very well that you had rejected mr. tom, but i could not possibly suppose that was any reason why i should refuse charles. of course he is older than i am, but he is only five-and-thirty, and has a good position; and i am sure we shall always give you a welcome; charles said so." "well," thought mrs. wimbush, "he has money, and it will be all in the family; that's at least a comfort." the effect of the little episode of the last chapter was that the brothers were made friends, and tom recovered his spirits, and could laugh heartily at what he had before supposed was his brother's rivalry. mrs. wimbush repented her that she had rejected mr. tom. her repentance produced a salutary desire on her part to make atonement for the past. she would have him yet. when a widow says so much as that about a man, let him 'ware hawk. a month went by, and behold mrs wimbush and mr. tom brookshank seated tete-a-tete at an evening party, where the music which was going on was sufficiently loud to render private conversation inaudible save to those to whom it was addressed. "i fear," said the widow, affecting an absent manner, "i treated you very unkindly, mr. tom. you took me so entirely by surprise, that, really, i--hardly know what i said. i have been very unhappy about it--very." "forgotten and forgiven," whispered mr. tom. "how generous of you! you make me so glad! because now that your brother charles is going to marry my daughter, we shall be in some sort related, and i could not bear you to think unkindly of me." "no," said mr. tom, fidgeting a little, "i shall never do that." "how droll!" said the widow. "let me see, what will the relationship be? you will be my son-in-law's brother, and consequently i shall be your mother-in-law once removed. you will have a mother younger than yourself, mr. tom. i hope you will not presume upon her youth to be a bad boy." "all this is very true," he answered; "but i see the relationship in a far different light. i shall be your father-in-law, and consequently my own brother's grandfather-in-law." "you mistake, mr. tom. don't you see that carry--" "no mistake at all about it, ma'am, for i've promised to marry your mother, mrs. marrables!" "monster!" cried mrs. wimbush aloud, and went off shrieking. the music stopped, and there was a great fuss. but above all the others was heard the voice of mrs. marrables. "don't be alarmed, pray. she is subject to it; she went off just like that the other day at a picnic. poor young thing, a very little upsets her. let me come to my little gu-url, then." they moved her into another room. presently mrs. wimbush opened her eyes. "mother! how dare you come near me! go away, do! you ought to be ashamed of yourself, at your time of life!" "my time of life! why, i'm only fifty-four--about ten years older than tom. how can you talk so to your mother!" "mother, if you don't leave the room, i will. it's really disreputable to have you for a mother. you've never done me any credit." "my dear, i am so glad to think you feel well enough to leave the room that i will remain." mrs. wimbush got up and went home. jilted, first for her daughter, and next for her mother! this was too much. mrs. wimbush went to church as regularly as any one, but revenge, after all, is very sweet. six weeks afterward mrs. wimbush recovered sufficient fortitude to go and call on her mother. "well, child, i'm glad you are going to be friendly; there is nothing like harmony in a family circle. let us consider the relationships into which we are about to enter, that we may rightly judge of our responsibilities and duties. i and my granddaughter are going to marry two brothers--the consequence is, she and i will be sisters-in-law. but as you are mother of my sister-in-law, you will nearly be my mother-in-law, which is a very singular relationship for a daughter to sustain toward her mother, especially when she is not the wife of one's father-in-law. now, as"-- "wait a moment, dear mamma; i've news for you; i'm going to marry old unguent! old mr. brookshank has asked me to be his wife, and i've consented. the consequence is, i shall be head of the family, and bona-fide mother-in-law to you all. i don't think we need trouble about harmony, for we shall be a united family, more so than any i know of." before her marriage, mrs. marrables set to work to draw up a table of the relationships involved by the three weddings. it is an extensive work in three volumes, and when our readers see the brookshank family advertised, they will know what it means. * * * * * our new clubbing list for . the prairie farmer in connection with other journals. we offer more liberal terms than ever before to those who desire to take, in connection with the prairie farmer, either of the following weekly or monthly periodicals. in all cases the order for the prairie farmer and either of the following named journals must be sent together, accompanied by the money; but we do not require both papers to be sent to the same person or to the same post-office. we send specimen copies only of the prairie farmer. our responsibility for other publications ceases on the receipt of the first number; when such journals are not received within a reasonable time, notify us, giving date of your order, also full name and address of subscriber. weeklies. price of the two the two. for harper's weekly $ $ harper's bazar harper's young people new york tribune toledo blade chicago times chicago tribune chicago inter-ocean chicago journal peck's sun milwaukee sentinel western farmer (madison, wis.) burlington hawkeye the continent (weekly magazine) detroit free press, with supplement detroit free press, state edition louisville courier-journal st. louis globe-democrat st. louis republican scientific american interior (presbyterian) standard (baptist) advance (congregational) alliance new york independent christian union boston pilot (catholic) american bee journal florida agriculturist breeder's gazette witness (n.y.) methodist (n.y.) chicago news globe (boston) youth's companion weekly novelist ledger (chicago) monthlies. harper's monthly $ $ atlantic monthly appleton's journal the century north american review popular science monthly lippincott's magazine godey's lady's book st. nicholas vick's illustrated magazine am. poultry journal (chicago) gardener's monthly wide awake phrenological journal american agriculturist poultry world arthur's home magazine andrews' bazar frank leslie's popular monthly frank leslie's sunday magazine frank leslie's ladies' magazine our little ones peterson's magazine art amateur demorest's magazine dio lewis' monthly for clubbing price with any publication in the united states not included in the above list send us inquiry on postal card. * * * * * now is the time to subscribe for the prairie farmer. price only $ . per year. it is worth double the money. * * * * * publications. marshall m. kirkman's books on railroad topics. do you want to become a railroad man if you do, the books described below point the way. the most promising field for men of talent and ambition at the present day is the railroad service. the pay is large in many instances, while the service is continuous and honorable. most of our railroad men began life on the farm. of this class is the author of the accompanying books descriptive of railway operations, who has been connected continuously with railroads as a subordinate and officer for years. he was brought up on a farm, and began railroading as a lad at $ per month. he has written a number of standard books on various topics connected with the organization, construction, management and policy of railroads. these books are of interest not only to railroad men but to the general reader as well. they are indispensable to the student. they present every phase of railroad life, and are written in an easy and simple style that both interests and instructs. the books are as follows: "railway expenditures--their extent, object and economy."--a practical treatise on construction and operation. in two volumes, pages. $ . "hand book of railway expenditures."--practical directions for keeping the expenditure accounts. . "railway revenue and its collection."--and explaining the organization of railroads. . "the baggage parcel and mail traffic of railroads."--an interesting work on this important service; pages. . "train and station service"--giving the principal rules and regulations governing trains; pages. . "the track accounts of railroads."--and how they should be kept. pamphlet. . "the freight traffic way-bill."--its uses illustrated and described. pamphlet. . "mutual guarantee."--a treatise on mutual suretyship. pamphlet. . any of the above books will be sent post paid on receipt of price, by prairie farmer publishing co., monroe st. chicago, ill. money should be remitted by express, or by draft check or post office order. * * * * * free! free!! to any address in the world! "the red river valley" "illustrated." an elegant eight-page paper full of the most desirable information. send for "publication p" to james b. power, land com'r st. paul, minneapolis & manitoba ry., st. paul. minnesota * * * * * maps. rand, mcnally & co.'s new railroad --and-- county map --of the-- united states --and-- dominion of canada. size, Ã� - / feet, mounted on rollers to hang on the wall. this is an entirely new map, constructed from the most recent and authentic sources. --it shows-- _all the railroads,_ --and-- every county and principal town --in the-- united states and canada. a useful map in every one's home, and place of business. price, $ . . agents wanted, to whom liberal inducements will be given. address rand, mcnally & co., chicago, ill. by arrangements with the publishers of this map we are enabled to make the following liberal offer: to each person who will remit us $ . we will send copy of the prairie farmer one year and this map postpaid. address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago, ill. * * * * * drainage. practical farm drainage. why, when, and how to tile-drain --and the-- manufacture of drain-tile. by c.g. elloitt and j.j.w. billingsley price, one dollar. for sale by the prairie farmer publishing co., monroe st., chicago, ill. * * * * * the shepherd's manual a practical treatise on the sheep. designed especially for american shepherds by henry stewart. finely illustrated price, $ . , by mail, postpaid. address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. * * * * * humourous [illustration] the carpenter's wooing. "oh, beam my life, my awl to me!" he cried, his flame addressing-- "if i 'adze such a love as yours, i'd ask no other blessing!" "i am rejoist to hear you speak," the maiden said with laughter-- "for tho' i hammer guileless girl, it's plane what you are rafter. now if file love you just a bit, what further can you ax me? can--will you be content with that, or will you further tacks me?" he looked handsaw her words were square-- "no rival can displace me-- yes, one more favor i implore, and that is, dear em, brace me!" she came full chisel to his arms; it really made him stair to have her make a bolt for him before he could prepare. he tried to screw his courage up, and did his level best to nail the matter then and there, while clasped unto her breast. says he: "it augers well for me, all seems to hinge on this; and, what is mortise plane to see the porch child wants a kiss." he kissed her lip, he kissed her cheek, and called her his adoored-- he dons his claw-hammer next week, and she will share his board. _--detroit free press._ where the old maids come in. "do you know, sir," inquired an american tourist of his companion, while doing england, "can you inform me the reason for the fresh, healthful appearance of the english people? their complexion is far superior to ours, or our countrymen over the herring pond." "well, i know what prof. huxley says." "and what reason does he advance?" "well, huxley says it is owing to the old maids." "owing to old maids! you surprise me." "fact. huxley figures it out this way. now, you know the english are very fond of roast beef." "but what has that to do with old maids?" "go slow. this genuine english beef is the best and most nutritious beef in the world, and it imparts a beautiful complexion." "well, about the old maids?" "yes, you see the excellence of this english beef is due exclusively to red clover. do you see the point?" "all but the old maids. they are still hovering in the shadows." "why, don't you see? this red clover is enriched, sweetened, and fructified by bumble bees." "but where do the old maids come in?" said the inquisitive american, wiping his brow wearily. "why, it is as plain as the nose on your face. the only enemy of the bumble bee is the field-mouse." "but what have roast beef, red clover, bumble-bees, and field-mice got to do with old maids?" "why, you must be very obtuse. don't you perceive that the bumble-bees would soon become exterminated by the field-mice if it were not for--" "old maids?" "no, if it were not for cats, the old maids of old england keep the country thoroughly stocked up with cats, and so we can directly trace the effects of the rosy english complexions to the benign cause of english old maids, at least that's what huxley says about it, and that's just where the old maids come in. science makes clear many mysterious things." * * * * * "those picture cards i brought back from boston," remarked mrs. partington, in a pensive mood. "they are momentums of the art loan imposition." don't give up in despair, girls. naomi didn't marry until she was five hundred and eighty years old--and then she was sorry she hadn't waited a century longer. "is you gwine to get an overcoat this winter?" asked a darkey of a companion. "well i dunno how dat's gwine to be," was the reply. "i'se done got my eye on a coat, but de fellah dat owns it keeps his eye on it too." her nephew had just come home from his day school. "what have you been learning this morning?" asked mrs. ramsbottom. "mythology, aunt," answered the little man, "all about the heathen gods and goddesses." "then i must brush up my memory," said mrs. ramsbottom, "and ask you a question or two. now, first, who was juniper?" "what is a limited monarchy, johnny?" "well, my idea of a limited monarchy is, where the ruler don't have much to rule." "give an example?" "an example! lemme see! well, if you was bossin' yourself, for instance." it was at the close of the wedding breakfast. one of the guests arose, and, glass in hand, said: "i drink to the health of the bridegroom. may he see many days like this." the intention was good, but the bride looked as though something had displeased her. * * * * * illinois central railroad. the elegant equipment of coaches and sleepers being added to its various through routes is gaining it many friends. its patrons fear no accidents. its perfect track of steel, and solid road-bed, are a guarantee against them. * * * * * the prairie farmer and youth's companion one year, $ for the two. it is not required that both papers be sent to one address, nor to the same post-office. address prairie farmer pub co., monroe street. chicago. * * * * * miscellaneous. one cent invested in a postal card and addressed as below will give to the writer full information as to the best lands in the united states now for sale; how he can buy them on the lowest and best terms, also the full text of the u.s. land laws and how to secure acres of government lands in northwestern minnesota and northeastern dakota. address: james b. power, land and emigration commissioner, st. paul, minn. * * * * * agents wanted, male and female, for spence's blue book, a most fascinating and salable novelty. every family needs from one to a dozen. immense profits and exclusive territory. sample mailed for cts in postage stamps. address j.h. clarson, p.o. box , philadelphia, pa. * * * * * medical. disease cured without medicine. _a valuable discovery for supplying magnetism to the human system. electricity and magnetism utilized as never before for healing the sick._ the magneton appliance co.'s magnetic kidney belt! for men is warranted to cure _or money refunded_, the following diseases without medicine:--_pain in the back, hips, head, or limbs, nervous debility, lumbago, general debility, rheumatism, paralysis, neuralgia, sciatica, diseases of the kidneys, spinal diseases, torpid liver_, gout seminal emissions, impotency, asthma, heart disease, dyspepsia, constipation, erysipelas, indigestion, hernia or rupture, catarrh, piles, epilepsy, dumb ague, etc. when any debility of the generative organs occurs, lost vitality, lack of nerve force and vigor, wasting weakness, and all those diseases of a personal nature, from whatever cause, the continuous stream of magnetism permeating through the parts, must restore them to a healthy action. there is no mistake about this appliance. to the ladies:--if you are afflicted with lame back, weakness of the spine, falling of the womb, leucorrhoea, chronic inflammation and ulceration of the womb, incidental hemorrhage or flooding, painful, suppressed, and irregular menstruation, barrenness, and change of life, this is the best appliance and curative agent known. for all forms of female difficulties it is unsurpassed by anything before invented, both as a curative agent and as a source of power and vitalization. price of either belt with magnetic insoles, $ , sent by express c.o.d., and examination allowed, or by mail on receipt of price. in ordering send measure of waist, and size of shoe. remittance can be made in currency, sent in letter at our risk. the magneton garments are adapted to all ages, are worn over the under-clothing (not next to the body like the many galvanic and electric humbugs advertised so extensively), and should be taken off at night. they hold their power forever, and are worn at all seasons of the year. send stamp for the "new departure in medical treatment without medicine," with thousands of testimonials. the magneton appliance co., state street. chicago, ill. note.--send one dollar in postage stamps or currency (in letter at our risk) with size of shoe usually worn, and try a pair of our magnetic insoles, and be convinced of the power residing in our other magnetic appliances. positively no cold feet when they are worn, or money refunded. * * * * * the prairie farmer is the cheapest and best agricultural paper published. only $ . per year. * * * * * scales. u.s. standard scales, manufactured expressly for the prairie farmer _every scale guaranteed by the manufacturers, and by us, to be perfect, and to give the purchaser satisfaction._ the prairie farmer sent two years free to any person ordering either size wagon scale at prices given below. [illustration] -ton wagon or farm scale (platform Ã� feet), $ ; -ton ( Ã� ), $ ; -ton ( Ã� ), $ . beam box, brass beam, iron levers, steel bearings, and full directions for setting up. the prairie farmer sent year free! to any person ordering either of the following scales, at prices named below. [illustration] the housekeeper's scale--$ . weighing accurately from / oz. to lbs. this is also a valuable scale for offices for weighing mail matter. tin scoop, c. extra; brass c. extra. [illustration] the family scale--$ . . weighs from / oz. to lbs. small articles weighed in scoop, large ones on platform. size of platform, - / Ã� - / in. [illustration] the prairie farmer scale--$ . weighs from oz. to lbs. size of platform Ã� inches. a convenient scale for small farmers, dairymen, etc. [illustration] platform scales-- sizes. lbs., $ ; lbs., $ ; lbs., $ ; , lbs., $ ; wheels and axles, $ extra. in ordering, give the price and description given above. all scales boxed and delivered at depot in chicago. give full shipping directions. send money by draft on chicago or new york post office order or registered letter. address the prairie farmer publishing company, chicago, ill. * * * * * miscellaneous [illustration] the standard remington type-writer is acknowledged to be the only rapid and reliable writing machine. it has no rival. these machines are used for transcribing and general correspondence in every part of the globe, doing their work in almost every language. any young man or woman of ordinary ability, having a practical knowledge of the use of this machine may find constant and remunerative employment. all machines and supplies, furnished by us, warranted. satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded. send for circulars. wyckoff, seamans & benedict, east madison st, chicago, ill. * * * * * given away $ , in premiums to agents ladies or gentlemen, selling our new book for particulars write for circular c. rand, mcnally & co., chicago. * * * * * seeds albert dickinson, dealer in timothy, clover, flax, hungarian, millet, red top, blue grass, lawn grass, orchard grass, bird seeds, &c. pop corn. warehouses { , & kinzie st. { , , & michigan st. office. kinzie st. chicago, ill. * * * * * general news. the emma bond case has been given to the jury. queen victoria will go to baden baden in february. the war feeling in france against china is increasing. four colored men were lynched at yazoo, miss., on saturday last. serious trouble is threatened between the orangemen and the catholics of ireland. the works of the lambert & smith wire fence company, at joliet, ill., burned last week. mr. villard is sick from nervous prostration. rumor says he is financially embarrassed. it is expected that the directors of the suez canal company will pay a dividend of per cent this year. john d. leslie, a grain-dealer of elkhart, indiana, was ruined by handling corn which failed to pass inspection. gen. grant fell upon the sidewalk in new york, the other day, and hurt his hip severely. he is recovering. n.g. ordway, governor of dakota, is charged with accepting bribes in making appointments of county commissioners. holloway, the great pill man of england, is said to be worth $ , , . he spends $ , per year in advertising. the extensive sewerage system which boston has been several years in constructing is at last finished, at a cost of $ , , . bradner smith & co, and the national printing company, chicago, were partially burned out on sunday. loss about $ , . among the distinguished dead of the year may be mentioned chambord, gambetta, gortschakoff, alexander h. stephens, karl marx, schultze-delitzsche, turgeneff, and prof. anthon. it is reported that the salters' company, one of the largest and most successful of the london guilds, has decided to dispose of its irish lands, and is now offering them to tenants on twenty years' time. during the year , up to the close of business saturday night, , , gallons of spirits were produced in the chicago distilleries. the total receipts of internal revenue in the first district of illinois for the year were $ , , . the outcry over the houses of the poor has spread to paris. alarming statistics are published of the increase of overcrowding and the consequent spread of disease, and no less than schemes of reform have been presented to the municipal council. the deaths between and have increased per , inhabitants from to in typhoid-fever, from to in diphtheria, from to in small-pox, from to in measles, and from to in scarlet-fever. alarm has been created in french commercial circles by rumors that the american congress will make reprisals for the prohibition by france of the importation of american salted meats by passing a law increasing the duties on french wines or providing for the seizure of french adulterations. the national, of paris, says: "france must expect that the reprisals bill now before congress, which was first directed against germany, will now be turned against france." p.t. barnum has just made his will. in order that there might be no question as to his sanity upon which to ground contests after his death, he had eminent physicians examine him, and secured their attestation that he was of sound mind. the will and its codicils cover more than pages of legal cap, closely written, and disposes of real estate and personal property of the value of $ , , to twenty-seven heirs. the property is in new york, brooklyn, bridgeport, colorado, and several other places. mr. barnum values his interest in the barnum and london shows at $ , , . he gives largely to charitable institutions. the number of lives lost by the more noticeable accidents of last year give a total of , , or over for each of the days of . these colossal figures are attained principally through the results of three calamities--ischia, java, and syria. aside from the earthquakes the year was unequaled in shipwrecks, cyclones, fire-scenes, and mining horrors. over thirty people were killed for each day in january, the newhall fire, the russian circus horror, and the cimbria shipwreck being the principal of thirty calamities during the month. three hundred and ninety-eight people went down in the cimbria alone. two hundred and seventy people burned in the circus at berditcheff. the panic later on at sunderland, england, caused the death of children and workmen were drowned like rats in the tub called the daphne on the clyde. there were , murders, executions, lynchings, and suicides. markets market reports. office of the prairie farmer, chicago. jan. , . financial and commercial. the general bank business of chicago last week was rather dull. but few new business contracts were made as everyone was waiting for the new year to begin before extending business. in the loan market money was quoted throughout the week at @ per cent interest. eastern exchange opened saturday at c off between banks, but subsequently sales were made at c per $ , premium. the market closed at @ c per $ , premium. railway stocks in new york with the exception of northern pacific were firm on saturday. government securities remain unchanged at last week's quotations. 's coupons. q. apr. 's reg., q. apr. - / 's coupon, q. mar. - / 's registered, q. mar. 's registered q. mar. grain and provisions. more was done on the board of trade in corn and hog products at the close of the week than in wheat and other grains. the bears had decidedly the best of it on saturday. wheat receipts were liberal and everybody seemed willing to sell. outside orders to purchase were exceedingly light. there were many transactions in corn but prices showed a gradual decline. flour was quiet at about the following rates. choice to favorite white winters $ @ fair to good brands of white winters @ good to choice red winters @ prime to choice springs @ good to choice export stock, in sacks, extras @ good to choice export stock, double extras @ fair to good minnesota springs @ choice to fancy minnesota springs @ patent springs @ low grades @ wheat.--red winter, no. @ c: car lots of spring, no. , sold at - / @ - / c; no. , do, - / @ c. corn.--fluctuating but active. car lots no , - / @ c; rejected, - / ; new mixed, @ - / c. oats.--no. in store, closed @ . rye.--may, in store @ . barley.--no. , @ c; no. , c. flax.--closed at $ . timothy.--$ per bushel. little doing. clover.--quiet at $ @ for prime. provisions.--mess pork, january $ - / per bbl; may, $ . green hams, - / c. per lb. short ribs, $ per cwt. lard.--january, $ ; february, $ - / . lumber. lumber unchanged. quotations for green are as follows: short dimension per m $ @ long dimension, per m @ boards and strips, no. @ boards and strips, medium @ boards and strips, no. choice @ shingles, standard @ shingles, choice @ shingles, extra @ lath @ country produce. note.--the quotations for the articles named in the following list are generally for commission lots of goods and from first hands. while our prices are based as near as may be on the landing or wholesale rates, allowance must be made for selections and the sorting up for store distribution. beans.--hand picked mediums $ @ . hand picked navies. $ @ . butter.--dull and without change. choice to extra creamery, @ c per lb.; fair to good do @ c; fair to choice dairy, @ c; common to choice packing stock fresh and sweet, @ c; ladle packed @ c; fresh made, streaked butter, @ c. bran.--quoted at $ - / @ per ton; extra choice $ . cheese.--choice full-cream cheddars - / @ c per lb; medium quality do @ c; good to prime full cream flats @ - / c; skimmed cheddars @ c; good skimmed flats @ c; hard-skimmed and common stock @ c. eggs.--in a small way the best brands are quotable at @ c per dozen; @ c for good ice house stock; @ c per pickled. hay.--no timothy $ @ per ton; no do $ @ ; mixed do $ ; upland prairie $ @ ; no prairie $ @ ; no do $ @ . small bales sell at @ c per ton more than large bales. hides and pelts.--green-cured light hides c per lb; do heavy cows c; no damaged green-salted hides c; green-salted calf @ - / cents; green-salted bull c; dry-salted hides cents; no. two-thirds price; no. dry flint @ - / c. sheep pelts salable at @ c for the estimated amount of wash wool on each pelt. all branded and scratched hides are discounted per cent from the price of no. . hops.--prime to choice new york state hops @ c per lb; pacific coast of @ c; fair to good wisconsin @ c: wisconsin 's @ c. poultry.--prices for live lots were: turkeys @ c per lb; chickens, @ c; ducks @ c per lb.; geese @ c per lb. for full feathered. dressed turkeys sell at @ c per lb more than live offerings. potatoes.--good to choice @ c per bu. on track; common to fair @ c. illinois sweet potatoes range at $ @ per bbl for yellow. baltimore stock at $ @ , and jerseys at $ . red are dull and nominal. tallow and grease.--no country tallow @ - / c per lb; no do - / @ - / c. prime white grease @ - / c; yellow - / @ - / c; brown - / @ . vegetables.--cabbage, $ @ per ; celery, @ c per per doz bunches; onions, $ @ per bbl for yellow, and $ for red; turnips, $ @ per bbl for rutabagas, and $ for white flat. wool.--from store range as follows for bright wools from wisconsin, illinois, michigan indiana, and eastern iowa--dark western lots generally ranging at @ c per lb. less. coarse and dingy tub @ good medium tub @ unwashed bucks' fleeces @ fine unwashed heavy fleeces @ fine light unwashed heavy fleeces @ coarse unwashed fleeces @ low medium unwashed fleeces @ fine medium unwashed fleeces @ fine washed fleeces @ coarse washed fleeces @ low medium washed fleeces @ fine medium washed fleeces @ colorado and territory wools range as follows: lowest grades @ low medium @ medium @ fine @ wools from new mexico: lowest grades @ part improved @ best improved @ burry from c to c off; black c to c off. live stock markets. the total receipts and shipments for last week were as follows: received. shipped. cattle , , hogs , , sheep , , cattle.--the above figures show a falling off of , head from the previous week's receipts. this contraction on the part of shippers is said to have been on account of advice from the commission men who argue that the unusual demand during christmas week following the previous large supply would not be very large. dressed-beef operators bought freely and there was a general advance in prices. the quality of the beef was not first-class. the highest price paid for the best was $ per cwt. sales were principally at $ @ . common lots brought $ @ . some poor ones went at $ . cows for butchers sold at $ @ , and inferior lots at $ @ . bulls brought from $ to $ . a few car loads of texans sold at $ @ per cwt. veal calves brought $ @ for lbs. milch cows were lower as the supply has been large. there was a falling off of about $ per head; they sold for $ to per head. hogs.--during the past week they formed a strong combination to break the market, all the packing houses doing business here agreeing to buy only a stipulated number of hogs each day. the plan worked as was anticipated, and although the receipts for the week dropped to , against , during the previous week, there was a steady decline from day to day. shippers were good buyers, taking on an average , hogs daily, but city packers bought only about , or , , leaving at times upwards of , or , unsold at the close of the day. choice hogs declined only moderately, but other descriptions were very weak. up to date there have been packed in the west this season about , head more than to same time last year. the market closed on saturday at $ @ for heavy; $ @ for light, and $ @ for skips and culls. note.--all sales of hogs are made subject to a shrinkage of lbs for piggy sows and lbs for stags. dead hogs sell for - / c per lb for weights of and over and [transcriber's note: blank in original] for weights of less than lbs. sheep.--the demand has been brisk and prices for good lots advanced fully c per cwt. the receipts have fallen off greatly. sales were made of common to choice at $ @ . no fancy droves were received, and they were nominal at $ @ . * * * * * commission merchants. j.h. white & co., produce commission s. water st., chicago. refers to this paper. miscellaneous. gold medal, paris, . [illustration] baker's breakfast cocoa. warranted _absolutely pure cocoa_, from which the excess of oil has been removed. it has _three times the strength_ of cocoa mixed with starch, arrowroot or sugar, and is therefore far more economical. it is delicious, nourishing, strengthening, easily digested, and admirably adapted for invalids as well as for persons in health. sold by grocers everywhere. w. baker & co., dorchester, mass. cheap farms. near markets. the state of michigan has more than , miles of railroad and , miles of lake transportation, schools and churches in every county, public buildings all paid for, and no debt. its soil and climate combine to produce large crops, and it is the best fruit state in the northwest. several million acres of unoccupied and fertile lands are yet in the market at low prices. the state has issued a new pamphlet containing a map and descriptions of the soil, crops and general resources of _every county_ in the state, which may be had free of charge by writing to the comm'r of immigration, detroit. mich. money to loan to farmers in illinois on mortgage security at per cent interest, with privilege of yearly payments. call on or address burnham, trevett & mattis, champaign, ill. patent procured or no charge. p. book patent-law free. add. w.t. fitzgerald, f st., washington, d.c. educational. university of the state of new york american veterinary college, west th st., new york city. the regular course of lectures commences in october each year. circular and information can be had on application to a. liautard, m.d.v.s., dean of the faculty. sewing silk. corticelli sewing silk, [illustration] ladies, try it! the best sewing silk made. every spool warranted. full length, smooth and strong. ask your storekeeper for corticelli silk. miscellaneous. buist's seeds are the best. warranted to give satisfaction or money returned, special-inducements for market gardeners. our valuable catalogue of pages free to all. seed grower robert buist, jr. philadelphia, pa. "facts about arkansas and texas." a handsome book, beautifully illustrated, with colored diagrams, giving reliable information as to crops, population, religious denominations, commerce, timber, railroads, lands, etc., etc. sent free to any address on receipt of a -cent stamp. address h.c. townsend, gen. passenger agt., st. louis, mo. [illustration: ferry's seed annual for ] will be mailed free to all applicants and to customers of last year without ordering it. it contains illustrations, prices, descriptions and directions for planting all vegetable and flower seeds, plants, etc. invaluable to all. d.m. ferry & co. detroit, mich. [illustration] lyon & healy state & monroe sts., chicago. will send prepaid to any address their band catalogue, for , pages, engravings of instruments, suits, caps, belts, pompons, epaulets, cap-lamps, stands, drum major's staffs, and hats, sundry band outfits, repairing materials, also includes instruction and exercises for amateur bands, and a catalogue of choice band music. knabe pianofortes. unequalled in tone, touch, workmanship and durability. william knabe & co. nos. and west baltimore street, baltimore. no. fifth avenue, n.y. agents make over one hundred per cent. profit selling the reflecting safety lamp which can be sold in every family. gives more light than three ordinary lamps. sample lamp sent for fifty cents in stamps. we have other household articles. send for circulars. forsee & mcmakin, cincinnati, o. seeds! plants--catalogue free. a.e. spalding, ainsworth, iowa. pig extricator to aid animals in giving birth. send for free circular to wm. dulin, avoca, pottawattamie co., ia. free _by return mail_, full description moody's new tailor system of dress cutting moody & co. cincinnati, o. cards satin finish cards, new imported designs, name on and present free for c. cut this out. clinton bros. & co., clintonville, ct. note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h.zip) smithsonian studies in history and technology--number agricultural implements and machines in the collection of the national museum of history and technology by john t. schlebecker [illustration] smithsonian institution press city of washington serial publications of the smithsonian institution the emphasis upon publications as a means of diffusing knowledge was expressed by the first secretary of the smithsonian institution. in his formal plan for the institution, joseph henry articulated a program that included the following statement: "it is proposed to publish a series of reports, giving an account of the new discoveries in science, and of the changes made from year to year in all branches of knowledge." this keynote of basic research has been adhered to over the years in the issuance of thousands of titles in serial publications under the smithsonian imprint, commencing with smithsonian contributions to knowledge in and continuing with the following active series: smithsonian annals of flight smithsonian contributions to anthropology smithsonian contributions to astrophysics smithsonian contributions to botany smithsonian contributions to the earth sciences smithsonian contributions to paleobiology smithsonian contributions to zoology smithsonian studies in history and technology in these series, the institution publishes original articles and monographs dealing with the research and collections of its several museums and offices and of professional colleagues at other institutions of learning. these papers report newly acquired facts, synoptic interpretations of data, or original theory in specialized fields. these publications are distributed by mailing lists to libraries, laboratories, and other interested institutions and specialists throughout the world. individual copies may be obtained from the smithsonian institution press as long as stocks are available. s. dillon ripley secretary smithsonian institution for sale by the superintendent of documents, u.s. government printing office washington, d.c. --price cents stock number - contents introduction the use of farm machinery in america catalog of agricultural implements and machines in the collection index to the catalog publications on farming by the staff of the division of agriculture and mining agricultural implements and machines in the collection of the national museum of history and technology the author: john t. schlebecker is curator in charge, division of agriculture and mining, museum of history and technology, smithsonian institution. introduction the art and science of agriculture embrace most intentional human efforts to control biological activity so as to produce plants and animals of the sort wanted, when wanted. rubber plantations, cattle ranches, vegetable gardens, dairy farms, tree farms, and a host of similar enterprises all represent human efforts to compel nature to serve man. those who undertake agriculture have had, from time immemorial, a variety of names, not all of them complimentary. the people involved in attempted biological control have been called farmers, planters, ranchers, and peasants. farmers carry on a complicated business in which they use a variety of tools, implements, and machines. they also employ land, chemicals, water, plants, and animals. their business, however, focuses on living things. no matter how crude their attempts, or how uncertain their successes, those who try to grow living things rank as agriculturalists.[ ] [footnote : of course, the definition excludes brewers, distillers, biological supply houses, and others, such as zoo curators, who manage living things. agriculture takes place on a piece of land widely and commonly known as a farm.] for the most part, a museum cannot show the essential biological aspects of agriculture. agricultural production involves the farmer in the course of nature in its seasons, and in the peculiar laws of living things. in these respects, agriculture stands rather apart from transportation, manufacturing, and artistic industries where the tools, machines, and raw materials remain fairly inert as men work on them. machines move but do not live, and therein lies the major difference between agriculture and the other arts. farmers deal with plants and animals but the museum can show only the things a farmer uses as he accommodates to and regulates nature. some of the objects, in themselves, give a fair idea of how the farmer used them. most people, after all, know about edged blades and digging tools. nearly anyone can grasp what a man might do with a scythe or a plow. even the working of a modern reaper needs only a little explanation. but museums cannot well show cross-breeding of plants and animals. museums seldom can show the results of that cross-breeding. bags of fertilizer can be put on display, as can vials of penicillin, and jars of herbicide. although some may find these interesting, such items show little in and of themselves. unfortunately, the things that cannot be shown in any easily intelligible way surpass in importance the items that can be shown. the sheep shears, which anyone can understand, represent less to the farmer than do the sheep. sheep shears, no matter how sophisticated and no matter how necessary, do not explain sheep husbandry. the shears tell little about the wool industry, and nothing much about sheep breeds. and so on through the list of agricultural enterprises. museums must collect and exhibit the tools, implements, and machines which farmers use in their business. these items, however, seldom make up the core of real agricultural activity. the catalog here presented shows something of the range of items that farmers use and that can be preserved and shown. the variety nearly equals the volume. most museums try to avoid duplication. even so, few museums manage to collect a continuous series of things showing any one line of development. the discontinuity of farm objects on hand virtually rules out the telling of a coherent and complete history of agriculture. nevertheless, the museum can show something about the major technological developments in agriculture. the evolution of the plow, the reaper, or the tractor can be suggested even if not fully illustrated. hitting the highlights has to suffice. the full history of technological change also involves several social and economic conditions. first, changes in implements, tools, and methods result from the accumulation of knowledge. device builds upon device: first came the wheel, and then, much later, the tractor. secondly, the potential user of the device must feel a need for it. the new method or device not only must save him work but must clearly increase his well-being. if any device or change merely increases the wealth of someone else (a tax collector or a landlord for example), the farmer seldom will adopt the new technology. thirdly, since, at first, the new technology almost invariably costs more than the old, the user must have or be able to get the capital to buy and use the newer devices and methods. of these conditions for technological change, only the cumulative nature of the knowledge can be shown by the objects. even here, however, missing objects make it possible to present only the most obvious changes, and then not all of them. still, seeing the things once used--no matter how crude or how few--can sometimes help us understand the way changes took place. also, this knowledge sometimes can help us guess how other changes will take place: the sequence of inventions also depends upon the changing needs of a society. needs and circumstances vary more than do degrees of talent. thus when need and knowledge merge, inventors quickly appear. indeed, several men in several places are likely to work on the same problems at the same time, and they often solve it in almost identical fashion. nearly simultaneous inventions or discoveries occur with astonishing frequency in the history of technology.[ ] [footnote : "the combine made in stockton," pacific historian, no. (autumn, ), p. .] the use of farm machinery in america the part of america that was destined to become the united states started its history at the very time when the parent european civilization began to make major breakthroughs in science and technology. thus, americans became the automatic beneficiaries of the achievements of others. because of peculiar opportunities and needs, americans could and did push on to unique achievements. nowhere, however, did this building on the past appear as early, or as impressively, as in the agricultural sector of the economy. american inventors of farm implements made important strides earlier than those in any other field. in turn, american farmers made more and better use of discoveries and inventions. from the s onward europeans expanded their activities in all fields and in all directions. by that time europeans had already discovered the new world, and had seized or bullied most of the old. european trade and industry increased, and as these grew so also did population and urbanization. people multiplied, and an increasingly greater proportion of them began to live in towns and cities. simultaneously, the europeans increased in wealth; indeed, most of their activities created more wealth. the ever-increasing number of people called for more food, and for changes in european farming. the europeans' growing wealth also allowed them to buy luxury items from around the world: silk and spice and everything nice. the goods came not only from the far east and africa but also from the new world. when europeans began to settle america, they almost at once had the advantages of a large and growing metropolitan market in western europe. this market provided opportunities for wealth, but only if the american farmers developed appropriate commodities and produced them at reasonable prices. the english, dutch, swedes, french, and spanish settled in north america at trading and exploring stations. so located, they could direct the flow of products to europe. the english chiefly sought rare products such as gold and spices, and they sent back furs. the dutch concentrated on furs. all european pioneers, however, had to feed themselves. this took a bit of doing, which at first involved a merging of european technology with indian crops and methods. later, the settlers adapted european crops and animals. in spite of starving times in almost every colony from virginia to new england, the new americans at least mastered the art of feeding themselves. european technology used animals for draft and employed plows, harrows, and similar implements. this technology fit european crops better than it fit american crops. thus, european implements and draft animals did not appear until comparatively late. as long as they depended chiefly on indian crops, europeans simply substituted iron hoes for stone hoes, and iron axes for stone axes. but methods such as girdling, slash and burn, and the rest, came almost directly from indian technology. the pilgrims of plymouth plantation went years without a plow; virginians went almost as long. the hoe of corn culture served well enough to keep men alive. hunting and fishing, of course, supplemented the food supply, as it did for the indians. from north to south the story was largely the same in the th century. everywhere the new americans pursued a subsistence agriculture which supported some other major economic activity. pennsylvania developed possibly the most flourishing subsistence farming. the commercial production of tobacco, an american crop with american methods and uses, began early in virginia and maryland. this specialty developed commercially almost exclusively in the upper south. farmers and planters of the lower south had hesitantly begun rice culture, but as the th century ended men in the carolinas still found hides and furs the most rewarding commodities. meanwhile, rapid changes took place in the european metropolitan centers, and in the west indian islands. the growth of population in both places created consumers for more and cheaper food. markets for american foods definitely began to increase as the th century got under way. europeans, of course, primarily wanted european foods rather than exotic indian crops. the foods also had to be comparatively nonperishable and easily transported. grains, particularly wheat, and processed meat (hams, salt pork, and such) especially met european preferences. commercial production of these commodities compelled american farmers to embrace the best european technology insofar as that technology fit the american scene. the plants, animals, methods, and tools all derived from europe. contrary to a common european view at the time, the immigrants did not bring the worst available methods to the new world. nor did the americans allow any deterioration of stock or plants without good economic reasons. most european criticism about american farming centered on things of no consequence to american farmers, who were selling in a world market. true, americans tended toward slovenly cultivation, but niceness of method mattered little if the land yielded an abundant exportable surplus. americans paid less attention than europeans to fertilizer, but americans at first had less need for it. livestock, in spite of nearly continual importations from europe, tended to decline from a european standpoint. still, the animals yielded meat of a quality suitable for export. the hardy american animals could survive in spite of casual care. americans had few barns and sheds, but the world market for meat did not demand barns, stalls, and fancy feeding. american dairy cows yielded ridiculously low volumes of milk, butter, and cheese, but dairy products, after all, served only the resident americans. the corn- and mast-fed hogs of america provided ham that was equal to any in europe. if the european consumer bought american food, the american farmer thought it pointless to consider the comfort and emotional well-being of his animals. new englanders tended to concentrate on animals, the middle atlantic on grains, the upper south on tobacco, and the lower south on rice and indigo. the revolutionary war disrupted the marketing from the farmer's view, but the major commercial commodities remained largely unchanged in the years immediately after the war. indigo declined and then disappeared as a major export commodity, but cotton almost at once replaced it. in the th century men everywhere made great technological advances. in america, the advances took place in a sort of reciprocal action with three major historical series and events dominating the story: the westward movement, urbanization, and industrialization. the greatest westward expansion in american history took place during the th century. american farmers and stockmen conquered, and almost entirely settled, a continent. they did this in a single century, - . nothing quite like it had ever happened before. starting from a thin line of people on the eastern seaboard (with a few incursions across the mountains as of ), farmers and herders pushed into a nearly empty land, dispossessed the indians, and exploited the country. and in course of time the american pioneers wanted and received political organization. california entered the union in , the plains states mostly in the s, and more states, such as arizona, new mexico, and oklahoma, came into the union in the th century. at the same time, a nation that was weak and underdeveloped in , had, by , become the world's leading industrial nation. from virtually no industry in , america rose to leading industrial power in , with more railroads and more manufactured goods per capita than any other nation. involved in the industrialization, and importantly so, was the farm implement and machinery industry. factories everywhere supplied farmers with the sophisticated tools and machines of the new agriculture. in these years urbanization also went forward rapidly. cities of the east grew fantastically, and even in the interior cities rose from wilderness outposts to gigantic metropolises. within one man's lifetime chicago increased from people in to , , in . simultaneously, tremendous developments in transportation kept the nation and its economy tied together. all of these developments had a profound influence on farming and farmers. the rich cities provided ever greater markets for the farmers' produce. the transportation system, rapidly moving farm commodities, made farming profitable in remote regions far distant from the coast. farmers also felt the advantages of the return flow of goods and services: the mail order catalog, the industrially made reapers and threshers, and countless other items. city people made a countless range of devices for farmers--from steel plows to steam engines. meanwhile, as these events altered the life of the farmer, a burst of activity took place in invention and discovery. these activities had a delayed but considerable impact on farm methods and technology. the list of inventions and discoveries could hardly fit in this narrative, but this catalog of items reflects fairly well what men accomplished in the th century. the changes included such diverse elements as the invention of the cotton gin by eli whitney in , the introduction of mexican upland cotton in , the discovery of the cause of texas fever in cattle in , and the invention of the internal combustion tractor in . these and many other achievements substantially changed the farm enterprise in two major directions: first, advances in technology allowed farmers to do more in less time; second, discoveries in science allowed farmers to increase the yield from the land. farmers got more from each acre, plant, and animal. farmers could use the savings in time brought by better implements and new machines to increase the amount of land farmed and the number of animals cared for. presumably, the farmer could also use the saved time for greater leisure. in fact, however, they usually used the extra time for more work. in the th century they often used the saved time for outside employment. farmers did this in the th century, but not so commonly as later. greater man-hour efficiency gave the farmer more time to devote to managing his enterprise, to keeping records, and to studying his business. technological efficiency also allowed farmers to use more land and more animals. the average size of farms steadily increased across the century. furthermore, the new machines and the pure-bred livestock cost money which could be most profitable only if the farmer specialized in one, or at most two, types of enterprise. so the greater efficiency created by technology impelled farmers to greater specialization, and with specialization came even greater efficiency. anyone who specializes will likely be more efficient because of the mastering of skills. he will also have a minimum of other cares to distract him. of course, for the consumers, foreign or domestic, greater farming efficiencies resulted in abundant food at comparatively low cost. plant and animal importation, improvement of breeds, and discoveries in genetics, soil chemistry, the use of fertilizers, and in controlling plant and animal diseases all helped the living things which form the basis of farming yield. grain farmers not only had to have a wheat which yielded well but a wheat which resisted the attacks of nature. for example, turkey red wheat, introduced in by mennonites from russia, not only survived drought and yielded well but provided the genetic elements for newer breeds of wheat. the farmer not only wanted good-producing meat cattle, such as the herefords, but had to control diseases and predators which killed the animals. sick animals do not grow properly or, in the case of dairy animals, give much milk. steady advances in disease control for both plants and animals brought fewer losses and greater productivity to farmers. the th century also brought scientific discoveries in both plant and animal nutrition. fertilizer and soil chemistry made great advances through scientific experiments, at first by farmers and later by government servants. the first experiment station in the modern era began in connecticut in , and in the congress established such stations in every state in conjunction with the agricultural land grant colleges. scientists at many of the stations also made discoveries in animal nutrition. for example, as a result of animal feeding experiments e. v. mccollum discovered vitamins a and b at the experiment station in wisconsin in . none of these scientific advances left much residue in the form of artifacts for museums, but the reality of the changes should not be obscured by the lack of objects on exhibit. even so, some of the related equipment survived. for example, the centrifuge used in the butterfat test, discovered in by stephen m. babcock, survived in several forms. manure spreaders and tree sprayers, reflective of advances in biochemistry, also survived. but these only suggest the more important biological control activities for which these machines and tools served merely as agents in some way. the th century introduced americans to total war. world wars i and ii demanded the total mobilization of all resources by all contenders. in both conflicts america became the food reservoir of the allies. from a technological view, the wars engendered a level of prosperity which both allowed and encouraged farmers to adopt new methods and devices. the principal technological change in farms was the widespread adoption of the internal combustion tractor, first used in . inventors and manufacturers gradually but constantly improved tractors along with the various devices attached to them. most notable were the corn picker, in , and the cotton picker, in . (dates are for commercial production in each instance.) farmers found both machines impracticable until a power source independent of the ground wheel had been developed. more than anything else the tractor and its related equipment finally set men free from the worst drudgery of farming. it also set many farmers free from the need to farm at all. the tractor and its equipment accomplished several other remarkable things, some obvious and some not so obvious. first, it allowed the farmer to get rid of horses and mules, and these animals steadily declined--to such an extent that in the s the census did not even bother to count them. as a result of this decline, land that farmers had used to raise feed for animals could grow food for people or fodder for dairy animals. the amount of land thus released for other needs finally amounted to perhaps million acres, and maybe even more. the change took place with increasing rapidity into the th century. also, the tractor sharply reduced labor needs for the major crops of the united states. even dairying, least susceptible to this sort of improvement, felt the impact of the tractor in such things as harvesting fodder and storing silage by running loaders off the tractor power-take-off. since the very founding of agriculture men had discovered only one way to prosper in farming. the farmer had to exploit somebody or something. animals, serfs, slaves, tenants, sharecroppers, or whatever, including the farmer's family and farm, had at various times been exploited on the farmer's way to success. after the age of machinery, however, the farmer tended to exploit the machine instead of other people or things. people had to leave farming, but in the long run they benefited from their removal. the machine had set them free. chief of the machines was the gasoline tractor. the influence of science and technology inside a free society may have been even more profound than seems at first glance. the farming of the th century, with its chemicals, genetics, machines, and all, required not only vast infusions of capital but brains and a considerable knowledge. farmers had to be literate at the very least. elitist systems, where one group of people get educated and the others get worked, could not accomplish much in the modern agricultural world. furthermore, notions of two kinds of education--one for the better sort who think, and another for the inferiors who do the work--could and did seriously impede the development of a modern agriculture. the backwardness of most of the world, the poverty of the underdeveloped countries, stemmed in large part from the impediments created by an ignorant population. a country like the united states with its highly technical and scientific farming could not afford, simply could not endure, limited educational opportunities for its people. neither could it long endure any class structure which placed farmers in an inferior position; for when men feel inferior because of their work they tend to shift to some other task, leaving the despised work to those who cannot avoid it. a highly developed agriculture in the hands of the truly inferior, the stupid and uneducated, would simply collapse. america, the land of plenty, had to maintain a high level of education open to all and a society where men reached status, at least partly, by effort and talent. in th century america the comparative social and economic equality continued, in large part, because the level of technology and science used in america demanded it. this equality may be one of the most important consequences of the technological and scientific advances in agriculture during the years - . catalog of agricultural implements and machines in the collection in the following catalog the items are listed numerically in the order in which the museum received them, with the earliest first and the latest last. this arrangement permits expansion and reissue of the catalog simply by adding new entries; and the user of the catalog can easily find everything acquired in any given year. in effect, the catalog thus presents an historical account of the development of the museum collection. following the item's title appears the national museum accession number (usnm number); year of accession, if known; description; and donor. the index to the catalog has several major categories of cross-referenced entries. in addition to the general object class, such as "tractor," it includes use-entries, such as "plant husbandry," the names of donors, vendors, and those who arranged for the gifts. . korean sketch of farming in the late th century. usnm ; . korean farmers plowing and breaking clods of earth. painted by han chin u. gift of g. goward, washington, d. c. . korean sketch of threshing in the late th century. usnm ; . korean farmers threshing rice. by han chin u. gift of g. goward, washington, d. c. . korean fishing scene of the late th century. usnm ; . koreans using a fish trap. by han chin u. gift of g. goward, washington, d. c. . scene of korean farmers chopping tobacco in th century. usnm ; . korean farmers chopping tobacco after it has been cured. by han chin u. gift of g. goward, washington, d. c. . scene of korean farmers working on farm buildings in late th century. usnm ; . korean farmers doing carpentry work, including roof repair. by han chin u. gift of g. goward, washington, d. c. . scene of a korean blacksmith at work in late th century. usnm ; . a korean blacksmith working at his forge and anvil. by han chin u. gift of g. goward, washington, d. c. . a korean farrier shoeing a horse in the late th century. usnm ; . by han chin u. gift of g. goward, washington, d. c. . centrifugal cream separator, . usnm ; . the first centrifugal cream separator used commercially in the united states. the deerfoot farm at southborough, massachusetts, used this machine, patented by d. m. weston of boston. gift of deerfoot farm company, southborough, massachusetts. . model of blount's daisy plow, . usnm ; . this model of a one-horse plow shows blount's daisy steel plow as pictured in the catalog of henry f. blount. gift of henry f. blount, evansville, indiana. [illustration: figure .--views of old colony strong plow, about . (catalog no. .)] . old colony strong plow, . usnm ; . in peter hardy of raymond, new hampshire, made this plow for henry lamprey of kensington, new hampshire. gift of j. p. lamprey, kensington, new hampshire. . winnowing basket, . usnm ; . a winnowing basket, or pan, made of willow woven over wide sprints; elliptical in shape, with a frame of thick rods. noah rogers bought this pan in new york in or . gift of frank a. brown, savage, maryland. . model of flail threshing machine, th century. usnm ; . the frame of this wooden model is - / inches high and by inches, rectangular. the levers, inches long, project from the frame and strike the floor much as a flail would. pins set in the shaft of a hand crank act as cams, raising the flails which then fall to the ground by gravity. gift of united states department of the interior. . model of gallic grain header, about a.d. . usnm ; . a wooden box on wheels, by inches, has metal teeth set at the front end. shafts extend to the rear, where an ox is yoked. the forward movement of the cart causes the grain to lodge against the teeth, which pulled the heads off. the grain then fell back into the box. gift of united states department of the interior. . model of ten eyck grain harvester, . usnm ; . model is made of wood and iron, inches by inches. long knives on a drum were rotated by belt shaft on traveling wheels. long projecting points gathered the straw. iron shafts at the rear allowed animals to be harnessed to push the machine. james ten eyck patented the harvester on november , . gift of united states department of the interior. . model of manning grain harvester, . usnm ; . model of horse-drawn reaper measures inches by inches, with a wheel diameter of inches. projecting iron points at the front end gather the grain, and vibrating knives, powered from the hob of the wheel, cut the grain. patented by william manning on may , . gift of united states department of the interior. . model of boyce grain harvester, . usnm ; . this model, made of wood and iron, is inches long, inches wide, and - / inches high. six rotating knives radically positioned on a vertical shaft rotate by level gearing on the wheel axle. the whole is mounted on a two-wheeled cart with shafts for draft animals. english patent number granted to james boyce in . gift of united states department of the interior. . model of newbold plow, . usnm ; . this model of a metal plow, with wooden beam and handles inches long, represents the plow patented by charles newbold on june , , the first american patent for a cast-iron plow. moldboard, share, and landside were cast in one piece. if the plow broke, it became totally useless. not until the parts were made in separate pieces did the iron plow come into wide use. the cast iron broke more readily than did the later wrought-iron plows. gift of united states department of the interior. . winnowing basket, about . usnm ; . used by the three richardson brothers, the first settlers of woburn, massachusetts. the threshed grain could be winnowed in two ways. it could be poured slowly from the edge of the basket in a breeze, where the heavier grain fell to the ground while the chaff blew away. more commonly, the farmer tossed the grain into the air and caught it in the basket, while the chaff blew away. this rectangular basket measures inches by inches. gift of mrs. clarissa w. samson, west medford, massachusetts. [illustration: figure .--de laval centrifugal cream separator of . (an earlier version of catalog no. .)] . centrifugal cream separator, . usnm ; . carl gustav de laval of sweden invented this successful continuous-flow cream separator in . loaned by de laval separator company, new york, new york. . model tractor, . usnm ; . no particular manufacturer seems represented by this spring-driven toy, which merely represents tractors of around . the heavy-duty field tractor has four widely spaced iron wheels. gift of toy manufacturers of the united states, new york, new york. . model tractor with plow, harrow, and roller, . usnm ; . spring-driven, toy tractor. the plow, harrow, and roller, as well as the tractor itself, represent a typical machine of the period. the product of no particular firm seems to have been copied. gift of toy manufacturers of the united states, new york, new york. . meat grinding machine, about . usnm ; . hand made of wood and iron, with six parts held together by two iron bolts. the cutting edges are set in the sides of a box parallel to each other and about one-quarter inch apart. a shaft, set in the center of the box, is turned by a crank. the horizontal shaft has iron slugs, graduated from coarse to fine, set into the shaft in a helical pattern. the meat enters through the square hole at the top and the iron teeth press it against the knife edges; thus, the meat is cut smaller and smaller until it comes out a small hole in the bottom of the machine. the device is very ancient in design and could still be found in common use in the united states as late as . gift of r. c. fairhead, rushville, nebraska. . carey plow, about . received from division of ethnology in . a carey plow with a slot in the beam for a colter. the landside handle passes through the beam. usually, the beam tenon passes through a mortise in the handle. possibly made by the farmer. replication of a common and popular american plow of the th century. donor not known. . hoe, about . usnm ; . wrought-iron, handmade hoe made in ohio and attributed to very early th century. the hoe's blade is inches wide and its handle is feet long. gift of mrs. grace m. swiggett, washington, d. c. . reaper sickle bar, about . usnm ; . sickle bar from a mccormick reaper. the blade style suggests a comparatively sophisticated stage of development, most surely after . david cromer of seneca county, ohio, used this sickle bar on a mccormick reaper. the blade is feet long and inches deep. gift of frank hepp, berwick, ohio. [illustration: figure .--gail borden's vacuum pan of , used to make condensed milk. (catalog no. .)] . borden vacuum pan, . usnm ; . the original vacuum pan used by gail borden in for condensing milk by concentrating it in a vacuum. he patented the process on august , . borden borrowed this pan from nearby shaker farmers who had used it for canning. borden did his early work at new lebanon, new york. borden at first failed to get a patent because the process was not deemed useful. there is nothing exceptional about this pan except that borden used it. gift of borden milk company, new york, new york. . model of mccormick reaper, . usnm ; . scale model of the grain reaper patented by cyrus mccormick on june , . roderick davis constructed the model from the specifications of the patent. gift of charles g. abbot, washington, d. c. . model of mccormick reaper, . usnm ; . scale model of the reaper patented by cyrus h. mccormick on january , . roderick davis constructed the model from the specifications of united states patent . gift of mccormick historical association, chicago, illinois. . model of mccormick reaper, . usnm ; . cyrus mccormick patented this reaper on october , . roderick davis built the model from specifications of united states patent . gift of mccormick historical association, chicago, illinois. . wheeled plow, . usnm ; . wheeled plow made by matthew thumb in at palatine, new york, for henry kloch. it has an almost flat, wooden moldboard; wrought-iron share and colter; a two-wheel truck in front for the beam; and one handle. the large wheel ran in the furrow and the small wheel on the land. the wooden parts of the hitch and the draft chain have been restored. the plow is probably a copy of a german one. gift of sir henry solomon wellcome, london, england. . model of grain separator, . usnm ; . working model of a grain separator for a threshing machine made by daniel garver. the model represents inventions covered by three patents issued to daniel and cyrus garver: the grain separator, patent , issued may , ; the fan blast regulator, patent , issued may , ; and the bag holding device, patent , issued march , . loaned by miss melchora garver, hagerstown, maryland. . waldron cradle blade and snead, about . usnm ; . the blade has holes for attaching the cradle. the wooden frame, or snead, supports the cradle fingers, now missing. gift of sydney s. stabler, washington, d. c. . settling can cream separator, about . usnm ; . cooley brand creamer, used for separating milk from cream prior to churning. the milk and cream were set in a cool place for several hours while the cream rose to the top. the farmer drew skim milk off through a spigot at the bottom, after which the cream could be drawn off. used on farms before the hand centrifugal separator came into wide use. by , in butter-producing areas, the centrifugal separator had already caused the disuse of the cooley and similar separators. gift of sidney s. stabler, washington, d. c. . wooden hayfork, about . usnm ; . hayfork of second-growth white oak, made by john heiss, lima township, lagrange county, indiana. it was used for feeding stock and for handling clover and short straw of all kinds. gift of e. w. heiss, washington, d. c. . wooden measure, or earlier. usnm ; . small, round wooden measure used in by william heiss, lagrange county, indiana, to feed small grain or mill feed to livestock. william heiss was a grandfather of the donor, e. w. heiss of washington, d. c. . half-bushel measure, about . usnm ; . made and used by william heiss on his farm in lagrange county, indiana, about . probably used in local barter and trade in such items as beans, corn, and seeds for various crops. loaned by e. w. heiss, washington, d. c. [illustration: figure .--cotton planter, about . (catalog no. .)] . wooden drum cotton planter, about . usnm ; . all wood except for a duckbill furrow opener in front and two duckbill row coverers in the rear, both made of metal. the drum of soft wood measures inches in diameter and inches wide. about the center of the drum is a wooden, metal-rimmed wheel which ran down the furrow, keeping the seeder on course. near the wheel, and all around the drum, are evenly spaced holes through which the cotton seeds fell into the furrow as the drum revolved. no counting or tripping mechanism was involved, so the device undoubtedly wasted seed. a mule or a horse pulled the planter and the farmer walked behind it. james nelson of greenwood, south carolina, made this planter about . gift of ruben f. vaughn, honea path, south carolina. . cast-iron plow, . usnm ; . a cast-iron plow made by stephen mccormick of fauquier county, virginia, in . the plow embodies features covered by patents issued to stephen mccormick on february , , january , , and december , . plows of this type, made chiefly between and , involved interchangeable parts. the first patent precedes that of jethro wood by seven months, but the principle of interchangeable parts had been worked out and patented as early as . gift of leander mccormick-goodhart, silver spring, md. . mehring's milking machine, . usnm ; . original working model of a hand-powered milking machine built by william m. mehring in . mehring subsequently improved and patented the machine in . the improved machine did not work well because it created continuous suction for the length of the stroke. the successful application of intermittent suction, necessary so as not to injure the cow, was worked out in scotland in . gift of mrs. bessie d. mehring, keymar, maryland. . hand-powered milking machine, . usnm ; . practical hand-pump milking machine designed and built in by william m. mehring, who was granted patent on december , . this milker, which injured cows when used rapidly, represents an effort to solve the problem of machine milking, although the use of human power also limited its usefulness. gift of mrs. bessie d. mehring, keymar, maryland. . ox yoke, . usnm ; . edward scoville ( - ) used this ox yoke when driving an ox cart from trumbull county, ohio, to de kalb county, indiana, in . until well after the civil war, oxen pulled most of the wagons going west, and this yoke is typical of all used in the westward migration, in the north as well as in the south. gift of reign scoville, poplar bluff, missouri. [illustration: figure .--john deere plow, one of the three plows made by deere in . (catalog no. .)] . deere plow, . usnm ; . john deere made this plow, with steel share and polished wrought-iron moldboard, at grand detour, illinois, in . joseph brierton bought it and used it on his farm, and the deere company obtained it in . it is one of three plows made by john deere in , and presumably it is identical to his first steel share plow, made in at grand detour. called the singing plow, it proved especially effective in prairie country after the sod had been broken because the earth did not adhere to the share and moldboard. the implement could also be used as a breaking plow. gift of deere and company, moline, illinois. . model of sulky plow, . usnm ; . working model of the hy-lift sulky plow invented by niels o. starks of madison, wisconsin, and made by the fuller and johnson company around . starks received patent on january , . the land wheel on this plow automatically raises and lowers the plow at the end of a furrow. gift of s. o. strucksberg, st. joseph, missouri. . barbed ribbon wire, . usnm ; . specimen of barbed wire made with saw teeth cut out of twisted ribbon wire. gift of b. f. arthur, winchester, virginia. . chinese plow, date unknown. usnm ; . this primitive, one-handled plow has an iron hook on the end of the beam. apparently it had an iron shoe for a share, which is now missing. this style of plow is typical of the kind used in rice-growing sections of china. gift of united states department of agriculture. . carey plow, about . usnm ; . the share and landside of this small cultivating plow are in one piece of wrought iron with sockets for the left handle and the standard bar share. it has a flat wooden moldboard. used in northumberland county, virginia, until or , for cultivating corn and other row crops. gift of united states department of agriculture. . plow, about . usnm ; . only the share, colter, and beam of this plow are original, the rest having been reconstructed. the original parts came from northumberland county, virginia. gift of edwin brown, brown's store, virginia. . old colony strong plow, . usnm ; . the moldboard of this plow is made of wood and covered with thick pieces of iron. the plow has a lock colter and wrought-iron share fitted on the end of a wooden beam. pelatiah kinsman of ipswich, massachusetts, had the plow made in . it represents the new england open-drawn plows of that time. gift of united states department of agriculture. . old colony plow, . usnm ; . this plow resembles the old colony strong plow (no. ) but it is not as large and the moldboard is covered with uniform, narrow iron straps. farmers used this plow for cross-plowing after initial breaking by the strong plow and for cultivating. it probably was drawn by oxen. john foster, a corporal in the revolutionary army, had this implement made at ipswich, massachusetts, in . gift of united states department of agriculture. . tavenner plow, between and . usnm ; . the tavenner plow has a cast-iron moldboard and a wrought-iron share and colter. plows of this type were made and used widely in loudon county, virginia. gift of united states department of agriculture. . smith plow, about . usnm ; . this sod-turning plow has its landside, moldboard, and colter in separate pieces. it was built on the lines of a plow patented by robert smith in . gift of united states department of agriculture. . gideon davis plow, about . usnm ; . gideon davis received a patent in for his improvements of the newbold plow patented in . in tests in to determine the efficiency of different plows, the davis plow took first place in a competition with five others. gift of united states department of agriculture. . woodcock plow, about . usnm ; . the woodcock plow has separate landside, moldboard, share, cutter, and point. this plow has the first reversible point. woodcock plows were first used in , in maryland. gift of united states department of agriculture. [illustration: figure .--eagle plow, about . (catalog no. .)] . eagle plow, . usnm ; . the number eagle plow, which first appeared in the catalog of the j. nourse company in , became the standard plow of new england after the middle of the th century. its moldboard was based on a design worked out by thomas jefferson. gift of united states department of agriculture. . mexican plow, about . usnm ; . this mexican bull tongue plow has an iron shoe on the point and it closely resembles spanish plows of the th century. it was intended to be pulled by an ox and to break the soil for only three or four inches at the most. gift of united states department of agriculture. . butcher's saw, . usnm ; . this saw is part of a set of butcher's tools (nos. - ) presented to william h. hoover by the washington light infantry corps in . all the tools have a silver presentation plate on the handle and have nickel plating. a. nittinger, jr., of philadelphia, made the set. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . splitting cleaver, . usnm ; . butcher's tool. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . cleaver, . usnm ; . butcher's tool. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . meat axe, . usnm ; . butcher's tool. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . knife, . usnm ; . butcher's knife. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . knife, . usnm ; . butcher's tool. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . triangular scraper, . usnm ; . butcher's tool. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . hand meat hook, . usnm ; . butcher's tool. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . meat hooks, . usnm ; . butcher's tool. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . carcass spreader, . usnm ; . butcher's tool. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . carcass spreader, . usnm ; . butcher's tool. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. . meat pins, . usnm ; . butcher's tools. gift of n. auth provision company, washington, d. c. [illustration: figure .--babcock butterfat tester, about . (catalog no. .)] . babcock butterfat tester, about . usnm ; . a machine used in determining the amount of butterfat in milk or cream. the vermont farm machine company of bellows falls, vermont, made the centrifuge, which mixed sulphuric acid with the milk in order to produce a reading of the amount of butterfat tested. the brighton farm at patuxent river, montgomery county, maryland, used this machine around . stephen m. babcock developed this tester in and released it to the public, without patent, in . the device had far-reaching effects in the dairy industry, because for the first time it allowed accurate payment to farmers for the actual amount of butterfat in their milk; also, it allowed farmers to test their cows to discover which ones produced the most butterfat. gift of sidney s. stabler, hyattsville, maryland. . buggy rake, . usnm ; . the buggy rake harvested grain after it had been cut with a cradle. the rake has handles and a wheel, like a wheelbarrow, with long wooden tines in front to scoop up the grain. when the binder stepped on a bar at the back of the buggy the tines would move up and allow the grain to slide back against the uprights in a convenient position for binding. although it undoubtedly reduced the physical labor of binding, this rake would not have been very efficient and would have allowed the reaper to get far ahead of the binder. gift of f. b. day, owosso, michigan. . model of plow, about . usnm ; . the model has a share, standard, and moldboard of metal with a gauge wheel on the beam. the beam pivots on the standard, allowing adjustments of the angle of draft. the end of the beam is fastened to a brace which extends to the back of the moldboard. the share and point are in one piece; and the moldboard is one piece. the model resembles the plows of james oliver, which by had been widely known and were quite possibly copied. donor unknown. . diorama of tropical banana plantation, late th century. usnm ; . the diorama shows bananas being harvested and trees being cut. the banana bunches get to the railroad cars on burros. at the bottom, bananas are shown in various stages of growth and ripening. gift of united fruit company, washington, d. c. . diorama of tropical coffee plantation, late th century. usnm ; . the diorama shows coffee berries being dried in the sun and in the shade in preparation for marketing the coffee. at the bottom, various stages of growth and ripening of the coffee berries are depicted. gift of the great atlantic and pacific tea company (a & p), new york, new york. . food-slicing machine, mid th century. usnm ; . cutting knives, set in helix in a wooden axle, move the meat through the box, cutting it finer and finer. gift of george murphy, washington, d. c. . fanning mill, about . usnm ; . a hand-crank operated the winnowing mill for separating grain from chaff and beans from hulls. a four-blade, wooden fan, shaped like a paddle wheel, blows a draft below oscillating screens. the chaff is blown off from the threshed grain, and the grain or beans fall from the screens into the path of the draft. the screens catch any straw left after threshing. gift of arden wilson, harrisville, west virginia. [illustration: figure .--two-row corn planter, about . (catalog no. .)] . two-row corn planter, about . usnm ; . this hand-operated planter, of a type patented by s. malone on january , , was sold by william m. plant, a dealer in seeds, tools, and machines at st. louis, missouri. when the planter was dropped to the ground, the two handles moved about inches in a slot toward the outside. this movement opened a space for the corn to drop into the shoe, where a small piece of wood opened and the corn fell to the ground. gift of warren hammond, fayette, missouri. . model of ferguson tractor, . usnm ; . this plastic and metal model of a ferguson tractor operates a ferguson hitch. gift of topping models, inc., akron, ohio. . model of two-disk plow, . usnm ; . a plastic and metal model of a two-disk plow for a ferguson tractor. gift of topping models, inc., akron, ohio. . model of new idea mower, . usnm ; . a cast-iron model of a new idea mower with an operating pitman for use behind a tractor. gift of topping models, inc., akron, ohio. . model of new idea manure spreader, . usnm ; . a plastic and metal model of a new idea, tractor-drawn manure spreader. gift of topping models, inc., akron, ohio. . model of new idea corn picker, . usnm ; . a plastic and metal model of a one-row, tractor-drawn corn picker. gift of topping models, inc., akron, ohio. . tiling spade, . usnm ; . this hand-forged steel spade has a bit with three tines. this style spade was invented around and was widely used for digging trenches for drain tiles on sticky or mucky soil. the osmundson forge company of webster city, iowa, made these spades as late as . gift of a. g. osmundson, webster city, iowa. . glass churn, about . usnm ; . this german-made churn, of -liter capacity, has a hand crank which drives a metal propeller at the bottom in one direction while paddles on the shaft turn in the other direction. gift of a. g. osmundson, webster city, iowa. . cedar sap spouts, about . usnm ; . sap spouts, made of cedar, about inches long. spouts like these were made and used by settlers of upper new york about to gather the maple sap after the trees had been tapped. gift of frank e. olmstead, potsdam, new york. . cedar sap spouts, about . usnm ; . sap spouts for maple tree tapping, about inches long and made of cedar. the maple syrup and sugar industry provided some income for frontier farms, as well as providing sugar for domestic use. although maple syrup often sold at high prices, the industry never achieved major importance even in the localities where it flourished. these spouts are of the sort used in the pioneer period in new york. (see also nos. , - .) gift of frank e. olmstead, potsdam, new york. . iron sap spout, possibly late th century. usnm ; . a cast-iron maple sap spout, about inches long, used for gathering the sap into buckets. possibly factory-made and used later than the frontier period, after maple syrup manufacture had become a commercial enterprise. the leading areas for maple syrup have long been ohio, new york, vermont, and new hampshire. gift of frank e. olmstead, potsdam, new york. . iron sap spout, possibly late th century. usnm ; . a thin, metal trough, plated, and about inches long, used to convey maple sap from the tap in the tree to the sap bucket. this is the type spout most commonly used today in those areas where farmers supplement their income with maple syrup production. gift of frank e. olmstead, potsdam, new york. . sap bucket spikes, possibly late th century. usnm ; . hand-made iron spikes used to hold buckets for maple tree sap. they had to be hooked somewhat so the bucket could hang on them well. gift of frank e. olmstead, potsdam, new york. . diagram of jefferson moldboard, . usnm ; . a three-dimensional wire diagram, at half scale, illustrating thomas jefferson's design of a plow mold-board as he described it in a letter to sir john sinclair in . in the same year jefferson read a paper to the american philosophical society that was titled "description of a mold-board of the least resistance and of the easiest and most certain design." the wire diagram was constructed by the division of crafts and industries, smithsonian institution. . model of jefferson moldboard, . usnm ; . the model consists of four separate blocks of wood cut to show the progressive steps in the construction of the jefferson moldboard: ( ) the block of wood marked for sawing with the rear section cut out, and in two parts; ( ) the block of wood sawed on two diagonals, with the rear section cut out, and in three parts; ( ) the block of wood sawed transversely on guide lines down to the diagonals, with the wood between the transverse cuts removed and leaving the face of the moldboard roughly shaped; ( ) the rear surface of the board produced in the same manner as the front, resulting in a completed moldboard. the models were constructed by the division of crafts and industries, smithsonian institution, after jefferson's original moldboard, located at the natural history museum, paris, france. . wooden curd breaker, about . usnm ; . this curd breaker is made of wood with iron pegs in the cylinder and hopper. gift of laurence hathaway, easton, maryland. [illustration: figure .--grain cradle in use in the field. international harvester corporation photo. (catalog no. .)] . grain cradle, about . usnm ; . caleb paul duval used this cradle on his glen echo farm near baltimore, maryland. gift of virginia duval, college park, maryland. . barrel churn, about . usnm ; . a wooden barrel churn with iron crank and paddles. such churns were of too small volume to be used on commercial dairy farms, and they were not at all useful in creameries, which first appeared in . gift of virginia duval, college park, maryland. . cookie roller, about . usnm ; . a wooden, grooved, one-handled cookie roller, about - / inches long and about - / inches in diameter. the roller added an esthetic touch to home-made cookies but was of little importance in the history of commercial food processing. gift of virginia duval, college park, maryland. . meat grinder, . usnm ; . this iron, hand-cranked meat grinder was patented august , . gift of virginia duval, college park, maryland. . butter prints, about . usnm ; . two butter prints. one is circular, with a tri-lobed leaf design and about inches in diameter; the other is a box mold with two five-point star designs and about inches long, - / inches wide, and inches high. the butter was pressed into these molds before being served, or, sometimes, before being rolled in paper and sold in towns. this aspect of farm dairying quickly disappeared after the creamery dominated the industry. gift of virginia duval, college park, maryland. . shoe last, possibly mid th century. usnm ; . a small last, to fit either foot, for a shoe about - / inches long and - / inches wide. such implements were useful in frontier communities and generally were owned by itinerant cobblers who went from house to house. gift of virginia duval, college park, maryland. . model of fanning mill, . usnm ; . this is a working model of a fanning mill invented by joseph and james montgomery and covered by patents , issued in ; , issued in ; and , issued in . the crank handle and the slide, which governed the flow into the hopper, are missing. james montgomery took the model on sales trips as a demonstrator. gift of ruth montgomery, peoria, illinois. [illustration: figure .--mccormick reaper ( ) in use in the field. photo courtesy of international harvester corporation. (catalog no. .)] . model of mccormick reaper, . usnm ; . a scale model of the reaper of cyrus mccormick, built long afterwards from descriptions by the inventor. gift of mccormick historical association, chicago, illinois. . bee colony, (renewed yearly). a -story bee hive with about , bees. the hive was designed by experts at the department of agriculture research station, beltsville, maryland. the united states department of agriculture donated the hive and the italian bees. . model of ox-powered sugar cane mill, . usnm ; . model of a mill of a type used in puerto rico as early as . it took ten men and four yoke of oxen to operate the mill, which could crush about four tons of cane in a -hour day. this type of mill extracted about to percent syrup based on the weight of the cane, compared to to percent extracted by modern mills. gift of daniel thompson, petersburg, virginia. . model of water-lifting wheel, . usnm ; . a model of a wind-driven waterwheel used for raising water into the evaporating beds in salt works. this type of device lifted water from the ocean in puerto rico. gift of daniel thompson, petersburg, virginia. . model of grist mill, . usnm ; . this model of a water-powered grist mill resembles those used throughout america in the th century before the discovery of the gradual reduction process and the consequent centralization of the milling industry. this particular mill, known to have operated from to , ground corn in puerto rico. gift of daniel thompson, petersburg, virginia. . farm copybook, about . usnm ; . wells forbes, who had a farm near alexandria, virginia, kept this book for about a year in the s. gift of bessie w. palm, washington, d. c. . grain cradle, about . usnm , . grain cradle used before . gift of jennie sabrosky, sturgis, michigan. . model of hussey reaper, . usnm ; . a model of the reaper patented by obed hussey and based on the specifications of the patent. constructed by the office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . horse spurs, possibly late th century. usnm ; . gift of catholic university of america, washington, d. c. . bridle bits, possibly late th century. usnm ; . a rugged type of bridle bit with steel rings used to control horses. this particular bridle bit may have been used in texas and mexico in the cattle industry. gift of catholic university of america, washington, d. c. . cow bell, possibly late th century. usnm ; . gift of catholic university of america, washington, d. c. . braided whip, possibly late th century. usnm ; . a home-made horsewhip. gift of catholic university of america, washington, d. c. . tobacco clips, possibly late th century. usnm ; . seven clips, each different, denoting a brand for labeling tobacco. gift of catholic university of america, washington, d. c. . bar share plow, . usnm ; . a left-handed wooden moldboard plow. most american plows cast the furrow to the right. the reverend christian lesher brought this rare sort of plow from lancaster county, pennsylvania, to washington township, pennsylvania, in . gift of daniel lesher, waynesboro, pennsylvania. [illustration: figure .--sausage stuffer, early th century. (catalog no. .)] . sausage stuffer, about . usnm ; . this hand-lever sausage stuffer, mounted on a bench, may have been made in england in the early th century and later brought to brampton, ontario. not all parts are of the same age. the replaced parts seem to be those most subject to wear and tear. this style sausage stuffer was quite common in the th and th centuries. gift of tee-pak, inc., chicago, illinois. . meat grinder, about . usnm ; . a hand-cranked meat grinder made of wood with iron slugs to push the meat against stationary knives. overall, inches long, inches wide, and inches high. gift of tee-pak, inc., chicago, illinois. . sausage stuffer, early th century. usnm ; . this hand-cranked sausage stuffer, made of wood and with an iron screw, fits on a small bench with lard press. it is inches long, - / inches wide, and inches high. gift of tee-pak, inc., chicago, illinois. . lard press, late th century. usnm ; . a lard press made of cylindrical perforated metal, with a screw press to be mounted on a small bench. the press is inches in diameter and inches high. the bench is about a yard long, inches wide, and inches high. gift of tee-pak, inc., chicago, illinois. . butcher's table, late th century. usnm ; . a heavy, low table made of two thick slabs of wood with a gutter cut along the edges of the table. used in cutting up animal carcasses. some feet long, inches wide, and - / inches high. gift of tee-pak, inc., chicago, illinois. . chopping bowl, late th century. usnm ; . elliptical wooden chopping bowl, some inches long, - / inches wide, and inches high. gift of tee-pak, inc., chicago, illinois. . thresher, about . usnm ; . a threshing machine marked "j. and p. flickinger, hanover, pa., no. ." it once had a drive for a vibrating straw separator. gift of james w. brown, brookeville, maryland. . grain cradle, about . usnm ; . a grain cradle made at brighton, maryland, by william nickerson, jr. the cradle fingers are of ash, and the braces of hickory. this type of cradle continued in use in many places even after the advent of harvesting machinery. farmers with only small acreages in bread grains or who farmed rough or hilly soil could not effectively use the reapers and harvester of the middle th century. gift of james w. brown, brookeville, maryland. . binder's rake, about . usnm ; . the binder followed the cradler. this hand rake, used by the binder for gathering the grain before binding and later shocking, had teeth rived out of hickory. such a rake could also be used by a binder who followed those the early reapers used before the invention of the twine binder. gift of james w. brown, brookeville, maryland. [illustration: figure .--harpoon hayforks. (catalog nos. , .)] . harpoon hayfork, late th century. usnm ; . a double-harpoon hayfork and pulley for lifting hay from a wagon to a barn hayloft. power was supplied by horse or mule. the small barbs on the harpoon could catch and hold a surprising amount of hay. gift of james w. brown, brookeville, maryland. . grain sack, . usnm ; . a grain sack of homespun linen made from flax grown on the john lesher farm near waynesboro, pennsylvania. woven at a roadside mill, the sack has a capacity of three bushels and is marked "john lesher, no. , ." prior to the advent of and widespread use of the elevator system of grain handling, nearly all grain was moved in sacks that had to be shifted about by hand and stored in warehouses. the elevator system began in buffalo, new york, in , but reached a position of prominence only in the s when it began flourishing in chicago and milwaukee. thereafter the grain sack became virtually a curiosity. gift of james w. brown, brookeville, maryland. . single-harpoon hayfork, about . usnm ; . a hay harpoon, commonly called a hay needle, about - / inches long. gift of cora e. robinson, schenectady, new york. . tractor engine starter, . usnm ; . the starting device could be bolted to the rear wheel hub of an automobile. an extendible shaft went from the wheel-fitting to the crank on the tractor. the car engine then could turn over the tractor engine. the starter was made by c. o. goodrich, who marketed it for about eight years in five midwestern states. self starters on tractors eventually ended the need for the device. gift of c. o. goodrich, plymouth, indiana. . fordson crank, about . usnm ; . this device was used to crank the engine on fordson tractors. gift of c. o. goodrich, plymouth, indiana. . milking machine, . usnm ; . a mehring foot-powered milking machine. gift of earl j. waybright, gettysburg, pennsylvania. . carey plow, about . usnm ; . a type of plow widely used in the late th and early th centuries in the united states. this particular plow was a one-horse, single-bottom, walking type, with wooden handles, beam, stock, and moldboard. the share point is of iron. all wooden joints are joined with wooden pegs. there is a bolt-type brace from beam to stock and a small iron brace with a larger wooden brace between the handles. gift of international harvester co., albany, new york. . hoe, possibly mid th century. usnm ; . only the blade remains of this socket-type hoe. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . log roller, late th century. usnm ; . oxen drew this roller in preparing seed beds. the roller crushed clods and compressed the soil, leaving a firm, compact seed bed. it was useful, obviously, only on certain types of soil in fairly humid areas. the roller is made of four log sections, each inches long and inches in diameter. the logs are set in a weighted frame measuring inches by feet, with a tongue about feet long. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . grain cradle, late th century. usnm ; . a form of scythe used for harvesting grain before the reaper came into use, or used in places where the reaper proved uneconomical or technologically inappropriate, as rough or hilly land. this specimen has four wooden fingers, or tines, that are inches long and spaced inches apart. the blade is inches wide and as long as the fingers. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . self-rake reaper, . usnm ; . a mccormick daisy reaper of in which the operator sat on a seat mounted on the axle of the left wheel. two horses drew the reaper. three rotating arms with -inch projections raked, bound and shocked the grain. the cutter bar, over feet long, has three triangular sickle blades which oscillate through the guard teeth, as in hussey or modern cutter bars. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . barley fork, possibly late th century. usnm ; . a rectangular wooden barley fork with a one-eighth-inch-gauge wire guard for holding the barley on the four tines. the guard was needed because of the nasty stings that the beard could give the worker. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . brush hook, late th century. usnm ; . a typical iron sickle, called a hook because of its general shape. it has a circular tip on the end of the blade so that it could be used for cutting brush. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . fanning mill, late th century. usnm ; . an early fanning mill with pulley and leather belt. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . scythe, late th century. usnm ; . a crooked-handled scythe used for cutting grain before the cradle, and thereafter for cutting hay. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. [illustration: figure .--flop-over hay rake. (catalog no. .)] . flop-over hay rake, about . usnm ; . a rake for piling hay that would be carried from the field or put into a mow. this sort of implement was used as early as . the farmer walked behind the horse-drawn rake and raised the handle when the rake was full; this caused the double set of teeth to revolve, releasing the hay in a pile and putting the second set of teeth into position to rake more hay. the older method involved using small hand rakes and required considerable time and effort in a very disagreeable task. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . victor mowing machine, . usnm ; . a one-horse, front-cut mowing machine similar to the buckeye mower. the cutter bar can be raised and lowered parallel to the ground for desired cutting heights, and it can be lifted and fastened in an upright position for transport to and from the field. mowers cut more rapidly and lower than did reapers, and thus they used a different gear ratio; however, farmers sometimes used reapers for mowing. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . spring-tooth hay rake, late th century. usnm ; . a sulky rake with spring teeth designed to jump over obstructions in the field. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . "railway horse power," about . usnm ; . a horse-powered treadmill made chiefly of wood, with metal parts where the wear would be greatest. it was used to produce power for belt-driven equipment such as threshers or fanning mills. the machine is set in motion by putting a horse in the pen and releasing the brake. the weight of the horse causes the slats to move endlessly, which in turn rotates the belting wheel. two-horse treadmills also were used, but such machines, although portable, worked less efficiently than the sweep-power machines. this treadmill was made in vermont. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. [illustration: figure .--dog-powered churn, . (catalog no. .)] . dog-powered churn, . usnm ; . h. m. childs of utica, new york, patented this dog-powered churn in , with improvements patented in . a dog, tied or strapped into the pen, ran forward and so moved the slats of the treadmill which in turn rotated a flywheel. attached to the flywheel is a pitman rod which raises and lowers a churn dasher. devices of this sort had appeared earlier for use in the farm-dairy industry. the change of direction effected by the pitman rod caused some loss of energy; in any case, a revolving barrel-churn proved more efficient in the long run. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. . winnowing basket, about . usnm ; . the winnowing basket was used to work off the chaff from the threshed grain. when the grain was tossed into the air, the wind would blow away the chaff and the grain would fall back into the basket. sometimes the grain would be poured from another basket into a winnowing basket, with the wind doing the winnowing. gift of new york historical association, cooperstown, new york. [illustration: figure .--avery bulldog tractor, about . (catalog no. .)] . avery bulldog tractor, . usnm ; . this is one of the several makes of tractors which set a trend toward lighter tractors about the time of world war i. it was designed for light field work such as cultivating but could also be used for belt drive. it developed to horsepower. sold by everett noirot, freehold, new york. . grain cradle, about . usnm ; . this grain cradle resembles a scythe, with modification by the addition of a light wooden frame of four fingers with braces. gift of massachusetts society for promoting agriculture. . scythe, about . usnm ; . a straight-handled scythe, probably hand-made, that largely was used for mowing, although it could be used for reaping grain. gift of massachusetts society for promoting agriculture. . harness vise, probably mid th century. usnm ; . this wooden device could be used to pry open the jaws of a recalcitrant horse. more often, it held parts of the harness as the saddler worked. gift of massachusetts society for promoting agriculture. . wooden hand fork, late th century. usnm ; . a wooden pitchfork for handling hay, straw, and the like. the metal pitchfork gradually replaced these wooden forks between the middle and end of the th century. gift of massachusetts society for promoting agriculture. . horse-drawn hayfork, late th century. usnm ; . the fork was driven into the hay and the handle compressed until it latched. a rope was attached to the fork, run up over a pully in the barn, and then down to a horse. in this way the hay could be lifted into the barn. gift of massachusetts society for promoting agriculture. . horse-drawn planter, . usnm ; . e. c. fairchild of deerfield, massachusetts, made this planter, which has compartments for seeds and fertilizer. as the drive-wheel pulled a sliding bar back and forth, seeds and fertilizer alternately dropped into the ground. the spacing of seeds and fertilizer could be set by adjusting the metal bar. gift of massachusetts society for promoting agriculture. . fanning mill, mid th century. usnm ; . a machine for winnowing grain after it had been threshed. grain fed into the machine landed on vibrating screens which permitted the kernels to fall into the path of a draft of air which blew off the chaff and debris. the clean grain fell into a container beneath the mill. the operator turned a crank which operated both the screens and the fan. gift of massachusetts society for promoting agriculture. . hoe, mid th century. usnm ; . a small hand hoe used for cultivating. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . tile knife, late th century. usnm ; . this knife, resembling a small spade, was used to cut the trench in which tile was laid. it has a triangular metal cutter at right angles on the right side, and this gave the trench a straight edge on one side and perhaps helped keep the trench straight. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . hand hayfork, about . usnm ; . farmers used this metal fork for pitching hay, straw, and possibly manure. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . grain sickle, th century. usnm ; . this hand tool for harvesting grain has not changed in design for the last thousand years. the sickle has a curved blade some inches long. the reaper would grab a handful of stalks and cut them with the blade. one man could cut up to an acre of grain by this method. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . grafting knife, possibly th century. usnm ; . a knife especially designed to make the cuts necessary for grafting branches onto fruit trees. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . manure fork, possibly th century. usnm ; . a typical manure fork. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . ox muzzle, about . usnm ; . threshers used the muzzle to prevent the ox from stopping to graze while pulling equipment or from eating the grain while treading on it in a threshing operation. this muzzle is made of thin strips of wood. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . hay cutter, th century. usnm ; . a knife made with the handle and serrated blade as one piece, all of metal. a wooden stock with a handgrip is fastened to the metal handle. this tool obviously was intended for cutting very small amounts of hay. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . narrow hoe, probably mid th century. usnm ; . this is a typical cultivating hoe. farmers used hoes of this type for cultivating crops until the innovation of plows and harrows. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . ox yoke, about . usnm ; . this yoke, for a single ox, probably was used in pulling small agricultural implements such as cultivating plows. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . grain flail, about . usnm ; . this type flail was used to beat grain free from unbound bundles of grain scattered about on the barn floor. the harvesters then threw the straw to one side and swept up the grain and chaff. the grain then had to be winnowed. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . curd breaker, late th century. usnm ; . this machine has a wooden roller with projecting wooden pegs which, when rotated, broke up cheese curds. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . horse-drawn cultivator, late th century. usnm ; . this triangular cultivator was used for stirring the soil and removing foreign vegetable matter. it is adjustable and has five teeth spaced from to inches apart. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. . ice saw, late th century. usnm ; . this steel-bladed saw cut ice in lakes, ponds, and streams. gift of farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts. [illustration: figure .--frick portable steam engine of . (catalog no. .)] . portable steam engine, . usnm ; . portable steam engines provided belting power on farms to run threshing machines, circular saws, etc. this frick model steam engine operated regularly from to . gift of frick company, waynesboro, pennsylvania. . broadcast seeder, . usnm ; . the operator saddles this implement from his shoulder by means of a strap fastened to the seed pack. by turning the crank at a normal pace, seeds are scattered from a spinning disk. the seeder is equipped with a gauge which can be set to sow prescribed amounts of seed per acre. gift of mrs. arnold miles, washington, d. c. . cigar formers, about . usnm ; . these instruments consist of two pieces of wood dowelled together with twenty holes that taper from / inch to / inch. the name "miller burial and pliers co." is stamped in the wood. gift of mrs. arnold miles, washington, d. c. . manure forks, about . usnm ; . two steel manure forks. gift of mrs. arnold miles, washington, d. c. . wooden hayfork, th century. usnm ; . a typical wooden hayfork of the th century. gift of mrs. arnold miles, washington, d. c. . model of manning mower, . usnm ; . william manning of plainfield, new jersey, invented this mower in . the cutter bar, suggestive of hussey's, has triangular knives which vibrate over long fingers. constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . model of bailey mower, . usnm ; . this mower, invented in by jeremiah bailey of pennsylvania, has a rotating disk that serves as the cutter. the cutting disk, which can be raised to avoid obstacles, is geared from the axle. constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . model of gallic reaper, first century a.d. usnm ; . this is a model of a reaper as described in use in gaul in the first and second centuries a.d. a donkey or an ox pushed the reaper through the grain; the heads of the grain were ripped off by the blade and fell into the box. constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . model of hussey reaper, . usnm ; . the first hussey reapers were crude two-wheel mowers with a platform attached to the rear right side of the machine. the sickle or cutter bar was made of a series of triangular knives riveted to a flat bar that oscillated back and forth between guard teeth. the action was initiated by means of a gear mounted on the main axle. the raker stands on the platform to remove the cut grain. constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . model of hussey reaper, . usnm ; . this is a one-eighth scale model of the hussey reapers built between and . constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . model of bell reaper, . usnm ; . on this machine a reel pressed the grain against the cutters and made it fall back on an apron. the apron could be set to run in either direction to deposit the cut grain at the side, out of the way of the machine on the next trip around. the reaper was invented by the reverend patrick bell, carmyllie, scotland. the model was constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . models of landis eclipse thresher, . usnm ; . constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . model of new england strong plow, about . usnm ; . constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . model of mahlon smith plow, about - . usnm ; . constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . check row corn planter, about . usnm ; . this machine planted two rows at a time and required two men to operate. one man drove the horses and the other operated a lever for dropping the corn at the point desired. patents for "check" row planters were issued in , , and . gift of clayton kanter, new knoxville, ohio. . one-row hand "corn jobber," mid th century. usnm ; . seed corn is released by means of a lever. gift of clayton kanter, new knoxville, ohio. . wide single-shovel plow, about . usnm ; . farmers in the western part of the united states in the s used this type of plow to cultivate corn. gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. [illustration: figure .--double-shovel plow. (catalog no. .)] . double-shovel plow, about . usnm ; . this plow, with shovels placed in a staggered position, was commonly used for cross-plowing or cultivating. gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . double-shovel plow, about . usnm ; . this double-shovel plow has the shovels placed opposite one another. gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . a-frame harrow, mid th century. usnm ; . this triangular harrow has wooden beams with ten-inch iron spikes driven through them. this type of harrow pulverized and leveled plowed land, covered the seed, and cultivated between rows of corn. triangular harrows worked better than square types because the triangles had greater strength on newly cleared land. gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . trolley carrier for hayfork, about . usnm ; . this steel trolley carrier supported a one-horse hayfork. a pulley attached to the trolley carrier lifted and lowered the hayfork. the first trolley carriers for hayforks were invented by j. e. porter of ottawa, illinois, in and . they were made of wood and iron. the first steel carriers were patented by jacob ney, canton, ohio, and (in ) by p. a. myer, ashland, ohio. gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . riding disk cultivator, late th century. usnm ; . this cultivator has two sections, each with three -inch disk wheels spaced - / inches apart. it has handgrip levers for making cutting adjustments. this machine worked best on ground between row crops. gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . singletree, late th and early th centuries. usnm ; . this singletree is made of wood. the trace chains of the team of horses could be attached to the hooks on the singletree. gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . doubletree, late th century to early th century. usnm ; . a doubletree made of wood. the doubletree served as a lever on which to mount two singletrees. this arrangement distributed equally the pull of a load between two horses. gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . singletree, late th century. usnm ; . the trace chains of two horses are attached to this home-made, wooden singletree. the tongue of a machine would be hooked to the center of the tree. gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . grain fork, about . usnm ; . this three-tine iron fork was used to move bundled grain. gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . one-row, hand "corn jobber," late th century. usnm ; . gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . double-harpoon hay fork, about . usnm ; . s. e. harris patented this double-harpoon, iron hayfork in . gift of john offenbacker, sidney, ohio. . ground hog thresher, about . usnm ; . this early thresher did not separate the grain from the chaff. grain fed into the trough passed into a compartment with a rotating iron cylinder filled with finger-like projections which broke the grain into its component parts. a fanning basket then separated the grain from the chaff. purchased from george rhoades, greenville, ohio. . sweep horse power, late th century. usnm ; . this type of horse power operated by the horse pulling a shaft in a circular motion that set iron gears into motion. the gears connected to a pulley for operating grain threshers, flour mills, saws, and the like. purchased from george rhoades, greenville, ohio. . marker sled, possibly late th century. usnm ; . this wooden sled marked rows for future planting. the sled could mark three rows approximately inches apart. purchased from george rhoades, greenville, ohio. . large hand rake, late th century. usnm ; . made entirely of wood. purchased from george rhoades, greenville, ohio. . jointed, wooden harrow, mid th century. usnm ; . this two-sectioned, rectangular wooden harrow has five wooden beams per section, each section having rounded teeth. very primitive. purchased from george rhoades, greenville, ohio. . wheeled cultivator, early th century. usnm ; . this cultivator has individual levers for setting each set of teeth and contains a neck yoke, singletree, and guard shields. this type of cultivator improved on the one-horse type, which required harrowing one side of a row at a time. a variety of teeth could be used on this machine. purchased from george rhoades, greenville, ohio. . double a-frame harrow, th century. usnm ; . this wooden, triangular harrow has iron teeth driven through the beams. purchased from ruth brown, sardinia, ohio. . wheeled cultivator, early th century. usnm ; . this riding-type cultivator has two sections with three teeth each. it differs from most wheeled cultivators by having iron bars for setting teeth depth, with one lever to elevate and lower the teeth. it has a neck yoke and a singletree. purchased from ruth brown, sardinia, ohio. . flop-over hayrake, about . usnm ; . a flop-over rake used as early as . purchased from ruth brown, sardinia, ohio. . side hill plow, late th century. usnm ; . one of several types of plows used for plowing along hillsides. the moldboard and share could rotate on a horizontal axis. at the end of each furrow the farmer could reverse it and hook in position so that the plow cast each furrow in the same direction. purchased from albert knecht, lancaster, ohio. . grain drill, about . usnm ; . this drill was made by the eagle machine company of lancaster, ohio. it has a double bar, singletree, neck yoke, one grain compartment with eight grain boots, and a packing wheel for each boot. it sowed eight rows at a time, inches apart. drills of this type became popular in the s. purchased from albert knecht, lancaster, ohio. . wheeled cultivator, about . usnm ; . this walking-type cultivator, divided into two sections, has three plow teeth per section with guard shields attached. the name j. deere is printed on the toolbox. purchased from albert knecht, lancaster, ohio. [illustration: figure .--flop-over hayrake, mid th century. (catalog no. .)] . flop-over hayrake, mid th century. usnm ; . wooden, horse-drawn rake which the farmer could flop over to empty as he walked behind it. purchased from albert knecht, lancaster, ohio. . wheeled cultivator, early th century. usnm ; . this mccormick deering, wheeled cultivator has one lever for lowering and elevating the plow teeth and two levers for setting the depth of the plow teeth. gift of mrs. lucy f. robinson, chandlersville, ohio. . grubbing hoe, about . usnm ; . this narrow grubbing hoe resembles a pick. it broke up soil and removed obstructions such as roots and shrubs. gift of mrs. harley climpson, bethesda, maryland. . model of th-century american mower. usnm ; . a copy of a model reaper on display at the american philosophical society, philadelphia, pennsylvania. purchased from mrs. l. c. eichner, clifton, new jersey. . barbed wire, about . usnm ; . a stamped zigzag ribbon between two twisted wires. gift of don holst, washington, d. c. . barbed wire, about . usnm ; . a stamped, ribbon-type wire with barbs on one edge and with the ribbon twisted. gift of john blake, washington, d. c. . narrow hoe, date unknown. usnm ; . blade from a socket-type hoe. the words "bedsteel oil tempered" are stamped on the blade. gift of james w. rutherford, springfield, ohio. . wallis tractor, . usnm ; . a model k wallis tractor of a series made from to . it succeeded the wallis cub and the wallis cub, jr. gift of massey-ferguson, inc., racine, wisconsin. . single-shovel plow, about . usnm ; . this type of shovel plow cultivated corn in the western part of the country in the s. this specimen resembles a row-buster for opening rows to plant seed, etc. gift of andrew w. frye, woodstock, virginia. . fiddle-bow broadcast seeder, late th century. usnm ; . the operator saddled the seeder on his shoulder by means of a strap fastened to the seed sack. sliding the bow back and forth caused the seeds to be broadcast from a spinning disk. a gauge on the seeder could be set to sow a prescribed amount of seeds per acre. gift of benjamin lambert, woodstock, virginia. . grain riddle, mid th century. . sieve for sifting grain. constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . broad hoe, mid th century. . constructed by office of exhibits, smithsonian institution. . miniature plow, late th century to early th century. . this plow, made entirely of steel, was found in alexandria, virginia. . mattock, th century. usnm ; . this is an implement for grubbing and digging. gift of veikko jarvis, negaune, michigan. . fodder cutter, . . this hand-cranked machine could cut all kinds of fodder--hay, straw, and corn stalks--with ease and rapidity. called the "improved baldwins american," it was patented in and . gift of thomas w. bein, bethesda, maryland. . oliver chilled plow, th century. . steel share, moldboard, and coulter, with wooden beam, frame, and handles. gift of oliver corporation, south bend, indiana. [illustration: figure .--hart-parr tractor of , the third in line of the first commercial tractors. (catalog no. .)] . hart-parr tractor, . usnm ; . the third internal combustion tractor built by the company founded earlier by charles hart and charles parr. the hart-parr tractor could pull gangs of plows or drive large threshers. oil circulating through the pipes in the square stack cooled the engine. gift of oliver corporation, south bend, indiana. . corn grinder, about . usnm ; . this iron corn grinder has "# " printed on the grease caps of the axle. gift of walter a. hitchcock, warrenton, virginia. . cider mill and press, late th or early th century. usnm ; . this wooden-frame mill has iron parts, with a feeder-trough and two tubes for draining the apple cider. it was operated by means of a hand crank. gift of walter a. hitchcock, warrenton, virginia. . model of john deere plow, . received in . an example of a typical plow of the s. gift of john deere company, moline, illinois. . model of john deere tractor, . received in . an example of a typical tractor of the period. gift of john deere company, moline, illinois. . sample fertilizers, . usnm ; . samples of types of fertilizers in common use at the time. gift of dr. john b. blake, washington, d. c. . sample fertilizers, . usnm ; . samples of six types of fertilizer in common use at the time. gift of dr. john b. blake, washington, d. c. . sample fertilizers, . usnm ; . samples of eight types of fertilizer in common use at the time. gift of dr. john b. blake, washington, d. c. . sample fertilizers, . usnm ; . samples of six types of fertilizer in common use at the time. gift of dr. john b. blake, washington, d. c. . sample fertilizers, . usnm ; . samples of thirteen types of fertilizers in common use at the time. gift of dr. john b. blake, washington, d. c. . cast-iron centrifuge, . usnm ; . a centrifuge used for running the babcock milk test, which determined the percentage of butterfat. gift of dr. john b. blake, washington, d. c. . insecticide, . usnm ; . a sample of a pyrox insecticide in common use in . gift of dr. john b. blake, washington, d. c. . hoe, th century. usnm ; . a socket-type, three-tine hoe used to weed vegetable gardens, tobacco, and similar row crops. gift of mrs. henry h. byrne, washington, d. c. . one-row planter, about . usnm ; . the gears from the drive-wheel mesh with a set of gears that turn the seed plate. the distance for dropping the seed could be determined by the size of the gear used on the drive-wheel. gift of h. c. cole, crestline, ohio. . portable gasoline engine, . usnm ; . this machine provided belting power for operating feed mills, cream separators, wood saws, etc. it generated hp at - rpm. it was covered by two patents dated april , . gift of new holland machine co., new holland, pennsylvania. . cotton planter, th century. usnm ; . this one-row, horse-drawn cotton planter drilled cottonseed in rows by means of a revolving wooden drum with one-inch holes spaced around the center of the drum. gift of lester souter, boerne, texas. . wooden spade, about . usnm ; . this wooden spade has a metal cutting edge. purchased from mrs. h. j. cummings, washington, d. c. . model of mccormick reaper, . usnm ; . a full-scale model of the mccormick reaper. gift of franklin institute, philadelphia, pennsylvania. . hoe, date unknown. usnm ; . this is a socket-type hoe with a half-moon cutting blade. gift of dr. ivor cornman, miami, florida. . curd breaker, mid th century. usnm ; . this tool for cutting cheese curds has four -inch parallel blades. gift of dr. ivor cornman, miami, florida. . wooden brace, possibly mid th century. usnm ; . this implement was used to hold open the split carcasses of hogs. gift of dr. ivor cornman, miami, florida. [illustration: figure .--a view in the hall of farm machinery, national museum of history and technology. the holt combine in (catalog no. ) is at left. the victor mowing machine of (catalog no. ) is in right foreground.] . holt combine, . usnm , . benjamin holt made this combine around . its main feature is the use of linked, wrought-iron chain belts for the drive rather than a system of gears as commonly found on combines of that day. gift of mrs. c. parker holt, stockton, california. . waterwheel and shafting, mid th century. usnm ; . components of a one-blade, sash sawmill. purchased from robert e. clement, chester springs, pennsylvania. . apple parer, about . usnm ; . the operator sat on the wooden seat and turned a crank which rotated the apple fastened to a spindle. when held at the proper contact, the knife peeled the rotating apple. purchased from mrs. gladys harbst, butler, ohio. . miniature plow, mid th century. usnm ; . this plow was caught in a fisherman's net in the susquehanna river near havre-de-grace, maryland, in . it probably was a display piece for the manufacturer. purchased from f. p. leithiser, milford, delaware. [illustration: figure .--john deere sulky plow, about . (catalog no. .)] . sulky plow, about . usnm ; . an all-steel john deere sulky plow. purchased from irwin vette, westboro, missouri. . tobacco transplanter, late th or early th century. usnm ; . the driver sat on a wooden water barrel on this horse-drawn tobacco transplanter. the men who set the plants in the furrow used the two seats in the rear. gift of pollitt graybill, diver, kentucky. . ice cream freezer, . usnm ; . thomas mills and brothers of philadelphia made this -quart commercial ice cream freezer which was patented on march , . gift of john g. mills, philadelphia, pennsylvania. . barbed wire, about - . usnm ; . a sample of ribbon barbed wire. gift of don holst, washington, d. c. [illustration: figure .--moline universal tractor, model d, of , in the hall of farm machinery, national museum of history and technology. (catalog no. .)] . moline universal tractor, . usnm ; . this model d is particularly unique in that it could be adapted as horse-drawn equipment and could be operated from its seat. it is light and versatile and equipped with front pulley drive and head lights. gift of minneapolis-moline, inc., hopkins, minnesota. . two-bottom plow, . usnm ; . this plow is attached to the moline universal model d tractor of . gift of minneapolis-moline, inc., hopkins, minnesota. . sulky plow, . usnm ; . a moline two-wheeled sulky plow. three horses drew the plow, which has three singletrees and one doubletree. gift of minneapolis-moline, inc., hopkins, minnesota. . grain binder, . usnm ; . this mccormick-deering grain binder cut the grain and, by means of an apron, carried it through a bundling and tying mechanism. the bundles of grain fell into a set of forks which the operator released. the machine is covered by patents , , and , , . it is similar to binders used in the s. gift of j. d. major, belton, south carolina. [illustration: figure .--cattle dehorner. (catalog no. .)] . dehorner, about . usnm , . this implement, used to trim cattle horns, works like a gigantic clipper. gift of newton e. wiat, arlington, virginia. . portable steam engine, . usnm ; . the first portable steam engine built by the j. i. case company in . it burned wood and developed hp. gift of j. i. case company, racine, wisconsin. . japanese cultivating machine, . usnm ; . this japanese model kf power cultivator has a detachable rotary hoe and a diesel engine with direct drive. . wooden grain fork, about . usnm ; . a four-tined wooden fork for handling bundles of grain. it was used by the donor's grandfather on his farm in maryland. gift of c. gordon dentry, washington, d. c. . model of lawn mower, . usnm ; . a model of the suburbia , a riding mower powered by a - / -hp gasoline engine with three speeds between / mph and - / mph. gift of herman becker, washington, d. c. . broadcast seeder, about . usnm ; . a hand-cranked seeder. gift of milton j. brandon, silver spring, maryland. . tobacco axe, mid th century. usnm ; . a tobacco axe used to harvest sun-cured tobacco in the connecticut valley region. gift of minner j. cooper, windsor, new york. . daveat milk sterilizer, . usnm ; . an autoclave combined with vacuum chambers and other devices that sterilized and canned milk or other liquid dairy products. the process preserved the product with a minimum loss of nutritional value and without causing coagulation. patent , , granted to elmer s. davis, august , . . hay bale hooks, th century or later. usnm ; . two bale hooks. gift of e. peterkin, forest heights, maryland. . model of huber steam tractor, . usnm ; . an operable scale model of a huber steam tractor. gift of raymond stout, washington, d. c. . hand cultivating hoe, th century. usnm ; . a three-tine, curved cultivating hoe probably used in vegetable gardening. gift of arnold miles, bethesda, maryland. . cast-iron implement seat, about . usnm ; . a cast-iron seat typical of those found on late- th and early- th-century farm implements. gift of k. e. clark, los angeles, california. . grain flail, . usnm ; . a typical flail used in wisconsin in for threshing grain. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . turkey collars, late th century. usnm ; . small leather collars, with bells attached, placed on turkeys at a time when farmers typically let their poultry run loose. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . branding iron, th century. usnm ; . a # branding iron, circle w, used to mark cattle. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . riding spurs, or later. usnm ; . gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . harness hames, early th century. usnm ; . brass knobs from the collar of a horse's harness. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . reaper hook, about . usnm ; . a hand sickle used for harvesting grain. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . iron pot hooks, late th century. usnm ; . pot hooks made of two pieces of heavy wire hinged on the ends. the hook fastened onto pots to remove them from open fires. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . iron spike, late th century. usnm ; . an iron spike, probably from a harrowing device such as a triangular beam harrow. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. [illustration: figure .--flax hackle. (catalog no. .)] . flax hackle, late th century. usnm ; . this hackle consists of a piece of wood, by inches, with square iron nails protruding from one side. the homemade hackle shredded flax in preparation for making linen cloth. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . barley fork, late th or early th century. usnm ; . a wooden, four-tined fork used for handling barley. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . wooden wheelbarrow, th century. usnm ; . all parts of this wheelbarrow are homemade. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . wooden wheel, th century. usnm ; . a wooden wheel used on a wheelbarrow. seven separate parts to the wheel illustrate the general construction of wooden wheels. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . grain sack, about . usnm ; . peter brugler snyder used this grain sack about years ago on his farm near montour falls, new york. the initials p. b. s. appear on the sack. gift of howard s. rappleye, washington, d. c. [illustration: figure .--corn sheller. (catalog no. .)] . corn sheller, about . usnm ; . a corn sheller that was operated by means of a hand crank. gift of dr. stephen lang, san fernando, california. . barbed-wire display panel, about . usnm ; . display panel of different types of barbed wire. gift of dr. frank horsfall, blacksburg, virginia. . barbed wire, about . eight pieces of "brotherton barb," a wire patented by j. brotherton of ames, iowa, in ; patent , . it became very popular, and was second only to glidden's "the winner" in sales. it had nonslipping barbs and was easy to make. . barbed wire, about . "baker perfect," a barbed wire invented by george baker of des moines, iowa. it was popular and widely used but never patented. . barbed wire, about . from jefferson county, iowa. patented by edward m. crandall of chicago, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . two pieces of "twist oval," a wire patented by josiah f. glidden of de kalb, illinois, in ; patent , . the use of oval wire shows an effort to prevent slipping of the barb. . barbed wire, about . from nodaway county, missouri. patented by henry m. rose of waterman, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . from jefferson county, iowa. patented by michael daley of waterman, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, date unknown. from jefferson county, iowa. a handmade specimen made with a tool in this collection. . barbed wire, about . "dobbs and booth," patented by john dobbs and benjamin booth of victor, iowa, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . from south-western arkansas. patented by j. f. glidden. . barbed wire, date unknown. from nodaway, county, missouri. a claim that this wire was patented by j. f. glidden has not been verified. . barbed wire, about . from jefferson county, iowa. patented by spencer st. john of cedar rapids, iowa, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, date unknown. standard cattle barbed wire patented by j. f. glidden and made by republic steel wire company. . barbed wire, date unknown. standard hog barbed wire patented by j. f. glidden and made by republic steel wire company. . barbed wire, about . from atchison county, missouri. patented by william h. frye of marshalltown, iowa, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . from nodaway county, missouri. patented by joseph goss of beloit, wisconsin, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . two pieces of "brink-martelle," a wire patented by john j. brinkerhoff of auburn, new york, in ; patent , . the round wire lacks its barbs. . barbed wire, about . from nodaway county, missouri. patented by william s. bate of boston, massachusetts, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "champion," or "zig-zag," patented by edward m. crandall of chicago, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . two pieces of "buckthorn" (modified), patented by t. v. allis of new york, new york, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . from nodaway county, missouri. patented by ole o. kittleson of milan, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . two pieces of "brink flat," patented by jacob and warren m. brinkerhoff of auburn, new york, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . four pieces of "decker spread," patented by alexander c. decker of bushnell, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "brink twist," patented by jacob and warren m. brinkerhoff of auburn, new york, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "ladder barbed wire," patented by alexander decker of bushnell, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . from nodaway county, missouri. patented by elijah sims of aurora, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "sunderland kink," patented by l. e. sunderland of joliet, illinois, in ; patent , . this wire has nonslipping barbs. . barbed wire, about . from caldwell county, missouri. patented by j. w. griswold of troy, new york, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "stubbe plate," patented by john stubbe of pittsburgh, pennsylvania, in ; patent , . this wire carried a patch so animals could see it easily. . barbed wire, about . "haish 's'," patented by jacob haish of de kalb, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "kennedy barbs," patented by charles kennedy of aurora, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "thorny fence," patented by michael kelly of new york, new york, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "the winner," patented by josiah f. glidden of de kalb, illinois, in ; patent , . this was the most successful and most popular barbed wire. it neither slipped nor twisted. . barbed wire, about . war wire (world war ii) from the australian shoreline. . barbed wire, about . "haish 's'" (modified). . barbed wire, about . war wire (world war ii) from bizerta, tunis, north africa. . barbed wire, about . war wire (german or italian, world war ii) from naples, italy. [illustration: figure .--haish barbed wire and advertisement. (catalog no. .)] . barbed wire, about . "brink flat," patented by jacob and warren m. brinkerhoff of auburn, new york, in ; patent , . this piece has a factory splice. . barbed wire, about . "corsicana clip," patented by daniel c. stover of freeport, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . from nodaway county, missouri. patented by andrew j. upham of syracuse, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . from nodaway county, missouri. patented by william m. clow of wheatland, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . from galloway county, missouri. patented by joseph h. connelly of pittsburgh, pennsylvania, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "dodge and washburn," patented by thomas h. dodge and charles g. washburn of worcester, massachusetts. . barbed wire, about . "ross's four point," patented by noble s. ross of chicago, illinois, in ; patent , . this wire was very common in the prairie states. . barbed wire, about . two pieces of "billings' simple," patented by frank billings of cleveland, ohio, in ; patent , . this wire hurt the animals but it was cheap and easy to make. . barbed wire, about . "shinn's four point," patented by milton shinn of burlington, iowa, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . two pieces of "four point wager" from andrew county, missouri. patented by j. f. glidden of de kalb, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "burnell's four point," patented by arthur burnell of marshalltown, iowa, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . two pieces of "hold fast," or "merrill twirl," patented by john c. merrill of turkey river, iowa, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "lazy plate," patented by w. watkins of joliet, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . from nodaway county, missouri. patented by john s. crowell of springfield, ohio, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . from nodaway county, missouri. patented by james b. oliver of pittsburgh, pennsylvania, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "split diamond," patented by henry frentress of dunleith, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . "jayne-hill," patented by william jayne and james hill of boone, iowa, in ; patent , . the barbs clamp very firmly in this wire. . barbed wire, about . from andrew county, missouri. patented by josiah f. glidden of de kalb, illinois, in ; patent , . . barbed wire, about . war wire used by the british army in world war ii. . barbed wire, about . war wire used by the u. s. army in world war i. . barbed wire, date unknown. "glidden no. ," a wide-faced cattle wire made by republic steel wire company. . barbed wire, date unknown. "glidden no. ," a closed-face hog wire made by republic steel wire company. . tool for barbed wire, about . device for making barbed wire on the farm. patented by john dobbs and benjamin booth in ; patent , . . barbed wire, . usnm ; . "brink flat," patented in . gift of mrs. miles mcpeek, washington, d. c. . stump puller, th century. usnm ; . a one-man, hand-operated stump puller. the machine consists of several pulleys, a length of wire cable, and a rachet mechanism to give leverage. gift of a. e. mcmechan, joplin, missouri. . plowshare, about . usnm ; . a wrought-iron fragment from a plowshare said to have been used for cultivating cotton in south carolina. it appears to be from a "duck foot" type plow. gift of great plains museum, lawton, oklahoma. . saddler's buck, late th century. usnm ; . a small bench with a wooden vise to hold leather and parts of saddles. gift of museum of science and industry, chicago, illinois. . flax breaker, mid or late th century. usnm ; . a rectangular bench measuring about feet long, feet high, and feet wide. the operator pulled a hinged arm of slats down on the bench, which also has slats. the flax stems broke between the slats. gift of museum of science and industry, chicago, illinois. . prairie sod plow, late th century. usnm ; . this heavy plow with an -foot beam broke virgin prairie soil. the long fingers of the moldboard helped break the sod further. gift of museum of science and industry, chicago, illinois. [illustration: figure .--butter worker, th century. (catalog no. .)] . butter worker, late th century. usnm ; . this butter worker consists of a wooden tray ( feet by feet) and a grooved wooden roller. the roller is passed over the butter in the tray by means of a hand crank, thus working the excess water to the top of the butter where it could be poured off. gift of museum of science and industry, chicago, illinois. . grain scoop, late th century. usnm ; . this wooden grain scoop, or possibly flour scoop, measures inches by inches and has a -foot handle. gift of museum of science and industry, chicago, illinois. . barrel churn, . usnm , . this rocking churn consists of a wooden barrel of -gallon capacity and a wooden "x" type stand. it was in use in . gift of museum of science and industry, chicago, illinois. . plunger churn, late th century. usnm ; . a small ( gallon) plunger-type butter churn which consists of a wooden barrel and a wooden paddle attached to a -foot handle. gift of museum of science and industry, chicago, illinois. . tobacco hogshead, . usnm ; . a tobacco hogshead reconstructed from a picture appearing in harper's weekly of december , . the hogshead, constructed of rough lumber, is feet long and feet in diameter. a horse or mule was hitched to the hogshead. gift of laross & bros. co., richmond, virginia. [illustration: figure .--fordson tractor ( ) before restoration work. the winch and wheel fenders were added by the tractor's owners. (catalog no. .)] . fordson tractor, . usnm ; . the fordson was the first tractor marketed by the ford motor co. for domestic use. its four-cylinder gas engine developed hp. the tractor measures inches across the rear wheels and inches across the front. the rear wheels, of steel, have riveted lugs. a winch has been added in the front. gift of thomas a. delong, new york, new york. . steel bear trap, . usnm ; . this is a typical bear trap of the late th century. it has steel jaws with a spread of - / inches and a wrought-iron pan. it weighs pounds. gift of oneida community, new york. . steel deer trap, . usnm ; . this is a no. steel deer trap manufactured by the oneida community in the late th century. it has steel jaws with a spread of - / inches, a wrought-iron pan, and a double spring. gift of oneida community, new york. . steel beaver trap, . usnm ; . a double-springed, steel beaver trap. gift of oneida community, new york. . steel otter trap, . usnm ; . this trap has a double spring and a jaw spread of - / inches. gift of oneida community, new york. . steel fox trap, . usnm ; . this steel, no. fox trap has a double spring and a jaw spread of - / inches. gift of oneida community, new york. . steel mink trap, . usnm ; . this trap has a single spring and a jaw spread of - / inches. gift of oneida community, new york. . steel muskrat trap, . usnm ; . this muskrat trap has a single spring and a jaw spread of inches. gift of oneida community, new york. . steel rat trap, . usnm ; . this trap has a single spring and a jaw spread of - / inches. gift of oneida community, new york. . bottle of , -d herbicide, . usnm ; . this bottle contains a small amount of the original purchase of , -d by the u. s. department of agriculture from the american chemical and paint company of ambler, pennsylvania, in . it cost $ . a pound at the time. scientists at the department of agriculture used the material in extensive experiments on plant growth inhibitors. subsequently, , -d became the most common chemical used for weed killing. gift of dr. j. w. mitchell, university of maryland, through gale peterson, university of maryland. . winnowing machine, mid th century. usnm ; . typical mid- th-century fanning mill with vibrator cleaner. gift of mrs. henry c. slunt, hyattsville, maryland. . winnowing machine, mid th century. usnm ; . typical mid- th-century fanning mill with screen vibrator cleaner. gift of mrs. henry c. slunt, hyattsville, maryland. [illustration: figure .--john deere model d tractor, . (catalog no. .)] . john deere model d tractor, . usnm ; . the john deere model d was the first tractor of the line bearing that name. the waterloo tractor works, waterloo, iowa, made the tractor in . gift of deere & company, moline, illinois, through george f. neiley. . waterloo boy model n tractor, . usnm ; . the waterloo boy tractor was manufactured first as model r, in , and then as model n, beginning in . the waterloo gasoline engine company of waterloo, iowa, made the waterloo boy. it was the first tractor marketed by the john deer company, which acquired the waterloo gasoline engine company in . the waterloo boy continued to be produced by john deere company until , when that company brought out its own model d. gift of deere & company, moline, illinois, through george f. neiley. [illustration: figure .--cheese press. (catalog no. .)] . cheese press, late th century. usnm ; . small, wooden, hand-operated cheese press, dating from the late th century but not unlike those in use a century before. gift of carlton m. gunn, sunderland, massachusetts, through allister f. macdougall. . gas-turbine tractor, . usnm ; . this ht- experimental gasoline turbine tractor operates with a hydrostatic transmission. it is air-cooled and has no brakes, gears, or clutch. the -pound motor produces hp. it tended to rear back because of its excessive power and so could not be put into commercial production until a less-powerful engine had been developed. gift of international harvester company, through john j. dierbeck. [illustration: figure .--fitzhenry-guptill power sprayer ( ), seen here spraying for elm leaf beetles on the grounds of the u.s. capitol, may . (catalog no. .)] . fitzhenry-guptill power sprayer, . usnm ; . this is the first power sprayer used by the u. s. department of agriculture. it was built in and used to spray for gypsy moths in new england. it was horse-drawn and had a -cylinder mounted engine to furnish power for the sprayer. gift of u. s. department of agriculture, through e. d. burgess. . truck seat, about . usnm ; . this truck seat, invented and manufactured by the bostrom corporation, is significant because of its suspension system, which gave greater comfort and convenience to the driver and came to be used in many truck and tractor lines of several manufacturers. gift of bostrom corporation, milwaukee, wisconsin, through karl bostrom. . tractor seat, about . usnm ; . a suspension seat for tractors produced by the bostrom corporation in . it was used first on the oliver tractor. all seats now used on tractors derived from this basic design. gift of bostrom corporation, milwaukee, wisconsin, through karl bostrom. . hog snouter, late th century. usnm ; . the snouter is a scissors-like device for clamping a ring in the pig's nose. the ring prevents the animal from rooting under or against fences. gift of mr. and mrs. george e. morgenstern of lake forest, illinois. . one-way disk plow, about . usnm ; . invented in the s but declared unpatentable by the patent office, the one-way disk plow became commonplace in the dry farming areas of the great plains. the disks, set at an angle, cast less furrow than a moldboard plow. this specimen is a reconstruction of the original. gift of francis angell, plains, kansas. . wine press, about . usnm ; . the donor's father brought this wine press to the united states from rheinfeldon, switzerland, in . gift of mrs. clara bieber, washington, d. c. . mill picks, late th century. usnm ; . steel picks used to repair and sharpen grooves in millstones. gift of c. w. wimberly, san marcos, texas. . seamless flour sack, late th century. usnm ; . a fairly typical flour sack of the time, although sacks with seams were more common. gift of c. w. wimberly, san marcos, texas. . sorghum cane mill, late th century. usnm ; . a steel, horse-powered mill, about feet high and feet in circumference, for crushing sorghum stalks to produce syrup; factory made. gift of mrs. emery l. stout, lost creek, west virginia. . midget incubator, about . usnm ; . midget incubator and literature pertaining to it. this incubator was patented by e. a. braun in (patent , , ). it was made for educational purposes for schools and laboratories and for use in private homes to germinate seeds, microscopic organisms, etc. gift of e. a. braun, chatham, new jersey. . ten-gallon milk can, s or later. usnm ; . an unexceptional milk can of about , with the more common type of lid. it was found at the farm of malcolm brumback, near belle grove plantation, middleton, virginia. purchased. . hand corn shuckers, late th century. usnm ; . seven hand corn shuckers, each consisting of a spike attached to a handle which fits over the hand. these are quite typical and of a type used for over a century. gift of john n. hoffman, washington, d. c. . model toy tractors, . usnm ; . ten model toy tractors, authentic as to outward details: ( ) caterpillar d , ( ) a. c. crawler, ( ) minneapolis-moline, ( ) oliver, ( ) case, ( ) allis-chalmers, ( ) g- vista, ( ) ford, ( ) i. h. hay baler, ( ) ford set. gift of ertl company, dyersville, iowa, through fred ertl, jr. . sidehill plow (knapp), late th century. usnm ; . sidehill plow patented and manufactured by the knapps. the plow can be flipped over at the end of the row to cast all the furrows in one direction when plowing on hills. one of several variations on the idea. this is a copy of a th-century plow. gift of n. e. knapp, through leslie o. merrill of san mateo historical association, san mateo, california. . crop meter, about . usnm ; . this crop meter was developed in by the department of agriculture as an aid in estimating the acreage of cotton in mississippi. the crop meter was attached to the dashboard of an automobile and connected by cable to the odometer. a circuitous route was followed through the cotton area, and when the driver came to the edge of a cotton field he pushed a button which started the meter measuring the frontage of the field. the total mileage registered could be interpreted in terms of the acreage. the meter method was later replaced by aerial observation. gift of statistical reporting service, u. s. department of agriculture, through harry c. trelogan. . cotton boll weigher, about . usnm ; . a cylinder, - / feet high, for measuring the size of a cotton boll by water displacement. when this device was used in conjunction with the crop meter, the actual fiber yield of a year's crop could be estimated. gift of statistical reporting service, u. s. department of agriculture. . viking garden tractor, about . usnm ; . a garden tractor with a gasoline engine and equipped with cultivator prongs. the operator walked behind the tractor and guided it down the rows. gift of woodson high school, fairfax, virginia. . clam rake, mid th century. usnm ; . a small rake, with tines about inches long and a handle of about feet, used by a clam digger on cape cod. gift of kurt vonnegut, jr., west barnstable, massachusetts. [illustration: figure .--scale model of aultman-taylor steam tractor of . (catalog no. .)] . model of aultman-taylor steam tractor, . usnm ; . this scale model is fully operative and correct in every detail. it is about feet long, foot high, and inches wide. gift of mrs. raymond stout, washington, d. c. . maps of u. s. national forests, . usnm ; . eight maps. regional maps of forest reserves in the u. s. and territories as of . transferred from division of mechanical and civil engineering, national museum of history and technology. . corn sheller, late th century. usnm ; . this factory-made implement is all wood except for the teeth and gears. it could handle only one ear of corn at a time and it was neither shaped properly nor adjustable enough to get the nubbins. gift of daniel gartling, cockeysville, maryland. . grass mower, about . usnm ; . this mower, manufactured by international harvester, has a gasoline engine. the cutters are similar to mower and reaper cutter-bars, but there is no protective cover on the cutting mechanism. gift of daniel gartling, cockeysville, maryland. . spring-toothed harrow, early th century. usnm ; . this was a commonplace implement of its type and period. the steel frame, measuring about feet by feet, was designed to be linked into gangs of harrows, of whatever size desired, and to be pulled by horses or tractors. made by j. i. case company. gift of daniel gartling, cockeysville, maryland. . mccormick-deering cream separator, s. usnm ; . a hand-powered, centrifugal cream separator commonly found on dairy and other farms all over the country in the late th century and early th century. the original owner kept this specimen for replacement parts but he never needed it for that purpose. it is complete and fully operational. gift of daniel gartling, cockeysville, maryland. . hay baler, mid th century. usnm ; . a horse-drawn screw-press that packed the hay, which was then tied by hand. this baler, feet square and feet high, is similar to machines advertised in the s that were largely superseded in the s. gift of john hosford, stone ridge, new york. . grass sickles, about . received in . two ordinary grass sickles. gift of t. h. bean, barnridge, pennsylvania, in . transferred from department of anthropology, smithsonian institution. . grain clips, about . received in . gift of "d.e.t." in . transferred from department of anthropology, smithsonian institution. . wright's patented expansion bit, th century. received in . woodworking tool, a drill. gift of n. materville of connecticut valley in . transferred from department of anthropology, smithsonian institution. . heavy knife, late th century. received in . a knife for cutting hay and straw. from beardsly scythe company. transferred from department of anthropology, smithsonian institution. . grain drill, - . usnm ; . this wheeled, wooden seed box, with metal disks to open the soil, drilled about seven rows at a time. the drill was designed to be horse-drawn, but this specimen has been modified to be pulled by a tractor. the brand name "hoosier" appears on the box. gift of innes saunders, leesburg, virginia. . mowing machine, - . usnm ; . a horse-drawn, mccormick-deering sulky mower that later was modified to be pulled by a tractor. this mower is representative of machines in the last years of the horse era in american farming. gift of innes saunders, leesburg, virginia. . corn cultivator, - . usnm ; . a mccormick-deering four-shovel corn cultivator with two arms for working two rows at once. gift of innes saunders, leesburg, virginia. . corn cutter, - . usnm ; . a mccormick-deering, horse-drawn corn cutter. the rider grabbed the corn stalks in his arms while a blade cut the stalks on the ground. this implement was used chiefly to cut fodder for livestock. gift of innes saunders, leesburg, virginia. . fanning mill, - . usnm ; . a hand-operated, wooden fanning mill with hurdle, screen, grader, and side spout. the separator and winnower are combined. gift of innes saunders, leesburg, virginia. . hay rake, - . usnm ; . a mccormick-deering sulky rake with spring steel teeth and a hand-operated dumping mechanism. gift of innes saunders, leesburg, virginia. . book: the growth of industrial art, . usnm ; . this -page book by benjamin butterworth was printed at the government printing office, washington, d. c., in . it contains line drawings of many agricultural tools and implements, some of them ancient. gift of william perkins, hyattsville, maryland. . corn huskers, early th century. usnm ; . these huskers fit over the hand like a glove without fingers. a steel hook in the palm removed the corn husks. similar devices date back to at least the early th century. gift of melvin deschner, halstend, kansas. . corn huskers, late th century. usnm ; . similar to the huskers in number . gift of cecil eberle, newton, kansas. . milking machine, about . usnm ; . a mccormick-deering milking machine with four suction cups that worked from a gasoline-powered vacuum pump. it is a machine typical of its time and place. gift of conrad lawlor, madrid, iowa. [illustration: figure .--international harvester spindle cotton picker, . (catalog no. .)] . mechanical cotton picker, . usnm ; . international harvester model h- -h, single-row, spindle cotton picker of . the model h- -h, developed in , was the first commercially successful spindle picker. it is about feet high and weighs about tons. this machine and its successors completely transformed the cotton farming industry and led to the destruction of the share-cropping system. gift of producers cotton oil co., fresno, california, through international harvester corporation. . duplicator, late th century and early th century. usnm ; . this duplicator, a tube about - / inches in diameter and about inches long, was used to copy farm records. the user wrote on paper with an indelible pencil. the original paper and copy papers were placed between two water-soaked linen leaves and all was rolled up on a wooden spool. then the spool was inserted in the tube and left for a few minutes until the penciled ink stained through the wet papers and thus made copies. this specimen was used on a farm in virginia. gift of mrs. arthur z. gardiner, mclean, virginia. . orchard ladder, th century. usnm ; . this ladder, about feet high and with steps, narrows toward the top. adjustable legs allowed it to be moved forward or backward for the desired positions in fruit picking. gift of mrs. arthur z. gardiner, mclean, virginia. . tobacco, . usnm ; . leaves of tobacco, a plug of tobacco for chewing, and a leaf roll of tobacco. gift of mrs. wanda white, thurmond, north carolina. . john deere garden tractor, . usnm ; . the first garden tractor-riding lawn mower made by john deere company in . called the , it is a typical suburban tractor with a -horsepower engine and forward and reverse gears. gift of john deere company, moline, illinois, through george neiley. . montamower lawn mower, . usnm ; . this lawn mower, made by montamower co., traverse city, michigan, has rotary blades that are about inches in diameter. the blades are set in a frame and are geared to the same number of wheels on the ground. the machine was patented on august , . gift of andrew corle, chevy chase, maryland. . "cyclone" seeder, early th century. usnm ; . a crank-operated broadcast seeder that the farmer carried as he walked across the field. gift of mrs. alice wiser, college park, maryland. . straw beehive, th century. usnm ; . this skep (a beehive made of woven straw) was made in the s but is of a sort that has been used since ancient times. gift of a. g. woodson company, grand rapids, michigan. . apple cider press, about . received in . this "buckeye" press, made mostly of wood, was manufactured by the p. p. mast company of springfield, ohio. many presses of this design were used throughout the country. gift of mrs. s. d. mottley, marshall, virginia. [illustration: figure .--roberts-mackensen bee insemination instrument, . (catalog no. .)] . roberts-mackensen bee insemination instrument, . usnm ; . this stainless steel device holds the queen bee while the technician performs the operation. controlled breeding of bees has resulted in hardy and gentle breeds and greater production of honey. gift of dadant & sons, hamilton, illinois, through charles dadant. index to the catalog (all numbers refer to catalog entries, not to pages) a. g. woodson co., a & p co., donor, abbot, charles g., donor, agriculture, department of, donor, , , - , , , , , , allis, t. w., allis-chalmers crawler tractor, american chemical and paint co., american philosophical society, , angell, francis, donor, animals, see livestock animal husbandry, , , anthropology, department of smithsonian institution, donor, , , anvil, korean, apples, implements used in connection with, , , apiary, , artificial insemination of bees, arthur, b. f., donor, aultman-taylor steam tractor, auth provision co., donor, , avery bulldog tractor, axe, meat, ; tobacco, babcock butterfat tester, , bailey, jeremiah, bailey mower, baker, george, baker perfect barbed wire, baking, baldwin's improved american fodder cutter, baler, , bananas, barbed wire, , , , , - barley, forks for, , barrel, churn, , ; tobacco, bar share, basket, winnowing, , bate, william s., bean, t. h., donor, beans, equipment for, bear, trap for, beardsly scythe co., donor, beaver, trap for, becker, herman, donor, bees, , , bein, thomas w., donor, bell, patrick, bell reaper, bell(s), cow, ; turkey, bench, for lard press, ; saddler's, bieber, mrs. clara, donor, billings, frank, billings' simple barbed wire, binder, grain, binder's rake, bit, expansion, blacksmith, korean, , blake, john b., donor, , - blount, henry f., donor, blount's plow, boll, cotton, book, farm copy, booth, benjamin, , borden, gail, borden company, donor, bostrom, karl, , bostrom corporation, donor, , bowl, boyce, james, brace, butcher's, braid, horsewhip, branding iron, brandon, milton j., donor, braun, e. a., donor, breaker, cheese curd, , , ; flax, bridle bits, brierton, joseph, brink-martelle barbed wire, brinkerhoff, jacob, , , brinkerhoff, john j., brinkerhoff, warren m., , , brink flat barbed wire, , , brink twist barbed wire, british barbed wire, broadcast seeder, , , , brotherton, j., - brown, edwin, donor, brown, frank a., donor, brown, james w., donor, - brown, ruth, - brumback, malcolm, brush cutter, buckeye cider press, buckthorn barbed wire, buggy rake, bulldog tractor, avery, burgess, e. d., burnell, arthur, burnell's four point barbed wire, butcher, table for, ; tools of, - , butter, implements used in preparing, , , , , , , , , butterfat tester, , butterworth, benjamin, byrne, mrs. henry h., donor, cane mill, sugar, ; sorghum syrup, canning, pan for, cape cod clam rake, carey plow, , , carrier for hayfork, caterpillar tractor, catholic university of america, donor, - cattle, dehorner for, ; branding iron for, centrifugal cream separator, , , champion barbed wire, cheese making, implements for, , , , childs, h. m., china, plow from, churns, , , , , cider mill and press, , cigars, clam rake, clark, k. e., donor, cleavers, , clement, robert e., climpson, mrs. harley, donor, clow, william m., coffee, cole, h. c, donor, collars for turkeys, colter plow, combine, horse-drawn, condensed milk, connelly, joseph h., cookie roller, cooley creamer, cooper, minner j., donor, corle, andrew, donor, corn, tools and machines for, , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , corman, ivor, donor, - corsicana clip barbed wire, cotton, implements used in connection with, , , , , , cow, bell for, ; milker for, , cradle, grain harvesting, , , , , , , crandall, edward m., , crank, tractor, cream, implements used for, , , , , , ; see also butter crop meter, crowell, john s., cultivator(s), , , , , , - , , - , , , , , , , , , cummings, mrs. h. g., curd breaker, , , cutter(s), , , cyclone seeder, dadant, charles, dadant & sons, donor, dairying, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , daley, michael, daveat milk sterilizer, daveat milk processes co., donor, davies, elmer s., davis, gideon, davis, roderick, - day, f. b., donor, decker, alexander c., , decker spread barbed wire, deer, traps for, deere, john, deere plows and tractors, , , , deere and company, donor, , , , deerfoot farm co., donor, deering, see mccormick-deering dehorner, de laval cream separator, de laval separator co., donor, de long, thomas a., donor, dentry, gordon, donor, department of agriculture, see agriculture, department of deschner, melvin, donor, dierbeck, john j., jr., diesel cultivator, disk(s), for plows and cultivators, , , dobbs, john, , dodge, thomas h., dodge and washburn barbed wire, dry farming, plow for, drill, grain, duplicator for farm records, duval, caleb paul, duval, virginia, donor, - eagle plow, eagle machine co., eberle, cecil, donor, eichner, l. c., engines, gasoline portable, ; starter, ; steam portable, , ; tractor, ertl company, donor, fairchild, e. c., fairhead, r. c., donor, fanning mill, winnowing, , , , , , , farmer's museum, hadley, massachusetts, donor, - fencing, barbed wire, , , , , - ferguson, harry, ferguson tractor, ; disk plow, fertilizer, , - fiber, , fitzhenry-guptill power sprayer, flails, , , flax, , flickinger, j. and p., flop-over hay rakes, , , flour mill, flour sacks, food processing, implements used in, , , , , , - , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , fodder, implements used in connection with, , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , forbes, wells, ford tractor, fordson tractor, ; crank for, forestry, , forge, korean, fork(s), , , , , , , , , , , , , , , foster, john, four point barbed wire, , - fox trap, franklin institute, donor, frentress, henry, freezer, ice cream, frick co., donor, frick steam engine, frye, andrew w., donor, frye, william, gallic grain header, , garden tractor(s), , gardiner, mrs. arthur z., donor, , gartling, daniel, donor, - garver, cyrus, garver, daniel, garver, melchora, donor, gasoline engines, , , , gas-turbine tractor, gideon davis plow, glass butter churn, glidden, josiah f., , , , , , , , , , glidden barbed wire, , goss, joseph, goodrich, c. o., donor, , gould, mary e., goward, g., donor, - grafting knife, grain, implements used in connection with, , - , , , , , , , , , , , - , , - , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , ; see also, combines; harvesting; reapers, etc. grass mowers, , , grass sickles, graybill, pollitt, donor, great atlantic & pacific co., see a & p co. grinder(s), for corn, ; for meat, , , grist mill, griswold, j. w., ground hog thresher, grubbing, hoe for, ; mattock for, gunn, carlton m., donor, guptill, see fitzhenry-guptill gypsy moths, sprayer for, hackle, flax, haish, jacob, , haish "s" barbed wire, , hames, horse, hammond, warren, donor, han chin u, - hand tools, see tools, hand harbst, gladys, hardy, peter, harness, , harpoon hayfork, , , harris, e., harris, s., harrows, , , , , , hart, charles, hart-parr tractor, harvester, see combines; harvesting; reapers harvesting, implements used in, - , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , hathaway, laurence, donor, hay, implements used in connection with, , , , , - , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , ; see also, fodder hayfork, , , , , headers, gallic, , hepp, frank, donor, herbicide, heiss, e. w., donor, - heiss, john, heiss, william, , hill, james, hitchcock, walter a., donor, , hoe(s), , , , , , , , , , hoffman, john n., donor, hogs, , hogshead, tobacco, hold fast barbed wire, holst, don, donor, , holt, benjamin, holt, mrs. c. parker, donor, holt combine, honey; see bees hook(s), for cutting, , ; for pots, ; hay bale, ; meat, , hoover, william h., - hoosier brand of grain drill, horses, implements used in connection with, , , , , , , - , , , , , ; shoeing of, horsfall, frank, donor, - , - hosford, john, donor, ht- tractor, huber steam tractor, huskers, corn, , hussey, obed, , , hussey reaper, , ice saw, ice cream freezer, incubator, midget, insecticide, ; sprayer for, insemination, bee, interior, department of the, donor, - international harvester co., (donor), , , , j. i. case, co., , , jayne, william, jayne-hill barbed wire, jefferson, thomas, , , jobber, corn, john deere co., , donor, , , kanter, clayton, donor, , kelly, michael, kennedy, charles, kennedy barbs barbed wire, kinsman, pelatiah, kittleson, ole o., kloch, henry, knapp, n. e., donor, knapp sidehill plow, knecht, albert, - knives, , , , , , , ladder, orchard, ladder wire barbed wire, lambert, benjamin, donor, lamprey, j. p., donor, landis eclipse thresher, lard press, laross and brothers co., donor, lawlor, conrad, donor, lawn mower, , , lazy plate barbed wire, leather, implements used in connection with, , leithiser, f. p., lesher, christian, lesher, daniel, donor, , livestock, implements and materials used in connection with, - , - , , , , , , , , , , - , , log roller, macdougall, allister f., mccormick, cyrus h., , mccormick, stephen, mccormick-deering, , , , - , , mccormick-goodhart, leander, donor, mccormick historical association, donor, , , mccormick reapers, , - , , , mcmechan, a. e., donor, mcpeek, mrs. miles, donor, machinery, for corn picking, ; for corn shelling, ; for curd breaking, ; for fanning mills, , , ; for food slicing, ; for milking, , , ; for power sources, , , , ; for reaping and mowing, , , , , - , ; for threshing, , ; tractor, , , , , mahlon smith plow, major, j. d., donor, malone, s., manning, william, , manning mower, manure, implements used in connection with, , , , maple sugar, implements used in connection with, - marker sled, massachusetts society for promoting agriculture, donor, - massey-ferguson, inc., donor, matterville, n., donor, mattock, grubbing, meal, grist mill for, measures, feed, , meat, implements used in connection with, , - , , - , mechanical and civil engineering division, smithsonian institution, donor, mehring, bessie d., donor, , mehring, william m., , , mehring cow milker, , , merrill, john c, merrill, leslie o., merrill twirl barbed wire, meter, for crop estimating, miles, mrs. arnold, donor, - , milk, implements used in connection with, , , ; see also dairying; milking machine milking machine, , , , miller burial and pliers co., mills, john g., donor, mill(s), cider, ; grist, ; picks for, ; sorghum, ; sugar, mink, trap for, minneapolis-moline, inc., - , mitchell, john w., donor, mittinger, a., jr., - moldboard, , , , moline co., donor, - ; see also minneapolis-moline, inc. montgomery, james, montgomery, joseph, montgomery, ruth, donor, motley, mrs. s. d., donor, mower(s), grass, , ; machine, ; models of, , , , ; seat for, murphy, george, donor, museum of science and industry, chicago, donor, - muskrat trap, muzzle, ox, neck yoke, needle; see harpoon fork neiley, george f., , , nelson, james, newbold, charles, , newbold plow, new holland machine co., donor, new idea brand of implements, - new york historical association, donor, - nickerson, william, noirot, everett, nourse, j., offenbacker, john, donor, - old colony strong plow, , , oliver, james, , oliver, james b., oliver, s. h., donor, oliver chilled plow, oliver corporation (donor), , olmstead, frank e., donor, - oneida community, donor, - orchard ladder, osmundson, a. g., donor, osmundson forge co., otter trap, oxen, implements used in connection with, , , , p. p. mast co., palm, bessie w., donor, parr, charles, peeler, apple, perkins, william, donor, peterkin, e. w., donor, peterson, frank d., peterson, gale e., picker, corn, ; cotton, pigs, see hogs, livestock pins, meat, pitchfork, , , , , plantation, banana, ; coffee, planters, , , , , , , , , ; see also seeders plow(s), , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , - , , , , , , plowshare, , plunger churn, pork, see hogs; meat porter, j. e., pot hooks, poultry, implements used in connection with, , power, sources of, - , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , press, cheese, ; cider, , ; lard ; wine, processing, fiber, , ; food, , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , ; tobacco producers cotton oil co., donor, pulley, , pyrox (insecticide), rakes, clam, ; hand, , ; horse-drawn, , , , , rappleye, howard s., donor, rat trap, reapers, - , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , republic steel wire co., , rhoades, george, - rice threshing, riddle, grain separator, roberts-mackensen bee inseminator, robinson, cora e., donor, robinson, lucy, donor, rogers, noah, roller(s), for butter worker, ; for cookies, ; for soil, , rose, henry m., ross, noble s., ross's four point barbed wire rutherford, james w., donor, sabrosky, jennie, donor, sacks, flour, ; grain, , saddler's buck, st. john, spencer, salt processing, samson, clarissa w., donor, sap spouts, - saunders, innes, donor, - sausage stuffer, , saw, butcher's, ; ice, scoop, grain, scoville, edward, scoville, reign, donor, scraper, butcher's, scythe, , seat(s), sulky, ; tractor, ; truck, seeders, , , , , , , , , , , , , seeds, germinating incubator for, self-rake reaper, separators, cream, , , , ; grain, , , , , , , , shakers (religious community), share for plow, , sheller, , shinn, milton, shinn's four point barbed wire, shoe last, shovel(s), grain, ; plow, - , shredder, flax, shuckers, sickle, , , sickle bar, sidehill plow, singletree, sims, elijah, sinclair, sir john, skep, sketches, korean, - sled marker, slicer, food, slunt, mrs. henry c., donor, , smith, mahlon, smith, robert, smith plow, snouter, hog, snyder, peter brugler, sod plows, , sorghum cane mill, souter, lester, donor, spade(s), , , spike(s), , spindle cotton picker, split diamond barbed wire, spouts, maple sap, - sprayer, power, spreader, butcher's, , ; manure, spring-tooth harrow, spring-tooth rake, , spurs, , stabler, sydney s., donor, , , starks, niels o., starter, tractor, statistical reporting service, u. s. department of agriculture, donor, , steam engines, , , , sterilizer, milk, stout, mrs. emery l., donor, stover, daniel c., strucksberg, s. o., donor, stubbe, john, stubbe plate barbed wire, stump puller, sugar, cane, ; maple, - sulky, implements for, , , , , , , sunderland, l. e., sunderland kink barbed wire, swiggett, grace m., donor, swine, see hogs; meat swingplow, tavenner plow, table, butcher's, taylor, see aultman-taylor tee-pak, inc., donor, - ten eyck, james, thomas mills and brothers, thompson, daniel, donor, - thorny fence barbed wire, threshers, see threshing threshing, implements used in connection with, , , , , , , , , , thumb, mathew, thurmond, wanda w., donor, tile knife, tile spade, tobacco, , , , , , , tools, hand, , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , topping models, inc., donor, - toy manufacturers association, donor, , toy tractors, , , , , tractor(s), , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; seats for, ; with cotton picker, transplanter, tobacco, trap(s), animal, - ; fish, treadmill, , trelogan, harry c., trolley carrier, hay, trucks, seat for, turbine tractor, turkey, collars for, twist barbed wire, see brink twist twist oval barbed wire, , -d, sample of, united fruit company, donor, upham, andrew j., vacuum pan, vaughn, ruben f., donor, veikko, jarvis, donor, vermont farm machine co., vette, irwin, victor mower, viking garden tractor, vise, bench, ; harness, vista tractor, vonnegut, kurt, jr., donor, waldron cradle, wallis tractor, war wire, barbed, , , , , washburn, charles g., water lift, wheel for, , waterloo boy tractor, waterwheel, , watkins, w., waybright, earl j., donor, welcome, sir henry s., donor, weston, d. m., wheat, implements used in connection with, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , wheelbarrow, , whip, wiat, newton e., donor, wilson, arden, donor, wimberly, c. w., donor, , winch, tractor, windmill, wine press, winner barbed wire, winnowing, baskets for, , , ; mills for, , , , , , , , wire, barbed, see barbed wire wiser, alice, donor, wood, jethro, woodcock plow, woodson, a. g., woodson high school, fairfax, virginia, donor, wright expansion bit, yoke, ox, , zig-zag barbed wire, publications on farming by the staff of the division of agriculture and mining, - christian, pauline b. . annotated list of photographs in the division of agriculture and forest products. smithsonian institution, information leaflet . pages. peterson, gale e. . "the discovery and development of , -." agricultural history, (july ): - . . "living historical farms: a feasibility study." smithsonian journal of history, (summer ): - . schlebecker, john t. . "the great holding action: the nfo in september, ." agricultural history, (october ): - . [reprinted in readings in collective behavior, edited by robert b. evans. chicago: rand mcnally, .] . "research in agricultural history at the smithsonian institution." agricultural history, (july ): - . . "the combine made in stockton." the pacific historian, (autumn ): - . illustrated. . a history of american dairying. chicago: rand mcnally. pages, illustrated. . a bibliography of books and pamphlets on the history of american agriculture, - . santa barbara: clio press. pages. . "agriculture in western nebraska, - ." nebraska history, (autumn ): - . . "henry ford's tractor." smithsonian journal of history, (summer ): - . illustrated. . the past in action: living historical farms. washington: smithsonian institution pages. . living historical farms: a walk into the past. washington: smithsonian institution press. pages, illustrated. [reprinted in early american life, (january-february ): - , - .] . [editor.] "colonial american agriculture," - . agricultural history, ( ): - . . "living historic farms tell it like it was." in contours of change, yearbook of agriculture, (pages - , illustrated). washington: u.s. department of agriculture. . "farmers in the lower shenandoah valley, ." virginia magazine of history and biography, (october, ): - . . "curatorial agriculture." agricultural history, (january, ): - . schlebecker, john t. and gale e. peterson . "living historical farms handbook." smithsonian studies in history and technology, : - . sharrer, george terry . george washington carver. washington: smithsonian institution press. pages, illustrated. . "indigo in carolina, - ." the south carolina historical magazine, (april, ): - . . "the indigo bonanza in south carolina, - ." technology and culture, (july ): - . summons, terry g. . "animal feed additives, - ." agricultural history, (october ): - . wessel, thomas r. . "prologue to the shelterbelt, - ." journal of the west, (january ): - . illustrated. . the honey bee. smithsonian institution, information leaflet . pages, illustrated. [revised .] . "roosevelt and the great plains shelterbelt." great plains journal, (spring ): - . . "agriculture and iroquois hegemony in new york, - ." maryland historian, (fall ): - . u.s. government printing office: o-- - +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | transcriber's note | | | | amendments to the text: | | | | p. - # . "usnm " has been | | changed to "usnm " | | | | p. - # . "eliptical in shape, with a frame of thick rods" | | has been changed to "elliptical in shape, with a frame of | | thick rods" | | | | p. - # . " by inches, restangular" has been changed to | | " by inches, rectangular" | | | | p. - # . "the first settlers of wobrun, massachusetts" | | has been changed to "the first settlers of woburn, | | massachusetts" | | | | p. - # . "and the deer company" has been changed to "and | | the deere company" | | | | p. - # . "the amount of buterfat in milk" has been | | changed to "the amount of butterfat in milk" | | | | p. - # . "diarama" has been changed to "diorama" | | | | p. - # . "diarama" has been changed to "diorama" | | | | p. - # . "used for digding trenches" has been changed to | | "used for digging trenches " | | | | p. - # . "such an implements" has been changed to "such | | implements" | | | | p. - # . "model of fanning miill" has been changed to | | "model of fanning mill" | | | | p. - # . "eliptical wooden chopping bowl," has been | | changed to "elliptical wooden chopping bowl," | | | | p. - # . "it was useful, obivously" has been changed to | | "it was useful, obviously" | | | | p. - # . figure . "(catalog no. )." has been | | changed to "(catalog no. .)" | | | | p. - # . "gift of pollitt grayhill" has been changed to | | "gift of pollitt graybill" | | | | p. - # . figure . "catalog no. .)" has been | | changed to "(catalog no. .)" | | | | p. - # . "this muckrat trap" has been changed to "this | | muskrat trap" | | | | p. - # . "miscroscopic organisms" has been changed to | | "microscopic organisms" | | | | p. - # . " . grass sickles" has been changed to " . | | grass sickles" | | | | p. - # . no change to "gift of n. materville of | | connecticut valley". inconsistent with the spelling | | "matterville" listed in the index. | | | | p. - "allis, t. w. " has been changed to "allis, t. | | w., " | | | | p. - "deer traps for" has been changed to "deer, traps | | for" | | | | p. - "mccormick-deering, ," has been changed to | | "mccormick-deering, , ," | | | | p. - "pyrox (insetcicide)" has been changed to "pyrox | | (insecticide)" | | | | p. - "sunderland kink barbed wire " has been changed | | to "sunderland kink barbed wire, " | | | | p. - "swiggett, grace m., donor " has been changed to | | "swiggett, grace m., donor, " | | | | p. - tractor(s) " , , " has been changed to " , | | , " | | | | p. - "colonial american agriculture, has been changed to | | "colonial american agriculture," with closing quotes | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ file was produced from images produced by core historical literature in agriculture (chla), cornell university) chapters in rural progress the university of chicago press chicago, illinois agents the baker & taylor company new york the cunningham, curtiss & welch company los angeles the cambridge university press london and edinburgh the maruzen-kabushiki-kaisha tokyo, osaka, kyoto, fukuoka, sendai the mission book company shanghai karl w. hiersemann leipzig chapters in rural progress by kenyon l. butterfield _president of the massachusetts agricultural college_ [illustration: publisher's logo] the university of chicago press chicago, illinois copyright by the university of chicago all rights reserved published february second impression june third impression may fourth impression february fifth impression october composed and printed by the university of chicago press chicago, illinois, u.s.a. to my father ira howard butterfield whose constant concern for rural welfare and life-long service to rural interests have been one of the chief incentives to the studies lying behind this book preface this book does not offer a complete analysis of the rural problem; but attempts, in general, to present some of the more significant phases of that problem, and, in particular, to describe some of the agencies at work in solving it. several of the chapters were originally magazine articles, and, though all have been revised and in some cases entirely rewritten, they have the limitations of such articles. other chapters consist of more formal addresses. necessarily there will be found some lack of uniformity in style and in method of presentation, and occasional duplication of argument or statement. for permission to use articles, in whole or in part, i have to thank the editors of the _chautauquan_, _arena_, _forum_, _review of reviews_, _popular science monthly_, _michigan alumnus_, _new england farmer_, _cornell countryman_; also professor l. r. taft, superintendent of farmers' institutes in michigan, and the officers of the american civic association. two chapters comprise material heretofore unpublished. contents introduction chapter page i. the study of rural life ii. the problems of progress the outlook iii. the expansion of farm life iv. the new farmer v. culture from the corn-lot agencies of progress vi. education for the farmer vii. farmers' institutes viii. the hesperia movement ix. the rural school and the community x. the grange xi. opportunities for farm women xii. the country church and progress xiii. a summary of recent progress forward steps xiv. the social side of the farm question xv. the needs of new england agriculture xvi. an untilled field in american education xvii. federation for rural progress introduction chapter i the study of rural life the american farm problem, particularly its sociological aspect, has not as yet had the attention that it deserves from students. much less have the questions that concern rural social advancement found the popular mind; in truth, the general city public has not been deeply interested in the farmer. but there seem to be recent indications that the sentiment is changing. the heated discussions in new england about mr. hartt's interesting clinic over a decadent hill-town, the suggestive fast-day proclamation of governor rollins of new hampshire a few years ago, the marvelous development of agricultural education, the renewed study of the rural school, the widespread and growing delight in country life, have all aroused an interest in and presage a new attention to rural conditions. this is well. the sociologist can hardly afford to omit the rural classes from the scope of his study, especially if he desires to investigate the practical phases of his subject. moreover, no one with intelligent notions of affairs should be ignorant of the forces that control rural life. in view of this apparent change in the attitude of people toward the farm problem, it may not be idle to suggest some possible errors that should be avoided when we are thinking of rural society. the student will doubtless approach his problem fortified against misconceptions--he probably has thoughtfully established his view-point. but the average person in the city is likely to call up the image of his ancestral home of a generation ago, if he were born in the country, or, if not, to draw upon his observations made on a summer vacation or on casual business trips into the interior. or he takes his picture from _shore acres_ and the _old homestead_. in any case it is not improbable that the image may be faulty and as a consequence his appreciation of present conditions wholly inadequate. let us consider some of these possible sources of misconception. in the first place it is not fair to compare country life as a whole with the best city conditions. this is often done. the observer usually has education, culture, leisure, the experience of travel, more or less wealth; his acquaintance is mostly with people of like attainments. when he fails to find a rural environment that corresponds in some degree to his own and that of his friends, he is quick to conclude that the country has nothing to offer him, that only the city ministers to the higher wants of man. he forgets that he is one of a thousand in the city, and does not represent average city life. he fails to compare the average country conditions with the average city conditions, manifestly the only fair basis for comparison. or he may err still more grievously. he may set opposite each other the worst country conditions and the better city conditions. he ought in all justice to balance country slum with city slum; and certainly so if he insists on trying to find palaces, great libraries, eloquent preachers, theaters, and rapid transit in each rural community. city life goes to extremes; country life, while varied, is more even. in the country there is little of large wealth, luxury, and ease; little also of extreme poverty, reeking crime, unutterable filth, moral sewage. farmers are essentially a middle class and no comparison is fair that does not keep this fact ever in mind. we sometimes hear the expression, "country life is so barren--that to me is its most discouraging aspect." much country life is truly barren; but much more of it is so only relatively and not essentially. we must admit that civilization is at least partially veneer; polish does wonders for the appearance of folks as well as of furniture. but while the beauty of "heart of oak" is enhanced by its "finish," its utility is not destroyed by a failure to polish it. now, much of the so-called barrenness of country life is the oak minus the polish. we come to regard polish as essential; it is largely relative. and not only may we apply the wrong standard to the situation, but our eyes may deceive us. to the uninitiated a clod of dry earth is the most unpromising of objects--it is cousin to the stone, and the type of barrenness. but to the elect it is pregnant with the possibilities of seed-time and harvest, of a full fruitage, of abundance and content for man and beast. and there is many a farm home, plain to an extreme, devoid of the veneer, a home that to the man of the town seems lacking in all the things that season life, but a home which virtue, intelligence, thrift, and courage transform into a garden of roses and a type of heaven. i do not justify neglect of the finer material things of life, nor plead for drab and homespun as passports to the courts of excellence; but i insist that the plainness, simple living, absence of luxury, lack of polish that may be met with in the country, do not necessarily accompany a condition barren of the essentials of the higher life. sometimes rural communities are ridiculed because of the trivial nature of their gossip, interests, and ambitions. there may be some justice in the criticism, though the situation is pathetic rather than humorous. but is the charge wholly just? in comparing country with town we are comparing two environments; necessarily, therefore, objects of gossip, interests, and ambitions differ therein. we expect that. it is no criticism to assert that fact. the test is not that of an existing difference, but of an essential quality. is not ben bolt's new top buggy as legitimate a topic for discussion as is arthur john smythe's new automobile? does not the price of wheat mean as much to the hard-working grower as to the broker who may never see a grain of it? may not the grove at turtle lake yield as keen enjoyment as do the continental forests? is the ambition to own a fine farm more ignoble than the desire to own shares in a copper mine? it really does not matter so much what one gossips about or what one's delights are or what the carving of the rungs on ambition's ladder; the vital question is the effect of these things on character. do they stunt or encourage the inner life? it must be admitted that country people do not always accept their environing opportunities for enjoying the higher life of mind and heart. but do they differ in this respect from their cousins of the town? we must remember, too, that this is a large country, and that a study of rural conditions in a certain community, township, county, state, or section may not give us the correct basis upon which to determine the agricultural status of the country. nor must we make the mistake of confusing conservatism and decadence. that the city will in many particulars always progress more rapidly than the country is inevitable. but speed is not the ultimate criterion of a full life. again must we apply the test whether the gain is relative or essential. telephones, free mail delivery, electric car lines, operas, great libraries, cathedrals--all come to the city first, some of them solely to the city. the country cannot hope to be other than inherently conservative as regards such institutions. but may there not be found such adaptations of or substitutes for these institutions as shall not only preserve the rural community from decadence, but, indeed, build it up into strength, beauty, and purity? comparative lack of identical resources need not mean poverty of attainment. let us agree that relatively the country will lag behind the town. is the country continually gaining in those things that are fundamentally important and that minister to its best life? is the kernal question. perhaps the most common error in studying rural conditions is the failure to distinguish the vital difference between the urban problem and the rural problem. _sociologically the city problem is that of congestion; the rural problem is that of isolation._ the social conditions of country and city are wholly different. institutions that succeed in alleviating social disorders in the town may or may not succeed in the country--in any event they must be adapted to country needs. this applies to organizations, schools, libraries, social settlements. and the adaptation must be one not only of form but of spirit. in other words, the farm problem is a peculiar problem, demanding special study, a new point of view, and sometimes unique institutions. those accustomed to large cities make a pretty broad classification of "country." a town of five thousand people is to them "country." but it is not country. the problem of the village and the small town is not the rural problem, take it the nation over. the smaller the town, the more nearly it approaches to rural conditions, but its essential problem is not that of the farm. and, finally, let no one suppose that philanthropy is the chief medicine for the social ill-health of the country. the intelligent student who possesses the true spirit of helpfulness may find in the rural problem ample scope for both his brain and his heart. but he will make a fundamental and irreparable error if he starts out with the notion that pity, charity, and direct gifts will win the day. you may flatter the american farmer; you cannot patronize him. he demands and needs, not philanthropy, but simple justice, equal opportunity, and better facilities for education. he is neither slave nor pauper. to conclude: there is a farm problem, and it is worth solving. but it differs from the city problem. and if, as is to be hoped, the recently renewed interest in this question is to be permanent, we trust that those who desire to make it a special study, as well as those whose interest in it is general and widely human, may from the start avoid the errors that are likely to obscure rural conditions when viewed through city eyes. chapter ii the problems of progress[ ] it is impossible to acquire a keen and permanent interest in the rural problem unless one first of all is cognizant of its significance. and lack of knowledge at this point may in part account for the fact already alluded to that in america the farm problem has not been adequately studied. so stupendous has been the development of our manufacturing industries, so marvelous the growth of our urban population, so pressing the questions raised by modern city life, that the social and economic interests of the american farmer have, as a rule, received minor consideration. we are impressed with the rise of cities like chicago, forgetting for the moment that half of the american people still live under rural conditions. we are perplexed by the labor wars that are waged about us, for the time unmindful that one-third of the workers of this country make their living immediately from the soil. we are astounded, and perhaps alarmed, at the great centralization of capital, possibly not realizing that the capital invested in agriculture in the united states nearly equals the combined capital invested in the manufacturing and railway industries. but if we pause to consider the scope and nature of the economic and social interests involved, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the farm problem is worthy of serious thought from students of our national welfare. we are aware that agriculture does not hold the same relative rank among our industries that it did in former years, and that our city population has increased far more rapidly than has our rural population. we do not ignore the fact that urban industries are developing more rapidly than is agriculture, nor deny the seriousness of the actual depletion of rural population, and even of community decadence, in some portions of the union. but these facts merely add to the importance of the farm question. and it should not be forgotten that there has been a large and constant growth both of our agricultural wealth and of our rural population. during the last half-century there was a gain of per cent. in the value of farm property, while the non-urban population increased per cent. agriculture has been one of the chief elements of america's industrial greatness, it is still our dominant economic interest, and it will long remain at least a leading industry. the people of the farm have furnished a sturdy citizenship and have been the primary source of much of our best leadership in political, business, and professional life. for an indefinite future, a large proportion of the american people will continue to live in a rural environment. what is the farm problem? current agricultural discussion would lead us to think that the farm problem is largely one of technique. the possibilities of the agricultural industry, in the light of applied science, emphasize the need of the farmer for more complete knowledge of soil and plant and animal, and for increased proficiency in utilizing this knowledge to secure greater production at less cost. this is a fundamental need. it lies at the basis of success in farming. but it is not the farm problem. business skill must be added, business methods enforced. the farmer must be not only a more skilful produce-grower, but also a keener produce-seller. but the moment we enter the realm of the market we step outside the individualistic aspect of the problem as embodied in the current doctrine of technical agricultural teaching, and are forced to consider the social aspect as emphasized, first of all, in the economic category of price. here we find many factors--transportation cost, general market conditions at home and abroad, the status of other industries, and even legislative activities. the farm problem becomes an industrial question, not solely one of technical and business skill. moreover, the problem is one of a successful industry as a whole, not merely the personal successes of even a respectable number of individual farmers. the farming class must progress as a unit. but have we yet reached the heart of the question? is the farm problem one of technique plus business skill, plus these broad economic considerations? is it not perfectly possible that agriculture as an industry may remain in a fairly satisfactory condition, and yet the farming class fail to maintain its status in the general social order? is it not, for instance, quite within the bounds of probability to imagine a good degree of economic strength in the agricultural industry existing side by side with either a peasant régime or a landlord-and-tenant system? yet would we expect from either system the same social fruitage that has been harvested from our american yeomanry? we conclude, then, that _the farm problem consists in maintaining upon our farms a class of people who have succeeded in procuring for themselves the highest possible class status, not only in the industrial, but in the political and the social order--a relative status, moreover, that is measured by the demands of american ideals._ the farm problem thus connects itself with the whole question of democratic civilization. this is not mere platitude. for we cannot properly judge the significance and the relation of the different industrial activities of our farmers, and especially the value of the various social agencies for rural betterment, except by the standard of class status. it is here that we seem to find the only satisfactory philosophy of rural progress. we would not for a moment discredit the fundamental importance of movements that have for their purpose the improved technical skill of our farmers, better business management of the farm, and wiser study and control of market conditions. indeed, we would call attention to the fact that social institutions are absolutely necessary means of securing these essential factors of industrial success. in the solution of the farm problem we must deliberately invoke the influence of quickened means of communication, of co-operation among farmers, of various means of education, and possibly even of religious institutions, to stimulate and direct industrial activity. what needs present emphasis is the fact that there is a definite, real, social end to be held in view as the goal of rural endeavor. the highest possible social status for the farming class is that end. we may now, as briefly as possible, describe some of the difficulties that lie in the path of the farmers in their ambition to attain greater class efficiency and larger class influence, and some of the means at hand for minimizing the difficulties. a complete discussion of the farm problem should, of course, include thorough consideration of the technical, the business, and the economic questions implied by the struggle for industrial success; for industrial success is prerequisite to the achievement of the greatest social power of the farming class. but we shall consider only the social aspects of the problem. rural isolation perhaps the one great underlying social difficulty among american farmers is their comparatively isolated mode of life. the farmer's family is isolated from other families. a small city of perhaps twenty thousand population will contain from four hundred to six hundred families per square mile, whereas a typical agricultural community in a prosperous agricultural state will hardly average more than ten families per square mile. the farming class is isolated from other classes. farmers, of course, mingle considerably in a business and political way with the men of their trading town and county seat; but, broadly speaking, farmers do not associate freely with people living under urban conditions and possessing other than the rural point of view. it would be venturesome to suggest very definite generalizations with respect to the precise influence of these conditions, because, so far as the writer is aware, the psychology of isolation has not been worked out. but two or three conclusions seem to be admissible, and for that matter rather generally accepted. the well-known conservatism of the farming class is doubtless largely due to class isolation. habits, ideas, traditions, and ideals have long life in the rural community. changes come slowly. there is a tendency to tread the well-worn paths. the farmer does not easily keep in touch with rapid modern development, unless the movements or methods directly affect him. physical agencies which improve social conditions, such as electric lights, telephones, and pavements, come to the city first. the atmosphere of the country speaks peace and quiet. nature's routine of sunshine and storm, of summer and winter, encourages routine and repetition in the man who works with her. a complement of this rural conservatism, which at first thought seems a paradox, but which probably grows out of these same conditions of isolation, is the intense radicalism of a rural community when once it breaks away from its moorings. many farmers are unduly suspicious of others' motives; yet the same people often succumb to the wiles of the charlatan, whether medical or political. farmers are usually conservative in politics and intensely loyal to party; but the populist movement indicates the tendency to extremes when the old allegiance is left behind. old methods of farming may be found alongside ill-considered attempts to raise new crops or to utilize untried machines. other effects of rural isolation are seen in a class provincialism that is hard to eradicate, and in the development of minds less alert to seize business advantages and less far-sighted than are developed by the intense industrial life of the town. there is time to brood over wrongs, real and imaginary. personal prejudices often grow to be rank and coarse-fibered. neighborhood feuds are not uncommon and are often virulent. leadership is made difficult and sometimes impossible. it is easy to fall into personal habits that may mark off the farmer from other classes of similar intelligence, and that bar him from his rightful social place. it would, however, be distinctly unfair to the farm community if we did not emphasize some of the advantages that grow out of the rural mode of life. farmers have time to think, and the typical american farmer is a man who has thought much and often deeply. a spirit of sturdy independence is generated, and freedom of will and of action is encouraged. family life is nowhere so educative as in the country. the whole family co-operates for common ends, and in its individual members are bred the qualities of industry, patience, and perseverance. the manual work of the schools is but a makeshift for the old-fashioned training of the country-grown boy. country life is an admirable preparation for the modern industrial and professional career. nevertheless, rural isolation is a real evil. present-day living is so distinctively social, progress is so dependent upon social agencies, social development is so rapid, that if the farmer is to keep his status he must be fully in step with the rest of the army. he must secure the social view-point. the disadvantages of rural isolation are largely in the realm of the social relations, its advantages mostly on the individual and moral side. farm life makes a strong individual; it is a serious menace to the achievement of class power. a cure for isolation sometimes suggested is the gathering of the farmers into villages. this remedy, however, is of doubtful value. in the first place, the scheme is not immediately practicable. about three and one-half billions of dollars are now invested in farm buildings, and it will require some motive more powerful than that inspired by academic logic to transfer, even gradually, this investment to village groups. moreover, it is possible to dispute the desirability of the remedy. the farm village at best must be a mere hamlet. it can secure for the farmer very few of the urban advantages he may want, except that of permitting closer daily intercourse between families. and it is questionable if the petty society of such a village can compensate for the freedom and purity of rural family life now existing. it may even be asserted with some degree of positiveness that the small village, on the moral and intellectual sides, is distinctly inferior to the isolated farm home. at the present time rural isolation in america is being overcome by the development of better means of communication among farmers who still live on their farms. so successful are these means of communication proving that we cannot avoid the conclusion that herein lies the remedy. improved wagon roads, the rural free mail delivery, the farm telephone, trolley lines through country districts, are bringing about a positive revolution in country living. they are curing the evils of isolation, without in the slightest degree robbing the farm of its manifest advantages for family life. the farmers are being welded into a more compact society. they are being nurtured to greater alertness of mind, to greater keenness of observation, and the foundations are being laid for vastly enlarged social activities. the problem now is to extend these advantages to every rural community--in itself a task of huge proportions. if this can be done and isolation can be reduced to a minimum, the solution of all the other rural social problems will become vastly easier. farmers' organization organization is one of the pressing social problems that american farmers have to face. the importance of the question is intrinsic, because of the general social necessity for co-operation which characterizes modern life. society is becoming consciously self-directive. the immediate phase of this growing self-direction lies in the attempts of various social groups to organize their powers for group advantage. and if, as seems probable, this group activity is to remain a dominant feature of social progress, even in a fairly coherent society, it is manifest that there will result more or less of competition among groups. the farming class, if at all ambitious for group influence, can hardly avoid this tendency to organization. farmers, indeed more than any other class, need to organize. their isolation makes thorough organization especially imperative. and the argument for co-operation gains force from the fact that relatively the agricultural population is declining. in the old days farmers ruled because of mere mass. that is no longer possible. the naïve statement that "farmers must organize because other classes are organizing" is really good social philosophy. in the group competition just referred to there is a tendency for class interests to be put above general social welfare. this is a danger to be avoided in organization, not an argument against it. so the farmers' organization should be guarded, at this point, by adherence to the principle that organization must not only develop class power, but must be so directed as to permit the farmers to lend the full strength of their class to general social progress. organization thus becomes a test of class efficiency, and consequently a prerequisite for solving the farm problem. can the farming class secure and maintain a fairly complete organization? can it develop efficient leaders? can it announce, in sound terms, its proposed group policy? can it lend the group influence to genuine social progress? if so, the organization of farmers becomes a movement of pre-eminent importance. organization, moreover, is a powerful educational force. it arouses discussion of fundamental questions, diffuses knowledge, gives practice in public affairs, trains individuals in executive work, and, in fine, stimulates, as nothing else can, a class which is in special need of social incentive. organization is, however, difficult of accomplishment. while it would take us too far afield to discuss the history of farmers' organizations in america, we may briefly suggest some of the difficulties involved. for forty years the question has been a prominent one among the farmers, and these years have seen the rise and decline of several large associations. there have been apparently two great factors contributing to the downfall of these organizations. the first was a misapprehension, on the part of the farmers, of the feasibility of organizing themselves as a political phalanx; the second, a sentimental belief in the possibilities of business co-operation among farmers, more especially in lines outside their vocation. there is no place for class politics in america. there are some things legislation cannot cure. there are serious limitations to co-operative endeavor. it took many hard experiences for our farmers to learn these truths. but back of all lie some inherent difficulties, as, for instance, the number of people involved, their isolation, sectional interests, ingrained habits of independent action, of individual initiative, of suspicion of others' motives. there is often lack of perspective, and unwillingness to invest in a procedure that does not promise immediate returns. the mere fact of failure has discredited the organization idea. there is lack of leadership; for the farm industry, while it often produces men of strong mind, keen perception, resolute will, does not, as a rule, develop executive capacity for large enterprises. it is frequently asserted that farmers are the only class that has not organized. this is not strictly true. the difficulties enumerated are real difficulties and have seriously retarded farm organization. but if the progress made is not satisfactory, it is at least encouraging. on the purely business side, over five thousand co-operative societies among american farmers have been reported. in co-operative buying of supplies, co-operative selling of products, and co-operative insurance the volume of transactions reaches large figures. a host of societies of a purely educational nature exists among stock-breeders, fruit-growers, dairymen. it is true that no one general organization of farmers, embracing a large proportion of the class, has as yet been perfected. the nearest approach to it is the grange, which, contrary to a popular notion, is in a prosperous condition, with a really large influence upon the social, financial, educational, and legislative interests of the farming class. it has had a steady growth during the past ten years, and is a quiet but powerful factor in rural progress. the grange is perhaps too conservative in its administrative policy. it has not at least succeeded in converting to its fold the farmers of the great mississippi valley. but it has workable machinery, it disavows partisan politics and selfish class interests, and it subordinates financial benefits, while emphasizing educational and broadly political advantages. it seems fair to interpret the principles of the grange as wholly in line with the premise of this paper, that the farmers need to preserve their status, politically, industrially, and socially, and that organization is one of the fundamental methods they must use. the grange, therefore, deserves to succeed, and indeed is succeeding. the field of agricultural organization is an extensive one. but if the farm problem is to be solved satisfactorily, the american farmers must first secure reasonably complete organization. rural education it is hardly necessary to assert that the education of that portion of the american people who live upon the land involves a question of the greatest significance. the subject naturally divides itself into two phases, one of which may be designated as rural education proper, the other as agricultural education. rural education has to do with the education of people, more especially of the young, who live under rural conditions; agricultural education aims to prepare men and women for the specific vocation of agriculture. the rural school typifies the first; the agricultural school, the second. rural education is but a section of the general school question; agricultural education is a branch of technical training. these two phases of the education of the farm population meet at many points, they must work in harmony, and together they form a distinct educational problem. the serious difficulties in the rural school question are perhaps three: first, to secure a modern school, in efficiency somewhat comparable to the town school, without unduly increasing the school tax; second, so to enrich the curriculum and so to expand the functions of the school that the school shall become a vital and coherent part of the community life, on the one hand translating the rural environment into terms of character and mental efficiency, and on the other hand serving perfectly as a stepping-stone to the city schools and to urban careers; third, to provide adequate high-school facilities in the rural community. the centralization of district schools and the transportation of pupils will probably prove to be more nearly a solution of all these difficulties than will any other one scheme. the plan permits the payment of higher wages for teachers and ought to secure better instruction; it permits the employment of special teachers, as for nature-study or agriculture; it increases the efficiency of superintendence; it costs but little, if any, more than the district system; it leaves the school amid rural surroundings, while introducing into the schoolroom itself a larger volume, so to speak, of world-atmosphere; it contains possibilities for community service; it can easily be expanded into a high school of reputable grade. there are two dangers, both somewhat grave, likely to arise from an urgent campaign for centralization. even if the movement makes as great progress as could reasonably be expected, for a generation to come a large share, if not a major portion, of rural pupils will still be taught in the small, isolated, district school; there is danger that this district school may be neglected. moreover, increased school machinery always invites undue reliance upon machine-like methods. centralization permits, but does not guarantee, greater efficiency. a system like this one must be vitalized by constant and close touch with the life and needs and aspirations of the rural community itself. wherever centralization is not adopted, the consolidation of two or three schools--a modified form of centralization--may prove helpful. where the district school still persists, there are one or two imperative requirements. teachers must have considerably higher wages and longer tenure. there must be more efficient supervision. the state must assist in supporting the school, although only in part. the small schools must be correlated with some form of high school. the last point is of great importance because of the comparative absence in country communities of opportunity near at hand for _good_ high-school training. agricultural education is distinctively technical, not in the restricted sense of mere technique, or even of applied science, but in the sense that it must be frankly vocational. it has to do with the preparation of men and women for the business of farming and for life in the rural community. agricultural education should begin in the primary school. in this school the point of view, however, should be broadly pedagogical rather than immediately vocational. fortunately, the wise teaching of nature-study, the training of pupils to know and to love nature, the constant illustrations from the rural environment, the continual appeal to personal observation and experience, absolute loyalty to the farm point of view, are not only sound pedagogy, but form the best possible background for future vocational study. whether we call this early work "nature-study" or call it "agriculture" matters less than that the fundamental principle be recognized. it must first of all _educate_. the greatest difficulty in introducing such work into the primary school is to secure properly equipped teachers. perhaps the most stupendous undertaking in agricultural education is the adequate development of secondary education in agriculture. the overwhelming majority of young people who secure any agricultural schooling whatever must get it in institutions that academically are of secondary grade. this is a huge task. if developed to supply existing needs, it will call for an enormous expenditure of money and for the most careful planning. from the teaching view-point it is a difficult problem. modern agriculture is based upon the sciences; it will not do, therefore, to establish schools in the mere art of farming. but these agricultural high schools must deal with pupils who are comparatively immature, and who almost invariably have had no preparation in science. nor should the courses at these schools be ultra-technical. they are to prepare men and women for life on the farm--men and women who are to lead in rural development, and who must get some inkling at least of the real farm question and its solution. the agricultural school, therefore, presents a problem of great difficulty. a perennial question in agricultural education is: what is the function of the agricultural college? we have not time to trace the history of these colleges, nor to elaborate the various views relative to their mission. but let us for a moment discuss their proper function in the light of the proposition that the preservation of the farmers' status is the real farm problem; for the college can be justified only as it finds its place among the social agencies helpful in the solution of the farm question. in so far as the agricultural college, through its experiment station or otherwise, is an organ of research, it should carry its investigations into the economic and sociological fields, as well as pursue experiments in soil fertility and animal nutrition. in the teaching of students, the agricultural college will continue the important work of training men for agricultural research, agricultural teaching, and expert supervision of various agricultural enterprises. but the college should put renewed emphasis upon its ability to send well-trained men to the farms, there to live their lives, there to find their careers, and there to lead in the movements for rural progress. a decade ago it was not easy to find colleges which believed that this could be done, and some agricultural educators have even disavowed such a purpose as a proper object of the colleges. but the strongest agricultural colleges today have pride in just such a purpose. and why not? we not only need men thus trained as leaders in every rural community, but, if the farming business cannot be made to offer a career to a reasonable number of college-trained men, it is a sure sign that only by the most herculean efforts can the farmers maintain their status as a class. if agriculture must be turned over wholly to the untrained and to the half-trained, if it cannot satisfy the ambition of strong, well-educated men and women, its future, from the social point of view, is indeed gloomy. the present-day course of study in the agricultural college does not, however, fully meet this demand for rural leadership. the farm problem has been regarded as a technical question, and a technical training has been offered the student. the agricultural college, therefore, needs "socializing." agricultural economics and rural sociology should occupy a large place in the curriculum. the men who go from the college to the farm should appreciate the significance of the agricultural question, and should be trained to organize their forces for genuine rural progress. the college should, as far as possible, become the leader in the whole movement for solving the farm problem. the farm home has not come in for its share of attention in existing schemes of agricultural education. the kitchen and the dining-room have as much to gain from science as have the dairy and the orchard. the inspiration of vocational knowledge must be the possession of her who is the entrepreneur of the family, the home-maker. the agricultural colleges through their departments of domestic science--better, of "home-making"--should inaugurate a comprehensive movement for carrying to the farm home a larger measure of the advantages which modern science is showering upon humanity. the agricultural college must also lead in a more adequate development of extension teaching. magnificent work has already been done through farmers' institutes, reading courses, co-operative experiments, demonstrations, and correspondence. but the field is so immense, the number of people involved so enormous, the difficulties of reaching them so many, that it offers a genuine problem, and one of peculiar significance, not only because of the generally recognized need of adult education, but also because of the isolation of the farmers. it should be said that in no line of rural betterment has so much progress been made in america as in agricultural education. merely to describe the work that is being done through nature-study and agriculture in the public schools, through agricultural schools, through our magnificent agricultural colleges, through farmers' institutes, and especially through the experiment stations and the federal department of agriculture in agricultural research and in the distribution of the best agricultural information--merely to inventory these movements properly would take the time available for this discussion. what has been said relative to agricultural education is less in way of criticism of existing methods than in way of suggestion as to fundamental needs. the ethical and religious problem wide generalizations as to the exact moral situation in the rural community are impossible. conditions have not been adequately studied. it is probably safe to say that the country environment is extremely favorable for pure family life, for temperance, and for bodily and mental health. to picture the country a paradise is, however, mere silliness. there are in the country, as elsewhere, evidences of vulgarity in language, of coarseness in thought, of social impurity, of dishonesty in business. there is room in the country for all the ethical teaching that can be given. nor is it easy to discuss the country church question. conditions vary in different parts of the union, and no careful study has been made of the problem. as a general proposition, it may be said that there are too many churches in the country, and that these are illy supported. consequently, they have in many cases inferior ministers. sectarianism is probably more divisive than in the city, not only because of the natural conservatism of the people and a natural disinclination to change their views, but because sectarian quarrels are perhaps more easily fomented and less easily harmonized than anywhere else. moreover, in the city a person can usually find a denomination to his liking. in the country, even with the present overchurched condition, this is difficult. the ideal solution of the country church problem is to have in each rural community one strong church adequately supported, properly equipped, ministered to by an able man--a church which leads in community service. the path to the realization of such an ideal is rough and thorny. church federation, however, promises large results in this direction and should be especially encouraged. whatever outward form the solution of the country church question may take, there seem to be several general principles involved in a satisfactory attempt to meet the issue. in the first place, the country church offers a problem by itself, socially considered. methods successful in the city may not succeed in the country. the country church question must then be studied thoroughly and on the ground. again, the same principle of financial aid to be utilized in the case of the schools must be invoked here. the wealth of the whole church must contribute to the support of the church everywhere. the strong must help the weak. the city must help the country. but this aid must be given by co-operation, not by condescension. the demand cannot be met by home missionary effort nor by church-building contributions; the principle goes far deeper than that. some device must be secured which binds together the whole church, along denominational lines if must be, for a full development of church work in every community in the land. furthermore, there is supreme necessity for adding dignity to the country parish. too often at present the rural parish is regarded either as a convenient laboratory for the clerical novice, or as an asylum for the decrepit or inefficient. the country parish must be a parish for our ablest and strongest. the ministry of the most christlike must be to the hill-towns of galilee as well as to jerusalem. there is still another truth that the country church cannot afford to ignore. the rural church question is peculiarly interwoven with the industrial and social problems of the farm. a declining agriculture cannot foster a growing church. an active church can render especially strong service to a farm community, in its influence upon the religious life, the home life, the educational life, the social life, and even upon the industrial life. nowhere else are these various phases of society's activities so fully members one of another as in the country. the country church should co-operate with other rural social agencies. this means that the country pastor should assume a certain leadership in movements for rural progress. he is splendidly fitted, by the nature of his work and by his position in the community, to co-operate with earnest farmers for the social and economic, as well as the moral and spiritual, upbuilding of the farm community. but he must know the farm problem. here is an opportunity for theological seminaries: let them make rural sociology a required subject. and, better, here is a magnificent field of labor for the right kind of young men. the country pastorate may thus prove to be, as it ought to be, a place of honor and rare privilege. in any event, the country church, to render its proper service, not alone must minister to the individual soul, but must throw itself into the struggle for rural betterment, must help solve the farm problem. federation of forces the suggestion that the country church should ally itself with other agencies of rural progress may be carried a step farther. rural social forces should be federated. the object of such federation is to emphasize the real nature of the farm problem, to interest many people in its solution, and to secure the co-operation of the various rural social agencies, each of which has its sphere, but also its limitations. the method of federation is to bring together, for conference and for active work, farmers--especially representatives of farmers' organizations, agricultural educators, rural school-teachers and supervisors, country clergymen, country editors; in fact, all who have a genuine interest in the farm problem. thus will come clearer views of the questions at issue, broader plans for reform, greater incentive to action, and more rapid progress. conclusion in this brief analysis of the social problems of american farmers it has been possible merely to outline those aspects of the subject that seem to be fundamental. it is hoped that the importance of each problem has been duly emphasized, that the wisest methods of progress have been indicated, and that the relation of the various social agencies to the main question has been clearly brought out. let us leave the subject by emphasizing once more the character of the ultimate farm problem. this problem may be stated more concretely, if not more accurately, than was done at the opening of the paper, by saying that the ideal of rural betterment is to preserve upon our farms the typical american farmer. the american farmer has been essentially a middle-class man. it is this type we must maintain. agriculture must be made to yield returns in wealth, in opportunity, in contentment, in social position, sufficient to attract and to hold to it a class of intelligent, educated american citizens. this is an end vital to the preservation of american democratic ideals. it is a result that will not achieve itself; social agencies must be invoked for its accomplishment. it demands the intelligent and earnest co-operation of all who love the soil and who seek america's permanent welfare. footnote: [ ] the material for this chapter is taken from an address entitled "social problems of american farmers," which was read before the congress of arts and science, section of the rural community, at st. louis, september, . the outlook chapter iii the expansion of farm life narrowness is perhaps the charge most often brought against american farm life. to a certain extent this charge may be just, though the comparisons that usually lead up to the conclusion do not always discriminate. it must be remembered that there are degrees of desirability in farm life, and that at the least there are multitudes of rural communities where bright flowers still bloom, where the shade is refreshing, and the waters are sweet. but, granting for the time that in the main rural life is less pleasant, less rich, less expansive than city life, we shall urge that this era of restriction is rapidly drawing to a close. there are forces at work that are molding rural life by new standards, and the old régime is passing. we shall soon be able to say of the country that "old things have passed away; all things have become new." this statement may seem too optimistic to some who can marshal an array of facts to prove that bigotry, narrowness, and the whole family of ills begotten by isolation still thrive in the country. it is true that our picture is not all of rose tints. but what of that? if it were not true there would be no farm problem; the country would have to convert the town. the fact remains that rural life is undergoing a rapid expansion. materially, socially, and intellectually, the farmer is broadening. old prejudices are fading. the plowman is no longer content to keep his eye forever on the furrow. the revival has been in slow progress for some time and has not yet reached its zenith; indeed, the movement is but well under way. for while the new day came long ago to some rural communities and they are basking in a noonday sun, yet in far too many localities the faintest gray of dawn is all that rouses hope. the fundamental change that is taking place is the gradual adoption of the new agriculture. "book-farmin'" is still decried, and many "perfessers" have a rocky road to travel in their attempts to guide the masses through the labyrinth of scientific knowledge that has been constructed during the last decade or two. this difficulty has not been wholly the farmer's fault--the scientist would often have been more persuasive had his wings been clipped. but there is a decided "getting together" nowadays--the farmer and the man of science have at last found common ground. and while the pendulum of agricultural prosperity shall always swing to and fro, there are, to change the figure, reasons for believing that an increasing number of farmers have rooted the tree of permanent success. to enumerate some of these reasons: ( ) thousands of farmers are farming on a scientific basis. they use the results of soil and fertilizer analysis; they cultivate, not to kill weeds so much as to conserve moisture; horticulturists spray their trees according to formulas laid down by experimenters; dairymen use the "babcock test" for determining the fat content of milk; stock-feeders utilize the scientists' feeding rations. ( ) the number of specialists among farmers is increasing. this is a sign of progress surely. more and more farmers are coming to push a single line of work. ( ) new methods are being rapidly adopted. fifteen years ago hardly a fruit-grower sprayed for insect and fungus pests; today it is rare to find one who does not. the co-operative creamery has not only revolutionized the character of the butter product made by the factory system, but it has set the pace for thousands of private dairymen who are now making first-class dairy butter. ( ) in general the whole idea of _intensive_ farming is gaining ground. this specialization, or intensification, of agriculture makes a new demand, upon those who pursue it, in the way of mental and business training. this training is being furnished by a multitude of agencies, and the younger generation of farmers is taking proper advantage of the opportunities thus offered. what are some of these regular agencies? ( ) an alert farm press, containing contributions from both successful farmers and scientific workers. ( ) farmers' institutes, which are traveling schools of technical instruction for farmers. ( ) the bulletins issued by the government experiment stations located in every state, and by the federal department of agriculture. ( ) special winter courses (of from two to twelve weeks), offered at nearly all the agricultural colleges of the country, for instruction in practical agriculture. ( ) regular college courses in agriculture at these same colleges. ( ) extension instruction by lectures and correspondence. ( ) a growing book literature of technical agriculture. ( ) more encouraging than all else is the spirit of inquiry that prevails among farmers the country over--the recognition that there is a basis of science in agriculture. no stronger pleas for the advancement of agricultural education can be found than those that have recently been formulated by farmers themselves. if this regeneration of farm life were wholly material it would be worth noting; for it promises a prosperity built on foundations sufficiently strong to withstand ordinary storms. yet this is but a chapter of the story. not only are our american farmers making a study of their business, bringing to it the resources of advancing knowledge and good mental training, and hence deriving from it the strong, alert mental character that comes to all business men who pursue equally intelligent methods, but the farmers are by no means neglecting their duty to broaden along general intellectual lines. farmers have always been interested in politics; there is no reason to think that their interest is declining. the grange and other organizations keep their attention on current problems. traveling libraries, school libraries, and grange libraries are giving new opportunities for general reading, and the farmer's family is not slow to accept the chance. low prices for magazines and family papers bring to these periodicals an increasing list from the rural offices. rural free mail delivery promises, among many other results of vast importance, to enlarge the circulation of daily papers among farmers not less than tenfold. the really great lesson that farmers are rapidly learning is to work together. they have been the last class to organize, and jealousy, distrust, and isolation have made such organizations as they have had comparatively ineffective. but gradually they are learning to compromise, to work in harmony, to sink merely personal views, to trust their own leaders, to keep troth in financially co-operative projects. there will be no farmers' party organized; but the higher politics is gaining among farmers, and more and more independent voting may be expected from the rural precincts. farmers are learning to pool such of their interests as can be furthered by legislation. it is also true that the whole aspect of social life in the country is undergoing a profound evolutionary movement. farmers are meeting one another more frequently than they used to. they have more picnics and holidays. they travel more. they go sight-seeing. they take advantage of excursions. their social life is more mobile than formerly. farmers have more comforts and luxuries than ever before. they dress better than they did. more of them ride in carriages than formerly. they buy neater and better furniture. the newer houses are prettier and more comfortable than their predecessors. bicycles and cameras are not uncommon in the rural home. rural telephone exchanges are relatively a new thing, but the near future will see the telephone a part of the ordinary furniture of the rural household; while electric car lines promise to be the final link in the chain of advantages that is rapidly transforming rural life--robbing it of its isolation, giving it balance and poise, softening its hard outlines, and in general achieving its thorough regeneration. this sketch is no fancy tale. the movement described is genuine and powerful. the busy city world may not note the signs of progress. well-minded philanthropists may feel that the rural districts are in special need of their services. even to the watchers on the walls there is much of discouragement in the advancement that _isn't_ being made. yet it needs no prophet's eye to see that a vast change for the better in rural life and conditions is now in progress. no student of these conditions expects or desires that the evolution shall be acadian in its results. it is to be hoped indeed that country sweets shall not lose their delights; that the farmer himself may find in his surroundings spiritual and mental ambrosia. but what is wanted, and what is rapidly coming, is the breaking down of those barriers which have so long differentiated country from urban life; the extinction of that social ostracism which has been the farmer's fate; the obliteration of that line which for many a youth has marked the bounds of opportunity: in fact, the creation of a rural society whose advantages, rewards, prerogatives, chances for service, means of culture, and pleasures are representative of the best and sanest life that the accumulated wisdom of the ages can prescribe for mankind. chapter iv the new farmer all farmers may be divided into three classes. there is the "old" farmer, there is the "new" farmer, and there is the "mossback." the old farmer represents the ancient régime. the new farmer is the modern business agriculturist. the mossback is a mediaeval survival. the old farmer was in his day a new farmer; he was "up with the times," as the times then were. the new farmer is merely the worthy son of a noble sire; he is the modern embodiment of the old farmer's progressiveness. the mossback is the man who tries to use the old methods under the new conditions; he is not "up" with the present times, but "back" with the old times. though he lives and moves in the present, he really has his being in the past. the old farmer is the man who conquered the american continent. his axe struck the crown from the monarchs of the wood, and the fertile farms of ohio are the kingdom he created. he broke the sod of the rich prairies, and the tasseling cornfields of iowa tell the story of his deeds. he hitched his plow to the sun, and his westward lengthening furrows fill the world's granary. the new farmer has his largest conquests yet to make. but he has put his faith in the strong arm of science; he has at his hand the commercial mechanism of a world of business. he believes he will win because he is in league with the ongoing forces of our civilization. the mossback cannot win, because he prefers a flintlock to a mauser. he has his eyes upon the ground, and uses snails instead of stars for horses. the old farmer was a pioneer, and he had all the courage, enterprise, and resourcefulness of the pioneer. he was virile, above all things else. he owned and controlled everything in sight. he was a state-builder. half a century ago, in the middle west, the strong men and the influential families were largely farmers. even professional men owned and managed farms, frequently living upon them. the smell of the soil sweetened musty law books, deodorized the doctor's den, and floated as incense above the church altars. the new farmer lives in a day when the nation is not purely an agricultural nation, but is also a manufacturing and a trading nation. he belongs no longer to the dominant class, so far as commercial and social and political influence are concerned. but none of these things move him. for he realizes that out of this seeming decline of agriculture grow his best opportunities. he discards pioneer methods because pioneering is not now an effective art. the mossback sees perhaps clearly enough these changes, but he does not understand their meaning, nor does he know how to meet them. he is dazzled by the romantic halo of the good old times, dumfounded by the electric energy of the present, discouraged and distracted by the pressure of forces that crush his hopes and stifle his strength. economically, the old farmer was not a business man, but a barterer. the rule of barter still survives in the country grocery where butter and eggs are traded for sugar and salt. the old farmer was industrially self-sufficient. he did not farm on a commercial basis. he raised apples for eating and for cider, not for market--there was no apple market. he had very little ready money, he bought and sold few products. he traded. even his grain, which afterward became the farmer's great cash crop, was raised in small quantities and ground at the nearest mill--not for export, but for a return migration to the family flour-barrel. the new farmer has always existed--because he is the old farmer growing. he has kept pace with our industrial evolution. when the régime of barter passed away, he ceased to barter. when the world's market became a fact, he raised wheat for the world's market. as agriculture became a business, he became a business man. as agricultural science began to contribute to the art of farming, he studied applied science. as industrial education developed, he founded and patronized institutions for agricultural education. as alertness and enterprise began to be indispensable in commercial activity, he grew alert and enterprising. the mossback is the man who has either misread the signs of the times, or who has not possessed the speed demanded in the two-minute class. he is the old farmer gone to seed. he tries to fit the old methods to the new régime. but it is not sufficient to picture the new farmer. you must explain him. what is it that makes the new farmer? who is he? what are his tools? in the first place, you cannot explain the new farmer unless you know the old farmer. you cannot have the new farmer unless you also have the mossback. the new farmer is a comparative person, as it were. you have to define him in terms of the mossback. the contrast is not between the old farmer and the new, for that is merely a question of relative conditions in different epochs of time. the contrast is between the new farmer and the mossback, for that is a question of men and of their relative efficiency as members of the industrial order. then, of course, you must observe the individual traits that characterize the new farmer, such as keenness, business instinct, readiness to adopt new methods, and, in fact, all the qualities that make a man a success today in any calling. for the new farmer, in respect to his personal qualities, is not a sport, a phenomenon. he does not stand out as a distinct and peculiar specimen. he is a successful american citizen who grows corn instead of making steel rails. but you have not yet explained the new farmer. these personal traits do not explain him. it may be possible to explain an individual and his success by calling attention to his characteristics, and yet you cannot completely analyze him and his career unless you understand the conditions under which he works--the industrial and social environment. much less can you explain a class of people by describing their personal characteristics. you must reach out into the great current of life that is about them, and discern the direction and power of that current. now, the conditions that tend to make the new farmer possible may be grouped in an old-fashioned way under two heads. in the old scientific phrases the two forces that make the new farmer are the "struggle for life" and "environment," or, to use other words, competition and opportunity. competition has pressed severely upon the farmer, competition at home and competition from other countries. at one time the heart of the wheat-growing industry of this country was near rochester, n. y., in the genesee valley; but the canal and the railway soon made possible the occupation of the great granary of the west. a multitude of ambitious young men soon took possession of that granary, and the flour-mills were moved from rochester to minneapolis. this is an old story, but the same forces are still at work. there has been developed a world-market. the sheep of the australian bush have become competitors of the flocks that feed upon the green vermont mountains and the ohio hills. the plains of argentina grow wheat for london. russia, siberia, and india pour a constant stream of golden grain into the industrial centers of western europe, and the price of american wheat is fixed in london. these forces have produced still another kind of competition; namely, specialization among farmers. localities particularly adapted to special crops are becoming centers where skill and intelligence bring the industry to its height. the truck-farming of the south atlantic region, the fruit growing of western michigan, the butter factories of wisconsin and minnesota, have crowded almost to suffocation the small market-gardener of the northern town, the man with a dozen peach trees, and the farmer who keeps two cows and trades the surplus butter for calico. these things have absolutely forced progress upon the farmer. it is indeed a "struggle for life." out of it comes the "survival of the fittest," and the fittest is the new farmer. but along with competition has come opportunity. indeed, out of these very facts that have made competition so strenuous spring the most marvelous opportunities for the progressive farmer. specialization brings out the best that there is in the locality and the man. it gives a chance to apply science to farming. our transportation system permits the peach growers of grand rapids to place their crops at a profit in the markets of buffalo and pittsburg; the rich orchards and vineyards of southern california find their chief outlet in the cities of the manufacturing northeast--three thousand miles away. during the forty years, from , the exports of wheat from this country increased from four million bushels annually to one hundred and forty million bushels; of corn, from three and one-third million bushels to one hundred and seventy-five million bushels; of beef products, from twenty million pounds to three hundred and seventy million pounds; of pork products, from ninety-eight million pounds to seventeen hundred million pounds. and not only do the grain and stock farmers find this outlet for their surplus products, but we are beginning to ship abroad high-grade fruit and first-class dairy products in considerable quantities. low rates of freight, modern methods of refrigeration, express freight trains, fast freight steamers--the whole machinery of the commercial and financial world are at the service of the new farmer. science, also, has found a world of work in ministering to the needs of agriculture, and in a hundred different ways the new farmer finds helps that have sprung up from the broadcast sowing of the hand of science. but perhaps even more remarkable opportunities come to the new farmer in those social agencies that tend to remove the isolation of the country; that assist in educating the farmer broadly; that give farmers as a class more influence in legislature and congress, and that, in fine, make rural life more worth the living. the new farmer cannot be explained until one is somewhat familiar with the character of these rural social agencies. they have already been enumerated and classified in a previous chapter; they will be more fully described in subsequent chapters. it must not be supposed that every successful farmer is necessarily a supporter of all of these social agencies. he may be a prosperous farmer just because he is good at the art of farming, or because he is a keen business man. but more and more he is coming to see that these things are opportunities that he cannot afford to disregard. indeed, some of these institutions are largely the creation of the new farmer himself. he is using them as tools to fashion a better rural social structure. but they also fashion him. they serve to explain him, in great part. competition inspires the farmer to his best efforts. the opportunity offered by these new and growing advantages gives him the implements wherewith to make his rightful niche in the social and industrial system. it would be erroneous to suppose that the new farmer is a _rara avis_. he is not. the spirit pervading the ranks of farmers is rapidly changing. we have been in a state of transition in agriculture. but the farther shore has been reached and the bridge is possible. the army of rural advancement is being recruited with great rapidity. the advance guard is more than a body of scouts, it is an effective brigade. i want also to make a plea for the mossback. he must not be condemned utterly. remember that competition among farmers has been intense; that rural environment breeds conservatism. remember also that the farmer cannot change his methods as rapidly as can some other business men. remember, too, that there is comparatively small chance for speculation in agriculture; that large aggregates of capital cannot be collected for farming, and consequently, that the approved means for securing immense wealth, great industrial advancement, and huge enterprises are nearly absent in agriculture. remember that the voices calling from the city deplete the country of many good farmers as well as of many poor ones. moreover, there are many men on farms who perhaps don't care for farming, but who for some reason cannot get away. on the farm a man need not starve; he can make a livelihood. doubtless this simple fact is responsible for a multitude of mossbacks. they can live without strenuous endeavor. possibly a good many of us are strenuous because we are pushed into it. so i have a good deal of sympathy for the mossback, and a mild sort of scorn for some of his critics, who probably could not do any better than he is doing if they essayed the gentle art of agriculture. i also have sympathy for the mossback particularly because he is the man that needs attention. the new farmer takes the initiative. he patronizes these opportunities that we have been talking about. but the mossback, because he is discouraged, or because he is ignorant, or perhaps merely because he is conservative, takes little interest in these things. about one farmer in ten belongs to some sort of farmers' association. thousands of farmers do not take an agricultural paper, and perhaps millions of them have not read an agricultural book. right here comes in another fact. every "new" farmer when full grown competes with every mossback. the educated farmer makes it still harder for the ignorant farmer to progress. the future of the american farmer is one of the most pregnant social problems with which we have to deal. there is indeed an issue involved in the success of the new farmer that is still more fundamental than any yet mentioned. the old farmer had a social standing that made him essentially a middle-class man. he was a landholder, he was independent, he was successful. he was the typical american citizen. the old farmer was father to the best blood of america. his sons and his sons' sons have answered to the roll call of our country's warriors, statesmen, writers, captains of industry. can the new farmer maintain the same relative social status? and if he can, is he to be an aristocrat, a landlord, a captain of industry, and to bear rule over the mossback? and is the tribe of mossbacks destined to increase and become a caste of permanent tenants or peasants? is the future american farmer to be the typical new farmer of the present, or are we traveling toward a social condition in which the tillers of the soil will be underlings? is there coming a time when the "man with the hoe" will be the true picture of the american farmer, with a low standard of living, without ideals, without a chance for progress? we must eliminate the mossback. it is to be done largely by education and by co-operation. there must be a campaign for rural progress. there must be a union of the country school teacher, of the agricultural college professor, of the rural pastor, of the country editor, with the farmers themselves, for the production of an increased crop of new farmers. anything that makes farm life more worth living, anything that banishes rural isolation, anything that dignifies the business of farming and makes it more prosperous, anything that broadens the farmer's horizon, anything that gives him a greater grasp of the rural movement, anything that makes him a better citizen, a better business man, or a better _man_, means the passing of the mossback. chapter v culture from the corn lot[ ] the question of questions that the college student asks himself is, what am i going to be? the surface query is, what am i going to _do_? but in his heart of hearts he ponders the deeper questions: what may i become in real intellectual and moral worth? how large a man, measured by the divine standards, will it be possible for me to grow into? these are the great questions because growth is the great end of life. that is what we are here for, to grow. to develop all our talents, all our possibilities, to increase our native powers of body, mind, and soul--this is life. it is important that we have a vocation. we must do something, and do it well. but the real end is not in working at a profession but in developing our abilities. our symmetrical growth is the measure of our success as human beings. as the student looks out over the ocean of life and scans the horizon for signs of the wise course for him to take, he should decide whether the particular mode of life that now appeals to him will yield the greatest possible measure of growth. he must consult his tastes, his talents, his opportunities, his training. and the test question is, will this line of work yield me the growth, the culture, i desire? but what are the elements that yield culture to an individual? using culture in a very broad sense as a synonym for growth, we may say that the things contributing most to the culture of the average person are his work, his leisure, and his service to others. we may now try to answer the question we started with, as it presents itself to many a student in the agricultural colleges of our country. will agriculture as a business, will the farm life and environment, contribute to the growth which i desire for myself? can i extract culture from the corn lot? let us first see if the work or vocation of farming gives culture. my answer would be that there is scarcely an occupation to be named that requires broader knowledge, more accurate observation, or the exercise of better judgment than does modern farming. the farmer deals with the application of many sciences. he must be an alert business man. he requires executive talent of no mean order. the study of his occupation in its wider phases leads him into direct contact with political economy, social movements, and problems of government. the questions confronting him as a farmer relate themselves to the leading realms of human knowledge and experience. i speak of course of the progressive farmer, who makes the best use of his opportunities. he can hardly hope to become immensely wealthy, but he can maintain that modest standard of living that usually is the lot of our most useful and cultured people and that ministers as a rule most fully to the ideal family life. the truly modern farmer cannot help growing. there is much hard work on the farm. yet on the whole there is fully as much leisure as in most other occupations. there is time to read, and books are today so easily accessible that living in the country is no bar to the bookshelf. better than time to read is time to think. the farmer has always been a man who pondered things in his heart. he has had a chance to meditate. no culture is sound except it has been bought by much thinking; all else is veneer. farm life gives in good measure this time to think. but it is in nature that the farmer finds or may find his most fertile field for culture. here he is at home. here he may revel if he will. here he may find the sources of mind-liberation and of soul-emancipation. he may be the envy of everyone who dwells in the city because he lives so near to nature's heart. bird and flower, sky and tree, rock and running brook speak to him a various language. he may read god's classics, listen to the music of divine harmonies, and roam the picture galleries of the eternal. so too in his dealings with his kind, he lives close to men and women who are frank, virile, direct, clean, independent. the culture coming from such associations is above price. one learns to pierce all shams, to honor essential manhood, to keep pure the fountains of sympathy, ambition, and love. thus on the farm one may find full opportunity for that second means of culture, leisure. another powerful agency for cultivating the human soul is service. indeed, service is the dynamic of life. to be of use is the ambition that best stimulates real growth. culture is the end of life, the spirit of service the motive power. so it is of this i would speak perhaps most fully, not only because it is a vital means of culture, but because it is also peculiarly the privilege and duty of the college man and the college woman. for let it be said that if any college student secures a diploma of any degree without having been seized upon by a high ambition to be of some use in the work of helping humanity forward, then have that person's years of study been in vain, and his teaching also vain. the college man comes not to be ministered unto but to minister. he has been poorly taught if he leaves college with no thought but for his material success. he must have had a vision of service, his lips touched with a coal from the altar of social usefulness, and his heart cultivated to respond to the call for any need he can supply, "here am i, send me." i think it may safely be said that there is no field which offers better chance for leadership to the average college man or woman than does the farm. take, for instance, politics. the majority of our states are agricultural states. the majority of our counties are agricultural counties. the agricultural vote is the determining factor in a large proportion of our elections. it follows inevitably that honest, strong farmers with the talent for leadership and the ability to handle themselves in competition with other political leaders have a marvelously fine chance for useful service. so is it in educational questions. nowhere may the citizen come into closer contact with the educational problems of the day than through service on the rural school board. if he brings to this position trained intelligence, some acquaintance with educational questions, and a desire to keep in touch with the advancement of the times, he can do for his community a service that can hardly be imagined. take another field--that of organization for farmers, constituting a problem of great significance. as yet this class of people is relatively unorganized, but the movement is growing and the need of well-trained leadership is vital. i cannot speak too strongly of the chance here offered for active, intelligent, masterful men and women in being of use as leaders and officials in the grange and other farmers' organizations. so with the church question. one of the reasons for the slow progress of the country church is the conservatism in the pews as well as in the pulpit. the ardent member of the young men's christian association in college may feel that, in the country, there will be no outlet for his ambition to be of religious use to his fellow-men. this is a mistake. the work of the young men's christian association itself in the country districts is just beginning, and promises large growth. wider service in the church, a community federation or union of different churches, the work of young people's societies and of the sunday schools--all these afford abundant opportunity for the man or the woman qualified and willing. there are other lines of usefulness. although i have stated that on the farm the opportunities for personal culture are great, it must be confessed that these opportunities are not fully utilized by the average farmer's family. here then is a very wide field, especially for the farmer's wife. for if she is a cultivated college woman, she can through the woman's club, the grange, the school, the nature-study club, the traveling library, and in scores of ways exercise an influence for good on the community that may have far greater results than would come from her efforts if expended in the average city. the farm home too has latent capacities that are yet to be developed. it ought to be the ideal home and, in many cases, it is. but there are not enough of such ideal homes in the country. no college woman with a desire to do her full service in the world ought for an instant to despise the chance for service as it exists on the farm. all of these opportunities so briefly suggested might be enlarged upon almost indefinitely, but the mere mention of them emphasizes the call for this service and this leadership. nowhere are leaders more needed than in the country. the country has been robbed of many of its strongest and best. the city and perhaps the nation are gainers: but the country has suffered. from one point of view, the future of our farming communities depends upon the quality of leadership that we are to find there during the next generation. so we come back to our question, can the farm be made to yield to the man or woman, residing upon it and making a living from it, that measure of growth and all-round development that the ambitious person wishes to attain? and our answer is, yes. in its work, its leisure, its field for service, it may minister to sound culture. if you love the life and work of the farm, do not hesitate to choose that occupation for fear of becoming narrow or stunted. you can live there the full, free life. you can grow to your full stature there. you can get culture from the corn lot. footnote: [ ] addressed to students in an agricultural college. the agencies of progress chapter vi education for the farmer the two generations living subsequent to the year are to be witnesses of an era in american history that will be known as the age of industrial education. these years are to be the boundaries of a period when the general principle that every individual shall be properly trained for his or her occupation in life is to receive its practical application. future generations will doubtless extend marvelously the limits to which the principle can be pushed in its ministrations to human endeavor, but we are in the time when the principle is first to receive general acceptation and is to be regarded as a fundamentally necessary fact of human progress. we are already "witnesses of the light." even within the memory of young men has it come to pass that the old wine skins of the old educational institutions have been filled with the new wine of science and of knowledge and training applied to the industries and businesses of life. agriculture has perhaps been slow to feel the current of the new wine as it flows from the wine press of fast-growing industrial and social need. but the least hopeful of us can, i am sure, already see signs of a vast awakening. the farm, as well as the pulpit, the bar, the schoolroom, the shop, the counting-room, is breathing in the new idea that knowledge and training can be made of use to every man. this awakening is due not merely to the desire of agriculturists to be in fashion, nor to the efforts of agricultural pedagogues, but to a real need. it is common knowledge that in america we have not farmed, but have mined the soil. we have "skimmed the cream" of fertility, and passed on to conquer new areas of virgin soil. this pioneer farming has required hard work, enterprise, courage, and all the noble traits of character that have made our american pioneers famous and that have within a century subdued a wilderness to civilization. but the farmer of today faces a new situation. the fertile lands are fairly well occupied. the old lands are depleted. these old lands must be handled skilfully if they are to produce profitably. they must be used because there is little else to use, and because they are near the best markets. meantime, scientists have been studying the deep things of nature, and have been learning the laws that govern soil, plant, and animal. thus we have the farmer's need met by the theorist's discoveries. the farmer, to avail himself of these discoveries must know their meaning and be able to apply the general principle to the specific case. this means agricultural education. then again, the consumption of high-class products increases at least as rapidly as does our wealth. the demand comes not alone from the rich, but from the middle classes of our cities. skilled artisans are large consumers of choice meats, fruits, and vegetables. to grow these high-grade products means skill, and skill means training, and training in the large sense means education. the need for agricultural education, is, then, a real and vital one. it is pressed upon us by economic and social conditions. it is in line with the movement of the age. in discussing agricultural education, we must not forget that the farmer is also a citizen and a man. he should be an intelligent citizen, and should therefore study questions of government. as a man, he should be the equal of other men of his same social rank. he therefore needs a good general education. he is more than mere farmer. while as farmer he must connect his business with its environment and out of his surroundings gain sound culture; while he should know nature, not only as its master, but as its friend; he should also be in sympathy with all that makes modern civilization worth while. and even as mere farmer, he finds himself face to face with grave social problems. he must not only produce but he must sell, and his selling powers are governed by conditions of the market, by transportation facilities and practices, and are affected by the laws of the land. hence he must be a student of these problems and must know the broad phases of agriculture and its relations to other industries. no intelligent man doubts the need of agricultural education. let us, then, say a word about the kind of education demanded. this question is settled very largely by the discussion we have just had about the need of this education. first of all, this education will give a fair mastery of the principles that govern proper soil management and plant and animal growth. this is fundamental. the farmer is dealing with natural laws, and he must know in them their applications. he cannot be blind to their dominance. they insist on recognition. they are jealous masters and good servants. nature serves only the man who obeys her. to obey he must know. the truth shall make him free. how to secure larger crops of better products at less cost and still maintain soil fertility, is the first demand of modern agriculture, and its solution depends in large measure upon education. but education does not stop here. the farmer is also a seller as well as a producer. he is a business man. he is manager of an industry. he is an investor of capital. so the question will arise, can he get any help from education in the handling of the business phases of his farm? he certainly can. you cannot teach a man business in the sense of supplying him with good sense, business judgment, ability to handle men, and so on. but you can study the general conditions that govern the business of agriculture, and you can report the results of your researches to the practical farmer; and he, if he is willing, may learn much that will be helpful to him in deciding the many difficult questions that confront him as a business man. farm administration in its largest sense will, then, be a most important phase of agricultural education. it is quite possible for the individual farmer to succeed admirably if he is equipped with a sound training in the principles of production and in farm management. but there are still larger questions that farmers as a class must meet if agriculture is to have its full success and if the farmer himself is to occupy the social position he ought to have. agriculture is an industry among industries. farmers are a class among classes. as an industry, agriculture has relations to other industries. it is subject to economic laws. it involves something more than growing and selling. the nature of the market, railroad rates, effects of the tariff and of taxation, are questions vital to agriculture. so with the farmers socially considered. their opportunities for social life, their school facilities, their church privileges, their associations and organizations--all these are important matters. so agricultural education will not fail to call attention to these larger questions. the well-educated farmer will, then, be trained in three lines of thought--first, that which deals with the growth of products; second, that which deals with the selling of products; and third, that which deals with agriculture as an industry and farmers as a class of people. we may next discuss as briefly as possible the methods by which agricultural education may be advanced. we may not consider all of them, but rather attend only to some of those agencies that seem of peculiar interest just at this time. there is one underlying requisite of successful agricultural education that is all-important. it is faith in agriculture. any man to succeed grandly must have absolute faith in his business. so the farmer must believe in agriculture. agriculture cannot attain its highest rank unless the men engaged in it believe in it most profoundly. they must believe that a man can make money in farming. they must love the farm life and surroundings. they must believe that the best days of agriculture are ahead of us, not behind us. they must believe that men can find in agriculture a chance to use brains and to develop talents and to utilize education. agricultural education rests on this faith. give us a state filled with such farmers and we can guarantee a strong system of agricultural education. but the seeds of education cannot grow in a soil barren of the richness of sentiment for and confidence in the farm. our agricultural colleges have been criticized because they have graduated so few farmers. but the fault is not all with the colleges. the farmers also are to blame. they have not had faith enough in the farm to advise young men to go to college to prepare for farming. they admit the value of education for the law, for building railroads, but not for farming. this must be changed, is being changed. the last ten years have seen a revolution in this respect, and the result is a mighty increase in agricultural educational interest. one powerful means of agricultural education is the farmers' organization or association. all our dairy, horticultural, poultry, and live-stock associations are great educators. so of an organization like the grange, its chief work is education. it brings mind in contact with mind; it gives chance for discussion and interchange of ideas; it trains in power of expression; it teaches the virtue of co-operation. farmers blunder when they fail to encourage organization. sometimes, out of foolish notions of independence, they neglect to unite their forces. they are utterly blind to their best interests when they do so. they should encourage organization if for no other reason than for the splendid educational advantages that flow from it. however, our chief interest is, perhaps, in those institutions that are formed purposely and especially for agricultural education and which are usually supported out of public funds. there are three great fields of endeavor in which these institutions are working. the first step is to know--to know the truth. so in agriculture we must know. know what? know how nature works. so the man of science studies the soil and finds out what plant-food it contains, how the water acts in it, what heat and air do, and the inter-relation of all these elements. he studies the plant and its habits and tries to discover how it grows and how it can be improved for man's use. he studies the animal and endeavors to learn what are the best foods for it and what laws govern its adaptation to human food. he studies climate and tries to find out what plants and animals are most appropriate to different locations. he studies injurious insects and diseases and devises remedies for them. he discovers, experiments. so we have research as the first term in agricultural education. the institutions of research are our experiment stations and united states department of agriculture. their work may be likened to the plowing of the field. they strive to know how nature works, and how man can make use of her laws in the growing of plant and animal. the next thing is to teach. the farmer too must know. knowledge confined to the scientist has little practical use. it is the farmer who can use it. moreover, new teachers must be trained, new experimenters equipped, and leaders in every direction prepared. so we have agricultural colleges and schools. if experiment is to be likened to plowing, the work of the schools may be compared to sowing and cultivating. agricultural colleges have been in existence in america almost fifty years. their careers have been both inspiring and disappointing. they have had to train their own teachers, create a body of knowledge, break down the bars of educational prejudice. this work has taken time. the results justify the time and effort. for today agricultural education is becoming organized, the subjects of study are well planned, and competent men are teaching and experimenting. the disappointment is twofold. they have not graduated as many farmers as they should have. this is due not wholly to wrong notions in the colleges. it is, as suggested before, partly due to the lack of faith in agriculture on the part of the farmers themselves. but the colleges are in part to blame. many of them have not been in close touch with the farmers. they have often been out of sympathy with the interests of the farmers. they have too frequently been servile imitators of the traditions of the older colleges, instead of striking out boldly on a line of original and helpful work for agriculture. today, however, we see a rapid change going on in most of our agricultural colleges. they are seeking to help solve the farmers' difficulties. they are training young men for farm life. the farmers are responding to this new interest and are beginning to have great confidence in the colleges. it is sometimes said that most farmers who get an agricultural education cannot be trained in the colleges. doubtless this is true. probably a very small proportion even of educated farmers can or will graduate from a full course in an agricultural college. many will do so. there is no reason why a large proportion of the graduates of our college courses in agriculture may not go to the farm. i have no sympathy with the idea that those courses are too elaborate for those young men who want to farm. it must be recognized, however, that even if our agricultural colleges shall graduate hundreds and thousands every year who return to the farm, it still leaves the great majority of farmers untouched in an educational way unless other means are devised. but there are other means at hand. we have first the agricultural school. the typical agricultural high school gives a course of two or three years, offering work of high-school grade in mathematics and english, with about half the time devoted to teaching in agriculture. many young men want to get an insight into the principles of modern agriculture, but cannot afford time or money for college work. this course fits their need. a splendid school of this design has been in successful operation in minnesota for more than a dozen years, and has nearly five hundred students. in wisconsin there are two county schools of agriculture for a similar purpose. other schools could be named. the agricultural colleges also offer shorter courses of college grade, perhaps of two years. these are very practical and useful courses. not only that, but nearly all the colleges give special winter courses of from ten days to fourteen weeks. these are patronized by thousands of young men. so in many ways are the colleges meeting the need. we all agree that it is desirable for a young man to take a full college course, even in agriculture. but it is better to have a half-loaf than no bread. yes, better to have a _slice_ than no bread. the colleges furnish the whole loaf, the half-loaf, and the slice. and young men are nourished by all. one reason why agricultural education has not made more rapid progress is because the children of the country schools have been taught in such a manner as to lead them to think that there is no chance for brains in farming. both their home influence and their school atmosphere have, in most cases perhaps, been working against their choice of agriculture as a vocation. it therefore becomes important that these children shall be so taught that they can see the opportunity in farming. they must, moreover, be so trained that they will be nature students; for the farmer above all men must be a nature student. so we see the need of introducing into our rural schools nature-study for the young pupils and elementary agriculture for the older ones. this is being successfully accomplished in many cases, and is arousing the greatest interest and meeting with gratifying success. we shall within ten years have a new generation of young men and women ready for college who have had their eyes opened as never before to the beauties of nature and to the fascination there is in the farmer's task of using nature for his own advantage. but when we have increased the attendance at our agricultural colleges tenfold; when we have hundreds of agricultural schools teaching thousands of our youth the fundamentals of agriculture; when each rural school in our broad land is instilling into the minds of children the nearness and beauty of nature and is teaching the young eyes to see and the young ears to hear what god hath wrought in his many works of land and sea and sky, in soil, and plant, and living animal--even when that happy day shall dawn will we find multitudes of men and women on our farms still untouched by agricultural education. these people must be reached. the mere fact that their school days are forever behind them is no reason why they shall not receive somewhat of the inspiration and guidance that flow from the schools. so we have an imperative demand for the extension of agricultural teaching out from the schools to the farm community. the school thus not only sheds its light upon those who are within its gates, but sets out on the beautiful errand of carrying this same light into every farm home in the land. this work is being done today by thousands of farmers' institutes, by demonstrations in spraying and in many other similar lines, by home-study courses and correspondence courses, by co-operative experiments, by the distribution of leaflets and bulletins, by lectures at farmers' gatherings, by traveling schools of dairying. these methods and others like them are being invoked for the purpose of bringing to the farmers in their homes and neighborhoods some of the benefits that the colleges and schools bestow upon their pupils. we have seen something of the need of agricultural education, of the kind of education required, and of the means used to secure it. does not this discussion at least show the supreme importance of the question? will not the farmers rally themselves to and league themselves with the men who are trying to forward the best interests of the farm? shall we not all work together for the betterment both of the farm and of the farmer? chapter vii farmers' institutes a decade and a half ago, there was a vigorous campaign for the establishment of university extension throughout the united states. generally speaking the campaign was a losing one--with but a few successes amid general failure. but many years before this agitation, there was begun a work among farmers, which in form and spirit was university extension, and which has constantly developed until it is today one of the most potent among the forces making for rural progress. this work has been done chiefly by what are now universally known as farmers' institutes. the typical farmers' institute is a meeting usually lasting two days, held for the purpose of discussing subjects that relate to the interests of farmers, more particularly those of a practical character. as a rule, the speakers to whom set topics are assigned are composed of two classes: the first class is made up of experts, either professors or experimenters in agricultural colleges and similar institutions, or practical farmers who have made such a study of, and such a conspicuous success in, some branch of agriculture that they may well be called experts; the second class comprises farmers living in the locality in which the institute is held. the experts are expected to understand general principles or methods, and the local speakers the conditions peculiar to the neighborhood. the meeting usually begins in the forenoon and ends with the afternoon session of the second day--five sessions being held. as a rule, not over two or three separate topics are treated in any one session, and in a well-planned institute topics of a like character are grouped together, so that there may be a fruit session, a dairy session, etc. each topic is commonly introduced by a talk or paper of twenty to forty minutes' length. this is followed by a general discussion in which those in the audience are invited to ask questions of the speaker relevant to the topic under consideration, or to express opinions and give experiences of their own. this is a rough outline of the average farmers' institute, but of course there are many variations. there are one-day meetings and there are three-day meetings, and in recent years the one-day meetings have grown in favor; in some states local speakers take little part; in some institutes a question-box is a very prominent feature, in others it is omitted altogether; in some cases the evening programme is made up of educational topics, or of home topics, or is even arranged largely for amusement; in other instances the evening session is omitted. in most institutes women are recognized through programme topics of special interest to them. it is not important to trace the early history of the farmers' institute movement, and indeed it is not very easy to say precisely when and where the modern institute originated. farmers' meetings of various sorts were held early in the century. as far back as the secretary of the massachusetts board of agriculture recommended that farmers' institutes be made an established means of agricultural education. by illinois and iowa held meetings called farmers' institutes, itinerant in character, and designed to call together both experts and farmers, but neither state kept up the work systematically. both vermont and new hampshire have held institutes annually since , though they did not bear that name in the early years. michigan has a unique record, having held regularly, since , annual farmers' institutes, "so known and designated," which always have contained practically the essential features of the present-day institute. the michigan legislature passed a law in providing for "lectures to others than students of the agricultural college," and has made biennial appropriations for institutes since . ohio, in , extended the institute idea to include every county in the state. more important than the origin of the farmers' institute movement is the present status. practically every state and territory in the union carries on institutes under some form or other. in somewhat more than half the states, the authorities of the land-grant colleges have charge of the work. in the other states, the board of agriculture or the department of agriculture has control. in - there were held , institutes, in states and territories, with a total reported attendance of , , people, at a cost of nearly $ , . the work is largely supported by the state treasuries, some of the states showing a most generous spirit. the annual state appropriations for the work in leading institute states are as follows: pennsylvania, $ , ; new york, $ , ; minnesota, $ , ; illinois, $ , ; ohio, $ , ; wisconsin, $ , ; indiana, $ , . in these states practically every county has annually from one to five institutes. institutes in no two states are managed in the same way, but the system has fitted itself to local notions and perhaps to local needs. a rough division may be made--those states which have some form of central control and those which do not have. even among states having a central management are found all degrees of centralization; wisconsin and ohio may be taken as the extremes. in wisconsin the director of institutes, who is an employee of the university, has practically complete charge of the institutes. he assigns the places where the meetings are to be held, basing his decision upon the location of former institutes in the various counties, upon the eagerness which the neighborhoods seem to manifest toward securing the institute, etc. he arranges the programme for each meeting, suiting the topics and speakers to local needs, prepares advertising materials, and sets the dates of the meeting. a local correspondent looks after a proper hall for meeting, distributes the advertising posters, and bears a certain responsibility for the success of the institute. meetings are arranged in series, and a corps of two or three lecturers is sent by the director upon a week's tour. one of these lecturers is called a conductor. he usually presides over the institute and keeps the discussions in proper channels. practice makes him an expert. the state lecturers do most of the talking. local speakers do not bear any large share in the programme. questions are freely asked, however. ohio has an institute society in each county, and this society largely controls its own institutes. the secretary of the state board of agriculture, who has charge of the system, assigns dates and speakers to each institute. after that everything is in the hands of the local society, which chooses the topics to be presented by the state speakers, advertises the meeting, and the society president acts as presiding officer. local speakers usually occupy half the time. it does not seem as if either of these plans in its entirety were ideal--the one an extreme of centralized control, the other an extreme of local management. yet in practice both plans work well. no states in the union have better institutes nor better results from institute work than wisconsin and ohio. skill, intelligence, and tact count for more than particular institutions. new york may be said to follow the wisconsin plan. minnesota goes even a step farther; instead of holding several series of institutes simultaneously in different parts of the state, attended by different "crews," the whole corps of state speakers attends every institute. no set programmes are arranged. everything depends upon local conditions. this system is expensive, but under present guidance very effective. michigan, indiana, and pennsylvania have adopted systems which are a mean between the plan of centralization and the plan of localization. illinois has a plan admirably designed to encourage local interest, while providing for central management. few other states have carried institute work so far as the states already named, and in some cases there seems to be a prejudice against a well-centralized and fully-developed system--a feeling that each locality may be self-sufficing in institute work. but this attitude is wearing away, for experience serves to demonstrate fully the value of system. the danger of centralization is bureaucracy; but in institute work, if the management fails to provide for local needs, and to furnish acceptable speakers, vigorous protests soon correct the aberration. it has been stated that in america we have no educational _system_--that spontaneity is the dominant feature of american education. this is certainly true of farmers' institutes. so it has transpired that numerous special features have come in to use in various states--features of value and interest. it may be worth while to suggest some of the more characteristic of these features, without attempting an exact category. formerly the only way in which women were recognized at the institutes was by home and social topics on the programme, though women have always attended the meetings freely. some years ago minnesota and wisconsin added women speakers to their list of state speakers, and in the case of wisconsin, at least, held a separate session for women, simultaneously with one or two sessions of the regular institute, with demonstration lectures in cooking as the chief features. michigan holds "women's sections" in connection with institutes, but general topics are taken up. in ontario separate women's institutes have been organized. in illinois a state association of domestic science has grown out of the institutes. thus institute work has broadened to the advantage of farm women. at many institutes there are exhibits of farm and domestic products--a sort of midwinter fair. oftentimes the merchants of the town in which the institute is held offer premiums as an inducement to the farmers. in wisconsin an educational feature of much value takes the form of stock-judging--usually at the regular autumn fairs. the judges give their reasons for their decisions, thus emphasizing the qualities that go to make up a perfect or desirable animal. in several states there is held an annual state institute called a "round-up," "closing institute," or the like. it is intended to be a largely attended and representative state convention of agriculturists, for the purpose of discussing topics of general interest to men and women from the farms. these meetings are frequently very large and enthusiastic gatherings. the county institute society is a part of the organization in some instances very well developed. it gives permanency to the work and arouses local interest and pride. the development of men and women into suitable state speakers is an interesting phase. as a rule the most acceptable speakers are men who have made a success in some branch of farming, and who also have cultivated the gift of clear and simple expression. not a few of these men become adepts in public speaking and achieve a reputation outside of their own states. in several states there is held a "normal institute"--an autumn meeting lasting a week or two weeks, and bringing together, usually at the state college of agriculture, the men who are to give the lectures at the institutes of the winter to follow. the object of the gathering is to bring the lecturers into close contact with the latest things in agricultural science, and to train them for more effective work. a few years ago the united states department of agriculture employed an experienced institute director to give all his time to the study and promotion of farmers' institutes. this incident is suggestive of the important place which institutes have secured in the work for better farming. the results of a generation of institute work are not easy to summarize. it is safe to make a broad generalization by asserting that this form of agricultural education has contributed in a remarkable degree to better farming. the best methods of farming have been advocated from the institute platform. agricultural college professors, and agricultural experimenters have talked of the relations of science to practical farming. the farmers have come to depend upon the institute as a means for gaining up-to-date information. and if institutes have informed, they have also done what is still better--they have inspired. they have gone into many a dormant farm community and awakened the whole neighborhood to a quicker life. they have started discussions, set men thinking, brought in a breath of fresh air. they have given to many a farmer an opportunity for self-development as a ready speaker. other educational agencies, such as the agricultural colleges and experiment stations, have profited by institutes. no one thing has done more than the institutes to popularize agricultural education, to stir up interest in the colleges, to make the farmers feel in touch with the scientists. farmers' institutes are a phase of university extension, and it is as a part of the extension movement that they are bound to increase in value and importance. reading-courses and correspondence-courses are growing factors in this extension movement, but the power of the spoken word is guarantee that the farmers' institute cannot be superseded in fact. and it is worth noting again, that while university extension has not been the success in this country which its friends of a decade ago fondly prophesied for it, its humbler cousin--agricultural college extension--has been a conspicuous success, and is acquiring a constantly increasing power among the educational agencies that are trying to deal with the farm problem. chapter viii the hesperia movement the gulf between parent and teacher is too common a phenomenon to need exposition. the existence of the chasm is probably due more to carelessness, to the pressure of time, or to indolence than to any more serious delinquencies; yet all will admit the disastrous effects that flow from the fact that there is not the close intellectual and spiritual sympathy that there should be between the school and the home. it needs no argument to demonstrate the value of any movement that has for its purpose the bridging of the gulf. but it is an omen of encouragement to find that there are forces at work designed to bring teacher and school patron into a closer working harmony. a statement of the history and methods of some of these agencies may therefore well have a place in a discussion of rural progress. for the movements to be described are essentially rural-school movements. of first interest is an attempt which has been made in the state of michigan to bridge the gulf--to create a common standing-ground for both teacher and parent--and on that basis to carry on an educational campaign that it is hoped will result in the many desirable conditions which, a priori, might be expected from such a union. at present the movement is confined practically to the rural schools. it consists in the organization of a county teachers and patrons' association, with a membership of teachers and school patrons, properly officered. its chief method of work is to hold one or more meetings a year, usually in the country or in small villages, and the programme is designed to cover educational questions in such a way as to be of interest and profit to both teachers and farmers. this movement was indigenous to michigan--its founders worked out the scheme on their own initiative, and to this day its promoters have never drawn upon any resources outside the state for suggestion or plan. but if the friends of rural education elsewhere shall be attracted by this method of solving one of the vexed phases of their problem, i hope that they will describe it as "the hesperia movement." for the movement originated in hesperia, was developed there, and its entire success in hesperia was the reason for its further adoption. hesperia deserves any renown that may chance to come from the widespread organization of teachers and patrons' associations. and where is hesperia? it lies about forty miles north and west of grand rapids--a mere dot of a town, a small country village at least twelve or fifteen miles from any railroad. it is on the extreme eastern side of oceana county, surrounded by fertile farming lands, which have been populated by a class of people who may be taken as a type of progressive, successful, intelligent american farmers. many of them are of scotch origin. partly because of their native energy, partly, perhaps, because their isolation made it necessary to develop their own institutions, these people believe in and support good schools, the grange, and many progressive movements. for several years there had existed in oceana county the usual county teachers' association. but, because hesperia was so far from the center of the county, and because it was not easily accessible, the teachers who taught schools in the vicinity could rarely secure a meeting of the association at hesperia; and in turn they found it difficult to attend the meetings held in the western part of the county. a few years ago it chanced that this group of teachers was composed of especially bright, energetic, and original young men and women. they determined to have an association of their own. it occurred to someone that it would add strength to their organization if the farmers were asked to meet with them. the idea seemed to "take," and the meetings became quite popular. this was during the winter of - . special credit for this early venture belongs to mr. e. l. brooks, still of hesperia and an ex-president of the present association, and to dr. c. n. sowers, of benton harbor, mich., who was one of the teachers during the winter named, and who was elected secretary of the board of school examiners in . mr. brooks writes: the programmes were so arranged that the participants in discussions and in the reading of papers were about equally divided between teachers and patrons. an active interest was awakened from the start. for one thing, it furnished a needed social gathering during the winter for the farmers. the meetings were held on saturdays, and the schoolhouse favored was usually well filled. the meetings were not held at any one schoolhouse, but were made to circulate among the different schools. these gatherings were so successful that similar societies were organized in other portions of the country. in , mr. d. e. mcclure, who has since ( - ) been deputy superintendent of public instruction of michigan, was elected county-school commissioner of oceana county. mr. mcclure is a man of great enthusiasm and made a most successful commissioner. he conceived the idea that this union of teachers and patrons could be made of the greatest value, in stimulating both teachers and farmers to renewed interest in the real welfare of the children as well as a means of securing needed reforms. his first effort was to prepare a list of books suitable for pupils in all grades of the rural schools. he also prepared a rural lecture-course, as well as a plan for securing libraries for the schools. all these propositions were adopted by a union meeting of teachers and farmers. his next step was to unite the interests of eastern oceana county and western newaygo county (newaygo lying directly east of oceana), and in there was organized the "oceana and newaygo counties joint grangers and teachers' association," the word "granger" being inserted because of the activity of the grange in support of the movement. mr. mcclure has pardonable pride in this effort of his, and his own words will best describe the development of the movement: this association meets thursday night and continues in session until saturday night. some of the best speakers in america have addressed the association. dr. arnold tompkins, in speaking before the association, said it was a wonderful association and the only one of its character in the united states. what was my ideal in organizing such associations? . to unite the farmers who pay the taxes that support the schools, the home-makers, the teachers, the pupils, into a co-operative work for better rural-school education. . to give wholesome entertainment in the rural districts, which from necessity are more or less isolated. . to create a taste for good american literature in home and school, and higher ideals of citizenship. . summed up in all, to make the rural schools character-builders, to rid the districts of surroundings which destroy character, such as unkept school yards, foul, nasty outhouses, poor, unfit teachers. these reforms, you understand, come only through a healthy educational sentiment which is aroused by a sympathetic co-operation of farm, home, and school. what results have i been able to discover growing out of this work? ideals grow so slowly that one cannot measure much progress in a few years. we are slaves to conditions, no matter how hard, and we suffer them to exist rather than arouse ourselves and shake them off. the immediate results are better schools, yards, out-buildings, schoolrooms, teachers, literature for rural people to read. many a father and mother whose lives have been broken upon the wheel of labor have heard some of america's orators, have read some of the world's best books, because of this movement, and their lives have been made happier, more influential, more hopeful. thousands of people have been inspired, made better, at the hesperia meetings. in western michigan the annual gathering at hesperia is known far and wide as "the big meeting." the following extract from the michigan _moderator-topics_ indicates in the editor's breezy way the impression the meeting for made upon an observer: hesperia scores another success. riding over the fourteen miles from the railroad to hesperia with governor warner and d. e. mcclure, we tried to make the latter believe that the crowd would not be forthcoming on that first night of the fourteenth annual "big meeting." it was zero weather and mighty breezy. for such a movement to succeed two years is creditable, to hold out for five is wonderful, to last ten is marvelous, but to grow bigger and better for fourteen years is a little short of miraculous. mcclure is recognized as the father of the movement and his faith didn't waver a hair's breadth. and sure enough there was the crowd--standing room only, to hear the governor and see the great cartoonist j. t. mccutcheon of the _chicago tribune_. for three evenings and two days the big hall is crowded with patrons, pupils and teachers from the towns and country round. during the fourteen years that these meetings have been held, the country community has heard some of the world's greatest speakers. the plan has been adopted by other counties in michigan and other states both east and west. its possibilities are well-nigh unlimited and its power for good is immeasurable. everyone connected with it may well feel proud of the success attending the now famous "hesperia movement." in , kent county, michigan (of which grand rapids is the county seat), organized a teachers and patrons' association that is worth a brief description, although in more recent years its work has been performed by other agencies. it nevertheless serves as a good example of a well-organized association designed to unite the school and home interests of rural communities. it was for several years signally successful in arousing interest in all parts of the county. besides, it made a departure from the oceana-newaygo plan which must be considered advantageous for most counties. the hesperia meeting is an annual affair, with big crowds and abundant enthusiasm. the kent county association was itinerant. the membership included teachers, school officers, farmers generally, and even pupils. an attempt was made to hold monthly meetings during the school year, but for various reasons only five or six meetings a year were held. the meetings usually occurred in some grange hall, the grange furnishing entertainment for the guests. there were usually three sessions--friday evening and saturday forenoon and afternoon. the average attendance was nearly five hundred, about one-tenth being teachers; many teachers as well as farmers went considerable distances to attend. the kent county association did not collect any fees from its members, the teachers' institute fund of the county being sufficient to provide for the cost of lectures at the association meetings. permission for this use of the fund was obtained from the state superintendent of public instruction. some counties have a membership fee; at hesperia, the fee is cents, and a membership ticket entitles its holder to a reserved seat at all sessions. the kent county association also suggested a reading-course for its members. the success of the work in kent county was due primarily to the fact that the educators and the farmers and their leaders are in especially close sympathy. and right there is the vital element of success in this work. the initiative must be taken by the educators, but the plan must be thoroughly democratic, and teacher and farmer must be equally recognized in all particulars. the results of the work in kent county were thus summarized by the commissioner of schools of the county: to teachers, the series of meetings is a series of mid-year institutes. every argument in favor of institutes applies with all its force to these associations. to farmers they afford a near-by lecture course, accessible to all members of the family, and of as high grade as those maintained in the larger villages. to the schools, the value is in the general sentiment and interest awakened. the final vote on any proposed school improvement is taken at the annual school meeting, and the prevailing sentiment in the neighborhood has everything to do with this vote. and not only this, but the general interest of patrons may help and cheer both teacher and pupils throughout the year. on the other hand, indifference and neglect may freeze the life out of the most promising school. there is no estimating the value to the schools in this respect. the kent county association had a very simple constitution. it is appended here for the benefit of any who may desire to begin this beneficent work of endeavoring to draw more closely together rural schools and country homes. article i.--name this association shall be known as "the kent county teachers and patrons' association." article ii.--membership any person may become a member of this association by assenting to this constitution and paying the required membership fee. article iii.--objects the object of this association shall be the promotion of better educational facilities in all ways and the encouragement of social and intellectual culture among its members. article iv.--meetings at least five meetings of the association shall be held each year, during the months of october, november, january, february, and march, the dates and places of meetings to be determined and announced by the executive committee. special meetings may be called at the election of the executive committee. article v.--officers section . the officers of the association shall be a president, a vice-president, a secretary, a treasurer, and an executive committee composed of five members to be appointed by the president. sec. . the election of officers shall occur at the regular meeting of the association in the month of october. sec. . the duties of each officer shall be such as parliamentary usage assigns, respectively, according to cushing's manual. sec. . it shall be the duty of the executive committee to arrange a schedule of meetings and to provide suitable lecturers and instructors for the same on or before the first day of september of each year. it shall be the further duty of this committee to devise means to defray the expenses incurred for lecturers and instructors. all meetings shall be public, and no charge for admission shall be made, except by order of the executive committee. article vi.--course of reading section . the executive committee may also recommend a course of reading to be pursued by members, and it shall be their duty to make such other recommendations from time to time as shall have for their object the more effective carrying out of the purposes of the association. whether the oceana county plan of a set annual meeting or the kent county plan of numerous itinerant meetings is the better one depends much on the situation. it is not improbable that itinerant meetings, with an annual "round-up" meeting of the popular type as the great event of the school year, would be very satisfactory. other counties in the state have taken up the hesperia idea. in some cases associations similar to the kent county association have been developed. more recently the work has frequently been carried on by the county commissioner of schools directly. "institutes on wheels" have become a factor in the campaign for better rural schools. one commissioner writes: my aim has been to bring into very close relationship teachers, patrons, and pupils. this is done, in part, in the following manner: i engage, for a week's work at a time, some educator of state or national reputation to ride with me on my visitation of schools. through the day, schools are visited, pupils' work inspected, and in the evening, a rally is held in the locality visited in that day. a circuit is made during the week, and friday evening and the saturday following a general round-up is held. the results of this work have been far reaching. teachers, patrons, and pupils are brought into close relationship and a higher standard of education is developed. the form of organization matters little. the essential idea of the "hesperia movement" was to bring together the teacher and the school patron on a common platform, to a common meeting-place, to discuss subjects of common interest. this idea must be vitalized in the rural community before that progress in rural-school matters which we desire shall become a fact. it is only fair to say that administrators of rural-school systems in several states are attempting in one way or another, and have done so for some years, to bring together teachers and school patrons. in iowa there are mothers' clubs organized for the express purpose of promoting the best interests of the schools. in many of the communities the county superintendent organizes excursions, and holds school contests which are largely attended by patrons of the schools. ohio has what is known as the "ohio school improvement federation." its objects are: ( ) to create a wholesome educational sentiment in the citizenship of the state; ( ) to remove the school from partisan politics; ( ) to make teaching a profession, protected and justly compensated. county associations of the federation are being organized and the effort is being made to reach the patrons of the schools and to create the right public sentiment. in many of the teachers' institutes there is one session devoted entirely to subjects that are of special interest to the school-board members and to the patrons of the schools. educational rallies are held in many of the townships, at which effort is made to get together all the citizens and have an exhibit of school work. in minnesota, a law was passed recently to the effect that school officers within a county may attend one educational convention a year upon call of the county superintendent. they receive therefor, three dollars for one day's services and five cents mileage each way for attendance. already a number of very successful conventions have been held, wherein all school districts in the counties have been represented. the county institutes in pennsylvania are largely attended by the public and are designed to reach patrons as well as teachers. in kansas, county superintendents have organized school-patrons' associations and school-board associations, both of which definitely purpose to bring together the school and the home and the officers of the school into one body and to co-operate with individuals for the purpose of bettering the school conditions. doubtless other states are carrying on similar methods. an interesting movement wholly independent of the hesperia plan has recently been put into operation under the leadership of principal myron t. scudder of the state normal school, new paltz, n. y. he has organized a series of country-school conferences. they grew out of a recognized need, but were an evolution rather than a definite scheme. the school commissioner, the teachers, and the grange people of the community have joined in making up the conference. an attempt is also made to interest the pupils. at one conference there was organized an athletic league for the benefit of the boys of the country school. the practical phases of nature-study and manual training are treated on the programme, and at least one session is made a parents' meeting. there is no organization whatever. dr. a. e. winship, of the _journal of education_, boston, had the following editorial in the issue of june , : it is now fourteen years since d. e. mcclure spoke into being the hesperia movement, which is a great union of educational and farmer forces, in a midwinter chautauqua, as it were. twelve miles from the railroad, in the slight village of hesperia, a one-street village, one side of the street being in one county and the other side in another, for three days and evenings in midwinter each year, in a ramshackle building, eight hundred people from all parts of the two counties sit in reserved seats, for which they pay a good price, and listen to one or two notable speakers and a number of local functionaries. one-half of the time is devoted to education and the other to farm interests. it is a great idea, well worked out, and after fourteen years it maintains its lustiness, but i confess to disappointment that the idea has not spread more extensively. it is so useful there, and the idea is so suggestive, that it should have been well-nigh universal, and yet despite occasional bluffs at it, i know of no serious effort to adopt it elsewhere, unless the midwinter meeting at shelby, in one of these two counties, can be considered a spread of the idea. this child of the hesperia movement, in one of the two counties, and only twenty miles away, had this year many more in attendance than have ever been at hesperia. this work of uniting more closely the interests, sympathies, and intelligence of the teachers and patrons of the rural school has had a test in michigan of sufficient length to prove that it is a practicable scheme. no one questions the desirability of the ends it is prepared to compass, and experience in michigan shows not only that where the educators have sufficient enterprise, tact, enthusiasm, and persistence the necessary organizations can be perfected, but that substantial results follow. for the sake of better rural schools, then, it is sincerely to be hoped that the "hesperia movement" may find expression in numerous teachers and patrons' associations in at least the great agricultural states. chapter ix the rural school and the community among the great phenomena of our time is the growth of the school idea--the realization of the part that the school plays in our civilization and in the training of our youth for life. our new england fathers started the school in order that their children might learn to read the scriptures, and thus that they might get right ideas of their religious duty. even after this aim was outgrown, our schools for generations did little more than to teach the use of the mere tools of knowledge; to read, to write, and to cipher were the great gains of the schoolroom. even geography and grammar were rather late arrivals. then came the idea that the school should train children for citizenship, and it was argued that the chief reason why schools should be supported at public expense was in order that good citizens should be trained there. history and civil government were put into the course in obedience to this theory. another step was taken when physiology was added, because it was an acknowledgment that the schools should do something to train youth in the individual art of living. still another step was taken when manual training and domestic science were brought into our city schools, because these studies emphasize the fact that the schools must do something to train workers. and finally we have at present the idea gaining a strong foothold that the schools must train the child to fill its place in the world of men; to see all the relations of life; to be fitted to live in human society. this idea really embraces all of the other ideas. it implies that the schools shall not only teach each individual the elements of knowledge, that they shall train for citizenship, that they shall train men in the art of living, that they shall aid in preparing for an occupation, but that they shall do _all_ of these things, and do them not merely for the good of the individual, but for the good of society as a whole. and not only is there a feeling that the pupil in school can be brought into closer touch with the life of the community, but that the school as an institution can be made more useful to the community as a whole. this double thought has been expressed in the phrase, "make the school a social center," and practically it is being slowly worked out in numerous city schools. how far can this idea be developed in the country school? the purpose of this chapter is not to deal in the theory of the subject, nor to argue particularly for this view of the function of the school, but rather to try to show some methods by which the rural school and the farm community actually can be brought into closer relations. in this way we may perhaps indicate that there is a better chance for co-operation between the rural school and the farm community than we have been accustomed to believe, and that this closer relation is worth striving for. five methods will be suggested by which the rural school can become a social center. some of these have already been tried in rural communities, some of them have been tried in cities, and some of them have not been tried at all. . the first means of making the rural school a social center is through the course of study. it is here that the introduction of nature-study into our rural schools would be especially helpful. this nature-study when properly followed approves itself both to educators and to farmers. it is a pedagogical principle recognized by every modern teacher that in education it is necessary to consider the environment of the child, so that the school may not be to him "a thing remote and foreign." the value of nature-study is recognized not only in thus making possible an intelligent study of the country child's environment, but in teaching a love of nature, in giving habits of correct observation, and in preparing for the more fruitful study of science in later years. our best farmers are also coming to see that nature-study in the rural schools is a necessity, because it will tend to give a knowledge of the laws that govern agriculture, because it will teach the children to love the country, because it will show the possibilities of living an intellectual life upon the farm. nature-study, therefore, will have a very direct influence in bringing the child into close touch with the whole life of the farm community. but it is not so much a matter of introducing new studies--the old studies can be taught in such a way as to make them seem vital and human. take, for instance, geography. it used to be approached from the standpoint of the solar system. it now begins with the schoolhouse and the pupils' homes, and works outward from the things that the child sees and knows to the things that it must imagine. history, writing, reading, the sciences, and even other subjects can be taught so as to connect them vitally and definitely with the life of the farm community. to quote colonel parker, who suggests the valuable results of such a method of teaching: it would make a strong, binding union of the home and the school, the farm methods and the school methods. it would bring the farm into the school and project the school into the farm. it would give parent and teacher one motive in the carrying out of which both could heartily join. the parent would appreciate and judge fairly the work of the school, the teacher would honor, dignify and elevate the work of the farm. the study of the landscape of the near-by country, the study of the streams, the study of the soils, studies that have to do with the location of homes, of villages, the study of the weather, of the common plants, of domestic animals--all of these things will give the child a better start in education, a better comprehension of the life he is to live, a better idea of the business of farming, a better notion about the importance of agriculture, and will tend to fit him better for future life either on the farm or anywhere else, than could any amount of the old-fashioned book knowledge. is it not a strange fact that so many farmers will decry book knowledge when applied to the business of farming, and at the same time set so much store by the book learning that is given in the common arithmetic, the old-fashioned reader, and the dry grammar of the typical school? of course anyone pleading for this sort of study in the rural schools must make it clear that the ordinary accomplishments of reading, writing, and ciphering are not to be neglected. as a matter of fact, pupils under this method can be just as well trained in these branches as under the old plan. the point to be emphasized, however, is that a course of study constructed on this theory will tend to bring the school and the community closer together, will make the school of more use to the community, will give the community more interest in the school, while at the same time it will better prepare pupils to do their work in life. . a second way of making the rural school a social center is through the social activities of the pupils. this means that the pupils as a body can co-operate for certain purposes, and that this co-operation will not only secure some good results of an immediate character, results that can be seen and appreciated by everyone, but that it will teach the spirit of co-operation--and there is hardly anything more needed today in rural life than this spirit of co-operation. the schools can perform no better service than in training young people to work together for common ends. in this work such things as special day programmes, as for arbor day, washington's birthday, pioneer day; the holding of various school exhibitions; the preparation of exhibits for county fairs, and similar endeavors, are useful and are being carried out in many of our rural schools. but the best example of this work is a plan that is being used in the state of maine, and is performed through the agency of what is called a school improvement league. the purposes of the league are: ( ) to improve school grounds and buildings; ( ) to furnish suitable reading-matter for pupils and people; ( ) to provide works of art for schoolrooms. there are three forms of the league, the local leagues organized in each school; the town leagues, whose membership consists of the officers of the local leagues; and a state league, whose members are delegates from the town leagues and members of the local leagues who hold school diplomas. any pupil, teacher, school officer, or any other citizen may join the league on payment of the dues. the minimum dues are one cent a month for each pupil, for other members not less than ten cents a term. but these dues may be made larger by vote of the league. each town league sends a delegate to the meeting of the state league. each league has the usual number of officers elected for one term. these leagues were first organized in and they have already accomplished much. they have induced school committees to name various rural schools for distinguished american citizens, as washington, lincoln, and so forth. they give exhibitions and entertainments for the purpose of raising funds. sometimes they use these funds to buy books for the schoolroom. the books are then loaned to the members of the league; at the end of the term this set of books is exchanged for another set of books from another school in the same township. in this way, at a slight expense, each school may have the use of a large number of books every year. the same thing is done with pictures and works of art, these being purchased and exchanged in the same way. through the efforts of the league schoolhouses have been improved, inside and out, and the school grounds improved. it is not so much the doing of new things that has been attempted by this league. the important item is that the school has been _organized_ for these definite purposes, and the work is carried on systematically from year to year. it needs no argument to show the value of this sort of co-operation to the pupil, to the teacher, to the school, to the parents, and ultimately to the community as a whole. . a third method is through co-operation between the home and the school, between the teacher and pupils on one side, and parents and taxpayers on the other side. parents sometimes complain that the average school is a sort of mill, or machine, into which their children are placed and turned out just so fast, and in just such condition. but if this is the case, it is partly the fault of the parents who do not keep in close enough touch with the work of the school. it is not that parents are not interested in their children, but it is rather that they look at the school as something separate from the ordinary affairs of life. now, nothing can be more necessary than that this notion should be done away with. there must be the closest co-operation between the home and school. how can this co-operation be brought about? frequently parents are urged to visit the schools. this is all right and proper, but it is not enough. there must be a closer relation than this. the teacher must know more about the home life of her pupils, and the parents must know far more about the whole purpose and spirit, as well as the method, of the school. a great deal of good has been done by the joint meeting of teachers and school officers. it is a very wise device, and should be kept up. but altogether the most promising development along this line is the so-called "hesperia movement," described in another chapter. these meetings of school patrons and teachers take up the work of the school in a way that will interest both teachers and farmers. they bring the teachers and farmers into closer touch socially and intellectually. they disperse fogs of misunderstanding. they inspire to closer co-operation. they create mutual sympathy. they are sure to result in bringing the teacher into closer touch with community life and with the social problems of the farm. and they are almost equally sure to arouse the interest of the entire community, not only in the school as an institution and in the possibilities of the work it may do, but also in the work of that teacher who is for the time being serving a particular rural school. . a fourth method is by making the schoolhouse a meeting-place for the community, more especially for the intellectual and aesthetic activities of the community. a good example of this kind of work is the john spry school of chicago. in connection with this school there is a lecture course each winter; there is a musical society that meets every tuesday evening; there is a men's club that meets every two weeks to discuss municipal problems and the improvement of home conditions; there is a woman's club to study for general improvement and social service; there is a mothers' council meeting every two weeks; there is a literary and dramatic society, meeting every week, composed of members of high-school age, and studying shakespeare particularly; there is a dressmaking and aid society meeting two evenings a week, to study the cutting of patterns, garment-making, etc.; a food-study and cooking club, also meeting two evenings a week; an inventive and mechanical club, meeting two evenings a week, and tending to develop the inventive and mechanical genius of a group of young men; an art club; and a boy's club, with music, games, reading-lessons, reading of books and magazines, intended for boys of fourteen or fifteen years of age. these things are all under the direction of the school, they are free, they are designed to educate. it will not be feasible for the rural school to carry out such a programme as this, but do we realize how large are the possibilities of this idea of making the rural school a community center? no doubt one of the advantages of the centralized rural school will be to give a central meeting-place for the township, and to encourage work of the character that has been described. of course, the grange and farmers' clubs are doing much along these lines, but is it not possible for the district school also to do some useful work of this character? singing-schools and debating clubs were quite a common thing in the rural schools forty years ago, and there are many rural schools today that are doing work of this very kind. is there any reason, for example, why the country schoolhouse should not offer an evening school during a portion of the winter, where the older pupils who have left the regular work of the school can carry on studies, especially in agriculture and domestic science? there is need for this sort of thing, and if our agricultural colleges, and the departments of public instruction, and the local school supervisors, and the country teachers, and the farmers themselves, could come a little closer together on these questions the thing could be done! . fifth and last, as a method for making the school a social center, is the suggestion that the teacher herself shall become something of a leader in the farm community. the teacher ought to be not only a teacher of the pupils, but in some sense a teacher of the community. is there not need that someone should take the lead in inspiring everyone in the community to read better books, to buy better pictures, to take more interest in the things that make for culture and progress? there are special difficulties in a country community. the rural teacher is usually a transient; she secures a city school as soon as she can; she is often poorly paid; she is sometimes inexperienced; frequently the labor of the school absorbs all her time and energy. unfortunately these things are so, but they ought not to be so. and we shall never have the ideal rural school until we have conditions favorable to the kind of work just described. the country teacher ought to understand the country community, ought to have some knowledge of the problems that the farmers have to face, ought to have some appreciation of the peculiar conditions of farm life. every teacher should have some knowledge of rural sociology. the normal schools should make this subject a required subject in the course, especially for country teachers. teachers' institutes and reading-circles should in some way provide this sort of thing. this is one of the most important means of bringing the rural school into closer touch with the farm community. ten years ago henry sabin, of iowa, one of the keenest students of the rural-school problem, in speaking of the supervision of country schools, said: the supervisor of rural schools should be acquainted with the material resources of his district. he should know not only what constitutes good farming, but the prevailing industry of the region should be so familiar to him that he can converse intelligently with the inhabitants, and convince them that he knows something besides books. the object is not alone to gain influence over them, but to bring the school into touch with the home life of the community about. it is not to invite the farmer to the school, but to take the school to the farm, and to show the pupils that here before their eyes are the foundations upon which have been built the great natural sciences. the programme needed to unite rural school and farm community is then, first, to enrich the course of study by adding nature-study and agriculture, and about these co-ordinating the conventional school subjects; second, to encourage the co-operation of the pupils, especially for the improvement of the school and its surroundings; third, to bring together for discussion and acquaintance the teachers and the patrons of the school; fourth, so far as possible to make the schoolhouse a meeting-place for the community, for young people as well as for older people, where music, art, social culture, literature, study of farming, and in fact, anything that has to do with rural education, may be fostered; and fifth, to expect the teacher to have a knowledge of the industrial and general social conditions of agriculture, especially those of the community in which her lot is cast. chapter x the grange the difficulty of uniting the farmers of america for any form of co-operative endeavor long ago became proverbial. the business of farming encouraged individualism; comparative isolation bred independence; and restricted means of communication made union physically difficult, even among those who might be disposed to unite. it was not strange, therefore, that the agricultural masses developed a state of mind unfavorable for organization--that they became suspicious of one another, jealous of leadership, unwilling to keep the pledges of union, and unable to sink personal views and prejudices. it must not be supposed, however, that the farmers themselves have failed to realize the situation, or that no genuinely progressive steps have been taken to remedy it. during the last four decades at least, the strongest men that the rural classes have produced have labored with their fellows, both in season and out of season, for union of effort; and their efforts have been by no means in vain. it is true that some of the attempts at co-operation have been ill-judged, even fantastic. it is true that much of the machinery of organization failed to work and can be found on the social junk-pile, in company with other discarded implements not wholly rural in origin. but it is also true that great progress has been made; that the spirit of co-operation is rapidly emerging as a factor in rural social life; and that the weapons of rural organization have a temper all the better, perhaps, because they were fashioned on the anvil of defeat. among all these efforts to unite the farming classes, by far the most characteristic and the most successful is the grange. the truth of this statement will immediately be questioned by those whose memory recalls the early rush to the grange, "granger legislation," and similar phenomena, as well as by those whose impressions have been gleaned from reading the periodicals of the late seventies, when the grange tide had begun to ebb. indeed, it seems to be the popular impression that the grange is not at present a force of consequence, that long ago it became a cripple, if not a corpse. only a few years ago, an intelligent magazine writer, in discussing the subject of farmers' organizations, made the statement, "the grange is dead." but the assertion was not true. the popular impression must be revised. the grange has accomplished more for agriculture than has any other farm organization. not only is it at the present time active, but it has more real influence than it has ever had before; and it is more nearly a _national_ farmers' organization than any other in existence today. the grange is also the oldest of the general organizations for farmers. though the notion of organizing the farmers was undoubtedly broached early in the history of the country, the germ idea that actually grew into the grange is about forty years old, and should be credited to mr. o. h. kelley, a boston young man who settled on a minnesota farm in . he wrote considerably for the agricultural press; and this experience helped to bring him to the conclusion that the great need of agriculture was the education of the agriculturist. he soon came to feel that existing agencies for this purpose--farm papers and fairs--were insufficient. in , as agent for the department of agriculture, mr. kelley made a tour of the south, with the view of gaining a knowledge of the agricultural and mineral resources of that section. on this tour he became impressed with the fact that politicians would never restore peace to the country; that if it came at all, it would have to come through fraternity. as his thought ripened he broached to friends the idea of a "secret society of agriculturists, as an element to restore kindly feelings among the people." thus the grange was born of two needs, one fundamental and the other immediate. the fundamental need of agriculture was that farmers should be better educated for their business; and the immediate need was that of cultivating the spirit of brotherhood between the north and the south. the latter need no longer exists; but the fundamental need still remains and is sufficient excuse for the grange's existence today. mr. kelley interested six other men in the new idea; and in december, , these "seven founders of the order" organized the national grange of patrons of husbandry. mr. kelley is the only one of these seven men now living. thus was begun a movement for organization that had resulted by in the formation of over , granges in states, comprising not less than , members; and in that year the national grange, as a representative body, was officially organized. for four or five years this unexampled prosperity continued; then the reports show a feeling of weakness creeping in. in fact, the order as a whole steadily declined in numbers and prestige during the whole of the decade following . the losses were most serious, however, in the south and west; for in new england and the middle states it retained its vitality, and, indeed, grew steadily. during the last fifteen years there has been a widespread revival of interest in the organization and the outlook is exceedingly promising. during the decade following the membership increased not less than per cent. during the last few years the rate of gain has been even greater. the following table gives the official records in the five leading grange states: ========================================================= | | | ------------------------------------------ | granges | members | granges | members -------------|------------------------------------------- new york | | , | | , maine | | , | | , michigan | | , | | , pennsylvania | | , | | , new hampshire| | , | | , --------------------------------------------------------- these states lead, but the order is also active and strong in vermont, connecticut, ohio, massachusetts. thirty states pay dues to the national grange treasury, and twenty-six were represented by delegates at the last national grange. since there has been substantial growth in most of these twenty-six states, both in numbers of granges and in membership. the official title of the grange is "patrons of husbandry," of the members, "patrons," and of the various divisions, "granges." the "subordinate grange," or local lodge, is the grange unit. its area of jurisdiction has, nominally, a diameter of about five miles; more roughly, "a grange to a township" is the working ideal among the organizers. the membership consists of men and women, and of young people over fourteen years of age, who may apply and by vote be accepted. constitutionally, those whose interests are not immediately with agriculture are ineligible to membership; and care is also exercised that only those who are of good repute shall be recommended. the presiding officer of each grange is the "master;" while among the twelve other officers the "lecturer" is the most important, and virtually acts as programme committee, with charge of the educational work of the body. meetings are held weekly or fortnightly. each regular meeting has first its business session, and then its "lecturer's hour," or literary session, usually with an intervening recess for social greetings, etc. the programmes are prepared by the lecturer, and consist of general discussions, essays, talks, debates, readings, recitations, and music; an attempt being made to suit the tastes and talents of all members, young and old. many granges have built and own their halls, which are usually equipped with kitchen and dining-room, in addition to audience rooms; for periodical "feasts" are as regular a feature of the association as are the initiations of new members. the granges of a county or other given district often organize themselves into a "pomona grange." the "state grange" is a delegate body, meeting annually; delegates being chosen by the subordinate and pomona granges. the "national grange" is composed of the masters of state granges and their wives, and is also an annual gathering. the national grange is the legislative body of the order, and has full authority in all matters of doctrine and practice. but to state granges is left the determination of policy and administration for the states. the state granges, in turn, legislate for the subordinate granges, while also passing down to them ample local powers. the machinery is thus strongly centralized, and subordinate granges are absolutely dependent units of a great whole. yet the principle of home rule pervades the organization; and local associations are responsible for their own methods and the results of their work, though their officers usually work in harmony with the state and national granges. perhaps the clearest conception of what the order originally meant to do can be gained from a few quotations from the declaration of purposes of the national grange, which was promulgated over thirty years ago, and is still in force: we shall endeavor to advance our cause by laboring to accomplish the following objects: to develop a better and higher manhood and womanhood among ourselves. to enhance the comfort and attractions of our homes and to strengthen our attachments to our pursuits. to foster mutual understanding and co-operation. to maintain inviolate our laws, and to emulate each other in labor, to hasten the good time coming. to reduce our expenses, both individual and corporate. to buy less and produce more, in order to make our farms self-sustaining. to diversify our crops and crop no more than we can cultivate. to condense the weight of our exports, selling less in the bushel and more on hoof and in fleece; less in lint and more in warp and woof. to systematize our work, and calculate intelligently on probabilities. to discountenance the credit system, the mortgage system, the fashion system, and every other system tending to prodigality and bankruptcy. we propose meeting together, talking together, working together, buying together, selling together, and, in general, acting together for our mutual protection and advancement, as occasion may require. we shall avoid litigation, as much as possible, by arbitration in the grange. we shall constantly strive to secure entire harmony, good will, vital brotherhood, among ourselves, and to make our order perpetual. we shall earnestly endeavor to suppress personal, local, sectional, and national prejudices, all unhealthy rivalry, all selfish ambition. faithful adherence to these principles will insure our mental, moral, social, and material advancement. for our business interests we desire to bring producers and consumers, farmers and manufacturers, into the most direct and friendly relations possible. hence we must dispense with a surplus of middle-men, not that we are unfriendly to them, but we do not need them. their surplus and their exactions diminish our profits. we wage no aggressive warfare against any other interests whatever. on the contrary, all our acts and all our efforts, so far as business is concerned, are not only for the benefit of the producer and consumer, but also for all other interests that tend to bring these two parties into speedy and economical contact. hence we hold that transportation companies of every kind are necessary to our success, that their interests are intimately connected with our interests. we are opposed to such spirit and management of any corporation or enterprise as tends to oppress the people, and rob them of their just profits. we are not enemies to capital, but we oppose the tyranny of monopolies. we long to see the antagonism between capital and labor removed by common consent, and by an enlightened statesmanship worthy of the nineteenth century. we are opposed to excessive salaries, high rates of interest, and exorbitant per-cent. profits in trade. we shall advance the cause of education among ourselves and for our children, by all just means within our power. we especially advocate for our agricultural and industrial colleges that practical agriculture, domestic science, and all the arts which adorn the home be taught in their courses of study. we emphatically and sincerely assert the oft-repeated truth taught in our organic law, that the grange--national, state, or subordinate--is not a political or party organization. no grange, if true to its obligations, can discuss political or religious questions, or call political conventions, or nominate candidates, or even discuss their merits at its meetings. we always bear in mind that no one, by becoming a patron of husbandry, gives up that inalienable right and duty which belongs to every american citizen, to take a proper interest in the politics of his country. on the contrary, it is his duty to do all he can in his own party to put down bribery, corruption, and trickery; to see that none but competent, faithful, and honest men, who will unflinchingly stand by our industrial interests, are nominated for all positions of trust; and to have carried out the principle which should characterize every patron, that the office should seek the man, and not the man the office. to enumerate the achievements of the grange would be to recall the progress of agriculture during the past third of a century. it has been a motor force in many helpful movements, and in many ways has organized and incorporated the best thought of the most intelligent farmers, about means for rural advancement. it has been an integral part of, and a most potent factor in, the expansion of american farm life. the greatest achievement of the order is that it has taught the farmers of america the value of co-operation and the power of organized effort. the lesson has not been fully learned, it is true; but the success of the institution testifies that it is possible for farmers to work in harmony. it is worth observing that this result has been achieved on conservative lines. it is comparatively easy to organize on radical lines; easy to generate enthusiasm by promising some great reform; easy to inflame self-interest by picturing millennial conditions, especially when the pocket is touched. but quite different is it to arouse and sustain interest in a large popular organization whose object is education, whose watchword is self-culture. of course, it would be but a half-truth to assert that the order places all its emphasis on the sober problems of education. agitation has had its place; the hope of better things for the farmer, to be achieved through legislation and business co-operation, has been an inspiration to activity; but the noteworthy fact remains that it has secured a fair degree of organization and co-operation among farmers chiefly by appeals to their larger and nobler interests. that the association has vastly improved the social opportunities of farmers is a trite saying among old observers of its work. it forces isolation out of the saddle. the regular meetings of the local bodies rapidly and surely develop the social instinct among the members. pomona granges bring together members from all parts of the county and make them acquainted with one another. the state grange draws its membership from every corner of the state; and as its personnel changes each year, thousands are in the course of a few years given the wider outlook, the more extended acquaintance, and the broader view that participation in such a gathering affords. special social features add their influence. as an educator on public questions the grange has done a noble work. at nearly every meeting in this country, some topic of public concern is brought up by essay, talk, general discussion, or formal debate. the views of the "village hampdens" may not always be economically scientific or scholarly. but it might surprise many people to see how well read the members are and how clearly they can express their ideas. their discussions are not seldom informative, and that they make public opinion in rural communities is beyond cavil. the persistent advocacy of specific reforms has directed the thought of the members toward the larger issues that so often rise above the haze of partisan politics. the order has prepared the soil for adequate agricultural education. while the agricultural colleges formerly had many enemies among the farmers, and received scornful opprobrium from those whom they were endeavoring to help, almost without exception the granges have praised the colleges, welcomed their work, and urged farmers to educate their sons at these institutions. farmers' institutes, the agricultural experiment stations, and the federal department of agriculture have been equally welcomed by the grange sentiment. the grange has always taught the need of better rural education. it has also tended to develop its members, so that they may not only appreciate education, but that they may be themselves living examples of the value of such education. farmers' institute lecturers frequently say, "you can always tell when you reach a community where a grange exists." in that meeting will be found men who have read and thought on farm and public themes, men who are not only ready in discussion, apt in statement, and eager to question, but men acquainted with parliamentary law, who know how such assemblages should be conducted, and who can preside with dignity and grace. the order has undoubtedly aided materially in obliterating sectionalism. that achievement was one of its avowed objects. there is no question but it assisted in cementing north and south; and that it has brought east and west into closer sympathy is equally true. other farm organizations have found their incentive in the order. these it has never frowned on, though believing and always hoping that it might attract the majority of farmers to its own ranks, and by this unity become a more powerful factor in securing the rights and developing the opportunities of the rural classes of america. it has always discountenanced the credit system; and that cash payments by farmers to merchants are far more common than a quarter-century ago may be fairly credited, in part at least, to its influence. to describe the many specific legislative achievements which the granges of the nation and of the several states have accomplished would be tedious. merely to enumerate a few of them must suffice here. a convenient summary is made from an official circular recently issued by the national grange. the order has had a large influence in securing the following: the separation of certain agricultural colleges from universities which were receiving the land-grant funds, but were not, in the opinion of the farmers, duly contributing to agricultural education; the confining of the appropriations under the second morrill act of strictly to instruction in agriculture and mechanical arts; the hatch act of , establishing an experiment station in each state and territory; making the head of the department of agriculture a cabinet official; the agitation resulting in the famous iowa court decision, that railroad franchises are subject to the power that created them; the establishment of the inter-state commerce commission; tax reform in many states; laws favoring pure food and dairy products; preventing extension of patents on sewing machines; the establishment of rural free mail delivery. the methods of work are many and varied. in addition to the regular literary and social programmes previously mentioned, socials are held at the homes of members, entertainments of various kinds occur at the grange hall, and in many ways the association becomes the center of the social and intellectual interest of the community. it is debating society, club, lecture course, parliamentary society, theater, and circulating library. in fact, it lends itself to almost any function that will instruct, entertain, benefit, or assist its members financially, morally, intellectually, or socially. of course, not every grange is awake to its opportunities; but as a rule, where a live one exists it is the acknowledged leader in social movements. it is not uncommon for granges to hold fairs for the exhibition of agricultural and domestic products. the state fair of new hampshire has been largely managed by the grange. in many cases granges as organizations will exhibit at the ordinary county or district fair. picnics and field meetings are coming to be very popular in some states. they are held during the summer season, at a time when work is least pressing, and are usually attended by speakers of prominence in the order. many subordinate granges give public lecture courses during the winter, securing speakers on general themes. they also arrange for entertainments of a popular character. the order also participates in activities that are not strictly grange work. for instance, in michigan, the state grange for several years carried on a "fresh-air work," by which over , working-girls, children, and hard-working mothers with babies, from the larger cities, were given a two-weeks' vacation in country homes. the philanthropic agencies of the cities arranged for transportation and secured the beneficiaries, while the grange obtained the places for them. granges are always active in the organization of farmers' institutes, agricultural fairs, etc. in michigan they have assisted in the organization of associations which are designed to bring together both teachers and parents for discussion of rural-school problems. on two important matters the grange has been misunderstood, not only by the public, but more unfortunately, sometimes by its own members. in his _division and reunion_, president woodrow wilson speaks of it under the sub-title of "new parties." professor alexander johnston, in his _american politics_ was more discriminating, for he said of it: "in its nature it is not political." but he also said: "its object is co-operation among farmers, in purchasing and in other business interests." the first conception of the character of the order is wholly misleading; the second is inadequate. the grange is not a party. it never was a party. during the "granger legislation" period, many members doubtless misconceived the true function of the grange, and abused the power organization gave them, while the popular mind credited the association with many notions for which it was not responsible. it has never organized itself as a farmers' party. the national grange has endeavored to keep strictly aloof from partisan politics. it is possible that in some states the influence of the organization was, in the early days, used for partisan purposes; but the penalty was fully paid in the disruption of the order in those states. the grange today regards partisanship as poisonous to its life, and does not allow it on its shelves. this is not to say that the grange makes no appeal to legislation. it is possible that in some cases it places too much faith in law as a means of emancipation from economic bondage; but, in the main, its legislative point of view is sane and conservative. it believes that such ills as are due to bad or imperfect legislation can be, at least partly, relieved by good or more perfect legislation. nor does it limit its interest to measures that concern the farmer alone. it is unalterably opposed to class legislation, and aims to keep its own skirts clear--to avoid even the suspicion of offence in this particular. it may be asked, how does the order manage to advocate public measures without becoming involved in partisan squabbles? simply by ceasing to discuss a question the moment it becomes a party football. for instance: the monetary policy of the government was warmly discussed until the conventions of made it clear that it was to be a party issue. again: the grange has consistently urged the construction and ownership of the interoceanic canal by the united states government; but it was silent on the larger question of "imperialism," not because the question was not of importance, but because it became a subject of party controversy. this neutral policy as to party questions imposes certain limitations on the influence of the organization; but experience has demonstrated that this, more than any other thing, is responsible for the fact that the grange still lives and thrives. the other misconception lies in the sentence quoted from professor johnston, that the grange has for its object "co-operation among farmers in purchasing and in other business interests;" the implication being that business was the chief function. it is generally admitted that in the early days thousands joined the order "for what there was in it;" believing that the organization furnished a means for abolishing the middlemen, and putting ready money into the pockets of the farmers. when these sordid souls were disillusioned, their enthusiasm went down to the zero of activity. they misunderstood, or interpreted too radically, a well-defined, conservative, legitimate purpose of the grange to co-operate on business lines. the order did believe that farmers could do without the surplus of middlemen; it did purpose to aid the farmer financially, though this purpose was not its main function. in the earlier period grange stores were organized. a few of these are in successful operation today, but the policy as a whole has been abandoned. another plan, discussed over thirty years ago, has during the past decade come to assume practical importance as a method of co-operation on business lines. the plan, in brief, is that various state granges contract with manufacturing and jobbing houses to furnish members of the order with goods at practically wholesale rates. goods are ordered by the subordinate granges, under seal of the order; are purchased on a cash basis; and are shipped to the purchasing agent of the grange, and by him distributed to the individual buyers. such materials as binder twine, salt, harness, paris green, all kinds of farm implements, vehicles, sewing-machines, and fruit trees are purchased advantageously. even staple groceries, etc., are sometimes bought in this way. members often save enough in single purchases to pay all their expenses for the grange. there is no capital invested; there are no debts imposed upon himself by the purchaser; and there has not been extreme difficulty in securing favorable contracts. the plan seems destined to continued enlargement and usefulness as a legitimate phase of business co-operation. michigan granges purchased not less than $ , worth of goods during , under such a plan. the estimate for maine is over half a million dollars. in several states the organization successfully conducts mutual fire insurance companies; active membership in the grange being an essential requisite for membership in the insurance company. wherever these companies have become well established, it is asserted that they maintain a lower rate of assessment than even the popular "farmers' mutuals." in new york there are twenty-three grange companies, with policies aggregating $ , , , the average cost for the year being $ . per thousand. single companies claim to have secured even better rates. this insurance not only pays individuals, but it attracts and holds members. in new hampshire a fairly successful grange life insurance company exists. in co-operative selling, the order has so far accomplished very little, except locally and among individuals or granges. there is a supreme difficulty in the way of successful transfers among patrons themselves, as members desiring to buy wish the very lowest prices; those desiring to sell, the very highest prices. arbitration under such circumstances is not easy. the fundamental obstacle to members selling together on the general market is that, in most cases, all members do not have the same things to sell. a co-operative creamery, for instance, is organized on the basis of a _product_--butter; the grange is organized on the basis of _manhood_--and each man may have his crop or stock specialty. this difficulty, though grave, is not, perhaps, insuperable, and will tend to disappear as membership enlarges. but it is only fair to state that, so far, the grange has not been able to devise any successful plan for co-operative selling, applicable on a large scale. there are two or three features that deserve further mention. one is the position of the family in the grange. it is stated that the grange was the first secret organization to place woman on a plane of perfect equality with man. in every association each female member has a vote. woman has four special offices assigned to her sex, and is eligible to any office in the gift of the order. the majority of subordinate lecturers are women; many subordinate and even pomona masters are women; michigan's state lecturer is a woman who is revolutionizing the educational work of the order in that state; while minnesota had for some years a competent and earnest woman as state master. every delegate to every state grange is a dual delegate--man and wife. the state master and his wife are delegates to the national grange. women serve on all committees in these gatherings, and a woman's voice is frequently heard in debates. and not only the wife, but, as previously stated, the children above fourteen years of age may attain full membership. a large proportion of every healthy grange consists of young people, who have their share in the active work. thus it will be seen that the order conserves the family life. it is doubtful if any other social institution in rural communities, not excepting the church, so completely interests the entire family. the organization is also a conservator of morals. while sectarian discussions are as foreign to its purposes as is partisan politics, and while it does not even pretend to take the place of the church, it is built on a truly religious foundation. its ritual is permeated, in word and in sentiment, by the religious spirit. every meeting opens and closes with prayer. moral character is constantly eulogized and glorified in grange esoteric literature. the membership comes almost exclusively from that large class of farmers who are moral, high-minded, god-fearing men and women. the grange has been opposed, both by farmers and by others, because secrecy is not a desirable attribute; but the experience of forty years and the uniform testimony of all leaders in the work declare that this was a wise provision. no influential member has, so far as it is known, proposed that the order should be dismantled of its secret features. the ritualistic work is not burdensome. occasionally the processes of initiation may take time that ought to be allotted to educational work; but, if the initiation is properly conducted, it has of itself a high educational value. the financial status of the grange itself is worth noting. the fees for joining are merely nominal, while the dues are only ten cents a month per member. these fees and dues support the subordinate granges, the state grange, and the national grange. there are no high-salaried officials in the order, and few salaried positions of any kind. the national grange today has nearly $ , in its treasury, and several state granges have substantial reserves. this policy is pursued, not for the love of hoarding, but because it is believed that it tends to the permanency and solidarity of the order. the grange is a live institution; it has within itself the capacity for satisfying a great need in rural society; and it is destined to growth and larger and more permanent usefulness. it is based on correct principles: organization, co-operation, education. it is neither a political party nor a business agency. it is progressively conservative--or conservatively progressive. it is neither ultra-radical nor forever in the rut. its chief work is on cultural lines. it includes the entire family. it is now growing, and there is every reason for thinking that this growth is of a permanent character. the grange is ambitious to take its place beside the school and the church, as one of a trinity of forces that shall mold the life of the farmer on the broadest possible basis--material, intellectual, social, and ethical. is there any good reason why this ambition is not worthy, or why its goal should not be won? chapter xi opportunities for farm women while rural life is often supposed to be fatally deficient in facilities for growth because of its isolation, the women living on our farms are thought to be the especial victims of this lack of social opportunity. no doubt there is much of truth in the popular opinion. modern city life unquestionably tends to enliven, to sharpen, to put a razor-edge on capacity. naturally the women as well as the men of the city are thus stimulated. an instance of the opportunities constantly presented to the city women is the rapid multiplication of women's clubs, which, especially in smaller towns, are absolutely revolutionizing the life of womankind. but have not the women of the country some resources of a similar character? can they not in some way break the bonds of isolation? are there not for them some of the blessings that come from a highly organized society? are there not, in the country also, opportunities for the co-operation of mind and heart for common service? i think all these questions can be answered in the affirmative. it is at least worth while to endeavor to describe several means by which the woman of the farm can keep pace with her urban sister, and under conditions not so discouraging as many may suppose. probably no movement has had such a profound significance for the farm women of america as has the grange movement. we have already discussed the general aspects of grange work. it must be remembered that the farmer's wife is practically equal with her husband in grange law and practice. she votes, she may hold office, even the higher executive offices. a delegate to the state grange is always two--a man and his wife if he has one. the wife serves on committees and votes as she pleases. this equality extends throughout the order. the woman bears her share of work; she reads papers; she directs the social phases of the grange; she talks on farm topics if she wants to; she debates school affairs; she visits neighboring granges. all this means education, and education of a very valuable sort, the effects of which permeate so thoroughly those communities where the grange has long been established that one hardly realizes the work that has been accomplished. for it is not at all an exaggeration to assert that a positive revolution often comes about from the planting of a grange in a neighborhood where no such organization has ever existed. it finds most of the women diffident, many of them with restricted views, few of them with the instinct for social service developed beyond the needs of friendly neighbors. in the grange these women find new acquaintances, learn the power of concerted action, meet the responsibility of office, get to their feet for a few words--unheard-of courage! such speech is usually brief and perhaps not ready, but it is likely to be cogent, because it is born of experience and "stops when through." county and perhaps state granges add their experiences. and so on through the years these shy, reserved, possibly narrow, lives come to flower. and the grange has furnished the dynamic. strong leaders among farm women have been developed by the opportunities the grange has afforded them. and thousands of other women in all parts of the country have by this same means grown out of their narrowness, "discovered themselves," and become comparatively cultured, well read, able to take a woman's place in this day of woman's power as a public factor. it is safe to say that the grange has been the greatest single influence in america with respect to the development of the women of the farm. another factor in the life of farm women which has arisen in more recent years is the farmers' institute. the audiences in some cases are largely of men, but as a rule the attendance of women averages one-third to one-half. until very recent years the women joined with the men in all sessions of the institute, and their presence was recognized by appropriate subjects on the programme, frequently presented by women themselves. several years ago minnesota and wisconsin initiated separate meetings for women, held simultaneously with the main meeting, for purposes of instruction in domestic science. michigan, a little later, developed the "women's section" of the farmers' institute. this is held one afternoon of the usual two-day session of the institute in a hall separate from the general meeting, and only women attend. two topics are presented for discussion, one by a woman sent by the state, the other by a woman from the town or a neighboring farm. topics concerning child-training, making housework easier, home life on the farm, and even themes relating to the problems that center about the sex question, are thoroughly discussed. women take part much more freely than they do in the general sessions of the institute. across the border, in ontario, the women have formed separate institutes, as they have also in indiana. all this means a new opportunity for the farm woman. the grange is an organization, and its members gain all the development that comes from engaging in the work required to maintain a semi-literary and social organization. the institute, on the other hand, is an event, and there cluster about it all the inspiration and suggestion that can come from any notable convention for which one will sacrifice not a little in order to attend. institute work for women is in its beginnings. so far we have found that existing institutions for women in rural districts bring together merely the women of the farm. in the women's section of the institutes half the audience is usually from the town. this meeting occurs, however, but once a year, and the social effect of the commingling of city and farm women can prove only suggestive of the desirability of further opportunity for similar gatherings. at a michigan institute some years ago this desire fructified, and the product was a "town and country club." this club secured a majority of its membership, of some ninety, from among women residing on farms. its meetings are bi-weekly. it is to be hoped that this sort of club may be organized in large numbers. it represents another step in the emancipation of the farm woman, because it brings her into contact with her city sister--and contact that is immediate, vital, inspiring, continuous, and mutually helpful. it may be thought unnecessary to form a new set of clubs for the purpose indicated, but the fact seems to be that the ordinary women's club even in small towns has failed to reach the woman who makes her home upon the farm. another feature of this idea of the town and country club is the "rest room" for farmers' wives. in a number of cases where this has been tried, the women of the village or town provide a room as near the shopping center of the town as possible, where the country women can find a place to rest, to lunch, and to leave their children. these rooms are fitted up in a neat but inexpensive manner with the necessary conveniences, and are entirely free to those for whom they were intended. if these rooms are well managed, they offer not only a very practical form of assistance to the women of the farm, but they may be the means of developing a form of co-operation between the women of the village and the farm, and eventually leading to some permanent scheme of mutual work. possibilities of this sort of thing are easily recognized. in the realms of higher education the girl who is to stay upon the farm has not been wholly neglected. in kansas, iowa, connecticut, illinois, ohio, and michigan, at least, and in connection with the agricultural colleges of those states, courses for women (including domestic science) have been provided. they are well patronized by girls from the farm. many of these girls do not marry farmers; many of them do. and their college training having thus been secured in an atmosphere more or less agricultural, they must inevitably take rank among their sisters of the farm as leaders in demonstrating what farm life for women may be. nor should it be forgotten that the tremendous movement of recent years which has so multiplied standard reading-matter, both periodicals and books, has reached the farm. a census of country post-offices will reveal the fact that the standard magazines go regularly to thousands of farm homes. agricultural papers, religious papers, and even dailies find multitudes of intelligent readers among farmers. with the advent of better highways, electric car lines, rural free delivery, and the rural telephone, each of which is looming on the horizon as an important feature of american farm life; with the grange or similar organization in every school district; with the development of courses for women at all our colleges of agriculture, and the logical complement of such courses in the form of college extension--farmers' institutes, reading-courses, traveling libraries, lecture and correspondence courses--we shall find farm life taking on a new dress, and perhaps farmers' wives may come to enjoy the envy of those women who are unfortunate enough not to have married farmers. chapter xii the country church and progress the only way to an understanding of the relation of the church to rural progress is through an appreciation of the place which the church as a social institution may have among other social institutions affecting rural life. moreover, to know the value of these institutions one must first know the rural social needs. may we not then, even at the risk of repetition, take a brief survey of these needs and institutions, in order that we may more clearly attain the proper point of view? at the outset let us be sure that we have sympathy with the countryman as such. it is often argued that the rural question, or any phase of it, as for instance the question of the rural church, is important because the country supplies the best blood to the city--and a roll-call of the famous country-born is read to prove the point. this may be all true. but it is only a partial view, for it places the emphasis upon the leaving of the farm, whereas the emphasis should be placed upon the farm and those who stay there. we may praise the country because it furnishes brain and brawn for the world's work; we may argue for country life because it possesses a good environment in which to rear a family; we may demand a school system that shall give the country child as good a chance as the city child has. in all this we do well. but we do not yet stand face to face with the rural problem. for the rural problem is the problem of those who farm. it is the problem of the man behind the plow. it is he that is the center of interest. his business, his success, his manhood, his family, his environment, his education, his future--these constitute the problem of the farm. half our people make their living from the brown soil. in virtue, in intelligence, in real worth, this half compare favorably with the other half who saw wood, and shovel sand, and pull throttles, and prepare briefs, and write sermons. the business of agriculture provides directly for the material welfare of nearly forty millions of our people. it supports gigantic railway systems, fills the hulls of immense ships, furnishes raw material for thousands of industries. this rural hemisphere of american economic and social life is surely worthy the thought of the captain of industry, of the statesman, of the economist, of the educator, of the preacher. we may also, without danger of being put to confusion, assume that the tiller of the soil is in essential character very much like other people. farmer nature is usually a fair specimen of human nature. nevertheless the environment of the farmer is a peculiar one. individually as well as socially he is comparatively isolated. he meets but little social friction. the class to which he belongs is largely a segregated class, physically and socially. all these things give to the rural social problem a distinctive character and give rise to the great social needs of the farmer. what are these needs? i name three: ( ) _completer organization._ farmers do not co-operate easily. they never had to co-operate largely under the old régime, for pioneer farming placed a premium on individualism. the present century however, with its emphasis upon organization and co-operation, calls the farmer to the task with the warning cry that unless he does organize he is in danger of losing his present industrial, political, and social status. ( ) _better education._ the rural schools may not be so deficient as to deserve all the scorn heaped upon them by educational reformers; but it is little enough to say that they can be vastly improved. they are not keeping up with city schools. the country is especially lacking in good high-school privileges. of technical training too, in spite of forty years of agricultural colleges, the country is sadly in need. neither in primary grades, in high schools, in special schools, is there an adequate amount of study of the principles of agriculture--principles which an age of science demands must be mastered if the independent farmer is to be a success. ( ) _quicker communication._ isolation has been the bugbear of farm life. it must be overcome partly by physical means. there must be a closer touch between individuals of the class, and between farmers and the dwellers in the town and city. these social needs are in some degree met by the farmers' organizations, by the rural and agricultural schools, and by the development of new means of communication. there is a host of minor agencies. in other chapters i have tried to show how these various institutions are endeavoring to meet these rural needs. so important are these factors of rural life that we may now raise the question, what should be the relation of the rural church to these needs and to the agencies designed to meet them? in dealing with this phase of the subject, we may best speak of the church most frequently in terms of the pastor, for reasons that may appear as we go on. there are three things the country pastor may do in order to bring his church into vital contact with these great sociological movements. of course he _may_ ignore them, but that is church suicide. ( ) he may recognize them. this means first of all to understand them, to appreciate their influence. there is a law of the division of labor that applies to institutions as well as to individuals. this law helps us to understand how such institutions as the grange and farmers' institutes are doing a work that the church cannot do. they are doing a work that needs doing. they are serving human need. no pastor can afford to ignore them, much less in sneer at them as unclean; he may well apply the lesson of peter's vision, and accept them as ministers of the kingdom. ( ) he may encourage and stimulate them. the rural pastor may throw himself into the van of those who strive for better farming, for a quicker social life, for more adequate educational facilities. he can well take up the rôle of promoter--a promoter of righteousness and peace through so-called secular means. thus shall he perform the highest function of the prophet--to spiritualize and glorify the common. but the rural pastor can go even farther. ( ) he may co-operate with them. he may thus assist in uniting with the church all of those other agencies that make for rural progress, and thus secure a "federation," if not "of the world," at least of all the forces that are helping to solve the farm problem; and he may thus found a "parliament," if not "of man," at least of all who believe that the rural question is worth solving and that no one movement is sufficient to solve it. we come now to the most practical part of our subject, which is, how the proposed relation between church and other rural social forces may be secured. there are four suggestions along this line. . sociological study by the rural pastor. this is fundamental. in general it means a fairly comprehensive study of sociological principles, some study of sociological problems, and some practice in sociological investigation. as it relates to the rural pastor, it means also a knowledge of rural sociology. it implies a grasp of the principles and significance of modern agricultural science, an understanding of the history, status, and needs of rural and agricultural education, an appreciation of and sympathy for the co-operative movements among farmers. does one say, this is asking too much of the burdened country pastor with his meager salary and widespread parish? let me ask if the pastor has any other road to power except _to know_? moreover, the task is not so formidable as first appears. the pastor is supposed to be a trained student, and since he needs to know these things only in broad lines, the acquiring of them need not compel the midnight oil. i would, however, urge that every pastor have a course in general sociology, either in college or in seminary, and if he has the slightest intimation that his lines will be cast in country places, that he add a course in rural sociology. inasmuch as the latter course is at present offered in few academic institutions in the united states, it might well be urged that brief courses in rural sociology be offered at the many summer schools. but sociological study by the pastor means more than knowledge of the general principles of sociology and of the problems of rural sociology; it means a minute and comprehensive sociological study of his particular parish. this in its simplest form consists of a religious canvass such as is frequently made both in country and city. but even this is not enough. it should at once be supplemented by a very careful and indeed a continuous sociological canvass, in which details about the whole business and life of the farm shall be collected and at last assimilated into the vital structure of the pastor's knowledge of his problem. . the second suggestion looks toward the establishment of a social-service church, or an institutional church, or again, as one has phrased it, a "country church industrial." there seems to be a growing feeling that the country church may become not only the distinctively religious center of the neighborhood, but also the social, the intellectual, and the aesthetic center. no doubt there is untold power in such an idea. no doubt the country church has a peculiarly rich and inviting field for community service. it would be gratifying if every country pastor would study the possibilities of this idea and endeavor to make an experiment with it. i have, however, a supplemental suggestion, at this point. it is not possible to make of every rural church an institutional church. the church is notably a conservative institution. the rural church is in this respect "to the manner born." rural church members are likely to be ultra-conservative, especially as to means and methods. even if this were not true, we might well lament any attempt to establish a social-service church that endeavored to make the church the sole motive power in rural regeneration, that failed to recognize, to encourage, and to co-operate with the other social forces which we have mentioned. but if every country pastor cannot have a social-service church, is it not possible that every country church shall have a social-service pastor? there are some things the church cannot _do_; there is nothing it may not through its pastor _inspire_. there are some uses to which the country church cannot be put; there are no uses to which the country pastor may not be put--as country pastors know by experience. the pastor ought to be an authority on social salvation as well as on personal salvation. he ought to be guide, philosopher, and friend in community affairs as well as in personal affairs. is he not indeed the logical candidate for general social leadership in the rural community? he is educated, he is trained to think, he is supposed to have broad grasp of the meaning of affairs, he usually possesses many of the qualities of leadership. he is _relatively_ a fixture. he is less transient than the teacher. he is the only man in the community whose tastes are sociological and who is at the same time a paid man--all this aside from the question of the munificence of his stipend. let us then have the social-service rural church if we can; but let us have the social-service rural pastor at all hazards, as the first term in the formula for solving the sociological problem of the country church. . co-operation among rural churches. the manifest lack of co-operation among churches seems to many laymen to result in a tremendous waster of power. of course it is a very hard problem. but is it insoluble? it would seem not. one would think that the plan of union suggested by dr. strong in _the new era_ is wholly practicable. but the burden of the suggestion at this point is this: cannot the churches unite sufficiently for a thorough religious and sociological canvass? if they cannot federate on a theological platform, can they not unite on a statistical platform? if they cannot unite for religious work, can they not join hands long enough to secure a more intelligent basis for their separate work? it seems to me that this sort of union is worth while, and that it is something in which there could be full union, in which "there is neither jew nor greek, there is neither bond nor free." . the pastor may aid if not lead in the federation of rural social forces. the idea involved is substantially this: given a farmers' organization that ministers chiefly to industrial and economic ends, though incidentally to moral and educational ones; a school system that feeds chiefly the accepted educational needs, though acting perhaps as a moving force in industrial and social betterment; a church which is chiefly a religious institution, but which touches the life of the community at many other points--given these things and the obvious next step is co-operation among them all, in order that a well-balanced kind of social progress may result. this form of federation means the attempt to solve the farm problem at all points. it suggests that the army of rural progress shall march with the wings abreast the center. it means that the farmer, the editor, the educator, the preacher--all, shall see the work that needs doing, in all its fulness, and, seeing, shall resolve to push ahead side by side. to sum up: the rural problem is a neglected but exceedingly important question. out of the peculiar environment of the farmer grow his peculiar social needs, namely, better organization, fuller and richer education, quicker communication. to meet these supreme needs we find a growing and already powerful coterie of farmers' organizations, somewhat heterogeneous but rapidly developing plans of agricultural education, and a marvelous evolution of the means of transportation for body, voice, and missive. these needs and these agencies are selected as the conspicuous and vital element in the sociological problem that confronts the rural pastor. what shall be his attitude toward them? he _may_ ignore them; but we assume that he will seek to work with them and to use them for the greater glory of god. he must then recognize them, encourage them, and co-operate with them. to do this successfully he must first be a student of sociology; he can then well afford to meditate upon the possibilities of making his church in some measure a social-service church or at least of making of himself a social-service pastor; he can work for church union at least on sociological lines; and finally he can do his best to secure an active federation of all the forces involved in the rural problem. chapter xiii a summary of recent progress in some respects the most notable recent advance in rural matters consists in the improved means of communication in rural districts. the country is relatively isolated, and it is this isolation in its extreme forms that is the bane of country living. undue conservatism, lack of conformity to progressive views, undue prominence of class feeling, and a tendency to be less alert are things that grow out of this isolation; but better means of communication decrease these difficulties, and the last few years have seen a remarkable advance in this respect. for instance, the rural free mail delivery system is only ten years old, and yet today there are more than twenty-five thousand routes of this character in the united states serving possibly twenty million people with daily mail, a great proportion of whom before had very irregular mail service. results are patent and marked. time is saved in going for mail; market reports come daily; farmers are more prompt in their business dealings; roads are kept in better shape; there is an increased circulation of papers and magazines. thus the farmer is in closer touch with affairs and much more alert to business opportunities, to political activities, and to social movements. the circulation of daily papers in country districts has increased at a marvelous rate. the amount of letter-writing has increased. rural delivery of mail arouses the spirit of "being in the world." its results have been almost revolutionary. so, too, the rural telephone. recent investigation in the states of ohio, michigan, and indiana showed that out of , subscribers to the independent telephone companies of those states about one-sixth were in farm homes. a few years ago, hardly a telephone could be found in a farmer's family. this business is constantly increasing. the established telephone companies are pushing their work into the country districts, small local exchanges are being formed, and soon the farmers, in the north at least, will be almost as well served by the telephone as are people of the smaller cities. interurban electric railways are being built very rapidly and their advantage to the farmer is obvious. it is doubtful if their effect has been quite so far-reaching as some have suggested. at present they very largely parallel existing steam railways, and while they give better freight and passenger service and assist materially in diminishing rural isolation in the areas which they traverse, their influence does not extend very far from the line itself, and they reach relatively small areas of the country. however, their value to the farmer is very large, and, as they increase in number and in efficiency of service, they will become a powerful factor in rural progress. the good-roads movement is beginning to take on large proportions. it is, however, a complicated question. to make first-class roads is a costly business, and while a few such roads are of great value in a general social way, they do not quite make general country conditions ideal. to accomplish this, every road in the country should be a good road the year through, and this is an ideal very difficult of realization. however, in general, the roads are improving and as rapidly as the wealth of the country will permit the road system of the united states will be developed. of course, good roads are a prime requisite for rural betterment. in general, it may be said that during the past decade the improvement of means of communication in rural districts has gone forward at a marvelously rapid pace. nor is it exaggerating to say that the movements named are re-creating farm life. during this same period, there has been an almost equally wonderful advance in the means of agricultural education. just twenty years ago the experiment-station system of this country was established. it took ten years for the stations to organize their work and to gain the confidence of the farmers. at present however, they are looked upon with great favor by the farming class and are doing a magnificent work. their function is that of research chiefly, although they attempt some control service, such as inspection of fertilizers, stock foods, etc. in research they aim both to study the more intricate scientific questions that relate to agriculture and to carry on experiments that are of more obvious and more immediate practical application to existing conditions in the various states. there is one of these stations in each state and territory, besides a number of stations supported by state funds. the department of agriculture at washington has also developed during the last ten years until it is performing very large service for agriculture. its annual expenditures aggregate eight or ten million dollars, and it has in its employment hundreds of experts carrying on laboratory and field research, scouring the world for plants and seeds that may be of economic value, and assisting to control plant and animal diseases. it is also distributing a vast amount of practical information, put in readable form and adapted to the average farmer. its work of seeking to extend the markets of our agricultural products is one of its notable successes. agricultural schools have been talked about for a century, and during the early part of the last century several were started. the first permanent agricultural college was opened in , in michigan. the morrill act of gave rise to a system of such colleges and today there will be found one in every state and territory, besides several for the colored people of the south. up to , these colleges had been not wholly satisfactory and the farming class was not patronizing very fully their agricultural courses. the fault belonged both to the college and to the farmers. the farmers were skeptical of the value of agricultural education, and the colleges were often out of sympathy with the real needs of the farmers, and in fact found it difficult to break away from the pedagogical ideals of the old educational régime. since , however, there has been a complete change of sentiment in this respect, particularly in the middle west. there the "land-grant" colleges, whether separate colleges or whether organized as colleges of state universities, are securing magnificent buildings for agriculture, are offering fully equipped courses, and are enrolling as students some of the best men in college, whom they are educating not only for agricultural teachers and experimenters but also for practical farmers. of course, there are many grave problems connected with this subject, many farmers who do not yet respond to the call for educated agriculturists, and some colleges that do not yet appreciate their opportunity. but the change for the better has been so marked that all agricultural educators are extremely optimistic. one of the most difficult and most important phases of agricultural education is that of a secondary grade. the great proportion of educated farmers will probably be trained for their business in secondary schools. this problem is being approached from many standpoints. the university of minnesota established, some fourteen years ago, a school of agriculture, which now enrols several hundred pupils of both sexes. wisconsin is trying the experiment of two county schools of agriculture. occasionally the public high school will be found offering a course in agriculture. several states are experimenting in one or more of these lines, and during the next few years we shall see a large development of this phase of agricultural education. one of the most interesting movements in agricultural education has been an attempt to introduce nature-study and even the elements of agriculture into the country schools. cornell university has taken the lead in advocating "nature-study" purely, for the schools; and the university of missouri has perhaps been the leader in advocating that the work be made even more definite and practical, and that the country pupils shall be taught, during their early years even, "the elements of agriculture." both plans are being worked out with a fair degree of success, and many other states are carrying out the work in some form or other. of course the idea is not a new one, but its present practical application is a timely one, and it will not be long before this branch of agricultural education will become a prominent factor in rural betterment. a most suggestive phase of agricultural education is college extension work. university extension has had a rather meteoric career in this country, in so far as it has been connected with educational institutions; although the extension idea is spreading rapidly and is being worked out through home study and correspondence courses of all sorts. but i think there is scarcely any field in which the real college extension idea is today being more successfully applied than in agriculture. the work started with farmers' institutes, which were instituted about twenty-five years ago and which have been adopted in practically all the states of the union. it has broadened within ten years, until now it is carried on not only by farmers' institutes, but through home-correspondence courses, the introduction of millions of pamphlets into farm homes, demonstrations in spraying, butter-making, soil testing, milk testing, and so on. ontario presents a good illustration of how a new agriculture can be created, in a dozen years, by co-operating methods of agricultural education. her provincial department of agriculture, her experiment station, her agricultural college, her various forms of extension work, and her various societies of agriculturists have all worked together with an unusual degree of harmony for the deliberate purpose of inducing canadian agriculturists to produce the things that will bring the most profit. the results have been most astonishing and most gratifying. the recent progress in the organization of farmers has been less marked than has been the development of rural communication and agricultural education. organization is a prime requisite for farmers. they feel this truth themselves. for the last forty years, many attempts--some large, some small, some successful, some great failures--have been made to this end. the problem is an extremely difficult one. business co-operation among farmers is especially difficult and, while co-operation has developed quite largely--so much so that the department of agriculture was able to report, a year ago, a list of five thousand co-operative societies of various kinds among farmers--still it cannot be said that the farmers are co-operating industrially in a relatively large way. they have, however, a multitude of associations and societies. they have also the grange, which is the most successful of all the general organizations of farmers in the country. contrary to public belief, the grange is not defunct, but has been growing at a very rapid pace during the last few years and has a large influence especially in the east and middle west. it has practically no existence in the far west and in the south. it has a national organization, however, representing some twenty-six states. its influence in congress is said to be marked. the local granges are doing a very large work, socially, educationally, and sometimes financially. the grange seems to understand itself now. its ideals have been worked out pretty carefully, and its future growth is quite certain. we have suggested that the significant rural social movements of the past few years have been the improvement of rural communication, the wonderful development of agricultural education, and the fairly satisfactory development of organization among farmers. it seems also apparent that there is a fourth line of development that might be mentioned as being significant, and it may be expressed in a somewhat general statement that the interest in agricultural questions has increased in a very marked way. there is undoubtedly a new emphasis upon country life generally. the people of the cities have been going to the country more than ever before. a walk, the length of beacon street in boston, at any time from the middle of june to late autumn, convinces one that the majority of the people are somewhere in the country. all over the north, city people are making country homes for at least a portion of the year. there is also a growing interest in the farm and farm problems among the general public. just now the country schools are attracting special attention from the educators--so much so that the late president harper stated, not long ago, that the rural-school question is the coming question in education. even the country church is being made a subject of discussion in religious circles. it is conceded that agriculture presents "problems." and while the throbbing, busy, intense life of the city brings perplexing questions to our civilization, our people are coming to realize that the agricultural population and the agricultural industry are still tremendous factors in our national life and success, and that both social and industrial conditions in the country are such that there also are grave questions to be settled. in view of the facts which have been given, i think if one were asked to give a direct answer to the question, is the farmer keeping up? one could reply, yes. in some sections of the country, the farmers have not responded to these forward movements. the countryman is naturally conservative. not only that, but there are some serious questions that he has to meet in his business and in his life. he finds it extremely and increasingly difficult to get adequate labor. he has not been able to take sufficient advantage of the power of co-operation. the industrial and social development of the city has lured away his children. and yet one cannot help feeling that these really remarkable advances of the past decade are prophetic of a steady improvement in rural conditions, of a larger development of rural life, of a greater prosperity for agriculture. with regard to the future, it seems to me that, on the social side, the progress of the next few years is to be along the lines, indicated above, which have characterized the past ten or a dozen years. still further improved means of communication will tend to banish isolation and its drawbacks. realization of the benefits of organization and ability to co-operate will vastly strengthen class power. the means of agricultural education will be developed very rapidly, with the ideal in mind of being able to furnish some sort of agricultural training for every individual who lives upon the farm. the country question, as a whole, will attract increasing attention. gradually it will be seen that the rural problem is one of the greatest interest to all our citizens. the spirit of co-operation will grow until not only the farmers themselves unite for their own class interests but the various social agencies--industrial, religious, educational--ministering to rural betterment will find themselves also co-operating. thus, it seems to me, the outlook for the future is full of hope. a genuine forward movement for rural betterment has had its beginning, is now gathering volume, and will soon attain very large proportions. forward steps chapter xiv the social side of the farm question there is a proverb in grange circles which expresses also the fundamental aim of all agricultural education--"the farmer is of more consequence than the farm and should be first improved." the first term in all agricultural prosperity is the man behind the plow. improved agriculture is a matter of fertile brain rather than of fertile field. mind culture must precede soil culture. but if the improved man is the first term in improved agriculture, if he is the effective cause of rural progress, he is also the last term and the choice product of genuine agricultural advancement. we may paraphrase the sordid, "raise more corn to feed more hogs to buy more land to raise more corn, etc.," into the divine, "train better farmers to make better farming to grow better farmers, etc." we want trained men that we may have an advancing agricultural art, that we may make every agricultural acre render its maximum. the improved acre, however, must yield not only corn but civilization, not only potatoes but culture, not only wheat but effective manhood. but we may carry the point a step farther. the individual farmer is the starting-point and the end of agriculture, it is true. but the lone farmer is an anomaly, either as a cause or as a product, as the lone man is everywhere. as an effective cause we must have co-operating individuals, and as an end we desire an improved community and a higher-grade _class_ of farmers. the farm question then is a social question. valuable as are the contributions of science to the problems of soil and plant and animal, the ultimate contribution comes from the development of improved men. so the real end is not merely to utilize each acre to its utmost, nor to provide cheap food for the people who do not farm, nor yet to render agriculture industrially strong. the gravest and most far-reaching consideration is the social and patriotic one of endeavoring to develop and maintain an agricultural class which represents the very best type of american manhood and womanhood, to make the farm home the ideal home, to bring agriculture to such a state that the business will always attract the keen and the strong who at the same time care more for home and children and state and freedom than for millions. in other words, the maintenance of the typical american farmer--the man who is essentially middle class, who is intelligent, who keeps a good standard of living, educates his children, serves his country, owns his medium-sized farm, and who at death leaves a modest estate--the maintenance of the typical american farmer is the real agricultural problem. if this analysis is a correct one, it will vitally affect our plans for agricultural training. the student will be taught not only soil physics, but social psychology. he will learn not only the action of bacteria in milk fermentation, but the underlying causes of the social ferment among the farmers of the last thirty years. he will concern himself with the value of farmers' organizations as well as with the co-operating influences of high-bred corn and high-bred steers. the function and organization of the rural school will be as serious a problem to him as the building and management of the co-operative creamery. the country church and its career will interest him fully as much as does the latest successful device for tying milch cows in the stable. he will want to get at the kernel of the political questions that confront agriculture just as fully and thoroughly as he wishes to master the formulae for commercial fertilizers. no man will have acquired an adequate agricultural education who has not been trained in rural social science, and who does not recognize the bearing of this wide field of thought upon the business of farming as well as upon american destiny. research, too, will be touched with the social idea. the men who study conditions existing in rural communities which have to do with the real life of the people--the effects of their environment, the tendencies of their habits and customs--will need as thorough preparation for their work, and the result of their efforts will be as useful as that of the men who labor in field and laboratory. but the most profound consequence of recognizing the social side of the farm question will be the new atmosphere created at the agricultural colleges. these institutions are fast gaining leadership in all the technical questions of agriculture--leadership gladly granted by progressive farmers whenever the institution is managed with intelligence and in the spirit of genuine sympathy with farming. but these colleges must minister to the _whole farmer_. they must help the farmer solve all his problems, whether these problems are scientific, or economic, or social, or political. and let it be said in all earnestness that in our rapidly shifting industrial order, the farmer's interest in the political, social, and economic problems of his calling is fully as great as it is in those purely scientific and technical. and rightly so. a prime steer is a triumph. but it will not of itself keep the farmer free. the -bushels-of-wheat acre is a grand business proposition provided the general industrial conditions favor the grower as well as the consumer. when our agricultural colleges enter into the fullest sympathy with all the rural problems, when the farm home and the rural school and the country church and the farmer's civic rights and duties and all the relations of his business to other industries--when these questions are "in the air" of our agricultural colleges, then and then alone will these colleges fulfil their true mission of being _all things to all farmers_. chapter xv the needs of new england agriculture one might name a score of important activities that should be encouraged in order to better new england agriculture. but the two fundamental needs are ( ) adaptation and ( ) co-operation. by adaptation is meant such development of agriculture as shall more fully utilize existing physical and commercial conditions. the west has for seventy-five years pressed hard upon new england farming. but along with this western competition has come a new opportunity for the eastern farmer. new england farmers as a whole have not quickly enough responded to this new opportunity. many of their troubles may be traced to the failure to adapt themselves to the new conditions. the men in new england who have met the new opportunity are succeeding. what does this adaptation consist in? it means, first, the adaptation of the new england farmer to his markets. in most parts of the country the type of farming is perhaps more dependent upon physical conditions of soil and climate than upon the immediate market. in new england the reverse is now true, and the type of new england farming must be adapted, absolutely and completely, to the demands of its market. new england farmers have the most superb markets in the country. of the six million people in new england, approximately per cent. live in the cities and villages. there are, in new england, thirty cities having a population of twenty-five thousand or more. the great majority of these cities are manufacturing cities peopled by the best class of consumers in the world--the american skilled artisan. they constitute a nearby market that demands fresh products which cannot be transported across a continent. new england is also especially favored in its nearness to the european market. the new england farmer then must adapt his crops, his methods, and his style of farming to his peculiar market. in the second place, this adaptation must be one of soil, just as anywhere else, only the problem here becomes more complicated because of the varied character of the farming lands. how to make the valleys and the hills, the rocky ridges and the sand plains of new england yield their largest possibilities in agriculture is a problem of the greatest scientific and industrial interest, and it is the problem that new england agriculture has to face. in this connection comes also the need of special varieties adapted not only to the market but to the soil and climate. this principle of adaptation is the industrial key to future agricultural development in new england. but to achieve this adaptation, to make the key work, there is needed the force of social organization. the farmer must be reached before the farm can be improved. the man who treads the furrow is a greater factor than nitrogen or potash. how is this man to be reached, inspired, instructed? largely by some form of organization. the second and greater need therefore is co-operation. co-operation means faith in agriculture--a faith too seldom found in the israel of new england's yeomanry. co-operation means ideals--ideals of rural possibilities too seldom dreamed of in the philosophy of the yankee farmer. co-operation means power--power that cannot be acquired by the lone man, not even by the resolute individualism so dominant in new england character. there are three forms of co-operation, all of which are desirable and even essential if the most rapid agricultural progress in new england is to be secured--co-operation among individuals, among organizations, among states. the farmers of new england must work together. the grange is stronger in new england than in any other portion of the country of similar area--yet not one farmer in ten belongs to the grange. we need not dwell on this point, for it is a truth constantly preached through the grange and through other means. let me suggest two ideas relative to co-operation which have not received so much attention. each organization has its peculiar work. the school is to train the young, the agricultural college to prepare the youth, the farmers' institute to instruct and inspire the middle-aged and mature. the experiment station seeks to discover the means by which nature and man may better work together. the producers' unions endeavor to secure a fair price for their goods. the grange enlarges the views of its members and brings the power which comes from working together, buying together, meeting together, talking together, acting together. boards of agriculture control conditions of health and disease among animals and plants. the country fair educates and interests. the church crowns all in its ministrations of spiritual vision, moral uplift, and insistence upon character as the supreme end of life. but no institution can do the work of the others. they are members one of another. the hand cannot say to the foot, i have no need of thee. all these things make for rural progress. none can be spared. the grange cannot take the place of the church. the institute cannot supplant the grange. the college course cannot reach the adult farmer. the experiment station cannot instruct the young. the church cannot secure reforms in taxation. these agencies may however co-operate. indeed the most rapid and most secure rural progress, the broadest and soundest agricultural growth, can not take place unless there be this form of co-operation. there will come added interest, increased efficiency, larger views, greater ambitions in our agricultural development, if, in each state, all of these forces work together. we may therefore welcome most cordially the proposed plan of federating the various agricultural societies of each state into one grand committee organized for the purpose of forwarding all the agricultural interests of that state. let there be, moreover, a "league for rural progress," in each state or, at least, an annual conference on rural progress, in each state, in which the representatives of the farmers' societies, of the schools, of the churches, and indeed all other people who have the slightest interest in rural advancement may meet to discuss plans and methods which shall better agriculture and the farmer. but this is not enough. there ought to be co-operation among these various social institutions without respect to state lines. the farm problem in new england is one problem, although differing in details, it is true, in different states. co-operation should not stop with the federating of the organizations of a state. there is no reason, for instance, why the agricultural colleges and experiment stations of new england should not co-operate. it is not practicable to prevent all duplication of work. i do suggest the desirability and the feasibility of genuine co-operation. why should not those in charge of the rural schools of all new england meet together and discuss the difficulties and achievements as they exist in different states? why not have a "new england society for agricultural education," in which all organizations and all individuals who are interested in any phase of this subject may meet for discussing new england problems? could not boards of agriculture co-operate to some extent, especially in farmers' institute work with general plans and ideas? certainly conferences between these boards ought to yield most valuable results. is the idea of a genuine new england fair a mere dream? cannot the granges of new england profitably co-operate more fully? it is true that there is considerable intervisitation, and yet the rank and file of members in one state know comparatively little of the progress and methods of the grange in an adjoining state; this knowledge is confined to a few leaders. would it not be worth while to attempt an occasional new england assemblage of grange members, a representative gathering for discussing grange work and for enthusing the grange people of new england with the possibilities of still further grange development? the idea of new england as a unit of interest in church matters is already exemplified by the appointment of a new england secretary of the federation of churches. it is not too much to expect that, in the near future, all the means for church federation in new england shall work together, because it is evident that co-operation and unity are demanded by the nature of the field. and finally, is it idle to think that there might be a new england league for rural progress or, at least, a new england conference on rural progress, which shall bring from every corner of new england representatives of the agricultural colleges, of the granges, of the country church, of the rural school, of the country press, and all other individuals who believe in the possibilities of new england agriculture, and in the efficiency of the fullest and freest co-operation? there are several powerful reasons why an attempt to better new england agriculture will be greatly aided by co-operation that includes every inch of new england soil from boston harbor to the berkshires, and from mt. katahdin to point judith. ( ) the importance of new england agriculture. in the appended table is attempted a comparison between new england as a unit, the state of michigan representing an average agricultural state, and the state of iowa representing the foremost agricultural state. the figures, taken from the census of , are given in round numbers. such a table is not conclusive as to agricultural conditions. but it is very suggestive as to the importance of new england agriculture both industrially and socially. it will be seen that, with an area only a little larger than michigan, new england compares in every respect favorably with that average state and, in some respects, excels it, while it excels both michigan and iowa by per cent. in gross value of product per acre of improved land. ( ) agricultural conditions all over new england are quite similar. speaking broadly, the soil and climate of one state are the soil and climate of another. the people are of the same stock, the same views, the same habits, the same traditions. the demand of the market is fairly uniform for different sections. the new england city is the new englander's special possession as a market. farm labor conditions are much the same. in fact, there is hardly a portion of our country, of the same area, which in all these respects yields itself more completely to the idea of unity. ( ) the hopefulness of the farm problem. nearly four millions of city people live in new england. they must be fed. the nearness of the market means high-class products. this means intensive agriculture. intensive agriculture means education and intelligence. the cities are growing. their power of consumption is steadily and rapidly increasing. ( ) the unusual social equipment. it must be remembered that in an area but little larger than iowa, which has one agricultural college and one agricultural experiment station and no granges to speak of, new england has, in comparison, six agricultural colleges, six experiment stations, six boards of agriculture, over a thousand granges, and numerous agricultural societies. the means of agricultural education in new england are more numerous and may be more efficient than in any other portion of this country of similar area. moreover, the cities are now in a position to help solve the problem in new england. they have leaders. there are in them men with leisure and talent who are interested in this problem and who are willing to help solve it. ( ) the sentimental side. a campaign for rural progress, with new england as the unit, ought to arouse the pride and enthusiasm of all the sons and daughters of new england who still have the privilege of living within her borders, as well as the interest and sympathy of all her grandsons who, though living under western skies, still cherish in their hearts the deepest affection for their fatherland. shall not the idea of uniting all the forces of agricultural betterment that exist in new england be a stimulus to every farmer in the six states, and, indeed, attract the sympathy and practical aid of every lover of new england soil? adaptation, co-operation: these are the primary needs of new england agriculture; an adaptation of the farmer and his farm to existing conditions, a co-operation that unites individual farmers into various associated efforts, that federates the work and influence of the different social agencies within the state, and that ultimately secures the unity of all new england in a great movement for rural advancement. =================================================================== | new england | michigan | iowa ------------------------------------------------------------------- total land area-- | | | square miles | , | , | , number of farms | , | , | , acreage in farms | , , | , , | , , acres of improved | | | land | , , | , , | , , value of farms | $ , , | $ , , | $ , , , value of farm | | | products | $ , , | $ , , | $ , , persons engaged in | | | agriculture | , | , | , rural population | , , | , , | , , value of products per| | | acre of improved | | | land | $ | $ | $ number of granges | , | | number of grange | | | members | , | , | ------------------------------------------------------------------- chapter xvi an untilled field in american education agricultural education in this country has thus far been an attempt to apply a knowledge of the laws of the so-called "natural" sciences to the practical operations of the farm. comparatively little attention has been paid to the application of the principles of the "social" sciences to the life of the farmer. all this is partly explained by the fact that the natural sciences were fairly well developed when the needs of the farmer called the scientist to work with and for the man behind the plow, when a vanishing soil fertility summoned the chemist to the service of the grain grower, when the improvement of breeds of stock and races of plants began to appeal to the biologist. moreover, these practical applications of the physical and biological sciences are, and always will be, a fundamental necessity in the agricultural question. but in the farm problem we cannot afford to ignore the economic and sociological phases. while it may be true that the practical success of the individual farmer depends largely upon his business sense and his technical education, it is folly to hope that the success of agriculture as an industry and the influence of farmers as a class can be based solely upon the ability of each farmer to raise a big crop and to sell it to advantage. general intelligence, appreciation of the trend of economic and social forces, capacity to co-operate, ability to voice his needs and his rights, are just as vital acquirements for the farmer as knowing how to make two blades of grass grow where but one grew before. it finally comes to this, that the american farmer is obliged to study the questions that confront him as a member of the industrial order and as a factor in the social and political life of the nation, with as much zeal and understanding as he is expected to show in the study of those natural laws governing the soil and the crops and the animals that he owns. in this connection it is significant to note that farmers themselves are already quite as interested in the social problems of their particular calling and in the general economic and political questions of the day, as they are in science applied to their business of tilling the soil. not necessarily that they minimize the latter, but they seem instinctively to recognize that social forces may work them ill or work them good according to the direction and power of those forces. this statement is illustrated by the fact that the aims, purposes, labors, and discussions of the great farmers' organizations like the grange are social in character, having to do with questions that are political, economic, sociological. when, however, we turn to those public educational agencies that are intended to assist in the solution of the farm problem, we discover that they are giving slight attention to the social side of the question. an examination of the catalogues of the agricultural colleges, whether separate institutions or colleges of state universities, reveals the fact that, beyond elementary work in economics, in civics, and occasionally in sociology, little opportunity is given students to study the farm question from its social standpoint. with a few exceptions, these institutions offer no courses whatever in rural social problems, and even in these exceptional cases the work offered is hardly commensurate with the importance of the subject. nearly all our other colleges and universities are subject to the same comment. the average student of problems in economics and sociology and education gains on conception whatever of the importance and character of the rural phases of our industrial and social life. it may be urged in explanation of this state of affairs that the liberal study of the social sciences in our colleges and universities and especially any large attention to the practical problems of economics and sociology, is a comparatively recent thing. this is true and is a good excuse. but it does not offer a reason why the social phases of agriculture should be longer neglected. the purpose of this article is less to criticize than to describe a situation and to urge the timeliness of the large development, in the near future, of rural social science. at the outset the queries may arise, what is meant by rural social science? and, what is there to be investigated and taught under such a head? the answer to the first query has already been intimated. rural social science is the application of the principles of the social sciences, especially of economics and sociology, to the problems that confront the american farmer. as a reply to the second query there are appended at the end of this chapter outlines of possible courses in agricultural economics and rural sociology, which were prepared by the writer for the exhibit in "rural economy" at the st. louis exposition. there are also subjects that have a political bearing, such as local government in the country, and primary reform in rural communities, which perhaps ought not to be omitted. so, too, various phases of home life and of art might be touched upon. the subjects suggested and others like them could be conveniently grouped into from two to a dozen courses, as circumstances might require. what classes of people may be expected to welcome and profit by instruction of this character? ( ) the farmers themselves. assuming that our agricultural colleges are designed, among other functions, to train men and women to become influential farmers, no argument is necessary to show how studies in rural social science may help qualify these students for genuine leadership of their class of toilers. on the other hand, it may be remarked that no subjects will better lend themselves to college extension work than those named above. lectures and lecture courses for granges, farmers' clubs, farmers' institutes, etc., on such themes would arouse the greatest interest. correspondence and home study courses along these lines would be fully as popular as those treating of soils and crops. ( ) agricultural educators. the soil physicist or the agricultural chemist will not be a less valuable specialist in his own line, and he certainly will be a more useful member of the faculty of an agricultural college, if he has an appreciative knowledge of the farmer's social and economic status. this is even more true of men called to administer agricultural education in any of its phases. ( ) rural school administrators and the more progressive rural teachers. the country school can never become truly a social and intellectual center of the community until the rural educators understand the social environment of the farmer. ( )country clergymen. the vision of a social-service church in the country will remain but a dream unless, added to the possession of a heart for such work, the clergyman knows the farm problem sufficiently to appreciate the broader phases of the industrial and social life of his people. ( ) editors of farm papers, and of the so-called "country" papers. probably the editors of the better class of agricultural papers are less in need of instruction such as that suggested than is almost anyone else. yet the same arguments that now lead many young men aspiring to this class of journalism to regard a course in scientific agriculture as a vestibule to their work may well be used in urging a study of rural social science, especially at a time when social and economic problems are pressing upon the farmer. as for the country papers, the work of purveying local gossip and stirring the party kettle too often obscures the tremendous possibilities for a high-class service to the rural community which such papers may render. no men, in the agricultural states at least, have more real influence in their community than the trained, clean, manly, country editors--and there is a multitude of such men. if as a class they possessed also a wider appreciation of the farmer's industrial difficulties and needs, hardly anyone could give better service to the solution of the farm problem than could they. ( ) everybody else! that is to say, the agricultural question is big enough and important enough to be understood by educated people. the farmers are half our people. farming is our largest single industrial interest. the capital invested in agriculture is four-fifths the capital invested in manufacturing and railway transportation combined. whether an individual has a special interest in business, in economics, in education, or in religious institutions, he ought to know the place of the farm and the farmer in that question. no one can have a full appreciation of the social and industrial life of the american people who is ignorant of the agricultural status. the natural place to begin work in rural social science is the agricultural college. future farmers and teachers of farmers are supposed to be there. the subjects embraced are as important in solving the farm problem as are biology, physics, or chemistry. no skilled farmer or leader of farmers should be without some reasonably correct notions of the principles that determine the position of agriculture in the industrial world. a brief study of the elements of political economy, of sociology, of civics, is not enough; no more than the study of the elements of botany, of chemistry and of zoölogy is enough. the specific problems of the farmer that are economic need elucidation alongside the study of soils and crops, of plant-and stock-breeding. and these economic topics should be thoroughly treated by men trained in social science, and not incidentally by men whose chief interest is technical agriculture. the normal schools may well discuss the propriety of adding one or two courses which bear on the social and economic situation of the rural classes. while these schools do not now send out many teachers into rural schools, they may do so under the system of centralized schools; and in any event they furnish rural school administrators, as well as instructors of rural teachers. there seems to be a growing sentiment which demands of the school and of the teacher a closer touch with life as it is actually lived. how can rural teachers learn to appreciate the social function of the rural school, except they be taught? nor is there any reason why the theological seminaries, or at least the institutions that prepare the men who become country clergymen, should not cover some of the subjects suggested. if the ambition of some people to see the country church a social and intellectual center is to be realized, the minister must know the rural problem broadly. the same arguments that impel the city pastor to become somewhat familiar with the economic, social, and civic questions of the day hold with equal force when applied to the necessary preparation for the rural ministry. the universities may be called upon to train teachers and investigators in rural social science for service in agricultural colleges, normal schools, and theological seminaries. moreover, there is no good reason why any college or university graduate should not know more than he does about the farm problem. there can be little doubt that the interest in the farm question is very rapidly growing, and that the universities will be but meeting a demand if they begin very soon to offer courses in rural social science. the arguments for rural social science rest, let us observe, not only upon its direct aid to the farmers themselves, but upon its value as a basis for that intelligent social service which preacher, teacher, and editor may render the farming class. it is an essential underlying condition for the successful federation of rural social forces. indeed it should in some degree be a part of the equipment of every educated person. it may not be out of place to add, in conclusion, that instruction in rural social problems should be placed in the hands of men who are thoroughly trained in social science as well as accurate, experienced, and sympathetic observers of rural conditions. it would be mischievous indeed if in the desire to be progressive any educational institution should offer courses in rural social science which gave superficial or erroneous ideas about the scientific principles involved, or which encouraged in any degree whatever the notion that the farmer's business and welfare are not vitally and forever bound up with the business and welfare of all other classes. outline for a brief course in agricultural economics i. characteristics of the agricultural industry. dependence upon nature. capital and labor as applied to agriculture. the laws of rent and of decreasing returns in agriculture. relation of agriculture to other industries and to the welfare of mankind. ii. history of the agricultural industry. in ancient times. status in europe prior to the eighteenth century. the struggle to maintain its standing after the advent of commerce and manufacture. in the united states. the pioneer stage. development of commercial agriculture. the new farming. iii. present status of the farming industry. the world's food supply. agricultural resources of the united states. geographical factors. soils, climate, fertility, natural enemies, etc. statistics of farms, farm wealth, production, etc. leading sub-industries, cereals, stock, etc. distribution of production. iv. the agricultural market. description of the market--local, domestic, foreign. mechanism of the market. banks and local exchange facilities. middlemen. boards of trade. prices of agricultural products. movements of prices. agricultural competition. depressions of agriculture. influence of "options." transportation of agricultural products. primary transportation--wagon roads and trolley lines. railroad and water transportation. facilities. rates. discriminations. delivery methods. incidents of the transportation system--elevators, etc. imperfect distribution of agricultural products. development of the market. increase of consumption of products--manufacture of farm products as a factor. the factor of choicer products. the factor of better distribution of products. the local market as a factor. the foreign market as a factor. v. business co-operation in agriculture. historical sketch. present status. production. marketing. buying. miscellaneous business co-operation. difficulties and tendencies. vi. agriculture and legislation. land laws and land policies of the united states. agriculture and the tariff. taxation and agriculture. food and dairy laws. government aid to agriculture. vii. general problems. agricultural labor. machinery and agriculture. interest rates, indebtedness, etc. tenant farming. large vs. small farming. business methods. immigration and agriculture. outline for a brief course in rural sociology introduction . definitions. . relation of the sociological to the economic, the technical, and the scientific phases of agriculture. part i the rural social status chapter i movements of the farm population . statistical survey. . the movement to the west. history, causes. . the movement to the cities. _a_) growth of cities. _b_) depletion of rural population in certain localities. . causes of the movement to the cities. _a_) industrial, social, and psychological causes. . results of the movements of the farm population. _a_) results both good and bad. _b_) résumé of industrial and social results. chapter ii social condition of the rural population nativity; color; illiteracy; families; health; temperance; crime; morality; pauperism; defectives; insanity; etc. chapter iii the social psychology of rural life . isolation and its results. . the farm home and its environment. . traits of family life. . traits of individual life. chapter iv the social aspect of current agricultural questions . tenant farming. . large vs. small farms. . farm labor. . irregular incomes. . farm machinery. . specialization in farming. . immigration. part ii social factors in rural progress chapter i means of communication in rural districts . importance and status of rural communication. . the new movements for better rural communication. _a_) highways. _b_) rural free mail delivery. _c_) rural telephone. _d_) interurban electric railways. chapter ii farmers' organizations . value of. . difficulties in organizing. . forms that organizations may take. . history and work of farmers' organizations in the united states. . general deductions from study of farmers' organizations. chapter iii rural education . distinction between rural and agricultural education. . the country school. _a_) its importance, organization, maintenance, instruction, and supervision. _b_) the rural school as a social center. _c_) the township unit, the consolidated school, the centralized school. . high-school privileges for rural pupils. . the rural library. . other agencies for rural education. chapter iv means of agricultural education . historical. . research in agriculture. . agricultural instruction to resident students. _a_) higher education in agriculture. _b_) secondary education in agriculture. _c_) primary education in agriculture. . extension teaching in agriculture. . miscellaneous agencies for agricultural education. _a_) farmers' societies. _b_) the farm press. _c_) the county paper. _d_) industrial departments of steam railways. chapter v the rural church . present status. . difficulties in country church work. . the awakening in the rural church. . the institutional rural church. . the y. m. c. a. in the country. . the rural sunday school. . the rural social settlement. chapter vi the social ideal for agriculture . the importance of social agencies. . the preservation of the "american farmer" essential. . relation of this ideal to our american civilization. . the federation or co-operation of rural social agencies. chapter xvii federation for rural progress it is almost trite to assert the need of the "socialization"--to use a much-worked phrase--of the country. it is possible that this need is not greater than in the cities, but it is different. among no class of people is individualism so rampant as among farmers. for more than a century the american farmer led the freest possible social life. his independence was his glory. but, when the day of co-operation dawned, he found himself out of tune with the movement, was disinclined to join the ranks of organized effort, and he prefers even yet his personal and local independence to the truer freedom which can be secured only through co-operative endeavor. moreover, the social aspect of the rural problem is important not merely because the farmer is slow to co-operate. the farm problem is to be met by the activities of social institutions. we may say (assuming the home life, of course) that the church, the school, and the farmers' organization are the great rural social institutions. they are the forces now most efficient, and the ones that promise to abide. this classification may appear to be a mere truism, when we suggest that under the church should be placed all those movements that have a distinctively religious motive, under the school all those agencies that are primarily educational in design, and under farmers' organizations those associations whose chief function is to settle questions which concern the farmer as a business man and a citizen. but the classification answers fairly well. it includes practically every device that has been suggested for rural betterment. there are two interesting facts about these rural institutions: ( ) none of them is doing a tithe of what it ought to be doing to help solve the farm problem. the church is apparently just about holding its own, though that is doubted by some observers. rural schools are not, as a rule, keeping pace with the demands being made upon them; comparatively few students in the whole country are studying scientific agriculture. not one farmer in twenty belongs to a strong farmers' organization. ( ) all these institutions are awakening to the situation. progress during the last decade has been especially gratifying. co-operative efforts among farmers are more cautious, but more successful. the grange has nearly doubled its membership since ; and it, as well as other farm organizations, has more real power than ever before. the rural-school question is one of the liveliest topics today among farmers as well as educators. opportunities for agricultural education have had a marvelous development within a decade. discussion about rural church federation, the rural institutional church, rural social settlements, and even experiments in these lines are becoming noticeably frequent. the young men's christian association has, its officers think, found the way to reach the country young man. the institutions which we have just discussed, together with the improvement that comes from such physical agencies as assist quicker communication (good wagon roads, telephones, rural mail delivery, electric roads), constitute the social forces that are to be depended upon in rural betterment. none can be spared or ignored. the function of each must be understood and its importance recognized. to imagine that substantial progress can result from the emphasis of any one agency to the exclusion of any other is a mistake. to assert this is not to quarrel with the statement we frequently hear nowadays that "the _church_ should be the social and intellectual center of the neighborhood;" or that "the _school_ should be the social and intellectual center of the neighborhood;" or that "the _grange_ should be the social and intellectual center of the neighborhood." it is fortunate that these statements have been made. they show an appreciation of a function of these agencies that has been neglected. the first item in rural social progress is that the country preacher, the rural teacher, the country doctor, the country editor, the agricultural editor, the agricultural college professor, and especially the farmer himself, shall see the social need of the farm community. but to assert, for instance, that the church shall be _the_ social center of that community may lead to a partial and even to a fanatical view of things. i would not restrain in the slightest the enthusiasm of any pastor who wants to make his church occupy a central position in community life, nor of the teacher who wants to bring her school into relation with all the economic and social life of the farm, nor of the leader of the farmers' organization who sees the good that may be done through the social and intellectual training which his organization can give. but if there is danger that the preacher in the pursuit of this ideal, shall ignore the social function of the school and of the farmers' organization, or that the teacher, or the farmer, or anybody else who is interested, shall fail to see that there is a logical division of labor among rural social forces, and that it is only the intelligent and efficient and harmonious co-operation of all these forces that will insure the best progress, then to such i appeal with all the power at my command to recognize not only the breadth of the whole movement, but to appreciate the limitations of their own special interests. there are things that the church cannot do and should not attempt to do. there are things the school cannot do and should not attempt to do. accepting our conventional division of social agencies, we may say that efficient rural progress stands upon a tripod of forces, and that balance can be maintained only when each is used in its proper measure. we reach now the heart of the topic, which is how these various social forces may be brought into co-operation--a co-operation that is intelligent and real. i would suggest, first of all, the encouragement of all efforts along this line that are already under way. for instance, there are scattered all over this country individual pastors who are seeking to make their churches the social and intellectual beacon-lights of the community. there are other individuals who are endeavoring to apply the social-settlement idea to the needs of the country. there are associations which attempt to bring together the teachers and the school patrons for mutual discussion of educational topics. in numerous instances the farmers' organizations include in their membership the country pastor, the district school teacher and perhaps the country doctor. in these and doubtless in other ways the idea we are dealing with is being promulgated, and up to a certain point this fact of promiscuous initiative is entirely satisfactory and desirable. so long as the work is done it makes little difference who does it. every attempt to bring any of these agencies into closer touch with the farm community is to be welcomed most heartily. but beyond a certain limit this promiscuous work must be unsatisfactory. the efforts and interests of any one social agency are bound to be partial. indeed the more effective such an agency is, the more partial it is likely to be. intensity is gained at the expense of breadth. the need for federation exists in the desirability of securing both the intensity and the breadth. the precise method of securing this federation of effort is not easy to foresee. it can be determined only by trial. it must be worked out in harmony with varying conditions. some very general plans at once suggest themselves: ( ) let the agricultural college in each state take the lead in the movement, acting not so much as an organization as a clearing-house and a go-between. let it direct conferences on the subject, and seek to bring all who are interested in rural affairs into touch and sympathy. ( ) have a "league for rural progress," made up of representatives from the churches, the agricultural colleges, the departments of public instruction, the farm press, various farmers' organizations, etc. ( ) enlarge the "hesperia movement," which now seeks to secure co-operation between school and farmers' organization, by including in it the church. it may be of interest to note that this idea of a federation of rural social forces is getting a foothold and has indeed already crystallized into organization. a brief description of what has actually been done will therefore not be out of place. so far as the writer is aware, the first meeting based on the definite idea of co-operation between school, church, and grange was held at morris, connecticut, in the summer of and was organized by rev. f. a. holden, then pastor at morris. this meeting was a very successful local affair, held in connection with "old home week" celebration. probably the first attempt to hold a similar meeting on a large scale was the conference at the agricultural college, michigan, in february, . it was a joint meeting of the michigan political science association and the agricultural college and farmers' institutes. the practical initiative was taken by the political science association under the leadership of its secretary, professor henry c. adams, who had the cordial co-operation of president snyder of the agricultural college and professor c. d. smith, then superintendent of farmers' institutes. it was a notable gathering, and its promoters were rejoiced to see the splendid attendance of farmers particularly; teachers and clergymen did not attend as freely as might have been expected. the programme was a strong one and included men of national reputation and topics covering a wide range of interests. the addresses were published in the _michigan farmers' institute bulletin_ for - , and were also gathered into a publication of the michigan political science association under the title _social problems of the farmer_. the state of rhode island has organized on a permanent basis. in there was held in kingston, at the college of agriculture and mechanic arts, a "conference on rural progress." it was a one-day meeting, well attended by representative farmers, clergymen, and educators. a committee was appointed to discuss further procedure, and the next year there was held in the halls of brown university a two-days' conference. the programme included addresses on: the grange, the country church, school gardens, and several phases of practical agriculture. among the speakers were the assistant secretary of agriculture, hon. n. j. bachelder, now master of the national grange, and dr. josiah strong. in the spring of there was organized "the rhode island league for rural progress," which was constituted through representation from the following organizations: state board of agriculture; rhode island college of agriculture; state federation of churches; state grange; state association of school superintendents; state league of improvement societies; washington county agricultural society; newport agricultural society; rhode island horticultural society; newport horticultural society; rhode island poultry association; florists and gardeners' club; kingston improvement association. this league held the third annual conference on rural progress, april and , , the first day's session being at brown university, providence, and the second day's at east greenwich. its fourth meeting was held in newport in march, . in rhode island the idea lying back of this conference has certainly approved itself to all who are interested in rural matters. the following is the constitution of the league: constitution rhode island league for rural progress i. name.--the name of this body shall be the "rhode island league for rural progress." ii. object.--the object of the league shall be to secure the co-operation of the various individuals, organizations, and agencies which are working for any phase of rural advancement in this state. iii. membership.--any organization interested in rural advancement, which may desire to co-operate with the work of the league, may be represented in the league. any individual in the state interested in rural progress may become a member of the league upon the payment of one dollar annual fee. iv. officers.--the administrative work of the league shall be conducted by a council, to be composed of one delegate from each organization represented in the league, to serve until superseded. the council at the time of each annual conference shall choose from among its members a president, a vice-president, and a secretary-treasurer, and these officers shall act as an executive committee. v. meetings.--the meetings of the league shall be held at the call of the executive committee. there shall, however, be at least one annual conference on rural progress held under the auspices of the league. vi. finances.--the funds necessary to forward the work of the league may come from three sources: _a_) contributions made by organizations belonging to the league and represented on the council, such contributions to be voluntary and in such amount as the respective organizations may designate. the council may, however, make up a schedule of desired contributions from the various organizations and present it to the different organizations. _b_) membership fees from individual members, $ . per year from each member. _c_) private subscriptions. probably the first successful attempt to organize a permanent league for rural progress was accomplished in through the efforts of rev. g. t. nesmith, of hebron, ill. it was called "the mchenry county federation," and has held three annual meetings and seems to be on a solid basis. mr. nesmith has endeavored to keep the purpose of the league on a high plane by endeavoring to state clearly the object of the federation, which is, "that the people of mchenry county might have life, and have it more abundantly, and this life was not to be a narrow life. it was the largest aggregate and highest symmetry of the sixfold ends of individual and community action, viz., health, wealth, knowledge, sociability, beauty, and righteousness." he also endeavored to make it clear that "the federation does not seek to supplant the other forces. it rather seeks to be a clearing-house of the ideas of all the federated organizations; to be a mount of vision from which each may look and get a complete vision of life; to be a fraternal bond which shall link all together in common ties of sympathy, fellowship, and co-operation." the results thus far obtained are perhaps best described by quoting the words of mr. g. w. conn, jr., superintendent of schools of mchenry county: there is one noticeable omission in the constitution--a provision for the proper financing of the federation. this is partially explained by the fact that the federation has largely centered about the county teachers' association and the county farmers' institute, organizations that are supported in a financial way by the county and the state appropriations. these appropriations, in addition to some voluntary gifts, have been sufficient to meet the necessary expenses of the meetings. i think that i am safe in saying that the interest and also the attendance has probably increased per cent. at each session. each year has also seen a much larger percentage of our local men and women helping out on the programme. it is a little early in its history to expect much evidence of material results, but i believe that results are already putting in an appearance, especially from the esthetic standpoint. without doubt more trees have been planted about the country homes and along the country roadsides of this county than in any two preceding years. in a great many places roads have been cleaned. refuse and weeds have been removed and burned. landscape gardening on a simple scale is putting in an appearance in places where it was little expected. the naming of farms is another feature that is rapidly growing. boys' country clubs are being formed and this year, for the first time, three of these clubs met with the federation, had a banquet, and formed a county organization. of course not all of these movements are rightfully to be attributed to the direct influence of the county federation. the public schools of the county have been largely instrumental in stirring the public conscience to a livelier appreciation of the beautiful. the regular observance of arbor and bird days in our schools has done much toward initiating this movement. however, the federation has been the great factor in uniting otherwise independent organizations into one large machine for stirring the social consciousness and molding public sentiment. it has proved to be an efficient association in at least three ways, in co-ordinating our efforts, harmonizing our methods, and broadening the field of operation. the constitution of this league is given herewith in full: . name.--the name of this organization shall be, the mchenry county federation of rural forces. . object.--the object of the federation is to gain a higher symmetry and a larger aggregate of health, wealth, knowledge, sociability, beauty, and righteousness to the citizens of mchenry county. . elements of the federation.--the federation shall consist of the following organizations: the farmers' institute, teachers' association, domestic science association, pastors' association, women's christian temperance union, and the young men's christian association. . membership.--any county organization may become a member of the federation by recommendation of the executive committee. . officers.--the officers of the federation shall consist of a president, as many vice-presidents as there are component organizations, a secretary-treasurer, and an executive committee. . committees.--the executive committee shall be composed of the president, the secretary-treasurer, and the presidents of the component organizations. there shall be an auditing committee and a committee on resolutions, each consisting of three members and to be appointed by the president. the nominating committee shall consist of two members from each of the component organizations and they shall be appointed by the president. . duties.--the executive committee shall select the date and fix the place of every meeting. they shall also prepare the programme. the presidents of the component organizations shall be _ex-officio_ vice-presidents of the federation. . auditing.--all bills shall be paid by the treasurer after the same have been countersigned by the auditing committee. . term of office.--the terms of all officers shall be one year or until their successors are elected. . how elected.--all officers shall be elected by ballot. the massachusetts conference for town and village betterment has dealt with some phases of the federation idea. its object is "to contribute to the formation of a strong, definite, and united purpose among the forces working for the improvement of civic and social conditions in massachusetts, by bringing together all town and village improvement societies, citizen's associations, civic clubs, and other organizations interested in this purpose." the massachusetts agricultural college, in celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its opening to students, october , , held a four days' conference on rural progress. the programme covered nearly the whole field of rural development and was made possible by the co-operation of the state board of agriculture, the state grange, the massachusetts civic league, the connecticut valley congregational club, the state committee of the y. m. c. a., the western massachusetts library club, and the head-masters' club of the connecticut valley. no permanent organization was formed, but the general idea of federation of rural social forces was fully emphasized and thoroughly appreciated. an attempt was made in the spring of to bring together the various elements of rural progress in all the new england states. under the initiative of the massachusetts state board of agriculture there was held in march, , a new england conference on rural progress. this meeting was held very largely for the purpose of discovering the sentiment among the leaders of new england agriculture with respect to the desirability and practicability of federating on so large a scale. in addition to the main meeting, the presidents of the agricultural colleges of new england were called together in a special section, and the same was true of the directors of the new england experiment stations, the masters of the various state granges, the secretaries of the various state boards of agriculture, and the leaders in the new england federation of churches. the idea of federation was clearly approved by the delegates present, and a temporary organization was effected. it was voted to hold a similar conference in boston in the spring of . it is probably true that the first and most important step in bringing about a federation of rural social forces is to educate all concerned to the _desirability_ of such a federation--to sow the seeds of the idea. so far as machinery is concerned it may not be necessary to form any new organization. indeed, what is chiefly necessary is a sort of _clearing-house_ for an exchange of ideas and plans among all who are at work on any phase of the rural social problem. there is need of a central bureau that shall emphasize the necessity of a study of agricultural economics and rural sociology, and press the value of co-operation in the work of social progress in the country. there is need that somewhere "tab" shall be kept on the whole rural social movement. we need a directing force to assure a comprehensive view and study of the whole rural problem. it is important that some investigations should be carried on that are not likely to be taken up by some other agency. it would be desirable to have a certain amount of publication, and in various other ways to carry on a campaign of education. above all, it would be desirable to initiate local, state, and national conferences pervaded by the spirit and purpose of securing the hearty co-operation of all rural social forces, of all the organizations that have any rural connection whatever, and of all individuals who have the slightest genuine interest in any phase of the farm problem. such a bureau should keep in constant touch with, secure the confidence of, and supply appropriate literature to, country teachers, preachers, editors, doctors, and business men, and, more than all, to intelligent and progressive farmers. and let me add at this point, that it must be fully understood that the work contemplated cannot possibly achieve large success unless it is done _with_ the farmers, rather than _for_ the farmers. the problem is far from that of doing a missionary work for a down-trodden and ignorant class. it is a much less heroic, a much more commonplace task. it is simply carrying the idea of co-operation of individuals a step farther, and endeavoring to secure the co-operation of interests that have precisely the same goal, although traveling upon different roads. the prime purpose of the movement is to bring the specialist into close touch with the more general phases of the problem, to secure breadth and wholeness, to assure well-balanced effort. [note.--a paper with the title of this chapter was read before the american civic association in , at minneapolis. a portion of the paper is retained here. the history of the development of the idea of federation is brought down to the present time.] [transcriber's note spellings are inconsistent, especially the use of ée and ee. notes of changes that have been made for obvious misprints, and of other anomalies, are at the end of this etext. there are many sidenotes in the original. they are indicated thus: {sn: }, and have been grouped together at the start of the paragraph in which they appear.] the english hvsbandman. * * * * * _the first part_: contayning the knowledge of the true nature of euery soyle within this kingdome: how to plow it; and the manner of the plough, and other instruments belonging thereto. _together with the_ art of planting, grafting, and gardening after our latest and rarest fashion. a worke neuer written before by any author: and now newly compiled for the benefit of this kingdome. _by_ g. m. _bramo assai, poco, spero nulla chieggio._ _london:_ printed by _t. s._ for _iohn browne_, and are to be sould at his shop in saint _dunstanes_ church-yard. . to the right honovrable, and his singular good lord, the lord _clifton_, baron of layton. it was a custome (right honorable, and my most singular good lord) both amongst the auntient _romans_, and also amongst the wise _lacedemonians_, that euery idle person should giue an account of the expence of his howers: now i that am most idle, and least imployed in your familie, present here vnto your lordships hands an account of the expence of my idle time, which how well, or ill, it is, your noble wisedome must both iudge and correct; onely this i am acertain'd, that for the generall rules and maximes of the whole worke, they are most infallibly true, and perfectly agreeing with our english climate. now if your lordship shall doubt of the true tast of the liquor because it proceedeth from such a vessell as my selfe, whom you may imagine vtterly vnseasoned vvith any of these knowledges, beleeue it (my most best lord) that for diuers yeeres, wherein i liued most happily, i liued a husbandman, amongst husbandmen of most excellent knowledge; during all which time i let no obseruation ouer-slip me: for i haue euer from my cradle beene naturally giuen to obserue, and albe i haue not that oylie tongue of ostentation which loueth euer to be babling all, and somewhat more then it knoweth, drawing from ignorance admiration, and from wisedome laughter, filling meale-times with much vnprofitable noyse; yet i thanke my maker i haue a breast which containeth contentment inough for my selfe, and i hope much benefit for the whole kingdome; how euer or whatsoeuer it is, it is all your lordships, vnder the couert of whose fauourable protection if it may finde grace it is the vttermost aime whereunto my wishes aspire, nor shall i feare the malignitie of the curious, for it is not to them but the honest plaine english husbandman, i intend my labours, vvhose defender you haue euer beene, and for whose honorable prosperitie both they and i will continually pray. _your honours in all seruiceable humblenesse_, g. m. the epistle to the generall and gentle reader. although (generall reader) the nature of this worst part of this last age hath conuerted all things to such vildnesse that whatsoeuer is truely good is now esteemed most vitious, learning being derided, fortitude drawne into so many definitions that it consisteth in meere words onely, and although nothing is happy or prosperous, but meere fashion & ostentation, a tedious fustian-tale at a great mans table, stuft with bigge words, with out sence, or a mimicke iester, that can play three parts in one; the foole, the pandar and the parasit, yet notwithstanding in this apostate age i haue aduentured to thrust into the world this booke, which nothing at all belongeth to the silken scorner, but to the plaine russet honest husbandman, for whose particular benefit, and the kingdomes generall profit, i haue with much paine, care, and industry, passed through the same. now for the motiues which first drew me to vndertake the worke, they were diuers: as first, when i saw one man translate and paraphrase most excellently vpon _virgils georgickes_, a worke onely belonging to the italian climbe, & nothing agreeable with ours another translates _libault & steuens_, a worke of infinit excellency, yet onely proper and naturall to the french, and not to vs: and another takes collections from _zenophon_, and others; all forrainers and vtterly vnacquainted with our climbes: when this i beheld, and saw with what good liking they were entertained of all men; and that euery man was dumbe to speake any thing of the _husbandry_ of our owne kingdome, i could not but imagine it a worke most acceptable to men, and most profitable to the kingdome, to set downe the true manner and nature of our right english _husbandry_, our soyle being as delicate, apt, and fit for increase as any forraine soyle whatsoeuer, and as farre out-going other kingdomes in some commoditie, as they vs in other some. hence, and from these considerations, i began this worke, of which i haue here sent thee but a small tast, which if i finde accepted, according to mine intent, i will not cease (god permitting mee life) to passe through all manner of english _husbandry_ and _huswifery_ whatsoeuer, without omission of the least scruple that can any way belong to either of their knowledges. now gentle reader whereas you may be driuen to some amazement, at two titles which insue in the booke, namely, a former part before the first, and the first part, you shall vnderstand that those first sheetes were detained both from the stationer and me, till the booke was almost all printed; and my selfe by extreame sicknesse kept from ouer-viewing the same, wherefore i must intreate your fauour in this impression and the rather in as much as there wanteth neither any of the words or matter whatsoeuer: _farewell_. thine _g. m._ a former part, before the first part: being an absolute perfect introduction into all the rules of true husbandry; and must first of all be read, or the readers labour will be frustrate. chap. i. _the proem of the author. what a husbandman is: his vtilitie and necessitie._ it is a common adage in our english spéech, that a man generally séene in all things can bée particularly perfect or compleate in none: which prouerbe there is no question will both by the curious and enuious be heauily imposed vpon my backe, because in this, and other workes, i haue delt with many things of much importance, and such as any one of them would require a whole liues experience, whereas neither my birth, my education, nor the generall course of my life can promise no singularitie in any part of those artes they treate of: but for suggestions (the liberty whereof the wisedome of kings could neuer bridle) let them poison themselues with their owne gall, they shall not so much as make me looke ouer my shoulder from my labour: onely to the curteous and well meaning i giue this satisfaction, i am but onely a publique notary, who record the most true and infallible experience of the best knowing husbands in this land. besides, i am not altogether vnséene in these misteries i write of: for it is well knowne i followed the profession of a husbandman so long my selfe, as well might make mee worthy to be a graduate in the vocation: wherein my simplicitie was not such but i both obserued well those which were estéemed famous in the profession, and preserued to my selfe those rules which i found infallible by experience. _virgill_ was an excellent poet, and a seruant, of trusty account, to _augustus_, whose court and study-imployments would haue said he should haue little knowledge in rurall businesse, yet who hath set downe more excellently the manner of italian husbandry then himselfe, being a perfect lanthorne, from whose light both italie and other countries haue séene to trace into the true path of profit and frugallitie? _steuens_ and _libault_, two famous phisitions, a profession that neuer medleth with the plough, yet who hath done more rarely! nay, their workes are vtterly vncontrolable touching all manner of french husbandry whatsoeuer; so my selfe although by profession i am onely a horse-man, it being the predominant outward vertue i can boast of, yet why may not i, hauing the sence of man, by the ayde of obseruation and relation, set downe all the rules and principles of our english husbandry in as good and as perfect order as any of the former? there is no doubt but i may and this i dare bouldly assure vnto all readers that there is not any rule prescribed through this whole worke, but hath his authoritie from as good and well experienced men, in the art of which the rule treateth, as any this kingdome can produce: neither haue i béene so hasty, or willing, to publish this part as men may imagining, for it is well knowne it hath laine at rest this many yéeres, and onely now at the instigation of many of my friends is bolted into the world, to try the censure of wits, and to giue aide to the ignorant husbandman. wherefore to leaue off any further digression, i will fall to mine intended purpose: and because the whole scope of my labour hath all his aime and reuerence to the english husbandman, i will first shew you what a husbandman is. {sn: the definition of a husbandman.} a husbandman is he which with discretion and good order tilleth the ground in his due seasons, making it fruitfull to bring forth corne, and plants, meete for the sustenance of man. this husbandman is he to whom god in the scriptures giueth many blessings, for his labours of all other are most excellent, and therefore to be a husbandman is to be a good man; whence the auntients did baptise, and wée euen to this day doe seriously obserue to call euery husbandman, both in our ordinary conference and euery particular salutation, goodman such a one, a title (if wée rightly obserue it) of more honour and vertuous note, then many which precede it at feasts and in gaudy places. {sn: the vtillitie of the husbandman.} a husbandman is the maister of the earth, turning sterillitie and barrainenesse, into fruitfulnesse and increase, whereby all common wealths are maintained and upheld, it is his labour which giueth bread to all men and maketh vs forsake the societie of beasts drinking vpon the water springs, féeding vs with a much more nourishing liquor. the labour of the husbandman giueth liberty to all vocations, arts, misteries and trades, to follow their seuerall functions, with peace and industry, for the filling and emptying of his barnes is the increase and prosperitie of all their labours. to conclude, what can we say in this world is profitable where husbandry is wanting, it being the great nerue and sinew which houldeth together all the ioynts of a monarchie? {sn: of the necessitie of a husbandman.} now for the necessitie, the profit inferreth it without any larger amplification: for if of all things it be most profitable, then of all things it must néeds be most necessary, sith next vnto heauenly things, profit is the whole aime of our liues in this world: besides it is most necessary for kéeping the earth in order, which else would grow wilde, and like a wildernesse, brambles and wéeds choaking vp better plants, and nothing remayning but a chaos of confusednesse. and thus much of the husbandman his vtillity and necessitie. chap. ii. _of the situation of the husbandmans house; the necessaries there to belonging, together with the modell thereof._ since couerture is the most necessariest thing belonging vnto mans life, and that it was the first thing that euer man inuented, i thinke it not amisse first to beginne, before i enter into any other part of husbandry, with the husbandmans house, without which no husbandry can be maintained or preserued. and albeit the generall husbandman must take such a house as hée can conueniently get, and according to the custome and abillitie of the soyle wherein he liueth, for many countries are very much vnprouided of generall matter for well building: some wanting timber, some stone, some lime, some one thing, some another: yet to that husbandman whom god hath enabled with power both of riches and euery other necessary fit to haue all things in a comely conuenientnesse about him, if he desire to plant himselfe decently and profitable, i would then aduise him to chuse for his situation no high hill, or great promontary (the seate of princes courts) where hée may be gazed vpon by the eye of euery traueller, but some pretty hard knole of constant and firme earth, rather assending then descending, frée from the danger of water, and being inuironed either with some pretty groues, of tall young spiers, or else with rowes of greater timber, which besids the pleasure and profit thereof (hauing wode so neare a mans dore) the shelter will be most excellent to kéepe off the bleaknesse of the sharpe stormes and tempests in winter, and be an excellent wormestall for cattell in the summer. this house would be planted, if possible, neare to some riuer, or fresh running brooke, but by no meanes vpon the verge of the riuer, nor within the danger of the ouerflow thereof: for the one is subiect to too much coldnesse and moisture, the other to danger. you shall plant the face, or forefront, of your house vpon the rising of the sunne, that the vigor of his warmth may at no time depart from some part thereof, but that as he riseth on the oneside so he may set on the other. you shall place the vpper or best end of your house, as namely, where your dining parlor and cheifest roomes are, which euer would haue their prospect into your garden, to the south, that your buttery, kitching and other inferiour offices may stand to the north, coldnesse bringing vnto them a manifold benefit. now touching the forme, fashion, or modell of the house, it is impossible almost for any man to prescribe a certaine forme, the world is so plentifull in inuention and euery mans minde so much adicted to nouelty and curiouity, yet for as much as it is most commended by the generall consent of all the auntients, and that from the modell of that proportion may be contracted and drawne the most curious formes that are almost at this day extant, i will commend vnto you that modell which beareth the proportion of the roman _h._ which as it is most plaine of all other, and most easie for conuaiance, so if a man vpon that plaine song, (hauing a great purse) will make descant, there is no proportion in which he may with best ease show more curiositie, and therefore for the plaine husbandmans better vnderstanding i will here shew him a _facsimile_ (for to adde a scale were néedlesse in this generall worke, all men not being desirous to build of one bignesse) & this it is: {illustration} here you behould the modell of a plaine country mans house, without plaster or imbosture, because it is to be intended that it is as well to be built of studde and plaster, as of lime and stone, or if timber be not plentifull it may be built of courser woode, and couered with lime and haire, yet if a man would bestow cost in this modell, the foure inward corners of the hall would be conuenient for foure turrets, and the foure gauell ends, being thrust out with bay windowes might be formed in any curious manner: and where i place a gate and a plaine pale, might be either a tarrisse, or a gatehouse: of any fashion whatsoeuer, besides all those windowes which i make plaine might be made bay windowes, either with battlements, or without, but the scope of my booke tendeth onely to the vse of the honest husbandman, and not to instruct men of dignitie, who in architecture are able wonderfully to controle me; therefore that the husbandman may know the vse of this _facsimile_, he shall vnderstand it by this which followeth. _a._ signifieth the great hall. _b._ the dining parlor for entertainment of strangers. _c._ an inward closset within the parlor for the mistrisses vse, for necessaries. _d._ a strangers lodging within the parlor. _e._ a staire-case into the roomes ouer the parlor. _f._ a staire-case into the good-mans roomes ouer the kitchin and buttery. _g._ the skréene in the hall. _h._ an inward cellar within the buttery, which may serue for a larder. _i._ the buttery. _k._ the kitchin, in whose range may be placed a bruing lead, and conuenient ouens, the bruing vessels adioyning. _l._ the dairy house for necessary businesse. _m._ the milke house. _n._ a faire sawne pale before the formost court. _o._ the great gate to ride in at to the hall dore. _p._ a place where a pumpe would be placed to serue the offices of the house. {illustration: this figure signifieth the dores of the house.} {illustration: this figure signifieth the windowes of the house.} {illustration: this figure signifieth the chimnies of the house.} now you shall further vnderstand that on the south side of your house, you shall plant your garden and orchard, as wel for the prospect thereof to al your best roomes, as also because your house will be a defence against the northerne coldnesse, whereby your fruits will much better prosper. you shall on the west side of your house, within your inward dairy and kitchin court, fence in a large base court, in the midst whereof would be a faire large pond, well ston'd and grauelled in the bottome, in which your cattell may drinke, and horses when necessitie shall vrge be washt: for i doe by no meanes alow washing of horses after instant labour. néere to this pond you shall build your doue-coate, for pigions delight much in the water: and you shall by no meanes make your doue-house too high, for pigions cannot endure a high mount, but you shall build it moderately, cleane, neate, and close, with water pentisses to kéepe away vermine. on the north side of your base-court you shall build your stables, oxe-house, cow-house, and swine-coates, the dores and windowes opening all to the south. on the south side of the base-court, you shall builde your hay-barnes, corne-barnes, pullen-houses for hennes, capons, duckes, and géese, your french kilne, and malting flowres, with such like necessaries: and ouer crosse betwixt both these sides, you shall build your bound houels, to cary your pease, of good and sufficient timber, vnder which you shall place when they are out of vse your cartes, waynes, tumbrels, ploughs, harrowes, and such like, together with plough timber, and axletrées: all which would very carefully be kept from wet, which of all things doth soonest rot and consume them. and thus much of the husbandmans house, and the necessaries there to belonging. chap. iii. _of the seuerall parts and members of an ordinarie plough, and of the ioyning of them together._ if a workeman of any trade, or mistery, cannot giue directions how, and in what manner, the tooles where with he worketh should be made or fashioned, doubtlesse hée shall neuer worke well with them, nor know when they are in temper and when out. and so it fareth with the husbandman, for if hée know not how his plough should be made, nor the seuerall members of which it consisteth, with the vertue and vse of euery member, it is impossible that euer hée should make a good furrow, or turne ouer his ground in husbandly manner: therefore that euery husbandman may know how a well shaped plough is made, he shall vnderstand that the first member thereof, as being the strongest and most principallest péece of timber belonging to the same, is called the plough-beame, being a large long péece of timber much bending, according to the forme of this figure. {illustration} this beame hath no certaine length nor thicknesse, but is proportioned according to the ground, for if it be for a clay ground the length is almost seauen foote, if for any other mixt or lighter earth, then fiue or sixe foote is long inough. the second member or part of the plough, is called the skeath, and is a péece of woode of two foote and a halfe in length, and of eight inches in breadth, and two inches in thicknesse: it is driuen extreamly hard into the plough-beame, slopewise, so that ioyned they present this figure. {illustration} the third part is called the ploughes principall hale, and doth belong to the left hand being a long bent péece of woode, some what strong in the midst, and so slender at the vpper end that a man may easily gripe it, which being fixed with the rest presenteth this figure. {illustration} the fourth part is the plough head, which must be fixed with the sheath & the head all at one instant in two seuerall mortisse holes: it is a flat péece of timber, almost thrée foote in length if it be for clay ground, otherwise shorter, of breadth seauen inches, and of thicknesse too inches and a halfe, which being ioyned to the rest presenteth this figure. {illustration} the fift part is the plough spindels, which are two small round pieces of woode, which coupleth together the hales, as in this figure. {illustration} the sixt part is the right hand hale, through which the other end of the spindels runne, and is much slenderer then the left hand hale, for it is put to no force, but is onely a stay and aide to the plough houlder when hée cometh to heauy, stiffe, and strong worke, and being ioyned with the rest presenteth this figure. {illustration} the seauenth part is the plough-rest, which is a small péece of woode, which is fixt at one end in the further nicke of the plough head, and the other end to the ploughs right-hand hale, as you may sée by this figure. {illustration} the eight part is called the shelboard, and is a broad board of more then an inche thicknesse, which couereth all the right side of the plough, and is fastned with two strong pinnes of woode through the sheath, and the right-hand hale, according to this figure. {illustration} the ninth part is the coulture, which is a long péece of iron, made sharpe at the neather end, and also sharpe on one side and being for a stiffe clay it must be straight without bending, which passeth by a mortisse-hole through the beame, and to this coulture belongeth an iron ring, which windeth about the beame and kéepeth it in strength from breaking as may appeare by this figure. {illustration} the tenth part of a compleate plough, is the share; which is fixed to the plough head, and is that which cutteth and turneth vp the earth: if it be for a mixt earth then it is made without a wing, or with a very small one, but if it be for a déepe, or stiffe clay, then it is made with a large wing, or an outward point, like the figure following. {illustration} the eleuenth part of a perfect plough is called the plough foote, and is through a mortisse-hole fastned at the farre end of all the beame with a wedge or two, so as the husbandman may at his discretion set it higher or lower, at his pleasure: the vse of it is to giue the plough earth, or put it from the earth, as you please, for the more you driue it downeward, the more it raiseth the beame from the ground, and maketh the irons forsake the earth, and the more you driue it vpward the more it letteth downe the beame, and so maketh the irons bite the sorer; the figure whereof is this. {illustration} thus haue you all the parts and members of a plough, and how they be knit and ioyned together, wherein i would wish you to obserue to make your plough-wright euer rather giue your plough land then put her from the land, that is, rather leaning towards the earth and biting sore, then euer slipping out of the ground: for if it haue two much earth the husbandman may help it in the houlding, but if it haue too little, then of necessitie it must make foule worke: but for as much as the error and amends lye both in the office of the plough-wright, i will not trouble the husbandman with the reformation thereof. now you shall vnderstand that there is one other thing belonging to the plough, which albe it be no member thereof, yet is it so necessary that the husbandman which liueth in durty and stiffe clayes can neuer goe to plough without it, and it is called the aker-staffe, being a pretty bigge cudgell, of about a yarde in length, with an iron spud at the end, according to this figure: {illustration} this akerstaffe the husbandman is euer to carry within his plough, and when at any time the irons, shelboard, or plough, are choaked with durt, clay, or filth, which will cling about the ould stubble, then with this akerstaffe you shall put the same off (your plough still going) and so kéepe her cleane and smooth that your worke may lye the handsomer; and this you must euer doe with your right hand: for the plough choaketh euer on the shelboard side, and betwéene the irons. and thus much touching the perfect plough, and the members thereof. chap. iiii. _how the husbandman shall temper his plough, and make her fit for his worke._ a plough is to a husbandman like an instrument in the hand of a musition, which if it be out of tune can neuer make good musicke, and so if the plough, being out of order, if the husbandman haue not the cunning to temper it and set it in the right way, it is impossible that euer his labour should come to good end. it is very necessary then that euery good husbandman know that a plough being perfectly well made, the good order or disorder thereof consisteth in the placing of the plough-irons and the plough-foote. know then, that for the placing of the irons, the share would be set to looke a little into the ground: and because you shall not bruise, or turne, the point thereof, you shall knocke it fast vpon the head, either with a crooked rams-horne, or else with some piece of soft ash woode: and you shall obserue that it stand plaine, flat, and leuell, without wrying or turning either vpward or downeward: for if it runne not euen vpon the earth it will neuer make a good furrow, onely as before i said, the point must looke a little downeward. now, for the coulture, you must place it slopewise through the beame, so as the point of it and the point of the share may as it were touch the ground at one instant, yet if the coulture point be a little thought the longer it shall not be amisse: yet for a more certaine direction and to try whether your irons stand true i or no, you shall take a string, and measure from the mortisse-hole through which the coulture passeth, to the point of the coulture, and so kéeping your vpper hand constant lay the same length to the of point your share, and if one measure serue them both right, there being no difference betwéene them, then the irons stand true for their length, otherwise they stand false. now your coulture albe it stand true for the length, yet it may stand either too much to the land, or too much from the land, either of which is a great errour, and will kéepe the plough from going true: your coulture therefore shall haue certaine wedges of ould dry ash woode, that is to say, one before the coulture on the vpper side the beame, and another on the land side, or left side, the coulture on the vpper side the beame also; then you shall haue another wedge behinde the coulture vnderneath the beame, and one on the furrow side, or right side, the beame vnderneath also. now, if your coulture haue too much land, then you shall driue in your vpper side wedge and ease the contrary: if it haue too little land, then you shall contrarily driue in your right side vnder wedge and ease the other: if your coulture stand too forward, then you shall driue in your vpper wedge which standeth before the coulture; and if it stand too backward and too néere your share, then you shall driue in your vnder wedge which standeth behinde the coulture: if your coulture standeth awry any way, then are either your side wedges too small, or else not euen and plaine cut, which faults you must amend, and then all will be perfect. now, when your irons are iust and truely placed, then you shall driue in euery wedge hard and firme, that no shaking or other straine may loosen them: as for the plough foote it also must haue a wedge or two, which when your plough goeth right and to your contentment (for the foote will kéepe it from sinking or rising) then you shall also driue them in hard, that the foote may not stirre from the true place where you did set it. and that these things when a man commeth into the field may not be to séeke, it is the office of euery good husbandman neuer to goe forth with his plough but to haue his hatchet in a socket, fixt to his plough beame, and a good piece of hard wedge woode, in case any of your wedges should shake out and be lost. {sn: of holding the plough.} when your plough is thus ordered and tempered in good manner, and made fit for her worke, it then resteth that you know the skill and aduantages in holding thereof, which indéed are rules of much diuersitie, for if it be a stiffe, blacke clay which you plow, then can you not plow too déepe, nor make your furrowes too bigge: if it be a rich hassell ground, and not much binding, then reasonable furrowes, laid closse, are the best: but if it be any binding, stony, or sandy ground, then you cannot make your furrowes too small. as touching the gouerning of your plough, if you sée shée taketh too much land, then you shall writh your left hand a little to the left side and raise your plough rest somewhat from the ground: if shée taketh too little earth, then you shall raise vp your left hand, and carry your plough as in a direct line: if your plough-irons forbeare and will not bite on the earth at all, then it is a signe that you hang too heauy on the plough hales, raising the head of the plough from the ground, which errour you must amend, and of the two rather raise it vp behind then before, but to doe neither is best, for the plough hale is a thing for the hand to gouerne, and not to make a leaning stocke of: and thus much touching the tempring of the plough and making her fit for worke. chap. v. _the manner of plowing the rich, stiffe, blacke clay, his earings, plough, and other instruments._ of all soyles in this our kingdome there is none so rich and fruitfull, if it be well handled and husbanded, as is that which we call the stiffe, blacke, clay, and indeed is more blacker to looke on then any other soyle, yet some times it will turne vp very blewish, with many white vaines in it, which is a very speciall note to know his fruitfulnesse; for that blewish earth mixt with white is nothing else but very rich marle, an earth that in cheshire, lanckashire, and many other countries, serueth to manure and make fat their barrainest land in such sort that it will beare corne seauen yeeres together. this blacke clay as it is the best soyle, well husbanded, so it is of all soyles the worst if it be ill husbanded: for if it loose but one ardor, or seasenable plowing, it will not be recouered in foure yéeres after, but will naturally of it selfe put forth wilde oates, thistels, and all manner of offensiue wéedes, as cockle, darnell, and such like: his labour is strong, heauy, and sore, vnto the cattell that tilleth it, but to the husbandman is more easie then any other soyle, for this asketh but foure times plowing ouer at the most, where diuers other soyles aske fiue times, and sixe times, as shalbe shewed hereafter. but to come to the plowing of this soyle, i hold it méete to beginne with the beginning of the yéere, which with husbandmen is at plow-day, being euer the first munday after the twelft-day, at which time you shall goe forth with your draught, & begin to plow your pease-earth, that is, the earth where you meane to sow your pease, or beanes: for i must giue you to vnderstand, that these clayes are euer more naturall for beanes then pease, not but that they will beare both alike, only the husbandman imployeth them more for beanes, because pease & fitches wil grow vpon euery soyle, but beanes wil grow no where but on the clayes onely. this pease-earth is euer where barley grew the yéere before, & hath the stubble yet remayning thereon. you shal plow this pease-earth euer vpward, that is, you shall beginne on the ridge of the land, & turne all your furrowes vp, one against another, except your lands lye too high (which seldome can be séene) and then you shall begin at the furrow, & cast downe your land. now, when you haue plowed all your pease-ground, you shall let it so lye, till it haue receiued diuers frosts, some raine, and then a fayre season, which betwixt plow-day and saint _valentines_ day you shalbe sure to inioy: and this is called, _the letting of land lye to baite_: for without this rest, and these seasons, it is impossible to make these clayes harrow, or yéelde any good mould at all. after your land hath receiued his kindely baite, then you shall cast in your séede, of beanes, or pease: but in my conceit, an equall mixture of them is the best séede of all, for if the one faile, the other will be sure to hit: and when your land is sowne you shall harrow it with a harrow that hath woodden téeth. the next ardor after this, is the sowing of your barley in your fallow field: the next is the fallowing of your ground for barley the next yéere: the next ardor is the summer-stirring of that which you fallowed: the next is the foyling of that which you summer-stirde: and the last is the winter rigging of that which you foil'd: of all which ardors, and the manner of plowing them, with their seasons, i haue written sufficiently in the first chapter of the next part; where i speake of simple earths vncompounded. now whereas i told you before that these clayes were heauy worke for your cattell, it is necessary that i shew you how to ease them, and which way they may draw to their most aduantage, which onely is by drawing in beare-geares, an inuention the skilfull husbandman hath found out, wherein foure horses shall draw as much as sixe, and sixe as eight, being geard in any other contrary fashion. now because the name onely bettereth not your knowledge, you shall heare behould the figure and manner thereof. {illustration} now you shall vnderstand the vse of this figure by the figures therein contayned, that is to say, the figure ( ) presenteth the plough-cleuisse, which being ioyned to the plough-beame, extendeth, with a chaine, vnto the first toastrée: and touching this cleuisse, you shall vnderstand, that it must be made with thrée nickes in the midst thereof, that if the plough haue too much land giuen it in the making, that is, if it turne vp too much land, then the chaine shall be put in the outwardmost nicke to the land side, that is, the nicke towards your right hand: but if it take too little land, then it shall be put in the nicke next the furrow, that is, towards the right hand: but if it goe euen and well, then you shall kéepe it in the middle nicke, which is the iust guide of true proportion. and thus this cleuisse is a helpe for the euill making or going of a plough. ( ) is the hind-most toastrée, that is, a broad piece of ash woode, thrée inches broad, which going crosse the chaine, hath the swingletrées fastned vnto it, by which the horses draw. now you shall vnderstand that in this toastrée is great helpe and aduantage: for if the two horses which draw one against the other, be not of equall strength, but that the one doth ouer-draw the other, then you shall cause that end of the toastrée by which the weaker horse drawes, to be longer from the chaine then the other, by at least halfe a foote, and that shall giue the weaker horse such an aduantage, that his strength shall counterpoyse with the stronger horse. now there be some especiall husbandmen that finding this disaduantage in the toastrée, and that by the vncertaine shortening, and lenthening of the toastrée, they haue sometimes more disaduantaged the strong horse, then giuen helpe to the weake, therefore they haue inuented another toastrée, with a double chaine, and a round ring, which is of that excellent perfection in draught, that if a foale draw against an olde horse, yet the foale shall draw no more then the abilitie of his owne strength, each taking his worke by himselfe, as if they drew by single chaines. now because this toastrée is such a notable implement both in plough, cart, or waine, and so worthy to be imitated of all good husbands, i thinke it not amisse to shew you the figure thereof. {illustration: the toastree with double chaines.} ( ) the swingletrées, being pieces of ash wood cut in proportion afore-shewed, to which the treates, by which the horses draw, are fastned with strong loopes. ( ) the treates by which the horses draw, being strong cords made of the best hempe. ( ) the place betwéene the treats, where the horses must stand. ( ) the hames, which girt the collers about, to which the other end of the treats are fastned, being compassed pieces of wood, eyther cleane ash, or cleane oake. ( ) the round withes of wood, or broad thongs of leather, to put about the horses necke, to beare the maine chayne from the ground, that it trouble not the horses in their going. ( ) the single-linckes of iron, which ioyne the swingle-trées vnto the toastrées. ( ) the belly-bands, which passe vnder the belly of the horse, and are made fast to both sides of the treates, kéeping them downe, that when the horse drawes, his coller may not choake him: being made of good small line or coard. ( ) the backe-bands, which going ouer the horses backe, and being made fast to both sides of the treates, doe hold them, so as when the horses turne, the treates doe not fall vnder their féete. {sn: how many beasts in a plough.} thus i haue giuen you the perfect portraiture of a well yoakt plough, together with his implements, and the vse of them, being the best which hath yet béene found out by any of our skilfullest english husbandmen, whose practise hath béene vpon these déepe, stiffe, blacke clayes. now you shall vnderstand, that for the number of cattell to be vsed in these ploughes, that in fallowing your land, and plowing your pease-earth, eight good cattell are the best number, as being the strongest, and within the compasse of gouernment, whereas more were but troublesome, and in all your other ardors, sixe good beasts are sufficient, yet if it be so, that eyther want of abilitie, or other necessity vrge, you shall know that sixe beasts will suffice eyther to fallow, or to plow pease-earth, and foure beasts for euery other ardor or earing: and lesse then this number is most insufficient, as appeares by daily experience, when poore men kill their cattell onely by putting them to ouer-much labour. and thus much touching the plowing of the blacke clay. chap. vi. _the manner of plowing the white or gray clay, his earings, plough, and instruments._ now as touching the white or gray clay, you shall vnderstand that it is of diuers and sundry natures, altering according to his tempers of wet or drynesse: the wet being more tough, and the dry more brittle: his mixture and other characters i haue shewed in a former chapter, wherefore for his manner of plowing (obseruing my first methode, which is to beginne with the beginning of the yéere, i meane at christmas) it is thus: {sn: of sowing of pease and beanes.} if you finde that any of this white or gray clay, lying wet, haue lesse mixture of stone or chaulke in it, and so consequently be more tough, as it doth many times fall out, and that vpon such land, that yéere, you are to sow your pease and beanes: for as in the former blacke clay, so in this gray clay you shall begin with your pease-earth euer: then immediately after plow-day, you shall plow vp such ground as you finde so tough, in the selfe-same manner as you did plow the blacke clay, and so let it lye to baite till the frost haue seasoned it, and then sow it accordingly. but if you haue no such tough land, but that it holdes it owne proper nature, being so mixt with small stones and chaulke, that it will breake in reasonable manner, then you shall stay till the latter end of ianuary, at what time, if the weather be seasonable, and inclining to drynesse, you shall beginne to plow your pease-earth, in this manner: first, you shall cause your séedes-man to sow the land with single casts, as was shewed vpon the blacke clay, with this caution, that the greater your séede is, (that is, the more beanes you sow) the greater must be your quantitie: and being sowne, you shall bring your plough, and beginning at the furrow of the land, you shall plow euery furrow downeward vpon the pease and beanes: which is called sowing of pease vnder furrow: and in this manner you shall sow all your pease and beanes, which is cleane contrary to your blacke clay. besides, whereas vpon the stiffe clay it is conuenient to take as large furrowes as you please, vpon this kinde of gray clay you shall take as small furrowes as is possible. now the reason for this manner of plowing your pease-earth, is, because it is a light kinde of breaking earth, so that should it be sowne according to the stiffe blacke clay, it would neuer couer your pease, but leaue them bare, both to be destroyed by the fowles of the ayre, and the bitternesse of the weather. as soone as your pease and beanes are risen a fingers length aboue the earth, then if you finde that any of your lands doe lye very rough, and that the clods be great, it shall not be amisse, to take a payre of woodden harrowes, and harrow ouer all your rough lands, the benefit whereof is this, that it will both breake the hard clots, and so giue those pease leaue to sprout through the earth, which before lay bound in and drowned, and also lay your lands smooth and cleane, that the mowers when they come to mowe your pease and beanes, shall haue better worke, and mowe them with more ease, and much better to the owners profit. for you must vnderstand that where you sow beanes, there it is euer more profit to mowe them with sythes, then to reape them with hookes, and much sooner, and with lesse charge performed. the limitation of time for this ardor of earing, is from the latter end of ianuary vntill the beginning of march, not forgetting this rule, that to sow your pease and beanes in a shower, so it be no beating raine is most profitable: because they, as wheat, take delight in a fresh and a moyst mould. {sn: of sowing of barley.} after the beginning of march, you shall beginne to sow your barley vpon that ground which the yéere before did lye fallow, and is commonly called your tilth, or fallow field: and if any part of it consist of stiffe and tough ground, then you shall, vpon such ground, sow your barley vnder furrow, in such manner and fashion as i described vnto you for the sowing of your stiffe blacke clay: but if it be (as for the most part these gray and white clayes are) of a much lighter, and as it were, fussie temper, then you shall first plow your land vpward, cleane and well, without baukes or stiches: and hauing so plowed it, you shall then sow it with barley, that is to say, with double casts, i meane, bestowing twise so many casts of barley, as you would doe if you were to sow it with pease. and as soone as you haue sowne your barley, you shall take a payre of woodden harrowes, and harrow it as small as is possible: and this is called sowing aboue furrow. {sn: of sowing oates.} now if you haue any land, which eyther through the badnesse of the soyle, or for want of manure, is more barrayne, and hard to bring forth then generally the rest of your land is, then you shall not bestow barley thereupon, but sow it with oates, in such manner and fashion as is appointed for the sowing of pease, that is to say, if it be stiffe ground you shall sow it aboue furrow, if it be light ground, then you shall sow it vnder furrow, knowing this for a rule, that the barraynest ground will euer beare indifferent oates, but if the ground haue any small hart, then it will beare oates in great abundance: neither néede you to be very precise for the oft plowing of your ground before you sow your oates, because oates will grow very well if they be sowne vpon reasonable ground, at the first plowing: whence it comes to passe that many husbandmen doe oft sow their oates where they should sow their pease, and in the same manner as they doe sow their pease, and it is held for a rule of good husbandry also: because if the ground be held any thing casuall for pease, it is better to haue good oates then naughty pease: besides, your oates are both a necessary graine in the house, as for oate-meale, for the pot, for puddings, and such like, and also for the stable, for prouender, and the féeding of all manner of poultry. the time for sowing of your barley and oates, is from from the first of march till the first of aprill, obseruing euer to sow your oates first, and your barley after, for it being onely a summer graine, would participate as little as may be with any part of the winter. {sn: of fallowing.} {sn: of sleighting barley.} about the middest of aprill you shall beginne to fallow that part of your ground, which you entend shall take rest that yéere, and so become your fallow or tilth-field. and in fallowing this gray or white clay, you shall obserue all those rules and ceremonies, which are formerly described for the fallowing of the stiffe blacke clay, knowing that there is in this worke no difference betwéene the blacke clay, and the gray clay, but both to be plowed after one manner, that is to say, to haue all the furrowes cast downeward, and the ridges of the lands laid largely open, and of a good depth, onely the furrowes which you turne vpon this gray clay must be much smaller and lesse then those which you turne vpon your stiffe blacke clay, because this earth is more naturally inclined to binde and cleaue together then that of the blacke clay. the time for fallowing of this ground, is from the middest of aprill vntill the middest of may: at what time you shall perceiue your barley to appeare aboue the ground, so that then you shall beginne to sleight and smooth it: but not with backe harrowes, as was described for the blacke clay, because this gray clay being not so fat and rich, but more inclined to fastnesse and hardnesse, therefore it will not sunder and breake so easily as the other: wherefore when you will smooth or sleight this ground, you shall take a round piece of wood, being in compasse about at least thirty inches, and in length sixe foote, hauing at each end a strong pinne of iron, to which making fast two small poales, by which the horse shall draw, yet in such sort that the round piece of wood may roule and turne about as the horse drawes it: and with this you shall roule ouer all your barley, and by the waight of the round piece of wood bruise and breake all the hard clots asunder. this is called amongst husbandmen a rouler, and is for this purpose of sleighting and smoothing of grounds of great vse and profit. now you shall vnderstand that you must not at any time sleight or smooth your corne, but after a shower of raine, for if the mould be not a little moistned the rouler will not haue power to breake it. now for as much as this rouler is of so good vse and yet not generally vsed in this kingdome, i thinke it not amisse to shew you the figure thereof. {illustration: the great rouler.} as soone as you haue roulled ouer your barley, & laid it so smooth as you can with your rouler, if then you perceiue any hard clots, such as the rouler cannot breake, then you shal send forth your seruants with long clotting béetels, made broad and flat, and with them you shall breake asunder all those hard clots, and so lay your barley as smooth and cleane as is possible: the profit whereof you shall both finde in the multiplying of your corne and also in the sauing of your sithes from breaking, at such time as you shall come to mowe your corne, and gather in your haruest. {sn: of summer-stirring.} {sn: of weeding.} {sn: of stone gathering.} your barley being thus laide smooth, you shall then follow your other necessary businesses, as preparing of your fewell, and other néedements for houshould, vntill the beginning of iune, at which time you shall beginne to summer-stirre your fallow field, which shalbe done in all points after the same manner as you did summer-stirre your blacke clay, that is to say, you shall beginne in the ridge of the land, and as when you fallowed your land you turned your furrowes downeward, so now in summer-stirring, you shall turne your furrowes vpward and close the ridge of you land againe. as soone as this ardor is finished, or when the vnseasonablenesse of the weather, as either too much wet, or too much drynesse shall hinder you from plowing, you shall then looke into your cornefields, that is to say: first into your wheate and rye field, and if there you shall finde any store of wéedes, as thistell, darnell, tare-cockle, or such like, you shall with weede-hookes, or nippers of woode, cut, or plucke them vp by the rootes; and also if you finde any annoyance of stones, which hinders the growth of your corne, as generally it happens in this soyle, you shall then cause some boyes and girles, or other waste persons, to gather them vp and lay them in heapes at the lands ends, to be imployed either about the mending of high wayes or other occasions, and for this purpose their is a generall custome in most villages, that euery houshoulder is bound to send out one seruant to be imployed about this businesse: whence it comes to passe, that it is called common worke, as being done at the generall charge of the whole parish. after you haue wéeded your wheate and rye, you shall then wéede your barley also, which being finished about the midst of iuly, you shall then beginne to looke into your medowes and to the preparing of your hay haruest. {sn: of foyling.} now at such time as either the vnseasonablenesse of the weather, or the growth of your grasse shall hinder you from following that businesse of haruest, you shall then looke into your fallow or tilth field againe, and whereas before at your summer-stirring you plowed your land vpward, now you shall beginne to foile, that is to say, you shall cast your land downe againe, and open the ridge: and this ardor of all other ardors you must by no meanes neglect vpon the gray, white clay, because it being most subiect vnto wéede, and the hardest to bring to a fine mould, this ardor of all others, doth both consume the one and makes perfect the other, and the drier season you doe foile your land in, the better it is, and the more it doth breake and sunder the clots in pieces: for as in summer-stirring the greater clots you raise vp, and the rougher your land lies the better it is, because it is a token of great store of mould, so when you foile, the more you breake the clots in pieces the better season will your land take, and the richer it wilbe when the séede is sowne into it: and the season for the foiling of this soile is from the midst of iuly till the midst of september. {sn: of manuring.} now albe i haue omitted the manuring of this land in his due place, as namely, from the midst of aprill, till the end of may, yet you shall vnderstand that of all other things it is not in any wise to be neglected by the carefull husbandman, both because the soyle being not so rich as the blacke clay, will very hardly bring forth his séede without manure, and also because it is for the most part subiect vnto much wet, and stones, both which are signes of cold and barrainenesse. now for those manures, which are best and most proper for this soile, you shall vnderstand that all those which i formerlie described for the blacke claies, as namely, oxe or cowes dung, horse dung and shéepes dung, are also very good for this soile, and to be vsed in the same manner as is specified in the former chapter: but if you haue not such store of this manure as will serue to compasse your whole land, you shall then vnderstand, that the blacke mud, or durt which lies in the bottome of olde ponds, or else standing lakes, is also a very good manure for this soile, or else straw which is spread in high-wayes, and so rotted by the great concourse or vse of much trauelling, and after in the spring-time shouelled vp in great heapes, is a good manure for this earth: but if you finde this soile to be subiect to extraordinary wet and coldnesse, you shall then know that the ashes eyther of wood, coale, or straw, is a very good manure for it. but aboue all other, and then which there is no manure more excellent for cold barraine clayes of this nature, the pigions dung, or the dung of houshold pullen, as capons, hennes, chickens, turkies, and such like, so there be no goose-dung amongst it, is the best of all other: but not to be vsed in such sort as the other manures, that is to say, to be laid in great heapes vpon the land, or to be spread from the cart vpon the land, for neyther is there such abundance of such manure to be gotten, nor if there were, it would not be held for good husbandrie to make lauish hauocke of a thing so precious. {sn: the vse of pigion or pullen-dung.} you shall then know that for the vse of pigion or pullen-dung, it is thus: you shall first with your hand breake it as small as may be, and then put it into the hopper, in such sort as you put your corne when you sow it: and then looke how you sow your corne, in such sort you shall sow your pigion or pullen-dung: which done, you shall immediately put your barley into the same hopper, and so sow it after the pigions or pullen-dung: by which you are to vnderstand that this kinde of manuring is to be vsed onely in séede-time, and at no other season. this manure is of the same nature that shéepes manure is, and doth last but onely for one yéere, onely it is much hotter, as being in the greatest extremitie of heate. now if it happen that you cannot get any of this pigions or pullen-dung, because it is scarce, and not in euery mans power, if then you take lime and sow it vpon your land in such sort as is before said of the pigions-dung, and then sow your corne after it, you shall finde great profit to come thereon, especially in colde wet soiles, such as for the most part, these gray white clayes are. {sn: of sowing wheate.} after your land is foild, which worke would be finished by the middest of september, then you shall beginne to sow your wheate, rye, and maslin, which in all things must be done as is before set downe for the blacke clay, the choice of séede, and euery obseruation being all one: for wheate not taking delight in a very rich ground, doth prosper best vpon this indifferent soile. whence it comes that in these gray white clayes, you shall for the most part, sée more wheate sowne then any other graine whatsoeuer. but as touching your rye and maslin, that euer desires a rich ground and a fine mould, and therefore you shall make choise of your better earth for that séede, and also obserue to helpe it with manure, or else shéepes folding, in such manner as is described in the former chapter, where i spake of the sowing of wheate, rye, and maslin. {sn: of winter-ridging.} as soone as you haue sowne your wheate, rye, and maslin, you shall then about the latter end of october, beginne to winter ridge, or set vp your land for the whole yéere: which you shall doe in all points, as you doe vpon the blacke clay, without any change or alteration. and the limitation for this ardor is, from the latter end of october vntill the beginning of december, wherein your yéeres worke is made perfect and compleate. {sn: obseruations.} now you shall vnderstand, that although i haue in this generall sort passed ouer the ardors and seuerall earings of this white or gray clay, any of which are in no wise to be neglected: yet there are sundry other obseruations to be held of the carefull husbandman, especially in the laying of his land: as thus, if the soile be of good temper, fruitfull, drie, and of a well mixed mould, not being subiect to any naturall spring or casting forth of moisture, but rather through the natiue warmth drying vp all kinde of fluxes or colde moistures, neyther binding or strangling the séede, nor yet holding it in such loosenesse, that it loose his force of increasing, in this case it is best to lay your lands flat and leuell, without ridges or furrowes, as is done in many parts of cambridge-shire, some parts of essex, and some parts of hartford-shire: but if the clay be fruitfull and of good temper, yet either by the bordering of great hils, the ouer-flow of small brookes, or some other casuall meanes it is subiect to much wet or drowning, in this case you shall lay your lands large and high, with high ridges and déepe furrowes, as generally you sée in lincolne-shire, nottingham-shire, huntington-shire, and most of the middle shires in england. but if the land be barraine, colde, wet, subiect to much binding, and doth bring forth great store of wéedes, then you shall lay your land in little stiches, that is to say, not aboue thrée or foure furrowes at the most together, as is generally séene in middlesex, hartford-shire, kent and surrey: for by that meanes neither shall the land binde and choake the corne, nor shall the wéede so ouer-runne it, but that the husbandman may with good ease helpe to strengthen and clense it, the many furrowes both giuing him many passages, whereby he may correct those enormities, and also in such sort conuaying away the water and other moistures, that there cannot be made any land more fruitfull. {sn: of the plough.} now to speake of the plough which is best and most proper for this gray or white clay, of which we now speake, you shall vnderstand that it differeth excéeding much from that of which we spake concerning the blacke clay: i, and in such sort, that there is but small alliance or affinitie betwéene them: as thus for example: first, it is not so large and great as that for the blacke clay: for the head thereof is not aboue twentie inches in length, and not aboue one inch and a halfe in thicknesse, the maine beame thereof is not aboue fiue foot long, & the rest is broader by an inch and more then that for the blacke clay: this plough also hath but one hale, & that is onely the left hand hale: for the plough-staffe, or aker-staffe serueth euer in stead of the right hand hale, so that the rough-staues are fixed, the vpper vnto the shelboard, and the neather vnto the plough-rest, as for your better vnderstanding you may perceiue by this figure. {illustration: the plough with one hale.} now you shall vnderstand that the especiall care which is to be held in the making of this plough, is, that it be wide and open in the hinder part, that it may turne and lay the furrowes one vpon another: whereas if it should be any thing straitned in the hinder part, considering that this clay naturally is somewhat brittle of it selfe, and that the furrowes which you plow must of necessitie be very narrow and little, it were not possible so to lay them, but that they would fall downe backe againe, and inforce the plow-man to lose his labour. also you shall vnderstand that whereas in the former plough, which is for the blacke clay, you may turne the shelboard, that is, when the one end is worne, you may eftsoones turne the other, and make it serue the like season: in this plough you must neuer turne the shelboard, because the rising wing of the share will so defend it, that it will euer last as long as the plough-head, without change or turning. now for the irons belonging vnto this plough, which is the share and coulture, there is more difference in them then in the plough: for to speake first of the share, whereas the former share for the blacke clay, was made broad, plaine, and with a large wing, this share must be made narrow, sharpe, and small, with no wing at all, hauing from the vpper part thereof, close by the shelboard, a certaine rising wing, or broad piece of iron, which comming vp and arming that part of the shelboard which turnes ouer the land, defends the wood from the sharpe mould, which hauing the mixture of pible stone in it, would otherwise in lesse then one dayes worke consume the shelboard vnto nothing, forcing the plow-man to much trouble and double cost. the fashion of the share is presented in this figure following. {illustration: the share.} this share is onely made that it may take a small furrow, and so by breaking the earth oftner then any other share, causeth the land to yéeld a good and plentifull mould, and also kéepe it from binding or choaking the séede when it is cast into it. now for the coulture, it differeth from the former coulture both in breadth and thicknesse, but especially in compasse: for whereas the former coulture for the blacke clay, was made straight, narrow, and thicke, this must be compassed like an halfe bent bow: it must be broader then thrée fingers, and thinner then halfe an inche, according to this figure. {illustration: the coulture.} now when these irons, the shelboard, and other implements are fixed vnto the plough, you shall perceiue that the plough will carry the proportion of this figure following. {illustration: the plough for the gray clay.} hauing thus shewed you the substance, difference, and contraries of these two ploughs, which belong to these two seuerall clayes, the blacke and gray, you shall vnderstand that there is no clay-ground whatsoeuer, which is without other mixture, but one of these ploughs will sufficiently serue to eare and order it: for all clayes are of one of these tempers. {sn: the vse and handling.} now for the vse and manner of handling or holding this plough, it differeth nothing in particular obseruation from the vse and handling of the plough formerly described, more then in the largenesse and smalnesse of the furrowes: for as before i said, whereas the blacke clay must be raised with a great furrow, and a broad stitch, this gray clay must be raised with a small furrow, and a narrow stitch: and although this plough haue nothing but a left hand hale, yet considering the plough-staffe, vpon which the plow-man resteth his right hand, it is all one as if he had a right. and indéede, to make your knowledge the more perfect, you shall know that these gray clayes are generally in their owne natures so wet, tough, and slimy, and doe so clogge, cleaue, and choake vp the plough, that hée which holds it shall haue enough to doe with his right hand onely to clense and kéepe the plough from choaking, insomuch that if there were another hale, yet the plow-man should haue no leasure to hold it. {sn: of the draught or teame.} now for the draught or teame which should draw this plough, they ought in all points, as well in strength as tryuing to be the same with those before shewed for the vse of the blacke clay: as namely, eyther oxen or horse, or horse and oxen mixt together, according to the custome of the soile wherein the plow-man liues, or his abilitie in prouision, obseruing euer to kéepe his number of beasts for his plough certaine, that is to say, for fallowing, and pease-earth, neuer vnder sixe, and for all other ardors foure at the least. and thus much for the plowing of this gray or white clay. chap. vii. _the manner of plowing the red-sand, his earings, plough, and implements._ next vnto these clayes, which are soiles simple and vncompound, as being perfect in their owne natures, without the helpe of other mixtures, i place the sand soiles, as being of like qualitie, not borrowing any thing but from their owne natures, nor bréeding any defects more then their owne naturall imperfections: and of sands, sith the red sand is the best and most fruitfull, therefore it is fit that it take prioritie of place, and be here first spoken of. you shall then vnderstand that this red sand, albeit it is the best of sands, yet it is the worst of many soiles, as being of it selfe of such a hot and drie nature, that it scorcheth the séede, and dryeth vp that nutriment and fatnesse which should occasion increase: whereby it comes to passe, that the barley which growes vpon this red sand is euer more yealow, leane and withered, then that which growes vpon the clayes or other mixt earths. this sand especially taketh delight in rye, because it is a graine which loues warmth aboue all other, and yet notwithstanding, if it be well ordered, manured and plowed, it will bring forth good store of barley, albeit the barley be not so good as clay-barley, either for the colour, or for the yéeld, whether it be in meale or in malt. {sn: of fallowing.} now for the manner of earing or plowing this redde sand, it differeth much from both the former soyles, insomuch that for your better vnderstanding, i must in many places alter my former methode, yet so little as may be, because i am loath to alter or clogge the memory of the reader: wherefore to pursue my purpose. as soone as christmas is ended, that is to say, about the middest of ianuary, you shall goe with your plough into that field where the haruest before did grow your rye, and there you shall in your plowing cast your lands downe-ward, and open the ridges well, for this yéere it must be your fallow field: for as in the former soiles, wée did diuide the fields either into thrée parts, that is, one for barley and wheate, another for pease, and the third fallow, which is the best diuision: or into foure parts, that is, one for wheate and rye, another for barley, a third for pease, and a fourth fallow, which is the worst diuision and most toilesome, so in this red sand soile, we must euer diuide it into thrée parts, that is, one for barley, another for rye, and a third fallow. for this sand-soile being hot, drie, and light, will neither bring forth good beanes nor good pease, and therefore that ardor is in this place but onely to be spoke of by way of discourse in vrgent necessitie. wherefore (as before i said) about the middest of ianuary you shall beginne to lay fallow that field, where formerly did grow your rye, the manner of plowing whereof differeth nothing from the manner of plowing the clayes before written of, onely that the discretion of the plow-man must thus farre forth gouerne him, that in as much as this soile is lighter, dryer, and of a more loose temper, by so much the more he must be carefull to make his furrowes lesse, and to lay them the closer together: & also in as much as this soile, through his naturall warmth and temperate moisture, is excéeding apt to bring forth much wéede, especially brakes, ling, brambles, and such like, therefore the plow-man shall be very carefull to plow all his furrowes very cleane, without baukes or other impediments by which may be ingendred any of these inconueniences. {sn: of spring-foyling.} after you haue thus broke vp and fallowed your fallow or tilth-field, the limitation of which time is from the middest of ianuary vntill the middest of february, you shall then at the middest of february, when the clay-men begin to sow their beanes and pease, goe with your plough into your other fallow-field, which all the yéere before hath laine fallow and already receiued at your hands at least foure seuerall ardors; as fallowing, summer-stirring, foyling, and winter-rigging; and there you shall plow all that field ouer the fift time, which is called the spring-foyling: and in this ardor you shall plow all your lands vpward, in such sort as when you winter-ridge it, by which meanes you shall plow vp all those wéedes which haue sprung forth in the winter season. for you must vnderstand that in these light, hot, sandy soiles, there is a continuall spring (though not of good fruits) yet of wéeds, quicks, and other inconueniences: for it is a rule amongst husbandmen, that warme soiles are neuer idle, that is, they are euer bringing forth something. {sn: of sowing march-rye.} now the limitation for this ardor is from the middest of februarie vntill the middest of march, at which time you shall, by comparing former experience with your present iudgement, take into your consideration the state, goodnesse, and powerfulnesse of your land, i meane especially of this fallow-field, which hath laine fallow the yéere before, and hath now receiued fiue ardors: and if you finde any part of it, either for want of good ordoring in former times, or for want of manure in the present yéere, to be growne so leane and out of hart, that you feare it hath not strength enough to beare barley, you shall then at this time, being the middest of march, sow such land with rye, which of husbandmen is called the sowing of march-rye: and this rye is to be sowne and harrowed in such sort as you did sow it vpon the clay soiles, that is to say, aboue furrow, and not vnder furrow, except the land be very full of quickes, that is, of brakes, ling, brambles, dockes, or such like, and then you shall first with a paire of iron harrowes, that is, with harrowes that haue iron téeth, first of all harrow the land ouer, and by that meanes teare vp by the rootes all those quickes, and so bring them from the land: which done, you shall sow the land ouer with rye, and then plow it downeward which is vnder furrow: & as soone as it is plowed, you shall then with a paire of iron harrowes harrow it all ouer so excéedingly, that the mould may be made as fine, and the land lie as smooth as is possible. {sn: of the harrow.} now because i haue in the former chapters spoke of harrowes and harrowing, yet haue not deliuered vnto you the shape and proportion thereof, and because both the woodden harrow and the iron harrow haue all one shape, and differ in nothing but the téeth onely, i thinke it not amisse before i procéede any further to shew you in this figure the true shape of a right harrow. {illustration: the harrow.} the parts of this harrow consisteth of buls, staues, and téeth: of buls, which are broad thicke pieces eyther of well seasoned willow, or sallow, being at least thrée inches euery way square, into which are fastned the téeth: of staues, which are round pieces of well seasoned ash, being about two inches and a halfe about, which going thorow the buls, holde the buls firmely in equall distance one from the other: and of téeth, which are either long pinnes of wood or iron, being at least fiue inches in length, which are made fast, and set slope-wise through the buls. {sn: the diuersitie of harrowes.} now you shall vnderstand that harrowes are of two kindes, that is, single and double: the single harrow is called of husbandmen the horse-harrow, and is not aboue foure foote square: the double harrow is called the oxe-harrow, and it must be at least seauen foote square, and the téeth must euer be of iron. now whereas i spake of the horse-harrow and the oxe-harrow, it is to be vnderstood that the single harrow doth belong to the horse, because horses drawing single, doe draw each a seuerall harrow by himselfe, albeit in the common vse of harrowing, we couple two horses euer together, and so make them draw two single harrowes: but oxen not being in good husbandry to be separated, because euer two must draw in one yoake, therefore was the double harrow deuised, containing in substance and worke as much as two single harrowes. {sn: the vse of harrowes.} now for the vse of harrowes. the woodden harrow which is the harrow with woodden téeth, is euer to be vsed vpon clay grounds and light grounds, which through drynesse doth grow loose, and fals to mould of it owne nature, as most commonly sand grounds doe also: and the iron harrow which is the harrow with iron téeth, is euer to be vsed vpon binding grounds, such as through drynesse grow so hard that they will not be sundered, and through wet turne soone to mire and loose durt. now whereas there be mingled earths, which neither willingly yéeld to mould, nor yet bindes so sore, but small industry breaks it, of which earth i shall speake hereafter, to such grounds the best husbands vse a mixture, that is to say, one woodden harrow, and one iron harrow, that the woodden harrow turning ouer and loosening the loosest mould, the iron harrow comming after, may breake the stiffer clots, and so consequently turne all the earth to a fine mould. and thus much for harrowes. {sn: of the sowing of pulse.} {sn: of pease, lentles, and lupines.} now to returne to my former purpose touching the tillage of this red sand: if (as before i said) you finde any part of your fallow-field too weake to beare barley, then is your march-rye, a graine which will take vpon a harder earth: but if the ground be too weake either for barley or rye, (for both those séedes desire some fatnesse of ground) then shall you spare plowing it at all vntill this time of the yéere, which is mid-march, and then you shall plow it, and sow it with either the smallest pease you can get, or else with our true english fitches, which by forraine authors are called _lentles_, that is, white fitches, or _lupines_, which are red fitches: for all these thrée sorts of pulse will grow vpon very barraine soiles, and in their growth doe manure and make rich the ground: yet your pease desire some hart of ground, your _lentles_, or white fitches, lesse, and your _lupines_, or red fitches, the least of all, as being apt to grow vpon the barrainest soile: so likewise your pease doe manure barraine ground well, your _lentles_ better and your _lupines_ the best of all. now for the nature and vse of these graines, the pease as all husbandmen know, are both good for the vse of man in his bread, as are vsed in leicester-shire, lincolne-shire, nottingham-shire, and many other countries: and also for horses in their prouender, as is vsed generally ouer all england: for _lentles_, or white fitches, or the _lupines_ which are redde fitches, they are both indifferent good in bread for man, especially if the meale be well scalded before it be knodden (for otherwise the sauour is excéeding rancke) or else they are a very good foode being sodden in the manner of leaps-pease, especially at sea, in long iourneyes where fresh meate is most exceeding scarce: so that rather then your land should lye idle, and bring forth no profit, i conclude it best to sow these pulses, which both bring forth commoditie, and also out of their owne natures doe manure and inrich your ground, making it more apt and fit to receiue much better séede. for the manner of sowing these thrée sorts of pulse: you shall sow them euer vnder furrow, in such sort as is described for the sowing of pease and beanes vpon the white or gray clay which is of indifferent drinesse and apt to breake. {sn: of manuring.} now the limitation for this ardor or séede time, is from the middest of march, till the middest of aprill: then from the middest of aprill, till the middest of may, you shall make your especiall worke, to be onely the leading forth of your manure to that field which you did fallow, or lay tilth that present yéere immediatelie after christmas, and of which i first spake in this chapter. and herein is to be vnderstood, that the best and principallest manure for this redde-sand, is the ouldest manure of beasts which can be-gotten, which you shall know by the excéeding blacknesse and rottennesse thereof, being in the cutting both soft and smooth, all of one substance, as if it were well compact morter, without any shew of straw or other stuffe which is vnrotted, for this dung is of all the fattest and coolest, and doth best agrée with the nature of this hot sand. next to the dung of beasts, is the dung of horses if it be old also, otherwise it is somewhat of the hottest, the rubbish of old houses, or the swéepings of flowres, or the scowrings of old fish-ponds, or other standing waters where beasts and horses are vsed to drinke, or be washt, or wherevnto the water and moisture of dunghills haue recourse are all good manures for this redde-sand: as for the manure of shéepe vpon this redde-sand, it is the best of all in such places as you meane to sow rie, but not fully so good where you doe intend to sow your barley: if it be a cold moist redde-sand (which is seldome found but in some particular low countries) then it doth not amisse to manure it most with shéepe, or else with chaulke, lime, or ashes, of which you can get the greatest plentie: if this soile be subiect to much wéede and quickes, as generally it is, then after you haue torne vp the wéedes and quickes with harrowes, you shall with rakes, rake them together, and laying them in heapes vpon the land, you shall burne them and then spreading the ashes they will be a very good manure, and in short space destroy the wéedes also; likewise if your land be much ouergrowne with wéedes, if when you sheare your rie you leaue a good long stubble, and then mowing the stubble burne it vpon the land, it is both a good manure and also a good meanes to destroy the wéedes. {sn: of sowing barley.} after your manure is lead forth and either spread vpon the lands, or set in great heapes, so as the land may be couered ouer with manure (for it is to be obserued that this soile must be throughly manured) then about the middest of may, which is the time when this worke should be finished, you shall repaire with your plough into the other fallow field, which was prepared the yéere before for this yéeres barley, & there you shall sow it all ouer with barley aboue furrow, that is to say, you shall first plough it, then sow it, and after harrow it, making the mould as fine and smooth as may be, which is done with easie labour, because this sand of it owne nature is as fine as ashes. {sn: of summer-stirring.} {sn: of sleighting.} now the limitation for this séede time, is from the middest of may, till the middest of iune, wherein if any man demand why it should not be sowne in march and aprill, according as it is sowne in the former soiles, i answere, that first this redde-sand cannot be prepared, or receiue his full season in weather, and earings, before this time of the yéere, and next that these redde-sands, by how much they are hotter and drier then the other claies, by so much they may wel stay the longer before they receiue their séede, because that so much the sooner the séede doth sprout in them, & also the sooner ripen being kept warmer at the roote then in any could soile whatsoeuer. as soone as the middest of iune approacheth, you shall then beginne to summer-stirre your fallow field, and to turne your manure into your land, in such sort as you did vpon your clay soiles, for this ardor of summer-stirring altereth in no soile, and this must be done from the middest of iune, till the middest of iuly, for as touching sleighting, clotting, or smoothing of this barley field, it is seldome in vse, because the finenesse of the sand will lay the land smooth inough without sleighting: yet if you finde that any particular land lieth more rough then the rest, it shall not be amisse, if with your backe harrowes you smooth it a little within a day or two after it is sowne. {sn: of foiling.} {sn: of sowing rye.} from the middest of iuly vntill the middest of august, you shall foile and throw downe your fallow field againe, if your lands lie well and in good order, but if any of your lands doe lie in the danger of water, or by vse of plowing are growne too flat, both which are hinderances to the growth of corne, then when you foile your lands you shall plow them vpward, and so by that meanes raise the ridges one furrow higher. after you haue foiled your land, which must be about the middest of august, then will your barley be ready to mowe, for these hot soiles haue euer an earely haruest, which as soone as it is mowne and carried into the barne, forthwith you shall with all expedition carry forth such manure as you may conueniently spare, and lay it vpon that land from whence you receiued your barley, which is most barraine: and if you want cart manure, you shall then lay your fould of shéepe thereupon, and as soone as it is manured, you shall immediately plow both it & the rest, which ardor should be finished by the middest of september, and so suffered to rest vntill the beginning of october, at which time you shall beginne to sow all that field ouer with rye in such sort as hath béene spoken of in former places. {sn: obiection.} now in as much as the ignorant husbandman may very easiely imagine that i reckon vp his labours too thicke, and therein leaue him no leasure for his necessarie businesses, especially because i appoint him to foile his land from the middest of iuly, till the middest of august, which is both a busie time for his hay haruest, and also for his rye shearing. {sn: answere.} to this i make answere, that i write not according to that which poore men are able (for it were infinit to looke into estates) but according as euery good husband ought, presupposing that he which will liue by the plough, ought to pursue all things belonging vnto the plough, and then he shall finde that there is no day in the yéere, but the saboth, but it is necessarie that the plough be going: yet to reconcile the poore and the rich together, they shall vnterstand, that when i speake of plowing in the time of haruest, i doe not meane that they should neglect any part of that principall worke, which is the true recompence of their labour: but because whilst the dew is vpon the ground, or when there is either raine or mizling there is then no time for haruest worke, then my meaning is that the carefull husbandman shall take those aduantages, and rising earelier in the mornings, be sure to be at his plough two howers before the dew be from the ground, knowing that the getting but of one hower in the day compasseth a great worke in a month, neither shall hée néede to feare the ouer toiling of his cattell, sith at that time of the yéere grasse being at greatest plenty, strongest and fullest of hart, corne scattered almost in euery corner, and the mouth of the beast not being muzeld in his labour, there is no question but he will indure and worke more then at any other season. {sn: of winter ridging.} in the beginning of nouember, you shall beginne to winter-ridge your fallow, or tilth-field, which in all points shalbe done according to the forme described in the former soiles: for that ardor of all other neuer altereth, because it is as it were a defence against the latter spring, which else would fill the lands full of wéedes, and also against the rigor of winter, and therefore it doth lay vp the furrow close together, which taking the season of the frost, winde, and weather makes the mould ripe, mellow, and light: and the limitation for this ardor, is from the beginning of nouember, vntill the middest of december. {sn: of the plough.} {sn: of the coulture.} now as touching the plough which is best and most proper for this redde-sand, it differeth nothing in shape and composure of members from that plough which is described for the blacke clay, hauing necessarily two hales, because the ground being loose and light, the plough will with great difficulty hold land, but with the least disorder be euer ready to runne into the furrow, so that a right hand hale is most necessarie for the houlding of the plough euen, onely the difference of the two ploughes consisteth in this, that the plough for this red-sand, must be much lesse then the plough for the blacke clay houlding in the sizes of the timber the due proportion of the plough for the white or gray clay, or if it be somewhat lesse it is not amisse, as the head being eightéene inches, the maine beame not aboue foure foote, and betwéene the hinder part of the rest, and the out-most part of the plough head in the hinder end not aboue eight inches. now for the plough-irons which doe belong vnto this plough, the coulture is to be made circular, in such proportion as the coulture for the gray, or white clay, and in the placing, or tempering vpon the plough it is to be set an inch at least lower then the share, that it may both make way before the share, and also cut déeper into the land, to make the furrow haue more easie turning. {sn: of the share.} now for the share, it differeth in shape from both the former shares, for it is neither so large nor out-winged, as that for the gray clay, for this share is onely made broad to the plough ward, and small to the point of the share, with onely a little peake and no wing according to this figure. {illustration: the share.} {sn: of the plough-slip.} these plough-irons, both coulture and share, must be well stéeled and hardned at the points, because these sandy soiles being full of moisture and gréete, will in short space weare and consume the irons, to the great hinderance and cost of the husbandman, if it be not preuented by stéele and hardning, which notwithstanding will waste also in these soiles, so that you must at least twise in euery ardor haue your irons to the smith, and cause him to repaire them both with iron and stéele, besides these irons, of coulture and share, you must also haue a long piece of iron, which must be iust of the length of the plough head, and as broad as the plough head is thicke, and in thicknesse a quarter of an inch: and this piece of iron must be nailed vpon the outside of the plough head, next vnto the land, onely to saue the plough head from wearing, for when the plough is worne it can then no longer hould the land, and this piece of iron is called of husbandmen the plough-slip and presenteth this figure. {illustration: the plough-slip.} {sn: of plough clouts.} ouer and besides this plough-slip, their are certaine other pieces of iron which are made in the fashion of broad thinne plates, and they be called plough clouts, and are to be nailed vpon the shelboard, to defend it from the earth or furrow which it turneth ouer, which in very short space would weare the woode and put the husbandman to double charge. {sn: the houlding of the plough.} thus hauing shewed you the parts, members, and implements, belonging to this plough, it rests that i procéede vnto the teame or draught: for to speake of the vse and handling of this plough, it is néedelesse, because it is all one with those ploughes, of which i haue spoken in the former chapters, and he which can hould and handle a plough in stiffe clayes must néedes (except he be excéeding simple) hould a plough in these light sands, in as much as the worke is much more easie and the plough a great deale lesse chargeable. {sn: of the draught.} now for the draught or teame, they ought to be as in the former soiles, oxen or horses, yet the number not so great: for foure beasts are sufficient to plow any ardor vpon this soile, nay, thrée horses if they be of reasenable strength will doe as much as sixe vpon either of the clay-soiles: asfor their attire or harnessing, the beare-geares, before described, are the best and most proper. and thus much concerning this red sand, wherein you are to take this briefe obseruation with you, that the graines which are best to be sowne vpon it, are onely rye, barley, small pease, _lentles_ and _lupines_, otherwise called fitches, and the graines to which it is aduerse, are wheat, beanes and maslin. chap. viii. _the manner of plowing the white sand, his earings, plough, and implements._ next vnto this red sand, is the white sand, which is much more barraine then the red sand, yet by the industry of the husbandman in plowing, and by the cost of manure it is made to beare corne in reasonable plentie. now of white sands there be two kindes, the one a white sand mixt with a kinde of marle, as that in norffolke, suffolke, and other such like places butting vpon the sea-coast: the other a white sand with pible, as in some parts of surrey, about ancaster in lincolne shire, and about salisbury in wil-shire. {sn: of the white sand with pible.} now for this white sand with pible, it is the barrainest, and least fruitfull in bringing forth, because it hath nothing but a hot dustie substance in it. for the manner of earing thereof, it agréeth in all points with the redde sand, the ardors being all one, the tempers, manurings and all other appurtenances: the séede also which it delights in is all one with the red sand, as namely, rye, barley, pease and fitches. wherefore who so shall dwell vpon such a soile, i must referre him to the former chapter of the red sand, and therein he shall finde sufficient instruction how to behaue himselfe vpon this earth: remembring that in as much as it is more barraine then the red sand, by so much it craueth more care and cost, both in plowing and manuring thereof, which two labours onely make perfect the ill ground. {sn: of the white sand with marle.} now for the white sand which hath as it were a certaine mixture, or nature of marle in it, you shall vnderstand that albeit vnto the eye it be more dry and dustie then the red sand, yet it is fully as rich as the red sand: for albe it doe not beare barley in as great plenty as the red sand, yet it beareth wheate abundantly, which the red sand seldome or very hardly bringeth forth. {sn: of fallowing.} wherefore to procéede to the earings or tillage of this white marly sand, you shall vnderstand that about the middest of ianuary is fit time to beginne to fallow your field which shall be tilth and rest for this yéere: wherein by the way, before i procéede further, you shall take this obseruation with you, that whereas in the former soiles i diuided the fields into thrée & foure parts, this soile cannot conueniently, if it be well husbanded, be diuided into any more parts then two, that is to say, a fallow field, and a wheat-field: in which wheate-field if you haue any land richer then other, you may bestow barley vpon it, vpon the second you may bestow wheat, vpon the third sort of ground rye, and vpon the barrainest, pease or fitches: and yet all these must be sowne within one field, because in this white sand, wheate and rye will not grow after barley or pease, nor barley and pease after wheate or rye. your fields being then diuided into two parts, that is, one for corne, the other for rest, you shall as before i said, about the middest of ianuary beginne to fallow your tith-field, which in all obseruations you shall doe according as is mentioned for the red sand. {sn: of sowing pease.} about the middest of march, if you haue any barraine or wasted ground within your fallow field, or if you haue any occasion to breake vp any new ground, which hath not béene formerly broake vp, in eyther of these cases you shall sow pease or fitches thereupon, and those pease or fitches you shall sow vnder furrow as hath béene before described. {sn: of spring-fallowing.} about the middest of aprill you shall plow your fallow-field ouer againe, in such manner as you plowed when you fallowed it first: and this is called spring-fallowing, and is of great benefit because at that time the wéedes and quickes beginning to spring, nay, to flowrish, by reason that the heate of the climbe puts them forth sooner then in other soyles, if they should not be plowed vp before they take too strong roote, they would not onely ouer-runne, but also eate out the hart of the land. {sn: of sowing barley.} about the middest of may you shall beginne to sow your barley vpon the richest part of your old fallow-field, which at the michaelmas before, when you did sow your wheate, and rye, and maslin, you did reserue for that purpose: and this barley you shall sow in such sort as is mentioned in the former chapter of the red sand, in so much that this ardor being finished, which is the last part of your séede-time, your whole field shall be furnished eyther with wheate, if it hold a temperate fatnesse, or with wheate and barley, if it be rich and richer, or with wheate, barley and pulse, if it be rich, poore or extreame barraine: and the manner of sowing all these seuerall séedes is described in the chapters going before. {sn: of summer-stirring.} about the middest of iune you shall beginne to summer-stirre your fallow-field, in such sort as was spoken of in the former chapters concerning the other soiles: for in this ardor there is no alteration of methode, but onely in gouernment of the plough, considering the heauinesse and lightnesse of the earth. during this ardor you shall busily apply your labour in leading forth your manure, for it may at great ease be done both at one season, neyther the plough hindering the cart, nor the cart staying the plough: for this soile being more light and easie in worke then any other soile whatsoeuer, doth euer preserue so many cattell for other imployment that both workes may goe forward together, as shall be shewed when wee come to speake of the plough, and the teame which drawes it. {sn: of manuring.} now as touching the manures most fit for this soyle, they be all those of which we haue formerly written, ashes onely excepted, which being of an hot nature doe scald the séede, and detaine it from all fruitfulnesse, being mixt with this hot soile, so is likewise lyme, and the burning of stubble: other manures are both good and occasion much fertilitie, as being of a binding and coole nature, and holding together that loosenesse which in his too much separation taketh all nutriment from the earth. {sn: of weeding.} after you haue ledde forth your manure, and summer-stird your land, you shall then about the beginning of iulie looke into your corne-field, and if you perceiue any thistles, or any other superfluous wéedes to annoy your corne, you shall then (as is before said) either cut, or plucke them vp by the rootes. {sn: of foyling.} about the middest of august you shall beginne to foile or cast downe your fallow-field againe, and in that ardor you shall be very carefull to plow cleane and leaue no wéedes vncut vp: for in these hot soiles if any wéedes be left with the least roote, so that they may knit and bring forth séede, the annoyance thereof will remaine for at least foure yéeres after, which is a double fallowing. and to the end that you may cut vp all such wéedes cleane, although both your share and coulture misse them, you shall haue the rest of your plough in the vnder part which strokes alongst the earth filled all full of dragges of iron, that is, of olde crooked nailes or great tenter-hookes, such as vpon the putting downe of your right hand when you come néere a wéed shall catch hold thereof and teare it vp by the rootes, as at this day is vsed be many particular husbands in this kingdome, whose cares, skils, and industries are not inferiour to the best whatsoeuer. {sn: of sowing wheate and rye.} {sn: the choise of seede.} about the middest of september, you shall beginne to sow your wheate and rye vpon your fallow field, which graine vpon this soile is to be reckoned the most principall: and you shall sow it in the same manner that is described in the former chapters, wherein your especiallest care is the choise of your séede: for in this soile your whole-straw wheate, nor your great pollard taketh any delight, neither your organe, for all those thrée must haue a firme and a strong mould: but your chilter-wheate, your flaxen-wheate, your white-pollard, and your red-wheate, which are the wheates which yéeld the purest and finest meale, (although they grow not in so great abundance) are the séedes which are most proper and naturall for this soile. as for rye or maslin, according to the goodnesse of the ground so you shall bestow your séede: for it is a generall rule, that wheresoeuer your wheate growes, there will euer rye grow, but rye will many times grow where wheate will not prosper; and therefore for the sowing of your rye, it must be according to the temper of the earth, and the necessitie of your houshold: for wheate being a richer graine then rye, if you be assured that your ground will beare wheate well, it is small husbandrie to sow more rye or maslin then for your house: but if it be too hot for wheate, and kindly for rye, then it is better to haue good rye, then ill wheate. now for the sowing of your rye or maslin in this soile, it differeth nothing from the former soiles, either in plowing or any other obseruation, that is to say, it must be plowed aboue furrow: for rye being the most tender graine, it can neither abide the waight of earth, nor yet moisture; the one, as it were, burying, and the other drowning the vigour and strength of the séede. {sn: of winter-ridging.} about the beginning of nouember you shall winter-ridge your fallow field, i meane that part which you doe preserue for barley (for the other part is furnished with séede) and this winter-ridging differeth nothing from the winter ridging of other soiles, onely you shall a little more precisely obserue to set vp your lands more straight and high then in other soiles, both to defend them from wet, which this soile is much subiect vnto, because commonly some great riuer is neare it, and also for the preseruing of the strength and goodnesse of the manure within the land which by lying open and vnclosed would soone be washt forth and consumed. {sn: of the clensing of lands, or drawing of water-furrowes.} now sith i haue here occasion to speake something of the draining of lands, and the kéeping of them from the annoyance of superfluous wet, whether it be by invndation or otherwise, you shall vnderstand that it is the especiall office and dutie of euery good husbandman, not onely in this soile, but in all other whatsoeuer, to haue a principall respect to the kéeping of his land dry, and to that end hée shall diligently (as soone as he hath winter-rigged his land) take a carefull view how his lands lie, which way the descent goes from whence annoyance or water may possibly come, and so consequently from those obseruations, with a spade or strong plough, of extraordinary greatnesse, draw certaine déepe furrowes from descent vnto descent, by which meanes all the water may be conuayed from his lands, eyther into some common sewer, lake, brooke, or other maine riuer: and to this end it is both a rule in the common lawes of our land, and a laudable custome in the common-wealth of euery towne, that for as much as many townes haue their lands lie in common, that is to say, mixed neighbour with neighbour, few or none hauing aboue two or three lands at the most lying together in one place, therefore euery man shall ioyne, and make their water-furrowes one from another, vntill such time as the water be conuayed into some common issue, as well hée whose lands be without all danger, as he that is troubled with the greatest annoyance, and herein euery one shall beare his particular charge: which is an act of great vertue and goodnesse. {sn: of the plough.} now for the plough which is to plow this white sand it doth differ nothing in size, proportion, and vse of handling from the plough described for the red sand, onely it hath one addition more, that is to say, at the further end of the maine beame of the plough, where you fixe your plough-foote, there you shall place a little paire of round whéeles, which bearing the beame vpon a loose mouing axletrée, being iust the length of two furrows and no more, doth so certainly guide the plough in his true furrow that it can neither lose the land by swaruing (as in these light soiles euery plough is apt to doe) nor take too much land, eyther by the gréedinesse of the plough or sharpnesse of the irons, neither can it drownd through the easie lightnesse of the earth, nor runne too shallow through the fussinesse of the mould, but the whéeles being made of a true proportion, which should not be aboue twelue inches from the centre, the plough with a reasonable hand of gouernment shall runne in a direct and euen furrow: the proportion of which plough is contained in this figure. {illustration: the plough with wheeles.} this plough of all others i hold to be most ancient, and as being the modell of the first inuention, and at this day is preserued both in france, germany, & italy, and no other proportion of ploughes knowne, both as we perceiue by our experience in séeing them plow, & also by reading of their writings: for neither in _virgil_, _columella_, _xenophon_, nor any olde writer: nor in _heresbachius_, _steuens_, nor _libault_, being later writers, finde wée any other plough bequeathed vnto our memories. yet it is most certaine, that in many of our english soiles, this plough is of little profit, as we finde by daily experience both in our clayes, and many of our mixt earths: for in truth this plough is but onely for light, sandy, or grauelly soiles, as for the most part these forraine countries are, especially about the sea-coast, or the borders of great cities, from whence these writers most generally tooke the presidents for their writings. {sn: of the plough-irons.} now for the parts of this plough, it consisteth of the same members which the former ploughs doe, onely that in stead of the plough-foote it hath a paire of whéeles. it hath also but one hale, in such sort as the plough for the gray or white clay. the beame also of this plough is much more straight then the former, by which meanes the skeath is not full so long. the irons belonging vnto this plough are of the fashion of the former irons, onely they be somewhat lesse, that is to say, the coulture is not so long, neyther so full bent as that for the red sand, nor so straight as that for the blacke clay, but as it were holding a meane betwéene both: so likewise the share is not fully so broad as that for the red sand, nor so narrow as that for the gray clay, but holds as it were a middle size betwéene both, somewhat leaning in proportion to the shape of that for the blacke clay. as for the plough-slip, plough-clouts, and other implements which are to defend the wood from the hardnesse of the earth, they are the same, and in the same wise to be vsed as those for the red sand. {sn: of the draught.} now for the draught or teame which drawes this plough, they are as in all other draughts, oxen or horses, but for the number thereof they differ much from those which are formerly written of: for you shall vnderstand that in this white sandy soile, which is of all soiles the lightest, eyther two good horses, or two good oxen are a number sufficient to plow any ardor vpon this soile whatsoeuer, as by daily experience we may sée in those countries whose soile consists of this white light sand, of which wée haue now written: neyther shall the plow-man vpon this soile néede any person to driue or order his plough more then himselfe: for the soile being so light and easie to cut, the plough so nimble, and the cattell so few and so neare him, hauing euer his right hand at libertie (because his plough hath but onely a left hand hale) he hath liberty euer to carry a goade or whip in his right hand, to quicken and set forward his cattell, and also a line which being fastned to the heads of the beasts, hée may with it euer when hée comes to the lands end, stop them and turne them vpon which hand he pleases. and thus much for the tillage and ordering of this white sand. chap. ix. _the manner of plowing the grauell with pible stones, or the grauell with flint, their earings, plough, and implements._ hauing in the plainest manner i can written sufficiently already of the foure simple and vncompounded soiles, to wit, two clayes, blacke and gray, and two sands, red and white, it now rests that i also giue you some perfect touch or taste of the mixt or compounded soiles, as namely, the grauell which is a kinde of hard sand, clay and stone mixt together: and of grauels there be two kindes, that is to say, one that is mixt with little small pible stones, as in many parts of middlesex, kent, and surry: and the grauell mixt with broad flints, as in many parts of hartford-shire, essex, and sundry such places. these grauels are both, in generall, subiect to much barrainnesse, especially if they be accompanied with any extraordinary moisture, yet with the good labour of plowing, and with the cost of much manure, they are brought to reasonable fruitfulnesse, where it comes to passe that the plow-man which is master of such a soile, if either he liue not neare some citie or market-towne, where great store of manure, by the concourse of people, is daily bred, and so consequently is very cheape, or else haue not in his owne store and bréede, meanes to raise good store of manure, hée shall seldome thriue and prosper thereupon. now although in these grauell soiles there is a diuersity of mixture, as the one mingled with small pibles, which indéede is the worst mixture, the other with broad flints, which is the better signe of fruitfulnesse: yet in their order of tillage or earings, in their wéeding and cleansing, and in all other ardors and obseruations, they differ nothing at all, the beginning and ending of each seuerall worke being all one. now for the manner of worke belonging vnto these two soiles, it altereth in no respect nor obseruation eyther in plough, plowing, manuring, weeding, or any other thing whatsoeuer, from that of the white sand, the same times of the yéere, the same séedes, and the same earings being euer to be obserued, wherefore it shall be needlesse to write so amply of these soiles as of the former, because being all one with the white sand, without alteration, it were but to write one thing twice, and therefore i referre the reader to the former chapter, and also the husbandman that shall liue vpon either of these soiles, onely with these few caueats: first, that for the laying his lands, hée shall lay them in little small stitches, that is, not hauing aboue foure furrowes laid together, as it were for one land, in such sort as you sée in hartford-shire, essex, middlesex, kent and surry: for this soile being for the most part subiect to much moisture and hardnesse, if it should be laid in great lands, according to the manner of the north parts, it would ouer-burden, choake and confound the séed which is throwne into it. secondly, you shall not goe about to gather off the stones which séeme as it were to couer the lands, both because the labour is infinite and impossible, as also because those stones are of good vse, and as it were a certaine manuring and helpe vnto the ground: for the nature of this grauell being colde and moist, these stones doe in the winter time, defend and kéepe the sharpnesse of the frosts and bleake windes from killing the heart or roote of the séedes, and also in the summer it defends the scorching heate of the sunne from parching and drying vp the séede, which in this grauelly soile doth not lie so well couered, as in other soyles, especially if this kinde of earth be inuironed with any great hils (as most commonly it is) the reflection whereof makes the heate much more violent. and lastly, to obserue that there is no manure better or more kindly for this kinde of earth then chaulke, white marle, or lyme: for all other matters whatsoeuer the former chapter of the white sand, will giue you sufficient instructions. chap. x. _the manner of plowing the blacke clay mixt with red sand, and the white clay mixt with white sand, their earings, plough and implements._ next to these grauelly soiles, there be also two other compounded earths, as namely, the blacke clay mixt with red sand, and the white clay mixt with white sand, which albe they differ in composition of mould, yet they hold one nature in their tillage and husbandry: wherefore first to speake of the blacke clay mixt with red sand, which (as before i said) is called of husbandmen an hassell earth, you shall vnderstand that it is a very rich and good soile, very fruitfull both for corne and grasse: for corne, being apt to beare any séede whatsoeuer: and for grasse, as naturally putting it forth very earely in the yéere, by which your cattell shall get reliefe sooner then in other soiles of colder nature: for both the blacke and white claies doe seldome flowrish with any store of grasse before iune, which is the time of wood-seare, and this soile will boast of some plenty about the beginning of aprill at the furthest: but for grasse we shall speake in his proper place. {sn: of fallowing.} now for his tillage it is thus: you shall about the middest of ianuary, beginne to fallow that field which you intend that yéere shall lye at rest or tilth, and you shall fallow it in such sort as is specified in the chapter of the blacke clay: onely you shall raise small furrowes and plow the land cleane, being sure to open and cast the land downeward if the land lie high and round, otherwise you shall neuer at any time cast the land downe but ridge it vp, that is to say, when you fallow it, you shall cast the first furrow downeward, and so likewise the second, which two furrowes being cleane ploughed, will lay the land open inough, that is, there wilbe no part of the ridge vnploughed: which done, by changing your hand and the gate of your plough, you shall plough those furrowes backe againe and lay them vpward, and so plough the whole land vpward, also laying it round and high: the reason for this manner of plowing being this, that for as much as this land being mixt of clay and sand, must néedes be a sore binding land, therefore if it should be laid flat, if any great raine or wet should fall, and a present drought follow it, neither should you possibly force your plough to enter into it and breake it, or being broken should you get so much mould as to couer your corne and giue the séede comfort, whereas vpon the contrary part, if it be laid high and vpright, it must necessarily be laid hollow and light, in so much that you may both plough it at your pleasure, and also beget so perfect a mould as any other soile whatsoeuer, both because the wet hath liberty to auoide through the hollownesse, and also because the sunne and weather hath power to enter and season it, wherefore in conclusion you shall fallow this field downeward if it lye high and vpright, otherwise you shall fallow it vpward as the meanes to bring it to the best ardor. now for this fallow field it must euer be made where the yéere before you did reape your pease, in case you haue but thrée fields, or where you did reape your wheate, rye, and maslin, in case you haue foure fields, according to the manner of the blacke clay. {sn: of sowing pease.} about the middest of february, which is within a day or two of saint _valentines_ day, if the season be any thing constant in fairenesse and drinesse, you shall then beginne to sow your pease, for you must vnderstand that albeit this soile will beare beanes, yet they are nothing so naturall for it as pease, both because they are an hungry séede and doe much impaire and wast the ground, and also because they prosper best in a fat, loose, and tough earth, which is contrary to this hard and drie soile: but especially if you haue foure fields, you shall forbeare to sow any beanes at all, least you loose two commodities, that is, both quantitie of graine (because beanes are not so long and fruitfull vpon this earth, as vpon the clayes) and the manuring of your ground, which pease out of their owne natures doe, both by the smoothering of the ground and their owne fatnesse, when your beanes doe pill and sucke the hart out of the earth. now for the manner of sowing your pease, you shall sow them aboue furrow, that is, first plough the land vpward, then immediately sow your pease, and instantly after harrow them, the plough, the séedes-man, and the harrower, by due course, following each other, and so likewise you may sow oates vpon this soile. {sn: of sowing barley.} about the middest of march, which is almost a fortnight before our lady day, you shall beginne to sow your barley, which barley you shall sow neither vnder-furrow nor aboue, but after this order: first, you shall plow your land downeward, beginning at the furrow and so assending vpward to the ridge of the land, which as soone as you haue opened, you shall then by pulling the plough out of the earth, and laying the shelboard crosse the ridge, you shall fill the ridge in againe with the same mould which you plowed vp: this done, your séedes-man shall bring his barley and sow the land aboue furrow: after the land is sowne, you shall then harrow it as small as may be, first with a paire of woodden harrowes, and after with a paire of iron harrowes, or else with a double oxe harrow, for this earth being somewhat hard and much binding, will aske great care and dilligence in breaking. {sn: of sleighting.} after your barley is sowne, you shall about the latter end of aprill beginne to smooth and sleight your land, both with the backe harrowes and with the rouler, and looke what clots they faile to breake, you shall with clotting beetles beate them asunder, making your mould as fine and laying your land as smooth as is possible. {sn: of summer-stirring.} about the middest of may, you shall, if any wet fall, beginne to summer-stirre your land, or if no wet fall, you shall doe your indeauour to summer-stirre your land, rather aduenturing to breake two ploughes, then to loose one day in that labour, knowing this, that one land summer-stird in a dry season, is better then thrée summer-stird in a wet or moist weather, both because it giues the earth a better temper, and kils the wéedes with more assurednesse, and as i speake of summer-stirring, so i speake of all other ardors, that the drier they are done the better they are euer done: and in this season you shall also gather the stones from your ground. {sn: obiection.} now it may be obiected, that if it be best to plough in drie seasons, it is then best to fallow also in a dry season, and by that meanes not to beginne to fallow vntill the beginning of may, as is prescribed for the blacke clay, and so to deferre the summer-stirring till the next month after, sith of necessitie ianuary must either be wet or else vnkindely. {sn: answere.} to this i make answere, that most true it is, that the land which is last fallowed is euer the best and most fruitfull, yet this mixt earth which is compound of sand and clay, is such a binding earth, that if it be not taken and fallowed in a moist-time of the yéere, as namely, in ianuary or february, but suffered to lye till may, at which time the drought hath so entered into him, that the greatest part of his moisture is decaied, then i say, the nature of the ground is such and so hard, that it wilbe impossible to make any plough enter into it, so that you shall not onely aduenture the losse of that speciall ardor, but also of all the rest which should follow after, and so consequently loose the profit of your land: where contrary wise if you fallow it at the beginning of the yéere, as in ianuary, and february, albe they be wet, yet shall you lay vp your furrowes and make the earth more loose, by which meanes you shall compasse all the other earings which belong to your soile: for to speake briefely, late fallowing belongs vnto claies, which by drought are made loose and light, and earely fallowings vnto mixt soiles, such as these which by drinesse doe ingender and binde close together. {sn: of weeding.} about the middest of iune, you shall beginne to wéede your corne, in such sort as hath béene before described in the former chapters: and although this soile naturally of it selfe (if it haue receiued his whole ardor in due seasons, and haue béene ploughed cleane, according to the office of a good husband) doth neither put forth thistle or other wéede, yet if it want either the one or the other, it is certaine that it puts them forth in great abundance, for by thistles and wéedes, vpon this soile, is euer knowne the goodnesse and dilligence of the husbandman. {sn: of foiling.} about the middest of iuly, you shall beginne to foile your land, in such sort also as hath béene mentioned in the former chapters, onely with this obseruation that if any of your lands lie flat, you shall then, in your foiling, plough those lands vpward and not downeward, holding your first precept that in this soile, your lands must lie high, light, and hollow, which if you sée they doe, then you may if you please in your foiling cast them downeward, because at winter ridging you may set them vp againe. {sn: of manuring.} now for as much as in this chapter i haue hitherto omitted to speake of manuring this soile, you shall vnderstand that it is not because i hold it so rich that it néedeth no manure, but because i know there is nothing more néedfull vnto it then manure, in so much that i wish not the husbandman of this ground to binde himselfe vnto any one particular season of the yéere for the leading forth of his manure, but to bestow all his leasurable houres and rest from other workes onely vpon this labor, euen through the circuit of the whole yéere, knowing this most precisely, that at what time of the yéere so euer you shall lay manure vpon this earth it will returne much profit. as for the choise of manures vpon this soile they are all those whatsoeuer, of which i haue formerly intreated in any of the other chapters, no manure whatsoeuer comming amisse to this ground: prouided that the husbandman haue this respect to lay vpon his moystest and coldest ground his hottest manures, and vpon his hottest and driest earth his coolest and moistest manures: the hot manures being shéepes-dung, pigions-dung, pullen-dung, lyme, ashes, and such like: the coole being oxe-dung, horse-dung, the scowrings of ponds, marle, and such like. {sn: of winter-ridging.} about the middest of september you shall beginne to winter-ridge your land, which in all points you shall doe according as is mentioned in the former chapters of the clayes: for in this ardor there is neuer any difference, onely this one small obseruation, that you may aduenture to winter-ridge this mixt earth sooner then any other: for many of our best english husbandmen which liue vpon this soile doe hold this opinion, that if it be winter-ridged so earely in the yéere, that through the vertue of the latter spring it put forth a certaine gréene wéede like mosse, bring short and soft, that the land is so much the better therefore, being as they imagine both fed and comforted by such a slender expression which doth not take from the land any hart, but like a warme couering doth ripen and make mellow the mould, and this cannot be effected but onely by earely winter-ridging. {sn: of sowing of wheate, rye, and maslin.} at the end of september you shall beginne to sow your wheate, rye, and maslin, all which graines are very naturall, good, and profitable vpon this soile, and are to be sowne after the same manner, and with the same obseruations which are specified in the former chapter of the blacke clay, that is to say, the wheate vnder furrow, and vnharrowed, the rye and maslin aboue furrow, and well harrowed. and herein is also to be remembred all those precepts mentioned in the chapter of the blacke clay, touching the diuision of the fields, that is to say, if you haue three fields, you shall then sow your wheate, rye and maslin in your fallow-field, and so saue both the foyling and double manuring of so much earth: but if you haue foure fields, then you shall sow those graines vpon that land from whence the same yéere you did reape your pease; your wheate hauing no other manure then that which came by the pease, your rye hauing, if possible, eyther manure from the cart, or from the folde, in such sort as hath béene shewed in the chapter of the blacke clay, and this of husbandmen is called inam-wheate or inam-rye, that is, white-corne sowne after white-corne, as barley after barley, or hard-corne after hard-corne, which is wheate after pease. {sn: of the plough.} now for the plough which is most proper for this soile it is to be made of a middle size betwixt that for the blacke clay, and that for the red sand, being not all out so bigge and vnwieldy as the first, nor so slender and nimble as the latter, but taking a middle proportion from them both, you shall make your plough of a competent fitnesse. {sn: of the plough-irons.} as for the irons, the share must be of the same proportion that the share for the red sand is, yet a little thought bigger, and the coulture of the fashion of that coulture, onely not full so much bent, but all-out as sharpe and as long: and these irons must be euer well maintained with stéele, for this mixt earth is euer the hardest, and weareth both the plough and irons soonest, and therefore it is agréed by all husbandmen that this plough must not at any time want his plough-slip, except at the first going of the plough you shall finde that it hath too much land, that is to say, by the crosse setting on of the beame, that it runneth too gréedily into the land, which to helpe, you shall let your plough goe without a plough-slip, till the plough-head be so much worne, that it take no more but an ordinary furrow, and then you shall set on your plough-slips and plough clouts also: but i write this in case there be imperfection in the plough, which if it be otherwise, then this obseruation is néedlesse. {sn: of the teame.} now for the teame or draught which shall draw this plough, they are as the former, oxen or horses, and their number the same that is prescribed for the blacke clay, as namely, eight or sixe beasts for pease-earth, for fallowing, and summer-stirring, and sixe or foure for all other ardors: for you must vnderstand that this mixt and binding soile, through his hardnesse, and glutenous holding together, is as hard to plow as any clay-soile whatsoeuer, and in some speciall seasons more by many degrées. {sn: of the white clay with white sand.} now for the white clay mixt with white sand, it is an earth much more barraine, then this former mixt earth, and bringeth forth nothing without much care, diligence, and good order: yet, for his manner of earings, in their true natures euery way doe differ nothing from the earings of this blacke clay and red sand, onely the séede which must be sowne vpon this soile differeth from the former: for vpon this soile in stead of barley you must sow most oates, as a graine which will take much strength from little fertilitie: and in stead of rye you shall sow more wheate and more pease, or in stead of pease then you shall sow fitches of eyther kinde which you please, and the increase will be (though not in abundance, yet) so sufficient as shall well quit the plow-mans labour. {sn: of manuring.} now for the manuring of this ground, you shall vnderstand that marle is the chiefest: for neyther will any man suppose that this hard soile should bring vp cattell sufficient to manure it, nor if it would, yet that manure were not so good: for a barraine clay being mixt with a most barraine sand, it must consequently follow that the soile must be of all the barenest, insomuch that to giue perfect strength and life vnto it, there is nothing better then marle, which being a fat and strong clay, once incorporated within these weake moulds, it must néedes giue them the best nourishment, loosening the binding substance, and binding that weaknesse which occasioneth the barrainnesse: but of this marle i shall haue more occasion to speake hereafter in a particular chapter, onely thus much i must let you vnderstand, that this soile, albe it be not within any degrée of praise for the bringing forth of corne, yet it is very apt and fruitfull for the bréeding of grasse, insomuch that it will beare you corne for at least nine yéeres together (without the vse of any fallow or tilth-field) if it be well marled, and immediately after it will beare you very good bréeding grasse, or else reasonable medow for as many yéeres after, as by daily experience we sée in the countries of lancaster and chester. so that the consequence being considered, this ground is not but to be held indifferent fruitfull: for whereas other soiles afore shewed (which beare abundance of graine) are bound to be manured once in thrée yéeres, this soile, albe it beare neither so rich graine, nor so much plenty, yet it néedes marling not aboue once in sixtéene or eightéene yéeres: and albe marle be a manure of the greatest cost, yet the profit by continuance is so equall that the labour is neuer spent without his reward, as shall more largely appeare hereafter. {sn: of the plough.} as touching the plough, it is the same which is mentioned in the other soile of the blacke clay, and red sand, altering nothing eyther in quantitie of timber, or strength of irons: so that to make any large description thereof, is but to double my former discourses, and make my writings tedious. for to conclude briefely, these two soiles differ onely but in fatnesse and strength of nature, not in earing, or plowing, so that the labours of tillage being equall there is not any alteration more then the true diligence of much manuring, which will bréede an affinitie or alyance betwixt both these soiles. and thus much for this blacke clay and red sand, or white clay and white sand. {illustration} the first part of the english husbandman: contayning, the manner of plowing and manuring all sorts of soyles, together with the manner of planting and setting of corne. chap. i. _of the manner of plowing all simple earths, which are vncompounded._ that many famous and learned men, both in fraunce, spaine, italy and germany, haue spent all their best time in shewing vnto the world the excellencie of their experiences, in this onely renowned arte of husbandry, their large and learned volumes, most excellently written, in that kinde, are witnesses: from whence we by translations haue gotten some contentment, though but small profit; because those forraine clymates, differing much from ours, both in nature of earth, and temper of ayre, the rules and obseruations belonging vnto them can be little auailable to vs, more then to know what is done in such parts, a thing more appertaining to our conference then practise. but now, that other kingdomes may sée though wée write lesse yet wée know as much as belongeth to the office of the english husbandman, i, though the meanest of many millions, haue vndertaken to deliuer vnto the world all the true rudiments, obseruations and knowledges what soeuer, which hath any affinitie or alliance with english husbandry. and for as much as the best and principallest part of husbandry consisteth in the plowing and earring of the ground (for in that onely _adam_ began his first labours) i thinke it not vnméete, first to treate of that subiect, procéeding so from braunch to braunch, till i haue giuen euery one sufficient knowledge. to speake then first of the tilling of grounds. you shall well vnderstand, that it is the office of euery good husbandman before he put his plough into the earth, truly to consider the nature of his grounds, and which is of which quallitie and temper. to procéede then to our purpose; all soyles what soeuer, in this our kingdome of england, are reduced into two kindes onely, that is to say, simple or compound. simple, are those which haue no mixture with others of a contrary quallitie, as are your stiffe clayes, or your loose sands: your stiffe clayes are likewise diuers, as a blacke clay, a blew clay, and a clay like vnto marble. your sands are also diuers, as a red sand, a white sand, a yellow sand, and a sand like vnto dust. your mixt earths are where any of these clayes and sands are equally or vnindifferently mixed together, as shalbe at large declared hereafter. now as touching the tilling of your simple clayes, it is to be noted, that the blacke clay, of all earth, is the most fruitfull, and demandeth from the husbandman the least toyle, yet bringeth forth his increase in the greatest abundance: it will well and sufficiently bring forth thrée crops, eare it desire rest: namely, the first of barly, the second of pease, and the third of wheate: it doth not desire much manure, for it is naturally of it selfe so fat, rich, and fruitfull, that if you adde strength vnto his strength, by heaping manure or compasse thereupon, you make it either blast, and mildew the corne that growes, with the too much fatnesse of the earth, or else through his extreame rankenesse, to bring it vp in such abundance that it is not able to stand vpright when it is shot vp, but falling downe flat to the ground, and the eares of corne smothering one another, they bring forth nothing but light corne, like an emptie huske, without a kirnell. the best manure or compasse therefore that you can giue such ground, is then to plow it in orderly and dew seasons, as thus: you shall begin to fallow, or breake vp this soyle, at the beginning of may, at which time you shall plow it déepe, & take vp a large furrow, and if your lands lye any thing flat, it shalbe méete that you begin on the ridge of the land, and turne all your furrowes vpward, but if your lands lye high and vpright, then shall you begin in the furrow and turne all your furrowes downeward, which is called of husbandmen, the casting downe of land. this first plowing of ground, or as husbandmen tearme it, the first ardor, is called fallowing: the second ardor, which we call stirring of ground, or sommer stirring, you shall begin in iuly, which is of great consequence, for by meanes of it you shall kill all manner of wéedes and thistells that would annoy your land. in this ardor you must oft obserue that if when you fallowed you did set vp your land, then now when you stirre you must cast downe your land, and so contrarily, if before you did cast downe, then now you must set vp: your third ardor, which is called of husbandmen, winter ridgeing, or setting vp land for the whole yéere, you shall begin at the latter end of september, and you must euer obserue that in this third ardor you doe alwaies ridge vp your land, that is to say, you most turne euery furrow vpward and lay them as close together as may be, for should you doe otherwise, that is to say, either lay them flat or loosely, the winter season would so beat and bake them together, that when you should sow your séede you would hardly get your plough into the ground. now your fourth and last ardor, which must be when you sow your séede, you shall begin euer about the midst of march, at least one wéeke before our ladies day, commonly called the annunciation of _mary_, and this ardor you shall euer plow downeward, laying your ridges very well open, and you shall euer obserue in this ardor, first to sow your séede, and then after to plow your ground, turning your séede into the earth, which is called of husbandmen, sowing vnderfurrow: as soone as your ground is plowed you shall harrow it with an harrow whose téeth are all of wood, for these simple earths are of easie temper and will of themselues fall to dust, then after you haue thus sowne your ground, if then there remaine any clots or lumpes of earth vnbroken, you shall let them rest till after the next shower of raine, at which time you shall either with a heauie rouler, or the backside of your harrowes, runne ouer your lands, which is called the sleighting of ground, and it will not onely breake such clots to dust, but also lay your land plaine and smoth, leauing no impediment to hinder the corne from sprouting and comming forth. in this same ordor as you are appointed for this blacke clay, in this same manner you shall ordor both your blew clay & your clay which is like vnto marble. now as touching the plough which is fittest for these clayes, it must be large and strong, the beame long and well bending, the head thicke and large, the skéeth broad, strong, and well sloaping, the share with a very large wing, craueing much earth, and the coulter long, thicke and very straight. now touching those lands which are simple and vncompounded, you shall vnderstand that euery good husbandman must begin his first ardor (which is to fallow them) at the beginning of ianuary, hée must sooner stirre them, which is the second ardor, at the latter end of aprill, he shall cast them downe againe, which is called foyling of land, at the beginning of iuly, which is the third ardor, and wherein is to be noted, that how soeuer all other ardors are plowed, yet this must euer be cast downward: the fourth ardor, which is winter-stirring or winter-ridgeing, must euer begin at the end of september, and the fift and last ardor must be performed when you sow your ground, which would be at the middest of may, at the soonest, and if your leasure and abilitie will giue you leaue, if you turne ouer your ground againe in ianuary, it will be much better, for these sands can neuer haue too much plowing, nor too much manure, and therefore for them both, you shall apply them so oft as your leasure will conueniently serue, making no spare when either the way or opportunitie will giue you leaue. now for as much as all sands, being of a hot nature, are the fittest to bring foorth rye, which is a graine delighting in drynesse onely, you shall vnderstand, that then you shall not néed to plow your ground aboue foure times ouer, that is, you shall fallow, sommer stirre, foyle, and in september sow your corne: and as these ardors serue the red sand, so are they sufficient for your white sand, and your yealow sand also. as touching the ploughes fit for these light earths, they would be little and strong, hauing a short slender beame and a crooked; a narrow and thinne head, a slender skéeth, a share without a wing, a coulter thinne and very crooked, and a paire of hales much bending forward towards the man; and with this manner of plough you may plow diuers mixt and compounded earths, as the blacke clay and red sand, or the red sand and white grauell: and thus much as touching earths that are simple and vncompounded. chap. ii. _of the manner of plowing the blacke clay mixt with white sand, and the white clay mixt with red sand: their earrings, plough, and implements._ as touching the mixture of these two seuerall soyles, that is to say, the blacke clay with white sand, and the white clay with red sand, they differ not in the nature of plowing, sowing, or in manuring, from the soyle which is mixt of a blacke clay and red sand, of which i haue sufficiently intreated before: onely thus much you shall vnderstand, that the blacke clay mixt with white sand is so much better and richer then the white clay mixt with red sand, by as much as the blacke clay is better then the white clay: and although some husbandmen in our land, hould them to be both of one temper and goodnesse, reasoning thus, that by how much the blacke clay is better then the white, by so much the red sand is better then the white sand, so that what the mixture of the one addeth, the mixture of the other taketh away, and so maketh them all one in fruitfulnesse and goodnesse: but in our common experience it doth not so fall out, for wée finde that the blacke clay mixt with white sand, if it be ordered in the forme of good husbandry, that is to say, be plowed ouer at least foure times, before it come to be sowne, and that it be manured and compassed in husbandly fashion, which is to allow at least eight waine-load to an aker, that if then vpon such land you shall sow either organe wheat (in the south parts called red wheat) or flaxen, or white pollard wheat, that such wheat will often mildew, and turne as blacke as soote, which onely showeth too much richnesse and fatnesse in the earth, which the white clay mixt with red sand hath neuer beene séene to doe, especially so long as it is vsed in any husbandly fashion, neither will the white clay mixt with red sand indure to be deuided into foure fields, that is to say, to beare thrée seuerall crops, one after another, as namely, barly, pease, and wheat, without rest, which the blacke clay mixt with white sand many times doth, and thereby againe showeth his better fruitfulnesse: neuerthelesse, in generalitie i would not wish any good husbandman, and especially such as haue much tillage, to deuide either of these soyles into any more then thrée fields, both because hee shall ease himselfe and his cattell of much toyle, shall not at any time loose the best seasons for his best workes, and make his commodities, and fruit of his hands labours, by many degrées more certaine. you shall also vnderstand, that both these soyles are very much binding, especially the white clay with red sand, both because the clay, procéeding from a chaukie and limie substance, and not hauing in it much fatnesse or fertillitie (which occasioneth seperation) being mixt with the red sand, which is of a much more hardnesse and aptnesse to knit together, with such tough matter, it must necessarilie binde and cleaue together, and so likewise the blacke clay, from whence most naturally procéedeth your best limestone, being mixt with white sand, doth also binde together and stifle the séede, if it be not preuented by good husbandry. you shall therefore in the plowing and earring of these two soyles, obserue two especiall notes; the first, that by no meanes you plow it in the wet, that is, in any great glut of raine: for if you either lay it vp, or cast it downe, when it is more like morter then earth, if then any sunshine, or faire weather, doe immediately follow vpon it, it will so drie and bake it, that if it be sowne, neither will the séede haue strength to sprout thorrow it, nor being in any of your other summer ardors, shall you by any meanes make your plough enter into it againe, when the season falleth for other plowing. the second, that you haue great care you lay your land high and round, that the furrowes, as it were standing vpright one by another, or lying light and hollow, one vpon another, you may with more ease, at any time, enter in your plough, and turne your moulde which way you please, either in the heate of sommer, or any other time of the yéere whatsoeuer. now as touching the plough, which is most best and proper for these soyles, it would be the same in sise which is formerly directed for the red sand, onely the irons must be altered, for the coulter would be more long, sharpe, and bending, and the share so narrow, sharpe, and small as can conueniently be made, according as is formerly expressed, that not hauing power to take vp any broad furrow, the furrowes by reason of there slendernesse may lye many, and those many both hollow, light and at any time easily to be broken. as for the teame which is best to worke in this soyle, they may be either horses or oxen, or oxen and horse mixt together, according to the husbandmans abillitie, but if hée be a lord of his owne pleasure and may commaund, and haue euery thing which is most apt and proper, then in these two soyles, i preferre the teame of horses single, rather then oxen, especially in any winter or moist ardor, because they doe not tread and foyle the ground making it mirie and durtie as the oxe doth, but going all in one furrow, doe kéepe the land in his constant firmenesse. as touching the clotting, sleighting, wéeding, and dressing of these two soyles, they differ in nothing from the former mixt earths, but desire all one manner of dilligence: and thus much for these two soyles the blacke clay mixt with white sand, and the white clay with white red sand. chap. iii. _a comparison of all the former soyles together, and most especiall notes for giuing the ignorant husbandman perfect vnderstanding, of what is written before._ the reason why i haue thus at large discoursed of euery seuerall soyle, both simple and compounded, is to show vnto the industrious husbandman, the perfect and true reason of the generall alteration of our workes in husbandry, through this our realme of england: for if all our land, as it is one kingdome, were likewise of one composition, mixture, and goodnesse, it were then excéeding preposterous to sée those diuersities, alterations, i, and euen contrary manners of procéedings in husbandry, which are daily and hourely vsed: but euery man in his owne worke knowes the alteration of clymates. yet for so much as this labour of husbandry, consisteth not for the most part in the knowing and vnderstanding breast, but in the rude, simple, and ignorant clowne, who onely knoweth how to doe his labour, but cannot giue a reason why he doth such labour, more then the instruction of his parents, or the custome of the countrie, where it comes to passe (and i haue many times séene the same to mine admiration) that the skillfullest clowne which is bred in the clay soyles, when hée hath béene brought to the sandy ground, hée could neither hould the plough, temper the plough, nor tell which way in good order to driue the cattell, the heauinesse of the one labour being so contrary to the lightnesse of the other, that not hauing a temperance, or vnderstanding in his hands, hée hath béene put euen vnto his wittes ends; therefore i thinke it conuenient, in this place, by a slight comparison of soyles together, to giue the simplest husbandman such direct & plaine rules that he shall with out the study of his braines, attaine to absolute knowledge of euery seuerall mixture of earth: and albeit hée shall not be able distinctly to say at the first that it is compounded of such and such earths, yet hée shall be very able to deliuer the true reason and manner how such ground (of what nature soeuer) shall be husbanded and tilled. therefore to begin the husbandman, is to vnderstand, that generally there are but two soyles for him to regard, for in them consisteth the whole arte of husbandry: as namely, the open and loose earth, and the close and fast binding earth, and these two soyles being meare opposites and contraries, most necessarily require in the husbandman a double vnderstanding, for there is no soyle, of what simplicitie or mixture soeuer it be, but it is either loose or fast. now to giue you my meaning of these two words, _loose_ and _fast_, it is, that euery soyle which vpon parching and dry weather, euen when the sunne beames scorcheth, and as it were baketh the earth, if then the ground vpon such excéeding drought doe moulder and fall to dust, so that whereas before when it did retaine moisture it was heauie, tough, and not to be seperated, now hauing lost that glewinesse it is light, loose, and euen with a mans foote to be spurnd to ashes, all such grounds are tearmed loose and open grounds, because at no time they doe binde in or imprison the séede (the frost time onely excepted, which is by accidence, and not from the nature of the soyle:) and all such grounds as in their moisture or after the fall of any sodaine raine are soft, plyable, light, and easie to be wrought, but after when they come to loose that moistnesse and that the powerfulnesse of the sunne hath as it were drid vp their veynes, if then such earths become hard, firme, and not to be seperated, then are those soyles tearmed fast and binding soyles, for if there ardors be not taken in their due times, and their séede cast into them in perfect and due seasons, neither is it possible for the plowman to plow them, nor for the séede to sprout through, the earth being so fastned and as it were stone-like fixt together. now sithence that all soyles are drawne into these two heads, fastnes, and loosenesse, and to them is annexed the diuersitie of all tillage, i will now show the simple husbandman which earths be loose, and which fast, and how without curiositie to know and to distinguish them. breifely, all soyles that are simple and of themselues vncompounded, as namely, all claies, as blacke, white, gray, or blew, and all sands, as either red, white, or blacke, are open and loose soyles: the claies because the body and substance of them being held together by moistnes, that moisture being dryed vp, their strength and stifnesse decayeth, and sands by reason of their naturall lightnesse, which wanting a more moist and fixt body to be ioyned with them doe loose all strength of binding or holding together. now all mixt or compound earths (except the compositions of one and the same kinds, as clay with clay, or sand with sand) are euer fast and binding earths: for betwixt sand and clay, or clay & grauell, is such an affinitie, that when they be mixt together the sand doth giue to the clay such hardnesse and drynesse, and the clay to the sand such moisture and coldnesse, that being fixt together they make one hard body, which through the warmth of the sunne bindeth and cleaueth together. but if it be so that the ignorance of the husbandman cannot either through the subtiltie of his eye sight, or the obseruations gathered from his experience, distinguish of these soyles, and the rather, sith many soyles are so indifferently mixt, and the colour so very perfect, that euen skill it selfe may be deceiued: as first to speake of what mixture some soyles consist, yet for as much as it is sufficient for the husbandman to know which is loose and which is binding, hée shall onely when he is perplext with these differences, vse this experiment, hée shall take a good lumpe of that earth whose temperature hée would know, and working it with water and his wet hands, like a péece of past, he shall then as it were make a cake thereof, and laying it before an hot fire, there let it lye, till all the moisture be dried & backt out of it, then taking it into your hands and breaking it in péeces, if betwéene your fingers it moulder and fall into a small dust, then be assured it is a loose, simple, and vncompounded earth, but if it breake hard and firme, like a stone, and when you crumble it betwéene your fingers it be rough, gréetie, and shining, then be assured it is a compounded fast-binding earth, and is compounded of clay and sand, and if in the baking it doe turne red or redish, it is compounded of a gray clay and red sand, but if it be browne or blewish, then it is a blacke clay & white sand, but if when you breake it you finde therein many small pibles, then the mixture is clay and grauell. now there be some mixt soyles, after they are thus bak't, although they be hard and binding, yet they will not be so excéeding hard and stone-like as other soyles will be, and that is where the mixture is vnequall, as where the clay is more then the sand, or the sand more then the clay. when you haue by this experiment found out the nature of your earth, and can tell whether it be simple or compounded, you shall then looke to the fruitfulnesse thereof, which generally you shall thus distinguish. first, that clayes, simple and of themselues vncompounded, are of all the most fruitfull, of which, blacke is the best, that next to clayes, your mixt earths are most fertill, and the mixture of the blacke clay and red sand, called a hasell earth, is the best, and that your sands are of all soyles most barraine, of which the red sand for profit hath euer the preheminence. now for the generall tillage and vse of these grounds, you shall vnderstand that the simple and vncompounded grounds, being loose and open (if they lye frée from the danger of water) the lands may be layd the flattest and greatest, the furrowes turned vp the largest and closest, and the plough and plough-irons, most large and massie, onely those for the sandy grounds must be more slender then those for the clayes and much more nimble, as hath béene showed before. now for the mixt earths, you shall lay your lands high, round, and little, set your furrowes vpright, open, and so small as is possible, and make your plough and plow irons most nimble and slender, according to the manner before specified: and thus i conclude, that hée which knoweth the loose earth and the binding earth, can either helpe or abate the strength of the earth, as is néedfull, and knowes how to sorte his ploughes to each temper, knowes the ground and substance of all tillage. chap. iiii. _of the planting or setting of corne, and the profit thereof._ not that i am conceited, or carried away with any nouelty or strange practise, vnusually practised in this kingdome, or that i will ascribe vnto my selfe to giue any iudiciall approbation or allowance to things mearely vnfrequented, doe i publish, within my booke, this relation of the setting of corne, but onely because i would not haue our english husbandman to be ignorant of any skill or obscure faculty which is either proper to his profession, or agréeable with the fertillitie and nature of our clymates, and the rather, since some few yéeres agoe, this (as it then appeared secret) being with much admiration bruted through the kingdome, in so much that according to our weake accustomed dispositions (which euer loues strange things best) it was held so worthy, both for generall profit and perticular ease, that very fein (except the discréet) but did not alone put it in practise, but did euen ground strong beleifes to raise to themselues great common-wealthes by the profits thereof; some not onely holding insufficient arguments, in great places, of the invtilitie of the plough, but euen vtterly contemning the poore cart iade, as a creature of no necessitie, so that poulters and carriers, were in good hope to buy horse-flesh as they bought egges, at least fiue for a penie; but it hath proued otherwise, and the husbandman as yet cannot loose the horses seruice. but to procéede to the manner of setting or planting of corne, it is in this manner. {sn: of setting wheate.} hauing chosen out an aker of good corne ground, you shall at the beginning of march, appoint at least sixe diggers or laborers with spades to digge vp the earth gardenwise, at least a foote and thrée inches déepe (which is a large spades graft) and being so digged vp, to rest till iune, and then to digge it ouer againe, and in the digging to trench it and manure it, as for a garden mould, bestowing at least sixtéene waine-load of horse or oxe manure vpon the aker, and the manure to be well couered within the earth, then so to let it rest vntill the beginning of october, which being the time for the setting, you shall then digge it vp the third time, and with rakes and béetells breake the moulde somewhat small, then shall you take a board of sixe foot square, which shalbe bored full of large wimble holes, each hole standing in good order, iust sixe inches one from another, then laying the board vpon the new digged ground, you shall with a stick, made for the purpose, through euery hole in the board, make a hole into the ground, at least fore inches déepe, and then into euery such hole you shall drop a corne of wheate, and so remouing the board from place to place, goe all ouer the ground that you haue digged, and so set each seuerall corne sixe inches one from another, and then with a rake you shall rake ouer and couer all the holes with earth, in such sort that they may not be discerned. and herein you are to obserue by the way that a quarte of wheate will set your aker: which wheate is not to be taken as it falles out by chance when you buy it in the market, but especially culd and pickt out of the eare, being neither the vppermost cornes which grow in the toppes of the eares, nor the lowest, which grow at the setting on of the stalke, both which, most commonly are light and of small substance, but those which are in the midst, and are the greatest, fullest, and roundest. {sn: of setting barly, or pease.} now in the selfe-same sort as you dresse your ground for your wheate, in the selfe same manner you shall dresse your ground for barly, onely the first time you digge it shalbe after the beginning of may, the second time and the manuring about the midst of october, wherein you shall note that to your aker of barly earth, you shall alow at least foure and twentie waine-load of manure, and the last time of your digging and setting shalbe at the beginning of aprill. now for the dressing of your earth for the setting of pease, it is in all things answerable to that for barly, onely you may saue the one halfe of your manure, because a dosen waine-load is sufficient, and the time for setting them, or any other pulse, is euer about the midst of february. {sn: of the profit of setting corne.} now for the profit which issueth from this practise of setting of corne, i must néeds confesse, if i shall speake simply of the thing, that is, how many foulds it doubleth and increaseth, surely it is both great and wonderfull: and whereas ingenerall it is reputed that an aker of set corne yéeldeth as much profit as nine akers of sowne corne, for mine owne part i haue séene a much greater increase, if euery corne set in an aker should bring forth so much as i haue séene to procéede from some thrée or foure cornes set in a garden, but i feare me the generalitie will neuer hould with the particular: how euer, it is most certaine that earth in this sort trimmed and inriched, and corne in this sort set and preserued, yéeldeth at least twelue-fold more commoditie then that which by mans hand is confusedly throwne into the ground from the hopper: whence it hath come to passe that those which by a few cornes in their gardens thus set, séeing the innumerable increase, haue concluded a publique profit to arise thereby to the whole kingdome, not looking to the intricacie, trouble, and casualtie, which attends it, being such and so insupportable that almost no husbandman is able to vndergoe it: to which we néed no better testimony then the example of those which hauing out of meare couetousnesse and lucre of gaine, followed it with all gréedinesse, séeing the mischiefes and inconueniences which hath incountred their workes, haue euen desisted, and forgotten that euer there was any such practise, and yet for mine owne part i will not so vtterly condemne it, that i will depriue it of all vse, but rather leaue it to the discretion of iudgement, and for my selfe, onely hould this opinion, that though it may very wel be spared from the generall vse of wheat and barly in this kingdome, yet for hastie-pease, french beanes, and such like pulse, it is of necessary imployment, both in rich and poore mens gardens. and thus much for the setting of corne. chap. v. _of the choice of seede-corne, and which is best for which soyle._ hauing thus showed vnto you the seuerall soyles and temperatures of our english land, together with the order of manuring, dressing and tillage of the same, i thinke it méete (although i haue in generall writ something already touching the séede belonging to euery seuerall earth) now to procéede to a particular election and choice of séede-corne, in which there is great care and diligence to be vsed: for as in men, beasts, fowle, & euery mouing thing, there is great care taken for the choice of the bréeders, because the creatures bred doe so much participate of the parents that for the most part they are séene not onely to carry away their outward figures and semblances, but euen their naturall conditions and inclinations, good issuing from good, and euill from euill: so in the choise of séede-corne, if their be any neglect or carelessenesse, the crop issuing of such corrupt séede must of force bring forth a more corrupt haruest, by as much as it excéedeth in the multiplication. {sn: the choise of seede wheate.} to procéede therefore to the choise of séede-corne, i will begin with wheate, of which there are diuers kindes, as your whole straw wheate, the great browne pollard, the white pollard, the organe or red wheate, the flaxen wheate, and the chilter wheate. your whole straw wheate, and browne pollard, are knowne, the first, by his straw, which is full of pith, and hath in it no hollownesse (whence it comes that husbandmen estéeme it so much for their thacking, allowing it to be as good and durable as réede:) the latter is knowne by his eare, which is great, white, and smooth, without anes or beard vpon it: in the hand they are both much like one to another, being of all wheates the biggest, roundest and fullest: they be somewhat of a high colour, and haue vpon them a very thicke huske, which making the meale somewhat browne causeth the baker not all together to estéeme them for his purest manchet, yet the yéeld of flower which cometh from them is as great and greater then any other wheate whatsoeuer. these two sortes of wheate are to be sowne vpon the fallow field, as crauing the greatest strength and fatnesse of ground, whence it comes that they are most commonly séene to grow vpon the richest and stiffest blacke clayes, being a graine of that strength that they will seldome or neuer mildew or turne blacke, as the other sortes of wheate will doe, if the strength of the ground be not abated before they be throwne into the earth. now for the choise of these two wheates, if you be compelled to buy them in the market, you must regard that you buy that which is the cleanest and fairest, being vtterly without any wéedes, as darnell, cockell, tares or any other foulnesse whatsoeuer: you shall looke that the wheate, as neare as may be, hould all of one bignesse and all of one colour, for to beholde it contrary, that is to say, to see some great cornes, some little, some high coloured, some pale, so that in their mixture they resemble changeable taffata, is an apparant signe that the corne is not of one kinde but mixt or blended, as being partly whole-straw, partly pollard, partly organe, and partly chelter. for the flaxen, it is naturally so white that it cannot be mixt but it may easily be discerned, and these mixt séedes are neuer good, either for the ground or the vse of man. againe you shall carefully looke that neither this kinde of wheate, nor any other that you buy for séede be blacke at the ends, for that is a signe that the graine comming from too rich a soyle was mildewed, and then it will neuer be fruitfull or proue good séede, as also you shall take care that it be not too white at the ends, showing the corne to be as it were of two colours, for that is a signe that the wheate was washt and dried againe, which vtterly confoundeth the strength of the corne and takes from it all abilitie of bringing forth any great encrease. now if it be so that you haue a crop of wheate of your owne, so that you haue no néed of the market, you shall then picke out of your choisest sheafes, and vpon a cleane floare gently bat them with a flaile, and not thresh them cleane, for that corne which is greatest, fullest, and ripest, will first flie out of the eare, and when you haue so batted a competent quantitie you shall then winnow it and dresse it cleane, both by the helpe of a strong winde and open siues, and so make it fit for your séede. i haue séene some husbands (and truely i haue accounted them both good and carefull) that haue before wheate séede time both themselues, wiues, children, and seruants at times of best leasure, out of a great wheate mow or bay, to gleane or pull out of the sheafes, eare by eare, the most principall eares, and knitting them vp in small bundells to bat them and make their séede thereof, and questionlesse it is the best séede of all other: for you shall be sure that therein can be nothing but the cleanest and the best of the corne, without any wéedes or foulnesse, which can hardly be when a man thresheth the whole sheafe, and although some men may thinke that this labour is great and troblesome, especially such as sowe great quantities of wheate, yet let them thus farre encourage themselues, that if they doe the first yéere but gleane a bushell or two (which is nothing amongst a few persons) and sowe it vp on good land, the encrease of it will the next yéere goe farre in the sowing the whole crop: for when i doe speake of this picking of wheate, eare by eare, i doe not intend the picking of many quarters, but of so much as the increase thereof may amount to some quarter. now there is also another regarde to be had (as auailable as any of the former) in chusing of your séede wheate, and that is to respect the soyle from whence you take your séede, and the soyle into which you put it, as thus. if the ground whereon you meane to sowe your wheat be a rich, blacke, clay, stiffe and full of fertillitie, you shall then (as neare as you can) chuse your séede from the barrainest mixt earth you can finde (so the wheate be whole-straw or pollard) as from a clay and grauell, or a clay and white sand, that your séede comming from a much more barraine earth then that wherein you put it, the strength may be as it were redoubled, and the encrease consequently amount to a higher quantitie, as we finde it proueth in our daylie experience; but if these barraine soyles doe not afforde you séede to your contentment, it shall not then be amisse (you sowing your wheate vpon fallow or tilth ground) if you take your séede-wheate either from an earth of like nature to your owne, or from any mixt earth, so that such séede come from the niams, that is, that it hath béene sowne after pease, as being the third crop of the land, and not from the fallow or tilth ground, for it is a maxiome amongst the best husbands (though somewhat proposterous to common sence) bring to your rich ground séede from the barraine, and to the barraine séede from the rich, their reason (taken from their experience) being this, that the séede (as before i said) which prospereth vpon a leane ground being put into a rich, doth out of that superfluitie of warmth, strength and fatnesse, double his increase; and the séede which commeth from the fat ground being put into the leane, hauing all the vigour, fulnesse and iuyce of fertilnes, doth not onely defend it selfe against the hungrinesse of the ground but brings forth increase contrary to expectation; whence procéedeth this generall custome of good husbands in this land, that those which dwell in the barraine woode lands, heathes and high mountaine countries of this kingdome, euer (as néere as they can) séeke out their séede in the fruitfull low vales, and very gardens of the earth, & so likewise those in the vales take some helpes also from the mountaines. now for your other sortes of wheate, that is to say, the white pollard and the organe, they are graines nothing so great, full, and large, as the whole straw, or browne pollard, but small, bright, and very thinly huskt: your organe is very red, your pollard somewhat pale: these two sorts of wheate are best to be sowne vpon the third or fourth field, that is to say, after your pease, for they can by no meanes endure an ouer rich ground, as being tender and apt to sprout with small moisture, but to mildew and choake with too much fatnesse, the soyles most apt for them are mixt earths, especially the blacke clay and red sand, or white clay and red sand, for as touching other mixtures of grounds, they are for the most part so barraine, that they will but hardly bring forth wheate vpon their fallow field, and then much worse vpon a fourth field. now for any other particular choise of these two séedes, they are the same which i shewed in the whole straw, and great pollard. as for the flaxen wheate, and chilter wheate, the first, is a very white wheate both inward and outward, the other a pale red or déepe yellow: they are the least of all sorts of wheate, yet of much more hardnes and toughnesse in sprouting, then either the organe or white pollard, and therefore desire somewhat a more richer soyle, and to that end they are for the most part sowne vpon fallow fields, in mixt earths, of what natures or barrainenesse soeuer, as is to be séene most generally ouer all the south parts of this realme: and although vncompounded sands out of their owne natures, doe hardly bring forth any wheate, yet vpon some of the best sands and vpon the flintie grauels, i haue séene these two wheates grow in good abundance, but being seldome it is not so much to be respected. {sn: the choise of seede rye.} after your wheate you shall make choise of your rie, of which there is not diuers kindes although it carrie diuers complections, as some blackish, browne, great, full and long as that which for the most part growes vpon the red sand, or red clay, which is thrée parts red sand mixt with blacke clay, and is the best rie: the other a pale gray rie, short, small, and hungry, as that which growes vpon the white sand, or white clay and white sand, and is the worst rie. now you shall vnderstand that your sand grounds are your onely naturall grounds for rie, as being indéede not principally apt for any other graine, therefore when you chuse your rie for séede, you shall chuse that which is brownest, full, bould, and longest, you shall haue great care that it be frée from wéedes or filth, sith your sand grounds, out of their owne naturall heat, doth put forth such store of naughtie wéeds, that except a man be extraordinarily carefull, both in the choise and dressing of his rie, he may easily be deceiued and poyson his ground with those wéedes, which with great difficultie are after rooted out againe. now for your séedes to each soyle, it is euer best to sow your best sand-rie vpon your best clay ground, and your best clay-rie vpon your best sand ground, obseruing euer this generall principle, not onely in rie, but euen in wheat, barly, pease and other graine of account, that is, euer once in thrée yéeres, to change all your séede, which you shall finde both to augment your encrease and to returne you double profit. {sn: the choise of seede-barly.} now for the choise of your séede-barly, you shall vnderstand, that for as much as it is a graine of the greatest vse, & most tendernesse, therefore there is the greatest diligence to be vsed in the election thereof. know then that of barly there be diuers sorts, as namely, that which wée call our common barly, being long eares with two rankes of corne, narrow, close, and vpright: another called spike or batteldore-barly, being a large eare with two rankes of corne, broad, flat, and in fashion of a batteldore: and the third called beane-barly, or barly big, being a large foure-square eare, like vnto an eare of wheate. of these thrée barlyes the first is most in vse, as being most apt and proper to euery soyle, whether it be fruitfull or barraine, in this our kingdome, but they haue all one shape, colour and forme, except the soyle alter them, onely the spike-barly is most large and plentifull, the common barly hardest and aptest to grow, and the beane-barly least, palest, & tenderest, so that with vs it is more commonly séene in gardens then in fields, although in other countries, as in fraunce, ireland, and such like, they sowe no other barly at all, but with vs it is of no such generall estimation, and therefore i will neither giue it precedencie nor speake of it, otherwise then to referre it to the discreation of him who takes delight in many practises: but for the common barly, or spike-barly, which our experience findes to be excellent and of great vse, i will knit them in one, and write, my full opinion of them, for their choise in our séede. you shall know then that when you goe into the market to chuse barly for your séede, you shall to your best power elect that which is whitest, fullest, and roundest, being as the ploughman calles it, a full bunting corne, like the nebbe or beake of a bunting, you shall obserue that it be all of one corne, and not mingled, that is, clay barly, and sand barly together, which you shall distinguish by these differences: the clay barly is of a palish, white, yellow colour; smoth, full, large, and round, and the sand barly is of a déepe yellow, browne at the neather end, long, slender, and as it were, withered, and in generall no sand barly is principall good for séede: but if the barly be somewhat of a high colour, and browne at the neather end, yet notwithstanding is very full, bould, and bigge, then it is a signe that such barly comes not from the sand, but rather from an ouer fat soyle, sith the fatnesse of the earth doth euer alter the complection of the barly; for the whiter barly euer the leaner soyle, and better séede: you shall also obserue, that there be not in it any light corne, which is a kinde of hungry graine without substance, which although it filleth the séeds-mans hand, yet it deceiueth the ground, and this light corne will commonly be amongst the best barly: for where the ground is so rich that it bringeth forth the barly too rankely, there the corne, wanting power to stand vpon roote, falleth to the ground, and so robde of kindly ripening, bringeth forth much light and insufficient graine. next this, you shall take care that in your séede-barly there be not any oates, for although they be in this case amongst husbandmen accounted the best of wéede, yet are they such a disgrace, that euery good husband will most diligently eschew them, and for that cause onely will our most industrious husbands bestow the tedious labour of gleaning their barly, eare by eare, by which gleanings, in a yéere, or two, they will compasse their whole séede, which must infallibly be without either oates or any wéede whatsoeuer: and although some grounds, especially your richest blacke clayes, will out of the abundance of their fruitfulnesse (as not induring to be idle) bring forth naturally a certaine kinde of wilde oates, which makes some ignorant husbands lesse carefull of their séede, as supposing that those wilde ones are a poisoning to their graine, but they are infinetly deceiued: for such wilde oates, wheresoeuer they be, doe shake and fall away long before the barly be ready, so that the husbandman doth carry of them nothing into the barne, but the straw onely. next oates, you must be carefull that there be in your barly no other foule wéede: for whatsoeuer you sow, you must looke for the increase of the like nature, and therefore as before i said in the wheate, so in the barly, i would wish euery good husband to imploy some time in gleaning out of his mow the principall eares of barly, which being batted, drest, and sowne, by it selfe, albeit no great quantitie at the first, yet in time it may extend to make his whole séede perfect, and then hée shall finde his profit both in the market, where hée shall (for euery vse) sell with the déerest, and in his owne house where he shall finde his yeeld redoubled. now for fitting of seuerall séedes to seuerall soyles, you shall obserue, that the best séede-barly for your clay field, is ninam barly, sowne vpon the clay field, that is to say, barly which is sowne where barly last grew, or a second crop of barly: for the ground hauing his pride abated in the first croppe, the second, though it be nothing néere so much in quantitie, yet that corne which it doth bring forth is most pure, most white, most full, and the best of all séedes whatsoeuer, and as in case of this soyle, so in all other like soyles which doe hould that strength or fruitfulnesse in them that they are either able of themselues, or with some helpe of manure in the latter end of the yéere, to bring forth two croppes of barly, one after the other: but if either your soyle deny you this strength, or the distance of place bereaue you of the commoditie thereof, then you shall vnderstand that barly from a hasell ground is the best séede, for the clay ground, and barly from the clay ground is the best séede, not onely for the hasell earth, but euen for all mixt earths whatsoeuer, and the barly which procéedes from the mixt earths is the best séede for all simple and vncompounded sands or grauells, as wée finde, both by their increasings and dayly experience. {sn: the choise of seede-beanes, pease, and pulse.} now for the choise of séede-beanes, pease, or other pulse, the scruple is nothing néere so great as of other séedes, because euery one that knowes any graine, can distinguish them when hée sées them: besides they are of that massie waight, and so well able to indure the strength of the winde, that they are easie to be seuered from any wéede or filth whatsoeuer: it resteth therefore that i onely giue you instruction how to imploy them. you shall vnderstand therefore, that if your soyle be a stiffe, blacke, rich, clay, that then your best séede is cleane beanes, or at the least thrée partes beanes, and but one part pease: if it be a gray, or white clay, then beanes and pease equally mixt together: if the best mixt earths, as a blacke clay and red sand, blacke clay and white sand, or white clay and red sand, then your séede must be cleane pease onely: if it be white clay and white sand, blacke clay and blacke sand, then your séede must be pease and fitches mixt together: but if it be grauell or sand simple, or grauell and sand compounded, then your séede must be either cleane fitches, cleane bucke, or cleane tares, or else fitches, bucke and tares mixt together. {sn: the choise of seede-oates.} now to conclude with the choise of your oates. you shall vnderstand that there be diuers kindes of them, as namely, the great long white oate, the great long blacke oate, the cut oate, and the skegge: the two first of these are knowne by their greatnesse and colours, for they are long, full, bigge, and smooth, and are fittest to be sowne vpon the best of barraine grounds, for sith oates are the worst of graine, i will giue them no other prioritie of place. the next of these, which is the cut oate, it is of a pale yealow colour, short, smooth, and thicke, the increase of them is very great, and they are the fittest to be sowne vpon the worst of best grounds, for most commonly where you sée them, you shall also sée both good wheate, good barly, and good beanes and pease also. now for the skegge oate, it is a little, small, hungry, leane oate, with a beard at the small end like a wilde oate, and is good for small vse more then pullen onely: it is a séede méete for the barrainest and worst earth, as fit to grow but there where nothing of better profit will grow. and thus much for those séedes which are apt and in vse in our english soyles: wherein if any man imagine me guiltie of errour, in that i haue omitted particularly to speake of the séede of blend-corne, or masline, which is wheate and rye mixt together, i answere him, that sith i haue shewed him how to chuse both the best wheate and the best rye, it is an easie matter to mixe them according to his owne discretion. chap. vi. _of the time of haruest and the gathering in of corne._ {sn: the getting in of masline.} {sn: the getting in of wheate.} next vnto plowing, it is necessary that i place reaping, sith it is the end, hope, and perfection of the labour, and both the merit and incouragement which maketh the toyle both light and portable: then to procéede vnto the time of haruest. you shall vnderstand that it is requisite for euery good husband about the latter end of iuly, if the soyle wherein he liueth be of any hot temper, or about the beginning of august, if it be of temperate warmth, with all dilligence constantly to beholde his rye, which of all graines is the first that ripeneth, and if he shall perceiue that the hull of the eare beginneth to open, and that the blacke toppes of the corne doth appeare, he may then be assured that the corne is fully ripe, and ready for the sickle, so that instantly he shall prouide his reapers, according to the quantitie of his graine: for if hée shall neglect his rye but one day more then is fit, it is such a hasty graine, that it will shale forth of the huske to the ground, to the great losse of the husbandman. when hée hath prouided his shearers, which he shall be carefull to haue very good, he shall then looke that neither out of their wantonnesse nor emulation, they striue which shall goe fastest, or ridd most ground, for from thence procéedeth many errors in their worke, as namely, scattering, and leauing the corne vncut behind them, the cutting the heads of the corne off so that they are not possible to be gathered, and many such like incommodities, but let them goe soberly and constantly, and sheare the rye at least fourtéene inches aboue the ground. then he must looke that the gatherers which follow the reapers doe also gather cleane, & the binders binde the sheafes fast from breaking, then if you finde that the bottomes of the sheafes be full of gréenes, or wéedes, it shall not be amisse to let the sheafes lye one from another for a day, that those gréenes may wither, but if you feare any raine or foule weather, which is the onely thing which maketh rye shale, then you shall set it vp in shockes, each shocke containing at least seauen sheafes, in this manner: first, you shall place foure sheafes vpright close together, and the eares vpwards, then you shall take other thrée sheafes and opening them and turning the eares downeward couer the other foure sheafes that stoode vpwards, and so let them stand, vntill you may with good conueniencie lead them home, which would be done without any protraction. next after your cleane rye, you shall in the selfe-same sort reape your blend-corne, or masline: and albeit your wheate will not be fully so ripe as your rye, yet you shall not stay your labour, being well assured that your rye is ready, because wheate will harden of it selfe after it is shorne, with lying onely. after you haue got in your rye and blend-corne, you shall then looke vnto your cleane wheate, and taking heare and there an eare thereof, rubbe them in your hand, and if you finde that the corne hath all perfection saue a little hardning onely, you shall then forthwith set your reapers vnto it, who shall sheare it in all things as they did sheare your rye, onely they shall not put it in shockes for a day or more, but let the sheafes lye single, that the winde and sunne may both wither the gréenes, and harden the corne: which done, you shall put the sheafes into great shockes, that is to say, at least twelue or fouretéene sheafes in a shocke, the one halfe standing close together with the eares vpward, the other halfe lying crosse ouerthwart those eares, and their eares downeward, and in this sort you shall let your wheate stand for at least two dayes before you lead it. now it is a custome in many countries of this kingdome, not to sheare their wheate, but to mow it, but in my conceit and in generall experience, it is not so good: for it both maketh the wheate foule, and full of wéede, and filleth vp a great place with little commoditie, as for the vse of thacking, which is the onely reason of such disorderly cutting, there is neither the straw that is shorne, nor the stubble which is left behinde, but are both of sufficiencie inough for such an imployment, if it passe through the hands of a workman, as we sée in dayly experience. {sn: the getting in of barly.} next to your wheate, you shall haue regard to your barly, for it sodainely ripeneth, and must be cut downe assoone as you perceiue the straw is turned white, to the bottome, and the eares bended downe to the groundward. your barly you shall not sheare, although it is a fashion in some country, both because it is painefull and profitlesse, but you shall mowe it close to the ground, and although in generall it be the custome of our kingdome, after your barly is mowen and hath lyne a day or two in swathe, then with rackes to racke it together, and make it into great cockes, and so to leade it to the barne, yet i am of this opinion that if your barly be good and cleane without thistles or wéedes, that if then to euery sitheman, or mower you alot two followers, that is to say, a gatherer, who with a little short rake and a small hooke shall gather the corne together, and a binder, who shall make bands and binde vp the barly in smale sheafes, that questionlesse you shall finde much more profit thereby: and although some thinke the labour troublesome and great, yet for mine owne part, i haue séene very great croppes inned in this manner, and haue séene two women, that with great ease, haue followed and bound after a most principall mower, which made me vnderstand that the toyle was not so great as mine imagination; and the profit ten-fold greater then the labour: but if your corne be ill husbanded, and full of thistles, wéedes, and all filthinesse, then this practise is to be spared, and the loose cocking vp of your corne is much better. assoone as you haue cleansed any land of barly, you shall then immediatly cause one with a great long rake, of at least thirtie téeth, being in a sling bound bauticke-wise crosse his body, to draw it from one end of the land to the other, all ouer the land, that he may thereby gather vp all the loose corne which is scattered, and carry it where your other corne standeth, obseruing euer, as your cheifest rule, that by no meanes you neither leade barly, nor any other graine whatsoeuer, when it is wet, no although it be but moistned with the dew onely: for the least dankishnesse, more then the sweate which it naturally taketh, will soone cause it to putrifie. {sn: the getting in of oates.} now for the gathering in of your oates, they be a graine of such incertaintie, ripening euer according to the weather, & not after any setled or naturall course, that you are to looke to no constant season, but to take them vpon the first show of ripenesse, and that with such diligence that you must rather take them before, then after they be ripe, because if they tarry but halfe a day too long, they will shed vpon the ground, & you shal loose your whole profit. the time then fittest to cut your oates is, assoone as they be somewhat more then halfe changed, but not altogether changed, that is, when they are more then two parts white, and yet the gréene not vtterly extinguished, the best cutting of them is to mow them (albeit i haue séene them shorne in some places) & being mowen to let them dry and ripen in the swathe, as naturally they will doe, and then if you bind them vp in sheafes, as you should binde your barly, it is best: for to carry them in the loose cocke, as many doe, is great losse and hindrance of profit. {sn: the getting in of pulse.} after you haue got in your white corne, you shall then looke vnto your pulse, as beanes, pease, fitches, and such like, which you shall know to be ready by the blacknesse of the straw: for it is a rule, whensoeuer the straw turnes, the pulse is ripe. if then it be cleane beanes, or beanes and pease mixt, you shall mowe them, and being cleane beanes rake them into heapes, and so make them vp into cockes, but if they be mixt you shall with hookes fould the beanes into the pease, and make little round reapes thereof, which after they haue béene turned and dryed, you may put twenty reapes together, and thereof make a cocke, and so lead them, and stacke them: but if they be cleane pease, or pease and fitches, then you shall not mowe them, but with long hookes cut them from the ground, which is called reaping, and so foulding them together into small reapes, as you did your pease and beanes, let them be turned and dryed, and so cocked, and carried either to the barne, stacke, or houell. now hauing thus brought in, and finished your haruest, you shall then immediately mowe vp the stubble, both of your wheate, rye, and masline, and with all expedition there-with thacke, and couer from raine and weather, all such graine as for want of house-roome, you are compeld to lay abroad, either in stacke, or vpon houell: but if no such necessitie be, and that you haue not other more necessary imployment for your stubble, it shall be no part of ill husbandry to let the stubble rot vpon the land, which will be a reasonable manuring or fatting of the earth. now hauing brought your corne into the barne, it is a lesson néedlesse to giue any certaine rules how to spend or vtter it forth, sith euery man must be ruled according to his affaires, and necessitie, yet sith in mine owne experience i haue taken certaine setled rules from those who haue made themselues great estates by a most formall and strickt course in their husbandry, i thinke it not amisse to show you what i haue noted from them, touching the vtterance and expence of their graine: first, for your expence in your house, it is méete that you haue euer so much of euery seuerall sort of graine thresht, as shall from time to time maintaine your family: then for that which you intend shall returne to particular profit, you shall from a fortnight before michaelmas, till a fortnight after, thresh vp all such wheate, rye, & masline, as you intend to sell for séede, which must be winnowed, fand, and drest so cleane as is possible, for at that time it will giue the greatest price; but as soone as séede-time is past, you shall then thresh no more of those graines till it be neare midsummer, but begin to thresh vp all such barly as you intend to conuert and make into malt, and so from michaelmas till candlemas, apply nothing but malting, for in that time graine is euer the cheapest, because euery barne being full, some must sell for the payment of rents, some must sell to pay seruants wages, and some for their christmas prouisions: in which time corne abating and growing scarse, the price of necessitie must afterwards rise: at candlemas you shall begin to thresh all those pease which you intend to sell for séede, because the time being then, and euery man, out of necessitie, inforced to make his prouision, it cannot be but they must néedes passe at a good price and reckoning. after pease séede-time, you shall then thresh vp all that barly which you meane to sell for séede, which euer is at the dearest reckoning of any graine whatsoeuer, especially if it be principally good and cleane. after your séede-barly is sould, you may then thresh vp all such wheate, rye, and masline, as you intend to sell: for it euer giueth the greatest price from the latter end of may vntill the beginning of september. in september you shall begin to sell your malt, which being old and hauing lyne ripening the most part of the yéere, must now at the latter end of the yéere, when all old store is spent, and the new cannot be come to any perfection, be most deare, and of the greatest estimation: and thus being a man of substance in the world, and able to put euery thing to the best vse, you may by these vsuall obseruations, and the helpe of a better iudgement, imploy the fruits of your labours to the best profit, and sell euery thing at the highest price, except you take vpon you to giue day and sell vpon trust, which if you doe, you may then sell at what vnconscionable reckoning you will, which because such vnnaturall exactions neither agrée with charitie, nor humanitie, i will forbeare to giue rules for the same, and referre euery man that is desirous of such knowledge, to the examples of the world, wherein he shall finde presidents inough for such euill customes. and thus much for the first part of this worke, which containeth the manner of plowing and tillage onely. the second part of the first booke of the english husbandman, contayning the art of planting, grafting and gardening, either for pleasure or profit; together with the vse and ordering of woodes. chap. i. _of the scyte, modell, squares, and fashion of a perfect orchard._ although many authors which i haue read, both in italian, french, and dutch, doe make a diuersitie and distinguishment of orchardes, as namely, one for profit, which they fashion rudely and without forme, the other for delight, which they make comely, decent, and with all good proportion, deuiding the quarters into squares, making the alleyes of a constant breadth, and planting the fruit-trées in arteficiall rowes: yet for as much as the comelinesse and well contriuing of the ground, doth nothing abate, but rather increase the commoditie, i will therefore ioyne them both together, and make them onely but one orchard. now for the scyte and placing of this orchard, i haue in the modell of my country house, or husbandmans farme, shewed you where if it be possible it should stand, and both what sunne & ayre it should lye open vpon: but if the scyte or ground-plot of your house will not giue you leaue to place your orchard according to your wish, you shall then be content to make a vertue of necessitie, and plant it in such a place as is most conuenient, and nearest alyed to that forme before prescribed. {illustration} now when you haue found out a perfect ground-plot, you shall then cast it into a great large square, which you shall fence in either with a stone or bricke wall, high, strong pale, or great ditch with a quicke-set hedge, but the wall is best and most durable, and that wall would haue vpon the inside within twelue or fourtéene foote on of another, iames or outshoots of stone or bricke, betweene which you may plant and plash those fruit-trées which are of greatest tendernesse, the south and west sunne hauing power to shine vpon them. when you haue thus fenc'st in this great square, you shall then cast foure large alleyes, at least fourtéene foote broad, from the wall round about, and so likewise two other alleyes of like breadth, directly crosse ouerthwart the ground-plot, which will deuide the great square into foure lesser squares, according to the figure before set downe. the figure . sheweth the alleyes which both compasse about, and also crosse ouer the ground-plot, and the figure . sheweth the foure quarters where the fruit-trées are to be planted. now if either the true nature and largnesse of the ground be sufficient, or your owne abilitie of pursse so great that you may compasse your desires in these earthly pleasures, it shall not be amisse, but a matter of great state, to make your ground-plot full as bigge againe, that is to say, to containe eight large quarters, the first foure being made of an euen leuell, the other foure being raysed at least eight foote higher then the first, with conuenient stayres of state for ascending to the same, to be likewise vpon another euen leuell of like forme, and if in the center of the alleyes, being the mid-point betwéene the squares, might be placed any quaint fountaines or any other antique standard, the platforme would be more excellent and if vpon the ascent from one leuell to another there might be built some curious and arteficiall banquetting house, it would giue luster to the orchard. now for the planting and furnishing of these quarters: you shall vnderstand that if your orchard containe but foure quarters, then the first shalbe planted with apple-trées of all sorts, the second with peares and wardens of all sorts, the third with quinces & chesnutes, the fourth with medlars & seruices. against the north side of your orchard wall against which the south sunne reflects, you shall plant the abricot, verdochio, peach, and damaske-plumbe: against the east side of the wall, the whit muskadine grape, the pescod-plumbe, and the emperiall-plumbe: against the west side the grafted cherries, and the oliue-trée: and against the south side the almond, & figge trée. round about the skirts of euery other outward or inward alley, you shall plant, the wheate-plumbe, both yealow & redde, the rye-plumbe, the damson, the horse-clog, bulleys of all kindes, ordinary french cherryes, filberts, and nuts of all sorts, together with the prune-plumbe, and other such like stone fruits. but if your orchard be of state and prospect, so that it containe eight quarters or more (according to the limitation of the earth) then you shall in euery seuerall quarter plant a seuerall fruit, as apple-trées in one quarter, peares in another, quinces in another, wardens in another, and so forth of the rest. also you shall obserue in planting your apples, peares, and plumbes, that you plant your summer or early fruit by themselues, and the winter or long lasting fruit by themselues. of apples, your ienitings, wibourns, pomederoy, and quéene-apples are reckoned the best earely fruits, although their be diuers others, and the pippin, peare-maine, apple-iohn, and russetting, your best winter and long lasting fruit, though there be a world of other: for the tastes of apples are infinite, according to there composition and mixture in grafting. of peares your golden peare, your katherine-peare, your lording, and such like, are the first, and your stone-peare, warden-peare, and choake-peare, those which indure longest. and of plumbes the rye-plumbe is first, your wheate-plumbe next, and all the other sorts of plumbes ripen all most together in one season, if they haue equall warmth, and be all of like comfortable standing. {illustration} now for the orderly placing of your trées, you shall vnderstand that your plumbe-trées (which are as it were a fence or guard about your great quarters) would be placed in rowes one by one, aboue fiue foote distance one from another, round about each skirt of euery alley: your apple-trées & other greater fruit which are to be planted in the quarters, would be placed in such arteficiall rowes that which way soeuer a man shall cast his eyes yet hée shall sée the trées euery way stand in rowes, making squares, alleyes, and deuisions, according to a mans imagination, according to the figure before, which i would haue you suppose to be one quarter in an orchard, and by it you may easily compound the rest: wherein you shall vnderstand that the lesser prickes doe figure your plumbe-trées, & the greater prickes your apple trées, and such other large fruit. now you shall vnderstand that euery one of these great trées which furnish the maine quarter, shall stand in a direct line, iust twelue foote one from another, which is a space altogether sufficient inough for there spreading, without waterdropping or annoying one another; prouided that the fruiterer, according to his duty, be carefull to preserue the trees vpright and to vnderprope them when by the violence of the winde they shall swarue any way. vpon the ascent or rising from one leuell to another, you may plant the barberry-trées, feberries, and raspberries, of all sorts, which being spreading, thorny and sharpe trées, take great delight to grow thicke and close together, by which meanes often times they make a kinde of wall, hedge, or fencing, where they stand. hauing thus shewed you the ground-plot and proportion of your orchard, with the seuerall deuisions, ascents, and squares, that should be contained therein, and the fruits which are to furnish euery such square and deuision, and their orderly placing, it now rests that you vnderstand that this orchard-plot, so neare as you can bring it to passe, doe stand most open and plaine, vpon the south and west sunne, and most defended from the east and north windes and bitternesse, which being obserued your plot is then perfect and absolute. now forasmuch as where nature, fruitfulnesse, and situation doe take from a man more then the halfe part of his industrie, and by a direct and easie way doth lead him to that perfection which others cannot attaine to without infinit labour and trauell: and whereas it is nothing so commendable to maintaine beautie, as to make deformitie beautifull, i will speake something of the framing of orchard-plots there where both nature, the situation, and barrainnesse, doe vtterly deny the enioying of any such commoditie, as where the ground is vneuen, stonie, sandy, or in his lownesse subiect to the ouerflow of waters, all being apparant enemies to these places of pleasure and delight. first, for the vneuennesse of the ground, if that be his vttermost imperfection, you shall first not onely take a note with your eye, but also place a marke vpon the best ascent of the ground to which the leuell is fittest to be drawne, and then plowing the ground all ouer with a great common plough, by casting the furrowes downward, séeke to fill in and couer the lesser hollownesses of the ground, that their may not any thing appeare but the maine great hollowes, which with other earth which is frée from stones, grauell, or such like euils, you shall fill vp and make leuell with that part where your marke standeth, and being so leuelled, forthwith draw the plot of your orchard: but if the ground be not onely vneuen but also barraine, you shall then to euery loade of earth you carry to the leuelling adde a loade of manure, either oxe manure, or horse manure, the rubbish of houses, or the clensings of olde ditches, or standing pooles, and the earth will soone become fertill and perfect; but if the ground be stonie, that is, full of great stones, as it is in darbishire about the peake or east mores, for small pibbles or small lime-stones are not very much hurtfull, then you shall cause such stones to be digd vp, and fill vp the places where they lay either with marle, or other rich earth, which after it hath béene setled for a yéere or two you shall then plough, and leuell it, and so frame forth the plot of your orchard. if the ground be onely a barraine sand, so that it wanteth strength either to maintaine or bring forth, you shall then first digge that earth into great trenches, at least foure foote déepe, and filling them vp with oxe manure, mixe it with the sand, that it may change some part of the colour thereof and then leuelling it fashion out your orchard. but lastly, and which is of all situations the worst, if you haue no ground to plant your orchard vpon, but such as either through the neighbourhood of riuers, descent of mountaines, or the earths owne naturall quallitie in casting and vomiting out water and moysture, is subiect to some small ouerflowes of water, by which you cannot attaine to the pleasure you séeke, because fruit-trées can neuer indure the corruption of waters, you shall then in the dryest season of the yéere, after you haue marked out that square or quantitie of ground which you intend for your orchard, you shall then cast therein sundry ditches, at least sixtéene foote broad, and nine foote déepe, and not aboue twelue foote betwixt ditch and ditch, vpon which reserued earth casting the earth that you digged vp, you shall raise the banckes at least seauen foote high of firme earth, and kéepe in the top the full breadth of twelue foote, with in a foote or little more: and in the casting vp of these bankes you shall cause the earth to be beaten with maules and broad béetels that it may lye firme, fast, and leuell, and after these bankes haue rested a yéere or more, and are sufficiently setled, you may then at the neather end of the banke, neare to the verge of the water plant store of osyers, which will be a good defence to the banke, and vpon the top and highest part of the banke you shall plant your orchard and fruit-trées, so that when any inundation of water shall happen, the ditches shalbe able inough to receiue it; or else making a passage from your orchard into some other sewer, the water excéeding his limits may haue a frée current or passage: besides these ditches being neatly kept, and comforted with fresh water, may make both pleasant and commodious fish-ponds. also you must be carefull in casting these bankes that you doe not place them in such sort that when you are vpon one you cannot come to the other, but rather like a maze, so that you may at pleasure passe from the one to the other round about the ground, making of diuers bankes to the eye but one banke in substance, and of diuers ponds in appearance, but one in true iudgement. and thus much for the plot or situation of an orchard. chap. ii. _of the nurserie where you shall set all manner of kernels, and stones, for the furnishing of the orchard._ although great persons, out of their greatnesse and abilitie, doe buy their fruit trées ready grafted, and so in a moment may plant an orchard of the greatest quantitie, yet sith the husbandman must raise euery thing from his owne indeauours, and that i onely write for his profit, i therefore hould it most conuenient to beginne with the nursery or store-house of fruits, from whence the orchard receiueth his beauty and riches. this nursery must be a piece of principall ground, either through art or nature, strongly fenced, warme, and full of good shelter: for in it is onely the first infancy and tendernesse of fruit-trées, because there they are first kernells, or stones, after sprigs, and lastly trées. now for the manner of chusing, sowing, and planting them in this nursery, i differ some thing from the french practise, who would chuse the kernells from the cider presse, sow them in large bedds of earth, and within a yeere after replant them in a wilde orchard: now for mine owne part, though this course be not much faulty, yet i rather chuse this kinde of practise, first: to chuse your kernells either of apples, peares, or wardens, from the best and most principallest fruit you can taste, for although the kernell doe bring forth no other trée but the plaine stocke vpon which the fruit was grafted, as thus, if the graft were put into a crab-stocke the kernell brings forth onely a crab-trée, yet when you taste a perfect and delicate apple, be assured both the stocke and graft were of the best choise, and so such kernells of best reckoning. when you haue then a competent quantitie of such kernells, you shall take certaine large pots, in the fashion of milke-boules, all full of hoales in the bottome, through which the raine and superfluous moysture may auoyde, and either in the months of march or nouember (for those are the best seasons) fill the pots three parts full of the finest, blackest, and richest mould you can get, then lay your kernells vpon the earth, about foure fingars one from another, so many as the vessell can conueniently containe, and then with a siue sift vpon them other fine moulds almost thrée fingars thicke, and so let them rest, filling so many pots or vessells as shall serue to receiue your quantitie of kernells of all sorts. now if any man desire to know my reason why i rather desire to set my kernells rather in vessells then in beds of earth, my answere is, that i haue often found it in mine experience, that the kernell of apples, peares, quinces, and such like, are such a tender and dainty séede that it is great oddes but the wormes will deuoure and consume them before they sprout, who naturally delight in such séedes, which these vessels onely doe preuent: but to proceede. after your kernells are sprouted vp and growne to be at least seauen or eight inches high, you shall then within your nursery digge vp a border about two foote and an halfe broad, more then a foote déepe, and of such conuenient length as may receiue all your young plants, and hauing made the mould fine and rich with manure, you shall then with your whole hand gripe as much of the earth that is about the plant as you can conueniently hould, and so take both the plant and the mould out of the vessell, and replant it in the new drest border: and you shall thus doe plant after plant, till you haue set euery one, and made them firme and fast in the new mould: wherein you are to obserue these two principles, first that you place them at least fiue foote one from another, and secondly, that such kernells as you set in your vessels in march, that you replant them in borders of earth in nouember following, and such as you set in nouember to replant in march following, and being so replanted to suffer them to grow till they be able to beare grafts, during which time you shall diligently obserue, that if any of them chance to put forth any superfluous branches or cyons, which may hinder the growth of the body of the plant, that you carefully cut them away, that thereby it may be the sooner inabled to beare a graft: for it is euer to be intended that whatsoeuer procéedeth from kernells are onely to be preserued for stockes to graft on, and for no other purpose. now for the stones of plumbes, & other stone fruit, you shall vnderstand that they be of two kindes, one simple and of themselues, as the rye-plumbe, wheate-plumbe, damson, prune-plumbe, horse-clogge, cherry, and such like, so that from the kernells of them issueth trées of like nature and goodnesse: the other compounded or grafted plumbes, as the abricot, pescod, peach, damaske, verdochyo, emperiall, and such like, from whose kernells issueth no other trées but such as the stockes were vpon which they were grafted. now, for the manner of setting the first, which are simple and vncompounded, you shall digge vp a large bedde of rich and good earth a month or more before march or nouember, and hauing made the mould as fine as is possible, you shall flat-wise thrust euery stone, a foote one from another, more then thrée fingars into the mould, and then with a little small rake, made for the purpose, rake the bedde ouer and close vp the holes, and so let them rest till they be of a yéeres groath, at which time you shall replant them into seuerall borders, as you did your apple-trée plants and others. now for the kernells of your compounded or grafted plumbes, you shall both set them in beddes and replant them into seuerall borders, in the same manner as you did the other kernells of plumbes, onely you shall for the space of eight and forty houres before you set them stéepe them in new milke, forasmuch as the stones of them are more hard, and with greater difficulty open and sprout in the earth, then any other stone whatsoeuer: and thus hauing furnished your nursery of all sorts of fruits and stockes, you shall when they come to full age and bignesse graft them in such order as shalbe hereafter declared. chap. iii. _of the setting or planting of the cyons or branches of most sorts of fruit-trees._ as you are to furnish your nursery with all sorts of kernells and stones, for the bréeding of stockes where on to graft the daintiest fruits you can compasse, so shall you also plant therein the cyons and branches of the best fruit trées: which cyons and branches doe bring forthe the same fruit which the trées doe from whence they are taken, and by that meanes your nursery shall euer afford you perfect trées, wherewith either to furnish your owne grounds, or to pleasure your neighbours. and herein by the way you shall vnderstand that some trées are more fit to be set then to be sowne, as namely, the seruice-trée, the medler, the filbert and such like. now for the seruice-trée, hée is not at all to be grafted, but set in this wise: take of the bastard cyons such as be somewhat bigger then a mans thumbe, and cutting away the branches thereof, set it in a fine loose moulde, at least a foote déepe, and it will prosper exceedingly, yet the true nature of this trée is not to be remoued, and therefore it is conuenient that it be planted where it should euer continue: in like manner to the seruice-tree, so you shall plant the bastard cyons of the medlar-trée either in march or october, and at the waine of the moone. now for the filbert, or large hassell-nut, you shall take the smallest cyons or wands, such as are not aboue two yéeres groath, being full of short heauie twigges, and grow from the roote of the maine trée, and set them in a loose mould, a foote déepe, without pruning or cutting away any of the branches, and they will prosper to your contentment. now for all sorts of plumbe-trées, apple-trées or other fruit-trées which are not grafted, if you take the young cyons which grow from the rootes cleane from the rootes, and plant them either in the spring, or fall, in a fresh and fine mould, they will not onely prosper, but bring forth fruit of like nature and qualitie to the trées from whence they were taken. now for your grafted fruit, as namely, apples, plumbes, cherryes, mulberries, quinces, and such like, the cyons also and branches of them also will take roote and bring forth fruit of the same kinde that the trées did from whence they were taken: but those cyons or branches must euer be chosen from the vpper parts of the trées, betwixt the feast of all-saints and christmas, they must be bigger then a mans finger, smooth, straight, and without twigges: you shall with a sharpe chissell cut them from the body or armes of the trée with such care, that by no meanes you raise vp the barke, and then with a little yealow waxe couer the place from whence you cut the cyon: then hauing digged and dunged the earth well where you intend to plant them, and made the mould easie, you shall with an iron, as bigge as your plant, make a hoale a foote déepe or better, and then put in your cyon and with it a few oates, long stéept in water, and so fixe it firme in the mould, and if after it beginneth to put forth you perceiue any young cyons to put forth from the root thereof, you shall immediatly cut them off, & either cast them away or plant them in other places, for to suffer them to grow may bréede much hurt to the young trées. now where as these cyons thus planted are for the most part small and weake, so that the smallest breath of winde doth shake and hurt their rootes, it shalbe good to pricke strong stakes by them, to which, fastning the young plant with a soft hay rope it may the better be defended from stormes and tempests. next to these fruit-trées, you shall vnderstand that your bush-trées, as barberryes, gooseberryes, or feberryes, raspberryes, and such like, will also grow vpon cyons, without rootes, being cut from their maine rootes in nouember, & so planted in a new fresh mould. and here by the way i am to giue you this note or caueat, that if at any time you finde any of these cyons which you haue planted not to grow and flourish according to your desire, but that you finde a certaine mislike or consumption in the plant, you shall then immediatly with a sharpe knife cut the plant off slope-wise vpward, about three fingars from the ground, and so let it rest till the next spring, at which time you shall beholde new cyons issue from the roote, which will be without sicknesse or imperfection; and from the vertue of this experiment i imagine the gardners of antient time found out the meanes to get young cyons from olde mulberry-trées, which they doe in this manner: first, you must take some of the greatest armes of the mulberry-trée about the midst of nouember, and with a sharpe sawe to sawe them into bigge truncheons, about fiuetéene inches long, and then digging a trench in principall good earth, of such depth that you may couer the truncheons, being set vp on end, with manure and fine mould, each truncheon being a foote one from another, and couerd more then foure fingars aboue the wood, not fayling to water them whensoeuer néede shall require, and to preserue them from wéeds and filthinesse, within lesse then a yéeres space you shall behold those truncheons to put forth young cyons, which as soone as they come to any groath and be twigged, then you may cut them from the stockes, and transplant them where you please, onely the truncheons you shall suffer to remaine still, and cherish them with fresh dunge, and they will put forth many moe cyons, both to furnish your selfe and your friends. and thus much for the planting and setting of cyons or branches. chap. iiii. _of the ordinary and accustomed manner of grafting all sorts of fruit-trees._ {sn: the mixing of stockes and grafts.} as soone as your nursery is thus amply furnished of all sorts of stockes, procéeding from kernells and of all sorts of trées procéeding from cyons, branches or vndergrowings, and that through strength of yéeres they are growne to sufficient abilitie to receiue grafts, which is to be intended that they must be at the least sixe or eight inches in compasse, for although lesse many times both doth and may receiue grafts, yet they are full of debilitie and danger, and promise no assurance to the worke-mans labour, you shall then beginne to graft your stockes with such fruits as from art and experience are méete to be conioyned together, as thus: you shall graft apples vpon apples, as the pippin vpon the great costard, the peare-maine vpon the ienetting, and the apple-iohn or blacke annet vpon the pomewater or crab-trée: to conclude, any apple-stocke, crab-tree, or wilding, is good to graft apples vpon, but the best is best worthy. so for peares, you shall graft them vpon peare stockes, quinces vpon quinces or crab-trées, and not according to the opinion of the frenchman, vpon white thorne or willow, the medlar vpon the seruice-trée, and the seruice vpon the medlar, also cherryes vpon cherryes, & plumbes vpon plumbes, as the greater abricots vpon the lesser abricots, the peach, the figge, or the damson-trée, and to speake generally without wasting more paper, or making a long circumstance to slender purpose, the damson-trée is the onely principall best stocke whereupon to graft any kinde of plumbe or stone fruit whatsoeuer. {sn: the choise of grafts.} after you haue both your stockes ready, and know which grafts to ioyne with which stockes, you shall then learne to cut and chuse your grafts in this manner: looke from what trée you desire to take your grafts, you shall goe vnto the very principall branches thereof, and looke vp to the vpper ends, and those which you finde to be fairest, smoothest, and fullest of sappe, hauing the little knots, budds, or eyes, standing close and thicke together, are the best and most perfect, especially if they grow vpon the east side of the trée, whereon the sunne first looketh; these you shall cut from the trée in such sort that they may haue at least thrée fingars of the olde woode ioyning to the young branch, which you shall know both by the colour of the barke, as also by a little round seame which maketh as it were a distinction betwixt the seuerall growths. now you shall euer, as néere as you can, chuse your grafts from a young trée, and not from an olde, and from the tops of the principall branches, and not from the midst of the trée, or any other superfluous arme or cyon; now if after you haue got your grafts you haue many dayes iourneys to carry them, you shall fould them in a few fresh mouldes, and binde them about with hay, and hay ropes, and so carry them all day, and in the night bury them all ouer in the ground and they will containe their goodnesse for a long season. {sn: how to graft in the cleft.} hauing thus prepared your grafts, you shall then beginne to graft, which worke you shall vnderstand may be done in euery month of the yéere, except nouember and october, but the best is to beginne about christmas for all earely and forward fruit, and for the other, to stay till march: now hauing all your implements and necessaryes about you, fit for the grafting, you shall first take your grafts, of what sort soeuer they be, and hauing cut the neather ends of them round and smoth without raysing of the barke, you shall then with a sharp knife, made in the proportion of a great pen-knife slice downe each side of the grafts, from the seame or knot which parts the olde woode from the new, euen to the neather end, making it flat and thinne, cheifely in the lowest part, hauing onely a regardfull eye vnto the pith of the graft, which you may by no meanes cut or touch, and when you haue thus trimmed a couple of grafts, for moe i doe by no meanes alow vnto one stocke, although sundry other skilfull workmen in this art alow to the least stocke two grafts, to the indifferent great thrée, and to the greatest of all foure, yet i affirme two are sufficiently inough for any stocke whatsoeuer, and albeit they are a little the longer in couering the head, yet after they haue couered it the trée prospereth more in one yéere then that which contayneth foure grafts shall doe in two, because they cannot haue sap inough to maintaine them, which is the reason that trées for want of prosperitie grow crooked and deformed: but to my purpose. when you haue made your grafts ready, you shall then take a fine thinne sawe, whose téeth shalbe filed sharpe and euen, and with it (if the stocke be excéeding small) cut the stocke round off within lesse then a foote of the ground, but if the stocke be as bigge as a mans arme, then you may cut it off two or thrée foote from the ground, and so consequently the bigger it is the higher you may cut it, and the lesser the nearer vnto the earth: as soone as you haue sawne off the vpper part of the stocke, you shall then take a fine sharpe chissell, somewhat broader then the stocke, and setting it euen vpon the midst of the head of the stocke somewhat wide of the pith, then with a mallet of woode you shall stricke it in and cleaue the stocke, at least foure inches déepe, then putting in a fine little wedge of iron, which may kéepe open the cleft, you shall take one of your grafts and looke which side of it you intend to place inward, and that side you shall cut much thinner then the out side, with a most héedfull circumspection that by no meanes you loosen or rayse vp the barke of the graft, cheifly on the out side, then you shall take the graft, and wetting it in your mouth place it in one side of the cleft of the stocke, and regard that the very knot or seame which goes about the graft, parting the olde woode from the new, do rest directly vpon the head of the stocke, and that the out side of the graft doe agrée directly with the out side of the stocke, ioyning barke vnto barke, and sappe vnto sappe, so euen, so smooth, and so close, that no ioyners worke may be discerned to ioyne more arteficially: which done, vpon the other side of the stocke, in the other cleft, you shall place your other graft, with full as much care, diligence, and euery other obseruation: when both your grafts are thus orderly and arteficially placed, you shall then by setting the haft of your chissell against the stocke, with all lenitie and gentlenesse, draw forth your wedge, in such sort that you doe not displace or alter your grafts, and when your wedge is forth you shall then looke vpon your grafts, and if you perceiue that the stocke doe pinch or squize them, which you may discerne both by the straitnesse and bending of the outmost barke, you shall then make a little wedge of some gréene sappy woode, and driuing it into the cleft, ease your grafts, cutting that wedge close to the stocke. when you haue thus made both your grafts perfect, you shall then take the barke of either apple-trée, crab-trée or willow-trée, and with that barke couer the head of the stocke so close that no wet or other annoyance may get betwixt it and the stocke, then you shall take a conuenient quantitie of clay, which indéede would be of a binding mingled earth, and tempering it well, either with mosse or hay, lay it vpon the barke, and daube all the head of the stocke, euen as low as the bottome of the grafts, more then an inch thicke, so firme, close, and smooth as may be, which done, couer all that clay ouer with soft mosse, and that mosse with some ragges of wollen cloath, which being gently bound about with the inward barkes of willow, or osyar, let the graft rest to the pleasure of the highest: and this is called grafting in the cleft. {sn: notes.} now there be certaine obseruations or caueats to be respected in grafting, which i may not neglect: as first, in trimming and preparing your grafts for the stocke: if the grafts be either of cherry, or plumbe, you shall not cut them so thinne as the grafts of apples, quinces, or medlars, because they haue a much larger and rounder pith, which by no meanes must be toucht but fortefied and preserued, onely to the neather end you may cut them as thinne as is possible, the pith onely preserued. secondly, you shall into your greatest stockes put your greatest grafts, and into your least, the least, that there may be an equall strength and conformitie in their coniunction. thirdly, if at any time you be inforced to graft vpon an olde trée, that is great and large, then you shall not graft into the body of that trée, because it is impossible to kéepe it from putrifaction and rotting before the grafts can couer the head, but you shall chuse out some of the principall armes or branches, which are much more slender, and graft them, as is before shewed, omitting not dayly to cut away all cyons, armes, branches, or superfluous sprigs which shall grow vnder those branches which you haue newly grafted: but if there be no branch, small or tender inough to graft in, then you shall cut away all the maine branches from the stocke, and couering the head with clay and mosse, let it rest, and within thrée or foure yéeres it will put forth new cyons, which will be fit to graft vpon. fourthly, if when you either sawe off the top of your stocke, or else cleaue the head, you either raise vp the barke or cleaue the stocke too déepe, you shall then sawe the stocke againe, with a little more carefulnesse, so much lower as your first errour had committed a fault. fiftly, you shall from time to time looke to the binding of the heads of your stockes, in so much that if either the clay doe shrinke away or the other couerings doe losen, by which defects ayre, or wet, may get into the incission, you shall presently with all spéede amend and repaire it. lastly, if you graft in any open place where cattell doe graze, you shall not then forget as soone as you haue finisht your worke to bush or hedge in your graft, that it may be defended from any such negligent annoyance. and thus much for this ordinary manner of grafting, which although it be generall and publike to most men that knoweth any thing in this art, yet is it not inferiour, but the principallest and surest of all other. chap. v. _of diuers other wayes of grafting, their vses and purposes._ although for certainty, vse, and commodity, the manner of grafting already prescribed is of sufficiency inough to satisfie any constant or reasonable vnderstanding, yet for nouelty sake, to which our nation is infinitly addicted, and to satisfie the curious, who thinke their iudgements disparaged if they heare any authorised traueller talke of the things which they haue not practised, i will procéede to some other more quaint manners of grafting, and the rather because they are not altogether vnnecessary, hauing both certainety in the worke, pleasure in the vse, and benefit in the serious imploying of those howers which else might challenge the title of idlenesse, besides they are very well agréeing with the soyles and fruits of this empyre of great brittaine and the vnderstandings of the people, for whose seruice or benefit, i onely vndergoe my trauell. you shall vnderstand therefore, that there is another way to graft, which is called grafting betwéene the barke and tree, and it is to be put in vse about the latter end of february, at such time as the sappe beginnes to enter into the trées: and the stockes most fit for this manner of grafting are those which are oldest and greatest, whose graine being rough and vneuen, either through shaking or twinding, it is a thing almost impossible to make it cleaue in any good fashion, so that in such a case it is meete that the grafter exercise this way of grafting betwixt the barke and the trée, the manner whereof is thus. {sn: grafting betweene the barke.} first, you shall dresse your grafts in such sort as was before discribed when you grafted in the cleft, onely they shall not be so long from the knot or seame downeward by an inch or more, neither so thicke, but as thinne as may be, the pith onely preserued, and at the neather end of all you shall cut away the barke on both sides, making that end smaller and narrower then it is at the ioynt or seame, then sawing off the head of the stocke, you shall with a sharpe knife pare the head round about, smooth and plaine, making the barke so euen as may be, that the barke of your grafts and it may ioyne like one body, then take a fine narrow chissell, not excéeding sharpe, but somewhat rebated, and thrust it hard downe betwixt the barke and the trée, somewhat more then two inches, according to the iust length of your graft, and then gently thrust the graft downe into the same place, euen close vnto the ioynt, hauing great care that the ioynt rest firme and constant vpon the head of the stocke, and thus you shall put into one stocke not aboue thrée grafts at the most, how euer either other mens practise, or your owne reading doe perswade you to the contrary. after your grafts are fixt and placed, you shall then couer the head with barke, clay, and mosse, as hath béene formerly shewed: also you shall fasten about it some bushes of thorne, or sharpe whinnes, which may defend and kéepe it from the annoyance of pye-annats, and such like great birds. there is another way of grafting, which is called grafting in the scutchion, which howsoeuer it is estéemed, yet is it troublesome, incertaine, and to small purpose: the season for it is in summer, from may till august, at what time trées are fullest of sappe and fullest of leaues, and the manner is thus: take the highest and the principallest branches of the toppe of the trée you would haue grafted, and without cutting it from the olde woode chuse the best eye and budding place of the cyon, then take another such like eye or budde, being great and full, and first cut off the leafe hard by the budde, then hollow it with your knife the length of a quarter of an inch beneath the budde, round about the barke, close to the sappe, both aboue and below, then slit it downe twice so much wide of the budde, and then with a small sharpe chissell raise vp the scutchion, with not onely the budde in the midst but euen all the sappe likewise, wherein you shall first raise that side which is next you, and then taking the scutchion betwéene your fingars, raise it gently vp without breaking or brusing, and in taking it off hould it hard vnto the woode, to the end the sappe of the budde may abide in the scutchion, for if it depart from the barke and cleaue to the woode, your labour is lost, this done you shall take another like cyon, and hauing taken off the barke from it, place it in the others place, and in taking off this barke you must be carfull that you cut not the woode, but the barke onely, and this done you shall couer it all ouer with redde waxe, or some such glutenous matter; as for the binding of it with hempe and such trumpery it is vtterly dissalowed of all good grafters: this manner of grafting may be put in practise vpon all manner of cyons, from the bignesse of a mans little fingar to the bignesse of a slender arme. {sn: grafting with the leafe.} not much vnlike vnto this, is the grafting with the leafe, and of like worth, the art whereof is thus: any time betwixt midst may, vntill the midst of september, you shall chuse, from the toppe of the sunne-side of the trée, the most principall young cyon you can sée, whose barke is smoothest, whose leaues are greatest, and whose sappe is fullest, then cutting it from the trée note the principall leafe thereof, and cut away from it all the woode more then about an inch of each side of the leafe, then cutting away the vndermost part of the barke with your knife, take péece meale from the barke all the woode and sappe, saue onely that little part of woode and sappe which féedeth the leafe, which in any wise must be left behind, so that the graft will carry this figure. {illustration} then goe to the body, arme, or branch of that trée which you intend to graft, which is to be presupposed must euer haue a smooth and tender barke, and with a very sharpe knife slit the barke, two slits at least, two inches long a péece, and about halfe an inch or more distance betwéene the two slits: then make another slit crosse-wise ouerthwart, from long slit to long slit, the figure whereof will be thus: {illustration} then with your knife raise the barke gently from the trée, without breaking, cracking, or brusing: then take your graft, and putting it vnder the barke lay it flat vnto the sappe of the trée, so as that little sappe which is left in the leafe, may without impediment cleaue to the sappe of the trée, then lay downe the barke close againe and couer the graft, and with a little vntwound hempe, or a soft wollen list, binde downe the barke close to the graft, and then couer all the incisions you haue made with greene waxe: by this manner of grafting you may haue vpon one trée sundry fruits, as from one apple-tree, both pippins, peare-maines, russettings and such like, nay, you may haue vpon one tree, ripe fruit all summer long, as ienettings from one branch, cislings from another, wibourns from another, costards and quéene-apples from others, and pippens and russettings, from others, which bringeth both delight to the eye, and admiration to the sence, and yet i would not haue you imagine that this kinde of grafting doth onely worke this effect, for as before i shewed you, if you graft in the cleft (which is the fastest way of all grafting) sundry fruits vpon sundry armes or bowes, you shall likewise haue procéeding from them sundry sorts of fruits, as either apples, plumbes, peares or any other kind, according to your composition and industry; as at this day we may dayly sée in many great mens orchards. {sn: grafting on the toppes of trees.} there is yet another manner of grafting, and it is of all other especially vsed much in italy, and yet not any thing disagréeable with our climate, and that is to graft on the small cyons which are on the toppes of fruit trées, surely an experience that carryeth in it both dificulty and wonder, yet being put to approbation is no lesse certaine then any of the other, the manner whereof is thus: you shall first after you haue chosen such and so many grafts as you doe intend to graft, and trimd them in the same manner as you haue béene taught formerly for grafting within the cleft, you shall then mount vp into the toppe of the trée, vpon which you meane to graft, and there make choise of the highest and most principallest cyons (being cleane barkt and round) that you can perceiue to grow from the trée, then laying the graft, and the cyon vpon which you are to graft, together, sée that they be both of one bignesse and roundnesse: then with your grafting knife cut the cyon off betwéene the olde woode and the new, and cleaue it downe an inch and an halfe, or two inches at the most: then put in your graft (which graft must not be cut thinner on one side, then on the other, but all of one thicknesse) and when it is in, sée that the barke of the graft both aboue and below, that is, vpon both sides, doe ioyne close, euen, and firme with the barke of the branch or cyon, and then by foulding a little soft towe about it, kéepe them close together, whilst with clay, mosse, and the in-most barke of osyars you lappe them about to defend them from ayre, winde, and tempests. and herein you shall obserue to make your graft as short as may be, for the shortest are best, as the graft which hath not aboue two or thrée knots, or buddes, and no more. you may, if you please, with this manner of grafting graft vpon euery seuerall cyon, a seuerall fruit, and so haue from one trée many fruits, as in case of grafting with the leafe, and that with much more spéede, by as much as a well-growne graft is more forward and able then a weake tender leafe. and in these seuerall wayes already declared, consisteth the whole art and substance of grafting: from whence albeit many curious braines may, from preuaricating trickes, beget showes of other fashions, yet when true iudgement shall looke vpon their workes, he shall euer finde some one of these experiments the ground and substance of all their labours, without which they are able to doe nothing that shall turne to an assured commoditie. {sn: the effects of grafting.} now when you haue made your selfe perfect in the sowing, setting, planting and grafting of trées, you shall then learne to know the effects, wonders, and strange issues which doe procéede from many quaint motions and helpes in grafting, as thus: if you will haue peaches, cherryes, apples, quinces, medlars, damsons, or any plumbe whatsoeuer, to ripen earely, as at the least two months before the ordinary time, and to continue at least a month longer then the accustomed course, you shall then graft them vpon a mulberry stocke: and if you will haue the fruit to tast like spice, with a certaine delicate perfume, you shall boyle honey, the powder of cloues and soaxe together, and being cold annoynt the grafts there-with before you put them into the cleft, if you graft apples, peares, or any fruit vpon a figge-tree stocke, they will beare fruit without blooming: if you take an apple graft, & a peare graft, of like bignesse, and hauing clouen them, ioyne them as one body in grafting, the fruit they bring forth will be halfe apple and halfe peare, and so likewise of all other fruits which are of contrary tastes and natures: if you graft any fruit-tree, or other trée, vpon the holly or vpon the cypresse, they will be greene, and kéepe their leaues the whole yéere, albeit the winter be neuer so bitter. if you graft either peach, plumbe, or any stone-fruit vpon a willow stocke, the fruit which commeth of them will be without stones. if you will change the colour of any fruit, you shall boare a hole slope-wise with a large auger into the body of the trée, euen vnto the pith, and then if you will haue the fruit yealow you shal fill the hole with saferne dissolued in water: if you will haue it redde, then with saunders, and of any other colour you please, and then stoppe the hole vp close, and couer it with red or yealow waxe: also if you mixe the coulour with any spice or perfume, the fruit will take a rellish or tast of the same: many other such like conceits and experiments are practised amongst men of this art, but sith they more concerne the curious, then the wise, i am not so carefull to bestow my labour in giuing more substantiall satisfaction, knowing curiosity loues that best which procéedes from their most paine, and am content to referre their knowledge to the searching of those bookes which haue onely strangnesse for their subiect, resolued that this i haue written is fully sufficient for the plaine english husbandman. chap. vi. _of the replanting of trees, and furnishing the orchard._ as soone as your séedes, or sets, haue brought forth plants, those plants, through time, made able, and haue receiued grafts, and those grafts haue couered the heads of the stockes and put forth goodly branches, you shall then take them vp, and replant them, (because the sooner it is done the better it is done) in those seuerall places of your orchard which before is appointed, and is intended to be prepared, both by dungging, digging, and euery orderly labour, to receiue euery seuerall fruit. and herein you shall vnderstand, that as the best times for grafting are euery month (except october and nouember) and at the change of the moone, so the best times for replanting, are nouember and march onely, vnlesse the ground be cold and moist and then ianuary, or february must be the soonest all wayes, excepted that you doe not replant in the time of frost, for that is most vnholsome. {sn: the taking vp of trees.} now when you will take vp your trées which you intend to replant in your orchard, you shall first with a spade bare all the maine branches of the roote, and so by degrées digge and loosen the earth from the roote, in such sort that you may with your owne strength raise the young trée from the ground, which done, you shall not, according to the fashion of fraunce, dismember, or disroabe the trée of his beauties, that is to say, to cut off all his vpper branches and armes, but you shall diligently preserue them: for i haue séene a trée thus replanted after the fall of the leafe to bring forth fruit in the summer following: but if the trée you replant be olde then it is good to cut off the maine branches with in a foote of the stocke, least the sappe running vpward, and so forsaking the roote too sodainely doe kill the whole trée. when you haue taken your trée vp, you shall obserue how, and in what manner, it stoode, that is, which side was vpon the south and receiued most comfort from the sunne, and which side was from it and receiued most shadow and bleaknesse, and in the same sort as it then stoode, so shall you replant it againe: this done you shall with a sharpe cutting-knife, cut off all the maine rootes, within halfe a foote of the trée, onely the small thriddes or twist-rootes you shall not cut at all: then bringing the plant into your orchard, you shall make a round hole in that place where you intend to set your trée (the rankes, manner, distance and forme whereof hath béene all ready declared, in the first chapter:) and this hole shalbe at least foure foote ouerthwart euery way, and at least two foote déepe, then shall you fill vp the hole againe, fiftéene inches déepe, with the finest blacke mould, tempered with oxe dunge that you can get, so that then the hole shalbe but nine inches déepe, then you shall take your trée and place it vpon that earth, hauing care to open euery seuerall branch and thrid of the roote, & so to place them that they may all looke downe into the earth, and not any of them to looke backe and turne vpward: then shall you take of the earth from whence your trée was taken, and tempering it with a fourth part of oxe dunge and slekt sope-asshes (for the killing of wormes) couer all the roote of your trée firmely and strongly: then with gréene soddes, cut and ioyned arteficially together, so sodde the place that the hole may hardly be discerned. lastly take a strong stake, and driuing it hard into the ground neare vnto the new planted trée, with either a soft hay rope, the broad barke of willow, or some such like vnfretting band, tye the trée to the stake, and it will defend it from the rage of winde and tempests, which should they but shake or trouble the roote, being new planted, it were inough to confound and spoyle the trée for euer. now, although i haue vnder the title and demonstration of replanting one trée giuen you a generall instruction for the replanting of all trées whatsoeuer, yet, for as much as some are not of that strength and hardnesse to indure so much as some others will, therefore you shal take these considerations by the way, to fortefie your knowledge with. first, you shall vnderstand that all your dainty and tender grafted plumbes, and fruits, as abricots, peaches, damaske-plumbes, verdochyos, pescods, emperialls, and diuers such like, together with orrenges, cytrons, almonds, oliues, and others, which indéede are not familiar with our soyles, as being nearer neighbours to the sunne, doe delight in a warme, fat, earth, being somewhat sandy, or such a clay whose coldnesse by manure is corrected, and therefore here with vs in the replanting of them you cannot bestow too much cost vpon the mould: as for the damson, and all our naturall english plumbes, they loue a fat, cold, earth, so that in the replanting of them if you shall lay too much dunge vnto their roote, you shall through the aboundant heate, doe great hurt vnto the trée. the cherry delighteth in any clay, so that vpon such soyle you may vse lesse manure, but vpon the contrary you cannot lay too much. the medlar estéemeth all earths alike, and therefore whether it be manured or no it skilles not, sunne and shadow, wet and drinesse, being all of one force or efficacy. the peare and apple-trée delights in a strong mixt soyle, and therfore indureth manure kindly, so doth also the quince and warden: lastly the filbert, the hasell, and the chesnut, loue cold, leane, moist, and sandy earths, in so much that there is no greater enimy vnto them then a rich soyle: so that in replanting of them you must euer séeke rather to correct then increase fertillity. you shall also vnderstand that all such fruit-trées as you doe plant against the walles of your orchard (of which i haue spoken already & deciphered out their places) you shall not suffer to grow as of themselues, round, and from the wall, but at the times of pruning and dressing of them (which is euer at the beginning of the spring and immediately after the fall) you shall as it were plash them, and spread them against the wall, foulding the armes in loopes of leather, and nayling them vnto the wall: and to that end you shall place them of such a fit distance one from another, that they may at pleasure spread and mount, without interruption: the profit whereof is at this day seene almost in euery great mans orchard: and although i haue but onely appointed vnto the wall the most quaint fruits of forraine nations; yet there is no fruit of our owne, but if it be so ordered it will prosper and bring forth his fruit better and in greater abundance. and thus much for the replanting of trées and furnishing of a well proportioned orchard. chap. vii. _of the dressing, dungging, proyning, and preseruing of trees._ sith after all the labour spent of ingendring by séede, of fortefying and inabling by planting, and of multiplying by grafting it is to little or no purpose if the trées be not maintained and preserued by dressing, dungging and proyning, i will therefore in this place shew you what belongs to that office or duty, and first, for the dressing of trees: you shall vnderstand that it containeth all whatsoeuer is méete for the good estate of the trée, as first, after your trée is planted, or replanted, if the season shall fall out hot, dry, and parching, insomuch that the moisture of the earth is sucked out by the atraction of the sunne, and so the trée wanteth the nutriment of moisture, in this case you shall not omit euery morning before the rising of the sunne, and euery euening after the set of the sunne, with a great watring-pot filled with water, to water & bath the rootes of the trées, if they be young trées, and newly planted, or replanted, but not otherwise: for if the trées be olde, and of long growth, then you shall saue that labour, and onely to such olde trées you shall about the midst of nouember, with a spade, digge away the earth from the vpper part of the rootes and lay them bare vntill it be midde-march, and then mingling such earth as is most agréeable with the fruit and oxe-dunge and sope-ashes together, so couer them againe, and tread the earth close about them: as for the vncouering of your trées in summer i doe not hold it good, because the reflection of the sunne is somewhat too violent and dryeth the roote, from whence at that time the sappe naturally is gone: you shall also euery spring and fall of the leafe clense your fruit trées from mosse, which procéeding from a cold and cankerous moisture, bréedeth dislike, and barrainenesse in trées: this mosse you must take off with the backe of an olde knife and leaue the barke smooth, plaine, and vnraced: also if you shall dunge such trées with the dunge of swine, it is a ready way to destroy the mosse. {sn: proyning of trees.} after you haue drest and trimmed your trées, you shall then proyne them, which is to cut away all those superfluous branches, armes, or cyons, which being either barraine, bruised or misplaced, doe like drones, steale-away that nutriment which should maintaine the better deseruing sinewes, and you shall vnderstand that the best time for proyning of trées, is in march and aprill, at which time the sappe assending vpward, causeth the trées to budde: the branches you shall cut away are all such as shall grow out of the stocke vnderneath the place grafted, or all such as by the shaking of tempests shall grow in a disorderly and ill fashioned crookednesse, or any other, that out of a well tempered iudgement shall séeme superfluous and burdensome to the stocke from whence it springs, also such as haue by disorder béene brooken, or maimed, and all these you shall cut away with a hooke knife, close by the trée, vnlesse you haue occasion by some misfortune to cut away some of the maine and great armes of the trée, and then you shall not vse your knife for feare of tearing the barke, but taking your sawe you shall sawe off those great armes close by the trée, neither shall you sawe them off downeward but vpward, least the waight of the arme breake the barke from the body: and herein you shall also vnderstand that for as much as the mischances which beget these dismembrings doe happen at the latter end of summer, in the gathering of the fruit, and that it is not fit such maymed and broken boughes hang vpon the trée till the spring, therefore you shall cut them off in the winter time, but not close to the trée by almost a foote, and so letting them rest vntill the spring, at that time cut them off close by the trée. now if you finde the superfluitie of branches which annoy your trées to be onely small cyons, springing from the rootes of the trées, as it often hapneth with all sorts of plumbe-trées, cherry-trées, nut-trées, and such like, then you shall in the winter, bare the rootes of those trées, and cut off those cyons close by the roote: but if your trées be broused or eaten by tame-deare, goates, shéepe, kine, oxen, or such like, then there is no help for such a misfortune but onely to cut off the whole head and graft the stocke anew. {sn: of barke-bound.} next to the proyning of trées, is the preseruing, phisicking, and curing of the diseases of trées: to which they are subiect as well as our naturall bodyes: and first of all, there is a disease called barke-bound, which is when the barke, through a mislike and leperous drynesse, bindeth in the trée with such straitnesse that the sappe being denied passage the body growes into a consumption: it is in nature like vnto that disease which in beasts is called hide-bound, and the cure is thus: at the beginning of march take a sharpe knife, and from the toppe of the body of the trée, to the very roote, draw downe certaine slits, or incissions, cleane through the barke, vnto the very sappe of the trée, round about the trée, & then with the backe of your knife open those slits and annoint them all through with tarre, and in short space it will giue libertie vnto the trée to encrease & grow: this disease commeth by the rubbing of cattell against the trée, especially swine, who are very poyson vnto all plants. {sn: of the gall.} there is another disease in fruit-trées, called the gall, and it eateth and consumeth the barke quit away, and so in time kills the trée: the cure is to cut and open the barke which you sée infected, and with a chissell to take away all that is foule and putrefied, and then to clappe oxe dunge vpon the place, and it will helpe it, and this must be done euer in winter. {sn: of the canker.} the canker in fruit trées is the consumption both of the barke and the body, & it commeth either by the dropping of trées one vpon another, or else when some hollow places of the trée retaineth raine water in them, which fretting through the barke, poysoneth the trée: the cure is to cut away all such boughes as by dropping bréede the euill, and if the hollow places cannot be smooth and made euen, then to stoppe them with clay, waxe, and sope-ashes mixt together. {sn: of worme-eaten barkes.} if the barkes of your trées be eaten with wormes, which you shall perceiue by the swelling of the barke, you shall then open the barke and lay there-vpon swines dunge, sage, and lime beaten together, and bound with a cloath fast to the trée, and it will cure it: or wash the trée with cowes-pisse and vinegar and it will helpe it. {sn: of pismiers and snailes.} if your young trées be troubled with pismiers, or snailes, which are very noysome vnto them, you shall take vnsleckt lime and sope-ashes and mingling them with wine-lées, spread it all about the roote of the trées so infected, and annoint the body of the trée likewise therewith, and it will not onely destroy them but giue comfort to the trée: the soote of a chimney or oake sawe-dust spread about the roote will doe the same. {sn: of caterpillers, and earewigges.} if caterpillers doe annoy your young trées, who are great deuourers of the leaues and young buddes, and spoylers of the barke, you shall, if it be in the summer time, make a very strong brine of water and salt, and either with a garden pumpe, placed in a tubbe, or with squirts which haue many hoales you shall euery second day water and wash your trées, and it will destroy them, because the caterpiller naturally cannot indure moisture, but if neuerthelesse you sée they doe continue still vpon your trees in winter, then you shall when the leaues are falne away take dankish straw and setting it on fire smeare and burne them from the trée, and you shall hardly euer be troubled with them againe vpon the same trées: roules of hay layd on the trées will gather vp earewigges and kill them. {sn: of the barrainenesse of trees.} if your trées be barraine, and albeit they flourish and spread there leaues brauely, yet bring forth no fruit at all, it is a great sicknesse, and the worst of all other: therefore you shall vnderstand it procéedeth of two causes: first, of two much fertillitie, and fatnesse of the ground, which causeth the leafe to put forth and flourish in such vnnaturall abundance, that all such sappe and nutriment as should knit and bring forth fruit, turnes onely vnto leafe, cyons, and vnprofitable branches, which you shall perceiue both by the abundance of the leaues and by the colour also, which will be of a more blacker and déeper gréene, and of much larger proportion then those which haue but their naturall and proper rights: and the cure thereof is to take away the earth from the roote of such trées and fill vp the place againe with other earth, which is of a much leaner substance: but if your trée haue no such infirmitie of fatnesse, but beareth his leaues and branches in good order and of right colour and yet notwithstanding is barraine and bringeth forth little or no fruit, then that disease springeth from some naturall defect in the trée, and the cure thereof is thus: first, you shall vnbare the roote of the trée, and then noting which is the greatest and principallest branch of all the roote, you shall with a great wimble boare a hole into that roote and then driue a pinne of olde dry ashe into the same (for oake is not altogether so good) and then cutting the pinne off close by the roote, couer all the head of the pinne with yealow waxe, and then lay the mould vpon the roote of the trée againe, and treade it hard and firmely downe, and there is no doubte but the trée will beare the yéere following: in fraunce they vse for this infirmitie to boare a hoale in the body of the trée slope-wise, somewhat past the hart, and to fill vp the hoale with life honey and rose-water mixt together, and incorporated for at least xxiiij. howers, and then to stoppe the hole with a pinne of the one woode: also if you wash the rootes of your trées in the drane water which runneth from your barley when you stéepe it for malt, it will cure this disease of barrainenesse. {sn: of the bitternesse of fruit.} if the fruit which is vpon your trées be of a bitter and sootie tast, to make it more pleasant and swéet you shall wash your trée all ouer with swines dunge and water mixt together, & to the rootes of the trées you shall lay earth and swines dunge mixt together, which must be done in the month of ianuary and february onely, and it will make the fruit tast pleasantly. and thus much for the dressing and preseruing of trées. chap. viii. _of the vine, and of his ordering._ for as much as the nature, temperature, and clymate, of our soyle is not so truely proper and agréeing with the vine as that of fraunce, italy, spaine, and such like, and sith wée haue it more for delight, pleasure, and prospect, then for any peculyar profit, i will not vndertake _monsiuer lybaults_ painefull labour, in discribing euery curious perfection or defect that belongs thereunto, as if it were the onely iewell and commoditie of our kingdome, but onely write so much as is fitting for our knowledge touching the maintaynance, increase, and preseruation thereof, in our orchards, gardens, and other places of recreation. {sn: of planting or setting the vine.} first then to speake of the planting or setting of the vine, your greatest diligence must be to séeke out the best plants, and if that which is most strange, rare, great and pleasant be the best, then is that grape which is called the muskadine, or sacke grape, the best, and haue their beginning either from spaine, the canary ilands, or such like places: next to them is the french grape, of which there be many kindes, the best whereof is the grape of orleance, the next the grape of gascoynie, the next of burdeaux, and the worst of rochell, and not any of these but by industry will prosper in our english gardens: when therefore you chuse your plants, you shall chuse such of the young cyons as springing from the olde woode, you may in the cutting cut at least a ioynt or two of olde woode with the young: for the olde will take soonest, and this olde woode must be at least seauen or eight inches long, and the young cyon almost a yard, and the thicker and closer the ioynts of the young cyon are, so much the better they are: and the fit time for cutting and gathering these sets are in midde-ianuary, then hauing prepared, digged, and dunged your earth the winter before, you shall at the latter end of ianuary take two of these sets, or plants, placing them according to this figure: {illustration} and lay them in the earth slope-wise, at least a foote déepe, leauing out of the earth, vncouered, not aboue foure or fiue ioynts, at the most, and then couer them with good earth firmely, closely, and strongly, hauing regard to raise those cyons which are without the earth directly vpward, obseruing after they be set, once in a month to wéede them, and kéepe them as cleane as is possible: for nothing is more noysome vnto them then the suffocating of wéeds: also you shall not suffer the mould to grow hard or bind about the rootes, but with a small spade once in a fortnight to loosen and breake the earth, because there rootes are so tender that the least straytning doth strangle and confound them. if the season doe grow dry, you may vse to water them, but not in such sort as you water other plants, which is to sprinckle water round about the earth of the rootes, but you shall with a round iron made for the purpose somewhat bigger then a mans fingar, make certaine holes into the earth, close vpon the roote of the vine, and powre therein either water, the dregges of strong-ale, or the lées of wine, or if you will you may mixe with the lées of wine either goats-milke, or cowes-milke, and power it into the holes and it will nourish the vine excéedingly, and not the vine onely, but all sorts of dainty grafted plumbes, especially peaches. {sn: of proyning the vine.} now for proyning the vine, you shall vnderstand that it is euer to be done after the fall of the leafe, when the sappe is desended downeward, for if you shall proyne, or cut him, either in the spring, or when the sappe is aloft, it will bléede so excéedingly, that with great difficulty you shall saue the body of the trée from dying: and, in proyning of the vine you shall obserue two things, the first, that you cut away all superfluous cyons and branches, both aboue and below, which either grow disorderly aboue, or fruitlessely below, and in cutting them you shall obserue, neither to cut the olde woode with the young cyon, nor to leaue aboue one head or leader vpon one branch: secondly, you shall in proyning, plash and spread the vine thinnely against the wall, giuing euery seuerall branch and cyon his place, and passage, and not suffer it to grow loosely, rudely, or like a wilde thorne, out of all decency and proportion: for you must vnderstand that your grapes doe grow euer vpon the youngest cyons, and if of them you shall preserue too many, questionlesse for want of nourishment they will lose their vertue, and you your profit. now if your vine be a very olde vine, and that his fruit doth decay, either in quantitie or proportion; if then you finde he haue any young cyons which spring from his roote, then when you proyne him you shall cut away all the olde stocke, within lesse then an handfull of the young cyons, and make them the leaders, who will prosper and continue in perfection a long time after, especially if you trimme the rootes with fresh earth, and fresh dunge. againe, if you be carefull to looke vnto your vine, you shall perceiue close by euery bunch of grapes certaine small thridde-like cyons, which resemble twound wyars, curling and turning in many rings, these also take from the grapes very much nutriment, so that it shall be a labour very well imployd to cut them away as you perceiue them. {sn: experiments of the vine.} now from the vine there is gathered sundry experiments, as to haue it tast more pleasant then the true nature of the grape, and to smell in the mouth odoriferously, or as if it were perfumed, which may be done in this sort: take damaske-rose-water and boyle therein the powder of cloaues, cynamon, thrée graines of amber, and one of muske, and when it is come to be somewhat thicke, take a round goudge and make a hole in the maine stocke of the vine, full as déepe as the hart thereof, and then put therein this medicine, then stopping the hole with cypresse, or iuniper, lay gréene-waxe thereupon, and binde a linnen cloath about it, and the next grapes which shall spring from that vine will tast as if they were preserued or perfumed. if you will haue grapes without stones, you shall take your plants and plant the small ends downeward and be assured your desire is attained. the vine naturally of himselfe doth not bring forth fruit till it haue béene thrée yéeres planted: but if euening and morning for the first month you will bath his roote with goats-milke or cowes-milke, it will beare fruit the first yéere of his planting. lastly, you may if you please graft one vine vpon another, as the swéet vpon the sower, as the muskadine grape, or gréeke, vpon the rochell or burdeaux, the spanish, or iland grape, on the gascoyne, and the orleance vpon any at all: and these compositions are the best, and bring forth both the greatest and pleasantest grapes: therefore whensoeuer you will graft one grape vpon another, you shall doe it in the beginning of ianuary, in this sort: first, after you haue chosen and trimmed your grafts, which in all sorts must be like the grafts of other fruits, then with a sharpe knife, you shall cleaue the head of the vine, as you doe other stockes and then put in your graft, or cyon, being made as thinne as may be and sée that the barkes and sappes ioyne euen and close together, then clay it, mosse it, and couer it, as hath béene before declared. {sn: the medicining of the vine.} if your vine grow too ranke and thicke of leaues, so that the sappe doth wast it selfe in them, and you thereby lose the profit of the fruit, you shall then bare all the rootes of the vine, and cast away the earth, filling vp the place againe with sand & ashes mingled together: but if the vine be naturally of it selfe barraine, then with a goudge you shall make a hole halfe way through the maine body of the vine, and driue into the hole a round pible stone, which although it goe straitly in, yet it may not fill vp the hole, but that the sicke humour of the vine may passe thorrow thereat: then couer the roote with rich earth, and oxe dunge mixt together, and once a day for a month water it with olde pisse, or vrine of a man, and it will make the trée fruitfull: if the vine be troubled with wormes, snailes, ants, earewigges, or such like, you shall morning and euening sprinckle it ouer with cowes-pisse and vinegar mixt together & it will helpe it: & thus much for ordering the vine. chap. ix. _the office of the fruiterrer, or the gatherer, and keeper, of fruit._ after you haue planted euery seuerall quarter, allye, and border within your orchard, with euery seuerall fruit proper vnto his place, and that you haue placed them in that orderly and comely equipage which may giue most delight to the eye, profit to the trée, and commendations to the workeman, (according to the forme and order prescribed in the first chapter) and that now the blessing of the highest, time, and your indeuours hath brought forth the haruest and recompence of your trauell, so that you behould the long-expected fruit hang vpon the trées, as it were in their ripenesse, wooing you to plucke, tast, and to deliuer them from the wombes of their parents, it is necessary then that you learne the true office of the fruiterer, who is in due season and time to gather those fruits which god hath sent him: for as in the husbanding of our grayne if the husbandman be neuer so carefull, or skilfull, in ploughing, dungging, sowing, wéeding and preseruing his crop, yet in the time of haruest be negligent, neither regarding the strength or ripnesse thereof, or in the leading and mowing respects not whether it be wet or dry, doth in that moments space loose the wages of his whole yéeres trauell, getting but durt from durt, and losse from his negligence: so in like case houlds it with all other fruits, if a man with neuer so great care and cost procure, yet if he be inrespectiue in the gathering, all his former businesse is vaine and to no purpose; and therefore i hould nothing more necessary then the relation of this office of the fruiterer, which is the consummation and onely hope of our cost, and diligence, teaching vs to gather wisely what wée haue planted wearily, and to eate with contentment what we haue preserued with care. {sn: of gathering and preseruing cherries.} know then, that of all fruits (for the most part) the cherry is the soonest ripe, as being one of the oldest children of the summer, and therefore first of all to be spoken of in this place, yet are not all cherries ripe at one instant, but some sooner then other some, according to the benefit of the sunne, the warmth of the ayre, and the strength of sappe in the branch on which the cherry hangeth: they are a fruit tender and pleasant, and therefore much subiect to be deuoured and consumed with byrds of the smallest kindes, as sparrowes, robins, starlings, and such like, especially the iay, and the bull-finch, who deuoure them stones and all, euen so fast as they rypen: for preuention whereof; if you haue great abundance of cherry trées, as maine holts that be either one or many akers in compasse, you shall then in diuers places of your holts, as well in the midst, as out-corners, cause to be errected vp certaine long poales of fyrre, or other woode, which may mount somewhat aboue the toppes of the trées, and one the toppes of those poales you shall place certaine clappe-milles made of broken trenchers ioyned together like sayles, which being moued and carryed about with the smallest ayre, may haue vnderneath the sayles a certaine loose little board, against which euery sayle may clap and make a great noyse, which will afright and scare the byrds from your trées: these milles you shall commonly sée in husbandmens yards placed on their stackes or houells of corne, which doth preserue them from fowle and vermine: but for want of these clap-milles you must haue some boy or young fellow that must euery morning from the dawning of the day till the sunne be more then an houre high, and euery euening from fiue of the clocke till nine, runne vp and downe your ground, whooping, showtying, and making of a great noyse, or now and then shooting of some harquebush, or other péece: but by no meanes to vse slings or throwing of stones, least by the miscarriage of his hand hée either beate downe the fruit or bruise the trees. in this sort hauing preserued your cherries from destruction, you shall then know there ripenesse by their colours, for euer those which are most red, are most ripe, and when you sée any that are ripe, you shall take a light ladder, made either of fyrre or sallow, and setting it carefully against the branches, so as you neither bruise them nor the fruit, you shall gather those you finde ripe, not taking the fruit from the stalke, but nipping the stalke and fruit both together from the trée: also you shall be carefull in gathering to handle or touch the cherry so little as may be, but the stalke onely, especially if your hands be hot, or sweaty, for that will change the colour of your cherries, and make them looke blacke: if there be any ripe cherries which hang out of the reach of your hands, then you shall haue a fine small gathering hooke of woode, whose bout shall be made round, and smooth, for nipping the barke of the branches, and with it you shall gently pull vnto you those branches you cannot reach: you shall also haue a little round basket of almost a foote déepe, made with a siue bottome, hauing a handle thwarte the toppe, to which a small hooke being fastned, you shall with that hooke hang the basket by you on some conuenient cyon, and as you gather the cherries, gently lay them downe into the same, and when you haue filled your basket you shall descend and empty it into larger great baskets made of the same fashion, with siue bottomes, and hauing vnderneath two broad lathes or splinters, at least thrée fingers broad a péece, within foure inches one of the other, and going both one way crosse ouerthwart the basket, that if either man or woman shall carry them vpon their heads, which is the best manner of cariage, then the splinters may defend the bottome of the basket from the head of the party, and kéepe the cherries from hurt or bruising, and if you haue occasion to carry your cherries farre, and that the quantitie grow beyond the support of a man, then you shall packe them in hampers or panniers made with false bottoms like siues, and finely lyned on the out side with white straw, and so being closely trust on each side a horses-backe, to carry them whether you please. you shall by no meanes suffer your cherries to lye in any great or thicke heapes one vpon another, but vntill you sell them, or vse them, lay them as thinne as may be, because they are apt of themselues to sweat and catch heate, and that heate doth soone depriue them of the glory of their colour. when you gather any cherries to preserue, you shall gather those which are the greatest, the ripest, you shall pull them from their stalkes one by one, and vse them at furthest within xxiiij. howers after the time they are gotten. {sn: the gathering of stone fruit.} {sn: of gathering hard plumbes.} {sn: of keeping of plumbes.} for the gathering of plumbes in generall, it is in the same manner as you did gather your cherries, both with such a like ladder, such a like hooke, and such like vessels, onely some more speciall obseruations are to be obserued in gathering your dainty grafted plumbes, then of the others, which are of a more hard and induring nature. you shall know then that for gathering of abricots, peaches, date-plumbes, and such like grafted plumbes, you shall duely consider when they are perfectly ripe, which you shall not iudge by their dropping from the trée, which is a signe of ouer-much ripnesse, tending to rottennesse, but by the true mixture of their colour, and perfect change from their first complexion: for when you shall perceiue that there is no gréenenesse nor hardnesse in their out-sides, no, not so much as at the setting on of the stalke, you may then iudge that they are ready to be gathered, and for a perfecter tryall thereof you may if you please, take one which you thinke ripest from the trée, and opening it if you sée the stone comes cleane and dry away and not any of the in-part of the fruit cleauing vnto it, then you may assure your selfe that the fruit is ready to be gathered, which you shall with great deligence and care gather, not by any meanes laying one plumbe vpon another, but each seuerally by another, for these dainty plumbes are naturally so tender that the least touch, though of themselues, doth bruise them, and occasion rottennesse. now when you haue gathered them, if either you haue desire to send them any iourney, as in gratulation to your friends, or for other priuate commoditie, you shall take some close, smooth, boxe, answerable to the store of fruit you are to send, and first line it within all ouer with white paper, then lay your plumbes one by one all ouer the bottome of the boxe, then couering them all ouer with white paper, lay as many moe vpon the toppe of them, and couer them likewise with paper, as before, and so lay row vpon row with papers betwéene them, vntill the boxe be sufficiently filled, and then closing it vp sende it whether you please, and they will take the least hurt, whereas if you should line the boxe either with hay or straw, the very skinnes are so tender that the straw would print into them and bruise them excéedingly, and to lay any other soft thing about them, as either wooll or bumbast, is excéeding euill, because it heateth the plumbes, and maketh them sweat, through which they both loose their colour and rot spéedily. as touching the gathering of plumbes when they are hard, and to ripen them afterward by laying them vpon nettles, to which consenteth the most of our london-fruiterrers, i am vtterly against the opinion, because i both know nature to be the perfectest worke-mistris, and where she is abridged of her power there euer to follow disorders and imperfections, as also that when such things are done, as it were through an ouer-hasty constraint, there cannot procéede any thing but abortiuenesse, and a distastfull rellish: from whence i thinke it comes to passe that in london a man shall very seldome tast a delicate or well rellisht plumbe, vnlesse it be from such as hauing fruit of their owne, make no commoditie thereof more then their owne pleasures: yet thus much i would perswade euery one, that if they haue moe plumbes ripe at once then they can vse, or spend, that then after they are gathered, to spread them thinnely vpon nettles or vine-trée leaues, and it will preserue them sound and well coloured a long time together, but if your store be so superabundant that in no reasonable time you can spend them, then what you doe not preserue, or make godiniake, or maruulade of, the rest you shall take and sprinkling them ouer with swéet-worte, or growt, and then laying them one by one (yet so as they may not touch one another) vpon hurdles or fleakes made of wands, or twigges, and put them into an ouen after bread or pyes haue béene taine thereout, and so leasurely dry them, and they will not onely last, but tast pleasantly all the yéere after: and in this sort you may vse all kindes of plumbes, or peares, whatsoeuer. now for the gathering of the other ordinary sorts of vngrafted plumbes, which haue both much stronger rindes, and are lesse subiect to rotting, you shall gather them, carry, or transport them, in the same manner that you did your cherries, onely in these, as in all other sorts of fruit whatsoeuer, you shall not omit neuer to gather, or pull them from the trée, till the dewe be dryed cleane both from the grasse and from the trées, and that the day be dry, faire, and full of sunne-shine: for the least wet or moisture doth canker and rot the fruit. {sn: of the gathering of peares.} as touching the gathering of peares, though sundry fruiterrers obserue sundry wayes in gathering them, as some making more hast then good-spéed, as either to haue the first tast, or the first profit, some vsing more negligence, thincking their store so great it will neuer be consumed, and some so curious that they will not gather till the peares fall into their bosomes, all which are dispraiseable fashions, yet i for my part would euer aduise all diligent husbands to obserue a mediocritie, and take the fittest season for the gathering of his fruit: as thus for example. if because you are vnexperienced or vnacquainted with the fruit you doe not know the due time of his ripening, you shall obserue the colour of the peare, and if you sée it doe alter, either in part, or in all, you shall be assured the fruit is neare ripening, for peares doe neuer change their colours, but when they doe desire to be taken from the trée: and of all fruit the peare may be gathered the hardest, because both his owne naturall heate and peculiar quallittie will ripen him best with lying: yet to be more strongly fortefied in the knowledge of the ripenesse of your fruit, and because it is better to get a day too late, then an hower to earely, you shall before you gather your peares, whether they be summer fruit or winter fruit, or whether you meane to spend them soone or preserue them long, take one of them from the trée, which is neither the ripest nor the gréenest, but betwixt both, and cut it through the midst with your knife, not longwise, but ouerthwart, and then looke into the coare where the kirnells lye, and if it be hollow so as the kirnells lye as it were hollow therein, the neather ends thereof being turned either blacke, or blackish, albeit the complexion of the peare be little, or not at all altered, yet the peares haue their full growth, and may very well be gathered: then laying them either vpon a bedde of ferne, or straw, one vpon another, in great thicknesse, their owne naturall heate will in short space ripen them, which you shall perceiue both by the spéedy changing of their colour, & the strength of their smell, which will be excéeding suffocating, which as soone as you perceiue, you shall then spread them thinner and thinner, vntill they be all ripe, and then lay them one by one, in such sort as they may not touch one another, and then they will last much the longer, you shall also after they be ripe, neither suffer them to haue straw nor ferne vnder them, but lay them either vpon some smooth table, boards or fleakes of wands, and they will last the longer. {sn: of transporting, or carrying of peares farre.} if you be to carry or transport peares farre, you shall then gather them so much the sooner, and not suffer any ripe one to be amongst them, and then lyning great wicker baskets (such as will hould at least quarters a péece) finely within with white-straw, fill them vp with peares, and then couer them with straw, and corde them aboue, and you may either transport them by land or sea, whether you please, for they will ripen in their cariage: but when you come to your place of residence, then you must néeds vnpacke them and spread them thinner, or else they will rot and consume in a sodaine. {sn: of gathering diuersly.} there be sundry wayes of gathering peares, or other fruit, as namely, to climbe into the trée and to haue a basket with a line fastned thereto, and so when it is filled to let it downe, and cause it to be emptied, which labour though some of our southerne fruiterers doe not much commend, yet for mine owne part i doe not sée much errour therein, but that it is both allowable and conuenient, both because it neither bruiseth the fruit, nor putteth the gatherer to any extraordinary labour, onely the imaginary euill is, that by climbing vp into the trée, hée that gathereth the fruit may indanger the breaking, slipping, and disbranching of many of the young cyons, which bréedeth much hurt and damage to the trée, but iudgement, and care, which ought to be apropriate to men of this quallitie, is a certaine preuenter of all such mischeifes. now for such as in gathering of their fruit doe euery time that the basket is full bring it downe themselues from the trée, and empty it by powring the fruit rudely, and boystrously forth, or for beating of fruit downe with long poales, loggets, or such like, they are both most vilde and preposterous courses, the first being full of too much foolish and carelesse trouble, the latter of too much disorder, & cruelty, ruyning in a moment what hath béene many yéeres in building: as for the climbing the trée with a ladder, albeit it be a very good way for the gathering of fruit, yet if it be neuer so little indiscréetly handled, it as much hazardeth the breaking and bruising both of the fruit and the small cyons, as either climbing the trée, or any other way whatsoeuer. {sn: the gathering of apples.} now for the gathering of your apples: you shall vnderstand that your summer fruit, as your ieniting, wibourne, and such like, are first to be gathered, whose ripenesse, you may partly know by the change of colour, partly by the pecking of birds, but cheifely by the course formerly discribed for your knowledge of the ripenesse of the peare, which is the hollownesse of coare, and liberty of the kirnell onely, and when you doe perceiue they are ripe, you shall gather them in such wise as hath béene declared for the gathering of your peares, without respecting the state of the moone, or any such like obseruation, but when you come to gather your winter-fruit, which is the pippin, peare-maine, russetting, blacke-annat, and such like, you shall in any wise gather them in the wane of the moone, and, as before i said, in the dryest season that may be, and if it be so that your store be so great that you cannot gather all in that season, yet you shall get so much of your principall fruit, the youngest and fairest, as is possible to be gotten, and preserue it for the last which you intend either to spend, or vtter. now for the manner of gathering your apples i doe not thinke you can amend or approue a better way then that which hath béene discribed for the gathering of peares, yet some of our late practitioners (who thinke themselues not cunning if they be not curious) dislike that way, and will onely haue a gathering apron, into which hauing gathered their fruit, they doe empty it into larger vessells: this gathering apron is a strong péece of canuas at least an ell euery way, which hauing the vpper end made fast about a mans necke, & the neather end with thrée loopes, that is, one at each corner, & one in the midst, through which you shall put a string, and binde it about your waste, in so much that both the sides of your apron being open you may put your fruit therein with which hand you please: this manner of gathering apples is not amisse, yet in my conceit the apron is so small a defence for the apples, that if it doe but knocke against the boughes as you doe moue your selfe, it cannot chuse but bruise the fruit very much, which ought euer to be auoyded: therefore still i am of this opinion, there is no better way, safer, nor more easie, then gathering them into a small basket, with a long line thereat, as hath béene before declared in the gathering of peares. now you shall carefully obserue in empting one basket into another, that you doe it so gently as may be, least in powring them out too rudely the stalkes of the fruit doe pricke one another, which although it doe appeare little or nothing at the first, yet it is the first ground, cause, and beginning of rottennesse, and therefore you shall to your vttermost power gather your apples with as small stalkes as may be, so they haue any at all, which they must néedes haue, because that as too bigge stalkes doth pricke and bruise the fruit, so to haue none at all makes the fruit rot first in the place where the stalke should be: you shall also kéepe your fruit cleane from leaues, for they being gréene and full of moisture, when by reason of their lying close together they beginne to wither they strike such an heate into the apples, that they mil-dew and rot instantly. {sn: of fallings.} {sn: of carriage and keeping fruit.} as touching your fallings, which are those apples which fall from your trées, either through too much ripenesse, or else through the violence of winde, or tempests, you shall by no meanes match them, or mixe them, with your gathered fruit, for they can by no meanes last or indure so long, for the latter which falleth by force of winde, wanting the true nourishment of the earth and the kindly ripening vpon the trée, must necessarily shrinke wither, and grow riuelled, so that your best course is to spend them presently, with all spéede possible: for the other which hath too much ripenesse from the earth, and the trée, though it be much better then the other, yet it cannot be long lasting, both because it is in the falling bruised, and also hath too much ripenesse, which is the first steppe to rottennesse, so that they must likewise be spent with all expedition. for the carriage of your apples, if the place be not farre whether you should carry them, you shall then in those large baskets into which you last emptied them, carry them vpon cole-staues, or stangs, betwixt two men, and hauing brought them carefully into your apple-loft, power them downe gently vpon bedds of ferne or straw, and lay them in reasonable large heapes, euery sort of apples seuerall by themselues, without mixture, or any confusion: and for such apples as you would haue to ripen soone, you shall couer them all ouer with ferne also, but for such as you would haue take all possible leasure in ripening, those you shall lay neither vpon ferne, nor straw, but vpon the bare boards, nay, if you lay them vpon a plaster floare (which is of all floares the coldest) till saint andrewes tide, it is not amisse, but very profitable, and the thinner you lay them so much the better. now if you haue any farre iourney to carry your apples, either by land, or by water, then trimming and lyning the insides of your baskets with ferne, or wheat-straw wouen as it were cleane through the basket, you shall packe, couer, and cord vp your apples, in such sort as you did your peares, and there is no danger in the transportation of them, be it by shippe, cart, waggon, or horse-backe. if you be inforced to packe sundry sorts of apples in one basket, sée that betwixt euery sort you lay a diuision of straw, or ferne, that when they are vnpackt, you may lay them againe seuerally: but if when they are vnpackt, for want of roome you are compeld to lay some sorts together, in any wise obserue to mixe those sorts together which are nearest of taste, likest of colour, and all of one continuance in lasting: as for the packing vp of fruit in hogsheads, or shooting them vnder hatches when you transport them by sea, i like neither of the courses, for the first is too close, and nothing more then the want of ayre doth rot fruit, the other is subiect to much wet, when the breach of euery sea indangereth the washing of the apples, and nothing doth more certainely spoyle them. the times most vnseasonable for the transporting of fruit, is either in the month of march, or generally in any frosty weather, for if the sharpe coldenesse of those ayres doe touch the fruit, it presently makes them looke blacke, and riuelled, so that there is no hope of their continuance. the place where you shall lay your fruit must neither be too open, nor too close, yet rather close then open, it must by no meanes be low vpon the ground, nor in any place of moistnesse: for moisture bréedes fustinesse, and such naughty smells easily enter into the fruit, and taint the rellish thereof, yet if you haue no other place but some low cellar to lay your fruit in, then you shall raise shelues round about, the nearest not within two foote of the ground, and lay your apples thereupon, hauing them first lyned, either with swéet rye-straw, wheate-straw, or dry ferne: as these vndermost roomes are not the best, so are the vppermost, if they be vnséeld, the worst of all other, because both the sunne, winde, and weather, peircing through the tiles, doth annoy and hurt the fruit: the best roome then is a well séeld chamber, whose windowes may be shut and made close at pleasure, euer obseruing with straw to defend the fruit from any moist stone wall, or dusty mudde wall, both which are dangerous annoyances. {sn: the seperating of fruit.} now for the seperating of your fruit, you shall lay those nearest hand, which are first to be spent, as those which will last but till alhallontide, as the cisling, wibourne, and such like, by themselues: those which will last till christmas, as the costard, pome-water, quéene-apple, and such like: those which will last till candlemas, as the pome-de-roy, goose-apple, and such like, and those which will last all the yéere, as the pippin, duzin, russetting, peare-maine, and such like, euery one in his seuerall place, & in such order that you may passe from bed to bed to clense or cast forth those which be rotten or putrefied at your pleasure, which with all diligence you must doe, because those which are tainted will soone poyson the other, and therefore it is necessary as soone as you sée any of them tainted, not onely to cull them out, but also to looke vpon all the rest, and deuide them into thrée parts, laying the soundest by themselues, those which are least tainted by themselues, and those which are most tainted by themselues, and so to vse them all to your best benefit. now for the turning of your longest lasting fruit, you shall know that about the latter end of december is the best time to beginne, if you haue both got and kept them in such sort as is before sayd, and not mixt fruit of more earely ripening amongst them: the second time you shall turne them, shall be about the end of february, and so consequently once euery month, till penticost, for as the yéere time increaseth in heate so fruit growes more apt to rot: after whitsontide you shall turne them once euery fortnight, alwayes in your turning making your heapes thinner and thinner; but if the weather be frosty then stirre not your fruit at all, neither when the thaw is, for then the fruit being moist may by no meanes be touched: also in wet weather fruit will be a little dankish, so that then it must be forborne also, and therefore when any such moistnesse hapneth, it is good to open your windowes and let the ayre dry your fruit before it be turned: you may open your windowe any time of the yéere in open weather, as long as the sunne is vpon the skye, but not after, except in march onely, at what time the ayre and winde is so sharpe that it tainteth and riuelleth all sorts of fruits whatsoeuer. {sn: to keepe fruit in frost.} if the frost be very extreame, and you feare the indangering your fruit, it is good to couer them somewhat thicke with fine hay, or else to lay them couered all ouer either in barley-chaffe, or dry salte: as for the laying them in chests of iuniper, or cipresse, it is but a toy, and not worth the practise: if you hang apples in nettes within the ayre of the fire it will kéepe them long, but they will be dry and withered, and will loose their best rellish. {sn: of wardens.} now for the gathering, kéeping, ordering, and preseruing of wardens, they are in all sorts and in all respects to be vsed as you doe vse your peares, onely you are to consider that they are a fruit of a much stronger constitution, haue a much thicker skinne, and will endure much harder season: neither ought you to séeke to ripen them in hast, or before the ordinary time of their owne nature, and therefore to them you shall vse neither straw, ferne, nor hay, but onely dry boards to lay them vpon, and no otherwise. {sn: of medlars and seruices.} for your medlars, you shall gather them about the midst of october, after such time as the frost hath nipt and bitten them, for before they will not be ready, or loosen from the stalke, and then they will be nothing ripe, but as hard as stones, for they neuer ripen vpon the trée, therefore as soone as you haue gathered them, you shall packe them into some close vessell, and couer them all ouer, and round about, with thicke woollen cloathes, and about the cloathes good store of hay, and some other waight of boards, or such like vpon them, all which must bring them into an extreame heate, without which they will neuer ripen kindely, because their ripenesse is indéed perfect rottennesse: and after they haue layne thus, at least a fornight, you shall then looke vpon them, and turning them ouer, such as you finde ripe you shall take away, the rest you shall let remaine still, for they will not ripen all at once, and those which are halfe ripe you shall also remoue into a third place, least if you should kéepe them together, they should beginne to grow mouldy before the other were ready; and in the selfe same manner as you vse your medlars, so you shall vse your seruices, and they will ripen most kindely: or if you please to sticke them betwixt large clouen stickes, and to sprinckle a little olde beare vpon them, and so set them in a close roome, they will ripen as kindely as any other way whatsoeuer. {sn: of quinces.} now for quinces, they are a fruit which by no meanes you may place neare any other kinde of fruit, because their sent is so strong and peircing, that it will enter into any fruit, and cleane take way his naturall rellish: the time of their gathering is euer in october, and the méetest place to lay them in is where they may haue most ayre, so they may lye dry (for wet they can by no meanes indure,) also they must not lye close, because the smell of them is both strong & vnwholsome: the beds whereon they must lye must be of swéet straw, and you must both turne them and shift them very often, or else they will rot spéedily: for the transporting or carying them any long iourney, you must vse them in all things as you vse your peares, & the carriage will be safe. {sn: of nuts.} for nuts, of what sort soeuer they be, you shall know they are ripe as soone as you perceiue them a little browne within the huske, or as it were ready to fall out of the same, the skill therefore in preseruing of them long from drynesse, is all that can be desired at the fruiterers hands: for as touching the gathering of them, there is no scruple to be obserued, more then to gather them cleane from the trée, with the helpe of hookes and such like, for as touching the bruising of them, the shell is defence sufficient. after they be gathered, you shall shale them, and take them cleane out of their huskes, and then for preseruing them from either wormes or drynesse, it shall be good to lay them in some low cellar, where you may couer them with sand, being first put into great bagges or bladders: some french-men are of opinion that if you put them into vessels made of wal-nut-trée, and mixe iuy-berries amongst them, it will preserue them moist a long time: others thinke, but i haue found it vncertaine, that to preserue nuts in honey will kéepe them all the yéere as gréene, moist, and pleasant, as when they hung vpon the trée: the dutch-men vse (and it is an excellent practise) to take the crusht crabbes (after your verdiuyce is strained out of them) and to mixe it with their nuts, and so to lay them in heapes, and it will preserue them long: or otherwise if they be to be transported, to put them into barrells and to lay one layre of crusht crabbes, and another of nuts, vntill the barrell be filled, and then to close them vp, and set them where they may stand coole. but aboue all these foresayd experiments, the best way for the preseruing of nuts is to put them into cleane earthen pots, and to mixe with them good store of salt and then closing the pots close, to set them in some coole cellar, and couer them all ouer with sand, and there is no doubt but they will kéepe coole, pleasant, and moist, vntill new come againe, which is a time fully conuenient. {sn: of grapes.} now to conclude, for the kéeping of grapes, you shall first vnderstand that the best time for their gathering is in the wane of the moone, and about the midst of october, as for the knowledge of his ripenesse it is euer at such time as his first colour is cleane altered, for all grapes before they be ripe are of a déepe, thicke, greene, colour, but after they be ripe, they are either of a blewish redde, or of a bright shining pale gréene. now for the preseruing them for our english vse, which is but onely for a fruit-dish at our tables, for neither our store, nor our soyle, affords vs any for the wine-presse, some thinke it good, after they are gotten, to lay them in fine dry sand, or to glasse them vp in close glasses, where the ayre cannot peirce, will kéepe them long, both full, plumpe, and swéet, but in my conceit the best course is after they are gotten to hang them vpon strings bunch by bunch, in such places of your house as they may take the ayre of the fire, and they will last longest, and kéepe the swéetest. chap. x. _of the making of cyder, or perry._ cyder is a certaine liquor or drinke made of the iuyce of apples, and perrye the like, made of peares, they are of great vse in france, and very wholsome for mans body, especially at the sea, and in hot countries: for they are coole and purgatiue, and doe preuent burning agues: with vs here in england cyder is most made in the west parts, as about deuon-shire & cornwaile, & perry in worcester-shire, glocester-shire, & such like, where indéede the greatest store of those kindes of fruits are to be found: the manner of making them is, after your fruit is gotten, you shall take euery apple, or peare, by it selfe, and looking vpon them, picke them cleane from all manner of filthinesse, as bruisings, rottennesse, worme-eating, and such like, neither leaue vpon them any stalkes, or the blacke buddes which are and grow vpon the tops of the fruit, which done you shall put them in to some very cleane vessell, or trough, and with béetells, made for the purpose, bruise or crush the apples or peares in péeces, & so remoue them into other cleane vessells, till all the fruit be bruised: then take a bagge of hayre-cloath, made at least a yard, or thrée quarters, square, and filling it full of the crusht fruit, put it in a presse of woode, made for the purpose, and presse out all the iuyce and moisture out of the fruit, turning and tossing the bagge vp and downe, vntill there be no more moisture to runne forth, and so baggefull after baggefull cease not vntill you haue prest all: wherein you are especially to obserue, that your vessells into which you straine your fruit be excéeding neate, swéet, and cleane, and there be no place of ill fauour, or annoyance neare them, for the liquour is most apt, especially cyder, to take any infection. as soone as your liquor is prest forth and hath stoode to settle, about twelue houres, you shall then turne it vp into swéet hogsheads, as those which haue had in them last, either white-wine or clarret, as for the sacke vessell it is tollerable, but not excellent: you may also if you please make a small long bagge of fine linnen cloath, and filling it full of the powder of cloues, mace, cynamon, ginger, and the dry pils of lemons, and hang it with a string at the bung-hole into the vessell, and it will make either the cyder, or perry, to tast as pleasantly as if it were renish-wine, and this being done you shall clay vp the bung-hole with clay and salt mixt together, so close as is possible. and thus much for the making of perry or cyder. chap. xi. _of the hoppe-garden, and first of the ground and situation thereof._ {sn: fit ground for hoppes.} that the hoppe is of great vse and commoditie in this kingdome, both the beare, which is the generall and perfect drinke of our nation, and our dayly traffique, both with france, the low-countries, and other nations, for this commoditie, is a continuall testimony, wherefore the first thing to be considered of in this worke, is the goodnesse and aptnesse of the ground for the bringing forth of the fruit thereof, wherein i thus farre consent with maister _scot_, that i doe not so much respect the writings, opinions, and demonstrations, of the gréeke, latine, or french authors, who neuer were acquainted with our soyles, as i doe the dayly practise and experience which i collect, both from my owne knowledge, and the labours of others my countrymen, best séene and approued in this art: therefore to come to my purpose, you shal vnderstand that the light sand, whether it be redde or white, being simple and vnmixed is most vnfit for the planting of hoppes, because that through the barrainenesse, it neither hath comfort for the roote, nor through his seperate lightnesse, any strong hould to maintaine and kéepe vp the poales: likewise the most fertill rich, blacke clay, which of all soyles is the best and most fruitfull, is not to be allowed for a hoppe garden, because his fatnesse and iuyce is so strong that the roote being as it were ouer-fedde, doth make the branches bring forth leaues in such infinite abundance that they leaue neither strength nor place for the fruit, either to knit, or put forth his treasure, as i haue séene by experience in many places: as for the earth which is of a morish, blacke, wet nature, and lyeth low, although i haue often times séene good hoppes to grow thereupon, being well trencht, and the hils cast high to the best aduantage, yet it is not the principall ground of all others, because it is neuer long lasting, but apt to decay and grow past his strength of bearing. the grounds then which i haue generally séene to beare the best hoppes, and whose natures doe the longest continue with such fruit, are those mixt earthes which are clayes with clayes, as blacke with white, or clayes and sands of any sorts, wherein the soyle is so corrected as neither too much fatnesse doth suffocate, nor too much leannesse doth pine: for i had euer rather haue my hoppe-garden desire increase, then continually labour in abatement. and although some doe excéedingly condemne the chauke-ground for this vse, yet i haue not at any time séene better hoppes, or in more plenty, then in such places, as at this day may be séene in many places about hartford-shire. to conclude, though your best mixt earths bring forth the best hoppes, yet there is no soyle, or earth, of what nature soeuer it be (if it lye frée from inundation) but will bring forth good hoppes, if it be put into the hands of an experienced workman. {sn: of the situation.} now, for the situation or site of your hoppe-garden: you shall so neare as you can place it neare some couer or shelter, as either of hils, houses, high-walles, woodes or trées, so those woodes or trées be not so neare that they may drop vpon your hoppe hils, for that will kill them: also the nearer it is planted to your dwelling house it is somuch the better, both because the vigilance of your owne eye is a good guarde thereunto, and also the labours of your work-maister will be more carefull and diligent. a hop-garden as it delighteth much in the pleasantnesse of the sunne, so it cannot endure by any meanes, the sharpenesse of the windes, frosts, or winter weather, and therefore your onely care is your defence and shelter. for the bignesse of your ground, it must be ordered according to your abillitie or place of trade for that commoditie, for if you shall haue them but for your owne vse, then a roode or two roodes will be inough, albeit your house kéeping match with nobillitie: but if you haue them for a more particuler profit, then you may take an aker, two or thrée, according to your owne discretion; wherein you shall euer kéepe these obseruations: that one mans labour cannot attend aboue two thousand fiue hundred hils, that euery roode will beare two hundred and fiftie hils, euery hill beare at least two pounds and an halfe of hoppes, (which is the iust quantitie that will serue to brew one quarter of malt) and that euery hundred waight of hoppes, is at the least, in a reasonable yéere, worth foure-nobles the hundred: so that euery roode of ground thus imployed, cannot be lesse worth, at the meanest reckoning, then sixe pounds by the yéere: for if the ground be principall good for the purpose, and well ordered, the profit will be much greater, in as much as the bells of the hoppes will be much greater, full, and more waighty: and thus much for the ground and situation. chap. xii. _of the ordering of the garden, and placing of the hils._ as soone as you haue chosen out your platforme of ground, you shal either by ploughing, or digging, or by both, make it as flat & leuell as is possible, vnlesse it be any thing subiect vnto water, and then you shall giue it some small desent, and with little trenches conuaye the water from annoying it: you shall also the yéere before you either make hill or plant it with hoppe-rootes, sowe it all ouer with hempe, which will not onely kill, and stifle all sorts of wéeds, but also rot the gréene-swarth, and make the mould mellow, and apt to receiue the rootes when they come to be planted. now, as soone as your ground is thus prepared, you shall then take a line, and with it measure your ground ouerthwart, and to euery hill allow at least thrée foote of ground euery way, and betwixt hill and hill, at the least sixe foote distance: and when you haue marked thus the number of thirty or forty places, where your hils shall be placed, intending euer that the time of yéere for this worke must be about the beginning of aprill, you shall then in the center, or midde part of these places made for the site of your hils, digge small square holes of a foote square each way, and a full foote déepe, and in these holes you shall set your hoppe-rootes, that is to say, in euery hole at least thrée rootes, and these thrée rootes you shall ioyne together in such wise that the toppes of them may be of one equall height, and agréeing with the face or vpper part of the earth, you shall set them straight and vpright, and not seperating them, as many doe, and setting at each corner of the hole a roote, neither shall you twist them, and set both ends vpward, nor lay them flat or crosse-wise in the earth, neither shall you make the hils first and set the rootes after, nor immediately vpon the setting cast great hils vpon them, all which are very vilde wayes for the setting of hoppes, but, as before i sayd, hauing ioyned your rootes together, you shall place them straight and vpright, and so holding them in one hand, with the other put the moulds close, firme, and perfectly about them, especially to each corner of the hole, which done you shall likewise couer the sets themselues all ouer with fine moulds, at least two fingers thicke, and in this sort you shall plant all your garden quite ouer, making the sites for your hill to stand in rowes and rankes, in such order that you may haue euery way betwéene the hils small alleyes and passages, wherein you may goe at pleasure from hill to hill, without any trouble or annoyance, according to that forme which i haue before prescribed touching the placing of your apple-trées in each seuerall quarter in your orchard: and herein you are to vnderstand, that in this first yéere of planting your hoppe-garden you shall by no meanes fashion or make any great hils, but onely raise that part of the earth where your plants are set, some two or thrée fingers higher then the ordinary ground. {sn: the choise of rootes.} now, before i procéede any further, i thinke it not amisse to speake some thing touching the choise, gathering and trimming of hoppe-rootes: wherefore you shall vnderstand that about the latter end of march is the best gathering of hoppe-rootes, which so neare as you can you shall select out of some garden of good reputation, which is both carefully kept, and by a man of good knowledge, for there euery thing being preserued in his best perfection, the rootes will be the greatest and most apt to take: and in the choise of your rootes you shall euer chuse those which are the greatest, as namely, such as are at the least thrée or foure inches about, & ten inches long, let euery roote containe about thrée ioynts, and no more, and in any case let them be the cyons of the last yéeres growth: if they be perfectly good they haue a great gréene stalke with redde streakes, and a hard, broad, long, gréene, bell; if they be otherwise, as namely, wilde-hoppes, then they are small and slender, like thriddes, their colour is all redde, euen when it is at least thrée yards high, whereas the best hoppe carieth his reddish colour not thrée foote from the earth. now hauing gotten such rootes as are good and fit for your purpose, if the season of the weather, or other necessitie hinder you from presently setting them, you shall then either lay them in some puddle, neare to your garden, or else bury them in the ground, vntill fit time for their planting: and of the two it is better to bury them then lay them in puddle, because if you so let them lye aboue xxiiij. houres, the rootes will be spoyled. now after you haue in manner aforeshewed, planted your garden with rootes, it shall not be amisse, if the place be apt to such annoyance, to pricke vpon the site of euery hill a few sharpe thornes to defend them from the scratching of poultry, or such like, which euer are busie to doe mischeife: yet of all house-fowle géese be the worst, but if your fence be as it ought, high, strong, and close, it will both preuent their harme and this labour. {sn: of poales.} next vnto this worke is the placing of poales, of which we will first speake of the choise thereof, wherein if i discent from the opinion of other men, yet imagine i set downe no oracle, but referre you to the experience or the practise, and so make your owne discreation the arbiter betwéene our discentions. it is the opinion of some, that alder-poales are most proper and fit for the hoppe-garden, both that the hoppe taketh, as they say, a certaine naturall loue to that woode, as also that the roughnesse of the rinde is a stay & benefit to the growth of the hoppe: to all which i doe not disagrée, but that there should be found alder-poales of that length, as namely, xvj. or xviij. foote long, nine, or ten, inches in compasse, and with all rush-growne, straight, and fit for this vse, séemeth to mée as much as a miracle, because in my life i haue not beheld the like, neither doe i thinke our kingdome can afford it, vnlesse in some such especiall place where they are purposely kept and maintained, more to shew the art of their maintenance, then the excellency of their natures: in this one benefit, and doutlesse where they are so preserued, the cost of their preseruation amounteth to more than the goodnesse of their extraordinary quallitie, which mine author defends to the contrary, giuing them a larger prerogatiue, in that they are cheaper to the purse, more profitable to the plant, and lesse consumption to the common-wealth: but i greatly doubt in the approbation, and therefore mine aduise is not to rely onely vpon the alder, and for his preheminence imagine all other poales insufficient: but be assured that either, the oake-poale, the ashe, the béeche, the aspe, or maple, are euery way as good, as profitable, and by many degrées much longer lasting. {sn: the proportion of the poale.} {sn: of cutting and erecting poales.} now, if it be so that you happen to liue in the champian country, as for the most part northampton shire, oxford-shire, some parts of leycester and rutland are, or in the wet and low countries, as holland, and kesten in lincolne-shire, or the ile of elye in cambridge-shire, all which places are very barraine of woode, and yet excellent soyles to beare hoppes, rather then to loose the commoditie of the hoppe-garden i wish you to plant great store of willowes, which will afforde you poales as sufficient as any of the other whatsoeuer, onely they are not so long lasting, and yet with carefull and dry keeping, i haue séene them last full out seauen yéeres, a time reasonably sufficient for any young woode, for such a vse. thus you sée the curiositie is not very great of what woode so euer your poale be, so it be of young and cleane growth, rush-growne, (that is to say, biggest at the neather end) eightéene foote in length, and ten inches in compasse. these poales you shall cut and prepare betwixt the feast of al-saints, and christmas, and so pile them vp in some dry place, where they may take no wet, vntill it be midde-aprill, at which time (your hoppes being shot out of the ground at least thrée quarters of a yarde, so that you may discerne the principall cyons which issue from the principall rootes) you shall then bring your poales into the garden, and lay them along in the alleyes, by euery hill so many poales as shall be sufficient for the maine branches, which happely the first yéere will not be aboue two or thrée poales at the most to a hill, but in processe of time more, as foure or fiue, according to the prosperitie of the plants, and the largenesse of the hils. after you haue thus layd your poales, you shall then beginne to set them vp in this sort: first, you shall take a gaue-locke, or crow of iron, and strike it into the earth so neare vnto the roote of the hoppe as is possible, prouided alwayes that you doe not bruise, or touch the roote, and so stroake after stroake, cease not striking till you haue made a hoale at least two foote déepe, and make them a little slantwise inward towards the hill, that the poales in their standing may shoote outwards and hould their greatest distance in the toppes: this done you shall place the poales in those hoales, thus made with the iron crow, and with another péece of woode, made rammer-wise, that is to say, as bigge at the neather end as the biggest part of the poale, or somewhat more, you shall ramme in the poales, and beate the earth firme and hard about them: alwayes prouided, that you touch not any branch, or as little as you may beate with your rammer within betwéene the poales, onely on the out-side make them so fast that the winde, or weather, may not disorder or blow them downe: then lay to the bottome of euery poale the branch which shall ascend it, and you shall sée in a short space, how out of their owne natures, they will imbrace and climbe about them. now, if it happen after your hoppes are growne vp, yet not come to their full perfection, that any of your poales chance to breake, you shall then take a new poale, and with some soft gréene rushes, or the inmost gréene barke of an alder-trée, tye the toppe of the hoppe to the toppe of the new poale, then draw the broken poale out of the hoppe (i meane that part which being broken lyeth vpon the ground) and as you saw it did winde about the olde poale (which is euer the same way that the sunne runnes) so you shall winde it about the new poale: then loosening the earth a little from the neather part of the broken poale, you may with your owne strength pull it cleane out of the earth, and place the new poale in his roome. now, there be some which are excéeding curious in pulling vp these olde poales, and rather then they will shake the earth, or loosen the mould, they will make a paire of large pincers, or tarriers of iron, at least fiue foote long with sharpe téeth, and a clasping hooke to hould the téeth together, when they haue taken fast hould vpon the poale so neare the earth as is possible, and then laying a peice of woode vnder the tarriers, and poysing downe the other ends to rest the poale out of the earth without any disturbance, the modell or fashion of which instrument is contained in this figure: {illustration} this instrument is not to be discommended, but to be held of good vse, either in binding grounds where the earth hardneth and houldeth the poale more then fast, or in the strength and heate of summer, when the drynesse of the mould will by no meanes suffer the poale to part from it: but otherwise it is néedlesse and may without danger be omitted. as soone as you haue sufficiently set euery hill with poales, and that there is no disorder in your worke, you shall when the hoppes beginne to climbe, note if their be any cyons or branches which doe forsake the poales, and rather shoote alongst the ground then looke vp to their supporters, and all such as you shall so finde, you shall as before i sayd, either with soft gréene rushes, or the gréene barke of elder, tye them gently vnto the poales, and winde them about, in the same course that the sunne goes, as oft as conueniently you can: and this you shall doe euer after the dew is gone from the ground, and not before, and this must be done with all possible speede, for that cyon which is the longest before it take vnto the poale is euer the worst and brings forth his fruit in the worst season. {sn: of the hils.} now, as touching the making of your hils, you shall vnderstand that although generally they are not made the first yéere, yet it is not amisse if you omit that scruple, and beginne to make your hils as soone as you haue placed your poales, for if your industry be answerable to the desert of the labour, you shall reape as good profit the first yéere, as either the second or the third. to beginne therefore to make your hils, you shall make you an instrument like a stubbing hoe, which is a toole wherewith labourers stubbe rootes out of decayed woode-land grounds, onely this shall be somewhat broader and thinner, somewhat in fashion (though twice so bigge) vnto a coopers addes, with a shaft at least foure foote long: some onely for this purpose vse a fine paring spade, which is euery way as good, and as profitable, the fashion of which is in this figure. {illustration} with this paring spade, or hoe, you shall pare vp the gréene-swarth and vppermost earth, which is in the alleyes betwéene the hils, and lay it vnto the rootes of the hoppes, raising them vp like small mole-hils, and so monthly increasing them all the yéere through, make them as large as the site of your ground will suffer, which is at least foure or fiue foote ouerthwart in the bottome, and so high as conueniently that height will carry: you shall not by any meanes this first yéere decay any cyons or branches which spring from the hils, but maintaine them in their growth, and suffer them to climbe vp the poales, but after the first yéere is expired you shall not suffer aboue two or thrée cyons, at the most, to rise vpon one poale. after your hils are made, which as before i sayd would be at least foure or fiue foote square in the bottome, and thrée foote high, you shall then diligently euery day attend your garden, and if you finde any branches that being risen more then halfe way vp the poales, doe then forsake them and spread outward, dangling downe, then you shall either with the helpe of a high stoole, on which standing you may reach the toppe of the poale, or else with a small forckt sticke, put vp the branch, and winde it about the poale: you shall also be carefull that no wéeds or other filthinesse grow about the rootes of your hoppes to choake them, but vpon the first discouery to destroy them. chap. xiii. _of the gathering of hoppes, and the preseruing of the poales._ touching the gathering of hoppes you shall vnderstand that after saint _margarets_ day they beginne to blossome, if it be in hot and rich soyles, but otherwise not till lammas: likewise in the best soyles they bell at lammas, in the worst at michaelmas, and in the best earth they are full ripe at michaelmas, in the worst at martillmas; but to know when they are ripe indeede, you shall perceiue the séede to loose his gréene colour, and looke as browne as a hares backe, wherefore then you shall with all dilligence gather them, and because they are a fruit that will endure little or no delay, as being ready to fall as soone as they be ripe, and because the exchange of weather may bréede change in your worke, you shall vpon the first aduantage of faire weather, euen so soone as you shall sée the dewe exhaled and drawne from the earth, get all the ayde of men, women, and children which haue any vnderstanding, to helpe you, and then hauing some conuenient empty barne, or shedde, made either of boards or canuas, neare to the garden, in which you shall pull your hoppes, you shall then beginne at the nearest part of the garden, and with a sharpe garden knife cut the stalkes of the hoppes asunder close by the toppes of the hils; and then with a straite forke of iron, made broad and sharpe, for the purpose, shere vp all the hoppes, and leaue the poales naked. then hauing labouring persons for the purpose, let them cary them vnto the place where they are to be puld; and in any case cut no more then presently is caryed away as fast as they are cut, least if a shower of raine should happen to fall, and those being cut and taking wet, are in danger of spoyling. you shall prouide that those which pull your hoppes be persons of good discretion, who must not pull them one by one, but stripe them roundly through their hands into baskets, mixing the young budds and small leaues with them, which are as good as any part of the hoppe whatsoeuer. after you haue pulled all your hoppes and carried them into such conuenient dry roomes as you haue prepared for that purpose, you shall then spread them vpon cleane floares, so thinne as may be, that the ayre may passe thorrow them, least lying in heapes they sweat, and so mould, before you can haue leasure to dry them. after your hoppes are thus ordered, you shall then cleanse your garden of all such hoppe-straw, and other trash, as in the gathering was scattered therein: then shall you plucke vp all your hoppe-poales, in manner before shewed, and hauing either some dry boarded house, or shed, made for the purpose, pile then one vpon another, safe from winde or weather, which howsoeuer some that would haue their experience, like a collossus, séeme greater then it is, doe disalow, yet it is the best manner of kéeping of poales, and well worthy the charge: but for want of such a house, it shall not be amisse to take first your hoppe-straw, and lay it a good thicknesse vpon the ground, and with sixe strong stakes, driuen slant-wise into the earth, so as the vppermost ends may be inward one to another, lay then your hoppe-poales betwéene the stakes, and pile them one vpon another, drawing them narrower and narrower to the top, and then couer them all ouer with more hoppe-straw, and so let them rest till the next march, at which time you shall haue new occasion to vse them. {sn: winter businesse.} as soone as you haue piled vp your hoppe-poales, dry and close, then you shall about mid-nouember following throw downe your hils, and lay all your rootes bare, that the sharpenesse of the season may nip them, and kéepe them from springing too earely: you shall also then bring into the garden olde cow-dunge, which is at least two yéeres olde, for no new dunge is good, and this you shall lay in some great heape in some conuenient place of the garden vntill aprill, at which time, after you haue wound your hoppes about your poales, you shall then bestow vpon euery hill two or thrée spade-full of the manure mixt with earth, which will comfort the plant and make it spring pleasantly. after your hils are puld downe, you shall with your garden spade, or your hoe, vndermine all the earth round about the roote of the hoppe, till you come to the principall rootes thereof, and then taking the youngest rootes in your hand, and shaking away the earth, you shall sée how the new rootes grow from the olde sets, then with a sharpe knife cut away all those rootes as did spring the yéere before, out of your sets, within an inch and an halfe of the same, but euery yéere after the first you shall cut them close by the olde rootes. now, if you sée any rootes which doe grow straight downward, without ioynts, those you shall not cut at all, for they are great nourishers of the plant, but if they grow outward, or side-wayes, they are of contrary natures, and must necessarily be cut away. if any of your hoppes turne wilde, as oft it happens, which you shall know by the perfect rednesse of the branch, then you shall cut it quite vp, and plant a new roote in his place. after you haue cut and trimmed all your rootes, then you shall couer them againe, in such sort as you were taught at the first planting them, and so let them abide till their due time for poaling. chap. xiiii. _of drying, and not drying of hoppes, and of packing them when they are dried._ although there be much curiositie in the drying of hoppes as well in the temperature of heate (which hauing any extremitie, as either of heate, or his contrary, bréedeth disorder in the worke) as also in the framing of the ost or furnace after many new moulds and fashions, as variable as mens wits and experiences, yet because innouations and incertainty doth rather perplexe then profit, i will shunne, as much as in me lyeth, from loading the memory of the studious husbandman with those stratagems which disable his vnderstanding from the attaining of better perfection, not disalowing any mans approued knowledge, or thinking that because such a man can mend smoking chimnyes, therefore none but hée shall haue license to make chimnyes, or that because some men can melt mettall without winde, therefore it shall be vtterly vnlawfull to vse bellowes: these violent opinions i all together disacknowledge, and wish euery one the liberty of his owne thoughts, and for mine english husband, i will shew him that way to dry his hoppes which is most fit for his profit, safe, easie, and without extraordinary expences. first then to speake of the time which is fittest for the drying of your hoppes, it is immediately as soone as they are gotten, if more vrgent occasions doe not delay the businesse, which if they happen, then you haue a forme before prescribed how to preserue them from mouldinesse and putrifaction till you can compasse fit time to effect the worke in. the manner of drying them is vpon a kilne, of which there be two sorts, that is to say, an english kilne, and a french kilne: the english kilne being composed of woode, lath, and clay, and therefore subiect to some danger of fire, the french, of bricke, lime, and sand, and therefore safe, close, and without all perill, and to be preferred much before the other: yet because i haue hereafter more occasion to speake of the nature, fashion, and edifice of kilnes in that part of this volumne where i intreate of malting, i will cease further to mention them then to say that vpon a kilne is the best drying your hoppes, after this manner, hauing finely bedded your kilne with wheate-straw, you shall lay on your hayre cloath, although some disallow it, but giue no reason therefore, yet it cannot be hurtfull in any degrée, for it neither distasteth the hoppes, nor defendeth them from the fire, making the worke longer then it would, but it preserueth both the hoppes from filthynesse, and their séede from losse: when your hayre-cloath is spread, you shall cause one to deliuer you vp your hoppes in baskets, which you shall spread vpon the cloath, all ouer the kilne, at the least eight inches thicke, and then comming downe, and going to the hole of the kilne, you shall with a little dry straw kindle the fire, and then maintaining it with more straw, you shall kéepe a fire a little more feruent then for the drying of a kilne-full of malt, being assured that the same quantitie of fuell, heate, and time, which dryeth a kilne-full of malt, will also dry a kilne-full of hoppes, and if your kilne will dry twenty strikes, or bushels of malt at one drying, then it will dry forty of hoppes, because being layd much thicker the quantitie can be no lesse then doubled, which is a spéede all together sufficient, and may very well serue to dry more hoppes then any one man hath growing in this kingdome. now, for as much as some men doe not alow to dry hoppes with straw, but rather preferre woode, and of woode still to chuse the gréenest, yet i am of a contrary opinion, for i know by experience that the smoake which procéedeth from woode, (especially if it be greene woode) being a strong and sharpe vapour, doth so taint and infect the hoppes that when those hoppes come to be brewed with, they giue the drinke a smoakie taste, euen as if the malt it selfe had beene woode-dryed: the vnpleasantnesse whereof i leaue to the iudgement of them that haue trauelled in york-shire, where, for the most part, is nothing but woode-dryed malt onely. that you may know when your hoppes are dry inough, you shall take a small long sticke, and stirring the hoppes too and fro with it, if the hoppes doe russell and make a light noyse, each as it were seperating one from another, then they are altogether dry inough, but if in any part you finde them heauy or glewing one to another, then they haue not inough of the fire: also when they are sufficiently and moderately dryed they are of a bright-browne colour, little or nothing altered from that they held when they were vpon the stalke, but if they be ouer dryed, then their colour will be redde: and if they were not well ordered before they were dryed, but suffered either to take wet or mould, then they will looke blacke when they are dry. {sn: of the drying hoppes.} there be some which are of opinion that if you doe not dry your hoppes at all, it shall be no losse, but it is an errour most grose, for if they be not dryed, there is neither profit in their vse, nor safty in preseruing them. as soone as your hoppes are sufficiently dryed, you shall by the plucking vp of the foure corners of your hayre-cloath thrust all your hoppes together, and then putting them into baskets, carry them into such dry places as you haue prepared of purpose to lay them in, as namely, either in dry-fats, or in garners, made either of plaster, or boards: and herein you shall obserue to packe them close and hard together, which will be a meanes that if any of them be not dry, yet the heate they shall get by such lying will dry them fully and make them fit for seruice. {sn: of packing hoppes.} now to conclude, if your store of hoppes be so great that you shall trade or make marchandize of them, then either to conuay them by land or sea, it is best that you packe them into great bagges of canuas, made in fashion of those bagges which woole-men vse, and call them pockets, but not being altogether so large: these bagges you shall open, and either hang vp betwéene some crosse-beames, or else let downe into some lower floare, and then putting in your hoppes cause a man to goe into the bagge and tread downe the hoppes, so hard as is possible, pressing downe basket-full after basket-full, till the bagge be filled, euen vnto the toppe, and then with an extraordinary packe-thriede, sowing the open end of the bagge close together, let euery hollow place be crammed with hoppes, whilst you can get one hand-full to goe in, and so hauing made euery corner strong and fast, let them lye dry till you haue occasion either to shippe or cart them. and thus much for the ordering of hoppes, and their vses. chap. xv. _the office of the gardiner, and first of the earth, situation, and fencing of a garden for pleasure._ there is to be required at the hands of euery perfect gardiner thrée especiall vertues, that is to say, _diligence_, _industry_, and _art_: the two first, as namely, _diligence_ (vnder which word i comprehend his loue, care, and delight in the vertue hee professeth) and _industry_ (vnder which word i conclude his labour, paine, and study, which are the onely testimonies of his perfection) hée must reape from nature: for, if hée be not inclined, euen from the strength of his blood to this loue and labour, it is impossible he should euer proue an absolute gardiner: the latter, which containeth his skill, habit, and vnderstanding in what hée professeth, i doubt not but hée shall gather from the abstracts or rules which shall follow hereafter in this treatise, so that where nature, and this worke shall concurre in one subiect, there is no doubt to be made, but the professor shall in all points, be able to discharge a sufficient dutie. now, for as much as all our antient and forraine writers (for wée are very sleightly beholding to our selues for these indeauours) are excéeding curious in the choise of earth, and situation of the plot of ground which is méete for the garden: yet i, that am all english husbandman, and know our soyles out of the worthinesse of their owne natures doe as it were rebell against forraine imitation, thinking their owne vertues are able to propound their owne rules: and the rather when i call into my remembrance, that in all the forraine places i haue séene, there is none more worthy then our owne, and yet none ordered like our owne, i cannot be induced to follow the rules of italie, vnlesse i were in italie, neither those of france, vnlesse i dwelt in france, nor those of germany except in germany i had my habitation, knowing that the too much heate of the one, or the too much coldnesse of the other, must rather confound then help in our temperate climate: whence it comes, that our english booke-knowledge in these cases is both disgraced and condemned, euery one fayling in his experiments, because he is guided by no home-bredde, but a stranger; as if to reade the english tongue there were none better then an italian pedant. this to auoide, i will neither begge ayde nor authoritie from strangers, but reuerence them as worthies and fathers of their owne countries. {sn: of the ground.} to speake therefore first of the ground which is fit for the garden, albeit the best is best worthy, the labour least, and the profit most certaine, yet it is not méete that you refuse any earth whatsoeuer, both because a garden is so profitable, necessary, and such an ornament and grace to euery house and house-kéeper, that the dwelling place is lame and maymed if it want that goodly limbe, and beauty. besides, if no gardens should be planted but in the best and richest soyles, it were infinite the losse we should sustaine in our priuate profit, and in the due commendations, fit for many worthy workmen, who haue reduced the worst and barrainest earths to as rare perfection and profit as if they had béene the onely soyles of this kingdome: and for mine owne part, i doe not wonder either at the worke of art or nature, when i behould in a goodly, rich, and fertill soyle, a garden adorned with all the delights and delicacies which are within mans vnderstanding, because the naturall goodnesse of the earth (which not induring to be idle) will bring forth whatsoeuer is cast into her: but when i behould vpon a barraine, dry, and deiected earth, such as the peake-hils, where a man may behould snow all summer, or on the east-mores, whose best hearbage is nothing but mosse, and iron stone, in such a place, i say, to behould a delicate, rich, and fruitfull garden, it shewes great worthinesse in the owner, and infinite art and industry in the workeman, and makes me both admire and loue the begetters of such excellencies. but to returne to my purpose touching the choise of your earth for a garden, sith no house can conueniently be without one, and that our english nation is of that great popularitie, that not the worst place thereof but is abundantly inhabited, i thinke it méete that you refuse no earth whatsoeuer to plant your garden vpon, euer obseruing this rule, that the more barraine it is, the more cost must be bestowed vpon it, both in manuring, digging, and in trenching, as shall be shewed hereafter, and the more rich it is, lesse cost of such labour, and more curiositie in wéeding, proyning, and trimming the earth: for, as the first is too slow, so the latter is too swift, both in her increase and multiplication. now, for the knowledge of soyles, which is good, and which is badde, i haue spoken sufficiently already in that part which intreateth of tillage, onely this one caueat i will giue you, as soone as you haue markt out your garden-plot, you shall turne vp a sodde, and taking some part of the fresh mould, champe it betwéene your téeth in your mouth, and if it taste swéetish then is the mould excellent good and fit to receiue either seedes or plants, without much manuring, but if it taste salt or bitter, then it is a great signe of barrainenesse, and must of necessitie be corrected with manure: for saltnesse sheweth much windinesse, which choaketh and stifleth the séede, and bitternesse that vnnaturall heate which blasteth it before it sprout. {sn: of the situation.} now, for the situation of the garden-plot for pleasure, you shall vnderstand that it must euer be placed so neare vnto the dwelling house as is possible, both because the eye of the owner may be a guard and support from inconueniences, as also that the especiall roomes and prospects of the house may be adorned, perfumed, and inriched, with the delicate proportions, odorifferous smells, and wholsome ayres which shall ascend and vaporate from the same, as may more amply be séene in that former chapter, where modelling forth the husbandmans house, i shew you the site and place for his garden, onely you must diligently obserue, that neare vnto this garden doe not stand any houells, stackes of hay, or corne, which ouer-pearing the walls, or fence, of the same, may by reason of winde, or other occasion, annoy the same with straw, chaffe, séedes, or such like filthinesse, which doth not onely blemish the beauty thereof, but is also naturally very hurtfull and cankerous to all plants whatsoeuer. within this garden plot would be also either some well, pumpe, conduit, pond, or cesterne for water, sith a garden, at many times of the yéere, requireth much watering: & this place for water you shall order and dispose according to your abillitie, and the nature of the soyle, as thus: if both your reputation, and your wealth be of the lowest account, if then your garden aford you a plaine well, comely couered, or a plaine pump, it shall be sufficient, or if for want of such springs you digge a fayre pond in some conuenient part thereof, or else (which is much better) erect a cesterne of leade, into which by pippes may discend all the raine-water which falls about any part of the house, it will serue for your purpose: but if god haue bestowed vpon you a greater measure of his blessings, both in wealth & account, if then insteade of either well, pumpe, pond, or cesterne, you erect conduits, or continuall running fountaines, composed of antique workes, according to the curiositie of mans inuention, it shall be more gallant and worthy: and these conduits or water-courses, you may bring in pippes of leade from other remote or more necessary places of water springs, standing aboue the leuell of your garden, as euery artist in the profession of such workes can more amply declare vnto you, onely for mée let it be sufficient to let you vnderstand that euery garden would be accompanied with water. also you shall haue great care that there adioyne not vnto your garden-plot any common-shewers, stinking or muddy dikes, dung-hils, or such like, the annoyance of whose smells and euill vapors doth not onely corrupt and bréede infection in man, but also cankereth, killeth and consumeth all manner of plants, especially those which are most pleasant, fragrant, and odorifferous, as being of tenderest nature and qualitie: and for this cause diuers will not alow the moating of garden-plots about, imagining that the ouer great moistnesse thereof, and the strong smells which doe arise from the mudde in the summer season, doe corrupt and putrifie the hearbes and plants within the compasse of the same, but i am not altogether of that opinion, for if the water be swéet, or the channell thereof sandy or grauelly, then there is no such scruple to be taken: but if it be contrary, then it is with all care to be auoyded, because it is euer a maxime in this case, that your garden-plot must euer be compassed with the pleasantest and swéetest ayre that may be. the windes which you shall generally defend from your garden, are the easterne windes and the northerne, because they are sharpest, coldest, and bring with them tempers of most vnseasonablenesse, & albeit in italie, spaine, and such like hot countries, they rather defend away the westerne and southerne winde, giuing frée passage to the east and north, yet with england it may not be so, because the naturall coldenes of our climate is sufficient without any assistance to further bitternesse, our best industry being to be imployed rather to get warmth, which may nourish and bring forth our labours, then any way to diminish or weaken the same. this plot of ground also would lye, as neare as you can, at the foote or bottome of an hill, both that the hill may defend the windes and sharpe weather from the same, as also that you may haue certaine ascents or risings of state, from leuell to leuell, as was in some sort before shewed in the plot for the orchard, and shall be better declared in the next chapter. {sn: of fencing the garden.} now lastly for the fencing or making priuate the garden-plot, it is to be done according to your abillitie, and the nature of the climate wherein you liue: as thus, if your reuenewes will reach thereunto, and matter be to be got, for that purpose, where you liue, then you shall vnderstand that your best fence is a strong wall, either of bricke, ashler, rough-stone, or earth, of which you are the best-owner, or can with least dammage compasse: but for want either of earth to make bricke, or quarries out of which to get stone, it shall not then be amisse to fence your garden with a tall strong pale of seasoned oake, fixt to a double parris raile, being lined on the inside with a thicke quicke-set of white-thorne, the planting whereof shall be more largely spoken of where i intreate of fencing onely. but if the place where you liue in, be so barraine of timber that you cannot get sufficient for the purpose, then you shall make a studde wall, which shall be splinted and lomed both with earth and lime, and hayre, and copt vpon the toppe (to defend away wet) either with tile, slate, or straw, and this wall is both beautifull, and of long continuance, as may be séene in the most parts of the south of this kingdome: but if either your pouerty or climate doe deny you timber for this purpose, you shall then first make a small trench round about your garden-plot, and set at least foure rowes of quicke-set of white-thorne, one aboue another, and then round about the outside, to defend the quick-set, make a tall fence of dead woode, being either long, small, brushy poales prickt into the earth, and standing vpright, and so bound together in the wast betwéene two other poales, according to the figure set downe, {illustration} being so high that not any kinde of pullen may flie ouer the same, or else an ordinary hedge of common woode, being beyrded vpon the toppe with sharpe thornes, in such wise that not any thing may dare to aduenture ouer it: and this dead fence you shall repaire and maintaine as occasion shall require from time to time, till your quicke-set be growne vp, and, by continuall plashing and interfouldings, be made able and sufficient to fence and defend your garden, which will be within fiue or seauen yeeres at the most, and so continue with good order for euer. and thus much for the situation of gardens. chap. xvi. _of the fashion of the garden-plot for pleasure, the alleyes, quarters, digging and dungging of the same._ {sn: the fashion.} after you haue chosen out and fenced your garden-plot, according as is before sayd, you shall then beginne to fashion and proportion out the same, sith in the conuayance remaineth a great part of the gardiners art. and herein you shall vnderstand that there be two formes of proportions belonging to the garden, the first, onely beautifull, as the plaine, and single square, contayning onely foure quarters, with his large alleyes euery way, as was discribed before in the orchard: the other both beautifull and stately, as when there is one, two or thrée leuelled squares, each mounting seauen or eight steppes one aboue another, and euery square contayning foure seuerall quarters with their distinct and seuerall alleyes of equall breadth and proportion; placing in the center of euery square, that is to say, where the foure corners of the foure quarters doe as it were neighbour and méete one another, either a conduit of antique fashion, a standard of some vnusuall deuise, or else some dyall, or other piramed, that may grace and beautifie the garden. and herein i would haue you vnderstand that i would not haue you to cast euery square into one forme or fashion of quarters or alleyes, for that would shew little varytie or inuention in art, but rather to cast one in plaine squares, another in tryangulars, another in roundalls, & so a fourth according to the worthinesse of conceite, as in some sort you may behould by these figures, which questionlesse when they are adorned with their ornaments, will breed infinite delight to the beholders. {illustration: the plaine square.} {illustration: the square triangular or circular.} {illustration: the square of eight diamonds.} from the modell of these squares, tryangles, and rounds, any industrious braine may with little difficulty deriue and fashion to himselfe diuers other shapes and proportions, according to the nature and site of the earth, which may appeare more quaint and strange then these which are in our common vse, albeit these are in the truth of workmanship the perfect father and mother of all proportions whatsoeuer. {sn: the ordering of alleyes.} now, you shall vnderstand that concerning the alleyes and walkes in this garden of pleasure, it is very méete that your ground, being spacious and large, (which is the best beauty) that you cut through the midst of euery alley an ample and large path or walke, the full depth of the roote of the gréene-swarth, and at least the breadth of seauen or eight foote: and in this path you shall strow either some fine redde-sand, of a good binding nature, or else some fine small grauell, or for want of both them you may take the finest of your pit-coale-dust, which will both kéepe your alleyes dry and smooth, and also not suffer any grasse or gréene thing to grow within them, which is disgracefull, if it be suffered: the french-men doe vse, to couer their alleyes, either with the powder of marble, or the powder of slate-stone, or else paue them either with pit-stone, frée-stone, or tiles, the first of which is too hard to get, the other great cost to small purpose, the rather sith our owne grauell is in euery respect as beautifull, as dry, as strong, and as long lasting: onely this héedfulnesse you must diligently obserue, that if the situation of your garden-plot be low and much subiect to moisture, that then these middle-cut paths or walkes must be heightned vp in the midst, and made in a proportionall bent or compasse: wherein you shall obserue that the out most verdges of the walke must be leuell with the gréene-swarth which holded in each side, and the midst so truly raised vp in compasse, that the raine which falles may haue a passage to each side of the gréene-swarth. now, the lesse this compasse is made (so it auoyde the water, and remaine hard) the better it is, because by that meanes both the eye shall be deceiued (which shewes art in the workman) and the more leuell they are, the more ease vnto them which shall continually walke vpon them. {sn: obiection.} now, if any shall obiect, why i doe not rather couet to haue these alleyes or walkes rather all gréene, then thus cut and deuided, sith it is a most beautifull thing to see a pleasant gréene walke, my answere is this, that first the mixture of colours, is the onely delight of the eye aboue all other: for beauty being the onely obiect in which it ioyeth, that beautie is nothing but an excellent mixture, or consent of colours, as in the composition of a delicate woman the grace of her chéeke is the mixture of redde and white, the wonder of her eye blacke and white, and the beauty of her hand blewe and white, any of which is not sayd to be beautifull if it consist of single or simple colours: and so in these walkes, or alleyes, the all gréene, nor the all yealow cannot be sayd to be most beautifull, but the gréene and yealow, (that is to say, the vntroade grasse, and the well knit grauell) being equally mixt, giue the eye both luster and delight beyonde all comparison. againe, to kéepe your walkes all gréene, or grassy, you must of force either forbeare to tread vpon them, (which is the vse for which they were onely fashioned,) or treading vpon them you shall make so many pathes and ilfauored wayes as will be most vglie to the eye: besides the dewe and wet hanging vpon the grasse will so annoy you, that if you doe not select especiall howers to walke in, you must prouide shooes or bootes of extraordinary goodnesse: which is halfe a depriuement of your liberty, whereas these things of recreation were created for a contrary purpose. now, you shall also vnderstand that as you make this sandy and smooth walke through the midst of your alleyes, so you shall not omit but leaue as much gréene-swarth, or grasse ground of eache side the plaine path as may fully counteruaile the breadth of the walke, as thus for example: if your sandy walke be sixe foote broad, the grasse ground of each side it, shall be at least sixe foote also, so that the whole alley shall be at least eightéene foote in breadth, which will be both comely and stately. {sn: of the quarters.} your alleyes being thus proportioned and set forth, your next worke shall be the ordering of your quarters, which as i sayd before, you may frame into what proportions you please, as into squares, tryangles and rounds, according to the ground, or your owne inuention: and hauing marked them out with lines, and the garden compasse, you shall then beginne to digge them in this manner: first, with a paring spade, the fashion whereof is formerly shewed, you shall pare away all the gréene-swarth, fully so déepe as the roote of the grasse shall goe, and cast it away, then with other digging spades you shall digge vp the earth, at least two foote and a halfe, or thrée foote déepe, in turning vp of which earth, you shall note that as any rootes of wéedes, or other quickes shall be raised or stirred vp, so presently with your hands to gather them vp, and cast them away, that your mould may (as neare as your dilligence can performe it) be cleane from either wilde rootes, stones, or such like offences: & in this digging of your quarters you shall not forget but raise vp the ground of your quarters at least two foote higher then your alleyes, and where by meanes of such reasure, you shall want mould, there you shall supply that lacke by bringing mould and cleane earth from some other place, where most conueniently you may spare it, that your whole quarter being digged all ouer, it may rise in all parts alike, and carry an orderly and well proportioned leuell through the whole worke. {sn: of dunging.} the best season for this first digging of your garden mould is in september: and after it is so digged and roughly cast vp, you shall let it rest till the latter end of nouember, at what time you shall digge it vp againe, in manner as afore sayd, onely with these additions, that you shall enter into the fresh mould, halfe a spade-graft déeper then before, and at euery two foote breadth of ground, enlarging the trench both wide and déepe, fill it vp with the oldest and best oxe or cow-manure that you can possibly get, till such time that increasing from two foote to two foote, you haue gone ouer and manured all your quarters, hauing a principall care that your dunge or manure lye both déepe and thicke, in so much that euery part of your mould may indifferently pertake and be inriched with the same manure. {sn: diuersitie of manures.} now, you shall vnderstand that although i doe particularly speake but of oxe or cow-manure, because it is of all the fattest and strongest, especially being olde, yet their are diuers respects to be had in the manuring of gardens: as first, if your ground be naturally of a good, fat, blacke, and well tempered earth, or if it be of a barraine, sandy, hot, yet firme mould, that in either of these cases your oxe, cow, or beast manure is the best & most sufficient, but if it be of a colde, barraine, or spewing mould then it shall be good to mixe your oxe-dunge with horse-dunge, which shall be at least two yéeres olde, if you can get it, otherwise such as you can compasse: if your ground be good and fertill yet out of his drynesse in the summer-time it be giuen to riue and chappe as is séene in many earths; you shall then mixe your oxe-dunge well with ashes, orts of lime, and such like: lastly, if your earth be too much binding and colde therewithall, then mixe your oxe-dunge with chalke or marle and it is the best manure. and thus much for the generall vse of earths. now, for perticular vses you shall vnderstand that for hearbs or flowers the oxe and horse-dunge is the best, for rootes or cabbages, mans ordure is the best, for harty-chockes, or any such like thisly-fruit, swines-dunge is most sufficient, and thus according to your setled determination you shall seuerally prouide for euery seuerall purpose, and so, god assisting, seldome faile in your profit. and this dunge you shall bring into your garden in little drumblars or whéele-barrowes, made for the purpose, such as being in common vse in euery husbandmans yarde it shall be néedlesse here either to shew the figure or proportion thereof. and thus much for the fashion, digging, and dunging of gardens. chap. xvii. _of the adornation and beautifying of the garden for pleasure._ the adornation and beautifying of gardens is not onely diuers but almost infinite, the industry of mens braines hourely begetting and bringing forth such new garments and imbroadery for the earth, that it is impossible to say this shall be singular, neither can any man say that this or that is the best, sith as mens tastes so their fancies are carried away with the varietie of their affections, some being pleased with one forme, some with another: i will not therefore giue preheminence to any one beauty, but discribing the faces and glories of all the best ornaments generaly or particularly vsed in our english gardens, referre euery man to the ellection of that which shall best agrée with his fancy. {sn: of knots and mazes.} to beginne therefore with that which is most antient and at this day of most vse amongst the vulgar though least respected with great ones, who for the most part are wholy giuen ouer to nouelties: you shall vnderstand that knots and mazes were the first that were receiued into admiration, which knots or mazes were placed vpon the faces of each seuerall quarter, in this sort: first, about the verdge or square of the quarter was set a border of primpe, boxe, lauandar, rose-mary, or such like, but primpe or boxe is the best, and it was set thicke, at least eightéene inches broad at the bottome & being kept with cliping both smooth and leuell on the toppe and on each side, those borders as they were ornaments so were they also very profitable to the huswife for the drying of linnen cloaths, yarne, and such like: for the nature of boxe and primpe being to grow like a hedge, strong and thicke, together, the gardiner, with his sheares may kéepe it as broad & plaine as himselfe listeth. within this border shall your knot or maze be drawne, it being euer intended that before the setting of your border your quarter shall be the third time digged, made exceeding leuell, and smooth, without clot or stone, and the mould, with your garden rake of iron, so broken that it may lye like the finest ashes, and then with your garden mauls, which are broad-boards of more then two foote square set at the ends of strong staues, the earth shall be beaten so hard and firme together that it may beare the burthen of a man without shrinking. and in the beating of the mould you shall haue all diligent care that you preserue and kéepe your leuell to a hayre, for if you faile in it, you faile in your whole worke. {illustration} now for the time of this labour, it is euer best about the beginning of february, and indifferent, about the midst of october, but for the setting of your primpe, or boxe-border, let the beginning of nouember be your latest time, for so shall you be sure that it will haue taken roote, and the leafe will flourish in the spring following: at which time your ground being thus artificially prepared, you shall begin to draw forth your knot in this manner: first, with lines you shall draw the forme of the figure next before set downe, and with a small instrument of iron make it vpon the earth. {illustration} which done, from the order and proportion of these lines you shall draw your single knots or plaine knots of the least curiositie, as may appeare by this figure, being one quarter of the whole knot: euer proportioning your trayles and windings according to the lines there discribed, which will kéepe your worke in iust proportion. but if you desire to haue knots of much more curiositie being more double and intricate, then you shall draw your first lines after this proportion here figured, pinning downe euery line firme to the earth with a little pinne made of woode. {illustration} which done you shall draw your double and curious knots after the manner of the figure following, which is also but one quarter of the whole knot, for looke in what manner you doe one knot in like sort will the other thrée quarters succéede, your lines kéeping you in a continuall euen proportion. {illustration} and in this manner as you draw these knots, with the like helps and lines also you shall draw out your mazes, and laborinths, of what sort or kind soeuer you please, whether they be round or square. but for as much, as not onely the _country-farme_, but also diuers other translated bookes, doe at large describe the manner of casting and proportioning these knots, i will not persist to write more curiously vpon them, but wish euery painefull gardiner which coueteth to be more satisfied therein, to repaire to those authors, where hée shall finde more large amplifications, and greater diuersities of knots, yet all tending to no more purpose then this which i haue all ready written. now, as soone as you haue drawne forth and figured your knot vpon the face of your quarter, you shall then set it either with germander, issoppe, time or pinke-gilly-flowers, but of all hearbes germander is the most principall best for this purpose: diuers doe vse in knots to set thrift, and in time of néed it may serue, but it is not so good as any of the other, because it is much subiect to be slaine with frost, and will also spread vpon the earth in such sort that, without very painefull cutting, it will put your knot out of fashion. {sn: yeallow.} {sn: white.} {sn: blacke.} {sn: red.} {sn: blew.} {sn: greene.} now there is another beautifying or adorning of gardens, and it is most generally to be séene in the gardens of noblemen and gentlemen, which may beare coate-armor, and that is, instead of the knots and mazes formerly spoken of, to draw vpon the faces of your quarters such armes, or ensines, as you may either beare your selfe, or will preserue for the memory of any friend: and these armes being drawne forth in plaine lines, you shall set those plaine shadowing lines either with germander, issop, or such like hearbes: and then for the more ample beautie thereof, if you desire to haue them in their proper and liuely colours (without which they haue but one quarter of their luster) you shall vnderstand that your colours in armory are thus to be made. first, for your mettalls: you shall make your yeallow, either of a yeallow clay, vsually to be had almost in euery place, or the yeallowest sand, or for want of both, of your flanders tile, which is to be bought of euery iron-monger or chandelor; and any of these you must beate to dust: for your white you shall make it of the coursest chalke beaten to dust, or of well burnt plaister, or, for necessity, of lime, but that will soone decay: your blacke is to be made of your best and purest coale-dust, well clensed and sifted: your red is to be made of broken vselesse brickes beaten to dust, and well clensed from spots: your blew is to be made of white-chalke, and blacke coale dust mixed together, till the blacke haue brought the white to a perfect blewnes: lastly your gréene, both for the naturall property belonging to your garden, as also for better continuance and long lasting, you shall make of camomill, well planted where any such colour is to be vsed, as for the rest of the colours, you shall sift them, and strow them into their proper places, and then with a flat beating-béetell you shall beate it, and incorporate it with the earth, and as any of the colours shall decay, you shall diligently repaire them, and the luster will be most beautifull. there is also another beautifying of gardens, which although it last not the whole yéere, yet it is most quaint, rare, and best eye-pleasing, and thus it is: you shall vpon the face of your quarter draw a plaine double knot, in manner of billet-wise: for you shall vnderstand that in this case the plainest knot is the best, and you shall let it be more then a foote betwixt line and line (for in the largenesse consists much beauty) this knot being scored out, you shall take tiles, or tileshreds and fixe them within the lines of your knot strongly within the earth, yet so as they may stand a good distance aboue the earth and this doe till you haue set out all your knot with tile: then precisely note the seuerall passages of your knot, and the seuerall thrids of which it consisteth, and then betwixt your tiles, (which are but as the shadowing lines of your knot) plant in euery seuerall third, flowers of one kinde and colour, as thus for example: in one thrid plant your carnation gilly-flower, in another your great white geli flower, in another your mingle-coloured gilly-flower, and in another your blood-red gilly-flower, and so likewise if you can compasse them you may in this sort plant your seueral coloured hyacinths, as the red, the blew, and the yealow, or your seuerall coloured _dulippos_, and many other italian and french flowers: or you may, if you please, take of euery seuerall plant one, and place them as afforesaid; the grace of all which is, that so soone as these flowers shall put forth their beauties, if you stand a little remote from the knot, and any thing aboue it, you shall sée it appeare like a knot made of diuers coloured ribans, most pleasing and most rare. many other adornations and beautifyings there are which belong to the setting forth of a curious garden, but for as much as none are more rare or more estéemed then these i haue set downe, being the best ornaments of the best gardens of this kingdome, i thinke them tastes sufficient for euery husbandman, or other of better quality which delighteth in the beauty and well trimming of his ground. chap. xviii. _how for the entertainment of any great person, in any parke, or other place of pleasure, where sommer-bowers are made, to make a compleat garden in two or three dayes._ if the honest english husbandman, or any other, of what quallity soeuer, shall entertaine any noble personage, to whom hee would giue the delight of all strange contentment, either in his parke, or other remote place of pleasure, néere vnto ponds, riuer, or other waters of cléerenesse, after hée hath made his arbors and summer-bowers to feast in, the fashion whereof is so common that euery labourer can make them, hée shall then marke out his garden-plot, bestowing such sleight fence thereon as hée shall thinke fit: then hée shall cast forth his alleys, and deuide them from his quarters, by paring away the gréene-swarth with a paring spade, finely, and euen, by a direct line (for a line must euer be vsed in this worke) then hauing store of labourers (after the vpper-most swarth is taken away) you shall cast vp the quarters, and then breaking the mould and leuelling it, you shall make sad the earth againe, then vpon your quarters you shall draw forth either knots, armes, or any other deuise which shall be best pleasing to your fancie, as either knots with single or double trayles, or other emblemicall deuise, as birds, beasts, and such like: and in your knots where you should plant hearbes, you shall take gréene-sods of the richest grasse, and cutting it proportionably to the knot, making a fine trench, you shall lay in your sod, and so ioyning sod to sod close and arteficially, you shall set forth your whole knot, or the portrayture of your armes, or other deuise, and then taking a cleane broome that hath not formerly béene swept withall, you shall brush all vncleanenesse from the grasse, and then you shall behold your knot as compleat, and as comely as if it had béene set with hearbes many yéeres before. now for the portrayture of any liuing thing, you shall cut it forth, ioyning sod vnto sod, and then afterward place it into the earth. now if within this plot of ground which you make your garden piece there be either naturall or arteficiall mounts or bankes vpon them, you may in this selfe-same manner with gréene sods set forth a flight, either at field or riuer, or the manner of hunting of any chase, or any story, or other deuise that you please, to the infinit admiration of all them which shall behold it: onely in working against mounts or bankes you must obserue to haue many small pinnes, to stay your worke and kéepe your sods from slipping one from another, till such time as you haue made euery thing fast with earth, which you must rame very close and hard: as for flowers, or such like adorments, you may the morning before, remoue them with their earth from some other garden, and plant them at your best pleasure. and thus much for a garden to be made in the time of hasty necessity. chap. xix. _how to preserue abricots, or any kinde of curious outlandish-stone-fruit, and make them beare plentifully be the spring or beginning of summer neuer so bitter._ i haue knowne diuers noblemen, gentlemen & men of vnder quallitie, that haue béene most laborious how to preserue these tender stone-fruits from the violence of stormes, frost and windes, and to that end haue béene at great cost and charges yet many times haue found much losse in their labours, wherefore in the end, through the practise of many experiments, this hath béene found (which i will here set downe) the most approuedst way to make them beare without all kinde of danger. after you haue planted your abricot, or other delicate fruit, and plasht him vp against a wall in manner as hath béene before declared, you shall ouer the tops of the trées all along the wall, build a large pentisse, of at least sixe or seauen foote in length: which pentisse ouer-shaddowing the trées, will, as experience hath found out, so defend them, that they will euer beare in as plentifull manner as they haue done any particular yéere before. there be many that will scoffe, or at least, giue no credit to this experiment, because it carrieth with it no more curiositie, but i can assure thée that art the honest english husbandman, that there is nothing more certaine and vnfallible, for i haue séene in one of the greatest noblemens gardens in the kingdome, where such a pentisse was made, that so farre as the pentisse went, so farre the trées did prosper with all fruitfulnesse, and where the pentisse ended, not one trée bare, the spring-time being most bitter and wonderfull vnseasonable. now i haue séene some great personages (whose pursses may buy their pleasures at any rate) which haue in those pentisses fixed diuers strong hookes of iron, and then made a canuasse of the best poldauie, with most strong loopes, of small corde, which being hung vpon the iron hookes, hath reacht from the pentisse to the ground, and so laced with corde and small pulleys, that like the saile of a ship it might be trust vp, and let downe at pleasure: this canuasse thus prepared is all the spring and latter end of winter to be let downe at the setting of the sunne, and to be drawne vp at the rising of the sunne againe. the practise of this i referre to such as haue abillitie to buy their delight, without losse, assuring them that all reason and experience doth finde it most probable to be most excellent, yet to the plaine english husbandman i giue certaine assurance that the pentisse onely is sufficient enough and will defend all stormes whatsoeuer. and thus much for the preseruation and increase of all tender stone-fruit, of what nature, or climbe bred, soeuer. chap. xx. _how to make grapes grow as bigge, full, and as naturally, and to ripen in as due season, and be as long lasting as either in fraunce or spaine._ diuers of our english gardiners, and those of the best and most approued'st iudgements, haue béene very industrious to bring grapes, in our kingdome, to their true nature and perfection: and some great persons i know, that with infinit cost, and i hope prosperous successe, hath planted a vineyard of many acres, in which the hands of the best experienced french-men hath béene imploied: but for those great workes they are onely for great men, and not for the plaine english husbandman, neither will such workes by any meanes prosper in many parts of our kingdome, especially in the north parts: and i that write for the generall vse, must treate of vniuersall maximes: therefore if you desire to haue grapes in their true and best kinde, most earely and longest lasting, you shall in the most conuenient part of your garden, which is euer the center or middle point thereof, build a round house, in the fashion of a round doue-coate, but many degrées lower, the ground worke whereof shalbe aboue the ground two or thrée brickes thickenesse, vpon this ground-plot you shall place a groundsell, and thereon, fine, yet strong studs, which may reach to the roofe: these studs shalbe placed better then foure foote one from another, with little square bars of woode, such as you vse in glasse windowes, two betwixt euery two studs, the roofe you may make in what proportion you will, for this house may serue for a delicate banqueting house, and you may either couer it with leade, slate or tile, which you please. now, from the ground to the top, betwéene the studs, you shall glase it, with very strong glasse, made in an excéeding large square pane, well leaded and cimented. this house thus made, you shall obserue that through the bricke worke there be made, betwéene euery two studs, square holes, cleane through into the house; then on the out-side, opposite against those holes, you shall plant the roote of your vine, hauing béene very carefull in the election and choise thereof: which done, as your vine groweth you shall draw it through those holes, and as you vse to plash a vine against a wall, so you shall plash this against the glasse window, on the in-side, and so soone as it shall beginne to beare grapes you shall be sure to turne euery bunch, so that it may lye close to the glasse, that the reflection of the sunne heating the glasse, that heate may hasten on the ripening, & increase the groath of your grapes: as also the house defending off all manner of euill weather, these grapes will hang ripe, vnrotted or withered, euen till christmas. thus haue i giuen you a tast of some of the first parts of english husbandry, which if i shall finde thankefully accepted, if it please god to grant mée life, i will in my next volumne, shew you the choise of all manner of garden hearbes and flowers, both of this and other kingdomes, the seasons of their plantings, their florishings and orderings: i will also shew you the true ordering of woodes, both high and low, as also the bréeding and féeding of all manner of cattell, with the cure of all diseases incident vnto them, together with other parts of husbandry, neuer before published by any author: this i promise, if god be pleased: to whom be onely ascribed the glory of all our actions, and whose name be praised for euer. amen. * * * * * finis. [transcriber's notes the following changes have been made and anomalies noted. a former part chap. ii. 'adicted to nouelty and curiouity' changed to 'adicted to nouelty and curiousity' chap. iii. 'plough houlder when hée cometh to' scan is unclear 'two much earth' probable misprint for 'too much earth' chap. iiii. 'the of point your share' changed to 'the point of your share' chap. v. 'of that which you soil'd:' changed to 'of that which you foil'd:' chap. vi. 'the ridge of you land againe.' probable misprint for 'the ridge of your land againe.' 'tare-cockle, or such like,' scan is unclear 'after your land is soild,' changed to 'after your land is foild,' chap. vii. 'and if you ffnde' changed to 'and if you finde' 'manure of beasts which can be-gotten' probable misprint for 'manure of beasts which can be gotten' 'your fould of séepe' changed to 'your fould of shéepe' 'frost, winde, and weathe,rmakes' changed to 'frost, winde, and weather, makes' 'no wing accoridng' changed to 'no wing according' chap. ix. 'much barrainnesse, espcially' changed to 'much barrainnesse, especially' 'it shall be needlesse to write' scan is unclear the first part chap. i. 'you most turne euery furrow' probable misprint for 'you must turne euery furrow' 'hée must sooner stirer' changed to 'hée must sooner stirre'. scan is unclear. chap. ii. 'euery thing with is most apt' changed to 'euery thing which is most apt' chap. iii. 'their naturall lighnesse' changed to 'their naturall lightnesse' 'as hath, béene showed before' changed to 'as hath béene showed before' chap. iiii. 'it is most, certaine' changed to 'it is most certaine' 'cornes in their gardens thus, set seeing' changed to 'cornes in their gardens thus set, seeing' chap. v. 'vpon the or fourth field' changed to 'vpon the third or fourth field' 'is ninam barly,' probable misprint for 'is niam barly,' chap. vi. 'as we sée in dayly experience,' changed to 'as we sée in dayly experience.' the second part of the first booke chap. i. 'perfect ground-plot, you' scan is unclear 'twelue or fourtéene foote on of another,' probable misprint for 'twelue or fourtéene foote one of another,' 'thorny and sharpe, trées,' changed to 'thorny and sharpe trées,' chap. iiii. 'you shall tak one of your grafts' changed to 'you shall take one of your grafts' chap. v. 'grafting betweene the barke.' scan is unclear in sidenote 'not aboue trée grafts at the most' changed to 'not aboue thrée grafts at the most' 'grafting on the toppes of trees.' scan is unclear in sidenote 'and to contincu' changed to 'and to continue' chap. vi. 'of the replanting of trees, and furnishing the orchard,' changed to 'of the replanting of trees, and furnishing the orchard.' chap. vii. 'it is a ready away' changed to 'it is a ready way' 'two much fertillitie' probable misprint for 'too much fertillitie' 'stéepe it mfor alt' changed to 'stéepe it for malt' chap. viii. 'for any peculyar pofit' changed to 'for any peculyar profit' chap. ix. 'and growriuelled' changed to 'and grow riuelled' 'they can by meanes indure,' changed to 'they can by no meanes indure,' chap. xi. 'then contiunally labour' changed to 'then continually labour' chap. xii 'of poales.' scan is unclear in sidenote chap. xiiii 'dry more hoppes then any one man' scan is unclear chap. xvii. 'then betwxit your tiles' changed to 'then betwixt your tiles' chap. xviii. 'chap: xviii.' changed to 'chap. xviii.' 'single or double trayles,' scan unclear chap. xix. 'to the pliane english husbandman' changed to 'to the plaine english husbandman' ] file was produced from images produced by core historical literature in agriculture (chla), cornell university) [illustration: hon. r. w. dunlap, kingston, ohio, graduate of course in agriculture, ohio state university, , noted football player, state senator, state dairy and food commissioner. farmer and institute lecturer. introduced alfalfa fourteen years ago into his farm and community. introduced commercial fertilizers and raised thereby more wheat from acres than his father did from acres, thus convincing his father and neighbors that when rightly used commercial fertilizers paid. mr. dunlap claimed that the agricultural college made him a farmer, because when he left for college he had no intention of returning to the farm.] the young farmer some things he should know _by_ thomas f. hunt imperial man! co-worker with the wind and rain and light and heat and cold, and all the agencies of god to feed and clothe and render beautiful and glad the world! --_stockard_ new york orange judd company london kegan paul, trench, trÜbner & co., limited ---------------------------------------------------------------------- orange judd company ---------- entered at stationers' hall _london, england_ printed in u. s. a. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- contents chapter page i essentials of success ii means of acquiring land iii farm organization iv opportunities in agriculture v where to locate vi size of farm vii selection of farm viii the farm scheme ix the rotation of crops x the equipment xi how to estimate profits xii grain and hay farming xiii the cost of farming operations xiv the place of intensive farming xv reasons for animal husbandry xvi returns from animals xvii farm labor xviii shipping xix marketing xx laws affecting land and labor xxi rural legislation xxii rural forces the young farmer: some things he should know ---------- chapter i essentials of success columella, the much traveled spanish-roman writer of the first century a. d., said that for successful farming three things are essential: knowledge, capital and love for the calling. this statement is just as true today as it was when written years ago by this early writer on european agriculture. every man who loves the calling and has an ambition to become a successful farmer should understand that no two of these essentials are sufficient, but that all three are necessary. although this is so simple as to be almost axiomatic, it is indeed surprising how few people believe a knowledge of farming is really essential to success. america is strewn with cases of failure, in farming, by men investing capital acquired in other business. in nine cases out of ten failure has been due to lack of knowledge of farming. there is known to the writer an expert mineralogist and metallurgist. on the subject of coal and gold mining he can give the most valuable information. his advice is constantly sought on all such matters. instead of investing his money in mining, on which he is a recognized authority, he has invested it in a farm, about which he knows next to nothing. he has not even had the advantage of being raised on a farm, since his father was a railroad man. a mechanical engineer remarked that if he had $ , he would invest it in a farm. this man is supposed to be an expert in business methods as applied to manufacturing in general, and he is especially conversant with the manufacture and trade in automobiles. about all he has seen of farming he has observed from the window of a pullman car or from the steering wheel of an automobile. instead of investing his earnings in some manufacturing business, about which he has spent years of study and in which he has had some training, he would invest it in farming, of which he has only the most rudimentary knowledge, if only he had sufficient capital. as a matter of fact, he is more in need of knowledge than of capital. even farmers of experience do not always realize the training required to succeed in farming. a letter was received by the dean of a certain agricultural college saying that a graduate of another agricultural college had taken one of the poorest farms in his neighborhood and was raising better potatoes than anyone else could raise. the letter asked that information be sent by return mail as to how this young man could be beaten in raising potatoes. of course the answer had to be sent that while information upon raising potatoes could easily be supplied, although not in the limits of an ordinary letter, the training in observation, judgment and reasoning faculties essential to meet the daily problems as they arise could not be supplied. there is no objection to men of other vocations adopting farming as an avocation if they can afford it. it is a rational form of pleasure for wealthy people, and one in which they can often be of great service. this cannot be said of all forms of relaxation. wealthy men have been of special service to the cause of agriculture by promoting the breeding of improved live stock. men in other callings should clearly understand, however, that if they have a farm merely as a place to spend a week end, that they may expect to find the financial returns unsatisfactory. to no one is there more significance in the old school aphorism "knowledge is power" than to the young man who is to become a farmer. while it is not necessary to be educated in schools in order to gain knowledge, yet the schoolroom with all its limitations is usually the most economical and most efficient method of acquiring certain forms of knowledge essential to every successful man or woman. a farm-to-farm canvass of a certain region of the state of new york discloses the fact that farmers with college training are obtaining a higher income from their farms than those whose school days ended with high school. similarly, those who have finished the high school are more prosperous financially than those who never advanced beyond the grades. the investigation showed, for example, that with the farmers under observation the high school education was equivalent to $ , worth of % bonds. farming is an occupation requiring keen observation, sound judgment and accurate reasoning, all attributes which are strengthened greatly by proper education. this is so true that many men, perhaps most men, are forty before they have grasped the problems which the truly successful farmer must solve. a considerable part of the knowledge essential to success in any pursuit is acquired by actually working at the occupation, or, as we say, by practical experience. some features of any occupation can be obtained in no other way. a preliminary education may, however, greatly reduce the time necessary to acquire even this practical experience. for example, a course in shop work as taught in technical high schools and colleges, requiring two hours a day for five months, may shorten the time of apprenticeship by one or more years, in acquiring the trade of carpenter or iron worker. in the same manner a course in butter making, cheese making or floriculture, may shorten the time required to obtain the necessary practical details by ten months or even more. eventually, also, the man thus trained will be the better man. if the industrial activities of the world be divided into farming, mining, manufacturing, trade and transportation, it will be noted at once that farming is the only one which deals with living things. in fact, the definition of agriculture, in its broadest sense, is the economic production of living things. the farmer is thus brought face to face with some of the most difficult and intricate problems with which the human race has to grapple. it is this fact that makes farming, in some ways, the most uncertain as well as the most fascinating occupation known to man. the fact that the farmer is dealing with living things puts his occupation in a class by itself for a number of reasons, one of which is germane to the subject of this chapter. in most occupations a larger part of the knowledge necessary to success can be acquired by doing than is the case in farming. locomotive engineers are trained for their responsible duty while firing the engine. the brakeman becomes a conductor by assisting the latter. a bank cashier is usually a promoted bank clerk. each obtained the knowledge essential to success largely by oft-repeated performance. while, of course, there is much the farmer can learn only by experience, there are many things essential to his success that the mere performance of the necessary farm operations will not teach him. spreading manure will never teach him that stable manure should be supplemented with phosphoric acid in order to get the best results. the growing of clover will not teach him that mineral fertilizer may keep up the fertility of the soil where clover grows luxuriantly and occurs in the rotation at definite intervals. feeding cattle will not teach him that a good ration for milch cows is one containing one pound of digestible protein to seven pounds of digestible carbohydrates, provided it is palatable and, at least, two-thirds of the total ration is digestible. nor will the feeding of such a ration teach the farmer how to calculate the most economical ration from feeding stuffs at current prices. the cause of potato blight and the methods of combating it cannot be learned from the operation of planting and cultivating potatoes. these are only a few illustrations--they might be multiplied indefinitely--to show that farming is peculiar in that performance of the daily duties does not give the knowledge essential to success in the same measure that it does in such occupations as banking, trade and transportation. yet, curiously enough, while no man would undertake to run a locomotive engine or perform the duties of cashier of a bank without thorough training, there are many who will undertake to farm without education or knowledge of the business. the young man who intends to become a farmer should fully understand that if farming is not a business worthy of a thoroughly educated man, it is not a business worthy of him; because every young man is worthy of a thorough education, provided he is a man of clean habits and good purposes. do not allow yourself to be persuaded that you lack ability to acquire a good education. all you require is opportunity, determination and honesty of intention. farming is worthy, moreover, of the most highly educated as well as the most capable. if lack of means prevents a young man from taking a four-years' training in agriculture, he will find a two years' course offered by many of the state agricultural schools. while it is obviously impossible to give in two years as much training as in four years, these two years' courses contain the more technical subjects and are usually very thorough and efficient. no young man, no matter how thorough his previous training, need hesitate to pursue one of them. there are, however, young men who cannot spare the time and expense of even two years' training. for such many state agricultural colleges offer winter terms of eight to twelve weeks. these courses are arranged to allow the student to specialize along some particular line. the better prepared the man is who enters these winter courses the more he will benefit by them. this leads to the caution that such courses should not be substituted for the education offered in the public schools, but should only be sought after all the opportunities for education at home have been exhausted. for the somewhat older young man who is now farming and cannot leave his farm or for the younger man as a preparation for the short courses, one or more correspondence courses will be found useful. not all colleges conduct correspondence courses, but fortunately those who do will accept students from other states on equal terms. there are many persons who will testify to their helpfulness. every young farmer should have a carefully selected library of standard books on agriculture, not only for reading but for reference. an instance of the value of a standard book of reference came recently to the attention of the writer. an educated young farmer in iowa paid $ . for a peck of crimson clover seed which he sowed in the spring in his oats. a reference to any standard publication on forage crops costing less than the peck of seed would have disclosed to him the probable hopelessness of success under the conditions named. the books to include as well as to exclude from a select list will depend upon the previous training of the man making the purchase, the character of the farming to be pursued, and, to some extent, to the section of the country where the farm is located. any bookseller can secure catalogs issued by firms making a specialty of publishing agricultural books. for the average reader these catalogs are sufficient to enable one to make intelligent purchases. every farmer should take one or more agricultural journals. at present journals are published on every phase of agriculture and many of them are of high character. publishers are always glad to send sample copies free of charge. by examining these copies intelligent selection may be made. the writer of this book has had rather unusual opportunity during more than a quarter of a century of observing the influence of education upon the success, financial and otherwise, of those who engage in farming. as the result of these observations he wishes to urge every young man to allow no one to persuade him that because he is to be a farmer, he does not need a thorough education. remember that you have but one life to live, and if you let the golden opportunity pass, the mistake can never be rectified. no man ever regretted that he had too much education--thousands have regretted the lack of it. every young man, no matter what his occupation is to be, should receive some school training, however little it may be, every year until he reaches the age of majority. otherwise the age of majority should be changed. in no occupation is this more important than in farming, because the operations involved in farming fail to develop certain attributes necessary to the largest success. a man cannot have a mind too well trained, although it is possible that he may have too much undigested information. the mental condition may not be unlike the physical condition of the man who is burdened with too many clothes. when in action he may need to strip his mind of unnecessary information in order to make the most efficient mental effort. chapter ii means of acquiring land of the three essentials to successful farming--capital, knowledge and love for the calling--only the first can be obtained on credit, and this only in part. usually when a man desires to buy a farm he must have, at least, one-third of his desired investment in cash. the amount to be invested will include, not only the cost of the land, but the cost of the necessary equipment of the farm. the percentage of the total capital which may be borrowed, however, will depend on many circumstances and is usually a matter of first importance. no man should borrow more than a banker or other reputable business man considers a safe investment. usually there is no better counselor as to a safe investment than the local banker. the banker should, and generally does, stand in much the same relation to the financial welfare of the community as the physician to its physical, the minister to its moral and spiritual welfare. the inexperienced person, even if he does not need to borrow money, would do well to consult some responsible banker in the neighborhood before making an investment in farm lands. the young man should, as early as possible in life, open an account with the local bank, not merely for the sake of the habit of saving which this will encourage, but in order to come into personal business relations with the banker. instead of concealing from the bank his business operations, he should seek the advice of his banker on all important financial matters. on an average, every farm changes hands at least three times in a century. every farm, therefore, must be acquired by purchase, inheritance or gift at more or less irregular intervals. in the neighborhood in which the author was born, there is not a farm but has changed hands since he can remember. in many cases the farm is now in the possession of a son; in some instances in that of a grandson of the owner as known by the writer in his boyhood days. in this particular community the acquirement of a farm by a person not related to the former owner has occurred in relatively few instances. as a rule, when the farm has been acquired by a son, the latter has operated the farm as tenant or partner for a period previous to his ownership and during lifetime of the father. in some instances the son has boarded with the parents or the parents with the son and his wife; or, in the case of a daughter, with the daughter and son-in-law. where there are several heirs, as is apt to be the case, the son operating the farm is required to purchase or rent the interest of the other heirs, unless the farm is large enough to be divided, which is less seldom the case than is popularly supposed. thus, if there are acres of land worth $ an acre, and five heirs, the young farmer may inherit $ , , and be required to assume the remaining $ , as an obligation. he may borrow this money at the bank, placing a mortgage upon the farm, thus settling with the other heirs at once. or he may pay the other heirs rent on their share of the farm. in any case he will, if successful, gradually cancel his obligation and become owner of the farm. that no heir is willing to assume this responsibility is the most common reason for a farm changing from one family to another, and the disruption of community interests. the customary, or normal, method of acquiring land has been and still is a combination of tenancy, inheritance and mortgage. without some tenant system and without the farm mortgage, it would be impossible for the average young man to acquire a farm. that men are constantly advancing from farm tenant to landowner is shown by statistics giving the percentage of tenants by ages. the majority of farmers under are renters. most farmers over are owners of farm land. thus in illinois, in , approximately % of the farmers under years of age rented their farms, while less than % of the farmers over years of age were tenants. the question for the young man to consider is not what effect the tenant system has upon the welfare of the nation or what political ills may be connected with farm mortgages, but how to make use of these necessary and beneficent agencies for the acquirement of a farm. a system of tenancy which leads to absent landlordism and a permanent tenant class is thoroughly vicious, while a practice which enables a man to become, within a reasonable period, a land-owning farmer is a thoroughly approvable and, indeed, necessary method of acquiring land. as already indicated, most young men will need in some form or other to employ more capital than they possess when they start farming. they must, therefore, determine what is the best form of obtaining the necessary capital, viz.: whether to borrow the money on a farm mortgage, or whether to use the capital someone else has invested in a farm by paying him rent for it. the conditions of tenancy in this country are often not the most fortunate, yet the young man of character may well find, for a time, at least, it would be best for him to rent a farm and invest his own capital in the necessary machinery and live stock to conduct it properly. much will depend on the character of the arrangement which may be made. usually more favorable terms can be secured from landlords owning large numbers of farms than from the owner of one or two farms. the large landowner is content with a moderate income from each farm, because in the aggregate his income is sufficient for his needs, while the retired farmer who must live off the proceeds of a single farm is apt to drive a hard bargain and may not be over particular concerning the maintenance of said farm. the writer knows a farmer who owns a good farm purchased from the proceeds of a rented farm. he continues to live on the rented farm and rents his own, because, it is said, his landlord is willing to make him more favorable terms than he makes to his tenant. the more capable the tenant the more favorable the terms he may exact. certain tenants are in demand and can have their choice of farms. a prosperous-looking man was pointed out recently as an example of a tenant capable of buying a farm in one of the most highly developed counties in the united states. it was stated that as a renter he could have his choice of any farm in the county, but that he did not have a dollar invested in farm land. possibly he invests his surplus earnings in stocks and bonds. it is not the present purpose to determine the relative merits of the different systems of land tenure, but to try to be helpful to the beginners by discussing the usual practices in order that he may know whether the arrangement he is considering is customary and whether it is likely to prove satisfactory. every third farm in the united states is rented under one of three methods: . a definite money rent may be paid, ranging from $ to $ an acre for land on which the ordinary, staple crops are raised. perhaps $ to $ is more commonly paid for such land. . in the south it is common for the landlord to require a definite number of pounds of cotton per acre or a certain number of bales of cotton for a one or two-mule farm, as the case may be. this is classified by the census authorities as "cash rent," but will here be called "crop rent." crop rent is less common than either cash or share rent in the northern and western states, although perhaps the most common form in the south. crop rent, however, is met with in some sections, as in western new york where certain large landowners require a definite number of bushels of wheat, oats or maize and make certain stipulations as to hay and straw. they charge a cash rent for pasture. . much the most common form of tenancy, however, is that where a certain percentage or share of the product is given the landlord for the use of the land. before entering into a discussion of the customary conditions under which land is rented on shares it may be helpful to point out the fundamental differences between cash rent, crop rent and share rent. in case of cash rent, the landlord takes no risk, either as to the price or the amount of product. in the case of crop rent, he shares the risk as to the variation in price, but not as to the amount of crop raised. the latter may depend upon the clemency of the weather or upon the industry and skill of the tenant. in the case of share rent, both landlord and tenant share equally as to variation in the price and the amount of product. three forms of share rent may be recognized: (a) where landlord furnishes only real estate (land and buildings), the tenant supplying everything else, including teams, machinery, labor, seeds and fertilizers. under these conditions it is customary for the landlord to receive one-third and the tenant two-thirds of the crop raised or the product produced. (b) the second form of share rent is where the landlord furnishes the real estate; the tenant supplies teams, tools and labor, while the landlord and tenant own equally all live stock other than teams, and bear equally all other expenses, as for seeds, fertilizers and cost of threshing. under this system, it is customary for landlord and tenant each to receive one-half of all sales. as each owns one-half of all the live stock (teams excepted), each shares equally in all increase. the landlord pays for the cost of permanent improvements such as new buildings, fences, repairs and drainage. the tenant, in making these improvements, in some cases, agrees to furnish two days' labor for one day's pay. the theory is that, while the increased value of the real estate is of advantage only to the landlord, the improved facilities are of some benefit to the tenant. since he can do this work at odd times when not otherwise employed, he can afford to take a generous view of the matter. it is obvious that if he remains on the farm long enough the tenant will come into his share of the benefit, while if he intends to leave the farm soon he may not. there is in the mind of the writer a prosperous tenant who, after eighteen years on a single farm, declared he had no desire to make a change, and doubtless there are thousands of similar instances. under the plan in which the tenant furnishes everything except the real estate, the tendency of the farm is apt to be downward both as to the improvements and the crop-producing power of the soil. the interests of the landlord and tenant are not mutual. this condition of tenancy leads to growing only those crops which can be readily sold from the farm and to frequent changes of the tenant, with its accompanying auction sales of property. in one region, where this system prevails, it has been facetiously remarked that each tenant has a sale every year to determine how much he is worth. it is less trouble than taking an inventory. in the second form of share rent, the interests of landlord and tenant are more nearly mutual. under this system, animal husbandry is possible, which, generally, involves pasturing and feeding a considerable part of the crops upon the farm, and even the purchase of nitrogenous by-products. all this leads to permanency of tenant, since the landlord and tenant are both interested in the live stock and other personal property, which cannot be divided, with economy, each year. it is interesting to note that the house is the least likely to be kept in repair. the improvement of the barns and fences or the laying of tile drains increases the landlord's income, but he has no financial interest in the house, so long as the tenant is willing to live in it. there are, of course, many variations in the arrangement of details between the landlord and tenant. on many dairy farms in the northeastern states it is customary for the landlord to own the cows. while the landlord and tenant share equally from the sale of milk, butter or cheese, in such cases the increase in the herd belongs to the owner of the land. hence, money from the sale of any animal, old or young, goes to him. this is because the landlord must keep up the herd. if a cow is sold, he must furnish another to take her place. (c) the third type of tenant farming is where the tenant furnishes nothing but his labor and managerial ability, and receives a share of the sales, which may be one-third. this is rather an unusual type of tenancy, since, where the landlord furnishes all the capital, it is much more common to employ a farm manager at a monthly wage. the wage varies greatly, but is seldom below forty dollars or above seventy-five dollars per month without board, especially to those who have not hitherto had much managerial experience. various attempts at profit sharing have been made. a recent instance is of a young married man taking acres of tillable land where the landlord has a fairly well-stocked farm. the young man is to have a house and everything in the way of living the farm can furnish. he is to receive $ a month and one-half the net proceeds, or, what is called in chapter xi, the farm income. in considering a contract of this kind it is necessary to make a careful distinction between: ( ) gross sales, ( ) net proceeds, viz.: the gross sales less the expenses of running the farm, and ( ) profits, which may be defined for the purpose of this discussion as the net proceeds less the interest on the investment.[a] assuming acres of land, all tillable, devoted to dairy farming in eastern united states, gross sales may be estimated at $ an acre, or an annual gross income of $ , , and the net proceeds at $ an acre, or $ , . under these conditions the young man's income would be $ , received as wages, plus $ , as his share of the net proceeds, or a total of $ , a year. generally speaking, probably a more satisfactory method, both for landlord and the farm manager, would be to pay the latter as nearly as may be what his services should be worth and give him in addition one-half the profits; that is, one-half of that which was left after deducting the expenses of running the farm and interest on the capital invested. merely for illustrating the method of calculation, let us assume this farm with its equipment to be worth $ an acre, or $ , . let the farm manager be paid $ a year. assume the same gross income, $ , , and the same cost of operating, $ , , to which add $ , the additional salary of the manager. the total expense is then $ , , and the net proceeds $ , . if %, or $ , was charged on the investment, there would be $ to be divided between landlord and manager, making the salary of manager $ , . a simple calculation will show that if % were charged, the salary of the manager would be $ a year, and if %, $ a year. the advantage of the latter method of employment is that the young man runs less risk, while both receive equally any surplus beyond fair wages and fair interest on the investment. in this connection it is important to consider how much may be reasonably paid for managerial ability. a study of the figures on page will show that the labor income from a considerable number of farms of the better class was about % of the capital invested in the farms. the inference is, therefore, that if a man has $ , wisely invested in a farm he may pay $ for a working manager; or, to put it in another form, before the owner of a farm can afford to pay $ , a year for a farm manager, he should have about $ , invested. moreover, this investment must be in a form calculated to return an income. if part of it consists of investments for pleasure or fancy, such investment will not only not add to the income, but will detract from it by increasing the cost of maintenance. this is scarcely less important to the employee than it is to the employer, since if the owner pays a higher salary than the manager can earn, he quite surely will sooner or later discharge his manager. this may result disastrously for the discharged young man, not merely on account of the loss of employment, but because his failure may militate against his securing satisfactory employment elsewhere. when an employer is seeking a man, he looks for one who has succeeded. there is an old saying, "nothing succeeds like success," and it is only too true that nothing fails like failure. ----- [a] profit is sometimes defined as that part of the product which the producer can consume without reducing his means of production. chapter iii farm organization in the last chapter were discussed the most common methods by which a young man acquires an opportunity to engage in farming. this chapter will discuss some less common arrangements by which may be bridged that period between the time the son is ready to go into the business and the time he may assume the complete control of the ancestral or other farm. it will also suggest a method for the continuous business management of a farm enterprise. as stated, the most common reason for a farm changing from one family to another is the fact that no heir is willing to assume the obligation which is involved in paying for the interest of the other heirs. connected with this problem is the further fact that the father is not usually ready to give up the management of the farm at the time one of his sons reaches the age to go into active business. the reason for this state of affairs is made clear by the results of insurance statistics. the period that a man may be expected to live can be obtained by taking the difference between his present age and and dividing the remainder by two. thus, a young man who is may reasonably expect to live years, or until he is years old. a man at , however, still has an expectation of life of years, and the man of of years. a farmer of will usually have one or more sons ready to go to farming if they ever expect to engage in farming. but, as has been shown, a man of has a reasonable expectation of more years of life and cannot turn over the farm to his son, completely, without destroying his own opportunity for earning a livelihood. as things are usually arranged, therefore, there is no place on the average farm for the son, except as a hired hand, which is not desired permanently by either father or son. frequently the father fails to appreciate the earning power of his son, and, what is more important, that the boy has grown into a man. one day a teacher called a student of agriculture to his office, when the following conversation occurred: [illustration: john armstrong, austinburg, ashtabula county, ohio, was a dairy tenant farmer for twenty years with nothing to show for his labor but a debt of $ . he then bought the farm of acres on which he lives, without cash payment, assuming a debt of $ , . at the end of ten years he owned his farm and equipment valued at $ , . he has two sons who have been important factors in his success. a year ago one of them married and went to a farm of his own, the father paying him $ , for his former labor.] [illustration: john m. hunt, ackley, iowa, two years a student at iowa state college. he returned to the home farm of acres, which, without any capital, he rented from his father. at the age of his gross receipts from this farm were a little over $ , . after paying rent, living, keeping a family of four, a few trips to fairs and corn shows, he had net $ , for his year's work. picture shows home with father, mother and sister in the foreground.] "the bureau of soils at washington," said the teacher, "has asked me to recommend several of our students to them for positions as field assistants. if you desire to have me do so, i would be glad to recommend you for one of these positions. the compensation is $ , a year and field expenses." "i do not believe that i can accept," said mr. manning, "my father is in poor health and needs my help on the farm." "does your father want you to take charge of the farm and manage it so that you can make your training count?" "no; my father expects to continue to manage the farm. he wishes me to work for him." "how much does your father expect to pay you?" "thirty dollars a month." the teacher found it extremely difficult not to interfere, but he merely said, "this is a case of filial duty which you must settle for yourself. i must have nothing further to say." the young man returned to the ancestral home and is probably still there. it is, of course, impossible to determine the merits of an individual case, but this incident represents a type of cases where the son makes two important sacrifices from the sense of duty. first, he sacrifices present, and, perhaps, future opportunity to earn the wages of which he is capable and to which he is justly entitled. and, second, and more important, he sacrifices the opportunity to develop his own powers and make concrete his own abstract self. there are two things that every young man should do. one is to earn a living. a man that cannot or does not earn a living is of no value to himself or to anyone else. the other is to develop within himself his latent possibilities. he must apply himself to some problem, or problems, and through them develop his own personality. there is no place where more intricate and satisfying problems may be found than in the development of a successful farming enterprise. in the instance cited, the father may have been unable to pay his son the wage he might have obtained elsewhere, but he did not need to dwarf his son's development by treating him merely as a hired hand. his willingness to do so was probably due to his failure to appreciate that his son had become a man. sometimes a father is astute enough to reorganize his business so as to retain a place for himself while giving to his sons that opportunity which every man must have who develops himself normally. an ohio farmer once came to the dean's office. he had a son in college who was just completing the first year of a two years' course in agriculture. "i should like to have you find a place for my son in a cheese factory during the coming summer," said mr. mckinley. "i own a farm of acres on which i have a herd of jersey cattle," continued the father. "i have two sons and one daughter. i would like to have my sons about me, but there is no place for them on my farm because i am there and cannot get away. in fact, i do not desire to give up the management of the farm and the development of the herd of cattle." "not every father sees the situation as clearly as you do," interjected the dean. "this is my plan. after my son has spent a summer in a cheese factory, i want him to come back to your school for another year. i want him to learn, especially, all you teach about dairying. i will then build a cheese factory on my own farm and my son will make into cheese the milk of my own herd, and also from the herds of our neighbors. by the time he has completed his work with you, my younger son will have finished the high school. he has some liking for trading, and he will sell the cheese at wholesale and deliver it to the surrounding towns where markets are unexcelled. as for the daughter," continued this practical man, "she will get married and that will take care of her." what became of the daughter is not known to the writer, but the rest of the program was carried out successfully and continued for many years. a german came to this country and settled in new jersey, where he established a large orchard. in course of time his two sons grew into manhood. while, of course, requiring plenty of laborers, the orchardist did not need the sons in the management of his farm. he, therefore, established one of these sons in the commission business in philadelphia, thus, at least, keeping the profits on the sale of the products of his orchard in the family. he also needed cold storage for his fruit. the other son started a cold storage plant, which plays an important part in the profitable management of the orchard. thus both sons have independent employment requiring managerial ability and the orchard is much more profitable than it otherwise would be. our land laws, our traditions and our practices are based upon the idea that a farm is to provide activity and support for but one family. in order, therefore, that the son may marry and begin to develop his life in his own way, it is essential to reorganize in some manner the method of managing the farm or to enlarge or, perhaps, specialize its activities. this may be accomplished on a simple partnership basis, or it may be in some such line as outlined in the illustrations which have been given. in other occupations such co-operative effort is the rule rather than the exception. that it is more difficult to effect satisfactory arrangements in farming must be conceded, else they would be more common. doubtless it will often tax the ingenuity of father and son to devise the plans best suited to meet their particular problem. there still remains to consider another form of business relation as applied to farming which has become almost universal in trade and transportation. the following incident may illustrate and emphasize the problem better than abstract discussion: one day a man walked into an office and stated that a friend had a half million dollars to invest in farming, provided that he could be convinced that the money would be invested profitably. "does your friend desire to buy land in any particular locality?" "yes," replied the promoter, "he wishes to buy land near ----. he has some sentiment about it. he was born in that neighborhood." "well, that is a rather bad beginning. farming on sentiment is dangerous, especially when the sentiment is in no way related to the business." the facts were that the region indicated was recognized to be one of the most unpromising sections of the state. "if you undertake to invest a half million dollars in one neighborhood," continued the adviser, "you will pretty certainly fail to earn interest on your investment." "why?" inquired the promoter. "before you could possibly buy any considerable part of the land the owners of the farms you desire to buy would have doubled or perhaps trebled the price asked for their holdings. it is one thing to earn interest on an investment of $ an acre and quite another to earn an equal per cent on $ or $ an acre. "in the second place, farmers are content to accept less per cent on their capital than they would if it was loaned at interest, because the farm furnishes a home as well as a business. when you buy up all these farms and convert them into a single enterprise you will destroy their home value. you cannot hope to compete with the man, who, because his farm furnishes him a home, is content with an otherwise small return on his investment." there were other reasons, of course, why such an enterprise would fail, which the speaker did not stop to explain. "you are mistaken," challenged the promoter. "i intend to meet both your objections. my plan is to form a corporation and issue both preferred and common stock. the preferred stock shall bear % and that will belong to my friend who furnishes the money. i will retain the common stock. five per cent is all the owner of the money is entitled to, while if the business returns more than that amount, it will be due to my management. i, and those associated with me, are entitled to all that is made above five per cent. by retaining the common stock the surplus income will come to us. neither will i destroy the home value, because i shall associate the former owners with me in the conduct of the estate and may give them some of the common stock, so that they will be interested with me in making a profitable return. if they wish to keep their money invested in the farm, they will be given preferred stock in place of cash for their farms." it is needless to say that the promoter never convinced his friend that he could successfully invest for him a half million dollars along the lines indicated. nevertheless the corporate plan is not without merit. for example, if a father should incorporate his farm, he could provide for the inheritance of the preferred stock, among the heirs, as he desires. he could give to the son who operates the farm all the common stock, together with what preferred stock he is entitled or the father may desire him to have. the common stock would provide the means by which the income from the farm, which was due to the sons skill and management, might go to him. as time went on the son could acquire additional preferred stock from the father or other heirs, or he could invest his earnings elsewhere, as might seem most expedient. on the death of the parents, the preferred stock would be distributed as inheritance or the will provided without in any way interfering with the continuity of the farm enterprise. if at any time the son desired to discontinue the management of the farm, all he would need to do would be to dispose of his interest in the common stock at whatever he might be able to secure from the man who succeeded to its management. he could sell or retain his preferred stock. farming is the one remaining great industry that has not been organized so that a single enterprise may have a continuous existence. a corporation never dies, but at least three generations of men occupy the farms of the united states each century. chapter iv opportunities in agriculture some years ago, a prominent magazine contained an article entitled "the american farmer's balance sheet," in which a descendant of the second and sixth presidents of the united states was shown to have made in one year a profit of over $ , from a , -acre wheat farm in north dakota, and over $ , from a , -acre corn farm in iowa. a few months later there appeared in the same magazine another article, the purport of which was that great wealth, whether it be obtained from farming, the mining of coal, the manufacture of steel or the selling of merchandise, is the exception, while the man, in whatever calling, who rears and educates a family and at the same time lays by a small competence is the normal american product. the moral is that a $ -a-year-income farm is a more important factor to the national welfare than a $ , -a-year-income farm. in the latter article the writer tells of two brothers who had been reared on a michigan farm. reuben was tired of the country. he went to the city and apprenticed himself to a harnessmaker. against the advice of young friends, lucien bought sixty acres of land and ran in debt for it. in a year reuben was earning a dollar a day. he wore a white shirt and pointed shoes, not because they were more comfortable, but because other people did. he had no debts. lucien had fair crops, but they yielded no more than enough to pay interest on the mortgage. he wore a ragged shirt, patched breeches and cowhide boots. people said that reuben was making a gentleman of himself and learning a trade in the bargain. in two years, reuben had completed his apprenticeship. he was now earning $ a week. he lived in a house that had a fancy veranda and green blinds. his clothing improved. lucien was still ragged, but he paid his interest and $ each year upon the principal. people said that reuben, the harnessmaker, was bound to come to the front. in ten years more, reuben was still foreman of the shop at $ a month. he lived in the same house, and smoked havana cigars. lucien built a new house and a barn. he smoked a pipe. the neighbors saw that every year he made some improvement on the farm. he wore a white shirt when he went to town, and he had a pair of button shoes. people said that lucien was becoming a prominent man. his word was good at the bank. reuben began to complain that harnessmaking was too confining. his health was breaking down. the proprietor was selfish. he would not die and leave the business to him. harnessmaking was not what it used to be. lucien bought more land. he went fishing when he wanted to. reuben came out now and then to spend sunday. the birds seemed to sing more sweetly than ever before and the grass was greener. lucien endorsed reuben's note. lucien has pigs, and cows, and sheep, and chickens, and turkeys, and horses. he raises potatoes and beans, and corn, and wheat, and garden stuff, and fruit. he buys his groceries and clothing and tobacco. reuben buys everything. at the close of the year lucien puts from $ to $ in the bank or takes a trip to washington. reuben does well if he come out even. lucien does not fret; reuben grumbles. the picture is true to life. it has been enacted and re-enacted in every one of the older communities of the united states. it has always seemed to the writer, however, that the author of this suggestive story left out two important personages. they were sarah, the wife of reuben, and mary, the wife of lucien. sarah liked to make tatting and to go to pink teas. mary preferred to raise flowers and fluffy little chickens. nothing is to be said for or against the taste of either. each has a right to her preference, but their point of view cannot be left out of the problem when a young man is considering his future occupation. it has been said, and probably with considerable truth, that most congressmen would not hang around washington if it were not for their wives. no one must mistake this story as an attempt to compare harness making with farming, much less to compare living in the city with life in the open country. what it does is to compare the struggle and the development of the man who goes into business for himself with the man who accepts employment at wages. because of less responsibility and less sacrifices at the beginning, the tendency is for young men to work for wages rather than to engage in business for themselves. this is becoming more and more true as industrial methods make it more and more difficult for the young man to command the requisite capital. the man who works for wages usually has the larger income and appears the most prosperous during the earlier years as compared with his brother who enters business. the business man, however, who, while young, economizes and invests his savings in his business gradually outstrips his wage-earning brother. during later life he is able to enjoy the fruits of his earlier economy and investments, while failing powers and keen competition of younger and better trained men restrict the opportunities of the wage earner, who has generally spent his wages in better living, or at least in more outward show. this is well shown by the fact that it is customary to make provision by means of pensions for wage earners of all sorts, while no such arrangement is made for men who engage in business, be that farming, trade or transportation. for many reasons, however, young men will continue to seek employment at wages, even if only for a few years, or until some capital has been acquired which may be invested in business. the question arises, therefore, what opportunities there may be for the young man who desires to engage, eventually, in the business of farming to work for wages along lines that will not be too far removed from the business in which he is subsequently to engage. it will be assumed that the young man has prepared himself in that same painstaking way that he would if he were preparing to become an engineer, a lawyer or a physician. there is a constant demand for men with proper training as managers of farms. as stated elsewhere, the wages are seldom less than $ nor more than $ a month to beginners, although for men of experience $ , a year has been paid in exceptional cases for the management of large enterprises. these positions often constitute ideal opportunities for capable young men. they require, however, not only an intimate knowledge of farming, but the ability, also, to manage men. the ability to manage men requires the combination of decision and tact, not possessed by all, and not easily acquired by education or practice. not only must the farm manager be able to manage workmen, but oftentimes he must manage his employer, who may have little knowledge of farming but still insists upon having his own ideas executed, as he, of course, has a perfect right to do. another danger is the fact that where the farm is owned by a man engaged in other business, many circumstances may arise to cause the owner to change his plans or sell his property. there is often, therefore, a lack of permanency in these positions. the united states department of agriculture employs upward of , people. there is a constant demand for young men to recruit this service, including experts in soils, plant production, animal husbandry, dairying, chemistry and forestry. beginners receive from $ to $ , a year. when they are sent out of washington into field service, as many of them are, they receive their expenses, including subsistence in addition. young men may rise rather rapidly by promotion to $ , a year, then more slowly to $ , , while an occasional man is promoted to the more responsible position paying $ , to $ , a year. the positions are all filled through the competitive civil service examinations. examinations are held at more or less irregular intervals, usually several times a year, in various sections of the country. a letter addressed to the united states civil service commission will secure the necessary information concerning openings and the general requirements for the examinations. employment in the united states department of agriculture often affords opportunity for varied experience and wide observation of farming methods throughout the country. such employment is generally to be considered desirable if not continued for too long a period. as a matter of fact, men are constantly leaving the service to engage in practical or other work, a fact which makes the demand for young men greater than would otherwise be the case. the various agricultural colleges and experiment stations are constantly seeking men. it would seem that the demand would eventually be satisfied. as a matter of fact, however, it grows greater year by year, both because these institutions continue to grow and because young men are attracted more and more to practical work. it is stated that in one institution there were graduates in the course in animal husbandry and that went into practical work and only two sought employment in college or station. the salaries are about the same as in government positions. agricultural newspaper work offers an attractive field for young men who are properly trained and have a taste for this kind of work. there is also beginning to be quite a demand for teachers of agriculture in the high schools. as a rule a man is wanted who can teach, in addition, the sciences usually taught in secondary school. the customary salary is from $ to $ a month on an eight to ten months' basis. an experience of one or two years as a teacher in a high school, or even the lower grades of the public school, should be invaluable to the young man who expects subsequently to engage in farming. this is particularly true if he has not had the opportunity of a college training. it is, perhaps, unnecessary to state that the salaries mentioned in this chapter are obtained only by young men who possess certain qualifications. to secure them, they must be men of ability, integrity, virtue and industry. no man who is not willing to make the preparation necessary to master his subject can expect to succeed. he must, also, be a man of absolute honesty, and he must lead a clean life. it was bismarck who said, of german university students, "one-third die out; one-third rot out; the other third rule germany." every man who will may choose whether he will belong to bismarck's second or third class. the question for the young man of is not merely as to the morrow, but what is likely to be the trend of events during the next to years. "in the united states nowhere crossed the mississippi and nowhere touched the gulf of mexico." in the country west of the mississippi river was agriculturally largely an undiscovered region. since we have much more than doubled our population and our agriculture. since that time we have subdued more of the open country to the uses of man than we had been able to do in years of our previous history. during the past years we have prided ourselves upon being an agricultural people. we have been an agricultural people, but our problems have not been chiefly those of the agriculturist, but those of the engineer. our problem, in the past, has not been to make two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before. our problem has been to harvest and transport two bushels of wheat or two bales of cotton with the labor previously required to harvest one. our crops have been so abundant that the agricultural problems connected with the growing of them has been secondary to the engineering problems of their harvesting and transportation. the self-binder and the steam locomotive have been our achievements. if the writer mistakes not, the future problem will not be so much the harvesting and transporting, as the growth of the crops. in the future, young men will be needed who have studied the science of living things in order that they may make, literally, two blades of grass to grow where but one grew. to men who will be able to do so, will come success and honor. chapter v where to locate unless the young farmer expects to return to the ancestral home, the first question he must settle is where he is going to locate. indeed, one of the most common questions asked is, what do you think of this state or that state or this region or that as a place to farm? there are few questions harder to answer. this is due, among other reasons, to the fact that every place has its advantages and disadvantages. the sum of the advantages may be greater in one place than in another, but if these advantages are known they must generally be paid for. new adaptations, however, may change materially the value of the land in a given locality as, for example, the discovery that a region is especially adapted to raising alfalfa, onions, cabbages, apples or peaches. changing conditions, as the growth of population or better transportation facilities, may materially affect the attractiveness of a region from the standpoint of the farmer. the competition of other regions which grow similar crops is a potent factor in determining the desirability of a region. for example, the farmers east of the allegheny mountains during the nineteenth century competed with the farmers of the central west who had free, fertile, easily tilled land on which to grow maize, wheat and oats. cattle and sheep were pastured on the open range. the twentieth century has found the land of this region settled and capitalized in some instances beyond that of the eastern states; thus one factor at least of competition has been eliminated. while farm values readjust themselves in time, it often happens, especially in the older settled regions, that farm values are slow in reflecting these changes in economic conditions. changed conditions often call for a change in farm methods which the habits and traditions of even one generation prevent. to the man who is able to apply the proper methods the region may be a desirable one, although under existing conditions the results may be unsatisfactory. the young man, however, is cautioned at this point not to be overconfident of his own ability. under such circumstances it is well to study the problem with great care, because the methods which seem unwise to the casual observer may, after all, be found to be based upon sound economic principles. a man of who is looking for a location should not only study the present conditions of the locality, but try to predict what is likely to be the future of the region during the next third of a century, since this is the period in which he may reasonably expect to be personally interested, although later in life he will find himself quite as much interested in the more distant future on account of his children. nothing is more self-evident than that one should choose a region, especially as regards soil and climate, which is adapted to the crop or crops to be raised, yet there are probably more failures due to a lack of crop adaptation than to any other cause that is not personal to the man himself. not only do apples, for their best success, require certain soil types, but different varieties of apples require for their best development, distinctly different types of soil as, for example, rhode island greening, baldwin, york imperial and grime's golden. each reaches its best development on different types of soil and some require different climatic conditions. in like manner apples and peaches require distinctly different types of soil for the best success of each and for this reason peaches are not desirable as fillers in apple orchards. if at the proper season of the year one goes from pittsburg to chicago via columbus and indianapolis, he will see great fields of winter wheat and a considerable number of permanent pastures. from chicago to omaha he will see only occasionally a field of wheat and scarcely any permanent pasture. oats have taken the place of wheat. in parts of eastern kansas and oklahoma the predominant crop is winter wheat. throughout the whole region from pittsburg to topeka, kansas, the characteristic crop is maize or indian corn. between st. paul and fargo, the main crops are spring wheat and oats. one may travel from winnipeg, manitoba, to calgary, alberta, a distance of over one thousand miles without seeing a field of maize. in some portions the main crop is wheat, in others it is oats. these are illustrations of the crop adaptation over large areas, which has come about unconsciously, as has most crop adaptation. in other parts of the united states are to be found even more striking examples of crop adaptation, although the areas are much smaller, as in the case of tobacco, potatoes, celery, onions, apples, peaches and other fruits. regions containing residual soils are more variable in crop adaptation than drift soils and require more careful watchfulness on the part of those who may wish to buy land. as previously stated, advantages, if known, must usually be paid for. it comes about, therefore, that if a region or a farm is adapted to the raising of a certain crop which is more profitable than the average, such as maize, tobacco, alfalfa, celery, apples or peaches, this land will, other things being equal, command a higher price than land which does not possess this characteristic. there is an underlying economic principle which the man who goes out to choose a farm should clearly understand. the principle has been stated by fairchild as follows: "the normal value of products capable of indefinite multiplication tends always toward the value of least costly. on the other hand, if any production cannot be largely extended, so that the supply barely meets the requirements of the purchasers, the tendency of normal values is toward the cost of the most costly part of the product required to meet wants." this principle explains why land especially adapted to raising maize is higher priced than land primarily adapted to raising wheat. maize which enters into commerce is raised almost exclusively in ten states of the united states. wheat is harvested practically every month of every year in different parts of the world. the young farmer should consider, therefore, whether he is undertaking to raise crops in which there is unlimited competition, or whether soil or other conditions cause the output to be relatively limited. chapter vi size of farm the size of the farm is another of those questions on which there is endless debate and to which no general answer can be given. there are, however, certain rather definite principles which may help in settling an individual problem. the size of the farm is related to the income per acre. if one's ideal or purpose is a gross income of $ , or $ , or $ , a year, he must consider how large a farm will be necessary to bring this return. assume, for the sake of discussion, it is desired to obtain a gross income of $ , . in the eastern united states acres of tillable land devoted to general farming may bring this amount. if the land is especially adapted to potatoes, and this crop takes a prominent place in the rotation, acres might be sufficient to return the income named. likewise a -acre retail milk dairy farm may produce a similar result. forty acres devoted to truck farming or market gardening may be sufficient. there is another way that the size of the farm needed may be estimated. there is a general relation between the gross income and the amount invested. in the gross income of the farms of the united states was per cent of the total investment, which includes land, buildings, tools, and live stock. the average gross income varied for the different types of farming common to the northern united states from to per cent. this represents, of course, a great deal of very poor farming. the income of prosperous farmers must be somewhat better than this. if we assume that by careful methods the gross income is % of the total investment, then an investment of $ , will be required to bring a gross income of $ , . while it is true that the gross income has no necessary relation to net income or profit, yet it is well to remember that a gross income is a necessary antecedent of a net income. the net profit from the production of a bushel of wheat, a dozen of eggs, or a pound of butter is of comparatively small consequence unless a sufficient quantity is produced. a recent investigation by the cornell station appears to show that with the type of farming now existing in tompkins and livingston counties, new york, where the investigation chanced to be made, the larger farms yielded the most profitable returns and that while present conditions exist, the size of farms is likely to increase rather than decrease. the fundamental reason seems to be the substitution of horse-drawn machinery for hand labor. the following table shows the labor income on farms operated by the owners, classified according to size: number average of size labor acres farms (acres) income or less $ to to to to over ---- ---- average $ while the larger the farm, the more prosperous was the operating owner or tenant, the size of the farm did not seem to affect the profit of the landlord. the amount of land one individual may own is unlimited; the size of the farm unit is limited. after a farm unit has reached a certain size, depending upon the type of farming, the general arrangement of the farm and the skill in management, any further increase will increase the cost of operation, and as the increase continues eventually cause a decrease in profits. assuming this to be true, it follows as a mathematical necessity that as the farm increases in size the total profits will increase as the farm increases up to a given point and then the profits will decrease. the following table illustrates this law: size of a b farm net profit net profit net profit net profit acres per acre per farm per acre per farm $ . $ $ . $ . . . . , . . , . . , . . , . . , . . , . . , . . , -- -- . , in both case a and case b it is assumed that the greatest net profit per acre is to be obtained with acres, and that the net profit per acre when the farm is of that size is $ . in case a it is assumed that the net profit would decrease $ for each acres added, while in case b the decrease is assumed to be only one-half as rapid. in the first instance the net profit per farm increases until acres are reached, when the net profit per farm decreases, until at acres no profit would be obtained. in case b the net profit per farm increases until acres are reached. everyone is cautioned not to accept these figures as representing what would actually happen. all that can be said is that as the farm unit increases in size there will come a point at which the net profit per acre will decrease because of the physical difficulty of managing a large area, and, therefore, there is a limit to the size of a single farm. fifteen thousand acres may lay in one tract and be owned by one individual, firm or corporation, but its economic management requires for purely physical reasons, not to mention others, that it be managed in several units more or less distinct from one another. just what the size of this unit will be no one knows and it will vary with the type of farming, the type of farmer and many other circumstances. for example, a very common unit for a tenant cotton farm is between and acres, both the product and the farmer being a limiting factor. perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from a study of this table is that it is wise for some men to operate a farm of acres, others of acres and still others of acres, because each size of farm presents a task suited to different abilities. it would be as futile for one fitted to operate only an -acre farm to attempt to manage acres as it would be unwise for the man capable of conducting acres to confine his attention to acres. unfortunately while this principle is not difficult to perceive and is easily stated, it is practically impossible to make any application of it to an individual case. only time and the inexorable laws of competition will adjust men to their several tasks. it will be of interest to note what influence in actual practice the type of farming has upon the size of the farm. the census reports the average size of all farms in the united states as acres, with the different types as follows: vegetables, acres; fruits, acres; dairy products, acres; hay and grain, acres; and live stock, acres. speaking in a very general way, only about one-half the land on these farms is in cultivated crops, while only % of the income may be from the products which cause the farm to be thus classified. the young farmer will do well to have these figures in mind when he starts out in life, for while they are not to be followed literally, they give him a measuring stick with which to compare his operations. chapter vii selection of farm having some of these preliminary questions settled, or at least well in mind, the young farmer is ready to inspect individual farms with a view to purchasing or renting. he should examine each farm from four general aspects, namely: ( ) the character and topography of the soil, ( ) the climatic conditions, including healthfulness and water supply, ( ) the location, and ( ) the improvements. it may be well at the outset to emphasize the advantage which even a small difference in fertility may bring. suppose one farm is capable of raising fifteen bushels of wheat per acre and another twenty bushels. if wheat is cents a bushel, then the gross income is $ and $ respectively. if it is assumed that it costs in either case for seed, labor and interest on investment $ an acre to raise and harvest the crop, then it will be seen that an increase of five bushels an acre doubles the profit. the comparison is perhaps not quite fair, since it costs slightly more to harvest the larger crop, but it serves to illustrate the point. neither the crop adaptation nor the crop-producing power of the soil can be determined by taking a sample and submitting it to a chemist for analysis. these factors can best be determined by the character of the vegetation, both domestic and wild, and by a knowledge obtained through observation or reading as to what this particular soil type usually does. every type of soil has certain characteristics which under like conditions it may be expected to reproduce, much in the same manner as each species of animal reproduces its characteristics. the first essential is to be able to recognize the different soil types. this can only be done by close observation and study. the second essential is to determine what the crop-producing characteristics of these types of soil are. this knowledge may be obtained by personal observation; but as most persons' opportunities are limited in this direction, it should be supplemented wherever possible by a study of the soil surveys of the united states department of agriculture wherever these are available. when this is not possible samples of soil may be submitted to the bureau of soils of the united states department of agriculture or to the soil division of the state experiment station, together with a suitable description and such knowledge of the history of the land as is obtainable. in this way you may obtain information as to the natural adaptation of the particular type of soil. [illustration: walter s. tomlinson, bryan, ohio, began thirteen years ago with acres, partly rented, to determine whether a farm could be made a satisfying enterprise. as tenant he has paid to himself as landlord $ , each year for rental and $ each year as salary. the rest of the profits have been invested in acres of additional land and in improvements. mr. tomlinson's specialty has been hogs, but he says it does not matter so much about the lines one adopts as the attention that is given them.] [illustration: dr. w. i. chamberlain, hudson, ohio, graduate of western reserve university, former state secretary of agriculture, later college president. farmer and institute lecturer and widely known for his editorial work on farm journals; has been able, amid his other activities, to manage his farm of acres. the net cash income above all expenses from the farm for to was $ , or $ , per year. of this income $ , were obtained from a ten-acre apple orchard.] there will still remain the question of the present condition of the land. for example, the pennsylvania station obtained in a certain season loads of hay from nine acres of land. the same season, from exactly the same soil type, the station obtained eight loads of hay from acres. the condition of the soil was different, which the previous history of the two tracts of land fully explains. it is of the utmost importance, therefore, to distinguish between the natural fertility of the soil and the condition of the soil. a further example will help to illustrate this point. at the rothamsted station a certain type of soil has for over years produced annually about bushels of wheat an acre without fertilizer, while with a complete fertilizer the same type has produced or more bushels. the bushels may be said to represent the natural fertility of the soil, while the additional bushels may be said to represent the condition of the soil due to fertilizers or to other conditions. on the other hand, the natural condition of some other soil type might be only eight bushels, or still another type might be bushels. this principle is of considerable practical importance, especially in the eastern third of the united states. generally speaking, clay and silt soils have a greater natural fertility than sandy soils; limestone soils than those that are deficient in lime. thus soils that naturally grow chestnut trees, indicating a low lime content, have a tendency to deteriorate under exhaustive cropping much more rapidly than limestone soils. more fertilizers and other methods of soil improvement are necessary in the case of chestnut soils than in the case of limestone valley soils. one of the first questions to ask, therefore, concerning an unknown farm in pennsylvania is whether or not chestnut trees grow naturally. it does not follow, however, that chestnut soils are undesirable. much will depend upon the crop or crops it is desired to raise. for example, in some regions they are well adapted to potatoes and peaches. in these cases the cost of the fertilizers necessary to keep the soil in proper condition is small compared with the total return from the crop. the pioneer's best guide as to the value of new land was and is the vegetation growing upon it, and, especially in a wooded country, the native trees. basswood, crab apple, wild plum, black walnut, ash, hickory and hard maple generally indicate a fertile soil. white oak indicates only a moderate soil; bur oak, a somewhat warmer and better drained soil. beech indicates a rather poor soil; a heavy clay, lacking in organic matter. certain species of elms, maples and oaks, as red maple and the spanish swamp oak, indicate wet soils. the occurrence and vigor of certain herbaceous plants are especially indicative of fertility of the soil, as, for example, ragweed, bindweed, certain plants of the sunflower family, such as goldenrod, asters and wild sunflowers. soils adapted to red clover and alfalfa are usually well drained and contain plenty of lime. alsike clover will grow on a soil too wet or containing too little lime for either of the former. soils that produce sorrel and redtop when red clover and timothy are sown need drainage or liming or both. sedges usually indicate a wet soil, although certain species grow on dry, sandy soils. the point of this paragraph, however, is not to give comprehensive advice but to cause the young farmer to observe the conditions and make his own applications, which will vary in different regions and under different circumstances. perhaps the one feature that the young farmer is most likely to overlook in the selection of a farm is the relative proportion of tillable land. one farm of acres, may, on account of stony land, wet land, comparatively unproductive woodland, or because of the arrangement of fences and roadways, contain only eighty acres of tillable land, while another may contain acres. this is one reason why a -acre farm in the central west may be more valuable than a farm of the same size in the northeastern united states. columella says with regard to the selection of land that there are two things chiefly to be considered, the wholesomeness of the air and the fruitfulness of the place, "of which if either the one or the other should be wanting, and notwithstanding anyone should have a mind to dwell there, he must have lost his senses and ought to be conveyed to his kinfolk to take care of him." in selecting a farm do not fail to inquire whether there has been any recent illness, and if so the nature of it, either among the persons living there or the domestic animals kept. aside from healthfulness, climate is a fundamental and controlling factor, both in productiveness and economic farm management. temperature and rainfall affect the number of days that work can be performed upon the land and hence affect materially the economy of labor. it is this fact that prevents the systematic organization of labor so common in manufacturing and transportation. the climate also affects the cost of producing live stock by modifying the food and shelter required. the climate of a region is best studied from the reports of the united states weather bureau rather than from the statements published by interested parties. so far as the production of crops is concerned the distribution of rainfall is more important than the annual amount, as may be shown by comparing the rainfall in such places as columbus, ohio, and lincoln, nebraska. the average temperature during the growing season is, of course, of more importance from the standpoint of crop production than the average annual temperature. maximum and minimum temperatures or the range of temperature must be considered as well as the average temperature. one of the most practical questions to determine is the average date of the last killing frost in the spring and the date of the first killing frost in the autumn; in other words, the length of the growing season. both altitude and topography enter into this problem. in a given locality killing frosts will occur on a still night in the valley before they do on the elevations, because the air as it cools becomes heavier and flows down into the lowest places just as water would do. on the other hand, as the altitude increases the growing season shortens. whenever i am asked a question involving the production of farm crops by a pennsylvania farmer before answering, i ask three questions: ( ) where are you located? ( ) do chestnut trees grow naturally upon your land? ( ) what is your altitude? one factor that is often overlooked by the young farmer needs only to be mentioned to be thoroughly appreciated. it is the amount and character of the water supply. not only is this of the utmost importance from the standpoint of the household, but it is fundamental to the best farm management. thus, if the water supply is limited the amount of live stock kept will be curtailed, and thus the proper utilization of farm products prevented and maintenance of the fertility of the soil made more difficult. the young farmer should recognize that some kinds of farming are more dependent upon the climatic conditions than others and should, therefore, select the location best suited to the type of farming desired or else modify his type of farming to suit the climatic conditions. if one studies critically the types of farming in various parts of the united states, it will be seen that they have already been adjusted in large degree, either consciously or unconsciously, to the climatic conditions. the young farmer should be careful that he does not undertake to butt his head against a stone wall. having found a farm that suits our ideal as to the natural conditions, such as the crop adaptation, fertility, topography and climate, what may be called the artificial conditions must be studied. the location may be studied, both as to local and distant markets and the means of reaching each, which includes roadways and shipping facilities. here again much will depend upon the products which are to be sold. the man who raises tobacco, hogs or beef cattle does not suffer any great economic disadvantage by living ten miles from a shipping station, but a man does who produces milk, peaches, potatoes or hay. in these days there is not much danger that the character of the roadway will be overlooked by the intending purchaser of the farm, although sufficient importance may not be given to the advantage of really good roads, both as to grade and surface. perhaps the one most important question to consider in connection with the transportation facilities is whether products may be shipped without change from the shipping station to the market it is desired to reach. although at first glance we may not like the thought, it must be conceded that neighbors are not only important morally and socially, but they also may have economic advantages and disadvantages. while it may sometimes happen that it will be wise to raise in a given neighborhood some product that no one else has undertaken to supply, yet as a rule, if a given neighborhood is raising jersey, or guernsey or holstein cattle or chester white, berkshire or poland china hogs, or southdown or shropshire or cotswold sheep, it will be wise to raise the breed commonly raised instead of the least commonly raised breed, as it is sometimes supposed. the more potato growers or cabbage growers or celery raisers or orchardists in a locality the better for all concerned, for a number of reasons, among which may be mentioned ( ) the more and the better the products raised the more buyers will seek the region and hence the higher will be the price obtained for the product; ( ) the more of a given product there is to ship the better the shipping facilities for that product are likely to be; ( ) all the necessary supplies for the type of farming can be more readily and cheaply obtained; ( ) there will be a better knowledge of the business when more men have had experience in raising the particular crop. these principles apply in all classes of business; thus we find woolen factories in philadelphia, silk factories at paterson, n. j., cotton factories at lowell, mass., plow factories at moline, ill., and steel mills at pittsburg. many of these centers possessed originally some natural advantages which caused the location of the first factory, but others have been drawn there on account of the principles enunciated. the farmers of a given region have a community of interest as well as railroads. the young farmer should recognize this fact and if necessary should exert himself to develop such interest in his community, both for his own benefit and that of his neighbors. there are two classes of farms for which the purchaser is in danger of paying too much, one on which there are extensive improvements and one on which there are none at all. a farm with just barely enough improvements for the conduct of the type of farming it is proposed to develop can usually be purchased most advantageously. the purchaser should understand clearly that the previous cost of the improvements has no necessary relation to their present value, any more than the value of a second-hand suit of clothes is dependent upon its original cost. all depends on how badly they are worn and how well they are adapted to present conditions. the value of farm improvements is not unlike those in other business enterprises in this respect. their value depends upon present and prospective earning capacity and not on former cost. no rule can be laid down as to the relation which should exist between the value of land itself and the value of the improvements. in practice it varies greatly. in the united states the farm improvements constitute on an average % of the total value of land, being as high as % in massachusetts and as low as % in texas. the young farmer may well consider, therefore, whether he can earn interest on his investment when the improvements cost more than % of the total value of the real estate. certainly when it becomes one-half it is excessive. the man who runs a farm as an avocation usually errs in putting too much money into permanent improvements for the farm to be a paying investment. if it is admitted that the farm unit is limited because of the physical difficulties of managing large areas, then it must at once be seen how important the arrangement of the farmsteading must be to the successful conduct of the farm. in the older farming communities where the present farm holdings are the result of several purchases or sales the shape of the farm, the arrangement of the fields and the place of the farm buildings become an extremely important matter. sometimes satisfactory rearrangements are easily made, at other times they are quite impossible. no attempt will be made to discuss this subject in detail here, but the young farmer should bring to this question all the experience and study possible. when the young farmer goes to inspect a farm it is to be assumed that he will be conducted over the farm by the owner or his authorized agent. it is proper to give respectful attention to everything that is told him, provided he follows carefully the california adage to "believe nothing you hear and only one-half what you see." if a farm consists of or acres of land, it is possible for the agent to convey the purchaser over the farm in such a way as to prevent the least desirable portions being seen. if the farm has attracted the seeker of land, he should not purchase until he has made another visit, preferably some days or weeks after the first one. he may then very properly visit the farm alone, passing over quite a different course from that pursued hitherto. sketches and notes will be found very helpful, and if the use of the soil auger is understood it may be well employed to study the character of both soil and subsoil. during the interval between visits some casual inquiries may be made among those who know the history of the farm in question, because the past history of the farm obtained from unprejudiced witnesses is of prime importance in arriving at a conclusion concerning its value. a farm is much more attractive when a crop is growing upon it than when it is without active vegetation. poor land looks relatively better than good land during or just after a rain. many matters concerning the selection of a farm can only be learned by some years of practical experience. the young farmer will do well, therefore, to secure the help of some more experienced person. if he has among his acquaintances a successful farmer of mature years he will be fortunate if he can secure his advice. chapter viii the farm scheme farming is no pink tea. it is a serious business. after the young farmer has selected the farm he must develop his farm scheme. he must contemplate well and seriously the philosophy which underlies his plans. unless he sees clearly what he is striving to attain and unless he understands the effect of his methods, he must fail in great measure to obtain his goal. satisfactory results in farming cannot be obtained as a general practice if the man is only interested in the results of a single year. for this reason the itinerant tenant system will not be satisfactory unless the landlord has worked out a satisfactory scheme which he requires his tenant to follow. it is not enough that a man shall grow a single large crop, but it is necessary that he should continue to grow a satisfactory crop at least at regular intervals. for example, a piece of land may be adapted to cabbage, celery, potatoes or hay. assume for the moment it is adapted to cabbage and that by one or more seasons of preparation an enormous crop of cabbages may be secured. this fact is of little value unless sufficient quantity is raised and the process can be repeated annually. cabbages cannot be grown again on this particular piece of land for from four to six years on account of club root. if the farmer does not have other areas which he can bring into cabbages year after year, for from three to five years, then he becomes a failure as a cabbage raiser. even a perennial, like alfalfa or asparagus, should form a part of the general scheme of crop production if the most satisfactory results are to be obtained. there are two general questions at the basis of all farm schemes: ( ) how to obtain a fairly uniform succession of cash products year after year, and ( ) how to keep up or improve the fertility of the soil economically while doing so. in other words, how to keep the investment from decreasing while it is earning a satisfactory and fairly uniform income. it is necessary, therefore, to consider what products are to be sold and what are simply subsidiary to the cash products. the cash products may, of course, be soil products or animal products, but more likely they will be both. when animals form a large part of the enterprise the cropping system must be carefully adjusted to meet the needs of these animals. many apparently trivial details must be considered, as for example, whether the cropping system furnishes too little or too much bedding for the live stock. in considering profits the enterprise as a whole must be kept in view. for example, if a man is producing milk, it may be cheaper, so far as the production of milk is concerned, to allow the liquid excrement to run to waste rather than to arrange for sufficient bedding. if, however, by using an abundance of bedding and saving all the high-priced nitrogen and the larger part of the potash in the manure, he is able to raise twelve tons of silage in place of eight tons, or three tons of hay in place of two tons, his enterprise as a whole will be more profitable when he uses the extra amount of bedding, although so far as the production of a quart of milk is concerned the cost is increased. it may be that by feeding corn to cattle or sheep one will obtain only cents a bushel for his maize, while his neighbor is selling it to the elevator at cents. if, however, the man who feeds his maize year after year thereby raises bushels instead of bushels, his enterprise, as a whole, may be more profitable than that of his neighbor. as a matter of fact, the pennsylvania experiment station has substantially these two conditions in certain of its fertilizer plats. when for years the conditions have been similar to those where crops are sold from the farm, the yields have been: maize, bushels; oats, bushels; wheat, bushels; and hay, , pounds per acre. but when conditions exist which represent the feeding of corn, oats and hay and the return of manure to the soil, the yields have been: maize, bushels; oats, bushels; wheat, bushels; and hay , pounds per acre. in the first instance the value of the products has been $ . an acre, while in the other case it has been $ . an acre. having worked out a cropping system that gives the proper yearly production of several crops desired, the next question to decide is how this cropping system and the disposition of the crops is going to affect the fertility of the soil. from a financial or economic point of view the most important soil element is nitrogen. first, because it costs from to cents a pound, while phosphoric acid can be purchased at five cents, potash at four cents; and, second, because of the readiness with which nitrogen may disappear from the soil under improper management, either through nitrification and leaching or by denitrification and passing back into the air. assuming a given type of management, the question is, how much of the required nitrogen will be obtained from the legumes in the cropping system, how much from the manure, and how much must be purchased in commercial fertilizers? no satisfactory cropping system can be devised at the present prices of farm products and cost of fertilizers for the production of the ordinary cereals and hay that does not include the production of some legume. assuming a legume in the cropping scheme, the fertility of the soil may be maintained by yard manure alone or by commercial fertilizers alone. illustrations of both methods are to be found in actual practice. generally speaking, however, the use of yard manure supplemented with commercial fertilizers will be found more scientific and in the end the most economical. a factor entering into this problem will be the amount of purchased feed. if considerable amounts of purchased feeds are used and the resulting manure carefully preserved and judiciously applied, the commercial fertilizers required will be reduced to the minimum. a concrete illustration may bring out the philosophy underlying farm schemes better than abstract problems. the following outline shows a five-course rotation with the method of fertilization which the results of the pennsylvania station indicated would be advisable, at least on limestone soils in eastern united states. . maize yard manure, tons per acre. . oats nothing. . wheat acid phosphate, lbs. muriate of potash, lbs. . clover and timothy nothing. . timothy nitrate of soda, lbs. acid phosphate, lbs. muriate of potash, lbs. this rotation is suggested for the purpose of maintaining a farm that is already in a fairly fertile condition and one on which there is no considerable amount of purchased feed. where concentrates are purchased liberally, yard manure should be available to use on the timothy and meadow in place of the commercial fertilizers. where there is plenty of manure and it is desired to increase the amount of maize and hay and reduce the amount of oats and wheat, the following rotation and method of fertilization would be indicated: . maize acid phosphate, lbs. . maize yard manure, tons. . oats nothing. . wheat acid phosphate, lbs. muriate of potash, lbs. . clover and timothy nothing. . timothy nitrate of soda, lbs. acid phosphate, lbs. muriate of potash, lbs. . timothy yard manure, tons. where there is plenty of yard manure, it would be also applied to maize under no. , or the yard manure could be applied to maize under no. , and commercial fertilizer applied to timothy under no. could be repeated under no. . if the land is more or less depleted, an application of pounds of acid phosphate to the oats would be advisable. however, the purpose is not to prescribe exact methods, but to point out underlying principles and their possible application. as further illustration, it seems probable that the practice of a market gardener in using excessive amounts of stable manure might, in some instances at least, be modified to good advantage by reducing the amount of manure and increasing the amount of commercial fertilizer used. unfortunately there is no experimental evidence bearing upon this question. potash required to maintain fertility is largely to be found in the coarse fodder, such as hay, maize stover and silage, and in the straw used for bedding; hence where these substances are used in abundance and returned to the soil the amount of potash required to be supplied in fertilizers is reduced to a minimum. where, however, the amount of live stock is limited and the products sold contain large quantities of potash, such as hay and straw, the supply furnished in fertilizers must be liberal. phosphoric acid is always being slowly depleted from the soil either from the sale of farm crops or animal products. there is no way of returning this loss completely, except from the addition of a commercial fertilizer. the above fertilizer suggestions are based on the experiments covering a period of more than years on a limestone soil. soils may modify materially the amount and application of the fertilizers, but not the principles enunciated. for example, a soil on which common red clover grows luxuriantly and has a prominent place in the farm scheme will require less nitrogen in commercial fertilizers in order to maintain the fertility than where legumes are raised with difficulty or do not form a part of the farm scheme. one of the most important points to be emphasized is the fact that haphazard fertilization is not effective in maintaining soil fertility. if one starts out to establish a five-course rotation and build up his soil through a rational system of fertilization, he will obviously not obtain the full benefit of the rotation until he begins to get crops from the second round, which will be the sixth year from the beginning. it may happen, and unfortunately it has perhaps usually happened in the past, that during the first rotation the increase in crops has not paid for the cost of the fertilizers applied. in many instances a rational system of fertilization has not been introduced because the owner of the land could not afford to wait six years for his return. profit in farming, therefore, does not consist in raising one big crop or even in obtaining a large balance on the right side of the ledger in a single year. it is both interesting and valuable to know that five tons of timothy hay, bushels of wheat, bushels of maize and tons of cabbage may be raised on an acre, but the real profit in farming only comes through a lifetime of effort. to the man of capacity who prepares for his work the results will surely come, but they will not come all at once and, as in every other business, he must pay the price in hard work and close application to details. in this connection it may be emphasized that one of the difficulties in successful farming is to find one man both interested and capable along the various lines essential to a successful farm enterprise. the danger is that a man will ride his hobby to the detriment of the other activities of the farm. a farmer friend of the writer, who keeps a horse and buggy, cares so little for a horse that for several years he has walked two miles each morning and each evening rather than to take the trouble to hitch up his horse. if one visits a high-grade breeder of dairy cattle, he is very apt to find his pigs of ordinary character. on the other hand, a specialist in hogs is likely to keep scrub cows. a man may be an excellent wheat raiser and a poor potato grower, and the reverse. the breeder of live stock is likely to be lacking in his methods of producing farm crops, while the up-to-date, so-called general farmer is not likely to be a special lover of live stock. in like manner, the man may be a successful farmer, dairyman or horticulturist from the producing side, but be a poor salesman. in fact, those qualities of mind and heart which make for the best success from the standpoint of production, whether soil products or animal products, is not that which makes the best trader. it is not expected that the young farmer will be materially different from his hundreds of thousands of predecessors, but the better a man is trained and the more fully he studies his own adaptabilities and deficiencies, the more likely he is to succeed in the open country. for this reason, the young man should be careful to get as broad a training as possible. it is, therefore, often more important for him to study those things which he dislikes than to study the things for which he has a natural taste. there was a man in our town and he was wondrous wise. he knew that if he wanted crops he'd have to fertilize. "its nitrogen that makes things green," said this man of active brain; "and potash makes the good strong straw, and phosphate plumps the grain. but it's clearly wrong to waste plant food on a wet and soggy field; i'll surely have to put in drains if i'd increase the yield. "and after i have drained the land i must plow it deep all over; and even then i'll not succeed unless it will grow clover. now, acid soils will not produce a clover sod that's prime; so if i have a sour soil, i'll have to put on lime. "and after doing all these things, to make success more sure, i'll try my very best to keep from wasting the manure. so i'll drain, and lime, and cultivate, with all that that implies; and when i've done that thoroughly i'll manure and fertilize." _vivian_ chapter ix the rotation of crops the two essential reasons for a rotation of crops are: ( ) the possibility of obtaining for the soil a supply of nitrogen from the air by introducing a legume at regular intervals, and ( ) the prevention of injury to the crops from fungous diseases, insect enemies, weeds or other causes. other reasons are often advanced, some of which are entirely erroneous, while others are of quite secondary importance. the rotation should be carefully studied with reference to the farm scheme as previously outlined. reasons for modifying the rotations are: ( ) to change the kind or proportion of crops grown, ( ) to change the amount of labor required, or ( ) to increase the crop-producing power of the soil. during years the four crops of maize, oats, wheat, timothy and clover hay have been taken in rotation from the four tiers of plats at the pennsylvania state college, so that the influence of the soil has been entirely eliminated. at the december farm prices for the decade ending december , , the value of these four crops per acre have been: maize, $ . ; oats, $ . ; wheat, $ . ; and hay, $ . . it will be noted that during years the average income from an acre of maize has been almost exactly twice that from an acre of oats. the region where these results were obtained is relatively unfavorable to a large yield of maize. it is obvious, therefore, that a modification in the rotation may modify the average income from the farm materially, provided such modification does not reduce the fertility of the soil. thus, while the average income per acre during years for the four-course rotation above mentioned was $ . , if the rotation were increased to a five-course rotation by the addition of another year of maize, the average income would be $ . an acre. it may be desirable to modify the rotation in order to increase or decrease a certain crop usually fed upon the farm. thus, with a four-course rotation of maize, oats, wheat, clover and timothy, one-fourth the area would produce hay; while with a six-course rotation, composed of maize, oats, wheat, each one year, and hay three years, one-half the area would produce hay. if it is desired to still further reduce the area in oats and wheat, a seven-course rotation could be arranged with maize, two years in succession. this is the rotation that would be desirable for a dairy farm where it is planned to keep as many cows as practicable and to buy the concentrates largely. either the wheat or the oats could be taken out of this rotation if either the one or the other were thought undesirable and a still greater amount of roughage desired. on the other hand, there are places where the minimum amount of roughage is wanted. there are certain sections of the central west where it is possible to sow oats on corn stubble without plowing and where occasionally a rotation is practiced of maize, oats and mammoth clover. the clover is plowed for maize, the oats are disked in upon the corn stubble and the next year the clover is pastured until about june , when it is allowed to go to seed. in this rotation the only roughage obtained is the corn stover and the oat straw. another result reached by this rotation is that only one-third the land is plowed annually. in the four-course rotation mentioned above three-fourths of the land must be plowed, while in the six-course rotation one-half is plowed each year. in other ways the character of the rotation modifies the labor. for example, the labor and cost of harvesting an acre of hay is much less than that of producing, harvesting and threshing an acre of wheat. rotations may often be planned with reference to the main or cash crop. thus in the aroostook (maine) potato district the rotation is potatoes, oats and clover. the chief purpose of the oats and clover is to keep down the blight in potatoes and add through the clover nitrogen and organic matter to the soil. a system of cropping that is best when the owner operates the farm may not be desirable when the farmer is a tenant. when a farm is rented, the lease should provide that clover or other legumes occur with sufficient frequency to keep up the supply of nitrogen without the purchase of a considerable quantity in chemical fertilizers. the lease should be so drawn as to make it necessary for the tenant to keep live stock in order to realize the largest profit. the landlord should provide an equitable proportion of the mineral fertilizers when such are required. the provisions of the lease and the character of the rotation will necessarily vary with circumstances, but the following system of tenant farming which has been employed for many years in maryland will illustrate the principles just stated: the lease provides for a five-course rotation consisting of maize, wheat, clover, wheat, clover. the landlord and the tenant share the maize and wheat equally, but the clover for hay or pasture goes entirely to the tenant, unless hay is sold, when it is divided equally. they each provide one-half the commercial fertilizer and one-half the seed, except clover seed, which the tenant is required to furnish. this lease provides for two clover crops out of every five crops raised, thus supplying nitrogen abundantly, and the terms of the lease are such that it is necessary for the tenant to keep live stock to consume these clover crops in order to secure the most profitable returns. the feeding of the clover makes it necessary to feed some or all the maize and may lead to buying additional concentrates. stable manure is thereby supplied for the field which is to raise maize, while mineral fertilizers may be applied to the fields sown to wheat. on the limestone soils of the eastern states pounds each of phosphoric acid and potash per acre applied to the wheat, and loads of stable manure per acre to the maize will probably be found sufficient to maintain the crop producing power of the soil. in laying out a farm for a rotation it is desirable to plan the number of fields or tracts that will go in a rotation and try to get these as nearly equal size as possible. having decided upon the number of years the rotation is to run and having adjusted the fields or tracts accordingly, it is quite possible to modify the proportion of crops by adding one crop and dropping another at the same time. thus, if there are six -acre fields, any one of the following rotations might be used and the change from one to another easily made: . maize maize maize maize maize . oats maize maize maize barley . wheat oats oats wheat alfalfa . clover and wheat clover and clover and alfalfa timothy timothy timothy . timothy clover and timothy timothy alfalfa timothy . timothy timothy timothy timothy alfalfa during the first year the -acre field could be divided into four tracts of five acres each, containing potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes and sweet corn, and then followed for four or five years by any succession of crops above outlined. the point is that a definite adjustment of the farm to some general method of rotation and a definite system of fertilization and soil renovation do not prevent a considerable latitude in the crops raised. it will be obvious that the longer the rotation the more flexible it becomes in this particular, which is a point to be considered in laying out the farm and in adjusting fields and fences. in some cases it may be desirable on account of the arrangement of the farm or the character of the crops to be raised to have two distinct rotations of crops. for example, if the farm lends itself to be divided into eight tracts, a five-course rotation of maize, oats, wheat, each one year, and clover and timothy two years, and a three-course rotation of potatoes, oats or wheat and clover may be arranged. chapter x the equipment the workman is known by his tools. the problem of obtaining the most efficient machinery for the conduct of the farm without having an excessive amount is not easy of solution. it is probable that the cost of maintaining machinery and tools is not less than %, % for upkeep and % for interest, even under the most careful management. doubtless in practice it is as much as %. if this is conceded there must be a limit to the amount which may be economically invested in equipment. this is a place where the lead pencil may be used profitably. for example, if $ is invested in a self-binder, the annual cost of the machine at % will be $ . . if one has but acres of grain to harvest, it may be better to hire a self-binder at $ an acre. on the other hand, it may be necessary to own a self-binder in order to get the grain harvested at the proper time. among the machines requiring a considerable investment for the number of days used may be mentioned hay loaders, hay tedders, corn-binding harvesters and lime spreaders. there is a certain class of labor-saving devices, however, for which there is more or less constant need, as, for example, means of pumping water, methods of handling manure, both from the stable to the manure shed, and from the manure shed to the field. this leads to the remark that there is at present great need of modifying our traditional ideas concerning farm barns. why do persons usually sleep on the second floor, while horses and cattle are placed in the basement? three things have brought about the need of a radical revision of our practices concerning the planning of barns: ( ) our present knowledge of the difference in the function of food in keeping the animal warm, and that of producing work, flesh or milk; ( ) the discovery of the bacillus of tuberculosis; and ( ) the invention of the hay carrier. it is not the purpose here to discuss barn buildings, but merely to call attention to the fact that the traditional barn has long since outlived its usefulness, and that the young farmer should plan his farm buildings to serve the purposes required in the light of modern knowledge. various attempts have been made to manufacture combined machines; that is, a machine which, by an interchange of parts or other modification, may be used for two or more purposes, as, for example, harvesting small grain and cutting grass. such attempts have usually been unsuccessful. on the other hand, the young farmer should consider the range of usefulness of any given type of machine or tool; thus, a disk harrow is more efficient for some purposes than a spring-tooth harrow. for other purposes the spike-tooth harrow is better than the spring tooth. the spring-tooth harrow, however, will do fairly well wherever the disk harrow or the spike-tooth harrow is needed. when, therefore, only one of these tools can be afforded, the spring tooth may be a better tool to buy than either the disk or the spike-tooth, although it is not for certain purposes as efficient as either of the others. the kind of machine should obviously be adjusted to the conditions, as, for example, the size of the farm, and the character of the farming. riding plows may be desirable on level land, but where it is necessary to plow up and down hill, walking plows should be used. the extra weight of the wheel plow is not a serious matter on level land, because the sliding friction has been transferred to rolling friction, but no mechanical device has been or can be invented which will decrease the power necessary to raise a given weight a given height. the various machines requiring horse power should be adjusted, as far as possible, to require the same number of horses. if the main unit is three horses, then, as far as possible, all machines should require three horses, such as plows, harrows, manure spreaders, harvesters, etc. if the activities of the farm are sufficient to require six horses then some of the tools may require three horses each, while others require a pair. [illustration: mr. r. h. garrahan, kingston, pa., is one of the most successful growers of celery in the united states. after graduating from the wyoming seminary he spent one year studying horticulture at the pennsylvania state college. for several years he was assistant in horticulture at the university of tennessee. he now has at kingston acres under intensive cultivation. his principal crops are celery, asparagus, cabbage, tomatoes and onions.] [illustration: h. h. richardson, brooklyn heights, ohio, agricultural graduate, ohio state university, . fourteen years ago inherited acres of land and an indebtedness of $ , . he has raised a family of four children, has what is seen in the picture plus the land and $ , invested elsewhere. mr. richardson has held some local public office continuously during the past ten years, being at present member of school and water boards, member of advisory board of bank, secretary of cleveland fruit and vegetable growers' association and ohio vice-president of the national vegetable growers' association.] a farm with six work horses is rather a desirable one from several aspects. among other things, it enables the farm owner to employ two men who can perform most of the team work with two three-horse teams, while at other times three pairs of horses may be arranged when the owner needs to use a team. this leaves the farmer time to attend to many activities not requiring horses, and time to plan the work and to look with more care after the purchases and sales. the size of such a farm will depend entirely on the nature of the activities. if it is a so-called general farm with a minimum of live stock, it would, perhaps, consist of from to acres of tillable land with some additional pasture and woodland. ideally, every farm should have sufficient activity to make it something of a center. it should be an organism. it is difficult to organize one man. it will be useful, when we come to discuss how profits may be estimated, to divide the capital into three general groups: ( ) the plant, which in addition to the real estate, will include the machines and tools, horses used for labor, and other animals used for breeding purposes or for the production of animal products, such as butter, wool or eggs; ( ) materials, which will include animals which are to be fattened for sale, and all seeds, fertilizers and foods intended to be turned into products to be sold; ( ) supplies, which may include foods for teams, and money with which to pay labor, be this labor that of the farmer or his employees. the purpose of this classification is to bring sharply into view the fact that the nature of different kinds of equipment varies. all the things named under the plant are in the nature of an annual charge against income. the charge under materials may or may not be an annual charge. if a man invests $ , in head of cattle, which he intends to feed and sell for $ , at the end of one hundred days, he does not have to calculate interest on $ , for a year, but only for days. cattle paper is held in large quantities by banks in the cattle feeding districts of the united states. the farmer would, in fact, be unwise to keep $ , in the bank nine months in the year in order to use it three months. like any other business man, if he has the money, he invests it and borrows the money to buy his cattle. the same thing applies to food and fertilizers. if the food is fed to cattle, some of the money invested in the food must pay interest during the fattening period. food fed to dairy cattle and chickens may be paid for out of each day's income. in practice, the amount of money invested in food for dairy cattle and chickens is dependent only upon the most economical unit of purchase. one may apply fertilizers to buckwheat, give a three months' note for the fertilizer, and pay the note out of the proceeds of the crop. if the fertilizer is applied to one-year-old apple trees, this investment may be required to pay interest for fifteen years. the same principle applies to supplies. if one starts into raising horses for sale, he needs to have some money or other income on which his laborers and his own family can live, say for five years, this being the age at which a horse is supposed to become salable. more people would raise apples and horses if they could afford to wait for the return on the investment. while this is a serious handicap, it is an advantage to the man who arranges his farming methods so that he can secure an income from some other source in the interim. the young farmer will do wisely to so arrange his farm methods that a portion, perhaps the major portion of his farm, will give him quick returns while making some long-time investments, which later in life will give him a greater return because so few people are sufficiently forehanded to make them. chapter xi how to estimate profits no man who engages in manufacturing or merchandising knows how much he is going to make annually during life. much less does he know how much he will be worth when he dies. neither does the man who works for a salary or practices some profession for fees know what his annual income will be even during the following decade. neither one nor the other knows whether he will die a millionaire or a pauper. it is a problem too complex for any human mind to analyze. it is less certain than what the weather will be on this day next year, because it is the resultant of more variable factors. in some respects there is more hazard in farming than in manufacturing or in merchandising, while in other respects there is much less. the profit which may be obtained from farming is neither easier nor more difficult to estimate than is that of other commercial enterprises. however, there is no business in which more foolish estimates are made as to the probable profits, except, perhaps, in mining. the purpose of this chapter is not to give advice as to possible or probable profits, but rather to point out the general character of the data required for any individual problem, where the data may be obtained and how it may be applied. there are two forms or methods of stating the financial gain that has been obtained from farming or other business ventures during a year or other specific period. the first may be called the interest on the investment method, and the second the labor income method. with the interest on the investment method, all expenses may be subtracted from all the sales. from the cash balance thus obtained the increase or decrease in inventory may be added or subtracted. this balance may then be divided by the capital invested, to determine the rate of interest received. the rate of interest method is the usual method in the commercial world. the prosperity of the railroad or industrial concern is judged by the rate of interest it pays its stockholders on the par value of the stock. the stock itself takes on the capitalization in accordance with the present and prospective dividends. the fact that this method is generally used in the commercial world is evidence that it is well suited to its needs. the young farmer who wishes to know whether the operation of a given tract of land in a certain manner offers him a worthy opportunity will not find the interest on the investment method the best suited for his purpose. this is especially true when applied to a single product. for example, it may be shown that hens will, when properly managed, in connection with other farm enterprises, return a remarkable interest on the capital employed. it does not follow, however, that a man can make a living with fifty hens or even hens. if a man has an investment of $ , , on which he obtains per cent, his income would be $ . if, on the other hand, he has an investment of $ , and obtains a return of only %, his income is $ , , or three times the former amount. in neither case, however, does this form of statement tell a man how much of his income is due to his brain and brawn and how much to the capital invested. what the young farmer wishes to know is how much will he receive for his own time, energy and skill, after deducting all expenses and a reasonable interest charge on his investment--such a rate of interest as he could get by placing his money in good securities or what he would be required to pay for his capital if he borrowed it. this is best obtained by the labor income method. with this method all expenses are subtracted from all sales and to the cash balance thus obtained is added or subtracted the increase or decrease in the inventory. this balance may be called the farm income. thus far the procedure is just the same as the interest on the investment method. from the farm income is now subtracted a reasonable interest on the investment, the balance remaining is called the labor income. this is the return which the farmer has obtained by and for his own efforts. if this balance is zero, then he should change his methods or get into some other business. this statement of his income, whatever it may be, enables him to compare his prosperity with that of the man who is employed upon a salary. here, again, however, it is difficult to make comparisons because of the differences in expenses of living. the chief difference, however, in the expense of the wage earner in the city and the farmer is in the matter of house rent. for example, if the wage earner pays $ a year house rent that must be deducted from his income in comparing it with the labor income of the farmer. it is often stated that the farmer also has his living from the farm. this was much more true formerly than it is at present. under present methods of distributing food products and with modern types of farming, the amount of food supplied the table from the farm is comparatively small. the rancher in montana eats foods canned in maine or delaware, while the new hampshire farmer buys his vegetables from boston commission merchants. the minnesota farmer cannot supply his breakfast table with oranges, grapefruit or oatmeal. many of them buy, if not their bread, at least their flour, and also their butter. the fact that the city man indulges in high living is no argument in favor of the country man expecting less wages. some of those things which are necessary to make the country an ideal place to live are expensive. some of them are more expensive to obtain in the country than in the city, as, for example, educational facilities. in justifying his purchase of an automobile, a young farmer recently stated that his wife had certain cares, responsibilities and even privations which her city friends did not have. he thought that the automobile would help to offset them. to my mind there is no more ideal place to live and rear a family than in the open country when the conditions are what they should be and may be. i believe, however, it is well to insist that it costs something to live in the country as well as in the city if one lives as well as every farmer has a right to expect to live. let us now consider the steps necessary in order to arrive at a fair estimate of the labor income. to make the matter concrete, we will assume a farm of acres worth $ an acre located in central pennsylvania on a limestone clay loam soil over , feet above sea level. this farm is to contain acres of timber, a -acre apple orchard two years old, acres of pasture, acres of cultivated land divided into six -acre fields. the rest of the acres consists of small yards, roadways and waste land. one-half of each of the six -acre fields is to consist of a rotation of maize, oats and wheat, each one year, and hay three years, the latter clover and timothy followed by timothy. the other half is to consist of maize, barley, followed by alfalfa four years. in the young orchard there will be grown for a few years potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages and garden peas. after the orchard attains a size which forbids these intertilled crops, a portion of the pasture may be broken up so that these market garden crops may be raised. there will be kept six horses, milch cows, ewes of some mutton breed of sheep, five brood sows and hens. first of all, let attention be called to the broad knowledge of farming required to operate this moderate-sized and comparatively simple farm. the crops to be raised are maize, oats, wheat, clover, alfalfa, timothy, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, garden peas and apples. the animal products sold will be chiefly butter fat, wool, mutton, veal, pork and eggs. this is neither a long nor complex list of products. they are all adapted to the farm which the writer has in mind. yet the man who operates this farm to the highest success will need to have a knowledge of agronomy, or the raising of field crops, of horticulture, animal husbandry, including poultry husbandry and dairying. he needs to have a good understanding of the principles of agricultural chemistry, to have a knowledge of how to prevent and combat fungous diseases and insect enemies. to get the most out of his timber land he should know at least some of the first principles of forestry, and if he has gained some instruction in the study of landscape gardening, his home will be more attractive, and his farm a source of greater pleasure to him. to proceed with the estimate, the first thing to be done is to make a record of the cropping system, giving the areas and the estimated production of each crop. how is the yield per acre to be determined? clearly, one cannot afford to estimate his profits on the basis of some unusual yields. if one could be assured of bushels of wheat, bushels of oats, five tons of hay, bushels of potatoes, or bushels of apples per acre, or pounds of butter fat per cow, or eggs per hen per year, there would be no difficulty about obtaining a snug labor income. such results are possible and are appropriate ideals for which to strive, but are not safe as estimates on which to do business. the year books of the united states department of agriculture contain the annual estimate of the yields, and the average december farm price of staple crops by states. these figures may serve as a basis for making estimates. if the natural conditions are about the average stated, one may properly assume that he can obtain an increase of %. he may even hope to double the yield, although it is not safe to assume such an increase in making an estimate of profits. if the natural conditions are more favorable or less favorable than the average, he must take the fact into consideration in his estimates. in the same way he may consider whether the average december farm price represents fairly his expectation of the price, or whether because of favorable location or superior quality of the article purchased he can expect higher remuneration. it is here assumed that the young farmer is himself going to be more than an average farmer. if he is not he will only get average results, in which case his labor income will be only that of the ordinary day laborer. to repeat the idea in concrete terms. if the young farmer is located in central pennsylvania and finds that the average yield of wheat for the state is bushels an acre, he may safely estimate that his improved methods will bring him bushels of wheat to the acre. he may even hope for bushels per acre. at the pennsylvania station several varieties of wheat have, during the past years, averaged over bushels per acre. one year one variety produced bushels. it would not be safe, however, to use such figures in estimating profits. having outlined the cropping system and made a careful estimate of the total annual production of each crop, the next step is to determine the amount of food and bedding required for the live stock. from this data it may be determined what products will be available for sale, and what foodstuffs must be bought. thus, it may be found, for example, that the amount of oats raised just meets the requirement, while more maize must be purchased, together with nitrogenous concentrates, and that a portion of the hay is available for sale. in the farm under consideration there will, of course, be wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, garden peas and the animal products previously mentioned for sale, and later there will be apples and some lumber from the wood lot. the data are now at hand by which to estimate the total receipts. having made the estimates of receipts, the expenses are estimated, and the difference gives the cash balance, if there is any. the most important items of expense will be labor, feed, seeds, fertilizers, harvesting and threshing expenses, spraying material, shipping packages, blacksmithing and repairs. after all expenses that can be thought of are included not less than % should be added for incidental expenses. the amount of commercial or natural fertilizers to be purchased is, of course, related to the yard manure which will be produced on the farm; therefore some estimate of the probable amount is desirable. in a roughly empirical way the amount of manure produced may be estimated at twice the amount of dry food and bedding used, provided it is hauled daily to the field. where stored and drawn to the field at stated periods, the shrinkage in weight, although not necessarily in plant food, may be as much as one-half. the estimate of what the inventory should be at the beginning and end of the year is not so simple a matter as it may at first seem to be. the purpose of taking the inventory is twofold: first, to determine whether the inventory has increased or decreased, and second, to determine on what amount of capital interest is to be calculated. for example, one must carry forward each year seed for the next year's crop. feed must be carried over to feed live stock until other food becomes available, and there must be money on hand with which to pay for labor unless there is a cash income from the sale of products sufficient to care for the labor bills. in the case of the farm under consideration there is a young orchard of about one thousand trees. this orchard is not bringing in any income, but there is a constant expenditure of money on it, and a constant increase in its value. while, therefore, it decreases the cash income it increases the farm income and the labor income. on the other hand, it increases the interest charges because the plant or farm is increasing in value. how much will it increase in value? in some sections it is customary to consider that an orchard increases in value $ per tree per year. if this is a correct estimate, this , -tree orchard will increase the value of the farm $ , a year until it comes into full bearing. the farm under consideration was purchased two years ago for $ , . on the assumption just stated, at the end of years from date of purchase this farm should be worth $ , , at least $ , of which will be due to a -acre orchard. this is at the rate of $ an acre for the orchard itself. in order to bring out some of the phases of the inventory more clearly the following classification of items is given below: inventory a. plant. the real estate, acres at $ per acre. the live stock. work horses and breeding stock. machinery. b. materials. seeds, potatoes, oats, maize, wheat. feed, hay for cattle and sheep, silage for cows, maize for pigs. growing wheat, acres at $ per acre. live stock, calves, lambs and pigs. c. supplies. hay and oats for horses. money for current expenses. in estimating the inventory at the end of the year, a deduction should be made for the decrease in the value of the live stock under the plant and also for the machinery. perhaps % for the live stock and % for the machinery and tools will be a fair deduction. under materials and supplies those items have been inventoried which are to be carried over each year from the preceding year. in the case of seeds the amount required must be deducted from the amount sold, or they must appear as a charge in the expense account. ordinarily they are carried over from year to year and thus become a part of the permanent investment. since on the farm under consideration there is a considerable monthly income from the sale of butter fat and eggs, it may be possible that no allowance will be needed in the inventory for current expenses, although it is always desirable to carry a bank account in order to be able to make favorable purchases when opportunity offers. as a part of the work in a course in farm management, the writer asked each student to secure the financial history of an actual farm covering a period of three years. the financial history of farms during the years to , inclusive, and farms during the years - , inclusive, was thus obtained and is given herewith. summary of financial history of farms average size of farm, acres . average area in crops (includes pasture), acres . capital at end of three-year period $ , $ , capital at beginning three-year period , , ------- ------ difference $ , $ , interest on capital, $ , , at per cent[b] $ $ increase in capital per annum average yearly receipts , , average yearly disbursements , , average yearly cash balance , average yearly farm income , , average yearly labor income , these figures show the application of principles enunciated in this chapter. a careful reader will have no difficulty in recognizing how the different items have been obtained. for example, the difference between the receipts and disbursements in the first column gives the cash balance of $ , . the farm income, $ , , is obtained by adding to the cash balance $ , which is the annual increase in the capital. the labor income is obtained by subtracting from the farm income the interest on the capital at five per cent. the amount of capital is determined by dividing by two the sum of the inventories at the beginning and end of the period.[c] it will be noted that the gross receipts, the expenses, the farm income and the labor income on these actual farms are all more closely related to the capital invested than the size of the farm. thus, on the farms with a capitalization of about $ , , the average yearly receipts were about $ an acre, while on the farms with a capitalization of about $ , , the average yearly receipts were about $ an acre. likewise on the high-priced farms the labor income was approximately $ an acre, while on the lower priced ones it was about $ . ----- [b] obtained by dividing by two the sum of capital at beginning and end of three-year period. [c] for further details see hunt, "how to choose a farm," chaps. x and xi. chapter xii grain and hay farming an important and primary factor in the production of all wealth is labor. aside from the professional and domestic classes, the people of the world devote themselves to three forms of work: ( ) changes in substance, or natural products; ( ) changes in form, or mechanical products; ( ) changes in place, or exchange of products. the second of these forms of work gives rise to manufacturing; the third, to trade and commerce. under the first sub-division two classes of natural products may be recognized; first, what, for want of a better name, may be called chemical products, such as ores, coal and salt, from which are derived mining and the metallurgical arts; and second, vital products, or, in other words, vegetation and animals. it is work applied to the production of vegetation and animals that gives rise to agriculture. agriculture is labor applied to the production of living things. kinds of agriculture the industries which deal with the production of living things may be divided, theoretically, largely on the basis of the character of the results, but to some extent upon the nature of the activities involved. { grain farming--cereals and } { grasses. } { } agriculture { plantations--cotton, sugar, } { tobacco, coffee. } plant production { (soil culture) { truck farming, market } { gardening--vegetables. } { } horticulture { fruit growing--fruits. } { } { forestry--trees, shrubs. } { stock raising--work, meat, fats, hides. { stock feeding--meat, fats. { stock breeding--animals. animal production { dairy farming--milk, butter and cheese. (an. husbandry) { sheep husbandry--wool raising. { poultry raising--eggs. { beekeeping--honey. mixed husbandry the manner in which this theoretical classification has worked out in actual practice will be indicated in some measure by the inquiries of the united states census bureau. the twelfth census has classified farms on the basis of their principal income. if % or more of the gross income of the farm was from dairy products, it was called a dairy farm; if from live stock, a live stock farm; if from cotton, a cotton farm. if no product constituted % of the gross receipts, the farm was classified as a miscellaneous or general farm. in there were , , farms in the united states, which were, according to the rule just stated, classified as follows: farms classified according to principal source of income gross average income total area, size per kind of farm. acres. number. acres. farm. hay and grain , , , , $ vegetables , , , fruits , , , live stock , , , , dairy produce , , , tobacco , , , cotton , , , , rice , , , , sugar , , , , flowers and plants , , , nursery products , , , miscellaneous , , , , ----------- --------- --- ----- total , , , , $ including miscellaneous or general farms, there are just a dozen kinds of farms mentioned. of this number, nine kinds obtained at least % of their products, and probably much more, from vegetable rather than from animal forms. however, live stock and dairy farms constitute about one-third of the total number of farms, and almost one-half the farm acreage. there are four kinds of farms on which the production of grain and hay forms an important part of their activities; namely, the hay and grain farm, the live stock farm, the dairy farm, and general farm. these constitute, in the aggregate, % of the farms of the united states, and by virtue of their larger area, they occupy % of the total farm area. grain and hay statistics at the close of the nineteenth century less than one-half the area of the united states was owned in farms. only one-half of this farm area was considered to be under cultivation. the total area in cereals was one-tenth the total land area, while % was devoted to hay and % to all other crops except pasture. without going into details, it may be stated with reasonable assurance that: ( ) during the last half of the last century, the production of cereals has increased much faster than the population. for example, in , there were raised in the united states one ton of cereal grains per capita; by this amount had increased to one and one-half tons for each inhabitant. ( ) since the number of persons engaged in agriculture has decreased in proportion to population, the quantity of cereals produced in proportion to persons engaged in agriculture has increased in still greater ratio. so far, therefore, as the amount of cereals is concerned, the farmer has been getting an increasingly larger return for his labor. ( ) the quantity of cereals has increased in proportion to the arable land. this may be due to one or more of three causes: (a) greater average yield per acre; (b) greater proportion of cereals to other crops; or (c) to a change in the ratio of the different cereal crops. the following table, giving the average yield of grain, reduced to pounds per acre, shows not only how the substitution of one cereal for another might affect the total production of cereal grains, but also suggests to the young farmer how he may modify the total product of his farm: yield lb. lb. in bu. per bu. per acre maize . barley . rye . oats . wheat . rice paddy buckwheat . yields will vary relatively in different regions and with different types of soil, and should be studied with reference to one's conditions. ( ) the wheat and oat crops have increased about six and one-half times in years, the hay crop five and one-half times, while maize has increased four and one-half times. cotton, the only other great staple crop, has increased four times in the same period. the oat crop has increased the most rapidly of any since . it is interesting, and may be significant, to note that, while the production of wheat and barley in great britain has decreased about one-half in thirty years, the production of oats has increased somewhat. ( ) the greatest rate of increase in the production of cereals in the united states during the last half century has taken place since . this increase is coincident with three other facts of the utmost importance: (a) the development of the central west, a treeless plain--prior to this period much of the farm land in the united states had been hewn out of the forest, tree by tree; (b) the consolidation of the steam railways into transcontinental lines; and (c) the introduction of the self-binding harvester. formerly it took at least five men to do what is done today by one man in the harvesting of cereals. advantages of grain farming ( ) the cost of land excepted, the production of hay and grain requires a small outlay of money. during the past fifty years, many thousands of persons have been able to obtain farms of acres at almost no cost. with a few hundred dollars invested in horses and tools with which to plow the prairie and sow the seed, these fortunate persons have oftentimes been able to pay the whole of their expenses, capital included, from the first crop. the renter who operates a hay and grain farm usually has but a small capital invested in his business. ( ) the cereals bring a quick return. wheat may be sown in september and sold in july; maize may be planted in may and sold in november; oats may be planted in april and sold in august. the short period between seed time and harvest makes the oat crop a favorite one among renters. on the other hand, it takes from three to seven years to produce a marketable horse. it may take ten to fifteen years to begin to realize on an apple orchard. ( ) the products are not easily perishable, and hence can be held almost indefinitely. the development of the magnificent elevator system, based upon the principle that the cereals can be handled like water, greatly simplifies the holding and preservation of these staple products. ( ) the products are in constant demand, and hence they always find a market. agricultural commodities may be divided into three classes, depending upon the area which controls the price of the commodity, as follows: (a) price units world-wide, as wheat, cotton, pork; (b) price units local to large districts--products too bulky to ship long distances--such as hay, potatoes and apples; (c) price units local to relatively small areas, such as strawberries and green vegetables. it is obvious that the larger the area which controls the price, the more constant will be the demand. objections to grain farming ( ) it exhausts the soil. about two-thirds of the wheat of the united states is consumed outside the county in which it is raised. ( ) it requires a large quantity of land to produce a competence. land must be low in price, or the interest on the money invested in the land will consume the profits. the relation of crop to income is suggested by comparing the gross returns from an acre of potatoes or tobacco with an acre of maize. the average gross income during a decade was, from an acre of maize, $ . ; an acre of potatoes, $ ; and from an acre of tobacco, $ . . ( ) only such part of the land as is suited to tillage can be used. ( ) the marketing of cereals requires the transportation of bulky products. hay is handicapped much more seriously. the distance a product can be shipped depends somewhat on the price per pound received for it. if it costs one cent a pound to ship maize to a grain market, obviously it cannot be transported without loss when it brings only cents a bushel. on the other hand, two cents a pound may easily be paid for shipping butter which is worth cents a pound. the transportation of $ , worth of maize to a railway station ten miles distant is a laborious and expensive operation, but when this same maize is turned into beef or pork, it will transport itself to the station with comparatively little trouble. notwithstanding the excellent transportation facilities which the farmers of the united states enjoy, % of the maize is consumed in the county in which it is raised. cereal production demands better transportation facilities than cotton farming, tobacco growing or the rearing of domestic animals. ( ) capital must lie idle much of the time. the self-binding harvester or the hay rake is only used a few weeks, or perhaps more often only a few days, each year. a cream separator or a churn may be used every day in the year. in the first instance, there is not only interest on unemployed capital, but the capital is actually deteriorating through nonuse. ( ) the production of hay and grain does not give continuous employment. the slightest consideration of the following table must show that unless live stock is kept, there are considerable periods of the year in which very little labor is required, while at other times considerable work is necessary to prevent loss. table showing the average acreage per farm of principal crops. new york ohio wisconsin virginia maize wheat oats barley, rye or buckwheat -- hay and forage potatoes, beans or other vegetables fruits miscellaneous crops pasture, wood or unimproved land --- -- --- --- total size of farm ( ) much depends upon natural forces. while there is opportunity for the use of knowledge and judgment in the production of high-grade seeds and even of large yields, there is not the same scope for skill that there is in some other lines of agricultural enterprise. skill means the capacity to do something difficult, and the more effort required to produce an object the more value it has, provided its utility is unlimited. the farming which requires the most skill pays the best if one has the skill to apply to it. this is because those who do not have the requisite skill are usually unsuccessful. chapter xiii the cost of farming operations several millions of the inhabitants of the united states, not to mention those of other countries, are engaged each year in the preparation of the soil for the cereal and forage crops and on the work of seeding and harvesting them. the welfare of one-third the population is directly and that of the other two-thirds, although less directly, is quite as surely dependent upon the effectiveness of this effort. if, for example, as sometimes happens, one-third the population receives on account of untoward seasonal conditions but four-fifths of the usual product, everyone must suffer on account of this unrewarded labor. many, perhaps most, financial panics have their origin in crop failures aided, doubtless, by an improper financial system. although widely and sometimes bitterly discussed, little is really known concerning the relation between the effort expended and the returns obtained in producing the great staple farm products; yet one of the most important and vital considerations in the organization of a farm enterprise is the income, both gross and net, which may be expected from the different crops contemplated. obviously the yield and price of the several crops will vary with the locality and with the season. it is, therefore, impossible to predict for any year either what yield may be obtained or what price will be secured. if, however, a sufficient number of years are selected, an average may be found which will form a basis for calculating the probable result for another series of years. the following table gives the yield and the average farm values per acre for five staple crops for five years, - inclusive, for the united states and for four widely separated states, viz., pennsylvania, iowa, texas and oregon. average yield per acre, - . pennsylvania iowa texas oregon maize, bu. . . . . wheat, bu. . . . . oats, bu. . . . . potatoes, bu. . . . . hay, tons . . . . average farm value per acre, - pennsylvania iowa texas oregon maize $ . $ . $ . $ . wheat . . . . oats . . . . potatoes . . . . hay . . . . such figures as the above may be compiled by anyone at any time for any year or series of years from the yearbooks of the united states department of agriculture. they form a fairly sound basis for calculating the gross income which may be expected from the staple farm crops, particularly for the cereals, potatoes, hay, cotton and tobacco. five questions, however, present themselves, which should, as far as possible, be settled before applying them to an individual problem. ( ) how nearly do the conditions, especially those of soil and climate, of the given location correspond to the averages of the state? the question can be settled only by a thorough study of soils and their crop adaptation. it is a matter requiring study, experience and judgment. ( ) how much larger yields may be expected on account of better methods employed? it is here that most mistakes are made in estimating possible farm profits. necessarily, all statistical averages of production are much below those which an enterprising farmer considers an average crop and habitually produces. not more than % increase upon these figures, however, should be anticipated by reason of the improved methods which one is going to employ. while the average yield of maize, even in the so-called corn states, is not far from bushels an acre, and while it is quite common for good farmers to produce to bushels of maize per acre, it would not be safe to assume a yield of more than bushels unless the conditions are more than ordinarily favorable. the application of the averages given on pages - to an individual farm enterprise may be illustrated by calculating the possible results which might be obtained on acres of arable land in iowa and pennsylvania with the four great soil products of northern united states. iowa pennsylvania acres income acres income maize $ . $ . oats . . wheat . . hay . . total $ . $ , . if % is added for the increased yields which may be expected on account of the employment of better methods, the total yield from acres of arable land would become for iowa $ , and for pennsylvania $ , . this does not mean that farming is necessarily more profitable in pennsylvania than in iowa. not only may the cost of cultivating an acre of arable land be greater in pennsylvania, but usually a larger territory must be owned in order to obtain acres of arable land. eighty acres of these four crops is probably as often grown on a farm of acres in iowa as on one of acres in pennsylvania. the total farm acreage in iowa is, in round numbers, millions; in pennsylvania, millions. in iowa about one-half the farm area is in the farm crops under consideration, while in pennsylvania these four crops occupy only one-third the farm area. [illustration: mr. r. d. maurice wertz, after several years in railroad offices, took charge of his fathers farm at quincy, pa., in , and converted it into a fruit farm. he now has about acres in peaches and apples. it is understood that he has sent from the above shipping station and one other about $ , worth of fruit in the last six years.] [illustration: mr. t. e. martin, rush, n. y., is one of the most successful potato growers in the united states. he has a farm of acres of the dunkirk series of soil. he has three -acre fields in rotation consisting of potatoes, wheat and clover and alfalfa. mr. martin has increased the yield of potatoes from bushels per acre in to bushels in . in he produced , bushels on acres. in he sold $ , . worth of potatoes from acres, or $ per acre. he attributes his large yields mainly to drainage, thorough preparation of the soil, good tillage, spraying, clover and alfalfa, manure and commercial fertilizers.] ( ) will there be a general increase or decrease in the price of crops during the coming years? the following table gives the average farm price for missouri by five-year periods. the average december farm price by previous decades compared with average of five years, - . to to to to to cts. cts. cts. cts. cts. maize, bu. wheat, bu. oats, bu. potatoes, bu. hay, ton an examination of the last column shows that the average price of these staple farm products has been considerably greater during five recent years than during the previous thirty years. will this increase in price continue, or will there be a series of years of unusually low prices which will bring the average price of the decade down to that of the previous three decades? few persons will care to venture an answer to this question, which is of the utmost importance to all farmers and especially to the beginner. ( ) the figures employed are taken from the yearbook of the united states department of agriculture and are the estimated farm price on december of each year. can the commodities be sold for the december farm price? will potatoes sold at the time of digging bring less than the december price? will wheat or maize held until may bring a higher price? to what extent, by the judicious holding of products, can advance in price be obtained? ( ) will the products be sold for cash, or may they be turned into animal products at an increased profit? in some sections of the united states animals are reared primarily because of the increased profit due to manufacturing soil products into animal products; in other regions, however, they are kept primarily for the purpose of maintaining the fertility of the soil and only incidentally on account of the increased profits. cost of production for a number of reasons it is difficult to determine the cost of growing farm crops. one reason deserves to be especially emphasized. in any business enterprise it may be necessary to run at a loss, because to stop would entail a still greater loss. this is particularly true in farming, where men are employed by the month in order that they may be had when needed. since they are receiving pay, it is better that such men should be employed some days at farm operations which return only a portion of their wages rather than not to have them employed at all. under such circumstances, therefore, the cost of producing a given crop may be greater than is indicated by the time actually employed in its production. many other factors also enter, as the average number of hours per day which it is possible to work. this is greatly influenced by weather conditions. the minnesota station determined that the working day on about thirty farms in that state varied from seven and one-half to eight and one-half hours, with two to three and one-half hours on sunday. the average length of the working day for horses varied from . to . hours. the cost for labor of cultivating a given area of land will depend not only on the crop or crops to be raised, the climate, the topography and character of the soil, the size and shape of the fields and the system of cropping, but also upon the man's ability for organization. it is said that the european farmers, and even the farmers from eastern canada, are several years in adjusting themselves to farming in western canada. when the farmers from iowa, kansas, nebraska or surrounding states move into western canada with their three-horse teams and other suitable equipment, applying their thorough knowledge of prairie farming, they are at once successful. the man is thus an important factor. time required for cultural operations the following table will be helpful as showing time required to perform certain operations, since it is a record of labor actually employed on a field of acres of easily tilled land in central ohio. all labor was employed at prices named, board for man and food for horses being furnished in addition at the prices estimated. the owner of the land furnished the horse for the harvester. plowing . days at $ $ . harrowing days at . planting days at . cultivating ( times) days at . cultivating with harvester days at . husking and cribbing by the job . estimated cost of board - / days . estimated team maintenance - / days . ------- $ . according to these figures the cost for labor of raising the crop and the cost of harvesting was almost exactly the same, each being a little less than $ an acre. the cost of producing farm crops the minnesota station has determined the cost of growing the staple farm crops on farms in different sections of the state. the total expense per acre for an average of six years is shown in the following table, not including land rental or cost of marketing. cost of producing farm crops in minnesota. spring wheat, land fall plowed $ . oats, land fall plowed . barley, land spring plowed . maize, husked from standing stalks . hay, timothy and clover . potatoes, land not fertilized . potatoes, land fertilized . some years ago the writer made an estimate of the cost of producing maize, oats, wheat and clover hay in a four-course rotation on a tenant farm in central pennsylvania. the soil was a heavy clay and required plowing for each crop, except, of course, the hay crop, one acre a day being considered a good day's work. counting the expense of man and team at $ per day, the labor cost per acre was found to be $ for maize, $ . for both wheat and oats, and $ . for hay, or an average of about $ . per acre for the four crops. the interest on the capital invested in operating this farm, exclusive of the land, was estimated at $ . per acre. influence of yield upon the cost of production the illinois station has prepared a set of estimates upon the cost of producing an acre of maize, showing variations in cost due to differences in yield. in these estimates, instead of making a charge for the actual cost of manure or fertilizer applied, an estimate is made of the value of the plant food removed. cost of producing one acre of maize in illinois as modified by yield. yield yield yield yield bu. bu. bu. bu. disking $ . $ . $ . $ . plowing . . . . preparation . . . . planting . . . . seed . . . . cultivation . . . . plant food . . . . husking . . . . marketing . . . . ----- ----- ------ ----- cost per acre $ . $ . $ . $ . cost per bushel . . . . the average yield per acre in illinois for years preceding date of this estimate was bushels per acre; the average price per bushel during the same period was cents. labor cost of producing a bushel of grain not counting rent of land or interest on capital invested in equipment, nor depreciation of soil fertility, it has been shown that under favorable conditions, the labor cost of growing and harvesting an acre of wheat or oats may be as low as $ . , and that of maize as low as $ per acre. assuming the average labor cost of producing an acre of wheat or oats at $ . and of maize at $ per acre, and taking the average yields per acre for a series of years to be . for wheat, . bushels for oats and . bushels for maize, the average labor cost per bushel will be: wheat, cents; oats, - / cents; and maize, cents. the data given in this chapter are to be accepted as suggestive rather than as determinative. the chief purpose in presenting them is to place before the young farmer an appreciation of some of the problems involved in the production of the chief and basic agricultural commodities. the young farmer's success will be modified by the role which they occupy in his farming system and by his ability to adjust them to the economic conditions in which he may find himself placed. a thorough understanding of the principle underlying the data submitted will go far toward enabling him to make this adjustment, although none of the illustrations given may have been obtained under conditions identical to his own. chapter xiv the place of intensive farming the doctrine of the survival of the most fit applies equally to the field of biology and to the field of economics. the general introduction of vegetables and fruits into the human dietary has, by banishing the loathsome diseases of the middle ages, greatly increased human efficiency. it follows that those peoples or nations who employ vegetables and fruits in abundance, other things being equal, will be most fit to survive and must outstrip others less fortunately situated. we may for this reason alone look forward to the increasing importance of vegetable growing and fruit raising; but there is a more obvious and perhaps more direct reason. there is in the production of vegetables, at least, a method of satisfying the dietetic needs of an increasing population. the employment of a part of the area now in cereals and forage crops for the production of potatoes, cabbages, legumes, roots and tomatoes is one of the most ready means of increasing the food supply. whether such substitution will be advantageous to the human race depends, however, not so much upon the food returns from a given area of land as upon the products from a given amount or unit of labor. kinds of horticulture in that form of intensive agriculture to which is given the designation horticulture, there may be recognized several more or less distinct divisions, as fruit growing, market gardening, truck farming and floriculture. each has its own special problems, based upon conditions of culture and market. while, as in all classifications, there is more or less overlapping, the tendency is for them to become more and more distinct. the market gardener is the producer of vegetables for a local market, while the truck farmer produces similar products for a larger or wider distribution. the former grows a great variety of products, disposing of them in relatively small quantity, not infrequently directly to the consumer. the latter raises a few highly specialized crops which he sells in gross, usually through a commission merchant. truck farming has developed since , in consequence of the growth of large cities, which require enormous supplies of vegetables of fairly uniform quality, and on account of the continuous demand for fresh vegetables as nearly as possible throughout the year. watermelons and sweet potatoes can be raised in the southern states and laid down in new york city or boston more cheaply than they can be raised in the suburbs of these cities, and, what is equally important, they will be of superior quality. the extension of railway facilities, the introduction of refrigerator cars and the building of cold storage plants has made it possible to grow in one climate products to be consumed in another. cold storage has enabled the fruit growers of california to supply the eastern markets with peaches and other fresh fruit. chicago, to give only one example, begins to receive strawberries, cabbages and tomatoes from the shores of the gulf of mexico early in the year and continues to receive these products, until finally they are being shipped late in the summer from the shores of lake superior. it is estimated that the change of locality from which these products come, travels northward at the rate of from to miles a day. important factors in intensive farming in the neighborhood of large cities, notably in the environs of paris, market gardeners often produce their vegetables in made soil. the local character of the soil under such conditions is a matter of comparative indifference, since a board floor would answer every requirement as a resting place for the artificial soil. the large expense in preparing and constantly renewing the seed bed is only economically possible, however, where proximity to a large city out-weighs all other considerations. ordinarily climatic and soil adaptation are prime factors in successful horticulture--much more than in any other branch of agriculture. each fruit has a restricted climatic range, and in most cases the number of soil types on which a given fruit can be made a commercial success is likewise limited. thus, in general, apples and pears require heavier soils than peaches. success in commercial apple growing requires even greater discrimination, since different varieties of apples demand different soil conditions. thus baldwins are grown the most successfully where a northern climate is modified by proximity to the great lakes. rhode island greenings will succeed on soils too heavy for many other varieties. the york imperial has not yet achieved a great commercial success save on one type of soil. some varieties of apples are much more restricted in their adaptation than others. thus, while the king is quite restricted, the ben davis has a fairly wide cultural adaptation. no one should plant an orchard until he has made a thorough study of his soil and climatic conditions and has received the highest possible expert assistance in choosing the varieties best adapted to his conditions. there is an increasing tendency to specialize in vegetable growing. the production of celery, onions, muskmelons, watermelons, cabbages, cauliflowers, tomatoes and sweet corn, to mention only some of the most striking examples, are becoming more and more localized. even where vegetables and flowers are grown under glass, not only is each house devoted to a single species, but, notably in the case of roses, growers are restricting themselves more and more to a few varieties. this is due to the fact that it is impossible to give in one house, or even in one establishment, the special set of conditions required for the most economic development of each species or variety of plant, just as in the open air the natural conditions are best adapted to a limited number of horticultural products. so much being admitted, it follows that it is folly to attempt to grow plants under unfavorable climatic and soil conditions when competing in the same market with those possessing favorable ones. it is true, of course, that where one man fails another often succeeds, but this is no reason why a man should apply his talents under unfavorable circumstances. in fact, one of the important attributes of most successful men is their ability to recognize and apply their energies under conditions which will give them the most effective return for a given effort. there is no virtue in unnecessary toil. progress in any enterprise, as progress in the human race, can be accomplished only in reducing the amount of labor required to produce a desired result. all this is axiomatic. the purpose of emphasizing it here is that it is fundamental to the success of those who attempt to produce horticultural products. the necessity for the emphasis lies in the fact that these factors are so often disregarded. they are of most vital importance to the man who attempts to raise tree fruits. a mistake in the planting of celery, cabbage, or onions may be rectified the following season, but if a mistake is made in planting tree fruits, it may, as in the case of apples, require ten or even years to discover the error. the growth in commercial orcharding is due in part to the need of special knowledge and facilities for combating fungous diseases and insect enemies and to the better markets which a large production of uniform quality makes possible. while these are extremely important considerations, there is a more fundamental reason, which may in the long run exercise an even more potent influence. the location of the ordinary family orchard, so called, has been determined in almost every instance by the location of the farm buildings. there is no necessary relation between a good site for a farm dwelling and a suitable location for an orchard. it happens, therefore, that family orchards, taken as a whole, are not grown under as favorable conditions as are commercial orchards. this is a sufficient reason in itself, even if the other reasons above mentioned did not exist, why the commercial orchard must, in time, supplant these accidental plantings. advantages of horticulture the advantages of this intensive form of agriculture as compared with the more extensive forms discussed in chapter xii may be stated as follows: ( ) a large gross income per acre may be obtained. an investigation of truck farming made some years ago indicated a gross return per acre about times as great as that obtained on an average from all forms of agriculture. ( ) there is a large opportunity for the use of skill in raising and preparing products for market and an equal opportunity for the exercise of judgment in choosing the best markets. disadvantages of horticulture ( ) it requires considerable capital, particularly for machinery and labor. in the investigation in truck farming above mentioned the capital per acre invested in land, buildings, implements and teams was eight times that in the more general forms of agriculture. ( ) the products are for the most part readily perishable, requiring special facilities if held for any length of time. ( ) growing out of above-mentioned fact, the market is easily overstocked at any given point, and hence prices often fluctuate widely. ( ) the yield is also quite variable, this class of products being especially influenced by seasonal conditions and particularly subject to insect attacks and fungous diseases. since large capital is invested in labor, the horticulturist may be involved in financial ruin through causes which he is unable to control. ( ) the labor question, in certain forms of horticulture more than in others, involves difficulties, among which is need of large quantities of cheap labor for short periods of time. chapter xv reasons for animal husbandry animal products in the united states nearly equal in value those of all other farm products. those soil supplies which constitute the food of domestic animals are not implied. practically every farm in the united states keeps domestic animals, either for their labor or their products, and nearly every household in both city and country keeps one or more animals for companionship. the domestication of animals has been a prime factor in the civilization of the human race by furnishing man with motive force by which he has been able to increase his productive power; by giving him a larger, better and more regular food supply; and by furnishing the materials for clothing, making it possible for him to inhabit temperate and even arctic climates. animals have not been less important in advancing the spiritual welfare of the human race, by inculcating habits of regularity and kindliness, which the care of domestic animals imposes. increase in animal production during the last half century animals have not increased in numbers as rapidly as have the inhabitants, but the value of animals has increased much more rapidly. while a part of this increase in value is due perhaps to a greater cost of production, a couple of illustrations will suffice to show that part of this increase in value has been due to increase in the individual merit of the animals. in sheep in this country produced . pounds of wool per fleece; in they produced . pounds per fleece. thus, while in years sheep have not quite doubled in numbers, the production of wool has increased more than five times. this is a striking example of the value of improvement in breeding, because the improvement in wool production is due to the influence of heredity in far greater degree than to the effect of improved feeding. wool, like the hair on one's head, is not greatly influenced by the food supply, assuming it to be reasonably ample. beef cattle offer another illustration of the way in which animal products have been increased without increasing the number of animals. formerly beef cattle were matured in their fourth and fifth years, or even their sixth year. they are now placed upon the market in their second and third years. if animals can be matured in their third instead of their fifth year, it is obvious that a much smaller number of animals must be kept upon the farm in order to provide an equal annual supply for slaughter. the increase in the size of our horses and the increased production of butter fat per cow which have occurred in the past half century are hardly less important factors in increasing the value of domestic animals and their products. the future of domestic animals one of the most striking features of recent progress in domestic animals is the large increase in the number of horses and the still greater increase in their value. there are those who have believed that the invention of many beneficent forms of mechanical power would in time, if not in the very near future, supplant the use of animals as a motive power. the fact seems to be, however, that they merely augment man's resources and increase his opportunities without lessening his need for animal power. it appears reasonable to suppose that there will be witnessed in the united states a gradual shifting of live stock centers. during the past half century, the great central west has been noted for the production of live stock, particularly for beef, mutton and wool, as an incident of its pioneer development. already the production of large herds of cattle and flocks of sheep has disappeared for the central west, and is now confined largely to texas and the mountain states. the northeastern states are unrivaled in the production of grass, and have considerable areas less fitted for tillage than the prairie states. in time, therefore, the tendency will be for the regions best fitted to rear animals to increase their numbers of breeding animals. on the other hand, those states which produce grain in relatively large abundance may give more attention to fattening animals and to the production of dairy products which can be shipped long distances. as time advances, the history of other countries will doubtless be repeated. a greater distinction between the breeding and rearing of animals, and their fattening and preparation for market will occur. advantages of keeping live stock since animals occupy a place in practically all farm organizations, it is desirable to state briefly the advantages and disadvantages which may accrue to any individual enterprise. the most striking advantages affecting the farmer are: ( ) animals make it possible to use land that would otherwise be wholly or partly unproductive. hillsides and mountain slopes, soil too stony to cultivate, fields traversed by winding streams, and land partially covered with trees, are familiar examples. as previously mentioned, only about one-half the farm area in this country is improved land, and only two-thirds, even of the improved land, is in cultivated crops. the other third of the improved land and a considerable portion of that half of the farm area known as unimproved land are utilized as pasture for domestic animals. ( ) they make use of farm crops which would be entirely or partially wasted. straw, the stalks of maize, clover and alfalfa hay and other leguminous forage crops would not have sufficient value to pay for raising if animals were not kept to convert them into useful products. in fact, the usefulness of a given animal may be judged by the economy with which he converts these otherwise useless products into food or other materials for the use of man. the most profound studies are being made to determine the conditions under which this takes place. ( ) in thus acting as machines in manufacturing raw materials into finished products animals convert these coarse and bulky materials into those which are much more concentrated, thus making their transportation economically possible. a pound of beef has required food containing ten pounds of dry substance, and a pound of butter has required thirty pounds of dry matter to produce it. these refined products may be shipped around the world, while the raw materials may not be profitably transported beyond the county in which they are raised. moreover, the farmer has the profit which comes from manufacturing the raw materials into refined products. ( ) in the production of these finer products much of the essential materials of plant growth are left upon the farm. the experiments of lawes and gilbert show conclusively that in fattening animals more than nine pounds out of ten of the essential fertilizing ingredients of the food reappear in the solid and liquid excrements. prothero says: "farming in a circle, unlike logic, is a productive process." the fiscal policy of one of the great nations of the globe is based upon this idea. everything possible is done by germany to encourage the keeping of live stock, because the more live stock that is kept, the more productive will be the soil. the larger the crops raised the more people will be required to harvest them and the larger will be the population to recruit the army and navy. the kaiser and the german scientist recognize that the fighting force of the empire is related to the number of domestic animals reared. the meat supplies of the people are, therefore, taxed to bring about this end. ( ) the rearing of live stock makes it possible to arrange a better rotation of crops. a five-year and, even better, a six-year rotation, is more effective than a four-year in maintaining the crop-producing power of the soil and enables the farmer to reduce his cost of production. it is possible to keep a larger proportion of the farm in grass and other forage crops, thus reducing the amount of land plowed annually and at the same time decreasing the exhaustion of the land, provided the forage crops are fed to live stock upon the farm. there is an old flemish proverb which reads: "no grass, no cattle; no cattle, no manure; no manure, no crops." the point of this proverb is that good grass is the basis of good agriculture. investigations have shown that one may go farther and say that one of the most ready means of increasing the crop-producing power of the soil is by adding fertilizers to grass land. the large number of plants per acre enables the plants to utilize the fertilizer to the highest degree, and plowing under the resulting dense sod is one of the most effective methods of enriching the soil. ( ) animals require constant care, thus making possible a more constant use of labor and other capital. the wheat farmer of north dakota sows his wheat in april and may and harvests it in july and august. he usually threshes it immediately, and is practically without employment for himself, his teams or his men from september until april. on live stock farms the labor employed in the summer in the field is needed in the winter in paddocks and stables. ( ) the management of live stock, including the rearing of poultry and the manipulation of dairy products, may be made to require a higher skill than the production of farm crops as ordinarily practiced. the communities which have given the most attention to dairying and to the rearing and fattening of animals have generally been the most prosperous. disadvantages of keeping live stock ( ) keeping live stock increases the capital required to operate a given area of land, especially where animals are kept in connection with the production of hay and grain. not only must there be capital with which to purchase animals, but usually more is invested in buildings. in a self-contained farm--that is, one which raises sufficient food for the requirements of the live stock--ten dollars an acre may be considered a moderate investment for animals. if, however, the plan is to raise only the coarse feed, while the necessary grain as well as other concentrates is largely purchased, a farm may easily carry from $ to $ worth of live stock per acre. lack of capital is one of the most potent influences in preventing a larger production of animals and animal products. cattle paper, or notes given to secure money for the purchase of fattening animals, is a common bank asset in the feeding districts of the central west. ( ) the very perishable nature of animals entails a great risk in the investment of capital in live stock. not only the products of a single year, but the growth of a number of years, may be suddenly swept away by disease. this may include the crops of several years, thus destroying capital invested in the production of the crops as well as the capital originally invested in the animals. many a farmer has seen the gradual accumulations of years rapidly melt away in the presence of some contagious disease. tuberculosis in cattle, cholera in hogs and liver rot in sheep are striking examples of diseases that have caused the farmers of this country untold losses. ( ) when an animal has been properly fattened he must be sold. if held for any great length of time, not only is there a constant outlay for food to maintain the animal, but the condition of the animal may actually deteriorate. hence it is not possible to hold animals for a better market for a long period of time, as is possible in the case of the cereal grains. ( ) serious losses may occur where profit was expected through a rise in the price of foodstuffs. scarcity in food supplies, due to an unfavorable season, often compels the stockman to sacrifice animals that he has been raising for two or three years. it is sometimes asserted that, although society suffers from short crops, the farmer is benefited, because the increase in price is greater than the decrease in yield. one year, for example, the decrease in the production of maize was %, while the increase in price was %. if, therefore, the crop had been sold it would have brought more than the crop of the previous year. the farmers, however, require about % of the maize crop in the production of their live stock, so that when there was a decrease of % in the yield of maize, many had none to sell, while others had to purchase maize at increased prices or use other crops, such as oats, which they might otherwise have sold. still others would be compelled to sell, at reduced prices, their partially fattened animals. there is a constant fluctuation in the price of animals and animal products, due to variation in yield and hence in price of food supplies. it requires continual vigilance on the part of the stockman to secure food supplies at such cost as will enable him to secure a profitable return from his animals. chapter xvi returns from animals in any well-considered plan of farm operations it is essential to have some basis for estimating the amount of food required to carry live stock through the year in order to know, on the one hand, what portion of the crops raised are available for sale and, on the other hand, what food supplies must be purchased. a requisite of any successful farm enterprise is a proper consideration of these market conditions. while domestic animals consume a variety of foods, and each class of animals has special food requirements, the basis of calculation of the needed supplies is fortunately not complicated. twenty-five pounds of dry matter are required per day for each thousand pounds of live weight of horses, cattle and sheep, and for swine about pounds for each thousand pounds of live weight. it may be more convenient to calculate the food requirement of swine on the basis of increase in live weight, allowing five pounds of dry matter for each pound of increase. some further details as to food requirements will be found in the paragraphs which follow. cost of producing hogs pigs possess two characteristics which make them unique among domestic animals. they consume concentrated and easily digested foods only, and they produce nothing but meat, fat and bristles. cattle furnish milk and hides; sheep, wool, hides and sometimes milk; fowls furnish eggs and feathers. on account of their limited range of usefulness and because of the high value of much of the food consumed, it would not be possible to rear swine economically were it not for their prolificacy and the fact that they are employed largely as scavengers. many cattle are fattened without direct profit. the indirect profit comes from the sale of the pigs which have followed the cattle. it is customary to mature one hog with little or no additional food while fattening two steers. in many well-known ways, pigs consume products which would otherwise be wasted. this is especially true in the more densely settled sections of the world. on account of their prolificacy, the returns obtained for the amount of capital invested is greater than in the case of sheep, cattle or horses. ten sows, worth $ to $ , are sufficient to produce pigs; to ewes, worth from $ to $ , are required to produce an equal number of lambs; cows, worth $ , to $ , , to produce calves; and mares, worth from $ , to $ , , to guarantee foals. to put the matter in another way, the capital invested in swine may be reproduced in the offspring ten times in one year; the capital invested in horses not more than once in five years. in general, pounds of maize will produce pounds of pork, which is equivalent to eleven pounds of pork from a bushel. since hogs are so largely produced from maize, the price of maize and the price of pork are very closely related. for example, if maize is worth fifty cents a bushel, the grain required to produce a pound of increase in live weight will cost about cents; if cents a bushel, cents; if cents a bushel, cents; and so on. cost of producing sheep in the classic investigations by lawes and gilbert, food containing pounds of dry matter produced a live-weight increase of nine pounds in steers and pounds in sheep. at the wisconsin station, sheep required less food than steers per pound of gain. during rapid fattening of sheep pounds of clover hay and pounds of maize may produce pounds of increase in live weight. while swine require a less weight of food for a pound of increase than sheep, on account of the more digestible character of the food eaten, yet the wisconsin station found that the expense of producing a pound of increase was less in sheep on account of the less expensive character of the food. meat and milk production compared a summary of the investigations of american experiment stations shows that pounds of dry matter produced ten pounds of increase in live weight of steers. the same quantity of food when fed to milch cows produced pounds of milk, plus one pound of increase in live weight. this pounds of milk contained - / pounds of fat. in general, therefore, the food required to produce a pound of butter fat is about three times that required to produce a pound of increase in steers. cost of steer feeding the fattening of beef animals is largely conducted by farmers who make a specialty of it. this is particularly true in the so-called corn belt. into this region are gathered the two and three-year-old and, more rarely, yearling steers, many of which have been reared in texas or in the mountain states where the supply of maize is not sufficiently ample to fatten them. these are placed in paddocks with open sheds, where they are fed from to days, after which they are sent to market for slaughter. the food consists usually of maize fodder, maize stover, hay, maize (usually in the ear), a little bran, linseed or cottonseed oil meal. the ration per day during rapid fattening is about pounds of dry matter per , pounds of live weight, containing pounds of digestible substance, of which . to . is digestible protein. one hundred pounds of increase may be obtained under average conditions from pounds stover, pounds of hay, pounds of maize and pounds of cottonseed meal. great variations will occur, however, depending upon the condition of the animals at the beginning of the feeding period and the degree of fatness or finish to which the animals are brought before placing upon the market. in any case, the food consumed will cost more than the value of the increase. the only way that steers can be profitably fattened is by increasing the value per pound of the animal. thus an -pound steer may be purchased at five cents per pound, or $ . after feeding, say days, he may weigh , pounds, when to bring a profitable return he should sell for cents a pound, or $ . this is a gain of $ , eight of which came from the increase in value of the original pounds. usually steers cannot be fattened profitably unless there is an increase of at least three-quarters of a cent per pound in the value of the animals and then, as previously explained, only in connection with the hogs which follow them. cost of producing milk and butter fat well-selected and properly fed cows may produce pounds of butter fat annually. the amount of fat obtained will depend upon the richness of the milk. thus, , pounds of % milk, , pounds of % milk, or a trifle less than , pounds of % milk, will give this quantity of butter fat. these are customary returns from different types of cows. if each cow in the herd is dry for six weeks each year the daily average of the cows actually milked will be three-quarters of a pound of butter fat. there are herds which make an average of nine-tenths of a pound of butter fat per day, but to secure this result requires superior cattle, careful feeding and more than ordinary care. the standard ration for milch cows weighing from , to , pounds is pounds of dry matter, two-thirds of which is digestible. the ration should contain not less than two pounds of digestible protein. in ordinary practice, about ten pounds of the dry matter of the ration is obtained from maize silage, nine pounds from hay and about six pounds from grain or other concentrates. in general, this is obtained by feeding pounds of maize silage, ten pounds of hay and seven to eight pounds of concentrates. the silage may be estimated at one-tenth to one-eighth of a cent a pound, hay at from one-fourth to one-half cent and concentrates at from three-quarters to one and one-quarter cents per pound, varying, of course, with the different sections of the country. the amount of food needed will vary somewhat with the size of the animals, but will depend much more largely upon the amount of milk and butter fat given. while maintaining substantially the general average just given for the whole herd, it is the practice of careful feeders to vary the amount of concentrates fed to each individual in accordance with the amount of butter fat or milk given. [illustration: mr. gabriel hiester, harrisburg, pa., graduate of the pennsylvania state college, for many years trustee of the college and president of the state horticultural society, had a beautiful farm home near harrisburg. during the first twenty years in bearing his orchard, of which one-fourth the trees were unprofitable varieties, returned an average of $ per acre with apples selling at cents to $ per bushel. mr. hiester believed, with a proper selection of varieties and a favorable location, that any well-managed orchard can be made to do much better.] [illustration: dr. j. h. funk, boyertown, pa., graduate of the university of pennsylvania, , farmers' institute lecturer, former state pomologist, has acres of apples and peaches. returns from his plantings begun in are so phenomenal that he is afraid to permit the publication of his profits. it is known, however, that he has sold $ , each of peaches and apples in one year.] cost of maintaining work horses at the minnesota station, the total cost of feeding and maintaining a farm work horse for one year was estimated to be from $ to $ , of which about $ was charged for interest and depreciation. on the basis of . hours as the length of the working day, the cost per horse per hour was estimated to be - / cents. at the ohio state university, it was found that four horses weighing about , pounds were chosen to perform , hours of labor during one year, while under like conditions four horses, weighing about pounds less, worked on an average but , hours each. for each secular day, therefore, the former worked about - / hours, while the latter were employed but five and one-half hours. the cost of food was estimated at $ ; cost of shoeing, repairs of harness and stable supplies at $ . ; and the cost of feeding, grooming and cleaning of stables at $ . , or a total cost of $ per year. nothing was charged for interest or depreciation, but the expense of feeding and caring for three colts was included in the estimates given. the annual expense of maintaining a horse was practically the same in both states, but the cost per hour of labor performed was less because of the possibility of employing the horses at productive labor a larger portion of the time. too much emphasis cannot be placed upon the need of planning a farm organization which will give continuous employment to horses as well as to men in order to realize the most profitable returns. an industrial system that makes it necessary to maintain work animals three days in order to secure one day's work falls far short of an ideal. chapter xvii farm labor the problem of farm labor demands thoughtful and frank consideration. since work is an essential element in the production of all wealth, it follows that every industry has its labor problem. the adjustment of labor to the production of the various forms of wealth must ever constitute one of the most important problems in any organized society. it is often remarked that the labor problem is the chief difficulty in farming. in a certain sense this is true, since work is a primary element in the production of agricultural as well as all other wealth. it is not true, however, that the problem of labor is more difficult or more intricate than that of other industries. in fact, that problem is less delicate than in some other occupations, because farming is less industrialized. it is not possible to settle once for all the problem of labor for any occupation, since changing conditions will give rise to new questions or new phases of the old problem. moreover, the problem of labor on the farm will grow more difficult as farming becomes more specialized and as the methods of production become more complex. however, the labor problem on the farm is different from that in the manufacturing industries or in trade and transportation. this chapter will not concern itself with an attempt to settle the farm labor problem, but will undertake to state the character of some of the differences between it and other forms of labor and to discuss some of the changes in recent years. a large proportion of farm work is done by the farm owner, or renter, and his family. there is not much opportunity to profit by the labor of other persons. in there were in the united states , industrial establishments each of which employed between and , persons, while there were establishments each of which had more than one thousand employees. in the same year there were , , farms, which employed in the aggregate . millions of people, not including the owners of the farms. moreover, over one-half of the . million persons thus employed were members of the families of the farmer. in other words, aside from members of the family, there was less than one employee to every two farmers. since a considerable number of farmers employ more than one person, it follows that the majority of farmers employ no help other than members of the family. in another particular farm labor differs from that of other forms of labor even more widely. there are sociologic as well as economic questions involved. baldly stated, custom permits, and necessity often requires, the laborer to eat at the same table with the farm owner and in other particulars he mingles intimately with the farmer's family. in all its bearings, this is a very important fact. it constitutes one of the greatest difficulties in the problem of securing suitable farm help. industrial corporations employ as common laborers largely italians, hungarians, poles and negroes. the english, the irish, the german, the swede and the norwegian have been readily received and assimilated in the american farming communities. the peoples of eastern and southern europe are often criticized because they do not become farm laborers. that they do not is in large part due to the fact that the farm hand is usually a member of the farmer's family. thus the supply of common labor which is today used by the rest of the industrial world is not open to the farmer. farming differs from some other occupations in that it does not ordinarily offer the laborer much opportunity for advancement. the fireman on a railway train becomes the engineer; the brakeman becomes a conductor. there are opportunities in many establishments for the advancement of the industrious and clever. a man may enter their service with the hope of being able to marry and support a family. on the other hand, all our land laws are based upon the idea that each farm should be of sufficient size to support only one family. where it does support two families, the relation is usually that of landlord and tenant. the farm laborer, therefore, must look upon his employment as more or less temporary. the young man who intends to become a farmer will find employment upon the farm a desirable if not essential preparation for his future occupation. the introduction of farm machinery has had the effect of increasing the price of farm labor while at the same time decreasing the amount of labor needed. the reason is that the introduction, not alone of farm machinery, but all forms of machinery, has made man's labor much more efficient than formerly. farm wages have doubled since the introduction of horse-drawn machinery. the labor income in the different sections of the united states is influenced by the extent and efficiency with which machinery is used. the relation of labor income to the use of horse power is shown by the following table taken from a recent census: influence of farm machinery as shown by the relation of labor income to horses and mules. number of horses and mules to divisions of the , persons united states labor income in agriculture north atlantic $ , south atlantic north central , south central , western , ----------------------------------------------- united states $ , in one of the states of the south atlantic division the average price of farm labor, without board, was $ per month, while in one of the states of the western division the price on the same date was $ . why? because in the latter case a man's labor was more productive. in the south atlantic division, in producing the chief crops cotton and maize, a man uses one mule in preparing and cultivating the soil. in the western division plowing and harrowing with six-horse teams is common and nine-horse teams are not unusual. the cotton picker in one day will be able to gather not to exceed pounds of seed cotton, worth not more than $ . the western wheat will be harvested by a machine drawn by horses. in the same time four men with this outfit will cut and thresh bushels of wheat, worth $ . when the threshing machine was first introduced in ohio, it was stubbornly opposed by all farm laborers. "they claimed it," says bateman, "as a right to thresh with a flail, and regarded the introduction of machinery to effect the same object in a few days which would require their individual exertion during the whole winter, not only as an invasion of a time-honored custom, but as absolutely depriving them of the means of obtaining an honest livelihood. at a later date, when a reaper had been introduced into a field of ripe wheat as a matter of experiment only, every one of the harvest hands deliberately marched out of the field and told the proprietor that he might secure his crop as best he could, that the threshing machine had deprived them of their regular winter work twenty years ago and now the reaper would deprive them of the pittance they otherwise could earn during harvest." how short-sighted they were! no class gained so much from the introduction of labor-saving machinery as did those who did the labor. the reason for the increase in well-being, the reason society enjoys luxuries and comforts beyond the fondest dreams of former generations, is due to the fact that the labor of each man has been made so much more effective through these labor-saving devices. the humblest citizen shares in this improvement. not all share alike and not all share equitably, but each generation sees its members sharing more equitably than those of any generation which preceded it. the proposition is an extremely simple one. if a man produces just enough food for himself and family, he will have nothing for clothing, shelter, or education. if, however, a man produces four times as much food as he and his family consume, he may exchange one-fourth for shelter, one-fourth for clothing and have remaining a fourth for education, and recreation or savings. this is only another way of saying that the greater the amount of any useful commodity produced by a single day's labor the larger will be the laborer's income or wages. although the increase in intensive agriculture and the diversification in farming tend to increase the need of farm laborers, the introduction of farm machinery has much more than offset this demand. the tendency of farm laborers to become farm tenants; or, to state it in other words, the tendency of landowners to rent their land rather than to continue to operate it themselves, is not without its influence upon the labor problem. the invention and introduction of farm machinery has accentuated the difficulty of keeping the farm laborer continuously employed. the decrease in the demand for farm labor and the increasing lack of uniformity in the amount required have caused a gradual depletion of the smaller villages and hamlets which were a source of labor supply during harvest and other busy seasons. the problem of keeping labor continuously employed has always been a difficult one on the farm, because of the change of seasons and because of the variations in the weather from day to day. there is a wide difference between those industries which are carried on within doors and farming, which is subject to the caprices of the weather. natural causes produce tremendous variations in the return for labor. for example, in there were produced in the aggregate , million bushels of wheat, maize and oats, while in there were harvested , million bushels. here is an increase of over a thousand million bushels. the same farmers tilled the same soil in the same way as far as natural causes would allow, and yet there was a difference in result amounting to per cent. a variation of one hundred million bushels of wheat from year to year, due to climatic conditions solely, is not at all unusual. the manufacturer also has far greater control of his labor. when it rains, he has a roof over his workmen, and hence the work is not interrupted. when it grows dark, he turns on the light and the work continues. if it gets cold, he lights the fire and still the work continues comfortably. it is not so in agriculture. there is a great variation in the working efficiency of men employed in farming. in a certain locality there were twenty-one days of rain in the thirty-one days of may. the next year between june and september in the same locality there was not half an inch of rainfall at any one time. what is true of labor is also true of machinery. the farmer must purchase machinery which he can use only a few days in the year, while the manufacturer, for the most part, employs his machinery continuously, sometimes day and night. while natural causes prevent the farmer from using the same business methods, or from being able to calculate his profits with the same precision as is possible by those following manufacturing and mercantile pursuits, it is nevertheless important that farming should be planned to avoid, as far as possible, the influence of natural causes. certain kinds of farming are less dependent upon natural causes than others. wisdom and foresight can do much to avoid, in all farming, untoward influences. the clever farmer seldom complains about the weather. farm machinery has made unnecessary, and hence unprofitable, some of the labor at which children were formerly employed. in the not distant past many, perhaps most farmers, owed their prosperity in large measure to the labor of their children. a large family, especially of boys, was a valuable asset. even a generation ago conditions were not far different, and two generations ago were quite the same as those described by homer: "another field rose high with waving grain: with bended sickles stand the reaper train: here, stretch'd in ranks, the level'd swaths are found; sheaves heaped on sheaves here thicken up the ground. with sweeping stroke the mowers strow the lands; the gath'rers follow, and collect in bands: and last the children, in whose arms are borne (too short to gripe them) the brown sheaves of corn. the rustic monarch of the field descries, with silent glee, the heaps around him rise. a ready banquet on the turf is laid beneath an ample oak's expanded shade. the victim ox the sturdy youth prepare: the reapers due repast, the women's care." there is also another reason why the age of the employed has been raised. it is due to the growth of higher education. where formerly the farmer's children between the ages of twelve and twenty-one did most of the farm work, now many of them at the same age are attending schools and colleges. the sons of a man, who a generation ago found no opportunity to get beyond the district school, graduate from high school and college, and thus spend most of their time in study until they are past twenty-one years of age. labor unions have doubtless caused a scarcity of farm labor by increasing the proportion of the created wealth which goes to the man who labors without capital. when a man can obtain fifty cents an hour for laying brick, he does not wish to work in the hay field at twenty cents an hour, even though the difference in the cost of living may in great measure offset the difference in wages. there is a growing tendency to perform work by what is called contract labor. thus a person may agree to weed and hoe sugar beets at a certain rate per acre. he, in turn, employs a force of cheap laborers which he sends from farm to farm to do this work. the harvesting of fruits and garden crops is not infrequently done in some such manner. in one instance a contractor of laborers of foreign birth has been furnishing them for all kinds of farm work. he keeps to of these laborers on a small farm, furnishing them a dwelling and selling them food supplies. farmers telephone for help when in need. the contractor receives $ . for a day's work and pays the laborer $ . . it appears from the preceding considerations that there are open to every farmer at least three methods of increasing the efficiency of farm labor. he may make every day's labor more efficient by use of labor-saving machinery and the employment of it in the most efficient manner; as, for example, using three , -pound horses to his farm machinery instead of a pair of , -pound horses. he may modify the character of his farming in order that profitable labor will be more continuous. he may modify the method of employing labor; as, for example, by introducing the system of contracting labor for specific purposes where feasible. increase in the price of farm labor is not an evil. it is an indication that labor applied to agriculture is becoming more productive and hence more profitable. since more than one-half the labor of the farm is done by the owner and his family, the farmer is benefited through the rise in price of farm wages. the more that labor can be made to earn upon the farm, the better it will be not only for the farm owner but for society in general. chapter xviii shipping the means of facile transportation and the machinery of trade are the need and the development of a complex civilization. the importance of these useful adjuncts of everyday life is indicated by the fact that about one-fourth of all the people engaged in gainful occupations in civilized communities are employed in them. nevertheless the expense of transportation and trade constitutes a tax upon the consumer which it is the aim of modern methods to reduce to the lowest limits. recent investigations indicate that for every thirteen dollars the consumer expends for farm products the producers receive six dollars. in some directions most remarkable results have been accomplished. a recent quotation on wheat per bushel was as follows: chicago, $ . ; antwerp, $ . ; london, $ . ; hamburg, $ . . eleven to cents per bushel represents the cost of haul and commissions between chicago and the european cities named. methods of handling have been so perfected that from the time the western farmer places the bundle of wheat at the mouth of the threshing machine the grain literally flows through the channels of trade until it reaches the flour sack. on an average the english miller pays about cents a bushel more for wheat than the american farmer receives for it. the cost of distributing many other farm products is greater, although the range of distribution is much less. the cost of haulage and selling potatoes is from to % of the retail price, while with hay it is still higher. the cost of distributing all forms of truck and market garden produce is high and often wasteful. many attempts have been made to eliminate a part of this cost as well as to better the conditions of the supplies when they reach the consumer. while many individuals have been quite successful in dealing directly with the consumer, little has thus far been accomplished that affects general trade conditions. great improvements have been made in methods of transportation and methods of preservation. cold storage and canned goods have been the direction in which progress has been notable. wasteful methods of distribution owing to customs and traditions there is frequently a great waste of effort in some of the methods of trade. the meat trade of france is an excellent illustration. certain sections of france make a specialty of rearing cattle. at a suitable age these animals are purchased by other farmers who fatten them. many of the small towns maintain market places at which fairs are held to facilitate these negotiations. frequently there is a shipment from one region to another, which is conducted by a middleman. when fattened the steers are collected by a stock buyer, who may ship them to la villette, the live stock market of paris. here they are placed on sale through commission men. there are the usual charges for yardage and food. after being sold the animals are driven to the slaughterhouses. the carcasses are then taken by wagon to the great market of paris located near the center of the city. here the retail vender of meats comes, makes his purchase, reloads the meat, which may have been unloaded less than an hour before, carries it to his shop, where the consumer seeks it. the number of people concerned and the amount of hand labor have been excessive. nor is the american system without its faults. the iowa or illinois farmer fattens cattle that may have been reared in montana or texas. after the stock buyer, the commission man and the stock yard company have each taken his toll, the packer ships the carcasses back to the very region where the animals were fattened, when the stockman may purchase it of the local vender of meats. the facilities and perfection with which these many transactions are accomplished is one of the wonderful sights of our country. nevertheless the producer of meat products may well consider whether some more economical system of distribution may not be devised. shipments: sources of information all railroad rates are now carefully supervised by the federal government and are open to the inspection of the public. such information as is ordinarily needed may be obtained from the local station agent, who is always glad to be of service to patrons of his road. if information of a special character is required, it may be obtained by addressing the division freight agent of the railroad in the region under consideration. the name of this officer is to be found in the circulars and upon the posters of the railroad. in addition to the freight facilities offered by any individual railroad, there are what are known as fast freight lines. these agencies enable through and prompt shipment from inland points in our own country to inland points in another. an individual railroad may operate in connection with several such agencies. a certain railroad, for example, is combined with nine fast freight lines. freight agents of local roads in the principal towns usually represent the fast freight lines and are prepared to transact business. in seaport cities there are firms styling themselves foreign freight contractors, outward freight agents, steamship agents, or ship brokers. these firms are prepared to quote prices on shipments to any part of the world on either regular or tramp ships. they will give freely to intending shippers full information concerning methods and conditions of shipment. there is nothing mysterious about the business of shipping farm products. the necessary details may be acquired by inquiry in the channels indicated and by a little study of the data, which will be cheerfully furnished. railroad rates a great many factors are involved in determining the rate which is charged for transporting different products. in a certain sense it is doubtless true that the rate charged is based upon what the traffic will bear. the purpose here, however, is to state some of the customs which exist rather than to discuss the philosophy or justice of them. the rate may vary with the value of the product, without any regard to the cost of the haul. suppose the cost of shipping a ten-gallon can of fresh milk between two points to be cents, the cost of shipping a similar can of cream may be cents. the cost of shipping a carload of hay is less than a carload of wheat. in some instances, zones or belts have been recognized, the rate from all towns within each zone being the same for a given product. certain railroads centering in new york recognize four zones for the shipment of milk and cream, as follows: zone a--first miles. zone b--between and miles. zone c--between and miles. zone d--beyond miles. it will be noticed that the size of these zones varies and may be the subject of adjustment between railroads and shippers. while less understood by the public, railroads recognize zones or, more properly, groups of towns in making rates to them instead of from them, as in the instance above mentioned. it is possible to change the rate on a product to a given town by classifying it in another group. the rate on bran and other stock foods from central western points to certain towns in new york state has been the same as that charged to boston, mass., while other towns in new york not far removed have taken a lower rate. differential rates are recognized to be legitimate. railroads are allowed to charge a less rate for wheat intended for export than that intended for local consumption. there has sometimes been a wide difference between the freight rate on wheat between kansas city and galveston, texas, depending upon whether the wheat was to be exported or intended for domestic use. in certain sections and for certain products the railroad rate varies with the season, because of difference in competition. the railroad rate between chicago and new york on grain is higher while the navigation of the great lakes is suspended. as an illustration of the cheapness of transportation by water, it is stated that sometimes it is cheaper to ship wheat from chicago to buffalo by boat than to store it in a grain elevator for an equal period of time. products may sometimes be sent by baggage to greater advantage than by express, special arrangements for which are generally required. facilities for freight transportation american railway facilities are, perhaps, unrivaled among the nations of the world, but the united states is still behind other nations in the matter of means of local transportation, in which good roads is only a part of the problem. in france, the so-called _messagers_ are a common feature of local traffic. thus in the department of touraine there are towns each having from one to four _messagers_, who with their great two-wheel carts, each with single draft horse, make one or two trips to tours each week. the _messagers_ carry freight both ways precisely in the same capacity as railroads do. while the railroads are fairly abundant these local agencies continue to thrive because delivery can be made directly to the consignee and delivery at the exact time and place is more certain. the enormous loads conveyed in these two-wheel carts by one horse is an element in this system to which the good roads of france now contribute. in , france had constructed , miles of roadway. since that time, over , miles of roadway have been completed and about , miles of railway have been constructed--ten miles of roadway for each mile of steam railway. the good roads of france are of comparatively recent origin, contributing materially to the improvement in well-being which has taken place during the same period. chapter xix marketing without stopping to inquire the reasons, it may be recalled that there are two rather distinct forms of trade, wholesale and retail. the wholesale trade is conducted by three classes of persons: dealers or merchants, commission men, and brokers. the dealer is one who buys the goods outright and takes his own risk on making a favorable sale to the retailer. the commission man is one who receives the goods, sells them at such price as he may be able to obtain and remits to the seller the amount obtained less expenses and his commission. the broker is a man who effects a sale without coming in contact in any way with the materials sold. a cheese broker, for example, receives instruction from different factories to sell for them a certain quantity of cheese of a given kind and quality each week or month as the case may be. at the same time he receives from grocery stores which retail cheese orders for various amounts, kinds and quality of cheeses. with this information at hand, he directs the various factories intrusting their business to him to ship the kind, quantity, and quality of cheese required by his several customers. for such service he receives a brokerage, which is less than that charged by a commission man because he is not required to handle or store the material. since the different farm products are purchased by different classes of retailers, and since their handling and sale require different facilities and special knowledge, there have arisen in the great centers of trade different kinds of markets, each having its particular facilities for the handling, care and sale, and each conducted by commission men or brokers with a special knowledge of the trade. furthermore, certain cities have become, on account of their favorable position--to mention but one reason--headquarters for certain products or groups of products. thus petersburg, virginia, has the principal wholesale market for peanuts. elgin, illinois, has been noted for its butter market. st. louis is the leading mart for mules. in a general way, the following five more or less distinct and important classes of markets for farm products may be recognized: grain, live stock, produce, cotton and tobacco. methods of trade the brokers or commission men doing business in any one of these markets usually form an association called a board of trade, chamber of commerce or similar title for the purpose of assisting "each other in the pursuit of common ends." the result has been uniformity of methods and charges; but above all in importance, perhaps, has been the definition of classes and grades of the products placed on sale. the tendency is for the associations in the different cities to adopt uniform rules for the grading of products, so that no. red winter wheat may mean the same thing in toledo and new york; that the quotation on prime beef may refer to the same quality of cattle in pittsburgh as it does in chicago; and that no. timothy hay in baltimore and st. louis may be alike. while the tendency is towards uniformity, much yet remains to be accomplished. the shipper must be on his guard lest he suffer loss through the variations in the classification or variations in their interpretations on the different markets. there has grown up around these markets some agency which stands as a disinterested party between seller and buyer impartially determining the weight and in some cases the quality of the object under negotiation. the state of illinois employs agents who inspect all cars of grain consigned to the chicago market. these inspectors determine the kind, grade and weight of the grain in each car. the car is then delivered under seal to the purchaser. if either seller or buyer is dissatisfied with the inspector's decision he may, by complying with certain regulations, have this decision reviewed by a higher authority. the decision of this higher authority is final and must be accepted by both parties. brokers selling grain in carload lots ship the cars subject to the weight and grade as determined by the inspector at chicago. grain of a specific grade may thus be bought in chicago or other great grain markets with almost perfect security as to weight and quality by persons living in any part of this or any other country. at elgin the quality of butter is determined by a committee appointed by the board of trade from its own members. in the live stock markets, the stock yards company, in addition to furnishing yards, shelter, food and water, acts as agent between seller and buyer in determining the weight of the animals. the purchaser or his agent must determine for himself the quality of the animals he buys. grain markets the chicago and st. paul boards of trade and the new york produce exchange are the three great agencies for dealing in grain in the united states. buffalo, duluth, baltimore and philadelphia are also important markets. adjuncts to these markets are the great terminal elevators capable of holding almost indefinitely enormous quantities of wheat and other grain. on the pacific coast all the wheat is handled in the bags, as is the custom in the other markets of the world. canada and the united states alone have recognized the principle that wheat and other grains will run like water, which has been a prime factor in their competition with other nations. country elevators charge two cents a bushel for storage during the first days and / cent for each additional days. the charge for storage at terminal elevators for the first days is / cent. the farmer may thus store his wheat in an elevator in place of his farm if he chooses so to do, although the wheat he thus puts in storage may have been made into flour and consumed before he sells it. this may be looked upon as a sort of intermediary step between storing wheat in one's own granary and dealing in futures. the country shipper pays / cent a bushel commission for the sale of wheat. there is also a charge for inspection and insurance, and, in case there is an advance payment, for interest. after five days there are storage charges. this has given rise to the expression, gilt edge, regular and short receipts, depending upon the length of time there remains before storage charges must be paid. every market has a grade known as contract grade, meaning the quality that must be furnished when wheat or other grain is sold without specifying the grade. in chicago no. red winter wheat is the contract grade. where grain is sold or purchased by a broker, the brokerage is usually / cent per bushel. hay markets at least twenty cities have adopted the rules of the national hay association as to classes and grades of hay and straw. the southern states constitute an important market for the hay of the north central states, while boston, new york and the mining towns of pennsylvania are important markets for the northeastern states. the size of bale varies from to pounds. small bales of pounds each are preferred in baltimore, medium bales of to pounds in philadelphia, while new york and boston usually deal in the larger bales. the commission charges vary from cents to $ per car. in new york, $ pays all charges. at chicago, $ per car has been charged for the inspection, divided equally between seller and buyer. produce markets every town of any consequence has its produce market. the south water street district in chicago and the west washington street market in new york are noted for their extent and variety. there are also many special markets for certain classes of produce. thus elgin, chicago and new york have butter exchanges. wisconsin, utica, watertown and cuba (new york) maintain exchanges where cheese is placed on sale each week during the manufacturing season. there is also a board of trade for cheese in new york city. the prices quoted upon these exchanges are made the basis of many transactions between buyer and seller, who never enter these markets. not only do buyers and sellers agree to abide by the quotations of one or the other of these markets, but the quotations are also used as a basis of settlement for milk furnished the creamery or factory. these agencies are thus impartial arbiters in countless financial transactions. the rate of commission varies in different markets and for different products. generally, however, produce is handled on a % basis, but for individual products which are especially bulky and difficult to handle, such as cabbage, % may be charged. in some cases commission is by quantity instead of on a percentage basis. thus for potatoes the commission is sometimes % and in other cases or cents a bushel. live stock markets while poultry and game, as well as the carcasses of the smaller animals, may be handled through the produce markets, the large animals require separate facilities. the united states is noted for its large live stock markets and for the perfection and size of the packing houses which have grown up about them. the most famous example of these combined agencies is to be found at chicago, but important live stock markets are also maintained at st. louis, kansas city, omaha, pittsburgh, buffalo and more recently fort worth, texas. the commission charges vary from cents to $ per head for cattle and from to cents per head for calves, sheep and hogs. in some markets, the commission on hogs is % of the gross returns. when located within miles of a central market, it is customary to allow cents per hundred pounds for cattle and cents for hogs to cover shrinkage, and cost of freight, yardage, food, bedding and commission. it is possible for an owner to sell his own live stock in these yards, but the commission man, because of his superior knowledge of existing trade conditions, is almost universally employed. firms which handle cattle, sheep and hogs seldom sell horses. although handled by different commission firms, important horse markets are maintained at chicago and buffalo immediately adjacent to the market for meat animals. in new york the horse markets are in a different section of the city, that for draft and common work horses on one street, while the american horse exchange, located at another point, handles high-class light horses. the usual custom is to sell horses at auction, although they may be purchased at private treaty. in whatever manner purchased, it is essential to understand precisely the character of the guarantee. cotton, wool and tobacco markets because of their higher value per pound and the ease with which they can be stored, cotton, wool and tobacco are dealt in somewhat differently than other farm products. the two great cotton exchanges are located at new orleans and new york, the quotations on these markets controlling the financial transactions in cotton throughout the world. the principal wool markets are boston, new york, philadelphia and st. louis. the principal tobacco markets are at richmond and danville, va., durham, n. c., and louisville, ky. [illustration: mr. c. w. wald, graduate of the ohio state university, farmer, formerly assistant horticulturist of the new hampshire and ohio experiment stations, is shown above in one of the new carlisle (ohio) greenhouses, in which three crops of lettuce occur in one bed. one crop is ready to cut, another planted and a third in pots between the other plants, to be planted in another bed when large enough. the net returns from a quarter of an acre under glass has been greater than from acres devoted to general farm crops.] [illustration: c. w. zuck & sons, erie, pa. one son was a student in agriculture at the pennsylvania state college. father and three sons, beginning six years ago with a run-down farm of acres, have built an acre of glass and a heating plant of horsepower. during the period they have spent $ , on the place and at the end of season they will have very nearly cleared their improvements. "tell the youthful readers of your book to get as much education as possible and then go in partnership with their fathers or brothers. if they do, success will be theirs."] the country shipper or the young farmer wishing to place his products in the ordinary channels of trade must consider and determine among other things the following: what cities have favorable markets for his products; choose some commission man or broker to handle them; calculate the expenses for freight, commission and other customary items; familiarize himself with the rules for grading his products in the market or markets under consideration; and determine what agency there may be for protecting him as to the weight and quality when sales are effected. whenever practicable, a visit to the market in question and a personal study of the conditions under which selling is done will be wise. having done so, and perhaps having made a number of sales through these usual channels of trade, he will be in a position to consider whether he may organize to advantage some more direct method of getting his products to the consumer. chapter xx laws affecting land and labor thus far property has been treated as invested capital upon which interest must be charged in determining the labor income. labor, likewise, has been considered principally in its effect upon profits. society has thrown around the transfer of property and the use of labor certain restraints for the protection of all individuals. through the ages certain procedures have become fixed by custom. these legal practices are largely the inheritance of old roman law and are usually known as common law. various legislative bodies having jurisdiction enact from time to time other laws. this body of enacted law is called statute law and is much more variable than common law. in the briefest possible manner it is the purpose here to state a few of the principles and applications of the law, chiefly the common law, as it affects the farmer in acquiring or disposing of his property and in his dealings with labor. property property may be defined as anything which is a subject of ownership. it possesses the characteristics of being acquired, held, sold, willed or inherited and is of two kinds: ( ) real property, real estate or realty; ( ) chattels or personal property. these two kinds of property are subject to quite distinct legal practices. in general, real estate consists of land, things attached to it, such as trees, buildings, fences and certain rights and profits arising out of or annexed to the land. the term land as ordinarily used includes all these things, so that when land is said to be worth so much an acre it includes all fixtures. ponds and streams are, under this definition, land. the land not only has surface dimensions, but extends upward indefinitely and down to the center of the earth, and hence includes a right to ores, coal, oil, gas or other materials whatsoever. an article may, however, be real property or personal property depending upon circumstances. thus a tree growing on the land is real property, but when cut into cord wood becomes personal property. new fence posts ready for use are personal property. when set in the ground they become real estate. just what goes with a farm or what are fixtures is frequently a subject for legal determination. fixtures the general rule is that "fixtures are any chattels which have become substantially and permanently annexed to the land or to buildings or other things which are clearly a part of the land."[d] the annexation may, however, be purely theoretical, since the keys to the house or barn, which may be in the owner's pocket, are real estate. one rule concerning fixtures is that they must be so annexed that they cannot be severed without injuring the freehold. the intention of the party making the annexation also often determines, since if the article is annexed with the intention of making it permanent, it then becomes a part of the land. among the things held to be fixtures, and therefore a part of the land, are: ( ) all buildings and everything which is a part of any building, such as doors, blinds, keys, etc.; ( ) fence materials which have been once used and are piled up to be used again are a part of the land, but new fence material not yet used is personal property. ( ) growing crops are real property. they go to the purchaser of the land unless specially reserved in the deed. a verbal agreement is not sufficient. ( ) trees, if blown down or cut down and still lying where they fell, are real property; if cut or corded up for sale they become personal property. ( ) all manure made on the farm is real estate and passes with the land. ( ) all the ordinary portable machines and tools are considered personal property, but certain machines held to be of permanent use upon the land are real estate. among the things which courts have held to go with the land are cotton gins, copper kettles encased in brick and mortar for cooking food for hogs, cider mills, pumps, water pipes bringing water from distant springs. in general, motive power machinery and the shafting go with the land, but the machinery impelled may or may not, depending upon the way it is annexed. ( ) if stones have been quarried for the purpose of using upon the farm, they go with the farm, but if quarried for sale they are personal property. contracts the difference between personal property and real property may be indicated by considering the essential features of a contract. a contract is an agreement between two or more persons. the foundation rule concerning a contract is that every man must fulfill every agreement he makes. an ethical practice grows out of this legal rule which, if strictly adhered to, will save much embarrassment, viz., make but few promises and always keep your engagements. there are seven requirements generally necessary to a valid contract. ( ) possibility. the thing to be done must be possible. ( ) legality. it must not be forbidden by law. ( ) proper parties. the parties to a contract must be competent. contracts with idiots or drunken persons are not binding. some contracts with minors are not binding, although contracts for the necessities of life are. ( ) mutual assent. a proposition not assented to by both parties is not binding on either. ( ) valid consideration. a man is not regarded as injured by the breaking of a promise for which he has paid, or is to pay, nothing. ( ) fraud or deceit. a contract obtained by fraud is void as against the party using the fraud, but may be enforced by the innocent party if he sees fit. ( ) written contracts. here comes the most important difference between real and personal property. real property can only be conveyed by a written instrument, properly executed and recorded, while personal property passes by mere possession. contracts relating to the sale of real estate are not binding unless in writing, while verbal contracts are sufficient for personal property if accompanied by payment of a part of the purchase price or the acceptance of the goods. for amounts under $ verbal agreement in itself is binding. transfer of real estate the purchaser should require of the seller evidence that the title to the land is straight and clear; if not, exactly what the defects are. this is done through an abstract of title, which should be prepared by a competent lawyer. this is not an official document, and its value depends largely upon the ability and watchfulness of the party making the abstract. ownership of land is conveyed by means of a deed. a deed is an instrument conveying at least a life interest in the land. care should be taken that the deed contains the essential parts and that it is properly executed. deeds deeds are of two kinds: quit claim deeds, which convey all the rights, title and interest which the seller has in the land, but does not warrant the title; and warranty deeds, which, in addition to what a quit claim does, contain covenants which agree that the seller and his heirs, etc., shall warrant and defend the title to the purchaser against the lawful claims of all persons. the requisites of a deed the requisites of a deed are: the parties to the deed, the consideration, the description; and with a warranty deed, the covenants. the seller must be of full age, sound mind and if married his wife should always join in the deed. her name should appear following his at the beginning of the instrument. she should sign and acknowledge the deed, and the certificate of acknowledgment should state that she is the wife of the seller. if the seller is a married woman, her husband does not need to join in the sale of her own property. it is customary to state the consideration upon which the deed is given, but this is not necessary, nor will a false statement as to the amount paid invalidate the deed. the description of the land conveyed should be as minute and careful as possible, and preferably in the exact language of former deeds. in case former description is in error, it should be referred to and correct description given. where land is conveyed by metes and bounds, this description governs, although it may not convey the number of acres of land stated. in describing boundaries the location of monuments takes precedence of distances mentioned. execution of the deed a deed must be signed, witnessed, acknowledged, delivered and recorded. in some states deeds must be sealed, but in other states the law has dispensed with this formality. witnesses to deeds are not required in all states. some states require one, but usually two witnesses are required. the parties signing the deed are required to appear before an official designated by statute, usually any magistrate, justice or notary public, and acknowledge the same to be his or her free act and deed. a deed has no effect until delivered, and should be immediately recorded by the purchaser. generally an unrecorded deed is not good as against a subsequent purchaser in good faith. it is well to note that the laws relating to the transfer of land are those of the place where the land lies and not necessarily those of the place where the deed is made. method of laying out public lands the public lands of the united states are, whenever practicable, laid out into townships each six miles square, "as near as may be," whose sides run due north and south and east and west. the townships are laid off north and south of a base line which is a parallel of latitude, and are numbered north and south from the base line: thus, t. s., means township no. south from the base line. each row of townships running north and south is called a range, and is numbered east or west of the principal meridian: thus, r. e., means range east of the given meridian. the townships are then laid off into sections or square miles of acres, "as near as may be," and these are numbered, beginning always at the northeast section, as shown in the accompanying diagram. n +-----------------------------+ | | | | | | | |----+----+----+----+----+----| | | | | | | | |----+----+----+----+----+----| w | | | | | | | e |----+----+----+----+----+----| | | | | | | | |----+----+----+----+----+----| | | | | | | | |----+----+----+----+----+----| | | | | | | | +-----------------------------+ s each quarter section is referred to as the northeast or southwest quarter of the section, and each forty acres as the northwest or southeast quarter of a particular quarter. for example, an eighty-acre field may be referred to as the west half of the southwest quarter of section , township north, range , west of ----. base line and meridian, or in some cases merely the meridian is mentioned. the curvature of the earth's surface makes it impossible for the sides of townships to be truly north and south and at the same time six miles square. the excesses and the deficiencies due to the convergency of meridians and the curvature of the earth are by law added to or deducted from the western and northern ranges of sections and half sections of the townships. while the above has been the rule in laying out public lands for more than a century, there are many exceptions, due to many causes. in the older settled sections the land was laid out in lots, often in a very irregular manner, although in some cases within a given tract the area was more or less regular. in these cases, the land must be described minutely and carefully by metes and bounds. in some of the southern and western states, also, where there were spanish grants, much irregularity in the surveys exists. over much of the north central states this rectangular system of laying out lands obtains and has worked well in most respects. the landlord and tenant leases of real estate follow the same procedure as deeds, except that a verbal lease, if for a term of not to exceed one year, is valid in most states. a written lease should be carefully drawn, because, according to common law, there are few things implied in a lease that are not stated. definite statement concerning repairs and insurance is desirable. a tenant should also acquaint himself with the law of the state concerning the surrender of the farm upon the expiration of his term. it is the duty of the tenant not only to guard the property, but to conduct the farm in a husbandlike manner. unless otherwise stated in the contract, the tenant must pursue those methods of husbandry which are customary in the vicinity. the relation of the farmer to his workmen the requirements of a valid contract, as previously stated, control most of the relations which the employer has with his employees. contracts for labor, unless for more than one year, need not be in writing. if, however, the service to be rendered is unusual, the agreement should be reduced to writing, because, in the absence of specific agreement, the law assumes that customary service and wages are implied. like all other employers of labor the farmer is under obligation to protect his workman from injury. he must not subject them to unusual and unreasonable risks. he must hire workmen suited to the employment. for example, if he employs a young boy to drive a fractious horse, he would be liable for any injury that might occur. in like manner, he must exercise proper care concerning the safety of the machinery placed in the hands of his workmen. he must keep his premises in a safe condition and must not expose his workmen to risks not incident to the employment for which they are hired. the farmer is liable in damages for the acts of his workmen which are within the scope of their employment, although the authority may not have been expressly conferred. "he who acts by another acts himself." in case one is sued for the acts of his employee, the burden is upon him to prove that the act of the workman was without authority, expressed or implied. ----- [d] haigh's "manual of law," p. . chapter xxi rural legislation various laws have been enacted by federal and state legislatures for the better protection of producer and consumer. much of this legislation affects in a very special way the interests of the farmer. not infrequently, in fact, generally, the state department of agriculture has more or less direct jurisdiction over their enforcement. state departments of agriculture usually publish a collection of the laws of this character. these laws vary greatly in the different states and only the most general outline, as they affect the interests of the farmer, can be given here. persons can inform themselves as to the details as enforced in a given state by applying to the state secretary of agriculture. a number of these acts affect interstate commerce, concerning which the united states constitution says: "no state shall, without the consent of the congress, lay any impost or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspection laws." by a series of judicial decisions it has been determined that a state has a right to enforce laws affecting interstate commerce when traffic in the articles thus modified or prohibited affects the public welfare. when it is necessary to have a police regulation to prevent fraud in the traffic of an article or for the purpose of guarding the public health or morals, police laws, so called, may be enacted and enforced. around this general question there has waged a bitter controversy which has occupied some of the best legal minds and is one involving some difficulty. fertilizer control one of the first of the "control" measures to be enacted, and the one which has been most universally adopted by the several states, is the law requiring the manufacturer and dealer in commercial fertilizers to guarantee the percentage of the so-called essential fertilizing elements--nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium--contained in each bag of fertilizer offered for sale. subsequent control laws have been modeled more or less closely after this law. hence a description of the operation and execution of it will serve for all. the execution of this law is usually under the immediate supervision of the state secretary of agriculture, while the necessary chemical analyses are made by the state experiment station. in some states the enforcement of the law is in charge of the state experiment station, while in others the state department of agriculture has its own laboratories or employs a private chemist. it is, however, becoming a more and more settled policy to place all police regulations in charge of the state department of agriculture, while at the same time the chemical analyses and other scientific and technological inquiries are made at the state experiment station. in order to facilitate the taking of samples and in order to raise funds for the execution of the law, the manufacturer is required to take out a license and to make a statement of the brands of fertilizers which he will place upon the market in the given state during the given season. during the spring and fall season agents traverse the state and sample the bags of fertilizers as found on sale by local merchants. the samples are sent by number under seal to the designated chemist, while at the same time the agent transmits to the state officer in charge of the enforcement of the law the necessary information concerning these samples. upon the receipt of the analysis made by the chemist, who has had no knowledge of the origin of the sample, the state officer compares them with the guarantee of the manufacturer, and if he finds it necessary enters legal complaint. while these laws have been in force for many years in some states and in many states for some years, prosecution has seldom been found necessary. the honest manufacturer is protected from dishonest competition, and the dishonest manufacturer, if there be such, cannot afford the publicity which noncompliance with the law would entail. it has been customary to publish, with the results of analysis, also an estimate of the commercial value per ton of each brand of fertilizer. this estimated commercial value is obtained by multiplying the pounds of each element or combinations of the element in a ton by a value per pound. to the value of the fertilizer thus obtained is added something for cost of mixing, bagging and freight, and something for profit. the price per pound given to each element or combinations of the elements is based upon the commercial value of the element when purchased in raw materials. the price for each year is usually determined by a conference of those in control of the execution of the law in the several states for certain groups of states. as a matter of fact, the price varies little from year to year. the published figures, therefore, constitute a table of comparative commercial values as determined by the most expert knowledge. while not constituting a statement of absolute commercial value for any given locality, they do enable the purchaser to determine whether the price quoted on a given brand of fertilizer is within reason. persons who are unacquainted with the principles controlling the use of commercial fertilizers may, however, be led to believe that the price of the fertilizer is an indication of its value for the production of a given crop. as is well known to all students of the subject, there is no necessary relation between the commercial value of a fertilizer and the fitness of its formula for a given soil and crop. for these and other reasons, the publication of tables of commercial value has been strongly opposed by some manufacturers, and in certain states the custom has been discontinued. while granting that tables of commercial value are subject to misinterpretation, it is perhaps fair to say that such tables have been of most benefit, and, moreover, have been of great value to those who were most likely to misinterpret them. it has been customary in most states to make analyses only of mixed fertilizers. thus such raw materials as nitrate of soda, sulphate of ammonia, dried blood, bone meal, rock phosphate, tankage, muriate of potash, sulphate of potash, have not been brought under the operation of the law. if one wishes to purchase nitrate of soda, muriate of potash and tankage with the intention of mixing them according to a formula of his own, he may not find any protection in his state. however, these products can be obtained through reputable dealers who will willingly guarantee the contents. in case of doubt, the purchaser may secure an analysis by his state experiment station at a moderate cost. the law requires that there shall be affixed to every package of fertilizer offered for sale a statement about as follows: the minimum per centum of each of the following constituents which may be contained therein: (a) nitrogen. (b) soluble, available and total phosphoric acid, except in cases of undissolved bone, basic slag phosphate, wood ashes, unheated phosphate rock, garbage tankage and pulverized natural manures, when the minimum per centum of total phosphoric acid may be substituted. this latter applies only in those states where raw materials are subject to inspection. (c) potash soluble in distilled water. it is possible to comply with the law and yet state the guarantee upon each bag of fertilizer in such a manner as to mislead the uninformed. it is not the purpose of this book to deal with such technical details, but if the purchaser of commercial fertilizers is not already well acquainted with fertilizer terms, he should secure an elementary textbook on the subject or write to his state experiment station for a bulletin discussing them. feeding stuff control the law controlling the sale of stock foods is of more recent origin than the fertilizer control act and has not been so universally adopted up to the present time. the necessity for such a law arises from the growing use as stock foods of various by-products in the manufacture of liquors, starch, glucose, sugar, cottonseed and linseed oils and breakfast foods. various mixtures, varying widely in chemical composition, especially in protein and crude fiber, were placed upon the market. in some instances mixtures were grossly adulterated with such things as oat hulls and ground corn cobs. the adoption of this law by certain states has served to make other states the dumping ground for inferior stock foods, thus increasing the necessity for similar protection. the law does not apply to the ordinary grains produced by farmers or to the usual by-products of millers. seed control from time immemorial it has been the universal custom of seedsmen to disclaim all responsibility for the purity and germinating power of their seeds. but as the importance of good seed--good in hereditary power, good in germination, good in its freedom from adulteration, good in its absence of noxious weed seed--has become better understood demand for some method of control has arisen. in at least one state there is a seed-control law modeled quite closely after the fertilizer-control law. however, the usual method of protection consists in purchasing by sample or the insistence of a guarantee, with a subsequent "analysis" of a sample of the purchased seed. the germinating power and purity of seed can be determined cheaply by an expert within from five to twenty days, depending upon the species. the federal government has a division of seed control in its department of agriculture at washington, d. c. any person may send a sample of seed to this division and have its purity and germinating power determined, and in some of the states the experiment station will perform similar services without charge. clover, alfalfa, grass and other small seeds should always be purchased subject to such inspection, unless the purchaser is prepared to make his own inspection, which a very little training makes possible. nursery inspection there is no national law concerning the importation of insect-infested or diseased plant stock. several of the states have passed both state and interstate regulations concerning the sale of nursery stock. the insects usually legislated against are san jose scale, gypsy moth and brown-tail moth, while the diseases usually interdicted are yellows, black knot, peach rosette, and pear blight. the enforcement of the law is usually placed in charge of a person having special knowledge of economic insects and fungous diseases. in addition to these police regulations this officer may, by various means, attempt to bring into practice methods calculated to eradicate or, at least, lessen the severity of existing attacks. commerce in vinegar, dried fruits, insecticides and fungicides is also regulated in some states. dairy, food and drug inspection an adequate discussion of the rise and development of the control in the sale of dairy and food products would require a chapter by itself, if not an entire volume. suffice it to say here that the laws on this general subject have acquired an importance in many ways quite beyond that of any of the other control measures discussed in this chapter. in the extent of funds handled, the number of agents employed and the public interest incited, the office of dairy and food commissioner outranks any other control agency. in some states the office is an elective one, and the questions with which the office has to deal become a part of the state political campaign. the importance of the inspection of dairy and food products grows out of the fact that not only is the consumer, hence all the world, interested, but the execution of these laws touch large commercial interests. not only are meat packers, distillers and brewers deeply interested, but the wholesale and retail grocers and, more recently, the manufacturing and prescribing druggists, are vitally concerned. not many years ago the inspection of dairy products, particularly control of the traffic in oleomargarine, was the chief function of this office. to-day the enforcement of laws concerning pure foods, liquor and drugs is of much greater importance. interstate commerce in oleomargarine is now regulated through the enactment of an internal revenue law requiring a tax of ten cents a pound on colored oleomargarine and one-fourth of a cent a pound on uncolored oleomargarine and, further, by prescribing the character of package and method of marking all oleomargarine entering into interstate commerce. state agencies are charged with the duty of requiring the compliance of local dealers and restaurateurs with the general features of the federal law. some states, however, prohibit entirely the sale of colored oleomargarine within the state. purity in dairy products attempts to define what is pure milk, cream, butter or cheese have been fraught with much difficulty. thus, for example, legal definitions of pure milk have resulted in some cows giving illegal milk. in some instances the law has declared simply that whole milk is milk from which no cream has been removed; in others, the minimum amount of butter fat has been prescribed; in still others, the minimum amount of total solids containing a minimum proportion of butter fat has been made the basis of legal milk. in like manner full cream cheese has been defined as cheese made from whole milk or from milk from which only a given amount of cream has been removed, while in other instances the minimum amount of butter fat which full cream cheese may contain is prescribed. the wide variation in the amount of butter fat carried by cream has caused much jocular comment and some serious discussion as to what is cream. while it is not feasible to indicate the laws for the several states, the ruling of the federal government as to what constitutes purity in dairy products under the national food and drug act may be accepted as a general guide. a circular giving the required information may be secured by addressing the secretary of agriculture, washington, d. c. live stock sanitation the control of contagious diseases in domestic animals and the inspection of meat products have been the chief work of the bureau of animal industry of the united states department of agriculture since its establishment. the bureau inspects all imported live animals and under certain conditions will inspect live animals intended for exportation. it inspects all meat products intended for export. its inspection of meats intended for interstate commerce is less rigid than that exported. meats sold within the state in which they are slaughtered cannot be required by the federal government to undergo inspection. it thus happens that the people of the several states enjoy less protection in the consumption of meat than the foreign purchaser of american meats unless there is a state meat inspection law. however, it is becoming more and more the custom for the large packers to have all their products inspected without regard to their destination. the meats slaughtered in the locality in which they are consumed are the ones that receive the least supervision. the federal government has been especially active and efficient in the prevention of interstate commerce in cattle suffering with texas fever, and sheep attacked with scab and foot rot. through the agency of the bureau dipping tanks have been provided in all the great live stock markets for the disinfection of cattle and sheep when needed. several of the states have laws controlling the importation of diseased animals from other states and the transfer of them within the state. the following are the diseases most commonly mentioned in the laws of the several states: anthrax, black quarter, hog cholera, swine plague, rabies, glanders and tuberculosis. the law is generally enforced by a state veterinarian, whose acts are supervised either by a state live stock commission or the state secretary of agriculture or these two agencies acting conjointly. perhaps the disease which has required the greatest amount of attention in the several states is tuberculosis in milch cows. it is customary for this office to apply the tuberculin test, free of charge, under certain stipulations, to any herd upon the request of the owner and to supervise the slaughter and disposition of the reacting animals. in some states the owner is indemnified in part or in whole for his loss. the amount of indemnity as well as the general features of the law concerning the control of tuberculosis in domestic animals has been the subject of much controversy and cannot be said to have reached an altogether satisfactory solution in most states. the young farmer should clearly understand that under no circumstances can he afford to have a tuberculous animal in his herd. the contact of a diseased animal with other animals of the herd is certain to entail a greater loss than the destruction of the diseased animal. the farmer must in his own interest rear healthy animals whether or not it is necessary for the protection of the consumer. fish and game laws the motives underlying the enactment of laws concerning fish and game are varied. the controversies over these laws in the legislatures of the several states indicate that there is a belief, whatever may be the fact, that there are opposing interests; viz., those of the hunter or sportsman on the one hand, and those of the farmer or landowner on the other. the law of trespass has been one over which has raged much bitterness, both with regard to the form of the law to be enacted and concerning its subsequent enforcement. sportsmen have usually held that a distinction existed between wild animals occupying private property and domestic animals. the landowner has urged that others should not trespass upon his property for the purpose of shooting wild animals, although his proprietary right in them was no greater. in like manner, laws concerning the closed season, made to protect animals during the breeding period, are the subject of extended discussion and are being constantly changed; both because there is a difference of opinion concerning the habits of the different species and because the motive varies for maintaining the supply. some animals are protected on account of their benefit, supposed or real, to agriculture. other animals are protected because of their gaming qualities, even to the extent of sometimes injuring farm crops. the money spent by sportsmen in the pursuit of game is an element in the varied interests involved. humane motives and a desire to prevent the further restriction of a not too varied fauna have helped, also, to save certain species from extinction. on the other hand, in some states commercial interests are involved, as where large quantities of birds are taken for their plumage. some attempts have been made to introduce foreign species, as the japanese pheasant. it is, however, with fish that the most has been accomplished in replenishment. the federal government and several of the states have been active in regularly restocking, each season, certain streams with "fry" of edible and game fish. information concerning the open season can be obtained from the proper state officer. the fish and game laws are usually under the control of a commission with a secretary as the executive officer. chapter xxii rural forces the united states is a vast domain. its material resources are enormous. its fertile and easily tilled soil, its magnificent forests, its great stores of ore, coal, oil and gas; its fine water-power sites and its temperate and healthful climate have all contributed to the making of a prosperous and progressive nation. without these natural resources the united states could not be what it is. the waste of some of these resources is almost beyond belief. in mining, one-half the anthracite and one-third the soft coal is left in the ground in such a manner that it may never be economically recovered. a ton of coal will produce , pounds of coke, worth $ . , and pounds of sulphate of ammonia, worth cents. if all the nitrogen in coal which is turned into coke in pennsylvania were recovered, it would furnish enough of this element to supply the needs of every acre of tillable soil in that state. only about % of the wood in the trees now harvested in the united states is incorporated into buildings, apparatus and furniture. the rest is wasted in the process of cutting, sawing and manufacturing into the finished products. facts like these have led the nation to realize that the conservation of our natural resources is an immediate and pressing problem. the united states has, however, a greater inheritance than these great and beneficent gifts of nature and a more fundamental problem than the preservation and efficient use of them. in a single sentence, the greatest inheritance of the american people is their puritan ancestry. the word puritan is here used to apply not only to the new england pilgrims, but to all our early forefathers, whose traditions and practices have served to set this country apart from the other countries of the world. because of the traditions which have been handed down to us, we are healthier-bodied and cleaner-minded men and women. we are more efficient, not merely in making money, but in everything that goes to make a full and well-rounded life. it is well to realize the resources of other nations. the agricultural possibilities of france appear to the casual observer to compare favorably with any equal area in the united states. one may see farm land in italy which has been cultivated for at least two thousand years which is evidently as fertile as any of the limestone valleys of the atlantic states, the prairies of the mississippi valley or the palouse district of the northwest. russia has enormous areas of fertile soil. careful observers report that in manchuria there are great stretches of country, which today possess natural opportunities similar to those which the mississippi valley offered one hundred years ago. the recent stories of the deposits of coal and mineral wealth in china are almost fabulous. europe has rich mines, great forests and unrivaled water-power. some years ago a native of argentina and a native of the united states were dining together. the argentinian had served his government as consul to canada. he related that he had recently written an official letter in which he had occasion to refer to the people of canada and to those of this country. he explained that in alluding to the former he could say the canadians, but the latter he could not call americans, since his people were also americans. after due consideration he referred to us as "the yankees." "but," turning to his hearer, he said, with great emphasis, "i do not look upon the people of the united states as a nation, but as a new civilization." in other words, our nation is not simply one of fertile farms, enormous mines, great forests, unparalleled railroad systems, palatial stores, or wealthy cities, but he saw that we are a people of different economic, political, educational, social, moral and religious ideals. there are in every rural neighborhood certain forces whose objects are to increase the educational advantages, the social opportunities and the moral aspirations of the people. this subject need not be discussed merely in the abstract. there are in every community concrete evidences of these forces. there is the rural church. there is the rural school. in many localities are to be found, also, buildings, for social and fraternal purposes, as grange halls, structures for holding fairs and picnics. these are tangible evidences that there are rural agencies at work in the community whose chief purpose is to increase the educational advantages, the social opportunities and the moral aspirations of the people. how are these existing rural forces to be made more effective? if co-operation in financial affairs is essential under modern conditions, it is more needed in social matters. such co-operation does not imply that these separate forces shall be fused into a single one. each of them has its particular and peculiar work to do, but each should work in harmony and not in the spirit of antagonism with the others. there should be formed in each locality a committee for which the following name is proposed: the community committee of rural forces. emphasis should be placed upon the word "community." like all moral movements, progress must come from within, and not from without. the movement must be adapted to its environment. like the plants that grow there, it must be indigenous to the soil. [illustration: jared van wagenen, jr., has a son jared, d, who is the fifth of the name that has lived upon a farm of acres at lawyerville, n. y. mr. van wagenen graduated from cornell university in , and is a noted farmers' institute lecturer. he has taken great interest in the country church and the betterment of the rural community. the view shows the pond that furnishes the power for the farm's electric light plant. the plant was installed by mr. van wagenen with his own hands and has proved a really satisfying success.] [illustration: mr. lowell b. gable, glen gable farms, wybrooke, pa., a graduate of cornell university, is developing acres of land in chester county. he has a herd of guernsey cows in milk and is breeding percheron, registered polling horses and chester white hogs. mr. gable has been supervisor of the township for two years, during which time nine and one-half miles of macadam road have been built without materially increasing the taxes. mr. gable firmly believes that one of the best opportunities to be of help to a rural community lies in the work to be done for the improvement of social conditions--"to help make what little leisure there is clean and refreshing." hence on return from college he played baseball and football with local teams and helped out at every opportunity at dances, musicales and other social entertainments.] this committee should be composed of representatives of the churches, the schools, farmers' clubs, granges, fair associations, farmers' institutes; and other organizations which are striving to increase the educational advantages, the social opportunities and the moral aspirations of the people. oftentimes the object of these rural forces is confused with efforts to increase the financial prosperity of the farmer. it goes without saying that the maintenance of the fertility of the soil is essential to the food supply of the nation. the problems of the economic production of plants and animals are of great importance to the prosperity of the farmer. the idea, however, that the proper solution of these economic problems is to be the means of solving the educational, social and religious problems is simply putting the cart before the horse. economic questions can only be satisfactorily adjusted through the application of intelligence and right ideas. let it be supposed that when a young man decides to pay attention to a young woman that instead of meeting her at the church door, or it may be at the railway station, it is considered better form for him to get permission of the mother to call upon the young woman in her own home. this is the most fundamental question in every neighborhood. what has it to do with the price of wheat? this illustration has been used to emphasize two points. first, there are many problems in every community that are in no way related to the material prosperity of the neighborhood. second, there is, at present, no single force in the community with sufficient influence to cope properly with many of these problems. a young college graduate who is now managing eight hundred acres of land recently wrote: "i firmly believe that one of the best opportunities to be of help to a rural community lies in the work that is to be done for the improvement of social conditions--to help make what little leisure there is clean and refreshing." hence on return from college this young man has found time to play football and baseball with local teams and to help whenever opportunity offered at dances, musicales and similar entertainments. games and other forms of recreation may be clean and wholesome, or they may be quite the reverse. it would be the duty of the community committee to see that dances occurred under proper environment--not next an open saloon--and that the young women were properly chaperoned. in many communities the boys and girls are almost wholly dependent upon the neighboring towns for their amusement. this condition may or may not be desirable. if the town and country are virtually one community, there is every reason why the boys and girls from the farms should find recreation and social intercourse with the boys and girls of the village. it is a relationship that should be fostered wherever possible. when, however, the town and the country are separate communities, which prevent the ordinary social relationships, it is usually unfortunate when the young people of the one community are dependent upon the other community for their amusements. a deeply earnest man recently said: "i was born and raised upon the farm. i never knew a dull day in my life. i went fishing. i went hunting and----" "stop right there," said the listener. "there is not the same opportunity today for a boy to go hunting that there was when you were a boy." "that is true." "our ideas about such things have changed, also." "yes," he replied, humbly enough, for he was a man of fine fiber. "i propose a substitute," said the listener. "there is much more pleasure and recreation to be obtained from photographing animals than from killing them. what is needed in every rural community is a camera club." when a boy wishes to go hunting, he merely has to buckle on his ammunition pouch, shoulder his gun and he is ready. a camera club, however, requires a social organization and a social center. the community committee would thus be required to decide whether the facilities for developing and printing pictures may best be located at the church, the schoolhouse, the grange hall or elsewhere. a little reflection will show how many possibilities such a club might have on its social, moral and educational side. the suggestion has been made here, however, only as an illustration of the problems which arise when a rural community is organized for social welfare. the organization of a book club, or a magazine club in a rural community presents precisely the same problems. some method must be devised for exchanging the books or magazines. whether they are exchanged at the church, the grange hall or through the school children will depend upon local conditions requiring a community committee to decide. this community committee will do something more than reach immediate results. it may project its influence far into the future. not all of life is comprised in a porcelain bathtub and nickel adornments. nevertheless modern methods of heating and plumbing are desirable in the country as well as in the city. in indiana there is a one-room school building. in the basement there has been placed a furnace and a gasoline engine. the engine is used not only to teach the boys how to run a gasoline engine, but it makes possible a modern system of plumbing. it is well known that many of the states within the past decade have voted to abolish or very materially restrict the sale of alcoholic beverages. no great temperance orators have roused the people as was the case thirty years or more ago. why, then, has such progress been made in recent years? in large part because twenty-five years ago, the teaching of physiology was introduced into the public schools, which taught the evil effects of alcohol to the human system. during the past decade young men who studied these physiologies have been voting. what has the teaching of physiology to do with the one-room schoolhouse in indiana with its modern system of plumbing? the girls between the ages of six and fourteen are now becoming accustomed to modern systems of plumbing. when they grow older and marry they will find some way to introduce similar conveniences into their homes without regard to the price of wheat. a wise community committee will find many ways to influence future generations. such a committee would be a priceless heritage to any community. the natural resources of the united states are necessary to the prosperity of the people. the preservation and economic use of these resources are of vast importance. the natural resources of the world were, however, as great five thousand years ago as they are today. the soil was no less fertile then than now. the difference between the prosperity of the human race at these two periods is caused by a difference in human motive and efficiency. it is the result of ideals and knowledge. sit at the banquet table with men who are the real powers in shaping the affairs of the world. the chances are that the champagne remains untouched. these men are not in the habit of partaking of midnight suppers. they must keep themselves fit for the next day's work. they have the approval and loyalty of their wives because they deserve it. in other words, the men who do the world's work are not drunkards. they are not gluttons. they are not libertines. they are efficient because they have healthy bodies and clean minds. it is this efficiency which the critic from argentina saw when he said, "i do not look upon the people of the united states as a nation, but as a new civilization." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- standard books published by orange judd company new york chicago ashland building people's gas building - fourth avenue michigan avenue ---------- _any of these books will be sent by mail, postpaid, to any part of the world, on receipt of catalog price. we are always happy to correspond with our patrons, and cordially invite them to address us on any matter pertaining to rural books. send for our large illustrated catalog, free on application._ ---------------------------------------- =first principles of soil fertility= by alfred vivian. there is no subject of more vital importance to the farmer than that of the best method of maintaining the fertility of the soil. the very evident decrease in the fertility of those soils which have been under cultivation for a number of years, combined with the increased competition and the advanced price of labor, have convinced the intelligent farmer that the agriculture of the future must be based upon more rational practices than those which have been followed in the past. we have felt for some time that there was a place for a brief, and at the same time comprehensive, treatise on this important subject of soil fertility. professor vivian's experience as a teacher in the short winter courses has admirably fitted him to present this matter in a popular style. in this little book he has given the gist of the subject in plain language, practically devoid of technical and scientific terms. it is pre-eminently a "first book," and will be found especially valuable to those who desire an introduction to the subject, and who intend to do subsequent reading. illustrated. x inches. pages. cloth. net, $ . =the study of corn= by prof. v. m. shoesmith. a most helpful book to all farmers and students interested in the selection and improvement of corn. it is profusely illustrated from photographs, all of which carry their own story and contribute their part in making pictures and text matter a clear, concise and interesting study of corn. illustrated. x inches. pages. cloth. net, $ . =profitable stock raising= by clarence a. shamel. this book covers fully the principles of breeding and feeding for both fat stock and dairying type. it tells of sheep and mutton raising, hot house lambs, the swine industry and the horse market. finally, he tells of the preparation of stock for the market and how to prepare it so that it will bring a high market price. live stock is the most important feature of farm life, and statistics show a production far short of the actual requirements. there are many problems to be faced in the profitable production of stock, and these are fully and comprehensively covered in mr. shamel's new book. illustrated. x inches. pages. cloth. net, $ . =the business of dairying= by c. b. lane. the author of this practical little book is to be congratulated on the successful manner in which he has treated so important a subject. it has been prepared for the use of dairy students, producers and handlers of milk, and all who make dairying a business. its purpose is to present in a clear and concise manner various business methods and systems which will help the dairyman to reap greater profits. this book meets the needs of the average dairy farmer, and if carefully followed will lead to successful dairying. it may also be used as an elementary textbook for colleges, and especially in short-course classes. illustrated. x inches. pages. cloth. net, $ . =questions and answers on buttermaking= by chas a. publow. this book is entirely different from the usual type of dairy books, and is undoubtedly in a class by itself. the entire subject of butter-making in all its branches has been most thoroughly treated, and many new and important features have been added. the tests for moisture, salt and acid have received special attention, as have also the questions on cream separation, pasteurization, commercial starters, cream ripening, cream overrun, marketing of butter, and creamery management. illustrated. x inches. pages. cloth. net, $ . =questions and answers on milk and milk testing= by chas. a. publow, and hugh c. troy. a book that no student in the dairy industry can afford to be without. no other treatise of its kind is available, and no book of its size gives so much practical and useful information in the study of milk and milk products. illustrated. x inches. pages. cloth. net, $ . =soils= by charles william burkett, director kansas agricultural experiment station. the most complete and popular work of the kind ever published. as a rule, a book of this sort is dry and uninteresting, but in this case it reads like a novel. the author has put into it his individuality. the story of the properties of the soils, their improvement and management, as well as a discussion of the problems of crop growing and crop feeding, make this book equally valuable to the farmer, student and teacher. illustrated. pages. - / x inches. cloth. net, $ . =weeds of the farm garden= by l. h. pammel. the enormous losses, amounting to several hundred million dollars annually in the united states, caused by weeds stimulate us to adopt a better system of agriculture. the weed question is, therefore, a most important and vital one for american farmers. this treatise will enable the farmer to treat his field to remove weeds. the book is profusely illustrated by photographs and drawings made expressly for this work, and will prove invaluable to every farmer, land owner, gardener and park superintendent. x inches. pages. cloth. net, $ . =farm machinery and farm motors= by j. b. davidson and l. w. chase. farm machinery and farm motors is the first american book published on the subject of farm machinery since that written by j. j. thomas in . this was before the development of many of the more important farm machines, and the general application of power to the work of the farm. modern farm machinery is indispensable in present-day farming operations, and a practical book like farm machinery and farm motors will fill a much-felt need. the book has been written from lectures used by the authors before their classes for several years, and which were prepared from practical experience and a thorough review of the literature pertaining to the subject. although written primarily as a textbook, it is equally useful for the practical farmer. profusely illustrated. - / x inches. pages. cloth. net, $ . =the book of wheat= by p. t. dondlinger. this book comprises a complete study of everything pertaining to wheat. it is the work of a student of economic as well as agricultural conditions, well fitted by the broad experience in both practical and theoretical lines to tell the whole story in a condensed form. it is designed for the farmer, the teacher, and the student as well. illustrated. - / x inches. pages. cloth. net, $ . =farmer's cyclopedia= =of agriculture= _a compendium of agricultural science and practice on farm, orchard and garden crops, and the feeding and diseases of farm animals._ =_by_ earley vernon wilcox, ph. d.= =_and_ clarence beaman smith, m. s.= _associate editors in the office of experiment stations, united states department of agriculture_ this is a new, practical, and complete presentation of the whole subject of agriculture in its broadest sense. it is designed for the use of agriculturists who desire up-to-date, reliable information on all matters pertaining to crops and stock, but more particularly for the actual farmer. the volume contains =detailed directions for the culture of every important field, orchard, and garden crop= grown in america, together with descriptions of their chief insect pests and fungous diseases, and remedies for their control. it contains an account of modern methods in feeding and handling all farm stock, including poultry. the diseases which affect different farm animals and poultry are described, and the most recent remedies suggested for controlling them. every bit of this vast mass of new and useful information is authoritative, practical and easily found, and no effort has been spared to include all desirable details. there are between , and , topics covered in these references, and it contains royal vo pages and nearly superb half-tone and other original illustrations, making the most perfect cyclopedia of agriculture ever attempted. =_handsomely bound in cloth. $ . ; half morocco (very sumptuous), $ . . postpaid_= ---------------------------------------- orange judd company, - fourth avenue, new york, n. y. people's gas building, chicago, ill. produced from images produced by core historical literature in agriculture (chla), cornell university) [illustration: author] soil culture; containing a comprehensive view of agriculture, horticulture, pomology, domestic animals, rural economy, and agricultural literature. by j. h. walden, a. m. illustrated by numerous engravings new york: published by robert sears, william street. . entered, according to act of congress, in the year , by j. h. walden, in the clerk's office of the district court of the united states, in and for the northern district of illinois. savage & mccrea, stereotypers, c. a. alvord, printer, chambers street, n.y. no. vandewater street, n.y. * * * * * to the practical cultivators of the soil, the true lords of the manor, this volume is dedicated, by their sincere friend, the author. * * * * * prefatory note to the reader. if "he who causes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before, is a benefactor of his race," he is not less so who imparts to millions a knowledge of the methods by which it is done. the last half century has been the era of experiments and writing on the cultivation of the soil. the result has been the acquisition of more knowledge on the subjects embraced, than the world had attained in all its previous history. that knowledge is scattered through many volumes of numerous periodicals and books, and interspersed with many theories, and much speculation, that can never be valuable in practice. in the form in which it is presented, it confuses, rather than aids, the great mass of cultivators. hence the prejudice against "_book-farming_." provided established facts only are presented, they are none the worse for being printed. the object of this volume is to condense, and present in an intelligible form, all important established facts in the science of soil-culture. the author claims originality, as to the discovery of facts and principles, in but few cases. during ten years of preparatory study for this work, he has sought the rewards of industry, in sifting out the certain and the useful from the hypothetical and the fanciful, and the results of judicious discrimination between fallacy and just reasoning, in support of theories. this volume is designed to be a complete manual for all but amateur cultivators. while it is believed that he who follows its directions will be certain of success, it is not intended to disparage the merits of other works, but to encourage and extend their perusal. we can not too strongly recommend to young culturists to keep themselves well posted in this kind of literature, and give to every discovery and invention in this science a fair trial; not on a large scale, so as to sink money in fruitless experiments, but sufficient to afford a sure test of their real value. to no class of men is study more important than to soil-culturists. it is believed that the directions here given, if followed, will save millions of dollars annually to that class of cultivators who can least afford to waste time and money in experimenting. with beginners it is important to be successful at first; which is impossible without availing themselves of the experience of others. while we thus aim to give our volume this exclusively practical form, and utilitarian character, we do not undervalue the labors of amateur cultivators. a meed of praise is due to those who are willing to spend time and money in experiments, by which great truths are evolved for the benefit of mankind. perfection is not claimed for this volume. but the author hopes nothing will be found here that is untrue. a fear of inserting errors may have induced us to omit some things that may yet prove valuable. if anything seems to be at variance with a cultivator's observation, in a given locality, he will discover in our general principles on climate, soil, and location, that it is a natural result. _accurate as far as we go_ has been our motto. it is hoped the form is most convenient. all is arranged under one alphabet, with a complete index. the author has consulted many intelligent cultivators and writers, who, without exception, approve his plan. all agree in saying that it is designed to fill a place not occupied by any other single volume in the language. it is impossible, without cumbering the volume, to give suitable credit to the authors and persons consulted. suffice it to say, the author has carefully studied all the works mentioned in this volume, and availed himself of a great variety of verbal suggestions, by scientific and practical men. if this work shall, in any good degree, serve the purpose for which it is intended, it will amply reward the author for an amount of labor, experiment, observation, and study, appreciable only by few. j. h. walden. new york, _january , _. illustrations. page apple-worms apple-tree borer caterpillar eggs canker-worm moths baldwin apple bellflower apple early harvest apple spitzbergen apple rhode island greening fall pippin newtown pippin rambo apple rome beauty westfield seek-no-further northern spy roxbury russet swaar apple maiden's blush barberries working bee, queen and drone high-bush blackberry budding (six illustrations) cherries (six illustrations) _milking qualities of cows illustrated_ the flanders cow the selvage cow the curveline cow the bicorn cow the demijohn cow the square escutcheon cow the lemousine cow the horizontal cut cow bastards cranberries fig cleft and tongue grafting isabella grapes catawba grapes rebecca grapes delaware grapes hedge-pruning ( engravings) ground plan of farm buildings ground plan of piggery ground plan of country residence, farm buildings, fruit garden, and grounds laying out curves illustrated ground plan of farm-house summer-house laborer's cottage ground plan of laborer's cottage italian farm-house ground plan of italian farm-house neglected peach-tree properly-trimmed peach-tree plan of a pear-orchard bartlett pear beurré diel pear white doyenne pear flemish beauty seckel gray doyenne pear the curculio lawrence's favorite plum imperial gage egg-plum green gage jefferson plum washington plum french merino ram shepherdia, or buffalo berry strawberry blossoms fan training (four illustrations) , horizontal training (two illustrations) conical training (four illustrations) soil culture. acclimation. this is the art of successfully changing fruits or plants from one climate to another. removal to a colder climate should be effected in the spring, and to a warmer one in the fall. this may be done by scions or seeds. by seeds is better, in all cases in which they will produce the same varieties. very few imported apple or pear trees are valuable in this country; while our finest varieties, perfectly adapted to our climate, were raised from seeds of foreign fruits and their descendants. the same is true of the extremes of this country. baldwin apple-trees, forty or fifty years old, are perfectly hardy in the colder parts of new england; while the same imported from warmer sections of the union fail in severe winters. this fact has given many new localities the reputation of being poor fruit-regions. when we remove fruit-trees to a similar climate in a new country, they flourish well, and we call it a good fruit-country. remove trees from the same nursery to a different climate and soil, and they are not hardy and vigorous, and we call it a poor fruit-country. these two localities may be equally good for fruit, with suitable care in acclimating the tree and preparing the soil. thus the rich prairies of central illinois are often said not to be adapted to fruit. give time to raise fruits from the seed, and to apply the principles of acclimation, and those rich prairies will be among the great fruit-growing regions of the world. two things are essential to successful fruit-culture, on all the alluvial soils of the northwest: raise from seed, and prune closely and head-in short, and thus put back and strengthen the trees for the first ten years, and no more complaints will be heard. the peach has been gradually acclimated, until, transplanted from perpetual summer, it successfully endures a temperature of thirty-five degrees below zero. this prince of fruits will yet be successfully grown even beyond the northern limits of minnesota. many vegetables may also be grown in very different climates, by annually importing the seed from localities where they naturally flourish. sweet potatoes are thus grown abundantly in massachusetts. we wonder this subject has received so little attention. we commend these brief hints to the earnest consideration of all practical cultivators, hoping they may be of great value in the results to which they may lead. almonds. almonds are natives of several parts of asia and africa. they perfectly resemble the peach in all but the fruit. the peach and almond grow well, budded into each other. in france, almond-stocks are preferred for the peach. their cultivation and propagation are in all respects the same as the peach. _varieties._-- . long, hard shell. this is the best for cultivation in western and middle states, and in all cold regions. very ornamental. . common sweet. productive in middle states, but not so good as the first. . ladies' thin shell. fruit large, long, and sweet; the very best variety, but not so hardy as the first two. grows well in warm locations, with slight protection in winter. . the bitter. large, with very ornamental leaves and blossoms. fruit bitter, and yielding that deadly poison, prussic acid. . peach almond. so called from having a pulp equal to a poor peach. not hardy in northern climates. other varieties are named, but are of no consequence to the practical cultivator. . two varieties of ornamental almonds are very beautiful in spring--the large, double flowering, and the well-known dwarf flowering. but we regard peach-blossoms quite as ornamental, and the ripe peaches much more so, and so prefer to cultivate them. almonds are extensively cultivated in the south of europe, especially in portugal, as an article of commerce. they will grow equally well in this country; but labor is so cheap in europe, that american cultivators can not compete with it in the almond market. but every one owning land should cultivate a few as a family luxury. apples. the original of all our apples was the wild european crab. we have in this country several native crabs larger and better than the european; but they have not yet, as we are aware, been developed into fine apples. apple-trees are hardy and long-lived, doing well for one hundred and fifty years. highly-cultivated trees, however, are thought to last only about fifty years. an apple-tree, imported from england, produced fruit in connecticut at the age of two hundred and eight years. the apple is the most valuable of all fruits. the peach, the best pears, the strawberries, and others, are all delicious in their day; but apples are adapted to a greater variety of uses, and are in perfection all the year; the earliest may be used in june, and the latest may be kept until that time next year. as an article of food, they are very valuable on account of both their nutritive and medicinal qualities. as a gentle laxative, they are invaluable for children, who should always be allowed to eat ripe apples as they please, when they can be afforded. children will not long be inclined to eat ripe fruit to their injury. an almost exclusive diet of baked sweet apples and milk is recorded as having cured chronic cases of consumption, and other diseases caused by too rich food. let dyspeptics vary the mode of preparing and using an apple diet, until it agrees with them, and many aggravated cases may be cured without medicine. it is strange how the idea has gained so much currency that apples, although a pleasant luxury, are not sufficiently nutritious for a valuable article of diet. there is no other fruit or vegetable in general use that contains such a proportion of nutriment. it has been ascertained in germany, by a long course of experiments, that men will perform more labor, endure more fatigue, and be more healthy, on an apple diet, than on that universal indispensable for the poor, the potato. apples are more valuable than potatoes for food. they are equally valuable as food for fowls, swine, sheep, cattle, and horses. hogs have been well fattened on apples alone. cooked with other vegetables, and mixed with a little ground grain or bran, they are an economical food for fattening pork or beef. sweet or slightly-acid apples, fed to neat stock or horses, will prevent disease, and keep the animals in fine condition. for human food they may be cooked in a greater variety of ways than almost any other article. apple-cider is valuable for some uses. it makes the best vinegar in general use, and, when well made and bottled, is better than most of our wines for invalids. apple-molasses, or boiled cider, which is sweet-apple cider boiled down until it will not ferment, is excellent in cookery. apple-butter is highly esteemed in many families. dried apples are an important article of commerce. green apples are also exported to most parts of the world. notwithstanding the increased attention to their cultivation during the last half-century, their market value is steadily increasing, and doubtless will be, for the best varieties, for the next five hundred years. it does not cost more than five or six cents per bushel to raise apples; hence they are one of the most profitable crops a farmer can raise. no farm, therefore, is complete without a good orchard. the man who owns but five acres of land should have at least two acres in fruit-trees. _soil._--apples will succeed well on any soil that will produce good cabbages, potatoes, or indian corn. land needs as much manure and care for apple-trees as for potatoes. rough hillsides and broken lands, unsuitable for general cultivation, may be made very valuable in orchards. it must be enriched, if not originally so, and kept clean about the trees. on no crop does good culture pay better. many suppose that an apple-tree, being a great grower, will take care of itself after having attained a moderate size. whoever observes the great and rapid growth of apple-trees must see, that, when the ground is nearly covered with them, they must make a great draft on the soil. to secure health and increased value, the deficiency must be supplied in manure and cultivation. the quantity and quality of the fruit depend mainly on the condition of the land. the kinds and proportions of manures best for an apple-orchard are important practical questions. we give a chemical analysis of the ashes of the apple-tree, which will indicate, even to the unlearned, the manure that will probably be needed:-- _analysis of the ash of the apple-tree._ sap-wood. heart-wood. bark of trunk. potash . . . soda . . . chloride of sodium . . . sulphate of lime . . . phosphate of peroxyde } . . . of iron } phosphate of lime . . . phosphate of magnesia . . carbonic acid . . . lime . . . magnesia . . . silicia . . . soluble silicia . . . organic matter . . . ______ _______ _______ . . . this table will indicate the application of plenty of wood-ashes and charcoal; lime in hair, bones, horn-shavings, old plaster, common lime, and a little common salt. lime and ashes, or dissolved potash, are indispensable on an old orchard; they will improve the fruit one half, both in quantity and quality. _propagation._--this is done mainly by seeds, budding and grafting. the best method is by common cleft-grafting on all stocks large enough, and by whip or tongue grafting on all others. (see under article, grafting.) grafting into the sycamore is recommended by some. the scions are said to grow profusely, and to bear early and abundantly; but they are apt to be killed by cold winters. we do not recommend it. almost everything does best budded or grafted into vigorous stocks of its own nature. root-grafting, as it is termed,--that is, cutting up roots into pieces three or four inches long, and putting a scion into each--has been a matter of much discussion and diversity of opinion. it is certainly a means of most rapidly multiplying a given variety, and is therefore profitable to the nurseryman. for ourselves, we should prefer trees grafted just above, or at the ground, using the whole stock for one tree. we do not, however, undertake to settle this controverted point. our minds are fixed against it. others must do as they please. propagation by seed is thought to be entirely uncertain, because, as is supposed, the seeds will not reproduce their own varieties. we consider this far from being an established fact. when grafts are put into large trees, high up from the ground, their fruit may be somewhat modified by the stock. there is also a slight tendency in the seeds of all grafts to return to the varieties from which they descended. but we believe the general rule to be, that the seeds of grafts, put in at the ground and standing alone, will generally produce the same varieties of fruit. the most prominent obstacle in the way of this reproduction is the presence of other varieties, which mix in the blossom. the planting of seeds from any mixed orchard can never settle this question, because they are never pure. propagation by seeds, then, is an inconvenient method, only to be resorted to for purposes of acclimation. but it is so seldom we have a good bearing apple-tree so far removed from others as not to be affected by the blossoms, that we generally get from seeds a modification of varieties. raising suitable stocks for grafting is done by planting seeds in drills thirty inches apart, and keeping clear of weeds until they are large enough to graft. the soil should be made very rich, to save time in their growth. land where root-crops grew the previous year is the best. if kept clear of weeds, on rich, deep soil, from one to two thirds of them will be large enough for whip-grafting after the first year's growth. the pomice from the cider-mill is often planted. it is better to separate the seeds, and plant them with a seed-drill. they will then be in straight, narrow rows, allowing the cultivator and hoe to pass close by them, and thus save two thirds of the cost of cultivation. the question of keeping seeds dry or moist until planting is one of some importance. most seeds are better for being kept slightly moist until planted; but with the apple it makes no difference. keep apple-seeds dry and spread, as they are apt to heat. freezing them is not of the slightest importance. if you plant pomice, put in a little lime or ashes to counteract the acid. for winter-grafting, pull the seedlings that are of suitable size, cut off the tops eight inches from the root, and pack in moist sand in a cellar that will not freeze. after grafting, tie them up in bunches, and pack in tight boxes of moist sand or sawdust. _transplanting._--this is fully treated elsewhere in this work. we give under each fruit only what is peculiar to that species. in mild climates transplant in the fall, and in cold in the spring. spring-planting must never be done until the soil has become dry enough to be made fine. a thoroughly-pulverized soil is the great essential of successful transplanting. trees for spring-planting should always be taken up before the commencement of vegetation. but in very wet springs, this occurs before the ground becomes sufficiently dry; it is then best to take up the trees and heel them in, and keep them until the soil is suitable. the place for an apple-tree should be made larger than for any other tree, because its roots are wide-spreading, like its branches. the earth should be thrown out to the depth of twenty inches, and four or five feet square, for an ordinary-sized tree. this, however, will not do on a heavy clay subsoil, for it would form a basin to hold water and injure the tree. a ditch, as low as the bottom of the holes, should extend from tree to tree, and running out of the orchard, constructed in the usual method of drains, and, whatever be the subsoil, the trees will flourish. the usual compost to manure the trees in transplanting will be found elsewhere. in the bottom of these places for apple-trees should be thrown a plenty of cobblestones, with a few sods, and a little decaying wood and coarse manure. we know of nothing so good under an apple-tree as small stones; the tree will always be the larger and thriftier for it. this is, in a degree, beneficial to other fruits, but peculiarly so to the apple. _size for transplanting._--small trees usually do best. large trees are often transplanted with the hope of having an abundance of fruit earlier. this usually defeats the object. the large trees will bear a little fruit earlier than the small ones; but the injury by removal is so much greater, that the small stocky trees come into full, regular bearing much the soonest. from five to eight feet high is often most convenient for field-orchard culture. but, wherever we can take care of them, it is better to set out smaller trees; they will do better for years. a suitable drain, extending through the orchard, under each row of trees, will make a good orchard on low, wet land. _trimming at the time of transplanting._--injured roots should be removed as in the general directions under transplanting. but the idea of cutting off most of the top is a very serious error. when large trees are transplanted, which must necessarily lose many of their roots in removal, a corresponding portion of the top must be separated; but in no other case. the leaves are the lungs of the tree. how shall it have vitality if most of them are removed? it is like destroying one lung and half of the other, and then expect a man to be in vigorous health. we have often seen the most of two years' growth of trees lost by such reckless pruning. if the roots are tolerably whole and sound, leave the top so. a peach-tree needs to be trimmed much closer when transplanted, because it has so many more buds to throw out leaves. _mulching._--this is quite as beneficial to apple-trees as to all transplanted trees. well done, it preserves a regularity of moisture that almost insures the life of the tree. _pruning._--the tops should be kept open and exposed to the sun, the cross limbs cut out, and everything removed that shows decided symptoms of decay. the productiveness of apple-trees depends very much upon pruning very sparingly and judiciously. there are two ways to keep an open top: one is, to allow many large limbs to grow, and cut out most of the small ones, thus leaving a large collection of bare poles without anything on which the fruit can grow;--the other method is to allow few limbs to grow large, and keep them well covered with small twigs, which always bear the fruit. the latter method will produce two or three times as much fruit as the former. the head of an apple-tree should be formed at a height that will allow a team to pass around under its branches. _distance apart._--in a full-grown orchard, that is designed to cover the ground, the trees should be two rods (thirty-three feet) apart. when it is designed always to cultivate the ground, and land is plenty, set them fifty or sixty feet apart. you will be likely always to have fine fruit, and a crop on the land beside. our recommendation to every one is to set out all orchards, of whatever fruit, so as to have them cover the whole ground when in maturity. among apple-trees, dwarf pears, peaches, or quinces, may be set, which will be profitable before the apples need all the ground. _bearing years._--a cultivator may have a part of his orchard bear one year, and the remainder the next, or he may have them all bear every year. there are two reasons why a tree bears full this year and will not bear the next. one is, it is allowed to have such a superabundance of fruit to mature this year, that it has no strength to mature fruit-buds for the next, and hence a barren year; the other reason is, a want of proper culture and the specific manures for the apple. manure highly, keep off the insects, cultivate well, and do not allow too much to remain on the trees one season, and you will have a good crop every year. but if one would let his trees take the natural course, but wishes to change the bearing year of half of his orchard, he can accomplish it by removing the blossoms or young fruit from a part of his trees on the bearing year, and those trees having no fruit to mature will put forth an abundance of buds for fruit the following season; thus the fruit-season will be changed without lessening the productiveness. go through a fruit-region in what is called the non-bearing seasons, and you will find some orchards and some trees very full of fruit. trees of the same variety in another orchard near by will have very little fruit. this shows that the bearing season is a matter of mere habit, in all except what is determined by late frosts. this fact may be turned to great pecuniary value, by producing an abundance of apples every year. _plowing and pasturing._--an apple-orchard should be often plowed, but not too deep among the roots. when not actually under the plow, it should be pastured, with fowls, calves, or sheep. swine are recommended, as they will eat all the apples that fall prematurely, and with them the worms that made them fall. but we have often seen hogs, by their rooting and rubbing, kill the trees. better to pick up the apples that fall too early, and give them to the swine. turkeys and hens in an orchard will do much to destroy the various insects. they may be removed for a short time when they begin to peck the ripening fruit. orchards pastured by sheep are said not to be infested with caterpillars. sheep pastured and salted under apple-trees greatly enrich the soil, and in those elements peculiarly beneficial. _enemies._--there are several of these that are quite destructive, when not properly guarded against. two things are necessary, and, united and thoroughly performed, they afford a remedy or a preventive for most of the depredations of all insects: . keep the trees well cleared of all rough, loose bark, which affords so many hiding-places for insects. . wash the trunks and large limbs of the trees, twice between the th of may and the th of august, with a ley of wood-ashes or dissolved potash. apple-trees will bear it strong enough to kill some of the finest cherries. we add another very effectual wash. let cultivators choose between the two. into two gallons of water put two quarts of soft-soap and one fourth pound of sulphur. if you add tobacco-juice, or any other very offensive article, it will be still better. _apple-worm._--the insect that produces this worm lays its egg in the blossom-end of the young apple. that egg makes a worm that passes down about the core and ruins the fruit. apples so affected will fall prematurely, and should be picked up and fed to swine. this done every day during their falling, which does not last a great while, will remedy the evil in two seasons. the worm that crawls from the fallen apple gets into crevices in rough bark, and spins his cocoon, in which he remains till the following spring. bonfires, for a few evenings in the fore part of june, in an orchard infested with moths, will destroy vast numbers of them, before they have deposited their eggs. this can not be too strongly insisted upon. [illustration: apple-worms. _a_ the young worm. _b_ the full-grown worm. _c_ the same magnified. _d_ cocoon. _e_ chrysalis. _f_ perfect insect. _g_ the same magnified. _h i_ passage of the worm in the fruit. _j_ worm in the fruit. _k_ place of egress.] _bark-louse._--dull white, oval scales, one tenth of an inch long, which sometimes appear on the stems of trees in vast numbers, may be destroyed by the wash recommended above. _woolly aphis_--called in europe by the misnomer, _american blight_--is very destructive across the water, but does not exist extensively on this side. it is supposed to exist, in this country, only where it has been introduced with imported trees. it appears as a white downy substance in the small forks of trees. this is composed of a large number of very minute woolly lice, which increase with wonderful rapidity. they are easily destroyed by washing with diluted sulphuric acid--three fourths of an ounce, by measure, from the druggist's--and seven and a half ounces of water, applied by a rag tied to the end of a stick. the operator must keep it from his clothes. after the first rain this is perfectly effectual. _apple-tree borer._--this is a fleshy-white grub, found in the trunks of the trees. it enters at the surface of the ground where the bark is tender, and either girdles or thoroughly perforates the tree, causing its death. this is produced by a brown and white striped beetle about half an inch long. it does not go through its different stages annually, but remains a grub two or three years. it finally comes out in its winged state, early in june, flying in the night and laying its eggs. if the borers are already in the tree, they may be killed by cutting out, or by a steel wire thrust into their holes. but better prevent them. this can be done effectually by placing a small mound of ashes or lime around each tree early in the spring. on nursery-trees their attacks may be prevented by washing with a solution of potash--two pounds in eight quarts of water. as this is a good manure, as well as a great remedy for insects, it had better be used every season. [illustration: borer. eggs. beetle.] _caterpillars_ are the product of a miller of a reddish-brown color, measuring about an inch and a half when flying. they deposit many eggs about the forks and near the extremities of young branches. these hatch in spring, in season for the young foliage, on which they feed voraciously. when neglected for two or three years, they often defoliate large trees. the habits of the caterpillar are favorable to their destruction. they weave their webs in forks of trees, and are always at home in rainy weather, and in the morning till nine o'clock. the remedy is to kill them. this is most effectually done by a sponge on the end of a pole, dipped in strong spirits of ammonia. each one touched by it is instantly killed, and it is not difficult to reach them all. they may also be rubbed off with a brush or swab on the end of a pole, and burned. the principle is to get them off, web and all, and destroy them. this can always be effectually done, if attended to early in the season, and early in the morning. if any have been missed, and come out in insects to deposite more eggs, bonfires are most effectual. these should be made of shavings, in different parts of the orchard, and about the middle of june, earlier or later, according to latitude and season. the ends of twigs on which the eggs are laid in bunches of hundreds (see figure), may be cut off in the fall and destroyed. as this can be done with pruning-shears, it may be an economical method of destroying them. [illustration: caterpillar eggs. canker-worm moths, male and female.] _canker-worm._--the male moth has pale-ash colored wings, with a black dot, and is about an inch across. the female has no wings, is oval in form, dark-ash colored above, and gray underneath. these rise from the ground as early in spring as the frost is out. some few rise in the fall. the females travel slowly up the body of the tree, while the winged males fly about to pair with them. soon you may discover the eggs laid, always in rows, in forks of branches and among the young twigs. every female lays nearly a hundred, and covers them over carefully with a transparent, waterproof glue. the eggs hatch from may st to june st, according to the latitude and season, and come out an ash-colored worm with a yellow stripe. they are very voracious, sometimes entirely stripping an orchard of its foliage. at the end of about four weeks they descend to the ground, to remain in a chrysalis state, about four inches below the surface, until the following spring. these worms are very destructive in some parts of new england, and have been already very annoying, as far west as iowa. they will be likely to be transported all over the country on young trees. many remedies are proposed, but to present them all is only to confuse. the best of anything is sufficient. we present two, for the benefit of two classes of persons. for all who have care enough to attend to it, the best remedy is to bind a handful of straw around the tree, two feet from the ground, tied on with one band, and the ends allowed to stand out from the tree. the females, who can not fly, but only ascend the trunk by crawling, will get up under the straw, and may easily be killed, by striking a covered mallet on the straw, and against the tree below the band. this should be attended to every day during the short season of their ascent, and all will be destroyed. burn the straw about the last of may. but those who are too indolent or busy to do this often till their season is past, may melt india-rubber over a hot fire, and smear bandages of cloth or leather previously put tight around the tree. this will prevent the female moth from crossing and reaching the limbs. tar is used, but india-rubber is better, as weather will not injure it as it will tar, so as to allow the moth to pass over. put this on early and well, and let it remain till the last of may. but the first, the process of killing them, is far the best. _gathering-and preserving._--all fruit, designed to be kept even for a few weeks, should be picked, and not shaken off, and laid, not dropped into a basket, and with equal care put into the barrels in which it is to be kept or transported. the barrel should be slightly shaken and filled entirely full. let it stand open two days, to allow the fruit to sweat and throw off the excessive moisture. then head up tight, and keep in a cool open shed until freezing weather; then keep where they can occasionally have good air, and in as cool a place as possible, without danger of freezing. of all the methods of keeping apples on shelves, buried as potatoes, in various other articles, as chaff, sawdust, &c., this is, on the whole, the best and cheapest. wrapping the apples in paper before putting them into the barrels, may be an improvement. apples gathered just before hard frosts, or as they are beginning to ripen, but before many have fallen from the trees, and packed as above, and the barrels laid on their sides in a good dry, dark cellar, where air can occasionally be admitted, can be kept in perfection from six to eight weeks, after the ordinary time for their decay. apples for cider, or other immediate use, may be shaken off upon mats or blankets spread under the tree for that purpose. they are not quite so valuable, but it saves times in gathering. _varieties_ are exceedingly numerous and uncertain. cole estimates that two millions of varieties have been produced in the single state of maine, and that thousands of kinds may there be found superior to those generally recommended in the fruit-books. the minute description of fruits is not of the least use to one out of ten thousand cultivators. the best pomologists differ in the names and descriptions of the various fruits. some varieties have as many as twenty-five synonyms. of what use, then, is the minute description of the hundred and seventy-seven varieties of cole's american fruit-book, or of the vast numbers described by downing, elliott, barry, and hooper? the best pear we saw in illinois could not be identified in elliott's fruit-book by a practical fruit-grower. we had in our orchard in ohio a single apple-tree, producing a large yield of one of the very best apples we ever saw; it was called natural beauty. we could not learn from the fruit-books what it was. we took it to an amateur cultivator of thirty years' experience, and he could not identify it. this is a fair view of the condition of the nomenclature of fruits. the london experimental gardens are doing much to systemize it, and the most scientific growers are congratulating them on their success. but it never can be any better than it is now. varieties will increase more and more rapidly, and synonyms will be multiplied annually, and the modification of varieties by stocks, manures, climates, and location, will render it more and more confused. we can depend only upon our nurserymen to collect all improved varieties, and where we do not see the bearing-trees for ourselves, trust the nurseryman's description of the general qualities of fruit. seldom, indeed, will a cultivator buy fruit-trees, and set out his orchard, and master the descriptions in the fruit-books, and after his trees come into bearing, minutely try them by all the marks to see whether he has been cheated, and, if so, take up the trees and put out others, to go the same round again, perhaps with no better success. hence, if possible, let planters get trees from a nursery so near at hand that they may know the quality of the fruit of the trees from which the grafts are taken, get the most popular in their vicinity, and always secure a few scions from any extraordinary apple they may chance to taste. it is well, also, to deal only with the most honorable nurserymen. remember that varieties will not do alike well in all localities. many need acclimation. every extensive cultivator should keep seedlings growing, with a view to new varieties, or modifications of old ones, adapted to his locality. we did think of describing minutely a few of the best varieties, adapted to the different seasons of the year. but we can see no advantage it would be to the great mass of cultivators, for whom this book is designed. those who wish to acquaint themselves with those descriptions will purchase some of the best fruit-books. we shall content ourselves with giving the lists, recommended by the best authority, for different sections, followed by a general description of the _qualities_ of a few of the best. downing's lists are the following:-- apples for middle and southern portions of the eastern states, ripening in succession. early harvest. vandevere of new york. red astrachan. jonathan. early strawberry. melon. summer rose. yellow bellflower. william's favorite. domine. primate. american golden russet. american summer pearmain. cogswell. garden royal. peck's pleasant. jefferis. wagener. porter. rhode island greening. jersey sweet. king of tompkins county. large yellow bough. swaar. baldwin. gravenstein. lady apple. maiden's blush. ladies' sweet. autumn sweet bough. red canada. fall pippin. newtown pippin. mother. boston russet. smokehouse. northern spy. rambo. wine sap. esopus spitzenburg. apples for the north. red astrachan. fameuse. early sweet bough. pomme gris. saps of wine or bell's canada reinette. early. yellow bellflower. golden sweet. golden ball. william's favorite. st. lawrence. porter. jewett's fine red. dutchess of oldenburgh. rhode island greening. keswick codlin. baldwin. hawthornden. winthrop greening. gravenstein. danvers winter-sweet. mother. ribston pippin. tolman sweet. roxberry russet. apples for the western states, made up from the contributions of twenty different cultivators, from five western states. early harvest. domine. carolina red june. swaar. red astrachan. westfield seek-no-further. american summer pearmain. broadwell. sweet june. vandevere of new york, or newtown spitzenburg. large sweet bough. ortly, or white bellflower. summer queen. yellow bellflower. maiden's blush. white pippin. keswick codlin. american golden russet. fall wine. herfordshire pearmain. rambo. white pearmain. belmont. wine sap. fall pippin. rawle's janet. fameuse. red canada. jonathan. willow twig. tolman sweet. apples for the south and southwest. early harvest. nickajack. carolina juice. maverack's sweet. red astrachan. batchelor or king. gravenstein. buff. american summer pearmain. shockley. julian. ben davis. mangum. hall. fall pippin. mallecarle. maiden's blush. horse. summer rose. bonum. porter. large striped pearmain. rambo. rawle's janet. large early bough. disharoon. fall queen, or ladies' meigs. favorite. cullasaga. oconee greening. camack's sweet. some varieties are included in all these lists, showing that the best cultivators regard some of our finest apples as adapted to all parts of the country. a careful comparison of hooper's lists, as recommended by the best western cultivators, whose names are there mentioned, will show that they name the same best varieties, with a few additions. we have carefully examined the varieties recommended by ernst, by kirtland and elliott, by barry, and by the national convention of fruit-growers, and find a general agreement on the main varieties. there are some differences of opinion, but they are minor. they have left out some of downing's list, and added some, as a matter of course. all this only goes to show the established character of our main varieties. out of all these, select a dozen of those named, in most of the lists, and you will have all that ever need be cultivated for profit. the best six might be still better. yet, in your localities, you will find good ones not named in the books, and new ones will be constantly rising. downing adds that "newtown pippin does not succeed generally at the west, yet in some locations they are very fine. rhode island greening and baldwin generally fail in many sections, while in others they are excellent." now, it is contrary to all laws of vegetation and climate, that a given fruit should be good in one county and useless in the next, if they have an equal chance in each place. a suitable preparation of the soil, in supplying, in the specific manures, what it may lack, getting scions from equally healthy trees, and grafting upon healthy apple-seedling stocks--observing our principles of acclimation--_and not one of our best apples will fail, in any part of north america_. on a given parallel of latitude, a man may happen to plant a tree upon a fine calcareous soil, and it does well. another chances to plant one upon a soil of a different character, and it does not succeed. it is then proclaimed that fruit succeeds well in one locality, and is useless in another near by and in the same latitude. the truth is, had the latter supplied calcareous substances to his deficient soil, as he might easily have done, in bones, plaster, lime, &c., the fruit would have done equally well in both cases. we should like to see this subject discussed, as it never has been in any work that has come under our observation. it would redeem many a section from a bad reputation for fruit-growing, and add much to the luxuries of thousands of our citizens. apples can be successfully and profitably grown on every farm of arable land in north america. we present, in the following cuts, a few of our best apples, in their usual size and form. some are contracted for the want of room on the page. we shall describe a few varieties, in our opinion the best of any grown in this country. these are all that need be cultivated, and may be adapted to all localities. we lay aside all technical terms in our description, which we give, not for purposes of identification, but to show their true value for profitable culture. the quality of fruit, habits of the tree, and time of maturity, are all that are necessary, for any practical purpose. nickajack.--_synonyms_--wonder, summerour. origin, north carolina. tree vigorous, and a constant prolific bearer. fruit large, skin yellowish, shaded land striped with crimson, and sprinkled with lightish dots. yellowish flesh, fine subacid flavor. tender, crisp, and juicy. season, november to april. baldwin.--_synonyms_--late baldwin, woodpecker, pecker, steele's red winter. [illustration] stands at the head of all apples, in the boston market. fruit large and handsome. tree hardy, and an abundant bearer. it is of the family of esopus spitzenburg. yellowish white flesh, crisp and beautiful flavor, from a mingling of the acid and saccharine. season, from november to march. on some rich western soils, it is disposed to bitter rot, which may be easily prevented, by application to the soil of lime and potash. canada red.--_synonyms_--old nonsuch, richfield nonsuch, steele's red winter. an old fruit in massachusetts and connecticut. tree not a great grower, but a profuse bearer. good in ohio, michigan, and other western states. retains its fine flavor to the last. january to may. bellflower.--_synonyms_--yellow bellflower, lady washington, yellow belle-fleur. [illustration] fruit very large, pale lemon yellow, with a blush in the sun. subacid, juicy, crisp flesh. tree vigorous, regular and excellent bearer. season, november to march. highly valuable. early harvest.--_synonyms_--early french reinette, prince's harvest, july pippin, yellow harvest, large white juneating, tart bough. [illustration] the best early apple. bright straw color. subacid, white, tender, juicy, and crisp. equally good for cooking and the dessert. season, the whole month of july in central new york; earlier south, and later north, as of all other varieties. red astrachan.--brought to england from sweden in . one of the most beautiful apples in the whole list. fruit very large, and very smooth and fair. color deep crimson, with a little greenish yellow in the shade and occasionally a little russet near the stalk. flesh white and crisp, rich acid flavor. gather as soon as nearly ripe, or it will become mealy. abundant bearer. july and august. esopus spitzenburg.--_synonym_--true spitzenburg. [illustration] large, fine flavored, lively red fruit. it is everywhere well known, as one of the very best apples ever cultivated, both for cooking and the desert. december to february, and often good even into april. a very great bearer. king of tompkins county.--_synonym_--king apple. this is an abundant annual bearer. skin rather yellowish, shaded with red and striped with crimson. flesh rather coarse, but juicy and tender, with a very agreeable vinous aromatic flavor. one of the best. december and march. rhode island greening.--_synonyms_--burlington greening, jersey greening, hampshire greening. [illustration] a universal favorite, everywhere known. acid, lively, aromatic, excellent alike for the dessert and kitchen. great bearer. november to march. it is said to fail on some rich alluvial soils at the west. avoid root grafting, and apply the specific manures, and we will warrant it everywhere. bonum.--_synonym_--magnum bonum. from north carolina. fruit large, from light to dark red. flesh yellow, subacid, rich, and delicious. tree hardy, vigorous, and an early and abundant bearer. american golden russet.--_synonyms_--sheep nose, golden russet, bullock's pippin, little pearmain. the english golden russet is a variety cultivated in this country, but much inferior to the above. the fruit is small, but melting juicy, with a very pleasant flavor. it is one of the most regular and abundant bearers known. tree hardy and thrifty. october to january. we know from raising and using it at the west, that it is one of the very best. pippin, fall.--confounded with holland pippin and several other varieties. [illustration] a noble fruit, unsurpassed by any other autumn apple. very large, equally adapted to table and kitchen. fine yellow, when fully ripe, with a few dots. flesh is white, mellow, and richly aromatic. october and december. a fair bearer, though not so great as many others. newtown pippin.--_synonyms_--green newtown pippin, green winter pippin, american newtown pippin, petersburg pippin. [illustration] this is put down as the first of all apples. it commands the highest price, in the london market. it keeps long without the least shriveling or loss of flavor. fruit medium size, olive green, with small gray specks. flesh greenish white, juicy, crisp, and of an exceedingly delicious flavor. _the best keeping apple_, good for eating from december to may. the yellow pippin, is another variety nearly as good. porter.--a massachusetts fruit, very fair; a very great bearer. is a favorite in boston. deserves general cultivation. september and into october. smokehouse.--_synonyms_--mill creek vandevere, english vandevere. an old variety from pennsylvania, where the original tree grew by a gentleman's smoke-house; hence its name. skin yellow, shaded with crimson, sprinkled with large gray or brown dots. september to february. one of the very best for cooking. rambo.--_synonyms_--romanite, bread and cheese apple, seek-no-further. [illustration] this is a great fall apple. medium size, flat, yellowish white in the shade, and marbled with pale yellow and red in the sun, and speckled with large rough dots. flesh greenish white, rich, subacid. october to december. canada reinette.--this has ten synonyms in europe, which indicates its popularity. in this country it is known only under the above name. fruit of the very largest size. a good bearer. the quality is in all respects good. lively, subacid flavor. december to april, unless allowed to hang on the tree too long. pick early in the fall. rome beauty.--_synonyms_--roman beauty, gillett's seedling. [illustration] fruit large, yellow, ground shaded, and striped with red, and sprinkled with little dots. flesh yellowish, juicy, tender, subacid. bears every year a great crop of very large showy apples. it is not superior in flesh or flavor, but keeps and sells very well. always must be very profitable, and hence very popular. autumn sweet bough.--_synonyms_--late bough, fall bough, summer bell flower, philadelphia sweet. tree very vigorous and productive. fruit medium. skin smooth, pale yellow with a few brown dots. flesh white, tender, sweet vinous flavor. one of the best dessert sweet apples. august and october. westfield seek-no-further.--_synonyms_--seek-no-further, red winter pearmain, connecticut seek-no-further. [illustration] fruit large, pale dull red, sprinkled with obscure russety yellow dots. flesh white, tender and fine-grained. on all accounts good. october to february according to downing. elliott says from december to february. but the doctors often disagree. so you had better eat your apples when they are good, whether it be october or december, or according to downing, elliott, or hooper. ribston pippin.--_synonyms_--glory of york, travers', formosa pippin, rock hill's russet. this occupies as high a place in england, as any other apple. in this country, two or three others, as baldwin and newtown pippin, are more highly esteemed. this is most successfully grown in the colder parts of the united states and canada. fruit medium, deep yellow, firm, crisp; flavor sharp aromatic. november to april. northern spy.--this is a new american variety, with no synonyms. it originated near rochester, n. y. [illustration] there is not a better dessert apple known. it retains its exceedingly pleasant juiciness, and excellent flavor from january to june. in western new york, they have been carried to the harvest field, in july in excellent condition. a fair bearer of beautiful fruit. subacid with a peculiar freshness of flavor. dark stripes of purplish red in the sun, but a greenish pale yellow in the shade. high culture and an open top for admission of the sun, affects the fruit more favorably than any other. roxbury russet.--_synonyms_--boston russet, putnam russet. [illustration] an excellent fruit, and prodigious bearer. medium size, flesh greenish white, rather juicy, and subacid. good in january, and one of the best in market in june. there are other russets of larger size, but much inferior. this should be in every collection. it is not first in richness and flavor, but it is superior to most in productiveness, and is one of the best keepers. large yellow bough.--_synonyms_--early sweet bough, sweet harvest, bough. no harvest-apple equals this, except the early harvest. excellent for the dessert, but rather sweet for pies and sauce. fruit above medium. tree a moderate grower, but a profuse bearer. flesh white and very tender. very sweet and sprightly. july and august. should have a place, even in a small collection. swaar.--one of the best american fruits. its name in dutch, where it originated on the hudson river, means heavy. [illustration] fruit is large, and when fully ripe, of a dead gold color, dotted with many brown specks. flesh yellowish, fine grained, and tender. flavor aromatic and exceedingly rich. bears good crops. december to march. winesap.--this is one of the best apples for cider, and good also for the table and kitchen. fruit hangs long on the tree without injury. it is very productive, and does well on a variety of soils. very fine in the west. yellow flesh, very firm, and high flavored. november to may. deservedly, a very popular orchard variety. maiden's blush.--a comparatively new variety from new jersey. remarkably beautiful. admired as a dessert fruit, and equally good for the kitchen and for drying. clear lemon yellow, with a blush cheek, sometimes a brilliant red cheek. rapid growing tree, with a fine spreading head, bearing most abundantly. august and october. [illustration] ladies' sweeting.--the finest sweet apple, for dessert in winter, that has yet been produced. skin smooth and nearly covered with red, in the sun. flesh is greenish white, very tender, juicy, and crisp. without any shriveling or loss of flavor, it keeps till may. so good a winter and spring sweet apple is a desideratum in any orchard or garden. the foregoing are all that any practical cultivator will need. most will select from our list, perhaps half a dozen, which will be all they wish to cultivate. from our descriptions, which are not designed to enable planters to identify the varieties, but to ascertain their qualities, any one can select such as he prefers. and they are so generally known, that there will be but little danger of getting varieties, different from those ordered. we subjoin, from hooker's excellent western fruit-book, the following-- list of apples for the western states. "the following list," says hooker, "contains a catalogue of the most popular varieties of apples, recommended by various pomological societies of the united states for the western states." these varieties can be obtained of all respectable nurserymen. the list may be of use to some cultivators in the different states mentioned. the general qualities of the best of these will be found in our descriptions under the cuts:-- _baldwin._--ohio, missouri, illinois. _roxbury russet._--michigan, ohio, missouri, indiana, illinois. _rhode island greening._--michigan, iowa, ohio, missouri, illinois. _swaar._--ohio, illinois, michigan. _esopus spitzenburg._--missouri, illinois, michigan, ohio. _early harvest._--virginia, ohio, missouri, indiana, illinois, michigan, iowa. _sweet bough._--illinois, virginia, missouri, indiana, ohio. _summer rose._--ohio, missouri, illinois. _fall pippin._--michigan, virginia, ohio, missouri, illinois. _belmont._--michigan, ohio. _golden sweet._--missouri. _red astrachan._--iowa, ohio, missouri, illinois. _jonathan._--ohio, missouri. _early strawberry._--ohio. _danvers winter sweet._--ohio. _american summer pearmain._--illinois. _maiden blush._--ohio, missouri, indiana, illinois. _porter._--ohio, missouri. _gravenstein._--ohio. _vandevere._--missouri, indiana, illinois. _yellow bellflower._--michigan, iowa, virginia, ohio, missouri, illinois. _fameuse._--illinois. _newtown pippin._--michigan, iowa, ohio, missouri, indiana, illinois. _rambo._--michigan, iowa, ohio, missouri, indiana, illinois. _smokehouse._--virginia, indiana. _fallawalden._--ohio. _golden russet._--ohio, illinois. _wine sap._--ohio, illinois. _white bellflower._--missouri, illinois. _holland pippin._--michigan, missouri, indiana. _raule's janet._--iowa, virginia, illinois. _lady apple._--ohio, missouri. for the value of these varieties, in the states mentioned, you have the authority of the best pomological societies. the several states are mentioned so frequently, that it will be seen that most of them are adapted to all the states. attend to acclimation and manure, and guard against insects, and they will all flourish, in all parts of the west and of the union. apricot. this is a fruit about half-way between a peach and a plum. the stone is like the plum, and the flesh rather more like the peach. it is esteemed, principally, because it comes earlier in the season than anything else of the kind. it is used as a dessert-fruit, for preserving, drying, and various purposes in cookery. it does well on plum-stock, and best in good deep, moist loam, manured as the peach and plum. the best varieties produce their like from the seed. seedlings are more hardy than any grafted trees. grafts on plums are much better than on the peach. the latter seldom produce good hardy, thrifty trees, although many persist in trying them. the apricot is a favorite tree for espalier training against walls and fences, in small yards, where it bears luxuriantly. it also makes a good handsome standard tree for open cultivation. it is as much exposed to depredations from curculio as the plum, and must be treated in the same way. cultivation same as peach. it produces its fruit, like the peach, only on wood of the previous year's growth; hence it must be pruned like the peach. especially must it be headed in well, to secure the best crop. _varieties_ are quite numerous, a few of which only deserve cultivation. any of the nine following varieties are good:-- brown's early.--yellow, with red cheek. a very productive, great grower. newhall's early.--bright-orange color, with deep-red cheek. a good cling-stone variety, every way worthy of cultivation. moorpark.--yellow, with ruddy cheek. an enormous bearer, though of slow growth. it is a freestone variety of english origin, and needing a little protection in our colder latitudes. dubois' early golden.--color, pale-orange. very hardy and productive. in , the original tree at fishkill, n. y., bore ninety dollars' worth of fruit. large early.--orange, but red in the sun. an excellent, early, productive variety. hemskirke.--bright-orange, with red cheek. an english variety, vigorous tree, and good bearer. peach.--yellow, with deep-brown on the sun-side. an excellent french variety. breda.--deep-orange, with blush spots in the sun. a vigorous, productive, african variety. roman.--pale-yellow, with occasionally red dots. good for northern latitudes. from these, planters may select those that best suit their localities and fancy. they are a little liable to be frost-bitten in the blossoms, as they bloom very early. otherwise they are always very productive. they are ornamental, both in the leaf and in the blossom. eaten plain, before thoroughly ripe, they are not healthy; otherwise, harmless and delicious. every garden should have half a dozen. artichoke. there are two plants known by this name. the jerusalem artichoke, so called, not from jerusalem in palestine, but a corruption of the italian name which signifies the tuber-rooted sunflower. the tubers are only used for pickling. they make a very indigestible pickle, and the plant is injurious to the garden, so they had better not be raised. the artichoke proper grows something like a thistle, bearing certain heads, that, at a particular stage of their growth, are fine for food. the soil should be prepared as for asparagus, only fifteen inches deep will do well. the plot of ground should be where the water will not stand on it at any time in the winter, as it will on most level gardens. this will kill the roots. when a new bed is made with slips from old plants, carefully separate vigorous shoots, remove superfluous leaves, plant five inches deep in rows five feet apart, and two feet apart in the rows. keep very clean of weeds. the first year, some pretty good, though not full-sized heads will be produced. plant fresh beds each year, and you will have good heads from july to november. small heads will grow out along the stalk like the sunflower. remove most of these small ones when they are about the size of hens' eggs, and the others will grow large. when the scales begin to diverge, but before the blossoms come out, is the time to cut them for use. lay brush over them to prevent suffocation, and cover with straw in winter, to protect from severest cold. too much warmth, however, is more injurious than frost. spring-dress much like asparagus. remove from each plant all the stocks but two or three of the best. those removed are good for a new bed. a bed, properly made, will last four or five years. to save seed, bend down a few good heads, so as to prevent water from standing in them; tie them to a stake, until the seed is matured. but, like early york cabbage, imported seed is better. the usual way of serving them is, the full heads boiled. in italy the small heads are cut up, with oil, salt, and pepper. this vegetable would be a valuable accession to american kitchen gardens. ashes. are one of the best applications to the soil, for almost all plants. leeched ashes are a valuable manure, but not equal to unleached. few articles about a house or farm should be saved with greater care. be as choice of them as of your small change. they are worth three times as much on the land as they can be sold for other purposes. on corn, at first hoeing, they are nearly equal to plaster. on onions and vines, they promote the growth and keep off the insects. sprinkle on dry, when plants are damp, but not too wet. do not put wet ashes on plants, or water while the ashes are on. it will kill them. mix ashes and plaster with other manures, and their power will be greatly increased. mixed in manure of hot-beds, they accelerate the heat. on sour land they are equal to lime for correcting the acidity. asparagus. this is a universal favorite in the vegetable garden. by the application of sand and compost, the soil should be kept loose, to allow the sprouts to spring easily from the crowns. propagation is best effected by seed, transplanting after one year's growth. older roots divided and transplanted are of some value, but not equal to young roots, nor will they last as long. _preparation of the soil_ for an asparagus-bed is most important to success. dig a trench on one edge of the plat designed for the bed, and the length of it, eighteen inches wide and two feet deep. put in the bottom one foot of good barn-yard manure, and tread down. then spade eighteen inches more, by the side of and as deep as the other, throwing the soil upon the manure in the trench. fill with manure and proceed as before, and so until the whole plat has been trenched; then wheel the earth from the first ditch to the other side and fill into the last trench, thus making all level. if there is danger that water will stand in the bottom, drain by a blind ditch. if this is objected to as too expensive, let it be remembered that such a bed, with a little annual top-dressing, will be good for twenty years, which is the age at which asparagus-plants begin to deteriorate; then a new bed should be ready to take its place. _planting._--mark the plat into beds five feet wide, leaving paths two feet wide between them. in each bed put four rows lengthwise, which will be just fifteen inches apart, and set plants fifteen inches apart in the row. dig a trench six inches wide and six inches deep for each row; put an inch of rich mould in the bottom; set the plants on the mould, with the roots spread naturally, with the ends pointing a little downward. be very particular about the position of the roots. fill the trench, and round it up a little with well-mixed soil and fine manure. the bed is then perfect, and will improve for many years. _after-culture._--in the fall, after the frost has killed the stalks, cut them down and burn them on the bed. cover the bed with fine rotted manure, to the depth of two inches, and one half-bushel salt to each square rod. as soon as frost is out in spring, with a fork work the top-dressing into the soil to the depth of four inches, and stir the soil to the depth of eight inches between the rows, using care not to touch the crowns of the roots with the fork. _cutting_ should never be performed until the third year. set out the plants when one year old, let them grow one year in the bed, and the next year they will be fit to cut. cut all the shoots at a suitable age, up to the last days of june. the shoots should be regularly cut just below the surface, when they are four or six inches high. if you are tempted to cut after the th of june, leave two or three thrifty shoots to each root, to grow up for seed, or you will weaken the plants, and they will die in winter. this is the reason why so many vacancies are seen in many asparagus beds. this plant may be forced in hotbeds, so as to yield an abundance of good shoots long before they will start in the open air, affording an early luxury to those who can afford it. this vegetable is equal or superior to green peas, and by taking all the pains recommended above, in the beginning, an abundance can be raised for twenty years, on the same bed, at a very trifling cost. early radishes and other vegetables can be raised, between the rows, without any harm to the asparagus. balm. this is a medicinal plant, very useful, and easily raised. a strong infusion of the leaves, drank freely for some time by a nervous, hypochondriacal person, is, perhaps, better than any other medicine. it is also good in flatulency and fevers. its _propagation_ is by slips or roots. it is perennial, affording a supply for many years. gather just as the blossoms are appearing, and dry quickly in a slow oven, or in the shade. press and do up in white papers, and keep in a tight, dry drawer, until needed for use. barberry. [illustration: barberries.] a prickly shrub, from five to ten feet high, growing wild in this country and in europe, on poor, hard soils, or in moist situations, by walls, stones, or fences. its _propagation_ is by seeds, suckers, or offshoots. this shrub is used for jellies, tarts, pickles, &c. preserves made of equal parts of barberry and sweet apples, or outer-part of fine water-melons, are very superior. it is also one of the best shrubs for hedge. the bark has much of the tannin principle, and with the wood, is used for coloring yellow. shrub, blossoms, and fruit, are quite ornamental, forming a beautiful hedge, but rather inclined to spread. will do well on any land and in any situation. the discussion in new england about its blasting contiguous fields of grain, is about as sensible as the old witchcraft mania. every garden should have two or three. barley. does best on land which was hoed the previous year. if properly tilled, such land is rich, free from weeds, and easily pulverized. sod, plowed deep in the fall, rolled early in the spring, well harrowed, the seed sown and harrowed in, and all rolled level, will produce a good crop. two bushels of seed should be sowed on an acre, unless the land be very rich; in that case, one half-bushel less. essential to a good crop is rain about the time of heading and filling. hence early sowing is always surest. in many parts of the country it is of little use to sow barley, unless it be gotten in very early. in not more than one season in twelve can you get a good crop of barley from late sowing in all the middle and western states. barley is more favorably affected than any other grain, by soaking twenty-four hours before sowing, and mixing with dry ashes. a weak solution of nitre is best for soaking the seed. _varieties_ are two, four, and six rowed. the two-rowed grows the tallest, and is most conveniently harvested. it is controverted whether the six-rowed variety yields the largest crop to the acre. if the weather be dry, and the worms attack the young plants, rolling when two or three inches high, with a heavy roller, will save and increase the crop. rolling is a great help to the harvesting, as it levels the surface. _harvesting_ should always be attended to just as it turns, but by all means before the straw becomes dry. if it stands up, cut with cradle or reaper, and bind. if lodged, cut with a scythe, and cure in small cocks like clover. standing until very ripe, or lying scattered until quite dry, is very wasteful. _products_ are all the way from fifteen to seventy bushels to the acre, according to season and cultivation. reasonable care will secure an average annual crop of forty-five or fifty bushels per acre, which makes it a profitable crop while the demand continues. it is a good crop for ground feed for all animals, the beards being a little troublesome when fed whole. the straw is one of the very best for animals. barley requires the use of the land only ninety days, leaving it in good condition for fall-grain. _used_ for malting, and for food for men and beasts. it makes handsome flour and good bread. hulled, it is a better article of food than rice. it succeeds well on land not stiff and tenacious enough for wheat, or moist and cool enough for oats. if farmers should raise only for malt, the nation would become drunk and poor on beer, and the market would be ruined. but raised as food, it is one of the most profitable agricultural products. barns. a barn should always front the north. the yard for stock should be on the south side, with tight fences for protection on the east and west. as this is designed for winter use, it is a great saving of comfort to the creatures. the barn-yard should be hollowed out by excavation, until four or five feet lower in the centre than on the edges. the border should be nearly level, inclining slightly toward the centre, to allow the liquid in the yard to run into it for purposes of manure. the front of a barn should be on the summit of a small rise of ground, to allow water to run away from the door, to prevent mud. in hilly countries it is very convenient to build barns by hills, so as to allow hay and grain to be drawn in near the top, and be thrown down, instead of being pitched up. these general principles are sufficient for all ordinary barns. those who are able to build expensive barns had better build them circular, eight or sixteen square, and one hundred feet in diameter--the lower part, to top of stable, of stone. let the stable extend all around next to the wall, and a floor over the stable, that teams may be driven all around to pitch into the bays, and upon the mows and scaffolds, at every point. thus teams may go round and out the door at which they entered. such a floor will accommodate several teams at the same time. the cellar should be in the centre, surrounded by the stable. such a cellar would never freeze, and would hold roots enough for one hundred head of cattle, which the stable would easily accommodate. let the mangers be around next the cellar, for convenience of feeding. such a barn would be more convenient for a dairy of one hundred cows, or for winter-fattening of cattle, than any other form. it would cost no more than many barns in western new york that are not half as convenient. beans. these are divided into two classes--pole and bush beans. they are subdivided into many varieties. we omit the english, or horse-bean, as being less valuable, for any purpose, than our well-known beans or peas. pole beans are troublesome to raise, and are only grown on account of excellence of quality, and to have successive gatherings from the same vines. pole beans are only used for horticultural purposes. _field-beans._--for general culture there are three varieties of white--small, medium, and large. of all known beans, we prefer the medium white. the china bean, white with a red face, is an early variety. all ripen nearly at the same time. it cooks almost as soon as a potato, and is good for the table; but it is less productive, and less saleable because not wholly white. for planting among corn, as for a very late crop, this bean is valuable, because it matures in so short a time. good beans may be raised among corn, without injury to the corn-crop. this can only be done when it is designed to cultivate the corn but one way. many fail in attempts to grow beans among corn, by planting them at first hoeing. the corn, having so much the start, will shade the beans and nearly destroy them. but plant at the same time of the corn, and they will mature before the corn will shade them much, and not be in the way even of the ordinary crop of pumpkins. but double-cropping land in this way, at any time, is of very doubtful utility. a separate plat of ground for each crop, in nearly all cases, is the most economical. to raise a good crop of beans, prepare the soil as thoroughly as for any other crop. beans will mature on land so poor and hard as to be almost worthless for other crops. but a rich, mellow soil is as good for beans as anything else, though not so indispensable. drill in with a planter as near together as possible, and allow a cultivator to pass between them. one bushel to the acre on ordinary land, and three fourths of a bushel on very rich land, is about the quantity of seed requisite. hoe and cultivate them while young. late cultivation is useless--more so than on most other crops. beans should not be much hilled in hoeing, and should never be worked when wet. all plants with a rough stalk, like the bean, potato, and vine, are greatly injured, sometimes ruined, by having the earth stirred around them when they are wet, or even damp. beans are usually pulled; this should be done when the latest pods are full-grown, but not dry. place them in small bunches on the ground with the roots up. if the weather be dry, they need not be moved until time to draw them in. if the weather be damp, they should be stacked loosely in small stacks around poles, and covered with straw on the top, to shed rain. always haul in when very dry. avoid stacking if possible, for they are always wasted rapidly by moving. in drawing in, keep the rack under them covered with blankets to save those that shell. in pulling beans, be sure and take hold below the pods, otherwise the pods will crack; and although no harm appears then to be done, yet, when they dry, every pod that has been squeezed by pulling, will turn wrong side out, and the contents be wasted. if your beans are part ripe and the remainder green, and it is necessary to pull them to save the early ones, or guard against frost, when the ripe ones are dry, thrash them lightly. this will shell all the ripe ones, and none of the green ones. put the straw upon a scaffold and thrash again in winter. thus you will save all, and have beautiful beans. bean-straw should always be kept dry for sheep in winter; it is equal to hay. _garden-beans._--there are many varieties, a few of which only should be cultivated. having the best, there is no object in raising an inferior quality. the best early string-bean is the early mohawk; it will stand a pretty smart spring-frost without injury; comes early, and is good. early yellow, early black, and quaker, or dun-colored, are also early and good. refugee, or thousand-to-one, are the best string-beans known; have a round, crisp, full, succulent pod; come as soon as the mohawks are out of the way; and are very productive. planted in august, they are excellent until frost; the very best for pickling. for an early shell-bean we recommend the china red-face; the white kidney and numerous other varieties are less certain and productive. _running beans_ are numerous. the true lima, very large, greenish, when ripe and dry, is the richest bean known; is nearly as good in winter, cooked in the same way, as when shelled green. they are very productive, continuing in blossom till killed by frost. in warm countries they grow for years, making a tree, or growing like a large grapevine. the london horticultural--called also speckled cranberry, and wild goose--is a very rich variety. the only objection is the difficulty of shelling; one only can be removed at once, because of the tenderness of the pod. the carolina or butter bean often passes for the lima. it has similar pods, the bean is of similar shape, but always white, instead of greenish like the lima, and smaller, earlier, and of inferior quality. the scarlet runner, formerly only grown as an ornament on account of its great profusion of scarlet blossoms continuing until frost, is a very productive variety; pods very large and very succulent, making an excellent string-bean; a rich variety when dry, but objectionable on account of their dark color. the red and the white cranberries, dutch caseknife, and many other varieties, have good qualities, but are inferior to those mentioned above. beans may be forwarded in hotbeds, by planting on sods six inches square, put bottom-up on the hotbed, and covered with fine mould; plant four beans on each sod; when frost is gone, remove the sod in the hill beside the pole, previously set, leave only two pole-beans to grow in a hill; they will always produce more than a greater number. a shrub six feet high, with the branches on, is better than a pole for any running bean; nearly twice as many will grow on a bush as on a pole. use a crowbar for setting poles, or drive a stake down first, and set poles very deep, or they will blow down and destroy the beans. bees and beehives. the study of the honey-bee has been pursued with interest from remote ages. a work on bees, by de montfort, published at antwerp in , estimates the number of treatises on this subject, before his time, at between five and six hundred. as that was two hundred and eight years ago, the number has probably increased to two thousand or more. we have some knowledge of the character of these early works, as far back as democritus, four hundred and sixty years before the christian era. the great men of antiquity gave particular attention to study and writing on the honey-bee.--among them we notice aristotle, plato, columella, pliny, and virgil. at a later period, we have huber, swammerdam, warder, wildman, _&c._ in our own day, we have huish, miner, quinby, weeks, richardson, langstroth, and a host of others. for the first two thousand years from the date of these works, the bee was treated mainly as a curious insect, rather than as a source of profit and luxury to man. and although palestine was eulogized as a land flowing with milk and honey, before the hebrews took possession of it, yet the science of _bee-culture_ was wholly unknown. in the earliest attention to bees, they were supposed to originate in the concentrated aroma of the sweetest and most beautiful flowers. virgil, and others of his time, supposed them to come from the carcasses of dead animals. but the remarkable experiments of huber, sixty years ago, developed many facts respecting their origin and economy. subsequent observers have added still more to the stock of our knowledge respecting these wonderful creatures. the different stages of growth, from the minute egg of the queen to a full grown bee, and the precise time occupied by each, are well established. the three classes of bees, in every perfect colony, and the offices of each; their mechanical skill in constructing the different sized and shaped cells, for honey, for raising drones, workers, and queens, all differing according to the purposes for which they are intended; the wars of the queens, and their sovereignty over their respective colonies; the methods by which working-bees will raise a young queen, when the old one is destroyed, out of the larvae of common bees; the peculiar construction and situation of the queen cells; and, above all, the royal jelly (differing from everything else in the hive) which they manufacture for the food of young queens; the manner in which they ventilate their hives by a swift motion of their wings, causing the buzzing noise they make in a summer evening; their method of repairing broken comb, and building fortifications, before their entrances, at certain times, to keep out the sphinx--all these curious matters are treated fully in many of our works on bees. but we must forego the pleasure of presenting these at length, it being our sole object to enable all who follow our directions, so to manage bees as to render them profitable. in preparing the brief directions that follow, we have most carefully studied all the works, american and foreign, to which we could get access. between this article and the best of those works there will be found a general agreement, except as it respects beehives. we present views of hives, that we are not aware have ever been written. the original idea, or new principle (which consists in constructing the hive with the entrance near the top), was suggested to us by samuel pierce, esq., of troy, n. y., who is the great american inventor of cooking-ranges and stoves. we have carefully considered the principle in its various relations to the habits of the bee, and believe it correct. to most of our late works on honey-bees we have one serious objection: it is, that they bear on their face the evidence of having been written to make money, by promoting the sale of some patent hive. these works all have a little in common that is interesting; the remainder seems designed to oppose some former patent and commend a new one. they thus swell their volumes to a troublesome and expensive size, with that which is of no use to practical men. a work made to fight a patent, or to sell one, can not be reliable. the requisites to successful bee-management are the following:-- . always have large, strong swarms. such only are able successfully to contend with their enemies. this is done by uniting weak swarms, or sending back a young, feeble swarm when it comes out (as herein after directed). . use medium-sized hives. in too large hives, bees find it difficult to guard their territories. they also store up more honey than they need, and yield less to the cultivator. the main box should be one foot square by fifteen inches high. make hives of new boards; plane smooth and paint white on the outside. the usual direction is to leave the inside rough, to aid in holding up the honey, but to plane the inside edges so as to make close joints. we counsel to plane the inside of the hive smooth, and draw a fine saw lightly length wise of the boards, to make the comb adhere. this will be a great saving of the time of bees, when it is worth the most in gathering honey. they always carry out all the sawdust from the inside of their hives. better save their time by planing it off. . to prevent robberies among bees, when a weak colony is attacked, close their entrances so that but one bee can pass at once, and they will then take care of themselves. to prevent a disposition to pillage, place all your hives in actual contact, on the sides, and make a communication between them, but not large enough to allow bees to pass. this will give the same scent to the whole, and make them feel like one family. bees distinguish strangers only by the smell: hence, so connected, they will not quarrel or pillage. . comb is usually regarded better for not being more than two or three years old. the usual theory is, that cells fill up by repeated use, and, becoming smaller, render the bees raised in them diminutive. this is not probable, as a known habit of the bee is to clean out the cells before reusing them. huber demonstrated that bees raised in drone-cells (which are always larger than for workers) grew no larger than in their own natural cells. and as bees build their cells the right size at first, it is probable they keep them so. quinby assures us that bees have been grown twenty years in the same comb, and that the last were as large as the first. but for other reasons, it is better to change the comb. in all ordinary cases, it is better to transfer the swarm to a new hive every third year. many think it best to use hives composed of three sections, seven and a half inches deep each, screwed together with strips of wood on the sides, and the top screwed on that it may easily be removed; thick paper or muslin should be pasted around, on the places of intersection, to guard against enemies; the two lower sections only allowed to contain bees--the upper one being designed for the honey-boxes, to be removed. each spring, after two years old, the lower section is taken out and a new one put on the top, the cover of the old one having been first removed. this is the old "pyramidal beehive," which is the title of a treatise on bees, by p. ducouedic, translated from the french and abridged by silas dinsmore in . this has recently been revived and patented as a new thing. we think with quinby, that these hives are too expensive and too complicated, and that the great mass of cultivators will succeed best with hives of simple construction. . allowing bees to swarm in their own time and way is better than all artificial multiplication of colonies. if there are no small trees near the apiary, place bushes, upon which the bees will usually light, when they come out. if they seem determined to go away without lighting, throw sand or dust among them; this produces confusion, and causes them to settle near. the practice of ringing bells and drumming on tin, &c., is usually ridiculed; but we believe it to be useful, and that on philosophic principles. the object to be secured is to confuse the swarm and drown the voice of the queen. the bees move only with their queen; hence, if anything prevents them from hearing her, confusion follows, and the swarm lights: therefore, any noise among them may answer the purpose, and save the swarm. to hive bees, place them on a clean white cloth, and set the hive over them, raised an inch or two by blocks under the corners. it is said that a little sweetened water or honey, applied to the inside of the hive, will incline the bees to remain. the best preparation is to fasten a piece of new white comb on the top of the inside of the hive. this is done by dipping the end of a piece of comb in melted beeswax, and sticking it to the top. bees should never be allowed to send off more than two colonies in one season. to restrict them to one is still better. excessive swarming is a precursor of destruction, rather than an evidence (as usually regarded) of prosperity. a given number of bees will make far less honey in two hives than in one, unless they are so numerous as greatly to crowd the hive. when a late swarm comes out, take away the queen, and they will immediately return. any one may easily find the queen: she is always in the centre of the bunch into which the swarm collects on lighting. if they form two or three clusters, it is because they have that number of queens. then all the queens should be destroyed. the following cuts of the three classes of bees will enable one to distinguish the queen. [illustration: working bee. queen. drone.] the queen is sometimes, but not always, larger than the common bee; but her body is always longer, and blackish above and yellowish underneath. to unite any two swarms together, turn the hive you wish to empty bottom-up, and place the one into which you would have them go on the top of the other, with their mouths together; then tie a cloth around, at the place of intersection, to prevent the egress of the bees. gently rap the lower hive on all sides, near the bottom, gradually rising until you reach the top of the lower hive, and all the bees will go into the upper one. in the same way, it is easy to remove a colony into a new hive, whenever you think they need changing. this should be performed in the dusk of the evening, and need occupy no more than half an hour. the hive should then be put in its place. uniting weak new swarms, may be done whenever they come out; but changing a swarm from an old hive to a new one should be performed as early as the middle of june. if moths get in, change hives at any time when it is warm enough for bees to work, and give them all the honey in their old hive. if you discover moths too late for the bees to build comb in a new hive, take the queen from the hive infested with moths, and place it where the bees will unite with another colony, and feed them all the honey from the deserted hive. this, or the destruction of the bees and saving the honey, is always necessary, when moth-worms are in possession, unless they are so near the bottom, that all the comb around them may be cut out. bees are fond of salt. always keep some on a board near them. they also need water. if a rivulet runs near the apiary, it is well. if not, place water in shallow pans, with pebbles in them, on which the bees can stand to drink. change the water daily. it is too late to speak of the improvidence of killing bees, to get their honey. use boxes of any size or construction you choose. in common hives, boxes should be attached to the sides, and not placed on the top. it is a wasteful tax upon the time and strength of loaded bees, to make them travel through the whole length of the hive, into boxes on the top. place boxes as near as possible to their entrance or below that entrance. bees should be kept out of the boxes until they have pretty well filled the hive, or they may begin to raise young bees in the boxes. _wintering bees_ successfully, is one of the most difficult matters in bee-culture. two evils are to be guarded against, dampness and suffocation. excessive dampness, sometimes causes frost about the entrance that fills it up and suffocation ensues. sometimes snow falls, or is blown over the entrance, and the bees die in a few hours for the want of air. many large colonies, with plenty of honey, are thus destroyed. dampness is very injurious to bees on other accounts. in a good bee-house there is no danger from snow, and little from dampness. bees, not having honey enough for winter, should be fed in pleasant fall weather, after they have nearly completed the labors of the season. weighing hives is unnecessary. a moderate degree of judgment will determine whether a swarm has a sufficient store for winter. if not, feed them. never give bees dry sugar. they take up their food, as an elephant does water in his trunk; it, therefore, should be in a liquid form. boil good sugar for ten minutes in ale or beer, leaving it about as thick as honey. put it in a feed trough; which should be flat-bottomed. fasten together thin slats, one fourth of an inch apart, so as to fit the inside of the feed trough and lie on the surface of the liquid, so as to rise and fall with it. put this in a box and attach it to the hive, as for taking box-honey, and the bees will work it all up. put out-door, it tempts other bees, and may lead to quarrels, and robbery. it is not generally known, that a good swarm of bees may be destroyed, by feeding them plenty of honey, early in the spring. they carry it in and fill up their empty cells and leave no room for raising young bees; hence the whole is ruined for want of inhabitants, to take the places of those that get destroyed, or die of age. to winter bees well, utterly exclude the light during all the cold weather, until it becomes so warm, that they will not get so chilled when out that they can not return. intense cold is not injurious to bees, provided they are kept in the hive and are dry. a large swarm, will not eat two pounds of honey during the whole cold winter, if kept from the light. when tempted out, every warm day they come into the sunshine and empty themselves, and return to consume large quantities of honey. kept in the dark, they are nearly torpid, eat but a mere trifle, and winter well. whatever your hive or house, then, keep your bees entirely from the light, in cold weather. this is the only reason why bees keep so well in a dark dry cellar, or buried in the ground, with something around them, to preserve them from moisture, and a conductor through the surface, to admit fresh air. it is not because it keeps out the cold, but because it excludes the light, and renders the bees inactive. gilmore's patent bee-house, is a great improvement on this account. of the diseases of bees, such as dysentery, &c., we shall not treat. all that can profitably be done, to remedy these evils, is secured by salt, water, and properly-prepared food, as given above. but the great question in bee-culture is, how to prevent the depredation of the wax-moth? to this subject, much study has been given, and respecting it many theories have been advanced. the following suggestions are, to us, the most satisfactory. the miller, that deposites the egg, which soon changes to the worm, so destructive in the beehive, commences to fly about, at dark. in almost every country-house, they are seen about the lights in the evening. they are still during all the day. they are remarkably attracted by lights in the evening. hence our first rule:-- . place a teasaucer of melted lard or oil, with a piece of cotton flannel for a wick, in or near the apiary at dusk; light it and allow it to burn till near morning, expiring before daylight. this done every night during the month of june, will be very effectual. . keep grass and weeds away from the immediate vicinity of your apiary. let the ground be kept clean and smooth. this destroys many of the hiding-places of the miller, and forces him away to spend the day. this precaution has many other advantages. . keep large strong colonies. they will be able to guard their territories, and contend with this and all other enemies. . never have any opening in a beehive near the bottom, during the season of millers (see beehive). let the openings be so small, that only one or two bees can pass at once. to accommodate the bees, increase the number of openings. millers will seldom enter among a strong swarm, with such openings. all around the bottom, it should be so tight, that no crevice can be found, in which a miller can deposite an egg. better plaster around, closely, with some substance, the place of contact between the hive and the board on which it stands, and keep it entirely tight during the time in which the millers are active. . if, through negligence, worms have got into a hive, examine it at once; and if they are near the bottom only, within sight and reach, cut out the comb around them, and remove them from the hive. if this is not practicable, transfer the swarm to a new hive, or unite it with another, without delay. . the great remedy for the moth is in the right construction of a beehive. whatever the form of the hive you use, have the entrance within three or four inches of the top. millers are afraid of bees; they will not go among them, unless they are in a weak, dispirited condition. they steal into the hive when the bees are quiet, up among the comb, or when they hang out in warm weather, but are still and quiet. if the hive be open on all sides (as is so often recommended), the miller enters on some side where the bees are not. now bees are apt to go to the upper part of the hive and comb, and leave the lower part and entrance exposed. if the entrance be at the upper part, the bees will fill it and be all about it. a bee can easily pass through a cluster of bees, and enter or leave a hive; but a miller will never undertake it: this, then, will be a perfect safeguard against the depredations of the moth. this hive is better on every account. moisture rises: in a hive open only at the bottom, it is likely to rise to the top of the hive and injure the bees; with the opening near the top it easily escapes. the objection that would be soonest raised to this suggestion is, that bees need a good circulation of fresh air, and such a hive would not favor it. to this we reply, a hive open near the top secures the best possible air to the swarm; any foul air has opportunity freely to escape. that peculiar humming heard in a hive in hot weather is produced by a certain motion of the wings of the bees, designed to expel vitiated air, and admit the pure, by keeping up a current. in the daytime, when the weather is hot, you will see a few bees near the entrance on the outside, and hear others within, performing this service, and, when fatigued, others take their place. this is one of the most wonderful things in all the habits and instincts of bees. they thus keep a pure atmosphere in a crowded hive in hot weather. now, it would require much less fanning to expel bad air from a hive open at the top, than from one where all that air had to be forced down, through an opening at the bottom. this theory is sustained by the natural habits of bees in their wild state. wild bees, that select their own abodes, are found in trees and crevices of rocks. they usually build their combs _downward_ from their entrance, and their abode is air-tight at the bottom; they have no air only what is admitted at their entrance, near the top of their dwelling, and with no current of air only what they choose to produce by fanning. the purest atmosphere in any room is where it enters and passes out at the top; in such a room only does the external atmosphere circulate naturally. it is on the same principle that bees keep better buried than in any other way, provided only they are kept dry. yet they are in a place air-tight, except the small conductor to the atmosphere above them. the old "pyramidal beehive" of ducouedic, with three sections, one above the other, allowing the removal of the lower one each spring, and the placing of a new one on the top--thus changing the comb, so that none shall ever be more than two years old, with the opening always within three or four inches of the top, is the best of the patent hives. we prefer plain, simple hives. the general adoption of this principle, whatever hives are used, would be a new era in the science of bee-culture. no beehive should ever be exposed to the direct rays of the sun in a beehouse. a hive standing alone, with a free circulation of air on every side, will not be seriously injured by the sun. but when the rays are intercepted by walls or boards, in the rear and on the sides, they are very disastrous. other hints, such as clearing off occasionally, in all seasons except in the cold of winter, the bottom board, &c., are matters upon which we need not dwell. no cultivator would think of neglecting them. let no one be alarmed at finding dead bees on the bottom when clearing out a hive; bees live only from five to seven months, and their places are then supplied with young ones. the above suggestions followed, and a little care taken in cultivating the fruits, grains, and grasses, that yield the best flowers for bees, _would secure uniform success_ in raising honey. this is one of the finest luxuries; and, what is a great desideratum, it is within the easy reach of every poor family, even, in all the rural districts of the land. good honey, good vegetables, and good fruit, like rain and sunshine, may be the property of all. the design of this volume is to enable the poor and the unlearned to enjoy these things in abundance, with only that amount of care and labor necessary to give them a zest. beets. of this excellent root there are quite a number of varieties. mangel-wurtzel yields most for field-culture, and is the great beet for feeding to domestic animals; not generally used for the table. french sugar or amber beet is good for field-culture, both in quality and yield; but it is not equal to the wurtzel. yellow-turnip-rooted, early blood-turnip-rooted, early dwarf blood, early white scarcity, and long blood, are among the leading garden varieties. of all the beets, three only need be cultivated in this country--the wurtzel for feeding, and the early blood turnip-rooted and long blood for the table. the early blood is the best through the whole season, comes early, and can be easily kept so as to be good for the table in the spring. the long blood is later, and very much esteemed. beets may be easily forwarded in hotbeds. sow seed early, and transplant in garden as soon as the soil is warm enough to promote their growth. when well done, the removal retards their growth but little. young beets are universally esteemed. to have them of excellent quality during all the winter, it is only necessary to plant on the last days of july. if the weather be dry, water well, so as to get them up, and they will attain the size and age at which they are most valued. keep them in the cellar for use, as other beets. they will keep as well as old ones. _field-culture._--make the soil very mellow, fifteen to eighteen inches deep. soil having a little sand in its composition is always best. even very sandy land is good if it be sufficiently enriched. choose land on which water will not stand in a wet season. beets endure drought better than extreme wet. having made the surface perfectly mellow, and free from clods, weeds, and stones, sow in drills, with a machine for the purpose, two feet apart. this is wide enough for a small cultivator to pass between them. after planting, roll the surface smooth and level; this will greatly facilitate early cultivation. on a rough surface you can not cultivate small plants without destroying many of them; hence the necessity of straight rows and thorough rolling. the english books recommend planting this and other roots on ridges: for their climate it is good, but for ours it is bad. they have to guard against too much moisture, and we against drought; hence, they should plant on ridges, and we on an even surface. to get the largest crop, plow a deep furrow for each row, put in plenty of good manure, cover it with the plow and level the surface, and plant over the manure. when well growing, they should be thinned to six or eight inches in the row. often stirring the earth while they are young is of great benefit. the quality and quantity of a root-crop depend much upon the rapidity of its growth. slow growth gives harder roots of worse flavor, as well as a stinted crop. _harvesting_ should be done just before severe frosts. they will grow until frost comes, however early they were planted, or whatever size they may have attained. they grow as rapidly after light frosts as at any time in the season; but very severe frosts expose them to rot during winter. _preserving_ for table use is usually done by putting in boxes with moist sand, or the mould in which they grew. this excludes air, and, if kept a little moist, will preserve them perfectly. roots are always better buried below frost out-door on a dry knoll, where water will not stand in the pits. but in cold climates it is necessary to have some in the cellar for winter use. the common method of burying beets, and turnips, and all other roots out-door, is well understood. the only requisites are, a dry location secured from frost, straw next the roots, a covering of earth, not too deep while the weather is yet mild; as it grows cold, put on another covering of straw, and over it a foot of earth; as it becomes very cold, put on a load or two of barnyard manure: this will save them beyond the power of the coldest winter. vast quantities of roots buried outdoor are destroyed annually by frost, and there is no need of ever losing a bushel. you "_thought_ they would not freeze," is not half as good as spending two hours' time in covering, so that you _know_ they can not freeze. there is hardly a more provoking piece of carelessness, in the whole range of domestic economy, than the needless loss of so many edible roots by frost. _the table use_ of beets is everywhere known; their value for feeding animals is not duly appreciated in this country. no one who keeps domestic animals or fowls should fail to raise a beet-crop; it is one of the surest crops grown; it is never destroyed by insects, and drought affects it but very little. on good soil, beets produce an enormous weight to the acre. the lower leaves may be stripped off twice during the season, to feed to cows or other stock, without injury to the crop. cows will give more milk for fifteen days, fed on this root alone, than on any other feed; they then begin to get too fat, and decline in milk: hence, they should be fed beets and hay or other food in about equal parts, on which they will do better than in any other way. horses do better on equal parts of beet and hay than on ordinary hay and grain. horses fed thus will fatten, needing only the addition of a little ground grain, when working hard. plenty of beets, with a little other food, makes cows give milk as well as in summer. raw beets cut fine, with a little milk, will fatten hogs as fast as boiled potatoes. all fowls are fond of them, chopped fine and mixed with other food. sheep, also, are fond of them. they are very valuable to ewes in the spring when lambs come, when they especially need succulent food. the free use of this root by english farmers is an important reason of their great success in raising fine sheep and lambs. they promote the health of animals, and none ever tire of them. as it needs no cooking, it is the cheapest food of the root kind. beets will keep longer, and in better condition, than any other root. they never give any disagreeable flavor to milk. it is considered established, now, that four pounds of beet equal in nourishment five pounds of carrot. every large feeder should have a cellar beyond the reach of frosts, and of large dimensions, accessible at all times, in which to keep his roots. these beets should be piled up there as cord-wood, to give a free circulation of the air. in germany, the beet-crop takes the place of much of their meadows, at a great saving of expense, producing remarkably fine horses, and fattening immense herds of cattle, which they export to france. we insist upon the importance of a beet-crop to every man who owns an acre of land and a few domestic animals, or only a cow and a few fowls. bene plant. introduced into the southern states by negroes from africa. they boil a handful of the seed with their allowance of indian corn. it yields a larger proportion than any other plant of an excellent oil. it is extensively cultivated in egypt as food for horses, and for culinary purposes. it is remarkable that this native of a southern clime should flourish well, as it does, in the northern states. it should be cultivated throughout the north as a medicinal herb. a virginia gentleman gave thorburn & son, seed-dealers of new york, the following account of its virtues: a few green leaves of the plant, plunged a few times in a tumbler of cold water, made it like a thin jelly, without taste or color. children afflicted with summer-complaint drink it freely, and it is thought to be the best remedy for that disease ever discovered; it is believed that three thousand children were saved by it in baltimore the first summer after its introduction. plant in april, in the middle states, about two feet apart. when half grown, break off the plants, to increase the quantity of leaves. we recommend to all families to raise it, and try its virtues, under the advice of their family physicians. birds. these are exceedingly useful in destroying insects. so of toads and bats. no one should ever be wantonly killed. boys, old or young, should never be allowed to shoot birds, or disturb their nests, only as they would domestic fowls, for actual use. a wanton recklessness is exhibited about our cities and villages, in killing off small birds, that are of no use after they are dead. living, they are valuable to every garden and fruit-orchard. in every state, stringent laws should be made and enforced against their destruction. even the crow, without friends as he is, is a real blessing to the farmer: keep him from the young corn for a few days, as it is easy to do, and, all the rest of the year, his destruction of worms and insects is a great blessing. birds, therefore, should be baited, fed, and tamed, as much as possible, to encourage them to feel at home on our premises. having protected our small fruits, they claim a share, and they have not always a just view of the rights of property, nor do they always exhibit good judgment in dividing it. it is best to buy them off by feeding them with something else. if they still prefer the fruit, hang little bells in the trees, where they will make a noise; or hang pieces of tin, old looking-glass, or even shingles, by strings, so that they will keep in motion, and the birds will keep away. images standing still are useless, as the birds often build nests in the pockets. blackberry. this berry grows wild, in great abundance, in many parts of the country. it has been so plentiful, especially in the newer parts, that its cultivation has not been much attended to until recently. like all other berries, the cultivated bear the largest and best fruit. _uses._--it is one of the finest desert berries; excellent in milk, and for tarts, pies, &c. blackberries make the best vinegar for table use, and a wine that retains the peculiar flavor, and of a beautiful color. this berry comes in after the raspberries, and ripens long in succession on the same bush. [illustration: high-bush blackberry.] _varieties_ of wild ones, usually found growing in the borders of fields and woods, are the low-bush and the high-bush. downing gives the first place to the low. our experience is, that the high is the best bearer of the best fruit. we have often gathered them one and one fourth inches in length, very black, and of delicious sweetness. the low ones that have come under our observation have been smaller and nearer round, and not nearly so sweet. the best cultivated varieties are-- the dorchester--introduced from massachusetts, and a vigorous, large, regular bearer. lawton, or new rochelle.--this is the great blackberry of this country, by the side of which, no other, yet known, need be cultivated. it is a very hardy, great grower. it is an enormous bearer of such fruit that it commands thirty cents per quart, when other blackberries sell for ten. on a rather moist, heavy loam, and especially in the shade, its productions are truly wonderful. continues to ripen daily for six weeks. _propagation_ is by offshoots from the old roots, or by seeds. when by seeds, they should be planted in mellow soil, and where the sun will not shine on them between eight and five o'clock in hot weather. in transplanting, much care is requisite. the bark of the roots is like evergreens, very tender and easily broken, or injured by exposure to the atmosphere; hence, take up carefully, and keep covered from sun and air until transplanted. this is destined to become one of the universally-cultivated small fruits--as much so as the strawberry. the best manures are, wood-ashes, leaves, decayed wood, and all kinds of coarse litter, with stable manure well incorporated with the soil, before transplanting. animal manure should not be very plentifully applied. we have seen in illinois a vigorous bush, and apparently good bearer, of perfect fruit--a variety called _white blackberry_. the fruit was greenish and pleasant to the taste. black raspberry. the common wild, found by fences, especially in the margin of forests, in most parts of the united sates, is very valuable for cultivation in gardens. coming in after the red raspberry, and ripening in succession until the blackberry commences, it is highly esteemed. cultivated with little animal manure, but plenty of sawdust, tan-bark, old leaves, wood, chips, and coarse litter, it improves very much from its wild state. fruit is all borne on bushes of the previous year's growth; hence, after they have done bearing, cut away the old bushes. to secure the greatest yield on rich land, cut off the tops of the shoots rising for next year's fruit, when they are four or five feet high. the result will be, strong shoots from behind all the leaves on the upper part of the stalk, each of which will bear nearly as much fruit as would the whole have done without clipping. a dozen of these would occupy but a small place in a border, or by a wall. not an american garden should be found without them. bones. bones are one of the most valuable manures. they yield the phosphates in large measure. on all land needing lime, they are very valuable. the heads, &c., about butchers' shops will bear a transportation of twenty miles to put upon meadows. break them with the head of an axe, and pound them into the sod, even with the surface. they add greatly to the products of a meadow. ground, they make one of the best manures of commerce. a cheap method for the farmer is to deposite a load of horse-manure, and on that a load of bones, and alternate each, till he has used up all his bones. cover the last load of bones deep with manure. it will make a splendid hotbed, and the fermentation of the manure will dissolve or pulverize the bones, and the heap will become one mass of the most valuable manure, especially for roots and vines, and all vegetables requiring a rich, fine manure. borecole, or kale. there are some fifteen or twenty kinds cultivated in europe. two only, the green and the brown, are desirable in this country. cultivate as cabbage. in portions of the middle states they will stand the frosts of winter well, without much protection; further north, they need protection with a little brush and straw during severe frosts. those grown on rather hard land are better for winter; being less succulent, they endure cold better. cut them off for use whenever you choose. they do not head like cabbage; they have full bunches of curled leaves. cut off so as to include all, not over eight inches long. in winter, after having been pretty well exposed to the frost, they are very fine. set out the stumps early in spring, and they will yield a profusion of delicious sprouts. this would be a valuable addition to many of our kitchen gardens. broccoli. this may be regarded as a late flowering species of cauliflower. it should be planted and treated as cabbage, and fine heads will be formed, in the middle states, in october: at the south much earlier, according to latitude. take up in november, and preserve as cabbage, and good ones may be had in winter. to prevent ravages of insects, mix ashes in the soil when transplanting, or fresh loam or earth from a new field; or trench deep, so as to throw up several inches of subsoil, which had not before been disturbed. to save seed, transplant some of the best in spring; break off all the lower sprouts, allowing only a few of the best centre ones to grow. tie them to stakes, to prevent destruction by storms. be sure to have nothing else of the cabbage kind near your seed broccoli. broom corn. cultivated like other corn, only that this is more generally planted in drills. three feet apart, and six inches in the drill, it yields more weight of better corn to the acre than to have it nearer. the great fault in raising this crop is getting it too thick. the finest-looking brush is of corn cut while yet so green that the seed is useless. but the brush is stronger, and will make better brooms for wear, when the corn is allowed to stand until the seed is hard, though not till the brush is dry. the land should be rich. this is a hard, exhausting crop for the soil. to harvest, bend down, two feet from the ground, two rows, allowing them so to fall across each other as to expose all the heads. cut off the heads, with six or eight inches of the stalk, and place them on top of the bent rows to dry. in a week, in dry weather, they will be well cured, and should be then spread thin, under cover, in plenty of air. there is no worse article to heat and mould. in large crops, they usually take off the seed before curing; it is much lighter to handle, and less bulky. it may be done then, or in winter, as you prefer. the seed is removed on a cylinder eighteen inches long, and two and a half feet in diameter, having two hundred wrought nails with their points projecting. it is turned by a crank, like a fanning mill. the corn is held in a convenient handful, like flax on a hatchel. where large quantities are to be cleaned of the seed, power is used to turn the machine. ground or boiled, the seed makes good feed for most animals. dry, it has too hard a shell. fowls, with access to plenty of gravel, do well on it. broom-corn is not a very profitable crop, except to those who manufacture their own corn into brooms. there is much labor about it, and considerable hazard of injuring the crop, by the inexperienced; hence, young farmers had, generally, better let it alone. there are two varieties--they may be forms of growth, from peculiar habits of culture--one, short, with a large, stiff brush running up through the middle, with short branches to the top, called pine-top: it is of no value;--the other is a long, fine brush, the middle being no coarser than the outside. it should be planted with a seed-drill, to make the rows straight and narrow for the convenience of cultivation. harrowing with a span of horses, with a =v= drag, one front tooth out, as soon as the corn is up, is beneficial to the crop. brussels sprouts. this is a species of cabbage. a long stem runs up, on which grow numerous cabbage-heads in miniature. the centre head is small and of little use, and the large leaves drop off early. it will grow among almost anything else, without injury to either. it is raised from seed like cabbage, and cultivated in all respects the same. eighteen inches apart each way is a proper distance, as the plant spreads but little. good, either as a cabbage, or when very small, as greens. they are good even after very hard frosts. by forwarding in hotbed in the spring, and by planting late ones for winter, they may be had most of the year. if they are disposed to run to seed too early, it may be prevented by pulling up, and setting out again in the shade. save seed as from cabbage, but use great caution that they are not near enough to receive the farina from any of the rest of the cabbage-tribe. buckthorn. this is the most valuable of the thorn tribe, for hedge, in this country. it never suffers from those enemies that destroy so much of the hawthorn. this is also used for dyeing and for medicine. buckwheat. this will grow well on almost any soil; even that too poor for most other crops will yield very good buckwheat--though rich land is better for this, as for all other crops. the heat of summer is apt to blast it when filling; hence, in the middle states, it is not best to sow it until into july. it fills well in cool, moist weather, and is quite a sure crop if sowed at the right time. on poor land, one bushel of seed is required for an acre, while half a bushel is sufficient on rich land, where stalks grow large. the blossoms yield to the honey-bee very large quantities of honey, much inferior to that made of white clover; it may be readily distinguished in the comb by its dark color and peculiar flavor. ground, it is good for most animals, and for fowls unground, mixed with other grain. it remains long in land; but it is a weed easily killed with the hoe; or a farmer may set apart a small field for an annual crop, keeping up the land by the application of three pecks of plaster per acre each year. it is very popular as human food, and always made into pancakes. the free use of it is said to promote eruptive diseases. the india buckwheat is more productive, but of poorer quality. the bran is the best article known to mix with horse-manure and spade into radish beds, to promote growth and kill worms. budding. this is usually given under the article on peaches. but, as it is a general subject, it should be in a separate article, reserving what is peculiar to the different fruits to be noticed under their respective heads. [illustration: budding.] budding small trees should usually be performed very near the ground, and on a smooth place. any sharp pocket-knife will do; but a regular budding knife, now for sale in most hardware-stores, is preferable. cut through the bark in the form of a horizontal crescent (_a_ in the cut). split the bark down from the cut three fourths of an inch, and, with the ivory-end of the knife, raise the corners and edges of the bark. select a vigorous shoot of this year's growth, but having buds well matured--select a bud that bids fairest to be a leaf-bud, as blossom-buds will fail--insert the knife half an inch below the bud, and cut upward in a straight line, severing the bark and a thin piece of the wood to one half inch above the bud, and let the knife run out: you then have a bud ready for insertion (_c_ in cut). the english method is to remove the wood from the bud before inserting it; this is attended with danger to the vitality of the bud, and is, therefore, less certain of success, and it is no better when it does succeed. hence, american authorities favor inserting the bud with the wood remaining. insert the lower end of this slip between the two edges of the bark, passing the bud down between those edges, until the top of the slip comes below the horizontal cut, and remaining contiguous to it. if the bud slip be too long, after it is sufficiently pressed down, cut off the top so as to make a good fit with the bark above the cut (_b_ in cut). the lower end of the bud will have raised the split bark a little more to make room for itself, and thus will set very close to the stalk. tie the bud in with a soft ligature; commence at the bottom of the split, and wind closely until the whole wound is covered, leaving only the bud exposed (_d_ in cut). it is more convenient to commence at the top, but it is less certain to confine the slip opposite the bud in close contact with the stalk: this is indispensable to success. we have often seen buds adhere well at the bottom, but stand out from the stalk, and thus be ruined. _preparation of buds._--take thrifty, vigorous shoots of this year's growth, with well-matured buds; cut off the leaves one half inch from the stalks (_e_ in cut); wrap them in moist moss or grass, or put them in sawdust, or bury them one foot in the ground. _bands._--the best yet known is the inside bark of the linden or american basswood. in june, when the bark slips easily, strip it from the tree, remove the coarse outside, immerse the inside bark in water for twenty days; the fibres will then easily separate, and become soft and pliable as satin ribbon. cut it into convenient lengths, say one foot, and lay them away in a dry state, in which they will keep for years. this will afford good ties for many uses, such as bandages of vegetables for market, &c. matting that comes around russia iron and furniture does very well for bands; woollen yarn and candle-wicking are also used; but the bass-bark is best. after ten days the bands should be loosened and retied; then, if the bud is dried, it is spoiled, and the tree should be rebudded in another place; at the end of three weeks, if the bud adheres firmly, remove the band entirely. better not bud on the south side; it is liable to injury in winter. in the spring, after the swelling of buds, but before the appearance of leaves, cut off the top four inches above the bud; when the bud grows, tie the tender shoot to the stalk (growing bud in cut, _f_). in july, cut the wood off even with the base of the bud and slanting up smoothly. _causes of failure._--if you insert a blossom-bud you will get no shoot, although the bud may adhere well. if scions cut for buds remain two hours in the sun with the leaves on, in a hot day, they will all be spoiled. the leaves draw the moisture from the bud, and soon ruin it. cut the leaves off at once. if you use buds from a scion not fully grown, very few of them will live; they must be matured. if the top of the branch selected be growing and very tender, use no buds near the top of it. if in raising the bark to make room for the bud, you injure the soft substance between the bark and the wood, the bud will not adhere. if the bud be not brought in close contact with the stalk and firmly confined there, it will not grow. with reasonable caution on these points, not more than one in fifty need fail. _time for budding._--this varies with the season. in the latitude of central new york, in a dry season, when everything matures early, bud peaches from the th to the th of august--plums, &c., earlier. in wet and great growing seasons, the first ten days in september are best. much budding is lost on account of having been done so late as to allow no time for the buds to adhere before the tree stops growing for the season. if budding is performed too early, the stalk grows too much over the bud, and it gums and dies. it is utterly useless to bud when the bark is with difficulty loosened; it is always a failure. bushes. the growth of bushes over pastures, along fences, and in the streets, shows a great want of thrift, and an unpardonable carelessness in a farmer. in pastures, so far from being harmless, they take so much from the soil as to materially injure the quality and quantity of the grass. the only truly effectual method of destroying noxious shrubs, is by grubbing them up with a mattock. frequent cutting of bushes inclining to spread only increases the difficulty, by giving strength and extension to the roots. cutting bushes thoroughly in august, in a wet season, and applying manure and plaster to promote the growth of grass, will sometimes quite effectually destroy them. larger trees, as the sweet locust, that are troublesome on account of sprouting out from the roots, when cut down, are effectually killed by girdling two feet from the ground, and allowing to stand one year. the tree, roots, and all, are sure to die. butter. raising the cream, churning, working, and preserving, are the points in successful butter-making. to raise cream, milk may be set in tin, wood, or cast-iron dishes. the best are iron, tinned over on the inside. tin is better than wood, only on account of its being more easily kept clean. no one can ever make good butter without keeping everything about the dairy perfectly clean and sweet. milk should never stand more than three inches deep in the pans, to raise the best and most cream. it should be set in an airy room, containing nothing else. butter and milk will collect and retain the flavor of any other substance near them, more readily than anything else; hence, milk set in a cellar containing onions, or in a room with new cheese, makes butter highly flavored with those articles. _temperature_ is an important matter. it should be regular, at from fifty to fifty-five degrees of fahrenheit's thermometer. it is sometimes difficult to be exact in this matter, but come as near it as possible. this can be well regulated in a good cool cellar, into which air can be plentifully admitted at pleasure. those who are so situated that their milk-house can stand over a spring, with pure water running over its stone floor, are favored. those who will take pains to lay ice in their milk-rooms, in very warm weather, will find it pay largely in the quality and quantity of their butter. those who will not follow either of the above directions, must be content to make less butter, and of rather inferior quality, out of the same quantity of milk. _skimming_ should be attended to when the milk has soured just enough to have a little of it curdle on the bottom of the pan. if it should nearly all curdle, it would not be a serious injury, unless it should become old. if you have not conveniences for keeping milk sufficiently warm in cold weather, place it over the stove at once, when drawn, and give it a scalding heat, and the cream will rise in a much shorter space of time, and more plentifully. milk should be strained and set as soon as possible after being drawn from the cow, and with the least possible agitation. the unpleasant flavor imparted to milk from the food of the cows, such as turnips or leeks, may be at once removed by adding to the milk, before straining, one eighth of its quantity of boiling water; or two ounces of nitre boiled in one quart of water and bottled, and a small teacupful put in twelve quarts of milk, will answer the same purpose. _milking_ should be performed with great care. experiments have demonstrated that the last drawn from a cow yields from six to sixteen times as large a quantity of better cream than that first drawn. careless milking will make the quantity of butter less, and the quality inferior, while it dries up the cows. there are probably millions of cows now in the united states that are indifferent milkers from this very cause. quick and clean milking, from the time they first came in, would have made them worth twice as much, for butter and milk, as they are now. always milk as quickly as possible, and without stopping, after you commence, and as nearly as possible at the same hour of the day. leaving a teacupful, or even half that quantity, in milking each cow, will very materially lessen the products of the dairy, and seriously injure the cows for future use. great milkers will yield considerable more by having it drawn three times per day. the quantity of milk given by a cow will never injure her, provided she be well fed. as it takes food to make meat, so it does also to make milk; you can never get something for nothing. the best breeds of swine, cattle, or fowls, can not be fattened without being well fed: so the best cows will never give large messes of milk unless they are largely fed. _churning._--this is entirely a mechanical process. the agitation of the cream dashes the oily globules in the cream against each other, and they remain together and grow larger, until the butter is, what the dairy woman calls, gathered. the butter in the milk, when drawn from the cow, is the same as when on the table, only it is in the milk in the form of very small globes: churning brings them together. the object then to be secured, by any form of a churn, is agitation, or dashing and beating together. _temperature of the cream_ should be from sixty to sixty-five degrees--perhaps sixty-two is best. this had better always be determined by a thermometer immersed in it. many churns have been invented and patented; and every new one is, of course, the best. a cylinder is usually preferred as the best form for a churn, and the churning is performed by turning a crank. an oblong square box is far better than a cylinder. in churning in a cylinder, it may often occur that the cream moves round in a body with the dasher, and so is but slightly agitated. but change that cylinder into an oblong square, and the cream is so dashed against the corners of the box that a most rapid agitation is the result, and the churning is finished in a short space of time. any person of a little mechanical genius can construct a churn, equal to any in use, and at a trifling expense. it is well to make a churn double, leaving an inch between the two, into which cold or warm water can be poured, to regulate the temperature of the cream. this would be a great saving of time and patience in churning. those who use the old-fashioned churns with dashes can most conveniently warm or cool their cream, by placing the churn containing it in a tub of cold or boiling water, as the case may require, until it comes to the temperature of sixty or seventy degrees. to make butter of extra quality for the fair, or for a luxury on your own table, set only one third of the milk, and that the last drawn from the cow. the scotch, so celebrated for making butter of more marrowy richness than any other, first let the calves draw half or two thirds of the milk, and then take the remainder. this makes the finest butter in the world. _preserving butter_ depends upon the treatment immediately after churning. success depends upon getting the buttermilk all out, and putting in all the salt you put in at all, immediately--say within ten minutes after churning. some accomplish this by washing, and others by working it, being much opposed to putting in a drop of water. those who use water in their butter, and those who do not, are equally confident of the superiority of their own method. but all good butter-makers agree, that the less you work butter, and still remove all the milk, the better it will be; and the more you are obliged to work it, the more gluey, and therefore the poorer the quality. very good butter is made by immediately working all the milk out and salting thoroughly--working the salt into every part, without the use of water. _working over_ butter, the next day after churning, should be nothing more than nicely forming it into rolls, without any further working or any more salt. an error, that spoils more butter than any other, is that of doing very little with butter when it first comes out of the churn, because it must be gone through with the next day. many do not know why their butter has different colors in the same mass--some white, and some quite yellow, and all shades between. the reason always is, putting in the salt immediately on churning, but neglecting to incorporate that salt into every part of the mass equally: thus, where there is most salt there will be one color, and where less, another. another evil is, when the salt is thus put in carelessly, while much buttermilk remains, that salt dissolves; and when the butter is worked over the next day, the salt is mostly worked out, with the milk or water left in, the previous day. the addition of more salt then will not save it. it has received an injury, by retaining the milk or water for twenty-four hours, from which no future treatment will enable it to recover. we recommend washing as preferable; it has the following advantages: it cools butter quickly in warm weather, bringing it at once into a situation to be properly worked and salted. the buttermilk is also removed more speedily than in any other way; this is a great object. it removes the milk with less working, and consequently with less injury, than the other method. these three advantages, cooling in hot weather, expelling the milk in the shortest time, and working the butter the least, lead us to prefer using water, by one hundred per cent. we have for years used butter that has been made in this way, and never tasted better. butter made in this way in summer will keep well till next summer, to our certain knowledge. immediately after churning, pour off all the milk and put in half a pailful of water, more or less according to quantity; agitate the whole with the dasher, and pour off the water. repeat this once or twice until the water runs off clear, without any coloring from the milk, and nearly all the buttermilk is out; this can all be done in five minutes after churning. press out the very little water that will remain, and put in all the salt the butter will require, and work it thoroughly into every part. all this need occupy no more than ten minutes, and the butter is set away for putting up in rolls, or packing down in jars the next day. such butter would keep tied up in a bag, and hung in a good airy place. best to put it down in a jar, packed close; put a cloth over top, and cover with half an inch of fine salt. the only difficulty in keeping butter grows out of failure to get out all the milk, and thoroughly salt every particle, within fifteen minutes after churning. speedy removal of buttermilk and water, and speedy salting, will make any butter keep. this subject is so important, as good butter is such a luxury on every table, that we recapitulate the essentials of good butter making:-- . keep everything sweet and clean, and well dried in the sun. . milk the cows, as nearly as possible, at the same hour, and draw the milk very quickly and very clean. . set the milk, in pans three inches deep, in good air, removed from anything that might give it an unpleasant flavor, and where it will be at a temperature of fifty to sixty degrees. . churn the cream at a temperature of sixty-two degrees. . get out the buttermilk, and salt thoroughly within fifteen minutes after churning, either with water or without, as you prefer. mix the salt thoroughly in every particle. put up in balls, or pack closely in jars the next day. . remember to work the butter as little as possible in removing the milk; the more it is worked, the more will it be like salve or oil, and the poorer the quality: hence, it is better to wash it with cold water, because you can wash out the buttermilk with much less working of the butter. . to make the best possible quality of butter, use only one third of the milk of the cows at each milking, and that the last drawn. . in the winter, when cream does not get sufficiently sour, put in a little lemon-juice or calves' rennet. if too white, put in a little of the juice of carrot to give it a yellow hue. butternut. this is a rich, pleasant nut, but contains rather too much oil for health. the oil, obtained by compression, is fine for clocks, &c. the root, like the branches, are wide-spreading, and hence injurious to the land about them. two or three trees on some corner not desired for cultivation, or in the street, will be sufficient. a rough piece of ground, not suitable for cultivation, might be occupied by an orchard of butternut-trees, and be profitable for market and as a family luxury. the bark is often used as a coloring substance. cabbage. the best catalogues of seeds enumerate over twenty varieties, beside the cauliflowers, borecoles, &c. a few are superior, and should, therefore, be cultivated to the exclusion of the others. early york is best for early use. it is earlier than any other, and with proper treatment nearly every plant will form a small, compact, solid head, tender, and of delicious flavor. no garden is complete without it. early dutch, and early sugarloaf, come next in season to the early york, producing much larger heads. large york is a good variety, maturing later than the preceding, and before the late drumheads. large drumhead, late drumhead, or large flat dutch, are the best for winter and spring use. there are many varieties under these names, so that cultivators often get disappointed in purchasing seeds. it is now difficult to describe cabbages intelligibly. every worthless hybrid goes under some excellent name. a dutch cabbage, with a short stem and very small at the ground, is the best with which we are acquainted. of this variety (the seed of which was brought from germany), we have raised solid heads, larger than a half bushel, while others called good, standing by their side, did not grow to more than half that size. this variety may be distinguished by the purple on the top of the grown head, and by the decided purple of the young plants, resembling the red dutch, though not of quite so deep a color. red dutch, having a very hard, small head, deep purple throughout, is the very best for pickling; every garden should have a few. they are also good for ordinary purposes. green curled savoy, when well grown, is a good variety. the _imperial_, the _russian_, large scotch for feeding, and others, are enumerated and described, but are inferior to the above. it is useless to endeavor to grow cabbages on any but the best of soil. plant corn on poor land, and it will mature and yield a small crop. plant cabbages on similar soil, and you will get nothing but a few leaves for cattle. therefore, if your land designed for cabbages be not already very rich, put a load of stable-manure on each square rod. cabbages are a very exhausting crop. the soil should be worked fully eighteen inches deep, and have manure well mixed with the whole. the best preparation we ever made was by double-plowing--not subsoiling, but plowing twice with similar plows: put on a good coat of manure, and plow with two teams in the same furrow, one plow gauged so as to turn a light furrow, and the other a very deep one, throwing it out of the bottom of the first; when the first plow comes round, it will throw the light furrow into the bottom of the deep one. this repeated over the whole plot will stir the soil sixteen or eighteen inches deep, and put from four to six inches of the top, manure and all, in the bottom, under the other. we have done this admirably with one plow, changing the gauge of the clevis every time round, and going twice in a furrow: this is the best way for those who use but one team in plowing; it is worth much more than the additional time required in plowing. enrich the surface a little with fine manure, and you have land in the best possible condition for cabbages. this is a fine preparation for onions and other garden vegetables, and for all kinds of berries. subsoiling is good, but double-plowing is better in all cases, where you can afford to enrich the surface, after this deep plowing. the alluvial soils of the west need no enriching after double-plowing. land so level, or having so hard a subsoil as to allow water to stand on it in a wet season, is not good for cabbages. they also suffer more than most crops from drought. one of the most important offices of plenty of manure is its control of the moisture. land well manured does not so soon feel the effects of drought. one of the best means of preserving moisture about the roots of cabbages, is to put a little manure in the bottom of the holes when transplanting; put it six inches below the surface. manure from a spent hotbed is excellent for this purpose; it is in the best condition about the time for transplanting cabbages. it is then very wet, and has a wonderful power of retaining the moisture. manure from the blacksmith-shop, containing hoof-parings, &c., is very good. if the manure be too dry, pour in water and cover immediately. set the plant in the soil, over the manure, the roots extending down into it, with a little fine mould mixed in it, and it will retain moisture through a severe drought; no further watering will be necessary, and not one out of twenty-five of all your plants will fail to make a good head. in climates subject to drought in summer, cabbages should be set out earlier; they require more time in dry weather than in wet. should they incline to crack open from too rapid growth, raise them a little, and push them down again; this will break some roots, and so loosen the remainder that the growth will be checked and the heads saved. winter cabbages should be allowed to stand in the ground as long as possible, without danger of freezing in. the question of transplanting, and of sowing the seed in the places where they are designed to head, has been much controverted. we have succeeded well in both ways, but prefer transplanting; it gives opportunity to stir the ground deep, and keep down weeds, and thus preserve moisture until summer, when it is time to transplant; it also makes shorter, smaller, and straighter stems, which is favorable to a larger growth of heads. sow seed on poor land; the plants will be straighter, more hardy, and less affected by insects. seed for early spring cabbages should be sown on poor soil in september or october; if inclined to get too forward, transplant, once or twice; late in fall, set them close together, lay poles in forks of limbs put down for the purpose, and cover with straw, as a protection from severe frost; the poles are to prevent the covering from lying on the plants. _preserving_, for winter or spring use, is best done by plowing a furrow on land where water will not stand, and placing the heads in the furrow with the roots up. cover with earth from three to six inches deep, letting the roots protrude. the large leaves will convey all the water off from the heads, and they will come out as fresh and good as in the fall. if you wish some, more easily accessible, for winter use, set them in the cellar in a small trench, in which a little water should be kept, and they will not only be preserved fresh, but will grow all winter, if the cellar be free from frost. they are also well preserved put in trenches eighteen inches deep, out door, with a little good soil in the bottom, and protected with poles and straw as directed for winter plants. cabbages that have scarcely any heads in the fall, so treated, will grow all winter, and come out good, tender, fresh heads in spring. _transplanting._--this is usually done in wet weather: if it be so wet as to render the soil muddy by stirring, it injures the plants. this may be successfully done in dry weather, not excessively hot. have a basin of water, in which dip the root and shake it, so as to wash off all the earth from the seed-bed that adheres to it. put the plant in its place at once, and the soil in which it is to grow takes hold of the roots readily, and nearly every one will live. transplant with your hand, a transplanting trowel, a stick, or a dibble made of a spade-handle, one foot long, sharpened off abruptly, and the eye left on for a handle. put the plant in its place, thrust the dibble down at a sharp angle with the plant, and below it, and move it up to it. the soil will thus be pressed close around the roots, leaving no open space, and the plant will grow. do not leave the roots so long that they will be doubled up in transplanting--better cut off the ends. large cabbages should be three feet apart each way, and in perfectly straight rows; this saves expense in cultivating, as it can be done with a horse. the usual objections of farmers to gardening, on account of the time required to hoe and weed, would be remedied by planting in long, straight rows, at suitable distances apart, to allow the free use of horse, cultivator, and plow, in cultivating; thus, beets, carrots, cabbages, onions, &c., are almost as easily raised as corn. an easy method of raising good cabbages is on greensward. put on a good dressing of manure, plow once and turn over handsomely, roll level, and harrow very mellow on the top, without disturbing the turf below; make places for planting seeds at the bottom of the turf; a little stirring of the surface, and destruction of the few weeds that will grow, will be all the further care necessary. the roots will extend under the sod in the manure below it, and will there find plenty of moisture, even when the surface is quite dry, and will grow profusely. _seed._--nothing is more difficult in cabbage culture than raising pure seed; nothing hybridizes worse, and in nothing else is the effect worse. it must not be raised in the same garden with anything else of the cabbage or turnip kind; they will mix in the blossoms, and the worse will prevail. raise seeds only from the best heads, and only one variety; break off all the lower shoots, allowing only a few of the best to mature. seeds raised from stumps, from which the head has been removed for use, will incline the leaves to grow down, as we often see, instead of closing up into heads. calves. the best method of raising calves is of much importance. it controls the value and beauty of grown cattle. stint the growth of a calf, and when he is old he will not recover from it. much attention has been paid to the breed of cattle, and some are very highly recommended. it is true that the breed of stock has much to do with its excellence. it is equally true that the care taken with calves and young cattle, has quite as much to do with it. we can take any common breed, and by great care in raising, have quite as good cattle, for market or use, as can another, who has the best breed in the world, but keeps them indifferently. but good breeds and good keeping make splendid animals, and will constantly improve them. the old adage, "anything worth doing at all, is worth doing well" is nowhere more true, than in the care of calves. we shall not pause to present the various and contradictory methods of raising calves, that are presented in the numerous books, on the subject, that have come under our observation. hay-tea, various preparations of linseed-meal, oilcake-meal, oatmeal, and every variety of ground feed, sometimes mixed up with gin, or some kind of cheap spirits (for the purpose of keeping calves quiet), are recommended. the discussion of the merits of these, would be of no practical benefit to our readers. the following brief directions are sufficient:-- . seldom raise late calves. their place is in the butcher's shop, after they are five weeks old. . raise only those calves that are well formed. straight back, small neck, not very tall, and a good expression of countenance, are the best marks. . let every calf suck its dam two days. it is for the health of the calf and the good of the cow. . to fatten a calf, let it suck one half the milk for two weeks, three fourths the third, and the whole the fourth. continue it another week, and the veal will be better. but we think it preferable to take calves off from the cow after two days. feed them the milk warm from the cow, and give them some warm food at noon. feed three times a day, they will fatten faster. it also gives opportunity to put oatmeal in their food after the second week, which will improve the veal, and give you a little milk, if you desire it. our first method is easier, and our last better, for fattening calves. . to raise calves for stock, take them from the cows after the second day. feed them half the milk (if the cow gives a reasonable quantity) for the first two weeks. begin then to put in a little oatmeal. after two weeks more, give one fourth of the milk, and increase the quantity of meal. when the calf is eight or ten weeks old, feed it only on meal and such skimmed milk, sour milk, or buttermilk, as you may have to spare. this is the course when the object is to save milk. if not, let the calf have the whole, with such addition of meal as you think desirable. the easiest way to raise calves, when you do not desire the milk for the family or dairy, is to let them run with the cows and have all the milk when they please. others let them suck a part of the milk, and feed them with meal, &c., besides. this is difficult. if you milk your own share first, you will leave much less for the calf than you suppose. if he gets his portion first, he will be sure to get a part of yours also. this can only be well done by allowing the calf to suck all the udders, but not clean. the remainder, being the last of the milk will make the best of butter. but it is difficult to regulate it as you please, and more difficult to feed a calf properly, that sucks, than one that depends wholly upon what you feed him. hence it is preferable to feed all your calves, whether for veal or stock. a little oilcake pulverized is a valuable addition. indian-meal and the coarse flour of wheat are good for calves, but not equal to oatmeal. good calves have been raised on gruels made of these meals, without any milk after the first two weeks. . in winter, feed chopped roots and meal, mixed with plenty of hay and pure water, and always from a month old give salt twice a week. . if calves are inclined to purge or scour, as the farmers call it, put a little rennet in their food. if they are costive, put in a little melted lard, or some kind of inoffensive oil. these will prove effectual remedies. there is, however, very little danger of disease, to calves, well, regularly, and properly fed, as above. fat calves are not apt to have lice. but should such a thing occur, washing in tobacco-water is a speedy and perfect remedy. . during cold nights in fall, and all of the first winter, calves should be shut up in a warm dry place. keep them curried clean. the cold and wet of the first winter are very injurious. after they are a year old they will give very little trouble. the great difficulty with calves is a want of enough to eat. they should not only be kept growing, but fat, all the first year. they will then make fine, healthy, and profitable animals. chalk or dry yellow loam, placed within their reach is very useful. they will eat of it, enough to correct the excessive acidity of their stomachs. the operation of changing calves into oxen, should be performed before they are twenty days old. it will then be only slightly injurious. cans. these are much used for preserving fruits and vegetables. there are a number of patent articles said to work well. they are, in our opinion, more expensive, and more likely to fail in inexperienced hands, than those that an ordinary tinman can readily make. the best invention for general use is that that is most simple. cans should be made in cylindrical form, with an orifice in the top large enough to admit whatever you wish to preserve, and should contain about two quarts. fill the cans and solder on the top, leaving an opening as large as a pin-head, from which steam may escape. set the cans in water nearly to their tops, and gradually increase the heat under them until the water begins to boil. take out the cans, drop solder on the opening, and all will be air-tight. this operation requires at least three hours, as the heating must be moderate. you may preserve in glass bottles, filling and putting in a cork very tight, and well tied, and gradually heating as above; this will require four hours, as glass will be in danger of bursting by too rapid heating. but for tomatoes, or anything that you have no objection to boiling and seasoning before preserving, the best way is to prepare and cook as for the table, putting in only pepper and salt, and fill cans while the mass is boiling, and, with a sealing-wax that you can get at any druggist's laid around the orifice, place the cover upon it; the heat will melt the wax, and when it cools, the cover will be fastened, and all will be air-tight. this will require no process of slow boiling. set the cans or bottles in a cool cellar, and whatever they contain may be taken out, at the end of a year, as good as when put in. the last method is the best and most simple of all. the whole principle of preserving is to make the cans air-tight. carrots. these are cultivated for the table, and for food for animals. boiled and pickled, or eaten with an ordinary boiled dish, they are esteemed. they are really excellent in soups. as a root for animals, they are very valuable. they are often preferred to beets;--this is a mistake--four pounds of beet are equal to five pounds of carrot for feeding to domestic animals. work the soil for carrots very deep, make it very rich with stable manure, with a mixture of lime; harrow fine and mellow, and roll entirely smooth. plant with a seed-sower, that the rows may be straight; rows two feet apart will allow a horse and small cultivator to pass between them. planted one foot apart, and cultivated with a horse, and a cultivator that will take three rows at once, they will yield much more to the acre, and may be cultivated at a moderate expense, exceeding but a little that of ordinary field-crops. sow as early as convenient, as the longer time they have, the larger will be the product. they grow until hard frosts, whenever you may sow them. there are several varieties, but the long orange is the only one that it is ever best to grow; it is richer than the white, and yields as well: the earlier sorts are no better, as the carrot may be used at any stage of its growth. they should be kept in the ground as long as it is safe. they will stand hard frosts, but, if too much frozen, they are inclined to rot in winter. dig in fair weather, dry in the sun, and keep dry. it is the best of all root crops, except the beet. all animals will eat it freely, while they have to acquire a taste for the beet. cauliflower. the two varieties known in this country are the english and the french--distinguished, also, as early and late. the french only is suitable for cultivation here; especially in the colder regions, as it is earlier. this is cultivated in every way like cabbage. in several respects it is preferable to cabbage; it has a more pleasant flavor, and is more easy of digestion. it is excellent for pickling. seeds may be raised in the same way, and with the same precautions, as cabbage; but it is generally imported. celery. this is one of the finest of our table vegetables, eaten raw with salt, or in soups. sow seed, early in spring, in open ground; or sow in hotbeds, if you wish it very early. when the plants are six inches high, they should be transplanted in trenches eighteen inches deep, containing six inches of well-rotted manure or compost. this should be well watered, and fine mould mixed with it, and the plants placed in it eight inches apart. the trenches should be from four to six feet apart. if the weather be warm and sun bright at the time of transplanting, a board laid lengthwise over the top of the trench will afford perfect protection. as the plants grow, draw the earth up to them, not allowing it to separate the leaves; do this two or three times during the season, and the stalks will be beautifully bleached. heavy loam is much better than sand. _preserving_ for winter is best done by taking up late in the fall, cutting the small roots off, and rounding down to a point the large root, removing the coarse, useless leaves, and placing in a trench at an angle of forty-five degrees, so that six inches of the upper end of the leaves will be above the surface. cover with soil and place poles over, and cover with straw, and in a very cold climate cover with earth. keep out the water. the end can be opened to take it out whenever you please, and it will be as fresh as in the fall. this is better than the methods of keeping in the cellar; it is more certain, and keeps the celery in perfect condition. cheese. the methods of cheese-making differ materially in different countries, and in different parts of the same country. it is also so much a matter of experience and observation, that we recommend to beginners to visit cheese-dairies, and get instructions from practical makers. but we give the following more general outlines, leaving our readers to learn all further details as recommended above. rennet, or the calf's stomach, is used, as nature's agent to turn the milk, or to curdle it without having it sour. there are many fanciful ways of preparing the rennet, putting in sweet herbs, &c. but the ordinary plain method is quite sufficient--which is, to steep it in cold salt water. the milk should be set at once on coming from the cow. setting it too hot, or cooling it with cold water, inclines the cheese to heave. too much rennet gives it a strong, unpleasant smell and taste. break the curd as fine as possible with the hand or dish, or better with a regular cheese-knife with three blades. this is especially important in making large cheeses; small ones need less care in this respect. if the curd be too soft, scald it with very hot whey or water; if it be hard, use a little more than blood-warm whey: it should stand a few minutes in this whey and then be separated, and the curd put into the cheese-hoop, making it heaped full, and pressed hard with the hand. spread a cloth over it, and turn it out. wash the hoop and put back the cheese, with the cloth between the curd and the hoop, and put it in the press. after a few hours take it out, wash the cloth and put it again around the cheese, and return it to the press. after seven or eight hours more take it out again, pare off the edges if they need it, and rub salt all over it--as much as it will take in: this is the best way of salting cheese; the moisture in it at this stage will cause it to absorb just about as much salt as will be agreeable. return it to the press in the hoop without the cloth; let it stand in the press over night; in the morning turn it in the hoop, and continue it in the press until the next morning. place it upon the shelf in the cheese-room, and turn it every day, or at least every other day. if the weather be hot, the doors and windows of the cheese-room should be shut; if cool, they should be open to admit air. _color._--the richest is supposed to be about that of beeswax. this is produced by annotta, or otter, rubbed into the milk at the time of setting, when warm from the cow--or, if the milk has stood till cold, after it has been warmed. cold milk must, before setting, be warmed to about blood or milk heat. this coloring process has no virtue but in its influence on the looks of the cheese. sage cheese is colored by the juice of pounded sage-leaves put into the fine curd before it is put in the hoop; this is the reason of its appearing in streaks, as it would not do if put into the milk, like the annotta. when the cheese is ten days old, it should be soaked in cold whey until the rind becomes soft, and then scraped smooth with a case-knife; then rinse, and wipe and dry it, and return it to the cheese-room, and turn it often until dry enough for market. rich cheeses are apt to spread in warm weather; this is prevented by sewing them in common cheap cotton, exactly fitting. _skippers._--some persons are very fond of skippery cheese. but few, however, like meat and milk together, especially if the meat be alive: hence, to remove skippers from cheese into which they have intruded is quite desirable. the following method is effectual:--wrap up the cheese in thin paper, through which moisture will readily strike; dig a hole two feet deep in pure earth, and bury the cheese;--in thirty-six hours every skipper will be on the outside; brush them off and keep the cheese from the flies, and you will have no further trouble. a mixture of spanish brown and butter, rubbed on the outside of a cheese, frequently gives that yellow coating so often witnessed, and exerts some influence in preserving it. the rank and putrid taste sometimes observed in cheese may be prevented by putting a spoonful of salt in the bottom of each pan, before straining the milk; it will also preserve the milk in hot weather, and give more curd. an english cheese called "stilton cheese," from the name of the place most celebrated for making it, is a superior article, made in the following way: put the cream of the night's milk with the morning's milk; remove the curd with the least possible disturbance, and without breaking; drain and gradually dry it in a sieve; compress it gradually until it becomes firm; put it in a wooden hop on a board, to dry gradually; it should be often turned between binders, top and bottom, to be tightened as the cheese grows smaller. this makes the finest cheese known. as the size makes no difference, it can be made by a person having but one cow. to preserve cheese, keep it from flies, and in a place not so damp as to cause mould. of cheese-pressers there is a great variety: each maker will select the one which he considers best or most convenient, within his reach. in some places, as on the western reserve, in ohio, one establishment makes all the cheese for the neighborhood, buying the curd from all the families around. in such places they have their own methods, which they have understood by all their customers. cherry. cherries are among our first luxuries in the line of fruits. we have cultivated varieties, ripening in succession throughout the cherry season. there is no necessity for cultivating the common red and very acid cherry, except in climates too vigorous for the more tender cultivated varieties. the cherry is an ornamental tree, making a beautiful shade, besides the luxury of its fruit. it is one of the most suitable trees we have for the roadside;--it ought to be extensively planted by the highways throughout all our rural districts, as it is in some parts of europe. in northern germany the highways are avenues, shaded with cherry-trees for distances of fifty or sixty miles together: these trees have been planted by direction of the princes, and afford shade and refreshment to the weary pedestrian, who is always at liberty to eat as much of the fruit as he pleases; this is eminently worthy of imitation in our own country. extremes of cold and heat are not favorable to the cherry: hence, cool places must be selected in hot countries, and warm locations in cold regions. very much, however, can be done by acclimation; it will, probably, yet naturalize the cherry throughout the continent. a deep and moderately rich loam is the best soil for the cherry; very rich soil causes too rapid growth, which makes the tree tender. it will bear more moisture than the grape or peach, and requires less than the apple or pear. it will endure very dry situations tolerably well, while in very wet ones it will soon perish. _propagation_ is generally by budding small trees near the ground. the best stocks are those raised from the seeds of the common black mazzard. it makes a more thrifty tree than any other. the tree grows very large, and bears an abundance of medium black fruit, smallest at the blossom end, and having seeds very large in proportion to the size of the fruit. in white's gardening for the south, it is stated that the common morello of that region does better, by far, for seedling stocks for budding, than the mazzard. use, then, the mazzard for the north, and the mahaleb or common morello for the south. pick them when ripe; let them stand two or three days, till the pulp decays enough to separate easily from the seed by washing. immediately plant the seeds in rows where you wish them to grow; this is better than keeping them over winter in sand, as a little neglect in spring will spoil them, they are so tender, when they begin to germinate. keep them clean of weeds. the next spring, set them in rows ten inches or a foot apart, placing the different sizes by themselves, that large ones need not overshadow small ones and prevent their growth. in the following august, or on the last of july, bud them near the ground. the stocks are to be headed back the following spring, and the bud will make five or six feet of growth the same season. the cherry-tree seldom needs pruning, further than to pinch off any little shoots that may come out in a wrong place (and they will be very few), and cut away dead branches. any removal of large limbs will produce gum, which is apt to end in decay, and finally in the death of the tree. whatever pruning you must do, do it in the hottest summer weather, and the wounds will dry and prevent the exudation of gum. trees are generally trained horizontally. some, however, are trained as espaliers against walls, and in fan shape. when once the form is perfected (as given under training), nothing is necessary but to cut off--twice in each season, about six weeks apart, in the most growing time--all other shoots that come out within four inches of their base. new shoots will be constantly springing, and the tree will keep its shape and bear excellent fruit. trees so trained are usually in warm locations, and where they can be easily protected in winter; hence, this is adapted to the finer and more tender varieties. the varieties of cherries are numerous, and rapidly increasing. they are less distinguishable than most other fruits. we shall only present a few of the best, and give only their general qualities, without any effort to enable our readers to identify varieties. (see our remarks on the nomenclature of apples.) downing, in , recommended the following, as choice and hardy, adapted to the middle states:-- . black tartarean. . black eagle. . early white heart. . downton. . downer's late. . manning's mottled. . flesh-color'd bigarreau . elton. . belle de choisy. . may duke. . kentish. . knight's early black. the national convention of fruit-growers recommend the following as the best for the whole country:-- . may duke. . black tartarean. . black eagle. . bigarreau. . knight's early black. . downer. . elton. . downton. we recommend the following as all that need be cultivated for profit. they are adapted alike to the field and the garden. we omit the synonyms, and give only the predominant color. the figures in the cuts refer to our numbers in the list:-- name. color. time. . rockport bigarreau, red. june st. . knight's early black, black. june th. . black tartarean, purplish. june th. . kirtland's mary, marbled, light-red. june, july. . delicate, amber-yellow. june th. . late bigarreau, deep-yellow. june th. . late duke, dark-red. aug. th. . cleveland bigarreau, red. june th. . american heart, pale. june st. . napoleon, purplish-black. july th. the time is that of their greatest perfection, but varies with latitude and location. we know none better than the foregoing. in the long lists of the fruit-books, there are others of great excellence, some of which are hardly distinguishable from our list. we recommend to all cultivators to procure the best in their localities, under the advice of the best pomologists in their vicinity. such men as barry will be consulted for the latitude of western new york; elliott and kirtland for cleveland, ohio; cole and others for new england and canada; hooker and other great fruit-growers of southern ohio, &c., &c. these gentlemen, like all scientific men, are happy to communicate their knowledge for the benefit of others. [illustration: cherries--natural size and shape. (see page .)] we see no reason for cultivating more than ten or twelve varieties; and, as the above are productive and excellent, including all desirable colors and qualities, and ripening through the whole cherry season, we know not what more would be profitable to the cultivator. if you wish more for the sake of variety, your nurseryman will name them, and show the quality of each, that renders it "_the best_ that ever was," until you will become tired of hearing, and more weary of paying for them. decayed wood, spent tanbark, and forest-leaves, are good for the cherry. in removing and transplanting, be careful not to injure the roots, or expose them to sun and air, as they are so tender, that a degree of exposure that would be little felt by the apple or peach tree will destroy the cherry. if you are going to keep a cherry-tree out of the ground half an hour, throw a damp mat, or damp straw, over the roots, and you will save disappointment. the rich alluvial soils of the west are regarded unfavorable to the cherry. we know from observation and experience that the common red cherry does exceedingly well there, while the best cultivated are apt to suffer much from the winters. one reason is, the common cherry is a slow-going, hardy tree, while the cultivated is more thrifty, and therefore more tender. we give the following as a _sure method_ of raising the cultivated cherries in great perfection on all the rich prairies of the west. it is all included in dry locations, root-pruning, and slight heading-in:-- . dry locations. it is known that the rich alluvial soils of the west are remarkable for retaining water in winter. on level, and even high prairie land, water will stand in winter, and thoroughly saturate the soil and freeze up. this is very destructive to the tender, porous root of the cherry-tree. how shall such locations be made dry, and these evils prevented? by carting on gravel and sand. put two or three loads of sand or gravel, or both, in the shape of a slight mound, for each cherry-tree. there should first be a slight excavation, that the sand and gravel may be about half below the level of the surrounding soil, and half above it: this will so elevate the tree that no water can stand around it, and none can stand in the gravel and sand below it. the freezing of such soil will not be injurious to the roots of the tree. . root-pruning is to prevent too rapid growth. such growth is always more tender and susceptible of injury from sudden and severe freezing. (see root-pruning.) . heading-in puts back the growth and throws the sap into the lateral twigs, thus maturing the wood already grown, instead of producing new wood, so young and tender that it will die in winter and spread decay through the whole tree. heading-in, with the cherry, must only be done with small twigs. cultivators will see at a glance that this method will certainly succeed in all the west and southwest. it is considered difficult to raise cherries at the south; the hot sun destroys the trees. plant in the coolest situations, where there is a little shade from other trees, though not too near, or from buildings; cut them back, so as to cause shoots near the ground, and then head-in as the peach, so as to keep the whole covered with leaves, to shade the trunk and large limbs, and perfect success will crown your efforts. but in all cutting-back and heading-in of cherry-trees, remove the limbs when very small. charcoal. there are but few who realize the value of charcoal applied to the soil. whoever will observe fields where coal has been burned, will see that grass or grain about the bed of the former pits, will be earlier and much more luxuriant than in any other portion of the field. this difference is discernible for twenty years. it is the best known agent for absorbing any noxious matter in the soil or in the moisture about the roots of the trees. no peach-tree should be planted without a few quarts of pulverized charcoal in the soil. this would also prove highly beneficial to cherry-trees on land where they might be exposed to too much moisture. its color also renders it an excellent application to the surface of hills of vines. it is quite effectual against the ravages of insects, and so absorbs the rays of the sun as to promote a rapid growth of the plants. chestnuts are among our best nuts, if not allowed to get too dry. when dried hard they are rather indigestible. the tree grows well in most parts of the united states, provided the soil be light sand or dry gravel. if the soil be not suitable, every man may have a half-dozen chestnut-trees, at a trifling expense. haul ten or fifteen loads of sand upon a square rod, and plant a tree in it, and it will flourish well. five or six trees would afford the children in a family a great luxury, annually. the blossoms appear so very late, that they are seldom cut off by the frost. the second growth chestnut-tree is also decidedly ornamental. cider. the usual careless way of making cider, in which is used all kinds of apples, even frozen and decayed ones, and without any reference to their ripeness; without straining, and neglecting all means of regulating the fermentation, is too well known. this is the more general practice throughout the country; but it makes cider only fit for vinegar, although it is used for general purposes. we give the most approved method of making and keeping cider, that is better for invalids than any of our adulterated wines (and this is the character of nearly all our imported wines). our domestic wines, and bottled cider, should take the place of all others. select apples best suited for cider, and gather them at the commencement of hard frosts. let them lie a few days, until they become ripe and soft. then throw out all decayed and immature fruit. grind fine and uniform. let the pulp remain in the vat two days. it will increase the saccharine principle and improve the color. put into the press in dry straw, and strain the juice into clean casks. place the casks in an open shed or cellar, if it be cold weather, give plenty of air and leave the bung out. as the froth works out of the bung, fill up every day or two, with some of the same pressing kept for the purpose. in three weeks or less this rising will cease, and the bung should be put in loose, and after three days driven in tight. leave a small vent-hole near the bung. in a cool cellar the fermentation will cease in two days. this is known by the clearness of the liquor, the thick scum that rises, and the cessation of the escape of air. draw off the clear cider into a clean cask. if it remains quiet it may stand till spring. a gill of fine charcoal added to a barrel will secure this end, and prevent fermentation from going too far. but if a scum collects on the surface, and the fermentation continues, rack it off again at once. then drive the vent-spile tight. rack it off again in early spring. if not perfectly clear, dissolve three quarters of an ounce of isinglass in cider, and put it in the barrel, and it will soon be perfectly fine. bottle between this and the last of may. fill the bottles within an inch of the bottom of the cork, and allow them to stand an hour, then drive the cork. lay them in dry sand, in boxes in a cool cellar, and the cider will improve by age, and is better for the sick than imported wines. citrons are only used for preserving. their appearance and growth resemble in all respects the watermelon. planted near the latter, they utterly ruin them, making them more citron than melon. they are injurious to most other contiguous vines. they are to be planted and cultivated like the watermelon. are very fine preserved; but we think the outside (removing the rind) of a watermelon better, and should not regret to know, that not another citron was ever to be raised. clover. the only varieties successfully cultivated in this country, are the red and the white. red clovers are divided into large, medium, and small. the white is all alike. the long-rooted clover of hungary is an excellent productive variety, enduring successfully almost any degree of drought. but in all the colder parts of this country it winter-kills so badly as to render it unprofitable. clover makes good pastures, being nutritious, and early and rapid growing. red-clover makes fair hay, though inferior to timothy or red-top. white clover is unsuitable for hay; it shrinks so much in drying, that it is very unproductive. it is the best of all grasses for sheep pasture, and its blossoms afford in abundance the best of honey. red clover plowed in, even when full-grown, is an excellent fertilizer. it begins to be regarded, in western new york, as productive of the weevil, so destructive to wheat. further observation is necessary to settle this question. red-clover hay is too dusty for horses, and too wasteful for cattle. the stalks are so large a proportion, and so slightly nutritious, that it is unprofitable even as cut-feed. it is best to cultivate clover mainly for pastures and as a fertilizer. sowing clover and timothy together for hay is much practised. the first year it will be nearly all clover, and the second year mostly timothy. but sown together, they are not good for hay, because they do not mature within ten or fifteen days of the same time. but, for those who are determined to make hay out of red clover, the following directions for curing may be valuable: mow when dry, spread at once, and let it wilt thoroughly; then put up into small cocks, not rolled, but one fork full _laid_ upon another until high enough;--it will then shed water; but when rolled up, water will run down through. let it stand till thoroughly dried, and then draw into the barn; it will be bright and sweet. another method is to cut when free from dew or rain, spread even, and allow it to wilt, and the leaves and smaller parts to dry; then draw into the barn, putting alternate loads of clover and dry straw into the mow, salting the clover very lightly. the clover is sometimes put in when quite green, and salted sufficiently to preserve it. it is injurious to cattle, by compelling them to eat more salt than they need. cattle will eat but little salt in winter, when it stands within their reach; too much salt in hay compels them to eat more, which engenders disease. clover cured as above makes the best possible clover-hay, if great care be used to prevent excessive salting. saving clover-seed is a matter of considerable importance. the large red clover is too late a variety to produce seed on a second crop the same season, as do the medium and small. the first growth must be allowed to ripen. cut when the heads are generally dead, but before it has begun to shell. the medium and small red clovers will produce a good crop of seed from second growth, if it be not too dry, immediately after mowing. cut when the heads generally are dry, rake into small winrows at once, and soon put it in small bunches and let it stand until very dry, and then draw in. raking and stirring after it becomes dry will waste one half of it. coffee bean. this grows in a pod somewhat resembling the pea; easily raised, as other beans; and is very productive. browned and ground, it is used as a substitute for coffee. by many persons it is much esteemed. if this and the orange carrot were adopted extensively, instead of coffee, it would afford a great relief to the health, as well as the pockets, of the american people. corn. this is the most valuable of all american products of the soil, not excepting wheat or cotton. it is used for human food all over the world. and there is no domestic animal or fowl, whose habits require grain, whether whole or ground, that is not fond of it. it is easily raised, and is a sure and abundant crop, in all latitudes south of forty-six degrees north. the varieties are few, and principally local. the soil can not be made too rich for corn. it should be planted in rows each way, to allow cultivating both ways with a horse. the distance of rows apart has been a subject of some differences of opinion; there is a disposition to crowd it too near together. in western new york, where much attention has been given to it, the usual distance is three and one half feet each way; others plant four feet apart. on all land we have ever seen, we believe four feet apart each way, with four or five stalks in a hill, will produce the largest yield. it lets in the sun sufficiently around every hill, and the proportion of ears to the stalks will be larger than in any other distance. planting with a span of horses, and a planter on which a man can ride and plant two rows at once, is the easiest and most expeditious. we can not too strongly recommend harrowing corn as soon as it comes out of the ground. it increases the crop, and saves much expense in cultivating. all planters should know that indian corn is one of those plants which will come to maturity at a certain age, whether it be large or small; hence, anything that will increase the growth while young will add to the product. corn neglected when small receives, thereby, an injury from which it will never recover; after-hoeing may help it, but never can fully restore it. if there are small weeds, the harrowing will destroy them, and give all the strength of the soil to the young corn; if there are no weeds, the effect of the harrowing will be to give the young plants twice as large a growth in the first two weeks as they would make without it. harrow with a =v= drag, with the front tooth out, that the remaining teeth may go each side of the row. use two horses, allowing the row to stand between them; let the harrow-teeth run as near the corn as possible. never plant corn until the soil has become warm enough to make it come up quickly and grow rapidly. if you feed corn to cattle whole, feed it with the husks on, as it will compel them to chew it better, and will thus be a great saving. crib corn only when very dry, and avoid the western and southern method of leaving cribs uncovered; the corn thus becomes less valuable for any use. a little plaster or wood-ashes applied to corn on first coming up, and again when six inches high, will abundantly repay cost and labor;--it will pay even on the prairie-lands of the west, and is quite essential on the poorer soils of the east and north. it had better never be neglected. the crop will weigh more to the acre, by allowing it to stand as it grew, until thoroughly dry. the next larger crop is when the stalks are cut off above the ear (called topping) after it has become glazed. still a little less will be the product when it is cut up at the ground, while the leaves are yet quite green. the two latter methods are adapted for the purpose of saving fodder in good condition for cattle. intelligent farmers regard the fodder of much more value than the decrease in the weight of the grain. corn thus cut up, and fed without husking, is the best possible way for winter-fattening cattle on a large scale, and where corn is abundant. to save the whole, swine should follow the cattle, changing yards once a week. seed-corn should be gathered from the first ripe large ears before frost, and while the general crop is yet green. select ears above the average size, that are well filled out to the end, and your corn will improve from year to year. take your seed indiscriminately from the crib at planting-time, and your corn will deteriorate. the largest and best ears ripen neither first nor last; hence, select the largest ears before all is ripe, and reject the small earliest ears. soaking seed twenty-four hours, and then rolling in plaster before planting, is recommended; it is conveniently practised only where you plant by hand. soaking without rolling in plaster is good, if you plant in a wet time; but if in a dry time, it is absolutely injurious. once in a while there occurs quite a general failure of seed-corn to come up. farmers say that their corn looks as fair as ever, but does not vegetate well. when this is general, there is a remedy that every farmer can successfully apply. the difficulty is not (as we have often heard asserted) from the intense cold of the winter: it is sometimes the result of cold, wet weather after planting. but we do not believe that such would be the effect, with good seed, on properly-prepared land. the difficulty is, the fall was very wet, and the seed was allowed to stand out and get thoroughly soaked; when it was gathered it was damp, and the intense cold of winter destroyed its vitality, without injuring its appearance. there is no degree of cold, in a latitude where corn will grow, that will injure the seed, if it be gathered dry and kept so. our rules for saving seed, given above, will always remedy this evil. this is, perhaps, the most profitable of all green crops for soiling cattle. sown on clean, mellow land, it will produce an enormous weight of good green fodder, suitable for summer and early fall feeding of cows, just at a time when dry weather has nearly destroyed their pastures. corn-fodder, well cured, is better for milch-cows than the best of hay. cut fine and mixed with ground feed, it is excellent for cattle and horses. it is best preserved in small stacks or large shocks, that will perfectly dry through. the tops and leaves, removed while green, are very fine. cotton. no product of the soil is more useful than this. to this country alone we give the highest value to indian corn. but, in usefulness to the whole world, corn must yield the palm to cotton. it employs more hands and capital in manufacturing, and enters more largely into the clothing of mankind, than any other article. the history of cotton and the cotton-gin, and of the manufacture of cotton goods, is exceedingly interesting. the eminence of great britain as the first commercial nation of the world is due, in no small degree, to her cotton manufactures. and the influence of this great staple american product upon all the interests of this country, social and political, civil and religious, is universally felt and acknowledged. the cotton-fields of the south, at certain stages of growth, and especially when in bloom, present scenes of beauty unsurpassed by any other growing crop. it does not come within our design in this work to give a very extended view of cotton culture. this business in the united states is confined principally to a particular class of men, known as planters. they cultivate it on a large scale, having the control of large means. such men seek knowledge of those of their own class, and would hardly condescend to listen to an essay on their peculiar business, written by a northern man, not experienced in planting. and yet an article, not covering more than ten pages of this volume, might be written, condensing in a clear manner all that is established in this branch of american industry, as found in the publications of the south. such an article, well written, by a man who would be regarded good authority, would be of vast pecuniary value to the south. whoever carefully reads southern agricultural papers, and "turner's cotton-planter's manual," will see a great conflict of opinions on the subject, and yet a presentation of many facts, that one thoroughly conversant with soil culture in general would see to be true and important. the embodiment of these facts and principles in a brief, plain article that would be received and practised, would add value to the annual cotton crop, that would be counted by millions. what better service can some southern gentleman do for his own chosen and favorite region than to write such an article? we give the following brief view of the whole subject, not presuming to teach cotton-planters what they are supposed to understand much better than we do, but to throw out some thoughts that may be suggestive of improvements that others may mature and carry out, and to lead young men, just commencing the business of planting, to look about and see if they may not make some improvements upon what they behold around them. this will not fail of being interesting to northern men, most of whom know nothing of the cotton-plant, or the modes of its cultivation. it is interesting, too, that some of the most essential points are in perfect accordance with the great principles of soil culture throughout the world. there are three species of cotton: tree-cotton, shrub-cotton, and herbaceous cotton. the tree-cotton is cultivated to considerable extent in northern africa, and produces a fair staple of cotton for commerce; being produced on trees from ten to twenty-five feet high, it is not so easily gathered. the shrub-cotton is cultivated in various parts of the world, particularly in asia and south america. growing in the form of small bushes, it is convenient, and the staple is fair. but these are both inferior to the herbaceous cotton. this is an herb growing annually, like corn, a number of feet in height, more or less according to soil and season, and producing the best known cotton. under these species there are many varieties: we need speak only of the varieties of herbaceous cotton. writers vary in their estimates of varieties; some say there are eight, and others put them as high as one hundred. this is a question of no practical moment. the sea-island cotton, called also "long staple" on account of its very long silky fibres, is the finest cotton known. its name arose from the fact of its production in greatest perfection on the low, sandy islands near the coasts of some of the southern states. it does well on low land near the seashore. the saltness and humidity of such locations seem peculiarly favorable to its greatest perfection. it yields about half as much as the "short staple" called mexican and petit gulf cotton, and known in commerce as upland cotton. but the sea-island, or long staple, sells for three or four times as much per pound, and, hence, is most profitable to the planter, in all regions where it will flourish well. the mexican is very productive on most soils, and is easily gathered and prepared for market. there are quite a number of other varieties; as, banana, vick's hundred-seed, pitt's prolific, multibolus, mammoth, sugar-loaf, &c., &c. the sugar-loaf is highly commended, as are some of the others named. they have had quite a run among seed-sellers. most of these varieties are the improved mexican. it is well to get seed frequently from a distance; but any extravagant prices are unwise. improvement of cotton-seed is an important part of its most profitable culture. while much said about it by interested parties is doubtless mere humbug, yet there is great importance to be attached to improvement of seed. this is true of all agricultural products, and no less so of cotton than of others. two things only are essential to constant improvement in cotton-seed--_selection_ and _care_. select from the best quality, producing the largest yield, and maturing early; pick it before much rain has fallen on it after ripening; dry it thoroughly before ginning, and dry it very thoroughly after it is clear of the fibre, before putting it in bulk. cotton-seed, without extra care in drying, has moisture enough to make it heat in bulk, by which its germinating power is greatly impaired. it is this, and the effects of fall rains, that causes seed to trouble planters so seriously by not coming up: this makes it difficult to obtain good even stands, and causes much loss by diminished crops. care in these respects would add many pounds to the acre in most cotton-fields of the land. _preparing the soil for planting._--on all land not having a porous subsoil, plow very deep; it gives opportunity for the long tap-root of the plant to penetrate deep, and guard against excessive drought. the usual custom is to lay the ground into beds, elevated a little in the middle, and a depression between them, in which excessive moisture may run off; also to increase the action of the sun and air. the surface of the soil to be planted should be made very fine and smooth. this is true of everything planted--it should be in finely-pulverized soil; it comes up more readily and evenly. soil left in coarse lumps or particles gives the air too much action on the germinating seeds and young plants, and retards and stints their growth. deep plowing guards alike against too much or too little moisture. too much water has room to sink away from the surface and allow it to dry speedily. it also forms a sort of reservoir to hold water for use in a drought. the seed should be planted in as straight a line as possible, from three and a half to five and a half feet apart one way, and from fourteen to twenty-five inches the other, according to the quality of the land, and the growth of the variety planted. rich lands will not bear the plants so close as the poor. many are great losers by not securing plants enough on the ground. straight lines greatly facilitate culture, as it can mostly be done with the plow or cultivator. turning land over deep, just before planting, is the best known remedy for the cut-worm; it is said to put them back until the plants grow beyond their reach. the best planters generally cover with a piece of plank drawn over the furrow in which the seed is dropped. it would be far better to roll it, as some few planters do; the effect on the early vegetation of the seed and rapid growth of the young plant would be very great, on the general principles given on "rolling." the object of cultivation is to keep down the grass, which is the great enemy of the cotton. plowing the last thing before planting aids this, by giving the cotton quite as early a start as the weeds or grass. cultivate early, and the grass will be easily covered and killed. always plant when it will come up speedily and grow rapidly; this is better than very early planting, and certainly much better than very late. thin out to one in a place, as early as the plants are out of danger of dying. gathering should commence as soon as bolls enough are in right condition to allow a hand to gather forty pounds per day. it is better and cheaper than to risk the injury from rains after the crop is ripe. manures.--perhaps this is, at the present time, the greatest question for cotton-planters. the application of all the most approved principles and agents of fertilization would do more for the interests of the cotton crop than anything else. cotton-plantations are sometimes said to run down so as to render it necessary to abandon portions of the land, and select new. instead of this, land may not only be kept up with proper manuring, but made to yield larger crops from year to year. the following analysis of the ash of the cotton-plant will indicate the wants of the soil in which it grows:-- . potash . . lime . . magnesia . . chloride . . phosphoric acid . . sulphuric acid . . silica . ---- . this analysis shows that the soil for cotton needs much lime, bones or bone-dust, and wood-ashes, besides the ordinary barn-yard and compost manures. all the preparations and applications of manures specified in this work, under the head of "manures," are applicable to cotton. the usual recommendations of rotation in crops is, perhaps, more important in cotton culture than anywhere else. judicious fallowing, on principles adapted to a southern climate, is another great means of keeping up and improving the land. this is also the only effectual means of guarding against the numerous enemies and diseases of the cotton-plant. the health of the plants is secured, and they are made to outstrip their enemies only by the fertility and fine tilth of the soil in which they grow. this is confirmed on every hand by the correspondence of the most intelligent planters of the south. let cotton-growers go into a thorough system of fertilization of their soils, and attend personally to the improvement of their cotton-seed, by selection, as recommended above, and the result will be an addition of one eighth, or one fourth, to the products of cotton in the united states, without adding another acre to the area under cultivation. when this comes to be understood, men of small means will cultivate a little cotton by their own individual labor, as the poorer men do corn and other agricultural products, and thus improve their condition. the above suggestions are the conclusions to which we come, from a thorough examination of what has been published to the world on this subject. we recommend the careful perusal of "the cotton-planter's manual," by turner (published by saxton and co., new york), and increased attention to the subject, by the intelligent, educated, and practical men with whom the cotton-growing regions abound. cows. the cow occupies the first place among domestic animals, in value to the american people, not excepting even the horse. from the original stock, still kept as a curiosity on the grounds of some english noblemen, cattle have been greatly improved by care in breeding and feeding. those wild animals are still beautiful, but only about one third of the weight of the ordinary improved cattle, and not more than one fourth that of the _most improved_. improving the breed of cattle is a subject by itself, demanding a separate treatise. it is not to be expected that we should go into it at length in a work like this. but so much depends upon the cow, that we can hardly write an article on her without giving those general principles that lie at the foundation of all improvement in cattle. the few suggestions that follow, if heeded, would be worth many times the value of this book to any farmer not already familiar with the facts. the cow affects all other stock in two ways; first, the form of calves, and consequently of grown cattle, is affected as much by the cow as by the bull. the quality and quantity of her milk, also, has a great influence upon the early growth of all neat stock. cattle are usually named from their horns, as "short horns," &c. it is a means of distinction, like a name, but not expressive of quality. the leading marks of a good cow are, medium height for her weight, small neck, straight and wide back, wide breast--giving room for healthy action of the lungs--heavy hind-quarters, and soft skin with fine hair, skin yellowish, with much dandruff above the bag behind. a smart countenance is also expressive of good qualities; there is as much difference in the eyes and expression of cattle as of men. select only such cows to raise stock from, and allow them to go to no bull that has not good marks, and is not of a superior form. another important matter is to avoid breeding in and in. this is injurious in all domestic animals and fowls. always have the cow and the bull from different regions: attention to this would constantly improve any breed we have, and by improving the size of cattle, and milking qualities of cows, would add vast amounts to the wealth of farmers, without the necessity of purchasing, at a great price, any of the high-bred cattle. we have observed, in our article on calves, that abundant feeding during the first year has much to do with the excellence of stock. unite with these regularity in feeding, watering, and salting, keeping dry and warm in stormy, cold weather, and well curried and clean, and a farmer's stock will be much more profitable to him. but this brief mention of the general principles must suffice, while we give all the further space we can occupy with this article to-- the infallible marks of the milking qualities of cows.--m. francis guenon, of france, has published a treatise, in which he shows, by external marks alone, the quality and quantity of milk of any cow, and the length of time she will continue to give milk. these marks are so plain, that they are applicable to calves but a few weeks old, as well as to cows. whoever will take a little pains to understand this, can know, when he proposes to buy a cow, how much milk she will give, with proper feed and treatment, the quality of her milk, and the length of time she will give milk after having been gotten with calf. if the farmer has heifer-calves, some of which he proposes to send to the butcher and others to raise, he may know which will make poor milkers, and which good ones, and raise the good and kill the poor. thus, he may see a calf that his neighbor is going to slaughter, and, from these external marks, he may discover that it would make one of the best milking cows of the neighborhood; it would then pay to buy and raise it, though he might have to kill and throw away his own, which he could see would make a poor cow if raised. thus, all extraordinary milkers would be raised, and all poor ones be slaughtered: this alone would improve the whole stock of the country twenty-five per cent. in as many years. attention has been called to this, in the most emphatic manner, by _the new york tribune_--a paper that always takes a deep interest in whatever will advance the great industrial interests of the whole people--and yet, this announcement will be new to a vast number of farmers into whose hands this volume will fall. to many it will be utterly incredible, especially when we inform them that the indications are, mainly, the growth of the hair, on the cow behind, from the roots of the teats upward. "impossible!" many a practical, common-sense man will say. but that same man will acknowledge that a bull has a different color, different neck, and different horns, left in his natural state, from those he would exhibit if altered to an ox. why is it not equally credible that the growth of the hair, &c., should be affected by the secretion and flow of the milk on that part of the system where those operations are principally carried on? but, aside from all reasonings on the subject, the fact is certain, and whoever may read this article may test its correctness, as applied to his own cows or those of his neighbor. the great agriculturists of france (and it is no mean agricultural country) have tested it, under the direction of the agricultural societies, and pronounced it entirely certain. this was followed by an award, by the french government, of a pension of three thousand francs per annum to guenon, as a benefactor of the people by the discovery he had made. the same has been amply tested in this country, with the same certain results. it now only remains for every farmer to test it for himself, and avail himself of the profits that will arise from it. guenon divides cows into eight classes, and has eight orders under each class, making sixty-four cows, of which he has cuts in his work. he also adds what he calls a bastard-cow in each class, making seventy-two in all. now, to master all these nice distinctions in his classes and orders would be tedious, and nearly useless. efforts at this would tend to confusion. we desire to give the indications in a brief manner, with a very few cuts; and yet, we would hope to be much better understood by the masses than we believe guenon to be. we claim no credit; guenon is the discoverer, and we only promulgate his discovery in the plainest language we can command; and if we can reach the ear of the american farmers, and call their attention to this, we shall not have labored in vain. the appearance of the hind-part of the cow, from a point near the gambrel-joint up to the tail, guenon calls the escutcheon. the following cuts show the marks of all of guenon's eight classes, the first and the last in each class. the intermediate ones are in regular gradation from the first to the eighth order. each class is divided into high, medium, and low, yielding milk somewhat in proportion to their size. we give the quantity of milk which the large cows will yield. this also supposes cows to be well fed on suitable food. smaller cows of the same class and order, or those that are poorly cared for and fed, will, of course, give less. the names of all these eight classes are entirely arbitrary--they mean nothing. m. guenon adopted them on account of the shape of the escutcheon, or from the name of the place from which the cows came. but cows with these peculiar marks are found among all breeds, in all countries, and of all colors, sizes, and ages. these marks are certain, except the variations that are caused by extra care or neglect. [illustration: fig. . first class. fig. . _order_ . flanders cow. _order_ .] this class of cows has a delicate bag, covered with fine downy hair, growing upward from between the teats, and, above the bag behind, it blends itself with a growth of hair pointing upward, and covering the region marked in figure . this upward growth of hair begins on the legs just above the gambrel-joint, covers the inside of the thighs, and extends up to the tail, as in figure first. above the hind teats they generally have two oval spots, two inches wide by three long, formed by hair growing downward, and of paler color than the hair that surrounds them (e, e, in fig. ). the skin covered by the whole of this escutcheon is yellowish, with a few black spots, and a kind of bran, or dandruff, detaches from it. cows of this class and order, when well kept, give about twenty-two quarts of milk per day, when in full flow, and before getting with calf again; after this a little less, but still a large quantity. they will continue to give milk till eight months gone with calf, or till they calve again, if you continue to milk them. this, however, should never be done; it exposes the health of cows at the time of calving, and injures the young. from this there is a gradual diminution in the quantity of milk through the orders, down to the eighth. cows of this order (fig. ), or with the marks you see in the drawing, will never yield more than about five quarts per day in their best state, and they will only continue to give milk until two months with calf: hence, these are only fit for the butcher. the intervening six in gruenon's classification are gradually poorer than the first, and better than the last, in our cuts. the marks are but very slightly different from the above, except in size; the difference is so trifling, that any one can at once see that they belong to this class;--and the comparative size of this mark will show, infallibly, their value compared with the above. in the intermediate grades, the spots (e, e, fig. ) are smaller, and as the orders descend, these spots are wanting, and some slight changes in the form of the whole mark are observed, yet the general outline remains the same. now, as the decrease in the eight orders in each class is about from two and a half to three or three and a half quarts, no man with eyes need be deceived in buying a cow, or raising a calf, in the quantity of milk she may be made to give. any man can tell, within one or two quarts, the yield of any cow or heifer. the only chance for mistake is in the case of bastard-cows, which rapidly dry up on getting with calf. [illustration: fig. . second class. fig. . _order_ . selvage cow. _order_ .] in this class, the shape of the escutcheon is entirely distinct, so that no one will confound it with the first. the gradations are the same as in the preceding, only this class, all through, is inferior to the other. the first (fig. ) will give only twenty or twenty-one quarts, and the poorest only four quarts. this escutcheon is formed by ascending hair, but with a very different outline from the first class; it has the same spots above the hind teats as the first, formed by descending hair. in the lower orders these disappear--first one, then one small one, and then none at all--and as they descend, similar spots appear, formed in the same way, on one or both sides of the vulva (f, fig. ). the skin of the inside surface of the thigh is yellowish. the time of giving milk--viz., eight months gone with calf, or as long as you continue to milk them--is the same as in the first class. the last order (fig. ) of this class give very little milk after getting with calf. [illustration: fig. . third class. fig. . _order_ . curveline cow. _order_ .] this escutcheon is easily distinguished from the others, by its outline figure. the spots on the bag above the hind teats are formed as in the preceding, and as gradually disappear in the lower orders. in those orders there is a slight difference in the outline, but its general form is the same. the first of this class (fig. ) yields twenty or twenty-one quarts a day, and gives milk till within a month of calving. the last order of the class (fig. ) gives only three and a half quarts, and goes dry on getting with calf. the intermediate gradations between the first and eighth orders are the same as in the preceding classes. [illustration: fig. . fourth class. fig. . _order_ . bicorn cow. _order_ .] these escutcheons are unmistakably diverse from either of the others; gradations, from first to eighth orders, the same. the first order in this class (fig. ) will give eighteen quarts a day, and give milk until eight months with calf. the dandruff which detaches from the skin within the escutcheon of the first order is yellowish or copperish color. the two marks on the sides of the vulva are narrow streaks of ascending hair, not in the general mark. the last order of the class (fig. ) gives three and a half quarts only a day, and goes dry when with calf. [illustration: fig. . fifth class. fig. . _order_ . demijohn cow. _order_ .] here is another general mark, easily distinguishable from all the others by its outline. the first order (fig. ) will give eighteen quarts a day, and give milk eight months, or within a month of calving. yellowish skin; delicate bag, covered with fine downy hair, as in the higher orders of all the preceding classes. the eighth order of this class (fig. ) will give only two and a half quarts per day, and none after conceiving anew. the gradation from first to eighth order is regular, as in the others. sixth class. yield of first order (fig. ) eighteen quarts per day; time, eight months. skin within the escutcheon same color, bag equally delicate, and hair fine, as in all the first orders. eighth order (fig. ) yields about two quarts per day, and dries up on getting with calf. [illustration: fig. . fig. . _order_ . square escutcheon cow. _order_ .] [illustration: fig. . seventh class. fig. . _order_ . limousine cow. _order_ .] first order in this class (fig. ) gives fifteen quarts; time, eight months. the skin, bag, and hair, same as in the higher orders in all the classes. the eighth order (fig. ) will yield two and a half quarts per day, and dry up when with calf. eighth class. first order (fig. ) will give fifteen quarts per day; time, eight months. skin in escutcheon reddish-yellow and silky, hair fine, teats far apart. the eighth order (fig. ) yields two and a half quarts a day, and dries up on getting with calf. [illustration: fig. . fig. . _order_ . horizontal cut cow. _order_ .] each class of cows has a kind called bastards, among those whose escutcheons would otherwise indicate the first order of their class: these often deceive the most practised eye. the only remedy is to become familiar with the infallible marks given by guenon by which bastards may be known. this defect will account for the irregularity of many cows, and their suddenly going dry on becoming with calf, and often for the bad quality of their milk. they are distinguished by the lines of ascending and descending hair in their escutcheon. [illustration: fig. . fig. . fig. .] in the flanders cow (fig. ) there are two bastards; one distinguished by the fact that the hair forming the line of the escutcheon bristles up, like beards on a head of grain, instead of lying smooth, as in the genuine cow; they project over the intersection of the ascending and descending hair in a very bristling manner. the other bastard of the flanders cow is known by having an oval patch of downward growing hair, about eight inches below the vulva, and in a line with it; in the large cows it is four inches long, and two and a half wide, and the hair within it always of a lighter color than that surrounding it. cows of this mark are always imperfect. in the bastards, the skin on the escutcheon is usually reddish; it is smooth to the touch, and yields no dandruff. bastards of the selvage cow are known by two oval patches of ascending hair, one on each side of the vulva, four or five inches long, by an inch and a half wide (fig. ). the larger the spot, and the coarser the hair, the more defective they prove, and vice versa. bastards of the curveline cow are known by the size of spots of hair on each side of the vulva (fig. ). when they are of four or five inches by one and a half, and pointed or rounded at the ends, they indicate bastards. if they be small, the cow will not lose her milk very rapidly on getting with calf. bastards of the bicorn cow are indicated precisely as in the preceding--by _the size_ of the spots of ascending hair, above the escutcheon and by the sides of the vulva (f, f, fig. ). bastards of the demijohn cow are distinguished precisely as the two preceding--_size of the streaks_ (fig. ). the square escutcheon cow indicates bastards, by a streak of hair at the right of the vulva (fig. ). when that ascending hair is coarse and bristly, it is a sure evidence that the animal is a bastard. limousine cows show their bastards precisely as do the curveline and bicorn, by the size of the ascending streaks of hair, on the right and left of the vulva. (fig. .) bastards of the horizontal cut cows have no escutcheon whatever. by this they are always known. some bastards are good milkers until they get with calf, and then very soon dry up. others are poor milkers. those with coarse hair and but little of it, in the escutcheon, give poor, watery milk. those of fine, thick hair will give good milk. bulls have escutcheons of the same shape as the cows, but on a smaller scale. whenever there are streaks of descending hair bristling up among the ascending hair of the escutcheon, rendering it quite irregular and rough in its appearance, the animal is regarded as a bastard. never put a cow to any bull that has not a regular, well-defined, and smooth escutcheon. this is as fully as we have room to go into m. guenon's details. we fear this will fall into the hands of many who will not take the pains to master even these distinctions. to those who will, we trust they will be found plain, and certain in their results. from all this, one thing is certain, and that is of immense value to the farmer: it is, that on general principles, without remembering the exact figure of one of the indications above given, or one of the arbitrary terms it has been necessary to use, any man can tell the quality and quantity of milk a cow will give, and the time she will give milk, with sufficient accuracy to buy no cow and raise no heifer that will not be a profitable dairy cow, if that is what he desires. the rules by which these things may be known are the following: no cow, of any class, is ever a good milker, that has not a large surface of hair growing upward from the teats and covering the inner surface of the thighs, and extending up toward or to the tail. no cow that is destitute of this mark, or only has a very small one, is ever a good milker. every cow having a scanty growth of coarse hair in the above mark will only give poor, watery milk; and every cow having a thick growth of fine hair on the escutcheon, or surface where it ascends, and considerable dandruff, will always give good rich milk, and be good for butter and cheese. every cow on which this mark is small will give but little milk, and dry up soon after getting with calf, and is not fit to be kept. observe these brief rules, and milk your cows _at certain hours every day_--milk _very quickly_, without stopping, and _very clean_, not leaving a drop--and you never will have a poor cow on your farm, and at least twenty-five per cent. will be added to the value of the ordinary dairy, that is made up of cows purchased or raised in the usual, hap-hazard way. if your cows' udders swell after calving, wash them in aconite made weak with water; it is very good for taking out inflammation. other common remedies are known. if your cow or other creature gets choked, pour into the throat half a pint, at least, of oil; and by rubbing the neck, the obstruction will probably move up or down. curry your cows as thoroughly as you do your horses; and if they ever chance to get lousy, wash them in a decoction of tobacco. cranberry. [illustration] this is native in the northern parts of both hemispheres. in england and on the continents of europe and asia, native cranberries are inferior, in size and quality, to the american. our own have also been greatly improved by cultivation. they have become an important article of commerce, and find a ready sale, at high prices, in all the leading markets of the country. their successful cultivation, therefore, deserves attention, as really as that of other fruits. mr. b. eastwood has written a volume on the subject, which probably contains all the facts already established, together with many opinions of scientific and practical cultivators. the work is valuable, but much less so than it would have been, had the author put into a few pages the important facts, and left out all speculations and diversities of opinion. the objection to most of this kind of literature is the intermixture of facts and valuable suggestions with so much that is not only useless, but absolutely pernicious, by the confusion it creates. we think the following directions for the cultivation of the cranberry are complete, according to our present knowledge:-- _soil._--it is universally agreed that _beach sand_ is the best. not from the beach of the ocean barely, but of lakes, ponds, or rivers. there is no evidence that any saline quality that may be in sand from the beach of the sea, is particularly useful. it is the cleanness of the sand, on which account it is less calculated to promote a growth of weeds, and allows a free passage of moisture toward the surface. hence white sand is preferable, and the cleaner the better. whoever has a moist meadow in the soil of which there is considerable sand has a good place for a cranberry bed. if you have not a sand meadow, select a plat of ground as moist as any you have, upon which water will not stand unless you confine it there, and draw on sand to the depth of four or six inches, having first removed any grass or break-turf, that may be in danger of coming up as weeds to choke the vines. if you make the ground mellow below and then put on the sand, you will have a bed that will give you but little further trouble. peat soils will do, if you take off the top and expose to the weather, frosts and rains, one year before planting. the first year, peat will dry and crack, so as to destroy young cranberry vines. but after one winter's frost, it becomes pulverized and will not again bake. hence it is next to sand for a cranberry bed. _situation._--the shore of a body of water, or of a small pond is best, if it be not too much exposed to violent action of wind and waves. land that retains much moisture within a foot of the surface, but which does not become stagnant, is very valuable. the bottoms of small ponds that can be drained off are very good. any land that can be flowed with water at pleasure is good. by flooding, the blossoms are kept back till late spring frosts are gone. any upland can be prepared as above. but if it be a very dry soil it must have a liberal supply of water during dry weather, or success may not be expected. _planting._--there are several methods. sod planting consists in preparing the land and then cutting out square sods containing vines, and setting them at the distances apart, you desire. this was the general method; but it is objectionable, on account of the weeds that will grow out of the sod and choke the vines. this method is improved by tearing away the sod, leaving the roots naked, and then planting. another method is to cut off a vigorous shoot, and plant the middle of it, with each end protruding from the soil two or three inches apart. roots will come out by all the leaves that are buried, and promote the springing of many new vines, and thus the early matting of the bed which is very desirable. others take short slips and thrust four or five of them together down into the soil as they do slips of currant bushes, thus making a hill of as many plants. and yet another method is, to cut up the vines into pieces of two or three inches in length, and broad cast them on mellow soil, and harrow them in as wheat--others bury the short pieces in drills. in either case they will soon mat the whole ground, if the land be not weedy. the best plan for small beds is probably the middle planting. distances apart depend upon your design in cultivating. if your soil is such that so many weeds will grow as to require cultivating with a horse, or much hoeing, four feet one way and two the other is the best. better have land so well covered with clean sand, that very few weeds will grow and no cultivation be needed. then set vines one foot apart and very soon the whole ground will be perfectly matted and will need very little care for years. for two or three years pull out the weeds by hand, and the ground will be covered and need nothing more. _varieties._--there are three principal ones of the lowland species. the bell, the bugle, and the cherry cranberries. these are named from their shape. probably the cherry is the best, being the size, shape, and color of the cultivated red cherries. there has recently been discovered an upland variety, on the shores of lake superior, that bids fair to be as hardy and productive as the common currant. on all poor, hard, and even very dry uplands, it does remarkably well. it grows extensively in the northern part of the british provinces. the fruit is smaller than the other varieties but is delicious, beautiful in color, and very abundant. it will probably be one of our great and universal luxuries. _healthy and unhealthy plants._--by this cultivators denote those that bear well and those that do not. and yet the unhealthy, or those that bear the least, are the larger, greener-leaved, and rapid-growing varieties. it is difficult to describe them so that an unpractised eye would know them from each other. the best way to be sure of getting the right kind is to purchase of a man you can trust, or visit the beds when the fruit is in perfection and witness where the crop is abundant, mark it, and let it remain until you are ready to plant. this is always best done in the spring, or from may th to june th. _gathering_--is performed by hand, or with a cranberry-rake. hand-picking is best for the vines, but is more expensive. if a rake be used, it will draw out some small runners and retard the growth of young vines. but it is such a saving of expense, it had better be used, and always drawn the same way. the fruit should be cleared of leaves and decayed berries; and if intended for a near market, be packed dry in barrels. if to be transported far, put them in small casks, say half-barrels, with good water. they may thus be carried around the globe in good condition. to keep well they should not be exposed to fall frosts, and should not be picked before ripe. a little practice, and at first on a small scale, may enable american cultivators of the soil, generally, to have good cranberry beds. much of the practical part of this can only be learned by experience. the above suggestions will save much loss and discouragement. _enemies_--are worms that attack the leaves, and another species that attack the berries. there are only two remedies proposed, viz., fire and water. if you can flood your beds you will destroy them. if not, take a time not very dry so as to endanger burning the roots, and burn over your cranberry-beds, so as to consume all the vines. next season new vines will grow up free from worms. cucumbers. there are quite a number of varieties. but a few only deserve attention. the best, for all uses, is the early cluster, a great bearer of firm, tender, brittle fruit. early frame, long white, turkey, and long green turkey, are rather beautiful, but not prolific varieties. long prickly, is very good for pickles, and fills a cask rapidly, but is by no means so pleasant as the early cluster. the short prickly and white spined are considerably used. the west india or small gherkin is used only for pickling, and is considered fine. but we regard all these inferior to the early cluster. _soil_ should be made very rich with compost and vegetable mould, with a liberal application of sand. all vines do better in a sandy soil. plant in the open air only after the weather has become quite warm. an effort to get early cucumbers by early out-door planting is usually a failure; seeds decay, or having come up, after a long while, they grow slowly, and vines and fruit are apt to be imperfect. six feet apart, each way, is the best distance; and after the plants get out of the way of insects, and become well established, two vines in each hill is better than more: the fruit will be better and more abundant, and they will bear much longer than when vines are left to grow very thick. they need water in dry weather (see watering). the first week in july is the best time to plant for pickling. in a warm, dry climate, cucumbers do better a little shaded, but not too much. planted among young fruit-trees, or in alternate rows with corn, they do well. if allowed to run up bushes like peas, they produce more and better fruit. forcing for an early crop is often done, by digging a hole in the ground, two feet deep and two feet square, and filling with hot manure, stamped down well, and covered with six inches of fine mould. put around a frame and cover with glass, at an angle of thirty-five degrees to the sun. plant one hundred seeds on the two feet square; when they come up, put two plants in a pot, set in a regular hotbed, and keep well watered and aired until the weather be warm enough to transplant in the open air; then remove from the pots without breaking the ball of earth, and plant six feet apart. four plants left in the original hill will bear earlier than those that have been removed. to get a large quantity of very early ones, plant a corresponding number of hills, with the two feet of manure, as above; whenever the weather becomes hot, they will need to be well watered, or they will dry up. all cucumber-plants forced should have the main runner cut off, after the second rough leaf appears; this brings fruit earlier and twice as abundant. on transplanting cucumbers, or any other vines, cover them wholly from the sun for three days, or, if the weather be dry, for a whole week. we once thought melons and cucumbers very difficult to transplant successfully; but we ascertained the only difficulty to be, the want of sufficient water and shade. when roots and soil were so dry that the dirt all fell off, we have transplanted with perfect success; but for a week the plants appeared to be ruined. we kept them covered and well watered, and they revived and made a great crop, much earlier than seeds planted at the same time. protection of plants from insects has been a subject of much study and many experiments. ashes and lime, and various decoctions and offensive mixtures, have been recommended. we discard them all, as both troublesome and ineffectual. our experience is, most decidedly, in favor of fencing each hill, of all vines, to keep off insects. a box a foot square and fifteen inches high, the lower edge set in the soil, will usually prove effectual. put over a pane of glass, and it will be more sure, and increase the warmth and consequently the growth of the plants. put millinet over the boxes, instead of glass, and not a hill will be lost. if a cutworm chances to be fenced in, he will show himself by cutting off a plant. search him out and kill him, and all will be safe. such boxes, well taken care of, will last for ten years. this, then, is a cheap as well as effectual method. cucumbers are a cooling, healthy article of diet, used in reasonable quantities. they should be sliced into cold water, taken out, and put in sharp vinegar with pepper and salt. ripe cucumbers make one of the best of pickles: for directions in making, we refer to the cook-books. if you have room near your back door for one large hill of cucumbers, you may obtain a remarkable growth. dig down deep enough to set in an old barrel, with head and bottom out, leaving the top even with the surface. fill with manure from the stable, well trod down. in fine rich mould, around on the outside of the barrel, plant twenty or thirty cucumber-seeds. put a pail of water in the barrel every day. the water comes up through the soil to the roots of the plants, bringing with it the stimulus of the manure, and the effect is wonderful. a large barrel has been filled with pickles from one such hill. if bushes be put up to support the vines, it is still better. neglect to pour in water, and they will dry up; but continue to water them, and they will bear till frost in autumn. currants. these are among the very best of all the small fruits; immensely productive in all locations, and adapted to a great variety of uses, and hang long on the bushes after ripening. there is quite a number of varieties, some of which are probably the mere result of cultivation of others well known. the common red is too well known to need description--very acid, and always remarkably productive, in all soils and situations. the size and quality of the fruit are affected by location and culture. the native currants, as found in the north of europe, are small and inferior; but all excellent modern varieties have sprung from them by cultivation. in working these important changes, the dutch and french gardeners have been the chief agents: hence our names, red and white dutch currants. the common red and the common white are still cultivated in the great majority of american gardens; and yet, they are not worthy to be named with the white dutch and the red dutch, which may easily be obtained by every cultivator. these two varieties are all that ever need be cultivated. long lists of currants are described in many of the fruit-books; the result, as in all such cases, is confusion and loss to the mass of growers. we will not even give the list. the common red and the white currants are greatly improved by cultivation. but the dutch have longer bunches, of larger fruit, the lower ones in the stem holding their size much better than common currants; the stems are usually full and perfect, and the fruit less acid and more pleasant. a new, strong-growing variety, called the "cherry currant" on account of its large size, is now considerably grown. a few bushes for variety, and for their beautiful appearance, may be well enough; but it is not a very good bearer, and therefore is not so profitable as the dutch. the attractor is a new french variety, said to be valuable. knight's early red has the single virtue of ripening a few days earlier than the others. the victoria is perhaps the latest of all currants, hanging on the bushes fully two weeks longer than others. the white grape, the red grape, and the transparent, are all good and beautiful. the utilitarian will cultivate the red dutch and the white dutch as his main crop, with two or three of the others for a variety. the amateur will get all the varieties, and amuse himself by comparing their qualities, and trying his skill at modifying them. as these efforts have resulted, in past time, in the production of our best varieties, so they may, in future, in something far better than we yet have. there is no probability that any of our fruits have reached the acme of perfection. the common black, or english black currant has long been cultivated. a jam made of it is valuable for sore throat. the highest medical authority pronounces black currant wine the best, in many cases of sickness, of any wine known. the black naples possesses the same virtues, and being a much larger fruit, and more productive, should take the place of the english black, and exclude it from all gardens. _cultivation._--currant-bushes should be set four feet apart each way, and the whole ground thoroughly mulched; it keeps down all weeds and grass, saving all further labor in cultivation, and greatly increases the size and quantity of the fruit. on nothing does mulching pay better. (see article mulching.) any good garden-soil is suitable for currants. on the north side of a wall or building, or in the shade of trees, they will be considerably later. the same effect may be produced by covering bushes a part of the time with blankets or mats. some are retarded by this means, so as to be in perfection after others are gone: thus, the currant that naturally comes to perfection about midsummer is preserved on the bushes until october. many cultivate currants in the tree form; allowing no sprouts from the roots, and no branches within a foot or two of the ground. this object is secured by cutting from the slip you are to plant, from which to raise a bush, all the lower buds to within two or three of the top, and then pinching off at once all shoots that may start out of the stem below; this makes beautiful little shrubs, but the top is apt to be broken off by the wind, and they must be replaced by new ones every four or five years. downing strongly recommends it, but we can not do so. let bushes grow in the natural way, removing all old, decaying branches, and all suckers that rise too far from the parent-bush, and keep the clusters of bushes and leaves thin enough to allow the sun free access, and prevent continued moisture in wet weather, which will rot the fruit, and you will find it the cheapest and best. we have seen quite as large and as fine fruit grow on such bushes, that we knew to be more than twenty years old, as we ever saw of the same variety when cultivated in the tree form. dairy. for cheese, the dairy should contain three rooms: one for setting the milk, with suitable boilers, &c.; next, a press-room, in which the cheese should be salted, as given under article _cheese_; the third, a store-room. in all climates a cheese-house should be made as tight as possible;--thick stone walls are best; windows should be on two sides, north and west, but not on opposite sides, so as to create a draught: this is no better for cheese or butter, and is always dangerous to the operator. let all persons who would enjoy good health avoid a draught of air as they would an arrow. if your cheese-house can be shaded on the east, south, and west, by trees, and have only a northern exposure, it will aid you much in guarding against extremes of heat and cold. windows should be fitted closely, and covered with wire-cloth on the outside, so as to exclude all flies. a dairy for butter needs but two rooms, and a cool, dry cellar, with windows in north and west. the first room should be for setting and skimming the milk, and the other for churning and working the butter, and scalding and cleaning the utensils. if your milk-room can be a spring-house with stone-floor, and a little water passing over it, you will find it a great benefit. the shade, situation of windows, avoiding a current, &c., should be the same as in the cheese-dairy. to prevent the taste of turnips or other food of cows in milk and butter, put one quart of hot water into eight quarts of the milk just drawn from the cow, and strain it at once. it has been recently declared, by intelligent farmers, that if you feed the turnips to cows immediately after milking, the next milking, twelve hours after feeding the roots, will be free from their taste or odor. the easiest remedy is the boiling water. declension of fruits. that there are instances of decided decline in the quality of fruits is certain. but on the causes of those changes pomologists do not agree. one theory is, that fruits, like animals and vegetables of former ages, may decline and finally become extinct. should this theory be established, the declension would be so gradual that a century would make no perceptible change. but we do not credit the theory, even as applied to former geological periods in the history of our globe. the changes of past ages, as revealed in geology, have been brought about, not gradually, but by great convulsions of nature, such as volcanoes, or the deluge, that resulted in the destruction of the old order of things, and in a new creation. the true theory of this declension of varieties of fruits, is, that it is the result of repeated budding upon unhealthy stocks, and of neglect and improper cultivation. apply the specific manures--that is, those particularly demanded by a given fruit--prune properly, mulch well, and bud or graft only on healthy seedling stocks of the same kind, and, instead of declension, we may expect our best fruits to improve constantly, in quality and quantity. dill. an herb, native in the south of europe, and on the cape of good hope. it is grown, particularly at the south, as a medicinal herb. the leaves are sometimes used for culinary purposes; but it is principally cultivated for its sharp aromatic seed, used for flatulence and colic in infants, and put into pickled cucumbers to heighten the flavor. the seeds may be sown early in the spring, or at the time of ripening. a light soil is best. clear of weeds, and thin in the rows, are the conditions of success. drains. drains are of two kinds--under-drains and surface-drains. the latter are simply open ditches to carry off surface-water, that might otherwise stand long enough to destroy the prospective crop. these are frequently useful along at the foot of hills, when they should be proportioned to the extent of the surface above them. they are also very useful on low, level meadow-lands. properly constructed, they will reclaim low swamps, and make them excellent land. millions of acres of land in the united states, as good as any we have, are lying useless, and spreading pestilence around, that by this simple method of ditching might be turned to most profitable account. the direction of these drains should be determined by the shape of the land to be drained by them--straight whenever they will answer the purpose, but crooked when they will do better. on low and very level land, they should be not more than five rods apart; they should be three times as wide at the top as they are at the bottom, and as deep as the width at the top; made so slanting, the sides will not fall in;--they should be so shaped as to allow only a very gentle flow of the water: if it flows too rapidly, it will wash down the sides, and obstruct the ditch, and waste the land. excavations for under-draining are made in the same way, only the top need not be so much wider than the bottom; it would be a waste of labor in excavating a useless quantity of earth. there are four methods of filling up the ditch, viz., with brush; with small stones thrown in promiscuously; with a throat laid in the bottom and filled with small stones; and with a throat made of tile from the pottery. in all cases, that with which the ditch is filled must not come so near the surface as to be reached by the plow. brush, put in green and covered with straw or leaves, will answer a good purpose for several years, and may be used where small stones can not easily be obtained. the tile is more expensive than either of the others, and not so good as the stones; it is so tight that the water does not enter it so readily; and if by any chance dirt gets into the throat, it obstructs it, and there is no other channel through which the water can pass off. small stones thrown in promiscuously serve a good purpose for a long time, if they be covered with straw or cornstalks before the earth is put in. but the best method is to make a throat, six inches square, in the bottom of the drain, laying the large stones over the top of it, and filling in the small stones above, and covering with straw;--the water will find its way into the throat through the numerous openings; and if the throat should ever be filled, the water could still pass off between the small stones above. such drains will last many years, and add one half to the products of all wet springy land. the earth over the new drain should be six inches higher than the surface of the field, that, when well settled, it may be level. leave no places open for surface-water to run in; that would soon fill up and ruin a drain. drains made to carry off spring-water are often useless by being in a wrong location. springs come out near the foot of rising ground. just where they come out should be the location of the drain, which would then carry off the water and prevent it from saturating and chilling the soil in the field below. many persons locate their ditch down in the centre of the wet level below the rise of ground; this is of no use to the surface above, to the point where the water springs. locate the drain just at the point where the land begins to be unduly wet. on very wet, level land, a small drain may also be needed below the first and main one. the cost of a covered drain as described above will be from fifty to seventy-five cents per rod, and an uncovered one will cost from twenty to thirty cents. when you have low swamps to drain, you can realize more than the cost of draining, by carting the excavations upon other land, or into the barnyard as material for compost. perhaps no expenditure, on land needing it, pays so well as thorough draining. it is important, for all fruit-orchards on low land, to put a drain through under each row of trees: it is indispensable to cherries, and highly favorable to all other fruits. ducks. there are a number of varieties, the wild black spanish, the canvass-back, and the ordinary little duck of the farmyard, are all good. the common duck is the only one we recommend for the american poultry-yard. a close pasture, including a rivulet, or a small stream of water, affords facilities for raising ducks at a cheap rate. from one hundred to one thousand ducks may be raised in such an enclosure of an acre or two, quite profitably. if there is plenty of grass, they will still need a little grain. in the winter the cheapest feed is beets or potatoes cut fine, with a very little grain. each duck, well kept, will lay from fifty to one hundred eggs, larger than hen's eggs, and about as good for cooking purposes. they may be picked as geese, for live feathers, though not quite so frequently. the feathers will nearly pay for keeping, leaving the eggs and increase as profit. dwarfing. this has some advantages in its application to fruit-trees. it will enable the cultivator to raise more fruit on a small plat of ground, to get fruit much earlier than from standard trees, and sometimes, with high cultivation, the fruit will be larger. dwarfing is done by grafting into small slow-growing stocks. almost all fruits have such kinds. grafting into other stocks, as the pear into the foreign quince, is a very effectual method. the paradise stock for the apple, the canada and other slow-growing stocks for the plum, the dwarf wild cherry of europe and the mahaleb for cherries. dwarfs produced by grafting upon other stocks are short-lived, compared with standards of the same varieties. they should only be used to economize room, to test varieties, and produce fruit while standards are coming into bearing. better and much longer-lived dwarfs may be produced by frequent transplanting, thorough trimming of the roots, and repeated heading-in. the fruit on such dwarfs must be well thinned out when young, or it will be smaller than is natural. the effect of heading in is to cause the sap to mature an abundance of fruit-buds. this will tax the tree too much, unless they be well thinned out. root-pruning is an effectual method of dwarfing (see pruning). dwarfing by root-pruning, repeated transplanting, and thorough heading-in, will not render the trees very short-lived, and in many situations it is profitable. the same is true of the dwarf pear on the quince. all other dwarfing is more for the amateur than the utilitarian. early fruits and vegetables are often considered a great luxury, and always command a high price. early vegetables are secured by hotbeds and the various methods of forcing, as given under the different species. early fruits are obtained by dwarfing, as given on that subject. location, soil, and mode of cultivation, also, have much to do with it. warm location, finely-pulverized soil, often stirred and kept moist, will materially shorten the time of the maturity of fruits and vegetables. seeds imported from the north, where seasons are shorter, will mature earlier. another means of hastening maturity is to plant successively, from year to year, the very first that ripens; this tends to dwarf in proportion as the time of maturity is hastened. in this way such dwarfs as the little canada corn, that will mature at the south in six weeks, have been produced. various early plants, as tomatoes, cabbages, peppers, and egg-plants, may be started in boxes or flower-pots in the house. planted in february here, or in january in the south, they will grow as well as house-plants, and acquire considerable size before it is time to place them in the open ground. this is convenient for those who have no hotbeds. they must be kept from frost, and occasionally set out in a warm day to harden, and they will do well. egg plant. the white is merely ornamental. the large purple is one of the greatest luxuries of the vegetable garden. plant seeds in hotbed at the time of planting tomatoes or peppers. set out in land made very rich with stable-manure and decayed forest-leaves, two feet and a half apart each way. kept clean, and earthed up a little, and the bugs kept off while the plants are small, they will produce an abundance of fruit. there are two varieties of the purple--_large prickly-stem purple_, growing sometimes eight inches in diameter; and the _long purple_, bearing smaller, long fruit, but a large quantity, and considerably earlier than the large. many do not like them at first; but after tasting a few times, almost all persons become very fond of them. if not properly cooked, they are not at all palatable. although it belongs to the cook-book, yet, to save this excellent plant from condemnation, we give a recipe for cooking it. it is fit for use from one third grown, until the seeds begin to turn. without paring, cut the fruit into slices one third of an inch thick; put it in a little water with plenty of salt, and let it stand over night, or six hours at least; take it out, and fry very soft and brown in butter or fresh lard--if not fried soft and brown, it is disagreeable. salt, ashes, and bonedust, or superphosphate of lime, are the best manures, as more than two thirds of the fruit is made up of potash, soda, and phosphates, as shown by chemical analysis. eggs. of the quality of eggs you can always judge correctly by looking at them toward the light: if they are translucent they are good; if they look dark they are old--or you may get a chicken, when you only paid for an egg. many methods for preserving eggs are recommended. packed away in fine salt they will keep, but, like salt meat, have not the same flavor as fresh. set them on their small ends in a tight cask, and fill it with pure lime-water, and they will keep, but it changes their flavor. this, however, is a very common method. the best way known to us, is to pack fresh eggs down in indian meal, allowing no two to touch each other. keep very dry in a cool cellar, and they will remain for months unchanged. elderberry. this is a healthy berry, dried and used for making pies, especially mixed with some other fruit. the blossoms are much used as medicine for small children. the common sweet elder is the only kind cultivated. the earlier red are offensive and poisonous. they are easily grown on rough waste land, or in any situation you prefer. of this berry is made a wine, superior in flavor and effect to any port wine now to be obtained in market; it has had the preference among the best judges in the country;--it is fast coming into notice and cultivation. the wine is so entirely superior to the poisonous substances of that name in commerce, that it would be well for every neighborhood to make enough for their sick. the process is sure and easily intelligible to all. (see article wine.) endive. this is a well-known winter-lettuce. sow from july to september, according to latitude. it should come into maturity at the time of the first smart frosts. to get beautiful, white, tender bunches, they should be tied up when the leaves are about six inches long. when frost comes, protect by covering. in very cold climates, place it in the cellar, with the roots in moist earth, and it will keep for a long time. it will not be extensively used in this country for soups and stews, as it is in europe; and but few of the american people care much about winter-lettuce. this is the best variety of lettuce, except for those who have hot-houses and attend to winter-gardening. they will prefer the other finer varieties. there are two varieties of endive cultivated in this country: _green curled_, which is the most common, and used principally as a salad; the _broad-leaved_, or batavian, has thicker leaves and large heads, and is principally used in stews and soups. still another variety, called _succory_, which is used to some extent in europe as a winter-salad, but is cultivated mainly for the root. it is dried and ground to mix with coffee: some consider it quite as good. this is more cultivated at the south than at the north--their winters are much better adapted to it. the medicinal virtues of this plant are nearly equal to those of the dandelion. when it is bleached, by tying or earthing up, the bitterness is removed, and the taste is pleasant; this must be done when the plants are dry, or they will rot. plant them in a sunny place and in a light soil. feeding animals. feed as nearly as possible at the same hours. all creatures do much better for being so fed. do not feed domestic animals too much: animals will be more healthy, grow faster, and fatten better, by being fed almost, but not quite as much as they will eat. giving food to lie by them is poor economy; always let them eat it all up, and desire a little more;--at the same time, let it be remembered that creatures kept very poorly for a considerable time, especially while young, will never fully recover from it. this is often done under the idea of keeping them cheap, but it is dear keeping. they never can make as fine animals afterward. all grains and vegetables, except beets and turnips, are better for being boiled or steamed. the increased value is much more than the cost of cooking, provided persons are not so careless as to allow food to be injured by standing after cooking. cooking is supposed to add one fourth to the value of food. grinding dry grains adds nearly as much to their value, as feed for animals, as cooking. if you neither grind nor boil hard grain for feed, it will pay well to soak it somewhat soft before feeding. variety of food is as pleasant and healthy for animals as for men. fences. these are matters of great importance to the farmers of the whole country, but especially to those on the prairies of the west. in all localities where stone can be obtained from the fields or quarry, the best and cheapest fence is a stone wall. if the stones are flat, make the wall two feet thick at bottom, and one at top, five feet high. if the stones are very irregular the wall should be thicker. stone walls should have transverse rows of shingles, boards, or split sticks, about half an inch thick, laid in the wall at suitable distances. if stones are quite flat three rows are desirable, one two, the next three, and the other four feet from the ground. if the wall is made of rough stones it will require one more course of sticks, leaving them only a foot apart. the sticks should be of such lengths as to come out just even with the wall, on each side. the lower courses will be longer than the upper ones. these sticks are to keep the wall from falling down. dig a ditch one foot deep, two feet from the wall, and throw the earth excavated up against the wall, and the water will run off and prevent heaving by frost, and such a wall will need the merest trifle of attention during a generation, and will last for centuries. a cord of stones will make one rod. we can not too strongly recommend this kind of fence, in all places where stones can be obtained reasonably. the pieces of wood laid in a wall, will keep well for thirty years, when they will need replacing. next to stone is a good board fence. well made and of good materials, it is durable and always in its place. hence it is a cheap fence. of the various styles of picket, and other fancy fences for front yards, &c., it is more the province of the architect or the mechanic to treat. styles vary and are constantly increasing in number. the great point to be secured in all such, to render them most durable, is to have the smallest possible points of contact. a picket fence with horizontal base should never have the pickets standing on the base board. they should be separated, from one quarter to one half an inch. a good style for villages, is a cap, water tight, and wide enough to cover the ends of the posts and pickets with a neat little cornice. it looks well and is very durable. in all localities where timber is not too valuable, a cheap and substantial fence is made of split rails. the crooked rail-fence, with stakes and riders, is well known. also that with upright stakes and caps, which is decidedly preferable. it will stand much longer, and the stakes are out of the way. no farmer should ever risk his crop with a rail-fence without stakes. but the best of all rail-fences, is that made of posts and rails. the rails are put in as bars, but so firmly that the fence can not be taken down, without commencing at the end. where cedar or locust posts, and oak or cedar rails can be obtained, a fence may be made that will not get out of repair for twenty-five years. no creature can tear it down, for human hands can not take it down without tools, or without commencing at the end. this is considered expensive. but as the farmer may prepare his posts and rails in winter, and it will require no attention to keep it up, and is very durable and perfectly effectual against cattle, it is an economical fence. for hedges, see that article. fennel. this is a hardy perennial plant of southern europe, and belongs to both the culinary and the medicinal departments. it grows well on almost any soil, and is propagated by seeds, offshoots, or by parting the roots. it is much inclined to spread. a few roots, kept within reasonable bounds, are enough for a family. it is much used in europe for soups, salads, and garnishes. the italians treat it as celery. in this country it is mostly used medicinally. it is stimulant and carminative. very beneficial to children in cases of flatulency and colic. figs. [illustration] this fruit is native in the warmer parts of asia: hence, the cold winters of the middle, northern, and western states, and of canada, would destroy the trees in the open air without protection. but as the trees are low-growing shrubs, they may easily be protected either in cellars, greenhouses, or the open air, and uncovered or planted out in the beginning of warm weather. frequent removals and transplantings injure the fig less than any other fruit, and our summers are long enough to produce large crops of excellent figs. in new england they are raised in tubs, set out of the cellar in spring, and produce largely. south of virginia, the fig is hardy, and may be cultivated with profit in the open air. the best method of raising all kinds of fruit, in climates where the winters are too cold for them, is to build a wall twelve feet high on one side, and six feet on the other, with the ends closed, and cover it with glass facing the south. this should only be kept warm enough to prevent freezing, which would require only a small outlay. men of moderate means might thus have oranges, lemons, figs, &c., of their own raising. in all except our coldest latitudes, such fruits might be raised at a profit. _soil._--the best is a deep, rich loam, with a dry subsoil. _propagation_ is by layers and cuttings. the latter should be taken off in the spring, be of last year's growth, with half an inch of the previous year's growth: they take root better. _varieties_ are numerous, and names uncertain. white, in his gardening for the south, says, some of the best varieties are not in the books, or so imperfectly described that they can not be recognised. this is true of all the fruits, and hence our decision, in this work, not to attempt to describe fruits with a view to their identification. as this fruit is more for the south than the north, we give the whole of white's list, as being adapted to those regions:-- , brunswick; , brown turkey; , brown ischia; , small brown ischia; , black genoa; , celestial; , common blue; , round white, common white, lemon fig; , white genoa, white italian; , nerii; , pregussatta; , allicant; , black ischia; , white ischia. these, with a few others, are those described in most of our fruit-books. the catalogue of the london horticultural society enumerates forty-two varieties. only a few of them have been introduced into this country. any of these varieties are good at the south. the five following are the most hardy, and, being in all respects good, are all we need in our more northern latitudes:-- . _brunswick._--very hardy, productive, and excellent. . _brown turkey._--the very hardiest, and one of the most regular and abundant bearers. . _black ischia._--bears an abundance of medium-sized, excellent fruit, very dark-colored. . _nerii._--said to be the richest fig in britain: from an acid mixture in its flavor, it is exceedingly delicious. . _celestial._--this may be the "malta" of downing. under whatever name, though small, it is one of the very best figs grown in this country. for forcing under glass, the best are the allicant and marseilles. with care, the first three of the above list may be raised in the middle states, without removal in winter. any variety may be protected by bending and tying down the branches, and covering with four inches of soil. below philadelphia, a little straw will be a sufficient protection. dried figs are an important article of import into this country; yet they might be raised as plentifully and profitably in the southern states. prune only to keep the tree low and regular. the fig-tree is a great and regular bearer, only when the wood makes too strong a growth, as it is somewhat apt to do. the remedy is _root-pruning_. cut off, on the first of november, the roots to half the length of the branches from the tree, and occasionally shorten the branches a little, and the fruit will be abundant, and not fall off. the ripening of the fruit may be hastened and perfected by putting a drop of oil in the blossom-end of each fig. this is done by dipping the end of a straw in oil, and then putting it into the end of the fruit. this is extensively practised in france. compost, containing a pretty liberal proportion of lime, is the best manure for the fig. fish. the cultivation of fish is attracting much attention in this country and in europe. the study and experiments of scientific and practical men have established important facts upon this subject. fish may be successfully cultivated wherever water can be conveniently obtained. the creeks, ponds, and small rivers of our land may be well stocked with fish. fish may be raised as a source of profit and luxury, with as much ease and certainty, and at a much less expense than fowls. this is so important to the whole people, that it demands the earnest attention of our state authorities, as it has engaged that of the government of france. the species of fish best adapted to artificial culture, in particular climates and in different kinds of water, have been ascertained. a man may know what fish to put in his waters, as well as what crops to put on his land, or what stocks on his farm. the following brief synopsis of the best methods of cultivation will be sufficient to insure success. the first requisite is suitable water for hatching eggs that have been artificially fecundated, and for the occupancy of fish of different ages, and for different species of fish. fish of different ages are much inclined to destroy each other for food; and hence, in order to multiply them most rapidly, they should be kept in separate ponds until considerably grown, when they will take care of themselves. a spring sending forth a rivulet of clear water, and not subject to overflow in freshets, is the best location. clear, cool water is essential to the trout, while some other fish will do well in warm and even roily water. the rivulet running from the spring should be made to form a succession of ponds, three or four in number. these ponds should be connected with flumes made of plank. if the space they must occupy be small, make the flumes zigzag, to increase their length. put across those flumes, once in four or five feet, a piece of plank half as high as the sides of the flume, with a notch cut in the centre of the top, that the fish may easily pass over: this will afford a succession of little falls, in which the trout very much delights. these different ponds are for the occupancy of fish of different ages, one age only inhabiting one pond. the flumes should have four inches of fine and coarse gravel in the bottom, making the most perfect spawning-ground. although you would not wish the female-trout to deposite her eggs in the natural way, but will extrude them by the hand (as hereinafter directed), yet they must have these natural conveniences, or they will not incline to spawn at all. at the upper end of each of these flumes separating the ponds, there should be a gate of wire-cloth, to prevent the passage of the fish from one pond to the other; also one at the outlet of the lower pond, to prevent egress of the fish. these must all be so arranged that freshets will not connect them all together. when trout are about to spawn in their natural waters, they select a gravelly margin, and remove, from a circle of about one foot or two feet in diameter, all the sediment, leaving only clean gravel, among which they deposite their eggs, where they are hatched. they want running water of three or four inches in depth for this purpose. a male and female occupy each nest. if left to themselves, they will gradually increase; but so many of their eggs fail of being fecundated, and so many are destroyed before they hatch, by enemies, and by the collection of sediment in the nest, that the number of young fish is small compared with the whole number of eggs deposited. artificial spawning, fecundation, and hatching, are far more productive. the process is simple and easy: when the female-fish first begins to deposite her eggs, catch her with a small net. it can not be done with bait, for fish will bite nothing at the time of spawning. we recollect, often when a boy, of trying to catch trout out of the brooks in october, where we could see large, beautiful fish, lying lazily in the places from which we had caught many in the summer, and put our bait carefully on every side of them, and they would not bite. then we knew not the cause: since studying the habits of fish, we have learned that they never will bite while spawning; with trout, this is done from the st to the th of october, some few spawning till the last of november. having caught two fish, male and female, take the female in one hand, and press her abdomen gently with the other hand, gradually moving it downward, and the eggs will be easily extruded, and should fall into an earthen vessel of pure water. then take the male-fish, and go through the same process, which will press out the spermatic fluid, which should be allowed to fall into the same vessel with the eggs; stir up the whole together, and, after it has stood fifteen minutes, pour off the water, put in more and stir it up, and let it stand as before. this having been done three times, the eggs will be thoroughly fecundated, and are ready to be deposited in the nests for hatching. if the fish are caught before the time of beginning to spawn, the eggs and the spermatic fluid will not be mature, and will be only extruded by hard pressing, and failing to be fecundated, the eggs will perish. the fluid from one male will fecundate the eggs of half a dozen females. these eggs may be hatched in the flumes described above, though hatching-boxes are preferable. the old fish can be returned to the water, and may live many years and produce thousands of fish. these fish, carefully treated and fed, will become so tame as to eat out of your hand, like the "naiad queen" of professors ackley and garlick, of cleveland, ohio. among all the hatching apparatus we have seen described, we regard that of the above professors at cleveland the best. to these gentlemen the country is much indebted for the knowledge derived from their zeal and success in fish culture. at the head of a spring they built a house eight by twelve feet; in the end of the house toward the spring they made a tank four feet wide, eight feet long, and two feet deep; this was made of plank. water enters the tank through a hole near the top, and escapes through a similar one at the other end, and is received into a series of ten successive boxes, each one a little lower than the preceding one. these boxes were eighteen inches long, eight inches wide, and six inches deep. these were filled to the depth of two inches with clean sand and gravel. the impregnated eggs were scattered among the gravel, care being exercised not to have them in piles or masses. clean water is necessary, as the sediment deposited by impure water is very destructive to the eggs. if it be seen to be collecting, it should be removed by agitating the water with a goose-quill or soft brush, and allowing it to run off; continue this till it runs clear. but there is a method of preventing impurities in spring-water, that will be always effectual: just around on the upper side of the spring make a tight fence two feet high, and it will turn aside, and cause to run around the spring, all the water that may flow down the rise above in time of rains. the house being near the head, there will not water enough get into the spring, in any storm, to roil the water. on the side of the boxes where the water escapes should be wire-cloth, so fine as not to allow the eggs to pass through. such an apparatus will be perfect. this great care is only necessary for trout. all other fish worthy of cultivation, will only need spawning-beds on the margin of their pond. a convenient hatching apparatus is a number of wicker-baskets, fine enough not to allow the eggs to pass through, set in a flume of clear running water. the method of gehen and remy, the great fish-cultivators of france, whose efforts and discoveries have contributed more to this science than those of any, if not of all other men, was to place the eggs in zinc-boxes of about one foot in diameter, having a lid over them--the top and sides of the boxes pierced with small holes, smooth on the inside; these boxes were partly filled with clean sand and gravel, and set in clear running water. m. costa's method, at the college of france, is to arrange boxes in the form of steps, the top one being supplied with water by a fountain, and that passing from one to the other through all the series, and the eggs placed on willow-hurdles instead of gravel. another very simple method may be arranged in the house. it is a reservoir--a barrel or cask--set perhaps two and a half feet from the floor, and a little hatching trough a few inches lower, into which water gradually runs through a faucet, from the reservoir. this water running through the hatching-box, escapes into a tub a little below. whatever plan be adopted, great care is necessary in preventing sediment from depositing. cleanliness is a principal condition of success. the eggs of the trout thus fecundated and deposited in october or november will hatch in the spring. young trout need no feeding for a month after leaving the egg. there is a small bladder or vesicle under the fore part of the body, when they first come out, from which they derive their sustenance. after this disappears, or at the end of about a month, they should be fed, in very small quantities. too much will leave a portion to decay on the bottom and injure the water. the best possible food (except the angle-worm) is lean flesh of animals, boiled and hashed fine for the young fish. the flesh of other kinds of fish, when they are plenty and not very valuable, would be very good. these young fish should be kept in the first pond until a year old. then let them into the second pond, closing the gate after them, to make room for another brood in the first pond. the next year let them into the third, and those into the second that are now in the first, and so on till the fourth. in the last pond, those of different ages will all be large enough to take care of themselves. but sometimes a trout two years old is said to swallow one a year old. but when they get to be three or four years old, this sort of cannibalism ceases. these principles can be carried out in small streams, by constructing gates to keep sections separate, and by forming banks and waste ways for water, with wire gates so high, that the water will not overflow in freshets, and carry the fish away. in taking trout use angle-worms or the fly. a fine light-colored small line is best. they are very shy. the following is a list of other fish, beside the trout, that are well worthy of cultivation:-- _black bass._--when full grown, this fish is from twelve to eighteen inches in length. one of the better fish for the table, and profitable to raise in a pond covering not less than half an acre. chub, being a very prolific little fish, may be kept in the same pond as food for the black bass and other large fish. they are very fond of them. minnows are the best bait for these fish, though they will bite a trolling hook of any ordinary kind. you may raise them as given for the trout above, or allow them to deposite their eggs in spawn beds of their own selection in their pond. they will do well in water less pure than is demanded for the trout. _white bass._--not so large as the black bass. seldom weighs more than two pounds. one of the best for food. thrives well in small ponds. requires the same treatment as the preceding. spawns in may and hatches soon. easily caught, as he is a great biter, at almost any bait. _grass bass or roach._--one of the most beautiful of the bass kind, and as a panfish highly esteemed. it prefers sluggish water, and hence is well adapted to small artificial ponds. spawns in may. may be treated as the preceding. bites the angle-worm well, and several other kinds of bait. _rock bass._--a small fish seldom reaching a pound in weight, but is fine and very easily raised in small ponds of any kind of water. spawns in may and may be treated in all respects as the rest of the bass family, only it will flourish well in quite small ponds. _pickerel._--is one of the best of fish, weighs from three to fifteen pounds. suitable only for large ponds. spawns early in the spring in the marshy edges of sluggish water. the eggs may be procured and treated as the trout, only cold running water is not necessary. best caught by trolling. it is not a good fish to raise with others, as it is apt to eat them up. _yellow perch._--is everywhere well known as a beautiful little fresh-water fish, and good for the table, at all seasons when the water is cool. perfectly hardy and adapted to sluggish waters, it is one of the best for artificial ponds. treat like all the preceding; or allowed to take its own course in the pond, it will increase rapidly. _sun-fish._--rarely weighs more than half a pound, but is a good pan-fish. this and the grass bass and yellow perch may be put together in the same pond. _eels._--may be cultivated with great success in almost any water. but we are so prejudiced against them, never consenting to taste one, that we can not speak in their favor. of the methods of introducing fish into our rivers and creeks, from which they have nearly all been taken by the fishermen, it is not our design to treat. that subject may be found fully presented in treatises on fish culture, and should command the immediate attention of the authorities in all the states. we have here given all that is necessary to success among the masses all over the land. there is hardly a township in the united states or british provinces, where good fish-ponds might not be constructed so as to be a source of profit and luxury to the inhabitants. fish are so certainly and easily raised, that the practice of cultivating them should be universally adopted. transporting fish alive is somewhat hazardous, especially if they be of considerable size. the difficulty is greatly lessened by keeping ice in the water with the fish. change water twice a day and keep ice in it, and you may safely transport fish around the globe. eggs of fish are best transported in boxes six inches square, filled with alternate layers of sand and eggs scattered over. when full, make quite wet, and fasten on the cover. other methods are adopted which will be easily learned of those engaged in the trade. flax. change the seed every season. this will greatly increase the quantity, and improve the quality. in nothing else is it more important. in ireland, the great flax-growing country of the world, they always sow foreign seed when it can be procured. american seed is preferred, and brings the highest price. experiments with different seeds, on varieties of soils, are much needed. changing from all the soils and latitudes of our country would be useful. the general rule, however, as with all seeds, is to change from colder to warmer regions. _soils._--the best are strong alluvial soils. any soil good for a garden is good for flax. as much clay as will allow soil soon to become dry and easily to be made mellow, is desirable; black loam, with hard, poor clay-subsoil, is also good. mellow, friable soils are not more important to any other crop than to flax. land must not be worked when too wet. the land should be rich from a previous year's manuring. salt, lime, ashes, and plaster, are good applications to flax after it has come up. on light soil with bad tillage, when the flax was so poor that the cultivator was about to plow it up, the application of three bushels of plaster, in the morning when the dew was on, produced a larger yield of better flax from an acre than adjoining growers got from two acres of their best land. flowers. floriculture is an employment appropriate to all classes, ages, and conditions. no yard connected with a dwelling is complete without a flower-bed. the cultivation of flowers is eminently promotive of health, refinement of manners, and good taste. constant familiarity with the most exquisite beauties of nature must refine the feelings and produce gentleness of spirit. association with flowers should be a part of every child's education. their cultivation is suitable for children and young ladies in all the walks of life. house-plants, and bouquets in sick-rooms, are injurious; their influence on the atmosphere of the rooms is unhealthy. but the cultivation of flowers in the garden or yard is in every way beneficial. we earnestly recommend increased attention to flowers by the whole american people. the necessary limits of our article will allow us to do but little more than to call attention to the subject. those who become interested will seek information from some of the numerous works devoted exclusively to ornamental flowers. flowers should be planted on rather level land, that the rains may not wash off the seeds and fine mould. choose a southern or eastern exposure whenever practicable. avoid, as much as possible, planting in the shade. _soil_--should be a deep, rich mould, neither too wet nor too dry, and should be enriched with a little compost, every year. _sowing the seeds_ is a most important matter in cultivating flowers. many fail to come up, solely on account of improper planting. the seeds of most flowers are very fine and delicate. planted in coarse earth, they will not vegetate; planted near the surface in a dry time, they usually perish. it is best to cover all small flower-seeds, by sifting fine mould upon them; and if the weather does not do it, use artificial means to keep the soil suitably moist until the seeds are fairly up. stir the soil gently often, and keep out all weeds. it is always best to plant the seeds in rows or hills, with small stakes to indicate their location; you can then stir the ground freely without destroying them. flowers usually need more watering than most other plants. the usual application of water to the leaves by using a sprinkler is injurious; it may be better than no watering at all, but is the worst way to apply water. make a basin in the soil near the plants, and fill it with water. the selection of suitable varieties for a small flower-garden is quite important. we shall only mention a brief list. those who would make this more of a study, are recommended to study "_breck's book of flowers_," which is quite as complete for american cultivators as anything we have. the principal divisions are, bulbous flowering roots, flowering shrubs, and flowering herbs--annual, biennial, and perennial--the first blossoming and dying the year they are sown; the second blossoming and dying the second year, without having blossomed the first; the last blossoming, and the top dying down and coming up the next spring, for a series of years. _bulbous flowering roots._--these need considerable sand in their soil. they should be taken up after the foliage is all dead, and if they are hardy, put the soil in good condition, and dry the bulbs and reset them, and let them remain through the winter. they may need slight protection, by spreading coarse straw, manure, or forest-leaves over them late in the fall; but all the more tender bulbs do better kept in sand until early spring. the best list with which we are acquainted, for a small garden, is the following: the well-known lilies, the tulips, gladiolas, hyacinths, feraria tigrida, crocus, narcissus, and jonquils. _flowering shrubs._--the following is a select small list: roses, as large a variety as you please, out of the hundreds known; flowering almond, indigo shrub, wahoo or fire-shrub, the mountain-ash, althea, snowball, lilac, fringe-tree, snow-drop, double-flowering peach, siberian crab, the smoke-tree, or french tree, or venitian sumach, honeysuckle, double-flowering cherry. the list of beautiful herbaceous flowers is very lengthy. we give only a few of those most easily raised, and most showy; the list is designed only to aid the inquiries of those who are unacquainted with them: superb amaranth, tri-colored amaranth, china and german astors--the latter are very beautiful--canterbury bell, carnation pinks (great variety), chrysanthemum (many varieties and splendid until very late in autumn), morning glory or convolvulus, japonicas, cupid's car, dahlias, dwarf bush, morning bride or fading beauty, fox-glove, golden coreopsis (we have raised a variety that proved biennial, which was superb all the season), ice-plant, larkspur, passion-flower, peony, sweet pea, pinks, sweet-williams, annual china pink, polyanthus (a great beauty), hyacinth bean, scarlet-runner bean, poppy, portalucca, nasturtium, marigolds (especially the large double french, and the velvet variegated), martineau, cypress vine. fowls. we are glad to believe that _the hen mania_, that has prevailed so extensively during the last fifteen or twenty years, has considerably abated. after all the extravagant notions about the profits of hens shall have passed away, the truth will be seen to be about the following: every farmer who has considerable waste grain about, and plenty more to supply the deficiency when the fowls shall have gathered up all the scatterings, had better keep a hundred hens. if he has sand and gravel, and wheat-bran and lime for shells, within their reach, and plenty of fresh water, they will do well, without much further care, in mild weather. in cold weather in winter, keep not more than forty hens together, in a tight, warm place, well ventilated; give them their usual food, with burnt bones pounded fine and mixed with mush, given warm, with occasionally a little animal food and boiled vegetables, and they will lay more than in summer. they will lay all winter without being inclined to set. every family, who will treat them as above, may profitably keep one or two dozen through the winter. most persons who undertake, with a few acres of land, to keep fowls as a business, will lose by it. a few only of the most experienced and careful can make money by it. it may be cheapest for some persons to raise a few chickens for their own use, although they cost them more than the market-price, though it would not be best to raise chickens in that way to sell. "but some one raised the chickens in market for the market-price, and why not i?" because, they raised a few that got fat on waste grain, and you must buy grain for yours, and give more for it than you can get for your chickens. whoever would make money by raising fowls on a large scale, must first serve some kind of an apprenticeship at it, as in all other business. get this experience, and learn by experiment the cheapest and most profitable food, and keep from five hundred to a thousand fowls, and a reasonable though not large profit may be realized. for store-fowls, boiled vegetables and beets cut very fine, with a little meal mixed in, are a good and cheap feed. when keeping fowls out-door in warm weather, keep no more than fifty together, and them on not less than one fourth of an acre of land. the expensive hen-houses and artificial nests are mostly humbugs. have many places of concealment about, where they can make their nests as they please. when a hen begins to set, remove her, nest and all, to a yard to which layers have no access, and you need have no difficulty with her. set a hen near the ground, in a dry place, on fifteen fresh eggs, all put under her at once, and they will hatch about the same time at the end of twenty days. old hens, of the common kind, are best to set. let them have their own way in everything but running in the wet with their young chickens--and that they will not be much inclined to do if they are well fed. much is said about the diseases of fowls and their remedies. we have very little confidence in any of it. sick chickens will die _unless they get well_. time spent in doctoring them does not generally pay. wormwood and tansy, growing, or gathered and scattered, or steeped and sprinkled about the premises occupied by hens, will protect them from small vermin. never give them anything salt or sour, unless it be sour milk. the eggs of ducks, turkeys, or geese, may be hatched under hens. time, thirty days. hence, if put under with hens' eggs, they must be set ten days earlier, that they may all hatch at once. fattening chickens may be well done in six days, by feeding rice, boiled rather soft in sweet skimmed milk, fed plentifully three times a day. feed these in pans, well cleaned before each meal, and give only what they will eat up at once, and desire a very little more. put a little pounded charcoal within their reach, and a little rice-water, milk, or clear water. this makes the most beautiful meal at a low price. never feed a chicken for sixteen or twenty-four hours before killing it. _varieties or breeds._--this has been matter of much speculation. the result has been (what was probably a main object) the sale of many fowls and eggs at exorbitant prices. when chickens have sold at fifty dollars per pair, and eggs at six dollars a dozen, some persons must have made money, while others lost it. yet, there is some choice in the breed of hens. the kind makes less difference, as far as flesh is concerned, than is usually imagined. it requires about a given quantity of grain to make a certain amount of flesh. large fowls give us much larger weight of flesh than small ones, but they also eat a much larger quantity of grain. large fowls are certainly large eaters. the three best layers are the black polands, the malayas, and the shanghaes. half-bloods, by crossing with the common fowl, are better for this country than either of the above, pure. fowls are generally improved by frequent crossing. the best we have ever had, for their flesh, we produced by putting a black poland rooster with common hens; they grew larger than either, and their flesh was very fine. shanghaes and half-blood shanghaes have proved permanently the best layers we have ever had. early pullets make great fall and winter layers, and late chickens are great layers in the spring, when older ones wish to set. ducks we have considered in a separate article. we shall do the same with turkeys. killing, dressing, and preparing all fowls for market, will be treated under the head of "poultry." geese will also be considered in another place. we should give drawings of aviaries, but we consider these generally worse than useless, as they are usually constructed. an airy place for summer, and a warm room for winter, poles with _rough bark_ on for roosts, and plenty of feed and water, sand, gravel, and lime, will give abundant success. fruit. the value of fruit is not fully appreciated in this country. as an article of diet nothing is more natural and healthy. the creator gave this to man for food, when human nature, physically, was in its normal condition. and why meats have since been allowed, i know not, unless it be the reason why moses allowed divorce in certain cases, although it was not so in the beginning, viz., the hardness of their hearts. why the stomach, upon the healthy condition of which all physical, mental, and moral functions so materially depend, should be made the receptacle of dead animals, and especially those so long dead, as much of the meat offered in market, it would puzzle a philosopher to tell. but we will not write an elaborate article on the healthfulness of a diet composed mainly of milk, fruits, and vegetables. suffice it to say that experience and observation, as well as analysis and physiology, unite in demonstrating that ripe fruits contain virtues, that go far toward preventing the ordinary diseases of men. they are good, plain or cooked, and for sick or well persons, except in extreme cases. they regulate the bowels and control the secretions, better than any other article of food. they are so highly nutritious, that they sustain nature under arduous toil, better than either meat, fine bread, or the irish potato. with proper care the fruits are cheaper than any other article of food. they can be raised cheaper than corn or potatoes. they may be enjoyed all the year, are profitable for market, and for food for animals. fruitfulness. _inducing it in fruit-trees._--fruit-trees often grow luxuriantly, but bear no fruit, or very little. in nearly all cases the evil may be remedied. one remedy is shortening in. this is done by cutting off half the present year's growth in july. this checks the tendency of the sap to promote so large a growth, and forces it to mature blossom-buds for the next season. another effectual means is to bend down all the principal branches and tie them down. this has a great influence in checking excessive growth and forming fruit-buds. frequent transplanting has a tendency also to induce fruitfulness. root pruning is one of _the best means_ of securing this object. lay bare the upper roots and cut off all the larger ones two feet from the tree. this will check excessive formation of wood and foliage, render the wood firm, and the organic matter of the sap will form abundance of fruit-buds. these methods will produce fruit in abundance on nineteen twentieths of barren or poor-bearing fruit-trees. garden. the garden has been the most delightful abode of man ever since his creation, before and since the fall. one of the most pleasant pastimes, for ladies and children, is gardening. the flower, vegetable, and fruit departments are all pleasant and healthful. _situation_ of a garden is important. this varies with climates. in a cold country the warmest exposures are best, and in a hot climate select the coolest. a garden combining both is the best possible. the warmest exposure is good for early vegetables, and the cooler and more shady for the main crop. much can be done to regulate this by fences and buildings. they will be warm and early on one side, and cool and late on the other. _soil._--a rich loam is always best. to convert stiff clay, or light sand and gravel, into a good loam, is an easy matter on so small a plat as is usually devoted to a garden. draw an abundance of sand on clay-ground, plow deep and mix well, and one winter's frost will so pulverize the whole that it will be in excellent condition. in warm climates, the incorporation of the sand with the clay is effected by frequent plowing and rains. on sand and gravel draw plenty of clay and loam, if it can be easily procured; thus it is easy to form a good friable, retentive loam, adapted to every variety of soil-culture. decayed wood and forest-leaves are excellent for garden-soils. manure well; but remember that it is possible to overfeed the soil of a garden, so as to render it unproductive. deep plowing or spading is very important; it is the best possible remedy for excessive drought or unusual rains. the water will not stand on the surface when it first falls, and will be retained long in the soil for the use of the plants. the soil should be very mellow. plowing or spading too early, in hope of getting earlier vegetables, is often a failure. the earlier the better, if you can pulverize the soil; otherwise not. plowing when covered with a heavy dew, or when it rains gently, is equal to a good coat of manure. a garden should be on level land well drained; if much inclined, rains will wash off the best of the soil, and destroy many seeds and plants. no weeds should be allowed to grow to any considerable size in a garden. early and frequent hoeings are important to success. directions for the cultivation of each garden vegetable and fruit are given under each of those articles respectively. methods of gardening at the south and the north vary but little in the main articles. at the north we have to guard against too much cool weather, and at the south against too much heat. some vegetables that need planting on ridges in the north, to obtain more sun and heat, should be planted on level land at the south, to guard against too much heat and drought. besides this, the main difference is in the time of planting, which varies more or less with every degree of latitude, or every five hundred feet of elevation. have no fruit-trees in your vegetable or fruit garden, unless it may be a few dwarf-pears on the quince-stock, and these had better be by themselves. the plan of a garden is a matter of taste, and depends much upon its size and necessary situation. we prefer ornamental shrubs in front of the house, the flowers adjoining it and passing the windows of those rooms that are constantly occupied, and the fruit-department in the rear of the flowers, while the vegetable-garden should be at the right or left of the fruit, and in the rear of the kitchen. on the other side of the house should be the larger fruit-trees, extending back as far as the fruit and vegetable garden, and in the rear of it, the carriage-house and other out-buildings. the best fence is of good wrought iron, sharp and strong enough to exclude all intruders. when this can not be afforded, a good hedge, made of the plants best adapted to hedges in your latitude, is preferred; next to this a good tight board-fence. all fruit-gardens should have alleys, eight or ten feet wide, within four rods of each other, to afford space for carting on manures, &c. a vegetable-garden of one acre should have such an alley through the centre each way, with a place in the end, opposite the entrance, to turn around a summer-house, arbor, or tool-house. one rod from the fence, on all sides, should be an alley four or five feet wide; other small alleys as convenience or taste may require. the usual way is to sink the alleys three or four inches below the level of the beds, and cover with gravel, tanbark, shells, &c. we strongly recommend raising the alleys in their middle, at least four inches above the surface of the beds. the paths are always neater, and the moisture is retained for the use of the plants. excessive rains can be allowed to pass off. this making alleys low sluice-ways for water is a great mistake in yards and gardens. garlic. this is a hardy perennial plant, from the south of europe, and has been in cultivation, as a garden vegetable, for hundreds of years. it is cultivated as the onion, and needs much ashes, bonedust, and lime, in the soil. it is much esteemed in some countries, in soups. it is but little used in the united states: it is used at the south as a medicinal herb. we know of no important use of garlic for which onions will not answer as well, and therefore do not recommend garlic as an american garden vegetable. those who wish to cultivate it will pursue the same course as in raising onions from sets. this will always be successful. gathering fruits. this is almost as important as proper cultivation. this is especially true of the pear. many cultivators raise inferior pears from trees of the very best varieties, for want of a correct knowledge of the best methods of gathering, preserving, and ripening the fruit. complete directions will be found under each fruit. geese. farmers usually are opposed to keeping geese, believing them to destroy more than they are worth. if you have a suitable place to keep them, they may be profitable. they should have a pasture with a fence they can not pass, enclosing a spring, pond, or stream. they do better to have a little grain the year round. this, with plenty of grass in summer and cut roots in winter, will keep them in fine condition. the feathers will pay the cost of keeping, leaving the increase and feathers of the young as profit. on an acre or two, one hundred geese may be kept, and if the proportion of males and females be right, they will yield a profit of two dollars each. gooseberry. this is a native of the north of europe and asia, from which all our fine varieties have been produced by cultivation. our own native varieties are not known to have produced any very desirable ones. probably the zeal of the lancashire weavers, in england, will surpass all that americans will do for the next century in gooseberry culture. they publish a small book annually, giving an account of new varieties. the last catalogue of the london horticultural society mentions one hundred and forty-nine varieties, as worthy of cultivation. a few only should receive attention among us. gooseberries delight in cool and rather moist situations. they do not flourish so naturally south of philadelphia; though they grow well in all the mountainous regions, and may produce fair fruit in many cool, moist situations. deep mulching is very beneficial; it preserves the moisture, and protects from excessive heat. the land must be trenched and manured deep. in november, cut out one half of the top, both old and new wood, and a good crop of fine fruit may be expected each year, for five or six years, when new bushes should take the place of old ones. propagate by cuttings of the last growth. cut out all the eyes, below the surface, when planted. plant six inches deep in loam, in the shade. press the soil close around them. to prevent mildew, it is recommended to sprinkle lime or flour of sulphur over the foliage and flowers, or young fruit. the fruit-books recommend the best varieties, and very open tops, as not exposed to mildew. we recommend spreading dry straw, or fine charcoal, on the surface under the bushes, as a perfect remedy, if the top be not left too thick. there is no necessity for mildew on gooseberries. the fall is much the best season for trimming, though early spring will do. varieties are divided into red, green, white, and yellow. these are subdivided into hundreds of others, with names entirely arbitrary. the following are the best varieties, generally cultivated in this country:-- . _houghton's seedling._--flavor, superior; skin, thin and tender; color, reddish-brown. prodigious grower and bearer--none better known. free from mildew. native of massachusetts. . _red warrington._--later and larger than the preceding; hangs long on the bush without cracking, and improves in flavor. . _woodward's whitesmith_--is one of the best of the white varieties. . _cleworth's white lion._--large and late; excellent. . _collier's jolly angler_--is a good green gooseberry; fruit large, excellent, and late. . _early green hairy._--very early; rather small; prolific. . _buerdsill's duckwing_--is a good, late, yellow gooseberry; large fruit, and a fine-growing bush. . _prophets rockwood._--very large fruit of excellent quality, ripening quite early. the foregoing list, giving two of each of the four colors, and early and late, are all, we think, that need be cultivated. many more varieties, nearly equalling the above, may be selected; but we are not aware that any improvement would be made. downing gives the following list for a garden:-- _red._--red warrington, companion, crown bob, london, houghton's seedling. _yellow._--leader, yellow ball, catharine, gunner. _white._--woodward's whitesmith, freedom, taylor's bright venus, tally ho, sheba queen. _green._--pitmaston green gage, thumper, jolly angler, massey's heart of oak, parkinson's laurel. thus you have downing's authority; his list includes most of those we have recommended above. the varieties are less important than in most fruits, provided only you get the large varieties of english gooseberry. proper cultivation will insure success. whoever cultivates, only tolerably well, the houghton seedling, will be sure to raise good berries, free from mildew. grafting. this is one of the leading methods of obtaining such fruits as we wish, on stocks of such habits of growth and degrees of hardiness, as we may desire. the stock will control, in some degree, the growth of the scion, but leave the fruit mainly to its habits on its original tree. the advantages of grafting are principally the following:-- good varieties may be propagated very rapidly. a single tree may produce a thousand annually, for a series of years. large trees of worthless fruit may be changed into any variety we please, and in a very short time bear abundantly. fruits not easily multiplied in any other way, can be rapidly increased by grafting. early bearing of seedlings can be secured by grafting on bearing trees. tender and exotic varieties may be acclimated by grafting into indigenous stocks. fruit can be raised on an uncongenial soil, by grafting into stocks adapted to that soil. several varieties may be produced on the same tree, for ornament or economy of room. dwarfs of any variety may be produced by grafting on dwarf stocks, and we may thus grow many trees on a small space. a slow-growing variety may be made to form a large top, by grafting into large vigorous-growing stocks. we are enabled to carry varieties to any part of the world, at a cheap rate, as the scions, properly done up, may safely be carried around the globe. _time of grafting._--grafts may be made to live, put in in any month of the year, but the beginning of the opening of the buds in spring, is the preferable season. stone fruits should be budded; and all fruits may be made to do well budded. budding is usually only practised on small trees, while grafting may be performed on trees of any size. _cutting and preserving scions._--mature shoots of the previous year's growth are best. those of the year before will also do. they may be cut at any time from november to time of setting. perhaps the month of february is best. they may be well preserved in moist sawdust in tight boxes. the more there are together the better they will keep. they keep better by being cut a little below the beginning of the last year's growth, but it is more injurious to the tree. they may be kept well in fine sand, moist and cool. too much moisture is always injurious. put the lower ends in shallow water, and they will look very fine, but not one of them will live. scions cut in the fall and buried six inches deep in yellow loam or fine sand, will keep well till next spring. there are several methods of grafting only two of which deserve particular attention. these are cleft-grafting and tongue or splice grafting, see figures. [illustration: cleft-grafting.] [illustration: tongue-grafting.] _cleft-grafting_ is performed in most cases, when scions are grafted upon stocks much larger than themselves. it is too well known to need particular description. tools should be sharp, and it should be performed before the bark slips so easily as to be started by splitting the stock. it endangers the growth of the scions. the requisite to success in all grafting, is to have some point of actual contact, between the inside barks of both the scion and the stock. this is more certainly secured by causing the scion to stand at a slight angle with the stock. _tongue-grafting_ is generally used in grafting on small stocks--seedlings or roots. with a sharp knife, cut off the scion slanting down, and the stock slanting up, split each in the centre, and push one in to the other until the barks meet, and wind with thick paper or thin muslin, with grafting wax on one side. this is generally used in root-grafting. the question of root-grafting has excited considerable discussion recently. many suppose it to produce unhealthy trees, and that retaining the variety is less certain than by other modes. root-grafting is a cheap and rapid means of multiplying trees, and hence is greatly prized by nursery men. practical cultivators of illinois have assured us, that it is impossible to produce good rhode island greenings in that state, by root-grafting--that they will not produce the same variety. we see no principle upon which they should fail, but will not undertake to settle this important question. for ourselves we prefer to use one whole stock for each tree, cutting it off at the ground and grafting there. _grafting composition or wax._--one part beef's tallow, two parts beeswax, and four parts rosin, make the best. harder or softer, it is liable to be injured by the weather. warm weather will melt it, and cold will crack it. melt these together and pour them into cold water, and pull and work as shoemaker's wax. when using, it is to be kept in cool or warm water, as the weather may demand. in its application, it is to be pressed closely over all the wound made by sawing and splitting the limb, and close around the scions, so as to exclude air and water. clay is often used for grafting, but is not equal to wax. you can use grafting tools, invented especially for the purpose, or a common saw, mallet, knife, and wedge. grapes. those cultivated so extensively in europe were natives of persia--showing that they may be acclimated far from their native home. foreign grapes are not suitable for out-door culture in this country, except a very few varieties, which do well in the southern states. the native grapes of this country have produced some excellent varieties, which are now in general cultivation. others are beginning to attract notice, and seedlings will probably multiply rapidly, and great improvements in our native grapes may be expected. the subject of grape-culture deserves greatly-increased attention. to all palates the grape is delicious; it is not only one of the most palatable articles of diet, but is more highly medicinal than any other fruit. it is the natural source of pure wine. pure wine made of grapes is only to be procured, in this country, by domestic manufacture. probably not one out of a thousand gallons of imported wines, sold as pure, contains a drop of the juice of the grape;--they are manufactured of poisonous drugs and ardent spirits--generally common whiskey. a french chemist discovered a method of imitating fermented liquor without fermentation, and distilled spirits without distillation. his process has been published in this country in book form, and by subscription; and while those books are unknown in the bookstores, they are generally possessed by prominent liquor dealers;--and the practice of those secret arts is terribly dangerous to the community. antecedent to this chemical manufacture of poisonous liquors, such a disease as _delirium tremens_ was unknown. thus the frenchman's discovery filled the liquor-sellers' pockets with cash, and the land with mourning, over frequent deaths by a disease, the horror of which is equalled only by hydrophobia. in self-defence, all should give up the use of everything purporting to be imported wines or liquors. wine should not be used as a common beverage by the healthy. the best medical authority in the world has pronounced it absolutely injurious. but in many cases of sickness, especially in convalescence from fevers, it is one of the very best articles that can be used; hence, a pure article, of domestic manufacture, should be accessible to all the sick. (see our article on "wine.") the luxury of good grapes can be enjoyed by every family in the land who have a yard twenty feet square. in the cities, almost every house may have a grapevine or two where nothing else would grow. allow a vine to run up trellis-work in the rear of the house, and over the roof of a wing, or rear-part, raised two feet above the roof, supported by a rack. in such situations they will bear better than elsewhere, will be out of the way, and decidedly ornamental. in such small yards, from five to twenty-five bushels have often grown in a season. some climates and soils are much better suited to grape-culture than others. but we have varieties that will flourish wherever indian corn will mature. _location._--for vineyards, the sides of hills are usually chosen, sometimes for the purpose of a warm exposure, but generally to secure the most perfect drainage. a northern exposure is preferable for all varieties adapted to the climate. to mature late varieties, choose a southern or eastern exposure. _soil._--gravelly, with a little sand, on a dry subsoil, is preferable, though good grapes may be grown upon any land upon which water will not stand. grapes always need much lime. if the vineyard is not located on calcareous soil, lime must be liberally supplied, especially for wine-making. a dry subsoil, or thorough draining, is indispensable to successful grape-culture. we prefer level land, wherever thorough draining is practicable. _propagation._--choice grapes are propagated by grafts, layers, or cuttings. new ones are produced from seeds. the more kinds that are cultivated together, the greater will be the varieties raised from their seeds, by cross-fertilization in the blossoms. a small grape crossed with a large one, or an early with a late one, or two of different flavors, will produce mediums between them. seeds should be cleaned, and planted in the fall, or kept in sand till spring. in the fall, cover up the young vines. the second or third year, the young vines should be set in the places where they are designed to remain. by efforts to get new varieties, we may adapt them to every latitude, from the gulf of mexico to pembina. _layers._--these produce large vines and abundance of fruit earlier than any other method of propagation. put down old wood in may or early june, and new wood a month later; fasten down with pegs having a hook to hold the vine, and cover up with earth; they will take root freely at the joints, and may be removed in autumn or spring. if you put down wood too late, or do not keep it covered with moist earth, it will fail; otherwise it is always sure. _cuttings_--may be from any wood you have to spare, and should be about a foot long, having two buds. plant at an angle of forty-five degrees, one bud and two thirds of the cutting under the soil. a little shade and moisture will cause nearly all to grow. a little grafting-wax on the top will aid the growth, by preventing evaporation. the cutting, so buried as to have the top bud half an inch under fine mould, is said to be surer. cuttings should be made late in fall, or early in winter, and preserved as scions for grafting. cuttings made in the spring are less sure to grow, and their removal is much more injurious to the vine. vines raised from cuttings may be transplanted when one or two years old. _grafting_--should be performed after the leaves are well developed in the spring. the sap becomes thick, which aids the process. remove the earth, and saw off the vine two or three inches below the surface. graft with scions of the previous year's growth, but well matured, and apply cement, to keep the sap from coming out. cover all but the top bud. in stocks an inch in diameter put two scions. very few need fail. _budding_--maybe done as in other cases, but always after the leaves are well developed, to avoid bleeding. these modes of propagation stand in the following order in point of preference, the best being named first: layers, cuttings, grafting, budding. _culture and manure._--land prepared by deep subsoil plowing, highly manured and cultivated the previous season in a root-crop, is the best for a vineyard. the trenches for the rows should be spaded twenty inches deep, and a part of the surface-soil put in the bottom. after planting the vines, stir the ground often and keep clear of weeds. at first, stir the soil deep; but, as the roots extend, avoid working among them, and never disturb the roots with a plow. mulching preserves the soil in a moist, loose condition, and is a good preventive of mildew. in many instances it is said to have doubled the crop. common animal-manures are good for young vines, and in preparing the soil, but are rather too stimulating for bearing vines, often injuring the fruit. ashes and cinders from the smith's forge, wood-ashes, charcoal, soapsuds, bones and bonedust, lime, and forest and grape leaves and trimmings, carefully dug into the soil around the vines, are all very good. a liberal supply of suitable manures will keep the vines in a healthy condition, and preserve the fruit from disease and decay. this, with judicious pruning, will render the grape-crop regular and sure. _vineyards_--should be in rows five feet apart, with vines four feet apart in the row. layers of one, and cuttings of two years' growth, will bear the second year, and very plentifully the third year. a good vineyard in the latitude of cincinnati yields about one hundred and fifty bushels of grapes per acre, making four hundred gallons of wine. the average yield of wine per acre, throughout the country, is estimated at two hundred gallons. _training under glass._--by this means the fine foreign varieties may be brought to perfection in our high latitudes. with most of the best kinds, this can be done by solar heat alone. a house covered with glass at an angle of forty-five degrees, facing the south, will answer the purpose. with a slight artificial heat, the finest varieties may be perfected, and others forwarded, so as to have fine grapes at most seasons of the year. the vines are planted on the outside of the grapehouse, and allowed to pass in through an aperture two feet from the ground, and are trained up near the glass on the inside. protect the roots in winter by a covering of coarse straw manure. wind the vines on the inside with straw, lay them down on the ground in the grape-house, and keep it closed during the winter. a house one hundred feet long and twenty-five feet wide, filled mainly with black hamburg, with a few other choice varieties, would afford a great luxury, and prove a profitable investment. from one such house, near a large city, a careful cultivator may realize a thousand dollars per annum. native and even hardy varieties are often greatly improved by cultivation under glass, or by a little protection in winter. the isabella grape is hardy and productive in western new york. in , we noticed a vine that had been laid down in a dry place and covered slightly with earth, in autumn; the fruit was more abundant, and one fourth larger, than that on a similar vine by its side that had remained on the trellis during winter: this shows the value of protection even to hardy vines. _training._--there are many methods, and the question of preference depends upon the location of the vines, the space they may occupy, and the taste of the cultivator. there are four principal systems--the cane or renewal system, spur system, fan-training, and spiral or hoop training. the renewal system we prefer for trellises. put posts firmly in the ground eight feet apart, allowing them to be seven feet above ground after they are set; put slats of wood or wire across these, a foot apart, commencing a foot above the ground. set vines eight feet apart; let the vines be composed of two branches, coming out near the ground: these can be formed by cutting off a young vine near the ground, and training two of the shoots that will spring from the bottom. these two vines should be bent down in opposite directions, and tied horizontally to the lower slat of the trellis; cut these off, so as to have them meet similar vines from the next root; upright shoots from these will extend to the top of the trellis, and it is then covered, and the work is complete. after these upright canes have borne, cut off every alternate one, two or three inches from its base, and train up the strongest shoot for a bearer next year: thus cut off and train new alternate ones every year, and the vine will be constantly renewing, and be in the most productive state; keep the vines clipped at the top of the trellis, and the sap will mature strong buds for next year's fruit. we regard this the most effectual of all training. the principle of renewal can be applied to any form of vine, and eminently promotes fruitfulness. many complain that their vines, though liberally pruned, do not bear well. the difficulty may be that the new wood is principally removed, while the old is left to throw out strong-growing shoots, bearing abundance of foliage and little fruit. more of the old wood removed, and more of the young saved, would have produced less vines and much more fruit. _pruning_--is the most important part of successful grape-culture. mistakes on this subject are very injurious. let vines grow in their own way, and you will have much wood and foliage, and very little, poor fruit. some cut off the shoots in summer just above the fruit, and remove most of the leaves around it to expose the fruit to the sun. this often proves to be a ruinous mistake; the sap ascends to the leaves, and there amalgamates with what they absorb from the atmosphere, and thus forms food for the vine and fruit. it is the leaves, and not the fruit, which need the sun: the leaves are the lungs, upon the action of which the life and health of the fruit depend. blight of the leaves destroys the fruit, and a frequent repetition of it destroys the vine. grape-vines should not be pruned at all until three years old, as it retards the growth of the roots, and thus weakens the vines. older vines should be freely pruned in november or december; pruned in winter they _may_ bleed in the spring, and pruned in the spring they _certainly_ will bleed. tender vines, not protected, may have an excess of wood left in the fall to allow for what may perish in winter; in this case, cut away the dead and surplus wood in spring, but never until the leaves are well developed, so as to prevent bleeding. necessary summer-pruning is of much importance. remove no leaves, except the ends of branches, that have already made as much wood as they can mature. in the middle states this should be done about the last of july, and at the south a month earlier. weak lateral branches, that bear no fruit, may be removed, but not all of them, for it is on the wood of this year's growth that the fruit will be found the following season. old wood does not send out wood in spring that will bear fruit the same season; that wood will bear fruit next season if allowed to remain. whoever observes will notice that grapes grow on young shoots of the same season; but they are shoots from wood of the previous year's growth, and not from old wood. many suppose if they trim their vines very closely, as the old vines send forth abundance of new wood, and it is new wood on which the fruit grows, of course they will have abundance of grapes; and they are disappointed by a failure. the explanation of the whole is, fruit grows on new wood, from wood of previous year's growth, and not from old vines; hence, in lessening a vine, remove old wood. this is the renewal system, whatever the form of the vine, and is the whole secret of successful pruning. this accounts for the great success of the germans in producing such quantities of grapes on low vines. in their best vineyards, they do not allow their vines to grow more than six or seven feet high, and yet they produce abundantly for many years. they so prune as to have plenty of last year's wood for the production of fruit the current season; after this has borne fruit, they remove it to make room for the young wood that will produce the next season. this principle is applicable to vines of any shape or size you may choose to form. the removal, in summer, of excessive growth, and shortening the ends of those you design to retain, throws the strength of the vine into the fruit, and to perfect the wood already formed. liberal fall-pruning is necessary to induce the formation of new wood the next season, for bearing the following year. parts that grow late do not mature sufficiently to bear fruit the next season; hence, cut off the ends in summer, and let what remains have the benefit of all the sap. _reduction of fruit._--the grape is disposed to excessive bearing, which weakens the vine, and injures the quality of the fruit. liberal pruning in autumn does much to remedy this evil, by not leaving room for an excessive amount of fruit: hence, when you have a plenty of fruit-bearing wood, cut off the ends, so as to leave spurs with two buds, or at the most only four; when too much fruit sets, remove it very early, before the juices of the vine have been wasted upon it. a vine cut or wounded in spring will bleed profusely. sheet india-rubber, or two or three thicknesses of a bladder, wet and bound closely around, may prevent the bleeding. _mildew_--is very destructive in confined locations, without a good circulation of air. sulphur and quicklime, separate or combined, dug into the soil around the vines, is a preventive. straw or litter of any kind, spread thick under the vines, is, perhaps, the best remedy--the action of it is in every way beneficial. _insects._--the rosebug, spanworm, great greenworm, and many other insects, infest grapevines, and do much injury. the large worms are most easily destroyed by hand; the small insects by flour-of-sulphur, or by snuff, sprinkled over profusely when the vines are wet. the various applications recommended in this work for the destruction of insects, are useful on the grapevine. the principle is to apply something offensive to the insects, without being injurious to the vines. _preserving grapes._--packed in sawdust or wheat-bran, always thoroughly dried by heat, they will keep well until spring. another method is packing them in cotton-batting or wadding (the latter is best); or put them in baskets holding no more than four or five quarts, cover tight with cotton, and hang up in a cool, airy place, and they will long remain in good condition. in shallow boxes, six inches deep, put a sheet of wadding, and on it a layer of bunches of grapes, not allowed to touch each other; on the top of the grapes put another sheet of cotton, and then another layer of grapes, and so the third, covering the last with cotton, and put the cover on tight, and keep in a cool place. this is the most successful method. a new method is to suspend hoops by three cords, like a baby-jumper, and hang the bunches of grapes all around it, as near as possible without touching, on little wire hooks, passing through the lower ends of the clusters, allowing the stem end to be suspended, and the grapes hang away from each other, and if the place be not damp enough to mould them, and not dry enough to cause them to shrivel, they keep exceedingly well. it requires more care and judgment, than the other methods. a very cool situation, without freezing, is essential in all cases. it is also necessary to remove all broken or immature grapes, from the clusters you would preserve. _varieties_ are very numerous, and their nomenclature is confused, as that of other fruits. it is utterly useless to cultivate foreign grapes in the open air in this country. they succeed very imperfectly, even in the southern states. but for cultivation under glass, they are preferable to any of our own. the following foreign grapes are preferred in this country:-- black prince, white muscat, white constantia, white muscadine, white sweet-water, early white muscat, black cluster, black hamburg. the latter is the best of all foreign grapes for cultivation under glass. it is very delicious, a great bearer, of very large clusters. it requires only solar heat to bring it to perfection. _native grapes._--of these we now have a large number, many of which are valuable. we call attention only to a very few of the best. the _isabella_ as a table luxury is hardly surpassed. in the eastern, middle, and western states, it is generally hardy and prolific. in northern maine, new hampshire, and vermont, it does not ripen well. the seasons are too short. it also feels somewhat the severity of the weather, on the western prairies. it is also apt to decay at the south. for all other parts it is one of the very best. it is an enormous bearer, one vine having been known to produce more than ten bushels, in a single year. [illustration: the isabella grape.] [illustration: the catawba grape.] next is the _catawba_, better for wine, more vinous but not so sweet as the isabella, ripens two or three weeks later, and hence not so good in high latitudes. _the rebecca grape._--this is a comparatively new variety, of great promise. white like the sweet-water, flavor very fine, vine hardy and productive. _the diana_ is a small delicious grape, excellent flavor for the dessert, and ripens two weeks earlier than the isabella. hence good for northern latitudes. _the concord._--large, showy, of good but not the best flavor, and ripens with the diana. should be cultivated at the north. _the york madeira_ is similar to the isabella, smaller and a few days earlier. [illustration: the rebecca grape.] [illustration: the delaware grape.] _the delaware_ is a small brown grape, excellent and hardy. ripens quite as early as the isabella. best outdoor grape, in many localities. _the canadian chief._--one of the very best grapes for canada. _canby's august._--very fine; considered better for the table than the isabella, ripens ten days earlier, and as it is a good bearer, it should be generally cultivated. _the ohio grape_ is a good variety, beginning to attract much notice. _the scuppernong_ is the best of all grapes, for general cultivation at the south. it is never affected by the rot. not easily raised from cuttings. layers are better. it does best trained on an arbor. the soil and climate of the south are well adapted to the grape, even the finer varieties that do not flourish well at the north. they are, however, seriously affected by the rot, an evil incident to the heat and humidity of the climate. it being very warm, the dews and rains incline the fruit to decay. we think the evil may be prevented by two very simple means: keep the vines very open, that they may dry very soon after rain; and train them to trellises, from six to ten feet high, and over the top put a coping of boards, in the shape of a roof, extending eighteen inches on each side of the trellis. it will prevent the rain and heavy dews from falling on the grapes, and is said to preserve them perfectly. this arrangement is about equal, in a warm climate, to cold graperies at the north. we recommend increased attention to this great luxury, in all parts of the country. seedlings will arise, adapted to every locality on the continent. grasses. there is a great number of varieties, adapted to cultivation in some countries and climates, but not suitable for american culture. on the comparative value of different grasses there is a diversity of opinions. the best course for the practical farmer is, having the best and surest, therewith to be content. sir john sinclair says there are two hundred and fifteen grasses cultivated in great britain. we shall notice a very few of them, with a view to their comparative value:-- . _sweet-scented vernal grass._--small growth; yield of hay light. for pastures it is very early, and grows quickly after being cropped, and is excellent for milch-cows; grows well on almost any soil, but most naturally on high, well-drained meadows. it grows in great abundance in massachusetts. . _meadow foxtail._--early like the preceding, but more productive and more nutritious. it is one of the five or six kinds usually sown together in english pastures; best for sheep and horses. . _rough cocksfoot._--_orchard-grass_ of the united states; cows are fond of it. in england it is taking the place of clovers and rye-grass. about philadelphia it is supplanting timothy. it is earlier, and therefore better to mix with clover for hay, as they mature at the same time; grows well in the shade, and on both loams and sands; springs rapidly after being cropped. colonel powell, one of the best american farmers, says it produces more pasture than any other grass he has seen in this country. two bushels of seed are sown on an acre. . _tall oat-grass._--a valuable grass, deserving increased attention. it will produce three crops in a season; grows four or five feet high, and should be cut for hay when in blossom. of all grasses, it is the earliest and best for green fodder. . _tall fescue._--cut in blossom, it contains more nutriment than any other known grass. grows well by the sides of ditches, and is well adapted to wet bogs, as, by its rapid growth, it keeps down coarse, noxious grass and weeds. . _rye grass._--this is extensively cultivated in scotland and in the north of england. it is mixed with clover. respecting its comparative value there is a diversity of opinion. some do not speak well of it. . _red clover and white clover._--see article "clover." . _lucern._--this yields much more green feed at a single crop than any other grass. for soiling cattle it is one of the best, and may be cut twice as often as red clover. this makes a good crop, soon after time for planting corn. common corn or pop-corn, and later, stowell's evergreen sweet corn, are the best for soiling cattle; but for early soiling, use lucern, or some other quick-growing, large grass. lucern needs clean land, or cultivation at first, as young plants are tender. the tap-root runs down very deep; hence, hard clay or wet soils are not favorable. it stands the cold, in latitudes forty to forty-five degrees in this country, better than red clover. . _long-rooted clover._--this is a hungarian variety--biennial, but resows itself several years in succession, on good, clean land. its yield of hay and seed is abundant. needs a deep, dry soil, and stands a drought better than any other grass. to plow in as a fertilizer, or for soiling cattle, it is valuable, wherever it will flourish. . _sain-foin._--adapted to calcareous or chalky soils; considered one of the best plants ever introduced into england; but in new england it proves almost a failure--it requires more cool moisture and less frost. . _timothy._--in england, _meadow cats'-tail_, and in new england, _herd's-grass_. this is the most valuable of all the grasses, and wherever it will thrive well, should never be superseded by anything else for hay. it should be cut when the seed has begun to harden, but before it begins to shell, and never in the blossom. let every farmer remember that timothy, cut in the seed, contains twice as much nutriment as when cut in the blossom; hence, it is not worth more than half as much for hay, sown among clover, as when sown by itself, as it must be cut too early, to avoid losing the clover. . _red top._--we can not find this described in agricultural books; but we have been familiar with it for thirty-five years, and can not find a new york or new england farmer who does not know it well and prize it highly. for low, moist, rich meadows, the red top is the best for hay of any known grass. it yields abundantly, and may be cut at any time, from july to last of september. the hay is better for cattle than timothy. many intelligent gentlemen insist that it is the most healthy hay for horses. after all that has been written on the various grasses, we regard it best for farmers throughout the continent to cultivate only the following:-- for early pastures, _vernal grass_ and _meadow foxtail_; pastures through the season, _white clover_, _cocks-foot_, _meadow foxtail_, _red clover_, and _timothy_; for lowland pastures, _red top_ and _tall fescue_; for hay, _timothy_, _red top_, _orchard grass_, and _tall fescue_; for the shade of fruit-trees, _orchard grass_; to be plowed in as fertilizers, _red clover_ and _white clover_, for soiling cattle, _tall oat-grass_ and _lucern_. time of sowing grass-seed is important. some prefer the fall, and others the spring. fall sowing should be very early or very late. early sowing will give the young plants strength to endure the frosts of winter, which would kill late sown; but sow so late that it will not vegetate until spring, and it will come up early and get out of the way of the droughts of summer. grass-seed sown late in the spring will always fail, except when followed by a very wet season. sow timothy with fall grain, or late in the fall, or on a light snow toward the close of winter. do not sow clover in the fall, as the young plants will generally fail in the cold winter;--sow it on the last light snow of winter, and it will always succeed. roll the land in spring on which you have sown grass-seed in the last of winter; it will benefit the grain, and cause the grass-seed to catch well, and get an earlier and more rapid growth. let all who would not lose their seed and labor, remember that grass-seed not sown so as to form good roots, before the frosts of winter or the drought of summer, will be lost; the plants will be killed. timothy-seed sown in the fall, one peck to the acre, will produce a good crop the next season. greenhouse. greenhouses vary as much in style and cost as dwellings. the simplest is any tight enclosure, covered with a glass roof at an angle of forty-five degrees, facing the south, and kept warm by artificial heat. the temperature is not allowed to be lower than forty nor higher than seventy degrees of fahrenheit; this will keep plants growing and make them blossom, and affords a good place for starting plants to be transplanted to out-door hotbeds, and finally to the vegetable garden, after frosts are over. there is but one main danger in greenhouse culture, and that is obviated by a little care: it is, allowing the air to become too much heated for the health of the plants; they require but little heat, but need it regularly. some greenhouses are warmed by stoves, and serve a good purpose; others have a stove set in a flue which is built in the wall, gradually rising until it has passed around two or three sides of the building. place three or four sheet-iron pans over this flue, at different points, and keep them filled with water; the fire in the flue will heat the water, and impart both warmth and humidity to the atmosphere, which is very favorable to the health and growth of plants. such a house is favorable to the growth of tender exotic fruits and plants. a similar house without any artificial heat affords an excellent place for the cultivation of the finest varieties of foreign grapes. gypsum, or plaster of paris. the fertilizing properties of this article were discovered by a german laborer in a quarry, who observed the increased luxuriance of the grass by his path, when the dust fell from his shoes and clothes. this led to experiments which demonstrated its fertilizing power. with the protracted controversies on gypsum we have nothing to do; certain important facts are established which are valuable to agriculturists. gypsum is valuable as an application to the soil, at from three fourths to one and a quarter bushels to the acre. on poor land, for a flax crop three bushels per acre, applied after the plants were up, and when wet, produced a great crop. it should be applied only once in two years, or in very small quantities every year. applied as a top-dressing, it will do no good until a considerable quantity of rain has fallen upon it. if it be applied in the spring, and the summer prove a dry one, its greatest effect will be felt the next season. its most marked effects are on poor soils; on land already rich it seems to produce but little effect; on dry, sandy or gravelly soils, it will increase a clover crop from one fourth to two thirds; sowed among clover and immediately plowed in, it acts powerfully. plants of large leaves feel its influence much more than those with small ones, hence its excellence on clover, potatoes, and vines. some soils contain enough plaster already: the farmer must determine by analysis or experiment. on the compost heap it is valuable in small quantities; it is also useful on all long, coarse, or fresh manures of the previous winter. seeds rolled in it before planting vegetate sooner and stronger. mixed with an equal quantity of ashes and a little lime, and applied to any crop immediately after hoeing, or when just coming up, it adds materially to its growth. it is better to apply it twice--on first coming up, and immediately after first hoeing; small quantities are best;--it will ten times repay the cost and labor. upland pastures and meadows, except clay soils, are greatly benefited by it. a time-saving method of sowing plaster on fields of grass or grain, is to sow out of a wagon driven slowly through the field, the driver being guided by his former tracks, while two men sow out of the wagon. it is customary to put plaster and ashes, mixed, around the hills of corn, or throw it upon the plants. sown on the field of hoed or hill crops, its effects are much greater than when only put on the hill. it should be sown equally over the whole ground. harrowing. the very liberal use of the harrow is one of the principal requisites of successful farming. no other single tool does so much to pulverize the soil, as the harrow. a full crop can only be raised on a fine mellow soil. seeds planted in soil left coarse and uneven, will vegetate unevenly, grow unequally, ripen at different times, and produce unequal quantities. many farmers insist that it is a mere notion, without reason, to harrow land four or five times, and roll it once or twice. not one in five hundred believes in the full utility of such a thorough working of the soil. coarse lumpy soils expose the seeds and roots of young plants to drought, and to too strong action of the atmosphere. (see article on _rolling_.) harrow sandy and sod land whenever you please. if you work any other soil when very wet, it will not recover from the effects of it during the whole season. harrow land the first time the same way it was plowed. the form of a harrow is of no importance, except avoiding the butterfly drag, that seldom works well. the square harrow with thirty teeth is usually preferred. every farmer should have a =v= drag also. corn, potatoes, peas, and other crops that are planted in straight rows, should be harrowed just after coming up, with a =v= drag, drawn by two horses. the front teeth should be taken out that the row may pass between the teeth, as well as between the horses. such a cultivation will do more good than any other single subsequent one. it stirs the whole surface, pulverizing the soil, keeps it mellow and moist, and destroys the weeds, and all at the best possible time, for the benefit of the crop. no other form of cultivation is so good for a young crop. try two acres, one in the usual way, and the other by harrowing, as we recommend, when it first comes up, and you will never after neglect harrowing all your hoed crops. hay. farmers differ in their modes of making and preserving hay. the following directions for timothy and clover, are applicable to all grasses suitable for hay, as they are all divided into two classes, broad-leaved, and the fine-leaved, or grasses proper. the principles involved in these directions may be considered comparatively well settled, and they are sufficient for all purposes. cut clover when half the blossoms are dried, and the other half in full bloom. cut later, the stalks are so dried, that they are of much less value. cut earlier, it is so immature, as to be of small value for hay. in case of great growth and lodging down, clover may be cut earlier, as it is better to save hay of less value, than to lose the whole. to cure clover for hay, spread it evenly, immediately after the scythe, let it thoroughly wilt, but not dry. rake it up, before any of the leaves are dry so as to break, and put it in small cocks, such as a man can pitch upon a cart at once or twice with a fork. this should be _laid_ on and not _rolled_ up from a winrow. in the former case it will shed nearly all the water, and the latter method suffers the rain to run down through the whole. unless the weather be very wet, clover will cure in this way, without opening until time to haul it in, and will retain its beautiful green color, almost equal to that of england and germany, cured in the shade, which, at two or three years old, appears almost as bright as though not cured at all. if the weather be quite wet, cut clover when free from dew or rain, wilt it at once, and draw it in, put as much as possible in thin layers on scaffolds, and under cover, to cure in the shade. put the remainder in alternate layers with equal quantities of dry straw, with one peck of salt to a ton. a ton may bear half a bushel of salt, less is better, and more is injurious to stock, by compelling them to eat too much salt. the most beautiful and palatable clover hay is that cured in the shade, on scaffolds and afterward mowed away. timothy should never be cut, until the seed is far enough advanced to grow. careful experiments have shown that cut in the blossom, the hay will contain only about one half as much nutriment, as when cut in the full-grown seed, but before it commences shelling. cure as clover, but in twice as large cocks, and never salt, unless compelled to draw in when damp or too green. hedge. the question of fencing in this country, so much of which is prairie, and in other parts of which there is such a wanton waste of timber, gives great importance to successful hedging. the same plants are not equally good for hedge in all parts of the country. there are but few plants suitable for hedges in our climate. _the osage orange_--is the best, in all latitudes where it will flourish. it has no diseases or enemies by which it will be destroyed, except too cold winters. of southern origin, yet it flourishes in many places at the north. in cold localities, where there is but little snow, it suffers much until three or four years old. it is being extensively introduced into central and northern illinois, where unusually cold winters destroy vast quantities of young plants, and kill the tops of much old hedge. it is still insisted that it will succeed; but we consider it too uncertain, and consequently too expensive, for general fencing in such climates. the roots and lower parts of the plants may be preserved, however, by setting them out for a hedge on level ground, instead of ridges as usual, and plowing a furrow three feet from each side of the row, to drain off surplus water. mulch thoroughly in the fall, and thus protect from frost until they have been set in the hedge for three years, and they may succeed and make a good live fence. to raise the plants, soak the seeds thoroughly, and, at the usual time of corn-planting, plant in straight rows, and keep clean of weeds. set out in hedge the following spring. the soil of the hedge-row should be deep, mellow, and moderately, not excessively rich. too rich soil makes a larger growth, of spongy and more tender wood. plants should have a portion of the tap-root cut off, and be planted a foot apart in the row. _the hawthorn_--will never be extensively cultivated for live fence in this country, being subject to borers, as destructive as in fruit-trees. _the virginia thorn_--is equally uncertain. _the buck thorn_--after fifteen years' trial, in new england, bids fair to answer every purpose for american live fence: it is easily propagated, of rapid growth, very hardy, thickens up well at the bottom, and is exempt from the depredations of insects. it may yet prove the great american hedge-shrub. _the newcastle thorn_--cultivated in new england, is much more beautiful, and promises to rival the buck thorn, but has not been sufficiently tested to settle its claims. much is anticipated from it. [illustration: shearing down young hedges.] [illustration: properly-trimmed hedge (end view).] [illustration: badly-trimmed hedge (end view).] [illustration: neglected hedge (side view).] there are plants well adapted to hedge at the south, which are too tender for the north. in white's gardening for the south, we have the following given as hedge-shrubs, adapted to that region: osage orange, pyracanth, cherokee, and single white macartney roses. the macartney, being an evergreen thorn, and said to make as close a hedge as the osage orange and much more beautiful, is quite a favorite at the south. they usually train the rose-shrubs for hedge on some kind of paling or wire fence. they render some of them impenetrable even by rabbits or sparrows; this is done by layers, and trimming twice a year, commencing after the first three months' growth. pruning is the most important matter in the whole business of hedging. a hedge set out ever so well, and composed of the best variety of plants, if left in the weeds, without proper care in trimming, will be nearly useless. a well-trimmed hedge around a fruit-orchard will keep out all fruit-thieves. the great difficulty is the _unwillingness_ of cultivators to cut off, so short and so frequently, _the fine growth_. shear off the first year's growth (_a_) within three inches of the ground (_b_). cut the vigorous shoots that will rise from this shearing, four inches higher, about the middle of july, and similar and successive cuttings, each a little longer, in the two following years; these will bring the hedge to a proper height. the form of trimming shown in end view of properly-trimmed hedge, protects the bottom from shade by too much foliage on the top: the effects of that shade are seen in neglected hedge in the cut. hemp. this is one of the staple articles of american agriculture. it is much cultivated in kentucky and other contiguous states. its market value is so fluctuating that many farmers are giving up its cultivation. the substance of these directions is taken from an elaborate article from the pen of the honorable henry clay. had not the length of that article rendered it inconsistent with the plan of this volume, we should have given it to the american people as it came from the hand of their greatest statesman, who was so eminently american in all his sentiments and labors. _preparation of the soil_--should be as thorough as for flax;--this can not be too strongly insisted on. much is lost by neglect, under the mistaken notion that hemp will do about as well on coarse, hard land. plants for seeds should be sown in drills four feet apart, and separate from that designed only for the lint. the stalks should be allowed to stand about eight inches apart in the rows. plants are male and female, distinguished in the blossoms. when the farina from the blossoms on the male plants (the female plants do not blossom) has generally fallen, pull up the male plants, leaving only the females to mature. cut the seed-plants after the first hard frost, and carry in wet, so as to avoid loss by shelling. seed is easily separated by a common flail. after the seeds are thrashed out, they should be spread thin, and thoroughly dried, or their vegetative power will be destroyed by heat or decay. they should be spread to be kept for the next spring's planting, and not be kept in large bulk. their vegetation is very uncertain after they are a year old. sow hemp for lint broadcast, when the weather has become warm enough for corn-planting. opinions vary as to the quantity of seed, from one bushel to two and a half bushels per acre. probably a bushel and a peck is best. plowing in the seed is good on old land; rolling is also useful. if it gets up six inches high, so that the leaves cover the ground well, few crops are less effected by the vicissitudes of the weather. some sow a part of their hemp at different times, that it may not all ripen at once and crowd them in their labor. cutting it ten days before it is ripe, or allowing it to stand two weeks after, will not materially injure it. hemp is pulled or cut. cutting, as near the ground as possible, is the better method. the plants are spread even on the ground and cured; bound up in convenient handfuls and shocked up, and bound around the top as corn. it is an improvement to shake off the leaves well before shocking up. if stacked after a while, and allowed to remain for a year, the improvement in the lint is worth more than the loss of time. there are two methods of rotting--dew-rotting, =and= water-rotting--one by spreading out on grass-land, and the other by immersing in water; the latter is much the preferable mode. the question of sufficient rotting is determined by trial. hemp is broken and cleaned like flax. the stalks need to be well aired and dried in the sun to facilitate the operation. extremes in price have been from three to eight dollars per hundred pounds: five dollars renders it a very profitable crop. thorough rotting, good cleaning, and neat order, are the conditions of obtaining the first market price. an acre produces from six hundred to one thousand pounds of lint--an average of about one hundred pounds to each foot of height of the stalks. hemp exhausts the soil but a mere trifle, if at all; the seventeenth successive crop on the same land having proved the best. nothing leaves the land in better condition for other crops; it kills all the weeds, and leaves the surface smooth and even. hoeing. much depends upon the proper and timely use of the hoe. never let weeds press you; hoe at proper times, and you never will have any large weeds. as soon as vegetables are up, so that you can do it safely, hoe them. the more frequent the hoeing while plants are young, the larger will be the crop. premium crops are always hoed very frequently. hoeing cabbages, corn, and similar smooth plants, when it rains slightly, is nearly equal to a coat of manure. but beans, potatoes, and vines, and whatever has a rough stalk, are much injured by stirring the ground about them while they are wet, or even much damp. we have known promising crops of vines nearly destroyed by hoeing when wet. hoeing near the roots of vines after they have formed runners one or two feet long, will also nearly ruin them;--the same is true of onions: hoe near them, cutting off the lateral roots, and you will lessen the crop one half. in hoeing, make no high hills except for sweet potatoes. high hilling up originated in england, where their cool, humid, cloudy atmosphere demands it, to secure more warmth. in this country we have to guard more against drought and heat. hops. these are native in this country, being found, growing spontaneously, by many of our rivers. there are four or five varieties, but no preference has been given to any particular one. moist, sandy loam is the best soil, though good hops may be grown in abundance on any land suitable for corn or potatoes. plow the land quite deep in autumn; in the spring, harrow the same way it was plowed. spread evenly over the surface sixteen cords of manure to the acre, if your soil be of ordinary richness; cross-plow as deep as the first plowing; furrow out as for potatoes, four feet apart each way. plant hops in every other hill of every other row, making them eight feet apart each way. plant all the remaining hills with potatoes. four cuttings of running roots of hops should be planted in each hill. many hop-yards are unproductive on account of being too thick;--less than eight feet each way deprives the vines of suitable air and sun, and prevents plowing them with ease. the first year, they only need to be kept clean of weeds by hoeing them with the potatoes. in the fall of the first year, to prevent injury from hard frosts, put a large shovelful of good manure on the top of each hill. each spring, before the hops are opened, spread on each acre eight cords of manure; coarse straw manure is preferable. plow both ways at first hoeing. they require three hoeings, the last when in full bloom in the beginning of august. open the hops every spring by the middle of may; at the south, by the last of april. this is done by making four furrows between the rows, turning them from the hills; the earth is then removed from the roots with a hoe, and all the running roots cut in with a sharp knife within two inches of the main roots. the tops of the main roots must also be cut in, and covered with earth two inches deep. set the poles on the first springing of the vines; never have more than two poles in a hill, or more than two vines on a pole, and no pole more than sixteen feet high. neglect this root-pruning, and multiply poles and crowd them with vines, and you will get very few hops. select the most thrifty vines for the poles, and destroy all the others. watch them during the summer, that they do not blow down from the poles. they must be picked as soon as they are ripe, and before frosts. the best picking-box is a wooden bin made of light boards, nine feet long, three feet wide, and two and a half feet deep; the poles are laid across this, and the hops picked into it by hand. in gathering hops, cut the vines two feet from the ground, that bleeding may not injure the roots. _curing_ is the most important matter in hop-growing. hops would all be of one quality, and bring the first price, if equally well cured. the following description (with slight abbreviation) of the process of curing, by william blanchard, esq., is, perhaps, as complete as anything that can be obtained. much depends upon having a well-constructed kiln. for the convenience of putting the hops on the kiln, a side hill is generally chosen for its situation; it should be a dry situation. it should be dug out the same bigness at the bottom as at the top; the side walls laid up perpendicularly, and filled in solid with stone to give it a tunnel form: twelve feet square at the top, two feet square at the bottom, and at least eight feet deep, is deemed a convenient size. on the top of the walls sills are laid, having joists let into them, as for laying a floor, on which laths, about one and a half inches wide, are nailed, leaving open spaces between them three fourths of an inch, over which a thin linen cloth is spread and nailed at the edges to the sills. a board about twelve inches wide is set up on each side of the kiln, on the inner edge of the sill, to form a bin to receive the hops. fifty pounds, after they are dry, is all such a kiln will hold at once. the larger the stones made use of in the construction of the kiln the better, as it will give a more steady and dense heat. the inside of the kiln should be well plastered with mortar to make it air-tight. charcoal is the best fuel. heat the kiln well before putting on the hops; keep a steady and regular heat while drying. hops must not remain in bulk long after being picked, as they will heat and spoil. do not stir them while drying. after they are thoroughly dry, remove them into a dry room, and lay in heaps, and not stir unless they are gathering dampness that will change their color; then spread them. this will only occur when they have not been properly dried. they are bagged by laying cloth into a box, so made that it can be removed, and give opportunity to sew up the bag while in the press. the hops are pressed in by a screw. in bulk they will sweat a little, which will begin to subside in about eight days, at which time they should be bagged. if they sweat much and begin to change their color, they must be dried before bagging. the best size for bags is about two hundred and fifty pounds' weight, in a bag about five feet long. common tow-cloth or russia-hemp bags are best. extensive hop-growers build houses over the kiln, that they may be able to use them in wet weather. in this case, keep the doors open as much as possible without letting in the rain. dried without sufficient air, their color is changed, and their quality and market-value injured. these houses are made much larger than the kiln, in many instances, for the convenience of storing and bagging the hops when dry; in this case, tight partitions should separate the storerooms from the kiln, to avoid dampness from the drying hops. the form of manuring recommended is contrary to the old practice of putting a little manure only in the hill: that practice exposed vines to decay and destruction by worms, and this does not; our system also produces hops equal to new land. horse. this noble animal is in general use, and everywhere highly prized. by the last census, we see that there are two thirds as many horses as cows in the united states-- , , horses, and over six millions of cows. but, valuable as is the horse, he suffers much ill treatment and neglect from his master. to give a history of the horse, the various breeds of different countries, and the efforts to improve them, would be interesting, did it fall within the limits of our design. the patronage of the kings and nobility of england has done much to elevate the horse to his present standard of excellence. it has now become the custom for intelligent gentlemen in rural districts, in all enlightened countries, to give much attention to the improvement of horses. unfortunately, some of that enthusiasm is perverted to the channel of horse-racing, a practice alike injurious to horses and the morals of men. a few brief hints are all we have space for, where a volume would be interesting and useful. the farmer should exercise constant care to improve the breed of his horses: it pays best to raise good horses. this depends upon the qualities of the dam and sire, and upon proper feed and care. this is a subject that farmers should carefully study from books and from their own observation. the most important matter in raising horses, is care in working and feeding. nineteen out of twenty of all sick horses are made so by bad treatment. the prevention of disease is better than cure. steady, and even hard work, will not injure a horse that is well and regularly fed. but a few moments of crowding a horse's speed, or of an unnatural strain on his strength, may ruin him. let it always be remembered that it is speed, and not heavy loads, that most injures a horse. a mile an hour too fast will soon run down your horse. a horse fed with grain, or watered, when warm, is liable to be foundered; and if not so fed as actually to be foundered, he will gradually grow stiff. horses are liable to take cold by any unreasonable exposure to the weather, in the same circumstances as men, and the effects on health and comfort are very similar. a horse having become warm by driving, should never stand a minute without a blanket. when a man goes from a heated room, or in a perspiration, into inclement weather, he takes cold the moment the cold or storm strikes him: in a few moments the effects on the pores of the body are such that there is no particular exposure. it is so with a horse. he takes cold when you are only going to allow him to "stand but a minute," and during that time you leave him uncovered. if you are under the necessity of doing an unusual day's work with a horse, do not feed him heavily on that day. unusual feed the day before and the day after will do him good; but on the day of excessive work it injures him. never feed horses too much; they will often eat one third more than is good for their health. keep the bottom of the trough in which you feed your horses grain, plastered over with a mixture of equal parts of salt and ashes, that they may eat a little of it when they please. when the water of your horse becomes thick and yellowish, or whitish, give him a piece of rosin as large as a walnut, pulverized and put in his grain. if a horse has the heaves, give him no hay or oats; corn, ground or soaked, should be his only grain, and green corn-fodder in summer, and cornstalks, cut fine, with a little warm water on them, mixed with meal, should constitute his only food. all except a few of the most confirmed and long-standing cases of heaves are _entirely relieved_ by this course of feeding, and that relief is permanent as long as the feed is continued, and it frequently effects a cure so radical that the disease will not return on a change of food. to bring up horses that have had hard usage and poor feed, and to secure growth in colts, feed them milk. the milk of a butter-dairy is not more profitably used in any other way, than fed to horses and colts. give them no water for two or three days, and they will readily learn to drink all the sour, thick milk you will give them. colts will grow faster on milk than on any other food. horses should be often rubbed down and kept clean, and when put in the stable wet, they should be rubbed dry. it is very essential to the health of a horse that he have pure air. stables in this country are usually airy enough. but if the stable be tight, it should be well ventilated. the gases from a wet stable floor are injurious. disinfecting agents are good remedies; a little plaster-of-paris spread over a stable-floor is very useful. these brief directions, followed, will prevent most of the diseases to which horses are subject; or in case a horse be attacked, he will have the disease lightly, as temperate men do epidemics. horseradish. this is regarded a healthy condiment, especially in the spring of the year. grated, with a little vinegar, it may be eaten with any food you choose. small shavings of the root are esteemed in mangoes. when steeped in vinegar for two weeks, it is said effectually to remove freckles from the face. any pieces of the roots will grow in any good garden-soil. larger and better roots may be produced, by trenching the bed two feet deep, and putting in the bottom, ten inches of good manure, and planting selected roots, about six inches deep. hotbeds. these are designed to force an early growth of plants. it is done by the use of solar heat, and that arising from fermenting manures, combined. the following directions for constructing and managing hotbeds will enable every one to be successful. nail boards on pieces of scantling placed in the inside corners, in the form of a box, sixteen feet long and six feet wide; make it three and a half feet high on the back-side, and two feet high in front, facing the sun; nail a piece of board across the middle, let in at the top, to prevent the box from spreading when filled. fill that with good, fresh horse-manure, with but little straw; tread it down firmly. put over the whole, sashes made with cross-pieces but one way, and filled with glass, lapped half an inch, like shingles on a roof, to carry off the rain; putty in the glass lightly, or it may adhere to fresh-painted frames; let the frames be halved on their edges, so as to lap and be tight; put these over the filled hotbed, perfectly fitted all around, and enough of them to cover the whole bed; in two or three days the manure will become pretty warm, when it should be covered, four inches deep, with rich mould, sheltered for the purpose the previous fall, and the seeds planted. when the plants come up, see that they are kept sufficiently moist, and not have the hot sun pour upon them intensely, and they will grow rapidly; when too warm, they should be partly covered with mats, and the frames raised to let in air. put small wedges between the sash and the boards, which will let in sufficient air. keep it closed when the air is cold, and covered with mats when the sun is too hot. plants are often destroyed by over-heating. when in danger of freezing, cover closely with mats or straw, or both. we have had plants growing in such a bed when the thermometer stood eight degrees below zero. if the heat of the manure subsides too early, pack fresh horse-manure all around the outside of the box, and as it heats it will communicate warmth to the inside of the bed. as plants grow up, transplant a part to a fresh bed, so as to give all a chance to grow stocky and strong. almost everything that grows in the garden may be forwarded greatly in the hotbed. vines, beets, tomatoes, cabbages, peppers, egg-plants, celery, beans, corn, and potatoes, may be obtained much earlier by this means. those that are injured most by transplanting should be planted in the hotbed, on inverted sods, or grass turfs, six inches square, which can be removed with the growing plants on them, without seriously disturbing the roots. plenty of shade and moisture on transplanting will save the most tender plants, and they will speedily recover. make a hotbed of any size you may desire on the same principle. the boards and frames will last many years, with proper care, and occasional supply of a broken light of glass. into such sash, broken glass of any size can be put, by cutting it to a proper width in one direction, no matter how far the points lap. houses. it is not our design to give an extended view of rural architecture. but this work can not be complete without a brief notice of farm-buildings, and a few plans for such buildings, adapted to the wants of those possessing limited means. we hope these directions and plans will prove important aids in getting up cheap, yet convenient and beautiful, country residences, especially in all the newer parts of the country. our reading on rural architecture, and an extensive observation in many states of the union, have made us acquainted with nothing, combining beauty, cheapness, and utility, better than the following. the scale at the bottom will enable any mechanic to determine the size of each of these buildings, and their relation to each other. they can, on the same general plan, be made of any dimensions, to suit the wishes of the proprietor. the wagon-house in the range is forty feet long, affording ample shelter for all kinds of vehicles, connected by a covered way with the horse-stables and barn-floor. [illustration: range of farm-buildings.] a lean-to is built on the north side of the wagon-house, in which is a tool-house opening into it, and a stable for eight milch-cows, that will thus be convenient for winter-milking; these cows are fed from the loft over the wagon-house. the barn is thirty by forty feet, with floor in the middle and bay on each side: this can be driven into on one side and out on the other. from the floor is a covered way to cattle and horse stables, and into the wagon and tool house, without going outdoor. _the piggery._--large and small swine do not do so well together; hence, the larger ones are to occupy the feeding-pen and bed on the right (in the cut), those of medium size on the left, and the smaller ones in the rear. the dimensions and relative size of apartments can be determined from the plan. the other buildings sufficiently explain themselves in the cut. [illustration: ground-plan of piggery.] with this range of buildings, let a farmer do his own thrashing, with a small horse-power, and thrash a part at a time during the winter, keeping the straw in an apartment in the bay, dry for litter, and for cut feed for cattle and horses, and it will be the best and most economical method of thrashing and keeping stock. every farmer should do at least a part of his thrashing in this way, during the winter, for the benefit of fresh straw, &c. _country residence._--this includes the range of buildings given opposite, their distance from the house, and all the parts of a complete residence, with all the comforts and conveniences that can be crowded into such a space, and at a very reasonable expense. three fourths of an acre are devoted to the ornamental grounds; except the walks and small flower-beds, it is all green turf. plowed very deep and thoroughly enriched, the trees are set out, and all then made very level, and one and a half bushels grass-seed sown on it and brushed in very smooth. this soon makes a very thick green turf, to be cut every ten days during the most growing season, and less frequently as the season advances. the trees, for a few years, need careful working around and mulching. the gravel carriage-road is twelve feet wide, and winding around shrubbery, it leads to the carriage-house in the range of buildings. the foot-walks are five feet wide. the curves in the walks may be accurately laid out in the following manner. determine the general position by a few points measured off. lay a pole upon the ground, in the direction of the walk; stick a peg in the ground at the first end and at its middle; move the pole round a little, leaving the middle the same,--then stick a peg at its end, and move it forward--moving it forward and round equally, each time, by measurement. a longer or shorter curve is made by a greater or less side-movement of the pole. in a regular curve, the movements are the same; but in going from a shorter to a longer, or from a longer to a shorter curve, the side-measurement must increase or diminish regularly. [illustration: country residence, farm buildings, grounds, and fruit-gardens.] [illustration: laying out curves.] [illustration: first floor.] [illustration: chambers.] the following cuts show the plan of the house: three principal rooms and a bed-room below, and four rooms above. the hall extends through the house, affording good ventilation in summer, and entrance to each room, without passing through another. the chimney in the centre economizes heat. this small and cheap house affords more conveniences than most large ones. one of the finest things about such a house is a good cellar. for a farm-house, the cellar should be under the whole; make it eight feet deep, gravel and water lime made smooth on the bottom, flagging under the bottom of the wall extending out a foot, the wall above ground built double, the inside four inches thick, with brick, with a space of two inches, and outside stone wall a foot thick. the windows should be double and well fitted, the inside one hung on hinges; the outside one to be removed in spring, and its place supplied with a well-fitted frame, covered with wire-cloth to admit air and exclude intruders during summer. this will not freeze, and never need banking. no rat can enter, for they always work close to the wall, and coming to the projecting flat stone at the bottom, they give it up. on one side of the cellar, under the kitchen, make a large rain-water cistern, with a pump in the kitchen and a faucet in the cellar, and the whole arrangement is perfect. if the farm be large, you will need some of the good, but cheap houses described in the following part of this article, where your men will live and board themselves, which is always the best and cheapest way. an open view from the house in the country residence extends to the summer-house (_b_) on the right. this is one of the neatest cheap summer-houses that can be made. the following directions for making it may be useful. set eight cedar posts, six inches in diameter, in the ground, in a circle; saw them off even at the top, and connect them by plank nailed on their tops. make an eight-sided roof of boards; nail lath from post to post, forming lattice-work, leaving a space between two posts for a door. put a seat around on the inside. leave all the materials except the seat unplaned, and cover with a white or brown wash, and it need not cost more than five or six dollars, and, covered with vines of some kind, it will be ornamental. [illustration: summer-house.] [illustration: laborer's cottage.] [illustration: plan of laborer's cottage.] this form of a cheap house is convenient and pleasant. built of four-inch scantling, the plates and sills being connected only by the upright plank, and the wings thoroughly bracing the upright posts; when lumber is cheap, it may be built for one hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars, with cellar, well, and cistern. occasional whitewash is as good as paint. with cellar under the whole, filled in with brick, and having blinds, it may cost three hundred and fifty dollars. the plan of the house sufficiently explains itself. the next cut illustrates a neat country-house, for a family who think more of neatness, comfort, and intellectual pursuits, than of mere ornament, and may serve the purpose of a farmhouse, or the residence of a retired or professional gentleman. it has the unconstrained air of the italian style, without a rigid adherence to any rules, and may therefore be altered or added to without destroying its effect. [illustration: italian farmhouse.] [illustration: plan of italian farm house.] the plan is intelligible without explanation. built in a plain way, the four large rooms not larger than fifteen by seventeen, and ten feet high, plain in its finish, it would cost about sixteen hundred dollars complete. it may go up from that, according to size and height of rooms, and style of finish, to three thousand dollars. it then makes as good a house as any person ever need to occupy, out of great cities. hybrids. although this subject has received far too little attention, yet our limits will only allow us to mention a few facts, of the most practical moment. plants hybridize only through their blossoms. this can only occur in plants of similarity, in nature and habits. squashes and pumpkins planted near each other mix badly, and the poorer will prevail. varieties of corn mix at considerable distances, by the falling of pollen from the tassel upon the silk of another variety. watermelons are always ruined by being planted near citrons. the seeds from melons so grown will not produce one good melon. how far watermelons and muskmelons, or squashes with melons, will hybridize, is uncertain. by planting nutmeg muskmelons with the common roughskinned variety, we have produced a kind about half way between them, that was of great excellence. two kinds of cabbage or turnip seed should never be raised in the same garden. cabbage and turnip seed raised near together is valueless. in strawberries, different plants are essential to each other, the quality of the fruit being determined by the plant fertilized, and not by the fertilizer. this subject is further treated under articles on different plants. inarching. this is a method of effecting a union of trees or branches, while both retain their hold in the ground. shave off a little wood from each, and put them together, fitting closely, so that the barks will meet, as in grafting; tie firmly, and cover with wax. when they have got well to growing, cut off the top of the old one, and after a while cut the new one from the ground. when you have a tree that it is difficult to propagate in the usual way, you may transplant it to a thrifty stock. vigorous branches may by this means be transferred to old, poor-bearing, or slow-growing trees. so also may a tree be prolonged beyond its ordinary age, as the pear on the quince, by inarching young shoots. we can only recommend this to the curious experimenter, who has little else to do. insects. these are the natural enemies of fruits and plants; and to prevent their depredations requires much care. there is no universal remedy. birds and young fowls--especially ducks and chickens--are useful in a garden. the ducks must not be kept there too long. they will appropriate a little to their own use, but will save much more for the proprietor. insects have their peculiar tastes for particular fruits and plants, of which we have treated, under those heads, respectively. success in many branches of horticulture and pomology, depends upon attention to the habits of insects. the most general remedy is to wash trees or plants with a strong decoction of some offensive herb, or with whale-oil soapsuds. tobacco is very useful for this purpose. iron filings. it has been ascertained by analysis, that iron enters largely into the composition of the pear. iron filings spread under them, or worked into the soil, increases the growth of pear-trees, and improves the quality of the fruit. irrigation. this is one of the most important matters, that can engage the attention of agriculturists of the present day. a stream of water that may be caused to flow gently over a field, or different parts of a farm, at pleasure, is a mine of wealth. plants receive their food from the air and water. we shall discuss this more fully when treating of manures. a poor, porous, sandy, or gravelly soil usually produces a fine crop, in a wet season. that is an addition to the soil of nothing but water. hence all springs and streams can be turned to great account, on a farm or garden. watering gardens by hand or with a garden-pump, will often pay better than any other expenditure on the land. employing a man, in a dry season, to spend his whole time in watering five acres of garden, of berries and vegetables, as cabbages, vines, onions, and potatoes, will pay a very large profit. strawberries will bear twice as much and twice as long, for daily watering, after they begin to bud for blossoms, until the fruit is gone. it is a necessary caution not to water irregularly, and only occasionally, in a dry season. better not commence than to leave off, or neglect it in a dry time, before a rain. read further in our article on "watering." labels. it is important, on many accounts, to have fruit-trees and shrubs well labelled. many labels have been invented. we prefer cole's, as given in his fruit book, to any other. take a piece of sound pine or other soft wood, whittle two sides smooth, leaving one wider than the other, with a sharp corner between them. for one, cut one notch in the edge, and so up to four, four notches for four. for five, cut across the narrow side. for ten cut across the wide side, and a notch for every ten up to forty. for fifty, cut obliquely across the narrow side, and for one hundred cut obliquely across the wide side. keep the names in a book, with numbers corresponding with the notches or numbers on the labels. fasten these to trees, loosely, by a small copper or brass wire. transported to any distance, exposed to any weather, or buried in the ground, they will not be obliterated. pieces of sheet lead, tin, or zinc, cut wide at one end, and written on with a sharp awl, and narrow at the other end, to be bent around a limb, will answer a pretty good purpose. any soft wood, made smooth, and a little white paint applied, and written on with a good pencil, will preserve the mark for a long time. fasten with small wire. there are many labels, but we know none preferable to the above. by all means make labels accurate and permanent. otherwise great losses may occur by budding or grafting from wrong varieties. landscape gardens. these deserve much more attention than they receive in this country. on most farms land enough is lying waste, to make a picturesque landscape, at a small expense. trees planted, weeds destroyed, grass cultivated, and paths made, according to the most approved rules of carelessness, would secure this object. with a wealthy man, the omission of such a park about his dwelling is hardly pardonable. landscape gardening is an extensive subject. we can only give a few of the most general simple rules, that may be practised, without the possession of very large means. . place the house some distance from the main street. . make the carriage-way leading to the house, at least twelve feet wide, and do not allow it to extend in a straight line, but in gentle curves, around clusters of trees and plats of grass, apparently rendering the curves necessary. . have no large trees directly in front of the house. . plant trees of the thickest and greenest foliage near the house, and those of more open tops at a greater distance. standard pear, and handsome cherry trees, do well planted among the forest trees. clusters of them, at suitable distances, are not only beautiful, but they bear exceedingly well. they are well protected by the forest trees, and standing alone are injured less by insects. . never set trees in a landscape garden, in straight rows, nor trees of similar size and form together. nature never does so. . let none of the walks be straight lines, but curves, meandering among trees and grass. if there be any water in the vicinity, let there be an open space, giving a fair view of it from the house. if you have a stream, make rustic bridges over it, the plainer the better. here and there have rustic arbors. attached to all this should be three other gardens, one of flowers, another of vegetables, and the third of fruits. these three should never grow together. fruit-trees ruin vegetables and injure flowers. and flowers in a vegetable garden are mere weeds. a separate plat for each is the correct rule, both for beauty and profit. all this need require but little time and expense. all landholders can, at a moderate cost, live amid scenes of perpetual beauty, while the rich may spend as much money in this way as they choose. layering. this is a method of propagation, by bending down a branch, and fastening it under the soil, leaving the upper end projecting, until it takes root. cut half way through the branch so as to raise the top, and fasten it at the point where it is cut, in a trench, with a stick thrust into the ground over it nearly horizontally, or with a stick having a hook made by cutting off a limb. cover well with soil, and mulch it, and water when dry. this done in the spring, in august the branch will be well rooted, and may be cut away from the parent stalk. this is important in any tree or shrub (like the snowball), difficult to propagate by slips or grafting. laying in trees. dig a trench where water will not stand, and lay the trees in at an angle of forty-five degrees, and cover the roots and lower part, very closely, with earth. in this way they may be well preserved through the winter, if buried so deep that the tap-root will not freeze, which is always injurious to trees that have been removed from their original soil. such freezing is always destructive to trees out of the ground. small trees and seedlings may be covered entirely, to be kept through the winter. put coarse straw manure on the earth, over trees large enough for setting, that are to be preserved heeled in during winter; and straw or corn-fodder over the tops, during the coldest weather, and they will come out perfect in the spring. if not ready to set out your trees at once, you may preserve them in perfect condition to very late in spring, in this way, by raising them once, to check vegetation, and putting them back, and shading their stems and mulching the roots, after the commencement of warm weather. trees may thus be preserved in better condition for transplanting than those left in the nursery, and they will make a larger growth the first season. leeks. these are said to be natives of switzerland. we think this doubtful, as they are an article of daily food in egypt, and were so highly esteemed there, centuries ago, as to become an object of worship. they are used as a pot-herb, to give a flavor to soups and stews. they are not bulbous, like onions, but have a long stem, which is principally used. they are transplanted very deep, so as to obtain a long white neck. the ends of the roots are to be cut off when transplanted, and they should be set in rows a foot apart, and from four to six inches in the row. there are several varieties, distinguished mainly by the width of the leaves,--the _flanders_ (or _narrow-leafed_), the _scotch_, and the _broad london_. we know no use of leeks for which onions would not be equally good, and, hence, do not recommend their cultivation. lemon. this is the finest acid fruit grown, and belongs to warm climates; but by getting good budded trees from the south, and setting in glass-houses, protected from severe frosts, we may grow lemons in abundance at the north. by a system of acclimation and protection, we anticipate seeing oranges and other southern fruits grown at the north as a domestic luxury, and perhaps at a profit for market. the houses necessary for protection may be worth more for other purposes than their cost and care, without interfering with their use for orange and lemon culture. lettuce. the varieties are numerous, and most of them do well on very rich land, well hoed. only two kinds of summer-lettuce need be cultivated--the _ice-head lettuce_, and the _brown_. the ice-head has a very thick and tender leaf, continuing to be excellent up to midsummer, from one sowing; and if not allowed to stand nearer together than six inches, it will produce fine heads. the brown lettuce is very large and very good. there are other, earlier kinds, and many others that form large heads. but we can get the above kinds early, by sowing in a hotbed and transplanting; or by sowing so as to have plants get of considerable size in the fall, and protect by covering in winter. these will be suitable for the table early in the spring. lettuce does better for transplanting; it forms larger heads than in the original bed, and is a little later. make the soil very rich with stable-manure. lettuce is more affected by the quality of the soil than most other vegetables. this is a pleasant and healthy article of food, in spring and early summer. licorice. this is a hardy plant from southern europe. the root in substance, or the extracted dried juice, is much used. needs a deep, rich soil. it is propagated by cuttings of roots set out in deeply-trenched land, in rows three feet apart, and one foot in the row. small vegetables may be grown among the plants the first year; afterward keep clear of weeds, and manure every autumn. at the end of the third year, after the leaves are dead, take up the roots and dry them thoroughly. this does well at the south. a few roots are sufficient for a family, and the demand will not be sufficient to require its culture very extensively as an article of commerce. the low price of labor in southern europe enables them to supply the demand cheaper than can be afforded in this country. lime. this is a valuable application to the soil. for wheat it is very important, except on soil containing a large proportion of calcareous matter. usually air-slaked, and applied as a top-dressing, or plowed or harrowed in, its effects are important. on moist, sour land, producing wild grass, it corrects the acidity, introduces other grass, and prepares the soil for cultivation. on hard, stiff lands, it has a tendency to make them friable, and keep them in a mellow condition, thus saving more than its cost, in the labor of cultivation. very valuable in a compost heap. so much may be applied as to burn the soil and prove injurious. it will not do as a substitute for everything else. see further on "manures." lime. a fruit resembling the lemon, growing in the same climate, but of smaller size. it is used for the same purposes as the lemon, but is not so valuable. preserved green, it is highly esteemed. it is cultivated as the orange and lemon, needing the same protection in cold climates. to preserve all these from destruction by insects, wash them in a strong decoction of bitter or offensive herbs, or with whale-oil soap-suds; tobacco is very effectual. these remedies are useful on all fruit-trees. location. this is important to everything we cultivate. but, as everything can not have the best location, we should study it with reference to those things most affected by it, especially fruits. fruits escape late frosts when growing near rills or small brooks. orchards near the shores of bodies of water--as on lake erie about cleveland, ohio--bear luxuriantly when all fruit a few miles back is cut off by late frosts. on the summits of hills, fruits escape late frosts, when they are all cut off in the valleys below. on the ohio river above cincinnati, peaches are very liable to destruction by late frosts. we have seen them all frozen through in one night, and turned black the next day, in the month of may, after they had grown to the size of marrowfat-peas. one season, when there were no peaches in any other locality within a hundred miles, we knew an orchard, on a kentucky hill, so high and steep, that it took miles of winding around the hill, to ascend it with a team. those trees were perfectly loaded with peaches, that sold on the tree at four dollars per bushel, and in cincinnati market at seven to eight dollars. in ohio, kentucky, and virginia, there are such hills, that may be turned to more valuable account than any of the rest of their land, that are not now considered good for anything--even for sheep-pastures. the same is true in the hilly parts of all the states. good fruit of some kind will grow on them all, every year. locust-trees. it will soon be a great object with american farmers to cultivate locust-trees, in all locations to which they are adapted. even in this new world, we shall soon be dependent on cultivated timber for fence-posts, railroad-ties, and building purposes. our native forests are rapidly disappearing, while demand for timber is as rapidly increasing. probably no other tree is so profitable for cultivation in this country as the locust. it is of rapid growth, and hard and durable, and adapted to many uses. the second-growth locust is not so durable as the native forest-tree, as found in parts of ohio; but, cut at a suitable age and at the right season of the year, it is as durable as white cedar, and much more valuable. the profits of the culture would be great. an acre of locust-trees fifteen or twenty years old would be worth fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars. the expense of growing it, aside from the use of the land, would be trifling. the grove would afford a good place for fowls, while the blossoms would be nearly equal to white clover for honey. the limbs would make excellent wood, and the ground would need no planting for a second growth. fortunate will be the men on the prairies of the west, and along the railroads and rivers of the land, who shall early plant fields of locust. the profits of it will greatly exceed the increase in the value of the land. manures. soils, manures, and preparing the soil--plowing, harrowing, &c.--are the three great subjects in any good agricultural work. we shall treat this subject under the following divisions:-- . the substances of which manures are composed. . preparation and saving of manures. . time and modes of application. . the principles of their action upon plants. manures are of two classes--called putrescent and fossil. the putrescent are composed of decayed, or decaying, vegetable and animal substances. the fossil are those dug from the earth, as lime, marl, and gypsum. all vegetable substances not useful for other purposes are valuable for manure. rotten wood, leaves, straw, and all the vegetable parts of stable manure, and any spoiled vegetables or grain, are all valuable. at the south, their immense quantities of cotton-seed are a mine of wealth, if properly prepared and applied as manure. animal manures consist of the animal parts of stable manure, dry and liquid, parts of bones, brine, spoiled meat, kitchen slops, soapsuds, and all dead animals. in decaying, these substances all pass through a process of fermentation. left exposed without suitable care, they become unhealthy and offensive. it is probable that a large share of the diseases suffered in the rural districts are caused by these impurities; and the impossibility of keeping large cities free from these substances is the cause of their increased mortality. in the country, a little timely caution and labor, in removing these substances and regulating their fermentation, would save much sickness; while the labor would pay a larger per-cent. profit than any other performed on the soil. no manures should be allowed to ferment, or decay, without being mixed or covered with enough common earth, sand, peat, or muck, to retain all the gases and exhalations of such putrescence. the smallest quantity that will answer is one load of earth to two of the decaying substances. the proportions reversed would be better: put one bushel of lime to two loads, two quarts of ground plaster, and half a bushel of ashes, and you have the very best compost heap. the following are brief general rules for the preparation of manures. it is always most economical to feed cattle in the stable or under cover, and never have manure exposed to the weather. but if cattle must be fed outdoor, let them be fed in a yard, lowest in the centre, that the liquids and washings may run into the centre, and be absorbed by straw and litter. put manure on the land, or into heaps for compost, before very warm weather. always feed sheep under cover, and keep their manure from rain; heap it together with earth in the spring, or apply it to the soil at once. manure thrown out of a stable should be kept under cover, out of the rain, and not allowed to heat in winter; its best qualities are evaporated by fermentation in the yard. manures often rained on in winter, or left in large piles without intermixture of earth, lime, plaster, and ashes, will ferment and waste. construct your stables so that the liquid manure will run into a vat filled with earth; muck is best. experiments have shown that the liquid manures are at least one sixth better than the solid. a gentleman dug a pit, thirty-six feet square and four feet deep, and walled it in on all sides. he filled his vat from a cultivated field, and so constructed his sewers from the stables adjoining that the urine saturated the whole. he kept fourteen head of cattle there for five months, allowing none but the liquid part of the manure to pass into the vat. he spread forty loads of this on an acre. for ten years he tried equal quantities of this and well rotted and prepared stable-manure, side by side, in the same field, and obtained great crops; but in no stage of their growth could he see that crops on the land manured from the stable were any better than those that had received only the soil from the vat. the latter were quite as good as the former. the contents of his vat manured seven acres, or half an acre to each creature stabled. the result is proof that one cow discharges urine sufficient in five months to manure abundantly half an acre of land. save the solid manure equally well, and a cow will make manure enough, in five or six months, to increase a crop sufficiently to pay for herself. it is certainly safe to say, that a careful man can make the manure of a cow pay for her body every year. is not this an important branch of farming operations? few pay sufficient attention to it. fowls should roost where their droppings may be mixed with common garden soil or loam. the manure from each fowl, carefully saved and judiciously applied, will pay for its body twice a year. the hogstye may be very productive of manure, one fourth better than that from the stable. connected with your hogpen, have a yard fifteen feet square for every five hogs; let that yard have no floor. throw the straw out of their sleeping-room frequently to make room for new; throw into the yard, also, all sorts of weeds, refuse vegetables, corn-husks, peapods, &c.; also the dirt that will naturally accumulate in the backyard of a dwelling, including sawdust, fine chips, cleanings of cellars, scrapings of ditches, and occasionally a load of loam, muck, or clay--and six loads of manure to each hog may be made, that will prove far better than any stable manure; it has been known to produce fifty bushels of corn to the acre, when stable-manure produced but forty bushels. old wood, brush, and chips, should never be allowed to remain on uncultivated, useless land. wood throws out the same amount of heat in decaying as it does when consumed as fuel. the action of that heat on the soil is highly beneficial, retaining it long in a mellow state: hence, all wood, too old to be of value for any other purpose, should be put in heaps, covered up till decomposed, and then applied to the soil, as other manures. for potatoes or vines, but especially melons, it is preferable to any other manure. nothing is so good for muskmelons as old chips from the woodyard. leaves of fruit and forest trees are also very good; blood and offal of animals, hair, hoofs, bones, horns, refuse feathers, woollen rags, mud from sewers, rivers, roads, swamps, or ponds, turf, ashes, old brine, soapsuds, all kinds of fish, oyster and clam shells--all are valuable, and no part of them should ever be thrown away or wasted; they are all good in compost heaps, or applied directly to the soil. bones are best ground, but may be used whole, pounded, or chemically dissolved, or mixed with alternate layers of fresh horse-manure, they will be decomposed by the fermentation of the manure (see "bones"). perhaps there is as much imprudence in wasting manures as in any part of american domestic economy. one who leaves his stock without care, and so exposed to the weather as to lose half of them and injure the others, is not fit to be a farmer; yet, many waste manure that would produce plants for man and beast, of far more value than the loss of stock complained of, and yet no one notices it--it is a matter of course, exciting no surprise. wastefulness in a family, if it be of bread, flour, or meat, is considered wicked and impoverishing; while ten times that amount may be wasted in manures, that would enrich the soil, and excite little or no disapprobation. we hope the agricultural periodicals will keep this subject before the people, until these mines of wealth will no longer be neglected or wasted. _application of manures_ is a subject that has been much discussed, and respecting which, intelligent agriculturists differ materially. some apply them extensively as a top-dressing for grass lands. this does much good, but probably one half of their virtues is lost by washing rains, and by evaporation. a better way is not to keep land down in grass long at a time, and, when under the plow, manure thoroughly. we knew a piece of light land that annually produced half a ton of hay per acre. the owner plowed it up, raised a crop, put a moderate quantity of stable-manure, and ten loads of leached ashes to the acre. we saw it in haying time, the third season after it had been manured and subsoiled and seeded down, and they were then taking fully three tons of timothy hay from an acre, which was the quantity it had yielded three years in succession, without any top-dressing. if a top-dressing of manure is to be applied, harrow the land quite thoroughly, and always apply the manure in the fall--it is worth twice as much as when applied in the spring. the rains and snows of winter cause it to sink into the soil, while the heat of spring and summer evaporate it. a mixture of plaster, lime, ashes, and a very little salt, sowed on meadows, immediately after haying, secures a good growth of feed, much sooner than it will come on other meadows. it also increases, quite considerably, the hay crop of the following season. it is a universal rule not to allow manure to lie long on the surface to which it is applied, before plowing in. place manure in heaps, as large as will be convenient for spreading, and spread it just before the plow. never spread manure one day to be plowed in the next. when manuring in the hill, have the planters follow the manure-cart. in manuring potatoes in the hill, drop the potatoes, and put the manure on them and cover at once. in a dry season, the yield will be double that of those planted in the usual way. for fall grains, plow in the manure, just before sowing the seed. this is better than plowing it in under the sod. if the land be not sod land, and you can plow the manure in only deep enough to cover it, and then, just before sowing the seed, plow again very deep, the effect is excellent. apply manure to land in the fall, or just after harvest, and plow it in, let the land remain till spring, and then plow deep, and you get the best possible effect. on an onion crop, manure does the most good on the surface. on those raised from sets, or on any onions, after they get large enough to give room, put fine manure enough to keep down all weeds, and it will double the crop. gypsum is better sowed than in any other way. mixed with a little lime and salt, or wood-ashes and salt, the effect on corn is better than from either alone. to hoed crops apply these articles twice, and always by sowing, and not by putting it around or upon the hills; the effect is much greater sowed, besides the labor that is saved. in applying guano, do not allow it to come in contact with the plants, as it is apt to destroy them. it only remains to consider the principles on which manure acts upon soils, and produces growth in plants. the action of manure on the soil, by which it is enabled to retain and appropriate moisture, constitutes its main, if not its whole benefit. it may afford a stimulus to the roots of plants. even the specific manures, that are supposed to supply organic matter to particular plants, may impart their benefits by their action upon the air and water. facts are certainly at hand to show that the great and leading benefits of manures are in their control of moisture, and where that control is not needed, plants get a great growth on what we call poor soil. no manures, either fossil or putrescent, afford any considerable food for plants. vegetation receives its growth mainly from water and from the atmosphere. facts in support of this theory are abundant. a trial was made to ascertain whence comes the matter of which a tree is composed. a quantity of kiln-dried earth was weighed and then put into a tight vessel. a willow shrub was also weighed and planted in that earth, and the vessel covered with perforated tin to keep out the dust; for a year and a half it was supplied only with pure water. the tree was then taken out, and found, by weight, to have gained one hundred and sixty pounds. the earth was then kiln-dried, as before, and weighed, and its weight was found to be only two ounces less than it was a year and a half before, when it was deposited there. the tree, then, must have received its growth, not from the soil, but from the water or the atmosphere, or both. another fact: take a load of manure, dry it thoroughly, and weigh it. then moisten it and apply it to the soil, and it will increase the weight of vegetation from ten to thirty or forty times its own weight when dry, and yet most of that manure may still be found in the soil. hence it can only feed plants in a very limited degree. its action must be on air and water, or the control it gives the soil over those elements. it is also matter of common observation that soil well manured, will continue moist for a long time after similar land by its side, but which has not been manured, is dried up. hard coarse soils dry up very quickly, while soft, mellow, and friable ones will endure a long drought. the gases and moisture generated by the decomposition of manures produce this mellow state. hence the necessity of having that decomposition take place under the soil, or of plowing in the manure. another important fact bearing on this question is, that what are regarded very poor soils, such as light sandy or gravelly land, will produce good crops in a season remarkable for the frequency of showers. on such soils crops are from twice to four times as large, in a wet season as in a dry, and yet there is an addition of nothing but moisture, and in such a manner, as not to have it stand and become stagnant among the roots of the plants. yet another evidence is in the strength of clay soils. a hard clay is very unproductive. but so disintegrated that plants can grow in it, it produces a great crop. this is because clay is of so close a texture, that when mixed with manure, turf, sand, or muck, although friable, it retains more moisture, than sand or ordinary loam. this is the reason of the superior fertility of land annually overflowed with water, as egypt in the vicinity of the nile. it is not that the nile brings down deposites from the mountains of the moon, so rich above all that is in the valleys below. the entire weight of all that a river deposites on ten acres would not equal in weight the increased vegetation of a single acre. the cause of the increased fertility is the fact that the deposite is so fine that it prevents rapid evaporation, and thus causes the soil to retain moisture for the large growth, and maturity of the plants. one more evidence is found on our sandy pine plains. our common forest-trees, as beech, maple, elm, or linden, will not flourish there. such land will produce comparatively no corn, oats, or wheat. but rye that stands drought better than any other grain, grows tolerably well. but such plains always produce an enormous growth of pine timber, hardly equalled in the number of cords to the acre, by the heaviest-timbered land of the river bottoms. why is this? does a maple need so much more food than a pine, or is it in the habits of the trees? it is not in the richness or poverty of the soil, but in the adaptation of the trees to reach and appropriate moisture. the roots of the maple and beech, spread out near the surface of the ground. and it being a light, porous, sandy soil, it does not retain moisture enough to promote their growth. but whoever notices a pine-tree that has been turned up from the roots by the wind, will see that the roots run down almost perpendicularly ten or fifteen feet into the sand. there they find plenty of moisture and hence their great growth. this principle explains the comparative productiveness of all soils. a soil composed of light muck, or a kind of peet-soil, will dry up soon. there is nothing to prevent rapid evaporation; hence it is always unproductive, for want of suitable moisture. mix with it clay, to render its texture more firm, and it will retain the moisture, and be very productive. clay alone is too solid to retain moisture; it runs off, as from a brick. mix sand with it, and it becomes mellow, and retains moisture, and produces great growth. sand allows so free and rapid an evaporation that it is unproductive. we say it leaches and is hungry, and so it is, because it has little power to retain water. our manures do it good, only as they are calculated to aid it in controlling moisture. if we apply a light manure as we would to clay, it is comparatively useless; it adds no firmness to the texture of the soil, and hence does not increase its capacity for controlling water. on such land, the only good that manure does, is while decomposition is taking place in the soil, it renders it more moist, and hence more productive. apply clay to such a soil, and it will increase its firmness and consequent capacity of retaining and appropriating moisture, and thus render it highly valuable. dry straw manure is sometimes said to dry up land, and ruin crops. so of turf in a dry season. in a wet season they greatly increase the growth of crops. now they contain just as much food for plants in one season as another. hence a soil too easily impervious to the atmosphere, will be a poor soil, that is, will produce poorly, simply because it has no power to retain the necessary moisture. we suppose these facts and reasons to establish our theory, that the principal benefit of manures, and of mixing different soils, is in the control they give over the moisture and the atmosphere. hence the greatly increased crop of clover from the application of three quarters of a bushel of plaster to an acre. the increased weight of clover on five square rods, would outweigh the plaster applied, and still that plaster remains, in almost its full weight, on the soil. this principle explains the benefit of mulching trees, plants, or vegetables. this is the best means of preserving trees, the first year after transplanting, and of securing a great growth, of any kind of shrubs or plants. this may be done with common straw or leaves. now wherein is their utility? not in the nourishment they afford the plants, but in the fact that mulching so covers the surface as to prevent rapid evaporation. in such cases, it is the more abundant moisture that secures the greater growth. hence the first study of a soil culturist should be to ascertain how he shall so mix and manage the materials at his command, as to cause them to retain moisture for the longest time, without leaving water to stand about the roots of his plants. on this depends the whole importance of deep plowing and ditching. on this theory we may also account for the fact that certain plants prefer a certain kind of manure to all others. it is that those plants act in a certain manner on the soil requiring a specific action of manure to enable it to appropriate moisture and tax the atmosphere for their growth. this theory explains why too much manure is bad. not because we give too much food to plants, but because excess of manure dries up the land. but whatever theory we adopt, we all agree in the utility of fertilizers. and the experience of practical farmers is of more value in aiding us to reach right conclusions, than all chemical essays on the subject that have ever been written. marl. this is one of the best distributed and most universal fertilizers. marl proper contains nearly equal proportions of clay and lime. sand-marl is spoken of, in which sand and lime are the main ingredients. clay-marls are to be applied to sandy and gravelly soils, and sand-marls to clayey soils. shell-marls are very valuable, and seldom contain clay. marls may easily be known, even by those not at all acquainted with chemistry. apply any mineral acid, or even very strong vinegar, and if it be a marl, an effervescence will at once be observed: this effect is produced by acid upon lime. marjorum. there are two varieties in cultivation--the _sweet_, an annual herb; and the _winter_, a hardy perennial. they are grown and used as summer savory--used green, or dried for winter. they give a sweet, aromatic flavor to soups, stews, and dressings. the cultivation is, in all respects, like other garden-herbs of the kind, whether for medicinal or culinary purposes. melons. there are two species--musk and water melons--which are subdivided into many varieties of each. these are among the most delicious of all the products of the garden. a little use makes all persons very fond of them. the climate of the middle and southern states is well adapted to raising melons; much better than the same latitudes in europe. the following brief directions will insure success in their cultivation. a light, rich soil is always desirable. there should always be a little sand in the composition of soil for melons. if not there naturally, supply it; it will always pay. the warm sands of long island and new jersey are the best possible for melons, especially for water-melons. it may be well to trench deep for the hills, and mix in a little well-rotted manure, and cover it with fine mould. a quantity of manure, left in bulk under the hills, will dry them up at the worst possible time. when you plant only a few in a garden, mulch your musk-melons with chips or sawdust from the wood-yard, or leaves and decayed wood from the forest, and you will get a great growth. they will grow luxuriantly in a pile of chips, with a little soil, in a door-yard, where hardly any other plant would flourish. the water-melon does best in almost pure sand, if it be enriched with liquid or some other of the finer manures. plant musk-melons six feet apart, and water-melons nine feet each way. when the plants become established, never leave more than two or three in a hill. the product will be greatly increased in number and size, by picking off the end bud of the first runners when they show their blossom-buds; this causes them to throw out many strong lateral vines, which will produce abundantly. the attacks of striped bugs, so well known as the enemies of vines, and also of the black fleas, or hoppers (very minute, but quite destructive to tender vines when first up), may be prevented (says downing) by sprinkling near the plants a little guano. as but a small portion of cultivators will have it, or can obtain it, we recommend to put many seeds in a hill, to provide for the depredations of the bugs, and sprinkle offensive articles around them. these will not always be effectual. we have recommended elsewhere to fence each hill, as the most effectual method. a box, with gauze or a pane of glass over the top, is a certain remedy in every case; it also greatly promotes the growth of the young vines. this is equally effectual against the cutworm and all other insects; and, as the boxes will last a dozen years or so, we should use them if we had ten acres of melons. but by early and late planting, and watchfulness, and replanting, you will succeed without protection. an excessive quantity of stable-manure does not increase the growth, especially of water-melons. plaster, bonedust, and ashes, are good applications; hog-manure is the best of all. the seeds should be soaked two days, and planted an inch deep on broad hills, raised in the centre four inches above the level of the bed, that water may not stand around them; planted low, they sometimes perish in a few hours in a hot sun, after a rain. hoe them often, but never when they are wet, and never hoe near them after they have commenced running; the roots spread, about as much as the vines, and hoeing deep near them cuts off the roots, and materially injures them. many a promising plat of melons has been ruined by stirring the soil when they were wet, and hoeing around them after they had begun to run. in walking among melons, great harm is done by stepping on the ends of vines. no one should be allowed among melons but the one who hoes or picks them. many are lost by drought, after great care. we have often used an effectual remedy; it consists in turning up the vines, if they have begun to run before the drought, and putting around each hill from a peck to half a bushel of wet, well rotted manure; that from a spent hotbed is excellent for this purpose; and hoe from a distance between the hills, and cover the manure an inch or two deep with fine mould, lay down the vines, and saturate the hill with water, and they will hardly get dry again during the season. a little judicious watering will give you a great crop in the most severe drought. _varieties of the musk-melon._--these are numerous, and the nomenclature uncertain. the london horticultural society's catalogue enumerates seventy. most of them are of no use to any one. two or three of the best are sufficient. there are three general classes of musk-melons--the _green-fleshed_, as the citron and nutmeg; _yellow-fleshed_, as the cantelope, or long yellow; and _persian melon_. the last is the finest of all, but is too tender for general cultivation with us, requiring much care and very warm seasons. the yellow-fleshed are very large, but much inferior in quality to either of the others. the green-fleshed are _the_ musk-melons for this whole country. the nutmeg has long been celebrated; but, it being much smaller than the citron, and in no way superior in quality, we think the latter the best for all american gardens. the following are enumerated in "white's gardening for the south," as adapted to the latitude of the southern states: _christiana_, _beechwood_, _hoosainee_, _sweet ispahan_, _pineapple_, _cassabar_, _netted citron_, and _rock_. these are doubtless all fine, and would do well at the north, with suitable care and protection. downing's catalogue is nearly the same, with a very few additions. _varieties of water-melons_--are also numerous, and names uncertain. the best varieties, however, are well known. the most choice are the following: _imperial_, _carolina_, _black spanish_, _mountain-sprout_, _mountain-sweet_, _apple-seeded_, and _ice-cream_. the following excellent water-melons all originated in south carolina: _souter_; _clarendon_, or _dark-speckled_; _bradford_, very dark-green, with stripes mottled and streaked with green; _ravenscroft_, and _odell's large white_. there is a fine little melon, called the orange-melon, because the flesh and skin separate like an orange. these varieties will all do well with care. to preserve any one of them, it must be grown at some distance from other varieties. all water-melons should be far removed from citrons, which resemble them, raised only for preserving. they always ruin the next generation of water-melons. different varieties of musk-melons planted together produce hybrids, partaking of the qualities of both, and are often very fine. we raised a cross between the yellow-fleshed cantelope and the nutmeg, which was excellent. seeds of most vines are better for being two or three years old, as they produce less vines, but more fruit. melons are a luxury that should grow in every garden, and the state should enact severe laws against stealing them, making the punishment no less than fine and imprisonment. millet. this is a species of grain, partaking much of the nature of a large grass. sowed thin, it produces a good yield. the seed is excellent for fowls. ground, it is good for keeping or fattening all domestic animals. it is about equal to indian corn for bread. cut while green, but when nearly ripe, it is a good substitute for hay, producing a much larger quantity per acre. all animals prefer millet, cut in the milk, to hay. it is a less profitable crop for grain, on account of the irregularity of its ripening, and its extreme liability to shell, when dry. it must be cut as soon as the seed begins to harden. it also attracts swarms of birds, which are exceedingly fond of the seed. about three tons per acre is an average crop on tolerably good land. from one to three pecks of seed to the acre are sown broadcast. when sown in drills and cultivated, it grows very large, and requires only four quarts of seed per acre. it will make good fodder sown at any time from april to july. its more extensive cultivation for fodder is recommended. mint. this genus of plants comprises twenty-four species. those usually cultivated in gardens are three, _peppermint_, _spearmint_, and _pennyroyal mint_. all mints are propagated by the same methods. parting the roots, offset young plants, and cuttings from the stalks. spearmint and peppermint like a moist and even wet soil. pennyroyal does better in a rich loam. plants come into use the same season they are set. set the plants eight inches apart, and on beds four feet wide, leaving a path two feet between them. in field culture, for the oils and essences, place them two feet apart, for the convenience of going between the rows with a horse. thus cultivation becomes easy. they should be cut in full blossom, and dried in small bunches in the shade, but better by artificial heat, like hops. they should be cut when dry. for domestic uses, dry quickly, and pulverize, and put away in tight glass bottles. they will retain all their strength, keep free from dust, and always be ready for use. the same is true of all the herbs for domestic use. as a field crop, mints are profitable. mulberry. there are three varieties cultivated in this country. we place them in the order of their qualities:-- . _the johnson._--a new variety, thus described by kirtland: "fruit very large; oblong cylindric; blackish, subacid, and of mild and agreeable flavor. growth of wood strong." . _the black mulberry._--an asiatic variety, rather tender for the north, though it succeeds tolerably well in some parts of new england. fruit large and delicious; tree low and spreading. easily cultivated on almost any soil. propagated by seeds, layers, cuttings, or roots. . _the red mulberry._--a native of this country. fruit small and pleasant, but inferior to the two preceding. mulching. this is placing around plants or trees, coarse manure or litter of any kind, to keep down weeds, and prevent too rapid evaporation of moisture. all straw, corn stalks, old weeds or stubble, forest leaves, seaweeds, old wood, sawdust, old tanbark, chips, &c., are good for mulching. any tree taken up and planted with reasonable care, and well mulched and watered, will live. one of fifty need not die. cover the loose earth deep enough to prevent the springing of weeds. put a little earth on the outer edge of the manure, leaving it dishing about the tree. fill that occasionally with water, and you will get a good growth, even in a dry season. plant gooseberries or currants, and mulch the whole ground between the bushes, and give them no other cultivation, and the berries will grow nearly twice as large as the same varieties standing neglected, to grow up to weeds, in the usual way. mulching with clean, dry straw, or with charcoal, is a preventive of mildew. it is the easiest method of taking care of strawberries after they are in blossom; the vines will bear much more and finer fruit, and it will be clean and neat. mulching vines is a great means of insuring a crop. every crop that can be mulched will be greatly benefited by it; hence, all the straw and litter that can be saved is money in the pocket; for mulching alone, it is worth five times as much as it can be sold for. burning or in any way destroying cobs, cornstalks, stubble, old straw, or decaying wood, is extravagant wastefulness. mushrooms are vegetables growing up in old pastures, or on land mulched and the straw partly covered with soil. they are also cultivated in beds for the purpose. picked at the right stage, they are a fine article of diet, almost equalling oysters. the use of the wild ones, however, is attended with some danger, for the want of knowledge of the varieties, or of the difference between the genuine mushroom, and the toadstools that so much resemble them. persons have been poisoned unto death by eating toadstools instead of mushrooms. when of middle size, mushrooms are distinguished by the fine pink or flesh color of their gills, and by their pleasant smell. in a more advanced stage, the gills become of a chocolate color; they are then apt to be confounded with injurious kinds. the toadstool that most resembles the true mushroom is slimy to the touch, and rather disagreeable to the smell. the noxious kind grows in the borders of woods, while the mushroom only grows in the open field. it is better, however, not to eat them unless gathered by a practised hand, so as to be sure of no mistake. with the help of one accustomed to gathering them, you will learn in a few moments, so as to be accurate and safe. _mushroom beds._--prepare a bed in the corner of the hothouse, or, in the absence of that, in a warm, dry cellar. the first of october is the best time. make the bed four feet wide, and as long as you require. it should be one foot high perpendicularly at the edges, and sloping toward the middle; it should be of horse-manure, well forked, and put in compact and even, so as to settle all alike. cover it with long straw, to preserve heat and the exhalations that would rise. at the end of ten days, the heat will be such as to allow you to remove the straw, and put an inch of good mould over the top of the bed. on this put the spawn or seed of the mushroom, in rows of six inches apart. the spawn are white fibres, found in old pastures, where mushrooms grow, or in old spent hotbeds, and sometimes under old stable floors. the warmth of the bed will produce mushrooms plentifully for a considerable time. if the production diminishes and nearly ceases, it may be renewed by removing the mould, and putting on good horse-manure to the depth of twelve inches, and covering and planting as before, and the production will be plentiful for a number of weeks. mustard. there are two kinds cultivated, the black and the white, annuals, and natives of great britain. the white mustard is cultivated in this country principally for greens, and sometimes for a small salad like the cress. it may be sown at any time from opening of spring to the beginning of autumn. but sown in hot weather, the bed must be shaded. the spaniards prefer the white mustard for grinding for table use, because of its mildness and its whiter flour. white mustard-seed, being much larger than the black, is preferred for mangoes, and all pickling purposes. black mustard is cultivated principally in the field, for the mills. it is there ground, and makes the well known condiment found on most tables. sow in march or april, broadcast on land tolerably free from weeds, and if you get it too thick, hoe up a part. in july or august, you may get a good crop. cradle it as wheat, before ripe enough to shell. mustard used in various ways is medicinal. it is one of the safest and most speedy emetics. stir up a table-spoonful of the flour and drink it. follow it with repeated draughts of warm water, and in half an hour, you will have gone through all the stages of a thorough emetic, without having been weakened by it. nasturtium. this annual plant, found in most gardens, is too well known to need description. were it not so common, its flowers, that appear in great profusion, from early summer till destroyed by frost, would be regarded very beautiful. its main use is for pickles. its green berries are nearly equal to capers for that purpose. it grows well on any good garden soil; bears more berries on less vines, planted on land not too rich. single vines four feet apart, on rich land, do best. nectarine. this is only a fine variety of the peach, having a smooth skin. downing gives instances of its return to the peach, and others of the production of nectarines and peaches on the same limb. the appearance of the tree is hardly distinguishable from the peach. it is one of the most beautiful of dessert fruits: it has no down on the skin, being entirely smooth and beautiful, like waxwork. its smooth skin exposes it to the ravages of the curculio. it is longer-lived on plum-stocks, but is more generally budded on the peach. it is usually productive wherever peaches flourish, if not destroyed by the curculio. it is even more important than in the peach to head-in the trees often, to produce good large fruit. _varieties_--are divided into freestone and clingstone, with quite a number in each class. we give only a few of those most esteemed. _boston._--freestone, american seedling; hardy and productive; color deep-yellow, with a bright-red cheek. time, september st. _due du telliers._--freestone, pale-green, with a marbled reddish cheek; flesh whitish, inclining to green; very fine; a great bearer of rather large fruit. time, last of august. _hunt's tawny._--very fine and early; a great bearer; tree hardy; color, pale-orange, with a dark-red cheek, with many russety specks. time, forepart of august. _pitmaston orange._--a fine yellow nectarine, maturing the last of august. _the early violet_--is an old french variety, everywhere esteemed; it has sixteen synonyms; fruit high-flavored. time, last of august. _newington._--a good clingstone; an english variety that has long been cultivated; it has many synonyms; the color dark-red when exposed. time, th of september. _newington early_--is one of the best, earlier, larger, and better, than the preceding; ripens first of september. the same varieties are excellent for the south, where they ripen considerably earlier. the following selection of choice, hardy nectarines for a small garden, is from downing:-- early violet, elruge, hardwicke seedling, hunt's tawny, boston, roman, and new white. new fruits. that these are constantly appearing, is a matter of common observation; but the manner of their production has given rise to much diversity of opinion. the theory that they are the results of replanting, from the seeds of successive generations of the same tree, is called the van mons' theory, after dr. van mons, of belgium, who devoted many years of close study and application to the improvement of fruit, especially of pears, by this method. his directions may be briefly summed up as follows. plant seeds from any good variety of fruit; let those seedlings stand without grafting, until they bear. take the first fruit from the best of those seedlings, and plant it and produce other seedlings, and so on. the peach and plum are said to reach a high state of excellence in the third generation, while the pear requires the fifth. seeds from old trees are said to have a great tendency to return to their wild origin, while those of young, improving trees will more generally produce a better fruit. the seeds from a graft from a young tree does not produce a better than itself. the succession must be of seedlings. this theory requires long practice, and is exposed to interruptions by the crosses that will necessarily occur between different trees in blossom. and we have in so many cases had a fruit of great perfection arise from a single planting of seed from some known variety, that we must conclude the improvement to be produced by some other principle than that of the van mons' theory. the evidence is in favor of the opinion that new varieties of fruit arise from cross-fertilization in the blossoms of different kinds, and that the improvement of the qualities of any given variety is the result of cultivation. some of the best plums we have are known to have been the product of fertilizing the blossoms of one tree from the pollen of another; this is constantly taking place with our fruits, and is consequent upon our mixed orchards. let this be attended to artificially, by covering branches with gauze, to prevent the fertilization by bees and winds, and make the cross between any two varieties you choose, and the results may prove highly beneficial. the amateur cultivator may render essential service to pomology by this practice. we know that all our choice fruits have come from those not fit for use. it is not improved cultivation of the old, barely, but the production of new varieties. the subject of further improvement, therefore, demands careful study and practice. the seeds of established varieties, planted at once without drying, will often reproduce the same. we are not certain but they generally would, if not affected by blossoms of contiguous trees. nursery. of this subject we can only give the general outlines. this department of soil-culture is so distinct, that the few who engage in it as a business are expected to make it an especial study. in a work like this, it is only desirable to give those general principles that will enable the cultivator of the soil to raise such trees as he may desire on his own premises. these directions may be considered reliable, and, as far as they go, are applicable to all nurseries. _location._--this is the first point demanding attention. if a piece of land containing a variety of soils can be selected, it will prove beneficial, as different trees require different soils for their greatest perfection. a situation through which a rivulet may run, or in which a pond may be constructed, fed by a spring or hydrant, is of great value for watering. the situation of the nursery, as it respects shade or exposure, is also important. trees should generally be as much exposed to the elements, in the nursery, as they will be when transplanted in the orchard. trees removed from shaded situations to the open field will be stinted in growth for some time, and may be permanently injured. never allow your nursery to be shaded by large trees. bearing trees, designed to show the quality of your fruit, should occupy a place by themselves. _soil._--a theory that has had many adherents is that trees raised on poorer and harder land than that they will occupy in the orchard, will grow more vigorously, and do better, than those transplanted from better to worse soil. thus, trees have often been preferred from high, hard hills, to transplant in good loam or alluvium. on the same principle, a calf or colt should be more healthy, and make a better creature, for having been nearly starved for the first year or two. neither of these is true. give fruit-trees as great a growth as possible while young, without producing too tender and spongy wood for cold winters. it is only desirable to check the early growth of fruit-trees on the rich prairies of the west, and that should be done, not by the poverty of the soil, but by root-pruning or heading-in; this prevents a spongy, tender growth, that is apt to be injured by their trying winds. trees that are brought from a colder to a warmer region, always do better. _preparation of the soil._--it should be made quite rich with stable-manure, lime, and wood-ashes, and cultivated in a root-crop the previous year--any roots except potatoes. those left in the ground will come up so early and vigorous in the spring, that you can not eradicate them without destroying many of your young seedlings. the land should be worked very deep by subsoiling, or better with double-plowing, by which the manure and top-soil are put in the bottom. as manure always works up, the effect will be excellent. buckwheat is good to precede a nursery; it shades the ground so densely as to protect it from the scorching sun, and effectually destroy all weeds. trees planted on land prepared by double-plowing (see our article on "plowing") will make one third greater growth, in a given time, than those on land prepared in the ordinary way. in double-plowing, if the subsoil be very poor, it will be necessary to give a top-dressing of well-rotted manure, worked in with a cultivator. thorough draining is also very essential to a nursery. _time of planting._--the general practice is to plant in the fall, at any time before the ground freezes. the better way is to keep seeds in moist sand, or dry and spread thin, until spring, and plant as early as the ground will allow. freezing apple-seeds is of no use. hard-shelled seeds had better be frozen, to open the stones and give them an opportunity to germinate. the advantage of spring-planting is, the ground can be put in much better condition, and the seeds will start quite as early as the weeds, and much labor may be saved in tending. _method of planting._--plant with a drill that will run about an inch deep, putting the seeds in straight rows, not more than an inch wide, and two and a half feet apart; this will allow the use of a small horse and cultivator, which will destroy nearly all the weeds. use a potato-fork or hoe, across the rows, among the seedlings, and very little weeding will be necessary. it is not more than one fourth of the ordinary work to keep a nursery clean in this way. two thirds of those thus planted and cultivated will be large enough for root-grafting the first season, and for cleft-grafting the second. when your seedlings are six inches high, if you thoroughly mulch them with fine straw or manure, you will be troubled with no more weeds, and your trees will get a strong growth. for root-grafting, pull up those of suitable size very late in the fall, cut off the tops eight inches from the root, and pack in boxes, in moist sand, and keep in a cellar that does not freeze; graft in winter, and repack them in the boxes with moist sand, sawdust, or moss, and keep them until time to transplant in spring. they should not be wet, but only slightly moist. in the spring, plant them in rows three feet apart, and ten inches in the row. the second year, if they are not wanted in market, they should be taken up and reset, in rows four feet apart, and two feet in the row. cut off the ends of large roots, to encourage the growth of numerous fibrous roots. large nursery-trees, that have not been transplanted, are of little value for the orchard, being nearly destitute of fibrous roots. but large trees, even of bearing size, when transplanted in the orchard, do quite as well as small ones, provided they have been several times transplanted in the nursery. this produces many fibrous roots, upon which the health and life of the tree depend. in many regions, great care must be taken to prevent destruction of young trees by snow-drifts. this is done by selecting locations, and by constructing or removing fences, to allow the snow to blow off; treading it down as it falls is also very useful, both in protecting the trees from breaking down by the settling of drifts in a thaw, and from the depredations of mice under the snow. trees should be taken up from the nursery with the least possible injury to the roots. do not leave them exposed to the air for an hour, not even in a cloudy day. it is an easy matter to cover the roots with mats, straw, or earth. protect also from frosts; many trees are ruined by exposure to air and frost, of which the nurseryman is very careful in all other respects. for transportation, they should be closely packed in moist straw, and wound in straw or mats, firmly tied and kept moist. trees, cared for and packed in this way, may be transported thousands of miles, and kept for two months, without injury. nuts. more attention to the cultivation of nuts, would add materially to our domestic luxuries. there are so many nuts in market, that are the spontaneous productions of other countries, or raised where labor is cheap, that we can not afford to raise them as an article of commerce. but a few trees of the various kinds, would be a great addition to every country residence. we could always be certain that our nuts were fresh and good. a small piece of ground devoted to nuts, and occupied by fowls, would be pleasant and profitable. english walnuts do well here. we have varieties of hickory nuts, native in this country, which, to our taste, are not surpassed by any other. chestnuts are easily grown here (see our directions elsewhere in this volume). butternuts, filberts, peanuts (growing in the ground like potatoes), and even our little forest beechnuts, are easily raised. the dwarf chestnut of the middle and southern states is decidedly ornamental in a fruit garden. its qualities are in all respects like the common chestnut, only the fruit is but half the size, and the tree grows from five to ten feet high. in all our landscape gardens, and in all places where we retain forest trees for ornamental purposes, it is better to cultivate trees that will bear good nuts. the varieties of nut-bearing trees, interspersed with evergreens, make a beautiful appearance. oaks. raising oak-timber, on a large scale, will soon be demanded in this country. in some sections we have immense quantities of native oaks; but they are fast disappearing, and the present expense of transporting the timber, to places where it is needed, is much greater than would be the cost of raising it. a million of acres of oaks ought to be planted within the next five years. a crop of white oak, of only twenty-five years' growth, would be very valuable; and twenty-five or fifty acres, of forty years' growth, would be worth a handsome fortune, especially in the west. on all the bluffs in the west they grow well, and on the prairies they will do even better, after they have been cultivated a few years. the application of a little common salt on rich alluvial soils, is a great advantage in growing timber. preserve acorns in moist sand during winter, and plant in the spring, in rows six feet apart, to give opportunity for other crops among them for a year or two, to encourage good cultivation. plant a foot apart in the row, that, in thinning out, good straight trees may be left; at three or four years old, thin to four feet in the rows; afterward, only remove as appears absolutely necessary. trim straight and smooth. the question of transplanting is important. shall we plant thick, as in a nursery, and then transplant, or shall we plant where they are to grow? in fruit-trees, the object is to get a low, full, and spreading top, of horizontal branches, that will bear much fruit. this is eminently promoted by transplanting, root-pruning, and heading-in. but in raising timber, the object is to get trees of long, straight bodies, with the fewest possible low branches. such are the native trees of the forest. this is best promoted by planting thick, never transplanting, and keeping all the lower limbs well trimmed off. these directions are for raising timber on good tillable land. such groves may be good for pastures, and for poultry-yards, for a long time. beside this, we have large areas of rough land, that will not soon be brought into cultivation for other purposes. fine timber may be grown on such land, with no care but trimming. oats. this is one of the great staple agricultural products of all regions, sufficiently moist and cool for their successful growth. oatmeal makes the most wholesome bread ever eaten by man. for all horses, except those having the heaves, oats are the best grain; to such horses they should never be fed--corn, soaked or ground, is best. they are valuable for all domestic animals and fowls. _varieties._--these are numerous. those called side-oats yield the largest crops: but of these there are several varieties. the genuine _siberian_ oats are tall, heavy, dark-colored side-oats, the most productive of any known. _swedish_ oats, and other new varieties, are coming into notice; most of these are the siberian, under other names, and perhaps slightly modified by location and culture. the barley-oats, scotch oats, and those usually cultivated, will yield only about two thirds as much per acre as the true siberian; the same difference is apparent in the growth of straw. oats will produce something on poor land, with bad tillage, but repay thorough fertilization and tillage as well as most other crops. enrich the land, work it deep and thoroughly, and roll after harrowing. moist, cool situations are much preferable for oats: hence, success in warm climates depends upon very early sowing. oats sowed as late as the first of july, in latitude forty-two and further north, will mature; yet, all late oats, even with large straw and handsome heads, will be found to be only from one half to two thirds filled in proportion to the lateness of sowing. the entire _profits_ of an oat-crop depend upon _early sowing_. harvest as soon as the grain begins to harden, and the straw to turn yellow. allowed to get quite ripe, they shell badly, and the straw becomes useless, except for manure. cut with reaper or cradle, and bind: all grain so cut is more easily handled, thrashed, and fed. mow no grain that is not so lodged down that a cradle or reaper can not be used. the straw of oats cut quite green is nearly as good as hay. okra. a valuable garden plant, easily propagated by seeds. it is excellent in cookery, as a sauce. its ripe seeds, used as coffee, very much resemble the genuine article. the green pods are much used in the west indies, in soups and pickles. plant at the usual time of corn-planting, in rows four feet apart, two or three seeds in a place, eight inches apart in the row; leave but one in a place after they get a few inches high, and hoe as peas, and the crop will be abundant. olives. these are natives of asia, but have, beyond date, been extensively cultivated in southern europe. olive-oil is an important article of commerce in most countries. its use in all kinds of cookery, in countries where it flourishes, renders olives as important, to the mass of the people, as cows are in new england. it should be a staple product of the southern states, to which it is eminently adapted. it is hardy further north than the orange. with protection, it may be cultivated, with the orange and lemon, all over the country. olive-trees attain a greater age than any other fruit-tree. an italian olive-plantation, near terni, is believed to have stood since the days of pliny. once set out, the trees require very little attention, and they flourish well on the most rocky lands, that are utterly useless for any other purpose. calcareous soils are most favorable to their growth. they are propagated by suckers, seeds, or by little eggs that grow on the main stalk, and are easily detached by a knife, and planted as potatoes or corn. olives will bear at four or five years from the seed; they bear with great regularity, and yield fifteen or twenty pounds of oil per annum to each tree. there are several varieties. plantations now growing at the south are very promising. onions. of this well-known garden vegetable there are quite a number of varieties. . _the large red._--one of the most valuable. . _the yellow._--large and profitable, keeping better than any other. . _the silver-skin._--the handsomest variety, excellent for pickling, brings the highest price of all, but is not quite so good a keeper as the red or yellow, and does not yield as well. . _the white portugal._--a larger white onion, often taken for the true silver-skin. it is a good variety. the preceding are all raised from the black seed, growing on the top. . _the egg onion._--so called from its size and shape. on good rich soil, the average size may be that of a goose-egg, which it resembles in form. it is of a pale-red color, and more mild in flavor than any other. they are usually raised by sowing the black seed, very thick, to form sets for next year. those sets, put out early, will form large onions for early market, that will sell more readily than any other offered. . _the top onion._--so called because the seed consists of small onions, growing on the top of the stalks, in place of the black seed of other onions. these are good for early use, grow large, but are poor keepers. . _the hill or potato onion_.--of these there are several kinds, most of which are unworthy of cultivation. the _large english_ is the only valuable variety. the small onions, for sets, grow in the ground from the same roots, by the side of the main onion. some of these grow large enough for cooking. the main onion is the earliest known, grows large, and has a mild, pleasant flavor;--they will mature at a certain season, whatever time you plant them; hence, they must be planted very early to produce a good crop. we have planted them on good ground so late as to get little more than the seed. they are fine for summer and fall use, but keep poorly. the foregoing are all that are necessary. they can all be brought forward by early planting of sets raised the previous season, by sowing the black seed so thick that they can not grow larger than peas, or small cherries. good sandy loam and black muck are the best soils for onions. any good garden soil may be made to produce large crops; good, well rotted stable-manure and leached ashes are the best. the theory of shallow plowing, and treading down onion-beds is incorrect. the roots of onions are numerous and long. the land should be well-manured, double-plowed, and thoroughly pulverized. the only objection to a very mellow onion-bed is the difficulty of getting the seed up: this is obviated by rolling after sowing, which packs the mould around the seed, so as to retain moisture and insure vegetation. fine manure, mixed in the surface of the soil for onions, is highly beneficial; on no other crop does manure on the surface do so much good. mulching the whole bed, as soon as the plants are large enough, is in the highest degree beneficial, both in promoting growth, and keeping down weeds. an onion-bed must be made very smooth and level, to favor very early hoeing, without destroying the small plants. all root-crops that come up small, are tended with less than half the expense, if the surface be made very smooth and level. never divide your onion-ground into small beds, but sow the longest way, in straight narrow rows, eighteen inches apart, for convenience of weeding and hoeing. cultivate while very young, and work the soil toward the rows, so as to hill up the plants; this should be removed after they begin to form large bulbs. breaking down the tops to induce them to bottom, is a fallacy: it will lessen the crop. rich soil, deep plowing, thorough pulverizing, early sowing, and frequent hoeings, will insure success. our system of double-plowing is the best for this crop. they will do equally well, some say improve, for twenty years on the same bed. work the tops into the soil where the plants grow. let the rows be very narrow and very straight, and you will save half the ordinary expense of cultivation. _to gather and preserve well_, you should house them when very dry. a day's exposure to a warm autumn sun is very beneficial. keep them in an open barn or shed until there is danger of frost. a warm, damp cellar always ruins them; keep them through winter in the coolest dry place possible, without severe freezing. once freezing is not injurious, but frequent freezing and thawing ruins them. they are very finely preserved braided into strings and hung in a cool, dry room. oranges. this name covers a variety of species of the same general habits. it flourishes well on the coast of florida, and all along the gulf of mexico. it will stand considerable freezing, if protected from sudden thawing. in southern europe, they are grown abundantly by being protected by a shed of boards. they may become perfectly hardy, as far north as philadelphia. and by a thorough system of acclimation, and a little winter protection, they may be grown abundantly, in every state of the union. the great enemy of the orange-tree is the scaled insect. it has been very destructive in florida. a certain remedy is said to have been discovered in the _camomile_. cultivate the plant under orange-trees, and it will prevent their attacks. the herb hung up in the trees, or the tree and foliage syringed with a decoction of it, will effectually destroy these insects. the orange is long-lived. a tree called "the grand bourbon" at versailles was planted in , and now, being years old, is "one of the largest and finest trees in france." there are several varieties mentioned in the fruit books. the common sweet orange, the maltese, the blood red--very fine with red flesh. the mandarin orange, an excellent little fruit from china. the st. michael's is described as the finest of all oranges, and the tree the best bearer. oranges are propagated by budding, and cultivated much in the same way as the peach. orchards. an orchard is a plat of ground, large or small, occupied by trees for the purpose of bearing fruit. the main directions for orchard culture, are given under the respective fruits. any soil good for vegetables or grains, is suitable for orchards. any land where excessive moisture will not stand, to the injury of the trees, may be adapted to any of the fruits. set pears on the heaviest land, peaches on the lightest, and the other fruits on the intermediate qualities. although peaches will do quite well on light soil, yet they do better on a rich deep loam, or alluvium. when it is desirable to set out an orchard on land originally too wet, a blind ditch must pass under each row, extending out of the orchard, and the place where each tree is to stand, should be raised a foot above the level around it. _the aspect_ is also important. a southern or eastern exposure is preferable, in all latitudes where the transitions from summer to winter, and from winter to summer are so sudden as to allow but little alternate thawing and freezing. this would therefore be the rule in high latitudes. in climates of long changeable springs, a northern or western exposure is better. trees may be made to start and blossom later in the spring by snow and ice about them, well pressed down in winter, and covered with straw. this will prevent the first warm weather from starting the leaves and blossoms, and cause them to be a little later, but surer and better. _subsoiling_ ground for an orchard, is of great importance. plant two orchards, one on land that has been subsoiled very deep, and the other upon that plowed in the ordinary way, and for ten years the difference will be discernable, as far as you can distinguish the trees in the two orchards. _manures_ of all kinds, are good for orchards, except coarse stable manure, which should be composted. a bushel of fine charcoal, thoroughly mixed in the soil in which you set a fruit-tree, will exert a very beneficial influence, for a dozen years. orchards should be cultivated every alternate three successive years, and the rest of the time be kept in grass. just about the trees, the ground should be kept loose, and free from weeds and grass. this may be done by spading and hoeing, but better by thorough mulching. _distances apart._--apples thirty-three feet. pears twenty feet. peaches and plums, sixteen feet. pruning, destroying insects, and all other matters bearing on successful fruit growing, are treated under the several fruits. oxen. every farmer who can afford to keep two teams, should have a pair of oxen. for many uses on a farm, they are preferable to horses; especially for clearing up new land. oxen to be most valuable, should be large, well matched, ruly, and not very fat. they should be kept in good heart, by the quality of their food. fast walking is one of the best qualities in both horses and oxen, for all working purposes, provided they are judiciously used and not overloaded. well built, strong animals are best for work. working oxen should be turned out for beef, at eight or nine years old. _to break oxen well_, commence when they are very young. put calves into yokes frequently, until they will readily yield to your wishes. yoke them often, and tie their tails together to prevent them from turning the yoke and injuring themselves. if left without training, until they are three or four years old, they will improve every opportunity to run away, to the danger and damage of proprietor and driver. it is quite an art to learn oxen to back a load. place them before a vehicle, in a locality descending in the rear. as it rolls down hill, they will easily learn to follow, backward. then try them on level ground. then accustom them to back up hill, and finally to back a load, almost as heavy as they can draw. breaking vicious animals is always best done by gentleness. we have known vicious horses whipped severely, and in every way treated harshly, and finally given up as useless. we have seen those same horses, in other hands, brought to be regular, gentle, and safe, as could be desired, by mild means, without a blow or harsh word. oxen should be driven in a low tone of voice, and without much use of the goad. the usual manner of driving, by whipping and bawling, to the annoyance of the whole neighborhood, and until the driver becomes hoarse with his perpetual screams, is one of the most pernicious habits on a farm. oxen will grow lazy and insensible under threat, or scream, or goad. driven in a low tone of voice, without confusion by rapid commands, and no whoa put in, unless you wish them to stand still, oxen may be made more useful on a farm than horses. their gears are cheap and never in the way. they can draw more and in worse places than horses, and it costs less to keep them. the various methods of drawing with head or horns, in vogue in other countries, need not be discussed here, as the american people will not probably change their yoke and bows for any other method. feed oxen, as other animals, regularly, both in time and quantity. curry them often and thoroughly. it improves their looks, health, and temper, and attaches them to their owner. parsley. this is a hardy biennial, highly prized as a garnish, and as a pot-herb for flavoring soups and boiled dishes. the large-rooted variety is used for the table, as carrots or parsnips. the principal varieties are--the _double-curled_, the _dwarf-curled_, the _siberian_ (single, very hardy, and fine-flavored), the _hamburgh_ (large-rooted, used as an edible root). the double-curled is well known, easily obtained, and suitable for all purposes. those who desire the roots instead of parsnips, &c., should cultivate the hamburgh or large-rooted. it needs the same treatment as beets. seed should always be of the previous year's growth, or it may not vegetate. it is four or five weeks in coming up, unless it be soaked twelve hours in a little sulphur-water, when it will vegetate in two weeks. by cutting the leaves close, even, and regular, a succession of fine leaves may be had for a whole year from the same plants, when they will go to seed, and new ones should take their place. in cold climates they should be covered in winter with straw or litter. the siberian is cultivated in the field, sown with grass or the small grains. it is said to prevent the disease called "_the rot_" in sheep, and is good for surfeited horses. the large-rooted should not be sowed in an excessively rich soil, as it produces an undue proportion of tops. parsnips. english authors speak of but one variety of this root in cultivation in england. the french have three--the _coquaine_, the _lisbonaise_, and the _siam_. the first runs down, in rich mellow soil, to the depth of four feet, and grows from six to sixteen inches in circumference; the lisbonaise is shorter and larger round; the siam is smaller than the others, of a yellowish color, and of excellent quality. we are not aware that our little hollow-crown carrot, so early and good, is included in the french varieties. we cultivate only the hollow-crown, and a common large variety; both are good for the table, and as food for animals. they need a light, deep, rich soil. a sandy loam is best, as for all roots. seed kept over one season seldom vegetates. should be soaked a day or two, and sown in straight rows, covered an inch deep, and the rows slightly rolled. it is much better, with this and the carrot, to sow radish-seed in the same rows. they come up so soon that they protect the parsnips and carrots from too hot a sun while tender, and also serve to mark the rows, so that they may be hoed early, without danger of destroying the young plants. parsnips may be grown many years on the same bed without deterioration, provided a little decomposed manure or compost be annually added. fresh manure is good if it be buried a foot deep. the yield will be greater if thinned to eight inches apart. rows two feet apart, and the plants six inches in the row, are most suitable in field-culture. they will grow till frost comes, and are better for the table, when allowed to stand in the ground through the winter. they may be dug and preserved as other roots. parsnips contain more sugar than any other edible root, and are therefore worth more per bushel for food. all domestic animals and fowls fatten on them very rapidly, and their flesh is peculiarly pleasant. fed to cows, they increase the quantity of milk, and impart a beautiful color and agreeable flavor to the butter. it is superior to the beet, that we have so highly recommended elsewhere, in all respects except one--it is less easily tended and harvested. still, they should be cultivated on every farm where cattle, hogs, or fowls, are kept. pastures. these are very important to all who keep domestic animals. the following brief directions for successful pasturing are essential. it is very poor economy to have all your pasture-lands in one field, or to put all your animals together. pasture fields in rotation, two weeks each, allowing rest and growth for six weeks: first horned cattle, next horses, then sheep. horses feed closer than cattle, and sheep closer than horses; each also eats something that the others do not relish. pasturing land with sheep thickens the grass on the ground. for the kinds of grass preferable for pastures, see our article on _grasses_. plaster sown on pastures containing clover, materially increases their growth. a little lime, plaster, and common salt, sown on any pasture, will prove very beneficial. streams or springs in pastures double their value. the idea that creatures need no water when feeding on green grass is a mistake. every pasture without a spring or stream should have a well. cattle in a pasture in warm weather need shade. it is usual to advise the growth of trees in the borders, or scattered over the whole field. sheds are much better. trees absorb the moisture, stint the growth of the grass, and injure its quality. a pasture containing many trees is not worth more than half price; it will keep about half as much stock, and keep them poorly. bushes, which so often occupy pastures, should be grubbed up, and by all means destroyed; so should all thistles, briers, and large weeds. hogs and geese should be kept in no pastures but their own. never turn into pastures when the ground is very soft and wet, in the spring; the tread of the creatures will destroy much of the turf. creatures in pasture should be salted twice a week. the age of grass, to make the best feed for animals, is often mistaken: most suppose that young and tender grass is preferable; this is far from correct. grass that is headed out, and in which the seed has begun to mature, is far more nutritious, as every farmer can ascertain by easy experiments. tall grass, approaching maturity, will fatten cattle much faster than the most tender young growth. pasturing land enriches it. it is well to mow pastures and pasture meadows occasionally, though few meadows and pastures should lie long without plowing. top-dressings of manure, on all grass-lands, are valuable; better applied in the fall than in the spring; evaporation is less, and it has opportunity to soak into the soil. peas. these are sown in the field and garden. as a field-crop, peas and oats are sown together, and make good ground or soaked feed for horses, or for fattening animals. early peas and large marrowfats are frequently sown broadcast on rich, clean land, near large cities, to produce green peas for market. it does not pay as well as to sow in rows three feet apart, and cultivate with a horse. all peas, for picking while green, are more convenient when bushed. they may produce nearly as well when allowed to grow in the natural way, but can not be picked as easily, and the second crop is less, and inferior, from the injury to the vines by the first picking. early kent peas (the best early variety) mature so nearly at the same time that the vines may be pulled up at once. all other peas had better be bushed, that they may be easily picked, and that the later ones may mature. bushes need not be set so close as usual. a good bush, put firmly in the ground, to enable it to resist the wind, once in two and a half feet, is quite sufficient. those clinging to the bushes will hold up the others. to bush peas in this way is but little work, and pays well. it is often said that stable-manure does no good on pea-ground---that peas are neither better nor more abundant for its use. we think this utterly a mistake. we have often raised twice the quantity on a row well manured, that grew on another row by its side, where no manure had been applied. if peas be sowed thick on thoroughly-manured land, the crop will be small: it is from this fact that the idea has gained currency. they are generally planted too thick on rich land. peas planted six inches deep will produce nearly twice as much as those covered but an inch. plowing in peas and leveling the surface is one of the best methods of planting. to get an early crop in a cold climate, they may be forced in hotbeds, or planted in a warm exposure, very early, and protected by covering, when the weather is cold. at the south, it is best to plant so as to secure a considerable growth in the fall, and protect by covering with straw during cold weather. the only known remedy for the bugs that are so common in peas, is late sowing. in latitude forty-two, peas sown as late as the th of june will have no bugs. bugs in seed-peas may be killed by putting the peas into hot water for a quarter of a minute; plant immediately, and they will come up sooner and do well. seed imported from the more northern parts of canada have no bugs; it is probably owing to the lateness of the season of their growth. but late peas are often much injured by mildew; this is supposed to be caused by too little moisture in the ground, and too much and too cool in the atmosphere, in dew or rain. liberal watering then would prevent it. _varieties_--are numerous. two are quite sufficient. _early kent_ the earliest we have ever been able to obtain, ripen nearly all at once; moderate bearers, but of the very best quality. this variety of pea is the only garden vegetable with which we are acquainted that produces more and better fruit for being sowed quite thick. the other variety that we recommend is the _large marrowfat_. these should not stand nearer together, on rich land, than three or four inches, and always be bushed. there are many other varieties of both late and early peas, but we regard them inferior to these. white's "gardening for the south" mentions landreth's extra early, prince albert, cedo-nulli, fairbank's champion, knight's tall marrow, and new mammoth. whoever wishes a greater variety can get any of these under new names. the large blue imperial is a rich pea, like many of the dwarfs, both of the large and small, but is very unproductive. we advise all to select the best they can find, and plant but two kinds, late and early. plant at intervals to get a succession of crops. but very late peas, in our dry climate, amount to but little, without almost daily watering. peach. this native of persia is one of the most healthy and universally-favorite fruits. in its native state, it was hardly suitable for eating, resembling an almond more than our present fine peaches. perhaps no other fruit exhibits so wide a difference in the products of seeds from the same tree. all the fine varieties are what we call chance products of seeds, not one out of a thousand of which deserved further cultivation. the prevailing opinion is, that planting the seeds is not a certain method of propagating a given variety; hence the general practice of budding (which see). others assert that there are permanent varieties, that usually produce the same from the seed, when not allowed to mix in the blossoms. some prefer to raise the trees for their peach-orchards from seed, thinking them longer-lived and more healthy. whole peaches planted when taken from the tree, or the pits planted before having become dry, are said to be much more certain to produce the same fruit. we know an instance in which the fruit of an early crawford peach, thus planted, could not be distinguished from those that grew on a budded tree in the same orchard. one of the difficulties in reproducing the same from seed, is the great difficulty in getting the seed of any variety pure. we everywhere have so many varieties of fruit-trees in the same orchard, that the seeds of no one can be pure; they mix in the blossoms. on this account, the surest method of perpetuating a variety is by budding. this tree is of rapid growth, often bearing the third year from the seed, and producing abundantly the fifth. the peach-tree is often called thrifty when its growth is very luxuriant, but tender and unhealthy, perishing in the following winter. a moderate, steady, hardy growth is most profitable. the following directions, though brief, are complete:-- _raising seedlings._--dry the pits in the shade; put them away till the last of winter; then soak them two days in water, and spread them on some place in the garden where water will not stand, and cover them an inch deep with wet sand, and leave them to freeze. when about time to plant them (which is early corn-planting time), take them up and select all those that are opened by the frost, and that are beginning to germinate, and plant in rows four feet apart and one foot in the row. these will grow and be ready for budding considerably earlier than those not opened by frost. crack the others on a wooden block, by striking their side-edge with a hammer; you thus avoid injury to the germ that is endangered by striking the end. plant these in rows like the others, but only six inches apart in the row, as they will not all germinate. plant them on rich soil covering an inch or two deep. keep them clear of weeds, and they will be ready for budding from august th to september th, according to latitude or season. in a dry season, when everything matures early, budding must not be deferred as long as in a wet season. for full directions for budding, see our article on that subject. _transplanting._--perhaps no other fruit-tree suffers so much from transplanting when too large. this should always be done, after one year's growth, from the bud. the best time for transplanting is the spring in northern latitudes subject to hard frosts, and in autumn in warmer climates. _soil and location._--all intelligent fruit-growers are aware that these exert a great influence upon the size, quality, and quantity, of all varieties of fruits. an accurate description of a variety in one climate will not always identify it in another. some few varieties are nearly permanent and universal, but most are adapted to particular localities, and need a process of acclimation to adapt them to other soils and situations. light sandy soils are usually regarded best for the peach: it is only so because nineteen out of twenty cultivators will not take pains to suitably prepare other soils. some of the best peaches we have ever seen grew on the richest illinois prairie, and others on the limestone bluffs of the ohio river. thorough drainage is indispensable for the peach, on all but very light, porous soils: with such drainage, peaches will do best on soil best adapted to growing corn and potatoes. bones, bonedust, lime, ashes, stable-manure, and charcoal, are the best applications to the soil of a peach-orchard. whoever grows peaches should put at least half a bushel of fine charcoal in the earth in which he sets each tree. mix it well with the soil, and the tree will grow better, and the fruit be larger and finer, for a dozen years. any good soil, well drained and manured with these articles, will produce great crops of peaches. for the location of peach-orchards, see our general remarks on "location of fruit-trees." but we would repeat here the direction to choose a northern exposure, in climates subject to late frosts. elevations are always favorable, as are also the shores of all bodies of water. in our remarks on location, we have shown by facts the great value of hills, so high as to be useless for any other purpose. between pittsburgh and the mouth of the ohio river, there are enough high elevations, now useless, to supply all the cities within fifty miles of the rivers, down to new orleans, with the best of peaches every year. in no year will they ever be cut off by frost on those hills. warm exposures, with a little winter protection, will secure good peaches in climates not adapted to them. in some parts of france, they grow large quantities for market by training them against walls, where they do not flourish in the open field. by this practice, and by enclosures and acclimation, the growth of this excellent fruit may be extended to the coldest parts of the united states. _transplanting_--should be performed with care, as in the case of all other fruit-trees. every injured root should be cut off smooth from the under side, slanting out from the tree. leave the roots, as nearly as possible, in the position in which they were before. set the tree an inch lower than it stood in the nursery; it saves the danger of the roots getting uncovered, and of too strong action of the atmosphere on the roots, in a soil so loose. the opposite is often recommended, viz., to allow the tree in its new location to stand an inch or two higher than before; but we are sure, from repeated trials, that it is wrong. shake the fine earth as closely around the roots as possible, mulch well, and pour on a pailful of tepid water, if it be rather a dry time, and the tree will be sure to live and make a good growth the first year. when a peach-tree is transplanted, after one year's growth from the bud, it should have the top cut off within eighteen inches or two feet of the ground, and all the limbs cut off at half their length. this will induce the formation of a full, large head. a low, full-branching head is always best on a peach-tree. _pruning_ is perhaps the most important matter in successful peach culture. the fruit is borne wholly on wood of the previous year's growth. hence a tree that has the most of that growth, in a mature state, and properly situated, will bear the most and the finest fruit. a tree left to its natural state, with no pruning but of a few of the lower limbs from the main trunk, will soon exhibit a collection of long naked limbs, without foliage, except near their extremities (see the cut overleaf). in this case fruit will be too thick on what little bearing wood there is, and it should be thinned. but very few cultivators even attend to that. the fruit is consequently small, and it weakens the growth of the young wood above, for next year's fruiting, and thus tree and fruit are perpetually deteriorating. observe a shoot of young peachwood, you will see near its base, leaf-buds. on the middle there are many blossom-buds, and on the top, leaf-buds again. the tendency of sap is to the extremity. hence the upper leaf-buds will put out at once. and for their growth, and the maturity of the excessive fruit on the middle, the power of the sap is so far exhausted, that the leaf-buds at the base do not grow. hence when the fruit is removed, nothing is left below the terminal shoots, but a bare pole. this is the condition in which we find most peach-trees. for this there is a certain preventive. it consists in shortening in, by cutting off in the month of september, from a third to a half of the current season's growth. if the top be large, cut off one half the length of the new wood. if it be less vigorous and rank, and you fear you will not have room for a fair crop of peaches, cut off but one third. this heading-in is sometimes recommended to be done in the spring. for forming a head in a young tree the spring is better. but to mature the wood, and increase the quantity, and improve the quality of the fruit, september is much the best. such shortening in early in september, directs the sap to maturing the wood, already formed and developing fruit-buds, instead of promoting the growth of an undue quantity of young and tender wood, to be destroyed by the winter, or to hinder the growth of the fruit of the next season. this heading-in process, with these young shoots, is most easily performed with pruning shears, with wooden handles, of a length suited to the height of the tree. [illustration: neglected peach-tree.] [illustration: properly-trimmed peach-tree.] but a work to precede this annual shortening-in, is the original formation of a head to a peach-tree. take a tree a year old from the bud, and cut it down to within two and a half feet from the ground. below that numerous strong shoots will come out. select three vigorous ones and let them grow as they please, carefully pinching off all the rest. in the fall you will have a tree of three good strong branches. in the next spring cut off these three branches, one half. below these cuts, branches will start freely. select one vigorous shoot to continue the limb, and another to form a new branch. check the growth of the shoots below, by cutting off their ends, but do not rub them off, as they will form fruit branches. at the close of the season you will have a tree with six main branches, and some small ones for fruit, on the older wood. repeat this process the third year, and you have a tree with twelve main branches, and plenty smaller ones for fruit. all these small branches on the old wood, should be shortened in half their length, to cause the leaf-buds near their base to start, so as to produce large numbers of young shoots. continue this as long as you please, and make just as large a head and just such a form as you may wish, being careful only to control the shape of the top so as to let the sun and air freely into every part. trees thus trained may be planted thick enough to allow four hundred to stand on an acre, and will bear an abundance of the finest fruit, and all low enough to be easily picked. this method of training is much better than allowing the tree to shoot out on all sides from the ground: in that case, the branches are apt to split down and perish. this system of heading-in freely every year, preserves the life and health of the tree remarkably. many of the finest peach-trees in france are from thirty to sixty years old, and some a hundred. we may, in this country, have peach-trees live fifty years, in the most healthy bearing condition. by trimming in this way, and carrying out fully this system, some have thrifty-looking peach-trees, more than a foot in diameter, bearing the very best of fruit. it is sheer neglect that causes our peach-orchards to perish after having borne from three to six years. let every man who plants a peach-tree remember, that this system of training will make his tree live long, be healthy, grow vigorously, and bear abundantly. _diseases_ of peach-trees have been a matter of much speculation. the result is, that the hope of the peach-grower is mainly in preventives. _the yellows_ is usually regarded as a disease. imagination has invented many causes of this evil. some suppose it to be produced by small insects; others that it is in the seed. again, it is ascribed to the atmosphere. it has been supposed to be propagated in many ways--by trimming a healthy tree with a knife that had been used on a diseased one; by contagion in the atmostphere, as the measles or small-pox; by impregnation from the pollen, through the agency of winds or bees; by the migration of small insects; or by planting diseased seeds, or budding from diseased trees. this great diversity of opinion leaves room to doubt whether the yellows in peach-trees be a disease at all, or only a symptom of general decay. the symptoms, as given in all the fruit-books, are only such as would be natural from decay and death of the tree, from any cause whatever. this may result from neglect to supply the soil with suitable manures, and to trim trees properly, and especially from over-bearing. this view of the case is more probable, from the fact that none pretend to have found a remedy. all advise to remove the tree thus affected at once, root and branch. we have seen the following treatment of such trees tried with marked success. cut off a large share of the top, as when you would renew an old, neglected tree; lay the large roots bare, making a sort of basin around the body of the tree, and pour in three pailfuls of _boiling_ water: the tree will start anew and do well. this is an excellent application to an old, failing peach-tree. the sure preventive of the yellows is, planting seeds of healthy trees, budding from the most vigorous, heading-in well, supplying appropriate manures, and general good cultivation. _curled leaves_ is another evil among peach-trees, occurring before the leaves are fully grown, and causing them to fall off after two or three weeks. other leaves will put out, but the fruit is destroyed, and the general health of the tree injured. elliott says the curl of the leaf is produced by the punctures of small insects. one kind of curled leaf is, but not this. but we have no doubt that barry's theory is the correct one, viz., that it is the effect of sudden changes of the weather. we have noticed the curled leaf in orchards where the trees were so close together as to guard each other. on the side where the cold wind struck them, we noticed they were badly affected; while on the warm side, and in the centre where they were protected by the others, they exhibited very few signs of the curl. in western new york, unusual cold east winds always produce the curled leaves, on trees much exposed: hence, the only remedy is the best protection you can give, by location, &c. _mildew_ is a minute fungus growing on the ends of tender shoots of certain varieties, checking their growth, and producing other bad effects. syringe the trees with a weak solution of nitre, one ounce in a gallon of water, which will destroy the fungus and invigorate the tree. _the borer_ has been the great enemy of the peach-tree, since about the close of the last century. the female insect, that produces the worms, deposites her eggs under rough bark, near the surface of the ground. this is done mostly in july, but occasionally from june to october. the eggs are laid in small punctures, and covered with a greenish glue; in a few days they come out, a small white worm, and eat through the bark where it is tender, just at, or a little below, the surface of the ground; they eat under the bark, between that and the wood, and, consuming a little of each, they frequently girdle the tree; as they grow larger, they perforate the solid wood; when about a year old, they make a cocoon just below the surface of the ground, change into a chrysalis state, and shortly come out a winged insect, to deposite fresh eggs. but the practical part of all this is the _remedy_: keep the ground clean around the trees, and rub off frequently all the rough bark; place around each tree half a peck of air-slaked lime, and the borer will not attack it. this should be placed there on the first of may, and be spread over the ground on the first of october; refuse tobacco-stems, from the cigar-makers, or any other offensive substance, as hen-manure, salt and ashes, &c., will answer the same purpose. we should recommend the annual cultivation of a small piece of ground in tobacco, for use around peach-trees. we have found it very successful against the borer, and it is an excellent manure; applied two or three times during the season, it proves a perfect remedy, and is in no way injurious, as an excessive quantity of lime might be. _leaf insects._--there are several varieties, which cause the leaves to curl and prematurely fall. this kind of curled leaf differs from the one described as the result of sudden changes and cold wind; that appears general wherever the cold wind strikes the tree, while this only affects a few leaves occasionally, and those surrounded by healthy leaves. the remedy is to syringe them with offensive mixtures, as tobacco-juice, or sprinkle them when wet with fine, air-slaked lime. _varieties._--their name is legion, and they are rapidly increasing, and their synonyms multiplying. a singular fact, in most of our fruit-books, is a minute description of useless kinds, and such descriptions of those that they call good, as not one in ten thousand cultivators will ever try to master--they are worse than useless, except to an occasional amateur cultivator. elliott, in his fruit-book, divides peaches into three classes: the first is for general cultivation; under this class he describes thirty-one varieties, with ninety-eight synonyms. his second class is for amateur cultivators, and includes sixty-nine varieties, with eighty-four synonyms. his third class, which he says are unworthy of further cultivation, describes fifty-four varieties, with seventy-seven synonyms. cole gives sixty-five varieties, minutely described, and many of them pronounced worthless. in hooker's western fruit-book, we have some eighty varieties, only a few of which are regarded worthy of cultivation. downing gives us one hundred and thirty-three varieties, with about four hundred synonyms. in all these works the descriptions are minute. the varieties of serrated leaves, the glandless, and some having globose glands on the leaves, and others with reniform glands. then we have the color of the fruit in the shade and in the sun, which will, of course, vary with every degree of sun or shade. we submit the opinion that those books would have possessed much more value, had they only described the best mode of cultivating peaches, without having mentioned a single variety, thus leaving each cultivator to select the best he could find. had they given a plain description of ten, or certainly of not more than fifteen varieties, those books would have been far more valuable _for the people_. we give a small list, including all we think it best to cultivate. perhaps confining our selection to half a dozen varieties would be a further improvement:-- . the first of all peaches is _crawford's early_. this is an early, sure, and great bearer, of the most beautiful, large fruit;--a good-flavored, juicy peach, though not the very richest. it is, on the whole, the very best peach in all parts of the country. time, from july th to september st. freestone. . _crawford's late_ is very large and handsome; uniformly productive, though not nearly so good a bearer as crawford's early. ripens last of september and in october. fair quality, and always handsome; freestone; excellent for market. . _columbia._--origin, new jersey. it is a thoroughly-tested variety, raised and described by mr. cox, who wrote one of the earliest and best american fruit-books. fine specimens were exhibited in , grown in covington, ky. excellent in all parts of the united states. freestone. . _george the fourth._--a large, delicious, freestone peach, an american seedling from mr. gill, broad street, new york. the national pomological society have decided the tree to be so healthy and productive as to adapt it to all localities in this country. it has twenty-five synonyms. . _early york._--freestone; the best, and first really good, early peach. time july at cincinnati, and august at cleveland. time of ripening of all varieties varies with latitude, location, and season. . _grass mignonne._--a foreign variety, a great favorite in france, in the time of louis xiv. very rich freestone, flourishing in all climates from boston south. the high repute in which it has long been held is seen in its thirty synonyms. one of the best, when you can obtain the genuine. time, august. . _honest john._--a large, beautiful, delicious, freestone variety. highly prized as a late peach, maturing from the middle to the last of october. indispensable in even a small selection. . _malacatune._--a very popular american freestone peach, derived from a spanish, and is the parent of the crawford peaches, both early and late. . _morris white._--everywhere well known; a good bearer; best for preserving at the north; a good dessert peach south. . _morris red rare-ripe._--a favorite, freestone, july peach. the tree is healthy and a great bearer. . _old mixon._--should be found in all gardens and orchards; it is of excellent quality and ripens at a time when few good peaches are to be had; it endures spring-frosts better than any other variety; profitable. . _old mixon cling._--one of the most delicious early clingstones. deserves a place in all gardens. . _monstrous cling._--not the best quality, but profitable for market on account of its great size. . _heath cling._--very good south and west. wrapped in paper and laid in a cool room, it will keep longer than any other variety. tree hardy and often produces when others fail. excellent for preserving, and when quite ripe, is superior as a dessert fruit. . _blood cling._--a well-known peach, excellent for pickling and preserving. it sometimes measures twelve inches in circumference. the old french blood cling is smaller. many of these varieties will be found under other names. you will have to depend upon your nursery-man to give you the best he has, and be careful to bud from any choice variety you may happen to taste. difficulties and disappointments will always attend efforts to get desired varieties. pear. the pear is a native of europe and asia, and, in its natural state, is quite as unfit for the table as the crab-apple. cultivation has given it a degree of excellence that places it in the first rank among dessert-fruits. no other american fruit commands so high a price. new varieties are obtained by seedlings, and are propagated by grafting and budding: the latter is generally preferred. root-grafting of pears is to be avoided; the trees will be less vigorous and healthy. the difficulty of raising pear-seedlings has induced an extensive use of suckers, to the great injury of pear-culture. fruit-growers are nearly unanimous in discarding suckers as stocks for grafting. the difficulty in raising seedling pear-trees is the failure of the seeds to vegetate. a remedy for this is, never to allow the seeds to become dry, after being taken from the fruit, until they are planted. keep them in moist sand until time to plant them in the spring, or plant as soon as taken from the fruit. the spring is the best time for planting, as the ground can be put in better condition, rendering after-culture much more easy. the pear will succeed well on any good soil, well supplied with suitable fertilizers. the best manures for the pear are, lime in small quantities, wood-ashes, bones, potash dissolved, and applied in rotten wood, leaves, and muck, with a little stable-manure and iron-filings--iron is very essential in the soil for the pear-tree. in all soils moderately supplied with these articles, all pear-trees grafted on seedling-stocks, and those that flourish on the foreign quince, will do well. a good yellow loam is most natural; light sandy or gravelly land is unfavorable. it is better to cart two or three loads of suitable soil for each tree on such land. the practice of budding or grafting on apple-stocks, on crab-apples, and on the mountain-ash, should be utterly discarded. for producing early fruit, quince-stocks and root-pruning are recommended. setting out pear-trees properly is of very great importance. the requisites are, to have the ground in good condition, from manure on the crop of the last season, and thoroughly subsoiled and drained. pear-trees delight in rather heavy land, if it be well drained; but water, standing in the soil about them, is utterly ruinous. pear-trees, well transplanted on moderately rich land, well subsoiled and well drained, will almost always succeed. by observing the following brief directions, any cultivator may have just such shaped tops on his pear-trees as he desires. cut short any shoots that are too vigorous, that those around them may get their share of the sap, and thus be enabled to make a proportionate growth. after trees have come into bearing, symmetry in the form of their heads may be promoted by pinching off all the fruit on the weak branches, and allowing all on the strong ones to mature. those two simple methods, removing the fruit from too vigorous shoots, and cutting in others, half or two-thirds their length, will enable one to form just such heads as he pleases, and will prove the best preventives of diseases. _diseases._--there are many insects that infest pear-orchards, in the same manner as they do apples, and are to be destroyed in the same way. the slugs on the leaves are often quite annoying. these are worms, nearly half an inch long, olive-colored, and tapering from head to tail, like a tadpole. ashes or quicklime, sprinkled over the leaves when they are wet with dew or rain, is an effectual remedy. _insect-blight._--this has been confounded with the frozen-sap blight, though they are very different. in early summer, when the shoots are in most vigorous growth, you will notice that the leaves on the ends of branches turn brown, and very soon die and become black. this is caused by a worm from an egg, deposited just behind or below a bud, by an insect. the egg hatches, and the worm perforates the bark into the wood, and commits his depredations there, preventing the healthy flow of the sap, which kills the twig above. soon after the shoot dies, the worm comes out in the form of a winged insect, and seeks a location to deposite its eggs, preparatory to new depredations. the remedy is to cut off the shoots affected at once, and burn them. the insect-blight does not affect the tree far below the location of the worm. watch your trees closely, and cut off all affected parts as soon as they appear, and burn them immediately, and you will soon destroy all the insects. but very soon after the appearance of the blight they leave the limb; hence a little delay will render your efforts useless. these insects often commit the same depredations on apple and quince-trees. we had an orchard in ohio seriously affected by them. we know no remedy but destruction as above. _the frozen-sap blight_ is a much more serious difficulty. its nature and origin are now pretty well settled. in every tree there are two currents of sap: one passes up through the outer wood, to be digested by the leaves; the other passing down in the inner bark, deposites new wood, to increase the size of the tree. now, in a late growth of this kind of wood, the process is rapidly going on, at the approach of cold weather, and the descending sap is suddenly frozen, in this tender bark and growing wood. this sudden freezing poisons the sap, and renders the tree diseased. the blight will show itself, in its worst form, in the most rapid growing season of early summer, though the disease commenced with the severe frosts of the previous autumn. its presence may be known by a thick, clammy sap, that will exude in winter or spring pruning, and in the discoloration of the inner bark and peth of the branches. on limbs badly affected on one side, the bark will turn black and shrivel up. but its effects in the death of the branches only occur when the growth of the tree demands the rapid descent of the sap: then the poisoned sap which was arrested the previous fall, in its downward passage, is diluted and sent through the tree; and when it is abundant, the whole tree is poisoned and destroyed in a few days; in others more slightly affected, it only destroys a limb or a small portion of the top. another effect of this fall-freezing of sap and growing wood, is to rupture the sap-vessels, and thus prevent the inner bark from performing its functions. this theory is so well established, that an intelligent observer can predict, in the fall, a blight-season the following summer. if the summer be cool, and the fall warm and damp, closed by sudden cold, the blight will be troublesome the next season, because the plentiful downward flow of sap, and rapid growth of wood, were arrested by sudden freezing. if the summer is favorable, and the wood matures well before cold weather, the blight will not appear. this is of the utmost practical moment to the pear-culturist. anything in soil, situation, or pruning, that favors early maturity of wood, will serve as a preventive of blight; hence, cool, moist situations are not favorable in climates subject to sudden and severe cold weather in autumn. root-pruning and heading-in, which always induce early maturity of wood, are of vast importance; they will, almost always, prevent frozen-sap blight. if, in spite of you, your pear-trees will make a late luxuriant growth, cut off one half of the most vigorous shoots before hard freezing, and you will check the flow of sap, by removing the leaves and shoots that control it, and save your trees. if blight makes its appearance, cut off at once all the parts affected. the effects will be visible in the wood and inner bark, far below the external apparent injury. remove the whole injured part, or it will poison the rest of the tree. when this frozen sap is extensive, it poisons and destroys the whole tree; when slight, the tree often wholly recovers. if a spot of black, shrivelled bark appears, shave it off, deep enough to remove the affected parts, and cover the wound with grafting-wax. remove all affected limbs. these are the only remedies. but the practice of pruning both roots and branches will prove a certain preventive. a tree growing in grass, where it grows more slowly, and matures earlier in the season, will escape this blight; while one growing in very rich garden soil, and continuing to grow until cold weather, will suffer severely. the effects on orchards, in different soils and localities everywhere, confirm this theory. a little care then will prevent this evil, which has sometimes been so great as to discourage attempts at raising pears. in some localities, some of the finer varieties of pears, as the virgalieu, are ruined by cracking on the trees before ripening. applications of ashes, salt, charcoal, iron-filings, and clay on light lands, will remedy this evil. _distances apart._--all fruit-trees had better occupy as little ground as is consistent with a healthy vigorous growth. they are manured and well cultivated, at a much less expense. the trees protect each other against inclement weather. the fruit is more easily harvested. and it is a great saving of land, as nothing else can be profitably grown in an orchard of large fruit-trees. the two kinds of pear-trees, dwarf and standard, may be planted together closely and be profitable for early and abundant bearing. the plan given on the next page of a pear-orchard, recommended in cole's fruit book, is the best we have seen. in the plan the trees on pear-stocks, designed for standards, occupy the large black spots where the lines intersect. they are thirty-three feet apart. the small spots indicate the position of dwarf-trees on quince stocks. of these there are three on each square rod. an acre then would have forty standard trees, and four hundred and eighty dwarfs. the latter will come into early bearing, and be profitable, long before the former will produce any fruit. this will induce and repay thorough cultivation. they should be headed in, and finally removed, as the standards need more room. one acre carefully cultivated in this way, will afford an income sufficient for the support of a small family. [illustration: plan of a pear-orchard.] _gathering and preserving._--most fruits are better when allowed fully to ripen on the tree. but with pears, the reverse is true; most of them need to be ripened in the house, and some of them, as much as possible, excluded from the light. gather when matured, and when a few of the wormy full-grown ones begin to fall, but while they adhere somewhat firmly to the tree. barrel or box them tight, or put them in drawers in a cool dry place. about the time for them to become soft, put them in a room, with a temperature comfortable for a sitting-room, and you will soon have them in their greatest perfection. they do better in a warm room, wrapped in paper or cotton. a few only ripen well on the trees. those ripened in the house keep much longer and better. _varieties._--the london horticultural society have proved seven hundred varieties, from different parts of the world, in their experimental garden. cole speaks of eight hundred and elliott of twelve hundred varieties. there are now probably more than three thousand growing in this country. many seedlings, not known beyond the neighborhood where they originated, may be among our very best. from six to ten varieties are all that need be cultivated. we present the following list, advising cultivators to select five or six to suit their own tastes and circumstances, and cultivate no more. we do not give the usual descriptions of the varieties selected. the mass of cultivators, for whom this work is specially intended, will never learn and test the descriptions. they will depend upon their nursery-man, and bud and graft from those they have tasted. we give their names and some of their synonyms, their adaptation to quince or pear stocks, their manner of growth, and time of maturity. these will enable the culturist to select whatever best suits his taste; adapted to quince or pear stocks; for the table or kitchen; for summer, fall, or winter use, and for home or the market. belle lucrative.--_fondante d' automne, seigneur d' esperin._ tree of moderate growth, but a great bearer. a fine variety, on quince or pear, better perhaps on the pear stock. season, last of september. beurrÉ easter with fifteen synonyms that few would ever read. best on quince. requires a warm soil and considerable care in ripening, when it proves one of the best. its season--from january to may--makes it very desirable. large, yellowish-green, with russet spots. [illustration: bartlett.] bartlett.--_william's, william's bon chretien, poire guilliaume_. tree, a vigorous grower, and a regular, early, good bearer, of long, handsome, perfectly-formed fruit; on the quince or pear stock. time, august and september. [illustration: beurré diel.] beurrÉ diel.--_diel_, _diel's butterbirne_, _dorothee royale_, _grosse dorothee_, _beurré royale_, _des trois tours_, _de melon_, _melon de kops_, _beurré magnifique_, _beurré incomparable_. grows well on quince or pear, but perhaps does best on quince. large, beautiful, luscious fruit. season, october to last of november. [illustration: white doyenne.] white doyenne.--_virgalieu._ tree vigorous and hardy on pear or quince. everywhere esteemed as one of the very best. needs care in supplying proper manure and clay on light soils, to prevent the fruit from cracking. september to november. if we could have but one we should choose this. columbia.--_columbian virgalieu._ native of new york, bearing abundantly, a uniformly smooth, fair, large fruit. color, fine golden yellow, dotted with gray. season, december and january. [illustration: flemish beauty.] flemish beauty.--_belle de flanders, &c._ this is a large, beautiful, and delicious pear. one of the finest in its season, but does not last long. ripens last of september. very fine on the quince, and is excellent on the rich prairie-lands of the west. deserves increased attention. beurrÉ d'aremberg.--_duc d'aremberg, and eight other synonyms._ tree very hardy, does well on the pear stock, and bears early, annually, and abundantly. a very fine foreign variety. the fruit hangs on the tree well, and may be ripened at will from december to february, by placing in a warm room, when you would ripen them. buffum.--a native of rhode island, and very successful wherever grown. a great bearer of handsome fruit, though not of the best quality. it is, however, an excellent orchard pear. fruit, medium size, ripening in september. louise bonne of jersey.--_william the fourth_, and three other useless foreign synonyms. not surpassed, on the quince. tree very vigorous, producing a great abundance of large fruit. season, october. madeleine.--_magdalen_, _citron des carmes_. this bears an abundance of small but delicious fruit. is valuable also on account of its season--the last half of july. good on pear or quince. must be checked in its growth, on very rich land, or it will be subject to the frozen sap-blight. onondaga.--american origin. equally good on pear or quince. large, hardy, and very productive tree. the fruit is very large, fine golden yellow when ripe. excellent for market. season, october and november. pound pear.--_winter belle_, and twelve other synonyms, which are unimportant. this is the great winter-pear for cooking. the tree is a very vigorous grower and great bearer. a very profitable orchard variety. december to march. prince's st. germain.--_new st. germain_, _brown's st. germain_. hardy and productive. good keeper, ripening as easily and as well as an apple. december to march. [illustration: seckel.] seckel.--there are a number of synonyms, but it is always known by this name. tree is small, but a good and regular bearer of small excellent fruit. time in warm climates, september and october. steven's genesee.--_stephen's genesee_, _guernsey_. desirable for all orchards and gardens, on quince or pear. fine grower and very productive. fruit large and excellent. elliott says "even the wind-falls are very fine." vicar of wakefield.--eight synonyms, but it will hardly be mistaken by nursery-men. does well on quince. it is thrifty and very productive of fruit of second quality. yet it is generally profitable. november to january. winter nellis.--its six foreign synonyms are of no consequence. this is the best of all winter-pears, grown on quince or pear. exceedingly well adapted to the rich western prairies. an early and great bearer. november to january . [illustration: gray doyenne.] gray doyenne.--a superior october pear. tree hardy and productive on both pear or quince. partakes much of the excellence of the white doyenne. from these you can select five or six just adapted to your wishes. the diversity of views, of the merits of different varieties of pears, arises mainly from the influence of location, soil, and culture. the established known varieties, may be grown in great perfection anywhere, with suitable care. at the west they _must be root-pruned_ and _headed-in_ until they are ten years old, after which they will be hardy and productive. if allowed to grow as fast as they will incline to, on alluvial soils, when they are exposed to severe winters, they will disappoint growers. with care they will be sure and profitable. peppers. the red peppers, cultivated in this country, are used for pickling, for pepper-sauce, as a condiment for food, and as a domestic medicine. _varieties_--are named principally from their shape. the _large squash-pepper_ is best for green pickles, on account of its size and tenderness. the _cayenne_, a small, long variety, much resembling the original from which it is named, is very pungent, used mostly for pepper-sauce. grind, not very fine, any of the varieties, and they are useful on any food of a cold nature and not easily digestible. they are all good for medicinal purposes. the capsicum needs a dry, warm soil, with exposure to the sun. plants should stand two feet apart each way; as they are slow growers, they should be started in an early hotbed. many will ripen during summer, and may be gathered. in the fall, when frost comes, the vines will be covered with blossoms and with peppers of all sizes. fall-grown green ones, strung on a thread, and hung in a warm, dry room, will ripen finely. they are very hardy, and may be transplanted without injury. hen-manure is best for them. peppergrass. this is a variety of cress, of quick growth, used as lettuce. on a rich, finely-pulverized soil, sow the seeds in drills, fifteen inches apart, and cover very lightly. sow thick and water in dry weather. for use, cut the tops while they are very tender. a second crop will grow, but inferior to the first. the water-cress, growing spontaneously by rills and springs, is a kind of wild peppergrass, and is by some persons more esteemed than the garden variety. we prefer early lettuce to cresses or peppergrass, and see no reason for their cultivation, but their rapid growth. plowing. this is one of the most important matters in soil-culture. when, how, and how much, shall we plow? are the three questions involving the whole. when should plowing be done? as it respects wet or dry, plow sandy or gravelly land whenever you are ready. it will neither be hard when dry, nor injured by being plowed when very wet. good loams may be plowed at all times except when excessively wet. clays can only be worked profitably when neither excessively wet or dry. plowing land in a warm rain is almost equal to a coat of manure. plowing in a light snow in the spring will injure it the whole season. we have noticed a marked difference in corn growing but a rod apart, on land where snow was plowed in, and the other plowed two or three days later, after the snow was gone; this difference was noticeable in the rows throughout the entire field. spring or fall plowing is a question that has been much discussed. sod-land is better plowed in the fall. the action of winter rains and frosts on the turf is beneficial. the same is true of land trenched deep, where much of the hard, poor subsoil is brought to the surface: it is benefited by winter exposure. other cultivated fields are injured by fall-plowing, unless it be very early. all stubble-land is much benefited by being plowed as soon as the grain is taken off. the weeds and stubble, plowed under, will be decomposed by the warm weather and rains, and benefit the soil almost as much as an ordinary coat of manure. plowed late, such action does not take place, and the surface is injured by winter-exposure: hence, do all the _early_ fall-plowing possible, but plow nothing _late_ in the fall but sod-land. how shall we plow? all land should be subsoiled, except that having a light, porous subsoil; one deep plowing on such land is sufficient. subsoiling is done by using two teams at once--one with a common plow, running deep, and the other with a subsoil-plow with no mould-board, and which will, consequently, stir and disintegrate the earth to the depth at which it runs, without throwing it to the surface. the next surface-furrow will cover up this loosened subsoil. in this way, land may be plowed eighteen inches deep, to the great benefit of any crop grown on it. if the surface be well manured, this method of plowing will place the manure between the first furrow and the subsoil, and increase its value. such plowing is very valuable on land for young fruit-trees. there is another method, which we denominate double-plowing, which is more beneficial than ordinary subsoiling: it is performed by two common plows, one following in the furrow of the other; the first furrow need not be very deep--let the furrow in the bottom of the first be as deep as possible, and thrown out upon the surface; the next furrow will throw the surface and manure into the bottom of the deep furrow; the next furrow will cover this surface-soil and manure very deep, and, as manure always works up, it will impregnate the whole. this, for garden-vegetables, berries, nurseries, or young orchards, is the best form of plowing that we have ever tried. it may be done with one team, by simply changing the gauge of the clevis every time round, gauging it light for the first furrow, and deep for the second. we once prepared a plat in this way with one team, on which cabbages made a remarkable growth, even in a dry season. still a farther improvement would be a light coat of fine manure on the surface. all furrows, in every description of plowing, should be near enough together to move the whole, leaving no hard places between them. the usual "cut and cover" system, to get over a large area in a day, is miserable economy. the more evenly and flatly land can be turned over in plowing, the better it will be; it retards the growth of weeds, and secures a better action upon substances plowed under. an exception to deep plowing is in breaking up the original prairies of the west: they have to be broken with plows kept sharp as a knife, and not more than two inches deep. the grass then dies and the sod rots. but plowed deep, the grass comes up through the turf, and will prove troublesome for two or three years. it must also be broken at a certain season of the year, to insure success. it may be profitably done for two months after the grass gets a good start in the spring. _how much_ is it best to plow land? once double-plowed, or thoroughly subsoiled, and well turned over, is better than more. land once plowed so as to disintegrate the whole to the depth of the furrow, will produce more, and require less care, than the same would do if cross-plowed once or twice. excessive plowing is a positive injury. all land should be broken up once in three or four years, and not kept longer than that under the plow at one time. some farmers keep land perpetually in grass, refusing to have a plow touch it on any condition. they see wrong tillage produce barrenness. but by this practice they are great losers; they never get over one half the hay or pasturage that could be obtained by frequent tillage and manuring, and a rotation of crops. plum. this is one of our best fruits, but suffers more from enemies than any other. _propagation_ is by seeds or layers, budding or grafting. seeds from trees not exposed to mixture with other varieties in the blossom, will produce the same; hence, this is the best method of propagating a given variety, standing alone. but, for most situations, budding is preferable to any other method. this should be performed earlier than on the peach. the plum matures earlier, and hence should be budded about the last of july, or first of august. bud on the north side of the tree to avoid the hot sun; and tie more tightly than in budding other trees. bud plum-trees the second year from the seed. grafting should be resorted to only when buds have failed, and there is a prospect that the trees will be too large for budding another season. the common wild plums make good stocks, if grafted at the ground. thoroughly mulch all newly-grafted plum-trees. root-grafting will succeed, but should never be practised. in all grafting of plums, put the graft in at the surface of the ground, and cover with sawdust or mould, leaving but one bud on the graft exposed. _soil._--all soils are good for the plum, provided they be thoroughly drained, and properly fertilized. hard soils are recommended as being almost proof against the curculio. that a soil affording a rather hard, smooth surface, will afford less burrows for curculio, and consequently lessen their ravages, is no doubt true. but it is not a perfect remedy, and, on other accounts, such a soil is no better. a good firm loam is best. plums will do well also on light land, but are more exposed to injury from the curculio. _transplanting._--the plum being perfectly hardy, we recommend transplanting in autumn. shorten in the top, cut off considerable of the tap-root, and the ends of the long roots, transplant well, and mulch so thoroughly as to prevent too strong action of the frost on the roots, and they will start early and do well. twelve feet apart for small varieties, and twenty feet for larger growers, are the distances usually recommended. we think a rod apart each way will do well for all varieties. _pruning._--once started in a regular growth, in such a shape as you desire, no further pruning will be necessary but occasionally heading-in a too luxuriant shoot, and removing diseased and cross limbs. on rich western lands, and in warm southern climes, young plum-trees must be root-pruned and headed-in, or they will be unfruitful and unhealthy. root-pruning should be done in august, in the following manner. in case of a tree ten feet high, take a sharp spade, and in a circle around the tree, two feet from the trunk (making the circle four feet in diameter), cut off all the roots within reach. in smaller trees, make the circle smaller, and in larger ones, larger. at the same time, shorten in the current year's growth, by cutting off one half the length of all the principal shoots; this will give vigor, symmetry, and fruitfulness, and prove a valuable preventive of disease. plum-trees should always have good, clean cultivation. _manures_ from the stable and slaughter-house, with wood-ashes, lime, and plenty of salt, are the best for the plum. the following analysis, by richardson, of the fruit of the plum, will aid the culturist in his selection of manures:-- potash . soda . lime . magnesia . sulphuric acid . silicic acid . phosphoric acid . phosphate of iron . hence, as wood-ashes contains much potash, and as this is the largest ingredient in the plum, it must be the best application to the soil for this fruit. bones, dissolved in sulphuric acid, would also be very valuable. bones, bonedust, salt, wood-ashes, and barnyard manure, with a little lime, will be all that will be necessary. _diseases._--in most northern latitudes, the black wart, or knot, is fatal to many plum-trees. it is less prevalent at the south: its origin is not known. many theories respecting it are put forth by different cultivators; they are unsatisfactory, and their enumeration here would be useless. it may be either the result of general ill health in the tree, from budding on suckers and unhealthy stocks, and a want of proper elements in the soil, or of improper circulation of sap, caused by the roots absorbing more than the leaves can digest. in the latter case, root-pruning and heading-in would be an effectual preventive. in the former, supply suitable manures, and give good cultivation. in every case, remove at once all affected parts, and wash the wounds and whole tree, and drench the soil under it, with copperas-water--one ounce of copperas to two gallons of water. this is stated to be a complete remedy. _defoliation_ of seedlings and bearing trees often occurs in july and august. land well supplied with the manures recommended, especially wood-ashes, salt, and the copperas-water, has not been known to produce trees that drop their leaves. _decay of the fruit_ is another serious evil. professor kirtland and others suppose it to be a species of fungus. poverty of soil, and wet weather, may be the cause. if the season be unusually wet, thin the fruit, so that no two plums shall touch each other. keep the soil properly manured, and spread charcoal or straw under the tree, and you will generally be able to preserve your fruit. _the curculio_ is the great enemy of the plum, and frequently of all smooth-skinned fruits, as the grape, nectarine, &c. [illustration: ( ) curculio, in the beetle-form, life-size. ( ) its assumed form when disturbed or shaken from the tree. ( ) larva, or worm, as found in the fallen fruit. ( ) pupa, or chrysalis state, in which it lives in the ground.] many remedies are proposed: making pavements, or keeping the ground hard and smooth, under the trees; pasturing swine and keeping fowls in the plum-orchard; syringing the whole tops of the trees four or five times with lime and salt water, or lime and sulphur-water--the proportions are not material, provided it be not excessively strong. it is recommended to apply with a garden-syringe. but, as few cultivators will have that instrument, they may sprinkle the mixture on the trees in any way most convenient. salt, worked into the soil under plum-trees, is said to destroy this insect in its pupa state. at any rate, the salt is a good manure for the plum-tree. we know a remedy for the ravages of the curculio, unfailing in all seasons and localities--that is, to kill them: spread a cloth under the tree, and with a mallet having a head, covered with india-rubber or cloth that it may not injure the bark, strike the body and large limbs sudden blows, which will so jar them as to cause the insects to fall upon the cloth, and you can then burn them. do this five or six times in the season, commencing when the fruit begins to set, and continuing till it becomes nearly full-grown. this is best done in the cool of the morning, while the insects are still; their habits of fear and quiet, when there is a noise about, are greatly in favor of their destruction by this method. this is somewhat laborious, but is a sure remedy, and will pay well in all plum-orchards, large or small. after two or three years of this treatment, there will be few or none of those insects left. _uses_ of the plum are various. the fine varieties, well ripened, are a good dessert-fruit; for sweetmeats and tarts they are much esteemed; they are one of the better and more wholesome dried fruits. the foreign ones are called prunes, and are an article of commerce. with a little care, we can raise much better prunes than the imported. like all fruits, they are better for quick drying by artificial heat. the french prunes, the process of drying which is minutely described by downing in his fruit-book, are no better than our best varieties, quickly dried by artificial heat in a dry house, or moderately-heated oven. all dried fruit is much better for having become perfectly ripe before picking. it is a great mistake to suppose unripe fruit will be good dried. [illustration: lawrence's favorite.] _varieties_ are numerous, and many of them ought to be forgotten, as is the case with all other fruits. we give a small list, containing all the good qualities of the whole:-- _bleecker's gage._--a hardy tree and sure bearer. time, august. [illustration: imperial gage.] [illustration: egg.] _imperial gage._--this is an american variety. it is of a lightish-green color, and excellent flavor. season, july at the south, and september at the north. _egg._--the above cut represents one of the egg-plums, of excellent quality in all respects. there are many of this name. _lawrence's favorite._--this is a fine plum, of the gage family. it was raised from the seed of the green gage; its qualities are seldom surpassed. _washington._--this is a very good plum for high latitudes. at the south it is too dry. [illustration: green gage.] [illustration: jefferson.] _green gage._--with fifteen synonyms. excellent. _jefferson._--one of the very best. time, last of august. _denniston's purple, or red._--vigorous grower and very productive. time, august . _madison._--a hardy, productive, and excellent october plum. the foregoing varieties, with the little black damson-plum, so hardy and productive, and so much esteemed for preserving, will answer all needful purposes. you will find long lists in the fruit-books. some of them are the above varieties, under different names. procure four or five of the best you can find in your vicinity, and cultivate them, and you will need no others. [illustration: washington.] pomegranate. this is one of the most delicious and beautiful of all the dessert-fruits. native in china, and much cultivated in southern europe. it will do quite well as far north as the ohio river. trained as an espalier, with protection of straw or mats, it will do tolerably well throughout the middle states. the fruit is about as large as an ordinary apple, and has a tough, orange-colored skin, with a beautiful red cheek. the tree is of low growth. blossoms are highly ornamental, as is also the fruit, during all the season. it is cultivated as the orange. there are several varieties: the _sweet-fruited_, the _sub-acid_, and the _wild_ or _acid-fruited_. the first is the best, and the second the one most cultivated in this country; the latter yields a very pleasant acid, making an excellent sirup. pomegranates should be extensively cultivated at the south, and form an important article of commerce for northern cities. potato. this is far the most valuable of all esculent roots; supposed to be a native of south america. it is called the irish potato, because it was grown extensively first in ireland. it was first planted on the estate of sir walter raleigh in . it was introduced into england in . it has been represented as having been introduced into england from virginia as early as , but attracted no attention, and for two centuries formed no considerable part of british agriculture. it has become naturalized in all temperate regions, and in many locations in high latitudes. in tropical climates, it flourishes on the mountains, at an elevation sufficient to secure a cool atmosphere. cool moist regions, as ireland and the northern parts of the united states, are most favorable for potatoes. in warm climates the potato grows less luxuriantly, yields much less, and is liable to be ruined by a second growth. in the latitude of southern ohio, a severe drought, while the tubers are small, followed by considerable rain, causes the young potatoes to sprout, and send up fresh shoots, and often make a very luxuriant growth of tops, to the complete ruin of the tubers. this is called second growth. in cooler climates this second growth simply makes prongs on the tubers, thus injuring the appearance and quality, but increasing the crop. the only preventive is watering regularly in a dry time. this can be done advantageously in a garden, and on a small scale. in field culture, when second growth occurs, dig your potatoes at once, if they are large enough to be of much use. if not they will all be lost. _propagation_ is by annually planting the tubers. no mixture of sorts ever takes place from planting different varieties together. this can only be done in the blossoms, and will consequently appear in young seedlings. to raise good potatoes, always plant ripe seed, and the largest and best, and leave them whole. selecting small potatoes for seed, and cutting them up, and planting mere eyes and pearings as some do, has done much to injure the health, quality, and quantity of yield of the potato. selecting the poorest for seed, will run out anything we grow in the soil. _new varieties_ have been multiplying within the past few years from seed. some gentlemen are raising varieties by thousands. not more than one out of a thousand prove truly valuable. the quality of a new variety can not be established earlier than the fifth year. many that promised well at first proved worthless. to raise from seed, gather the balls after they have matured, hang them in a dry place till they become quite soft, when separate the seeds and dry them as others, and plant as early as the temperature of the soil favors vegetation. chance varieties from seed of balls left to decay in the fall, as tomatoes, are recorded. probably our present best varieties had such an origin. raising new varieties requires much care and patience. keep each one separate, plant only the best, and then you must wait four or five years to determine whether, out of a thousand, you have one good variety. _varieties._--these are numerous. those best adapted to one locality, are often inferior in another. that excellent potato, the carter, so firm in new england and western new york, is ill-shapen and inferior in many localities in illinois. the neshannock or common mercer produces a larger yield in illinois than in the eastern states, but of a slightly inferior quality. most seeds do better transported from a colder to a warmer climate, but with the potato the reverse is true. the best potatoes of ireland are usually inferior in the warmer latitudes of this country. in ordering potatoes for seed it is better to describe the quality than to order by the name. we omit any list, of even the best varieties. they are known by different names, and are not equally good in all localities. and all varieties are scattered over the whole country, very soon, by dealers, and through the agency of agricultural societies and periodicals. different varieties should be kept separate, as they look better for market, and no two will cook in precisely the same time. _plant the large potatoes and plant them whole._ from a small eye or a small potato to the largest they will vegetate equally well. and in a wet, cool season, the small seed will produce nearly as good a crop as the large. but the large seed matures earlier, and in a dry season produces a much larger crop. the moisture in a large potato decaying in the hill, is of great use to the growing plants, in a dry season. it is also generally conceded that potatoes growing from cut seed are more liable to be affected by the rot. _quantity of seed per acre._--the practices of farmers vary from five to twenty bushels. it takes a less number of bushels per acre when the seed is cut. the quantity is also affected by the size of the seed, the larger the potatoes the more will it take to seed an acre. plentiful, but not excessive, seeding is best. it is a universal fact that you can never get something for nothing. hence light seeding will bring a light yield. we think it best to put one good-sized potato in a place and make the rows three feet apart each way. we think they yield better than at any other distances or in any other way. we have often tried drills, and found them more trouble, with no greater yield. the soil should be disintegrated to the depth of sixteen inches and the potatoes planted four inches deep, and cultivated with subsoil plow, and other suitable tools, in a manner to leave the surface nearly flat. hilling up potatoes never does any good. we advise always to harrow the crop, as soon as they begin to appear through the soil. _soil._--any good rich garden soil is good for this crop, provided it be well drained. potatoes like moisture, but are ruined by having water stand in the soil. new land and newly broken-up old pastures are best. _manures._--all the usual fertilizers are good for potatoes, but especially ashes and plaster. the application above all others, for potatoes, is potash. dissolve it in water, making it quite weak, and saturate your other manures with it, and the effect will always be marked. the tops contain a great deal of potash, and should always be plowed in and decay in the soil where they grow, otherwise they will rapidly exhaust the land. it is supposed that nothing will do more to restore the former vigor and health of the potato than a liberal application of potash in the soil in which they grow. the crop will be much increased in a dry season by manuring in the hill, dropping the potato first and putting the manure on the top of it. _gathering and preserving._--the usual hand-digging with hoe or potato-fork are well known, and do well when the crop is not large. but for those who grow potatoes for market, it is better to employ the plow in digging. modern inventions for this purpose can everywhere be found in the agricultural warehouses. potatoes are well preserved in a good cool cellar, in boxes or barrels; and are better for being covered with moist sand. the usual method of burying them outdoor is effectual and safe, if they be covered beyond the reach of frost, and have a small airhole at the apex, filled with straw. _the potato disease._--this is altogether atmospherical. a new piece of land was cleared for potatoes. in the middle was a close muck, on a coarse, gravelly subsoil. in the lowest place a ditch was dug, to carry off the superabundance of water; from that ditch the coarse gravel was thrown out on one side, and suffered to remain at considerable depth. only two or three rods distant, on one side the plat extended over a knoll of loose sand. potatoes were planted, from the same seed, at the same time, and in the same manner, on these three kinds of land, side by side. they were all tended alike, needing little hoeing or care, the land being new. the rot prevailed badly that season. on digging the potatoes, it was found that in the coarse gravel, where the air could circulate almost as freely as in a pile of stove-wood, all the potatoes were rotten: on the muck, which was unlike a peat-bog, very fine and tight, almost impervious to the atmosphere, they were nearly all sound; on the sand, which was quite open, but tighter than the gravel, part were decayed and the rest sound. their condition was graduated entirely by the condition of the soil. it is an apparent objection to this theory, that when the rot prevails, the best potatoes are raised on light, sandy soils. it is said that they are open to the action of air. to this it is replied, that whether they rot or not, in sandy soils, depends on the kind of sand. on some sand they rot very badly, on others hardly at all. sandy soils differ very materially: some are almost pure silex; while others are filled with a fine dust, and, although apparently loose, are much more nearly impervious to the air than heavier soils; on the former, nearly all will decay, and on the latter, most will be preserved. look at the immense potato crops near rochester, n. y., on sandy land. we have personally examined it, and find it to be filled with dust, that excludes the air, and saves the potato from rot. why, then, is a heavy clay useless for potatoes? is not clay a very tight soil? unbroken it is; but, when plowed, it is always left in larger particles than other land--it is but seldom pulverized. the spaces between the particles are all open to the free action of the air; hence, instead of being close, it is one of the most open of all our soils. this confirms the theory. the influence of manuring land is still another confirmation. we are directed not to manure our land for potatoes when the disease prevails. it is said we can raise no sound potatoes on rich land when the rot is abroad. this is an error. the richness of the soil does not promote the disease; but if any kind of manure be applied that, from its bulk and coarseness, keeps the soil open to the air, the potatoes will rot. but fertilize to the highest extent, in any way that does not make the soil too open, and let in the air, and the crop will be greatly increased with perfect safety. thus, this theory, like every truth, perfectly fits in all its bearings. there is, then, no perfect remedy for the disease but in the power of him who can purify the atmosphere. numerous remedies and preventives have been recommended, by those who suppose they have tried them with success. but in other localities and soils, all their remedies have failed, as will all others that will yet be discovered. a careful examination of the texture of the soils, upon the principles here indicated, and a repetition of their experiments, will show the discoverers that their success depended upon their soils, while others failed in using the same remedies on other soils. the practical uses of this theory are obvious. when the disease is abroad, we should select soil that excludes, as much as possible, the atmosphere, and plant _deep_; on all land not liable to have water stand on the subsoil. do not be deceived into the belief that all sandy land will bear good potatoes, in the seasons when the disease prevails. the worst rot we ever had was in , on very sandy land. this year ( ) we have witnessed the worst rot in open sand and gravel. add to this, great care in preserving the health of the tubers. plant very early, only whole potatoes, and of mature growth, thoroughly ripe; apply a little salt and lime, plaster rather plentifully, and potash, or plenty of wood-ashes--and you will succeed in the worst of seasons. preserving fruits, &c. the essentials in preserving fruits, berries, and vegetables, during the whole year, are, a total exclusion from atmospheric action, and, in some vegetables, a strong action of heat. we have a variety of patent cans, and several processes are recommended. the patent cans serve a good purpose, but, for general use, are inferior to those ordinarily made by the tinman. the patent articles are only good for one year, and are used with greater difficulty by the unskilful. the ordinary tin cans, made in the form of a cylinder, with an orifice in the top large enough to admit whatever you would preserve, will last ten years, with careful usage, and they are so simple that no mistakes need be made. it is usually recommended to solder on the cover, which is simply a square piece of tin large enough to cover the orifice. soldering may be best for those cans that are to be transported a long distance, but it is troublesome, and is entirely unnecessary for domestic use. a little sealing-wax, which any apothecary can make at a cheap rate, laid on the top of the can when hot, will melt, and the cover placed upon it will adhere and cause it to be air-tight. all articles that do not part with their aroma by being cooked, may be perfectly preserved in such cans, by putting them in when boiling, seasoned to your taste, and putting on the covers at once. the cans should be full, and set in a cool place, and the articles will remain in a perfect state for a year. the finest articles of fruit, as peaches and strawberries, may be preserved so as to retain all their peculiar aroma, by putting them into such cans, filled with a sirup of pure sugar, and placing the cans so filled in a kettle of water, and raising it to a boiling heat, and then putting on the cover as above; the heat expels the air, and the cover and wax keep it out. stone jugs are used for the same purposes, but are not sufficiently tight to keep out the air, unless well painted after having become cold. wide-mouthed glass bottles are excellent. but, in using glass or stone ware, the corks must be put in and tied at the commencement, leaving a small aperture for the escape of steam, and the process of raising the water to a boiling heat must be gradual, requiring three or four hours, or the bottles will be broken by sudden expansion. make the corks air-tight by covering with sealing-wax on taking from the boiling water. some vegetables, as peas, beans, cauliflowers, &c., need considerable boiling, in order to perfect preservation. tin cans may stand in the water and boil an hour or two, if you choose, and then be sealed. the bottles should be corked tight, have the cork tied in, and then be immersed and boil for an hour: take them out, and dip the cork and mouth of the bottles in sealing-wax, and all will be safe. by one of these processes, exclusion of the atmosphere and thorough boiling, we may preserve any fruit or vegetable, so as to have an abundance, nearly as good as the fresh in its season, the whole year, and that at a trifling expense. all fruits and vegetables may also be preserved by drying. by being properly dried, the original aroma can be mostly retained. the essentials in properly drying are artificial heat and free circulation of the air about the drying articles. fruit dried in the sun is not nearly so fine as that dried by artificial heat. an oven from which bread has just been taken is suitable for this purpose; but a dry-house is better. a tight room, with a stove in the bottom, and the fruit in shallow drawers, put in from the outside, serves a good purpose. construct the room so as to give a draft, the heated air passing out at the top, and the process of drying will be greatly facilitated, and the more rapid the process, without cooking the fruit, the better will be its quality. this process is applicable to all kinds of vegetables. roots, as beets, carrots, parsnips, or potatoes, should be sliced before drying. the object in drying the latter articles would be to afford the luxury of good vegetables for armies and ships' crews, in distant regions, and in climates where they are not grown. milk can be condensed and preserved for a long time, and, being greatly reduced in quantity, it is easily transported. it is not generally known in the country that mr. gail borden, of new york, has invented a method of condensing milk, fresh from the cow, so that it will perfectly retain all its excellences, including the cream, and by being sealed up in tin cans, as above, may be kept for many months. the milk and the process of condensation have been scientifically examined by the new york academy of medicine, and pronounced perfect, and of great value to the world. we have used the condensed milk, which was more than a month old; it had been kept in a tin can without sealing and without ice, but in a cool place. it was sweet and good, differing in no respect from fresh milk from the cow, except that the heat employed in condensing it gave it the taste of boiled milk. if kept in a warm place, and exposed to the atmosphere, it may sour nearly as soon as other milk: but it may be sealed up and kept cool so as to be good for a long time. the condensation is accomplished by simple evaporation of the watery part, in pans in vacuo. no substance whatever is put into the milk. four gallons of fresh milk are condensed into one. when wanted for use, the quantity desired is put into twice the quantity of water, which makes good cream for coffee; or one part to four of water makes good new milk; and one part to five or six makes a better milk than that usually sold in cities. steamers now lay in a supply for a voyage to liverpool and return, and on arrival in new york, the milk is as good as when taken on board. the advantages will be numerous. such milk will be among regular supplies for armies and navies, and for all shipping to distant countries. all cities and villages may have pure, cheap milk, as the condensation will render transportation so cheap that milk can be sent from any part of the country where it is most plenty and cheapest. the process is patented, but will be granted to others at reasonable rates, by borden & co.; and eventually it will become general, when farmers can condense and lay by, in the season when it is abundant, milk for use in the winter, when cows are dry. this will make milk abundant at all seasons of the year, and plenty wherever we choose to carry it. it will also save the lives of thousands of children, in cities, that are fed on unwholesome milk or poisonous mixtures. there is no temptation to adulterate such milk, for the process of condensation is cheaper than any mixture that could be passed. preserving hams is effectually done by either of the following methods. after well curing and smoking, sew them up in a bag of cotton cloth, fitting closely, and dip them into a tub of lime-whitewash, nearly as thick as cream, and hang up in a cool room. this is a good method, though they will sometimes mould. the other process, and the one we most recommend, is to put well cured and smoked hams in a cask, or box, with very fine charcoal; put in a layer of charcoal, and then one of hams; cover with another layer of coal and then of hams, and so on, until the cask is full, or all your hams are deposited. no mould will appear, and no insect will touch them. this method is perfect. another process, involving the same principles as the preceding, is to wrap the hams in muslin, and bury them in salt. the muslin keeps the salt from striking in, and the salt prevents mould and insects. pumpkin. there are some five or six varieties in cultivation. loudon says six, and russell's catalogue has five. the number is increasing, and names becoming uncertain. certain varieties are called pumpkins by some, and squashes by others. the large yellow connecticut, or yankee pumpkin, is best for all uses. the large cheese pumpkin is good at the south and west. the mammoth that has weighed as high as two hundred and thirty pounds, is a squash, more ornamental than useful. the seven years' pumpkin is a great keeper. it has doubtless been kept through several years without decay. pumpkins will grow on any good rich soil, but best on new land, and in a wet season. do best alone, but will grow well among corn and better with potatoes. a good crop of pumpkins can seldom be raised, two years in succession, on the same land. care in saving seed is very important. the spot on the end that was originally covered by the blossom, varies much in dimensions, on pumpkins of the same size. seeds from those having small blossom-marks, bear very few, and from those having large ones, produce abundantly. they are good fall and winter feed for most animals. they will cause hogs to grow rapidly, if boiled with roots, and mixed with a little grain. fed raw to milch cows and fattening cattle, they are valuable. learn a horse to eat them raw, and if his work be not too hard, he will fatten on them. they may be preserved in a dry cellar, in a warm room as sweet potatoes, or in a mow of hay or straw, that will not freeze through. but for family use they are better stewed green, and dried. quince. this fruit, with its uses, for drying, cooking, marmalades, flavors to tarts and pies made of other fruits, and for preserving as a sweetmeat, is well known and highly esteemed. the quince is rather a shrub than a tree. it should be set ten feet apart each way, in deep, rich soil. it needs little pruning, except removing dead or cross branches, and cutting off and burning at once, twigs affected with the insect-blight, as mentioned under pears. the soil should be manured every year, by working-in a top-dressing of fine manure, including a little salt. _propagation_--is by seeds, buds, or cuttings. budding does very well. seedlings are not always true to the varieties. cuttings, put out early and a little in the shade, nearly all take. this is the best and easiest method of propagation. there are several varieties; the _apple-shaped_, _pear-shaped_, and the _portugal_, are the principal. the apple-shaped, or orange quince (and perhaps the large-fruited may be the same) is, on the whole, the best of all. early, a great bearer, and excellent for all uses. the pear-shaped is smaller, harder, and later. it may be kept longer in a green state, and therefore be carried much farther. the only reason for cultivating it would be its lateness and its keeping qualities. the portugal quince is the finest fruit of all, but is such a shy bearer as to be unprofitable. the _rea quince_ is a seedling raised by mr. joseph rea, of greene county, new york, and is pronounced by downing "an acquisition." the fruit is very handsome, and one third larger than the common apple or orange quince. the tree is thrifty, hardy, and productive. it is a valuable modification of the apple-shaped or orange quince, superior to the original. such varieties may be multiplied and improved, by new seedlings and high cultivation. rabbits. to prevent rabbits and mice from girdling fruit-trees in winter, is very important to fruit-growers. the meadow-mouse is very destructive to young trees, under cover of snow. rabbits will girdle trees after the green foliage on which they delight to feed is gone. take four quarts of fresh-slaked lime, the same quantity of fresh cows' dung, two quarts of salt, and a handful of flour of sulphur; mix all together, with just enough water to bring it to the consistency of thick paint. at the commencement of cold weather, paint the trunks of the trees two feet high with this mixture, and not a tree will suffer from rabbits or mice. treading own the snow does good, but it is very troublesome, and not a perfect remedy. experience has never known the foregoing wash to fail. radish. this is a well-known root, eaten only raw, and when young and tender. a rich sandy soil is best. like most turnips, the roots are more tender and perfect when grown in rather cool weather; hence, those grown in early spring are better than a summer growth. they do well in an early hotbed. the _scarlet_ and _white turnip-rooted_ are fine for early use. they are always small, but fair, and very early. the _scarlet short-top_ comes next, and is a very fine variety. these may be had through the whole season, by sowing at proper intervals; hence, others are unnecessary. other good varieties are the _summer_, or _long white naples_; _long salmon_, a large, gray radish, not generally described in the books (a splendid variety in southern ohio); and the _black spanish_ for fall and winter use. this grows large like a turnip, and is preserved in the same way. the best method of guarding against worms is to take equal quantities of fresh horse-manure and buckwheat-bran, and mix and spade them into the bed. active fermentation follows, and toadstools will grow up within forty-eight hours, when you should spade up the bed again and sow the seed; they will grow very quickly, be very tender, and entirely free from worms. radish-seed is sown with slow-vegetating seeds, as carrots, beets, parsnips, &c. the radishes mark the rows, so that they may be cleared of weeds, and the ground stirred before the plants would otherwise be discernible, and also shade the germinating seeds and the young plants from destruction from a hot sun. the radishes may be pulled out when the main crop needs the ground and sun. for this purpose the scarlet short-top variety is used, because the long root loosens the soil in pulling; and as the crown stands so much above the surface, they may be crushed down with a small roller, and thus destroyed without the labor of pulling. sowing radish-seed among root-crops, and cultivating early with a root-cleaner, an acre of roots can be raised with about the same labor as an acre of corn. raspberry. the common black raspberry we have noticed elsewhere as one of the most profitable in cultivation. the other varieties, worthy of general cultivation, are the franconia, the fastollf, the red, and the white or yellow antwerp. any good garden-soil is suitable for raspberries. it should be worked deep, and have decayed wood and leaves mixed with barnyard manure and wood-ashes. in all but very cold latitudes, raspberries should be planted where they may be a little shaded. none of the finer old varieties produce a good crop of fruit without winter-protection. the canes may live without it, but will bear but little fruit. the best method of protection is to bend down the canes at the beginning of winter, before the ground freezes, and cover them lightly, with the soil around them. they should first have some well-rotted manure put around the canes. stools should be four feet apart, and have about five or six canes in a stool. cut away the rest. the best of all manures for raspberries is said to be spent tan-bark. put it around in the fall to the depth of two inches; work it into the soil in the spring, and put around fresh tan-bark, to the same depth. the varieties for general cultivation are few. the common black is one of the best. the common wild american red, native in all the middle and eastern states, is greatly improved by cultivation. as it is perfectly hardy, and a great and early bearer, it should have a place in every collection. the franconia is a fine fruit, and, among those generally cultivated, occupies the first place. the yellow antwerp is fine-flavored and good-sized, but too soft for a general market-berry. the same is true of the fastollf. the red antwerp is good, but quite inferior to the new red antwerp, or hudson river antwerp. the ohio evergreen is a new variety, hardy, prolific, and a long bearer, fine fruit in considerable quantities having been picked on the st of november. on this account, it should be in every garden. there are two kinds of red raspberries brought to notice by mr. lewis p. allen, of black rock, n. y., that deserve extensive cultivation, if they warrant his recommendation. mr. allen says he has cultivated them for a number of years, and, with no winter protection, they have borne a large crop of excellent fruit every year, pronounced by dealers in buffalo market superior to any other variety. should these varieties prove equally good elsewhere, they deserve a place in every garden in the land. rhubarb. there are several varieties of rhubarb now in cultivation. _the victoria, mammoth, and scotch hybrid_, all of which (if they be really distinct) are fine and large, under proper culture. there is much of the old inferior kind, which generally affords only small short leaves, and which is of no value, compared with the large varieties. the method of growing is very simple, and yet the value of the plant depends mainly on right cultivation. propagation is by seeds, or by dividing the roots. by seed is preferable. the idea that the largest kinds will not produce seed is incorrect. we raised four or five quarts of seed from a single plant of the largest variety, in one season. young plants are suitable for transplanting after the first year's growth. they should be set three feet apart each way. the soil should be thoroughly enriched and trenched two feet deep, with plenty of well-rotted manure in the bottom, and mixed in all the soil. plant the crowns two or three inches below the surface to allow stirring the ground in the spring, without injury. after this they will only want enriching with well-rotted manure in rather liberal quantities, worked in with a fork in the fall or spring. covering up with manure in the fall is good. those who raise the largest leaves, lay bare the crowns in spring, and with a sharp knife, remove all the smaller crown-buds. the leaves will be greatly reduced in number, but increased in size. we have often seen a single stem of a leaf that weighed a full pound. the roots live many years. we know a single root, in st. lawrence county, n. y., from which we ate pies and tarts twenty-two years ago, and which is now so vigorous as to yield more than a supply for two families through the season. the only care it has ever had, has been liberal supplies of well-rotted manure. the seed stocks have generally been broken off. they should always be, unless you wish to raise seed, then save one or two of the strongest. new crowns come out on the sides, from year to year, until each plant will cover a considerable space. the one mentioned, as being twenty-two years old, has never been moved during the whole time. it is not the giant kind, but the leaves are large and long. rhubarb has a better flavor and requires much less sugar, by blanching. this is best done by placing an old barrel, without a bottom, over the hill as it begins to grow. the leaves will grow long, with white tender stems. use it when the leaves are half or full grown, as you please. rice. this, in its value to the world as an article of food, is next to indian corn. it is the main article of diet for one third of the human race. it is produced only in certain parts of the world, and its cultivation is so simple and easy, and so much a department of agriculture by itself, that we omit directions for growing it. the ravages of the rice-weevil, so destructive to rice lying in bulk, are prevented by the application of common salt, at the rate of half a pound to the bushel. rocks. we frequently find, on some of our best land, large boulders, very hard, and too large to be removed, with any team we can command, and which would be in the way, in any place to which we might remove them. the best way to get rid of them, when it can be afforded, is to burn or blast them into pieces small enough to be easily handled. when this can not be afforded, the best method is to make an excavation by the side of them, deep enough to let them sink below the reach of the plow, and allow them to fall in, being careful not to get caught by them. roller. this is quite as indispensable to good farming and gardening as any other tool. it serves a great variety of useful purposes. the first is to pulverize soils. no man can get a full crop on a soil not made fine on the surface, however rich that soil may be. it is often the case that land needs rolling two or three times before the last harrowing and sowing the seed. another purpose is, on all light soils, to place the soil close around the seeds after they have been covered. when this is not done, seeds will vegetate very unevenly, and, in dry weather, some of them not at all. another advantage of rolling a field-crop is the greater facility and economy with which it can be harvested. it makes a level, smooth surface, sinking small stones out of the way of the scythe or reaper. rolling makes grass-seed catch, when sown with a spring-crop. all beds of small seeds--as onions, beets, carrots, parsnips, &c.--should be rolled after planting. it will so smooth the surface, that hoeing and cultivating can be done without injury to the plants. the rows are also much more easily seen while the plants are young. any crop will grow better and larger by not being too much exposed to the action of the atmosphere on its roots. when the soil is coarse, part of the seeds and roots are greatly exposed to the action of the atmosphere, and this exposure is very irregular. the roller so crushes the lumps and fills up the openings in the soil as to cause the atmosphere to act regularly on the whole crop. few farmers stop to think that the pressure of the atmosphere on their soils is fifteen pounds' weight on every square inch, and that, hence, the air must penetrate to a considerable depth into the soil; and where the soil is coarse, the air enters too freely, and acts too powerfully for the good of the plants. rollers are made of wood, iron, or freestone. for most purposes, wood is best. a log made true and even, or, better, narrow plank nailed on cylindrical ends, are the usual forms. from eighteen inches to three feet in diameter is the better size. iron or stone rollers, in sections, are best for pulverizing soil disposed to cake from being annually overflowed with water, or from other causes. root crops. it is important that american farmers learn to attach much greater importance to the culture of roots. the potato is the best of all roots for feeding; but, as the yield has become so light in most localities, and the demand for it for human food has so greatly increased, it will no longer be grown extensively as food for animals. farmers must, therefore, turn their attention to beets, carrots, and parsnips. reasonable tillage will produce one thousand bushels to the acre of beets and carrots, and two hundred more of parsnips. these roots, raw or cooked, are valuable for all domestic animals. a horse will do better on part oats and part carrots, or beets, than upon clear oats. for milch cows, young stock, and fattening cattle, and for sheep and fowls, they are highly valuable. with the facilities now enjoyed, they may be raised at a cheap rate. plant scarlet short-top radish-seed in the rows, to shade the vegetating seed and young plants, and to mark the rows, to facilitate clearing and stirring the ground, while the plants are very young, and using the most approved root-cleaners, and the same amount of food can not be grown at the same price in any other crops. saffron. this is a well-known medicinal herb, as easily grown as a bean or sunflower. it is principally used in eruptive diseases, to induce moisture of the skin and keep the eruption out. sow in any good soil, in rows eighteen inches apart, and keep clean of weeds. when in full bloom, the flowers are gathered and dried. sage. this is a hardy garden-herb, easily grown. its value for medicinal and culinary purposes is well known. it is propagated by seeds, or by dividing the roots. with suitable protection in winter, roots will live for a number of years, bearing seed after the first. _varieties_ are, the _red_, the _broad-leaved_, the _green_, and the _small-leaved green_. the red is most used for culinary purposes, and the broad-leaved is most medicinal. all the varieties may be used for the same purposes. any garden-soil, not decidedly wet, is suitable for sage. raise new plants once in three or four years. plants may be renovated, by certain culture and care, but it is better to grow new ones. cut the leaves two or three times in the season, and dry quickly, and put away in paper bags; or, better, pulverize and cork up in glass bottles. this is the best method of preserving all herbs for domestic use. salsify, or vegetable oyster. this is a hardy biennial vegetable, resembling a small parsnip, and as easily grown. when properly cooked, its flavor resembles the oyster, whence its name. sow and cultivate as parsnips or carrots. it is suitable for use from november to may. it is better for being allowed to remain in the ground until wanted for use, though it may be well kept, in moist sand in the cellar. care is necessary in saving seed as it shells and blows away like thistle seed, as soon as ripe. it must be sown quite thick, on account of its proneness not to vegetate. it should be more extensively cultivated. scraping land. this is a process needed only on land that has not been under cultivation long enough to become level. all new land has many knolls of greater or less size. as soon as the roots are out sufficiently to allow it, the knolls should be plowed and leveled with a common scraper. most farmers neglect it as injurious to the soil, and too expensive. but when we consider that rough land never gets well plowed, and that the gradual wearing away of the knolls will continue their unproductiveness for a number of years, it will be seen that the cheapest way is to plow and scrape the land level at once, and thoroughly manure the places from which the soil has been scraped. seeds. the best of everything should be saved for seed. peas, beans, corn, tomatoes, &c., should not be gathered promiscuously, finally preserving the last that matures, for seed. leave some of the finest and earliest stocks, and from them save seed, not from the first or the last that matures, but from the earliest that grows large and fair. save tomato-seed from those that grow largest, but near the root. gather all seeds as soon as mature, as remaining exposed to the weather is unfavorable to vegetation. dry in a warm place in the shade, but not too near a stove or fire. keep in paper bags, hung in a dry airy place, beyond the reach of mice. trying the quality of seeds is important, as it may save loss and disappointment, from sowing seeds that will not vegetate. a little cotton wool or moss in a tumbler containing a little water, and placed in a warm room, will afford a good means of testing seeds. seeds placed on that wool, will vegetate sooner than they would do in the soil. but a more speedy, and generally sure method, is by putting a few seeds on the top of a hot stove. if they are good they will crack like corn in parching; otherwise they will burn without noise, and with very little motion. the improvement or declension of fruits, grains, and vegetables, depend very materially upon the manner of gathering and preserving seeds. gather promiscuously and late, and keep without care, and rapid declension will be the result. gather the earliest and best, and plant only the very best of that saved, and constant improvement will be secured. sheep. these are the most profitable of all domestic animals. the original cost is trifling, and the expense of raising and keeping is so light, and the sale of meat, tallow, hide, and wool, is so ready, that sheep-growing is always profitable. so important has this always been considered, that in all ages of the world, there have been shepherds, whose sole business it has been to tend their flocks. were the flesh of sheep and lambs more extensively substituted for that of swine, in this country, it would be equally healthy and economical. american farmers do not attach to sheep-growing half the importance it deserves. we recommend a thorough study of the subject, in the use of the facilities afforded by the writings of practical men. we can only give the outlines of the subject in a work like this. a theory has been scientifically established by peter a. brown ll. d. of philadelphia, in which it is shown that all sheep are divided into two species, hair-bearing and wool-bearing. these species crossed, produce sheep that bear both wool and hair, as the two never change. the hair makes blankets that will not shrink. the wool is good for making fulled cloth. blankets made from the fleeces of sheep that are the product of the cross of these two species, will shrink in some places and not in others, just as the hair or wool prevails. it is also true that the hair-bearing sheep delight in low, moist situations and sea-breezes, while the wool-bearing sheep does best on high, airy, and dry land. these fleeces all pass as wool, but the microscope shows a marked and permanent difference, and one can easily learn to distinguish it at once, by the touch and with the naked eye. this is thrown out here to induce a thorough examination of the whole subject. there are three staples of wool, short, three inches long, middling, five inches, and long, eight inches. varieties of sheep are numerous. we shall only mention a few. the question of the best breeds has been warmly controverted. we have no disposition to try to settle it. the question of the best variety must depend upon locality and design. if the wool is the object, then the vermont merino for the north, and the pure saxony for the south, are evidently the best. if located near large cities, where the flesh is the main object, then the large-bodied, long-wooled breeds are much preferable. among those much esteemed we note the following:-- the _cotswold_ mature young, and the flesh will vary in weight from fifteen to thirty pounds per quarter. the _new leicester_ is less hardy than the cotswold, but heavier, weighing from twenty-four to thirty-six pounds per quarter. the _teeswater sheep_, improved by a cross with the leicester, is considered valuable. the _bampton_ is one of the very best grown in england. fat ewes average twenty pounds per quarter, and wethers from thirty to thirty-five pounds. the _sussex_, _hampshire, and shropshire_ varieties of the down sheep, are all highly esteemed. the _leicester_ are very valuable. an ordinary fleece weighs from three to five pounds. mr. joseph beers of new jersey had one that sheared thirteen pounds at one time, and the live weight of the sheep was pounds. there are _french_, _silesian_, and _spanish merinoes_, much esteemed in vermont and elsewhere. the average weight of a flock of ewes of french merinoes after shearing was pounds. their fleeces averaged twelve pounds and eight ounces. the fleece of one buck of the same flock weighed twenty pounds and twelve ounces. [illustration: the french merino ram.] the _silesian merinoes_ are smaller, but produce beautiful fleeces. in a flock of nineteen ewes, the average weight of fleece was seven pounds and ten ounces, and that of the buck weighed ten and a half pounds. a large flock of _spanish merinoes_ yielded an average of a little over five pounds of well-washed wool. all these varieties are valuable for wool. the wool of the pure saxony sheep, however, is best. the _tartar sheep_, called also shanghae and broadtail, is a recently-imported breed, of great promise for mutton. their fleece is a fine silky hair, making fine blankets that will not shrink, but not good for fulled cloths. the ewes are remarkably prolific, producing sometimes five lambs at a time, and often twice a year. one ewe bore seven lambs in one year, all living and being healthy. the flesh is of the highest quality. this may stand at the head of all our sheep as a market animal. the cross of this with our common sheep has proved fine. they need to be further tested in this country. a new kind of sheep has also been imported from africa, within a few years; a variety unknown to naturalists, but having some points in common with the tartar sheep. _diseases of sheep._--there are several that have been very troublesome, but which experience has enabled us to cure. _scours_ is often very injurious. a little common soot from the chimney, or pulverized charcoal, is a sure remedy. mix it with water, not so thick as to make it difficult to swallow, and give a teaspoonful every two hours, and relief will soon be experienced. _water in the head_ is a disease caused by long exposure to wet and cold. this is prevented by a small blanket on the back of the sheep. the wool on the backs of sheep will be seen to be often parted, exposing the skin. water falling on the back will penetrate the wool and run down, and wet and chill the whole body. a small cotton blanket, fifteen inches wide, and long enough to reach from the neck to the tail, fastened to its place by tying to the wool, and painted on the outside, will cause all the water to run off, saving the health of the sheep, and causing him to require less food. in the cold, wet season, every sheep should have such a blanket; they would cost three or four cents each, and be worth many times their cost in the saving of feed for the animals. the more comfortable an animal is, the less food will he require. applying tar above the noses of sheep at shearing, that they may be compelled to smell it and eat a little for a long time, is considered favorable to their general health, and a preventive of rot. the foot-rot, in cattle, sheep, and hogs, is a prevalent disease. boys walking the path, barefoot, where such diseased animals frequently pass, may contract the disease. this is always cured by washing in blue vitriol. most cases are cured by one application, and the most confirmed by two or three. make a narrow passage, where only one animal can pass at once. put in a trough twelve feet long, twelve inches wide, and as many deep. put in that fifty pounds of blue vitriol and fill with water, throwing a little straw over the top. cause the diseased animals to pass through that, and they will be cured. this is thought to be an invariable remedy. if sheep do not appear healthy on lowland pasture, give them small quantities of fine charcoal and salt, and they will be as healthy as on the hills. a little salt for sheep is useful during the whole year. the health of sheep is injured more in fall than at any other season; they are very apt to be neglected at the beginning of winter. they grow poor rapidly when their green feed first fails; a little hay and grain and a few roots then will keep them up, prevent disease, and make it less expensive to keep them through the winter. feed in racks or troughs, when they can not get their food under foot, and as far as practicable, under shelter, and in a warm place. it is much cheaper, and keeps the sheep much more healthy. they should have fresh water, where they can drink, two or three times a day. salt, mixed with wood-ashes and pulverized charcoal, should also be constantly within their reach. a few beets, carrots, or parsnips, are always valuable. some green feed is very essential for ewes, for some time before the yeaning season. corn is good for fattening sheep; but, for increasing the wool, it is not half as valuable as beans. good bean-straw is better than hay. corn-fodder is excellent. the product of one and a half acres of land, sowed with corn, will winter, in fine condition, one hundred sheep--the corn sowed the th of june, and cut up after it has begun to lose its weight slightly, and shocked up closely, bound round the top with straw, and then allowed to stand till wanted for feeding. to have healthy sheep, do not use a ram under two, or over six or seven years old, and raise no lambs from unhealthy ewes or rams. the expense of keeping sheep, as all other animals, is much less when they are kept warm. much feed is wasted in keeping up animal heat, which would be saved by warm quarters. sheep-manure is better than any other, except that of fowls. no other parts with its qualities by exposure so slowly. some farmers save all labor of carting and spreading sheep-manure, by having movable wire fences, and putting their sheep on one acre for a few days, and then removing to another. one hundred sheep may thus be made to manure an acre of land in ten days, better than any ordinary dressing of other manure. we should prefer carefully collecting and saving it under cover, mixed with muck or loam, and apply where and when we choose. keeping a suitable number of sheep on a farm is very important in keeping up the farm. a farm devoted to grain or vegetables, without a suitable number of animals, usually runs down. the time when lambs should be allowed to come is important. we much prefer letting them come when they please, if we have warm quarters, and can take a little extra care of them. this will give a larger growth, and furnish large lambs for market, at a season of the year when they are most desired, and bring the greatest price. for those who will not take the necessary pains, let them come when the weather has become warm and grass plenty. sometimes a ewe loses her lamb, and you wish her to raise one of another ewe's, that has two. to make a ewe own another's lamb, take off the skin of her dead lamb, and bind it on to the other lamb, and she will smell it and own the lamb; after which the skin may be removed. sheep-culture is a subject to which farmers should give increased attention, until the average weight of sheep in the united states shall become one third greater than at present, and until there shall be ten sheep to one of all we have at present. shepherdia or buffalo berry. [illustration] this is an ornamental shrub, growing from six to fifteen feet high, bearing a roundish red fruit, much esteemed for preserves. trees are of two kinds, male and female, one bearing staminate and the other pistillate flowers. hence no fruit can be grown without setting out the trees in pairs from six to fifteen feet apart. if you set out only two, and they chance to be of the same kind, you will get no fruit. soils. the nature and management of soils must be measurably understood by any one who would be a thorough cultivator. the productive power of a soil depends much upon the character of the subsoil. a gravelly subsoil is, on the whole, the best. a thin soil lying on a cold clay subsoil--the hardpan of the east, and the crowfish clay of the west--however rich it may be, will be unproductive; while the same soil, on a gravelly subsoil, would produce abundantly. the best soils, for all purposes, are the brown or hazel-colored. plowed in wet weather, they do not make mortar, and in dry weather they will not break in clods. dark-mixed and russet moulds are considered the next best. the worst are the dark-gray or ash-colored. the deep-black alluvial soils of the western prairies are an exception to all other soils, possessing, under proper treatment, great powers of production. soils do not, to any considerable extent, afford food for plants. a willow-tree has been known to gain one hundred and fifty pounds' weight, without exhausting more than two or three ounces of the soil, and even that might have been wasted in drying and weighing. in our article on manures, we have shown that it is the texture of soils, and their power to control moisture and heat, that renders them productive: hence, no soil can be poor that is stirred deep and kept in a friable condition, without being too open and porous; and no soil can be good that is hard and not retentive of moisture, without having water stand upon it. hence, the great secret of successful farming, is, such a mixture of the soils, and of fertilizers with the soil, as shall keep it friable and moist, and such thorough drainage as will prevent water from standing so as to become stagnant, and to unduly chill the roots of growing plants. nature has provided, near at hand, all that is essential to productiveness; all that is necessary is to properly mix them. we do not believe that there is an acre of land now under cultivation in the united states, in a latitude where corn will grow, on which we can not raise a hundred bushels of shelled indian corn, without applying anything but what may be raised out of that soil, and procured in the shape of manure by animals in consuming that product. the poorest farm in america may be brought up to a state of great fertility, without applying one dollar's worth of any foreign substance. plow _deep_, turn under all the green substances possible, and feed out the products on the farm and apply the manure, and mix opposite soils, that may be found in different localities. three years will secure great productiveness, and the same course will increase its value, from year to year, without cost. three things only are essential to convert poor land into the best; deep and thorough stirring and pulverization, suitable draining, and thorough mixture of soils of different qualities, and the incorporation of such animal and vegetable substances as can be produced on the land itself. we would not declare against foreign manures, but insist that the necessary ingredients are found, or may be manufactured near at hand. the philosophy of deep plowing and thorough pulverization is obvious. a fine soil will retain and appropriate moisture in an eminent degree, on the principle of capillary attraction, or as a sponge or a piece of loaf sugar will take up water. there is also room for excess of water to sink away from the surface, and return again when needed. it also affords room for the roots of plants. such a soil also receives moisture from the atmosphere. the atmosphere also contains much water, and more in the heat of summer than at any other time. the air also, with a constant pressure of fifteen pounds to the square inch, enters to a considerable depth into the soil, and the deeper it is stirred, and the more thoroughly it is pulverized, the more it will enter. in coming in contact with the cool moisture below, it is condensed and waters the soil, on the principle that a pitcher of cold water in a warm room has large drops of water on the outside; that water is a mere condensation of moisture in the atmosphere. the cool subsoil acts in the same way upon the atmosphere at night. a deeply disintegrated soil, also, seldom washes by rain. shallow-plowed and coarse land sends off the water after a slight rain, while deep-plowed and thoroughly pulverized land retains it. the philosophy of manures involves the same principles. all the fertilizers act upon soils in such a manner as to render them fine, and open an immense surface to the action of the atmosphere, and form large reservoirs for moisture through their innumerable fine pores. draining is to carry off an excess of water that would stand on an unfavorable subsoil. that water, on undrained land, causes two evils; it stagnates and renders plants unhealthy, and it is too cool, rendering land what we call cold. thus, the deeper you plow land, and the finer you make it, the warmer it will be, and the more perfectly it will control moisture. mixing soils by subsoiling, trenching, and deep plowing, and by carting on foreign substances, is wholly on this principle. sand that drifts about with the wind is too light to retain moisture, and needs clay carted on. by this means the poorest white sand has often been converted into the most productive soil. definite rules for this mixture of soils can not be safely given. the rules must differ in different localities and circumstances; it must, therefore, be determined by experiment. analyzing soils is sometimes of use, but usually has too much importance attached. we do not advise farmers to study it. let them try applications and mixtures, at first on a small scale: they will soon learn what is best on their farms, and may then proceed without loss. some lands are of such a character that the carting on, and suitably mixing, the substances in which they are deficient, may cost as much as it did to clear the land of its original forest; but it will pay well for a long series of years. so well are we persuaded of the utility and correctness of these brief hints, that, in selecting a farm, we should regard the location more than the quality of the soil. the latter we could mend easily; while we should find it difficult to move our farm to a more favorable location. poor land near a city or large town, or on some great thoroughfare, we should much prefer to good land far removed from market, or in an unpleasant location. spinage, or spinach. both these names are correct; the former is the general one among americans. this plant is used in soups, but more generally boiled alone and served as greens. in the spring of the year, this is one of the most wholesome vegetables. by sowing at different times, we may have it at any season of the year, but it is more tender and succulent in the spring. the male and female flowers are produced on separate plants. the male blossoms are in long, terminal spikes, and the female in clusters, close at the stalk, on each joint. _varieties_--the two best are the _broad_, or _summer_, and the _prickly_, or _fall_. there are three others--the _english patience dock_, the _holland_, or _lamb's quarter_, and the _new zealand_. the first two are sufficient. sow in august and september for winter and spring use, and in spring for summer. sow in rich soil, in drills eighteen inches apart. thin to three inches in the row, and when large enough for use, remove every other one, leaving them six inches apart. to raise seed, have male plants at convenient distances, say one in two or three feet. when they have done blossoming, remove the male plants, giving all the room to the others, for perfecting the seed. success depends upon very rich soil and plenty of moisture. squash. there are several varieties of both summer and winter squashes. all the summer varieties have a hard shell, when matured. they are usually eaten entire, outside, seeds and all, while young and tender, from one quarter to almost full grown. they are also used as a fall and winter squash, rejecting the shell and that portion of the inside which contains the seeds. the _summer crookneck_, and _summer scolloped_, both _white_ and _yellow_, are the principal summer squashes. the finest is the _white scolloped_. the best winter varieties are the _acorn_, _valparaiso_, _winter crookneck_, and _vegetable marrow_ or _sweet potato squash_. the latter is the best known. cultivate as melons, but leave only two plants in a hill. they do best on new land. varieties should be grown far apart, and far removed from pumpkins, as they mix very easily, and at a great distance. bugs eat them worse than any other garden vegetable. the only sure remedy is the box covered with gauze or glass. as they are great runners, they do better with their ends clipped off. used as a vegetable for the table, and in the same manner as pumpkins, for pies. strawberry. none of our small fruits are more esteemed, or more easily raised, and yet none more frequently fails. failures always result from carelessness, or the want of a little knowledge of the best methods of cultivation. we omit much that might be said of the history and uses of the strawberry, and confine ourselves to a few brief directions, which, if strictly followed, will render every cultivator uniformly successful. no one need ever fail of growing a good crop of strawberries. in , we saw plats of strawberries in illinois, in the cultivation of which much money had been expended, and which were remarkably promising when in blossom, but which did not yield the cultivators five dollars' worth of fruit. in the language of the proprietors, "they blasted." strawberries never blast; but, for the want of fertilizers at suitable distances, they may not fill. there are but three causes of failure--want of fertilizers, excessive drought, and allowing the vines to become too thick. of most of our best varieties, the blossoms are of two kinds--pistillate and staminate, or male and female--and they are essential to each other. the pistillate plants bear the fruit, and the staminates are the fertilizers, without which the pistillates will be fruitless. there are three kinds of blossom--pistillate, staminate, and perfect, as seen in the cut. [illustration: . perfect blossom. . staminate blossom. . pistillate blossom.] the first ( ) is perfect; that is, has both the stamens and pistils well developed: this will produce a fair crop of fruit, without the presence of any other variety. the second ( ) has the stamens large, while the pistils (the apparently small green strawberry in the centre) are not sufficiently developed to produce fruit: such plants seldom bear more than a few imperfectly-formed berries. the third ( ) has pistils in abundance, but is destitute of stamens, and hence, will not bear alone. the two latter are to be placed near each other, to render them productive; they may be readily distinguished when in blossom. it is always safe to cultivate the hermaphrodite plants; that is, those producing perfect blossoms; but the pistillates and staminates, in due proportions, produce the largest crops, and finer fruit. _soil._--much has been said against high fertilization with animal manures, and in favor of vegetable mould only. we feel entirely satisfied that the largest crops of strawberries are grown on land highly manured with common barnyard manure. to plant and manure a strawberry-bed, begin on one side, and dig a trench eighteen inches deep (from two to three feet is much better) and as wide; put six inches of common manure in the bottom; dig another trench as deep, and place the soil upon the manure in the first trench; fill the last with manure as the first, and so on over the whole plat. manure the surface lightly with very fine manure and wood-ashes. _transplanting_ is usually better in the month of august. if done at that season, and it be not too dry, the plants will get such a growth the same season as to produce quite a good crop of fruit the next season. planted as early in the spring as it will do to stir the soil, they are more sure to grow and yield a very few berries the first season, and very abundantly the next. if you would cultivate in hills, put them two feet apart each way; if otherwise, two feet one way, and one foot the other. cut off the roots to two or three inches in length, and remove all the dead leaves; dip them in mud, which is a great means of causing them to grow; and set them in fine mould, the crown one inch below the level of the soil around, and leave it in a slight basin, and water it, unless the weather be damp. many plants are lost from not being set low enough to escape drought. the basin will hold water, and nearly every plant will grow; excessive water will destroy them. set out three or four rows of pistillate plants, and then one of the staminates, or fertilizers. some set them out in beds and allow them to cover the whole ground, and cultivate by spading up the bed in alternate sections of eighteen inches or two feet each year, turning under, in the spring, that portion that bore fruit the previous season--which has long been recommended by good authority. this was the lamented downing's method. we think rows preferable for this reason. the young plants formed by the runners are less vigorous after the first; hence, the tendency is to deterioration by this mode of culture. and this method does not afford so good an opportunity for stirring the soil around the plants as planting in rows; this stirring the soil is a great means of protecting from drought, and securing the most vigorous growth. deep subsoiling between the rows early in the spring, or after fruiting, is valuable; hence, we always advise to cultivate in hills two feet apart each way, and renew them after they have borne two, or at most three crops. hermaphrodites are best for cultivation in beds. many strawberry-beds do well the first year of their bearing, but are almost useless afterward. the cultivator says they all run to vines. in such cases, they overlook the fact that the staminate plants grow altogether the fastest, because their strength goes to support foliage in the absence of fruit, while bearing vines require much of their strength to mature the fruit; hence, if they are allowed to run together the second, or at most the third year, the fertilizers will monopolize the ground and prevent fruiting. this is the greatest cause of failure of a crop, next to a want of both kinds of plants. this is the origin of fears of having land too rich. it is said it all runs to vines without fruit; this is because the wrong vines have intruded--the staminates have overcome the pistillates. we reject the whole theory of the luxuriance of the vines preventing the production of fruit. the larger the vines the more fruit, provided only the vines are bearers, and not too thick: hence this invariable rule--_always have fertilizers within five feet, and never allow the two kinds to run together._ manures should be applied in august, well spaded in. applying in the spring to increase the crop for that season, is like feeding chickens in the morning to fatten them for dinner--it is too late. fertilizing in august is a good preparation for a large crop for the next season. strawberry-vines, in all freezing climates, should be covered, late in the fall, with forest-leaves or straw, to protect from the severity of winter, and enrich the land by what can be dug into the soil in spring. rotten wood, fine chips, sawdust, &c., are all good for a fall top-dressing. after well hoeing and weeding in spring, until blossom-buds appear, just before the blossoms open, cover the bed thoroughly with spent tanbark, sawdust, or fine straw. this will keep down weeds, preserve moisture in the soil, enrich the ground, and protect the fruit from injury by rains, and in part from worms and insects. this should never be omitted. _varieties_ are numerous, and, from the ease with which they are raised from seed, will rapidly increase; it is so frequent to have blossoms fertilized by pollen from several different varieties. some of the most marked varieties are known in different parts of the country by very different names; hence, we advise cultivators to select the best in their locality. every valuable variety is soon scattered over the country. the following are good:-- _burr's new pine._--originated at columbus, ohio, in . hardy, vigorous, and quite productive; very early; tender for market, but superior for a private garden. _western queen._--originated at cleveland, ohio, by professor j. p. kirtland, . very hardy and productive; larger than the hudson or the willey; good for market; bears carriage well. _longworth's prolific._--origin, cincinnati, . regular, sure, full bearer of large, delicious fruit; good for market; an independent bearer. _m'avoy's superior._--cincinnati, . received one-hundred-dollar prize from the cincinnati horticultural society in . exceedingly large; hardy; female or pistillate flowers; needs fertilizers, and then is one of the best ever grown; rather tender for carriage, though it is extensively sold in western markets. _jenney's seedling._--valuable for ripening late; fruit large and regular; very productive, , quarts having been gathered from three quarters of an acre. _hovey's seedling._--elliott puts it in his second class; but we can not avoid the conviction that it is one of the best that ever has been raised. it is pistillate, but with fertilizers it yields immense crops, of very fine large fruit. boston pine is one of the best fertilizers for the hovey seedling. _hudson bay._--a hardy and late variety, highly esteemed. _pyramidal chilian._--hermaphrodite, highly valued. _crimson cone._--an old variety, quite early, and something of a favorite in eastern markets. _peabody's new hautbois._--originated in columbus, georgia, by charles a. peabody. said to bear more degrees of heat and cold than any other variety. very vigorous, fruit of the largest size, very many of the berries measuring seven inches in circumference. flesh firm, sweet, and of a delicious pine-apple flavor. rich, deep crimson. it may be seen in full size in the patent office report on agriculture for . if this new fruit sustains its recommendations, it will prove the best of all strawberries. downing describes over one hundred varieties. we repeat our recommendation to select the best you can find near home. the following rules will insure success: . make the ground very rich. . put fertilizers within five feet of each other, and never allow different kinds to run together. . cover the ground two inches deep with tan-bark, sawdust, or fine straw, just before the blossoms open; tan-bark is best. . never allow the vines to become very thick, but thin them out. . water every day from the appearance of the blossoms until done gathering the fruit; this increases the crop largely, and, at the south, has continued the vines in bearing until november. daily watering will prolong the bearing season greatly in all climates, and greatly increase the crop. . protect in winter by a slight covering of forest-leaves, coarse straw, or cornstalks. . to get a late crop, keep the vines covered deep with straw. you can retard their maturity two weeks, and daily watering will prolong it for weeks. . apply, twice in the fall and once in the spring, a solution of potash, one pound in two pails of water, or two pounds in a barrel of water in which stable-manure has been soaked. . the best general applications to the soil, in preparing the bed, are lime, charcoal, and wood-ashes--one part of lime to two of ashes and three of charcoal. the application of wood-ashes will render less dissolved potash necessary. these nine rules, strictly observed, will render every cultivator successful in all climates and localities. sugar. there have, until recently, been but two general sources of our supply of sugar--the sugar-cane of the south, and the sugar-maple of the north. beet-sugar will not be extensively manufactured in this country. we now have added the sorgho, or chinese sugar-cane, and the imphee, or african sugar-cane, adapted to the north and the south, flourishing wherever indian corn will grow, and raised as easily and surely, and much in the same way. of the methods of making sugar from the old sugar-cane of the south, we need give no account. it is not an article of general domestic manufacture. it is made on a large scale on plantations, and is in itself simple, and easily learned by the few who become sugar-planters. the process of manufacturing sugar from the maple-tree is very simple and everywhere known. it is to be regretted that our sugar-maples are being so extensively destroyed, and that those we pretend to keep for sugar-orchards are so unmercifully hacked up, in the process of extracting the sap. to so tap the trees as to do them the least possible injury, is a matter of much importance. whether it should be done by boring and plugging up with green maple-wood after the season is over, or be done by cutting a small gash with an axe and leaving open, has been a disputed point. many prefer the axe, and think the tree will be less blackened in the wood, and will last longer, provided it be judiciously performed. cut a small, smooth gash; one year tap the tree low, and another high, and on alternate sides; scatter the wounds, made from year to year, as much as possible. another process of tapping is now most popular with all who have tried it. bore into the tree half an inch, with a bit not larger than an inch, slanting slightly up, that standing sap or water may not blacken the wood. make the spout out of hoop-iron one and a fourth inches wide; cut the iron, with a cold chisel, into pieces four inches long; grind one end sharp; lay the pieces over a semicircular groove in a stick of hard wood, and place an iron rod on it lengthwise over the groove--slight blows with a hammer will bend it. these can be driven into the bark, below the hole made by the bit. they need not extend to the wood, and hence make no wound at all. if the wound dries before the season is over, deepen it a little by boring again, or by taking out a small piece with a gouge. this process will injure the trees less than any other. the spouts will be cheaper than wooden ones, and may last twenty years. always hang buckets on wrought nails, that may be drawn out. buckets made of tin, to hold three or four gallons, need cost only about twenty-five cents each, and, with good care, may last twenty years. a crook in the wire of the rim will make a good place to hang upon the nail. a hole bored in the ear of other buckets will answer the same purpose. in all windy situations, the bucket must be near the end of the spout, or much will be lost by being blown over by the wind. great care to keep all vessels used, clean and sweet, and not burn the sugar in finishing it, will enable any one to succeed in making good maple-sugar. the various forms in which it is put up, and the manner of draining, are familiar to all makers. it is only necessary to add, that there are few small farms on which the sugar-maple will grow, where there might not be raised two or three hundred maples, within fifteen or twenty years, that would add greatly to the beauty, comfort, and value of the farm. on the highway as shade-trees, or on the side of lots, they would be very ornamental and profitable, without doing injury. we can not too strongly recommend raising sugar-maples. always cultivate trees that will bear fruit, yield sugar, or be good for timber. sorgho, or chinese sugar-cane, is raised much as indian corn--only, it will bear some ten or twelve stalks in a hill, instead of three or four. in all parts of our continent, it produces enormous crops of stalks. the trials thus far indicate, that the quantity of saccharine matter it contains is not quite equal to that of the common sugar-cane; but, with the necessary facilities for manufacturing, it makes quite as good sugar and as fine sirups as the other cane. suitable machinery, that need not be expensive, owned by a neighborhood of farmers, may enable all northern men, where other cane will not grow, to make their own sugar cheaper than to buy. but it will be made probably by large establishments as other sugar. we give no method of making it. the subject is so new, that every method of manufacture finds its way into all the newspapers, and what might appear the best to-day would be quite antiquated to-morrow. we have seen as fine sugars and sirups, of all the different grades, made from this new cane, as any others we have ever tasted. the question is settled that imphee and sorgho will make good sugar in abundance. a few years will place such sugars among the great staple products of the country. summer-savory. this is a hardy annual, raised from seed on any good soil, with no care but keeping free from weeds. the seed is small, and may not vegetate well in dry, warm weather, without a little shade or regular watering. its use for culinary and medicinal purposes is well known. gather and dry when nearly ripe. keep in paper bags, or pulverize and put in glass bottles. for the benefit of persons who keep those sprightly pets called fleas, we mention the fact that dry summer-savory leaves, put in the straw beds, will expel those insects. sunflower. this large, hardy, annual plant would be considered very beautiful, were it not so common. three quarts of clear, beautiful oil are expressed from a bushel of the seed, in the same way as linseed-oil. the seed, in small quantities, is good for fowls. it may be grown with less labor than corn. sweet potato. this is a southern plant, but is now being acclimated in northern latitudes. good sweet potatoes are now grown in the colder parts of vermont, wisconsin, and minnesota. there are many varieties, and they are increasing by seedlings. not long since, they were said to bear no seed; but recently, in different parts of the country, seeds have been found, and new varieties grown from them. certain varieties are best in different localities. they will always find their way through growers of plants. the process of growing is simple, but must be carefully followed to insure success. plant the seed potatoes in a moderate hotbed, at the time when grass begins to start freely. keep well watered, and do not allow them to get too warm. an hour's over-heating will cause them all to decay. the heat, when it begins to rise too high, is at once checked by a thorough drenching with cold water: if too low, the heat is raised by a tight cover, in a warm sun, and by watering with warm water. water them every day after they are up. the sprouts, when six inches high, are pulled off from the potato, and set out as cabbage-plants; this should be done as soon as all danger of frost has ceased. the same potatoes will sprout as many times as they are pulled off. sweet potatoes need much sun and warmth; they are, therefore, planted on round hills, or, better, on ridges, which may be principally thrown up with a plow, and made from a foot to eighteen inches high. set the plants in the top, about fifteen inches or two feet apart; keep clear of weeds, making the hill or ridge a little larger by each hoeing. the tops, being long running vines, will soon cover the ground. they produce better tubers for throwing the vines, in a twist, up over the top of the rows. they will take root at each joint of vine, when undisturbed, which roots will draw from the main tuber. these roots would be as good and large as any, if they had time: hence, at the south, one half of the crop is grown from sets, from cuttings of the ends of the early-planted vines. at the north, where seasons are short, these joints must be prevented--by throwing up, as above, or loosening--from taking root. the tubers will need all the strength; the plant and tuber are tender, and a little frost will kill the vines and cause the potatoes to decay. they may be kept for use until january by packing, when dug in a warm day, in the soil in which they grew;--kept through winter, packed in straw or chaff, in boxes that will contain about two or three bushels each, and kept in a room with a fire: the room should be at a temperature of from forty to sixty degrees; fifty-five is best, though seventy will not destroy them; more or less will cause them to decay. the boxes may be placed one upon another, but should be left open, that their moisture may evaporate. dry sand (kiln-dried), sifted over and close among them, will preserve them. free circulation of air is indispensable. it is usually cheapest to buy the plants of those who make a business of raising them. they are very hardy--may be transported one thousand miles and do just as well. to transplant with perfect safety in a dry time, after the plant has been put in its place, pour in a pint of water, and cover it with a little dry soil to prevent baking--and not one out of fifty will perish. these few brief directions will enable any one to be successful wherever corn will grow. a new variety has just been brought into alabama from peru, that is pronounced superior to all others; a prodigious bearer, even on poor sandy land, and far more hardy than other varieties, the root retaining its excellence as it came out of the ground till the following may. swine. hogs are evil in their propensities, mischievous and filthy in their habits, and yet profitable to the farmer. every farmer should keep a few in proportion to the refuse grain and various slops that his establishment may afford. buying hogs and then purchasing grain on which to fatten them in the usual way is the poorest economy. such pork is often made to cost from twelve to twenty cents per pound. there are many breeds of swine highly recommended. some of the varieties of the chinese are the most prolific and have the greatest tendency to fattening of any known. they have formed the basis of the great improvements in the breeds in great britain. farmers will be able to select the best breed from their own knowledge and observation, better than from any directions we can give them. every new variety will be introduced by dealers, and farmers must be cautious how they accept their representations. _age of swine for pork._--it is most profitable and least troublesome, to keep over winter, no swine but breeding sows, to have pigs early in spring, to kill in autumn. of any of the good breeds, they can be made to weigh from to pounds, by the proper time for killing. the practice of keeping swine till eighteen or twenty-four months old, and only fattening them late in the fall and beginning of winter, is very unprofitable. it is best to give pigs about what they will eat, from the time of beginning to feed them until they are slaughtered. this is in every way most economical. it secures fattening in the hot weather in summer, when pork can be made faster and cheaper than at any other time. many farmers begin to fatten their pork, after the season in which it can most rapidly and cheaply be done. hogs having been kept poor, on being fed freely for fattening, become cloyed, and much time is lost, while those that always have had what they would eat, of good wholesome food, always have a good appetite for as much as they need, and not root over and injure more. _food for swine._--they do better shut up in a pen, but where they can get access to the ground. all edible roots are good and all the grains. but grain should be ground or soaked. it pays well to cook all food for swine. boiled potatoes, carrots, beets, and parsnips, are all good. ground feed should be mixed with cooked vegetables. the disposition that swine have to root deep in the ground, indicates the want of something, not found in sufficient quantities in their ordinary food. numerous experiments show that that deficiency is abundantly supplied by having charcoal within their reach. the stories of fattening pork wholly on charcoal, which we find in the books, we do not credit. but that small quantities of it are uniformly healthy for swine, is an established fact. the question of sour food has many respectable advocates. cultivators and writers take different sides of the question, based as they say upon their carefully-tried and noted experiments, one affirming that fermented food is superior, and others that it has done his hogs positive injury. this discrepancy grows out of not carefully distinguishing the different kinds of fermentation, the sweet, the vinous, the acid, and the putrid. the first makes excellent food, the second will do quite well, the third is injurious, and the last absolutely poisonous. as it requires much care and observation to get this right, and mistakes are easy, it is best to take the sure method, give them food in a natural state, ground, and either cooked or fed raw. either will make good pork at a reasonable cost, but cooked food is preferable. sows are prevented from destroying their young by quiet, plenty of food, and little animal food, and but a very little straw in a dry pen, or washing the pig's backs with a strong decoction of aloes. tobacco. this is a plant abhorred by everything but man and the tobacco-worm. its use for chewing and snuffing is happily becoming more and more offensive to refined society, and we hope it may, after a long struggle, go out of use. for those who will cultivate it as an article of commerce, the following brief directions are sufficient. burn over a small bed, on which sow the seed early in march. when the leaves are as large as a quarter of a dollar, transplant them in deep, rich soil, or on new land, in rows three feet apart each way, or four feet one way and two the other. tend as cabbage. it is necessary, twice in the season, to destroy, by hand, the large green worms that feed on this plant. when the plants are from two and a half to three and a half feet high, according to the richness of the soil on which they grow, pick out the head or blossom-buds, except in the few plants you would have go to seed. pinch off also the suckers, or shoots behind the leaves, as they come out. when the leaves are full grown and begin to ripen, which is known by the small, dusky spots appearing on the leaves, cut up the stalks and lay them down singly to wilt; when they are thoroughly wilted, lay them together, that they may sweat for forty-eight hours, then hang them up in a tolerably tight room to dry--hang across poles, one on each side. a sharp stick put through the but of the stalks and laid over the pole, leaving one stalk on each side, is a very good method. when it becomes well dried, pick off the leaves, and tie the stems together in small bunches, and pack away in hogsheads or boxes, in a dry place. we recommend to every agriculturist to cultivate a little tobacco--not for himself or others to chew, snuff, or smoke, but to use in destroying insects. a strong decoction, used in washing animals, will destroy lice on horses and cattle, and ticks on sheep. tobacco-water applied to plants, or trees, will effectually destroy all insects with which they may be infested. boil tobacco-stems or stalks, or the refuse-tobacco of the cigar-makers, until you make a strong decoction, and apply with a syringe, or in any other way, and it will prove more effectual than anything else known. tobacco-stems, stalks, or leaves, laid around peach-trees in the month of may, will protect them from the attacks of the borer. this is also a good manure for peach-trees. tomato. this vegetable is well known, and has recently come to be generally esteemed. it can always be grown without failure, and more easily and at one fourth of the cost of potatoes. its use for cooking, eating raw, and pickling in various forms, is known to all. there are several varieties. the best of all is the large red--not the largest, but the smooth ones: although smaller, they contain more, and are much more conveniently used, than the very large rough or scolloped variety. the large yellow are less liable to decay on the vines, and have less of the tomato taste. the small plum-tomato, both red and yellow, and the pear or bell-shaped, are good for preserving as a common sweetmeat, and for pickling whole. they should be started in early hotbed--in february in the middle states--and transplanted after frosts are over, in rows eight feet apart each way. that distance will leave none too much room for letting in the sun and for the convenience of picking. they will mature on the poorest land; but the amount of the crop is graduated altogether by the richness of the soil, and the care given them. they will produce frequently a bushel to a vine, lying on the ground. but they ripen better, and as the vines are not injured by picking the early ones, they will produce more, by being trained up. a few sticks to hold them up at first, and let them break down over them later, is of no use. train them, and tie up all the principal bunches, and they will be greatly benefited thereby. tied to slats, or any board fence, in a kind of fan-training form, they do very well. in all cities and villages, enough for a large family can be grown on twenty-five feet of board-fence, exposed to the southern or eastern sun, and not occupy the ground a single foot from the fence. drive in nails, and tie up the branches as they grow. removing some of the branches and leaves, and letting in the sun, or placing the fruit on a shingle or stone, hastens its ripening. tools. it is no part of our design to go into any general description of agricultural implements. there are constant changes and improvements, and they are introduced at once to the whole country by the inventors or dealers. we also wish to avoid all participation in the controversies respecting the merits of various new inventions. we have several forms of cultivators, horse-hoes, subsoil-plows, drills, seed-sowers, land-diggers, and drainers, various formed plows, root-cleaners, corn-planters, &c., &c. these possess different degrees of merit; all have their day, and will be superseded by others, in the general advancement that marks the science of soil-culture. we strongly recommend the use of the best tools, especially subsoil-plows, seed-planters, and root-cleaners. always have a tool-house, as much as you do a kitchen. use the best tools; never lay them down but in their proper place; and always clean them before putting them away. keep all the wood-work of tools well painted, and the iron and steel in a condition, by the application of oil and otherwise, to prevent rust. good tools facilitate and cheapen cultivation, and increase the yield of crops, money paid out for such tools is well expended. training. this is a matter that has received much attention from all fruit-growers. the influence of different modes of training and pruning is very great on the bearing qualities of trees. the peculiarities demanded by the various fruit-trees, vines, and bushes, are given under these articles respectively. we give here only some general principles. the health, beauty, and profit, of most fruit-trees depend upon judicious pruning and training. the following are the general objects:-- . to secure regular growth and prevent deformities, and thus promote the health of trees. . to secure a sufficient number of fruit-bearing shoots, and in right locations, and to throw sufficient sap into those shoots to enable them to mature the fruit. with a certain amount of pruning, you may double the quantity of fruit, or destroy half that the trees would have produced if not trained at all. one half of the fruit of any orchard depends upon correct pruning. it also has a great influence upon the quality of fruit. the cherry is almost the only fruit-tree that throws out nearly the right number of branches, and in the right places. it needs a very little direction while young, and afterward only the removal of decaying branches. the quince needs considerable trimming at first; but, the head once formed, it will need very little after-pruning. next comes the plum, needing, perhaps, a little more pruning than the cherry or quince, but much less than the other fruits. the plum is apt to throw out strong branches, in some directions, quite out of proportion with the rest of the top. such need shortening in, to distribute the sap equally through the tree, and thus produce a symmetrical form. this is all the trimming necessary. the roots of a plum-tree are usually stronger than the top, and absorb more than the leaves can digest; hence some of its diseases. the natural remedy would be root-pruning, and leaving the top in its natural state, except shortening-in the disproportioned branches. removing much of the top of a plum-tree would ordinarily prove injurious. the apple needs considerable pruning, but not of the spurs and side-twigs which bear the fruit, but of limbs that grow too thick, and of disproportioned luxuriance. (see under apple.) so the pear must be often slightly pruned to check the too vigorous growth and encourage the too tardy. the peach must be so pruned as to prevent the long bare poles so often seen, and to secure annually the growth of a large number of shoots for next year's bearing, and to check the flow of the sap by cutting off the ends of the growing young shoots, so as to cause the formation on each, of a few vigorous fruit-buds. peach-trees, so pruned, will be healthy and do well for fifty years, and produce a larger number of better peaches than will grow on trees left in the usual way. by a system of pruning that will equalize the growth and strength, the bearing will be general on all the branches of the tree. this will make the fruit more abundant and of better quality. the following six principles--first stated by m. dubreuil, of france, and since presented to the american people in barry's "fruit-garden," and still later in elliott's "fruit-book"--will guide any attentive cultivator into the correct method of pruning and training:-- . the vigor of a tree, subject to pruning, depends, in a great measure, upon the equal distribution of sap in all its branches. . the sap acts with greater force, and produces more vigorous growth on a branch pruned short than on one pruned long. . the sap, tending always to the extremities, causes the terminal shoots to push with more vigor than the laterals. . the more the sap is obstructed in its circulation, the more likely it will be to produce fruit-buds. . the leaves serve to prepare the sap for the nourishment of the tree, and to aid in the formation of fruit-buds. therefore, trees deprived of their foliage are liable to perish, and they are injured in proportion to their defoliation. . when the buds of any shoot or branch do not develop before the age of two years, they can only be forced into activity by very close pruning; and this will often fail, especially in the peach. observe the foregoing, and never cut large limbs from any tree, except in grafting an old tree (and then only graft a part of the top in one year, especially in the pear), and of old, neglected peach-trees, to renew the top, and any careful cultivator can raise an orchard of healthy, beautiful, and profitable trees. there are different forms of training that have gone the rounds of the fruit-books, that are nearly all more fanciful than useful. there are four forms of fan-training, and several of horizontal and conical. the following only are useful:-- _fan-training._--a tree but one year from the graft, or bud, is planted and headed down to within four buds of the ground, the buds so situated as to throw out two shoots on each side (see fan-training, first stage). [illustration: fan-training, st stage.] [illustration: fan-training, d stage.] [illustration: fan-training, d stage.] [illustration: fan-training, complete.] the following season, the two upper shoots are to be cut back to three buds, so as throw out one leading shoot, and one shoot on each side. the two lower shoots are to be cut back to two buds, so as to throw out one leading shoot, and one shoot on the upper side. in this second stage, you will have a tree with five leading shoots on each side (see cut, fan-training, d stage). these shoots form the future tree, and should neither be shortened in, nor allowed to bear fruit this year. each shoot should now be allowed to produce three shoots, one leading one, and two others on the upper side, one near the bottom, and the other half way up the stem. all others should be pinched off when they first appear. at the end of the third year you will have the appearance in the cut (fan-training, third stage). after this it may bear fruit, but not too much, as a young tree so trained, is disposed to over-bearing. these shoots, except the leading ones, should be shortened back; but to what length depends upon the vigor of the tree. this is to be continued and extended as the grower may choose, always preventing the top from becoming too dense, and the shoot too long for a proper flow of sap, and maturity of fruit-buds. a good form, though slightly irregular, is seen in the cut (fan-training, complete). such trees trained against walls, or better, on trellis-work, are beautiful and very productive. [illustration: horizontal training, first stage.] _horizontal training_ is another form contributing to fruitfulness, by regulating the flow of the sap. this is done by preserving an upright leader with lateral shoots at regular distances. to secure this, such shoots as you wish to train must be tied in a horizontal position, and all others pinched off on first appearance. [illustration: horizontal training, fourth year.] the process is simple and easy, continued as long as you please. head in the shoots of these lateral branches to two or three buds and they will bear abundantly. as the growth increases, remove all that are not in the right places, and train all you spare, as before. in the fourth year, you will have trees of the appearance in the cut (horizontal training, fourth year). _conical training._--the quenouille (pronounced _kenoole_) of the french, is the best of all forms of training, especially for the pear. to produce conical standards, plant young trees four or five feet high, and after the first year's growth, head back the top, and cut in the side branches, as in the cut (progressive stages of conical training). [illustration: progressive stages of conical training.] [illustration: conical training complete.] the next season several tiers of side branches will shoot out. the lowest should be left about eighteen inches from the ground, and by pinching off a part, others may be made to grow, at such distances as you may desire. at the end of the second year, the leader is headed back to increase the growth of the side shoots. the laterals will constantly increase, and you must save only a sufficient number. the third or fourth year, the lateral branches may be bent down and tied to stakes. the branches must be tied down from year to year, and the top so shortened in as to prevent too vigorous growth, and throw the sap into the laterals. this may be continued until the tree will exhibit the appearance in the cut (conical training complete). when the tree has become thoroughly formed it will retain its shape without keeping the branches tied. the fan and horizontal training are valuable for fruits that need winter protection, and they are also very ornamental, and enable us to cultivate much fruit on a small place. all these forms of training increase largely the productiveness of fruit-trees. it is recommended for all small gardens and yards, and will pay in growing fruit for market. transplanting. trees should be transplanted in spring in cold climates, and in autumn in warm regions. the top should be lessened about as much as the roots have been by removal. cutting off so large a part of the top as we often see is greatly injurious. trees frequently lose one or two years' growth, by being excessively trimmed when transplanted. the leaves are the lungs of the tree, and how can it grow if they are mostly removed? all injured roots should be cut off smoothly on the lower side, slant out from the tree, and just above the point of injury. places for the trees should be prepared as given under the different fruits and the trees set firmly in them an inch lower than they stood in the nursery. the great point is to get the fine mould very close around all the roots, leaving them in the most natural position. trees dipped in a bucket of soil or clay and water, thick enough to form a coat like paint, just at the time of transplanting, are said to be less liable to die. every transplanted tree should have a stake, and be thoroughly mulched. trees properly transplanted will grow much faster, and bear a year or two earlier, than those that have been carelessly set out. for further remarks on this important matter, see under the different fruits. turnip. this is one of the great root crops of england, and to considerable extent in this country, for feeding purposes. we think it should be displaced, mostly, by beets, carrots, and parsnips. they are more nutritious, as easily raised, and more conveniently fed. the rutabaga is a productive variety, and possesses a good deal of nutriment. the essentials in raising good turnips of most varieties, are very rich soil, worked deep, and finely pulverized. they should stand in rows two feet apart, and one foot apart in the rows. they may be mainly tended with a small cultivator or root-cleaner. english turnips are extensively grown as a second crop on wheat stubble, &c. the soil is highly enriched and the seed sown in rows to allow cultivation. the best method, however, is to turn over old greensward say june , and yard cattle or sheep on it till july , and then harrow thoroughly, and sow the seed broadcast. the yield will usually be large, and they will need very little weeding. if it is not convenient to yard cattle on the turnip-ground, apply fifteen double wagon loads of fine manure with a few bushels of lime to the acre, and the crop will be large. the usual time of sowing turnips is from the th to the th of july. we think the yield is larger when sown by the middle of june. the only way to get good early turnips is to sow them very early. the flat, or common field turnip, is easily grown on new land, or on any rich soil tolerably free from weeds and not infested with worms. wheat. this is the most highly esteemed of all grains, and has more enemies, and is more affected in its growth by the weather, than any other. it has engaged more attention in the study and writings of agriculturists than all other cereals. the outlines only of the results of the vast field of investigation and experiment on wheat-growing can be presented here. there are doubts respecting the origin of wheat. the more general and probable theory is, that it is the product of the cultivation, for a series of years, of a species of grass called Ægilops. this is indigenous on the shores of the mediterranean, in those countries which, from time immemorial, have been the sources of our wheat. no one has ever found wild wheat in any country; it would be as strange as a wild cabbage or turnip. but the practical question is, how can wheat be most surely and profitably grown? the first requisite is a suitable soil. a clay or limestone soil is usually considered best, as there is much lime in wheat-bran. such soil is better than light sand, or some of the poorer loams. but the large yields of wheat on the western prairies, and on the rich alluvial soils of california river-bottoms, shows that the best of wheat may grow on other than clay lands. the truth of the matter respecting soils for wheat, is, that any soil good for corn, potatoes, or a garden, may, with proper tillage, produce the best of wheat. experience in england, and in all the old countries on the continent of europe, shows us that old land may be made to yield as large crops of wheat as the virgin soil of the new world. the production of wheat at suitable intervals, for a century, on the same land, need not lessen its power to produce good wheat in large quantities. wheat is a plant demanding a rich soil, worked deep, and not too wet: these three things will produce a good crop on any land. we say to all farmers, raise wheat on any land that you can afford to prepare. first, if your land has not a dry subsoil, underdrain it thoroughly: water standing in the soil, and becoming cold or stagnant, is very injurious to wheat. drainage is hardly more essential to any other crop than this. next, plow deep. subsoiling, on most lands, is very important to wheat. manure highly, and put the manure between the soil and the subsoil: this attracts the roots deep into the soil, which is the greatest protection against winter-killing, and the effects of excessive drought. render the surface of the soil as fine as possible. a finely-pulverized soil is as essential for wheat as for onions. coarse lumpy soils are so open to the action of the atmosphere as to render the growth unequal, and cause the roots of the plant to grow too near the surface, for dry weather or the cold of winter. always apply lime to wheat-lands, unless it be a limestone soil--not too much at once, but a few bushels to the acre annually. on no other crop do wood-ashes and dissolved potash, applied in the coarse manures, pay so well as on wheat. sowing the seed is next in importance. the three questions in sowing are the manner, the depth, and the quantity. shall it be drilled or sowed broadcast? broadcast sowing requires more seed, and is liable to be less evenly covered; hence, we should prefer drilling. the depth of the seed is to be determined by the texture of the soil. careful experiments have shown, that on clay land there is no perceptible difference in the growth of the plants, at any of the stages, in seed sown at any depth, from a slight covering to three or four inches. at a greater depth, it comes up less regularly, and in every way is in a worse condition. but on a light soil, it is, no doubt, best to plant it from four to six inches deep. on very loose soils, as muck land and alluvial soils, the roots of the plants grow too near the surface, and are exposed to being thrown out by winter frosts, and destroyed. the remedy is deep sowing and thorough rolling. the quantity of seed now more generally sown is from five pecks to two bushels per acre. rich land will not bear so much seed as the poorer. it will grow so thick as to render the straw tender, and expose it to lodge and ruin the crop. wheat tillers, or thickens up at the bottom, making many stalks from a single seed, quite as much as any other grain; hence, we believe that if it be sown at a proper time on very rich land, three pecks to the acre would be better than more. such sowing would make more vigorous plants, with much stronger roots, which would withstand cold and unfavorable weather better than any other. we should still more strongly recommend another form of sowing, practised by some european cultivators with great success: it is, to drill in wheat, in rows two feet apart, and give it a spring cultivation; this gives great strength to the plants, destroys the weeds, promotes rapid growth by stirring the soil, and favors tillering, so that the rows will meet, and give a great growth. we doubt not this will yet be extensively adopted in this country. all wheat-land had better be rolled after sowing, and light lands, with a very heavy roller. light sandy land, having a little clay mixed in as recommended under soils, well manured, the seed planted six inches deep, and the whole rolled with a heavy roller, will bear great crops of wheat. as it respects fall or spring wheat, no positive directions can be given, adapted to all climates. in many localities it is of little use to sow winter wheat, as it is very uncertain. in other localities winter wheat almost always succeeds best. this question then must be determined by circumstances. the time of sowing winter wheat varies in different climates, according as it may be exposed to depredations of worms and insects in the fall. farmers are not liable to mistake in this matter. spring wheat, in all climates, should be sowed very early. it is hardly possible in all the middle and northern states to prepare the ground in spring, and get in wheat in suitable season. the yield of a crop of spring wheat, depends materially upon the growth in the cool and moist weather of spring, when it spreads and its roots get a strong hold before the hot weather, that hurries up the stalks and ears to maturity. hence plow in the fall, and harrow in the wheat, as early as possible, in the spring. _the varieties_ of wheat are numerous and uncertain. in the state of maine, an intelligent cultivator, in , recommended java wheat as having a very stiff straw, and producing a very heavy yield. the mediterranean wheat is also a favorite variety. club wheat has also had a great run, and is now very popular at the west. but of varieties no one can be confident. we notice in the discussions of the best agriculturists of england and scotland, that they have doubts of the proper names of some of the best varieties. in a certain rich part of illinois we know an unusually popular wheat, sold at high prices for seed, under the name of _mud club_, as being much better than the ordinary club. we happened to learn that it was nothing but common club wheat, sown on rather low ground, where it happened to grow very fair that season. it is only occasionally that such tricks are successfully played, but it is true that many varieties are the result of extra good or chance cultivation. the celebrated chidham wheat, named from a place where it was successfully grown, was also called hedge wheat, because a head found growing in a hedge was supposed to be the origin of it. now it is not probable that that head was the only one of the kind in all the country, and it would by no means be identified in all localities. and as all wheat is the result of the cultivation of the Ægilops or some other wild grass, it shows us that varieties may be produced by cultivation. great importance is therefore to be attached to frequently changing seed; especially bringing it from colder into warmer climates, and changing from one soil to a very different one. thus seed raised on hard hills is highly valuable for alluvial soils. thus the efforts to introduce so many new varieties from the dominions of the sultan, will prove of vast advantage to wheat culture in america. so let us be constantly importing the best from great britain and the british provinces and from california, and all the extremes of our own country. such wheats are worth more for seeds than others, but any extravagant prices for seed wheat, under the idea of almost miraculous powers of production, are unwise. it would be useless to go into a more extended notice of varieties, as some do best in certain localities, and all are rapidly spread through the dealers, and by the influence of agricultural periodicals. the best time to harvest wheat is when the straw below the head has turned yellow, and the grain is so far out of the milk as not to be easily mashed between the fingers, but before it has become hard. the grain is heavier and of better quality, and wastes far less in harvesting, than when allowed to ripen and dry standing in the field. drying in good shocks is far better than drying before cut. some have gone to extremes in early cutting, and harvested their wheat while in the milk, and suffered serious loss in its weight. we sometimes have rain in harvest, which causes all the wheat in a large region to grow before getting it dry enough to house. a remedy is, to go right on and cut your wheat, rain or shine, and put it up, without binding, in large cocks of from three to five bushels, packing together as close as possible, however wet, and cover the centre with a bundle of wheat to shed rain. it will dry out without growing; and, although the straw will be somewhat mouldy, the grain will be perfectly good, even when it has been so wet as to make the top of the shocks perfectly green with grown wheat. this process is of great value in a wet season. to prepare seed-wheat for sowing, soak it for a day or two in very strong brine; skim off all that rises; remove the grain from the brine, and while wet, sift on fresh-slaked lime until it slightly coats the whole grain; put on a little plaster to render the sowing more pleasant to the hand. wheat will lie in this condition for days without injury. so prepared, it will exhibit a marked superiority in the growing crop. _enemies_ of wheat are numerous, and various remedies are proposed. the wire-worm is sometimes very destructive. wheat planted with a drill, with a heavy cast-iron roller behind each tooth, will not suffer by them; they will only work in the mellow ground between the drills. drive over a field of wheat exposed to injury from wire-worms with a common ox-cart, and you will notice a marked difference; wherever the cartwheel passed over, the wheat remains unharmed by the wire-worm, while on either side much of it will be destroyed. but the wheat-midge, or weevil, is the great enemy, rendering the cultivation of wheat in some localities useless. one precaution is, to get the wheat forward so early and fast as to have it out of the way before they destroy it. this is often done by early sowing, high fertilization, and warm land. sometimes wheat is too late for them, and then a good crop is secured. but this can only be relied on in cool, moist climates. our hot, dry seasons are not suitable for wheat, late enough to be out of the way of the weevil. the great remedy for this enemy is his destruction. burning the chaff at thrashing is useless for this purpose. the worm has entered the ground to remain for the winter, before the wheat is harvested. we know of but one way to kill the weevil, and that is, by insect lamps or torches in the field in the evening. the flies are inactive until evening, when, from dusk till eight or nine o'clock, they deposite their eggs in the blossoms and chaff of the wheat. now, it is ascertained that this fly, like many other insects, will fly several rods to a light. twenty-five torches at equal distances, in a ten-acre lot of wheat, would be near enough. nearly all the flies in a field would fly to them in half an hour. these need be lighted only on pleasant evenings, as weevils will not work in wind or rain, and they only commit their depredations during the time the wheat is in blossom. let twenty-five racks, or holders of some kind, be put up on ten acres of wheat, and have pitch-pine put in them and ignited, after the manner of night fishermen, and let this be done a few nights, during the blossoming season of wheat, and the fly will be destroyed and the crop saved, in the worst weevil-season that ever occurred. in the absence of pitch-pine, some other light can be devised--as, balls of rags dipped in turpentine and sulphur, as in a torchlight procession. something can be devised that will burn brilliantly for an hour: this will not cost fifty cents an acre, during the weevil-season, and will prove almost a perfect remedy. rust in wheat is only avoided by getting your wheat to maturity before the rust strikes it. if it is nearly mature, and the rust strikes it, cut it and shock it up in the shortest time possible. wheat is a great subject in agriculture, on which many volumes have been written, and on which it is customary to write long articles. we trust the recapitulation of what we have said, in the following brief rules, is more valuable to the practical wheat-culturist than any large volume could be. analyses of wheat-bran and straw, the philosophy of rust in wheat, the length, size, and color of the weevil, and the great diversity of opinions on wheat-growing, are not what practical men regard. the one question is, how can i grow wheat surely and profitably? the following rules answer this important question, rendering failure unnecessary:-- . make your soil very rich, putting the manure as deep as convenient. apply lime, wood-ashes, and potash, the latter dissolved and applied to your coarse manure. . under-drain thoroughly all wheat-land, except that on a dry subsoil. . plow deep and subsoil all wheat-lands, except those on a gravelly or sandy bottom. . plant wheat from two to six inches deep, according to the texture of the soil--deepest on the lightest soil. roll after sowing, and roll light lands with a heavy roller. . always get your wheat in early, and in a finely-pulverized soil, and be careful not to seed too heavy. . sow seed that has not long been grown in your vicinity, and steep it two days, before sowing, in a brine, with as much salt as the water will dissolve, sifting fine, fresh lime over the wet grain, after removing it from the brine; put on, also, plaster-of-paris or wood-ashes. . harvest wheat before the straw becomes dry, or the grain hard. . destroy weevil by lights in the field, on the pleasant evenings during the blossoming season. whortleberry. of this excellent berry there are several varieties, distinguished by the height of the bushes, or by the color of the fruit. the main divisions are, the _swamp_ and the _plain whortleberries_. the swamp variety has been transferred to gardens, in michigan, and has proved valuable. the shrub attains considerable size, producing fruit more surely and regularly than in its wild state, and of an improved quality and larger size. it may be grown as well as currants all over the country. the small plain variety is usually found on sandy plains, and is a great bearer of fruit everywhere highly prized. it may be transferred to all our gardens, by making a bed of sand six inches or a foot deep, or it may be so acclimated as to grow well in any good garden soil, and become a universal luxury. we recommend it as a standing fruit for all gardens. willow. the cultivation of willow for osier-work is pursued to some extent in this country, and might be greatly increased. at one fourth the present prices, it would pay as well as any other branch of agriculture. some varieties will grow on land of little value for other purposes, and all on any good land. willows will take care of themselves after the second or third year. the more usual method of planting is of slips, ten inches long, set in mellow ground about eight inches deep, in straight rows four or six feet apart, and one foot apart in the rows--except the green willow, which is put two feet apart in the row. they should be kept clear of weeds for the first two years. the osiers are to be cut when the bark will peel somewhat easily, and may be put through a machine for the purpose, invented by j. colby, of jonesville, vermont, at the rate of two tons per day, removing all the bark, without injuring the wood. different opinions prevail respecting the varieties most profitable for cultivation; they vary in different localities. the manufacture of willow-ware will increase with the increased production of osiers, and the consequent reduction of their cost. wine. we have elsewhere stated that our only hope for pure wine in this country is in domestic manufacture. we shall here give two recipes that will insure better articles than are now offered under the name of imported wines. _currant wine._--this, as usually manufactured, is a mere cordial, rather than a wine. the following recipe gathered from the _working farmer_, is all that need be desired, on making wine from currants, cherries, and most berries, that are not too sweet. take clean ripe currants and pass them between two rollers, or in some other way, crush them, put them in a strong bag, and under a screw or weight, and the juice will be easily expressed. to each quart of this juice, add three pounds of _double-refined_ loaf sugar (no other sugar will do) and water enough to make a gallon. or in a cask that will hold thirty gallons, put thirty quarts of the juice, ninety pounds of the sugar, and fill to the bung with water. put in the bung and roll the cask until you can not hear the sugar moving on the inside of the barrel, when it will all be dissolved. next day roll it again, and place it in a cellar of very even temperature, and leave the bung out to allow fermentation. this will commence in two or three days and continue for a few weeks. its presence may be known by a slight noise like that of soda water, which may be heard by placing the ear at the bung hole. when this ceases drive the bung tight and let it stand six months, when the wine may be drawn off and bottled, and will be perfectly clear and not too sweet. no alcohol should be added. putting in brandies or other spirituous liquors prevents the fermentation of wine, leaving the mixture a mere cordial. the use of any but double-refined sugar is always injurious, and yet many will persist in using it, because it is cheaper. the reason for discarding, for wine-making, all but double-refined sugar, may be easily understood. common sugar contains one half of one per cent. of gum, that becomes fetid on being dissolved in water. the quantity of this gum in the sugar, for a barrel of wine, is considerable--enough to give a bad flavor to the wine. this is avoided by using double-refined sugar, which contains no gum. this recipe is equally good for cherry wine. the following recipe for making _elderberry wine_, produces an article that the best judges in new york and elsewhere have pronounced equal to any imported wine. its excellence has made quite a market for elderberries in new york. these berries are so easily grown, and the wine so excellent, that their growth will be encouraged throughout the country. it is not only an exceedingly palatable wine, but is better for the sick, than any other known. to every quart of the berries, put a quart of water and boil for half an hour. bruise them from the skin and strain, and to every gallon of the juice add three pounds of _double-refined_ sugar and one quarter of an ounce of cream of tartar and boil for half an hour. take a clean cask and put in it one pound of raisins to every three gallons of the wine, and a slice of toasted bread covered over with good yeast. when the wine has become quite cool, put it into the cask, and place it in a room of even temperature to ferment. when the fermentation has fully ceased, put the bung in tight. no brandy or alcohol of any kind will be necessary. any one following this recipe _exactly_, will be surprised at the excellence of the wine that will be the result. of _grape wines_, there are several varieties, whose peculiarities are determined mainly by the process of manufacturing. a full treatment of the subject would require a volume. the following brief directions will insure success in making the most desirable grape wines: . let the grapes become thoroughly ripe before gathering, to increase their saccharine qualities and make a stronger wine. all fruits make much better wine for being fully ripe. cut the bunches with a sharp knife and move carefully to avoid bruising. spread them in a dry shade to evaporate excessive moisture. . assort the grapes before using, removing all decayed, green, or broken ones, using only perfect berries. . mash the grapes with a beater in a tub, or by passing them through a cider-mill. "_treading the wine vat_" was the ancient method of mashing the grapes, not now practised except in some parts of europe. . to make light wines put them at once into press, as apple pomace in a cider-press. . to make higher-colored wines let the pomace stand from four to twenty-four hours before pressing. they will be dark in proportion to the length of time the pomace stands. . to make wines resembling the austere wines of france and spain, let the pomace stand until the first fermentation is over, called "fermenting in the skin." . the "must" or grape-juice is to be put into casks, the larger the better, but only one pressing should be put into one cask. put in a cellar of even temperature, not lower than fifty nor higher than sixty-five degrees of fahrenheit, and where there is plenty of air. prepare the cask by burning in it a strip of paper or muslin, dipped in melted sulphur, and suspended by a wire across the bung-hole. fermentation commences very soon and will be completed within a few days or weeks according to the temperature. its completion is marked by the cessation of the escape of gas. no sugar, brandy, or any other substance, should be added to the grape-juice to make good wine. they are all adulterations. the wine having settled after this fermentation, may be racked off into clean casks, prepared as before. a second fermentation will take place in the spring. it should not be bottled until after this second fermentation, as its expansion will break the glass. while in the casks they should always be kept full, being occasionally filled from a small cask, kept for the purpose. when this fermentation ceases, bottle and cork tight, and lay the bottles on their sides, in a cool cellar. the wine will improve with age. sometimes it remains on the lees without racking and is drawn off and bottled. frequently the wine does not become wholly clear and needs fining. various substances are used for this purpose, as fish-glue, charcoal, starch, rice, milk, &c. the best of these substances is charcoal, or the white of eggs and milk. add by degrees according to the foulness of the wine. an ounce of charcoal to a barrel of wine is an ordinary quantity; or a pint of milk with the white of four eggs--more or less according to the state of the wine. _rhine wine_ of germany may be made as follows:-- take good catawba or isabella grapes, and pound or grind them so as to crush every seed and leave them in that state for twenty-four hours. fumigate the cask by burning strips of muslin dipped in sulphur as in the preceding recipe. strain or press out the juice into the cask filling it and keeping it _entirely full_, that impurities may run out of the bung, during fermentation. in the spring prepare another cask in the same way and rack it off into that. when a year old bottle it and it is fit for use. sweeter wines than any of the above are made by adding sugar to the must before fermentation. it should be _double-refined_ sugar, and still it is an adulteration. woodlands. one of the greatest errors of american farmers is their neglect to cultivate groves of trees for woodlands, in all suitable places. our primeval forests have been wantonly destroyed, and the country is not yet old enough to feel the full force of neglecting to replenish them, by new groves, in suitable localities. on the points of hills, rough stony places, sides of steep hills, ravines that can not be cultivated, and by the side of all the highways of the land, trees should be cultivated: in some places fruit-trees, but in most places forest-trees. the advantages would be manifold; they would afford shade for cattle, groves for birds, which would destroy the worms; they would break off the cold winds from crops, cattle, fruit-orchards, and dwellings; would greatly enrich the soil by their annual foliage, afford abundance of fuel at the cheapest rates, give much good timber, provide for fine maple-sugar, and be the greatest ornaments of the rural districts. only think of the comfort and beauty of fifty miles square, in which not a street could be found which had not trees on each side, not more than twelve feet apart. when such trees should become twenty years old, the pedestrian or the carriage could move all day in the shade, listening to the music of the birds, and inhaling the aroma of the foliage or flowers. to every owner or occupant of the soil we say, plant trees. poultry. fattening and preparing poultry for the market are important items in rural economy. plenty of sweet food and pure water given at regular times, and the fowls not allowed to wander, are the requisites of successful fattening. the best feed for fattening fowls is oat-meal. next to this is corn-meal. three things are essential in food for fattening animals, flesh-forming, fat-forming, and heat-producing substances. of all the grains ordinarily fed, oat-meal contains these in the best proportions, and next to this comes yellow indian corn meal. fat is good, but must be given in a hard form as in mutton or beef suet. rice boiled in sweet milk, fed for a day or two before killing fowls is said to render the flesh of a white delicate color. at least one third of the value of poultry in the market depends upon properly preparing and transporting it. . do not feed fowls at all for twenty-four hours before killing them. . kill by cutting the jugular vein with a sharp pen-knife, just under the sides of the head, and hang them up to bleed. . pick carefully and very clean, without tearing the skin, and without scalding. singe slightly if need be. dip in hot water for three or four seconds and in cold water half a minute. . do not open the breast at all, but remove the entrails from the hind opening, leaving the gizzard in its place. put no water in but wipe out the blood with a dry cloth. leaving the entrails in is injurious, tending to sour the meat and taint it with their flavor. . do not allow your poultry to freeze by any means. for transporting to a distant market, pack in shallow boxes never containing over three hundred pounds each and in clean straw without chaff or dust, and in such a manner that no two fowls will touch each other. . geese and ducks look better with the heads cut off. but all fowls having their heads removed must have the skin drawn down and tightly tied over the end of the neck bone. this will preserve them well and give a good appearance. to preserve fowls for a long time in a perfectly sweet condition for family use, fill them half full or more with pulverized charcoal, which will act as an absorbent and prevent every particle of taint. agricultural periodicals. the following list of agricultural periodicals embraces all that have come to our knowledge. in a subsequent edition we shall endeavor to render the list more complete, and give the special design of each, with the frequency of publication, form, price, editor's and publisher's names, etc. name of paper. place of publication. american farmers' magazine _new york city._ american farmer _baltimore, md._ alabama planter _mobile, ala._ american agriculturist _new york city._ canadian agriculturist _toronto, c. w._ cultivator _albany, n. y._ cotton planter _montgomery, ala._ cultivator _columbus, ohio._ cultivator _boston, mass._ california farmer _san francisco, cal._ country gentleman _albany, n. y._ farmer and planter _pendleton, s. c._ granite farmer _manchester, n. h._ genesee farmer _rochester, n. y._ horticulturist _albany, n. y._ homestead _hartford, ct._ journal of agriculture _chicago, ill._ maine farmer _augusta, me._ michigan farmer _detroit, mich._ magazine of horticulture _boston, mass._ massachusetts ploughman _boston, mass._ new england farmer _boston, mass._ new jersey farmer _trenton, n. j._ north carolina planter _raleigh, n. c._ ohio valley farmer _cincinnati, ohio._ ohio farmer _cleveland, ohio._ prairie farmer _chicago, ill._ rural new yorker _rochester, n. y._ rural southerner _ellicott's mills, md._ rural american _utica, n. y._ southern planter _richmond, va._ southern cultivator _augusta, ga._ southern homestead _nashville, tenn._ valley farmer _st. louis, mo._ vermont stock journal _middlebury, vt._ wisconsin farmer _madison, wisc._ working farmer _new york city._ index. acclimation; agricultural periodicals, list of; almonds; animals, rules for feeding; apples; apple-tree wood, analysis of; apple-worm, remedy for; apricot; artichoke; ashes; asparagus; atmosphere, important auxiliary in the growth of plants; balm; barberry; barley; barns; bean, coffee; beans; bees and beehives; beets; bene plant; berries, preservation of; birds useful in destroying insects; blackberry; black currant; black raspberry; board fences; bones, their value as a fertilizer; , borden's milk condensation; borecale; borer, preventive and remedy for; breck's book of flowers; breeding in, deteriorating effects of; broccoli; broom-corn; brussels sprouts; buckthorn; buckwheat; budding; buffalo berry; bulbous flowering roots; bushes, eradication of noxious; butter; butter dairy; butter-making, essential rules for; butternuts; cabbage; calves; canker-worm, remedy for; cans; , carrots; caterpillars, how destroyed; cauliflower; celery; charcoal; cheese; cheese-house; cherries; chestnuts; chickens; - churn, best form of; churning, brief rules for; cider; citron; cleft-grafting; clover; , coffee bean; colts, milk from the dairy excellent food for; conical training; corn; corn, broom; cottage, economical plan of a laborer's; cotton; cotton plant, analysis of; country residence, plan of; cows; cranberry; cucumber; curculio on plum-trees, unfailing remedy for; currants; currants, black; currant wine, recipe for making; dairy; declension of fruits, cause of and remedy for; dill; downing's list of gooseberries; drains; ducks; dwarfing fruit-trees, process of; early fruits and vegetables, how produced; eastern states, varieties of apples adapted to; eastwood's work on cranberry culture; egg plant; eggs, how to test and preserve them; elderberry; elderberry wine, a recipe for making; endive; fan training of trees; farm-buildings; feeding animals; fences; fennel; figs; fish; flax; flowering shrubs; flowers; foot-paths, circular, how laid out; foot-rot in animals, remedy for; forest trees; fowls; fruit; fruits, declension of; fruits, early, how produced; fruits, preservation of; fruits, manner of gathering; fruit-trees, location of; fruit-trees, how to induce productiveness in; garden; garlic; gathering fruits; geese; gooseberry; grafting; grafting-wax, how made; grapes; grape-wine, method of making; grasses; greenhouse; guano, care requisite in the application of; guenon's treatise on the milking qualities of cows; gypsum; , hams, preservation of; harrowing; hay, making and preserving of; hedge; hedge-pruning; hedges, shrubs suitable for the formation of; , , - hemp; hens; herbaceous flowers; hive, proper construction of; hoeing; hogs; hogstye, plan of; hogstye, manure from the; hops; hops, method of curing; horizontal training; horse; horseradish; hotbeds; hothouse; houses; hybrids; inarching; insects; iron-filings, beneficial to pear-trees irrigation; italian farmhouse, plan of; kale; labels for fruit-trees; laborer's cottage, plan of; landscape gardens; lawton blackberry; layering; laying in trees; leeks; lemon; lettuce; licorice; lime, value of as a fertilizer; limes; liquid manures, value of; location; locust-trees; manures; maple-trees, best method of tapping; marjorum; marl; melons; mice, protection of fruit-trees from in winter; milk, condensation and preservation of; milking qualities of cows, infallible marks of; - milking, rules for; , milk, value of for horses; millet; mint; moisture, retention of, leading benefit of manure; mulberry; mulching; mushrooms; muskmelons; mustard; nasturtium; nectarine; new fruits; new rochelle (lawton) blackberry northern states, varieties of apples suitable for; nursery; nuts; oaks; oats; okra; olives; onions; oranges; orchards; orchards, favorable locations for; osage orange; oxen; parsley; parsnips; pastures; peas; peach;; pear;; pear-orchard, plan of; pennyroyal mint; peppers; peppergrass; peppermint; picket fences; piggery, plan of; plaster of paris; plowing; plum; plum, analysis of; pomegranate; potato; potato-rot, cause of and remedy for; potato, sweet; poultry; preserving fruits and vegetables protection of trees for transplanting , prunes, domestic; pruning and training; pruning peach-trees; pumpkin; quince; rabbits, a protection of fruit-trees from in winter; radish; rail fences; raspberry; raspberry, black; rennet, how prepared; rhubarb; rice; rocks, methods of removing; rollers; root crops; root-pruning, method of; saffron; sage; salsify or vegetable oyster; scraping land; seeds; shade-trees; sheep; sheep-manure, value of; shepherdia, or buffalo berry; skippers in cheese; soils; sorgho, or chinese sugarcane; south, apples adapted to the climate of the; spearmint; spinage or spinach; squash; stable; stilton cheese, method of making; strawberry; subsoil plowing; succory; sugar; summer-house, plan of; summer savory; sunflower; sweet potato; swine; tobacco; tomato; tongue-grafting; tools; training and pruning; transplanting; turnip; van mon's theory of the production of new fruits; vegetables, early; vegetable oyster; vineyards; , wagon-house; walls, stone; watering gardens in dry seasons, benefits of; watermelons; wax-moth, protection against; weevil, or wheat midge, remedy for; western states, varieties of apples suitable for the; , wheat; white blackberry; whortleberry; willow; wine; wines, adulteration of imported; winter lettuce; wood-ashes, value of as a manure; woodlands; woolly aphis, remedy for; * * * * * agricultural books, published by a. o. moore, (late c. m. saxton & co.) fulton street, new york, _and sent by mail to any part of the united states on receipt of the price._ american farmers' encyclopedia. a work of great value $ dadd's modern horse doctor dadd's anatomy and physiology of the horse do. do. do. do. colored plates dadd's american cattle doctor the stable book the horse's foot, and how to keep it sound; paper cts., cloth bridgeman's gardener's assistant bridgeman's florist's guide, half cloth cts., cloth bridgeman's gardener's instructor, half cloth cts., cloth bridgeman's fruit cultivator, half cloth cts., cloth field's hand-book of pear culture cole's american fruit book cole's american veterinarian buist's american flower garden directory buist's family kitchen gardener browne's american bird fancier; paper cts., cloth dana's muck manual, cloth dana's prize essay on manures stockhardt's chemical field lectures norton's scientific and practical agriculture johnston's catechism of agricultural chemistry (for schools) johnston's elements of agricultural chemistry and geology johnston's lectures on agricultural chemistry and geology downing's landscape gardening fessenden's complete farmer and gardener fessenden's american kitchen gardener nash's progressive farmer richardson's domestic fowls richardson on the horse richardson on the hog richardson on the pests of the farm richardson on the hive and honey bee milburn and stevens on the cow and dairy husbandry skinner's elements of agriculture topham's chemistry made easy breck's book of flowers leuchar's hot houses and green houses chinese sugar cane and sugar making turner's cotton planter's manual allen on the culture of the grape allen's diseases of domestic animals allen's american farm book allen's rural architecture pardee on the strawberry peddar's farmer's land measurer phelp's bee-keeper's chart guenon's treatise on milch cows; paper cts., cloth domestic and ornamental poultry, plain $ . , colored plates randall's sheep husbandry youatt, randall, and skinner's shepherd's own book youatt on the breed and management of sheep youatt on the horse youatt, martin, and stevens, on cattle youatt and martin on the hog barry's fruit garden munn's practical land drainer stephens' book of the farm, complete, illustrations the american architect, or plans for country dwellings thaer, shaw, and johnson's principles of agriculture smith's landscape gardening, parks, and pleasure grounds weeks on the bee: paper cts., cloth wilson on cultivation of flax miner's american bee-keeper's manual quinby's mysteries of bee-keeping cottage and farm bee-keeper elliott's american fruit grower's guide the american florist's guide hyde on the chinese sugar cane, paper every lady her own flower gardener; paper cts., cloth the rose culturist; paper cts., cloth history of morgan horses moore's rural hand books, vols. rabbit fancier; paper cts., cloth reemelin's vine-dresser's manual neill's fruit, flower, and vegetable gardener's companion browne's american poultry yard browne's field book of manures hooper's dog and gun skilful housewife; paper cts., cloth chorlton's grape grower's guide sorgho and imphee, sugar plants white's gardening for the south eastwood on the cranberry persoz on the culture of the vine boussingault's rural economy thompson's food of animals; paper cts., cloth richardson on dogs; paper cts., cloth liebig's familiar letters to farmers cobbett's american gardener waring's elements of agriculture blake's farmer at home rural essays fish culture flint on grasses warder's hedges and evergreens the first book of farming [illustration: the farm equipment--plants, soils, animals, tools, buildings.] the first book of farming by charles l. goodrich _farmer_ expert in the bureau of plant industry, united states department of agriculture, washington, d.c. _illustrated_ garden city new york doubleday, page & company , by doubleday, page & company published march, printed in the united states at the country life press, garden city, n.y. preface the most successful farmers of the present day are those who work in harmony with the forces and laws of nature which control the growth and development of plants and animals. these men have gained their knowledge of those laws and forces by careful observation, experiment and study. this book is a result of the author's search for these facts and truths as a student and farmer and his endeavor as a teacher to present them in a simple manner to others. the object in presenting the book to the general public is the hope that it may be of assistance to farmers, students and teachers, in their search for the fundamental truths and principles of farming. in the first part of the book an attempt has been made to select the most important and fundamental truths and principles underlying all agriculture and to present them in the order of their importance, beginning with the most important. an endeavor has been made to present these truths to the reader and student in a simple and interesting manner. as far as possible each advance step is based on a previously stated fact or truth. a number of side truths are introduced at various places. a number of simple experiments have been introduced into the text in the belief that they will make the work more interesting to the general reader, and will aid the student in learning to make simple investigations for himself. the author recommends all who use the book to perform the experiments and to make the observations, and so come actively in touch with the work. the observations begin on the farm. the author considers the plant the central and all-important factor or agent on the farm. the root is regarded as the most important part of the plant to itself, and consequently to the plant grower. the general truths or principles which state the conditions necessary for the growth and development of plant roots are regarded as the foundation truths or fundamental principles of all agriculture. these truths are as follows: the roots of farm plants need for their best growth and development: a firm, mellow soil. a moist soil. a ventilated soil. a warm soil. a soil supplied with plant food. the first two chapters lead the reader quickly through logical reasoning to these fundamental truths, on which the remainder of the work is based. a study of soils is made in connection with the root studies, as the two are so closely related. after the study of roots and soils the other parts of the plant are considered in the order of their importance to the farmer or plant grower. the aim is always to get at fundamental facts and principles underlying all agricultural and horticultural practice. the author regards the conditions necessary to root growth and development as the important factor constituting soil fertility, and in the last ten chapters takes up the discussion of certain farm operations and practices and their effects on these necessary conditions, and consequently their effect on the fertility of the soil. the author extends gratitude to all who have in any way assisted in the preparation of this book, whether through advice, preparation of the text, preparation of the illustrations, or any other way in which he has received assistance. c.l. goodrich. glenndale, prince george co., maryland, _january_ , . contents part i general principles underlying plant culture chapter page i.--introduction to plants ii.--roots uses of roots to plants habit of growth of roots conditions necessary for root growth iii.--soils relation of soil to plants classification of soils how were soils made? soil texture iv.--relation of soils to water importance of water to plants sources of soil water attitude of soils toward water: percolation absorption from below power to hold water the effect of working soils when wet v.--forms of soil water free water capillary water film water vi.--loss of soil water by surface wash by percolation and leaching by evaporation by transpiration how to check these losses vii.--soil temperature how soils are warmed how soils lose heat how to check loss of heat conditions which influence soil temperature value of organic matter viii.--plant food in the soil ix.--seeds conditions necessary for sprouting seed testing how the seeds come up use of cotyledons and endosperm x.--seed planting depth of planting: operation of planting planting machines seed classification transplanting xi.--spading and plowing spading the soil plowing why we spade and plow parts of a plow characteristics of a good plow the furrow slice how deep to plow "breaking out the middles" ridging the land time to plow bare fallow xii.--harrowing and rolling harrowing: why we harrow time to harrow types of harrows rolling xiii.--leaves facts about leaves the uses of leaves to plants: transpiration starch making digestion of food conditions necessary for leaf work how the work of leaves is interfered with xiv.--stems what are stems for? how the work of the stem may be interfered with xv.--flowers function of flowers parts of flowers functions of the parts: cross pollination value of a knowledge of the flowers fruit part ii soil fertility as affected by farm operations and farm practices chapter page xvi.--a fertile soil physical properties: power to absorb and hold water power of ventilation power to absorb and hold heat biological properties nitrogen-fixing germs nitrifying germs denitrifying germs chemical properties: nitrogen in the soil phosphoric acid in the soil potash in the soil lime in the soil great importance of physical properties maintenance of fertility xvii.--soil water importance of soil water necessity of soil water sources and forms of soil water too much water not enough water loss of soil water how some farm operations influence soil water hoeing, raking, harrowing and cultivating manures and soil water methods of cropping and soil water selection of crops with reference to soil water xviii.--the after-cultivation of crops loss of water by evaporation loss of water through weeds saving the water time to cultivate tools for after-cultivation hilling and ridging xix.--farm manures the functions of manures and fertilizers classification importance of farm manures barn or stable manure loss of value checking the losses applying the manure to the soil proper condition of manure when applied composts xx.--farm manures, concluded green-crop manures: functions benefits character of best plants for green-crop manuring the time for green-manure crops leguminous green-manure crops non-leguminous green-manure plants xxi.--commercial fertilizers the raw materials sources of nitrogen sources of phosphoric acid sources of potash sources of lime xxii.--commercial fertilizers, continued mixed fertilizers: what they are many brands safeguard for the farmer low grade materials inflating the guarantee valuation low grade mixtures buy on the plant food basis xxiii.--commercial fertilizers, concluded home mixing of fertilizers kind and amount to buy the crop the soil the system of farming testing the soil xxiv.--rotation of crops systems of cropping the one crop system rotation of crops benefits derived from rotation of crops the typical rotation conditions which modify the rotation general rules length of rotation xxv.--farm drainage how surplus water affects fertility indications of a need of drainage drains: surface drains open ditch drains covered drains or under drains influence of covered drains on fertility location of drains: grade tile drains glossary list of illustrations the farm equipment--plants, soils, animals, tools, buildings _frontispiece_ figure facing page . specimen plants for study . the first effort of a sprouting seed . germinating seeds with roots . to show that plant roots take water from the soil . to show that plant roots take food from the soil . a radish root, from which the stored food has been used to help produce a crop of seeds . a sweet-potato root producing new plants . sweet-potato roots . soy-bean roots . a plow stopped in the furrow, to show what it does to the roots of plants when used for after-cultivation . a corn-plant ten days after planting the seed . to show where growth in length of the root takes place . radish seeds sprouted on dark cloth . to show how water gets into the roots of plants . to show osmose . to show that roots need air . comparison of fresh and boiled water . comparison of moist sand and puddled clay . comparing soils . water-test of soils . to show what becomes of the water taken from the soil by roots . percolation experiment. to show the relative powers of soils to take in water falling on the surface . bottles used in place of the lamp chimneys in figs. and . capillarity of soils. to show the relative powers of soils to take water from below . water-absorbing and water-holding powers of soils . capillary tubes. to show how water rises in small tubes or is drawn into small spaces . capillary plates . a cone of soil to show capillarity . to show the relative amounts of film-moisture held by coarse and fine soils . to show the effect of a soil mulch . soil temperature experiment . charts showing average temperature of a set of dry and wet soils during a period of five days . to show the value of organic matter . soy-bean roots, showing nodules or tubercles . garden-pea roots, showing tubercles or nodules . to show that seeds need water for germination . to show that seeds need air for germination . to show that seeds need air for germination . a seed-tester: two plates and a moist cloth . a seed-tester: a plaster cast with cavities in the surface for small seeds . germinating corn-kernel and bean . to show how the bean-plant gets up . to show how the corn-plant gets out of the soil . to show the use of cotyledons . to show the use of the kernel to the young corn-plant . to show how deeply seeds should be planted . operations of seed-planting . a collection of planting machines . spading-fork and spade . a wood beam-plow . a slip-nose share and a slip-nose . a straight knife coulter . an iron beam-plow with rolling coulter and double clevis . a rolling cutter-harrow . spring-toothed harrows . spike-toothed harrows . a coulter-toothed harrow . a plank harrow . to show transpiration . amount of transpiration . to show that growing leaves contain starch . to show that starch disappears from the leaf when the plant is placed in the dark . to show that sunlight is necessary for starch-making by leaves . to show that chlorophyl is necessary for starch formation in the leaf . to show the giving off of gas by leaves, and that sunlight is necessary for it . seedling radishes reaching for light . elm leaves injured by the "imported elm-tree leaf-beetle," a chewing insect . a horse-chestnut stem, showing leaves, buds, and scars, where last year's leaves dropped off . an underground stem. buds show distinctly . flower of cherry . flower of apple . pistil and stamen of flowering raspberry . flower of buttercup . a magnolia flower showing central column of pistils and stamens . flowers of squash . flower of a lily . bud and flower of jewel-weed or "touch-me-not" . pistillate flower and perfect flower of strawberry . a crop of cowpeas . red clover . soy-beans in young orchard . a young alfalfa plant just coming into flower . cross-sections of stone-drains . cross-section of a pole-drain and of a tile-drain . a collection of drainage tools . a poorly laid tile-drain and a properly graded tile-drain part i general principles underlying plant culture the first book of farming part i _general principles underlying plant culture_ chapter i introduction to plants our object in reading and studying this book is to find out some facts that will help those of us who are thinking of going into farming and gardening as a business or recreation to start right, and will also help those of us that are already in the business to make our farms and gardens more productive. in order to make the book of greatest value to you, i would urge you not only to read and study it, but also to make the excursions suggested and to perform the experiments. in other words, it will be of much greater value to you if you will make the observations and investigations and find out for yourselves the important facts and principles rather than simply take statements of the book unquestioned. a very good time to begin this work is during the latter part of the summer, when the summer crops are ripening and the fall and winter crops are starting into growth. so suppose we begin our study with a visit to some farm in early september, to bring to mind the many things a farmer works with, the many things he has to think about and know about. as we approach the farm we will probably see first the farm-house surrounded by shade trees, perhaps elms or maples, with the barns and other buildings grouped nearby. as we pass up the front walk we notice more or less lawn of neatly clipped grass, with flower beds bordering the walk, or we may find a number of chickens occupying the front yard, and the flower beds, placed in red half-barrels, set upon short posts. in the flower beds we may find petunias, nasturtiums, geraniums, rose bushes and other flowering plants. going around the house, we come upon the dairy, with its rack of cans and pans set out for the daily sunning and airing. nearby is a well with its oaken bucket; at the barn we find the farmer, and he very kindly consents to go with us to answer questions. in the barn and sheds we find wagons, plows, harrows, seed drills, hoes, rakes, scythes and many other tools and machines. passing on to the fields, we go through the vegetable garden, where are carrots, parsnips, cabbages, beets, celery, sage and many other vegetables and herbs. on the right, we see a field of corn just ready to harvest, and beyond a field of potatoes. on the left is the orchard, and we are invited to refresh ourselves with juicy apples. in the field beyond the hired man is plowing with a fine team of horses. in the south we would find a field of cotton and one of sweet potatoes, and perhaps sugar cane or peanuts. we have not failed to notice the pig weeds in the corn field nor the rag weed in the wheat stubble, and many other weeds and grasses in the fence corners. perhaps we may meet the cows coming from pasture to the stable. all the way we have been trampling on something very important which we will notice on our way back. in this field we find a coarse sandy soil, in the next one a soil that is finer and stiffer. the plow is turning up a reddish soil. in the garden we find the soil quite dark in color. but these are only a few of the things we have found. if you have used your notebook you will discover that you have long lists of objects which you have noticed, and these may be grouped under the following headings: animals, plants, soils, buildings, tools, etc. the farmer, then, in his work on the farm deals with certain agents, chief among which are soils, plants, animals, tools and buildings. other agents which assist or retard his work according to circumstances are the air, sunlight, heat, moisture, plant food, microscopic organisms called bacteria, etc. these agents are controlled in their relations to one another by certain forces which work according to certain laws and principles of nature. to work intelligently and to obtain the best results the farmer must become familiar with these agents and must work in harmony with the laws and principles which control them. let us take up the study of some of these groups of agents, beginning with the most important or central one on the farm. which do you think is the most important group? some will say "tools." the majority will probably say, study the soil first, "because we must work the soil before we can grow good crops." some few will mention "plants." this last is right. the farm animals are dependent on plants for food. we till or work the soil to produce plants. plants are living, growing things, and certain requirements or conditions are necessary for their growth and development; we cannot intelligently prepare the soil for plant growth until we know something about the work of plants and the conditions they need to do their work well. for our first study of plants let us get together a number of farm and garden plants. say, we have a corn plant, cotton, beet, turnip, carrot, onion, potato, grass, geranium, marigold, pigweed, thistle, or other farm or garden plants. in each case get the entire plant, with as much root as possible. do these plants in any way resemble one another? all are green, all have roots, all have stems and leaves, some of them have flowers, fruit, and seeds, and the others in time will produce them. why does the farmer raise these plants? for food for man and animals; for clothing; for ornamental purposes; for pleasure, etc. [illustration: fig. .--specimen plants for study.] [illustration: fig. . the first effort of a sprouting seed is to send a root down into the soil.] [illustration: fig. . germinating seeds produce roots before they send a shoot up into the air.] which part of any or all of these farm plants is of greatest importance to the plant itself? i am sure that you will agree that the root is the part most important to the plant itself, for if any part of a plant be separated from the root, that part ceases growth and will soon die, unless it is able to put out new roots. but the root from which the plant was cut will generally send up new shoots, unless it has nearly completed its life work. when a slip or cutting is placed in water or in moist sand it makes a root before it continues much in growth. when a seed is planted its first effort is to send a rootlet down into the soil. experiment to see if this is true by planting slips of willow, or geranium, or by planting corn or beans in a glass tumbler of soil, or in a box having a glass side, placing the seeds close to the glass; then watch and see what the seed does. figs. and . which of the parts of the plant is of greatest importance to the farmer or any plant grower, or to which part of a plant should the plant grower give his best attention? you will probably mention different parts of the different plants in answering this question. for instance, some will say, "the seed is the most important part of the wheat plant to the farmer, for that is what the wheat is grown for." "the fruit is the most important part of the apple plant for the same reason." "the leaves and grain of the corn, the leaves of the cabbage, are the important parts of these plants and should have the best attention of the grower, because they are the parts for which he grows the plants." but you must remember that all of these parts are dependent on the root for life and growth, as was brought out in the answer to the last question, and that if the farmer or plant grower desires a fine crop of leaves, stems, flowers, fruit or seeds, he must give his very best attention to the root. judging from the poor way in which many farmers and plant growers prepare the soil for the plants they raise, and the poor way they care for the soil during the growth of the plants, they evidently think least of, and give least attention to, the roots of the plants. then, in studying our plants, which part shall we study first? why, the roots, of course: to find out what they do for the plant, how they do this work, and what conditions are necessary for them to grow and to do their work well. chapter ii roots uses of roots to plants of what use are roots to plants, or, what work do they perform for the plants? if the reader has ever tried to pull up weeds or other plants he will agree that one function of the roots of plants is to hold them firmly in place while they are growing. =experiment.=--pull two plants from the soil, shake them free of earth, and place the roots of one in water and expose the roots of the other to the air. notice that the plant whose roots are exposed to the air soon wilts, while the one whose roots were placed in water keeps fresh. you have noticed how a potted plant will wilt if the soil in the pot is allowed to become dry (see fig. ), or how the leaves of corn and other plants curl up and wither during long periods of dry weather. it is quite evident roots absorb moisture from the soil for the plant. =experiment.=--plant some seeds in tumblers or in boxes filled with sand and in others filled with good garden soil. keep them well watered and watch their progress for a few weeks (see fig. ). the plants in the garden soil will grow larger than those in the sand. the roots evidently must get food from the soil and those in the good garden soil get more than those in the poorer sand. another important function of plant roots then is to take food from the soil for the plant. you know how thick and fleshy the roots of radishes, beets and turnips are. well, go into the garden and see if you can find a spring radish or an early turnip that has sent up a flower stalk, blossomed and produced seeds. if you are successful, cut the root in two and notice that instead of being hard and fleshy like the young radish or turnip, it has become hollow, or soft and spongy (see fig. ). evidently the hard, fleshy young root was packed with food, which it afterwards gave up to produce flower stalk and seeds. a fourth use of the root, then, is to store food for the future use of the plant. =experiment.=--plant a sweet potato or place it with the lower end in a tumbler of water and set it in a warm room. observe it from day to day as it puts out new shoots bearing leaves and roots (see fig. ). break these off and plant them in soil and you have a number of new plants. if you can get the material, repeat this experiment with roots of horse-radish, raspberry, blackberry or dahlia. from this we see that it is the work of some roots to produce new plants. this function of roots is made use of in propagating or obtaining new plants of the sweet potato, horse-radish, blackberry, raspberry, dahlia and other plants. [illustration: fig. . to show that plant-roots take water from the soil, the plants in _a_ are suffering from thirst. _b_ has sufficient water.] [illustration: fig. . to show that plant roots take food from the soil. both boxes were planted at the same time.] [illustration: fig. . a radish root, from which the stored food has been used to help produce a crop of seeds. notice the spindle shaded seed-vessels.] [illustration: fig. . a sweet-potato root producing new plants.] we have now learned five important things that roots do for plants, namely: roots hold plants firmly in place. they absorb water from the soil for the plants. they absorb food from the soil for the plants. some roots store food for the future use of the plant. some roots produce new plants. how do the roots do this work? to answer this question it will be necessary to study the habit of growth of the roots of our plants. habit of growth of roots the proper place to begin this study is in the field or garden. so we will make another excursion, and this time we will take with us a pick-axe or mattock, a shovel or two, a sharp stick, a quart or half-gallon pitcher, and several buckets of water. arrived in the field, we will select a well-developed plant, say, of corn, potato or cotton. then we will dig a hole about six feet long, three feet wide, and five or six feet deep, close to the plant, letting one side come about four or five inches from the base of the plant. it will be well to have this hole run across the row rather than lengthwise with it. then with the pitcher pour water about the base of the plant and wash the soil away from the roots. gently loosening the soil with the sharpened stick will hasten this work. in this way carefully expose the roots along the side of the hole, tracing them as far as possible laterally and as deep as possible, taking care to loosen them as little as possible from their natural position. (see figs. and .) having exposed the roots of one kind of plant to a width and depth of five or six feet, expose the roots of six or eight plants of different kinds to a depth of about eighteen inches. as this may require more time than we can take for it in one day, it will be well to cover the exposed roots with some old burlaps or other material until we have them all ready, in order to keep them from drying and from injury. when all is ready we will study the root system of each plant and answer these four questions: in what part of the soil are most of the roots? how deep do they penetrate the soil? how near do they come to the surface of the soil? how far do they reach out sidewise or laterally from the plant? to the first question, "in what part of the soil are most of the roots?" you will give the following answers: "in the upper layer." "in the surface soil." "in the softer soil." "in the darker soil." "in the plowed soil." these are all correct, but the last is the important one. most of the roots will be formed in that part of the soil that has been plowed or spaded. the second question, "how deep do the roots penetrate the soil?" is easily answered. roots will be found penetrating the soil to depths of from two to six feet or more. (see fig. .) the author has traced the roots of cowpea and soy bean plants to depths of five and six feet, corn roots four and five feet, parsnips over six feet. the sweet-potato roots illustrated in fig. penetrated the soil to a depth of over five feet. the roots of alfalfa or lucern have been traced to depths of from thirteen to sixteen feet or more. how near to the surface of the soil do you find roots? main side or lateral roots will be found within two or three inches of the surface, and little rootlets from these will be found reaching up as near the surface as there is a supply of moisture. after a continued period of wet weather, if the soil has not been disturbed, roots will be found coming to the very surface and even running along the top of the soil. as to the fourth question, how far do roots reach out sidewise or laterally from the plant? you will find roots extending three, four, five and even six or more feet from the plant. they have numerous branches and rootlets, which fill all parts of the upper soil. tree roots have been found thirty or forty feet in length. we started on this observation lesson to find out something about the habit of growth of roots, so that we could tell how the roots do their work for the plant. but before going on with that question, let us stop right here and see whether we cannot find some very important lessons for the farmer and plant grower from what we have already seen. is a knowledge of these facts we have learned about roots of any value to the farmer? let us examine each case and see. of what value is it to the farmer to know that the larger part of the roots of farm plants develop in that part of the soil that has been plowed or spaded? it tells him that plowing tends to bring about the soil conditions which are favorable to the growth and development of roots. therefore, the deeper he plows, the deeper is the body of the soil having conditions best suited for root growth, and the larger will be the crop which grows above the soil. of what value is it to the farmer to know that the roots of farm plants penetrate to depths of five or six feet in the soil? to answer this question it will be necessary for us to know something of the conditions necessary for root growth. so we will leave this till later. of what value is it to the farmer to know that many of the roots of his farm plants come very near the surface of the soil? it tells him that he should be careful in cultivating his crop to injure as few of these roots as possible. in some parts of the country, particularly in the south, the tool commonly used for field cultivation is a small plow. this is run alongside of the row, throwing the soil from the crop, and then again throwing the soil to the crop. suppose we investigate, and see how this affects the roots of the crop. [illustration: fig. . sweet potato roots. the great mass of the roots is in the plowed soil. many of them reach out to feet from the plant. some reach a depth of more than feet, and others come to the very surface of the soil.] [illustration: fig. . soy-bean roots showing location, extent and depth of root-growth.] let us visit a field where some farmer is working a crop with a plow, or get him to do it, for the sake of the lesson. we will ask him to stop the plow somewhere opposite a plant, then we will dig a hole a little to one side of the plow and wash away the soil from over the plow (see fig. ), and see where the roots are. we will find that the plow-point runs under many strong-feeding lateral roots and tears them off, thus checking the feeding power of the plant, and consequently checking its growth. now, if we can get a cultivator, we will have that run along the row and then wash away the loosened soil. it will be found that few, if any, of the main lateral roots have been injured. is it of any value to the farmer to know that roots extend laterally three to six feet and more on all sides of the plant, and that every part of the upper soil is filled with their branches and rootlets? this fact has a bearing on the application of manures and fertilizers. it tells the farmer that when he applies the manure and fertilizers to the soil he should mix the most of them thoroughly all through the soil, placing only a little directly in the row to start the young plant. to find out how quickly the roots reach out into the soil, wash the soil away from some seedlings that have been growing only a few days, say, seven, ten and fifteen. (see fig. .) from our observations, then, we have learned the important lessons of deep, thorough plowing, careful shallow after-cultivation, and that fertilizers should be well mixed with the soil. we are now ready to go back to our study of the habit of growth of roots, and can perhaps tell something of how the root does its work for the plant. it is very easy to see how the roots hold the plant firmly in place, for they penetrate so thoroughly every part of the soil, and to such distances, that they hold with a grip that makes it impossible to remove the plant from the soil without tearing it free from the roots. it is also on account of this very thorough reaching out through the soil that the roots are able to supply the plant with sufficient moisture and food. we have doubtless observed that most of these roots are very slender and many very delicate. how did they manage to reach out into the soil so far from the plant? or where does the root grow in length? to answer this question i will ask you to perform the following experiment: =experiment.=--place some kernels of corn or other large seeds on a plate between the folds of a piece of wet cloth. cover with a pane of glass or another plate. keep the cloth moist till the seeds sprout and the young plants have roots two or three inches long. now have at hand a plate, two pieces of glass, by inches, a piece of white cloth about by inches, a spool of dark thread, and two burnt matches, or small slivers of wood. a shallow tin pan may be used in place of the plate. lay one pane of glass on the plate, letting one end rest in the bottom of the plate and the other on the opposite edge of the plate. at one end of the piece of cloth cut two slits on opposite sides about an inch down from the end and reaching nearly to the middle. wet the cloth and spread it on the glass. take one of the sprouted seeds, lay it on the cloth, tie pieces of thread around the main root at intervals of one-quarter inch from tip to seed. tie carefully, so that the root will not be injured. place the second pane of glass over the roots, letting the edge come just below the seed, slipping in the slivers of wood to prevent the glass crushing the roots. wrap the two flaps of the cloth about the seed. pour some water in the plate and leave for development. (fig. .) a day or two of waiting will show conclusively that the lengthening takes place at the tip only, or just back of the tip. is this fact of any value to the farmer? yes. the soft tender root tips will force their way through a mellow soil with greater ease and rapidity than through a hard soil, and the more rapid the root growth the more rapid the development of the plant. this teaches us again the lesson of deep, thorough breaking and pulverizing of the soil before the crop is planted. we have learned that the roots grow out into the soil in search of moisture and food, which they absorb for the use of the plant. how does the root take in moisture and food? many people think that there are little mouths at the tips of the roots, and that the food and moisture are taken in through them. this is not so, for examination with the most powerful microscopes fails to discover any such mouths. sprout seeds of radish, turnip or cabbage, or other seeds, on dark cloth, placed in plates and kept moist. notice the fuzz or mass of root hairs near the ends of the tender roots of the seedlings (fig. ). plant similar seed in sand or soil, and when they have started to grow pull them up and notice how difficult it is to remove all of the sand or dirt from the roots. this is because the delicate root hairs cling so closely to the soil grains. the root hairs are absorbing moisture laden with plant food from the surface of the soil particles. the root hairs are found only near the root tips. as the root grows older, its surface becomes tougher and harder, and the hairs die, while new ones appear on the new growth just back of the root tips, which are constantly reaching out after moisture and food. the moisture gets into the root hairs by a process called osmose. the following interesting experiment will give you an idea of this process or force of osmose. [illustration: fig. . a plow stopped in the furrow, to show what it does to the roots of plants when used for after-cultivation. notice the point of the plow under the roots.] [illustration: fig. . a corn-plant ten days after planting the seed. to show how quickly the roots reach out into the soil. some of the roots were over inches long.] =experiment.=--procure a wide-mouthed bottle, an egg, a glass tube about three inches long and a quarter-inch in diameter, a candle, and a piece of wire a little longer than the tube. remove a part of the shell from the large end of the egg without breaking the skin beneath. this is easily done by gently tapping the shell with the handle of a pocket-knife until it is full of small cracks, and then, with the blade of the knife, picking off the small pieces. in this way remove the shell from the space about the size of a nickel. remove the shell from the small end of the egg over a space about as large as the end of the glass tube. next, from the lower end of the candle cut a piece about one-half inch long. bore a hole in this just the size of the glass tube. now soften one end of the piece of candle with the hole in it and stick it on to the small end of the egg so that the hole in the candle comes over the hole in the egg. heat the wire, and with it solder the piece of candle more firmly to the egg, making a water-tight joint. place the glass tube in the hole in the piece of candle, pushing it down till it touches the egg. then, with the heated wire, solder the tube firmly in place. now run the wire down the tube and break the skin of the egg just under the end of the tube. fill the bottle with water till it overflows, and set the egg on the bottle, the large end in contact with the water (fig. ). in an hour or so the contents of the egg will be seen rising in the glass tube. this happens because the water is making its way by osmose into the egg through the skin, which has no openings, so far as can be discovered. if the bottle is kept supplied with water as fast as it is taken up by the egg, almost the entire contents of the egg will be forced out of the tube. in this way water in which plant food is dissolved enters the slender root hairs and rises through the plant. =experiment.=--this process of osmose may also be shown as follows (fig. ): remove the shell from the large end of an egg without breaking the skin, break a hole in the small end of the egg and empty out the contents of the egg; rinse the shell with water. fill a wide-mouthed bottle with water colored with a few drops of red ink. fill the egg-shell partly full of clear water and set it on the bottle of colored water. colored water will gradually pass through the membrane of the egg and color the water in the shell. prepare another egg in the same way, but put colored water in the shell and clear water in the bottle. the colored water in the shell will pass through the skin and color the water in the bottle. sugar or salt may be used in place of the red ink, and their presence after passing through the membrane may be detected by taste. conditions necessary for root growth we have learned some of the things that the roots do for plants and a little about how the work is done. the next thing to find out is: what conditions are necessary for the root to do its work? we know that a part of the work of the root is to penetrate the soil and hold the plant firmly in place. therefore, it needs a firm soil. we know that the part of the root which penetrates the soil is tender and easily injured. therefore, for rapid growth the root needs a mellow soil. we know that part of the work of the root is to take moisture from the soil. therefore, it needs a moist soil. we know that part of the work of the root is to take food from the soil. therefore, it needs a soil well supplied with plant food. we know that roots stop their work in cold weather. therefore, they need a warm soil. another condition needed by roots we will find out by experiment. =experiment.=--take two wide-mouthed clear glass bottles (fig. ); fill one nearly full of water from the well or hydrant; fill the other bottle nearly full of water that has been boiled and cooled; place in each bottle a slip or cutting of wandering jew (called also inch plant, or tradescantia, and spiderwort), or some other plant that roots readily in water. then pour on top of the boiled water about a quarter of an inch of oil--lard oil or cotton-seed oil or salad oil. this is to prevent the absorption of air. in a few days roots will appear on the slip in the hydrant water, while only a very few short ones, if any, will appear in the boiled water, and they will soon cease growing. why is this? to answer this question, try another experiment. take two bottles, filled as before, one with hydrant water and the other with boiled water; drop into each a slip of glass or a spoon or piece of metal long enough so that one end will rest on the bottom and the other against the side of the bottle, and let stand for an hour or so (fig. ). at the end of that time bubbles of air will be seen collecting on the glass or spoon in the hydrant water, but none in the boiled water. this shows us that water contains more or less air, and that boiling the water drives this air out. the cutting in the boiled water did not produce roots because there was no air in it and the oil kept it from absorbing any. =experiment.=--into some tumblers of moist sand put cuttings of several kinds of plants that root readily (fig. ), geranium, tradescantia, begonia, etc. put cuttings of same plants into tumblers filled with clay that has been wet and stirred very thoroughly, until it is about the consistency of cake batter. keep the sand and puddled clay moist; do not allow the clay to crack, which it will do if it dries. the cuttings in the sand will strike root and grow, while most, if not all, those in the clay will soon die. the reason for this is that the sand is well ventilated and there is sufficient air for root development, while the clay is very poorly ventilated, and there is not sufficient air for root growth. these experiments show us that to develop and do their work roots need air or a well-ventilated soil. we have found the conditions which are necessary for the growth and development of plant roots, namely: a firm, mellow soil. a moist soil. a soil supplied with available plant food. a warm soil. a ventilated soil. these are the most important facts about plant growth so far as the plant grower is concerned. in other words, these conditions which are necessary for root growth and development are the most important truths of agriculture, or they are the foundation truths or principles upon which all agriculture is based. having found these conditions, the next most important step is to find out how to bring them about in the soil, or, if they already exist, how to keep them or to improve them. this brings us, then, to a study of soils. [illustration: fig. . to show where growth in length of the root takes place. forty hours before the photograph was taken the tip of the root was ¼ inch from the lowest thread. the glass cover was taken from this in order to get a good picture of the root.] [illustration: fig. . radish seeds sprouted on dark cloth. to show root hairs.] [illustration: fig. . to show how water gets into the roots of plants. water passed up into the egg through the skin, or membrane, and forced the contents up the glass tube until it began to overflow.] [illustration: fig. . to show osmose (see page ).] chapter iii soils the soil considered agriculturally, is that part of the earth's crust which is occupied by the roots of plants and from which they absorb food and moisture. relation of soil to plants we have learned that plant roots penetrate the soil to hold the plant in a firm and stable position, to absorb moisture and with it plant food. we learned also that for roots to do these things well, the soil in which they grow must be mellow and firm, and must contain moisture and plant food, air must circulate in its pores and it must be warm. how can we bring about these conditions? to answer this question intelligently it will be necessary for us to study the soil to find out something about its structure, its composition, its characteristics; also, how it was made and what forces or agencies were active in making it. are these forces acting on the soil at the present time? do they have any influence over the conditions which are favorable or unfavorable to plant growth? if so, can we control them in their action for the benefit or injury of plants? we will begin this soil study with an excursion and a few experiments. go to the field. examine the soil in the holes dug for the root lessons, noticing the difference between the upper or surface soil and the under or subsoil. examine as many kinds of surface soils and subsoils as possible, also decayed leaf mould, the black soil of the woods, etc. if there are in the neighborhood any exposed embankments where a road has been cut through a hill, or where a river or the sea water has cut into a bank of soil, visit them and examine the exposed soils. =experiment.=--place in separate pans, dishes, plates, boxes, or on boards, one or two pints each of sand, clay, decayed vegetable matter or leaf mould or woods soil, and garden soil. the soil should be fresh from the field. examine the sand, clay and leaf mould, comparing them as to color; are they light or dark, are they moist or not? test the soils for comparative size of particles by rubbing between the fingers (fig. ), noticing if they are coarse or fine, and for stickiness by squeezing in the hand and noting whether or not they easily crumble afterwards. =experiment.=--take samples, about a teaspoonful, of sand, clay and leaf mould. dry them and then place each in an iron spoon or on a small coal shovel and heat in stove to redness. it will be found that the leaf mould will smoke and burn, and will diminish in amount, while the sand and clay will not. =experiment.=--take two wide-mouthed bottles; fill both nearly full of water. into one put about a teaspoonful of clay and into the other the same amount of sand; shake both bottles thoroughly and set on table to settle (fig. ). it will be found that the sand settles very quickly and the clay very slowly. as the result of our three experiments we will find something as follows: sand is light in color, moist, coarse, not sticky, settles quickly in water, and will not burn. clay is darker in color, moist, very fine, quite sticky, settles slowly in water, and will not burn. leaf mould or humus is very dark in color, moist, very fine, slightly sticky, and burns when placed in the fire. =experiment.=--we now have knowledge and means for making simple tests of soils. repeat the last three experiments with the garden soil. we will find, perhaps, that it is dark in color and some of it burns away when placed in the fire, therefore it contains organic matter or decaying vegetable matter or humus, as it is called. this sample has perhaps fine particles and coarse particles; part of it will settle quickly in water while part settles very slowly, and it is sticky. therefore we conclude that there are both clay and sand in it. if we shake a sample of it in a bottle of water and let it settle for several days, we can tell roughly from the layers of soil in the bottom of the bottle the relative amounts of sand and clay in the soil. also if we weigh a sample before and after burning we can tell roughly the amount of organic matter in the soil. test a number of soils and determine roughly the proportions of sand, clay and organic matter in them. =experiment.=--take the pans of soil used in our first soil experiment and separate the soils in the pans into two parts by a trench across the centre on the pan. now wet the soil in one side of the pan and stir it with a stick or a spoon, carefully smooth the surface of the soil in the other side of the pan and pour or sprinkle some water on it, but do not stir it. set the pans aside till the soils are dry. this drying may take several days and in the meantime we will study the classification of soils. [illustration: fig. . to show that roots need air. bottle _a_ was supplied with fresh water, and bottle _b_ with water that had been boiled to drive the air out and then cooled.] [illustration: fig. . bottle _a_ contains fresh water, bottle _b_ contains boiled water. notice the air bubbles in bottle _a._] [illustration: fig. . tumblers _a_ and _c_ contained moist sand, _b_ and _d_ contained puddled clay. cuttings in _b_ and _d_ died, because there was not sufficient ventilation in the clay for root-development.] classification of soils soil materials and soils are classified as follows: _stones._--coarse, irregular or rounded rock fragments or pieces of rock. _gravel._--coarse fragments and pebbles ranging in size from several inches in diameter down to / inch. _sand._--soil particles ranging from / of an inch down to / of an inch in diameter. sand is divided into several grades or sizes. coarse sand / to / of an inch. medium sand / to / of an inch. fine sand / to / of an inch. very fine sand / to / of an inch. these grades of sand correspond very nearly with the grains of granulated and soft sugar and fine table salt. _silt._--fine soil particles ranging from / to / of an inch in diameter. it feels very fine and smooth when rubbed between the fingers, especially when moist. a good illustration of silt is the silicon used for cleaning knives, a small amount of which can be obtained at most any grocery store. by rubbing some of this between the fingers, both dry and wet, one can get a fair idea of how a silty soil should feel. silt when wet is sticky like clay. _clay._--the finest of rock particles, / to / of an inch in diameter, too small to imagine. clay when wet is very soft, slippery and very sticky. yellow ochre and whiting from the paint shop are good illustrations of clay. _humus_, or decaying vegetable and animal matter. this is dark brown or almost black in color--decaying leaves and woods soil are examples. soils composed of the above materials: _sands or sandy soils._--these soils are mixtures of the different grades of sand and small amounts of silt, clay and organic matter. they are light, loose and easy to work. they produce early crops, and are particularly adapted to early truck, fruit and bright tobacco, but are too light for general farm crops. to this class belongs the so-called norfolk sand. this is a coarse to medium, yellow or brown sand averaging about five-sixths sand and one-sixth silt and clay and is a typical early truck soil found all along the eastern coast of the united states. "it is a mealy, porous, warm sand, well drained and easily cultivated. in regions where trucking forms an important part of agriculture, this soil is sought out as best adapted to the production of watermelons, canteloupes, sweet potatoes, early irish potatoes, strawberries, early tomatoes, early peas, peppers, egg plant, rhubarb and even cabbage and cauliflower, though the latter crops produce better yields on a heavier soil." a very similar sand in the central part of the country is called miami sand and, on the pacific coast, fresno sand. these names are given to these type soils by the bureau of soils of the united states department of agriculture. _loams or loamy soils_, consist of mixtures of the sands, silt and clay with some organic matter. the term loam is applied to a soil which, from its appearance in the field and the feeling when handled, appears to be about one-half sand and the other half silt and clay with more or less organic matter. these are naturally fine in texture and quite sticky when wet. they would be called clay by many on account of their stickiness. they are good soils for general farming and produce good grain, grass, corn, potatoes, cotton, vegetables, etc. _sandy loams_, averaging about three-fifths sand and two-fifths silt and clay. these soils are tilled easily and are the lightest desirable soil for general farming. they are particularly adapted to corn and cotton and in some instances are used for small fruits and truck crops. _silt loam_ consists largely of silt with a small amount of sand, clay, and organic matter. these soils are some of the most difficult to till, but when well drained they are with careful management good general farming soils, producing good corn, wheat, oats, potatoes, alfalfa and fair cotton. _clay loams._--these soils contain more clay than the silt loams. they are stiff, sticky soils, and some of them are difficult to till. they are generally considered the strongest soils for general farming. they are particularly adapted to wheat, hay, corn and grass. _gravelly loams_ are from one-fourth to two-thirds coarse grained; the remaining fine soil may be sandy loam, silt or clay loam. they are adapted to various crops according to the character of the fine soil. some of them are best planted to fruit and forest. _stony loam._--like the gravelly loam the stony loams are one-fourth to three-fourths sandy, silty or clay loam, the remainder being rock fragments of larger size than the gravel. these fragments are sometimes rough and irregular and sometimes rounded. the stones interfere seriously with tillage, and naturally the soils are best planted with forest or fruit. _clay soils._--clay soils are mixtures of sand, silt, clay and humus, the clay existing in quite large quantities, there being a greater preponderance of the clay characteristics than in the clay loams; they are very heavy, sticky, and difficult to manage. some clay soils are not worth farming. those that can be profitably tilled are adapted to wheat, corn, hay and pasture. _adobe soils._--these are peculiar soils of the dry west. they are mixtures of clay, silt, some sand and large amounts of humus. their peculiar characteristic is that they are very sticky when wet and bake very hard when dry and are, therefore, very difficult to manage, though they are generally very productive when they are moist enough to support crops. _swamp muck_ is a dark brown or black swamp soil consisting of large amounts of humus or decaying organic matter mixed with some fine sand and clay. it is found in low wet places. _peat_ is also largely vegetable matter, consisting of tough roots, partially decayed leaves, moss, etc. it is quite dense and compact and in some regions is used for fuel. how were soils made? as a help in finding the answer to this question collect and examine a number of the following or similar specimens: _brick._--take pieces of brick and rub them together. a fine powder or dust will be the result. _stones._--rub together pieces of stone; the same result will follow, except that the dust will be finer and will be produced with greater difficulty because the stones are harder. some stones will be found which will grind others without being much affected themselves. _rock salt or cattle salt._--this is a soft rock, easily broken. place on a slate or platter one or two pieces about the size of an egg or the size of your fist. slowly drop water on them till it runs down and partly covers the slate, then set away till the water dries up. fine particles of salt will be found on the slate wherever the water ran and dried. this is because the water dissolved some of the rock. _lime stone._--this is harder. crush two samples to a fine powder and place one in water and the other in vinegar. water has apparently no effect on it, but small bubbles are seen to rise from the sample in vinegar. the vinegar which is a weak acid is slowly dissolving the rock. the chemists tell us water will also dissolve the limestone, but very slowly. there are large areas of soil which are the refuse from the dissolving of great masses of limestone. we find that the rocks about us differ in hardness: they are ground to powder when rubbed together, some are easily dissolved in water, others are dissolved by weak acids. geologists tell us that the whole crust of the earth was at one time made up of rocks, part of which have been broken down into coarse and fine particles which form the gravel, sand and clay of our soils. the organic matter of our soils has been added by the decay of plants and animals. several agencies have been active in this work of breaking down the rocks and making soils of them. if we look about we can perhaps see some of this work going on now. _work of the sun._--examine a crockery plate or dish that has been many times in and out of a hot oven, noticing the little cracks all over its surface. most substances expand when they are heated and contract when they are cooled. when the plate is placed in the oven the surface heats faster than the inner parts, and cools faster when taken out of the oven. the result is that there is unequal expansion and contraction in the plate and consequently tension or pulling of its parts against each other. the weaker part gives way and a crack appears. if hot water is put into a thick glass tumbler or bottle, the inner surface heats and expands faster than the outer parts and the result is tension and cracking. if cold water be poured on a warm bottle or piece of warm glass, it cracks, because there is unequal contraction. in the early part of a bright sunny afternoon feel of the surface of exposed rocks, bricks, boards, or buildings on which the sun has been shining. examine them in the same way early the next morning. you will find that the rocks are heated by the sun just as the plate was heated when put into the oven, and when the sun goes down the rocks cool again. this causes tension in the rocks and little cracks and checks appear in them just as in the heated plate, only more slowly. this checking may also be brought about by a cool shower falling on the sun heated rocks just as the cool water cracked the warm glass. many rocks if examined closely will be found to be composed of several materials. these materials do not expand and contract alike when heated and cooled and the tendency for them to check is greater even than that of the plate. this is the case with most rocks. [illustration: fig. .--comparing soils.] [illustration: fig. .--water test of soils. bottle _a_ contains sand and water, bottle _b_ clay and water. the sand settles quickly, the clay very slowly.] _work of rain._--rain falling on the rocks may dissolve a part of them just as it dissolved the rock salt; or, working into the small cracks made by the sun, may wash out loosened particles; or, during cold weather it may freeze in the cracks and by its expansion chip off small pieces; or, getting into large cracks and freezing, may split the rock just as freezing water splits a water pitcher or the water pipes. _work of moving water._--visit some neighboring beach or the banks of some rapid stream. see how the waves are rolling the sand and pebbles up and down the beach, grinding them together, rounding their corners and edges, throwing them up into sand beds, and carrying off the finer particles to deposit elsewhere. now visit a quiet cove or inlet and see how the quiet water is laying down the fine particles, making a clay bed. notice also how the water plants along the border are helping. they act as an immense strainer, collecting the suspended particles from the water, and with them and their bodies building beds of soil rich in organic matter or humus. the sun, besides expanding and cracking the rocks by its heat, helps in another way to make soils. it warms the water that has been grinding soil on the beach or along the river banks and causes some of it to evaporate. this vapor rises, forms a cloud and floats away in the air. by and by the vapor forms into rain drops which may fall on the top of some mountain. these rain drops may wash loosened particles from the surface or crevices of exposed rocks. these drops are joined by others until, by and by, they form a little stream which carries its small burden of rock dust down the slope, now dropping some particles, now taking up others. other little streams join this one until they form a brook which increases in size and power as it descends the mountain side. as it grows by the addition of other streams it picks up larger pieces, grinds them together, grinds at its banks and loads itself with rocks, pebbles, sand and clay. as the stream reaches the lower part of the mountain where the slope is less steep, it is checked in its course and the larger stones and pebbles are dropped while the sand and finer particles are carried on and deposited on the bottom of some broad quiet river farther down, and when the river overflows its banks, are distributed over the neighboring meadows, giving them a new coating of soil and often adding to their fertility. what a river does not leave along its course it carries out to sea to help build the sand bars and mud flats there. the rain drops have now gotten back to the beach where they take up again the work of grinding the soil. the work of moving water can be seen in almost any road or cultivated field during or just after a rain, and particularly on the hillsides, where often the soil is loosened and carried from higher to lower parts, making barren sand and clay banks of fertile hillsides and destroying the fertility of the bottom lands below. we have already noticed the work of freezing water in splitting small and large fragments from the rocks. water moving over the surface of the earth in a solid form, or ice, was at an earlier period in the history of the earth one of the most powerful agencies in soil formation. away up in greenland and on the northern border of this continent the temperature is so low that most if not all of the moisture that falls on the earth falls as snow. this snow has piled up until it has become very deep and very heavy. the great weight has packed the bottom of this great snow bank to ice. on the mountains where the land was not level the masses of snow and ice, centuries ago, began to slide down the slopes and finally formed great rivers of solid water or moving ice. the geologists tell us that at one time a great river of ice extended from the arctic region as far south as central pennsylvania and from new england to the rocky mountains. this vast river was very deep and very heavy and into its under surface were frozen sand, pebbles, larger stones and even great rocks. thus it acted as a great rasp or file and did an immense amount of work grinding rocks and making soils. it ground down mountains and carried great beds of soil from one place to another. when this great ice river melted, it dropped its load of rocks and soils, and as a result we find in that region of the country great boulders and beds of sand and clay scattered over the land. _work of the air._--the air has helped in the work of wearing down the rocks and making soils. if a piece of iron be exposed to moist air a part of the air unites with part of the iron and forms iron rust. in the same way when moist air comes in contact with some rocks part of the air unites with part of the rock and forms rock rust which crumbles off or is washed away by water. thus the air helps to break down the rocks. moving air or wind picks up dust particles and carries them from one field to another. on sandy beaches the wind often blows the sand along like snow and piles it into drifts. the entire surface of sandy regions is sometimes changed in this way. sands blown from deserts sometimes bury forests which with their foliage sift the fatal winding sheet from the dust-laden winds. _the work of plants._--living plants sometimes send their roots into rock crevices; there they grow, expand, and split off rock fragments. certain kinds of plants live on the surface of rocks. they feed on the rocks and when they die and decay they keep the surface of the rocks moist and also produce carbonic acid which dissolves the rocks slowly just as the vinegar dissolved the limestone in our experiment. dead decaying roots, stems, and leaves of plants form largely the organic matter of the soil. when organic matter has undergone a certain amount of decay it is called humus, and these soils are called organic soils or humus soils. the black soils of the woods, swamps and prairies, contain large amounts of humus. _work of animals._--earth worms and the larvæ of insects which burrow in the soil eat soil particles which pass through their bodies and are partially dissolved. these particles are generally cast out on the surface of the soil. thus these little animals help to move soil, to dissolve soil, and to open up passages for the entrance of air and rain. soil texture we have seen that the soil particles vary in size and that for the best development of the plant the particles of the soil must be so arranged that the delicate rootlets can readily push their way about in search of food, or, in other words, that the soil must have a certain texture. by the texture of the soil we mean the size of its particles and their relation to each other. the following terms are used in describing soil textures: coarse, fine, open, close, loose, hard, stiff, compact, soft, mellow, porous, leachy, retentive, cloddy, lumpy, light, heavy. which of these terms will apply to the texture of sand, which to clay, which to humus, which to the garden soil, which to a soil that plant roots can easily penetrate? we find then that texture of the soil depends largely on the relative amounts of sand, silt, clay and humus that it contains. chapter iv relation of soils to water importance of water to plants we learned in a previous paragraph that plant roots take moisture from the soil. what becomes of this moisture? we will answer this question with an experiment. =experiment.=--take a pot or tumbler in which a young plant is growing, also a piece of pasteboard large enough to cover the top of the pot or tumbler; cut a slit from the edge to the centre of the board, then place it on top of the pot, letting the stem of the plant enter the slit. now close the slit with wax or tallow, making it perfectly tight about the stem. if the plant is not too large invert a tumbler over it (fig. ), letting the edge of the tumbler rest on the pasteboard; if a tumbler is not large enough use a glass jar. place in a sunny window. moisture will be seen collecting on the inner surface of the glass. where does this come from? it is absorbed from the soil by the roots of the plant and is sent with its load of dissolved plant food up through the stem to the leaves. there most of the moisture is passed from the leaves to the air and some of it is condensed on the side of the glass. by experiments at the cornell university agricultural experiment station, ithaca, n.y., it has been found that during the growth of a sixty bushel crop of corn the plants pump from the soil by means of their roots, and send into the air through their leaves over nine hundred tons of water. a twenty-five bushel crop of wheat uses over five hundred tons of water in the same way. this gives us some idea of the importance of water to the plant and the necessity of knowing something of the power of the soil to absorb and hold moisture for the use of the plant. also the importance of knowing if we can in any way control or influence the water-holding power of the soil for the good of the plant. sources of soil water from what sources does the soil receive water? from the air above, in the form of rain, dew, hail and snow, falling on the surface, and from the lower soil. this water enters the soil more or less rapidly. attitude of the soils towards water which soils have the greater power to take in the rain which falls on their surface? [illustration: fig. . to show what becomes of the water taken from the soil by roots. moisture, sent up from the roots, has been given off by the leaves and has condensed on the glass.] [illustration: fig. .--percolation experiment. to show the relative powers of soils to take in water falling on the surface. _a_, sand; _b_, clay; _c_, humus; _d_, garden soil.] =experiment.=--take four student-lamp chimneys. (in case the chimneys cannot be found get some slender bottles like salad oil bottles or wine bottles and cut the bottoms off with a hot rod. while the rod is heating make a shallow notch in the glass with the wet corner of a file in the direction you wish to make the cut. when the rod is hot lay the end of it lengthwise on the notch. very soon a little crack will be seen to start from the notch. lead this crack around the bottle with the hot rod and the bottom of the bottle will drop off.) (fig. .) make a rack to hold them. tie a piece of cheese cloth or other thin cloth over the small ends of the chimneys. then fill them nearly full respectively, of dry, sifted, coarse sand, clay, humus soil, and garden soil. place them in the rack; place under them a pan or dish. pour water in the upper ends of the tubes until it soaks through and drips from the lower end (fig. ). ordinary sunburner lamp chimneys may be used for the experiment by tying the cloth over the tops; then invert them, fill them with soil and set in plates or pans. the sand will take the water in and let it run through quickly; the clay is very slow to take it in and let it run through; the humus soil takes the water in quite readily. repeat the experiment with one of the soils, packing the soil tightly in one tube and leaving it loose in another. the water will be found to penetrate the loose soil more rapidly than the packed soil. we see then that the power of the soil to take in rainfall depends on its texture or the size and compactness of the particles. if the soil of our farm is largely clay, what happens to the rain that falls on it? the clay takes the water in so slowly that most of it runs off and is lost. very likely it carries with it some of the surface soil which it has soaked and loosened, and thus leaves the farm washed and gullied. what can we do for our clay soils to help them to absorb the rain more rapidly? for immediate results we can plow them and keep them loose and open with the tillage tools. for more permanent results we may mix sand with them, but sand is not always to be obtained and is expensive to haul. the best method is to mix organic matter with them by plowing in stable manures, or woods soil, or decayed leaves, or by growing crops and turning them under. the organic matter not only loosens the soil but also adds plant food to it, and during its decay produces carbonic acid which helps to dissolve the mineral matter and make available the plant food that is in it. clay soils can also be made loose and open by applying lime to them. =experiment.=--take two bottles or jars, put therein a few spoonsful of clay soil, fill with water, put a little lime in one of them, shake both and set them on the table. it will be noticed that the clay in the bottle containing lime settles in flakes or crumbs, and much faster than in the other bottle. in the same manner, lime applied to a field of clay has a tendency to collect the very fine particles of soil into flakes or crumbs and give it somewhat the open texture of a sandy soil. lime is applied to soil for this purpose at the rate of twenty bushels per acre once in four or five years. which soils have the greater power to absorb or pump moisture from below? =experiment.=--use the same or a similar set of tubes as in the experiment illustrated in fig. . fill the tubes with the same kinds of dry sifted soils. then pour water into the pan or dish beneath the tubes until it rises a quarter of an inch above the lower end of the tubes (fig. ). watch the water rise in the soils. the water will be found to rise rapidly in the sand about two or three inches and then stop or continue very slowly a short distance further. in the clay it starts very slowly, but after several hours is finally carried to the top of the soil. the organic matter takes it up less rapidly than the sand, faster than the clay, and finally carries it to the top. by this and further experiments it will be found that the power of soils to take moisture from below depends on their texture or the size and closeness of their particles. we found the sand pumped the water only a short distance and then stopped. what can we do for our sandy soils to give them greater power to take moisture from below? for immediate results we can compact them by rolling or packing. this brings the particles closer together, makes the spaces between them smaller, and therefore allows the water to climb higher. for more lasting results we can fill them with organic matter in the shape of stable manures or crops turned under. clay may be used, but is expensive to haul. which soils have greatest power to hold the water which enters them? =experiment.=--use the same or similar apparatus as for the last experiment. after placing the cloth caps over the ends of the tubes label and carefully weigh each one, keeping a record of each; then fill them with the dry soils and weigh again. now place the tubes in the rack and pour water in the upper ends until the entire soil is wet; cover the tops and allow the surplus water to drain out; when the dripping stops, weigh the tubes again, and by subtraction find the amount of water held by the soil in each tube; compute the percentage. it will be found that the organic matter will hold a much larger percentage of water than the other soils; and the clay more than the sand. the tube of organic soil will actually hold a larger amount of water than the other tubes. (see also fig. .) in the experiment on page we noticed that the sand took in the water poured on its surface and let it run through very quickly. this is a fault of sandy soils. what can we do for our sandy soils to help them to hold better the moisture which falls on them and tends to leach through them? for immediate effect we can close the pores somewhat by compacting the soil with the roller. for more lasting effects, we can fill them with organic matter. which soils will hold longest the water which they have absorbed? or which soils will keep moist longest in dry weather? [illustration: fig. . to show how bottles may be used in place of lamp chimneys shown in figs and .] [illustration: fig. .--capillarity of soils to show the relative powers of soils to take water from below.] [illustration: fig. .--water-absorbing and water-holding powers of soils.] =experiment.=--fill a pan or bucket with moist sand, another with moist clay, and a third with moist organic matter; set them in the sun to dry and notice which dries last. the organic matter will be found to hold moisture much longer than the other soils. the power of the other soils to hold moisture through dry weather can be improved by mixing organic matter with them. we find then that the power of soils to absorb and hold moisture depends on the amount of sand, clay, or humus which they contain, and the compactness of the particles. we see also how useful organic matter is in improving sandy and clayey soils. the effect of working soils when wet by this time the soils we left in the pans (see page ), sand, clay, humus and garden soil, must be dry. if so, examine them. we find that the clay which was stirred when wet has dried into an almost bricklike mass, while that which was not stirred is not so hard, though it has a thick, hard crust. the sand is not much affected by stirring when wet. the organic matter which was stirred when wet has perhaps stiffened a little, but very easily crumbles; the unstirred part was not much affected by the wetting and drying. the garden soil after drying is not as stiff as the clay nor as loose as the sand and humus. this is because it is very likely a mixture of all three, the sand and the humus checking the baking. this teaches us that it is not a good plan to work soils when they are wet if they are stiff and sticky; and that our stiff clay soils can be kept from drying hard or baking by the use of organic matter. "and that's a witness" for organic matter. the relation of the soil to moisture is very important, for moisture is one of the greatest factors if not the greatest in the growth of the crop. the power to absorb or soak up moisture from any source is greatest in those soils whose particles are smaller and fit closer together. it is for this reason that strong loams and clay soils absorb and hold three times as much water as sandy soils do, while peaty or humus soils absorb a still larger proportion. the reason why crops burn up so quickly on sandy soils during dry seasons is because of their weak power to hold water. the clay and humus soils carry crops through dry weather better because of their power to hold moisture and to absorb or soak up moisture from below. it is for this reason also that clay and peaty soils more often need draining than sandy soils. when rain falls on a sandy soil it enters readily, but it is apt to pass rapidly down and be, to a great extent, lost in the subsoil, for the sand has not sufficient power to hold much of it. when rain falls on a clay soil it enters less readily because of the closeness of the particles, and during long rains or heavy showers some of the water may run off the surface. if the surface has been recently broken and softened with the plow or cultivator the rain enters more readily. what does enter is held and is not allowed to run through as in the case of the sand. humus soil absorbs the rain as readily as the sand and holds it with a firmer grip than clay. this fact gives us a hint as to how we may improve the sand and clay. organic matter mixed with these soils by applying manures or plowing under green crops will cause the sand to hold the rain better and the clay to absorb it more readily. chapter v forms of soil water water which comes to the soil and is absorbed exists in the soil principally in two forms: free water and capillary water. free water free water is that form of water which fills our wells, is found in the bottoms of holes dug in the ground during wet seasons and is often found standing on the surface of the soil after heavy or long continued rains. it is sometimes called ground water or standing water and flows under the influence of gravity. is free water good for the roots of farm plants? if we remember how the root takes its food and moisture, namely through the delicate root hairs; and also remember the experiment which showed us that roots need air, we can readily see that free water would give the root hairs enough moisture, but it would at the same time drown them by cutting off the air. therefore free water is not directly useful to the roots of house plants or farm plants, excepting such as are naturally swamp plants, like rice, which grows part of the time with its roots covered with free water. [illustration: fig. .--capillary tubes. to show how water rises in small tubes or is drawn into small spaces.] [illustration: fig. .--capillary plates. water is drawn to the highest point where the glass plates are closest together.] [illustration: fig. . a cone of soil to show capillarity. water poured about the base of this cone of soil has been drawn by capillary force half-way to the top.] [illustration: fig. . to show the relative amounts of film-moisture held by coarse and fine soils. the colored water in bottle _a_ represents the amount of water required to cover the half pound of pebbles in the tumbler _b_ with a film of moisture. the colored water in bottle _c_ shows the amount required to cover the soil grains in the half pound of sand in tumbler _d._] capillary water if you will take a number of glass tubes of different sizes, the largest not more than one-fourth of an inch in diameter, and hold them with one end of each in water or some colored liquid, you will notice that the water rises in the tubes (fig. ), and that it rises highest in the smallest tube. the force which causes the water to rise in these tubes is called the capillary force, from the old latin word _capillum_ (a hair), because it is most marked in hair-like tubes, the smaller the tube the higher the water will rise. the water which rises in the tubes is called capillary water. another method of illustrating capillary water is to tie or hold together two flat pieces of glass, keeping two of the edges close together and separating the opposite two about one-eighth of an inch with a sliver of wood. then set them in a plate of water or colored liquid and notice how the water rises between the pieces of glass, rising higher the smaller the space (fig. ). it is the capillary force which causes water to rise in a piece of cloth or paper dipped in water. take a plate and pour onto it a cone-shaped pile of dry sand or fine soil; then pour water around the base of the pile and note how the water is drawn up into the soil by capillary force (fig. ). capillary water is the other important form of water in the soil. this is moisture which is drawn by capillary force or soaks into the spaces between the soil particles and covers each particle with a thin film of moisture. film water take a marble or a pebble, dip it into water and notice the thin layer or film of water that clings to it. this is a form of capillary water and is sometimes called film water or film moisture. take a handful of soil that is moist but not wet, notice that it does not wet the hand, and yet there is moisture all through it; each particle is covered with a very thin film of water. now this film water is just the form of water that can supply the very slender root hairs without drowning them, that is, without keeping the air from them. and the plant grower should see to it that the roots of his plants are well supplied with film water and are not drowned by the presence of free water. capillary water may sometimes completely fill the spaces between the soil particles; when this occurs the roots are drowned just as in the case of free water as we saw when cuttings were placed in the puddled clay (see fig. ). free water is indirectly of use to the plant because it serves as a supply for capillary and film moisture. now i think we can answer the question which was asked when we were studying the habit of growth of roots but was left unanswered at the time (see page ). the question was this: of what value is it to the farmer to know that roots enter the soil to a depth of three to six feet? we know that roots will not grow without air. we also know that if the soil is full of free water there is no air in it, and, therefore, roots of most plants will not grow in it. it is, therefore, of interest to the farmer to see that free water does not come within at least three or four feet of the surface of the soil so that the roots of his crops may have plenty of well ventilated soil in which to develop. if there is a tendency for free water to fill the soil a large part of the time, the farmer can get rid of it by draining the land. we get here a lesson for the grower of house plants also. it is that we must be careful that the soil in the pots or boxes in which our plants are growing is always supplied with film water and not wet and soggy with free water. water should not be left standing long in the saucer under the pot of a growing plant. it is best to water the pot from the top and let the surplus water drain into the saucer and then empty it out. which soils have the greatest capacity for film water? =experiment.=--place in a tumbler or bottle one-half pound of pebbles about the size of a pea or bean; pour a few drops of water on them and shake them; continue adding water and shaking them till every pebble is covered with a film of water; let any surplus water drain off. then weigh again; the difference in the two weights will be approximately the weight of the film water that the pebbles can carry. repeat this with sand and compare the two amounts of water. a striking illustration can be made by taking two slender bottles and placing in them amounts of colored water equal to the amounts of film water held by the pebbles and sand respectively. in the accompanying illustration (fig. ), _a_ represents the amount of water that was found necessary to cover the pebbles in tumbler _b_ with a film of moisture. _c_ is the amount that was necessary to cover with a film the particles of sand in _d_. the finer soil has the greater area for film moisture. it has been estimated that the particles of a cubic foot of clay loam have a possible aggregate film surface of three-fourths of an acre. chapter vi loss of soil water loss of soil water and means of checking the loss we noticed in previous paragraphs that soil might at times have too much water in it for proper ventilation and so check the growth of the roots of the plant. now is it possible that soil water may be lost or wasted and if so can we check the loss? in the experiment to find out how well the soils would take in the rainfall (page ) we noticed that the clay soil took in the water very slowly and that on a field of clay soil part of the rain water would be likely to run off over the surface and be lost. free water may be lost then, by surface wash. we noticed methods of checking this loss, namely, pulverizing the soil with the tillage tools and putting organic matter into it to make it absorb the rain more readily. we noticed that water poured on the sand ran through it very quickly and was apt to be lost by leaching or percolation. this we found could be checked by rolling the soil and by putting organic matter into it to close the pores. we learned that roots take water from the soil for the use of the plant and send it up to the leaves, which in turn send it out into the air, or transpire it, as this process is called. we learned also that the amount transpired is very great. now water that is pumped up and transpired by the crops we are growing we consider properly used. but when weeds grow with the crop and pump and transpire water we consider this water as lost or wasted. water may be lost then by being pumped up and transpired by weeds. and this is the way weeds do their greatest injury to crops during dry weather. the remedy is easily pointed out. kill the weeds or do not let them get a start. there is another way, which we are not apt to notice, by which water may be lost from the soil. when the soil in the pans in a previous experiment (page ) had been wet and set aside a few days it became very dry. how did the water get out of this soil? that at the surface of the soil evaporated or was changed into vapor and passed into the air. then water from below the surface was pumped up by capillary force to take its place just as the water was pumped up in the tubes of soil. this in turn was evaporated and the process repeated till all of the water in the soil had passed into the air. now this process is going on in the field whenever it is not raining or the ground is not frozen very hard. water then may be lost by evaporation. how can we check this loss? suppose we try the experiment of covering the soil with some material that cannot pump water readily. =experiment.=--take four glass fruit jars, two-quart size, with straight sides. if you cannot get them with straight sides cut off the tops with a hot iron just below the shoulder; tin pails will do if the glass jars cannot be had. fill these with moist soil from the field or garden, packing it till it is as hard as the unplowed or unspaded soil. leave one of them in this condition; from two of them remove an inch or two of soil and replace it in the case of one with clean, dry, coarse sand, and in the case of the other with chaff or straw cut into half-inch lengths. stir the soil in the fourth one to a depth of one inch, leaving it light and crumbly. now weigh the jars and set them aside. weigh each day for several days. the four jars illustrated in fig. were prepared in this way and allowed to stand seven days. in that time they lost the following amounts of water: amounts of water lost from jars of prepared soil in seven days. no. packed soil--lost . oz. equal to about tons per acre. no. covered with straw--lost oz. equal to about tons per acre. no. covered with dry sand--lost oz. equal to about tons per acre. no. covered with crumbled soil--lost . oz., equal to about tons per acre. why did not , and lose as much water as no. ? the soil in jar no. was packed and water was pumped to the surface by capillary force and was evaporated as fast as it came to the surface. in no. the water could rise rapidly until it reached the straw, then it was stopped almost entirely. but the straw being coarse, the air circulated in it more or less freely and there was a slow loss by evaporation. in jar no. the water could rise only to the sand, which was so coarse that the water could not climb on it to the surface, and the air circulated in the sand so slowly that there was not sufficient evaporation to affect scales weighing to one-quarter ounce. no. lost less than no. because, as in the case of the sand, the water could not climb rapidly to the surface on the coarse crumbs of soil. the loss that did take place from no. was what the air took from the loosely stirred soil on the surface with a very little from the lower soil. simply stirring the surface of the sod in no. reduced the loss of water to less than half the loss from the hard soil in no. . this experiment gives us the clew to the method of checking loss of water from the soil by evaporation. it is to keep the water from climbing up to the surface, or check the power of the soil to pump the water to the surface by making it loose on top. this loose soil is called a soil mulch. everything that we do to the soil that loosens and crumbles the surface tends to check the loss of water by evaporation from the soil below. [illustration: fig. .--to show the effect of a soil mulch . packed soil, lost in days . ozs. water, equal to tons per acre. . packed soil, covered with straw, lost in days ozs. water, equal to tons per acre. . packed soil, covered with sand, lost in days ozs. water, equal to tons per acre. . packed soil, covered with soil mulch, lost in days . ozs. water, equal to tons per acre.] chapter vii soil temperature we learned that roots need heat for their growth and development. now what is the relation of the different kinds of soil toward heat or what are their relative powers to absorb and hold heat? =experiment.=--some days before this experiment, spread on a dry floor about a half bushel each of sand, clay and decayed leaf mould or black woods soil. stir them occasionally till they are thoroughly dry. when they are dry place them separately in three boxes or large flower pots and keep dry. in three similar boxes or pots place wet sand, wet clay, and wet humus. place a thermometer in each of the soils, placing the bulb between one and two inches below the surface (fig. ). then place the soils out of doors where the sun can shine on them and leave them several days. if a rain should come up protect the dry soils. observe and make a record of the temperatures of each soil several times a day. chart the average of several days observations. fig. shows the averages of several days observations on a certain set of soils. it will be noticed that the temperature of the soils increased until the early part of the afternoon and after that time they lost heat. [illustration: fig. .--soil temperature experiment. thermometer in pot of soil.] how soils are warmed =experiment.=--hold your hand in bright sunlight or near a warm stove or radiator. your hand is warmed by heat radiated from the sun or warm stove through the air to your body. in the same manner the rays of the sun heat the surface of the soil. =experiment.=--take the stove poker or any small iron rod and hold one end of it in the fire or hold one end of a piece of wire in a candle or lamp flame. the end of the rod or wire will quickly become very hot and heat will gradually be carried its entire length until it becomes too hot to hold. this carrying of the heat from particle to particle through the length of the rod is called heating by conduction. now when the warm rays of the sun reach the soil, or a warm wind blows over it, the surface particles are warmed and then pass the heat on to the next ones below, and these in turn pass it to others and so on till the soil becomes heated to a considerable depth by conduction. a clay soil will absorb heat by conduction faster than a sandy soil because the particles of the clay lie so close together that the heat passes more readily from one to another than in the case of the coarser sand. if the soil is open and porous, warm air and warm rains can enter readily and carry heat to the lower soil. you have noticed how a pile of stable manure steams in cold weather. you doubtless know that manure from the horse stable is often used to furnish heat for hotbeds and for sweet potato beds. now the heat which warms the manure and sends the steam out of it, and warms the hotbed and sweet potato bed, is produced by the decaying or rotting of the manure. more or less heat is produced by the decay of all kinds of organic matter. so if the soil is well supplied with organic matter, the decay of this material will add somewhat to the warmth of the soil. how soils lose heat wet one of your fingers and hold your hand up in the air. the wet finger will feel colder than the others and will gradually become dry. this is because some of the heat of your finger is being used to dry up the water or change it into a vapor, or in other words to evaporate it. in the same manner a wet soil loses heat by the evaporation of water from its surface. =experiment.=--heat an iron rod, take it from the fire and hold it near your face or hand. you will feel the heat without touching the rod. the heat is radiated from the rod through the air to your body and the rod gradually cools. in the same way the soil may lose its heat by radiating it into the air. a clay soil will lose more heat by radiation than a sandy soil because the clay is more compact. conditions which influence soil temperature it will be noticed that the dry soils are warmer than the wet ones. why is this? scientists tell us that it takes a great deal more heat to warm water than it does to warm other substances. therefore when soil is wet it takes much more heat to warm it than if it were dry. it will be seen that of the dry soils the humus is the warmest. why? =experiment.=--take two thermometers, wrap the bulb of one with a piece of black or dark colored cloth and the bulb of the other with a piece of white cloth, then place them where the sun will shine on the cloth covered bulbs. the mercury in both thermometers will be seen to rise, but in the thermometer with the dark cloth about the bulb it will rise faster and higher than in the other. this shows that the dark cloth absorbs heat faster than the white cloth. in the same manner a dark soil will absorb heat faster than a light colored soil; therefore it will be warmer if dry. why was the dry clay warmer than the dry sand? because its darker color helped it to absorb heat more rapidly than the sand, and, as the particles were smaller and more compact, heat was carried into it more rapidly by conduction. why were the wet humus and clay cooler than the wet sand? as they were darker in color and the clay was more compact than the sand, they must have absorbed more heat, but they also held more water, and, therefore, lost more heat by evaporation. [illustration: fig. . charts showing average temperature of a set of dry and wet soils during a period of five days. _h_, humus; _c_, clay; _s_, sand.] [illustration: fig. . to show the value of organic matter. contains clay subsoil; , clay subsoil and fertilizer; , clay subsoil and organic matter. all planted at the same time.] of the dry soils, then, the humus averaged warmest, because, on account of its dark color, it absorbed heat more readily than the others. the dry clay was warmer than the sand on account of its color and compact texture. of the wet soils the sand was the warmest, because, on account of its holding less moisture, less heat was required to raise its temperature and there was less cooling by evaporation, while the other soils, although they absorbed more heat than the sand, lost more on account of greater evaporation, due to their holding more moisture. why are sandy soils called warm soils and clay soils said to be cold? how may we check losses of heat from the soil? if we make a mulch on the surface of the soil evaporation will be checked and therefore loss of heat by evaporation will be checked also. the mulch will also check the conduction of heat from the lower soil to the surface and therefore check loss of heat by radiation from the surface. value of organic matter figure illustrates a simple way to show the value of organic matter in the soil. the boxes are about twelve inches square and ten inches deep. they were filled with a clay subsoil taken from the second foot below the surface of the field. to the second box was added sufficient commercial fertilizer to supply the plants with all necessary plant food. to the third box was added some peat or decayed leaves, in amount about ten per cent. of the clay subsoil. the corn was then planted and the boxes were all given the same care. the better growth of the corn in the third box was due to the fact that the organic matter not only furnished food for the corn but during its decay prepared mineral plant food that was locked up in the clay, and also brought about better conditions of air and moisture by improving the texture of the soil. the plants in the second box had sufficient plant food, but did not make better growth because poor texture prevented proper conditions of air and moisture. "and that's another witness" for organic matter. decaying organic matter or humus is really the life of the soil and it is greatly needed in most of the farm soils of the eastern part of the country. it closes the pores of sandy soils and opens the clay, thus helping the sand to soak up and hold more moisture and lessening excessive ventilation, and at the same time helping the roots to take a firmer hold. it helps the clay to absorb rain, helps it to pump water faster, helps it to hold water longer in dry weather, increases ventilation, favors root penetration and increases heat absorption. we can increase the amount of organic matter in the soil by plowing in stable manure, leaves and other organic refuse of the farm, or we can plow under crops of clover, grass, grain or other crops grown for that purpose. chapter viii plant food in the soil we learned in previous paragraphs that the roots of plants take food from the soil, and that a condition necessary for the root to do its work for the plant was the presence of available plant food in sufficient quantities. what is plant food? for answer let us go to the plant and ask it what it is made of. =experiment.=--take some newly ripened cotton or cotton wadding, a tree branch, a cornstalk, and some straw or grass. pull the cotton apart, then twist some of it and pull apart; in turn break the branch, the cornstalk and the straw. the cotton does not pull apart readily nor do the others break easily; this is because they all contain long, tough fibres. these fibres are called woody fibre or cellulose. the cotton fibre is nearly pure cellulose. =experiment.=--get together some slices of white potato, sweet potato, parsnip, broken kernels of corn, wheat and oats, a piece of laundry starch and some tincture of iodine diluted to about the color of weak tea. rub a few drops of the iodine on the cut surfaces of the potatoes, parsnip, and the broken surfaces of the grains. notice that it turns them purple. now drop a drop of the iodine on the laundry starch. it turns that purple also. this experiment tells us that plants contain starch. =experiment.=--chew a piece of sorghum cane, sugar cane, cornstalk, beet root, turnip root, apple or cabbage. they all taste sweet and must therefore contain sugar. examine a number of peach and cherry trees. you will find on the trunk and branches more or less of a sticky substance called gum. =experiment.=--crush on paper seeds of cotton, castor-oil bean, peanuts, brazil nuts, hickory nuts, butternuts, etc. they make grease spots; they contain fat and oil. =experiment.=--chew whole grains of wheat and find a gummy mucilaginous substance called wheat gum, or wet a pint of wheat flour to a stiff dough, let it stand about an hour, and then wash the starch out of it by kneading it under a stream of running water or in a pan of water, changing the water frequently. the result will be a tough, yellowish gray, elastic mass called gluten. this is the same as the wheat gum and is called an albuminoid because it contains nitrogen and is like albumen, a substance like the white of an egg. if we crush or grate some potatoes or cabbage leaves to a pulp and separate the juice, then heat the clear juice, a substance will separate in a flaky form and settle to the bottom of the liquid. this is vegetable albumen. [illustration: fig. . soy-bean roots. showing nodules of tubercles, the homes of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.] [illustration: fig. . garden-pea roots, showing tubercles or nodules, the homes of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.] =experiment.=--crush the leaves or stems of several growing plants and notice that the crushed and exposed parts are moist. in a potato or an apple we find a great deal of moisture. plants then are partly made of water. in fact growing plants are from to per cent. water. =experiment.=--expose a plant or part of a plant to heat; the water is driven off and there remains a dry portion. heat the dry part to a high degree and it burns; part passes into the air as smoke and part remains behind as ashes. we have found then the following substances in plants: woody fibre or cellulose, starch, sugar, gum, fats and oils, albuminoids, water, ashes. aside from these are found certain coloring matters, certain acids and other matters which give taste, flavor, and poisonous qualities to fruits and vegetables. more or less of all these substances are found in all plants. now these are all compound substances. that is, they can all be broken down into simpler substances, and with the exception of the water and the ashes, the plants do not take them directly from the soil. the chemists tell us that these substances are composed of certain chemical elements, some of which the plant obtains from the air, some from the soil and some from water. the following table gives the substances found in plants, the elements of which they are composed, and the sources from which the plants obtain them: ----------------------------------------------------------+ substances found | elements of which | sources from | in plants. | they are made. | which plants | | | obtain them. | -------------------+---------------------+----------------+ cellulose or | | | woody fibre | carbon | air | starch |---------------------+----------------+ sugar | | | gum | oxygen | water | fat and oil | hydrogen | | -------------------+---------------------+----------------+ | carbon | air | +---------------------+----------------+ albuminoids | oxygen | water | | hydrogen | | +---------------------+----------------+ | _nitrogen_ | | | sulphur | | | phosphorus | | -------------------+---------------------| soil + | _phosphorus_ | | | _potassium_ | | ashes | _calcium_ | | | magnesium | | | iron | | -------------------+---------------------+----------------+ water | oxygen | soil | | hydrogen | | -----------------------------------------+----------------+ here is a brief description of these chemical elements. oxygen, a colorless gas, forms one-fifth of the air. hydrogen, a colorless gas, forms a part of water. carbon, a dark solid, forms nearly one-half of all organic matter; charcoal is one of its forms. the lead in your pencil is another example. nitrogen, a colorless gas, forms four-fifths of the air. found in all albuminoids. sulphur, a yellow solid. phosphorus, a yellowish white solid. potassium, a silver white solid. calcium, a yellowish solid. found in limestone. magnesium, a silver white solid. iron, a silver gray solid. of these elements the nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and iron must not only exist in the soil but must also be there in such form that the plant can use them. the plant does not use them in their simple elementary form but in various compounds. these compounds must be soluble in water or in weak acids. of these seven elements of plant food the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium and calcium are of particular importance to the farmer, because they do not always exist in the soil in sufficient available quantities to produce profitable crops. professor roberts, of cornell university, tells us that an average acre of soil eight inches deep contains three thousand pounds of nitrogen. the nitrogen exists largely in the humus of the soil and it is only as the humus decays that the nitrogen is made available. here is another reason for keeping the soil well supplied with organic matter. the decay of this organic matter is hastened by working the soil; therefore good tillage helps to supply the plant with nitrogen. if the nitrogen becomes available when there is no crop on the soil it will be washed out by rains and so lost. therefore the soil, especially if it is sandy, should be covered with a crop the year through. many lands lose large amounts of plant food by being left bare through the fall and winter, especially in those parts of the country where the land does not freeze. the phosphorus, potassium and calcium also exist in most soils in considerable quantities, but often are not available; thorough tillage and the addition of organic matter will help to make them available, and new supplies may be added in the form of fertilizers. calcium is found in nearly all soils in sufficient quantities for most crops, but sometimes there is not enough of it for such crops as clover, cowpea, alfalfa, etc. it is also used to improve soil texture. the entire subject of commercial fertilizers is based almost entirely on the fact of the lack of these four elements in the soil in sufficient available quantities to grow profitable crops. the plant gets its phosphorus from phosphoric acid, its potassium from potash, and its calcium from lime. there is a class of plants which have the power of taking free nitrogen from the air. these are the leguminous plants; such as clover, beans, cowpeas, alfalfa, soy bean, etc. they do it through the acid of microscopic organisms called bacteria which live in nodules or tubercles on the roots of these plants (figs. - ). collect roots of these plants and find the nodules on them. the bacteria take nitrogen from the air which penetrates the soil and give it over to the plants. here is another reason for good soil ventilation. this last fact brings us to another very important property of soils. soils have existing in them many very small plants called bacteria. they are so very small that it would take several hundred of them to reach across the edge of this sheet of paper. we cannot see them with the naked eye but only with the most powerful microscopes. some of these minute plants are great friends to the farmer, for it is largely through their work that food is made available for the higher plants. some of them break down the organic matter and help prepare the nitrogen for the larger plants. others help the leguminous plants to feed on the nitrogen of the air. to do their work they need warmth, moisture, air, and some mineral food; these conditions we bring about by improving the texture of the soil by means of thorough tillage and the use of organic matter. chapter ix seeds conditions necessary for seeds to sprout in the spring comes the great seed-planting time on the farm, in the home garden and in the school garden. many times the questions will be asked: why didn't those seeds come up? how shall i plant seeds so as to help them sprout easily and grow into strong plants? to answer these questions, perform a few experiments with seeds, and thus find out what conditions are necessary for seeds to sprout, or germinate. for these experiments you will need a few teacups, glass tumblers or tin cans, such as tomato cans or baking-powder cans; a few plates, either of tin or crockery; some wide-mouth bottles that will hold about half a pint, such as pickle, olive, or yeast bottles or druggists' wide-mouth prescription bottles; and a few pieces of cloth. also seeds of corn, garden peas and beans. =experiment.=--put seeds of corn, garden peas, and beans (about a handful of each) to soak in bottles or tumblers of water. next day, two hours earlier in the day, put a duplicate lot of seeds to soak. when this second lot of seeds has soaked two hours, you will have two lots of soaked seeds of each kind, one of which has soaked twenty-four hours and the other two hours. now take these seeds from the water and dry the surplus water from them by gently patting or rubbing a few at a time in the folds of a piece of cloth, taking care not to break the skin or outer coating of the seed. place them in dry bottles, putting in enough to cover the bottoms of the bottles about three seeds deep; cork the bottles. if you cannot find corks, tie paper over the mouths of the bottles. label the bottles "seeds soaked hours," "seeds soaked hours," and let them stand in a warm place several days. if there is danger of freezing at night, the bottles of seeds may be kept in the kitchen or living room where it is warm, until they sprout. observe the seeds from day to day. the seeds that soaked twenty-four hours will sprout readily (fig. ), while most, if not all, of those that soaked only two hours will not sprout. why is this? it is because the two-hour soaked seeds do not receive sufficient moisture to carry on the process of sprouting. our experiment teaches us that seeds will not sprout until they receive enough moisture to soak them through and through. this also teaches that when we plant seeds we must so prepare the soil for them and so plant them that they will be able to get sufficient moisture to sprout. =experiment.=--soak some beans, peas or corn, twenty-four hours; carefully dry them with a cloth. in one half-pint bottle place enough of them to cover the bottom of the bottle two or three seeds deep; mark this bottle a. fill another bottle two-thirds full of them and mark the bottle b (fig. ). cork the bottles and let them stand for several days. also let some seeds remain soaking in the water. the few seeds in bottle a will sprout, while, the larger number in bottle b will not sprout, or will produce only very short sprouts. why do not the seeds sprout easily in the bottle which is more than half full? to answer this question try the following experiment: =experiment.=--carefully loosen the cork in bottle b (the bottle containing poorly sprouted seeds), light a match, remove the cork from the bottle and introduce the lighted match. the match will stop burning as soon as it is held in the bottle, because there is no fresh air in the bottle to keep the match burning. test bottle a in the same way. what has become of the fresh air that was in the bottles when the seeds were put in them? the seeds have taken something from it and have left bad air in its place; they need fresh air to help them sprout, but they have not sprouted so well in bottle b because there was not fresh air enough for so many seeds. the seeds in the water do not sprout because there is not enough air in the water. now try another experiment. [illustration: fig. . to show that seeds need water for germination. the beans in bottle _a_ were soaked hours, those in bottle _b_ were soaked hours. they were then removed from the water and put into dry bottles.] [illustration: fig. . to show that seeds need air for germination. the beans in both bottles were soaked hours, and then were put into dry bottles bottle _a_ contained sufficient air to start the few seeds. bottle _b_ had not enough. the water in the tumbler _c_ did not contain sufficient air for germination. see experiment, page .] [illustration: fig. . to show that seeds need air for germination. corn planted in puddled clay in tumbler _a_ could not get sufficent air for sprouting. the moist sand in tumbler _b_ admitted sufficient air for germination.] =experiment.=--fill some tumblers or teacups or tin cans with wet sand and others with clay that has been wet and then thoroughly stirred till it is about the consistency of cake batter or fresh mixed mortar. take a tumbler of the wet sand and one of the wet clay and plant two or three kernels of corn in each, pressing the kernels down one-half or three-quarters of an inch below the surface; cover the seeds and carefully smooth the surface. in other tumblers plant peas, beans, and other seeds. cover the tumblers with saucers, or pieces of glass or board to keep the soil from drying. watch them for several days. if the clay tends to dry and crack, moisten it, fill the cracks and smooth the surface. the seeds in the sand will sprout but those in the clay will not (see fig. ). why is this? water fills the small spaces between the particles of clay and shuts out the fresh air which is necessary for the sprouting of the seeds. this teaches us that when we plant seeds we must so prepare the soil, and so plant the seeds that they will get enough fresh air to enable them to sprout, or, in other words, the soil must be well ventilated. =experiment.=--plant seeds of corn and beans in each of two tumblers; set one out of doors in a cold place and keep the other in a warm place in the house. the seeds kept in the house will sprout quickly but those outside in the cold will not sprout at all. this shows us that seeds will not sprout without heat. if the weather is warm place one of the tumblers in a refrigerator. why don't we plant corn in december? why not plant melons in january? why not plant cotton in november? the seeds of farm crops may be divided into two classes according to the temperatures at which they will germinate or sprout readily and can be safely planted. class a. those seeds that will germinate or sprout at an average temperature of forty-five degrees in the shade, or at about the time the peach and plum trees blossom: barley beet parsley oats carrot parsnip rye cabbage onion wheat cauliflower pea red clover endive radish crimson clover kale turnip grasses lettuce spinach these can be planted with safety in the spring as soon as the ground can be prepared, and some of them, if planted in the fall, live through the winter. class b. those seeds that will germinate or sprout at an average temperature of sixty degrees in the shade, or when the apple trees blossom: alfalfa soy bean squash cow pea pole bean cucumber corn string bean pumpkin cotton melon tomato egg plant okra pepper we are now ready to answer the question: what conditions are necessary for seeds to sprout or germinate? these conditions are: the presence of enough moisture to keep the seed thoroughly soaked. the presence of fresh air. the presence of more or less heat. this teaches us that when we plant seeds in the window box or in the garden or on the farm we must so prepare the soil and so plant the seeds that they will be able to obtain sufficient moisture, heat, and air for sprouting. the moisture must be film water, for if it is free water or capillary water filling the soil pores, there can be no ventilation and, therefore, no sprouting. seed testing in a previous experiment (page ) the seeds planted in the wet clay did not sprout (see fig. ). in answer to the question, "why is this?" some will say the seeds were bad. it often happens on the farm that the seeds do not sprout well and the farmer accuses the seedsman of selling him poor seed, but does not think that he himself may be the cause of the failure by not putting the seeds under the proper conditions for sprouting. how can we tell whether or not our seeds will sprout if properly planted? we can test them by putting a number of seeds from each package under proper conditions of moisture, heat and air, as follows: for large seeds take two plates (see fig. ) and a piece of cloth as wide as the bottom of the plate and twice as long. count out fifty or one hundred seeds from a package, wet the cloth and wring it out. place one end of the cloth on the plate, place the seeds on the cloth and fold the other end of the cloth over them. on a slip of paper mark the number of seeds and date, and place on the edge of the plate. now cover the whole with another plate, or with a pane of glass to keep from drying. set the plate of seeds in a warm room and examine occasionally for several days. if the cloth tends to dry, moisten it from time to time. as the seeds sprout take them out and keep a record of them. or leave them in the plate and after four or five days count those that have sprouted. this will give the proportion of good seeds in the packages. for small seeds fold the cloth first and place the seeds on top of it. another good tester for small seeds is made by running about an inch of freshly mixed plaster of paris into a small dish or pan and moulding flat cavities in the surface by setting bottles into it. the dish or pan and bottles should be slightly greased to prevent the plaster sticking to them. when the cast has hardened it should be turned out of the mould and set in a large dish or pan. one hundred small seeds are then counted out and put into one of the cavities, others are put into the other cavities. water is then poured into the pan till it rises half way up the side of the plaster cast or porous saucer. the whole thing is then covered to keep in the moisture (fig. ). another method is to get boxes of finely pulverized sand or soil and carefully plant in it fifty or one hundred seeds of each kind to be tested. then by counting those that come up, the proportion of good seeds can easily be found. in every case the testers should be kept at a temperature of about seventy degrees or about that of the living room. how the seeds come up plant a few seeds of corn, beans and garden peas in boxes or tumblers each day for several days in succession. then put seeds of corn, beans and garden peas to soak. after these have soaked a few hours, examine them to find out how the seed is constructed. note first the general shape of the seeds and the scar (fig. - ) on one side as in the bean or pea and at one end or on one edge in the corn. this scar, also called hilum, is where the seed was attached to the seed vessel. cut into the bean and pea, they will be found to be protected by a tough skin or coat. within this the contents of the seed are divided into two bodies of equal size lying close to each other and called seed leaves or cotyledons (fig. - ). between them near one end or one side will be found a pair of very small white leaves and a little round pointed projection. the part bearing the tiny leaves was formerly, and is sometimes now, called the plumule, but is generally called the epicotyl, because it grows above or upon the cotyledons. the round pointed projection was formerly called the radicle, but is now spoken of as the hypocotyl, because it grows below or under the cotyledons. examine a dry kernel of corn and notice that on one side there is a slight oval-shaped depression (fig. - ). now take a soaked kernel and cut it in two pieces making the cut lengthwise from the top of the kernel through the centre of the oval depression and examine the cut surface. a more or less triangular-shaped body will be found on the concave side of the kernel (see figs. - and - ). this is the one cotyledon of the corn. besides this will be found quite a mass of starchy material packed in the coverings of the kernel and in close contact with one side of the cotyledon. this is sometimes called the endosperm. within the cotyledon will be found a little growing shoot pointed toward the top of the kernel. this is the epicotyl, and another growing tip pointed toward the lower end of the kernel; this is the hypocotyl or the part which penetrates the soil and forms roots. now examine the seeds that were planted in succession. some will be just starting a growing point down into the soil. some of them have probably come up and others are at intermediate stages. how did the bean get up? after sending down a root the hypocotyl began to develop into a strong stem which crooked itself until it reached the surface of the soil and then pulled the cotyledons or seed-leaves after it (fig. ). these turn green and after a time shrink and fall off. the pea cotyledons were left down in the soil, the epicotyl alone pushing up to the surface. the corn pushed a slender growing point to the surface leaving the cotyledon and endosperm behind in the soil but still attached to the little plant (fig. ). use of cotyledons and endosperm =experiment.=--plant some beans in a pot or box of soil and as soon as they come up cut the seed-leaves from some of them and watch their growth for several days. it will soon be seen that the plants on which the seed-leaves were left increase in size much more rapidly than those from which the seed-leaves were removed (see figs. and ). sprout some corn in the seed tester. when the seedlings are two or three inches long, get a wide-mouthed bottle or a tumbler of water and a piece of pasteboard large enough to cover the top. cut a slit about an eighth of an inch wide from the margin to the centre of the pasteboard disk. take one of the seedlings, insert it in the slit, with the kernel under the pasteboard so that it just touches the water. take another seedling of the same size, carefully remove the kernel from it without injuring the root, and place this seedling in the slit beside the first one (fig. ). watch the growth of these two seedlings for a few days. repeat this with sprouted peas. in each case it will be found that the removal of the seed-leaves or the kernel checks the growth of the seedling. therefore, it must be that the seed-leaves which appear above ground, as in the case of the bean, or the kernel of the corn which remains below the surface of the soil, furnish the little plant with food until its roots have grown strong enough to take sufficient food from the soil. [illustration: fig. . a seed-tester, consisting of two plates and a moist cloth.] [illustration: fig. .--a seed-tester. a plaster cast with cavities in the surface for small seeds.] [illustration: fig. . . corn-kernel showing depression at _z_. . section of same after soaking. . corn-kernel after germination has begun. the seed-coat _a_ has been partly removed. . bean showing scar or hilum at _h_. . the same, split open. . bean with one cotyledon removed, after sprouting had begun. _a_, seed-coat; _b_, cotyledon; _c_, epicotyl; _d_, hypocotyl; _e_, endosperm. (drawings by m.e. feltham.)] chapter x seed planting how deep should seeds be planted? =experiment.=--plant several kernels of corn in moist soil in a glass tumbler or jar. put one kernel at the bottom and against the side of the glass, place the next one a half inch or an inch higher and an inch and a half to one side of the first seed and against the glass. continue this till the top of the glass is reached (fig. ). leave the last seed not more than one-fourth inch below the top of the soil. the soil should be moist at the start and the seeds should all be against the glass so they can be seen. this can best be done by planting as you fill the glass with soil. plant peas and beans in the same way. do not water the soil after planting. set aside in a warm place and wait for the seeds to come up. another method of performing this experiment is to make a box having one side glass (fig. ). the length and the depth of the box will depend upon the size of the glass you use. fill the box nearly full of moist soil and plant seeds of corn and beans and peas at depths of one-quarter inch, one inch, two inches, three inches, and four inches. these seeds can best be put in as the box is being filled. hold each individual seed against the glass with a stick so that when planted they may be seen through the glass. protect the seeds and roots from light by using a sheet of cardboard, tin or wrapping paper or a piece of board, and set in a warm place. many of the seeds planted only one-quarter inch deep will not sprout because the soil about them will probably dry out before they take from it enough moisture to sprout. the one and two-inch deep seeds will probably come up all right. of the three and four-inch deep seeds, the corn and peas will probably make their way to the surface because they send up only a slender shoot, which can easily force its way through the soil. the deep-planted beans will make a strong effort but will not succeed in forcing their way to the surface because they are not able to lift the large seed-leaves through so much soil, and will finally give up the struggle. if any of the deeper beans do get up, the seed-leaves will probably be broken off and the little plant will starve and be dwarfed. this experiment teaches us that we should plant seeds deep enough to get sufficient moisture for sprouting and yet not so deep that the young seedlings will not be able to force their way to the surface. seeds which raise their cotyledons above the soil should not be planted as deep as those which do not. large, strong seeds like corn, peas, etc., which do not lift their cotyledons above the surface, can be planted with safety at a depth of from one to four or five inches. [illustration: fig. . to show how the bean plant gets up. notice the curved hypocotyls pulling the seed-leaves or cotyledon out of the soil.] [illustration: fig. . to show how the corn-plant gets out of the soil. a slender growing point pushes straight up through the soil, leaving the kernel behind.] [illustration: fig. . to show the use of the cotyledons. these are the plants shown in tumbler , fig , forty-eight hours after removing the cotyledons from plant _b._ plant _b_, although first up, has been handicapped by the loss of its cotyledons.] seeds of carrot, celery, parsley, parsnip and egg plant are weak and rather slow in germinating. it is customary to plant them rather thickly in order that by the united strength of many seeds they may more readily come to the surface. this point should be observed also in planting seeds in heavy ground that is liable to pack and crust over before the seeds germinate. seed should always be sown in freshly stirred soil and may be planted by hand or with a machine. for the home garden and the school garden, and when only small quantities of any one variety are planted, a machine is hardly desirable and hand planting is preferable. the rows are marked out with the garden marker, or the end of a hoe or rake handle (fig. ), using a line or the edge of a board as a guide. the seeds are then carefully and evenly dropped in the mark or furrow. the covering is done with the hand or a rake or hoe, and the soil is pressed over the seeds by patting it with the covering tool or walking on the row and pressing it with the feet. this pressing of the soil over the seeds is to bring the particles of soil close to each other and to the seed so that film water can climb upon them and moisten the seed sufficiently for sprouting. a convenient way of distributing small seeds like those of turnip and cabbage, is to take a small pasteboard box or tin spice or baking-powder box, and punch a small hole in the bottom near one end or side. through this the seeds can be sifted quite evenly. for the larger operations of the farm and market garden, hand and horse-power drills and broadcasters are generally used, though some farmers still plant large fields by hand. the grasses and clovers are generally broadcasted by hand or machine, and are then lightly harrowed and are generally rolled. the small grains (wheat, oats, etc.) are broadcasted by many farmers, but drilling is considered better. with the grain drill the seed is deposited at a uniform depth and at regular intervals. in broadcasting, some of the seeds are planted too deep, and some too shallow, and others are left on the surface of the soil. from experiment it has been found that there is a loss of about one-fifth of the seed when broadcasted as compared with drilling. as in the case of grass seed, the grains are generally rolled after sowing. corn is planted by hand, or by hand- and horse-corn-planters, which drop a certain number of seeds at any required distance in the row. there are a number of seed drills made for planting vegetable seeds which are good machines. the main points to be considered in seed drills or seed planting machines are: simplicity and durability of structure. ease of draft. uniformity in quantity of seed planted, and in the distances apart and depth to which they are planted. the distances apart at which seeds are planted vary according to the character of the plant. bushy, spreading plants and tall plants require more room than low and slender-growing plants. visit the neighboring hardware stores and farms and examine as many seed-growing tools as possible to see how they are constructed and how properly used. practice planting with these tools, if possible. illustrations of grain drills and other seed-planting machines will be found in seed catalogues, hardware catalogues, and in the advertising columns of agricultural papers. seed classification in order to become familiar with the farm and garden seeds, obtain samples of as many of them as possible. put them in small bottles--homoeopathic vials for instance--or stick a few of each kind on squares of cardboard. arrange them in groups according to resemblances or relationships, comparing not only the seeds but the plants on which they grew. if you cannot recall the plants, and there is no collection available, study the illustrations in seed catalogues which can be obtained from seedsmen. the following groups contain most of the farm and garden seeds, excepting flower seeds: grass family: mustard family: nightshade family: corn, mustard, potato, wheat, cabbage, tomato, oats, cauliflower, egg plant, rye, collards, pepper. barley, brussels sprouts, sorghum, kale, goosefoot family: orchard grass, kohl rabi, beet, red top grass, radish, chard, timothy, ruta baga, spinach, kentucky blue grass. turnips, mangle wurzel. watercress. gourd family: pea or legume family: canteloupe, thistle family: garden pea, citron, artichoke, canada field pea, cucumber, cardoon, cow pea, gourd, chicory, soy bean, muskmelon, dandelion, bush bean, pumpkin, endive, lima bean, squash, lettuce, velvet bean, watermelon, salsify, vetch, cymling. sunflower, clover, tansy. alfalfa. parsley family: caraway, lily family: mallow family: carrot, asparagus, okra, celery, garlic, cotton. coriander, leek, cumin, onion. fennel, parsley, parsnip. [illustration: fig. . to show the use of the kernel to the young corn-plant. the kernel was carefully removed from the plant on the right when both plants were of the same size. the result is a dwarfing of the plant.] [illustration: fig. . to show how deeply seeds should be planted. seeds and did not sprout because they were not deep enough to get sufficient moisture. the corn-plants from sprouting seeds , and all pushed their slender growing points to the surface. of the beans, no. succeeded in pulling the cotyledons to the surface, and has made a good plant. nos. and , although they made a hard struggle, were not able to raise the cotyledons through so great a depth of soil, and finally gave up the struggle.] transplanting the seeds of some crops--cabbage, tomato, lettuce, for example--are planted in window boxes, hot-beds, cold frames or a corner of the field or garden. when the seedlings have developed three or four leaves or have become large enough to crowd one another, they are thinned out or are transplanted into other boxes, frames or plots of ground, or are transplanted into the field or garden. the time and method of transplanting depend largely on the condition of the plant. the condition of the soil. the condition of the atmosphere. for best results in field planting the plant should be well grown, strong and stocky, with well developed roots and three or four strong leaves. the soil should be thoroughly prepared, moist and freshly stirred. a moist day just before a light shower is the best time. these conditions being present, the plants are carefully lifted from the seed bed with as little disturbance of the roots as possible and carried to the field or garden. some plants, like cabbage, will stand considerable rough treatment, while others, like the eggplant, require greater care. in the field or garden a hole is made for each plant with the hand, a stick or dibber or any convenient tool, the roots of the plant are carefully placed in it and the soil is pressed about them. if the soil is moist and freshly stirred, new roots will generally start in a very short time. plants that have been grown in pots, small boxes or tin cans, as tomatoes and eggplants are sometimes grown, may be quickly transplanted in the field in the following manner: open the furrow with a small plow, knock the plants out of the pots or cans and place them along the land side of the furrow at the proper distances, then turn the soil back against them with the plow. when there is a large number of plants to be set, as in planting cabbage, sweet potatoes, etc., by the acre, it is not always convenient to wait for a cloudy day or to defer operations till the sun is low in the afternoon. in such cases the roots of the plants should be dipped in water or in thin mud just before setting them, or a little water may be poured into each hole as the plant is put in. the soil should always be well firmed about the roots. the firming of the soil about the roots of a newly set plant is as important as firming it over planted seeds. the soil should be packed so tightly that the individual leaves will be torn off when an attempt is made to pull the plant up by them. in dry or warm weather it is a good plan to trim the tops of plants when setting them. this can be done readily with some plants, such as cabbage and lettuce, by taking a bundle of them in one hand and with the other twisting off about half of their tops. [illustration: fig. . operations of seed-planting: , making the drill; , dropping the seeds; , covering the seeds; , packing the soil over the seeds.] [illustration: fig. . a collection of planting machines. the large central machine is a grass and grain planter. the one on the left, a potato planter. the one on the right, a corn, bean, and pea planter. the three smaller machines in front are hand seed planters.] the proper time to transplant fruit and ornamental trees and shrubs is during the fall, winter and early spring, which is their dormant or resting season, as this gives the injured roots a chance to recover and start new rootlets before the foliage of the plant makes demands on them for food and moisture. in taking up large plants many roots are broken or crushed. these broken and injured roots should be trimmed off with a smooth cut. the tree or shrub is then placed in the hole prepared for it and the soil carefully filled in and packed about the roots. after the plant is set, the top should be trimmed back to correspond with the loss of root. if the plant is not trimmed, more shoots and leaves will start into growth than the damaged roots can properly furnish with food and water, and the plant will make a weak growth or die. there are on the market a number of hand transplanting machines which, from their lack of perfection, have not come into general use. many of them require more time to operate than is consumed in hand planting. a number of large machines for transplanting are in successful and satisfactory use on large truck and tobacco farms. these machines are drawn by horses and carry water for watering each plant as it is set. practice transplanting in window boxes or in the open soil and see how many of your plants will survive the operation. chapter xi spading and plowing we have learned the important conditions necessary for the sprouting of seeds and for the growth and development of roots. we have also learned something about the soil, its properties, and its relation to, or its behavior toward these important conditions. we are therefore prepared to discuss intelligently methods of treating the soil to bring about, or maintain, these conditions. spading the soil the typical tool for preparing the soil for root growth is a spade or spading fork (fig. ). with this tool properly used we can prepare the soil for a crop better than with any other. in spading, the spade or fork should be pushed into the soil with the foot the full length of the blade and nearly straight down. the handle is then pulled back and the spadeful of earth is pried loose, lifted slightly, thrown a little forward, and at the same time turned. the lumps are then broken by striking them with the blade or teeth of the tool. all weeds and trash should be covered during the operation. a common fault of beginners is to put the spade in the soil on a slant and only about half the length of the blade, and then flop the soil over in the hole from which it came, often covering the edge of the unspaded soil. the good spader works from side to side across his piece of ground, keeping a narrow trench or furrow between the spaded and unspaded soil, into which weeds and trash and manure may be drawn and thoroughly covered, and also to prevent covering the unspaded soil. if this work has been well done with the ordinary spade or fork and finished with a rake, the result will be a bed of soil twelve to fifteen inches deep, fine and mellow and well prepared for root penetration, for good ventilation, for the absorbing and holding of moisture and warmth. this method should always be employed for small gardens and flower beds. plowing for preparing large areas of soil the plow is the tool most generally used. why do we spade and plow? to break and pulverize the soil and make it soft and mellow, so the roots of plants may enter it in search of food, and get a firm hold for the support of the plant which is above ground. to make the soil open and porous, so that it can more readily absorb rain as it falls on the surface. to check loss of water by evaporation. to admit air to the roots of plants. also to allow air to act chemically on the mineral and organic matter of the soil and make them available to the crop. to raise the temperature of soils in the spring, or of damp soils at any time. to mix manures and organic matter with the soil. the more thoroughly manure is distributed through the soil the more easily plants will get it and the greater will be its effect on the soil. to destroy the insect enemies of the plant by turning them up to the frost and the birds. to kill weeds. weeds injure crops: they waste valuable moisture by pumping it up from the soil and sending it out into the air through their leaves. in this way they do their greatest injury to crops. they crowd and shade the crop. they take plant food which the plant should have. spading and plowing bring about conditions necessary for the sprouting or germination of seeds. spading and plowing also tend to bring about conditions necessary for the very important work of certain of the soil bacteria. parts of a plow it will be found that a good farm plow has the following parts (fig. ): _a standard_ or stock, the central part of the plow to which many of the other parts are attached. [illustration: fig. .--spading-fork and spade.] [illustration: fig. .--a wood beam-plow _a_, stock; _b_, beam; _c_, handles; _d_, clevis, _e_, shackle, _f_, share; _g_, mould board; _h_, landside; _k_, jointer or skimmer, _l_, truck or wheel, _p_, point or nose, _s_, shin.] _a beam_, to which the power is attached by which the plow is drawn. some plows have wooden beams and others have iron beams. _handles_ by which the plowman guides and steadies the plow and also turns it at the corners of the plowed ground in going about the field. _a clevis_, which is attached to the end of the beam and is used to regulate the depth of plowing. to the clevis is attached a _draft ring_ or _shackle_, to which the horse or team is fastened. to make the plow run deep the draft ring or shackle is placed in the upper holes or notches of the clevis; to make it run shallow the ring is placed in the lower holes. on some plows there are only notches in the clevis for holding the ring, they answer the same purpose as holes. the clevis is also used on some plows to regulate the width of the furrow. by moving the draft ring or shackle towards the plowed land the plow is made to cut a wider furrow, moving it away from the plowed land causes the plow to cut narrower. some plows have a double clevis so that the draft ring may be raised or lowered, or moved to right or left. with some plows the width of the furrow is adjusted by moving the beam at its attachment to the handles. _a share_, called by some the point, which shears the bottom of the furrow slice from the land. the share should be sharp, especially for plowing in grass land and land full of tough roots. if the share, particularly the point, becomes worn so that it bevels from beneath upwards it will be hard to keep the plow in the soil, for it will tend to slide up to the surface. if this happens the share must be renewed or sharpened. plows are being made now with share and point separate, and both of these reversible (fig. ), so that if either becomes worn on the under side it can be taken out and turned over and put back and it is all right, they thus become self-sharpening. _a mouldboard._ this turns and breaks the furrow slice. the degree to which the mouldboard pulverizes depends on the steepness of its slant upward and the abruptness of its curve sidewise. the steeper it is and the more abrupt the curve, the greater is its pulverizing power. a steep, abrupt mouldboard is adapted to light soils and to the heavier soils when they are comparatively dry. this kind of a plow is apt to puddle a clay soil if it is quite moist. for breaking new land a plow with a long, gradually sloping share and mouldboard is used. _a landslide_, which keeps the plow in place. _a coulter._ some plows have a straight knife-like coulter (fig. ) which is fastened to the beam just in front of the mouldboard and serves to cut the furrow slice from the land. in some plows this is replaced by an upward projection of the share; this is wide at the back and sharp in front and is called the shin of the plow from its resemblance to the shin bone. the coulter is sometimes made in the form of a sharp, revolving disk (fig. ), called a rolling coulter. this form is very useful in sod ground and in turning under vines and tall weeds. it also lessens the draft of the plow. _a jointer_ or skimmer which skims stubble and grass from the surface of the soil and throws them into the bottom of the furrow where they are completely covered. the jointer helps also to pulverize the soil. _a truck_ or wheel, attached under the end of the beam. this truck makes the plow run steadier. this is sometimes used to make the plow run shallower by setting it low down. this is not right, for it then acts as a brake and makes the plow draw harder. the depth of the furrow should be adjusted at the clevis. a plow not only has parts but it has character also. characteristics of a good plow a good plow should be strong in build and light in weight. the draft should be as light as possible. the plow should run steadily. a good plow should not only turn the soil but should pulverize it as well. when plowing, the team should be hitched to the plow with as short traces as possible, and the plow should be so adjusted that it will cut furrows of the required width and thickness with the least possible draft on the team and the least exertion on the part of the plowman. the furrow slice in plowing, the furrow slice may be cut thin and wide and be turned over flat. this method is adapted to breaking new land and heavy sod land. it may be cut thick and narrow and be turned up on edge. or it may be cut of such a width and depth that the plow will turn it at an angle of about forty-five degrees. by this last method the greatest amount of soil can be turned at least expense of labor; the furrow slice can be more thoroughly broken; the greatest surface is exposed to the action of the air, and plant food is more evenly distributed through the soil. how deep shall we plow? we learned in a previous chapter that the roots of farm plants develop largely in that part of the soil which is worked by the plow; therefore, to have as much tilled soil as possible for root growth, we should generally plow as deep as possible without turning too much of the subsoil to the surface. lands that have been plowed deep should be deepened gradually by plowing up a half-inch to an inch of subsoil each year until the plow reaches a depth of at least nine or ten inches. there is an opinion among many farmers that sandy soils should not be plowed deep. but as these soils are apt to be leachy it seems best to fill them with organic matter to as great a depth as possible to increase their water-holding power, and this can best be done by plowing farm manures in deep. [illustration: fig. .--a slip-nose share. _n_, a slip-nose.] [illustration: fig. .--_c_, straight knife coulter.] [illustration: fig. . an iron beam-plow, with rolling coulter and double clevis.] [illustration: fig. .--a rolling coulter harrow.] [illustration: fig. .--spring-toothed harrows.] in many parts of the south the farmers use very small plows and small animals to draw them. the result is that the soil is not prepared to a sufficient depth to allow of the large root development necessary for large crops. these farmers need larger tools and heavier animals if they expect to make much improvement in the yield of their crops. these small plows and this shallow plowing have done much to aid the washing and gulleying of the hill farms by rain. the shallow layer of loose soil takes in the rain readily, but as the harder soil beneath does not take the water as readily, the shallow plowed soil soon fills, then becomes mud, and the whole mass goes down the slope. the land would wash less if it had not been plowed at all, and least of all if it were plowed deep, for then there would be a deep reservoir of loose soil which would be able to hold a large amount of water until the harder lower soil could take care of it. breaking out the middles some farmers have a way when getting the land ready for a crop, of plowing the rows first and then "breaking out the middles" or spaces between after the crop is planted. this is a poor practice, as it interferes with thorough preparation of the soil. the ground can be more thoroughly plowed and broken up before the crop is planted than afterwards. this practice of leaving the middles interferes with proper harrowing and after-cultivation. throwing the land up in ridges many farmers throw the land up into ridges with the plow and then plant on the ridge. when land is thrown into ridges a greater amount of surface is exposed to the air and a greater loss of moisture by evaporation takes place, therefore ridge culture is more wasteful of soil water than level culture. for this reason dry soils everywhere and most soils in dry climates should, wherever practicable, be left flat. on stiff, heavy soils which are slow to dry out, and on low bottom lands it may be desirable to ridge the land to get the soil dried out and warmed quicker in the spring. late fall and early planter truck crops are often planted on the southern slopes of low ridges thrown up with the plow for warmth and protection from cold winds. time to plow the time of plowing will depend somewhat on the nature of the soil, climate and the crop. more plowing is done in the spring just before planting spring and summer crops than at any other time, excepting in localities that plant large areas of winter grain and truck. this spring plowing should be done early, for the spring plowing tends to dry the loosened soil somewhat and allows it to become warm at an earlier date, and at the same time the loosened soil tends to hold water in the lower soil for future use by the crop and allows the soil to take in spring rains more readily. if a cover crop or green manure crop is to be turned under in the spring it should be done early so as to prevent the crop to be turned under from pumping too much water out of the soil and thus interfering with the growth of the crop for which the land is being prepared. there are some particular advantages to be gained by fall plowing in heavy soils: immediately after harvest the land is usually dry and easy to work. the soil plowed at this time and left rough is acted upon physically by frost which pulverizes it, and chemically by rain and air which renders plant food available. insects are turned up and exposed to frost and birds. a great number of weeds are destroyed and the land is more easily fitted for crops in the spring. fall plowing should be done as early as possible, especially in the dryer regions, to catch all water possible. it is not advisable to plow sandy soils in the fall lest plant food be washed out of them. when possible a cover crop should be put on fall plowed land where there is likely to be loss of plant food by leaching. bare fallow the term "fallowing" is sometimes applied to the operation of plowing, and sometimes the land is left bare without a crop sometime after plowing; this is called "bare fallowing" the land. bare fallowing should not be practiced on all soils. it is adapted: to dry climates and dry seasons where it is desirable to catch and save every possible drop of rainfall, and where plant food will not be washed out of the exposed soils by rains. to heavy clay lands. to lands that are foul with weeds and insects. to sour soils which are sweetened by exposure to air and rain. light sandy soils should not be subjected to bare fallow unless they are very foul with weeds. they should always be covered with a crop to prevent loss of plant food by leaching. chapter xii harrowing and rolling harrowing after spading or plowing the next operation in the preparation of the soil is generally raking, harrowing or dragging. the objects of these operations are: to break lumps and clods left by the plow and spade and to further pulverize the soil. harrowing and raking aid in controlling soil ventilation, and put the soil in better condition to absorb moisture. they check the loss of moisture by making a mulch of fine loose earth on the surface. the harrow and rake destroy the weeds. the harrow brings about conditions favorable to the even distribution of seeds. it is also the tool generally used to cover seeds sown broadcast. harrowing is generally done just before planting, and with some crops just after, to cover seeds or to smooth the ground. harrowing is also done in the first stages of growth of some crops to kill weeds and make a soil mulch. the harrow should always follow the plow within a few hours unless it is desired to leave the land in a bare fall or winter fallow. at other times of the year the lumps of earth are apt to dry out and become hard and difficult to break. if there is but one work team on the farm it is a good plan during the plowing season to stop the plow in time to harrow the day's plowing before the day's work ends. harrows there are several types of harrows in use. they may be classified according to the style of their teeth or cutting parts; they are as follows: rolling cutter harrows. spring-toothed harrows. spike-toothed harrows. coulter-toothed harrows. chain harrows. brush harrows. plank or drag harrows. these types vary in the depth to which they cut, and the degree to which they pulverize the soil. _rolling cutter harrows._ harrows of this type (see fig. ) consist of one or more revolving shafts on which are arranged a number of concave disks. these disks are either entire, notched, or made of several pieces fastened together. examples of these are the disk, cutaway and spading harrows. these harrows cut and move the soil deeper than the other types. they are especially adapted to work on heavy clay soils. the value of this type of harrow as moisture preservers depends on the manner in which they are used. if the disks are so set that they cover but a portion of the surface with a mulch of fine earth they leave a ridge exposed to the action of the wind and sun and the rate of evaporation is greatly increased. the disks should be set at such an angle that the whole surface shall be stirred or covered. soils which need the disk harrow should generally be gone over again with some shallower working tool to smooth the surface. an objection to the rolling cutters is that unless great care is taken they will leave the land in ridges and valleys. the two gangs of disks throw the earth in opposite directions. they are generally set to throw it from the centre and the result is a shallow double furrow the width of the machine. by lapping each time the furrow is partially filled, but to get the land smooth a smoothing harrow should be used after the rolling cutter. _spring-toothed harrows_ (fig. ). spring-toothed harrows with their curved spring teeth enter the soil readily, draw moderately easy and pass over obstructions without much difficulty. they are very useful in new land that is full of roots and stumps and also stony land. they pulverize the soil to an average depth. they leave the soil in ridges. the ridges can be leveled by a smoother in the shape of a piece of plank attached to the rear of the harrow. on newly plowed grass land they tend to tear up the sod and leave it on the surface. they also tend to drag out coarse manures when plowed in. the original and more common form of the spring-toothed harrow is a floating harrow when at work. that is, it rests on the points of the teeth and is dragged or floated over the ground. a newer form of spring-toothed harrow, sometimes called the fallow cultivator, is mounted on high wheels and its action is largely controlled by them. this form of harrow is claimed to do much better work than the floating harrow and may in a large measure displace the rolling cutter. the weight of this harrow is entirely taken from the soil except in the wheel tracks, and the entire action is that of pulverizing and lightening the soil. _spike-toothed harrows_ (fig. ). the teeth of these harrows are round, square or diamond-shaped spikes fastened into a wood or iron frame. the teeth are set in a vertical position or are inclined to the rear. these harrows are shallow in their action; they run easily but tend to compact the soil more than the other types and are therefore better adapted to loose soils and to finishing off after the work of the deep cutting harrows. they are also used for covering seeds. [illustration: fig. .--spike-toothed harrows.] [illustration: fig. .--a coulter-toothed harrow.] [illustration: fig. .--a plank harrow.] _coulter-toothed harrows._ the coulter-toothed harrows (fig. ) have teeth resembling the coulter of a plow twisted or bent into various shapes. the acme is a good example of this class of harrow. it cuts, turns and pulverizes the surface soil somewhat after the manner of the plow. it prepares a fine mulch and leaves an excellent seed bed. it is an excellent harrow to finish off with after using a rolling cutter. _chain harrows._ the chain harrow consists of a web of chains linked together. they have a wonderful power for breaking clods and are useful for collecting weeds. they shake the dirt from the weeds and roll them into heaps. chain harrows tend to compact the soil. _brush harrows._ the brush harrow is a primitive form made by fastening brush to a long pole. brush harrows are quite useful for brushing in seed and for pulverizing manure broadcasted on grass lands. _plank harrows._ the plank harrow (see fig. ) is made of several planks fastened together so that each plank overlaps the next one to it, like the clapboards of a house. this harrow is as good as a roller in fining and smoothing the surface soil. it is an excellent tool to use alternately with a spike or coulter-toothed harrow on lumpy soil. this tool rasps or grinds many of the lumps or clods which slip by the harrow teeth and presses others into the ground so that the harrow following can get a grip on them. it is a harrow that can be made on any farm. this planker is an excellent tool to smooth the surface, for broadcasting small seeds and for planting truck crops. rolling the objects of rolling are: to compress the surface soil so that the harrow will do its work more efficiently, also to break clods or lumps that may have resisted the action of the harrow. to smooth the surface of the soil for an even distribution of small seeds, and to firm the soil around such seeds after they are planted so that they will keep moist and sprout readily. to give compactness to soils that are light and loose and thus enable them to hold moisture and plant food better. to press into the ground the roots of plants partly dislodged by the frost. to remove the conditions favorable to the development of many kinds of insects. to sink surface stones so that they will not interfere with harvesting the crop. light porous soils may be rolled at any time, but clay soils can be rolled to advantage only when they are stiff and cloddy. spring-sown grain is often rolled as soon as sown. this is all right in ordinary spring weather, but if showers are frequent and the soil is quite moist the rolling should be omitted till after the grain is up. the same practice will apply to autumn-sown grain also. if the soil is dry the rolling helps it to pump water up to the seeds. but if it is moist and showers are frequent the combined action of the roller and the rain is to make so thick a crust that many of the seeds will not be able to force their way through it or will be smothered by poor ventilation. after the grain is up the rolling may be done to advantage, as it then makes a firm soil about the roots of the plants, a condition of benefit to grain crops. the most simple form of roller is a solid or hollow cylinder of wood fastened into a frame by which it is drawn. some rollers have spikes or blunt attachments fastened to their surfaces for breaking clods. a roller that is quite popular consists of a cylinder of pressed steel. chapter xiii leaves facts about leaves we found in an earlier lesson that all of our farm plants have roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruit and seeds. we studied the root first as being the most important part of the plant to the farmer. the seed was the next part studied, for that was considered the next most important, because the seed is the main reliance for new plants. the part next in importance is the leaf and that we will now study. if you will go into the field and observe the leaves on a number of plants, you will find that the following facts are true: they are all green. they are flat and thin. many of them are very broad. some of the leaves on a single branch are larger than others on the same branch, and some have longer stems than others. most of them have a rather dark glossy upper surface and a lighter rougher under surface. [illustration: fig. . to show transpiration. plant _a_ was set in the sunlight, plant _b_ was left in the darker part of the room. _a_ has transpired much more than _b_, showing that sunlight is necessary for this work.] [illustration: fig. .--amount of transpiration this plant transpired within hours an amount of water equal to the colored liquid in the bottle standing on the jar, more than ounces.] the leaves on the lower branches of the trees are spread out in a more or less flat layer and have their glossy surfaces all turned up, while those on branches in the tops of trees or shrubs are arranged all around the branch, the glossy surface being turned up. what are the reasons for these facts? a study of the work of the leaves and the conditions necessary for them to perform their work will help us to answer this question. the uses of leaves to plants =experiment.=--(see fig. ). take a pot or tumbler in which a young plant is growing, also a piece of pasteboard large enough to cover the top of the pot; cut a slit from the edge to the centre of the pasteboard, then place it on the top of the pot, letting the plant enter the slit. now close the slit with wax or tallow, making it perfectly tight about the stem. if the plant is not too large, invert a tumbler over it, letting the edge of the tumbler rest on the pasteboard; if a tumbler is not large enough use a glass jar. if a potted plant is not convenient a slip or a seedling bean or pea placed in a tumbler of water will serve the purpose. prepare several and place some in a sunny window and leave others in the room where it is darker, and observe them from time to time. in the case of those plants that were set in the sunny window moisture will be seen collecting on the inner surface of the tumbler. where does this come from? it is absorbed from the soil by the roots and is sent with its load of dissolved plant food up through the stems to the leaves. there most of the water is passed from the leaves to the air and is condensed on the sides of the glass. a work of leaves then is to throw off or to transpire moisture and thus make room for a new supply of food-laden moisture. this water is thrown off through little pores or mouths or stomata which are very small and very numerous on the under side of the leaf. it will be noticed that the plant not placed in the sunlight transpires very little moisture, showing that sunlight helps the leaves in this work of transpiration. how much water does a plant transpire or throw off from its leaves? =experiment.=--(see fig. ). fill a common quart fruit jar or can with soil and plant in it a kernel of corn, a bean, a cotton seed or seed of some other plant. after the plant has grown to be twelve or fifteen inches high, cut a piece of pasteboard a little larger than the top of the jar, cut a hole in the centre as large as the stem of the plant and make a slit from edge to centre. soak the pasteboard in melted wax or paraffine candle. cool it and then place it over the jar, slipping it around the plant stem. now solder the pasteboard to the jar with melted candle making the joints tight all the way around. then close up the slit and the hole about the stem. the jar is now completely sealed and there is no way for water to escape except through the plant. the plant should be well watered before the jar is closed. now weigh the jar and set in the sunlight. weigh again the next day. the difference in the two weights will represent the amount of water transpired by the plant. the weighings may be repeated until moisture gives out. if it is desired to continue this experiment some time, a small hole should be cut in the pasteboard before it is fastened to the jar. this hole is for adding water to the jar from time to time. the hole should be kept closed with a cork. the amount of water added should always be weighed and account taken of it in the following weighings. while this plant is growing it will be well to wrap the jar with paper to protect the roots from the light. it has been found that the amount of water necessary to grow a plant to maturity is equal to from to times the weight of the plant when dry. this gives us an idea of the very great importance of water to plants. =experiment.=--take a few leaves from a plant of cotton, bean, clover or other plant that has been growing in the sunlight; boil them for a few minutes to soften the tissues, then place them in alcohol for a day or until the green coloring matter is extracted by the alcohol. wash the leaves by taking them from the alcohol and putting them in a tumbler of water. then put them in saucers in a weak solution of iodine. the leaf will be seen to gradually darken; this will continue until it becomes dark purple or almost black (fig. ). we have already learned that iodine turns starch this color, so we conclude that leaves must contain starch. (five or ten cents worth of tincture of iodine from a drug store diluted to about the color of weak tea will be sufficient for these leaf experiments.) =experiment.=--if a potted plant was used for the last experiment, set it away in a dark closet after taking the leaves for the experiment. a day or two after, take leaves from it before removing it from the closet. boil these leaves and treat them with alcohol as in the previous experiment. then wash them and test them with iodine as before. no starch will be found in the leaves (fig. ). the starch that was in them when placed in the closet has disappeared. now paste some thick paper labels on some of the leaves of a plant exposed to the sunlight. after a few hours remove the leaves that have the labels on them, boil, treat with alcohol and test with the iodine. in this case starch will be found in all parts of the leaf except the part over which the label was pasted (fig. ). if the sunlight is intense and the label thin, some starch will appear under it. according to these last experiments, leaves contain starch at certain times, and this starch seems to appear when the leaf is in the sunlight and to disappear when the light is cut off. the fact is that the leaves manufacture starch for the plant and sunlight is necessary for this work. the starch is then changed to sugar which is carried by the sap to other parts of the plant where it is again changed to starch to be built into the plant structure or stored for future use. =experiment.=--take leaves from a plant of silver-leaf geranium growing in the sunlight. if this plant cannot be had, the leaves from some other variegated white and green leaved plant will do. boil these leaves, treat with alcohol, wash and test with iodine (fig. ). starch will be found in the leaf wherever there was green coloring matter in it, while the parts that were white will show no starch. the green coloring matter seems to have something to do with the starch making, in fact starch is manufactured only where it is present. this coloring matter is called chlorophyl or leaf green. we are told by the chemists that this starch is made from carbon and water. there exists in the air a gas called carbonic acid gas; this gas is composed of carbon and oxygen. it is breathed out of the lungs of animals and is produced by the burning and decay of organic matter. the under side of the leaf contains hundreds of little pores or mouths called stomata. this gas mixed with air enters these mouths. the green part of the leaf aided by the sun takes hold of the gas and separates the carbon from the oxygen. the oxygen is allowed to go free, but the carbon is made to unite with water and form starch. =experiment.=--the escape of this oxygen gas may be seen by taking some water weed from either fresh or salt water and placing it in a glass jar of the kind of water from which it came, then set the jar in the sunlight. after a time bubbles of gas will be seen collecting and rising to the surface. if a mass of weed like the green scum of fresh water ponds or green sea lettuce be used, the bubbles of gas will become entangled in the mass and will cause it to rise to the surface of the water. at the same time prepare another jar of the weed and place it somewhere out of the sun; very few bubbles will be seen to rise and the weed will settle to the bottom of the jar (fig. ). all of the food of the plant, whether taken from the air or from the soil is digested in the leaves, and sunlight and air are necessary for this work. another function of leaves then is to digest food for the plant. important functions of leaves then are: to transpire moisture sent up by the roots. to manufacture starch by combining some of the water sent up by the roots with carbon taken from the air. to digest the starch and food sent up by the roots. to do these things well leaves must be connected with a strong, healthy root system and must have plenty of light and air. we are now ready to give reasons for the facts about leaves mentioned in the first part of the chapter (see page ). leaves are green because the green coloring matter is necessary for the leaf to do its work. leaves are flat and thin and broad in order that they may present a large surface to the air and sunlight. [illustration: fig. . to show that growing leaves contain starch. . represents a green cotton leaf as picked from the plant. . is the same leaf after taking out the green coloring matter; the leaf is white. . the same leaf after treatment with weak iodine turned to a dark purple, showing the presence of starch. (drawings by m.e. feltham.)] [illustration: fig. . to show that starch disappears from the leaf when the plant is placed in the dark. the plant from which was taken the leaf represented in fig , was immediately placed in a dark closet for hours. then leaf was taken from it; represents this leaf after the chlorophyl was taken from it: it is white; is the same after treatment with iodine. the leaf remains white, showing no starch. (drawings by m.e. feltham.)] [illustration: fig. . to show that sunlight is necessary for starch-making by leaves. leaf had a paper label stuck to its upper surface a couple of hours while the plant was exposed to sunlight; is the same leaf after the chlorophyl was taken out, and represents it after treatment with iodine. the leaf turned purple in all parts except the part that was shaded by the label. starch was removed from the portion under the label, but was not renewed because the label kept out the necessary sunlight. (drawings by m.e. feltham.)] [illustration: fig. . to show that chlorophyl is necessary for starch formation in the leaf. is a variegated leaf from a silver-leaved geranium; the center is an irregular patch of green, with an irregular border of white. , after taking out the green. , after iodine treatment, the leaf turns purple only where it was originally green, showing that no starch forms in the white border. (drawings by m.e. feltham.)] some leaves on the branch are larger than others because in the struggle for light and air they have had a better chance than the others or they have had more of the food which has come up from the root. some of the leaves have developed longer stems than others in their effort to reach out after light and air. most leaves have the little mouths through which air is taken in and water and oxygen given out on the rough side, and that side is turned down toward the earth probably so that rain and dust will not choke the little pores. the leaves of the lower branches tend to spread out in a broad, flat plane because in the effort to get light no leaf will grow directly under and in the shadow of another, while on those branches which grow straight up from the top of the tree the leaves can get light from all sides and so arrange themselves around the stem. is it of any value to the plant grower to know these facts about leaves? it is, for knowing these things he can better understand the necessity of caring for the leaves of his growing plants to see that their work is not interfered with. how the work of some leaves is interfered with many people who grow house plants have trouble in keeping them well clothed with leaves, for instance, the geranium and the rubber plant. the leaves are constantly turning yellow and dropping off or drying up. this sometimes occurs from over-watering or not sufficiently watering the soil in the pot or box. if the watering is all right the trouble may occur in this way: the air of the house is quite dry, especially in winter. as a result transpiration from the leaf may be excessive. more water is transpired than is necessary, consequently more is pumped by the roots and with it more food is sent to the leaf than it can take care of. as the excess of water is transpired the excess of food is left in the leaf. the tendency is to clog its pores and therefore interfere with its work, and gradually weaken and finally kill it. the remedy for this is to spray the leaves frequently so as to keep the air about them moist and so check transpiration. keeping a vessel of water near them helps also as this tends to keep the air moist. dust sometimes chokes the leaves. washing or spraying remedies this. sometimes house plants, and out-door plants as well, become covered with a small, green insect called the plant louse or aphis. this insect has a sharp beak like a mosquito and it sucks the juices from the leaf and causes it to curl up, interfering with its work and finally killing it. frequent spraying with water will tend to keep these away. a surer remedy against them is to spray the plants with weak tobacco water made by soaking tobacco or snuff in water, or to fumigate them with tobacco smoke. sometimes the under side of the leaf becomes infested with a very small mite called red spider because it spins a web. these mites injure the leaf by sucking sap from it. they can be kept in check by frequent spraying for they do not like water. if, then, we are careful to frequently spray the leaves of our house plants we will have very little trouble from aphis, red spider or over transpiration. the aphis, or plant louse, is often very numerous on out-door plants, for instance, the rose, chrysanthemum, cabbage, and fruit trees. they vary in color from green to dark brown or black. they are treated in the same way as those on the house plants. some familiar out-door insects which interfere with leaf work are the common potato bug, the green cabbage worm, the rose slug, the elm tree leaf beetle, the canker worm, the tomato worm. these insects and many others eat the leaves (fig. ). they chew and swallow their food and are called chewing insects. all insects which chew the leaves of plants can be destroyed by putting poison on their food. the common poisons used for this purpose are paris green and london purple, which contain arsenic, and are used at the rate of one teaspoonful to a pail of water or one-fourth pound to a barrel of water. this is sprinkled or sprayed on the leaves of the plants. another poison used is white hellebore. this loses its poisoning qualities when exposed to the air for a time. therefore it is safer to use about the flower garden and on plants which are soon to be used as food or whose fruit is to be used soon, like cabbages and current bushes. this hellebore is sifted on the plant full strength, or it may be diluted by mixing one part of hellebore with one or two parts of flour, plaster, or lime. it is also used in water, putting one ounce of hellebore in three gallons of water and then spraying it on the plants. plants may be sprayed by using a watering pot with a fine rose or sprinkler, or an old hair-brush or clothes-brush. for large plants or large numbers of smaller plants spray pumps of various sizes are used. sometimes chewing insects on food plants and sucking insects on all plants are treated by spraying them with soapy solutions or oily solutions which injure their bodies. the work of the leaf is also interfered with by diseases which attack the leaves and cause parts or the whole leaf to turn yellow or brown or become blistered or filled with holes. the common remedy for most of these diseases is called the "bordeaux mixture." it is prepared as follows: dissolve four pounds of blue vitriol (blue stone, or copper sulphate) in several gallons of water. then slake four pounds of lime. mix the two and add enough water to make a barrelful. the mixture is then sprayed on the plants. for more detailed directions for spraying plants and combating insects and diseases write to your state experiment station and to the united states department of agriculture at washington, d.c. [illustration: fig. . to show the giving off of gas by leaves, and that sunlight is necessary for it. the jars contain seaweed. _a_ was set in the sun and developed enough gas to float part of the plant. _b_ was left in the darker part of the room and developed very little gas.] [illustration: fig. . seedling radishes reaching for light.] [illustration: fig. . elm leaves injured by the "imported elm-tree leaf beetle," a chewing insect.] the work of the leaves of house plants is often interfered with by not giving them sufficient sunlight. garden and field plants are sometimes planted so thick that they crowd each other and shut the light and air from each other, or weeds are allowed to grow and do the same thing, the result being that the leaves cannot do good work and the plant becomes weak and sickly. weeds are destroyed by pulling them up and exposing their roots to the sun. this should be done before the weeds blossom, to prevent them from producing fresh seeds for a new crop of weeds. some weeds have fleshy roots--for example, dock, thistle--in which food is stored; these roots go deep in the ground, and when the upper part of the plant is cut or broken off the root sends up new shoots to take the place of the old. some have underground stems in which food is stored for the same purpose. the surest way to get rid of such weeds, in fact, of all weeds, is to prevent their leaves from growing and making starch and digesting food for them. this is accomplished by constantly cutting off the young shoots as soon as they appear above the soil, or by growing some crop that will smother them. the constant effort to make new growth will soon exhaust the supply of stored food and the weed will die. chapter xiv stems what are stems for? visit the farm or garden and the fields to examine stems and study their general appearances and habits of growth. notice that many plants, like the trees, bushes and many vegetable and flowering plants, have stems which are very much branched, while others have apparently single stems with but few or no branches. examine these stems carefully and note that there are leaves on some part of all of them and that just above the point where each leaf is fastened to the stem there is a bud which may sometime produce a new branch (fig. ). if the stems of trees and other woody plants be examined in the winter after the leaves have fallen, it will be seen that the buds are still there, and that just below each bud is a mark or leaf scar left by the fallen leaf. these buds are the beginnings of new branches for another year's growth. on some branches will be found also flowers and fruit or seed vessels. buds and leaves or buds and leaf scars distinguish stems from roots. some plants have stems under the soil as well as above it. these underground stems resemble roots but can be distinguished from them by the rings or joints where will be found buds and small scale-like leaves (fig. ). quitch-grass or wiregrass, burmuda grass, white potato and artichoke are examples of underground stems. now study the habit of growth of these stems. notice that: some plants grow erect with strong, stiff stems, for example, corn, sunflower, maple, pine, elm and other trees. many of these erect stems have branches reaching out into the air in all directions. stand under a tree close to the stem or trunk and look up into the tree and notice that the leaves are near the outer ends of the branches while in the centre of the tree the branches are nearly bare. why is this? if you remember the work of leaves and the conditions necessary for their work you will be able to answer this question. leaves need light and air for their work, and these erect, branching stems hold the leaves up and spread them out in the light and air. notice that where several trees grow close together, they are one-sided, and that the longest and largest branches are on the outside of the group and that they have more leaves than the inner branches. why? why do the trees in thick woods have most of the living branches and bear most of their leaves away up in the top of the tree? some stems instead of standing up erect climb up on other plants or objects by means of springlike tendrils which twist about the object and so hold up the slender stem. on the grape vine these tendrils are slender branches. on the sweet pea and garden pea they are parts of the leaves. the trumpet creeper and english ivy climb by means of air roots. the nasturtium climbs by means of its leaf stems. other stems get up into the light and air with their leaves by twining about upright objects. for example, the morning glory and pole bean. some stems will be found that spread their leaves out to the sun by creeping over the ground. sweet potato, melon, squash, and cucumber vines are examples of such plants. one use of the stems of plants then is to support the leaves, flowers and fruit, and expose them to the much needed light and air. =experiment.=--get a piece of grape vine and cut it into pieces four or five inches long; notice that the cut surface appears to be full of little holes. cut a piece from between joints, place one end in your mouth and blow hard. it will be found that air can be blown through the piece of vine. now pour about an inch of water in a tumbler or cup and color it with a few drops of red ink. then stand some of the pieces of grape vine in the colored water. in a few hours the colored water will appear at the upper ends of the sticks. capillary force has caused the colored water to rise through the small tubes in the vine. repeat this experiment with twigs of several kinds of trees and soft green plants, as elm, maple, sunflower, corn, etc. it will not be possible to blow through these twigs, but the red water will rise through them by osmose, and in a few hours will appear at the upper ends. if some leaves are left on the stems the colored water will appear in them. some white flowers can be colored in this way. in this manner the stem carries plant food dissolved in water from the roots to the leaves, and after the leaves have digested it carries it back to various parts of the plant. the stem then serves as a conductor or a passage for food and moisture between roots and leaves. visit a strawberry bed or search for wild strawberry plants. notice that from the older and larger plants are sent out long, slender, leafless stems with a bud at the tip. these stems are called runners. find some runners that have formed roots at the tip and have developed a tuft of leaves there, forming new plants. find some black raspberry plants and notice that some of the canes have bent over and taken root at the tips sending up a new shoot and thus forming a new plant. you know how rapidly wire grass and bermuda grass will overrun the garden or farm. one way in which they do this is by sending out underground stems which take root at the joints and so form new plants. another use of the stem then is to produce new plants. on the farm we make use of this habit of stems when we wish to produce new white potato plants. we cut an old potato in pieces and plant them. the buds in the eyes grow and form new plants. one way of getting new grape plants is to take a ripened vine in the fall and cut it in pieces with two or three buds and plant them so that one or both of the buds are covered with soil. the pieces will take root and in the spring will send up new shoots and thus form new plants. you can obtain new plants from geranium, verbena, nasturtium and many other flowering plants, by cutting and planting slips or parts of the stems from them. in parts of the south new sweet potato plants are obtained by cutting parts of the stems from growing plants and planting them. florists produce large numbers of new plants by taking advantage of this function of stems. =experiment.=--take a white potato which is a thickened stem and place it in a warm, dark place. it will soon begin to sprout or send out new stems, and as these new stems grow the potato shrinks and shrivels up. why is this? it is because the starch and other material stored in the potato are being used to feed the new branches. when we plant potatoes in the garden and field the new plants produced from the eyes of the potato are fed by the stored material until they strike root and are able to take care of themselves. all stems store food for the future use of the plant. annual plants, or those which live but one year, store food in their stems and leaves during the early part of their growth. during the fruiting or seed forming season this food material is transferred to the seeds and there stored, and the stems become woody. this is a fact to bear in mind in connection with the harvesting of hay or other fodder crops. if we let the grass stand until the seeds form in the head, the stem and leaves send their nourishment to the seeds and become woody and of less value than if cut before the seeds are fully formed. in plants of more than one year's growth the stored food is used to give the plant a start the following season, or for seed production. the rapid growth of leaf and twig on trees and shrubs in spring is made from the food stored in the stem the season before. sago is a form of starch stored in the stem of the sago palm for the future use of the plant. maple sugar is made from the food material stored in the trunk of the maple tree for the rapid growth of twig and leaf in the spring. cane sugar is the food stored in the sugar cane to produce new plants the next season. if we examine the stem of a tree that has been cut down we find that it is woody, that the wood is arranged in rings or layers and that the outer part of the stem is covered with bark. we will notice also that the wood near the centre of the tree is darker than the outer part. this inner part is called the heart wood of the tree. the lighter wood is called the sap wood. it is through the outer or sap wood that the water taken in by the root is passed up to the leaves where the food which it carries is digested and then sent back to the plant. the returning digested food is sent back largely through the bark. between the bark and the wood is a very thin layer which is called cambium. this is the active growing tissue of the stem. in the spring it is very soft and slippery and causes the bark to peel off easily. this cambium builds a new ring of wood outside of the old wood and a new ring of bark on the inside of the bark. in this way the tree grows in diameter. now if the bark is injured, or any part of the stem, all parts below the wound are cut off from the return supply of digested food and their growth is checked. when such a wound does occur, or if a wound is made by cutting off a branch, the cambium sets to work to repair the damage by pushing out a new growth which tends to cover the wound. we can help this by covering the wound and keeping the air from it to prevent its drying and to keep disease from attacking it before it is healed. how the work of the stem may be interfered with if there are any peach trees near by, examine the trunks close to the ground, even pulling away the soil for a few inches. you will very likely find a mass of gummy substance oozing from the tree. pull this away and in it and in the wood under it will be found one or more yellowish white worms. these are tree borers. they will be found in almost all peach trees. they interfere with the work of the stem and in many cases kill the trees. these worms may be kept somewhat in check by keeping papers wrapped about the lower part of the tree. but the surest way to keep them in check is to dig them out, spring and fall, with a knife and wire. borers attack the other fruit trees and also ornamental trees and shrubs. rabbits sometimes gnaw the bark from trees during severe winters. careless workmen sometimes injure the bark of trees by allowing plows and mowing machines or other tools which they are using among them to come in contact with the trees and injure the bark. young trees purchased from the nursery generally have a label fastened to them with a piece of wire. unless this wire is removed or is carefully watched and enlarged from time to time it will cut into the bark as the stem grows and interfere with its work and often kill the top of the tree or injure a main branch. these are a few ways in which the work of the stem is sometimes checked and the plant injured thereby. chapter xv flowers in our study of the parts of plants the flower and fruit have been given the last place because in the growing of most farm plants a knowledge of the functions of the flower is of less importance than that of the roots, leaves and stems. however, a knowledge of these parts is necessary for successful fruit culture and some other horticultural industries. as with the other parts of the plant our study will not be exhaustive but will be simply an attempt to bring out one or two important truths of value to most farmers. in the study of flowers the specimens used for study will depend upon the time of the year in which the studies are made and need not necessarily be the ones used here for illustration. function or use of flowers to plants of what use is the flower to the plant? you have doubtless noticed that most flowers are followed by fruit or seed vessels. in fact, the fruit and seeds are really produced from the flower, and the work of most flowers is to produce seeds in order to provide for new plants. [illustration: fig. . a horse-chestnut stem showing leaves, buds, and scars where last year's leaves dropped off.] [illustration: fig. .--an underground stem buds show distinctly at points indicated by _b_.] to understand how this comes about it will be necessary to study the parts of the flower and find out their individual uses or functions. parts of a flower if we take for our study any of the following flowers: cherry, apple, buttercup, wild mustard, and start from the outside, we will find an outer and under part which in most flowers is green. this is called the calyx (figs. - ). in the buttercup and mustard the calyx is divided into separate parts called sepals. in the cherry, peach and apple, the calyx is a cup or tube with the upper edge divided into lobes. above the calyx is a broad spreading corolla which is white or brightly colored and is divided into several distinct parts called petals. the petals of one kind of flower are generally different in shape, size and color from those of other flowers. in some flowers the petals are united into a corolla of one piece which may be funnel-shaped, as in the morning glory or petunia of the garden, or tubular as in the honeysuckle, wheel-shaped as in the tomato and potato, or of various other forms. within the corolla are found several bodies having long, slender stems with yellow knobs on their tips. these are called stamens. the slender stems are called stalks or filaments and the knobs anthers. the anthers of some of the stamens will very likely be found covered with a fine, yellow powder called pollen. this pollen is produced within the anther which, when ripe, bursts and discharges the pollen. the stamens vary greatly in number in different kinds of flowers. in the centre of the cherry, peach, or mustard flower will be found an upright slender body called the pistil. in the peach and cherry the pistil has three parts, a lower rounded, somewhat swollen part called the ovary, a slender stem arising from it called the style, and a slight enlargement at the top of the style called the stigma. the stigma is generally roughened or sticky. if the ovary is split open, within it will be found a little body called an ovule, which is to develop into a seed. in the apple flower the pistils will be found to have one ovary with five styles and stigmas and in the ovary will be several ovules. in the buttercup will be found a large number of small pistils, each consisting of an ovary and stigma. the parts of different flowers will be found to vary in color, in shape, in relative size and in number. in some flowers one or more of the parts will be found wanting. examine a number of flowers and find the parts. functions of the parts of the flowers now what are the uses of these parts of the flower? [illustration: fig. .--flower of cherry. _a_, pistil; _b_, stamen; _c_, corolla; _d_, calyx; _e_, section of flower showing ovary with ovule. (drawing by m.e. feltham.)] [illustration: fig. . . flower of apple; _b_, stamens; _c_, corolla; _d_, calyx. . section of same; _a_, style; _e_, compound ovary; _f_, filament; _g_, anther. (drawing by m.e. feltham.)] [illustration: fig. . _a._ pistil of flowering raspberry; _e_, ovary; _t_, style; _s_, stigma. _b._ stamen of flowering raspberry; _f_, filament; _g_, anther; _p_, pollen.] [illustration: fig. .--flower of buttercup. _c_, petals; _d_, sepals; _h_, ripened pistils, or fruit. (drawing by m.e. feltham.)] if we watch a flower of the peach or cherry from week to week, we will see that the pistil develops into a peach or cherry which bears within a seed from which a new plant will be produced if the seed is placed under conditions necessary for germination or sprouting. the pistils of the flowers of other plants will be found to develop into fleshy fruits, hard nuts, dry pods or husks containing one or more seeds. the work of the pistil or pistils of flowers then is to furnish seeds for the production of new plants. the botanists tell us that a pistil will not produce seeds unless it is fertilized by pollen from the same kind of flower falling on its stigma. the work of the stamen then is to produce pollen to fertilize the pistils. pistils and stamens are both necessary for the production of fruit and seed. they are therefore called the essential or necessary parts of the flower. the botanists also tell us that nature has provided that in most cases the pistils shall be fertilized by the pollen of some other flower than their own, as this produces stronger seeds. how is the pollen carried from flower to flower? go into the garden or field and watch the bees and butterflies flying about the flowers, resting on them and crawling into them. they are seeking for nectar which the flower secretes. as they visit plant after plant, feeding from many flowers, their bodies become more or less covered with pollen as they brush over the stamens. some of this pollen in turn gets rubbed off on the stigmas of the pistils and they become fertilized. thus the bees and some other insects have become necessary as pollen carriers for some of the flowers and the flowers in turn feed them with sweet nectar. this gives us a hint as to one use of the corollas which spreads out such broad, brightly-colored, conspicuous petals. it must be that they are advertisements or sign boards to attract the bees and to tell them where they can find nectar and so lead them unconsciously to carry pollen from flower to flower to fertilize the pistils. the act of carrying pollen to the pistil is called pollination, and carrying pollen from the stamens of one flower to the pistil of another flower is called cross pollination. if we examine a blossom bud just before it opens we will see only the calyx. everything else will be wrapped up inside of it. evidently, then, the calyx is a protecting covering for the other parts of the flower until blossoming time. the corolla will be found carefully folded within the calyx and also helps protect the stamens and pistil. some flowers do not produce bright-colored corollas to attract the bees, for examples, the flowers of the grasses, wheat, corn, and other grains, the willows, butternuts, elms, pines and others. but they produce large amounts of pollen which is carried by the wind to the pistils. you have sometimes noticed in the spring that after a rain the pools of water are surrounded by a ring of yellow powder and you have perhaps thought it was sulphur. it was not sulphur but was composed of millions of pollen grains from flowers. one spring sunday i laid my hat on the seat in church. when i picked it up at the end of the service i found considerable dust on it. i brushed the dust off, but on reaching home i found some remaining and noticed that is was yellow, so i examined it with a magnifying glass and found that it was nearly all pollen grains. then i rubbed my finger across a shelf in my room and found it slightly dusty; the magnifying glass showed me that this dust was half pollen. this shows what a great amount of pollen is produced and discharged into the air, and it shows that very few pistils could escape even if they were under cover of a building. to make sure of cross pollination nature has in some cases placed the stamens and pistils in different flowers on the same plant. this will be found true of the flowers of the squashes, melons and cucumber. below some of the flower buds will be seen a little squash, melon or cucumber (fig. ). these are the ovaries of pistils and the stigmas will be found within the bud or will be seen when the bud opens. but no stamen will be found here. other flowers on these plants will be found to possess only stamens. these staminate flowers produce pollen and then die. they do not produce any fruit, but their pollen is necessary for the little cucumbers, squashes and melons to develop. another example is the corn plant. here the pistils are on the ear, the corn silk being the styles and stigmas, while the pollen is produced in the tassel at the top of the plant. with some plants we find that not only are the pistils and stamens in separate flowers but the staminate and pistilate flowers are placed on different plants. this will be found true of the osage orange and the willow. in many flowers that have both stamens and pistils or are perfect flowers the stigmas and pollen ripen at different times. with some varieties of fruit it is found that the pistils cannot be fertilized by pollen of the same variety. this is true of most of our native plums. for example, the pistils of the wild goose plum cannot be fertilized by pollen of wild goose plums even if it comes from other trees than the one bearing the pistils. they must have pollen from another variety of plum. value of a knowledge of the flower many times it happens that a farmer or a gardener wants to start a strawberry bed and buys plants of a variety of berries that have the reputation of being very productive. he plants them and cultivates them carefully, and at the proper time they blossom very freely, and there is promise of a large crop, yet very few berries appear and this continues to be the case. not satisfied with them he buys another variety and plants near them, and after that the old bed becomes very productive. now why is this? it happens that the flowers of some varieties of strawberries have a great many pistils but no stamens, or very few stamens, and there is not pollen enough to fertilize all of the blossoms, and when such a variety is planted it is necessary to plant near it some variety that produces many stamens and therefore pollen enough to fertilize both varieties in order to be sure of a crop. those strawberries which produce flowers with only pistils are called pistilate varieties, while those with both stamens and pistils are called perfect varieties (fig. ). in planting them there should be at least one row of a perfect variety to every four or five pistilate rows. [illustration: fig. . a magnolia flower showing central column of pistils and stamens, the pistils being above and the stamens below them.] [illustration: fig. .--flowers of squash. _a_, pistillate flower; _b_, staminate flower. a means of insuring cross-pollination.] we have learned that certain varieties of plums cannot be fertilized by pollen from the same variety, and to make them fruitful some other variety must be planted among them to produce pollen that will make them fruitful. this is more or less true of all our fruits. therefore it is not best generally to plant one variety of fruit by itself. not knowing this some orchardists have planted large blocks of a single variety of fruit which has been unfruitful till some other varieties have been planted near them or among them. a knowledge of the necessity of pollination is very important to those gardeners who grow cucumbers, tomatoes, melons and other fruiting plants in greenhouses. here in most cases the pollination is done by hand. we noticed that nature provides that most of the flowers shall be cross pollinated. this is particularly true of the flowers of the fruit trees, and for this reason it is impossible to get true varieties of fruit from seed. for example, if we plant seeds of the wine sap apple, the new trees produced from them will not produce the same kind of apple but each tree will produce something different and they will very likely all be poorer than the parent fruit. this is because of the mixture of pollens which fertilize the pistils. knowing this fact the nurseryman plants apple seeds and grows apple seedlings. when these get to be the size of a lead pencil he grafts them, that is, he digs them up, cuts off the tops away down to the root and then takes twigs from the variety he wishes to grow and sets or splices these twigs in the roots of the seedlings and then plants them. the root and the new top unite and produce a tree that bears the same kind of fruit as that produced by the tree from which the twig was taken. these are a few of the reasons why it is well to know something about flowers and their work. [illustration: fig. .--flower of a lily. notice how the stigma and the anthers are kept as far as possible from each other to guard against self-pollination and to insure cross-pollination.] [illustration: fig. . bud and flower of jewel-weed, or "touch-me-not." _a._ interior of bud. stamens are seen, but there appears to be no pistil. _b._ section of bud showing the pistil concealed behind the stamens. _c._ bee entering flower comes in contact with stamens and is loaded with pollen. _d._ same bee entering older flower. the stamens have ripened and been pushed off by the lengthened pistil, which is brushed by the back of the bee, and thus is pollinated. this is a contrivance to insure cross-pollination.] [illustration: fig. . _a._ pistillate flower of strawberry. _b._ perfect flower of strawberry. (drawing by m.e. feltham.)] fruit the pistil develops and forms the fruit of the plant. this fruit bears seed for the production of new plants. this fruit may be a dry pod like the bean or pea, or it may be a fleshy fruit like the apple or plum. now the developing pistil or fruit may be checked in its work of seed production by insects and diseases, and to secure good fruit it is in many cases necessary to spray the fruits just as the leaves are sprayed, to keep these insects and diseases in check. the fruits of most plants, like the leaves, need light and air for their best development, and it sometimes happens that the branches of the fruit trees grow so thick that the fruits do not get sufficient light and air. this makes it necessary to thin the branches or in other words to prune the tree. some trees also start more fruit than they can properly feed and as a result the ripened fruits are small and the tree is weakened. this makes it necessary to thin the fruits while they are young and undeveloped. part ii soil fertility as affected by farm operations and farm practices the first book of farming part ii _soil fertility as affected by farm operations and farm practices_ chapter xvi a fertile soil what is a fertile soil? the expression a fertile soil is often used as meaning a soil that is rich in plant food. in its broader and truer meaning a fertile soil is one in which are found all the conditions necessary to the growth and development of plant roots. these conditions, as learned in chapter ii, are as follows: the root must have a firm yet mellow soil. it must be well supplied with moisture. it must be well supplied with air. it must have a certain amount of heat. it must be supplied with available plant food. in order to furnish these needs or conditions the soil must possess certain characteristics or properties. these properties may be grouped under three heads: physical properties; the moisture, heat and air conditions needed by the roots. biological properties; the work of very minute living organisms in the soil. chemical properties; plant food in the soil. physical properties of a fertile soil three very important physical properties of a fertile soil are its power to take water falling on the surface. power to absorb water from below. power to hold water. the fertile soil must possess all three of these powers. the relative degrees to which these three powers or properties are possessed determine more than anything else the kind of crops or the class of crops that will grow best on a given soil. these powers depend, as we learned in chapter iv, on the texture of the soil or the relative amounts of sand, silt, clay and humus contained in the soil. the power of admitting a free circulation of air through its pores is also an important property of a fertile soil, for air is necessary to the life and growth of the roots. this property is dependent also on texture. two other important properties of a fertile soil are power to absorb and power to hold heat. these depend upon the power of the soil to take in warm rain and warm air, and also upon density and color. the denser or more compact soil and the darker soil having greater power to absorb heat. the compactness of the soil which gives it greater powers to absorb heat weakens its powers to hold it, because the compactness allows more rapid conduction of heat to the surface, where it is lost by radiation. the more moisture a soil holds, the weaker is its heat-holding power, because the heat is used in warming and evaporating water from the surface of the soil. these important properties or conditions of moisture, heat and air, are, as we have seen, dependent on soil texture and color, which in turn are dependent upon the relative amounts of sand, clay and humus in the soil. we are able to control soil texture and therefore these physical properties to a certain degree by means of tillage and the addition of organic matter or humus (see chapter iv). biological properties of a fertile soil biology is the story or science of life; and the biological properties of the soil have to do with living organisms in the soil. the soil of every fertile field is full of very small or microscopic plants called bacteria or germs. they are said to be microscopic because they are so small that they cannot be seen without the aid of a powerful magnifying glass or microscope. they are so small that it would take about , average-sized soil bacteria or soil germs placed side by side to measure one inch. a knowledge of three classes of these soil germs is of great importance to the farmer. these three classes of germs are: nitrogen-fixing germs. nitrifying germs. denitrifying germs. nitrogen-fixing germs we learned in chapter viii that nitrogen is one of the necessary elements of plant food, and that although the air is four-fifths nitrogen, most plants must take their nitrogen from the soil. there is, however, a class of plants called legumes which can use the nitrogen of the air. clover, alfalfa, lucern, cowpea, soy bean, snap bean, vetch and similar plants are legumes. these legumes get the nitrogen from the air in a very curious and interesting manner. it is done through the aid of bacteria or germs. carefully dig up the roots of several legumes and wash the soil from them. on the roots will be found many small enlargements like root galls; these are called nodules or tubercles. on clover roots these nodules are about the size of the head of a pin while on the soy bean and cowpea they are nearly as large as a pea (see fig. ). these nodules are filled with bacteria or germs and these germs have the power of taking nitrogen from the air which finds its way into the soil. after using the nitrogen the germ gives it to the plant which then uses it to build stem, leaves and roots. in this way the legumes are able to make use of the nitrogen of the soil air, and these germs which help them to do it by catching the nitrogen are called nitrogen-fixing germs. the work of these germs makes it possible for the farmer to grow nitrogen, so to speak, on the farm. by growing crops of legumes and turning them under to decay in the soil, or leaving the roots and stubble to decay after the crop is harvested, he can furnish the following crop with a supply of nitrogen in a very cheap manner and lessen the necessity of buying fertilizer. nitrifying germs almost all the nitrogen of the soil is locked up in the humus and cannot in that condition be used by the roots of plants. the nitrogen caught by the nitrogen-fixing germs and built into the structure of leguminous plants which are grown and turned under to feed other plants cannot be used until the humus, which is produced by their partial decay, is broken down and the nitrogen built into other substances upon which the root can feed. the breaking down of the humus and building of the nitrogen into other substances is the work of another set of bacteria or germs called nitrifying germs. these nitrifying germs attack the humus, break it down, separate the nitrogen, cause it to unite with the oxygen of the air and thus build it into nitric acid which can be used by plant roots. this nitric acid if not immediately used will unite with lime or potash or soda or other similar substances and form nitrates, as nitrate of lime, nitrate of potash or common saltpetre. these nitrates are soluble in water and can be easily used by plant roots. if there are no plant roots to use them they are easily lost by being washed out of the soil. the work of the nitrifying germs is called nitrification. to do their work well the nitrogen-fixing germs and the nitrifying germs require certain conditions. the soil must be moist. the soil must be well ventilated to supply nitrogen for the nitrogen-fixing germs and oxygen for the nitrifying germs. the soil must be warm. summer temperature is the most favorable. their work begins and continues slowly at a temperature of about forty-five degrees and increases in rapidity as the temperature rises until it reaches ninety or ninety-five. the nitrifying germs require phosphoric acid, potash and lime in the soil. direct sunlight destroys these bacteria, therefore they cannot work at the surface of the soil unless it is shaded by a crop. from this we see that these bacteria or germs work best in the soil that has conditions necessary for the growth and development of plant roots. denitrifying germs these germs live on the coarse organic matter of the soil. like the nitrifying germs they need oxygen, and when they cannot get it more readily elsewhere they take it from the nitric acid and nitrates. this allows the nitrogen of the nitrates to escape as a free gas into the air again, and the work of the nitrogen-fixing and nitrifying germs is undone and the nitrogen is lost. this loss of nitrogen is most apt to occur when the soil is poorly ventilated, because of its being very compact, or when the soil spaces are filled with water. this loss of nitrogen by denitrification can be checked by keeping the soil well ventilated. chemical properties of a fertile soil by the term chemical properties we have reference to the chemical composition of the soil, the chemical changes which take place in the soil, and the conditions which influence these changes. the sand, clay and humus of the soil are made up of a great variety of substances. the larger part of these act simply as a mechanical support for the plants and also serve to bring about certain physical conditions. only a very small portion of these substances serve as the direct food of plants and the chemical conditions of these substances are of great importance. in chapter viii we learned that plants are composed of several elements and that seven necessary elements are taken from the soil. these seven are nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron and sulphur. now a fertile soil must contain these seven elements of plant food and they must be in such form that the plant roots can use them. plant roots can generally get from most soils enough of the magnesium, calcium, iron, and sulphur to produce well developed plants. but the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, although they exist in sufficient quantities in the soil, are often in such a form or condition that the roots cannot get enough of one or more of them to produce profitable crops. for this reason these three elements are of particular importance to the farmer for, in order to keep his soil fertile, he must so treat it that these elements will be made available or he must add more of them to the soil in the proper form or condition. _nitrogen in the soil._--plant roots use nitrogen in the form of nitric acid and salts of nitrogen called nitrates. but the nitrogen of the soil is very largely found in the humus with the roots cannot use. a chemical change must take place in it and the nitrogen be built into nitric acid and nitrates. this, we have learned, is done through the aid of the nitrifying germs. _phosphoric acid in the soil._--phosphorus does not exist pure in the soil. the plant finds it as a phosphoric acid united with the other substances forming phosphates. these are often not available to plants, but can to a certain extent be made available through tillage and by adding humus to the soil. _potash in the soil._--the plant finds potassium in potash which exists in the soil. potash like phosphoric acid often exists in forms which the plant cannot use but may be made available to a certain extent by tillage, the addition of humus, and the addition of lime to the soil. _lime in the soil._--most soils contain the element calcium or lime, the compound in which it is found, in sufficient quantities for plant food. but lime is also of importance to the farmer and plant grower because it is helpful in causing chemical changes in the soil which tend to prepare the nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash for plant use. it is also helpful in changing soil texture. the chemical changes which make the plant foods available are dependent on moisture, heat, and air with its oxygen, and are therefore dependent largely on texture, and therefore on tillage. when good tillage and the addition of organic matter and lime do not render available sufficient plant food, then the supply of available food may be increased by the application of manure and fertilizers. it will be seen that all these classes of properties are necessary to furnish all the conditions for root growth. the proper chemical conditions require the presence of both physical and biological properties and the biological work in the soil requires both chemical and physical conditions. from the farmer's standpoint the physical properties seem to be most important, for the others are dependent on the proper texture, moisture, heat and ventilation which are controlled largely by tillage. therefore the first effort of the farmer to improve the fertility of his soil should be to improve his methods of working the soil. every one of these properties of the fertile soil, and consequently every one of the conditions necessary for the growth and development of plant roots, is influenced in some way by every operation performed on the soil, whether it be plowing, harrowing, cultivating, applying manure, growing crops, harvesting, or anything else, and the thoughtful farmer will frequently ask himself the question: "how is this going to effect the fertility of my soil or the conditions necessary for profitable crop production?" maintenance of fertility the important factors in maintaining or increasing the fertility of the soil are: the mechanical operations of tillage, especially with reference to the control of soil water. the application of manures and fertilizers, especially with reference to maintaining a supply of humus and plant food. methods or systems of cropping the soil, with reference to economizing fertility. chapter xvii soil water the more important tillage tools and tillage operations we studied in chapters xi and xii. they will be noticed here only in connection with their influence over soil water, for in the regulation of this important factor in soil fertility the other conditions of fertility are also very largely controlled. importance of soil water "of all the factors influencing the growth of plants, water is beyond doubt the most important," and the maintaining of the proper amount of soil water is one of the most important problems of the thinking farmer in controlling the fertility of his soil. necessity of soil water the decay of mineral and organic matter in the soil, and the consequent setting free of plant food, can take place only in the presence of moisture. the plant food in barn manures and crops plowed under for green moisture, can be made available only when there is sufficient moisture in the soil to permit breaking down and decomposition. the presence of moisture in the soil is necessary for the process of nitrification to take place. soil moisture is necessary to dissolve plant food. plant roots can absorb food from the soil only when it is in solution, and it seems to be necessary that a large quantity of water pass through the plant tissues to furnish the supply of mineral elements required by growth. moisture is necessary to build plant tissues. the quantity of water entering into the structure of growing plants varies from sixty to as high as ninety-five per cent, of their total weight. during the periods of active growth there is a constant giving off of moisture by the foliage of plants and this must be made good by water taken from the soil by their roots. in a series of experiments at the university of wisconsin agricultural experiment station, it was found that in raising oats, every ton of dry matter grown required . tons of water to produce it; for every ton of dry matter of corn there were required . tons of water; a ton of dry red clover requires . tons of water to grow it. at the cornell university agricultural experiment station, a yield of potatoes at the rate of bushels per acre represented a water requirement of . tons of water. sources and forms of soil water the soil which is occupied by the roots of plants receives moisture in the form of rain, snow and dew from above and free and capillary water rising from below. "free water is that form of water which fills our wells, is found in the bottom of holes dug in the ground during wet seasons, and is often found standing on the surface of the soil after heavy or long continued rains. it is sometimes called 'ground water' or 'standing water,' and flows under the influence of gravity." free water is not used directly by plants unless they are swamp plants, and its presence within eighteen inches of the surface is injurious to most farm plants. free water serves as the main source of supply for capillary water. "capillary water is water which is drawn by capillary force or soaks into the spaces between the soil particles and covers these particles with a thin film of moisture." it is a direct source of water to plants. capillary water will flow in any direction in the soil, the direction of flow being determined by texture and dryness, the flow being stronger toward the more compact and drier parts. if the soil is left lumpy and cloddy then capillary water cannot rise readily from below to take the place of that which is lost by evaporation. if, however, the soil is fine and well pulverized, the water rises freely and continuously to supply the place of that taken by plant roots or evaporation from the surface. too much water some farm lands contain too much water for the growth of farm crops; for example, bottom lands which are so low that water falling on the surface cannot run off or soak down into the lower soil. the result is that the spaces between the soil particles are most of the time filled with water, and this checks ventilation, which is a necessary factor in soil fertility. this state of affairs occurs also on sloping uplands which are kept wet by spring water or by seepage water from higher lands. some soils are so close and compact that water falling on the surface finds great difficulty in percolating through them, and therefore renders them too wet for profitable cropping during longer or shorter periods of the year. nearly all such lands can be improved by removing the surplus water through drains. (see chapter xxv.) percolation and ventilation of close compact soils can be improved by mixing lime and organic matter with them. not enough water in some sections of the country, particularly the arid and semi-arid sections of the west, the soil does not receive a sufficient supply of rain water for the production of profitable yearly crops. these soils are rendered unfertile by the lack of this one all important factor of fertility. they can be made fertile and productive by supplying them with sufficient water through irrigation. the crop-producing power of some lands is lowered even in regions where the rainfall is sufficient, because these lands are not properly prepared by tillage and the addition of organic matter to absorb and hold the water that comes to them, or part of the water may be lost or wasted by lack of proper after-tillage or after-cultivation. this state of affairs is of course improved by better preparation to receive water before planting the crop and better methods of after-cultivation to save the water for the use of the crop. loss of soil water aside from what is used by the crops the soil may lose its water in the following ways: rain water which comes to the soil may be lost by running off over the surface of the land. this occurs especially on hilly farms and in the case of close, compact soils. water may be lost from the soil by leaching through the lower soil. water may be lost from the soil by evaporation from the surface. the soil may lose water by the growth of weeds which are continually pumping water up by their roots and transpiring it from their leaves into the air. how some farm operations influence soil water plowing and soil water. one of the first effects of deeply and thoroughly plowing a close, compact soil, is that rain will sink into it readily and not be lost by surface wash. in many parts of the country, especially the south, great damage is done by the surface washing and gulleying of sloping fields. the shallow layer of soil stirred up by small plows and practice of shallow plowing so prevalent in the south takes in the rain readily, but as the harder soil beneath does not easily absorb the water the shallow layer of plowed soil soon fills, then becomes mud, and the whole mass goes down the slope. where the land is plowed deep there is prepared a deep reservoir of loose soil that is able to hold a large amount of water till the harder lower soil can gradually absorb it. the soil stirred and thoroughly broken by the plow serves not only as a reservoir for the rainfall, but also acts as a mulch over the more compact soil below it, thus checking the rapid use of capillary water to the surface and its consequent loss by evaporation. the plow which breaks and pulverizes the soil most thoroughly is the one best adapted to fit the soil for receiving and holding moisture. if the plowing is not well done or if the land is too dry when plowed and the soil is left in great coarse lumps and clods, the air circulates readily among the clods and takes from them what little moisture they may have had and generally the soil is left in a worse condition than if it had not been plowed at all. fall plowing on rolling land and heavy soil leaving the surface rough helps to hold winter snows and rains when they fall, giving to such fields a more even distribution of soil water in the spring. spring plowing should be done early, before there is much loss of water from the surface by evaporation. professor king, of the university of wisconsin agricultural experiment station, carried on an experiment to see how much soil water could be saved by early plowing. he selected two similar pieces of ground near each other and tested them for water april th. immediately after testing one piece was plowed. seven days later, may th, he tested them for water again and found that both had lost some water, but that the piece which was not plowed had lost . pounds more water per square foot of surface than the plowed piece. this means that by plowing one part a week earlier than the other he saved in it water equal to a rainfall of nearly two inches or at the rate of nearly tons of water per acre. hoeing, raking, harrowing, and cultivating these operations when properly and thoroughly done tend to supplement the work of the plow in fitting the soil to absorb rain and in making a mulch to check loss by surface evaporation. the entire surface should be worked and the soil should be left smooth and not in ridges. rolling cutters and spring-toothed harrows are apt to leave ridges and should have an attachment for smoothing the surface or be followed by a smoothing harrow. cultivators used to make mulches to save water should have many narrow teeth rather than few broad ones. if a large broad-toothed tool is used to destroy grass and large weeds it should be followed by a smoother to level the ridges and thus lessen the evaporating surface. the soil should be cultivated as soon after a rain as it can be safely worked. rolling compacts the soil and starts a quicker capillary movement of water toward the surface and a consequent loss by evaporation. when circumstances will permit, the roller should be followed by a light harrow to restore the mulch. ridging the land tends to lessen the amount of moisture in the soil because it increases the evaporating surface. it should be practiced only on wet land or in early spring to secure greater heat. drains placed in wet land remove free water to a lower depth and increase the depth of soil occupied by capillary water and therefore increase the body of soil available to plant roots. manures and soil water humus, as we learned in chapter iv, has a very great and therefore important influence over the water-absorbing and water-holding powers of soils. therefore, any of the farm practices that tend to increase or diminish the amount of humus in the soil are to be seriously considered because of the effect on the water content of the soil. for this reason the application of barn manures and green crops turned under tend to improve the water conditions of most soils. the mixing of heavy applications of coarse manures or organic matter with light sandy soils may make them so loose and open that they will lose moisture rapidly. when this practice is necessary the land should be rolled after the application of the manure. methods of cropping and soil water constant tillage hastens the decay of organic matter in the soil. hence any method or system of cropping which does not occasionally return to the soil a new supply of humus tends to weaken the powers of the soil toward water. all of the operations and practices which influence soil water also affect the other conditions necessary to root growth; namely, texture, ventilation, heat, and plant food, and those operations and practices which properly control and regulate soil water to a large degree control and regulate soil fertility. selection of crops with reference to soil water while climatic conditions determine the general distribution of plants, the amount of water which a soil holds and can give up to plants during the growing season determines very largely the crops to which it is locally best adapted. with crops that can be grown on a wide range of soils the water which the soil can furnish largely determines the time of maturing, the yield, and often the quality of the crop. with such a crop a small supply of water tends to hasten maturity at the expense of yield. the sweet potato, when wanted for early market and high prices, is grown on the light sandy soils called early truck soils. these soils hold from five to seven per cent, of water. that is, the texture is such that during the early part of the growing season one hundred pounds of this soil is found to hold an average of from five to seven pounds of water under field conditions. this soil, holding little water, warms up early and thus hastens growth. then as the warmer summer weather advances, the water supply diminishes, growth is checked, and the crop matures rapidly. on account of the small amount of water and the early checking of growth, the yield of the crop is less than if grown on a soil holding more water, but the earlier maturity makes it possible to realize a much higher price per bushel for the crop. a sweet potato grown on such a light soil is dry and starchy, a quality which brings a higher price in the northern markets than does the moist, soggy potato grown on heavier soils which contain more water and produce larger yields. early white potatoes, early cabbage, water melons, musk-melons, tomatoes and other early truck and market garden crops are also grown on light soil holding from five to seven per cent. of water. the main crop of potatoes and cabbage and the canning crop of tomatoes are grown on the loam soils holding from ten to eighteen per cent. of water. such soils produce a later though much larger yield. upland cotton produces best on a deep loam that is capable of furnishing a uniform supply of about ten or twelve per cent. of water during the growing season. sea island cotton grows best on a light, sandy soil holding only five per cent. of water. on light, sandy soils the upland cotton produces small plants with small yield of lint, while on clay and bottom land, which are apt to have large amounts of water, the plants grow very large and produce fewer bolls, which are very late in maturing. corn, while it will grow on a wide range of soils, produces best on loam or moist bottom lands holding about fifteen per cent. of water during the growing season. the grasses and small grains do best on cool, firm soils holding eighteen to twenty-two per cent. of water. sorghum or "molasses cane" grows best on good corn soil, while the sugar cane of the gulf states requires a soil with twenty-five per cent. of water for best growth. while the amount of water which a soil will hold is determined largely by texture, it is also considerably influenced by the amount and frequency of rainfall and the location of the soil as to whether it be upland or bottom land. the average percentage of water held by a soil during the growing season may be approximately determined in the following manner: sample the soil in one of the following methods: take to the field a spade, a box that will hold about half a bushel, and a pint or quart glass jar with a tight cover. if a cultivated field, select a place free from grass and weeds. dig a hole one foot deep and about eighteen inches square. trim one side of the hole square. now from this side cut a slice about three inches thick and one foot deep, quickly place this in the box and thoroughly break lumps and mix together, then fill jar and cork tightly. another method is to take a common half-inch or two-inch carpenter's auger and bore into the soil with it. pull it out frequently and put the soil which comes up with it into the jar until you have a sample a foot deep. if one boring twelve inches deep does not give sufficient soil make another boring or two close by and put all into the jar. take the sample, by whatever method obtained, weigh out ten or twenty ounces of the moist soil and dry it at a temperature just below degrees. when it is thoroughly dry weigh again. the difference between the two weights will be the amount of water held by the sample. now divide this by the weight of the dry sample and the result will be the per cent. of water held by the soil. several samples taken from different parts of the field will give an average for the field. repeat this every week or oftener through the season and an approximate estimate of the water-holding capacity of the soil will be obtained and consequently an indication of the crops to which the soil is best adapted. example. weight of a soil sample, ounces. when dried this sample weighs ¾ ounces. - ¾ = ¼, the water held by the soil. . ÷ . = . plus. this soil held a little over twelve per cent. of water. if this soil continues to give about the same result for successive tests during the growing season, the results would indicate a soil adapted to cotton, late truck or corn. chapter xviii the after-cultivation of crops the term "after-cultivation" is here used in referring to those tillage operations which are performed after the crop is planted. synonymous terms are "cultivation," "inter-tillage," "working the crop." after-cultivation influences the texture, ventilation, heat, plant food and moisture factors of fertility, but most particularly the moisture factor. under ordinary circumstances the greatest benefit derived from after-cultivation when properly performed is the saving of soil water for the use of the crop. loss of water by evaporation soil water is seldom at rest unless the soil be frozen solid. when rain falls on a fertile soil there is a downward movement of water. when the rain ceases, water begins to evaporate from the surface of the soil. its place is taken by water brought from below by capillarity. this is in turn evaporated and replaced by more from below. this process continues with greater or less rapidity according to the dryness of the air and the compactness of the soil. loss of water through weeds we learned in a former chapter that during their growth farm plants require an amount of water equal to from to times their dry weight. weeds require just as much water and some of them probably more than the cultivated plants. this water is largely absorbed by the roots and sent up to the leaves where it is transpired into the air and is lost from the soil, and therefore is unavailable to the growing crop until it again falls onto the soil. in some parts of the country, particularly the semi-arid west, the rainfall is not sufficient to supply the soil with enough water to grow such crops as it could otherwise produce. in the moister regions the rainfall is not evenly distributed throughout the growing season, and there are longer or shorter intervals between rains when the loss of water through evaporation and weeds is apt to be greater than the rainfall. for these reasons it is best to check these losses and save the water in the soil for the use of the crops. saving the water this can be done by: preventing the growth of weeds and by checking losses by evaporation with a soil mulch. time to cultivate a seedling plant is easiest killed just as it has started into growth. the best time to kill a plant starting from an underground stem or a root is just as soon as it appears above the surface in active growth. the best time to cultivate, then, to kill weeds is as soon as the weeds appear. at this time large numbers can be killed with the least of effort. do not let them get to be a week or two old before getting after them. in planting some crops the ground between the rows becomes trampled and compact. this results in active capillarity which brings water to the surface and it is lost by evaporation. every rainfall tends to beat the soil particles together and form a crust which enables the capillary water to climb to the surface and escape into the air. this loss by evaporation should be constantly watched for and the soil should be stirred and a mulch formed whenever it becomes compact or a crust is formed. the proper time to cultivate, then, to save water is as soon as weeds appear or as soon as the surface of the soil becomes compact or crusted by trampling, by the beating of rain or from any other cause, whether the crop is up or not. the cultivation should start as soon after a rain as the soil is dry enough to work safely. the surface soil should always be kept loose and open. the efficacy of the soil mulch depends on the thoroughness and frequency of the operation. it is particularly beneficial during long, dry periods. during such times it is not necessary to wait for a rain to compact the soil; keep the cultivators going, rain or no rain. tools for after-cultivation the main objects of after-cultivation are to destroy weeds and to form a soil mulch for the purpose of controlling soil moisture. these ends are secured by shallow surface work. it is not necessary to go more than two or three inches deep. deeper work will injure the roots of the crop. therefore the proper tools for after-cultivation in the garden are the hoe and rake and for field work narrow-toothed harrows and cultivators or horse-hoes which stir the whole surface thoroughly to a moderate depth. these field tools are supplemented in some cases by the hand hoe, but over wide areas of country the hoe never enters the field. a light spike-toothed harrow can be used on corn, potatoes, and similar crops, and accomplish the work of cultivation rapidly until they get to be from four to six inches high; after that cultivators which work between the rows should be used. a very useful class of tools for destroying weeds in the earlier stages are the so-called "weeders." they somewhat resemble a horse hay rake and have a number of flexible wire teeth which destroy shallow rooted weeds but slip around the more firmly rooted plants of the crop. these weeders must be used frequently to be of much value, for after a weed is well rooted the weeder cannot destroy it. there is a larger class of hand wheel hoes which are very useful in working close planted garden and truck crops. they either straddle the row, working the soil on both sides at the same time, or, running between the rows, work the soil to a width of from six to eighteen inches. for best results with the weeder and hand wheel hoes the soil should be thoroughly prepared before planting by burying all trash with the plow and breaking all clods with harrow and roller. the objection made to the deep-working implements, like the plow, is that they injure the crop by cutting its feeding roots, and this has been found by careful experiment and observation to diminish the crop. some farmers object to using a light harrow for cultivation in the early stages of the crop because they say the harrow will destroy the crop as well as the weeds. this danger is not so great as it seems. the seeds of the crop are deeper in the soil than the seeds of the weeds which germinate and appear so quickly. the soil has also been firmed about them. hence they have a firmer hold on the soil and but few of them are destroyed if the work is carefully done. in working crops not only should weeds be destroyed but also surplus plants of the crop, as these have the same effect as weeds; namely, they occupy the soil and take plant food and moisture which if left to fewer plants would produce a larger harvest. hilling and ridging except in low, wet ground, the practice of hilling or ridging up crops is now considered by those who have given the matter thorough study, to be unnecessary, flat and shallow culture being cheaper. it saves more moisture, and for this reason, in the majority of cases, produces larger crops. sometimes during very long-continued periods of wet weather weeds and grass become firmly established among the plants of the crop. under such circumstances it is necessary to use on the cultivator teeth having long, narrow sweeps that will cut the weeds just beneath the surface of the soil. sometimes a broad-toothed tool is used that will throw sufficient soil over the large weeds near the rows to smother them. the condition to be met and the effect of the operation should always be given serious thought. we have considered after-cultivation as influencing soil fertility by checking a loss of water by evaporation and weed transpiration, and this is its main influence but other benefits follow. keeping the surface soil loose and open benefits fertility because it directly aids the absorption of rain, favors ventilation, and has a beneficial influence over soil temperature. indirectly through these factors it aids the work of the beneficial soil bacteria and the chemical changes in the process of preparing plant food for crop use. chapter xix farm manures functions of manures and fertilizers in chapter ii we learned that the roots of plants for their growth and development need a soil that is firm yet mellow, moist, warm, ventilated and supplied with plant food. we also learned that of the plant foods there is often not enough available nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potash and lime for the needs of the growing plants. manures and fertilizers are applied to the soil for their beneficial effects on these necessary conditions for root growth and therefore to assist in maintaining soil fertility. classification of manures and fertilizers manures may be classified as follows: { barn or stable manures, farm manures. { green-crop manures, { composts. commercial { materials furnishing nitrogen, fertilizers { " " phosphoric acid, or artificial { " " potash, manures. { " " lime. importance of farm manures of these two classes of manures the farmer should rely chiefly on the farm manures letting the commercial fertilizers take a secondary place because: farm manures are complete manures; that is they contain all the necessary elements of plant food. farm manures add to the soil large amounts of organic matter or humus. the decay of organic matter produces carbonic acid which hastens the decay of mineral matter in the soil and so increases the amount of available plant food. the organic matter changes the texture of the soil. it makes sandy soils more compact and therefore more powerful to hold water and plant food. it makes heavy clay soils more open and porous, giving them greater power to absorb moisture and plant food. this admits also of better circulation of the air in the soil, and prevents baking in dry weather. farm manures influence all of the conditions necessary for root growth while the commercial fertilizers influence mainly the plant food conditions. the farm manures are good for all soils and crops. they are lasting in their effects on the soil. barn or stable manure barn or stable manure consists of the solid and liquid excrement of any of the farm animals mixed with the straw or other materials used as bedding for the comfort of the animals and to absorb the liquid parts. the liquid parts should be saved, as they contain more than half of the nitrogen and potash in the manure. the value of barn manure for improving the soil conditions necessary for root growth depends in a measure upon the plant food in it, but chiefly upon the very large proportion of organic matter which it contains when it is applied to the soil. these factors are influenced somewhat: by the kind of animal that produces the manure; by the kind of food the animal receives; by the kind and amount of litter or bedding used; but they depend particularly on the way the manure is cared for after it is produced. loss of value improper care of the manure may cause it to diminish in value very much. _loss by leaching._ if the manure is piled against the side of the stable where water from the roof can drip on it, as is often the case, or if it is piled in an exposed place where heavy rain can beat on it, the rain water in leaching through the manure washes out of it nitrogen and potash, which pass off in the dark brown liquid that oozes from the base of the pile. _loss by heating or fermenting._ when barn manure is thrown into piles it soon heats and throws off more or less steam and gas. this heating of the manure is caused by fermentation or the breaking down of the materials composing the manure and the forming of new compounds. this fermentation is produced by very small or microscopic plants called bacteria. the fermentation of the manure is influenced by the following conditions: a certain amount of heat is necessary to start the work of the bacteria. after they have once started they keep up and increase the temperature of the pile until it gets so hot that sometimes a part of the manure is reduced to ashes. the higher the temperature the more rapid the fermentation. this can be seen particularly in piles of horse manure. the bacteria which produce the most rapid fermentation in manure need plenty of air with its oxygen. therefore fermentation will be more or less rapid according as the manure is piled loosely or in a close compact mass. a certain amount of moisture is necessary for the fermentation to take place, but if the manure is made quite wet the temperature is lowered and the fermentation is checked. the water also checks the fermentation by limiting the supply of air that can enter the pile. the composition of the manure influences the fermentation. the presence of considerable amounts of soluble nitrogen hastens the rapidity of the fermentation. now when the manure ferments a large part of the organic matter in it is broken down and changed into gases. the gas formed most abundantly by the fermentation is carbonic acid gas, which is produced by the union of oxygen with carbon of the organic matter. the formation of this gas means a loss of humus. this loss can be noticed by the fact that the pile gradually becomes smaller. the next most abundant product of the fermentation is water vapor which can often be seen passing off in clouds of steam. when manure ferments rapidly the nitrogen in it is changed largely into ammonia. this ammonia combines with part of the carbonic acid gas and forms carbonate of ammonia, a very volatile salt which rapidly changes to a vapor and is lost in the atmosphere. this causes a great loss of nitrogen during the rapid decomposition of the manure. this loss can be detected by the well known odor of the ammonia which is particularly noticeable about horse stables and piles of horse manure. besides these gases a number of compounds of nitrogen, potash, etc., are formed which are soluble in water. it is these that form the dark brown liquid that sometimes oozes out from the base of the manure heap. at the cornell university agricultural experiment station, the following experiment was carried out to find out how much loss would take place from a pile of manure: "four thousand pounds of manure from the horse stable were placed out of doors in a compact pile and left exposed from april th to september d. the results were as follows:" ----------------------------+-------------+--------------+---------- | april . | sept. . | loss | | | per cent. ----------------------------+-------------+--------------+---------- gross weight | , lbs. | , lbs. | nitrogen | . " | . " | phos. acid | . " | . " | potash | " | . " | value of plant food per ton | $ . | $ . | ----------------------------+-------------+--------------+---------- this shows a loss of more than half the bulk of the manure and more than half the plant food contained in it. checking the losses the first step to be taken in preserving the manure or in checking losses is to provide sufficient bedding or litter in the stable to absorb and save all the liquid parts. the losses from fermentation of hot manures like horse manure may be largely checked by mixing with the colder manure from the cow stable. losses from fermentation may also be checked. by piling compactly, which keeps the air out. by moistening the pile, which lowers the temperature and checks the access of oxygen. the manure may be hauled directly to the field each day and spread on the surface or plowed in. this method is the best when practicable because fermentation of the manure will take place slowly in the soil and the gases produced will be absorbed and retained by the soil. gypsum or land plaster is often sprinkled on stable floors and about manure heaps to prevent the loss of ammonia. copperas or blue stone, kainite and superphosphate are sometimes used for the same purpose. there is, however, nothing better nor so good for this purpose as dry earth containing a large percentage of humus. losses from washing or leaching by rain may be prevented by piling the manure under cover or by hauling it to the field as soon as produced and spreading it on the surface or plowing it under. applying the manure to the soil from ten to twenty tons per acre is considered a sufficient application of barn manure for most farm crops. larger amounts are sometimes applied to the soil for truck and market garden crops. barn manures are applied to the soil by these methods: the manure is sometimes hauled out from the barn and placed in a large pile in the field or in many small piles where it remains for some time before being spread and plowed or harrowed in. some farmers spread it on the field and allow it to lie some time before plowing it in. it is sometimes spread as soon as hauled to the field and is immediately plowed in or mixed with the soil. this last is the safest and most economical method so far as the manure alone is concerned. when the manure is left in a large pile it suffers losses due to fermentation and leaching. at the cornell university agricultural experiment station, five tons of manure from the cow stable, including three hundred pounds of gypsum which was mixed with it, were exposed in a compact pile out of doors from april th to september d. the result was as follows: ----------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------- | april | sept | loss | | | per cent. ----------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------- gross weight | , lbs. | , lbs. | nitrogen | " | " | phos. acid | " | " | potash | " | " | value of plant food per ton | $ . | $ . | ----------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------- when distributed over the field in small piles and allowed to remain so for some time, losses from fermentation take place, and the rain washes plant food from the pile into the soil under and immediately about it. this results in an uneven distribution of plant food over the field, for when the manure is finally scattered and plowed in, part of the field is fertilized with washed out manure while the soil under and immediately about the location of the various piles is often so strongly fertilized that nothing can grow there unless it be rank, coarse weeds. [illustration: fig. .--a crop of cowpeas.] [illustration: fig. .--red clover.] when the manure is spread on the surface and allowed to lie for some time it is apt to become dry and hard, and when finally plowed in, decays very slowly. when the manure is plowed in or mixed with the soil as soon as applied to the field there results an even distribution of plant food in the soil, fermentation takes place gradually and all gases formed are absorbed by the soil, there is very little loss of valuable nitrogen and organic matter, and the fermentation taking place in the soil also aids in breaking down the mineral constituents of the soil and making available the plant food held by them. therefore it seems best to spread the manure and plow it in or mix it with the soil as soon as it is hauled to the field, when not prevented by bad weather and other more pressing work. proper condition of manure when applied a large part of the value of barn manure lies in the fact that it consists largely of organic matter, and therefore has an important influence on soil texture, and during its decay in the soil produces favorable chemical changes in the soil constituents. therefore it will produce its greatest effect on the soil when applied fresh. for this reason it is generally best to haul the manure to the field and mix it with the soil as soon after it is produced as possible. if coarse manures are mixed with light, sandy soils it is best to follow with the roller, otherwise the coarse manure may cause the soil to lie so loose and open that both soil and manure will lose moisture so rapidly that fermentation of the manure will be stopped and the soil will be unfit for planting. if it is desired to apply manure directly to delicate rooted truck and vegetable crops it is best to let it stand for some time until the first rank fermentation has taken place and the manure has become rotten. a good practice is to apply the manure in its fresh condition to coarse feeding crops like corn, and then follow the corn by a more delicate rooted crop which requires the manure to be in a more decomposed condition than is necessary for the corn. in this case the corn is satisfied and the remaining manure is in proper condition for the following crop when it is planted. another practice is to broadcast the coarse manure on grass land and then when the hay is harvested the sod and remaining manure are plowed under for the following crop. a study of root development in chapter ii. tells us that most of the manure used for cultivated crops should be broadcasted and thoroughly mixed with the soil. a small amount may be placed in the drill or hill and thoroughly mixed with the soil for crops that are planted in rows or furrows in order to give the young plant a rapid start. for the vegetable garden and flower garden and lawns, it is best to apply only manure that has been piled for some time and has been turned over several times so that it is well rotted and broken up. there may not be a single farm where it will be possible to carry out to the letter these principles applying to the treatment and application of barn manures. this is because climate, crops and conditions vary in different parts of the country and on different farms. therefore we should study carefully our conditions and the principles and make our practice so combine the two as to produce the best and most economical results under the circumstances. if we can get manure out in the winter it will very much lessen the rush of spring work. in some parts of the country on account of deep snows, heavy rainfall and hilly fields, it is not advisable to apply manure in the winter. this will necessitate storing the manure. if conditions are such that we can get the manure on to the land as soon as it is made, it should be applied to land on which a crop is growing or land which is soon to be planted. if land is not intended for an immediate crop, put a cover crop on it. composts composts are collections of farm trash or rubbish, as leaves, potato tops, weeds, road and ditch scrapings, fish, slaughter-house refuse, etc., mixed in piles with lime, barn manure, woods-earth, swamp muck, peat and soil. the object of composting these materials is to hasten their decay and render available the plant food in them. there are certain disadvantages in composting, namely: expense of handling and carting on account of bulk. low composition. loss of organic matter by fermentation. compost heaps serve as homes for weed seeds, insects and plant diseases. nevertheless, all waste organic matter on the farm should be saved and made use of as manure. these materials when not too coarse may be spread on the surface of the soil and plowed under; they should never be burned unless too coarse and woody or foul with weed seeds, insects and disease. [illustration: fig. .--soy beans in young orchard.] [illustration: fig. .--a young alfalfa plant just coming into flower.] chapter xx farm manures--concluded green-crop manures green-crop manures are crops grown and plowed under for the purpose of improving the fertility of the soil. the main object of turning these crops under is to furnish the soil with humus. any crop may be used for this purpose. by growing any of the class of crops called legumes we may add to the soil not only humus but also nitrogen. cowpeas, beans, clover, vetch and plants having foliage, flowers, seed pods and seeds like them are called legumes. most of the farm plants take their nitrogen from the soil. this nitrogen is taken in the form of nitric acid and nitrogen salts dissolved in soil water. the legumes, however, are able to use the free nitrogen which forms four-fifths of the atmosphere. this they do not of their own power but through the aid of very minute plants called bacteria or nitrogen-fixing germs. these germs are so small that they cannot be seen without the use of a powerful microscope. it would take ten thousand average sized bacteria placed side by side to measure one inch. these little germs make their homes in the roots of the legumes, causing the root to enlarge at certain points and form tubercles or nodules (figs. and ). carefully dig up a root of clover, cowpea, soy bean or other legume and wash the soil from it. you will find numbers of the little tubercles or nodules. on the clover they will be about the size of a pin head or a little larger. on the soy bean they will be nearly as large as the beans. these nodules are filled with colonies or families of bacteria which take the free nitrogen from the air which penetrates the soil and give it over to the plant in return for house rent and starch or other food they may have taken from the plant. in an experiment at cornell university agricultural experiment station, in , clover seeds were sown august st, and the plants were dug november th, three months and four days after the seeds were sown. the clovers were then weighed and tested and the following results were obtained: ----------------+---------------------------------------------- | nitrogen in an acre of clovers. +---------------+----------------+------------- | lbs. in tops. | lbs. in roots. | lbs., total. ----------------+---------------+----------------+------------- crimson clover | . | . | . mammoth clover | . | . | . red clover | . | . | . ----------------+---------------+----------------+------------- a large part of the nitrogen found in these plants was undoubtedly taken by the roots from the soil air. besides adding humus and nitrogen to the soil the legumes, being mostly deep-rooted plants, are able to take from the subsoil food which is out of reach of other plants. this food is distributed throughout the plant and when the plant is plowed under the food is deposited in the upper soil for the use of shallow-rooted plants. benefits the benefits derived from green crop manuring then are as follows: we add to the soil organic matter or humus which is so helpful in bringing about the conditions necessary for root growth. by using the legumes for our green manure crops we may supply the soil with nitrogen taken from the air. we return to the surface soil not only the plant food taken from it but also plant food brought from the subsoil by the roots of the green manure plants. character of best plants for green crop manuring the plants best adapted to green crop manuring are deep-rooted, heavy-foliaged plants. of these the legumes are by far the best, as they collect the free nitrogen from the air which other plants cannot do. this enables the farmer to grow nitrogen which is very expensive to buy. the time for growing green manure crops green manure crops may be grown at any time that the soil is not occupied by other crops, provided other conditions are suitable. land which is used for spring and summer crops often lies bare and idle during fall and winter. a hardy green manure crop planted after the summer crop is harvested will make considerable growth during the fall and early spring, and this can be plowed under for the use of the following summer crops. if there is a long interval of time during spring or summer when the land is bare, that is a good time for a green manure crop. green manure crops are often planted between the rows of other crops such as corn or cotton at the last working of the crop for the benefit of the crop which is to follow. it is advisable to arrange for a green manure crop at least once in three or four years. leguminous green manure crops _cowpea_. (field pea, stock pea, black pea, black-eyed pea, clay pea, etc.) (fig. .) the cowpea is perhaps the most important leguminous plant grown for soil improvement in the south. it will grow anywhere south of the ohio river and can be grown with fair success in many localities farther north. it is a tender annual, that is, it is killed by frost and makes its entire growth from seed to seed in a single season. it should therefore be planted only during the spring and summer. this crop not only has power like the other legumes to take nitrogen from the air, but it is also a strong feeder, that is, it can feed upon mineral plant food in the soil that other plants are unable to make use of. for this reason it will grow on some of the poorest soils, and is a good plant with which to begin the improvement of very poor land. it is a deep-rooted plant. on the farm of the hampton normal and agricultural institute cowpea roots have been traced to the depth of sixty-one inches. cowpeas will grow on almost any land that is not too wet. from one and one-half to three bushels of seed are used per acre. these are sown broadcast and harrowed in or are planted in drills or furrows and cultivated a few times. aside from its value as a green manure crop the cowpea is useful as food for man and the farm animals. the green pods are used as string beans or snaps. the ripened seeds are used as a food and the vines make good fodder for the farm animals. "experiments at the louisiana experiment station show that one acre of cowpeas yielding , . pounds of organic matter, turned under, gave to the soil . pounds of nitrogen, . pounds of phosphoric acid and . pounds of potash."--farmer's bulletin, u.s. dept. of agriculture. "it is now grown in all the states south of the ohio river, and in there were planted nearly , acres to the crop. basing our estimate on the amount of nitrogen stored in the soil by this crop, it is fair to say that fully fifteen million pounds of this valuable substance were collected and retained as a result of the planting of the cowpea alone. this at fifteen cents per pound (the market price of nitrogen) would be worth something more than $ , , for nitrogen alone."--year book of the department of agriculture, . _the clovers._--these are the most extensively grown plants for green manure purposes in the united states. they are deep-rooted, and are able to use mineral food that is too tough for other plants. they furnish large crops of hay or green forage and a good aftermath and sod to turn under as green manure, or the entire crop may be plowed under. _red clover_ is the most widely planted (fig. ). it is a perennial plant and grows from the most northern states to the northern border of the gulf states. it grows best on the loams and heavier soils well supplied with water, but not wet. it is sown broadcast at the rate of from ten to twenty pounds of seed per acre. in the north it is generally sown in the spring on fields of winter grain. in the south, september and october are recommended as the proper sowing times. it is the custom to let it grow two years, cutting it for hay and seed, and then to turn the aftermath and sod under. _mammoth red clover_, also called sapling clover and pea-vine clover, closely resembles the red clover, but is ranker in growth and matures two or three weeks later. it is better adapted to wet land than the red clover. _crimson clover_, also called german clover and italian clover, is a valuable green manure crop in the central and southern states east of the mississippi. it is a hardy annual in that section and is generally sown from the last of july to the middle of october, either by itself or with cultivated crops at their last working. fifteen and twenty pounds of seed are used to the acre. it makes a good growth during the fall and early winter and is in blossom and ready to cut or plow under in april or may. it grows at a season when the cowpea will not live. crimson clover will grow on soils too light for other clovers. the _soy bean_, also called soja bean and japanese pea, is another leguminous crop used for green manuring (fig. ). it was introduced into this country from japan and in some localities is quite extensively planted. it grows more upright than the cowpea and produces a large amount of stem and foliage which may be used for fodder or turned under for green manure the seeds are used for food for man and beast. the soy bean is planted and cared for in the same manner as the cowpea. the _canadian field pea_ is sometimes grown in the north as a green manure crop. _white sweet clover_, white melitot or bokhara clover, grows as a weed from new england to the gulf of mexico. in the gulf states it is regarded as a valuable forage and green manure plant. one or two pecks of seed per acre are sown in january or february. _alfalfa_, or lucern, though grown more for a forage crop than for green manuring, should be mentioned here, for wherever grown and for whatever purpose, its effects on the soil are beneficial (fig. ). this plant requires a well prepared soil that is free from weeds. twenty to twenty-five pounds of seed are planted per acre. in the north the seeding is generally done in the spring after danger of frost is past, as frost kills the young plants. in the south fall seeding is the custom in order to give the young plants a long start ahead of the spring weeds. one seeding if well cared for lasts for many years. alfalfa is pastured or cut for hay, four to eight tons being the yield. many fields run out in five or six years and the sod is plowed under. this plant sends its roots thirteen, sixteen, and even thirty feet into the soil after water and food, and when these roots decay they furnish the lower soil with organic matter and their passages serve as drains and ventilators in the soil. alfalfa is grown extensively in the semi-arid regions of the country. non-leguminous green manure plants among the non-leguminous green manure plants are rye, wheat, oats, mustard, rape, buckwheat. of these the rye and buckwheat are most generally used, the rye being a winter crop and the other a warm weather plant. they are both strong feeders and can use tough plant food. they do not add new nitrogen to the soil though they furnish humus and prepare food for the weaker feeders which may follow them. chapter xxi commercial fertilizers the raw materials next to the soil itself, the farmer's most important sources of plant food are the farm manures. but most farms do not produce these in sufficient quantities to keep up the plant food side of fertility. therefore the farmer must resort to other sources of plant food to supplement the farm manures. there is a large class of materials called commercial fertilizers, which, if judiciously used, will aid in maintaining the fertility of the farm with economy. we learned in a previous chapter that the plant foods, nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potash and lime, are apt to be found wanting in sufficient available quantities to supply the needs of profitable crops. we learned also that lime is useful in improving the texture of the soil and in making other plant foods available. now the commercial fertilizers are used to supply the soil with these four substances and they may be classified according to the substance furnished as follows: sources of nitrogen, " " phosphoric acid, " " potash, " " lime. sources of nitrogen nitrogen is the most expensive of plant foods to buy, therefore special attention should be given to producing it on the farm by means of barn manures and legumes plowed under. the principal commercial sources of nitrogen are: nitrate of soda, sulphate of ammonia, dried blood, tankage, dry ground fish, cotton-seed meal. _nitrate of soda_ or chile saltpetre containing . per cent. of nitrogen, is found in large deposits in the rainless regions of western south america. in the crude state as it comes from the mine it contains common salt and earthy matter as impurities. to remove these impurities the crude nitrate is put into tanks of warm water. the nitrate dissolves and the salt and earthy matter settle to the bottom of the tank. the water with the nitrate in solution is then drawn off into other tanks from which the water is evaporated, leaving the nitrate, a coarse, dirty looking salt which is packed in three-hundred-pound bags and shipped. plants that take their nitrogen from the soil take it in the form of nitrate. hence nitrate of soda, which is very soluble in water, is immediately available to plants and is one of the most directly useful nitrogen fertilizers. it is used for quick results and should be applied only to land that has a crop or is to be immediately planted, otherwise it is liable to be lost by leaching. _sulphate of ammonia_ contains per cent. of nitrogen. it is a white salt, finer and cleaner looking than the nitrate. it is a by-product of the gas works and coke ovens. the nitrogen in it is quite readily available. _dried blood_ contains to per cent. of nitrogen. this is blood collected in slaughter-houses and dried by steam or hot air. it decays rapidly in the soil and is a quick acting nitrogen fertilizer. _tankage_ contains to per cent. of nitrogen and to per cent. of phosphoric acid. slaughter-house waste, such as meat and bone scrap, are boiled or steamed to extract the fat. the settlings are dried and ground and sold as tankage. it is much slower in its action than dried blood and supplies the crop with both nitrogen and phosphoric acid. _dried fish scrap_ is a by-product of the fish oil factories and the fish canning factories. it contains to per cent. of nitrogen and to per cent. of phosphoric acid. it undergoes nitrification readily and is a quick acting organic source of nitrogen and phosphoric acid. _cotton-seed meal_ contains per cent. of nitrogen, about . phosphoric acid, and . per cent. of potash. it is a product of the cotton oil factories and is obtained by grinding the cotton seed cake from which the oil has been pressed. it is a most valuable source of nitrogen for the south. the nitrogen in the dried blood, tankage, fish scrap and cotton-seed meal, being organic nitrogen, must be changed by the process of nitrification to nitric acid or nitrate before it is available. they are therefore better materials to use for a more gradual and continuous feeding of crops than the nitrate of soda or sulphate of ammonia. scrap leather, wool waste, horn and hoof shavings are rich in nitrogen but they decay so slowly that they make poor fertilizers. they are used by fertilizer manufacturers in making cheap mixed fertilizers. sources of phosphoric acid the principal commercial sources of phosphoric acid are: phosphate rocks. bones. fish scrap. phosphate slag. the _phosphate rocks_ are found in shallow mines in north and south carolina, georgia, florida and tennessee, and also as pebbles in the river beds. they are the fossil remains of animals. after being dug from the mines the rock is kiln dried and then ground to a very fine powder called "floats" which is used on the soil. the phosphoric acid in the floats is insoluble and becomes available only as the phosphate decays. this is too slow for most plants so it is treated with oil of vitriol or sulphuric acid to make it available. the phosphoric acid in the ground rock is combined with lime, forming a phosphate of lime which is insoluble. when treated with the oil of vitriol or sulphuric acid, the sulphuric acid takes lime from the phosphate and forms sulphate of lime or gypsum. the phosphoric acid is left combined with the smallest possible amount of lime and is soluble in water. it is then called soluble or water soluble phosphoric acid. now if this soluble form remains unused it begins to take on lime again and turns back toward its original insoluble form. after a time it gets to such a state that it is no longer soluble in water but is soluble in weak acids. it is then said to be reverted phosphoric acid. reverted phosphoric acid is also called citrate soluble phosphoric acid, because in testing fertilizers the chemists use ammonium citrate to determine the amount of reverted phosphoric acid. this form still continues to take on lime and by and by gets back to the original insoluble form called insoluble phosphoric acid. the soluble phosphoric acid and reverted phosphoric acid are available to plant roots. the insoluble form is not. the rock phosphates contain from to per cent. of insoluble phosphoric acid. the acid phosphates or dissolved rock phosphates contain from to per cent. of available phosphoric acid and from to per cent. of insoluble. _bone fertilizers._ bones have long been a valuable and favored source of phosphoric acid. in addition to phosphoric acid they contain some nitrogen which adds to their value. they are organic phosphates and are quite lasting in their effect on the soil as they decay slowly. the terms "raw bone," "steamed bone," "ground bone," "bone meal," "bone dust," "bone black," "dissolved bone," indicate the processes through which the bone has passed in preparation, or the condition of the material as put on the market and used on the soil. ground bone, bone meal, bone dust, indicate the mechanical conditions of the bones. the bones are sometimes ground "raw" just as they come from the slaughter-house or kitchen, or they are sometimes first "steamed" to extract the fat for soap, and the nitrogenous matter for glue. _raw bone._ analysis: nitrogen, . to . per cent. available phosphoric acid, to per cent. insoluble phosphoric acid to per cent. _steamed bone_ contains . to . per cent. of nitrogen, to per cent. of available phosphoric acid and to per cent. of insoluble phosphoric acid. steamed bone pulverizes much finer than raw bone and decays more rapidly in the soil because the fat has been extracted from it. _dissolved bone._ ground bone is sometimes treated with sulphuric acid to render the phosphoric acid in it more available. it is then called dissolved bone and contains thirteen to fifteen per cent. of available phosphoric acid and two to three per cent. of nitrogen. _dissolved bone black._ bone charcoal is used for refining sugar. it is then turned over to the fertilizer manufacturers who sell it as "bone black" or treat it with sulphuric acid and then put it on the market as dissolved bone black. the bone black contains thirty to thirty-six per cent. of insoluble phosphoric acid. the dissolved bone black contains to per cent. of available phosphoric acid and to per cent. insoluble. "_thomas slag_," "_phosphate slag_," "_odorless phosphate_." phosphorous is an impurity in certain iron ores. in the manufacture of bessemer steel this is extracted by the use of lime which melts in the furnace, unites with the phosphorous and brings it away in the slag. this slag is ground to a fine powder and used as a fertilizer. it contains to per cent. of phosphoric acid, most of which is available. _superphosphate._ the term superphosphate is applied to the phosphates that have been treated with sulphuric acid to make the phosphoric acid available. dissolved bone, dissolved bone black, and the dissolved phosphate rocks are superphosphates. _fish scrap_, mentioned as a source of nitrogen, is also a valuable source of phosphoric acid, containing to per cent., which is quite readily available owing to the rapid decay of the scrap. sources of potash the chief sources of potash used for fertilizers are the potash salts from the potash mines at stassfurt, germany, where there is an immense deposit of rock salt and potash salts. the principal products of these mines used in this country are the crude salts: _kainite_, containing per cent. of potash. _sylvinite_, containing to per cent. of potash, and the higher grade salts manufactured from the crude salts: _muriate of potash_, containing per cent. potash. _high grade sulphate of potash_, containing per cent. potash. _low grade sulphate of potash_, containing per cent. potash. _wood ashes_, if well kept and not allowed to get wet and leach, contain to per cent. of potash. _cotton hull ashes_ contain to per cent, of potash and to per cent. of phosphoric acid. the potash in all these forms is soluble in water and equally available to plants. the crude salts, kainite and sylvinite, and the muriate contain chlorine and are not considered good for potatoes and tobacco as the chlorine lowers the quality of these products. in tobacco regions tobacco refuse is a valuable source of potash, the stems are about five per cent. potash. lime _lime_ is generally supplied to the soil in the form of quicklime made by burning lime stone or shells. other forms are gypsum or land plaster, gas lime (a refuse from gas works) and marl. most soils contain sufficient lime for the food requirements of most plants. some soils, however, are deficient in lime and some crops, particularly the legumes, are benefitted by direct feeding with lime. lime is valuable for its effect on the soil properties which constitute fertility. physically lime acts on the texture of the soil making clay soils mealy and crumbly, and causing the lighter soils to adhere or stick together more closely. chemically, lime decomposes minerals containing potash and other plant foods, thus rendering them available for the use of plants. it also aids the decay of organic matter and sweetens sour soils. biologically lime aids the process of nitrification. the action of lime is greatest in its caustic or unslacked form. too much or too frequent liming may injure the soil. it should be carefully tried in a small way, and its action noted, before using it extensively. a common way of using lime is to place twenty to forty bushels on an acre in heaps of three to five bushels, covering them with soil until the lime slacks to a fine powder. the lime is then spread and harrowed in. lime tends to hasten the decay of humus. it should not be applied oftener than once in four or five years. _gypsum_, a sulphate of lime, is similar to lime in its action on the soil. its most important effect is the setting free of potash from its compounds. _gas lime_ should be used with great care as it contains substances that are poisonous to plant roots. it is best to let it lie exposed to the weather several months before using. _marl_ is simply soil containing an amount of lime varying from five to fifty per cent. it has value in the vicinity of marl beds but does not pay to haul very far. chapter xxii commercial fertilizers--continued mixed fertilizers _what they are._ there are a large number of business concerns in the country which buy the raw materials described in chapter xxi, mix them in various proportions, and sell the product as mixed or manufactured fertilizers. if these mixtures contain the three important plant foods, nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash, they are sometimes called "complete" manures or fertilizers. in some parts of the country all commercial fertilizers are called "guano." _many brands._ these raw materials are mixed in many different proportions and many dealers have special brands for special crops. there are consequently large numbers of brands of fertilizers which vary in the amounts, proportions and availability of the plant foods they contain. for instance, in , twenty-three fertilizer manufacturers offered for sale ninety-six different brands in the state of rhode island. in missouri one hundred and ten brands, made by sixteen different manufacturers, were offered for sale. eighty-three manufacturers placed six hundred and forty-four brands on the market in new york state during the same year. of one hundred and twenty brands registered for sale in vermont in the spring of , there were seventeen mixtures for corn and thirty-four for potatoes. the result of this is more or less confusion on the part of the farmer in purchasing fertilizers, and with many a farmer it is a lottery as to whether or not he is buying what his crop or his soil needs. some of the manufacturers are not above using poor, low grade, raw materials in making these mixtures. this means that the farmer should make himself familiar with the subject of fertilizers if he desires to use them intelligently and economically. _safeguard for the farmer._ as a safeguard to the buyer of fertilizers the state laws require that every brand put on the market shall be registered and that every bag or package sold shall have stated on it an analysis showing the amounts of nitrogen, or its equivalent in ammonia, the soluble phosphoric acid, the reverted phosphoric acid, the insoluble phosphoric acid, and the potash. this registration is generally made at the state experiment station, and the director of the station is instructed to take samples of these brands and have them analyzed, and publish the results together with the analysis guaranteed by the maker. these analyses are published in bulletin form and should be in the hands of every farmer who makes a practice of using commercial fertilizers. the manufacturers of fertilizers comply with the law by printing on the bag or package the per cents of plant food in the fertilizers, and these statements in the great majority of cases agree favorably with the analyses of the experiment stations, but they do not in all cases state what materials were used to furnish the different kinds of plant food, and it is not always possible to find this out by analysis. _low grade materials._ for instance in mixing a fertilizer one manufacturer may use dried blood to furnish nitrogen and another may use leather waste or horn shavings. the latter contains more nitrogen than the dried blood, but they are so tough and decay so slowly that they are of little benefit to a quick growing plant. _inflating the guarantee._ although the dealer states correctly the per cents of plant food in the fertilizer, he is quite frequently inclined to repeat this in a different form, and thus give the impression that the mixture contains more than it really does. the dealers also give the nitrogen as ammonia because it makes a larger showing. phosphoric acid is often stated as "bone phosphate" because in this the amount appears to be greater. for example, an analysis taken from a fertilizer catalogue reads as follows: ammonia to per cent. available phosphoric acid to " total phosphoric acid to " total bone phosphate to " actual potash to " sulphate of potash to " a better statement would be as follows: nitrogen . per cent. available phosphoric acid " total phosphoric acid (furnished in bone phosphate) " potash (furnished in sulphate of potash) " ammonia is reduced to terms of nitrogen by multiplying by . . all bone phosphate is forty-six per cent. phosphoric acid. when bone phosphate is given instead of phosphoric acid it simply makes the mixture appear to have more in it, and when both phosphoric acid and bone phosphate are stated one is merely a repetition of the other. the same is true of the statements, potash and sulphate of potash, one is a repetition of the other only a different form. valuation the experiment stations not only publish comparative analyses of the registered fertilizers but they also compute the market values of the plant food contained in them and compare these valuations with the selling price of the fertilizers. they also furnish a list of trade values of the plant foods in raw materials for the convenience of fertilizer buyers in testing the values of the brands offered them on the markets. in the following list are given the "trade values agreed upon by the experiment stations of massachusetts, rhode island, connecticut, new jersey and vermont, after a careful study of prices ruling in the larger markets of the southern new england and middle states." trade values of fertilizing ingredients in raw materials and chemicals for : cents per lb. nitrogen in nitrates nitrogen in ammonia salts ½ organic nitrogen in dry and fine ground fish, blood, and meat, and in mixed fertilizers ½ organic nitrogen in fine ground bone and tankage organic nitrogen in coarse bone and tankage ½ phosphoric acid soluble in water ½ phosphoric acid soluble in ammonium citrate phosphoric acid in fine ground bone and tankage phosphoric acid in coarse bone and tankage phosphoric acid (insoluble in water and in ammonium citrate) in mixed fertilizer potash as high-grade sulphate and in mixtures free from muriate (chloride) potash as muriate ¼ for example, in calculating the commercial value of the plant food in a fertilizer we will take the formula mentioned on page , namely: ammonia to per cent. available phosphoric acid to " total phosphoric acid to " total bone phosphate to " actual potash to " sulphate of potash to " this fertilizer is evidently a mixture of bone meal and sulphate of potash and the plant food contained in it is as follows: nitrogen . per cent. available phosphoric acid " insoluble phosphoric acid " potash " one hundred pounds of the mixture would contain: pounds. value per lbs. nitrogen . value at ½¢ . available phosphoric acid " " ¢ . insoluble phosphoric acid " " ¢ . potash " " ¢ . ----- total $ . in one ton the whole value would be twenty times this or $ . . add to this $ , which is about the average charge for mixing, bagging, shipping, selling and profit, and we find that $ is probably the lowest figure at which this fertilizer could be purchased on the markets, and very likely the price would be higher as we have taken the lowest guaranteed per cent. of plant food for our basis of calculation. fertilizers are generally mixed and sold to the farmer on the ton basis. low grade mixtures most dealers, to meet a certain demand, furnish mixtures ranging from $ to $ per ton. these mixtures are necessarily low grade and are more expensive than the higher priced high grade mixtures. for example: a certain potato fertilizer on the market, which we will call mixture a, has the following guaranteed analysis: ammonia to per cent. available phosphoric acid to " actual potash to " a ton of this would contain: pounds. nitrogen . value at ½¢ $ . available phosphoric acid " " ¢ . potash " " ¢ . ----- ------ totals . $ . add to this the average charge for mixing, bagging, selling, profit, etc., $ , and the cost will be $ . . the selling price of this fertilizer would probably be not less than $ . now suppose the farmer thinks this a high priced and expensive fertilizer and looks about for something cheaper. he finds a low grade potato fertilizer, which we will call mixture b, that has the following guarantee: ammonia ½ to per cent. available phosphoric acid to ½ " actual potash ½ to " just one-half the guarantee of the high grade mixture a. a ton of this contains: pounds. nitrogen . value at ½¢ $ . available phosphoric acid " " ¢ . potash " " ¢ . ----- ------ totals . $ . add average charge for mixing, etc. . ------ $ . the selling price of this would very likely be not less than $ . this seems at first sight to be cheaper and more reasonable. but let us see. in a ton of mixture a he gets . pounds of plant food for $ , or at an average cost of twelve cents per pound, while in a ton of mixture b he gets . pounds of plant food for $ , or at an average cost of fifteen cents per pound. to put it another way, in a ton of the high grade mixture a, he gets . pounds of plant food for $ . to get the same amount of plant food, . pounds, in the low grade mixture, b, it will be necessary to buy two tons at a cost of $ . a low grade fertilizer is always expensive even if the plant food is furnished by high grade materials. buy on the plant food basis the farmer generally buys his fertilizer on the ton basis. a better method is to buy just as the fertilizer manufacturers buy the raw materials they use for mixing, namely, on the basis of actual plant food in the fertilizer. the dealers have what they call the "unit basis," a "unit" meaning one per cent. of a ton or twenty pounds of plant food. a ton of nitrate of soda, for instance, contains pounds or ½ units of nitrogen, which at $ . cents per unit would cost $ . buy your mixture of a reliable firm, find out the actual amounts of the plant foods in the mixture and pay a fair market price for them. chapter xxiii commercial fertilizers--concluded the home mixing of fertilizers when a considerable amount of fertilizer is used a better plan than buying mixed fertilizer is to buy the raw materials and mix them yourself. for example, a farmer is about to plant five acres of cabbages for the market. he finds that a certain successful cabbage grower recommends the use of fifty pounds nitrogen, fifty pounds phosphoric acid and seventy pounds potash per acre. for the five acres this will mean pounds nitrogen, pounds phosphoric acid and pounds potash. to furnish the nitrogen he can buy , pounds of nitrate of soda or , pounds dried blood or , pounds sulphate of ammonia, or a part of each. to furnish the phosphoric acid he can buy , pounds acid phosphate. seven hundred pounds of either sulphate or muriate of potash will furnish the potash. these materials can be easily mixed by spreading in alternate layers on a smooth floor and then shovelling over the entire mass several times. the mixture can be further improved by passing it through a sand or coal screen or sieve. by following this method of buying the raw materials and mixing them on the farm, the farmer can reduce his fertilizer bill by quite a considerable amount and at the same time can obtain just the kinds and proper amounts of plant foods needed by his crops. kind and amount to buy the farmer should make the best use of farm manures and through tillage to render plant food available for his crops before turning to commercial fertilizer for additional plant food. if he grows leguminous crops for green manuring, for feeding stock or for cover crops, he can in many cases secure, chiefly through them, sufficient high priced nitrogen for the needs of his crops, and it is necessary only occasionally to purchase moderate amounts of phosphoric acid, potash and lime. for special farming and special crops it may be necessary to use the commercial fertilizer more freely. it is impossible to say here just what amounts or what kinds of fertilizer should be purchased, because no two farms are exactly alike as to soil, methods of cropping or methods of tillage. there are certain factors, however, which will serve as a general guide and which should be considered in determining the kind and amount of fertilizer to buy. these factors are: the crop. the soil. the system of farming. the crop crop roots differ in their powers of feeding, or their powers of securing plant foods. some roots can use very tough plant foods, while others require it in the most available form. some roots secure nitrogen from the air. the cowpea roots, for example, can take nitrogen from the air and they can use such tough phosphoric acid and potash that it seldom pays to feed them directly with fertilizers. a bale per acre crop of cotton requires for the building of roots, stems, leaves, bolls, lint and seed: pounds of nitrogen. " " phosphoric acid. " " potash. and yet experiment and experience have proved that the best fertilizer for such a crop contains the following amounts of plant food: nitrogen pounds phosphoric acid " potash " this means that cotton roots are fairly strong feeders of nitrogen and potash, but are weak on the phosphoric acid side. the small grains, wheat, oats, barley and rye, can use tough phosphoric acid and potash, but are weak on nitrogen, and as they make the greater part of their growth in the cool spring before nitrification is rapid, they are benefitted by the application of nitrogen, particularly in the form of nitrate, which is quickly available. clover, peas, beans, etc., have the power of drawing nitrogen from the air, but draw from the soil lime, phosphoric acid and potash. hence the phosphates, potash manures and lime are desirable for these crops. root and tuber crops are unable to use the insoluble mineral elements in the soil, hence they require application of all the important plant foods in readily available form. nitrogen is especially beneficial to beets. turnips are benefitted by liberal applications of soluble phosphoric acid. white and sweet potatoes require an abundance of potash. if we are growing tender, succulent market garden crops, we need nitrogenous manures, which increase the growth of stem and foliage. fruit trees are slow growing plants and do not need quick acting fertilizers. the small fruits, being more rapid in growth, require more of the soluble materials. a dark, healthy green foliage indicates a good supply of nitrogen, while a pale yellowish green may indicate a need of nitrogen. a well developed head of grain, seed pod or fruit indicates liberal supplies of phosphoric acid and potash. the soil soils that are poor in humus are generally in need of nitrogen. heavy soils are generally supplied with potash but lack phosphoric acid. sandy soils are apt to be poor in potash and nitrogen. system of farming a system of general or diversified farming embracing crop products and stock raising, requires much less artificial manuring than does a system which raises special crops or quick growing crops in rapid succession, as in the case of truck farming or market gardening. testing the soil every farmer should be more or less of an investigator and experimenter. the factors mentioned previously as indicating the presence or absence of sufficient quantities of certain plant foods serve as a general guide, but are not absolute. the best method of determining what plant foods are lacking in the soil is to carry on some simple experiments. the following plan for soil testing with plant foods is suggestive: to test the soil for a possible need of the single plant foods, a series of five plots may be laid off. these plots should be long and narrow and may be one-twentieth, one-sixteenth, one-tenth, one eighth acre or larger. a plot one rod wide and eight rods long will contain one-twentieth acre. the width of the plot may be adjusted to accommodate a certain number of rows of crop and the length made proper to include an even fraction of an acre. a strip three or four feet in width should be left between each two plots. these strips are to be left unfertilized and are for the purpose of preventing one plot being affected by the plant food of another. the plots are all plowed, planted and cared for alike, the only difference in treatment being in the application of plant food. if the plots are one-twentieth acre in size, plant foods may be applied as follows. +----------------------------+ plot . | nitrate of soda lbs. | +----------------------------+ +----------------------------+ plot . | acid phosphate lbs. | +----------------------------+ +----------------------------+ plot . | nothing. | +----------------------------+ +----------------------------+ plot . | muriate of potash lbs. | +----------------------------+ +----------------------------+ plot . | lime bushel. | +----------------------------+ plot is a check plot for comparison. the measuring of the plots, weighing and application of the fertilizers, planting and care of the crops, weighing and measuring at harvest, should be carefully and accurately done. a number of additional plots may be added if desired to test the effect of plant foods in combination. for instance: +----------------------------+ plot . | nitrate of soda lbs. | | acid phosphate " | +----------------------------+ +----------------------------+ plot . | nitrate of soda lbs. | | muriate of potash " | +----------------------------+ +----------------------------+ plot . | nothing. | | | +----------------------------+ +----------------------------+ plot . | muriate of potash lbs. | | acid phosphate " | +----------------------------+ +----------------------------+ plot . | nitrate of soda lbs. | | acid phosphate " | | muriate of potash " | +----------------------------+ if the amount of fertilizer is too small to distribute evenly over the plot, mix it thoroughly with a few quarts of dry earth or sand to give it more bulk and then apply it. in the use of fertilizers it should always be remembered that small crops are not always due to lack of plant food, but may be caused by an absence of the other conditions necessary for root growth and development. the soil may not be sufficiently moist to properly supply the plants with water. too much water may check ventilation. poor tillage may check root development. unless the physical conditions are right the possible effects of additional plant food in the form of fertilizers are greatly diminished. the farmer who gets the largest return from fertilizers is the one who gives greatest attention to the physical properties of the soil. he makes use of organic matter and is very thorough in his methods of tillage. every farmer should apply to his state experiment station for bulletins on the subject of fertilizers. chapter xxiv the rotation of crops systems of cropping there are two methods or systems of cropping the soil: the one crop system, or the continuous cropping of the soil year after year with one kind of crop. the rotation of crops or the selection of a given number of different crops and growing them in regular order. the purpose of this chapter is to inquire into the effect of these two systems of cropping: on the soil conditions necessary for the best growth and development of the crops. on the market value of the crops. on the increase of or the protection from injurious diseases and insects. on the distribution of labor throughout the year. on the caring for farm stock. on the providing for home supplies. this inquiry and the conclusion will be based on the following facts learned in the foregoing chapters. plant roots need for their growth and development (see chapter ii): a mellow yet firm soil. a moist soil. a ventilated soil. a warm soil. a soil supplied with plant food. decaying organic matter or humus is one of the most important ingredients of our soils. because: it greatly influences soil texture and therefore the conditions necessary for root growth. its presence or absence greatly influences the attitude of soils toward water, the most important factor in plant growth. its presence helps light, sandy soils to hold more water and to better pump water from below, while it helps close, heavy soils to better take in the water which falls on their surface. its absence causes an opposite state of affairs. the presence of organic matter checks excessive ventilation in too open, sandy soil by filling the pores, and improves poor ventilation in heavy clay soils by making them more open. humus, on account of its color, influences the heat absorbing powers of soils. the organic matter is constantly undergoing more or less rapid decay unless the soil be perfectly dry or frozen solid. stirring and cultivating the soil hasten this decay. as the organic matter decays it adds available plant food to the soil, particularly nitrogen. as it decays, it produces carbonic acid and other acids which are able to dissolve mineral plant food not soluble in pure water and thus render it available to plants. plants, although they require the same elements of plant food, take them in different amounts and different proportions. plants differ in the extent and depth of root growth and therefore take food from different parts of the soil. some are surface feeders while others feed on the deeper soil. plants differ in their power to take plant food from the soil; some are weak feeders, and can use only the most available food; others are strong feeders, and can use tougher plant food. plants vary in the amount of heat they require to carry on their growth and development. the one crop system we are now ready for the question. what effect has the continuous cultivation, year after year, of the same kind of crop on the soil conditions necessary to the best growth and development of that crop or any other crop? suppose we take cotton for example. how does cotton growing affect soil humus? during the cultivation of cotton, the organic matter or humus of the soil decays in greater quantities than are added by the stalks and leaves of the crop. therefore, cotton is a humus wasting crop, and the continuous cultivation of this crop tends to exhaust the supply of organic matter in the soil. how does cotton growing affect soil texture? cotton growing wastes soil humus and therefore injures soil texture by making the lighter soils more loose and open, and the heavier soils more dense and compact. how does cotton growing affect soil water? by wasting humus cotton growing injures soil texture and so weakens the water holding and water pumping power of light soils and weakens the water absorbing power of heavy soils. therefore the continuous cultivation of cotton weakens the power of the soil over water, that most important factor in crop growth. how does cotton growing affect soil ventilation? continuous cotton culture, by wasting humus, injures texture and therefore injures soil ventilation, causing too much ventilation in the lighter soils and too little in heavier soils. how does cotton culture affect plant food in the soil? continuous cotton growing wastes plant food: because it wastes organic matter which contains valuable plant food, particularly nitrogen. because by wasting organic matter it increases the leaching of the lighter soils and the surface washing of the heavier soils. because its roots occupy largely the upper soil and do not make use of much food from the lower soil. because it grows only during the warm part of the year and there is no crop on the land to check loss of plant food from leaching and surface wash during the winter. because it is a weak feeder of phosphoric acid, and can use only that which is in the most available form. in applying fertilizer to cotton it is necessary for best results to apply at least twice as much phosphoric acid as the crop can use, because it can use only that which is in the most available form and the remainder is left in the soil unused. continuous cotton culture then has an injurious effect on all the important soil conditions necessary to its best growth and development, and the result is a diminishing yield or an increasing cost in maintaining fertility by the use of fertilizer. how does continuous cotton culture affect the economics of the farm? the injury to the soil conditions necessary to root growth diminishes the yield and therefore increases the cost of production. the poor soil conditions tend not only to diminish yield but also to diminish the quality of the crop, which tends to lower the price received for the cotton. keeping the land constantly in cotton tends to increase the insect enemies and the diseases of the crop. the continuous growing of cotton does not permit the constant employment of one set of laborers throughout the year. the continuous growing of cotton generally means that most of the farm goes into cotton. a small patch of corn is planted for the stock, which are apt to suffer from a lack of variety in food. the same is true with reference to home supplies. very few vegetables are grown for the table and there is little milk, butter or eggs for home use or exchange for groceries or drygoods at the store. thus we see that the continuous growing of cotton on the soil, year after year, has a bad effect on conditions necessary to its best growth and development and also on the economics of the farm. these facts are true to a greater or less degree in the case of nearly all of the farm crops. the grain crops are often considered as humus makers because of the stubble turned under, but professor snyder, of minnesota, found that five years' continuous culture of wheat resulted in an annual loss of pounds of nitrogen per acre, of which only . was taken by the crop, the remaining . pounds were lost through a waste of organic matter. the rotation of crops now, suppose that instead of growing cotton on the same soil year after year, we select four crops--cotton, corn, oats and cowpea--and grow them in regular order, a rotation practiced in some parts of the south. we will divide the farm into three fields and number them , and , and will plant these crops as indicated by the following diagrams: [illustration: plan of farm.] plan for planting. field . field . field . +----------------+----------------+----------------+ | | oats, | corn, | st year | | harvested in | followed by | or . | cotton | spring, | oats, | | | followed by | planted in | | | cowpeas. | fall. | +----------------+----------------+----------------+ | corn, | | oats, | d year | followed by | | harvested in | or . | oats, | cotton. | spring, | | planted in | | followed by | | fall. | | cowpeas. | +----------------+----------------+----------------+ | oats, | corn, | | d year | harvested in | followed by | | or . | spring, | oats, | cotton. | | followed by | planted in | | | cowpeas. | fall. | | +----------------+----------------+----------------+ each of these crops occupies one-third of the farm each year, and yet the crop on each field changes each year so that no one kind of crop is grown on any field oftener than once in three years. the cotton is grown for market, the corn partly to sell, partly to feed, the oats to feed and the cowpeas to plow under. all cotton and corn refuse is plowed under. what effect will such a system have on the conditions necessary for plant growth? suppose we follow the crops on field . cotton, corn, and oats are humus wasting crops but the pea crop which is grown the third year is plowed under, and largely, if not entirely, remedies the loss by furnishing a new supply of organic matter, and the ill effects which we noticed would follow the loss of organic matter due to the continuous growing of cotton are avoided, soil texture is preserved, soil ventilation is not injured, and the power of the soil over water is preserved. what is the effect on plant food in the soil? before answering this question let us see what amounts of plant foods these crops take out of the soil. we will assume that the soil is a good loam at the start and will produce: one bale of five hundred pounds of lint cotton per acre, sixty bushels shelled corn per acre, thirty bushels oats per acre, or two tons cowpea hay per acre. such a yield of crop would take from the soil the following amounts of plant food per acre: ----------------------+-----------+------------+------------ | | phosphoric | | nitrogen, | acid, | potash, | pounds. | pounds. | pounds. ----------------------+-----------+------------+--------- cotton (whole plant) | | | corn (whole plant) | | | oats (whole plant) | | | cowpea | | | ----------------------+-----------+------------+--------- now suppose we sell the lint of the cotton, keeping all the rest of the plant, including the seed, on the farm and turning it back into the soil. of the corn suppose we sell one-half the grain and keep the other half and the fodder for use on the farm. suppose the oats be made into oat hay and be fed on the farm and the cowpeas be turned under. assuming that the cowpeas take half their nitrogen from the air. this will mean that in the course of three years we take out of the soil of each acre in the crops: nitrogen. phosphoric acid. potash. pounds. pounds. pounds. but we return to the soil in crop refuse and manure from the stock: nitrogen. phosphoric acid. potash. pounds. pounds. pounds. this assumes that we have taken from the farm in products sold: ------------------+-----------+------------+------------+ | nitrogen. | phosphoric | potash. | | | acid. | | ------------------|-----------|------------|------------| cotton lint | | | | corn | | | | animal products | | | | +-----------+------------+------------+ totals | | | | ------------------+-----------+------------+------------+ the plant food charged to animal products is twenty per cent. of that in the grain and forage fed to the stock. at the end of the three years the plant food account will balance up with: nitrogen a gain of pounds. phosphoric acid a loss of " potash a loss of " this result is of course approximate. there will be some loss of nitrogen through leaching and denitrification. some of the potash and phosphoric acid will be converted into unavailable forms. this can be made good by applying to the cotton a fertilizer containing twenty pounds of nitrogen, sixty pounds of phosphoric acid and twenty pounds of potash. additional nitrogen and organic matter can be grown to turn under by planting crimson clover in the cotton at the last working for a winter cover crop to be turned under for the corn, and by planting cowpeas or soy beans between the rows of corn. if this is done it may not be necessary to add any nitrogen in the fertilizer, letting that supply only phosphoric acid and potash. if commercial fertilizer is used on the cotton, it would be a good plan to apply the manure from the stock to the corn. to follow our crop on field through the three years we will have, first, cotton drawing large amounts of plant food from the soil and diminishing the humus of the soil. growing a winter crop of crimson clover, turning back all the cotton refuse except the lint and oil, and applying the barn manure will furnish ample plant food for the corn and replenish the organic matter. the corn is a rather stronger feeder of phosphoric acid than cotton and will be able to get sufficient from that left by the cotton. the oats will be able to get a full ration after the corn, and the cowpeas will readily take care of themselves on the score of plant food and will put the soil in fine condition for cotton again. the peas may be left on the ground to turn under in the spring at cotton planting time, or they may be plowed under in the early fall and a crimson clover or vetch cover crop planted, which will be plowed under for the cotton. these same facts will be true of each of the three fields. the humus and, therefore, texture will be taken care of; ventilation, soil temperature and plant food will be controlled to advantage. each of the crops will be represented on the farm each year and the yields of each crop will be better than if grown continuously alone. the quality and therefore the market value will be greater. insects and disease will be easier kept in control, and stock will be more economically furnished with a variety of foods. benefits derived from rotation of crops rotation of crops economizes the natural plant food of the soil and also that which is applied in the form of manure and fertilizer. this is because: crops take food from the soil in different amounts and different proportions. crops differ in their feeding powers. crops differ in the extent and depth to which they send their roots into the soil in search of food and water. crops differ in the time of year at which they make their best growths. rotation helps to maintain or improve the texture of the soil because the amount of humus in the soil is maintained or increased by turning under green manure and cover crops which should occur in every well-planned rotation. rotation helps to maintain or increase the plant food in the surface soil. when crops like cowpeas or clover which take mineral food from the subsoil and nitrogen from the air, are plowed under, they give up the plant food in their leaves, stems and upper roots to the surface soil, and thus help to maintain or increase fertility. rotation tends to protect crops from injurious insects and diseases. if one kind of crop is grown continuously on one piece of land the soil becomes infested with the insects and diseases which injure that particular crop. if the crop is changed, the insects and diseases find difficulty in adapting themselves to the change and consequently diminish in numbers. rotation helps to keep the soil free from weeds. "if the same kind of crop were grown year after year on the same field, the weeds which grow most readily along with that crop would soon take possession of the soil." for example, chick weed, dock, thistle, weeds peculiar to grain and grain crops tend to increase if the land is long occupied by these crops. rotation helps the farmer to make a more even distribution of labor throughout the year. this is because crops differ as to the time of year at which they are planted and harvested. rotation of crops enables the farmer to provide for his stock more economically. live stock fares better on a variety of food, which is more cheaply secured by a system of rotation than otherwise. the typical rotation a typical rotation for general farming should contain at least: one money crop which is necessarily an exhaustive crop. one manurial crop which is a soil enricher. one feeding crop which diminishes fertility only a little. one cleansing crop, a hoed or cultivated crop. conditions which modify the rotation there are certain conditions which tend to modify the rotation or to influence the farmer in his choice of crops. they are as follows: first of all the climate will set a limit on the number and varieties of crops from which a choice can be made for a given locality. the kind of farming which he chooses to carry on, whether stock raising, grain farming, truck farming, or a combination of two or more of these, or others. kind of soil. certain soils are best adapted to particular crops. for example, heavy soils are best suited to wheat, grass, clover, cabbages, etc. light, sandy soils to early truck, certain grades of tobacco, etc. the demand for crops and their market value. facilities for getting crops to market, good or bad country roads, railroads and water transportation. the state of the land with respect to weeds, insect pests and plant diseases. general rules a few general rules may be made use of in arranging the order of the crops in the rotation though they cannot always be strictly followed. crops that require the elements of plant food in the same proportion should not follow each other. deep-rooted crops should alternate with shallow-rooted crops. humus makers should alternate with humus wasters. every well arranged rotation should have at least one crop grown for its manurial effect on the soil, as a crop of cowpeas, or one of clover, to be turned under. the objection often made to this last rule is that, aside from the increase in fertility, there is no direct return for the time, labor and seed, and the land brings no crop for a year. it is not necessary to use the entire crop for green manuring--a part of it may be used for hay or for pasture with little loss of the manurial value of the crop, provided the manure from that part of the crop taken off is returned and the part of the crop not removed is turned under. length of the rotation the length of the rotation may vary from a two-course or two crop rotation to one of several courses. crimson clover may be alternated with corn, both crops being grown within a year. a three-course rotation, popular in some parts of the country, is wheat, clover, and potatoes; potatoes being the money crop and cleansing crop, wheat a secondary money crop or feeding crop, and clover the manurial and feeding crop. a popular four-course rotation is corn, potatoes or truck, small grain, clover; the potatoes being the chief money crop, corn the feeding crop, the small grain the secondary money or feeding crop, and clover the manurial and feeding crop. on many new england farms near towns, hay and straw are the chief money crops. here the rotation is grass two or more years, then a cleansing crop and a grain crop. a canadian rotation is wheat, hay, pasture, oats, peas. a rotation for the south might be corn, crimson clover, cotton, crimson clover; this rotation covering a period of two years. a south carolina rotation is oats, peas, cotton, corn--a three-year rotation. it might be improved as follows: oats, peas, crimson clover, cotton, crimson clover, corn. chapter xxv farm drainage some farm lands contain so much water that the conditions of fertility are interfered with and therefore the crop producing power of these lands is lowered. how surplus water affects fertility this surplus water diminishes fertility by reducing the area of film water in the soil. it checks soil ventilation. it tends to keep the soil cold. it dilutes plant food in the soil. it interferes with proper tillage. indications of a need of drainage the above-mentioned state of affairs occurs sometimes in fields at the foot of hills, or on sloping uplands which receive spring water or seepage water from higher lands. some fields are underlaid by a close, compact subsoil which so checks percolation that the surface soil is too wet for tillage operations the greater part of the year. in such cases: a need of drainage is generally indicated by the presence of more or less free water standing on the surface. in some lands the surface water does not appear as free water standing on the surface. in such cases: a need of drainage is indicated by the curling and wilting of the leaves of corn and other crops during dry, hot weather. this curling and wilting is due to the fact that during the early growth of the crop free water stands so high in the soil that the crop roots are confined to a shallow layer of soil. when dry, hot weather comes, the free water recedes, the upper soil dries out, and the roots cannot get sufficient water to supply the demands of transpiration, hence the curling and wilting of the leaves. if drains are placed in this soil, the free water will be kept at a lower level in the spring and the plant roots will develop deeper in the soil, where there will be constant supply of film water during the dryer and warmer summer weather. the wiry and spindling growth of grass and grain crops may indicate too much water. the growth of moss on the surface of the ground and the cracking of the soil in dry weather are also indications of too much water. drains how can we get rid of this surplus free water? we can make passageways through the soil to a lower level and then let gravity pull the water through them to lower ground below. these passageways are called drains. drains may be classed as: surface drains which are shallow, open channels made in the soil with a plow, hoe or other tool, to carry off surface water. they are temporary and need frequent renewing. open-ditch drains are deeper, more permanent water passageways around or across the fields. surface and open-ditch drains take only surface water. they also carry off surface soil and manures washed into them. they frequently become choked or stopped by trash and soil, and are in the way of cultivation and harvesting operations. covered drains, under drains or blind ditches are water passageways made of brush, poles, stones, tiles, etc. (figs. - ), placed in the bottoms of ditches and then covered with soil. influence of covered or under drains on fertility _influence on soil water._ covered or under drains take not only surface water, but also remove free water from the soil beneath down to nearly the level of the bottom of the drains, and thus increase the area of film water. removing the free water enables the soil to absorb more readily rain water falling on the surface and therefore checks surface wash and the gullying of fields. _influence on soil ventilation._ lowering the free water allows a deeper penetration of air and, therefore, a deeper root development and enables crops to better resist dry periods. _influence on soil temperature._ lowering the free water in the soil influences soil temperature: by diminishing the amount of water to be heated. by checking evaporation. by letting warm showers sink down into the soil. by increasing ventilation and therefore permitting the circulation of warm air in the soil. the cropping season is lengthened by causing the soil to be warmer and drier earlier in the spring and later in the fall. _influence on plant food in the soil._ covered or under drains check losses of plant food that occur with surface and open ditch drains. they render available more plant food, for lowering free water and increasing ventilation: deepen the feeding area of the roots. aid the process of nitrification. aid chemical changes which make plant food available. check denitrification. location of drains as gravity is the force that is to take the surplus water from the soil, the outlet of the drainage system should be at the lowest part of the area to be drained. [illustration: fig. .--cross-sections of stone-drains.] [illustration: fig. . _a._ cross-section of a pole-drain. _b._ cross-section of a tile-drain.] [illustration: fig. .--a collection of drainage tools.] [illustration: fig. . _a_ represents a poorly laid tile-drain. it is poorly graded, and has partly filled with soil. it has lost more than half its water carrying capacity. _b_ was properly graded, and has kept free from sediment.] the main drains should be located in the lowest parts of the fields, indicated by courses taken by water after a rain or by small streams running through the farm. the lateral drains, if surface or open ditch drains, should run across the slopes; if under drains, they should run up and down the slopes. _grade or slope of the drain._ the grade of the drain should be sufficient to cause a flow of the water. in the case of open ditches it should not be steep enough to cause too rapid a current and a consequent serious washing of the banks of the ditch. large, deep ditches will carry water with a grade of one inch to a hundred feet. _tile drains._ covered or under drains are made of brush, poles, planks, stones, tiles, etc. (figs. - ). where tiles can be obtained at reasonable prices they are considered best. tiles are made of clay and are burnt like brick. they are more lasting than wood and are easier and cheaper to lay than stone, unless the stone must be gotten rid of. the most approved form of drain tile is the round or circular form. these are made in sizes ranging from two and one-half to six and eight inches in diameter, and in pieces one foot in length. the size used depends on the length of the drain, the amount of water to carry, the frequency of heavy rainfalls and the character of the soil. the distance apart varies from twenty-five feet in heavy soils to over two hundred feet in light soils. the usual depth is about three feet, though the farther apart the deeper they are put. a lateral tile drain should enter a main at an acute angle to prevent too great a check in the current. in putting in a drainage system the first thing to be done is to make a plan of the ground and determine the slope of the land and the grade of the drain. the ditches are then staked out and the digging proceeds. in digging the ditches plows are sometimes used to throw out the top soil, then the work is finished with spades and shovels. professional ditchers use special tools and they take out only sufficient earth to make room for the tiles (fig. ). the tiles are then laid end to end, the joints covered with a piece of sod, some grass, straw, paper or clay, to prevent loose soil sifting in. as the tiles are laid, enough soil is placed on them to hold them in place until the ditch is filled. in laying the tiles an even grade should be maintained (fig. ). a lessening of the grade checks the current of water and tends to cause a stoppage of the drain. the water gets into the drain through the joints where the tiles come together. the outlet of a tile drain should be protected by brick work or should be of glazed tile such as the so-called terra-cotta tile, to prevent injury by frost. the mouth of the drain should be protected by a screen of wire to prevent the entrance of rats and other small animals. glossary =acid=, a chemical name given to many sour substances. =albumen=, a nitrogenous organic compound. =albuminoid=, a nitrogenous substance resembling albumen. =ammonia=, a gas containing nitrogen produced by the decay of organic matter. =annual=, a plant that lives only one year; corn and sunflower are examples. =anther=, the part of a stamen that bears the pollen. =available=, that which can be used. =bacteria=, very small plants, so small that they cannot be seen without the aid of a powerful microscope. they are sometimes called "germs." some of them are beneficial, some do great harm and some produce disease. =biennial=, a plant that lives two years, usually producing seeds the second year. =bordeaux mixture,= a mixture of copper sulphate, lime and water used to prevent plant diseases. it was invented in bordeaux, france. =bud=, an undeveloped branch. =calyx=, the outermost part of a flower. =cambium=, the active growing layer between the bark and the wood of a tree. =capillary=, hair-like. a name given to very small spaces through which water flows by the force of capillary attraction. =carbohydrate=, an organic substance made of oxygen, hydrogen and carbon, but containing no nitrogen; cellulose or woody fibre, sugar, starch are examples. =carbon=, a chemical element. charcoal is nearly pure carbon. =carbonic acid gas=, a gas consisting of carbon and oxygen. it is produced from the lungs of animals, and by the decay or burning of organic matter. =catch crop=, a crop growing during the interval between regular crops. =cereal=, a name given to the grain crops that are used for food. =chlorophyl=, the green matter in plants. =commercial fertilizers=, materials containing plant food which are bought and sold in the markets to improve the soil. =compost=, a mixture of decaying organic matter used to enrich the soil. =cross pollination=, the pollination of a flower by pollen brought from some other flower. =cover crop=, a crop to cover the soil during the interval between regular corps. =cultivator=, a farm implement used to loosen the surface of the soil and to kill weeds after a crop has been planted. =cutting=, a part of a plant placed in moist soil, water or other medium with the object of its producing roots and making a new plant. =dormant=, said of plants when they are resting or inactive. most plants are dormant during the winter season. =drainage=, the method by which surplus water is removed from the land. =element=, a substance that cannot be divided into simpler substances. =fermentation=, the process by which organic substances are broken down or changed and new substances formed. =fertility=, that state or condition of the soil which enables it to produce crops. =fibre=, long thread-like structure. =flocculate=, to make crumbly. =free water=, standing water or water which flows under the influence of gravity. =function=, the particular action of any part of an organism. =furrow=, the trench left by the plow. =furrow slice=, the strip of earth which is turned by the plow. =germinate=, to sprout. =grafting=, the process of inserting a cion or bud in a stock plant. =green manure crops=, crops intended to be plowed under to improve the soil. =harrow=, an implement used to pulverize the surface of the soil. =heavy soils=, soils that are hard to work; stiff, cloddy soils. =horticulture=, that branch of agriculture which deals with the growing of fruits, vegetables, flowers and ornamental plants. =humus=, partially decayed animal and vegetable matter in the soil. =hydrogen=, a gaseous, chemical element, one of the constituents of water. =inter-tillage=, tillage between plants. =irrigation=, the practice of supplying plants with water by artificial means. =kainite=, a potash salt used in making fertilizer. =kernel=, a single seed or grain. =leaching=, passing through and going off in drainage water. =legume=, a plant belonging to the bean, pea and clover family. =light soils=, soils which are loose and open and easy to work. =loam=, a mixture of sand, clay and organic matter. =mould board=, the curved part of the plow which turns the furrow slice. =mulch=, a covering on the soil. it may be of straw, leaves, pulverized soil or other material. =nectar=, a sweet substance in flowers from which bees make honey. =nitrate=, a soluble form of nitrogen. =nitrification=, the changing of nitrogen into a nitrate. =nitrogen=, a gas forming four-fifths of the air. nitrogen is a very necessary food of plants. =organic matter=, substances produced by the growth of plants and animals. =osmose=, the movement of fluids through membranes or thin partitions. =oxygen=, a gas which forms one-fifth of the air. its presence is necessary to the life of all green plants and all animals. =ovary=, the part of the pistil that bears the developing seeds. =ovule=, an immature seed in the ovary. =perennial=, living through several years. =phosphoric acid=, an important plant food found in phosphates. =pistil=, the part of the flower which produces seeds. =propagate=, to increase in number. =pollen=, the powdery substance produced by stamens. =pollination=, the transfer of pollen from stamens to pistils. =potash=, an important plant food. =pruning=, removing parts of a plant for the good of what remains. =retentive=, holding, retaining, said of soil which holds water. =reverted=, said of phosphoric acid in the process of becoming insoluble. =rotation of crops=, a change of crops in regular order. =sap=, the juice or liquid contents of plants. =seed bed=, the earth in which seeds are sown. =seedling=, a young plant just from the seed. also a plant raised from a seed in distinction from one produced from a graft or a cutting. =sepal=, one of the parts of the calyx. =slip=, a cutting placed in water or moist soil or other substance to produce roots and form a new plant. =soil=, that part of the earth's crust into which plants send their roots for food and water. =stamen=, that part of a flower which bears the pollen. =stigma=, the part of the pistil which receives the pollen. =stomata=, breathing pores in plants. =subsoil=, that part of the soil which lies beneath the soil that is worked with the tillage tools. =sap root=, a main root that runs straight down into the soil. =tillage=, stirring the soil. =transpiration=, the giving off of water from plants. =tubercle=, a small nodular growth on the roots of plants. =under drainage=, drainage from below. =vitality of seeds=, the ability of seeds to grow. index acid phosphates, . adobe soils, . after-cultivation, , . benefits from, . flat, . frequency of, . saves water, . shallow, , , . time for, . tools for, . agencies active in making soils, . agents, with which farmer works, . most important, . agriculture, foundation facts and principles of, . air, and the farmer, . in relation to germination, . necessary for root growth, . work of, in making soils, . albuminoids in plants, , . alfalfa or lucern, . roots, . soils, . ammonia in fertilizers, , . in barn manures, . lost by fermentation, . sulphate of, . analysis of plants, - . of fertilizers, . animals, . and the farmer, . dependent on plants, . work of, in making soils, . annual plants, . anthers, . aphis, . apple, flower of, , . ash in plants, , . ashes, a source of potash, . cotton hull, . bacteria, , . and the farmer, , . denitrifying, . in manures, . in the roots of legumes, . in the soil, , . nitrifying, . nitrogen-fixing, . bare fallow, . when advisable, . barn manures, . application of, . condition of, . effect of on soil texture, . loss of value of, . meaning of term, . beet, . beets, . nitrogen for, . biological properties of a fertile soil, . biology, . blood, dried, . as a fertilizer, . nitrogen in, . bokhara clover, . bone, dissolved, . dust, . ground, . bone fertilizers, . meal, . raw, . steamed, . bone black, . dissolved, . bones, , . bordeaux mixture, . breaking out the middles, . brick, . brush harrow, , . buds, . buildings, . and the farmer, . bureau of soils, united states, . department of agriculture, . buttercup, flower of, , . cabbage, fertilizer for, . soil, , . transplanting, , . worm, . cabbages, . calcium in plants, , . in soils, . calyx, . function of, . cambium, . canadian field pea, . canteloupe soil, . capillary force, . meaning of term, . tubes, . water, . carbon in plants, . carbonic acid in soil, . carrots, , . cauliflower soil, . celery, . cellulose in plants, , . chain harrow, , . chemical properties of a fertile soil, . cherry flower, , . chlorophyl in leaves, . classification of soils, . clay, , . and lime, . loams, . power to absorb water, , . relation to water, , , . soils, . soils injured by working when wet, . to improve texture of, . water-holding power, . clevis, . climbing plants, . clover, . bokhara, . crimson, . mammoth, . red, . clovers, as green manure-crops, . as nitrogen gatherers, . nodules on roots of, . commercial fertilizers, , . amount to buy, . home mixing, . kind to buy, . raw materials, . (see also fertilizers.) composts, , . conditions necessary for root growth, . corn, a humus waster, . depth of root growth of, . flower of, . germination of, , . in rotation, , , . plant, . pollination of, . rapid growth of roots of, . roots cut by plow, . soils, , , , . structure of seed, . water used by, . corolla, . function of, . cotton, , . a humus waster, . in rotation, - . plant, . plant food removed by, . sea island, . soils, , , . upland, . cotton hull ashes, . cotton-seed meal, . cotyledons, . use of, . coulter of plow, . coulter-toothed harrow, , . cow manure, . losses by exposure, . cowpeas, , . for green manuring, . plant food in, . root growth of, . soils for, . cropping and soil water, , . crops, cleansing, . feeding, . in rotation, . manurial, . money, . cucumber flower, . cultivation. (see after-cultivation.) denitrification, . conditions favoring, . denitrifying germs, , . draft ring of plow, . draining, need of, . drains, - . and capillary water, . covered, . drains, effect on film water, . effect on plant food, . effect on soil temperature, . effect on soil water, . grade of, . lateral, . location of, . main, . open ditch, . surface, . tile, . dried blood, . as a fertilizer, . nitrogen in, . early crops, soils for, , . egg experiments to show osmose, , . egg plant, soil for, . elements in plants, . elm tree leaf beetle, . endosperm, . use of, . epicotyl, . essential organs of flowers, . evaporation, loss of water by, . loss of heat by, . excursion, to examine soils, . to see plow cutting roots, . to study roots, . to study leaves, . to study stems, . to visit farm, . experiment to show, air necessary for germination, . amount of transpiration, . capillarity, . capacity of soils for film water, . checking loss of water by evaporation, . chlorophyl necessary for starch making, . effect of soil mulch, . depth of planting seeds, . effect of lime on clay soil, . effect of working soil when wet, , . exclusion of oxygen by leaf, . film water, . growth in length of roots, . heat necessary for germination, . how food and water get into the root, , . how soils are warmed, . how soils lose heat, . importance of roots, . moisture necessary for germination, . no starch formed in dark, . osmose, , . plants contain albuminoids, . plants contain ashes, . plants contain cellulose, . plants contain gum, . plants contain oil, . plants contain starch, . plants contain sugar, . plants contain water, . power of soils to absorb rain, . power of soils to hold water, , . power of soils to pump water, . roots absorb moisture, . roots take food from soil, . roots produce new plants, . roots need air, . soil characteristics, , . soil temperature, , . starch in leaf, . stems carry sap, . stems store food, . transpiration, the fact, . transpiration, amount, . use of cotyledons, . what becomes of water taken by roots, . fallow, bare, . fall plowing, . families of plants, . farm drainage, . farm manures, , . classification of, . importance of, . farmer deals with agents, laws and forces, . fat in plants, . fermentation of manures, . fertile soil, a, . biological properties of, , . chemical properties of, , . most important properties of, . physical properties of, . fertility of the soil, . economizing the, . maintaining the, . fertilizers, commercial, , . analysis of, . classification of, . home mixing, . how to know what kind is needed, . importance of thorough mixing with the soil, . manufactured, . many brands, . mixed, . raw materials, . sources of lime, , . sources of nitrogen, . sources of phosphoric acid, , . sources of potash, , . use of by farmer, , . value of plant food in, . filament of stamen, . film water, . fish scrap as a fertilizer, . flower, of apple, , . of buttercup, , . calyx, . of cherry, , . corolla, . of cucumber, . functions of parts of, . of honeysuckle, . of melon, . parts of, . of peach, , . petals, . of petunia, . pistil, . pollen, . of potato, . sepals, . stamen, . of squash, . of tomato, . of wild mustard, , . flowers, , . essential parts of, . functions of, . food of plants, . forces of nature and the farmer, . forest soils, . foundation facts and principles of agriculture, . free water in the soil, , . injurious to roots, . source of capillary and film water, . fresno sand, . fruit, , . fruit soils, . fruits, . furrow slice, . gas lime, . geranium, . germinating seeds, need air, . need heat, . need water, . germs, . denitrifying, , . nitrifying, , . nitrogen fixing, . goosefoot family, . gourd family, . grafting, . grain crops humus wasters, . grain soils, . grass, . family, . soils, , , , . gravel, . gravelly loams, . green-crop manures, , . benefits from, . best plants for, . green manure-crops, . clovers as, . cowpeas as, . legumes as, . non-leguminous, . soy-bean as, . time for growing, . gum in plants, , . gypsum, . habit of growth of roots, . handles of plow, . harrowing, , . objects of, . time for, . harrows, , . brush, , . chain, , . coulter-toothed, , . plank, , . rolling cutter, , . spike-toothed, , . spring-toothed, , . hay soils, , . heat and the farmer, . heat necessary for germination, . hilling the crop, . hilum, . hoeing and soil water, . hoes, . horn shavings as fertilizer, . horse manure, . losses when piled, . house plants, watering of, . how the bean gets up, . how the corn gets up, . humus, , . influence on soil texture, . nitrogen in, . a source of nitrogen, . water-absorbing power of, . water-holding power of, . water-pumping power of, . hydrogen in plants, . hypocotyl, . ice, work of, in making soils, . insects, chewing, . how to combat, , . injure leaves, . sucking, . insect pollination, . inter-tillage, . iodine, test for starch, . iron in plants, . jointer of plow, . value as a pulverizer, . kainite, . knowledge of flowers, value of, . land plaster, . laws of nature, . leaf work, conditions necessary for, . interfered with, , . leather as a fertilizer, . leaves, , . digest food, . facts about, . functions of, . manufacture starch, . transpire water, . legume family, . legumes, definition of, . nitrogen fixers, , , . value as green manure plants, , . leguminous plants, . light necessary for leaf work, . lily family, . lime, . amount to use, . effect on sand, . effect on clay, . in soils, . its action on soils, , . sets free potash, . sources of, , . lime stone soluble in water, . loam, . loamy soils, . london purple, . loss of soil water, , . lucern, . roots, . magnesium in plants, . maintenance of fertility, . materials composing soils, . mallow family, . manures, barn, , . application of, . care of, . checking losses from, . effect on soil texture, . effect on soil water, . functions of, . losses from leaching, . losses from heating, . many things the farmer deals with, . marigold, . marl, . melon flower, . miami sand, . microscopic organisms, . mixed fertilizers, . inflating the guarantee, . low grade, , . many brands, . valuation of, . morning-glory, . most important factor in the raising of crops, . mould board of plow, . muck, swamp, . mulch, soil, . how made, . to save water, . muriate of potash, . mustard, family, . flower, , . muskmelon soils, . night shade family, . nitrates, what they are, . availability of, , . solubility of, . nitrate of soda, . nitrogen, . nitric acid in soil, . nitrification, . aided by plowing, . aided by lime, . conditions favorable to, . nitrifying germs, , . nitrogen, . added to the soil by legumes, . grown on the farm, . in humus, . in soils, , . in plants, , . in fertilizers, . loss of, . sources of, . nitrogen-fixing germs, . non-leguminous green manure-crops, . norfolk sand, . oats, soil for, . object of this book, . odorless phosphate, . oil in plants, , . one-crop system, . effect on fertility, . onion, . organic matter, in soils, , , . value of, . osmose, . ovary of flower, . ovules, . oxygen in plants, . paris green to destroy chewing insects, . parsley family, . parsnip root, depth of growth, . parsnips, . pasture, soils for, . pea family, . soils, . peach borer, . flower, . peanuts, . peat, . peppers, soil for, . percolation of water, . petals, . petunia, . pigweeds, , . pistil, . function of, . phosphate, odorless, . rock, . slag, , . phosphoric acid, . available, , . in fertilizers, . in soil, . insoluble, , . reverted, . soluble, . sources of, . phosphorus in plants, , . in soils, . plank harrow, , . plant, analysis of, . most important part of to plant itself, . most important part of to plant grower, . plant diseases, . plant food, . and the farmer, . plant food, in soil, . in fertilizers, , , . what it is, , . planting, corn, . grass seed, . grain seed, . method of, . seeds, . vegetable seeds, . plants, . and the farmer, . conditions for growth, . composition of food of, . for study, . living, growing things, . parts of, . resemble one another, . why raised, . work of in making soils, . plow beam, . coulter, . characteristics of, . clevis, . cutting roots, . draft ring, . handles, . jointer, . landside, . mouldboard, . parts of, . shackle, . share, . standard, . truck, . plowing, . depth of, . effect on soil water, . favors root growth, . in fall, , . in spring, , . importance of deep, , . objects of, , . to save water, . time for, . plows, . plumule, . pollen, . pollination, , , . cross, , , . of wild goose plum, . potash, . in fertilizers, . in soils, . sources of, . potassium, in plants, , . in soils, . potato, . soils, , , . potato, sweet, roots of, . soils, , . properties of a fertile soil, . pruning, . quitch-grass, . underground stem of, . radicle, . radish, shrunken root of, . ragweed, . rain, work of in making soils, . on clay soils, . on sandy soils, . rake, . rakes, . raking and soil water, . red spider, . rhubarb soil, . ridging the soil, , , . rock salt, . rollers, . rolling, , , . autumn-sown grain, . light soils, . reason for, . spring-sown grain, . rolling cutter harrows, . root, . how it takes moisture, . most important part of plant, . root hairs, , . roots, absorb water, , , . absorb plant food, , . alfalfa, . and fertilizers, . growth of in length, . conditions necessary for growth of, , , , . corn, . cowpea, . depth of growth of, . extent of growth of, . habit of growth of, , . hold plant in place, , , , . important lessons from, , . location of, , . need firm soil, , , . need mellow soil, , , . need moist soil, , , . need plant food in soil, , , . need warm soil, , , . need air in soil, , , . produce new plants, , . rapidity of growth of, . soy-bean, . store food, , . sweet potato, . tree, . uses of, , , , . work of, , , . rotation of crops, . benefits from, . conditions which modify, . effect upon fertility, . examples of, . general rules for, . length of, . typical, . sampling soils, . sand, , . fresno, . grades of, . miami, . norfolk, . power to absorb water, , . sandy soils, . adapted to early truck, . effect of humus on, , , . improving, . water-holding power of, . sandy loam, . sapwood, . scythes, . seed leaves, . seed, . classification of, . crab, drills, , . planting, , . seeds, . depth to plant, . how they come up, . how to test, . which germinate at a temperature of degrees, . which germinate at a temperature of degrees, . seeds to germinate, need air, , , . need heat, , . need moisture, , . sepals, . shallow cultivation, , , , . share of plow, . shackle of plow, . silt, , . silt loam, . small fruit soils, . soil, a fertile, . definition of, . formation of, , . material composing, , . mulch, . temperature, , . testing, , . texture, , . texture important, , . ventilation, , . warmed by sun, . warmed by conduction, . water, , . soils, , . adobe, . alfalfa, . and the farmer, . attitude of toward water, . cabbage, , . canteloupe, , . capacity for film water, . cauliflower, . classified, . clay, . cloddy, . close, . coarse, . compact, . corn, , , , . cotton, , , . effect of working when wet, , . egg plant, . fine, . forest, . fruit, , . general farming, , . grain, , . grass, , , . gravelly, . hard, . hay, , . heavy, . how made, . humus, , . leachy, . loamy, . loose, . lose heat, . light, . lime in, , . loss of water from, , . lumpy, . mellow, . oat, . open, . organic matter in, . pasture, . pea, . peat, . peppers, . plant food in, . potato, , , . porous, . relation of to water, , . relation of to plants, . retentive, . rhubarb, . sandy, . small fruit, , . soft, . sorghum, . stiff, . stony, . strawberry, . swamp, . testing, , . tobacco, . tomato, , . truck, , , , . vegetable, . water-absorbing power of, , , , . water-holding power of, , . watermelon, , . wheat, , . soil water, , . amount of used by plants, . and farm operations, . control of, . form of, , . greatest factor in growth of crop, . importance of, , . loss of, , , , . loss of by evaporation, . loss of by weeds, , . loss of by surface wash, . necessity for, . not enough, . saving, . sources of, , . too much, . soil water influenced, by cropping, . by harrowing, , , . by humus, , , , , . by plowing, , . by ridging, , . by rolling, , . sorghum soils, . soy-bean, as a green manure crop, . growth of roots, . spade, . spading, . spading-fork, . spike-toothed harrows, , . spraying, . spring plowing, . spring-toothed harrows, , . squash flowers, . stable manure, , . stamen, . function of, . staminate flowers, . starch in plants, , . iodine test for, . stems, , . distinguished from roots, . habit of growth of, . structure of, . underground, . uses of, . work of checked, . stigma, . stomata, . stones, , . stony loam, . strawberry flowers, . perfect, . pistillate, . study of plants begun, . style, . sugar cane, . soil, . sugar in plants, , . sulphate of ammonia, . sulphate of potash, . sulphur in plants, . sun, work of in making soils, , . sunlight, and the farmer, . necessary for leaf work, , , . superphosphates, . swamp muck, . sweet clover, . sweet potato roots, . soils, , . sweet potatoes, . sylvinite, . systems of cropping, . tankage, . as fertilizer, . nitrogen in, . phosphoric acid in, . temperature of soil, . tendrils, plants climb by, . testing seeds, . testing soils for water, . for plant food, . texture of soils, , , . thinning fruit, . thistle, . thistle family, . thomas slag, . as fertilizer, . phosphoric acid in, . tillage and plant food, . and fertility, . time to begin this study, . time to plow, . tobacco soils, . tomato soils, . tools, . and the farmer, . transpiration, the fact, . amount of, . transplanting, . machines, . truck of plow, . truck soils, , , , . tubercles on roots of legumes, , . turnip, . type soils, . under drains, . advantage of, . underground stems, . value of knowledge of flowers, . vegetables, roots, , , . soil for, . ventilation of soils, , . necessary for germination, . necessary for root growth, , , . necessary for fixation of nitrogen, . water, absorption of by soil, , , , . amount used by plants, . capillary, , . evaporation of, , . free, , . film, . ground, . importance of to plants, . percolation of, . relation of soils to, . standing, . work of in making soils, , . water and the farmer, . water in plants, . watering house plants, . watermelon soils, , . weeders, . weeds, . how they injure crops, , . how to kill, . waste soil water, . wheat soils, , . water used by, . wheel hoes, . white hellebore, . wind pollination, . work of roots, , , . work of sun in making soils, , . air in making soils, . animals in making soils, . moving ice in making soils, . moving water in making soils, , . plants in making soils, . rain in making soils, . wood ashes, . wool waste as fertilizer, . * * * * * history of farming in ontario by c. c. james [illustration: publisher's device] reprinted from canada and its provinces a history of the canadian people and their institutions by one hundred associates edited by adam shortt and a. g. doughty history of farming in ontario by c. c. james c.m.g. [illustration: publisher's device] toronto glasgow, brook & company this volume consists of a reprint, for private circulation only, of the one hundred and sixteenth signed contribution contained in canada and its provinces, a history of the canadian people and their institutions by one hundred associates. adam shortt and arthur g. doughty, general editors history of farming the land and the people from the most southern point of ontario on lake erie, near the nd parallel of latitude, to moose factory on james bay, the distance is about miles. from the eastern boundary on the ottawa and st lawrence rivers to kenora at the manitoba boundary, the distance is about miles. the area lying within these extremes is about , square miles. in a northern addition of over , square miles was made to the surface area of the province, but it is doubtful whether the agricultural lands will thereby be increased. of this large area about , , acres are occupied and assessed, including farm lands and town and city sites. it will be seen, therefore, that only a small fraction of the province has, as yet, been occupied. practically all the occupied area lies south of a line drawn through montreal, ottawa, and sault ste marie, and it forms part of the great productive zone of the continent. the next point to be noted is the irregularity of the boundary-line, the greater portion of which is water--lakes superior, huron, erie, ontario, the st lawrence river, the ottawa river, james bay, and hudson bay. the modifying effect of great bodies of water must be considered in studying the agricultural possibilities of ontario. across this great area of irregular outline there passes a branch of the archæan rocks running in a north-western direction and forming a watershed, which turns some of the streams to hudson bay and the others to the st lawrence system. an undulating surface has resulted, more or less filled with lakes, and almost lavishly supplied with streams, which are of prime importance for agricultural life and of incalculable value for commercial purposes. to these old rocks which form the backbone of the province may be traced the origin of the large stretches of rich soil with which the province abounds. an examination of the map, and even a limited knowledge of the geological history of the province, will lead to the conclusion that in ontario there must be a wide range in the nature and composition of the soils and a great variety in the climatic conditions. these conditions exist, and they result in a varied natural production. in the extreme south-western section plants of a semi-tropical nature were to be found in the early days in luxurious growth; while in the extreme north, spruce, somewhat stunted in size and toughened in fibre, are still to be found in vast forests. it is with the southern section, that lying south of the laurentian rocks, that our story is mainly concerned, for the occupation and exploitation of the northland is a matter only of recent date. nature provided conditions for a diversified agriculture. it is to such a land that for over a hundred years people of different nationalities, with their varied trainings and inclinations, have been coming to make their homes. we may expect, therefore, to find a great diversity in the agricultural growth of various sections, due partly to the variety of natural conditions and partly to the varied agricultural training of the settlers in their homelands. early settlement, - originally this province was covered with forest, varied and extensive, and was valued only for its game. the hunter and trapper was the pioneer. to protect and assist him, fortified posts were constructed at commanding points along the great waterways. in the immediate vicinity of these posts agriculture, crude in its nature and restricted in its area, had its beginning. it was into this wooded wilderness that the united empire loyalists, numbering in all approximately ten thousand people, came in the latter part of the eighteenth century.[ ] they were a people of varied origins--highland scottish, german, dutch, irish palatine, french huguenot, english. most of them had lived on farms in new york state, and therefore brought with them some knowledge and experience that stood them in good stead in their arduous work of making new homes in a land that was heavily wooded. in the year prospectors were sent into western quebec, the region lying west of the ottawa river, and selections were made for them in four districts--along the st lawrence, opposite fort oswegatchie; around the bay of quinte, above fort cataraqui; in the niagara peninsula, opposite fort niagara; and in the south-western section, within reach of fort detroit. two reasons determined these locations; first, the necessity of being located on the water-front, as lake and river were the only highways available; and, secondly, the advisability of being within the protection of a fortified post. the dependence of the settlers upon the military will be realized when we remember that they had neither implements nor seed grain. in fact, they were dependent at first upon the government stores for their food. it is difficult at the present time to realize the hardships and appreciate the conditions under which these united empire loyalist settlers began life in the forest of . having been assigned their lots and supplied with a few implements, they began their work of making small clearings and the erection of rude log-houses and barns. among the stumps they sowed the small quantities of wheat, oats, and potatoes that were furnished from the government stores. cattle were for many years few in number, and the settler, to supply his family with food and clothing, was compelled to add hunting and trapping to his occupation of felling the trees. gradually the clearings became larger and the area sown increased in size. the trails were improved and took on the semblance of roads, but the waterways continued to be the principal avenues of communication. in each of the four districts the government erected mills to grind the grain for the settlers. these were known as the king's mills. water-power mills were located near kingston, at gananoque, at napanee, and on the niagara river. the mill on the detroit was run by wind power. an important event in the early years was when the head of the family set out for the mill with his bag of wheat on his back or in his canoe, and returned in two or three days, perhaps in a week, with a small supply of flour. in the early days there was no wheat for export. the question then may be asked, was there anything to market? yes; as the development went on, the settlers found a market for two surplus products, timber and potash. the larger pine trees were hewn into timber and floated down the streams to some convenient point where they were collected into rafts, which were taken down the st lawrence to montreal and quebec. black salt or crude potash was obtained by concentrating the ashes that resulted from burning the brush and trees that were not suitable for timber. for the first thirty years of the new settlements the chief concern of the people was the clearing of their land, the increasing of their field crops, and the improving of their homes and furnishings. it was slow going, and had it not been for government assistance, progress, and even maintenance of life, would have been impossible. that was the heroic age of upper canada, the period of foundation-laying in the province. farming was the main occupation, and men, women, and children shared the burdens in the forest, in the field, and in the home. roads were few and poorly built, except the three great military roads planned by lieutenant-governor simcoe running east, west, and north from the town of york. social intercourse was of a limited nature. here and there a school was formed when a competent teacher could be secured. church services were held once a month, on which occasions the missionary preacher rode into the district on horseback. perhaps once or twice in the summer the weary postman, with his pack on his back, arrived at the isolated farmhouse to leave a letter, on which heavy toll had to be collected. progress was slow in those days, but after thirty years fair hope of an agricultural country was beginning to dawn upon the people when the war of broke out. by this time the population of the province had increased to about eighty thousand. during this first thirty years very little had been done in the way of stimulating public interest in agricultural work. conditions were not favourable to organization. the 'town meeting' was concerned mainly with the question of the height of fences and regulations as to stock running at large. one attempt, however, was made which should be noted. lieutenant-governor simcoe took charge of affairs early in , and, immediately after the close of the first session of the legislature at newark (niagara) in the autumn of that year, organized an agricultural society at the headquarters which met occasionally to discuss agricultural questions. there are no records to show whether social intercourse or practical agricultural matters formed the main business. the struggle for existence was too exacting and the conditions were not yet favourable for organization to advance general agricultural matters. when the war of broke out the clearings of the original settlers had been extended, and some of the loyalists still lived, grown grey with time and hardened by the rough life of the backwoods. their sons, many of whom had faint recollection of their early homes across the line, had grown up in an atmosphere of strictest loyalty to the british crown, and had put in long years in clearing the farms on which they lived and adding such comforts to their houses, that to them, perhaps as to no other generation, their homes meant everything in life. the summons came to help to defend those homes and their province. for three years the agricultural growth received a severe check. fathers and sons took their turn in going to the front. the cultivation of the fields, the sowing and the harvesting of the crops, fell largely to the lot of the mothers and the daughters left at home. but they were equal to it. in those days the women were trained to help in the work of the fields. they did men's work willingly and well. in many cases they had to continue their heroic work after the close of the war, until their surviving boys were grown to years of manhood, for many husbands and sons went to the front never to return. footnotes: [ ] see 'pioneer settlements' in this section. a period of expansion, - the close of the war saw a province that had been checked at a time of vigorous growth now more or less impoverished, and, in some sections, devastated. this was, however, but the gloomy outlook before a period of rapid expansion. in , on the close of the napoleonic wars in europe, large numbers of troops were disbanded, and for these new homes and new occupations had to be found. then began the first emigration from britain overseas to upper canada. all over the british isles little groups were forming of old soldiers reunited to their families. a few household furnishings were packed, a supply of provisions laid in, a sailing vessel chartered, and the trek began across the atlantic. the emigrants sailed from many ports of england, scotland, and ireland. sometimes the trip was made in three or four weeks; but often, through contrary winds or rough weather, three or four months passed before the vessel sailed up the st lawrence and landed the newcomers at montreal. hardly half of their difficulties were then overcome or half of their dangers passed. if they were to find their new locations by land, they must walk or travel by slow ox-cart; if they journeyed by water, they must make their way up the st lawrence by open boat, surmounting the many rapids in succession, poling the boats, pulling against the stream, at times helping to carry heavy loads over the portages. their new homes in the backwoods were in townships in the rear of those settled by the loyalists, or in unoccupied areas lying on the lake-fronts between the four districts referred to as having been taken up by the loyalists. then began the settlements along the north shore of lake ontario and of lake erie, and the population moved forward steadily. in the total population of the province was approximately , ; by , according to returns made to the government, it had increased to , ; in it was , , and in it was , . the great majority of these people, of course, lived upon the land, the towns being comparatively small, and the villages were composed largely of people engaged in agricultural work. this peaceful british invasion contributed a new element to the province and added still further to the variety of the people. in one township could be found a group of english settlers, most of whom came from a southern county of england, near by a township peopled by scottish lowlanders, and not far away a colony of north of ireland farmers, or perhaps a settlement composed entirely of people from the vicinity of cork or limerick. these british settlers brought new lines of life, new plans for houses and barns, new methods of cultivation, new varieties of seed, and, what was perhaps of most influence upon the agricultural life of the province, new kinds of live stock. even to this day can be seen traces of the differences in construction of buildings introduced by the different nationalities that came as pioneers into the various sections of the province--the french canadian constructed his buildings with long, steep roofs; the englishman followed his home plan of many small, low outbuildings with doors somewhat rounded at the top; the german and dutch settler built big barns with their capacious mows. these latter have become the type now generally followed, the main improvement in later years being the raising of the frames upon stone foundations so as to provide accommodation for live stock in the basement. it would be interesting and profitable to study carefully the different localities to determine what elements have contributed to the peculiar agricultural characteristics of the present day. in this connection the language also might be investigated. for instance, to the early dutch farmers of upper canada we owe such common words as 'stoop,' 'bush,' 'boss,' 'span.' to the early british settler these were foreign words. when the oversea settlers came up the st lawrence they were transported from montreal either by 'bateau' or by 'durham boat.'[ ] special reference must be made to the live stock introduced by the british settlers. this was one of the most important elements in the expansion and permanent development of the agriculture of the province. the british isles have long been noted for their pure-bred stock. in no other part of the world have so many varieties been originated and improved. in horses, there are the clydesdale, the shire, the thoroughbred, and the hackney; in cattle, shorthorns, herefords, ayrshires, devon, and the dairy breeds of jersey and guernsey; in sheep, southdowns, shropshires, leicesters; in swine, berkshires and yorkshires. many other breeds might be added to these. poultry and dogs also might be referred to. the britisher has been noted for his love of live stock. he has been trained to their care, his agricultural methods have been ordered to provide food suitable for their wants, and he has been careful to observe the lines of breeding so as to improve their quality. in the earliest period of the settlement of the province live stock was not numerous and the quality was not of the best. whatever was to be found on the farms came mainly from the united states and was of inferior type. the means of bringing in horses, cattle, and sheep were limited. the result was that field work at that time was largely done by hand labour. hunting and fishing helped to supply the table with the food that to-day we obtain from the butcher. when the britisher came across the atlantic he brought to upper canada his love for live stock and his knowledge how to breed and care for the same. the result was seen in the rapid increase in the number of horses, cattle, sheep, and swine, and the placing of the agriculture of the province on a firm basis for future growth. by the population had grown to about , , practically all located on the land. in that year there were only five towns of or over: namely, kingston, ; york (toronto), ; london, (including the township), ; hamilton (including the township), ; and brockville, . the returns to the government show that of the , , acres occupied , were under cultivation. on the farms were to be found , horses, , oxen, , milch cows, and , young cattle. it is interesting to note that oxen, so useful in clearing land and in doing heavy work, were more numerous than horses. oxen were hardier than horses; they could forage for themselves and live on rough food, and when disabled could be converted into food. they thus played a very important part in the pioneer life. there were no improved farm implements in those days: the plough, the spade, the hoe, the fork, the sickle, the hook, the cradle, and the rake--implements that had been the husbandman's equipment for centuries--completed the list. with these the farmer cultivated his lands and gathered his crops. with two stout hickory poles, joined together at the end with tough leather thongs, a flail was made with which he threshed out his grain on the floor of his barn. the earliest pioneers raised some flax, and from the fibre made coarse linen fabrics, supplementing these by skins of wild animals and the hides of cattle. with the introduction of sheep by the british settlers wool became an important product, and homespun garments provided additional clothing for all the members of the family. seeds of various fruit trees were planted, and by the products of these seedlings supplemented the wild plums and cherries of the woods and the wild raspberries that sprang up in abundance in the clearings and slashes. by this time every farm had one or more milch cows and the farmer's table was supplied with fresh milk, butter, and home-made cheese. as the first half-century of the province was drawing to its close, some of the comforts of home life began to be realized by the farming community. the isolation of the former period disappeared as roads of communication were opened up and extended. here and there societies were formed for the exhibition of the products of the farm and for friendly competitions. so important were these societies becoming in the life of the whole community that in the government gave them recognition and provided an annual grant to assist them in their work. this is an important event in agricultural history, for it marks the beginning of government assistance to the agricultural industry. between and probably not more than half a dozen agricultural societies were organized. some records of such were preserved at york, kingston, and in the newcastle district. from the record of the county of northumberland agricultural society it is learned that its first show was held in the public square of the village of colborne on october , , when premiums were awarded amounting in all to seventy-seven dollars. there were fourteen prizes for live stock, two prizes for cheese, two for field rollers, and two for essays on the culture of wheat. the first prize essay, for which the winner received five dollars, was printed for distribution. the prize list was limited in range, but it shows how this new settlement, formed largely by british settlers since , was giving particular attention to the encouragement of live stock. a short quotation from the prize essay as to the best method of clearing the land for wheat should be found of interest. as a great part of our county is yet in a wilderness state and quite a share of the wheat brought to our markets is reared on new land, i deem it important that our enterprising young men who are clearing away the forest should know how to profit by their hard labor. let the underwood be cut in the autumn before the leaves fall, and the large timber in the winter or early in the spring. this will insure a good burn, which is the first thing requisite for a good crop. do your logging in the month of june, and if you wish to make money, do it before you burn your brush and save the ashes; these will more than half pay you for clearing the land: and by burning at this season you will attract a drove of cattle about you that will destroy all sprouts which may be growing; do not leave more than four trees on an acre and girdle these in the full moon of march and they will never leaf again; thus you may have your land prepared for the seed before harvest. the act of provided a grant of £ for a society in each district, upon condition that the members subscribed and paid in at least £ , and in the case of a society being organized in each county the amount was to be equally divided among the societies. the condition of making the grant was set forth in the act as follows: 'when any agricultural society, for the purpose of importing valuable live stock, grain, grass seeds, useful implements or whatever else might conduce to the improvement of agriculture in this province,' etc. as a result of this substantial assistance by the government, agricultural societies increased in number, and their influence, in assisting in the improvement of the live stock and the bringing of new implements to the attention of farmers, was most marked. horses, sheep and milch cows increased rapidly. purebred cattle now began to receive some attention. the first record of importation is the bringing of a shorthorn bull and a cow from new york state in by robert arnold of st catharines. in rowland wingfield, an englishman farming near guelph, brought a small herd of choice animals across the ocean, landed them at montreal, took them to hamilton by way of the ottawa river, the rideau canal, and lake ontario, and then drove them on foot to wellington county. the hon. adam fergusson of woodhill followed two or three years later with a similar importation. the first ayrshire cattle can be traced back to the scottish settlers who arrived during this period. these emigrants had provided their own food for the voyage to canada, and in some cases brought a good milch cow to provide fresh milk on the voyage. she would be disposed of on landing, at montreal or in the eastern part of upper canada. this accounts for the early predominance of ayrshires in eastern ontario. thus to the period - belongs the first foundation of the pure-bred stock industry. it was in this period also that the first signs appear of improved farm implements and labour-saving machinery. ploughs of improved pattern, lighter and more effective, were being made. land rollers and harrows made in the factory began to take the place of the home-made articles. crude threshing machines, clover-seed cleaners, root-cutters, and a simple but heavy form of hay-rake came into use. the mowing machine and the reaper were making their appearance in great britain and the united states, but they had not yet reached upper canada. the organization of agricultural societies in the various districts, and the great impetus given to the keeping of good stock, led in to the suggestion that a provincial organization would be of benefit to the farming industry. in the neighbouring state of new york a similar organization had been in existence since and successful state fairs had been held, which some of the more prominent farmers of upper canada had visited. an agricultural paper called the _british american cultivator_ had been established in york, and through this paper, in letters and editorials, the idea of a provincial association was advocated. for three years the discussion proceeded, until finally, in , there was organized the provincial agricultural association and board of agriculture for canada west, composed of delegates from the various district societies. the result was that the first provincial exhibition was held in toronto on october and of that year. the old government house at the south-western corner of king street and simcoe street, then empty, was used for the exhibits, and the stock and implements were displayed in the adjoining grounds. the canada company gave a contribution of $ , eight local societies made donations, about $ was secured as gate money, and members paid subscriptions. premiums were paid to the amount of $ , the bulk of which went to live stock; books, which cost about $ , were given as prizes; and there was left a cash balance on hand of $ . a ploughing match was held, and on the evening of the first day a grand banquet was given, attended by the officers and directors and by some of the leading citizens of toronto. among the speakers at this banquet were chief justice robinson and egerton ryerson, superintendent of education. footnotes: [ ] see 'shipping and canals' in section v. pp. - . organized agriculture, - the organization of this provincial association fittingly introduces another era in agricultural growth. it is to be noted that this provincial organization was a self-created body; it drew at first no government funds direct. it commended itself to the people, for on july , , the provincial parliament in session at montreal passed an act incorporating it under the name of the agricultural association of upper canada, and in the charter named as members a number of the leading citizens of the province. it was governed by a board of directors, two of whom were chosen annually by each district agricultural society. the objects set forth were the improvement of farm stock and produce, the improvement of agricultural implements, and the encouragement of domestic manufactures, of useful inventions applicable to agricultural or domestic purposes, and of every branch of rural and domestic economy. out of this provincial association came all the further agricultural organizations of a provincial nature, and ultimately, some forty years later, the ontario department of agriculture. the second provincial exhibition was held at hamilton in , and lord elgin, the governor-general, was in attendance. he was also a generous patron, for his name appears as a donor of $ . the address which he delivered at the banquet has been preserved in the published records and is copiously marked with cheers and loud applause. the third exhibition was held at cobourg in . the official report of the exhibits indicates that pure-bred stock was rapidly increasing and improving in quality; but the most significant paragraph is that dealing with implements, and this is well worth quoting in full. of implements of canada make, the show was deficient; and we were much indebted to our american neighbours for their valuable aid on this occasion. a large number of ploughs, straw-cutters, drills, cornshellers, churns, etc., etc., were brought over by messrs briggs & co. of rochester, mr emery of albany, and a large manufacturing firm near boston. mr bell of toronto exhibited his excellent plough, straw-cutter, and reaping machine. the first prize for the latter article was awarded to mr helm of cobourg for the recent improvements which he has effected. mr clark of paris exhibited his one-horse thrashing-mill, which attracted much attention. at the fourth exhibition, held at kingston in , the show of implements was much more extensive, and comment was made on the improvement of articles of home manufacture. at this meeting professor j. f. w. johnson, of edinburgh, who was making a tour of north america, was present. the address of the president, henry ruttan of cobourg, is a most valuable reference article descriptive of the agricultural progress of the province from the first settlements in to the time of the exhibition. ruttan was a loyalist's son, and, from his own personal knowledge, he described the old plough that was given by the government to each of the first settlers. it consisted of a small iron socket, whose point entered by means of a dove-tailed aperture into the heel of the coulter, which formed the principal part of the plough, and was in shape similar to the letter l, the shank of which went through the wooden beam, and the foot formed the point which was sharpened for operation. one handle and a plank split from the side of a winding block of timber, which did duty for the mould-board, completed the implement. besides provisions for a year, i think each family had issued to them a plough-share and coulter, a set of dragg-teeth, a log chain, an axe, a saw, a hammer, a bill hook and a grubbing hoe, a pair of hand-irons and a cross-cut saw amongst several families, and a few other articles. he then refers to the large number of implements then being pressed upon the farmers, until 'they have almost become a nuisance to the farmer who desires to purchase a really useful article.' all of which indicates that a distinctive feature of the period beginning with was the introduction and rapid extension of improved farm machinery. a few words as to the reaping machine, which contributed more than any other modern implement to the development of agriculture in the past century, may not be out of place. various attempts had been made at producing a machine to supersede the sickle, the scythe, and the cradle before the rev. patrick bell, in , presented his machine to the highland agricultural society of scotland for its examination. bell's machine was fairly successful, and one was then in operation on the farm of his brother, inch-michael, in the carse of gowrie. one set of knives was fixed, another set worked above and across these like the blades of a pair of scissors. the grain fell on an endless cloth which carried and deposited the heads at the side of the machine. a horse pushed it forward and kept all parts in motion. it was simple, and, we are told, harvested twelve acres in a day. this was in . in the _new york farmer and american gardener's magazine_ for may be found the descriptions and illustrations of obed hussey's grain-cutter and cyrus h. mccormick's 'improved reaping-machine.' the question has been raised as to whether either of these united states inventions owed anything to the earlier production of patrick bell. it was, of course, the improved united states reaping machines that found their way into upper canada shortly after the organization of the provincial agricultural association. our interest in this matter is quickened by the fact that the rev. patrick bell, when a young man, was for some time a tutor in the family of a well-to-do farmer in the county of wellington, and there is a tradition that while there he carried on some experiments in the origination of his machine. the suggestion of a 'mysterious visitor' from the united states to the place where he was experimenting is probably mere conjecture. this period, to , was one of rapid growth in population. the free-grant land policy of the government was a great attraction for tens of thousands of people in the british isles, who were impelled by social unrest, failure of crops, and general stagnation in the manufacturing industries to seek new homes across the sea. in the twenty years referred to the population more than doubled, and the improved lands of the province increased fourfold. the numbers of cattle and sheep about doubled, and the wheat production increased about threefold. towards the latter part of the period a new agricultural industry came into existence--the manufacture of cheese in factories. it was in new york state that the idea of co-operation in the manufacture of cheese was first attempted. there, as in canada west, it had been the practice to make at home from time to time a quantity of soft cheese, which, of course, would be of variable quality. to save labour, a proposition was made to collect the milk from several farms and have the cheese made at one central farm. the success of this method soon became known and small factories were established. in harvey farrington came from new york state to canada west and established a factory in the county of oxford, about the same time that a similar factory was established in the county of missisquoi, quebec. shortly afterwards factories were built in hastings county, and near brockville, in leeds county. thus began an industry that had a slow advance for some fifteen years, but from spread rapidly, until the manufacture of cheese in factories became one of the leading provincial industries. the system followed is a slight modification of the cheddar system, which takes its name from one of the most beautiful vales in the west of england. its rapid progress has been due to the following circumstances: ontario, with her rich grasses, clear skies, and clean springs and streams, is well adapted to dairying; large numbers of her farmers came from dairy districts in the mother country; the co-operative method of manufacture tends to produce a marketable article that can be shipped and that improves with proper storage; great britain has proved a fine market for such an article; and the industry has for over thirty years received the special help and careful supervision and direction of the provincial and dominion governments. during this period we note the voluntary organization of the ontario fruit-growers' association, a fact which alone would suggest that the production of fruit must have been making progress. the early french settlers along the detroit river had planted pear trees or grown them from seed, and a few of these sturdy, stalwart trees, over a century old, still stand and bear some fruit. mrs simcoe, in her _journal_, july , , states: 'we have thirty large may duke cherry trees behind the house and three standard peach trees which supplied us last autumn for tarts and desserts during six weeks, besides the numbers the young men eat.' this was at niagara. the records of the agricultural exhibitions indicate that there was a gradual extension of fruit-growing. importations of new varieties were made, rochester, in new york state, apparently being the chief place from which nursery stock was obtained. here and there through the province gentlemen having some leisure and the skill to experiment were beginning to take an interest in their gardens and to produce new varieties. on january , , a few persons met in the board-room of the mechanics' hall at hamilton and organized a fruit-growers' association for upper canada. judge campbell was elected president; dr hurlbert, first vice-president; george leslie, second vice-president; arthur harvey, secretary. the members of this association introduced new varieties and reported on their success. they were particularly active in producing such new varieties as were peculiarly suitable to the climate. for nine years they maintained their organization and carried on their work unaided and unrecognized officially. to this period belongs also the first attempts at special instruction in agriculture and the beginning of an agricultural press. both are intimately connected with the association, already referred to, that had been organized in by some of the most progressive citizens. for four years the provincial association carried on its work and established itself as a part of the agricultural life of canada west. in the government stepped in and established a board of agriculture as the executive of the association. its objects were set out by statute and funds were to be provided for its maintenance. the new lines of work allotted to it were to collect agricultural statistics, prepare crop reports, gather information of general value and to present the same to the legislature for publication, and to co-operate with the provincial university in the teaching of agriculture and the carrying on of an experimental or illustrative farm. professor george buckland was appointed to the chair of agriculture in the university in january and an experimental farm on a small scale was laid out on the university grounds. professor buckland acted also as secretary to the board until , when he resigned and was succeeded by hugh c. thomson. he continued his work for some years at the university, and was an active participant in all agricultural matters up to the time of his death in . provision having been made for agricultural instruction at the university, the board in decided to establish a course in veterinary science, and at once got into communication with professor dick of the veterinary college at edinburgh, scotland. in a school was opened in toronto under the direction of professor andrew smith, recently arrived from edinburgh. the _british american cultivator_ was established in by eastwood and co. and w. g. edmundson, with the latter as editor. it gave place in to the _canadian agriculturist_, a monthly journal edited and owned by george buckland and william mcdougall. this was the official organ of the board till the year , when george brown began the publication of the _canada farmer_ with the rev. w. f. clark as editor-in-chief and d. w. beadle as horticultural editor. the board at once recognized it, accepted it as their representative, and the _canadian agriculturist_ ceased publication in december . the half-century of british immigration, to , had wrought a wonderful change. from a little over a hundred thousand the population had grown to a million and a half; towns and cities had sprung into existence; commercial enterprises had taken shape; the construction of railways had been undertaken; trade had developed along new lines; the standards of living had materially changed; and great questions, national and international, had stirred the people and aroused at times the bitterest political strife. the changed standards of living can best be illustrated by an extract from an address delivered in by sheriff ruttan. referring to the earlier period, he said: our food was coarse but wholesome. with the exception of three or four pounds of green tea a year for a family, which cost us three bushels of wheat per pound, we raised everything we ate. we manufactured our own clothes and purchased nothing except now and then a black silk handkerchief or some trifling article of foreign manufacture of the kind. we lived simply, yet comfortably--envied no one, for no one was better off than his neighbour. until within the last thirty years, one hundred bushels of wheat, at s. d. per bushel, was quite sufficient to give in exchange for all the articles of foreign manufacture consumed by a large family.... the old-fashioned home-made cloth has given way to the fine broadcloth coat; the linsey-woolsey dresses of females have disappeared and english and french silks been substituted; the nice clean-scoured floors of the farmers' houses have been covered by brussels carpets; the spinning wheel and loom have been superseded by the piano; and in short, a complete revolution in all our domestic habits and manners has taken place--the consequences of which are the accumulation of an enormous debt upon our shoulders and its natural concomitant, political strife. students of canadian history will at once recall the story of the rebellion of , the struggle for constitutional government, the investigation by lord durham, the repeal of the preferential wheat duties in england, the agitation for canadian independence, and other great questions that so seriously disturbed the peace of the canadian people. they were the 'growing pains' of a progressive people. the crimean war, in - , gave an important though temporary boom to canadian farm products. reciprocity with the united states from to offered a profitable market that had been closed for many years. then came the close of the great civil war in the united states and the opening up of the cheap, fertile prairie lands of the middle west to the hundreds of thousands of farmers set free from military service. this westward movement was joined by many farmers from ontario; there was a disastrous competition in products, and an era of agricultural depression set in just before confederation. it was because of these difficulties that confederation became a possibility and a necessity. the new political era introduced a new agricultural period, which began under conditions that were perhaps as unfavourable and as unpromising as had been experienced for over half a century. the growth of scientific farming, - the period that we shall now deal with begins with confederation in and extends to , when a provincial minister of agriculture was appointed for the first time and an independent department organized. from to what is now ontario was known as upper canada; from to it was part of the united province of canada, being known as canada west to distinguish it from quebec or canada east. in , however, it resumed its former status as a separate province, but with the new name of ontario. in the formation of the government of the province agriculture was placed under the care of a commissioner, who, however, held another portfolio in the cabinet. john carling was appointed commissioner of public works and also commissioner of agriculture. on taking office carling found the following agricultural organizations of the province ready to co-operate with the government: sixty-three district agricultural societies, each having one or more branch township societies under its care, and all receiving annual government grants of slightly over $ , ; a provincial board of agriculture, with its educational and exhibition work; and a fruit-growers' association, now for the first time taken under government direction and given financial assistance. one extract from the commissioner's first report will serve to show the condition of agriculture in ontario when the dominion was born. 'it is an encouraging fact that during the last year in particular mowers and reapers and labour-saving implements have not only increased in the older districts, but have found their way into new ones, and into places where they were before practically unknown. this beneficial result has, no doubt, mainly arisen from the difficulty, or rather in some cases impossibility, of getting labour at any price.' it would appear, therefore, that the question of shortage of farm labour, so much complained of in recent years, has been a live one for forty years and more. in the second report of the commissioner ( ) special attention was directed to the question of agricultural education, and the suggestion was made that the agricultural department of the university and the veterinary college might give some instruction to the teachers at the normal school. in the following year, however, an advanced step was taken. it was noted that dr ryerson was in sympathy with special agricultural teaching and had himself prepared and published a text-book on agriculture. the suggestion was made that the time had arrived for a school of practical science. at the same time ryerson had appointed the rev. w. f. clark, the editor of the _canada farmer_, to visit the agricultural department at washington and a few of the agricultural colleges of the united states, and to collect such practical information as would aid in commencing something of an analogous character in ontario. it will thus be seen that the two branches of technical training--the school of practical science and the agricultural college--were really twin institutions, originating, in the year , in the dual department of public works and agriculture. these institutions were the outcome of the correlation of city and country industries, which were under the fostering care of the agriculture and arts association, as the old provincial organization was now known. the school of practical science, it may be noted, is now incorporated with the provincial university, and the agricultural college is affiliated with it. there were at that time two outstanding agricultural colleges in the united states, that of massachusetts and that of michigan. these were visited, and, based upon the work done at these institutions, a comprehensive and suggestive report was compiled. immediate action was taken upon the recommendations of this report, and a tract of land, six hundred acres in extent, was purchased at mimico, seven miles west of toronto. before work could be commenced, however, the life of the legislature closed and a new government came into office in with archibald mckellar as commissioner of agriculture and arts. new governments feel called upon to promote new measures. there were rumours and suggestions that the soil of the mimico farm was productive of thistles and better adapted to brick-making than to the raising of crops. also the location was so close to toronto that it was feared that the attractions of the city would tend to make the students discontented with country life. for various reasons a change of location was deemed desirable, and a committee of farmer members of the legislature was appointed. professor miles, of the michigan agricultural college, was engaged to give expert advice; other locations were examined, and finally moreton lodge farm, near guelph, was purchased. after some preliminary difficulties, involving the assistance of a sheriff or bailiff, possession was obtained, and the first class for instruction in agricultural science and practice, consisting of thirty-one pupils in all, was opened on june , , with william johnston as rector or principal. thus was established the ontario school of agriculture, now known as the ontario agricultural college. its annual enrolment has grown to over fifteen hundred, and it is now recognized as the best-equipped and most successful institution of its kind in the british empire. its development along practical lines and its recognition as a potent factor in provincial growth were largely due to dr james mills, who was appointed president of the college in , and filled that position until january , when he was appointed to the dominion board of railway commissioners. under his direction farmers' institutes were established in ontario in . dr mills was succeeded by dr g. c. creelman as president. the next important step in agricultural advancement was the appointment in of the ontario agricultural commission 'to inquire into the agricultural resources of the province of ontario, the progress and condition of agriculture therein and matters connected therewith.' the commission consisted of s. c. wood, then commissioner of agriculture (chairman), alfred h. dymond (secretary), and sixteen other persons representative of the various agricultural interests, including the president and ex-president of the agricultural and arts association, professor william brown of the agricultural college, the master of the dominion grange, the president of the entomological society, and two members of the legislature, thomas ballantyne and john dryden. in there were but two survivors of this important commission, j. b. aylesworth of newburgh, ont., and dr william saunders, who, after over twenty years' service as director of the dominion experimental farms, had resigned office in . all parts of the province were visited and information was gathered from the leading farmers along the lines laid down in the royal commission. in the report was issued in five volumes. it was without doubt the most valuable commission report ever issued in ontario, if not in all canada. part of it was reissued a second and a third time, and for years it formed the ontario farmer's library. even to this day it is a valuable work of reference, containing as it does a vast amount of practical information and forming an invaluable source of agricultural history. the first outcome of this report was the establishment, in , by the government of the ontario bureau of industries, an organization for the collection and publication of statistics in connection with agriculture and allied industries. archibald blue, who now occupies the position of chief officer of the census and statistics branch of the dominion service, was appointed the first secretary of the bureau. agriculture continued to expand, and associations for the protection and encouragement of special lines increased in number and in importance. thus there were no fewer than three vigorous associations interested in dairying: the dairymen's association of eastern ontario, and the dairymen's association of western ontario, which were particularly interested in the cheese industry, and the ontario creameries association, which was interested in butter manufacture. there were poultry associations, a beekeepers' association, and several live stock associations. from time to time the suggestion was made that the work of these associations, and that of the agriculture and arts association and of the bureau of industries, should be co-ordinated, and a strong department of agriculture organized under a minister of agriculture holding a distinct portfolio in the ontario cabinet. provision for this was made by the legislature in , and in that year charles drury was appointed the first minister of agriculture. the bureau of industries was taken as the nucleus of the department, and archibald blue, the secretary, was appointed deputy minister. we have referred to the reaction that took place in ontario agriculture after the close of the american civil war and the abrogation of the reciprocity treaty. the high prices of the crimean war period had long since disappeared, the market to the south had been narrowed, and the western states were pouring into the east the cheap grain products of a rich virgin soil. agricultural depression hung over the province for years. gradually, however, through the early eighties the farmers began to recover their former prosperous condition, sending increasing shipments of barley, sheep, horses, eggs, and other commodities to the cities of the eastern states, so that at the close of the period to which we are referring agricultural conditions were of a favourable and prosperous nature. the modern period, - in a new period in ontario's agricultural history begins. the working forces of agriculture were being linked together in the new department of agriculture. charles drury, the first minister of agriculture, held office until , being succeeded by john dryden, who continued in charge of the department until , when a conservative government took the place of the liberal government that had been in power since . two factors immediately began to play a most important part in the agricultural situation: the opening up of the north-western lands by the completion of the canadian pacific railway in , and the enactment, on october , , of the mckinley high tariff by the united states. the former attracted ontario's surplus population, and made it no longer profitable or desirable to grow wheat in the province for export; the latter closed the doors to the export of barley, live stock, butter, and eggs. the situation was desperate; agriculture was passing through a period of most trying experience. any other industry than that of agriculture would have been bankrupted. the only hope of the ontario farmer now was in the british market. the sales of one ontario product, factory cheese, had been steadily increasing in the great consuming districts of england and scotland, and there was reason to believe that other products might be sold to equal advantage. dairying was the one line of agricultural work that helped to tide over the situation in the early nineties. the methods that had succeeded in building up the cheese industry must be applied to other lines, and all the organized forces must be co-ordinated in carrying this out. this was work for a department of agriculture, and the minister of agriculture, john dryden, who guided and directed this co-operation of forces and made plans for the future growth and expansion of agricultural work, was an imperialist indeed who, in days of depression and difficulty, directed forces and devised plans that not only helped the agricultural classes to recover their prosperity, but also made for the strengthening of imperial ties and the working out of national greatness. the british market presented new conditions, new demands. the north-west could send her raw products in the shape of wheat; ontario must send finished products--beef, bacon, cheese, butter, fruit, eggs, and poultry--these and similar products could be marketed in large quantities if only they could be supplied of right quality. transportation of the right kind was a prime necessity. lumber, wheat, and other rough products could be handled without difficulty, but perishable goods demanded special accommodation. this was a matter belonging to the government of canada, and to it the dominion department of agriculture at once began to give attention. the production of the goods for shipment was a matter for provincial direction. gradually the farmers of the province adapted themselves to the new conditions and after a time recovered their lost ground. general prosperity came in sight again about . for several years after this the output of beef, bacon, and cheese increased steadily, and the gains made in the british market more than offset the loss of the united states market. it was during the five years after that the farmers suffered so severely while adjusting their work to the new conditions. with these expanding lines of british trade products, the values of stock, implements, and buildings made steady advance, and in the total value of all farm property in the province crossed the billion dollar mark. since that year the annual increase in total farm values has been approximately forty million dollars. the following statement of total farm values in ontario, as compiled by the ontario bureau of industries, the statistical branch of the department of agriculture, is very suggestive: _total farm values_ $ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , from the above table it will be seen that the closing of the united states markets in was followed by a depreciation in general farm values which lasted until , when the upward movement that has continued ever since set in. and now let us see how the population was changing, as to its distribution between rural and urban, during these years. first, we shall give the assessed population. rural urban , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , the canadian pacific railway opened up the wheat lands of the west in . at that time the rural population was nearly double the urban; in they were about equal; and six years later the urban population of ontario exceeded the rural. the dominion census figures are as follows: rural urban , , , , , , , --------- --------- increase .... , decrease , .... it will thus be seen that during the past twenty-five years there has been a steady increase in the consumers of food products in ontario and a slight decrease in the producers of the same. the surplus population of the farms has gone to the towns and cities of ontario and to the western provinces. now for a moment let us follow these people to the west. many of them have gone on the land to produce wheat. wheat for the european market has been their principal product, therefore they in turn have become consumers of large quantities of food that they do not themselves produce but must obtain from farmers elsewhere. but not all who have gone west have become farmers. the dominion census of gives the following statement of population for the provinces and districts west of lake superior: rural urban , , , , , --------- ------- increase , , the western provinces are generally considered to be almost purely agricultural, and yet the percentage increase of urban population has been nearly double the percentage increase of rural population. and this rapidly growing urban population also has demanded food products. their own farmers grow wheat and oats and barley. british columbia produces fruit for her own people and some surplus for the prairie provinces. there is some stock-raising, but the rapid extension of wheat areas has interfered with the great stock ranches. from out of the great west, therefore, there has come an increasing demand for many food products. add to this the growing home market in ontario, and, keeping in mind that the west can grow wheat more cheaply than ontario, it will be understood why of recent years the ontario farmer has been compelled to give up the production of wheat for export. his line of successful and profitable work has been in producing to supply the demands of his own growing home market, and the demands of the rapidly increasing people of the west, both rural and urban, and also to share in the insatiable market of great britain. another element of more recent origin has been the small but very profitable market of northern ontario, where lumbering, mining, and railroad construction have been so active in the past five or six years. the result of all this has been a great increase in fruit production. old orchards have been revived and new orchards have been set out. the extension of the canning industry also is most noticeable, and has occasioned the production of fruits and vegetables in enormous quantities. special crops such as tobacco, beans, and sugar beets are being grown in counties where soil and climatic conditions are favourable. the production of poultry and eggs is also receiving more attention each succeeding year. the growth of cities is creating an increasing demand for milk, and the production of factory-made butter and cheese is also increasing, as the following figures for ontario from the dominion census prove: butter cheese , , lb. , , lb. , , " , , " for the past ten or twelve years the farmers of ontario have been slowly adjusting their work to the new situation, and the transition is continuing. while in some sections farms are being enlarged so as to permit the more extensive use of labour-saving machinery and the more economical handling of live stock, in other sections, particularly in counties adjacent to the great lakes, large farms are being cut up into smaller holdings and intensive production of fruits and vegetables is now the practice. this, of course, results in a steady increase in land values and is followed by an increase in rural population. the farmers of ontario are putting forth every effort to meet the demands for food products. the one great difficulty that they have encountered has been the scarcity of farm labour. men have come from europe by the tens of thousands, but they have been drawn largely to the growing towns and cities by the high wages offered in industrial lines; and the west, the 'golden west' as it is sometimes called, has proved an even stronger attraction. it seems rarely to occur to the new arrival that the average farm in ontario could produce more than a quarter section of prairie land. signs, however, point to an increase in rural population, through the spread of intensive agriculture. before referring to the methods of instruction and assistance provided for the developing of this new agriculture in ontario, reference should be made to one thing that is generally overlooked by those who periodically discover this rapid urban increase, and who moralize most gloomily upon a movement that is to be found in nearly every progressive country of the civilized world. in the days of early settlement the farmer and his family supplied nearly all their own wants. the farmer produced all his own food; he killed his own stock, salted his pork, and smoked his hams. his wife was expert in spinning and weaving, and plaited the straw hats for the family. the journeyman shoemaker dropped in and fitted out the family with boots. the great city industries were then unknown. the farmer's wife in those days was perhaps the most expert master of trades ever known. she could spin and weave, make a carpet or a rug, dye yarns and clothes, and make a straw hat or a birch broom. butter, cheese, and maple sugar were products of her skill, as well as bread, soap, canned fruits, and home-made wine. in those days the farm was a miniature factory or combination of factories. many, in fact most, of these industries have gradually moved out of the farm home and have been concentrated in great factories; and the pedlar with his pack has disappeared under a shower of catalogues from the departmental city store. in other words, a large portion of work once done upon the farm and at the country cross-roads has been transferred to the town and city, and this, in some part, explains the modern movement citywards-- there has been a transference from country to city not only of people but also of industries. whether this has been in the interests of the people is another question, but the process is still going on, and what further changes may take place it is difficult to determine and unwise to forecast. and now let us see what agencies and organizations have been used in the development of the special lines of agriculture since the creation of the department in . we have stated that the agriculture and arts association had been for many years the directing force in provincial agricultural organization. it held an annual provincial exhibition; it issued the diplomas to the graduates of the ontario veterinary college; and it controlled the various live stock associations that were interested in the registration of stock. shortly after legislation was enacted transferring the work to the department of agriculture. the place for holding the provincial exhibition was changed from year to year. in a charter was obtained by special act for the toronto industrial exhibition, the basis of which was the toronto electoral agricultural society. out of this came the annual toronto exhibition, now known as the canadian national exhibition, and the governmental exhibition was discontinued. the ontario veterinary college was a privately owned institution, though the diplomas were issued by the agriculture and arts association. the royal commission appointed in to investigate the university of toronto recommended the taking over of this association by the government, and as a result it passed under the control of the department of agriculture in , and was affiliated with the university of toronto. since that time the diploma of veterinary surgeon (v.s.) has been issued by the minister of agriculture, and a supplementary degree of bachelor of veterinary science (b.v.sc.) has been granted by the university. the taking over of this institution by the government, the resuming by the province of its original prerogative, was accompanied by an enlargement of the course, an extension from two years to three years in the period of instruction, and a strengthening of the faculty. the herd-books or pedigree record books were, in most cases, canadian, and it was felt that they should be located at the capital of the dominion. these have therefore been transferred to ottawa and are now conducted under dominion regulations. the ontario bureau of industries was the basis of organization of the department. as other work was added the department grew in size and importance, and the various branches were instituted until there developed a well-organized department having the following subdivisions: the agricultural college, the veterinary college, the agricultural and horticultural societies branch, the live stock branch, the farmers' and women's institutes branch, the dairy branch, the fruit branch, the statistical branch, the immigration and colonization branch. each branch is in charge of a special officer. in addition to the above there is a lot of miscellaneous work, which as it develops will probably be organized into separate branches, such as farm forestry, district representatives, etc. john dryden was in succeeded as minister of agriculture by nelson monteith, who in was succeeded by j. s. duff. under their care the department has grown and expanded, and through their recommendations, year by year, increasing amounts of money have been obtained for the extension of agricultural instruction and the more thorough working out of plans inaugurated in the earlier years of departmental organization. the history of agricultural work in ontario in recent years may be put under two heads--expansion of the various organizations and extension of their operations, and the development of what may be called 'field work.' farmers' institutes and women's institutes have multiplied; agricultural societies now cover the entire province; local horse associations, poultry associations, and beekeepers' associations have been encouraged; winter fairs for live stock have been established at guelph and ottawa; dairy instructors have been increased in number and efficiency; short courses in live stock, seed improvement, fruit work, and dairying have been held; and farm drainage has received practical encouragement. perhaps the most important advance of late years has resulted through the appointment of what are known as district representatives. in co-operation with the department of education, graduates of the agricultural college have been permanently located in the various counties to study the agricultural conditions and to initiate and direct any movement that would assist in developing the agricultural work. these graduates organize short courses at various centres, conduct classes in high schools, assist the farmers in procuring the best seed, advise as to new lines of work, assist in drainage, supervise the care of orchards--in short, they carry the work of the agricultural college and of the various branches of the department right to the farmer, and give that impetus to better farming which can come only from personal contact. the growth of the district representative system has been remarkable: it was begun in seven counties in , by fifteen counties had representatives, and in no fewer than thirty-eight counties were so equipped. at first the farmers distrusted and even somewhat opposed the movement, but the district representative soon proved himself so helpful that the government has found it difficult to comply with the numerous requests for these apostles of scientific farming. approximately $ , is spent each year on the work by the provincial government, in addition to the $ granted annually by the county to each district office. the result of all this is that new and more profitable lines of farming are being undertaken, specializing in production is being encouraged, and ontario agriculture is advancing rapidly along the lines to which the soils, the climate, and the people are adapted. a study of the history of ontario agriculture shows many changes in the past hundred years, but at no time has there been so important and so interesting a development as that which took place in the opening decade of the twentieth century. [signature: c c james] [transcriber's note: the following correction was made: p. : newburg to newburgh spelling in quoted passages has not been changed. page numbering matches the original.] none produced from images produced by core historical literature in agriculture (chla), cornell university) transcriber's note: minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. dialect spellings, contractions and discrepancies have been retained. crops and methods for soil improvement the macmillan company new york · boston · chicago dallas · san francisco macmillan & co., limited london · bombay · calcutta melbourne the macmillan co. of canada, ltd. toronto [illustration: alfalfa and corn in indiana.] crops and methods for soil improvement by alva agee, m.s. head of department of agricultural extension acting dean and director of the school of agriculture and experiment station of the pennsylvania state college _illustrated_ new york the macmillan company _all rights reserved_ copyright, , by the macmillan company. set up and electrotyped. published november, . norwood press j. s. cushing co.--berwick & smith co. norwood, mass., u.s.a. contents chapter i pages introduction - in lieu of preface natural strength of land plant constituents organic matter drainage lime crop-rotation fertilizers tillage control of soil moisture chapter ii the need of lime - the unproductive farm soil acidity the rational use of lime where clover is not wanted determining lime requirement the litmus-paper test a practical test duration of effect chapter iii applying lime - forms of lime definitions the kind to apply the fineness of limestone hydrated lime stone-lime ashes marl magnesian lime amount per acre time of application chapter iv organic matter - office of organic matter the legumes storing nitrogen the right bacteria soil inoculation method of inoculation chapter v the clovers - red clover clover and acid soils methods of seeding fertility value taking the crops off the land physical benefit of the roots used as a green manure when to turn down mammoth clover alsike clover crimson clover chapter vi alfalfa - adaptation to eastern needs fertility and feeding value climate and soil free use of lime inoculation fertilization a clean seed-bed varieties clean seed the seeding seeding in august subsequent treatment chapter vii grass sods - value of sods prejudice against timothy object of sods seeding with small grain seeding in rye good soil conditions chapter viii grass sods (_continued_) - seeding in late summer crops that may precede preparation the weed seed summer grasses sowing the seed deep covering seed-mixtures chapter ix sods for pastures - permanent pastures seed-mixtures blue-grass timothy red-top orchard grass other seeds yields and composition of grasses suggested mixtures for pastures renewal of permanent pastures destroying bushes close grazing chapter x the cowpea - a southern legume characteristics varieties fertilizing value affecting physical condition planting inoculation fertilizers harvesting with livestock the cowpea for hay as a catch crop chapter xi other legumes and cereal catch crops - the soybean fertility value feeding value varieties the planting harvesting the canada pea vetch sweet clover rye as a cover crop when to plow down buckwheat oats chapter xii stable manure - livestock farming the place for cattle sales off the farm the value of manure the content of manure relative values amount of manure analysis of manure chapter xiii care of stable manure - common source of losses caring for liquid manure use of preservatives spreading as made the covered yard harmless fermentation rotted manure composts poultry manure chapter xiv the use of stable manure - controlling factors direct use for corn effect upon moisture manure on grass manure on potatoes when to plow down heavy applications reënforcement with minerals durability of manure chapter xv crop-rotations - the farm scheme value of rotation selection of crops an old succession of crops corn two years the oat crop two crops of wheat the clover and timothy two legumes in the rotation potatoes after corn a three-years' rotation grain and clover potatoes and crimson clover chapter xvi the need of commercial fertilizers - loss of plant-food prejudice against commercial fertilizers are fertilizers stimulants? soil analysis physical analysis the use of nitrogen phosphoric-acid requirements the need of potash fertilizer tests variation in soil chapter xvii commercial sources of plant-food - acquaintance with terms nitrate of soda sulphate of ammonia dried blood tankage fish animal bone raw bone steamed bone rock-phosphate acid phosphate basic slag muriate of potash sulphate of potash kainit wood-ashes other fertilizers salt coal-ashes muck sawdust chapter xviii purchasing plant-food - necessity of purchase fertilizer control brand names statement of analysis valuation of fertilizers a bit of arithmetic high-grade fertilizers chapter xix home-mixing of fertilizers - the practice of home-mixing effectiveness of home-mixing criticisms of home-mixing the filler ingredients in the mixture materials that should not be combined making a good mixture buying unmixed materials chapter xx mixtures for crops - composition of plant not a guide the multiplication of formulas a few combinations are safest amount of application similarity of requirements maintaining fertility fertilizer for grass all the nitrogen from clover method of applying fertilizers an excess of nitrogen chapter xxi tillage - desirable physical condition of the soil the breaking-plow types of plows subsoiling time of plowing method of plowing the disk harrow cultivation of plants controlling root-growth elimination of competition length of cultivation chapter xxii control of soil moisture - value of water in the soil the soil a reservoir the land-roller the plank-drag the mulch mulches of foreign material plowing straw down the summer-fallow the modern fallow chapter xxiii drainage - underdrainage counting the cost where returns are largest material for the drains the outlet locating main and branches the laterals size of tile kind of tile the grade establishing a grade cutting the trenches depth of trenches connections permanency desired illustrations alfalfa and corn in indiana _frontispiece_ facing page a good crop for a poor soil red clover on limed and unlimed land turning down organic matter with a gang plow red clover on the farm of p. s. lewis & son, pt. pleasant, w. va. alfalfa on the ohio state university farm curing alfalfa at the pennsylvania experiment station a heavy grass sod in new york good pasture land in chester county, pa. sheep on a new york farm the cowpea seeded at the last cultivation of corn in the great kanawha valley, w. va. texas calves on an ohio farm in the fertile miami valley, ohio concrete stable floors corn in the ohio valley penn's valley, pennsylvania in the shenandoah valley plat experiments in the lebanon valley, pennsylvania on the productive farm of dr. w. i. chamberlain in northwestern ohio deep tillage making an earth mulch in a new york orchard drain tile the lure of the country crops and methods for soil improvement chapter i introduction in lieu of preface.--this book is not a technical treatise and is designed only to point out the plain, every-day facts in the natural scheme of making and keeping soils productive. it is concerned with the crops, methods, and fertilizers that favor the soil. the viewpoint, all the time, is that of the practical man who wants cash compensation for the intelligent care he gives to his land. the farming that leads into debt, and not in the opposite direction, is poor farming, no matter how well the soil may prosper under such treatment. the maintenance and increase of soil fertility go hand in hand with permanent income for the owner when the science that relates to farming is rightly used. experiment stations and practical farmers have developed a dependable science within recent years, and there is no jarring of observed facts when we get hold of the simple philosophy of it all. natural strength of land.--nearly all profitable farming in this country is based upon the fundamental fact that our lands are storehouses of fertility, and that this reserve of power is essential to a successful agriculture. most soils, no matter how unproductive their condition to-day, have natural strength that we take into account, either consciously or unconsciously. some good farm methods came into use thousands of years ago. experience led to their acceptance. they were adequate only because there was natural strength in the land. nature stored plant-food in more or less inert form and, as availability has been gained, plants have grown. our dependence continues. plant constituents.--there are a few technical terms whose use cannot be evaded in the few chapters on the use of lime and fertilizers. a plant will not come to maturity unless it can obtain for its use combinations of ten chemical elements. agricultural land and the air provide all these elements. if they were in abundance in available forms, there would be no serious soil fertility problem. some of their names may not interest us. six or seven of these elements are in such abundance that we do not consider them. a farmer may say that when a dairy cow has luxuriant blue-grass in june, and an abundance of pure water, her wants are fully met. he omits mention of the air because it is never lacking in the field. in the same way the land-owner may forget the necessity of any kind of plant-food in the soil except nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potash, and lime. probably the lime is very rarely deficient as a food for plants, and will be considered later only as a means of making soils friendly to plant life. nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash are the three substances that may not be in available form in sufficient amount for a growing crop. the lack may be in all three, or in any two, or in any one, of these plant constituents. the natural strength of the soil includes the small percentage of these materials that may be available, and the relatively large stores that nature has placed in the land in inert form as a provision against waste. the thin covering of the earth that is known as the soil is disintegrated rock, combined with organic matter. the original rock "weathered," undergoing physical and chemical change. a long period of time was required for this work, and for the mixing and shifting from place to place that have occurred. organic matter has been a factor in the making of soils, and is in high degree a controlling one in their production of food. organic matter.--nature is resourceful and is constantly alert to repair the wastes and mistakes of man. we may gain fundamental truth about soil fertility through observance of her methods in restoring land to a fertile condition. our best success comes only when we work with her. when a soil has been robbed by man, and has been abandoned on account of inability to produce a profitable crop, the first thing nature does is to produce a growth of weeds, bushes, briers, or aught else of which the soil chances to have the seeds. it is nature's effort to restore some organic matter--some humus-making material--to the nearly helpless land. vegetable matter, rotting on and in the soil, is the life-giving principle. it unlocks a bit of the great store of inert mineral plant-food during its growth and its decay. it is a solvent. the mulch it provides favors the holding of moisture in the soil, and it promotes friendly bacterial action. the productive power of most farming land is proportionate to the amount of organic matter in it. the casual observer, passing by farms, notes the presence or absence of humus-making material by the color and structure of the soil, and safely infers corresponding fertility or poverty. organic matter is the life of the soil. [illustration: a good crop for a poor soil.] a great percentage of the food consumed by europe and the americas continues to come out of nature's own stores in the soil, organic and inorganic, without any assistance by man except in respect to selection of seeds, planting, and tillage. the percentage grows less as the store of original supplies grows less and population increases. our science has broadened as the need has grown greater. we have relatively few acres remaining in the united states that do not require intelligent treatment to insure an adequate supply of available plant-food. the total area that has fallen below the line of profitable productiveness is large. other areas that never were highly productive must supplement the lands originally fertile in order that human needs may be met. when soils have been robbed through the greed of man, nature is handicapped in her effort to restore fertility by the absence of the best seeds. man's intelligent assistance is a necessity. successful farming involves such assistance of nature that the percentage of vegetable matter in the soil shall be made high and kept high. there must be such selection of plants for this purpose that the organic matter will be rich in fertility, and at the same time their growth must fit into a scheme of crop production that can yield profit to the farmer. soils produce plants primarily for their own needs. it is a provision of nature to maintain and increase their productive power. the land's share of its products is that part which is necessary to this purpose. skill in farming provides for this demand of the soil while permitting the removal of a large amount of animal food within the crop-rotation. lack of skill is responsible for the depleted condition of soils on a majority of our farms. the land's share of the vegetation it has produced has been taken from it in large measure, and no other organic matter has been given it in return. its mineral store is left inert, and the moisture supply is left uncontrolled. helplessness results. drainage.--productive soils are in a condition to admit air freely. the presence of air in the soil is as necessary to the changes producing availability of plant-food as it is to the changes essential to life in the human body. a water-logged soil is a worthless one in respect to the production of most valuable plants. the well-being of soil and plants requires that the level of dead water be a considerable distance below the surface. when a soil has recently grown trees, the rotting stump roots leave cavities in the subsoil that permit the removal of some surplus water, and the rotted wood and leaves that give distinctive character to new land are absorbents of such water. as land becomes older, losing natural means of drainage and the excellent physical condition due to vegetable matter in it, the need of drainage grows greater. the tramping of horses in the bottoms of furrows made by breaking-plows often makes matters worse. the prompt removal of excessive moisture by drains, and preferably by underdrains, is essential to profitable farming in the case of most wet lands. the only exception is the land on which may be grown the grasses that thrive fairly well under moist conditions. lime.--the stores of lime in the soil are not stable. the tendency of lime in most of the states between the missouri river and the atlantic seaboard is to get out of the soil. there is no evidence that lime is not in sufficient quantity in most soils to feed crops adequately, but within recent years we have learned that vast areas do not contain enough lime in available form to keep the soil from becoming acid. some soils never were rich in lime, and these are the first to show evidence of acidity. in our limestone areas, however, acid soil conditions are developing year by year, limiting the growth of clover and affecting the yields of other crops. the situation is a serious one just in so far as men refuse to recognize the facts as they exist, and permit the limiting of crop yields, and consequently of incomes, through the presence of harmful acids. the natural corrective is lime, which combines with the acid and leaves the soil friendly to all plant life and especially to the clovers and other legumes that are necessary to profitable farming. nature is largely dependent upon man's assistance in the correction of soil acidity. crop-rotation.--a good crop-rotation favors high productiveness. one kind of crop paves the way nicely for some other one. the land can be occupied by living plants without any long intermissions. organic matter can be supplied without the use of an undue portion of the time. the stores of plant-food throughout all the soil are more surely reached by a variety of plants, differing in their habits of root-growth. the injury from disease and insects is kept down to a minimum. there is better distribution of the labor required by the farm, and neglect of crops at critical times is escaped. the maintenance of fertility is dependent much upon the use of a legume that will furnish nitrogen from the air. a permanently successful agriculture in our country must be based upon the use of legumes, and crop-rotations would be demanded for this reason alone if none other existed. fertilizers.--when a crop is fed to livestock, and all the manure is returned to the land that produced the crop without loss by leaching or fermentation, there is a return to the land of four fifths of the fertility, and a good form of organic matter is supplied. a portion of the crops cannot be fed upon the farm, or otherwise the human race would have only animal products for food. the welfare of the people demands that a vast amount of the soil's crops be sold from the farms producing them. this brings about a dependence upon the natural stores of plant-food in the soil, which become available slowly, and upon commercial fertilizers. there has been a disposition on the part of many farmers to regard fertilizers only as stimulants, due to the irrational use of certain materials, but a good commercial fertilizer is a carrier of some or all of the necessary elements that we find in stable manures. they may carry nitrogen, phosphoric acid, or potash,--any one or two or the three,--and the three are the constituents that usually are lacking in available forms in our soils. examples of the best modern skill in farming may be found in the rational selection and use of commercial fertilizers. tillage.--man's ability to assist nature in the work of production finds a notable illustration in the matter of tillage. its purpose is to provide right physical condition of the soil for the particular class of plants that should be produced, while destroying the competition of other plants that are for the time only weeds. most soils become too compact when left unstirred. the air cannot enter freely, plant-roots cannot extend in every direction for food, the water from rains cannot enter easily, there is escape of the moisture in the ground, and weathering of the soil proceeds too slowly. the methods used in plowing, harrowing, and later cultivations fix the productive power of a soil for the season in large measure. control of soil moisture.--the water in the soil is a consideration that has priority over plant-food in the case of agricultural land. the natural strength of the soil is sufficient to give some return to the farmer in crops if the moisture content is right throughout the season. the plant cannot feed unless water is present; the process of growth ceases in the absence of moisture. one purpose of plowing is to separate the particles of soil to a good depth so that water-holding capacity may be increased. when the soil is compact, it will absorb and hold only a very limited amount of moisture. we harrow deeply to complete the work of the plow, and the roller is used to destroy all cavities of undue size that would admit air too freely and thus rob the land of its water. later cultivations may be given to continue the effect of the plow in preventing the soil from becoming too compact, but usually should be required only to make a loose mulch that will hold moisture in the ground, and to destroy the weeds that would compete with the planted crop for water, food, and sunshine. chapter ii the need of lime the unproductive farm.--when a soil expert visits an unproductive farm to determine its needs, he gives his chief attention to four possible factors in his problem: lack of drainage, of lime, of organic matter, and of available plant-food. his first concern regards drainage. if the water from rains is held in the surface by an impervious stratum beneath, it is idle to spend money in other amendments until the difficulty respecting drainage has been overcome. a water-logged soil is helpless. it cannot provide available plant-food, air, and warmth to plants. under-drainage is urgently demanded when the level of dead water in the soil is near the surface. the area needing drainage is larger than most land-owners believe, and it increases as soils become older. on the other hand, the requirements of lime, organic matter, and available plant-food are so nearly universal, in the case of unproductive land in the eastern half of the united states, that they are here given prior consideration, and drainage is discussed in another place when methods of controlling soil moisture are described. the production of organic matter is so important to depleted soils, and is so dependent upon the absence of soil acidity, that the right use of lime on land claims our first interest. soil acidity.--lime performs various offices in the soil, but farmers should be concerned chiefly about only one, and that is the destruction of acids and poisons that make the soil unfriendly to most forms of plant life, including the clovers, alfalfa, and other legumes. lime was put into all soils by nature. large areas were originally very rich in lime, while other areas of the eastern half of the united states never were well supplied. within the last ten years it has been definitely determined that a large part of this vast territory has an actual lime deficiency, as measured by its inability to remain alkaline or "sweet." many of the noted limestone valleys show marked soil acidity. there has been exhaustion of the lime that was in a state available for union with the acids that constantly form in various ways. the area of soil thus deficient grows greater year by year, and it can be only a matter of time when nearly all of the eastern half of this country will have production limited by this deficiency unless applications of lime in some form are made. when owners of soil that remains rich in lime do not accept this statement, no harm results, as their land does not need lime. on the other hand are tens of thousands of land-owners who do not recognize the need of lime that now exists in their soils, and suffer a loss of income which they would attribute to other causes. irrational use of lime.--some refusal to accept the facts respecting soil acidity and its means of correction is due to a prejudice that was created by an unwise use of lime in the past. owners of stiff limestone soils learned in an early day that a heavy application of caustic lime would increase crop production. it caused such flocculation of the fine particles in their stiff soils that physical condition was improved, and it made the organic matter in the soil quickly available as plant-food. the immediate result was greater crop-producing power in the soil, and dependence upon lime as a fertilizer resulted. the vegetable matter was used up, some of the more available mineral plant-food was changed into soluble forms, and in the course of years partial soil exhaustion resulted. the heavy applications of lime, unattended by additions of organic matter in the form of clover sods and stable manure, produced a natural result, but one that was not anticipated by the farmers. the prejudice against the use of lime on land was based on the effects of this irrational practice. there are land-owners who are not concerned with present-day knowledge regarding soil acidity because they cannot believe that it has any bearing upon the state of their soils. they know that clover sods were easily produced on their land within their remembrance, and that their soils are of limestone origin. as the clovers demand lime, these two facts appear to them final. the failures of the clovers in the last ten or twenty years they incline to attribute to adverse seasons, poor seed, or the prevalence of weed pests. they do not realize that much land passes out of the alkaline class into the acid one every year. the loss of lime is continuous. exhaustion of the supply capable of combining with the harmful acids finally results, and with the accumulation of acid comes partial clover failure, a deficiency in rich organic matter, a limiting of all crop yields, and an inability to remain in a state of profitable production. lime deficiency and its resulting ills would not exist as generally as is now the case if the application of lime to land were not expensive and disagreeable. these are deterrent features of wide influence. there continues hope that the clover will grow successfully, as occasionally occurs in a favorable season, despite the presence of some acid. the limitation of yields of other staple crops is not attributed to the lack of lime, and the proper soil amendment is not given to the land. where clover is not wanted.--the ability to grow heavy red clover is a practical assurance that the soil's content of lime is sufficiently high. when clover fails on account of a lime deficiency, the work of applying lime may not be escaped by a shift in the farm scheme that permits the elimination of clover. the clover failure is an index of a condition that limits the yields of all staple crops. the lack of lime checks the activity of bacteria whose office it is to prepare plant-food for use. the stable manure or sods decompose less readily and give smaller results. soil poisons accumulate. mineral plant-food in the soils becomes available more slowly. physical condition grows worse. the limitations of the value of manure and commercial fertilizers applied to land that has a lime deficiency have illustration in an experiment reported by the cornell station: the soil was once a fertile loam that had become very poor. a part was given an application of lime, and similar land at its side was left unlimed. the land without lime and fertilizer of any kind made a yield of pounds of clover hay per acre. a complete fertilizer on the unlimed land made the yield pounds, and tons of manure on the unlimed land made the yield pounds. where lime had been applied, the unfertilized land yielded pounds per acre, the fertilized, pounds, and the manured, pounds. the manure and fertilizer were nearly inactive in the acid soil. the lime enabled the plants to obtain benefit from the plant-food. determining lime requirement.--it is wasteful to apply lime on land that does not need it. as has been said, the man who can grow heavy clover sods has assurance that the lime content of his soil is satisfactory. this is a test that has as much practical value as the analysis of a skillful chemist. the owner of such land may dismiss the matter of liming from his attention so far as acidity is concerned, though it is a reasonable expectation that a deficiency will appear at some time in the future. experience is the basis of such a forecast. just as coal was stored for the benefit of human beings, so was lime placed in store as a supply for soils when their unstable content would be gone. the only ones that need be concerned with the question of lime for soils are those who cannot secure good growths of the clovers and other legumes. putting aside past experience, they should learn whether their soils are now acid. practical farmers may judge by the character of the vegetation and not fail to be right nine times out of ten. where land has drainage, and a fairly good amount of available fertility, as evidenced by growths of grass, a failure of red clover leads immediately to a strong suspicion that lime is lacking. if alsike clover grows more readily than the red clover, the probability of acidity grows stronger because the alsike can thrive under more acid soil conditions than can the red. acid soils favor red-top grass rather than timothy. sorrel is a weed that thrives in both alkaline and acid soils, and its presence would not be an index if it could stand competition with clover in an alkaline soil. the clover can crowd it out if the ground is not too badly infested with seed, and even then the sorrel must finally give way. where sorrel and plantain cover the ground that has been seeded to clover and grass, the evidence is strong that the soil conditions are unfriendly to the better plants on account of a lime deficiency. the experienced farmer who notes the inclination of his soil to favor alsike clover, red-top, sorrel, and plantain should infer that lime is lacking. if doubt continues, he should make a test. the litmus-paper test.--a test of fair reliability may be made with litmus paper. a package of blue litmus paper can be bought for a few cents at any drug store. this paper will turn pink when brought into contact with an acid, and will return to a blue if placed in lime-water. a drop of vinegar on a sheet of the paper will bring an immediate change to pink. if the pink sheet be placed in lime-water, the effect of the lime in correcting the acidity will be evidenced by the return in color to blue. to test the soil, a sample of it may be put into a basin and moistened with rain-water. several sheets of the blue litmus paper should be buried in the mud, care being used that the hands are clean and dry. when one sheet is removed within a few seconds and rinsed with rain-water, if any pink shows, there is free acid present. another sheet should be taken out in five minutes. the rapidity with which the color changes, and the intensity of the color, are indicative of the degree of acidity, and aid the judgment in determining how much lime should be used. if a sheet of the paper retains its blue color in the soil for twenty minutes, there probably is no lime deficiency. the test should be made with samples of soil from various parts of the field, and they should be taken beneath the surface. one just criticism of this test is that while no acidity may be shown, the lime content may be too low for safety. [illustration: red clover on limed and unlimed land.] a practical test.--the importance of alkalinity in soils is so great, and the prevalence of acidity has such wide-spread influence to-day, limiting the value of the clovers on a majority of our farms, that a simple and more convincing test is suggested here. every owner of land that is not satisfactorily productive may learn the state of his soil respecting lime requirement at small expense. when a field is being prepared for seeding to the grain crop with which clover will be sown, a plat containing four square rods should be measured off, and preferably this should be away from the border to insure even soil conditions. a bushel of lump-lime, weighing eighty pounds, should be slaked and evenly distributed over the surface of the plat of ground. it can be broadcasted by hand if a spreader is not available, and mixed with the surface soil while in a powdered state. the plat of ground should be left as firm as the remainder of the field, so that all conditions may be even for the test. the appearance of the clover the following year will determine whether lime was needed or not. there is no reason why any one should remain in doubt regarding the lime requirement of his fields. if income is limited by such a cause, the fact should be known as soon as possible. duration of effect.--soil acidity is not permanently corrected by a lime application. the original supply failed to prove lasting, and the relatively small amount given the land in an application will become exhausted. the duration depends upon the degree of acidity, the nature of the soil and its crops, and the size of the application. experiments at the pennsylvania experiment station have shown that an application only in sufficient amount to correct the existing acidity at the time of application will not maintain an alkaline condition in the soil, even for a few months. there must be some excess at hand to unite with acids as formed later in the crop-rotation, or limings must be given at short intervals of time to maintain alkaline conditions. experience causes us to assume that enough lime should be applied at one time to meet all requirements for a single crop-rotation of four, five, or six years, and, wherever lime is cheap, the unpleasant character of the labor inclines one to make the application in sufficient amount to last through two such rotations. it is a reasonable assumption, however, that more waste results from the heavier applications at long intervals than from light applications at short intervals. in any event need will return, and soil acidity will again limit income if applications do not continue to be made. chapter iii applying lime forms of lime.--there is unnecessary confusion in the mind of the public regarding the forms of lime that should be used. if amounts greatly in excess of needs were being applied, the form would be a matter of concern. there would arise the question of soil injury that might result from the use of the lime in caustic form. again, if pulverized limestone were used, a very heavy application would bring up the question of coarseness in order that waste by leaching might be escaped. most farms needing lime do not have cheap supplies, and the consideration is to secure soil alkalinity at a cost that will not be excessive. freight rates and the cost of hauling to the fields, added to first cost of the lime, limit applications on most farms to the necessities of a single crop-rotation which includes clover, or, at the most, to two crop-rotations. under these circumstances it is best to let cost of correction of soil acidity determine the form of lime to be used. the material that will render the soil friendly to clover for the least money is the right one to select. we need to be concerned only with the relative efficiencies of the various forms of lime, as measured in terms of money. that which will most cheaply restore heavy clover growths to the land is the form of lime to be desired. the contentions of salesmen may well be disregarded as they produce confusion and delay a work that is important to the farmer. definitions.--the use of the various forms of lime will become general, and the terms employed to designate them should be understood. they vary in their content of acid-correcting material, and their correct names should be used with accuracy. _stone-lime_, often called lump-lime or unslaked lime, or calcium oxide or cao, is a form widely known, and may be taken as a standard. it is the ordinary lime of commerce, and is obtained by the burning of limestone. one hundred pounds of pure limestone will produce pounds of stone-lime (cao). _pulverized lime_, often called ground lime, is stone-lime after being pulverized to permit even distribution. when it is fully exposed to the air or moisture, it slakes and doubles in volume. _hydrated lime_, often called slaked lime, is a combination of stone-lime and water. the water causes an increase in weight of per cent, pounds of stone-lime becoming pounds of the hydrate. _pulverized limestone_, often called carbonate of lime, is the unburned limestone made fine so that good distribution may be possible. _air-slaked lime_, often called carbonate of lime, is stone-lime or hydrated lime combined with carbonic acid from the air, and thereby increased in weight. fifty-six pounds of stone-lime, or pounds of hydrated lime, become pounds of air-slaked lime. _agricultural lime_, or land-lime, may embrace anything that the manufacturer of lime chooses to market. it may be reasonably pure unslaked lime, or it may have less value than a finely pulverized pure limestone. there is a custom of grinding the core, or partially burned limestone of the kiln, together with impurities removed from builders' lime, and with this may be put some air-slaked lime. some manufacturers market under this name a lime of excellent value. there is no standard, and one should not pay more than a finely pulverized pure limestone would cost unless he knows that the content of fresh burned lime is high. the element with which we are concerned in any of these forms of lime is calcium. it is the base whose union with the acids destroys the latter. it should be obvious that the addition of water to stone-lime, which adds weight and causes pounds of the stone-lime to become pounds of hydrated lime, adds no calcium. likewise the change to the air-slaked condition adds no calcium, but again adds weight. the kind to apply.--if a soil contains free acid, the amount of calcium needed is definite. the form of lime that can supply the need in that particular field at least expenditure of money and trouble is the one to be selected. a ton of stone-lime, or pulverized lime, can correct as much acid as pounds of hydrated lime or pounds of pulverized limestone, if all the original material was pure. in other words, if the value of a given weight of pulverized limestone is placed at , the value of the same weight of hydrated lime would be and the value of stone-lime would be , when each was finely divided and distributed throughout the surface soil. the fineness of limestone.--experiments at the pennsylvania experiment station have shown that limestone has practically immediate availability in an acid soil if all of it has ability to pass through a screen having meshes to the linear inch. much of the limestone meeting this test doubtless is fine enough to pass through an -mesh screen. the requirement that a -mesh screen be used in testing is a satisfactory one to the buyer that wants immediate results in the field. a coarser product must be used in larger amount per acre, as only the fine particles are available at once, and the object of the application is to correct all the acidity. where a coarse product, containing some fine particles, can be used at such a low price per ton that the application may consist of a large number of tons per acre, the practice may be commended, but the essential thing is immediate results, and only finely divided limestone can give them. any long railway or wagon haul makes a heavy application of coarsely pulverized limestone inexpedient. hydrated lime.--many salesmen are too enthusiastic in their claims for hydrated lime. it has advantages over pulverized limestone, stone-lime, and pulverized lime, and there are disadvantages. the buyer of pulverized limestone pays for the haul on pounds of material to get the pounds of lime carried, while pounds of the hydrate furnish the same amount of actual lime, if all of it is a hydrate. while the hydrate contains less strength than the stone-lime, it is in good physical condition for distribution, and the stone-lime must be slaked. the buyer will bear in mind, moreover, that much of the stone-lime which is burned on farms comes from limestone that is not very pure, and all impurity is waste. most manufacturers of the hydrate locate their costly plants where the limestone is relatively pure. prudent business reasons dictate such a course. a careful manufacturer of hydrated lime takes out imperfectly burned and other faulty material with screens. these advantages have some weight, but the fact remains that a ton of pure stone-lime has considerably more acid-correcting power than a ton of the hydrate. stone-lime.--stone or lump-lime is composed of the per cent of a pure limestone that gives value to the limestone. forty-four pounds of waste material were driven off in the burning. where railway or wagon hauls are costly, the purchase of stone-lime is indicated. there is advantage in getting this lime in pulverized form, provided it can be distributed in the soil before moisture from the air induces slaking and consequent bursting of the packages. the necessity of rapid handling has limited the popularity of pulverized unslaked lime, but no other form is equal to it when it is wholly unslaked. some manufacturers grind the partially burned limestone often found in kilns, and furnish goods little better than pulverized limestone. the slaking of stone-lime should be done in a large pile, and the distribution may be made with lime-spreaders. when the application is fairly heavy, a manure-spreader does satisfactory work. a good lime-spreader is to be desired, but care must be used to remove any stones or similar impurities in the slaked lime when filling it. such spreaders are on the market. the practice of slaking lime in small piles in the field is wasteful. it is difficult to reduce all the lime to a fine powder and to make even distribution over the surface. any excess of water from rains puddles some of the lime, destroying practically all its immediate effectiveness. distribution with shovels is necessarily imperfect. the labor of slaking stone-lime and the difficulty in distribution are two factors to be considered when selecting the form of lime to be used. they may counter-balance in some instances the higher percentage of actual lime when comparison is made with the hydrate. that is a question to be decided by the buyer. he must be willing to use methods that will secure even distribution. the prevailing practice, however, of marketing the hydrate at a much higher price per ton than the stone-lime should prevent sales to farmers. the price paid for ease of handling is too great when purchase of the hydrate is made under such circumstances. it is better to do the slaking at home, furnishing the added weight of per cent in water on the farm. ashes.--hard-wood ashes have ceased to have much importance as a source of lime for land, but their use is held in high esteem even by those who regard fertilizers as mere stimulants and doubt the efficiency of lime. hard-wood ashes, unleached, clean and dry, are valuable for acid soils. their content of potash, which is variable and averages about per cent, formerly was given all the credit for the soil improvement and increased clover growth that resulted from their use. tests with other carriers of potash have shown that the potash probably produced only a small part of the effect noted, and the benefit is attributable to the lime in the ashes which exists in an effective form. the content of lime is variable, and largely so on account of the percentage of moisture and dirt that may be found in most ashes, and when no analysis has been made, the estimate of value should not be based on more than to per cent of carbonate of lime. the price of ashes runs so high, as a result of prejudice in favor of this well-known kind of soil amendment, that it rarely is advisable to buy them. pure lime is a cheaper means of correcting the soil acidity, and the sulphate or the muriate of potash is by far the cheaper source of potash. marl.--marls vary widely in composition. when quite pure, they contain or more per cent of carbonate of lime, and have a value per ton about equal to finely pulverized limestone, and near half the value per ton of stone-lime. there are marls that are carriers of potash and phosphoric acid, and are to be valued accordingly as fertilizers. magnesian lime.--some limestone is a nearly pure calcium compound, and yields a pure lime, while much limestone contains a high percentage of magnesia. the latter is preferred by manufacturers who furnish pulverized lime because it does not slake readily, and is less liable to burst the packages before required for use. a pound of magnesian lime will correct a little more acid than a pound of pure lime, and no preference may be shown the latter on that score. there are soils in which the proportion of magnesia to pure lime is too great for best results with some plants, as plant biologists assure us, but there is too little definite information respecting these soils to justify one in paying more for a high calcium lime than for a magnesian lime when it is to be used on acid land. the day may come when more will be known, but the rational selection to-day is the material that will do the required work in the soil for the least money. amount per acre.--the amount of lime that should be applied to an acre of land depends upon the degree of its acidity, the nature of the soil, the cheapness of the lime, and the character of the crops to be grown. the actual requirement for the moment could be determined by a chemical test, but the application should carry to the soil an amount in excess of immediate requirement. when clover has ceased to grow within recent years, it is a fair inference that the deficiency, if it exists, has not become great. when sorrel and plantain have gained a strong foothold, indicating that good grasses are unable to replace clover, the degree of acidity probably is higher. the results of tests at experiment stations and on farms show that pounds of pulverized lime, or one ton of pulverized limestone, evenly distributed throughout the surface soil, can restore clover to the crop-rotation on much land. this is an application so light that a state of alkalinity cannot be long retained. it is better to apply the equivalent of a ton of stone-lime in the case of all heavy soils that have shown any acidity. where lime is low in price, pounds of stone-lime, or its equivalent in any other form of lime, is advised, the belief being that such an application will maintain good soil conditions through two crop-rotations, or eight to ten years. this amount can be applied quite successfully with a manure-spreader, and meets the convenience of the man who burns his own lime and does not want to screen it for use in a lime-spreader. the man who must buy his lime, and pay a freight charge upon it, will find it better to use only a ton per acre. this advice applies to heavy soils. a light, sandy soil should be given only a small application, as otherwise physical condition may be injured. the lime, used in excess, has an undue binding effect upon the sand. an application of pounds of stone-lime per acre can be made with safety. time of application.--the use of lime on land should be associated in the land-owner's thoughts with the growing of clover. it does help soil conditions so that more grain can be produced, but if it is permitted to displace the use of fertilizers, and does not lead to the growth of organic matter, harm will result in the end. lime should be applied to secure clover, and therefore it should be mixed with the soil before the clover is sown. the application may be made when fitting the seed-bed for the grain with which clover usually is seeded, or may be given a year or two years previous to that time. the important point is to have the soil friendly to plant life when a sod is to be made. lime should be put on ground always after the plowing, and it should be well mixed with the surface soil. even distribution is just as important in its case as in that of fertilizers. a good practice is to break a sod for corn, harrowing and rolling once, and then to put on the lime. a cut-away or disk harrow should be used to mix the lime with the soil before any moisture causes it to cake. when large crumbs form, immediate efficiency is lost. if the application is light, and may barely be equal to immediate demand, it is better practice to put on the lime when preparing the seed-bed for the wheat or other small grain in which the clover will be sown. it should never be mixed with the fertilizer nor applied with the seed. the lime should go into the soil a few days, or more, prior to the seeding. the soil having been put into a condition favorable to plant life, the seeding and the use of commercial fertilizers should proceed as usual. lime should never be mixed with manure in the open air, but it is good practice to plow manure down, and then to use lime as indicated above, if needed. if manure and lime must be used after the land has been plowed, the lime should be disked well into the soil before the manure is applied, and it is advisable that the interval between the two applications be made as long as possible. chapter iv organic matter office of organic matter.--the restoration of an impoverished soil to a productive state usually is a simple matter so far as method is concerned. it may be a difficult problem for the individual owner on account of expense or time involved, but he has only a few factors in his problem. assuming that there is good drainage, and that the lime requirement has been met, the most important consideration is organic matter. a profitable agriculture is dependent upon a high percentage of humus in the soil. average yields of crops are low in this country chiefly because the humus-content has been greatly reduced by bad farming methods. [illustration: turning down organic matter with a gang plow.] nature uses organic matter in the following ways: . to give good physical condition to the soil. the practical farmer appreciates the importance of this quality in a soil. clayey soils are composed of fine particles that adhere to each other. they are compact, excluding air and failing to absorb the water that should be held in them. the excess of water finally is lost by evaporation, and the sticky mass becomes dry and hard. the incorporation of organic matter with clay or silt changes the character of such land, breaking up the mass, and giving it the porous condition so essential to productiveness. improved physical condition is likewise given to a sandy soil, the humus binding the particles together. . to make the soil retentive of moisture. yields of crops are limited more by lack of a constant and adequate supply of moisture throughout the growing season than by any other one factor. decayed organic matter has great capacity for holding moisture, and in some measure should supply the water needed during periods of light rainfall. . to serve, directly and indirectly, as a solvent of the inert plant-food in the soil that is known as the "natural strength" of the land. its acids do this work directly, and by its presence it makes possible the work of the friendly bacteria that are man's chief allies in maintaining soil fertility. . to furnish plant-food directly to growing plants. even when it has been produced from the soil supplies alone, there is great gain because the growing crop must have immediately available supplies. many of the plants used in providing humus for the soil are better foragers for fertility than other plants that follow, sending their roots deeper into the subsoil or using more inert forms of fertility. the legumes.--any plant that grows and rots in the soil adds to the productive power of the land if lime is present, but plants differ in value as makers of humus. there are only ten essential constituents of plant-food, and the soil contains only four that concern us because the others are always present in abundance. if lime has been applied to give to the soil a condition friendly to plant life, we are concerned with three constituents only, viz. nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash. the last two are minerals and cannot come from the air. they must be drawn from original stores in the soil or be obtained from outside sources in the form of fertilizers. the nitrogen is in the air in abundance, but plants cannot draw directly from this store in any appreciable amount. the soil supply is usually light because nitrogen is unstable in character and has escaped from all agricultural land in vast amounts during past ages. profitable farming is based upon the great fact that we have one class of plants which can use bacteria to work over the nitrogen of the air into a form available for their use, and the store of nitrogen thus gained can be added to the soil's supply for future crops. these plants, known as legumes, embrace the clovers, alfalfa, the vetches, peas, beans, and many others of less value. they provide not only the organic matter so much needed by all thin soils, but at the same time they are the means of adding to the soil large amounts of the one element of plant-food that is most costly, most unstable, and most deficient in poor soils. their ability to secure nitrogen for their own growth in poor land also is a prime consideration in their selection for soil improvement, assuring a supply of organic matter where otherwise partial failure would occur. storing nitrogen.--man needs protection from his own greed, and nature's checks are his salvation. an illustration is afforded in the case of legumes grown for the maintenance of soil fertility. the clovers and some other legumes are seeded primarily for the benefit of the soil. the need of organic matter is recognized, and a cheap supply of nitrogen is wanted for other crops in the rotation. the purpose of the seeding is praiseworthy, but if all of the product were available for use off the land, observation teaches that the soil producing the crop probably would fare badly. the crops grown prior to the season devoted to legumes proclaim their need of better soil conditions, more organic matter, and more nitrogen, but the legumes, appropriating nitrogen for themselves, give to the land a more prosperous appearance, and the disposition to harvest everything that is in sight prevails. there is the excusing intention to return to the soil the residue from feeding, which should be nearly as valuable as the original material, while the fact usually is that faulty handling of the manure results in heavy loss, and the distribution of the remainder is imperfect. there is no happier provision of nature for the guarding of the soil's interests than the unavailability for man's direct use of a considerable part of most plants, thus saving to the land a portion of its share of its products. the humus obtained from plant-roots, stubble, and fallen leaves forms a large percentage of all the humus obtained by land whose fertility is not well guarded by owners. this proportion is large in some legumes, amounting to or per cent in the case of red and mammoth clover. the right bacteria.--the word "bacteria" has had a grudging admission to the vocabulary of practical farmers, and the reason is easily stated. the knowledge of bacteria and their work is recent and limited. they are many in kind, and scientists are only in the midst of their discoveries. the practical farmer does well to let bacteriologists monopolize interest in the whole subject except in so far as he can provide some conditions that have been demonstrated to be profitable. the work of bacteria must come more and more into consideration by the farmer because nature uses them to produce a vast amount of the change that is going on around us. in consideration of the value of legumes we must take into account the bacteria which they have associated with them, and through which they obtain the atmospheric nitrogen. this would be a negligible matter, it may be, if all legumes made use of the same kind of bacteria. it is true that the bacteria must have favorable soil conditions, but they are the same favorable conditions that our plants require. a fact of importance to the farmer is that the bacteria which thrive on the roots of some legumes will not serve other legumes. this is a reason for many failures of alfalfa, crimson clover, the soybean, the cowpea, hairy vetch, and other legumes new to the region. soil inoculation.--the belief that the right kind of bacteria may be absent from the soil when a new legume is seeded, and that they should be supplied directly to the soil, has failed in ready acceptance because examples of success without such inoculation are not uncommon. even if the explanation of such success is not easy, the fact remains that legumes new to a region usually fail to find and develop a supply of bacteria adequate for a full yield, and some of these legumes, of which alfalfa is an example, make a nearly total failure when seeded for the first time without soil inoculation. experiment stations and thousands of practical farmers have learned by field tests that the difference between success and failure under otherwise similar conditions often has been due to the introduction of the right bacteria into the soil before the seeding was made. explanations offered for any phenomenon may later become embarrassing in the light of new knowledge. we do not really need to know why an occasional soil is supplied with the bacteria of a legume new to it. we have learned that the bacteria of sweet clover serve alfalfa, and this accounts for the inoculation of some regions in the east. we believe that some bacteria are carried in the dust on the seed, and produce partial inoculation. other causes are more obscure. the cowpea trails on the ground, and carries its bacteria more successfully than the soybean. most legumes require a soil artificially inoculated when brought into a new region, failing otherwise in some degree to make full growth. method of inoculation.--the bacteria can be transferred to a new field by spreading soil taken from a field that has been growing the legume successfully. the surface soil is removed to a depth of three inches, and the next layer of soil is taken, as it contains the highest percentage of bacteria. they develop in the nodules found on the feeding roots of the plants. the soil is pulverized and applied at the rate of pounds per acre broadcast. if the inoculated soil is near at hand and inexpensive, pounds should be used in order that the chance of quick inoculation may be increased. the soil should be spread when the sun's rays are not hot, and covered at once with a harrow, as drying injures vitality. the soil may be broadcasted by hand or applied with a fertilizer distributer. the work may be done at any time while preparing the seed-bed. the bacteria will quickly begin to develop on the roots of the young plants, and nodules may be seen in some instances before the plants are four weeks old. pure cultures may be used for inoculation. some commercial concerns made failures and brought the use of pure cultures into disrepute a few years ago, but methods now are more nearly perfect, and it is possible to buy the cultures of all the legumes and to use them with success. prices continue too high to make the pure cultures attractive to those who can obtain inoculated soil with ease. if land has been producing vigorous plants, and if it contains no weeds or disease new to the land to be seeded, its soil offers the most desirable means of transferring the bacteria. the claim is made by some producers of pure cultures that their bacteria are selected for virility, and should be used to displace those found in the farmer's fields. the chances are that, if soil conditions are good, the bacteria present in the soil are virile, and if the conditions are bad, the pure cultures will not thrive. all eastern land is supplied with red clover bacteria, just as some western land possesses alfalfa bacteria, and partial clover failure has causes wholly apart from the character of its bacteria. we do not have definite knowledge concerning duration of inoculation nor the manner in which it is maintained when legumes are not growing, but we do know that when a legume has once made vigorous growth in a field, the soil will remain inoculated for a long term of years. chapter v the clovers red clover.--wherever red clover thrives there is no more valuable plant than this legume for making and keeping soils productive under ordinary crop-rotations. the tyro in farming finds his neighbors conservative in thought and method, and may rightly see room for improvement. he naturally turns to new crops that are receiving much exploitation, but should bear in mind that the world nowhere has found a superior to red clover as a combined fertilizing and forage crop for use in short rotations. farmers turn aside from it because it turns aside from them. there has been increasing clover failure in our older states for a long term of years. it has become the rule to seed to timothy with the clover in the short crop-rotations as well as in the longer ones, and chiefly for the reason that clover seeding has become no longer dependable. in many regions the proportion of timothy seed used per acre has been made large because the clover would not surely grow. in the winter-wheat belt, where the custom has been to make such seedings with wheat, timothy being sown in the fall and clover the next spring, this increase in the timothy has made matters worse for the clover, but it has helped to insure a sod and a hay crop. "clover sickness," supposedly resulting from close clover rotations, and the prevalence of plantain and other weeds, have been assigned as a partial cause of clover failure. it is only within recent years that the true cause of much failure has been recognized. clover and acid soils.--there are limited areas in which some clover disease has flourished, and in some years insect attacks are serious. barring these factors which have relatively small importance when the entire clover area is taken into account, the causes of clover failure are under the farmer's control. the need of drainage increases, and the deficiency in organic matter becomes more marked. the sale of hay and straw, and especially the loss of liquid manures in stables, have robbed many farms. these are adverse influences upon clover seedings, but the most important handicap to clover is soil acidity. there is sad waste when high-priced clover seed is put into land so sour that clover bacteria cannot thrive, and there is ten-fold more waste in letting land fail to obtain the organic matter and nitrogen clover should supply. when land-owners refuse to let their soils remain deficient in lime, clover will come into a prominence in our agriculture that it never previously has known. methods of seeding.--it is a common practice to sow clover in the spring, either with spring grain or with wheat or rye previously seeded in the fall. this method has much to commend it. the cost of making the seed-bed is transferred to the grain crop, and there is little outlay other than the cost of seed. wheat and rye offer better chances to the young clover plants than do the oat crop which shades the soil densely and ripens later in the summer. the amount of seed that should be used depends upon the soil, the length of time the sod will stand, and the purpose in growing the clover. when soil fertility is the one consideration, to pounds of bright, plump medium red clover seed per acre should be sown. a fuller discussion of the principles involved in making a sod and of seed mixtures is given in chapters vii and viii. fertility value.--attempts have been made to express the actual value of a good clover crop to the soil in terms of money. the number of pounds of matter in the roots and stubble has been determined, and analyses show the percentage of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash contained. the two crops harvested in the second year of its growth likewise have their content of plant-food determined. if the total amounts of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash have their values fixed by multiplying the number of pounds of each ingredient of plant-food by their respective market values, as is the practice in the case of commercial fertilizers, a total valuation may be placed upon the clover, roots and top, as a fertilizer. such valuation is so misleading that it affords no true guidance to the farmer. in the first place, the phosphoric acid and potash were taken out of the soil, and while some part of these materials may have been without immediate value to another crop until used by the clover, no one knows how much value was given to them by the action of the clover. again, no one knows what percentage of the nitrogen in the clover came from the air, and how much was drawn from the soil's stores. the proportion varies with the fertility of the land, the percentage of nitrogen taken from the air being greater in the case of badly depleted soils. a big factor of error is found in the valuations of the ingredients found in the crop. all plant-food is worth to the farmer only what he can get out of it. he may be able to use pounds of nitrogen per acre in the form of nitrate of soda, at cents a pound, when growing a certain crop, but could not afford to buy, at market price of organic nitrogen, all the nitrogen found in the clover crop, and therefore it does not have that value to him. on the other hand, these estimates do not embrace the great benefit to the physical condition of the soil that results from the incorporation of a large amount of vegetable matter. discussion has been given to this phase of the question in the interest of accuracy. values are only relative. the practical farmer can determine the estimate he should put upon clover only by noting its effect upon yields in the crop-rotation upon his own farm. it is our best means of getting nitrogen from the air, it provides a large amount of organic matter, it feeds in subsoil as well as in top soil, bringing up fertility and filling all the soil with roots that affect physical condition favorably, and it provides a feed for livestock that gives a rich manure. [illustration: red clover on the farm of p. s. lewis and sons, point pleasant, w. va.] taking the crops off the land.--the feeding value of clover hay is so great that the livestock farmer cannot afford to leave a crop of clover on the ground as a fertilizer. the second crop of red clover produces the seed, and, if the yield is good, is very profitable at the prices for seed prevailing within recent years. the amount of plant-food taken off in the hay and seed crops would have relatively small importance if manure and haulm were returned without unnecessary waste. van slyke states that about one third of the entire plant-food value is contained in the roots, while to per cent of the nitrogen is found in the roots and stubble. hall instances one experiment at rothamstead in which the removal of pounds of nitrogen in the clover hay in one year left the soil enough richer than land by its side to produce per cent more grain the next year. he cites another experiment in which the removal of three tons of clover hay left the soil so well supplied with nitrogen that its crop of swede turnips two years later was over one third better than that of land which had not grown clover, the application of phosphoric acid and potash being the same. when two tons of well-cured clover hay are harvested in june, removing about pounds of nitrogen, to pounds are left for the soil. the amounts of potash are about the same, while phosphoric acid is much less in amount. physical benefit of the roots.--while the roots and stubble contain less than two fifths of the total plant-food in a clover crop, one may not safely infer that the removal of the crop for hay reduces the beneficial effect of the clover to the soil fully per cent, or more. the roots break up the soil in a way not possible to a mass of tops plowed down. they improve the physical condition of the subsoil as well as the top soil. the amount of the benefit depends in part upon the nature of the land. its value cannot be surely determined, but the facts are called to mind as an aid to judgment in deciding upon the method of handling the clover crop. used as a green manure.--where dependence must be placed upon clover as a fertilizer, little or no manure being returned to the land, at least one of the two clover crops within the year should be left on the land. the maximum benefit from clover, when left on the land, can be obtained by clipping it before it is sufficiently heavy to smother the plants, leaving it as a mulch. when the cutter-bar of the mower is tilted upward, the danger of smothering is reduced. truckers, remote from supplies of manure, have found it profitable to make two such clippings just prior to blossoming stage, securing a third heavy growth. the amount of humus thus obtained is large, and the benefit of the mulch is an important item. some growers clip the first crop for a mulch, and later secure a seed crop. the early clipping and the mulch cause increase in yield of seed. a common practice is to take one crop off for hay, and to leave the second for plowing down the following spring. early harvesting of the clover for hay favors the second crop. when to turn down.--when the maximum benefit is desired for the soil from a crop of clover, the first growth should not be plowed down. its office should be that of a mulch. in its decay all the mineral plant-food and most of the nitrogen go into the soil. the second crop should come to maturity, or near it. as a rule, there is gain, and not loss, by letting the second crop lie on the ground until spring if a spring-planted crop is to follow. some fall growth, and the protection from leaching, should equal any advantage arising from rotting the bulky growth in the soil. in some regions it is not good practice to plow down a heavy green crop on account of the excessive amount of acid produced. when this has been done, the only corrective is a liberal application of lime. mammoth clover.--when clover is grown with timothy for hay, some farmers prefer to use mammoth clover in place of the medium red. it may be known as sapling clover, and is accounted a perennial, though it is little more so than the red. it is a strong grower and makes a coarse stalk but, when grown with timothy, it has the advantage over the red in that the period of ripening is more nearly that of the timothy. it inclines to lodge badly, and should be seeded thinly with timothy when wanted for hay. the roots run deep into the soil, and this variety of clover compares favorably with the medium red in point of fertilizing power, the total root-growth being heavier. while its yield of hay, when seeded alone, is greater than the first crop of the red, its inclination to lodge and its coarseness are offsets. it produces its seed in the first crop, and the after-growth is small, while red clover may make a heavy second crop. its use should become more general on thin soils, its strong root-growth enabling it to thrive better than the red, and the lack of fertility preventing the stalks from becoming unduly coarse for hay. the amount of seed used per acre, when grown by itself, should be the same as that of red clover. alsike clover.--a variety of clover that may have gained more popularity than its merit warrants is alsike clover. it is more nearly perennial than the mammoth. the roots do not go deep into the subsoil like those of the red or the mammoth, and therefore it is better adapted to wet land. it remains several years in the ground when grazed, and is usually found in seed mixtures for pastures. it is decumbent, and difficult to harvest for hay when seeded alone. it is credited with higher yields than the red by most authorities, but this is not in accord with observation in some regions, and it is markedly inferior to the red in the organic matter and the nitrogen supplied the soil in the roots. the popularity of this clover is due to its ability to withstand some soil acidity and bad physical conditions. in regions where red clover is declining on account of lack of lime, one may see some alsike. the rule is to mix alsike with the red at the rate of one or two bushels of the former to six bushels of the latter. as the seed of the alsike is hardly half as large as that of the red, the proportion in the mixture is greater than some farmers realize. the practice is an excellent one where the red will not grow, and the alsike adds fertility, but when the soil has been made alkaline, the red clover should have nearly all the room. alsike is a heavy producer of seed. crimson clover.--wherever crimson clover is sufficiently hardy to withstand the winter, as in delaware and new jersey, it is a valuable aid in maintaining and increasing soil fertility. it is a winter annual, like winter wheat, and should be seeded in the latter half of summer, according to latitude. it comes into bloom in late spring. the plant has a tap-root of good length, but in total weight of roots is much inferior to the red. this clover, however, compares favorably with red clover in the total amount of nitrogen added to the soil by the entire plant when grown under favorable conditions. it is peculiarly fitted for a cover crop in orchards and wherever spring crops are removed as early as august, or a seeding can be made in them, as is the case with corn. even when winter kills the plants, a successful fall growth is highly profitable, adding more nitrogen before winter than red clover seeded at the same time. where the plants do not winter-kill, they are plowed down for green manure when in bloom in may, or earlier in the spring to save soil moisture and permit early planting, although a good hay for livestock can be made, and the yield is about the same as that of the first crop of red clover. in the northern states a large amount of money has been wasted in experimental seedings with crimson clover, and it is only in exceptional cases that it continues to be grown. there is reason to believe that many of these failures were due to lack of soil inoculation. the pennsylvania experiment station is located in a mountain valley where winters are severe. crimson clover is under test with other cover crops for an experimental orchard, and success with it has increased as the soil has become fully inoculated. this view is supported by the experience of various growers in the north, and while crimson clover can never make the success in a cold climate that it does in delaware, there is a much wider field of usefulness for it than is now occupied. experiments should be made with it under favorable conditions respecting moisture and soil tilth. fifteen pounds of seed should be used, and the seed should be well covered, as is the case with all seeds sown in mid-summer. chapter vi alfalfa adaptation to eastern needs.--the introduction of alfalfa into the eastern half of the united states will prove a boon to its depleted soils, encouraging the feeding of livestock and adding to the value of manures. it will affect soils directly, as does red clover, when farmers appreciate the fact that its rightful place on their farms is in rotation with grain. under western conditions, where no other crop can compete with it in value, as is the case in semi-arid belts, its ability to produce crops for a long term of years adds much to its value, but in eastern agriculture this characteristic is not needed. on most soils of the east it will not remain productive for more than four to six years, and that fact detracts little from its value. it should fit into crop-rotations, adding fertility for grain crops. when grown in a six-years rotation with corn and oats or other small grain, it furnishes a rich sod for the corn, and the manure made from the hay helps to solve the farmer's fertility problem. fertility and feeding value.--vivian says that "the problem of the profitable maintenance of fertility is largely a question of an economic method of supplying plants with nitrogen." the greatest value of alfalfa to eastern farming lies in its ability to convert atmospheric nitrogen into organic nitrogen. it has no equal in this respect for relatively long crop-rotations, storing in its roots and successive growths of top far more nitrogen within three or four years than is possible to any other of our legumes. a good stand of alfalfa, producing nine crops of hay in the three years following the season of seeding, will produce from nine to twelve tons of hay. good fields, under the best conditions, have produced far more, but the amounts named are within reach of most growers on land adapted to the plant. a ton of hay, on the average, contains as much nitrogen as five or six tons of fresh stable manure. thus there comes to the farm a great amount of plant-food, to be given the land in the manure, and in addition the roots and stubble have stored in the ground enough nitrogen to feed a successive corn crop, and a small grain crop which may follow the corn. moreover, the roots have filled the soil with organic matter, improving the physical condition of the soil and subsoil. [illustration: alfalfa on the ohio state university farm.] another gain is found in the content of phosphoric acid and potash in the manure, much of which was drawn from soil supplies out of reach of the other farm crops. the profit from introduction of alfalfa into a region's agriculture is very great. alfalfa makes a nutritious and palatable feed for livestock. a ton contains as much digestible protein as pounds of wheat bran. climate and soil.--the experimentation with alfalfa by farmers has been wide-spread, and the percentage of failure has been so large that many have believed this legume was unfitted to the climate and soil of the country east of the missouri river. successful experience has shown that it can be made to take a considerable place in eastern crop-schemes. the climate is not unfavorable, as is evidenced by large areas of good alfalfa sods on thousands of farms. the abundant rainfall brings various weeds and grasses into competition with it, and that will remain a serious drawback until growers learn to clean their surface soils by good tillage before seeding. any land that is sufficiently well drained to produce a good corn crop in a wet summer can grow alfalfa if the seed-bed is rightly made. the loose soils are more difficult to seed successfully than is the land having enough clay to give itself body, although most experimenters select their most porous soils. all farms having good tilth can bring alfalfa into their crop-rotations. free use of lime.--the conditions requisite to success in alfalfa-growing are not numerous, but none can be neglected. alfalfa should be given a calcareous soil when possible, but an acid soil can be made favorable to alfalfa by the free use of lime. there must remain a liberal amount after the soil deficiency has been met, and when the use of lime is on a liberal scale, the pulverized limestone makes the safest carrier. however, bushels of stone-lime per acre can be used safely on any land that is not distinctly sandy, and that amount is adequate in most instances. inoculation.--the necessity of inoculation has been discussed in chapter iv. eastern land would become inoculated for alfalfa if farmers would adopt the practice of mixing a little alfalfa with red clover whenever making seedings. some alfalfa plants usually make growth, securing the bacteria in the dust of the seed, presumably. the addition of one pound of alfalfa seed per acre would assist materially in securing a good stand when the day came that an alfalfa seeding was desired. fertilization.--the ability of alfalfa to add fertility to the farm, and directly to the field producing it when all the crops are removed as hay, does not preclude the necessity of having the soil fertile when the seeding is made. the plants find competition with grass and other weeds keen under eastern skies where moisture favors plant-life. in their first season this is markedly true. there should be plenty of available plant-food for the young plants. stable manure that is free from the seeds of pernicious weeds makes an excellent dressing. it is good practice to plow down a heavy coat of manure for corn and then to replow the land for alfalfa the next season. a top-dressing of manure is good, affording excellent physical condition of the surface for starting the plants. eight tons per acre make a good dressing. if land is not naturally fertile, mineral fertilizers should be applied. a mixture of pounds of per cent acid phosphate and pounds of muriate of potash is excellent for an acre of manured land. in the absence of manure, pounds of nitrate of soda and pounds of muriate of potash should be added to the mixture. if the materials are wet, a drier must be used. the fertilizer should be drilled into the ground prior to the seeding. a clean seed-bed.--much failure with alfalfa is due to summer grasses and other weeds. the moisture in our eastern states favors plant-life, and most soils are thoroughly stocked with the seeds of a large number of weeds. the value of blue-grass and timothy would be comparatively small if they were not capable of monopolizing the ground when well started and given fertility. alfalfa plants are less capable of crowding out other plants, and especially in their first season. their habit of growth is unlike that of grass. rational treatment of alfalfa demands that the surface soil be made fairly clean of weed seed, and this applies with peculiar force to annual grasses, like fox-tail. if attention were paid to this point, failures would be far less numerous. old grass land should not be seeded until a cultivated crop has followed the plowing. the land should be in good tilth, and capable of producing a good crop of any sort. alfalfa is not a plant for poor land, although it does add organic matter and nitrogen. varieties.--there is only one variety of alfalfa in common use in this country, and the western-grown seed sold upon the market is known simply as alfalfa. bound up in this one so-called variety are many strains differing in habit of growth, and their differentiation will occur, just as it has in the case of wheat, and is now proceeding slowly with timothy. the eastern grower at present should use the variety of the west that is furnishing nearly all the seed produced in this country. there is a variety known as sand lucerne that has shown value for the light, sandy soils of michigan. the turkestan variety was introduced for dry, cold regions, but does not produce much seed. clean seed.--care should be exercised to secure seed free from impurities. if one is not a competent judge, he should send a sample to his state experiment station for examination. the practice of adulteration is decreasing, but the seed may have been taken from land infested with pernicious weeds. the impurity most to be feared is dodder. there are several varieties, the seeds varying in size and color. the same pest may be found in clover fields, but the injury is less because the clover stands only two years. the dodder seed germinates in the soil, and the plant attaches itself to the alfalfa, losing its connection with the soil and forming a mass of very fine vines that reach out to other alfalfa plants. in this way it spreads, feeding on the sap of the host plants and killing them. when the infestation is in only a few spots in the field, the remedy is to cover with straw, soak with kerosene oil, and burn. all the infestation at the edges of these spots must be destroyed. when the dodder is too widely distributed throughout the field to permit of this treatment, the only course is to plow the field at once, and to grow cultivated crops for two or three years. it is believed that no variety of dodder produces seed freely in the eastern states, and that the hay made from the first crop of alfalfa or red clover will not contain any seed of this pernicious plant. the seeding.--when alfalfa has become established on eastern farms, the difficulties in making new seedings will be smaller. the experience of growers will save from mistakes in selection of soils and preparation of the ground, and the thorough inoculation with the right bacteria that can come only with time will do much to insure success. the unwisdom of making seedings in ground filled with grass and other weed seeds will be appreciated. it is quite probable that much successful seeding will be made in wheat and oats, where the alfalfa is to stand only one or two years. these practices are not for the beginner. his land is not thoroughly supplied with bacteria, and every chance should be given the alfalfa. if there are no annual grasses, such as appear so freely in some regions in mid-summer, spring seeding is excellent. a cover crop is then desirable, and nothing is better for this purpose than barley at the rate of pecks of seed per acre. in all experimental work pounds of bright, plump alfalfa seed per acre should be sown. the seeding should be made as soon as spring comes, the barley being drilled in, and the seed-spouts of the drill thrown forward so that the alfalfa will fall ahead of the hoes and be covered by them. seeding in august.--much land is infested with annual grasses and other weeds, and in such case seedings should be made in august, as described in chapter viii. subsequent treatment.--if the alfalfa plants find the bacteria at hand, they will begin to profit from them within the first month of their lives. a large percentage of the plants may fail to obtain this aid in land which has not previously grown alfalfa, and within a few months they indicate the failure by their light color, while the plants liberally supplied with nitrogen through bacteria become dark green. where there are no bacteria, the plants turn yellow and die. there are diseases that attack alfalfa, causing the leaves to turn yellow, and when they appear, the only known treatment of value is to clip the plants with a mower without delay. the next growth may not show any mark of the diseases. [illustration: curing alfalfa at the pennsylvania experiment station.] when alfalfa is seeded in the spring on rich land, a hay crop may be taken off the same season. if the plants do not make a strong growth, they should be clipped, and the tops should be left as a mulch. the clipping and all future harvestings are made when the stalks start buds from their sides near the ground. this ordinarily occurs about the time some flowers show, and is the warning that the old top should be cut off, no matter how small and unprofitable for harvesting it may be. the exception to this rule is found only in the fall. an august seeding may make such growth in a warm and late autumn that flowering will occur, and lateral buds start, but the growth should not be clipped unless there remains time to secure a new growth large enough to afford winter protection. this is likewise true of a late growth in an old alfalfa field. owners of soils that are not well adapted to the alfalfa plant will find top-dressing with manure helpful to alfalfa fields when made in the fall. the severity of winters in a moist climate is responsible for some failures. if the soil is not porous, heaving will occur. a dressing of manure, given late in the fall, and preferably during the first hard freeze, will prevent alternate thawings and freezings in some degree. the manure should have been made from feed containing no seeds of annual grasses or other weed pests. rolling in the spring does not serve to settle heaved alfalfa plants. the tap-roots are long, and when they have been lifted by action of frost, they cannot be driven back into place. it is believed that the permanence of an alfalfa seeding may be increased by the use of mineral fertilizers in the early spring. in the case of one alfalfa field of fifteen years' standing in the east, the fertilizers were applied immediately after the first hay crop of the year was removed. three hundred and fifty pounds of acid phosphate and pounds of muriate of potash per acre is the mixture recommended. when old alfalfa plants do not stand thickly enough on the ground, grasses and other weeds come in readily. they can be kept under partial control by use of a spring-tooth harrow, the points being made narrow so that no ridging will occur. the harrow should be used immediately after the harvest, and will not injure the alfalfa. it does not pay to use alfalfa for pasturage in our eastern states because the practice shortens the life of the seeding. alfalfa makes a seed crop in profitable amount only in our semi-arid regions. no attempt to produce a seed crop in the east should be made. chapter vii grass sods value of sods.--the character of the sods is a faithful index of the condition of the soil in any region adapted to grass. the value of heavy sods to a soil cannot be overestimated. they not only give to a farm a prosperous appearance, but our country's agriculture would be on a much safer basis if heavy coverings of grass were more universal. we do not hold the legumes in too high esteem, but the emphasis placed upon their ability to appropriate nitrogen from the air has caused some land-owners to fail in appreciation of the aid to soil fertility that may be rendered by the grasses. one often hears the statement that they can add nothing to the soil, and this is serious error. they add all that may be given in the clovers, excepting nitrogen only, and that is only one element of plant-food, important though it be. a great part of the value of clover lies in its ability to supply organic matter to the soil and to improve physical condition by its net-work of roots. heavy grass sods furnish a vast amount of organic matter which not only supplies available plant-food to succeeding crops, but in its decay affects the availability of some part of the stores of potential fertility in the land. [illustration: a heavy grass sod in new york.] prejudice against timothy.--timothy, among the grasses, is especially in disrepute as a soil-builder, and yet its value is great. the belief that timothy is hard on land is based upon observation of bad treatment of this grass. there is a common custom of seeding land down to timothy when it ceases to have sufficient available plant-food for a profitable tilled crop, and usually this is the third year after a sod has been broken. the seeding is made with a grain crop that needs all the commercial fertilizer that may chance to be used. clover may be seeded also, and on a majority of farms it fails to thrive when sown. if clover does grow, the succeeding crop of timothy may be heavy. if clover does not grow, the timothy is not so heavy. the seeding to grass is made partly because a tilled crop would not pay, and partly because a hay crop is needed. it comes in where other crops cannot come with profit, and it produces fairly well, or very well, the first year it occupies the ground by itself. with little or no aid from manure or commercial fertilizer, it adds much to the supply of organic matter in the soil, and it produces a hay crop that may be made into manure or converted into cash. if the sod were broken the following spring, giving to the soil all the after-math and the mass of roots, its reputation with us would be far better than it is. this would be true even if it had received little fertilizer when seeded or during its existence as a sod, not taking into account any manure spread upon it during the winter previous to its breaking for corn. but the rule is not to break a grass sod when it is fairly heavy. the years of mowing are arranged in the crop-rotation to provide for as many harvests as promise immediate profit. on some land this is two years, and not infrequently it is three. where farms are difficult of tillage, it is a common practice to let timothy stand until the sod is so thin that the yield of hay is hardly worth the cost of harvesting. then the thin remnant of sod is broken for corn or other grain, and the poor physical condition of the soil and the low state of available fertility lead to the assertion that timothy is hard on the soil. this is a fair statement of the treatment of this plant on most farms. object of sods.--the land's share of its products cannot be disregarded without loss. the legumes and grasses come into the crop-rotation primarily to raise the percentage of organic matter that the land may appropriate to itself within the rotation. some of the crops usually are for sale from the farm. most of the crops require tillage, and that is exhaustive of the store of humus. a portion of the time within the rotation belongs to a crop that increases the supply of vegetable matter, unless manure is brought from an outside source. sods lend themselves well to this purpose because they afford some income, in pasturage or hay, while filling the soil with vegetation. the tendency is to forget the primary purpose of sods in the scheme, and to ignore the requirement of land respecting a due share of what it produces. attention centers upon the product that may be removed. the portion of the farm reduced in productive power for the moment goes to grass, while the labor and fertilizers are concentrated upon the fields that are broken for grain and vegetables. the removal of all the crop at harvest, and probably the pasturing of after-math, are the only matters of interest that the fields, depleted by cultivation and seeded down to grass, have for the owner until the poor hay yield and the need of a sod for corn draw attention again to them. seeding with small grain.--the usual custom is to sow grasses with small grain, and there is much to commend it. the cost of preparing the seed-bed rests upon the grain crop, and the conditions are favorable to fall growth and winter protection, if the seeding is made in the fall. wheat and rye are good crops with which to seed. in the case of fertile land there is the danger that the timothy will establish itself too well in a warm, moist autumn to permit clover to get a foothold the following spring, and clover should always be seeded for the sake of fertility. in northern latitudes clover cannot be seeded successfully as late in the season as wheat should be sown, as it fails to become well rooted for winter. the overcrowding of clover by timothy is met in part by reduction in amount of timothy seed sown with the wheat. the oat crop is less satisfactory for seedings to grass and clover. the leaves near the ground are too thick, shading the young plants unduly, and the late harvest exposes the grass and clover when the season is hot, and usually dry. some reduction in the amount of seed oats used per acre helps to save from injury. seeding in rye.--when thin land is desired for pasture, and available fertility cannot well be applied, a sod may be formed more surely by seeding with rye, using the rye for pasture and a mulch, than, probably, in any other way. the ground should have good tillage and then be seeded to rye in september at the rate of six pecks of seed per acre. timothy and red-top should be seeded with it, and in the spring red and alsike clover should be added. whenever the ground is dry enough in the spring to permit the tramping of cattle without injury, the rye should be pastured, and preferably by a sufficient number of animals to hold the rye well in check. when the usual time for heading comes, all stock should be removed, and when heads do appear, the growth should be clipped with a mower and left as a mulch on the surface. a second clipping will be required later, with cutter-bar tilted well upward. when the usual summer drouth is past, livestock can again be turned into the field. this method is suggested only for thin fields that have failed to make catches of grass, and that for some reason cannot well be given the fertility that all thin soils need. the application of lime before seeding to the rye is an expense that usually must be met in the case of such fields, and fertilizers should be used. good soil conditions.--when the grasses and clovers desired for a sod are sown with small grain, there is competition between them and the grain crop for fertility, moisture, and light. the grain crop is the one that will produce the income the following summer, and naturally is given right of way. the amount of seed is used that experience teaches is best for a maximum yield of grain. usually this gives a thicker stand of plants than is best for the tiny grass and clover plants that often are struggling for existence down under the taller grain. if the farmer could see his way clear to cut down the quantity of seed wheat or oats used on a fertile soil, the catch of grass would be better, but the small-grain crop is not very profitable at the best, and the owner does not like deliberately to limit it. a greater amount of failure is due to an inadequate supply of fertility. the grass does not suffer so much from over-shading as it does from starvation, both during the growth of the grain and after harvest. the stronger grain plants appropriate the scanty stock of available fertility, and leave the grass and clover nearly helpless. this condition is especially noticeable in dry seasons when there is less opportunity to obtain food in solution. plants which are expected in another season to fill the ground with vegetable matter are starved in the beginning and die. plant-food is needed, and should be mixed with the soil when the seeding is made. the fertilizer needs are discussed in another chapter. when manure is available, it should be spread on the plowed ground and mixed with the surface soil. if a soil is thin, or heavy, or light, the use of a ton of manure in this way can bring greater returns than under any other circumstances in general farming. it supplies some fertility, and it puts the surface soil into good physical condition for young plants. land deficient in humus forms a crust after a rain, and a tiny plant suffers. a light dressing of manure, well mixed with the soil, tends to prevent this hardening of the surface and loss of water. there is no other form of fertility that can fully replace manure, for either compact or leachy land. the probable need of lime has been discussed in other chapters. clovers and the grasses want an alkaline soil, and there is waste of money and time in seeding acid land. the lime and the manure must not be mixed together in the air, but both can be used when fitting land for seeding, and both should be used if the need exists. one should be applied early and be well disked into the soil, and then the other application may be made and covered with the harrow. the soil is an absorbent, and the contact of manure and lime within the soil only leads to immediate availability, which is desirable in giving the grass a start. chapter viii grass sods--(_continued_) seeding in late summer.--the natural time of beginning life, in the case of timothy, blue-grass, red-top, red clover, and alfalfa is in the summer or autumn. the best conditions of growth are given where no stronger plants take the plant-food and moisture. wherever there is any difficulty in getting heavy grass and clover sods after the lime deficiency has been met, and wherever a hay crop has more value than a small-grain crop, the method of seeding alone in august should be employed. in warmer latitudes the date may be a little later, but in the northern states it should be in the first half of august for best results. seeding alone offers opportunity to make conditions right for the seeds which are to be used, and in view of the importance of heavy sods to our agriculture, this reason alone is sufficient. in some regions the ability to substitute a good hay crop for a cereal that brings small net income is an item of value, adding to the proportion of feeding-stuff produced in the rotation and to the resulting supply of manure. the practice of making seedings to grass and clover alone is growing, and it is based on sound reasoning. crops that may precede.--farms that are under common crop-rotations may adopt the practice of august seeding. the winter wheat comes off in time for preparation, and this is true of an early variety of oats, and of rye and barley. early crops of vegetables get out of the way nicely. there is a vast total area of thin soil that may be brought up to a productive stage rapidly by the growth of a green-manuring crop to precede the grass and clover. rye may be sown in the fall and plowed down in may, and cowpeas planted to be disked into the soil. oats and canada peas add organic matter with nitrogen when plowed down. the summer fallow, which deservedly has fallen into general disuse, may well be employed when a soil is in an inert state, provided grass and clover be permitted to appropriate the plant-food made soluble by the fallowing. the catch crops add organic matter while cleansing the land of weeds; the fallowing releases plant-food and is peculiarly efficient in killing out weeds. care must be exercised about preserving moisture in the ground, and therefore a green crop should not be plowed under immediately before seeding time. when a soil is thin, there may be no better preparatory crop than the cowpea, which will not make too rank a growth in the north to prevent its handling with a weighted disk harrow. by this means the soil below is left firm, and the rich vines are mixed with the surface soil, where most needed. it is always a mistake to bury fertility in the bottom of the furrow when a soil is thin and small seeds are to be sown. the infertile ground lying next the subsoil is not what is needed at the surface when preparing for a sod. it is a good practice to use the early summer in making conditions better for an august seeding, if the land has fallen below a profitable state of productiveness. a growth may be plowed down in time for firming the seed-bed, or it may be cut into the surface soil with a harrow, or the time may be used in freeing inert plant-food and destroying weed seed. on better soils, and in warm latitudes, a crop for hay may be removed, especially in the case of the cowpea in the south, and the stubble prepared for seeding by use of the cutaway or disk harrow. preparation.--a seed-bed for small seeds planted in mid-summer must be able to retain moisture. nothing robs a soil of water more surely than a breaking-plow. its use is a necessity in farming, but this effect of plowing must be borne in mind when a seeding is planned for the driest period of the year. it goes without saying that sods should not be formed on land that is too solid for admission of air. a thorough plowing is needed by most soils prior to making a sod that will prevent further stirring of the ground for a long period of time. it is best when this plowing can be given in the preceding spring. this enables the ground to become firm enough to hold moisture. if there is time for a tilled crop, the cultivation is helpful. when the land must be broken in the summer, the plowing should be done several weeks before the seeding to grass must be made. the roller should follow the plow closely to destroy the spaces that lie open to the hot air, permitting the land to dry out. all deep harrowings should be given soon after the plowing, stirring and mixing the ground, and then leaving it to settle so that moisture can be held. it is bad practice to continue deep harrowing until the seeding time of any small grain or grass planted in a dry part of the year. firmness is wanted in the soil. the weed seed.--the seeds of tilled crops are planted in ground containing much weed seed, and no harm may result. the cultivation needed to keep the soil loose, or to prevent evaporation, destroys the weeds. grass, clover, alfalfa, and like seeds are put into the ground to occupy it to the exclusion of other plants for several years, as a rule, and no tillage can be given. the rule is to sow such seeds after tilled crops have been grown, and some weed seed has been destroyed, but there is evidence on every hand that the weed seed remains in abundance. summer preparation for grass gives opportunity to destroy a great part of the seeds in the surface of the ground, and it is only when they are near the surface that the seeds of most weeds will germinate. deep harrowings, continued up to time of planting, not only rob land of water, but they bring to the surface new lots of seed that had been safely buried, and become a part of the actual seeding when the grass, clover, or alfalfa is sown. the obviously right method of preparing for planting is to use only a surface harrow for a few weeks previous to seeding time, stirring the ground after every rain to the depth of three inches, or near that, and destroying the plants soon after germination of the seed. the process which is right for holding moisture is right for cleansing the ground. summer grasses.--one of the worst pests is the annual grasses, springing up in june, july, and august. they are responsible for many failures to obtain stands of alfalfa, clover, and the valuable grasses. the delay in seeding until august is due largely to this pest. when seedings are made in the spring, or in june, failure is invited where these grasses have a fast hold. the only effective way of combating them is to make the ground firm enough to encourage germination, and to stir the surface whenever a growth starts. the late seeding is the one means of escape, and if there is fertility and moisture, the newly seeded crop becomes well rooted by winter and takes the ground so completely that there is little room for weeds to start the next year. sowing the seed.--partial failure with august seeding is due to faulty methods. we are accustomed to broadcasting clover seed on top of the wheat fields and obtaining a stand of plants. a majority of the seeds do not become buried in the soil, or only very slightly, and yet germinate. moisture is necessary, but in the spring, when this method is used, there is moisture at the surface of the ground under the wheat plants much of the time. the conditions respecting moisture are not unfavorable in most springs, and we come to think that a small seed should not be buried much if any. in the autumn, again, we sow timothy with the wheat, and while more prompt germination is secured by covering the timothy seed with the hoes of the drill, we often have seen a successful seeding made without any covering being given. the work is done at a time when fall rains may continue for days and, when the sun's heat does not continue long, the covering given by settling the seed into the loose earth is sufficient. moisture does not leave rapidly because the air is not hot. deep covering.--in august the air is hot, and the surface of the ground is dry nearly all the time. a shower may be followed by hot sunshine, and the water at the surface evaporates quickly, leaving the ground covered with a dry crust. there are two essential things to bear in mind: the seeding should be made only when there is enough moisture in the ground to insure quick germination, and preferably as soon as feasible after a rain, and the seed should be put down where moisture can be retained. it is poor practice to sow any kind of small seeds before a rain that seems imminent. if it forms a crust, or causes weed-seed germination along with that of the grass seeds, only harm results. when seeds are put into a dry soil, and a light shower comes, there may be germination without sufficient moisture to continue life in the plants. the seeds should be well buried: the soil and air conditions are different from those of the spring. it is best to wait for moisture, and to save the seed if it does not come, but when enough water has fallen to make the firm soil moist, the danger of failure is very small if the seeds are buried one to two inches deep. a surface harrow will stir the surface, and then the seeds should be sifted down into the soil by another harrowing. a light plank float, mashing the little clods and pressing the soil slightly together, finishes the work. the plants will appear above ground within a few days, the only danger being in a beating shower that may puddle the surface before the plants are up. seed-mixtures.--when grass is wanted for hay as well as fertility, the clovers and timothy compose the greater part of a desirable mixture wherever the clovers and timothy thrive. probably this condition always will continue. the clovers are needed to supply nitrogen to the soil and to put protein into the hay for livestock. they give way, in large part, or entirely, the second year. alsike is more nearly perennial than the red which practically lasts only through its second season, when its seed crop has been made, and its function performed. the sod is chiefly timothy in the second season. a little red-top is desirable, and the percentage should be heaviest for quite wet land or very dry land. when fertility is the first consideration, and the sod is left only two or three years, the following mixture is good, and is for one acre: red clover pounds alsike pounds timothy pounds red-top pounds when a mixed hay is wanted the first year, the following mixture may be found better for the purpose: red clover pounds alsike pounds timothy pounds red-top pounds mammoth clover seed may be substituted for the red without change in number of pounds. the amount of timothy and red-top in the second mixture suggested calls for a liberal supply of plant-food, and this is true of any heavy grass mixture. if fertility is not present, the seeding of grass should be lighter, but the clover should not be less in amount for a thin soil than for a good one. the question of fertilizers is discussed in chapter xx. chapter ix sods for pastures permanent pastures.--there is a large total area of land that can be brought into profitable production of food only by means of pasture grasses. a small part is too low and moist for tillage, but a larger part is too rough or too infertile. it can be made to yield profit in grasses that are harvested without expense by animals. the grasses afford feed and at the same time protect the soil from waste. the efficiency of much pasture land is kept low by poor stands of grass, the encroachment of weeds, bushes, and briers, close grazing, and the failure to supply fertility. when making a sod for mowing, the aim is to select varieties of plants that mature near the same time. pastures need varieties maturing at different times, and this is a matter under control when temporary pastures are used. permanent pasture land soon becomes occupied by the grasses best fitted to soil conditions or most able to crowd other plants. [illustration: good pasture land in chester county, pa.] seed-mixtures.--several varieties of grasses should be used when making a sod for grazing. they occupy all the surface more quickly and surely than a single variety, and the pasturage is better. the character of the soil determines the character of the mixture in large measure. when land can be well fitted, a heavy seeding is best, but the cost is nearly prohibitive for thin, rough lands. a brief description of the leading pasture grasses east of the semi-arid region, and north of the gulf states, is given: _blue-grass._--no other pasture grass equals kentucky blue-grass wherever it thrives. it makes a close sod, preventing the growth of weeds and withstanding tramping, and contains a high percentage of protein. while it is best adapted to limestone soils, it is grown with success on clay land outside of limestone areas. it is slow in making a heavy sod, as a rule, and partly because the seeding is too light on account of low germination. the rule is to seed with timothy and other grasses which furnish the greater part of the pasturage for two or three years. when seeded alone, to pounds of seed per acre should be used. it may be seeded in the spring or fall, and preferably in august or september. _timothy._--in a mixture of pasture grasses timothy has a place wherever it thrives. it is not naturally a pasture grass, standing grazing rather poorly, but it makes a large amount of feed quickly. the grass is one of the poorest in protein, and the pasturage gains much in quality when the timothy gives way to blue-grass, as it will in two or three years if the latter has favoring soil conditions. in most mixtures it is given a leading place. it may be sown in the spring, but preferably in the fall, and pounds of seed will be found satisfactory, when seeded alone. _red-top._--if red-top were as palatable to livestock as blue-grass, it would have one of the most prominent places among our pasture grasses. it is valuable anyway, thriving where land is too acid for blue-grass or timothy, or too thin. it is adapted to wet land, and yet is one of our surest grasses for dry and poor land. it makes a sod that lasts well, and yields better than most other grasses. notwithstanding its lack in palatability, it should be in all pasture mixtures for soils not in the best tilth. when used alone, pounds of seed per acre should be sown. the seeding may be made in spring or fall. _orchard grass._--in most mixtures recommended for pasture orchard grass has a place, but it should be a minor one. it makes early growth in the spring, which is a point in its favor. it stands shade and also drouth better than some other grasses, but is not at home in a poor or wet soil. it grows in bunches, and becomes unpalatable if not promptly grazed. it needs crowding with other grasses when grown for pasturage. when seeded alone for hay, pounds of seed per acre may be used. _other seeds._--there are other grasses often recommended, but they have no wide acceptance. meadow fescue is a palatable grass that would be used more often in pasture mixtures if the seed were not high in price. all land seeded for grazing should have some clover sown for sake of soil fertility. the alsike remains longer than the red or mammoth, and is better for undrained, thin, and acid soils. yields and composition of grasses.--the ohio station has compared the yields of various grasses and their composition. the following table is arranged from its data, as given in bulletin : +-----------------+----------+---------+----------+ | name | average | pounds | pounds | | | tons hay | protein | protein | | | per acre | per | per acre | | | | hundred | | +-----------------+----------+---------+----------+ | timothy | . | . | | | blue-grass | . | . | | | red-top | . | . | | | orchard grass | . | . | | | meadow fescue | . | . | | +-----------------+----------+---------+----------+ suggested mixtures for pastures.--for ordinary conditions, williams suggests the following mixture for an acre of land: blue-grass pounds timothy pounds red-top pounds orchard grass pounds red clover pounds alsike clover pounds for use on rather wet lands, and especially off the limestone, he suggests: red-top pounds blue-grass pounds timothy pounds alsike clover pounds hunt recommends the following as a basis, to be modified to suit varying conditions: timothy pounds kentucky blue-grass pounds meadow fescue pounds red clover pounds alsike clover pounds white clover pounds the cornell station recommends the following for good land: timothy to pounds kentucky blue-grass pounds meadow fescue to pounds orchard grass to pounds red clover pounds alsike clover pounds white clover to pounds for poor lands it recommends this mixture: timothy to pounds red-top pounds canadian blue-grass pounds red clover pounds alsike clover pounds white clover pound zinn, of west virginia, recommends the following mixture for permanent pasture: timothy pounds red-top pounds orchard grass pounds kentucky blue-grass pounds red clover pounds alsike clover pounds white clover pound renewal of permanent pastures.--there is much pasture land that could not be broken with profit for reseeding. there is neither time, nor money, nor opportunity at the owner's hand for this purpose, and often the loss of soil resulting from washing would be a bar if the labor would cost nothing. the renewal of such grass lands can be made with profit if pernicious weeds are not in the way. plant-food, lime, and grass seed are wanted. a disk or sharp spike-tooth harrow, used in early spring or after an august rain, will give some fresh earth for covering the seeds. a complete fertilizer always is needed. the clovers should go into the seed-mixture used. [illustration: sheep on a new york farm.] destroying bushes.--the absence of sheep is evident in the appearance of the greater area of permanent pasture in the mountainous regions of the eastern states. bushes, briers, and other weeds must be destroyed if pasture land would be kept in a profitable state, and only the sheep or the goat is the fully efficient aid of man in caring for such land. the presence of dogs makes the tariff on wool, or lack of it, a minor matter. the cost to the country, in indirect effect upon pastures only, due to unrestrained dogs, is incalculable. the maintenance of good sods without sheep is a problem without solution in some regions. close grazing.--much harm results from turning livestock on pastures too early in the spring. the ground is kept soft by spring rains, and the hoofs cut the turf. the grass needs its first leaves to enable it to make rapid growth, and the first grass of spring is not nutritious. close grazing is harmful, exposing the soil to the sun and robbing it of moisture. when winter comes, there should be sufficient grass to serve as a mulch to the roots. it acts like a coat of manure, giving new life to the plants the next spring. good sods are not easily or quickly made, and when they have been secured on land unfit for the plow, their value measures the value of the land itself. chapter x the cowpea a southern legume.--the soils of the cold north are protected from leaching during the winter by the action of frost. the plant-food is locked up safely for another year when nature ceases her work of production for the year. farther south, in the center of the corn belt, there are leaching periods in fall and spring and oftentimes during the winter, but winter wheat thrives and, in ordinary crop-rotations, covers much of the land that might otherwise lose plant-food. as we pass from the northern to the southern states, the preservation of soil fertility grows more difficult and at the same time the restoration of humus becomes easier. the heat makes easy the change of organic matter to soluble forms, and the rains cause waste, but the climate favors plants that replace rapidly what is lost. in the work of supplying land with fertility, directly and indirectly, the southern cowpea has an important place. it is to the south what red clover is to the north, and it overlaps part of the red-clover belt, having a rightful place as far north as the ohio valley, and portions of pennsylvania. characteristics.--the cowpea is closely related to the bean, and is very unlike the canada pea, which is a true pea, thriving only in a cool climate. the cowpea has been grown in the southern states over one hundred years, and the acreage is large, but it never has come into the full use it deserves. being a legume, it stores up nitrogen taken from the air, and unlike red clover it makes its full growth within a short period of time. it can grow on land too infertile for most kinds of valuable plants, and on better land. the vines can crowd out nearly all varieties of weeds. the roots go to a good depth and are thickly covered with the nodules of nitrogen-gathering bacteria. varieties.--there are many varieties of the cowpea, and confusion of names prevails, although some stations have done good service in identification of individuals carrying a number of names. the very quick-maturing varieties adapted to northern conditions do not make as much foliage as the rank-growing ones that require a relatively long season, but some of them are heavy producers of seed. there are varieties requiring six months of southern heat to bring them to maturity, and some failures attending the introduction of the cowpea into more northern latitudes have been due to bad selection. a few varieties reach maturity within two months of hot weather. the trailing habit is affected by the soil, the bunch varieties tending to trail when grown on fertile land. when the crop is wanted for seed, the peas that do not trail heavily will prove more satisfactory. the selection of variety is a matter of latitude and purpose, exactly as it is with corn. fertilizing value.--a heavy growth of the cowpea is worth as much to the soil as a good crop of red clover. when the equivalent of two tons of hay is produced, the roots and vines contain nearly as much plant-food as the roots and first crop of medium red clover that makes two tons of hay. some analyses show a higher percentage of protein in cowpea hay than in clover hay, and the experience of many stockmen indicates that such is the case. the roots and stubble have somewhat less fertilizing power than in the case of the clover, and all thin soils should have the entire plant, or the manure from the hay, saved without loss. comparison is made on the basis of equal adaptability of soil and climate to clover and the cowpea. going southward, the cowpea has the advantage, and northward the clover gains. it is in the overlapping belt that both should be freely used. the cowpea has distinct advantage over the clover in its ability to supply nitrogen and organic matter within a few months, and in its adaptation to very poor soils where clover would not make much growth. as a catch crop it has great value. affecting physical condition.--the cowpea has marked influence upon the physical condition of heavy soils, even when the vines are not plowed down. this is due in some degree to the roots, and probably more to the mulching effect of the vines during their growth. heavy soils are made much more mellow by the cowpea, and when the crop is removed for hay, the stubble-land is easily prepared for a seeding to grass or small grain. when the growth is plowed down, the soil may be made too loose for seeding to small grain, but is put into prime condition for a tilled crop. planting.--the land should be fitted as it is for corn. light, sandy soils require little preparation, and too often the seeding is made in a woefully careless manner, the chief dependence being placed upon sufficiently deep covering to insure germination. the ground should be fitted as well as it is for a cash crop, being made fine and smooth. a grain drill makes the seeding in a satisfactory manner, and the seed may be drilled solid or in rows for cultivation. when the crop is grown as a fertilizer or for hay, solid drilling is good, and about five pecks of seed gives a good stand of plants if peas are sound. much cowpea seed is low in germination power, and the buyer should exercise caution. when a seed crop is wanted, two to three pecks of seed per acre, placed in drills to inches apart, make an excellent seeding, as cultivation can be given. the amount of seed varies with the variety. in northern latitudes a warm soil is to be desired, and cultivation gives better results when a seeding to wheat will be made on the pea-stubble. there is evidence that the cowpea can make a heavy growth in soils too deficient in lime for red clover, and it gained its first prominence in southern ohio on land that was failing to grow clover. it is the plant of adversity as well as prosperity, adding rich organic matter to thin soils, but making its full returns under better conditions. lime applications on acid soils give increase in yields. its one absolute requirement is heat, and in a cold summer its northern limit is markedly depressed. inoculation.--the inoculation of the soil with cowpea bacteria is necessary to best results in most regions new to the plant. self-inoculation is quicker in the cowpea than in alfalfa because the vines carry some soil on them, and thus the dust in the seed crop may be rich in bacteria. however, most new seedings of the cowpea do not show a large number of nodules on the plant roots, and inoculation pays. in some cases it makes the difference between failure and success. two hundred pounds of soil from an old field should be well harrowed into each acre of land when preparing for a cowpea seeding in a new region. the soils of the southern states contain the bacteria just as the states in the clover belt are supplied with clover bacteria. fertilizers.--the light soils of maryland, new jersey, and the southern states are not naturally rich in phosphoric acid or potash. the cowpea can draw its nitrogen from the air, but on all thin land it pays to use to pounds of acid phosphate and pounds of muriate of potash per acre for this crop which should have a luxuriant growth for the soil's benefit. such use of fertilizers is more profitable than their use on the crop which follows. harvesting with livestock.--when the cowpea is made into hay, there is always danger that the most of the plant-food contained in it never will get back to the soil on account of a careless handling of the manure. the practice of pasturing with cows and hogs is excellent. the feed is rich, and the manure is left on the ground. there is a saving of labor. if the full fertilizing value is wanted for the soil, the crop should be plowed down. the trailing varieties form a tangled mass that cannot be handled by an ordinary breaking-plow, but a stalk-cutter, run in the direction the plow will follow, makes plowing possible. pasturing with cattle and hogs sufficiently to reduce the growth so that a plow can be used is good practice. the cowpea for hay.--the hay is one of our most palatable feeding-stuffs. livestock may reject it the first time it is put into the manger, but a taste for it is quickly acquired, and soon it is eaten greedily. the high content of protein makes it exceptionally valuable for young animals and milk cows, and the manure contains a high percentage of nitrogen. the difficulty in making the hay is a drawback, but this is over-rated. while rain discolors the vines and makes them unattractive in appearance, the hay remains more palatable and nutritious than good timothy, if the leaves are not lost in curing. when the first pods turn yellow, the crop should be harvested. the vines can be left in the swath until the top leaves begin to burn and then be put into windrows with a sulky hay-rake. the windrows should be small, the rake merely serving to invert half the vines upon the other half, bringing new surface to the sun. after another day of curing, the windrows should be broken up into bunches no larger than can be pitched upon the wagon by a workman, thus saving the trouble of disentangling the vines. if rain comes, the bunches should be inverted the following day. in dry, hot weather the curing proceeds rapidly, while in cooler latitudes or cloudy weather the curing may require a week. the chief point is to prevent undue exposure of the leaves to the sun, and this is accomplished by the turning. the hay will mold in the mow if not thoroughly well cured, unless placed in a large body in a deep, close mow that excludes the air. some farmers use the latter method successfully, but the experimenter with the cowpea usually will fail, and should prefer thorough field curing, at the risk of some damage from rain and sun. the leaves are the most nutritious part of the plant, excepting the seed. as a catch crop.--a leading use of the cowpea is that of a catch crop, either between other crops or in a growing crop, such as corn. early maturing varieties can be brought in between main crops of the rotation in warm latitudes. the growth prevents the leaching of plant-food, shades the ground, adds nitrogen to the soil, smothers weeds, and produces material that is valuable as feed for livestock or an addition of organic matter to the soil. when the time that can be devoted to the crop is short, an early variety should be selected because its vines are far more valuable to the soil than an equal volume of a rank-growing variety that is not near maturity. [illustration: the cowpea seeded at the last cultivation of corn in the great kanawha valley, w. va.] if this legume were used whenever opportunity afforded along the southern border of our northern states, and throughout the south, the faded color of soils, resulting from leaching rains, would be replaced by the darker colors that mark the presence of rich organic matter. it is one of nature's best allies in the maintenance of soil fertility. chapter xi other legumes and cereal catch crops the soybean.--the soybean is gaining a place among the valuable legumes of the united states, and the acreage is increasing as its merits become known to all. its northern limits of profitable production are much farther north than those of the cowpea, and approach those of corn. in the south it is gaining friends. some of the advantages of the soybean over the cowpea, as found by the tennessee station, may be stated as follows: . greater seed production in case of fertile soils. . less sensitiveness to cold in spring and fall. . greater feeding value of the seed. on the other hand, a stand of cowpea plants is surer in the case of soils that crust, and germination runs higher. its climbing habit makes it better suited for growing with corn for forage. a less amount of leaves is lost in curing. fertility value.--there are so many varieties of the soybean and the cowpea, and adaptation to soil and climate varies so widely, that a fair comparison is difficult to make. in cool latitudes the soybean is recognized as distinctly more profitable, making larger yields of vines and of seed. where adaptation is equal, the cowpea makes a slightly larger growth of vines for hay, but the soybean gives a much richer lot of seed for use as grain. when soil fertility is the chief consideration, the adaptation of climate and soil should decide our choice between these two legumes. there is no serious difference where conditions for each are equally good. in cool latitudes the soybean should be chosen. in the ohio valley it is usually to be preferred. the greater part of the organic matter and the plant-food is stored in the vines and seed. feeding value.--the soybean makes a rich hay, surpassing clover, but it is coarse, and its unattractive appearance has caused many farmers to condemn it without trial. livestock eat it greedily, and it is one of our richest coarse feeds. the curing is more difficult than in the case of the cowpea because the leaves drop early, and the plants must be harvested before they approach maturity. probably the large yield of rich seed is the most important feature of the soybean crop. a ton of the seed contains as much protein as a ton of old-process oil meal, and three fourths as much as a ton of cottonseed meal. a good crop of the soybean will yield to bushels of seed, and as the nitrogen may be obtained chiefly from the air, the protein from this crop will come to be a leading substitute for purchased protein feeds. varieties.--there are many varieties of the soybean, and their characteristics are modified by climatic conditions. each region will find the varieties best suited to its purposes by tests. when hay is wanted, the variety should have fine stems and a leafy habit of growth. it may not be a good producer of seed, or able to hold the seed unshattered. the harvesting should be done when some lower leaves turn brown and before the pods are half filled. this stage of maturity should be reached early enough in the fall to insure some hot days for making the hay, and to permit harvesting in time for seeding to wheat. the preparation for wheat is made with the harrow and roller or plank drag. when the soybean is grown for seed, the variety should hold the peas without undue shattering, and an erect grower is more easily handled without loss of the crop. varieties for regions will vary, as do varieties of corn, according to climate. the planting.--early varieties of the soybean in the south can be planted as late as mid-summer, but farther north a profitable crop requires nearly all of the summer heat. the planting may be made soon after the usual time of planting corn, or whenever the ground has become warm. the preparation of the soil should be more thorough than that often given the cowpea. solid drilling of five pecks of seed per acre is satisfactory when the crop is for fertilizing purposes only, and gives an excellent hay on land free of weeds. when the crop is wanted for hay, however, wheat usually will follow, and it is much better to plant in rows and to give two or three cultivations so that the ground may be easily prepared for the wheat. a seed crop should be grown in rows. three pecks of seed in rows inches apart is the usual amount. the soybean does not come up through a crusted surface as well as most other plants, and planting should not be made immediately before a rain. the plants are tender and easily injured by use of a weeder. the fertilizer requirement is like that of the cowpea. an application of pounds of acid phosphate per acre should be given, and the addition of pounds of muriate of potash often pays. harvesting.--the soybean is not an easy crop to handle without loss. when grown for seed, the tendency of the pods to split and to drop the seed compels early cutting, and that makes curing more difficult. the mower is the only practical harvester on most farms, and the swath must be turned out of the way of the horses to save tramping. a side-delivery attachment can do the work. this is the best practice when cut for hay. when used for mixing with corn in a silo, the self-binder is satisfactory. the hay and seed crop must have thorough field-curing in windrow and bunches, and the harvest comes in a season when cold rains may prevail. this disadvantage of one of our most valuable crops is to be taken into account, but it will not prevent rapid increase in acreage as the merit of the soybean becomes known. the canada pea.--among field peas there are many varieties, but the one chiefly grown in the united states under the general name of the canada pea is the golden vine. it makes a green forage or hay that is rich in protein. usually it is grown with oats, giving a hay nearly as nutritious as that of clover. the crop is adapted to cold latitudes, and the planting should be made as early in the spring as possible. fall-plowing of the land is to be advised on this account. a good method of seeding is to drill in six pecks of the pea seed to a depth of four inches, and then to drill in six pecks of oats. the crop should be cut for hay when the oats are in the milk stage. at this time the peas are forming pods. the hay is not easily made, but is specially valuable for dairy cows. there is no profitable place for the canada pea in crop-rotations farther south than the true oat-crop belt, except as a green-forage crop. the soybean and red clover have greater usefulness in the center of the corn belt. vetch.--a variety of vetch known as winter, sand, or hairy vetch is coming into great usefulness as a catch crop. it is a winter annual, and being a legume, it has special value as a fertilizing crop. it is more hardy than crimson clover, and is grown as far north as winter wheat. the seeding is made in august in the north, and when grown for hay or seed, it needs rye or wheat to hold it up. rye and vetch make a rich and early green forage crop, and the proportion in which they are seeded varies widely in practice. six pecks of rye and pounds of vetch make an excellent seeding per acre. when grown for seed, one to two pecks of rye and to pounds of vetch may be used. the rye can be fairly well separated from the vetch by use of a fanning-mill or an endless belt of felt so inclined that the round vetch seed will roll down, while the rye sticks to the felt and is carried over. vetch is excellent as a fertilizing crop, adding a great amount of nitrogen to the soil when plowed down in may. if the seed were cheap, its use would become much more common. thirty pounds should be used when seeding alone after summer crops or in corn. farmers should produce the seed for their farms, and use it freely. when sown for seed, september first is a good date for the north. the seed matures in june. as vetch matures with wheat, it may easily become a weed on farms devoted largely to small grain, but it is not to be feared where tilled crops and sods are the chief consideration. inoculation is needed for best results, as in the case with other legumes new to a region. sweet clover.--much interest has been aroused within recent years in sweet clover, a legume that formerly was regarded as a more or less pernicious weed. its friends regard it as a promising forage crop, but too little is definitely known to permit its advocacy here except as a soil-builder in the case of poor land that is not too deficient in lime to permit good growth. experiments have shown that a taste for this bitter plant can be acquired by livestock, and it is nearly as nutritious as alfalfa when cut before it becomes coarse and woody. it is a strong grower, sending its roots well down into the subsoil, and its great ability to secure nitrogen from the air enables it to make a very heavy growth of top. the yield in forage usually exceeds that of the clovers. its most peculiar characteristic is its ability to thrive in a poor, compact soil that contains little humus. it may be seen in thrifty condition on roadsides and in waste places that seemingly would not support other plants. laying aside all consideration of its possibilities as a forage crop, it will come into greater popularity as a soil-builder on thin land. it is found usually on land of limestone formation, and shares with other legumes a liking for lime, but it has been grown successfully in regions that are known to have a lime deficiency. there are two biennial varieties and one annual. the biennial having white blossoms is the one most commonly seen, but the smaller variety with yellow blossoms is more leafy and palatable. the larger variety is the better fertilizer. the seed does not germinate readily, and to pounds is used per acre. the soil should be compact, and the seeding can be made in the spring with a cover crop, or in august by itself. inoculation is necessary if the right bacteria are not present. soil from an alfalfa field will serve for inoculation. an effort should be made to grow sweet clover on all infertile hillsides that are lying bare. it stops washing and paves the way for a sod of nutritious grasses. rye as a cover crop.--as has been stated elsewhere, the plant that stores nitrogen in its organic matter is most desirable, but the greater part of the soil's stock of humus did not come through legumes. among the good cover crops is rye, both on account of its ability to grow under adverse conditions and because it produces a large amount of material for the soil. when seeded in the early fall, its roots fill the soil the following spring, and the tops furnish all the material that can be plowed down with safety. in northern latitudes it is the most dependable of all winter cover crops, making some growth in poorly prepared seed-beds and on thin land. the most value is obtained from early seedings, thus securing a good fall growth. two bushels of seed are sufficient in good ground seeded ten weeks before winter begins, but two or three pecks should be added to this amount if the rye can be given only a few weeks of growth before frost locks up the soil. rye can grow in warm spells of winter, and starts early in the spring. it uses up some available fertility that might otherwise be lost, and releases it when it rots in the ground. when to plow down.--if rye has made a good growth before spring, the roots run deeper than the plow goes, and holds the soil much like a grass sod. in such a case the plowing may be made early in the spring without regard to the rye, though organic matter increases rapidly day by day if the rye is permitted to grow. as a rule, it is safest to plow down before the plants are eighteen inches high. they dry land out rapidly, and any mass of matter in the bottom of the furrow interferes with the rise of water from the subsoil. when the land is wanted for oats or corn, a jointer should be used on the plow to insure burying all the crop. buckwheat.--an excellent crop for green-manuring is buckwheat. it has such unusual ability to grow in a poor soil that the farmer who makes free use of it as a grain crop never boasts of acreage planted, assuming that his land will not be highly regarded if known to be devoted chiefly to buckwheat. it does not withstand heat well, especially from period of blossoming to maturity, and therefore is restricted to cool latitudes. when grown for grain, it usually is not planted until july, and matures a crop in a shorter period than any other grain. it is sensitive to frost, but may be planted as soon as the ground is warm, and will give a good body of matter for plowing down within eight weeks. the root growth is not extensive, but the crop leaves naturally heavy soils more mellow, and it is an excellent cleansing crop for weed-infested fields. it makes a less heavy growth than rye, but can be used at a time of the year that rye would fail. there is time in a single season to grow two crops of buckwheat for green-manuring, turning the first crop down when the blossoms appear. oats.--when a fall growth is wanted for the soil, and it is preferred that the plants be dead in the spring, oats make a good catch crop. thin land which is wanted for seeding to wheat and grass in the fall, or for timothy and clover seeding in august, may use oats as a spring cover crop. a large amount of humus-making material may be gained by this means. the only danger lies in the effect upon soil moisture. the oat crop uses up the water freely in its growth, and when permitted to form heads before being plowed down, the mass of material in the bottom of the furrow does not rot quickly enough to induce the rise of water from the subsoil. the land should be plowed early enough to permit a solid seed-bed to be made. chapter xii stable manure livestock farming.--the fertility of the soil is most safely guarded in regions devoted to livestock farming. "selling everything off the farm" is a practice associated in the public mind with soil poverty. it is a rule with few exceptions that the absence of livestock on the farm is an index of gradual reduction in the productive power of the land. generally speaking, the farmers who feed the most of their crops on the farm are maintaining fertility, and those who do not feed their crops on the farm have been making drafts upon the soil's stores of available plant-food that are evidenced in a reduction of yields. these statements will have the assent of all careful observers. the inference has been that the maintenance of fertility requires the return to the land of all the manure that would result from feeding its crops on the farm. we know that by such feeding we can return to the fields at least four fifths of all the plant-food taken out by the crops, and we loosely reason that such a scheme is demanded by nature. the maintenance of fertility involves good arithmetic, and a plant must have certain weights of mineral elements at command before it can grow, but it is not true that the productive power of land is chiefly dependent upon the return to it in manure of all the fertility removed by its crops. if this were true, meat and other animal products would be the sole food supply of the world's markets. [illustration: texas calves on an ohio farm.] the place for cattle.--there are general trends in human practice that cannot be changed by man. a change in human diet that makes the percentage of meat lower will not come through propaganda, but there are forces at work that will restrict the consumption of meat by the individual. the increase in population makes heavier demand for food. armsby has shown that the fattening steer returns to man for food only per cent of the energy value of the corn consumed by it, and in pork-production this percentage scarcely rises to . this is the reason meat-making animals give way before increase in population in congested countries. their office becomes, more and more, the conversion of products inedible to man to edible products. in our country their number will increase, doubtless, for a long period of time, finding their places more surely on eastern farms rather than on western ranches. they must find the cheaper land, and that is no longer confined to the west. they must be where coarse materials, inedible to man, are found, and that is on eastern as well as on western farms. their office will not be the conversion of crops into manure, but the conversion of coarse materials into human food in the form of meat or milk. this is the trend, and while the consummation may happily be far in the future, its consideration helps us to an appreciation of the facts regarding nature's provision for maintaining the productiveness of the soil. sales off the farm.--the day is now here when the major portion of human food must be provided in grain and vegetables and fruit, and the demand for hay and grain for animals off the farm is very large. fiber products likewise must be supplied. the draft upon the soil is heavy, but it must be good farm practice to supply bread and vegetables and fruit to the per cent of our population that is not on farms. the great majority of farmers do not feed all their crops to livestock, and the amount of food-stuffs, for human beings and animals, that is now going off the farms is none too great. many farmers who incline to believe that they are safely guarding fertility by feeding the most of their crops are not returning to the fields one third of the plant-food that their crops remove. there is no virtue in feeding when the manure is permitted to waste away. the losses in stable and barnyard, the wastes from bad distribution by animals, and the sales from the farm of some crops, animals, and milk, lead to the estimate that one half of the farms on which livestock is kept do not give to the fields in the form of manure over per cent of the fertility taken out of them by crops. this estimate, for which no accurate data is possible, probably is too high. the sales of food for man and animal are a necessity, and the scheme of farming involving such sales is right, provided the farmer makes use of other supplies of fertility. the area devoted to such sales will grow greater because human needs are imperative. livestock will become more and more a means of working over the material that man cannot eat--the grass, hay, stalks, by-products in manufacture, and coarse grains. the demand for meat and milk will lead to careful conversion of material into this form of food, and the animals on eastern farms will increase in number for a time, while sales of grain and vegetables grow greater. the draft upon soil fertility through sales must increase because every pound of material sold from the farm carries plant-food in it. the value of manure.--it is not possible to put a commercial valuation upon farm manures that may be a sure guide to any farmer. the value depends upon what the individual can get out of it in crops and improved soil conditions. it is rather idle to say that the annual product of a horse in the form of manure is $ , or more or less, even when an analysis shows that the nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash contained in it are worth that sum when valued at the market prices of those plant constituents. if the total amount of fertility found in the voidings of all the animals of the farm were provided in a pile of commercial fertilizer containing the same amount of each plant constituent, its worth to the farmer would depend upon his ability to convert all that fertility into crops at a profit. there are farmers so situated in respect to soils, crops, and markets that they can make a good profit from an investment of $ in the total liquid and solid voidings of a horse for a year. on the other hand, there are many who would fail. the values usually given are relative and suggestive. they are aids in forming judgment. actual value on the farm depends much on the man. the content of manure.--when the crops of a farm are fed, the manure contains nearly all the plant-food that went originally into the crops. in the case of idle work-horses on a maintenance ration, the manure contains practically all the plant-food. cows giving milk remove some fertility, and a growing calf or colt may take out per cent. there is some waste beyond control, but when manure is made on tight floors with good bedding, and is drawn to the field fast as made, on the average it carries back to the soil fully four fifths of the plant-food that existed in the feed. disregarding all cash valuations for the moment, here is an index of value that should be sufficient in itself to encourage the feeding of crops on the farm and the careful saving of the manure. when one can market his crops to animals on the farm at their cash value, and at the same time retain for his fields four fifths of all the fertility, he is like a manufacturer who can use much of his raw material over and over again. the value is in the manure, and full appreciation is lacking only because a majority of farms do not provide for careful saving of its valuable constituents. relative values.--the plant-food content of manure is determined chiefly by the feed. the animals add nothing: they subtract. the kind of animals consuming the feed does not affect materially the value of the manure made from it, if the animals are mature and not giving milk. the manures from the various kinds of animals differ in value per ton because the feeds differ in character and the manure varies in percentage of water. on an average, however, the total annual product of manure from farm animals, per pounds of live weight, does not vary widely in value. the rich protein feeds given the cow, and the heavy feeding, more than make amends for the fertility that goes into the milk, and her annual product, per pounds of live weight, may exceed in value that of the horse by per cent. this is likewise true of the pig, figured on the -pound basis, while in the case of the sheep the value, per pounds of live weight, is near that of the horse. [illustration: in the fertile miami valley, ohio.] these variations are not wide enough to have great importance to the livestock farmer. the manure represents to him four fifths of all the fertility that was contained by the feed he gave the various animals. they added no plant-food, and they took away only a fraction that was not large. they converted the crops into a form of plant-food that either is available or can become so quickly enough, and in addition to the nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash that would have a high valuation in a commercial fertilizer, there is a body of organic matter that affects the physical condition of the soil favorably. the manure also promotes the multiplication of friendly soil bacteria. its possibilities are so great that the inference of many farmers that no successful agriculture can be maintained without it is very natural. amount of manure.--vivian states that the amount of manure that may be made from feed can be determined by multiplying the total weight of dry matter in the feed by . this assumes that bedding will be used in sufficient amount to absorb the urine, and that will require material containing one fourth as much dry matter as there is in the feed. when the amount of hay and grain is known, and the dry matter in all succulent feed is estimated, the total product of manure in tons can be arrived at with fair accuracy. analysis of manure.--as has been stated, the content of the manure must depend chiefly upon the character of the feed. we are accustomed to combine feeding stuffs in differing proportions for horses, cows, pigs, and sheep. van slyke names the following approximate percentages of plant-food constituents in fresh excrements of farm animals, the solid and liquid being mixed: +----------+----------+------------+----------+ | animal | per cent | per cent | per cent | | | nitrogen | phosphoric | potash | | | | acid | | +----------+----------+------------+----------+ | horse | . | . | . | | cow | . | . | . | | pig | . | . | . | | sheep | . | . | . | | hen | . | . | . | +----------+----------+------------+----------+ he estimates that one ton of average mixed stable manure, inclusive of absorbents, contains approximately pounds of nitrogen, pounds of phosphoric acid, and pounds of potash. chapter xiii care of stable manure common source of losses.--when we bear in mind that four fifths of all the fertility removed from the land in the grains and coarse stuffs fed on the farm may be recovered from the animals and returned to the soil, we can appreciate the consideration that the care of manure should have on every farm. the careless methods that prevail in most sections of the country are an inheritance from the day when soils were new and full of fertility. these methods continue partly through a lack of confidence in the statements that the liquid portion of animal excrements, in average mixed stable manure, has nearly as great value as the solid portion. if this fact were accepted, many of the losses would be stopped. another reason for continuance of careless methods is failure to appreciate that the soluble portion of manure is the highly valuable part, and that leaching in the barnyard carries away value more rapidly than decrease in volume of manure indicates. the widely demonstrated facts do not have effective acceptance, and enormous loss continues. thorne found that manure placed in flat piles in the barnyard in january, and allowed to lie until april, lost one third of its value. under the conditions prevailing on many farms the loss suffered by exposure of manure is far greater. [illustration: concrete stable floors.] caring for liquid manure.--if all manure were in solids, one great difficulty in caring for it would not exist. the nitrogen is the most valuable element in manure, and two fifths of all of it in horse manure is found in the liquid. in the case of cow manure, over one half of the nitrogen is found in the liquid. more than this, a pound of nitrogen in the liquid has greater value than a pound in the solid because of its nearly immediate availability. there is only one good way of caring for the liquids, and that is by use of absorbents on tight floors or in tight gutters. american farmers find cisterns and similar devices nuisances. the first consideration is to make the floor water-tight, and clay will not do this. the virtues of puddled clay have had many advocates, but examination of clay floors after use will show that valuable constituents of the manure have been escaping. the soils of the country cannot afford the loss, and careful farm management requires acceptance of the truth that a tight floor is as necessary to the stable as to the granary. the difficulty in supplying a sufficient amount of absorbents on tight floors only emphasizes the loss where floors are not water-tight. use of preservatives.--the use of land-plaster in stables helps to prevent loss of the nitrogen-content through fermentation. its value does not lie chiefly in physical action as an absorbent, but the beneficial results come through chemical action. the volatile part of the manure is changed into a more stable form. in recent years this preservative has fallen somewhat into disuse, as acid phosphate contains like material and also supplies phosphoric acid to the manure. the phosphoric acid content of stable manure is too low for all soils, and the reënforcement by means of acid phosphate would be good practice even if there were no preservative effect. the use of fifty pounds of acid phosphate to each ton of manure will assist materially in preserving the nitrogen, and the gain in phosphoric acid will repay all the cost. it should be used daily on the moist manure, as made in the stable, and preferably just before bedding is added, so that the phosphate will not come into direct contact with the feet of the animals. some stockmen prefer the use of acid phosphate and kainit mixed half-and-half. the latter is a carrier of potash, and is a preservative of nitrogen. the use of ground rock-phosphate in stables is coming into use in some localities, chiefly through the recommendation that it be mixed with manure to secure availability of its own plant-food. it is not a preservative except in so far as it acts physically as an absorbent. it should not displace acid phosphate in stables, the preservation of nitrogen in the manure being the vital matter. spreading as made.--when farm conditions make it feasible to draw and spread manure fast as made, the danger of heavy loss in storing is escaped. there is evidence that no appreciable escape of fertility occurs when manure is spread on land that is not covered with ice. the phosphoric acid and potash are minerals, and leach into the soil. the nitrogen does not change into a gas in any appreciable amount when spread over the surface, and it likewise leaches into the soil. there are soils in which the decay of the organic matter would have a more beneficial effect than the rotting upon the surface, it may be, but the mulching effect of the manure is valuable. there should be no doubt that the loss from manure is kept to a minimum when it goes directly to the soil. in some latitudes the snow and ice oftentimes prevent spreading, or make it inadvisable, and in many farm schemes it is desirable to hold manure for special fields and crops. some means of storing manure must be provided in these instances. the covered yard.--if the possible value of manure were realized, provision for its care would be made as promptly and surely as provision for the care of a harvested crop. there are only three conditions that must be provided in order that manure may be preserved without much loss. the manure must be protected from leaching rains, it must be kept moist, and air must be excluded. the exposure of stable manure to the processes of fermentation and leaching, produces a waste that is believed to amount to several hundreds of millions of dollars in the united states annually. the day will come when no farmer will be willing to share heavily in a loss from this source, but will either spread manure fast as made or provide a roof for the stored manure. an absolutely tight floor is not so great a necessity as it is in the stable, because the amount of moisture is under control, but many farmers prefer to make concrete floors for the manure-shed and thus to guard against any loss from leaching. the chief cost may be confined to the roof. a better plan is to inclose three sides, making them so tight that all drafts will be prevented, and to use the shed as a place of exercise for cows or other livestock. we have learned within recent years that such an inclosure is more healthful and comfortable for cattle than stalls in an inclosed building, no matter how cold the weather may be. the fresh air without any drafts, and the liberty of movement, are needed. this shed should be connected with the stable, and on its floor the manure from the stables may be spread daily. it should be scattered evenly over the surface, and the mass can be kept firm by the tramping of the animals. it may be necessary to add some water at intervals to keep the mass sufficiently moist. the water excludes air and assists in holding harmful fermentation in check. harmless fermentation.--there is a kind of fermentation in manure that goes on in the absence of air. it is due to bacteria that break up the organic matter, producing rotted manure. this is not attended by much loss, and proceeds beneath the surface of the moist and packed mass. manure properly controlled under a roof goes into prime condition for spreading later in the season. the only danger is neglect, and especially when the livestock is removed to the pasture fields in the spring. if no water is added from time to time, hot fermentation replaces the harmless kind because air can penetrate through the bed of manure. compactness and moisture can save the plant-food with small loss throughout the summer, and a body of good manure is available when needed for top-dressing land in the summer. rotted manure.--mixed stable manure contains in a ton as many pounds of potash as it does of nitrogen, and yet we speak of it as a highly nitrogenous fertilizer. when fresh manure has suffered no loss of the liquid part, much of its nitrogen is almost immediately available. the nitrogen in the urine is in soluble forms, and fermentation quickly occurs. when manure is used on grass, it cannot be too fresh, as the immediate action of the nitrogen is desirable. vegetable growers often prefer a slower and more continuous action, and the rotting of manure under right conditions changes the liquid nitrogen into compounds that act more slowly. the solid material in horse manure contains less water than that of the cow, and this absence of water permits quick fermentation when air is present. the use of large quantities of such manure per acre is not liked by vegetable-growers. rotting under control in a covered barnyard has a beneficial effect for this reason when a hot manure is not wanted. the covered shed costs some money, and there is a loss estimated at per cent under the best conditions, but when manure cannot be drawn fast as made, there is compensation in improved condition for certain soils and crops. composts.--the compost, involving the handling of manure and soil, has no rightful place on the average farm. the gardener or trucker using great quantities of manure per acre must let some of the fermentation occur before he incorporates it with the soil, or harm will result. he wants reduction in volume, and such change in character that it will add to the retentive character of the soil respecting moisture instead of drying the soil out. he can afford all the labor of piling the manure with layers of sods or other material, and the turning to secure mixing. it is his business to watch it so that loss will not occur. the farmer uses manure in smaller quantities per acre. probably all his fields need the full action of the organic matter in its rotting. the percentage of humus-making material is low. the place for fresh manure is on the land, when this is feasible. the covered shed is a device for holding manure with least possible loss when spreading cannot be done, or a supply must be carried over for land in the summer. the gain in condition is only incidental, and an advantage chiefly to vegetables. the composting of manure by gardeners is not a practice to be copied on most farms. poultry manure.--the value of poultry manure often is overestimated. its content of plant-food is one half greater than that of horse manure, ton for ton. the availability of the nitrogen is so great that returns from applications are immediate, and give the impression of greater strength than is possessed. its availability makes it excellent for plants that need forcing. for such use it needs reënforcing only with acid phosphate, but as a general manure it should have the addition of potash. acid phosphate should be used in the poultry-house to prevent loss of nitrogen, which escapes quickly on account of rapid fermentation, and to supply phosphoric acid. thirty pounds of acid phosphate to each pounds of the manure gives a mixture containing one pound of nitrogen, three pounds of phosphoric acid, and two fifths of a pound of potash. the addition of four pounds of muriate of potash makes the mixture a well-balanced and effective fertilizer when used at the rate of to pounds per acre. dry muck or loam should be mixed with it to serve as an absorbent and to give good physical condition. chapter xiv the use of stable manure controlling factors.--the farm supply of stable manure is a carrier of plant-food, returning to the soil four fifths of all the fertility removed in the crops fed, but it is much more than this. land which receives only plant-food, as may be the case when fertility is supplied in commercial fertilizers, loses good physical condition. organic matter is needed for maintenance of physical condition, the retention of soil moisture, the freeing of inert minerals in the land, and the promotion of bacterial life in the soil. no small share of the value of a ton of manure is due to its organic matter. this is a factor in the problem when deciding what disposition of the manure will pay best. one field may be in condition to respond fully to the use of commercial fertilizers, while another is too deficient in humus for best results. some crops are more insistent upon supplies of organic matter than others. again, the disposition of the manure depends upon the supply. if most crops are fed on the farm, the manure is a leading source of fertility for all fields and crops, and may be used once or twice in the crop-rotation on every field. if the manure is in small amount, due to a scheme of farming involving the growing of crops for market, the function of the manure may be only to encourage the starting of sods, in which legumes are a leading factor. direct use for corn.--the practice of spreading manure on grass land for corn is based upon much good experience. the custom is nearly universal in regions where corn is an important part of a four, five, or six years' rotation, and all of the corn and hay is fed on the farm. this disposition of the manure permits the handling at times when other work does not rush. the supply carried over from the spring is put on in late summer, and the manure made in the early part of the winter can be drawn to the field fast as made. manure spread immediately before the sod is broken is less effective, as no leaching of soluble elements into the surface soil occurs before the coarse material is buried in the bottom of the furrow. [illustration: corn in the ohio valley.] the use of fresh manures for corn is rational, because corn is a gross feeder and requires much nitrogen. all plants having heavy foliage can use nitrogen in large amounts. it is possible to apply manure in excessive amount for this cereal, the growth of stalk becoming out of proportion to the ear, but the instances are relatively few. ordinarily corn suffers from lack of nitrogen. when the farm manure is in large amount, its direct use for corn is good practice. effect upon moisture.--coarse manures should not be plowed down late in the spring, as they increase the ill effects of drouth. decayed vegetation, well mixed with the soil, increases the soil's water-holding capacity, but undecayed material in the bottom of the furrow is harmful. fresh, strawy manure, made immediately before the time for breaking a sod, is preferably carried over in a covered shed until a later season of the year. when manure has been spread upon a sod in the fall or early winter, it decays quickly after the plowing, and aids in resistance to drouth. when it is plowed down, the ground is kept more porous, and the presence of plant-food and moisture at or near the depth of plowing encourages deeper rooting of plants, and thus indirectly assists them to withstand dry weather. if the plowing is good in character, leaving the furrow-slice partly on edge, and permitting the harrow to mix part of the turf and the manure with the remainder of the soil, the best conditions respecting moisture are secured. manure on grass.--when the crop-rotation embraces two or more years of grass, or one of clover followed by only one of grass, it is better practice to use the manure to thicken the sod. the object in view is the largest possible amount of crops, and the maximum amount of organic matter for the soil. grass is a heavy feeder, like corn, and makes good use of nitrogen. its roots fill the soil so that no loss attends the use of manure. when the supply is given the grass, after the harvest of the second crop of clover and during the winter, the timothy can make a rank growth. the part of the plant above ground has corresponding development below ground. not only does a large increase in the hay crop result, but the heavy mass of grass roots, the aftermath, and the remains of the manure provide a great amount of fertility for the corn which follows. the increase in hay permits a corresponding increase in the manure supply the next year, if it is fed, and if it is sold on account of a market price greater than its value for feed and manure, it adds to income materially--and that is one reason for farming. manure on potatoes.--there are excellent cash crops that may get more than their fair share of the farm supply of fertility, and against the interest of fields in the farm not adapted to cash crops. the justification is found in the farm ledger. in some regions potatoes are the best crop in point of net income per acre, where the acreage is kept restricted so that there may be plenty of organic matter to help in conserving moisture. it is not good practice to use fresh manure, and especially that from horse-stables, for potatoes. a heavy application makes an excessive growth of vine, and the yield of tubers suffers. a stronger deterrent is the effect that fresh manure has on the development of the spores that produce the disease known as potato-scab. rotted manure is less dangerous, and few crops repay its use in higher degree than the potato. some growers prefer to make heavy application of fresh manure to grass for corn, and follow with potatoes so that they can profit by the rotted organic matter that remains. in this way the physical condition is made excellent, moisture is well held in a dry season, and commercial fertilizers can supplement the plant-food left in the manure. when to plow down.--excellent farmers differ regarding the relative efficiencies of manure plowed down and that mixed with the top soil. both classes may be right for their individual instances. the plowing down of manure helps to deepen the soil, and that always is desirable. it causes plants to root deeply, and that is a distinct benefit in a drouthy season, and always desirable. when a soil is in such tilth that the breaking-plow always brings fertile soil to the surface, the plowing down of manure gives excellent results, though it should be permitted to leach at the surface for a few weeks before being turned under. when land is being prepared for a seeding to grass or clover, the supply of manure should not be plowed down wherever the breaking-plow brings soil to the surface that is deficient in humus. in the latter case the manure always should be used as a top-dressing, and should be evenly spread and well mixed with the surface soil. it is needed there far more than it can be needed farther down. the surface soil always should have a high content of organic matter. heavy applications.--when the farm supply of manure is small, applications should be light. the manure should not be the dependence for plant-food on a part of a field, or a single field of the farm, under such circumstances. it is more profitable to give a light dressing to a larger area. the manure is needed to make a fertilizing crop grow, and a very few tons per acre can assist greatly, when rightly used. the manure is needed to furnish bacteria to the soil, and a small amount per acre is useful for this purpose. always there is temptation to use all the manure on a field convenient to the barn, and to concentrate it on a sufficiently small area to make a good yield sure. the loss to the farm in this method is heavy. the thin spots and the thin fields have first right to the manure as a top-dressing, and six tons per acre will bring larger returns per ton than twelve tons per acre. at the pennsylvania experiment station the land receiving ten tons of manure per acre in the common four years' rotation of corn, oats, wheat, and mixed clover and grass gives added returns of $ . a ton, while an application of eight tons pays $ . a ton, and a six-ton application brings the value per ton up to $ . . these applications are made twice in the four years. reënforcement with minerals.--a ton of mixed manure in the stable contains about ten pounds of nitrogen, five pounds of phosphoric acid, and ten pounds of potash. this makes the percentage of nitrogen and potash the same, while the percentage of phosphoric acid is only half as high. a commercial fertilizer of such percentages would be esteemed a badly balanced one. certainly the phosphoric acid should be relatively high, as this constituent of plant-food runs low in the soil. if pounds of per cent acid phosphate were added to each ton of manure while it is being made in the stable, seven pounds of phosphoric acid would be added, making the percentage in the manure a little higher than that of the nitrogen and the potash. a better balance is given to the fertility. there cannot be any loss in this purchased plant-food, if the stable floor is tight. fermentation cannot drive it off, and when applied to the soil it is tightly held. practically no phosphoric acid is found in drainage waters. eight tons of manure thus reënforced would contain the same amount of plant-food as a ton of fertilizer having per cent nitrogen, per cent phosphoric acid, and per cent potash. the addition of the pounds of acid phosphate per ton does not bring the phosphoric acid content up as high relatively as in most commercial fertilizers, but it helps. the total amount in the eight tons manure may be sufficient, and the greater part of the total has sufficiently immediate availability, while the manure must undergo decomposition, and some of the nitrogen and potash does not become available within the year. durability of manure.--tests of the durability of manure in the soil involve some uncertain factors, but we are interested only in the effects of applications. these effects may continue for a long term of years, and an example will illustrate. land may be too infertile to make a good clover sod. if a good dressing of manure be given half the land, affording proper conditions for making a sod, the result will be a heavy growth of clover, while the seeding on the unmanured half will be nearly a failure. if no manure or fertilizer be used in the crop-rotation, the probability is the manured portion of the field will again make a fairly good sod. how much this success may be due to the remains of the manure, and how much is attributable to the effect of the clover and to better bacterial life introduced and favored by the manure, no one knows. probably the greater part of the benefit comes only indirectly from the manure applied three or four years previously. half of the field may thus be lifted out of a helpless state and remain out of it for a long term of years, while the other half grows only poorer. a probable illustration of this lasting indirect effect may be seen in one of the plats in the soil fertility experiments on the pennsylvania experiment station farm. experiments at the rothamstead station, england, show some lasting results from applications of manure. director hall cites the case of one plat of grass land which was highly manured each year from to , and has since been left unmanured. in this plat gave double the yield of an adjoining plat which had been left unmanured during the eight years. in the plat, last manured in , gave over double the yield of the unmanured. in the following ten years its yield was a half more than that of the unmanured. in the next ten years the yield was a quarter more. in the next ten years it fell to per cent more than the plat that had received no manure in the beginning of the experiment. in the following ten years it rose to per cent. here is a lasting effect of manure for over forty years where grass was grown continuously. chapter xv crop-rotations the farm scheme.--notwithstanding some of the theorizing that does not commend itself to the practical man, farm management is taking on the form of a science. it involves the organization of a farm for best results, and in the scheme that should be worked out for any particular farm the most important feature is the crop-rotation. the selection of crops is controlled by so many local considerations, including the personal likes and dislikes of the farmer, that very rightly the kinds of rotation are innumerable. the order in which crops may be grown with most profit is less variable, and yet even here local conditions may quickly derange the scheme of a theorist. there is, however, such right relation of facts to each other that we are getting a working philosophy, and the individual farmer can bend practice to his own liking in considerable degree, and yet not compel plants to do their part at a disadvantage. he has much liberty in the order of their growing, without endangering profits materially. theoretically, this is not true, and the factors of production on any farm are such that the largest return is obtainable in only one scheme of farming. practically there is rather wide liberty. value of rotation.--experience has shown the benefit of variety in crops grown on land. among the advantages of crop-rotation are the following: . it enables the farmer to maintain the supply of organic matter in his soil. the roots and stubble of a grain crop are insufficient for this purpose, and the introduction of a sod or cover crop is helpful. . it permits the use of legumes to secure cheap supplies of nitrogen. . some plants feed near the surface of the ground, and the use of other plants which send roots deeper adds to the production. . some crops leave the soil in bad physical condition, and the use of other crops in the rotation serves as a corrective. . the keeping of livestock is made more feasible and profitable, and this leads to increase in farm manures. . in a proper succession of crops the soil is covered with living plants nearly all the time, and thus is prevented from washing or leaching. . in addition to these influences upon soil fertility, crop-rotation assists in control of insect and fungous foes and of weeds; it permits such distribution of labor on the farm that the largest total production may be secured by its employment; and it saves the farmer from sole dependence upon a single crop. [illustration: penn's valley, pennsylvania.] selection of crops.--the natural inclination of the farmer is a consideration that cannot be ignored. if a man does not like certain kinds of animals or crops, his farm or market must possess an unusual advantage to counter-balance. illustration of this truth may be seen in every farming community. as a rule, the crops should be those that are well adapted to the particular soils upon which they are grown. it is up-hill work to compete with producers whose soils have far better adaptation, unless the local markets equalize conditions. the crops should follow each other in such succession that each crop naturally paves the way for the next one in the succession, or at least does not place its successor at a disadvantage. when it is feasible, a rather large proportion of the entire produce of the rotation should be feeding-stuff for livestock, as soil fertility is most easily guarded by livestock farming. this is desirable when consistent with profit, but, as we have seen, it is not an absolute essential. an old succession of crops.--in the corn belt of the northern states some time-honored crop-rotations have been formed by corn, oats, wheat, clover, and timothy. the number of years devoted to the grain and to the sod has varied with the soil and the desire of its owner. a common succession is corn one year, oats one year, wheat one year, clover and timothy one year, timothy one year--a five years' rotation that has much substantial success behind it. such a rotation is wholly reasonable and in accord with the nature of things. every year furnishes some organic matter for the soil in roots and stubble, and all the produce of four years out of the five may be fed on the farm. there is one cash crop, or two if the price of the clear timothy hay justifies sale. the manure may be hauled upon the sod when other work does not press, and it goes where the crop is one that prefers fresh manure, be that the grass or the corn. there is plenty of time after the corn to prepare for oats, and after the oats to prepare for wheat. the preparation for the wheat is sufficient for the clover and timothy. the seedings come only in the spring and the fall, when rainfall is more abundant and effective than in mid-summer. the danger of failure in case of this rotation is relatively small. corn two years.--hunt says that the prosperity of the east, as a whole, would be greatly increased if the rotations of crops were so modified as to increase the corn acreage. he suggests the four rotations given in the table below, which is taken from bulletin of the pennsylvania experiment station. the fertilizers recommended should maintain fertility. corn in crop-rotations +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------------------------------------+ | yr. | yr. | yr. | yr. | | | ------+-------+-------+-------+-------------------------------------+ | | | | | corn: to loads of manure and | | | | | | pounds of phosphoric acid. | | | | | | corn: to loads of manure and | | | | | | pounds of phosphoric acid. | | | | | | oats: no fertilizer. | | | | | | wheat: pounds each of phosphoric | | | | | | acid and potash. | | | | | | clover and timothy: no fertilizer. | | | | | | timothy: pounds each of nitrogen,| | | | | | phosphoric acid, and potash. | | | | | | timothy: pounds each of nitrogen,| | | | | | phosphoric acid, and potash. | +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------------------------------------+ the oat crop.--in the northern part of the corn belt the oat crop is profitable. in the southern half of ohio and regions of like temperature the oat crop rarely pays. the heat, when the oat is in the milk stage, usually is too great. the tendency there is to eliminate this crop. where silage is wanted, the stubble-land can be seeded directly to wheat with good results. a common practice is to seed to wheat between the shocked corn, and the wheat does poorly unless the soil is quite fertile. two crops of wheat.--a common practice has been to grow two crops of wheat, seeding first in the corn stubble-land, and plowing the ground for the second wheat crop, making a smooth surface for mowing. this method ceased to pay well when wheat became low in price. it has the advantage of giving two cash crops to the rotation. where winter wheat does not thrive in the north, it is dropped out, and the seeding to clover and grass is with the oat crop. there is the compensation of a large oat yield where the climate is too cold for a good crop of wheat. [illustration: in the shenandoah valley.] the clover and timothy.--the timothy and clover sod is made inexpensively so far as labor is concerned. the first crop of hay is chiefly clover, and the soil is enriched by the roots and stubble, while the hay is converted into manure. the second year the hay is nearly clear timothy. the sod should not be left until it becomes thin, but should be turned under while heavy, no matter if this must be after one season's harvest, or two. a sod stands three or four years for harvest on some farms, and without heavy fertilization there is decrease in fertility. two legumes in the rotation.--if all the crops of this five years' rotation, excepting wheat, were fed on the farm, and if all the manure were saved and rightly applied, there would be little or no difficulty in maintaining fertility, provided the soil were friendly to clover. the fact is that much such land has grown poorer, and it is known that another legume is needed in the rotation. the substitution of the soybean or cowpea for the oat crop gives excellent results. it makes a large supply of rich hay, and it fits the soil nicely for winter grain. the use of the breaking-plow is escaped. the surface of the land is in good tilth, especially if the legume was planted in rows so that cultivation could be given. a cutaway harrow, run shallow, and a roller make the seed-bed. near the southern edge of the oat belt this substitution gives more value in the crop following corn, and at the same time conserves soil fertility. where land is thin, a four years' rotation of corn, soybeans or cowpeas, wheat, and clover is one of the best, because it contains two leguminous crops, and because one of them favors the wheat which follows and the clover seeded in the wheat. potatoes after corn.--when potatoes are grown in the corn belt, a five years' rotation of corn, potatoes, oats, wheat, and clover, or corn, potatoes, wheat, clover, and timothy, is one of the best. when a late potato crop is grown, there is not time for seeding to wheat in cool latitudes, and the oat crop, or the soybean, fits in best. farther south, where the oat crop is less profitable, there usually is time to go directly to wheat. the advantage in this rotation is that the fresh manure can be used on the sod for the corn, and the potato thrives in the rotted remains of the sod and manure. corn leaves the soil in good physical condition for the potato. commercial fertilizer is used freely for the potato, which repays fertilization in higher degree than most other staple crops. the land can be prepared for seeding to wheat and grass with a minimum amount of labor. the rotation is excellent where there is enough fertility for the potato, which usually can be by far the most profitable crop in the entire rotation. a three years' rotation.--farm conditions may require that certain fields in the farm go under a crop-rotation covering three years. in the winter wheat belt this may be clover, corn, and wheat, or clover, potatoes, and wheat. it is an excellent rotation when early planted potatoes or silage corn follows the sod, favoring the wheat in which the clover again is seeded. the ground is plowed only once in three years. the clover furnishes hay for the farm, and organic matter with nitrogen for the land. there are two cash crops in the rotation when potatoes are grown, and that makes a heavy draft upon fertility. experience has demonstrated that commercial fertilizers or manure become necessary as a supplement to clover in a three years' rotation embracing potatoes. this rotation gives good control of most weeds and insect enemies. where wheat is unprofitable, the oat crop is used in its stead. if mixed hay is wanted, timothy is sown with the clover. this is poor practice from the standpoint of soil fertility because the draft upon humus is heavy in a close rotation embracing a tilled crop and small grain. the sod should be chiefly clover, or manure should be used in connection with commercial fertilizer. grain and clover.--in the case of some soils it is possible to grow a wheat or corn crop each year, clover being grown as a catch crop. in the long run, this practice will fail because the clover will cease to make a thrifty growth when grown so nearly continuously. it succeeds best on fertile land. potatoes and crimson clover.--in some potato-producing sections in warm latitudes it is a not uncommon practice to grow potatoes year after year on the same land, seeding to crimson clover after the removal of the crop in august, and plowing the clover down early in the spring. rye has been similarly used farther north. in each instance available plant-food must be freely supplied. the practice is a temporary expedient of value, but probably cannot be pursued indefinitely with profit. this is likewise true of similar close rotations. chapter xvi the need of commercial fertilizers loss of plant-food.--the soil is composed chiefly of material that never will enter into the structure of plants, but that serves us by affording a congenial place for plant-roots. it anchors the plants, holds moisture for them, and offers opportunity for all the processes necessary to the preparation of plant-food and to its use. in this material are the abundant supplies of such plant-food as silica, but, as has been previously stated, their very abundance leads us rightly to disregard them in our thinking. our interest is only in the very small percentage of material that is composed of the four constituents which may be lacking in available form in the soil: nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potash, and lime. we believe that the only consideration that now need be given lime is as a soil-corrective and, when there is no acidity, we may assume that there is plenty of lime present. when yields of crops tend to decrease, the only plant-foods with which we are concerned are nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash. the materials were stored in all agricultural land, and much of the supply is in inert forms. they help to make what we call the natural strength of the land. the rotting of organic matter, tillage, and many other agencies bring about some availability. the removal of crops, leaching, etc., reduce the supply. the right use of commercial fertilizers involves the addition of some plant-food when the available supply in a particular soil is inadequate. prejudice against commercial fertilizers.--the owner of land that was made very fertile by nature, and that has not been cropped long enough to reduce the supply of available fertility to the danger-point, rarely fails to entertain a prejudice against commercial fertilizers. it is the rule that he refuses to consider their use until the decrease in crop yields becomes so serious that necessity drives. if his land is not contributing its fair share of grain, vegetables, etc., to the markets, but has all its products converted into meat or milk, the supply of available plant-food may remain sufficient for so long a time that the matter cannot have any interest for him. if the land is producing some crops for market, there is reduction in its mineral store. it is the rule that the boundary of profitable use of commercial fertilizers pushes westward from the older and naturally poorer seaboard states about one generation after need shows in the crop yields. lack of knowledge, the association of the use of commercial fertilizers with poor land, and some observation of the unwise use of fertilizers, combine to create a lively prejudice. they are viewed as stimulants only, and costly ones at that. are fertilizers stimulants?--some words carry with them their own popular condemnation. we are accustomed to draw a sharp line between foods and stimulants, and to condemn the latter. to stimulate is to rouse to activity. tillage does not add one pound of plant-food to the soil, and its office is to enable plants to draw material out of the soil. it makes activities possible that convert soil material into crops. fertilizers add plant-food directly to the soil, and it is also to their credit that their judicious use favors increased availability in some of the compounds already in the soil. the greater part of the labor put on land is designed to make plant-food available, either by providing moisture, or ease of penetration of plant-roots, or activity of bacteria, or other means that will permit plants to remove what they need for growth. fertilizers supply fertility directly and indirectly, but it is their direct service in meeting a deficiency in plant-food that affords all needed justification for their use by practical farmers. referring to the thirty years' soil fertility experiments of the pennsylvania station, hunt says that they "show that there is nothing injurious about commercial fertilizers. for thirty years certain plats in this experiment have received no stable manures. no organic matter has been added to the soil except that which was furnished by the roots and stubble of plants grown. these plats are not only as fertile as they were thirty years ago, but they have yielded, and continue to yield, as good crops as adjacent plats which have received yard manure every two years in place of commercial fertilizer." soil analysis.--there is wide misconception regarding the value of chemical analysis of the soil as an aid in making choice of a fertilizer. analysis has shown that some soil types are relatively richer in plant-constituents than are others, and it has shown abnormal deficiency in some types of limited area. it has given us more knowledge of soils, but as a guide to fertilization in particular instances it usually has no value. the samples used by an analyst are so small that the inaccuracy in his determination may easily be greater than the total amount of plant-food in a very heavy application of commercial fertilizer. a field that has been reduced to temporarily low productive power by heavy cropping or bad farming methods may show a greater content of plant-food than another field that is in a highly productive condition. this is a fact difficult of acceptance by some who want the aid of science, but such are the present limitations. the weight of a fertilizer application is so small in comparison with the weight of the surface part of an acre of land that the use of a ton of fertilizer may not be detected in the analyst's determinations, and moreover his determinations of actual availability in the soil's supplies are not serviceable in the selection of a fertilizer for any particular field and crop. physical analysis.--chemical analysis is costly and unsatisfactory as a guide to fertilization. physical analysis by a competent man may have distinct value, and especially to one lacking experience with his soil. the mapping of soils by national and state authorities has given pretty accurate knowledge of hundreds of soil types, their location and characteristics, and when a soil expert obtains a sample of soil and the history of its past treatment, he can assign it to its type and give to its owner dependable advice regarding its crop-adaptation and probable fertilizer requirements. the use of nitrogen.--there is no fully satisfactory way of determining the kind and amount of fertilizer that should be used at any particular time for any one crop. perfection in this respect is no easier in attainment than in other matters. there are, however, means of arriving at conclusions that are a valuable guide. in a general way, nitrogen is in scant supply in all worn soils. wherever the cropping has been hard, and manure has not gone back to the land, the growth in stalk and leaves of the plant is deficient. the color is light. inability of a soil to produce a strong growth of corn, a large amount of straw, or a heavy hay crop, is indicative of lack of nitrogen in nearly every instance. the legumes, such as clover, and the stable manures are rich in nitrogen, and when the scheme of farming involves their use on all the land of the farm, no need of purchased nitrogen may arise in the production of staple crops. in the black corn soils the nitrogen content originally was high. lands that naturally are not very fertile rarely have enough available nitrogen. where timothy is a leading crop, the demand for nitrogen is heavy. a cold spring or summer, checking nature's processes in the soil, may cause a temporary deficiency in available nitrogen in land that usually has a sufficient supply. associating a rank growth of stalk and leaf with an abundance of nitrogen, the experienced man can form a pretty safe opinion regarding the probable profitableness of an investment in this element. it costs nearly four times as much per pound as either of the two other constituents of a fertilizer, and so far as is feasible it should be obtained through the legumes and stable manure. phosphoric-acid requirements.--soil analyses show that the content of phosphoric acid in most soils of this country is relatively small. the results of experiments with the various constituents of fertilizers are in accord with this fact. fertilizer experiments at the various stations and on farms are nearly a unit in showing that if any need in plant-food exists, phosphoric acid is deficient. when crop-producing power decreases, and the farmer begins to seek a commercial fertilizer to repair the loss, he finds that bone-dust or acid phosphate is serviceable. the resulting increase in yield often leads to such sole dependence upon this fertilizer that clover and manure are disregarded, the percentage of humus is allowed to drop, and finally the fertilizer is brought into disrepute. the need of phosphoric acid is so common that it is the sole plant-food in much fertilizer, and the dominant element in practically all the remainder on the market. [illustration: plat experiments.] the need of potash.--land which is deficient in organic matter ordinarily is lacking in available potash, and responds with profit to applications, provided the nitrogen and phosphoric-acid requirements have been met. clay soils contain far more potash than sandy soils, and in a farming scheme for them that permits the use of manure and clover, it may not become necessary to buy much potash. the liberal use of straw in the stables, and the saving of all the liquid manure, are helps. farms from which the hay and straw have been sold for a long period of time develop an urgent need of potash. much muck land is very deficient in this constituent. fertilizer tests.--every farmer should conduct some fertilizer tests for himself. it is only the soil itself that can make an adequate reply to a question regarding its needs. the test should be made under conditions furnishing evenness in the soil, and it should be continued for years. there is pleasure to an intelligent farmer in such questioning of his soil, and only in this way can assurance be obtained that the investment in fertilizers is the wisest that can be planned for the farm. there are only three plant constituents to be tested, but they must be used in combination as well as singly. a soil that is deficient in the three may not give any return from potash alone, and usually does not, although it may give a marked increase from use of phosphoric acid alone. the plats may be eight rods long and one rod wide, containing each one twentieth of an acre, and having strips two feet wide separating them. the following chart suggests quantities of fertilizers to be used on the one-twentieth acre plats, in number: +---------------------------------------+ | nothing. | +---------------------------------------+ | pounds nitrate of soda. | +---------------------------------------+ | pounds per cent acid phosphate. | +---------------------------------------+ | pounds muriate of potash. | +---------------------------------------+ | nothing. | +---------------------------------------+ | pounds nitrate of soda. | | pounds per cent acid phosphate. | +---------------------------------------+ | pounds nitrate of soda. | | pounds muriate of potash. | +---------------------------------------+ | pounds per cent acid phosphate. | | pounds muriate of potash. | +---------------------------------------+ | pounds nitrate of soda. | | pounds per cent acid phosphate. | | pounds muriate of potash. | +---------------------------------------+ | nothing. | +---------------------------------------+ variation in soil.--the difficulty in determining the character of fertilizer for a field, due to variation in the soil, is overestimated. very often a land-owner says, "i have a dozen kinds of soil in every field." this is true in a way, it may be, but if all the field has had the same treatment in the past, the probability is that the fertilizer which is best for one part of the field will be quite good for the other parts. the likeness in characteristics that permits the land to be cropped as one field gives some assurance of likeness in plant-food needs, even where the proportion of clay and sand varies and the color is not the same. there may be wide variation in the productive power of the fields of a farm, due to the treatments they have received. the land that grows heavy clover in a close rotation, or receives all the stable manure, may need neither nitrogen nor potash, while another field, hard-run by timothy and corn, may need a complete fertilizer. when a careful fertilizer test on land of only average productive power has been made, the owner has some definite knowledge of his soil that enables him to give more intelligent treatment to all his fields than was possible before the test had been made. he observes the appearance and yield of plants where the plant-food requirement was fully met, and makes allowance in other fields for gains or losses in the soil due to different treatment. it is out of the question to become discouraged before a beginning has been made. if yields are limited by absence of plant-food, fertilizers must be used. if money must be expended for fertilizers, it is only good business to know that the money is expended to the best advantage. chapter xvii commercial sources of plant-food acquaintance with terms.--the hesitation of many users of commercial fertilizer to master the few technical terms used in analyses of the goods, for which over one hundred million dollars annually are expended in this country, is to be deplored. the number of the materials available for any large use as sources of plant-food in a commercial fertilizer is small, and something of their characteristics should be known. every farmer should have a working knowledge of these materials--their sources, the percentage of plant-food carried by them, and their probable availability. he should know in a general way their advantages and disadvantages in comparison with each other. nitrate of soda.--one of the best carriers of nitrogen is nitrate of soda, which is imported from chili, south america, where great beds exist. the most of the impurities are removed, and the nitrate of soda comes to us in bags holding pounds, and looks much like discolored salt. it is easily soluble in water, and usually contains a little over per cent of nitrogen, which is in a very available form. its immediate availability brings it into use by gardeners and truckers, and it is an excellent source of nitrogen for grass fertilizers to be used in the early spring. it was formerly advised that nitrate of soda should not form part of a fertilizer for use before plant-roots had filled the ground, its high availability being supposed to lead to heavy loss by leaching. the pennsylvania experiment station uses it as its sole source of nitrogen in fertilizers for staple crops on its acres of farm land. it is effective in fertilizers for corn, wheat, potatoes, and grass, as well as for special crops. the warnings regarding loss by leaching should not be disregarded, however. if the price of nitrogen in an organic form were as low as it has been in nitrate of soda, and if the soils of the pennsylvania station farms were sandy, the use of nitrate of soda as the sole carrier of nitrogen would be inadvisable. the only fact of consequence is that the danger of loss has been over-stated, turning some farmers away from the use of a good and relatively cheap carrier of nitrogen. sulphate of ammonia.--this is a by-product in the manufacture of coke and also of illuminating gas. hunt estimates that the amount of nitrogen lost annually in pennsylvania's coke industry would be sufficient, if recovered by proper type of ovens, to furnish every acre of land under cultivation in the state with four fifths of all the nitrogen needed to keep it in a maximum state of fertility. sulphate of ammonia contains about per cent of nitrogen, which is in a quite available form. it has a tendency to exhaust the lime in the soil, producing an acid condition. some plats in the fertilizer experiment at the pennsylvania station have received their nitrogen in the form of sulphate of ammonia for years, and are now in such acid condition that no crops thrive upon them. the corrective, of course, is lime, and if ammonium sulphate were somewhat lower in price, its use would be profitable, justifying cost of correction of acidity if it should occur. it is used by manufacturers of commercial fertilizers, and is well adapted to mixtures on account of its physical condition. dried blood.--there is no more satisfactory source of organic nitrogen than dried blood of high grade. the best blood, red in color, contains nearly as much nitrogen as nitrate of soda, running from to per cent. the nitrogen is not as quickly available as that in the nitrate, but is more so than that in any other form of organic nitrogen. one would rarely go amiss in the purchase of dried blood as a carrier of nitrogen if the price were relatively as low as in the case of nitrate of soda, but he should not let any prejudice in favor of animal origin of fertilizers lead him to pay an excessive price per pound for the nitrogen contained in it. such a prejudice has caused the nitrogen in a good red blood to sell for one half more per pound than in nitrate of soda, and it is not a good purchase on that basis. the lower grades of dried blood on the market contain as low as per cent of nitrogen, and the animal refuse put into it gives it a content of a few per cent of phosphoric acid. this black blood is very variable in composition, and should always be accompanied by a guaranteed analysis. tankage.--the waste from the slaughter of animals goes into a product called tankage. the refuse is cooked for removal of the fat, and then ground. it may run high in nitrogen on account of the amount of meat in the mixture, and it may be low in nitrogen and very high in phosphoric acid by reason of the large amount of bone in the mixture. only a guarantee of analysis affords safety to the buyer. it is a relatively slow and good fertilizer, and is used usually in connection with forms of plant-food that are more quickly available. fish.--near the atlantic coast a large quantity of ground fish, after the extraction of oil, is used as a fertilizer, but the cost of the nitrogen and phosphoric acid in this carrier is relatively too high to justify its free use. like dried blood, its organic character gains for it a popularity that does not have full justification in fact. animal bone.--the original source of phosphoric acid as a fertilizer was animal bone, just as hard-wood, unleached ashes were the source of potash. the organic character of the animal bone made it appear more truly a manure than could any rock or other inorganic substance. there is no more satisfactory source of phosphoric acid than animal bone, and if it were in full supply for the needs of soils, there would be little occasion to discuss the merits of rock-phosphate and other similar materials. the supply is a small fraction of the need. if all animal bone were carefully saved and returned to the land that produced all of our animals, it would return to the soil only what those animals carried away in their bones, and that is indeed a small fraction of all the draft our crops make upon the soil's supply of this one substance. some of the best animal bone goes into the manufacture of articles that never contribute anything to the soil, and there are other sources of loss. the supply of phosphoric acid from bone is too small, when compared with the land's need, to deserve more than a small fraction of the consideration it receives by users of commercial fertilizers. the peculiar situation respecting animal bone has come about through a form of deceit. the demand for bone existed, and there was no legal restraint in the matter of branding phosphatic rock as "bone," "bone-phosphate," etc. in the past, nearly all forms of rock-phosphates have carried the word "bone" on the bag to quiet the apprehension of those who entertained a prejudice against anything other than animal bone. nearly all the phosphoric acid has come from rock, and its use has been necessary and profitable, but the misrepresentation fostered the old-time prejudice. within recent years some manufacturers have tired of the seeming deceit that served no purpose with many customers, and have placed acid phosphate and mixed goods upon the market without the intimation that the phosphoric acid was derived from animal bone. the demand for bone makes prices high for the very limited amount upon the market, when availability is taken into account, and the advice that such goods be used would be valueless if it had any general acceptance. prices would go higher, and the amount in the world would remain wholly inadequate. raw bone.--stable manure lasts several years in the soil because decay is slow. raw bone has appealed to many because its action is likewise necessarily slow. the fat in it prevents fine grinding and protects the coarse particles from decay. it is known as bone-meal or coarse ground-bone. a good quality of raw bone may contain per cent of nitrogen, while the phosphoric-acid content is to per cent. the bones of old animals is less rich in nitrogen. the age of the animals, and the sorting for manufactures of various kinds, cause variation in quality, and the purchase of raw bone should be made on guaranteed analysis just as surely as the purchase of bone that has been treated in any way for removal of various substances in it. steamed bone.--when animal bone is boiled or steamed under pressure for removal of the fat and the cartilage, the content of nitrogen is reduced, and the percentage of phosphoric acid is increased by this removal of fat and nitrogenous substance. the nitrogen in steamed bone may run as low as per cent, and the phosphoric acid may go up to per cent. the composition of steamed bone is so widely variable that the name means little, and purchase should be made only on guaranteed analysis. some grades run very low both in nitrogen and phosphoric acid, due probably to adulteration. the boiling or steaming of bone makes fine grinding possible, and the fineness and absence of fat permit quick decay in the soil. steamed bone is an excellent source of phosphoric acid. the availability is less immediate than that of acid phosphate, but much greater than that of raw bone. rock-phosphate.--while the greater part of our soils contain relatively scant stores of phosphoric acid, the deposits of this plant constituent in combination with lime are immense. the rock now chiefly used in this country is found in south carolina, tennessee, and florida. it varies greatly in content of phosphoric acid. when pulverized for direct use on land, without treatment with sulphuric acid to make the plant-food available, a grade running per cent phosphoric acid, or less, usually is selected, the higher grades being reserved for treatment with acid or for export. this untreated rock, pulverized exceedingly fine, often is known as floats. the value of a pound of phosphoric acid in floats, as compared with that of a pound in the treated rock, known as acid phosphate, is a matter upon which scientists differ widely. only a small percentage of the plant-food is immediately available, and the question of wise use hinges upon the degree of availability gained later, and the time required. the large amount of experimental work that has been done affords data that causes the following opinion to be stated here: rock-phosphate, known as floats, is not a profitable source of plant-food for soils deficient in organic matter, when compared with acid phosphate. it is more nearly profitable in an acid soil than in one that has no lime deficiency. it gives more satisfactory results when mixed intimately with stable manure than when used upon land that remains deficient in organic matter. applications should be in large amount per acre-- to pounds--in order that the amount of readily available phosphoric acid may meet the immediate need of plants. dependence should be placed upon the readily available acid phosphate in all instances until experiment on the farm shows that the rock-phosphate is a cheaper source of plant-food than the acid phosphate. acid phosphate.--when animal bone is treated with sulphuric acid, the result is an acid phosphate, but treated animal bone is so rare on the market that it may be ignored. the acid phosphate on the market is rock-phosphate treated with sulphuric acid to render its plant-food available. the content of phosphoric acid varies because the original rock-phosphate varies, but the most common grade on the market is guaranteed to contain per cent available phosphoric acid, and to per cent insoluble. some acid phosphate is guaranteed to contain per cent available phosphoric acid, and some runs down to per cent available. an acid phosphate contains quickly available plant-food. a prejudice exists against it on account of its source, and it has been a common practice to label the bags "bone-phosphate," or "dissolved bone," or such other designation as would imply an organic source, but the acid phosphate is made out of rock-phosphate, regardless of the name given. the prejudice against the rock as a source of plant-food is giving way. it is our chief and cheapest source of supply. the combination of sulphuric acid with rock-phosphate in the production of acid phosphate produces sulphate of lime, known as gypsum or land-plaster. the amount of gypsum in a ton of acid phosphate varies, but may be roughly estimated by the buyer as two thirds of the total weight of the acid phosphate. the tendency of gypsum is, in the long run, to make a soil acid, and its use necessarily hastens rather than retards the day when a lime deficiency will occur. the influence in this direction is not great enough to be a very material factor in deciding upon a carrier of phosphoric acid. if a soil has little lime in it, a state of acidity soon will come anyway, and the increase in amount of required lime will be small. the cheapness of acid phosphate, as compared with animal bone, is the decisive factor. the ill-effects usually attributed to acid phosphate are not due in any great degree directly to the sulphuric acid used in its making, but to the bad farming methods that so often attend its use. when the need of commercial fertilizers is first recognized, acid phosphate seems to meet the need. the soil's store of available phosphoric acid gives out first, and this fertilizer brings a new supply. if the available potash is in scant amount, the acid phosphate helps in this direction by freeing some potash. the phosphoric acid has peculiar ability in giving impetus to the growth of a young plant, and that enables it to send its roots out and obtain more nitrogen than it otherwise would do. the farmer thus may come to regard it as a means of securing a crop, and there is neglect of manure and clover. if a field is thin and fails to make a sod, there is no immediate compulsion to use manure or to grow a catch crop to get organic matter, but the field is cropped again with grain. soon the supply of humus is exhausted, the soil lies lifeless, and the stores of available nitrogen and potash are in a worse depleted state than formerly. the fault lies with the method. the phosphoric acid in the acid phosphate was needed. profit from its use was legitimate, but the necessity of supplying organic matter became even greater than it would have been otherwise. tens of thousands of our most successful farmers use heavy applications of acid phosphate, but they keep their soils in good physical condition by the use of manure or clover, and they apply potash and nitrogen when needed. the clover is assured by using lime wherever it is in too limited supply, and that is the case in most instances, regardless of the use of any kind of commercial fertilizer. basic slag.--when iron ores contain much phosphorus, its extraction by use of lime gives a by-product in the making of steel that has agricultural value. the ores of the united states usually do not give a slag sufficiently rich in phosphorus to be valuable. nearly all the basic slag used as a fertilizer is imported from germany, and usually contains to per cent of phosphoric acid. the availability of the plant-food in this fertilizer has been the subject of much discussion. the chemist's test which is fair for acid phosphate is admittedly not fair when used for basic slag. field tests, at experiment stations and on farms, are our best sources of knowledge. when the soil is slightly acid, each per cent of phosphoric acid in the slag appears to be about as valuable as each per cent of the available phosphoric acid in an acid phosphate. some of the effectiveness may be due to the lime, although very little of it is in forms regarded as valuable for the correction of soil acidity. there is evidence that basic slag favors clover. it has not been found feasible to ship this material many hundreds of miles inland from the seaboard to compete with acid phosphate, but it is an excellent source of phosphoric acid for soils that are not rich in lime. muriate of potash.--the mines of stassfurt, germany, contain an inexhaustible supply of potash in various compounds. muriate of potash is prepared from the crude salts, and the commercial product on our markets has the appearance of a coarse and discolored salt. it is handled in large bags, and inclines to become moist by absorption of water from the air. it contains some common salt. the content of actual potash is about per cent. the potash is readily available, but the loss from leaching out of the soil is very small. muriate of potash is our cheapest source of potash, and should be used for all staple crops except tobacco, sugar beets, and, possibly, the potato. tests even on heavy soils fail to show any injury to the quality of the potato, and on light soil the muriate may always be used. sulphate of potash.--some sulphate of potash is imported into this country. its content of potash may vary or per cent below or above . its physical condition favors mixing more than does the muriate. it usually costs several dollars a ton more than the muriate, and the fact that it is known to favor quality in tobacco, and is popularly supposed to do so in the potato, creates demand at the higher price. it is soluble in water, and quickly available. as a rule, it has no higher agricultural value than the muriate. kainit.--unlike muriate and sulphate of potash, kainit is a crude product of the german mines, having received no treatment to remove impurities. it contains to per cent of potash, and is rated as a sulphate, but one third of it is common salt, and in effect upon quality it should be classed with muriate and not sulphate. its low content of plant-food should confine its use to regions relatively near the seaboard. when shipped far inland, the price becomes too high to give a reasonably cheap pound of potash. wood-ashes.--wood-ashes contain lime and potash, with a small percentage of phosphoric acid. the market price is above agricultural value, and any needed potash should be obtained from the german potash salts. other fertilizers.--manufacturers of commercial fertilizer make use of other materials, some of which, like manufactured nitrogen, are excellent, and others are low in quality and slow in action. the sources of plant-food that have been described form the great bulk of all fertilizers on the market, and from them may be selected all the materials a farmer needs to use on his land, either singly or home-mixed. in most instances the selection will embrace only four or five of these fertilizing materials. salt.--salt is not a direct fertilizer, and its use is not to be advised unless it can be secured at a very low price per ton. some soils have been made more productive by the application of to pounds per acre, and chiefly in case the salt was mixed well with the soil when the seed-bed was made. the practice of using salt as a top-dressing on wheat in the spring gives less effectiveness it is believed. salt frees potash in the soil, and may have some practical effect upon soil moisture. as a soil amendment, salt has had more reputation than its performance justifies. if land is infertile, it is better, as a rule, to apply actual plant-food. coal-ashes.--there is no plant-food of value in coal-ashes. the physical condition of heavy soils is improved by an application, and their use may be quite profitable in this way if cost of application is small. when used as a mulch, ashes conserve moisture. muck.--the use of muck pays in stables, as it is a good absorbent and contains some nitrogen which gains in availability by mixture with manure. its direct application to land as a fertilizer does not pay the labor bill under ordinary circumstances. sawdust.--as a fertilizer, sawdust does not have much value, but serves as an excellent absorbent in stables. its presence in manure need not cause fear of injury to the soil. when fresh sawdust is applied in large quantity to a sandy soil, the effect upon physical condition is bad, increasing drouthiness. chapter xviii purchasing plant-food necessity of purchase.--the necessity of buying plant-food in the form of commercial fertilizers is a mooted question in any naturally fertile agricultural region just so long as crop yields do not drop to a serious extent. the natural strength of the land and the skill that enters into the farming are important factors in determining the profitableness of recourse to purchased plant-food. the free use of organic matter to maintain the supply of humus defers the time when commercial fertilizers should be used. good tillage frees the potential plant-food of the soil, and delays the day of necessary purchase. the farm so situated that it can have all its products fed upon it is longer independent of outside help. the profitable use of feeding-stuffs from other farms is a safe way of escaping the direct purchase of fertilizers, although it is a transfer of fertility to the farm as surely as the employment of fertilizers, and is not a method that may have general adoption. [illustration: in the lebanon valley, pennsylvania.] the organic sources of fertility, such as slaughter-house refuse, are containers of plant-food as surely as is stable manure. the inorganic sources, such as acid phosphate and muriate of potash, are containers of plant-food as surely as is animal bone or blood. there is no line that may be drawn to debar any substance that supplies plant-food profitably and contains no compound harmful to the soil. the purchase of plant-food should begin whenever profit is offered by it, and in connection with its use there should be good tillage, organic matter, and healthful plant conditions in every respect. the use of a fertilizer pays best when the conditions are such that the plants can avail themselves of it in the fullest degree. good farming and the heavy use of commercial fertilizers go consistently hand-in-hand. fertilizer control.--the dreams of the patent-medicine vender never pictured more favoring conditions for his activity than were found by fertilizer manufacturers and agents before state laws provided for inspection and control. men who wanted to do a legitimate business welcomed protection from the unscrupulous competition that dishonest men employed. the memory of some of the frauds perpetrated lingers, and causes a questioning to-day that is unnecessary. all fertilizer-control laws afford a good degree of legal protection to the buyer, although in most states they do not demand a clearness and fullness in statements of analyses that would be helpful to many, and they fail to require that sources of plant-food be given. some fertilizers are sold for more than they are worth, and some are bought for soils and crops that need other kinds of plant-food, but this is due to lack of knowledge on the part of the buyer that he can acquire. the law does its part in the work of protection better than many buyers do their part. it has driven fraudulent brands off the market, compelled carefulness in factory-mixing, and given to the intelligent buyer a knowledge of the kinds and amounts of plant-food in the bag or ton. the sampling is done by disinterested men, and the analyses are made by competent chemists. there need be little distrust of the analysis as printed on the bag, unless a failure of the manufacturer to keep his goods up to the standard has been made public in the state's fertilizer bulletin. brand names.--notwithstanding all that has been done by the state to acquaint the buying public with the composition of fertilizers, many purchasers are guided in selection by the brand name, and that usually is fanciful in character, no matter whether it be "farmers' friend" or "jones' potato fertilizer." in either case it may be far from friendly to soil or pocket-book, and widely at variance with the needs of the soil for which it is purchased. the pretense of making a fertilizer peculiarly adapted to the potato, or to wheat, or to corn would not attract a single buyer if the public would compare the analyses of these special crop fertilizers offered by manufacturers and note their dissimilarity of composition. any kind of a mixture may be given any kind of a name. it is the composition that counts. the farmer is in the market for nitrogen and phosphoric acid and potash, singly or combined, for a certain soil, and all he wants is to know the number of pounds he is getting, its availability, and its price per pound. any added detail not required by law is an impertinence. statement of analysis.--it would be well if the law refused to the manufacturer the privilege of printing unnecessary detail in the statement of analysis that must be placed upon the fertilizer bag. it is added to confuse the buyer and mislead him regarding actual value. the following statement is an example of this practice: analysis per cent nitrogen . to . equal to ammonia . to . soluble phosphoric acid . to . reverted . to . available . to . insoluble . to . total . to . potash (actual) . to . equal to sulphate of potash . to . as the row of larger figures is not guaranteed percentages, it has no value. the buyer is not concerned regarding the amount of ammonia to which the nitrogen is equal, and so the second line is a needless repetition. the fifth line gives the sum of the third and fourth, the available being the total of the soluble and reverted. therefore the third and fourth lines may be ignored. the sixth line gives the percentage of unavailable phosphoric acid in the rock, and should be ignored by the purchaser who wants available plant-food. the seventh gives the sum of the available and insoluble, and should be ignored. the ninth is a restatement of the eighth line. there then remains the following guaranty: per cent nitrogen . available phosphoric acid . potash . this is a low-grade fertilizer whose cheap character becomes apparent when the unnecessary statements and restatements are erased. a ton of it contains only pounds of nitrogen, pounds of phosphoric acid, and pounds of potash. valuation of fertilizers.--the manufacturer of a mixed fertilizer must make use of the unmixed materials he finds upon the market. the prices of the various plant constituents in the different unmixed materials can be determined by averaging quotations in leading markets for a given length of time. the fair retail price is obtained by adding about per cent to the wholesale cash price. the retail cash price per pound of the plant constituents in leading markets is thus determined for their various forms and carriers. a pound of nitrogen in dried blood may have its valuation fixed at a figure per cent higher than that of a pound of nitrogen in nitrate of soda simply because the dried blood sells at a price per ton that makes that difference. it is true commercial value that is sought, and that may be very different from agricultural value. the mixed fertilizer of the manufacturer has its content of plant-food known by analysis. its number of pounds of the various constituents in a ton is known, and the retail price per pound of these substances has been fixed. the commercial value per ton can then be determined, provided proper allowance is made for cost of mixing and bagging. the individual must pay in addition the freight, and usually a considerable sum for unnecessarily costly methods of distribution and collection. a bit of arithmetic.--this paragraph is intended to serve the man who is willing to be reasonably near right if he cannot be wholly so: a ton is pounds, and one per cent is pounds. in dealing with fertilizers it is the practice to call pounds, or one per cent of a ton, a unit, and to base the price of the nitrogen, and phosphoric acid, and potash, on the unit. this is done for convenience. if five cents is a fair price for a pound of available phosphoric acid in one's locality, as it would be if a ton of per cent acid phosphate cost $ , a unit of pounds is worth $ . each one per cent guaranteed is thus worth a dollar, and the phosphoric acid in the fertilizer is easily valued. if a pound of potash in a ton of muriate is worth five cents in one's locality, as it would be if a ton of muriate cost $ , the muriate being one half actual potash, a unit of pounds of potash is worth $ . each one per cent of guaranteed potash is thus worth one dollar, and the entire content of potash is easily valued. if a pound of nitrogen in nitrate of soda is worth seventeen and one half cents a pound in one's locality, as it would be if a ton of nitrate of soda cost $ , a unit, or one per cent, is worth $ . , and the content of nitrogen is easily valued. the prices named would seem high to good cash buyers near the seaboard, and they are too low for some other regions where freights are very high. they are only illustrative. the consumer can get his own basis for an estimate by obtaining the best possible cash quotations from city dealers. some interested critic may point out that nitrate of soda should not be the sole source of nitrogen in a fertilizer on account of its immediate availability. manufacturers use some sulphate of ammonia, and a pound of nitrogen in it has had practically the same market price as that in nitrate of soda. tankage may be used in part, and in it the nitrogen costs very little more per pound. it may be said that the potash in the fertilizer is in form of sulphate. usually that profits the user nothing, and often the claim is baseless, but if it is a sulphate, the cost of the potash should have only per cent added to the valuation of the potash, which usually will not add one dollar to the total cost of the ton of mixed fertilizer. basing the valuations of the pounds of plant-food in the mixed fertilizer on the value per pound in unmixed materials delivered to one's own locality, there must be taken into account the added expense of mixing. high-grade fertilizers.--a high-grade fertilizer is not necessarily a high-priced one. what we want in a fertilizer is a high content of the plant-food needed, together with desirable availability. if only phosphoric acid is wanted, a per cent, or per cent, acid phosphate is high-grade because it contains as many pounds of available phosphoric acid in a ton as the public can buy in a large way. a per cent acid phosphate is low-grade. the effort is to escape paying freight, and other cost of handling, on waste material as far as possible. generally speaking, the higher the percentages of plant-food in a fertilizer, the cheaper per pound is the plant-food. a low-grade fertilizer rarely fails to be an expensive one because the expense of handling adds unduly to the price per pound of the small content of plant-food. chapter xix home-mixing of fertilizers the practice of home-mixing.--the business of compounding fertilizers has been involved in a great deal of unnecessary mystery. many of our best station scientists have labored to show that the home-mixing of fertilizers is a simple and profitable piece of work, and the heaviest users of fertilizers in the east now buy unmixed materials, but a majority of farmers use the factory-mixed. manufacturers are right in their contention that many people do not know what materials are best for their own fields, or what proportions are best, but the purchase of mixed materials does not solve their problem and it does not help them to a solution as quickly as home-mixing. the source of the plant-food in the factory-mixed goods is not known, while it is known in the home-mixed. effectiveness of home-mixing.--van slyke says ("fertilizers and crops," p. ): "manufacturers of fertilizers and their agents have persistently sought to discourage the practice of home-mixing, but their statements cannot be accepted as the evidence of disinterested parties. it has been represented to farmers that peculiar and mysterious virtues are imparted to the plant-food constituents by proper mixing, and that really proper mixing can be accomplished only by means not at the command of farmers. such statements are misrepresentations, based either upon the ignorance of the person who makes them or upon his determination to sell commercial mixed goods." criticisms of home-mixing.--the manufacturer's advocate formerly laid much stress upon the danger attending the treatment of bones and rock with sulphuric acid. that is a business of itself, and the home-mixer has nothing to do with it. he buys on the market the acidulated bone or rock, just as a manufacturer makes his purchase. it is claimed that the manufacturer renders a great public service by using supplies of plant-food that the home-mixer would not use, and thus conserves the world's total supply. let us see the measure of truth in the statement. the manufacturer gets his supply of phosphoric acid from rock, bone, or tankage exactly as does the home-mixer. his potash he buys from the syndicate owning the german beds, and the farmer does the same. these sources must contribute all the phosphoric acid and potash used on land, if we except trifling supplies of ashes, marl, etc., and the only difference in the transaction is that in one case the manufacturer buys the materials and mixes them, and in the other case the farmer buys them direct and mixes them. the remaining constituent is the nitrogen. if the manufacturer uses nitrate of soda, sulphate of ammonia, bones, tankage, or manufactured nitrogen, he does what the home-mixer may do. most nitrogen must come from these sources. if all came from these sources, the increased demand would not affect the price. the beds of nitrate of soda will last for hundreds of years, the present waste in ammonia from coal is immense, and the supply of manufactured nitrogen can be without limit. the saving in use of inert and low-grade forms of nitrogen is more profitable to the manufacturer than to the farmer who buys and pays freight on low-grade materials. the rather remarkable argument is advanced that fertilizer manufacturers do not make a large per cent on their investment, despite the perfection of their equipment, and therefore the farmer cannot find it profitable to mix his materials at home. by the same reasoning, assuming for the moment that the profit in manufacturing does not pay a heavy dividend on all the stock issued, if a great hotel does not find its dining-room a source of profit, as many hotels do not, no private home should hope to prepare meals for its own members in competition with hotels. as has been stated, every user of commercial fertilizer should learn what a pound of plant-food in unmixed material would cost him, selecting the common materials that are the only chief sources. if he can buy a pound of nitrogen in nitrate of soda or sulphate of ammonia, a pound of phosphoric acid in acid phosphate or steamed bone, and a pound of potash in muriate or sulphate of potash for less than they would cost in the factory-mixed goods offered him, allowing to himself a dollar or so a ton for the labor of mixing, it is only good business to buy the unmixed materials. the saving usually is from five to ten dollars a ton, excepting only interest on money, as he would pay cash for the unmixed material. the cost of bags always is mentioned. that is not to be considered by the farmer, as he uses the bags in which the unmixed materials come to him. the filler.--there has been much misleading use of the word "filler," as applied to fertilizers. we have seen that a pure grade of dried blood contains about per cent of nitrogen. the buyer of a ton of dried blood thus gets about pounds of plant-food. the remaining pounds constitute what may be called nature's "filler." the blood is a good fertilizer. we do not buy nitrogen in a pure state. we buy a ton of material to get the needed pounds of nitrogen. thus it is with nitrate of soda, sulphate of ammonia, acid phosphate, muriate and sulphate of potash, and all other fertilizer materials. as freight must be paid upon the entire ton, it usually pays best to select materials that run high in percentage of plant-food. it is possible to get very low-grade fertilizers that have not had any foreign material added by the manufacturer. an acid phosphate may be poor in phosphoric acid because low-grade rock was used in its manufacture. kainit is a low-grade potash because the impurities have not been taken out. filler may be used, however, for two reasons, and one is legitimate. when limestone or similar material is used merely to add weight, reducing the value per ton, the practice is reprehensible. the extent of this practice is less than many suppose, preference being given to the use of low-grade materials in making very low-priced fertilizers. a legitimate use of filler is to give good physical condition to a fertilizer. some materials, such as nitrate of soda and muriate of potash, take up moisture and then become hard. the addition of peat or limestone or other absorbent is necessary to keep the mass in condition for drilling. the use of some steamed animal bone or high-grade tankage in the mixture helps to prevent caking. the home-mixer can use a drier without loss, as he does not pay freight upon it. dry road dust will serve his purpose. his need of a drier may be greater than that of the manufacturer, as he probably will use only high-grade unmixed materials. if the use of the home-mixture is immediate, no drier to prevent caking is needed, but its presence facilitates drilling. storage of unmixed materials in a dry place is an aid in maintaining good condition. ingredients in the mixture.--the matters of interest to the farmer are the determination of the amounts of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash that he should apply to a particular field, their availability, and their cost. let us assume that he has found pounds of a fertilizer containing per cent nitrogen, per cent phosphoric acid, and per cent potash to be an excellent application for wheat on a thin soil that is to be seeded to clover and timothy. this fertilizer contains pounds of nitrogen to each pounds. he applies pounds of the fertilizer per acre, or pounds of nitrogen. the fertilizer contains pounds of phosphoric acid to the pounds. he thus applies pounds of phosphoric acid per acre. the fertilizer contains pounds of potash per pounds, and he therefore applies pounds per acre. what he has really learned, then, is that an acre of this land, when seeded to wheat, needs pounds of nitrogen, pounds of phosphoric acid, and pounds of potash. it is in these terms he should do his thinking, and the matter of fertilization becomes simple. in the general farming of the pennsylvania experiment station, it is the practice to depend upon nitrate of soda as the source of a fertilizer for wheat. manufacturers claim that sulphate of ammonia and tankage would be better. the farmer soon will learn what he prefers for his soil, provided he practices home-mixing. let us assume that he uses nitrate of soda, which never varies much from per cent in its content of nitrogen. if pounds of nitrate contain pounds of nitrogen, the pounds wanted for an acre will be found in / of pounds or pounds. thirty pounds of phosphoric acid are wanted for an acre. if the acid phosphate contains per cent of phosphoric acid, or pounds to the , the required amount will be / of , or pounds. eighteen pounds of potash are wanted for an acre. the muriate of potash on our markets never varies much from per cent in its content of potash. if pounds of muriate contain pounds of potash to the , the required amount wanted will be / of , or pounds. adding the , , and pounds, we have pounds for the acre of land. if the field contains acres, the order will call for times the pounds of nitrate of soda, times the pounds of acid phosphate, and times the pounds of potash. if the farmer prefers to use sulphate of ammonia, which varies little from per cent of nitrogen, or pounds in the , he will get his pounds of nitrogen for an acre by buying / of pounds, or pounds, and the substitution of the pounds of sulphate of ammonia for the pounds of nitrate of soda will reduce the total application of fertilizer per acre from pounds to pounds. the important fact is that in either case there is the required amount of nitrogen. let us assume that the field contains enough nitrogen, but other needs remain the same. in such case, the nitrogen is dropped out, and the application becomes pounds per acre. the home-mixer may substitute tankage of guaranteed analysis for part of the nitrogen and phosphoric acid. let us assume that the tankage runs per cent nitrogen and per cent phosphoric acid. if half the required nitrogen per acre, or - / pounds, is wanted in tankage, pounds of the tankage will supply it. at the same time the pounds of tankage supplies pounds of phosphoric acid, replacing one third of the pounds of acid phosphate. we thus have for the acre pounds of nitrate of soda, pounds of tankage, pounds of acid phosphate, and pounds of potash, or pounds. the content of plant-food remains the same, but one half of the nitrogen is only slowly available. the farmer who buys unmixed materials will incline to use only a few kinds, and at first he will confine himself chiefly to materials whose composition varies little. in this way he quickly sees in a ton of the material, not the whole bulk, but the definite number of pounds of nitrogen and other constituents of plant-food contained in it, and the calculations in home-mixing become simple. materials that should not be combined.--the advocate of factory-mixed goods warns the farmer against the danger of making combinations of materials that will cause loss by chemical action. the danger is wholly imaginary if no form of lime, wood-ashes, or basic slag is used in the home-mixtures. as has been said, some materials will harden, if permitted to absorb moisture, and if the mixture must stand, a few hundred pounds of muck or dry road dust should be added to each ton as a drier, and a correspondingly larger amount per acre should be applied. making a good mixture.--the process of mixing is simple, and careful station tests have shown that it is fully as effective as factory-mixing. the unmixed materials should be kept in a dry place until the mixing is done. if there are any coarse lumps, a wooden tamper can crush them on the barn floor, and the material should be passed through a sand-screen. the material of largest bulk should be spread on the floor, and the other materials should be put on in layers. three careful turnings with a shovel will secure good mixing. scales should be used to secure accuracy in desired amounts of the materials. buying unmixed materials.--acid phosphate, animal bone, and tankage can be bought of any fertilizer agent, but when one pays cash, he does well to get quotations from various leading manufacturers. the names of dealers in nitrate of soda can be secured from the new york agency which keeps its address before the public in agricultural papers. this is likewise true in the case of the syndicate controlling all the potash. when the addresses of leading distributors of all needed materials have been secured, quotations should be obtained on a cash basis. the best terms are obtained by groups of men combining their orders. chapter xx mixtures for crops composition of plant not a guide.--it has been pointed out that a chemical analysis of a soil is not a dependable guide in the selection of a fertilizer. years ago the theory was advanced that the analysis of the crops desired should be a guide, but it has proved nearly worthless. this theory does not take into account the soil's supply of plant-food. moreover, a certain crop may demand a large supply of an element at a time of the year when the soil's supply is inactive. the need of nitrogen for grass in the early spring, before nitrification in the soil is active, is an illustration. let the causes be what they may, the fertilizer formulas that call for plant-food in a fertilizer in the same proportions that it is found in plants are disappointing in their results. the analysis of the plant is not a dependable index. the multiplication of formulas.--fertilizer manufacturers have made all possible combinations of fertilizer materials, using them in various quantities. each manufacturer has given a mixture a brand of his own, and confusion reigns. there is no formula for a soil or crop that will remain absolutely the best, even for one particular field. it represents one's judgment of the present need, and is employed subject to change, just as is the prescription of a physician. it is usually only an approach toward the most profitable amount and kind of plant-food that may be supplied. the one important consideration is that no manufacturer can know the need nearly so well as the intelligent farmer who knows the history of his field and constantly tests its ability. [illustration: on the productive farm of dr. w. i. chamberlain, in northern ohio.] a few combinations are safest.--it is the best judgment of scientists to-day that greater results would be obtained from the use of commercial fertilizers if the number of formulas could be reduced to ten, or even a less number. the satisfactory fertilizers fall into three classes: . the phosphatic fertilizer, carrying phosphoric acid to land that gets its nitrogen from clover or stable manure, and that continues to supply its own potash. such a fertilizer should have a high content of phosphoric acid in order that the freight charge, per pound of plant-food, may be as low as possible. acid phosphate, basic slag, and bone are chief in this group. . the combination of phosphoric acid and potash that is needed by soils obtaining all required nitrogen from clover or manure. in most instances the phosphoric acid should run higher than the potash, but the percentage of potash should never run lower than . a lower percentage of potash is not as profitable as a higher one, provided any potash is needed. the potash content should be greater than that of the phosphoric acid in case of some sandy soils and of some crops of heavy leaf growth, including various garden crops. . the so-called "complete" fertilizer that supplies some nitrogen with the two other plant-constituents. such fertilizer should furnish, with few exceptions, per cent of nitrogen, if no more. amount of application.--in common practice fertilizers are not applied freely enough when they are used at all. the exception to this rule may be found in the case of small applications to cold and inert soils to force growth in the first few weeks of a plant's life. it is difficult to see how or pounds of fertilizer can affect an acre of land one way or the other, but experience teaches that such an amount can do so in respect to young plants. phosphoric acid has peculiar power in forcing some development of roots in a small plant, and a small application in the drill or row may help the plants to gain ability to forage for themselves. in early spring a small application of nitrate of soda has marked effect, tiding the plants over a period of need until the soil is ready to give up a part of its store. if a soil is not fertile, and fertilizers are needed as an important source of plant-food throughout the season, the application should be liberal. if it is necessary to plant a field that is deficient in fertility, expending labor and money for tillage and seed, the only rational course is to furnish all needed plant-food for a good yield. there may be little net profit from the one crop, but there will be more than could be obtained without the liberal fertilization, and the soil will be better equipped for another crop. this applies, in a notable degree, to fertilization of a wheat crop with which timothy and clover will be seeded. the difference in cost of pounds of a high-grade fertilizer and pounds of a low-grade one, when applied to a poor soil under these circumstances, may be recovered in the grain crop, and at the same time a good sod will be made possible for the permanent improvement of the land. it is a safe business rule that land should be left uncultivated unless enough plant-food can be provided in some way for a good yield. the man who cannot incur a heavy fertilizer bill, when necessary, should restrict acreage for his own sake. similarity of requirements.--many of our staple crops are very similar in their fertilizer requirements, and this simplifies fertilization. setting aside the impression gained from the dissimilarity in the so-called corn, potato, wheat, and grass fertilizers on the market, the farmer knows that the soil which is in a good state of fertility is best for any of them, and if the soil is hard-run, it should have its plant-food supply supplemented. the hard-run soil usually is lacking in available supplies of all three plant-food constituents. if a fertilizer containing per cent of nitrogen, per cent of phosphoric acid, and per cent of potash serves the wheat well, it will serve the timothy that starts in the wheat. likewise it will serve the corn, although a heavier application will be needed because corn is a heavy feeder. experience has taught that it will serve the potato similarly, and that the potato will repay the cost of free use of fertilizer. if the soil is sandy and deficient in potash, the percentage of phosphoric acid may be cut to , and the percentage of potash raised to , and all these crops will profit thereby. if the nitrogen content in the soil is high, none of these crops may need nitrogen in the fertilizer. this is a general principle, and safe for guidance, though the best profit will demand some modification that readily occurs to the farmer as he studies his crops and their rotation. to illustrate: the corn is given the clover sod or the manure partly because it requires more plant-food than the wheat. it gets the best of the nitrogen, and may need only a rock-and-potash fertilizer, while the wheat that follows may need some available nitrogen to force growth in the fall. there is no fixed formula for any field or crop, and the point to be made here only is that the requirements of many standard crops do not have the dissimilarity usually supposed, except in respect to quantity. a marked exception is found in the oat crop, which does not bear the application of much nitrogen, and often fares well on the remains of the manure that fed the corn, if some phosphoric acid is added. maintaining fertility.--a heavy clover sod gives assurance that a good crop of corn or potatoes can be grown. if the amount of plant-food in the sod is not excessive, a heavy crop of wheat can be produced. the condition of the soil favors many crops. the clover has placed it upon a productive basis for the time being. the object that should be kept in view, when a scheme of soil fertilization is worked out, is the maintenance of such a state of fertility that the land can be depended upon for whatever crop comes round in the rotation. when a - - fertilizer, or a - - fertilizer, is used, the effect upon a thin soil is to restore it temporarily to this good-cropping power, the size of the application varying with the crop. a richer soil may want the phosphoric acid and potash without the nitrogen. a manured soil may need only the phosphoric acid. the purpose of the fertilizer in any case is maintenance or increase of fertility, and when this object has been secured, the crop may be whatever the rotation calls for. it is this rational scheme that gives success to the pennsylvania station's methods on some of its test plats. a given amount of plant-food is put upon the land, which is under a four-years' rotation. one half of it is applied every second year. the corn gets one half because it can use it to advantage. the oat crop that follows finds enough fertility because the soil is good. next in the rotation is the wheat, and the wheat and timothy and clover plants can use fertilizer with profit. there is no change in its character because it is the soil that is getting the assistance, and not primarily just one crop in a rotation. the land in this experiment that is well fertilized is more productive than it was thirty years ago, although no manure has been applied, and it is the general productive condition that assures good yields, and not chiefly any one application of fertilizer. fertilizer for grass.--a fertile soil will make a good sod. a thinner soil should have a liberal dressing of complete fertilizer at seeding time, and the formula that has been suggested is excellent for this purpose. if a succession of timothy hay crops is desired, the problem of maintaining fertility is wholly changed. the nitrogen supplied by the clover is soon exhausted, and the timothy sod must be kept thick and heavy until broken, or the soil will not have its supply of organic matter maintained. nitrogen must be supplied freely, and phosphoric acid and potash must likewise be given the soil. the draft upon the soil is heavy, and at the same time the effort should be to have a sod to be broken for corn that will produce a big crop without the use of any fertilizer. the grass is the natural crop to receive the plant-food because its roots fill the ground, and the corn should get its food from the rotting sod, when broken. station tests have shown that a sod can be caused to increase in productiveness for several years by means of annual applications of the right combinations of plant-food in the early spring. a mixture of pounds of nitrate of soda, pounds of acid phosphate, and pounds of muriate of potash is excellent. this gives nearly the same quantity each of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, and is near a - - fertilizer. the only material change in relative amounts of plant-food constituents, when compared with a - - and - - fertilizer, is in the increase of nitrogen, due to the heavy drafts made by continuous mowings of timothy. this fertilizer should be used as soon as any green appears in the grass field in the spring after the year of clover harvest. the large amount of nitrogen makes this an unprofitable fertilizer for clover, and its use is not advised until the spring of the year in which timothy will be harvested. all the nitrogen from clover.--the pennsylvania station has shown in a test of thirty years that when good clover is grown in a four-years' rotation of corn, oats, wheat, and clover, the fertility of the naturally good clay loam soil may be maintained, and even slightly increased, without the use of any manure or purchased nitrogen. phosphoric acid and potash have been applied, and the clover hay crop has been taken off the land. this result has been possible only by means of good clover sods. if there had been no applications of phosphoric acid and potash, the clover would have failed to maintain fertility, as is proved by other plats in this experiment. no one should continue to depend upon such a scheme of keeping land fertile whenever he finds that the clover is not thriving. method of applying fertilizers.--if a fertilizer is used in small amount with the purpose of merely giving the plants a start, it should be near the seed. if the application is heavy, and the roots of the plants spread upon all sides, the fertilizer, as a rule, should be applied to all the ground, and should be mixed with the surface soil. this puts the plant-food where needed, and saves from danger of injury to the seed through contact. a seeming exception may be found in the case of the potato, but usually some close tillage confines its roots to the row for a time. experience indicates that when a potato fertilizer does not exceed pounds per acre, it may well be put into the row, but a heavier application should be divided, one half being broadcasted or drilled into the surface, and the other half of the application being made in the row. an excess of nitrogen.--too much nitrogen, due to heavy manuring or other cause, produces an excessive growth of stalk or straw, at the expense of grain production, in the case of corn, wheat, and other cereals. it produces a rank growth of potato vines and partial failure of the crop of tubers. it produces a tender growth of straw or vine that invites injury from fungous diseases. it is the rule that soils have a deficiency in nitrogen, but when there is an excess, the best cure comes through use of such crops as timothy, cabbage, and ensilage corn. heavy applications of rock-and-potash fertilizers assist in recovery of right conditions, but are not wholly effective until exhaustive crops have removed some of the nitrogen. chapter xxi tillage desirable physical condition of the soil.--successful cropping of land is dependent upon favoring soil conditions. the plants to be grown must have ease in root extension, so that their food may be found. there must be moisture to hold the food in solution. there must be air. there must be destruction of plants that would be competitors of the ones desired. a soil rarely is in prime condition for the planting and growth of any crop without some change in its structure by means of tillage, and it does not remain in the best condition for any long period of time. if the number of plants required per acre for a crop is relatively small, tillage of the soil is continued after planting. if the necessary number makes tillage impossible, there is some loss in conditions most favorable to the plant. the particles of soil settle together, and there is loss of water at the surface. most plants want a mellow soil, and tillage is in large part an effort to make and to keep the condition of the soil friendly to plant life in this respect. the wide variation in methods of tillage are due to the great differences in the texture and structure of soils, and to the habits of plants, and skill in selection of methods is a measure of the intelligence used in farming. the breaking-plow.--land containing enough clay to give it an excellent soil inclines to become firm. during the growth of a crop, when plant roots fill the soil and prevent deep stirring, the particles pack closely together, limiting the power of the land to make fertility available. the presence of organic matter counteracts, in part, this packing tendency, but there are few soils that remain permanently mellow. the breaking-plow is used to loosen the soil, and to undo the firming that has been taking place while plant roots prevented deep tillage. at the same time the plow may be used to bury organic matter below the surface, affording a clean seed-bed. in some soils it has value in bringing inert soil to the surface, and in mixing the soil constituents. types of plows.--the kind and condition of the soil, and the character of the crop, determine the type of plow to be used. a plow with a short and quite straight moldboard does not bury manure and turf in the bottom of the furrow so completely as is the case with a long, curved moldboard. the organic matter should be distributed throughout all the soil. on the other hand, it is essential to some plants that they have a fine seed-bed, and one whose surface is free from tufts of grass. the long moldboard is preferred in breaking a sod for corn. its use in plowing for all crops is more general than it should be, the gain in pulverization of the furrow-slice, due to the curve, and the neatness in appearance of the plowed land, inducing its use. the disk plow has been used chiefly in soils not requiring deep plowing. it pulverizes better than a moldboard plow, and buries trash more easily. [illustration: deep tillage.] the device for using two disks to turn a single furrow-slice rests upon a sound principle. this plow may be set to run deeper than moldboard plows go, and it mixes well all the soil that it turns. the disks are so hung that the mixing of all the soil to a depth of twelve or fifteen inches is admirable. the deep-tilling plow does not bury the organic matter in the bottom of the furrow, and thereby permits the deepening of the soil without bringing an undue amount of subsoil to the surface. subsoiling.--the theory of subsoiling always has been captivating. most soils are too shallow, inviting injury from drouth. enthusiasm regarding subsoiling comes to large numbers of farmers at some time in their experience, and a great number of subsoil plows have been bought. the check to enthusiasm is the fact that few men ever have seen such a plow worn out. some reasons are as follow: (_a_) the subsoil at time of spring-plowing rarely is dry enough for good results, and there is danger of puddling; (_b_) the subsoil often is too dry and hard in late summer, when rains permit easy breaking of the top soil for fall grain; (_c_) the work doubles the labor and time of plowing, and (_d_) the subsoil soon settles together because it contains little organic matter. subsoiling is generally approved and little practiced. land at plow-depth becomes packed by the tramping of horses upon it and the pressure of the plow, when the plowing is done at the same depth year after year, and in some soils subsoiling has been found distinctly valuable. time of plowing.--in great measure the time of plowing is determined by the effect upon soil moisture, and is discussed in the next chapter. method of plowing.--the depth of plowing should be fixed largely by the amount of organic matter in the soil. it is essential that a good percentage of this material should be mixed throughout the soil, and when it is in scant supply, the depth of plowing usually should not be great. fertile soils should be plowed deep for their own good, and thin soils should be deepened gradually, as sods and manures afford a supply of humus-making material. even when manure is used liberally in a single application on a poor soil, a large amount of inert subsoil should not be thrown upon the surface. the manure goes out of reach of the greatest need, which is in the surface soil where plant-life starts. a gradual process of deepening the soil is to be preferred, but such deepening should not be neglected. the subsoil is a store of inert fertility that should not remain dormant. it may not do to say that the success of the best farmers is due to thoroughness in plowing, but it is true that the more successful ones are insistent that the plowing be absolutely thorough. every inch of the soil should be stirred to a certain depth, and that requires a plow so set that it does not turn a furrow-slice much wider than the point can cut. evenness in depth and width of furrow is seen in good plowing. the disk harrow.--the purpose of the plow is to break up the soil so that it will be crumbly and mellow. the frequency with which land should be thoroughly stirred to full plow-depth depends upon the condition of the soil and the character of the crops. oftentimes a disk or cutaway harrow may replace the plow. its action is the same as that of the plow, loosening and turning the soil over. when land has had a good plowing within the year, and has not become compact, stirring to a depth of four inches may give a better seed-bed for some crops than could be made by use of a plow. this is true of land that has produced a cultivated crop and is being prepared for a fall-seeding. the gain in time of preparing ground for oats in the spring makes the use of the disk or cutaway harrow profitable on mellow corn-stubble land. there is temptation to carry the substitution of the disk harrow for the breaking-plow too far. its use alone would have the same effect as poor plowing, reducing the depth of the soil. the surface soil, down to plow-depth, is the chief feeding-ground for plants because it is kept in good tilth by organic matter and tillage. the depth of this soil affects the amount of available plant-food and water. the duration of time between deep plowings depends upon the soil and the crops. experience shows that when land has been broken for corn or potatoes or beans or similar crop, the one plowing may be sufficient for a succeeding crop. if grass is not seeded with the succeeding crop, it is best to give another thorough plowing before seeding to grass in august if the soil is heavy, but in naturally loose soils a disk harrow makes a better seed-bed. two influences favor such undue dependence upon a disk harrow that a soil may become shallow: the cost of preparing the seed-bed is reduced, and the saving in moisture may give a better stand of plants when the harrow takes the place of the plow. the immediate productiveness of a crop is not an assurance that the method is right: consideration for the good of the land must be shown. depth of soil is a requirement of a good agriculture, and deep plowing is a means to that end. the looseness of the soil and the character of the season may make substitution right in one instance and wrong in another. deep soils, well filled with organic matter, will bear shallow preparation of a seed-bed more frequently than thin soils, and yet it is the latter that may profit most by having its best part kept near the surface at the time a new sod must be made. the disk harrow has some place as a substitute for a plow, but when its use results in making a soil more shallow, the harm is a most serious one. cultivation of plants.--if a soil would remain mellow throughout the season, there usually would be no reason to disturb the roots of plants by any deep stirring, and all tillage would be only deep enough to make a mulch of earth for the retention of moisture and to destroy all weeds. soils containing enough clay to make them retentive of moisture become too compact when rains beat upon the ground, as usually happens after the planting of spring crops. a deep and close cultivation of corn and potato plants after they appear in the row helps to restore the condition created by the plow and harrow, and often is the best practice. there is some sacrifice of roots, but the gain far exceeds the loss. it may be necessary to give a second such cultivation when a clay soil is deficient in organic matter, but the root-pruning is a handicap. controlling root-growth.--the exception to the rule that plant-roots should not be pruned by deep cultivation is found in the case of a close soil in a wet season. the plants extend their roots only in the soil at the surface because the ground is soaked with water nearly all the time. they cannot form far enough below the surface to withstand a drouth that may follow the wet weather. good tillage in such a case demands the pruning of the roots and the airing of the soil when the ground is dry enough to permit such stirring, and the plants then extend their roots in the lower soil where they rightly belong. judgment is required to decide when such tillage is desirable, but judgment is needed all the time in farming. when a continued period of wet weather affects the position of the plant-roots, it rarely is advisable not to risk deeper tillage than is given in a normal season. underdrainage helps to prevent such ill-effect of continued rains in the early part of a plant's life-time. elimination of competition.--weeds pump the water out of the soil, use up available plant-food, and compete for the sunlight. tillage is given for several reasons, and one is the destruction of weeds. a weeder which stirs the soil only an inch or two deep is an excellent destroyer of weeds when they are starting, but after the weeds are well-rooted, the weeder acts only as a cultivator for the plants that should be destroyed. modern cultivators have fine teeth that let the surface remain nearly level, and they do their best work when the weeds are small. the use of "sweeps" should be more general. the blades are so placed that they slip under the surface, letting the soil fall back so that a mulch is formed. length of cultivation.--most tilled crops grow rapidly until they shade and mulch the soil. tillage should continue, if possible, until this occurs. the exception is in the case of orchard trees and other plants that should not have their period of growth extended late in the fall. good tillage tends to increase the lateness of a crop by encouraging growth. the new wood of trees may not become hardy enough to withstand the frost of winter if tillage is continued. early maturity is hastened by exhaustion of soil moisture and plant-food. chapter xxii control of soil moisture value of water in the soil.--the amount of water in the soil each day of the growing season determines in large measure the possibility of securing a profitable crop from land. observant farmers have noticed oftentimes that the differences in yields on the farms of a region are less in a wholly favorable season than in one of deficient rainfall. the skill of the farmer in conserving the moisture supply in a wet season is less well repaid because it is less needed. the poverty of a worn soil is less marked in a favorable season. the land is accounted poor because the supply of plant-food is inadequate for a drouthy year in which a considerable percentage of the time produces little growth, but most agricultural land has enough plant-food for a fairly good crop when water is present all the time to carry daily supplies into the roots. it is the amount of moisture in the soil that is the limiting factor in the case of most land that is not in a high state of productiveness. the soil a reservoir.--the rains of the summer rarely are adequate to the needs of growing plants. some water runs off the surface, some passes down through crevices beyond the effect of capillary attraction, and much quickly evaporates. the part that becomes available is only a supplement to the store of water made by the rains of the fall, winter, and early spring. if the soil were viewed as a medium for the holding of water to meet the daily needs of plants, and were given rational treatment on this basis, a long step toward higher productiveness would have been taken. as has been stated, rotted organic matter gives a soil more capacity for holding water. it is an absorbent in itself, and it puts clays and sands into better physical condition for the storage of moisture. an unproductive soil may need organic matter for this one reason alone more than it may need actual plant-food. fall-plowing for a spring crop enables land to withstand summer's drouth if it gains in physical condition by full exposure to the winter's frost. it is in condition to take up more water from spring rains than would be the case if it lay compact, and it does not lose water by the airing in the spring that plowing gives. early spring-plowing leaves land less subject to drouth than does later plowing. as the air becomes heated, the open spaces left by the plowing serve to hasten the escape of moisture. if a cover crop is plowed down late in the spring, the material in the bottom of the furrow makes the land less resistant to drouth because the union of the top soil with the subsoil is less perfect, and capillary attraction is retarded. it is usually good practice to sacrifice some of the growth of a cover crop, even when organic matter is badly needed, and to plow fairly early in the spring in order that the moisture supply may be conserved. the land-roller.--the breaking-plow is a robber of soil water when used in warm weather. the air carries the water away rapidly. the air-spaces are large. the corrective of this condition is the land-roller. it presses the soil together, driving out the excess of air. large crumbs are pressed down into the mass, and are kept from drying into hard clods. the roller never should be used on land when fresh-plowed in a moist condition, and it is not needed after fall-plowing, or early spring-plowing in most instances, but land broken when the season is advanced should be rolled before much water evaporates. [illustration: making an earth mulch in a new york orchard.] the plank-drag.--an excellent implement on a farm is the plank-drag. it is usually made of over-lapping heavy planks, and when floated over the surface, it both pulverizes and packs the soil. the effectiveness is controlled by the weight placed upon it, and oftentimes the drag is to be preferred to the roller. the mulch.--in conserving the supply of water in the soil the mulch plays an important work. the dry air is constantly taking up the water from the surface of land, and when the surface is drier than the soil below, the moisture moves upward if there is no break in the structure of the surface soil. the mulch is a covering of material that does not readily permit the escape of water. the only available material for a mulch in most instances is the soil itself. experience has taught that when the top layer of soil, to a depth of two or three inches, is made fine and loose, the water beneath it cannot escape readily. it is partly for this reason that the smoothing-harrow should follow the roller after land has been plowed. the plow is used to break up the soil into crumbs that will permit air to enter. the loosening is excessive when the planting must follow soon, permitting rapid escape of water. the roller or plank-drag is employed to compress the soil, and to crush crumbs of soil that are too large for good soil conditions. the harrow follows to make a mulch of fine, loose soil at the surface to assist in prevention of evaporation. a sandy soil will retain its mulch in effective condition for a longer time than a fine clay, if no rain falls. when the air is laden with moisture, clay particles absorb enough water to pack together and form an avenue for the rise of water to the surface, where the dry air has access to it. mulches of foreign material.--the truth that moisture is a leading factor in soil productiveness is evidenced by the value of straw and similar material as a mulch. a covering of straw around trees in an orchard, or bush fruits, or such plants as the potato, may give better results than an application of fertilizer when no effort is made to prevent the escape of water. people so situated that little attention can well be given to the fruit and vegetable garden obtain good results by replacing tillage with a substantial mulch that keeps the soil mellow, prevents weed growth, and retains an abundant supply of water. in grain-producing districts where all the straw is not needed as an absorbent in the stables its use as a mulch on thin grass lands, or wheat-fields seeded to grass, is more profitable than conversion into manure by rotting in a barnyard. the straw affords protection from the sun, and aids in the conservation of soil water, when scattered evenly in no larger amount than two tons per acre, and a less amount per acre has value. the sod is helped, and as the straw rots, its plant-food goes into the soil. plowing straw down.--the practice of plowing straw under as a manure is unsafe, when used in any large quantity per acre. it rots slowly, and while lying in the bottom of the furrow it cuts off the rise of water from the subsoil which is a reservoir of moisture for use during drouth. the summer-fallow.--bare land loses in total plant-food, but may make a temporary gain in available fertility. the practice of leaving a field uncropped for an entire season has been abandoned in good farming regions. where moisture is in scant supply, and a soil is thin, there continue instances of the summer-fallow. in a crop-rotation containing corn and wheat, the corn-stubble land is left unbroken until may or june, and then plowed. in august it is plowed again, and fitted for seeding to wheat. the practice favors the killing of weeds, and the soil at seeding time may contain more water than would have been the case if a crop had been produced, because its mellow condition enables the farmer to hold within it nearly all the moisture that a shower may furnish after the second plowing. the modern fallow.--the modern method of making a grass seeding in august partakes of the nature of the old-fashioned summer-fallow. the desire is to eradicate weeds, secure availability in plant-food, and fit the soil to profit by even a light rainfall. thin soils lend themselves well to this treatment, which is described in chapter viii, and there is no better method for fertile land. the benefit of the fallow is obtained without serious loss of time. chapter xxiii drainage underdrainage.--there are great swamps, and small ones, whose water should be carried off by open ditches. our present interest is in the wet fields of the farm,--the cold, wet soil of an entire field, the swale lying between areas of well-drained land, the side of a field kept wet by seepage from higher land,--and here the right solution of the troubling problem lies in underdrainage. an excess of water in the soil robs the land-owner of chance of profit. it excludes the air, sealing up the plant-food so that crops cannot be secured. it keeps the ground cold. it destroys the good physical condition of the soil that may have been secured by much tillage, causing the soil particles to pack together. it compels plant-roots to form at the surface of the ground. it delays seeding and cultivation. an excess of water is more disheartening than absolute soil poverty. the remedy is only in its removal. the level of dead water in the soil must be below the surface--three feet, two and one half feet, four feet,--some reasonable distance that will make possible a friable, aërated, warm, friendly feeding-ground for plant-roots. only under drainage can do this. counting the cost.--thorough underdrainage is costly, but it is less so than the farming of fields whose productiveness is seriously limited by an excess of water. the work means an added investment. estimates of cost can be made with fair accuracy, and estimates of resulting profit can be made without any assurance of accuracy. the farmer with some wet land does well to gain experimental knowledge, and base future work upon such experience. he knows that he cannot afford to cultivate wet land, and the problem before him is to leave it to produce what grass it can produce, sell it, or find profit in drainage. he has the experience of others that investment in drainage is more satisfactory than most other investments, if land has any natural fertility. he has assurance that debt incurred for drainage is the safest kind of debt an owner of wet land can incur. he has a right to expect profit from the undertaking, and he can begin the work in a small way, if an outlet is at hand, and learn what return may be expected from further investment. almost without fail will he become an earnest advocate of underdrainage. [illustration: drain tile.] where returns are largest.--the total area of land needing drainage is immense. swamps form only a small part of this area. yields of much old farm land are limited by the excess of water during portions of the year. as land becomes older, the area needing drainage increases. the owner of wet land does well to gain his first experience in a field where a swale or other wet strip not only fails to produce a full crop, but limits the yield of the remainder of the field by delaying planting and cultivation. this double profit often is sufficient to repay cost in a single year. material for the drains.--doubtless there are places and times when stone, or boards, or brush should be used in construction of underdrains, but they are relatively few in number. such underdrains lack permanency, as a rule, though some stone drains are effective for a long time. if drain tile can be obtained at a reasonable price, it should be used even in fields that have an abundance of stone. its use requires less labor than that of stone, and when properly laid on a good bottom, it continues effective. there is no known limit to the durability of a drain made of good tile. the outlet.--the value of any drainage system is dependent upon the outlet. its location is the first thing to be determined. if the land is nearly flat, a telescope level should be used to determine elevations of all low points in the land to be drained. the outlet should permit a proper fall throughout the length of the system, and it should not require attention after the work is completed. if it is in the bank of a stream or ditch, it should be above the normal level of the water in the stream. in times of heavy rainfall water may back up into the main with no injury other than temporary failure to perform its work, but continuous submersion will lead to deposits of silt that may close the tile. locating main and branches.--there are various systems of drainage. wherever a branch or lateral joins the main, the means of drainage is duplicated within the area that the main can drain, and the system should call for the least possible waste of this sort. it usually is best that the main take the center line of the low land, laterals being used to bring the water to the main from both sides, but there is less duplication of work when the main can be at one side of the wet land. branches of the main may be needed to reach remote parts of the area. the laterals.--small lines of tile are used to bring the water to the main when the wet land extends beyond the influence of the main. the distance between these laterals depends upon their depth and the nature of the land. a tight clay soil will not let water pass laterally more than a rod or feet, compelling the placing of the drains not over feet apart, while an open soil may permit a distance of or more feet between laterals. size of tile.--the size of the main depends upon the area that eventually may be drained, the amount of overflow from higher land, the nature of the soil, and the grade of the drain. it is a common mistake to make the main too small because the drainage immediately contemplated is less than that which will be desired when its value is known. in the determination of the size the judgment of an expert is needed, and if this cannot be had, the error should be on the side of safety. if the main will not be required to carry overflow from other land, and has a fall of inches to feet, one may assume that a -inch main will carry the surplus water from to acres of land, and an -inch main will carry the water of twice that area. some drainage experts figure larger areas for such mains, but there is danger of loss of crop when the rainfall is very heavy. the laterals need not be larger than inches in diameter when laid on a good bottom. kind of tile.--when clay tile is used, it should be well burned. some manufacturers offer soft tile for sale, as the loss from warping and cracking is less in case of insufficient burning. the claim may be made that the efficiency of soft tile is greater than that of the hard tile whose porosity has been destroyed. this is an error, as the water enters the drain at the joints, and not through the walls of the tile. underdrainage should be permanent in its character, and it is essential that every piece of tile be sound and well-burned. vitrified clay tile is good for drainage, but no better than common clay hard-burned. round or octagonal tile is the most desirable because it can be turned in laying to secure the best joints. collars are not needed in ordinary drainage. cement tile is coming into general use in regions having no good clay. its durability has not been tested, but there is no apparent reason that it should not be a good substitute for clay. the grade.--the outlet may fix the grade. if it does not, the main, branches, and laterals should have a fall of inches, or more, to the feet. this grade insures against deposits of silt and gives good capacity to the drains. if the outlet demands less fall in the system, the main may be laid on a grade of only a half inch to the feet with satisfactory results. such a small fall should be accepted only when a lower outlet cannot be secured, and great care should be used in grading the trench and laying the tile. establishing a grade.--if the grades are light, they should be established by use of a telescope level. most of the cheap levels are a delusion. a stake driven flush with the surface of the ground at the outlet becomes the starting point, and by its side should be driven a witness stake. every feet along the line of the proposed drain and laterals similar stakes should be driven. their levels should then be taken, and when the fall from the head of the system to the outlet is known, the required cut at each -feet station is easily determined. it may be necessary to reduce or increase the grade at some point to get proper depth in a depression or to save cutting when passing through a ridge. cutting the trenches.--there are ditching-machines that do efficient work. the best are costly. most of the work on farms will continue to be done with ditching-spades. the ground should be moved when wet, so that labor can be saved. a line should be used to secure a straight side to the trench. the grade should be obtained by means of a system of strings. if two light poles be pushed into the ground at each -feet station, one on either side of the proposed trench, and a string be drawn across at a point - / feet above the bottom of the proposed trench, these strings will be in line on a grade - / feet above the grade the drain will have. as the cut at the station is known, the height of the string above the top of the stake is easily determined. these strings will reveal any inaccuracy in the survey. the workman can test every part of the bottom of the trench by use of a rod - / feet high, the top end being exactly in line with the strings when the lower end is placed on the correct grade of the trench. this device is better than running water where grades are slight. a drain scoop should be used in bottom of the trench to make a resting place for the tile that will prevent any displacement by the soil when the trench is filled. depth of trenches.--underdrains may be placed too deep in close soils for best results. in an early day it was advised that the drains be put down feet deep. we now know that a tight clay soil may give best results from a drain only inches deep, or even a little less. in a looser soil feet is a better depth, and in porous swamp lands the drain may well go feet deep, thus permitting increase in distance between drains. connections.--the laterals should enter the branches and mains near the top, so that the water will be drawn out rapidly. the tile should be laid with close joints at the top, so that the water may enter more freely from the sides than the top. no covering other than moist soil is needed unless there is very fine sand, when paper over the joints will serve a good purpose. after some moist soil from the sides of the trench has been tramped upon the tile, the trench may be filled by use of a breaking-plow or winged scraper. permanency desired.--the expense of underdrainage demands care in every detail of the work. the grade of the trenches should be carefully tested. every piece of tile should be examined. the outlet should be guarded against displacement or entrance by animals. a good plan is to lay the last few pieces of tile in a close-fitting wooden box, and to protect the end with iron rods placed inches apart. if the drain is on a true grade, so that no silt will collect, there need be no fear concerning its continued efficiency, provided water does not run in it all the time. if it carries the water from springs continuously, plant-roots may fill it, and tree roots are quite sure to do so when opportunity offers. this is notably true in case of elms and willows, but protection is afforded in such an instance by closing the joints with cement. [illustration: the lure of the country.] _the following pages contain advertisements of books on kindred subjects_ new farm and garden books injurious insects: how to recognize and control them by w. c. o'kane entomologist of the new hampshire agricultural experiment station, and professor of economic entomology in new hampshire college _illustrated. cloth, mo. $ . net._ complete information on the characteristics, life histories and means of control of the more common injurious insects, including those infesting field crops, vegetables, fruits, the principal pests of domestic animals, stored products and the household, is contained in this book. a distinctive feature of the work is the illustrations with which the text throughout is accompanied. these have been made especially for dr. o'kane. with each insect treated he shows in an original photograph the characteristic injurious stage or the typical work of the insect where that is characteristic. by this means the author hopes that the layman will be able to recognize an insect that threatens by the picture aside from any description in the text. principles of fruit growing by professor l. h. bailey _new edition. cloth, mo. $ . net._ since the original publication of this book, in , it has gone through many editions. the progress of fruit growing in the meantime has been very marked and it has been necessary to completely rewrite the work. the present issue of it brings the accounts of the new practices and discoveries as they relate to fruit growing up to date. all of the text and practically all of the illustrations are new. the macmillan company publishers - fifth avenue new york new farm and garden books sheep farming by john a. craig and f. r. marshall _illustrated. cloth, mo. $ . net._ this book deals with sheep husbandry as a phase of intensive farming. recognizing that it is likely to be used by persons unfamiliar with sheep, the authors have worked from the standpoint of the producer of market stock, rather than from the standpoint of the professional breeder. the various breeds are discussed in such a way as to enable the reader to select the kind that is most likely to do well under his conditions and to acquaint him with the care it is accustomed to and needs. the management of the flock in the fall, winter, spring and summer seasons, the formation of the flock, the selection of foundation stock, and the means of maintaining a high standard of flock efficiency, are all discussed in subsequent chapters. forage crops for the south by s. m. tracy _illustrated. cloth, mo. preparing._ professor tracy has had long experience in southern agriculture, both in application and in teaching. he was formerly professor of agriculture in the mississippi agricultural college, and now conducts a branch station or farm for the united states department of agriculture. he is a botanist of note and has traveled extensively in the south as a collector. his book is not only authentic, but practical. in it is contained a discussion of all kinds of plants and crops adapted to the southern states for fodder, soiling, pasturing and hay. the text is abundantly illustrated. the macmillan company publishers - fifth avenue new york the rural manuals edited by l. h. bailey manual of farm animals a practical guide to the choosing, breeding and keep of horses, cattle, sheep and swine. by merritt w. harper assistant professor of animal husbandry in the new york state college of agriculture at cornell university _illustrated, decorated cloth, mo, pages, index, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ "the work is invaluable as a practical guide in raising farm animals."--_morning telegram._ "a book deserving of close study as well as being handy for reference, and should be in the possession of every farmer interested in stock."--_rural world._ manual of gardening a practical guide to the making of home grounds and the growing of flowers, fruits and vegetables for home use. by l. h. bailey _illustrated, cloth, mo, pages, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ this new work is a combination and revision of the main parts of two other books by the same author, "garden making" and "practical garden book," together with much new material and the result of the experience of ten added years. among the persons who collaborated in the preparation of the other two books, and whose contributions have been freely used in this one, are c. e. hunn, a gardener of long experience; professor ernest walker, reared as a commercial florist; professor l. r. taft, and professor f. a. waugh, well known for their studies and writings on horticultural subjects. a standard work revised and enlarged the farm and garden rule book by liberty h. bailey _illustrated, cloth, mo, $ . net_ when professor bailey's "horticulturist's rule book" was published nearly twenty-five years ago, the volume became a standard agricultural work running through sixteen editions. taking this book as a basis the author has now made a wholly new book, extending it to cover the field of general farming, stock-raising, dairying, poultry-rearing, horticulture, gardening, forestry, and the like. it is essentially a small cyclopedia of ready rules and references packed full from coyer to cover of condensed, meaty information and precepts on almost every leading subject connected with country life. in preparation manual of home-making. manual of cultivated plants the macmillan company publishers - fifth avenue new york the rural outlook set by professor l. h. bailey director of the new york state college of agriculture at cornell university _four volumes. each, cloth, mo. uniform binding, attractively boxed. $ . net per set; carriage extra. each volume also sold separately._ in this set are included three of professor bailey's most popular books as well as a hitherto unpublished one,--"the country-life movement." the long and persistent demand for a uniform edition of these little classics is answered with the publication of this attractive series. the country-life movement _cloth, mo, pages, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ this hitherto unpublished volume deals with the present movement for the redirection of rural civilization, discussing the real country-life problem as distinguished from the city problem, known as the back-to-the-land movement. the outlook to nature (new and revised edition) _cloth, mo, pages, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ in this alive and bracing book, full of suggestion and encouragement, professor bailey argues the importance of contact with nature, a sympathetic attitude toward which "means greater efficiency, hopefulness, and repose." the state and the farmer (new edition) _cloth, mo, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ it is the relation of the farmer to the government that professor bailey here discusses in its varying aspects. he deals specifically with the change in agricultural methods, in the shifting of the geographical centers of farming in the united states, and in the growth of agricultural institutions. the nature study idea (new edition) _cloth, mo, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ "it would be well," the critic of _the tribune farmer_ once wrote, "if 'the nature study idea' were in the hands of every person who favors nature study in the public schools, of every one who is opposed to it, and, most important, of every one who teaches it or thinks he does." it has been professor bailey's purpose to interpret the new school movement to put the young into relation and sympathy with nature,--a purpose which he has admirably accomplished. the macmillan company publishers - fifth avenue new york how to keep hens for profit by c. s. valentine _cloth, illustrated, mo, $ , net; postpaid, $ . _ "the plymouth rock, java, dominique, wyandotte, rhode island red, and buckeye breeds are discussed in the first few chapters. considerable attention is given to other breeds later on. eighteen beautiful half-tone engravings adorn the book. from the standpoint of the practical farmer and poultry-grower, we consider this book as one of the very best of its kind. the author is evidently an experienced poultry-man. it is a book that should be of special help to beginners in poultry, while at the same time it contains much information for the expert." --_farmers' tribune._ the beginner in poultry by c. s. valentine _decorated cloth, profusely illustrated, mo, $ . net; postpaid, $ . _ it has been estimated that of the five million people who are raising poultry in this country today half have gone at it blindly. and it is just as impossible to make a success of the poultry business without preparation as it is impossible to succeed in any other business without an acquaintance with the fundamentals. the difficulty which the novice has experienced in going at the raising of chickens systematically in the past has been that he could find no book in which the essentials--only the essentials and all of them--of poultry-raising are given. to write such a book has been mr. valentine's purpose in "the beginner in poultry" he discusses the different breeds of fowls, the types of houses, feeding and the kinds of food, raising chickens for the market and for their eggs, diseases and their cures and everything else which will be of value for the one who is starting out--and much for the seasoned poultry-raiser as well. the macmillan company publishers - fifth avenue new york rural science series edited by l. h. bailey on selection of land, etc. isaac p. roberts' the farmstead $ on tillage, etc. f. h. king's the soil isaac p. roberts' the fertility of the land f. h. king's irrigation and drainage edward b. voorhees' fertilizers edward b. voorhees' forage crops j. a. widtsoe's dry farming l. h. bailey's principles of agriculture on plant diseases, etc. e. c. lodeman's the spraying of plants on garden-making l. h. bailey's garden-making l. h. bailey's vegetable-gardening l. h. bailey's forcing book on fruit-growing, etc. l. h. bailey's nursery book l. h. bailey's fruit-growing l. h. bailey's the pruning book f. w. card's bush fruits on the care of live-stock nelson s. mayo's the diseases of animals w. h. jordan's the feeding of animals i. p. roberts' the horse m. w. harper's breaking and training of horses george c. watson's farm poultry on dairy work, farm chemistry, etc. henry h. wing's milk and its products j. g. lipman's bacteria and country life on economics and organization i. p. roberts' the farmer's business handbook george t. fairchild's rural wealth and welfare h. n. ogden's rural hygiene j. green's law for the american farmer the macmillan company publishers - fifth avenue new york cyclopedia of american agriculture edited by l. h. bailey director of the college of agriculture and professor of rural economy, cornell university. _with full-page plates and more than , illustrations in the text; four volumes; the set, $ . net; half morocco, $ . net; carriage extra_ volume i--farms volume ii--crops volume iii--animals volume iv--the farm and the community "indispensable to public and reference libraries ... readily comprehensible to any person of average education."--_the nation._ "the completest existing thesaurus of up-to-date facts and opinions on modern agricultural methods. it is safe to say that many years must pass before it can be surpassed in comprehensiveness, accuracy, practical value, and mechanical excellence. it ought to be in every library in the country."--_record-herald, chicago._ cyclopedia of american horticulture edited by l. h. bailey _with over , original engravings; four volumes; the set, $ . net; half morocco, $ . net; carriage extra_ "this really monumental performance will take rank as a standard in its class. illustrations and text are admirable.... our own conviction is that while the future may bring forth amplified editions of the work, it will probably never be superseded. recognizing its importance, the publishers have given it faultless form. the typography leaves nothing to be desired, the paper is calculated to stand wear and tear, and the work is at once handsomely and attractively bound."--_new york daily tribune._ the macmillan company publishers - fifth avenue new york none a short history of english agriculture by w.h.r. curtler oxford at the clarendon press henry frowde, m.a. publisher to the university of oxford london, edinburgh, new york toronto and melbourne preface 'a husbandman', said markham, 'is the master of the earth, turning barrenness into fruitfulness, whereby all commonwealths are maintained and upheld. his labour giveth liberty to all vocations, arts, and trades to follow their several functions with peace and industrie. what can we say in this world is profitable where husbandry is wanting, it being the great nerve and sinew which holdeth together all the joints of a monarchy?' and he is confirmed by young: 'agriculture is, beyond all doubt, the foundation of every other art, business, and profession, and it has therefore been the ideal policy of every wise and prudent people to encourage it to the utmost.' yet of this important industry, still the greatest in england, there is no history covering the whole period. it is to remedy this defect that this book is offered, with much diffidence, and with many thanks to mr. c.r.l. fletcher of magdalen college, oxford, for his valuable assistance in revising the proof sheets, and to the rev. a.h. johnson of all souls for some very useful information. as the agriculture of the middle ages has often been ably described, i have devoted the greater part of this work to the agricultural history of the subsequent period, especially the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. w.h.r. curtler. _may , ._ contents chapter i communistic farming.--growth of the manor.--early prices.--the organization and agriculture of the manor chapter ii the thirteenth century.--the manor at its zenith, with seeds of decay already visible.--walter of henley chapter iii the fourteenth century.--decline of agriculture.--the black death.-- statute of labourers chapter iv how the classes connected with the land lived in the middle ages chapter v the break-up of the manor.--spread of leases.--the peasants' revolt.--further attempts to regulate wages.--a harvest home.--beginning of the corn laws.--some surrey manors chapter vi - . the so-called 'golden age of the labourer' in a period of general distress chapter vii enclosure chapter viii fitzherbert.--the regulation of hours and wages chapter ix - . progress at last--hop-growing.--progress of enclosure.-- harrison's _description_ chapter x - . live stock.--flax.--saffron.--the potato.--the assessment of wages chapter xi - . clover and turnips.--great rise in prices.--more enclosure.--a farming calendar chapter xii the great agricultural writers of the seventeenth century.--fruit-growing. --a seventeenth-century orchard chapter xiii the evils of common fields.--hops.--implements.--manures.--gregory king.--corn laws chapter xiv - . general characteristics of the eighteenth century.--crops. --cattle.--dairying.--poultry.--tull and the new husbandry.--bad times.--fruit-growing chapter xv - . townshend.--sheep-rot.--cattle plague.--fruit-growing chapter xvi - . arthur young.--crops and their cost.--the labourers' wages and diet.--the prosperity of farmers.--the country squire.--elkington.--bakewell.--the roads.--coke of holkham chapter xvii - . the great french war.--the board of agriculture.--high prices, and heavy taxation chapter xviii enclosure.--the small owner chapter xix - . depression chapter xx - . revival of agriculture.--the royal agricultural society.--corn law repeal.--a temporary set-back.--the halcyon days chapter xxi - . agricultural distress again.--foreign competition.-- agricultural holdings act.--new implements.--agricultural commissions.--the situation in chapter xxii imports and exports.--live stock chapter xxiii modern farm live stock appendices i. average prices from to ii. exports and imports of wheat and flour from and into england, unimportant years omitted iii. average prices per imperial quarter of british corn in england and wales, in each year from to inclusive iv. miscellaneous information landmarks in english agriculture . domesday inquest, most cultivated land in tillage. annual value of land about d. an acre. - . henry iii. assize of bread and ale. - . edward i. general progress. walter of henley. . edward ii. decline. . great famine. . export of wool prohibited. - . black death. heavy blow to manorial system. many demesne lands let, and much land laid down to grass. . statute of labourers. . export of corn forbidden. . villeins' revolt. . richard ii allows export of corn under certain conditions. . import of wheat under s. d. prohibited. end of fifteenth century. increase of enclosure. . fitzherbert's _surveying and husbandry_. . general rise in prices and rents begins. . kett's rebellion. the last attempt of the english peasant to obtain redress by force. . potatoes introduced. . poor law act of elizabeth. . turnips and clover introduced as field crops. . statute of parochial settlement. . importation of cattle, sheep, and swine forbidden. . bounty of s. per quarter on export of wheat, and high duty on import. . tull publishes his _horse-hoeing husbandry_. . great sheep-rot. . exports of corn reached their maximum. . bakewell began experimenting. (about). industrial and agrarian revolution, and great increase of enclosure. . elkington's new drainage system. . wheat allowed to be imported at a nominal duty of d. a quarter when over s. . bath and west of england society established, the first in england. . england definitely becomes a corn-importing country. . board of agriculture established. . speenhamland act. about same date swedes first grown. . duty on wheat reached its maximum. - . agricultural distress. . export of wool allowed. . smith of deanston, the father of modern drainage. . foundation of royal agricultural society. . repeal of the corn laws. - . great agricultural prosperity. . english agriculture feels the full effect of unrestricted competition with disastrous results. " first agricultural holdings act. - . excessive rainfall, sheep-rot, and general distress. chapter i communistic farming.--growth of the manor.--early prices.--the organization and agriculture of the manor when the early bands of english invaders came over to take britain from its celtic owners, it is almost certain that the soil was held by groups and not by individuals, and as this was the practice of the conquerors also they readily fell in with the system they found.[ ] these english, unlike their descendants of to day, were a race of countrymen and farmers and detested the towns, preferring the lands of the britons to the towns of the romans. co-operation in agriculture was necessary because to each household were allotted separate strips of land, nearly equal in size, in each field set apart for tillage, and a share in the meadow and waste land. the strips of arable were unfenced and ploughed by common teams, to which each family would contribute. apparently, as the land was cleared and broken up it was dealt out acre by acre to each cultivator; and supposing each group consisted of ten families, the typical holding of acres was assigned to each family in acre strips, and these strips were not all contiguous but mixed up with those of other families. the reason for this mixture of strips is obvious to any one who knows how land even in the same field varies in quality; it was to give each family its share of both good and bad land, for the householders were all equal and the principle on which the original distribution of the land depended was that of equalizing the shares of the different members of the community.[ ] in attributing ownership of lands to communities we must be careful not to confound communities with corporations. maitland thinks the early land-owning communities blended the character of corporations and of co-owners, and co-ownership is ownership by individuals.[ ] the vills or villages founded on their arrival in britain by our english forefathers resembled those they left at home, and even there the strips into which the arable fields were divided were owned in severalty by the householders of the village. there was co-operation in working the fields but no communistic division of the crops, and the individual's hold upon his strips developed rapidly into an inheritable and partible ownership. 'at the opening of anglo-saxon history absolute ownership of land in severalty was established and becoming the rule.'[ ] in the management of the meadow land communal features were much more clearly brought out; the arable was not reallotted,[ ] but the meadow was, annually; while the woods and pastures, the right of using which belonged to the householders of the village, were owned by the village 'community'. there may have been at the time of the english conquest roman 'villas' with slaves and _coloni_ cultivating the owners' demesnes, which passed bodily to the new masters; but the former theory seems true of the greater part of the country. at first 'extensive' cultivation was practised; that is, every year a fresh arable field was broken up and the one cultivated last year abandoned, for a time at all events; but gradually 'intensive' culture superseded this, probably not till after the english had conquered the land, and the same field was cultivated year after year.[ ] after the various families or households had finished cutting the grass in their allotted portions of meadow, and the corn on their strips of tillage, both grass and stubble became common land and were thrown open for the whole community to turn their stock upon. the size of the strips of land in the arable fields varied, but was generally an acre, in most places a furlong (furrow long) or yards in length, and yards broad; or in other words, rods of - / yards in length and in breadth. there was, however, little uniformity in measurement before the norman conquest, the rod by which the furlongs and acres were measured varying in length from to feet, so that one acre might be four times as large as another.[ ] the acre was, roughly speaking, the amount that a team could plough in a day, and seems to have been from early times the unit of measuring the area of land.[ ] of necessity the real acre and the ideal acre were also different, for the reason that the former had to contend with the inequalities of the earth's surface and varied much when no scientific measurement was possible. as late as the acre was of many different sizes in england. in bedfordshire it was roods, in dorset perches instead of , in lincolnshire roods, in staffordshire - / acres. to-day the cheshire acre is , square yards. as, however, an acre was and is a day's ploughing for a team, we may assume that the most usual acre was the same area then as now. there were also half-acre strips, but whatever the size the strips were divided one from another by narrow grass paths generally called 'balks', and at the end of a group of these strips was the 'headland' where the plough turned, the name being common to-day. many of these common fields remained until well on in the nineteenth century; in half the county of huntingdon was in this condition, and a few still exist.[ ] cultivating the same field year after year naturally exhausted the soil, so that the two-field system came in, under which one was cultivated and the other left fallow; and this was followed by the three-field system, by which two were cropped in any one year and one lay fallow, the last-named becoming general as it yielded better results, though the former continued, especially in the north. under the three-field plan the husbandman early in the autumn would plough the field that had been lying fallow during summer, and sow wheat or rye; in the spring he broke up the stubble of the field on which the last wheat crop had been grown and sowed barley or oats; in june he ploughed up the stubble of the last spring crop and fallowed the field.[ ] as soon as the crops began to grow in the arable fields and the grass in the meadows to spring, they were carefully fenced to prevent trespass of man and beast; and, as soon as the crops came off, the fields became common for all the village to turn their stock upon, the arable fields being usually common from lammas (august ) to candlemas (february ) and the meadows from july , old midsummer day, to candlemas[ ]; but as in this climate the season both of hay and corn harvest varies considerably, these dates cannot have been fixed. the stock, therefore, besides the common pasture, had after harvest the grazing of the common arable fields and of the meadows. the common pasture was early 'stinted' or limited, the usual custom being that the villager could turn out as many stock as he could keep on his holding. the trouble of pulling up and taking down these fences every year must have been enormous, and we find legislation on this important matter at an early date. about the laws of ine, king of wessex, provided that if 'churls have a common meadow or other partible land to fence, and some have fenced their part and some have not, and cattle stray in and eat up their common corn or grass; let those go who own the gap and compensate to the others who have fenced their part the damage which then may be done, and let them demand such justice on the cattle as may be right. but if there be a beast which breaks hedges and goes in everywhere, and he who owns it will not or cannot restrain it, let him who finds it in his field take it and slay it, and let the owner take its skin and flesh and forfeit the rest.' england was not given over to one particular type of settlement, although villages were more common than hamlets in the greater part of the country.[ ] the vill or village answers to the modern civil parish, and the term may be applied to both the true or 'nucleated' village of clustered houses and the village of scattered hamlets, each of a few houses, existing chiefly on the celtic fringe. the population of some of the villages at the time of the norman conquest was numerous, households or people; but the average townships contained from to households.[ ] there was also the single farm, such as that at eardisley in herefordshire, described in domesday, lying in the middle of a forest, perhaps, as in other similar cases, a pioneer settlement of some one more adventurous than his fellows.[ ] * * * * * such was the early village community in england, a community of free landholders. but a change began early to come over it.[ ] the king would grant to a church all the rights he had in the village, reserving only the _trinoda necessitas_, these rights including the feorm or farm, or provender rent which the king derived from the land--of cattle, sheep, swine, ale, honey, &c.--which he collected by visiting his villages, thus literally eating his rents. the churchmen did not continue these visits, they remained in their monasteries, and had the feorm brought them regularly; they had an overseer in the village to see to this, and so they tightened their hold on the village. then the smaller people, the peasants, make gifts to the church. they give their land, but they also want to keep it, for it is their livelihood; so they surrender the land and take it back as a lifelong loan. probably on the death of the donor his heirs are suffered to hold the land. then labour services are substituted for the old provender rents, and thus the church acquires a demesne, and thus the foundations of the manorial system, still to be traced all over the country, were laid. thegns, the predecessors of the norman barons, become the recipients of grants from the churches and from kings, and householders 'commend' themselves and their land to them also, so that they acquired demesnes. this 'commendation' was furthered by the fact that during the long-drawn out conquest of britain the old kindred groups of the english lost their corporate sense, and the central power being too weak to protect the ordinary householder, who could not stand alone, he had to seek the protection of an ecclesiastical corporation or of some thegn, first for himself and then for his land. the jurisdictional rights of the king also passed to the lord, whether church or thegn; then came the danegeld, the tax for buying off the danes that subsequently became a fixed land tax, which was collected from the lord, as the peasants were too poor for the state to deal with them; the lord paid the geld for their land, consequently their land was his. in this way the free ceorl of anglo-saxon times gradually becomes the 'villanus' of domesday. landlordship was well established in the two centuries before the conquest, and the land of england more or less 'carved into territorial lordships'.[ ] therefore when the normans brought their wonderful genius for organization to this country they found the material conditions of manorial life in full growth; it was their task to develop its legal and economic side.[ ] as the manorial system thus superimposed upon the village community was the basis of english rural economy for centuries, there need be no apology for describing it at some length. the term 'manor', which came in with the conquest,[ ] has a technical meaning in domesday, referring to the system of taxation, and did not always coincide with the vill or village, though it commonly did so, except in the eastern portion of england. the village was the agrarian unit, the manor the fiscal unit; so that where the manor comprised more than one village, as was frequently the case, there would be more than one village organization for working the common fields.[ ] the manor then was the 'constitutive cell' of english mediaeval society.[ ] the structure is always the same; under the headship of the lord we find two layers of population, the villeins and the freeholders; and the territory is divided into demesne land and tributary land of two classes, viz. that of the villeins and that of the freeholders. the cultivation of the demesne (which usually means the land directly occupied and cultivated by the lord, though legally it has a wider meaning and includes the villein tenements), depends to a certain extent on the work supplied by the tenants of the tributary land. rents are collected, labour superintended, administrative business transacted by a set of manorial officers. we may divide the tillers of the soil at the time of domesday into five great classes[ ] in order of dignity and freedom: . liberi homines, or freemen. . socmen. . villeins. . bordarii, cotarii, buri or coliberti. . slaves. the two first of these classes were to be found in large numbers in norfolk, suffolk, lincolnshire, nottinghamshire, leicestershire, and northamptonshire. it is not easy to draw the line between them, but the chief distinction lay in the latter being more burdened with service and customary dues and more especially subject to the jurisdictional authority of the lord.[ ] they were both free, but both rendered services to the lord for their land. both the freemen and the slaves by were rapidly decreasing in number. the most numerous class[ ] on the manors was the third, that of the villeins or non-free tenants, who held their land by payment of services to the lord. the position of the villein under the feudal system is most complicated. he both was and was not a freeman. he was absolutely at the disposal of the lord, who could sell him with his tenement, and he could not leave his land without his lord's permission. he laboured under many disabilities, such as the merchet or fine for marrying his daughter, and fines for selling horse or ox. on the other hand, he was free against every one but his lord, and even against the lord was protected from the forfeiture of his 'wainage' or instruments of labour and from injury to life and limb.[ ] his usual holding was a virgate of acres of arable, though the virgate differed in size even in the same manors; but in addition to this he would have his meadow land and his share in the common pasture and wood, altogether about acres of land. for this he rendered the following services to the lord of the manor: . week work, or labour on the lord's demesne for two or three days a week during most of the year, and four or five days in summer. it was not always the villein himself, however, who rendered these services, he might send his son or even a hired labourer; and it was the holding and not the holder that was considered primarily responsible for the rendering of services.[ ] . precarii or boon days: that is, work generally during harvest, at the lord's request, sometimes instead of week work, sometimes in addition. . gafol or tribute: fixed payments in money or kind, and such services as 'fold soke', which forced the tenants' sheep to lie on the lord's land for the sake of the manure; and suit of mill, by which the tenant was bound to grind his corn in the lord's mill. with regard to the 'boon days' in harvest, it should be remembered that harvest time in the middle ages was a most important event. agriculture was the great industry, and when the corn was ripe the whole village turned out to gather it, the only exceptions being the housewives and sometimes the marriageable daughters. even the larger towns suspended work that the townsmen might assist in the harvest, and our long vacation was probably intended originally to cover the whole work of gathering in the corn and hay. on the occasion of the 'boon-day' work, the lord usually found food for the labourers which, the inquisition of ardley[ ] tells us, might be of the following description: for two men, porridge of beans and peas and two loaves, one white, the other of 'mixtil' bread; that is, wheat, barley, and rye mixed together, with a piece of meat, and beer for their first meal. then in the evening they had a small loaf of mixtil bread and two 'lescas' of cheese. while harvest work was going on the better-off tenants, usually the free ones, were sometimes employed to ride about, rod in hand, superintending the others. the services of the villeins were often very comprehensive, and even included such tasks as preparing the lord's bath; but on some manors their services were very light.[ ] when the third of the above obligations, the gafol or tribute, was paid in kind it was most commonly made in corn; and next came honey, one of the most important articles of the middle ages, as it was used for both lighting and sweetening purposes. ale was also common, and poultry and eggs, and sometimes the material for implements. these obligations were imposed for the most part on free and unfree tenants alike, though those of the free were much lighter than those of the unfree; the chief difference between the two, as far as tenure of the land went, lay in the fact that the former could exercise proprietary rights over his holding more or less freely, the latter had none.[ ] it seems very curious to the modern mind that the villein, a man who farmed about acres of land, should have been in such a servile condition. the amount of work due from each villein came to be fixed by the extent or survey of the manor, but the quality of it was not[ ]; that is, each one knew how many days he had to work, but not whether he was to plough, sow, or harrow, &c. it is surprising to find, that on the festival days of the church, which were very numerous and observed as holy days, the lord lost by no work being done, and the same was the case in wet weather. one of the most important duties of the tenant was the 'averagium', or duty of carrying for the lord, especially necessary when his manors were often a long way apart. he would often have to carry corn to the nearest town for sale, the products of one manor to another, also to haul manure on to the demesne. if he owned neither horse nor ox, he would sometimes have to use his own back.[ ] the holding of the villein did not admit of partition by sale or descent, it remained undivided and entire. when the holder died all the land went to one of the sons if there were several, often to the youngest. the others sought work on the manor as craftsmen or labourers, or remained on the family plot. the holding therefore might contain more than one family, but to the lord remained one and undivided.[ ] in the fourth class came the bordarii, the cotarii, and the coliberti or buri; or, as we should say, the crofters, the cottagers, and the boors. the bordarii numbered , in domesday, and were subject to the same kind of services as the villeins, but the amount of the service was considerably less.[ ] their usual holding was acres, and they are very often found on the demesne of the manor, evidently in this case labourers on the demesne, settled in cottages and provided with a bit of land of their own. the name failed to take root in this country, and the bordarii seem to become villeins or cottiers.[ ] the cotarii, cottiers or cottagers, were , in number, with small pieces of land sometimes reaching acres.[ ] distinctly inferior to the villeins, bordarii, and cottars, but distinctly superior to the slaves, were the buri or coliberti who, with the bordars and cottars, would form a reserve of labour to supplement the ordinary working days at times when work was pressing, as in hay time and harvest. at the bottom of the social ladder in domesday came the slaves, some , in number, who in the main had no legal rights, a class which had apparently already diminished and was diminishing in numbers, so that for the cultivation of the demesne the lord was coming to rely more on the labour of his tenants, and consequently the labour services of the villeins were being augmented.[ ] the agricultural labourer as we understand him, a landless man working solely for wages in cash, was almost unknown. all the arrangements of the manor aimed at supplying labour for the cultivation of the lord's demesne, and he had three chief officers to superintend it: . the seneschal, who answers to our modern steward or land agent, and where there were several manors supervised all of them. he attended to the legal business and held the manor courts. it was his duty to be acquainted with every particular of the manor, its cultivation, extent, number of teams, condition of the stock, &c. he was also the legal adviser of his lord; in fact, very much like his modern successor. . the bailiff for each manor, who collected rents, went to market to buy and sell, surveyed the timber, superintended the ploughing, mowing, reaping, &c., that were due as services from the tenants on the lord's demesne; and according to _fleta_ he was to prevent their 'casting off before the work was done', and to measure it when done.[ ] and considering that those he superintended were not paid for their work, but rendering more or less unwelcome services, his task could not have been easy. . the praepositus or reeve, an office obligatory on every holder of a certain small quantity of land; a sort of foreman nominated from among the villeins, and to a certain extent representing their interests. his duties were supplementary to those of the bailiff: he looked after all the live and dead stock of the manor, saw to the manuring of the land, kept a tally of the day's work, had charge of the granary, and delivered therefrom corn to be baked and malt to be brewed.[ ] besides these three officers, on a large estate there would be a messor who took charge of the harvest, and many lesser officers, such as those of the akermanni, or leaders of the unwieldy plough teams; oxherds, shepherds, and swineherds to tend cattle, sheep, and pigs when they were turned on the common fields or wandered in the waste; also wardens of the woods and fences, often paid by a share in the profits connected with their charge; for instance, the swineherd of glastonbury abbey received a sucking-pig a year, the interior parts of the best pig, and the tails of all the others slaughtered.[ ] on the great estates these offices tended to become hereditary, and many families did treat them as hereditary property, and were a great nuisance in consequence to their lords. at glastonbury we find the chief shepherd so important a person that he was party to an agreement concerning a considerable quantity of land.[ ] there were also on some manors 'cadaveratores', whose duty was to look into and report on the losses of cattle and sheep from murrain, a melancholy tale of the unhealthy conditions of agriculture. the supervision of the tenants was often incessant and minute. according to the court rolls of the manor of manydown in hampshire, tenants were brought to book for all kinds of transgressions. the fines are so numerous that it almost appears that every person on the estate was amerced from time to time. in seven tenants were convicted of having pigs in their lord's crops, one let his horse run in the growing corn, two had cattle among the peas, four had cattle on the lord's pasture, three had made default in rent or service, four were convicted of assault, nine broke the assize of beer, two had failed to repair their houses or buildings. in all thirty-four were in trouble out of a population of some sixty families. the account is eloquent of the irritating restrictions of the manor, and of the inconveniences of common farming.[ ] it is impossible to compare the receipts of the lord of the manor at this period with modern rents, or the position of the villein with the agricultural labourer; it may be said that the lord received a labour rent for the villein's holding, or that the villein received his holding as wages for the services done for the lord,[ ] and part of the return due to the lord was for the use of the oxen with which he had stocked the villein's holding. though in there were many free villages, yet by the time of domesday they were fast disappearing and there were manors everywhere, usually coinciding with the village which we may picture to ourselves as self-sufficing estates, often isolated by stretches of dense woodland and moor from one another, and making each veritably a little world in itself. at the same time it is evident from the extent of arable land described in domesday that many manors were not greatly isolated, and pasture ground was often common to two or more villages.[ ] if we picture to ourselves the typical manor, we shall see a large part of the lord's demesne forming a compact area within which stood his house; this being in addition to the lord's strips in the open fields intermixed with those of his tenants. the mansion house was usually a very simple affair, built of wood and consisting chiefly of a hall; which even as late as the seventeenth century in some cases served as kitchen, dining room, parlour, and sleeping room for the men; and one or two other rooms.[ ] it is probable that in early times the thegns possessed in most cases only one manor apiece,[ ] so that the manor house was then nearly always inhabited by the lord, but after the conquest, when manors were bestowed by scores and even hundreds by william on his successful soldiers, many of them can only have acted as the temporary lodging of the lord when he came to collect his rent, or as the house of the bailiff. according to the _gerefa_, written about --and there was very little alteration for a long time afterwards--the mansion was adjacent to a court or yard which the quadrangular homestead surrounded with its barns, horse and cattle stalls, sheep pens and fowlhouse. within this court were ovens, kilns, salt-house, and malt-house, and perhaps the hayricks and wood piles. outside and surrounding the homestead were the enclosed arable and grass fields of the portion of the demesne which may be called the home farm, a kitchen garden, and probably a vineyard, then common in england. the garden of the manor house would not have a large variety of vegetables; some onions, leeks, mustard, peas, perhaps cabbage; and apples, pears, cherries, probably damsons, plums,[ ] strawberries, peaches, quinces, and mulberries. not far off was the village or town of the tenants, the houses all clustering close together, each house standing in a toft or yard with some buildings, and built of wood, turf, clay, or wattles, with only one room which the tenant shared with his live stock, as in parts of ireland to-day. indeed, in some parts of yorkshire at the beginning of the nineteenth century this primitive simplicity still prevailed, live stock were still kept in the house, the floors were of clay, and the family slept in boxes round the solitary room. examples of farmhouses clustered together at some distance from their respective holdings still survive, though generally built of stone. next the village, though not always, for they were sometimes at a distance by the banks of a stream, were the meadows, and right round stretched the three open arable fields, beyond which was the common pasture and wood,[ ] and, encircling all, heath, forest, and swamp, often cutting off the manor from the rest of the world. the basis of the whole scheme of measurement in domesday was the hide, usually of acres, the amount of land that could be ploughed by a team of oxen in a year; a quarter of this was the virgate, an eighth the bovate, which would therefore supply one ox to the common team. these teams, however, varied; on the manors of s. paul's cathedral in they were sometimes composed of horses and oxen, or of horses only, sometimes oxen.[ ] the farming year began at michaelmas when, in addition to the sowing of wheat and rye, the cattle were carefully stalled and fed only on hay and straw, for roots were in the distant future, and the corn was threshed with the flail and winnowed by hand. in the spring, after the ploughing of the second arable field, the vineyard, where there was one, was set out, and the open ditches, apparently the only drainage then known, cleansed. in may it was time to set up the temporary fences round the meadows and arable fields, and to begin fallowing the third field. a valuable document, describing the duties of a reeve, gives many interesting details of eleventh-century farming:-- 'in may, june, and july one may harrow, carry out manure, set up sheep hurdles, shear sheep, do repairs, hedge, cut wood, weed, and make folds. in harvest one may reap; in august, september, and in october one may mow, set woad with a dibble, gather home many crops, thatch them and cover them over, cleanse the folds, prepare cattle sheds and shelters ere too severe a winter come to the farm, and also diligently prepare the soil. in winter one should plough and in severe frosts cleave timber, make an orchard, and do many affairs indoors, thresh, cleave wood, put the cattle in stalls and the swine in pigstyes, and provide a hen roost. in spring one should plough and graft, sow beans, set a vineyard, make ditches, hew wood for a wild deer fence; and soon after that, if the weather permit, set madder, sow flax seed and woad seed, plant a garden and do many things which i cannot fully enumerate that a good steward ought to provide.'[ ] the methods of cultivation were simple. the plough, if we may judge by contemporary illustrations, had in the eleventh century a large wheel and very short handles.[ ] in the twelfth century neckham describes its parts: a beam, handles, tongue, mouldboard, coulter, and share.[ ] breaking up the clods was done by the mattock or beetle, and harrowing was done by hand with what looks like a large rake; the scythes of the haymakers and the sickles of the reapers were very like those that still linger on in some districts to-day. here is a list of tools and implements for the homestead: an axe, adze, bill, awl, plane, saw, spokeshave, tie hook, auger, mattock, lever, share, coulter, goad-iron, scythe, sickle, weed-hook, spade, shovel, woad dibble, barrow, besom, beetle, rake, fork, ladder, horse comb, shears, fire tongs, weighing scales, and a long list of spinning implements necessary when farmers made their own clothes. the author wisely remarks that one ought to have coverings for wains, plough gear, harrowing tackle, &c.; and adds another list of instruments and utensils: a caldron, kettle, ladle, pan, crock, firedog, dishes, bowls with handles, tubs, buckets, a churn, cheese vat, baskets, crates, bushels, sieves, seed basket, wire sieve, hair sieve, winnowing fans, troughs, ashwood pails, hives, honey bins, beer barrels, bathing tub, dishes, cups, strainers, candlesticks, salt cellar, spoon case, pepper horn, footstools, chairs, basins, lamp, lantern, leathern bottles, comb, iron bin, fodder rack, meal ark or box, oil flask, oven rake, dung shovel; altogether a very complete list, the compiler of which ends by saying that the reeve ought to neglect nothing that should prove useful, not even a mousetrap, nor even, what is less, a peg for a hasp. manors in were of all sizes, from one virgate to enormous organizations like taunton or leominster, containing villages by the score and hundreds of dependent holdings.[ ] the ordinary size, however, of the domesday manor was from four to ten hides of acres each, or say from to , acres,[ ] and the manor of segenehou in bedfordshire may be regarded as typical. held by walter brother of seiher it had as much land as ten ploughs could work, four plough lands belonging to the demesne and six to the villeins, of whom there were twenty-four, with four bordarii and three serfs; thus the villeins had acres each, the normal holding. the manorial system was in fact a combination of large farming by the lords, and small farming by the tenants. nor must we compare it to an ordinary estate; for it was a dominion within which the lord had authority over subjects of various ranks; he was not only a proprietor but a prince with courts of his own, the arbiter of his tenants' rights as well as owner of the land. one of the most striking features of the domesday survey is the large quantity of arable land and the small quantity of meadow, which usually was the only land whence they obtained their hay, for the common pasture cannot often have been mown.[ ] indeed, it is difficult to understand how they fed their stock in hard winters. according to the returns, in many counties more acres were ploughed in than to-day; in some twice as much. in somerset in there were , acres of arable; in , , . in gloucestershire, in , , acres; in , , .[ ] these are extreme instances; but the preponderance of arable is startling, even if we allow for the recent conversion of arable to pasture on account of the low price of corn. between the eleventh century and the sixteenth, the laying down of land to grass must have proceeded on a gigantic scale, for harrison tells us that in his day england was mainly a grazing country. no wonder harrison's contemporaries complained of the decay of tillage. mediaeval prices and statistics are, it is well known, to be taken with great caution; but we may assume that the normal annual value of land under cultivation in was about d. an acre.[ ] land indeed, apart from the stock upon it, was worth very little: in the tenth and eleventh centuries it appears that the hide, normally of acres, was only worth £ to buy, apparently with the stock upon it. in the time of athelstan a horse was worth d., an ox d., a cow d., a sheep d., a hog d., a slave £ --so that a slave was worth oxen[ ]; and these prices do not seem to have advanced by the domesday period. according to the pipe roll of , wheat was s. d. a quarter; but prices then depended entirely on seasons, and we do not know whether that was good or bad. however, many years later, in it was only s. a quarter at hawsted.[ ] in dear years, nearly always the result of wet seasons, it went up enormously; in the english chronicle tells us the acre seed of wheat, that is about bushels, sold for s.,[ ] bushels of barley for s. and bushels of oats for s. in holinshed says that, owing to a great dearth, the quarter of wheat was s. d. the average price, however, in the twelfth century was probably about s. a quarter. in roger of hoveden[ ] says an ox, a cow, and a plough horse were the same price, s.; a sheep with fine wool d., with coarse wool d.; a sow d., a boar d. sometimes prices were kept down by imports; was a bad and dear year, 'most part of the corn rotted on the ground,' and was not all got in till after november , so excessive was the wet and rain. and upon the dearth a sore death and mortality followed for want of necessary food to sustain the pining bodies of the poor people, who died so thick that there were great pits made in churchyards to lay the dead bodies in. and corn had been dearer if great store had not come out of almaine, but there came fifty great ships with wheat and barley, meal and bread out of dutchland, which greatly relieved the poor.[ ] were the manors as isolated as some writers have asserted? generally speaking, we may say the means of communication were bad and many an estate cut off almost completely from the outside world, yet the manors must often have been connected by waterways, and sometimes by good roads, with other manors and with the towns. rivers in the middle ages were far more used as means of communication than to-day, and many streams now silted up and shallow were navigable according to domesday. water carriage was, as always, much cheaper than land carriage, and corn could be carried from henley to london for d. or d. a quarter. the roads left by the romans, owing to the excellence of their construction, remained in use during the middle ages, and must have been a great advantage to those living near them; but the other roads can have been little better than mud tracks, except in the immediate vicinity of the few large towns. the keeping of the roads in repair, one part of the _trinoda necessitas_ was imposed on all lands; but the results often seem to have been very indifferent, and they appear largely to have depended on chance, or the goodwill or devotion of neighbouring landowners.[ ] perhaps they would, except in the case of the roman roads, have been impassable but for the fact that the great lords and abbots were constantly visiting their scattered estates, and therefore were interested in keeping such roads in order. but in those days people were contented with very little, and though edward i enforced the general improvement of roads in , in the fourteenth century they were decaying. parliament adjourned thrice between and because the state of the roads kept many of the members away. in the high road running from temple bar, then the western limit of london, to westminster was 'so full of holes and bogs' that the traffic was dangerous for men and carriages; and a little later all the roads near london were so bad, that carriers 'are oftentimes in peril of losing what they bring.' what must remote country roads have been like when these important highways were in this state? if members of parliament, rich men riding good horses, could not get to london, how did the clumsy wagons and carts of the day fare? the church might well pity the traveller, and class him with the sick 'and the captive among the unfortunates whom she recommended to the daily prayers of pious souls.'[ ] rivers were mainly crossed by ford or ferry, though there were some excellent bridges, a few of which still remain, maintained by the _trinoda necessitas_, by gilds, by 'indulgences' promised to benefactors, and by toll, the right to levy which, called pontage, was often spent otherwise than on the repair of the bridge. a few of the old open fields still exist, and the best surviving example of an open-field parish is that of laxton in nottinghamshire.[ ] nearly half the area of the parish remains in the form of two great arable fields, and two smaller ones which are treated as two parts of the third field. the different holdings, freehold and leasehold, consist in part of strips of land scattered all over these fields. the three-course system is rigidly adhered to, first year wheat, second year spring corn, third year fallow. in a corner of the parish is laxton heath, a common covered with coarse grass where the sheep are grazed according to a 'stint' recently determined upon, for when it was unstinted the common was overstocked. the commonable meadows which the parish once had were enclosed at a date beyond anyone's recollection, though the neighbouring parish of eakring still has some. there are other enclosures in the remote parts of the parish which apparently represent the old woodland. the inconvenience of the common-field system was extreme. south luffenham in rutland, not enclosed till , consisted of , acres divided among twenty-two owners into , pieces. in some places furrows served to divide the lands instead of turf balks, which were of course always being altered. another difficulty arose from there being no check to high winds, which would sometimes sweep the whole of the crops belonging to different farmers in an inextricable heap against the nearest obstruction. footnotes: [ ] vinogradoff, _growth of the manor_, p. ; medley, _constitutional history_, p. . [ ] vinogradoff, _villeinage in england_, p. . [ ] maitland, _domesday book and beyond_, pp. et seq. [ ] stubbs, _constitutional history_, § . [ ] vinogradoff, _english society in the eleventh century_, p. , says, 'as a rule it was not subject to redivision.' [ ] cunningham, _growth of english industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] maitland, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] _anonymous treatise on husbandry_, royal historical society, pp. xli. and . about , smyth, in his _lives of the berkeleys_, i. , says, 'at this time lay all lands in common fields, in one acre or ridge, one man's intermixt with another.' [ ] see below. [ ] cunningham, _growth of english industry and commerce_, i. . maitland thinks the two-field system was as common as the three-field, both in early and mediaeval times. _domesday book and beyond_, p. . [ ] nasse, _agricultural community of the middle ages_, p. . to-day harvest generally commences about august , so that this, like the growth of grapes in mediaeval times, seems to show our climate has grown colder. [ ] vinogradoff, _english society in the eleventh century_, p. . [ ] maitland, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] vinogradoff, _english society in the eleventh century_, p. . [ ] maitland, _op. cit._ pp. et seq. [ ] vinogradoff, _english society in the eleventh century_, p. . [ ] vinogradoff, _english society in the eleventh century_, p. . [ ] maitland, _domesday book_, p. [ ] vinogradoff, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] vinogradoff, _villeinage in england_, pp. et seq. [ ] maitland, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] vinogradoff, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] in domesday they number , . maitland, _domesday book_. [ ] maitland, _op. cit._. [ ] vinogradoff, _english society in the eleventh century_, p. . [ ] _domesday of s. paul_, p. lxviii. [ ] maitland, _domesday book_, p. . [ ] cunningham, _growth of english industry and commerce_, i. . in some manors free tenants could sell their lands without the lord's licence, in others not. [ ] vinogradoff, _villeinage in england_, p. . [ ] vinogradoff, _villeinage in england_, p. . [ ] ibid. p. ; and _english society in the eleventh century_, p. . at the end of the eighteenth century, in default of sons, lands in some manors in shropshire descended to the youngest daughter.--bishton, _general view of the agriculture of shropshire_, p. . [ ] vinogradoff, _english society in the eleventh century_, p. . [ ] maitland, domesday book, p. . [ ] ibid. [ ] maitland, _domesday book_, p. . [ ] _fleta_, c. . [ ] _domesday of s. paul_, xxxv. _fleta_, 'an anonymous work drawn up in the thirteenth century to assist landowners in managing their estates' says, the reeve 'shall rise early, and have the ploughs yoked, and then walk in the fields to see that all is right and note if the men be idle, or if they knock off work before the day's task is fully done.' [ ] vinogradoff, _villeinage in england_, p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] _manor of manydown_, hampshire record society, p. . breaking the assize of beer meant selling it without a licence, or of bad quality. the village pound was the consequence of the perpetual straying of animals, and later on the vicar sometimes kept it. see ibid. p. . [ ] cunningham, _growth of english industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] vinogradoff, _villeinage in england_, p. . [ ] andrews, _old english manor_, p. . [ ] _domesday of s. paul_, p. xxxvii. [ ] thorold rogers, _agriculture and prices_, i. : cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. : neckham, _de natura rerum_, rolls series, ch. clxvi. rogers says there were no plums, but neckham mentions them. see also denton, _england in the fifteenth century_, p. . matthew paris says the severe winter in destroyed cherries, plums and figs. _chron. maj._, rolls series, v. . [ ] woods were used as much for pasture as for cutting timber and underwood. not only did the pigs feed there on the mast of oak, beech, and chestnut, but goats and horned cattle grazed on the grassy portions. [ ] the illustrations of contemporary mss. usually show teams in the plough of or oxen, and was probably the team generally used, according to vinogradoff, _op. cit._ p. . it must, of course, have varied according to the soil. birch, in his _domesday_, p. , says he has never found a team of in contemporary illustrations. to-day oxen can be still seen ploughing in teams of two only. however, about a hundred years ago, when oxen were in common use, we find teams of , as in shropshire, for a single-furrow plough, 'so as to work them easily.' six hours a day was the usual day's work, and when more was required one team was worked in the morning, another in the afternoon.--_victoria county history: shropshire, agriculture_. walter of henley says the team stopped work at three. [ ] cunningham, _growth of english industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] see the excellent reproductions of the calendar of the cott. mss. in green's _short history of the english people_, illustrated edition, i. . [ ] _de natura rerum_, rolls series, p, . [ ] vinogradoff, _english society in the eleventh century_, p. . [ ] ibid. p. . perhaps one of the most interesting features of the smaller manors is that they were constantly being swallowed up by the larger. [ ] as some of the common pasture was held in severalty, this may perhaps have been mown in scarce years. walter of henley mentions mowing the waste, see below, p. . [ ] maitland, _domesday book_, ; _board of agriculture returns_, . [ ] vinogradoff, _english society in the eleventh century_, p. ; birch, _domesday_, p. . [ ] maitland, _domesday book_. ; cunningham, _growth of industry and commerce_, i. ; _domesday of s. paul_, pp. xliii. and xci. [ ] cullum, _history of hawsted_, p. . [ ] rolls series, ii. . according to this, the price of a bushel of wheat reckoned in modern money was £ in that year [ ] ibid. iii. . [ ] holinshed, who is supported by william of malmesbury in the assertion that in time of scarcity england imported corn. matthew paris, _chron. maj._, v. . [ ] jusserand, _english wayfaring life_, p. . [ ] jusserand, _english wayfaring life_, p. . [ ] gilbert slater, _the english peasantry and the enclosure of common fields_, p. . chapter ii the thirteenth century.--the manor at its zenith, with seeds of decay already visible.--walter of henley in the thirteenth century the manorial system may be said to have been in its zenith; the description therefore of cuxham manor in oxfordshire at that date is of special interest. according to professor thorold rogers[ ] there were two principal tenants, each holding the fourth part of a military fee. the prior of holy trinity, wallingford, held a messuage, a mill, and acres of land in free alms; i.e. under no obligation or liability other than offering prayers on behalf of the donor. a free tenant had a messuage and - / acres, the rent of which was s. a year. he also had another messuage and nine acres, for which he paid the annual rent of lb. of pepper, worth about s. d. the rector of the parish had part of a furrow, i.e. one of the divisions of the common arable field, and paid d. a year for it. another tenant held a cottage in the demesne under the obligation of keeping two lamps lighted in the church. another person was tenant-at-will of the parish mill, at a rent of s. a year. the rest of the tenants were villeins or cottagers, thirteen of the former and eight of the latter. each of the villeins had a messuage and half a virgate, to acres of arable land at least, for which his rent was chiefly corn and labour, though there were two money payments, a halfpenny on november and a penny whenever he brewed. he had to pay a quarter of seed wheat at michaelmas, a peck of wheat, bushels of oats, and hens on november , and at christmas a cock, two hens, and two pennyworth of bread. his labour services were to plough, sow, and till half an acre of the lord's land, and give his work as directed by the bailiff except on sundays and feast days. in harvest time he was to reap three days with one man at his own cost. some of these tenants held, besides their half virgates, other plots of land for which each had to make hay for one day for the lord, with a comrade, and received a halfpenny; also to mow, with another, three days in harvest time, at their own charges, and another three days when the lord fed them. after harvest six pennyworth of beer was divided among them, each received a loaf of bread, and every evening when work was over each reaper might carry away the largest sheaf of corn he could lift on his sickle. the cottagers paid from s. d. to s. a year for their holdings, and were obliged to work a day or two in the hay-making, receiving therefor a halfpenny. they also had to do from one to four days' harvest work, during which they were fed at the lord's table. for the rest of the year they were free labourers, tending cattle or sheep on the common for wages or working at the various crafts usual in the village. this manor was a small one, and contained in all twenty-four households, numbering from sixty to seventy inhabitants.[ ] on most manors, as in forncett,[ ] which contained about , acres, from the preponderance of arable, the chief source of income to the lord was from the grain crops; other sources may be seen from the following table of the lord's receipts and expenses in - : receipts. £ s. d. fixed rents - / farm of market chevage[ ] foldage - / sale of works - / herbage hay turf, &c. - / underwood grain - / cider - / stock dairy - / pleas tallage ------------------ £ - / expenses. £ s. d. rents paid and allowed - / ploughs and carts buildings and walls - / small necessaries - / dairy - / threshing - / meadow and autumn expenses stock bailiff steward - / grain - / expenses of acct. - / ------------------ £ - / the manor was almost entirely self-sufficing; of necessity, for towns were few and distant, and the roads to them bad. each would have its smith, millwright, thatcher, &c., paid generally in kind for their services. there was little trade with the outside world, except for salt--an invaluable article when meat had to be salted down every autumn for winter use, since there were no roots to keep the cattle on--and iron for some of the implements. nearly everything was made in the village. the mediaeval system of tillage was compulsory; even the freeholders could not manage their plots as they wished, because all the soil of the township formed one whole and was managed by the entire village. even the lord[ ] had to conform to the customs of the community. any other system than this, which must have been galling to the more enterprising, was impossible, for as the various holdings lay in unfenced strips all over the great common fields, individual initiative was out of the question. as may be imagined, the great number of strips all mixed together often led to great confusion, sometimes or acres could not be found at all, and disputes owing to careless measurement were frequent. it is not surprising that the services by which the villeins paid rent for their holdings to the lord very early began to be commuted for money; it was much more convenient to both parties; and with this change from a 'natural economy' to a 'money economy' the destruction of the manorial system commenced, though it was to take centuries to effect it. the first money payments apparently date from as early as ,[ ] but must then have been very few, and services were the rule in the thirteenth and earlier centuries, though at the beginning of the twelfth we find a great number of rent-paying tenants.[ ] in the fourteenth century money began to be more generally available, and the process of commutation grew steadily; a process greatly accelerated by the destruction of large numbers of tenants who paid rent in services by the black death of - , which forced lords of manors to let their lands for money or work them themselves with hired labour. before that visitation, however, it appears that commutation of labour services for fixed annual payments had made very little progress.[ ] when these services were commuted for money in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were put at d. a day in winter, and d. a day in summer, and rather more in harvest[ ]; and we may put the ordinary agricultural labourers' wages from - all the year round at d. a day, and from - at d., but few were paid in this way. many were paid by the year, with allowances of food besides and sometimes clothes, and many were in harvest at all events paid by the piece. at crondal in hampshire in a carter by the year received s., a herdsman s. d., a day a or dairymaid, s.[ ] the change to money payments was beneficial to both parties; it stopped many of the dishonest practices of the lord's bailiff, apart from the fact that farming by officials was an expensive method. it meant, too, that religious festivals and bad weather would no longer diminish the lord's profits; on the other hand, the tenant could devote himself entirely to his holding free from annoying labour services.[ ] the state of agriculture at the time of domesday was apparently very low, judging by the small returns of manors,[ ] but by the time of edward i it had made considerable progress. during the reign of henry iii england had grown in opulence, and continued to do so under his great son, who found time from his manifold tasks to encourage agriculture and horticulture. fruit and forest trees, shrubs and flowers, were introduced from the continent, and we are told that the hop flourished in the royal gardens.[ ] at his death england was prosperous, the people progressing in comfort, the population advancing, the agricultural labourers were increasing in numbers, the value of the land had risen and was rising. then came a reaction from which england did not recover for two centuries, and harrison, who wrote his description of england at the end of the sixteenth century, says that many of the improvements began to be neglected in process of time, so that from henry iv till the latter end of henry vii there was little or no use for them in england, 'but they remained unknown.' the hundred rolls of edward i, which embody the results of the labours of a commission appointed by that monarch to inquire into encroachments on royal lands and royal jurisdiction, show clearly that there had been since the domesday survey a very great growth in the rural population, a sure sign that agriculture was flourishing; and on some estates the number of free tenants had increased largely, but the burdens of the villeins were not less onerous than they had been. it was in the thirteenth century that the practice of keeping strict and minute accounts became general, and the accounts of the bailiff of those days would be a revelation to the bailiff of these. at the same time we must not forget that the earliest improvements in english agriculture were largely due to the monks, who from their constant journeys abroad were able to bring back new plants and seeds; while it is well known that many of the religious houses, the cistercians especially, who always settled in the remote country, were most energetic farmers, their energy being materially assisted by their wealth. it is said that the great becket when he visited a monastery did not disdain to labour in the field. among other benefits that the landed interest gained at this time was the more easy transference of land provided, _inter alia_, by the statute of _quia emptores_, which led to many tenants selling their lands, provided the rights of the lord were preserved, and to a great increase consequently of free tenants, many of whom had quite small holdings.[ ] the amalgamation of holdings by the more industrious and skilful has, as we should expect, been a well-marked tendency all through the history of english agriculture, and began early. for instance, according to the records of s. paul's cathedral, john durant, whose ancestor in held only one virgate in 'cadendon', had in eight or ten at least. at 'belchamp', martin de suthmere, one of the free tenants, held acres by himself and his tenants, twenty-two in number, who rendered service to him; one of them being de vere, earl of oxford, who held acres under martin. to such a position had the abler of the small holders of a century or so before already pushed their way, in spite of the heavy hand of feudalism, which did much to hinder individual initiative. at this period and until tudor times england, as regards the cultivated land, was essentially a corn-growing country; the greater part of the lord's demesne was arable, and the tillage fields of the villeins largely exceeded their meadows. for instance, in the cultivated lands at hawsted in suffolk were nearly all under the plough; in seven holdings there were acres of arable and only of meadow, a proportion of to . no doubt there was plenty of common pasture, but we cannot call this cultivated land. the seven holdings were as follows:[ ] acres. arable. meadow. wood. thomas fitzeustace, lord of the manor william tallemache philip noel robert de ros walter de stanton william de camaville john beylham --- -- -- these were the larger tenants; among the smaller several had no meadow at all. we must not forget that the grazing of the tillage fields after the crops were off was of great assistance to those who kept stock; for there was plenty to eat on the stubbles. the wheat was cut high, the straw often apparently left standing inches or feet high; weeds of all kinds abounded, for the land was badly cleaned; and often only the upper part of the high ridges, into which the land was thrown for purposes of drainage, was cultivated, the lower parts being left to natural grass.[ ] the greatest authority for the farming of the thirteenth century is walter of henley, who wrote, about the middle of it, a work which held the field as an agricultural textbook until fitzherbert wrote in the sixteenth century, and much of his advice is valuable to-day. there was from his time until the days of william marshall, who wrote five centuries afterwards, a controversy as to the respective merits of horses and oxen as draught animals, and it is a curious fact that the later writer agreed with the earlier as to the superiority of oxen. 'a plough of oxen', says walter, 'will go as far in the year as a plough of horses, because the malice of the ploughman will not allow the plough of horses to go beyond their pace, no more than the plough of oxen. further, in very hard ground where the plough of horses will stop, the plough of oxen will pass. and the horse costs more than the ox, for he is obliged to have the sixth part of a bushel of oats every night, worth a halfpenny at least, and twelve pennyworth of grass in the summer. besides, each week he costs more or less a penny a week in shoeing, if he must be shod on all four feet;' which was not the universal custom. 'but the ox has only to have - / sheaves of oats per week (ten sheaves yielding a bushel of oats), worth a penny, and the same amount of grass as the horse.[ ] and when the horse is old and worn out there is nothing but his skin, but when the ox is old with ten pennyworth of grass he shall be fit for the larder.'[ ] the labourer of the middle ages could not complain of lack of holidays; walter of henley tells us that, besides sundays, eight weeks were lost in the year from holidays and other hindrances.[ ] he advises the sowing of spring seed on clay or on stony land early, because if it is dry in march the ground will harden too much and the stony ground become dry and open; therefore fore sow early that corn may be nourished by winter moisture. chalky and sandy ground need not be sown early. at sowing, moreover, do not plough large furrows, but little and well laid together, that the seed may fall evenly. let your land be cleaned and weeded after s. john's day, june , for before that is not a good time; and if thistles are cut before s. john's day 'for every one will come two or three.' do not sell your straw; if you take away the least you lose much; words which many a landlord to-day doubtless wishes were fixed in the minds of his tenants. manure should be mixed with earth, for it lasts only two or three years by itself, but with earth it will last twice as long; for when the manure and the earth are harrowed together the earth shall keep the manure so that it cannot waste by descending in the soil, which it is apt to do. 'feed your working oxen before some one, and with chaff. why? i will tell you. because it often happens that the oxherd steals the provender.' the oxen were also to be bathed, and curried when dry with a wisp of straw, which would cause them to lick themselves. 'change your seed every year at michaelmas; for seed grown on other ground will bring more profit than that which is grown on your own.' apparently the only drainage then practised was that of furrow and open ditch; and we find him saying that to free your lands from too much water, let the marshy ground be well ridged, and the water made to run, and so the ground may be freed from water. here is his estimate of the cost of wheat growing[ ]: 'you know surely that an acre sown with wheat takes three ploughings, except lands which are sown yearly; and that each ploughing is worth d. and the harrowing d., and on the acre it is necessary to sow at least two bushels. now two bushels at michaelmas are worth at least d., and weeding / d., and reaping d., and carrying in august d., and the straw will pay for the threshing.'[ ] the return was wretched: 'at three times your sowing you ought to have bushels, worth s.' the total cost is thus s. - / d.; and without debiting anything for rent and manure, the loss would be - / d. an acre. the anonymous _treatise on husbandry_ of about the same date says, however, that 'wheat ought to yield to the fifth grain, oats to the fourth, barley to the eighth, beans and peas to the sixth.'[ ] in the years - the average yield of wheat at combe, oxfordshire, was bushels per acre, of barley a little over , oats . in the manor of forncett, in various years from to , wheat yielded about bushels, oats from to , barley , and peas from to bushels per acre.[ ] as for the dairy, cows, says walter, should yield a wey, ( cwt) of cheese annually, and half a gallon of butter a week, 'if sorted out and fed in pasture of salt marsh;' but 'in pasture of wood or in meadows after mowing, or in stubble, it should take cows for the same.' twenty ewes, which it was then the custom to milk, fed in pasture of salt marsh, ought to yield the same as the cows. a gallon of butter was worth d., and weighed lb. and the anonymous treatise says each cow ought to yield from the day after michaelmas until the first kalends of may, twenty-eight weeks, d. more or less; and from the first kalends of may till michaelmas, twenty-four weeks, the milk of a cow should be worth s. d.; and she should give also stones ( lb. per stone) of cheese, and 'as much butter as shall make as much cheese.'[ ] it was a common practice all through the middle ages, and survives in localities to-day, to let out the cows by the year, at from s. to s. d. a head, often to the daya or dairymaid, the owner supplying the food, and the lessee agreeing to restore them in equal number and condition at the end of the term.[ ] the anonymous treatise tells us that 'if you wish to farm out your stock you can take s. d. clear for each cow and the tithe, and for a sheep d. and the tithe, and a sow should bring you s. d. a year and acquit the tithe, and each hen d. and the tithe; and walter says, 'when i was bailiff the dairymaids had the geese and hens to farm, the geese at d. and the hens at d.' among other information conveyed by these two treatises we learn that the poor servants or labourers were accustomed to be fed on the diseased sheep, salted and dried; but walter adds, 'i do not wish you to do this.' nor can we point the finger of scorn at this: for in the disastrous season of numbers of rotten sheep were sold to the butcher and consumed by the unsuspecting public without even being salted and dried. he further tells us that 'you can well have acres weeded for d., and an acre of meadow mown for d., and an acre of waste meadow for - / d. and know that men can well reap and bind acres a day of each kind of corn, and where each takes d. a day then you must give d. an acre.'[ ] 'one ought to thresh a quarter of wheat or rye for d. and a quarter of oats for d. a sow ought to farrow twice a year, having each time at least pigs; and each goose goslings a year and each hen eggs and chicks, of which ought to be made capons; and for geese you must have one gander, and for hens one cock.' the laying qualities of the hen, in spite of the talk of the -egg bird, were evidently as good then as to-day. in those days of self-supporting farms it was the custom to put together the farm implements at home, and the farmer is advised that it will be well if he can have carters and ploughmen who should know how to work all their own wood, though it should be necessary to pay them more.[ ] the village smith, however, seems, as we should expect, to have done most of the iron work that was needed.[ ] these extracts have given the reader some insight into thirteenth-century prices, prices which in the case of grain altered very little for nearly years: for instance, the average price of wheat from to was s. - / d. a quarter, and from to s. - / d.; of barley, s. - / d. from to , s. - / d. from to ; of oats, s. - / d. and s. - / d. in the same two periods respectively; of rye, s. d. and s. - / d.; and of beans, s. - / d. and s. - / d.[ ] wheat fluctuated considerably, being as we have seen s. a quarter at hawsted in and in s. d., a most exceptional price. oxen, which were chiefly valued as working animals, were about s. apiece[ ]; cows, s. d. farm horses were of two varieties: the 'affer' or 'stott', a rough small animal, generally worth about s. d., and the cart-horse, probably the ancestor of our shire horses, whose average price was s. d. a good saddle-horse fetched as much as £ . sheep were from s. d. to s. d. each. in hampshire in shoeing ten farm horses for the plough for a year cost s.; making a gate cost d. as walter of henley said, it cost a penny a week to shoe a horse on all four feet; these horses must have been very roughly shod.[ ] it is evident, from what walter of henley says, that horses were not always shod on all four feet, and their shoes were generally very light. the roads were mere tracks without any metalling, so that there was little necessity for heavy shoes; and as professor thorold rogers suggests, it is quite possible that the hoofs of our horses have become weaker by reason of the continual paring and protection which modern shoeing involves.[ ] they weighed usually less than half a pound, and cost about s. a hundred. the most striking fact about agricultural prices at this date is the low price of land compared with that of its products. the annual rent of land was from d. to d.[ ] an acre, and it was worth about ten years' purchase. consequently, a quarter of wheat was often worth more than an acre of land, a good ox three times as much, a good cart-horse four times, while a good war-horse was worth the fee-simple of a small farm. a greater breadth of wheat was sown than of any other crop; but it seems that none was ever stored except in the castles and monasteries, for in spite of successive abundant harvests a bad season would send the price up at once. barley was, as now, chiefly used for making beer, which was also made from oats and wheat, of course without hops, which were not used till the fifteenth century; and sometimes it was made of oats, barley, and wheat, a concoction worth / d. a gallon in .[ ] cider was also drunk, and was sold at exminster in devonshire in at / d. a gallon, and apples fetched d. a bushel. thorold rogers[ ] says that wheat was the chief food of the english labourer from the earliest times until perhaps the seventeenth century, when the enormous prices were prohibitive; but this statement must be taken with reserve, as must that of mr. prothero[ ] that rye was the bread-stuff of the peasantry. where the labourer's food is mentioned as part of his wages, wheat, barley, and rye all occur, wheat and rye being often mixed together as 'mixtil'; and it is most probable that in one district wheat, in another one of the other cereals, formed his chief bread-stuff, according to the crop best adapted to the soil of the locality. walter of henley mentions wheat as if it was the chief crop, for he selects it as best illustrating the cost of corn-growing[ ]; and from the enormous number of entries enumerated by thorold rogers in his mediaeval statistics it was apparently more grown than other cereals. the chief meat of the lower classes then, as to-day, was bacon from the innumerable herds of swine who roamed in the woods and wastes, but in bad years, when food was scarce, the poor ate nuts, acorns, fern roots, bark, and vetches.[ ] as the cattle of the middle ages were like the mountain cattle of to-day, so were the sheep like many of the sheep to be seen in the welsh mountains; yet, unlike the cattle, an attempt seems to have been made, judging by the high price of rams, to improve the breed; but they were probably poor animals worth from s. to s. d. each, with a small fleece weighing about a pound and a half, worth d. a lb. or a little more. footnotes: [ ] _six centuries of work and wages_, p. . no one can write on english agriculture without acknowledging a deep debt to his monumental industry, though his opinions are often open to question. [ ] compare the account of the manors in huntingdonshire belonging to romsey abbey given in page _end of villeinage in england_, pp. et seq. [ ] davenport, _a norfolk manor_, p. ; and see hall, _pipe roll of bishopric of winchester_, p. xxv. [ ] chevage, poll money, paid to the lord. [ ] vinogradoff, _villeinage in england_, p. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] vinogradoff, _villeinage in england_, p. . on the berkeley estates in - money was so scarce with the tenants that the rents, apparently even where services had been commuted, were commonly paid in oxen.--smyth, _lives of the berkeleys_, i. . in the thirteenth century the labour services of the villeins were stricter than in the eleventh. vinogradoff, _op. cit._ . [ ] page, _end of villeinage_, p. . [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, i. . [ ] hampshire record society, i. . see appendix, i. [ ] hasbach, _english agricultural labourer_, p. . [ ] hallam, _middle ages_, iii. [ ] denton, _england in the fifteenth century_, p. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] cullum, _history of hawsted_, ed., p. . [ ] ballard, _domesday_, p. . [ ] walter of henley, royal historical society, p. . [ ] walter reckons the above food of the horse at s. d., and of the ox at s. d.; but both are wrong. [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] walter of henley, royal historical society, p. . [ ] walter of henley, royal historical society, p. . [ ] davenport, _a norfolk manor_, pp. et seq. see also hall, _pipe roll of the bishopric of winchester_, p. xxvi, which gives an average yield of wheat over a large area in - at . bushels per acre. [ ] walter of henley, royal historical society, p. . [ ] thorold rogers, _agriculture and prices_, i. ; _archaeologia_, xviii. . [ ] walter of henley, pp. , . in lancashire, at the end of the thirteenth century, mowing - / acres cost s. - / d. _victoria county history, lancashire, agriculture_, and _two compoti of the lancashire and cheshire manors of henry de lacy_ (cheetham society). [ ] walter of henley, p. . [ ] _crondall, records_, hampshire record society, i. . [ ] see thorold rogers, various tables in vol. i. of _history of agriculture and prices_. compare these with the prices on the berkeley estates from to , omitting years of scarcity: wheat, s. d. to s.; oxen, s. to s.; cows, s. to s.; bacon hogs, s.; fat sheep, s. d. to s.; and in the early part of edward iii's reign, wheat, s. d. to s.; oxen, s. to s. other prices about the same.--smyth, _lives of the berkeleys_, i. . [ ] if it is true, as generally stated, that the mediaeval ox was one-third the size of his modern successor, it is apparent that he was a very dear animal. cattle at this date suffered from the ravages of wolves. [ ] _crondall, records_, hampshire record society, i. . [ ] _history of agriculture and prices_, i. . [ ] seebohm, _transactions of royal historical society_, new series, xvii. , says that rent in the fourteenth century was commonly d.; the usual average is stated at d. an acre. [ ] _domesday of s. paul_, camden society, p. li. [ ] _history of agriculture and prices_, i. . [ ] _pioneers of agriculture_, p. . [ ] ed. lamond, royal historical society, p. . [ ] denton, _england in the fifteenth century_, p. . chapter iii the fourteenth century.--decline of agriculture.--the black death.-- statute of labourers after the death of edward i in the progress of english agriculture came to a standstill, and little advance was made till after the battle of bosworth in . the weak government of edward ii, the long french war commenced by edward iii and lasting over a hundred years, and the wars of the roses, all combined to impoverish the country. england, too, was repeatedly afflicted during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by pestilences, sometimes caused by famines, sometimes coming with no apparent cause; all probably aggravated, if not caused, by the insanitary habits of the people. the mention of plagues, indeed, at this time is so frequent that we may call them chronic. at this period corn and wool were the two main products of the farmer; corn to feed his household and labourers, and wool to put money in his pocket, a somewhat rare thing. english wool, which came to be called 'the flower and strength and revenue and blood of england', was famous in very early times, and was exported long before the conquest. in edgar's reign the price was fixed by law, to prevent it getting into the hands of the foreigner too cheaply; a wey, or weigh, was to be sold for d.[ ] patriotic englishmen asserted it was the best in the world, and henry ii, edward iii, and edward iv are said to have improved the spanish breed by presents of english sheep. spanish wool, however, was considered the best from the earliest times until the peninsular war, when the saxon and silesian wools deposed it from its pride of place. smith, in his _memoirs of wool_,[ ] is of the opinion that england 'borrowed some parts of its breed from thence, as it certainly did the whole from one place or another.' spanish wool, too, was imported into england at an early date, the manufacture of it being carried on at andover in .[ ] yet until the fourteenth century it was not produced in sufficient quantities to compete seriously with english wool in the markets of the continent; and it appears to have been the long wools, such as those of the modern leicester and lincoln, from which england chiefly derived its fame as a wool-producing country. our early exports went to flanders, where weaving had been introduced a century before the conquest, and, in spite of the growth of the weaving industry in england, to that country the bulk of it continued to go, all through the middle ages, though in the thirteenth century a determined effort was made to divert a larger share of english wool to italy.[ ] during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the export of wool was frequently forbidden,[ ] sometimes for political objects, but also to gain the manufacture of cloth for england by keeping our wool from the foreigner; but these measures did not stop the export, they only hampered it and encouraged much smuggling. it commanded what seems to us an astonishing price, for d. a lb. in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is probably equal to nearly s. in our money. its value, and the ease with which it could be packed and carried, made it an object of great importance to the farmer. in [ ] we have a schedule of the price of wool in the various counties of england, for in that year , sacks of the best wool was ordered to be bought in various districts by merchants for edward iii, to provide the sinews of war against france. the price for the best wool was to be fixed by the king, his council, and the merchants; the 'gross' wool being bought by agreement between buyer and seller. of the former the highest price fixed was for the wool of hereford, then and for long afterwards famous for its excellent quality, marks the sack of lb.; and the lowest for that of the northern counties, marks the sack. somewhat more than a century afterwards we have another similar list of wool prices, when in the commons petitioned the king that 'as the wools growing within this realm have hitherto been the great commodity, enriching, and welfare of this land, and how of late the price is greatly decayed so that the commons were not able to pay their rents to their lords', the king would fix certain prices under which wools should not be bought. the highest price fixed was for the wool of 'hereford, in leominster', £ a sack; the lowest for that of suffolk, £ s.[ ]; the average being about £ s. the manorial accounts of the knights' hospitallers, who then held land all over england, afford valuable information as to agriculture in .[ ] from these we gather that the rent of arable land varied from d. to s. an acre; but the latter sum was very exceptional, and there are only two instances of it given, in lincolnshire and kent. most of the tillage rented for less than s. an acre, more than half being at d. or under, and the average about d. on the other hand, meadow land is seldom of less value than s. an acre, and in warwickshire, oxfordshire, and norfolk rose to s. this is one of the numerous proofs of the great value of meadow land at a time when hay was almost the sole winter food of stock; in some places it was eight or ten times as valuable as the arable.[ ] the pasture on the hospitallers' estates was divided into several and common pasture, the former often reaching s. an acre and sometimes s., the latter rarely exceeding d. the most usual way, however, of stating the value of pasture was by reckoning the annual cost of feeding stock per head, cows being valued at s., oxen at s., a horse at a little less than an ox, a sheep at d. the reign of edward iii was a great era for wool-growers, and the hospitallers at hampton in middlesex had a flock of , sheep whose annual produce was six sacks of wool of lb. each, worth £ a sack, which would make the fleeces weigh a little more than lb. each. the profit of cows on one of their manors was reckoned at s. per head, on another at s.; and the profit of sheep at s.[ ] the wages paid to the labourers for day work were d. a day, and we must remember that when he was paid by the day his wages were rightly higher than when regularly employed, for day labour was irregular and casual. the tenants about the same date obtained the following prices[ ] for some of their stock:-- £ s. d. a good ox, alive, fatted on corn " " " not on corn a fatted cow a two-year-old hog a sheep and its fleece a fatted sheep, shorn " goose hens, each[ ] eggs in the middle of the fourteenth century occurred the famous black death, the worst infliction that has ever visited england. its story is too well known for repetition, and it suffices to say that it was like the bubonic plague in the east of to-day: it raged in - , and killed from one-third to one-half of the people.[ ] it is said to have effected more important economic results than any other event in english history. it is probable that the prices of labour were rising before this terrible calamity; the dreadful famine of - ,[ ] followed by pestilence, when wheat went up to s. a quarter, and according to the contemporary chroniclers, in some cases much higher, destroyed a large number of the population, and other plagues had done their share to make labour scarce, but after the black death the advance was strongly marked. it also accelerated the break-up of the manorial system. a large number of the free labourers were swept away, and their labour lost to the lord of the manor; the services of the villeins were largely diminished from the same cause; many of the tenants, both free and unfree, were dead, and the land thrown on the lord's hands. flocks and herds were wandering about over the country because there was no one to tend them. in short, most manors were in a state of anarchy, and their lords on the verge of ruin. it is not to be wondered at, therefore, that they immediately adopted strong measures to save themselves and their property and, no doubt they thought, the whole country. englishmen had by this time learnt to turn to parliament to remedy their ills, but as the plague was still raging a proclamation was issued of which the preamble states that wages had already gone up greatly. 'many, seeing the necessity of masters and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they get excessive wages', and it is, therefore, hard to till the land. every one under the age of , it was ordered, free or villein, who can work, and has no other means of livelihood, is not to refuse to work for any one who offers the accustomed wages; no labourer is to receive more wages than he did before the plague, and none are to give more wages under severe penalties. but besides regulating wages, the proclamation also insists on reasonable prices for food and the necessaries of life: it was a fair attempt not only to protect the landlords but the labourers also, by keeping both wages and prices at their former rate, so that its object was not tyrannous as has been stated.[ ] it was at once disregarded, a fate which met many of the proclamations and statutes of the middle ages, which often seem to have been regarded as mere pious aspirations. accordingly, the statute of , edw. iii, stat. , c. , states that the servants had paid no regard to the ordinance regulating wages, 'but to their ease and singular covetise do withdraw themselves unless they have livery and wages to the double or treble of that they were wont to take'. accordingly, it was again laid down that they were to take liveries and wages as before the black death, and 'where wheat was wont to be given they shall take for the bushel d. ( s. d. a quarter),[ ] or wheat at the will of the giver. and that they be hired to serve by the whole year or by other usual terms, and not by the day, and that none pay in the time of sarcling (weeding) or hay-making but a penny a day, and a mower of meadows for the acre d., or by the day d., and reapers of corn in the first week of august d., and the second d., without meat or drink.' and none were to take for the threshing of a quarter of wheat or rye more than d., and for the quarter of beans, peas, and oats more than d. these prices are certainly difficult to understand. hay-making has usually been paid for at a rate above the ordinary, because of the longer hours; and here we find the price fixed at half the usual wages, while mowing is five times as much, and double the price paid for reaping, though they were normally about the same price.[ ] it is interesting to learn from the statute that there was a considerable migration of labourers at this date for the harvest, from stafford, lancaster, derby, craven, the marches of wales and scotland, and other places. such was the first attempt made to control the labourers' wages by the legislature, and like other legislation of the kind it failed in its object, though the attempt was honestly made; and if the rate of wages fixed was somewhat low, its inequity was far surpassed by the exorbitance of the labourers' demands.[ ] it was an endeavour to set aside economic laws, and its futility was rendered more certain by the depreciation of the coinage in , which led to an advance in prices, and compelled the labourers to persevere in their demands for higher wages.[ ] both wages and prices, except those of grain, continued to increase, and labour services were now largely commuted for money payments,[ ] with the result that the manorial system began to break up rapidly. owing to the dearth of labourers for hire, and the loss of many of the services of their villeins, the lords found it very hard to farm their demesne lands. it should be remembered, too, that an additional hardship from which they suffered at this time was that the quit rents paid to them in lieu of services by tenants who had already become free were, owing to the rise in prices, very much depreciated. their chief remedy was to let their demesne lands. the condition of the manor of forncett in norfolk well illustrates the changes that were now going on. there, in the period - , there were many free tenants as well as villeins, and the holdings of the latter were small, usually only acres. it is also to be noticed that in no year were all the labour services actually performed, some were always sold for money. yet in the period named there was not much progress in the general commutation of services for money payments, and the same was the case in the manors, whose records between and mr. page examined for his _end of villeinage in england_.[ ] the reaping and binding of the entire grain crop of the demesne at forncett was done by the tenants exclusively, without the aid of any hired labour.[ ] however, in the period - the manor underwent a great change. the economic position of the villeins, the administration of the demesne, and the whole organization of the manor were revolutionized. much of the tenants' land had reverted to the lord, partly by the deaths in the great pestilence, partly because tenants had left the manor; they had run away and left their burdensome holdings in order to get high wages as free labourers. this of course led to a diminution of labour rents, so the landlord let most of the demesne for a term of years,[ ] a process which went on all over england; and thus we have the origin of the modern tenant farmer. a fact of much importance in connexion with the peasants' revolt, soon to take place, was that the average money rent of land per acre in forncett in was d., while the labour rents for land, where they were still paid by villeins who had not commuted or run away, were, owing to the rise in the value of labour, worth two or three times this. we cannot wonder that the poor villeins were profoundly discontented. on this manor, as on others, some of the villeins, in spite of the many disadvantages under which they lay, managed to accumulate some little wealth. in and in one bond tenant had two messuages and acres of land; in another died seized of messuages and acres; some had a number of servants in their households, but the majority were very poor. there are several instances of bondmen fleeing from the manor; and the officers of the manor failed to catch them. this was common in other manors, and the 'withdrawal' of villeins played a considerable part in the disappearance of serfdom and the break-up of the system.[ ] the following table shows the gradual disappearance of villeins in the manor of forncett: in the servile families who had land numbered " " " " " " " " " " " " there is no event of greater importance in the agrarian history of england, or which has led to more important consequences, than the dissolution of this community in the cultivation of the land, which had been in use so long, and the establishment of the complete independence and separation of one property from another.[ ] as soon as the manorial system began to give way, and men to have a free hand, the substitution of large for small holdings set in with fresh vigour, for we have already seen that it had begun. it was one of the chief causes of the stagnation of agriculture in the middle ages that it lay under the heavy hand of feudalism, by which individualism was checked and hindered. every one had his allotted position on the land, and it was hard to get out of it, though some exceptional men did so; as a rule there was no chance of striking out a new line for oneself. the villein was bound to the lord, and no lord would willingly surrender his services. there could be little improvement in farming when the custom of the manor and the collective ownership of the teams bound all to the same system of farming.[ ] in fact, agriculture under feudalism suffered from many of the evils of socialism. but, though hard hit, the old system was to endure for many generations, and the modern triumvirate of landlord, tenant, and labourer was not completely established in england until the era of the first reform bill. footnotes: [ ] cunningham, _growth of english industry and commerce_, i. . a weigh in the middle ages was lbs., or half a sack. [ ] second edition, i. n. see also burnley, _history of wool_, p. . [ ] gross, _gild merchant_, ii. . it is from the spanish merino, crossed with leicesters and southdowns, that the vast australian flocks of to-day are descended. [ ] cunningham, _op. cit._ i. . [ ] ashley, _early history of english woollen industry_, p. . [ ] _calendar of close rolls_, - , pp. - . [ ] _rolls of parliament_, v. . [ ] _the hospitallers in england_, camden society. [ ] denton, _england in the fifteenth century_, p. . [ ] _hospitallers in england_, p. xxvi. [ ] ibid. pp. , li. [ ] poultry-keeping was wellnigh universal, judging by the number of rents paid in fowls and eggs. [ ] seems also to have been an excessively rainy year. the wet season was very disastrous to live stock; according to the accounts of the manors of christ church, canterbury, about this time (_historical mss. commission, th report_, ) there died of the murrain on their estates oxen, cows, , sheep. murrain was the name given to all diseases of stock in the middle ages, and is of constant occurrence in old records. [ ] the cause of this as usual was incessant rain during the greater part of the summer; the chronicles of the time say that not only were the crops very short but those that did grow were diseased and yielded no nourishment. the 'murrain' was so deadly to oxen and sheep that, according to walsingham, dogs and ravens eating them dropped down dead. [ ] see cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. . also in an age when the idea of competitive price had not yet been evolved, and when regulation by authority was the custom, it was natural and right that the government in such a crisis should try to check the demands of both labourers and producers, which went far beyond what employers or consumers could pay. putnam, _enforcement of the statute of labourers_, . [ ] the average price of wheat in was s. - / d., which went down to s. d. next year, and s. - / d. the year after; but judging by the ineffectiveness of the statute to reduce wages, it probably had little effect in causing this fall. [ ] see appendix i. [ ] putnam, _op. cit._, . the statute for the first ten years, however, kept wages from ascending as high as might have been the case. [ ] mcpherson, _annals of commerce_, i. , says that as the plague diminished the number of employers as well as labourers, the demand for labour could not have been much greater than before, and would have had little effect on the rate of if edward iii had not debased the coinage. but if the owners did decrease the lands would only accumulate in fewer hands, and would still require cultivation. [ ] page, _end of villeinage_, pp. et seq. [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] _transactions_, royal historical society, new series, xiv. . [ ] this had been done before, but was now much more frequent. hasbach, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] 'after the black death the flight of villeins was extremely common.'--page, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] nasse, _agricultural community of the middle ages_, p. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. . chapter iv how the classes connected with the land lived in the middle ages the castles of the great landowners have been so often described that there is no need to do this again. the popular idea of a baron of the middle ages is of a man who when he was not fighting was jousting or hunting. such were, no doubt, his chief recreations; so fond was he of hunting, indeed, that his own broad lands were not enough, and he was a frequent trespasser on those of others; the records of the time are full of cases which show that poaching was quite a fashionable amusement among the upper classes. but among the barons were many men who, like their successors to-day, did their duty as landlords. of one of the lords of berkeley in the fourteenth century, it was said he was 'sometyme in husbandry at home, sometyme at sport in the field, sometyme in the campe, sometyme in the court and council of state, with that promptness and celerity that his body might have bene believed to be ubiquitary'. many of them were farmers on a very large scale, though they might not have so much time to devote to it as those excellent landlords the monks. thomas lord berkeley, who held the berkeley estates from to , farmed the demesnes of a quantity of manors, as was the custom, and kept thereon great flocks of sheep, ranging from to , on each manor.[ ] the stock of the bishop of winchester, by an inquisition taken at his death in , amounted to draught horses, , head of black cattle, and , sheep and lambs. almost every manor had one or two pigeon houses, and the number of pigeons reared is astonishing; from one manor lord berkeley obtained , pigeons in a single year. no one but the lord was allowed to keep them, and they were one of the chief grievances of the villeins, who saw their seed devoured by these pests without redress. their dung, too, was one of the most valued manures. lord berkeley, like other landlords, went often in progress from one of his manors and farmhouses to another, making his stay at each of them for one or two nights, overseeing and directing the husbandry. the castle of the great noble consumed an enormous amount of food in the course of the year; from two manors on the berkeley estate came to the 'standinghouse' of the lord in twelve months, , eggs, , pigeons, capons, hens, ducks, chickens, pigs, calves, quarters of wheat, quarters of oats; and from several other manors came the like or greater store, besides goats, sheep, oxen, butter, cheese, nuts, honey, &c.[ ] even the lavish hospitality of the lords, and the great number of their retainers, must have had some difficulty in disposing of these huge supplies. the examining of their bailiff's accounts must have taken a considerable portion of the landlord's time, for those of each manor were kept most minutely, and set forth, among other items, 'in what sort he husbanded' the demesne farms, 'what sorts of cattle he kept in them, and what kinds of graine he yearly sowed according to the quality and condition of the ground, and how those kinds of graine each second or third yeare were exchanged or brought from one manor to another as the vale corne into an upland soyle, and contrarily'. and we are told incidentally he 'set with hand, not sowed his beanes'. he was also accustomed to move his live stock from one manor to another, as they needed it. the accounts also stated what days' works were due from each tenant according to the season of the year, and at the end of each year there was a careful valuation of live and dead stock.[ ] the difference between the smaller gentry and the more important yeomen[ ] who farmed their own land must have been very slight. no doubt both of them were very rough and ignorant men, who knew a great deal about the cultivation of their land and very little about anything else. we may be sure that the ordinary house of both was generally of wood; as there is no stone in many parts of england, and bricks were not reintroduced till the fourteenth century and spread slowly. even in elizabeth's reign, harrison[ ] tells us that 'the ancient houses of our gentry are yet for the most part of strong timber', and he even thinks that houses made of oak were luxurious, for in times past men had been contented with houses of willow, plum, and elm, but now nothing but oak was good enough; and he quaintly says that the men who lived in the willow houses were as tough as oak, and those who lived in the oak as soft as willow. there are very few mansions left of the time before edward iii, for being of timber they naturally decayed. in a lease, dated , of a manor house belonging to s. paul's cathedral,[ ] is a description of a manor house which contained a hall feet long, feet broad, and feet high; that is, feet to the tie beam and feet from that to the ridge board; showing that the roof was open and that there were no upper rooms. there was a chamber between the hall and the thalamus or inner room which was feet long, feet broad, and feet high, the roof being open as in the hall; and the thalamus was feet long, feet broad, and feet high. about the same date the manor house of thorp was larger, and contained a hall, a chamber, tresantia (apparently part of the hall or chamber separated by a screen to form an antechamber), two private rooms, a kitchen, brew-house, malt-house, dairy, ox shed, and three small hen-houses. the ordinary manor house of the middle ages contained three rooms at least, of mean aspect, the floor even of the hall, which was the principal eating and sleeping room, being of dirt; and when there was an upper room or solar added, which began to be done at the end of the twelfth century,[ ] access to it was often obtained by an outside staircase. if the manor house belonged to the owner of many manors, it was sometimes inhabited by his bailiff. the barns on the demesnes were often as important buildings as the manor houses; one at wickham, belonging to the canons of s. paul's[ ] in the twelfth century, was feet long, feet high from the floor to the principal beam, and - / feet more to the ridge board; the breadth between the pillars was - / feet, and on each side it had a wing or aisle - / feet wide and - / feet high. the amount of corn in the barn was often scored on the door-posts.[ ] in the manor houses chimneys rarely existed, the fire being made in the middle of the hall. even in the early seventeenth century in cheshire there were no chimneys in the farmhouses, and there the oxen were kept under the same roof as the farmer and his family.[ ] when chimneys did come in they were not much thought of. 'now we have chimneys our tenderlings complain of rheums, catarrhs, and poses (colds);' for the smoke not only hardened the timbers, but was said by harrison to be an excellent medicine for man. instead of glass there was much lattice, and that made either of wicker or fine rifts of oak in checkerwise, and horn was also used. beds, of course, were a luxury, the owner of the manor, his guests, and retainers flung themselves down on the hall floor after supper and all slept together, though sometimes rough mattresses were brought in. furniture was rude and scanty. in the farm implements and household furniture on the manor of 'waleton' was valued and consisted of carts, baskets, a basket used in winnowing corn, a pair of millstones, tubs, barrels, boilers of lead with stoves, wooden bowls, three-legged tables, dishes or platters, tablecloths worth d., metal bowls, half a load of the invaluable salt, axes, a table with trestles (the usual form of table), and beehives made of rushes.[ ] these articles were handed down from one generation to another, and in a lease made years afterwards of the same manor most of them reappear. the greater part of the furniture, until the fifteenth century, was most likely made by migratory workmen, who travelled from village to village; for except the rudest pieces it was beyond the village carpenter, and shops there were none. it is not to be expected that when the master lived in this manner the lot of the labourer was a very good one. his home was miserably poor, generally of 'wattle and dab', sometimes wholly of mud and clay; many with only one room for all purposes. a bill is still in existence for a house, if it can be called one, built in for two labourers by queen's college, oxford, which cost s. in all, and was a mere hovel without floor, ceiling, or chimney.[ ] their wretched houses appear to have been built on the bare earth, and unfloored. perhaps as time went on a rude upper storey was added, the floor of which was made of rough poles or hurdles and was reached by a ladder. the furniture was miserably poor; a few pots and pans, cups and dishes, and some tools would exhaust the list.[ ] the goods and chattels of a landless labourer in consisted of a dish, an adze, a brass pot, plates, augers, an axe, a three-legged stool, and a barrel.[ ] englishmen of all classes were hopelessly dirty in their habits; even till the sixteenth century they were noted above other countries for the profuseness of their diet and their unclean ways. erasmus spoke of the floor of his house as inconceivably filthy. to save fuel, the labourer's family in the cold season all lay huddled in a heap on the floor, 'pleasantly and hot', as barclay the poet tells us; and if he ever had a bed it was a bundle of fern or straw thrown down, with his cloak as a coverlet, though thus he was just as well off as his social superiors, for with them the loose cloak of the day was a common covering for the night. he was constantly exposed to disease, for sanitary precautions were ignored; at the entrance of his hovel was a huge heap of decaying refuse, poisoning air and water. even in the sixteenth century a foreigner noticed that 'the peasants dwell in small huts and pile up their refuse out of doors in heaps so high that you cannot see their houses'.[ ] diseased animals were constantly eaten, vegetables were few, and in the winter there was no fresh meat for any one, except game and rabbits and, for the well-to-do, fish, but we may doubt if the peasant got any but salt fish. the consequence was that leprosy and kindred ailments were common; and we do not wonder that plagues were frequent and slew the people like flies. the peasants' food consisted largely of corn. in the bailiff's accounts of the manor of woodstock in , six servants at handborough received - / bushels of corn each, ox herds at combe received the same, and servants at bladon had bushels each. in at bosham, and in at stoughton in sussex, the allowance was the same.[ ] the writer of the anonymous _treatise on husbandry_ says that in his time, the thirteenth century, the average annual allowance of corn to a labourer was bushels.[ ] fish, too, seem to have formed a large portion of his diet; all classes ate enormous quantities of fish, before the reformation, in lent and on fast days, and the labourer was constantly given salt herrings as part of his pay. in , at hawsted, the villeins when working were allowed herrings a day, some milk, a loaf, and some drink.[ ] eden[ ] says his food consisted of a few fish, principally herrings, a loaf of bread, and some beer; but we must certainly add pork, which was his stand-by then as now.[ ] in the fourteenth century, at all events, there were three kinds of bread in use--white bread, ration bread, and black bread; and it was no doubt the latter that the peasant ate.[ ] clothing was dear and cloth coarse, the most valuable personal property consisting of clothing and metal vessels. shirts were the subject of charitable gifts.[ ] by edw. iii, c. , labourers were not to wear any manner of cloth but 'blanket and russet wool of d.' and girdles of linen. if they wore anything more extravagant it was forfeited to the king. to the labourer of modern times the life of his forefathers would have seemed unutterably dull. no books, no newspapers, no change of scene by cheap excursions, no village school, no politics. the very cultivation of the soil by the old three-course system was monotonous. but there were bright spots in his existence: the village church not only afforded him the consolations of religion but also entertainments and society. religion in the middle ages was a part of the people's daily life, and its influence permeated even their amusements. miracles and mystery plays, played in the churches and churchyards, were a common feature in village life; as were the church ales or parish meetings held four or five times a year, where cakes and beer were purchased from the churchwarden and consumed for the good of the parish. indeed, there can be no doubt that there was much more sociability than to-day, in the country at least. labour was lightened by the co-operation of the common fields; common shepherds and herdsmen watched the sheep and cattle of the different tenants, 'a common mill ground the corn, a common oven baked the bread, a common smith worked at a common forge.' his existence, moreover, was enlivened by a considerable number of sports. a statute at the end of the fourteenth century ( ric. ii, c. ) says he was fond of playing at tennis(!), football, quoits, dice, casting the stone, and other games, which this statute forbad him, and enacted that he should use his bow and arrows on sundays and holidays instead of such idle sport. this is a foretaste of the modern sentiment that seeks to wean him from watching football matches and take to miniature rifle clubs. he was also, like some of his successors, fond of poaching, though he appears to have been rash enough to indulge in it by day. ric. ii, c. , says he was prone on holidays, when good christian people be in church hearing divine service, to go hunting with greyhounds and other dogs, in the parks and warrens of the lord and of others, and sometimes these hunts were turned into conferences and conspiracies,' for to rise and disobey their allegiance', such as preceded the peasants' revolt of ; and accordingly no one who did not own lands worth s. a year was to keep a dog to hunt, or ferrets other 'engines': the first game law on the english statute book. footnotes: [ ] smyth, _lives of the berkeleys_, i. . no doubt the riches of the berkeleys were considerably greater than those of many of the barons. [ ] _lives of the berkeleys_, i. . there is no reason to doubt smyth, as he wrote with the original accounts before him. [ ] _lives of the berkeleys_, i. . [ ] the yeoman is said to have made his appearance in the fifteenth century, but the small freeholders of the manor before that date were to all intents and purposes yeomen. no doubt, as trade grew in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries successful tradesmen bought small freeholds in the country and swelled the numbers of yeomen. [ ] harrison, _description of britain_, f.j. furnivall edn., p. . [ ] _domesday of s. paul_, camden society, p. . [ ] turner, _domestic architecture_, i. . [ ] _domesday of s. paul_, p. . [ ] _historical mss. commission report_, v. . [ ] ormerod, _history of cheshire_, i. . [ ] _domesday of s. paul_, p. xcvii. [ ] denton, _england in the fifteenth century_. [ ] eden, _state of the poor_, i. . [ ] see cullum, _history of hawsted_. [ ] harrison, _description of britain_, appendix ii, lxxxi. in some manors, however, there were careful regulations for public health. according to the durham _halmote rolls_, published by the surtees society, village officials watched over the water supply, prevented the fouling of streams; bye-laws were enacted as to the regulation of the common place for clothes washing, and the times for emptying and cleansing ponds and mill-dams. [ ] ballard, _domesday_, antiquary series, p. . [ ] walter of henley, royal historical society, p. . [ ] cullum, _hawsted_, ed., p. . [ ] _state of the poor_, i. . [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, i. . [ ] see _knights hospitallers in england_, camden society, introduction. [ ] thorold rogers, _op. cit._ i. . chapter v the break-up of the manor.--spread of leases.--the peasants' revolt.--further attempts to regulate wages.--a harvest home.-- beginning of the corn laws.--some surrey manors we have seen that the landlords' profits were seriously diminished by the black death, and they cast about them for new ways of increasing their incomes. arable land had been until now largely in excess of pasture, the cultivation of corn was the chief object of agriculture, bread forming a much larger proportion of men's diet than now. this began to change. much of the land was laid down to grass, and there was a steady increase in sheep farming; thus commenced that revolution in farming which in the sixteenth century led harrison to say that england was mainly a stock-raising country. the lords also let a considerable amount of their demesne land on leases for years. 'then began the times to alter' says smyth of the lord berkeley of the end of the fourteenth century, 'and hee with them, and he began to tack other men's cattle on his pasture by the week, month, and quarter, and to sell his meadow grounds by the acre. and in the time of henry iv still more and more was let, and in succeeding times. as for the days' works of the copyhold tenants, they also were turned into money.'[ ] such leases had been used long before this, but this is the date of their great increase. in the thirteenth century a lease of acres of arable land in nowton, suffolk, let the land at d. an acre per annum for a term of six years.[ ] it contains no clauses about cultivation; the landlord warrants the said acres to the tenant, and the tenant agrees to give them up at the end of the term freely and peaceably. the deed was indented, sealed, and witnessed by several persons. the impoverished landlords also let much of their land on stock and land leases. the custom of stocking the tenants' land was a very ancient one: the lord had always found the oxen for the plough teams of the villeins. in the leases of the manors of s. paul's in the twelfth century the tenant for life received stock both live and dead, which when he entered was carefully enumerated in the lease, and at the end of the tenancy he had to leave behind the same quantity.[ ] it was a common practice also, before the black death, for the lord to let out cows and sheep at so much per head per annum.[ ] the stock and land lease therefore was no novelty. in there is a lease of the demesne lands at hawsted by which the landlord kept the manor house and its appurtenances in his own hands, the tenant apparently having the farm buildings, which he was to keep in repair. he was to receive at the beginning of the term cows and one bull, worth s. each; stotts, worth s. each; and oxen, worth s. d. each; which, or their value in money, were to be delivered up at the end of the term. the tenant was also to leave at the end of the lease as many acres well ploughed, sown, and manured as he found at the beginning. otherwise the landlord was not to interfere with the cultivation. if the rent or any part thereof was in arrear for a fortnight after the two fixed days for payment, the landlord might distrain; and if for a month, he might re-enter: and both parties bound themselves to forfeit the then huge sum of £ upon the violation of any clause of the lease.[ ] there is a lease[ ] of a subsequent date (the twentieth year of henry viii), but one which well illustrates the custom now so prevalent, granted by the prior of the monastery of lathe in somerset to william pole of combe, edith his wife, and thomas his son, for their lives. with the land went wethers. for the land they paid quarters of best wheat, 'purelye thressyd and wynowed,' quarters of best barley, and were to carry loads of wood and fatten one ox for the prior yearly; the ox to be fattened in stall with the best hay, the only way then known of fattening oxen. for the flock of wethers they paid £ yearly. the tenants were bound to keep hedges, ditches, and gates in repair. also they were bound by a 'writing obligatory' in the sum of £ to deliver up the wether flock whole and sound, 'not rotten, banyd,[ ] nor otherwise diseased.' the consequence of the spread of leases was that the portion of the demesne lands which the lords farmed themselves dwindled greatly, or it was turned from arable into grass. stock and land leases survived in some parts till the beginning of the eighteenth century, when it was still the custom for the landlord to stock the land and receive half the crop for rent.[ ] according to the _domesday of s. paul_, in the thirteenth century, a survey of eighteen manors containing , acres showed three-eighths of the land in demesne, the rest in the hands of the tenants. in the lord of the principal manor at hawsted held in his own hand acres of arable land, worth d. to d. an acre rent, and acres of meadow, worth s. an acre.[ ] he had also pasture for cows, which was considered worth s. a year, and for horses and oxen worth s. a year, with acres of wood, estimated at s. an acre. in , however, the arable land had decreased to acres, but the stock had increased, and now numbered cart horses, stotts or smaller horses, oxen, bull, cows, heifers, calves, wethers, hoggerells or two-year-old sheep, gander, geese, capons, hens, and only one cock. the dairy of cows was let out, according to the custom of the time, for £ a year; and we are told that the oxen were fed on oats, and shod in the winter only. but if the position of the lords was severely affected by the great pestilence that of the villeins was also. the villein himself was becoming a copyholder; in the thirteenth century the nature of his holding had been written on the court roll, before long he was given a copy of the roll, and by the fifteenth century he was a copyholder.[ ] there was, too, a new spirit abroad in this century of disorganization and reform, which stirred even the villeins with a desire for better conditions of life. these men, thus rising to a more assured position and animated by new hopes, saw all round them hired labourers obtaining, in spite of the statute of labourers, double the amount of wages they had formerly received, while they were bound down to the same services as before. the advance in prices was further increased by the king's issuing in an entirely new coinage, of the same fineness but of less weight than the old; so that the demands of the labourers after the black death were largely justified by the depreciation in the currency.[ ] there had also arisen at this time, owing to the increase in the wealth of the country, a new class of landlords who did not care for the old system[ ]; and it is probably these men who are meant by the statute i ric. ii, c. , which complains that the villeins daily withdrew their services to their lords at the instigation of various counsellors and abettors, who made it appear by 'colour of certain exemplifications made out of the book of domesday' that they were discharged from their services, and moreover gathered themselves in great routs and agreed to aid each other in resisting their lords, so that justices were appointed to check this evil. but there were other 'counsellors and abettors' of the peasants' revolt than the new landlords. one of its most interesting features to modern readers is its thorough organization. travelling agents and agitators like john ball were all over the country, money was subscribed and collected, and everything was ripe for the great rising of , which was brought to a head by the bad grading of the poll tax of king richard. it has been said that the chief grievance of the villeins was that the lords of manors were attempting to reimpose commuted services, but judging by the petition to the king when he met them at mile-end there can be no doubt that the chief grievance was the continuance of existing services. 'we will', said they, 'that ye make us free for ever, and that we be called no more bond, or so reputed.' also, as walsingham says,[ ] they were careful to destroy the rolls and ancient records whereby their services were fixed, and to put to death persons learned in the law. as every one knows, the revolt was a failure; and whether it ultimately helped much to extinguish serfdom is doubtful. it probably, like the pestilence, accelerated a movement which had been for some time in progress and was inevitable. there is ample evidence to prove that there was a very general continuance of predial services after the revolt, though they went on rapidly decreasing. one of the chief methods adopted by the villeins to gain their freedom was desertion, and so common did this become that apparently the mere threat of desertion enabled the villein to obtain almost any concession from his lord, who was afraid lest his land should be utterly deserted. the result was that by the middle of the fifteenth century the abolition of labour services was approaching completion.[ ] it lingered on, and fitzherbert lamented in elizabeth's reign the continuance of villeinage as a disgrace to england; but it had then nearly disappeared, and was unheard of after the reign of james i.[ ] seven years after the peasants' revolt another attempt was made to regulate agricultural wages by the statute ric. ii, c. , which stated that 'the hires of the said servants and labourers have not been put on certainty before this time', though we have seen that the act of tried to settle wages. in the preamble it is said that the statute was enacted because labourers 'have refused for a long season to work without outrageous and excessive hire', and owing to the scarcity of labourers 'husbands' could not pay their rents, a sentence which shows the general use of money rents. the wages were as follows, apparently with food:-- s. d. a bailiff annually, and clothing once a year a master hind, without clothing a carter, " " a shepherd, " " an ox or cow herd " " swine herd or female labourer, without clothing a plough driver, without clothing the farm servants' food would be worth considerably more than the actual cash he received; a quarter of wheat, barley, and rye mixed every nine weeks was no unusual allowance, which at s. d. would be worth about s. a year. he would also have his harvest allowance, though the statute above forbids any perquisites, worth about s., and sometimes it was accompanied by the gift of a pig, some beer, or some herrings.[ ] his wife also, at a time when women did the same work as the men, could earn d. a day, and his boy perhaps / d. if his wages were wholly paid in money, we may say that in the last half of the fourteenth century the ordinary labourer earned d. a day, so that as corn and pork, his chief food, had not risen at all, he was much better off than in the preceding years. cullum, in his invaluable _history of hawsted_, gives us a picture of harvesting on the demesne lands in which shows an extraordinarily busy scene. there were acres of all kinds of corn to be gathered in, and over people took part; though apparently such a crowd was only collected for the two principal days of the harvest, and it must be remembered that the towns were emptied into the country at this important season. the number of people for one day comprised a carter, ploughman, head reaper, cook, baker, brewer, shepherd, daya (dairymaid); hired reapers; pitchers, stackers, and reapers (not hired, evidently villeins paying their rents by work); other reapers, hired for goodwill (_de amore_); and customary tenants. this small army of men consumed bushels of wheat, pennyworth of beer, and bushels of malt, worth s. - / d.; meat to the value of s. - / d.; fish and herrings, s. d.; cheese, butter, milk, and eggs, s. - / d.; oatmeal, d. salt, d.; pepper and saffron, d., the latter apparently introduced into england in the time of edward iii, and much used for cooking and medicine, but it gradually went out of fashion, and by the end of the eighteenth century was only cultivated in one or two counties, notably essex where saffron walden recalls its use; candles, d.; and pairs of gloves d.[ ] the presentation of gloves was a common custom in england; and these would be presented as a sign of good husbandry, as in the case of the rural bridegroom in the account of queen elizabeth's visit to kenilworth who wore gloves to show he was a good farmer. tusser bids the farmer give gloves to his reapers. the custom was still observed at hawsted in , and in eden's time, , the bursars of new college, oxford, presented each of their tenants with two pairs, which the recipients displayed on the following sunday at church by conspicuously hanging their hands over the pew to show their neighbours they had paid their rent. in this account of the hawsted harvest the large number of hired men and the few customary tenants is noteworthy as a sign of the times, for before the black death the harvest work on the demesne was the special work of the latter. in the fourteenth century the long series of corn laws was commenced which was to agitate englishmen for centuries, and after an apparently final settlement in to reappear in our day.[ ] it was the policy of edward iii to make food plentiful and cheap for the whole nation, without special regard to the agricultural interest: and by edw. iii, c. , the export of corn to any foreign part except calais and gascony, then british possessions, or to certain places which the king might permit, was forbidden. richard ii, however, reversed this policy in answer to the complaints of agriculturists whose rents were falling,[ ] and endeavoured to encourage the farmer and especially the corn-grower; for he saw the landlords turning their attention to sheep instead of corn, owing to the high price of labour. accordingly, to give the corn-growers a wider market, he allowed his subjects by the statute ric. ii, c. , to carry corn, on paying the duties due, to what parts they pleased, except to his enemies, subject however to an order of the council; and owing to the interference of the council the law probably became a dead letter, at all events we find it confirmed and amended by hen. vi, c. . the prohibition of export must have been a serious blow to those counties near the sea, for it was much easier to send corn by ship to foreign parts than over the bad roads of england to some distant market.[ ] indeed, judging by the great and frequent discrepancy of prices in different places at the same date, the dispatch of corn from one inland locality to another was not very frequent. richard also attempted to stop the movement, which had even then set in, of the countrymen to the growing towns, forbidding by ric. ii, c. , those who had served in agriculture until years of age to be apprenticed in the towns, but to 'abide in husbandry'. one of the most unjust customs of the middle ages was that which bade the tenants of manors, except those who held the _jus faldae_, fold their sheep on the land of the lord, thus losing both the manure and the valuable treading.[ ] however, sometimes, as in surrey, the sheepfold was in a fixed place and the manure from it was from time to time taken out and spread on the land.[ ] in the same district horses had been hitherto used for farm work, as it was considered worthy of note that oxen were beginning to be added to the horse teams. the milk of two good cows in twenty-four weeks was considered able to make a wey of cheese, and in addition half a gallon of butter a week; and the milk of ewes was equal to that of cows. on the manor of flaunchford, near reigate, the demesne land amounted to acres of arable and two meadows, but there must have been the usual pasture in addition to keep the following head of stock: cows, who in the winter were fed from the racks in the yard; calves, bought at s. each; oxen for ploughing, whose food was oats and hay--a very large number for acres of arable, and they were probably used on another manor; stott, used for harrowing; a goat, and a sow. £ s. d. in the total receipts of this manor were - / the total expenses -------------- profit £ - / ============== among the receipts were:-- for the lord's plough, let to farmers (perhaps this accounts for the large team of oxen kept) bushels of apples loads of charcoal a cow among the payments:-- for keeping plough in repair, and the wages of a blacksmith, one year by agreement making a new plough from the lord's timber mowing acres of meadow making and carrying hay of ditto, with help of lord's servants threshing wheat, peas, and tares, per quarter " oats, per quarter - / winnowing quarters of corn cutting and binding wheat and oats, per acre on the manor of dorking the harvest lasted five weeks as a rule; the fore feet only of oxen used for ploughing, and of heifers used for harrowing, were shod. for washing and shearing sheep d. a hundred was the price; ploughing for winter corn cost d. an acre, and harrowing / d. - / acres of barley produced - / quarters; acres of oats produced - / quarters; cows were let for the season at s. each. in the same reign, at merstham, the demesne lands of - / acres were let on lease with all the live and dead stock, which was valued at £ s. d., and the rent was £ or about s. d. an acre, an enormous price even including the stock. footnotes: [ ] smyth, _lives of the berkeleys_, ii. . there is no doubt the lease system was growing in the thirteenth century. about the writ _quare ejecit infra terminum_ protected the person of a tenant for a term of years, who formerly had been regarded as having no more than a personal right enforceable by an action of covenant. vinogradoff, _villeinage in england_, p. ; but leases for lives and not for years seem the rule at that date. [ ] cullum, _hawsted_, p. . [ ] see _domesday of s. paul_, introduction. [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, i. . [ ] cullum, _hawsted_, p. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] banyd, afflicted with sheep rot. [ ] eden, _state of the poor_, i. . [ ] cullum, _hawsted_, p. . another instance of the difference in value between arable and tillage. at the inquisition of the manor of great tey in essex, , the jury found that acres of arable land was worth d. an acre rent, acres of meadow s. an acre, and acres of pasture s. an acre. _archaeologia_, xii. . [ ] medley, _constitutional history_, p. . [ ] cunningham, _op. cit._ i. , and - . [ ] _domesday of s. paul_, p. lvii. [ ] _hist. angl._, rolls series, i. . the other political and social causes of the revolt do not concern us here. the attempt to minimize its agrarian importance is strange in the light of the words and acts above mentioned. [ ] page, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. , ; _transactions of the royal historical society_, new series, xvii. . fitzherbert probably referred more to villein status, which continued longer than villein tenure. [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, i. , . [ ] harrison, _description of britain_, p. , says the produce of an acre of saffron was usually worth £ . [ ] exportation of corn is mentioned in , when a fine was paid to the king for licence to ship corn from norfolk and suffolk to norway.--mcpherson, _annals of commerce_, i. . as early as the reign of henry ii, henry of huntingdon says, german silver came to buy our most precious wool, our milk (no doubt converted into butter and cheese), and our innumerable cattle.--rolls series, p. . in , the _chronicle of london_ says the country was saved from dearth by the importation of rye from prussia. [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._. p. . [ ] lord berkeley, about , had a ship of his own for exporting wool and corn and bringing back foreign wine and wares.--smyth, _lives of the berkeleys_, i. . [ ] nasse, _agricultural community of the middle ages_, p. . [ ] customs in some surrey manors in the time of richard ii, _archaeologia_, xviii. . chapter vi - the so-called 'golden age of the labourer' in a period of general distress in this period the average prices of grain remained almost unchanged until the last three decades, when they began slowly and steadily to creep up, this advance being helped to some extent by defective harvests. in , according to holinshed it rained from april to june every day or night; in may thirty hours without ceasing; and the floods did much damage to the corn. in incessant deluges of rain prevented the corn being sown in the spring, and grain had to be imported from germany. the price of wheat was a trifle higher than in the period - ; barley, oats, and beans lower; rye higher.[ ] oxen and cows were dearer, horses about the same, sheep a little higher, pigs the same, poultry and eggs dearer, wool the same, cheese and butter dearer. the price of wheat was sometimes subject to astonishing fluctuations: in it varied from s. to s. d.; in from s. d. to s. the rent of land continued the same, arable averaging d. an acre,[ ] though this was partly due to the fact that rents, although now generally paid in money, were still fixed and customary; for the purchase value of land had now risen to twenty years instead of twelve.[ ] the art of farming hardly made any progress, and the produce of the land was consequently about the same or a little better than in the preceding period.[ ] at the end of the fourteenth century the ordinary wheat crop at hawsted was in favourable years about a quarter to the acre, but it was often not more than bushels; and this was on demesne land, usually better tilled than non-demesne land.[ ] as for the labourer, it is well known that thorold rogers calls the fifteenth century his golden age, and seeing that his days' wages, if he 'found himself', were now d. and prices were hardly any higher all round than when he earned half the money in the thirteenth century, there is much to support his view. as to whether he was better off than the modern labourer it is somewhat difficult to determine; as far as wages went he certainly was, for his d. a day was equal to about s. now; it is true that on the innumerable holidays of the church he sometimes did not work,[ ] but no doubt he then busied himself on his bit of common. but so many factors enter into the question of the general material comfort of the labourer in different ages that it is almost impossible to come to a satisfactory conclusion. denton paints a very gloomy picture of him at this time[ ]; so does mr. jessop, who says, the agricultural labourers of the fifteenth century were, compared with those of to-day, 'more wretched in their poverty, incomparably less prosperous in their prosperity; worse clad, worse fed, worse housed, worse taught, worse governed; they were sufferers from loathsome diseases, of which their descendants know nothing; the very beasts of the field were dwarfed and stunted; the disregard of to sell their corn at low prices to the detriment of the whole kingdom: a typical example of the political economy of the time, which considered the prosperity of agriculture indispensable to the welfare of the country, even if the consumer suffered. accordingly, it was enacted that wheat could be exported without a licence when it was under s. d. a quarter, except to the king's enemies. on imports of corn there had been no restriction until , when edw. iv, c. forbade the import of corn when under s. d: a statute due partly to the fear that the increase of pasture was a danger to tillage land and the national food supply, and partly to the fact that the landed interest had become by now fully awake to the importance of protecting themselves by promoting the gains of the farmer.[ ] it may be doubted, however, if much wheat was imported except in emergencies at this time, for many countries forbade export. these two statutes were practically unaltered till ,[ ] and by that of was initiated the policy which held the field for nearly years. thorold rogers denounces the landlords for legislating with the object of keeping up rents, but, as mr. cunningham has pointed out, this ignores the fact that the land was the great fund of national wealth from which taxation was paid; if rents therefore rose it was a gain to the whole country, since the fund from which the revenue was drawn was increased.[ ] in spite of the high wages of agricultural labourers, the movement towards the towns noticed by richard ii continued. the statute hen. iv, c. , asserts that there is a great scarcity of labourers in husbandry and that gentlemen are much impoverished by the rate of wages; the cause of the scarcity lying in the fact that many people were becoming weavers,[ ] and it therefore re-enacted ric. ii, c. , which ordained that no one who had been a servant in husbandry until years old should be bound apprentice, and further enacted that no person with less than s. a year in land should be able to apprentice his son. like many other statutes of the time this seems to have been inoperative, for we find hen. vi, c. ( ), enacting that if a servant in husbandry purposed leaving his master he was to give him warning, and was obliged either to engage with a new one or continue with the old. it also regulated the wages anew, those fixed showing a substantial increase since the statute of . by the year:-- a bailiff was to have £ s. d., and s. worth of clothes. a chief hind, carter, or shepherd, £ , and s. worth of clothes. a common servant in husbandry, s., and s. d. worth of clothes. a woman servant, s., and s. worth of clothes. all with meat and drink. by the day, in harvest, wages were to be:-- a mower, with meat and drink, d.; without, d. a reaper or carter, with meat and drink, d.; without, d. a woman or labourer, with meat and drink, d.; without, d. in the next reign the labourer's dress was again regulated for him, and he was forbidden to wear any cloth exceeding s. a yard in price, nor any 'close hosen', apparently tight long stockings, nor any hosen at all which cost more than d.[ ] yeomen and those below them were forbidden to wear any bolsters or stuff of wool, cotton wadding, or other stuff in their doublets, but only lining; and somewhat gratuitously it was ordered that no one under the degree of a gentleman should wear pikes to his shoes. in england's thirty years' war, the war of the roses, began, and agriculture received another set back. the view that the war was a mere faction fight between nobles and their retainers, while the rest of the country went about their business, is somewhat exaggerated. no doubt, the mass of englishmen, as in the civil war of the seventeenth century, preferred to 'sit still', as clarendon said, but the business of many must have been very much upset. the various armies were compelled to obtain their supplies from the country, and with the lawless habits of the times plundered friend and foe alike, as cavalier and roundhead did afterwards; and many a farmer must have seen all his stock driven off and his grain seized to feed the combatants. for instance, it was said before the battle called easter day field that all the tenants of abbot's ripton in huntingdonshire were copyholders of the abbot of ramsey, and the northern army lay there so long that they impoverished the country and the tenants had to give up their copyholds through poverty.[ ] the loss of life, too, must have told heavily on a country already suffering from frequent pestilence. it is calculated that about one-tenth of the whole population of the country were killed in battle or died of wounds and disease during the war; and as these must have been nearly all men in the prime of life, it is difficult to understand how the effect on the labour market was not more marked. the enclosing of land for pasture farms, which we shall next have to consider, was probably in many cases an absolute necessity, for the number of men left to till the soil must have been seriously diminished. footnotes: [ ] see table at end of volume. the shrinkage of prices which occurred in the fifteenth century was due to the scarcity of precious metals. [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, iv. . the rent of arable land on lord derby's estate in wirral in was a little under d. a statute acre; of meadow, about s. d.--_cheshire sheaf_ (ser. ), iv. . [ ] thorold rogers, _op. cit._ iv. . [ ] thorold rogers, _op. cit._ iv. . [ ] cullum, _hawsted_, p. . the amount of seed for the various crops was, wheat bushels per acre, barley , oats - / . [ ] by hen. iv, c. , labourers were to receive no hire for holy days, or on the eves of feasts for more than half a day; but the statute was largely disregarded. [ ] see _england in the fifteenth century_, p. : 'the undrained neglected soil, the shallow stagnant waters which lay on the surface of the ground, the unhealthy homes of all classes, insufficient and unwholesome food, the abundance of stale fish eaten, and the scanty supply of vegetables predisposed rural and town population to disease.' [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] mcculloch, _commercial dictionary_ ( ), p. . in parliament had decided that all foreign merchants importing corn should spend the money so obtained on english goods to prevent it leaving the country.--mcpherson, _annals of commerce_, i. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] much of the weaving, however, was done in rural districts. [ ] see edw. iv, c. ; _rot. parl._ v. ; edw. iv, c. . [ ] cunningham, _op. cit._ i. . chapter vii enclosure we have now reached a time when the enclosure question was becoming of paramount importance,[ ] and began to cause constant anxiety to legislators, while the writers of the day are full of it. enclosure was of four kinds: . enclosing the common arable fields for grazing, generally in large tracts. . enclosing the same by dividing them into smaller fields, generally of arable. . enclosing the common pasture, for grazing or tillage. . enclosing the common meadows or mowing grounds. it is the first mainly, and to a less degree the third of these, which were so frequent a source of complaint in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; for the first, besides displacing the small holder, threw out of employment a large number of people who had hitherto gained their livelihood by the various work connected with tillage, and the third deprived a large number of their common rights. the first enclosure act was the statute of merton, passed in , henry iii, c. , which permitted lords of manors to add to their demesnes such parts of the waste pasture and woods as were beyond the needs of the tenants. there is evidence, however, that enclosure, probably of waste land, was going on before this statute, as the charter of john, by which all devonshire except dartmoor and exmoor was deforested, expressly forbids the making of hedges, a proof of enclosure, in those two forests.[ ] we may be sure that the needs of the tenants were by an arbitrary lord estimated at a very low figure. at the same time many proceeded in due legal form. thomas, lord berkeley, about the period of the act reduced great quantities of ground into enclosures by procuring many releases of common land from freeholders.[ ] his successor, lord maurice, was not so observant of legality. he had a wood wherein many of his tenants and freeholders had right of pasture. he wished to make this into a park, and treated with them for that purpose; but things not going smoothly, he made the wood into a park without their leave, and then treated with his tenants, most of whom perforce fell in with his highhanded plan; those who did not 'fell after upon his sonne with suits, in their small comfort and less gaines.'[ ] sometimes the rich made the law aid their covetousness, as did roger mortimer the paramour of the 'she wolf of france'. some men had common of pasture in king's norton wood, worcestershire, who, when mortimer enclosed part of their common land with a dike, filled the dike up, for they were deprived of their inheritance. thereupon mortimer brought an action of trespass against them 'by means of jurors dwelling far from the said land', who were put on the panel by his steward, who was also sheriff of the county, and the commoners were convicted and cast in damages of £ , not daring to appear at the time for fear of assault, or even death.[ ] neither dared they say a word about the matter till mortimer was dead, when it is satisfactory to learn that edward iii gave them all their money back save marks. we are told that lord maurice berkeley consolidated much of his demesne lands, throwing together the scattered strips and exchanging those that lay far apart from the manor houses for those that lay near; trying evidently to get the home farms into a ring fence as we should term it.[ ] in this policy he was followed by his successor thomas the second, who during his ownership of the estate from to , to the great profit of his tenants and himself, encouraged them to make exchanges, so as to make their lands lie in convenient parcels instead of scattered strips, by which he raised the rent of an acre from d. and d. to s. d.[ ] there is a deed of enclosure made in the year , preserved, by which the free men of north dichton 'appropriated and divided between them and so kept for ever in fee all that place called sywyneland, with the moor,' and they were to have licence to appropriate that place, which was common pasture (the boundaries of which are given), 'save, however, to the grantor william de ros and his heirs' common of pasture in a portion thereof named by bounds, with entry and exit for beasts after the wheat is carried. the men of north dichton were also to have all the wood called rouhowthwicke, and to do what they liked with it.[ ] in return they gave the lord marks of silver and a concession as regards a certain wood. it has been noticed that the black death, besides causing many of the landlords to let their demesnes, also made them turn much tillage into grass to save labour, which had grown so dear. we have also seen that the statutes regulating wages were of little effect, and they went on rising, so that more land was laid down to grass. the landowners may be said to have given up ordinary farming and turned to sheep raising. english wool could always find a ready sale, although spanish sheep farming had developed greatly; and the profitable trade of growing wool attracted the new capitalist class who had sprung up, so that they often invested their recently made fortunes in it, buying up many of the great estates that were scattered during the war.[ ] the increase of sheep farming was assisted by the fact that the domestic system of the manufacture of wool, which supplanted the guild system, led, owing to its rapid and successful growth, to a constant and increasing demand for wool. at the same time this development of the cloth industry helped to alleviate the evils it had itself caused by giving employment to many whom the agricultural changes wholly or partially deprived of work. 'it is important to remember, that where peasant proprietorship and small farming did maintain their ground it was largely due to the domestic industries which supplemented the profits of agriculture.'[ ] much of the land laid down to grass was demesne land, but many of the common arable fields were enclosed and laid down. john ross of warwick about compares the country as he knew it with the picture presented by the hundred rolls in edward i's time, showing how many villages had been depopulated; and he mentions the inconvenience to travellers in having to get down frequently to open the gates of enclosed fields.[ ] enclosure was really a sure sign of agricultural progress; nearly all the agricultural writers from fitzherbert onwards are agreed that enclosed land produced much more than uninclosed. fitzherbert, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, said an acre of land rented for d. uninclosed was worth d. when enclosed. gabriel plattes, in the seventeenth century, said an acre enclosed was worth four in common. in fact, the history of enclosures is part of the history of the great revolution in agriculture by which the manorial system was converted into the modern system as we know it to-day of several ownership and the triumvirate of landlord, tenant farmer, and labourer. no one could have objected to the enclosure of waste; it was that of the common arable fields and of the common pasture that excited the indignation of contemporaries. they saw many of the small holders displaced and the countryside depopulated; many of the labourers were also thrown out of employment, for there was no need in enclosed fields of the swineherd and shepherd and oxherd who had tended the common flocks of the villagers in the old unfenced fields. but much of the opposition was founded on ignorance and hatred of change; england had been for ages mainly a corn-growing land, and, many thought, ought to remain so. as a matter of fact, what much of the arable land wanted was laying down to grass; it was worn out and needed a rest. the common field system was wasteful; the land, for instance, could never be properly ploughed, for the long narrow strips could not be cross-ploughed, and much of it must have suffered grievously from want of manure at a time when hardly any stock was kept in the winter to make manure. the beneficial effect of the rest is shown by the fact that at the end of the sixteenth century, when some of the land came to be broken up, the produce per acre of wheat had gone up largely.[ ] marling and liming the land, too, which had been the salvation of much of it for centuries, had gone out partly because of insecurity of tenure, partly because in the unsettled state of england men knew not if they could reap any benefit therefrom; and partly because, says fitzherbert, men were lazier than their fathers. there can be no doubt that enclosures were often accompanied with great hardships and injustice. dugdale, speaking of stretton in warwickshire,[ ] says that in henry vii's time thomas twyford, having begun the depopulation thereof, decaying four messuages and three cottages whereunto acres of 'errable' land belonged, sold it to henry smith; which henry, following that example, enclosed acres of land more, whereby twelve messuages and four cottages fell to ruins and eighty persons there inhabiting, being employed about tillage and husbandry, were constrained to depart thence and live miserably. by means whereof the church grew to such ruin that it was of no other use than for the shelter of cattle. a sad picture, and true of many districts, but much of the depopulation ascribed to enclosures was due to the devastation of the civil wars. in spite of these enclosures, which began to change the england of open fields into the country we know of hedgerows and winding roads, great part of the land was in a wild and uncultivated state of fen, heath, and wood, the latter sometimes growing right up to the walls of the towns.[ ] an unbroken series of woods and fens stretched right across england from lincoln to the mersey, and northwards from the mersey to the solway and the tweed; warwickshire, northamptonshire, and leicestershire were largely covered by forests, and sherwood forest extended over nearly the whole of notts. cannock chase was covered with oaks, and in the forest of needwood in camden's time the neighbouring gentry eagerly pursued the cheerful sport of hunting. the great forest of andredesweald, though much diminished, still covered a large part of sussex, and the chiltern district in bucks and oxfordshire was thick with woods which hid many a robber. the great fen in the east covered , acres of land in six counties, in spite of various efforts to reclaim the land, and was to remain in a state of marsh and shallow water till the seventeenth century. north and west of the great fen was hatfield chase, , acres mostly swamp and bog, with here and there a strip of cultivated land, much of which had been tilled and neglected; a great part too of yorkshire was swamp, heath, and forest, and of lancashire marshes and mosses, some of which were not drained till recent times. the best corn-growing counties were those lying immediately to the north of london, stretching from suffolk to gloucestershire, and including the southern portions of staffordshire and leicestershire; essex was a great cheese county; hants, cambridgeshire, northamptonshire, and bedfordshire were famous for malt, and leicestershire for peas and beans. the population of england in was probably from two to two and a half millions. at the time of domesday it was under two millions, and from that date increased perhaps to nearly four millions at the time of the black death in - , which swept away from one-third to one-half of the people, and repeated wars and pestilences seem to have kept it from increasing until tudor times. of the whole population no fewer than eleven-twelfths were employed in agriculture.[ ] it was sought to remedy enclosure and depopulation by legislation, and the statute of hen. vii, c. , was passed, which stated in its preamble that where in some towns (meaning townships or villages) persons used to be occupied and lived by their lawful labours, now there are occupied only two or three herdsmen, so that the residue fall into idleness, and husbandry is greatly decayed, churches destroyed, the bodies there buried not prayed for, the parsons and curates wronged, and the defence of this land enfeebled and impaired; the latter point being wisely deemed one of the most serious defects in the new system of farming. indeed, the encouragement of tillage was largely prompted by the desire to see the people fed on good home-grown corn and made strong and healthy by rural labour for the defence of england. it therefore enacted that houses which within three years before had been let for farms with acres of tillage land should be kept in that condition, under a penalty of forfeiting half the profits to the king or the lord of the fee. soon after henry viii ascended the throne came another statute, hen. viii, c. , that all townships, villages, &c., decayed and turned from husbandry and tillage into pasture, shall by the owner be rebuilt and the land made mete for tillage within one year; and this was repeated and made perpetual by a law of the next year.[ ] but legislation was in vain; the price of wool was now beginning to advance so that the attraction of sheep farming was irresistible, and laws, which asked landowners and farmers to turn from what was profitable to what was not, were little likely to be observed, especially as the administration of these laws was in the hands of those whose interest it was that they should not be observed. their ill success, however, did not deter the parliament from fresh efforts. hen. viii, c. , sets forth the condition of affairs in its preamble: as many persons have accumulated into few, great multitude of farms and great plenty of cattle, especially sheep, putting such land as they can get into pasture, and enhanced the old rents and raised the prices of corn, cattle, wool, and poultry almost double, 'by reason whereof a mervaylous multitude and nombre of the people of this realme be not able to provide drynke and clothes necessary for themselves, but be so discoraged with myserie and povertie that they fall dayly to thefte and robberye or pitifully dye for hunger and colde.' so greedy and covetous were some of these accumulators that they had as many as , sheep; and a good sheep, that was used to be sold for s. d. or s. at the most, was now from s. to s.; and a stone of clothing wool, that in some shires was accustomed to be sold for d. or d., is now s. d. to s.; and in others, where it was s. d. to s. it is now s. d. to s. it was therefore enacted that no man, with some exceptions, was to keep more than , sheep at one time in any part of the realm, though lambs under one year were not to count. the frequency of these laws proves their inefficacy, and the conduct of henry viii was the chief cause of it; for while parliament was complaining of the decrease of tillage he gave huge tracts of land taken from the monasteries to greedy courtiers, who evicted the tenants and lived on the profits of sheep farming.[ ] for the dissolution of the monasteries was now taking place,[ ] and the best landowners in england, some of whom farmed their own land long after most of the lay landlords had given it up or turned it into grass, and whose lands are said to have fetched a higher rent than any others, were robbed and ruined. including the dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of the chantry lands in by edward vi, about one-fifteenth of the land of england changed hands at this time. the transfer of the abbey lands to henry's favourites was very prejudicial to farming; it was a source of serious dislocation of agricultural industry, marked by all the inconvenience, injustice, and loss that attends a violent transfer of property. it is probable also that many of the monastic lands were let on stock and land leases; and the stock was confiscated, with inevitable ruin to the tenant as well as the landlord.[ ] and not only was a serious injury wrought to agriculture by the spoliation of a large number of landlords generally noted for their generosity and good farming, but with the religious houses disappeared a large number of consumers of country produce, the amount of which may be gathered from the following list of stores of the great abbey of fountains at the dissolution: , horned cattle, , sheep, horses, swine, and large quantities of wheat, oats, rye, and malt, with loads of hay.[ ] it must indeed have seemed to many as if the poor farmer was never to have any rest; no sooner were the long wars over and pestilences in some sense diminished, than the evils of enclosure and the dissolution of the monasteries came upon him. many ills were popularly ascribed to the fall of the monasteries; in an old ballad in percy's _reliques_ one of the characters says, in western dialect:-- 'chill tell the what, good vellowe, before the friers went hence, a bushel of the best wheate was zold vor vorteen pence, and vorty eggs a penny that were both good and newe.' note.--if any further proof were needed of the constant attention given by parliament to agricultural matters, it would be furnished by the acts for the destruction of vermin.[ ] our forefathers had no doubt that rooks did more harm than good, yearly destroying a 'wonderfull and marvelous greate quantitie of corne and graine'; and destroying the 'covertures of thatched housery, bernes, rekes, stakkes, and other such like'; so that all persons were to do their best to kill them, 'on pain of a grevous amerciament'. footnotes: [ ] much the same tendencies were at work in other countries, especially in germany. [ ] slater, _english peasantry and enclosure_, . [ ] smyth, _lives of the berkeleys_, i. . [ ] _cal. pat. rolls_, , p. . [ ] _lives of the berkeleys_, i. . [ ] ibid. i. . [ ] _lives of the berkeleys_, i. . [ ] _historical mss. commission, th report_, p. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] ashley, _english woollen industry_, pp. - . broadly speaking, there are four stages in the development of industry--the family system, the guild system, the domestic system, and the factory system. [ ] _hist. reg. angl._, p. . [ ] gisborne, _agricultural essays_, pp. - . [ ] _antiquities of warwickshire_ nd ed., p. . [ ] denton, _england in the fifteenth century_, p. . [ ] see cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. ; denton, _england in the fifteenth century_, p. . [ ] hen. viii, c. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] dissolution of small monasteries, ; of greater, - . [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, iv. . [ ] dugdale, _monasticon_, v, . [ ] hen. viii, c. ; eliz. c. ; eliz. c. ; eliz. c. . chapter viii fitzherbert.--the regulation of hours and wages the farming of this period is portrayed for us by fitzherbert, the first agricultural writer of any merit since walter of henley in the thirteenth century. he was one of the justices of common pleas, and had been a farmer for forty years before he wrote his books on husbandry, and on surveying in , so that he knew what he was writing about; 'there is nothing touching husbandry contained in this book but i have had experience thereof and proved the same.' in spite of the increase of grazing in his time he says the 'plough is the most necessarie instrument that an husbandman can occupy', and describes those used in various counties; in kent, for instance, 'they have some go with wheeles as they do in many other places'; but the plough of his time is apparently the same as that of walter of henley, and altered little till the seventeenth century. the rudeness of it may be judged from the fact that in some places it only cost d. or s. though in other parts they were as much as s. or even s. he says[ ] it was too costly for a farmer to buy all his implements, wherefore it is necessary for him to learn to make them, as he had done in the middle ages before the era of ready-made implements, when he always bought the materials and put them together at home. on the vexed question of whether to use horses or oxen for ploughing, he says it depends on the locality; for instance, oxen will plough in tough clay and upon hilly ground, whereas horses will stand still; but horses go faster than oxen on even ground and light ground, and are 'quicke for carriages, but they be far more costly to keep in winter.' according to him, oxen had no shoes as horses had.[ ] here is his description of a harrow: it is 'made of six final peeces of timber called harow bulles, made either of ashe or oke; they be two yardes long, and as much as the small of a man's leg; in every bulle are five sharpe peeces of iron called harow tyndes, set somewhat a slope forward.' this harrow, drawn by oxen, was good to break the big clods, and then the horse harrow came after to break the smaller clods. it differed slightly from the former, some having wooden tines. for weeding corn the chief instrument 'is a pair of tongs made of wood, and in dry weather ye must have a weeding hoke with a socket set upon a staffe a yard long.'[ ] he recommends that grass be mown early, for the younger and greener the grass is the softer and sweeter it will be when it is hay, and the seeds will be in it instead of fallen out as when left late; advice which many slovenly farmers need to-day. he does not approve of the custom of reaping rye and wheat high up and mowing them after, but advises that they be cut clean; barley and oats, however, should be commonly mown. both wheat and rye were to be sown at michaelmas, and were cast upon the fallow and ploughed under, two london bushels of wheat and rye being the necessary amount of seed per acre. in spite of his praise of the plough he allows that the sheep 'is the most profitablest cattel that a man can have', and he gives a list of their diseases, among the things that rot them being a grass called sperewort, another called peny grass, while marshy ground, mildewed grass, and grass growing upon fallow and therefore full of weeds were all conducive to rot. the chief cause, however, is mildew, the sign of whose presence is the honeydew on the oak leaves. in buying cattle to feed the purchaser is to see that the hair stare not, and that the beast lacks no teeth, has a broad rib, a thick hide, and be loose skinned, for if it stick hard to his ribs he will not feed[ ]; it should be handled to see if it be soft on the forecrop, behind the shoulder, on the hindermost rib upon the huck bone, and at the nache by the tail. among other diseases of cattle he mentions the gout, 'commonly in the hinder feet'; but he never knew a man who could find a remedy. he was a great advocate of enclosures; for it was much better to have several closes and pastures to put his cattle in, which should be well quick-setted, ditched, and hedged, so as to divide those of different ages, as this was more profitable than to have his cattle go before the herdsman (in the common field). it will be seen from the above that fitzherbert made no idle boast in saying he wrote of what he knew, and much of his advice is applicable to-day, though the time is past for the farmer's wife to 'wynowe all manner of cornes, to make malte, to shere corne, and in time of nede to helpe her husbande to fyll the mucke wayne or dounge carte, dryve the plough, lode heye, corne, and such other'; though she may go or ride to the market 'to sel butter, cheese, milke, eggs, chekyns, hennes, and geese.'[ ] it appears that the horses of england at this time had considerably deteriorated, for the statute hen. viii, c. , mentions the great decay of the breed, the cause it is stated being that 'in most places of this realme little horsis and naggis of small stature and valeu be suffered to depasture and also to covour marys and felys of very small stature'; therefore owners and farmers of deer parks shall keep in every such park two brood mares of 'hand fulles' (hands) at least. another statute, hen. viii, c. , strove to remedy this evil by enacting that no entire horse under hands was to feed on any forest, chase, waste, or common land. this statute was a useful one, so also was hen. viii, c. , which forbade for three years the killing of calves between january and may , under a penalty of s. d., because so many had been killed by 'covetous persons' that the cattle of the country were dwindling in number. others, however, were merely meddlesome, and directed against that unpopular man the dealer. for instance, owners refusing to sell cattle at assessed prices were to answer first in the star chamber ( hen. viii, c. ); and by and edw. vi, c. , no cattle were to be bought but in open fair or market, and not to be resold then alive, though a man might buy cattle anywhere for his own use. no person, again, was to resell cattle within five weeks after he bought them ( edw. vi, c. ); and a common drover had by the same act to have a licence from three justices before he could buy and sell cattle. we may be sure that these laws were more honoured in the breach than in the observance, as they deserved to be. hops were said to have been introduced from the low countries about the middle of henry viii's reign; but there can be no doubt that this is a mistake. it has been mentioned that they flourished in the gardens of edward i, and a distinguished authority[ ] says the hop may with probability be reckoned a native of britain; but it was first used as a salad or vegetable for the table, the young sprouts having the flavour of asparagus and coming earlier. hasted, the historian of kent, states[ ] that a petition was presented to parliament against the hop plant in wherein it was called a 'wicked weed'. harrison says, 'hops in time past were plentiful in this land, afterwards their maintenance did cease, and now (cir. ) being revived where are anie better to be found?'[ ] even then growers had to face foreign competition, as the customs accounts prove that considerable quantities were imported into england. in a cwt. was sold for s. and cwt. lb. for s. d., an early example of that fluctuation in price which has long characterized them.[ ] their average price about this time seems to have been s. / d. a cwt. during the tudor period the number of day labourers increased, largely owing to the enclosures having deprived the small holder and commoner of their land and rights. but judging by the statutes those paid yearly and boarded in the farm house were still most numerous. in the hours of labourers were first regulated by law. the statute ii hen. vii, c. , says that hen. vi, c. ,[ ] was insufficiently observed; and besides increasing wages slightly set forth the following hours for work on the farm: the labourer was to be at his work from the middle of march to the middle of september before a.m., and have half an hour for breakfast and an hour and a half for dinner and sleep, when sleep was allowed, that is from the middle of may to the middle of august; when sleep was not allowed, an hour for dinner and half an hour for his nonemete or lunch; and he was to work till between and p.m. during the rest of the year he was to work from daylight to dark. the attempt to regulate hours, which seem fair and reasonable, no doubt met with better success than that to regulate wages, for hen. viii, c. ( ), says the previous statutes had been very much disregarded, and sets down the rates once more:-- a bailiff's yearly wages, with diet, were to be not more than £ s. d., and s. for clothes. a chief hind, carter, or chief shepherd, with diet, not more than £ , and s. for clothes. a common servant or labourer, with diet, not more than s. d., and s. for clothes. a woman servant, with diet, not more than s., and s. for clothes. by the day, except in harvest, a common labourer from easter to michaelmas was to have d. with food and drink, d. without; and from michaelmas to easter - / d. with food and drink, and d. without. in harvest:-- a mower, with food, d. a day; without, d. a reaper, with food, d. a day; without, d. a carter, with food, d.; without, d. other labourers, with food, - / d.; without, - / d. women, with food, - / d.; without, - / d. footnotes: [ ] _booke of husbandry_ (ed. ), fol. . the surveyor of fitzherbert's day combined some of the duties of the modern bailiff and land agent: he bought and sold for his employer, valued his property, and supervised the rents. [ ] _booke of husbandry_ (ed. ), fol. vi. [ ] ibid. fol. xv. [ ] _booke of husbandry_ (ed. ), fol. xxix. [ ] fitzherbert adds pigs and all manner of cornes, so altogether the farmer's wife seems to have done as much as the farmer. [ ] sir jas. e. smith, _english flora_, iv. . [ ] _history of kent_ (ed. ), i. . [ ] _description of britain_ (furnivall ed.), p. . [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, iii. . [ ] see above. chapter ix - progress at last.--hop-growing.--progress of enclosure.--harrison's 'description' the period we have now reached was one of steady growth in the value of land and its products. in henry viii, who had given away or squandered, in addition to the great treasure left him by his thrifty father, all the wealth obtained from the dissolution of the monasteries, debased the coinage in order to get more money into his insatiable hands, and prices went up in consequence. but there were other causes: the influx of precious metals from newly discovered america into europe had commenced to make itself felt, and the population of the country began to grow steadily. also, it must not be forgotten that the seasons, which in the early part of the century had been normal, were for the next sixty years frequently rainy and bad. it is unnecessary to say that this must have largely helped to raise the price of corn. the average price of wheat from - was s. - / d. a quarter; from - , s. - / d. corn was still subject to extraordinary fluctuations: in , holinshed says before harvest wheat was s. d. a quarter, malt s. after harvest wheat was s., malt s. d., the former prices being due to a terrible drought in england. oxen in the period - were worth s. instead of under £ in the period - . wool was from d. to s. a lb. instead of about - / d., and all other farm products increased with these.[ ] hops were from - about s. d. a cwt., and from - , s. - / d. in reynold scott published the first english treatise on hops,[ ] in which he says, 'one man may well keep , hils, upon every hil well ordered you shall have lb. of hoppes at the least, one hundred pounds of these hoppes are commonly worth s. d., one acre of ground and the third part of one man's labour with small cost beside, shall yield unto him that ordereth the same well, fortie marks yearly and that for ever,' an optimistic estimate that many growers to-day would like to see realized. 'in the preparation of a hop garden', says the same writer, 'if your ground be grasse, it should be first sowen with hempe or beanes which maketh the ground melowe, destroyeth weedes, and leaveth the same in good season for this purpose.[ ] at the end of marche, repayre to some good garden to compound with the owner for choice rootes, which in some places will cost d. an hundredth. and now you must choose the biggest rootes you can find, such as are three or four inches about, and let every root be nine or ten inches long, and contain three joints.' holes were then to be dug at least feet apart, one foot square, and one foot deep, and in each two or three roots planted and well hilled up. tusser, however, recommended them much closer: 'five foot from another each hillock should stand, as straight as a levelled line with the hand. let every hillock be four foot wide. three poles to a hillock, i pas not how long, shall yield the more profit set deeplie and strong.' three or four poles were to be set to each hill or feet long, unless the ground was very rich, the poles or inches in circumference at the butt, so as to last longer and stand the wind well. after they were put up, the ground round the poles was to be well rammed. rushes or grass were used for tieing the hops. during the growth of the hops, not more than two or three bines were to be allowed to each pole; and after the first year the hills were to be gradually raised from the alleys between the rows until, according to the illustrations in scott's book, they were or feet high, the 'greater you make your hylles the more hoppes you shall have upon your poals'. when the time for picking came, the bines when cut were carried to a 'floore prepared for the purpose', apparently of hardened earth, where they were stripped into baskets, and scott thought that 'it is not hurtfull greatly though the smaller leaves be mingled with the hoppes'. in wet weather the hops were to be stripped in the house. the fire for drying hops was of wood, and some dried their hops in the sun, both processes to us appearing very risky; as the first would be too quick, and the latter next to impossible in september in england. they were sometimes packed in barrels, as tusser tells us, 'some close them up drie in a hogshead or vat, yet canvas or sontage (coarse cloth) is better than that.' by this time england had largely changed from a corn-growing to a stock-raising country; harrison, writing in the middle of queen elizabeth's reign, says, 'the soile of britaine is more inclined to feeding and grazing than profitable for tillage and bearing of corne ... and such store is there of cattle in everie place that the fourth part of the land is scarcely manured for the provision of graine.' but this statement seems exaggerated. we know that by harrison's time enclosures had affected but a small area, and the greater part of the cultivated land was in open arable fields. the yield of corn was now much greater than in the middle ages; rye or wheat well tilled and dressed now produced to bushels to the acre instead of or , barley bushels, oats or quarters[ ], though in the north, which was still greatly behind the rest of england, crops were smaller. no doubt this was partly due to the much-abused enclosures: the industrious farmer could now do what he liked with his own, without hindrance from his lazy or unskilful neighbour. tusser's preference for the 'several' field is very decided; comparing it with the 'champion' or common field he says:-- the countrie inclosed i praise the tother delighteth me not, there swineherd that keepeth the hog there neetherd with cur and his horne, there shepherd with whistle and dog be fence to the medowe and corne, there horse being tide on a balke is readie with theefe for to walke, where all things in common doth reste corne field with the pasture and meade, tho' common ye do for the best yet what doth it stand ye in steade? more plentie of mutton and beefe corne butter and cheese of the best more wealth any where (to be briefe) more people, more handsome and prest (neat.) where find ye? (go search any coaste) than there where enclosure is most. more work for the labouring man as well in the towne as the fielde. for commons these commoners crie inclosing they may not abide, yet some be not able to bie a cow with her calf by her side. nor laie (intend) not to live by their wurke, but thievishly loiter and lurke. what footpaths are made and how brode annoiance too much to be borne, with horse and with cattle what rode is made thorowe erie man's come. but the rich graziers boasted that they did not grow corn because they could buy it cheaper in the market; and they are said to have traded on the necessity of the poor farmer to sell at michaelmas in order to pay his rent, and when they had got the corn into their hands they raised the price. the corn-dealers of the time were looked upon with dislike by every one; many of the dearths then so frequent, and nearly always caused by bad seasons, were ascribed to 'engrossers buying of corn and witholding it for sale'. by a statute of the freedom of internal corn trade was entirely suppressed, and no one could carry corn from one part of england to another without a licence, and any one who bought corn to sell it again was liable to two months' imprisonment and forfeited his corn. although we shall see that this policy was reversed in the next century, the feeling against corn-dealers survived for many years and was loudly expressed during the napoleonic war; indeed, we may doubt if it is extinct to-day. many of the fruits and garden produce, which had been neglected since the first edward, had by now come into use again, 'not onlie among the poor commons, i meane of melons, pompions, gourds, cucumbers, radishes, skirets (probably a sort of carrot), parsneps, carrots, cabbages, navewes (turnip radishes (?)), turnips,[ ] and all kinds of salad herbes, but also at the tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen, and the nobilitie.'[ ] 'also we have most delicate apples, plummes, pears, walnuts, filberts, &c., and those of sundrie sorts, planted within fortie years past, in comparison of which most of the old trees are nothing worth: so have we no less store of strange fruite, as abricotes, almonds, peaches, figges, cornetrees (probably cornels) in noblemen's orchards. i have seen capers, orenges, and lemmons, and heard of wild olives growing here, besides other strange trees.'[ ] as a proof of the growth of grass in proportion to tillage between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, eden gives several examples,[ ] of which the following are significant:-- arable. grass. acres. acres. . messuages in norfolk had . a norfolk manor . messuages in warwickshire . messuages in warwickshire . a norfolk estate . " manor 'our sheepe are very excellent for sweetness of flesh, and our woolles are preferred before those of milesia and other places.'[ ] so thought harrison and many english landowners and farmers too, so that legislation was powerless to stop the spread of sheep farming. in a commission of inquiry instigated by wolsey held inquisition on enclosures and the decay of tillage, and it seems to have been the only honest effort to stop the evil. it was to inquire what decays, conversions, and park enclosures had been made since , but the result even of this attempt was small. in a fresh statute, hen. viii, c. , stated that the act limiting the number of sheep to be kept had only been observed on lands held of the king, whereon many houses had been rebuilt and much pasture reconverted to tillage; but on lands holden of other lords this was not the case, therefore the king was to have the moiety of the profits of such lands as had been converted from tillage to pasture since hen. vii until a proper house was built and the land returned to tillage; but the act only applied to fourteen counties therein enumerated. the enclosing for sheep-runs still went on, however, often with ruthless selfishness; houses and townships were levelled, says sir thomas more, and nothing left standing except the church, which was turned into a sheep-house: 'the towns go down, the land decays, of corn-fields plain lays, great men maketh nowadays a sheepcot of the church', said a contemporary ballad. latimer wrote, 'where there were a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog.' 'i am sorie to report it,' says harrison,[ ] 'but most sorrowful of all to understand that men of great port and countenance are so far from suffering their farmers to have anie gaine at all that they themselves become graziers, butchers, tanners, sheepmasters, and woodmen, thereby to enrich themselves.' the act against pulling down farmhouses was evaded by repairing one room for the use of a shepherd; a single furrow was driven across a field to prove it was still under the plough; to avoid holding illegal numbers of sheep flocks were held in the names of sons and servants.[ ] the country swarmed with heaps of miserable paupers, 'sturdy and valiant' beggars, and thieves who, though hanged twenty at a time on a single gallows, still infested all the countryside, their numbers being swollen by the dissolution of the monasteries and the breaking up of the bands of retainers kept by the great nobles. rents also were rising rapidly. latimer's account of his father's farm is too well known to be again quoted; his opinions were shared by all the writers of the day. sir william forrest, about , says that landlords now demand fourfold rents, so that the farmer has to raise his prices in proportion, and beef and mutton were so dear that a poor man could not 'bye a morsell'. 'howe joyne they lordshyp to lordshyppe, manner to manner, ferme to ferme. how do the rych men, and especially such as be shepemongers, oppresse the king's people by devourynge their common pastures with the shepe so that the poore are not able to keepe a cowe, but are like to starve. and yet when was beef ever so dere or mutton, wool now s. a stone. 'now', says another, later in the century, 'i can never get a horse shoed under d. or d., when i have also seen the common pryce was d. and cannot your neighbour remember that within these thirty years i could bye the best pigge or goose that i could lay my hand on for four pence which now costeth d., a good capon for d. or d., a hen for d., which now costeth me double and triple.'[ ] parliament, of course, tried to regulate the price of food; an act of , hen. viii, c. , ordained that beef and pork should be / d. a lb. and mutton and veal / d. a lb. the decrease in the number of cows also received its attention; and philip and mary, c. , states that forasmuch of late years a great number of persons have fed in their pastures sheep and cattle with no regard to breeding, so that there was great scarcity of stock, therefore for every sheep kept one milk cow shall be kept, and for every sheep one calf shall be bred, and for every head of horned cattle shall be kept one milk cow, and for every two cows so kept one calf shall be bred. the act was to last seven years, but eliz. c. made it perpetual. in came the rising of robert kett in norfolk, the last attempt of the english labourer to obtain redress of his wrongs by force of arms, though kett himself belonged to the landlord class and took the side of the people probably by accident. the petition of grievances drawn up by his followers aimed at diminishing the power of lords of manors as regards enclosures, the keeping of dove-cots, and other feudal wrongs. 'we pray', said the insurgents, 'that all bondmen may be made free, for god made all free with his precious blood-shedding.' the rebellion came to nothing, and some of the abuses at which it was aimed were dying a natural death, though enclosure often acted hardly on the poor man. the manorial system went on steadily decaying, and by this time the demesne lands had much diminished in area on most manors. many parcels had been sold to the new landlord class, who had made their fortunes in the towns and, like most englishmen, desired to become country gentlemen. much of the demesne had been sold in small lots to well-off tradesmen, and as the villeins had become copyholders a large part of the land was owned or occupied by yeomen or tenant farmers, who cultivated from to acres. many of the labourers also owned or rented cottages with or acres attached to them. such was the rural society at the end of the tudor period. the progress of enclosures helped to destroy this, for the labourers gradually ceased to own or occupy land, farms increased in size, the ownership of land came to be more and more the privilege of the rich, and people flocked in increasing numbers to the towns.[ a] in five norfolk manors in elizabeth's time only from one-seventh to one-tenth was in demesne, and little of what was left was farmed by the lord, but let to farmers on leases.[ b] on some manors the demesne land lay in compact blocks near the manor house; on others it was in scattered strips of various size; in others it lay in blocks and strips. the following particulars of a manor in norfolk give a good picture of an estate in - , the tenants on it, their rank, and the size of their holdings:-- horstead with staninghall, , acres. the tenants with messuages in the village were:-- acres. . j. topliffe, gentleman . f. woodhouse, esquire . r. ward, gentleman . h. shreve . a. pightling, widow . w. rose's heirs . g. berde . a. thetford, gentleman . t. pightling . r. pightling . j. rose . r. lincoln . w. jeckell . w. bulwer . e. newerby, gentleman . t. barnard . e. sparke there were also tenants without houses, holding from to acres; the demesne was acres; there were two glebes containing acres, and town lands of acres. the waste amounted to acres, which by had all disappeared. on this manor the houses were not collected together in a village as usual in most parts of england, but scattered about the estate. in two other manors the amount of waste remaining at this period was very small, but in three others little had been 'approved' and much consequently remained; most of the 'approvements', where made, seem to have been of long standing, and all the enclosures made were for tillage, not for grass as we should expect. the acres of waste that remained at horstead in - was enclosed in by agreement between the lords of the manor and the tenants on the following terms:-- . lords to take acres in severalty. . lords to reserve all rights to treasure trove, minerals, waifs, &c., with right of entry to take the same. . all rights of pasture, shack, and foldage were to be extinguished on all lands in the village. . the tenants were to pay an annual quit rent of £ s. d. for their shares of the common. before a man enclosed he consolidated his holding by exchange, so as to bring it into a compact parcel instead of scattered strips, a very lengthy process; then he ploughed up the bounds between the strips; after which he changed the direction of the ploughing, ploughing the land crossways, a very necessary change, as it had all been ploughed lengthways for centuries; and lastly he erected his fences: the bounds of the strips, however, were sometimes left to show which were freehold and which copyhold. on the other hand, there were exceptions to the curtailment of the demesne: on an oxfordshire manor of the sixteenth century the greater part of the yard-lands of which it consisted had by then passed from the possession of the peasants to the private use of the lord of the manor.[ ] to each yard-land belonged a house and farmyard, to - / acres of arable land, a share in the commonable meadows which for each occupier came to some acres, also the right to turn out oxen or cows, or horses and sheep on to the common pasture. probably, as in other manors in ancient times, each occupier had a right to as much firewood as was necessary, and timber for building purposes and fences. the arable land lay in numerous small plots of half an acre each and less, mingled together in a state of great confusion, and was farmed on the four-field system--wheat, beans, oats, fallow--though years before the three-field system had been most common in the district. many of the common arable fields evidently often contained, in those days of poor cultivation and inefficient drainage, patches of boggy and poor land which were left uncultivated.[ ] in the rolls of the manor of scotter in lincolnshire, in the early part of the sixteenth century, no one was to allow his horses to depasture in the arable fields unless they were tethered on these bad spots to prevent them wandering into the growing corn.[ ] many of the other regulations of this manor throw a flood of light on the farming of the day. in it was ordered that no man should drive his cattle unyoked through the corn-field under a penalty of s. d. every man shall keep a sufficient fence against his neighbour under the same penalty. no man shall make a footpath over the corn-field, the penalty for so doing being d. every one shall both ring and yoke their swine before s. ellen's day (probably may ), under a penalty of s. d., the custom of yoking swine to prevent them breaking fences being common until recent times. it was the custom in some manors to sow peas in a plot especially set apart for the poor. another rule was that no one should bake or brew by night for fear of burning down the flimsy houses and buildings. the penalty for ploughing up the balks which divided the strips, or meere (marc) furrows as they were called in lincolnshire, was d., a very light one for so serious an offence. in a penalty of s. was imposed on thomas dawson for breaking his hemp, i.e. separating the fibre from the bark in his large open chimney on winter nights, a habit which the manor courts severely punished owing to the risk of fire, for hemp refuse is very inflammable. it it was laid down that every one was to sow the outside portion of their arable lands, and not leave it waste for weeds to the damage of his neighbours; and that those who were too poor to keep sheep should not gather wool before o'clock in the morning, in reference to the custom of allowing the poor to pick refuse wool found on bushes and thorns, and this rule was to prevent them tearing wool from the sheep at night under that pretext. no man was to keep any beasts apart from the herdsman, for if the herdsman did not know the animals he could not tell them from strays. every one was to sweep their chimney four times a year, for fear of sparks falling on the thatch. no man was to suffer the nests of crows or magpies in his ground, but pull them down before may day. in the meadows, before each man began to mow his grass he was to mark the exact limits of his own land with 'wadsticks' or tall rods, so that there could be no mistake as to boundaries. the health of the community and of the live stock also received attention: in one pattynson was fined s. for allowing a 'scabbed' horse to go on the common; dead cattle were to be buried the day after death, and all unwholesome meat was to be buried. harrison praises the farmer of his day highly: 'the soyle is even now in these oure dayes growne to be much more fruitfulle; the cause is that our country men are grown more skilful and careful throwe recompense of gayne.' he was also doing well by means of his skill and care; and in spite of the raising of rents by the much-abused landlords; for in former times 'for all their frugality they were scarcely able to live and pay their rents on rent day without selling a cow or a horse'. such also used to be their poverty, that if a farmer went to the alehouse, 'a thing greatly used in those days,' and there, 'in a braverie to show what store he had, did caste downe his purse and therein a noble or shillings in silver unto them, it was very likely that all the rest could not lay downe so much against it.' and in henry's time, though rents of £ had increased to £ , £ , or £ , yet the farmer generally had at the end of his term saved six or seven years' rent, besides a 'fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard', and odd vessels, also 'three or four feather beds, so manie coverlids and carpets of tapestry, a silver salt, a bowle for wine, and a dozzen of spoones to furnish up the sute'. his food consisted principally of beef, and 'such food as the butcher selleth', mutton, veal, lamb, pork, besides souse, brawn, bacon, fruit, fruit pies, cheese, butter, and eggs.[ ] in feasting, the husbandman or farmer exceeded, especially at bridals, purifications of women, and such other meetings, where 'it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent'. but, besides these, there were many poorer farmers who lived at home 'with hard and pinching diet'. wheaten bread was at this time a luxury confined to the gentility, the farmer's loaf, according to tusser, was sometimes wheat, sometimes rye, sometimes mastlin, a mixture of wheat and rye, though the poorer farmer on uninclosed land ate bread made of beans. the poor ate bread of rye or barley, and in time of dearth of beans, peas, and oats, and sometimes acorns.[ ] according to tusser, the labourer was allowed roast meat twice a week, 'good plowmen looke weekly of custom and right, for roast meate on sundaies, and thursdaies at night'; and latimer calls bacon 'the necessary meate' of the labourer, and it seems to have been his great stand-by then as now. the bread and bacon were supplemented largely by milk and porridge.[ ] the statute, hen. viii, c. , says that all food, and especially beef, mutton, pork, and veal, 'which is the common feeding of mean and poor persons.' was too dear for them to buy, and fixed the price of beef and pork at / d. a lb. and of mutton and veal at / d. a lb.; but the statute, like others of the kind, was of little avail, and the price of beef was in the middle of the sixteenth century about d. a lb. or d. in our money. as the average price of wheat at the same date was s. a quarter, or about s. in our money, fresh meat was comparatively much cheaper, and it is no wonder that even the farmer could not afford wheaten bread regularly. moryson, writing in elizabeth's reign, says 'englishmen eate barley and rye brown bread, and prefer it to white as abiding longer in the stomeck and not so soon digested'.[ ] a tithe dispute at north luffenham in rutlandshire throws considerable light on the financial position of the various classes interested in the land about . at the trial several witnesses were examined, who all made statements as to the amount of their worldly wealth, and it is a noteworthy fact that even the humblest had saved something; perhaps because there was no poor law or state pension fund to discourage thrift.[ ] thomas blackburne, a husbandman, who had served his master as 'chief baylie of his husbandrie', had at the end of a long life saved £ . another, william walker, eighty years of age, during forty years of service to mr. john wymarke had put by £ . robert sculthorp, who had at one time been a farmer, was worth £ s. d., but the size of his farm is unfortunately not told us. roland wymarke, a gentleman farmer, who had farmed for forty years at north luffenham, was little better off than thomas blackburne, the baylie, for he estimated his capital at £ . £ , however, must not be taken as representing the average wealth of a 'gentleman', though a few hundred pounds was then considered a considerable fortune. in thomas corny, a prosperous landlord at bassingthorpe, lincolnshire, had a house with a hall, three parlours, seven chambers, a high garret, maid's garret, five chambers for yeomen hinds, shepherd, &c., two kitchens, two larders, milk-house, brew-house, buttery, and cellar; and it was furnished with tables, carpets, cushions, pictures, beds, curtains, chairs, chests, and numerous kitchen and other utensils, besides a quantity of plate, which was then looked upon not only as a useful luxury but as a safe form of investment. the small squire was not nearly so well off as this. in the house of john asfordby, who was of that degree, contained a hall, parlour, small parlour, low parlour, a chamber over the parlour, gallery chamber, buttery, and kitchen, and furniture was scanty, but the plate cupboard was well filled.[ ] a prosperous yeoman was often comparatively better off than the small squire. richard cust, of pinchbeck in the same county, though his house was small, consisting only of a hall, parlour with chamber over, kitchen with chamber over, brew-house, milne-house (mill-house), and milk-house, was richer in furniture, possessing a folding-table, chairs, cushions, pieces of pewter, candlesticks, basins, laver, beds, and other articles.[ ] footnotes: [ ] see table at end, and thorold rogers's prices in vol. v. of his great work. [ ] 'a perfite platforme of a hoppegarden', in _arte of gardening_, by r. scott, . [ ] tusser recommends that the hopyard be dug. thomas tusser was born in essex, about , and died in . he led a roving life, which included a good deal of farming; but the statement that he died poor appears to be inaccurate. much of his advice is not very valuable. [ ] harrison, _description of britain_, p. . [ ] usually grown in gardens, until the middle of the seventeenth century. tusser also mentions them. [ ] _description of britain_, ii. (furnivall ed.). [ ] harrison, _description of britain_, ii. . [ ] _state of the poor_, i. - . blomefield's _norfolk_, iv. , i. , i. . dugdale, _warwickshire_, p. . [ ] _description of britain_, iii. . [ ] _description of britain_ (ed. furnivall), ii. . [ ] froude, _history of england_, v. iii. [ ] 'a compendious or brief examination of certain ordinary complaints', quoted by eden, _state of the poor_, . . [ a] _transactions of the royal historical society_ (new series), xix. . [ b] ibid. xi. sq. [ ] nasse, _agricultural community of the middle ages_, p. . _archaeologia_, xxxiii. . [ ] in the still surviving open fields at laxton, mentioned above, there are certain unploughed portions called 'sicks', or grassy patches, never cultivated.--slater, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] _archaeologia_, xlvi. . [ ] _description of britain_, ii. . [ ] in the reign of mary, 'the plain poor people did make very much of acorns.' cullum, _hawsted_, p. . [ ] eden, _state of the poor_, i. . [ ] _itinerary_, iii. . [ ] _rutland magazine_, i. . [ ] _victoria county history: lincolnshire_, ii. . [ ] see _records of cust family_, i. . chapter x - live stock.--flax.--saffron.--the potato. the assessment of wages the cattle and sheep of this period have generally been described as poor animals, and no doubt they would seem small to us. to jacob rathgib, a traveller, writing in , they seemed worthy of praise: 'england has beautiful oxen and cows, with very large horns, low and heavy and for the most part black; there is abundance of sheep and wethers, which graze by themselves winter and summer without shepherds.' the heaviest wethers, according to him, weighed lb. and had at the most lb. of wool, a much heavier fleece than is generally ascribed to them; others had or lb. horses were abundant, and, though low and small, were very fleet; the riding horses being geldings and generally excellent. immense numbers of swine were in the country, 'larger than in any other.' six years later another traveller, hentzner, noticed that the soil abounded with cattle, and the inhabitants were more inclined to feeding than ploughing. he saw, too, a berkshire harvest-home: 'as we were returning to our inn (at windsor) we happened to meet some country people celebrating their harvest-home, their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed by which perhaps they would signify ceres; this they keep moving about, while men and women, men and maid-servants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn.' harrison[ ] tells us, no doubt with patriotic bias, that 'our oxen are such as the like are not to be found in any country of europe both for greatness of body and sweetness of flesh, their horns a yard between the tips.' cows had doubled in price in his time, from s. d. to s. d. 'our horses are high, but not of such huge greatness as in other places,' yet remarkable for the easiness of their pace; and or cart-horses will draw cwt. a long journey, and a pack-horse will carry cwt. without any hurt,--a statement which is one more proof of the poorness of the roads. the chief horse fairs were at 'ripon, newportpond, wolfpit, and harborow,' where horse dealers were as great rogues as ever. pigeons were still the curse of the farmer, and their cotes were called dens of thieves. by the end of the sixteenth century, certainly by the first quarter of the seventeenth, the villein, who in the middle ages had formed the bulk of the population, had disappeared.[ ] it is probable that even at the beginning of the tudor period the great majority of the bondmen had become free, and that the serf then only formed one per cent. of the population, and many of those had left the country and become artizans in the towns, for personal serfdom had outlasted demesne farming; though even there the heavy hand of the lord was upon them and enforced the ancient customs. in the sixteenth century flax was apparently grown upon most farms, the statutes hen. viii, c. , and eliz., c. , obliging every person occupying acres of tillage to have a quarter of an acre in flax or hemp, and moryson says the husbandmen wore garments of coarse cloth made at home, so did their wives, and 'in generall' their linen was coarse and made at home.[ ] 'good flax and good hemp to have of her own in maie a good housewife will see it be sowne', sings tusser. the statute of henry viii enjoined the sowing of flax and hemp because of the great increase of idle people in the realm, to which the numerous imports, especially linen cloth, contributed. saffron also was much grown, that at saffron walden in essex was said to be the best in the world, the profit from it being reckoned at £ an acre. its virtues were innumerable, if we may believe the contemporary writers; it flavoured dishes, helped digestion, was good for short wind, killed moths, helped deafness, dissolved gravel, and, lastly, 'drunk in wine doth haste on drunkenesse.' the most important novelty of this century was the potato, which the colonists, sent out in by sir walter raleigh, brought from virginia to ireland, though it had been introduced into europe by the spaniards before this. according to gerard, the old english botanist, it was, on its first introduction from america, only cultivated in the gardens of the nobility and gentry as a curious exotic; and in it occurs among the vegetables considered necessary for a nobleman's household.[ ] it is curious to find gerard comparing it to what he calls the 'common potato', in reality the sweet potato brought to england by drake and hawkins earlier in the century. in james i's reign the root was considered a great delicacy, and was sold to the queen's household at s. a lb., an enormous price. like most agricultural novelties it spread very slowly, but about the middle of the seventeenth century began to be planted out in the fields in small patches in lancashire, whence it spread all over the kingdom and to france.[ ] at this date it was looked upon as a very second-rate article of food, if we may judge by the _spectator_ (no. ), which alludes to it as the diet of beggars. about , houghton says, 'now they begin to spread all the kingdom over,' and recommends them boiled or roasted and eaten with butter and sugar.[ ] eden notes its increasing popularity during the eighteenth century, and by his time (the end of that century) in many parts it was the staple article of food for the poor; in somerset the children mainly subsisted on it, and in devon it was made into bread. its cultivation on a large scale in the field did not, however, spread all over england till the napoleonic war, and the ignorance and prejudice against it lasted for long; even cobbett called it 'the lazy root,' and whole potatoes were used for seed regardless of the number of eyes. in was passed the famous act, eliz., c. , which thorold rogers has asserted to be the commencement of a conspiracy for cheating the english workman of his wages, to tie him to the soil, to deprive him of hope, and to degrade him into irremediable poverty.[ ] the violence of this language is a prima facie reason for doubting the correctness of his assertion, which on examination is found to be grossly exaggerated. under richard ii the justices were authorized to fix the rate of wages, provided they did not exceed the maximum fixed by parliament. the elizabethan statute abolished the maximum and left the justices to fix reasonable rates. so far from being an attempt to keep wages down it seems to have been an honest effort to regulate them according to prices,[ ] whereas most previous statutes had merely reduced wages. the preamble of the act states this clearly enough, saying that the existing laws with regard to the hiring and wages of servants were insufficient; chiefly because the wages 'are in dyvers places to small and not answerable to this time respecting the advancement of prices in all things that belong to the said servants and labourers, the said lawes cannot conveniently without the great greefe and burden of the poore labourer and hired man be put in due execution.' but as several of these acts were still beneficial it was proposed to consolidate them into one statute in order to banish idleness, advance husbandry, and give the labourer decent wages. it was enacted therefore that all persons between the ages of twelve years and sixty, not being otherwise occupied, 'nor being a gentleman born, nor having lands of the yearly value of s., nor goods to the value of £ ,' should be compellable to serve in husbandry with 'any person that keepeth husbandry' by the year, and the hours of work were re-enacted. the rates of wages of artificers, husbandmen, &c., were to be ascertained yearly by the justices and the sheriff, 'if he conveniently may,' at quarter sessions, 'calling unto them such discrete and grave persons as they shall thinck meete and conferring together respecting the plentie or scarcitie of the tyme and other circumstances necessary to be considered,' and the wages fixed were to be certified into chancery. then proclamations of the wages thus determined were to be made in the cities and market towns. every person who gave higher wages than those established by the proclamation was to be imprisoned for ten days and fined £ , every receiver to be imprisoned twenty-one days. the importance still attached to the harvest season is shown by the section that all artificers and others were compellable to work in harvest or be put in the stocks two days and a night. for the better advancement of husbandry and tillage every householder farming acres of tillage or more might receive an apprentice in husbandry, but no tradesman or merchant might take an apprentice save his own son, unless his parents had freehold of the annual value of s.; and no person was to use 'any art mistery or manual occupation now in use' unless he had served seven years' apprenticeship to it. there can be no doubt that the clauses last quoted confined a large portion of the population to agricultural work, but as we know that the people were deserting the country and flocking to the towns, this must have seemed to the framers of the law very desirable. this method of fixing wages was in force until , and its repeal then was entirely contrary to the opinion of the artizan class; but it may be doubted if the magistrates extensively used the powers given them by the act, and wages seem to have been settled generally by competition. several instances remain, however, of wages drawn up under this act. almost immediately after it was passed, in june , the rutland magistrates met under the act, and stated that the prices of linen, woollen, leather, corn, and other victuals were great, so they drew up the following list of wages[ ]:-- a bailiff in husbandry, having charge of two plough lands, at least should have by the year s., and s. for his livery. a chief servant in husbandry, which can eire (plough), sow, mow, thresh, make a rick, thatch and hedge, and can kill and dress a hog, sheep, and calf, by the year s., and s. for his livery. a common servant in husbandry, which can mow, sow, thresh, and load a cart, and cannot expertly make a rick, hedge, and thatch, and cannot kill and dress a hog, sheep, or calf, by the year s. d., and s. for his livery. a mean servant in husbandry, which can drive the plough, pitch the cart, and thresh, and cannot expertly sow, mow, thresh, and load a cart, nor make a rick, nor thatch, by the year s., and s. for his livery. the chief shepherd is only to receive s. and s. for his livery; but this must be an error, as in the statutes hen. viii, c. , and hen. vi, c. , he was placed next the bailiff as we should expect. these wages were evidently 'with diet', and show a considerable advance on those fixed by hen. viii, c. .[ ] by the day the ordinary labourer was to have d. in winter, d. in summer, and d. to d. in harvest time, 'finding himself.' a mower with meat earned d., without meat d. a day; a man reaper with meat d., without d.; a woman reaper d., and d. as the price of corn and meat was three times what it had been in the fifteenth century, and the labourers' wages, taking into consideration his harvest pay, not quite double, the rutland magistrates hardly observed the spirit of the act. rutland, moreover, judging by the assessments of the time, was a county where agriculture was very flourishing; and thirty years after we find in yorkshire that the winter wages of the labourer were d. and the summer d. a day: that is, he had little more wages than in the fifteenth century, with provisions risen threefold. at chester at the same date his day's wages were to be d. all the year round.[ ] in the rutland magistrates at oakham[ ] decreed that an ordinary labourer was to have d. a day in winter and d. in summer, the same wages as in , yet wheat in that year averaged s. d. a quarter. a bailiff by the year was now advanced to s., a manservant of the best sort, equal no doubt to the chief servant in husbandry, to s., a 'common servant' to s., and a 'mean servant' to s., but all without livery. at chelmsford, in , there was a very different rate fixed, the ordinary labourer getting from s. to s. d. a day; but this seems to have been exceptional, as at warwick in he was only to have d., and as late as in lancashire d. to d. a day.[ ] in , by the bury st. edmunds assessment, a common labourer got d. a day in winter and s. in summer, and a reaper in harvest s. d. by the year a bailiff was paid £ , a carter £ , and a common servant £ s., of course with food.[ ] these figures clearly prove that the wages fixed by the magistrates were often terribly inadequate, though it must be said in their defence that the great rise in prices probably struck them as abnormal and not likely to last. it should be remembered, too, that besides his wages the labourer and his family had often bye industries such as weaving to fall back upon, and in most parts of england still a piece of common land to help him. footnotes: [ ] _description of britain_, iii. . [ ] _transactions of the royal historical society_ (new series), xvii. . [ ] moryson, _itinerary_ (ed. ), iii. . [ ] _archaeologia_ xiii. . [ ] in it was much cultivated about london. [ ] _collections on husbandry and trade_, ii. . [ ] _six centuries of work and wages_, p. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, ii. . the statute of labourers of made the same effort, see p. . [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, iv. ; and _work and wages_, p. . [ ] see above. [ ] thorold rogers, _work and wages_, pp. - . [ ] _archaeologia_, xi. . [ ] thorold rogers, _six centuries of work and wages_, p. . [ ] cullum, _hawsted_, p. . it is strange to find food reckoned so highly; if the common labourer at hawsted received his food, he was only paid d. a day in winter, and d. in summer; if one man's food was reckoned at half his wages, how far did the other half go in feeding and clothing his family? chapter xi - clover and turnips.--great rise in prices. more enclosure.--a farming calendar the seventeenth century was one of considerable progress in english agriculture. the decay of common-field farming was enabling individual enterprise to have its way. the population was rapidly growing; by the returns of the hearth tax prove that the northern counties were nearly as thickly populated as the southern, and prices during the first half were continually rising, though after that they remained almost stationary, since the effect of the influx of precious metals from the new world was exhausted. in the first half of the century john smyth ascribes the advance of rents to the castilian voyages opening the new world, whereby such floods of treasure have flowed into europe that the rates of christendom are raised near twentyfold'. but the greatest agricultural event of the century was the introduction of clover and the encouragement of turnips as grown in holland, by sir richard weston, about . no doubt the turnip was already well known in england. tusser and fitzherbert both mention it, apparently as a garden root only; but gerard in his _herbal_, , says it grew in fields 'and divers vineyards or hoppe gardens in most places of england', which certainly points to an effort having been made generally to use it as a field crop whenever an enclosed space gave it some protection from the depredations of the common herds. however, its cultivation must have declined, as long after this it was regarded as a novelty as a field crop in most parts of england.[ ] in holland it had been used in the field universally, and this use with that of 'great', as it was called, or broad clover, weston pressed on the english farmer. but their progress was wofully slow. at hawsted in suffolk clover and turnips were first sown about , and the eastern portion of england was far ahead of the north and west; as late as arthur young wrote that 'sainfoin, cabbages, potatoes, and carrots are not common crops in england; i do not imagine above half or at most two-thirds of the nation cultivate clover.'[ ] yet their introduction must have been of the greatest benefit to the farmer and the public; his stock of hay was increased, he could utilize his fallows, and keep a much larger head of stock through the winter, who would give him a greater quantity of manure. every one where turnips were grown could now have fresh meat during the winter. the slow progress of these great blessings is perhaps the strongest testimony in our history of the innate conservatism of the farmer. the green crop was for long considered to be suited only to the garden, and as our forefathers were prejudiced against the spade it was difficult to get such crops cultivated even there; but it should also be remembered that no crop was possible in the common fields which did not come to maturity before lammas, unless some special agreement was made as to it.[ ] clover, sir richard weston said, thrives best when sown on the worst and barrenest ground, which was to be pared and burnt, and unslaked lime added to the ashes. then it was to be well ploughed and harrowed, and about lb. of seed sown per acre in the end of march or in april. 'it will stand five years, and then when ploughed up will yield three or four years running rich crops of wheat, and then a crop of oats, after which you may sow clover again.' in the seventeenth century the practice of liming and marling, which had been largely discontinued since the fourteenth century, was revived (westcote, in his _view of devon_ in , calls liming, &c., a new invention), and there was also a great improvement in implements. patents were taken out for draining machines in , for new manures in - , ploughs - and , mechanical sowing - . only six were taken out, however, between and that concerned agriculture.[ ] the civil war checked the improvement, for though the great mass of the people had nothing to do with either party, the country was of necessity in a very unsettled state, and both sides plundered indiscriminately. yet in some parts, as in devonshire, so many of the able men served in the two armies, that few but old men, women, and children were left to manage the farms, and even they were afraid to grow more than enough to supply themselves since both armies seized the crops.[ ] these bad effects lasted for some time afterwards; chapple, a devonshire land agent of the eighteenth century, says he had talked with people who remembered the state of husbandry in the last ten or twelve years of the reign of charles ii, when in many parts of devonshire an acre or two of wheat was esteemed a rarity. that the rate of progress in the century was not more rapid is attributed by blyth to several causes[ ]:-- . want of leases, by which tenants were deprived of security. . discouragement to flood (irrigate) land, from the risk of law suits with neighbours. . intermixture of different properties in common fields. . unlimited pasturage on commons, by which they were overstocked. . the want of a law compelling all men to kill moles. . the excessive number of water-mills, to the great destruction of much gallant land. the average price of wheat during the seventeenth century was s. a quarter, of barley s., and oats s. - / d. oxen averaged about £ apiece, cows much less, about £ , and there was not much change in their value during the century. sheep were about s. d., and a cart-horse in the first half of the century from £ to £ , in the second half from £ to £ . beef rose from d. a lb. in the early part of the century to d. at the close of it. wool remained stationary at from d. to s. per lb. [ ]a proclamation of fixed the following prices for london poulterers and victuallers:-- s. d. best turkey-cock duck best hen eggs lb. best fresh butter in winter lb. best fresh butter in summer lb. best salt butter - / best fat goose " crammed capon " pullet " chicken according to the _manydown manor rolls_ the wootton churchwardens in paid from s. to s. for calves, s. d. for a fat lamb, s. for a sheep, s. d. for a barren ewe, d. for a couple of chickens, s. d. for faggots.[ ] after the restoration in another period of prosperity set in,[ ] and altogether the century was a prosperous one for farmers and manufacturers. the newly established royal society materially helped agriculture. 'since his majesty's most happy restoration the whole land hath been fermented and stirred up by the profitable hints it hath received from the royal society, by which means parks have been disparked, commons enclosed, woods turned into arable, and pasture lands improved by clover, st. foine, turnips, cole-seed, and many other good husbandries, so that the food of cattle is increased as fast, if not faster, than the consumption, and by these means the rent of the kingdom is far greater than ever it was.'[ ] the century was distinguished also for the curious number of cycles of good and bad seasons; - were years of prolonged dearth, wheat reaching an enormous price, and - , were famine years, while the end of the century was long famous for its barren years. with the prices of produce rents rose enormously. very early in the century[ ] rents of arable land had increased ninefold, since the fifteenth century, and by davenant and king estimated the average rent of arable land in england at s. d. per acre and of permanent grass at s. d. perhaps this is too high an estimate, as on the belvoir estate of , acres in the rental all round was s. - / d. an acre for land above the average in quality, though it must be remembered that the earls and dukes of rutland were indulgent landlords. the _history of hawsted_ affords a valuable index of the increase of rents at this period.[ ] in the average rent was s. d. an acre; in , acres of arable, meadow, and pasture were let for s. d. an acre, the landlord, it is interesting to notice, reserving the right of hawking, netting rabbits, hunting, and fowling; and about the same date other lands on the estate were let at s. d. and s. d. an acre, so that there had not generally been much advance since , which is what we should expect, as the great rise took place at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. in , therefore, it is not surprising to find that acres of meadow and pasture let at s. an acre, and in some buildings and acres of park at s. an acre. in , acres of arable and pasture and acres of meadow were valued at s. an acre for letting, and the hall farm of acres ( - / acres meadow) at s.; and great pipers farm of acres ( meadow) at s., while meadow and pasture near the mansion was valued at s. an acre. in the rent of the hall farm had advanced from s. an acre to about s., though in it went down to s. d.[ ] according to the survey of the manor of manydown in hampshire in , meadow land was worth s. an acre, pasture s. to s., arable from s. to s., the latter showing a great variation in quality.[ ] in bryers wood farm at hawsted, which had been let in for £ , was let at £ s. these rents are considerably higher than the estimate of davenant and king; but it must be remembered that they were for land in the parts of england, where farming was at its best, and they, in accounting for the whole country, had to take into consideration a vast amount of land in the north and west which was worth very little. in the rawlinson collection[ ] in the bodleian library is a rental of lord kingston's estate in north nottinghamshire in , the rents averaging s. an acre; but this was an exceptionally good estate, much of the property being meadow and pasture. the farmhouses also were above the average, while in two of the parishes the tenants had rights of common, and in two others the tenancies were tithe free. there was very little arable land on the estate, three small holdings letting for s. d. an acre; and some of the pasture land was let at s., s. d., and even s. an acre. the largest farm, saundby hall, of acres, nearly all meadow and pasture, was s. d. an acre. the cottages were fortunate in having pieces of land attached to them. in saundby, richard ffydall rented a cottage and acres of arable land for £ s. d.; widow johnson a cottage and yard for s. d.; william daubney a cottage with - / acres of arable and - / acres of pasture for £ s. d. a farm in scrooby, consisting of a messuage, cottage, and acres of arable, meadow, and pasture, only let at £ . as to the freehold value of land, in , according to d'ewes, it was worth from sixteen to twenty years' purchase; yet, in , sir josiah child said that lands now sell at twenty years' purchase, which fifty or sixty years before sold at eight or ten; and he also states, 'the same farms or lands to be now sold would yield treble and in some cases six times the money they were sold for fifty years ago'.[ ] davenant puts land at twelve years' purchase in , at eighteen years in .[ ] in the price of land was said to be twenty-seven years' purchased.[ ] the legislation against laying down tillage to grass was continued until the end of the sixteenth century. the statute eliz., c. , repealed hen. vii, c. , and all other acts against pulling down houses, and provided that a house of husbandry should be a house that hath or hath had acres of arable land. all such houses which had been destroyed during the last seven years were to be rebuilt, and if destroyed more than seven years only one-half was to be rebuilt; but to each of them at least acres of land were to be attached. the next statute, eliz., c. , sets forth once more the advantages of tillage, viz. the increase and multiplying of people for service in the wars, and in time of peace the employment of a greater number of people, the keeping of people from poverty, the dispersal of the wealth of the kingdom in many hands, and 'the standing of this realm upon itself without depending upon foreign countries'[ ]; and therefore enacts that lands converted from tillage to pasture shall be restored to tillage within three years, and lands then in tillage should be so continued; but this was only to extend to twenty-three counties, and omitted most of those in the south-west. at the beginning of the seventeenth century a reaction set in; the price of corn had risen immensely and continued to do so, the price of wool remained stationary, and tillage was as profitable as grass. in coke speaks of the man who only kept a shepherd and a dog as one who never prospered. in several of the tillage laws were repealed.[ ] as an example of the unenclosed fields, at the end of the sixteenth century, we may take the common fields at daventry, which were three in number, containing respectively , , and acres, divided into furlongs, a term which had now a very wide signification, each of which was subdivided into lands nearly always half an acre in extent, several of these lands when adjoining being often held now by the same owner. one furlong may be taken as an example. it was acres rood in extent, and contained ninety-six lands, owned by seventeen people. the meadows were divided still more minutely, some of the smaller portions being only a quarter of an acre each. the largest meadow contained acres, divided among fifty-three people. in the manor, besides the arable and meadow, there were acres of common pasture, a park, and a small wood. there were forty-one freeholders and many leasehold tenants, the average freehold being acres, the average leasehold only half an acre, small holdings being the usual feature of the unenclosed township. in the seventeenth century the price of wool ceased to operate as a cause of enclosure, but in many parts the change to pasture continued, owing to the rise in price of cattle and of wages. the same reason, too, for laying down land to grass that had been so powerful in the preceding centuries still existed, the common arable fields needed rest from continual cropping and poor manuring, while good crops of corn could be grown from the virgin soil of the newly enclosed waste. the preamble of the durham decrees clearly states this: 'the land is wasted and worn with continual ploweing, and thereby made bare, barren, and very unfruitful.'[ ] we may, therefore, take coke's words as inapplicable to many districts. in the seventeenth century there were several methods of enclosing. sometimes the lord of the manor enclosed and left the land of the tenants still in common; or a tenant enclosed piece by piece; or enclosures were made by act of parliament, the earliest of which for common fields was passed in the time of james i, a method at this period very seldom used; or there was an agreement between lord and tenants often authorized by the courts of chancery or exchequer. besides enclosure, another process was going on, the consolidation of farms by the amalgamation of small holdings into larger ones. farmhouses, as we see them to-day, began to appear on the holdings thus consolidated, instead of being grouped together in villages. a writer in says, 'we may see many of their houses built alone like raven's nests, no birds building neere them' so unwonted was the sight of isolated dwellings in most places at the time. however, in charles i went back to the policy of his forefathers and issued letters to certain of the midland counties ordering all enclosures of the last two years to be removed, and commissions were issued to inquire into the matter in , , and ,[ ] the chief evil feared from enclosures being depopulation, and enclosers were prosecuted in the court of star chamber. the assertion that enclosures ceased during the seventeenth century has been proved inaccurate by modern research, and there is no doubt that they went on continuously. in , in the midlands, the enclosing of land produced serious armed resistance, probably because the midland counties were then the great corn-growing district of england, and the change to pasture and the consolidation of farms displaced a larger population there than elsewhere. between and enclosures in leicestershire, for instance, were very numerous, no less than , acres being enclosed in that time, most of which was converted to pasture. the attempt of the government to check the movement, initiated by charles i, seems to have had considerable effect, but died away with the civil war, and though other attempts were made under the commonwealth they came to nothing, and from this time enclosures went on unchecked by the government,[ ] and were soon to have its active support. yet there was a vast amount still in common field: the whole of the cultivated land of england in was stated by king and davenant to amount to not much more than half the total area, and of this cultivated portion three-fifths was still farmed on the old common-field system. northamptonshire, leicestershire, rutland, huntingdonshire, and bedfordshire were comparatively unenclosed.[ ] from the books and maps of the day 'it is clear that many routes which now pass through an endless succession of orchards, corn-fields, hay-fields, and bean-fields then ran through nothing but heath, swamp, and warren. in the drawings of an english landscape made in that age for the grand duke cosmo scarce a hedgerow is to be seen.... at enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a region of five-and-twenty miles in circumference which contained only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields.'[ ] the enclosure of these areas was to be mainly the work of the latter half of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries. the amount of enclosure in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and the first half of the seventeenth centuries was, according to the latest research, much, and perhaps very naturally, exaggerated by contemporaries. between - the enclosures in twenty-four counties are said to have amounted to some , acres, or . of their total area,[ ] but the evidence for this is by no means conclusive. however, there seems no reason to doubt that the enclosure of this period was but a faint beginning of that great outburst of it that marked the agrarian revolution of the middle of the eighteenth century, and that it was mainly confined to the midland counties, mr. johnson, in his recent ford lectures, has stated that the enclosure of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not accompanied by very much direct eviction of freeholders or bona fide copyholders of inheritance; yet the small holder suffered in many ways, e.g. by the lord disproving the hereditary character of the copyhold, or by changing copyholds of inheritance into copyholds for lives or leases for lives or years. he and his successors could then refuse to renew at the termination of lives or years except on payment of a practically prohibitory fine. in short, though there was not much violation of legal right there was much injustice, and enclosure, though its effects were exaggerated at this period, certainly tended to displace the small landholder. it does not appear, however, that the moderate-sized proprietors were seriously affected. many of the larger freeholders and copyholders on manors enclosed on their own account, and perhaps increased at the expense of the very large and the very small. indeed, the decrease of small landowners was chiefly due to political and social causes. the old self-sufficing, agricultural economy of england, which we have seen beginning to break up in the fourteenth century, was becoming thoroughly disintegrated. the capitalist class was increasing; the successful merchant and lawyer were acquiring land and becoming squires; there was an intense land hunger. simon degge, wilting of staffordshire in , says that in the previous sixty years half the lands had changed owners, not so much as of old they were wont to do, by marriage, but by purchase; and he notices how many lawyers and tradesmen have supplanted the gentry.[ ] in fact, there was a much freer disposal of lands from the end of the fifteenth century, when the famous taltarum's case enabled entailed estates to be barred, until the restoration, than there has been before or since. for these two hundred years the courts of law and parliament resisted every effort to re-establish the system of entails; the owners of land constantly multiplied, and this tendency must have counteracted the displacement of the small holder by enclosure. sir thomas smith, writing towards the end of the sixteenth century, says that it was the yeomen who bought the lands of 'unthrifty gentlemen;' and moryson tells us that 'the buyers (excepting lawyers) are for the most part citizens and vulgar men'.[ ] it became one of the boasts of england that she had a large number of yeomen farming their own land. during the civil war, however, it became important to landowners to protect their properties in the interest of children and descendants from forfeiture for treason. the judges lent their aid, and the system of strict family settlements was devised, under which the great bulk of the estates in england are now held. this system favoured the accumulation of lands in a few hands and the aggregation of great estates, and was largely responsible for the disappearance of the small freeholder. in reviewing the progress of agriculture in the seventeenth century, the drainage of the fen country of lincolnshire and the adjoining counties must not be forgotten. it had been for centuries the scene of drainage operations on a more or less extended scale, few of which, however, met with success; but in the seventeenth century the growing value of land caused a serious revival of these efforts. attempts made under elizabeth and james i had only succeeded in rescuing a certain amount of land for pasture,[ ] but in the reign of charles i the scheme of cornelius vermuyden was more successful. his system, however, was defective, and in the reign of charles ii the bedford level was in a lamentable state and in danger of reverting to its primitive condition. many of the works too were destroyed by the 'stiltwalkers', and in maxwell states that out of , acres of fen land in huntingdonshire only , or , were productive[ ]; and in stone tells us that the commons round the isle of axholme were chiefly covered with water.[ ] still to vermuyden and his contemporaries must be assigned the credit of the first comprehensive scheme for rescuing these fertile lands from the waters that covered them. at the commencement of this important century an old calendar of [ ] clearly sets forth the farming work of the year:-- january and february are the best months for ploughing for peas, beans, and oats, and to have peas soon in the year following sow them in the wane of the moon at s. andrewstide before christmas; which may be compared to tusser's advice for february, 'go plow in the stubble, for now is the season for sowing of fitches of beans and of peason.' 'clean grounds of all such rubbish as briars, brambles, blackthorns, and shrubbs' (then more often choking the ground than now), which are to be fagoted as good fuel for baking and brewing. 'do not plough in rainy weather, for it impoverisheth the earth.' march and april. take up colts from grass to be broken. sow beans, peas, and oats. in these months are all grounds where cattle went in the last winter to be furthed (apparently managed) and cleared and the mole-hills scattered, that the fresh spring of grass may grow better. all hedges and ditches to be made betwixt 'severals', evidently enclosures as distinguished from common fields. from march to may summer pastures are to be spared, that they may have time to get head before summer cattle be put in. in the meantime such cattle are to be bestowed in meadows till may day, and after that date such meadows are to be cleansed and spared until the crops of hay be taken off. from now till midsummer sell fat cattle and sheep, and with the money buy lean cattle and sheep. sow barley. may and june. sort all cattle for their summer pasture on may day, viz. draught oxen by themselves, milch cows by themselves, weaning calves, yearlings, two-year-olds, three- and four-year-olds, every sort by themselves, which being divided in pasture fitting for them will make larger and fairer cattle. separate the horses in the same way. wash sheep and shear four or five days after, which done the wool is to be well wound and weighed, and safely laid up in some place where there is not too much air or it will lose weight, nor where it is damp or it will increase too much in weight. cleanse winter corn from thistles and weeds. july and august. first of all comes hay-making. in august wean lambs, and put them in good pasture, and in winter put them in fresh pasture until spring, and then put them with the 'holding' sheep. in these months is corn to be 'shornne or mowen downe' (the writer, it is to be noticed, has no preference for either method); and after the corn is carried put draught horses and oxen into the averish (corn stubble), to ease other pastures; and after them put hogs in. gather crabs in woods and hedgerows for making verjuice. september and october. have all plows and harrows neat and fit for sowing of wheat, rye, mesling (wheat and rye mixed), and vetches.[ ] pick hops. buy store cattle, both steers and heifers, of three or four years old, which being well wintered at grass, or on straw at the barn doors, will be the sooner fed the summer following, and they will sooner feed after straw than grass. from october to may are calves to be reared, because then they be more hardly bred and become the stronger cattle. feed brawns, bacons, lards, and porkets on mast if there is any, if not on corn. 'in these months cleanse poundes or pools, this season being the driest;' an extraordinary assertion, unless the climate has changed, seeing that according to the monthly averages from - , taken at the royal observatory, greenwich, october is the wettest month in the year.[ ] november and december. sort all kinds of sheep until lady day, viz. wethers by themselves, and weaning lambs by themselves; and do not put rams to the ewes before s. lukestide, october , for those lambs fall about march , and if they fall before then the scarcity of grass and the cold will so nip and chill them that they will die or be weaklings. it is good at this time to take draught cattle and horses from grass into the house before any great storms begin. thrash corn now after it hath had a good sweat in the mow, and so dried again, and give the straw to the draught oxen and cattle at the standaxe or at the barn doors for sparing of hay, advice which tusser also gives: 'serve rie straw out first, then wheat straw and peas, then ote straw and barley, then hay if ye please.' footnotes: [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , pp. sq., and gerard, _herbal_ (ed. ), p. . [ ] about , john worlidge wrote to houghton that sheep fatted on clover were not such delicate meat as the heath croppers, and that sheep fatten very well on turnips. houghton, _collection for improvement of husbandry_, iv. . this is said to be the first notice of turnips being given to sheep. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . one of the proofs of the rarity of vegetables among the poorer classes of england, especially in the middle ages, is the fact that rents paid in kind never included them. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] chapple, _review of risdon's survey of devon_ ( ), p. n. _victoria county history: devonshire, agriculture_. [ ] blyth was a great advocate of enclosure. 'live the commoners do indeed', he says, 'very many in a mean, low condition, with hunger and ease. better do these in bridewell. what they get they spend. and can they make even at the year's rent?' [ ] rymer, _foedera_ (orig. ed.), xix. . [ ] _manydown manor rolls_, hampshire record society, p. . [ ] thorold rogers, _work and wages_, p. . [ ] houghton, _collections, &c._, ii. . [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, v. p. vii. cf. p. infra. [ ] cullum, _hawsted_, pp. et seq. in the hawsted leases, at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, it is noteworthy that there were, at a time of repeated complaints against laying down land to pasture, clauses against breaking up pasture land. [ ] in there were complaints of a fall in rents. [ ] _manydown manor rolls_, hampshire record society, pp. et seq. [ ] rawl. a. , no. . [ ] mcpherson, _annals of commerce_, ii. . [ ] ibid. ii. . [ ] ibid. iii. . the rental of the lands in england in was estimated by davenant at £ , , , in at £ , , ; and in by phillips at £ , , . ibid. iii. . in , caird estimated it at £ , , . [ ] with what horror would those legislators have contemplated england's position to-day, when a temporary loss of the command of the sea would probably ruin the country. [ ] jac. , c. . [ ] _transactions of the royal historical society_ (new series), xix. . [ ] _transactions of the royal historical society_ (new series), xix. . [ ] ibid. . [ ] see article in _transactions of the royal historical society_ (new series), xix. [ ] macaulay, _history of england_, ch. iii. [ ] _quarterly journal of economics_, xvii. . considering that the legislature of the sixteenth century was against enclosure and depopulation, it is hard to understand eliz., c. , which forbade cottages to be erected unless acres of land were attached thereto, in order to avoid the great inconvenience caused by the 'buyldinge of great nombers and multitude of cottages, which are daylie more and more increased in many partes of this realme'. how was it that cottages had increased so much in rural districts, which are of course alluded to, in spite of enclosure? [ ] harwood, _erdeswick_. [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. . [ ] _general view of hunts._, p. . [ ] _general view of lincoln_, p. . [ ] _farming calendar_, from an original ms., printed in _archaeologia_, xiii. et seq. [ ] cf. tusser: 'october for wheat-sowing calleth as fast'; and 'when wheat upon eddish (stubble), ye mind to bestowe let that be the first of the wheat ye do sowe'; and 'who soweth in raine, he shall reap it with tears'. [ ] the writer of the diary probably meant this work should be done in september. chapter xii the great agricultural writers of the seventeenth century.--fruit growing. a seventeenth-century orchard the seventeenth century is distinguished by a number of agricultural writers whose works, as they afford the best account of the farming of the time, we may be pardoned for freely quoting. the best known of them were, sir john norden, gervase markham, sir richard weston, blythe, hartlib, sir hugh plat, john evelyn, john worlidge, and houghton. sir john norden printed his _surveyor's dialogue_ in , which is in the form of a conversation between a farmer and a surveyor, the former at the outset telling the latter that men of his profession were then very unpopular because 'you pry into men's titles and estates, and oftentimes you are the cause that men lose their land, and customs are altered, broken, and sometimes perverted by your means. and above all, you look into the values of men's lands, wherefore the lords of manors do reckon their tenants to a higher rent, and therefore not only i but many poore tenants have good cause to speak against the profession'.[ ] the surveyor attributes the increase in prices to farmers outbidding one another for farms, for the rents of farms and prices grow together; a statement which seems to have been quite true and disposes of the assertion that the landlords raised the rents unfairly, for they were quite entitled to what rent they could get in the open market, the farmers being presumably wise enough not to offer rents which would preclude a profit. he further blames the farmer of his day for being discontented with his lot: in former times 'farmers and their wives were content with mean dyet and base attire and held their children to some austere government, without haunting alehouses, taverns, dice, and cards; now the husbandman will be equal to the yeoman, the yeoman to the gentleman, the gentleman to the squire, and there is at this day thirty times as much vainely spent in a family of like multitude and quality as was in former ages'; a complaint that has been common in all ages. contrary to what is the practice to-day, and apparently to common sense, the surveyor recommends that open drains be made as narrow above as at the bottom, at the most not more than a foot and a half broad.[ ] hops, he says, were then grown in suffolk, essex, and surrey, 'in your loose and spongie grounds, trenched.' 'carret' roots were raised in suffolk and essex, and beginning to increase in all parts of the realm[ ]; but if he alludes to their cultivation in the open field the statement must be taken with considerable qualification, as they were not so grown generally until the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the next. kent was then, as now, the great fruit county of england; 'above all others i think the kentishmen be most apt and industrious in planting orchards with pippins and cherries, especially near the thames about feversham and sittingbourne.' but devon and hereford were also famous; westcote about says the devonshire men had of late much enlarged their orchards, and 'are very curious in planting and grafting all kinds of fruit'[ ]; and john beale in tells us hereford 'is reputed the orchard of england'[ ]; while hartlib says there were many orchards in worcestershire and gloucestershire.[ ] he calls 'tandeane' near taunton the paradise of england, where the husbandry was excellent, the land fruitful by nature and improved by the art and industry of the farmers; 'they take extraordinary pains in soyling, ploughing, and dressing their lands, and after the plow there goeth some three or four with mattocks to break the clods and to draw up the earth out of the furrows that the lands may lye round, and that the water annoy not the seed (the water evidently often lying long in the furrows between the great high ridges), and to that end they most carefully cut gutters and trenches in all places. and for the better enriching of their ploughing lands they cut up, cast, and carry in the unplowed headlands and places of no use. their hearts, hands, eyes, and all their powers concurre in one to force the earth to yield her utmost fruit; and the crops of wheat that rewarded this industry were sometimes and quarters to an acre. a short pamphlet called the _fruiterer's secrets_, published in london in , imparts some interesting and curious information about fruit growing.[ ] there were then four sorts of cherries in england, flemish,[ ] english, gascoyne, and black, and the preserving of them from birds, always a burden on the grower, the author says can be done by a gun or a sling; the worst enemies being jays and bullfinches, who ate stones and all. stone fruit should be gathered in dry weather, and after the dew is off, for if gathered wet it loses colour and becomes mildewed. if nettles newly gathered are laid at the bottom of the basket and on the top of the fruit, they will hasten the ripening of fruit picked unripe, and make it keep its colour. those english farmers who still shake their apples from the trees to fall and be bruised on the ground had better listen to the careful directions for placing the ladder on the trees where it will do no damage, as to the use of the gathering hook so that the branches can be brought within easy reach of the picker on his ladder, the wearing of a gathering apron, and the emptying of it gently into the baskets. green fern has the same effect on pears packed for carriage as nettles on stone fruit; while apples should be packed in wheat, or better still in rye straw. for long journeys the american system of packing in barrels is anticipated, the apples being carefully put in by hand, and the barrels lined at both ends with straw, but not at the sides to avoid heating, while holes should be bored at either end to prevent heat. pippins, john apples, pearmains, and other 'keepers' need not be turned until the week before christmas, and again at the end of march, when they must be turned oftener; but never touch fruit during a frost or a thaw, or in rainy weather, or it will turn black. hartlib, a few years after, reckoned no less than sorts of apples in england, though doubtless many of these were identical, since the same apple often has two or three names in one parish. the best for the table were the jennetings, harvey apple, golden pippin, summer and winter pearmains, john apple, &c.; for cider the red streak (the great favourite), jennet moyle, eliot, stocking apple, &c. he was told that in herefordshire a tenant bought the farm he rented with the fruit crop of one year; £ to £ having been given per acre for cherries and more for apples and pears. pears for the table were the windsor, 'burgamet,' 'boon christians'! greenfield, and others; and for perry, which john beale, a well-known writer of the day considered 'a weak drink, fit for our hindes and generally refused by our gentry as breeding wind in the stomack', the horse pear, bosbury, choak, &c.[ ] there were many kinds of plums, among them the mistle plum, damazene, violet, and premorden. four kinds of grafting were practised: in the cleft, and in the bark, the two most usual ways; shoulder or whip grafting, and grafting by approach,[ ] the last 'where the stock you intend to graft on and the tree from which you take your graft stand so near together that they may be joined, then take the sprig you intend to graft and pare away about three inches in length of the rind and wood near unto the very pith, and cut also the stock on which you intend to graft the same after the same manner that they may evenly join each other, and so bind them and cover them with clay or wax.' inoculation was also practised, 'when the sap is at the fullest in the summer, the buds you intend to inoculate being not too young but sufficiently grown.' for transplanting the middle of october is recommended, and the wise advice added, 'plant not too deep,' and in clay plant as near the surface as possible, for the roots will seek their way downward but rarely upward; and in transplanting 'you may prune the branches as well as the roots of apples and pears, but not of plums.' the best distance apart in an orchard for apples and pears was considered to be from to feet, the further apart the more they benefit from the sun and air, a piece of advice which many a subsequent planter has neglected. for cherries and plums to feet was thought right. worlidge's directions for pruning are minute and careful, and should be well hammered into many slovenly farmers to-day. cider-making was performed much as it is in old-fashioned farms to-day, by mashing the apples in a trough by means of a millstone set edgeways, and then pressing the juice out through hair mats, the juice, says hartlib, 'having been let stand a day or two and the black scum that ariseth in that time taken off they tunne it, and in the barrels it continueth to work some days longer, just as beer useth to do.[ ] another method was to put the fruit in a clean vessel or trough, and bruise or crush it with beetles, then put the crushed fruit in a bag of hair-cloth and press it.[ ] after the cider was in the barrels there was placed in them a linen bag containing cloves, mace, cinnamon, ginger, and lemon peel which was said to make the cider taste as pleasantly as rhenish wine. worlidge gives us what is perhaps the first mention of a poultry farm, and strangely enough it seems to have paid. 'i have been credibly informed that a good farm hath been wholly stocked with poultry, spending the whole crop upon them and keeping severall to attend them, and that it hath redounded to a very considerable improvement'.[ ] incubators of a very rude sort were used, three or four dozen eggs being placed in a 'lamp furnace made of a few boards', and hatched by the heat of a lamp or candle. it must strike the reader that the accusation levelled against the english farmer, of having made little progress in his art from the middle ages to the commencement of the reign of george iii is hardly warranted. their knowledge and skill in their business were evidently such as to make considerable progress inevitable, and then as now they were in some cases assisted by their landlords, as in herefordshire, where lord scudamore, after the assassination of his friend the duke of buckingham, devoted his energies to the culture of fruit, and with other public-spirited gentlemen turned that county into 'one entire orchard', besides improving the pastures and woods[ ]; though hartlib laments that gentlemen try so few experiments for the advancement of agriculture, and that both landowners and farmers instead of communicating their knowledge to each other kept it jealously to themselves.[ ] the chief hindrance to landlord and tenant was that the heavy hand of ancient custom lay upon them, with its antiquated communistic system of farming, which still in the greater part of the land of england utterly prevented good husbandry and stifled individual effort. it was one of these herefordshire gentlemen. rowland vaughan, who in wrote what is probably the first account of irrigation in england, though the art was mentioned by fitzherbert and must have been known in devon and hampshire long before his time; indeed, it is another instance of the then isolation of country districts that he speaks as if he had made a new discovery. he tells us that 'having sojourned two years in his father's house, wearied in doing nothing and fearing his fortunes had been overthrown, he cast about what was best to be done to retrieve his reputation'. and one day he saw from a mole-hill on the side of a brook on his property a little stream of water issuing down the working of the mole, which made the ground 'pleasing green', and from this he was led on to what he calls 'the drowning of his lands'. this was so successful that he improved the value of his estate from £ to £ a year, and his neighbours, who of course had first scoffed at him, came to learn from him. not many years after 'drowning' was said to have become one of the most universal and advantageous improvements in england.[ ] vaughan says that he had counted as many as persons gleaning in one field after harvest, and that in the mountains near eggs were a penny, and a good bullock s. d., but this was a backward region.[ ] between and the price of wheat fell from s. d. to s. a quarter, and immediately affected the payment of rent.[ ] mr. john chamberlain, in february, , wrote to sir dudley carleton, 'we are here in a strange state to complain of plenty, but so it is that corn beareth so low a price that farmers are very backward to pay their rents and in many places plead disability: for remedy whereof the council have written letters into every shire to provide a granary with a stock to buy corn and keep it for a dear year.' sir symonds d'ewes notes in his diary that 'at this time ( ) the rates of all sorts of corn were so extremely low as it made the very prices of land fall from twenty years' purchase to sixteen or seventeen. for the best wheat was sold for s. d. and s. d. the bushel, the ordinary at s. barley and rye at s. d. and s. d. the bushel, and the worser of those grains at a meaner rate, the poorer sort that would have been glad but a few years before of coarse rye bread, did now usually traverse the markets to find out the finer wheats as if nothing else would please their palates'. instead of being glad that they were for once having a small share of the good things of this world, he rejoices that their unthankfulness and daintiness was soon punished by high prices and dearness of all sorts of grain.[ ] the year was the commencement of a series of dear seasons, when for nine consecutive years the price of wheat did not fall below s. a quarter and actually touched s. the restraints laid on corn-dealers had, since the principles of commerce were being better understood, been modified in , but the high prices revived the old hatred against them, and we find sir john wingfield writing from rutland that he has 'taken order that ingrossers of corne shall be carefullie seen unto and that there is no badger (corn-dealer) licensed to carry corne out of this countrye nor any starch made of any kind of graine'. he adds that he had 'refrayned the maulsters from excessive making of mault, and had suppressed alehouses'.[ ] however, the senseless policy of preventing trade in corn received a severe blow from the statute car. ii, c. , which enacted that when corn was under s. persons were to be allowed to buy and store corn and sell the same again without penalty, provided they did not sell it in the same market within three months of buying it, a statute which adam smith said contributed more to the progress of agriculture than any previous law in the statute book. gervase markham, who was born about and died in , gives us a description of the day's work of the english farmer. he is to rise at four in the morning, feed his cattle and clean his stable. while they are feeding he is to get his harness ready, which will take him two hours. then he is to have his breakfast, for which half an hour is allowed. getting the harness on his horses or cattle, he is to start by seven to his work and keep at it till between two and three in the afternoon. then he shall bring his team home, clean them and give them their food, dine himself, and at four go back to his cattle and give them more fodder, and getting into his barn make ready their food for next day, not forgetting to see them again before going to his own supper at six. after supper he is to mend shoes by the fireside for himself and his family, or beat and knock hemp and flax, or pitch and stamp apples or crabs for cider or verjuice, or else grind malt, pick candle-rushes, or 'do some husbandry office within doors till it befall eight o'clock'. then he shall take his lantern, visit his cattle once more, and go with all his household to rest. the farm roller of this time, according to markham, was made of a round piece of wood inches in circumference, feet long, having at each end a strong pin of iron to which shafts were made fast.[ ] he mentions wooden and iron harrows, but this refers only to the tines, the wooden ones being made of ash. from an illustration of a harrow which he gives, it appears it was much like fitzherbert's and many used to-day: a wooden frame, with the teeth set perhaps more closely than ours; the single harrow feet square drawn by one horse, the double harrow feet square by two oxen at least. wheat he says, when the land is dug inches deep, and the seed dibbled in, will produce twelve times as much as when ploughed; but he admits the 'intricacy and trouble' of this method.[ ] as to the question of mowing or reaping corn, he is of opinion that though 'it is a custom in many countries of this kingdom not to sheare the wheat but to mow it, in my conceit it is not so good, for it both maketh the wheate foule and full of weede'. barley, however, should be mown close to the ground, though many reap it; oats too were to be mown. his directions for planting an orchard[ ] are interesting, both as showing the kinds of fruit then grown, the number of different sorts planted together, and the growth of the olive in england.[ ] the orchard, he says, should be a square, divided into four quarters by alleys, and in the first quarter should be apples of all sorts, in the second pears and wardens of all sorts, in the third quinces and chestnuts, in the fourth medlars and services. a wall is the best fence, and on the north wall, 'against which the sunne reflects, you shall plant the abricot, verdochio, peache, and damaske plumbe; against the east side the white muskadine grape, the pescod plumbe, and the emperiale plumbe; against the west, the grafted cherries and the olive tree; and against the south side the almond and the figge tree.' as if this extraordinary mixture were not enough, 'round about the skirts of the alleys' were to be planted plums, damsons, cherries, filberts and nuts of all sorts, and the 'horse clog' and 'bulleye', the two latter being inferior wild plums. plums were to be feet apart, apples and other large fruit feet. young trees should be watered morning and evening in dry summers, and old ones should have the earth dug away from the upper part of the roots from november to march, then the earth, mixed with dung or soap ashes, replaced. moss was carefully to be scraped off the trees with the back of an old knife, and, to prevent it, the trees manured with swine's dung. minute distinctions are given as to pruning and washing the trees with strong brine of water and salt, either with a garden pump placed in a tub or with 'squirtes which have many hoales', the forerunner of modern spraying. cider was then mostly made in the west, as in devonshire and cornwall, and perry in worcestershire and gloucestershire; but he leaves out herefordshire, where it was certainly made at this time.[ ] a curious help to fattening beasts, says markham, is a lean horse or two kept with them, for the beasts delight to feed with them. fattening cattle were to have first bite at the pastures, then draught cattle, and then sheep; after midsummer, when there is an extraordinary sweetness in the grass, suffer the cattle to eat the grass closer till lammas (august ). though some do not hold with him, he thinks reading and writing not unprofitable to a husbandman, but not much material 'to his bailiff'; for there is more trust in an honest score chalked on a trencher than 'in a commen writen scrowle'. landowners derived a good income from their woods and coppices. an acre of underwood of twenty-one years' growth, was at this time worth from £ to £ ; of twelve years' growth, £ to £ ; but on many of the best lands it was only cut every thirty years.[ ] in - oak timber was worth from d. to d. per cubic foot and ash about d. during the napoleonic war oak sold for s. d. a foot. in blyth's _improver improved_ we have one of the first accounts of covered drains. the draining trench was to be made deep enough to go the bottom of the 'cold spewing moist water' that feeds the flags and the rushes; as for the width 'use thine own liberty' but be sure make it as straight as possible. the bottom was to be filled in with faggots or stones to a depth of inches, a method in some parts retained till comparatively modern times, with the top turf laid upon them grass downward, and the drain filled in with the earth dug out of it. a country gentleman at this date could keep up a good establishment on an income which to-day would compel him to live economically in a cottage. from the accounts of mr. master, a landowner near chiselhurst, it appears that a man with an income of £ or £ a year could live in some luxury, keep a stud of horses, and a considerable number of servants.[ ] some of them had no scruples about adding to their incomes by turning corn-dealers, even selling such small quantities as pecks of peas, bushels of rye, and half pecks of oatmeal. from the accounts of one of them, henry best,[ ] of elmswell, we learn many valuable details concerning farming in yorkshire about . it was the custom to put the ram to the ewes about october , but best did so about michaelmas, and generally used one ram to or ewes, and he considered it necessary that the ewes should be two-shear. 'good handsome ewes', he says, could have been bought at kilham fair for s. d. each, a price far below the average of the time. as for wages, mowers of grass had d. a day, and found their own food and their scythes, which cost them about s. d. each. haymakers got d. a day, and had to 'meat themselves' and find their own forks and rakes. shearers or reapers were paid from d. to d., and found their own sickles; binders and stackers, d.; mowers of 'haver', or oats, d., a good mower cutting acres a day. in he sold oats for s. a quarter, best barley for s., rye s. d., wheat s.[ ] the roads were dreadful, and produce nearly all sent to market on pack-horses. 'wee seldome send fewer than horse loads to the market at a time, and with them two men, for one man cannot guide the poakes (sacks) of above four horses. when wee sende oats to the market wee sack them up in bushel poakes and lay bushels on a horse; when wee sende wheate, rye, or masseldene (rye and wheat) and barley to market wee put it into mette poakes ( bushel sacks), sometimes into half quarter sacks, and these we lay on horses that are short coupled and well backed.' when the servants got to market they were charged a halfpenny a horse for stabling and hay, but if they dined at the inn they paid nothing for their horses, and their dinners cost them d. a head. butter was sold by the lb., or the 'cake' of lb., and in the beginning of lent was d. a lb., by april , d., in the middle of may, - / d. when william pinder took acres of land 'of my lord haye' he paid a fine of £ and a rent of £ ; but this must have been an extremely choice piece of land, for arable land rented apparently at less than s. an acre.[ ] the rent of a cottage was usually s. a year, 'though they have not so much as a yard or any backe side belonging to them.' there is more evidence, if such were needed, of the beneficial effect of enclosure, which was said to treble the value of pasture. good meadow land fetched a great price: 'the medow sykes is about acres of grounde, and was letten in the year at £ per annum, and in at £ s. d. the requirements of a foreman on a farm were that he could sow, mow, stack peas, go well with horses, and be accustomed to marketing; and for this when hired by the year he received marks, and perhaps half a crown as earnest money. the next man got s., the next s. d., the fourth s. 'christopher pearson had the first year he dwelt here £ s. d. wages per annum and s. to a god's penny (earnest money); next year he had £ wages, and he was both a good seedsman,' before the invention of drills a very valuable qualification, 'and did sow all our seed both the years. when you are about to hire a servant you are to call them aside and talk privately with them concerning their wage, and if the servants stand in the churchyard they usually call them aside and walk to the back side of the church and there treat of their wage. i heard a servant asked what he could do, who made this answer: "i can sowe, i can mowe, and i can stacke; and i can doe my master too when my master turns his backe".' if we are to judge by the food provided for the thatchers, who were little better than ordinary labourers, the yorkshire farm-hand fared well on plenty of simple food, his three meals a day consisting of butter, milk, cheese, and either eggs, pies, or bacon, sometimes porridge instead of milk. probably, however, few country gentlemen were such industrious farmers as best; many of them passed their days mostly in hunting and fowling and their evenings in drinking, though we know too that there were exceptions who did not care for this rude existence. deer hunting, and we must add deer poaching, was the great sport of the wealthy, but the smaller gentry had to be content with simpler forms of the chase. for fox hunting each squire had his own little pack, and hunted only over his own estate and those of his friends. he had also the otter, the badger, and the hare to amuse him. fowling was conducted, as in the middle ages, by hawk or net, for the shot gun had not yet come into use, and was forbidden by an old law.[ ] the partridge and pheasant, as now, were the chief game birds. after the restoration the country gentlemen seem to have been infected by the dissipation of the court, and farming was left to the tenant farmer and yeoman: 'our gentry', says pepys, 'have grown ignorant of everything in good husbandry.' the middle of the seventeenth century was the golden age of the yeoman who owned and farmed his land; even at the end of the stuart period, when their decline had already begun, gregory king estimated their numbers at , families, or about one-seventh of the population. the class included all those between the man who owned freehold land worth s. a year and the wealthier yeoman who was hardly distinguishable from the small gentleman. owning their own land they were a sturdy and independent class, and they 'took a jolly pride in voting as in fighting on the opposite side of the neighbouring squire'. 'the yeomanry', wrote fuller, 'is an estate of people almost peculiar to england;' he 'wears russet clothes but makes golden payment, having tin in his buttons and silver in his pocket he seldom goes abroad, and his credit stretches farther than his travel.' the tenant farmers were nearly as numerous, king estimating them at , families; economically they were about on a level with the yeoman, their social standing, however, was considerably inferior. the greatest improvement of the seventeenth century, the introduction from holland of turnips and clover, was over-estimated by its author, sir richard weston; for he tells his sons that by sowing flax, turnips, and clover they might in five years improve acres of poor land so as to bring in £ , a year.[ ] to bring about this desirable consummation, he provides his sons with accounts as to the cost, one of which shows the cost of growing an acre of flax and the profit thereon, though this gentleman's estimates are clearly optimistic: dr. £ s. d. devonshiring, i.e. paring and burning lime ploughing and harrowing bushels of seed weeding pulling and binding grassing the seed from the flax watering, drying, swinging, and beating ---------- £ ========== cr. £ s. d. lb. of flax ----------- balance profit £ =========== turnips were to come after flax, and were to be given to the cows as they did in flanders; that is, wash them clean, put them in a trough where they were to be stamped together with a spitter or small spade; and the turnips were to be followed by clover. all these, says weston, were already grown in england, but 'there is as much difference between what groweth here and there as is between the same thing which groweth in a garden and that which groweth wild in the fields'. worlidge soon after recommended that clover be sown on barley or oats about the end of march or in april, and harrowed in, or by itself; and says, with optimism equal to weston's, one acre of clover will feed you as many cows as acres of ordinary grass and make the milk richer.[ ] it has been noticed that the price of wool altered little during the century, and from the private accounts of sir abel barker[ ] of hambleton, in the county of rutland, we learn that in he sold his wool to his 'loving friend mr. william gladstone' for £ a tod, though by it had gone up to s., a good price for those days. during the civil war some of barker's horses were carried off for the service of the state, and he values them at £ a piece, a fair price then. some years later, for mowing acres of grass he sets down in his account £ s. d., for making the same £ s. d., and stacking it s. simon hartlib, a dutchman by birth and a friend of john milton, published his _legacy_ in , containing both rash statements and useful information. we certainly cannot believe him when he states that pasture employs more hands than tillage. his estimate of a good crop of wheat was from to bushels per acre, and he speaks strongly of the great fluctuations in prices, for he had known barley sell at northampton at d. a bushel, and within months at s., and wheat in london in one year varied from s. d. to s. a bushel. the enormous number of dovecotes was still a great nuisance, and the pigeons were reckoned to eat , , quarters of grain annually. hartlib recommends his countrymen to sow 'a seed commonly called saint foine, which in england is as much as to say holy hay,' as they do in france: especially on barren lands, advice which some of them followed, and in wilts., soon after, sainfoin is said to have so improved poor land that from a noble ( s. d.) per acre, the rent had increased to s.[ ] they were also to use 'another sort of fodder which they call la lucern at paris for dry and barren grounds'. so wasteful were they of labour in some parts that in kent were to be seen horses and oxen drawing one plough.[ ] the use of the spade was long looked askance at by english husbandmen; old men in surrey had told hartlib that they knew the first gardeners that came into those parts to plant cabbages and 'colleflowers', and to sow turnips, carrots, and parsnips, and that they gave £ an acre for their land. the latter statement must be an exaggeration, as it is equivalent to a rent of about £ in our money; but we may give some credence to him when he says that the owner was anxious lest the spade should spoil his ground, 'so ignorant were we of gardening in those days.' though it was not the case in elizabeth's time, by now the licorice, saffron, cherries, apples, pears, hops, and cabbages of england were the best in the world; but many things were deficient, for instance, many onions came from flanders and spain, madder from zealand, and roses from france.[ ] 'it is a great deficiency in england that we have not more orchards planted. it is true that in kent, and about london, and in gloucestershire, herefordshire, and worcestershire[ ] there are many gallant orchards, but in other country places they are very rare and thin, i know in kent some advance their ground from s. per acre to £ by this means', and acres of cherries near sittingbourne had realized £ , in one year. his recipe for making old fruit trees bear well savours of a time when old women were still burnt as witches. 'first split his root, then apply a compost of pigeon's dung, lees of wine, or stale wine, and a little brimstone'. the tithes of wine in gloucestershire were 'in divers parishes considerably great', and wine was then made in kent and surrey, notably by sir peter ricard, who made or hogsheads yearly.[ ] there is no doubt that the vine has been grown in the open in england from very early times until comparatively recent ones. the britons were taught to plant it by the romans in a.d. .[ ] in domesday there are examples of vineyards, chiefly in the south central counties. neckham, who wrote in the twelfth century, says the vineyard was an important adjunct to the mediaeval mansion.[ ] william of malmesbury praised the vines and wine of gloucestershire; and says that the vine was either allowed to trail on the ground, or trained to small stakes fixed to each plant. indeed, the mention of them in mediaeval chronicles is frequent. two bushels of green grapes in fetched s. d.[ ] richard ii planted vines in great plenty, according to stow, within the upper park of windsor, and sold some part to his people. the wine made in england was sweetened with honey, and probably flavoured and coloured with blackberries.[ ] at the dissolution of the monasteries there was a vineyard at barking nunnery. 'we might have a reasonable good wine growing in many places of this realme', says barnaby googe, about , 'as doubtless we had immediately after the conquest, tyll, partly by slothfulnesse, partly by civil discord long continued, it was left, and so with time lost.... there is besides nottingham an ancient house called chylwel in which remaineth yet as an ancient monument in a great wyndowe of glasse, the whole order of planting, proyning, stamping, and pressing of vines. upon many cliffes and hills are yet to be seen the rootes and old remaines of vines.' plot, in his _natural history of staffordshire_,[ ] says 'the vine has been improved by sir henry lyttelton at over (upper) arley, which is situate low and warm, so that he has made wine there undistinguishable from the best french by the most judicious palates, but this i suppose was done only in some over hot summer, and dr. bathurst made very good claret at oxon in , a very mean year for the purpose.' in the famous vineyard at bath of acres, planted with the 'white muscadene' and the 'black chester grape,' produced hogsheads of wine worth £ a hogshead, but in unfavourable years grew very little.'[ ] mr. peter collinson, writing from middlesex in , says, 'the vineyards turn to good profit, much wine being made this year in england;' and again in , 'my vineyards are very ripe; a considerable quantity of wine will this year be made in england.'[ ] however, the attempt made to grow vines on the undercliff at ventnor at the end of the eighteenth century by sir richard worsley ended in dismal failure, and it is probable that the english climate in its normal years seldom produced good grapes out of doors whatever it may have done in exceptionally hot ones, unless we assume that it has changed considerably, for which there is little ground. hartlib was no friend of commons; they made the poor idle and trained them for the gallows or beggary, and there were fewest poor where there were fewest commons,[ ] as in kent--a statement re-echoed by many observant writers; he also recommends enclosures, because they gave warmth and consequent fertility to the soil. he tells us that an effort had been made by james i to encourage the growth of mulberry trees and the breeding of silkworms, the lords-lieutenant of the different counties being urged to see to it, but it had little effect.[ ] the number of different sorts of wheat was by this time considerable. hartlib gives the white, red, bearded ('which is not subject to mildews as others'); some sorts with two rows, others with four and six; some with one ear on a stalk, others with two; the red stalk wheat of bucks; winter wheat and summer wheat. there were also twenty varieties of peas that he knew, and the white, black, naked. scotch, and poland oats. markham adds the whole straw wheat, the great brown pollard, the white pollard, the organ, the flaxen, and the chilter wheat. there was a sad lack of enterprise in the breeding of stock now and for many generations before; indeed, it may be doubted if this important branch of farming, except perhaps in the case of sheep, was much attended to until the time of bakewell and the collings. in elizabeth's time a frenchman had twitted england with having only , or , horses worth anything, which was one of the reasons that induced the spaniards to invade us.[ ] 'we are negligent, too, in our kine, that we advance not the best species.' the size of cattle at this date, however, seems to have been greater than is often stated. the report of the select committee on the cultivation of waste lands in , states that the average weight, dressed, of cattle at smithfield in was only lb.,[ ] yet the household book of prince henry at the commencement of the seventeenth century says that an ox should weigh lb. the four quarters, and cost about £ s., a sheep about lb., so that the latter were apparently relatively smaller than the oxen. in oxen were sold at tostock in suffolk weighing , lb. apiece, dead weight.[ ] according to the records of winchester college, the oxen sold there in the middle of the century averaged, dressed, about lb.; in , oxen sold there averaged lb. 'some kine,' it was said at the end of the century, 'have grown to be very bulky and a great many are sold for £ or £ apiece; there was lately sold near bury a beast for £ , and 'twas fatted with cabbage leaves. an ox near ripon weighed, dressed, - / cwt.'[ ] they were, of course, chiefly valued as beasts of draught, and no doubt the one evelyn saw in , 'bred in kent, foot in length, and much higher than i could reach,' was a powerful animal for this purpose. the young ones were taught to draw by yoking two of them, together with two old ones before and two behind, with a man on each side the young ones, 'to keep them in order and speak them fair,' for if much beaten they seldom did well: for the first two or three days they were worked only three or four hours a day, but soon they worked as long as the older ones, that is from to , then a bait of hay and rest till , with work again till , at least in lancashire. they were kept in the yoke till nine or ten years old, then turned on to the best grass in may, and sold to the butcher.[ ] footnotes: [ ] _surveyor's dialogue_ (ed. ), p. . [ ] _surveyor's dialogue_, p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] _victoria county history: devon, agriculture_. [ ] _herefordshire orchards a pattern for all england_ (ed. ). [ ] see infra, p. . [ ] these extracts are from the original edition in the bodleian library. [ ] 'the flanders cherry excels', says worlidge, _syst. agr._, p. . [ ] bradley, in , gives a long list of pears all with french names, hardly any of which are now known in england. [ ] worlidge, _systema agriculturae_, p. . [ ] _annotation upon the legacie of husbandry_, , p. . [ ] markham, i. (ed. ). [ ] _systema agriculturae_, p. . [ ] evelyn, _pomona_ (ed. ), p. . [ ] _compleat husbandman_ (ed. ), p. . [ ] _most approved and long experienced waterworks_. london, . [ ] see worlidge, _systema agriculturae_ (ed. ), p. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, i. . [ ] _life of sir s. d'ewes_, i. . [ ] _calendar of state papers, domestic_, - , p. . [ ] _whole art of husbandry_ (ed. ), i. . [ ] ibid. i. . [ ] ibid. i. . [ ] an astonishing statement; cf. denton, _england in the fifteenth century_, p. , neckham, _de natura rerum_, cap. clxvi. and above, p. . [ ] _whole art of husbandry_ (ed. ), i. . [ ] _whole art of husbandry_ (ed. ), ii. . and ms. accounts of mr. chevallier of aspall hall, suffolk. [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, v. . [ ] _farming and account books of henry best of elmswell_, , surtees society, xxxiii. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] _farming and account books of henry best of elmswell_, . surtees society, xxxiii. . many districts in the north of england were still much behind the rest of the country. [ ] trevelyan, _england under the stuarts_, sq. though, as we have seen, p. , the writer of the _fruiterer's secrets_ recommends the gun for scaring birds in . [ ] _the husbandry of brabant and flanders_ (ed. ), p. . [ ] _systema agriculturae_, p. . [ ] ms. accounts of sir abel barker, in the possession of g.w.p. conant, esq. [ ] worlidge, _systema agriculturae_, p. . [ ] _compleat husbandman_ ( ), p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] cf. supra, p. . [ ] _compleat husbandman_ ( ), p. . [ ] _archaeologia_, i. ; iii. . [ ] _de natura rerum_, rolls ser., lxi. [ ] denton, _england in the fifteenth century_, n. [ ] ibid. [ ] ed. , p. . [ ] r. bradley, _a general treatise of husbandry_ (ed. ), ii. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_ i. . brandy was made in the eighteenth century from grapes grown in the beaulieu vineyards in hampshire, and a bottle of it long kept at the abbey.--_hampshire notes and queries_, vi. . there are two vineyards to-day, of - / and acres respectively, on the estates of the marquis of bute in glamorganshire; but a vintage is only obtained once in four or five years from them, and they are not profitable. [ ] _compleat husbandman_, , p, . [ ] _compleat husbandman_, , p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] in this apparently repeating davenant's statement. see mcculloch, _commercial dictionary_, , p. . [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, v. . [ ] houghton, _collections for improvement of husbandry_, i. . [ ] ibid., _collections for husbandry and trade_ (ed. ), iv. . chapter xiii the evils of common fields.--hops.--implements.--manures.--gregory king--corn laws from what has been said in the preceding pages, it will be gathered that a vast amount of compassion has been wasted on the enclosure of commons, for it is abundantly evident from contemporary writers that there were a large number of people dragging out a miserable existence on them, by living on the produce of a cow or two, or some sheep and a few poultry, with what game they could sometimes catch, and refusing regular work. dymock, hartlib's contemporary, questions 'whether commons do not rather make poore by causing idlenesse than maintaine them;' and he also asks how it is that there are fewest poor where there are fewest commons. in the common fields, too, there was continual strife and contention caused by the infinite number of trespasses that they were subject to.[ ] the absence of hedges, too, in these great open fields was bad for the crops, for there was nothing to mitigate drying and scorching winds, while in the open waste and meadows the live stock must have sadly needed shelter and shade, 'losing more flesh in one hot day than they gained in three cool days.' worlidge, a hampshire man, joins in the chorus of praise of enclosures, for they brought employment to the poor, and maintained treble 'the number of inhabitants' that the open fields did; and he gives further proof of the enclosure of land in the seventeenth century, when he mentions 'the great quantities of land that have within our memories lain open, and in common of little value, yet when enclosed have proved excellent good land.' why then was this most obvious improvement not more generally effected? because there was a great impediment to it in the numerous interests and diversity of titles and claims to almost every common field and piece of waste land in england, whereby one or more envious or ignorant persons could thwart the will of the majority.[ ] another hindrance, he says, was that many roads passed over the commons and wastes, which a statute was needed to stop. in the seventeenth century hop growing was not nearly so common in england as in the preceding, when harrison had said, in his _description of britain_, 'there are few farmers or occupiers in the country which have not gardens and hops growing of their own, and those far better than do come from flanders.' there seems, indeed, to have been a prejudice against the hop; worlidge[ ] says it was esteemed an unwholesome herb for the use it was usually put to, 'which may also be supplied with several other wholesome and better herbs.' john evelyn was very much against them, probably because he was such an advocate of cider: 'it is little more than an age,' he says, 'since hopps transmuted our wholesome ale into beer, which doubtless much altered our constitutions. that one ingredient, by some not unworthily suspected, preserving drink indeed, and so by custom made agreeable, yet repaying the pleasure with tormenting diseases, and a shorter life, may deservedly abate our fondness for it, especially if with this be considered likewise the casualties in planting it, as seldom succeeding more than once in three years.'[ ] the city of london petitioned against hops as spoiling the taste of drink. yet its cultivation is said to have advanced the price of land to £ , £ , and sometimes £ an acre, the latter an almost incredible price if we consider the value of money then. there were not enough planted to serve the kingdom, and flemish hops had to be imported, though not nearly so good as english. a great deal of dishonesty, moreover, was shown by the foreign importers, so that in a statute ( jac. i, c. ) was passed against the 'false packinge of forreine hops,' by which it appears that the sacks were filled up with leaves, stalks, powder, sand, straw, wood, and even soil, for increasing the weight, by which english growers it is said lost £ , a year. such hops were to be forfeited, and brewers using them were to forfeit their value. the chief cause of their decrease was that few farmers would take the trouble and care required to grow them, in spite of the often excellent prices, which at winchester at this date averaged from s. to s. a cwt., sometimes, however, reaching over s., as in and , though then as now they were subject to great fluctuations, and in were only s. many, too, were discouraged by the fact 'they are the most of any plant that grows subject to the various mutations of the air, mildews sometimes totally destroying them,' no doubt an allusion to the aphis blight. hop yards were often protected at this early date by hedges of tall trees, usually ash or poplar, the elm being disapproved of as contracting mildews. markham[ ] says that hertfordshire then contained as good hops as he had seen anywhere, and there the custom was hills to every rood, 'and every hill will bear - / lb., worth on an average nobles a cwt. (a noble = s. d.);' hills were to be ft. apart at least, poles to ft. long and or inches in circumference at the butt, of ash, oak, beech, alder, maple or willow. some planted the hills in 'plain squares chequerwise, which is the best way if you intend to plough with horses between the hills. others plant them in form of a quincunx, which is better for the hop, and will do very well where your ground is but small that you may overcome it with either the breast plough or spade.' the manure recommended by worlidge was good mould, or dung and earth mixed. the hills were like mole-hills feet high, and sometimes were large enough to have as many as poles, so that some hop yards must have looked very different then from what they do now, even when poles are retained; but from two to five poles per hill was the more usual number. cultivation was much the same as in reynold scott's time, and picking was still done on a 'floor' prepared by levelling the hills, watering, treading, and sweeping the ground, round which the pickers sat and picked into baskets, but the hop crib was also used. it was considered better not to let the hops get too ripe, as the growers were aware of the value of a fresh, green-looking sample; and worlidge advises the careful exclusion of leaves and stalks, though markham does not agree with him. kilns were of two sorts: the english kiln made of wood, lath, and clay; the french of brick, lime, and sand, not so liable to burn as the former and therefore better.[ ] one method of drying was finely to bed the kiln with wheat straw laid on the hair-cloth, the hops being spread inches thick over this, 'and then you shall keepe a fire a little more fervent than for the drying of a kiln full of malt,' the fire not to be of wood, for that made the hops smoky and tasted the beer, but of straw! worlidge, strangely, recommended the bed of the kiln to be covered with tin, as much better than hair-cloth, for then any sort of fuel would do as well as charcoal, since the smoke did not pass through the hops. besides hertfordshire, northamptonshire, oxfordshire, leicestershire, and rutlandshire; lincolnshire and cambridgeshire were recommended by markham for hop growing, the great hop counties of to-day being passed over by him. the growth of hemp and flax had by this time considerably decayed, owing to the want of encouragement to trade in these commodities, the lack of experience in growing them, and the tithes which in some years amounted to more than the profits.[ ] an acre of good flax was worth from £ to £ ; but if 'wrought up fit to sell in the market' from £ to £ . woad was considered a 'very rich commodity', but according to blyth it robbed the land if long continued upon it, although if moderately used it prepared land for corn, drawing a 'different juice from what the corn requires'. it more than doubled the rent of land, and had been sold at from £ to £ a ton, the produce of an acre. john lawrence, who wrote in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, says woad was in his time cultivated by companies of people, men, women, and children, who hired the land, built huts, and grew and prepared the crop for the dyer's use, then moved on to another place.[ ] there were proofs that man's inventive genius was at work among farm implements. worlidge mentions[ ] an engine for setting corn, invented by gabriel plat, made of two boards bored with wide holes in. apart, set in a frame, with a funnel to each hole. it was fitted with iron pins in. long to 'play up and down', and dibble holes into which the corn was to go from the funnels. this machine was so intricate and clumsy that worlidge found no use for it. however, he recommends another instrument which certainly seems to anticipate tull's drill, though tull is said to have stated when bradley showed him a cut of it that it was only a proposal and it never got farther than the cut.[ ] it consisted of a frame of small square pieces of timber inches thick; the breadth of the frame feet, the height inches, length feet, placed on four good-sized wheels. in the middle of the frame a coulter was fixed to make a furrow for the corn, which fell through a wooden pipe behind, that dropped the corn out of a hopper containing about a bushel, the fall of the corn from the hopper being regulated by a wooden wheel in its neck. the same frame might contain two coulters, pipes, and hoppers, and the instrument could be worked with one horse and one man. it was considered a great advance on sowing broadcast, and by the use of it 'you may also cover your grain with any rich compost you shall prepare for that purpose, either with pigeon dung, dry or granulated, or any other saline or lixirial (alkaline, or of potash) substance, which may drop after the corn from another hopper behind the one that drops the corn, or from a separate drill'. the corn thus sown in rows was found easier to weed and hoe, so that it is clear that this advantage was well understood before tull's time. there was a great diversity of ploughs at this date, almost every county having some variation.[ ] the principal sorts were the double-wheel plough, useful upon hard land, usually drawn with horses or oxen two abreast, the wheels in. to in. high. the one-wheel plough, which could be used on almost any sort of land; it was very 'light and nimble', so that it could be drawn by one horse and held by one man, and thus ploughed an acre a day. then there was a 'plain plough without either wheel or foot', very easy to work and fit for any lands; a double plough worked by four horses and two men, of two kinds, one ploughing a double furrow, the other a double depth. there were also ploughs with a harrow attached, others constructed to plough, sow, and harrow, but not of much value; and a turfing plough for burning sod. carts and waggons were of many sorts, according to the locality, the greater wheels of the waggon being usually feet in circumference the lesser feet. a useful implement was the trenching plough used on grass land to cut out the sides of trenches or drains, with a long handle and beam and with a coulter or knife fixed in it and sometimes a wheel or wheels. the following is a list of other implements then considered necessary for a farm. _for the field._ harrows mole spear beetles forks mole traps roller sickles weedhooks cradle scythe reaphooks pitchforks seedlip[ ] sledds rakes _for the barn and stable._ flails pannels (pillions) pails winnowing fan pack-saddles mane combs sieves cart lines goads sacks ladders yokes bins corn measures wanteyes[ ] curry combs brooms suffingles (surcingles?) whips skeps (baskets) screens for corn. harness _for the meadows and pastures._ scythes pitchforks cutting spade for hayrick rakes fetters and clogs horse-locks. besides many tools. a considerable variety of manures were in use, chalk, lime, marl, fuller's earth, clay, sand, sea-weed, river-weed, oyster shells, fish, dung, ashes, soot, salt, rags, hair, malt dust, bones, horns, and the bark of trees. of the oyster shells worlidge says, 'i am credibly informed that an ingenious gentleman living near the seaside laid on his lands great quantities, which made his neighbours laugh at him (as usually they do at anything besides their own clownish road or custom of ignorance),' and after a year or two's exposure to the weather 'they exceedingly enriched his land for many years after.' the bones then used were marrow-bones and fish bones, or 'whatever hath any oiliness or fatness in it', but the bones of horses and other animals were also used, burnt before being applied to the land, crushing not being thought of till many years after. in gregory king,[ ] who was much more accurate than most statisticians of his time, gave the following estimate of the land of england and wales:-- acres. per acre. arable , , worth to rent s. d. pasture and meadow , , " " s. d. woods and coppices , , " " s. forests and parks , , " " s. d. barren land , , " " s. houses, gardens, churches, &c. , , water and roads , , ---------- total: , , he valued the live stock of england and wales at £ - / millions, and estimated the produce of the arable land in england at: million value bushels. per bushel. wheat s. d. rye s. d. barley s. d. oats s. d. peas s. d. beans s. d. vetches s. d. the same statistician drew up a scheme of the income and expenditure of the 'several families' in england in , the population being - / millions[ ]:-- no. of families class. income. in class. temporal lords £ , baronets knights , esquires , gentlemen , eminent merchants , lesser merchants , lawyers , eminent clergy , lesser clergy yeoman: , freeholders of the better sort , freeholders of the lesser sort , (tenant) farmers , shopkeepers and tradesmen , artisans , labouring people and outservants , cottagers and paupers he calculated that the freeholder of the better sort saved on an average £ s. d. a year per family of ; and the lesser sort £ s. d. a year with a family of - / . the tenant farmer with a family of , only saved s. a year, while labouring families who, he said, averaged - / (certainly an under estimate), lost annually s., and cottagers and paupers with families of - / (also an under estimate) lost s. d. a year. it will thus be seen that the tenant farmers, labourers, and cottagers, the bulk of those who worked on the land, were very badly off; the tenant farmer saved considerably less than the artisan. it will also be noticed that the rural population of england was about three-quarters of the whole.[ ] the winter of - was marked by one of the severest frosts that have ever visited england. ice on the thames is said to have been eleven inches thick; by jan. there were streets of booths on it; and by the th, the frost continuing more and more severe, all sorts of shops and trades flourished on the river, 'even to a printing press, where the people and ladies took a fancy to have their names printed and the day and year set down when printed on the thames.' coaches plied, there was bull-baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, tippling 'and other lewd places'--a regular carnival on the water.[ ] altogether the frost which began at christmas lasted ninety-one days and did much damage on land, many of the trees were split as if struck by lightning, and men and cattle perished in some parts. poultry and other birds and many plants and vegetables also perished. wheat, however, was little affected, as the average price was under s. a quarter. in a series of very bad seasons commenced, lasting, with a break in , until , always known as the 'ill' or 'barren' seasons, and the cause was the usual one in england, excessive cold and wet. in wheat was over s. a quarter, and in kent turnips were made into bread for the poor.[ ] the difference in the price of farm produce in various localities was striking, and an eloquent testimony to the wretched means of communication. at newark, for instance, in - wheat was from s. to s. a quarter, while at brentford it touched s.; next year in the same two places it was s. and s. respectively. in - hay at newark was s. d. a ton, at northampton it was from s. to s. in was passed the famous statute of parochial settlement, car. ii, c. , which forged cruel fetters for the poor, and is said to have caused the iron of slavery to enter into the soul of the english labourer.[ ] the act states, that the reason for passing it was the continual increase of the poor throughout the kingdom, which had become exceeding burdensome owing to the defects in the law. poor people, moreover, wandered from one parish to another in order 'to settle where there is the best stocke, the largest commons or wastes to build cotages, and the most woods for them to burn and destroy.'[ ] it was therefore determined to stop these wanderings, and most effectually was it done. two justices were empowered to remove any person who settled in any tenement under the yearly value of £ within forty days to the place where he was last legally settled, unless he gave sufficient security for the discharge of the parish in case he became a pauper. it is true that certain relaxations were subsequently made. the act of , w. & m., c. , allowed derivative settlements on payment of taxes for one year, serving an annual office, hiring for a year, and apprenticeship; while the act of , & wm. iii, c. , allowed the grant of a certificate of settlement, under which safeguard the holder could migrate to a district where his labour was required, the new parish being assured he would not become chargeable to it, and therefore not troubling to remove him till there was actual need: but the statute acted as an effectual check on migration and prevented the labourer carrying his work where it was wanted.[ ] it became the object of parishes to have as few cottages and therefore as few poor as possible. in 'close' parishes, i.e. where all the land belonged to one owner, as distinguished from 'open' ones where it belonged to several, all the cottages were often pulled down so that labourers coming to work in it had to travel long distances in all weathers. we shall see further relaxation in the law in , but it was not until modern times that this abominable system was destroyed. the agricultural labourer's difficulty in building a house was aggravated by the statute eliz., c. , before noticed, which in order to restrain the building of cottages enacted that none, except in towns and certain other places, were to be built unless acres of land were attached to them, under a penalty of £ , and s. a month for continuing to maintain it. this act was not repealed until the reign of george iii. however, it seems to have been frequently winked at. in shropshire, for instance, the fine often was only nominal; in the seventeenth century orders authorizing the building of cottages on the waste were freely given by the court of quarter sessions, and orders were also made by the court for the erection of cottages elsewhere.[ ] at the restoration of charles ii the corn laws had practically been unaltered since ,[ ] when it had been enacted that corn might be exported from certain ports in certain ships at all times when proclamation was not made to the contrary, on a payment of d. a quarter on wheat and d. a quarter on other grain. now both export and import were subjected to heavy duties, but these caused such high prices in corn that they were reduced in ; yet high duties were again imposed in , which continued until the revolution. then, owing to good crops and low prices, which brought distress on the landed interest, a new policy was introduced: export duties were abolished and the other extreme resorted to, viz. a bounty on export of s. in the quarter as long as the home price did not exceed s. at the same time import duties remained high, and this system lasted till . never had the corn-growers of england been so thoroughly protected, yet, owing to causes over which the legislators had no control, namely bountiful seasons, the prices of wheat for the next seventy years was from to per cent. cheaper than in the previous forty. modern economists have described this system as one of the worst instances of a class using their legislative power to subsidize themselves at the expense of the community. as a matter of fact it was the firm conviction of the statesmen and economists of the time, that husbandry, being the main industry and prop of england, and the foundation on which the whole political power of the country was based, should receive every encouragement. at all events, in many ways the policy was successful.[ ] it encouraged investment in land, and materially assisted the agricultural improvement for which the eighteenth century was noted, the export too employed english shipping, and thus aided industry. arthur young said it was the singular felicity of this country to have devised a plan which accomplished the strange paradox of at once lowering the price of corn and encouraging agriculture, for by the system in vogue till if corn was scarce it was imported, while if there was a glut at home export was assisted so that great fluctuations in price were prevented.[ ] it seemed of the utmost importance to men of that time that england should be self-supporting and independent of possible adversaries for the necessaries of life; the wisdom of the policy was never questioned, and was accepted by statesmen of every party.[ ] to blame the landowners for adopting what seemed the wisest course to every sensible person is merely an instance of partisan spite. at the peace of paris in the question as to whether england or france was to be the great colonizing country of the world was finally settled, and a great development of english trade ensued. it was accompanied by a great increase of population, exports of corn were largely reduced, and the balance began to incline the other way, so that the next act of importance was that of which permitted the import of foreign wheat at a nominal duty of d. a quarter when it was over s., but prohibited export and the bounty on export when wheat was at or above s. this was the nearest approach to free trade before . the time, however, was not yet ripe for this, and the nominal duty on imports was too small for landlords and farmers, so that in the price when the same nominal duty was to come into force was raised to s., while between s. and s. a duty of s. d. was imposed, and under s. a duty of s. d.; and export was allowed without bounty when wheat was under s. export of corn, however, by this time had become a matter of little moment, england having definitely ceased to be an exporting country after . not only were english landowners after the restoration anxious to protect their corn, but they also took alarm at the imports of irish cattle which they said lowered english rents, so that in and ( car. ii, c. , and car. ii, c. ) laws were framed absolutely prohibiting the import of irish cattle, sheep, and swine, as well as of beef, pork, bacon, and mutton, and even butter and cheese. the statute car. ii, c. , also virtually excluded irish wool from england by duties amounting to prohibition. it was not until that free imports of cattle from ireland were allowed for five years,[ ] a period prolonged by geo. iii, c. , and a statute of . in wool was allowed to be shipped from six specified ports in ireland to eight specified ports in england,[ ] and by geo. ii, c. , wool might be sent from ireland to any port in england under certain restrictions. footnotes: [ ] worlidge, _systema agriculturae_ (ed. ), p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] _pomona_ (ed. ), p. . [ ] ed. , book i, p. . [ ] markham, _op. cit._ i. . [ ] worlidge, _systema agriculturae_, p. . plot, however, in his _natural history of staffordshire_, , says hemp and flax were sown in small quantities all over the county, p. . [ ] _new system of agriculture_ (ed. ), p. . woad is still grown 'in some districts in england' (morton, _cyclopaedia of agriculture_, ii. ), but in the agricultural returns of apparently occupies too small an acreage to entitle it to a separate mention. [ ] worlidge, _systema agriculturae_, p. . [ ] tull, in his _horseshoeing husbandry_ (p. ), speaks of the drill as if already in use. [ ] worlidge, _systema agriculturae_, p. . [ ] the seedlip was a long-shaped basket suspended from the sower's shoulder and was usually made of wood. [ ] horse-girths for securing pack-saddles. [ ] houghton, about the same time, said england contained to million acres, of which millions lay waste (_collections_, iv. ii). in the board of agriculture returned the total area of england and wales, excluding water, at , , acres. [ ] eden, _state of the poor_, i. . [ ] if we allow that most of the two last classes enumerated were country folk. for the decline of the yeoman class, see chap. xviii. [ ] evelyn's _diary_. [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, i. . [ ] fowle, _poor law_, p. . [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ p. , says, 'the abuses complained of in the preamble (of the act) did actually exist.' [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ pp. , , says the statute of did not entail so much evil by hindering migration as is generally supposed. [ ] _shropshire county records_: abstracts of the orders made by the court of quarter sessions, - , pp. xxiv, xxv. [ ] see above, p. . eliz., c. . mcculloch, _commercial dictionary_ ( ), p. . [ ] cunningham, _english industry and commerce_, ii. . [ ] _political arithmetic_, pp. - , , . [ ] lecky, _england in the eighteenth century_, vi. . [ ] mcpherson, _annals of commerce_, iii. . [ ] ibid. ii. ; iii. , . chapter xiv - general characteristics of the eighteenth century.--crops.--cattle.-- dairying.--poultry.--tull and the new husbandry.--bad times. --fruit-growing the history of agriculture in the eighteenth century is remarkable for several features of great importance. it first saw the application of capital in large quantities to farming, the improvements of the time being largely initiated by rich landowners whom young praises rightly as public-spirited men who deserved well of their country, though thorold rogers attributes a meaner motive for the improvement of their estates, namely, their desire not to be outshone by the wealthy merchants.[ ] they were often ably assisted by tenant farmers, many of whom were now men with considerable capital, for whom the smaller farms were amalgamated into large ones. after the agricultural revolution of the latter half of the century, the tendency to consolidate small holdings into large farms grew apace and was looked on as a decided mark of progress. this agricultural revolution was largely a result of the industrial revolution that then took place in england. owing to mechanical inventions and the consequent growth of the factory system, the great manufacturing towns arose, whence came a great demand for food, and, to supply this demand, farms, instead of being small self-sufficing holdings just growing enough for the farmer and his family and servants, grew larger, and became manufactories of corn and meat. the century was also remarkable for another great change. england, hitherto an exporting country, became an importing one. the progress of the century was furthered by a band of men whose names are, or ought to be, household words with english farmers: jethro tull, lord townshend, arthur young, bakewell, coke of holkham, and the collings. further the century witnessed a great number of enclosures, especially when it was drawing to its close. according to the report of the committee on waste lands in , the number of enclosure acts was: under anne, acts, enclosing , acres; under geo. i, acts, enclosing , acres; under geo. ii, acts, enclosing , acres; from to , , acts, enclosing , , acres. the period from to has been called the golden age of the agricultural classes, as the fifteenth century has been called the golden age of the labourer, but the farmer and landlord were often hard pressed; rates were low, wages were fair, and the demand for the produce of the farm constant owing to the growth of the population, yet prices for wheat, stock, and wool were often unremunerative to the farmer, and we are told in , 'necessity has compelled our farmers to more carefulness and frugality in laying out their money than they were accustomed to in better times.'[ ] the labourer's wages varied according to locality. the assessment of wages by the magistrates in lancashire for remains, and according to that the ordinary labourer earned d. a day in the summer and d. in the winter months, with extras in harvest, and this may be taken as the average pay at that date. threshing and winnowing wheat by piece-work cost s. a quarter, oats s. a quarter. making a ditch feet wide at the top, inches wide at the bottom, and feet deep, double set with quicks, cost s. a rood ( yards), d. if without the quick.[ ] the magistrates remarked in their proclamation on the plenty of the times and were afraid that for the northern part of the county, which was then very backward, the wages were too liberal. wheat was, unfortunately, that year s. d. a quarter, but a few years before and after that date it was cheap-- s., s., s. a quarter--and fresh meat was only d. a lb., so that their wages went a long way.[ ] a considerable portion of the wages was paid in kind, not only in drink but in food, though this custom became less frequent as the century went on.[ ] as for his food, eden tells us[ ] that the diet of bedford workhouse in was much better than that of the most industrious labourer in his own home, and this was the diet: bread and cheese or broth for breakfast, boiled beef hot or cold, sometimes with suet pudding for dinner, and bread and cheese or broth for supper. this must have been sufficiently monotonous, and we may be sure the labourer at home very seldom had boiled beef for dinner; but in the north he was much cleverer than his southern brother in cooking cereal foods such as oatmeal porridge, crowdie (also of oatmeal), frumenty or barley milk, barley broth, &c.[ ] the village of the first half of the eighteenth century contained a much better graded society than the village of to-day. it had few gaps, so that there was a ladder from the lowest to the highest ranks, owing to the existence of many small holders of various degree, soon to be diminished by enclosure and consolidation.[ ] there was a great increase in the number of live stock owing to the spread, gradual though it was, of roots and clover, which increased the winter food; 'of late years,' it was said in , 'there have been improvements made in the breed of sheep by changing of rams, and sowing of turnips, grass seeds, &c.'[ ] crops, too, were improving; and enclosed lands about were said to produce over bushels of wheat to the acre.[ ] though the number of enclosure acts at the beginning of the century was nothing like the number at the end, the process was steadily going on, often by non-parliamentary enclosure, and was approved by nearly every one. some, however, were opposed to it. john cowper, who wrote an essay on 'enclosing commons' in , said, a common was often the chief support of forty or fifty poor families, and even though their rights were bought out they were under the necessity of leaving their old homes, for their occupation was gone; but he says nothing of the well-known increased demand for labour on the enclosed lands. the force of his arguments may be gauged from his answer to lawrence's statement that enclosure is the greatest benefit to good husbandry, and a remedy for idleness. on the contrary, says he, who among the country people live lazier lives than the grazier and the dairyman? all the dairyman has to do is to call his cows together to be milked! worlidge in had lamented that turnips were so little grown by english farmers in the field, and that it was a plant 'usually nourished in gardens',[ ] and in a letter to houghton in , he is the first to mention the feeding of turnips to sheep.[ ] however, in it was said that nothing of late years had turned to greater profit to the farmer, who now found it one of his chief treasures; and there were then three sorts: the round which was most common, the yellow, and the long.[ ] for winter use they were to be sown from the beginning of june to the middle of august, on fallow which had been brought to a good tilth, the seed harrowed in with a bush harrow, and if necessary rolled. when the plants had two or three leaves each they were to be hoed out, leaving them five or six inches apart, though some slovenly farmers did not trouble to do this; but there is no mention of hoeing between the rows. the fly was already recognized as a pest, and soot and common salt were used to fight it. folding sheep in winter on turnips was then little practised, though lawrence strongly recommends it. according to defoe,[ ] suffolk was remarkable for being the first county where the feeding and fattening of sheep and other cattle with turnips was first practised in england, to the great improvement of the land, 'whence', he says, 'the practice is spread over most of the east and south, to the great enriching of farmers and increase of fat cattle.' there were great disputes as to collecting the tithe, always a sore subject, on turnips; and the custom seems to have been that if they were eaten off by store sheep they went tithe free, if sheep were fattened on them the tithe was paid.[ ] clover, the other great novelty of the seventeenth century, was now generally sown with barley, oats, or rye grass, about lb. per acre. this amount, sown on acres of barley, would next year produce loads worth about £ . the next crop stood for seed, which was cut in august, the hay being worth £ , and the seed out of it, lb., was sold much of it for d. a lb., the sum realized in that year from the acres being £ , without counting the aftermath. at this time most of the seed was still imported from flanders.[ ] much of the common and waste land of england, not previously worth d. an acre, had been by vastly improved through sowing artificial grasses on it, so that various people had gained considerable estates.[ ] carrots were also now grown as a field crop in places, especially near london, two sorts being known, the yellow and red, used chiefly by farmers for feeding their hogs.[ ] of wheat the names were many, but there were apparently only seven distinct sorts, the double-eared, eggshell, red or kentish, great-bearded, pollard, grey, and flaxen or lammas.[ ] the growth of saffron had declined, though the english variety was the best in the world, according to lawrence, and except in cambridgeshire and about saffron walden it was little known. though it was still some time before the days of bakewell, increased attention was given to cattle-breeding; it was urged that a well-shaped bull be put to cows, one that had 'a broad and curled forehead, long horns, fleshy neck, and a belly long and large.'[ ] such in was the ideal type of the long-horns of the midland and the north, but it was noticed that of late years and especially in the north the dutch breed was much sought after, which had short horns and long necks, the breed with which the collings were to work such wonders. the then great price of £ had been given for a cow of this breed. bradley, professor of botany at cambridge, and a well-known writer on agriculture, divided the cattle of england into three sorts according to their colour: the black, white, and red.[ ] the black, commonly the smallest, was the strongest for labour, chiefly found in mountainous countries; also bred chiefly in cheshire, yorkshire, lancashire, and derbyshire, sixty years before this, and in those days cheshire cheese came from these cattle, apparently very much like the modern welsh breed.[ ] the white were much larger, and very common in lincolnshire at the end of the seventeenth century. they gave more milk than the black sort but went dry sooner. they were also found in suffolk and surrey. the red cattle were the largest in england, their milk rich and nourishing, so much so that it was given specially to consumptives. they were first bred in somerset, where in bradley's time particular attention was paid to their breeding, and were evidently the ancestors of the modern devons. about london these cows were often fed on turnips, given them tops and all, which made their milk bitter. they were also found in lincolnshire and some other counties, where 'they were fed on the marshes', and defoe saw, in the weald of kent, 'large kentish bullocks, generally all red with their horns crooked inward.' bradley gives the following balance sheet for a dairy of nine cows:[ ] dr. £ s. d. months' grass keep at s. d. per week per head months' winter keep (straw, hay, turnips, and grains) at s. per week per head --------- £ ========= cr. , gallons of milk --------- balance (profit) £ ========= a correspondent, however, pointed out to bradley that this yield and profit was far above the average, which was about £ a cow, on whom bradley retorted that it could be made, though it was exceptional. in the eighteenth century the great trade of driving scottish cattle to london began, walter scott's grandfather being the pioneer. the route followed diverged from the great north road in yorkshire in order to avoid turnpikes, and the cattle, grazing leisurely on the strips of grass by the roadside, generally arrived at smithfield in good condition.[ ] defoe tells us that most of the scottish cattle which came yearly into england were brought to the village of s. faiths, north of norwich, 'where the norfolk graziers go and buy them. these scots runts, coming out of the cold and barren highlands, feed so eagerly on the rich pasture in these marshes that they grow very fat. there are above , of these scots cattle fed in this county every year. the gentlemen of galloway go to england with their droves of cattle and take the money themselves.'[ ] it was no uncommon thing for a galloway nobleman to send , black cattle and , sheep to england in a year, and altogether from , to , cattle were said to come to england from galloway yearly. gentlemen on the border before the union got a very pretty living by tolls from these cattle; and the earl of carlisle made a good income in this way. cattle were sometimes of a great size. in , in the park of sir john fagg near steyning, defoe saw four bullocks of sir john's own breeding for which was refused in defoe's hearing £ apiece. they were driven to smithfield and realized £ each, having probably sunk on the way, but dressed they weighed stone a quarter![ ] these weights must have been very exceptional, but go to prove that cattle then could be grown to much greater size than is generally credited. a good price for a bullock in the first half of the eighteenth century was from £ to £ . the best poultry at the same date ( ) were said to be 'the white-feathered sort', especially those that had short and white legs, which were esteemed for the whiteness of their flesh; but those that had long yellow legs and yellow beaks were considered good for nothing.[ ] care was to be used in the choice of a cock, for those of the game kind were to be avoided as unprofitable. bradley gives a balance sheet for hens and cocks who had a free run in a farmyard and an orchard:[ ] dr. £ s. d. bushels of barley balance, profit ---------- £ ========== cr. £ s. d. eggs (number unfortunately not given) early chickens at s. late chickens at d. ---------- £ ========== he also recommends that in stocking a farm of £ a year the following poultry should be purchased: £ s. d. chickens at d. geese turkeys ducks pair of pigeons the best way to fatten chickens, according to bradley, was to put them in coops and feed them with barley meal, being careful to put a small quantity of brickdust in their water to give them an appetite.[ ] on this farm were acres of cow pasture besides common, and this with some turnips kept cows, which gave about three gallons of milk a day at least, the milk being worth d. a quart. his pigs were of the 'black bantham' breed, which were better than the large sort common in england, for the flesh was much more delicate. suffolk was famous for supplying london with turkeys.[ ] three hundred droves of turkeys, each numbering from to , had in one season passed over stratford bridge on the road from ipswich to london. geese also travelled on foot to london in prodigious numbers from norfolk, suffolk, and the fen country, often , to , in a drove, starting in august when harvest was nearly over, so that the geese might feed on the stubble by the way; 'and thus they hold on to the end of october, when the roads begin to be too stiff and deep for their broad feet and short legs to march on.' there was, however, a more rapid method of getting poultry to the great market, by means of carts of four stages or stories, one above another, to carry the birds in, drawn by two horses, which by means of relays travelled night and day, and covered as much as miles in two days and one night, the driver sitting on the topmost stage. hop growing in , according to richard bradley, paid well; he says, 'ground never esteemed before worth a shilling an acre per annum, is rendered worth forty, fifty, or sometimes more pounds a year by planting hops judiciously. an acre of hops shall bring to the owner clear profit about £ yearly; but i have known hop grounds that have cleared above £ yearly per acre.' at this date , acres in england were planted with hops. the great market for hops was stourbridge fair, once the greatest mart in england and still preserving much of its former importance: 'there is scarce any price fixed for hops in england till they know how they sell in stourbridge fair.'[ ] thither they came from chelmsford, canterbury, maidstone, and farnham, where the bulk of the hops in england were then grown, though some were to be found at wilton near salisbury, in herefordshire, and worcestershire. round canterbury defoe says there were , acres of hops, all planted within living memory[ ]; but the maidstone district was called 'the mother of hop grounds', and with the country round feversham was famous for apples and cherries. the finest wool still, it seems, came from near leominster, where the sheep in markham's time were described as small-boned and black-faced, with a light fleece, and apparently they still had the same appearance at the beginning of the eighteenth century[ ]; and large-boned sheep with coarser wool were to be found in the counties of warwick, leicester, buckingham, northampton, and nottingham; in the north of england too were big-boned sheep with inferior wool, the largest with coarse wool being found in the marshes of lincolnshire. about this time wool had fallen much in price: 'has nobody told you,' writes a west country farmer to his absentee landlord in , 'that wool has fallen to near half its price, and that we cannot find purchasers for a great part of it at any price whatsoever. when most of our estates (farms) were taken wool was generally d., d., or more by the pound; the same is now d. and still falling.'[ ] but the latter price was exceptionally low; smith[ ] gives the following average prices per tod of lb.: s. d. - s. to s. - s. to s. s. - s. after it fell again, largely owing to the great plague among cattle, which brought about a 'prodigious increase of sheep'[ ]; and about young[ ] favoured corn rather than wool, for there was always a market for the former, but the foreign demand for cloth was diminishing, especially in the case of france, besides prohibition of export kept down the price.[ ] yet although wool was being deserted for corn it had in young's time 'been so long supposed the staple and foundation of all our wealth, that it is somewhat dangerous to hazard an opinion not consonant to its encouragement'. at the end of the century, however, there was a rapid increase in the price, partly due to increased demand by spinners and weavers who, owing to machinery, were working more economically; and partly to the enclosure of commons, and the ploughing up of land for corn.[ ] cheshire had long been famous for cheese. barnaby googe, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, says, 'in england the best cheese is the cheshyre and the shropshyre, then the banbury cheese, next the suffolk and the essex, and the very worst the kentish cheese.' camden, who died in , tells us that 'the grasse and fodder (in cheshire) is of that goodness and vertue that cheeses be made here in great number, and of a most pleasing and delicate taste such as all england again affordeth not the like, no though the best dairywomen otherwise and skillfullest in cheese making be had from hence;' and a little later it was said no other county in the realm could compare with cheshire, not even that wonderful agricultural country holland from which england learnt so much.[ ] in lawrence's time cheddar cheese was also famous, and there it had long been a custom for several neighbours to join their milk together to make cheeses, which were of a large size, weighing from lb. to lb. good cheese came also from gloucestershire and warwickshire. the cheshire men sent great quantities by sea to london, a long and tedious voyage, or else by land to burton-on-trent, and down that river to hull and then by sea to london. the gloucestershire men took it to lechlade and sent it down the thames; from warwickshire it went by land all the way, or to oxford and thence down the thames to london. stilton, too, had lately become famous, and was considered the best of all, selling for the then great price of s. a lb. on the farm, and s. d. at the bell inn, stilton, where it seems to have first been sold in large quantities, though leicestershire perhaps claims the honour of first making it.[ ] the eastern side of suffolk was, in defoe's time, famous for the best butter and perhaps the worst cheese in england, the butter being 'barrelled and sometimes pickled up in small casks'.[ ] rabbits were occasionally kept in large numbers for profit; at auborne chase in wilts, there was a warren of acres surrounded by a wall--a most effective way of preventing escape, but somewhat expensive. in winter time they were fed on hay, and hazel branches from which they ate the bark. they were never allowed to get below , head, and from these, after deducting losses by poachers, weazles, polecats, foxes, &c., , were sold annually. these rabbits, owing to the quality of the grass, were famous for the sweetness of their flesh. the proprietor, mr. gilbert, began to kill them at bartholomewtide, aug. , and from then to michaelmas obtained s. a dozen for them delivered free in london; but those from michaelmas to christmas realized s. d. a dozen. the difference in price at the two periods is accounted for by the fact that their skins were much better in the latter, and the rabbits kept longer when killed; they must also have been larger. a skin before michaelmas was only worth d., but soon after nearly d.; and in hertfordshire was a warren where rabbit skins with silvery hair fetched s. each.[ ] we have now reached the period when the result of jethro tull's labours was given to the world, his _horse-hoeing husbandry_ appearing in . it is no exaggeration to say that agriculture owes more to tull than to any other man; the principles formulated in his famous book revolutionized british agriculture, though we shall see that it took a long time to do it. he has indeed been described as 'the greatest individual improver agriculture ever knew'. he first realized that deep and perfect pulverization is the great secret of vegetable nutrition, and was thus led on to perfect the system of drilling seed wide enough apart to admit of tillage in the intervals, and abandoning the wide ridges in vogue, laid the land into narrow ridges feet or feet wide. he was born at basildon in berkshire, heir to a good estate, and was called to the bar in , but on his marriage in the same year settled on the paternal farm of howberry in oxfordshire. in his preface to his book he throws a flash of light on country life at a time when the roads were nearly as bad as in the middle ages, so that they effectually isolated different parts of england, when he speaks of 'a long confinement within the limits of a lonely farm, in a country where i am a stranger, having debarred me from all conversation'.[ ] he took to agriculture more by necessity than by choice, for he knew too much 'the inconveniency and slavery attending the exorbitant power of husbandry servants', and he further gives this extraordinary character of the farm labourer of his day: ''tis the most formidable objection against our agriculture that the defection of labourers is such that few gentlemen can keep their land in their own hands, but let them for a little to tenants who can bear to be insulted, assaulted, kicked, cuffed, and bridewelled, with more patience than gentlemen are endowed with.'[ ] tull wrote just before it became the fashion for gentlemen to go into farming, and laments that the lands of the country were all, or mostly, in the hands of rack-renters, whose supposed interest it was that they should never be improved for fear of fines and increased rents. gentlemen then knew so little of farming that they were unable to manage their estates. no doubt his scathing remarks helped to initiate the well-known change in this respect, and soon, over all england, gentlemen of education and position were engaged in removing this reproach from their class. the same complaint as to their ignorance of matters connected with their land crops up again during the great french war, but they then had a good excuse, as they were busy fighting the french. tull invented his drill about at howberry. the first occasion for making it, he says, was that it 'was very difficult to find a man that could sow clover tolerably; they had a habit to throw it once with the hand to two large strides and go twice in each cast; thus, with or lb. of seed to an acre, two-thirds of the ground was unplanted. to remedy this i made a hopper, to be drawn by a boy, that planted an acre sufficiently with lb. of seed; but when i added to this hopper an exceeding light plough that made channels eight inches asunder, into which lb. to an acre being drilled the ground was as well planted. this drill was easily drawn by a man, and sometimes by a boy.' his invention was largely prompted by his desire to do without the insolent farm servant whom he has described above, and the year after it was invented he certainly had his wish, for they struck in a body and were dismissed: 'it were more easy to teach the beasts of the field than to drive the ploughman out of his way.' his ideas were largely derived from the mechanism of the organ which, being fond of music, he had mastered in his youth--a rotary mechanism, which is the foundation of all agricultural sowing implements. his first invention may be described as a drill plough to sow wheat and turnip seed in drills three rows at a time, a harrow to cover the seed being attached. afterwards he invented a turnip drill, so arranged as regards dropping the seed and its subsequent covering with soil that half the seed should come up earlier than the rest, to enable a portion at least to escape the dreaded fly. he was a great believer in doing everything himself, and worked so hard at his drill that he had to go abroad for his health. he was somewhat carried away by his invention, and asserts that the expense of a drilled crop of wheat was one-ninth of that sown in the old way, giving the following figures to prove his assertion: _the old way_ £ s. d. seed, - / bushels, at s. three ploughings, harrrowing, and sowing weeding rent of preceding fallow manure reaping --------- £ [ ] ========= _the new way_ seed, pecks tillage drilling weeding uncovering (removing clods fallen on the wheat) brine and lime reaping ----- ===== it should be noted that he has omitted to charge rent for the year in which the crop was grown in both cases. he considered fallowing and manure unnecessary, and grew without manure successive wheat crops on the same piece of ground, getting better crops than his neighbours who pursued the ordinary course of farming. his three great principles, indeed, were drilling, reduction of seed, and absence of weeds, and he saw that dung was a great carrier of the latter but lacked a due appreciation of its chemical action. of course, like all _improvers_, he was met with unlimited opposition, and on the publication of his book he was assailed with abuse, which, being a sensitive man, caused him extreme annoyance. his health was bad, his troubles with his labourers unending, his son a spendthrift, and he died at his now famous home, prosperous farm, near hungerford, in , having said not long before his death, 'some, allowed as good judges, have upon a full view and examination of my practice declared their opinion that it would one day become the general husbandry of england.'[ ] scotland was the first to perceive the merits of the system, and it gradually worked southwards into england, but for many years had to fight against ignorance and prejudice, even so intelligent a man as arthur young being opposed to it. farm leases had by this time assumed their modern form, and cultivation clauses were numerous. in one of , at hawsted, the tenant was to keep the hedges in repair, being allowed bushes and stakes for so doing. he was also to bestow on some part of the lands one load of good rotten muck over and above what was made on the farm for every load of hay, straw, or stover (fodder) which he should carry off.[ ] in another of , he was to leave in the last year of the tenancy one-third of the arable land summer tilled, ploughed, and fallowed, for which he was to be paid according to the custom of the country. in , in the lease of pinford end farm, there was a penalty of £ an acre for breaking up pasture; a great increase in the amount of the penalty. all compost, dung, soil, and ashes arising on the farm were to be bestowed upon it. only two crops successively were to be taken on any of the arable land, but land sown with clover and rye-grass, if fed off, or with turnips which were fed on some part of the farm, were not to count as crops. the ashes mentioned were those from wood, which were now carefully looked after, as it had become the custom to sell them to the soap-boilers, who came round to every farm collecting them. this is the earliest mention in a hawsted lease of rye-grass, clover, and turnips, though clover and turnips had been first cultivated there about , and soon spread. the winter of - was very severe, a great frost lasting from october until the spring; wheat was s. d. a quarter, and high prices lasted until .[ ] from to was an era of good seasons and low prices generally; in that half-century tooke says there were only five bad seasons. in prices of corn were very low, wheat being about s. a quarter, so that we are not surprised to find that its cultivation often did not pay at all.[ ] at little gadsden in hertfordshire, in that year a fair season, and on enclosed land, the following is the balance sheet for an acre: dr. £ s. d. rent dressing (manuring) - / bushels of seed ploughing first time " twice more harrowing reaping and carrying threshing -------- ======== cr. £ s. d. bushels of wheat (a poor crop, as bushels was now about the average) straw -------- _loss_ ======== on barley, worth about £ a quarter, the loss was s. d. an acre; on oats, worth s. a quarter, however, the profit was s.; on beans, s. d., these being that year exceptionally good and worth s. a quarter.[ ] ellis objected to the new mode of drilling wheat because, he said, the rows are more exposed to the violence of the winds, rains, &c., by growing apart, than if close together, when the stalks support each other.[ ] this estimate may be compared to that of tull for the 'old way' of sowing wheat,[ ] and to the following estimate of fifty years later in surrey, when wheat was a much better price:-- dr. £ s. d. rent, tithe, taxes team, &c. bushels of seed carting and spreading manure and water furrowing brining weeding reaping and carrying threshing and cleaning binding straw --------- £ [ ] ========= cr. bushels at s. - / loads of straw --------- £ ========= the profit was thus £ s. d. an acre, and for barley it was £ s. d., for oats £ s. d., for beans £ s. d.[ ] this crop of wheat was not very good, as the average in that district was from to bushels per acre, and young before this saw crops of bushels per acre growing. the over frequent use of fallows, which had so long marked agriculture, was in the early half of the eighteenth century beginning to be strongly disapproved of. bradley advocated the continuous cultivation of the ground with different kinds of crops, 'for i find', he said, 'by experience that if such crops are sown as are full of fibrous roots, such roots greatly help to open the parts of grounds inclining to too much stiffness.'[ ] footnotes: [ ] _six centuries of work and wages_, p. . [ ] see baker, _record of seasons and prices_, p. . [ ] eden, _state of the poor_, iii p. cvii; thorold rogers, _work and wages_, p. . [ ] in herefordshire at this time it was - / d. per lb. [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] eden, _op. cit._ i. . [ ] ibid. i. . [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] smith, _memoirs of wool_, ii. . [ ] john lawrence, _new system of agriculture_, p. . in , a normal season, acres of wheat at southwick in hants produced bushels per acre, acres of barley bushels per acre, acres of oats bushels per acre; at the same place sheep realized s. each, cows s., calves £ , horses £ , hay s. a ton (_hampshire notes and queries_, iii. ). [ ] worlidge, _systema agriculturae_, p. . [ ] _collections_, iv. . [ ] lawrence, _new system of agriculture_, p. . [ ] _tour_ (ed. ), i. . [ ] ellis, _chiltern and vale farming_, p. . [ ] bradley, _general treatise_, i. . [ ] ellis, _chiltern and vale farming_, p. . [ ] j. lawrence, _new system of agriculture_, p. . [ ] ibid. p. . about lucerne, hitherto little grown in england, took its place in the rotation of crops. [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] _a general treatise on husbandry_ ( ), i. ; cf. c. [ ] the black cattle seem to have been spread very generally over england, according to previous writers and to defoe, who often mentions them. he saw a 'prodigious quantity' in the meadows by the waveney in norfolk.--_tour_, i. . [ ] bradley, _general treatise_, i. . [ ] slater, _english peasantry_, p. . [ ] _tour_ (ed. ), i. ( ) , and iii. ( ) . [ ] ibid. i. . [ ] j. lawrence, _new system of agriculture_, p. . [ ] bradley, _general treatise_, i. . [ ] _country gentleman and farmer's director_ ( ), p. . [ ] defoe, _tour_, i. . [ ] defoe, _tour_ ( rd ed.), i. . [ ] defoe, _tour_ (ed. ), ii. , . [ ] bradley, _general treatise_, i. ; see also smith, _memoirs of wool_, ii. , where the sheep of leominster, of cotteswold, and of the isle of wight are said to be the best in . the great market for sheep was weyhill fair, and stourbridge fair was a great wool market. [ ] _the west country farmer, a representation of the decay of trade_, . [ ] _memoirs of wool_, ii. . [ ] ibid. ii. . [ ] _farmer's letters_ ( rd ed.), p. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, ii. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, ii. . [ ] ormerod, _cheshire_, i. . these words were written about . [ ] see _victoria county history: rutland, agriculture_. stilton was eaten in the same condition as many prefer it now, 'with the mites round it so thick that they bring a spoon for you to eat them.' [ ] defoe, _tour_, i. ( ) . cheshire cheese was d. to - / d. per lb., cheddar d. to d. in , an extraordinary difference. [ ] bradley, i. . [ ] preface to _horse-hoeing husbandry_, (ed. ). [ ] _horse-hoeing husbandry_, p. vi. [ ] _the west country farmer_, above quoted, says wheat growing (in ) paid little. before a bushel can be sold it costs £ an acre, and the crop probably fetches half the money. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journ._ ( rd ser.), ii. . [ ] cullum, _hawsted_, p. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, i. . [ ] wheat averaged: - about s. about s. about s. " s. " s. " s. " s. " s. " s. " s. " s. " s. " s. " s. [ ] ellis, _chiltern and vale farming_, p. . nothing is charged for tithe and taxes. [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] see above, p. , also p. for young's estimate in . [ ] nothing is charged for the manure which was carted and spread. [ ] john trusler, _practical husbandry_, p. . [ ] _country gentleman and farmer's director_ ( ), p. xiii. chapter xv - townshend.--sheep-rot.--cattle plague. fruit-growing in charles, second viscount townshend, retired from politics, on his quarrel with his brother-in-law walpole, who remarked that 'as long as the firm was townshend and walpole the utmost harmony prevailed, but it no sooner became walpole and townshend than things went wrong'. he devoted himself to the management of his norfolk estates and set an example to english landlords in wisely and diligently experimenting in farm practice which was soon followed on all sides, the names of lords ducie, peterborough, and bolingbroke being the best known of his fellow-labourers. a generation afterwards young wrote, 'half the county of norfolk within the memory of man yielded nothing but sheep feed, whereas those very tracts of land are now covered with as fine barley and rye as any in the world and great quantities of wheat besides.'[ ] there can be no doubt from this statement, made by an eyewitness of exceptional capacity, that he commenced the work so nobly carried on by coke. the same authority tells us that when townshend began his improvements near norwich much of the land was an extensive heath without either tree or shrub, only a sheepwalk to another farm; so many carriages crossed it that they would sometimes be a mile abreast of each other in pursuit of the best track. by there was an excellent turnpike road, enclosed on each side with a good quickset hedge, and all the land let out in enclosures and cultivated on the norfolk system in superior style; the whole being let at s. an acre, or ten times its original value. townshend's two special hobbies were the field cultivation of turnips, and improvement in the rotation of crops. pope says his conversation was largely of turnips, and he was so zealous in advocating them that he was nicknamed 'turnip townsend'.[ ] he initiated the norfolk or four-course system of cropping, in which roots, grasses, and cereals were wisely blended, viz. turnips, barley, clover and rye grass, wheat. he also reintroduced marling to the light lands of norfolk, and followed tull's system of drilling and horse-hoeing turnips, with the result that the poor land of which his estate was largely composed was converted into good corn and cattle-growing farms. like all the progressive agriculturists of the day, he was an advocate of enclosures, and he had no small share in the growth of the movement by which, in the reigns of anne and the first two georges, enclosure acts were passed and , acres enclosed. the progress of enclosure was alleged as a proof that england was never more prosperous than under walpole; the number of private gentlemen in britain of ample estates was said to exceed that of any country in the world proportionately, and was far greater than in the reign of charles ii. the value of land at twenty-six or twenty-seven years' purchase was a conclusive proof of the wealth of england.[ ] though, however, the first half of the century was generally prosperous there were bad times for farmer and landlord. we have seen that wheat-growing paid little, although from to the farmer was protected against imports and aided by a bounty on exports. in lord lyttelton wrote: 'in most parts of england, gentlemen's rents are so ill paid and the weight of taxes lies so heavy upon them that those who have nothing from the court can scarce support their families.'[ ] sheep in the damp climate of england have always been subject to rot, and in there was, according to ellis, the most general rot in the memory of man owing to a very wet season; and, as in the disastrous year of , which must be fresh in many farmers' memories, other animals, deer, hares, and rabbits, were affected also; and the dead bodies of rotten sheep were so numerous in road and field that the stench was offensive to every one. another bad outbreak occurred in . it is well known that farmers are always grumblers, probably with an eye to the rent; but even in these much praised times they apparently made small profits. the west country farmer quoted before, who had been fifty years on the same estate, and writes with the stamp of sincerity, admits in that 'with all the skill and diligence in the world he can hardly keep the cart upon the wheels. wool had gone down, wheat didn't pay and graziers were doing badly; tho' formerly our cattle and wool was always a sure card'. he says that the profits of grazing were reckoned at one-third of the improvement that ensued from the grazing, but the grazier was not now getting this. he attributed much of the distress, however, to the extravagance of the times. landlords, including his own, preferred london to the country, and spent their money there. how different was the behaviour of his landlord's grandfather. 'many a time would his worship send for me to go a-hunting or shooting with him; often would he take me with him on his visits and would introduce me as his friend. the country gentlewoman and the parson's wife, that used to stitch for themselves, are now so hurried with dressings and visits and other attractions that they hire an abigail to do it.' he thought, too, the labourers were getting too high wages; 'they are so puffed up by our provender as to offer us their heels and threaten on any occasion to leave us to do our work ourselves.' one would like to hear the labourers' opinion on this point, but they were dumb. in spite of higher wages the young men and young women flocked to the cities, and those who remain were lazy and extravagant, even the country wenches contending about 'double caps, huge petticoats, clock stockings, and other trumpery'.[ ] the bounty now paid on the export of wheat was naturally resented by the common people, as it raised the price of their bread. in a load belonging to farmer waters of burford, travelling along the road to redbridge for exportation, was stopped near white parish by a crowd of people who knocked down the leading horse, broke the wagon in pieces, cut the sacks, and strewed about the corn, with threats that they would do the like to all who sold wheat to export.[ ] while england was paying farmers to export wheat she was also importing, though in plentiful years importers had a very bad time. in there were lying at liverpool , windles (a windle-- lb.) of imported corn, unsaleable owing to the great crop in england.[ ] the year was distinguished by one of the severest winters on record. from january to february the thermometer seldom reached °, and the cold was so intense that hens and ducks, even cattle in their stalls died of it, trees were split asunder, crows and other birds fell to the ground frozen in their flight. this extraordinary winter was followed by a cold and late spring; no verdure had appeared by may; in july it was still cold, and thousands of acres of turnips rotted in the ground. among minor misfortunes may be noticed the swarms of grasshoppers who devastated the pastures near bristol at the end of august ,[ ] and the swarms of locusts who came to england in and consumed the vegetables.[ ] the cattle plague of [ ] was so severe that owing to the scarcity of stock great quantities of grass land were ploughed up, which helped to account for the fact that in the export of corn from england reached its maximum; though the main cause of this was the long series of excellent seasons that set in after .[ ] the cattle plague also raged in in spite of an order in council that all infected cattle should be shot and buried ft. deep, and pitch, tar, rosin, and gunpowder burnt where infected cattle had died, and cow-houses washed with vinegar and water. such were the sanitary precautions of the time.[ ] in came another bad year, corn was so scarce that there were many riots; the king expressed to parliament his concern at the suffering of the poor, and the export of corn was temporarily prohibited. the fluctuations in price are remarkable: in , before the deficiency of the harvest was realized, wheat was s. and it went up at the following rate: jan., , s.; feb., s.; march, s.; april, s.; june, s. about the middle of the century, if we may judge from the _compleat cyderman_ written in by experienced hands living in devon, cornwall, herefordshire, and elsewhere, fruit-growing received an amount of attention which diminished greatly in after years. the authors fully realized that an orchard under tillage causes apple trees to grow as fast again as under grass, and this was well understood and practised in kent, where crops of corn were grown between the trees. a devonshire 'cyderist' urged that orchards should be well sheltered from the east winds, which 'bring over the narrow sea swarms of imperceptible eggs, or insects in the air, from the vast tracts of tartarian and other lands, from which proceeded infinite numbers of lice, flies, bugs, caterpillars, cobwebs, &c.' the best protection was a screen of trees, and the best tree for the purpose, a perry pear tree. in the hard frosts of , , and great numbers of fruit and other trees had been destroyed. in devon what was called the 'southams method' was used for top-dressing the roots of old apple trees, which was done in november with soil from the roads and ditches, or lime or chalk, laid on furze sometimes, inches thick, for or ft. all round the trees. great attention was paid there to keeping the heads of fruit trees in good order, so that branches did not interfere with each other,[ ] and the heads were made to spread as much as possible. many of the trees were grown with the first branches commencing ft. in. from the ground. it was claimed that devon excelled all other parts of england in the management of fruit trees, a reputation that was not maintained, according to the works of half a century later. the best cider apple in the county then was the white-sour, white in colour, of a middling size, and early ripe; other good ones were the 'deux-anns, jersey, french longtail, royal wilding, culvering, russet, holland pippin, and cowley crab.' in herefordshire it was the custom to open the earth about the roots of the apple trees and lay them bare and exposed for the 'twelve days of the christmas holidays', that the wind might loosen them. then they were covered with a compost of dung, mould, and a little lime. 'the best way' to plant was to take off the turf and lay it by itself, then the next earth or virgin mould, to be laid also by itself. next put horse litter over the bottom of the hole with some of the virgin mould on that, on which place the tree, scattering some more virgin mould over the roots, then spread some old horse-dung over this and upon that the turf, leaving it in a basin shape. the ground between the trees in devonshire in young orchards was first planted with cabbage plants, next year with potatoes, next with beans, and so on until the heads of the trees became large enough, when the land was allowed to return to pasture, a proceeding which was quite contrary to their previously quoted assertion that tillage was best for fruit trees. the cider-makers were quite convinced, as many are to-day, that rotten apples were invaluable for cider, and the lady who was famous for the best cider in the county never allowed one to be thrown away. a generation later than this marshall[ ] noted that in herefordshire the management of orchards and their produce was far from being well understood, though 'it has ever borne the name of the first cider county'. all the old fruits were lost or declining in quality, the famous red streak apple was given up and the squash pear no longer made to flourish. as for prices, in apples were selling at liverpool for s. d. a bushel,[ ] a very good price if we allow for the difference in the value of money, but prices then were entirely dependent on the english seasons; no foreign apples were imported, and a night's frost would treble prices in a day. in at aspall hall, suffolk, apples, apparently for cider, were d. a bushel, in s. a bushel, in only d., and in cider there was worth d. a gallon.[ ] at the end of the century, in 'the great hit' of , common apples were less than d. a bushel, the best about s. in the price was twice as high, owing to a short crop. incidentally there is mentioned in the _compleat cyderman_ a novel implement, 'a most profitable new invented five-hoe plough, that after the ground has been once ploughed with a common plough will plough four or five acres in one day with only four horses, and by a little alteration is fitted to hoe turnips or rape crops as it is now practised by the ordinary farmers'; much too favourable an estimate of the ordinary farmer, as young found horse-hoeing rare. an acre of good orchard land at this time was let at £ an acre; and this is a fair balance sheet for an acre[ ]:-- dr. £ s. d. rent of one acre tithe on hogsheads, @ d. gathering, making, and carriage to and from the pound, @ s. d. a hogshead racking twice, @ d. casks and cooperage --------- £ ========= cr. £ s. d. hogsheads diminished by racking and waste to , @ s. d. ======== leaving a balance of s. for spoiling, &c., so there was not much profit in cider-making then. the same authority sets down the cost of planting an acre of apples as:-- £ s. d. trees, @ s. (the custom had been to plant trees to the acre, but this was considered too close.) carriage per tree, @ d.; manure per tree, @ d.; planting per tree, @ d. interest on £ s. d. for fifteen years before orchard is profitable, @ per cent. loss of half the rent of the land for the same period, @ s. an acre building cellarage for product per acre --------- £ ========= for this outlay the landowner would gain an additional rent of £ a year, so that, according to this authority, growing cider fruit at that time paid neither landlord nor tenant. footnotes: [ ] _farmer's letters_, i. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( rd series), iii. . [ ] see the _hyp doctor_, no. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, i. . [ ] cf. this and tull's character of servants with defoe's accusation of their laziness. [ ] salisbury newspaper, quoted by baker, _seasons and prices_, p. . [ ] see _autobiography of wm. stout_, ed. by j. harland. [ ] _gentleman's magazine_, . [ ] baker, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] _a defence of the farmers of great britain_ ( ), p. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, i. . [ ] see a curious pamphlet called _an exhortation to all people to consider the afflicting hand of god_ ( ), p. . the plague lasted from to . [ ] _the compleat cyderman_, p. . [ ] _rural economy of gloucestershire_ ( ), ii. . [ ] blundell's _diary_, p. . [ ] ms. accounts of mr. chevallier, of aspall hall. [ ] _the case with the county of devon with respect to the new excise duty on cider_ ( ). the duty was s. a hogshead, but the opposition was so strong it was taken off. chapter xvi - arthur young.--crops and their cost.--the labourers' wages and diet.--the prosperity of farmers.--the country squire.--elkington.--bakewell.--the roads.--coke of holkham. the history of english agriculture in the latter half of the eighteenth century has been so well described by arthur young that any account of it at that time must largely be an epitome of his writings. the greatest of english writers on agriculture was born in , and began farming early; but, as he confesses himself, was a complete failure. when he was twenty-six he took a farm of acres at samford hall in essex, and after five years of it paid a farmer £ to take it off his hands, who thereupon made a fortune out of it. he had already begun writing on agriculture, and it must be confessed that he began to advise people concerning the art of agriculture on a very limited experience. it paid him, however, much better than farming, for between and he realized £ , on his works, among which were _the farmer's letters_, _the southern_, _northern_, and _eastern tours_. these are his qualifications for writing on agriculture, from his own pen: 'i have been a farmer these many years' (he was not yet thirty), 'and that not in a single field or two but upon a tract of near acres most part of the time. i have cultivated on various soils most of the vegetables common in england and many never introduced into field husbandry. i have always kept a minute register of my business in every detail of culture, expenses, and produce, and an accurate comparison of the old and new husbandry.'[ ] it is said that though he really understood the theory and practice of farming he failed utterly in small economies. he was also far too vivacious and fond of society for the monotonous work of the plain farmer. at the same time his failures gave his observant mind a clear insight into the principles of agriculture. he was indefatigable in inquiries, researches, and experiments; and the best proof of the value of his works is that they were translated into russian, german, and french. he tells us in the preface to _rural economy_ that his constant employment for the previous seven years, 'when out of my fields, has been registering experiments.' his pet aversions were absentee landlords, obsolete methods of cultivation, wastes and commons, and small holdings (though towards the end of his life he changed his opinion as to the last); and the following, according to him, were the especially needed improvements of the time:-- the knowledge of good rotations of crops so as to do away with fallows, which was to be effected by the general use of turnips, beans, peas, tares, clover, &c., as preparation for white corn; covered drains; marling, chalking, and claying; irrigation of meadows; cultivation of carrots, cabbages, potatoes, sainfoin, and lucerne; ploughing, &c., with as few cattle as possible; the use of harness for oxen; cultivation of madden liquorice, hemp, and flax where suitable.[ ] above all, the cultivation of waste lands, which he was to live to see so largely effected. there was little knowledge of the various sorts of grasses at this time, and to young is due the credit of introducing the cocksfoot, and crested dog's tail. in he contemplated retiring to france or america, so heavy was taxation in england. 'men of large fortune and the poor', he said, in words which many to-day will heartily endorse, 'have reason to think the government of this country the first in the world; the middle classes bear the brunt.' perhaps to-day 'men of large fortune' have altered their opinion and only 'the poor' are satisfied. however, he only visited france, and gave us his vivid picture of that country before the great revolution. in the board of agriculture was formed, and young was made secretary with a salary of £ a year. about he wrote that the preceding half-century had been by far the most interesting in the progress of agriculture, and ascribes the increase of interest in it to the publication of his _tours_. george iii told him he always took with him the _farmer's letters_. the improvement, young said, had been largely due to individual effort, for commerce had been predominant in parliament and agriculture had begun to be neglected; a statement which, seeing that parliament was then almost entirely composed of landowners, must be accepted with some reserve. young died in , having been totally blind for some time, a misfortune which did not prevent him working hard. in his well-known _tours_ he often had much difficulty in obtaining information, and confesses that he was forced to make more than one farmer drunk before he got anything out of him. the exodus from the country to the towns then, as so often in history, was noted by thinking people, but young says it was merely a natural consequence of the demand for profitable employment and was not to be regretted; but he wrote in a time when the country population was still numerous, and there was little danger of england becoming, what she is to-day, a country without a solid foundation, with no reservoir of good country blood to supply the waste of the towns. when young began to write, the example of townshend and his contemporaries was being followed on all sides, and this good movement was stimulated by young's writings. farming was the reigning taste of the day. there was scarce a nobleman without his farm, most of the country gentlemen were farmers, and attended closely to their business instead of leaving it to stewards, 'who governed in matters of wheat and barley as absolutely as in covenants of leases,' and the squire delighted in setting the country a staring at the novelties he introduced. even the stable and the kennel were ousted by farming from rural talk,[ ] and citizens who breathed the smoke of london five days a week were farmers the other two, and many young fellows of small fortune who had been brought up in the country took farms, and the fashion was followed by doctors, lawyers, clergymen, soldiers, sailors, and merchants. the american and french war of - and the great conflict with france from to were, however, to divert many of the upper classes from agriculture, for they very properly thought their duty was then to fight for their country; so that we again have numerous complaints of agents and stewards managing estates who knew nothing whatever about their business. it was not to be wondered at that all this activity brought about considerable progress. 'there have been,' said young about , 'more experiments, more discoveries, and more general good sense displayed within these ten years than in a hundred preceding ones,' a statement which perhaps did not attach sufficient importance to the work of townshend and his contemporaries, and to the 'new husbandry' of tull, which young did not appreciate at its full value.[ ] the place subsequently taken by the board of agriculture, and in our time by the royal agricultural society, was then occupied by the society for the encouragement of arts, manufactures, and commerce, which offered premiums for such objects as the cultivation of carrots in the field for stock, then little practised; for gathering the different sorts of grass seeds and keeping them clean and free from all mixture with other grasses, a very rare thing at that time; for experiments in the comparative merits of the old and new husbandry; for the growth of madder; £ for a turnip-slicing machine, then apparently unknown, and for experiments whether rolling or harrowing grass land was better, 'at present one of the most disputed points of husbandry.' in spite of this progress, many crops introduced years before were unknown to many farmers. sainfoin, cabbages, potatoes, carrots, were not common crops in every part of england, though every one of them was well known in some part or other; not more than half, or at most two-thirds, of the nation cultivated clover. many, however, of the nobility and gentry in the north had grown cabbages with amazing success, lately, guineas an acre being sometimes the value of the crop. half the cultivated lands, in spite of the progress of enclosure for centuries, were still farmed on the old common-field system. when anything out of the common was to be done on common farms, all common work came to a standstill. 'to carry out corn stops the ploughs, perhaps at a critical season; the fallows are frequently seen overrun with weeds because it is seed time; in a word, some business is ever neglected.'[ ] as for the outcry against enclosing commons and wastes, people forgot that the farmers as well as the poor had a right of common and took special care by their large number of stock to starve every animal the poor put on the common.[ ] about the same time that young wrote these words there appeared a pamphlet written by 'a country gentleman' on the advantages and disadvantages of enclosing waste lands and common fields, which puts the arguments against enclosure very forcibly.[ ] the writer's opinion was that it was clearly to the landowner's gain to promote enclosures, but that the impropriator of tithes reaped most benefit and the small freeholder least, because his expenses increased inversely to the smallness of his allotment. as to diminution of employment, he reckoned that enclosed arable employed about ten families per , acres, open field arable twenty families, a statement opposed to the opinion of nearly all the agricultural writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. it is surely an incontestable fact that enclosed land meant much better tillage, and better tillage meant more labour, the excessive amount of fallow necessary under the common-field system, from the inability to grow roots except by special arrangement, is alone enough to prove this. the same writer admitted that common pastures, wastes, &c., employed only one family per , acres, but enclosed pasture five families per , acres, and enclosed wastes sixteen families. a 'country farmer', who wrote in , states that many of the small farmers displaced by enclosures sold their few possessions and emigrated to america.[ ] the growing manufacturing towns also absorbed a considerable number. that there was a considerable amount of hardship inflicted on small holders and commoners is certain, but industrial progress is frequently attended by the dislocation of industry and consequent distress; the introduction of machinery, for instance, often causing great suffering to hand-workers, but eventually benefiting the whole community. how many men has the self-binding reaping machine thrown for a time out of work? so enclosure caused distress to many individuals, but was for the good of the whole nation. the history of enclosure is really the history of progress in farming; the conversion of land badly tilled in the old common fields, and of waste land little more valuable than the prairies; into well-managed fruitful farms. that much of the common-field land when enclosed was laid down to grass is certainly true, and certainly inevitable if it paid best under grass.[ ] no one can expect the holders of land naturally best suited for grass to keep it under tillage for philanthropic purposes. a vast number of the commoners too were idle thriftless beings, whose rights on a few acres enabled them to live a life of pilfering and poaching; and it was a very good thing when such people were induced to lead a more regular and respectable existence. the great blot on the process was that it made the english labourer a landless man. compensation was given him at the time of enclosure in the shape of allotments or sums of money, but the former he was generally compelled to give up owing to the expense he had been put to at allotment, and the latter he often spent in the public-house. at this date the proprietors of large estates who wished to enclose by act of parliament, generally settled all the particulars among themselves before calling any meeting of the rest of the proprietors. the small proprietor had very little say either in regulating the clauses of the act, or in the choice of commissioners. any owner of one-fifth of the land, however, could negative the measure and often used his right to impose unreasonable clauses. it is well known that the legal expenses and fencing were very costly. the enclosure commissioners too often divided the land in an arbitrary and ignorant manner, and there was no appeal from them except by filing a bill in chancery. accounts were hardly ever shown by the commissioners, and if a proprietor refused to pay the sums levied they were empowered to distrain immediately. all these evils attending enclosure made many who were eager to benefit by it very chary in commencing it.[ ] then, as now, one of the commonest errors of farmers was that of taking too much land for their capital; young considered £ an acre necessary on an average, equal to more than £ to-day; a sum which few farmers at any time have in hand when they take a farm. as for gentlemen farmers, who were then rushing into the business, they were warned that they had no chance of success if they kept any company or amused themselves with anything but their own business, unless perhaps they had a good bailiff. lime, one of the most ancient of manures, was then the most commonly used in england, to loads an acre being a common dressing, but many farmers were very ignorant of its proper use. marl, which to-day is seldom used, was considered to last for twenty years, though for the first year no benefit was observable, and very little the second and the third, its value then becoming very apparent. in the last five years, however, its value was nearly worn out. but it was much to be questioned whether marl in its best state anywhere yields an increase of produce equal to that which a good manuring of dung will give.[ ] marl was applied in huge quantities on arable and grass, and often made the latter look like arable land so thickly was it spread. at this date ( ) the average crops on poor, and on good land were[ ]: on land worth s. an acre: wheat bushels per acre. rye " " barley " " oats " " turnips, to the value of £ . clover " " on land worth s. an acre: wheat bushels per acre. barley " " oats " " beans " " turnips, to the value of £ . clover " " the cost of cultivating the latter, which may be given in full, as it affords an excellent example of the price of growing various crops, and the methods of their cultivation at this period, was as follows: first year, turnips: £ s. d. rent tithe and 'town charges' five ploughings, @ s. three harrowings seed sowing twice hand-hoeing ----------- £ =========== it will be noticed there was no horse-hoeing. second year, barley: £ s. d. rent, tithe, &c. three ploughings three harrowings seed sowing mowing and harvesting water furrowing threshing, @ s. a quarter ----------- £ =========== third year, clover: £ s. d. rent, &c. seed sowing ---------- £ ========== fourth year,[ ] wheat: £ s. d. rent, &c. one ploughing three harrowings seed sowing water furrowing thistling reaping and harvesting threshing, @ s. a quarter ---------- £ ========== fifth year, beans: £ s. d. rent, &c. two ploughings seed, bushels sowing twice hand-hoeing twice horse-hoeing reaping and harvesting threshing ---------- £ ========== sixth year, oats: £ s. d. rent, &c. once ploughing two harrowings four bushels of seed sowing mowing and harvesting threshing, @ s. a quarter ---------- £ ========== good land at a high rent is always better than poor land at a low rent; the average profit per acre on s. land was then about s. d., on s. land, s. grass was much more profitable than tillage, the profit on acres of arable in nine years amounted to £ , whereas on grass it was £ , or s. d. an acre per annum for the former and s. for the latter.[ ] yet dairying, at all events, was then on the whole badly managed and unprofitable. the average cow ate - / acres of grass, and the rent of this with labour and other expenses made the cost £ a year per cow, and its average produce was not worth more than £ s. d.[ ] this scanty profit was due to the fact that few farmers used roots, cabbages, &c., for their cows, and to their wrong management of pigs, kept on the surplus dairy food. by good management the nett return could be made as much as £ s. d. per cow. the management of sheep in the north of england was wretched. in northumberland the profit was reckoned at s. a head, partly derived from cheese made from ewes' milk. the fleeces averaged lb., and the wool was so bad as not to be worth more than d. or d. per lb.[ ] pigs could be made to pay well, as the following account testifies: food and produce of a sow in one year ( ), which produced seven pigs in april and eleven in october: dr. £ s. d. grains cutting a litter quarters peas bushels barley expenses in selling[ ] bushels peas ---------- £ ========== cr. £ s. d. a pig a fat hog another, lb. wt. another, lb. wt. heads fat hogs fat hog young pigs ----------- £ ----------- profit £ =========== we have seen that young thought little of the 'new husbandry'; he does not even give tull the credit of inventing the drill: 'mr. tull perhaps _again_ invented it. he practised it upon an extent of ground far beyond that of any person preceding him: the spirit of drilling died with mr. tull and was not revived till within a few years.'[ ] it was doubtful if acres of corn were then annually drilled in england. lately drilling had been revived and there were keen disputes as to the old and new methods of husbandry, the efficacy of the new being far from decided. the cause of the slow adoption of drill husbandry was the inferiority of the drills hitherto invented. they were complex in construction, expensive, and hard to procure. it seemed impossible to make a drill or drill plough as it was called, for such it then was--a combination of drill, plough, and harrow--capable of sowing at various depths and widths, and at the same time light enough for ordinary use. all the drills hitherto made were too light to stand the rough use of farm labourers: 'common ploughs and harrows the fellows tumble about in so violent a manner that if they were not strength itself they would drop to pieces. in drawing such instruments into the field the men generally mount the horses, and drag them after them; in passing gateways twenty to one they draw them against the gate post.' some of 'these fellows' are still to be seen! another defect in drilling was that the drill plough filled up all the water furrows, which, at a time when drainage was often neglected, were deemed of especial importance, and they all had to be opened again. further, said the advocates of the old husbandry, it was a question whether all the horse-hoeings, hand-hoeings, and weedings of the new husbandry, though undoubtedly beneficial, really paid. it was very hard to get enough labourers for these operations. with more reason they objected to the principles of discarding manure and sowing a large number of white straw crops in succession, but admitted the new system was admirably adapted for beans, turnips, cabbages, and lucerne. however, there were many followers of tull. the author of _dissertations on rural subjects_[ ] thought the drill plough an excellent invention, as it saved seed and facilitated hoeing; but he said tull's drill was defective in that the distances between the rows could not be altered, a defect which the writer claims to have remedied. young's desire for a stronger drill seems to have been soon answered, as the same writer says the barrel drill invented by du-hamel and improved by craik was strong, cheap, and easily managed. the tendency of the latter half of the century was decidedly in favour of larger farms; it was a bad thing for the small holders, but it was an economic tendency which could not be resisted. the larger farmers had more capital, were more able and ready to execute improvements; they drained their land, others often did not; having sufficient capital they were able both to buy and sell to the best advantage and not sacrifice their produce at a low price to meet the rent, as the small farmer so often did and does. they could pay better wages and so get better men, kept more stock and better, and more efficient implements. they also had a great advantage in being able by their good teams to haul home plenty of purchased manure, which the small farmer often could not do. the small tenants, who had no by-industry, then, as now, had to work and live harder than the ordinary labourer to pay their way. young calculated as early as that the average size of farms over the greater part of england was slightly under acres.[ ] in his _tour in france_ young, speaking of the smallness of french farms as compared with english ones, and of the consequent great inferiority of french farming, says, 'where is the little farmer to be found who will cover his whole farm with marl at the rate of to tons per acre; who will drain his land at the expense of £ to £ an acre; who will, to improve the breed of his sheep, give , guineas for the use of a single ram for a single season; who will send across the kingdom to distant provinces for new implements and for men to use them? deduct from agriculture all the practices that have made it flourishing in this island, and you have precisely the management of small farms.' in the _report of the commission on the agriculture of france_[ ] agreed with young, noting the grave consequences of the excessive subdivision of land, loss of time, waste of labour, difficulties in rotation of crops, and of liberty of cultivation. for stocking an arable farm of acres young considered the following expenditure necessary, the items of which give us interesting information as to prices about :-- £ s. d. rent, tithe, and town charges for first year household furniture wagon cart with ladders tumbril roller for broad lands (of wood) " narrow " " cart harness for horses plough " " ploughs a pair of harrows screen, bushel, fan, sieves, forks, rakes, &c. dairy furniture sacks horses wear and tear, and shoeing one year keep of horses from michaelmas to may day, @ s. d. each a week cows sheep one sow one servant's board and wages for one year a labourer's wages for one year seed for first year, acres, @ s. d. harvest labour ------------ £ ============ or nearly £ an acre. about the same date the _complete english farmer_ reckoned that the occupier of a farm of acres ( arable, pasture), ought to have a capital of £ , , and estimated that, after paying expenses and maintaining his family, he could put by £ a year; 'but this capital was much beyond what farmers in general can attain to.'[ ] the controversy of horses versus oxen for working purposes was still raging, and young favoured the use of oxen; for the food of horses cost more, so did their harness and their shoeing, they are much more liable to disease, and oxen when done with could be sold for beef. one stout lad, moreover, could attend to or oxen, for all he had to do was to put their fodder in the racks and clean the shed; no rubbing, no currying or dressing being necessary. no beasts fattened better than oxen that had been worked. a yoke of oxen would plough as much as a pair of horses and carry a deeper and truer furrow, while they were just as handy as horses in wagons, carts, rollers, &c. william marshall, the other great agricultural writer of the end of the eighteenth century, agreed with young, yet in spite of all these advantages horses were continually supplanting oxen. among the improvements in agriculture was the introduction of broad-wheeled wagons; narrow-wheeled ones were usual, and these on the turnpikes were only allowed to be drawn by horses so that the load was small, but broad-wheeled wagons might use horses. the cost of the latter was £ against £ for the former.[ ] young's opinion of the labouring man, like tull's, was not a high one. 'i never yet knew', he says, 'one instance of any poor man's working diligently while young and in health to escape coming to the parish when ill or old.' this is doubtless too sweeping. there must have been others like george barwell, whom marshall tells of in his _rural economy of the midlands_, who had brought up a family of five or six sons and daughters on a wage of s. to s. a week, and after they were out in the world saved enough to support him in his old age. the majority, however, long before the crushing times of the french war, seem to have been thoroughly demoralized by indiscriminate parish relief, and habitually looked to the parish to maintain them in sickness and old age. cullum[ ] a few years later, remarks on the poor demanding assistance without the scruple and delicacy they used to have, and says 'the present age seems to aim at abolishing all subordination and dependence and reducing all ranks as near a level as possible.'! idleness, drunkenness, and what was then often looked on with disgust and contempt, excessive tea-drinking, were rife. tea then was very expensive, s. or s. a lb. being an ordinary price, so that the poor had to put up with a very much adulterated article, most pernicious to health. the immoderate use of this was stated to have worse effects than the immoderate use of spirits. the consumption of it was largely caused by the deficiency of the milk supply, owing to the decrease of small farms; the large farmers did not retail such small commodities as milk and butter, but sent them to the towns so that the poor often went without.[ ] in young found wages differing according to the distance from london[ ]:-- s. d. miles from london they were per week from to " " " " to " " " " to " " " giving an average of s. d. which, however, was often exceeded as there was much piece-work which enabled the men to earn more. young drew up a dietary for a labourer, his wife, and a family of three children, which he declared to be sufficient:-- £ s. d. food, s. per week[ ]; per year rent clothes soap and candles loss of time through illness, and medicine fuel ---------- £ ========== £ s. d. the man's wages were, @ s. d. a day, for the year the woman's, @ - / d. a day, for the year the boy of fifteen could earn the boy of ten could earn ---------- £ ========== which would give the family a surplus of £ s. d. a year. what the man's food should consist of is shown by a list of 'seven days' messes for a stout man':-- s. d. st day. lb. of bread made of wheat, rye, and potatoes--'no bread exceeds it' cheese, oz. @ d. a lb / beer, quarts nd day. three messes of soup rd day. rice pudding - / th day. / lb. of fat meat and potatoes baked together - / beer th day. rice milk th day. same as first day - / th day. potatoes, fat meat, cheese, and beer --------- - / ========= as young was a man of large practical experience we may assume that this, though it seems a very insufficient diet, was not unlike the food of some labourers at that date. however, the bread he recommends was not that eaten by a large number of them. eden[ ] states that in about half the people of england were estimated to be using wheaten bread, and at the end of the century, although prices had risen greatly, he says that in the home counties wheaten bread was universal among the peasant class. young, indeed, acknowledges that many insisted on wheaten bread.[ ] in suffolk, according to cullum,[ ] pork and bacon were the labourer's delicacies, bread and cheese his ordinary diet. the north of england was more thrifty than the south. at the end of the eighteenth century barley and oaten bread were much used there. lancashire people fed largely on oat bread, leavened and unleavened; the rd regiment, which went by the name of the 'havercake lads', was usually recruited from the west riding where oat bread was in common use, and was famous for having fine men in its ranks.[ ] the labourers of the north were also noted for their skill in making soups in which barley was an important ingredient. in many of the southern counties tea was drunk at breakfast, dinner, and supper by the poor, often without milk or sugar; but alcoholic liquors were also consumed in great quantities, the southerner apparently always drinking a considerable amount, the northerner at rare intervals drinking deep. the drinking in cider counties seems always to have been worse as far as quantity goes than elsewhere, and the drink bills on farms were enormous. marshall says that in gloucestershire drinking a gallon 'bottle', generally a little wooden barrel, at a draught was no uncommon feat; and in the vale of evesham a labourer who wanted to be even with his master for short payment emptied a two-gallon bottle without taking it from his lips. even this feat was excelled by 'four well-seasoned yeomen, who resolved to have a fresh hogshead tapped, and setting foot to foot emptied it at one sitting.'[ ] yet in the beer-drinking counties great quantities were consumed; a gallon a day per man all the year round being no uncommon allowance.[ ] the superior thrift of the north was shown in clothes as well as food, the midland and southern labourer at the end of the century buying all his clothes, the northerner making them almost all at home; there were many respectable families in the north who had never bought a pair of stockings, coat, or waistcoat in their lives, and a purchased coat was considered a mark of extravagance and pride. perhaps the most remarkable feature of young's dietary is that green vegetables are absolutely ignored. the peasant was supposed to need them as little as in the middle ages. however, young admits that very few labourers lived as cheaply as this, and he found the actual ordinary budget for the same family to be:-- £ s. d. food, per week, s. d.; per year beer " s. d. " soap and candles rent clothes fuel illness, &c. infant ---------- £ ========== this, with the same income as before, left him with a surplus of £ s. d.; but as it was not likely his wife could work all the year round, or that both his eldest children should be boys, it appears that his expenses must often have exceeded his income. this being so, it is not surprising that he was often drunken and reckless, and ready to come on the parish for relief. to labour incessantly, often with wife and boys, to live very poorly, yet not even make both ends meet, was enough to kill all spirit in any one. a great evil from which the labourer suffered was the restrictions thrown on him of settling in another parish. if he desired to take his labour to a better market he often found it closed to him. his marriage was discouraged,[ ] because a single man did not want a cottage and a married one did. to ease the rates there was open war against cottages, and many were pulled down.[ ] if a labourer in a parish to which he did not legally belong signified his intention of marrying, he immediately had notice to quit the parish and retire to his own, unless he could procure a certificate that neither he nor his would be chargeable. if he went to his own parish he came off very badly, for they didn't want him, and cottages being scarce he probably had to put up with sharing one with one or more families. sensible men cried out for the total abolition of the poor laws, the worst effects of which were still to be felt. yet there was a considerable migration of labour at harvest time when additional hands were needed. labourers came from neighbouring counties, artisans left their workshops in the towns, scots came to the northern counties, welshmen to the western, and irishmen appeared in many parts; and they were as a rule supplied by a contractor.[ ] london was regarded as a source of great evil to the country by attracting the young and energetic thither. it used, men said, to be no such easy matter to get there when a stage coach was four or five days creeping miles and fares were high; but in a country fellow miles from london jumped on a coach in the morning and for s. or s. got to town by night, 'and ten times the boasts are sounded in the ears of country fools by those who have seen london to induce them to quit their healthy clean fields for a region of dirt, stink, and noise.' a prejudice might well have been entertained against the metropolis at this time, for it literally devoured the people of england, the deaths exceeding the births by , a year. one of the causes that had hitherto kept people from london was the dread of the small-pox, but that was now said to be removed by inoculation. among the troubles farmers had to contend with were the audacious depredations caused by poachers, generally labourers, who swarmed in many villages. they took the farmer's horses out of his fields after they had done a hard day's work and rode them all night to drive the game into their nets, blundering over the hedges, sometimes staking the horses, riding over standing corn, or anything that was cover for partridges, and when they had sold their ill-gotten game spent the money openly at the nearest alehouse. then they would go back and work for the farmers they had robbed, drunk, asleep, or idle the whole day. the subscription packs of foxhounds were also a great nuisance, many of the followers being townsmen who bored through hedges and smashed the gates and stiles, conduct not unknown to-day. in spite of these drawbacks the long period of great abundance from to and the consequent cheapness of food with an increase of wages was attended with a great improvement in the condition and habits of the people. adam smith refers to 'the peculiarly happy circumstances of the country'; hallam described the reign of george ii as 'the most prosperous period that england has ever experienced'[ ]; and it was young's opinion about that england was in a most rich and flourishing situation, 'her agriculture is upon the whole good and spirited and every day improving, her industrious poor are well fed, clothed, and lodged at reasonable rates, the prices of all necessaries being moderate, our population increasing, the price of labour generally high.'[ ] the great degree of luxury to which the country had arrived within a few years 'is not only astonishing but almost dreadful to think of. time was when those articles of indulgence which now every mechanic aims at the possession of were enjoyed only by the baron or lord.'[ ] great towns became the winter residence of those who could not afford london, and the country was said to be everywhere deserted, an evil largely attributed to the improvement of posting and coaches. the true country gentleman was seldom to be found, the luxuries of the age had softened down the hardy roughness of former times and the 'country, like the capital, is one scene of dissipation.' the private gentleman of £ or £ a year must have his horses, dogs, carriages, pictures, and parties, and thus goes to ruin. the articles of living, says the same writer, were per cent. dearer than some time back. this is a very different picture from that in which young represents every one rushing into farming, but no doubt depicts one phase of national life. an excellent observer[ ] noticed in that the preceding forty or fifty years had witnessed the total destruction in england of the once common type of the small country squire. he was:-- 'an independent gentleman of £ per annum who commonly appeared in a plain drab or plush coat, large silver buttons, a jockey cap, and rarely without boots. his travels never exceeded the distance of the county town, and that only at assize or session time, or to attend an election. once a week he commonly dined at the next market town with the attorneys and justices. he went to church regularly, read the weekly journal, settled the parochial disputes, and afterwards adjourned to the neighbouring alehouse, where he generally got drunk for the good of his country. he was commonly followed by a couple of greyhounds and a pointer, and announced his arrival at a neighbour's house by smacking his whip and giving a view halloo. his drink was generally ale, except on christmas day, the fifth of november, or some other gala day, when he would make a bowl of strong brandy. the mansion of one of these squires was of plaster striped with timber, not unaptly called callimanco work, or of red brick with large casemented bow windows; a porch with seats in it and over it a study: the eaves of the house well inhabited by swallows, and the court set round with hollyhocks; near the gate a horse-block for mounting. the hall was furnished with flitches of bacon, and the mantelpiece with guns and fishing-rods of different dimensions, accompanied by the broadsword, partisan, and dagger borne by his ancestor in the civil wars. against the wall was posted king charles's _golden rules_, vincent wing's _almanac_ and a portrait of the duke of marlborough; in his window lay baker's _chronicle_, foxe's _book of martyrs_, glanvill _on apparitions_, quincey's _dispensatory_, _the complete justice_, and a _book of farriery_. in a corner by the fireside stood a large wooden two-armed chair with a cushion, and within the chimney corner were a couple of seats. here at christmas he entertained his tenants, assembled round a glowing fire made of the roots of trees; and told and heard the traditionary tales of the village about ghosts and witches while a jorum of ale went round. these men and their houses are no more.' the farmer, in some parts at all events, was becoming a more civilized individual; the late race had lived in the midst of their enlightened neighbours like beings of another order[ ]; in their personal labour they were indefatigable, in their fare hard, in their dress homely, in their manners rude. the french and american war of - was a very prosperous time, and the farmer's mode of living greatly improved. farmhouses in england, it was noticed, were in general well furnished with every convenient accommodation. into many of them a 'barometer had of late years been introduced'. the teapot and the mug of ale jointly possessed the breakfast table, and meat and pudding smoked on the board every noon. formerly one might see at church what was the cut of a coat half a century ago, now dress was spruce and modern.[ ] as a proof of the spirit of improvement among farmers, marshall instances the custom in the midlands of placing their sons as pupils on other farms to widen their experience. 'their entertainments are as expensive as they are elegant, for it is no uncommon thing for one of these new-created farmers to spend £ or £ , at one entertainment, and to have the most expensive wines; to set off the entertainment in the greatest splendour an elegant sideboard of plate is provided in the newest fashion.'[ ] as to dress, no one could tell the farmer's daughter from the duke's. marshall noticed that in warwickshire the harness of the farmer's teams was often ridiculously ornamented, and the horses were overfed and underworked to save their looks. before enclosure the farmer entertained his friends with bacon fed by himself, washed down with ale brewed from his own malt, in a brown jug, or a glass if he was extravagant. he wore a coat of woollen stuff, the growth of his own flock, spun by his wife and daughters, his stockings came from the same quarter, so did the clothes of his family. some of these farmers were doing their share in helping the progress of agriculture. in joseph elkington, of princethorpe in warwickshire, was the first to practise the under drainage of sloping land that was drowned by the bursting of springs. he drained some fields at princethorpe which were very wet, and dug a trench or feet deep for this purpose; but finding this did not reach the principal body of subjacent water, he drove an iron bar feet below the bottom of his trench and on withdrawing it the water gushed out. he was thus led to combine the system of cutting drains, aided when necessary by auger holes. his main principles were three: ( ) finding the main spring, or cause of the mischief. ( ) taking the level of that spring and ascertaining its subterranean bearings, for if the drain is cut a yard below the line of the spring the water issuing from it cannot be reached, but on ascertaining the line by levelling the spring can be cut effectually. ( ) using the auger to tap the spring when the drain was not deep enough for the purpose.[ ] it was owing to the board of agriculture at the end of the century that he obtained the vote of £ , from parliament, and a skilful surveyor was appointed to observe his methods and give them to the public, for he was too ignorant himself to give an intelligible account of his system. after the publication of the report his system was followed generally until smith of deanston in gave the method now in use to his country. robert bakewell, who did more to improve live stock than any other man, was born at dishley, leicestershire, in , and succeeding to the management of his father's farm in began to make experiments in breeding.[ ] he scorned the old idea that the blood must be constantly varied by the mixture of different breeds, and his new system differed from the old in two chief points: ( ) small versus large bone, and consequently a greater proportion of flesh and a greater tendency to fatten; ( ) permissible in-breeding versus perpetual crossing with strange breeds. he took immense pains in selecting the best animals to breed from, and had at dishley a museum of skeletons and pickled specimens for the comparison of one generation with another, and he conducted careful post-mortem examinations on his stock. his great production was the new leicester breed of sheep,[ ] which in half a century spread over every part of the united kingdom, as well as to europe and america, and gave england lb. of meat where she had one before. sheep at this time were divided into two main classes: ( ) short-woolled or field sheep, fed in the open fields; ( ) long-woolled or pasture sheep, fed in enclosures. that they were not at a very high state of perfection may be gathered from this description of the chief variety of the latter, the 'warwickshire' breed: 'his frame large and loose, his bones heavy, his legs long and thick, his chine as well as his rump as sharp as a hatchet, his skin rattling on his ribs like a skeleton covered with parchments.' the origin of the new leicester sheep is uncertain, but apparently the old lincoln breed was the basis of it, though this, like other large breeds of english sheep, was itself an introduction of the last half century. the new sheep was described as having a clean head, straight broad flat back, barrel-like body, fine small eyes, thin feet, mutton fat, fine-grained and of good flavour, wool lb. to the fleece, and wethers at two years old weighed from to lb. a quarter. by his rams were hired for guineas a season, and soon after he made £ , a year by their hire, one named 'two-pounder' bringing him , guineas in one year. one of his theories was that the poorer the land the more it demanded well-made sheep, which is no doubt true to a certain extent; but it has been proved conclusively since that the quality of the breed gradually drops to the level of the land unless artificially assisted. at his death he left two distinct breeds of sheep, for he improved on his own new leicester, so that the improved became the 'new leicester' and the former the 'old leicester.' however, at the time and, afterwards, his sheep were generally called 'new leicesters', and sometimes the 'dishley breed'. there was much prejudice among farmers against the new breed; in the midlands most of the farmers would have nothing to do with them, and 'their grounds were stocked with creatures that would disgrace the meanest lands in the kingdom.' yet in april, , yearling wethers of the new breed were sold for s. while those of the old were s. the cattle which he set to work to improve were the famous old longhorn breed, the prevailing breed of the midlands, which had already been considerably improved by webster of canley in warwickshire, and others, especially in lancashire and the north. the kind of cattle esteemed hitherto had been 'the large, long-bodied, big-boned, coarse, flat-sided kind, and often lyery or black-fleshed.'[ ] he founded his herd upon two heifers of webster's and a bull from westmoreland, and from these bred all his cattle. the celebrated bull 'twopenny' was a son of the westmoreland bull and one of these heifers, who came to be celebrated in agricultural history as 'old comely', for she was slaughtered at the age of twenty-six. he bred his cattle so that they produced an enormous amount of fat, as hitherto there had been a difficulty in producing animals to fatten readily; but this he pushed to too great an extreme, so that there has been a reaction. the following is a description of a six-year-old bull, got by 'twopenny' out of a canley cow: 'his head, chest, and neck remarkably fine and clean; his chest extraordinarily deep; his brisket bearing down to his knees; his chine thin, loin narrow at the chine, but remarkably wide at the hips. quarters long, round bones snug, but thighs rather full and remarkably let down. the carcase throughout, chine excepted, large, roomy, deep, and well spread.'[ ] the new longhorn, however good for the grazier, was not a good milker. bakewell was a great believer in straw as a food, and strongly objected to having it trodden into manure; his beasts were largely fed on it, in such small quantities that they greedily ate what was before them and wasted little. his activity was not confined to the breeding of cattle and sheep, for he also produced a breed of black horses, thick and short in the body, with very short legs and very powerful, two ploughing acres a day, a statement which seems much exaggerated; and was famous for his skill in irrigating meadows, by which he could cut grass four times a year. he was a firm believer in the wisdom of treating stock gently and kindly, and his sheep were kept as clean as racehorses. a visitor to dishley saw a bull of huge proportions, with enormous horns, led about by a boy of seven. he travelled much, and admired the farms of norfolk most in england, and those of holland and flanders abroad, founding his own system on these. it was his opinion that the devon breed of cattle were incapable of improvement by a cross of any other breed, and that from the west highland heifer the best breed of cattle might be produced. he died in , and apparently did not keep what he made, owing largely to his boundless hospitality, which had entertained russian princes, german royal dukes, english peers, and travellers from all countries. his breed of cattle has completely disappeared, unless traces survive in the lately resuscitated longhorn breed, but his principles are still acted upon, viz. the correlation of form, and the practice of consanguineous breeding under certain conditions. bakewell's earliest pupil was george culley, who devoted himself to improving the breed of cattle, and became one of the most famous agriculturists at the end of the eighteenth and the commencement of the nineteenth centuries. another farmer to whom english agriculture owes much was john ellman of glynde, born in , who by careful selection firmly established the reputation of the southdown sheep which had previously been hardly recognized. he was one of the founders of the smithfield cattle show in , which helped materially to improve the live stock of the country. the relations between landlord and tenant, judging from the accounts of contemporary writers, were generally good. leases were less frequent than agreements voidable by six months' notice on either side, and when there was a tenancy-at-will the tenant who entered as a young man was often expected to hand on the holding to his posterity, and therefore executed improvements at his own cost, so complete was the trust between landlord and tenant. tenants then did much that they would refuse to do to-day, as the following lease, common in the midlands in , shows[ ]: tenant agrees to take, &c., and to pay the stipulated rent within forty days, without any deduction for taxes, and double rent so long as he continues to hold after notice given. to repair buildings, accidents by fire excepted. to repair gates and fences. when required, to cut and plash the hedges, and make the ditches feet by feet, or pay or cause to be paid to the landlord s. per rood for such as shall not be done after three months' notice has been given in writing. not to break up certain lands specified in the schedule, 'under £ an acre.' not to plough more than a specified number of acres of the rest of the land in any one year, under the same penalty. to forfeit the same sum for every acre that shall be ploughed for any longer time than three crops successively, without making a clean summer fallow thereof after the third crop. and the like sum for every acre over and above a specified number (clover excepted) that shall be mown in any one year. at the time of laying down arable lands to grass he shall manure them with quarters of lime per acre, and sow the same with lb. of clover seeds, and one bushel of rye-grass per acre. shall spend on the premises all hay, straw, and manure, or leave them at the end of the term. tenant on quitting to be allowed for hay left on the premises, for clover and rye-grass sown in the last year, and for all fallows made within that time.'[ ] a striking picture of the conditions prevailing in many parts of england at this period is given by mr. loch in his account of the estates of the marquis of stafford.[ ] when this nobleman inherited his property in staffordshire and shropshire, much of the land, as in other parts of england, was held on leases for three lives, a system said to have been ruinous in its effects. although the farms were held at one-third of their value, nothing could be worse than the course of cultivation pursued, no improvements were carried out, and all that could be hoped for was that the land would not be entirely run out when the lease expired. the closes were extremely small and of the most irregular shape; the straggling fences occupied a large portion of the land; the crookedness of the ditches, by keeping the water stagnant, added to, rather than relieved, the wetness of the soil. farms were much scattered, and to enable the occupiers to get at their land, lanes wound backwards and forwards from field to field, covering a large quantity of ground. it is to the great credit of the marquis of stafford that this miserable state of things was swept away. lands were laid together, the size of the fields enlarged, hedges and ditches straightened, the drainage conducted according to a uniform plan, new and substantial buildings erected, indeed the whole countryside transformed. another evil custom on the estate had been to permit huts of miserable construction to be erected to the number of several hundreds by the poorest, and in many instances the most profligate, of the population. they were not regularly entered in the rental account, but had a nominal payment fixed upon them which was paid annually at the court leet. these cottages were built on the sides of the roads and on the lord's waste, which was gradually absorbed by the encroachment, which the occupiers of these huts made from time to time by enclosing the land that lay next them. these wretched holdings gradually fell into the hands of a body of middlemen, who underlet them at an extravagant rent to the occupiers; and these men began to consider that they had an interest independent of the landlord, and had at times actually mortgaged, sold, and devised it. this abuse was also put an end to, the cottagers being made immediate tenants of the landlord, to their great gain, but to this day small aggregations of houses in shropshire called 'heaths' mark the encroachments of these squatters on the roadside wastes. this class, indeed, has been well known in england since the middle ages. norden speaks of them in , and so do many subsequent writers. numbers of small holdings exist to-day obtained in this manner, and the custom must to some extent have counteracted the effect of enclosure.[ ] the roads of england up to the end of the eighteenth century were generally in a disgraceful condition. some improvement was effected in the latter half of the century, but it was not until the days of telford and macadam that they assumed the appearance with which we are familiar; and long after that, though the main roads were excellent, the by-roads were often atrocious, as readers of such books as _handley cross_, written in the middle of the nineteenth century, will remember. defoe in his tour in found the road between s. albans and nottingham 'perfectly frightful,' and the great number of horses killed by the 'labour of these heavy ways a great charge to the country'. he notes, however, an improvement from turnpikes. many of the roads were much worn by the continual passing of droves of heavy cattle on their way to london. sheep could not travel in the winter to london as the roads were too heavy, so that the price of mutton at that season in town was high. breeders were often compelled to sell them cheap before they got to london, because the roads became impassable for their flocks when the bad weather set in.[ ] in lord cathcart wrote in his diary: 'all went well until i arrived within miles of doncaster, when suddenly my horse fell with a crash and with me under him. i fancied myself crushed to death. i slept at doncaster and had a bad night. i was so bad all day, that i could get no further than wetherby. next day i was all right again. i had another terrible fall between north allerton and darlington, but was not a bit the worse.'[ ] it was owing to this defective condition of the roads that the prices of corn still differed greatly in various localities; there would be a glut in one place and a deficiency in another, with no means of equalizing matters. to the same cause must be attributed in great measure the slow progress made in the improvement of agriculture. new discoveries travelled very slowly; the expense of procuring manure beyond that produced on the farm was prohibitive; and the uncertain returns which arose from such confined markets caused the farmer to lack both spirit and ability to exert himself in the cultivation of his land.[ ] therefore farming was limited to procuring the subsistence of particular farms rather than feeding the public. the opposition to better roads was due in great measure to the landowners, who feared that if the markets in their neighbourhood were rendered accessible to distant farmers their estates would suffer. but they were not alone in their opposition; in the reign of queen anne the people of northampton were against any improvement in the navigation of the nene, because they feared that corn from huntingdon and cambridge would come up the river and spoil their market.[ ] horner was very enthusiastic over the improvement recently effected: 'our very carriages travel with almost winged expedition between every town of consequence in the kingdom and the metropolis' and inland navigation was soon likely to be established in every part, in consequence of which the demand for the produce of the land increased and the land itself became more valuable and rents rose. 'there never was a more astonishing revolution accomplished in the internal system of any country'; and the carriage of grain was effected with half the former number of horses. it is clear, however, that he was easily satisfied, and this opinion must be compared with the statements of young and marshall, who were continually travelling all over england some time after it was written, and found the roads, in many parts, in a very bad state. even near london they were often terrible. 'of all the cursed roads that ever disgraced this kingdom in the very ages of barbarism, none ever equalled that from billericay to the king's head at tilbury.[ ] it is for near miles so narrow that a mouse cannot pass by any carriage. i saw a fellow creep under his wagon to assist me to lift, if possible, my chaise over a hedge. the ruts are of an incredible depth, and everywhere chalk wagons were stuck fast till or horses tacked to each drew them out one by one' others said that turnpike roads were the enemies of cheapness; as soon as they opened up secluded spots, low prices vanished and all tended to one level. owing to the work of telford and macadam, the high roads by the first quarter of the nineteenth century attained a high pitch of excellence; and were thronged with traffic, coaches, postchaises, private carriages, equestrians, carts and wagons: so animated a sight that our forefathers built small houses called 'gazebos' on the sides of the road, where they met to take tea and watch the ever varying stream. it should not be forgotten, too, that the inns, where numbers of horses put up, were splendid markets for the farmers' oats, hay, and straw. the seasons in the latter part of the eighteenth century were distinguished for being frequently bad. in gilbert white wrote, 'such a run of wet seasons as we have had the last ten or eleven years would have produced a famine a century or two ago.' owing to the dearness of bread in riots broke out in many places, many lives were lost, and the gaols were filled with prisoners.[ ] was, however, a year of great fertility and prices were low all round: wheat s. d., barley s., oats s. d., wool s. a tod of lb.: and there were many complaints of ruined farmers and distressed landlords. though england was now becoming an importing country, the amount of corn imported was insufficient to have any appreciable effect on prices, which were mainly influenced by the seasons, as the following instance of the fluctuations caused by a single bad season ( ) testifies[ ]: prices after harvest of . prices after harvest of . £ s. d. £ s. d. wheat, per bushel wheat, per bushel barley " barley " dutch oats for seed dutch oats for seed clover seed, per cwt. clover seed, per cwt. the summer of was amazing and portentous and full of horrible phenomena, according to white, with a peculiar haze or smoky fog prevailing for many weeks. 'the sun at noon looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground and floors of rooms.' this was succeeded by a very severe winter, the thermometer on december being ° below zero; the worst since - . in occurred a severe drought in the summer, , horned cattle perishing for lack of water.[ ] in there was a remarkable change of temperature in the middle of june, the thermometer in a few days falling from ° to °, and the hills of kent and surrey were covered with snow. we have now to deal with one of those landowners whose great example is one of the glories of english agriculture. coke of holkham began his great agricultural work about on an estate where, as old lady townshend said, 'all you will see will be one blade of grass and two rabbits fighting for that;' in fact it was little better than a rabbit warren. it has been said that all the wheat consumed in the county of norfolk was at this time imported from abroad; but this is in direct contradiction to young's assertion, already noted, that there were in great quantities of wheat besides other crops in the county. coke's estate indeed seems to have been considerably behind many parts of the shire when he began his farming career.[ ] when coke came into his estate, in five leases which were about to expire the farms were held at s. d. an acre; and in the previous leases they had been s. d. an acre. we may judge of the quality of this land by comparing it with the average rent of s. which young says prevailed at this time. with a view to remedy this state of things he studied the agriculture of other counties, and his observations thereon reveal a very poor kind of farming in many places: in cheshire the rich pasture was wasted and the poor impoverished by sheer ignorance, in yorkshire luxuriant grass was understocked, in shropshire there were hardly any sheep; in his own part of norfolk the usual rotation was three white straw crops and then broadcast turnips.[ ] this coke changed to two white crops and two years pasture, and he dug up and brought to the surface the rich marl which lay under the flint and sand, so that clover and grasses began to grow. so successful was he in this that in he cut nearly tons of sainfoin from acres of land previously valued at s. an acre. he increased his flock of sheep from worthless animals with backs as narrow as rabbits, the description of the norfolk sheep of the day, to , good southdowns. encouraged by the duke of bedford, another great agriculturist, he started a herd of north devons, and, fattening two devons against one shorthorn, found the former weighed stone, the latter , and the shorthorn had eaten more food than the two devons. however, a single experiment of this kind is not very conclusive. the ploughs of norfolk were, as in many other counties, absurdly over-horsed, from three to five being used when only two were necessary; so coke set the example of using two whenever possible, and won a bet with sir john sebright by ploughing an acre of stiff land in hertfordshire in a day with a pair of horses. he transformed the bleak bare countryside by planting acres of trees every year until he had , acres well covered, and in had probably the unique experience of embarking in a ship which was built of oak grown from the acorns he had himself planted.[ ] between and (the date of his death) he is said to have spent £ , on improving his estate, without reckoning the large sums spent on his house and demesne, the home farm, and his marsh farm of acres. this expenditure paid in the long run, but when he entered upon it, it must have seemed very doubtful if this would be the case. a good understanding between landlord and tenant was the basis of his policy, and to further this he let his farms on long leases, at moderate rents, with few restrictions. when farmers improved their holdings on his estate the rent was not raised on them, so that the estate benefited greatly, and good tenants were often rewarded by having excellent houses built for them; so good, indeed, that his political opponents the tories, whom he, as a staunch whig detested, made it one of their complaints against him that he built palaces for farmhouses. at first he met with that stolid opposition to progress which seems the particular characteristic of the farmer. for sixteen years no one followed him in the use of the drill, though it was no new thing; and when it was adopted he reckoned its use spread at the rate of a mile a year. yet eventually he had his reward; his estate came to command the pick of english tenant farmers, who never left it except through old age, and would never live under any other landlord. even the radical cobbett, to whom, as to most of his party, landlords were, and are, the objects of inveterate hatred, said that every one who knew him spoke of him with affection. coke was the first to distinguish between the adaptability of the different kinds of grass seeds to different soils, and thereby made the hitherto barren lands of his estate better pasture land than that of many rich counties. carelessness about the quality of grasses sown was universal for a long time. the farmer took his seeds from his own foul hayrick, or sent to his neighbour for a supply of rubbish; even bakewell derived his stock from his hayloft. it was not until the society for the encouragement of arts offered prizes for clean hay seeds that some improvement was noticeable. in norfolk, as in other parts of england, there was at this time a strong prejudice against potatoes; the villagers of holkham refused to have anything to do with them, but coke's invincible persistency overcame this unreasoning dislike and soon they refused to do without them. coke was a great advocate for sowing wheat early and very thick in the rows, and for cutting it when ear and stem were green and the grain soft, declaring that by so doing he got s. a quarter more for it; he also believed in the early cutting of oats and peas. it was his custom to drill bushels of wheat per acre, which he said prevented tillering and mildew. he was the first to grow swedes on a large scale.[ ] the famous holkham sheep-shearings, known locally as 'coke's clippings', which began in and lasted till , arose from his practice of gathering farmers together for consultation on matters agricultural, and developed into world-famous meetings attended by all nationalities and all ranks, men journeying from america especially to attend them, and lafayette expressed it as one of his great regrets that he had never attended one. at these gatherings all were equal, the suggestion of the smallest tenant farmer was listened to with respect, and the same courtesy and hospitality were shown to all whether prince or farmer. at the last meeting in no less than , people were present. his skill, energy, and perseverance worked a revolution in the crops; his own wheat crops were from to coombs an acre, his barley sometimes nearly . the annual income of timber and underwood was £ , , and from to he increased the rent roll of his estate from £ , to £ , , which, even after allowing for the great advance in prices during that period, is a wonderful rise. it is a very significant fact that there was not an alehouse on the estate, and in connexion with this, and with the fact that his improvements made a constant demand for labour, we are not surprised to learn that the workhouse was pulled down as useless, for it was always empty, and this at a time when the working-classes of england were pauperized to an alarming degree. the year was one of terrible distress all over england in country and town, yet at his sheep-shearing of that year coke was enabled to say he had trebled the population of his estate and not a single person was out of employment, though everywhere else farmers were turning off hands and cutting down wages. principally through his agency, between and , no less than enclosures took place in norfolk, while between and , , , acres of waste land in england were brought under cultivation largely by his efforts. he is said, indeed, to have transformed agriculture throughout england, and, but for that, the country would not have been able to grow enough food for its support during the war with napoleon, and must have succumbed. footnotes: [ ] _northern tour_, i. . for an interesting account of young, see _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( rd series), iv. . [ ] in bradley had urged the use of liquorice, madder, woad, and caraway as improvers of the land in the preface to the _country gentleman_. [ ] _rural economy_ ( ), pp. - . trusler, who wrote in , mentions 'the general rage for farming throughout the kingdom.'--_practical husbandry_, p. i. [ ] in sir thomas bernard, travelling through northumberland, saw 'luxuriant plantations, neat hedges, rich crops of corn, comfortable farmhouses' in a county whereof the greater part was barren moor dearly rented at s. d. an acre thirty years before, and he said the county had increased in annual value fourfold, (contemporary ms., unpublished.) [ ] _rural economy_, p. . [ ] _farmer's letters_ ( rd ed.), p. . [ ] slater, _english peasantry and enclosure_, p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] young, _northern tour_, iv. , about estimates the cultivated land of england to be half pasture and half arable, and, in the absence of reliable statistics, his opinion on this point is certainly the best available. the conversion of a large portion of the richer land from arable to grass in the eighteenth century was compensated for, according to young, by the conversion, on enclosure, of poor sandy soils and heaths or moors into corn land. hasbach, _op. cit._ pp. - . [ ] young, _northern tour_, i. . [ ] _rural economy_, p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] cf. above, p. . [ ] _farmer's letters_ ( rd ed), p. . [ ] _northern tour_, iv. . [ ] ibid. iv. . [ ] this large item is explained by the fact that a bailiff was employed to sell, and no bailiff could find customers 'without feeling the same drought as stage coachmen when they see a sign'.--young, _farmer's letters_, p. . [ ] _rural economy_, p. . [ ] , pp. x-xiii. [ ] _northern tour_, iv. - . [ ] see _parliamentary reports commission_ ( ), xvi. . [ ] _dissertations on rural subjects_, p. . [ ] _farmer's letters_, p. . [ ] _history of hawsted_, p. . [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ p. ; kent, _hints to gentlemen_, p. . [ ] _southern tour_, p. . he says nothing of the manufacturing towns, which had not yet began to influence the wages of farm labourers near them as they soon afterwards did. [ ] some prices at this time were: bread per lb., d.; butter, - / d. to d.; cheese, - / d. to d.; beef, d. to d.; mutton, - / d. to d. [ ] _state of the poor_, i. . [ ] according to walter harte, though the yeoman in the middle of the seventeenth century ate bread of rye and barley (maslin), in even the poor cottagers looked upon it with horror and demanded best wheaten bread. yet in the quartern loaf in london was s. d.--tooke, _history of prices_, i. . [ ] _history of hawsted_, p. . [ ] eden, _state of the poor_, i. . [ ] _rural economy of gloucestershire_, i. . [ ] eden, _op. cit._ i. . [ ] _farmer's letters_, i. [ ] the pulling down of cottages began to be complained of in the seventeenth century; they harboured the poor, who were a charge upon the parish, and repairs were saved.--_transactions royal historical society_ (new series), xix. . [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ ; clarke, _general view of herefordshire_, p. ; marshall, _review of northern department_, p. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, i. ; hallam, _constitutional history_, iii. . [ ] _northern tour_, iv. . the increase in population in the first half of the eighteenth century was slow; after the peace of paris in , when the commerce and manufactures of the country were extended in an unprecedented degree, it was rapid. [ ] _the way to be rich and respectable_, london, . [ ] grose, _olio_, pp. - ; lecky, _history of england in eighteenth century_, vi. et. seq. [ ] cullum, _history of hawsted_, p. . [ ] cullum, _history of hawsted_, p. . [ ] _thoughts on enclosure, by a country farmer_ ( ), p. . [ ] johnstone, _account of elkington's draining_ ( ), pp. - . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( ), p. , from which this account of bakewell is mainly taken. [ ] according to some, joseph allom originated the breed, and bakewell vastly improved it. we may safely give the chief credit to so careful and gifted a breeder as bakewell. [ ] _culley on live stock_ ( ), p. . [ ] marshall, _rural economy of the midland counties_, i. . [ ] _victoria county history: warwickshire, agriculture_. [ ] in lancashire at this date it was not uncommon, when a tenant wished for his farm or a particular field to be improved by draining, marling, liming, or laying down to grass, to hand it over to the landlord for the process; who, when completed, returned it to the tenant with an advanced rent of per cent. upon the improvements.--marshall, _review of reports to board of agriculture_ (under lancashire). [ ] , p. et seq. [ ] see hasbach, _op. cit._ pp. sq.; _annals of agriculture_, xxxvi. ; scrutton, _commons and common fields_, p. . [ ] defoe, _tour_, ii. et seq. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( rd ser.), ii. . [ ] horner, _inquiry into the means of preserving the public roads_ ( ), pp. et seq. [ ] _victoria county history: northants._, ii. . [ ] young, _southern tour_ (ed. ), p. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, i. . it is difficult to understand the price of the quartern loaf, s. d. in , as wheat was only s. d. a quarter. prices of wheat in these years were: s. d. these returns differ from those of the board of agriculture; see appendix iii. [ ] _annals of agriculture_, iii. . [ ] baker, _seasons and prices_, pp. et seq. [ ] a. stirling, _coke of holkham_, i. . [ ] but in other parts of it the cultivation of turnips was well understood, for the _complete farmer_, s.v. _turnips_ (ed. ), says that about norfolk farmers boasted that turnips had doubled the value of their holdings, and norfolk men were famous for understanding hoeing and thinning, which were little practised elsewhere. further, young, _southern tour_, p. , says: 'the extensive use of turnips is known but little of except in norfolk, suffolk, and essex. i found no farmers but in these counties that understood anything of fatting cattle with them; feeding lean sheep being the only use they put them to.' [ ] a. stirling, _op. cit._ i. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( ), p. . chapter xvii - the great french war.--the board of agriculture.--high prices, and heavy taxation. this period, that of the great war with france, was one generally of high prices and prosperity for landowners and farmers. it was a prosperity, however, that was largely fictitious, and when the high prices of the war time were over, it was succeeded by many disastrous years. the prosperity, too, was also largely neutralized by a crushing weight of taxation and rates, while the labourer, although his wages were increased, found prices grow at a much greater rate, and it was, as thorold rogers has said, the most miserable period in his history. its commencement was marked by the foundation of the board of agriculture. on may , , sir john sinclair[ ] moved in the house of commons, 'that his majesty would take into his consideration the advantages which might be derived from the establishment of such a board, for though in some particular districts improved methods of cultivating the soil were practised, yet in the greatest part of these kingdoms the principles of agriculture are not sufficiently understood, nor are the implements of husbandry or the stock of the farmer brought to that perfection of which they are capable. his majesty's faithful commons were persuaded that if it were founded a spirit of improvement might be encouraged, which would result in important national benefits. the motion was carried by to . by its charter the board consisted of a president, ex-officio and ordinary members, with honorary and corresponding members. it was not a government department in the modern sense of the term, but a society for the encouragement of agriculture, as the royal society is for the encouragement of science. it was, indeed, supported by parliamentary grants, receiving a sum of £ , a year, but the government had only a limited control over its affairs through the ex-officio members, among whom were the archbishops of canterbury and york, the lord chancellor, the first lord of the admiralty, and the speaker. the first president was sir john sinclair, and the first secretary arthur young, with a salary of £ a year, which he thought insufficient.[ ] the first task of the new board was that of preparing statistical accounts of english agriculture, and it was intended to take in hand the commutation of tithes, which would have been a great boon to farmers, with whom the prevailing system of collecting tithes was very unpopular; but the primate's opposition stopped this. the board appointed lecturers, procured a reward for elkington for his draining system, encouraged macadam in his plans for improving roads, and meikle the inventor of the thrashing machine, and obtained the removal of taxes on draining tiles, and other taxes injurious to agriculture. it also recommended the allotment system, and sinclair desired acres and a cow for every industrious cottager. during the abnormally high prices of provisions from - , the quartern loaf in london in being s. d., though next year it dropped to - / d.,[ ] the board made experiments in making bread with substitutes for wheat, which resulted in a public exhibition of eighty different sorts of bread. its efforts were generally followed by increased zeal among agriculturists; but sinclair, an able but impetuous man,[ ] appears to have taken things too much into his own hands and pushed them too speedily. financial difficulties came, chiefly owing to the cost of the surveys, which had been hurried on with undue haste and often with great carelessness, the surveyors sometimes being men who knew nothing of the subject. sinclair was deposed from the presidency in , and succeeded by lord somerville. he again was succeeded by lord carrington, under whose presidency the board offered premiums (the first of £ ), owing to the high price of wheat and consequent distress, for essays on the best means of converting certain portions of grass land into tillage without exhausting the soil, and of returning the same to grass, after a certain period, in an improved state, or at least without injury. the general report, based on the information derived from these essays, states that no high price of corn or temporary distress would justify the ploughing up of old meadows or rich pastures, and that on certain soils well adapted to grass age improves the quality of the pasture to a degree which no system of management on lands broken up and laid down can equal. in spite of this, the cupidity of landowners and farmers, when wheat was a guinea a bushel or at prices near it, led to the ploughing up of much splendid grass land, which was never laid down again until, perhaps in recent years, owing to the low price of grain; so that some of the land at all events has, owing to bad times, returned to the state best suited to it. the board looked upon the enclosure and cultivation of waste lands, which in england they estimated at , , acres,[ ] as a panacea for the prevailing distress, and after much opposition they managed to pass through both houses in a bill cheapening and facilitating the process of parliamentary enclosure. this act, geo. iii, c. , 'extracted a number of clauses from various private acts and enacted that they should hold good in all cases where the special act did not expressly provide to the contrary.' another benefit rendered to agriculture was the establishment in of lectures on agricultural chemistry, the first lecturer engaged being mr., afterwards sir humphry, davy, who may be regarded as the father of agricultural chemistry. in sinclair was re-elected president, and his second term was mainly devoted to completing the agricultural surveys of the different counties, which, before his retirement in , he had with one or two exceptions the satisfaction of seeing finished. though over-impetuous, he rendered valuable service to agriculture, not only by his own energy but by stirring up energy in others; as william wilberforce the philanthrophist said, 'i have myself seen collected in that small room several of the noblemen and gentlemen of the greatest properties in the british isles, all of them catching and cultivating an agricultural spirit, and going forth to spend in the employment of labourers, and i hope in the improvement of land, immense sums which might otherwise have been lavished on hounds and horses, or squandered on theatricals.' among the numerous subjects into which the board inquired was the divining rod for finding water, which was tested in hyde park in , and successfully stood the test. in , davy the chemist reported on a substance in south america called 'guana', which he had analysed and found to contain one-third of ammoniacal salt with other salts and carbon, but its use was not to come for another generation. from the time of sinclair's retirement in the board declined. arthur young, its secretary, had become blind and his capacity therefore impaired. one year its lack of energy was shown by the return of £ , of the government grant to the treasury because it had nothing to spend it on. the prime minister, lord liverpool, was against it, the clergy feared the commutation of tithe which the board advocated, the legal profession was against the enclosure act, the landed interest thought the surveys were intended for purposes of taxation; and the grant being withdrawn, an effort to maintain the board by voluntary subscription failed, so that it dissolved in , after doing much valuable work for english agriculture. before its extinction it had held in , at aldridge's repository, the first national agricultural show. £ was given in prizes, and the entries included bulls, cows and heifers, several fat steers and cows, pens of leicester and cotswold rams and ewes; pens of down, and or pens of merino rams and ewes.[ ] most of the cattle shown were shorthorn, or durham, as they were then called, with some herefords, devons, longhorns, and alderneys. there were also exhibits of grass, turnip-seed, roots, and implements. this first national show had been preceded by many local ones.[ ] the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries saw the establishment all over england of farmers' clubs, cattle shows, and ploughing matches. the period now before us is marked by the great work of the collings, who next to bakewell did most to improve the cattle of the united kingdom. charles colling was born in , and the scene of his famous labours was ketton near darlington. he had learnt from bakewell the all-importance of quality in cattle, and determined to improve the local shorthorn breed near his own home, which had been described in as 'the most profitable beasts for the dairyman, butcher, and grazier, with their wide bags, short horns, and large bodies.' he was to make these 'profitable beasts' the best all-round cattle in the world, and to succeed where george culley had failed. the first bull of merit he possessed was 'hubback',[ ] described as a little yellow, red, and white five-year-old, which was mated with cows afterwards to be famous, named duchess, daisy, cherry, and lady maynard. at first colling was against in-breeding, and not until did he adopt it, more by accident than intention, but the experiment being successful he became an enthusiast. the experiment was the putting of phoenix to lord bolingbroke, who was both her half-brother and her nephew, and the result was the famous favourite. a young farmer who saw favourite and his sister at darlington in , was so struck by them that he paid colling the first guineas ever given for a shorthorn cow.[ ] one of hubback's daughters had in , by favourite, a roan calf which grew to be the celebrated durham ox, which at five and a half years weighed , lb., and was sold for £ . it was sold again for £ , the second purchaser refusing £ , for it, and taking it round england on show made a profitable business out of it, in one day in london making £ . a still more famous animal was the bull comet, born , which at the great sale in fetched , guineas. this bull was the crowning triumph of colling's career and the result of very close breeding, being described as the best bull ever seen, with a fine masculine head, broad and deep chest, shoulders well laid back, loins good, hind-quarters long, straight and well packed, thighs thick, with nice straight hocks and hind legs. perhaps colling thought he had pursued in-and-in breeding too far, at all events in he dispersed his famous herd. the sale was held at a most propitious time, for the durham ox had advertised the name of colling far and wide, and owing to the war prices were very high. comet fetched , guineas, and the other forty-seven lots averaged £ s. d., an unheard-of sale, yet all the auctioneer got was guineas, much of the work of the sale falling on the owner, and the former sold the stock with a sand-glass. after the sale at ketton, brampton, the farm of charles's brother robert, became the centre of interest to the shorthorn world. robert obtained excellent prices for his stock, five daughters of his famous bull george fetching guineas each. probably he, like his brother, pursued in-and-in breeding too far, and in there was another great sale; but war-prices had gone and agriculture was depressed, so that the cattle fetched less than at ketton, but still averaged £ s. d. for lots, and rams averaged £ s. d. robert died in , his brother in . it cannot be said that the collings were the founders of a new breed of cattle; they were the collectors and preservers of an ancient breed that might otherwise have disappeared.[ ] the object of good breeders was now to get their cattle fat at an early age, and they so far succeeded as to sell three-year-old steers for £ apiece, generally fed thus: in the first winter, hay and turnips; the following summer, coarse pasture; the second winter, straw in the foldyard and a few turnips; next summer, tolerable good pasture; and the third winter, as many turnips as they could eat.[ ] cattle at this time were classified thus: shorthorns, devons, sussex, herefords (the two latter said by culley to be varieties of the devon), longhorned, galloway or polled, suffolk duns, kyloes, and alderneys. sheep thus: the dishley breed (new leicesters), lincolns, teeswaters, devonshire notts, exmoor, dorsetshire, herefordshire, southdown, norfolk, heath, herdwick, cheviot, dunfaced, shetland, irish.[ ] with the increased demand for corn and meat from the towns the necessity of new and better implements became apparent, and many patents were taken out: by praed, for drill ploughs, in ; by horn, for sowing machines, in ; by heaton, for harrows, in ; for sowing machines, by sandilands, ; for reaping machines, by boyce, ; winnowing machines, by cooch, ; haymakers, by salmon, ; and for scarifiers, chaff-cutters, turnip-slicers, and food-crushers.[ ] but the great innovation was the threshing machine of meikle. like most inventions, it had forerunners. the first threshing machine is mentioned in the _select transactions of the society of improvers in the knowledge of agriculture in scotland_, published in by maxwell. it was invented by michael menzies, and by it one man could do the work of six. one machine was worked by a great water-wheel and triddles, another by a little wheel of feet diameter, moved by a small quantity of water. the first attempts to substitute horse or other power for manual in threshing were directed to the revolution of jointed flails, which should strike the floor on which the corn was spread, but this proved unsatisfactory, so that rubbing the grain out of the straw by revolving cylinders was tried,[ ] young, in his northern tour, met a mr. clarke at belford in northumberland, who was famous for mechanics,[ ] among his inventions being a threshing machine worked by one horse, which does not seem to have effected much. eventually mr. a. meikle, of houston mill near haddington, in erected a machine the principles of which, much modified, are those of to-day; and in mr. aitchison, of drumore in east lothian, first applied steam to threshing. it was some time, however, before this beneficent invention was generally used, and when the machines were used they were usually driven by horse--or water-power until about . in messrs. howard, of bedford, adapted a sheaf-binding apparatus to the threshing machine. with new implements came new crops; the swede turnip was grown on some farms in notts just before , but it is not known who introduced it.[ ] the mangel wurzel was introduced about - by parkyns, and prickly comfrey in . the year was one of great scarcity owing to the wet and stormy summer, and in august wheat went up to s. a quarter.[ ] as usual many other causes but the right one were put forth, and the old accusations of monopoly, forestalling, and regrating were heard again. the war with france, with more reason, was considered to have helped in raising prices, but the chief cause was the bad season. the members of both houses of parliament bound themselves to reduce the consumption of bread in their homes by one-third, and recommended others to a similar reduction. it was a period of terrible distress for the agricultural labourer. his wages were about s. a week, and it was impossible for him to live on them, so that what is known as 'the allowance system' came in. at speenhamland in berkshire, in this year, the magistrates agreed that it was not expedient to help the labourer by regulating his wages according to the statute of elizabeth, but recommended the farmers to increase their pay in proportion to the present price of provisions, and they also granted relief to all poor and industrious men according to the price of bread. they were merely giving effect to gilbert's act of , which legalized the supplementing of the wages of able-bodied men from the rates, and the decision was nicknamed the 'speenhamland act' because it was so generally followed. however well meant, the effect was most demoralizing and the english labourer, already too prone to look to the state for help, was induced to depend less on his own exertions. the real remedy would have been a substantial increase of his scanty wages. as it was, landowner and farmer were often paying the labourer in rates money that would far better have come to him in wages, and the rates in some districts became so burdensome that land was thrown out of cultivation. in the same year as the speenhamland act the statute geo. iii, c. , forbade the removal of persons from any parish until they were in actual need of support; but although the law was thus relaxed, the fixed principle which caused the refusal of all permanent relief to labourers who had no settlement in the parish acted as a very efficient check on migration, though, as we have seen, it did not entirely check it. in the question of regulating the labourers' wages by parliament was raised; but pitt, remembering such schemes had always failed, was hostile, and the matter dropped.[ ] in the same year eden made his inquiries concerning the rate of wages and the cost of living. in bedford, he found the agricultural labourer was getting s. d. a day and beer, with extras in harvest[ ]; but bacon was d. a lb. and wheat s. a bushel. however, parish allowances were liberal, a man, his wife, and four children sometimes receiving s. a week from that source. in cumberland the labourer was being paid d. to s. a day with food, or s. d. to s. d. without; in hertfordshire, s. d. a day; in suffolk, s. d. a day and beer. nearly everywhere his expenditure was much in excess of his earnings, the yearly budgets of fifty-three families in twelve different counties showed generally large annual deficiencies, amounting in one case to £ s. d. in one case in lindsey, where the deficiency was small, the family lived on bread alone. the factory system, too, had already deprived the labourer of many of his by-industries, and thus helped the pauperism for which landlord and farmer had to pay in rates. about sir william young proposed to send the unemployed labourers round to the parishioners to get work, their wages being paid by their employers and by the parish. this method of obtaining work was known as the 'roundsman system'.[ ] landlords, however, and farmers were profiting greatly by the high prices, which fortunately received a check by the abundant harvest of , which, with large imports,[ ] caused the price of wheat to fall to s. d., and in to s. d. it is difficult to conceive what instability, speculation, and disaster such fluctuations must have led to. in the bank restriction act was passed, suspending cash payments, and thereby causing a huge growth in credit transactions, a great factor in the inflated prosperity of this period. in january, , wool was s. a lb., and prices at smithfield: s. d. s. d. beef, per stone of lb. to mutton " " " pork " " " the summer of that year was uninterruptedly wet; some corn in the north was uncut in november, so that wheat went up to s. d., and in june, , was s. d., the scarcity being aggravated by the russian government laying an embargo on british shipping.[ ] yet pitt denied that the high prices were due to the war.[ ] they were due, indeed, to several causes: . frequent years of scarcity. . increase of consumption, owing to the great growth of the manufacturing population, england during the war having almost a monopoly of the trade of europe. . napoleon's obstructions to importation. . the unprecedented fall of foreign exchanges. . the rise in the price of labour, scanty as it was. . suspension of cash payments, which produced a medium of circulation of an unlimited nature, and led to speculation.[ ] in march, , wheat was s.; beef at smithfield, s. to s. d. a stone; and mutton, s. d. to s. a rise in wages was allowed on all sides to be imperative, but the labourer even now got on an average little more than s. a week,[ ] a very inadequate pittance, though generally supplemented by the parish. arthur young[ ] tells of a person living near bury in , who, before the era of high prices, earned s. a week, and with that could purchase: a bushel of wheat. " malt. lb. of butter. lb. of cheese. a pennyworth of tobacco. but in the same articles cost him: s. d. a bushel of wheat " malt lb. of butter lb. of cheese tobacco -------- £ ======== his wages were now s., and his allowance from the rates s., so that there was a deficiency of s. d. the increase in the cost of living in the last thirty years is further illustrated by the following table: . . . . £ s. d. £ s. d. £ s. d. £ s. d. coomb of malt chaldron of coals coomb of oats load of hay meat, per lb. butter, " loaf sugar, per lb. poor rates, in the £ it was again proposed by mr. whitbread in the house of commons that wages should be regulated by the price of provisions, and a minimum wage fixed; but there was enough sense in the house to reject this return to obsolete methods. after march, , prices commenced to fall, owing to a favourable season and the reopening of the baltic ports, which allowed imports to come in more freely, for most of our foreign corn at this time came from germany and denmark. at the end of the year wheat averaged s. d., and with fair seasons it came down in the beginning of to s. d. beef at smithfield was from s. to s. d. a stone, mutton from s. to s. d.[ ] this great drop in prices was accompanied by an increase in wages, the labourer from to getting on an average s. a week[ ]; the cost of implements rose, so did the rate of interest, and the cry of agricultural distress in was heard everywhere. more protection was demanded by those interested in the land, and accordingly a duty of s. d. was imposed when the price was s. or under; a bounty was paid on export when it was s. or under; and wheat might be exported without bounty up to s. however, was a very deficient harvest, owing to blight and mildew, and by the end of the year wheat was s. d. the harvests till were not as bad as that of , but not good enough to lower the prices. also, owing to the berlin and milan decrees of napoleon and the non-intercourse act of the united states of america, imports were restricted so that at the end of wheat was s. in this year the exports of wheat exceeded the imports, but it was due to the requirements of our army in spain; and was the last year when exports were greater under normal circumstances.[ ] was a bad harvest, so was ; in the former rot being very prevalent among sheep; and by august, , hay was £ a load and wheat s., only large imports ( , , quarters) preventing a famine. down wool was s. d. per lb., beef and mutton - / d., cheese d.[ ] in the whole of july and part of august were wet and cold; and in august, , wheat averaged s., the finest dantzic selling at mark lane for s., and oats reached s. as our imports of corn then chiefly came from the north-west of europe, which has a climate very similar to our own, crops there were often deficient from bad seasons in the same years as our own, and the price consequently high. on the other hand, it is a proof that produce will find the best market regardless of hindrances, that much of our corn at this time came from france. corn in was seized on with such avidity that there was no need to show samples. as high prices had now prevailed for some time and were still rising, landlords and farmers jumped to the conclusion that they would be permanent; so that this is the period when rents experienced their greatest increase, in some cases having increased fivefold since , and speculations in land were most general. land sold for forty years' purchase, many men of spirit and adventure very different from farmers 'were tempted to risk their property in agricultural speculations',[ ] and large sums were sunk in lands and improvements in the spirit of mercantile enterprise. the land was considered as a kind of manufacturing establishment, and 'such powers of capital and labour were applied as forced almost sterility itself to become fertile.' even good pastures were ploughed up to grow wheat at a guinea a bushel, and much worthless land was sown with corn. manure was procured from the most remote quarters, and we are told a new science rose up, agricultural chemistry, which, 'with much frivolity and many refinements remote from common sense, was not without great operation on the productive powers of land.' land jobbing and speculation became general, and credit came to the aid of capital. the larger farmers, as we have seen, were before the war inclined to an extravagance that amazed their older contemporaries; now we are told, some insisted on being called esquire, and some kept liveried servants.[ ] it is somewhat curious to learn that one of the drawbacks from which farmers suffered at this time was the ravages of pigeons, which seem to have been as numerous as in the middle ages, when the lord's dovecote was the scourge of the villein's crops. in there was said to be , pigeon houses in england and wales, each on an average containing pairs of old pigeons.[ ] another pest was the large number of 'vermin', whose destruction had long before been considered important enough to demand the attention of the legislature.[ ] some parishes devoted large portions of their funds to this object; in east budleigh in devonshire, out of a total receipt of £ s. - / d., voted £ s. for vermin killing. that now sacred animal the fox was then treated with scant respect, farmers and landlords paying for his destruction as 'vermin'[ ]; the parish accounts of ashburton in devonshire, for instance, from - include payments for killing foxes and vixens, with no less than badgers. but the edifice of artificial prosperity was already tottering. after prices fell steadily,[ ] the abundant harvest of and the opening of the continental ports accelerated this, and by december, , wheat was s. d. yet agriculture had made solid progress. the committee of the house of commons which inquired into the state of the corn trade in stated that through the extension of, and improvements in, agriculture the agricultural produce of the kingdom had increased one-fourth in the preceding ten years.[ ] the high prices had attracted a large amount of capital to the land, so that there was very rapid and extensive progress, the methods of tillage were improved, large tracts of inferior pasture converted into arable, much, however, of which was soon to revert to weeds; there were many enclosures, and many fens, commons, and wastes reclaimed. but there was a reverse side to this picture of prosperity, even in the case of landlord and farmer. the burden of taxation was crushing; a contemporary writer, a farmer of twenty-five years standing,[ ] wrote that, with the land tax remaining the same, there was a high property tax, house and window taxes were doubled, poor rates in some places trebled, highway, church, and constable rates doubled and trebled, and there were oppressive taxes on malt and horses, both nags and farm animals. a man renting a farm at £ and keeping two farm-horses, a nag, and a dog, would pay taxes for them of £ s. d., a fourteenth of his rent.[ ] indeed, poor rates of s. and s. in the £ were known,[ ] and they were occasionally more than the whole rent received by the landlord forty years before. a devonshire landowner complained that seven-sixteenths out of the annual value of every estate in the county was taken from owners and occupiers in direct taxes.[ ] and the committee on agricultural depression of asserted that during the war taxes and rates were quadrupled.[ ] blacksmiths, whitesmiths, collar makers, ropers, carpenters, and many other tradesmen with whom the farmer dealt, raised their prices threefold; and it was openly asserted that the high prices of grain and stock were not proportionate to the increase of other prices. much of the grass land broken up in the earlier years of the war was before the close in a miserable condition, for it was cropped year after year without manure, and was worn out. on the whole it may be doubted if the bulk of the farmers of england made large profits during the war; many no doubt profited by the extraordinary fluctuations in prices, and it was those men who 'kept liveried servants'; but there must have been many who lost heavily by the same means, and the rise of rent, taxes, rates, labour, and tradesmen's prices largely discounted the prices of corn and stock. the landowners at this period have generally been described as flourishing at the expense of the community, but their increased rents were greatly neutralized by the weight of taxation and the general rise in prices. a contemporary writer says that owing to the heavy taxes, even in the war time, he 'often had not a shilling at the end of the year.'[ ] the following accounts, drawn up in ,[ ] do not show that farmers were making much money with wheat at s. a bushel: account of the culture of an acre of wheat on good fallow land: dr. £ s. d. two years' rent hauling dung from fold four ploughings two harrowings lime seed, - / bushels reaping threshing wages tithes and taxes -------- £ ======== cr. £ s. d. bushels of wheat at s the straw was set against the value of the dung. the tailend wheat was eaten by the family! --------- £ ========= and on a farm on good land in the same county the following would be the annual balance sheet at the same date: dr. £ s. d. rent tithes wages extra harvestmen tradesmen's bills taxes and rates malt, hops, and cider lime hop poles expenses at fairs and markets clothing, groceries, &c., for the family interest on £ , capital, at per cent. sundries ---------- £ ========== cr. £ s. d. bushels of wheat, @ s. bushels of barley, @ s. bushels of peas, @ s. cwt. hops sale of oxen, cows and calves profits from sheep " from pigs, poultry, dairy, and sundries ---------- £ ========== according to this the farmer did little more than pay rent, interest on capital, and get a living. yet prices of what he had to sell had gone up greatly: wheat in herefordshire in was s. a bushel, in , s.; butcher's meat in was - / d. a lb., in , d.; fresh butter - / d. in , s. d. in ; a fat goose in hereford market in , d.; , s.; , s.; a couple of fowls in , d.; , d.; , s. d.[ ] the winter of - was extraordinarily severe, and the wheat crop was seriously injured, but the increased breadth of cultivation, a large surplus, and great importations kept the price down. many sheep, however, were killed by the hard winter, which also reduced the quality of the cattle, so that meat was higher in than at any previous period.[ ] at smithfield beef was s. to s. a stone, mutton s. to s. d. with the peace of the fictitious prosperity came to an end, a large amount of paper was withdrawn from circulation, which lowered the price of all commodities, and a large number of country banks failed. the first sufferers were the agricultural classes, who happened at that time to hold larger supplies than usual, the value of which fell at once; the incomes of all were diminished, and the capital of many annihilated.[ ] at the same time the demand for our manufactures from abroad fell off; the towns were impoverished, and bought less from the farmer. the short period of war in had little effect on prices, and in january, , wheat was s. d., and the prices of live stock had fallen considerably. in protection reached its highest limit, the act of that year prohibiting import of wheat when the price was under s. a quarter, and other grain in proportion.[ ] however, it was of no avail; and in the beginning of the complaints of agricultural distress were so loud and deep that the board of agriculture issued circular letters to every part of the kingdom, asking for information on the state of agriculture. according to the answers given, rent had already fallen on an average per cent. and agriculture was in a 'deplorable state.'[ ] bankruptcies, seizures, executions, imprisonments, were rife, many farmers had become parish paupers. rent was much in arrear, tithes and poor rates unpaid, improvements generally discontinued, live stock diminished; alarming gangs of poachers and other depredators ranged the country. the loss was greater on arable than on grass land, and 'flock farms' had suffered less than others, though they had begun to feel it heavily. all classes connected with the land suffered severely; the landlords could not get many of their rents; the farmer's stock had depreciated per cent.[ ]; many labourers, who during the war had been getting from s. to s. a week and s. in summer,[ ] were walking the country searching for employment. many tenants threw up their farms, and it was often noticed that landlords, 'knowing very little of agriculture and taken by surprise,' could not manage the farms thrown on their hands, and they went uncultivated. some farmers paid up their rent to date, sold their stock, and went off without any notice; others, less scrupulous, drove off their stock and moved their household furniture in the night without settling.[ ] farmers and landowners were asked to state the remedies required. some asked for more rent reduction and further prohibition of import, but the most general cry was for the lessening of taxation. a herefordshire farmer[ ] stated that in the taxes on a farm of acres in that county were: £ s. d. property tax, landlord and tenant great tithes lesser tithes land tax window lights poor rates, landlord " tenant cart-horse duty, landlord, horses two saddle horses, landlord gig cart-horse duty,[ ] tenant one saddle horse, tenant landlord's malt duty on bushels of barley tenant's duty for making bushels of barley into malt new rate for building shire hall, paid by landlord " " " tenant surcharge ------------ £ ============ the parish of kentchurch, in herefordshire, paid in direct taxes a greater sum than the lands of the whole parish could be let for. another very general complaint was of the collection of tithe in kind, a most awkward and offensive method, causing great expense and waste, which, however, had given way in many places to compounding. such is the picture of agriculture after twenty years of high prices and protection.[ ] one may naturally ask, if much money had been made by farmers during these years, where had it all gone to that they were reduced at the first breath of adversity to such straits? some allowance must be made for the fact that these accounts come from those interested in the land, who were always ready to make the most of misfortune with a view to further protection, and the farmer is a notorious grumbler. it seems, however, that most landlords and tenants believed that the high prices would last for ever, and lived accordingly, and, as we have seen, many made no profit at all because of their increased burdens. as a matter of fact, both were grumbling because prices had come back to their natural level after an unnatural inflation.[ ] hemp at this date was still grown in lincolnshire and somerset, and marshall tells us that in there was a considerable quantity of hemp grown in shropshire.[ ] in that county there was a small plot of ground, called 'the hemp-yard,' appendant to almost every farm-house and to many of the best sort of cottages. whenever a cottager had or perches of land to his cottage, worth from s. d. to s. d. a year, with the aid of his wife's industry it enabled him to pay his rent. a peck of hempseed, costing s., sowed about perches of land, and this produced from to lb. of tow when dressed and fit for spinning. a dozen pounds of tow made ells of cloth, worth generally about s. an ell. thus a good crop on perches of land brought in £ s. d., half of which was nett profit. the hemp was pulled a little before harvest, and immediately spread on grass land, where it lay for a month or six weeks. the more rain there was the sooner it was ready to take off the grass. when the rind peeled easily from the woody part, it was, on a dry day, taken into the house, and when harvest was over well dried in fine weather and dressed, being then fit for the tow dresser, who prepared it for spinning. after the crop of hemp the land was sown with turnips, a valuable resource for the winter. since little hemp or flax has been grown in england[ ]; in there were, according to the agricultural returns, acres of flax grown in england, and hemp was not mentioned. footnotes: [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. , and , p. . [ ] _autobiography_, p. . [ ] eden, _state of the poor_, i. . [ ] 'had his industry been under the direction of a better judgement, he would have been an admirable president.'--young, _autobiography_, p. . [ ] _the report of the committee on waste lands_, , estimated wastes and commons at , , acres, p. . [ ] the merino was largely imported into england by the efforts of george iii, and a merino society was formed in ; but many circumstances made it of such little profit to cultivate it in preference to native breeds, that it was diverted to australia.--burnley, _history of wool_, p. . [ ] the first, the bath and west of england, was established in . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] higher prices had been realized for the improved longhorns; in , at the sale of mr. fowler of little rollright, sultan a two-year-old bull fetched guineas, and a cow guineas; and at mr. paget's sale in , a bull of the same breed sold for guineas.--_culley on live stock_, p. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] _culley on live stock_ ( ), pp. - . [ ] _culley on live stock_, p. vi. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] morton, _cyclopaedia of agriculture_, ii. . [ ] _northern tour_, iii. . clarke also experimented on the effect of electricity on vegetables, electrifying turnips in boxes with the result that growth was quickened and weight increased. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p, . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, p. . [ ] _autobiography of a. young_, p. . [ ] _state of the poor_, i. et seq.; thorold rogers, _work and wages_, p. . it is difficult to calculate the exact income of the labourer; besides extras in harvest, and relief from the parish, he might have a small holding, or common rights, also payments in kind and the earnings of his wife and children. [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ p. ; eden, _op. cit._ li. . [ ] imports of wheat and flour in were , quarters. [ ] yet imports were comparatively large; , , quarters of wheat, against , quarters in . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, p. . [ ] _farmer's magazine_, , p. . [ ] thorold rogers, _work and wages_, c. . [ ] _annals of agriculture_, xxxvii. . in , in herefordshire, the labourer was getting about s. d. a week--see duncumb, _general view of agriculture of herefordshire_. those who lived in the farm-house often fared best: in the diet of a hampshire farm servant was, for breakfast, bacon, bread, and skim milk; for lunch, bread and cheese and small beer; for dinner, between p.m. and p.m., pickled pork or bacon with potatoes, cabbages, turnips, or greens, and broths of wheat-flour and garden stuff. supper consisted of bread and cheese and a pint of ale. his bread was usually made of wheat, which, considering the price, is remarkable. on sundays he had fresh meat. the farmers lived in many cases little better; a statement which must be compared with others ascribing great extravagance to them.--vancouver, _general view of the agriculture of hants_ ( ), p. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, i. . [ ] thorold rogers, _work and wages_, c. . in many cases he was getting s. and s. a week all the year round. the parliamentary committee of put his wages during the war at from s. to s. a week. _parliamentary reports committees_, v. ; but it is difficult to say how much he received as wages, and how much as parish relief. recruiting for the war helped to raise wages, as did the increased growth of corn. [ ] mcculloch, _commercial dictionary_ ( ), p. . see appendix, ii. [ ] tooke, i. , and _pamphleteer_, vi. (a. young). since , says the latter, labour by - had doubled, but meat had risen per cent., cheese per cent., bread per cent. wages therefore had not risen in proportion to prices. [ ] _inquiry into agricultural distress_ ( ), p. . [ ] _thoughts on present depressed state of agricultural industry_ ( ), p. . [ ] vancouver, _general view of the agriculture of devon_, p. . [ ] see eliz., c. , and eliz., c. . [ ] _transactions of the devon association_, xxix. - . [ ] average annual prices of wheat were: , s. d.; , s. d.; , s. d.; , s. d. [ ] porter, _progress of the nation_, p. . [ ] _a defence of the farmers and landowners of great britain_ ( ), p. . [ ] ibid. p. x. [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] _agricultural state of the kingdom_, p. . [ ] _parliamentary reports (committees)_, v. . [ ] _thoughts on the present depressed state of the agricultural interest_ ( ), p. . [ ] duncumb, _general view of the agriculture of hereford_, . the writer of _a defence of the farmers and landowners of great britain_ ( ) puts the average crop of wheat in the united kingdom at or bushels an acre, p. . a very low estimate. [ ] duncumb, _general view of the agriculture of hereford_, p. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, ii. . [ ] _farmer's magazine_ ( ), p. . [ ] the duties were often evaded by smuggling; coasting vessels met the foreign corn ships at sea, received their cargoes, and landed them so as to escape the duty. [ ] _agricultural state of the kingdom_, p. . [ ] _observations for the use of landed gentlemen_ ( ), p. . [ ] _defence of the farmers, &c._ ( ); and _parliamentary reports_, v. . [ ] _agricultural state of the kingdom_, p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] the agricultural horse tax was repealed in , the tax on ponies and mules in . [ ] there were some exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of replies to the letters were couched in the above spirit. [ ] at a time when landlords formed the majority in parliament, it is curious to find a substantial farmer asserting that 'the landed interest has been, since the corn law of , held in a state of complete vassalage to the commercial and manufacturing, and the farmers of the country in a state very little superior to that of polish peasants.' [ ] _review of western department_, pp. , . [ ] morton, _cyclopaedia of agriculture_, ii. . chapter xviii enclosure--the small owner the war period was one of great activity in enclosure; from to there were bills; from - , .[ ] it must be remembered, however, that the number of acts is not a conclusive test of the amount of enclosure, as there was a large amount that was non-parliamentary: by the principal landlord, and by freeholders who agreed to amicable changes and transfer, as at pickering, in yorkshire.[ ] roughly speaking, about one-third of the acts were for enclosing commonable waste, the rest for enclosing open and commonable fields and lands.[ ] owing to the expense an act was only obtained in the last resource. it was also because of the expense[ ] that many landlords desirous to enclose were unable to do so, and therefore devoted their attention to the improvement of the common fields. that agriculture benefited by enclosure there is no possible doubt, but it was attended with great hardships. the landowner generally gained, for his rents increased largely. in twenty-three parishes of lincolnshire, for instance, his rents doubled on enclosure. but the expenses were so heavy that his gain was often very small, and sometimes he was a loser by the process. as for the farmers, the poorer ones suffered, for more capital was needed for enclosed lands, and the process generally was so slow, taking from two to six years before the final award was given, that many farmers were thrown out in the management of their farms, for they did not know where their future lands would be allotted. that the poor suffered greatly is indubitable: 'by nineteen enclosure acts out of twenty the poor are injured, in some cases grossly injured,' wrote young in .[ ] in the acts it was endeavoured to treat them fairly,[ ] and allotments were made to them, or money paid on enclosure in lieu of their rights of common, or small plots of land; but the expense of enclosing small allotments was proportionately very great, generally too great, and they had to be sold, while the sums of money were often spent in the alehouse. the results of sixty-eight acts were investigated in the eastern counties, with the result that in all but fifteen the poor were injured. it was generally found that they had lost their cows. its effect on the smallholder is well described by davis in his _report on wilts_.[ ] there, before enclosure, the tenants usually occupied yard-lands consisting of a homestead, acres of meadow, acres of arable, generally in eighteen or twenty strips, with a right on the common meadows, common fields and downs for sheep, and as many cattle as the tenant could winter with the fodder he grew. the sheep were kept by a common shepherd with the common herd, were taken every day to the downs and brought back every night to be folded on the arable fields, the rule being to fold , sheep on a 'tenantry' acre (three-quarters of a statute acre) every night.[ ] in breeding sheep regard was had to 'folding quality,' i.e. the propensity to drop manure only after being folded at night, as much as to quality and quantity of wool and meat. on enclosure the common flock was broken up. the small farmer had no longer any common to turn his horses on. the down on which he fed his sheep was largely curtailed, the common shepherd was abolished, and the farmer had too few sheep to enable him individually to employ a shepherd. therefore he had to part with his flock. having no cow common and very little pasture land he could not keep cows. in such circumstances the small farmer, after a few years, succumbed and became a labourer, or emigrated, or went to the towns. in a pamphlet called _the case of labourers in husbandry_, , the rev. david davies said, 'by enclosure an amazing number of people have been reduced from a comfortable state of partial independence to the precarious condition of mere hirelings, who when out of work immediately come on the parish.' it has often been said that the poor were robbed of their share in the land by the landowners; but as a matter of fact it was the expense of securing the compensation allowed them, much greater in proportion on small holdings than on large, which went into the pockets of surveyors and lawyers, that did this. it was also often through the farmer that the labourer was deprived of his land when he had retained an acre or two after enclosure. wishing to make the labourer dependent on him, he persuaded the agent to let the cottages with the farm, and the agent in order to avoid collecting a number of small rents consented. as soon as the farmer had the cottages he took the land from them and added it to his own. the peasant's losses engaged the serious attention of many landlords; near tewkesbury, in , the lord of the manor on enclosure, besides reserving acres for the use of the poor, allowed land to each cottage sufficient to keep a horse or a cow, often added a small building, and gave stocks for raising orchards. even some of the idlest were thereby made industrious, poor rates sank to d. in the £, though the population increased, and the labourer always had for sale some poultry, or the produce of his cow, or some fruit.[ ] in the board of agriculture, composed almost entirely of landowners, noticing that the poor of rutland and lincolnshire, who had land for one or two cows and some potatoes, had not applied for poor relief, offered a gold medal for the most satisfactory account of the best means of supporting cows on poor land, in a method applicable to cottagers.[ ] young recommended that in the case of extensive wastes every cottage on enclosure should be secured sufficient land on which to keep a cow, the land to be inalienable from the cottage and the ownership vested in the parish. lord winchelsea[ ] urged that a good garden should always go with a cottage, and set the example himself, one which has been generally followed in england by the greater landlords with much success. as may be imagined, these schemes or others similar to them were put into effect by the conscientious and energetic, but not by the apathetic and careless. further, an act was passed in the fifty-ninth year of george iii, which enabled parishes to lease or buy acres of land for the employment of their poor. in many cases, it must be allowed, the grazing of the commons was often worth very little. let one man, it was said in , put a cow on a common in spring for nothing, and let another pay a farmer s. d. a week to keep a cow of equal value on enclosed land. when both are driven to market at michaelmas the extra weight of the latter will more than repay the cost of the keep, while her flow of milk meanwhile has been much superior. the committee on waste lands of attributed the great increase in the weight of cattle not only to the improved methods of breeding, but to their being fed on good enclosed lands instead of wastes and commons.[ ] even when commons were stinted they were in general overstocked, while disease was always being spread with enormous loss to the commoners. the larger holders, too, who had common rights, often crowded out the smaller. there were often, as we have seen, a large number of 'squatters' on commons who had seized and occupied land without any legal title. as a rule, if these people had been in possession twenty-one years their title was respected; if not, no regard was very justly paid to them on enclosure, and they were deprived of what they had seized. eden wrote when enclosure was at its height; he was a competent and accurate observer, and this is his picture of the 'commoner':[ ] 'the advantages which cottagers and poor people derive from commons and wastes are rather apparent than real; instead of sticking regularly to labour they waste their time in picking up a few dry sticks or in grubbing on some bleak moor. their starved pig or two, together with a few wandering goslings, besides involving them in perpetual altercations with their neighbours, are dearly paid for in care, time, and bought food. there are thousands and thousands of acres in the kingdom, now the sorry pastures of geese, hogs, asses, half-grown horses, and half-starved cattle, which want but to be enclosed to be as rich as any land now in tillage.' enclosure worked an important social revolution. before it the entirely landless labourer was rare: he nearly always had some holding in the common field or a right on the common pasture. with enclosure his holding or right had generally disappeared, and he deteriorated socially. it was very unfortunate, too, that when enclosure was most active domestic industries, such as weaving, decayed, and deprived the labourer and his family of a badly needed addition to his scanty income. in its physical and moral effects the system of domestic manufactures was immensely preferable to that of the crowded factory, while economically it enabled the tillers of the soil to exist on farms which could not support them by agriculture alone. this uprooting of a great part of the agricultural population from the soil by irresistible economic causes brought with it grave moral evils, and created divisions and antagonisms of interest from which we are suffering to-day.[ ] if some such scheme as that of arthur young or lord winchelsea had been universally adopted, this blot on an inevitable movement might have been removed, and a healthy rural population planted on english soil. another result followed, the labourer no longer boarded as a rule in his employer's house, where the farmer worked and lived with his men; the tie of mutual interest was loosened, and he worked for this or that master indifferently. one advantage, however, arose, in that, having to find a home of his own, he married early, but this was vitiated by his knowledge that the parish would support his children, on which knowledge he was induced to rely. on the other hand, the farmer often rose in the social scale. with the abandonment of the handicaps and restrictions of the common-field system the efficient came more speedily to the front. it was they who had amassed capital, and capital was now needed more than ever, so they added field to field, and consolidated holdings. the act of did away with the necessity for private enclosure acts, still further reducing the expense; and since that date there have been , or , acres of common arable fields and meadows enclosed without parliamentary sanction, and , acres of the same have been enclosed with it,[ ] besides many acres of commons and waste. in the _report of the committee of enclosures_ of ,[ ] there is a curious description of the way in which common fields were sometimes allotted. there were in some open fields, lands called 'panes', containing forty or sixty different lands, and on a certain day the best man of the parish appeared to take possession of any lot he thought fit. if his right was called in question there was a fight for it, and the survivor took the first lot, and so they went on through the parish. there was also the old 'lot meadow' in which the owners drew lots for choice of portions. on some of the grazing lands the right of grazing sheep belonged to a man called a 'flockmaster', who during certain months of the year had the exclusive right of turning his sheep on all the lands of the parish. closely connected with the subject of enclosure is that of the partial disappearance of the small owner, both the yeoman who farmed his own little estate and the peasant proprietor. we have noticed above[ ] gregory king's statement as to the number of small freeholders in england in , no less than , , or with their families about one-seventh of the population of the country. this date, that of the revolution, marks an epoch in their history, for from that time they began to diminish in proportion to the population. their number in is a sufficient answer to the exaggerated statement of contemporaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to the depopulation caused by enclosures. chamberlayne, in his _state of great britain_, published at about the same time as gregory king's figures, says there were more freeholders in england than in any country of like extent in europe: '£ or £ a year is very ordinary, £ or £ in some counties is not rare, sometimes in kent and in the weald of sussex £ or £ per annum, and £ , or £ , of stock.' in the first quarter of the eighteenth century he was a prominent figure. defoe[ ] describes the number and prosperity of the greycoats of kent (as they were called from their homespun garments), 'whose interest is so considerable that whoever they vote for is always sure to carry it.' why has this sturdy class so dwindled in numbers, and left england infinitely the weaker for their decrease? the causes are several; social, economic, and political. the chief, perhaps, is the peculiar form of government which came in with the revolution. the landed gentry by that event became supreme, the national and local administration was entirely in their hands, and land being the foundation of social and political influence was eagerly sought by them where it was not already in their hands.[ ] at the same time the successful business men, whose numbers now increased rapidly from the development of trade, bought land to 'make themselves gentlemen'. both these classes bought out the yeomen, who do not seem to have been very loath to part with their land. the recently devised system of strict family settlements enabled the old and the new gentlemen to keep this land in their families. the complicated title to land made its transfer difficult and costly, so that there was little breaking up of estates to correspond with the constant buying up of small owners. to the smaller freeholder, as has been noticed, the enclosure of waste land did much harm, for it was necessary to his holding. again, smaller arable farms did not pay as well as large ones, so they tended to disappear. the decay of home industries was also a heavy blow to the smaller yeoman and the peasant proprietor. under this combination of circumstances many of the yeomen left the land. yet though young, less than a century after king and davenant, said that the small freeholder had practically disappeared, there were at the end of the eighteenth century many left all over england, who however largely disappeared during the war and in the bad times after the war.[ ] but a contrary tendency was at work which helped to replenish the class. the desire of the englishman for land is not confined to the wealthy classes. at the end of the eighteenth century men who had made small fortunes in trade were buying small properties and taking the place of the yeomen.[ ] in the great french war of - , many yeomen, attracted by the high prices of land, sold their properties, but at the same time many farmers, attracted by the high prices of produce, which had often enriched them, bought land.[ ] during the 'good times' of - many small holders, like those of axholme, noticed in the _report_ of the agricultural commission of , bought land. a new class of small owners also has sprung up, who, dwelling in or near towns and railway stations, have bought small freeholds. the return of the owners of land of - gave the following numbers of those owning land in england and wales[ ]: total number of owners of: number. acreage. less than one acre , , acre and under , , " , , , " , , , " , , , the great majority of the first class here enumerated, those owning less than one acre, do not concern us, as they were evidently merely houses and gardens not of an agricultural character, but a large number of the second class and most of the other three must have been agricultural, though unfortunately no distinction is made. it will be seen, therefore, that there were a considerable number of small owners in england in , and their numbers have probably increased since. many of them, however, are of the new class mentioned above, and there appears to be no doubt that the number of the peasant proprietors and of the yeomen of the old sort has much diminished, especially in proportion to the growth of population. footnotes: [ ] cf. supra, p. . [ ] r. marshall, _rural economy of yorkshire_, p. et seq. [ ] slater, _english peasantry and enclosure_, p. . [ ] it was stated in the _report of the committee on enclosures_ ( ), p. , that the ordinary expense of obtaining an enclosure act was from £ , to £ , . in the enclosure of three farms, amounting to acres, including subdivision fences and money paid to a tenant for relinquishing his agreement, cost the landlord nearly £ , .--_agricultural state of the kingdom_ ( ), p. . [ ] _enquiry into the propriety of supplying wastes to the better support of the poor_, p. . [ ] the usual clause in enclosure acts stated that the land should be 'allotted according to the several and respective rights of _all_ who had rights and interests' in the enclosed property, and expenses were to be borne 'in proportion to the respective shares of the people interested'. [ ] pp. et seq. slater, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] cf. marshall's account of the common-field townships in hampshire at the end of the eighteenth century. each occupier of land in the common fields contributed to the town flock a number of sheep in proportion to his holding, which were placed under a shepherd who fed them and folded them on all parts of the township. a similar practice was observed with the common herd of cows, which were placed under one cowherd who tended them by day and brought them back at night to be milked, distributing them among their respective owners, and in the morning they were collected by the sound of the horn.--_rural economy of southern counties_, ii. . [ ] _report of committee on waste lands_ ( ), p. . ground was frequently left by the acts for the erection of cottages for the poor, and special allotments were made to guardians for the use of the poor, in addition to the land allotted to all according to their respective claims. can any one doubt that if there had been a systematic robbery of the smaller holders on enclosure they would not have risen 'en masse'? [ ] slater, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] _agricultural state of the kingdom_ ( ), p. . [ ] _report_, p. . [ ] _state of the poor_, pp. i, xviii. [ ] lecky, _england in the eighteenth century_, vi. . [ ] slater, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] _report_, p. . [ ] _see_ above. another estimate puts them at , . [ ] _tour_, i. ( ), , . [ ] toynbee, _industrial revolution_, p. . [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] marshall, _review of agriculture, reports western department_, p. . [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xv. . [ ] _parliamentary accounts and papers_, lxxx. . the number of those owning over acres does not concern the small owner or the yeoman class, but they were: from acres to , , , ; from , to , , , ; from , to , , , ; from , to , , ; from , to , , ; from , to , , ; from , to , , ; over , , . for the numbers of the 'holdings' of various sizes in and see below, p. . the term 'holdings', however, includes freeholds and leaseholds. chapter xix - depression the summer of was wretched; the distress, aggravated by the bad season, caused riots everywhere. at bideford the mob interfered to prevent the export of a cargo of potatoes; at bridport they broke into the bakers' shops. incendiary fires broke out night after night in the eastern counties. at swanage six people out of seven were paupers, and in one parish in cambridgeshire every person but one was a pauper or a bankrupt.[ ] corn rose again: by june, , it was s., but fell to s. in september. in occurred a drought of four months, lasting from may till september, and great preparations were made to ward off the expected famine; immense quantities of wheat came from the baltic, of maize from america, and beans and maize from italy and egypt, with hay from new york, as it was selling at £ a ton. however, rain fell in september, brown fields suddenly became green, turnips sprang up where none had appeared, and even spring corn that had lain in the parched ground began to grow, so the fear of scarcity passed. in came a good season, which produced a great crop of wheat; in the lifetime of the existing generation old men declared that such a harvest had been known only once before; imports also came from ireland to the amount of nearly a million quarters, so that the price at the end of the year was s., and the average price for the year was s. d. beef went down to s. d. a stone and mutton to s. d. the cry of agricultural distress again rose loudly. farmers were still, though some of the war taxes had been remitted, heavily taxed; for the taxes on malt, soap, salt, candles, leather, all pressed heavily.[ ] the chief cause of the distress was the long-felt reaction after the war, but it was aggravated by the return to cash payments in . gold had fallen to its real value, and the fall in gold had been followed by a fall in the prices of every other article.[ ] the produce of many thousand acres in england did not sell that year for as much money as was expended in growing it, without reckoning rent, taxes, and interest on capital.[ ] estates worth £ , a year, says the same writer, some years since, were now worth £ , . bacon had gone down from s. d. to s. d. a stone; southdown ewes from s. to s., and lambs from s. to s. a dorset farmer told the parliamentary committee that since he knew of fifty farmers, farming , acres, who had failed entirely.[ ] in the _tyne mercury_ of october , , it was recorded that mr. thos. cooper of bow purchased milch cows and sheep for £ s. d. which sum four years previously would only have bought their skins. prime beef was sold in salisbury market at d. retail, and good joints of mutton at - / d.[ ] everywhere the farmers were complaining bitterly, but 'hanging on like sailors to the masts or hull of a wreck'. in sussex labourers were being employed to dig holes and fill them in again, proof enough of distress but also of great folly. many thousands of acres were now a mass of thistles and weeds, once fair grass land ploughed up during the war for wheat, and abandoned at the fall of prices. there were no less than petitions on agricultural distress presented to the house from to march , . in , it was proposed that the government should purchase wheat grown in england to the value of one million sterling and store it; also that when the average price of wheat was under s. the government should advance money on such corn grown in the united kingdom as should be deposited in certain warehouses, to an extent not exceeding two-thirds the value of the corn.[ ] there were not wanting men, however, who put the other side of the question. in a tract called _the refutation of the arguments used on the subject of the agricultural petition_, written in , it was said that the increase in the farmer's expenditure was the cause of his discontent. 'he now assumes the manners and demands the equipage of a gentleman, keeps a table like his landlord, anticipates seasons in their productions, is as choice in his wines, his horses, and his furniture.' let him be more thrifty. 'let him dismiss his steward, a character a few years back only known to the great landowner, and cease from degrading the british farmer into a synonym for prodigality.' lord liverpool, in the house of lords, in a speech which roused great opposition among agriculturists, minimized the distress; distress there was, he admitted, but it was not confined to england, it was world-wide; neither was it produced by excessive taxation, for since taxation had been reduced per cent., while though rents and prices had fallen they were much higher than before the war. another writer said at the time, 'individuals of all classes have of late been as it were inflated above their natural size: let this unnatural growth be reduced; let them resume their proper places and appearances, and the quantum of substantial enjoyment, real comfort and happiness, will not be found lessened.' it was also asserted that the taxes on malt, leather, soap, salt, and candles, were not very pressing. the persistent cries of distress produced a bill giving still further protection to corn-growers, which was fortunately not carried into effect. there was no doubt, however, about the reality of the crisis through which the landed classes were passing. many of the landowners were heavily in debt. mortgages had been multiplied during the war, and while prices were high payment of interest was easy; but when prices fell and the tenant threw up his farm, the landlord could not throw over the mortgage, and the interest hung like a dead weight round his neck.[ ] the price to which wheat fell at the end of was to be the lowest for some years; it soon recovered, and until the average annual prices ranged from s. to s. d., while in beef at smithfield was s. and mutton s. d. a stone. in there was a marked improvement, and the king's speech congratulated the country on 'the gradual abatement of those difficulties under which agriculture has so long suffered.'[ ] in 'agriculture was recovering from the depression under which it laboured.'[ ] in it was said, 'there never was a period in the history of this country when all the great interests of the nation were in so thriving a condition.'[ ] in that year over-speculation produced a panic and agricultural distress was again evident. in cobbett said, 'the present stock of the farms is not in one-half the cases the property of the farmer, it is borrowed stock.'[ ] in all the farmers in kent were said to be insolvent.[ ] at the meeting of parliament in the king lamented the state of affairs, and ascribed it to unfavourable seasons and other causes beyond the reach of legislative remedy. many had learnt that high protection was no protection for farmers, and it was stated more than once that the large foreign supply of grain, though only then about one-third of the home-grown, depressed our markets. at the same time, it must be admitted that agriculture, like all other industries, was suffering from the crisis of . in , the country was filled with unrest, in which the farm labourer shared. his motives, however, were hardly political. he had a rooted belief that machinery was injuring him, the threshing machine especially; and he avenged himself by burning the ricks of obnoxious farmers. letters were sent to employers demanding higher wages and the disuse of machines, and notices signed 'swing' were affixed to gates and buildings. night after night incendiary fires broke out, and emboldened by impunity the rioters proceeded to pillage by day. in hampshire they moved in bodies , strong. a special commission was appointed, and the disorders put down at last with a firm hand. in there had been a relaxation in the duties on corn, the object of the act passed in that year being to secure the farmer a constant price of s. a bushel instead of s. as in , and by a sliding scale to prevent the disastrous fluctuations in prices. the best proof of its failure is afforded by the appointment of another parliamentary committee in to inquire into the distressed state of agriculture. at this inquiry many witnesses asserted that the cultivation of inferior soils and heavy clays had diminished from one-fourth to one-fifth.[ ] it was also asserted that farmers were paying rent out of capital.[ ] tooke, however, thought there was much exaggeration of the distress, which was proved by the way the farmers weathered the low prices of , when wheat, after a succession of four remarkably good seasons, averaged s. d. for the year. in these abundant years, too, he asserts that the home supply was equal to the demand,[ ] though the committee of had stated that this had ceased to be the case.[ ] another committee, the last for many years, sat in to consider the distress; but although prices were low the whole tenor of the evidence established the improvement of farming, the extension of cultivation, and the increase of produce, and it was noticed at this time that towns dependent on agriculture were uniformly prosperous.[ ] on the whole, in spite of exaggeration from interested motives, the distress for the twenty years after the battle of waterloo was real and deep; twenty years of depression succeeded the same period of false exaltation. the progress, too, during that time was real, and made, as was remarked, _because_ of adversity. from this time agriculture slowly revived. on one point both of the two last committees were agreed, that the condition of the labourer was improved, and they said he was better off than at any former period, for his wages remained the same, while prices of necessaries had fallen. that his wages went further is true, but they were still miserably low, and he was often housed worse than the animals on the farm. 'wattle and dab' (or mud and straw) formed the walls of his cottage, the floors were often of mud, and all ages and both sexes frequently slept in one room. a block of ten cottages were put up in the parish of holmer[ ] at the commencement of the nineteenth century, which were said to have combined 'comfort, convenience, and economy;' they each contained one room feet by feet and feet high with a bedroom over, and cost £ s. each. they were evidently considered quite superior dwellings, far better than the ordinary run of labourer's cottages. cobbett gives us a picture of some in leicestershire in ; 'hovels made of mud and straw, bits of glass, or of old cast-off windows, without frames or hinges frequently, and merely stuck in the mud wall. enter them and look at the bits of chairs or stools, the wretched boards tacked together to serve for a table, the floor of pebble, broken brick, or of the bare ground; look at the thing called a bed, and survey the rags on the backs of the wretched inhabitants.'[ ] the chief exceptions to this state of affairs were the estates of many of the great landlords. on that of the earl of winchelsea in rutland, the cottages he had built contained a kitchen, parlour, dairy, two bedrooms, and a cow-house, and several had small holdings attached of from to acres.[ ] not long before, wages in hampshire and wiltshire were s. and s. a week.[ ] in it was stated that 'beef and mutton are things the taste of which was unknown to the mass of labourers. no one has lived more in cottages than i, and i declare solemnly i never remember once to have seen such a thing.'[ ] a group of women labourers, whom cobbett saw by the roadside in hampshire, presented 'such an assemblage of rags as i never saw before even amongst the hoppers at farnham.'[ ] the labourer's wages may have gone a little further, but he had lost his by-industries, his bit of land and rights of common, and would have had a very different tale to tell from that of the framers of the reports above quoted. in spite of the complaints made that the improvements of the coaches and of the roads drew the countryman to the towns, many stirred hardly at all from their native parish, and their lives were now infinitely duller than in the middle ages. the great event of the year was the harvest home, which was usually a scene of great merry-making. in devonshire, when a farmer's wheat was ripe he sent round notice to the neighbourhood, and men and women from all sides came to reap the crop. as early as eleven or twelve, so much ale and cider had been drunk that the shouts and ribald jokes of the company were heard to a considerable distance, attracting more helpers, who came from far and near, but none were allowed to come after o'clock. between and came dinner, with copious libations of ale and cider, which lasted till , when reaping was resumed and went on without interruption except from the squabbles of the company till , when what were called 'drinkings', or more food and drink, were taken into the field and consumed. after this the corn reaped was bound into sheaves till evening, when after the sport of throwing their reaping hooks at a sheaf which had been set up as a mark for a prize, all proceeded to supper and more ale and cider till the small hours.[ ] no wages were paid at these harvestings, but the unlimited amount of eating and drinking was very expensive, and about this date the practice of using hired labour had largely superseded this old custom. the close of this period was marked by two acts of great benefit to farmers: the poor law amendment act of ( & wm. iv, c. ), which reduced the rates,[ ] and marked 'the beginning of a period of slow recovery in the labourer's standard of life, moral and material, though at first it brought him not a little adversity'[ ]; and the tithe commutation act of ( & wm. iv, c. ), which substituted for the tithe paid in kind or the fluctuating commuted tithe, a tithe rent charge equivalent to the market value, on a septennial average, of the exact quantities of wheat, barley, and oats, which made up the legal tithes by the estimate in . thus was removed a perpetual source of dispute and antagonism between tithe-payer and tithe-owner. the system hitherto pursued, moreover, was wasteful. in exceptionally favourable circumstances the clergy did not receive more than two-thirds of the value of the tithe in kind. the delays were a frequent source of loss. in rainy weather, when the farmer desired to get his crops in quickly, he was obliged to shock his crops, give the tithe-owners notice to set out their tithes, and wait for their arrival; in the meantime the crop, perhaps, being badly damaged.[ ] footnotes: [ ] walpole, _history of england_, i. . [ ] _inquiry into agricultural distress_ ( ), p. . [ ] walpole, _op. cit._ ii. . [ ] _a letter to the earl of liverpool by an old tory_, . the committee on agricultural distress found that farmers were paying rent out of capital (_parliamentary reports. committees_, v. ), and that leases fixed on the basis of the high prices of the war meant ruin to the farmer if held to his engagement. [ ] _parliamentary reports, committees_, ix. . [ ] cobbett, _rural rides_ (ed. ), i. , . [ ] _report of the committee on agricultural depression_ ( ), pp. , . [ ] walpole, _history of england_, ii. . [ ] _hansard_, ix. . [ ] ibid. x. , . [ ] ibid. xii. . [ ] _rural rides_, ii. . [ ] walpole, _history of england_, ii. . the distress was aggravated by rot among sheep, which is said to have destroyed one-fourth of those in the kingdom. see _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), viii ( ), p. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, ii. . [ ] _report_ of , p. . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, ii, . [ ] imports fell considerably at this date; they were: , , quarters. , , " , " , " , " , , " , , " there were also considerable exports: , quarters. , " , " , " , " , " , " mcculloch, _commercial dictionary_ ( ), p. . [ ] porter, _progress of the nation_, p. . [ ] see duncumb, _general view of herefordshire_, ( ). [ ] rural rides, ii. . [ ] london, _encyclopaedia of agriculture_ ( ), p. . [ ] cobbett, _rural rides_, i. . the average, however, now was about s.; see _parliamentary reports_, v. . [ ] _a letter to the earl of liverpool by an old tory_ ( ), p. . [ ] _rural rides_, i. . [ ] moore, _history of devonshire_, i. . [ ] by this act and the various amending acts the law of settlement, so long a burden on the labourer, is now settled thus: a settlement may be acquired by birth, parentage, marriage, renting a tenement, by being bound apprentice and inhabiting, by estate, payment of taxes, and by residence.--stephen, _commentaries on the laws of england_ ( ), iii. . [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( ), p. . chapter xx - revival of agriculture.--the royal agricultural society.--corn law repeal.--a temporary set-back.--the halcyon days the revival of agriculture roughly coincided with the accession of queen victoria. it was proved that scotch farmers who had farmed highly had weathered the storm. instead of repeatedly calling on parliament to help them they had helped themselves, by spending large sums in draining and manuring the land; they had adopted the subsoil plough, and the drainage system of smith of deanston, used machinery to economize labour, and improved the breed of stock. this was an object-lesson for the english farmer, and he began to profit by it. it was high time that he did. in spite of the undoubted progress made, farming was still often terribly backward. little or no machinery was used, implements were often bad, teams too large, drilling little practised, drainage utterly inefficient; in fact, while one farmer used all the improvements made, a hundred had little to do with them. but better times were at hand. about elkington's system of drainage, which among the more advanced agriculturists, at any rate, had been used for half a century, was superseded by that of james smith of deanston, a system of thorough drainage and deep ploughing, which effected a complete revolution in the art of draining, and holds the field to-day. hitherto the draining of land had been done by a few drains where they were thought necessary, which was often a failure. smith initiated a complete system of parallel underground drains, near enough to each, other to catch all the superfluous water, running into a main drain which ran along the lowest part of the ground. his system has also been called 'furrow or frequent draining', as the drains were generally laid in the furrows from two to two-and-a-half feet deep at short intervals. even then the tributary drains were at first filled in with stones inches deep, as they had been for centuries, and sometimes with thorns, or even turves, as tiles were still expensive; and the main was made of stonework. however, the invention of machines for making tiles cheapened them, and the substitution of cylindrical pipes for horse-shoe tiles laid on flat soles still further lowered the cost and increased the efficiency.[ ] in , peel introduced government drainage loans, repayable by twenty-two instalments of / per cent. this was consequently an era of extensive drainage works all over england, which sorely needed it; but even now the work was often badly done. in some cases it was the custom for the tenant to put in as many tiles as his landlord gave him, and they were often merely buried. at stratfieldsaye, for instance, where the iron duke was a generous and capable landlord, the drains were sometimes a foot deep, while others were feet deep and feet apart,[ ] although the soil required nothing of the kind. vast sums were also spent on farm-buildings, still often old and rickety, with deficient and insanitary accommodation; in devonshire the farmer was bound by his lease to repair 'old mud and wooden houses', at a cost of per cent. on his rent, and there were many such all over england. farm-buildings were often at the extreme end of the holding, the cattle were crowded together in draughty sheds, and the farmyard was generally a mass of filth and spoiling manure, spoiling because all the liquid was draining away from it into the pool where the live stock drank; a picture, alas, often true to-day. it was to bring the great mass of landlords and farmers into line with those who had made the most of what progress there had been, that the royal society was founded in , in imitation of the highland society, but also owing to the realization of the great benefits conferred on farming during the last half-century by the exertions of agricultural societies, the smithfield club shows having especially aided the breeding of live stock. writing on the subject of the society, mr. handley[ ] spoke of the wretched modes of farming still to be seen in the country, especially in the case of arable land, though there had been a marked improvement in the breeding of stock. prejudice, as ever, was rampant. bone manure, though in the previous twenty years it had worked wonders, was in many parts unused. it was felt that what the english farmer needed was 'practice with science'. the first president of the society was earl spencer, and it at once set vigorously to work, recommending prizes for essays on twenty-four subjects, some of which are in the first volume of the society's journal. prizes were also offered for the best draining-plough, the best implement for crushing gorse, for a ploughing match to be held at the first country meeting of the society fixed at oxford in , for the best cultivated farm in oxfordshire and the adjacent counties, and for the invention of any new agricultural implement. in the society was granted a charter under the title of the royal agricultural society of england, and its career since then has been one of continued usefulness, and forms a prominent feature in the agricultural history of the times. in [ ] the first country meeting of the society was held at oxford, and its entries of live stock and of implements were described as constituting a show of unprecedented magnitude. according to _bell's weekly messenger_ for july , , the show for some time had been the all-absorbing topic of conversation not only among agriculturists, but among the community at large, and the first day , people attended the show, many having come great distances by road. everybody and every exhibit had to get to oxford by road; some shorthorn cattle, belonging to the famous thomas bates of kirkleavington, took nearly three weeks on the road, coming from london to aylesbury by canal. but such a journey was not unusual then, for cattle were often two or three weeks on the road to great fairs, and stood the journey best on hay; it was surprising how fresh and sound they finished.[ ] the show ground covered acres, and among the implements tested was a subsoil plough, biddell's scarifier, and a drill for depositing manure after turnips. there were only six classes for cattle--shorthorns, herefords, devons, cattle of any other breed, dairy cattle, and oxen; one class for horses, and three for sheep--leicesters, southdown or other short wool, and long woolled; with one for pigs.[ ] the shorthorns, with the exception of the kirkleavingtons, were bred in the neighbourhood, and many good judges said long afterwards that a finer lot had not been seen since. the duchesses especially impressed all who saw them. the rest of the live stock was in no way remarkable. from this small beginning, then thought so much of, the show grew fast, and the warwick meeting[ ] of , after several years of agricultural depression, illustrates the excellent work of the society and the enormous progress made by english agriculture. the show ground covered acres; horses were now divided into thoroughbred stallions, hunters, coach horses, hackneys, ponies, harness horses and ponies, shires, clydesdales, suffolks, and agricultural horses. cattle were classified as shorthorns, herefords, devons, sussex, longhorns (described as few in number and of no particular quality, 'a breed which has now been many years on the wane', but has recently been revived),[ ] welsh, red polled, jerseys, guernseys, kerry and dexter-kerry. the increased variety of sheep was also striking; leicesters, cotswolds, lincolns, oxford downs, shropshires, southdowns, hampshire downs, suffolks, border leicesters, clun forest, and welsh mountain. pigs were divided into large, middle, and small white berkshires, any other black breed, and tamworths. altogether the total number of stock exhibited was , , and the number of implements was , . in appeared liebig's _chemistry in its application to agriculture and physiology_, tracing the relations between the nutrition of plants and the composition of the soil, a book which was received with enthusiasm, and completely changed the attitude which agriculturists generally had maintained towards chemistry; one of contempt, founded on ignorance. but, as mr. prothero has said,[ ] 'if the new agriculture was born in the laboratory of glissen, it grew into strength at the experimental station of rothamsted.' there, for more than half a century, lawes and gilbert conducted experiments, of vast benefit to agriculture, in the objects, method, and effect of manuring; the scientific bases for the rotation of crops, and the results of various foods on animals in the production of meat, milk, and manure. the use of artificial manures now spread rapidly; bones, used long before uncrushed, are said to have been first crushed in , and their value was realized by coke of holkham, but for long they were crushed by hammer or horse mill, and their use was consequently limited. then iron rollers worked by steam ground them cheaply and effectively, and their use soon spread, though it was not till about that it can be said to have become general. its effects were often described as wonderful. in cheshire, cheese-making had exhausted the soil, and it was said that by boning and draining an additional cow could be kept for every acres, and tenants readily paid per cent. to their landlords for expenditure in bone manure. its use had indeed raised many struggling farmers to comparative independence.[ ] a very large quantity of the bones used came from south america.[ ] porter also noticed that 'since an extensive trade has been carried on in an article called guano', the guana of davy, 'from the islands of the pacific and off the coast of africa'. nitrate of soda was just coming in, but was not much used till some years later. in liebig suggested the treatment of bones with sulphuric acid, and in lawes patented the process and set up his works at deptford.[ ] italian rye grass, not to be confounded with the old english ray grass, had been introduced by thomson of banchory, in , from munich;[ ] and though the swede was known at the end of the eighteenth century, in many parts it had only just become common. in notts it was in described as having recently become 'the sheet-anchor of the farmer'.[ ] in cheshire a writer at the same date said, 'in the year there were not acres of swedish turnips grown in the parish where i reside; now there are from to , and in many parts of the county the increase has been in a much greater ratio.'[ ] about this time a remedy was found in the south for leaving the land idle during the nine months between harvesting the corn crop in august, and sowing the turnip crop in the following june, by sowing rye, which was eaten green by the sheep in may, a good preparation for the succeeding winter crop. turnip cutters were at last being used, and corn and cake crushers soon followed. the seasons from to were bad, and must be characterized as a period of dearth, wheat keeping at a good price.[ ] that of - was remarkable for the first general appearance of the potato disease, not only in these islands but on the continent of europe.[ ] in august, , the worst apprehensions of the failure of the crop were more than realized, and the terrible results in ireland are well known. in the early part of there was a fear of scarcity in corn, and the price of wheat rose to s. d. in spite of an importation of , , quarters, but this was largely owing to the absence of any reliable agricultural statistics, which were not furnished till , and the price soon fell.[ ] we have now reached the period of free trade, when the corn laws, which had protected agriculture more or less effectually for so long, were definitely abandoned. that they had failed to prevent great fluctuations in the price of corn is abundantly evident, it is also equally evident that they kept up the average price; in the ten years from to , the average price of wheat was s. d. a quarter, in the seven years from to , the average price was s. d.[ ] the average imports of wheat and flour for the same period were , , and , , quarters respectively. but to obtain the real effect of free trade on prices, the prices for the period between and must be compared with those between and the present day, when the fall is enormous. the act of , which tooke said had failed to secure any one of the objects aimed at by its promoters, had received two important alterations. in ( geo. iv, c. ) a duty of s. d. was imposed when the price was s., decreasing to s. when it was s. in ( vict. c. ) a duty of s. was imposed when the price was s., and the duty became s. when the price reached s. a contemporary writer denies that these duties benefited the farmer at all: 'if the present shifting scale of duty was intended to protect the farmer, keep the prices of corn steady, insure a supply to the consumer at a moderate price, and benefit the revenue, it has signally failed. during the continuation of the corn laws the farmers have suffered the greatest privations. the variations in price have been extreme, and when a supply of foreign corn has been required it has only reached the consumer at a high price, and benefited the revenue little.'[ ] rents of farms were often calculated not on the market price of wheat, but on the price thought to be fixed by the duties, which was occasionally much higher.[ ] it was also said that but for the restrictions that had been imposed in the supposed interests of agriculture, the skill and enterprise of farmers would have been better directed than it had been. by means of these restrictions and the consequent enhancement of the cost of living, the cultivation of the land had been injuriously restricted, for the energies of farmers had been limited to producing certain descriptions of food, and they had neglected others which would have been far[ ] more profitable. the landlord had profited by higher rents, but, according to caird, a most competent observer, had generally speaking been induced by a reliance on protection to neglect his duty to his estates, so that buildings were poor, and drainage neglected. the labourer was little if any better off than eighty years before. it was a mystery even to farmers how they lived in many parts of the country; 'our common drink,' said one, 'is burnt crust tea, we never know what it is to get enough to eat.'[ ] against these disadvantages can only be put the fact that protection had kept up the price of corn, a calamity for the mass of the people. the amount of wheat imported into england before the era of corn law repeal was inconsiderable. mr. porter has shown[ ] how very small a proportion of wheat used in this country was imported from - . from to the average annual import of wheat into the kingdom was , quarters, or a little over a peck annually per head, the average annual consumption per head being about eight bushels. between and the average importation was , quarters, or for the increased population a gallon-and-a-half per head, and the same share for each person was imported in the next decade - . from - the average imports arose to , quarters, or two-and-a-quarter gallons per head, and in - an average import of , , quarters raised the average supply to four-and-a-half gallons per person, still a very small proportion of the amount consumed. in a small association had been formed in london for advocating the repeal of the corn laws, and in a similar association was formed in manchester.[ ] at one of its earliest meetings appeared richard cobden, under whose guidance the association became the anti-corn law league, and at whose invitation john bright joined the league. under these two men the anti-corn law league commenced its great agitation, its object being 'to convince the manufacturer that the corn laws were interfering with the growth of trade, to persuade the people that they were raising the price of food, to teach the agriculturist that they had not even the solitary merit of securing a fixed price for corn'. the country was deluged with pamphlets, backed up by constant public meetings; and these efforts, aided by unfavourable seasons, convinced many of the errors of protection. in the league spent £ , in distributing , circulars and , pamphlets, and in delivering lectures to , people. bakers were persuaded to bake taxed and untaxed shilling loaves, and, on the purchaser choosing the larger, to demand the tax from the landlord; in the league collected £ , , next year £ , , and in £ , in support of their agitation. yet for some years they had little success in parliament; even in peel only amended the laws; and it was not until that, convinced by the league's arguments, as he himself confessed, and stimulated by the famine in ireland, he introduced the famous act, & vict. c. . by this the maximum duty on imported wheat was at once to be reduced to s. a quarter when the price was under s., to s. on barley when the price was under s., and to s. on oats when the price was under s., with lower duties as prices rose above these figures, but the most important part of the act was that on february , , these duties were to cease, and only a nominal duty of s. a quarter on foreign corn be retained, which was abolished in . by and vict. c. the duties on live stock were also abolished entirely. down to the importation of horned cattle, sheep, hogs, and other animals used as food was strictly prohibited,[ ] but in that year the prohibition was withdrawn and they were allowed to enter the country on a payment of s. a head on oxen and bulls, s. on cows, s. on sheep, s. on hogs; which duties continued till . it is interesting to find that so shrewd an observer as mcculloch did not expect any great increase in the imports of live animals from the reduction of the duties, but he anticipated a great increase in salted meat from abroad; cold storage being then undreamt of. the full effect of this momentous change was not to be felt for a generation, but the immediate effect was an agricultural panic apparently justified by falling prices. in wheat averaged s. d. and in s. d. on the other hand, stock farmers were doing well. but on the corn lands the prices of the protection era had to come down; many farms were thrown up, some arable turned into pasture; distress was widespread. owing to the depressed state of agriculture in , the _times_ sent james caird on a tour through england, and one of the most important conclusions arrived at in his account of his tour is, that owing to protection, the majority of landowners had neglected their land; but another cause of neglect was that the great body of english landlords knew nothing of the management of their estates, and committed it to agents who knew little more and merely received the rents. the important business of being a landowner is the only one for which no special training is provided. many of the landlords, however, then, as now, were unable to improve their estates if they desired to do so, as they were hopelessly encumbered, and the expense of sale was almost prohibitive. the contrast between good and bad farmers was more marked in than to-day, the efforts of the royal agricultural society to raise the general standard of farming had not yet borne much fruit. in many counties, side by side, were farmers who used every modern improvement, and those who still employed the methods of the eighteenth century: on one farm wheat producing bushels an acre, threshed by steam at a cost of s. d., on the next bushels to the acre threshed by the flail at a cost of s.[ ] drainage in the counties where it was needed had made considerable progress, the removal of useless hedgerows often crowded with timber, that kept the sun from the crops and whose roots absorbed much of the nourishment of the soil, was slowly extending, but farm-buildings almost everywhere were defective. 'the inconvenient ill-arranged hovels, the rickety wood and thatch barns and sheds devoid of every known improvement for economizing labour, food, and manure, which are to be met with in every county in england, are a reproach to the landlords in the eyes of all good farmers.'[ ] the farm-buildings of belgium, holland, france, and the rhenish provinces were much superior. in parts of england indeed no progress seems to have been made for generations at this date. thousands of acres of peat moss in lancashire were unreclaimed, and many parts of the fylde district were difficult even to traverse. even in warwickshire, in the heart of england, between knowle and tamworth, instead of signs of industry and improvement were narrow winding lanes leading to nothing, traversed by lean pigs and rough cattle, broad copse-like hedges, small and irregular fields of couch, amidst which straggled the stalks of some smothered cereal; these with gipsy encampments and the occasional sound of the poacher's gun from woods and thickets around were the characteristics of the district.[ ] leases were the exception throughout england, though more prevalent in the west.[ ] the greater proportion of farms were held on yearly agreements terminable by six months' notice on either side, a system preferred by the landlord as enabling him to retain a greater hold over his land, and acquiesced in by the tenant because of easy rents. in spite of this insecurity of tenure and the absence of agricultural holdings acts, the tenants invested their capital largely with no other security than the landlord's character, 'for in no country of the world does the character of any class of men stand so high for fair and generous dealing as that of the great body of the english landlords.' the custom of tenant-right was unknown except in certain counties, surrey, sussex, the weald of kent, lincoln, north notts, and in part of the west riding of yorkshire.[ ] where it existed, the agriculture was on the whole inferior to that of the districts where it did not, and it had frequently led to fraud in a greater or less degree. many farmers were in the practice of 'working up to a quitting', or making a profit by the difference which their ingenuity and that of their valuer enabled them to demand at leaving as compared with what they paid on entry. the best farmers as well as the landlords were said to be disgusted with the system. the dislike for leases in the days immediately before the repeal of the corn laws was partly due to the uncertainty how long protection would last; but chiefly then, as afterwards, to the fact that if a man improved his farm under a lease he had nearly always to pay an increased rent on renewal, but if he held from year to year his improvement, if any, was so gradual and imperceptible that it was hardly noticed and the rent was not raised. it may also be attributable to the modern disinclination to be bound down to a particular spot for a long period. at all events, the general dislike of farmers for leases is a curious commentary on the assertions of those writers who said that leases were his chief necessity. the disparity of the labourer's wages in was most remarkable, ranging from s. a week in parts of lancashire to s. in south wilts, the average of the northern counties being s. d., and of the southern s. d. a difference due wholly to the influence of manufactures, which is still further proved by the fact that in lancashire in wages were below the average for england. in fact since young's time wages in the north had increased per cent., in the south only per cent. in berkshire and wiltshire there had been no increase in that period, and in suffolk an actual decrease. it is not surprising to learn that in some southern counties wages were not sufficient for healthy sustenance, and the consequence was, that there, the average amount of poor relief per head of population was s. - / d., but in the north s. - / d., and the percentage of paupers was twice as great in the former as in the latter. this was mainly due to two causes: ( ) the ratepayers of parishes in the south were accustomed to divide among themselves the surplus labour, not according to their requirements but in proportion to the size of their farms, so that a farmer who was a good economist of labour was reduced by this system to the same level as his unskilful neighbours, and the labourer himself had no motive to do his best, as every one, good and bad, was employed at the same rate. ( ) to the system of close and open parishes, by which large proprietors could drive the labourer from the parish where he worked to live in some distant village in case he should become chargeable to the rates, so that it was a common thing to see labourers walking three or four miles each day to their work and back, and in one county farmers provided donkeys for them. between and the labourer had, however, already benefited by free trade, for the price of many articles he consumed fell %; on the other hand the rent of his cottage in eighty years had increased %, and meat %, which however did not, unfortunately, affect him much. the great development of railway construction also helped him by absorbing much surplus labour, and the work of his wife and children was more freely exploited at this date to swell the family budget.[ ] the great difference between the wages of the north and the south is a clear proof that the wages of the agricultural labourer are not dependent on the prices of agricultural produce, for those were the same in both regions. it was unmistakably due to the greater demand for labour in the north. the housing of the labourer was, especially in the south, often a black blot on english civilization. from many instances collected by an inquirer in the following may be taken. at stourpaine in dorset, one bedroom in a cottage contained three beds occupied by eleven people of all ages and both sexes, with no curtain or partition whatever. at milton abbas, on the average of the last census there were thirty-six persons in each house, and so crowded were they that cottagers with a desire for decency would combine and place all the males in one cottage, and all the females in another. but this was rare, and licentiousness and immorality of the worst kind were frequent.[ ] as for the farmer, the stock raiser was doing better than the corn grower. the following table shows the rent of cultivated land per acre, the produce of wheat per acre in bushels, the price of provisions, wages of labour, and rent of cottages in england at the date of young's tours, about , and of caird's in [ ]: rent of produce of cultivated land wheat price per lb. of per acre. per acre. bread. meat. butter. s. d. - / d. - / d. d. s. d. - / [ ] - / d. d. s. price of wool cottage labourer's wages per lb. rents. per week. - / d. s. d. s. d. s. s. d. s. d. thus in eighty years the average rent of arable land rose %, the average wheat crop %, while the price of bread had decreased %. but meat had increased %, wool over %, butter %. the chief benefit to the farmer therefore lay in the increased value of live stock and its products, and it was found then, as in the present depression, that the holders of strong wheat land suffered most, which was further illustrated by the fact that the rent of the corn-growing counties of the east coast averaged s. d. per acre; that of the mixed corn and grass counties in the midlands and west, s. d. writing in , porter said rents had doubled since .[ ] in essex farms could be pointed out which were let in at less than s. an acre, but during the war at from s. to s. in the rent went down to s., and in was s. in berks. and wilts. farms let at s. per acre in , rose by to s., or fivefold; sank in to s., and in to s. in staffordshire farms on one estate let for s. an acre in , rose during the war to s., and at the peace were lowered to s., at which price they remained. owing to better farming light soils had been applied to uses for which heavy lands alone had formerly been considered fit, with a considerable increase of rent. on the duke of rutland's[ ] belvoir estate, of from , to , acres of above average quality, rents were in-- s. - / d. an acre. s. - / d. " s. - / d. " s. d. " but the dukes of rutland were indulgent landlords and evidently took no undue advantage of the high prices during the war, a policy whose wisdom was fully justified afterwards. it was the opinion of most competent judges, even after the abolition of the corn laws, that english land would continue to rise in value. porter stated that the united kingdom could never be habitually dependent on the soil of other countries for the food of its people, there was not enough shipping to transport it if it could.[ ] caird prophesied that in the next eighty years the value of land in england would more than double. the wellnigh universal opinion was that as the land of england could not increase, and the population was constantly increasing, land must become dearer. men failed to foresee the opening of millions of acres of virgin soil in other parts of the world, and the improvement of transport to such an extent that wheat has occasionally been carried as ballast. about twenty-five or thirty years after these prophecies their fallacy began to be cruelly exposed.[ ] about [ ] matters began to mend, chiefly owing to the great expansion in trade that followed the great gold discoveries in america and australia. then, came the crimean war, with the closing of the baltic to the export of russian corn, wheat in averaging s. d., and in the next decade the american war crippled another competitor, the imports of wheat from the united states sinking from , , cwt in , to , cwt. in . from until english agriculture prospered exceedingly, assisted largely by good seasons. between and there were ten good harvests, and only two below the average. prices of produce rose almost continuously, and the price and rent of land with them. the trade of the country was good, and the demand for the farmer's products steadily grew; the capital value of the land, live stock, and crops upon it, increased in this period by £ , , .[ ] it appeared as if the abolition of the corn laws was not to have any great effect after all. now at last the great body of farmers began to approach the standard set them long before by the more energetic and enterprising. early maturity in finishing live stock for the market by scientific feeding probably added a fourth to their weight the produce of crops per acre grew, and drainage and improvements were carried out on all sides, the greatest improvement being made in the cultivation and management of strong lands, of which drainage was the foundation, and enabled the occupier to add swedes to his course of cropping.[ ] it was in this period that shorthorns, herefords, and devons attained a standard of excellence which has made them sought after by the whole world; and other breeds were perfected, the sussex and aberdeen angus especially; while in sheep the improvement was perhaps even greater.[ ] the improved lincolns, oxford downs, hampshire downs, and shropshires took their place as standard breeds at this period. in , after many years of expectation and disappointment, agriculturists were furnished with statistics which are trustworthy for practical purpose, but are somewhat vitiated by the fact that the live stock census was taken on march , which obviously omitted a large number of young stock; so that those for , when the census was taken on june , are better for purposes of comparison with those of subsequent years, when the census has been taken on june or . between and the cattle in england and wales had increased from , , to , , , though sheep had diminished from , , to , , .[ ] the total acreage under cultivation had increased from , , acres to , , acres in the same period. there was, however, one black shadow in this fair picture: in england was invaded by the rinderpest, which spread with alarming rapidity, killing , cows in a month from its first appearance, and within six months infecting thirty-six counties.[ ] the alarm was general, and town and country meetings were held in the various districts where the disease appeared to concert measures of defence. the privy council issued an order empowering justices to appoint inspectors authorized to seize and slaughter any animal labouring under such diseases; but, in spite of this, the plague raged with redoubled fury throughout september. there was gross mismanagement in combating it, for the inspectors were often ignorant men, and no compensation was paid for slaughter, so that farmers often sold off most of their diseased stock before hoisting the black flag. the ravages of the disease in the london cow-houses was fearful, as might be expected, and they are said to have been left empty; by no means an unmixed evil, as the keeping of cow-houses in towns was a glaring defiance of the most obvious sanitary laws. in october a commission was appointed to investigate the origin and nature of the disease, and the first return showed a total of , animals attacked. by march , , , animals had died from the plague, and , been killed in the attempt to stay it. by the end of august the disease had been brought within very narrow limits, and was eventually stamped out by the resolute slaughter of all infected animals. by november the number of diseased animals that had died or been killed was , ,[ ] and the loss to the nation was reckoned at £ , , . the disease was brought by animals exported from russia, who came from revel, via the baltic, to hull. in , cattle brought to the same port infected the cattle of the east riding of yorkshire, but this outbreak was checked before much damage had been done, and since there has been no trace of this dreaded disease in the kingdom. the cattle plague, rinderpest, or steppe murrain, is said[ ] to have first appeared in england in , the year of the great plague, and reappeared in , when it came from holland, but did little damage, being chiefly confined to the neighbourhood of london. the next outbreak was in , and lasted for twelve years, undoubtedly coming from holland; it is said to have caused such destruction among the cattle, that much of the grass land in england was ploughed up and planted with corn, so that the exports of grain increased largely. in it came again, but only affected a few localities, and disappeared in , not to return till . foot and mouth disease was first observed in england in ,[ ] and it was malignant in - , when cattle, sheep, and pigs were attacked as they were during the serious outbreak of - . in no less than , cattle were attacked, besides , sheep, and , pigs, when the disease was worse than it has ever been in england. since then, though there have been occasional outbreaks, it has much abated. another dread scourge of cattle, pleuro-pneumonia, was at its worst in , a most calamitous year in this respect, when , cattle were attacked. in the board of agriculture assumed powers with respect to it under the diseases of animals act of that year, and their consequent action has been attended with great success in getting rid of the disease. at the end of this halcyon period farmers had to contend with a new difficulty, the demand for higher wages by their labourers at the instigation of joseph arch.[ ] this famous agitator was born at barford in warwickshire in , and as a boy worked for neighbouring farmers, educating himself in his spare time. the miserable state of the labourer which he saw all around him entered into his soul, meat was rarely seen on his table, even bacon was a luxury in many cottages. tea was s. to s. a lb., sugar d., and other prices in proportion; the labourers stole turnips for food, and every other man was a poacher. arch made himself master of everything he undertook, became famous as a hedger, mower, and ploughman, and being consequently employed all over the midlands and south wales, began to gauge the discontent of the labourer who was then voiceless, voteless, and hopeless. his wages by had increased to s. a week, but had not kept pace with the rise in prices. bread was - / d. a loaf; the labourer had lost the benefit of his children's labour, for they had now all gone to school; his food was 'usually potatoes, dry bread, greens, herbs, "kettle broth" made by putting bread in the kettle, weak tea, bacon sometimes, fresh meat hardly ever.'[ ] it is difficult to realize that at the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when gladstone said the prosperity of the country was advancing 'by leaps and bounds', that any class of the community _in full work_ could live under such wretched conditions. arch came to the conclusion that labour could only improve its position when organized, and the agricultural labourers' union was initiated in . not that the idea of obtaining better conditions by combination was new to the rural labourer. it was attempted in in dorset, but speedily crushed, and not till was a new union founded in scotland, which was followed by a strike in buckinghamshire in , and the foundation of a union in herefordshire in .[ ] it was determined to ask for s. a week and a - / hours' working day, which the farmers refused to grant, and the men struck. the agitation spread all over england, and was often conducted unwisely and with a bitter spirit, but the labourer was embittered by generations of sordid misery. very reluctantly the farmers gave way, and generally speaking wages went up during the agitation to s. or s. a week, though arch himself admits that even during the height of it they were often only s. and s. with the bad times, about , wages began to fall again, and men were leaving the agricultural union; by arch says many were again taking what the farmer chose to give. from the union steadily declined, and after a temporary revival about , practically collapsed in . other unions had been started, but were then going down hill, and in only two remained in a moribund condition. their main object, to raise the labourer's wages, was largely counteracted by the acute depression in agriculture, and though there has since been considerable recovery, there are districts in england to-day where he only gets s. and s. a week. the labourers' union helped to deal a severe blow to the 'gang system', which had grown up at the beginning of the century (when the high corn prices led to the breaking up of land where there were no labourers, so that 'gangs' were collected to cultivate it[ ]), by which overseers, often coarse bullies, employed and sweated gangs sometimes numbering or persons, including small children, and women, the latter frequently very bad specimens of their sex. these gangs went turnip-singling, bean-dropping, weeding &c., while pea-picking gangs ran to or . though some of these gangs were properly managed, the system was a bad one, and the union and the education acts helped its disappearance. footnotes: [ ] cylindrical pipes came in about , though they had been recommended in by switzer. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( st series), xxii. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , pp. sq. [ ] ibid., , pp. sq. [ ] mccombie, _cattle and cattle breeders_, p. . [ ] these classes, however, did not comprise all the then known breeds of live stock. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , pp. sq. [ ] at the show at birmingham in there were entries of longhorns; in a longhorn cattle society was established, and the herd-book resuscitated. more than twenty herds of the breed are now well established. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] caird, _english agriculture in - _, pp. sq. [ ] porter, _progress of the nation_, p. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] ibid. , p. . [ ] ibid. ( st ser.), vi. . [ ] ibid. ( st ser.), v. . [ ] , s. d; , s. d.; , s. d.; , s. d. [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, iv. . [ ] c. wren hoskyns, _agricultural statistics_, p. . [ ] the abnormal prices during the crimean war cannot fairly be taken into account. the home and foreign supplies of wheat and flour from - were:-- home supplies. foreign supplies. qrs. qrs. - , , , , - , , , , - , , , , - , , , , - , , , , - , , , - , , , , (tooke, _history of prices_, iv. .) - was a very abundant crop, and the threatened repeal of the corn laws induced farmers to send all the corn possible to market. [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, iv. . [ ] cobden's speech, march , . [ ] tooke, _history of prices_, iv. . [ ] from evidence collected by mr. austin in the southern counties. [ ] _progress of nation_, pp. sq. for the amount imported before that date, see appendix . [ ] walpole, _history of england_, iv. sq. cobden apparently never contemplated such low prices for corn as have prevailed since . in his speech of march , , he mentioned s. a quarter as a probable price under free trade, and he died before the full effect of foreign competition was felt by the english farmer. [ ] mcculloch, _commercial dictionary_, , p. . see below, pp. sq. [ ] caird, _english agriculture in - _, p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] _victoria county history: warwickshire_, ii. . [ ] caird, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] caird, _op. cit._ p. . [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._ pp. , . [ ] cobden's speech, march , . [ ] mr. pusey, one of the best informed agriculturists of the day, estimated the produce of wheat per acre in at bushels.--_r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] caird, _english farming in - _, p. . [ ] _progress of the nation_. [ ] thorold rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, v. . [ ] _progress of the nation_, pp. - . [ ] yet as the growth of population overtakes the corn and meat supply, these prophets may in the end prove correct. [ ] the great exhibition of was said to have widely diffused the use of improved implements.--_r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] ibid. , p. . see below, p. . [ ] _board of agriculture returns_, , and _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . young estimated the number of cattle in england in at , , , including , draught cattle.--_eastern tour_, iv. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, ( nd ser.), ii. . [ ] ibid. iii. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( nd ser.), ii. . [ ] see _autobiography of joseph arch_. [ ] ibid. ix. . [ ] in many districts, however, his food was better than this. [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._, pp. - . [ ] hasbach, _op. cit._, pp. , et seq. the gangs act ( & vict. c. ) had already brought the system under control. chapter xxi - agricultural distress again.--foreign competition.--agricultural holdings acts.--new implements.--agricultural commissions.--the situation in about the year the good times came to an end. the full force of free trade was at last felt. the seasons assisted the decline, and there was now no compensation in the shape of higher prices. in the eight years between and there were only two good crops. a new and formidable competitor had entered the field; between and the produce of wheat in the united states had trebled. vast stretches of virgin soil were opened up with the most astonishing rapidity by railroads, and european immigrants poured in. the cost of transport fell greatly, and england was flooded with foreign corn and meat. english land which had to support the landlord, the tithe-owner, the land agent, the farmer, the labourer, and a large army of paupers,[ ] had to compete with land where often one man was owner, farmer, and labourer, with no tithe and no poor rates. yet prices held up fairly well until , when there was a collapse from which they have not yet recovered. in wheat was s. d., in s. d., and in s. d.; by the average price for the year was s. d.[ ] farmers' capital was reduced from to per cent., and rents and the purchase value of land in a similar proportion. poor clays only fit for wheat and beans went out of cultivation, though much has since been laid down to grass, and much has 'tumbled down'. in fact most of the increased value of the good period between - disappeared. the year will long be remembered as 'the black year'. it was the worst of a succession of wet seasons in the midland, western and southern counties of england, the average rainfall being one-fourth above the average, and was little better. the land, saturated and chilled, produced coarser herbage, the finer grasses languished or were destroyed, fodder and grain were imperfectly matured. mould and ergot were prevalent among plants, and flukes producing liver-rot among live stock, especially sheep. in in england and wales , , sheep died or were sacrificed from rot,[ ] by , , had perished at an estimated loss of £ , , , and many, alas! were sent to market full of disease. cattle also were infected, and hares, rabbits, and deer suffered. in some cases entire flocks of sheep disappeared. the disease was naturally worst on low-lying and ill-drained pastures, but occurred even on the drier uplands hitherto perfectly free from liver-rot, carried thither no doubt by the droppings of infected sheep, hares, and rabbits, and perhaps by the feet of men and animals. apart from medicine, concentrated dry food given systematically, the regular use of common salt, and of course removal from low-lying and damp lands, were found the best preventives. besides this great calamity, this year was distinguished by one of the worst harvests of the century, outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, of pleuro-pneumonia, and a disastrous attack of foot-rot. the misfortunes of the landed interest produced a commission in under the duke of richmond, which conducted a most laborious and comprehensive inquiry. their report, issued in , stated that they were unanimously convinced of the great intensity and extent of the distress that had fallen upon the agricultural community. owner and occupier had alike been involved. yet, though agricultural distress had prevailed over the whole country, the degree had varied in different counties, and in some cases in different parts of the same counties. cheshire, for instance, had not suffered to anything like the same extent as other counties, nor was the depression so severe in cumberland, westmoreland, northumberland, and parts of yorkshire. the rainfall had been less in the northern counties. in the midlands, the eastern, and most of the southern counties the distress was severe, in essex the state of agriculture was deplorable, but kent, devon, and cornwall were not hardly hit.[ ] the chief causes of the depression were said to be these:-- . the succession of unfavourable seasons, causing crops deficient in quantity and quality, and losses of live stock. . low prices, partly due to foreign imports and partly to the inferior quality of the home production. . increased cost of production. . increased pressure of local taxation by the imposition of new rates, viz. the education rate and the sanitary rate; and the increase of old rates, especially the highway rate, in consequence of the abolition of turnpikes. some exceptionally bad instances of this were given. in the parish of didmarton, gloucestershire, the average amount of rates paid for the five years ending march , , was £ s. d., for the five years ending march , , £ s. d. in the northleach union the rates had increased thus in decennial periods from :-- - £ , - , - , - , on one small property in staffordshire the increase of rates, other than poor rates, amounted to s. d. in the £ on the rateable value. . excessive rates charged by railway companies for the conveyance of produce, and preferential rates given to foreign agricultural produce; the railway companies alleging, in defence of this, that foreign produce was consigned in much greater bulk, by few consignors, than home grown, and could be conveyed much more economically than if picked up at different stations in small quantities. as to the effect of restrictive covenants on the depression, the balance of evidence did not incline either way.[ ] the agricultural holdings act of was stated to have done much good in the matter of compensation to tenants for improvements, notwithstanding its merely permissive character, as it had reversed the presumption of law in relation to improvements effected by the tenant, prescribed the amount of compensation, and the mode in which it should be given. as to the important subject of freedom of cropping and sale of produce, there were diverse opinions, some advocating it wholly, others not believing in it at all, others saying each landlord and each tenant should make their own bargains since each farm stands on its own footing, others again favouring modified restrictions. the preponderance of opinion was in favour of a modification of the law of distress. the commission further said that the pressure of foreign competition was greatly in excess of the anticipations of the supporters and of the apprehensions of the opponents of corn law repeal; if it had not been for this, english farmers would have been partly compensated for the deficient yield by higher prices. on the other hand, the farmer had had the advantage of an increased and cheapened supply of feeding stuffs, such as maize, linseed and cotton cakes, and of artificial manures imported from abroad. at the same time the benefit to the community from cheap food was immense. it seemed just, however, that as agriculture was suffering from low prices, by which the country gained as a whole, that the proportion of taxation imposed on the land should be lessened; it was especially unjust that personal property was exempted from local rates, contrary to the act of eliz. c. , and the whole burden thrown on real property. the difficulties of farmers were aggravated by the high price of labour, which had increased per cent. in twenty years, largely owing to the competition of other industries, and at the same time become less efficient. as provisions were cheap, and employment abundant, the labourer had been scarcely affected by the distress. his cottage, however, especially if in the hands of a small owner, with neither the means nor the will to expend money on improvements, was often still very defective. farmers were already complaining of the results of the new system of education, for which they had to pay, while it deprived them of the labour of boys, and drained from the land the sources of future labour by making the young discontented with farm work. the commission denied that rents had been unduly raised previous to [ ]; and in the exceptional cases where they had been, it was due to the imprudent competition of tenant farmers encouraged by advances made by country bankers, the sudden withdrawal of which had greatly contributed to the present distress. districts where dairying was carried on had suffered least, yet the yield of milk was much diminished, and the quality deteriorated, owing to the inferiority of grass from a continuance of wet seasons. the production and sale of milk was increasing largely, so that the attention of farmers and landlords was being drawn to this important branch of farming, milk-sellers necessarily suffering less from foreign competition than any other farmers. let us turn once more to the hop yards: in the acreage of hops in england reached its maximum. we have seen that in the first half of the eighteenth century hop yards covered , acres; which between and increased to , , and by to , . in , , acres were grown. the great increase prior to that year was due to the abolition of the excise duty in , which on an average was equal to an annual charge of nearly £ an acre.[ ] this encouraged hop-growing more than the taking off of the import duty in the same year discouraged it. in there was a very small crop in england, which raised the average price to £ s. a cwt.; some choice samples fetching £ a cwt.; growers who had good crops realizing much more than the freehold value of the hop yards. this, however, was most unfortunate for them, as it led to a great increase in the use of hop substitutes, such as quassia, chiretta, colombo, gentian, &c., which, with the decreasing consumption of beer and the demand for lighter beer, has done more than foreign competition to lower the price and thereby cause so large an area to be grubbed up as unprofitable, that in it was reduced to , acres. yet the quality of the hops has in the last generation greatly improved in condition, quality, and appearance. growers also have in the same period often incurred great expense in substituting various methods of wire-work for poles; and washing, generally with quassia chips and soft soap and water, has become wellnigh universal, so that the expense of growing the crop has increased, while the price has been falling.[ ] the crop has always been an expensive one to grow; marshall in put it at £ an acre, exclusive of picking, drying, and marketing[ ]; and young estimated the total cost at the same date at £ s. an acre[ ]; to-day £ an acre is by no means an outside price. it may be some encouragement to growers to remember that hops have always been subject to great fluctuations in price; between and , for instance, they varied from s. to s. a cwt., so that they may yet see them at a remunerative figure. 'upon the whole', says an eighteenth-century writer, 'though many have acquired large estates by hops, their real advantage is perhaps questionable. by engrossing the attention of the farmer they withdraw him from slower and more certain sources of wealth, and encourage him to rely too much upon chance for his rent, rather than the honest labour of the plough. to the landlord the cultivation of hops is an evil, defrauding the arable land of its proper quantity of manure and thereby impoverishing his estate.' it was by this time the general opinion of men with a thorough experience of farming, that in many parts of great britain no sufficient compensation was secured to the tenant for his unexhausted improvements. in some counties and districts this compensation was given by established customs, in others customs existed which were insufficient, in many they did not exist at all. it must be confessed that often when a tenant leaves his farm there is more compensation due to the landlord than to the tenant. human nature being what it is, the temptation to get as much out of the land just before leaving it is wellnigh irresistible to many farmers. in these days, when the landlord is often called upon by the tenant to do what the tenant used to do himself, the question of compensation to the tenant must on many estates appear to the landlord extremely ironical. it is, in the greater number of cases, the landlord who should receive compensation, and not the tenant; and though he has power to demand it, such power is over and over again not put in force. at the same time there are bad men in the landlord class as in any other, and from them the tenant required protection. by the agricultural holdings (england) act of , & vict. c. , improvements for which compensation could be claimed by the tenant were divided into three classes. first class improvements, such as drainage of land, erection or enlargement of buildings, laying down of permanent pasture, &c., required the previous consent in writing of the landlord to entitle the tenant to compensation. second class improvements, such as boning of land with undissolved bones, chalking, claying, liming, and marling the land, the latter now hardly ever practised, required notice in writing by the tenant to the landlord of his intention, and if notice to quit had been given or received, the consent in writing of the landlord was necessary. for third class improvements, such as the application to the land of purchased manure, and consumption on the holding by cattle, sheep, or pigs, of cake or other feeding stuff not produced on the holding, no consent or notice was required. improvements in the first class were deemed to be exhausted in twenty years, in the second in seven, and in the third in two. it was the opinion of the richmond commission of that, notwithstanding the beneficial effects of this act, no sufficient compensation for his unexhausted improvements was secured to the tenant. the landlord and tenant also might agree in writing that the act should not apply to their contract of tenancy, so in when the agricultural holdings act of that year ( & vict. c. )[ ] was passed, it was made compulsory as far as regarded compensation, and the time limit as regards the tenant's claims for improvements was abolished, the basis for compensation for all improvements recognized by the act being laid down as 'the value of the improvement to an incoming tenant'. improvements for which compensation could be claimed were again divided into three classes as before, but the drainage of land was placed in the second class instead of the first, and so only required notice to the landlord. this was the only improvement in the second class; the other improvements which had been in the second class in the act of were now placed in the third, where no consent or notice was required. the act also effected three other important alterations in the law; first, as to 'notices to quit', a year's notice being necessary where half a year's notice had been sufficient, though this section might be excluded by agreement; secondly, after january , , the landlord could only distrain for one year's rent instead of six years as formerly; and thirdly, as to fixtures. these formerly became the property of the landlord on the determination of the tenancy, but by & vict. c. an agricultural tenant was enabled to remove fixtures put up by him with the consent of his landlord for agricultural purposes. now all fixtures erected after the commencement of the act were the property of and removable by the tenant, but the landlord might elect to purchase them. this act was amended by the act of ( & vict. ), and has been much altered by the agricultural holdings act of ( edw. vii, c. ), which has treated the landlord with a degree of severity, which considering the excellent relations that have for the most part existed between english landlords and tenants for generations, is utterly unwarranted. in several respects indeed he has been treated by the act as if the land did not belong to him, while freedom of contract, until recent years one of the most cherished principles of our law, is arbitrarily interfered with. the chief alterations made by the act of were:-- . _improvements._--by the act of , in the valuation for improvements under the first schedule, such part of the improvement as is justly due to the inherent capabilities of the soil was not credited to the tenant this provision is repealed by the act of , in reference to which it must be said that the latent fertility of the soil, sometimes very considerable, may be developed by a small outlay on the part of the tenant for which outlay he is certainly entitled to compensation. but the greater part of the improvement may be due to the soil which belongs to the landlord, yet the act credits the tenant with the whole of this improvement. an addition is made to the list of improvements which a tenant may make without his landlord's consent and for which he is entitled on quitting to compensation, viz. repairs to buildings, being buildings necessary for the proper working of the holding, other than repairs which the tenant is obliged to execute. . _damage by game._ a tenant may now claim compensation for damage to crops by deer, pheasants, partridges, grouse, and black game. . _freedom of cropping and disposal of produce._ prior to this act it had been the custom for generations to insert covenants in agreements providing for the proper cultivation of the farm; as, for instance, forbidding the removal from the holding of hay, straw, roots, green crops, and manure made on the farm. these and other covenants were merely in the interests of good farming, and to prevent the soil deteriorating. in recent times vexatious covenants formerly inserted had practically disappeared, and where still existing were seldom enforced. by this act, notwithstanding any custom of the country or any contract or agreement, the tenant may follow any system of cropping, and dispose of any of his produce as he pleases, but after so doing he must make suitable and adequate provision to protect the farm from injury thereby: a proviso vague and difficult to enforce, and not sufficient to prevent an unscrupulous tenant greatly injuring his farm. . _compensation for unreasonable disturbance._ if a landlord without good cause, and for reasons inconsistent with good estate management, terminates a tenancy by notice to quit; or refuses to grant a renewal of the tenancy if so requested at least one year before the expiration thereof; or if a tenant quits his holding in consequence of a demand by the landlord for an increased rent, such demand being due to an increased value in the holding owing to improvements done by the tenant; in either of such events the tenant is entitled to compensation. this compensation for disturbance is in direct opposition to the recommendation of the commission of ,[ ] and seems to be an unwarrantable interference with the owner's management of his own land. another benefit, and one long needed, was conferred on farmers by the ground game act of , & vict., c. . before the act the tenant had by common law the exclusive right to the game, including hares and rabbits, unless it was reserved to the landlord, which was usually the case. by this act the right to kill ground game, which often worked terrible havoc in the tenant's crops, was rendered inseparable from the occupation of the land, though the owner may reserve to himself a concurrent right. one consequence of this act has been that the hare has disappeared from many parts of england. the greatest improvement in implements during this period was in the direction of reaping and mowing machines, which have now attained a high degree of perfection. as early as the society of arts offered a gold medal for a reaping machine, but it was not till that john common of denwick, northumberland, invented a machine which embodied all the essential principles of the modern reaper. popular hostility to the machine was so great that common made his early trials by moonlight, and he ceased from working on them.[ ] his machine was improved by the browns of alnwick, who sold some numbers in , and shortly afterwards emigrated to canada taking with them models of common's reapers. mccormick, the reputed inventor of the reaping machine, knew the browns, and obtained from them a model of common's machine which was almost certainly the father of the famous machine exhibited by him at the great exhibition of . various other inventors have assisted in improving this implement, and in the first wire binder was exhibited in europe by the american, w.a. wood, wire soon giving place to string owing to the outcry of farmers and millers. the self-binding reaper is the most ingenious of agricultural machines, and has been of enormous benefit to farmers in saving labour. though the hay-tedding machine was invented in it is only during the last thirty years that its use has become common, the spread of the mowing machine making it a necessity, cutting the grass so fast that only a very large number of men with the old forks could keep up with it. the tedder also rendered raking by hand too slow, and the horse-rake, patented first in , has immensely improved in the last thirty years. another enormous labour saver is the hay and straw elevator, having endless chains furnished with carrying forks at intervals of a few feet, driven by horse gear. the steam cultivator invented by john fowler is much used, but cannot be said to have superseded the ordinary working stock of the farm, though for deep ploughing on large farms of heavy land it is invaluable. improvements in dairying appliances have also been great, but the english farmer has generally fought shy of factories or creameries, so that his butter still lacks the uniform quality of his foreign rivals. in manures the most important innovation in the last generation has been the constantly growing use of basic slag, formerly left neglected at the pit mouth and now generally recognized as a wonderful producer of clover. most of the suggestions of the commission of were carried into effect. rents were largely reduced, so that between and the annual value of agricultural land in england sank £ , , .[ ] grants were made by the government in aid of local burdens, cottages were improved although the landowners' capital was constantly dwindling, settled land acts assisted the transfer of limited estates, a minister of agriculture was appointed in , and in the payment of the tithe was transferred from the tenant to the landlord, which generally meant that the whole burden was now borne by the latter. still foreign imports continued to pour in and prices to fall. wheat land, which was subject to the fiercest competition, began to be converted to other uses, and between and had fallen in england from , , acres to , , , most of it being converted to pasture or 'tumbling down' to grass, while a large quantity was used for oats. the price of live stock was now falling greatly before increasing imports of live animals and dead meat, while cheese, butter, wool, and fruit were also pouring in. farming, too, was now suffering from a new enemy, gambling in farm produce, which began to show itself about and has since materially contributed to lowering prices.[ ] the enormous gold premium in the argentine republic, with the steady fall in silver, was another factor. as mr. prothero says, 'enterprise gradually weakened, landlords lost their ability to help, and farmers their recuperative power. the capital both of landlords and tenants was so reduced that neither could afford to spend an unnecessary penny. land deteriorated in condition, drainage was practically discontinued ... less cake and less manure were bought, labour bills were reduced, and the number of males employed in farming dwindled as the wheat area contracted.'[ ] the year was remarkable for a prolonged drought in the spring; from march to may hardly any rain fell, and live stock were much reduced in quality from the parching of the herbage, while in many parts the difficulty of supplying them with water was immense. in the same year another commission on agriculture was appointed, whose description of the condition of agriculture was a lamentable one. the commission in their final report[ ] stated that the seasons since had on the whole been satisfactory from an agricultural point of view, and the evidence brought forward showed that the existing depression was to be mainly attributed to the fall in prices of farm produce. this fall had been most marked in the case of grain, particularly wheat, and wool also had fallen heavily. it was not surprising therefore to find that the arable counties[ ] had suffered most; in counties where dairying, market gardening, poultry farming, and other special industries prevailed the distress was less acute, but no part of the country could be said to have escaped. in north devon, noted for stock rearing, rents had only fallen to per cent. since , and in many cases there had been no reduction at all. in herefordshire and worcestershire good grass lands, hop lands, and dairy farms had maintained their rents in many instances, and the reductions had apparently seldom exceeded per cent.; on the heavy arable lands, however, the reduction was from to per cent. in cheshire, devoted mainly to dairying, there had been no general reduction of rent, though there had been remissions, and in some cases reductions, of per cent. in fact, grazing and dairy lands, which comprise so large an area of the northern and western counties, were not badly affected, though the depreciation in the value of live stock and the fall in wool had considerably diminished farm profits and rents. but of the eastern counties, those in which there are still large quantities of arable land, a different tale was told. in essex much of the clay land was going out of cultivation; many farms, after lying derelict for a few years, were let as grass runs for stock at a nominal rent the rent of an estate near chelmsford of , acres had fallen from £ , in to £ in , or from s. d. an acre to s. d.[ ] the net rental of another had fallen from £ , in to £ , in , and the landlord's income from his estate of , acres in - was s. an acre. the balance sheet of the estate for the same year is an eloquent example of the landowner's profits in these depressed times[ ]: : am / / receipts. £ s. d. tithe received cottage rents garden " estate " , tithes refunded by tenants -------------- £ , ============== payments. £ s. d. tithe, rates and taxes , rent-charge and fee farm rents gates and fencing estate repairs and buildings , draining brickyard management insurances balance profit --------------- £ , =============== in the great agricultural county of lincoln rents had fallen from to per cent.[ ] the average amount realized on an acre of wheat had fallen from £ s. d. in - to £ s. d. in [ ]; and the fall in the price of cattle between and was a little over per cent. many of the large farmers in lincolnshire before had lived in considerable comfort and even luxury, as became men who had invested large sums, sometimes £ , , in their business. they had carriages, hunters, and servants, and gave their children an excellent start in life. but all this was changed; a day's hunting occasionally was the utmost they could afford, and wives and daughters took the work from the servants. the small farmers had suffered more than the large ones, and the condition of the small freeholders was said to be deplorable; a fact to be noted by those who think small holdings a panacea for distress.[ ] even near boston, where the soil is favourable for market gardening, the evidence of the small holder was 'singularly unanimous' as to their unfortunate condition. the small occupiers were better off than the freeholders, because their rents had been reduced and they could leave their farms if they did not pay; but their position was very unsatisfactory. from the evidence given to the assistant commissioner it is clear that the small occupier and freeholder could only get on by working harder and living harder than the labourer. 'we all live hard and never see fresh meat,' said one. 'we can't afford butcher's meat,' said another. another said, 'in the summer i work from a.m. to p.m., and often do not take more than an hour off for meals. that is penal servitude, except you have your liberty. a foreman who earns £ a week is better off than i am. he has no anxiety, and not half the work.' these instances could be multiplied many times, so that it is not surprising that the children of these men have flocked to the towns. in norfolk, 'twenty or thirty years ago, no class connected with the land held their heads higher' than the farmers. many of them owned the whole or a part of the land they farmed, and lived in good style. all this was now largely changed. 'the typical norfolk farmer of to-day is a harassed and hardworking man,' engaged in the struggle to make both ends meet. many were ruined. however, there were farmers who, by skill, enterprise, and careful management, made their business pay even in these times, such as the tenant of the farm at papplewick in nottinghamshire who gained the first prize in the royal agricultural society's farm competition in .[ ]. this farm consisted of acres, of which only were grass, but chiefly owing to the trouble taken in growing fine root crops, a large number of live stock were annually purchased and sold off, the following balance sheet showing a profit of £ s. d. per acre: dr. £ rent, tithes, rates, taxes, &c. wages purchase of cake, corn, seeds, manure, &c. purchase of live stock , ----- £ , profit , ------ £ , ====== cr. £ corn, hay, potatoes, and like product sold live stock, poultry, dairy produce, and wool sold , ------ £ , ====== the reductions of rents in various counties were estimated thus[ ]: per cent. per cent. northumberland to hereford to cumberland to somerset to york to oxford to lancaster to suffolk up to stafford to essex to leicester kent to nottingham to hants to warwick to wilts to huntington to devon to derby to cornwall to this large reduction in the rent rolls of landowners has materially affected their position and weakened their power. many, indeed, have been driven from their estates, while others can only live on them by letting the mansion house and the shooting, and occupying some small house on the lands they are reluctant to leave. the agricultural depression, which set in about , may in short be said to have effected a minor social revolution, and to have completed the ruin of the old landed aristocracy as a class. the depreciation of their rents may be judged from the following figures[ ]: gross annual value of lands, including tithes, under schedule a in england. decrease. - - amount. per cent. £ £ £ , , , , , , . these figures, however, are far from indicating the full extent of the decline in the rental value of purely agricultural land, as they include ornamental grounds, gardens, and other properties, and do not take into account temporary remissions of rent. sir james caird, as early as , estimated the average reduction on agricultural rents at per cent. the loss in the capital value of land has inevitably been great from this reduction in rents, and has been aggravated by the fact that the confidence of the public in agricultural land as an investment has been much shaken. in thirty years' purchase on the gross annual value of land was the capital value, in only eighteen years' purchase; and whereas the capital value of land in the united kingdom was in £ , , , , in it was £ , , , , a decrease of . per cent. moreover, landlords have incurred increased expenditure on repairs, drainage, and buildings, and taxation has grown enormously. on the occupiers of land the effect of the depression was no less serious, their profits having fallen on an average per cent.[ ] occupying owners had suffered as much as any other class, both yeomen who farmed considerable farms and small freeholders. many of the former had bought land in the good times when land was dear and left a large portion of the purchase money on mortgage, with the result that the interest on the mortgage was now more than the rent of the land.[ ] they were thus worse off than the tenant farmer, for they paid a higher rent in the shape of interest; moreover, they could not leave their land, for it could only be sold at a ruinous loss. the 'statesmen' of cumberland were weighed down by the same burdens and their disappearance furthered; for instance, in the parish of abbey quarter, between and their number decreased from to . by it was ; by , ; and in only remained. the small freeholders were also largely burdened with mortgages, and even in the isle of axholme were said to have suffered more than any other class; largely because of their passion for acquiring land at high prices, leaving most of the purchase money on mortgage, and starting with insufficient capital. as regards the agricultural labourer, the chief effect of the depression had been a reduction of the number employed and a consequent decrease in the regularity of employment. [ ] their material condition had everywhere improved, though there were still striking differences in the wages paid in different parts; and the improvement, though partly due to increased earnings, was mainly attributable to the cheapening of the necessaries of life.[ ] the great majority of ordinary labourers were hired by the week, except those boarded in the farm-house, who were generally hired by the year. men, also, who looked after the live stock were hired by the year. weekly wages ranged from s. in wilts, and dorset to s. in lancashire, and averaged s. d. for the whole country. the fall in the prices of agricultural produce is best represented in tabular form: triennial average of british wheat, barley, and oats per quarter. wheat. barley. oats. s. d. s. d. s. d. - - thus wheat had fallen per cent., barley , and oats . triennial average prices of british cattle, per stone of lb. inferior quality. second quality. first quality. s. d. s. d. s. d. - - or a fall of per cent. in the best quality, and per cent. in inferior grades. the decline in the prices of all classes of sheep amounted on the average to from so to per cent., and in the price of wool of from to per cent.; that is, from an average of s. d. a lb. in - , to a little over d. in - . milk, butter, and cheese were stated to have fallen from to per cent. between and , and there had been a further fall since. in districts, however, near large towns there had been much less reduction in the price of milk. this general fall in prices seems to have been directly connected with the increase of foreign competition.[ ] wheat has been most affected by this development, and at the date of the commission the home production had sunk to per cent. of the total quantity needed for consumption. other home-grown cereals had not been similarly displaced, but the large consumption of maize had affected the price of feeding barley and oats. as regards meat, while foreign beef and mutton had seriously affected the price of inferior british grades, the influence on superior qualities had been much less marked. foreign competition had been, on the whole, perhaps more severe in pork than in other classes of meat, but had been confined mainly to bacon and hams. the successful competition of the foreigner in our butter and cheese markets was attributed mainly to the fact that the dairy industry is better organized abroad than in great britain. the commission found that another cause of the depression was the increased cost of production, not so much from the increase of wages, as from the smaller amount of work done for a given sum. where wages in the previous twenty years had remained stationary, the cost of work had increased because the labourer did not work so hard or so well as his forefathers. the following table[ ] is a striking proof of the increased ratio of the cost of labour to gross profits: ratio of average cost of acreage period average annual average labour of of gross cost of cost per to gross county. farm. acct. profit. labour. acre. profits. £ s. d. £ s. d. s. d. per cent. suffolk - , . - , . - , , . - . on a farm in wilts., between and , the ratio of the cost of labour to gross profits had increased from . per cent. to . per cent.; on one in hampshire, between and , from . per cent. to . per cent.; and many similar instances are given, illustrating very forcibly the economic revolution which has led to the transfer of a larger share of the produce of the land to the labourer. on the other hand, this commission found, like the last, that the farmer had derived considerable benefit from the decrease in cost of cake and artificial manure, while the low price of corn had led to its being largely used in place of linseed and cotton cakes. before leaving the subject of this famous commission it is well to state the answer of sir john lawes, than whom there was no higher authority, to the oft-repeated assertion that high farming would counteract low prices. 'the result of all our experiments,' he said, 'is that the reverse is the case. as you increase your crops so each bushel after a certain amount costs you more and more ... the last bushel always costs you more than all the others.' as prices went lower 'we must contract our farming to what i should call the average of the seasons'; and in the corn districts, the higher the farmer had farmed his land by adding manure the worse had been the financial results.[ ] in the injustice of the incidence of rates on agricultural land was partly remedied, the occupier being relieved of half the rates on the land apart from the buildings, which act was continued in .[ ] but the system is still inequitable, for a farmer who pays a rent of £ a year even now probably pays more rates than the occupier of a house rated at £ a year. yet the farmer's income would very likely not be more than £ a year, whereas the occupier of the house rated at £ might have an income of £ , a year. in and mr. rider haggard, following in the footsteps of young, marshall, and caird, made an agricultural tour through england. he considered that, after foreign competition, the great danger to english farming was the lack of labour,[ ] for young men and women were everywhere leaving the country for the towns, attracted by the nominally high wages, often delusive, and by the glamour of the pavement. yet the labourer has come better out of the depression of the last generation than either landowner or farmer: he is better housed, better fed, better clothed, better paid, but filled with discontent. since mr. haggard wrote, however, there seems to be a reaction, small indeed but still marked, against the townward movement, and in most places the supply of labour is sufficient. the quality, however, is almost universally described as inferior; the labourer takes no pride in his work, and good hedgers, thatchers, milkers, and men who understand live stock are hard to obtain[ ]; and the reason for this is in large measure due to the modern system of education which keeps a boy from farm work until he is too old to take to it. his wages to-day in most parts are good; near manufacturing towns the ordinary farm hand is paid from s. to s. a week with extras in harvest, and in purely agricultural districts from s. to s. a week, often with a cottage rent free at the lower figure. his cottage has improved vastly, especially on large estates, though often leaving much to be desired, and the rent usually paid is £ or £ a year, rising to £ and £ near large towns. the wise custom of giving him a garden has spread, and is nearly always found to be much more helpful than an allotment. the superior or more skilled workmen,[ ] such as the wagoner, stockman, or shepherd, earns in agricultural counties like herefordshire from s. to s. a week, and in manufacturing counties like lancashire from s. to s. a week, with extras such as d. a lamb in lambing time. at the lower wages he often has a cottage and garden rent free. the improved methods of cutting and harvesting crops have so enabled the farmer to economize labour that the once familiar figure of the irish labourer with his knee-breeches and tall hat, who came over for the harvest, has almost disappeared. women, who formerly shared with the men most of the farm work, now are little seen in most parts of england at work in the fields, and are better occupied in attending to their homes. the divorce of the labourer from the land by enclosure had early exercised men's minds, and many efforts were made to remedy this. about especially, several landowners in various parts of england introduced allotments, and the movement spread rapidly, so that in the royal commission on labour stated that in most places the supply was equal to or in excess of the demand.[ ] however, previous allotments and small holdings acts not being considered so successful as was desired, in an effort was made to give more effect to the cry of 'back to the land' by a small holdings and allotments act[ ] which enables county councils to purchase land by agreement or take it on lease, and, if unable to acquire it by agreement, to do so compulsorily, in order to provide small holdings for persons desiring to lease them. the county council may also arrange with any borough council or urban district council to act as its agent in providing and managing small holdings. the duty of supplying allotments rests in the first instance with the rural parish councils, though if they do not take proper steps to provide allotments, the county council may itself provide them. it is a praiseworthy effort, though marked by arbitrary methods and that contempt for the rights of property, provided it belongs to some one else, that is a characteristic of to-day. that it will succeed where the small holder has some other trade, and in exceptionally favoured situations, is very probable; most of the small holders who were successful before the act had something to fall back upon: they were dealers, hawkers, butchers, small tradesmen, &c. there is no doubt, too, that an allotment helps both the town artisan and the country labourer to tide over slack times. whether it will succeed in planting a rural population on english soil is another matter. it is a consummation devoutly to be wished, for a country without a sound reserve of healthy country-people is bound to deteriorate. the small holder, pure and simple, without any by-industry, has hitherto only been able to keep his head above water by a life which without exaggeration may be called one of incessant toil and frequent privation, such a life as the great mass of our 'febrile factory element' could not endure. and if there is one tendency more marked than another in the history of english agriculture, it is the disappearance of the small holding. in the middle ages it is probable that the average size of a man's farm was acres, with its attendant waste and wood; since then amalgamation has been almost constant. it is true that the occupier of a few acres often brings to bear on it an amount of industry which is greater in proportion than that bestowed on a large farm; but the large farmer has, as young pointed out long ago, very great advantages. he is nearly always a man of superior intelligence and training. he has more capital, and can buy and sell in the best markets; he can purchase better stock, and save labour and the cost of production by using the best machinery. by buying in large quantities he gets manures, cakes, seeds, &c., better and cheaper than the small holder. besides the small holders who have outside industries to fall back upon, those who are aided by some exceptionally favourable element in the soil or climate, or proximity to good markets, should do well. yet in the isle of axholme, the paradise of small holders, we have seen that the commission of reported that distress was severe. this, however, seems to have been largely due to the exaggerated land-hunger in the good times, which induced the tenants to buy lands at too high a price; and under normal conditions, such as they are now returning to, the tenants seem to thrive. in this district the preference for ownership as opposed to tenancy is, in spite of recent experiences, unqualified, though it is admitted that the best way is to begin by renting and save enough to buy.[ ] the soil is peculiarly favourable to the production of celery and early potatoes; and large tracts of land are divided into unfenced strips locally known as 'selions' of from a quarter of an acre to acres each, cultivated by men who live in the villages, each having one or more strips, some as much as acres, and it is considered that acres is the smallest area on which a man can support a family without any other industry to help him. yet in the fen districts and on the marsh lands between boston and the east coast of lincolnshire, where the land is naturally very productive, many people are making livings out of or acres, mainly by celery and early potatoes.[ ] other districts adapted naturally to small holdings are those of rock and far forest, the famous vale of evesham, the sandy and biggleswade district of bedfordshire; upwey, dorset; calstock and st. dominick, cornwall; wisbech, cambridgeshire; and tiptree, essex. apart, however, from by-industries, and exceptional climate, soil, and situation, the small holding for the purpose of raising corn and meat, as distinguished from that which is devoted to dairying, fruit-growing, and market gardening, does not seem to-day to have much chance of success. if farms were still self-sufficing, and simply provided food and clothing for the farmer, the small producer even of corn and meat might do as well as the larger farmer on a lower scale, but such conditions have gone; all holdings now are chiefly manufactories of food, and the smaller manufactory has little chance in competition with the greater. the example of foreign countries is usually held up to englishmen in this connexion, and the argument naturally used is that 'if small holdings answer in france and belgium, why can they not do so in england?' on this point the testimony of sir john lawes is worth quoting.[ ] 'in most, if not in all continental countries' he says, 'the success of small holdings depends very materially on whether or not the soil and the climate are suitable for what may be called industrial crops: such as tobacco, hops, sugar beet, colza, flax, hemp, grapes, and other fruit and vegetables; where these conditions do not exist the condition of the cultivators is such _as would not be tolerated in this country_.' that is the reason probably why small holdings, apart from exceptional conditions, do not answer in england; the englishman of to-day is not anxious to face the hard and grinding conditions under which the continental small holder lives. since mr. haggard's tour the black clouds which have so long lowered over agriculture have shown signs of lifting. rents have been adjusted to a figure at which the farmer has some chance of competing with the foreigner,[ ] though the price of grain keeps wretchedly low; stock has improved, and there is undoubtedly to-day ( ) a brisker demand for farms, and in some localities rents have even advanced slightly. the yeoman--that is, the man who owns and farms his own land, perhaps the most sound and independent class in the community--has, unfortunately for england, largely disappeared. even of those who remain, some prefer to let their property and rent holdings from others! it has been noticed that the labourer's lot has improved in this generation of adversity; and well it might, for his previous condition was miserable in the extreme. the farmers have suffered severely, many losing all their capital and becoming farm labourers. the landlords have suffered most; they have not been able to throw up their land like the farmer, and until quite recently have watched it becoming poorer and poorer. the depression, in short, has driven from their estates many who had owned them for generations. those who have survived have usually been men with incomes from other sources than land, and they have generally deserved well of their country by keeping their estates in good condition in spite of falling rents and increasing taxation. no class of men, indeed, have been more virulently and consistently abused than the landlords of england, and none with less justice. there have been many who have forgotten that property has its duties as well as its rights; they have erred like other men, but as a rule they play their part well. even the worst are to some extent obliged by their very position to be public spirited, for the mere possession of an estate involves the employment of a number of people in healthy outdoor occupations which englishmen to-day so especially need to counteract the degenerating influences of town life. many of the great estates[ ] are carried on at a positive loss to their owners, and it may be doubted whether agricultural property pays the possessor a return of per cent. per annum; which is as much as to say that the landlord furnishes the tenant with capital in the form of land at that rate for the purpose of his business. what other class is content with such a scanty return? they are often charged with not managing their estates on business principles, and no charge is worse founded. it would be a sad day for the tenants on many an estate if they were managed on commercial lines. one of the first results would be that many properties would be given up as a dead loss. they could only be made to pay by raising the rents or cutting down the ever-recurring expenditure on repairs and buildings which are necessary for the welfare of the tenants. the duke of bedford, in his _story of a great estate_, has said that the rent has completely disappeared from three of his estates. on the thorney and woburn estates over £ , was spent on new works and permanent improvements alone between and , and the result, owing to agricultural depression and increased burdens on the land, was a net loss of £ , a year; and every one with any knowledge of the management of land knows that this is no isolated case, though it may be on an exceptionally large scale. where would many tenants be if commercial principles ruled on rent audit days? the larger english landlords of to-day are as a rule not dependent on their rent rolls. to their great advantage, and to the advantage of their tenants, they generally own other property, so that they need not regard the land as a commercial investment. they can therefore support the necessary outlay on a large estate, the capital expenditure on improvements of all kinds, and thus relieve the tenant of any expense of this kind. the farms are let at moderate, not rack rents, such as the tenants can easily pay. also the landlord can make large reductions of rent in years of exceptional distress.[ ] rents are generally collected three months after they are due, a considerable concession; and even then arrears are numerous, for any reasonable excuse for being behind with the rent is generously listened to. it is owing to forbearance in this and other matters that the relations between landlord and tenant are generally excellent. where are the best farm buildings, where the best cottages, where does the owner carry on a home farm often for the assistance of the tenant by letting him have the use of entire horses, well-bred bulls, and rams, if not on the larger estates? the restrictions in leases, so much decried of late years, were nearly always in the interest of good farming, and their abolition will lead to the deterioration of many a holding. bacon said, 'where men of great wealth do stoop to husbandry, it multiplieth riches exceedingly' and wiser words were never uttered. yet these are the men who are singled out for attack by agitators, who are only listened to because the greater number of modern englishmen are ignorant of the land and everything connected with it. at a time when rents have dwindled, in some cases almost to vanishing point, taxation has increased, and confiscatory schemes and meddlesome restrictions have frightened away capital from the land. many of the landlords of england would clearly gain by casting off the burden of their heavily weighted property, but they nearly all stick nobly to their duty, and hope for that restoration of confidence in the sanctity of property and of respect for freedom of contract which would do so much towards the rehabilitation of what is still the greatest and most important industry in the country. footnotes: [ ] and an ever increasing burden of taxation. [ ] see appendix iii. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , pp. , . [ ] _parliamentary reports of commissioners_, , xiv. pp. sq. [ ] _parliamentary reports of commissioners_, , xiv. . [ ] the rise between and has been estimated at per cent., and between and at - / per cent. hasbach, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_, , p. . [ ] see infra, p. . [ ] _rural economy of southern counties_, i. - . [ ] _victoria county history: hereford, agriculture_. [ ] in one respect the act of restricted the rights of tenants to compensation, for while the act of had expressly reserved the rights of the parties under 'custom of the country', the act of provided that a tenant 'shall not claim compensation by custom or otherwise than in manner authorized by this act for any improvement for which he is entitled to compensation under this act' (§ ). [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xv. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( ), p. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( ), p. . cf. infra, p. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( ), p. ; ( ), p. . sometimes to artificially raising them. [ ] ibid. ( ), p. . [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xv. [ ] broadly speaking, the arable section, or eastern group, included the counties of bedford, berks., bucks, cambridge, essex, hants, hertford, huntingdon, kent, leicester, lincoln, middlesex, norfolk, northampton, notts, oxford, rutland, suffolk, surrey, sussex, warwick, and the east riding of york; the grass section, or western group, included the remaining counties. [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xvi. ( ), app. b. ii. [ ] ibid. app. b. iii. [ ] ibid. ( ), xvi. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xvi. - . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( nd ser.), xxiv. [ ] ibid. ( ), p. . [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xv. . cf. p. n. [ ] ibid. pp. - . [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xv. . [ ] ibid. p. : number of agricultural labourers in england and wales. . . . . , , , , the figures for are from summary tables, _parliamentary blue book_ (c, d. , ), p. , table xxxvi. [ ] according to the report of the royal commission on labour, - , the labourer was 'better fed, better dressed, his education and language improved, his amusements less gross, his cottage generally improved, though generally on small estates there were many bad ones still'.--_parliamentary reports_, , xxxv. index et seq. [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xv. , . sir robert giffen suggested that the decline in the price of wheat pay be partly attributed to the great increase in the supply and consumption of meat. [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xv. app. iii. table viii. from an examination of the accounts of seventy-seven farms, the average expenditure on labour was found to be . per cent. of the total outlay. [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xv. . but see above, p. . [ ] & vict., c. ; i edw. vii, c. . [ ] _rural england_, ii. . yet the census returns of , , and gave no support to the idea that _young_ men were leaving agriculture for the towns. see _parl. reports_ ( ), xxxviii. ( ) . [ ] the author speaks from information derived from answers to questions addressed to landowners, farmers, and agents in many parts of england, to whom he is greatly indebted. [ ] it is, however, a fallacy to assume, as is nearly always done, that the ordinary farm labourer, at all events of the old type, is unskilled. a good man, who can plough well, thatch, hedge, ditch, and do the innumerable tasks required on a farm efficiently, is a much more skilled worker than many who are so called in the towns. [ ] _parl. reports_ ( ), xxxv. index. [ ] edw. vii, c. , amending the allotments acts of and and the small holdings act of . the allotments act of defined an 'allotment' as any parcel of land of not more than acres held by a tenant under a landlord; but for the purposes of the acts of and a 'small holding' means an agricultural holding which exceeds one acre and either does not exceed acres or, if exceeding acres, is of an annual value not exceeding £ . at the same time the act defines an allotment as a holding of any size up to acres, so that up to that size a parcel of land may be treated as a small holding or an allotment. [ ] jebb, _small holdings_, p. . [ ] jebb, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] _allotments and small holdings_ ( ), p. et seq. [ ] the gross income derived from the ownership of lands in great britain, as returned under schedule a of the income tax, decreased from £ , , in - to £ , , in - . in caird estimated the rental of english land, exclusive of middlesex, at £ , , . cf. above, p. . [ ] according to the commission of , the amount expended on improvements and repairs alone on some great estates was: on lord derby's, in lancashire, of , acres, £ , in twelve years, or £ , , or s. d. an acre, each year. on lord sefton's, of , acres, £ , in twenty-two years, or about £ , , or s. an acre, each year. on the earl of ancaster's estates in lincolnshire, of , acres, £ , was spent in twelve years, or s. d. an acre each year; and many similar instances are given.--_parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xv. - . [ ] shaw lefevre, _agrarian tenures_, p. . chapter xxii imports and exports.--live stock it is a curious fact that the barriers which protected the british farmer were thrown down shortly before he became by unforeseen causes exposed to the competition of the whole world. down to germany supplied more than half the wheat that was imported into england, denmark sent more than russia, and the united states hardly any. other competitors who have since arisen were then unknown. by the end of the next decade russia and the united states sent large quantities, as may be gathered from the following table [ ]: annual average imports of wheat and flour for the seven years - . cwt. russia , , denmark and the duchies , germany , , france , , spain , wallachia and moldavia , turkish dominions, not otherwise specified , egypt , , canada , , united states , , other countries , , in the years - the united states held the first place, russia came next, and germany third with only about one-sixth of the american imports, and canada was running germany close. other formidable competitors were now arising, and by the chief importing countries[ ] were: cwt. argentina , , russia[ ] , , united states of america , , australia , , canada , , india , , since then the imports of wheat and flour from the united states have decreased, and in india took the first place, russia the second, argentina the third, and the united states the fourth. however, in the united states sent more than any other country, followed by argentina, india, canada, russia, and australia, in the order named. it is probable in the near future that the imports from the united states will decline considerably, for in the last quarter of a century its population has increased per cent. and its wheat area only per cent. on the other hand, the population of canada increased per cent. and her wheat area per cent. in the same time; while in argentina an addition of per cent. to the population has been accompanied by an increase of the wheat area from half a million to fourteen million acres. it is probable also that india and australia will continue to send large supplies, and there are said to be vast wheat-growing tracts opened up by the siberian railway, so that there seems little chance of wheat rising very much in price for many years to come, apart from exceptional causes such as bad seasons and 'corners'. mcculloch, writing in ,[ ] says that, except denmark and ireland, no country of western europe 'has been in the habit of exporting cattle'. danish cattle, however, could rarely be sold in london at a profit, and irish cattle alone disturbed the equanimity of the english farmer. for a few years after the repeal of the corn laws and of the prohibition of imports of live stock, the imports of live stock, meat, and dairy produce were, except from ireland, almost nil[ ]; since then they have increased enormously, and in the value of live cattle, sheep, and pigs imported was £ , , , not so great, however, as some years before, owing to restrictions imposed; but this decrease has been made up by the increase in the imports of meat, which in touched their highest figure of . , cwt, valued at the large sum of £ , , .[ ] forty years ago hardly any foreign butter or cheese was imported; to-day it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that not one hundredth part of the butter eaten in london is british; in the amount of butter imported was , , cwt., and of cheese, , , cwt. the increase in the imports was largely assisted by the fact that in the last half of the nineteenth century english farmers had directed their attention chiefly to meat-producing animals and neglected the milch cow. however, of late years great efforts have been made to recover lost ground, and in england the number of cows and heifers in milk or in calf has increased from , , in to , , in . the regulation of the imports and exports of live stock did not concern the legislature so early as those of corn. one of the earliest statutes on the subject is ii hen. vii, c. , which forbade the export of horses and of mares worth more than s. d., because many had been conveyed out of the land, so that there were few left for its defence and the price of horses had been thereby increased. a subsequent statute, hen. viii, c. , says this law was disobeyed by many who secretly exported horses, so it was enacted that no one should export a horse without a licence; and edw. vi, c. , continued this. but after this date the export of horses does not seem to have occupied the attention of parliament. hen. viii, c. , also forbade the export of cattle and sheep without a licence because so many had been carried out of the realm that victual was scarce and cattle dear. by car. ii, c. , oxen might be exported on payment of a duty of s. each, the last statute on the subject. as for sheep, their export without the king's licence had been forbidden by hen. vi, c. , because men had been in the habit of taking them to flanders and other countries, where they sheared them and sold the wool and the mutton. eliz., c. , forbade their export, and and car. ii, c. , declared the export of sheep and wool a felony. the importation of cattle was forbidden by car. ii, c. , which stated that the 'comeing in of late of vast numbers of cattle already fatted' had caused 'a very great part of the land of this kingdom to be much fallen and like dayly to fall more in their rents and values'; therefore every head of great cattle imported was to pay s. to the king, s. to the informer, and s. to the poor after july , . by car. ii, c. , the importation of cattle was declared a common nuisance, and if any cattle, sheep, or swine were imported they were to be seized and forfeited. by car. ii, c. , this was made perpetual and continued in force till , though it was repealed as to ireland, as we have seen.[ ] it appears from the laws dealing with the matter that in the time of the plantagenets england exported butter and cheese. in the reign of edward iii they were merchandise of the staple, and therefore when exported had to go to calais when the staple was fixed there. this caused great damage, it is said, to divers persons in england, for the butter and cheese would not keep until buyers came; therefore hen. vi, c , enacted that the chancellor might grant licence to export butter and cheese to other places than to the staple. the regulation of the export of wool frequently occupied the attention of parliament it has been noticed[ ] that the laws of edgar fixed its price for export, and henry of huntingdon mentions its export in the twelfth century, while during the reign of edward i it was for some time forbidden except by licence, which led to its being smuggled out in wine casks.[ ] the _hundred rolls_ give the names of several italian merchants who were engaged in buying wool for export, the ecclesiastical houses, especially the cistercians, furnishing a great quantity, and the chief port then for the wool trade was boston, the export was again prohibited in , the great object being to make the foreigner pay dearly for our staple product: an object which was certainly effected, for when queen philippa redeemed her crown from pawn at cologne in by a quantity of english wool, s. - / d. a lb. was the price, and it was even said to sell in flanders at s. a lb., a price which, expressed in modern money, seems fabulous.[ ] however, in the next reign english wool began to decline in price, owing probably to changes in fashion, but the long wools maintained their superiority and their export was forbidden by henry vi and elizabeth.[ ] in the reign of james i it was confessed 'that the cloth of this kingdom hath wanted both estimation and vent in foreign parts, and that the wools are fallen from their stated values', so that export was prohibited entirely; and and car. ii, c. , declared the export of wool a felony, though and will. iii, c. , says this did not deter people from exporting it, so that the law was made more stringent on the subject, and export continued to be forbidden until .[ ] in a letter written in the fall of rents in england, which had caused the value of estates to sink from twenty-one to sixteen or seventeen years' purchase, is ascribed mainly to the low price of wool,[ ] owing to the prohibition of export and increased imports from ireland and spain. it was now, said the writer, worth d. instead of d., and a great quantity of spanish wool was being sold in england at low rates. these 'low rates' were s. and s. d. a lb. for the best wool, whereas in the best spanish wool was s. and s. d. a lb. we have seen[ ] that spanish wool was imported into england in the middle ages. in , according to smith,[ ] england imported , bags of lb. each from spain[ ]; in the three years - , , bags; in the three years - , , bags; and about some came from jamaica, maryland, and virginia, and down to imports were free.[ ] in that year a duty of s. d. a cwt. was imposed, which in was raised to s. a cwt., which, however, was reduced to d. a lb. on s. wool and / d. a lb. on wool under s. in . in colonial wool was admitted free, and in the duty taken off altogether, and imports from our colonies and foreign countries soon assumed enormous proportions. down to nearly all our imports of wool came from spain; after that the greater part came from germany and the east indies; but russia and india soon began to send large quantities, and in recent times australasia has been our chief importer, in sending , , lb., while new zealand sent , , lb. out of a total import of , , lb. about our imports of wool were , , lb.![ ] of our enormous imports of wool, however, a very large quantity is re-exported. in it was stated before the house of lords that english wool had deteriorated considerably during the previous thirty years, owing chiefly to the farmer increasing the weight of the carcase and the quantity of wool, so that fineness of fleece was injured. the great extension of turnips and the introduction of a large breed of sheep also appeared to have lessened the value of the fleece, yet english wool to-day still commands a high price in comparison with that of other countries, though the price in recent years has declined greatly; in it was s. - / d. a lb., in s. - / d., in s. d. in leicester wool was - / d., southdown d. to d., and lincoln d. a lb.; australian at the same date being d., and new zealand - / d. the fruit-grower has also had to contend with an enormous foreign supply, which nearly always has a better appearance than that grown in these islands, though the quality is often inferior. in apples were included with other raw fruits in the returns, so that the exact figures are not given, but apparently about , cwt. came in; by this had increased to , , bushels, and in , , bushels arrived. enormous foreign supplies of grapes, pears, plums, cherries, and even strawberries have also combined to keep the home price down. the decrease in the acreage of hops, from its maximum of , acres in to , in , was ascribed by the recent commission to the lessening demand for beer in england, the demand for lighter kinds of beer, and the use of hop substitutes, and not to increase in foreign competition; which the following figures seem to bear out: imports of hops. cwt. , , , , , (the year before the record acreage planted) , , , , , , , in recent years they have been a loss to the grower; as the average crop is a little under cwt. per acre, and the total cost of growing and marketing from £ to £ an acre, it is obvious that prices of about £ per cwt., which have ruled lately, are unremunerative. however disastrous to the farmer and landowner, the increased quantities and low prices of food thus obtained have been of inestimable benefit to the crowded population of england. in the whole corn supply, both english and foreign, afforded lb. per annum per head of the population of millions. in the total supply gave lb. per head to a population of - / millions at a greatly reduced cost.[ ] the supply of animal food presents similar contrasts; in each person obtained lb., in lb. the average value of the imports of food per head in the period - was about s.; in the period - , s.[ ] the products which have stood best against foreign competition are fresh milk, hay and straw, the softer kinds of fruit that will not bear carriage well, and stock of the finest quality. these islands still maintain their great reputation for the excellent quality of their live stock, and exports, chiefly of pedigree animals, touched their highest figure in : average per no. total value. head. £ £ cattle , , sheep , , pigs , , .[ ] acreage under crops and grass in england , , _corn crops._ wheat , , barley or bere , , oats , , rye , beans , peas , --------- total , , _green crops._ potatoes , turnips and swedes , , mangels , carrots , cabbage, kohl rabi, and rape , vetches and other green crops , --------- total , , flax , hops , barefallow or uncropped arable , clover, sainfoin, and grasses under rotation , , ---------- total arable , , permanent grass, exclusive of mountain or heath land , , ---------- , , . total acreage under crops and grass , , _corn crops._ wheat , , barley , , oats , , rye , beans , peas , ----------- total , , potatoes , turnips and swedes , , mangels , cabbage , kohl rabi , rape , vetches or tares , lucerne , hops , small fruit , clover, sainfoin, and grasses under rotation , , other crops , bare fallow , ---------- total arable , , permanent grass , , ---------- , , the small fruit was divided into: strawberries , raspberries , - / currants and gooseberries , - / others , --------------- , - / as arable land has suffered much more than grass from foreign imports, it was inevitable that this country should become more pastoral; in the arable land of england amounted to , , acres, and permanent grass to , , . by this was practically reversed, the permanent grass amounting to , , acres and the arable to , , . in corn crops the great decrease has been in the acreage of wheat, but barley, beans, and peas have also diminished, while oats have increased. in green crops there has been a great decrease in turnips and swedes, compensated to some extent by an increase in mangels, and a sad decrease in hops. the changes in thirty years can be gathered from the tables of the board of agriculture given on p. . in no separate return of small fruit was made, but in the orchards of england, including fruit trees of any kind, covered , acres, which by had grown to a total area under fruit of , acres, among which were , acres of apples, , of pears, , of cherries, and , of plums. much of the small fruit is included in the orchards. 'other crops' were further divided into: acres. carrots , onions , buckwheat , flax others , ------- , the average yield per acre of various crops in england for the ten years - was: bushels. wheat . [ ] barley . oats . beans . peas . tons. potatoes . turnips and swedes . mangels . cwt. hay from clover, and grasses under rotation . hay from permanent grass . hops . the live stock in consisted of: horses used solely for purposes of agriculture , unbroken horses and mares kept solely for breeding , --------- , , --------- cattle. cows and heifers in milk or in calf , , two years old and over , , under two years of age , , --------- , , --------- sheep , , pigs , , in : horses used solely for agriculture , unbroken , --------- , , --------- cattle. cows and heifers in milk or in calf , , two years old and over , , under two years of age , , --------- , , --------- sheep[ ] , , pigs , , the decrease in sheep and the increase in cattle and horses (though of late years the latter have shown a tendency to decrease) are to be noted. the number of live stock per , acres of cultivated land in the united kingdom and other countries is: country. cattle. sheep. pigs. total. united kingdom belgium denmark france germany holland it will be observed that in cattle the united kingdom comes out badly, but is pre-eminent in sheep and has the largest total; though, as cattle require more acreage, belgium nearly equals its aggregate produce for , acres. as regards prices at the two periods - and - , if we take as the price at the former the following are the prices at the latter: beef mutton bacon wheat butter cheese turning once more to the occupation of land, the percentage of land occupied by owners in in england was . , the rest being occupied by tenants, and the following is a statement of the number of agricultural holdings of various sizes in and : .[ ] acres to to to to above and , , under. acres. acres. acres. acres. acres. , , , , , . above and above and above and above not exceeding not exceeding not exceeding acres. acres. acres. acres. , , , , footnotes: [ ] mcculloch, _commercial dictionary_ ( ), p. . [ ] see _returns of the board of agriculture_. [ ] the imports from russia were that year exceptionally small. [ ] mcculloch, _commercial dictionary_ ( ), p. . [ ] in the number of live cattle imported was , ; in , , ; in , , . [ ] in the quantity of beef imported was , cwt.; in , , , cwt. [ ] see above. [ ] supra, p. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, i. , ; _hundred rolls_, i. , . [ ] burnley, _history of wool_, p. . [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] cf. supra, p. . [ ] smith, _memoirs of wool_, i. . [ ] see above. [ ] smith, _memoirs of wool_, ii. . [ ] mcpherson, _annals of commerce_, iii. . [ ] mcculloch, _commercial dictionary_, p. . for imports see appendix, p. . [ ] of which , , lb. came from spain. the first spanish merino sheep were introduced into australia in . see cunningham, _industry and commerce_, ii. , and cf. below. [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( ), p. . [ ] _board of agriculture returns_ ( ), p. . [ ] cf. appendix iv. [ ] in the average wheat crop was . bushels per acre in england and . in scotland. the average yield per acre of wheat in holland is . bushels; belgium, ; germany, . ; denmark, . france, . [ ] the total number of sheep in great britain in was , , ; in , , , . in youatt estimates it at , , ; in , , , ; in , , ; in , , . [ ] unfortunately the class acres and under at this time included holdings _under_ one acre, so that it is useless for the comparison of the number of small holdings at the two dates, for in none appear under one acre. chapter xxiii modern farm live stock cart horses arthur young at the end of the eighteenth century found only two kinds of cart horses worthy of mention, the shire and the suffolk punch; to-day, besides these two, we have the clydesdale. the shire horse, according to sir walter gilbey, is the purest survival of the great horse of mediaeval times, known also as the war horse, and the old english black horse. it is the largest of draught horses, attaining a height of to . hands and a weight of , lb., its general characteristics being immense strength, symmetrical proportions, bold free action, and docile disposition. in the shire horse society was established to improve the breed, and distribute sound and healthy sires through the country. the clydesdale, whose native home is the valley of the clyde, is not so large as the shire, but strong, active, and a fine worker. they are either derived from a cross between flemish stallions and lanarkshire mares, or are an improvement of the old lanark breed.[ ] the suffolk punch looks what he is-a thorough farm horse. he stands lower than the two former breeds, but weighs heavily, often , lb. they are generally chestnut or light dun in colour, and their legs are without the feather of the clydesdale and shire. they have been long associated with suffolk, and were mentioned by camden in . according to the suffolk _stud book_ of , the suffolk horses of to-day are with few exceptions the descendants in the direct male line of the original breed described by arthur young. cattle what was the original breed of cattle in this island is uncertain. the report of the british association for the advancement of science in favours the view that the herds of wild cattle, such as still exist at chillingham, represent the original breed of great britain. it states that the 'urus' was the only indigenous wild ox in this country, and the source of all our domesticated breeds as well as of the few wild ones that remain, such as the chillingham breed, which is small, white, with the inside of the ear red, and a brownish muzzle. some, however, assert they are merely the descendants of a domesticated breed run wild, which have reverted somewhat to the ancient type.[ ] according to thorold rogers, the cattle of the middle ages were small rough animals like the mountain breeds of to-day, and at the end of the sixteenth century we have seen they had large horns, were low and heavy, and for the most part black.[ ] the great variety of cattle in great britain may be due to their being the descendants of several species, or to difference of climate and soil, or to spontaneous variation, but the chief cause is the diligent selection of breeders. marshall is quite positive[ ] that the hereford, devon, sussex, and the black mountain breeds of scotland and wales are all descended from the original native breed of this island, that the shorthorns came from the continent, and the longhorns probably from ireland. bradley's division of cattle into black, white, and red tells us little.[ ] there was very little attempt at improvement until the middle of the eighteenth century, for peace was necessary for long continued effort, and , the date of culloden, the last battle fought on british soil, may be taken practically as the commencement of the era of progress. the shorthorn is the most famous and widely-spread breed of this country, if not in the world; it exceeds in number any other breed in the united kingdom, and most cross-breds have shorthorn blood in them. it adapts itself to any climate, and is equally noted for beef-making and milk-yielding. the origin of the shorthorns is uncertain; they originated from the teeswater and holderness varieties, but where these came from is a matter of dispute. young, in his _northern tour_,[ ] says, 'in yorkshire the common breed was the short-horned kind of cattle called holderness, but really the dutch sort'; and many have said the holderness and the teeswater breeds both came from holland, and were practically the same, while others assert the original home of the teeswaters was the west highlands.[ ] john lawrence speaks of the dutch breed with short horns in ;[ ] but, unless they were smuggled over, it certainly seems strange that any dutch cattle should have been imported in the eighteenth century, for the importation of cattle was strictly forbidden during the whole century. it was george culley's opinion that they came from holland, because few were found except along the eastern coast; he also knew farmers who went over to holland to buy bulls.[ ] be this as it may, it was the cattle of the teeswater district in durham that the collings improved, and they are still called durhams in many parts. the work of the collings[ ] was carried on by thomas booth, who farmed his own estate of killerby in yorkshire, where he turned his attention to shorthorns about , and by he was as well known as the collings. he improved the shorthorns by reducing the bone, especially the length and coarseness of the legs, the too prominent hips, and the heavy shoulder bones. in he removed to warlaby, and died there in , having given up the killerby estate to his son john, who with his brother richard ably sustained their father's reputation. 'booth strains' equally with 'bates strains', the results of the work of bates of kirkleavington, whose cattle we have seen at the oxford show in , and whose herd was dispersed in , have been the foundation of many famous herds, and can be traced in many a pedigree animal of to-day. the palmy days of the shorthorns were the 'seventies' of the last century, when they made fabulous prices. at the great sale at new york mills, in , eleven females of the duchess tribe averaged £ , s. d., and one cow sold for £ , s. d. in mr. loder bought third duchess of hillhurst for , guineas; in lord bective gave , guineas for fifth duchess of hillhurst, then months old; and in the bull duke of connaught sold for , guineas. it was not likely that with the advent of bad times these prices would continue, and nothing like them in the shorthorn world has occurred since. _herefords._[ ] herefordshire cattle have long been famous as one of the finest breeds in the world. marshall, writing in , does not hesitate to say, 'the herefordshire breed of cattle, taking it all in all, may without risque be deemed the first breed of cattle in the land.' their origin has been accounted for in various ways. some say they were originally brown or reddish-brown from normandy or devon, others that they came from wales, while it is recorded that lord scudamore in the latter half of the seventeenth century introduced red cows with white faces from flanders. however, they do not emerge from obscurity until about the middle of the eighteenth century, when messrs. tomkins, weyman, yeomans, hewer, and tully devoted their energies to establishing a county breed. there were four varieties of herefords, which have now practically merged into the red with white face, mane, and throat: the mottle face, with red marks intermixed with the parts usually white; the dark greys; light greys; and the red with the white face. the rivalry between the breeders of the white and the mottle faces almost caused the failure of the herd-book commenced in by mr. eyton. the mottle-faced party seems to have been then the most influential, but the dark and light grey varieties also had strong adherents. in mr. duckham took over the management of the herd-book, and to his exertions the breed owes a deep debt of gratitude. one of the greatest supporters of the herefordshire breed was mr. westcar of creslow, who, starting in , attended hereford october fair for forty years, and when the smithfield show commenced in won innumerable first prizes there with herefordshire cattle. between and twenty of his herefordshire prize oxen averaged £ s. each, and at the sale of mr. ben tomkins's herd after his death in twenty-eight breeding animals averaged £ , one cow fetching £ s. herefords are famous for their feeding qualities at grass, and good stores are scarce, the best being fattened on their native pastures. they are not only almost the only breed in their own county, but few english counties south of shropshire are without them; they have done well in ireland, and in canada, the united states, south america, and australia have attained great success. they are not so well qualified for crossing as shorthorns, but have blended well with that breed, and produced good crosses with ayrshires and jerseys, but not with devons. it has been said that they are not a favourite sort with london butchers, as they require time to ripen, which does not suit a hurrying age. hence they probably flourished best under the old school of graziers, who sometimes kept them to six or seven years old. at all events they are a very fine breed for beef purposes, their meat being particularly tender, juicy, and fine-grained. they are seldom kept for dairy purposes, being poor milkers; consequently the calf is nearly always allowed to run with the dam, which accounts for the fact that one seldom sees pure-bred herefords that are not well grown. the highest price paid for a hereford was , guineas for lord wilton in . _devons._ the cattle of north devon can be traced as the peculiar breed of the county from which they take their name from the earliest records. bradley mentioned the red cattle of somerset in , and no doubt there were many in devonshire.[ ] william marshall states ( ), and he is supported by subsequent writers, that 'they are of the middle horn class', and in his time so nearly resembled the herefordshire breed in frame, colour, and horn, as not to be distinguishable from them, except in the greater cleanness of the head and fore-quarters, and their smaller size. yet they could not have had the white faces and throats of the herefords, as they have always been famous for their uniformity in colour--a fine dark red.[ ] he also compares them to the cattle of sussex and the native cattle of norfolk.[ ] the devons then differed very much in different parts of the county; those of north devon taking the lead, being 'nearly what cattle ought to be'. they were, considered as draught animals, the best workers anywhere beyond all comparison, though rather small, for which deficiency they made up in exertion and agility. as dairy cattle they were not very good, since rearing for the east country graziers had long been the main object of devon cattle farmers, but as grazing cattle they were excellent. vancouver, a few years after this, praised their activity in work and their unrivalled aptitude to fatten, but says they were then declining in their general standard of excellence, and in numbers, owing to the great demand for them from other parts of england, where the buyers (mr. coke, who had established a valuable herd of them, and others) spared neither pains nor price to obtain those of the highest excellence. this danger was clearly perceived by francis quartly of molland, who set to work to remedy it by systematically buying the choicest cows he could procure. as the reputation and perhaps continuance of the devon breed is due to him more than to any other man, his account of his own efforts on behalf of it is specially valuable.[ ] at the end of the eighteenth century the principal north devon yeomen were all breeders, and every week you might see in the molton market, their natural locality, animals that would now be called choice. there were few cattle shows in those days, and therefore the relative value of animals was not so easily tested. the war prices tempted many farmers to sell their best bulls and cows out of the district, so that good animals were becoming scarce, and the breed generally going back. mr. quartly therefore for years bought all the best animals he could find with rare skill and judgement, and continued to improve his stock till he brought it to perfection. about the year cattle shows began at exeter, and for the first year or two mr. quartly did not compete; then he allowed his nephews to enter in all the classes, and they brought home all the prizes. this lead they kept, and at the royal show at exeter in their stock obtained nine out of the ten prizes for devons. the _devon herd-book_ was first published in by captain t.t. davy, and a writer in says that of twenty-nine prize bulls in the first three volumes twenty-seven were descended from the quartly bull forester, and of thirty-four prize cows twenty-nine from the cow curly, also of their stock. among other famous breeders of devons contemporary with quartly were messrs. merson, davy, michael thorne, yapp, buckingham, the halses, and george turner. in moore says, 'the young heifers of north devon, with their taper legs, the exact symmetry of their form, and their clear coats of dark red, are pictures of elegance.' their superiority for grazing and draught was proved by the high prices demanded for them, but they were not equally esteemed as dairy animals,[ ] though of late years this reproach has been removed. the ploughing of two acres of fallow land was the common work of four oxen, which, when fattened at five years old, would reach eleven score a quarter. since the publication of the herd-book, devons have spread all over the world, to mexico, jamaica, canada, australia, france, and united states, and the fact that in their original home they have been largely kept by tenant farmers proves them a good rent-paying breed. yet it cannot be pretended that away from their native country they are as much valued as the shorthorn and hereford. the south hams breed of south devon is a distinct variety, though it is believed to be descended from the 'rubies'[ ] and apparently has at some time been crossed with the guernsey; they are good milkers and attain a great size, but the quality of the meat is decidedly inferior to that of north devon. from the earliest times the real devon colour has been red, varying from a dark to a lighter or almost chestnut shade; half a century ago the lighter ones were more numerous than at present, and they are often of richer quality though less hardy than the dark ones. the sussex is larger and coarser than the devon, of a deep brown chestnut colour, very hardy, a beef-producing but not a milk-yielding sort. longhorns,[ ] a generation ago nearly extinct, once the favourite cattle of the midlands and portions of the north, are descended from a breed long established in the craven district of yorkshire. 'the true lancashire,' said young in , 'were longhorns, and in derbyshire were a bastard sort of lancashires.'[ ] it was this breed that bakewell improved, and of late years great efforts, chiefly in warwickshire and leicestershire, have been made to revive it. the red polled, or norfolk polled, is the only hornless breed of english cattle, and they are good milkers and fatteners. the lincoln red is a small red variety of the shorthorn. many of the welsh breeds have spread into the adjacent parts of england, and may be classified as north and south welsh, or angleseys and castle martins; black in colour, and generally with long horns. the scottish cattle--the aberdeen angus, the galloways, the highland breed, and the ayrshires--are also seen in england, but not so often as the jerseys and guernseys from the channel islands, while the small dexters and kerrys from ireland are favourites with some english farmers. sheep the sheep of the british isles may be divided into three main classes:-- . longwools, containing leicesters, border leicester's, cotswolds, lincolns, kentish, devon longwool, south devon, wensleydale, and roscommon. . shortwools: the oxford downs, southdowns, shropshires, hampshire downs, suffolks, ryelands, somerset and dorset horned, and clun forest. . mountain breeds: cheviots, blackfaced mountain, herdwick, lonk, dartmoor, exmoor, welsh mountain, and limestone. these are all english except the border leicester, cheviot, and blackfaced mountain, which are scotch; the welsh mountain is of course welsh, and the roscommon irish. . the leicesters, the largest and in many respects the most important of british longwool sheep, are the sheep which bakewell improved so greatly. they are capable of being brought to a great weight, and their long fine wool averages lb. to the fleece. the border leicesters are an offshoot of the last named, bred on the scottish border, and originating from the flock which george and matthew culley in took from the tees to the tweed. the cotswolds have been on the gloucestershire hills for ages, and have long been famous for the length of their fleece, hardiness, and breeding qualities. the lincoln is the result of the old native breed of the county improved by leicester blood. they have larger heads and denser and heavier wool than the leicesters, averaging to lb. to the fleece, but have been known to yield lb. the kentish or romney marsh have long existed in the district whence they obtain their name, but are not much known away from that locality. the devon longwool is a result of the infusion of leicester blood among the old bampton stock of devonshire called bampton notts or polled sheep. the south devons or south hams are another local breed, and are a result of the improvement of the south hams notts by the leicester. the wensleydales are descendants of the old teeswater breed, itself a variety of the old leicester and improved by the new leicesters of culley. . oxford downs, a modern black-faced breed, now widely spread all over the midland counties, are a mixture of cotswolds with hampshire downs and southdowns, and originated at the beginning of queen victoria's reign, but were not definitely so called till . this cross of two distinct varieties, the long and the short wool, has approximated to the shortwool type. the southdown, formerly sussex down, an old breed bred for ages on the chalky soils of the south downs, is 'perhaps', says youatt, 'the most valuable breed in the kingdom.' it was to john ellman of glynde, at the end of the eighteenth century, that they owe their present perfection, and they have exercised as much influence among the shortwools as the leicesters among the longwools. the shropshire sheep is a descendant of the original longmynd or old shropshire sheep, which began to be crossed by the southdown at the commencement of the nineteenth century.[ ] they were recognized as a distinct breed in , and since then have become one of the most valued breeds, combining the symmetry and quality of the southdown with the weight of the cotswold and the fattening tendency of the leicester, with a hardier constitution. the hampshire down is another instance of the widespread influence of the southdown, being the result of crossing that breed with the old wiltshire sheep, which had long curling horns, and the berkshire knott. they are heavier than the shropshire, and are perhaps more distinguished for early maturity than any other breed. the suffolk is derived from the old horned norfolk ewe mated with the southdown, and was first granted its name in . the ryeland is a small, hornless, white-faced breed which has been in herefordshire for centuries, but of late years has dwindled in numbers before the advent of the shropshire. the somerset and dorset horned is another old breed, preserved in a pure state, much improved in modern times, and very hardy. the clun forest breed of west shropshire and the adjacent parts of wales is a mixture of the ryeland, shropshire, and welsh breeds. . the cheviot is found on both sides of the hills of that name, though northumberland is said to be its original home, and it was improved in the eighteenth century by crossing with the lincoln. the blackfaced mountain breed is found chiefly in scotland, but thrives on the bleak grazing lands of the north of england. the herdwicks' home is the hills of cumberland and westmoreland, where they are hardy enough to fatten on the poor, thin pasture. the lonk is the largest mountain breed, belonging to the fells of yorkshire and lancashire. the dartmoors and exmoors almost certainly came from one stock, though the former are now the larger, and are the few real survivors of the old forest or mountain breeds of england. the exmoor is horned, the dartmoor hornless. the welsh mountain is a small, hardy, soft-woolled breed, their mutton having the best flavour of any sheep, and their wool making the famous welsh flannel. the limestone is little known outside the fells of westmoreland. pigs our pigs may be roughly divided into white, black, and red; the first comprising the large, middle, and small whites, formerly called yorkshires; the second the small black (suffolk or essex), the large black only recently recognized, but apparently very ancient, and the berkshire, which often has white marks on face, legs, or tail. the red is the tamworth, one of the oldest breeds, its skin being red with dark spots. footnotes: [ ] youatt, _complete grazier_ ( ), p. ; cf. pp. - . [ ] youatt, _complete grazier_ ( ), p. . [ ] see above. [ ] _rural economy of west of england_, i. cf. above, p. . [ ] see above. [ ] ii. ; about . [ ] youatt, _complete grazier_, p. , and see 'druid', _saddle and sirloin_. [ ] cf. supra, p. . [ ] _culley on live stock_ ( ), p. . [ ] see p. . [ ] much of these accounts of herefords and devons is from the author's articles in the _victoria county history_. [ ] see above. [ ] risdon, _survey_ ( ), introd. p. viii. [ ] _rural economy of west of england_, i. . risdon says of devonshire: 'as to cattle, no part of the kingdom is better supplied with beasts of all sorts, whether for profit or pleasure,' those for pleasure being apparently wild ones kept in parks.--chapple's _review of risdon's survey_, p. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( st ser.), xi. . see also ibid. xix. , and ( nd ser.) v. ; xiv. ; xx. . [ ] _history of devon_, i. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( rd ser.), i. . [ ] see above. [ ] _northern tour_, ii. . [ ] _r.a.s.e. journal_ ( ), p. . appendix i average prices from to [ ] corn per quarter. wheat. barley. oats. - s. - / d. s. - / d. s. - / d. - s. - / d. s. - / d. s. - / d. - s. - / d. s. - / d. s. - / d. - s. - / d. s. d. s. d. rye. beans. - s. - / d. s. - / d. - s. - / d. s. - / d. - -- s. - / d. - -- s. - / d. live stock. oxen. cows. cart horses.[ ] - s. - / d. s. d. s. d. - moderate increase s. unaltered - s. s. great increase - s. s. - £ to £ - £ to £ pigs sheep. lambs. (grown). boars. - s. d. to s. d. d. s. s. d. - moderate increase d. unaltered s. - s. to s. d. s. to s. s. d. to s. -- - s. d. -- great increase poultry and eggs. hens. ducks. geese. eggs. - - / d. d. - / d. - / d. per - - / d. - / d. - / d. - / d " - - / d. - / d. d. - / d. " - d.- s. - / d. s. s. d. " wool. cheese. butter. per lb. - - / d. - / d. per lb. - / d. per lb. - - / d. / d. per lb. d. per lb. - - / d. d. " d. " - d.- s. - / d. " - / d. " hay. hops. per load. per cwt. - s. d. -- - unaltered s. - / d. - s. d. s. d. - s. d. s. d. labour. reaping reaping labourer per wheat oats mowing day without per acre. per acre. per acre. food. - - / d. - / d. - / d. d. - - / d. - / d. d. d. - - / d. - / d. - / d. d. - --[ ] -- -- - / d. - -- -- s. d. - / d. - -- -- s. d. d. price of land per acre. to rent. to buy. arable. grass. - d.- d. s.- s. years' purchase - d. s. " - d. s. - years - slight increase unaltered - great increase years - s. s. " s. years footnotes: [ ] summarized from thorold rogers' prices in his _history of agriculture and prices_, with some alterations. [ ] affri, s. d. cart horses, s. d. a good saddle horse about was worth £ . by it was worth £ to £ , by £ to £ . [ ] a decided increase, but prices fluctuate so much that it is hard to strike an average. appendix ii table showing exports and imports of wheat and flour from and into england, unimportant years omitted exports. imports. quarters. quarters. england. , , , none , , , , great britain. , , , , , none , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , the above figures are taken from mcculloch's _commercial dictionary_, , p. , and agree roughly with those given by mcpherson, _annals of commerce_, iii. , and iv. and . after , exports played a very small part, and imports continued to increase; in , , , _quarters_ of wheat and flour came in; and the following figures show their growth in recent times:-- average of annual imports of wheat and flour in cwts. - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , with regard to the exports and imports of all kinds of corn, large quantities were exported in the first half of the eighteenth century. in , , quarters were sent to france, portugal, spain, and italy,[ ] and exports reached their maximum in with , , quarters, but by had decreased to , , and after that fell considerably; in , for instance, the first year of the corn register, they only amounted to , quarters, whereas imports were , . the figures of the imports were swollen by the large quantities of oats which came into england at this time. the following years are typical of the fluctuations in the trade:-- exports. imports. , , , , , , , , , , - large excess of imports, mainly oats , , the last year when exports of all kinds of corn exceeded imports.[ ] to sum up, according to these figures, england's exports of wheat regularly exceeded her imports from until , with the exception of the years - ; then they fluctuated till , the last year in which exports of wheat exceeded imports, and as the same year is the last time when our exports of all kinds of corn exceeded our imports, england at that date ceased to be an exporting country.[ ] footnotes: [ ] mcpherson, _annals of commerce_, iii. . [ ] ibid. iii. ; iv. , . [ ] the excess of exports of wheat in was accidentally due to the requirements of the army in spain. appendix iii average prices per imperial quarter of british corn in england and wales, in each year from to inclusive, according to the returns of the board of agriculture years. wheat. barley. oats. s. d. s. d. s. d. appendix iv miscellaneous information gregory king, at the end of the seventeenth century, estimated the acreage of england and wales at , , --not at all a bad estimate, the area, excluding water, according to the board of agriculture returns of , being , , . the different estimates by grew, templeman, petty, young, halley, middleton, and others varied between , , and , , acres. the last, that of arthur young, was actually adopted by pitt for his estimate of the income-tax.[ ] * * * * * caird in [ ] estimated the cultivated lands of england at , , acres (in they were , , acres), cultivated thus:-- permanent grass , , arable , , the latter being divided as follows:-- acres. bushels produce, per acre. quarters. wheat , , , , barley , , , , oats and rye , , , , clover and seeds , , beans and peas , , , , turnips, marigolds, & potatoes , , rape and fallow , , davenant, at the end of the seventeenth century, made the following estimate showing the importance of wool in english trade[ ]:-- annual income of england £ , , yearly rent of land , , value of wool shorn yearly , , " woollen manufactures , , thus the rents of land formed nearly one-fourth the total income of the country, and wool paid one-fifth of the rents.[ ] in the eighteenth century a great quantity of wool was smuggled out of england in defiance of the law; in the space of four months in , , tods was 'run' into boulogne.[ ] foreign and colonial wool imported into england.[ ] lb. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , prices of labour in surrey in .[ ] s. d. day labourer, per day, in winter " " in summer reaping wheat, per acre " " and according to the crop up to mowing barley, per acre " oats, " s. d. to " grass " hand-hoeing turnips, per acre, first time " " second time thatching hayricks, per square of ft. washing and shearing sheep, per score ploughing light land, per acre " stiff " " s. to common hurdles, each occupiers of land. in there were said to be , occupiers of land in great britain[ ]-- with incomes under £ , between £ and £ , over £ , ------- , ======= in there were , occupiers of one acre and more. mulhall's calculation of average annual wages in england. bailiff. shepherd. labourer. woman. boy. £ £ £ £ £ the average annual cost of living of an agricultural family of five was in £ , in , £ . comparative statement by a. young of prices and wages in england from to on the principle of representing facts in by the number , and the facts of the preceding periods by the proportion borne by them to that number. labourer's periods. wheat. meat. wool. wages. horses. - - / ... - / ... - - / ... - / ... - ... - / ... - ... - / ... - - / ... ... - - / - / - / - - / - / - / - / - - / - / - / - / - thus wheat in - had risen per cent. since the sixteenth century. the labourer's wages. the following table, published by mr. barton in ,[ ] shows the depreciation of the labourer's wages in purchasing power between and :-- weekly price of wages in period. pay. wheat. pints of s. d. s. d. bread. - - - - - in answer to inquiries sent by the poor law commissioners in to parishes in england the average weekly wages of labourers were-- in summer, s. d. in parishes, with beer or cider - / " without beer or cider - / in winter, in " with beer or cider - / " without beer or cider - / the annual average inclusive earnings of the labourer £ s. d. himself were stated at and of his wife and children ------------ ============ it will thus be seen that the wife and children provided a third of the income. the majority of the parishes said the labourer could maintain his family on these wages. here is the weekly budget of a labourer with an average family in :--[ ] cr. s. d. wages garden extras ----- ===== dr. s. d. rent - / bread bacon tea and sugar cheese butter fuel candles and soap clothes schooling sundries --------- - / ========= there is no fresh meat, and it is hard to say where any economy could be practised. contract prices of butcher's meat per cwt. at greenwich hospital, - .[ ] £ s. d. footnotes: [ ] c. wren hoskyns, _pamphlet on agricultural statistics_, p. . [ ] _english agriculture in - _, p. . cf. above, p. . [ ] smith, _memoirs of wool_, i. . [ ] in the rental of agricultural land was - / per cent. of the total income of the country. see _the times_ may , . [ ] ibid. ii. . [ ] cunningham, _industry and commerce_, ii. . cf. above, p. . [ ] trusler, _practical husbandry_, p. . [ ] farmer's magazine ( ), p. . statistics at this date, however, must be taken with caution. they were usually estimates. cf. above, p. , for holdings in england. [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xvi, . [ ] _parliamentary reports, commissioners_ ( ), xvi. . [ ] mcculloch, _commercial dictionary_ ( ), p. . index a abbot's ripton, . aberdeen angus cattle, , . accounts, keeping, , . accumulation of estates, . acre, ; tenantry, . advantages of large farms, . affer, the, . agricultural holdings acts, , , - . agricultural revolution, the, of eighteenth century, . agriculture, state of, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; seventeenth-century writers on, ; state of, in eighteenth century, , , , ; nineteenth, , , - , , . aitchison, . akermanni, . alderney cattle, . ale, . allotments, , , , n., - . allowance system, . allowances, parish, , , , . almaine, corn from, . almonds, , . amalgamation of farms, , , , , , , , , , . america, gold discoveries in, ; imports from, , , - . ancaster, earl of, estate of, . andover, . anti-corn law league, . apples, , , , , , , - , , , - , , . (_see_ prices.) apprentices, . apricots, , . arable district of england ( ), n. arable fields, , , , , . arable land, , , , ; amount of, in , ; decrease of, ; extent of, in domesday, ; in , ; in , ; in and , ; preponderance of, , ; produce of, in , ; suffers more than grass, , , , , , ; value of, , , , - , . arch, joseph, - . ardley, inquisition of, . argentina, imports from, . arley, upper, wine made at, . artificial grasses, _see_ clover, improve commons, . ash timber, value of, . assize of beer, , n. association, british, . average crops of corn ( ), . (_see under_ wheat, oats, barley, &c.) average size of farms in , . averagium, . australia, gold discoveries in, ; imports from, ; sheep introduced into, ; wool from, . axholme, , , , . ayrshires, , . b bacon, lord, , bacon, 'the necessary meate' of the labourer, , ; price of, _see_ prices. badger, a corn dealer, . bailiff, , , , , , , , , , , , . bakewell, , - , - , , , , . balance sheet, estate, ; farm, in , ; in , . balks, . ball, john, . banbury cheese, . bank restriction act, , , . barking nunnery, vineyard at, . barley, , , , , , , , , , , , - , ; cost of, per acre, ; produce, per acre, n., - ; profit on, , . (_see_ prices.) barns, size of, . barren years at end of seventeenth century, , . basic slag, . bassingthorpe, . bates, thomas, , . bath, wine made at, . beale, john, , . beans, , , , , , , , , - , ; cost of growing, ; profit on, . (_see_ prices.) bedford, duke of, , , . bedfordshire, , , , , , , . beef, price of, _see_ prices. beer, , . belgium, live stock in, ; wheat crops in, n. belvoir estate, , . berkeley estates, , n., n., , , , , . berkshire, , , , , , n. berkshire knotts, ; pigs, . berlin decrees, . best, henry, accounts of, - . bideford, . biggleswade, . birds eating fruit, . black death, , - , , . black year, the, . blight, hop, . blyth, , , , . board of agriculture, , , , - , ; (government), . bones for manure, - , , - , . booth, thomas, - . bordarii, , . boston, , , . boys' wages, . bradley, , , - , , , , . brampton, . bread, different kinds of, , , - , ; rye, , , ; wheaten, a luxury, ; common, , ; made of turnips, ; price of (_see_ prices). breeding of stock, , , , - , , . brentford, . bridport, . bright, john, . buckinghamshire, , , , , n. buckwheat, . budget, labourer's weekly, , , . buildings, farm, and repairs, , , , , , , , . bull, description of a ( ), . burford, riot at, . buri, , . bury st. edmunds, , . butter, , n., , , , , , , , n., , (_see_ prices), , , , ; exports of, - . by-industries of peasant, , , , , , , . c cabbages, , , , , , , , . cadaveratores, . caird, sir james, , , , , , , n. cake, , , , . calstock, . calves, killing of, forbidden, ; rearing, . cambridgeshire, , , , , , n., . camden, , . canada, imports from, - . canterbury, hops from, . capital of farmers, , - . carrington, lord, . carrots, , , , , , , . . carter, wages of, . cart-horses, price of, , . carts, . cattle, chillingham, ; diseases, ; export of, , ; improvement in, , , (_see_ cattle, size of); number of, in and , ; in , - ; original breed of, ; price of, _see_ prices; size of, , , , , , , ; separation of, for summer pasture, ; sorts of ( ), (_see under_ various breeds); about , ; in , ; in , , ; time to buy, . (_see_ bakewell, collings, exports, _and_ imports.) cattle plagues, of eighteenth century, , - , ; of nineteenth century, - , . cauliflowers, . causes of high prices at end of eighteenth century, . celery, . chamberlayne, . cheddar cheese, . cheese, , n., , , , , , n., , , , . (_see_ prices, exports, _and_ imports.) chelmsford, , , . chemistry, agricultural, , , . cherries, , , , , , , , , . cheshire, , , , , , , , . chestnuts, . cheviots, , , child, josiah, . christ church, canterbury, . cider, , , , - , , - , , . cistercians, good farmers, , . civil war, checks improvement, ; family settlements after, . claret made in oxfordshire, . clarke, . close parishes, , . cloth made in england, , . clothes, part of wages, , ; of labourer, , , , , - , , ; of farmer, , . clover, cost of growing, ; extent of, , , ; introduced, , ; spread of, , - , , , , , , ; seed, price of, ; sown with corn, . clun forest sheep, , . clydesdale horse, . cobbett, , , , . cobden, richard, n., , n. coinage, depreciation of, , , . coke of holkham, , , - , , . 'coke's clippings', . coleseed, . coliberti, . collings, the, , , , - , . combe, . 'comet,' , . commissions, royal, on agriculture, &c., , , , - , , , , , - , , , , . committees, parliamentary, , , n., , . common, john, . common fields, , , , , , - , , , , . common land, , , ; evils of, , , , ; improvement of, . common pasture, _see_ pasture _and_ meadows. commons, advantages of, ; extent of, in , ; rights of, lost, . communities and corporations contrasted, . commutation of labour services for money, , . compensation for improvements, , - . competition, foreign, , , , , , - . consolidation of farms, _see_ amalgamation. contractors for labour, . co-operation in agriculture, . copyholders, , - . corn laws, , , , , , , , , , - , - . cornwall, , , , , . cost of living ( - ), . cotarii, , , . cotswold sheep, , , , ; wool, famous, . cottages, , , n., , , , , , , , , - , , , , n., - . court rolls, of manydown, . cowper, john, . cows, decrease in number of, ; increase, ; let out by the year, , , ; yield of, , . (_see_ prices of cattle.) craik improves drill, . craven, migration from, . crimean war, effect of, n., . crondall, . crows' and magpies' nests to be destroyed, . culley, george, , , , . cultivated land, amount of, in , ; in , . cultivation, walter of henley on, ; of england, in , ; the old and new ways of, , , , - . cultivation, clauses, , , , , , . cumberland, , , , , . currants, . custom of the country, , n., (_see_ tenant right). cuxham, manor of, . cylindrical drain pipes, . d dairy, the, and dairying, , , , , , - , , , , , , , - . (_see_ butter, cheese, _and_ milk.) damsons, , . danegeld, . dartmoor sheep, , . davenant, , , , , . daventry, common fields at, , , , , . davy, sir h., , ; t.t., . dealers, legislation against, , , ; complaints against, . defoe, daniel, , , , , , , . degge, simon, . demesne, , , , , , , , , , . denmark, imports from, , , - ; livestock in, ; wheat crops in, n. depression, agricultural, , , , , , , , - , , , - , - . derby, lord, estate of, n. derbyshire, , , , . devon cattle, , , , , , , , , - . (_see_ southams.) devon sheep, , . devonshire, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . devonshiring, . d'ewes, sir s., quoted, , . dexters, . dibbling wheat, . digging for wheat, . diseases of animals act ( ), . dishley, - . distress, law of, , ; periods of, , (_see_ depression, agricultural), , . divining rod, . domesday, , , , , , , . doncaster, roads near, . dorking, manor of, . dorset, , , , , , ; sheep, , . dovecotes, _see_ pigeons. drainage, , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , . drills, , , - , , , - , , , , . drinking habits, - , . drying hops, . duchesses, the, , , . duckham, mr., . ducks, (_see_ poultry). dugdale, . du-hamel, . durham, , . durham ox, , . dutch breed of cattle, _see_ shorthorns. e eakring, common meadows at, . eardisley, . east indies, wool from, . eden, account of potatoes, , , , . education acts, , . egypt, imports from, . eighteenth century, general characteristics of, . electricity applied to vegetables, . elevator, hay and straw, . elkington of princethorpe, - , , . ellis, chiltern and vale farming, . ellman, john, , . enclosers prosecuted in star chamber, . enclosure, - , , , , , , , , , , - ; agreement as to, ; acts of, , , , , , , , ; amount of, exaggerated, ; different kinds of, , , , ; eighteenth century, , , , , , , , ; evils of, , , - , - , ; expense of, , ; non-parliamentary, , ; a deed of, ; a sign of progress, , , , - , ; legislation against, , , ; checked, . england, appearance of, in fifteenth century, ; in the seventeenth, - . english invaders, . entails, barred, . essex, , , , , , , , , , , , . estates, great, accumulation of, ; advantages of, ; often a loss, . evelyn, john, , . evesham, vale of, . ewes, milking of, , , . exhibition, great, , . exmoor sheep, , . exporting country, england ceases to be an, , . exports of butter and cheese, - . exports of corn, n., , , - , , , , , - ; reaches its maximum, ; of livestock, - ; of wool, , , , . extensive cultivation, . extent of the manor, . eyton, mr., . f faggots, price of, . fairs for hops, ; horses, ; sheep, n.; wool, n. fallows, utilized, , , , , ; in , , ; in , . families employed on common and on enclosed land, . farm or feorm, . farmer, day's work of, in seventeenth century, ; discontent of, - , ; financial position of, , , , , , , , - , , , - , - , , , , , ; growing more skilful, , . _farmer's letters_, young's, . farmhouses, , , , , , . farming, bad, , ; improvement in, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . farming calendar, , . farms, in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, - ; size of ( ), . farnham, hops, . fashion, farming becomes the, , . fattening oxen, , , , - , , , , n., , ; sheep, , , n.; chickens, . 'favourite', . feeding pigs, , . fences, legislation as to, . fens, the, , , , . feversham, fruit growing near, , . fifteenth century, character of, . figs, , , . filberts, , . fitzherbert, , , , , - , , , . fixtures, . flanders, cattle, ; clover from, , ; hops from, , ; wool exported to, , ; sheep exported to, . flax, , , , , - , , , , . fleece, weight of, , , , , . fleta, quoted, , . floor, for hop-picking, , . flour, exports and imports of, - . fluctuations in price of corn, , , , , , , , , , . fold soke, . folding quality, of sheep, . food, labourer's, , , , , , , , , , , , - , , - , , n., , - , , , ; farmer's, , , , n., , . foot-and-mouth disease, _see_ cattle plagues. foot-rot, . foreman, requirements of, . forncett, manor of, , , . fountains abbey, . four-course rotation, . four-field system, . fourteenth century, characteristics of, . fowler, john, . fox, the, , . france, exports to, ; imports from, , ; livestock in, ; small holders of, - ; wheat crops in, . freeholders, _see also_ yeoman, , - . freemen, . free tenants, , , . free trade, , - , ; effect of, , , , , . french war, great, _see_ wars. fruit, , , , ; imports of . fruit-growing in seventeenth century, - , , ; in eighteenth century, , - ; in nineteenth century, , , . furlongs, , . furniture of manor house, ; labourer's home, . g gafol, , . galloway cattle, , . game, damage by, . game law, the first, . gang system, . geese, , . (_see_ poultry.) gentry, at the revolution, ; estates of under walpole, ; status of , ; supplanted, , , , , , , , , . (_see_ landlords _and_ squire). gerard, , . 'gerefa, the', . germany, exports to, ; imports from, , , , , , , - , ; livestock in, ; wheat crops in, n. gilbert, . gilbert's act, . gilbey, sir w., . glamorganshire, vineyards in, . glastonbury abbey, . gleaning, . gloucestershire, , , , , , , , , , . gloves, gifts of, . gold premium, . googe, barnaby, , . gooseberries, . grafting in seventeenth century, . grain crops, chief source of lord's income, . grapes, , (_see_ vineyards). grass, acreage under, in and , - ; in , ; arable land laid down to, , , , , , - , - , , , , , ; converting, to tillage, , ; more profitable than arable, ; seeds, , , , - . grass land, price of, _see_ pasture and meadow, price of; ploughed up, , , . grass section of england in , n. grasshoppers, plague of, . graziers, profits of, , greycoats of kent, . ground game act, . guano, , . guernsey cattle, , . gun, the, in seventeenth century, . h haggard, rider, mr., - . hallam, . hambleton, sir a. barker of, . hamlets, . hampshire, , , , , , , n., , , , , n., , ; sheep, , , , . handborough, . harrison, 'description of england,' , , , , , , , , , . harrow, the, and harrowing, , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , . hartlib, simon, , , , , , - . harvest, importance of, , . harvest homes, , . harvest work, , , , , . hatfield chase, . hawsted, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . hay, ; price of, _see_ prices; carrying off, , , ; imports of, . hay tedder, . haymaking, , , , , , . headlands, . 'heaths', shropshire, . hedges, , , , , , . hemp, , , , . henley, walter of, n., , , . henry of huntingdon, . hens, number of eggs from, . herdwick sheep, , . hereford cattle, , , , , , - , . herefordshire, , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , . hertfordshire, , , , , , n. hentzner's description of english fanning, . hide, . highland, west, cattle, , . hoeing, , , , - , ; horse, , . holder, the small, , , , - , , , , , , , - , , , , , - ; decrease of, causes of, , ; new class of, . holderness cattle, . holdings, various sizes of, . holland, shorthorns from, ; live stock in, ; wheat crops in, n. honey, , . hops, , - , - , , , , , , , , - , - , ; acreage of, in , , - , ; average crop, ; duty on, - ; imports of, - ; profit on, , , , - , ; substitutes, , . horse fairs, . horse shoes, . horses, deterioration of; , ; export of, - ; kinds of, , ; number of, ; size of, , , ; tax on, ; working powers of, , , . (_see_ prices.) houghton, account of potatoes, , , . houses, wooden, (_see_ farmhouses); of the squire and yeoman, , . housing cattle and horses, . howberry, - . 'hubback', . hundred rolls, , , . hunting, , . huntingdonshire, , n., , , , , n., . hurdles, . husbandry, old and new, _see_ cultivation. i implements, cost of, rises, ; in seventeenth century, , - , ; in eighteenth century, , , , , ; in nineteenth century, , - , , n., - , ; improvement in, ; list of, in eleventh century, - ; prices of, , . importing country, england becomes an, . imports cause low prices, . imports of clover seed, ; of corn, , n., , , , - , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , - , , , , - , , - ; of dairy produce, ; of fruit, , ; of hops, ; of linen, ; of livestock, , - , , - , ; of meat, , , , ; of wool, , , , , . improvements, amount expended in, - ; needed in eighteenth century, ; in farming in eighteenth century, (_see_ agriculture, state of), , (_see_ farming). inbreeding, bakewell and, ; the collings and, - . income and expenditure of landed classes ( ), . incubators, early, . india, imports from, ; wool from, . ine, laws of, as to fencing, . inherent capabilities of the soil, . inns, markets for produce, . inoculation of fruit trees, . intensive cultivation, . irish imports, , , - , ; labourers, , . irrigation, , , . isle of wight, n. italy, exports to, ; wool exported to, , . j jamaica, wool from, . jersey cattle, , , (_see_ alderney.) jus faldae, . justices regulate wages, . k kent, , , - , , , , , , , , , n., . kentish cattle, ; sheep, , . kerry cattle, . kett, rising of, . ketton, , . kilns, hop, . king's, gregory, statistics, , , , , - , , . kingston, lord, estate rents of, . knights hospitallers' estates, . l labour, cost of, per acre, ; services, , , , , , , , . labourer, character of, in eighteenth century, , , , , , ; condition of, at end of eighteenth century, - ; condition of, in nineteenth century, , - , , , , - , , - , , - , - , , , ; decrease of, , n., ; life of, in middle ages, , , , , ; made a land-less man by enclosure, , ; number of ( ), ; savings of, - , ; sports of, ; the home of the, , ; wages of, _see_ wages. lambs, to fall march , . lammas, , , . lancashire, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . land, value of, , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , . landlords, absentee, , ; of the fourteenth century, ; new class of, ; houses of the (_see_ cottages); improve estates, , , , , , , ; protectionists, - ; ignorant of estate management, , , , ; in nineteenth century, , , , , , - ; position, weakened, ; relations of, and tenant, , , - , , , ; suffered most from present depression, ; reserve sporting rights, ; take to farming, . landlordship, . lawes, sir john, , , , . lawrence, john, , , , , , . laxton, notts, . leases, , , , , , , , - , - , , , , n., , , . leicester sheep, - , , , , , . leicestershire, , , , , , , , - , , n., , . 'lemmons', . leominster, manor of, ; wool, , , n. liberi homines, . liebig, , . lime, , , , , . limestone sheep, , . liming the land, , , , , , . lincoln red cattle, ; sheep, , , , , , , . lincolnshire, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , n., , , . liquorice, , . liverpool, apples at, ; wheat at, . liverpool, lord, , . live stock, depreciation of, , ; exports of, - , ; number of ( and ), - ; in england ( ), , ; duty on, repealed, . locusts in england, . london, affects wages, ; attracts country folk, , ; potato grown near, ; carrots grown near, , ; roads near, ; sheep and cattle driven to, . longhorn cattle, , - , , , , n., , . longmynd, . lonk sheep, , . lord of the manor, , , , , , , , ; small holder suffers at his hand, . 'lord wilton', . lucerne, , n., , . luffenham, south, ; north, . luxury, spread of, an, , . lyttelton, sir h., ; lord, . m macadam, , , . machinery, use of, . madder, , , , . maidstone hops, . maize, imports of, , , . mangolds, , - , , . manor, regulations of the, , . manor, the typical, . manorial balance sheets, , . manorial system, , , , , , , . manors, , , , , , , , , , , . mansion house, , . manufactures, influence of, on wages, , , . manures, , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , . manydown, hants, . market gardening, , , . markham, gervase, , - , , , . marling, , , , , , , , . marshall, william, , , , , , , , , , . maryland, wool from, . mattocks for breaking clods, . mccormick, . mcculloch, , , . meadowland, , , , , , . meadows, , , , , , , , , , ; value of, , , - , , . meat, imports of, , , . medlars, . meikle, , . menzies, . merino sheep, , n. messor, the, . middlesex, , , n. midland counties, enclosure in, ; sheep in, , . migration of labourers, , n., , . milk, n., (_see_ dairy), , , , , . mill, suit of, . mills, excessive number of, . minimum wage proposed, . minister of agriculture, . mixtil, or mastlin, or mesling, , , , , n. moles, , . molton market, . monasteries, , . money payments, , , , . mortimer abuses the law, . moryson, , , . mountain sheep, , . mowing corn, fitzherbert's advice, , , , , , ; machines for, - . mowing grass, cost of, , , , , , , , , ; fitzherbert's advice, . mulberries, , . murrain, , n., . mutton, price of, _see_ prices. n new world, influx of precious metals from, , . new zealand, wool from, . newark, . nitrate of soda, . non-intercourse act of united states, . norden, sir john, - , . norfolk, , , , n., , , , n., , , , , - , n., , . norfolk, or four-course rotation, . normandy, . north, difference of wages between, and south, - ; superior thrift in, - . northamptonshire, , , , , , , , , n. northleach, rates at, . northumberland, n., , , , , . norwich, , . nottinghamshire, , , , , , , , , , n., , . nowton, suffolk, . nucleated villages, . nuts, . o oak timber, value of, ; coke's, - . oakham, . oats, , , , , , - , , , , , - , ; cost of growing, in , ; produce, per acre, in , n.; in , - ; profit on, . (_see_ prices.) occupiers of land, . 'old comely', . olives, , . onions, , . open parishes, , . oranges, . orchards, , , , , , , , ; seventeenth century, - . owners and occupiers, percentage of, . owners of land, return, - . owners, small, _see_ holders, small. ox teams, , , , , , , , , , . oxen, description of, in , ; value of, , , , , , . (_see_ cattle, price of.) oxford, , , . oxford down sheep, , , , . oxfordshire, , , , , , . p pack-horses, use of, . packing fruit in seventeenth century, , . paring and burning, , . parsnips, . pasture, breaking up, . pasture, common, , , , , , , , ; often worth little, ; permanent, in holdings act, ; extent of, in , ; in , ; ploughed up during french war, ; sparing, . pasture land, price of, , , - , . patents, , . peaches, , , . pears, , , , , , , , . peas, , , , , , , - , . peasants' revolt, . peel's drainage loans, . penalty for breaking up pasture, . perry, . pestilences, , , , . piecework, , , . pigeons, number of, , , , , , , . pigs, export of, ; feeding, , ; foot-and-mouth disease attacks, ; import of, ; number of, - ; profit on, in , ; size of, in , ; value of, , n., , - ; varieties of, , . (_see_ prices.) pinchbeck, . pitt, william, , . plat, sir hugh, , . plattes, gabriel, , . pleuro-pneumonia, _see_ cattle plagues. plot, . plough, eleventh- and twelfth-century, . ploughing, cost of, , , , , , , ; months for, , . ploughland, the, , . ploughs and ploughing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . plums, , , , , , , . poaching, ; by labourers, , , , , . population of england, , , , , , , , , , , . pork, price of, _see_ prices. porter, 'progress of nation,' , , , . portugal, exports to, . potatoes, , , , , , , , , - , ; disease, . poultry, n., , , , , (_see_ prices); carrying, to london, . praepositus, . precarii, or boon days, . precious metals, influx of, , ; scarcity of, n. prices: apples, , , , . bacon and pork, , , , , , , . barley, , , , , , , , , , , , , , - . beans, , , , . beef, , , , , n., , , , , , , , . bread, n., n., , , n., , , , . butter, , , , n., , , - , , , . carts, . cattle, , , , , , , , , , , , , n., , , , , , , , . cheese, - , n., , , , , . clover, . eighteenth century, , , , , n., , , , , , - , , , , , , , , n., , , , , , , , , , , , , . fifteenth century, , , , . fourteenth century, , , , , , , . flax, . grapes, . harness, . hay, , n., , - , , . hops, , , , , , , . horses, , , , , , , n., , , . horse-shoes, . implements, , . malt, , , . milk, , , . mutton, , - , n., , , , , , , , , . nineteenth century, , , , - , , - , , , - , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , . oats, , , , , , , , , , , , - . peas, , , , . pedigree cattle, , . pigs, , , , , , . potatoes, . poultry and eggs, , , , , , , . rabbits, . rams, , , . rollers, . rye, , , , , , , , . saffron, . seventeenth century, , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , . sheep, , ., , , , , , n., , n., , , . sixteenth century, , , , , , - , , . straw, , . tenth century, . thirteenth century, , , , . twelfth century, . vetches, . waggons, - . wheat, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , - , , , - , , , , , , , - , . wine, . wool, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , . prickly comfrey, . proclamation as to wages and prices, . production, increased cost of, , . prosperity, agricultural, , , , , , - , , - , , , ; during french war, - , , . protecting fruit from blight, sec., . protection, effect of, , - , ; highest limit of, ; , , - . provender rents, . pruning fruit trees, , . pulverization of soil, . q quarter sessions, assessment of wages by, . quartly, francis, . quiet emptores, statute of, . quinces, , . quit, notice to, , , . r rabbits, rearing, ; reserved to landlord, . railway rates, - . rake, horse, . raleigh introduces potatoes, . rams, ewes to, , ; price of, , , . ramsey, . raspberries, . rates, , , , , , , , , , , , , , . rathgib, jacob, ., reaping, cost of, , , , , , , , , , , , , ; machines, - ; time for, ; versus mowing corn, . red polled cattle, . reeve, ; duties of a, . reigate, flaunchford near, . rents: twelfth century, . thirteenth century, , , , . fourteenth century, , , , , , . fifteenth century, , , , . sixteenth century, , , , , , . seventeenth century, , , , , , , , , , , . eighteenth century, , , , , , n., , , , . nineteenth century, , , , , , , - , , , , - , , n., - . repairs, _see_ buildings, farm. restrictive covenants, _see_ cultivation clauses. revival, recent, in agriculture, . revolt, peasants', . revolution, agricultural and industrial, . ridges, high, , . rinderpest, _see_ cattle plagues. riots, , , , , ripon, . roads, , , , , , , , , , , - , , , . rock and far forest district, , rogers, thorold, , . roller, farm, in seventeenth century, . rolling, , . romney marsh sheep, . romsey abbey, n. roots, few, used for cows, (_see_ turnips). roscommon sheep, . roses, . ross, john, of warwick, . rot, _see_ sheep rot. rotation of crops (_see_ four-course and three-field system) , . rothamsted, . roundsman system, . royal agrlctttonal society, - , , . royal society, helps agriculture, . russia, imports rom, - ; wool from, . rutland, , , , , , , , , , , n.; dukes of, , . rye, , , , , , , ; in norfolk, , ; produce, per acre, in , . rye-grass, - , , . ryeland sheep, , , . s saffron, , , , ; walden, , . sainfoin, , , , , , , . saint paul's, manors of, , , , , . sales, famous, n., , , . salt, value of, . samford hall, . scotland, cattle of, , ; wheat crop in, n. scott, reynold, , . scottish cattle, - . scudamore, lord, , ^ . seasons, bad, , n., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; good, , , , , . seed, amount of, for wheat, , n., , , , , , ; for clover, , , , ; clover, price of, . sefton, lord, estate of, n. selions, . self-binding reaper, . seneschal, . settled land acts, . settlement, law of parochial, - , , , n., . settlements, family, , - . seventeenth century, characteristics of, . sheaf-binding apparatus, . shearing sheep, . sheep, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; diseases of, ; export of, , (_see_ live stock); improvement of, , , ; number of, in , ; in and , - ; price of, _see_ prices; varieties of, , , - , , , , , - ; washing, cost of, , , . sheep-rot, , , n., . shepherd, wages of, , , , . shire horse, , ; society, . shoeing, , , , . shorthorn cattle, , , - , , , - , , . shows, agricultural, , - , . shropshire, n., n., , , , , , , ; sheep, , , , , . siberian railway, . sicks, uncultivated patches, n. sinclair, sir j., , , . sittingboume, , . sixteenth century, character of, . slaves, , , . smith, adam, , . smith of deanston, , - . smithfield, , ; cattle show, , , ; prices at, , , , , . smyth, john, . society, royal agricultural, . society for encouragement of arts, &c., > , . socmen, . somerset, , , , , , , ; sheep, . somerville, loid, . southams cattle, . southdown sheep, , , , , , , , , . spade, prejudice against, , ; for hops, . spain, exports to, ; imports from, . spanish wool, - , . speculation, in land, ; in produce, . speenhamland act, - . spencer, earl, . sporting rights reserved, . spraying fruit, . squatters, , . squire, the, , , , , , - . stafford, marquis of, . staffordshire, , , , , , , , . statesmen, . statistics, agricultural, , , , , (_see_ king, gregory), - , . statute of labourers, . statutes _quoted_: hen. iii. c. , . edw. iii. . c. , . edw. iii. c. , . ric. ii. c. , . ric. ii. c. , . ric. ii. c. , . ric. ii. c. , . ric. ii. c. , . ric. ii. c. , . hen. iv. c. , n. hen. iv. c. , . hen. v. c. , n. hen. vi. c. , . hen. vi. c. , . hen. vi. c. , . hen. vi. c. , . hen. vi. c. , , . edw. iv. c. , . edw. iv. c. , in. edw. iv. c. , in. hen. vii. c. , , , . hen. vii. c. , . hen. vii. c. , . hen. viii. c. , . hen. viii. c. , . hen. viii. c. , . hen. viii. c. , . hen. viii c. , . hen. viii. c. , . hen. viii. c. , n. hen, viii. c. , . hen. viii. c. , . hen. viii. c. , . hen. viii. c. , . hen. viii. c. , . i edw. vi. c. , . and edw. vi. c. , . edw. vi. c. , . and phil. and mary, c. , . eliz. c. , . eliz. c. , . eliz. c. , . eliz. c. , n. eliz. c. , . eliz. c. , n. eliz. c. , n., . eliz. c. , . eliz, c. , . eliz. c. , n. eliz. c. , . jac. i. c. , . jac. i. c. , n. car. ii. c. , . and car. ii. c. , , . car. ii. c. , . car. ii. c. , , . car. ii. c. , , . car. ii. c. , . car. ii. c. , , . w. and m. c. , . and w. and m. c. , . and wm. iii. c. , . geo. iii. c. , . geo. iii. c. , - . geo. iv. c. , . and wm. iv. c. , . and wm. iv. c. , . vict. c. , . and vict. c. , . and vict. c. , . and vict. c. , . and vict. c. , . and vict. c. , . and vict. c. , . and vict. c. , . and vict. c. , n. and vict. c. , . edw. vii. c. , n. edw. vii. c. , . edw. vii. c. , . steam, applied to threshing, ; cultivator, . stilton cheese, - . stinting the common pasture, . stock and land leases, . stocking a farm, , . stores, public grain, , . stott, the, or affer, , , . stourbridge fair, , n. stratfieldsaye, . straw, as winter food for cattle, , ; carrying off, , , ; price of, , , . strawberries, , , . stubble, grazing of, , . suffolk, , , , , n., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , n., , ; punch, ; sheep, , , . supplies of com per head, (_see_ wheat, home supplies). surrey, , , , , , , , n. surveyor, the seventeeiith-century, . sussex, , , , , , n.; cattle, , , , , . swanage, . swedes, , , , , - , . 'swing' riots, . t taltarum's case, effect of, . tamworth pigs, . taunton, manor of, ; good fanning near, . taxes, , - , , ; weight of, , , , , , , , , , . tea, drinking, , , , ; price of, . teams, composition of, . telford, , . tenant farmers, assist in agricultural progress, ; number of, , ; origin of, , . tenant-right, . teeswater cattle, . tewkesbury, . thatchers, , . thomson of banchory, . thorney and woburn estates, . three-field system, , . threshing, cost of, , , , , , , - , ; machine, , - , ; time for, , . tillage, decrease of, , , ; encouragement of, , , - ; reaction against, . (_see_ arable, _and_ grass.) timber (_see_ oak timber), ; spoils crops, . tiptree, . tithe, dispute, ; on turnips, ; rent charge, . tithes, , , , , , , , , , , , , , . tooke, , . _tours_, young's, , . towns, movement of rural population towards, , , , , , , , , - . townshend, lord, , - , , . _treatise on husbandry_, , . tull, jethro, , , - , , , , , - , . turkeys, . turkish dominions, imports from, . turnip cutters, . turnip fly, remedies for, . turnips, , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , ; cost of growing, in , ; injure wool, ; sheep first fattened on, ; spread of, in eighteenth century, , , , , , , , ; varieties of, in , . tusser, , , , , , , , , , . two-field system, . 'twopenny', . u underwood, value of, in seventeenth century, . unions, agricultural labourers', - . united states, _see_ america. unreasonable disturbance, . upwey, . v vanghan, rowland, - . vegetables, , , , n., , n. ventnor, vineyard at, . vermin, destruction of, , , . vermuyden, cornelius, . vetches, , , . village, the, of the eighteenth century, . village smith, the, . villeins, , , , , , , , ; disappearance of, , , , . vills or villages, , , , , , . vineyards, , , , - . virgate, . virginia, potatoes from, ; wool from, . w wages: twelfth century, . thirteenth century, , , , , . fourteenth century, , , , , , , , , . fifteenth century, , , , . sixteenth century, , , , . seventeenth century, , , , , . eighteenth century, , , , , - , , , , , , , - . nineteenth century, , , , , , - , , - , , , , , , , , . wages, on a farm in , ; regulated by statute, , , , ; by justices, , , . waggons, , . wainage, . wales, cattle of, , , , . wallachia and moldavia, imports from, . walsingham states demands of villeins, . wars, effect of, , , , , , , , , , , , . warwickshire, , , , , , , , , , , , , , n., , . waste land, ; committee on, n., ; good crops from the, ; young and, . water carriage, cheapness of, , . weaning lambs, time for, . weaving, , , , . webster of canley, . weeding hook and tongs, , . weeds, , , . week work, . welsh mountain sheep, , . wensleydale sheep, , . westcar of creslow, . westcote, . westmoreland, , , . weston, sir r., introduces clover, , , . weyhill fair, . wheat, acreage tinder, in , - ; consumption of, per head, ; cost of growing, , , , , , ; crops, , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , ; cultivation of, , , , , , , , - , , , ; different kinds of, , ; home supplies of, , , , ; price of, _see_ prices. white, gilbert, . wilton, hops near, . wiltshire, , , , , , , , , ; sheep, . winchelsea, lord, , , . winchester, , . wine, - . wire binder, . wirral, . wisbech, . woad, , . women, work of, on the farm, , , , . wood, w. a., . woods, , , , , , , , , . woodstock, . wool, , - , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , ; export of, _see_ exports; import of, _see_ imports; price of, _see_ prices. wool, custom of picking refuse, ; storing, . worcestershire, , , , , , . work, hours of, , , . worlidge, john, , , , - , - , . worsley, sir r., . y yeoman, the, , , , , , , , - , , ; house of, . yeomen purchase lands of gentry, . yorkshire, , , , - , , , , , , , , n., , , , . young, arthur, , , , , , , , - , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , n., , , , , , , , , ; opposed to drilling, ; pet aversions of, ; statements of, as to growth of clover, . prairie farmer a weekly journal for the farm, orchard, and fireside. established in . entire series: vol. --no. . chicago, saturday, january , . price, $ . per year, in advance. [transcriber's note: the table of contents was originally located on page of the periodical. it has been moved here for ease of use.] the contents of this number. agriculture--dew and soil moisture, page ; specialty in farming, ; public squares in small cities, - ; farm names, ; diogenes in his tub, ; field and furrow, - ; agricultural organizations, ; didn't no. die hard, ; a grange temple, . live stock--items, page ; swine statistics, ; iowa stock breeders, ; the horse and his treatment, ; items, - . the dairy--winter feed for cows, page ; churning temperature, ; seas of milk, . veterinary--about soundness, page ; questions answered, . horticulture--the hedge question, page ; young men wanted, ; possibilities of iowa cherry growing, - ; prunings, . floriculture--gleanings by an old florist, page . editorial--items, page ; illinois state board, - ; sorghum at washington, ; the cold spell, ; american ash, ; wayside notes, ; letter from champaign, . poultry notes--a duck farm, page . the apiary--apiary appliances, page ; what should be worked for, . scientific--the star of bethlehem, page . household--how the robin came, poem, page ; after twenty years, ; will readers try it, ; the secret of longevity, ; how the inventor plagues his wife, ; recipes, ; pamphlets, etc., received, . young folks--the city cat, poem, page ; amusing tricks, ; bright sayings, ; compiled correspondence, . literature--the wrong pew, poem, page ; yik kee, - . humorous--"a leedle mistakes," page ; sharper than a razor, ; a coming dividend, . news of the week--page . markets--page . dew and soil moisture. bulletin no. of missouri agricultural college farm is devoted to an account of experiments intended to demonstrate the relation of dew to soil moisture. prof. sanborn has prosecuted his work with that patience and faithfulness characteristic of him, and the result is of a most interesting and useful nature. the professor begins by saying that many works on physics, directly or by implication, assert that the soil, by a well-known physical law, gains moisture from the air by night. one author says "cultivated soils, on the contrary (being loose and porous), very freely radiate by night the heat which they absorb by day; in consequence of which they are much cooled down and plentifully condense the vapor of air into dew." not all scientific works, however, make this incautious application of the fact that dew results from the condensation of moisture of the air in contact with cooler bodies. farmers have quite universally accepted the view quoted, and believe that soils gain moisture by night from the air. this gain is considered of very great importance in periods of droughts, and is used in arguments favoring certain methods of tillage. professor stockbridge, in , at the massachusetts agricultural college, carried on very valuable and full experiments in test of this general belief, and arrived at results contradictory of this belief. he found, in a multitude of tests, that in every instance, save one, for the months from may to november, that the surface soil from one to five inches deep, was warmer than the air instead of cooler, as the law requires for condensation of moisture from the air. that exception was in the center of a dense forest, under peculiar atmospheric conditions. after noting these facts, ingenious methods were employed to test more directly the proposition that soil gains moisture from the air by night, with the result that he announced that soils lose moisture by night. professor stockbridge's efforts met with some criticism, and his conclusions did not receive the wide acceptance that his view of the question justifies. in reasoning from observation, professor stockbridge noted that the bottom of a heap of hay, during harvesting, would be wet in the morning, the under side of a board wet in the morning, and so of the other objects named. in the progress of tillage experiments related in his bulletins nos. and , prof. sanborn's attention was again called to this question, resulting in the prosecution of direct tests of the soil moisture itself. when completed it is thought that there will then no longer be occasion to reason from assumed premises regarding the matter. the trials were begun late, and under disadvantages; and are to be understood as preliminary to more complete tests during . the experiments were all conducted upon a soil bare of vegetation. prof. sanborn concludes from his experiments thus far that the surface gains moisture from soil beneath it by capillary action, but gathers nothing from the air. this is made strongly probable, if not shown; first, because the soil is warmer by night than the air. (he relies upon other facts than his own for this assertion.) nd. because he found more moisture in the soil when covered over night than when left bare. d. because when hoed, thereby disturbing capillary action, he found less moisture than when unhoed, in surface soil. finally, he concludes the position proven, for, when he shut off the upward flow of water to the surface of the soil, he found not only less moisture above the cut off or in the surface soil than where no disturbance of capillary action had been made, but actually less moisture in the surface soil than the night before. strongly corroborating this conclusion is the fact that all of the tests conspire to show that the gain of moisture in the surface of the soil by night is traceable to one source, and only one source. [illustration: american ash.--see page .] the facts of this bulletin accord with the previous ones in showing that mulching and frequent shallow tillage economize the moisture of the soil and add new proof of this to those already given. specialty in farming. this subject in my estimation should begin to attract attention, especially among the large land owners and farmers of the west. if we study the whole catalogue of money-making enterprises and money-making men, we find that the greatest success has been attained where there has been the greatest concentration on a special line of work. true, it is, that specialists are subject to unexpected changes of the times, and if thrown out of their employment are not well prepared for other work, and yet their chances for success as compared with the "general idea" man are as ten to one. for an example look at science. how has it advanced? is it not by the invaluable aid of men who have given their whole lives to the solution of some special problem? it could not be otherwise. if every scientist had attempted to master the majority of scientific truths before he was contented to concentrate his time on some special branch of science, science would have progressed little or none at all. linnæus opened the way in botany, and the world profited by his blunders. but to be brief--it seems to me that the most successful farmer in the future is to be the man who can so arrange his work that he is led into the deepest research on some one branch of farming. he must be a specialist. he must thoroughly master the raising of fine stock for breeding purposes, for practical profit and the shambles. attend stock associations, and hear witnesses testify on every hand to the difficulties connected with properly rearing calves for breeding purposes. the honest breeder, though full of ideas, acknowledges he knows but very little on breeding. his time in farm life, for twenty years or more has been devoted to too many things. is not the expert swine-grower the successful man? books are something, but practical experience is something more. it matters little however practical the author of a work on agricultural science may be, unless the man who reads has some practical experience, his application of the author's truths will be a total failure. we insist, therefore, that the successful farmer must be a specialist. he must devote his time to special more than to general farm work. you ask me to outline in detail the idea thus advanced. you somewhat question its practicability. to attempt it might lead to endless discussion, but let us reduce to example. farmer a. raises cattle, hogs, and sheep for breeding purposes, devotes some attention to fine horses, and keeps thirty-six cows for dairy purposes. farmer b. devotes his entire attention to dairying and has invested in dairy cows as much money as a. has in all his stock. is it not evident that though each farmer began life the same year, the latter man will make the most money, providing the section he is in demands dairy work? it seems to me so. and if we further place limit on the dairyman's work, we should say he can not afford, with fifty or seventy-five cows, to give as much attention to the manufacture of cheese and butter as that work necessarily demands. even though he employs a specialist in creamery work, he himself must be a specialist to some extent. we say to investing farmers do not put $ into horses, $ into fine cattle, and $ into swine, but concentrate on one class of stock, and give that your time. j.n. muncey, asst. ag. expts. ag. col., ames, iowa. public squares in small cities. by h.w.s. cleveland. a respectable looking, middle-aged gentleman called upon me not long since and told me he was a resident of an interior city of some eight or ten thousand inhabitants, and at a recent public meeting had been appointed chairman of a committee on the improvement of a small park, which it was thought might be made an attractive ornamental feature of the town. on further inquiry i learned that the proposed park was simply a public square with a street on each of its four sides, on which fronted the principal public buildings, stores, etc. it was a dead level, with no natural features of any kind to suggest the manner of its arrangement, but they thought it might be made to add to the beauty of the town, and he had called to ask my advice in regard to it. as the arrangement of such areas had occupied my thoughts a good deal in a general way, it occurred to me that this was a good opportunity to ventilate some opinions i had formed in regard to prevalent errors in their management, and accordingly i addressed him substantially as follows: "it is very rare that the people of any town show a just appreciation of the value of such an area for ornamental use. such a piece of ground as you describe in the very business center of a town must of course possess great pecuniary value, and the fact that it has been voluntarily given up and devoted for all time to purposes of recreation and ornament would lead us to expect that they would at least exercise the same shrewdness in securing their money's worth, that they do in their private transactions. they have given this valuable tract for the object of ornamenting the town by relieving the artificial character of the buildings and streets by the refreshing verdure of trees and grass and shrubbery, and that it may afford a place for rest and recreation for tired wayfarers and laborers, and nurses with their children, and a pleasant resort for rest and refreshment when the labors of the day are at an end. "its arrangement, therefore, should be such as to set forth these objects so obviously that no one could look upon the scene without perceiving it. the trees should be so arranged in groups and in such varieties as would afford picturesque effects when seen from the principal points of approach. the paths and open areas should be so arranged as to prevent the possibility of saving time by a short cut across, and so provided with seats under the shade of the trees as to invite to repose, instead of this, in nine cases out of ten, the trees (if any are planted) are simply set in rows at equal distances, without the faintest attempt at picturesque effect, and the paths are carried diagonally across from corner to corner for the express purpose of affording an opportunity for a short-cut to every one who is hastening to or from his business. the consequence is that at certain hours the paths are filled by a hurrying throng whose presence would alone suffice to banish the effect of repose which should be the ruling spirit of the place, while at all other times it is comparatively deserted. "perhaps these ideas might not be satisfactory to your people, and i have therefore set them forth somewhat at length in order that you may understand what i conceive should be the ruling principle of arrangement." i perceived that my visitor was somewhat disturbed and it was not till he had told me, in a kind of half apologetic way, that he did not know "but what i was pretty nigh right," that he finally informed me that the square in question was already divided in the manner i described, by diagonal paths, and moreover that the paths were lined on each side by rows of well-grown trees. i could not help inquiring what further laying out it required, and it then came out that there had been no thought of a re-arrangement of the component elements of the park in order to give it an expression of grace or beauty, but they had thought i might be able to make it attractive by the introduction of rustic arbors and gateways, or perhaps a fountain or "something of that sort to give it a stylish look." i gave him an advertising pamphlet containing designs and prices of garden ornaments, and told him they could select and order whatever they liked from the manufacturers,--but declined to give any advice which should connect my name with the work. i have told this story as the readiest means of setting forth my ideas of the capabilities of such public areas, and also as an illustration of prevailing errors in regard to landscape gardening, which most people seem to think consists solely of extraneous, artificial decoration, by means of which any piece of ground can be made beautiful, however stiff and formal may be the arrangement of the trees, shrubbery, and lawns which give expression to its character as truly as the features of a human face. such squares as i have described are the most common and simple forms of public parks, and they might and should in all cases constitute not only a chief ornament of the town, but a most attractive place of resort for rest and refreshment. nothing beyond the materials which nature furnishes is needed for the purpose, but it is essential that these should be gracefully dispersed, and that they should exhibit a luxuriant, healthy growth. above all we should avoid the introduction of artificial decorations which are intended to "look pretty." if arbors or rests are needed, let them be placed at the points where they are obviously required, and be made of graceful patterns; but do not put elaborate structures of rustic work where no one will ever use them, and where in a few years they will be only dilapidated monuments of a futile effort at display. the village improvement societies which are everywhere springing up should devote their earliest efforts to the tasteful arrangement and care of these public ornamental areas, which should form the nucleus and pattern of the graceful expression which should pervade the streets. farm names. since the call of the prairie farmer for "something new" i have been afraid to follow any of the old beaten paths so long traveled by agricultural writers; and have been on the lookout for the "something new." something that does not appear in our agricultural papers, yet of interest to the fraternity. it matters little how trifling the subject may be, if it begets an interest in farm or country life; anything that will make our homes more attractive, more beautiful, and leave a lasting impression on the minds of the boys and girls that now cluster around the farmers' hearths throughout this vast country of ours. there is a beautiful little song entitled, "what is home without a mother?" which could be supplemented with another of equal interest, to wit: "what is home without a name?" i answer, a dreary waste of field and fence, there being nothing in the mind of the absent one to remind him of his distant home but a lone farm-house, a barn, long lines of fences, and perhaps a few stunted apple trees; and when he thinks of it, his whole mind reverts to the hot harvest field, the sweat, the toil, and the tiresomeness of working those big fields! nothing attractive, no pleasant memory. nothing to draw the mind of the youth to the roof that sheltered his childhood. no wonder boys and girls yearn for a change. then what are we to do to change this for the better. i say give your country homes a name, no matter how homely or isolated that home may be. give each one a name, and let those names be appropriate and musical, short, sweet, and easily remembered and pronounced, and then, when you go to visit a neighbor, either on business or pleasure, instead of saying, i am going to jones', or to brown's, or smith's, let it be, i am going over to "the cedars," or, to "hickory grove," or, to "holly hill." how much pleasanter it would sound. there would be no mistake about your destination, there being perhaps half a dozen jones, browns, or smiths within five miles of your home, but only one "hickory hill." then, when young folks make up their surprise parties during the long, cold, winter evenings, in place of notifying each other that they are going to surprise the james', the jones', or the jackson's, it would be, we are going to surprise "pleasant valley" "viewfield" or "walnut hill." every member of the surprise party would know the place intended, and the squads and companies of sleighs with their closely packed loads of laughing girls, and well filled baskets of good things would begin to marshal on the several roads that lead towards the trysting place; and when the merry-makers reach the well trimmed walnut grove from which the farm takes its name, and march up to the dwelling, instead of shouting: mrs. brown, we greet you, or uncle brown, etc., it would be: "walnut hill" we greet you, which would include all the browns, old and young. one of the brightest spots in my memory is the remembrance of "rose valley" my childhood's happy home. every pleasant occurrence of my boyhood clusters around that never-to-be forgotten name. it has acted like a guide, a land mark for me through my life; and my great aim in life has been to make my own home just like dear "rose valley." to begin the work, i have set my own house in order; and the following names given to the farms under my care will practically illustrate my plan. -----------------+-------------------------+----------------------------- former owners. | farm names. | present tenants. -----------------+-------------------------+----------------------------- thompson place | hickory ridge | a. maddox home " | elmwood | mr. houck's home doutey " | south elmwood | d.q. renfrue horroll " | gravel hill | t.h. miller conran " | cedar grove | a. miller casebolt " | millbrook | c. blettner harness " | burnside | a. tunge heller " | pleasant hill | j.h. kempf lewis " | woodlawn | w. lewis oaks' " | castle rock | noah neff held " | the glade | w. reubelman jackson " | beechwald | g. edwards bottom " | deerfield | . . . . . . . . . . . . benna " | the mound | r. oliver williams " | blacklands | w. mitchel mcgee " | lone tree | tom miller johnson " | south park | owen bush new land | cedar cliff | peter heller " " | cypress grove | geo. surlett old homestead | middle park | johd meintz west of city | west park | dave meintz east of r. by. | spring park | jas. ballinger manning place | longview | aug. klemme cox " | meadow hill | h. stinehoff davis " | lilypond | chas. davis renfroe " | beechfield | i. renfroe ruble " | sycamore springs | mrs. sarah miller bair | clover hill | w. gunter edmonson " | riverside | j.h. relley new " | cotton grove | w.h. henson garaghty " | wheatland | j.h. relley price " | roundpond | w. miller jordan " | parsonage | wm. jackson bird " | richwood | mrs. jackson laseley " | richland | w. lackey new " | lakeside | d. edmunson new " | the island | geo. laseley sexton " | beech hill | j.h. irving martin " | creekfield | joe bair miss co " | catalpa grove | geo. burns cramer " | hubbleside | . . . . . . . . . . . . miller " | spring grove | a. miller brown " | east gravel hill | j.h. miller ---------------------------------------------------------------------- i give these as samples to guide my brother farmers in selecting names for their homes. every one of those farms can be identified by some local peculiarity, prominent and visible. for instance, davis place is situated close to a large pond covered with white lilies. standing on the doorsteps of the manning place you can view a ten-mile stretch of the mississippi river, while mr. relley's place is situated on the banks of that great stream. such names can be multiplied to an indefinite extent, and duplicated in each county. if such names were generally in use, it would greatly assist postmasters in their difficult task of knowing which smith or brown was intended. now brother farmers, i have moved the adoption of appropriate names for every farm in the land; who will second the motion? give your wives and daughters a chance to name the homestead, and my word for it, it will be both musical and appropriate. let us give our children something pleasant to think of after they have left the dear old home. to afix the name, paint it on a large board and nail it over your front gate. alex ross, cape girardeau, mo. diogenes in his tub. allow me, messrs. editors, to give you notes of what i see, and hear, and learn, and cogitate, and endeavor to inculcate, from my snug little home in my tub--will you not? well--having your assent, i begin by wishing you all--editors, correspondents, typos, and "devils"--a happy new year, and your excellent paper unlimited success in , and a long life thereafter. next, permit me to advert to the contents of some recent numbers. first, to the pro and con of pasturing corn-stalks. that is a subject, like many others, on which much can be said on both sides. mr. stahl (in no. ) quotes prof. sanborn as saying that a ton of corn fodder, "rightly cured and saved," is worth two-thirds of a ton of good timothy hay. that may be true; but to be rightly cured and saved it must be protected from the rains and snows as the hay is; otherwise it will be as worthless as the corn left standing in the field. most people who have cut their corn and left it standing in the shock during the fall rains, know by experience that large portions of it are rendered useless. and if we deduct the waste of corn by wet, and by rats and mice, and the waste of fodder, added to the cost of cutting, it would seem that a "subscriber" (in no. ) has at least a strong side of the argument. but these men are both right, in a degree. in the east in cases where the crop is not large, or in the west, and where the producer has large barns or sheds in which to store his fodder, it had doubtless best be cut and utilized in that way. but where no such facilities exist and the crop is large, as usual in the west, i can conceive of no better way to utilize the product than to feed it where it grew. how to raise wheat. prof. hamilton (see no. ) has hit the nail squarely on the head in his essay. i doubt if there has been a more valuable article on wheat-growing in the public prints, for many a day. it gives a new view of the question, and in my opinion illustrates, at least in part, why it was that in the early days of wheat-growing throughout the prairie states, the crops were so much better than now. wheat was then sown for the most part on newly broken prairie sod, and its character was such that the grain could not be deeply covered, nor could the ground be heaved so much as in later sowings, when it has been mellowed by deeper culture. prof. hamilton's essay ought to be read by every wheat-grower in the country. other valuable articles in no. are those of j.h., on corn, prof. hall's lecture on schools, and many others--not omitting what the two talented ladies say about hens and bees. counts and barons in america. some alarm has been manifested in certain quarters, and congress been inquired of, concerning the fact that divers european noblemen have been purchasing large bodies of lands in our public domain. there are no laws, i believe, to prevent foreign noblemen from acquiring lands in large or small quantities in our territories; but it is clearly contrary to public policy to permit these, or our own capitalists or syndicates to do this thing. the public lands should be held for actual settlers, and for them alone; and it is to be hoped that congress will so amend the laws as to prevent english or european lords, or american lords, from acquiring large bodies of land. the government has been generous--too generous--to the railroads in the gift of lands; and that policy ought now to cease, and the roads required to fulfil their side of the contract to the letter. monopoly--agrarianism. in connection with the above, it will do to say, that as monopolies increase and gain strength, agrarianism also is extending. legislation should be so shaped as to check the one, and give no cause for the other. good government and strict regard for the rights and interests of the masses, are the surest means of checking agrarian and nihilistic tendencies. had the french monarchy and governing classes been just, the revolution would have been impossible. to conclude. it does seem to me that your magnificent offer of your standard time or commercial map--worth $ itself--in connection with the prairie farmer, all for $ , ought to bring you hosts of subscribers, and that it does is the hope of diogenes. field and furrow. the best temperature to preserve apples, potatoes, turnips, or any other roots or fruits stored in the cellar, is just above the freezing point. stiff, hard clays intended for tillage in the spring ought, by all means, to be broken up in the fall. a light, sandy soil should, on the contrary, be suffered to remain unbroken. a wholesale drug house in indianapolis, tells the editor of the drainage journal that tile drainage has reduced the sale of quinine and other fever and ague medicines nearly sixty per cent. the american cultivator says that if barley has not germinated the fact of its having been slightly stained by wet is no actual detriment whatsoever; the grain is not really injured and ought to bring to the farmer just as much as the bright samples of equal plumpness. dr. e. lewis sturtevant, reporting in bulletin lxxii. of the state experiment station his hybridizing tests during the past season with different kinds of corn, incidentally mentions that "the red ears have a constancy of color which is truly remarkable; where sweet corn appears upon red pop and red dent ears the sweet corn partakes of the red color." an esteemed exchange suggests, if farmers would go to the barn on a wet day and spend their time in making an eaves-trough for the barn or stable, and thereby carry away the drip which would otherwise fall on the manure pile, causing a waste of the elements of plant food contained therein, they will make more money that day than they could any fine day in the field. american cultivator: in winter, while the ground is covered with snow and the soil is frozen deeply, it is sometimes curious to note the effect of openings leading down to deep underdrains. the snow will be melted away by the warm air coming up from the unfrozen earth. even in an uncovered drain three feet deep, a little straw or loose earth will generally protect the bottom from severe freezing. cincinnati gazette: there are so many excellencies about the cow pea, and it is good for so many uses, that we advise our ohio, indiana, and kentucky farmers to be sure and cultivate it this year. next spring, when all danger of frost is over, sow, plant, or drill more or less of these valuable peas, and, in the language of the elder weller, "you'll be glad on it arterwards," and so will your live stock. new england homestead: nearly level culture, hand-hoeing and slightly hilling but once, and keeping the cultivator running, was recommended at the waterbury meeting as the best culture for potatoes. it was said that the second hilling induced a second growth of roots higher up on the plant which produced small tubers. if this is not done the additional growth will make large potatoes. cincinnati gazette: during sundry recent visits to tennessee, we noticed that a considerable share of the immigrants arriving were from michigan. they are mostly of the second generation from the settlers from the east in that state--men in the prime of life, who are seeking cheap lands in a genial climate, where the pastoral, dairy, and fruit-raising pursuits to which they are accustomed may be pursued with perfect success. michigan farmers are usually intelligent, practical workers, who understand their profession and like it. they, and such as they, appreciate the advantages they will enter upon in their new homes at the south. new england farmer: prof. goessmann, as director of the state experiment station, has been analyzing a sample of rye hay, sent to the station by secretary russell of the state board of agriculture. the sample was not cut till in full bloom, but prof. goessmann finds it compares well in nutritive value with a medium good quality of meadow hay. this agrees with our own estimate of well cured rye hay, judged by its effect in practical feeding to stock. animals usually have to learn to eat it heartily, as they do many other kinds of coarse fodder which are inferior to the best hay. rye should be cut before it comes in full bloom, to obtain the greatest feeding value from the fodder. it is then liked better, and a larger per cent will be digested. republican, manhattan, kan.: in traveling through a considerable portion of the country this week, we noticed that the wheat looked exceedingly promising. the contrast between the green fields and the dry grass and naked trees was cheering to behold. cattle are in good condition; most of the farmers are provided with sheds or shelter of some sort to protect the animals, but we saw some small bunches of young cattle standing in unprotected enclosures shivering from the north wind; it is cruel to take them through the winter without so much as a wind break to turn off the scorching blasts. surely every farmer can afford to build a wind break, at least a pile of brush and old hay, around the stock yards. the cost would be more than made up in the saving of feed. they are growing some pretty heavy crops of wheat in new hampshire. the lebanon free press reports that harlan flint, of hanover, raised this year eighty bushels of wheat on five acres of ground, and uel spencer, of the same town, bushels from four and a half acres, while the town farm crop averaged forty-three bushels per acre. that raised by mr. flint was winter wheat, and spencer's white russian. a meredith correspondent of the laconia democrat says that eight farms adjoining each other, in that town, have produced this year bushels of wheat. reports from all sections of the state show that a great yield of wheat has been secured wherever the crop has been sown. perhaps by the time the prairie skinners of the northwest have spread over all the wheat bearing land this side of the rocky mountains, they may begin the new england states and travel the continent over again. correspondent farm and fireside: there is nothing so much needed about many houses as good walks in paths that must be used daily. there is hardly an excuse for not having them when either brick, gravel, or timber can be had. a good walk through muddy yards can be easily and cheaply made by placing poles side by side, a short distance apart, and then filling the intervening space with gravel, or with broken corn cobs, or with sawdust. oak planks will last many years, if turned over occasionally, and this also counteracts warping. one of the best of walks through a level barn-yard can be made by cutting off short pieces from logs, a foot or more in diameter, and setting them upon end in a shallow trench. such a walk from the barn to the kitchen will always be clean, and there will be less to disturb the temper of the women folks of the household, to say nothing of the good effect upon the men folks who take pleasure in lightening the labor required to keep everything neat and tidy within doors. agricultural organizations. [_officers and members of farmers' organizations of all kinds are invited to send for publication in this department notices of meetings, time of holding fairs, and other pertinent information. we desire to make of it a weekly bulletin that shall be looked for with interest by members of clubs, granges, fair associations, and agricultural and horticultural societies._] the maine state grange has elected the following officers: master, frederick robie, of gorham; overseer, h.e. gregory, of hampden; lecturer, d.h. thing, of vernon. at a meeting of the wisconsin state grange resolutions were passed requesting the legislature to separate the state agricultural experiment farm from the state university, and to locate it in an agricultural district. at the vermont state grange's annual meeting at brattleboro, december - , , granges were represented. for the first time since the organization of the grange its doors were opened to the public, and the state board of agriculture met with it. worthy master franklin's address revealed a healthy condition of the order in vermont. the meeting of the massachusetts state grange was an excellent one. master draper was again re-elected. the committees' reports and discussions revealed a hearty interest in and sympathy with the experimental station and the agricultural college, but the present system by which the college trustees perpetuate themselves was sharply criticised, and a change in the law was recommended. it was also "resolved, that as patrons of husbandry, we recommend such a change in the law as will withhold the state bounty from all societies that permit liquor selling or gambling at their annual fairs." the annual meeting of the michigan grange last month was largely attended. the secretary's report showed the grange to be in good condition. the committee on the agricultural college recommended the admission of girls to that institution. reports were adopted recommending the restoration of the duty on wool, so that it shall equal that on manufactured woolen articles; urged that taxpayers be required to make oath to their assessments; recommended the continued fostering of the sorghum industry; condemned the extortionate practices of many millers in the state, urging co-operative mills if necessary to remedy the same, and asks the appointment of a committee to draft a bill similar to the reagan bill to remedy some of the evils of transportation. didn't no. die hard! new england homestead: "the eminent men"--george b. loring, daniel needham, charles l. flint, benjamin p. ware, and george noyes--composing the late massachusetts grange no. , couldn't appreciate what had happened to them when the state master's action in revoking the charter of their grange was sustained by the national grange tribunal. so brother ware hied him to barre, last week, to bring the matter up before the state grange at its annual session. no doubt the "eminent men" supposed that the presence of the hon. mr. ware would alone be sufficient to cause the state grange to tremble and humbly beg pardon for their master's action in disturbing the serenity of this mutual admiration society. alas, pride must have a fall! judge of the consternation of these "eminent men" when the state grange unanimously refused admittance to brother ware because he was a suspended member! now if the honorable delegate from no. deceased had known when he was "set on," he would have silently packed his grip sack and returned to the secrecy of the obscure agricultural newspaper office at milk street, boston, the "headquarters" of the corpse of no. . but like all "eminent men" he made a grave mistake. at a subsequent session he induced a friend to move that he be given a hearing, but the grange again voted against taking any further action in the matter. this double rebuff was effectual. with his hopes dashed to the ground, the honorable suspended brother crept sadly away to the depot, and when last seen was trying to derive some consolation from his flattering picture as it appeared in the homestead of december . as our able contemporary, the maine farmer remarks, it was a triumph of principle, proving that the grange recognizes no aristocracy. thus may it ever be! a grange temple. at its last meeting the national grange determined to enter upon the work of erecting, in washington city, a building in which the records and archives of the order may be preserved. it is proposed to raise the money needful to erect such a building in a way which shall enlist the brotherhood at large, and yet not to be burdensome to even the least wealthy of the members. the national grange asks each subordinate grange to solicit from every name on its roll a contribution of not less than fifty cents. the money so collected is to be kept separate from all other funds, and is to be used for no other purpose than the building of a grange home in washington. the treasurer of the national grange is directed to procure a book in which the names of all contributors, and the sums contributed, shall be properly entered. in due time a building-fund certificate will be prepared, containing an engraving of the building, and such other devices as may be agreed upon, and a copy of the same will be sent to every individual who donates the sum of fifty cents or more. * * * * * club rates. to our readers. the prairie farmer is the oldest, most reliable, and the leading agricultural journal of the great northwest, devoted exclusively to the interests of the farmer, gardener, florist, stock breeder, dairyman, etc., and every species of industry connected with that great portion of the people of the world, the producers. now in the forty-fourth year of its existence, and never, during more than two score years, having missed the regular visit to its patrons, it will continue to maintain supremacy as a standard authority on matters pertaining to agriculture and kindred productive industries, and as a fresh and readable family and fireside journal. it will from time to time add new features of interest, securing for each department the ablest writers of practical experience. the prairie farmer will discuss, without fear or favor, all topics of interest properly belonging to a farm and fireside paper, treat of the most approved practices in agriculture, horticulture, breeding, etc.; the varied machinery, implements, and improvements in same, for use both in field and house; and, in fact, everything of interest to the agricultural community, whether in field, market, or home circle. it will give information upon the public domain, western soils, climate, etc.; answer inquiries on all manner of subjects which come within its sphere; give each week, full and reliable market, crop, and weather reports; present the family with choice and interesting literature; amuse and instruct the young folks; and, in a word, aim to be, in every respect, an indispensable and unexceptionable farm and fireside companion. terms of subscription and 'club rates': one copy, year, postage paid $ . two copies, " " " . five " " sent at one time . ten " " sent at one time, and one to club getter . twenty " " sent at one time, and one to club getter . address the prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. ill. * * * * * the shepherd's manual a practical treatise on the sheep. designed especially for american shepherds by henry stewart. finely illustrated price, $ . , by mail, postpaid. address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. * * * * * farm machinery, etc. nichols' centennial wind mill. [illustration] contains all the valuable features of his old "nichols' mills" with none of their defects. this is the only balanced mill without a vane. it is the only mill balanced on its center. it is the only mill built on correct scientific principles so as to govern perfectly. all vanes are mechanical devices used to overcome the mechanical defect of forcing the wheel to run out of its natural position. a wind wheel becomes its own vane if no vane is used, hence, vanes--save only to balance the wheel--are useless for good, and are only useful to help blow the mill down. this mill will stand a heavier wind, run steadier, last longer, and crow louder than any other mill built. our confidence in the mill warrants us in offering the first mill in each county where we have no agent, at agents' prices and on days' trial. our power mills have per cent more power than any mill with a vane. we have also a superior feed mill adapted to wind or other power. it is cheap, durable, efficient. for circulars, mills, and agencies, address nichols & daggett, elgin, ill. (successors to the batavia manf. co., of batavia, ill.) * * * * * chicago scale co. ton wagon scale, $ . ton, $ . ton $ , beam box included. lb. farmer's scale, $ . the "little detective," / oz. to lb. $ . other sizes. reduced price list free. forges, tools, &c. best forge made for light work, $ . lb. anvil and kit of tools, $ . farmers save time and money doing odd jobs. blowers, anvils, vices & other articles at lowest prices, wholesale & retail. * * * * * the profit farm boiler is simple, perfect, and cheap; the best feed cooker; the only dumping boiler; empties its kettle in a minute. over , in use; cook your corn and potatoes, and save one-half the cost of pork. send for circular. d.b. sperry & co., batavia, illinois. * * * * * evaporating fruit full treatise on improved methods, yields, profits, prices and general statistics, free. american m'fg co. waynesboro franklin county, pa. * * * * * hoosier auger tile mill. [illustration: mills on hand. prompt delivery.] for prices and circulars, address nolan, madden & co., rushville, ind. * * * * * "the best is the cheapest." engines saw mills, threshers, horse powers, (for all sections and purposes.) write for free pamphlet and prices to the aultman & taylor co., mansfield, ohio. * * * * * the modern horse doctor. containing practical observations on the causes nature and treatment of diseases and lameness in horses, by geo. h. dadd, m.d. will be sent upon receipt of price, $ . ; or free to any sender of three subscribers to this paper, at $ each, by prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. * * * * * maps. rand, mcnally & co.'s new railroad --and-- county map --of the-- united states --and-- dominion of canada. size, × - / feet, mounted on rollers to hang on the wall. this is an entirely new map, constructed from the most recent and authentic sources. --it shows-- _all the railroads,_ --and-- every county and principal town --in the-- united states and canada. a useful map in every one's home, and place of business. price, $ . . agents wanted, to whom liberal inducements will be given. address rand, mcnally & co., chicago, ill. by arrangements with the publishers of this map we are enabled to make the following liberal offer: to each person who will remit us $ . we will send copy of the prairie farmer one year and this map postpaid. address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago, ill. * * * * * drainage. practical farm drainage. why, when, and how to tile-drain --and the-- manufacture of drain-tile. by c.g. elloitt and j.j.w. billingsley price, one dollar. for sale by the prairie farmer publishing co., monroe st., chicago, ill. * * * * * miscellaneous. [illustration: ferry's seed annual for ] will be mailed free to all applicants and to customers of last year without ordering it. it contains illustrations, prices, descriptions and directions for planting all vegetable and flower seeds, plants, etc. invaluable to all. d.m. ferry & co. detroit, mich. * * * * * agents make over one hundred per cent. profit selling the reflecting safety lamp which can be sold in every family. gives more light than three ordinary lamps. sample lamp sent for fifty cents in stamps. we have other household articles. send for circulars. forsee & mcmakin, cincinnati, o. * * * * * miscellaneous seed corn for sale. a large quantity of first-class, selected iowa seed corn, in large or small quantities. address _mitchell vincent,_ onawa, iowa. please state you saw ad in this paper. * * * * * the great musical wonder of the age. a stem-winding musical watch. each watch is finely made, silver plated, and a _complete and sweet-toned musical instrument_. size and shape of an ordinary watch, and has a music box attachment concealed within, so arranged that when wound at the stem plays one of the following tunes: "wait till the clouds roll by," "carnival of venice," "blue bells of scotland," "home, sweet home," "coming through the rye," "swanee river," waltz, polka, schottische, etc. the notes, time, and tones are correct. it will please both old and young, and is truly the _greatest novelty_ ever offered to the american public. our special offer. in order to introduce our large illustrated family story paper entitled youth into every home in the union where it is not a visitor, we are making this extraordinary offer: upon receipt of cents (or two-cent postage stamps), we will send our paper for the next three months on trial, and this _musical watch_ as an absolute _free gift_. just think of it! a _music box_ and our large page paper _three months_ for _only_ cents. for a club of and $ . will send three subscriptions and three _musical watches_. this is a chance of a life-time. write to-day. address, youth publishing co., doane st., boston, mass. * * * * * hope for the deaf. peck's patent tubular cushioned ear drums cure deafness in all stages. recommended by scientific men of europe and america. write for _illustrated descriptive book_ and testimonials from doctors, judges, ministers and prominent men and women who have been cured, and who _take pleasure in recommending them_. they are unseen while in use, comfortable to wear, and make a permanent cure. address.--west & co., murray st., new-york, agents for south and west. * * * * * fay grapes currant head-quarters. all best, new and old. small fruits and trees. low to dealers and planters. stock first-class. free catalogues. geo. s. josselyn, fredonia, n.y. remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _one year, and the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ * * * * * [illustration] live stock department. stockmen, write for your paper. hon. a.m. garland is expected home from australia about the first of february. * * * * * col. j.w. judy & son, the popular thoroughbred cattle auctioneers of tallula, ill., last year sold , head of cattle for $ , . * * * * * ohio jersey cattle-breeders will hold a convention at columbus, on the th. the short-horn breeders of the state will meet at the same city on the same day. * * * * * mr. c. huston, blandinsville, ill., has gone to scotland to purchase clydesdale horses. he expects to be gone about half the year, and will make several shipments. * * * * * wm. yule, esq., the well-known short-horn breeder, of somers, kenosha county, wisconsin, names, through the prairie farmer, march th prox., for his public sale for . * * * * * at the annual meeting of the american guernsey cattle club, held at the fifth avenue hotel, new york, december th, dr. j. nelson borland, new london, conn., was re-elected president; edward norton was chosen secretary and treasurer. * * * * * three new cases of pleuro-pneumonia were recently discovered near west chester, penn. thus far the disease has been confined to three dairy herds. all infected animals are promptly appraised, condemned, killed and paid for by the state. the disease was introduced there by cows purchased at baltimore. * * * * * the twenty-ninth volume of the new series of coates' short-horn herd-book has just been published by the english short-horn society. it contains the pedigrees of bulls ranging from ( ) to ( ). the larger half of the volume is devoted to the entry of cows with their produce. each breeder's entries of females are recorded together under his own name. her majesty the queen heads the list, followed by the prince of wales. * * * * * the offices of the american short-horn breeders' association in chicago were badly damaged by fire on sunday, december . some , pedigrees were destroyed and many others partially destroyed. pedigrees received previous to december th, were saved. it will take time and work to restore these pedigrees and the loss must cause some delay in the work of the office. it will be remembered that the records of the association had a narrow escape at the time the evening journal office burned. * * * * * the following are the officers of the national chester-white swine record co. for : hon. jack hardin, pleasureville, ky., president; h.w. tonkins, fenton, mo., vice-president; w.b. wilson, eminence, ky., treasurer; e.r. moody, eminence, k., secretary. the capital stock of the company is $ , , in shares of $ each. fees are charged as follows: book of blank pedigrees, with stub for private record and instructions for filling, $ ; for entry in record, each pedigree, $ ; stockholders, cents; record will be furnished at cost of publication. * * * * * at the late meeting of the american merino sheep register association at burlington, wis., the following officers were chosen: president, c.s. miller, caldwell, wis.; first vice-president, daniel kelly, wheaton, ill.; second vice-president, f.c. gault, east hubbardton, vt.; secretary, a.h. craig, caldwell, wis.; treasurer, george andrews, mukwonago, wis.; directors, c.a. dingman, troy center, wis.; g.b. rhead, norvell, mich.; george peck, geneva, ill.; e. campbell, pittsfield, ohio; s.d. short, honeoye, n.y.; john s. goe, brownsville. pa.; f.c. gault, east hubbardton, vt.; e.f. gilman, farmington, me.; ward kennedy, butler, ind.; a. wilson, richfield, minn.; fayette holmes, russell, kan.; h.j. chamberlain, davilla, tex. registering committee, t.w. gault, waterford, wis.; c.a. dingman, troy center, wis.; perry craig, caldwell, wis. * * * * * here is an excellent prize winning record: s.h. todd, of wakeman, ohio, won on chester-whites and poland-chinas in as follows: at the tri-state fair, at toledo, o., sweepstakes for best herd of poland-chinas, and the same on chester-whites. at the michigan state fair he took sweepstakes on chester-white boar; at the illinois state fair, sweepstakes, for best poland-china sow; do. for chester-white sow, and the grand sweepstakes of $ for the best herd on the ground regardless of breed. he also won in breeders' ring the prize for best herd of chesters, and the prize for best boar with five of his get; also first and second prizes for sow with five of her pigs. besides these notable premiums mr. todd's stock won for him nearly class prizes at various leading fairs. swine statistics. one of the chicago dailies recently made the point that this city should be the center of the swine and pork statistics of the country on the ground that here is the center of trade in these products. the point is a good one. some years ago the bulk of the hogs of the west was marketed at cincinnati. at that time the price current of cincinnati with commendable enterprize established itself as an authority in swine and pork statistics, and it has held the position from that day to this, despite the fact that chicago has for several years received and packed several times as many hogs annually as has the original porkopolis. and this year, as usual, the chicago press is dependent upon cincinnati for packing statistics throughout the extensive swine-growing regions of the country. of course it makes no real difference to merchants or producers where the figures emanate from so that they are comprehensive and reliable. it is only a bit of local pride that suggests the idea that here should the records be kept and the statistics compiled. if there is not sufficient enterprize here to capture the business, there is no ground for complaint. we should not have alluded to the matter, probably, but for the fact that the cincinnati price current, with its hog-packing statistics, for the season of has just brought it to notice. here the figures are compared with those of last year: cities. - . - . chicago, packed , , , , kansas city , , cincinnati , , st. louis , , indianapolis , , milwaukee , , louisville, ky. , , cedar rapids, iowa , , cleveland, o. , , keokuk, iowa , , iowa stock breeders. the iowa state improved stock breeders' association had a good attendance at its annual meeting at ames, last month. sheep. hon. j. kennedy read a paper on the subject "will sheep breeding pay." viewed from a financial point of view, he thought there had been no better financial results from any commodity than from the sheep--the wool and mutton--when given proper care and attention. speculators and traffickers in wool and woolen goods were failing all over the country, but he attributed this to want of fitness for the business in which they were engaged. though the present depression in the wool market was somewhat due to tariff tinkering, was more the result of over-production--greater supply than demand. mr. grinnell said that at one time he was the owner of a flock of , sheep, but wool went down in price, and he did not think it profitable to keep so large a flock, and sold out. col. lucas believed the owner of acres of land could not do better than to put upon the tract at least sheep. hon. e. campbell had found the business profitable where flocks were fairly dealt with. he thought iowa one of the best places in the world in which to raise sheep. he believed that both sheep and cattle could be profitably kept upon the same farm. his favorite cross is cotswold and merino. the average weight of fleece in his own flock was over six pounds. swine. col. john scott introduced the subject of swine by reading a compilation of historical facts regarding them. he presented drawings, showing the different breeds and the improvements made in them, in form and size. mr. failor spoke of the jersey-reds as his favorite breed for docility and other essentials. prof. knapp said the most profitable hogs are those with sound constitutions, good muscular systems, of early maturity, and in general made to resist diseases which prevail from time to time, all over the country. mr. young said that when we want an animal for the farm, we must first look to soundness of constitution. breed is not of so much consequence. a breed should not be run after merely because it is novel. he breeds poland-chinas. in order to gain the most prolific breeding, the sows of this breed should not be allowed to get too fat before dropping the first litter; simply keep them in good condition. c.r. smith thought early breeding injurious to the swine interests of the country. h.w. lathrop asserted that the forcing system of putting on meat had injured the constitutions of many of our breeds of hogs. in times past, when less pampering was in vogue and hogs were allowed wide range, there was less disease than now. cattle. mr. clarkson, of des moines, read a paper entitled "plain and practical thoughts for common farmers." it treated of the breeding and care of cattle. mr. roberts said the more care there is bestowed upon cattle, the more profitable they are. he had bred up from a good short-horn bull. other members agreed upon the necessity of improving the grade of cattle. the best demand is always for the best stock. hon. j.b. grinnell read his paper upon the extent of the cattle interest and the necessity of protecting our cattle from contagious diseases, in this connection, the following resolutions were passed: resolved, that we earnestly urge upon congress, in view of the fact, the cattle interest is one of the most important industries, the justice and expediency of passing laws providing for an effectual eradication of pleuro-pneumonia from the entire territory of the united states, and also preventing the introduction of all contagious diseases in the future. this is the only authority to which we can go for the power for this purpose, as congress has the exclusive power to regulate commerce with other nations, as well as among the several states; and, as there is now no law in any of the states to prevent any man who has a herd infected with a malignant, contagious disease, from taking them anywhere he pleases to the herds of any of the states; to prevent which, there must be a law more comprehensive in territorial power and extent than any state has. therefore, it is of the most vital importance that the authority to regulate inter-state commerce should promptly act to protect our great cattle interest from total annihilation. resolved, that the legislature of iowa, as a police regulation, should put the power in some hands, carefully and wisely guarded from abuse and wasteful extravagance, to arrest by isolation and destruction, if necessary, any contagious disease which may suddenly be developed in any neighborhood. this, however, not to include any of doubtful contagious character, such as hog cholera; and that we respectfully ask the governor to call the especial attention of the legislature to this subject, though there is no pleuro-pneumonia in our state now, nor has there ever been any, but we need laws to arrest it if any should be introduced. resolved, that nations, as well as individuals, who ask justice should do justice, therefore, we insist that our government should as carefully and vigilantly seek to prevent the exportation of contagious cattle diseases as to prevent their importation. this policy would create a feeling of national comity, and an effort to eradicate the scourge of nations (the cattle diseases). wolves, dogs, sheep. the committee on resolutions submitted the following, which was adopted: whereas, it has become impossible to keep sheep in safety in many parts of this state, owing to the loss occasioned by the ravage of wolves and dogs: therefore, be it resolved, that this association petition the state legislature to increase the bounty on wolves and the tax on dogs. resolved, that the president of this association be requested to appoint a committee to draft a bill embodying the sense of this meeting in reference to a wolf and dog law. business. the next meeting of the association will be held at ottumwa, commencing the first tuesday in december next. col. scott is to prepare and publish the proceedings of this meeting. the edition will be , copies. the following are the officers for : president, c.f. clarkson; vice-presidents, h.c. wheeler, b.f. elbert, r. stockdale, h. wallace, w.h. jordan, e.w. lucas, and p. nichols; secretary and treasurer, fitch b. stacy. the horse and his treatment. number one. history chronicles no improvement in the horse made by the agency of man. the horses of the days of pharaoh, or of homer, have their superiors in no part of the civilized world to-day. the arabs have for ages been noted for the excellence of their horses, but that excellence was not created, nor has it been increased by the arts of man. since the time of cromwell the horses of england have steadily degenerated. those most conversant with the matter say that this degeneracy has been the most marked and rapid during the last fifty years. the horses of this country lack the value of their ancestors of the revolutionary period. nowhere, or at no time, can man boast of improving the horse by the arts of breeding. what is the reason of this? the horse, the ox, the hog, and the sheep comprise the four great classes of domesticated farm animals. in certain directions man has improved these three last. these improvements have made them more valuable. the ox has been bred to make more flesh from the same amount of food, and to lay on fat at an earlier age; the cow has been bred to give instead of a supply of milk barely large enough to sustain her young, a bountiful yield, and of a richer quality; the hog has been bred into a veritable machine to convert food into pork; the sheep has been bred to yield more wool, and of a finer texture, and to make more mutton. all these changes have been beneficial because the value of the animal lay in its production of beef, milk, pork, wool, or mutton, as the case might be. it is true that these changes have been accomplished at the expense of vigor and endurance. these two qualities are important in the hog, ox, or sheep, but those that have been developed so far overshadow their lessening that on the whole we can say that the arts of man have improved our kine, swine, and sheep. but it is not so with the horse. its value does not depend upon the quantity and quality of its flesh, milk, or bodily covering. unlike the others its value depends upon the work it can do. hence vigor and endurance are the prime essentials of a good horse. but as man has lessened the vigor and endurance of the hog, ox, and sheep, so he has of the horse. this is the invariable result of human art. whenever man tampers with the work of nature he is certain to lessen bodily vigor. it could not be otherwise. for the course of nature, undisturbed and undeflected, is always towards the greatest health. man changes the course of nature and the result is lessened vigor and endurance. man has improved some qualities of the horse. he has increased its speed, perhaps, but only for short distances. our race horses of to-day would make a sorry record with those of days no longer past than those of the "pony express," to say nothing of the couriers of centuries ago, because they have been made to deteriorate in vigor and endurance. we have ponderous, heavy horses to-day; but they can not do as much work before the plow or dray as those of the eighteenth century. we can not point anywhere to horses produced by breeding that are the equals of the horses of the days of chivalry. they lack not only in vigor and hardihood, but in intelligence. as the perfect symmetry of development by the course of nature has been destroyed by man the intelligence of the animal lessened. whenever the hand of man has touched his equine friend it has been only to mar. this decrease in the excellence of the horse can not be shifted from man to time. one instance alone demonstrates the unfairness of this. the andalusians are now mere ponies, yet they are the descendants of those noble beasts ridden to victory by the spanish chivalry in the days when the valor of the horse was as important as the valor of the knightly rider. taken from their hills and valleys to serve in the haunts of men, and to be subjected to the arts of breeding, they have sadly degenerated. but the horses of the spanish explorers of both north and south america escaped, and to-day the descendants of these same spanish horses are, under the nurture of nature and nature's ways, the superb wild horses of the new world. they are the work of nature; the andalusian ponies are the work of man's art. as this degeneracy is the necessary co-existent of man's breeding, so far as it is produced by this cause it can not be escaped. but a good part of the evil is not the necessary sequence of breeding per se. it is also attributable to errors in treatment so palpable and easy of correction that it behooves us to note and avoid them. in my next i shall briefly mention a few of the most important of these. * * * * * breeder and sportsman: the old story of the countryman and his deceptive plug was recently repeated in jersey, where people are supposed to have their eye-teeth cut. it was an old gray pacer this time, attached to a dilapidated wagon by cords and odd ends of harness. the astute hotel proprietor refused to give $ for the outfit. owner then replied that he would pace the horse over a good track in three minutes. landlord bets $ to $ that he can't do it. money was then put up, and owner wanted to draw, as the track was a good way off, and he could not spare the time to attend to the matter. landlord insisted that the horse must pace or pay forfeit. a sulky and harness were borrowed, and judge placed in the stand, according to hoyle. owner claims the right to three trials, according to national association rules. point conceded. old crowbait is scored up and given the word. works off the mile very slick in : . landlord feels small, and $ goes into owner's pocket. another greenhorn bets $ that horse can't beat : . rips off another mile : , and owner pockets the money. landlord feels better; owner better yet. latest advices: same old side-wheeler won two or three hundred same way at flemington, some more at paterson, and has had a little pacing circuit all to himself. "what fools these mortals be!" * * * * * the following by richard white in the new york sun, might very properly have been dedicated to those trichinæ-frightened twins, bismarck and paul bert. sing, heavenly muse, the noble quadruped, whom orientals oft presume to scorn, who glorifies the food that he is fed, extracting carbon from convenient corn. peaceful his life, his death almost sublime, his end a grand effect of modern art; scarce has he bid a sharp adieu to time, when he is packed and ready for the mart. he goes abroad, our land to represent; the earth, from pole to tropic, is his range; he fills the bill for use and ornament, greases the world, and regulates exchange. though ministers abroad may lightly treat the rights that only appertain to men, they must protect our western corn-fed meat, defending our four-footed citizen. if bismarck bars our barrels, tubs, or cans, forcing our pork to make its way incog, upset his schemes, and overthrow his plans, and clear a pathway for the native hog. * * * * * dr. detmers, v.s., stationed at the union stock yards at chicago, by the department of agriculture for the purpose of inspecting swine, alleges that during the last four months he has examined at one packing-house not less than four thousand hogs and has seen at least ten times that number, but has not seen the slightest trace of disease, as he certainly should if any had existed. during the last two years but very little swine plague has prevailed anywhere, and, as far as he knows, no diseased hogs have been shipped; nearly if not all the small rendering tanks having been closed. * * * * * m. pasteur, the eminent french scientist, says epizootic hog-cholera, even of the most virulent type, can be prevented by inocculation with the attenuated virulent virus. he also says it is proven that the period of immunity is more than a year; that, consequently, this is long enough for the requirements of hog-raising, since the period of fattening does not generally exceed a year. yet, in spite of these happy results, i repeat that the question of the use of vaccination for different breeds needs new investigation, so that the vaccination of swine may be made general. the dairy dairymen, write for your paper. winter feed for cows. the increasing demand for milk in our cities and villages, and for gilt-edged butter during the winter season, is leading some of our most intelligent farmers to study more carefully the problem of winter dairying. "it costs more to make butter in winter than in summer," says the american agriculturalist, "but if a select class of customers in cities or elsewhere, are willing to pay for the increased cost of producing it fresh in zero weather, then there is no good reason why they should not be gratified. its feasibility is already established on a small scale, and there seems to be no discernible limit to the demand for a first-class article during the six months when the pastures are barren. the farmer who has the capital can readily provide a barn that will make his cows nearly as comfortable and healthy in winter as in summer, and shelter all the food they need to keep up a constant flow of rich milk. we have not attained, perhaps, all the information necessary to secure the best rations for winter milking, yet we are approximating toward that knowledge. some think they have found in ensilage the one thing needful. yet, some of the parties dealing in gilt-edge butter begin to complain of that made from rations consisting largely of ensilage. we shall probably have to put down early cut hay with the flavor of june grass in it as an essential part of the winter rations for first-class butter. we doubt if the bouquet of the june made article can be found elsewhere. another ration will be indian meal, our great national cereal, which is abundant and cheap and likely to continue so. then we want green, succulent food with the dry fodder to sharpen the appetite and help the digestion. this suggests roots as another ration. we have carrots, mangolds and sugar beets; all easily raised, and cheaply stored in barn cellars or pits. and from our own experience in using them during several winters in connection with dry feed, we judge them to be a safe ration in butter-making. cabbage also is available, and in districts remote from large markets, might be grown for this purpose. near cities it is probably worth more for human food than for fodder. the whole subject is yet in the tentative state, and all are looking for further light!" churning temperature. a correspondent of the new england homestead found difficulty in making the butter "come" from cream raised in the cooley creamer. in a later issue several correspondents tried to help her through the difficulty. one said: first of all be sure your cream is ready to come before you churn it. if you have no floating thermometer, please get one right away. deep set cream needs not only to be ripened, but the temperature must be right--not less than degrees, and degrees is better. don't guess at it, but be sure. mix each skimming with the others thoroughly, and keep the cream pail in a warm place at all times. another said: keep the cream at degrees to degrees all the time before it goes into the churn. take care to thoroughly mix the different skimmings. sometimes in cold weather the butter will nearly come, and then hold on without any advance. in such cases, put into a thirty-quart churning, half a cupful of salt and four quarts of water heated to degrees; it will cut the butter from the buttermilk in five minutes. my butter sells for fifty cents a pound and this is the way i manage. another: sour your cream before churning and have it as near degrees as you can, and you will have no trouble. the first fall we had the cooley we had one churning that would not come into butter. i found it was perfectly sweet. since then i have been particular to have it ripe and have had no trouble. seas of milk. a newspaper correspondent contributes the following which is of course made up of a mixture of facts and guesses. but as it is somewhere near the truth, as a general thing, we do as all the rest of the papers are doing, print it. "there are nearly $ , , , invested in the dairying business in this country," said an officer of the erie milk producers' association yesterday. "that amount is almost double the money invested in banking and commercial industries, it is estimated that it requires , , cows to supply the demand for milk and its products in the united states. to feed these cows , , acres of land are under cultivation. the agricultural and dairy machinery and implements in use are worth over $ , , . the men employed in the business number , and the horses nearly , , . the cows and horses consume annually , , tons of hay, nearly , , bushels of corn meal, about the same amount of oat-meal, , , bushels of oats, , , bushels of bran, and , , bushels of corn, to say nothing of the brewery grains and questionable feed of various kinds that is used to a great extent. it costs $ , , to feed these cows and horses. the average price paid to the laborers necessary in the dairy business is probably $ a month, amounting to $ , , a year. "the average cow yields about gallons of milk a year, giving a total product of , , , gallons. twelve cents a gallon is a fair price to estimate the value of this milk at, a total return to the dairy farmer of $ , , . fifty per cent of the milk is made into cheese and butter. it takes twenty-seven pounds of milk to make one pound of butter, and about ten pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese. there is the same amount of nutrition in three and one half pounds of milk that there is in one pound of beef. a fat steer furnishes fifty per cent of boneless beef, but it would require about , , steers, weighing , pounds each, to produce the same amount of nutrition as the annual milk product does." veterinary. about soundness. it may be supposed that the hackneyed term "sound" is so explicit as to need no comment,--and most people conceive it to be so; but the term "sound" really admits of as much contrariety of opinion as the word "tipsy;" one man considers another so if, at ten at night, he is not precisely as cool and collected as he was at one in the day. another one calls a man so when he lies on the floor and holds himself on by the carpet. so,--as to soundness, some persons can not see that a horse is unsound, unless he works his flanks like the drone of a bagpipe, or blows and roars like a blacksmith's bellows; while some are so fastidious as to consider a horse as next to valueless because he may have a corn that he never feels, or a thrush for which he is not, nor likely to be, one dollar the worse. so far as relates to such hypercritical deciders on soundness, we will venture to say that, if they brought us twenty reported horses in succession, we would find something in all of those produced that would induce such persons to reject them, though, perhaps, not one among the lot had anything about him of material consequence. to say the least, we will venture to assert that nine-tenths of the horses now in daily use are more or less unsound. we make no reservation as to the description of horse, his occupation, or what he may be worth. we scarcely ever had, indeed scarcely ever knew, a horse that had been used, and tried sufficiently to prove him a good one, that was in every particular unequivocally sound. we have no doubt that there are thousands of owners of horses who will at once say we are wrong in this assertion, and would be ready to produce their own horses as undeniable proofs, whereby to back their opinion and refute ours. they may, perhaps, say that their horses are never lame--perhaps not; that is, not lame in their estimation or to their eye; but we daily see horses that go to a certain degree indubitably lame, while their owners conceive them to be as indubitably sound. these horses, perhaps, all do their work perfectly well, are held as sound by owners, servants, acquaintances, and casual observers; but a practical eye would detect an inequality in their going, as a watchmaker would do the same in the movement of a watch, though we might look for a week, or listen for the same length of time, without being able to either see or hear the variation. the watch might, however, on the average keep fair time; but it would not be a perfect one; and what matters, if it answers all the purposes for which we want it? a really bad watch that can not keep time is a different affair;--it is pretty much the same with a horse. if the unsoundness is such as to render him unable to do his work, or even to do it unpleasantly to himself or owner, or if it is likely to bring him to this, our advice is to have nothing to do with him. if, however, this is not the case, or likely to be so,--if you like him--buy him. it is not improbable that a man may say, i begin to believe that few horses that have done work are quite sound; but a sound one i will have; i will, therefore, buy a four-year old, that has never done a day's work. we will acknowledge that if he does so, he may probably get his desideratum; but do not let him make too sure of this. there are such things as four-year olds, unsound, as well as worked. but, supposing him to have got this sound animal; what has he got? an animal that he has to run the risk of making useful, so far as teaching him his business goes; and by the time this is effectually done, and the colt has arrived at a serviceable age, he will probably be quite as unsound as many of those he has rejected; independent of which, and supposing him to continue sound, the breeder of this horse must have better luck or better judgment in breeding than his neighbors, if more than one in five or six that he does breed turn out desirable horses in every respect. if he turns out but a middling sort of beast, it is but small satisfaction to know that he is sound; in fact, so little satisfaction should we feel, that, if we were compelled to keep and use him, so far from rejoicing that he was sound, we should only regret that he was not dead. in relations to the doings of dealers in horses, it is not our present object to expose the tricks of the trade, or to prejudice the unsophisticated buyer against all horse dealers. there are honest horse dealers, and there are dishonest ones; and we are sorry to say that, in numbers, the latter predominate; that honesty in horse dealing is not proverbial. but horse dealers, like other mortals, are apt to err in judgment; and all their acts should not be set down as willful wrong-doings. however, be their acts what they may, the general verdict is against their motives. therefore, supposing we could bring any person or number of persons to believe the fact that a man conversant with horses might sell, as a sound horse, one that might, on proper inspection, be returned as unsound, all that we could say or write, would never convince the majority of persons that a dealer could innocently do the same thing. if his judgment errs, and leads him into error as to the soundness of his horse, it is set down, not as willful or corrupt perjury as to oath, but most undoubtedly as to his word and honesty. questions answered. glanders, chronic catarrh, and "horse distemper."--h.p.w., peotone, ill.--query--what are the symptoms whereby a person may know the difference between glanders, catarrh, and ordinary horse distemper? reply--among the prominent symptoms of glanders may be mentioned a discharge of purulent matter from one or both nostrils; one or both glands on the inside of the lower jaw bones are more or less swollen, hard and knotty. one or both nostrils are sometimes swollen and glued up by a sticky, unhealthy looking pus, sometimes streaked with blood. on opening the nostrils, pustules and ulcers are seen on the inner surface. the nose may sometimes bleed. the eyes are often prominent and watery; the coat rough and staring if the horse is in lean condition; and the voice more or less hoarse. the appetite is not often impaired. sooner or later, farcy buds may appear on the head, neck, body or limbs, generally along the inner side of the thighs. in chronic nasal catarrh or so-called gleet, the glands between the jaw bones are very slightly, if at all, enlarged; they are loose, not hard and knotty, as in glanders. this ailment, which is apt to persist for months, unless properly treated, may leave an animal in an unthrifty state, with a staring coat, disturbed appetite, dullness at work, cough and discharge from one or both nostrils; but there are no pustules or ragged sores or ulcers within the nose, as in glanders. chronic nasal gleet, however, is apt to run into glanders; and, as there is no telling when the beginning is, such a horse, with chronic discharge from the nose, should always be looked upon with suspicion, and be kept away from other horses. the difference between glanders and influenza or ordinary horse distemper, is so marked that a mistake is not easily made. the more prominent symptoms of distemper are as follows: with signs more or less prominent of a general febrile condition, there is great dullness and debility, frequent and weak pulse, scanty discharge of high-colored urine, costiveness, loss of appetite, and a yellow appearance of the membranes of the mouth and the eyes. the eyes appear more or less sunken, upper lid drooping and lips hanging, giving the animal a sleepy look; there is cough, soreness of the throat, and labored breathing; the mouth is filled with frothy slime, the legs are cold and sometimes more or less swollen below the knees and hocks. in the advanced stages of distemper, there is a free discharge from both nostrils. brittle hoofs.--i.f.c., camden, ill. if the animal is shod, the shoes should be removed and reset at least once a month, to allow the feet to be properly pared and trimmed. if habitually brittle, it will be proper to keep such feet off from much moisture, and instead provide dry floor of whatever kind. once or twice a week such feet should be given an ample coat of some simple hoof ointment, such as equal parts of tar, tallow and beeswax, carefully melted together, and stirred till cold. lung disease in swine.--a.j.t., emery, ill. most internal diseases of swine, especially inflammation of the lungs, which is often given the wrong name of thumps, are very intractable and apt to prove fatal when occurring during the winter months. prevention is the sheet anchor for these troubles, and it must be a poor farmer indeed who can not manage to provide clean, comfortable and dry housing for his live stock during this season, or who can not comprehend that such is necessary for the well-doing of animals as well as of himself. any animal, even a hog, will of course suffer more, or less severely when constantly exposed to chilly winds, draft of cold air, wet ground and damp surroundings, icy or frozen drink or food, etc. blindness after lockjaw.--m.j.g., los angeles, cal. let the animal go loose in a comfortable, roomy, well-bedded shed, from which strong light is excluded. apply, once daily, to the hollow space above the orbit of the eyes, a small portion of fluid extract of belladonna. give food which does not require much hard chewing. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _one year, and the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ horticultural [illustration] horticulturists, write for your paper. the hedge question. at one of the december meetings of the massachusetts horticultural society a prize essay from the pen of john j. thomas, of union springs, n.y., was read on the subject "hedge plants and hedges." the subject of the essay was proposed in the form of a question, "are live hedges to be recommended either for utility or ornament, and if they are, what plants are most suitable?" the answer to this question was given from the experiments of the essayist during the last forty years. the deciduous plants tried were the buckthorn, osage orange, honey-locust, privet and barberry. the evergreens were the norway spruce, hemlock, and american arbor-vitæ. the buckthorn has the advantage of great hardiness, thick growth, and easy propagating and transplanting, and requires but a moderate amount of cutting back. but the growth is not stout enough to resist unruly animals, unless in very rich soils, and even a moderate amount of cutting back is an objection to farmers. the cost of buckthorn hedges, including the preparation of a strip of soil five feet wide, purchase of plants, setting, and occasional horse cultivation on each side, was about twenty-five cents a rod the first year. the yearly cultivation and cutting back, until the hedge had reached full size, was three or four cents a rod. though the buckthorn has nearly passed out of use on account of its inefficiency, it is not impossible that it may be extensively planted when cultivators find that it may be converted into an efficient barrier by inclosing two or three barbed wires extending its length through the interior--these wires, supported on occasional posts, being successively placed in position as the hedge increases in height, the branches growing around the wires and holding them immovably in position. galvanized wire should be always used, on account of its durability. osage orange hedges require more care than buckthorn, in assorting plants of equal size and vigor, and the rejection of feeble plants. like all other hedge plants, they should be set in a single line, and eight inches apart is a suitable distance. for the first few years the ground must be kept well cultivated. it is partly tender and will not endure the winters at the north, unless on a well-drained soil. hence the importance of placing a good tile drain parallel to the hedge and within a few feet of it. thus protected, good hedges have stood for twenty-five years where the thermometer has often shown ten or twelve degrees below zero, and sometimes lower. no hedge is more commonly mismanaged than the osage orange. it is planted in imperfectly prepared ground; vigorous and feeble plants are planted indiscriminately, cultivation and pruning are omitted or not done thoroughly, resulting in broken and irregular lines. when more care is given, the hedge is nearly spoiled by being pruned too wide at the top, the heavy shade above causing meagre growth and openings below. it should be pruned in wedge shape, but shearing is objectionable as causing a thick and short growth of leaves at the exterior, excluding light from the inside and causing bare branches there. cutting back more irregularly with a knife allows the growth of interior foliage, and gives more breadth to the hedge. the sheared hedge presents an unnatural stiffness in ornamental grounds; but skillfully cut back with the knife it has more of the beauty of natural form. the manner of pruning is very important, both as regards utility and beauty. for farm barriers hedges do not require so elaborate care. another mode of treatment has been adopted in the western states. the trees are trimmed and the main stems trained upright for a few years. they are then cut half off at the ground and bent over at an angle of thirty degrees with the ground, a tree being left upright at distances of four or five feet, and the inclined ones interwoven among them, a straight line of trees being thus formed. the tops are then cut off about three feet high. new shoots spring up in abundance and form an impenetrable growth, as many as fifty having been counted from a single plant the first year. the top is cut to within a few inches each year of its previous height. hedges made in this way have no gaps. a similar treatment may be adopted when a hedge becomes too high by long years of growth. the trees are first partly trimmed with a light axe or hook with a long handle, and then half cut off at the ground and bent over. a new growth will spring up and form a new hedge. this course was adopted by the essayist with a hedge planted twenty-eight years ago, and which has been a perfect farm barrier for more than twenty years. the cost of this hedge was about twenty-five cents a rod the first year, and the three subsequent cuttings for sixty rods cost about twenty dollars, averaging less than a dollar a year. but it was usually too tall and shaded, and occupied too much ground, to be recommended where land is valuable. ninety rods of osage orange hedge, properly trimmed, cost about the same for the first four years of cultivation, but more for annual cutting back. it was planted twenty-four years ago, and has been a perfect barrier for about twenty years. the yearly cost of pruning was about four cents a rod for ten or twelve years, and since it has become larger and higher nearly double. for cutting back a stout hook with a handle two and a-half feet long or a stout scythe was used. hedge shears are too slow except for ornamental hedges, and even for these the knife is preferable. the honey locust has been extensively used for hedges of late years on account of its hardiness. seed should be selected from the most thorny trees. the trees have a tall, slender, and not hedgy growth, and require thorough cutting back to secure a thick mass of branches at the bottom, and very few have received this treatment when young. the care in planting and rearing is similar to that required by the osage orange. many hedges have been injured or even destroyed by pruning after the summer growth has commenced. the pruning must be done in spring before the buds swell, if vigorous growth is to be preserved. but strong-growing hedges, that are likely to become too high, may be checked by summer pruning. though the cost of planting and starting a hedge is less than that of building a good board fence, they are not adapted to farmers who will not give them the continued care required to keep them in good order. this conclusion is justified by observing how few have succeeded with hedges, and many have allowed them to be ruined by neglect. the evergreens which have been employed have been exclusively for ornamental screens, and not for farm barriers. the norway spruce may be placed at the head on account of its rigid growth, hardiness, and the freedom with which it may be cut back, it will bear more shade than many other evergreens, and hence the interior of the screen is green with foliage. the cutting back should be done with a knife, and not with shears. next to the norway spruce is the hemlock, which excels the former in its livelier green in winter, while it is unsurpassed for retaining interior foliage. it will bear cutting back to an almost unlimited extent in spring before growth commences. but it is not so stiff as the norway spruce as a barrier. the american arbor-vitæ, though much used, becomes destitute of foliage inside, and is browned by winter. by the introduction of barbed wire an important change is likely to take place in planting hedges. barbed wire makes a cheaper fence for its efficiency than any other material. a serious objection to it is the danger of animals being lacerated against it, the wires being nearly invisible. this objection may be obviated by inclosing the wires in visible hedges. efficiency may also be thus imparted to small-growing hedge plants, such as privet, barberry and small evergreens, which will require but little labor in pruning and would become handsome ornaments. the purple barberry, for example, would present an attractive appearance during a large portion of the year. a new value may thus be given to hedges by rendering moderate growers and those easily kept in shape efficient barriers for farm and fruit gardens. young men wanted. perhaps one of the greatest needs of horticulture at the present day, is young men to engage in the work--intelligent, patient, energetic young men, who will begin and make it a life-labor and study. what nobler employment in which young men can engage? what field for study and investigation can be found for them which offers a more gratifying and pleasant pursuit, and promises richer and more substantial results? there are so many open questions connected with the science; so many points that need investigation, so many problems to be solved; so much to learn that is yet unknown--that the needs for more laborers are great and pressing; and the wonder is that more of our young men are not entering upon the work. that young men are needed, rather than the old or middle aged, is because many of the investigations to be undertaken require a lifetime to perfect, and can only be brought to a profitable issue in a long series of years. such, for instance, as the production of new varieties of fruits; the relative hardiness and longevity of trees; the effects of soil and climate, heat, cold, etc., upon plant life; the degeneracy of species, etc.;--all of which require a long series of experiments to determine. older men, here and there, are engaged in these investigations; but they are passing away in the midst of their work only partially accomplished, and their labors are thus in a degree lost. our farmers' sons--stout, healthy, energetic young men--are the ones upon whom this labor and high duty more properly devolves. to them belongs, or should belong, the honor and glory of pushing forward this noble work. many of these, however, are mistakenly leaving the farms to engage in trade and speculation; while others who remain at home mostly incline to other branches. the agricultural colleges are doubtless developing a few faithful workers for these too neglected fields; but these munificently endowed institutions are believed to fall far short of their duty in this respect. i will close by recommending this matter to the thoughtful consideration of the young readers of the prairie farmer, who, as a class, i believe to be as capable and intelligent as the country affords, and with the remark that i know of no business in life to which i would sooner urge any young friend of my own to devote his talents and his energies. t.g. possibilities in iowa cherry growing. prof. budd, of iowa, sends the prairie farmer the following copy of his address before the eastern iowa horticultural society, remarking that its appearance in this paper may lead the bloomington nurserymen to look up this very important line of propagation: the topic assigned me is, as usual, experimental horticulture. i select the division of the work implied in the heading for the reason that it is, as yet, mainly an unoccupied field of inquiry. if the idea occurs that my treatment of the question is speculative rather than practical permit me to suggest that thought and investigation must always precede the work of adapting fruits to a newly occupied country, especially if that country is as peculiar in climate and soil as the great northwest. in the summer of , i was fortunate in having a fine opportunity for studying the varieties and races of cherries in continental europe. the fruit was ripening when we were in the valley of the moselle in france, and as we went slowly northward and eastward it continued in season through wirtemberg, the valleys and spurs of the swabian alps to munich in bavaria, through the passes of the tyrol in saltzburg to austria, bohemia, siberia, poland, and southwestern russia. still farther north of st. petersburg and moscow we met the cherries from vladimir on every corner, and our daily excursions to the country permitted the gathering of the perfectly ripened fruit from the trees. still again when we passed six hundred miles east of moscow we had opportunities for picking stray cherries of excellent quality from trees standing near the th parallel of north latitude. to undertake to tell of the varieties of the fruit and the relative hardiness of the trees--as estimated from the behavior of varieties we knew something of--of the many varieties and races we studied on this extended trip would make too long a story. on the plains of silesia, north of the carpathian mountains we first began to be intensely interested in the cherry question. here the cherry is the almost universal tree for planting along division lines and the public highways. as far as the eye could reach over the plains when passing over the railways, the cherry tree indicated the location of the highways and the division of estates. as we passed the highways running at right angles with the track we could get a glimpse down the avenues to a point on the plain where the lines seem to meet, and we were told that unbroken lines along the highways were often found thirty to fifty miles in length. as a rule these street and division trees are of a race wholly unknown in this country excepting a few trees of the ostheim in iowa and minnesota. they are classed in the books as griottes with colored juice and long, slender, drooping branches. the trees are smaller than our english morello with low stems, and neat round tops. while some other races are hardy on this plain as far north as warsaw in poland and russia the griottes are grown for three main reasons. ( ) the trees are deep rooted and so small in size that they do little shading of the street or cultivated fields. ( ) they rarely fail to bear full crops as the fruit buds are hardier and the fruit buds expand later than the kentish and the other and more upright forms of the morello. ( ) the fruit is less acid and richer in grape sugar than the kentish forms making it more valuable for dessert, culinary use, and above all for making the celebrated "kirsch wasser" which here takes the place of wine. some of the thin twigged griottes with dark skins and colored juice are as large in size as our morello and nearly or quite as sweet. that they will prove hardy and fruitful with us we can hardly doubt as they grow on the dry plains of northeast europe where the kentish forms utterly fail. why have they not been introduced? i once asked this question of mr. george ellwanger, of rochester, n.y. he replied that in the early days of their nursery some varieties of the weichel type were introduced in their collection. but the eastern demand ran in the line of the heart cherries and the dukes, and if sour cherries were wanted for pies the kentish forms with uncolored juice seemed to be preferred. i suspect the difficulty of propagation and the inferior look of the little thin twigged trees in the nursery had something to do with the ignorance of our people of the merits of this hardy and fruitful race. in the trying climate of the swabian alps, the tyrol, and the east plain of silesia, hungary, poland, and south russia, the trees are on their own roots mainly, and the sprouts are used for propagation. when small they are placed in the nursery with the tops and roots cut back in the form of root-grafts. for the use of methodic growers and or planting on private grounds where sprouts are not wanted the trees are budded or inarched on prunus padus. how will we propagate this valuable race of the cherry? the scions are too small for profitable grafting, and budding on our morello seedlings hardly answers, as the slow-growing top favors sprouting from the root. perhaps we shall find that our bird cherry (prunus pennsylvanica) is best suited for our use. the question of propagation of this race is important, as the cherries grown in immense quantities in the province of vladimir, one hundred and fifty miles east of moscow, and in all the provinces of the upper volga are of this thin twigged race. beyond all doubt it is the coming cherry for universal use in central and northern iowa, and even in dakota and the far northwest. yet it is not the only race of the cherry which will thrive on our prairies and prove longer-lived, more fruitful, and far better in quality than any we now have. * * * * * on the grounds of the pomological institute, at proskau, silesia, we saw many varieties of the amarelle and spanish cherries that will bear more summer heat, an aridity of air, and a lower summer temperature than our richmonds or english morello. in leaf and habit of growth these amarells of austria and south russia are much like our carnalion, but some of the varieties bear large fruit, as nearly sweet as is desirable for dessert use. the race known as spanish bears sweet fruit, much like our tall growing hearts and bigarreaus, but the leaves are smaller, firmer, and thicker, and the habit of the tree is nearly as low and spreading as that of the amarells. in austria we are told that the original stock of these round-topped, sweet cherries came from spain, but as we went east to orel, veronish, and saratov we met varieties of this race on the grounds of amateurs and proprietors who told us that the race was indigenous to bokara and other parts of central asia. while these varieties are hardier than the richmond the trees are lightly protected with straw during the winter for protection of the fruit buds, when paying crops are secured. north of orel the griottes alone are grown on the bush plan, with from three to six stems springing up from the crown. in vladimir tens of thousands of acres are covered with these bush cherry orchards, producing many train loads annually of fruit of surprising excellence, considering the far northern and inland location of the plantations. on the college farm we have some specimens growing of the ostheim, vladimir, double natte, and other forms of the griottes, and a few specimens from orel and veronish of the amarells and the spanish races. we have now orders out, of which we have received a part, for perhaps fifty other varieties from austria, poland, and south russia. for the present these will be planted in experimental orchard with a view to noting their behavior in our climate. until scions are grown here we can not make much advance in propagation. the work is necessarily slow, but it can not fail, i think, to finally demonstrate that so far we have been on the wrong track in attempting to grow cherries on the prairies of the northwest. prunings. if turnips or other vegetables to be fed to stock become frosted, place them in a cool cellar, cover lightly with straw, and let them remain frozen. if they do not thaw they will be little harmed for feeding. snow should not be allowed to accumulate on evergreens. if so, and it partly thaws and then freezes, it can not be removed, but will catch the snow and wind, often to the entire destruction of the tree. a frost proof vegetable house is described as made with walls fifteen inches thick, double boarded, the space between the boards being filled with sawdust. the ceiling is also boarded, with about ten inches of sawdust between the boards. new england homestead: the early black cranberry is the popular early berry on cape cod. it escapes the early frosts and so the crop produces better prices. a larger, lighter and longer berry is the james p. howley, which is being introduced in essex county. the latter variety is not so early as the former, but bears well, and in the protected bogs along shore is frequently preferred. northwest farmer: mr. edison gaylord, of floyd county, iowa, advocates setting trees in a leaning posture, to prevent them from being killed by the combined effects of the wind and sun on their southwest side. prof. j.l. budd, of the iowa agricultural college, says, in confirmation of mr. gaylord's view, he saw hundreds of the finer cherry and plum trees in russia planted at an angle of forty-five degrees towards the one o'clock sun. he says that only for a short time will trees thus set have an awkward appearance. the most convenient boxes in which to start seeds and cuttings are those known as "flats" among gardeners. a good size for the kitchen garden in which to start tomato seeds, etc., or for the ordinary conservatory, is two feet long, sixteen inches wide, and three inches deep. these shallow boxes are easy to handle, take up little room, and allow of much better drainage to the young plants. salt or soap boxes can be easily cut up into three or four boxes three inches deep. neat leather handles on each end of the box will increase its handiness. the bottom is better if made of several pieces of board, as the cracks insure good drainage. james vick's plan of catching slugs is as follows: "take some pieces of slate, or flat stones, or flat pieces of tin, and lay them about in the garden among the plants, distributing them very liberally; just at sundown go out and place a teaspoonful of bran on each piece of slate or tin, and the slugs will soon become aware of it, and begin to gather and feed on it. in about two hours, when it is dark, go out again with a lantern and a pail containing salt and water, and pick up each piece on which the slugs are found feeding, and throw slugs and bran into the brine, where they instantly die. it is well, also, to go around in the morning, and many slugs will be found hiding under the pieces of slate, and can be destroyed in the brine. by following up this method persistently for a few weeks the garden may be effectually rid of the nuisance." a correspondent of the iowa register advises us as to the proper manner of performing this operation: "to heel trees in properly, a trench should be dug on high, dry ground from two and a half to three feet deep; one side of which should slope from the bottom at an angle of to degrees. the trees should then be set against the sloping side of the trench and sufficiently apart to allow of fine earth being brought in close contact with every part of every root. when the roots and bodies of the trees are carefully covered, the trench should not only be filled but rounded up so as to form a mound over them. when air spaces are left among the roots they are liable to mould and rot. and very frequently, when they have not been buried sufficiently deep, the outside bark becomes detached from them and will slip off when they are being taken from the trench." a correspondent of gardening illustrated (england), says this is the way to make an asparagus bed: trench the soil at once two spits deep, and work in stable manure as the work proceeds, or if procurable, seaweed and plenty of sand, or any gritty substance, such as road scrapings. it should be left as rough as possible on the surface until april next, when the young plants will be in the best condition for planting, viz., with shoots a few inches long; then draw wide drills, and spread the roots of the plants out, covering with fine sandy soil, leaving the tips of the shoots just peeping through the soil, and if mild showery weather prevails the growth will be rapid. put some pea-sticks to support the growth and keep it from suffering by wind waving. merely keeping from weeds is all the other attention required until november, when the old tops may be cut off, and a dressing of rotten manure spread on the surface of the bed, to be lightly forked in during the following spring. the rural new yorker says as follows: we plant the cuthbert raspberry for late, the hansel for early--both are of a bright red color, and suitable for market as well as for home use. for a yellow plant the caroline. it is hardy and productive, though not of the first quality. for canning, or for table use, if you like a fruit full of raspberry flavor though a little tart, shaffer's colossal. it is rather dark in color for market, and perhaps a little soft. for a hardy, early, red raspberry that is sweet and delicious for home use, plant the turner. for a raspberry that is excellent in every way, plant the new marlboro. for the earliest and most productive of blackcaps, plant the souhegan. for a larger and later blackcap, plant the gregg. for currants, plant the fay's prolific for red, and the white grape currant for white. for grapes, plant the lady for earliest white, moore's early and worden for early black. for later, plant the victoria or pocklington, for light colored; the vergennes, jefferson. brighton or centennial for red, and the wilder, herbert or barry for black. for strawberries, try the cumberland triumph, charles downing, sharpless, manchester (pistillate), daniel boone, james vick, mount vernon, hart's minnesota, and kentucky. you can not select a better list for trial unless by experience you know already what varieties will succeed best on your land. floriculture gleanings by an old florist. propagating houses and other things. in the days of our boyhood the propagating house was, in the more pretentious nurseries, a very sacred place, under lock and key, and some of its mysteries supposed to be so profound that prying eyes of other establishments were not welcome. bell glasses in those days were thought to be indispensable, and some of the plants desired to be propagated were found to require months, sometimes nearly a year, before they could be transferred from the cutting pots. the hot-water tanks, and other bottom heat appliances of the present day were then unknown; and these appliances have resulted in greater simplicity of management. still we are bound to admit that the demands here generally embrace a class of plants that, as a rule, are found to root the most readily, while those that have always been known to tax the propagator's skill, as the heaths, new holland, and others called hard wooded plants, are but little called for in this market. at that time nearly everything was placed in pots of almost pure white sand, surrounded by the ordinary atmosphere of the house; while nowadays the establishment must be small indeed if it does not contain some place where the bed is so arranged that the heat at the bottom is from ten to fifteen degrees above that of the house proper. here lies the whole secret as to whether it is a part of a single green-house or a house devoted exclusively to propagating purposes. for the purpose of being able at all times to control the temperature of the top, the propagating house has often a northern exposure, except in the very dead of winter. with a bright, clear sun above it is almost impossible in the daytime to keep down the temperature of the house sufficiently to prevent the young cuttings from wilting, after which disaster is very likely to follow in their final rooting. given a top temperature never above or degrees, with a bottom always from to degrees higher, if the cuttings are in good shape it is a simple matter to root them in from seven to fifteen days; though the time it takes depends, of course, upon the plant and condition of the wood. at first efforts used to be contrived to get this bottom heat by means of the old flue system, with plenty of material covering the bricks, to break, in part, the dry burning nature of the heat. then hot water came in and furnished what was thought the acme of a propagator, and tanks of elaborate workmanship, and made of the finest material down to the commonest wood, were made so a circulation of hot water was kept up over as large an area as the necessity of the owner might require. the results seemed excellent, but lo, every now and again, disastrous failures would occur. a material would spread all around called by the florist the cutting bench fungus, that would sweep through his crop like a plague; all sorts of theories would be given, and numberless articles appear in the horticultural periodicals of the day on its cause and cure. presently it was found that those who did not use a tank of water, but had inclosed a space to be heated by hot water pipes, did not seem to suffer so much from the invidious foe. much moisture was found an excellent remedy for the enemy, though it might have been its first cause, as it could be best warded off by dousing with the once praised hot water tank. whether a house is used exclusively or not, the ordinary hot water pipes are simply inclosed in a brick or wood space, with ventilators that may be opened to let off part of the confined heat into the house at pleasure. the front benches used are about two feet six inches to three feet in width, over, say four -inch pipes, up to within eighteen inches or two feet of the glass. on this is a platform over which three to six inches of sand is put, and in this bed are placed the cuttings where, with the differences before mentioned, they are kept as uniform as possible, and the sand kept decidedly wet. almost everything we called soft wooded, or that can be got from the soft wood, even including most of our hardy shrubs, can be rooted with almost unerring certainty in the larger establishments by the hundreds of thousands. as modern ideas demand large propagating, even in the summer, when it is next to impossible to keep these proportions of top and bottom heat, if in an ordinary propagating house, such firms as miller & hunt, strike out with another idea to overcome the difficulty. this is none other than instead of glass, they have a muslin canvas-covered house, in which they have again pits, where mild bottom heat can be obtained by the use of spent hops, tan bark, manure, or other material. of course, it would be idle to talk of a summer bottom heat of deg., but instead of that, they get one of about deg., and depend upon a close, uniform, high, moist temperature to carry out the same results. with this, rose plants can be and are raised by the hundreds of thousands from the single eye to a cutting, with a loss of not five per cent in the aggregate, and often not one per cent. it is very evident that with new or scarce plants this is an enormous average, as by its means firms can import the new european plants in the spring, at perhaps very high rates, start them into immediate, rapid growth, and from half a dozen plants to work on, maybe in the next spring markets have hundreds for sale. this is all new as managed by us old 'uns in former times, but he who expects to be up with the present day and cater for that class of patronage, must take the new and not the old way of doing things, or he will, in the vernacular of the streets, "get left." as we are on this particular topic, however, and as the amateur window plant-grower may want to propagate some little stock as well, even if not on these "high-falutin" ways, it might not be amiss to say that beyond the methods of "slipping" here and there cuttings in and among others growing in pots, or, mayhap, in a pot all by themselves, they can readily root lots of plants in a water and sand bath, which is nothing more than taking a deep saucer, putting half an inch of sand in the bottom, filling up the saucer full of water, and keeping it full; stick your cuttings into this, place right in the sunniest spot of your window, and they will grow about as certain, many of them, as if treated by the florist's more portentious method. likely the reason of all this is, the water keeps the cuttings from wilting long enough for them to put forth their efforts for existence in the shape of new roots, obtained from the stored up material in the cuttings, and as soon as this is done they become new individual plants, requiring only to be transferred into a suitable medium of earth to go on as an independent, but similar existence to the plant from which they were obtained. edgar sanders. * * * * * our new clubbing list for . the prairie farmer in connection with other journals. we 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[illustration] "the little detective." weighs / oz. to lbs. every housekeeper ought to have this very useful scale. the weight of article bought or sold may readily be known. required proportions in culinary operations are accurately ascertained. we have furnished hundreds of them to subscribers, and they give entire satisfaction. during january, , to any person sending us three subscribers, at $ . each, we will give one of these scales, and to each of the three subscribers ropp's calculator, no. . * * * * * the sorghum-growers of kansas are invited to meet at topeka, the second wednesday in february. the kansas wool-growers meet on the th of this month. do not forget the mississippi valley horticultural society meeting at kansas city, january - . this will prove one of the important horticultural events of the year. if any of our friends have vols. i to xiv, and the years , to , and to , of the prairie farmer, they would like to dispose of, we should be glad to hear from them. the fifteenth annual exhibition of the montana agricultural, mineral and mechanical association, will be held at helena, september th- th, . president, s.h. crounse; francis pope, secretary. the twenty-fifth annual fair of the linn county (iowa) agricultural and mechanical society will be held on the fair grounds at cedar rapids, september , , , and , . c.g. greene, secretary, cedar rapids. if you are in need of a first-class wind mill, find out all about the nichols' centennial as advertised in our columns by nichols & daggett, and see if you do not think it just fills the bill. it is strong, durable, steady, and it takes and uses all the wind there is going. hon. e.b. david, member of the illinois state board of agriculture from mercer county, made a brief call at the prairie farmer office last week. from him we gathered the facts regarding the late meeting of the board mentioned elsewhere. mr. david has long been a staunch friend of the prairie farmer, and his call was a very welcome one. immigration at the port of new york fell off last year to the amount of , persons, or about - / per cent from that of . the total number landed this last year was , . the greatest decrease was from sweden and russia. from england came , ; ireland, , ; germany, , ; italy, , ; norway, , ; hungary, , ; switzerland, , ; denmark, , ; bohemia, , . last year the arrivals were , . it is not unlikely that there will be a greater falling off this year for times are not sufficiently promising here to greatly stimulate emigration from europe. the crystal palace company, of london advertise the holding for six months, from april next, of an "exhibition of arts, manufactures, and scientific, agricultural, and industrial products," and invite the participation of american exhibitors. a court in a central position on the main floor has been set aside for expected american contributions, and the ordinary charge for space is two shillings per square foot. this will probably seem a trifle steep to american exhibitors who are not accustomed to pay for space in their own exposition buildings. last year was not a very surprising one in the matter of railway extension within the limits of illinois. the report of the railway and warehouse commissioners will show that but miles of track were laid. but there are , miles of track in use in the state. the companies among these lines numbering sixty-four, operate , miles of road or nearly , miles outside of illinois. the total net income of these companies was $ , , and the dividends amounted to $ , , . in the dividends amounted to but $ , , . the average freight charges in were . cents per mile, while the year before they averaged . cents, hence it must follow that the amount of traffic greatly increased over that of . a lecture course for farmers at the nebraska agricultural college, will be given from february - , by the regular instructors in the college. one or more lectures will be given on the following topics: breeds of cattle and swine; breeding, improving, and care of stock; care of farm machinery; health on the farm; adulteration of food; economical farming; tame grapes; ensilage; what to feed; meteorology and plant growth; sorghum-growth and manufacture; horticulture; principles of pruning; the digestive organs of domestic animals; injurious insects. a number of leading farmers of the state have been invited to lecture upon their specialties. all the facilities of illustration and study owned by the college will be at the disposal of the students attending the course. these include several compound microscopes, a good agricultural library, meteorological apparatus, six breeds of cattle and four of swine, orchard, nursery, arboretum, vineyard, etc., etc. a limited number will be boarded at the college farm for a price not to exceed three dollars per week. persons attending will be aided in securing cheap board in the city. persons expecting to attend or desiring further information should write to s.r. thompson, dean agricultural college, lincoln, neb. some of our readers may wish to paste this item in their scrap books. it cost to run the united states government last year the sum of $ , , , expended as follows: to supply deficiencies, $ , , ; legislative, executive, and judicial expenses, $ , , ; sundry civil expenses, $ , , ; support of the army, $ , , ; naval service, $ , , ; indian service, $ , , ; rivers and harbors, $ , , ; forts and fortifications, $ , ; military academy, $ , ; post-office department, $ , , ; pensions, $ , , ; consular and diplomatic service, $ , , ; agricultural department, $ , ; expenses district of columbia, $ , , . the interest on the public debt amounted to $ , , and the amount of principal paid off was $ , , . the receipts from internal revenue were $ , , , and from custom duties $ , , . the minnesota state horticultural society will hold its seventeenth annual meeting at the college of agriculture, minneapolis, four days, beginning with january th, and with the minnesota state forestry association on the th. a cordial invitation is given to all persons interested in horticulture and forestry to be present. a large number of papers and reports are to be read, followed by discussions. these reports are by persons who possess a thorough practical acquaintance with the subjects presented, including such men as peter m. gideon, j.c. plumb, dr. t.h. hoskins, prof. c.w. hall, prof. j.l. budd, dr. f.b. hough, h.j. joly, j.f. williams, and others. a number of premiums are offered for apples, grapes, plants, and flowers, vegetables, seeds, and miscellaneous objects. john s. harris, of la crescent, is president, and oliver gibbs, jr., of lake city, is secretary. illinois state board. the illinois state board of agriculture held a business session in springfield last week. all the members were present at one time or another during the meeting. the premium list was revised for the fair of . the premiums for speed were somewhat increased over last year. in cattle sweepstakes classes it was decided that no animals can be allowed to compete except the winners of a first prize in other classes in which they had been entered, except in the case of the grand sweepstakes, to which will be permitted animals not previously entered for any prize. the board is to make a laudable attempt to stimulate corn culture and to benefit the corn growers of the state. it offers $ for the best bushel (ears) of corn grown in each of the three grand divisions of the state, and a second prize of $ for the next best sample in the three divisions. the premium samples are to become the property of the board, and the winners of prize premiums must deliver on cars directed to the agricultural rooms, springfield, twenty-five bushels (ears) of same variety that shall equal in merit the premium bushel. the winners of the second premiums must send the samples and fifteen bushels of same variety and of equal quality. the premiums will not be paid until the comparisons of the premium corn with the larger lots are made by a committee of the board at its winter meeting in january next. the corn thus donated to the board will be distributed to farmers throughout the state for planting in . premiums are to be offered for tools, implements and appurtenances used in the coal mining and handling industry of the state. premiums for poultry have been increased, and an expert will be selected to do all the judging in the poultry department. the chicken exhibit at the fat stock show will not be continued. the committee of dairymen appointed at the late meeting of the illinois dairymen's association did not present themselves at the state board meeting to confer about holding a dairy exhibit either at the state fair or the fat stock show, as instructed to do. no explanation of the failure was made. the state board, however, to leave nothing undone to establish its desire to meet the dairymen half way or more, appointed a committee consisting of messrs. david, chester, and griffith, to confer with the dekalb committee, in chicago, at some convenient time to be agreed upon. it was decided to hold the next illinois state fair at chicago the week beginning september th, and the fat stock show at the exposition building, chicago, beginning november th. sorghum at washington. prof. wiley, of the department of agriculture at washington, will soon issue his report upon the sorghum business of . newspaper correspondents have been permitted to make a digest of the report. he pronounces erroneous the prevalent impression that every farmer may become his own sugar-maker. sorghum, unlike sugar beet, contains various non-crystallizable sugars, the separation of which demands much skill and scientific knowledge. sorghum-sugar will have to be made in large factories. the existing factories have shown that it can be made, but how profitably or unprofitably can not be stated by prof. wiley, who suggests that farmers near factories may, in effect, make their own sugar by raising the cane and trading it at factories for sugar. cane giving sixty pounds of sugar per ton ought to bring the farmer thirty-five pounds, the rest of the sugar and molasses going to the manufacturer to pay expenses and yield profit. the profitableness of making sugar from sorghum depends largely on utilizing all waste products. the scums and sediments make manure hardly inferior to guano. bagasse, or crushed cane, can be turned into manure by being thrown into hog-pens, as at rio grande, n.j., or it will make a fair quality of printing paper. it is not economical to burn it. if the manufacture of sorghum-sugar is proved to be profitable, it will result in supplying to a large extent our demand for sugar, but as sorghum makes a great deal more molasses in proportion to sugar than sugar-cane does, the professor concludes that when there is enough sugar there will be a great deal more molasses than can be disposed of. prof. wiley has made experimentally some fair samples of rum and alcohol from sorghum molasses. under favorable circumstances one gallon of molasses weighing eleven pounds would give . pounds absolute alcohol, . pounds of per cent, and . whisky or rum. thus each gallon of molasses would give nearly half a gallon of commercial alcohol and two thirds of a gallon of whisky or rum. as it has been abundantly proved, he says, that sugar can be made from sorghum, the government should make no further experiments in this direction. prof. wiley has tried the diffusion process, and finds it yields per cent more sugar, but at a somewhat higher cost than grinding. the government, he thinks, should purchase machinery for large experiments in the diffusion process, and should raise its cane somewhere else than near washington, as land there is expensive and not adapted to the purpose. the government should also make arrangements with agricultural colleges or other agencies in various states for experimenting with sorghum-culture to determine what parts of the country are most favorable to the culture of sugar-producing plants. prof. wiley suggests in each state the trial of two acres divided into ten plots--five for sorghum, four for beets, and one for corn--to test for purposes of comparison the general fertility of the soil and the character of the season. the government ought to carry on for a series of years the process of selection of sorghum seed in order to secure an improvement in the quality of the cane. the cold spell. the cold weather of last week seems to have extended over nearly the entire north american continent. nothing for severity has been known to equal it during a long series of years. east, west, north, and south it was all the same, differing in degree of course, but uniformly colder than scarce ever known in the same latitude. the greatest loss to stock so far as heard from was in that in transit to market. on some of the roads the losses were heavy. a dispatch from independence, mo., says a train of fifteen cars, loaded with mules from texas via the iron mountain and southern road, arrived there on the th, when it was discovered that at least of the mules had frozen to death, and the others were in a freezing condition. the mules were two years old and direct from grass. they had been three days without food. many trains arriving at chicago had scores of frozen animals. no great disaster is yet reported from the far west or from minnesota and dakota. still there must have been great suffering not only among the dumb brutes, but among human beings as well. it is fortunate that polar waves do not visit us more frequently. the effect upon fruit, buds, trees, and shrubs is not yet ascertained. it will be a marvel if many localities are not barren of fruit of nearly all kinds next year. the prairie farmer will be very glad if its readers will favor it with their ideas and the results of their observations in regard to the damage of all sorts done by the intense cold of the first week of the year. questions answered. william miller and f. myrick, peotone, ill.-- . what are the laws in regard to drainage passed by the last legislature? . who is the chief justice of the supreme court and who his associates? answer-- . this is a question probably neither lawyers nor judges in illinois are competent to answer. it you doubt it procure from the clerk of your county court a copy of the public laws of and read the fifteen pages relating to drainage. . the chief justice of the united states supreme court is m.r. waite, and his associates are s.f. miller, s.j. field, j.p. bradley, j.m. harlan. w.b. woods, s. mathews, h. gray, and s. blatchford. samuel snodgrass, meade co., ky.-- . i have some large, old, and apparently healthy, apple trees, but they are comparatively barren. what can i do for them? . i have others which appear to be going to decay and will soon die. had i better anticipate their death by cutting them down, or try to save them as i would like to do, for their associations with the past. answer-- . we know no better course for you to take than to dig a deep ditch all around the trees, say three feet wide and as many deep, and just within the outer reach of the limbs, and fill this in with half the earth removed and the other half made up of vegetable matter, ashes, road dirt, and such manure from the barn and stable as you can spare. having done this make an arrangement about each tree that will retain all the rainfall which comes down to the earth beneath and collect as much more from the open spaces about as possible. . your old and decaying trees may be saved if decay has not gone too far. but the remedy is an heroic one, and rather expensive as you will find. first treat the decaying trees as described for the healthy ones, with the exception you add a greater proportion of fertilizers and manure when you fill in the ditch with half new material. then (and all this work should be done, as it can readily be done, in your latitude during the cold months when vegetation is at a stand) give the old trees a thorough pruning, even going as far as to remove per cent of all the leaf and fruit buds on the tree. then wait for results, looking for nothing more than a new growth of wood the first year, but fruitfulness thereafter and a new lease of life. but remember as in the first place, care must be taken to supply abundant water, indeed as much more as the average rainfall, so much being absolutely necessary to afford the roots the amount of manurial plant food, in solution, the new departure demands. every fruit-grower knows when a dwarf pear has borne a certain number of crops, fruit buds cease to form and the tree becomes nearly barren. if at this stage the dwarf is deprived of every bud, whether fruit or leaf, and the limbs are left to resemble bare sticks, and at the same time the earth about the roots is fortified with wood ashes and well rotted manure, a handsome growth of branches will be made the first year and a crop of fruit result the second. this, the writer has tried with perfectly satisfactory results twice on the same dwarfs, and has others which, having been submitted to this course of treatment, in the fall of , made a handsome growth in , and have set fruit buds for a good crop in . the life of an average apple tree in illinois is scarcely more than or years; but there is no doubt if, when they begin to show signs of decrepitude or decay, they are treated as above, they may be made to live and bear fruit for perhaps a hundred years. american ash. there are five well-known species of this genus (fraxinus americana), and they occupy an important place as valuable timber trees. this is especially true of the white ash, more commonly called the american ash. of this tree the late arthur bryant, sr., said in his book on trees: "it is one of the most valuable and worthy of culture for the quality of its wood and the rapidity of its growth. when full grown it is one of the largest of the trees of our forests. * * * * the prairie soils of iowa and central and northern illinois are well adapted to the growth of the white ash." wayside notes. by a man of the prairie. it is a strange and almost an unheard of thing for any one to say a good word for the "tree peddler" but i am going to say it if it breaks the heart of every horticultural baby in the land. since a time to which the memory of man runneth not back, the poor "tree peddler" has been abused and maligned by horticultural speakers and writers. in conventions he has been ridiculed and denounced. every cross-road nursery-man not possessed of stock sufficient to warrant a line of advertising even in his local paper, nor business force enough to send an agent through his own neighborhood to take orders for trees, has spoken in a horticultural meeting or written a letter to his favorite paper, warning the farmers against the wiles of the oily tongued fellow with colored fruit plates, specimens of preserved fruits, and an order book for trees, shrubs, and vines. and i think i have known of some of the big fish in the nursery business who with one end of their tongues have lashed some other big fish in the same business for employing irresponsible agents to sell stock for them, while with the other end they were commanding a small army of the same class of agents to go forth into all the world and preach the gospel of tree planting and--sell trees. others have sold and continue to sell trees to peddlers without limit, for cash, and of any and all varieties called for, while they denounced the system of peddling in unmeasured terms. now it is just as possible for a tree peddler to be an honest man as it is for the man who grows trees to sell to be honest. i do not say that all men belonging to either class are honest. it would be equally absurd to say that all of either class are dishonest. i despise the quack, the liar, the deceiver in any business, and i have no respect or love for the man who will sell worthless varieties of trees or wrongly named varieties, knowingly. honesty here as elsewhere is the best policy. but here is a fact, as i believe: it is better to plant an inferior tree than none at all, and i know of neighbors who would go down into their graves without ever planting a tree if some persuasive peddler had not talked it into them to do so, and these same neighbors now have quite respectable orchards. here is another fact: one half the orders sent to nursery-men by farmers during the past twenty years have called for varieties utterly worthless for the localities in which they were to be planted. and the tree peddler often gratifies the purchaser by pretending to sell to him a sort which he has made up his mind to have because he knows it was good in his old home a thousand miles away. but the peddler, not having this variety, and knowing that if he did have it it would prove worthless, substitutes a ben davis or some other approved variety, and it goes into the ground and in due time produces an abundance of excellent fruit. in this case the peddler does a really good thing. if nursery-men will stop propagating everything but varieties adapted to the country and the markets, and many of them are doing this, the tree peddler will be powerless for mischief--will in fact become a great public benefactor. but so long as nursery-men will continue to grow and sell worthless varieties, and so long as the people will remain in ignorance regarding adaptability, so long will the dishonest peddler remain an unmitigated nuisance and fraud. in brief these three things are wanted: intelligent and honest nurserymen; orchard planters who either know what varieties are best for them to have, or who are willing to trust the selection to the afore-mentioned intelligent and honest nursery-men; and third, first-class talkers, intelligent as to varieties and methods of culture, who buy only of the intelligent and honest nursery-men, to go through the country and sell trees. it is unfortunate that it takes so many words to express what i wanted to say, but i am done at last. * * * * * i have got it! yes, all the ice i want is now white for the harvest in our "artificial" pond. it is the only thing that reconciles me to this fierce visit of polar weather. as soon as a trifle milder wave gets along our way we shall carefully store away sufficient for the year's use. by the way, where are the poor deluded woodchucks, muskrats, and old settlers, who told us we were to bask in mild etherialness all winter long? i am disgusted this morning, with the mercury at degrees below zero, and still going down, at the whole batch of them, and with vennor and hazen, and all professionally weatherwise men and things. i have heard of little real suffering in my neighborhood from the cold, among either humans or brutes. doubtless, when the weather moderates and people get out to tell each other all about the cold spell, there will be many true tales of intense suffering and more than the usual romancing about the terrible week. and then the oldest inhabitant will thaw out, and with all the self-satisfaction that superior age and experience crown him with, will tell how much colder it was in such and such a year, until we wish this little spell had sealed his memory and mouth, for we do all take a great pride in living in a time that excels all other times, albeit, if it be only in a storm or a freeze. but in these things the early times of the old settler can never be excelled, no matter in what century he flourishes. he is always master of the situation. his experiences are like those of no other settler that ever lived and died. with him, imagination has gradually usurped the place of experience and its isothermal dips and dodges carry him through hotter and through colder seasons than are marked down in any standard time prairie farmer, or any other map or chart in existence. but for this weather business i should like to live next door to the old settler, for he is generally truthful, good, kind, full of practical knowledge and common sense. letter from champaign. we are having some very sharp winter weather, and sleighing as uninterruptedly good since the th of december as i ever remember. this morning, january th, the mercury reported degrees below zero at : a.m., and degrees below at o'clock. this is the coldest since january th, , when degrees below was recorded at the industrial university here, and degrees below by the spirit thermometer at one of the jacksonville institutions. but the wind was west at that date, and it is so to-day, showing our coldest weather comes from that direction rather than from the northwest or north. the explanation i suppose to be, those great fountains of cold storage, the colorado mountains, lie west and southwest of us, and are several hundred miles nearer than the lower peaks and ranges northwest. * * * * * it is an interesting and important truth to know at this time that an unexpected source for seed corn has been discovered here at home. it has been ascertained by experiment and investigation that the early frosted corn, which has been allowed to stand in the field, has a sound germ, and though shrunken, will make fairly good seed, whereas corn which was not frosted till late in october, and ripened in most respects, save drying out, is wholly unfit for seed, having had the cells of the kernels ruptured by the freezings it has been subjected to. this rupture of cells the grain of the frosted corn escaped, having parted with the surplus water of vegetation before hard weather set in. however, the early frosted and shrunken cane fit for seed may be confined to this county or neighborhood, or a narrow area, and therefore i advise every one who thinks of making use of it to ascertain for himself, by the usual methods, whether the germ is sound or not. * * * * * several parties have written me--one from missouri, another from indiana, and a third from kentucky, that they have seed corn for sale, cheap and in quantity. i have no doubt of it, and i have accordingly advised each to advertise it in the prairie farmer, if they are really desirous of selling, stating briefly what variety, where grown, and at what price. i should be glad to advertise it for them gratuitously, but the contract of the prairie farmer with its contributors contains a clause to the effect that "they shall neither use its columns to grind their own axes nor the axes of anybody else." with the recourse of early frosted corn to go to, and the assistance of appropriately selected seed from abroad, the gross mistakes and disappointments of are pretty certain to be avoided in . * * * * * no doubt many who are more or less familiar with the reports on hog cholera in the official publication of the department of agriculture, ask themselves why dr. detmers is singled out by frenchmen as the sole authority on swine diseases, when his colleagues of the commission, dr. salmon and laws went nearly as far as he did in their extravagant statements. but the prominence dr. detmers has obtained in the estimation of frenchmen is now explained in this: at a late sitting of the french academy of sciences that eminent savant, pasteur, referred to him and his investigations in flattering terms. giving an account of the discovery of the microbe which causes the rouget of swine in france, pasteur said: "respect for historic truth compels me to state, however, that in the month of march, , the microbe of the rouget was discovered at chicago, in america, by professor detmers, in a series of investigations which did great honor to their author." with the indorsement of one of the most eminent scientists in the world, before a body equally distinguished, dr. detmers may find some compensation in being singled out as the scape goat for an unfortunate commission which has cost the country many millions. b.f.j. * * * * * remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _one year, and the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ poultry notes. poultry-raisers. write for your paper. a duck farm. you will not find it on the map because it is not mentioned there, and i shall not tell you where it is because i promised the little woman who owns it, and who gave me permission to tell other women what she had done, that i would not mention her name or the name of the place where she lives and works. how did i happen to find her? i didn't find her; it just happened--i.e., if anything ever happens in this queer old world of ours. we bumped our heads together once in a railway accident, and we have been firm friends ever since. her farm is only a bit of land, some thirty acres, but for the last five years she has made from ten to twelve hundred dollars a year from it, and most of the money came from the ducks. she sells eggs for hatching, and ducks for breeding and for exhibition, but the main object is ducks and feathers for market. she thinks ducks are less trouble and quite as profitable as hens. she keeps twenty-four stock ducks, eight males and sixteen females, through the winter. the ducks commence laying from the middle of february to the first of march, and lay from to eggs each in a season. the first laid eggs are set to get ducks to sell for breeding stock and for the early summer market. for this purpose the eggs from the ducks that are two or three years old are used, and when hatched the ducklings from those eggs are marked by punching a small round hole in the web of the feet. she thinks, and rightly, too, that the eggs from the older ducks procure larger and more vigorous birds than the first eggs from the young ducks. as soon as the weather gets warm enough to ship without danger of chilling on the way, she sells eggs for hatching at $ per dozen, and finds no difficulty in disposing of as many as she cares to spare at that price. her sales of eggs for hatching amount to about $ yearly. besides the eggs used and sold for hatching she generally sends a twenty-four-dozen case to new york just before easter. these large, finely-shaped, pure white eggs sell readily for easter eggs, and bring from forty to fifty cents per dozen. from the eggs set on her own place during the season she raises from ten to twelve hundred ducks each year. the ducklings are hatched from the first of april up to about the first of august. most of the ducklings are raised by hen mothers, and she keeps some fifty hens for that purpose. the hens are all pure buff cochins, and are kept until they are two years and a half old. besides raising two broods of ducks each season, each hen pays her owner an average profit of seventy-five cents a year from the sale of eggs for market. when fattened for market at the end of the second season, these cochin hens are large and heavy, and the carcass of the old fowl generally sells for enough to pay for a pullet to take her place. no chickens are raised on the farm; the pullets are bought of a neighbor who keeps the buff cochins. she aims to set several hens and the incubator at the same time; when the eggs hatch the incubator ducklings are divided up among the hens; one hen will care for twenty ducklings until they are old enough to care for themselves. the eggs hatch well--those in the incubator quite as well as those under hens, and when the incubator ducklings are once mixed up with the others she finds it impossible to distinguish "which from 'tother." when the ducklings are ten or twelve hours old they are moved with the mother hen to coops and safety runs, which are placed in an orchard near the house. this orchard contains about four and a half acres, and the coops are scattered over it a few rods apart. on the side of the orchard that leads to the "pond lot," the bottom board of the fence is a foot wide and comes close to the ground in order to keep the ducklings from taking to the water too early in life. when the ducklings are four weeks old the hens are taken away, but the ducklings are kept in the orchard until they are six weeks old, or until they are well feathered on the breast and under part of their bodies, when they are turned into the pond lot, where they "take to the water like ducks." the pond lot contains nearly thirteen acres, five of which are covered with water. originally, this lot was a piece of low, rocky, bushy pasture land, between two low ranges of hills. a stream of clear, sparkling water, a famous trout brook, ran through the center. the woman who proposed to raise ducks saw at once the advantage of such a situation, and had a dam constructed near the upper end of the lot, and later another was made lower down, so that the lot contained two large ponds. where the fences which separate my friend's land from that of her neighbor cross the stream, water-gates are put in, which keep the ducks from swimming out with the water; and the bottom boards of the fence around the rest of the lot keep them from getting out that way. two well-trained dogs guard this lot at night, and woe to the two-footed or four-footed prowler who intrudes. the duck houses are simply long, low sheds--with the exception of the one where the breeding stock is wintered, which is inclosed--placed on the slope a few rods back from the water. they were built of refuse lumber, and the cost was comparatively trifling. connected with the house for the breeding-stock is a small yard where the ducks are shut in at night through the laying season. from the time when they are twelve hours old till within twenty-four hours of the time when they are killed for market, the ducklings are well fed with a great variety of food. from the first meal until they are turned into the pond lot they are fed every two hours between daylight and dark. "little and often," is the motto. before they take to the water the ducklings are fed a little cooked meat once each day, and doubtless this ration of meat has much to do toward making the fine large ducks that my friend has a reputation for raising. after they are turned into the pond lot the ducklings are fed but three times a day till within two or three weeks of the time when they are to be marketed; then they are confined in the fattening yards and fed oftener. the fattening yards are situated between the two ponds, and so arranged as to inclose a portion of the stream. the ducklings are marketed as fast as they reach a suitable age and size. she commences sending them to market about the middle of june and keeps it up till about the middle of september, when she quits till near the middle of january. these prime young ducks, getting into market at a time when such poultry is scarce, bring good prices--from to cents a pound, dressed. by the time the price begins to decline she has marketed all the earlier ones that she cares to spare, and the later-hatched she keeps growing till mid-winter, when fine ducks are again scarce and the price goes up. at thanksgiving and during the holidays when the markets are crowded with poultry of all kinds, she holds on to her ducks, unless she has an order at an extra price. at first my friend kept the rouens; then she tried the aylesburys, but now she keeps only the pure pekins, and is so well satisfied with them that she has no desire to change for anything else. she says, "for laying qualities, quick growth, great size, fine flesh and fine feathers, the pekins can not be excelled." on her place i have seen six-weeks old pekins that weighed six pounds a pair alive, and those that dressed from three to four pounds each at ten or twelve weeks. at five and six months her ducks dress from six to eight pounds each. for the feathers, the best and finest of which are carefully saved by themselves, my friend obtains forty cents per pound. all the work connected with the duck-raising, except now and then some heavy work which is necessary in the pond lot, is now performed by my friend and her three children, a boy of fifteen, and two girls of thirteen and eighteen. there is a moral to this, but if you can't find it it will not do you one bit of good. fanny field. * * * * * consumption cured. an old physician, retired from practice, having had placed in his hands by an east india missionary the formula of a simple vegetable remedy for the speedy and permanent cure of consumption, bronchitis, catarrh, asthma and all throat and lung affections, also a positive and radical cure for nervous debility and all nervous complaints, after having tested its wonderful curative powers in thousands of cases, has felt it his duty to make it known to his suffering fellows. actuated by this motive and a desire to relieve human suffering, i will send free of charge, to all who desire it, this recipe, in german, french, or english, with full directions for preparing and using. sent by mail by addressing with stamp, naming this paper. w.a. noyes, _ power's block, rochester, n.y._ * * * * * a guilt frame--the prison window. the apiary. apiary appliances. in the last issue of the prairie farmer the "italian and german bees" were described true as life, by that prince of writers, l.l. langstroth. after a careful perusal of the article named, in which the good and bad traits of each race are delineated, any person ought to be able to choose intelligently which bee is best, all things taken into consideration, for him to procure. in starting an apiary, there is another item of equal importance, and that is what kind of dwellings should be erected for the occupants of this future city. the wants of the future tenants should be considered; provide them with all modern conveniences, as to pantry and larder, and don't forget, as some architects do, that abodes should be ventilated as well as warm. some bee-masters prefer houses that are high between ceilings, others low; some prefer large houses, many again those that are smaller. the size has to be made according to the frame chosen. there are five different sizes of movable frames now in use among bee-keepers, and those are equally successful who use either size. the langstroth is more in common use than any other. some object to it, claiming that it is too shallow. [illustration] in looking at the plates of the five different sizes of frames, an idea is gained how minds differ. each one has its advocates, and its votaries claim that the frame they use is the very best for all purposes. we were once looking out of the window of a friend's house on her neat, well-kept apiary, and remarked what baby hives. and we found no fault with the baby, when this lady showed us her beautiful white sections of comb-honey, and ate her delicious peaches, canned, with extracted honey for sweetening. it must be fun to handle the little gallup, but the langstroth has an advantage over all others; it consists in this: that it is most used, and if a person desires to sell his hives and frames, he can more readily do so. it is also easily obtained, as it is kept in stock by supply dealers, and can be quickly sent forward when ordered, but if it was an off size wanted, a delay would occur; some change might have to be made in the machinery, and it would cost more, as well as the delay occasioned, which, if in the midst of the honey harvest, might cause great loss. other appliances of the apiary, to suit this frame, are kept by supply dealers; such as extractors, comb-baskets, uncapping cans, etc. with any of these frames a hive can be made large or small, by regulating the number of frames. if the hives are bottomless, as many make them, a tall hive can be made by tiering up, as is practiced by those who work for extracted honey. the adair frame was formerly used in a hive called the "new idea, or non-swarming hive." its non-swarming qualities consisted in its being a long hive, and if empty frames were always kept in front, so that the bees had to pass through empty space to reach the brood nest, they would not swarm. frames should be placed in a hive an inch and one-half from center to center, and should have three-eighths of an inch space between them and the hive. this last item was considered of enough importance to have a patent issued for it. if the distance from the top of the frames to the honey board, or between the frames and the hive, is less than three-eighths of an inch, the bees will propolis it together, and if it is more, they will build comb between. mrs. l. harrison. what should be worked for. as publishers, says the weekly bee journal, we should, . encourage planting bee-pasturage, that there may be, every season, a crop of honey to gather, in order to make apiculture a certain occupation. . foster district and local societies to afford mutual instruction, and strengthen fraternization. . institute large and attractive honey and apiarian exhibits at all fairs, to educate the community to the desirableness of a superior product. . cultivate a discriminating domestic market, to encourage superiority and excellence. . sell at all times, and in all places, an honest article under an honest name. * * * * * brown's bronchial troches for coughs and colds: "i do not see how it is possible for a public man to be himself in winter without this valuable aid."--_rev. r.m. devens, pocasset, mass._ * * * * * the prairie farmer and youth's companion one year, $ for the two. it is not required that both papers be sent to one address, nor to the same post-office. address prairie farmer pub. co., monroe street, chicago. * * * * * railroads. a man who is unacquainted with the geography of this country will see by examining this map that the [illustration] chicago, rock island & pacific r'y by the central position of its line, connects the east and the west by the shortest route, and carries passengers, without change of cars, between chicago and kansas city, council bluffs, leavenworth, atchison, minneapolis and st. paul. it connects in union depots with all the principal lines of road between the atlantic and the pacific oceans. its equipment is unrivaled and magnificent, being composed of most comfortable and beautiful day coaches, magnificent horton reclining chair cars, pullman's prettiest palace sleeping cars, and the best line of dining cars in the world. three trains between chicago and missouri river points. two trains between chicago and minneapolis and st. paul, via the famous "albert lea route." a new and direct line, via seneca and kankakee, has recently been opened between richmond, norfolk, newport news, chattanooga, atlanta, augusta, nashville, louisville, lexington, cincinnati, indianapolis and lafayette, and omaha, minneapolis and st. paul and intermediate points. all through passengers travel on fast express trains. tickets for sale at all principal ticket offices in the united states and canada. baggage checked through and rates of fare always as low as competitors that offer less advantages. for detailed information, get the maps and folders of the great rock island route, at your nearest ticket office, or address r.r. cable, vice-pres. & gen'l m'g'r, e. st. john, gen'l tkt. & pass. agt. chicago. * * * * * standard books. now ready for distribution. volumes one and two of the national register norman horses the most reliable, concise, and exhaustive history of the horse in general, and by far the most complete and authentic one of the norman horse in particular, ever published in the united states. prices: volume i.........................................$ . volume ii........................................ . when the two volumes are sent in one package to one address, $ . . sent, postpaid, on receipt of price. address your orders to prairie farmer publishing co., chicago * * * * * remember _that_ $ . _pays for_ the prairie farmer _one year and, the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ scientific. the star of bethlehem. "we have seen his star in the east," said the wise men. from what remote region of antiquity may we suppose that this fancy came, that important events to the world of man were heralded by marvelous phenomena of the heavens? to the ignorant man, there can never be any world outside of that with which he is concerned. so the primitive man had no use for planets, comets, and the like, that were not in some way concerned with his destiny. and we no doubt own our magnificent modern science of astronomy to the quack system of astrology, which was only a device to induce the heavenly bodies to minister to the importance and conceit of man. the accepted scriptures tell us that the birth of the savior of mankind was heralded by the appearance of a remarkable star in the sky. taking this assertion to be true, it might be a matter of some interest to consider what explanations have been made of this phenomenon. a large majority of religious teachers, we admit, even to the present day, have attempted no explanation whatever, but have settled the subject by calling the star a miraculous appearance, concerning whose true nature we can know nothing. but two solutions of the phenomenon have been given by well-known astronomers, either of which, if accepted, will place the miracle in the list of purely natural occurrences. kepler held that the star of bethlehem was simply a conjunction of the planets. astronomy, which, more fortunate than history, can bring unimpeachable witnesses to its record of past events, assures us that there was a remarkable conjunction, or rather three conjunctions of the planets jupiter and saturn, in the year of rome , or seven years before the christian era. it is now generally admitted that christ was probably born at least four years before the date fixed upon as the first "year of our lord," and remembering how much uncertainty hangs about this date we might consider ourselves fully justified in placing it, as kepler did, in the year b.c. this being granted, let us see how the occurrence of the conjunctions in this year explains the miracle of the "star." in the first place, note that the magi, or wise men, of the east (presumably the country of chaldea) were the first to call attention to the star as indicating the birth of the "king of the jews." the chaldeans were devoted to astrology, and it is only reasonable to infer that whatever remarkable appearance they saw in the sky, they would endeavor to explain it by their astrological laws. on the th of may, b.c., a conjunction of jupiter and saturn occurred, in the th degree of the constellation pisces, close to the first point of aries; on the th of september of the same year, another conjunction of these planets took place, in the th degree of pisces; and on the th of december, a third, in the th degree of the same sign. (these are not conjectures or inferences, but known astronomical facts.) if we suppose that the magi, intent on their study of the heavens, saw the first of these conjunctions, they actually saw it _in the east_, for on may , it would rise three and one half hours before sunrise. it is not necessary to suppose that the planets approached near enough to each other to appear as one star, for they probably did not--it was their conjunctions that gave their astrological significance. it plainly indicated to these observers that some important event was impending, and what could be more important than the birth of a great man? but where was this one to appear? the sign pisces was the most significant one for the jews, for according to astrological legend, in the year a.m. a conjunction of jupiter and saturn in this sign had heralded the birth of moses; the proximity to aries indicated that the hero foretold was of kingly lineage; the jewish expectation of a great king had become a well-known story in chaldea during the captivity, ergo, the inference was prompt and sure, this conjunction indicated the birth of the expected king of the jews. that they might be among the first to do honor to so great a personage as they believed this king to be, the wise men soon set out for judea. the journey probably took them five months or more. on their way they witnessed the second conjunction, which no doubt only strengthened their faith. if they performed the journey from jerusalem to bethlehem at the time of the third conjunction, december , in the evening, as the narration implies, the stars would be some distance east of the meridian, and would seem to move from southeast to southwest, or towards bethlehem. their standing over the house we may regard as an additional statement that crept into the narration probably through its repetitions. such is kepler's explanation of the star of bethlehem. but before he had given this to the world, indeed while he was an infant in his cradle, tycho brahe had connected the phenomenon with that of one of the great variable stars of the solar system. the latter astronomer discovered, in , what appeared to be a new star in the constellation, cassiopeia. it was a star of the first magnitude when first perceived, and daily it increased in brilliancy, till it out-shone sirius, equaled venus in lustre, and could be perceived, even by the naked eye, at noonday. for nearly a month the star shone; at first it had a white light, then a yellow, and finally it was a bright red. then it slowly faded, and in about sixteen months had disappeared. amidst all the conjecture concerning this remarkable appearance, some regarding it as a new world in process of creation, others as a sun on fire, tycho brahe held to the belief, though unable to prove it, that it was a star with a regular period of light and of darkness, caused possibly by its nearness to, or distance from, the earth. when the telescope was invented, forty years later, the accuracy of this theory was known. at the spot carefully mapped out by tycho brahe, a telescopic star was found, undoubtedly the same one whose brilliant appearance had so startled the world in . upon this, astronomers began to study the annals of their science for similar appearances, and found that a very brilliant star had appeared and disappeared near the same spot in the heavens in , and also in . the inference was that this star had a period of about three hundred years, and counting back, imagination might place one of its periods of brilliancy very near the time of christ's birth. for this reason it received the name of the star of bethlehem, and many have fully accepted the theory which makes this variable luminary identical with the "star of the east." this second theory has especial interest just now, for if astronomical calculations are correct, we may look for the reappearance of this remarkable star during the coming year. if it does fulfill the prediction of its return it must be reckoned as one of the most noteworthy phenomena of the century. for the benefit of amateur observers, who are as likely as any to be the first to perceive this remarkable sight, we may say that cassiopeia, the constellation in which it will appear, lies very near the north star. you all know how to find the polar star by the pointers of the great dipper; continue this line beyond about an equal distance, and you will strike caph, the largest star in cassiopeia, or the chair, so-called because the stars form the outline of an inverted chair. near one of these the wandering luminary will probably flash out, "to amaze a wondering world." we may remark, in conclusion, that though there are quite a number of variable stars, their nature and the cause of their changes are but imperfectly understood. the star of bethlehem has no doubt an orbit, which brings it much nearer the earth at some times than others. but astronomers do not believe that the mere fact of distance explains all changes. there is a star known as mira, which for eleven months is wholly invisible to the naked eye, then flames forth as a star of the first magnitude, and is visible for a period of nearly three months, fading at its close into darkness again. the star algol, in the constellation perseus, is usually of the second magnitude, but every two and a-half days it begins to decline in brilliancy, becomes very faint, and remains thus for about three hours, and then waxes bright again. possibly this may be caused by the shadow of another star. in a star of the eighth magnitude, in the northern crown, suddenly flamed up into extraordinary brilliancy, remained thus for several months and gradually subsided. this star was examined with the spectrum, and showed lines of burning hydrogen. this led to the theory, now held, that the increase in brilliancy of these stars is caused by the incandescence of this gas. these fixed stars are all supposed to be suns of other systems, and to be surrounded--like our sun--with envelopes of fiery gases; from some cause not at all understood these gases may, at regular periods, flame up with fiercer heat than usual, and produce this appearance of greatly increased light. this is a very inadequate explanation, no doubt, but it is the best that astronomers have yet been able to devise in the matter. a.c.c. * * * * * our books. books free! good books are valued by intelligent men and women more than silver and gold. they are treasures in every home. they are to the mind what light and heat are to plants. they _store the mind with useful knowledge;_ the mind directs the hands. an intelligent man has an advantage over one who is ignorant, whether he is a farmer, or mechanic, or merchant, and is surer of success in his occupation. think how _losses of time and money may be saved_ by having some book at hand containing just the information desired in some line of the rural industries. we offer an excellent opportunity for any one to obtain books free for himself or family, and also for societies, farmers' clubs, and associations to make additions to a library, or to start one. these books comprise standard works, and the latest and best books for farmers, stockmen, dairymen, fruit-growers, gardeners, florists, poultrymen, apiarists, silk-culturists, housekeepers, architects, etc., etc. the prairie farmer publishing company will give to any person, association, or club, who will obtain and send subscribers to the prairie farmer (including both new subscribers and renewals), at the regular price of the paper ($ ) each, any of the books contained in our book list on the following terms: for three subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . for four subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . for five subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . for six subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . for seven subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . for eight subscribers, books to the amount of $ . for ten subscribers, books to the amount of $ . . _for twelve subscriptions and upward,_ a dollar's worth of books for every two subscriptions sent at $ . each. all books given under these offers will be delivered at our office, no. monroe street. if it is desired that they shall be forwarded by express, they will be packed and delivered at the express office by us, the receiver to pay cost of carriage. sent by mail to any part of the united states or canada, the postage will be seven cents on each dollar's worth of books. it is necessary that parties to whom the books are given shall remit us the postage before the books are sent. * * * * * a dictionary free! this is no catchpenny affair, but a valuable lexicon. it is the popular american dictionary, on the basis of webster, worcester, johnson, and other eminent american and english authorities. it contains over , words, with accurate definitions, proper spelling, and exact pronunciation; to which is added a mass of valuable information. it is enriched with illustrations. remember, every subscriber at the regular price of the prairie farmer gets this dictionary free, if preferred to our commercial map. * * * * * here is another. ropp's calculator and account book for . this is the most useful thing in the way of a memorandum book and calculator ever issued. it is a work of nearly pages of printed matter and an equal number of blank leaves, ruled, for keeping accounts. the contents include a vast array of practical calculations, , or more in number, arranged for reference like a dictionary, so that a farmer or business man may turn to the figures, and find the answer to any problem in business. there are three kinds. we use no. . full leather; assorted colors, with flap, slate pocket, and a renewable account book, ruled with divisions or headings especially adapted to farmers' use. the retail price of this book in leather is $ . we will send it free to every subscriber to the prairie farmer who sends us $ . or we will send three copies of no. , the cheaper issue. * * * * * and yet another. american etiquette and rules of politeness. it is the latest and best standard work recommended and endorsed by all who have read it. the acknowledged authority. beautifully and appropriately illustrated; handsomely and substantially bound. it contains chapters, treating on all subjects relating to etiquette. we send this book--plain edition, to any subscriber desiring it who sends $ . for the prairie farmer year, or for two subscribers to the prairie farmer at $ each, we will send american etiquette bound in english cloth, burnished edges. our large and varied premium list will be issued in a few days. send for it. * * * * * miscellaneous. to preserve the health use the magneton appliance co.'s magnetic lung protector! price only $ . they are priceless to ladies, gentlemen, and children with weak lungs; no case of pneumonia or croup is ever known where these garments are worn. they also prevent and cure heart difficulties, colds, rheumatism, neuralgia, throat troubles, diphtheria, catarrh, and all kindred diseases. will wear any service for three years. are worn over the under-clothing. catarrh, it is needless to describe the symptoms of this nauseous disease that is sapping the life and strength of only too many of the fairest and best of both sexes. labor, study, and research in america, europe, and eastern lands, have resulted in the magnetic lung protector, affording cure for catarrh, a remedy which contains no drugging of the system, and with the continuous stream of magnetism permeating through the afflicted organs, must restore them to a healthy action. we place our price for this appliance at less than one-twentieth of the price asked by others for remedies upon which you take all the chances, and we especially invite the patronage of the many persons who have tried drugging their stomachs without effect. how to obtain this appliance. go to your druggist and ask for them. if they have not got them, write to the proprietors, enclosing the price, in letter at our risk, and they will be sent to you at once by mail, post paid. send stamp for the "new departure in medical treatment without medicine," with thousands of testimonials, the magneton appliance co., state street, chicago, ill. note.--send one dollar in postage stamps or currency (in letter at our risk) with size of shoe usually worn, and try a pair of our magnetic insoles, and be convinced of the power residing in our magnetic appliances. positively _no cold feet where they are worn, or money refunded_. * * * * * publications. marshall m. kirkman's books on railroad topics. do you want to become a railroad man if you do, the books described below point the way. the most promising field for men of talent and ambition at the present day is the railroad service. the pay is large in many instances, while the service is continuous and honorable. most of our railroad men began life on the farm. of this class is the author of the accompanying books descriptive of railway operations, who has been connected continuously with railroads as a subordinate and officer for years. he was brought up on a farm, and began railroading as a lad at $ per month. he has written a number of standard books on various topics connected with the organization, construction, management and policy of railroads. these books are of interest not only to railroad men but to the general reader as well. they are indispensable to the student. they present every phase of railroad life, and are written in an easy and simple style that both interests and instructs. the books are as follows: "railway expenditures--their extent, object and economy."--a practical treatise on construction and operation. in two volumes, pages. $ . "hand book of railway expenditures."--practical directions for keeping the expenditure accounts. . "railway revenue and its collection."--and explaining the organization of railroads. . "the baggage parcel and mail traffic of railroads."--an interesting work on this important service; pages. . "train and station service"--giving the principal rules and regulations governing trains; pages. . "the track accounts of railroads."--and how they should be kept. pamphlet. . "the freight traffic way-bill."--its uses illustrated and described. pamphlet. . "mutual guarantee."--a treatise on mutual suretyship. pamphlet. . any of the above books will be sent post paid on receipt of price, by prairie farmer publishing co., monroe st. chicago, ill. money should be remitted by express, or by draft check or post office order. * * * * * cut this out & return to us with ten cts. & you'll get by mail a golden box of goods that will bring you in more money, in one month, than anything else in america. absolute certainty. need no capital. m. young, greenwich st. n. york. * * * * * ( ) chromo cards, no alike, with name, c., pks, $ . george i. reed & co., nassau, n.y. household. for nothing lovelier can be found in woman than to study _household_ good.--milton. how the robin came. happy young friends, sit by me, under may's blown apple-tree; hear a story, strange and old, by the wild red indians told, how the robin came to me: once a great chief left his son,-- well-beloved, his only one, when the boy was well-nigh grown, in the trial-lodge alone left for tortures long and slow youths like him must undergo, who their pride of manhood test, lacking water, food and rest, seven days the fast he kept, seven nights he never slept. then the poor boy, wrung with pain, weak from nature's overstrain, faltering, moaned a low complaint; "spare me, father, for i faint!" but the chieftain, haughty-eyed, hid his pity in his pride. "you shall be a hunter good, knowing never lack of food; you shall be a warrior great, wise as fox, and strong as bear; many scalps your belt shall wear, if with patient heart you wait one day more!" the father said. when, next morn, the lodge he sought, and boiled samp and moose-meat brought for the boy, he found him dead. as with grief his grave they made, and his bow beside him laid, pipe and knife, and wampum-braid-- on the lodge-top overhead, preening smooth its breast of red and the brown coat that it wore, sat a bird, unknown before. and as if with human tongue, "mourn me not," it said, or sung; "i, a bird, am still your son, happier than if hunter fleet, or a brave, before your feet laying scalps in battle won. friend of man, my song shall cheer lodge and corn-land hovering near. to each wigwam i shall bring tidings of the coming spring; every child my voice shall know in the moon of melting snow, when the maple's red bud swells, and the wild flower lifts its bells. as their fond companion men shall henceforth own your son, and my song shall testify that of human kin am i." thus the indian legion saith how, at first, the robin came with a sweeter life from death, bird for boy, and still the same. if my young friends doubt that this is the robin's genesis, not in vain is still the myth if a truth be found therewith: unto gentleness belong gifts unknown to pride and wrong: happier far than hate is praise-- he who sings than he who slays. _--j.g. whittier in st. nicholas._ after twenty years. the following tale of love and faithful waiting is told the new york world by its canton, ohio, correspondent: at the residence of thomas barker, three miles from this village, two people were to-day made man and wife. william craig left his pretty girl sweetheart in a fit of jealous anger on the eve of dec. , , returned a week or two since, found his betrothed still single and true, and this afternoon the long deferred marriage was consummated. all the surviving friends of their youth were present, and many half forgotten associates came from neighboring towns and farms to join in the merrymaking. twenty years ago will craig worked on his father's farm near here during the day and spent his evenings at the residence of a farmer neighbor. the attraction was mary barker, a pretty seventeen-year old girl. craig was deeply in love and so was mary, but like many other girls she liked to play the coquette occasionally. their wedding-day was set for christmas, , and the prospective bride felt secure. one evening, however, the pretty mary pushed her coquetry too far. on december , , farmer barker gave an old-fashioned "sociable" in honor of his daughter's approaching wedding. craig was there, of course, but his happiness was marred by the presence of a pittsburg youth--a new comer. mary allowed this young man to pay her many attentions. craig was madly jealous. after all his attention he thought his betrothed showed too much regard for his rival, and as she only laughed at his pleadings he grew angry and threatened to leave. her seeming indifference made him desperate, and he declared: "if you dance once more with that fellow you will not see me again for twenty years." "you couldn't leave me for even twenty hours if you tried ever so hard," she replied, and with a coquettish smile she went off to dance with his rival. craig went home alone that night and the next day was missing. the most careful search failed to reveal any trace of him. the old couple continued to till the farm without the aid of the strong-armed son, and at the neighbor's down the road pretty mary barker went about her household labors with a demure air that told plainly how she regarded her lover's disappearance. she refused to "keep company" in the old-fashioned way with any of the young farmers who would willingly have taken young craig's place. she went out very little, kept a cat and grew domestic in her habits. she had an abiding faith that craig would return, and to all entreaties would only shake her head and say: "i am waiting for will." the firm contour of the cheek grew somewhat less rounded, the springing step less elastic, but she would not think of marriage. friday, december , of this month (december) was just twenty years since the disappearance of william craig. in the twilight a bearded man of forty came up the walk and as miss barker opened the door he put out both hands and said: "mary, i have come again." "i am sorry you waited so long will," was the quiet reply, as she led him into the house, where each told the story of the weary waiting, and christmas was fixed upon once more as the day for the wedding. to the eager questions of old friends as to where he spent the time, he told them, as he had already told his wife, how he had at once gone to philadelphia, enlisted in the army under an assumed name, then, after the war, gone to nebraska and taken up a tract of valuable land. this he had diligently cultivated until at present he is in more than comfortable circumstances. the craigs will leave early in january for their nebraska home. will readers try it. the other day, says an exchange, we came across the following recipe for making ink in an english archæological journal. archæology is the "science of antiquities," and surely this recipe is old enough to be good. it occurred to us that during the summer vacation many of our boys who are longing for something to do, might earn some money by manufacturing some of this ink and selling it in their neighborhood. at any rate the recipe is a good one and worthy of a trial by old folks as well as young people. here is the recipe, and the way it was discovered, as told by a writer in notes and queries: while examining a large number of mss. of an old scribe some twenty years ago, i was struck with the clearness and legibility of the writing, owing in a great measure to the permanent quality of the ink, which had not faded in the least, although many of the mss. were at least two hundred years old. it was remarkable, that the writer must have been celebrated in his day for the excellence of his calligraphy, for i met with a letter or two from his correspondents in which there was a request for the recipe of the ink he used. i found his recipes, which i copied, and from one of them, dated in , i have, during the last fifteen years, made all the ink i have used. the recipe is as follows: rain water, one pint; galls, bruised, one and one-half ounces; green copperas, six drachms; gum arabic, ten drachms. the galls must be coarsely powdered and put in a bottle, and the other ingredients and water added. the bottle securely stoppered, is placed in the light (sun if possible), and its contents are stirred occasionally until the gum and copperas is dissolved; after which it is enough to shake the bottle daily, and in the course of a month or six weeks it will be fit for use. i have ventured to add ten drops of carbolic acid to the contents of the bottle, as it effectually prevents the formation and growth of mold, without any detriment to the quality of the ink, so far as i know. the secret of longevity. a french medical man who has just died at the age of one hundred and seven, pledged his word to reveal the secret of his longevity, when no more, for the benefit of others. it was stipulated, however, that the precious envelope containing the recipe for long life was not to be opened until he had been buried. the doctor's prescription, now made known, is simple enough; and easy to follow; but whether it is as available as he pretends, the journal of chemistry says, is extremely doubtful. he tells his fellow-men, that, if they wish to live for a century or more, they have but to pay attention to the position of their beds. "let the head of the bed be placed to the north, the foot to the south; and the electric current, which is stronger during the night in the direction of the north, will work wonders on their constitutions, insure them healthier rest, strengthen their nervous system, and prolong their days." it is, he adds, to scrupulous attention to the position of his bed that he ascribes his longevity, the enjoyment of perfect health, and the absence of infirmity. how the inventor plagues his wife. a facetious chap connected with one of our daily newspapers gave the following amusing burlesque on the trials of an inventor's wife: "it is all very well to talk about working for the heathen," said one, as the ladies put up their sewing, "but i'd like to have some one tell me what i am to do with my husband." "what is the matter with him?" asked a sympathetic old lady. "william is a good man," continued the first, waving her glasses in an argumentative way, "but william will invent. he goes inventing round from morning till night, and i have no peace or comfort. i didn't object when he invented a fire escape, but i did remonstrate when he wanted me to crawl out of the window one night last winter to see how it worked. then he originated a lock for the door that would not open from midnight until morning, so as to keep burglars out. the first time he tried it he caught his coat tail in it, and i had to walk around him with a pan of hot coals all night to keep him from freezing." "why didn't he take his coat off?" "i wanted him to, but he stood around till the thing opened itself, trying to invent some way of unfastening it. that's william's trouble. he will invent. a little while ago he got up a cabinet bedstead that would shut and open without handling. it went by clockwork. william got into it, and up it went. bless your heart, he staid in there from saturday afternoon till sunday night, when it flew open and disclosed william with the plans and specifications of a patent washbowl that would tip over just when it got so full. the result was that i lost all my rings and breastpin down the waste pipe. then he got up a crutch for a man that could also be used as an opera-glass. whenever the man leaned on it up it went, and when he put it to his eye to find william, it flew out into a crutch and almost broke the top of his head off. once he invented a rope ladder to be worn as guard chain and lengthened out with a spring. he put it round his neck, but the spring got loose and turned it into a ladder and almost choked him to death. then he invented a patent boot heel to crack nuts with, but he mashed his thumb with it and gave it up. why, he has a washtub full of inventions. one of them is a prayerbook that always opens at the right place. we tried it one morning at church, but the wheels and springs made such a noise that the sexton took william by the collar and told him to leave his fire engines at home when he came to worship. the other day i saw him going up the street with a model of a grain elevator sticking out of his hip pocket, and he is fixing up an improved shot tower in our bed-room." recipes. a hot shovel held over furniture removes white spots. a paste of equal parts of sifted ashes, clay, salt, and a little water cements cracks in stoves and ovens. fried potatoes: chop fine cold boiled potatoes; heat some butter in a frying pan and put the potatoes in. a few minutes before taking them from the fire stir in some well beaten eggs. serve hot. sardines picked up fine, and mixed with cold boiled ham also minced fine, and all well seasoned with a regular mayonnaise dressing, make a delicious filling for sandwiches. rye bread: make sponge as for wheat bread; let it rise over night; then mix up with rye flour, not as stiff as wheat bread. place in baking pans; let rise, and bake half an hour longer than wheat bread. one of the best ways to cure sore throat is as follows: wring a cloth out of salt and cold water, and keeping it quite wet bind tightly about the neck. cover this with a dry cloth. it is best to use this remedy in the night. a delicious hot sauce for puddings is made of six tablespoonfuls of sugar, two of butter, and one egg; beat the butter, sugar, and the yolk of the egg together, then add the white beaten to a froth; lastly stir in a tea-cupful of boiling water and a teaspoonful of vanilla. a dish for breakfast: take six good cooking apples, cut them in slices one-fourth of an inch thick; have a pan of fresh, hot lard ready, drop the slices in and fry till brown; sprinkle a little sugar over them and serve hot. a little curry-powder in chopped pickle gives a delicious flavor to it. a tablespoonful of the powder to four quarts of pickle is about the right quantity to use, unless you like to use the curry in place of pepper; then at least twice this quantity should be put in. a good way to extract the juice of beef for an invalid is to broil the beef on a gridiron for a few minutes, and then squeeze the juice from it with a lemon-squeezer. put a little salt with it. this may be given, as the sick one prefers, cold or hot, or it may be frozen, and given in small lumps. rolls: flour, two quarts; sugar, one tablespoonful; one half cup of yeast; one pint of scalded milk, or water if milk is scarce, and a little salt. set to rise until light; then knead until hard, and set to rise, and when wanted make in rolls. place a piece of butter between the folds and bake in a slow oven. for earache.--a writer in the druggists' circular says: "the remedy which i here offer has, after repeated trials, never failed to afford almost instant relief. it is perfectly simple, easy of application, costs but little, and can be procured at any drug store: olive oil, ounce; chloroform, drachm. mix, and shake well together. then pour twenty-five or thirty drops into the ear, and close it up with a piece of raw cotton to exclude the air and retain the mixture." * * * * * the prairie farmer and youth's companion one year, $ for the two it is not required that both papers be sent to one address, nor to the same post-office. address prairie farmer pub. co., monroe street chicago. pamphlets, etc., received. gunnison, colorado's bonanza county, by john k. hallowell, geologist, denver, col. price cents, postpaid. midland florida: the eden of the south. by "carl" webber, new york. united states consular reports, no. , for november, . the saskatchewan fife wheat: its history, from its first importation from the saskatchewan valley, in manitoba, six years ago, till the present time. by w.j. abernethy. price list of huntsville nurseries, huntsville, ala. oscar close, greendale. catalogue of nurseries, worcester, mass. price list of l.r. bryant's cider vinegar works, princeton, ill. vich's floral guide. here it is again, brighter and better than ever; its cover alone, with its delicate tinted background and its dish of gracefully arranged flowers, would entitle it to a permanent place in every household. the edition is an elegant book of pages, three colored plates of flowers and vegetables, and more than , illustrations of the choicest plants, flowers, and vegetables, with directions for growing. the price, only cents, can be deducted from the first order sent for goods. rochester, n.y. the great rock island cook book, dedicated to the women of america, chicago, rock island and pacific railway. this book contains a selection of the most useful recipes and other valuable information in the culinary art. it will be found especially valuable for the young housekeepers, as they can hardly fail to become good cooks with such a guide. buist's almanac and garden manual for , philadelphia. this little book is in its fifty-sixth year, and is one of the best of its kind published. it contains a full descriptive list (with cuts) of all kinds of vegetables, and many kinds of flowers. report of the crops of the year, december, . department of agriculture, washington, d.c. the household magazine for january comes to us in its usual bright, readable form. it is an unusually good number and will be enjoyed by the ladies. catalogue of clydesdale and cleveland bay horses. imported and bred by the door prairie live stock association, door village, la porte, ind. * * * * * remember _that_ $ . pays _for_ the prairie farmer _one year and, the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ our young folks. the city cat. he is gaunt and thin, with a ragged coat, a scraggy tail, and a hunted look; no songs of melody burst from his throat as he seeks repose in some quiet nook-- a safe retreat from this world of sin, and all of its boots and stones and that-- for the life of a cat is a life of din, if he is a city cat. he is grumpy and stumpy, and old and gray, with a sleepy look in his lonely eye, (the other he lost at a matinee-- knocked out by a boot from a window high.) wherever he goes, he never knows-- quarter or pause in the midnight spree, for the life of a cat is a life of blows, if he is a city cat. he is pelted by boys if he stirs abroad, he is chased by dogs if he dares to roam. his grizzled bosom has never thawed 'neath the kindly blare of the light of home. his life's a perpetual warfare waged on balcony, back yard fence, and flat; for the life of a cat is a life outraged, if he is a city cat. the country cat is a different beast. petted, well-housed, demure, and sleek; three times a day he is called to feast, and why should he not be quiet and meek? no dreams of urchins, tin cans, and war, disturb his sensuous sleep on the mat; ah! cat life is a thing worth living for, if he isn't a city cat. and even when dead, the cat with strident members uneasy lies in some alley-way, and seems staring at a coming foe with his wild wide eye, nobody owns him and nobody cares-- another dead "tom," and who mourns for that, if he's only a city cat. --_providence press._ amusing tricks. the fruit candle. procure a good, large apple or turnip, and cut from it a piece of the shape to resemble the butt-end of a tallow candle; then from a nut of some kind--an almond is the best--whittle out a small peg of about the size and shape of a wick end. stick the peg in the apple and you have a very fair representation of a candle. the wick you can light, and it will burn for at least a minute. in performing you should have your candle in a clean candlestick, show it plainly to the audience, and then put it into your mouth, taking care to blow it out, and munch it up. if you think best, you can blow the candle out and allow the wick to cool, and it will look, with its burned wick, so natural that even the sharpest eyes can not distinguish it from the genuine article. once, at a summer resort in massachusetts, i made use of this candle with considerable effect. while performing a few parlor tricks to amuse some friends, i pretended to need a light. a confederate left the room, and soon returned with a lantern containing one of these apple counterfeits. "do you call that a candle?" i said. "certainly," he replied. "why, there is scarcely a mouthful." "a mouthful? rather a disagreeable mouthful, i guess." "you have never been in russia, i presume." "never." "then you don't know what is good." "good?" "yes, good. why, candle ends, with the wick a little burned to give them a flavor, are delicious. they always serve them up before dinner in russia as a kind of relish. it is considered bad taste in good society there to ask a friend to sit down to dinner without offering him this appetizer." "the bad taste would be in the relish, i think." "not at all. try a bit." i took the candle out of the lantern, and extended it toward my confederate, who shrank back with disgust. "well," i said, "if you won't have it, i'll eat it myself." and so saying, i put it into my mouth and munched it up, amid the cries of surprise and horror of the assembled party. two old maids insisted on looking into my mouth to see whether it was not concealed there. having soaked a piece of thread in common salt water, tie it to a small finger-ring. when you apply the flame of a candle to the thread it will burn to ashes and yet sustain the ring. a difficult circle to jump from. take a piece of chalk, and ask, if you make a circle, whether any boy standing in it thinks he can jump out of it. as soon as one proposes to do so, bring him into the center of the room, draw a circle with the chalk around his jacket, and say, "now jump out of it!" an impossible walk. ask one young lady in the company whether she thinks, if she clasped her hands, she could walk out of the room. on her saying she could, request her to pass her arm round the leg of the table or piano, join her hands, and walk away. the hat trick. fill a small glass with water, cover it with a hat, and profess your readiness to drink it without touching the hat. put your head under the table, make a noise, as if drinking, rise, and wipe your lips. the company, thinking you have drunk the water, one of them will certainly take up the hat to see. as soon as the hat is removed, take up the glass and drink its contents. "there!" say you, "you see i have not touched the hat." the incombustible thread. wind some linen thread tightly round a smooth pebble, and secure the end; then, if you expose it to the flame of a lamp or candle, the thread will not burn; for the caloric (or heat) traverses the thread, without remaining in it, and attacks the stone. the same sort of trick may be performed with a poker, round which is evenly pasted a sheet of paper. you can poke the fire with it without burning the paper. an impossible jump. take a ruler, or any other piece of wood, and ask whether, if you laid it down on the ground, any of the company could jump over it. of course one or two will express their readiness to jump over so small an obstruction. then lay the ruler on the ground, close against the wall, and tell them to try. a difficult load to carry. take a piece of wood, such as a lucifer match, and say to one of the company, "how long do you think it would take you to carry this piece of wood into the next room?" "half a minute." perhaps one will reply. "well, try, then," say you; "carry it." you then cut off little pieces, and give them to him one by one. he will soon be tired of the experiment. to turn a glass of water upside down without spilling its contents. fill a glass carefully, place a piece of paper on the top, place your hand on the paper, and tilt the glass round sharply, when it will be found that the pressure of the air upward on the paper will retain the water. the glass may then be held by the bottom. health and home says: i want to tell you of something very funny to do, if you have a little brother or sister who does not mind dressing up and standing still for a few moments. my aunt showed me how to do it the other day, when sister nelly had a birthday party. we took little brother tommy out into the library and stood him upon a high wooden stool, and dressed him up very finely in mamma's clothes. the stool made him so full that the dress was of just the right length. then uncle ned, telling him to stand straight and firm, carried him, stool and all, into the parlor. i wish you could have heard the girls and boys laugh! he had such a comical look--with his tall body and little round face--just like some of those french parian figures. one little girl handed him a fan, and then it was too funny to see the tall lady fan herself affectedly with her very small, dimpled hands. all the boys and girls just shouted.--_young people._ bright sayings. a writer in the school-boy magazine has gathered together the following dictionary words as defined by certain small people: bed time--shut-eye time. dust--mud with the juice squeezed out. fan--a thing to brush warm off with. fins--a fish's wings. ice--water that staid out in the cold and went to sleep. nest-egg--the egg that the old hen measures to make new ones. pig--a hog's little boy. salt--what makes your potato taste bad when you don't put any on. snoring--letting off sleep. stars--the moon's eggs. wakefulness--eyes all the time coming unbuttoned. * * * * * if you would have good health, go out in the sunshine. sickness is worse than freckles. * * * * * hypochondria. the mysterious element in the mind that arouses vague apprehensions--what actually causes it. the narrative below, by a prominent scientist, touches a subject of universal importance. few people are free from the distressing evils which hypochondria brings. they come at all times and are fed by the very flame which they themselves start. they are a dread of coming derangement caused by present disorder and bring about more suicides than any other one thing. their first approach should be carefully guarded. _editors herald_: it is seldom i appear in print and i should not do so now did i not believe myself in possession of truths, the revelation of which will prove of inestimable value to many who may see these lines. mine has been a trying experience. for many years i was conscious of a want of nerve tone. my mind seemed sluggish and i felt a certain falling off in my natural condition of intellectual acuteness, activity, and vigor. i presume this is the same way in which an innumerable number of other people feel, who, like myself, are physically below par, but like thousands of others i paid no attention to these annoying troubles, attributing them to overwork, and resorting to a glass of beer or a milk punch, which would for the time invigorate and relieve my weariness. after awhile the stimulants commenced to disagree with my stomach, my weariness increased, and i was compelled to resort to other means to find relief. if a physician is suffering he invariably calls another physician to prescribe for him, as he cannot see himself as he sees others; so i called a physician, and he advised me to try a little chemical food, or a bottle of hypophosphates. i took two or three bottles of the chemical food with no apparent benefit. my lassitude and indisposition seemed to increase, my food distressed me. i suffered from neuralgic pains in different parts of my body, my muscles became sore, my bowels were constipated, and my prospects for recovery were not very flattering. i stated my case to another physician, and he advised me to take five to ten drops of magende's solution of morphine, two or three times a day, for the weakness and distress in my stomach, and a blue pill every other night to relieve the constipation. the morphine produced such a deathly nausea that i could not take it, and the blue pill failed to relieve my constipation. in this condition i passed nearly a year, wholly unfit for business, while the effort to think was irksome and painful. my blood became impoverished, and i suffered from incapacity with an appalling sense of misery and general apprehension of coming evil. i passed sleepless nights and was troubled with irregular action of the heart, a constantly feverish condition, and the most excruciating tortures in my stomach, living for days on rice water and gruel, and, indeed, the digestive functions seemed to be entirely destroyed. it was natural that while in this condition i should become hypochondrical, and fearful suggestions of self-destruction occasionally presented themselves. i experienced an insatiable desire for sleep, but on retiring would lie awake for a long time, tormented with troubled reflections, and when at last i did fall into an uneasy slumber of short duration, it was disturbed by horrid dreams. in this condition i determined to take a trip to europe, but in spite of all the attentions of physicians and change of scene and climate, i did not improve, and so returned home with no earthly hope of ever again being able to leave the house. among the numerous friends that called on me was one who had been afflicted somewhat similarly to myself, but who had been restored to perfect health. upon his earned recommendation i began the same treatment he had employed but with little hope of being benefited. at first, i experienced little, if any, relief, except that it did not distress my stomach as other remedies or even food had done. i continued its use, however, and after the third bottle could see a marked change for the better, and now after the fifteenth bottle i am happy to state that i am again able to attend to my professional duties. i sleep well, nothing distresses me that i eat, i go from day to day without a feeling of weariness or pain, indeed i am a well man, and wholly through the influence of h.h. warner & co's tippecanoe. i consider this remedy as taking the highest possible rank in the treatment of all diseases marked by debility, loss of appetite, and all other symptoms of stomach and digestive disorders. it is overwhelmingly superior to the tonics, bitters, and dyspepsia cures of the day, and is certain to be so acknowledged by the public universally. thousands of people to-day are going to premature graves with these serious diseases, that i have above described, and to all such i would say: "do not let your good judgment be governed by your prejudices, but give the above named remedy a fair and patient trial, and i believe you will not only be rewarded by a perfect restoration to health, but you will also be convinced that the medical profession does not possess all the knowledge there is embraced in medical science." a.g. richards, m.d., tremont street, boston, mass. compiled correspondence. e.b.f., scotia, neb., writes: the weather, so far this winter, has been extremely warm. no snow to exceed one inch since october. cattle and hogs doing finely. corn planted early is a good crop both as to quality and quantity, but late planted is soft. wheat and oats were an extra good crop, wheat yielding from to bushels per acre, and oats from to bushels. e.b.f. * * * * * cobden, ill., jan. .--we have been through the coldest weather ever experienced here since weather records have been kept, which is twenty-five years or more. yesterday morning the mercury reached degrees below at my house, which is feet higher than the village. reports from lower situations run down to , , with one of . this is six degrees lower than the lowest record ever made here, which was twenty years ago, when on the st of january it marked below at my house, with some other records two or three degrees lower. at that time peach orchards were badly killed. there can be no doubt that such is the case now. and if it has been proportionately cold north, i fear that the injury to all kinds of fruit trees must have been very serious. parrer earle. * * * * * kane co., jan .--the weather has been intensely cold here since the d instant. the thermometer has been from to degs. below zero at a.m., and from to degs. below at p.m. the th was the coldest. the mercury dropped to degs. below at sunrise; in some places degs. below. on the th, degs. below at a.m.; at m. degs. below; at p.m. degs. below. domestic animals were kept closely housed, except while being watered. where they were exposed to the weather, they froze. we have not had such continued cold weather since january , when for ten successive days it was intensely cold. some farmers are short of coarse feed, and are shipping bran and middlings from minneapolis, and corn from kansas and nebraska. many farmers who were shipping milk to chicago, are now taking it to the cheese factories. there has been an over supply of milk in the city. the dividends for october were from $ . to $ . per cwt. j.p.b. * * * * * the prairie farmer and youth's companion one year, $ for the two. it is not required that both papers be sent to one address, nor to the same post-office. address prairie farmer pub. co., monroe street, chicago. * * * * * breeders directory. the following list embraces the names of responsible and reliable breeders in their line, and parties wishing to purchase or obtain information can feel assured that they will be honorably dealt with: cattle. jersey. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois horses. clydesdales. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois swine. berkshire. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois chester whites. w.a. gilbert......................wauwatosa wis. sheep. cotswold. mills, charles f.....................springfield, illinois * * * * * live stock, etc. jerseys for sale. one heifer, years old in may, due to calve in april. heifer, years in june, and due to calve in april. cow, years old, due to calve in may. bull calf months old, and one good yearling bull. address l.p. wheeler. quincy, ill. * * * * * scotch collie shepherd pups, --from-- imported and trained stock --also-- newfoundland pups and rat terrier pups. concise and practical printed instruction in training young shepherd dogs, is given to buyers of shepherd puppies; or will be sent on receipt of cents in postage stamps. for printed circular, giving full particulars about shepherd dogs, enclose a -cent stamp, and address n.h. paaren, p.o. box , chicago. ill. * * * * * house plans for everybody. by s.b. reed, architect. one of the most popular architectural books ever issued, giving a wide range of design from a dwelling costing $ up to $ , , and adapted to farm, village, and town residences. it gives an estimate of the quantity of every article used in the construction, and probable cost of constructing any one of the buildings presented. profusely illustrated. price, postpaid, $ . . address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago * * * * * map of the united states and canada, printed in colors, size × - / feet, also a copy of the prairie farmer for one year. sent to any address for $ . . * * * * * agents wanted everywhere to solicit subscriptions for this paper. write prairie farmer publishing co., chicago, for particulars. literature the wrong pew. there's one who wrote in years gone by in clear and ringing rhyme-- a poet of an elder day and of a distant clime-- who sang of mortal misery, of sufferers long and lorn, "man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn!" the hand that held that golden pen--that golden tongue--is dust; a dust that's dear to hearts that hold his homely truths in trust; and you who read this simple tale of wrath, and ruth, and wrong, may hear the echo of the sob that breaks upon my song! i sat upon the sabbath-day within the sacred fane, the sunlight through the windows poured like rainbow-tinted rain; while maids and matrons passing fair, and men of high degree, all fashion's proudest votaries, knelt low on bended knee. and there was one of stature tall, whose robe of silken sheen draped quiet grace and courtesy that might have shamed a queen, save only that her pallid face, and drooping, tear-dimmed eyes, looked like the peri's, waiting by the gates of paradise. what is it moves that jeweled throng of dainty worshippers? their hearts have probed the cruel wrong that rankles sore in hers; for she who sat beside her there--ah, heart of hardest stone! swept forth with stern and haughty stare, and left her there alone. then one, god bless her woman's heart! the loveliest woman there, stepped down the aisle with stately tread, and calm and steadfast air; with gentle voice, and tender eyes distilling heaven's own dew, she whispered to the shrinking girl, "i've room, my friend, for you." i think earth's sorest sinners need a judge less stern than they who wear their ermine clasped across a breast of common clay! i think heaven's loveliest angels come among us circling down, to bear the cruel earthly cross, and then regain the crown. alas! alas! for paltry pride arrayed in rich attire, and woe is me for priestly praise which is our heart's desire! would we could seek, like pilgrims gray, beside that sunlit sea, the simple faith that lit the shores of sacred galilee! sometimes it seems that ages past our souls have sojourned here; but god's great angel guards the gate and stands beside the bier; for when some mystic touch awakes the chords of memory, his awful hand holds down the note, and clasps the quivering key. bend low, bend low the lofty brow and bring the sack-cloth gown; throw dust and ashes on our heads, and through the sinful town; i think the green earth grows more gray, beneath its golden sun, because the good god sits in heaven, and sees such evil done. --_edward renaud._ yik kee. after father died some ten years ago, i found, that for three years we had been living on credit. i was eighteen, strong and well, but did not know how to work. in the little back room of the new york tenement house (by the way, the landlady seized my clothes for our rent) i considered my future. i had inherited a great faith in relatives, from my father, so i wrote to seven. i received six polite notes, telling me to go to work, and the following letter: jonesboro, colorado--jackson's ranch. dear nell.--i'm your cousin jack. your father once give me money to come out west. i've took up land, got a comfortable home, no style or frills, but good folks to live with and healthy grub. i've got the best wife you ever see and seven fine youngsters. the city ain't no place for a friendless girl. wife wants you to come. she'll be a mother to you. come right off. i'll meet you at denver. jack. inclosed was a check sufficient to defray expenses; so i started. denver was then only a large town and the depot a barn-like structure. i got out of the cars and stood bewildered among all the emigrants and their bundles. some one touched me on the shoulder--a roughly-dressed, broad-shouldered man with long, blonde beard and big blue eyes. "are you nell?" he said. "yes; and you're cousin jack." "i knew you," he said, as he led the way, "by your black clothes an' sorrerful look, an' them big blue eyes, like yer father's as two peas. we'll git the shader outer 'em when we get home. yer father was a mighty good man. bless yer dear heart, don't let them tears come. this 'ere's a dry country, we don't waste no water." comforting me in his kind, rough way, he reached his team, a big green wagon, drawn by two wild-looking steeds which i afterward knew to be bronchos. a fat, blonde boy, about twelve, held the reins. "that's ted," said cousin jack. "ted, this is miss nell, yer cousin; give her a hug." the fat boy solemnly obeyed. after this he seemed to have a special claim on my affections because he met me first. jack's wife was a jolly, plump woman, with brown eyes and curly hair. she always had a baby in her arms and another at her heels. she adored jack. i never knew them to have a quarrel. i soon grew to love the life at the ranch. i liked the big, half-finished house, its untidyness and comfort--its pleasant, healthy atmosphere. i loved the children, the household pets--shep, the sagacious dog; thad, the clever cat; the hens and sheep; the horses dolly, dot, and daisy, that did the plowing, and the marketing at denver, twelve miles away, and were so gentle and kind we used to ride them without saddle or bridle. i learned that cattle grew fat on the dry-looking grass and gave the best of milk. i learned to love the broad plains and the glorious sunsets, and to watch the distant bands of indians with half fear, half interest. i helped cousin mary, sewed and cooked, kept the house and children neat, and lifted many burdens from her weary shoulders. we were so happy. the children and i took long walks over the plains, and ted and i took many rides on dolly and dot, and in the long winter evenings i told the children stories. occasionally harry white came over to visit us from his ranch five miles away. he lived with his old mother; he and jack were dear friends. harry needed a wife, jack used to say, winking at me. one day jack went to denver for supplies. he went alone, and coming home later than usual, ted and i and baby mame went out to meet him. jack looked sober and guilty, and seemed ill at ease. if he ever drank, i should have thought him intoxicated. in the wagon was a queer-shaped heap under a horse-blanket. i was sure it moved. when we got behind the barn jack said, sheepishly, avoiding my eye. "well, ted, i calkerlate i've got su'thing in that there waggin that 'ul astonish yer marm." little mame pulled the blanket off the heap; she had been peeping under it all the while she was in the back of the wagon. there lay a human being. such an object; short and squat, dressed in a queer blue blouse with flowing sleeves, wide trousers and queer wooden shoes. he had small, black eyes, a shaven poll, from which depended a long thin queue. his countenance was battered and bruised, his clothes torn and bloody. "there was a row down to denver," said jack; "the christian folks stove in these 'ere heathen's winders, tore their houses down, an' killed half on 'em. i cleared out soon as i could. when i got half way home i heard a noise back o' me, and out crawled this thing. i was so dumfounded i couldn't speak. he thought i was going ter send him back, an' he fell ter cryin' an' jabberin' in that yap of his, an' clingin' onter my han' an' kissin' of it. it sorter turned my stomach. i told him ter set down, give him some crackers ter eat, covered him up an' told him he could live with me. what do you s'pose marm'll say?" "oh! cousin jack," i said, "of course, she will not care. your home is a refuge for all the wretched and unfortunate." "now don't, nell," he said, turning as red as a rose, and busying himself about the harness. the celestial looked at us solemnly: mame toddled up to him. he looked at her curiously, but did not move. "get out, john," said jack, "you needn't be scared no more; we're to home." he got out stiffly, and, to my surprise, turned and lifted the baby down. she caught his pig-tail, and pulled it in wild delight. he seemed grieved when i took her away. when jack told mary, the good soul found a thousand reasons why he should stay, and hurried to make him a bed in the attic. the celestial did not say much, but when jack called him "john," he smiled a sad smile. "melican man callee john. hump. yik kee." so with due consideration for his feelings we addressed him as yik kee. he was of great use. he helped take care of the children, did the washing (mary did not fancy his method of sprinkling clothes) and helped jack on the farm. we made him one of the family. he was always pleasant and smiling, but was a man of few words. cousin jack added much to his income by trading in hides. ranchmen living at a distance sold their hides to him and jack sold them to traders who came around at certain times in the year. harry white was a partner in the business. he used to go on a sort of round-up and visit the ranches all over the country. the cattle of the ranchmen roamed in vast herds over the plains, protected only by the brand of the owner. cattle stealing was frequently practiced. offenders in this respect were shown no mercy. they were convicted, tried, and executed only in the court of judge lynch. i never blamed the ranchmen for this; it was impossible to guard the herds in the vast area over which they traversed, and the cattle must be protected in some way. gil mead was a wealthy ranchman, who lived about ten miles from us. he owned the largest herd of cattle on the plains. they were branded with the vowels of his name. e.a., which could be recognized anywhere. he always shipped his cattle east to his brother in chicago. i feared the man. he was tall and gaunt, with deep-set black eyes and low forehead. his home was unhappy; his wife cross and ugly, and his children wild and unruly. this made him more than commonly disagreeable. i think it was in the fall of ' that harry white brought the big load of hides to jack. both were much pleased at the bargain they made. harry gave glowing accounts of a new customer--a ranchman from chicago, who had taken up an abandoned homestead. he had purchased many cattle from his cousin, gil mead, and hoped to rival him in the number and quality of his herd. jack packed the hides away to keep till december, when we expected the dealer. one afternoon, not long after this, gil mead rode up to the house, looking very agreeable and pleasant. a couple of strangers, also ranchmen, were with him. they wanted to look at the hides, one of the men being a trader, gil said. jack was in denver, so yik kee and i went to the barn with them. they looked the hides over carefully, and conversed in low tones, gil with a suppressed oath. finally they thanked us courteously and took their leave. "hump; no goodee," said yik kee, but he wouldn't say any more. at five that evening, when we were at supper, a crowd of twenty-five or thirty men rode up on horseback. jack came out and met them, inviting them in to take supper, in his generous, hospitable way. they wanted him to go to denver with them, there was to be a meeting there of importance to ranchmen. the meeting would be at eight. they had brought with them an extra horse for jack. mary looked around for yik kee to help her, but he had mysteriously disappeared. i faintly remembered seeing his white, horrified face peering around the barn at the horses. i noted the visitors ate little--the food seemed to choke them. some of them watched mary and the baby in a queer sort of way. when jack, as was his custom, kissed his wife and babies good-by, one of the visitors, an oldish man, coughed huskily, and said: "blest if i kin stan' this." they all rode off, jack the merriest of all, waving his hat till he was out of sight. when we were clearing up the unusual quantity of dishes, yik kee appeared at the end window and beckoned me. i followed him out. ted was with him. behind the barn were the three horses saddled. shep was with them, released from confinement, where he had been secured from following his master. "foller 'em," said ted in an excited whisper. "yik's afraid they're up to something." "what is it, yik?" i said, sternly. "no fooling now." for answer he twisted his long pig-tail around his neck, tying it under his left ear in a significant manner. "hump, he hangee; stealee cow." "oh, mary," i sobbed, remembering gil mead's visit, and his strange actions, and dimly seeing what yik kee meant, "i must tell mary," i said, wildly. "hump, no," said yik kee. "yellee sick," and he closed his eyes in a die-away sort of manner. "go now--too latee." we mounted. "mother'll think we're gone to ride," said ted, as we galloped over the plains. he was deathly pale, poor little fellow, but he sat erect and firm. i saw his father's big colt's revolver sticking out of his pocket. he was a determined boy. even in my despair, in my wild hope that i could save jack by begging on my knees, that i could cling to him, that they would have to kill me first, i could not help a smile at the comical figure yik kee presented on horseback. his loose garments flapped in the wind, his long pig-tail flew out behind, and he bobbed up and down like a kernel of corn in a corn-hopper. it was a soft, warm night, lighted only by the pale young moon and the twinkling stars. we rode as fast as our horses could gallop. shep was close at our heels. way ahead, when we reached the top of a little hill, we saw the crowd of horsemen. they were riding toward denver. we galloped on with renewed zeal. they turned into a cross road leading to mead's ranch. on this road was a bridge over dry gulch, which was in the spring a roaring torrent. beyond the bridge, across the fields, was the hay-stack of mead, where was stored sufficient to feed his domestic cattle through the winter. we at last reached the turn in the road. they were three miles in advance, riding rapidly. yik kee stopped at the turn. "hump! can't catchee. hangee at bridge. you goee!" he turned his horse and sped across the field, deserting us basely. we rode on, ted and i. he was pale and still; my cheeks were burning. we neared the bridge. the high mound of earth before us hid us from sight. we stopped our horses and listened. the men had lighted torches, some were preparing a rough gallows under the bridge; two were uncoiling rope; some held the horses of the others beyond the bridge. the men were masked now, and i could see by the lighted torches that this number was increased. jack was very white and sad, but he showed no fear. "i am innocent, gentlemen," he said, slowly, "but i refuse to tell you of whom i bought the hides." i understood him. could harry white be a cattle thief? i felt as if i were going mad. "what shall we do?" whispered ted, cocking his revolver? suddenly a bright red light illuminated the heavens, followed by clouds of black smoke and a queer crackling noise. a yell from the men--gil mead's voice above the rest. the hay-stack was on fire. it seemed to me in the gale around it that i could see a foreign-looking human vanishing across the plain. the men mounted their horses, gil mead at the head, and set off across the fields at a mad gallop. they must save the stack. they left jack, bound hand and foot, and guarded by one man. shep, the wonderful dog, had kept by us until now, slinking in the dark shadows. now, gliding sidewise and still, he reached the man on guard whose back was to us, and with no warning growl caught him by the throat with strong white teeth that could choak a coyote in a second. the man, who was in a sitting posture, fell back with a groan. ted struck him over the head with the butt of the revolver, and pulled off the dog. i cut jack's bonds with a knife. he looked at us wonderingly and staggered to his feet. "never mind how we came, jack," i said; "quick, mount the horse beyond the bridge, and ride to denver for your life. they will not harm a woman and child." "harry white," he muttered, the loyal soul that even now could think of another's danger. "i will tell him." "no, no; not of this--only say, if he stole the cattle, to fly the country. they will find out, sooner or later." he galloped down the road. ted and i mounted, calling off shep, who sat on his haunches watching the unconscious man, and then we, too, sped down the road. the hay-stack was giving out great columns of black smoke, but the fire was dead. ahead of us was a riderless horse, dolly, who greeted her master with a joyful whinny. where was yik kee? then dot, my horse, shied from the road at a recumbent black figure. it was the indomitable yik kee, who had crawled all the way from the stack on his stomach, so that he could not be seen, after lying in the ditch till the blaze had faded out. "hump! no catchee chinee; heap sore," he said, laconically rubbing his stomach. he mounted dolly, and we rode on to white's ranch. harry rushed out at the sound of horses' feet, at midnight. there, under the twinkling stars i looked into his eyes, and i told him the whole story. he showed no guilt, but only said we must stay the night at his ranch, for the men would come back to jack's for him, and then mounting his fleet colt rode off down the road. i comforted his mother as best i could. at day-break we rode home. mary was in a wild state of alarm. where had we been? where was jack? and how cruel we were to leave her alone. she said that at one o'clock three masked men had come to the house and searched it and the premises, and had not molested her or the children, only asking where jack was, very sternly and sharply. at noon jack, harry, the sheriff, and a party of armed men from denver rode up, stopping only a moment to tell me they would be back at night. i dared not tell mary, and she worried all the afternoon at their strange conduct. at night jack and harry came home, looking tired but happy. then jack told mary, and she clung to him as though she could never let him go. it seemed the pleasing ranchman from chicago was one of a band of cattle thieves. he sold the hides to harry, who, honest and open himself, was slow to suspect wrong dealings in others. the sheriff had caught the men skinning a cow that belonged to mead, and had captured the gang and taken them to denver. the men concerned in the attempt to lynch jack were sincerely sorry. their regrets would not have availed much, however, if they had succeeded in their purpose. they gave each of the children ten acres of land; they gave ted sixty-five, and me, whom they pleased to consider very plucky, one hundred and fifty acres. i felt rich enough, and time has made it very valuable land. the man on guard was our warmest admirer. he thought ted, shep, and i wonders of courage. he said when i came down on the bridge with the open knife, he thought his last hour had come. gil mead committed suicide not long after this. he was always queer. no one ever knew that yik kee set the stack afire. i tell you jack rewarded the faithful fellow--gave him a good farm, taught him to work it, and built him a house. the funniest thing was yik kee had a wife and three queer little children back in china, and jack sent for them, and yik kee and his family are as happy as they can be. the children play with jack's (he has twelve now) and get along finely together. in ' i married harry white, which, i suppose, was foreseen from the beginning--at least, jack says anybody could have seen it. the most serene and satisfied face at the wedding was that of the celestial. in my inner consciousness, notwithstanding he is a "heathen chinee," i have the conviction that as great a hero as is seen in modern times is the man of few words, yik kee.--_the continent._ humorous "a leedle mistakes." "i see all how it vhas now," observed jacob handonder, as he came out. "oh, you do! you are the man who got drunk and raised a fuss on a street car?" "i vhas der man, and i tell you how it vhas. you see, i vhas tight. i took too much beer." "can a saloon-keeper take too much beer?" "vhell, maype i vhas seek. i shtart to go home. vhen der sthreet car comes along i pelief it vhas my house. i got in und look all aroundt, but i doan' see katarina. i call out for der shildrens, und eferybody laughs at me. maype dot makes me madt, und der drifer calls a boliceman, und i vhas galloped down here." "so it wasn't your home?" "not oxactly. it vhas a leedle mistake." "it'll cost you $ ." "vheel, dot ain't so bad. i pay him oop und go home to preakfast." "be careful next time." "oh, i vill dot. next time i vhas tight i go home on some shtreets midout cars. if i take some ice-wagon for my house i pelief i got cooled off pooty queek." sharper than a razor. a long-waisted man, with the nose of a fox and an eye full of speculation, walked up to a second-hand clothier, in buffalo, the other day, and said: "see that overcoat hanging out down there?" "of course." "well, i've taken a fancy to it. it's rather cheeky to ask you to go down there, but i'll make it an object; i won't give but $ for the coat, but i'll give you $ to buy it for me. you are also a jew and know how to beat him down. here are $ ." the dealer took the money and started off, and in five minutes was back with the coat. "good!" chuckled the other. "i reckoned you'd lay him out. how much did you make for your share?" "vhell, ash dot is my branch shore, and i only ask six dollar fur de goat, i was about tree dollar ahead." a coming dividend. last fall, when a would-be purchaser of railroad stock called upon russell sage and asked him regarding the outlook of certain stock, mr. sage replied: "splendid idea! that stock is certain to raise fifteen per cent." "upon what do you base your calculations?" "upon the immense crops to be moved along that line." the other day the same gentleman again interviewed mr. sage regarding the same stock, and the great financier replied: "best outlook in the world for that stock! certain to advance fifteen per cent." "do you base your calculations upon last fall's crops?" "no, sir; it's going to be an open winter, and the line will save enough in snow-plows to declare a dividend of five per cent." * * * * * at a party: merchant--"ah! how d'do, mr. blank? how is your paper coming out? i read it daily. by the way, you are getting up a report of this grand assembly, i suppose?" editor--"no. by the way, how is your store coming on? my cook buys a good deal of you. you are here drumming up custom, i suppose?" * * * * * "yes," said mrs. towers, as she expatiated upon the beauties of her flower-garden, "i have given it great care, and if you come over in a week or two, i expect to be able to show you some beautiful scarlet pneumonias." * * * * * the prairie farmer and youth's companion one year, $ for the two. it is not required that both papers be sent to one address, nor to the same post-office. address prairie farmer pub co., monroe street. chicago. * * * * * illinois central railroad. the elegant equipment of coaches and sleepers being added to its various through routes is gaining it many friends. its patrons fear no accidents. its perfect track of steel, and solid road-bed, are a guarantee against them. * * * * * medical. disease cured without medicine. _a valuable discovery for supplying magnetism to the human system. electricity and magnetism utilized as never before for healing the sick._ the magneton appliance co.'s magnetic kidney belt! for men is warranted to cure or money refunded, the following diseases without medicine:--pain in the back, hips, head, or limbs, nervous debility, lumbago, general debility, rheumatism, paralysis, neuralgia, sciatica, diseases of the kidneys, spinal diseases, torpid liver, gout seminal emissions, impotency, asthma, heart disease, dyspepsia, constipation, erysipelas, indigestion, hernia or rupture, catarrh, piles, epilepsy, dumb ague, etc. when any debility of the generative organs occurs, lost vitality, lack of nerve force and vigor, wasting weakness, and all those diseases of a personal nature, from whatever cause, the continuous stream of magnetism permeating through the parts, must restore them to a healthy action. there is no mistake about this appliance. to the ladies:--if you are afflicted with lame back, weakness of the spine, falling of the womb, leucorrhoea, chronic inflammation and ulceration of the womb, incidental hemorrhage or flooding, painful, suppressed, and irregular menstruation, barrenness, and change of life, this is the best appliance and curative agent known. for all forms of female difficulties it is unsurpassed by anything before invented, both as a curative agent and as a source of power and vitalization. price of either belt with magnetic insoles, $ , sent by express c.o.d., and examination allowed, or by mail on receipt of price. in ordering send measure of waist, and size of shoe. remittance can be made in currency, sent in letter at our risk. the magneton garments are adapted to all ages, are worn over the under-clothing (not next to the body like the many galvanic and electric humbugs advertised so extensively), and should be taken off at night. they hold their power forever, and are worn at all seasons of the year. send stamp for the "new departure in medical treatment without medicine," with thousands of testimonials. the magneton appliance co., state street. chicago, ill. note.--send one dollar in postage stamps or currency (in letter at our risk) with size of shoe usually worn, and try a pair of our magnetic insoles, and be convinced of the power residing in our other magnetic appliances. positively no cold feet when they are worn, or money refunded. * * * * * self cure free nervous debility lost manhood weakness and decay a favorite prescription of a noted specialist (now retired.) druggists can fill it. address dr. ward & co., louisiana, mo. * * * * * scales. u.s. standard scales, manufactured expressly for the prairie farmer _every scale guaranteed by the manufacturers, and by us, to be perfect, and to give the purchaser satisfaction._ the prairie farmer sent two years free to any person ordering either size wagon scale at prices given below. [illustration] -ton wagon or farm scale (platform × feet), $ ; -ton ( × ), $ ; -ton ( × ), $ . beam box, brass beam, iron levers, steel bearings, and full directions for setting up. the prairie farmer sent year free! to any person ordering either of the following scales, at prices named below. [illustration] the housekeeper's scale--$ . weighing accurately from / oz. to lbs. this is also a valuable scale for offices for weighing mail matter. tin scoop, c. extra; brass c. extra. [illustration] the family scale--$ . . weighs from / oz. to lbs. small articles weighed in scoop, large ones on platform. size of platform, - / × - / in. [illustration] the prairie farmer scale--$ . weighs from oz. to lbs. size of platform × inches. a convenient scale for small farmers, dairymen, etc. [illustration] platform scales-- sizes. lbs., $ ; lbs., $ ; lbs., $ ; , lbs., $ ; wheels and axles, $ extra. in ordering, give the price and description given above. all scales boxed and delivered at depot in chicago. give full shipping directions. send money by draft on chicago or new york post office order or registered letter. address the prairie farmer publishing company, chicago, ill. * * * * * miscellaneous [illustration] the standard remington type-writer is acknowledged to be the only rapid and reliable writing machine. it has no rival. these machines are used for transcribing and general correspondence in every part of the globe, doing their work in almost every language. any young man or woman of ordinary ability, having a practical knowledge of the use of this machine may find constant and remunerative employment. all machines and supplies, furnished by us, warranted. satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded. send for circulars. wyckoff, seamans & benedict, east madison st, chicago, ill. * * * * * send for catalogue and prices. atlas engine works [illustration] indianapolis, ind., u.s.a. manufacturers of steam engines and boilers. carry engines and boilers in stock for immediate delivery * * * * * seeds albert dickinson, dealer in timothy, clover, flax, hungarian, millet, red top, blue grass, lawn grass, orchard grass, bird seeds, &c. popcorn. warehouses { , & kinzie st. office. kinzie st., { , , , & michigan st. chicago, ill. general news. gen. butler is now out of office. a verdict of not guilty was rendered in the emma bond case. st. petersburg, russia, is in a panic over recent acts of the nihilists. two wolves have lately been killed in the vicinity of douglas park, chicago. another effort is soon to be made in congress to reinstate fitz john porter. brokers in dubuque have offered $ , cash for the b.f. allen homestead. at winnipeg on thursday of last week the mercury was degrees below zero. albert e. kent, of san francisco, gives $ , for a chemical laboratory at yale college. judge mccrary, of the supreme court, has resigned, and accepted a position as a railway attorney. the government of china has ordered the construction of two more torpedo boats at the german port of stettin. st. louis had many fires last week. there were nine outbreaks within forty-eight hours. the firemen were completely worn out. there were failures in the united states last week--the largest number yet recorded within the same number of days. there was strong talk at hillsboro of lynching the discharged prisoners in the emma bond case, but better counsel prevailed. governor stoneman presided at a meeting in san francisco, where arrangements were made to hold a world's exposition in . the mercury at charleston, s.c., was degrees below zero january th. through new england the weather was extremely cold. mary, the seventeenth wife of the late brigham young, died at salt lake city saturday from blood poisoning. she has fourteen survivors. a pie made of tainted meat caused the poisoning of sixteen boarders and three sisters at a convent in montreal. two of the former are dangerously ill. it is announced from paris that the french government is intending to sell the railways owned by the republic. the rothschilds stand ready to purchase them. by a railroad accident near fort dodge, on wednesday last, three persons were killed and several wounded. among the killed was mrs. j.h. south, of bureau co., ills. mrs. holcomb, daughter of the murdered millionaire crouch, of michigan, has committed suicide. there is some suspicion that she knew something about the murder. a nihilist proclamation has been issued threatening the czar. there is much anxiety at gatschina palace. it is now said the czar's injury in the shoulder the other day was caused by a bullet. the united states consul general at cairo reports the deaths by the cholera epidemic at from , to , . a member of the international tribunal says there are still from one to three fatal cases each day. the gould system of railroads is about to establish a telegraph school at st. louis, with a view not only to educating operators, but of selecting pupils from the acclimated people along the southwestern lines. the catholic convent at belleville, ill., took fire from the furnace saturday evening, and in an hour was reduced to ashes. sixty pupils made desperate efforts to escape, some of them leaping from the windows. twenty-seven lives were lost. the secretary of state at springfield has issued papers of incorporation to col. wood's museum, at chicago, with a capital stock of $ , . the colonel is said to have secured a lease of his old stand on randolph street, and the olympic theatre. henry villard closed his business career by handing over to assignees his mansion on madison square and other property, with instructions to dispose of the same, pay a mortgage of $ , , and discharge any indebtedness to the oregon railway company, the residue to be given to his wife. the directors of the northern pacific road held a meeting in new york, on friday, of last week. a letter was read from henry villard, resigning the presidency of the company because of nervous prostration and in deference to the interests of the stockholders. the resignation was accepted, and a special election was ordered to choose a successor. the directors voted mr. villard $ , per annum for his services. vice president oakes reported the line in first-class order except one hundred miles near the junction west of helena. it is understood that the oregon navigation company will reduce its dividends to per cent. the oregon transcontinental has raised $ , , in boston with which to lift its floating debt. markets market reports. office of the prairie farmer, chicago. jan , . financial and commercial. the extremely cold weather of the past week interfered with business very generally. in financial circles, as in others, the arctic wave made matters rather quiet. early in the present week, however, business at the banks was active. the arrival of delayed mail trains added to the volume of business; but while there was much activity, the monetary situation remained about the same as usual. in the loan market quotations were @ per cent. eastern exchange sold at @ c per $ , premium. government securities are as follows: 's coupons, q. apr. - / 's reg., q. apr. - / - / 's coupon, q. mar. - / - / 's registered, q. mar. - / 's registered q. mar. grain and provisions. the leading produce markets have been irregular for several days past, and the tendency, in the main, was downward. yesterday wheat was moderately active, but the market was depressed at the close. there was a drop, also, in corn, oats, mess pork, and lard. flour was quiet at about the following rates. choice to favorite white winters $ @ fair to good brands of white winters @ good to choice red winters @ prime to choice springs @ good to choice export stock, in sacks, extras @ good to choice export stock, double extras @ fair to good minnesota springs @ choice to fancy minnesota springs @ patent springs @ low grades @ wheat.--red winter, no. @ c; car lots of spring, no. , sold at - / @ c; no. , do. - / @ c. corn.--moderately active. car lots no. , - / @ - / c; rejected, - / ; new mixed, @ - / c. oats.--no. in store, closed - / @ - / . rye.--may, in store @ - / . barley.--no. , @ c; no. , c. flax.--closed at $ . timothy.--$ per bushel. little doing. clover.--quiet at $ @ for prime. provisions.--mess pork, february, $ @ - / per bbl; may, $ @ . green hams, - / c, per lb. short ribs, $ - / per cwt. lard.--january, $ ; february, $ . lumber. lumber unchanged. quotations for green are as follows: short dimension, per m $ @ long dimension, per m @ boards and strips, no. @ boards and strips, medium @ boards and strips, no. choice @ shingles, standard @ shingles, choice @ shingles, extra @ lath @ country produce. note.--the quotations for the articles named in the following list are generally for commission lots of goods and from first hands. while our prices are based as near as may be on the landing or wholesale rates, allowance must be made for selections and the sorting up for store distribution. beans.--hand picked mediums $ @ . hand picked navies, $ @ . butter.--dull and without change. choice to extra creamery, @ c per lb.; fair to good do. @ c; fair to choice dairy, @ c; common to choice packing stock fresh and sweet, @ c; ladle packed @ c; fresh made, streaked butter, @ c. bran.--quoted at $ - / @ per ton; extra choice $ . broom-corn.--good to choice hurl - / @ - / c per lb; green self-working @ c; red-tipped and pale do. @ c; inside and covers @ c; common short corn - / @ - / c; crooked, and damaged, @ c, according to quality. cheese.--choice full-cream cheddars - / @ c per lb; medium quality do. @ c; good to prime full cream flats @ - / c; skimmed cheddars @ c; good skimmed flats @ c; hard-skimmed and common stock @ c. eggs.--in a small way the best brands are quotable at @ c per dozen; @ c for good ice house stock; @ c per pickled. hay.--no. timothy $ @ per ton; no. do. $ @ ; mixed do. $ @ ; upland prairie $ @ ; no. prairie $ @ ; no. do. $ @ . small bales sell at @ c per ton more than large bales. hides and pelts.--green-cured light hides c per lb; do. heavy cows c; no. damaged green-salted hides c; green-salted calf @ - / cents; green-salted bull c; dry-salted hides cents; no. two-thirds price; no. dry flint @ - / c. sheep pelts salable at @ c for the estimated amount of wash wool on each pelt. all branded and scratched hides are discounted per cent from the price of no. . hops.--prime to choice new york state hops @ c per lb; pacific coast of @ c; fair to good wisconsin @ c. poultry.--prices for good to choice dry picked and unfrozen lots are: turkeys @ c per lb; chickens @ c; ducks @ c; geese @ c. thin, undesirable, and frozen stock @ c per lb less than these figures; live offerings nominal. potatoes.--good to choice @ c per bu. on track; common to fair @ c. illinois sweet potatoes range at $ @ per bbl for yellow. baltimore stock at $ @ , and jerseys at $ . red are dull and nominal. tallow and grease.--no. country tallow @ - / c per lb; no. do. - / @ - / c. prime white grease @ - / c; yellow - / @ - / c: brown - / @ . vegetables.--cabbage, $ @ per ; celery, @ c per doz bunches; onions, $ @ $ bbl for yellow, and $ for red; turnips, $ @ per bbl for rutabagas, and $ for white flat. wool.--from store range as follows for bright wools from wisconsin, illinois, michigan, indiana, and eastern iowa--dark western lots generally ranging at @ c per lb. less. coarse and dingy tub @ good medium tub @ unwashed bucks' fleeces @ fine unwashed heavy fleeces @ fine light unwashed heavy fleeces @ coarse unwashed fleeces @ low medium unwashed fleeces @ fine medium unwashed fleeces @ fine washed fleeces @ coarse washed fleeces @ low medium washed fleeces @ fine medium washed fleeces @ colorado and territory wools range as follows: lowest grades @ low medium @ medium @ fine @ wools from new mexico: lowest grades @ part improved @ best improved @ burry from c to c off: black c to c off. live stock markets. the total receipts and shipments for last week were as follows: received. shipped. cattle , , calves hogs , , sheep , , the live stock receipts are increasing, and show a large gain over last week. cattle.--the receipts for sunday and monday were rather large, being estimated at , head of cattle, as against , received in the corresponding time last week. shipping grades of cattle were active and firm yesterday at $ @ - / , exporters taking a fair number. common lots were lower, with sales to dressed-beef buyers as low as $ . a good share of the day's trading was done at $ @ . quotations are as follows: fancy fat cattle $ @ choice to prime steers @ fair to good shipping steers @ common to medium steers @ butcher's steers @ cows and bulls, common to good @ inferior cows and bulls @ stockers @ feeders @ milch cows, per head @ veal calves, per lbs @ hogs.--the receipts sunday and monday were estimated at , hogs, against only , received in the corresponding time last week. although the receipts have been increasing during the last few days, supplies are still remarkably small for the first half of january. the great bulk of the crop has undoubtedly been marketed, but there are known to be a very good number still unmarketed, and it is believed that farmers are unwilling to ship freely to this market while packers are so largely inactive, fearing a decline in prices. shippers have been taking most of the hogs lately. butchers took in the neighborhood of , hogs, leaving a few thousand still unsold. sales were made of heavy at $ @ ; light at $ @ , and skips and culls at $ @ . note.--all sales of hogs are made subject to a shrinkage of lbs for piggy sows and lbs for stags. dead hogs sell for - / c per lb for weights of and over and for weights of less than lbs. sheep.--the market opened with a good supply, the receipts for sunday and monday being estimated at , head, as against , received in the same time last week. there was an active local and shipping demand for all desirable offerings, and prices ruled firm at the recent advance, sales being made of fair to choice at $ @ . * * * * * commission merchants. j.h. white & co., produce commission water st., chicago. refers to this paper. * * * * * miscellaneous. your name printed on cards all new designs of _gold floral, remembrances, sentiment, hand floral_, etc., with _love, friendship,_ and _holiday mottoes_. c. pks. and this elegant ring, c., pks. & ring, $ . new "concealed name" cards (name concealed with hand holding flowers with mottoes) c. pks. and this ring for $ . agents sample book and full outfit, c. over new cards added this season. blank cards at wholesale prices. northford card co. northford, conn. * * * * * agents wanted, male and female, for spence's blue book, a most fascinating and salable novelty. every family needs from one to a dozen. immense profits and exclusive territory. sample mailed for cts in postage stamps. address j.h. clarson, p.o. box , philadelphia, pa. * * * * * $ every days positively sure to agents everywhere selling our new silver mould white wire clothes-line. warranted. pleases at sight. cheap. sells readily at every house. agents clearing $ per day. farmers make $ to $ during winter. _handsome samples free._ address, girard wire mills, philadelphia, pa. * * * * * best quality. [illustration] cards new designs in satin and gold finish, with name, cts. we offer $ for a pack of cards any nicer work, or prettier styles. _samples free_. eagle card works, new haven, ct. * * * * * virginia farms & mills for sale and exchange. write for free real estate journal. r.b. chaffin; co. richmond, virginia. * * * * * patent procured or no charge. p. book patent-law free. add. w.t. fitzgerald f st., washington, d.c. * * * * * cards satin finish cards, new imported designs, name on and present free for c. cut this out. clinton bros. & co., clintonville, ct. * * * * * educational. mt. carroll seminary and musical conservatory, carroll co., ill., _never had an agent_ to beg funds or pupils. the pecuniary aid system _is original_, and helps many worthy girls, without means, to an education. "_oreads_" _free_. * * * * * sewing silk. corticelli sewing silk, [illustration] ladies, try it! the best sewing silk made. every spool warranted. full length, smooth and strong. ask your storekeeper for corticelli silk. * * * * * special offer. $ for $ ! [illustration] a superb new family sewing machine! combining all the most recent improvements, and now selling for $ , is offered by the prairie farmer publishing company to subscribers to the prairie farmer for $ , including one year's subscription to the paper. this exceptional offer will remain open for a few days only. * * * * * miscellaneous. "facts about arkansas and texas." a handsome book, beautifully illustrated, with colored diagrams, giving reliable information as to crops, population, religious denominations, commerce, timber, railroads, lands, etc., etc. sent free to any address on receipt of a -cent stamp. address h.c. townsend, gen. passenger agt., st. louis, mo. * * * * * stock farm for sale consisting of acres-- under plow, acres timber, balance in grass--situated in finest county in iowa, one-fourth mile from village, station, and creamery. or will sell one-half interest to practical stockman and feeder who will assume management. write for particulars to h.i. smith, prest. first national bank, mason city, iowa. * * * * * print your own cards labels, envelopes, etc. [illustration] with our $ printing press. larger sizes for circulars, etc., $ to $ . for pleasure, money making, young or old. everything easy, printed instructions. send stamps for catalogue of presses, type, cards, etc., to the factory. kelsey & co., meriden, conn. * * * * * [illustration] we will send you a watch or a chain by mail or express, c.o.d, to be examined before paying any money and if not satisfactory, returned at our expense. we manufacture all our watches and save you per cent. catalogue of styles free. every watch warranted. address standard american watch co., pittsburgh. pa. * * * * * pig extricator to aid animals in giving birth. send for free circular to wm. dulin, avoca, pottawattamie co., ia. * * * * * free _by return mail_. full description moody's new tailor system of dress cutting moody & co, cincinnati, o. * * * * * the prairie farmer is the cheapest and best agricultural paper published. only $ . per year. file was produced from images produced by core historical literature in agriculture (chla), cornell university) transcribers' notes most pages of the book include at the bottom a number of questions for the student to consider. these have been retained in this version and enclosed in square brackets. some corrections to typographical errors have been made. these are recorded at the end of the text. * * * * * g. e. waring, jr. consulting agriculturist. accurate analyses of soils, manures, and crops procured. farms visited, treatment recommended, etc. letters of advice on analyses will be written for those who require them, for $ each. letters on other branches of the subject, inclosing a suitable fee, will receive prompt attention. office, fulton-street, new york, (up stairs. post-office address, rye, n. y. dr. charles enderlin, analytical and consulting chemist, walker-street, new york. analysis of minerals, soils,--organic analysis, etc. d. appleton & company have in course of preparation, the earthworker; or, book of husbandry. by g. e. waring, jr. author of the "elements of agriculture." this book is intended as a sequel to the elements of agriculture, being a larger and more complete work, containing fuller directions for the treatment of the different kinds of soils, for the _preparation of manures_, and especially for the drainage of lands, whether level, rolling, hilly, or springy. particular attention will be paid to the use of analysis. the feeding of different animals, and the cultivation of the various crops, will be described with care. the size of the work will be about pp. vo., and it will probably be published january st, . price $ . orders sent to the publishers, or to the author, at rye, n. y., will be supplied in the order in which they are received. elements of agriculture extract from a letter to the author from prof. mapes, editor of the _working farmer_: * * * "after a perusal of your manuscript, i feel authorized in assuring you that, for the use of young farmers, and schools, your book is superior to any other elementary work extant. james j. mapes." * * * * * letter from the editor of the n. y. tribune: my friend waring, if all who need the information given in your _elements of agriculture_ will confess their ignorance as frankly as i do, and seek to dispel it as promptly and heartily, you will have done a vast amount of good by writing it. * * * * * i have found in every chapter important truths, which i, as a would-be-farmer, needed to know, yet which i _did not_ know, or had but a confused and glimmering consciousness of, before i read your lucid and straightforward exposition of the bases of agriculture as a science. i would not have my son grow up as ignorant of these truths as i did for many times the price of your book; and, i believe, a copy of that book in every family in the union, would speedily add at least ten per cent. per acre to the aggregate product of our soil, beside doing much to stem and reverse the current which now sets so strongly away from the plow and the scythe toward the counter and the office. trusting that your labors will be widely regarded and appreciated, i remain yours truly, horace greeley. new york, june , . the elements of agriculture: a book for young farmers, with questions prepared for the use of schools. by geo. e. waring, jr., consulting agriculturist. the effort to extend the dominion of man over nature is the most healthy and most noble of all ambitions.--bacon. new york: d. appleton and company, & broadway. m dccc liv. entered according to act of congress, in the year , by geo. e. waring, jr., in the clerk's office of the district court of the united states for the southern district of new york. to my friend and tutor, prof. james j. mapes, the pioneer of agricultural science in america, this book is respectfully dedicated by his pupil, the author. to the student. this book is presented to you, not as a work of science, nor as a dry, chemical treatise, but as a plain statement of the more simple operations by which nature produces many results, so common to our observation, that we are thoughtless of their origin. on these results depend the existence of man and the lower animals. no man should be ignorant of their production. in the early prosecution of the study, you will find, perhaps, nothing to relieve its tediousness; but, when the foundation of agricultural knowledge is laid in your mind so thoroughly that you know the character and use of every stone, then may your thoughts build on it fabrics of such varied construction, and so varied in their uses, that there will be opened to you a new world, even more wonderful and more beautiful than the outward world, which exhibits itself to the senses. thus may you live two lives, each assisting in the enjoyment of the other. but you may ask the _practical_ use of this. "the world is made up of little things," saith the proverb. so with the productive arts. the steam engine consists of many parts, each part being itself composed of atoms too minute to be detected by our observation. the earth itself, in all its solidity and life, consists entirely of atoms too small to be perceived by the naked eye, each visible particle being an aggregation of thousands of constituent elements. the crop of wheat, which the farmer raises by his labor, and sells for money, is produced by a combination of particles equally small. they are not mysteriously combined, nor irregularly, but each atom is taken from its place of deposit, and carried to its required location in the living plant, by laws as certain as those which regulate the motion of the engine, or the revolutions of the earth. it is the business of the practical farmer to put together these materials, with the assistance of nature. he may learn her ways, assist her action, and succeed; or he may remain ignorant of her operations, often counteract her beneficial influences, and often fail. a knowledge of the _inner_ world of material things about us will produce pleasure to the thoughtful, and profit to the practical. contents. section first. the plant. page. chapter i.--introduction, " ii.--atmosphere, " iii.--hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, " iv.--inorganic matter, " v.--growth, " vi.--proximate division of plants, " vii.--location of the proximates, and variations in the ashes of plants, " viii.--recapitulation, section second. the soil. chapter i.--formation and character of the soil, " ii.--uses of organic matter, " iii.--uses of inorganic matter, section third. manures. chapter i.--character and varieties of manure, " ii.--excrements of animals, " iii.--waste of manure, " iv.--absorbents, " v.--composting stable manure, " vi.--different kinds of animal excrement, " vii.--other organic manures, " viii.--mineral manures, " ix.--deficiencies of soils, means of restoration, etc., " x.--atmospheric fertilizers, " xi.--recapitulation, section fourth. mechanical cultivation. chapter i.--mechanical character of the soil, " ii.--under-draining, " iii.--advantages of under-draining, " iv.--sub-soil plowing, " v.--plowing and other modes of pulverizing the soil, " vi.--rolling, mulching, weeding, etc., section fifth. analysis. chapter i.--nature of analysis, " ii.--tables of analysis, the practical farmer, explanation of terms, section first. the plant. chapter i. introduction. [what is the object of cultivating the soil? what is necessary in order to cultivate with economy? are plants created from nothing?] the object of cultivating the soil is to raise from it a crop of _plants_. in order to cultivate with economy, we must _raise the largest possible quantity with the least expense, and without permanent injury to the soil_. before this can be done we must study the character of plants, and learn their exact composition. they are not _created_ by a mysterious power, they are merely made up of matters already in existence. they take up water containing food and other matters, and discharge from their roots those substances that are not required for their growth. it is necessary for us to know what kind of matter is required as food for the plant, and where this is to be obtained, which we can learn only through such means as shall separate the elements of which plants are composed; in other words, we must _take them apart_, and examine the different pieces of which they are formed. [what must we do to learn the composition of plants? what takes place when vegetable matter is burned? what do we call the two divisions produced by burning? where does organic matter originate? inorganic? how much of chemistry should farmers know?] if we burn any vegetable substance it disappears, except a small quantity of earthy matter, which we call _ashes_. in this way we make an important division in the constituents of plants. one portion dissipates into the atmosphere, and the other remains as ashes. that part which burns away during combustion is called _organic matter_; the ashes are called _inorganic matter_. the organic matter has become air, and hence we conclude that it was originally obtained from air. the inorganic matter has become earth, and was obtained from the soil. this knowledge can do us no good except by the assistance of chemistry, which explains the properties of each part, and teaches us where it is to be found. it is not necessary for farmers to become chemists. all that is required is, that they should know enough of chemistry to understand the nature of the materials of which their crops are composed, and how those materials are to be used to the best advantage. this amount of knowledge may be easily acquired, and should be possessed by every person, old or young, whether actually engaged in the cultivation of the soil or not. all are dependent on vegetable productions, not only for food, but for every comfort and convenience of life. it is the object of this book to teach children the first principles of agriculture: and it contains all that is absolutely necessary to an understanding of the practical operations of cultivation, etc. [is organic matter lost after combustion? of what does it consist? how large a part of plants is carbon?] we will first examine the _organic_ part of plants, or that which is driven away during combustion or burning. this matter, though apparently lost, is only changed in form. it consists of one solid substance, _carbon_ (or charcoal), and three gases, _oxygen_, _hydrogen_ and _nitrogen_. these four kinds of matter constitute nearly the whole of most plants, the ashes forming often less than one part in one hundred of their dry weight. [what do we mean by gas? does oxygen unite with other substances? give some instances of its combinations] when wood is burned in a close vessel, or otherwise protected from the air, its carbon becomes charcoal. all plants contain this substance, it forming usually about one half of their dry weight. the remainder of their organic part consists of the three gases named above. by the word gas, we mean _air_. oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, when pure, are always in the form of air. oxygen has the power of uniting with many substances, forming compounds which are different from either of their constituents alone. thus: oxygen unites with _iron_ and forms oxide of iron or _iron-rust_, which does not resemble the gray metallic iron nor the gas oxygen; oxygen unites with carbon and forms carbonic acid, which is an invisible gas, but not at all like pure oxygen; oxygen combines with hydrogen and forms water. all of the water, ice, steam, etc., are composed of these two gases. we know this because we can artificially decompose, or separate, all water, and obtain as a result simply oxygen and hydrogen, or we can combine these two gases and thus form pure water; oxygen combines with nitrogen and forms nitric acid. these chemical changes and combinations take place only under certain circumstances, which, so far as they affect agriculture, will be considered in the following pages. as the organic elements of plants are obtained from matters existing in the atmosphere which surrounds our globe, we will examine its constitution. chapter ii. atmosphere. [what is atmospheric air composed of? in what proportions? what is the use of nitrogen in air? does the atmosphere contain other matters useful to vegetation? what are they?] atmospheric air is composed of oxygen and nitrogen. their proportions are, one part of oxygen to four parts of nitrogen. oxygen is the active agent in the combustion, decay, and decomposition of organized bodies (those which have possessed animal or vegetable life, that is, organic matter), and others also, in the breathing of animals. experiments have proved that if the atmosphere consisted of pure oxygen every thing would be speedily destroyed, as the processes of combustion and decay would be greatly accelerated, and animals would be so stimulated that death would soon ensue. the use of the nitrogen in the air is to _dilute_ the oxygen, and thus reduce the intensity of its effect. besides these two great elements, the atmosphere contains certain impurities which are of great importance to vegetable growth; these are, _carbonic acid, water, ammonia, etc._ carbonic acid. [what is the source of the carbon of plants? what is carbonic acid? what is its proportion in the atmosphere? where else is it found? how does it enter the plant? what are the offices of leaves?] carbonic acid is in all probability the only source of the carbon of plants, and consequently is of more importance to vegetation than any other single sort of food. it is a gas, and is not, under natural circumstances, perceptible to our senses. it constitutes about / of the atmosphere, and is found in combination with many substances in nature. marble, limestone and chalk, are carbonate of lime, or carbonic acid and lime in combination; and carbonate of magnesia is a compound of carbonic acid and magnesia. this gas exists in combination with many other mineral substances, and is contained in all water not recently boiled. its supply, though small, is sufficient for the purposes of vegetation. it enters the plant in two ways--through the roots in the water which goes to form the sap, and at the leaves, which absorb it from the air in the form of gas. the leaf of the plant seems to have three offices: that of absorbing carbonic acid from the atmosphere--that of assisting in the chemical preparation of the sap--and that of evaporating its water. if we examine leaves with a microscope we shall find that some have as many as , openings, or mouths, in a square inch; others have a much less number. usually, the pores on the under side of the leaf absorb the carbonic acid. this absorptive power is illustrated when we apply the lower side of a cabbage leaf to a wound, as it draws strongly--the other side of the leaf has no such action. young sprouts may have the power of absorbing and decomposing carbonic acid. [what parts of roots absorb food? how much of their carbon may plants receive through their roots? what change does carbonic acid undergo after entering the plant? in what parts of the plant, and under what influence, is carbonic acid decomposed?] the roots of plants terminate at their ends in minute spongioles, or mouths for the absorption of fluids containing nutriment. in these fluids there exist greater or less quantities of carbonic acid, and a considerable amount of this gas enters into the circulation of the plants and is carried to those parts where it is required for decomposition. plants, under favorable circumstances, may thus obtain about one-third of their carbon. carbonic acid, it will be recollected, consists of _carbon and oxygen_, while it supplies only _carbon_ to the plant. it is therefore necessary that it be divided, or decomposed, and that the carbon be retained while the oxygen is sent off again into the atmosphere, to reperform its office of uniting with carbon. this decomposition takes place in the _green_ parts of plants and only under the influence of daylight. it is not necessary that the sun shine directly on the leaf or green shoot, but this causes a _more rapid_ decomposition of carbonic acid, and consequently we find that plants which are well exposed to the sun's rays make the most rapid growth. [explain the condition of different latitudes. does the proportion of carbonic acid in the atmosphere remain about the same?] the fact that light is essential to vegetation explains the conditions of different latitudes, which, so far as the assimilation of carbon is concerned, are much the same. at the equator the days are but about twelve hours long. still, as the growth of plants is extended over eight or nine months of the year, the duration of daylight is sufficient for the requirements of a luxuriant vegetation. at the poles, on the contrary, the summer is but two or three months long; here, however, it is daylight all summer, and plants from continual growth develop themselves in that short time. it will be recollected that carbonic acid constitutes but about / of the air, yet, although about one half of all the vegetable matter in the world is derived from this source, as well as all of the carbon required by the growth of plants, its proportion in the atmosphere is constantly about the same. in order that we may understated this, it becomes necessary for us to consider the means by which it is formed. carbon, by the aid of fire, is made to unite with oxygen, and always when bodies containing carbon are burnt _with the presence of atmospheric air_, the oxygen of that air unites with the carbon, and forms carbonic acid. the same occurs when bodies containing carbon _decay_, as this is simply a slower _burning_ and produces the same results. the respiration (or breathing) of animals is simply the union of the carbon of the blood with the oxygen of the air drawn into the lungs, and their breath, when thrown out, always contains carbonic acid. from this we see that the reproduction of this gas is the direct effect of the destruction of all organized bodies, whether by fire, decay, or consumption by animals. [explain some of the operations in which this reproduction takes place. how is it reproduced?] furnaces are its wholesale manufactories. every cottage fire is continually producing a new supply, and the blue smoke issuing from the cottage-chimney, as described by so many poets, possesses a new beauty, when we reflect that besides indicating a cheerful fire on the hearth, it contains materials for making food for the cottager's tables and new faggots for his fire. the wick of every burning lamp draws up the carbon of the oil to be made into carbonic acid at the flame. all matters in process of combustion, decay, fermentation, or putrefaction, are returning to the atmosphere those constituents, which they obtained from it. every living animal, even to the smallest insect, by respiration, spends its life in the production of this material necessary to the growth of plants, and at death gives up its body in part for such formation by decay. thus we see that there is a continual change from the carbon of plants to air, and from air back to plants, or through them to animals. as each dollar in gold that is received into a country permanently increases its amount of circulating medium, and each dollar sent out permanently decreases it until returned, so the carbonic acid sent into the atmosphere by burning, decay, or respiration, becomes a permanent stock of constantly changeable material, until it shall be locked up for a time, as in a house which may last for centuries, or in an oak tree which may stand for thousands of years. still, at the decay of either of these, the carbon which they contain must be again resolved into carbonic acid. [what are the coal-beds of pennsylvania? what are often found in them?] the coal-beds of pennsylvania are mines of carbon once abstracted from the atmosphere by plants. in these coal-beds are often found fern leaves, toads, whole trees, and in short all forms of organized matter. these all existed as living things before the great floods, and at the breaking away of the barriers of the immense lakes, of which our present lakes were merely the deep holes in their beds, they were washed away and deposited in masses so great as to take fire from their chemical changes. it is by many supposed that this fire acting throughout the entire mass (without the presence of air _to supply oxygen_ except on the surface) caused it to become melted carbon, and to flow around those bodies which still retained their shapes, changing them to coal without destroying their structures. this coal, so long as it retains its present form, is lost to the vegetable kingdom, and each ton that is burned, by being changed into carbonic acid, adds to the ability of the atmosphere to support an increased amount of vegetation. [explain the manner in which they become coal. how does the burning of coal benefit vegetation? is carbon ever permanent in any of its forms? what enables it to change its condition?] thus we see that, in the provisions of nature, carbon, the grand basis, on which all organized matter is founded, is never permanent in any of its forms. oxygen is the carrier which enables it to change its condition. for instance, let us suppose that we have a certain quantity of charcoal; this is nearly pure carbon. we ignite it, and it unites with the oxygen of the air, becomes carbonic acid, and floats away into the atmosphere. the wind carries it through a forest, and the leaves of the trees with their millions of mouths drink it in. by the assistance of light it is decomposed, the oxygen is sent off to make more carbonic acid, and the carbon is retained to form a part of the tree. so long as that tree exists in the form of wood, the carbon will remain unaltered, but when the wood decays, or is burned, it immediately takes the form of carbonic acid, and mingles with the atmosphere ready to be again taken up by plants, and have its carbon deposited in the form of vegetable matter. [give an instance of such change. how do plants and animals benefit each other? describe the experiment with the glass tube.] the blood of animals contains carbon derived from their food. this unites with the oxygen of the air drawn into the lungs and forms carbonic acid. without this process, animals could not live. thus, while by the natural operation of breathing, they make carbonic acid for the uses of the vegetable world, plants, in taking up carbon, throw off oxygen to keep up the life of animals. there is perhaps no way in which we can better illustrate the changes of form in carbon than by describing a simple experiment. take a glass tube filled with oxygen gas, and put in it a lump of charcoal, cork the ends of the tube tightly, and pass through the corks the wires of an electrical battery. by passing a stream of electrical fluid over the charcoal it may be ignited, when it will burn with great brilliancy. in burning it is dissolved in the oxygen forming carbonic acid, and disappears. it is no more lost, however, than is the carbon of wood which is burned in a stove; although invisible, it is still in the tube, and may be detected by careful weighing. a more satisfactory proof of its presence may be obtained by _decomposing_ the carbonic acid by drawing the wires a short distance apart, and giving a _spark_ of electricity. this immediately separates the oxygen from the carbon which forms a dense black smoke in the tube. by pushing the corks together we may obtain a wafer of charcoal of the same weight as the piece introduced. in this experiment we have changed carbon from its solid form to an invisible gas and back again to a solid, thus fully representing the continual changes of this substance in the destruction of organic matter and the growth of plants. chapter iii. hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. hydrogen and oxygen. [what is water composed of? if analyzed, what does it yield? how do plants obtain their hydrogen and oxygen?] let us now consider the three gases, _hydrogen_, _oxygen_ and _nitrogen_, which constitute the remainder of the organic part of plants. hydrogen and oxygen compose _water_, which, if analyzed, yields simply these two gases. plants perform such analysis, and in this way are able to obtain a sufficient supply of these materials, as their sap is composed chiefly of water. whenever vegetable matter is destroyed by burning, decay, or otherwise, its hydrogen and oxygen unite and form water, which is parted with usually in the form of an invisible vapor. the atmosphere of course contains greater or less quantities of watery vapor arising from this cause and from the evaporation of liquid water. this vapor condenses, forming rains, etc. hydrogen and oxygen are never taken into consideration in manuring lands, as they are so readily obtained from the water constituting the sap of the plant, and consequently should not occupy our attention in this book. nitrogen. [if vegetable matter be destroyed, what becomes of these constituents? what is the remaining organic constituent? why is it worthy of close attention? do plants appropriate the nitrogen of the atmosphere?] _nitrogen_, the only remaining _organic_ constituent of vegetable matter, is for many reasons worthy of close attention. . it is necessary to the growth and perfection of all cultivated plants. . it is necessary to the formation of animal muscle. . it is often deficient in the soil. . it is liable to be easily lost from manures. although about four fifths of atmospheric air are pure nitrogen, it is almost certain that plants get no nutriment at all from this source. it is all obtained from some of its compounds, chiefly from the one called ammonia. nitric acid is also a source from which plants may obtain nitrogen, though to the farmer of less importance than ammonia. ammonia. [what is the principal source from which they obtain nitrogen? what is ammonia? how is it formed? where does it always exist? how do plants take up ammonia?] _ammonia_ is composed of nitrogen and hydrogen. it has a pungent smell and is familiarly known as _hartshorn_. the same odor is perceptible around stables and other places where animal matter is decomposing. all animal muscle, certain parts of plants, and other organized substances, consist of compounds containing nitrogen. when these compounds undergo combustion, or are in any manner decomposed, the nitrogen which they contain usually unites with hydrogen, and forms ammonia. in consequence of this the atmosphere always contains more or less of this gas, arising from the decay, etc., which is continually going on all over the world. this ammonia in the atmosphere is the capital stock to which all plants, not artificially manured, must look for their supply of nitrogen. as they can take up ammonia only through their roots, we must discover some means by which it may be conveyed from the atmosphere to the soil. [does water absorb it? what is _spirits of hartshorn_? why is this power of water important in agriculture? what instance may be cited to prove this?] water may be made to absorb many times its bulk of this gas, and water with which it comes in contact will immediately take it up. spirits of hartshorn is merely water through which ammonia has been passed until it is saturated.[a] this power of water has a direct application to agriculture, because the water constituting rains, dews, &c., absorbs the ammonia which the decomposition of nitrogenous matter had sent into the atmosphere, and we find that all rain, snow and dew, contain ammonia. this fact may be chemically proved in various ways, and is perceptible in the common operations of nature. every person must have noticed that when a summer's shower falls on the plants in a flower garden, they commence their growth with fresh vigor while the blossoms become larger and more richly colored. this effect cannot be produced by watering with spring water, unless it be previously mixed with ammonia, in which case the result will be the same. although ammonia is a gas and pervades the atmosphere, few, if any, plants can take it up, as they do carbonic acid, through their leaves. it must all enter through the roots in solution in the water which goes to form the sap. although the amount received from the atmosphere is of great importance, there are few cases where artificial applications are not beneficial. the value of farm-yard and other animal manures, depends chiefly on the ammonia which they yield on decomposition. this subject, also the means for retaining in the soil the ammoniacal parts of fertilizing matters, will be fully considered in the section on manures. [can plants use more ammonia than is received from the atmosphere? on what does the value of animal manure chiefly depend? what changes take place after ammonia enters the plant? may the same atom of nitrogen perform many different offices?] after ammonia has entered the plant it may be decomposed, its hydrogen sent off, and its nitrogen retained to answer the purposes of growth. the changes which nitrogen undergoes, from plants to animals, or, by decomposition, to the form of ammonia in the atmosphere, are as varied as those of carbon and the constituents of water. the same little atom of nitrogen may one year form a part of a plant, and the next become a constituent of an animal, or, with the decomposed dead animal, may form a part of the soil. if the animal should fall into the sea he may become food for fishes, and our atom of nitrogen may form a part of a fish. that fish may be eaten by a larger one, or at death may become food for the whale, through the marine insect, on which it feeds. after the abstraction of the oil from the whale, the nitrogen may, by the putrefaction of his remains, be united to hydrogen, form ammonia, and escape into the atmosphere. from here it may be brought to the soil by rains, and enter into the composition of a plant, from which, could its parts speak as it lies on our table, it could tell us a wonderful tale of travels, and assure us that, after wandering about in all sorts of places, it had returned to us the same little atom of nitrogen which we had owned twenty years before, and which for thousands of years had been continually going through its changes. [is the same true of the other constituents of plants? is any atom of matter ever lost?] the same is true of any of the organic or inorganic constituents of plants. they are performing their natural offices, or are lying in the earth, or floating in the atmosphere, ready to be lent to _any_ of their legitimate uses, sure again to be returned to their starting point. thus no atom of matter is ever lost. it may change its place, but it remains for ever as a part of the capital of nature. footnotes: [a] by _saturated_, we mean that it contains all that it is capable of holding. chapter iv. inorganic matter. [what are ashes called? how many kinds of matter are there in the ashes of plants? into what three classes may they be divided? what takes place when alkalies and acids are brought together?] we will now examine the ashes left after burning vegetable substances. this we have called inorganic matter, and it is obtained from the soil. organic matter, although forming so large a part of the plant, we have seen to consist of four different substances. the inorganic portion, on the contrary, although forming so small a part, consists of no less than _nine_ or _ten_ different kinds of matter.[b] these we will consider in order. in their relations to agriculture they may be divided into _three_ classes--_alkalies_, _acids_, and _neutrals_.[c] [is the character of a compound the same as that of its constituents? give an instance of this. do neutrals combine with other substances? name the four alkalies found in the ashes of plants.] alkalies and acids are of opposite properties, and when brought together they unite and neutralize each other, forming compounds which are neither alkaline nor acid in their character. thus, carbonic acid (a gas,) unites with lime--a burning, caustic substance--and forms marble, which is a hard tasteless stone. alkalies and acids are characterized by their desire to unite with each other, and the compounds thus formed have many and various properties, so that the characters of the constituents give no indication of the character of the compound. for instance, lime causes the gases of animal manure to escape, while sulphate of lime (a compound of sulphuric acid and lime) produces an opposite effect, and prevents their escape. the substances coming under the signification of neutrals, are less affected by the laws of combination, still they often combine feebly with other substances, and some of the resultant compounds are of great importance to agriculture. alkalies. the alkalies which are found in the ashes of plants are four in number; they are _potash_, _soda_, _lime_ and _magnesia_. potash. [how may we obtain potash from ashes? what are some of its agricultural uses?] when we pour water over wood ashes it dissolves the _potash_ which they contain, and carries it through in solution. this solution is called _ley_, and if it be boiled to dryness it leaves a solid substance from which pure potash may be made. potash left exposed to the air absorbs carbonic acid and becomes carbonate of potash, or _pearlash_; if another atom of carbonic acid be added, it becomes super-carbonate of potash, or _salæratus_. potash has many uses in agriculture. . it forms a constituent of nearly all plants. . it unites with silica (a neutral), and forms a compound which water can dissolve and carry into the roots of plants; thus supplying them with an ingredient which gives them much of their strength.[d] . it is a strong agent in the decomposition of vegetable matter, and is thus of much importance in preparing manures. . it roughens the smooth round particles of sandy soils, and prevents their compacting, as they are often liable to do. . it is also of use in killing certain kinds of insects, and, when artificially applied, in smoothing the bark of fruit trees. the source from which this and the other inorganic matters required are to be obtained, will be fully considered in the section on manures. soda. [where is soda found most largely? what is glauber's salts? what is washing soda? what are some of the uses of lime?] _soda_, one of the alkalies contained in the ashes of plants, is very much the same as potash in its agricultural character. its uses are the same as those of potash--before enumerated. soda exists very largely in nature, as it forms an important part of common salt, whether in the ocean or in those inland deposits known as rock salt. when combined with sulphuric acid it forms sulphate of soda or _glauber's salts_. in combination with carbonic acid, as carbonate of soda, it forms the common washing soda of the shops. it is often necessary to render soils fertile. lime. _lime_ is in many ways important in agriculture: . it is a constituent of plants and animals. . it assists in the decomposition of vegetable matter in the soil. . it corrects the acidity[e] of sour soils. . as chloride or sulphate of lime it is a good absorbent of fertilizing gases. [how is caustic lime made? how much carbonic acid is thus liberated? how does man resemble sinbad the sailor?] in nature it usually exists in the form of carbonate of lime: that is, as marble, limestone, and chalk--these all being of the same composition. in manufacturing caustic (or quick) lime, it is customary to burn the carbonate of lime in a kiln; by this means the carbonic acid is thrown off into the atmosphere and the lime remains in a pure or caustic state. a french chemist states that every cubic yard of limestone that is burned, throws off _ten thousand_ cubic yards of carbonic acid, which may be used by plants. this reminds us of the story of sinbad the sailor, where we read of the immense _genie_ who came out of a very small box by the sea-shore, much to the surprise of sinbad, who could not believe his eyes, until the _genie_ changed himself into a cloud of smoke and went into the box again. sinbad fastened the lid, and the _genie_ must have remained there until the box was destroyed. now man is very much like sinbad, he lets the carbonic acid out from the limestone (when it expands and becomes a gas); and then he raises a crop, the leaves of which drink it in and pack the carbon away in a very small compass as vegetable matter. here it must remain until the plant is destroyed, when it becomes carbonic acid again, and occupies just as much space as ever. the burning of limestone is a very prolific source of carbonic acid. magnesia. [what do you know about magnesia? what is phosphoric acid composed of? with what substance does it form its most important compound?] _magnesia_ is the remaining alkali of vegetable ashes. it is well known as a medicine, both in the form of calcined magnesia, and, when mixed with sulphuric acid, as epsom salts. magnesia is necessary to nearly all plants, but too much of it is poisonous, and it should be used with much care, as many soils already contain a sufficient quantity. it is often found in limestone rocks (that class called _dolomites_), and the injurious effects of some kinds of lime, as well as the barrenness of soils made from dolomites, may be attributed entirely to the fact that they contain too much magnesia. acids. phosphoric acid. _phosphoric acid._--this subject is one of the greatest interest to the farmer. phosphoric acid is composed of phosphorus and oxygen. the end of a loco-foco match contains phosphorus, and when it is lighted it unites with the oxygen of the atmosphere and forms phosphoric acid; this constitutes the white smoke which is seen for a moment before the sulphur commences burning. being an acid, this substance has the power of combining with any of the alkalies. its most important compound is with lime. [will soils, deficient in phosphate of lime, produce good crops? from what source do plants obtain their phosphorus?] _phosphate of lime_ forms about per cent. of the dry weight of the bones of all animals, and it is all derived from the soil through the medium of plants. as plants are intended as food for animals, nature has provided that they shall not attain their perfection without taking up a supply of phosphate of lime as well as of the other earthy matters; consequently, there are many soils which will not produce good crops, simply because they are deficient in phosphate of lime. it is one of the most important ingredients of manures, and its value is dependent on certain conditions which will be hereafter explained. another use of phosphoric acid in the plant is to supply it with a small amount of _phosphorus_, which seems to be required in the formation of the seed. sulphuric acid. [what is sulphuric acid composed of? what is plaster? what is silica? why is it necessary to the growth of plants? what compounds does it form with alkalies?] _sulphuric acid_ is important to vegetation and is often needed to render soils fertile. it is composed of sulphur and oxygen, and is made for manufacturing purposes, by burning sulphur. with lime it forms _sulphate of lime_, which is gypsum or 'plaster.' in this form it is often found in nature, and is generally used in agriculture. other important methods for supplying sulphuric acid will be described hereafter. it gives _to_ the plant a small portion of _sulphur_, which is necessary to the formation of some of its parts. neutrals. silica. [how can you prove its existence in corn stalks? what instance does liebig give to show its existence in grass? how do we supply silicates? why does grain lodge? what is the most important compound of chlorine?] this is sand, the base of flint. it is necessary for the growth of all plants, as it gives them much of their strength. in connection with an alkali it constitutes the hard shining surface of corn stalks, straw, etc. silica unites with the alkalies and forms compounds, such as _silicate of potash_, _silicate of soda, etc._, which are soluble in water, and therefore available to plants. if we roughen a corn stalk with sand-paper we may sharpen a knife upon it. this is owing to the hard particles of silica which it contains. window glass is silicate of potash, rendered insoluble by additions of arsenic and litharge. liebig tells us that some persons discovered, between manheim and heidelberg in germany, a mass of melted glass where a hay-stack had been struck by lightning. they supposed it to be a meteor, but chemical analysis showed that it was only the compound of silica and potash which served to strengthen the grass. there is always _enough_ silica in the soil, but it is often necessary to add an alkali to render it available. when grain, etc., lodge or fall down from their own weight, it is altogether probable that they are unable to obtain from the soil a sufficient supply of the soluble silicates, and some form of alkali should be added to the soil to unite with the sand and render it soluble. chlorine. [of what use is chloride of lime? what is oxide of iron? what is the difference between the _per_oxide and the _prot_oxide of iron?] _chlorine_ is an important ingredient of vegetable ashes, and is often required to restore the balance to the soil. it is not found alone in nature, but is always in combination with other substances. its most important compound is with sodium, forming _chloride of sodium_ (or common salt). sodium is the base of soda, and common salt is usually the best source from which to obtain both soda and chlorine. chlorine unites with lime and forms _chloride of lime_, which is much used to absorb the unpleasant odors of decaying matters, and in this character it is of use in the treatment of manures. oxide of iron. _oxide of iron_, one of the constituents of ashes, is common iron rust. _iron_ itself is naturally of a grayish color, but when exposed to the atmosphere, it readily absorbs oxygen and forms a reddish compound. it is in this form that it usually exists in nature, and many soils as well as the red sandstones are colored by it. it is seldom, if ever, necessary to apply this as a manure, there being usually enough of it in the soil. this red oxide of iron, of which we have been speaking, is called by chemists the _peroxide_. there is another compound which contains less oxygen than this, and is called the _protoxide of iron_, which is poisonous to plants. when it exists in the soil it is necessary to use such means of cultivation as shall expose it to the atmosphere and allow it to take up more oxygen and become the peroxide. the black scales which fly from hot iron when struck by the blacksmith's hammer are protoxide of iron. the _peroxide of iron_ is a very good absorbent of ammonia, and consequently, as will be hereafter described, adds to the fertility of the soil. [what can you say of the oxide of manganese? how do you classify the inorganic constituents?] oxide of manganese, though often found in small quantities in the ashes of cultivated plants, cannot be considered indispensable. having now examined all of the materials from which the ashes of plants are formed,[f] we are enabled to classify them in a simple manner, so that they may be recollected. they are as follows:-- alkalies. acids. neutrals. potash. sulphuric acid. silica. soda. phosphoric " chlorine. lime. oxide of iron. magnesia. " manganese. footnotes: [b] bromine, iodine, etc., are sometimes detected in particular plants, but need not occupy the attention of the farmer. [c] this classification is not strictly scientific, but it is one which the learner will find it well to adopt. these bodies are called neutrals because they have no decided alkaline or acid character. [d] in some soils the _fluorides_ undoubtedly supply plants with soluble silicates, as _fluoric acid_ has the power of dissolving silica. thus, in derbyshire (england), where the soil is supplied with fluoric acid, grain is said never to lodge. [e] sourness. [f] there is reason to suppose that _alumina_ is an essential constituent of many plants. chapter v. growth. [of what does a perfect young plant consist? how must the food of plants be supplied? can carbon and earthy matter be taken up at separate stages of growth, or must they both be supplied at once?] having examined the materials of which plants are made, it becomes necessary to discover how they are put together in the process of growth. let us therefore suppose a young wheat-plant for instance to be in condition to commence independent growth. it consists of roots which are located in the soil; leaves which are spread in the air, and a stem which connects the roots and leaves. this stem contains sap vessels (or tubes) which extend from the ends of the roots to the surfaces of the leaves, thus affording a passage for the sap, and consequently allowing the matters taken up to be distributed throughout the plant. [what seems to be nature's law with regard to this? what is the similarity between making a cart and raising a crop? in the growth of a young plant, what operations take place about the same time?] it is necessary that the materials of which plants are made should be supplied in certain proportions, and at the same time. for instance, carbon could not be taken up in large quantities by the leaves, unless the roots, at the same time, were receiving from the soil those mineral matters which are necessary to growth. on the other hand, no considerable amount of earthy matter could be appropriated by the roots unless the leaves were obtaining carbon from the air. this same rule holds true with regard to all of the constituents required; nature seeming to have made it a law that if one of the important ingredients of the plant is absent, the others, though they may be present in sufficient quantities, cannot be used. thus, if the soil is deficient in potash, and still has sufficient quantities of all of the other ingredients, the plant cannot take up these ingredients, because potash is necessary to its life. if a farmer wishes to make a cart he prepares his wood and iron, gets them all in the proper condition, and then can very readily put them together. but if he has all of the _wood_ necessary and no _iron_, he cannot make his cart, because bolts, nails and screws are required, and their place cannot be supplied by boards. this serves to illustrate the fact that in raising plants we must give them every thing that they require, or they will not grow at all. in the case of our young plant the following operations are going on at about the same time. the leaves are absorbing carbonic acid from the atmosphere, and the roots are drinking in water from the soil. [what becomes of the carbonic acid? how is the sap disposed of? what does it contain? how does the plant obtain its carbon? its oxygen and hydrogen? its nitrogen? its inorganic matter?] under the influence of daylight, the carbonic acid is decomposed; its oxygen returned to the atmosphere, and its carbon retained in the plant. the water taken in by the roots circulates through the sap vessels of the plant, and, from various causes, is drawn up towards the leaves where it is evaporated. this water contains the _nitrogen_ and the _inorganic matter_ required by the plant and some carbonic acid, while the water itself consists of _hydrogen_ and _oxygen_. thus we see that the plant obtains its food in the following manner:-- carbon.--in the form of _carbonic acid_ from the atmosphere, and from that contained in the sap, the oxygen being returned to the air. oxygen } from the elements of the water constituting the sap. & } hydrogen.} nitrogen.--from the soil (chiefly in form of ammonia). it is carried into the plant through the roots in solution in water. inorganic} from the soil, and only _in solution_ in water. matter. } [what changes does the food taken up by the plant undergo?] many of the chemical changes which take place in the interior of the plant are well understood, but they require too much knowledge of chemistry to be easily comprehended by the young learner, and it is not absolutely essential that they should be understood by the scholar who is merely learning the _elements_ of the science. it is sufficient to say that the food taken up by the plant undergoes such changes as are required for its growth; as in animals, where the food taken into the stomach, is digested, and formed into bone, muscle, fat, hair, etc., so in the plant the nutritive portions of the sap are resolved into wood, bark, grain, or some other necessary part. the results of these changes are of the greatest importance in agriculture, and no person can call himself a _practical farmer_ who does not thoroughly understand them. chapter vi. proximate division of plants, etc. we have hitherto examined what is called the _ultimate_ division of plants. that is, we have looked at each one of the elements separately, and considered its use in vegetable growth. [of what do wood, starch and the other vegetable compounds chiefly consist? are their small ashy parts important? what are these compounds called? into how many classes may proximate principles be divided? of what do the first class consist? the second? what vegetable compounds do the first class comprise?] we will now examine another division of plants, called their _proximate division_. we know that plants consist of various substances, such as wood, gum, starch, oil, etc., and on examination we shall discover that these substances are composed of the various _organic_ and _inorganic_ ingredients described in the preceding chapters. they are made up almost entirely of _organic_ matter, but their ashy parts, though very small, are (as we shall soon see) sometimes of great importance. these compounds are called _proximate principles_,[g] or _vegetable proximates_. they may be divided into two classes. the first class are composed of _carbon_, _hydrogen_, and _oxygen_. the second class contain the same substances and _nitrogen_. [are these substances of about the same composition? can they be artificially changed from one to another? give an instance of this. is the ease with which these changes take place important? from what may the first class of proximates be formed?] the first class (those compounds not containing nitrogen) comprise the wood, starch, gum, sugar, and fatty matter which constitute the greater part of all plants, also the acids which are found in sour fruits, etc. various as are all of these things in their characters, they are entirely composed of the same ingredients (carbon, hydrogen and oxygen), and usually combined in about the _same proportion_. there may be a slight difference in the composition of their _ashes_, but the organic part is much the same in every case, so much so, that they can often be artificially changed from one to the other. as an instance of this, it may be recollected by those who attended the fair of the american institute, in , that prof. mapes exhibited samples of excellent sugar made from the juice of the cornstalk, starch, linen, and woody fibre. the ease with which these proximates may be changed from one to the other is their most important agricultural feature, and should be clearly understood before proceeding farther. it is one of the fundamental principles on which the growth of both vegetables depends. the proximates of the first class constitute usually the greater part of all plants, and they are readily formed from the carbonic acid and water which in nature are so plentifully supplied. [why are those of the second class particularly important to farmers? what is the general name under which they are known? what is the protein of wheat called? why is flour containing much gluten preferred by bakers? can protein be formed without nitrogen? if plants were allowed to complete their growth without a supply of this ingredient, what would be the result?] the _second class_ of proximates, though forming only a small part of the plant, are of the greatest importance to the farmer, being the ones from which _animal muscle_[h] is made. they consist, as will be recollected, of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and _nitrogen_, or of _all_ of the organic elements of plants. they are all of much the same character, though each kind of plant has its peculiar form of this substance, which is known under the general name of _protein_. the protein of wheat is called _gluten_--that of indian corn is _zein_--that of beans and peas is _legumin_. in other plants the protein substances are _vegetable albumen_, _casein_, etc. gluten absorbs large quantities of water, which causes it to swell to a great size, and become full of holes. flour which contains much gluten, makes light, porous bread, and is preferred by bakers, because it absorbs so large an amount of water. [what is the result if a field be deficient in nitrogen?] the protein substances are necessary to animal and vegetable life, and none of our cultivated plants will attain maturity (complete their growth), unless allowed the materials required for forming this constituent. to furnish this condition is the object of nitrogen given to plants as manure. if no _nitrogen_ is supplied the protein substances cannot be formed, and the plant must cease to grow. when on the contrary _ammonia_ is given to the soil (by rains or otherwise), it furnishes nitrogen, while the carbonic acid and water yield the other constituents of protein, and a healthy growth continues, provided that the soil contains the _mineral_ matters required in the formation of the ash, in a condition to be useful. the wisdom of this provision is evident when we recollect that the protein substances are necessary to the formation of muscle in animals, for if plants were allowed to complete their growth without a supply of this ingredient, our grain and hay might not be sufficiently well supplied with it to keep our oxen and horses in working condition, while under the existing law plants must be of nearly a uniform quality (in this respect), and if a field is short of nitrogen, its crop will not be large, and of a very poor quality, but the soil will produce good plants as long as the nitrogen lasts, and then the growth must cease.[i] animals. that this principle may be clearly understood, it may be well to explain more fully the application of the proximate constituents of plants in feeding animals. [of what are the bodies of animals composed? what is the office of vegetation? what part of the animal is formed from the first class of proximates? from the second? which contains the largest portions of inorganic matter, plants or animals? must animals have a variety of food, and why?] animals are composed (like plants) of organic and inorganic matter, and every thing necessary to build them up exists in plants. it seems to be the office of the vegetable world to prepare the gases in the atmosphere, and the minerals in the earth for the uses of animal life, and to effect this plants put these gases and minerals together in the form of the various _proximates_ (or compound substances) which we have just described. in animals the compounds containing _no nitrogen_ comprise the fatty substances, parts of the blood, etc., while the protein compound, or those which _do contain nitrogen_, form the muscle, a part of the bones, the hair, and other portions of the animal. animals contain a larger proportion of inorganic matter than plants do. bones contain a large quantity of phosphate of lime, and we find other inorganic materials performing important offices in the system. in order that animals may be perfectly developed, they must of course receive as food all of the materials required to form their bodies. they cannot live if fed entirely on one ingredient. thus, if _starch_ alone be eaten by the animal, he might become _fat_, but his strength would soon fail, because his food contains nothing to keep up the vigor of his _muscles_. if on the contrary the food of an animal consisted entirely of _gluten_, he might be very strong from a superior development of muscle, but would not be fat. hence we see that in order to keep up the proper proportion of both fat and muscle in our animals (or in ourselves), the food must be such as contains a proper proportion of the two kinds of proximates. [why is grain good for food? on what does the value of flour depend? is there any relation between the ashy part of plants and those of animals? how may we account for unhealthy bones and teeth?] it is for this reason that grain, such as wheat for instance, is so good for food. it contains both classes of proximates, and furnishes material for the formation of both fat and muscle. the value of _flour_ depends very much on the manner in which it is manufactured. this will be soon explained. [what is a probable cause of consumption? what is an important use of the first class of proximates? what may lungs be called? explain the production of heat during decomposition. why is the heat produced by decay not perceptible?] apart from the relations between the _proximate principles_ of plants, and those of animals, there exists an important relation between their _ashy_ or _inorganic_ parts; and, food in order to satisfy the demands of animal life, must contain the mineral matter required for the purposes of that life. take bones for instance. if phosphate of lime is not always supplied in sufficient quantities by food, animals are prevented from the formation of healthy bones. this is particularly to be noticed in teeth. where food is deficient of phosphate of lime, we see poor teeth as a result. some physicians have supposed that one of the causes of consumption is the deficiency of phosphate of lime in food. [why is the heat produced by combustion apparent? explain the production of heat in the lungs of animals? why does exercise augment the animal heat? under what circumstances is the animal's own fat used in the production of heat?] the first class of proximates (starch, sugar, gum, etc.), perform an important office in the animal economy aside from their use in making fat. they constitute the _fuel_ which supplies the animal's fire, and gives him his _heat_. the lungs of men and other animals may be called delicate _stoves_, which supply the whole body with heat. but let us explain this matter more fully. if wood, starch, gum, or sugar, be burned in a stove, they produce heat. these substances consist, as will be recollected, of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and when they are destroyed in any way (provided they be exposed to the atmosphere), the hydrogen and oxygen unite and form water, and the carbon unites with the oxygen of the air and forms carbonic acid, as was explained in a preceding chapter. this process is always accompanied by the liberation of _heat_, and the _intensity_ of this heat depends on the _time_ occupied in its _production_. in the case of decay, the chemical changes take place so slowly that the heat, being conducted away as soon as formed, is not perceptible to our senses. in combustion (or burning) the same changes take place with much greater rapidity, and the same _amount_ of heat being concentrated, or brought out in a far shorter time, it becomes intense, and therefore apparent. in the lungs of animals the same law holds true. the blood contains matters belonging to this carbonaceous class, and they undergo in the lungs the changes which have been described under the head of combustion and decay. their hydrogen and oxygen unite, and form the moisture of the breath, while their carbon is combined with the oxygen of the air drawn into the lungs, and is thrown out as carbonic acid. the same consequence--heat--results in this, as in the other cases, and this heat is produced with sufficient rapidity for the animal necessities. when an animal exercises violently, his blood circulates with increased rapidity, thus carrying carbon more rapidly to the lungs. the breath also becomes quicker, thus supplying increased quantities of oxygen. in this way the decomposition becomes more rapid, and the animal is heated in proportion. thus we see that food has another function besides that of forming animal matter, namely to supply heat. when the food does not contain a sufficient quantity of starch, sugar, etc., to answer the demands of the system the _animal's own fat_ is carried to the lungs, and there used in the production of heat. this important fact will be referred to again. footnotes: [g] by _proximate principle_, we mean that combination of vegetable elements which is known as a vegetable product, such as _wood_, etc. [h] _muscle_ is _lean meat_, it gives to animals their strength and ability to perform labor. [i] this, of course, supposes that the soil is fertile in other respects. chapter vii. location of the proximates and variations in the ashes of plants. [of what proximate are plants chiefly composed? what is the principal constituent of the potato root? of the carrot and turnip? what part of the plant contains usually the most nutriment?] let us now examine plants with a view to learning the _location_ of the various plants. the stem or trunk of the plant or tree consists almost entirely of _woody fibre_; this also forms a large portion of the other parts except the seeds, and, in some instances, the roots. the roots of the potato contain large quantities of _starch_. other roots such as the _carrot_ and _turnip_ contain _pectic acid_,[j] a nutritious substance resembling starch. it is in the _seed_ however that the more nutritive portions of most plants exist, and here they maintain certain relative positions which it is well to understand, and which can be best explained by reference to the following figures, as described by prof. johnston:-- [illustration: fig. .] "thus _a_ shows the position of the oil in the outer part of the seed--it exists in minute drops, inclosed in six-sided cells, which consists chiefly of gluten; _b_, the position and comparative quantity of the starch, which in the heart of the seed is mixed with only a small proportion of gluten; _c_, the germ or chit which contains much gluten."[k] [is the composition of the inorganic matter of different parts of the plant the same, or different? what is the difference between the ash of the straw and that of the grain of wheat?] the location of the _inorganic_ part of plants is one of much interest, and shows the adaptation of each part to its particular use. take a wheat plant, for instance--the stalk, the leaf, and the grain, show in their ashes, important difference of composition. the stalk or straw contains three or four times as large a proportion of ash as the grain, and a no less remarkable difference of composition may be noticed in the ashes of the two parts. in that of the straw, we find a large proportion of silica and scarcely any phosphoric acid, while in that of the grain there is scarcely a trace of silica, although phosphoric acid constitutes more than one half of the entire weight. the leaves contain a considerable quantity of lime. [what is the reason for this difference? in what part of the grain does phosphoric acid exist most largely?] this may at first seem an unimportant matter, but on examination we shall see the use of it. the straw is intended to support the grain and leaves, and to convey the sap from the roots to the upper portions of the plant. to perform these offices, _strength_ is required, and this is given by the _silica_, and the woody fibre which forms so large a proportion of the stalk. the silica is combined with an alkali, and constitutes the glassy coating of the straw. while the plant is young, this coating is hardly apparent, but as it grows older, as the grain becomes heavier, (verging towards ripeness), the silicious coating of the stalk assumes a more prominent character, and gives to the straw sufficient strength to support the golden head. the straw is not the most important part of the plant as _food_, and therefore requires but little phosphoric acid. [why is graham flour more wholesome than fine flour? are the ashes of all plants the same in their composition?] the grain, on the contrary, is especially intended as food, and therefore must contain a large proportion of phosphoric acid--this being, as we have already learned, necessary to the formation of bone--while, as it has no necessity for strength, and as silica is not needed by animals, this ingredient exists in the grain only in a very small proportion. it may be well to observe that the phosphoric acid of grain exists most largely in the hard portions near the shell, or bran. this is one of the reasons why graham flour is more wholesome than fine flour. it contains all of the nutritive materials which render the grain valuable as food, while flour which is very finely bolted[l] contains only a small part of the outer portions of the grain (where the phosphoric acid, protein and fatty matters exist most largely). the starchy matter in the interior of the grain, which is the least capable of giving strength to the animal, is carefully separated, and used as food for man, while the better portions, not being ground so finely, are rejected. this one thing alone may be sufficient to account for the fact, that the lives of men have become shorter and less blessed with health and strength, than they were in the good old days when a stone mortar and a coarse sieve made a respectable flour mill. another important fact concerning the ashes of plants is the difference of their composition in different plants. thus, the most prominent ingredient in the ash of the potato is _potash_; of wheat and other grains, _phosphoric acid_; of meadow hay, _silica_; of clover, _lime_; of beans, _potash_, etc. in grain, _potash_ (or _soda_), etc., are among the important ingredients. [of what advantage are these differences to the farmer? of what are plants composed?] these differences are of great importance to the practical farmer, as by understanding what kind of plants use the most of one ingredient, and what kind requires another in large proportion, he can regulate his crops so as to prevent his soil from being exhausted more in one ingredient than in the others, and can also manure his land with reference to the crop which he intends to grow. the tables of analyses in the fifth section will point out these differences accurately. footnotes: [j] this pectic acid gelatinizes food in the stomach, and thus renders it more digestible. [k] see johnston's elements, page . [l] sifted through a fine cloth called a bolting cloth. chapter viii. recapitulation. we have now learned as much about the plant as is required for our immediate uses, and we will carefully reconsider the various points with a view to fixing them permanently in the mind. plants are composed of _organic_ and _inorganic_ matter. [what is organic matter? inorganic? of what does organic matter consist? inorganic? how do plants obtain their organic food? how their inorganic? how is ammonia supplied? carbonic acid?] organic matter is that which burns away in the fire. inorganic matter is the ash left after burning. the organic matter of plants consists of three gases, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, and one solid substance carbon (or charcoal). the inorganic matter of plants consists of potash, soda, lime, magnesia, sulphuric acid, phosphoric acid, chlorine, silica, oxide of iron, and oxide of manganese. plants obtain their organic food as follows:--oxygen and hydrogen from water, nitrogen from some compound containing nitrogen (chiefly from ammonia), and carbon from the atmosphere where it exists as carbonic acid--a gas. they obtain their inorganic food from the soil. the water which supplies oxygen and hydrogen to plants is readily obtained without the assistance of manures. ammonia is obtained from the atmosphere, by being absorbed by rain and carried into the soil, and it enters plants through their roots. it may be artificially supplied in the form of animal manure with profit. carbonic acid is absorbed from the atmosphere by leaves, and decomposed in the green parts of plants under the influence of daylight; the carbon is retained, and the oxygen is returned to the atmosphere. [when plants are destroyed by combustion or decay, what becomes of their constituents? how does the inorganic matter enter the plant? are the alkalies soluble in their pure forms? which one of them is injurious when too largely present? how may sulphuric acid be supplied? is phosphoric acid important? how must silica be treated? from what source may we obtain chlorine?] when plants are destroyed by decay, or burning, their organic constituents pass away as water, ammonia, carbonic acid, etc., ready again to be taken up by other plants. the inorganic matters in the soil can enter the plant only when dissolved in water. _potash_, _soda_, _lime_, and _magnesia_, are soluble in their pure forms. magnesia is injurious when present in too large quantities. _sulphuric_ acid is often necessary as a manure, and is usually most available in the form of sulphate of lime or plaster. it is also valuable in its pure form to prevent the escape of ammonia from composts. _phosphoric_ acid is highly important, from its frequent deficiency in worn-out soils. it is available only under certain conditions which will be described in the section on manures. _silica_ is the base of common sand, and must be united to an alkali before it can be used by the plant, because it is insoluble except when so united. _chlorine_ is a constituent of common salt (chloride of sodium), and from this source may be obtained in sufficient quantities for manurial purposes. [what is the difference between _per_oxide and _prot_oxide of iron? how must the food of plants be supplied? what takes place after it enters the plant? what name is given to the compounds thus formed? how are proximates divided? which class constitutes the largest part of the plant? of what are animals composed, and how do they obtain the materials from which to form their growth?] _oxide of iron_ is iron rust. there are two oxides of iron, the _peroxide_ (red) and the _protoxide_ (black). the former is a fertilizer, and the latter poisons plants. _oxide of manganese_ is often absent from the ashes of our cultivated plants. the food of plants, both organic and inorganic, must be supplied in certain proportions, and at the time when it is required. in the plant, this food undergoes such chemical changes as are necessary to growth. the compounds formed by these chemical combinations are called _proximates_. proximates are of two classes, those not containing nitrogen, and those which do contain it. the first class constitute nearly the whole plant. the second class, although small in quantity, are of the greatest importance to the farmer, as from them all animal muscle is made. animals, like plants, are composed of both organic and inorganic matter, and their bodies are obtained directly or indirectly from plants. [what parts of the animal belong to the first class of proximates? what to the second? what is necessary to the perfect development of animals? why are seeds valuable for working animals? what other important use, in animal economy, have proximates of the first class? under what circumstances is animal fat decomposed?] the first class of proximates in animals comprise the fat, and like tissues. the second class form the muscle, hair, gelatine of the bones, etc. in order that they may be perfectly developed, animals must eat both classes of proximates, and in the proportions required by their natures. they require the phosphate of lime and other inorganic food which exist in plants. seeds are the best adapted to the uses of working animals, because they are rich in all kinds of food required. aside from their use in the formation of _fat_, proximates of the first class are employed in the lungs, as fuel to keep up animal heat, which is produced (as in fire and decay) by the decomposition of these substances. when the food is insufficient for the purposes of heat, the animal's own fat is decomposed, and carried to the lungs as fuel. the stems, roots, branches, etc., of most plants consist principally of _woody fibre_. their seeds, and sometimes their roots, contain considerable quantities of _starch_. [name the parts of the plant in which the different proximates exist. state what you know about flour. do we know that different plants have ashes of different composition?] the _protein_ and the _oils_ of most plants exist most largely in the _seeds_. the location of the proximates, as well as of the inorganic parts of the plant, show a remarkable reference to the purposes of growth, and to the wants of the animal world, as is noticed in the difference between the construction of the straw and that of the kernel of wheat. the reason why the fine flour now made is not so healthfully nutritious as that which contained more of the coarse portions, is that it is robbed of a large proportion of protein and phosphate of lime, while it contains an undue amount of starch, which is available only to form fat, and to supply fuel to the lungs. different plants have ashes of different composition. thus--one may take from the soil large quantities of potash, another of phosphoric acid, and another of lime. by understanding these differences, we shall be able so to regulate our rotations, that the soil may not be called on to supply more of one ingredient than of another, and thus it may be kept in balance. [how are farmers to be benefited by such knowledge?] the facts contained in this chapter are the _alphabet of agriculture_, and the learner should not only become perfectly familiar with them, but should also clearly understand the _reasons_ why they are true, before proceeding further. section second. the soil. chapter i. formation and character of the soil. [what is a necessary condition of growth?] in the foregoing section, we have studied the character of plants and the laws which govern their growth. we learned that one necessary condition for growth is a fertile soil, and therefore we will examine the nature of different soils, in order that we may understand the relations between them and plants. [what is a fixed character of soils? how is the chemical character of the soil to be ascertained? what do we first learn in analyzing a soil? how do the proportions of organic or inorganic parts of soils compare with those of plants? of what does the organic part of soils consist?] the soil is not to be regarded as a mysterious mass of dirt, whereon crops are produced by a mysterious process. well ascertained scientific knowledge has proved beyond question that all soils, whether in america or asia, whether in maine or california, have certain fixed properties, which render them fertile or barren, and the science of agriculture is able to point out these characteristics in all cases, so that we can ascertain from a scientific investigation what would be the chances for success in cultivating any soil which we examine. the soil is a great chemical compound, and its chemical character is ascertained (as in the case of plants) by analyzing it, or taking it apart. we first learn that fertile soils contain both organic and inorganic matter; but, unlike the plant, they usually possess much more of the latter than of the former. in the plant, the organic matter constitutes the most considerable portion of the whole. in the soil, on the contrary, it usually exists in very small quantities, while the inorganic portions constitute nearly the whole bulk. [can the required proportion be definitely indicated? from what source is the inorganic part of soils derived? do all soils decompose with equal facility? how does frost affect rocks? does it affect soils in the same way?] the organic part of soils consists of the same materials that constitute the organic part of the plants, and it is in reality decayed vegetable and animal matter. it is not necessary that this organic part of the soil should form any particular proportion of the whole, and indeed we find it varying from one and a half to fifty, and sometimes, in peaty soils, to over seventy per cent. all fertile soils contain some organic matter, although it seems to make but little difference in fertility, whether it be ten or fifty per cent. the inorganic part of soils is derived from the crumbling of rocks. some rocks (such as the slates in central new york) decompose, and crumble rapidly on being exposed to the weather; while granite, marble, and other rocks will last for a long time without perceptible change. the _causes_ of this crumbling are various, and are not unimportant to the agriculturist; as by the same processes by which his soil was formed, he can increase its depth, or otherwise improve it. this being the case, we will in a few words explain some of the principal pulverizing agents. . the action of frost. when water lodges in the crevices of rocks, and _freezes_, it expands, and bursts the rock, on the same principle as causes it to break a pitcher in winter. this power is very great, and by its assistance, large cannon may be burst. of course the action of frost is the same on a small scale as when applied to large masses of matter, and, therefore, we find that when water freezes in the _pores_[m] of rocks or stones, it separates their particles and causes them to crumble. the same rule holds true with regard to stiff clay soils. if they are _ridged_ in autumn, and left with a rough surface exposed to the frosts of winter, they will become much lighter, and can afterwards be worked with less difficulty. [what is the effect of water on certain rocks? how are some rocks affected by exposure to the atmosphere? give an instance of this.] . the action of water. many kinds of rock become so soft on being soaked with water, that they readily crumble. . the chemical changes of the constituents of the rock. many kinds of rock are affected by exposure to the atmosphere, in such a manner, that changes take place in their chemical character, and cause them to fall to pieces. the red kellis of new jersey (a species of sandstone), is, when first quarried, a very hard stone, but on exposure to the influences of the atmosphere, it becomes so soft that it may be easily crushed between the thumb and finger. [what is the similarity between the composition of soils and the rocks from which they were formed? what does feldspar rock yield? talcose slate? marls? does a soil formed entirely from rock contain organic matter? how is it affected by the growth of plants?] other actions, of a less simple kind, exert an influence on the stubbornness of rocks, and cause them to be resolved into soils.[n] of course, the composition of the soil must be similar to that of the rock from which it was formed; and, consequently, if we know the chemical character of the rock, we can tell whether the soil formed from it can be brought under profitable cultivation. thus feldspar, on being pulverized, yields potash; talcose slate yields magnesia; marls yield lime, etc. the soil formed entirely from rock, contains, of course, no organic matter.[o] still it is capable of bearing plants of a certain class, and when these die, they are deposited in the soil, and thus form its organic portions, rendering it capable of supporting those plants which furnish food for animals. thousands of years must have been occupied in preparing the earth for habitation by man. as the inorganic or mineral part of the soil is usually the largest, we will consider it first. as we have stated that this portion is formed from rocks, we will examine their character, with a view to showing the different qualities of soils. [what is the general rule concerning the composition of rocks? do these distinctions affect the fertility of soils formed from them? what do we mean by the mechanical character of the soil? is its fertility indicated by its mechanical character?] as a general rule, it may be stated that _all rocks are either sandstones, limestones, or clays; or a mixture of two or more of these ingredients_. hence we find that all mineral soils are either _sandy_, _calcareous_, (limey), or _clayey_; or consist of a mixture of these, in which one or another usually predominates. thus, we speak of a sandy soil, a clay soil, etc. these distinctions (sandy, clayey, loamy, etc.) are important in considering the _mechanical_ character of the soil, but have little reference to its fertility. by _mechanical_ character, we mean those qualities which affect the ease of cultivation--excess or deficiency of water, ability to withstand drought, etc. for instance, a heavy clay soil is difficult to plow--retains water after rains, and bakes quite hard during drought; while a light sandy soil is plowed with ease, often allows water to pass through immediately after rains, and becomes dry and powdery during drought. notwithstanding those differences in their mechanical character, both soils may be very fertile, or one more so than the other, without reference to the clay and sand which they contain, and which, to _our observation_, form their leading characteristics. the same facts exist with regard to a loam, a calcareous (or limey) soil, or a vegetable mould. their mechanical texture is not essentially an index to their fertility, nor to the manures required to enable them to furnish food to plants. it is true, that each kind of soil appears to have some general quality of fertility or barrenness which is well known to practical men, yet this is not founded on the fact that the clay or the sand, or the vegetable matter, enter more largely into the constitution of plants than they do when they are not present in so great quantities, but on certain other facts which will be hereafter explained. [what is a sandy soil? a clay soil? a loamy soil? a marl? a calcareous soil? a peaty soil?] as the following names are used to denote the character of soils, in ordinary agricultural description, we will briefly explain their application: a _sandy soil_ is, of course, one in which sand largely predominates. _clay soil_, one where _clay_ forms a large proportion of the soil. _loamy soil_, where sand and clay are about equally mixed. _marl_ contains from five to twenty per cent. of carbonate of lime. _calcareous soil_ more than twenty per cent. _peaty soils_, of course, contain large quantities of organic matter.[p] [how large a part of the soil may be used as food by plants? what do we learn from the analyses of barren and fertile soils?] we will now take under consideration that part of the soil on which depends its ability to supply food to the plant. this portion rarely constitutes more than five or ten per cent. of the entire soil, sometimes less--and it has no reference to the sand, clay, and vegetable matters which they contain. from analyses of many fertile soils, and of others which are barren or of poorer quality, it has been ascertained that the presence of certain ingredients is necessary to fertility. this may be better explained by the assistance of the following table: ---------------------------+--------------+-------------+---------- in one hundred pounds. | soil fertile | good | barren. | without | wheat soil. | | manure. | | ---------------------------+--------------+-------------+---------- organic matter, | . | . | . silica (sand), | . | . | . alumina (clay), | . | . | . lime, | . | . | . magnesia, | . | . | . oxide of iron, | . | . | . oxide of manganese, | . | | . potash, | . | . | soda, | . | . | chlorine, | . | . | sulphuric acid, | . | . | phosphoric acid, | . | . ½ | carbonic acid, | . | | loss during the analysis | . | . ½ | . +--------------+-------------+---------- | . | . | . ---------------------------+--------------+-------------+---------- [what can you say of the soils represented in the table of analyses? what proportion of the fertilizing ingredients is required? if the soil represented in the third column contained all the ingredients required except potash and soda, would it be fertile? what would be necessary to make it so? what is the reason for this? what are the offices performed by the inorganic part of soils?] the soil represented in the first column might still be fertile with less organic matter, or with a larger proportion of clay (alumina), and less sand (silica). these affect its _mechanical_ character; but, if we look down the column, we notice that there are small quantities of lime, magnesia, and the other constituents of the ashes of plants (except ox. of manganese). it is not necessary that they should be present in the soil in the exact quantity named above, but _not one must be entirely absent, or greatly reduced in proportion_. by referring to the third column, we see that these ingredients are not all present, and the soil is barren. even if it were supplied with all but one or two, potash and soda for instance, it could not support a crop without the assistance of manures containing these alkalies. the reason for this must be readily seen, as we have learned that no plant can arrive at maturity without the necessary supply of materials required in the formation of the ash, and these materials can be obtained only from the soil; consequently, when they do not exist there, it must be barren. the inorganic part of soils has two distinct offices to perform. the clay and sand form a mass of material into which roots can penetrate, and thus plants are supported in their position. these parts also absorb heat, air and moisture to serve the purposes of growth, as we shall see in a future chapter. the minute portions of soil, which comprise the acids, alkalies, and neutrals, furnish plants with their ashes, and are the most necessary to the fertility of the soil. geology. [what is geology? is the same kind of rock always of the same composition? how do rocks differ?] the relation between the inorganic part of soils and the rocks from which it was formed, is the foundation of agricultural geology. geology may be briefly named the _science of rocks_. it would not be proper in an elementary work to introduce much of this study, and we will therefore simply state that the same kind of rock is of the same composition all over the world; consequently, if we find a soil in new england formed from any particular rock, and a soil from the same rock in asia, their natural fertility will be the same in both localities. some rocks consist of a mixture of different kinds of minerals; and some, consisting chiefly of one ingredient, are of different degrees of _hardness_. both of these changes must affect the character of the soil, but it may be laid down as rule that, _when the rocks of two locations are exactly alike, the soils formed from them will be of the same natural fertility, and in proportion as the character of rocks changes, in the same proportion will the soils differ_. [what rule may be given in relation to soils formed from the same or different rocks? are all soils formed from the rocks on which they lie? what instances can you give of this?] in most districts the soil is formed from the rock on which it lies; but this is not always the case. soils are often formed by deposits of matter brought by water from other localities. thus the alluvial banks of rivers consist of matters brought from the country through which the rivers have passed. the river nile, in egypt, yearly overflows its banks, and deposits large quantities of mud brought from the uninhabited upper countries. the prairies of the west owe a portion of their soil to deposits by water. swamps often receive the washings of adjacent hills; and, in these cases, their soil is derived from a foreign source. we might continue to enumerate instances of the relations between soils and the sources whence they originated, thus demonstrating more fully the importance of geology to the farmer; but it would be beyond the scope of this work, and should be investigated by scholars more advanced than those who are studying merely the _elements_ of agricultural science. the mind, in its early application to any branch of study, should not be charged with intricate subjects. it should master well the _rudiments_, before investigating those matters which should _follow_ such understanding. [in what light will plants and soils be regarded by those who understand them?] by pursuing the proper course, it is easy to learn all that is necessary to form a good foundation for a thorough acquaintance with the subject. if this foundation is laid thoroughly, the learner will regard plants and soils as old acquaintances, with whose formation and properties he is as familiar as with the construction of a building or simple machine. a simple spear of grass will become an object of interest, forming itself into a perfect plant, with full development of roots, stem, leaves, and seeds, by processes with which he feels acquainted. the soil will cease to be mere dirt; it will be viewed as a compound substance, whose composition is a matter of interest, and whose care is productive of intellectual pleasure. the commencement of study in any science must necessarily be wearisome to the young mind, but its more advanced stages amply repay the trouble of early exertions. footnotes: [m] the spaces between the particles. [n] in very many instances the crevices and seams of rocks are permeated by roots, which, by decaying and thus inducing the growth of other roots, cause these crevices to become filled with organic matter. this, by the absorption of moisture, may expand with sufficient power to burst the rock. [o] some rocks contain sulphur, phosphorus, etc., and these may, perhaps, be considered as organic matter. [p] these distinctions are not essential to be learned, but are often convenient. chapter ii. uses of organic matter. [what proportion of organic matter is required for fertility? how does the soil obtain its organic matter? how does the growth of clover, etc., affect the soil?] it will be recollected that, in addition to its mineral portions, the soil contains organic matter in varied quantities. it may be fertile with but one and a half per cent. of organic matter, and some peaty soils contain more than fifty per cent. or more than one half of the whole. the precise amount necessary cannot be fixed at any particular sum; perhaps five parts in a hundred would be as good a quantity as could be recommended. the soil obtains its organic matter in two ways. first, by the decay of roots and dead plants, also of leaves, which have been brought to it by wind, etc. second, by the application of organic manures. [when organic matter decays in the soil, what becomes of it? is charcoal taken up by plants? are humus and humic acid of great practical importance?] when a crop of clover is raised, it obtains its carbon from the atmosphere; and, if it be plowed under, and allowed to decay, a portion of this carbon is deposited in the soil. carbon constitutes nearly the whole of the dry weight of the clover, aside from the constituents of water; and, when we calculate the immense quantity of hay, and roots grown on an acre of soil in a single season, we shall find that the amount of carbon thus deposited is immense. if the clover had been removed, and the roots only left to decay, the amount of carbon deposited would still have been very great. the same is true in all cases where the crop is removed, and the roots remain to form the organic or vegetable part of the soil. while undergoing decomposition, a portion of this matter escapes in the form of gas, and the remainder chiefly assumes the form of carbon (or charcoal), in which form it will always remain, without loss, unless driven out by fire. if a bushel of charcoal be mixed with the soil now, it will be the same bushel of charcoal, neither more nor less, a thousand years hence, unless some influence is brought to bear on it aside from the growth of plants. it is true that, in the case of the decomposition of organic matter in the soil, certain compounds are formed, known under the general names of _humus_ and _humic acid_, which may, in a slight degree, affect the growth of plants, but their practical importance is of too doubtful a character to justify us in considering them. the application of manures, containing organic matter, such as peat, muck, animal manure, etc., supplies the soil with carbon on the same principle, and the decomposing matters also generate[q] carbonic acid gas while being decomposed. the agricultural value of carbon in the soil depends (as we have stated), not on the fact that it enters into the composition of plants, but on certain other important offices which it performs, as follows:-- [on what does the agricultural value of the carbon in the soil depend? why does it make the soil more retentive of manure? what is the experiment with the barrels of sand?] . it makes the soil more retentive of manures. . it causes it to appropriate larger quantities of the fertilizing gases of the atmosphere. . it gives it greater power to absorb moisture. . it renders it warmer. . carbon (or charcoal) makes the soil retentive of manures, because it has in itself a strong power to absorb, and retain[r] fertilizing matters. there is a simple experiment by which this power can be shown. ex.--take two barrels of pure beach sand, and mix with the sand in one barrel a few handfuls of charcoal dust, leaving that in the other pure. pour the brown liquor of the barn-yard through the pure sand, and it will pass out at the bottom unaltered. pour the same liquor through the barrel, containing the charcoal, and pure water will be obtained as a result. the reason for this is that the charcoal retains all of the impurities of the liquor, and allows only the water to pass through. charcoal is often employed to purify water for drinking, or for manufacturing purposes. [will charcoal purify water? if a piece of tainted meat, or a fishy duck be buried in a rich garden soil, what takes place? what is the reason of this? how does charcoal overcome offensive odors? how can you prove that charcoal absorbs the _mineral_ impurities of water?] a rich garden-soil contains large quantities of carbonaceous matter; and, if we bury in such a soil a piece of tainted meat or a fishy duck, it will, in a short time, be deprived of its odor, because the charcoal in the soil will entirely absorb it. carbon absorbs gases as well as the impurities of water; and, if a little charcoal be sprinkled over manure, or any other substance, emitting offensive odors, the gases escaping will be taken up by the charcoal, and the odor will cease. it has also the power of absorbing _mineral_ matters, which are contained in water. if a quantity of salt water be filtered through charcoal, the salt will be retained, and the water will pass through pure. we are now able to see how carbon renders the soil retentive of manures. st. manures, which resemble the brown liquor of barn-yards, have their fertilizing matters taken out, and retained by it. [how does charcoal in the soil affect the manures applied? why does charcoal in the soil cause it to appropriate the gases of the atmosphere? what fertilizing gases exist in the atmosphere? how are they carried to the soil? does the carbon retain them after they reach the soil? what can you say of the air circulating through the soil? how does carbon give the soil power to absorb moisture?] d. the gases arising from the decomposition (_rotting_) of manure are absorbed by it. d. the soluble mineral portions of manure, which might in some soils leach down with water, are arrested and retained at a point at which they can be made use of by the roots of plants. . charcoal in the soil causes it to appropriate larger quantities of the fertilizing gases of the atmosphere, on account of its power, as just named, to absorb gases. the atmosphere contains results, which have been produced by the breathing of animals and by the decomposition of various kinds of organic matter, which are exposed to atmospheric influences. these gases are chiefly ammonia and carbonic acid, both of which are largely absorbed by water, and consequently are contained in rain, snow, etc., which, as they enter the soil, give up these gases to the charcoal, and they there remain until required by plants. even the air itself, in circulating through the soil, gives up fertilizing gases to the carbon, which it may contain. . charcoal gives to the soil power to absorb moisture, because it is itself one of the best absorbents in nature; and it has been proved by accurate experiment that peaty soils absorb moisture with greater rapidity, and part with it more slowly than any other kind. [how does it render it warmer? is the heat produced by the decomposition of organic matter perceptible to our senses? is it so to the growing plant? what is another important part of the organic matter in the soil?] . carbon in the soil renders it warmer, because it darkens its color. black surfaces absorb more heat than light ones, and a black coat, when worn in the sun, is warmer than one of a lighter color. by mixing carbon with the soil, we darken its color, and render it capable of absorbing a greater amount of heat from the sun's rays. it will be recollected that, when vegetable matter decomposes in the soil, it produces certain gases (carbonic acid, etc.), which either escape into the atmosphere, or are retained in the soil for the use of plants. the production of these gases is always accompanied by _heat_, which, though scarcely perceptible to our senses, is perfectly so to the growing plant, and is of much practical importance. this will be examined more fully in speaking of manures. [how is it obtained by the soil? what offices does the organic matter in the soil perform?] another important part of the organic matter in the soil is that which contains _nitrogen_. this forms but a very small portion of the soil, but it is of the greatest importance to vegetables. as the nitrogen in food is of absolute necessity to the growth of animals, so the nitrogen in the soil is indispensable to the growth of cultivated plants. it is obtained by the soil in the form of ammonia (or nitric acid), from the atmosphere, or by the application of animal matter. in some cases, manures called _nitrates_[s] are used; and, in this manner, nitrogen is given to the soil. we have now learned that the organic matter in the soil performs the following offices:-- organic matter thoroughly decomposed is _carbon_, and has the various effects ascribed to this substance on p. . organic matter in process of decay produces carbonic acid, and sometimes ammonia in the soil; also its decay causes heat. organic matter containing _nitrogen_, such as animal substances, etc., furnish ammonia, and other nitrogenous substances to the roots of plants. footnotes: [q] produce. [r] by absorbing and retaining, we mean taking up and holding. [s] nitrates are compounds of nitric acid (which consists of nitrogen and oxygen), and alkaline substances. thus nitrate of potash (saltpetre), is composed of nitric acid and potash: nitrate of soda (cubical nitre), of nitric acid and soda. chapter iii. uses of inorganic matter. [what effect has clay besides the one already named? how does it compare with charcoal for this purpose?] the offices performed by the inorganic constituents of the soil are many and important. these, as well as the different conditions in which the bodies exist, are necessary to be thoroughly studied. those parts which constitute the larger proportion of the soil, namely the clay, sand, and limy portions, are useful for purposes which have been named in the first part of this section, while the _clay_ has an additional effect in the absorption of ammonia. for this purpose, it is as effectual as charcoal, the gases escaping from manures, as well as those existing in the atmosphere, and in rain-water, being arrested by clay as well as charcoal.[t] [what particular condition of inorganic matter is requisite for fertility? what is the fixed rule with regard to this? what is the condition of the alkalies in most of their combinations? of the acids? what is said of phosphate of lime?] the more minute ingredients of the soil--those which enter into the construction of plants--exist in conditions which are more or less favorable or injurious to vegetable growth. the principal condition necessary to fertility is _capacity to be dissolved_, it being (so far as we have been able to ascertain) a fixed rule, as was stated in the first section, that _no mineral substance can enter into the roots of a plant except it be dissolved in water_. the _alkalies_ potash, soda, lime, and magnesia, are in nearly all of their combinations in the soil sufficiently soluble for the purposes of growth. the _acids_ are, as will be recollected, sulphuric and phosphoric. these exist in the soil in combination with the alkalies, as sulphates and phosphates, which are more or less soluble under natural circumstances. phosphoric acid in combination with lime as phosphate of lime is but slightly soluble; but, when it exists in the compound known as _super_-phosphate of lime, it is much more soluble, and consequently enters into the composition of plants with much greater facility. this matter will be more fully explained in the section on manures. [how may silica be rendered soluble? what is the condition of chlorine in the soil? do peroxide and protoxide of iron affect plants in the same way? how would you treat a soil containing protoxide of iron? on what does the usefulness of all these matters in the soil depend?] the _neutrals_, silica, chlorine, oxide of iron, and oxide of manganese, deserve a careful examination. silica exists in the soil usually in the form of _sand,_ in which it is, as is well known, perfectly insoluble; and, before it can be used by plants, which often require it in large quantities, it must be made soluble, which is done by combining it with an alkali. for instance, if the silica in the soil is insoluble, we must make an application of an alkali, such as potash, which will unite with the silica, and form the silicate of potash, which is in the exact condition to be dissolved and carried into the roots of plants. chlorine in the soil is probably always in an available condition. oxide of iron exists, as has been previously stated, usually in the form of the _per_oxide (or red oxide). sometimes, however, it exists in the form of the _prot_oxide (or black oxide), which is poisonous to plants, and renders the soil unfertile. by loosening the soil in such a manner as to admit air and water, this compound takes up more oxygen, which renders it a peroxide, and makes it available for plants. the oxide of manganese is probably of little consequence. the usefulness of all of these matters in the soil depends on their _exposure_; if they are in the _interior_ of particles, they cannot be made use of; while, if the particles are so pulverized that their constituents are exposed, they become available, because water can immediately attack to dissolve, and carry them into roots. [what is one of the chief offices of plowing and hoeing? is the subsoil usually different from the surface soil? what circumstances have occasioned the difference? in what way?] this is one of the great offices of plowing and hoeing; the _lumps_ of soil being thereby more broken up and exposed to the action of atmospheric influences, which are often necessary to produce a fertile condition of soil, while the trituration of particles reduces them in size. subsoil. [may the subsoil be made to resemble the surface soil? may all soils be brought to the highest state of fertility? on what examination must improvement be based? what is the difference between the soil of some parts of massachusetts and that of the miami valley?] the subsoil is usually of a different character from the surface soil, but this difference is more often the result of circumstances than of formation. the surface soil from having been long cultivated has been more opened to the influences of the air than is the case with the subsoil, which has never been disturbed so as to allow the same action. again the growth of plants has supplied the surface soil with roots, which by decaying have given it organic matter, thus darkening its color, rendering it warmer, and giving greater ability to absorb heat and moisture, and to retain manures. all of these effects render the surface soil of a more fertile character than it was before vegetable growth commenced; and, where frequent cultivation and manures have been applied, a still greater benefit has resulted. in most instances the subsoil may by the same means be gradually improved in condition until it equals the surface soil in fertility. the means of producing this result, also farther accounts of its advantages, will be given under the head of _cultivation_ (sect. iv.) improvement. from what has now been said of the character of the soil, it must be evident that, as we know the _causes_ of fertility and barrenness, we may by the proper means improve the character of all soils which are not now in the highest state of fertility. chemical analysis will tell us the _composition_ of a soil, and an examination, such as any farmer may make, will inform us of its deficiencies in _mechanical_ character, and we may at once resort to the proper means to secure fertility. in some instances the soil may contain every thing that is required, but not in the necessary condition. for instance, in some parts of massachusetts, there are nearly _barren_ soils which show by analysis precisely the same chemical composition as the soil of the miami valley of ohio, one of the most _fertile_ in the world. the cause of this great difference in their agricultural capabilities, is that the miami soil has its particles finely pulverized; while in the massachusetts soil the ingredients are combined within particles (such as pebbles, etc.), where they are out of the reach of roots. [why do soils of the same degree of fineness sometimes differ in fertility? can soils always be rendered fertile with profit? can we determine the cost before commencing the work? what must be done before a soil can be cultivated understandingly? what must be done to keep up the quality of the soil?] in other cases, we find two soils, which are equally well pulverized, and which appear to be of the same character, having very different power to support crops. chemical analysis will show in these instances a difference of composition. all of these differences may be overcome by the use of the proper means. sometimes it could be done at an expense which would be justified by the result; and, at others, it might require too large an outlay to be profitable. it becomes a question of economy, not of ability, and science is able to estimate the cost. soil cannot be cultivated understandingly until it has been subjected to such an examination as will tell us exactly what is necessary to render it fertile. even after fertility is perfectly restored it requires thought and care to maintain it. the ingredients of the soil must be returned in the form of manures as largely as they are removed by the crop, or the supply will eventually become too small for the purposes of vegetation. footnotes: [t] it is due to our country, as well as to prof. mapes and others, who long ago explained this absorptive power of clay and carbon, to say that the subject was perfectly understood and practically applied in america a number of years before prof. way published the discovery in england as original. section third. manures. chapter i. character and varieties of manures. [what must a farmer know in order to avoid failures? can this be learned entirely from observation? what kind of action have manures? give examples of each of these. may mechanical effects be produced by chemical action? how does potash affect the soil?] to understand the science of _manures_ is the most important branch of practical farming. no baker would be called a good practical baker who kept his flour exposed to the sun and rain. no shoemaker would be called a good practical shoemaker, who used morocco for the soles of his shoes, and heavy leather for the uppers. no carpenter would be called a good practical carpenter, who tried to build a house without nails, or other fastenings. so with the farmer. he cannot be called a good practical farmer if he keeps the materials, from which he is to make plants, in such a condition, that they will have their value destroyed, uses them in the wrong places, or tries to put them together without having every thing present that is necessary. before he can avoid failures _with certainty_, he must know what manures are composed of, how they are to be preserved, where they are needed, and what kinds are required. true, he may from observation and experience, _guess_ at results, but he cannot _know_ that he is right until he has learned the facts above named. in this section of our work, we mean to convey some of the information necessary to this branch of _practical farming_. we shall adopt a classification of the subject somewhat different from that found in most works on manures, but the _facts_ are the same. the action of manures is either _mechanical_ or _chemical_, or a combination of both. for instance: some kinds of manure improve the mechanical character of the soil, such as those which loosen stiff clay soils, or others which render light sandy soils compact--these are called _mechanical_ manures. some again furnish food for plants--these are called _chemical_ manures. many mechanical manures produce their effects by means of chemical action. thus _potash_ combines chemically with sand in the soil. in so doing, it roughens the surfaces of the particles of sand, and renders the soil less liable to be compacted by rains. in this manner, it acts as a _mechanical_ manure. the compound of sand and potash,[u] as well as the potash alone, may enter into the composition of plants, and hence it is a _chemical_ manure. in other words, potash belongs to both classes described above. it is important that this distinction should be well understood by the learner, as the words "mechanical" and "chemical" in connection with manures will be made use of throughout the following pages. [what are absorbents? what kind of manure is charcoal?] there is another class of manures which we shall call _absorbents_. these comprise those substances which have the power of taking up fertilizing matters, and retaining them for the use of plants. for instance, _charcoal_ is an absorbent. as was stated in the section on soils, this substance is a retainer of all fertilizing gases and many minerals. other matters made use of in agriculture have the same effect. these absorbents will be spoken of more fully in their proper places. table. mechanical manures are those which improve the mechanical condition of soils. chemical " are those which serve as food for plants. absorbents are those substances which absorb and retain fertilizing matters. [into what classes may manures be divided? what are organic manures? inorganic? atmospheric?] manures may be divided into three classes, viz.: _organic_, _inorganic_, and _atmospheric_. organic manures comprise all _animal_ and _vegetable_ matters which are used to fertilize the soil, such as dung, muck, etc. inorganic manures are those which are of a purely _mineral_ character, such as lime, ashes, etc. atmospheric manures consist of those organic manures which are in the form of gases in the atmosphere, and which are absorbed by rains and carried to the soil. these are of immense importance. the ammonia and carbonic acid in the air are atmospheric manures. footnotes: [u] silicate of potash. chapter ii. excrements of animals. [of what is animal excrement composed? explain the composition of the food of animals. what does hay contain? to what does liebig compare the consumption of food by animals, and why?] the first organic manure which we shall examine, is animal _excrement_. this is composed of those matters which have been eaten by the animal as food, and have been thrown off as solid or liquid manure. in order that we may know of what they consist, we must refer to the composition of food and examine the process of digestion. the food of animals, we have seen to consist of both organic and inorganic matter. the organic part may be divided into two classes, _i. e._, that portion which contains nitrogen--such as gluten, albumen, etc., and that which does not contain nitrogen--such as starch, sugar, oil, etc. the inorganic part of food may also be divided into _soluble_ matter and _insoluble_ matter. digestion and its products. [of what does that part of dung consist which resembles soot? what else does the dung contain? in what manner does the digested part of food escape from the body?] let us now suppose that we have a full-grown ox, which is not increasing in any of his parts, but only consumes food to keep up his respiration, and to supply the natural wastes of his body. to this ox we will feed a ton of hay which contains organic matter, with and without nitrogen, and soluble and insoluble inorganic substances. now let us try to follow it through its changes in the animal, and observe its destination. liebig compares the consumption of food by animals to the imperfect burning of wood in a stove, where a portion of the fuel is resolved into gases and ashes (that is, it is completely burned), and another portion, which is not thoroughly burned, passes off as _soot_. in the animal action in question, the food undergoes changes which are similar to this burning of wood. a part of the food is _digested_ and taken up by the blood, while another portion remains undigested, and passes the bowels as solid dung--corresponding to soot. this part of the dung then, we see is merely so much of the food as passes through the system without being materially changed. its nature is easily understood. it contains organic and inorganic matter in nearly the same condition as they existed in the hay. they have been rendered finer and softer, but their chemical character is not materially altered. the dung also contains small quantities of nitrogenous matter, which _leaked out_, as it were, from the stomach and intestines. the digested food, however, undergoes further changes which affect its character, and it escapes from the body in three ways--_i. e._, through the lungs, through the bladder, and through the bowels. it will be recollected from the first section of this book, p. , that the carbon in the blood of animals, unites with the oxygen of the air drawn into the lungs, and is thrown off in the breath as carbonic acid. the hydrogen and oxygen unite to form a part of the water which constitutes the moisture of the breath. [explain the escape of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. what becomes of the nitrogenous parts? how is the _soluble_ ash of the digested food parted with? the insoluble? if any portions of the food are not returned in the dung, how are they disposed of?] that portion of the organic part of the hay which has been taken up by the blood of the ox, and which does not contain nitrogen (corresponding to the _first_ class of proximates, as described in sect. i), is emitted through the lungs. it consists, as will be recollected, of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and these assume, in respiration, the form of carbonic acid and water. the organic matter of the digested hay, in the blood, which contains nitrogen (corresponding to the _second_ class of proximates, described in sect. i), goes to the _bladder_, where it assumes the form of urea--a constituent of urine or liquid manure. we have now disposed of the imperfectly digested food (dung), and of the _organic_ matter which was taken up by the blood. all that remains to be examined is the inorganic or mineral matter in the blood, which would have become _ashes_, if the hay had been burned. the _soluble_ part of this inorganic matter passes into the bladder, and forms the _inorganic part of urine_. the _insoluble_ part passes the bowels, in connection with the dung. [how is their place supplied? is food put out of existence when it is fed to animals? what does the solid dung contain? liquid manure? the breath?] if any of the food taken up by the blood is not returned as above stated, it goes to form fat, muscle, hair, bones, or some other part of the animal, and as he is not growing (not increasing in weight) an equivalent amount of the body of the animal goes to the manure to take the place of the part retained.[v] we now have our subject in a form to be readily understood. we learn that when food is given to animals it is not _put out of existence_, but is merely _changed in form_; and that in the impurities of the breath, we have a large portion of those parts of the food which plants obtain from air and from water; while the solid and liquid excrements contain all that was taken by the plants from the soil and manures. the solid dung contains the undigested parts of the food, the _insoluble_ parts of the ash, and the nitrogenous matters which have _escaped_ from the digestive organs. "liquid manure" the nitrogenous or _second class_ of proximates of the digested food, and the _soluble_ parts of the ash. the breath contains the _first class_ of proximates, those which contain carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, but _no nitrogen_.[w] footnotes: [v] this account of digestion is not, perhaps, strictly accurate in a physiological point of view, but it is sufficiently so to give an elementary understanding of the character of excrements as manures. [w] the excrements of animals contain more or less of sulphur, and sometimes small quantities of phosphorus. chapter iii. waste of manure. [what are the first causes of loss of manure? what is _evaporation_?] the loss of manure is a subject which demands most serious attention. until within a few years, little was known about the true character of manures, and consequently, of the importance of protecting them against loss. the first causes of waste are _evaporation_ and _leaching_. evaporation. [name a solid body which evaporates. what takes place when a dead animal is exposed to the atmosphere for a sufficient time? what often assist the evaporation of solids?] evaporation is the changing of a solid or liquid body to a vapory form. thus common smelling salts, a solid, if left exposed, passes into the atmosphere in the form of a gas or vapor. water, a liquid, evaporates, and becomes a vapor in the atmosphere. this is the case with very many substances, and in organic nature, both solid and liquid, they are liable to assume a gaseous form, and become mixed with the atmosphere. they are not destroyed, but are merely changed in form. as an instance of this action, suppose an animal to die and to decay on the surface of the earth. after a time, the flesh will entirely disappear, but is not lost. it no longer exists as the flesh of an animal, but its carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, still exist in the air. they have been liberated from the attractions which held them together, and have passed away; but (as we already know from what has been said in a former section) they are ready to be again taken up by plants, and pressed into the service of life. the evaporation of liquids may take place without the aid of any thing but heat; still, in the case of solids, it is often assisted by decay and combustion, which break up the bonds that hold the constituents of bodies together, and thus enable them to return to the atmosphere, from which they were originally derived. [what is the cause of odor? when we perceive an odor, what is taking place? why do manures give off offensive odors? how may we detect ammonia escaping from manure?] it must be recollected that every thing, which has an _odor_ (or can be smelled), is evaporating. the odor is caused by parts of the body floating in the air, and acting on the nerves of the nose. this is an invariable rule; and, when we perceive an odor, we may be sure that parts of the material, from which it emanates, are escaping. if we perceive the odor of an apple, it is because parts of the volatile oils of the apple enter the nose. the same is true when we smell hartshorn, cologne, etc. manures made by animals have an offensive odor, simply because volatile parts of the manure escape into the air, and are therefore made perceptible. all organic parts in turn become volatile, assuming a gaseous form as they decompose. we do not see the gases rising, but there are many ways by which we can detect them. if we wave a feather over a manure heap, from which ammonia is escaping, the feather having been recently dipped in manure, white fumes will appear around the feather, being the muriate of ammonia formed by the union of the escaping gas with the muriatic acid. not only ammonia, but also carbonic acid, and other gases which are useful to vegetation escape, and are given to the winds. indeed it may be stated in few words that all of the organic part of _plants_ (all that was obtained from the air, water, and ammonia), constituting more than nine tenths of their dry weight, may be evaporated by the assistance of decay or combustion. the organic part of _manures_ may be lost in the same manner; and, if the process of decomposition be continued long enough, nothing but a mass of mineral matter will remain, except perhaps a small quantity of carbon which has not been resolved into carbonic acid. [what remains after manure has been long exposed to decomposition? what gaseous compounds are formed by the decomposition of manures?] the proportion of solid manure lost by evaporation (made by the assistance of decay), is a very large part of the whole. manure cannot be kept a single day in its natural state without losing something. it commences to give out an offensive odor immediately, and this odor is occasioned, as was before stated, by the loss of some of its fertilizing parts. animal manure contains, as will be seen by reference to p. , all of the substances contained in plants, though not always in the correct relative proportions to each other. when decomposition commences, the carbon unites with the oxygen of the air, and passes off as carbonic acid; the hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water (which evaporates), and the _nitrogen is mostly resolved into ammonia, which escapes into the atmosphere_. [describe fire-fanging. what takes place when animal manure is exposed in an open barn-yard? what does liquid manure lose by evaporation?] if manure is thrown into heaps, it often ferments so rapidly as to produce sufficient heat to set fire to some parts of the manure, and cause it to be thrown off with greater rapidity. this may be observed in nearly all heaps of animal excrement. when they have lain for some time in mild weather, gray streaks of _ashes_ are often to be seen in the centre of the pile. the organic part of the manure having been _burned_ away, nothing but the ash remains,--this is called _fire-fanging_. manures kept in cellars without being mixed with refuse matter are subject to the same losses. when kept in the yard, they are still liable to be lost by evaporation. they are here often saturated with water, and this water in its evaporation carries away the ammonia, and carbonic acid which it has obtained from the rotting mass. the evaporation of the water is rapidly carried on, on account of the great extent of surface. the whole mass is spongy, and soaks the liquids up from below (through hollow straws, etc.), to be evaporated at the surface on the same principle as causes the wick of a lamp to draw up the oil to supply fuel for the flame. liquid manure containing large quantities of nitrogen, and forming much ammonia, is also liable to lose all of its organic part from evaporation (and fermentation), so that it is rendered as much less valuable as is the solid dung.[x] [when does the waste of exposed manure commence? what does economy of manure require? what is the effect of leaching? give an illustration of leaching.] from these remarks, it may be justly inferred that a very large portion of the _value_ of solid and liquid manure as ordinarily kept is lost by evaporation in a sufficient length of time, depending on circumstances, whether it be three months or several years. the wasting commences as soon as the manure is dropped, and continues, except in very cold weather, until the destruction is complete. hence we see that true economy requires that the manures of the stable, stye, and poultry-house, should be protected from evaporation (as will be hereafter described), as soon as possible after they are made. leaching. the subject of _leaching_ is as important in considering the _inorganic_ parts of manures as evaporation is to the organic, while leaching also affects the organic gases, they being absorbed by water in a great degree. a good illustration of leaching is found in the manufacture of potash. when water is poured over wood-ashes, it dissolves their potash which it carries through in solution, making ley. if ley is boiled to dryness, it leaves the potash in a solid form, proving that this substance had been dissolved by the water and removed from the insoluble parts of the ashes. [how does water affect decomposing manures? does continued decomposition continue to prepare material to be leached away? how far from the surface of the soil may organic constituents be carried by water?] in the same way water in passing through manures takes up the soluble portions of the ash as fast as liberated by decomposition, and carries them into the soil below; or, if the water runs off from the surface, they accompany it. in either case they are lost to the manure. there is but a small quantity of ash exposed for leaching in recent manures; but, as the decomposition of the organic part proceeds, it continues to develope it more and more (in the same manner as burning would do, only slower), thus preparing fresh supplies to be carried off with each shower. in this way, while manures are largely injured by evaporation, the soluble inorganic parts are removed by water until but a small remnant of its original fertilizing properties remains. [what arrests their farther progress? what would be the effect of allowing these matters to filter downwards? what does evaporation remove from manure? leaching?] it is a singular fact concerning leaching, that water is able to carry no part of the organic constituents of vegetables more than about thirty-four inches below the surface in a fertile soil. they would probably be carried to an unlimited distance in pure sand, as it contains nothing which is capable of arresting them; but, in most soils, the clay and carbon which they contain retain all of the ammonia; also nearly all of the matters which go to form the inorganic constituents of plants within about the above named distance from the surface of the soil. if such were not the case, the fertility of the earth must soon be destroyed, as all of those elements which the soil must supply to growing plants would be carried down out of the reach of roots, and leave the world a barren waste, its surface having lost its elements of fertility, while the downward filtration of these would render the water of wells unfit for our use. now, however, they are all retained near the surface of the soil, and the water issues from springs comparatively pure. evaporation removes from manure-- carbon, in the form of carbonic acid. hydrogen and oxygen, in the form of water. nitrogen, in the form of ammonia. leaching removes from manure-- the soluble and most valuable parts of the ash in solution in water, besides carrying away some of the named above forms of organic matter. footnotes: [x] it should be recollected that every bent straw may act as a syphon, and occasion much loss of liquid manure. chapter iv. absorbents. [what substances are called absorbents? what is the most important of these? what substances are called charcoal in agriculture? how is vegetable matter rendered useful as charcoal?] before considering farther the subject of animal excrement, it is necessary to examine a class of manures known as _absorbents_. these comprise all matters which have the power of absorbing, or soaking up, as it were, the gases which arise from the evaporation of solid and liquid manures, and retaining them until required by plants. the most important of these is undoubtedly _carbon_ or charcoal. charcoal. _charcoal_, in an agricultural sense, means all forms of carbon, whether as peat, muck, charcoal dust from the spark-catchers of locomotives, charcoal hearths, river and swamp deposits, leaf mould, decomposed spent tanbark or sawdust, etc. in short, if any vegetable matter is decomposed with the partial exclusion of air (so that there shall not be oxygen enough supplied to unite with all of the carbon), a portion of its carbon remains in the exact condition to serve the purposes of charcoal. [what is the first-named effect of charcoal? the second? third? fourth? explain the first action.] the offices performed in the soil by carbonaceous matter were fully explained in a former section (p. , sect. ), and we will now examine merely its action with regard to manures. when properly applied to manures, in compost, it has the following effects: . it absorbs and retains the fertilizing gases evaporating from decomposing matters. . it acts as a _divisor_, thereby reducing the strength (or intensity) of powerful manures--thus rendering them less likely to injure the roots of plants; and also increases their bulk, so as to prevent _fire fanging_ in composts. . it in part prevents the leaching out of the soluble parts of the ash. . it keeps the compost moist. the first-named office of charcoal, _i. e._, absorbing and retaining gases, is one of the utmost importance. it is this quality that gives to it so high a position in the opinion of all who have used it. as was stated in the section on soils, carbonaceous matter seems to be capable of absorbing every thing which may be of use to vegetation. it is a grand purifier, and while it prevents offensive odors from escaping, it is at the same time storing its pores with food for the nourishment of plants. [explain its action as a divisor. how does charcoal protect composts against injurious action of rains? how does it keep them moist?] d. in its capacity as a _divisor_ for manures, charcoal should be considered as excellent in all cases, especially to use with strongly concentrated (or heating) animal manures. these, when applied in their natural state to the soil, are very apt to injure young roots by the violence of their action. when mixed with a divisor, such manures are _diluted_, made less active, and consequently less injurious. in composts, manures are liable, as has been before stated, to become burned by the resultant heat of decomposition; this is called _fire fanging_, and is prevented by the liberal use of divisors, because, by increasing the bulk, the heat being diffused through a larger mass, becomes less intense. the same principle is exhibited in the fact that it takes more fire to boil a cauldron of water than a tea-kettle full. d. charcoal has much power to arrest the passage of mineral matters in solution; so much so, that compost heaps, well supplied with muck, are less affected by rains than those not so supplied. all composts, however, should be kept under cover. th. charcoal keeps the compost moist from the ease with which it absorbs water, and its ability to withstand drought. [what source of carbon is within the reach of most farmers? what do we mean by muck? of what does it consist? how does it differ in quality?] with these advantages before us, we must see the importance of an understanding of the modes for obtaining charcoal. many farmers are so situated that they can obtain sufficient quantities of charcoal dust. others have not equal facilities. nearly all, however, can obtain _muck_, and to this we will now turn our attention. muck, and the lime and salt mixture. [what is the first step in preparing muck for decomposition? with what proportion of the lime and salt mixture should it be composted? why should this compost be made under cover? what is this called after decomposition? why should we not use muck immediately after taking it from the swamp?] by _muck_, we mean the vegetable deposits of swamps and rivers. it consists of decayed organic substances, mixed with more or less earth. its principal constituent is _carbon_, in different degrees of development, which has remained after the decomposition of vegetable matter. muck varies largely in its quality, according to the amount of carbon which it contains, and the perfection of its decomposition. the best muck is usually found in comparatively dry locations, where the water which once caused the deposit has been removed. muck which has been long in this condition, is usually better decomposed than that which is saturated with water. the muck from swamps, however, may soon be brought to the best condition. it should be thrown out, if possible, at least one year before it is required for use (a less time may suffice, except in very cold climates) and left, in small heaps or ridges, to the action of the weather, which will assist in pulverizing it, while, from having its water removed, its decomposition goes on more rapidly. after the muck has remained in this condition a sufficient length of time, it may be removed to the barn-yard and composted with the lime and salt mixture (described on page ) in the proportion of one cord of muck to four bushels of the mixture. this compost ought to be made under cover, lest the rain leach out the constituents of the mixture, and thus occasion loss; at the end of a month or more, the muck in the compost will have been reduced to a fine pulverulent mass, nearly equal to charcoal dust for application to animal excrement. when in this condition it is called _prepared_ muck, by which name it will be designated in the following pages. muck should not be used immediately after being taken from the swamp, as it is then almost always _sour_, and is liable to produce sorrel. its _sourness_ is due to _acids_ which it contains, and these must be rectified by the application of an alkali, or by long exposure to the weather, before the muck is suitable for use. lime and salt mixture. [what proportions of lime and salt are required for the decomposing mixture? explain the process of making it. why should it be made under cover?] the lime and salt mixture, used in the decomposition of muck, is made in the following manner: recipe.--take _three_ bushels of shell lime, _hot from the kiln_, or as fresh as possible, and slake it with water in which _one_ bushel of salt has been dissolved. care must be taken to use only so much water as is necessary to dissolve the salt, as it is difficult to induce the lime to absorb a larger quantity. in dissolving the salt, it is well to hang it in a basket in the upper part of the water, as the salt water will immediately settle towards the bottom (being heavier), and allow the freshest water to be nearest to the salt. in this way, the salt may be all dissolved, and thus make the brine used to slake the lime. it may be necessary to apply the brine at intervals of a day or two, and to stir the mass often, as the amount of water is too great to be readily absorbed. this mixture should be made under cover, as, if exposed, it would obtain moisture from rain or dew, which would prevent the use of all the brine. another objection to its exposure to the weather is its great liability to be washed away by rains. it should be at least ten days old before being used, and would probably be improved by an age of three or four months, as the chemical changes it undergoes will require some time to be completed. [explain the character of this mixture as represented in the diagram. (black board.)] the character of this mixture may be best described by the following diagram:-- we have originally-- +----------------------------------+ | | lime-+ salt | consisting of | +---chlorine } chloride | | and } of | | +-sodium. } sodium. | | | --carbonic acid | | | and | | | --oxygen in the air. +-chloride of lime.-+ | +-carbonate of soda. [y] the lime unites with the chlorine of the salt and forms _chloride of lime_. the sodium, after being freed from the chlorine, unites with the oxygen of the air and forms soda, which, combining with the carbonic acid of the atmosphere, forms carbonate of soda. chloride of lime and carbonate of soda are better agents in the decomposition of muck than pure salt and lime; and, as these compounds are the result of the mixture, much benefit ensues from the operation. when _shell_ lime cannot be obtained, thomaston, or any other very pure lime, will answer, though care must be taken that it do not contain much magnesia. lime. [what effect has lime on muck? on what does the energy of this effect depend? why should a compost of muck and lime be protected from rain?] muck may be decomposed by the aid of other materials. _lime_ is very efficient, though not as much so as when combined with salt. the action of lime, when applied to the muck, depends very much on its condition. air-slaked lime (carbonate of lime), and hydrate of lime, slaked with water, have but a limited effect compared with lime freshly burned and applied in a caustic (or pure) form. when so used, however, the compost should not be exposed to rains, as this would have a tendency to make _mortar_ which would harden it. potash. [is potash valuable for this use? from what sources may potash be obtained? in what proportion should ashes be applied to muck? sparlings?] _potash_ is a very active agent in decomposing vegetable matter, and may be used with great advantage, especially where an analysis of the soil which is to be manured shows a deficiency of potash. _unleached_ wood ashes are generally the best source from which to obtain this, and from five to twenty-five bushels of these mixed with one cord of muck will produce the desired result.[z] the sparlings (or refuse) of potash warehouses may often be purchased at sufficiently low rates to be used for this purpose, and answer an excellent end. they may be applied at the rate of from twenty to one hundred pounds to each cord of muck. * * * * * by any of the foregoing methods, muck may be _prepared_ for use in composting. footnotes: [y] there is, undoubtedly, some of this lime which does not unite with the chlorine; this, however, is still as valuable as any lime. [z] _leached_ ashes will not supply the place of these, as the leaching has deprived them of their potash. chapter v. composting stable manure. [what principles should regulate us in composting? in what condition is solid dung of value as a fertilizer? what do we aim to do in composting?] in composting stable manure in the most economical manner, the evaporation of the organic parts and the leaching of the ashy (and other) portions must be avoided, while the condition of the mass is such as to admit of the perfect decomposition of the manure. solid manures in their fresh state are of but very little use to plants. it is only as they are decomposed, and have their nitrogen turned into ammonia, and their other ingredients resolved into the condition required by plants, that they are of much value as fertilizers. we have seen that, if this decomposition takes place without proper precautions being made, the most valuable parts of the manure would be lost. nor would it be prudent to keep manures from decomposing until they are applied to the soil, for then they are not immediately ready for use, and time is lost. by composting, we aim to save every thing while we prepare the manures for immediate use. shelter. [what is the first consideration for composts? describe the arrangement of floor.] the first consideration in preparing for composting, is to provide proper shelter. this may be done either by means of a shed or by arranging a cellar under the stables, or in any other manner that may be dictated by circumstances. it is no doubt better to have the manure shed enclosed so as to make it an effectual protection; this however is not absolutely necessary if the roof project far enough over the compost to shelter it from the sun's rays and from driving rains. the importance of some protection of this kind, is evident from what has already been said, and indeed it is impossible to make an economical use of manures without it. the trifling cost of building a shed, or preparing a cellar, is amply repaid in the benefit resulting from their uses. the floor. the _floor_ or foundation on which to build the compost deserves some consideration. it may be of plank tightly fitted, a hard bed of clay, or better, a cemented surface. whatever material is used in its construction (and stiff clay mixed with water and beaten compactly down answers an excellent purpose), the floor must have such an inclination as will cause it to discharge water only at one point. that is, one part of the edge must be lower than the rest of the floor, which must be so shaped that water will run towards this point from every part of it; then--the floor being water-tight--all of the liquids of the compost may be collected in a tank. [how should the tank be attached?] this _tank_ used to collect the liquids of the manure may be made by sinking a barrel or hogshead (according to the size of the heap) in the ground at the point where it is required, or in any other convenient manner. in the tank a pump of cheap construction may be placed, to raise the liquid to a sufficient height to be conveyed by a trough to the centre of the heap, and there distributed by means of a perforated board with raised edges, and long enough to reach across the heap in any direction. by altering the position of this board, the liquid may be carried evenly over the whole mass. the appearance of the apparatus required for composting, and the compost laid up, may be better shown by the following figure. [illustration: fig. . _a_, tank; _b_, pump; _c_ & _g_, perforated board; _d_, muck; _e_, manure; _f_, floor.] [how is the compost made?] the compost is made by laying on the floor ten or twelve inches of muck, and on that a few inches of manure, then another heavy layer of muck, and another of manure, continuing in this manner until the heap is raised to the required height, always having a thick layer of muck at the top. [what liquids are best for moistening the compost? how should they be applied? what are the advantages of this moistening? how does it compare with forking over?] after laying up the heap, the tank should be filled with liquid manure from the stables, slops from the house, soap-suds, or other water containing fertilizing matter, to be pumped over the mass. there should be enough of the liquid to saturate the heap and filter through to fill the tank twice a week, at which intervals it should be again pumped up, thus continually being passed through the manure. this liquid should not be changed, as it contains much soluble manure. should the liquid manures named above not be sufficient, the quantity may be increased by the use of rain-water. that falling during the first ten minutes of a shower is the best, as it contains much ammonia. the effects produced by frequently watering the compost is one of the greatest advantages of this system. the soluble portions of the manure are equally diffused through every part of the heap. should the heat of fermentation be too great, the watering will reduce it. when the compost is saturated with water, the air is driven out; and, as the water subsides, _fresh_ air enters and takes its place. this fresh air contains oxygen, which assists in the decomposition of the manure. in short, the watering does all the work of forking over by hand much better and much more cheaply. [why will the ammonia of manure thus made, not escape if it be used as a top dressing? what are the advantages of preparing manures in this manner? what is the profit attending it?] at the end of a month or more, this compost will be ready for use. the layers in the manure will have disappeared, the whole mass having become of a uniform character, highly fertilizing, and ready to be immediately used by plants. it may be applied to the soil, either as a top-dressing, or otherwise, without fear of loss, as the muck will retain all of the gases which would otherwise evaporate. the cost and trouble of the foregoing system of composting are trifling compared with its advantages. the quantity of the manure is much increased, and its quality improved. the health of the animals is secured by the retention of those gases, which, when allowed to escape, render impure the air which they have to breathe. the cleanliness of the stable and yard is much advanced as the effete matters, which would otherwise litter them, are carefully removed to the compost. as an instance of the profit of composting, it may be stated that prof. mapes has decomposed ninety-two cords of swamp muck, with four hundred bushels of the lime and salt mixture, and then composted it with eight cords of _fresh_ horse dung, making one hundred cords of manure fully equal to the same amount of stable-manure alone, which has lain one year exposed to the weather. indeed one cord of muck well decomposed, and containing the chlorine lime and soda of four bushels of the mixture, is of itself equal in value to the same amount of manure which has lain in an open barn-yard during the heat and rain of one season, and is then applied to the land in a _raw_ or undecomposed state. [in what other manners may muck be used in the preservation of manures? how may liquid manure be made most useful?] the foregoing system of composting is the best that has yet been suggested for making use of solid manures. many other methods may be adopted when circumstances will not admit of so much attention. it is a common and excellent practice to throw prepared muck into the cellar under the stables, to be mixed and turned over with the manure by swine. in other cases the manures are kept in the yard, and are covered with a thin layer of muck every morning. the principle which renders these systems beneficial is the absorbent power of charcoal. liquid manure. _liquid manure_ from animals may, also, be made useful by the assistance of prepared muck. where a tank is used in composting, the liquids from the stable may all be employed to supply moisture to the heap; but where any system is adopted, not requiring liquids, the urine may be applied to muck heaps, and then allowed to ferment. fermentation is necessary in urine as well as in solid dung, before it is very active as a manure. urine, as will be recollected, contains nitrogen and forms ammonia on fermentation. [describe the manner of digging out the bottoms of stalls.] it is a very good plan to dig out the bottoms of the stalls in a circular or gutter-like form, three or four feet deep in the middle, cement the ground, or make it nearly water-tight, by a plastering of stiff clay, and fill them up with prepared muck. the appearance of a cross section of the floor thus arranged would be as follows: [illustration: fig. .] the prepared muck in the bottom of the stalls would absorb the urine as soon as voided, while yet warm with the animal heat, and receive heat from the animal's body while lying down at night. this heat will hasten the decomposition of the urea,[aa] and if the muck be renewed twice a month, and that which is removed composted under cover, it will be found a most prolific source of good manure. in flanders, the liquid manure of a cow is considered worth $ per year, and it is not less valuable here. as was stated in the early part of this section, the inorganic (or mineral) matter contained in urine, is soluble, and consequently is immediately useful as food for plants. by referring to the analysis of liquid and solid manure, in section v., their relative value may be seen. chapter vi. different kinds of animal excrement. the manures of different animals are, of course, of different value, as fertilizers, varying according to the food, the age of the animals, etc. stable manure. by stable manure we mean, usually, that of the horse, and that of horned cattle. the case described in chap. (of this section), was one where the animal was not increasing in any of its parts, but returned, in the form of manure, and otherwise, the equivalent of every thing eaten. this case is one of the most simple kind, and is subject to many modifications. [is the manure of full-grown animals of the same quality as that of other animals? why does that of the growing animal differ? why does not the formation of _fat_ reduce the quality of manure? what does _milk_ remove from the food?] the _growing_ animal is increasing in size, and as he derives his increase from his food, he does not return in the form of manure as much as he eats. if his bones are growing, he is taking from his food phosphate of lime and nitrogenous matter; consequently, the manure will be poorer in these ingredients. the same may be said of the formation of the muscles, in relation to nitrogen. the _fatting_ animal, if full grown, makes manure which is as good as that from animals that are not increasing in size, because the fat is taken from those parts of the food which is obtained by plants from the atmosphere, and from nature, (_i. e._ from the st class of proximates). fat contains no nitrogen, and, consequently, does not lessen the amount of this ingredient in the manure. _milch cows_ turn a part of their food to the formation of milk, and consequently, they produce manure of reduced value. [how do the solid and liquid manure of the horse and ox compare? what occasions these differences?] the solid manure of the horse is better than that of the ox, while the liquid manure of the ox is comparatively better than that of the horse. the cause of this is that the horse has poorer digestive organs than the ox, and consequently passes more of the valuable parts of his food, in an undigested form, as dung, while the ox, from chewing the cud and having more perfect organs, turns more of his food into urine than the horse. recapitulation. full grown animals not } producing milk, and full } make the best manure. grown animals fattening } growing animals reduce the value of their manure, taking portions of their food to form their bodies. milch cows reduce the value of their manure by changing a part of their food into milk. the ox makes poor dung and rich urine. the horse makes rich dung and poor urine.[ab] night soil. [what is the most valuable manure accessible to the farmer? what is the probable value of the night soil yearly lost in the united states? of what does the manure of man consist?] the _best_ manure within the reach of the farmer is _night soil_, or human excrement. there has always been a false delicacy about mentioning this fertilizer, which has caused much waste, and great loss of health, from the impure and offensive odors which it is allowed to send forth to taint the air. the value of the night soil yearly lost in the united states is, probably, about _fifty millions of dollars_ ( , , ); an amount nearly equal to the entire expenses of our national government. much of the ill health of our people is undoubtedly occasioned by neglecting the proper treatment of night soil. [describe this manure as compared with the excrements of other animals. does the use of night soil produce disagreeable properties in plants?] that which directly affects agriculture, as treated of in this book, is the value of this substance as a fertilizer. the manure of man consists (as is the case with that of other animals) of those parts of his food which are not retained in the increase of his body. if he be _growing_, his manure is poorer, as in the case of the ox, and it is subject to all the other modifications named in the early part of this chapter. his food is usually of a varied character, and is rich in nitrogen, the phosphates, and other inorganic constituents; consequently, his manure is made valuable by containing large quantities of these matters. as is the case with the ox, the _dung_ contains the undigested food, the secretions (or leakings) of the digestive organs, and the insoluble parts of the ash of the digested food. the _urine_, in like manner, contains a large proportion of the nitrogen and the soluble inorganic parts of the digested food. when we consider how much richer the _food_ of man is than that of horned cattle, we shall see the superior value of his _excrement_. night soil has been used as a manure, for ages, in china, which is, undoubtedly, one great secret of their success in supporting a dense population, for so long a time, without impoverishing the soil. it has been found, in many instances, to increase the productive power of the natural soil three-fold. that is, if a soil would produce ten bushels of wheat per acre, without manure, it would produce thirty bushels if manured with night soil. some have supposed that manuring with night soil would give disagreeable properties to plants: such is not the case; their quality is invariably improved. the color and odor of the rose become richer and more delicate by the use of the most offensive night soil as manure. [what is the direct object of plants? what would result if this were not the case? how may night soil be easily prepared for use, and its offensive odor prevented?] it is evident that this is the case from the fact that plants have it for their direct object to make over and put together the refuse organic matter, and the gases and the minerals found in nature, for the use of animals. if there were no natural means of rendering the excrement of animals available to plants, the earth must soon be shorn of its fertility, as the elements of growth when once consumed would be essentially destroyed, and no soil could survive the exhaustion. there is no reason why the manure of man should be rejected by vegetation more than that of any other animal; and indeed it is not, for ample experience has proved that for most soils there is no better manure in existence. a single experiment will suffice to show that night soil may be so kept that there shall be no loss of its valuable gases, and consequently no offensive odor arising from it, while it may be removed and applied to crops without unpleasantness. all that is necessary to effect this wonderful change in night soil, and to turn it from its disagreeable character to one entirely inoffensive, is to mix with it a little charcoal dust, prepared muck, or any other good absorbent--thus making what is called poudrette. the mode of doing this must depend on circumstances. in many cases, it would be expedient to keep a barrel of the absorbent in the privy and throw down a small quantity every day. the effect on the odor of the house would amply repay the trouble. [should pure night soil be used as a manure? what precaution is necessary in preparing hog manure for use?] the manure thus made is of the most valuable character, and may be used under any circumstances with a certainty of obtaining a good crop. it should not be used unmixed with some absorbent, as it is of such strength as to kill plants. for an analysis of human manure, see section v. hog manure. _hog manure_ is very valuable, but it must be used with care. it is so violent in its action that, when applied in a pure form to crops, it often produces injurious results. it is liable to make cabbages _clump-footed_, and to induce a disease in turnips called _ambury_ (or fingers and toes). the only precaution necessary is to supply the stye with prepared muck, charcoal-dust, leaf-mould, or any absorbent in plentiful quantities, often adding fresh supplies. the hogs will work this over with the manure; and, when required for use, it will be found an excellent fertilizer. the absorbent will have overcome its injurious tendency, and it may be safely applied to any crop. from the variety and rich character of the food of this animal, his manure is of a superior quality. [why is the manure from butchers' hog-pens very valuable? how does the value of poultry manure compare with that of guano? how may it be protected against loss?] _butchers' hog-pen manure_ is one of the best fertilizers known. it is made by animals that live almost entirely on blood and other animal refuse, and is very rich in nitrogen and the phosphates. it should be mixed with prepared muck, or its substitute, to prevent the loss of its ammonia, and as a protection against its injurious effect on plants. poultry house manure. next in value to night soil, among domestic manures, are the excrements of poultry, pigeons, etc. birds live on the nice bits of creation, seeds, insects, etc., and they discharge their solid and liquid excrements together. poultry-dung is nearly equal in value to guano (except that it contains more water), and it deserves to be carefully preserved and judiciously used. it is as well worth twenty-five cents per bushel as guano is worth fifty dollars a ton (at which price it is now sold). poultry-manure is liable to as much injury from evaporation and leaching as is any other manure, and equal care should be taken (by the same means) to prevent such loss. good shelter over the roosts, and daily sprinkling with prepared muck or charcoal-dust will be amply repaid by the increased value of the manure, and its better action and greater durability in the soil. the value of this manure should be taken into consideration in calculating the profit of keeping poultry (as indeed with all other stock). it has been observed by a gentleman of much experience, in poultry raising, that the yearly manure of a hundred fowls applied to previously unmanured land would produce _extra_ corn enough to keep them for a year. this is probably a large estimate, but it serves to show that this fertilizer is very valuable, and also that poultry may be kept with great profit, if their excrements are properly secured. the manure of pigeons has been a favorite fertilizer in some countries for more than years. market gardeners attach much value to rabbit-manure. sheep manure. [what can you say of the manure of sheep?] the manure of sheep is less valuable than it would be, if so large a quantity of the nitrogen and mineral parts of the food were not employed in the formation of wool. this has a great effect on the richness of the excrements, but they are still a very good fertilizer, and should be protected from loss in the same way as stable manure. guano. [should the use of guano induce us to disregard other manures? where and in what manner is the best guano deposited?] _guano_ as a manure has become world renowned. the worn-out tobacco lands of virginia, and other fields in many parts of the country, which seemed to have yielded to the effect of an ignorant course of cultivation, and to have sunk to their final repose, have in many cases been revived to the production of excellent crops, and have had their value multiplied many fold by the use of guano. although an excellent manure, it should not cause us to lose sight of those valuable materials which exist on almost every farm. every ton of guano imported into the united states is an addition to our national wealth, but every ton of stable-manure, or poultry-dung, or night soil evaporated or carried away in rivers, is equally a _deduction_ from our riches. if the imported manure is to really benefit us, we must not allow it to occasion the neglect and consequent loss of our domestic fertilizers. the peruvian guano (which is considered the best) is brought from islands near the coast of peru. the birds which frequent these islands live almost entirely on fish, and drop their excrements here in a climate where rain is almost unknown, and where, from the dryness of the air, there is but little loss sustained by the manure. it is brought to this country in large quantities, and is an excellent fertilizer, superior even to night soil. [how should it be prepared for use?] it should be mixed with an absorbent before being used, unless it is plowed deeply under the soil, as it contains much ammonia which would be lost from evaporation. it would probably also injure plants. the best way to use guano, is in connection with sulphuric acid and bones, as will be described hereafter. the composition of the various kinds of guano may be found in the section on analysis. footnotes: [aa] the nitrogenous compound in the urine. [ab] comparatively. chapter vii. other organic manures. the number of organic manures is almost countless. the most common of these have been described in the previous chapters on the excrements of animals. the more prominent of the remaining ones will now be considered. as a universal rule, it may be stated that all organic matter (every thing which has had vegetable or animal life) is capable of fertilizing plants. dead animals. [what are the chief fertilizing constituents of dead animals? what becomes of these when exposed to the atmosphere? how may this be prevented?] the bodies of animals contain much _nitrogen_, as well as valuable quantities, the phosphates and other inorganic materials required in the growth of plants. on their decay, the nitrogen is resolved into _ammonia_,[ac] and the mineral matters become valuable as food for the inorganic parts of plants. if the decomposition of animal bodies takes place in exposed situations, and without proper precautions, the ammonia escapes into the atmosphere, and much of the mineral portion is leached out by rains. the use of absorbents, such as charcoal-dust, prepared muck, etc., will entirely prevent evaporation, and will in a great measure serve as a protection against leaching. if a dead horse be cut in pieces and mixed with ten loads of muck, the whole mass will, in a single season, become a most valuable compost. small animals, such as dogs, cats, etc., may be with advantage buried by the roots of grape-vines or trees. bones. [of what do the bones of animals consist? what is gelatine? describe the fertilizing qualities of fish.] the _bones_ of animals contain phosphate of lime and gelatine. the gelatine is a nitrogenous substance, and produces ammonia on its decomposition. this subject will be spoken of more fully under the head of 'phosphate of lime' in the chapter on mineral manures, as the treatment of bones is more directly with reference to the fertilizing value of their inorganic matter. fish. in many localities near the sea-shore large quantities of fish are caught and applied to the soil. these make excellent manure. they contain much nitrogen, which renders them strongly ammoniacal on decomposition. their bones consist of phosphate and carbonate of lime; and, being naturally soft, they decompose in the soil with great facility, and become available to plants. the scales of fish contain valuable quantities of nitrogen, phosphate of lime, etc., all of which are highly useful. refuse fishy matters from markets and from the house are well worth saving. these and fish caught for manure may be made into compost with prepared muck, etc.; and, as they putrefy rapidly, they soon become ready for use. they may be added to the compost of stable manure with great advantage. [should these be applied as a top dressing to the soil? what are the fertilizing properties of woollen rags? what is the best way to use them?] fish (like all other nitrogenous manures) should never be applied as a top dressing, unless previously mixed with a good absorbent of ammonia, but should when used alone be immediately plowed under to considerable depth, to prevent the evaporation--and consequent loss--of their fertilizing gases. woollen rags, etc. _woollen rags, hair, waste of woollen factories_, etc., contain both nitrogen and phosphate of lime; and, like all other matters containing these ingredients, are excellent manures, but must be used in such a way as to prevent the escape of their fertilizing gases. they decompose slowly, and are therefore considered a _lasting_ manure. like all _lasting_ manures, however, they are _slow_ in their effects, and the most advantageous way to use them is to compost them with stable manure, or with some other rapidly fermenting substance, which will hasten their decomposition and render them sooner available. rags, hair, etc., thus treated, will in a short time be reduced to such a condition that they may be immediately used by plants instead of lying in the soil to be slowly taken up. it is better in all cases to have manures act _quickly_ and give an immediate return for their cost, than to lie for a long time in the soil before their influence is felt. [what is their value compared with that of farm-yard manure? how should old leather be treated? describe the manurial properties of tanners' refuse. how should they be treated? are horn piths, etc. valuable?] a pound of woollen rags is worth, as a manure, twice as much as is paid for good linen shreds for paper making; still, while the latter are always preserved, the former are thrown away, although considered by good judges to be worth forty times as much as barn-yard manure. old leather should not be thrown away. it decomposes very slowly, and consequently is of but a little value; but, if put at the roots of young trees, it will in time produce appreciable effects. _tanners' and curriers' refuse_, and all other animal offal, including that of the slaughter-house, is well worth attention, as it contains more or less of those two most important ingredients of manures, nitrogen and phosphate of lime. it is unnecessary to add that, in common with all other animal manures, these substances must be either composted, or immediately plowed under the soil. horn piths, and horn shavings, if decomposed in compost, with substances which ferment rapidly, make very good manure, and are worth fully the price charged for them. organic manures of vegetable origin. _muck_, the most important of the purely vegetable manures, has been already sufficiently described. it should be particularly borne in mind that, when first taken from the swamp it is often _sour_, or _cold_, but that if exposed for a long time to the air, or if well treated with lime, unleached ashes, the lime and salt mixture, or any other alkali, its acids will be _neutralized_ (or overcome), and it becomes a good application to any soil, except peat or other soils already containing large quantities of organic matter. in applying muck to the soil (as has been before stated), it should be made a vehicle for carrying ammoniacal manures. spent tan bark. [why is decomposed bark more fertilizing than that of decayed wood?] _spent tan bark_, if previously decomposed by the use of the lime and salt mixture, or potash, answers all the purposes of prepared muck, but is more difficult of decomposition. [how may bark be decomposed? why should tan bark be composted with an alkali? why is it good for mulching? is sawdust of any value?] the bark of trees contains a larger proportion of inorganic matter than the wood, and much of this, on the decomposition of the bark, becomes available as manure. the chemical effect on the bark, of using it in the tanning of leather, is such as to render it difficult to be rotted by the ordinary means, but, by the use of the lime and salt mixture it may be reduced to the finest condition, and becomes a most excellent manure. it probably contains small quantities of nitrogen (obtained from the leather), which adds to its value. unless tan bark be composted with lime, or some other alkali, it may produce injurious effects from the _tannic acid_ which it is liable to contain. alkaline substances will neutralize this acid, and prevent it from being injurious. one great benefit resulting from the use of spent tan bark, is due to its power of absorbing moisture from the atmosphere. for this reason it is very valuable for _mulching_[ad] young trees and plants when first set out. sawdust. [why is sawdust a good addition to the pig-stye? what is the peculiarity of sawdust from the beech, etc.? what is a peculiarity of soot? why may soot be used as a top dressing without losing its ammonia?] _sawdust_ in its natural state is of very little value to the land, but when decomposed, as may be done by the same method as was described for tan bark, it is of some importance, as it contains a large quantity of carbon. its ash, too, which becomes available, contains soluble inorganic matter, and in this way it acts as a direct manure. so far as concerns the value of the ash, however, the bark is superior to sawdust. sawdust may be partially rotted by mixing it with strong manure (as hog manure), while it acts as a _divisor_, and prevents the too rapid action of this when applied to the soil. some kinds of sawdust, such as that from beech wood, form acetic acid on their decomposition, and these should be treated with, at least, a sufficient quantity of lime to correct the acid. _soot_ is a good manure. it contains much carbon, and has, thus far, all of the beneficial effects of charcoal dust. the sulphur, which is one of its constituents, not only serves as food for plants, but, from its odor, is a good protection against some insects. by throwing a handful of soot on a melon vine, or young cabbage plant, it will keep away many insects. soot contains some ammonia, and as this is in the form of a _sulphate_, it is not volatile, and consequently does not evaporate when the soot is applied as a top dressing, which is the almost universal custom. green crops. [what plants are most used as green crops? what office is performed by the roots of green crops? how do such manures increase the organic matter of soils?] _green crops_, to plow under, are in many places largely raised, and are always beneficial. the plants most used for this purpose, in our country, are clover, buckwheat, and peas. these plants have very long roots, which they send deep in the soil, to draw up mineral matter for their support. this mineral matter is deposited in the plant. the leaves and roots receive carbonic acid and ammonia from the air, and from water. in this manner they obtain their carbon. when the crop is turned under the soil, it decomposes, and the carbon, as well as the mineral ingredients obtained from the subsoil, are deposited in the surface soil, and become of use to succeeding crops. the hollow stalks of the buckwheat and pea, serve as tubes, in the soil, for the passage of air, and thus, in heavy soils, give a much needed circulation of atmospheric fertilizers. [what office is performed by the straw of the buckwheat and pea? what treatment may be substituted for the use of green crops? which course should be adopted in high farming? why is the use of green crops preferable in ordinary cultivation? name some other valuable manures.] although green crops are of great benefit, and are managed with little labor, there is no doubt but the same results may be more economically produced. a few loads of prepared muck will do more towards increasing the organic matter in the soil, than a very heavy crop of clover, while it would be ready for immediate cultivation, instead of having to lie idle during the year required in the production and decomposition of the green crop. the effect of the roots penetrating the subsoil is, as we have seen, to draw up inorganic matter, to be deposited within reach of the roots of future crops. in the next section we shall show that this end may be much more efficiently attained by the use of the sub-soil plow, which makes a passage for the roots into the subsoil, where they can obtain for themselves what would, in the other case, be brought up for them by the roots of the green crop. the offices of the hollow straws may be performed by a system of ridging and back furrowing, having previously covered the soil with leaves, or other refuse organic material. in _high farming_, where the object of the cultivator is to make a profitable investment of labor, these last named methods will be found most expedient; but, if the farmer have a large quantity of land, and can afford but a limited amount of labor, the raising of green crops, to be plowed under in the fall, will probably be adopted. before closing this chapter, it may be well to remark that there are various other fertilizers, such as the _ammoniacal liquor of gas-houses_, _soapers' wastes_, _bleachers' lye_, _lees of old oil casks, etc._, which we have not space to consider at length, but which are all valuable as additions to the compost heap, or as applications, in a liquid form, to the soil. [what are the advantages arising from burying manure in its green state? which is generally preferable, this course, or composting? why?] in many cases (when heavy manuring is practised), it may be well to apply organic manures to the soil in a green state, turn them under, and allow them to undergo decomposition in the ground. the advantages of this system are, that the _heat_, resulting from the chemical changes, will hasten the growth of plants, by making the soil warmer; the carbonic acid formed will be presented to the roots instead of escaping into the atmosphere; and if the soil be heavy, the rising of the gases will tend to loosen it, and the leaving vacant of the spaces occupied by the solid matters will, on their being resolved into gases, render the soil of a more porous character. as a general rule, however, in ordinary farming, where the amount of manure applied is only sufficient for the supply of food to the crop, it is undoubtedly better to have it previously decomposed--_cooked_ as it were, for the uses of the plants--as they can then obtain the required amount of nutriment as fast as needed. absorption of moisture. it is often convenient to know the relative power of different manures to absorb moisture from the atmosphere, especially when we wish to manure lands that suffer from drought. the following results are given by c. w. johnson, in his essay on salt, (pp. and ). in these experiments the animal manures were employed without any admixture of straw. parts parts of horse dung, dried in a temperature of °, absorbed by exposure for three hours, to air saturated with moisture, of the temperature of ° parts of cow dung, under the same circumstances, absorbed parts pig dung " sheep " " pigeon " " rich alluvial soil " fresh tanner's bark " putrified " " refuse marine salt sold as manure ½ " soot " burnt clay " coal ashes " lime " sediment from salt pans " crushed rock salt " gypsum " salt [ae] muck is a most excellent absorbent of moisture, when thoroughly decomposed. distribution of manures. the following table from johnson, on manures, will be found convenient in the distribution of manures. by its assistance the farmer will know how many loads of manure he requires, dividing each load into a stated number of heaps, and placing them at certain distances. in this manner manure may be applied evenly, and calculation may be made as to the amount, per acre, which a certain quantity will supply.[af] ----------+----------------------------------------------------------- distance | of | the heaps.| number of heaps in a load. ----------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- | | | | | | | | | | ----------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- yards. | | | | | | ½| | | | ½ do. | | | | | | | ½| ½| | ½ do. | | | | ½| ½| ½| ¼| ¾| ½| ¼ ½ do. | | | ½| | ¾| ¾| ¼| | ½| do. | | | ½| ½| ¾| ¼| ¾| ¼| ½| ¼ ½ do. | | | ½| | | ¾| ¾| | ¾| do. | | | ¾| ½| | ½| ¼| ¾| | ½ ½ do. | | ½| ¼| ¾| | | ¼| ¼| ¾| ½ do. | | ½| | ¾| ¾| ½| | ¼| | ½ do. | | | ¾| ½| ¼| ¼| ¼| ¾| ½| ½ do. | ½| ¾| ¼| | ¾| ½| ¾| ½| ½| ½ ½ do. | | ½| ¼| ¾| ½| ¼| ½| ½| ½| ¾ do. | | | | | | | ½| ¾| ¾| ½ do. | ½| ¾| | ½| ¾| | ¾| ¾| | ¼ do. | ½| ¼| ¼| | ¾| | | | ½| ¾ ----------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- _example ._--required, the number of loads necessary to manure an acre of ground, dividing each load into six heaps, and placing them at a distance of ½ yards from each other? the answer by the table is ¾. _example ._--a farmer has a field containing ½ acres, over which he wishes to spread loads of dung. now divided by ½, gives loads per acre; and by referring to the table, it will be seen that the desired object may be accomplished, by making heaps of a load, and placing them yards apart, or by heaps at yards, as may be thought advisable. footnotes: [ac] under some circumstances, _nitric acid_ is formed, which is equally beneficial to vegetable growth. [ad] see the glossary at the end of the book. [ae] working farmer, vol. , p. . [af] it is not necessary that this and the foregoing table should be learned by the scholar, but they will be found valuable for reference by the farmer. chapter viii. mineral manures. [how many kinds of action have inorganic manures? what is the first of these? the second? third? fourth? do all mineral manures possess all of these qualities?] the second class of manures named in the general division of the subject, in the early part of this chapter, comprises those of a mineral character, or _inorganic_ manures. these manures have four kinds of action when applied to the soil. st. they furnish food for the inorganic part of plants. d. they prepare matters already in the soil, for assimilation by roots. d. they improve the mechanical condition of the soil. th. they absorb ammonia. some of the mineral manures produce in the soil only one of these effects, and others are efficient in two or all of them. the principles to be considered in the use of mineral manures are essentially given in the first two sections of this book. it may be well, however, to repeat them briefly in this connection, and to give the _reasons_ why any of these manures are needed, from which we may learn what rules are to be observed in their application. [relate what you know of the properties of vegetable ashes? how does this relate to the fertility of the soil? according to what two rules may we apply mineral manures? what course would you pursue to raise potatoes on a soil containing a very little phosphoric acid and no potash?] st. those which are used as food by plants. it will be recollected that the _ash_ left after burning plants, and which formed a part of their structures, has a certain chemical composition; that is, it consists of alkalies, acids, and neutrals. it was also stated that the ashes of plants of the same kind are always of about the same composition, while the ashes of different kinds of plants may vary materially. different parts of the same plant too, as we learned, are supplied with different kinds of ash. for instance, _clover_, on being burned, leaves an ash containing _lime_, as one of its principal ingredients, while the ash of _potatoes_ contains more of _potash_ than of any thing else. in the second section (on soils), we learned that some soils contain every thing necessary to make the ashes of all plants, and in sufficient quantity to supply what is required, while other soils are either entirely deficient in one or more ingredients, or contain so little of them that they are unfertile for certain plants. [would you manure it in the same way for wheat? why?] from this, we see that we may pursue either one of two courses. after we know the exact composition of the soil--which we can learn only from correct analysis--we may manure it with a view either to making it fertile for all kinds of plants or only for one particular plant. for instance, we may find that a soil contains a very little phosphoric acid, and no potash. if we wish to raise potatoes on such a soil, we have only to apply potash (if the soil is good in other particulars), which is largely required by this plant, though it needs but little phosphoric acid; while, if we wish to make it fertile for wheat, and all other plants, we must apply more phosphoric acid as well as potash. as a universal rule, it may be stated that to render a soil fertile for any particular plant, we must supply it (unless it already contains them) with those matters which are necessary to _make_ the ash of that plant; and, if we would render it capable of producing _all_ kinds of plants, it must be furnished with the materials required in the formation of _all kinds of vegetable ashes_. it is not absolutely necessary to have the soil analyzed before it can be cultivated with success, but it is the _cheapest_ way. [how is the fertility of the soil to be maintained, if the crops are _sold_? what rule is given for general treatment? give an instance of matters in the soil that are to be rendered available by mineral manures?] we might proceed from an analysis of the plant required (which will be found in section v.), and apply to the soil in the form of manure every thing that is necessary for the formation of the ash of that plant. this would give a good crop on _any_ soil that was in the proper _mechanical_ condition, and contained enough organic matter; but a moment's reflection will show that, if the soil contained a large amount of potash, or of phosphate of lime, it would not be necessary to make an application of more of these ingredients--at an expense of perhaps three times the cost of an analysis. it is true that, if the crop is _sold_, and it is desired to maintain the fertility of the soil, the full amount of the ash must be applied, either before or after the crop is grown; but, in the ordinary use of crops for feeding purposes, a large part of the ash will exist in the excrements of the animals; so that the judicious farmer will be able to manure his land with more economy than if he had to apply to each crop the whole amount and variety required for its ash. the best rule for practical manuring is probably to _strengthen the soil in its weaker points, and prevent the stronger ones from becoming weaker_. in this way, the soil may be raised to the highest state of fertility, and be fully maintained in its productive powers. d. those manures which render available matter already contained in the soil. [how may silica be developed? how does lime affect soils containing coarse particles? how do mineral manures sometimes improve the mechanical texture of the soil?] silica (or sand), it will be recollected, exists in all soils; but, in its pure state, is not capable of being dissolved, and therefore cannot be used by plants. the alkalies (as has been stated), have the power of combining with this silica, making compounds, which are called _silicates_. these are readily dissolved by water, and are available in vegetable growth. now, if a soil is deficient in these soluble silicates, it is well known that grain, etc., grown on it, not being able to obtain the material which gives them strength, will fall down or _lodge_; but, if such measures be taken, as will render the sand soluble, the straw will be strong and healthy. alkalies used for this purpose, come under the head of those manures which develope the natural resources of the soil. again, much of the mineral matter in the soil is combined within particles, and is therefore out of the reach of roots. lime, among other thing, has the effect of causing these particles to crumble and expose their constituents to the demand of roots. therefore, lime has for one of its offices the development of the fertilizing ingredients of the soil. d. those manures which improve the mechanical condition of the soil. the alkalies, in combining with sand, commence their action on the surfaces of the particles, and roughen them--_rust_ them as it were. this roughening of particles of the soil prevents them from moving among each other as easily as they do when they are smooth, and thus keeps the soil from being compacted by heavy rains, as it is liable to be in its natural condition. in this way, the mechanical texture of the soil is improved. it has just been said that _lime_ causes the pulverization of the particles of the soil; and thus, by making it finer, improves its mechanical condition. some mineral manures, as plaster and salt, have the power of absorbing moisture from the atmosphere; and this is a mechanical improvement to dry soils. [name some mineral manures which absorb ammonia?] th. those mineral manures which have the power of absorbing ammonia. _plaster_, _chloride of lime_, _alumina_ (_clay_), etc., are large absorbents of ammonia, whether arising from the fermentation of animal manures or washed down from the atmosphere by rains. the ammonia thus absorbed is of course very important in the vegetation of crops. having now explained the reasons why mineral manures are necessary, and the manner in which they produce their effects, we will proceed to examine the various deficiencies of soils and the character of many kinds of this class of fertilizers. chapter ix. deficiencies of soils, means of restoration, etc. as will be seen by referring to the analyses of soils on p. , they may be deficient in certain ingredients, which it is the object of mineral manures to supply. these we will take up in order, and endeavor to show in a simple manner the best means of managing them in practical farming. alkalies. potash. [do all soils contain a sufficient amount of potash? how may its deficiency have been caused? how may its absence be detected? does barn-yard manure contain sufficient potash to supply its deficiency in worn-out soils?] _potash_ is often deficient in the soil. its deficiency may have been caused in two ways. either it may not have existed largely in the rock from which the soil was formed, and consequently is equally absent from the soil itself, or it may have once been present in sufficient quantities, and been carried away in crops, without being returned to the soil in the form of manure until too little remains for the requirements of fertility. in either case, its absence may be accurately detected by a skilful chemist, and it may be supplied by the farmer in various ways. potash, as well as all of the other mineral manures, is contained in the excrements of animals, but not (as is also the case with the others) in sufficient quantities to restore the proper balance to soils where it is largely deficient, nor even to make up for what is yearly removed with each crop, except that crop (or its equivalent) has been fed to such animals as return _all_ of the fertilizing constituents of their food in the form of manure, and this be all carefully preserved and applied to the soil. in all other cases, it is necessary to apply more potash than is contained in the excrements of animals. [what is generally the most available source from which to obtain this alkali? will leached ashes answer the same purpose? how may ashes be used?] _unleached wood ashes_ is generally the most available source from which to obtain this alkali. the ashes of all kinds of wood contain potash (more or less according to the kind--see analysis section v.) if the ashes are _leached_, the potash is removed; and, hence for the purpose of supplying it, they are worthless; but _unleached_ ashes are an excellent source from which to obtain it. they may be made into compost with muck, as directed in a previous chapter, or applied directly to the soil. in either case the potash is available directly to the plant, or is capable of uniting with the silica in the soil to form silicate of potash. neither potash nor any other alkali should ever be applied to animal manures unless in compost with an absorbent, as they cause the ammonia to be thrown off and lost. [from what other sources may potash be obtained? how may we obtain soda? in what quantities should pure salt be applied to the soil?] _potash sparlings_, or the refuse of potash warehouses, is an excellent manure for lands deficient in this constituent. _potash marl_, such as is found in new jersey, contains a large proportion of potash, and is an excellent application to soils requiring it. _feldspar_, _kaolin_, and other minerals containing potash, are, in some localities, to be obtained in sufficient quantities to be used for manurial purposes. _granite_ contains potash, and if it can be crushed (as is the case with some of the softer kinds,) it serves a very good purpose. soda. [if applied in large quantities will it produce permanent injury? in what quantities should salt be applied to composts? to asparagus?] _soda_, the requirement of which is occasioned by the same causes as create a deficiency of potash, and all of the other ingredients of vegetable ashes, may be very readily supplied by the use of _common salt_ (chloride of sodium), which consists of about one half sodium (the base of soda). the best way to use salt is in the lime and salt mixture, previously described, or as a direct application to the soil. if too much salt be given to the soil it will kill any plant. in small quantities, however, it is highly beneficial, and if _six bushels per acre_ be sown broadcast over the land, to be carried in by rains and dews, it will not only destroy many insects (grubs, worms, etc.), but will, after decomposing and becoming chlorine and soda, prove an excellent manure. salt, even in quantities large enough to denude the soil of all vegetation, is never _permanently_ injurious. after the first year, it becomes resolved into its constituents, and furnishes chlorine and soda to plants, without injuring them. one bushel of salt in each cord of compost will not only hasten the decomposition of the manures, but will kill all seeds and grubs--a very desirable effect. while small quantities of salt in a compost heap are beneficial, too much (as when applied to the soil) is positively injurious, as it arrests decomposition; fairly _pickles_ the manures, and prevents them from rotting. [what is generally the best way to use salt? what is nitrate of soda? what plants contain lime?] for _asparagus_, which is a marine plant, salt is an excellent manure, and may be applied in almost unlimited quantities, _while the plants are growing_, if used after they have gone to top, it is injurious. salt has been applied to asparagus beds in such quantities as to completely cover them, and with apparent benefit to the plants. of course large doses of salt kill all weeds, and thus save labor and the injury to the asparagus roots, which would result from their removal by hoeing. salt may be used advantageously in any of the foregoing manners, but should always be applied with care. for ordinary farm purposes, it is undoubtedly most profitable to use the salt with lime, and make it perform the double duty of assisting in the decomposition of vegetable matter, and fertilizing the soil. soda unites with the silica in the soil, and forms the valuable _silicate of soda_. _nitrate of soda_, or cubical nitre, which is found in south america, consists of soda and nitric acid. it furnishes both soda and nitrogen to plants, and is an excellent manure. lime. the subject of _lime_ is one of most vital importance to the farmer; indeed, so varied are its modes of action and its effects, that some writers have given it credit for every thing good in the way of farming, and have gone so far as to say that _all_ permanent improvement of agriculture must depend on the use of lime. although this is far in excess of the truth (as lime cannot plow, nor drain, nor supply any thing but _lime_ to the soil), its many beneficial effects demand for it the closest attention. [do all soils contain enough lime for the use of plants? what amount is needed for this purpose? what is its first-named effect on the soil? its second? third? fourth? fifth? how are acids produced in the soil?] as food for plants, lime is of considerable importance. all plants contain lime--some of them in large quantities. it is an important constituent of straw, meadow hay, leaves of fruit trees, peas, beans, and turnips. it constitutes more than one third of the ash of red clover. many soils contain lime enough for the use of plants, in others it is deficient, and must be supplied artificially before they can produce good crops of those plants of which lime is an important ingredient. the only way in which the exact quantity of lime in the soil can be ascertained is by chemical analysis. however, the amount required for the mere feeding plants is not large, (much less than one per cent.), but lime is often necessary for other purposes; and setting aside, for the present, its feeding action, we will examine its various effects on the mechanical and chemical condition of the soil. . it corrects acidity (sourness). . it hastens the decomposition of the organic matter in the soil. . it causes the mineral particles of the soil to crumble. . by producing the above effects, it prepares the constituents of the soil for assimilation by plants. . it is _said_ to exhaust the soil, but it does so in a very desirable manner, the injurious effects of which may be easily avoided. [how does lime correct them? how does it affect animal manures in the soil?] . the decomposition of organic matter in the soil, often produces acids which makes the land _sour_, and cause it to produce sorrel and other weeds, which interfere with the healthy growth of crops. lime is an _alkali_, and if applied to soils suffering from sourness, it will unite with the acids, and neutralize them, so that they will no longer be injurious. . we have before stated that lime is a decomposing agent, and hastens the rotting of muck and other organic matter. it has the same effect on the organic parts of the soil, and causes them to be resolved into the gases and minerals of which they are formed. it has this effect, especially, on organic matters containing _nitrogen_, causing them to throw off ammonia; consequently, it liberates this gas from the animal manures in the soil. . various inorganic compounds in the soil are so affected by lime, that they lose their power of holding together, and crumble, or are reduced to finer particles, while some of their constituents are rendered soluble. one way in which this is accomplished is by the action of the lime on the silica contained in these compounds, forming the silicate of lime. this crumbling effect improves the mechanical as well as the chemical condition of the soil. . we are now enabled to see how lime prepares the constituents of the soil for the use of plants. [inorganic compounds? how does lime prepare the constituents of the soil for use? what can you say of the remark that lime exhausts the organic matter in the soil?] by its action on the roots, buried stubble, and other organic matter in the soil, it causes them to be decomposed, and to give up many of their gaseous and inorganic constituents for the use of roots. in this manner the organic matter is prepared for use more rapidly than would be the case, if there were no lime present to hasten its decomposition. by the decomposing action of lime on the mineral parts of the soil ( ), they also are placed more rapidly in a useful condition than would be the case, if their preparation depended on the slow action of atmospheric influences. thus, we see that lime, aside from its use directly as food for plants, exerts a beneficial influence on both the organic and inorganic parts of the soil. . many contend that lime _exhausts_ the soil. if we examine the manner in which it does so, we shall see that this is no argument against its use. [how can lime exhaust the mineral parts of the soil? must the matter taken away be returned to the soil?] it exhausts the organic parts of the soil, by decomposing them, and resolving them into the gases and minerals of which they are composed. if the soil do not contain a sufficient quantity of absorbent matter, such as clay or charcoal, the gases arising from the organic matter are liable to escape; but when there is a sufficient amount of these substances present (as there always should be), these gases are all retained until required by the roots of plants. hence, although the organic matter of manure and vegetable substances may be _altered in form_, by the use of lime, it can escape (except in very poor soils) only as it is taken up by roots to feed the crop, and such exhaustion is certainly profitable; still, in order that the fertility of the soil may be _maintained_, enough of organic manure should be applied, to make up for the amount taken from the soil by the crop, after liberation for its use by the action of the lime. this will be but a small proportion of the organic matter contained in the crop, as it obtains the larger part from the atmosphere. the only way in which lime can exhaust the inorganic part of the soil is, by altering its condition, so that plants can use it more readily. that is, it exposes it for solution in water. we have seen that fertilizing matter cannot be leached out of a good soil, in any material quantity, but can only be carried down to a depth of about thirty-four inches. hence, we see that there can be no loss in this direction; and, as inorganic matter cannot evaporate from the soil, the only way in which it can escape is through the structure of plants. [if this course be pursued, will the soil suffer from the use of lime? is it the lime, or its crop, that exhausts the soil? is lime containing magnesia better than pure lime? what is the best kind of lime?] if lime is applied to the soil, and increases the amount of crops grown by furnishing a larger supply of inorganic matter, of course, the removal of inorganic substances from the soil will be more rapid than when only a small amount of crop is grown, and the soil will be sooner exhausted--not by the lime, but by the plants. in order to make up for this exhaustion, it is necessary that a sufficient amount of inorganic matter be supplied to compensate for the increased quantity taken away by plants. thus we see, that it is hardly fair to accuse the _lime_ of exhausting the soil, when it only improves its character, and increases the amount of its yield. it is the _crop_ that takes away the fertility of the soil (the same as would be the case if no lime were used, only faster as the crop is larger), and in all judicious cultivation, this loss will be fully compensated by the application of manures, thereby preventing the exhaustion of the soil. [is the purchase of marl to be recommended? how is lime prepared for use? (note.) describe the burning and slaking of lime.] _kind of lime to be used._ the first consideration in procuring lime for manuring land, is to select that which contains but little, if any _magnesia_. nearly all stone lime contains more or less of this, but some kinds contain more than others. when magnesia is applied to the soil, in too large quantities, it is positively injurious to plants, and great care is necessary in making selection. as a general rule, it may be stated, that the best plastering lime makes the best manure. such kinds only should be used as are known from experiment not to be injurious. _shell lime_ is undoubtedly the best of all, for it contains no magnesia, and it does contain a small quantity of _phosphate of lime_. in the vicinity of the sea-coast, and near the lines of railroads, oyster shells, clam shells, etc., can be cheaply procured. these may be prepared for use in the same manner as stone lime.[ag] _the preparation of the lime_ is done by first burning and then slaking, or by putting it directly on the land, in an unslaked condition, after its having been burned. shells are sometimes _ground_, and used without burning; this is hardly advisable, as they cannot be made so fine as by burning and slaking. as was stated in the first section of this book, lime usually exists in nature, in the form of carbonate of lime, as limestone, chalk, or marble (being lime and carbonic acid combined), and when this is burned, the carbonic acid is thrown off, leaving the lime in a pure or caustic form. this is called burned lime, quick-lime, lime shells, hot lime, etc. if the proper quantity of water be poured on it, it is immediately taken up by the lime, which falls into a dry powder, called _slaked lime_. if _quick-lime_ were left exposed to the weather, it would absorb moisture from the atmosphere, and become what is termed _air slaked_. [what is air slaking? if slaked lime be exposed to the air, what change does it undergo? what is the object of slaking lime? how much carbonic acid is contained in a ton of carbonate of lime? how much lime does a ton of slaked lime contain? what is the most economical form for transportation?] when _slaked lime_ (consisting of lime and water) is exposed to the atmosphere, it absorbs carbonic acid, and becomes carbonate of lime again; but it is now in the form of a very fine powder, and is much more useful than when in the stone. if quick-lime is applied directly to the soil, it absorbs first moisture, and then carbonic acid, becoming finally a powdered carbonate of lime. one ton of _carbonate of lime_ contains ¼ cwt. of lime; the remainder is carbonic acid. one ton of _slaked lime_ contains about cwt. of lime; the remainder is water. hence we see that lime should be burned, and not slaked, before being transported, as it would be unprofitable to transport the large quantity of carbonic acid and water contained in carbonate of lime and slaked lime. the quick-lime may be slaked, and carbonated after reaching its destination, either before or after being applied to the land. [what is the best form for immediate action on the inorganic matter in the soil? for most other purposes?] as has been before stated, much is gained by slaking lime with _salt water_, thus imitating the lime and salt mixture. indeed in many cases, it will be found profitable to use all lime in this way. where a direct action on the inorganic matters contained in the soil is desired, it may be well to apply the lime directly in the form of quick-lime; but, where the decomposition of the vegetable and animal constituents of the soil is desired, the correction of _sourness_, or the supplying of lime to the crop, the mixture with salt would be advisable. _the amount of lime_ required _by plants_ is, as was before observed, usually small compared with the whole amount contained in the soil; still it is not unimportant. of lime. bus. of wheat contain about lbs. " barley " ½ " " oats " " tons of turnips " " " potatoes " " " red clover " " " rye grass " "[ah] [what is the best guide concerning the quantity of lime to be applied? what is said of the sinking of lime in the soil? what is plaster of paris composed of? why is it called plaster of paris?] the amount of lime required at each application, and the frequency of those applications, must depend on the chemical and mechanical condition of the soil. no exact rule can be given, but probably the custom of each district--regulated by long experience--is the best guide. _lime sinks in the soil_; and therefore, when used alone, should always be applied as a top dressing to be carried into the soil by rains. the tendency of lime to settle is so great that, when cutting drains, it may often be observed in a whitish streak on the top of the subsoil. after heavy doses of lime have been given to the soil, and have settled so as to have apparently ceased from their action, they may be brought up and mixed with the soil by deeper plowing. _lime should never be mixed with animal manures_, unless in compost with muck, or some other good absorbent, as it is liable to cause the escape of their ammonia. plaster of paris. _plaster of paris or gypsum_ (sulphate of lime) is composed of sulphuric acid and lime in combination. it is called 'plaster of paris,' because it constitutes the rock underlying the city of paris. [is it a constituent of plants? what else does it furnish them? how does it affect manure? how does it produce sorrel in the soil? how may the acidity be overcome?] it is a constituent of many plants. it also furnishes them with sulphur--a constituent of the sulphuric acid which it contains. it is an excellent absorbent of ammonia, and is very useful to sprinkle around stables, poultry houses, pig-styes, and privies, where it absorbs the escaping gases, saving them for the use of plants, and purifying the air, thus rendering stables, etc., more healthy than when not so supplied. it has been observed that the extravagant use of plaster sometimes induces the growth of _sorrel_. this is probably the case only where the soil is deficient in lime. in such instances, the lime required by plants is obtained by the decomposition of the plaster. the lime enters into the construction of the plant, and the sulphuric acid remains _free_, rendering the soil _sour_, and therefore in condition to produce sorrel. in such a case, an application of _lime_ will correct the acid by uniting with it and converting it into _plaster_. chloride of lime. [what does chloride of lime supply to plants? how does it affect manures? how may it be used? how may magnesia be supplied, when wanting? what care is necessary concerning the use of magnesia?] _chloride of lime_ is a compound of _lime and chlorine_. it furnishes both of these constituents to plants, and it is an excellent absorbent of ammonia and other gases arising from decomposition--hence its usefulness in destroying bad odors, and in preserving fertilizing matters for the use of crops. it may be used like plaster, or in the decomposition of organic matters, where it not only hastens decay, but absorbs and retains the escaping gases. it will be recollected that _chloride of lime_ is one of the products of the _lime and salt mixture_. _lime_ in combination with _phosphoric acid_ forms the valuable _phosphate of lime_, of which so large a portion of the ash of grain, and the bones of animals, is formed. this will be spoken of more at length under the head of 'phosphoric acid.' magnesia. magnesia is a constituent of vegetable ashes, and is almost always present in the soil in sufficient quantities. when analysis indicates that it is needed, it may be applied in the form of _magnesian lime_, or _refuse epsom salts_, which are composed of sulphuric acid and magnesia (sulphate of magnesia). the great care necessary concerning the use of magnesia is, not to apply too much of it, it being, when in excess, as has been previously remarked, injurious to the fertility of the soil. some soils are hopelessly barren from the fact that they contain too much magnesia. acids. sulphuric acid. [what is sulphuric acid commonly called? how may it be used? how does it prevent the escape of ammonia?] _sulphuric acid_ is a very important constituent of vegetable ashes, especially of oats and the root-crops. it is often deficient in the soil, particularly where potatoes have been long cultivated. one of the reasons why _plaster_ (sulphate of lime) is so beneficial to the potato crop is undoubtedly that it supplies it with sulphuric acid. sulphuric acid is commonly known by the name of _oil vitriol_, and may be purchased for agricultural purposes at a low price. it may be used in a very dilute form (weakened by mixing it with a large quantity of water) to the compost heap, where it will change the ammonia to a sulphate as soon as formed, and thus prevent its loss, as the sulphate of ammonia is not volatile; and, being soluble in water, is useful to plants. some idea of the value of this compound may be formed from the fact that manufacturers of manures are willing to pay seven cents per lb., or even more, for sulphate of ammonia, to insure the success of their fertilizers. notwithstanding this, many farmers persist in throwing away hundreds of pounds of _ammonia_ every year, as a tax for their ignorance (or indolence), while a small tax in _money_--not more valuable, nor more necessary to their success--for the support of common schools, and the better education of the young, is too often unwillingly paid. [what is the effect of using too much sulphuric acid?] if a tumbler full of sulphuric acid (costing a few cents), be thrown into the tank of the compost heap once a month, the benefit to the manure would be very great. where a deficiency of sulphuric acid in the soil is indicated by analysis, it may be supplied in this way, or by the use of plaster or refuse epsom salts. care is necessary that _too much_ sulphuric acid be not used, as it would prevent the proper decomposition of manures, and would induce a growth of sorrel in the soil by making it _sour_. in many instances, it will be found profitable to use sulphuric acid in the manufacture of super-phosphate of lime (as directed under the head of 'phosphoric acid,') thus making it perform the double purpose of preparing an available form of phosphate, and of supplying sulphur and sulphuric acid to the plant. phosphoric acid. [how large a part of the ashes of grain consists of phosphoric acid? of what other substances does it form a leading ingredient? how many pounds of sulphuric acid are contained in one hundred bushels of wheat?] we come now to the consideration of one of the most important of all subjects connected with agriculture, that is, _phosphoric acid_. _phosphoric acid_, forming about one half of the ashes of wheat, rye, corn, buckwheat, and oats; nearly the same proportion of those of barley, peas, beans and linseed; an important ingredient of the ashes of potatoes and turnips; one quarter of the ash of milk and a large proportion of the bones of animals, often exists in the soil in the proportion of only about one or two pounds in a thousand. the cultivation of our whole country has been such, as to take away the phosphoric acid from the soil without returning it, except in very minute quantities. every hundred bushels of wheat sold contains (and removes permanently from the soil) about _sixty pounds_ of phosphoric acid. other grains, as well as the root crops and grasses, remove likewise a large quantity of it. it has been said by a contemporary writer, that for each cow kept on a pasture through the summer, there is carried off in veal, butter and cheese, not less than _fifty_ lbs. of phosphate of lime (bone-earth) on an average. this would be _one thousand lbs._ for twenty cows; and it shows clearly why old dairy pastures become so exhausted of this substance, that they will no longer produce those nutritious grasses, which are favorable to butter and cheese-making. [how much phosphate of lime will twenty cows remove from a pasture during a summer? what has this removal of phosphate of lime occasioned? how have the genesee and mohawk valleys been affected by this removal of phosphoric acid?] that this removal of the most valuable constituent of the soil, has been the cause of more exhaustion of farms, and more emigration, in search of fertile districts, than any other single effect of injudicious farming, is a fact which multiplied instances most clearly prove. it is stated that the genesee and mohawk valleys, which once produced an average of _thirty-five_ or _forty bushels_ of wheat, per acre, have since been reduced in their average production to _twelve and a half_ bushels. hundreds of similar cases might be stated; and in a large majority of these, could the cause of the impoverishment be ascertained, it would be found to be the removal of the phosphoric acid from the soil. [how may this devastation be arrested? is any soil inexhaustible? what is usually the best source from which to obtain phosphoric acid?] the evident tendency of cultivation being to continue this murderous system, and to prey upon the vital strength of the country, it is necessary to take such measures as will arrest the outflow of this valuable material. this can never be fully accomplished until laws shall be made preventing the wastes of cities and towns. such laws have existed for a long time in china, and have doubtlessly been the secret of the long subsistence and present prosperity of the millions of people inhabiting that country. we have, nevertheless, a means of restoring to fertility many of our worn-out lands, and preserving our fertile fields from so rapid impoverishment as they are now suffering. many suppose that soils which produce good crops, year after year, are inexhaustible, but time will prove to the contrary. they may possess a sufficiently large stock of phosphoric acid, and other constituents of plants, to last a long time, but when that stock becomes so reduced, that there is not enough left for the uses of full crops, the productive power of the soil will yearly decrease, until it becomes worthless. it may last a long time, a century, or even more, but as long as the system is--to _remove every thing, and return nothing_,--the fate of the most fertile soil is evident. the source mentioned, from which to obtain phosphoric acid, is the bones of animals. these contain large quantities of _phosphate of lime_. they are the receptacles which collect nearly all of the phosphates in crops, which are fed to animals, and are not returned in their excrements. for the grain, etc., sent out of the country, there is no way to be repaid except by the importation of this material; but, all that is fed to animals, or to human beings, may, if a proper use be made of their excrement, and of their bones after death, be returned to the soil. with the treatment of animal excrements we are already familiar, and we will now turn our attention to the subject of bones. [of what do dried bones consist? what is the organic matter of bones? the inorganic? what can you say of the use of whole bones?] _bones_ consist, when dried, of about one third organic matter, and two thirds inorganic matter. the organic matter consists chiefly of _gelatine_--a compound containing _nitrogen_. the inorganic part is chiefly _phosphate of lime_. hence, we see that bones are excellent, as both organic and mineral manure. the organic part, containing nitrogen, forms _ammonia_, and the inorganic part supplies the much needed _phosphoric acid_ to the soil. liebig says that, as a producer of ammonia, lbs. of dry bones are equivalent to lbs. of human urine. [how does the value of bone dust compare with that of broken bones? what is the reason of the superiority of bone dust? how is bone-black made? of what does it consist?] bones are applied to the soil in almost every conceivable form. _whole bones_ are often used in very large quantities; their action, however, is extremely slow, and it is never advisable to use bones in this form. ten bushels of bones, finely ground, will produce larger results, during the current ten years after application, than would ensue from the use of one hundred bushels merely broken, not because the dust contains more fertilizing matter than the whole bones, but because that which it does contain is in a much more available condition. it ferments readily, and produces ammonia, while the ashy parts are exposed to the action of roots. [should farmers burn bones before using them? how would you compost bones with ashes? in what way would you prevent the escape of ammonia?] _bone-black._ if bones are burned in retorts, or otherwise protected from the atmosphere, their organic matter will all be driven off, except the carbon, which not being supplied with oxygen cannot escape. in this form bones are called _ivory black_, or _bone-black_. it consists of the inorganic matter, and the carbon of the bones. the nitrogen having been expelled it can make no ammonia, and thus far the original value of bones is reduced by burning; that is, one ton of bones contains more fertilizing matter before, than after burning; but one ton of bone black is more valuable than one ton of raw bones, as the carbon is retained in a good form to act as an absorbent in the soil, while the whole may be crushed or ground much more easily than before being burned. this means of pulverizing bones is adopted by manufacturers, who replace the ammonia in the form of guano, or otherwise; but it is not to be recommended for the use of farmers, who should not lose the ammonia, forming a part of bones, more than that of other manure. _composting bones with ashes_ is a good means of securing their decomposition. they should be placed in a water-tight vessel (such as a cask); first, three or four inches of bones, then the same quantity of strong unleached wood ashes, continuing these alternate layers until the cask is full, and keeping them _always wet_. if they become too dry they will throw off an offensive odor, accompanied by the escape of ammonia, and consequent loss of value. in about one year, the whole mass of bones (except, perhaps, those at the top) will be softened, so that they may be easily crushed, and they are in a good condition for manuring. the ashes are, in themselves, valuable, and this compost is excellent for many crops, particularly for indian corn. a little dilute sulphuric acid, occasionally sprinkled on the upper part of the matter in the cask, will prevent the escape of the ammonia. [what is the effect of boiling bones under pressure? how is super-phosphate of lime made? describe the composition of phosphate of lime, and the chemical changes which take place in altering it to super-phosphate of lime.] _boiling bones under pressure_, whereby their gelatine is dissolved away, and the inorganic matter left in an available condition, from its softness, is a very good way of rendering them useful; but, as it requires, among other things, a steam boiler, it is hardly probable that it will be largely adopted by farmers of limited means. any or all of these methods are good, but bones cannot be used with true economy, except by changing their inorganic matter into super-phosphate of lime. _super-phosphate of lime_ is made by treating phosphate of lime, or the ashes of bones, with _sulphuric acid_. phosphate of lime, as it exists in bones, consists of one atom of phosphoric acid and three atoms of lime. it may be represented as { lime phosphoric acid { lime { lime by adding a proper quantity of sulphuric acid with this, it becomes _super_-phosphate of lime; that is, the same amount of phosphoric acid, with a smaller proportion of lime (or a _super_-abundance of phosphoric acid), the sulphuric acid, taking two atoms of lime away from the compound, combined with it making sulphate of lime (plaster). the changes may be thus represented. {phosphoric acid} super-phosphate phosphate of lime {lime } of lime. {lime} {lime} sulphate of lime. sulphuric acid} super-phosphate of lime may be made from whole bones, bone dust, bone-black, or from the pure ashes of bones. [how should sulphuric acid be applied to whole bones? what is the necessity for so large an amount of water?] the process of making it from whole bones is slow and troublesome, as it requires a long time for the effect to diffuse itself through the whole mass of a large bone. when it is made in this way, the bones should be _dry_, and the acid should be diluted in many times its bulk of water, and should be applied to the bones (which may be placed in a suitable cask, with a spiggot at the bottom), in quantities sufficient to cover them, about once in ten days; and at the end of that time, one half of the liquid should be drawn off by the spiggot. this liquid is a solution of super-phosphate of lime, containing sulphate of lime, and may be applied to the soil in a liquid form, or through the medium of a compost heap. the object of using so much water is to prevent an incrustation of sulphate of lime on the surfaces of the bones, this must be removed by stirring the mass, which allows the next application of acid to act directly on the phosphate remaining. the amount of acid required is about or lbs. to each lbs. of bones. the gelatine will remain after the phosphate is all dissolved, and may be composted with muck, or plowed under the soil, where it will form ammonia. [may less water be employed in making super-phosphate from bone dust or crushed bones?] _bone dust_, or _crushed bones_, may be much more easily changed to the desired condition, as the surface exposed is much greater, and the acid can act more generally throughout the whole mass. the amount of acid required is the same as in the other case, but it may be used _stronger_, two or three times its bulk of water being sufficient, if the bones are finely ground or crushed--more or less water should be used according to the fineness of the bones. the time occupied will also be much less, and the result of the operation will be in better condition for manure. bones may be made fine enough for this operation, either by grinding, etc., or by boiling under pressure, as previously described; indeed, by whatever method bones are pulverized, they should always be treated with sulphuric acid before being applied to the soil, as this will more than double their value for immediate use. bone-black is chiefly used by manufacturers of super-phosphate of lime, who treat it with acid the same as has been directed above, only that they grind the black very finely before applying the acid. [what other forms of bones may be used in making super-phosphate of lime? why is super-phosphate of lime a better fertilizer than phosphate of lime? what can you say of the _lasting manures_?] _bone ashes_, or bones burned to whiteness, may be similarly treated. indeed, in all of the forms of bones here described, the phosphate of lime remains unaltered, as it is indestructible by heat; the differences of composition are only in the admixture of organic constituents. _the reason why super-phosphate of lime is so much better than phosphate_, may be easily explained. the _phosphate_ is very _slowly_ soluble in water, and consequently furnishes food to plants slowly. a piece of bone as large as a pea may lie in the soil for years without being all consumed; consequently, it will be years before its value is returned, and it pays no interest on its cost while lying there. the _super-phosphate_ dissolves very _rapidly_ and furnishes food for plants with equal facility; hence its much greater value as a manure. it is true that the _phosphate_ is the most _lasting_ manure; but, once for all, let us caution farmers against considering this a virtue in mineral manures, or in organic manures either, when used on soils containing the proper absorbents of ammonia. they are _lasting_, only in proportion as they are _lazy_. manures are worthless unless they are in condition to be immediately used. the farmer who wishes his manures to _last_ in the soil, and to lose their use, may be justly compared with the _miser_, who buries his gold and silver in the ground for the satisfaction of knowing that he owns it. it is an old and a true saying that "a nimble sixpence is better than a slow shilling." improved super-phosphate of lime. [what are the ingredients of the _improved_ super-phosphate of lime?] to show the manner in which super-phosphate of lime is perfected, and rendered the best manure for general uses, which has yet been made, containing large quantities of phosphoric acid and a good supply of ammonia,--hereby covering the two leading deficiencies in a majority of soils, it may be well to explain the composition of the _improved super-phosphate of lime_ invented by prof. mapes. this manure consists of the following ingredients in the proportions named:-- lbs. bone-black (phosphate of lime and carbon). " sulphuric acid. " guano. " sulphate of ammonia. [explain the uses of these different constituents. what is nitrogenized phosphate?] the sulphuric acid has the before-mentioned effect on the bone-black, and _fixes_ the ammonia of the guano by changing it to a sulphate. the twenty pounds of sulphate of ammonia added increase the amount, so as to furnish nitrogen to plants in sufficient quantities to give them energy, and induce them to take up the super-phosphate of lime in the manure more readily than would be done, were there not a sufficient supply of ammonia in the soil. the addition of the guano, which contains all of the elements of fertility, and many of them in considerable quantities, renders the manure of a more general character, and enables it to produce very large crops of almost any kind, while it assists in fortifying the soil in what is usually its weakest point--phosphoric acid. prof. mapes has more recently invented a new fertilizer called nitrogenized super-phosphate of lime, composed of the improved super-phosphate of lime and blood, dried and ground before mixture, in equal proportions. this manure, from its highly nitrogenous character, theoretically surpasses all others, and probably will be found in practice to have great value; its cost will be rather greater than guano. we understand its manufacture will shortly be commenced by a company now forming for that purpose. [what should be learned before purchasing amendments for the soil? what do you know of silica?] many farmers will find it expedient to purchase bones, or bone dust, and manufacture their own super-phosphate of lime; others will prefer to purchase the prepared manure. in doing so, it should be obtained of men of known respectability, as manures are easily adulterated with worthless matters; and, as their price is so high, that such deception may occasion great loss. we would not recommend the application of any artificial manure, without first obtaining an analysis of the soil, and knowing _to a certainty_ that the manure is needed; still, when no analysis has been procured, it may be profitable to apply such manures as most generally produce good results--such as stable manure, night soil, the improved super-phosphate of lime; or, if this cannot be procured, guano. neutrals. silica. _silica_ (or sand) always exists in the soil in sufficient quantities for the supply of food for plants; but, as has been often stated in the preceding pages, not always in the proper condition. this subject has been so often explained to the student of this book, that it is only necessary to repeat here, that when the weakness of the straw or stalk of plants grown on any soil indicates an inability in that soil to supply the silicates required for strength, not more sand should be added, but _alkalies_, to combine with the sand already contained in it, and make _soluble silicates_ which are available to roots. sand is often necessary to stiff clays, as a _mechanical_ manure, to loosen their texture and render them easier of cultivation, and more favorable to the distribution of roots, and to the circulation of air and water. chlorine. [how may chlorine be applied?] _chlorine_, a necessary constituent of plants, and often deficient in the soil (as indicated by analysis), may be applied in the form of salt (chloride of sodium), or chloride of lime. the former may be dissolved in the water used to slake lime, and the latter may, with much advantage, be sprinkled around stables and other places where fertilizing gases are escaping, and, after being saturated with ammonia, applied to the soil, thus serving a double purpose. oxide of iron. [how may the protoxide of iron be changed to peroxide?] nearly all soils contain sufficient quantities of _oxide of iron_, or iron rust, so that this substance can hardly be required as a manure. some soils, however, contain the _prot_oxide of iron in such quantities as to be injurious to plants,--see page . when this is the case, it is necessary to plow the soil thoroughly, and use such other mechanical means as shall render it open to the admission of air. the _prot_oxide of iron will then take up more oxygen, and become the _per_oxide--which is not only inoffensive, but is absolutely necessary to fertility. oxide of manganese. this can hardly be called an essential constituent of plants, and is never taken into consideration in manuring lands. various other mineral manures. leached ashes. [why are leached ashes inferior to those that have not been leached? on what do the benefits of leached ashes depend? can these ingredients be more cheaply obtained in another form? why do unleached ashes, applied in the spring, sometimes cause grain to lodge?] among the mineral manures which have not yet been mentioned--not coming strictly under any of the preceding heads, is the one known as _leached ashes_. these are not without their benefits, though worth much less than unleached ashes, which, besides the constituents of those which have been leached, contain much potash, soda, etc. farmers have generally overrated the value of leached ashes, because they contain small quantities of available phosphate of lime, and soluble silicates, in which most old soils are deficient. while we witness the good results ensuing from their application, we should not forget that the fertilizing ingredients of _thirty bushels_ of these ashes may be bought in a more convenient form for _ten_ or _fifteen cents_, or for less than the cost of spreading the ashes on the soil. in many parts of long island farmers pay as much as eight or ten cents per bushel for this manure, and thousands of loads of leached ashes are taken to this locality from the river counties of new york, and even from the state of maine, and are sold for many times their value, producing an effect which could be as well and much more cheaply obtained by the use of small quantities of super-phosphate of lime and potash. these ashes often contain a little charcoal (resulting from the imperfect combustion of the wood), which acts as an absorbent of ammonia. it is sometimes observed that _unleached_ ashes, when applied in the spring, cause grain to lodge. when this is the case, as it seldom is, it may be inferred that the potash which they contain causes so rapid a growth, that the soil is not able to supply silicates as fast as they are required by the plants, but after the first year, the potash will have united with the silica in the soil, and overcome the difficulty. old mortar. [what are the most fertilizing ingredients of old mortar?] _old mortar_ is a valuable manure, because it contains nitrate of potash and other compounds of nitric acid with alkalies. these are slowly formed in the mortar by the changing of the nitrogen of the hair (in the mortar) into nitric acid, and the union of this with the small quantities of _potash_, or with the _lime_ of the plaster. nitrogen, presented in other forms, as ammonia, for instance, may be transformed into nitric acid, by uniting with the oxygen of the air, and this nitric acid combines immediately with the alkalies of the mortar.[ai] the lime contained in the mortar may be useful in the soil for the many purposes accomplished by other lime. gas house lime. [how may gas-house lime be prepared for use? why should it not be used fresh, from the gas house? on what do its fertilizing properties depend? what use may be made of its offensive odor?] _the refuse lime of gas works_, where it can be cheaply obtained, may be advantageously used as a manure. it consists, chiefly, of various compounds of sulphur and lime. it should be composted with earth or refuse matter, so as to expose it to the action of air. it should never be used fresh from the gas house. in a few months the sulphur will have united with the oxygen of the air, and become sulphuric acid, which unites with the lime and makes sulphate of lime (plaster), which form it must assume, before it is of much value. having been used to purify gas made from coal, it contains a small quantity of ammonia, which adds to its value. it is considered a profitable manure in england, at the price there paid for it (forty cents a cartload), and, if of good quality, it may be worth double that sum, especially for soils deficient in plaster, or for such crops as are much benefited by plaster. its price must, of course, be regulated somewhat by the price of lime, which constitutes a large proportion of its fertilizing parts. the offensive odor of this compound renders it a good protection against many insects. the refuse _liquor of gas works_ contains enough ammonia to make it a valuable manure. soapers' ley and bleachers' ley. [what use may be made of the refuse ley of soap-makers and bleachers? what peculiar qualities does soapers' ley possess?] the refuse ley of soap factories and bleaching establishments contains greater or less quantities of soluble silicates and alkalies (especially soda and potash), and is a good addition to the tank of the compost heap, or it may be used directly as a liquid application to the soil. the soapers' ley, especially, will be found a good manure for lands on which grain lodges. much of the benefit of this manure arises from the soluble silicates it contains, while its nitrogenous matter,[aj] obtained from those parts of the fatty matters which cannot be converted into soap, and consequently remains in this solution, forms a valuable addition. heaps of soil saturated with this liquid in autumn, and subjected to the freezings of winter, form an admirable manure for spring use. mr. crane, near newark (n. j.), has long used a mixture of spent ley and stable manure, applied in the fall to trenches plowed in the soil, and has been most successful in obtaining large crops. irrigation. [on what does the benefit arising from irrigation chiefly depend? what kind of water is best for irrigation? how do under-drains increase the benefits of irrigation?] _irrigation_ does not come strictly under the head of inorganic manures, as it often supplies ammonia to the soil. its chief value, however, in most cases, must depend on the amount of mineral matter which it furnishes. the word "irrigation" means simply _watering_. in many districts water is in various ways made to overflow the land, and is removed when necessary for the purposes of cultivation. all river and spring water contains some impurities, many of which are beneficial to vegetation. these are derived from the earth over, or through which, the water has passed, and ammonia absorbed from the atmosphere. when water is made to cover the earth, especially if its rapid motion be arrested, much of this fertilizing matter settles, and is deposited on the soil. the water which sinks into the soil carries its impurities to be retained for the uses of plants. when, by the aid of under-drains, or in open soils, the water passes _through_ the soil, its impurities are arrested, and become available in vegetable growth. it is, of course, impossible to say exactly what kind of mineral matter is supplied by water, as that depends on the kind of rock or soil from which the impurities are derived; but, whatever it may be, it is generally soluble and ready for immediate use by plants. [what is the difference between water which only runs over the surface of the earth, and that which runs out of the earth? why should strong currents of water not be allowed to traverse the soil?] water which has run over the surface of the earth contains both ammonia and mineral matter, while that which has arisen out of the earth, contains usually only mineral matter. the direct use of the water of irrigation as a solvent for the mineral ingredients of the soil, is one of its main benefits. to describe the many modes of irrigation would be too long a task for our limited space. it may be applied in any way in which it is possible to cover the land with water, at stated times. care is necessary, however, that it do not wash more fertilizing matter from the soil than it deposits on it, as would often be the case, if a strong current of water were run over it. brooks may be dammed up, and thus made to cover a large quantity of land. in such a case the rapid current would be destroyed, and the fertilizing matter would settle; but, if the course of the brook were turned, so that it would run in a current over any part of the soil, it might carry away more than it deposited, and thus prove injurious. small streams turned on to land, from the washing of roads, or from elevated springs, are good means of irrigation, and produce increased fertility, except where the soil is of such a character as to prevent the water from passing away, in which case it should be under-drained. irrigation was one of the oldest means of fertility ever used by man, and still continues in great favor wherever its effects have been witnessed. mixing soils. [how are soils improved by mixing?] the _mixing of soils_ is often all that is necessary to render them fertile, and to improve their _mechanical_ condition. for instance, soils deficient in potash, or any other constituent, may have that deficiency supplied, by mixing with them soil containing this constituent in excess. it is very frequently the case, that such means of improvement are easily availed of. while these chemical effects are being produced, there may be an equal improvement in the mechanical character of the soil. thus stiff clay soils are rendered lighter, and more easily workable, by an admixture of sand, while light blowy sands are compacted, and made more retentive of manure, by a dressing of clay or of muck. [why may the same effect sometimes be produced by deep plowing? what is absolutely necessary to economical manuring?] of course, this cannot be depended on as a sure means of chemical improvement, unless the soils are previously analyzed, so as to know their requirements; but, in a majority of cases, the soil will be benefited, by mixing with it soil of a different character. it is not always necessary to go to other locations to procure the soil to be applied, as the subsoil is often very different from the surface soil, and simple deep plowing will suffice, in such cases, to produce the required admixture, by bringing up the earth from below to mingle it with that of a different character at the surface. * * * * * in the foregoing remarks on the subject of mineral manures, the writer has endeavored to point out such a course as would produce the "greatest good to the greatest number," and, consequently, has neglected much which might discourage the farmer with the idea, that the whole system of scientific agriculture is too expensive for his adoption. still, while he has confined his remarks to the more simple improvements on the present system of management, he would say, briefly, that _no manuring can be strictly economical that is not based on an analysis of the soil, and a knowledge of the best means of overcoming the deficiencies indicated, together with the most scrupulous care of every ounce of evaporating or soluble manure_. footnotes: [ag] marl is earth containing lime, but its use is not to be recommended in this country, except where it can be obtained at little cost, as the expenses of carting the _earth_ would often be more than the value of the _lime_. [ah] the straw producing the grain and the turnip and potato tops contain more lime than the grain and roots. [ai] see working farmer, vol. , p. . [aj] glycerine, etc. chapter x. atmospheric fertilizers. [are the gases in the atmosphere manures? what would be the result if they were not so?] it is not common to look on the gases in the atmosphere in the light of manures, but they are decidedly so. indeed, they are almost the only organic manure ever received by the uncultivated parts of the earth, as well as a large portion of that which is occupied in the production of food for man. if these gases were not manures; if there were no means by which they could be used by plants, the fertility of the soil would long since have ceased, and the earth would now be in an unfertile condition. that this must be true, will be proved by a few moments' reflection on the facts stated in the first part of this book. the fertilizing gases in the atmosphere being composed of the constituents of decayed plants and animals, it is as necessary that they should be again returned to the form of organized matter, as it is that constituents taken from the _soil_ should not be put out of existence. ammonia. [how is ammonia used by plants? how may it be carried to the soil? how may the value of organic manures be estimated? what effects has ammonia beside supplying food to plants?] the _ammonia_ in the atmosphere probably cannot be appropriated by the leaves of plants, and must, therefore, enter the soil to be assimilated by roots. it reaches the soil in two ways. it is either arrested from the air circulating through the soil, or it is absorbed by rains in the atmosphere, and thus carried to the earth, where it is retained by clay and carbon, for the uses of plants. in the soil, ammonia is the most important of all organic manures. in fact, the value of organic manure may be estimated, either by the amount of ammonia which it will yield, or by its power of absorbing ammonia from other sources. the most important action of ammonia in the soil is the supply of _nitrogen_ to plants; but it has other offices which are of consequence. it assists in some of the chemical changes necessary to prepare the matters in the soil for assimilation. some argue that ammonia _stimulates_ the roots of plants, and causes them to take up increased quantities of inorganic matter. the discussion of this question would be out of place here, and we will simply say, that it gives them such vigor that they require increased amounts of ashy matter, and enables them to take this from the soil. [to how great a degree can the farmer control atmospheric fertilizers? what should be the condition of the soil? what substances are good absorbents in the soil? how may sandy soils be made retentive of ammonia?] although, in the course of nature, the atmospheric fertilizers are plentifully supplied to the soil, without the immediate attention of the farmer, it is not beyond his power to manage them in such a manner as to arrest a greater quantity. the precautions necessary have been repeatedly given in the preceding pages, but it may be well to name them again in this chapter. the condition of the soil is the main point to be considered. it must be such as to absorb and retain ammonia--to allow water to pass _through_ it, and be discharged _below_ the point to which the roots of crops are searching for food--and to admit of a free circulation of air. the power of absorbing and retaining ammonia is not possessed by sand, but it is a prominent property of clay, charcoal, and some other matters named as absorbents. hence, if the soil consists of nearly pure sand, it will not make use of the ammonia brought to it from the atmosphere, but will allow it to evaporate immediately after a shower. soils in this condition require additions of absorbent matters, to enable them to use the ammonia received from the atmosphere. soils already containing a sufficient amount of clay or charcoal, are thus far prepared to receive benefit from this source. [why does under-draining increase the absorptive power of the soil? how do plants obtain their carbonic acid? how does carbonic acid affect caustic lime in the soil?] the next point is to cause the water of rains to pass _through_ the soil. if it lies on the surface, or runs off without entering the soil, or even if it only enters to a slight depth, and comes in contact with but a small quantity of the absorbents, it is not probable that the fertilizing matters which it contains will all be abstracted. some of them will undoubtedly return to the atmosphere on the evaporation of the water; but, if the soil contains a sufficient supply of absorbents, and will allow all rain water to pass through it, the fertilizing gases will all be retained. they will be filtered (or raked) out of the water. this subject will be more fully treated in section iv. in connection with under-draining. besides the properties just described, the soil must possess the power of admitting a free circulation of air. to effect this, it is necessary that the soil should be well pulverized to a great depth. if, in addition to this, the soil be such as to admit water to pass through, it will allow that circulation of air necessary to the greatest supply of ammonia. carbonic acid. [what power does it give to water? what condition of the soil is necessary for the reception of the largest quantity of carbonic acid? may oxygen be considered a manure? what is the effect of the oxidation of the constituents of the soil?] carbonic acid is received from the atmosphere, both by the leaves and roots of plants. if there is caustic lime in the soil, it unites with it, and makes it milder and finer. it is absorbed by the water in the soil, and gives it the power of dissolving many more substances than it would do without the carbonic acid. this use is one of very great importance, as it is equivalent to making the minerals themselves more soluble. water dissolves carbonate of lime, etc., exactly in proportion to the amount of carbonic acid which it contains. we should, therefore, strive to have as much carbonic acid as possible in the water in the soil; and one way, in which to effect this, is to admit to the soil the largest possible quantity of atmospheric air which contains this gas. the condition of soil necessary for this, is the same as is required for the deposit of ammonia by the same circulation of air. oxygen. [how does it affect the protoxide of iron? how does it neutralize the acids in the soil? how does it affect its organic parts? how does it form nitric acid? how may it affect excrementitious matter of plants? what effect has it on the mechanical condition of the soil?] _oxygen_, though not taken up by plants in its pure form, may justly be classed among manures, if we consider its effects both chemical and mechanical in the soil. . by oxidizing or _rusting_ some of the constituents of the soil, it prepares them for the uses of plants. . it unites with the _prot_oxide of iron, and changes it to the _per_oxide. . if there are _acids_ in the soil, which make it sour and unfertile, it may be opened to the circulation of the air, and the oxygen will prepare some of the mineral matters contained in the soil to unite with the acids and neutralize them. . oxygen combines with the carbon of organic matters in the soil, and causes them to decay. the combination produces carbonic acid. . it combines with the nitrogen of decaying substances and forms _nitric acid_, which is serviceable as food for plants. . it undoubtedly affects in some way the matter which is thrown out from the roots of plants. this, if allowed to accumulate, and remain unchanged, is often very injurious to plants; but, probably, the oxygen and carbonic acid of the air in the soil change it to a form to be inoffensive, or even make it again useful to the plant. . it may also improve the _mechanical_ condition of the soil, as it causes its particles to crumble, thus making it finer; and it roughens the surfaces of particles, making them less easy to move among each other. these properties of oxygen claim for it a high place among the atmospheric fertilizers. water. [why may water be considered an atmospheric manure? what classes of action have manures? what are chemical manures? mechanical?] _water_ may be considered an atmospheric manure, as its chief supply to vegetation is received from the air in the form of rain or dew. its many effects are already too well known to need farther comment. the means of supplying water to the soil by the deposit of _dew_ will be fully explained in section iv. chapter xi. recapitulation. manures have two distinct classes of action in the soil, namely, _chemical_ and _mechanical_. _chemical_ manures are those which enter into the construction of plants, or produce such chemical effects on matters in the soil as shall prepare them for use. _mechanical_ manures are those which improve the mechanical condition of the soil, such as loosening stiff clays, compacting light sands, pulverizing large particles, etc. [what are the three kinds of manures? what are organic manures, and what are their uses? mineral? atmospheric?] manures are of three distinct kinds, namely, _organic_, _mineral_, and _atmospheric_. _organic_ manures comprise all vegetable and animal matters (except ashes) which are used to fertilize the soil. vegetable manures supply carbonic acid, and inorganic matter to plants. animal manures supply the same substances and ammonia. _mineral_ manures comprise ashes, salt, phosphate of lime, plaster, etc. they supply plants with inorganic matter. their usefulness depends on their solubility. many of the organic and mineral manures have the power of absorbing ammonia arising from the decomposition of animal manures, as well as that which is brought to the soil by rains--these are called absorbents. _atmospheric_ manures consist of ammonia, carbonic acid, oxygen and water. their greatest usefulness requires the soil to allow the water of rains to pass _through_ it, to admit of a free circulation of air among its particles, and to contain a sufficient amount of absorbent matter to arrest and retain all ammonia and carbonic acid presented to it. [what rule should regulate the application of manures? how must organic manures be managed? atmospheric?] manures should never be applied to the soil without regard to its requirements. ammonia and carbon are almost always useful, but mineral manures become mere _dirt_ when applied to soils not deficient of them. the only true guide to the exact requirements of the soil is _chemical analysis_; and this must always be obtained before farming can be carried on with true economy. organic manures must be protected against the escape of their ammonia and the leaching out of their soluble parts. one cord of stable manure properly preserved, is worth ten cords which have lost all of their ammonia by evaporation, and their soluble parts by leaching--as is the case with much of the manure kept exposed in open barn-yards. atmospheric manures cost nothing, and are of great value when properly employed. in consequence of this, the soil which is enabled to make the largest appropriation of the atmospheric fertilizers, is worth many times as much as that which allows them to escape. section fourth. mechanical cultivation. chapter i. the mechanical character of soils. [what is the first office of the soil? how does it hold water for the uses of the plant? how does it obtain a part of its moisture?] the mechanical character of the soil is well understood from preceding remarks, and the learner knows that there are many offices to be performed by the soil aside from the feeding of plants. . it admits the roots of plants, and holds them in their position. . by a sponge-like action, it holds water for the uses of the plant. . it absorbs moisture from the atmosphere to supply the demands of plants. [how may it obtain heat? what is the use of the air circulating among its particles? could most soils be brought to the highest state of fertility? what is the first thing to be done? should its color be darkened?] . it absorbs heat from the sun's rays to assist in the process of growth. . it admits air to circulate among roots, and supply them with a part of their food, while the oxygen of that air renders available the minerals of the soil; and its carbonic acid, being absorbed by the water in the soil, gives it the power of dissolving, and carrying into roots more inorganic matter than would be contained in purer water. . it allows the excrementitious matter thrown out by roots to be carried out of their reach. all of these actions the soil must be capable of performing, before it can be in its highest state of fertility. there are comparatively few soils now in this condition, but there are also few which could not be profitably rendered so, by a judicious application of the modes of cultivation to be described in the following chapters. the three great objects to be accomplished are:-- . to adopt such a system of drainage as will cause all of the water of rains to pass _through_ the soil, instead of evaporating from the surface. . to pulverize the soil to a considerable depth. . to darken its color, and render it capable of absorbing atmospheric fertilizers. [name some of the means used to secure these effects. why are under-drains superior to open drains?] the means used to secure these effects are _under-draining, sub-soil and surface-plowing, digging, applying muck, etc._ chapter ii. under-draining. the advantages of _under_-drains over _open_ drains are very great. when open drains are used, much water passes into them immediately from the surface, and carries with it fertilizing parts of the soil, while their beds are often compacted by the running water and the heat of the sun, so that they become water-tight, and do not admit water from the lower parts of the soil. the sides of these drains are often covered with weeds, which spread their seeds throughout the whole field. open drains are not only a great obstruction to the proper cultivation of the land, but they cause much waste of room, as we can rarely plow nearer than within six or eight feet of them. there are none of these objections to the use of under-drains, as these are completely covered, and do not at all interfere with the cultivation of the surface. [with what materials may under-drains be constructed? describe the tile.] under drains may be made with brush, stones, or tiles. brush is a very poor material, and its use is hardly to be recommended. small stones are better, and if these be placed in the bottoms of the trenches, to a depth of eight or ten inches, and covered with sods turned upside down, having the earth packed well down on to them, they make very good drains. tile draining. the best under-drains are those made with tiles, or burnt clay pipes. the first form of these used was that called the _horse-shoe tile_, which was in two distinct pieces; this was superseded by a round pipe, and we have now what is called the _sole tile_, which is much better than either of the others. [illustration: fig. --sole tile.] [why is the sole tile superior to those of previous construction? how are these tiles laid? how may the trenches be dug?] this tile is made (like the horse-shoe and pipe tile) of common brick clay, and is burned the same as bricks. it is about one half or three quarters of an inch thick, and is so porous that water passes directly through it. it has a flat bottom on which to stand, and this enables it to retain its position, while making the drain, better than would be done by the round pipe. the orifice through which the water passes is egg-shaped, having its smallest curve at the bottom. this shape is the one most easily kept clear, as any particles of dirt which get into the drain must fall immediately to the point where even the smallest stream of water runs, and are thus removed. an orifice of about two inches is sufficient for the smaller drains, while the main drains require larger tiles. these tiles are laid, so that their ends will touch each other, on the bottoms of the trenches, and are kept in position by having the earth tightly packed around them. care must be taken that no space is left between the ends of the tiles, as dirt would be liable to get in and choke the drain. it is advisable to place a sod--grass side down--over each joint, before filling the trench, as this more effectually protects them against the entrance of dirt. there is no danger of keeping the water out by this operation, as it will readily pass through any part of the tiles. in _digging the trenches_ it is not necessary (except in very stony ground) to dig out a place wide enough for a man to stand in, as there are tools made expressly for the purpose, by which a trench may be dug six or seven inches wide, and to any required depth. one set of these implements consists of a long narrow spade and a hoe to correspond, such as are represented in the accompanying figure. [illustration: fig. . upton tool. spade and hoe.] with these tools, and a long light crowbar, for hard soils, trenches may be dug much more cheaply than with the common spade and pickaxe. where there are large boulders in the soil, these draining tools may dig under them so that they will not have to be removed. when the trenches are dug to a sufficient depth, the bottoms must be made perfectly smooth, with the required descent (from six inches to a few feet in one hundred feet). then the tiles may be laid in, so that their ends will correspond, be packed down, and the trenches filled up. such a drain, if properly constructed, may last for ages. unlike the stone drain, it is not liable to be frequented by rats, nor choked up by the soil working into it. the position of the tile may be best represented by a figure, also the mode of constructing stone drains. [why are small stones better than large stones in the construction of drains? on what must the depth of under-drains depend?] it will be seen that the tile drain is made with much less labor than the stone drain, as it requires less digging, while the breaking up of the stone for the stone drain will be nearly, or quite as expensive as the tiles. drains made with large stones are not nearly so good as with small ones, because they are more liable to be choked up by animals working in them.[ak] [illustration: fig. . _a_--tile drain trench. _b_--stone drain trench. _c_--sod laid on the stone.] [describe the principle which regulates these relative depths and distances. (blackboard.) which is usually the cheaper plan of constructing drains?] the _depth_ of the drains must depend on the distances at which they are placed. if but _twenty_ feet apart, they need be but _three_ feet deep; while, if they are _eighty_ feet apart, they must be _five_ feet deep, to produce the same effect. the reason for this is, that the water in the drained soil is not level, but is higher midway between the drains, than at any other point. it is necessary that this highest point should be sufficiently far from the surface not to interfere with the roots of plants, consequently, as the water line between two drains is _curved_, the most distant drains must be the deepest. this will be understood by referring to the following diagram. [illustration: fig. . _aa_-- feet drains, ft. apart. _bb_-- feet drains, ft. apart.] the curved line represents the position of the water. in most soils it will be easier to dig one trench five feet deep, than four trenches three feet deep, and the deep trenches will be equally beneficial; but where the soil is very hard below a depth of three feet, the shallow trenches will be the cheapest, and in such soils they will often be better, as the hard mass might not allow the water to pass down to enter the deeper drains. by following out these instructions, land may be cheaply, thoroughly, and permanently drained. footnotes: [ak] it is probable that a composition of hydraulic cement and some soluble material will be invented, by which a continuous pipe may be laid in the bottoms of trenches, becoming porous as the soluble material is removed by water. chapter iii. advantages of under-draining. the advantages of under-draining are many and important. . it entirely prevents drought. . it furnishes an increased supply of atmospheric fertilizers. . it warms the lower portions of the soil. . it hastens the decomposition of roots and other organic matter. . it accelerates the disintegration of the mineral matters in the soil. . it causes a more even distribution of nutritious matters among those parts of soil traversed by roots. . it improves the mechanical texture of the soil. . it causes the poisonous excrementitious matter of plants to be carried out of the reach of their roots. . it prevents grasses from running out. . it enables us to deepen the surface soil. by removing excess of water-- . it renders soils earlier in the spring. . it prevents the throwing out of grain in winter. . it allows us to work sooner after rains. . it keeps off the effects of cold weather longer in the fall. . it prevents the formation of _acetic_ and other organic acids, which induce the growth of sorrel and similar weeds. . it hastens the decay of vegetable matter, and the finer comminution of the earthy parts of the soil. . it prevents, in a great measure, the evaporation of water, and the consequent abstraction of heat from the soil. . it admits fresh quantities of water from rains, etc., which are always more or less imbued with the fertilizing gases of the atmosphere, to be deposited among the absorbent parts of soil, and given up to the necessities of plants. . it prevents the formation of so hard a crust on the surface of the soil as is customary on heavy lands. * * * * * [how does under-draining prevent drought?] . under-draining _prevents drought_, because it gives a better circulation of air in the soil; (it does so by making it more open). there is always the same amount of water _in_ and _about_ the surface of the earth. in winter, there is more in the soil than in summer, while in summer, that which has been dried out of the soil exists in the atmosphere in the form of a _vapor_. it is held in the vapory form by _heat_, which acts as _braces_ to keep it distended. when vapor comes in contact with substances sufficiently colder than itself, it gives up its heat--thus losing its braces--contracts, and becomes liquid water. this may be observed in hundreds of common operations. [why is there less water in the soil in summer than in winter, and where does it exist? what holds it in its vapory form? how is it affected by cold substances? describe the deposit of moisture on the outside of a pitcher in summer. what other instances of the same action can be named?] it is well known that a cold pitcher in summer robs the vapor in the atmosphere of its heat, and causes it to be deposited on its own surface. it looks as though the pitcher were _sweating_, but the water all comes from the atmosphere, not, of course, through the sides of the pitcher. if we breathe on a knife-blade, it condenses in the same manner the moisture of the breath, and becomes covered with a film of water. stone houses are damp in summer, because the inner surfaces of the walls, being cooler than the atmosphere, cause its moisture to be deposited in the manner described. by leaving a space, however, between the walls and the plaster, this moisture is prevented from being troublesome. [how does this principle affect the soil? explain the experiment with the two boxes of soil.] nearly every night in the summer season, the cold earth receives moisture from the atmosphere in the form of dew. a cabbage, which at night is very cold, condenses water to the amount of a gill or more. the same operation takes place in the soil. when the air is allowed to circulate among its lower and _cooler_ particles, they receive moisture from the same process of condensation. therefore, when, by the aid of under-drains, the lower soil becomes sufficiently open to admit of a circulation of air, the deposit of atmospheric moisture will keep the soil supplied with water at a point easily accessible to the roots of plants. if we wish to satisfy ourselves that this is _practically_ correct, we have only to prepare two boxes of finely pulverized soil, one, five or six inches deep, and the other fifteen or twenty inches deep, and place them in the sun at mid-day in summer. the thinner soil will be completely dried, while the deeper one, though it may have been perfectly dry at first, will soon accumulate a large amount of water on those particles which, being lower and more sheltered from the sun's heat than the particles of the thin soil, are made cooler. with an open condition of subsoil, then, such as may be secured by under-draining, we entirely overcome drought. [how does under-draining supply to the soil an increased amount of atmospheric fertilizers? how does it warm the lower parts of the soil?] . under-draining _furnishes an increased supply of atmospheric fertilizers_, because it secures a change of air in the soil. this change is produced whenever the soil becomes filled with water, and then dried; when the air above the earth is in rapid motion, and when the comparative temperature of the upper and lower soils changes. it causes new quantities of the ammonia and carbonic acid which it contains to be presented to the absorbent parts of the soil. . under-draining _warms the lower parts of the soil_, because the deposit of moisture ( ) is necessarily accompanied by an abstraction of heat from the atmospheric vapor, and because heat is withdrawn from the whole amount of air circulating through the cooler soil. when rain falls on the parched surface soil, it robs it of a portion of its heat, which is carried down to equalize the temperature for the whole depth. the heat of the rain-water itself is given up to the soil, leaving the water from one to ten degrees cooler, when it passes out of the drains, than when received by the earth. there is always a current of air passing from the lower to the upper end of a well constructed drain; and this air is always cooler in warm weather, when it issues from, than when it enters the drain. its lost heat is imparted to the soil. [how does it hasten the decomposition of roots and other organic matter in the soil? how does it accelerate the disintegration of its mineral parts? why is this disintegration necessary to fertility?] this heating of the lower soil renders it more favorable to vegetation, partially by expanding the spongioles at the end of the roots, thus enabling them to absorb larger quantities of nutritious matters. . under-draining _hastens the decomposition of roots and other organic matters in the soil_, by admitting increased quantities of air, thus supplying _oxygen_, which is as essential in decay as it is in combustion. it also allows the resultant gases of decomposition to pass away, leaving the air around the decaying substances in a condition to continue the process. this organic decay, besides its other benefits, produces an amount of heat perfectly perceptible to the smaller roots of plants, though not so to us. . draining _accelerates the disintegration of the mineral matters in the soil_, by admitting water and oxygen to keep up the process. this disintegration is necessary to fertility, because the roots of plants can feed only on matters dissolved from _surfaces_; and the more finely we pulverize the soil, the more surface we expose. for instance, the interior of a stone can furnish no food for plants; while, if it were finely crushed, it might make a fertile soil. any thing, tending to open the soil to exposure, facilitates the disintegration of its particles, and thereby increases its fertility. [how does under-draining equalize the distribution of the fertilizing parts of the soil? why does this distribution lessen the impoverishment of the soil? how does under-draining improve the mechanical texture of the soil? how do drains affect the excrementitious matter of plants?] . draining _causes a more even distribution of nutritious matters among those parts of soil traversed by roots_, because it increases the ease with which water travels around, descending by its own weight, moving sideways by a desire to find its level, or carried upward by attraction to supply the evaporation at the surface. by this continued motion of the water, soluble matter of one part of the soil may be carried to some other part; and another constituent from this latter position may be carried back to the former. thus the food of vegetables is continually circulating around among their roots, ready for absorption at any point where it is needed, while the more open character of the soil enables roots to occupy larger portions, making a more even drain on the whole, and preventing the undue impoverishment of any part. . under-drains _improve the mechanical texture of the soil_; because, by the decomposition of its parts, as previously described ( and ), it is rendered of a character to be more easily worked; while smooth round particles, which have a tendency to pack, are roughened by the oxidation of their surfaces, and move less easily among each other. . drains _cause the excrementitious matter of plants to be carried out of the reach of their roots_. nearly all plants return to the soil those parts of their food, which are not adapted to their necessities, and usually in a form that is poisonous to plants of the same kind. in an open soil, this matter may be carried by rains to a point where roots cannot reach it, and where it may undergo such changes as will fit it to be again taken up. [why do they prevent grasses from running out?] . by under-draining, _grasses are prevented from running out_, partly by preventing the accumulation of the poisonous excrementitious matter, and partly because these grasses usually consist of _tillering_ plants. these plants continually reproduce themselves in sprouts from the upper parts of their roots. these sprouts become independent plants, and continue to tiller (thus keeping the land supplied with a full growth), until the roots of the _stools_ (or clumps of tillers), come in contact with an uncongenial part of the soil, when the tillering ceases; the stools become extinct on the death of their plants, and the grasses run out. the open and healthy condition of soil produced by draining prevents the tillering from being stopped, and thus keeps up a full growth of grass until the nutriment of the soil is exhausted. . draining _enables us to deepen the surface-soil_, because the admission of air and the decay of roots render the condition of the subsoil such that it may be brought up and mixed with the surface-soil, without injuring _its quality_. the second class of advantages of under-draining, arising in the removal of the excess of water in the soil, are quite as important as those just described. [how does the removal of water render soils earlier in spring? why does it prevent the throwing out of grain in winter? why does it enable us to work sooner after rains? why does it keep off the effects of cold weather longer in the fall?] . _soils are, thereby, rendered earlier in spring_, because the water, which rendered them cold, heavy, and untillable, is earlier removed, leaving them earlier in a growing condition. . _the throwing out of grain in winter_ is prevented, because the water falling on the earth is immediately removed instead of remaining to throw up the soil by freezing, as it always does from the upright position taken by the particles of ice. . _we are enabled to work sooner after rains_, because the water descends, and is immediately removed instead of lying to be taken off by the slow process of evaporation, and sinking through a heavy soil. . _the effects of cold weather are kept off longer in the fall_, because the excess of water is removed, which would produce an unfertile condition on the first appearance of cold weather. the drains also, from causes already named ( ), keep the soil warmer than before being drained, thus actually lengthening the season, by making the soil warm enough for vegetable growth earlier in spring, and later in autumn. [how does it prevent lands from becoming sour? why does it hasten the decay of roots, and the comminution of mineral matters? how does it prevent the abstraction of heat from the soil?] . _lands are prevented from becoming sour by the formation of acetic acid_, etc., because these acids are produced in the soil only when the decomposition of organic matter is arrested by the _antiseptic_ (preserving) powers of water. if the water is removed, the decomposition of the organic matter assumes a healthy form, while the acids already produced are neutralized by atmospheric influences, and the soil is restored from sorrel to a condition in which it is fitted for the growth of more valuable plants. . _the decay of roots_, etc., is allowed to proceed, because the preservative influence of too much water is removed. wood, leaves, or other vegetable matter kept continually under water, will last for ages; while, if exposed to the action of the weather, as in under-drained soils, they soon decay. the presence of too much water, by excluding the oxygen of the air, prevents the _comminution of matters_ necessary to fertility. [how much heat does water take up in becoming vapor? why does water sprinkled on a floor render it cooler? why is not a cubic inch of vapor warmer than a cubic inch of water? why does a wet cloth on the head make it cooler when fanned? how does this principle apply to the soil?] . _the evaporation of water, and the consequent abstraction of heat from the soil, is in a great measure prevented_ by draining the water out at the _bottom_ of the soil, instead of leaving it to be dried off from the surface. when water assumes the gaseous (or vapory) form, it takes up times as much _heat_ as it contained while a liquid. a large part of this heat is derived from surrounding substances. when water is sprinkled on the floor, it cools the room; because, as it becomes a vapor, it takes heat from the room. the reason why vapor does not feel hotter than liquid water is, that, while it contains times as much heat, it is as large. hence, a cubic inch of vapor, into which we place the bulb of a thermometer, contains no more heat than a cubic inch of water. the principle is the same in some other cases. a sponge containing a table-spoonful of water is just as _wet_ as one twice as large and containing two spoonsful. if a wet cloth be placed on the head, and the evaporation of its water assisted by fanning, the head becomes cooler--a portion of its heat being taken to sustain the vapory condition of the water. the same principle holds true with the soil. when the evaporation of water is rapidly going on, by the assistance of the sun, wind, etc., a large quantity of heat is abstracted, and the soil becomes cold. when there is no evaporation taking place, except of water which has been deposited on the lower portions of soil, and carried to the surface by capillary attraction (as is nearly true on under-drained soils), the loss of heat is compensated by that taken from the moisture in the atmosphere by the soil, in the above-named manner. this cooling of the soil by the evaporation of water, is of very great injury to its powers of producing crops, and the fact that under-drains avoid it, is one of the best arguments in favor of their use. some idea may, perhaps, be formed of the amount of heat taken from the soil in this way, from the fact that, in midsummer, hogsheads of water may be evaporated from a single acre in twelve hours. [when rains are allowed to _enter_ the soil, how do they benefit it? how do under-drains prevent the formation of a crust on the surface of a soil?] . when not saturated with water the soil admits the water of rains, etc., which bring with them _fertilizing gases from the atmosphere_, to be deposited among the absorbent parts of soil, and given up to the necessities of the plant. when this rain falls on lands already saturated, it cannot enter the soil, but must run off from the surface, or be removed by evaporation, either of which is injurious. the first, because fertilizing matter is washed away. the second, because the soil is deprived of necessary heat. . _the formation of crust on the surface of the soil_ is due to the evaporation of water, which is drawn up from below by capillary attraction. it arises from the fact that the water in the soil is saturated with mineral substances, which it leaves at its point of evaporation at the surface. this soluble matter from below, often forms a very hard crust, which is a complete shield to prevent the admission of air with its ameliorating effects, and should, as far as possible, be avoided. under-draining is the best means of doing this, as it is the best means of lessening the evaporation. the foregoing are some of the more important reasons why under-draining is always beneficial. thorough experiments have amply proved the truth of the theory. [what kinds of soil are benefited by under-draining?] the _kinds of soil benefited by under-draining_ are nearly as unlimited as the kinds of soil in existence. it is a common opinion, among farmers, that the only soils which require draining are those which are at times covered with water, such as swamps and other low lands; but the facts stated in the early part of this chapter, show us that every kind of soil--wet, dry, compact, or light--receives benefit from the treatment. the fact that land is _too dry_, is as much a reason why it should be drained, as that it is _too wet_, as it overcomes drought as effectually as it removes the injurious effects of too much water. all soils in which the water of heavy rains does not immediately pass down to a depth of at least _thirty inches_, should be under-drained, and the operation, if carried on with judgment, would invariably result in profit. [what do english farmers name as the profits of under-draining? what stand has been taken by the english government with regard to under-draining?] of the precise _profits_ of under-draining this is not the place to speak: many of the agricultural papers contain numerous accounts of its success. it may be well to remark here, that many english farmers give it, as their experience, that under-drains pay for themselves every three years, or that they produce a perpetual profit of - / per cent., or their original cost. this is not the opinion of _theorists_ and _book farmers_. it is the conviction of practical men, who know, _from experience_, that under-drains are beneficial. the best evidence of the utility of under-draining is the position, with regard to it, which has been taken by the english national government, which affords much protection to the agricultural interests of her people--a protection which in this country is unwisely and unjustly withheld. in england a very large sum from the public treasury has been appropriated as a fund for loans, on under-drains, which is lent to farmers for the purpose of under-draining their estates, the only security given being the increased value of the soil. the time allowed for payments is twenty years, and only five per cent. interest is charged. by the influence of this patronage, the actual wealth of the kingdom is being rapidly increased, while the farmers themselves, can raise their farms to any desired state of fertility, without immediate investment. [how does under-draining affect the healthfulness of marshy countries? describe the sub-soil plow.] the best proof that the government has not acted injudiciously in this matter is, that private capitalists are fast employing their money in the same manner, and loans on under-drains are considered a very safe investment. there is no doubt that we may soon have similar facilities for improving our farms, and when we do, we shall find that it is unnecessary to move west to find good soil. the districts nearer market, where the expense of transportation is much less, may, by the aid of under-drains, and a judicious system of cultivation, be made equally fertile. one very important, though not strictly agricultural, effect of thorough drainage is its removal of certain local diseases, peculiar to the vicinity of marshy or low moist soils. the health-reports in several places in england, show that where _fever and ague_ was once common, it has almost entirely disappeared since the general use of under-drains in those localities. chapter iv. sub-soil plowing. [describe the mapes plow. why is the motion in the soil of one and a half inches sufficient? how does the oxidation of the particles of the soil resemble the rusting of cannon balls in a pile?] the _sub-soil plow_ is an implement differing in figure from the surface plow. it does not turn a furrow, but merely runs through the subsoil like a mole--loosening and making it finer by lifting, but allowing it to fall back and occupy its former place. it usually follows the surface plow, entering the soil to the depth of from twelve to eighteen inches below the bottom of the surface furrow. the best pattern now made (the mapes plow) is represented in the following figure. [illustration: fig. . the mapes plow and its mode of action. _a_--shape of the foot of the plow, _b_--its effect on the soil.] the sub-soil plows first made raised the whole soil about eight inches, and required very great power in their use often six, eight, or even ten oxen. the mapes plow, raising the soil but slightly, may be worked with much less power, and produces equally good results. it may be run to its full depth in most soils by a single yoke of oxen. of course a motion in the soil of but one and a half inches is very slight, but it is sufficient to move each particle from the one next to it which, in dry soils, is all that is necessary. whoever has examined a pile of cannon-balls must have observed that at the points where they touch each other, there is a little rust. in the soil, the same is often the case. where the particles touch each other, there is such a chemical change produced as renders them fit for the use of plants. while these particles remain in their first position, the changed portions are out of the reach of roots; but, if, by the aid of the sub-soil plow, their position is altered, these parts are exposed for the uses of plants. if we hold in the hand a ball of dry clay, and press it hard enough to produce the least motion among its particles, the whole mass becomes pulverized. on the same principle, the sub-soil plow renders the compact lower soil sufficiently fine for the requirements of fertility. [why are the benefits of sub-soiling not permanent on wet lands? does sub-soiling overcome drought? how does it deepen the surface soil?] notwithstanding its great benefits on land, which is sufficiently dry, sub-soiling cannot be recommended for wet lands; for, in such case, the rains of a single season would often be sufficient to entirely overcome its effects by packing the subsoil down to its former hardness. on lands not overcharged with water, it is productive of the best results, it being often sufficient to turn the balance between a gaining and a losing business in farming. it increases nearly every effect of under-draining; especially does it overcome drought, by loosening the soil, and admitting air to circulate among the particles of the subsoil and deposit its moisture on the principle described in the chapter on under-draining. it deepens the surface-soil, because it admits roots into the subsoil where they decay and leave carbon, while the circulation of air so affects the mineral parts, that they become of a fertilizing character. the deposit of carbon gives to the subsoil the power of absorbing, and retaining the atmospheric fertilizers, which are more freely presented, owing to the fact that the air is allowed to circulate with greater freedom. as a majority of roots decay in the surface-soil, they there deposit much mineral matter obtained from the subsoil. [why is the retention of atmospheric manures ensured by sub-soiling? why are organic manures plowed deeply under the soil, less liable to evaporation than when deposited near the surface? how does sub-soiling resemble under-draining in relation to the tillering of grasses? when the subsoil consists of a thin layer of clay on a sandy bed, what use may be made of the sub-soil plow?] the retention of atmospheric manures is more fully ensured by the better exposure of the clayey portions of the soil. those manures which are artificially applied, by being plowed under to greater depths, are less liable to evaporation, as, from the greater amount of soil above them, their escape will more probably be arrested; and, from the greater prevalence of roots, they are more liable to be taken up by plants. the subsoil often contains matters which are deficient in the surface-soil. by the use of the sub-soil plow, they are rendered available. sub-soiling is similar to under-draining in continuing the tillering of grasses, and in getting rid of the poisonous excrementitious matter of plants. when the subsoil is a thin layer of clay on a sandy bed (as in some plants of cumberland co. maine), the sub-soil plow, by passing through it, opens a passage for water, and often affords a sufficient drainage. [to how great a depth will the roots of plants usually occupy the soil? what is the object of loosening the soil? how are these various effects better produced in deep than in shallow soils?] if plants will grow better on a soil six inches deep than on one of three inches, there is no reason why they should not be benefited in proportion, by disturbing the soil to the whole depth to which roots will travel--which is usually more than two feet. the minute rootlets of corn and most other plants, will, if allowed by cultivation, occupy the soil to the depth or thirty-four inches, having a fibre in nearly every cubic inch of the soil for the whole distance. there are very few cultivated plants whose roots would not travel to a depth of thirty inches or more. even the onion sends its roots to the depth of eighteen inches when the soil is well cultivated. the object of loosening the soil is to admit roots to a sufficient depth to hold the plant in its position--to obtain the nutriment necessary to its growth--to receive moisture from the lower portions of the soil--and, if it be a bulb, tuber, or tap, to assume the form requisite for its largest development. it must be evident that roots, penetrating the soil to a depth of two feet, anchor the plant with greater stability than those which are spread more thinly near the surface. the roots of plants traversing the soil to such great distances, and being located in nearly every part, absorb mineral and other food, in solution in water, only through the _spongioles at their ends_. consequently, by having these ends in _every part_ of the soil, it is _all_ brought under contribution, and the amount supplied is greater, while the demand on any particular part may be less than when the whole requirements of plants have to be supplied from a depth of a few inches. [may garden soils be profitably imitated in field culture?] the ability of roots, to assume a natural shape in the soil, and grow to their largest sizes, must depend on the condition of the soil. if it is finely pulverized to the whole depth to which they ought to go, they will be fully developed; while, if the soil be too hard for penetration, they will be deformed or small. thus a carrot may grow to the length of two and a half feet, and be of perfect shape, while, if it meet in its course at a depth of eight or ten inches a _cold, hard_ subsoil, its growth must be arrested, or its form injured. roots are turned aside by a hard sub-soil, as they would be if received by the surface of a plate of glass. add to this the fact that cold, impenetrable subsoils are _chemically_ uncongenial to vegetation, and we have sufficient evidence of the importance, and in many cases the absolute necessity of sub-soiling and under-draining. it is unnecessary to urge the fact that a garden soil of two feet is more productive than a field soil of six inches; and it is certain that proper attention to these two modes of cultivation will in a majority of cases make a garden of the field--more than doubling its value in ease of working, increased produce, certain security against drought, and more even distribution of the demands on the soil--while the outlay will be immediately repaid by an increase of crops. [is the use of the sub-soil plow increasing? will its use ever injure crops?] the subsoil will be much improved in its character the first year, and a continual advancement renders it in time equal to the original surface-soil, and extending to a depth of two feet or more. the sub-soil plow is coming rapidly into use. there are now in new jersey more foundries casting sub-soil plows than there were sub-soil plows in the state six years ago. the implement has there, as well as in many other places, ceased to be a curiosity; and the man who now objects to its use, is classed with him who shells his corn on a shovel over a half-bushel, instead of employing an improved machine, which will enable him to do more in a day than he can do in the "good old way" in a week. had we space, we might give many instances of the success of sub-soiling, but the agricultural papers of the present day (at least one of which every farmer should take) have so repeatedly published its advantages, that we will not do so. in no case will its use be found any thing but satisfactory, except in occasional instances where there is some chemical difficulty in the subsoil, which an analysis will tell us how to overcome. as was before stated, its use on wet lands is not advisable until they have been under-drained, as excess of water prevents its effects from being permanent. chapter v. plowing and other modes of pulverizing the soil. [may the satisfaction attending labor be increased by an understanding of the natural laws which regulate our operations? on what depends the kind of plow to be used?] the advantages of pulverizing the soil, and the _reasons_ why it is necessary, are now too well known to need remark. few farmers, when they plow, dig, or harrow, are enabled to give substantial reasons for so doing. if they will reflect on what has been said in the previous chapters, concerning the supply of mineral food to the plant by the soil, and the effect of air and moisture about roots, they will find more satisfaction in their labor than it can afford when applied without thought. plowing. [what is a general rule with regard to this? should deep plowing be immediately adopted? why? why is this course of treatment advisable for garden culture?] the kind of plow used in cultivating the surface-soil must be decided by the kind of soil. this question the practical, _observing_ farmer will be able to solve. as a general rule, it may be stated that the plow which runs the _deepest_, with the same amount of force, is the best. we might enter more fully into this matter but for want of space. the advantages of _deep plowing_ cannot be too strongly urged. the statement that the _deeper_ and the _finer_ the soil is rendered, the more productive it will become, is in every respect true, and which no single instance will contradict. it must not be inferred from this, that we would advise a farmer, who has always plowed his soil to the depth of only six inches, to double the depth at once. such a practice in some soils would be highly injurious, as it would completely bury the more fertile and better cultivated soil, and bring to the top one which contains no organic matter, and has never been subject to atmospheric influences. this would, perhaps, be so little fitted for vegetation that it would scarcely sustain plants until their roots could reach the more fertile parts below. such treatment of the soil (turning it upside down) is excellent in _garden_ culture, where the great amount of manures applied is sufficient to overcome the temporary barrenness of the soil, but it is not to be recommended for all _field_ cultivation, where much less manure is employed. [how should field plowing be conducted? how does such treatment affect soils previously limed? how may it sometimes improve sandy or clay soils?] the course to be pursued in such cases is to _plow one inch deeper each year_. by this means the soil maybe gradually deepened to any desired extent. the amount of uncongenial soil which will thus be brought up, is slight, and will not interfere at all with the fertility of the soil, while the elevated portion will become, in one year, so altered by exposure, that it will equal the rest of the soil in fertility. often where lime has been used in excess, it has sunk to the subsoil, where it remains inactive. the slight deepening of the surface plowing would mix this lime with the surface-soil, and render it again useful. when the soil is light and sandy, resting on a heavy clay subsoil, or clay on sand, the bringing up of the mass from below will improve the texture of the soil. as an instance of the success of deep plowing, we call to mind the case of a farmer in new jersey, who had a field which had yielded about twenty-five bushels of corn per acre. it had been cultivated at ordinary depths. after laying it out in eight step lands ( feet), he plowed it at all depths from five to ten inches, on the different lands, and sowed oats evenly over the whole field. the crop on the five inch soil was very poor, on the six inch rather better, on the seven inch better still, and on the ten inch soil it was as fine as ever grew in new jersey; it had stiff straw and broad leaves, while the grain was also much better than on the remainder of the field. [what kind of soils are benefited by fall plowing?] there is an old anecdote of a man who died, leaving his sons with the information that he had buried a pot of gold for them, somewhere on the farm. they commenced digging for the gold, and dug over the whole farm to a great depth without finding the gold. the digging, however, so enriched the soil that they were fully compensated for their disappointment, and became wealthy from the increased produce of their farm. farmers will find, on experiment, that they have gold buried in their soil, if they will but dig deep enough to obtain it. the law gives a man the ownership of the soil for an indefinite distance from the surface, but few seem to realize that there is _another farm_ below the one they are cultivating, which is quite as valuable as the one on the surface, if it were but properly worked. _fall plowing_, especially for heavy lands, is a very good means of securing the action of the frosts of winter to pulverize the soil. if it be a stiff clay, it may be well to throw the soil up into ridges (by ridging and back furrowing), so as to expose the largest possible amount of surface to the freezing and thawing of winter. sandy soils should not be plowed in the fall, as it renders them too light. digging machines. [what is the digging machine?] a recent invention has been made in england, known as the digging machine or rotary spade, which--although from having too much gearing between the power and the part performing the labor, it is not adapted to general use--has given such promise of future success, that mr. mechi (an agricultural writer of the highest standing) has said that "the plow is doomed." this can hardly be true, for the varied uses to which it may be applied, will guarantee its continuance in the favor of the farmer. already, in this country, messrs. gibbs & mapes, have invented a digging machine of very simple construction, which seems calculated to serve an excellent purpose, even in the hands of the farmer of limited means. its friends assert that, with one pair of oxen, it will dig perfectly three feet wide, and for a depth of fifteen inches. an experiment with an unperfected machine, in the presence of the writer, seemed to justify their hopes. this machine thoroughly pulverizes the soil to a considerable depth, and for smooth land must prove far superior to the plow. the harrow and cultivator. [why is the harrow a defective implement? why is the cultivator superior to the harrow?] the _harrow_, an implement largely used in all parts of the world, to pulverize the soil, and break clods, has become so firmly rooted in the affections of farmers, that it must be a very long time before they can be convinced that it is not the best implement for the use to which it is devoted. it is true that it pulverizes the soil for a depth of two or three inches, and thus much improves its appearance, benefiting it, without doubt, for the earliest stages of the growth of plants. its action, however, is very defective, because, from the _wedge_ shape of its teeth, it continually acts to _pack_ the soil; thus--although favorable for the germination of the seed--it is not calculated to benefit the plant during the later stages of its growth, when the roots require the soil to be pulverized to a considerable depth. the _cultivator_ may be considered an _improved harrow_. the principal difference between them being, that while the teeth of the harrow are pointed at the lower end, those of the cultivator are shaped like a small double plow, being large at the bottom and growing smaller towards the top. they lift the earth up, instead of pressing it downwards, thus loosening instead of compacting the soil. many styles of cultivators are now sold at agricultural warehouses. a very good one, for field use, may be made by substituting the cultivator teeth for the spikes in an old harrow frame. chapter vi. rolling, mulching, weeding, etc. rolling. [name some of the benefits of rolling?] _rolling_ the soil with a large roller, arranged to be drawn by a team, is in many instances a good accessory to cultivation. by its means, the following results are obtained:-- . the soil at the surface is pulverized without the compacting of the lower parts, the area of contact being large. . the stones on the land are pressed down so as to be out of the way of the scythe in mowing. . the soil is compacted around seeds after sowing in such a manner as to exclude light and to _touch_ them in every part, both of which are essential to their germination and to the healthfulness of the plants. [under what circumstances should the roller be used?] . the soil is so compacted at the surface, that it is less frequented by _grubs_, etc., than when it is more loose. . when the soil is smoothed in this manner, there is less surface exposed for the evaporation of water with its cooling effect. . light sandy lands, by being rolled in the fall, are rendered more compact, and the loosening effects of frequent freezing and thawing are avoided. although productive of these various effects, rolling should be adopted only with much care, and should never be applied to very heavy lands, except in dry weather when lumpy after plowing, as its tendency in such cases would be to render them still more difficult of cultivation. soils in which air does not circulate freely, are not improved by rolling, as it presses the surface-particles still more closely together, and prevents the free admission of the atmosphere. if well _under-drained_, a large majority of soils would doubtless be benefited by a judicious use of the roller.[al] mulching. [what is mulching? what are some of its benefits?] _mulching_ (called gurneyism in england) consists in covering the soil with salt hay, litter, seaweed, leaves, spent tanbark, chips, or other refuse matter. every farmer must have noticed that, if a board or rail, or an old brush-heap be removed in spring from soil where grass is growing, the grass afterwards grows in those places much larger and better than in other parts of the field. this improvement arises from various causes. . the evaporation of water from the soil is prevented during drought by the shade afforded by the mulch; and it is therefore kept in better condition, as to moisture and temperature, than when evaporation goes on more freely. this condition is well calculated to advance the chemical changes necessary to prepare the matters--both organic and mineral--in the soil for the use of plants. . by preventing evaporation, we partially protect the soil from losing ammonia resultant from decaying organic matter. . a heavy mulch breaks the force of rains, and prevents them from compacting the soil, as would be the result, were no such precaution taken. . mulching protects the surface-soil from freezing as readily as when exposed, and thus keeps it longer open for the admission of air and moisture. when unprotected, the soil early becomes frozen; and all water falling, instead of entering as it should do, passes off on the surface. [why does mulching take the place of artificial watering? why is the late sowing of oats beneficial? from what arises the chief benefit of top dressing the soil with manure in autumn?] . the throwing out of winter grain is often prevented, because this is due to the freezing of the surface-soil. . mulching prevents the growth of some weeds, because it removes from them the fostering heat of the sun. many of the best nursery-men keep the soil about the roots of young trees mulched continually. one of the chief arguments for this treatment is, that it prevents the removal of the moisture from the soil and the consequent loss of heat. also that it keeps up a full supply of water for the uses of the roots, because it keeps the soil cool, and causes a deposit of dew. . it also prevents the "baking" of the soil, or the formation of a crust. it is to be recommended in nearly all cases to sow oats very thinly over land intended for winter fallow after the removal of crops, as they will grow a little before being killed by the frost, when they will fall down, thus affording a very beneficial mulch to the soil. when farmers spread manure on their fields in the fall to be plowed under in the spring, they benefit the land by the mulching more than by the addition of fertilizing matter, because they give it the protecting influence of the straw, etc., while they lose much of the ammonia of their manure by evaporation. the same mulching might be more cheaply done with leaves, or other refuse matter, and the ammonia of the manure made available by composting with absorbents. [why is snow particularly beneficial?] it is an old and true saying that "snow is the poor man's manure." the reason why it is so beneficial is, chiefly, that it acts as a most excellent mulch. it contains no more ammonia than rain-water does; and, were it not for the fact that it protects the soil against loss of heat, and produces other benefits of mulching, it would have no more advantageous effect. the severity of winters at the north is partially compensated by the long duration of snow. it is a well known fact that when there is but little snow in cold countries, wheat is very liable to be _winter killed_. the same protection is afforded by artificial mulching. this treatment is peculiarly applicable to the cultivation of flowers, both in pots and in beds out of doors. it is almost indispensable to the profitable production of strawberries, and many other garden crops, such as asparagus, rhubarb, etc. many say that the best treatment for trees is to put stones about their roots. this is simply _mulching_ them, and might be done more cheaply by the use of leaves, copying the action of nature in forests;[am] for, unless these stones be removed in spring, they will sink and compact the soil in part during open weather. weeding. [what are some of the uses of weeds? their disadvantages?] if a farmer were asked--what is the use of _weeds_? he might make out quite a list of their benefits, among which might be some of the following:-- . they shade tender plants, and in a measure serve as a mulch to the ground. . some weeds, by their offensive odor, drive away many insects. . they may serve as a green crop to be plowed into the soil, and increase its organic matter. . _they make us stir the soil_, and thus increase its fertility. still, while thinking out these excuses for weeds, he would see other and more urgent reasons why they should not be allowed to grow. . they occupy the soil to the disadvantage of crops. . they exclude light and heat from cultivated plants, and thus interfere with their growth. . they take up mineral and other matters from the soil, and hold them during the growing season, thus depriving crops of their use. it is not necessary to argue the injury done by weeds. every farmer is well convinced that they should be destroyed, and the best means of accomplishing this are of the greatest importance. [how may we protect ourselves against their increase? why is it especially important for this purpose to maintain the balance of the soil?] in the first place, we should protect ourselves against their increase. this may be done:-- by decomposing all manures in compost, whereby the seeds contained will be killed by the heat of fermentation; or, if one bushel of salt be mixed through each cord of compost (as before recommended), it will kill seeds as well as grubs,-- by hoeing, or, otherwise, destroying growing weeds before they mature their seeds, and by keeping the soil in the best chemical condition. this last point is one of much importance. it is well known that soils deficient in potash, will naturally produce one kind of plants, while soils deficient in phosphoric acid will produce plants of another species, etc. many soils produce certain weeds which would not grow on them if they were made chemically perfect, as indicated by analysis. it is also believed that those weeds, which naturally grow on the most fertile soils, are the ones most easily destroyed. there are exceptions (of which the thistle is one), but this is given as a general rule. [how much salt may be used with advantage? why is the scuffle-hoe superior to the common hoe?] by careful attention to the foregoing points, weeds may be kept from increasing while those already in the soil may be eradicated in various ways, chiefly by mechanical means, such as hoeing, plowing, etc.[an] prof. mapes says that six bushels of salt annually sown broadcast over each acre of land, will destroy very many weeds as well as grubs and worms. the _common hoe_ is a very imperfect tool for the purpose of removing weeds, as it prepares a better soil for, and replants in a position to grow, nearly as many weeds as it destroys. the _scuffle-hoe_ (or push-hoe) is much more effective, as, when worked by a man walking backwards, and retiring as he works, it leaves nearly all of the weeds on the surface of the soil to be killed by the sun. when used in this way, the earth is not trodden on after being hoed--as is the case when the common hoe is employed. this treading, besides compacting the soil, covers the roots of many weeds, and causes them to grow again. [how may much labor be saved in removing weeds? what is the langdon horse-hoe? describe the _universal_ cultivator?] much of the labor of weeding usually performed by men, might be more cheaply done by horses. there are various implements for this purpose, some of which are coming, in many parts of the country, into very general use. one of the best of these is the _langdon horse hoe_, which is a shovel-shaped plow, to be run one or two inches deep. it has a wing on each side to prevent the earth from falling on to the plants in the rows. at the rear, or upper edge, is a kind of rake or comb, which allows the earth to pass through, while the weeds pass over the comb and fall on the surface of the soil, to be killed by the heat of the sun. it is a simple and cheap tool, and will perform the work of twenty men with hoes. the hand hoe will be necessary only in the rows. cultivator. the _cultivator_, which was described in the preceding chapter, and of which there are various patterns in use, is excellent for weeding, and for loosening the soil between the rows of corn, etc. the one called the _universal_ cultivator, having its side bars made of iron, curved so that at whatever distance it is placed the teeth will point _straight forward_, is a much better tool than those of the older patterns, which had the teeth so arranged that when set for wide rows, they pointed towards the clevis. it is difficult to keep such a cultivator in its place, while the "_universal_" is as difficult to move out of a straight line. improved horse-hoe. [what is the improved horse-hoe?] the _improved horse-hoe_ is a combination of the "langdon" horse hoe and the cultivator, and is the best implement, for many purposes, that has yet been made.[ao] [illustration: fig. ] harvesting machines. until within a comparatively short period, but little attention has been paid to the production of machines for harvesting the various crops. during the past few years, however, many valuable inventions have appeared. among these we notice ketchum's mower, hussey's mower and reaper, and wagener's grain and grass seed harvester. the latter machine gathers only the grain and seeds of the crop, leaving the straw to be plowed under the soil, thus maintaining its supply of soluble silicates, and increasing its amount of organic matter. after taking the seed heads from the standing straw and grasses, it thrashes them, blows out the chaff, separates the different kinds of seeds, and discharges them into bags ready for market. it consists of a car containing the machinery; to this may be attached any required number of horses. the inventor affirms that it has harvested the grain of two acres in one hour, performing the work with accuracy.[ap] * * * * * there is much truth in the following proverbs: "a garden that is well kept, is kept easily." "you must conquer weeds, or weeds will conquer you." [what are the two great rules in mechanical cultivation?] it is almost impossible to give a _recapitulation_ of the matters treated in this section, as it is, itself, but an outline of subjects which might occupy our whole book. the scholar and the farmer should understand every principle which it contains, as well as they understand the multiplication table; and their application will be found, in every instance, to produce the best results. the two great rules of mechanical cultivation are-- thorough under-draining. deep and frequent disturbance of the soil. footnotes: [al] field rollers should be made in sections, for ease of turning. [am] the beneficial effects of mulching is so great as to lead us to the conclusion that it has other means of action than those mentioned in this book. future experiments may lead to more knowledge on this subject. [an] it is possible that the excrementitious matter thrown out by some plants may be sufficiently destructive to other kinds to exterminate them from the soil--thus, farmers in maine say that a single crop of turnips will entirely rid the soil of _witch grass_. this is, undoubtedly, the effect of the excrementitious matter of the turnips. this subject is one of practical importance, and demands close investigation by farmers, which may lead to its being reduced to a system. [ao] the improved horse-hoe is made and sold by ruggles, nourse & mason, of worcester, mass., and quincy hall, boston. [ap] this machine is more fully noticed in the advertising pages. section fifth. analysis. chapter i. [why does true practical economy require that the soil should be analyzed?] at the present time, when such marked improvements have been, and are still being made, in the practice of agriculture, the farmer cannot be too strongly advised to procure an analysis of his soil, and for obvious reasons. it has been sufficiently proved that the plant draws from the soil certain kinds of mineral matter, in certain proportions; also, that if the soil do not contain the constituents required, the plants cannot obtain them, and consequently cannot grow. furthermore, in proportion to the ability of the soil to supply these materials, in exactly the same proportion will it, when under good treatment, produce good and abundant crops. [can each farmer make his own analyses? why will not travelling chemists answer the purpose? how must an analysis be used?] all admit the value and the necessity of manures; they are required to make up deficiencies in the soil, and consequently, they must supply to it the matters which are wanting. in order to know what is wanting, we must know the composition of the soil. this can be learned only by accurate chemical analysis. such an analysis every farmer must possess before he can conduct his operations with _true practical economy_. an important question now arises as to whether each farmer can make his own analyses. he cannot do so without long study and practice. the late prof. norton said that, at least _two years'_ time would be necessary to enable a man to become competent to make a reliable analysis. when we reflect that a farmer may never need more than five or six analyses, we shall see that the time necessary to learn the art would be much more valuable than the cost of the analyses (at $ or $ each), setting aside the cost of apparatus, and the fact that while practising in the laboratory, he must not use his hands for any labor that would unfit them for the most delicate manipulations. neither will _travelling_ chemists be able to make analyses as accurately and as cheaply as those who work in their own laboratories, where their apparatus is not liable to the many injuries consequent on frequent removal. the cost of sending one hundred samples of soil to a distant chemist, would be much less than the expense of having his apparatus brought to the town where his services are required. [how may a farmer obtain the requisite knowledge? when are the services of a consulting agriculturist required?] _the way in which an analysis should be used_ is a matter of much importance. to a man who knows nothing of chemistry (be he ever so successful a farmer), an analysis, as received from a chemist, would be as useless and unintelligible as though it were written in chinese; while, if a chemist who knew nothing of farming, were to give him advice concerning the application of manures, he would be led equally astray, and his course would be any thing but _practical_. it is necessary that chemical and practical knowledge should be combined, and then the value of analysis will be fully demonstrated. the _amount_ of knowledge required is not great, but it must be _thorough_. the information contained in this little book is sufficient, but it would be folly for a man to attempt to use an analysis from reading it once hurriedly over. it must be studied and thought on with great care, before it can be of material assistance. the evenings of one winter, devoted to this subject, will enable a farmer to understand the application of analysis to practical farming, especially if other and more compendious works are also read. a less time could hardly be recommended. [is there any doubt as to the practical value of analysis? how should samples of soil for analysis be selected?] where this attention cannot be given to the subject, the services of a consulting agriculturist should be employed to advise the treatment necessary to render fertile the soil analyzed. every farmer, however, should learn enough of the principles of agriculture to be able to use an analysis, when procured, without such assistance.[aq] nearly all scientific men (all of the highest merit) are unanimous in their conviction of the _practical_ value of an analysis of soils; and a volume of instances of their success, with hardly a single failure, might be published. prof. mapes says, in the _working farmer_, that he has given advice on hundreds of different soils, and _not a single instance_ can be found where he has failed to produce a profit greater than the cost of analysis and advice. dr. t. c. jackson, of boston, the late prof. norton, of yale college, and others, have had universal success in this matter. analysis must be considered the only sure road to economical farming. _to select samples of soil for analysis_, take a spadeful from various parts of the field--going to exactly the depth to which it has been plowed--until, say a wheel-barrow full, has been obtained. mix this well together, and send about a quart or a pint of it (free from stones) to the chemist. this will represent all of that part of the farm which has been subject to the same cultivation, and is of the same mechanical character. if there are marked differences in the kinds of soil, separate analyses will be necessary. [give an instance of the success of treatment according to analysis?] when an analysis is obtained, a regular debtor and creditor account may be kept with the soil; and the farmer may know by the composition of the ashes of his crops, and the manures supplied, whether he is maintaining the fertility of his soil. prof. mapes once purchased some land which could not produce corn at all, and by applying only such manures as analysis indicated to be necessary, at a cost of less than $ per acre, he obtained the first year over _fifty bushels of shelled corn per acre_. the land has since continued to improve, and is as fertile as any in the state. it has produced in one season a sufficient crop of cabbages to pay the expense of cultivation, and over $ per acre besides, though it was apparently _worthless_ when he purchased it. these are strong facts, and should arouse the farmers of the whole country to their true interests. let them not call the teachings of science "book-farming," but "prove all things--hold fast that which is good." footnotes: [aq] see author's card in the front of the book. chapter ii. tables of analysis. analyses of the ashes of crops. no. i. ------------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+-------- | wheat. | wheat | rye. | rye | | straw. | | straw. ------------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+-------- ashes in dry parts | | | | ------------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+-------- silica (_sand_) | | | | lime | | | | magnesia | | | | peroxide of iron | | | | potash | | | | soda | | | | chlorine | | | | sulphuric acid | | | | phosphoric acid | | | | ------------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+-------- no. ii. ------------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+--------- | corn. | corn | barley. | barley | | stalks. | | straw. ------------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+--------- ashes in dry parts. | | | | ------------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+--------- silica (_sand_) | | | | lime | | | | magnesia | | | | peroxide of iron | | | | oxide of manganese | | | | potash | | | | soda | | | | chlorine | | | | sulphuric acid | | | | phosphoric acid | | | | ------------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+--------- no. iii. ------------------------+-----------+--------+--------+---------- | oats. | oat | buck | potatoes. | | straw. | wheat. | ------------------------+-----------+--------+--------+---------- ashes in dry parts | | | | ------------------------+-----------+--------+--------+---------- silica (_sand_) | | | | lime | | | | magnesia | | | | peroxide of iron | | | | potash | { } | | | soda | { } | | | chlorine | | | | sulphuric acid | | | | phosphoric acid | | | | organic matter | | | | | | | | water. ------------------------+-----------+--------+--------+--------- no. iv. ------------------------+---------+--------+----------+-------- | peas. | beans. | turnips. | turnip | | | | tops. ------------------------+---------+--------+----------+-------- ashes in dry parts | | | | ------------------------+---------+--------+----------+-------- silica (_sand_) | | | | lime | | | | magnesia | | | | peroxide of iron | | | | potash | | | | soda | | | | chlorine | | | | sulphuric acid | | | | phosphoric acid | | | | organic matter | | | water.| ------------------------+---------+--------+----------+-------- no. v. --------------------------+--------+----------+--------+---------- | flax. | linseed. | meadow | red | | | hay. | clover. --------------------------+--------+----------+--------+---------- ashes in dry parts | | | | --------------------------+--------+----------+--------+---------- silica (_sand_) | | | | alumina (_clay_) | ? | | | lime | | | | magnesia | | | | peroxide of iron | ? | | | potash | | | | soda | | | | chlorine | | | | sulphuric acid | | | | phosphoric acid | | | | --------------------------+--------+----------+--------+---------- no. vi. amount of inorganic matter removed from the soil by ten bushels of grains, etc., and by the straw, etc., required in their production--estimated in pounds: -------------------+--------+-----------+----------+---------- | | lbs. | | lbs. | wheat. | wheat | rye. | rye | | straw. | | straw. -------------------+--------+-----------+----------+---------- potash | . | . | . | . soda | . | . | . | . lime | . | . | . | . magnesia | . | . | . | . oxide of iron | . | . | . | . sulphuric acid | . | . | . | . phosphoric acid | . | . | . | . chlorine | | . | | . silica | . | . | . | . -------------------+--------+-----------+----------+---------- pounds carried off | | | ½ | -------------------+--------+-----------+----------+---------- no. vii. -------------------+-------+----------+-------+---------- | | lbs.| | lbs. | corn. | corn | oats. | oat | | stalks. | | straw. -------------------+-------+----------+-------+---------- potash | . | . | . | . soda | | . | | lime | . | . | . | . magnesia | . | . | . | . oxide of iron | | . | . | . sulphuric acid | | . | . | . phosphoric acid | . | . | . | . chlorine | | . | . | . silica | . | . | . | . -------------------+-------+----------+-------+---------- pounds carried off | | | ½ | -------------------+-------+----------+-------+---------- no. viii. -------------------+--------+---------+----------+---------- | buck | | lbs. | lbs. | wheat. | barley. | barley | flax. | | | straw. | -------------------+--------+---------+----------+---------- potash | . | . | . | . soda | . | . | . | . lime | . | . | . | . magnesia | . | . | . | . oxide of iron | . | . | . | . sulphuric acid | . | . | . | . phosphoric acid | . | . | . | . chlorine | | . | . | . silica | . | . | . | . -------------------+--------+---------+----------+---------- pounds carried off | | | | -------------------+--------+---------+----------+---------- no. ix. --------------------+----------+----------+----------+--------- | | lbs.| | lbs. | beans. | bean | field | pea | | straw. | peas. | straw. --------------------+----------+----------+----------+--------- potash | . | . | . | . soda | . | . | . | lime | . | . | . | . magnesia | . | . | . | . oxide of iron | . | . | . | . sulphuric acid | . | . | . | . phosphoric acid | . | . | . | . chlorine | . | . | . | . silica | . | . | . | . --------------------+----------+----------+----------+--------- pounds carried off | | | | --------------------+----------+----------+----------+--------- no. x. --------------------+------------+----------+-------------+----------- | | lbs. | | lbs. | ton | turnip | ton | red | turnips. | tops. | potatoes. | clover. --------------------+------------+----------+-------------+----------- potash | . | . | . | . soda | . | . | . | . lime | . | . | . | . magnesia | . | . | . | . oxide of iron | . | . | . | . sulphuric acid | . | . | . | . phosphoric acid | . | . | . | . chlorine | . | . | . | . silica | . | . | . | . --------------------+------------+----------+-------------+----------- pounds carried off | | | | --------------------+------------+----------+-------------+----------- no. xi. ----------------------------------+----------+----------- | lbs.| lbs. | meadow | cabbage | hay. | water - ----------------------------------+----------+----------- potash | . | . soda | . | . lime | . | . magnesia | . | . oxide of iron | . | . sulphuric acid | . | . phosphoric acid | . | . chlorine | . | . silica | . | . ----------------------------------+----------+----------- pounds carried off | | ----------------------------------+----------+----------- no. xii. composition of ashes, leached and unleached, showing their manurial value: -------------------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+---------- | oak | oak | beech | beech |unleached. | leached. |unleached. | leached. -------------------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+---------- potash | | -- | | -- soda | | -- | | -- lime | | | | magnesia | | | | oxide of iron | | -- | | sulphuric acid | | -- | | -- phosphoric acid | | | | chlorine | | | | -------------------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+---------- no. xiii. ------------------+-----------+------------+------------ | birch | seaweed | bituminous | leached. | unleached. | coal | | | unleached. ------------------+-----------+------------+------------ potash | -- | | soda | -- | | lime | | | magnesia | | | oxide of iron | | | sulphuric acid | -- | | phosphoric acid | | | chlorine | -- | | ------------------+-----------+------------+------------ no. xiv. tobacco. analysis of the ash of the plant [will & fresedius]-- potash . soda . magnesia . lime . phosphoric acid . sulphuric acid . oxide of iron . chloride of sodium . loss . ------ . analysis of the ash of the root [berthier]-- soluble matter . insoluble . the soluble parts consist of nearly-- carbonic acid . sulphuric acid . muriatic acid (chlorine, &c.) . potash and soda . ------ . no. xv. composition of some of the more common compounds of acids and alkalies. --------------------------------------+----------------+------------------ parts of | contain of the | contain of the | alkalies | acids --------------------------------------+----------------+------------------ carbonate of potash (pearlash) | potash . | carbonic . bi-carbonate of potash (saleratus) | do. . | carbonic . nitrate of potash (saltpetre) | do. . | nitric . silicate of potash | do. . | silicic . carbonate of soda | soda . | carbonic . bi-carbonate of soda (common soda)[ar]| do. . | carbonic . nitrate of soda | do. . | nitric . sulphate of soda (glauber salts)[ar] | do. . | sulphuric . silicate of soda | do. . | silicic . carbonate of lime (limestone) | lime . | carbonic . sulphate of lime (plaster paris)[ar] | do. . | sulphuric . sulphate of lime (burned) | do. . | sulphuric . phosphate of lime | do. . | phosphoric . super-phosphate of lime | do. . | phosphoric . silicate of lime | do. . | silicic . carbonate of magnesia | magnesia . | carbonic . sulphate of magnesia (epsom salts)[ar]| do. . | sulphuric . silicate of alumina | alumina . | silicic . sulphate of iron (green vitriol)[ar] | oxide of | sulphuric . | iron . | --------------------------------------+----------------+------------------ no. xvi. proximate analyses of crops, showing the amount of the different organic compounds contained in grain, roots, hay, etc.--estimated in pounds: --------------------------+--------+---------+---------+----------+-------- | water. | husk or | starch, | gluten, | fatty | | woody | gum and | albumen, | matter. | | fibre. | sugar. | legumin. | +--------+---------+---------+----------+-------- bushels. | | | | | wheat lbs. | | | | | barley lbs. | | | | | oats lbs. | | | | | rye lbs. | | | | | indian corn lbs. | | | | | buck wheat lbs. | | | | | ? beans lbs. | | | | | peas lbs. | | | | | | | | | | lbs. | | | | | potatoes | | | | | turnips | | | [as]| | carrots | | | [as]| | mangold wurtzel | | | [as]| | ? meadow hay | | | | | clover hay | | | | | pea straw | | | | | rye straw | | | | | ? corn stalks | | | | | lbs. fine wheat flour | | | | | lbs. wheat bran | | | | | --------------------------+--------+---------+---------+----------+-------- no. xvii. amount of ash left after burning lbs. of various plants, ordinarily dry-- wheat its straw barley " oats " rye " indian corn " pea " bean meadow hay to clover " rye grass " potato to turnip to carrot to -------------------------------------------------------------- no. xviii. manures. horse manure. solid dung-- combustible matter . ash . water . ------ . composition of the ash-- silica . potash . soda . oxide of iron . lime . magnesia . oxide of manganese . phosphoric acid . sulphuric acid . chlorine . loss . ------ . no. xix. night soil. solid (ash)-- earthy phosphates and a trace of sulphate of lime sulphate of soda and potash, and phosphate of soda carbonate of soda silica charcoal and loss --- urine urea[at] . uric acid . sal ammoniac[at] . lactic acid, etc. . mucus . sulphate of potash . sulphate of soda . phosphate of ammonia[at] . earthy phosphates . salt (chloride of sodium) . silica . ------ . water . ------ . no. xx. cow manure. solid (ash)-- phosphates . peroxide of iron . lime . sulphate of lime (plaster) . chloride of potassium trace silica . loss . ----- . no. xxi. comparative value of the urine of different animals. solid matter. organic. inorganic. total. man . . horse . . cow . . pig . . sheep . . no. xxii. guano. water . ammonia . uric acid . oxalic acid, etc. . fixed alkaline salts. sulphate of soda . phosphate of soda . chloride of sodium (salt) . earthy salts. carbonate of lime . phosphates . foreign matter. silicious grit and sand . ------ . for the analysis of fertile and barren soils, see page . footnotes: [ar] contain a large amount of water. [as] pectic acid. [at] supply ammonia. the practical farmer. who is the _practical farmer_? let us look at two pictures and decide. here is a farm of acres in ordinary condition. it is owned and tilled by a hard-working man, who, in the busy season, employs one or two assistants. the farm is free from debt, but it does not produce an abundant income; therefore, its owner cannot afford to purchase the best implements, or make other needed improvements; besides, he don't _believe_ in such things. his father was a good solid farmer; so was his grandfather; and so is he, or thinks he is. he is satisfied that 'the good old way' is best, and he sticks to it. he works from morning till night; from spring till fall. in the winter, he _rests_, as much as his lessened duties will allow. during this time, he reads little, or nothing. least of all does he read about farming. he don't want to learn how to dig potatoes out of a book. book farming is nonsense. many other similar ideas keep him from agricultural reading. his house is comfortable, and his barns are quite as good as his neighbors', while his farm gives him a living. it is true that his soil does not produce as much as it did ten years ago; but prices are better, and he is satisfied. let us look at his premises, and see how his affairs are managed. first, examine the land. well, it is good fair land. some of it is a little springy, but is not to be called _wet_. it will produce a ton and a half of hay to the acre--it used to produce two tons. there are some stones on the land, but not enough in his estimation to do harm. the plowed fields are pretty good; they will produce bushels of corn, bushels of wheat, or bushels of oats per acre, when the season is not dry. his father used to get more; but, somehow, the _weather_ is not so favorable as it was in old times. he has thought of raising root crops, but they take more labor than he can afford to hire. over, in the back part of the land there is a muck-hole, which is the only piece of _worthless_ land on the whole farm. now, let us look at the barns and barn-yards. the stables are pretty good. there are some wide cracks in the siding, but they help to ventilate, and make it healthier for the cattle. the manure is thrown out of the back windows, and is left in piles under the eaves on the sunny side of the barn. the rain and sun make it nicer to handle. the cattle have to go some distance for water; and this gives them exercise. all of the cattle are not kept in the stable; the fattening stock are kept in the various fields, where hay is fed out to them from the stack. the barn-yard is often occupied by cattle, and is covered with their manure, which lies there until it is carted on to the land. in the shed are the tools of the farm, consisting of carts, plows--not deep plows, this farmer thinks it best to have roots near the surface of the soil where they can have the benefit of the sun's heat,--a harrow, hoes, rakes, etc. these tools are all in good order; and, unlike those of his less prudent neighbor, they are protected from the weather. the crops are cultivated with the plow, and hoe, as they have been since the land was cleared, and as they always will be until this man dies. here is the 'practical farmer' of the present day. hard working, out of debt, and economical--of dollars and cents, if not of soil and manures. he is a better farmer than two thirds of the three millions of farmers in the country. he is one of the best farmers in his town--there are but few better in the county, not many in the state. he represents the better class of his profession. with all this, he is, in matters relating to his business, an unreading, unthinking man. he knows nothing of the first principles of farming, and is successful by the _indulgence_ of nature, not because he understands her, and is able to make the most of her assistance. this is an unpleasant fact, but it is one which cannot be denied. we do not say this to disparage the farmer, but to arouse him to a realization of his position and of his power to improve it. but let us see where he is wrong. he is wrong in thinking that his land does not need draining. he is wrong in being satisfied with one and a half tons of hay to the acre when he might easily get two and a half. he is wrong in not removing as far as possible every stone that can interfere with the deep and thorough cultivation of his soil. he is wrong in reaping less than his father did, when he should get more. he is wrong in ascribing to the weather, and similar causes, what is due to the actual impoverishment of his soil. he is wrong in not raising turnips, carrots, and other roots, which his winter stock so much need, when they might be raised at a cost of less than one third of their value as food. he is wrong in considering worthless a deposit of muck, which is a mine of wealth if properly employed. he is wrong in _ventilating_ his stables at the cost of _heat_. he is wrong in his treatment of his manures, for he loses more than one half of their value from evaporation, fermentation, and leaching. he is wrong in not having water at hand for his cattle--their exercise detracts from their accumulation of fat and their production of heat, and it exposes them to cold. he is wrong in not protecting his fattening stock from the cold of winter; for, under exposure to cold, the food, which would otherwise be used in the formation of _fat_, goes to the production of the animal heat necessary to counteract the chilling influence of the weather, p. . he is wrong in allowing his manure to lie unprotected in the barn-yard. he is wrong in not adding to his tools the deep surface plow, the subsoil plow, the cultivator, and many others of improved construction. he is wrong in cultivating with the plow and hoe, those crops which could be better or more cheaply managed with the cultivator or horse-hoe. he is wrong in many things more, as we shall see if we examine all of his yearly routine of work. he is right in a few things; and but a few, as he himself would admit, had he that knowledge of his business which he could obtain in the leisure hours of a single winter. still, he thinks himself a _practical_ farmer. in twenty years, we shall have fewer such, for our young men have the mental capacity and mental energy necessary to raise them to the highest point of practical education, and to that point they are gradually but surely rising. let us now place this same farm in the hands of an educated and understanding cultivator; and, at the end of five years, look at it again. he has sold one half of it, and cultivates but fifty acres. the money for which the other fifty were sold has been used in the improvement of the farm. the land has all been under-drained, and shows the many improvements consequent on such treatment. the stones and small rocks have been removed, leaving the surface of the soil smooth, and allowing the use of the sub-soil plow, which with the under-drains have more than doubled the productive power of the farm. sufficient labor is employed to cultivate with improved tools, extensive root crops, and they invariably give a large yield. the grass land produces a yearly average of ½ tons of hay per acre. from to bushels of corn, bushels of wheat, and bushels of oats are the average of the crops reaped. the soil has been analyzed, and put in the best possible condition, while it is yearly supplied with manures containing every thing taken away in the abundant crops. the analysis is never lost sight of in the regulation of crops and the application of manures. the _worthless_ muck bed was retained, and is made worth one dollar a load to the compost heap, especially as the land requires an increase of organic matter. a new barn has been built large enough to store all of the hay produced on the farm. it has stables, which are tight and warm, and are well ventilated _above_ the cattle. the stock being thus protected from the loss of their heat, give more milk, and make more fat on a less amount of food than they did under the old system. water is near at hand, and the animals are not obliged to over exercise. the manure is carefully composted, either under a shed constructed for the purpose with a tank and pump, or is thrown into the cellar below, where the hogs mix it with a large amount of muck, which has been carted in after being thoroughly decomposed by the lime and salt mixture. they are thus protected against all loss, and are prepared for the immediate use of crops. no manures are allowed to lie in the barn-yard, but they are all early removed to the compost heap, where they are preserved by being mixed with carbonaceous matter. in the tool shed, we find deep surface-plows, sub-soil plows, cultivators, horse-hoes, seed-drills, and many other valuable improvements. this farmer takes one or more agricultural papers, from which he learns many new methods of cultivation, while his knowledge of the _reasons_ of various agricultural effects enables him to discard the injudicious suggestions of mere _book farmers_ and uneducated dreamers. here are two specimens of farmers. neither description is over-drawn. the first is much more careful in his operations than the majority of our rural population. the second is no better than many who may be found in america. we appeal to the common sense of the reader of this work to know which of the two is the _practical farmer_--let him imitate either as his judgment shall dictate. finis. explanation of terms. absorb--to soak in a liquid or a gas. abstract--to take from. acid--sour; a sour substance. agriculture--the art of cultivating the soil. alkali--the direct opposite of an _acid_, with which it has a tendency to unite. alumina--the base of clay. analysis--separating into its primary parts any compound substance. carbonate--a compound, consisting of carbonic acid and an alkali. caustic--burning. chloride--a compound containing chlorine. clevis--that part of a plow by which the drawing power is attached. decompose--to separate the constituents of a body from their combinations, forming new kinds of compounds. digestion--the decomposition of food in the stomach and intestines of animals (agricultural). dew--deposit of the insensible vapor of the atmosphere on cold bodies. excrement--the matter given out by the organs of plants and animals, being those parts of their food which they are unable to assimilate. fermentation--a kind of decomposition. gas--air--aeriform matter. gurneyism--see _mulching_. ingredient--component part. inorganic--mineral, or earthy. mouldboard--that part of a surface plow which turns the sod. mulching--covering the soil with litter, leaves, or other refuse matter. see p. . neutralize--to overcome the characteristic properties of. organic matter--that kind of matter which at times possesses an organized (or living) form, and at others exists as a gas in the atmosphere. oxide--a compound of oxygen with a metal. phosphate--a compound of phosphoric acid with an alkali. proximate--an organic compound, such as wood, starch, gum, etc.; a product of life. pungent--pricking. putrefaction--rotting. saturate--to _fill_ the pores of any substance, as a sponge with water, or charcoal with ammonia. silicate--a compound of silica with an alkali. soluble--capable of being dissolved. solution--a liquid containing another substance dissolved in it. saturated solution--one which contains as much of the foreign substance as it is capable of holding. spongioles--the mouths at the ends of roots. sulphate--a compound of sulphuric acid with an alkali. vapor--gas. ketchum's patent mowing machines [illustration] =the greatest improvement ever made for simplicity, durability, and ease of action.= it is now beyond a question, from the complete triumph over all other machines this season, that this is the _only_ successful grass cutter known. it is in fact the _only_ machine that has ever cut _all kinds of grass_ without _clogging_ or _interruption_. more than have been sold the present season under the following warranty, and not in a single instance have we been called on to take one back. (warranty:) that said machines are capable of cutting and spreading, with one span of horses and driver, from ten to fifteen acres per day, _of any kind of grass, heavy or light, wet or dry, lodged or standing_, and do it as well as is done with a scythe by the best mowers. the price of our machine, with two sets of knives and extras, is $ , cash, delivered on board of cars or boat, free of charge. howard & co., manufacturers and proprietors, buffalo, n. y. _buffalo_, aug. , . ruggles, nourse, mason & co., manufacture ketchum's mower for new england. warder & brokaw, springfield, ohio; for southern ohio and kentucky. seymour & morgan, brockport, n. y.; for michigan and illinois. new and useful works. just published by _d. appleton & company_ a new and much, enlarged edition of =dr. ure's= dictionary of arts, manufactures and mines. containing a clear exposition of their principles and practice. illustrated with nearly , engravings. complete in two large vo. volumes; counts over , pages. price $ . . this new edition is nearly a quarter of a century in advance of any previous one. it contains one third more matter than the latest previous one. the statistics, inventions, and improvements, are all brought down to the present time. the results of the london exhibition on the respective subjects of which the dictionary treats, are presented with great fulness and accuracy. the numerous errors in the typography of the london edition have been corrected in this. =sir charles lyell's= principles of geology; or, the modern changes of the earth and its inhabitants, considered as illustrative of geology. a new and much enlarged edition. illustrated with maps, plates, and wood-cuts. vol. vo., of pages. price $ . . =sir charles lyell's= manual of elementary geology; or, the ancient changes of the earth and its inhabitants, as illustrated by geological monuments. a new and greatly enlarged edition. illustrated with wood-cuts. vol. vo. price $ . . 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"it should be in the hands of every owner or friend of the horse." dogs: their origin and varieties. directions as to their general management. with numerous original anecdotes. also complete instructions as to treatment under disease. by h. d. richardson. illustrated with numerous wood engravings. vol. mo, cts. paper cover, cts. cloth. this is not only a cheap, but one of the best works ever published on the dog. the book of useful knowledge: a cyclopædia of six thousand practical receipts, and collateral information in the arts, manufactures, and trades; including medicine, pharmacy, and domestic economy, designed as a compendious book of reference for the manufacturer, tradesman, amateur, and heads of families. by arnold james cooley, practical chemist. illustrated with numerous wood engravings. forming one handsome volume, vo, of pages. price $ , bound. treatise on the theory and practice of landscape gardening: adapted to north america, with a view to the improvement of country residences-- comprising historical notices and general principles of the art, directions for laying out grounds and arranging plantations, the description and cultivation of hardy trees, decorative accompaniments of the house and grounds, the formation of pieces of artificial water, flower gardens, etc., with remarks on rural architecture. a new edition, enlarged, revised and newly illustrated. by a. j. downing, author of "designs for cottage residences," etc. a new and improved edition, vo., illustrated, $ . "insult not nature with absurd expense, nor spoil her simple charms by vain pretense; weigh well the subject, be with caution bold, profuse of genius, not profuse of gold." riker, thorpe & co., fulton st., new york. "there is no work extant which can be compared in ability to downing's volume on this subject. it is not overlaid with elaborate and learned disquisition, like the english works, but it is truly practical."--_louisville journal._ "mr. downing's works have been greatly influential in recommending among us that life which has always seemed to us the perfection of human existence--the life of men of education, living upon and cultivating their own farms."--_cour. and enq._ "the principles he lays down are not only sound, but are developed on a uniform system, which is not paralleled in any english work."--_prof. lindley's chronicle, london._ =ruggles, nourse, mason & co.=, _manufacturers at worcester_, and wholesale and retail dealers in agricultural implements and machines, =garden, field and flower seeds=, fruit and ornamental trees, shrubs, roses, vines and plants, guano, bone dust, phosphates, poudrette, &c. also, agricultural and horticultural publications, and agents for principal nurseries, at the quincy hall =agricultural warehouse and seed store=, over quincy market, south market st., =boston, mass.= wagener's american seed =harvester.= highest premiums awarded =at the world's fair exhibition of the industry of all nations, .= also by the american institute, new york. various other approbations have been received. this machine consists of a simple frame and box mounted on wheels, in front of which is a cylinder, set with spiral knives, acting in concert with curved spring teeth, in combination with a straight knife, which forms a perfect shear, and severs the head from the stalk; the heads are at the same time discharged into the box. the teeth being made to spring and vibrate, not a particle of clover, however stalky or thick, can possibly escape being cut, or allow the teeth to become clogged. the cylinder and knives are protected by an adjustible guard plate, thus allowing only the heads to pass to the knives, retaining the head, and the head only--thus leaving the stalk to enrich the soil. the machine is so constructed that it can be made adjustible to the height of the clover and timothy. to be seen at the crystal palace. price of the machines moderate. the farmer will find that by this process, he may save two crops of timothy per year. when the seed is ripe the tops can be clipped, and the straw left until fall to mature. you now have your seed and hay in two crops of equal value; in case of clover, you mow the first crop for hay, the second for seed; you in both cases get better seed and hay with less labor and expense than grain crops, at the same time leaving the soil clothed with a coat of straw, for the coming season, which will increase the value of the soil for crops, make fine pastures and fine stock, while it fits the land for fine grain. in this way lands in our states have been raised in production from five to twenty-five or thirty bushels of wheat per acre, in the course of a few years. this is within the reach of every farmer, without money or labor, as organic matter accumulates from the atmosphere and is deposited in the soil. manufactured and for sale by the patentee and proprietor, jeptha a. wagener. _office west twenty-fourth street, new york._ all orders for machines this season should be sent in immediately, in order to have them in readiness for harvest time. =price of machines, $ and $ , two sizes, at the manufactory.= --> rights of states and counties on favorable terms. "wagener's clover and timothy seed harvester has been in successful operation two seasons, and has received the premium at the world's fair and at the fair of the american institute, and various other testimonials of superior value. they are manufactured and for sale by the inventor, jeptha a. wagener, at west th street, new york."--_u. s. journal._ the grain harvester is in course of preparation, and will soon be offered for sale. the working farmer, published on the first of each month, at fulton st., (upper side,) a few doors east of broadway, new york. terms. one year, _payable in advance_, $ clubs of six subscribers, clubs of twelve subscribers, clubs of twenty-five subscribers, single copies, volume one, in paper cover, volumes two, three, four and five, in paper cover, each postage on the working farmer, _if paid at the subscriber's post office_, is, for any distance within the united states, miles and under, _one cent_ for each paper. if paid at a subscriber's post office, _in advance_, ¾ cents per quarter, or cents per year. postage on bound volumes in _paper covers, if pre-paid at the new york post office_, vol. i. | vols. ii., iii., iv & v. any distance within united cts. | cts. states, miles and under | each volume. if not pre-paid at the new york post office, double the above rates will be charged. subscriptions must commence with the year, namely, march; or the even half year, september; and for not less than one year. remittances can be made, from such states as have no small paper circulation, in gold dollars, post office stamps, or the bills of other states. =advertisements.= five lines, one dollar each insertion, and in the same ratio for more lengthy advertisements. post-paid letters, addressed to the publisher, will meet with prompt attention. fred'k mccready, fulton street, upper side, a few doors east of broadway. mapes' improved super phosphate of lime lbs. fredk. mccready wholesale agt. fulton street, keep dry. n.y. several imitations of this celebrated fertilizer having been introduced among the dealers since the introduction of the _improved super-phosphate of lime_, i beg to state that all manufactured under the recipe of prof. j. j. mapes, is marked on the bags as above, and each bag contains his certificate of having been made under his superintendence. --> orders for the above fertilizer by mail, from strangers, should be accompanied with the money, a draft, or proper references. the bags contain exactly lbs., which at two and a half cents per pound, amounts to four dollars. fred'k mccready, fulton street, new york. [illustration] the universal cultivator, described on page , is represented in the above cut. it is manufactured by us, and is sold by all implement dealers. our improved horse hoe, of which a cut may be seen on p. , is now manufactured at our establishment, and is sold throughout the union. it is the best implement for weeding, etc. ever made. the sod and sub-soil plow, (sometimes called the michigan plow,) consists of two plows on the same beam. the first inverts the sod to the depth of a few inches, and the hindmost plow brings up the lower soil, depositing it on the inverted sod. for deep tillage, especially on prairie land, this is superior to any of its competitors. ruggles, nourse, mason & co. worcester, mass., and quincy hall, boston. transcribers' notes page page number added for tables of analysis page period added after "great brilliancy" page seashore standardised to sea-shore; genii standardised to genie page no footnote anchor was in place. anchor added after "are formed," as this seemed most reasonable in context. page quanties corrected to quantities; nutricious corrected to nutritious page footnote marker added for "see johnston's elements, page ." page ? added after "in their composition" in footer page removed second "the" in "is the the foundation of agricultural geology." page pigstye standardised to pig-stye page plough standardised to plow pages , subsoil plow standardised to sub-soil plow [note that in line with the more common usage in this work, the phrases sub-soil plow and sub-soiling have retained their hyphens] page removed second n in mannures page postash corrected to potash page suplying corrected to supplying page carbonia corrected to carbonic page buck-wheat standardised to buckwheat pages , , , , , , sub-soil standardised to subsoil page ? added after mineral in the question section page water tight standardised to water-tight page second . changed to . page oxydation standardised to oxidation page period added after lbs in lbs rye straw page title no. xvi. added to table page , corrected to . page accurracy corrected to accuracy page number of pages unclear. guessed. the farm that won't wear out by cyril g. hopkins preface the farm that won't wear out was first published serially in the country gentleman, the privilege having been granted the author of subsequent publication. it is now issued in book form in response to numerous requests coming especially from the central, eastern, and southern states. cyril g. hopkins. champaign, ill. _"population must increase rapidly, more rapidly than in former times, and ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil."--lincoln._ _"it is not the land itself that constitutes the farmer's wealth, but it is in the constituents of the soil, which serve for the nutrition of plants, that this wealth truly consists."--liebig._ contents chapter i: what goes to make up permanent fertility chapter ii: the nitrogen problem and its economical solution chapter iii: phosphorus: the master key to permanent agriculture chapter iv: permanent soil fertility: its relation to profits and future values chapter i what goes to make up permanent fertility it is an old saying that "any fool can farm," and this was almost the truth when farming consisted chiefly in reducing the fertility of new, rich land secured at practically no cost from a generous government. but to restore depleted soils to high productive power in economic systems is no fool's job, for it requires mental as well as muscular energy; and no apologies should be expected from those who necessarily make use of technical terms in the discussion of this technical subject, notwithstanding the common foolish advice that farmers should be given a sort of "parrot" instruction in almost baby language instead of established facts and principles in definite and permanent scientific terms. the farmer should be as familiar with the names of the ten essential elements of plant food as he is with the names of his ten nearest neighbors. safe and permanent systems of soil improvement and preservation may come with intelligence--never with ignorance--on the part of the landowners. when the knowledge becomes general that food for plants is just as necessary as food for animals, then american agriculture will mean more than merely working the land for all that's in it. this knowledge is as well established as the fact that the earth is round, although the people are relatively few who understand or make intelligent application of the existing information. agricultural plants consist of ten elements, known as the essential elements of plant food; and not a kernel of corn or a grain of wheat, not a leaf of clover or a spear of grass can be produced if the plant fails to secure any one of these ten elements. some of these are supplied to plants in abundance by natural processes; others are not so provided and must be supplied by the farmer, or his land becomes impoverished and unproductive. foods that plants live on two elements, carbon and oxygen, are contained in normal air in the form of a gas called carbon dioxid, and this compound is taken into the plant through the breathing pores, which are microscopic openings located chiefly on the under side of the leaves. some plants have more than a hundred thousand breathing pores to the square inch of leaf surface. when plants or plant products are burned or decomposed the carbon of the combustible material--grass, wood, coal, and so forth--unites with the free oxygen of the atmosphere to re-form the carbon dioxid, which thus returns as a gas to the air. even the food taken into the animal system, after being digested and carried into the blood, is brought, into contact with the oxygen of the air--which also passes into the blood through the cell walls of the lungs--and a form of combustion takes place, the heat generated serving to warm the body while the carbon dioxid passes back into the lungs and is exhaled into the open air. by these circulation processes the supply of carbon dioxid in the atmosphere is renewed and maintained without any special effort on the part of man. hydrogen is one of the elements of which water is composed. water is taken into the plant through the roots, carried through the stems to the leaves, and there, under the influence of chlorophyll, sunlight and the life principle, the carbon, oxygen and hydrogen are made to unite into some of the most important plant compounds, such as the sugars, which are later transformed into starch and fiber. though these three elements constitute the larger part of the mature agricultural plant they are no more necessary for plant growth than the seven which are supplied by the soil. iron is one of the essential elements of plant food; but the amount required by plants is so small and the amount contained in the soil is so large that soils have never been known to become deficient in iron. though sulfur is found in plants in very appreciable amounts and is known to be essential to plant growth, it is evident that plants do not need so much sulfur as they often contain, some of it being taken up and merely tolerated, as is the case with all of the sodium and silicon found in plants, neither of these being required for normal growth, although commonly found in plants in very considerable amounts. the supply of sulfur in normal soils is not large; but, with the combustion and decay of organic materials--coal, wood, grass, leaves, and so forth--sulfur passes into the air and is brought back to the soil dissolved in rain or absorbed by direct contact of soil and air. thus under normal conditions the supply of sulfur naturally provided is ample to meet the needs of the staple farm crops, although there are some plants, such as cabbage, for example, which may possibly be benefited by fertilizing with sulfur. but there are five other essential elements of plant food, and these require special consideration in connection with permanent soil fertility. they are potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphorus and nitrogen. there are also five important points to be kept in mind in relation to each of these elements: ( ) the soil's supply, ( ) the crop requirements, ( ) the loss by leaching, ( ) the methods of liberation, and ( ) the means of renewal. the neglect of one or more of these important points in relation to one or more of these five elements has reduced the fertility of most cultivated soils in the united states, has greatly impoverished the older farm lands, and has brought agricultural abandonment to millions of acres in the original thirteen states. on the other hand, intelligent attention to these same factors will bring restoration and high productive power to such lands. england's best lesson in farming where these five elements were supplied regularly to land on the rothamsted experiment station the average yield of wheat for the thirty years, to , was . bushels an acre, while . was the average yield of similar unfertilized land; and during the next thirty years-- to --the corresponding average yields were bushels an acre on the fertilized land, and . bushels where no plant food was applied. these statements are not mere opinions, but determined facts whose accuracy stands unquestioned. on another field at rothamsted, england, the average yield of barley for the same sixty years was bushels an acre where nitrogen, phosphorus and calcium were regularly applied, . where all five elements--including potassium and magnesium--were added, but only . on unfertilized land. on still another rothamsted experiment field, where a four-year crop rotation of turnips, barley, clover (or beans) and wheat has been practiced since , the yield of turnips in was pounds an acre on unfertilized land and , pounds where the five important elements of plant food had been regularly applied once every four years--for the turnips only--since . in the barley yielded . bushels an acre on the fertilized land, but only bushels where no plant food was applied. the yield of clover in was pounds an acre on the land fertilized for turnips, but only on the unfertilized land. the wheat following the clover with no other fertilizer produced . bushels an acre in , but bushels where plant food is always applied for turnips grown three years before. these are the established facts from the longest accurate record, and thus the most trustworthy data the world affords; and when one hears promulgated the very pleasing doctrine that the rotation of crops will maintain the fertility of the soil it is time to remember that "to err is human." fertility in normal soils of the four important mineral elements, potassium is by far the most abundant in common soils. thus, as an average of ten residual soils from ten different geological formations in the eastern part of united states, two million pounds of subsurface soil were found to contain: potassium , pounds magnesium , pounds calcium , pounds phosphorus , pounds even the depleted, and to some extent abandoned, gently undulating upland "leonardtown loam," which was farmed for generations and which, according to the surveys of the federal bureau of soils, covers per cent of st. mary's county, maryland, and more than , acres of prince george's county--still contains in two million pounds of surface soil--corresponding to the plowed soil of an acre about - / inches deep: potassium , pounds magnesium , pounds calcium , pounds phosphorus pounds the brown silt loam prairie soil of the early wisconsin glaciation is the most common type of the greatest soil area in the illinois corn belt. two million pounds of this surface soil contain as an average: potassium , pounds magnesium , pounds calcium , pounds phosphorus , pounds the older gray silt loam prairie, the most extensive soil of southern illinois, contains in two million pounds of soil: potassium , pounds magnesium , pounds calcium , pounds phosphorus pounds these data represent averages involving hundreds of soil analyses, and they emphasize the fact that normal soils are rich in potassium and poor in phosphorus. this is to be expected, for most soils are made from the earth's crust, and normal soils should bear some relation in composition to the average of the earth's crust, which contains in two million pounds , pounds of potassium and , pounds of phosphorus, as shown by the weighted averages of analyses involving about two thousand samples of representative rocks, reported by the united states geological survey. measuring fertility losses the plant food required for one acre of wheat yielding bushels, one acre each of corn and oats yielding bushels, and one acre of clover yielding four tons, includes for the total crops: potassium pounds magnesium pounds calcium pounds phosphorus pounds if only the grain, including a yield of bushels an acre of clover seed, is considered, the straw, stalks and hay being returned to the soil--either directly or in farm fertilizer--then the loss per acre from four years of cropping as above would be as follows: potassium pounds magnesium pounds calcium pounds phosphorus pounds the average annual loss by leaching from good soils in humid sections is known by the results of many analyses to be about as follows per acre: potassium pounds calcium pounds phosphorus pounds the average annual loss of magnesium in drainage water from good soils is probably pounds or more an acre, but the data thus far secured are inconclusive with respect to that element. a careful consideration of the trustworthy data clearly reveals the fact that potassium is very abundant in normal soils, while phosphorus is relatively very deficient; and, all things considered, calcium--and probably magnesium--is of much greater significance than potassium, from the standpoint of the maintenance of usable plant food in the soil. it should be noted, too, that certain crops which are exceedingly important for economic systems of permanent agriculture require very large amounts of calcium as plant food. thus a four-ton crop of clover hay takes about pounds of calcium from the soil, or the same amount as of potassium; while such a crop of alfalfa requires about pounds of calcium, but only pounds of potassium. when it is known that the abandoned "leonardtown loam" still contains in two million pounds of surface soil , pounds of potassium and only pounds of total calcium, the significance of these chemical and mathematical data must be apparent. the liberation of fertility probably there has never been a greater waste of time and effort in the name of science than in the endeavor to determine the "available" plant food in soils. the almost universal assumption has been that the plant food in the soil exists in two distinct conditions, "available" and "unavailable," and that the determination of the "available" plant food would reveal both the crop-producing power of the soil and the fundamental fertilizer requirements for the improvement of the soil for crop production. after ascertaining the total stock of plant food in the plowed soil, the next important question is not how much is "available," but rather how much can be made available during the crop season, year after year. in other words we must make plant food available by practical methods of liberation, by converting it from insoluble compounds into soluble and usable forms; for plant food must be in solution before the plant can take it from the soil. for the present, space is taken only to emphasize the value of decaying organic manures in the important matter of making plant food available; and attention is also called to the fact that the decomposition of the organic matter of the soil--including both fresh materials and old humus--is hastened by tillage and by underdrainage, which permit the oxygen of the air to enter the soil more freely, oxygen being a most active agent in nitrification and other decomposition processes of organic matter, as well as in the more common combustion of wood, coal, and so forth. the renewal of fertility in rational systems of general farming the supply of any element which is normally very abundant may be renewed from the subsoil by even the very slight erosion which occurs on all ordinary lands in humid sections. this statement applies to iron and potassium, and often to magnesium. if two million pounds of normal surface soil contain , pounds of potassium, one inch an acre would contain pounds of that element; and if a third of this-- pounds--were removed by cropping and leaching before its removal by surface washing, then two-thirds of a century could be allowed for the erosion of one inch of soil, with crop yields of bushels of wheat, bushels of corn and oats, and bushels of clover seed to the acre, provided the stalks, straw and clover hay were returned to the land, either directly or in farm manure. this amount of surface washing is likely to occur on land sufficiently undulating for good surface drainage, provided the land is plowed and cultivated as frequently as would be required for a four-year rotation as suggested above. where hay, straw, potatoes, root crops or common market garden crops are sold, very much larger amounts of potassium leave the farm than in grain farming or live-stock farming, and in such cases potassium must ultimately be purchased and returned to the soil, either in commercial form or in animal manures from the cities. thirty bushels for potassium there are some soils, however, which are not normal--soils whose composition bears no sort of relation to the average of the earth's crust; such, for example, as peaty swamp soil or bog lands, which consist largely of partly decayed moss and swamp grasses. these soils are exceedingly poor in potassium, and they are markedly and very profitably improved by potassium fertilizers, such as potassium sulphate and potassium chloride--commonly but erroneously called "muriate" of potash. thus, as an average of triplicate tests each year, the addition of potassium to such land on the university of illinois experiment field near manito, mason county, increased the yield by . bushels more corn to the acre in , by . in , by in and by . in ; and the proceedings of the midsummer session of the illinois state farmers' institute for report that the use of $ , in potassium salts on the peaty swamp lands in the neighborhood of tampico, whiteside county, increased the value of the corn crop in by $ , , the average increase for potassium being about bushels of corn to the acre. some sand soils, particularly residual sands, which often consist largely of quartz-silicon dioxid--are very deficient in potassium; consequently the experiments or demonstrations conducted by the potash syndicate at southern pines, north carolina, show very marked increases from the use of potassium salts on such soil, although the result ought not to be used to encourage the use of such fertilizers on normal soils, which are exceedingly rich in potassium. even in soils abundantly supplied with potassium temporary use may well be made of soluble potassium salts when no adequate supply of decaying organic matter can be provided. for this purpose, kainit--which contains potassium and also magnesium and sodium in chlorides and sulfates--is preferred to the more concentrated and more expensive potassium salts. about pounds an acre every four years is a good application. the kainit will not only furnish soluble potassium and magnesium but will also help to dissolve and thus make available other mineral plant food naturally present or supplied, such as natural phosphates. when the supply of organic matter produced in crops and returned either in farm manure or in crop residues becomes sufficiently abundant, then the addition of kainit may be discontinued on normal soil. thus, as an average of separate tests covering four different years, on the southern illinois experiment field on worn, thin land, at fairfield, the use of pounds an acre of kainit once in four years increased the yield of corn by . bushels where no organic manure was used, and by only . bushels when applied with eight tons of farm manure. liming the soil in the form of ashes, marl or chalk, lime has been used as a fertilizer for thousands of years. it serves two very important purposes: to correct the acidity of sour soils and to supply calcium and sometimes magnesium as plant food. burned lime has also been much used, but in more recent years the development of machinery for crushing and pulverizing rock--especially in cement manufacture--has made possible the production of pulverized natural limestone, and at much less expense than for caustic lime made by burning and slaking. where ground limestone can be easily procured it takes the place of burned lime, and it produces better results at less expense, even though - / tons of ground limestone are required to equal ton of quicklime in calcium content and in power to correct acidity. furthermore, ground limestone can be applied in any amount with no injurious results, while caustic lime destroys the organic matter or humus of the soil, dissipates soil nitrogen, is disagreeable to handle, and may injure the crop unless applied in limited amounts or several months before the crop is to be planted. the most valuable and trustworthy investigation on record in regard to the comparative value of burned lime and ground limestone has been conducted by the pennsylvania experiment station. a four-year rotation of crops was practiced, including corn, oats, wheat and hay (clover and timothy) on four different fields, each crop being represented every year. after twenty years the results for the four acres showed that the land treated with ground limestone had produced bushels more corn, bushels more oats, bushels more wheat and . tons more hay than the land treated with about an equivalent amount of burned lime. at the end of sixteen years the analysis of the soil showed that the burned lime had destroyed . tons of humus and had dissipated pounds of nitrogen to the acre, as compared with the ground limestone, this loss being equivalent to - / tons of farm manure. other trustworthy experiments by the maryland and ohio experiment stations confirm the pennsylvania results in showing better crop yields when unburned lime carbonate was used; and more extensive experiments by the tennessee experiment station also agree with the pennsylvania data in regard to the destruction of organic matter and loss of soil nitrogen from the use of burned lime. if dolomitic limestone is used, magnesium as well as calcium is thus added to the soil. limestone need not be very finely pulverized. if ground so that it will pass through a ten-mesh sieve it is amply fine, assuming that the entire product is used, including the finer dust produced in grinding, and it is very possible that final investigations will show that the entire product from a quarter-inch screen is even more economical and profitable in permanent systems. limestone is quite easily soluble in soil water carrying carbonic acid. it is thus readily available; in fact, it is too available to be durable if very finely ground; and in humid sections the loss by leaching far exceeds that removed by cropping. in practical economic systems of farming about two tons an acre of ground limestone should be applied every four years, or corresponding amounts for other rotation periods. the essential facts relating to potassium, magnesium and calcium and to the use and value of different forms of lime have been stated above, and they may be accepted with confidence for use in economic systems of farming on normal soils. chapter ii the nitrogen problem and its economical solution in the previous chapter emphasis has been laid upon the fact that plants as well as animals must have food, and that the neglect or ignorance of this factor in american agriculture has led to soil depletion and land ruin on vast areas, especially in the older states. it has been shown that of the ten essential elements of plant food, five are provided by natural processes without the intervention of man; that, of the remaining five, potassium is the most abundant in normal soil, but requires liberation by good systems of farming; that ground natural limestone is the ideal material with which to supply calcium and to prevent or correct soil acidity; and that if dolomitic limestone be used magnesium is also supplied in suitable form for plant food, thus only nitrogen and phosphorus remain for consideration. keeping in mind that systems of permanent profitable agriculture in america must be founded upon an intelligent understanding of the foundation principles involved, let us pray for strength to acknowledge the truth and cease trying to deceive ourselves. the truth is that by soil enrichment alone the average crop yields of the united states could be doubled, with the same seed and seasons and with but little more work than is now devoted to the fields; and we should cease trying to deceive ourselves in the hope or belief that the fertility of our soil will be maintained if we continue year after year to take crops from the land and fail to make adequate return. nitrogen is both the most abundant agriculturally and the most expensive commercially of all the elements of plant food; and yet there is a method by which it can be secured not only without money but with profit in the process. the percentage of nitrogen in normal soils decreases with depth, so that subsoils are almost devoid of nitrogen. this would be more generally understood if it were known that the supply of soil nitrogen in humid countries is contained only in the organic matter. this organic or vegetable matter consists of the partly decomposed residues of plants, including the roots and fallen leaves which may accumulate naturally, and the green manure crops, crop residues and farm manure which may be supplied in farm practice. thus the nitrogen of a soil is measured approximately by its content of organic matter; and, vice versa, the percentage of nitrogen is an approximate measure of the organic matter, because nitrogen is a regular constituent of the organic matter normally contained in soils. consequently if the organic matter of a soil is reduced the supply of nitrogen is also reduced. in the most depleted soils nitrogen is usually the most deficient element, although it may not be the only deficiency. thus in the depleted "leonardtown loam," which occupies such extensive areas of land in southern maryland, near the district of columbia, and which has been to a large extent agriculturally abandoned after one or two centuries of farming, only pounds of nitrogen are found in the plowed soil of an acre--that is, in , , pounds of surface soil, corresponding to about - / inches an acre. this total amount if made available would be sufficient for only six such crops of corn as are actually produced on our best land in good seasons, and yet it is four times as much as is contained in an equal weight of the subsoil. the average prairie land of the corn belt contains only pounds of nitrogen in the plowed soil of an acre - / inches deep, whereas a -bushel crop of corn removes pounds of nitrogen from the soil. a simple computation shows the supply in the plowed soil to be sufficient for only such crops. even the -bushel crop of corn per acre is known to have been produced in many places on exceptionally rich land, and yet the ten-year average yield in the united states is only bushels to the acre. per cent for nitrogen on broadbalk field at rothamsted, england, wheat has been grown on the same land every year for about two-thirds of a century. as an average of the sixty years, to the yield was . bushels an acre on unfertilized land, . where mineral plant food was annually applied, . where nitrogen salts alone were used, and where both nitrogen and mineral plant food were applied. during the thirty years, to the average yields were . bushels an acre on the unfertilized land, with minerals, . where only nitrogen salts were used, and where both nitrogen and minerals were regularly supplied. these absolute data from the oldest agricultural experiment station in the world should help us to understand why the ten-year average yield of wheat is bushels an acre for all of great britain, - / for england alone, and only for the united states. the application of nitrogen increased the yield of wheat by bushels an acre--from to bushels--as an average of the last thirty years, following an average increase of . for the nitrogen applied during the previous thirty years. it is true that the cost of the fertilizers used exceeded the value of the increase in yield; but let us bear in mind that this truth does not destroy the other truth. prove all things, and hold fast that which is good. it is a good fact that bushels of wheat were produced by the application of nitrogen to an acre of land during a period of sixty years, over and above the produce of another acre which differed only by not receiving nitrogen; whereas the total produce from an acre of unfertilized land was only bushels during the same sixty years. it is a good fact that the increase alone from the nitrogen applied is more than twice the total yield of the unfertilized land during the last thirty years, and he does well who holds fast this fact. it is also a good fact that as an average of sixty years the yield of barley was increased by . bushels an acre by nitrogen; that nitrogen increased the yield of hay on permanent meadow land at rothamsted by - / tons an acre as a fifty-year average; and that nitrogen increased the average yield of potatoes by bushels as an average of twenty-six years; while the average of the unfertilized land was only bushels an acre, these increases in barley, bay, and potatoes being obtained over and above the yields where minerals alone were used. where is nitrogen? if nitrogen has such enormous power to increase the yield of our great staple farm crops then we may well inquire, where is nitrogen, and how can it be secured economically and utilized profitably in practical agriculture? the weight of the atmosphere is pounds to the square inch. this means that a column of air inch square taken to the full height of the terrestrial atmosphere weighs pounds. more than three fourths of the air is nitrogen. since there are , square feet in one acre, it follows that the nitrogen in the air above each acre of the earth's surface amounts to , , pounds, or nearly , times the pounds of nitrogen required for a hundred-bushel crop of corn. the leaves of the corn plant are blown about by the wind carrying - / per cent of nitrogen, but cannot utilize an ounce of this supply. many people know that clover and other legumes have power, through the bacteria which inhabit their root tubercles, to feed upon the inexhaustible supply of atmospheric nitrogen which freely enters the pores of the soil; but who knows how much nitrogen is taken from the air by a given crop of clover? not one in a thousand can answer this question; and meanwhile our continued agricultural and national prosperity depends in large part upon the possibility of wide dissemination and practical application of a quantitative knowledge of the nitrogen problem. as a rule the so-called "practical" farmer is a theorist. he first believes that the virgin soil is inexhaustible, even though cropped continuously. later he clings to the popular theory that the rotation of crops will maintain the productive capacity of the land; and it is safe to say that a large majority of the farmers of the united states gladly hold to the erroneous theory that clover grown once every three to five years will increase and permanently maintain the fertility of the soil. the fact that clover was grown for generations on the lands of the older eastern states until the clover crop itself finally failed on millions of acres now agriculturally abandoned is overlooked or forgotten by present-day farmers, especially by the descendants of those who have gone west and settled on new, rich lands. six facts and a question the following six facts will furnish a comprehensive basis for the solution of the nitrogen problem in practical general agriculture: ( ) to produce pounds of grain requires about pounds of nitrogen, of which pounds are deposited in the grain itself and pound in the straw or stalks. ( ) in live-stock farming one-fourth of the nitrogen in the food consumed is retained in the animal products--meat, milk, wool, and so on--and three-fourths may be returned to the land in the excrements if saved without loss. ( ) when grown on soils of normal productive capacity legumes secure about two-thirds of their total nitrogen from the air and one-third from the soil. ( ) clover and other biennial or perennial legumes have about two-thirds of their total nitrogen in the tops and one-third in the roots, while the roots of cowpeas and other annual legumes contain only about one-tenth of their total nitrogen. ( ) hay made from our common legumes contains about pounds of nitrogen per ton. ( ) average farm manure contains pounds of nitrogen per ton. question: how many tons of average farm manure must be applied to a -acre field in order to provide as much nitrogen as would be added to the soil by plowing under - / tons of clover per acre? answer: tons. either method will furnish about as much nitrogen as would be taken from the soil by a -bushel crop of wheat, a -bushel crop of corn or a -bushel crop of oats per acre. the decision by the individual between live-stock farming and grain farming should be based upon preference and profit rather than upon the erroneous teaching that farm manure is either essential or sufficient for the maintenance of soil fertility in this country. bread is the staff of life, and many must sell grain. i do not advise all grain farmers to become live-stock farmers; but i do advise both grain farmers and live-stock farmers to enrich their soils by practical, profitable and permanent methods. both classes of farmers may secure new nitrogen--that is, they can positively increase their nitrogen supply by sufficient use of legume crops. how to supply nitrogen the cotton-grower who sells cotton lint at cents a pound and the market gardener who sells from $ to $ worth of fruits and vegetables from one acre may well make liberal use of commercial nitrogen at or cents a pound; but if after deducting the cost of harvesting, threshing, storing and marketing the average farmer receives only cent a pound for his grain and if per cent of the commercial nitrogen applied is lost by leaching, then the total crop of grain would bring only enough money to pay for the nitrogen required to produce it, at cents a pound. we may sometimes advise the american grain-grower to buy water with which to irrigate his crop, but not to buy nitrogen with which to fertilize it. if the grain farmer grows bushels of wheat to the acre, clover having been seeded on the same land in order to plow under the equivalent of - / tons of hay as green manure the following spring, and follows this by a -bushel crop of corn and a -bushel crop of oats, and this the fourth year by two crops of clover aggregating tons an acre, including bushels of seed, he can thus secure from the air about pounds of nitrogen in the - / tons of clover. moreover, if the first cutting of clover the fourth year is left on the land and the threshed clover straw from the seed crop and likewise all straw and stalks are returned to the soil, only pounds of nitrogen an acre would leave the farm if the total grain and clover seed were sold. with cents a bushel for wheat, cents for corn, cents for oats and $ for clover seed, the total returns from the four acres would amount to $ . on the other hand the live-stock farmer may grow two -bushel crops of corn, followed by bushels of oats and then tons of clover hay containing pounds of new nitrogen. the four crops would contain pounds of nitrogen; and if the grain and hay and half the corn-stalks are used for feed, with the straw and the remainder of the stalks for bedding, it is likewise possible to replace the pounds of nitrogen required for the grain crops, provided not more than one-seventh of the manure is lost before being returned to the land. the important weakness on the common live-stock farm lies in the enormous waste of manure. if pounds of feed produce pound increase in the live-weight of the animals fed, and if they bring cents a pound on the hoof, the gross returns aggregate $ . from the four acres, barring losses from accidents, animal diseases, and so on. thus, with a few established facts in mind, one can easily determine how to maintain or even to increase the supply of nitrogen in the soil, and without the purchase of nitrogen in any form; and it is just as possible and just as necessary thus to provide the nitrogen needed in grain farming as in livestock farming. when we consider that animals destroy two-thirds of the organic matter in the food consumed we find that as between the two systems above described the organic matter or humus of the soil will be better maintained in the grain system outlined. live-stock or grain farming for those who believe that live-stock farming must be adopted for the maintenance of fertility on all farms, attention should be called to the fact that there are , , acres of farm-land in the united states and only , , head of live-stock equivalent to cows, including all farm animals. will the manure from one cow serve to enrich acres of land? it should also be known that a hundred bushels of grain will support five times as many people as could live for the same length of time on the meat and milk that could be made by feeding the grain to domestic animals. it is because of this fact that the consumer may sometimes boycott meat or other animal products, while he never boycotts bread; but let us hope that permanent systems will become generally adopted in america, for the production of both grain and live stock, so that high standards of living may be maintained for all classes of people in this country. the oldest direct comparison between these two systems of farming, so far as the writer has learned, is on the experiment fields of the university of illinois, where as an average of six years the yield of corn has been bushels an acre in grain farming and bushels in live-stock farming, the same crop rotation being practiced. where wheat was introduced the average yield for six years was . bushels in grain farming and . in live-stock farming. no nitrogen was purchased in any form in either of these systems; but clover is grown in the rotation to secure nitrogen from the air and then the crop residues or farm manure is returned to the soil to provide sufficient nitrogen for the grain crops. in all cases phosphorus was used for these yields. even more encouraging than these six-year average results from illinois are the results of sixty years from agdell field at rothamsted. where mineral plant food was regularly applied, and where all the manure produced by feeding the turnips was returned to the soil, in a four-year rotation of turnips, barley, clover (or beans) and wheat, with no other provision made for supplying nitrogen, the yields per acre were as follows: turnips, , lbs. in , and , in . barley, . bushels in and . in clover, pounds in and in . wheat, bushels in and . in . here we have data which span a period of sixty years and which show that where mineral plant food has been provided the clover in rotation and the manure produced by the feeding of only one of the four crops have maintained the yield of all crops except the barley-the third crop after clover-and without the application of nitrogen in any other form. if the clover and straw had been returned to the land either directly or in farm manure the additional nitrogen thus provided would have been sufficient both to maintain the yield of barley and to prevent the moderate decrease which has occurred in the nitrogen content of the soil. chapter iii phosphorus: the master key to permanent agriculture the greatest economic loss that america has ever sustained has been the loss of energy and profit in farming with an inadequate supply of phosphorus. phosphorus is a greek word which signifies "light-bringer"; but it is a light which few americans have yet seen, else we should not permit the annual exportation of more than a million tons of our best phosphate rock, for which we receive at the mines the paltry sum of five million dollars, carrying away from the united states an amount of the one element of plant food we shall always need to buy, which if retained in this country and applied to our own soils would be worth not five million but a thousand million dollars for the production of food for the oncoming generations of americans. for five million dollars we export to europe each year enough phosphorus for , , , bushels of wheat, or twice the average crop of the entire united states. meanwhile our ten-year-average yield of wheat is bushels an acre, while germany's yield has gone up to , great britain's to , england's to - / and denmark's to more than as the average for a decade. potato yield twice doubled there is only one place in the world where we can go for the results of soil improvement for more than a quarter of a century in connection with the growing of potatoes. of course this place is rothamsted, england, where as an average for twenty-six years the yield of potatoes was bushels an acre on unfertilized land and exactly bushels where only a phosphate fertilizer was applied. where the same amount of phosphorus-- pounds of the element per acre per annum--was used in connection with other minerals-- pounds of potassium sulfate and pounds each of the sulfates of magnesium and sodium--the average yield of potatoes was bushels. where pounds of nitrogen was applied in sodium nitrate the average yield was bushels; but where the nitrogen, phosphorus and other minerals were all applied the average yield for the twenty-six years was bushels. at cents a bushel for potatoes, the investment in phosphorus alone paid per cent net profit; and even the complete fertilizer, including pounds of acid phosphate, pounds of sodium nitrate and pounds of alkali salts, aggregating pounds, and costing at moderate prices $ . an acre per annum, paid back $ a year as a twenty-six year average, thus making per cent even on an investment of nearly $ an acre a year. phosphorus helps good farming there is also but one place in the world where we can learn the results secured from the application of phosphorus for a period of thirty-six years in a good system of farming; and again this place is rothamsted. in sir john lawes and sir henry gilbert began investigations on agdell field. the norfolk rotation, already known at that time as one of the best rotation systems, was turnips, barley, clover, and wheat; and in these practical field experiments the turnips were fed on the land and the animal fertilizer thus produced was returned to the soil, which was well supplied with limestone. during the next thirty-six years $ . worth of phosphorus per acre was applied to one part of the field; and in comparison with another part of the same field cropped and managed similarly, except that no phosphorus was applied, the $ . worth of phosphorus produced $ . increase in the value of the turnips, $ . in barley, $ . in clover (and beans) and $ . in wheat. the total value of the crops grown on the land not receiving phosphorus during the thirty-six years was $ . an acre, while on the phosphated land the crop values amounted to $ . , an increase of $ . from an investment of $ . , the turnips being figured at $ . a ton, barley at cents a bushel, clover hay at $ a ton, beans at $ . a bushel, wheat at cents a bushel, and phosphorus at cents a pound. as a general average at these conservative prices, the investment of $ . an acre every four years paid back $ . in the four crops. in most states the legal rate of interest is per cent but here is an investment that paid the principal and per cent interest every four years. and these investigations show that the phosphorus was used with profit for the production of markedly different crops, including potatoes and turnips, barley and wheat, clover and beans. but the soil at rothamsted is no poorer in phosphorus than is the average soil of the united states; and these results are given here not only because they are the oldest and most trustworthy the world affords, but because they are strictly applicable to the production of common crops on vast areas of agricultural land in our own country. the form of phosphorus to use the unfertilized soil at the rothamsted station contains, in , , pounds--corresponding to about - / inches to the acre-- pounds of phosphorus and , of potassium, while an acre of plowed soil of the same weight at state college, pennsylvania, contains pounds of phosphorus and , of potassium. in a word, normal soils are deficient in phosphorus, and the application of phosphorus in good systems of farming produces marked and profitable increases in crop yields. but what form of phosphorus shall we apply? this is a very important question in agricultural economics, for we have many different kinds of fertilizing materials that contain phosphorus, and one may cost ten times as much as another as a source of phosphorus. thus pounds of phosphorus in a ton of finely ground natural rock phosphate can be purchased at the mines in tennessee and delivered at the farmer's railway station in the heart of the corn belt for $ . or the ton of raw phosphate may be mixed with a ton of sulfuric acid in the fertilizer factory, and the two tons of acid phosphate may be sold to the same farmer for $ . or the fertilizer manufacturer may mix the two tons of acid phosphate with two tons of "filler," containing a little nitrogen and potassium, and then sell the same farmer the four tons of so-called "complete" fertilizer for $ ; and the farmer gets no more phosphorus in the four tons of "complete" fertilizer for $ than in the one ton of natural phosphate for $ . the pennsylvania state college conducted an experiment for twelve years-- to --in which $ . an acre was invested in ground raw rock phosphate with a rotation of corn, oats, wheat and hay (clover and timothy), and the value of the increase produced by the phosphorus amounted to $ . as an average for the twelve years, and to $ . as an average for the last four years. thus the profit was from about to per cent on the investment, counting corn at cents a bushel, oats at cents, wheat at cents, and hay at $ a ton. these figures represent the increase produced by phosphorus over and above the value of the crops grown without phosphorus fertilizer. in this case no farm manure was used on either part of the field; but commercial nitrogen and potassium were applied alike on both parts, and clover was grown in the rotation. acid phosphate was also used in direct comparison; and, in answer to the question whether the general farmer should apply liberal amounts of finely ground natural rock phosphate, or whether he should pay four times as much for phosphorus after the fertilizer manufacturer has mixed one part of the raw rock with one of sulfuric acid and thus produced two parts of acid phosphate, these pennsylvania experiments tell us that the yearly average for the twelve years gave a gain per year of $ . from the raw phosphate and cents from the acid phosphate, at the prices used by the pennsylvania experiment station. but we must not draw general conclusions from this one experiment, even though it covers twelve years. in the maryland experiment station began field experiments with different forms of phosphorus; and, as an average of six tests every year for twelve years, $ . invested in ground raw rock phosphate produced increases in corn, wheat and hay that were worth $ . , at cents a bushel for corn, cents for wheat, $ a ton for hay, and cents a pound for phosphorus in the ground natural phosphate. how would you like per cent profit as the result of mixing brain with brawn, in connection with the improvement of your own business, thus keeping the investment under your own control? mind you, this does not prove that farming is profitable, but only that the intelligent use of phosphorus in farming is profitable. in other words the admixture--brains--is profitable. in commenting upon his investigations the director of the maryland agricultural experiment station states that the raw phosphate produced a higher total average yield than acid phosphate, and at less than half the cost. the rhode island experiment station began a series of experiments with different forms of phosphorus in . if we add together all the hay and grain crops grown during the decade following the first year of these experiments, we find that the increases per acre were , pounds for raw phosphate and , pounds for acid phosphate, on unlimed land; while lime and raw phosphate produced , pounds, and lime and acid phosphate , pounds, of increase; and the acid phosphate cost three times as much as the raw phosphate. in commenting upon these investigations the director of the rhode island experiment station states that the raw phosphate gave very good results with such farm crops as oats, peas, crimson clover, millet, soy beans, and so forth, but very poor results with such garden crops as turnips, rutabagas, cabbage, beets, lettuce, squash, and so forth, and its use for these garden crops is not advised. in the massachusetts experiment station began investigations with different phosphates applied in equal money value, and in his report for the director states that the raw rock phosphate ranks above the acid phosphate both as an average for the entire period and as an average between and , during which time the land to which no phosphorus was applied produced only per cent as much as where raw phosphate was used--a result worth every farmer's consideration. more bushels and tons the ohio agricultural experiment station has reported investigations covering sixteen years in which raw phosphate was compared with acid phosphate costing twice as much per acre. as an average of all results secured, pounds of raw phosphate applied with manure on clover sod produced . bushels more corn, . bushels more wheat, and . ton more hay per acre than where manure alone was used, and pounds of acid phosphate, costing twice as much money but containing only half as much phosphorus, applied with the same amount of manure, produced . bushels more corn, . bushels more wheat, and . ton more hay than where the manure alone was used. now i have presented the averages or summaries of all investigations that have been reported covering ten years or more where equal money values of raw phosphate and acid phosphate have been used, or where any apparent provision was made to supply some organic manure, whether as farm manure, green manure or merely as clover grown in the rotation; and i invite the reader to mix his own brains with these data and not to expect me to state whether he should use the relatively cheap ground natural phosphate rock or the more costly manufactured acidulated phosphate in the improvement of his own soil in systems of permanent profitable agriculture. making phosphate available if the natural rock is used it should be ground so that at least per cent will pass through a sieve with , meshes to the square inch, and of course its content of phosphorus (from to per cent) or of so-called "phosphoric acid" (from to per cent) should also be guaranteed. moreover it should be used liberally and in connection with plenty of decaying organic matter. people sometimes ask, "how much of the phosphorus in raw phosphate is available?" the best answer to this question is, "none of it; and, if you are not going to make it available, don't use it." on my own farm i use about one ton per acre of raw phosphate once every six years, thus adding at least pounds of phosphorus at a cost of less than $ ; whereas pounds of the common "complete" fertilizer per acre yearly would cost $ every six years, and would supply only pounds of phosphorus. i do not use "complete" fertilizers, because there is plenty of nitrogen in the air and plenty of potassium in the soil; and because, by growing and plowing under plenty of clover, i not only secure nitrogen from the air and liberate potassium from the soil but also liberate the phosphorus from the raw rock phosphate applied to the soil. in beginning the use of raw phosphate where the supply of organic manures is limited, i apply one ton of phosphate and pounds of kainit in intimate connection, turn them under, preferably with organic matter, then add ground limestone if needed, and thus prepare to grow clover. by far the most important agencies under the farmer's control for the liberation of plant food are the decomposition products of fermenting or decaying organic matter, such as green manures, crop residues and ordinary farm manures. in the decomposition of these organic materials sour or acid products are formed. thus vinegar, containing acetic acid, is formed from the fermentation of apple juice, hard cider being an intermediate product. sweet, chopped, immature field corn becomes sour silage in the silo, lactic, acetic, carbonic and other acids being formed. by a similar process cabbage is turned into sauerkraut. likewise sweet milk becomes sour, with the formation of lactic acid. oxalic, citric, tartaric, succinic, malic, gallic and tannic are other well-known organic acids. some of these are contained in the sap or juice of certain plants, and these or others are formed when crop residues are decomposed in the soil. in the ultimate decomposition of organic matter the carbon appears in the form of carbon dioxid which when combined with water forms carbonic acid. though this is a very weak acid, its solvent action is very important. but, in addition to the various organic acids and carbonic acid, we have also to consider the formation of nitric acid in connection with the decomposition of organic manures. nitric acid is one of the strongest known, and in solvent power it is excelled by no single acid. the nitrogen contained in crop residues and other organic manures is chiefly in chemical combination with carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, much of it in insoluble protein compounds. normally this organic nitrogen is transformed in the soil, first into ammonia nitrogen, next into nitrite nitrogen, and lastly into nitrate nitrogen, these three transformations being effected by biochemical action produced by different kinds of living microscopic organisms called bacteria. though detectable amounts of free nitric acid do not accumulate during this process of nitrification, the soluble nitrate or final product is formed by the action of nitric acid upon a mineral base, such as calcium, magnesium, or potassium, which may have been in the soil in insoluble form, so that the nitrogen must pass through the form of nitric acid in the transformation into nitrates. while the organic matter applied to the soil contains about twenty times as much carbon as nitrogen, and while corresponding amounts of carbonic acid and important amounts of intermediate organic acids must be formed, it is of much interest to know that even the nitric acid formed in the transformation of organic nitrogen to nitrate nitrogen in sufficient quantity for a given crop is seven times as much acid as would be required to convert raw rock phosphate into soluble phosphate to furnish the phosphorus required for the same crop. a knowledge of this definite quantitative relationship should help us to appreciate the possibilities of decaying organic manures in the important matter of making plant food available, including potassium, calcium and magnesium as well as phosphorus and nitrogen. the value of rye, rape, buckwheat and other non-legumes when used as green manures is very largely due to the liberation of plant food by their decomposition in contact with the natural phosphates, potash and other minerals contained in the soil. the farmer has no more important business than that of making plant food available, especially by supplying liberal amounts of decaying organic matter. the following suggestions are offered to the land owner: to enrich the soil apply liberal amounts of limestone, organic manures and phosphorus. to enrich the seller apply small amounts of high-priced "complete" commercial fertilizers. thus the average of seventy-three "cooperative fertilizer tests on clay and loam soils," extending into thirty-eight different counties in indiana (bulletin ), shows cents as the farmer's profit from each dollar spent for "complete" fertilizers used for corn, oats, wheat, timothy, and potatoes, if valued in the field at cents a bushel for corn, cents for oats, cents for wheat, cents for potatoes, and at $ a ton for hay, over and above the extra expense for harvesting and marketing the increase, and of course the soil grows poorer, because the crops harvested removed much more plant food than the fertilizers supplied. chapter iv permanent soil fertility its relation to profits and future values though intelligent soil improvement is the most profitable business in which an honest man can engage, ordinary farming is not a highly remunerative occupation, and to a large extent the fortune of the farmer is bound up with the increase or depreciation in the market value of his land. there are at least three important factors of influence which induce people to continue farming: first, the farmer is his own employer. he controls his own job, is his own boss and has no superior officer to lay him off because of disagreement, dull business or political preferment. farmers constitute by far the largest class of citizens who own their own business, and are thus "independent." second, the farmer is able as a rule to make some sort of a living for his family very largely out of the produce of the farm, so that he gets some return for his labor in terms of food, even when there is no profit in farming as a business; whereas the wage-earner of the city, as soon as his wages stop and his savings and credit are exhausted, must see his family supported by charity or starve. this is not fiction, but fact. third, land is usually considered a safe investment, in which one may hold a perfect and undivided title to his property; and people will retain possession of a farm even when it pays a low rate of interest, rather than sell and invest the proceeds in some other enterprise which they cannot control as individuals or which may suddenly depreciate in earning power, fail or be utterly destroyed. is land a safe investment? though it is true that farm land does not pass out of existence in a day, nevertheless it is by no means a safe investment, as witness the numerous abandoned farms in the older agricultural sections of this new country. it is easily possible for one of means to become land-poor--to have investments in land which will not pay the taxes and upkeep of buildings, fences and so forth. at prevailing prices for farm produce and labor there are vast areas of land in the older states far past the point of possible self-redemption; and, as a matter of business, one might better burn his money and save his energy than to expend all his resources in half-paying for such depleted land, depending upon the immediate income from it to raise a mortgage covering the unpaid balance. intelligent optimism is admirable, but fact is better than fiction; and blind bigotry paraded as optimism is dangerous and condemnable. some one has said that such a bigot is not an optimist but a "cheerful idiot." to purchase rich, well-watered land at a low price and become wealthy by merely waiting till the land increases in value tenfold, while making a living by taking fertility from the soil, has been easy and common in the great agricultural states during the last half-century. but, paradoxical as it may seem, land values have increased while fertility and productiveness have decreased and, with shorter days for higher priced and less efficient farm labor, with more middlemen absorbing the profits between the producer and the consumer, it is now difficult indeed to buy land with borrowed money and pay for it from subsequent farm profits. if continued soil depletion is practiced, ultimate failure is the only future for such investments. that vast areas of land once cultivated with profit in the original thirteen states now lie agriculturally abandoned is common knowledge; and that the farm lands of the great corn belt and wheat belt of the north-central states are even now undergoing the most rapid soil depletion ever witnessed is known to all who possess the facts. unless this tendency is checked these lands will go the way of the abandoned farms. some broad facts the united states bureau of the census reports that the total production of our five great grain crops--corn, wheat, oats, barley and rye--amounted to , , , bushels in , and to , , , bushels in , an increase of less than one per cent. furthermore, if we assume the average production reported by the united states department of agriculture for the three-year periods to and to as the normal for , and , respectively, and compare these averages with the production actually reported by that department for and , we find that as an average of all these crops was a slightly more favorable season than , which indicates that with strictly comparable seasons the increase from to was less than / per cent in the production of these five great grain crops of the united states. on the other hand, the bureau of census reports that during the same decade the acreage of farm land in the united states increased by . per cent, and that the acreage of improved farm land-that is, farmed land-increased by per cent. thus the census data plainly show reduced yield per acre. in addition we have actual records which show that during the decade our wheat exports decreased from , , to , , bushels, and that our corn exports decreased from , , to , , bushels, in order to help feed the increase of per cent in our population. and yet the people complained of the high cost of plain living and many have been forced to adopt lower standards for the table. meanwhile the value of the farm land in the united states increased by per cent during the ten years--from $ , , , to $ , , , --as reported by the bureau of census. the value of land the great primary reason why land values have increased so markedly during the last thirty years is that america has no more free land of good quality in humid sections. civilized man is characterized by hunger for the ownership of land. our population continues to increase by more than per cent each decade, but all future possible additions to the farm lands of the united states amount to only per cent of the present acreage, and most of this small addition requires expensive irrigation or drainage. if it cost $ an acre to raise corn, cents a bushel to harvest and market the crop, cents a bushel to maintain the fertility of the soil, and / per cent on the value of the land for taxes, then, if money is worth per cent, land that produces bushels of -cent corn is worth $ . an acre. on the same basis, what would land be worth that produces bushels of corn and equivalent values of other crops? at first thought one might say, $ . ; but this answer would be far from the correct one, which is $ . . and, if we again double the yield, making it bushels an acre, the value of the land becomes not $ . , and not $ . ; but easy computation will show that the gross receipts from an -bushel crop will pay $ . an acre for soil enrichment, $ for raising the crop, $ for harvesting and marketing, $ . for taxes and per cent interest on a valuation of $ . an acre. the average yield of corn in the united states is only bushels an acre, and the average net returns even from the farms of the corn belt will not pay per cent interest on their present market value. but the intelligent investment of $ an acre annually in positive soil enrichment will increase the crop yield by two bushels of corn each year--or by equivalent amounts of other crops grown in the rotation--and will maintain this increase for at least a dozen years on the average land now under cultivation in the united states; and no other safe investment can be named that will pay so great returns. of course, the cost is $ a bushel for the first year's increase, and even the second year the bushels of corn cost $ ; but what is the cost per bushel of the increase the tenth year? it is cents; and the twelfth year the bushels of increase cost only - / cents a bushel, with a return of nearly per cent on the annual investment in soil improvement. and this is not based on mere theoretical considerations. the average corn-belt land is producing only bushels of corn to the acre; while a six-year average yield of bushels has been produced on the common corn-belt land with proper and profitable soil treatment. thus is it too much for any farmer to adopt a definite system based upon established practical scientific information which makes it possible for his yield to increase from bushels to an average of bushels an acre? but let him make sure that the system he adopts is cumulative and truly permanent, and not merely stimulating and temporary. what phosphorus did on one farm on his -acre farm near gilman, in the heart of the illinois corn belt, mr. frank i. mann has produced a -bushel average yield of corn for a five-year period, and with acres of land in corn annually. it cost him only $ an acre a year in fine-ground natural rock phosphate to produce increased yields of bushels more corn, bushels more oats and ton more clover than the average yields secured without adding phosphorus. but this progressive, practical farmer is only putting into profitable practice the results of the long-continued careful investigations with raw phosphate conducted by such public-service institutions as the agricultural experiment stations of pennsylvania, maryland, rhode island, massachusetts, ohio and illinois. he knows also that on four different fields of typical corn-belt land in mclean county, illinois, the total crop values per acre for a period of ten years were $ . $ - , $ . and $ . , respectively, and that on four other adjoining or intervening fields, which differed only by two liberal additions of phosphorus during the ten years, the respective crop values for the same time were $ , , $ . , $ . and $ . . of course, mr. mann does not buy nitrogen, but he takes it from the inexhaustible supply in the air by means of clover and alfalfa or other legumes. he does not buy potassium because he knows how to liberate it from the inexhaustible supply contained in the soil, and because he knows that in the illinois investigation just cited the crop values from four different fields not receiving potassium were $ . , $ . , $ . and $ . ; while four other adjoining fields, which differed only by liberal applications of potassium, produced during the same ten years $ . , $ . , $ . and $ . , respectively. thus, as a general average, phosphorus increased the crop values by $ . an acre, which amounts to more than per cent on the investment, and at the end of the ten years the soil on the best treated and highest yielding land was per cent richer in phosphorus than at the beginning; while the crops from the unfertilized land removed an amount of phosphorus equal to nearly one-tenth of the total supply in the plowed soil. but a similar general average shows that potassium produced increased crop values worth only cents, or per cent of its cost. what other results should be expected from land containing in the plowed soil of an acre less than pounds of phosphorus and more than , pounds of potassium? "working" the land if there is one agricultural fact that needs to be impressed upon the american people it is that the farmers of this country have been living, not upon the interest from their investments, but upon their principal; and whatever measure of apparent prosperity they have had has been taken from their capital stock. the boastful statement sometimes made, that the american landowner has become a scientific farmer, is as erroneous as it is optimistic. such statements are based upon a few selected examples or rare illustrations, and not upon any adequate knowledge of general farm practice. even to this date almost every effort put forth by the mass of american farmers has resulted in decreasing the fertility of the soil. the productive power of normal land in humid climates depends almost wholly upon the power of the soil to feed the crop; but the american farmer does everything except to restore to the soil the plant food required to maintain permanently its crop-producing power. these ought be to have done, but not to leave the other undone. thus, tile drainage adds nothing to the soil out of which crops are made, but only permits the removal of more fertility in the larger crops produced on the well-drained land. more thorough tillage with our improved implements of cultivation is merely "working the land for all that's in it." the use of better seed produces larger crops, but only at the expense of the soil. even the farm manure is so limited and is spread so thinly with manure-spreaders made for the purpose that it adds but little to the soil in comparison with the crops removed and sold in grain and hay as well as in meat and milk. clover, as commonly produced and harvested, adds little or no nitrogen to the soil. the ordinary high-priced, manufactured, acidulated, so-called "complete" commercial fertilizers, in the small amounts that farmers can afford to use, and do use quite generally in the older states, serve in part as soil-stimulants and commonly leave the land poorer year by year; and if the farmers of the great corn and wheat belts are ever to adopt systems of permanent agriculture, it must be done in the near future, or they too will awake to find their lands impoverished beyond self-redemption. even in the state of massachusetts, where a most active campaign has been waged for forty years by the mixed commercial fertilizer interests, urging and persuading many farmers to use their high-priced artificial soil stimulants, very large areas of land are being agriculturally abandoned. thus the following statement appears in the report of the united states bureau of census in regard to the farm land of massachusetts: "the area of improved land decreased without interruption until in it was only about one-half what it was in ." it should not be forgotten, however, that market gardeners often sell from $ to $ worth of produce from an acre and they can well afford to use large amounts of soluble commercial plant food (acid phosphate, nitrates, etc.) as well as animal manures from the cities. is the soil inexhaustible? it is not the fault of the farmer alone that soil-robbing and land ruin have followed his work in america. neither the average farmer of today nor any of his ancestors received any agricultural instruction in the schools; and the greedy fertilizer agent has persuaded him to buy his patent soil medicine and has taken $ of the farmer's money and given him in return only $ worth of what he really needs to buy; and even the bureau of soils of the federal government has for several years promulgated the erroneous and condemnable theory expressed in the following quotations: "from the modern conception of the nature and purpose of the soil it is evident that it cannot wear out; that, so far as the mineral food is concerned, it will continue automatically to supply adequate quantities of the mineral plant foods for crops." (united states bureau of soils, bulletin no. , p. .) "there is another way in which the fertility of the soil can be maintained: namely, by arranging a system of rotation and growing each year a crop that is not injured by the excreta of the preceding crop: then when the time comes round for the first crop to be planted again, the soil has had ample time to dispose of the sewage resulting from the growth of the plant two or three years before." (united states farmers' bulletin no. , p. .) "the soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. it is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up." (united states bureau of soils, bulletin no. , p. .) and these are only samples of the false teaching spread abroad by this bureau of theorists, even though the congressmen of the united states can not enter the capitol of the nation from any direction without passing depleted and agriculturally abandoned lands. is it not in order to ask the congress or the president of the united states how long the american farmer is to be burdened with these pernicious, disproved and condemnable doctrines poured forth and spread abroad by the federal bureau of soils? it is true that these erroneous teachings have been opposed or ridiculed in europe; they have been denounced by the association of official agricultural chemists of the united states, and rejected by every land-grant college and agricultural experiment station that has been heard from, including those in forty-seven states; and yet this doctrine, emanating from what should be the position of highest authority, is the most potent of all existing influences to prevent the proper care of our soils. the values in land it was baron von liebig who taught, both in germany and in england, that--"it is not the land itself that constitutes the farmer's wealth, but it is in the constituents of the soil, which serve for the nutrition of plants, that this wealth truly consists." and it is in the application of this teaching, completely verified by sixty years of investigation and demonstration by lawes and gilbert at rothamsted, that england has been able to raise her -year average yield of wheat to - / bushels an acre, while the average for the united states stands at bushels. in illinois, where the agricultural college and experiment station, the state farmers' institute and the agricultural press have been working in perfect co-operation in teaching and demonstrating the need and value of soil enrichment as well as of seed selection and proper tillage, the -year average yield of wheat is already bushels higher and the -year average yield of corn is - / bushels higher than the averages for the -year period ending with , before the definite information from illinois investigations began to be widely disseminated; and yet it must be confessed that on the average illinois is producing only bushels of wheat and bushels of corn to the acre, which is less than half a crop, measured by the possibilities of our soil and climate. but what shall we say of georgia, both an older and a larger state, and with far better climatic conditions for corn, yet with a -year average yield of less than bushels of corn to the acre, notwithstanding the yearly expenditure of $ , , for more than different brands of commercial fertilizers that have been bought by georgia farmers? the facts are that while some profit can be secured from the use of high-priced mixed commercial fertilizers for cotton with lint at cents a pound, they scarcely pay their cost when used for corn, even at georgia prices. working mind and muscle but georgia spends money enough for fertilizers to double the average crop yields of the entire state within a decade if wisely invested in positive soil enrichment in rational permanent systems of agriculture. why should not the farmers of georgia and other southern states be brought to understand and to apply the results of those most valuable investigations conducted by the louisiana experiment station on typical worn upland soil of the south, which show that the use of organic manures produced upon the farm-farm manure, legume cover-crops and cottonseed meal--re-enforced by liberal additions of phosphorus, increased the crop yields from to pounds per acre of seed cotton, from . to . bushels of corn, and from . to . bushels of oats, as the averages for nineteen years? this experiment occupied acres of land, but when the results are applied to a -acre farm it is found that the gross returns from the untreated land would amount to $ . , while the net returns from the soil treatment amount to $ . annually, both the value of produce and the cost of fertilizer being computed at the prices that were used by the louisiana experiment station. thus the combined _gross_ earning power of both land and labor is less than $ a year; while the brain work applied to the improvement of the soil on the same farm brings a net return of more than $ . once in three years pounds an acre of kainit was also applied. this would contain only pounds of potassium, or less than would be required for one -bushel crop of corn. these are the oldest experiments in the united states in which organic manures have been re-enforced with phosphorus, and the only addition suggested for the profitable improvement of this system is ground limestone on acid soils. these results only emphasize the fact that the average farm yields small returns upon the capital and labor invested, but the statement may well be repeated that the intelligent improvement of his soil, in systems of permanent agriculture, is the most profitable business in which the farmer and land owner can engage. author's note the following generous statements are quoted here only because of the hope and earnest desire that those who have read the preceding pages may continue their study of the soil--the foundation of all agriculture--until they master the subject, and make their own the existing knowledge of the fundamental principles of permanent soil fertility. "another great sermon" have you read it? it is "the story of the soil," by doctor cyril g. hopkins, and not since the publication of uncle tom's cabin has any writer in the world produced a book of such tremendous importance to present and future generations. this sermon is in harmony with th century ideals. h. a. mckeene, _secretary illinois state farmers institute._ "the story of the soil:" from the basis of absolute science and real life. this is an odd book. it has a love story running through it, and it has an index, not a usual appendix to a novel. and yet it is not really a novel, but a scientific book on agriculture. there is just enough story to entice the less willing reader to absorb some of the latest results of soil analysis. the young man of the story visits virginia and new england, with a view to purchasing a worn-out farm and building it up. he finally buys such a farm, and by the methods carefully explained restores it to fertility and profit. this requires dialogs and letters on scientific husbandry, even in the love-making, and one who reads and digests it will make a better farmer.--_the independent,_ new york. "the story of the soil" has proven an inspiration to many of our california farmers. we wish for the book a widespread circulation.--_california cultivator._ i doubt if a dozen people in the country would believe that it is possible to write a novel about the soil--these big soil problems handled so ably, so plainly that any person can understand. here is a book that certainly every man in the land should read.--editor charles w. burkett, _of american agriculturist and of ginn & company's country life education series._ i must say that i think the book is destined to do more good, stir more thought, encourage more upward effort among the farmers of this country, than any other publication that has yet appeared. it was a happy thought making a human story of it.--ex-gov. w. d. hoard, _editor of hoard's dairyman, fort atkinson, wis._ when dr. cyril hopkins sets out to write a book we know we are in for something unconventional, but this time he has excelled himself in unconventionality, and has essayed a task that no author has attempted for the last sixty years,--to tell the story of the soil in the form of a chronicle. the result is remarkable; a clear account is given of the soil in relation to the crop, and the interest of the subject is broadened by skillfully weaving in the threads of a mild novel. light reading the book certainly is, as the author intended, but it has depth and permanent value.--dr. e.j. russell, _director of the rothamsted experiment station, england,--from "nature."_ in this book dr. hopkins has embodied in the shape of an interesting story, dealing with life on a farm, the science of soil fertility and permanent agriculture. he has demonstrated how the most badly run-down soil can be restored to more than virgin fertility, and with profit in the doing of the work.--editor j. f. jackson, _of the southern planter, richmond, va._ i wish that every farmer and farmer's family in the land could read "the story of the soil," for it gives in a nutshell the results of years of patient study and investigation upon the most vital question that now confronts the farmer: how shall he conserve his soil? i have read it with great pleasure and profit.--fred l. hatch, _farmer, spring grove, ill._ in the form of a story--a real, live, interesting story--the book develops a very large number of highly important facts in connection with soils and farm fertility. we have not seen anything like it before and owing to the hold it gets upon the reader it will be a power in carrying soil and fertility facts to many who would not read the purely scientific works. the author is a leading authority and the statements in the book are reliable.--_ohio farmer._ "the story of the soil," by cyril g. hopkins, professor of soils and crops, university of illinois, a practical farmer and a scientific soil investigator; a book of pages printed on heavy wove white paper, in strong and durable binding; illustrated with photographic reproductions of actual results secured in profitable systems of permanent soil improvement; with comprehensive index and glossary. price $ . can also be obtained from the publisher for $ . postpaid. none proofreading team. [transcriber's note: the extensive and lengthy footnotes have been renumbered and placed at the end of the book.] roman farm management the treatises of cato and varro done into english, with notes of modern instances by a virginia farmer preface the present editor made the acquaintance of cato and varro standing at a book stall on the quai voltaire in paris, and they carried him away in imagination, during a pleasant half hour, not to the vineyards and olive yards of roman italy, but to the blue hills of a far distant virginia where the corn was beginning to tassel and the fat cattle were loafing in the pastures. subsequently, when it appeared that there was then no readily available english version of the roman agronomists, this translation was made, in the spirit of old piero vettori, the kindly florentine scholar, whose portrait was painted by titian and whose monument may still be seen in the church of santo spirito: in the preface of his edition of varro he says that he undertook the work, not for the purpose of displaying his learning, but to aid others in the study of an excellent author. victorius was justified by his scholarship and the present editor has no such claim to attention: he, therefore, makes the confession frankly (to anticipate perhaps such criticism as bentley's "a very pretty poem, mr. pope, but don't call it homer") and offers the little book to those who love the country, and to read about the country amidst the crowded life of towns, with the hope that they may find in it some measure of the pleasure it has afforded the editor. the texts and commentaries used have been those of schneider and keil, the latter more accurate but the former more sympathetic. f.h. belvoir, fauquier county, virginia. december, . foreword to second edition the call for a reprint of this book has afforded the opportunity to correct some errors and to make several additions to the notes. in withholding his name from the title page the editor sought not so much to conceal his identity as to avoid the appearance of a parade in what was to him the unwonted field of polite literature. as, however, he is neither ashamed of the book nor essays the _rôle_ of a violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye, he now and here signs his name. fairfax harrison. belvoir house, christmas, . contents note upon the roman agronomists note on the obligation of virgil to varro * * * * * cato's _de agricultura_ synopsis introduction: of the dignity of the farmer of buying a farm of the duties of the owner of laying out the farm of stocking the farm of the duties of the overseer of the duties of the housekeeper of the hands of draining of preparing the seed bed of manure of soil improvement of forage crops of planting of pastures of feeding live stock of the care of live stock of cakes and salad of curing hams varro's _rerum rusticarum libri tres_ synopsis book i the husbandry of agriculture chapter i. introduction: the literary tradition of country life of the definition of agriculture: ii. a. what it is not iii. b. what it is iv. the purposes of agriculture are profit and pleasure v. the four-fold division of the study of agriculture _i° concerning the farm itself_: vi. how conformation of the land affects agriculture vii. how character of soil affects agriculture viii. (a digression on the maintenance of vineyards) ix. of the different kinds of soils x. of the units of area used in measuring land of the considerations on building a steading: xi. a. size b. water supply xii. c. location, with regard to health xiii. d. arrangement of the protection of farm boundaries: xiv. a. fences xv. b. monuments xvi. of the considerations of neighbourhood _ ° concerning the equipment of a farm_: xvii. } & }of agricultural labourers xviii.} xix. } & }of draught animals xx. } xxi. of watch dogs xxii. of farming implements _ ° concerning the operation of a farm_: xxiii. of planting field crops xxiv. of planting olives xxv. } & } of planting vines xxvi.} _ ° concerning the agricultural seasons_: xxvii. } & }of the solar measure of the year, illustrated by xxviii.} a calendar of agricultural operations throughout the year, in eight seasons, viz: xxix. ° february -march xxx. ° march -may xxxi. ° may -june xxxii. ° june -july xxxiii. ° july -september xxxiv. ° september -october xxxv. ° october -december xxxvi. ° december -february xxxvii. of the influence of the moon on agriculture to which is added another calendar of six agricultural seasons with a commentary on their several occupations, viz: chapter _ ° preparing time_: of tillage, xxxviii. of manuring, xxxix. _ ° planting time_: of the four methods of propagating plants, viz: xl. a. seeding and here of seed selection b. transplanting c. cuttage d. graftage, and e. a "new" method, inarching xli. of when to use these different methods xlii. of seeding alfalfa xliii. of seeding clover and cabbage xliv. of seeding grain _ ° cultivating time_: xlv. of the conditions of plant growth xlvi. of the mechanical action of plants xlvii. of the protection of nurseries and meadows xlviii. of the structure of a wheat plant xlix. _ ° harvest time_: of the hay harvest l. of the wheat harvest li. the threshing floor lii. threshing and winnowing liii. gleaning liv. of the vintage lv. of the olive harvest _ ° housing time_: lvi. of storing hay lvii. of storing grain lviii. of storing legumes lix. of storing pome fruits lx. of storing olives lxi. of storing amurca lxii. _ ° consuming time_: lxiii. of cleaning grain lxiv. of condensing amurca lxv. of racking wine lxvl. of preserved olives lxvil. of nuts, dates and figs lxviii. of stored fruits lxix. of marketing grain epilogue: the dangers of the streets of rome book ii the husbandry of live stock introduction:--the decay of country life i. of the origin, the importance and the economy of live stock husbandry ii. of sheep iii. of goats iv. of swine v. of neat cattle vi. of asses vii. of horses viii. of mules ix. of herd dogs n. of shepherds xi. of milk and cheese and wool book iii the husbandry of the steading i. introduction: the antiquity of country life ii. of the definition of a roman villa iii. of the roman development of the industries of the steading iv. of aviaries v. a. for profit b. for pleasure (including here the description of varro's own aviary) vi. of pea-cocks vii. of pigeons viii. of turtle doves ix. of poultry x. of geese xi. of ducks xii. of rabbits xiii. of game preserves xiv. of snails xv. of dormice xvi. of bees xvii. of fish ponds index. roman farm management note upon the roman agronomists quaecunque autem propter disciplinam ruris nostrorum temporum cum priscis discrepant, non deterrere debent a lectione discentem. nam multo plura reperiuntur, apud veteres, quae nobis probanda sint, quam quae repudianda. columella i, i. the study of the roman treatises on farm management is profitable to the modern farmer however practical and scientific he may be. he will not find in them any thing about bacteria and the "nodular hypothesis" in respect of legumes, nor any thing about plant metabolism, nor even any thing about the effects of creatinine on growth and absorption; but, important and fascinating as are the illuminations of modern science upon practical agriculture, the intelligent farmer with imagination (every successful farmer has imagination, whether or not he is intelligent) will find some thing quite as important to his welfare in the body of roman husbandry which has come down to us, namely: a background for his daily routine, an appreciation that two thousand years ago men were studying the same problems and solving them by intelligent reasoning. columella well says that in reading the ancient writers we may find in them more to approve than to disapprove, however much our new science may lead us to differ from them in practice. the characteristics of the roman methods of farm management, viewed in the light of the present state of the art in america, were thoroughness and patience. the romans had learned many things which we are now learning again, such as green manuring with legumes, soiling, seed selection, the testing of soil for sourness, intensive cultivation of a fallow as well as of a crop, conservative rotation, the importance of live stock in a system of general farming, the preservation of the chemical content of manure and the composting of the rubbish of a farm, but they brought to their farming operations some thing more which we have not altogether learned--the character which made them a people of enduring achievement. varro quotes one of their proverbs "romanus sedendo vincit," which illustrates my present point. the romans achieved their results by thoroughness and patience. it was thus that they defeated hannibal and it was thus that they built their farm houses and fences, cultivated their fields, their vineyards and their oliveyards, and bred and fed their live stock. they seem to have realized that there are no short cuts in the processes of nature, and that the law of compensations is invariable. the foundation of their agriculture was the fallow[ ] and one finds them constantly using it as a simile--in the advice not to breed a mare every year, as in that not to exact too much tribute from a bee hive. ovid even warns a lover to allow fallow seasons to intervene in his courtship. while one can find instruction in their practice even today, one can benefit even more from their agricultural philosophy, for the characteristic of the american farmer is that he is in too much of a hurry. the ancient literature of farm management was voluminous. varro cites fifty greek authors on the subject whose works he knew, beginning with hesiod and xenophon. mago of carthage wrote a treatise in the punic tongue which was so highly esteemed that the roman senate ordered it translated into latin, but, like most of the greeks,[ ] it is now lost to us except in the literary tradition. columella says that it was cato who taught agriculture to speak latin. cato's book, written in the middle of the second century b. c, was the first on the subject in latin; indeed, it was one of the very first books written in that vernacular at all. of the other latin writers whose bucolic works have survived, varro and virgil wrote at the beginning of the augustan age and were followed by the spanish columella under tiberius, and by pliny (with his natural history) under titus. after them (and "a long way after," as mr. punch says) came in the fourth century the worthy but dull palladius, who supplied the hornbook used by the agricultural monks throughout the dark ages. marcus porcius cato (b.c. - ), known in history as the elder cato, was the type of roman produced by the most vigorous days of the republic. born at tusculum on the narrow acres which his peasant forefathers had tilled in the intervals of military service, he commenced advocate at the country assizes, followed his fortunes to rome and there became a leader of the metropolitan bar. he saw gallant military service in spain and in greece, commanded an army, held all the curule offices of state and ended a contentious life in the senate denouncing carthage and the degeneracy of the times. he was an upstanding man, but as coarse as he was vigorous in mind and in body. roman literature is full of anecdotes about him and his wise and witty sayings. unlike many men who have devoted a toilsome youth to agricultural labour, when he attained fame and fortune he maintained his interest in his farm, and wrote his _de re rustica_ in green old age. it tells what sort of farm manager he himself was, or wanted to be thought to be, and, though a mere collection of random notes, sets forth more shrewd common sense and agricultural experience than it is possible to pack into the same number of english words. it remains today of much more than antiquarian interest. marcus terentius varro (b.c. - ) whom quintilian called "the most learned of the romans," and petrarch "il terzo gran lume romano," ranking him with cicero and virgil, probably studied agriculture before he studied any thing else, for he was born on a sabine farm, and although of a well to do family, was bred in the habits of simplicity and rural industry with which the poets have made that name synonymous. all his life he amused the leisure snatched from his studies with intelligent supervision of the farming of his several estates: and he wrote his treatise _rerum rusticarum_ in his eightieth year.[ ] he had his share of active life, but it was as a scholar that he distinguished himself.[ ] belonging to the aristocratic party, he became a friend and supporter of pompey, and, after holding a naval command under him in the war against the pirates in b.c. , was his legatus in spain at the beginning of the civil wars and there surrendered to caesar. he was again on the losing side at the battle of pharsalia, but was pardoned by caesar, who selected him to be librarian of the public library he proposed to establish at rome.[ ] from this time varro eschewed politics and devoted himself to letters, although his troubles were not yet at an end: after the death of caesar, the ruthless antony despoiled his villa at casinum (where varro had built the aviary described in book three), and like cicero he was included in the proscriptions which followed the compact of the triumvirs, but in the end unlike cicero he escaped and spent his last years peacefully at his villas at cumae and tusculum. his literary activity was astonishing: he wrote at least six hundred books covering a wide range of antiquarian research. st. augustine, who dearly loved to turn a balanced phrase, says that varro had read so much that it is difficult to understand when he found time to write, while on the other hand he wrote so much that one can scarcely read all his books. cicero, who claimed him as an intimate friend, describes (_acad_. ill) what varro had written before b.c. , but he went on producing to the end of his long life, eighteen years later: "for," says cicero, "while we are sojourners, so to speak, in our own city and wandering about like strangers, your books have conducted us, as it were, home again, so as to enable us at last to recognize who and whence we are. you have discussed the antiquities of our country and the variety of dates and chronology relating to it. you have explained the laws which regulate sacrifices and priests: you have unfolded the customs of the city both in war and peace: you have described the various quarters and districts: you have omitted mentioning none of the names, or kinds, or functions, or causes of divine or human things: you have thrown a flood of light on our poets and altogether on latin literature and the latin language: you have yourself composed a poem of varied beauties and elegant in almost every part: and you have in many places touched upon philosophy in a manner sufficient to excite our curiosity, though inadequate to instruct us." of varro's works, beside the _rerum rusticarum_, there have survived only fragments, including a considerable portion of the treatise on the latin language: the story is that most of his books were deliberately destroyed at the procurement of the church (something not impossible, as witness the emperor theodosius in _corpus juris civilis_. cod. lib. i, tit. i, cap. , § i) to conceal st. augustine's plagiarism from them; yet the _de civitate dei_, which is largely devoted to refuting varro's pagan theology, is a perennial monument to his fame. st. augustine says (vi, ): "although his elocution has less charm, he is so full of learning and philosophy that ... he instructs the student of facts as much as cicero delights the student of style." varro's treatise on farm management is the best practical book on the subject which has come down to us from antiquity. it has not the spontaneous originality of cato, nor the detail and suave elegance of columella. walter harte in his _essays on husbandry_ ( ) says that cato writes like an english squire and varro like a french academician. this is just comment on cato but it is at once too much and too little to say of varro: a french academician might be proud of his antiquarian learning, but would balk at his awkward and homely latin, as indeed one french academician, m. boissier, has since done. the real merit of varro's book is that it is the well digested system of an experienced and successful farmer who has seen and practised all that he records. the authority from which virgil drew the practical farming lore, for which he has been extolled in all ages, was varro: indeed, as a farm manual the _georgics_ go astray only when they depart from varro. it is worth while to elaborate this point, which professor sellar, in his argument for the originality of virgil, only suggests.[ ] after philippi the times were ripe for books on agriculture. the roman world had been divided between octavian and antony and there was peace in italy: men were turning "back to the land." an agricultural regeneration of italy was impending, chiefly in viticulture, as ferrero has pointed out. with far sighted appreciation of the economic advantages of this, octavian determined to promote the movement, which became one of the completed glories of the augustan age, when horace sang tua, caesar, aetas fruges et agris rettulit uberes. varro's book appeared in b.c. and during that year maecenas commissioned virgil to put into verse the spirit of the times; just as, under similar circumstances, cromwell pensioned samuel hartlib. such is the co-incidence of the dates that it is not impossible that the _rerum rusticarum_ suggested the subject of the _georgics_, either to virgil or to maecenas. there is no evidence in the _bucolics_ that virgil ever had any practical knowledge of agriculture before he undertook to write the _georgics_. his father was, it is true, a farmer, but apparently in a small way and unsuccessful, for he had to eke out a frugal livelihood by keeping bees and serving as the hireling deputy of a _viator_ or constable. this type of farmer persists and may be recognized in any rural community: but the agricultural colleges do not enlist such men into their faculties. so it is possible that virgil owed little agricultural knowledge to his father's precepts or example. virgil perhaps had tended his father's flock, as he pictures himself doing under the guise of tityrus; certainly he spent many hours of youth "patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi" steeping his celtic soul with the beauty and the melancholy poetry of the lombard landscape: and so he came to know and to love bird and flower and the external aspects of wheat and woodland tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd, but it does not appear that he ever followed the plough, or, what is more important, ever laid off a ploughgate. as a poet of nature no one was ever better equipped (the highest testimony is that of tennyson), but when it came to writing poetry around the art of farm management it was necessary for him to turn to books for his facts. he acknowledges (_geo_. i, ) his obligation only to _veterum praecepta_ without naming them, but as m. gaston boissier says he was evidently referring to varro "le plus moderne de tous les anciens."[ ] virgil evidently regarded varro's treatise as a solid foundation for his poem and he used it freely, just as he drew on hesiod for literary inspiration, on lucretius for imaginative philosophy, and on mago and cato and the two sasernas for local colour. virgil probably had also the advantage of personal contact with varro during the seven years he was composing and polishing the _georgics_. he spent them largely at naples (_geo_. iv, ) and varro was then established in retirement at cumae: thus they were neighbours, and, although they belonged to different political parties, the young poet must have known and visited the old polymath; there was every reason for him to have taken advantage of the opportunity. whatever justification there may be for this conjecture, the fact remains that varro is in the background every where throughout the _georgics_, as the "deadly parallel" in the appended note will indicate. this is perhaps the most interesting thing about varro's treatise: instructive and entertaining as it is to the farmer, in the large sense of the effect of literature on mankind, virgil gave it wings--the useful cart horse became pegasus. as a consequence of the chorus of praise of the _georgics_, there have been those, in all ages, who have sneered at virgil's farming. the first such _advocatus diaboli_ was seneca, who, writing to lucilius (_ep_. ) from the farm house of scipio africanus, fell foul of the advice (_geo_, i, ) to plant both beans and millet in the spring, saying that he had just seen at the end of june beans gathered and millet sowed on the same day: from which he generalized that virgil disregarded the truth to turn a graceful verse, and sought rather to delight his reader than to instruct the husbandman. this kind of cheap criticism does not increase our respect for nero's philosophic minister.[ ] whatever may have been virgil's mistakes, every farmer of sentiment should thank god that one of the greatest poems in any language contains as much as it does of a sound tradition of the practical side of his art, and here is where varro is entitled to the appreciation which is always due the schoolmaster of a genius. note on the obligation of virgil to varro at the beginning of the first _georgic_ ( - ) virgil lays out the scope of the poem as dealing with three subjects, agriculture, the care of live stock and the husbandry of bees. this was varro's plan (r.r. i, i, , and i, passim) except that under the third head varro included, with bees, all the other kinds of stock which were usually kept at a roman steading. varro asserts that his was the first scientific classification of the subject ever made. virgil (g. i, - ) begins too with the invocation of the sun and the moon and certain rural deities, as did varro (r.r. i, i, ). the passages should be compared for, as m. gaston boissier has pointed out, the difference in the point of view of the two men is here illustrated by the fact that varro appeals to purely roman deities, while virgil invokes the literary gods of greece. following the _georgics_ through, one who has studied varro will note other passages for which a suggestion may be found in varro, usually in facts, but some times in thought and even in words, viz: before beginning his agricultural operations a farmer should study the character of the country (g. i, : r.r. i, ), the prevailing winds and the climate (g. i, : r.r. i, , ), the farming practice of the neighbourhood (g. i, : r.r. i, , ), "this land is fit for corn, that for vines, and the other for trees," (g. i, : r.r. i, , ). he should practise fallow and rotation (g. i, : r.r. i, , ), and compensate the land by planting legumes (g. i, : r.r. i, ); he should irrigate his meadows in summer (g. i, : r.r. i, , ), and drain off surface water in winter (g. i, : r.r. i, ). man has progressed from a primitive state, when he subsisted on nuts and berries, to the domestication of animals and to agriculture (g. i, - : r.r. ii, , ). the threshing floor must be protected from pests (g. i, : r.r. i, ). seed should be carefully selected (g. i, : r.r. , ); the time for sowing grain is the autumn (g. i, : r.r. i, ). "everlasting night" prevails in the arctic regions (g. i, : r.r. i, , ); the importance to the farmer of the four seasons (g.i. ; r.r. i, ) and the influence of the moon (g.i. : r.r. i, ). the several methods of propagating plants described (g. ii, - : r.r. i, ), but here varro follows theophrastus (h.p. ii, ); trees grow slowly from seed (g. ii, ; r.r. i, , ); olives are propagated from truncheons (g. ii, ; r.r. i, , ). "the praise of italy" (g. ii, - : r.r. i, , ), where trees bear twice a year (g. ii, : r.r. i, , ). certain plants affect certain soils (g. ii, : r.r. i, ). a physical experiment (g. ii, ; r.r. i, ); the advantage of the quincunx in planting (g. ii, : r.r. i, ). fence the vineyard to keep out live stock (g. ii, : r.r. i, ); the goat a proper sacrifice to bacchus (g. ii, : r.r. i, , ). be the first to put your vine props under cover (g. ii, : r.r. i, , ). the points of cattle (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ); their breeding age (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ); segregate the bulls before the breeding season (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). recruit your herd with fresh blood (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). how to break young oxen (g. iii, : r.r. i, ). of breeding live stock, the males should be fat, the females lean (g. iii, - : r.r. ii, , ). the points of a horse (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). mares fecundated by the wind (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). the care of the brood mare (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). the bearing of a spirited colt in the field (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ); the training of a colt, "rattling bridles" in the stable (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). supply bedding for the sheep (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ), the goat stable should face southeast (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). goats' hair used for military purposes (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , .) goats affect rough pasture (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). a shepherd's daily routine (g. iii, ; r.r. ii, , - ). the life of shepherds in the saltus (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). beware of a ram with a spotted tongue (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). anoint sheep as a precaution against scab (g. iii, : r.r. ii, , ). the location of the bee-stand: a drinking pool with stones in it (g. iv, : r.r. iii, , ); planted round with bee plants (g. iv, : r.r. iii, , ), and free from an echo (g. iv, : r.r. iii, , ). when saving a swarm sprinkle bees balm and beat cymbals (g. iv, : r.r. iii, , and ). bees at war obey their leaders 'as at the sound of a trumpet,' but may be quelled by the bee-keeper (g. iv, - : r.r. iii, , and ). keep the mottled king and destroy the black one (g. iv, : r.r. iii, , ); the "old corycian" and the brothers veiani (g. iv, : r.r. iii, , ): the bees' care of their king (g. iv, : r.r. iii, , ). take off the honey twice in the season (g. iv, : r.r. iii, , ); the generation of bees from the carcase of an ox (g. iv, : r.r. ii, , ) and cf. the wisdom on this subject attributed to varro by the _geoponica_ (xv, ). cato's de agricultura _introduction: of the dignity of the farmer_ the pursuits of commerce would be as admirable as they are profitable if they were not subject to so great risks: and so, likewise, of banking, if it was always honestly conducted. for our ancestors considered, and so ordained in their laws, that, while the thief should be cast in double damages, the usurer should make four-fold restitution. from this we may judge how much less desirable a citizen they esteemed the banker than the thief. when they sought to commend an honest man, they termed him good husbandman, good farmer. this they rated the superlative of praise.[ ] personally, i think highly of a man actively and diligently engaged in commerce, who seeks thereby to make his fortune, yet, as i have said, his career is full of risks and pitfalls. but it is from the tillers of the soil that spring the best citizens, the stanchest soldiers; and theirs are the enduring rewards which are most grateful and least envied. such as devote themselves to that pursuit are least of all men given to evil counsels. and now, to get to my subject, these observations will serve as preface to what i have promised to discuss. _of buying a farm_ (i)[ ] when you have decided to purchase a farm, be careful not to buy rashly; do not spare your visits and be not content with a single tour of inspection. the more you go, the more will the place please you, if it be worth your attention. give heed to the appearance of the neighbourhood,--a flourishing country should show its prosperity. "when you go in, look about, so that, when needs be, you can find your way out." take care that you choose a good climate, not subject to destructive storms, and a soil that is naturally strong. if possible, your farm should be at the foot of a mountain, looking to the south, in a healthy situation, where labour and cattle can be had, well watered, near a good sized town, and either on the sea or a navigable river, or else on a good and much frequented road. choose a place which has not often changed ownership, one which is sold unwillingly, that has buildings in good repair. beware that you do not rashly contemn the experience of others. it is better to buy from a man who has farmed successfully and built well.[ ] when you inspect the farm, look to see how many wine presses and storage vats there are; where there are none of these you can judge what the harvest is. on the other hand, it is not the number of farming implements, but what is done with them, that counts. where you find few tools, it is not an expensive farm to operate. know that with a farm, as with a man, however productive it may be, if it has the spending habit, not much will be left over.[ ] _of the duties of the owner._ (ii) when you have arrived at your country house and have saluted your household, you should make the rounds of the farm the same day, if possible; if not, then certainly the next day. when you have observed how the field work has progressed,[ ] what things have been done, and what remains undone, you should summon your overseer the next day, and should call for a report of what work has been done in good season and why it has not been possible to complete the rest, and what wine and corn and other crops have been gathered. when you are advised on these points you should make your own calculation of the time necessary for the work, if there does not appear to you to have been enough accomplished. the overseer will report that he himself has worked diligently, but that some slaves have been sick and others truant, the weather has been bad, and that it has been necessary to work the public roads. when he has given these and many other excuses, you should recall to his attention the program of work which you had laid out for him on your last visit and compare it with the results attained. if the weather has been bad, count how many stormy days there have been, and rehearse what work could have been done despite the rain, such as washing and pitching the wine vats, cleaning out the barns, sorting the grain, hauling out and composting the manure, cleaning seed, mending the old gear, and making new, mending the smocks and hoods furnished for the hands. on feast days the old ditches should be mended, the public roads worked, briers cut down, the garden dug, the meadow cleaned, the hedges trimmed and the clippings collected and burned, the fish pond cleaned out. on such days, furthermore, the slaves' rations should be cut down as compared with what is allowed when they are working in the fields in fine weather. when this routine has been discussed quietly and with good humour and is thoroughly understood by the overseer, you should give orders for the completion of the work which has been neglected. the accounts of money, supplies and provisions should then be considered. the overseer should report what wine and oil has been sold, what price he got, what is on hand, and what remains for sale. security should be taken for such accounts as ought to be secured. all other unsettled matters should be agreed upon. if any thing is needed for the coming year, it should be bought; every thing which is not needed should be sold. whatever there is for lease should be leased. orders should be given (and take care that they are in writing) for all work which next it is desired to have done on the farm or let to contract. you should go over the cattle and determine what is to be sold. you should sell the oil, if you can get your price, the surplus wine and corn, the old cattle, the worn out oxen, and the cull sheep, the wool and the hides, the old and sick slaves, and if any thing else is superfluous you should sell that. the appetite of the good farmer is to sell, not to buy.[ ] (iv) be a good neighbour. do not roughly give offence to your own people. if the neighbourhood regards you kindly, you will find a readier market for what you have to sell, you will more easily get your work done, either on the place or by contract. if you build, your neighbours will aid you with their services, their cattle and their materials. if any misfortune should overtake you (which god forbid!) they will protect you with kindly interest.[ ] _of laying out the farm_ (i) if you ask me what is the best disposition to make of your estate, i would say that should you have bought a farm of one hundred _jugera_ (about acres) all told,[ ] in the best situation, it should be planted as follows: ° a vineyard, if it promises a good yield, ° an irrigated garden, ° an osier bed, ° an olive yard, ° a meadow, ° a corn field, ° a wood lot, ° a cultivated orchard, and ° a mast grove[ ]. (iii) in his youth, the farmer ought, diligently to plant his land, but he should ponder before he builds. planting does not require reflection, but demands action. it is time enough to build when you have reached your thirty-sixth year, if you have farmed your land well meanwhile. when you do build, let your buildings be proportioned to your estate, and your estate to your buildings[ ]. it is fitting that the farm buildings should be well constructed, that you should have ample oil cellars and wine vats, and a good supply of casks, so that you can wait for high prices, something which will redound to your honour, your profit and your self-respect. (iv) build your dwelling house in accordance with your means. if you build well in a good situation and on a good property, and furnish the house suitably for country life, you will come there more often and more willingly[ ]. the farm will then be better, fewer mistakes will be made, and you will get larger crops. the face of the master is good for the land.[ ] (vi) plant elm trees along the roads and fence rows, so that you may have the leaves to feed the sheep and cattle, and the timber will be available if you need it. if any where there are banks of streams or wet places, there plant reeds; and surround them with willows that the osiers may serve to tie the vines. (vii) it is most convenient to set out the land nearest the house as an orchard, whence fire wood and faggots may be sold and the supply of the master obtained. in this enclosure should be planted every thing fitting to the land and vines should be married to the trees.[ ] (viii) near the house lay out also a garden with garland flowers and vegetables[ ] of all kinds, and set it about with myrtle hedges, both white and black, as well as delphic and cyprian laurel. _of stocking the farm_ (x) an olive farm of two hundred and forty _jugera_ ( acres) ought to be stocked as follows: an overseer, a house keeper, five labourers, three ox drivers, one swineherd, one ass driver, one shepherd; in all thirteen hands: three pair of oxen,[ ] three asses with pack saddles, to haul out the manure, one other ass to turn the mill, and one hundred sheep.[ ] _of the duties of the overseer._[ ] (v) these are the duties of the overseer: he should maintain discipline. he should observe the feast days. he should respect the rights of others and steadfastly uphold his own. he should settle all quarrels among the hands; if any one is at fault he should administer the punishment. he should take care that no one on the place is in want, or lacks food or drink; in this respect he can afford to be generous, for he will thus more easily prevent picking and stealing.[ ] unless the overseer is of evil mind, he will himself do no wrong, but if he permits wrong-doing by others, the master should not suffer such indulgence to pass with impunity. he should show appreciation of courtesy, to encourage others to practise it. he should not be given to gadding or conviviality, but should be always sober. he should keep the hands busy, and should see that they do what the master has ordered. he should not think that he knows more than his master. the friends of the master should be his friends, and he should give heed to those whom the master has recommended to him. he should confine his religious practices to church on sunday, or to his own house.[ ] he should lend money to no man unbidden by the master, but what the master has lent he should collect. he should never lend any seed reserved for sowing, feed, corn, wine, or oil, but he should have relations with two or three other farms with which he can exchange things needed in emergency. he should state his accounts with his master frequently. he should not keep any hired men or day hands longer than is necessary. he should not sell any thing without the knowledge of the master, nor should he conceal any thing from the master. he should not have any hangers-on, nor should he consult any soothsayer, fortune teller, necromancer, or astrologer. he should not spare seed in sowing, for that is bad economy. he should strive to be expert in all kinds of farm work, and, without exhausting himself, often lend a hand. by so doing, he will better understand the point of view of his hands, and they will work more contentedly; moreover, he will have less inclination to gad, his health will be better, and he will sleep more refreshingly. first up in the morning, he should be the last to go to bed at night; and before he does, he should see that the farm gates are closed, and that each of the hands is in his own bed, that the stock have been fed. he should see that the best of care is taken of the oxen, and should pay the highest compliments to the teamsters who keep their cattle in the best condition. he should see to it that the ploughs and plough shares are kept in good repair. plan all the work in ample time, for so it is with farm work, if one thing is done late, every thing will be late. (xxxix) when it rains try to find some thing to do indoors. clean up, rather than remain idle. remember that while work may stop, expenses still go on. _of the duties of the housekeeper_ (cxliii) the overseer should be responsible for the duties of the housekeeper. if the master has given her to you for a wife, you should be satisfied with her, and she should respect you. require that she be not given to wasteful habits; that she does not gossip with the neighbours and other women. she should not receive visitors either in the kitchen or in her own quarters. she should not go out to parties, nor should she gad about.[ ] she should not practise religious observances, nor should she ask others to do so for her without the permission of the master or the mistress. remember that the master practises religion for the entire household. she should be neat in appearance and should keep the house swept and garnished. every night before she goes to bed she should see that the hearth is swept and clean. on the kalends, the ides, the nones, and on all feast days, she should hang a garland over the hearth. on those days also she should pray fervently to the household gods. she should take care that she has food cooked for you and for the hands. she should have plenty of chickens and an abundance of eggs.[ ] she should diligently put up all kinds of preserves every year. _of the hands_ (lvi) the following are the customary allowances for food: for the hands, four pecks of meal for the winter, and four and one-half for the summer. for the overseer, the housekeeper, the wagoner, the shepherd, three pecks each. for the slaves, four pounds of bread for the winter, but when they begin to cultivate the vines this is increased to five pounds until the figs are ripe, then return to four pounds. (lvii) the sum of the wine allowed for each hand per annum is eight quadrantals, or amphora, but add in the proportion as they do work. ten quadrantals per annum is not too much to allow them to drink. (lviii) save the wind fall olives as much as possible as relishes for the hands. later set aside such of the ripe olives as will make the least oil. be careful to make them go as far as possible. when the olives are all eaten, give them fish pickles and vinegar. one peck of salt per annum is enough for each hand. (lix) allow each hand a smock and a cloak every other year. as often as you give out a smock or cloak to any one take up the old one, so that caps can be made out of it. a pair of heavy wooden shoes should be allowed every other year. _of draining_ (xliii) if the land is wet, it should be drained with trough shaped ditches dug three feet wide at the surface and one foot at the bottom and four feet deep. blind these ditches with rock. if you have no rock then fill them with green willow poles braced crosswise. if you have no poles, fill then with faggots. then dig lateral trenches three feet deep and four feet wide in such way that the water will flow from the trenches into the ditches. (clv) in the winter surface water should be drained off the fields. on hillsides courses should be kept clear for the water to flow off. during the rainy season at the beginning of autumn is the greatest risk from water. when it begins to rain all the hands should go out with picks and shovels and clear out the drains so that the water may flow off into the roads, and the crops be protected. _of preparing the seed bed_ (lxi) what is the first principle of good agriculture? to plough well. what is the second? to plough again; and the third is to manure. when you plough corn land, plough well and in good weather, lest you turn a cloddy furrow. the other things of good agriculture are to sow seed plentifully, to thin the young sprouts, and to hill up the roots with earth. (v) never plough rotten land[ ] nor drive flocks or carts across it. if care is not taken about this, the land so abused will be barren for three years. _of manure_ (v) plan to have a big compost heap and take the best of care of the manure. when it is hauled out see that it is well rotted and spread. the autumn is the time to do this. (xxxvii) you can make manure of litter, lupine straw, chaff, bean stalks, husks and the leaves of ilex and of oak.[ ] (xxx) fold your sheep on the land which you are about to seed, and there feed them leaves.[ ] _of soil improvement_ (xxxvii) the things which are harmful to corn land are to plough the ground when it is rotten, and to plant chick peas which are harvested with the straw and are salt. barley, fenugreek and pulse all exhaust corn land, as well as all other things which are harvested with the straw. do not plant nut trees in the corn land. on the other hand, lupines, field beans and vetch manure corn land.[ ] (vi) where the soil is rich and fertile, without shade, there the corn land ought to be. where the land lies low, plant rape, millet, and panic grass. _of forage crops_ (viii) if you have a water meadow you will not want forage, but if not then sow an upland meadow, so that hay may not be lacking. (liii) save your hay when the times comes, and beware lest you mow too late. mow before the seed is ripe. house the best hay by itself, so that you may feed it to the draft cattle during the spring ploughing, before the clover is mature. (xxvii) sow, for feed for the cattle, clover, vetch, fenugreek, field beans and pulse. sow these crops a second and a third time. _of planting_ (xxxiv) wherever the land is cold and wet, sow there first, and last of all in the warmest places. _of pastures_ (l) manure the pastures in early spring in the dark of the moon, when the west wind begins to blow. when you close your pastures (to the stock) clean them and root out all weeds. _of feeding live stock_ (xxx) as long as they are available, feed green leaves of elm, poplar, oak and fig to your cattle and sheep. (v) store leaves, also, to be fed to the sheep before they have withered.[ ] (xxx) take the best of care of your dry fodder, which you house for the winter, and remember always how long the winter may last. (iv) be sure you have well constructed stables furnished with substantial stalls and equipped with latticed feed racks. the intervals between the bars of the racks should be one foot. if you build them in this way, the cattle will not waste their food. (liv) this is the way that provender should be prepared and fed: when the seeding is finished, gather mast and soak it in water. feed a measure of it every day to each steer; or if they have not been worked it will be sufficient to let them pasture the mast beds. another good feed is a measure of grape husks which you shall have preserved in jars. by day turn the cattle out and at night feed twenty-five pounds of hay to each steer. if hay is short, feed the leaves of the ilex and ivy.[ ] stack the straw of wheat, barley, beans, vetch and lupine, indeed all the grain straws, but pick out and house the best of it. scatter your straw with salt and you can then feed it in place of hay. when in the spring you begin to feed (more heavily to prepare for work), feed a measure of mast or of grape husks, or a measure of ground lupines, and fifteen pounds of hay. when the clover is ripe, feed that first. gather it by hand so that it will bloom a second time, for what you harvest with the sickle blooms no more. feed clover until it is dry, then feed vetch and then panic grass, and after the panic grass feed elm leaves. if you have poplar, mix that with the elm so that the elm may last the longer. if you have no elm feed oak and fig leaves. nothing is more profitable than to take good care of your cattle. cattle should not be put out to graze except in winter when they are not worked; for when they eat green stuff they expect it all the time, and it is then necessary to muzzle them while they plough. _of the care of live stock_ (v) the flocks and herds should be well supplied with litter and their feet kept clean. if litter is short, haul in oak leaves, they will serve as bedding for sheep and cattle. beware of scab among the sheep and cattle. this comes from hunger and exposure to rain. (lxxii) to prevent the oxen from wearing down their hoofs, anoint the bottom of the hoof with liquid pepper before driving them on the highroad. (lxxiii) take care that during the summer the cattle drink only sweet and fresh water. their health depends on it. (xcvi) to prevent scab among sheep, make a mixture of equal parts of well strained amurca,[ ] of water in which lupine has been steeped, and of lees of good wine. after shearing, anoint all the flock with this mixture, and let them sweat profusely for two or three days. then dip them in the sea. if you have no sea water, make salt water and dip then in that. if you will do this they will suffer no scab, they will have more and better wool and they will not be molested by ticks. (lxxi) if an ox begins to sicken, give him without delay a raw hen's egg and make him swallow it whole. the next day make him drink from a wooden bowl a measure of wine in which has been scraped the head of an onion. both the ox and his attendant should do these things fasting and standing upright. (cii) if a serpent shall bite an ox, or any other quadruped, take a cup of that extract of fennel, which the physicians call smyrnean, and mix it with a measure of old wine. inject this through his nostrils and at the same time poultice the wound with hogs' dung.[ ] you can treat a man the same way. (clx) if a bone is dislocated it can be made sound by this incantation. take a green reed four or five feet long, split it down the middle and let two men hold the pieces against your hips. begin then to chant as follows: "in alio. s.f. motas vaeta, daries dardaries astataries dissunapiter" and continue until the free ends of the reed are brought slowly together in front of you. meanwhile, wave a knife above the reeds, and when they come together and one touches the other, seize them in your hand and cut them right and left. these pieces of reed bound upon a dislocated or fractured bone will cure it.[ ] but every day repeat the incantation, or in place of it this one: "huat hanat huat ista pista sista domiabo damnaustra"[ ] _of cakes and salad_[ ] (lxxv) this is the recipe for cheese cake (_libum_): bray well two pounds of cheese in a mortar, and, when this is done, pour in a pound of corn meal (or, if you want to be more dainty, a half pound of flour) and mix it thoroughly with the cheese. add one egg and beat it well. pat into a cake, place it on leaves and bake slowly on a hot hearth stone under a dish. (cxix) this is the recipe for olive salad (_epityrum_): select some white, black and mottled olives and stone them. mix and cut them up. add a dressing of oil, vinegar, coriander, cumin, fennel, rue and mint. mix well in an earthen ware dish, and serve with oil. (cxxi) this is the recipe for must cake (_mustaceus_): sprinkle a peck of wheat flour with must. add anise, cumin, two pounds of lard, a pound of cheese and shredded laurel twigs. when you have kneaded the dough, put laurel leaves under it and so bake. _of curing hams_ (clxii) this is the way to cure hams in jars or tubs: when you have bought your hams trim off the hocks. take a half peck (_semodius_) of ground roman salt for each ham. cover the bottom of the jar or tub with salt and put in a ham, skin down. cover the whole with salt and put another ham on top, and cover this in the same manner. be careful that meat does not touch meat. so proceed, and when you have packed all the hams, cover the top with salt so that no meat can be seen, and smooth it out even. when the hams have been in salt five days, take them all out with the salt and repack them, putting those which were on top at the bottom. cover them in the same way with salt and press them down. after the twelfth day remove the hams finally, brush off the salt and hang them for two days in the wind. on the third day wipe them off clean with a sponge and rub them with (olive) oil. then hang them in smoke for two days, and on the third day rub them with a mixture of (olive) oil and vinegar. then hang them in the meat house, and neither bats nor worms will touch them.[ ] varro's rerum rusticarum libri tres book i the husbandry of agriculture _introduction: the literary tradition of country life_ i had i leisure, fundania, this book would be more worthy of you, but i write as best i may, conscious always of the necessity of haste: for, if, as the saying is, all life is but a bubble, the more fragile is that of an old man, and my eightieth year admonishes me to pack my fardel and prepare for the long journey. you have bought a farm and wish to increase its fertility by good cultivation, and you ask me what i would do with it were it mine. not only while i am still alive will i try to advise you in this, but i will make my counsel available to you after i am dead. for as it befel the sibyl to have been of service to mankind not alone while she lived, but even to the uttermost generations of men after her demise (for we are wont after so many years still to have solemn recourse to her books for guidance in interpretation of strange portents), so may not i, while i still live, bequeath my counsel to my nearest and dearest.[ ] i will then write three books for you, to which you may have recourse for guidance in all things which must be done in the management of a farm. and since, as men say, the gods aid those who propitiate them, i will begin my book by invoking divine approval, not like homer and ennius, from the muses, nor indeed from the twelve great gods of the city whose golden images stand in the forum, six male and as many female, but from a solemn council of those twelve divinities who are the tutelaries of husbandmen. * * * * * first: i call upon father jupiter and mother earth, who fecundate all the processes of agriculture in the air and in the soil, and hence are called the great parents. _second_: i invoke the sun and the moon by whom the seasons for sowing and reaping are measured. _third_: i invoke ceres and bacchus because the fruits they mature are most necessary to life, and by their aid the land yields food and drink. _fourth_: i invoke robigus and flora by whose influence the blight is kept from crop and tree, and in due season they bear fruit (for which reason is the annual festival of the _robigalia_ celebrated in honour of robigus, and that of the _floralia_ in honour of flora).[ ] _next_: i supplicate minerva, who protects the olive; and venus, goddess of the garden, wherefore is she worshipped at the rural wine festivals. _and last_: i adjure lympha, goddess of the fountains, and bonus eventus, god of good fortune, since without water all vegetation is starved and stunted and without due order and good luck all tillage is in vain. * * * * * and so having paid my duty to the gods, i proceed to rehearse some conversations[ ] concerning agriculture in which i have recently taken part. from them you will derive all the practical instruction you require, but in case any thing is lacking and you wish further authority, i refer you to the treatises of the greeks and of our own countrymen. the greek writers who have treated incidentally of agriculture are more than fifty in number. those whom you may consult with profit are hieron of sicily and attalus philometor, among the philosophers; democritus the physicist; xenophon the disciple of socrates; aristotle and theophrastus, the peripatetics; archytas the pythagorean; likewise the athenian amphilochus, anaxipolis of thasos, apollodorus of lemnos, aristophanes of mallos, antigonus of cyme, agathocles of chios, apollonius of pergamum, aristandrus of athens, bacchius of miletus, bion of soli, chaeresteus and chaereas of athens, diodorus of priene, dion of colophon, diophanes of nicaea, epigenes of rhodes, evagon of thasos, euphronius of athens, and his name sake of amphipolis, hegesias of maronea, the two menanders, one of priene, the other of heraclaea, nicesius of maronea, pythion of rhodes. among the rest whose countries i do not know, are andiotion, aeschrion, aristomenes, athenagoras, crates, dadis, dionysius, euphiton, euphorion, eubulus, lysimachus, mnaseas, menestratus, plentiphanes, persis, and theophilus. all those whom i have named wrote in prose, but there are those also who have written in verse, as hesiod of ascra and menecrates of ephesus. the agricultural writer of the greatest reputation is, however, mago the carthaginian[ ] who wrote in the punic tongue and collected in twenty-eight books all the wisdom which before him had been scattered in many works. cassius dionysius of utica translated mago into greek in twenty books (and dedicated his work to the praetor sextilius), and notwithstanding that he reduced mago by eight books he cited freely from the greek authors whom i have named. diophanes made a useful digest of cassius in six books, which he dedicated to deiotarus, king of bithynia. i have ventured to compress the subject into the still smaller compass of three books, the first on the husbandry of agriculture, the second on the husbandry of live stock and the third on the husbandry of the steading. from the first book i have excluded all those things which i do not deem to relate immediately to agriculture: thus having first limited my subject i proceed to discuss it, following its natural divisions. my information has been derived from three sources, my own experience, my reading, and what i have heard from others. _of the definition of agriculture_ _a. what it is not_ ii. on the holiday which we call sementivae i came to the temple of tellus at the invitation of the sacristan (i was taught by my ancestors to call him _aeditumus_ but the modern purist tells me i must say _aedituus_). there i found assembled c. fundanius, my father-in-law, c. agrius, a roman knight and a disciple of the socratic school, and p. agrasius, of the revenue service: they were gazing on a map of italy painted on the wall. "what are you doing here?" said i. "has the festival of the seed-sowing drawn you hither to spend your holiday after the manner of our ancestors, by praying for good crops?" "we are here," said agrius, "for the same reason that you are, i imagine--because the sacristan has invited us to dinner. if this be true, as your nod admits, wait with us until he returns, for he was summoned by his chief, the aedile, and has not yet returned though he left word for us to wait for him." "until he comes then," said i, "let us make a practical application of the ancient proverb that 'the roman conquers by sitting down.'" "you're right," cried agrius, and, remembering that the first step of a journey is the most difficult,[ ] he lead the way to the benches forthwith and we followed. when we were seated agrasius spoke up. "you who have travelled over many lands," said he, "have you seen any country better cultivated than italy?" "i, for one, don't believe," replied agrius, "that there is any country which is so intensely cultivated. by a very natural division eratosthenes has divided the earth into two parts, that facing south and that facing north: and as without doubt the north is healthier than the south, so it is more fertile, for a healthy country is always the most fertile. it must be admitted then that the north is fitter for cultivation than asia, and particularly is this true of italy; first, because italy is in europe, and, second, because this part of europe has a more temperate climate than the interior. for almost everlasting winter grips the lands to the north of us. nor is this to be wondered at since there are regions within the arctic circle and at the pole where the sun is not seen for six months at a time. yea, it is even said that it is not possible to sail a ship in those parts because the very sea is frozen over." "would you think it possible," said fundanius, "for any thing to grow in such a region, and, if it did grow, how could it be cultivated? the tragedian pacuvius has spoken sooth where he says: 'should sun or night maintain e'er lasting reign, then all the grateful fruits of earth must die, nipped by the cold, or blasted by the heat.' even here in this pleasant region, where night and day revolve punctually, i am not able to live in summer unless i divide the day with my appointed midday nap. how is it possible to plant or to cultivate or to harvest any thing there where the days and nights are six months long. on the other hand, what useful thing is there which does not only grow but flourish in italy? what spelt shall i compare with that of campania? what wheat with that of apulia? what wine with that of falernum? what oil with that of venafrum? is not italy so covered with fruit trees that it seems one vast orchard? is phrygia, which homer calls [greek: ampeloessa], more teeming with vines, or is argos, which the same poet calls [greek: polupuros] more rich in corn?[ ] in what land does one jugerum produce ten, nay even fifteen, cullei of wine, as in some regions of italy? has not m. cato written in his book of _origines_ 'that region lying this side of ariminium and beyond picenum, which was allotted to colonists, is called roman gaul. there in several places a single jugerum of land produces ten cullei of wine.' is it not the same in the region of faventia where the vines are called _tre centaria_ because a jugerum yields three hundred amphorae of wine," and, looking at me, he added, "indeed l. martius, your chief engineer, said that the vines on his faventine farm yielded that much.[ ] the italian farmer looks chiefly for two things in considering a farm, whether it will yield a harvest proportioned to the capital and labour he must invest, and whether the location is healthy. whoever neglects either of these considerations and despite them proposes to carry on a farm, is a fool and should be taken in charge by a committee of his relatives.[ ] for no sane man is willing to spend on an agricultural operation time and money which he knows he cannot recoup, nor even if he sees a likely profit, if it must be at the risk of losing all by an evil climate. "but there are here present those who can discourse on this subject with more authority than i, for i see c. licinius stolo and cn. tremelius scrofa approaching. it was the ancestor of the first of these who brought in the law for the regulation of land-holding; for the law which forbade a roman citizen to own more than jugera of land was proposed by that licinius who acquired the cognomen of stolo on account of his diligence in cultivating his land: he is said to have dug around his trees so thoroughly that there could not be found on his farm a single one of those suckers which spring up from the ground at the roots of trees and are called _stolones_. of the same family was that other c. licinius who, when he was tribune of the people, years after the expulsion of the kings, first transferred the sovereign function of law making from the comitium to the forum, thus as it were constituting that area the 'farm' of the entire people.[ ] the other whom i see come hither is cn. tremelius scrofa, your colleague on the committee of twenty for the division of the campanian lands, a man distinguished by all the virtues and considered to be the roman most expert in agriculture.[ ] "and justly so," i exclaimed, "for his farms are a more pleasing spectacle to many on account of their clean cultivation than the stately palaces of others;[ ] when one goes to visit his country place, one sees granaries and not picture galleries, as at the 'farm' of lucullus.[ ] indeed," i added, "the apple market at the head of the sacred way is the very image of scrofa's fruit house." as the new comers joined us, stolo inquired: "have we arrived after dinner is over, for we do not see l. fundilius who invited us." "be of good cheer," replied agrius, "for not only has that egg which indicates the last lap of the chariot race in the games at the circus not yet been removed, but we have not even seen that other egg which is the first course of dinner.[ ] and so until the sacristan returns and joins us do you discourse to us of the uses or the pleasures of agriculture, or of both. for now the sceptre of agriculture is in your hands, which formerly, they say, belonged to stolo." "first of all," began scrofa, "we must have a definition. are we to be limited in discussing agriculture to the planting of the land or are we to touch also on those other occupations which are carried on in the country, such as feeding sheep and cattle. for i have observed that those who write on agriculture, whether in greek or punic or latin, wander widely from their subject." "i do not think that those authors should be imitated in that," said stolo, "for i deem them to have done better who have confined the subject to the straitest limits, excluding all considerations which are not strictly pertinent to the subject. wherefore the subject of grazing, which many writers treat as a part of agriculture, seems to me to belong rather to a treatise on live stock. that the occupations are different is apparent from the difference in the names of those we put in charge of them, for we call one the farmer (_villicus_) and the other the herdsman (_magister pecoris_). the farmer is charged with the cultivation of the land and is so called from the _villa_ or farm house to which he hauls in the crops from the fields and from which he hauls them away when they are sold. wherefore also the peasants say _vea_ for _via_, deriving their word for the road over which they haul from the name of the vehicle in which they do the hauling, _vectura_, and by the same derivation _vella_ for _villa_, the farm house to and from which they haul. in like manner the trade of a carrier is called _vellatura_ from the practice of driving a _vectura_, or cart." "surely," said fundanius, "feeding cattle is one thing and agriculture is another, but they are related. just as the right pipe of the _tibia_ is different from the left pipe, yet are they complements because while the one leads, it is to carry the air, and the other follows, it is for the accompaniment." "and, to push your analogy further, it may be added," said i, "that the pastoral life, like the _tibia dextra_, has led and given the cue to the agricultural life, as we have on the authority of that learned man dicaearchus who, in his _life of greece_ from the earliest times, shows us how in the beginning men pursued a purely pastoral life and knew not how to plough nor to plant trees nor to prune them; only later taking up the pursuits of agriculture; whence it may be said that agriculture is in harmony with the pastoral life but is subordinate to it, as the left pipe is to the right pipe." "beware," exclaimed agrius, "of pushing your musical analogy too far, for you would not only rob the farmer of his cattle and the shepherd of his livelihood but you would even break the law of the land in which it is written that a farmer may not graze a young orchard with that pestiferous animal which astrology has placed in the heavens near the bull." "see here, agrius," said fundanius, "let there be no mistake about this. the law you cite applies only to certain designated kinds of cattle, as indeed there are kinds of cattle which are the foes and the bane of agriculture such as those you have mentioned--the goats--for by their nibbling they ruin young plantations, and not the least vines and olives. but, because the goat is the greatest offender in this respect, we have a rule for him which works both ways, namely: that victims of his family are grateful offerings on the altar of one god but should never come near the fane of another; since by reason of the same hate one god is not willing even to see a goat and the other is pleased to see him killed. so it is that goats found among the vines are sacrificed to father bacchus as it were that they should pay the penalty of their evil doing with their lives; while on the contrary nothing of the goat kind is ever sacrificed to minerva, because they are said to make the olive sterile even by licking it, for their very spittle is poison to the fruit. for this reason goats are never driven into the acropolis of athens, except once a year for a certain necessary sacrifice, lest the olive tree, which is said to have its origin there,[ ] might be touched by a goat." "no kind of cattle," said i, "are of any use to agriculture except those which aid in the cultivation of the land, as they do when they are yoked to the plough." "if this was so," said agrasius, "how could we afford to take cattle off the land, since it is from our flocks and herds that we derive the manure which is of the greatest benefit to our purely agricultural operations." "on your argument of convenience," said agrius, "we might claim that slave dealing was a branch of agriculture, if they were agricultural slaves which we dealt in. the error lies in the assumption that because cattle are good for the land, they make crops grow on the land. it does not follow, for by that reasoning other things would become part of agriculture which have nothing to do with it: as for example spinsters and weavers and other craftsmen which you might keep on your farm." "let us then agree," said scrofa, "to exclude live stock from our consideration of the art of agriculture. does any one want to exclude any thing else?" "are we to follow the book of the two sasernas," i inquired, "and discuss whether the manufacture of pottery is more related to agriculture than mining for silver or other metals? doubtless the material comes out of the ground in both cases, but no one claims that quarrying for stone or washing sand has any thing to do with agriculture, so why bring in the potter? it is not a question of what comes out of the land, nor of what can be done profitably on a farm, for if it were it might as well be argued that had one a farm lying along a frequented road and a site on it convenient to travellers, it would be the farmer's business to build a cross-roads tavern. but surely, however profitable this might prove, it would not make the speculation any part of agriculture. it is not, i repeat, whether the business is carried on on account of the land, nor out of the land, that it may be classed as a part of agriculture, but only if from planting the land one gains a profit." "you are jealous of this great writer," interrupted stolo. "because of his unfortunate potteries you rebuke him captiously and give him no credit for all the admirable things which he says about matters which certainly relate to agriculture." at this sally, scrofa, who knew the book and justly contemned it, smiled, whereupon agrasius, who thought that he and stolo alone knew the book demanded of scrofa a quotation from it. "here is his recipe for getting rid of bugs," said scrofa. "'steep a wild cucumber in water and where-ever you sprinkle it the bugs will disappear,' and again, 'grease your bed with ox gall mixed with vinegar.'" fundanius looked at scrofa. "and yet saserna gives good advice even if it is in a book on agriculture," he said. "yes, by hercules," said scrofa, "and especially in his recipe for removing superfluous hair, in which he bids you take a yellow frog and stew it down to a third of its size and then rub the body with what is left."[ ] "i would rather cite," said i, "sasernas' prescription for the malady from which fundanius suffers, for his corns make wrinkles on his brow." "tell me, pray, quickly," exclaimed fundanius, "for i had rather learn how to root out my corns than how to plant beet roots." "i will tell you," said stolo, "in the very words he wrote it, or at least as i heard tarquenna read it: 'when a man's feet begin to hurt he should think of you to enable you to cure him.'" "i am thinking of you," said fundanius, "now cure my feet." "listen to the incantation," said stolo. 'may the earth keep the malady, may good health remain here.' saserna bids you chant this formula thrice nine times, to touch the earth, to spit and be sure that you do it all before breakfast." "you will find," said i, "many other wonderful secrets in saserna, all equally foreign to agriculture, and so all to be left where they are. but it must be admitted that such digressions are found in many other authors. does not the agricultural treatise of the great cato himself fairly bristle with them, as for instance his instructions how to make must cake and cheese cake, and how to cure hams?" "you forget," said agrius, "his most important precept: 'if you wish to drink freely and dine well in company, you should eat five leaves of raw cabbage steeped in vinegar, before sitting down to the table.'" _b. what agriculture is_ iii. "and so," said agrasius, "as we have agreed upon and eliminated from the discussion all those things which agriculture is not, it remains to discuss what it is. is it an art, and, if so, what are its principles and its purposes?" stolo turned to scrofa and said: "you are our senior in age, in reputation and in experience, you should speak." and scrofa, nothing loath, began as follows: "in the first place, agriculture is not only an art but an art which is as useful as it is important. it is furthermore a science, which teaches how every kind of land should be planted and cultivated, and how to know what kind of land will produce the largest crops for the longest time.[ ]" _the purposes of agriculture are profit and pleasure_ iv. the elements with which this science deals are the same as those which ennius says are the elements of the universe--water, earth, air and fire. before sowing your seed it behooves you to study these elements because they are the origin of all growing things. so prepared, the farmer should direct his efforts to two ends: profit and pleasure,[ ] one solid the other agreeable: but he should give the preference to the pursuit of profit.[ ] and yet those who have regard for appearances in their farming, as for instance by planting their orchards and olive yards in orderly array, often add not only to the productiveness of the farm but as well to its saleability, and so doubly increase the value of their estate. for of two things of equal usefulness, who would not prefer to buy the better looking? the farm which is healthiest is the most valuable, for there the profit is certain. on the other hand, on an unhealthy farm, however fertile it may be, misfortune dogs the steps of the farmer. for where the struggle is against death, there not only is the profit uncertain, but one's very existence is constantly at risk: and so agriculture becomes a gamble in which the farmer hazards both his life and his fortune. and yet this risk can be diminished by forethought, for, when health depends upon climate, we can do much to control nature and by diligence improve evil conditions. if the farm is unhealthy by reason of the plight of the land itself, or of the water supply, or is exposed to the miasma which breeds in some localities, or if the farm is too hot on account of the climate, or is exposed to mischievous winds, these discomforts can be mitigated by one who knows what to do and is willing to spend some money. what is of the greatest importance in this respect is the situation of the farm buildings, their plan and convenience, and what is the aspect of their doors and gates and windows. during the great plague, hippocrates the physician saved not merely one farm but many cities because he knew this. but why should i summon him as a witness: for when the army and the fleet lay at corcyra[ ] and all the houses were crowded with the sick and dying, did not our varro here contrive to open new windows to the healthy north wind and close those which gave entrance to the infected breezes of the south, to change doors and to do other such things, and so succeed in restoring his comrades safe and sound to their native land? _the fourfold division of the study of agriculture_ v. i have rehearsed the elements and the purposes of agriculture, it now remains to consider in how many divisions this science is to be studied." "i have supposed these to be without number," said agrius, "when i have read the many books which theophrastus wrote on _the history of plants_ and _the causes of vegetation_. "these books," said stolo, "have always seemed to me to be fitter for use in the schools of the philosophers than in the hands of a practical farmer. i do not mean to say that they do not contain many things which are both useful and practical. however that may be, do you rather explain to us the divisions in which agriculture should be studied." "there are four chapters for the study of agriculture, of the highest practical importance," resumed scrofa, "namely:" ° what are the physical characteristics of the land to be cultivated, including the constitution of the soil; ° what labour and equipment are necessary for such cultivation; ° what system of farming is to be practised; ° what are the season? at which the several farming operations are to be carried out. each of these four chapters may be divided in at least two subdivisions: the first into (_a_) a study of the soil, and (_b_) a survey of the buildings and stabling. the second into an enquiry as to (_c_), the men who will carry on the farming operations, and (_d_) the implements they will require. the third into (_e_) the kind of work to be planned, and (_f_) where that work is to be done. the fourth into what relates (_g_) to the annual revolution of the sun, and (_h_) the monthly revolution of the moon. i will speak of the four principal parts first, and then in detail of the eight subdivisions. ° concerning the farm itself _how conformation of the land affects agriculture_ vi. four things must be considered in respect of the physical characteristics of the farm: its conformation, the quality of the soil, its extent, and whether it is naturally protected. the conformation is either natural, or artificial as the result of cultivation, and may be good or bad in either case. i will speak first of natural conformation, of which there are three kinds: plain, hill and mountain--although there is a fourth kind made up of a combination of any two or all three of those mentioned, as may be seen in many places. a different system of cultivation is required for each of these three kinds of farms, for without doubt that which is suited for the hot plain would not suit the windy mountain, while a hill farm enjoys a more temperate climate than either of the other two kinds and so demands its own system of cultivation. these distinctions are most apparent when the several characteristic conformations are of large extent, as for example the heat and the humidity are greater in a broad plain, like that of apulia, while on a mountain like vesuvius the climate is usually fresher and so more healthy. those who cultivate the lowlands feel the effects of their climate most in summer, but they are able to do their planting earlier in the spring, while those who dwell in the mountains suffer most from their climate in winter, and both sow and reap at later seasons. frequently the winter is more propitious to those who dwell in the plains because then the pastures are fresh there and the trees may be pruned more readily. on the other hand the summer is more kindly in the mountains for then the upland grass is rich when the pastures of the plains are burnt, and it is more comfortable to cultivate the trees in a keen air. a lowland farm is best when it is gently sloping rather than absolutely flat, because on a flat farm water cannot run off and so forms swampy places. but it is a disadvantage to have the surface too rolling because that causes the water to collect and form ponds. certain trees, like the fir and the pine, flourish most in the mountains on account of the eager air, while in this region where it is more temperate the poplars and the willows thrive best. again the arbute and the oak prefer the more fertile lands, while the almond and the fig trees love the lowlands.[ ] the growth on the low hills takes on more of the character of the plains, on the high hills that of the mountains. for these reasons the kind of crops to be planted must be suited to the physical characteristics of the farm, as grain for the plains, vines for the hills and forests for the mountains. all these considerations should be weighed separately with reference to each of the three kinds of conformation. vii. "it seems to me," said stolo, "that, so far as concerns the natural situation of a farm, cato's opinion is just. he wrote, you will recall, that the best farm was one which lay at the foot of a mountain looking to the south." scrofa resumed: "so far as concerns the laying out of the farm, i maintain that the more appearances are considered the greater will be the profit, as, for instance, orchards should be planted in straight lines arranged in quincunxes and at a reasonable distance apart. it is a fact that, because of their unintelligent plan of planting, our ancestors made less wine and corn to the acre than we do. the point is that if each plant is set with due reference to the others they occupy less land and are less likely to screen from one another the influence of the sun and the moon and the air. this may be illustrated by an experiment: you can press a parcel of nuts with their shells on into a measure having only two thirds of the capacity of what is required to contain them after they have been cracked, because the shells keep them naturally compacted. when trees are planted in rows the sun and the moon have access to them equally from all sides, with the result that more raisins and olives are developed and then mature more quickly, a double result with the double consequence of a larger crop of must and oil and a greater profit." _how character of soil affects agriculture_ "we will now take up the second consideration in respect of the physical characteristics of a farm, namely: the quality of the soil, which partly, if not entirely, determines whether it is considered a good or a bad farm: for on this depends what crops can be planted and harvested and how they should be cultivated, as it is not possible to plant everything successfully on the same soil. for one soil is suitable for vines, another for corn, and others for other things. in the island of crete, near cortynia, there is said to be a plane tree which does not lose its leaves even in winter--a phenomenon due doubtless to the quality of the soil. there is another of the same kind in cyprus, according to theophrastus. likewise within sight of the city of sybaris (which is now called thurii) stands an oak having the same characteristic. again at elephantine neither the vines nor the fig trees lose their leaves, something that never happens with us. for the same reason many trees bear fruit twice a year, as do the vines near the sea at smyrna, and the apples in the fields of consentinium. the effect of soil appears also from the fact that those plants which bear most profusely in wild places produce better fruit under cultivation. the same explanation applies to those plants which cannot live except in a marshy place, or indeed in the very water: they are even nice about the kind of water, some grow in ponds like the reeds at reate, others in streams like the alders in epirus, some even in the sea like the palms and the squills of which theophrastus writes. when i was in the army, i saw in transalpine gaul, near the rhine, lands where neither the vine, nor the olive, nor the pear tree grew, where they manured their fields with a white chalk which they dug out of the ground:[ ] where they had no salt, either mineral or marine, but used in place of it the salty ashes obtained from burning a certain kind of wood." stolo here interrupted. "you will recall," he said, "that cato in comparing the different kinds of soil, ranked them by their merit in nine classes according to what they would produce, of which the first was that on which the vine would grow a plentiful supply of good wine; the second that fit for an irrigated garden; the third for an osier bed; the fourth for an olive yard; the fifth for a meadow; the sixth for a corn field; the seventh for a wood lot; the eighth for a cultivated orchard, and the ninth for a mast grove." "i know he wrote that," replied scrofa, "but every one does not agree with him. there are some who put a good pasture first, and i am among them." our ancestors were wont to call them not _prala_, as we do, but _parata_ (because they are always ready for use). the sedile caesar vopicus, in pleading a cause before the censors, once said that the prairie of rosea was the nurse of italy, because if one left his surveying instruments there on the ground over night they were lost next day in the growth of the grass.[ ] (_a digression on the maintenance of vineyards_) viii. there be those who assert that the cost of maintaining a vineyard eats up the profit. what kind of vineyard? i ask. for there are several: in one the vines grow on the ground without props, as in spain; in another, which is the kind common in italy, the vines climb and are trained either separately on props or one with another on a trellis, which last is what is called marrying the vine. there are four kinds of trellis in use--made out of poles, of reeds, of ropes and of vines themselves, which are in use respectively in falerum, in arpinum, in brundisium and in mediolanum. there are two methods of training the vine on trellises, one upright, as is done in the country of canusium; the other crossed and interwoven, as is the practice generally throughout italy. if one obtains the material for his trellises from his own land, the expense of maintaining that kind of vineyard is negligible, nor is it burdensome if the material is procured from the neighbourhood. such trellis material, as has been described, can be grown at home by planting willows, reeds and rushes, or some thing of that kind; but if you propose to rely on the vines to form their own trellis, then you must plant an _arbustum_ where the vines can be trained on trees, such as maples, which the inhabitants of mediolanum use for that purpose; or fig trees, on which the people of canusium train their vines. likewise there are four kinds of props used for the cultivation of unwedded vines; first, the planted post, which is called _ridicum_ and is best when fashioned out of oak or juniper; second, poles cut in the swamp, and the more seasoned they are the longer they will last, but it is the practice to reset them upside down when they rot out in the ground; third, for lack of some thing better, a bundle of reeds tied together and thrust into a pointed tube of baked clay, which is then planted in the ground and serves to preserve the reeds from water rot; the fourth is what may be called the natural prop, when vines are swung from tree to tree. vines should be trained to the height of a man and the interval between the props should be sufficient to give room for a yoke of oxen to plough. the least expensive kind of a vineyard is that which brings wine to the jug without the aid of any sort of prop. there are two of this kind, one in which the earth serves as a bed for the grapes, as in many places in asia, and where usually the foxes share the crop with man;[ ] or, if mice appear, it is they who make the vintage, unless you put a mouse trap in every vine, as they do on the island of pandataria. the other kind of vineyard, is that where each shoot which promises to bear grapes is lifted from the earth and supported about two feet off the ground by a forked stick: by this means the grapes, as they form, learn to hang as it were from a branch and do not have to be taught after the vintage; they are held in place with a bit of cord or by that kind of tie which the ancients called a _cestus_. as soon as the farmer sees the vintagers turn their backs he carries these props under cover for the winter so that he may use them another year without expense for that account. in italy the people of reate practise this custom. thus there are as many methods of cultivating the vine as there are kinds of soil. for where the land is wet the vine must be trained high because when wine is being made and matured on the vine, it needs sun, not water--as when it is in the cup! for this reason it was, i think, that first the vine was made to grow on trees. _of the different kinds of soil_ ix. it is expedient then, as i was saying, to study each kind of soil to determine for what it is, and for what it is not, suitable. the word _terra_ is used in three senses: general, particular and mixed. it is a general designation when we speak of the orb of the earth, the land of italy or any other country. in this designation is included rock and sand and other such things. in the second place, _terra_ is referred to particularly when it is spoken of without qualification or epithet. in the third place, which is the mixed sense, when one speaks of _terra_ as soil--that in which seeds are sown and developed; as for example, clay soil or rocky soil or others. in this sense there are as many kinds of earth as there are when one speaks of it in the general sense, on account of the mixtures of substances in it in varying quantities which make it of different heart and strength, such as rock, marble, sand, loam, clay, red ochre, dust, chalk, gravel, carbuncle (which is a condition of soil formed by the burning of roots in the intense heat of the sun); from which each kind of soil is called by a particular name, in accordance with the substances of which it is composed, as a chalky soil, a gravelly soil, or what ever else may be its distinguishing quality. and as there are different varieties of soil so each variety may be subdivided according to its quality, as, for example, a rocky soil is either very rocky, moderately rocky or hardly rocky at all. so three grades may be made of other mixed soils. in turn each of these three grades has three qualities: some are very wet, some very dry, some moderate, these distinctions are of the greatest importance in respect of the crops, for the skilled husbandman plants spelt rather than wheat in wet land, and on dry land barley rather than spelt, in medium land both. furthermore there are still more subtle distinctions to be made in respect of all these kinds of soil, as for example it must be considered in respect of loam, whether it is white loam or red loam, because white loam is unfit for nursery beds, while red loam is what they require. but the three great distinctions of quality of soil are whether it is lean or fat, or medium. fat soils are apparent from the heavy growth of their vegetation, and the lean lie bare; as witness the territory of pupinia (in latium), where all the foliage is meagre and the vines look starved, where the scant straw never stools, nor the fig tree blooms, while for the most part the trees are as covered with moss as are the arid pastures. on the other hand, a rich soil like that of etruria reveals itself heavy with grain and forage crops and its umbrageous trees are clean of moss. soil of medium strength, like that near tibur, which one might say is rather hungry than starved, repays cultivation in proportion as it takes on the quality of rich land." "diophanes of bithynia," said stolo, "was very much to the point when he wrote that the best indication of the suitability of soil for cultivation can be had either from the soil itself or from what grows in it: so one should ascertain whether it is white or black, if it is light and friable when it is dug, whether its consistency is ashy, or too heavy: or it can be tested by evidence that the wild growth upon it is heavy and fruitful after its kind.[ ] but proceed and tell us of your third division, which relates to the measurement and laying out of the farm." _of the units of area used in measuring land_ x. scrofa resumed: "every country has its own system for measuring land. in further spain the unit of area is the _jugum_, in campania the _versus_, here in the roman country and among the latins it is the _jugerum_. they call a _jugum_ the area which a pair of oxen can plough in a day. the _versus_ is one hundred feet square: the _jugerum_ is the area containing two square _actus_: the _actus quadratus_ or _acnua_, as it is called by the latins, measuring feet in width and as much in length.[ ] the smallest fraction of a jugerum is called a _scripulum_ and is ten feet square. from this base the surveyors some times call the butts of land which exceed a jugerum _unciae_ (twelfths) or _sextantes_ (seventy seconds) or some other such duodecimal division, for the jugerum contains scripula, like the ancient pound weight which was in use before the punic wars. two jugera, which romulus first made the headright and which thus became the unit of inheritance, are called an _haeredium_:[ ] later one hundred haeredia were called a _centuria_, which is , _unciae_ square. four centuriae adjoining, so that there are two on each side, are called a _saltus_ in the distribution of the public lands." _of the considerations on building a steading_ _a. size_ xi. as the result of faulty surveys of the farm it often happens that the steading is constructed either too small or too large for the farm, a mistake which in either case is of prejudice both to the property and its revenue. if one builds too large or too many buildings he is eaten up by the expense of maintenance, while if one builds less than the farm requires the harvest is lost, for there is no doubt that the largest wine cellar must be provided for that farm on which the vintages are largest, or granary, if it is a grain farm. _b. water supply_ if possible, the steading should be so built that it shall have water within the walls, or certainly near at hand: it is preferable that this should be derived from a spring, or, if not, then from an unfailing stream. if no running water is available a cistern should be constructed within doors, and a pond in the open, the one for the use of the men, the other for the use of the cattle. _c. location, with regard to health_ xii. when you plan to build, try your best to locate the steading at the foot of a wooded hill where the pastures are rich, and turn it so as to catch the healthiest prevailing breeze. the best situation is facing the east so to secure shade in summer and sun in winter. but if you must build on the bank of a river, take care that you do not let the steading face the river, for it will be very cold in winter and unhealthy in summer. like precautions must be taken against swampy places for the same reasons and particularly because as they dry, swamps breed certain animalculae which cannot be seen with the eyes and which we breathe through the nose and mouth into the body where they cause grave maladies."[ ] "but," said fundanius, "suppose i inherited a farm like that, what should i do to avoid the malady you describe?" "the answer to that question is easy," said agrius. "you should sell the farm for what you can get for it: and if you can't sell it, give it away." scrofa resumed: "take care to avoid having the steading face the direction from which disagreeable winds blow, yet you should not build in a hollow. high ground is the best location for a steading: for by ventilation all noxious gases are dissipated, and the steading is healthier if exposed to the sun all day: with the further advantage that any insects which may be bred in or brought upon the premises are either blown away or quickly perish where there is no damp. sudden rains and overflowed streams are dangerous to those who have their steadings in low or hollow places, and they are more at the hazard of the ruthless hand of the robber because he is able to take advantage of those who are unprepared. against either of these risks the higher places are safer." _d. arrangement_ xiii. in arranging the steading, see that the cattle are put where they will be warm in winter. such crops as wine and oil should be housed below ground in cellars, or rather in jars placed in such cellars, while dry crops like beans, and hay, are best stored on high board floors. a rest room should be provided for the comfort of the hands where they can gather after the day's work or for protection from cold or heat and there recruit themselves in quiet. the room of the overseer should be near the entrance to the farm house so that he may know who comes in and who goes out during the night, and what they bring in or out, especially if there is no gate-keeper. the kitchen also should be near the overseer's room because there in winter is great activity before daylight when food is being prepared and eaten. good sized sheds should be built in the barn yard for the wagons and other implements which might be damaged by the rain. for while they may be kept safe from the thief within the gates, yet if they are exposed to the weather they will be lost nevertheless. it is better to have two barn yards for a large farm. the inner court should contain a cistern like a little fish pond into which the drainage from the eaves may collect: as here the cattle and swine and geese can drink and bathe in summer when they are driven in from work or pasture. in the outer court there should be another pond where you can handle lupines and such other things as must be soaked in water. this exterior court yard should be strewn thick with straw and chaff, which, by being trampled under the feet of the cattle, becomes the handmaid of the farm by reason of the service it renders when it is hauled out. every farm should have two manure pits, or one divided into two parts; into one division should be put the new manure from the barn, in the other the old manure which is ready for use on the farm: for new manure is not as good as that which is well rotted.[ ] the manure pit is more serviceable when its sides and top are protected from the sun by leaves and branches, for the sun draws out from the manure those elements which the land requires; for this reason experienced farmers sprinkle water on their manure pits, and so largely preserve its quality: here too some establish the privies for the slaves. one should build a barracks (what we call a _nubilarium_ because it affords protection from the weather) and it should be large enough to contain under its roof the entire crop of the farm: this should be placed near the threshing floor and left open only on the side of the threshing floor, so that while threshing you may conveniently throw out the corn and if it begins to cloud up then quickly throw it back again under shelter. there should be windows in this barracks on the side most fitted for ventilation." "a farm would be more of a farm," said fundanius, "if the buildings were constructed with reference to the diligence of our ancestors rather than the luxury of their descendants. for they built for use, while we build to gratify an unbridled luxury. their barns were bigger than their houses, but the contrary is often the case today. then a house was praised if it had a good kitchen, roomy stables and a cellar for wine and oil fitted, according to the custom of the country, with a floor draining into a reservoir, into which the wine can flow when, as often happens after the new wine has been laid by, the fermentation of the must bursts both spanish butts and our own italian tuns. in like manner our ancestors equipped a country house with whatever other things were necessary to agriculture, but now on the contrary it is the effort to make such a house as vast and as elegant as possible, and we vie with those palaces which men like metellus and lucullus have built, to the detriment of the very state itself: in them the effort is to contrive summer dining rooms fronting the cool east, and those designed for use in winter facing the western sun, rather than, as the ancients did, to adjust their windows with regard chiefly to the cellars, since wine in casks keeps best when it is cool, while oil craves warmth. for this reason also it would seem that the best place to put a house is on a hill, if nothing obstructs it." _of the protection of farm boundaries_ _a. fences_ xiv. "now," resumed scrofa, "i will speak of fences, which are constructed for the protection of the farm or for dividing the fields. there are four kinds of such barriers: natural, dead wood, military and masonry. the first is the natural fence of live hedge, consisting of planted shrubs or thorns, and, as it has roots, runs no risk from the flaming torch of the passing traveller who may be inclined to mischief. the second kind is built of the wood of the country, but is not alive. it is made either of palings placed close together and wattled with twigs, or posts placed at some distance apart and pierced to receive the ends of rails, which are generally built two or three to the panel, or else of trunks of trees laid on the ground and joined in line. the third, or military fence, consists of a ditch and a mound: but such a ditch should be so constructed to collect all the rain water, or it should be graded to drain the surface water off the farm. the mound is best when constructed close adjoining the ditch, or else it should be steep so that it will be difficult to scale. it is customary to construct this kind of fence along the public roads or along streams. in the district of crustumeria one can see in many places along the via salaria ditches and mounds constructed as dikes against damage by the river (tiber).[ ] mounds are some times built without ditches and are called walls, as in the country around reate. the fourth and last kind of fence is of built up masonry. there are usually four varieties: those of cut stone, as in the country around tusculum; those of burned brick, as in gaul; those of unburned brick as in the sabine country; those of gravel concrete,[ ] as in spain and about tarentum." _b. monuments_ xv. lacking fences, the more discreet establish the boundaries of their property, or of their sowings, by blazed trees, and so prevent neighbourhood quarrels and lawing about corners. some plant pines around their boundaries, as my wife did on her sabine farm, or cypresses, as i have on my property on vesuvius.[ ] others plant elms, as many have done in the district of crustumeria: indeed, for planting in plains where it flourishes there is no tree which can be set out with such satisfaction or with more profit than the elm, for it supports the vine and so fills many a basket with grapes, yields its leaves to be a most agreeable forage for flocks and herds, and supplies rails for fences and wood for hearth and oven. "and now," said scrofa, "i have expounded my four points upon the physical characteristics of a farm, which were, its conformation, the quality of the soil, its extent and layout, its boundaries and their protection." _of the considerations of neighbourhood_ xvi. it remains to discuss the conditions outside the farm itself, for the character of the neighbourhood is of the utmost importance to agriculture on account of the necessary relations with it. there are four considerations in this respect also, namely: whether the neighbourhood bears a bad reputation; whether it affords a market to which our products can be taken and whence we can bring back what we may require at home; whether there is a road or a river leading to that market, and, if so, whether it is fit for use; and fourth whether there is in our immediate vicinity any thing which may be to our advantage or disadvantage. of these four considerations the most important is whether the neighbourhood bears a bad reputation: for there are many farms which are fit for cultivation but not expedient to undertake on account of the brigandage in the neighbourhood, as in sardinia those farms which adjoin oelium, and in spain those on the borders of lusitania. on the second point those farms are the most profitable which have opportunities in the vicinity for marketing what they raise and buying what they must consume: for there are many farms which must buy corn or wine or what ever else they lack, and not a few which have a surplus of these commodities for sale. so in the suburbs of a city it is fitting to cultivate gardens on a large scale, and to grow violets and roses and many other such things which a city consumes, while it would be folly to undertake this on a distant farm with no facilities for reaching the market. so, again, if there is nearby a town or a village or even the well furnished estate of a rich man where you can buy cheap what you require on the farm, and where you can trade your surplus of such things as props and poles and reeds, your farm will be more profitable than if you had to buy at a distance; nay, more profitable even than if you were able to produce all you require at home: because in this situation you can make annual arrangements with your neighbours to furnish on hire the services of physicians, fullers and blacksmiths to better advantage than if they were your own: for the death of a single such skilled slave wipes out the entire profit of a farm. in carrying on the operation of a vast estate, the rich can afford to provide such servants for every department of the work: for if towns and villages are far distant from the farm, they supply blacksmiths and all other necessary craftsmen and keep them on the place, in order to prevent the hands from leaving the farm and spending working days in going leisurely to and from the shop when they might more profitably be engaged on what should be done in the fields. so saserna's book lays down the rule that "no one may leave the farm except the overseer, the butler, or such a one as the overseer sends on an errand. if any one disobeys this rule, he shall be punished for it, but if he disobeys a second time the overseer shall be punished." this rule may be better stated that no one should leave the farm without the approval of the overseer, and, without the consent of the master, not even the overseer, for more than a day at a time, but in no event more frequently than the business of the farm requires. on the third point, conveniences of transportation make a farm more profitable, and these are whether the roads are in such condition that wagons can use them smoothly, or whether there are rivers nearby which can be navigated. we know that each of these means of transportation is available to many farms. the fourth point, which is concerned with how your neighbour has planted his land, also relates to your profits: because if he has an oak forest near your boundary, you cannot profitably plant olives in that vicinity, for the oak is so perverse in its effect upon the olive that not only will your trees bear less but they will even avoid the oaks and bend away from them until they are prostrate on the ground, as the vine is wont to do when planted near vegetables. like the oak, a grove of thickly planted full grown walnut trees renders sterile all the surrounding land. ° concerning the equipment of a farm xvii. i have spoken of the four points of husbandry which relate to the land to be cultivated and also of those other four points which have to do with the outside relations of that land: now i will speak of those things which pertain to the cultivation of the land. some divide this subject into two parts, men and those assistants to men without which agriculture cannot be carried on. others divide it into three parts, the instruments of agriculture which are articulate, inarticulate and mute: the articulate being the servants,[ ] the inarticulate the draught animals, and the mute being the wagons and other such implements. _of agricultural labourers_ all men carry on agriculture by means of slaves or freemen or both. the freemen who cultivate the land do so either on their own account, as do many poor people with the aid of their own children, or for wages,[ ] as when the heaviest farm operations, like the vintage and the harvest, are accomplished with the aid of hired freemen: in which class may be included those bond servants whom our ancestors called _obaerati_, a class which may still be found in asia, in egypt and in illyricum. with respect to the use of freemen in agriculture, my own opinion is that it is more profitable to use hired hands than one's own slaves in cultivating unhealthy lands, and, even where the country is salubrious, they are to be preferred for the heaviest kind of farm work, such as harvesting and storing grapes and corn. cassius has this to say on the subject: 'select for farm hands those who are fitted for heavy labour, who are not less than twenty-two years of age and have some aptitude for agriculture, which can be ascertained by trying them on several tasks and by enquiring as to what they did for their former master.' slaves should be neither timid nor overconfident. the foreman should have some little education, a good disposition and economical habits, and it is better that they should be some what older than the hands, for then they will be listened to with more respect than if they were boys. it is most important to choose as foremen those who are experienced in agricultural work, for they should not merely give orders but lend a hand at the work, so that the labourers may learn by imitation and may also appreciate that it is greater knowledge and skill which entitles the foreman to command. the foreman should never be authorized to enforce his discipline with the whip if he can accomplish his result with words. avoid having many slaves of the same nation, for this gives rise to domestic rows. the foremen will work more cheerfully if rewards are offered them, and particularly pains must be taken to see that they have some property of their own, and that they marry wives among their fellow servants, who may bear them children, some thing which will make them more steady and attach them to the place.[ ] on account of such relationships families of epirote slaves are esteemed the best and command the highest prices. marks of consideration by the master will go far in giving happiness to your hands: as, for instance, by asking the opinion of those of them who have done good work, as to how the work ought to be done, which has the effect of making them think less that they are looked down upon, and encourages them to believe that they are held in some estimation by the master. those slaves who are most attentive to their work should be treated more liberally either in respect of food or clothes, or in holidays, or by giving them permission to graze some cattle of their own on the place, or some thing of that kind. such liberality tempers the effect of a harsh order or a heavy punishment, and restores the slaves' good will and kindly feeling towards their master. xviii. on the subject of the number of slaves one will require for operating a farm, cato lays down the two measures of the extent of the farm and the kind of farming to be carried on. writing about the cultivation of olives and vines he gives these formulas, viz.: for carrying on an olive farm of two hundred and forty jugera, thirteen slaves are necessary, to-wit: an overseer, a housekeeper, five labourers, three teamsters, an ass driver, a swineherd and a shepherd: for carrying on a vineyard of one hundred jugera, fifteen slaves are necessary, to-wit: an overseer, a housekeeper, ten labourers, a teamster, an ass driver and a swineherd. on the other hand saserna says that one man is enough for every eight jugera,[ ] as a man should cultivate that much land in forty-five days: for while one man can cultivate a jugerum in four days, yet he allows thirteen days extra for the entire eight jugera to provide against the chance of bad weather, the illness or idleness of the labourer and the indulgence of the master.[ ] at this licinius stolo put in. "neither of these writers has given us an adequate rule," he said. "for if cato intended, as he doubtless did, that we should add to or subtract from what he prescribes in proportion as our farm is of greater or less extent than that he describes, he should have excluded the overseer and the housekeeper from his enumeration. if you cultivate less than two hundred and forty jugera of olives you cannot get along with less than one overseer, while if you cultivate twice or more as much land you will not require two or three overseers. it is the number of labourers and teamsters only which must be added to or diminished in proportion to the size of the farm: and this applies only if the land is all of the same character, for if part of it is of a kind which cannot be ploughed, as for example very rocky, or on a steep hillside, there is that much less necessity for teams and teamsters. i pass over the fact that cato's example of a farm of two hundred and forty jugera is neither a fair nor a comparable unit.[ ] the true unit for comparison of farms is a centuria, which contains two hundred jugera, but if one deducts forty jugera, or one-sixth, from cato's two hundred and forty jugera, i do not see how in applying this rule one can deduct also one-sixth of his thirteen slaves; or, even if we leave out the overseer and the housekeeper, how one can deduct one-sixth of eleven slaves. again, cato says that one should have fifteen slaves for one hundred jugera of vineyard, but suppose one had a _centuria_ half in vines and half in olives, then, according to cato's rule, one would require two overseers and two housekeepers, which is absurd. wherefore it is necessary to find another measure than cato's for determining the number of slaves, and i myself think better of saserna's rule, which is that for each jugerum it suffices to provide four days work of one hand. yet, if this was a good rule on saserna's farm in gaul, it might not apply on a mountain farm in liguria. in fine you will best determine what number of slaves and what other equipment you will require if you diligently consider three things, that is to say, what kind of farms are there in your neighbourhood, how large are they, and how many hands are engaged in cultivating them, and you should add to or subtract from that number in proportion as you take up more or less work. for nature gave us two schools of agriculture, which are experience and imitation. the most ancient farmers established many principles by experiment and their descendants for the most part have simply imitated them. we should do both these things: imitate others and on our own account make experiments, following always some principle, not chance:[ ] thus we might work our trees deeper or not so deep as others do to see what the effect would be. it was with such intelligent curiosity that some farmers first cultivated their vines a second and a third time, and deferred grafting the figs from spring to summer." _of draught animals_ xix. in respect of those instruments of agriculture which are called inarticulate, saserna says that two yokes of oxen will be enough for two hundred jugera of arable land, while cato prescribes three yokes for two hundred and forty jugera in olives: thus if saserna is correct, one yoke of oxen is required for every hundred jugera, but if cato is correct a yoke is needed for every eighty jugera. my opinion is that neither of these standards is appropriate for all kinds of land, but each for some kind: for some land is easy and some difficult to plough, and oxen are unable to break up some land except by great effort and often they leave the ploughshare in the furrow broken from the beam: wherefore in this respect we should observe a triple rule on every farm, when we are new to it, namely: find out the practice of the last owner; that of the neighbours, and make some experiments of our own. "cato adds," resumed scrofa, "that on his olive farm there are required three asses to haul out the manure and one to turn the mill, and on his hundred jugera vineyard a yoke of oxen and a pair of asses for the manure, and an ass for the wine press." in respect of cattle kept for all these purposes, which it is customary to feed in the barn yard, it should be added that you should keep as many and only as many as you need for carrying on the work of the farm, so that more easily you can secure diligent care of them from the servants whose chief care is of themselves. in this connection the keeping of sheep is preferable to hogs not only by those who have pastures but also by those who have none, for you should keep them not merely because you have pasture, but for the sake of the manure. watch dogs should be kept in any event for the safety of the farm. xx. the most important consideration with respect to barn yard cattle is that the draft oxen should be fit for their work: when bought unbroken they should not be less than three years old nor more than four, strong, but well matched, lest the stronger wear out the weaker: with large horns, black rather than any other color, broad foreheads, flat noses, deep chests and heavy quarters. old steers which have worked in the plains cannot be trained to service in rough and mountain land; a rule as applicable when reversed. in breaking young steers it is best to begin by fastening a fork shaped yoke on their necks and leaving it there even when they are fed; in a few days they will become used to it and disposed to be docile. then they should be broken to work gradually until they are accustomed to it, as may be done by yoking a young ox with an old one, so that he may learn what is expected of him by imitation. it is best to work them first on level ground without a plough, then with a light plough, so that their first lessons may be easy and in sand and mellow soil. oxen intended for the wagon should be broken in the same way, at first by drawing an empty cart, if possible through the streets of a village or a town, where they may become quickly inured to sudden noises and strange sights. you should not work an ox always on the same side of the team, for an occasional change from right to left relieves the strain of the work. where the land is light, as in campania, they do not plough with heavy steers but with cows or asses, as they can be driven more easily to a light plough. for turning the mill and for carrying about the farm some use asses, some cows and others mules: a choice determined by the supply of provender. for an ass is cheaper to feed than a cow, though a cow is more profitable.[ ] in the choice of the kind of draft animals he is to keep, a farmer should always take into consideration the characteristics of his soil: thus on rocky and difficult land the prime requirement is doubtless strength, but his purpose should be to keep that kind of stock which under his conditions yields the largest measure of profit and still do all the necessary work. _of watch dogs_ xxi. it is more desirable to keep a few dogs and fierce ones than a pack of curs. they should be trained to watch by night and to sleep by day chained in the kennel [so that they may be the more alert when set loose.] it remains to speak elsewhere of unyoked cattle, like the flocks, but if there are meadows on the farm and the owner keeps no live stock, it is the business of a good farmer after he has sold his hay to graze and feed another's cattle on his land. _of farming implements_ xxii. concerning the instruments of agriculture which are called mute, in which are included baskets, wine jars and such things, this may be said: those utensils which can be produced on the farm or made by the servants should never be bought, among which are what ever may be made out of osiers or other wood of the country, such as hampers, fruit baskets, threshing sledges, mauls and mattocks, or what ever is made out of the fibre plants like hemp, flax, rushes, palm leaves and nettles, namely: rope, twine and mats. those implements which cannot be manufactured on the farm should be bought more with reference to their utility than their appearance that they may not diminish your profit by useless expense, a result which may be best secured by buying where the things you need may be found at once of good quality, near at hand and cheap. the requirement of the kind and number of such implements is measured by the extent of the farm because the further your boundaries lie apart the more work there is to do." "in this connection," put in stolo, "given the size of the farm, cato recommends with respect to implements as follows: he who cultivates jugera in olives should have five sets of oil making implements, which he enumerates severally, such as the copper utensils, including kettles, pots, ewers with three spouts, etc.; the implements made out of wood and iron, including three large wagons, six ploughs with their shares, four manure carriers, etc. so of the iron tools, what they are and how many are needed, he speaks in great detail, as eight iron pitch forks, as many hoes and half as many shovels, etc. "in like manner he lays down another formula of implements for a vineyard, viz.: if you cultivate jugera you should have three sets of implements for the wine press and also covered storage vats of a capacity of eight hundred _cullei_, as well as twenty harvesting hampers for grapes and as many for corn, and other things in like proportion. "other writers advise a smaller quantity of such conveniences, but i believe cato prescribed so great a capacity in order that one might not be compelled to sell his wine every year, for old wine sells better than new, and the same quality sells better at one time than another. cato writes further in great detail of the kind and number of iron tools which are required for a vineyard, such as the falx or pruning hook, spades, hoes. so also several of these instruments are of many varieties, as for instance the falx, of which this author says that there must be provided forty of the kind suitable for use in a vineyard, five for cutting rushes, three for pruning trees and ten for cutting briers." so far stolo, when scrofa began again. "the owner should have an inventory of all the farm implements and equipment, with a copy on file both at the house and at the steading, and it should be the duty of the overseer to see that everything is checked against this inventory and is assigned its appropriate keeping place in the barn. what cannot be kept under lock and key should be kept in plain sight, and this is particularly necessary in respect of the utensils which are used only at intervals, as at harvest time, like the grape baskets and such things, for what ever one sees daily is in the least danger from the thief." ° concerning the operation of a farm xxiii. "and now," interposed agrasius, "as we have discussed the two first parts of the four-fold division of agriculture, namely: concerning the farm itself and the implements with which it is worked, proceed with the third part." _of planting field crops_ "as i hold," said scrofa, "that the profit of a farm is that only which comes from sowing the land, there are two considerations which remain for discussion, what one should sow and where it is most expedient to sow it, for some lands are best suited for hay, some for corn, some for wine and some for oil. so also should be considered the forage crops like basil, mixed fodder, vetch, alfalfa, snail clover and lupines. all things should not be sown in rich land, nor should thin land be left unsown, for it is better to sow in light soil those things which do not require much nourishment, such as snail clover and the legumes, except always chick peas (for this also is a legume like the other plants which are not reaped but from which the grain is plucked) because those things which it is the custom to pluck (legere) are called legumes. in rich land should be sown what ever require much nourishment, such as cabbage, spring and winter, wheat and flax. certain plants are cultivated not so much for their immediate yield as with forethought for the coming year, because cut and left lying they improve the land. so, if land is too thin it is the practice to plough in for manure, lupines not yet podded, and likewise the field bean, if it has not yet ripened so that it is fitting to harvest the beans.[ ] "not less should you make provision for cultivating what yields you profit in mere pleasure, like arbours and flower gardens: and those plantations which do not serve either for the support of man or the delight of the senses, but are not the less useful in the economy of the farm. thus suitable places must be set aside for growing willows and reeds and other such things which affect wet places. on the other hand, you should sow field beans as much as possible in your corn land. there are other plants which seek dry places, and still others demand shade, like asparagus, both when wild and cultivated: while violets and garden flowers, which flourish in the sun should be set out in the open. "so other things demand other planting conditions, like the osiers from which you derive your material for making basket ware, for wagon frames, winnowing baskets and grape hampers. elsewhere you might plant and cultivate a forest for cut wood and a spinney for fowling. "so you should reserve ground for planting hemp, flax, rush and spanish broom (spartum) which serve to make shoes for the cattle, thread, cord and rope. other situations are suitable for still other kinds of planting, as, for example, some plant garden truck and some plant other things, in a nursery, or between the rows of a young orchard before the roots of the trees have spread far out, but this should never be done when the trees have grown lest the roots be injured." "in this respect," said stolo, "what cato says about planting is in point, that a field which is rich and in good heart and without shade should be planted in corn, while a low lying field should be set in turnips, radishes, millet and panic grass." _of planting olives_ xxiv. scrofa resumed: "the varieties of olives to plant in rich and warm land are the preserving olive _radius major_, the olive of sallentina, the round _orchis_, the bitter _posea_, the sergian, the colminian, and the waxy _albicera_: which ever of these does best in your locality, plant that most extensively. an olive yard is not worth cultivating unless it looks to the west wind and is exposed to the sun; if the soil is cold and thin there you should plant the licinian olive, for if you set out this variety in a rich and warm soil it will never make a _hostus_ and the tree will exhaust itself in bearing and will become infected with red moss. (_hostus_ is the country name for the yield of oil from a single tree at each _factus_ or pressing: some claim this should amount to _modii_, while others reduce it to _modii_, and even less in proportion to the size and number of their storage vats.) "cato advises you to plant elms and poplars around the farm so as to obtain from them leaves to feed the sheep and cattle as well as a supply of lumber: while this is not necessary on all farms, nor in some for the forage alone, it may be done with advantage as a wind break against the north where the trees will not shut out the sun." stolo added the following advice from the same author: 'if you have a piece of wet ground there plant cuttings of poplars, and also reeds which are set out as follows: having turned the sod with a hoe plant the scions of reed three feet one from the other. wild asparagus (from which you may cultivate garden asparagus) should also be set out in such a place because the same kind of cultivation is suitable for it as for reeds. you should set out greek willows around the reed bed to supply ties for your vines.' _of planting vines_ xxv. "in respect of planting vines," resumed scrofa, "it should be observed that the varieties fitted for the best land and exposure to the sun are the little aminean, the twin _eugeneam_ and the little yellow kind: while on rich or wet land the best varieties are the large aminean, the murgentine, the apician and the lucanian. other vines, and especially the mixed varieties, do well in any kind of land." xxvi. "in all vineyards care is taken that the prop should shelter the vine against the north wind. and if live cypresses are used as props they are planted in alternate rows and are not allowed to grow higher than is necessary for use as a prop. cabbages are never planted near vines because they do each other damage." "i fear," said agrius, turning to fundanius, "that the sacristan may get back before we have reached the fourth head of our subject, that of the vintage, for i am looking forward thirstily to the vintage." "be of good cheer," said scrofa, "and prepare the grape baskets and the ewer." ° concerning the agricultural seasons xxvii. we have two standards of time, the first that of the revolution of the year, because in it the sun completes his circuit, the other the measure of the month, because it includes the waxing and the waning of the moon. _of the solar measure of the year_ first i will speak of the sun, whose recurring journey is divided with reference to the pursuits of agriculture into four seasons of three months each, or more accurately into eight seasons of a month and a half each. the four seasons are spring, summer, autumn and winter. in spring certain crops are sown and the sod fields are broken up,[ ] so that the weeds in them may be destroyed before they have seeded themselves again, and the clods, by drying out in the sun, may become more accessible to the rain and when broken down by its action easier to cultivate. such land should be ploughed not less than twice, but three times is better.[ ] the summer is the season of the grain harvest; the autumn, when the weather is dry, that of the vintage: and it is also the fit time for thinning out the woods, when the trees to be removed should be cut down close to the ground and the roots should be dug up before the first rains to prevent them from stooling. in winter the trees may be pruned, provided this is done at a time when the bark is free from frost and rain and ice. xxviii. spring begins when the sun is in aquarius, summer when it is in taurus, autumn when it is in leo, and winter when it is in scorpio. since the beginning of each of the four seasons is the twenty-third day after the entrance of the sun in these signs respectively, it follows that spring has ninety-one days, summer ninety-four, autumn ninety-one and winter eighty-nine: which, reduced to the dates of our present official calendar,[ ] makes the beginning of spring on the seventh day before the ides of february (february ), of summer on the seventh day before the ides of may (may ), of autumn on the third day before the ides of august (august ), and of winter on the fourth day before the ides of november (november ). a calendar of agricultural operations by a more exact definition of the seasons, the year is divided into eight parts, the first of forty-five days from the date of the rising of the west wind (february ) to the date of the vernal equinox (march ), the second of the ensuing forty-four days to the rising of the pleiades (may ), the third of forty-eight days to the summer solstice (june ), the fourth of twenty-seven days to the rising of the dog star (july ), the fifth of sixty-seven days to the autumn equinox (september ), the sixth of thirty-two days to the setting of the pleiades (october ), the seventh of fifty-seven days to the winter solstice (december ), and the eighth of forty-five days to the beginning of the first.[ ] _ ° february -march _ xxix. these are the things to be done during the first of the seasons so enumerated: all kinds of nurseries should be set out, the vines should be first pruned, then dug, and the roots which have protruded from the ground should be cut out, the meadows should be cleaned, willows planted and the corn hoed. we call that corn land (_seges_) which has been ploughed and sowed as distinguished from plough land (_arva_) which has been ploughed but not yet sowed, while that land which was formerly sowed and lies awaiting a new ploughing is called stubble (_novalis_). when land is ploughed for the first time it is said to be broken up (_proscindere_), and at the second ploughing to be broken down (_offringere_) because at the first ploughing large clods are turned up and at the second ploughing these are reduced. the third cultivation, after the seed has been sown, is called ridging (_lirare_), that is, when by fastening mould boards on the plough, the sown seed is covered up in ridges[ ] and at the same time furrows are cut by means of which the surface water may drain off. some farmers who cultivate small farms, as in apulia, are wont to harrow their land after it is ridged, if perchance any large clods have been left in the seed bed. the hollow channel left by the share of the plough is called the furrow, the raised land between two furrows is called the ridge (_porca_,) because there the seed is as it were laid upon an altar (_porricere_) to secure a crop, for when the entrails are offered to the gods this word _porricere_ is used to describe the oblation. ° _march -may _ xxx. these are the things to be done during the second season between the vernal equinox and the rising of the pleiades. weed the corn land, break up old sod, cut the willows, close the pastures (to the stock) and complete any thing left undone in the preceding season. plant trees before the buds shoot and they begin to blossom, for deciduous trees are not fit to transplant after they put forth leaves. plant and prune your olives. ° _may -june _ xxxi. these are the things to be done during the third season between the rising of the pleiades and the summer solstice. dig the young vines or plough them, and afterwards put the land in good order; that is to say, fine the soil so that no clods shall remain. this is called fining the soil (_occare_) because it breaks down (_occidare_) the clods. thin out the vines, but let it be done by one who knows how, for this operation which is considered of great importance is performed only on vines and not on the orchard. to thin a vine is to select and reserve the one, two and some times even three best new tendrils sprung from the stem of the vine, cutting off all the others, lest the stem may be unable to furnish nourishment for those which have been reserved. so in a nursery it is the custom to cut it back at first so that the vine may grow with a stronger stem and may have greater strength to produce fruitful tendrils: for a stem which grows slender like a rush is sterile through weakness and cannot throw out tendrils. thus it is the custom to call a weak stem a flag, and a strong stem, which bears grapes, a palm. the name _flagellum_, indicating something as unstable as a breeze, is derived from _flatus_, by the change of a letter, just as in the case of the word _flabellum_, which means fly fan. the name _palma_, which is given to those vine shoots which are fruitful in grapes, was it seems, at first, parilema, derived from _parire_ (to produce), whence by a change of letters, such as we find in many instances, it came to be called _palma_. from another part of the vine springs the _capreolus_, which is a little spiral tendril, like a curled hair, by means of which the vine holds on while it creeps towards the place of which it would take possession, from which quality of taking hold of things (_capere_) it is called _capreolus_. all forage crops should be saved at this season; first, basil, then mixed fodder (_farrago_)[ ] and vetch, and last of all the hay. our name for basil is _ocinum_, which is derived from the greek word [greek: ocheos] and signifies that it comes quickly, like the pot herb of the same name. it has this name also because it quickens the action of the bowels of cattle and so is fed to them as a purgative. it is cut green from a bean field before the pods are formed. on the other hand that forage which is cut with a sickle from a field in which barley and vetch and other legumes have been sown in mixture for forage, is called _farrago_ from the instrument (_ferro_) with which it is cut, or perhaps because it was first sown in the stubble of a field of corn (_far_). it is fed to horses and other cattle in the spring to purge and to fatten them. vetch (_vicia_) is so called from its quality of conquering (_vincire_) because this plant, like the vine, has tendrils by means of which it creeps twisting upward on the stalks of lupines or other plants where it clings until it over-tops its host. if you have irrigated meadows, proceed to water them at this season, as soon as you have saved the hay. during droughts water your grafted fruit trees every evening. they probably derive their name, (_poma_), from their appetite for drink (_potus_). ° _june -july _ xxxii. during the fourth season between the summer solstice and the rising of the dog star most farmers make their harvest, because it is claimed that to mature properly corn should be allowed fifteen days to germinate and shoot, fifteen days to bloom and fifteen days to ripen. finish your ploughing: it will be more profitable in proportion as the earth is ploughed warm, when the land is broken up, fine it, that is, work it again in order that all the clods may be reduced, for at the first ploughing large clods are always turned up. this is the time also to sow vetch, lentils, the small variety of chick peas, pulse (_ervilia_) and the other things which we call legumes, but which others, as for example the gauls, call _legarica_, both of which names come from the practice of picking their fruit (_legere_) because they are not cut but gathered. work the old vines a second time and the young ones thrice, especially if there are any clods left. ° _july -september _ xxxiii. during the fifth season between the rising of the dog star and the autumn equinox thresh your straw and rick it, continue the harrowing of your fallow land, prune your fruit trees, and mow your irrigated meadow the second time. ° _september -october _ xxxiv. the authorities advise you to begin to sow at the commencement of the sixth season immediately after the autumn equinox and to keep it up for the following days, but not to attempt to sow any thing after the winter solstice, unless it is absolutely necessary, because seed sown before the winter solstice germinates in seven days, while that sown later hardly ever sprouts for days. in like manner the authorities say that you should not begin your sowing before the equinox, lest continued rains cause the seed to rot in the ground. the best time to plant beans is at the setting of the pleiades, but gather the grapes and make the vintage between the equinox and the setting of the pleiades. immediately afterward begin to prune the vines, to propagate them and plant fruit trees, but in those regions where the frost comes early it is better to postpone these operations until the following spring. ° _october -december ._ xxxv. these are the things to do during the seventh season between the setting of the pleiades and the winter solstice. plant lilies and crocuses and propagate roses, which may be done by making cuttings about three inches in length from a stem already rooted, set these out and later, after they have formed their own roots, transplant them. the cultivation of violets has no place on a farm because they require elevated beds for which the soil is scraped up and these are damaged or even washed away by heavy rains, thus wasting the fertility of the land. at any time of the year between the rising of the west wind and the rising of arcturus (february-september) it is proper to transplant from the seed beds thyme, an herb, which owes its name, _serpyllum_, to its creeping habit (_quod serpit_). this is the season also to dig new ditches, clean the old ones, and to prune the trees in the arbustum and the vines which are married to them, but be careful that you suspend most of your work during the fifteen days before and after the winter solstice: it is fitting, however, to set out some trees during this period, as, for example, elms. ° _december -february _ xxxvi. these are the things to do during the eighth season between the winter solstice and the rising of the west wind. drain the fields, if any water is standing on them, but if they are dry and the land is friable, harrow them. prune the vines and the orchard. when it is not fitting to work in the fields then those things should be done which can be done under cover during the winter twilight. all these rules should be written out and posted in the farmstead and the overseer especially should have them at the tip of his tongue. _of the influence of the moon on agriculture_ xxxvii. the lunar seasons also must be considered. they are divided into two terms, that from the new moon to the full, and that from the full moon to the next moon, or until that day which we call _intermenstruus_, or the last and the first of a moon, whence at athens this day is called [greek: henae kai nea] (the old and the new), though the other greeks call it [greek: triakas] the thirtieth day. some agricultural operations may be undertaken with more advantage during the increase of the moon, others during the decrease,[ ] as, for example, the harvest or cutting of wood." "i observe a practice which i learned from my father," said agrasius, "not only never to shear my sheep, but not even to have my own hair cut on the decrease of the moon, for fear that i might become bald." "what are the quarters of the moon," said agrius, "and what bearing have they on agriculture?" "have you never heard in the country," said tremelius, "the lore about the influence of jana (diana) on the eighth day before her waxing, and again on the eighth day before her waning; how certain things which ought to be done during the increase can be done to better advantage in the second quarter than the first, and that what ever is fitting to do on the wane of the moon can be better done when her light is less? this is all i know about the effect of the four quarters of the moon upon agriculture." another calendar of six agricultural seasons "there is another division of the year," said stolo, "which takes account of both the sun and the moon, namely: into six seasons, because almost all the cultivated fruits of the earth come to maturity and reach the vat or the granary after five successive agricultural operations and are put to use by a sixth, and these are, first, the preparing (_praeparandum_); second, the planting (_serendum_); third, the cultivating of the growing crop (_nutricandum_); fourth, the ingathering (_legendum_); fifth, the storing (_condendum_), and sixth, the consuming (_promendum_)." ° preparing time _of tillage_ in the matter of preparation there are different things to be done for different crops, as, if you wish to make an orchard or an arbustum, you trench and grub and plough; if you plant grain, you plough and harrow; while, if you cultivate trees, you mulch their roots by breaking the earth with a mattock, more or less according to the nature of the tree, for some trees, like the cypress, have a small, and others like the plane tree have a large, root system (for example, that in the lyceum at athens described by theophastus, which, when it was still a young tree, had a spread of roots to the extent of cubits). if you break the ground with a plough and cattle, it is well to work the land a second time before you sow your seed. so, if you are making a meadow the preparation is to close it to the stock, and this is usually done when the pear tree is in bloom: if it is an irrigated meadow the preparation is to turn in the water at the proper time. _of manuring_ xxxviii. as part of this same operation should be considered what places in a field need manure and what kind of manure you can use to the greatest advantage, for the several kinds have different qualities. cassius says that the best manure is that of birds, except swamp and sea birds,[ ] but the best of all is, he claims, the manure of pigeons because it is the hottest and causes the land to ferment. this ought to be sown on the land like seed, not distributed in heaps like the dung of cattle. i myself think the best manure is that from aviaries in which thrushes and blackbirds are kept, because it is not only good for the land but serves as a fattening food for cattle and hogs: for which reason those who farm aviaries pay less rent when the owner stipulates that the manure is to be used on the farm, than those to whom it is a perquisite. cassius advises that the manure next in value to that of doves is human feces, and third that of goats and sheep and asses. the manure of horses is of the least value on corn land, but on meadows it is the best, because, like the manure of other draught animals fed on barley, it brings a heavy stand of grass. the manure pit should be near the barn in order that it may be available with the least labour. if you plant a stake of oak wood in the manure pit it will not harbour serpents. ° planting time _of the four methods of propagating plants_ xxxix. the second operation, namely that of propagating, must be considered in relation to the proper time for sowing each kind of seed, for this concerns the aspect of the field you are to sow and the season fitting for what you are to plant. do we not see some things grow best in the spring, others in summer, some in autumn, and others again in winter? for each plant is sowed or propagated or harvested in season according to its nature: so while most trees are grafted most successfully in spring, rather than the autumn, yet figs may be grafted at the summer solstice, and cherries even in winter. and since there are four methods of propagation of plants, by nature and by the several processes of art, namely: transplanting from one place to another, as is done in layering vines, what is called cuttage or propagating quick sets cut from trees, and graftage, which consists in transferring scions from one tree to another, let us consider at what season and in what locality you should do each of these things. _a. seeding, and here of seed selection_ xl. in the first place, the seed, which is the principle of all germination, is of two kinds, that which is not appreciable by our senses and that which is. seed is hidden from us when it is disseminated in the air, as the physicist anaxagoras holds, or is distributed over the land by the surface water, as theophrastus maintains. the seeds which the farmer can see should be studied with the greatest care. there are some varieties, like that of the cypress, which are so small as to be almost invisible, for those nuts which the cypress bears, that look like little balls covered with bark, are not the seed but contain it. nature gave the principle of germination to seed, the rest of agriculture was left for the experience of man to discover, for in the beginning before the interference of man plants were generated before they were sown, afterwards those seeds which were collected by man from the original plants did not generate until after they had been sown. seed should be examined to ascertain that it is not sterile by age, that it is clean, particularly that it is not adulterated with other varieties of similar appearances: for age has such effect upon seed as in some respects to change its very nature, thus it is said that rape will grow from old cabbage seed, and vice versa.[ ] _b. transplanting_ in respect of transplanting, care should be taken that it is done neither too soon nor too late. the fit time, according to theophrastus, is spring and autumn and midsummer, but the same rule will not apply in all places and to all kinds of plants: for in dry and thin clay soil, which has little natural moisture, the wet spring is the time, but in a rich and fat soil it is safe to transplant in autumn. some limit the practice of transplanting to a period of thirty days. _c. cuttage_ in respect of cuttage, which consists in planting in the ground a live cutting from a tree, it behooves you especially to see that this is done at the proper time, which is before the tree has begun to bud or bloom: that you take off the cutting carefully rather than break it from the parent tree, because the cutting will be more firmly established in proportion as it has a broad footing which can readily put out roots: and that it is planted promptly before the sap dries out of it. in propagating olives select a truncheon of new grown wood about a foot in length and the same size at each end: some call these _clavolae_ and others call them _taleae_. _d. graftage_ in respect of graftage, which consists in transferring growing wood from one tree to another, care must be taken in selecting the tree from which the scion is taken, the tree on which it is grafted, and the time and the manner in which it is done: for the pear cannot be grafted on an oak, even though it may upon the apple. in this operation many men who have great faith in the sayings of the soothsayers give heed to their warning that as many kinds of grafts there may be on a tree so many bolts of lightning will strike it, because a bolt of lightning is generated by each graft (_ictu_).[ ] if you graft a cultivated pear upon a wild pear tree no matter how good it may be, the result will not be as fortunate as if you had grafted on another cultivated pear. having regard for the result, on what ever kind of tree you graft, if it is of exactly the same kind, as, for instance, apple on apple, you should take care that the scion comes from a better tree than that on which it is grafted. _e. a "new" method--inarching_ there is another operation recently suggested,[ ] for propagating one tree from another, when the trees are neighbours. from the tree from which you wish to take a scion a branch is trained to that on which you wish to make the graft and the scion is bound upon an incision in a branch of the stock. the place of contact of both scion and stock is cut away with a knife so that the bark of one joins evenly with the bark of the other at the point of exposure to the weather. care should be taken that the growing top of the scion is pointed straight upwards. the following year when the graft has knitted, the scion may be cut from its parent tree. _of when to use these different methods_ xli. the most important consideration in propagating is, however, the time at which you do it: thus things which formerly were propagated in the spring now are propagated in summer, like the fig, whose wood is not heavy and so craves heat, as a consequence of which quality figs cannot be grown in cold climates. for the same reason water is dangerous to a new fig graft because its soft wood rots easily. for these reasons it is now considered that midsummer is the best season to propagate figs. on the other hand it is the custom to tie a pot of water above a graft of hard wood trees so that it may drip on the graft and prevent the scion from drying up before it has been incorporated with the stock. care must be taken that the bark of the scion is kept intact, and to that end it should be sharpened but so that the pith (_medulla_) is not exposed. to prevent the rain or the heat from injuring it from without, it should be smeared with clay and bound with bark. it is customary to take off the scion of a vine three days before it is to be grafted so that the superfluity of moisture may drain out before the scion is inserted, or, if the graft is already in place, an incision is made in the stock a little below the graft from which the adventitious moisture may drain off: but this is not done with figs and pomegranates, for in all trees of a comparatively dry nature the graft is made immediately. indeed, some trees, like the fig, are best grafted when the scion is in bud. of the four kinds of propagation which i have discussed, that of graftage is preferred in respect of those trees which, like the fig, are slow in developing: for the natural seeds of the fig are those grains seen in the fruit we eat and are so small as scarcely to be capable of sprouting the slenderest shoots. for all seeds which are small and hard are slow in germinating, while those which are soft are more spontaneous, just as girls grow faster than boys. thus by reason of their feminine tenderness the fig, the pomegranate and the vine are quicker to mature than the palm, the cypress and the olive, which are rather dry than humid by nature. wherefore we some times propagate figs in nurseries from cuttings rather than attempt to raise them from seed: unless there is no other way to secure them, as happens when one wishes to send or receive seed across the sea. for this purpose the ripe figs which we eat are strung together and when they have dried out are packed and shipped wheresoever we wish, and thereafter being planted in a nursery they germinate. in this way the chian, the chalcidian, the lydian, the african and other foreign varieties of figs were imported into italy. for the same reason olives are usually propagated in nurseries from truncheons such as i have described, rather than from its seed, which is hard like a nut and slow to germinate. _of seeding alfalfa_ xlii. you should take care not to plant alfalfa[ ] in soil which is either too dry or half wet,[ ] but in good order. the authorities say that if the soil is in proper condition a _modius_ (peck) and a half of alfalfa seed will suffice to sow a _jugerum_ of land. this seed is sowed broad-cast on the land like grass and grain. _of seeding clover and cabbage_ xliii. snail clover (_cytisus_) and cabbage is sowed in beds well prepared and is transplanted from them and set out so that the plants are a foot and a half apart, also cuttings are taken from the stronger plants and set out like those which were raised from seed. _of seeding grain_ xliv. the quantity of seed required for one _jugerum_ is, of beans, four modii, of wheat five modii, of barley six modii, and of spelt ten modii: in some places a little more or a little less; if the soil is rich, more; if it is thin, less. wherefore you should observe how much it is the custom to sow in your locality in order that you may do what the region and the quality of the soil demands, which is the more necessary as the same amount of seed will yield in some localities ten for one, and in others fifteen for one, as in etruria. in italy also, in the region of sybaris it is said that seed yields as much as one hundred for one, and as much is claimed for the soil of syria at gadara, and in africa at byzacium.[ ] it is also important to consider whether you will sow in land which is cropped every year which we call _restibilis_, or in fallow land (_vervactum_), which is [ploughed in the spring and so] allowed an interval of rest." "in olynthia," said agrius, "they are said to crop the land every year but to get a greater yield every third year." "a field ought to lie fallow every other year," said stolo, "or at least be planted with some crop which makes less demand upon the soil." ° cultivating time "tell us," said agrius, "about the third operation which relates to the cultivation and the nourishment of the crops." _of the conditions of plant growth_ "all things which germinate in the soil," replied licinius, "in the soil also are nourished, come to maturity, conceive, are pregnant and in due time bear fruit or ear, so each fruit after its kind yields seed similar to that from which it is sprung. thus if you pluck a blossom or a green pear from a pear tree, or the like from any other tree, nothing will grow again in that place during the same year, because a tree cannot have two periods of fruition in the same season. they produce only as women bear children, when their time has come." xlv. barley usually sprouts in seven days after it has been sowed, and wheat not much later, while the legumes almost always sprout in four or five days, except the bean, which is somewhat later. millet and sesame and the other similar grains sprout in the same time unless some thing in the nature of the soil or the weather retards them. if the locality is cold, those plants which are propagated in the nursery and are tender by nature ought to be protected from the frosts by coverings of leaves or straw, and, if rains follow, care should be taken that water is not permitted to stand any where about them, for ice is a poison to tender roots under ground, as to sprouts above, and prevents them from developing normally. in autumn and winter the roots develop more than does the leaf of the plant because they are nourished by the warmth of the roof of earth, while the leaf above is cut down by the frosty air. we can learn this by observation of the wild vegetation which grows without the intervention of man, for the roots grow more rapidly than that which springs from them, but only so far as they are actuated by the rays of the sun. there are two causes of the growth of roots, the vitality of the root itself by which nature drives it forward, and the quality of the soil which yields a passage more easily in some conditions than in others. _of the mechanical action of plants_ xlvi. in their effect upon plants such natural forces as i have mentioned produce some curious mechanical results. thus it is possible to determine the time of the year from the motion of the leaves of certain trees like the olive, the white poplar and the willow, for when the summer solstice has arrived their leaves turn over. not less curious is the habit of that flower which is called the heliotrope, which in the morning looks upon the rising sun and, following its journey to its setting, never turns away its face. _of the protection of nurseries and meadows_ xlvii. those plants, which, like olives and figs, are grown in the nursery from cuttings and are of a tender nature, should be protected by sheds built of two planks fastened at each end: moreover they should be weeded, and this should be done while the weeds are still young, for after they have become dry they offer resistance, and more readily break off in your hand than yield to your pull. on the other hand the grass which springs in the meadows and gives you hope of forage not only should not be rooted out while it is growing, but should not even be walked upon; hence both the flock and the herd should be excluded from the meadow at this time and even man himself should keep away, for grass disappears under the foot and the track soon becomes a path. _of the structure of a wheat plant_ xlviii. a corn plant consists of a culm bearing at its head a spike, which, when it is not mutilated, has, as in barley and wheat, three parts, namely: the grain, the glume and the beard, not to speak of the sheath which contains the spike while it is being formed. the grain is that solid interior part of the spike, the glume is its hull and the beard those long thin needles which grow out of the glume. thus as the glume is the pontifical robe of the grain, the beard is its apex. the beard and the grain are well known to almost every one, but the glume to very few: indeed i know only one book in which it is mentioned, the translation which ennius made of the verses of evhemerus. the etymology of the word _gluma_ seems to be from _glubere_, to strip, because the grain must be stripped from this hull: and by a like derivation the hull of the fig which we eat is called a glume. the beard we call _arista_ because it is the first part of the corn to dry (_arescere_), while we call the grain _granum_ from the fact that it is produced (_gerere_), for we plant corn to produce grain, not glumes or beards, just as vines are planted to produce grapes, not tendrils. the spike, which, by tradition, the country people call _speca_, seems to get its name from _spes_, hope. for men plant with hope of the harvest. a spike which has no beard is called polled (_muticus_), for, when the spike is first forming, the beard, like the horns of a young animal, is not apparent but lies hid like a sword in its scabbard under a wrapping of foliage which hence is called the sheath. when the spike is mature its taper end above the grain is called the _frit_, while that below, where the spike joins the straw culm, is called the _urruncum_. xlix. when stolo drew breath, no one asked any questions, and so, believing that enough had been said on the subject of the care of the growing crops, he resumed. ° harvest time "i will now speak about the gathering of the crops." _of the hay harvest_ and first of the meadows: when the grass ceases to grow and begins to dry out with the heat, then it should be cut with scythes and, as it begins to cure, turned with forks. when it is cured it should be tied in bales and hauled into the steading; then what hay was left lying should be raked together and stacked, and, finally, when this has all been done, the meadow should be gleaned, that is, gone over with the sickle to save what ever grass escaped the mowing, such as that left standing on tussocks. from this act of cutting (_sectare_) i think that the word _sicilire_ (to glean with a sickle) is derived. _of the wheat harvest_ l. the word harvest (_messis_) is properly used with respect to the ingathering of those crops which are reaped, and from this action (_metere_) its name is derived, but it is mostly used in respect of corn. there are three methods of harvesting corn, one as in umbria, where they cradle the straw close to the earth and shock up the sheaves as they are cut: when a sufficient number of shocks has been made, they go over them again and cut each sheaf between the spikes and the straw, the spikes being thrown into baskets and sent off to the threshing floor, while the straw is left in the field and stacked. a second method of harvesting is practised in picenum, where they have a curved wooden header[ ] on the edge of which is fixed an iron saw: when this instrument engages the spikes of grain it cuts them off, leaving the straw standing in the field, where it is afterwards cut. a third method of harvesting, which is used in the vicinity of rome and in most places, is to cut the straw in the middle and take away the upper part with the left hand (whence the word to reap [_metere_] is, i think, derived from the word _medium_--connoting a cutting in the middle). the lower part of the straw which remains standing is cut later,[ ] while the rest, which goes with the grain, is hauled off in baskets to the threshing floor and there in an airy place is winnowed with a shovel (_pala_) from which perhaps the chaff (_palea_) takes its name. some derive the name of straw (_stramentum_) from the fact that it stands (_stare_), as they think the word _stamen_ is also derived, while others derive it from the fact that it is spread (_strare_), because straw is used as litter for cattle. the grain should be harvested when it is ripe: it is considered that under normal conditions and in an easy field one man should reap almost a jugerum a day and still have time to carry the grain in baskets to the threshing floor. _the threshing floor_ li. the threshing floor should be on high ground so that the wind can blow upon it from all directions. it should be constructed of a size proportioned to your crops, preferably round and with the centre slightly raised so that if it rains the water may not stand on it but drain off as quickly as possible, and there is no shorter distance from the centre to the circumference of a circle than a radius:[ ] it should be paved with well packed earth, best of all of clay, so that it may not crack in the sun and open honeycombs in which the grain can hide itself, and water collect and give vent to the burrows of mice and ants. it is the practice to anoint the threshing floor with amurca,[ ] for that is an enemy of grass and a poison to ants and to moles. some build up and even pave their threshing floor with rock to make it permanent, and some, like the people of bagiennae, even roof it over because in that country storms are prevalent at the threshing season. in a hot country where the threshing floor is uncovered it is desirable to build a shelter near by where the hands can resort in the heat of the day. _threshing and winnowing_ lii. the heaviest and best of the sheaves should be selected on the threshing floor and the spikes laid aside for seed. the grain is threshed from the spikes on the threshing floor, an operation which some perform by means of a sledge drawn by a yoke of oxen: this sledge consisting of a wooden platform, studded underneath with flints or iron spikes, on which either the driver rides or some heavy weight is imposed in order, as it is drawn around, to separate the grain from the chaff: others use for this purpose what is called the punic cart, consisting of a series of axle trees, equipped with toothed rollers, on which some one sits and drives the cattle which draw it, as they do in hither spain and other places. others cause the grain to be trodden out under the hoofs of a herd of driven cattle, which are kept moving by goading them with long poles. when the grain has been threshed it should be tossed from the ground by means of a winnowing basket or a winnowing shovel when the wind is blowing gently, and this is done in such way that the lightest part, which is called the chaff, is blown away beyond the threshing floor, while the heavy part, which is the corn, comes clean into the basket.[ ] _gleaning_ liii. after the harvest is over the grain fields should be gleaned of shattered grain, and the straw left in the field should be gathered and housed, but if there is little to be gained by such work, and the expense is disproportionate, the stubble should be grazed: for in farming it is of the greatest importance that the expense of an operation shall not exceed the return from it. _of the vintage_ liv. in vineyards the vintage should begin when the grape is ripe, but care must be taken with what kind of grapes and in what part of the vineyard you begin: for the early grapes and the mixed variety, which is called black, ripen some time before the others and should be gathered first, like the fruit grown on the side of the arbustum, or of the vineyard, which is exposed to the sun. during the gathering those grapes from which you expect to make wine should be separated from those reserved for the table: the choicer being carried to the wine press and collected in empty jars, while those reserved to eat are collected in separate baskets, transferred to little pots and stored in jars packed with marc, though some are immersed in the pond in jars daubed with pitch and some raised to a shelf in the store room. the stems and the skins of the grapes which have been trodden out should be put under the press so that any must left in them may be added to the supply in the vat. when this marc ceases to yield a flow, it is chopped with a knife and pressed again, and the must expressed by this final operation is hence called _circumcisitum_[ ] and is kept by itself because it smacks of the knife. the marc finally remaining is thrown into jars, to which water is added, thus preparing a drink which is called after-wine or grape juice, and is given to the hands in the winter instead of wine. _of the olive harvest_ lv. and now of the harvest of the olive yard.[ ] you should pick by hand, rather than beat from the tree, all the olives which can be reached from the ground or from a ladder, because this fruit becomes arid when it has been struck and does not yield so much oil: and in picking by hand it is better to do so with the bare fingers rather than with a tool because the texture of a tool not only injures the berry but barks the branches and leaves them exposed to the frost. so it is better to use a reed than a pole to strike down the fruit which cannot be reached by hand, for (as the proverb is) the heavier the blow, the more need there is for a surgeon. he who beats his trees should beware of doing injury, for often an olive when it is struck away brings down with it from the branch a twig, and when this happens the fruit of the following year is lost: and this is not the least reason why it is said that the olive bears fruit, or much fruit, only every other year. like the grape, the olive serves a two-fold function after it is gathered. some are set aside to be eaten and the rest are made into oil, which comforts the body of man not only within but without, for it follows us into the bath and the gymnasium. those berries from which it is proposed to make oil are usually stored in heaps on tables for several days where they may mellow a little. each heap in turn is carried in crates to the oil jars and to the _trapetus_, or pressing mill, which is equipped with both hard and rough stones. if the olives are left too long in the heap they heat and spoil and the oil is rancid, so if you are unable to grind promptly the heaps of olives should be ventilated by moving them. the yield of the olive is of two kinds, oil which is well known and _amurca_, of the use of which many are so ignorant that one can often see it streaming from the mill and wasting upon the ground where it not only discolours the soil, but in places where it collects even makes it sterile: while if applied intelligently it has many uses of the greatest importance to agriculture, as, for instance, by pouring it around the roots of trees, chiefly the olive itself, or wherever it is desired to destroy weeds.[ ] _ ° housing time_ lvi. "up to this moment," cried agrius, "i have been sitting in the barn with the keys in my hands waiting for you, stolo, to bring in the harvest." "lo, i am here at the threshold," replied stolo. "open the gates for me." _of storing hay_ in the first place, it is better to house your hay than to leave it stacked in the field, for thus it makes more palatable provender, as may be proven by putting both kinds before the cattle. _of storing grain_ lvii. but corn should be stored in an elevated granary, exposed to the winds from the east and the north, and where no damp air may reach it from places near at hand. the walls and the floors should be plastered with a stucco of marble dust or at least with a mixture of clay and chaff and amurca, for amurca will serve to keep out mice and weevil and will make the grain solid and heavy. some men even sprinkle their grain with amurca in the proportion of a quadrantal to every thousand modii of grain: others crumble or scatter over it, for the same purpose, other vermifuges like chalcidian or carian chalk or wormwood, and other things of that kind. some farmers have their granaries under ground, like caverns, which they call silos, as in cappadocia and thrace, while in hither spain, in the vicinity of carthage, and at osca pits are used for this purpose, the bottoms of which are covered with straw: and they take care that neither moisture nor air has access to them, except when they are opened for use, a wise precaution because where the air does not move the weevil will not hatch. corn stored in this way is preserved for fifty years, and millet, indeed, for more than a century. on the ether hand again, in hither spain and in certain parts of apulia they build elevated granaries above ground, which the winds keep cool, not only by windows at the sides but also from underneath the floor. _of storing legumes_ lviii. beans and other legumes keep safe a long time in oil jars covered with ashes. cato says the little aminnean grape, as well as the large variety and that called apician, keep very well when buried in earthen pots: or they may be preserved quite as well in boiled new wine, or in fresh after-wine. the varieties which keep best when hung up are the hard grapes and those known as the aminnean scantian. _of storing pome fruits_ lix. the pome fruits, like the preserving sparrow apples, quinces and the varieties of apples known as scantian, and 'little rounds' (_orbiculata_) and those which formerly were called winesap (_mustea_), and now are called honey apples (_melimela_), can all be kept safely in a cold and dry place when laid on straw, and so those who build fruit houses take care to have the windows give upon the north wind and that it may blow through them: but they should not be left without shutters for fear that the fruits should lose their moisture and become shrivelled by the effect of the continuous wind. the vaults, the walls and the pavements of these fruiteries are usually laid in stucco to keep them cool: thus rendering them such pleasant resorts that some men even spread there their dining couches: as well they may, for if the pursuit of luxury impels some of us to turn our dining rooms into picture galleries in order to regale even our eyes with works of art [while we eat], should we not find still greater gratification in contemplating the works of nature displayed in a savory array of beautiful fruits, especially if this was not procured, as has been done, by setting up in your fruitery on the occasion of a party a supply of fruit purchased for the purpose in town? some think best to dispose their apples in the fruitery on concrete tables, others on beds of straw, and some even on flocks of wool. pomegranates are preserved by sticking their twigs in jars of sand, quinces and sparrow apples are strung together and hung up, but the late maturing anician pears are best preserved in boiled must. sorbs and pears also are some times cut up and dried in the sun, though the sorb may be easily preserved intact by keeping them in a dry place: turnips are cut up and preserved in mustard, while walnuts keep well in sand, as i have explained with respect to ripe pomegranates. there is a similar way of ripening pomegranates: put the fruit, while it is still green and attached to its branch, in a pot without a bottom, bury this in the earth and scrape the soil around the protruding branch so as to keep out the air, and when the pomegranates are dug up they will be found to be not only intact but larger than if they had hung all the time on the tree. _of storing olives_ lx. with respect to preserving olives, cato advises that table olives, both the round and the bitter berried kinds, keep best in brine both when they are dry and when they are green, but if they are bruised it is well to put them in mastich oil. round olives will retain their black colour if they are packed in salt for five days, and then, the salt having been brushed away, are exposed for two days in the sun: or they may be preserved in must boiled down to one-third, without the use of salt. _of storing amurca_ lxi. experienced farmers do well to save their amurca as they do their oil and their wine. the method of preserving it is this: immediately after the oil has been pressed out, draw off the amurca and boil it down to one-third and, when it has cooled, store it in vats. there are other methods also, as that in which must is mingled with the amurca. ° consuming time lxii. since no one stores his crops except to bring them out again, it remains to make a few observations upon the sixth and last operation in our round of agriculture. crops which have been stored are brought out either to care for them, to consume them or to sell them, and as all crops are not alike there are different times for caring for them and for consuming them. _of cleaning grain_ lxiii. grain is taken out of store to be cleaned, when the weevil begins to damage it. when this is apparent the grain should be laid out in the sun and bowls of water placed nearby and the weevil will swarm on this water and drown themselves. those who store their grain in the pits which are called silos should not attempt to bring out the grain for some time after the silo has been opened because there is danger of suffocation in entering a recently opened silo. the corn which, during the harvest time, you stored in the ear and which you contemplate using for food, should be brought out during the winter to be crushed and ground in the grist mill. _of condensing amurca_ lxiv. when it flows from the oil mill, amurca is a watery fluid full of dregs. it is the custom to store it in this state in earthen jars and fifteen days later to skim off the scum from the top and transfer this to other jars, an operation which is repeated at regular intervals twelve times during the following six months, taking care that the last skimming is done on the wane of the moon. then it is boiled in a copper kettle over a slow fire until it is reduced two-thirds, when it may be drawn off for use. _of racking wine_ lxv. when the must is stored in the vat to make wine, it should not be racked off while it is fermenting nor until this process has advanced so far that the wine may be considered to be made. if you wish to drink old wine, it is not made until a year is completed; when it is a year old, then draw it out. but if your vineyard contains that kind of grape which turns sour early, you should eat the fruit, or sell it before the succeeding vintage. there are kinds of wine, like that of falernum, which improve the longer you keep them. _of preserved olives_ lxvi. if you attempt to eat white olives immediately after you have put them up and before they are cured your palate will reject them on account of their bitterness (and the same is true of the black olive) unless you dip them in salt to make them palatable. _of nuts, dates and figs_ lxvii. the sooner you use nuts, dates and figs after they have been stored, the more palatable they will be, for by keeping figs lose their flavour, dates rot and nuts dry up. _of stored fruits_ lxviii. fruits which are strung, such as grapes, apples and sorbs show by their appearance when they may be taken down for use, for by their change of colour and shrinking they reveal themselves as destined to the garbage pile unless they are eaten in time. sorbs which have been laid by when they are already dead-ripe should be used promptly, but those which were picked green are slower to decay: for green fruit in the store house must there go through the process of ripening which was denied it on the tree. _of marketing grain_ lxix. the spelt which you wish to have prepared for food should be taken out in the winter to be ground in the mill: but your seed corn should not be taken out until the fields are ready to receive it, a rule which obtains in respect of all kinds of seed. what you have for sale should be taken out at the appropriate time also, for some things which cannot be kept long without spoiling should be taken out and sold promptly, while others which keep should be retained so that you may sell when the price is high, for often commodities which are kept on hand a long time, will, if put on the market at the proper time, not only yield interest for the time you held them but even a double profit. as stolo was speaking, the freedman of the sacristan ran up to us with his eyes full of tears and, begging our pardon for having kept us waiting so long, invited us to come to the funeral on the following day. we all sprang up and cried out together "what? to the funeral? whose funeral? what has happened?" the freedman, weeping, told us that his master had been struck down by a blow with a knife, but who did it he had been unable to discover by reason of the crowd, all that he heard being an exclamation that a mistake had been made. he added that when he had carried his master home and had sent the servants to call a doctor, whom they brought back with them quickly, he trusted that it might seem reasonable to us that he had waited to attend upon the doctor rather than come to notify us at once, and while he had not been able to be of any service to his master, who had given up the ghost in a few minutes, yet he hoped we might approve his conduct. accepting these excuses as amply justified, we descended from the temple bewildered more by the hazard of human life than surprised that such a fate should be possible at rome:[ ] and so we went our several ways. book ii the husbandry of live stock _introduction: the decay of country life_ those great men our ancestors did well to esteem the romans who lived in the country above those who dwelt in town. for as our peasants today contemn the tenant of a villa as an idler in comparison with the busy life of an agricultural labourer, so our ancestors regarded the sedentary occupations of the town as waste of time from their habitual rural pursuits: and in consequence they so divided their time that they might have to devote only one day of the week to their affairs in town, reserving the remaining seven for country life.[ ] so long as they persisted in this practice they accomplished two things both that their farms were fertile through good cultivation and that they themselves enjoyed the best of health: they felt no need of those greek gymnasia which now every one of us must have in his town house, nor did they deem that in order to enjoy a house in the country one must give sounding greek names to all its apartments, such as [greek: prokoiton] (antechamber) [greek: palaistra] (exercising room) [greek: apodutaerion] (dressing room) [greek: peristulon] (arcade) [greek: ornithon] or (poultry house) [greek: peristereon] (dove cote) [greek: oporothaekae] (fruitery) and the like. since now forsooth most of our gentry crowd into town, abandoning the sickle and the plough and prefer to exercise their hands in the theatre and the circus rather than in the corn field and the vineyard, it has resulted that we must fain buy the very corn that fills our bellies and have it hauled in for us, yea, out of africa and sardinia, while we bring home the vintage in ships from the islands of cos and chios! and so it has happened that those lands which the shepherds who founded the city taught their children to cultivate are now, by their later descendants, converted again from corn fields back to pastures, thus in their greed of gain violating even the law, since they fail to distinguish the difference between agriculture and grazing.[ ] for a shepherd is one thing and a ploughman another, nor for all that he may feed his stock on farm land is a drover the same as a teamster: herded cattle, indeed, do nothing to create what grows in the land, but destroy it with their teeth, while the yoked ox on the contrary conduces to the maturity of grain in the corn fields and forage in the fallow land. the practice and the art of the farmer is one thing, i say; that of the shepherd another; the farmer's object being that what ever may be produced by cultivating the land should yield a profit; that of the shepherd to make his profit from the increase of his flock; and yet the relation between them is intimate because it is much more desirable for a farmer to feed his forage on the land than to sell it, and a herd of cattle is the best source of supply of that which is the most available food of growing plants, namely, manure:[ ] so it follows that whoever has a farm ought to practise both arts, that of agriculture and that of grazing cattle, indeed, also that of feeding game, as is done at our country houses, since no little profit may be derived from aviaries and rabbit warrens and fish ponds. and since i have written a book concerning the first of these occupations--that of the husbandry of agriculture--for my wife fundania because of her interest in that subject, now, my dear turranius niger, i write this one on the husbandry of live stock for you, who are so keen a stock fancier that you are a frequent attendant at the cattle market at macri campi, where, by your fortunate speculations, you have found means to make provision for many crying expenses. i could do this on my own authority because i am myself a considerable owner of live stock with my flocks of sheep in apulia and my stud of horses at reate, but i will run through the subject, briefly and summarily rehearsing what i gathered from conversation with certain large stock feeders in epirus at the time when, being in command of the fleet in greece during the war with the pirates, i lay between delos and sicily.[ ] _of the origin, the importance and the economy of live stock husbandry_ i.[ ] when menates had gone, cossinius said to me: "we shall not let you go until you have explained those three points which you began to discuss the other day when we were interrupted." "what three points," said murrius. "are they those concerning feeding cattle, of which you spoke to me yesterday?" "yes," replied cossinius, "they are the considerations of what was the origin, what the importance, and what the economy of the husbandry of live stock. varro here had begun to discourse upon them while we were calling on petus during his illness, when the arrival of the physician interrupted us." "of the three divisions of the [greek: historikon] or interpretation of this subject, which you have mentioned, i will venture," said i, "to speak only of the first two, of the origin and of the importance of this industry. the third division, of how it should be practised, scrofa shall undertake for us, as one, if i may speak greek to a company of half greek shepherds [greek: hos per mou pollon ameinon] (who is better qualified than i am),[ ] for scrofa was the teacher of c. lucilius hirrus, your son-in-law, whose flocks and herds in bruttii have such reputation." "but," interrupted scrofa, "you shall hear what we have to say only on condition that you, who come from epirus and are masters of the art of feeding cattle, shall recompense us and shall give public testimony of what you know on the subject: for none of us knows it all." having thus assumed that my share of the discussion should be the first or theoretical part of the subject (which i did, although i have a stock farm in italy, because, as the proverb is, not every one who owns a lyre is a musician), i began: "doubtless in the very order of nature both man and cattle have existed since the beginning of time, for whether we believe that there was a first cause of the generation of animals, as thales of miletus and zeno of citium maintained, or that there was none as was the opinion of pythagoras of samos and aristotle of stagira, it is, as dicaearchus points out, a necessity of human life to have descended gradually from the earliest time to the present day: thus in the beginning was the primitive age when man lived on whatever the virgin soil produced spontaneously; thence he descended to the second or pastoral age, when, as he had formerly gathered for his use acorns,[ ] strawberries, mulberries and apples by picking them from trees and bushes, so now, to satisfy a like need, he captured in the woods such as he could of the wild beasts of the field, and, having enclosed, began to domesticate them. among these it is considered not without reason that sheep were foremost, both because of their utility and because of their docile nature, for this animal is the gentlest of all and most readily accommodated to the life of man, and supplies him with milk and cheese for food, and skins and wool to clothe his body. "finally, by the third step, man descended from the pastoral age to that of agriculture. in this there have persisted many relics of the two preceding ages, which, long remaining in their original state, are found even in our day: for in many places may yet be seen some kinds of our domestic cattle still in their wild state, such as the large flocks of wild sheep in phrygia, and in samothrace a species of wild goats like those which are called "big horns" (platycerotes) and abound in italy on the mountains of fiscellum and tetrica. every body knows that there are wild swine, unless you maintain that the wild boar is not a true member of the swine family. "there are still many cattle running at large in dardania, medica and thrace, while there are wild asses in phrygia and lycaonia, and wild horses in certain regions of hither spain. "i have now told you of the origin of the industry of feeding cattle. as to its importance, i have this to say: "the most important persons of antiquity were all keepers of live stock, as both the greek and latin languages reveal, as well as the earliest poets, who describe their heroes some as [greek: polyarnos] (rich in lambs), some as [greek: polymaelos] (rich in sheep), and others as [greek: polyboutaes] (rich in herds), and tell of flocks which on account of their value were said to have golden fleeces, like that of atreus in argos which he complained that thyestes stole away from him: or that ram which aeetes sacrificed at colchis, whose fleece was the quest of those princes known as the argonauts: or again like those so called golden apples (_mala_) of the hesperides that hercules brought back from africa into greece, which were, according to the ancient tradition, in fact goats and sheep which the greeks, from the sound of their voice, called [greek: maela]: indeed, much in the same way our country people, using a different letter (since the bleat of a sheep seems to make more of the sound of _bee_ than of _me_) say that sheep "be-alare," whence by the elision of a letter as often happens, is derived the word _belare_ (or _balare_), to bleat. "if cattle had not been held in the highest esteem among the ancients the astrologers would not have called the signs of the zodiac by their names in describing the heavens: and they not only did not hesitate to place them there but many even begin their enumeration of the twelve signs with these animal names, thus giving aries and taurus precedence over apollo and hercules, whose signs, very gods as they are, are subordinated under the name of gemini: nor did they deem that a sixth of these twelve signs was a sufficient proportion for the names of cattle, but they must even add capricornus and make it a quarter. furthermore, in naming the constellations they selected other names of cattle, as the goat, the kid, and the dog. and in like manner have not certain parts both of the sea and of the land taken their names from cattle, as witness the aegean sea, which is called after the greek name for goat [greek: aigeos], and mount taurus in syria after the bull, and mount cantherius in the sabine country after the horse, and the thracian, as well as the cimmerian, bosphorus, after the ox: and again many place names on land like the town in greece known as [greek: hippion argos], or horse breeding argos. yea, italy itself derives its name, according to piso, from _vitula_, our word for heifer. "who can deny that the roman people themselves are sprung from a race of shepherds, for every one knows that faustulus, the foster father of romulus and remus, who brought them up, was a shepherd. is it not proof that they were shepherds that they chose the parilia, or feast of the goddess of the shepherds, in preference to all other days, for the founding of the city; that a penalty even to this day is assessed in terms of cattle or sheep, according to the ancient custom; that our most ancient money, the _as_ of cast copper, always bore the effigy of some domestic animal; that whenever a town was founded the limits of the walls and the gates were laid off with a plough drawn by a bull and a cow yoked together; that when the roman people are purified it is done by driving around them a boar, a ram and a bull, whence the sacrifice is known as the suovetaurilia; that we have many family names among us derived from both the great and small cattle: thus from small cattle porcius, ovinius, caprilius, and from great cattle equitius, taurius, and some of our families have received from cattle cognomens which signify for what they are esteemed, as, for instance, the annius family are called capra, the statilius family are called taurus and the pomponius family are called vitulus, and so many others are derived from cattle. "it remains now to discuss the art of animal husbandry, and on this subject our friend scrofa, to whom this age has awarded the palm for excellence in all branches of farm management, will say what ever is to be said, as he is better qualified than am i." when all eyes had been turned upon him, scrofa began: "doubtless the art of breeding and of feeding cattle consists in getting the maximum profit out of those things from which the very name of money is derived, for our word for money (_pecunia_) comes from _pecus_, cattle, which is the foundation of all wealth. "our enquiry may be divided into nine subjects, or three parts each with three subdivisions, namely: (i) concerning small cattle, of which the three kinds are sheep, goats and swine: ( ) concerning large cattle, which are likewise divided by nature into three species, neat cattle, asses and horses: and ( ) concerning those instruments of animal husbandry which are not kept for profit but for convenience, namely: mules, dogs and shepherds. each of these nine subjects must be considered under nine heads: (a) four relating to the acquisition of cattle, (b) four to the care of them, and (c) one which has to do with all the others. so there are at least eighty-one chapters for discussion of the subject, all indispensable and all of great importance. "under the head (a) of acquisition, it is first of all necessary, to enable you to buy good live stock, that you should know at what age it is best to buy and to keep each different kind. for instance, you may buy neat cattle for less money before they are a year old and after they are ten, because they begin to breed at two or three years and leave off soon after the tenth year, the beginning and the end of the life of all live stock being sterile. the second consideration under this head is a knowledge of the conformation of each kind of cattle and what it should be, for this is of great importance in determining the value of all animals. thus experienced stockmen buy cattle with black horns rather than white, large goats rather than small, and swine with long bodies and short heads. the third consideration under this head is to make sure of the breeding. on this account the asses of arcadia are celebrated in greece, as are those of reate in italy, so that i remember an ass that brought sixty thousand sesterces, and a four-in-hand team at rome that was held at four hundred thousand. the fourth consideration is of the legal precautions to be observed in buying live stock, for in order that title may pass from one to another certain formalities must intervene, since neither a contract nor even the payment of the purchase money suffices in all cases to transfer a title: thus in buying you some times stipulate that the animal is in good health, some times that it comes out of a healthy flock or herd, and some times no stipulation at all is made. "under the head (b) of the care of live stock, the four considerations are what should be done, after you have bought your cattle, in respect of feeding, of breeding, of raising them, and of maintaining their health. in the matter of feeding, which is the first of these considerations, the three things to be observed are where and how much, when, and on what your cattle will graze: thus it suits goats better to graze on rough and mountain land than in fat pastures, while the contrary is true of horses. nor are the same places fit for grazing for all kinds of cattle both in summer and winter: thus flocks of sheep are driven from apulia a long distance into samnium to spend the summer, and are reported to the tax farmer to be registered lest they violate the regulations of the censor.[ ] "in the same way mules are driven in the summer from the prairie of rosea to the high mountains of gurgures. "the rules for feeding each kind of live stock in the barn yard must also be studied, as, for instance, that hay is fed to the horse and the ox, while it will not do for swine which require mast, and that barley and beans should at intervals be fed to some kinds of stock, lupines to draft cattle and alfalfa and clover to milch cows. furthermore, it is desirable to feed the ram and the bull more heavily for thirty days before admitting them to the flock and the herd, the purpose being to increase their strength, while on the other hand the feed of the cows is cut down at that time because it is deemed that they breed most successfully when they are thin. "the next consideration is concerning breeding, which i call the period between conception and birth, for these are the beginning and the end of pregnancy. first of all then we should consider the stinting and the season at which this should be accomplished, for as the season from the rising of the west wind to the vernal equinox (february-march) is considered best for swine, so that from the setting of arcturus to the setting of aquila (may-july) is best for sheep. furthermore, a rule should be made that the male animals are kept apart from the females for some time before they are bred, a period which neatherds and shepherds usually fix at two months. the next consideration is of the rules to be observed while the animal is pregnant, because the periods of gestation differ in the several domestic animals: thus the mare goes twelve months, the cow ten, the ewe and the goat five and the sow four. "in spain is reported a phenomenon of breeding which seems incredible, but is nevertheless true, namely: that on mount tagnus on that part of the coast of lusitania near the town of olisippo, mares are some times impregnated by the wind,[ ] some thing which often happens with respect to chickens, whence their eggs are called [greek: hypaenemios] (conceived by the wind),[ ] but the foals born of such mares never live more than three years. "when lambs are born in due season, or what we call _chordi_ (that is to say those lambs which are born late and have remained beyond their season in the belly of the dam, the name _chordi_, being derived from [greek: chorion] the greek name for the membrane which is called the after birth), care must be taken to clean them and set them gently on their feet and to prevent the dam from crushing them. "on the third consideration with respect to raising young animals, you must consider for how long they should be permitted to suck the dam and when and where, and if the mother has an insufficient supply of milk, how you may put the young one to nurse at the udder of another: in which case they are called _subrumi_, that is to say, under the udder, for i think that rumis is an old word for udder. "lambs are weaned usually at the end of four months, kids in three, pigs in two. weanling pigs, from the fact that they are considered fit to be offered for sacrifice at that age, were formerly called _sacres_ as plautus calls them when he says, "what's the price of sacred pigs?"[ ] in like manner stall fed cattle, which are being fattened for the public sacrifices, are called _opimi_. "the fourth consideration relates to the health of the cattle, a subject as important as it is complex, for a single beast which may be sick or infected and ailing often brings a great calamity on an entire herd. there are two degrees of the healing art, one which requires consultation with a surgeon, as for men: the other which the skilful shepherd can himself practise, and this consists of three parts, namely: the consideration of what are the causes, the symptoms and the treatment which should be followed in relation to each malady. the common causes of disease in cattle are excess of heat or of cold, overwork, or its opposite lack of exercise, or, if when they have been worked, you give them food and drink at once without an interval of rest. the symptoms of fever due to heat or overwork are a gaping mouth, heavy humid breath and a burning body. the cure when such is the malady is this: bathe the animal with water, rub it with a warm mixture of oil and wine, put it on a nourishing diet, blanket it as protection against chills and give it tepid water when it is thirsty.[ ] if this treatment does not suffice, let the blood, chiefly from the head. "so there are different causes and different symptoms of the maladies peculiar to each kind of cattle, and the flock master should have them all written down. "it remains to speak of the ninth head (c), which i mentioned, and this relates to the number of cattle to be kept and so concerns both of the other heads. "for whoever buys cattle must consider the number of herds and how many in each herd he can feed on his land, lest his pastures prove short or more than he need, as so in either case the profit be lost. further more, one should know how many breeding ewes there are in the flock, how many rams, how many lambs of each sex, how many culls to be weeded out. thus, if a ewe has more lambs at a birth than she can nourish, you should do what some shepherds practise--take part of them away from her, which is done to the end that those remaining may prosper." "beware!" put in atticus, "that your generalisations do not lead you astray, and that your insistence on the rule of nine does not contradict your own definition of small and large cattle: for how can all your principles be applied to mules and to shepherds, since those with respect to breeding certainly cannot be followed so far as they are concerned. as to dogs i can see their application. i admit even that men may be included in them, because they have their wives on the farm in winter, and indeed even in their summer pasture camps, a concession which is deemed beneficial because it attaches the shepherds to their flocks, and by begetting children they increase the establishment and with it the profit on your investment." "if scrofa's number cannot be measured with a carpenter's rule," said i, "neither can many other generalisations, as, for instance, when we say that a thousand ships sailed against troy, or that a certain court of rome consists of a hundred judges (_centumviri_). leave out, if you wish, the two chapters relating to breeding in so far as mules are concerned." "but why should we," exclaimed vaccius, "for it is related that on several occasions at rome a mule has had a foal." to back up what vaccius had said, i cited mago and dionysius as writing that when mules and mares conceive they bear in the twelfth month. "if," i added, "it is considered a prodigy in italy when a mule has a foal, it is not necessarily so in all countries. for is it not true that swallows and swans breed in italy, which do not lay in other lands, and don't you know that the syrian date palm, which bears fruit in judea, does not yield in italy?" "if you prefer," said scrofa, "to make out the entire eighty-one chapters without any on the care of mules during the breeding season, there are subjects with which you can fill this double vacancy by adding those two kinds of extraordinary profit which is derived from live stock. one of these is the fleece which men shear or pull from sheep and goats, the other, which is more widely practised, that from milk and cheese: the greek writers indeed actually treat this separately under the title [greek: turopoiia], and have written extensively about it." _of sheep_ ii. "and now, since i have completed my task and the economy of live stock husbandry has been defined, do you, men of epirus, requite us by expounding the subject in detail, so that we may see of what the shepherds of pergamis and maledos are capable." at this challenge, atticus (who then was known as t. pomponius but now as q. caecilius retaining the same cognomen)[ ] began as follows: "i gather that i must make the beginning since you seem to turn your eyes upon me: so i will speak of those cattle which you, varro, have called primitive, for you say that sheep were the first of the wild beasts of the field which were captured and domesticated by man. "in the first place you should buy good sheep, and they are so judged primarily in respect of their age, that they are not what is known as aged nor yet undeveloped lambs, because neither can yield you any profit, the one no longer, the other not yet: but you may deem that age which holds out a promise preferable to that whose only future is death. so far as concerns conformation, a sheep should have a round barrel, wool thick and soft and with long fibre, and, while heavy all over the body, it should be thickest on the back and neck, and yet the belly also should be covered, for unless the belly was covered our ancestors were wont to call a sheep _apica_ and throw it out. they should have short legs,[ ] and, if they are of the italian breed, long tails, or short tails if they come from syria. the most important point to guard is that your flock is headed by a good sire. the quality of a ram can usually be determined from his conformation and from his get. so far as concerns conformation, a ram should have a face well covered with wool, horns twisted and converging on the muzzle, tawny eyes, woolly ears, a deep chest, wide shoulders and loin, a long and large tail. you should see also whether he has a black or a spotted tongue,[ ] for such rams usually get black or spotted lambs. you may judge them by their get, if their lambs are of good quality. in buying sheep we practise the formalities which the law requires, following them more or less strictly in particular cases. some men in fixing a price per head stipulate that two late lambs or two toothless ewes shall be counted as one. in other respects the traditional formula is employed thus: the buyer says to the seller, "do you sell me these sheep for so much?" and the seller answers, "they are your sheep," and states the price. whereupon the buyer stipulates according to the ancient formula: "do you guarantee that these sheep, for which we have bargained, are in such good health as sheep should be; that there is none among them one-eyed, deaf or bare-bellied; that they do not come out of an infected flock and that i will take them by good right and title?" "even when this is done the title to the flock does not pass until they have been counted, but, nevertheless, the purchaser can hold the seller to the bargain if he does not make delivery, even though the purchase money has not passed, and by a like right the seller can hold the buyer if he does not pay up. "i will next speak about those other four subjects which scrofa outlined, namely: the feeding, breeding, raising and physicking of sheep. in the first place, one should see that provision is made for feeding the flock throughout the entire year, as well indoors as out. the stable should be in a suitable location, protected against the wind, looking rather to the east than the south, on cleared and sloping ground so that it can be easily swept out and kept clean, for moisture not only rots the wool of the sheep but their hoofs as well and causes scab. when sheep have stood for several days you should strew the stable with new bedding, so that they may be more comfortable and be kept cleaner, and thus eat with more appetite. you should also contrive stalls separated from the others in which you may segregate the ewes about to yean, as well as any which may be ailing. this precaution is practicable, however, only with sheep fed at the steading, but those who graze their sheep in the mountain pastures and far from cover, carry with them wicker hurdles or nets, and other such conveniences with which they contrive folds for such separation. sheep indeed are grazed far and wide so that often it happens that their winter quarters are many miles from their summer pastures." "i know that to be true," said i, "for my flocks winter in apulia and spend the summer in the mountains above reate: thus the public cattle drifts between these two localities balance the separated pastures, as a yoke balances two baskets."[ ] atticus resumed: "when sheep are fed continually in the same locality distinction must be made in the times of feeding them according to the seasons: thus in summer they are driven out[ ] to pasture at day break because then the dewy grass is more appetizing than at midday, when it is dry. at sunrise they are driven to water, to make them more lickerish on their return. about noon and during the heat of the day they are permitted to lie in the shade of rocks or under broad spreading trees until the fresher evening air invites them to feed again until sunset.[ ] a sheep should always graze with the sun behind it, because its head is very sensitive to heat. at sunset the flock should be given a short rest and then driven again to water, and so brought back to feed again until it is dark, for at that time of day the grass has renewed its pleasant savour. this routine is usually followed from the rising of the pleiades until the autumn equinox. "after the harvest it is of two-fold advantage to turn the flock in on the stubble, as they will fatten on the shattered grain and improve the land for next year's planting by spreading their manure in the trampled straw. "the rules for pasturing sheep in winter and spring differ from the summer rules in this, that at those seasons the flock is not driven to pasture until the hoar frost has evaporated and they feed all day long, one watering about noon being enough. "this is about all there to say on the subject of feeding sheep, so i pass to the consideration of breeding. the rams which you are about to use for breeding should be separated from the flock for two months before the season, and fed heavily by giving them a ration of barley when they come into the stable from the pasture: it will make them stronger for their duty. "the best breeding season is from the setting of arcturus to the setting of aquila, (may-july) because lambs begotten later are apt to be born runts, and weak. as a ewe is pregnant for one hundred and fifty days, this arrangement causes her to drop her lambs at the end of autumn when the temperature is mild and the grass is renewed by the first rains. during the breeding season the flock should drink only the same kind of water, since a change not only makes spotted wool but injures the offspring. when all the ewes have been stinted, the rams should be separated from them again, because it injures ewes to be teased while they are pregnant. ewe lambs should never be bred before they are two years old, as they cannot earlier produce strong lambs, but will themselves degenerate: indeed, it is better to keep them until the third year. to this end some shepherds protect their ewe lambs from the ram by tying baskets made of rushes or something of that kind over their rumps, but it is better to feed them apart from the flock. "i come now to the consideration of how lambs should be raised. "when the ewes begin to yean they are driven into a stable which has stalls set apart for the purpose, where the new born lambs can be placed near a fire to strengthen them, and there the ewes are kept two or there days until the lambs know their dams and are able to feed themselves. thereafter the lambs are still kept up but the ewes are driven out to pasture with the flock, being brought back to them in the evening to be suckled and then once more separated, lest the lambs be trampled by the ewes at night. in the morning before the ewes go out to pasture they are given access to their young again until the lambs are satisfied with milk. after about ten days have elapsed the lambs are picketed out of doors, being tethered with fibre or such other light material, to stakes planted some distance apart so that the little fellows may not injure themselves as they frisk together all day. "if a lamb will not suck, it should be held up to the teat and its lips greased with butter or suet, and so made to smell at the milk. a few days later some soft vetch or tender grass may be given them before they go out to pasture and after they come in. and so they are nursed until they are four months old. "there are some shepherds who do not milk the ewes during the nursing period, but those who do not milk them at all do better, as thus they bear more wool and more lambs. "when the lambs are weaned great attention is necessary to prevent them from wasting away in their longing for the dam: they should be tempted to eat by giving them appetizing food, and care should be taken that they do not suffer from cold or heat. when at last they have forgotten the taste of milk and no longer yearn for the dam, they may be driven out with the flock. "a ram lamb should not be altered until he is five months old, nor yet in very hot or very cold weather. those which you wish to keep for rams should be chosen as far as possible from dams who are in the habit of having twin lambs. "most of these recommendations apply equally to those fine wool sheep which are called _pellitae_, because they are jacketed with skins, as is done at tarentum and in attica, to protect their wool from fouling, for by this precaution the fleece is kept in better plight for dyeing, washing or cleaning. greater diligence is required to keep clean the folds and stables of such sheep than is necessary for the ordinary breeds: so they are paved with stone to the end that no urine may stand anywhere in the stable. "sheep eat whatever is put before them--fig leaves, marc, even straw. bran should be fed to them in moderation, lest they eat either too much or too little of it, in either of which cases it is bad for the digestion, but clover and alfalfa agree with them best and make both fat and milk with the utmost facility. "so far as concerns the health of the flock, there are many things i might add, but, as scrofa has said, the flock master keeps his prescriptions written down in a book and carries with him what he needs in the way of physic. "it remains to speak of the number of sheep in a flock. some make this more, some less, for there is no natural limit. in epirus almost all of us have a rule not to allow more than one hundred short wool sheep or fifty fine wool jacketed sheep to a shepherd." _of goats_ iii. as atticus stopped, cossinius took him up. "come, my dear faustulus," he cried, "you have bleated long enough. take now from me, as from a late born homeric melanthius,[ ] a small offering from my flock of goats, and at the same time learn a lesson in brevity. he who wishes to form a flock of goats should consider in choosing them: first of all that they are of an age capable of breeding, and that for some time to come, for a tiro is more useful for that purpose than a veteran. as to conformation, see to it that they are strong and large, with a smooth body and thick coat: but beware of the short haired goat, for there are both kinds. the she goat should have two excrescences, like little teats, hanging under the muzzle: those which have them are fecund:[ ] the larger the udder the more milk and butter fat she will yield. the qualities of a buck are that his coat should be largely white: his crest and neck short and his gullet long. you will have a better flock if you buy at one time goats which have been accustomed to run together, rather than by putting together a lot of goats picked up here and there. "concerning breeding, i refer to what atticus has said about sheep, with this difference: that while you select a breed of sheep which are slow of foot, because they are of quieter disposition, all goats are as excitable as they are agile. of, this last characteristic cato records in his book _origines_: 'in the mountains of socrate and fiscellus there are wild goats which leap from rock to rock a distance of more than sixty feet.' for as the sheep which we feed are sprung from wild sheep, so the goats which we herd are sprung from wild goats: and it is from them that the island of caprasia, near the coast of italy, gets its name. "as it is recognized that the best breed of goats is one which bears two kids at a birth, breeding bucks are chosen from such a race whenever possible. some fanciers even take the trouble to import bucks from the island of melia, where are bred what are considered the largest and most beautiful specimens of the race. "i hold that the formula for buying sheep cannot altogether apply to goats because no sane man ever guaranteed that goats are without malady, for the fact is that they are forever in a fever. for this reason the usual stipulation has had a few words cut out of it for use in respect of goats, and, as manilius gives it in his treatise on the law of sales, runs as follows: 'do you guarantee that these goats are well today; that they are able to drink, and that i will get good title to them?' "there is a wonderful fact concerning goats which has been stated by certain ingenious shepherds and is even recorded in the book of archelaus, namely, that they do not breathe through their nostrils, like other animals, but through their ears.[ ] "upon scrofa's four considerations which relate to the care of goats i have this to say. the flock is better stabled in the winter if its quarters look toward the southeast, because goats are very sensitive to cold. so also, as for most cattle, the goat stable should be paved with stone or brick that the flock may be less exposed to damp and mud. when the flock passes the night out of doors, a place should be selected having the same exposure and the fold strewn with leaves to protect the flock from fouling themselves. "there is not much difference in the method of handling goats in the pasture from sheep, but goats have this characteristic, that they prefer the mountain woodland pastures to meadows, for they feed eagerly on the brushwood and in cultivated places crop the shrubbery; indeed, their name _caprae_ is derived from _carpere_, to crop. for this reason it is customary to stipulate in farm leases that the tenant shall not graze any goat on the leased land, for their teeth are the enemies of all planted crops: wherefore the astrologers were careful to station them in the heavens outside of the pale of the twelve signs of the zodiac, but there are two kids and a goat not far from taurus. "so far as concerns breeding, it is the custom to separate the bucks from the pastured flock at the end of autumn and confine them apart, as has been said with respect to rams. the nannies which conceive at this time drop their kids in four months, and so in the spring. in what regards rearing the kids, it is enough to say that when they are three months old they are raised and may join the flock. what shall i say of the health of these animals who never have any? yet the flock master should have written down what remedies are used for certain of their maladies and especially for the wounds which often befall them by reason of their constant fighting among themselves and their feeding in thorny places. it remains to speak of number: this is less to the herd in the case of goats than with sheep because of the wantonness and wandering habit of the goat: sheep, on the other hand, are wont to flock together and keep in one place. "for another reason it is the custom in gaul to divide the goats into many flocks rather than concentrate them in large ones, because a pestilence quickly takes possession of a large herd and sweeps it to destruction. about fifty goats is considered to be a large enough flock. "the experience of gaberius, a roman of the equestrian order, will illustrate the reason for this: for he, who had a thousand jugera of land near rome, met one day a certain goatherd leading ten goats to town, and heard him say that he made a denier[ ] a day out of each goat, whereupon gaberius bought a thousand goats, hoping that he might thereby derive from his property an income of a thousand deniers a day: but so it fell out that he lost all his goats after a brief illness. on the other hand, among the sallentini and near casinum they graze their goats in flocks of one hundred. "almost the same difference of opinion exists as to the relative number of bucks to nannies, for some, and i am among them, allow a buck to every ten nannies, but others, like menas, make it fifteen, and some even twenty, like murrius." _of swine_ iv. "and now," concluded cossinius, "which of you italian swine breeders will stand forth and tell us of his herd? surely he should be able to speak with the most authority whose cognomen is scrofa." at this pleasantry, tremelius turned upon cossinius and said: "you seem to be ignorant why i am called scrofa, but, in order that our friends sitting beside you may understand, you should know my family did not always bear this swinish cognomen, nor am i of the race of eumaeus. the first of us to be called scrofa was my grandfather who, when he was quaestor under the praetor licinius nerva, and was left in command of the army in the province of macedonia during the absence of the praetor, it so happened that the enemy thought they had an opportunity to gain a victory and began to attack the camp. my grandfather, in exhorting the soldiers to take up their arms and go out against the enemy, exclaimed that he would soon scatter them as a sow (scrofa) does her pigs, and he was as good as his word. for in that battle he so overwhelmed and discomfited the enemy, that on account of it the praetor nerva was hailed imperator and my grandfather obtained his cognomen and so was called scrofa.[ ] so, while neither my great grandfather nor any of my ancestors of the tremelian family was ever called scrofa, yet as i am not less than the sixth of our family in succession who has attained praetorian rank, it ill becomes me to run away in the face of your challenge, so i will tell you what i know about swine. indeed from my youth i have been devoted to agriculture, so that i am perhaps as well acquainted with that animal as is any of you great stockmen: for who of us cultivates a farm but keeps hogs, and who has not heard his father say that that man is either lazy or a spendthrift who hangs in the meat house a flitch of bacon obtained from the butcher rather than from his own farm. "he who wishes to have a proper herd of swine ought to choose them, in the first place, of the right age, and in the second place, of good conformation: which means large everywhere except in the head and feet and of a solid colour rather than spotted: but the boar should have without fail a thick neck in addition to these other qualities. swine of good breed may be known from their appearance, if both boar and sow are of good conformation; from their get, if they have many pigs at a birth; and from their origin, if you buy them in a place with a reputation for producing fat rather than lean hogs. the usual formula for buying runs thus: 'do you warrant that these hogs are in good health; that i shall take good title to them; that they have committed no tort, and that they do not come out of a diseased herd?' "some add a particular stipulation that they are not affected with cholera. "in the matter of pasture, a marshy place is well fitted for hogs, because they delight not only in water, but in mud, the reason for which appears in the tradition that when a wolf has fallen upon a hog he always drags the carcass into the water because his teeth cannot endure the natural heat of hog flesh. "swine are fed mostly on mast, though also on beans, barley and other kinds of corn, which not only make them fat but give the meat an agreeable relish. in summer they go out to pasture early in the morning and before the heat of the day: at midday they are brought into some shady place, preferably where there is water: in the afternoon, when the heat has abated, they are fed again. in the winter time they do not go out to pasture until the hoar frost has evaporated and the ice has melted. "in the matter of breeding, the boar should be separated from the herd for two months before the season, which should be arranged between the rising of the west wind and the vernal equinox, for thus it will befall that the sows (which are big for four months) will have their litters in summer when forage is plenty. sows should not be bred under a year old, but it is better to wait until the twentieth month so that they may have pigs at two years. they are said to breed regularly for seven years after the first litter. during the breeding season they should be given access to muddy ditches and sloughs, so that they may wallow in the mud, which is the same relaxation to them that a bath is to a man. when all the sows are stinted, the boars should be segregated again. a boar is fit for service at eight months and so continues until his prime, after which his vigor decreases until he is fit only for the butcher to make of his flesh a dainty offering for the people. our name for the hog, _sus_, is called [greek: hus] in greek, but formerly it was [greek: thus], derived from [greek: thuein], meaning to offer as a sacrifice, for it seems that victims were chosen from the race of swine for the earliest sacrifices; evidence of which remains in the tradition that pigs are sacrificed at the initiation to the mysteries of ceres, that when a treaty is ratified peace begins with the slaughter of a pig, and that in solemnizing a marriage the ancient kings and mighty men of etruria caused the bride and the bridegroom to sacrifice a pig at the beginning of the ceremony, a practice which the earliest latins and the greek colonists in italy seem also to have followed: nam et nostrae mulieres, maxime nutrices, naturam qua feminae sunt in virginibus appellant porcum, et graecae [greek: choiron], significantes esse dignum insigni nuptiarum.[ ] "the hog is said to be created by nature for the food of man[ ] and so life and salt perform the same functions for him, as they both preserve his flesh. "the gauls[ ] are reputed to put up not only the largest quantity but the best quality of pork: evidence of its quality being that even now hams, sausage,[ ] bacon and shoulders are imported every year from gaul to rome: while cato writes concerning the amount of pork cured by the gauls: 'in (northern) italy the insubres are wont to put up three or four thousand cuts of pork [the bulk of which can be appreciated from the fact that among that people][ ] the hog some times grows so fat that it is not able to stand on its feet or to walk, so that it is necessary to put it on a cart to move it any where.' atilius the spaniard, who is a truthful man and learned in many things, tells of a hog which was killed in further spain or lusitania from which two chops, sent to the senator l. volumnius, were found to weigh three and twenty pounds, the fat on them being so thick that it measured a foot and three fingers from the skin to the bone." "i can testify to some thing not less extraordinary than what you have related," said i, "for in arcadia i saw with my own eyes a hog which was so fat that not only was it unable to get up but a shrew mouse having eaten a hole in its back had there made its nest and was rearing a family. i have heard that this same thing happened in the country of the veneti." "usually," resumed scrofa, "the fecundity of a sow may be learned from her first litter, for in later litters she does not vary much from the number of pigs in the first. "in the matter of rearing young swine, which we call _porculatio_ it is customary to leave pigs with the sow for two months, and then when they are able to feed themselves to separate them. pigs born in the winter are apt to be runts on account of the cold and because the sow refuses to suckle them, partly by reason of her lack of milk at that season and partly to protect her teats from the teeth of the hungry pigs. "each sow should suckle her pigs in her own stye, because a sow will not drive strange pigs away from her, and it results that if the litters are mingled the breed deteriorates. the year is naturally divided for the sow into two parts, because they breed twice a year, being heavy in pig for four months and suckling for two. the stye should be built about three feet deep and a little more in width and such a height from the ground as will permit a pregnant sow to get out without straining herself, as that might cause her to abort. a good measure of the proper height from the ground is what is necessary to enable the swineherd to keep watch that no little pigs are crushed by the sow, and to clean out the bedding easily. there should be a door to the stye with the lower sill elevated a foot and a palm high so as to prevent the pigs from following the sow when she goes out. as often as the swineherd cleans out the stye he should strew the floor with sand, or some thing else to absorb moisture. "when a sow has had her pigs she should be fed liberally to enable her to make milk: for this the ration is usually two pounds of boiled barley, indeed some feed this both at morning and at night if other feed is lacking. when pigs are taken from their dam they are sometimes called _delici_ or weanlings being then no longer _lactantes_ or sucklings. "pigs are considered to be clean ten days after birth, and for that reason were then called by the ancients sacred, as being then first fit for sacrifice: and so in the _menaechmi_ of plautus, when a character thinking some one in epidamnus to be out of his wits and seeking to purify him, asks: 'how much are sacred pigs here.' "if the farm affords them, pigs should be fed grape husks and stalks. "after they have lost the name of _lactantes_ the shoats are called _nefrendes_ because they are not yet able to break down (_frendere_ that is _frangere_) the bean stalks. _porcus_ is the ancient greek name for them but is fallen into disuse, for the greeks now call them [greek: choiros]. "while she is giving suck the sow should be watered twice a day to promote the flow of milk. a sow should bear as many pigs as she has teats: if she has less it is considered that she is unprofitable, but if more, a prodigy. in this respect there is the ancient tradition that the sow of aeneas bore thirty white (_albos_) pigs at lavinium,[ ] which portended that after thirty years the inhabitants of lavinium would found the town of alba: indeed, vestiges of this sow and of her pigs may still be seen at lavinium where there is a brazen image of them now in the public square, and the true body of the sow is shown by the priests, preserved in pickle. "sows are able at first to suckle eight little pigs, but as they grow larger half of them are usually taken away by experienced swineherds, because the sow cannot supply milk enough for all, and too many pigs fed together do not prosper in any event. a sow should not be driven out of the stye for ten days after having her litter except for water, but after that time she is permitted to graze in a paddock so conveniently near at hand that she may return to the stye frequently to suckle the pigs. when the pigs are large enough they are permitted to follow the sow to pasture, but at home they should be penned apart from the sow and fed by themselves until they overcome their yearning for the dam, which usually happens in ten days. the swineherd should train his shoats to do every thing at the sound of the trumpet. this training is begun by letting the shoats hear the trumpet outside their pens and then at once come out to a place where barley has been scattered broad cast (for thus less is wasted than if the feed is put in heaps and more of the shoats can get to it easily). by such education it is possible to collect pasturing hogs at the sound of a trumpet and prevent their being lost when scattered in the woods.[ ] "boars are altered most successfully when they are a year old, but in no case should this be done when they are less than six months old. after the operation they are no longer called boars, but barrows. "concerning the health of swine, i will say one thing only by way of example: if the sow is not able to supply milk the sucking pigs should be fed, until they are three months old, on roasted wheat (for when it is raw it loosens the bowels) or on barley boiled in water. "as to number: it is considered that ten boars to an hundred sows is enough; some even reduce this proportion. "the practice varies as to the number to a herd, but my judgment is that a hundred is a moderate number: some make it more, say : some feed two herds together, and some do even more than that. a small herd is less expensive than a large one because the swineherd requires less assistance. a swinefeeder should fix the number to be fed as a herd on a principle of utility, not by the number of boars he may happen to have, for that is determined by nature." so far scrofa. _of neat cattle_ v. at this point we were joined by the senator q. lucienus, a man as learned as he is agreeable and intimate with us all. "hail, my fellow citizens of epirus," he exclaimed in greek,[ ] "and you, my dear varro, 'shepherd of men,' for i have already greeted scrofa this morning." while one saluted him, another reproached him for having come so late to our club. "i will see to that, my merry men, for i am about to offer you my back and a scourge: or else, murrius, you who are my friend: come with me while i pay a forfeit to the goddess pales, so that you may bear me witness if our friends here seek to make me do it again." "tell him," said atticus, turning to murrius, "what we have been talking about and what is still on the programme, so that when his turn comes he may be prepared. in the meantime we will take up the second order of domestic live stock and proceed to a discussion of the larger cattle." "in this," said vaccius, "my name would seem to assign me a part, since cows (_vaccae_) are included in that category. wherefore i will tell what i know about neat cattle, so that he who knows less may learn, while he who knows more may correct me when i fall down." "be careful what you do, vaccius," said i, "for the genus _bos_ is of the first importance among cattle, certainly in italy, which is thought to have taken its very name from that family, for, as timaeus records, in ancient greece a bull was called [greek: italos], whence is derived our word _vitula_, and from this italy is supposed to have taken its name because of the number and beauty of its breed, of cattle (_vituli_). others claim that the name comes from that of the famous bull italus which hercules drove out of sicily into this country. "the ox is indeed the companion and fellow labourer of man and the minister of ceres: wherefore the ancients, holding him inviolable, made it a capital offence to kill an ox.[ ] both attica and peloponnesus bear witness of the regard in which the ox was held: for he who first yoked oxen to the plough is celebrated at athens under the name buzyges and at argos under that of homogyros." "i know," replied vaccius, "the importance of the ox and that his very name is used to signify that quality, as in words like [greek: bousukon](big fig), [greek: boupais](a big boy), [greek: boulimos] (a ravenous hunger),[greek: boopis] (large eyed), and again that a certain large grape is called _bumamma_ (cow teat). furthermore, i know it was the form of a bull that jupiter assumed when he wooed europa and bore her across the sea from phoenicia: that it was a bull which protected the children of neptune and melanippe from being crushed in a stable by a herd of cattle: i know too that the bees which give the sweetest honey are generated from the carcase of an ox, whence the greeks call them [greek: bougeneis] (born of an ox), an expression which plautius latinized on the occasion where the praetor hirrius, was accused at rome of having libeled the senate. 'but be of good cheer, i will give you at least as great satisfaction as did he who wrote the bugonia.'[ ] "in the first place there are said to be four ages of cattle, during which they are known by the successive designation of calf (_vitulus_), yearling (_juvencus_), prime (_novellus_) and aged (_vetulus_). these designations are further divided according to sex, as bull-calf and heifer-calf, or bull and cow. "a cow which is sterile is called _taura_: when pregnant, _horda_, from which last name a certain festival is called the _hordicalia (fordicidia_) because cows in calf are sacrificed upon it. "he who wishes to buy a herd of neat cattle should take care first that they are of an age to produce, rather than past breeding; that they are well set up, clean limbed, square bodied, large, with black horns and broad brows, large black eyes, hairy ears, flat cheek bones, snub-nosed, not hump-backed but rather with the back bone slightly roached, wide nostrils, blackish lips, a neck muscular and long with dew laps hanging from it, the barrel large and well ribbed, the shoulders broad and the quarters good, a tail sweeping the heels, the end being frizzled in a heavy brush, the legs rather short and straight with knees projecting a little and well separated, the feet narrow and not inclined to spread in walking, the hoofs not being splayed but consisting of light and even bones, and a hide which is not rough and hard to the touch. the best colour is black, next red, third chestnut and last white: for a white coat indicates weakness, as black indicates endurance: of the other two colours red is more common than chestnut, and both than black and white. in addition you should be particular that the bull is of good breed, which is determined from his conformation and his get, as calves usually reproduce the qualities of their sire. and, finally, it is of importance whence they come. gallic cattle are considered in italy to be the best for work, while on the other hand ligurian cattle are worthless. the foreign cattle of epirus are not only better than all the greek cattle but even than the italian: nevertheless, there are those who choose italian cattle for victims and to serve as offerings to the gods on account of their size: and without doubt they may be preferred for such holy offices, so great is the distinction of their majestic bulk and their candid coats: and they are the more suitable for such use because white cattle are not so common in italy as in thrace at the gulf of melas, where there are few of any other colour. "when cattle are bought already broken for work we stipulate thus: 'do you guarantee these cattle to be in good health and warrant me against liability for any tort committed by them?' "when we buy them unbroken, we say: 'do you guarantee these yearlings to be in good health and to come out of a healthy herd, and warrant me against liability for tort?' "when butchers buy for the shambles they use a fuller formula recommended by manilius: but those who buy for the altar do not usually stipulate for health in their victims. "neat cattle pasture best in groves where there is brushwood and much leafage: and so when they are wintered by the sea they are driven up to pasture in summer in the hills where shrubbery abounds. "these are my breeding rules: "for a month before breeding i cut down the food and drink of the cows because it is deemed that they breed more certainly when they are thin. on the other hand, i fatten the bulls up on grass and straw and hay for two months before the breeding season, and during that time i keep them apart from the cows. like atticus, i have two for seventy cows, one a yearling, the other two years old. when that constellation has risen which the greeks call lyra, and we romans, fides, i turn the bull into the herd again. the bull indicates whether a male or a female calf has been conceived by the side on which he leaves the cow: if male, on the right; if female, on the left. "why this is so," said vaccius, turning to me, "i leave to you who read aristotle." "a cow should not be served under two years, so that she may have her first calf in the third year: it would be better in the fourth. most cows bear for ten years, some even more. the most suitable time for stinting cows is during the forty days following the rising of the dolphin, or even a little later, for thus they will drop their calves at the most temperate season of the year, for a cow goes ten months pregnant. on this subject i have come upon an extraordinary statement in a book that a bull which has just been altered can get a cow with calf. "breeding cows should be pastured where there is abundant grass and plenty of water, and care should be taken to protect them from crowding too close together, and from being struck, or from fighting with one another: moreover, to protect them against being worried in summer by cattle flies and those minute insects which get under their tails, some farmers shut them up during the heat of the day in pens, which should be strewn with leaves or some other bedding on which they can rest comfortably. in summer they are driven to water twice a day, in winter once. against the time when they are due to drop their calves you should arrange to give them access to fresh forage near the stable which they can eat with appetite as they go out, for at that time they are very dainty about their food. a watch out must be kept to prevent their frequenting chilly places, for cold depresses the vitality as much as hunger. "these are the rules for raising neat cattle: the suckling calves should not be suffered to sleep with their dams, for they might crush them, but should be given access to them in the morning and when they return from pasture. when the calves are weaned the dams should be comforted by having green stuff thrown into their stalls for them to eat. the floor of a calf stable, like most others, should be paved with stone to keep their hoofs from rotting. the calves may be pastured with their dams after the autumn equinox. bull calves should not be altered before they are two years old, as they recover with difficulty if the operation is performed sooner, while if it is done later they are apt to be stubborn and useless. "as in the case of other cattle, the herd should be gone over every year and the culls thrown out because they occupy the room of those which might be profitable. if a cow loses her calf she should be given another to nurse, taken from a cow which has not a sufficient supply of milk. calves six months old are fed wheat bran and barley meal and young grass, and care should be taken that they are watered morning and evening. "the rules for taking care of the health of neat cattle are many. i have those which mago has recorded written out and i take care that my herdsman reads them frequently. "i have already said that a yearling and a two-year old bull should be provided for every sixty cows, though some have more or less cows in the herd: thus atticus has two bulls for every seventy cows. some observe one rule as to the number of cattle to the herd, some another. i am among those who think that one hundred is enough, but atticus here, like lucienus, has one hundred and twenty." so far vaccius. _of asses_ vi. while vaccius was speaking, murrius had returned with lucienus and now began: "i propose to tell about asses as well i may, because i am from reate where the best and the largest are found; indeed, i have sold to the arcadians themselves asses of this race and of my own breeding. he who wishes to establish a good herd of asses should see in the first place that he procures jacks and jennies of prime age so that they may breed as long as possible, strong, well made in all parts, of full body and of a good breed, that is to say derived from those localities whence the best specimens come; thus the peloponnesians, so far as possible, buy asses bred in arcadia and we in italy those from the valley of reate. for if the best of those delicious fish we call _muraenae flutae_ are taken on the coast of sicily and the best sturgeons at rhodes, it does not follow that they are of equal delicacy in all seas. "there are two kinds of asses, one wild, which is called the onager, of which there, are many herds in phrygia and lycaonia; the other domestic, as they are all over italy. the onager is fit for use for breeding because he is easily tamed and once domesticated never reverts to a wild life.[ ] "because their young take after their parents, it is important to choose both jack and jenny of good conformation. the conditions of buying and selling asses are much the same as for other kinds of cattle and include stipulations as to their health and against tort. they are best fed on corn and barley bran. the jennies are bred before the solstice so that they may have their foals at the same season in the following year, for their period of gestation is twelve months. the jennies should be relieved from work while in foal for fatigue at that time injures the offspring: but the jacks, on the contrary, are worked all the time, because it is lack of exercise which is bad for them. "in the matter of rearing, practically the same rules apply to asses as to horses. the foals are not separated from their dams for the first year after they are born: during the second year they are permitted to stay with their dams at night, but they should then be tied with a loose halter or some other such restraint. in the third year you begin to break them for whatever service they are intended. "as to the number: they are not usually kept in herds unless it may be for transport service; generally they are used to turn the mill, or for carrying about the farm, or even for the plough where the soil is light, as in campania. herds of asses are some times employed by merchants, like those who transport wine, or oil, or corn, or any other commodity, from brundisium or apulia to the sea, by pack trains." _of horses_ vii. here lucienus took up the discourse. "it is my turn," he said, "to open the barrier and drive in my horses: and they are not only stallions, of which, like atticus, i keep one for every ten breeding mares, but mares as well, such as q. modius equiculus, that gallant soldier, was wont to esteem for use even in war nearly as much as stallions.[ ] "he who wishes to have such studs of stallions and mares as may be seen in peloponnesus and in apulia should first consider age and see that he obtains them not less than three nor more than ten years old. the age of a horse, as also of nearly all animals whose hoofs are not cloven, even horned animals, may be known from the condition of the teeth: thus at thirty months of age a colt is said to lose the milk incisors from the middle of his mouth, two above and two below. at the beginning of the fourth year, in like manner he sheds the same number, being the incisors adjoining those previously lost, and at that age also the teeth called canine begin to appear. at the beginning of the fifth year he loses two more incisors, and at that time the new teeth show hollow. in the sixth year the new teeth begin to fill out their cavities, and by the seventh usually all have been renewed and the permanent mouth is made. what is the age of a horse beyond this point it is not possible to determine accurately, except that when the teeth project and the eye brows are white and have hollows under them, it is considered that a horse is sixteen years old. "a breeding mare should be of medium size, for it is not fitting that they should be either very large or very small, but the quarters and belly should be broad. "a breeding stallion on the other hand should be chosen with a large body, well made and all his parts in harmony. what sort of horse it will turn out to be can be determined from the points of the foal, for it should exhibit a small head: limbs well knit together: a black eye, wide nostrils: ears well pricked: a mane which is thick, dark and curly, of fine hairs and falling on the right side of the neck: a breast broad and well developed: strong shoulders: a moderate belly: the loins flat and rising to the quarters: long shoulder blades: a back bone well doubled [with ridges of meat] but if these are not prominent in no event should the bone itself stand out: a tail large and curly: legs straight and even and rather long: knees round and small and not turned in as you look at them: hard hoofs: veins visible all over the body (for a horse of this kind is fit for treatment when he is sick). "the breed is of the greatest importance, for there are many. in this respect the celebrated breeds take the names of the countries from which they come: thus in greece we have the thessalian breed: in italy the apulian from apulia, and the rosean from rosea.[ ] "it is a sign that they will make good horses if, when at pasture with the herd, the colts contend with one another for superiority in running or in any thing else, or if when a stream is to be crossed they leap it at the head of the herd and do not look back for the others. "horses are bought in almost the same manner as cattle or asses, because they change ownership by similar formalities, all of which are set forth in the book of manilius. "horses should be pastured whenever possible in meadows of grass, and in the stable and stall they are fed on hay. "when a mare has foaled she should be fed on barley and watered twice a day. "in the matter of breeding, the period of service is from the vernal equinox to the solstice so that the foal may come at a suitable season, for they are supposed to be born on the tenth day of the twelfth month after the mare was stinted. those which are born after the time are usually defective and unfit for use. when the season has come the stallion should be admitted to the mare twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, under the direction of the _origa_ (so the studgroom is called), for a mare held in hand is stinted more quickly, nor does the stallion waste his seed by excess of ardor. when a mare is stinted she makes it known by defending herself. if the stallion shows an aversion for a mare, her parts should be smeared when she is in heat with the marrow of a shrimp macerated in water to the consistency of honey, and the stallion allowed to smell of it. "although it may seem incredible, what i am about to relate is true and should be remembered. once upon a time a studgroom tried to make a stallion cover his mother, but could never get him to come near her: so one day the groom muffled the stallion's head and put him to his mother successfully: but when the bandage was removed and the stallion saw what he had done, he fell upon the groom and killed him with his teeth. "when the mares have been stinted it must be seen to that they are worked only in moderation and are kept out of cold places, because cold is of the greatest prejudice to a mare in that condition. for this reason the floor of their stable should be kept dry and the windows and doors should be kept shut: and furthermore the mares should be separated one from another by long poles fastened back from the manger so that they may not fight. "mares in foal should neither be over-fed nor starved. "there are some who breed their mares only every other year and claim they get better colts, on the same principle that as corn land is exhausted by continuous cropping, so is a mare which is bred every year.[ ] "the foal should be led out to pasture with its dam on the tenth day after it is born, so to avoid burning its tender hoofs by standing on manure in the stable. when five months old a colt should be fed, whenever he is brought into the stable, a ration of barley meal whole with its bran, or any other product of the earth which he will eat with appetite. when they are a year old they may be fed barley in the grain mixed with bran, and this should be kept up as long as they suckle, for they should not be weaned until they have completed the second year. from time to time while they are still with their dams they should be handled so that they may not be wild after they are separated. to the same end it is well to hang bridles in their stalls so that while they are still colts they may become accustomed to the sight of them and the sound of their clanking as well. when a colt has learned to come to an outstretched hand you should put a boy on his back, for the first two or three times stretched out flat on his belly, but afterwards sitting upright. the time to do this is when the colt is three years old, for then he has his full growth and is beginning to develop muscles. "there are those who say that a colt may be broken at eighteen months, but it is better to wait until the third year. then is the time too to begin to feed him that mixture of grain in the milk which we call _farrago_, for this is very good for a horse as a purgative. it should be fed for ten days to the exclusion of all other food. on the eleventh day and until the fourteenth you should feed barley, adding a little to the ration every day for four days and then maintaining that quantity for the ten days succeeding: during this period the horse should be exercised moderately, and when in a sweat rubbed down with oil. if it is cold a fire should be lit in the stable. "as some horses are suitable for military service, some for the cart, some for breeding, some for racing, and others for the carriage, it follows that the methods of handling and looking after them all are not the same. thus the soldier chooses some and rears and trains them for his particular use, and so in turn does the charioteer and the circus rider. nor does he who wishes a cart horse choose the same conformation or give the same training as to a horse intended for the saddle or the carriage: for as the one desires mettle for military service, the other prefers a gentle disposition for use on the road. it was to provide for this difference of use that the practice of castrating horses was inaugurated, for horses that are altered are of a quieter disposition: they are called geldings, as hogs in the same state are called barrows and chickens are called capons. "as to medicine for the horse, there are so many symptoms of their maladies and so many cures that the studgroom must have them written down: indeed, on this account in greece the veterinarians are mostly called [greek: hippiatroi] (horse leeches)." _of mules_ viii. while we were talking a freedman came from menas and said that the sacrificial cakes were cooked and every thing ready for the sacrifice--that whoever wishes to take part had only to come. "but i will not suffer you to go," i protested, "until you have fulfilled your promise and given me the third chapter of our subject, that concerning mules and dogs and shepherds." "what is to be said about mules,"[ ] replied murrius, "may be said briefly. mules and hinnies are mongrels and grafts as it were on a stock of a different species, for a mule is got by an ass out of a mare, and a hinny by a horse out of a she ass. both have their uses, but neither is fit to reproduce its kind. for this purpose it is the custom to put a newborn ass colt to nurse to a mare because mares' milk will make it more vigorous: it is considered better than asses' milk, or indeed than any other kind of milk. later they are fed on straw, hay and barley. the foster mother must be given good attention also, as she must bring up her own colt in addition to her service as a wet nurse. an ass raised in this way is fit to get mules when he is three years old, nor will he contemn the mares because he has become used to their kind. if you use him for breeding earlier he will quickly exhaust himself and his get will be poor. "if you have no ass foal to have brought up by a mare and you wish a breeding jackass, you should buy the largest and handsomest you can find; the best breed, as the ancients said, was that of arcadia, but nowadays we who know maintain that the breed of reate is best: where breeding jacks have brought thirty and even forty thousand sesterces ($ , -$ , ). "jacks are bought like horses, with the same stipulations and guarantees. we feed them principally on hay and barley, increasing the ration at the breeding season so as to infuse strength into their get by means of their food. the breeding season is the same as for horses, and, like them again, we have the jack handled by a studgroom. "when a mare has dropped a mule colt or filly we bring it up with care. those which are born in marshy and swampy country have soft hoofs, but if they are driven up into the mountain in summer, as we do at reate, their hoofs become hardened. "in buying mules you must consider age and conformation, the one that they may be able to work under a load, the other that the eye may have pleasure in looking at them: for a team of two good mules is capable of drawing any kind of a wagon on the road. "you, my friend from reate," murrius added, turning to me, "can vouch for what i have said, as you yourself have herds of breeding mares at home and have bred and sold many mules. "the get of a horse out of a she ass is called a hinny: he is smaller in the body and usually redder in colour than a mule, and has ears like a horse, but mane and tail like an ass. hinnies are carried by the dam twelve months, like a horse, and, like the horse too, they are raised and fed, and their age can be told by their teeth." _of herd dogs_ ix. "it remains," said atticus, "to speak of the last of the quadrupeds on our programme, that is to say, of dogs, which are of the greatest importance to us who feed the woolly flock, for the dog is the guardian of such cattle as lack the means to defend themselves, chiefly sheep and goats. for the wolf is wont to lie in wait for them and we oppose our dogs to him as defenders. hogs can defend themselves, as well pigs, boars, barrows and sows, for they are near akin to the wild boar, which we know often kills dogs in the woods, with their tusks. what shall i say of large cattle? i know of an instance of a herd of mules pastured together, which, when they were attacked by a wolf, joined in forming a circle about him and killed him with blows of their hoofs: and again, bulls often stand together, rump to rump, and drive off wolves with their horns. but of dogs there are two kinds, hunting dogs, which are used against wild beasts and game, and herd dogs, which are used by the shepherd. i will discuss the latter methodically, following scrofa's nine heads. "of the first importance is the choice of dogs of suitable age, for puppies and old dogs cannot protect themselves, much less the sheep, and so often become themselves the prey of wild beasts. "in appearance they should be handsome, of good size, with black or tawny eyes: a symmetrical nose: lips blackish or ruddy, neither drawn back above nor hanging underneath: a short muzzle, showing two teeth on either side, those of the lower jaw projecting a little, those above rather straight and not so apparent, and the other teeth, which are covered by the lips, very sharp: a large head, ears large and turned over: a thick crest and neck: long joints: straight legs, rather bowed than knock-kneed: feet large and well developed, so that in walking they may spread out: toes slightly splayed: claws hard and curved: the pad of the foot neither horny nor hard but as it were puffed and soft: short-coupled: a back bone neither projecting nor roached: a heavy tail: a deep bark, and wide gaping chops. the colour to be preferred is white because it gives the dog a lion-like aspect in the dark.[ ] finally, the females should have large teats equally distributed. care should be taken that they are of good breed, such as those called for their place of origin, laconian, epirot and sallentian. be careful not to buy a sheep dog from a professional hunter or a butcher, because the one is apt to be lazy about following the flock, while the other is more likely to make after a hare or a deer which it might see, than to tend the sheep. "it is better either to buy, from a shepherd, dogs which are accustomed to follow sheep or dogs which are without any training at all. while a dog does readily whatever he has been trained to do, his affection is apt to be stronger for the shepherds than for the flock.[ ] "once p. aufidius pontianus of amiternum bought certain flocks of sheep in further umbria, the dogs which herded them being included in the bargain, but not the shepherds, who were, however, to make the delivery at the saltus of metapontum and the market of heraclea: when these shepherds had returned home, their dogs, longing for their masters, a few days later of their own will came back to the shepherds in umbria, having made several days journey without other food than what the fields afforded. nor had any one of those shepherds done what saserna advises in his books on agriculture, 'whoever wishes to be followed by a dog should throw him a cooked frog.'[ ] "it is of importance that all your dogs should be of the same breed, for when they are related they are of the greatest aid to one another. "now as to scrofa's fourth consideration, that concerning the manner of buying: this is accomplished by delivery by the former owner to the purchaser. "the same stipulations as to health and against liability for tort are made as in the case of cattle, leaving out whatever is inapplicable to dogs. some make a price on dogs at so much per head, others stipulate that the puppies shall go with the mother, others that two puppies shall count as one dog--as two lambs usually count as a sheep. usually it is provided that all the dogs which have been accustomed to be together should be included in the bargain. "the food appropriate for dogs is more like that of man than of sheep, for they are fed on scraps and bones rather than on grass and leaves. care must be taken that they are fed regularly, for, if food is not provided, hunger will lead them in search of it away from the flock, unless, indeed, they shall find it in one another, thereby contradicting the old proverb,[ ] or perchance they may realize the fable of actaeon and turn their teeth against their master himself. you would do well to feed them on barley bread soaked in milk, because when they have become accustomed to that diet they will not readily desert the flock. they should never be suffered to taste the flesh of a carrion sheep lest the relish should tempt them to indulge in such food again. they may be fed also broth made out of bones, or bones themselves when broken up, for that makes their teeth stronger and the mouth wider: and thereby the jaws are stretched, while the zest of the marrow makes the dog fiercer. they should be accustomed to take their food in the day time where the flock is feeding and at night where the flock is folded. "in the matter of breeding it is the practice to line the bitch at the beginning of spring, for then she is said to be in heat, that is to say, to show a readiness for breeding. when they are lined at this season they pup about the solstice, for they go three months. while they are in pup they should be fed barley bread rather than wheat bread, for it is more nourishing and makes more milk. "in the matter of bringing up the puppies after birth: if there are many in the litter you should choose those you wish to keep and destroy the others: the fewer you keep the better they will be nourished, for then their portion of the mother's milk will be larger. "chaff or some thing else of that sort should be spread under them, because the better they are bedded the more easily they are brought up. puppies open their eyes twenty days after birth.[ ] during the first two months they are not separated from their mother, but wean themselves gradually. a number of puppies should be kenneled together, where they may be encouraged to fight, which will make them fiercer, but they should never be suffered to tire themselves since weariness develops cowardice. they should also be accustomed to be tied, at first with a light leash, and if they attempt to gnaw it they should be punished by whipping, so that they may not get the habit. on rainy days their kennels should be bedded with leaves or grass, for two reasons: that they may not soil themselves or suffer from cold. some castrate their puppies thinking them less likely to leave the flock, but others do not, thinking that the operation makes them less fierce. some rub their ears and between their toes with a suffusion of bitter almonds steeped in water because flies, ticks and fleas usually develop sores in those parts, unless it is your practice to so anoint them. to protect them from wounds from wild beasts we place collars on them, of the kind which we call _melium_, which is a girth around the neck made from strong leather studded with nails and lined with soft leather to protect the neck from being chafed by the hard iron heads of the nails: for if a wolf or other wild beast is once wounded by these nails all the other dogs are safe from his attack, even if they have no collars. "the number of dogs to be kept is determined by the size of the flock, usually one dog for every shepherd is considered enough, but the practice varies. thus there should be more in localities where wild beasts are plentiful, and those increase the number also who are wont to drive their flocks over the long forest drift ways to their summer or their winter feeding grounds. "but two dogs are enough for a flock kept on a farm: in which case they should be male and female, for they are more attached and, by emulation, fiercer, and if one is sick for a protracted time the flock will not be without a dog." here atticus looked around as if to enquire whether he had omitted any thing. "this is the silence," said i, "which summons another player on the boards." _of shepherds_ x. "the rest of this act," i added, "relates to how many and what kind of shepherds are necessary." cossinius took the cue. "for large cattle," he said, "men of full age are required; for small cattle boys will do: but in either case those who drive their flocks and herds on the drift ways must be stouter than those who remain on the farm and return to the steading every day. "so in the wood pastures _(saltus)_ it behooves one to have young men and usually armed men, while on the farm boys or even girls may tend the flock. those who use the distant feeding grounds should require their shepherds to feed their flocks together all day, but at night to remain each one with his own flock. they should all be under the supervision of one flock master, who should be older and more experienced than the others, because they will obey more cheerfully one who surpasses them in age and knowledge; and yet the flock master should be of such years that he may not be prevented by age from hard work: for neither old men nor boys can endure the steeps of the drift ways, nor the ardours and roughness of the mountains, which must be suffered by those who follow flocks, especially cattle and goats, to whom the rocks and the forests are pleasant grazing places. "so far as concerns the conformation of the men chosen for these occupations, they should be strong and swift and active, with ready limbs not only able to follow the cattle but to defend them from the incursions of wild beasts and of brigands: men who can load the packs on the sumpter beasts: can run and throw a javelin.[ ] "every nation is not fit for tending cattle, especially the basculi and the turduli [of spain]. the gauls are the best of all, particularly for draught cattle. "in the matter of the purchase of shepherds, there are six usual methods of obtaining lawful title to a slave: (i) by inheritance, ( ) by due form of mancipation, which is delivery of possession by one who has the legal right, ( ) by the legal process called surrender in court (_cessio in jure_) from one who has that right, the transfer taking place where it should, ( ) by prescriptive use (_usucapion_), ( ) by purchase of a prisoner of war "under the crown" ( ) by auction at the distribution of some one's property by order of court under the process known as _bonorum emptio_.[ ] "the _peculium_ or personal property of the slave usually passes with him to a new master unless it is specially excepted in the terms of sale: there is also the usual guaranty as to the health of the slave and that he has committed no theft or tort for which his master is legally responsible, and, unless the purchase is by mancipation, the bargain is bound by an obligation of double indemnity, or in the amount of the purchase price alone, if that is the agreement. "the shepherds should take their meals separately during the day, each one with his flock, but in the evening they should meet at a common supper under the supervision of the flock master.[ ] it should be the duty of the flock master to see that every thing is provided which may be required by the flock or by the shepherds, chiefly the victuals for the men and medicine for the flock: for which the master should provide beasts of burden, either horses or some thing else which can carry a load on its back. "as to what relates to the breeding of shepherds, it is easy, so far as concerns those who remain on the farm all the time because they can have a fellow servant to wife at the farmstead, for venus pastoralis demands no more. some hold that it is expedient also to furnish women[ ] for those who pasture the flocks in the saltus and the forests and have no residence but find their shelter from the rain under improvised sheds: that such women following the flocks and preparing the food for the shepherds keep the men better satisfied and more devoted to their duty. but they must needs be strong though not deformed, and not less capable of work then the men themselves, as they are in many localities and as may be seen throughout illyricum, where the women feed the flocks or carry in wood for the fire and cook the food, or keep watch over the household utensils in their cottages. "as to the method of raising their children, it suffices to say that the shepherd women are usually both mothers and nurses at the same time." at this cossinius looked at me and said: "i have heard you relate that, when you were in liburnia, you saw women big with child bringing in fire wood and at the same time carrying a nursing child, or even two of them, thus putting to shame those slender reeds, the women of our class, who are wont to lie abed under mosquito bars for days at a time when they are pregnant." "that is true," i replied, "and the contrast is even more marked in illyricum, where it often happens that a pregnant woman whose time has come will leave her work for a little while and return with a new born child which you would think she had found rather than borne.[ ] "not only this, the custom of that country permits the girls as much as twenty years of age, whom they call virgins, to go about unprotected and to give themselves to whomever they wish and to have children before marriage." "as to what pertains to the health of man and beast," resumed cossinius, "and the leech craft which may be practised without the aid of a physician, the flock master should have the rules written down: indeed, the flock master must have some education, otherwise he can never keep his flock accounts properly.[ ] "as to the number of shepherds, some make a narrow, some a broad, allowance. i have one shepherd for every eighty long wool sheep: atticus here has one for every hundred. one can reduce the number of men required in respect of large flocks (like those containing a thousand head or more) much more readily than in respect of comparatively small flocks, like atticus' and mine, for i have only seven hundred head of sheep, and you, atticus, have, i believe, eight hundred, though we are alike in providing a ram for every ten ewes. two men are required to care for a herd of fifty mares: and each of them should have a mare broken for riding to serve as a mount in those localities where it is the custom to drive the mares to pasture, as often happens in apulia and lucania." _of milk and cheese and wool_ xi. "and now that we have fulfilled our promise, let us go," said cossinius. "not until you have added some thing," i cried, "concerning that supplemental profit from cattle which was promised; namely, of milk and cheese and the shearing of wool." so cossinius resumed: "ewes' milk, and, after it, goats' milk, is the most nourishing of all liquids which we drink. as a purgative, mares' milk ranks first, and, after it, in order, asses' milk, cows' milk and goats' milk, but the quality depends upon what has been fed to the cattle, upon the condition of the cattle, and upon when it is milked. "so far as concerns the food of the cattle, milk is nourishing which is made from barley and stover and other such kinds of dry and hard cattle food. "so far as concerns its purgative qualities, milk is good when made from green stuff, especially if it is grass containing plants which, taken by themselves, have a purgative effect upon the human body. "so far as concerns the condition of the cattle, that milk is best which comes from cattle in vigorous health and from those still young. "so far as concerns the time of milking, that milk is best which comes neither from a 'stripper' nor from a recently fresh dam. "the cheese made of cows' milk is the most agreeable to the taste but the most difficult to digest: next, that of ewes' milk, while the least agreeable in taste, but the most easily digested, is that of goats' milk. "there is also a distinction between cheese when it is soft and new made and when it is dry and old, for when it is soft it is more nourishing and digestible, but the opposite is true of old and dry cheese. "the custom is to make cheese from the rising of the pleiades in spring to their rising in summer, and yet the rule is not invariable, because of difference in locality and the supply of forage. "the practice is to add a quantity of rennet, equal to the size of an olive, to two _congii_ of milk to make it curdle. the rennet taken from the stomachs of the hare and the kid is better than that from lambs, but some use as a ferment the milk of the fig tree mixed with vinegar, and some times sprinkled with other vegetable products. in parts of greece this is called [greek: opos], elsewhere [greek: dakruos]." "i am prepared to believe," i said, "that the fig tree standing beside the chapel of the goddess rumina[ ] was planted by shepherds for the purpose you mention, for there is it the practice to make libations of milk rather than of wine or to sacrifice suckling pigs. for men used to use the word _rumis_ or _ruma_ where we now say _mamma_, signifying a teat: hence even now suckling lambs are called _subrumi_ from the teat they suck, just as we call suckling pigs _lactantes_ from _lac_, the milk that comes from the teat." cossinius resumed: "if you sprinkle your cheese with salt it is better to use the mineral than the marine kind. "concerning the shearing of sheep, the first thing to be looked into before you begin is that the sheep are not suffering from scab or sores, as it is better to wait, if necessary, until they are cured before shearing. "the time to shear is between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice, when the sheep begin to sweat (it is the sweat which gives new clipped wool its name _sucida_). as soon as the sheep are sheared they are smeared with a mixture[ ] of wine and oil, some add white wax and hogs' grease. if they are sheep which are kept blanketed, the inside of the blanket should be anointed with this mixture before it is put on again. "if the sheep has suffered any wound during the shearing, it should be treated with liquid tar. "long wool sheep are usually sheared about the time of the barley harvest: in some places before the hay harvest. "some men shear their sheep twice a year, as in hither spain, investing double work because they think they get more wool, just as some men mow their meadows twice a year. careful shepherds are wont to shear on a mat so as not to lose any of the wool. a clear day should be chosen for the shearing and it is usually done between the fourth and the tenth hours ( a.m.- p.m.) since wool sheared in the hot sun is softer, heavier and of better colour by reason of the sweat of the sheep. wool which has been collected and packed in bags is called _vellera_ or _velamina_, words derived from _vellere_, to pull, whence it may be concluded that the practice of pulling wool is older than shearing. those who pull the wool today make a practice of starving their sheep for three days before, because when they are weak the wool yields more readily." "speaking of shearing," i said, "it is reported that the first barbers were brought into italy from sicily in the year after the foundation of rome (b.c. ) by p. ticinius menas, as appears from the inscription in the public square of ardea. the statues of the ancients show that formerly there were no barbers because most of them have long hair and a heavy beard."[ ] cossinius resumed: "as the wool of the sheep serves to make clothes, so the hair of goats is employed: on ships, in making military engines and certain implements of industry. certain nations, indeed, are clad in goat skins, as in gaetulia and sardinia. their use for this purpose by the ancient greeks is apparent, because old men in the tragedies are called [greek: diphtheriai], from the fact that they were clad in goat skins: and it is the custom also in our comedies to dress rustic characters in goat skins, like the youth in the _hypobolimaeus_ (the counterfeit) of caecilius, and the old man in the _heautontimorumenos_ (the self tormentor) of terence. "it is the practice to shear goats in the greater part of phrygia because there the goats have heavy coats, of which cilicia (so called because the practice of shearing goats began in the city of that name) and other hair cloth materials of that kind are made." with this cossinius stopped, and, while he was waiting for criticism of what he had said, vitulus' freedman, coming into town from the gardens [of his master] turned to us and said, "i was on my way to your house to invite you to come early so as not to shorten the holiday." and so, my dear turranius niger, we separated: scrofa and i going to the gardens of vitulus; the others, some home and some to see menas. book iii the husbandry of the steading _introduction: the antiquity of country life_ i there are two modes of human life, my dear pinnius, which are manifestly as different in the time of their origin as they are in their habitat, that of the country and that of the town. country life is much the more ancient, for time was when men lived altogether in the country and had no towns: indeed, the oldest town in greece, according to the tradition, is the boeotian thebes, which was founded by king ogyges, and in our own land that of rome, founded by king romulus of which now it may be affirmed with confidence, as was not possible when ennius wrote: "'tis seven hundred years, or more or less, since first illustrious rome began her sway, with hallowed augury." now, if it is admitted that thebes was founded before the deluge, which is known by ogyges' name, its age is not more than about twenty-one hundred years: and if that period is compared with the lapse of time since men began to cultivate the land and to live in huts and hovels, knowing naught of city walls and gates, it is evident that life in the country preceded life in town by a tale of immemorial years. nor is this to be wondered at since 'god made the country and man made the town.'[ ] while the tradition is that all the arts were invented in greece within a thousand years, there never was a time when the earth could not be cultivated. and, as life in the country is the more ancient, so it is the better life: for it was not without good reason that our ancestors were wont to plant colonies of citizens in the country, because by them they were both fed in times of peace and protected in times of war: nor was it without significance that they called both the earth and ceres by the common name of mother and esteemed that those who worshipped her lead a life at once pious and useful and were the sole representatives left on earth of the race of saturn. a proof of this is that the mysteries peculiar to the cult of ceres were called _initia_, the very name indicating that they related to the beginning of things. a further proof that country life was earlier than that of town is found in the name of the town of thebes, which was bestowed from the character of its situation rather than from the name of its founder: for in the ancient language, and among the aeolians who had their origin in boeotia, a small hill is called _tebas_ without the aspirate; and in the sabine country, where pelasgians from greece settled, they still have the same locution: witness that hill called tebae which stands in the sabine country on the via salaria not far from the mile stone of reate. at first agriculture was conducted on so small a scale that it had little distinction, since those who followed it, being sprung from shepherds, at once sowed their corn and pastured their flocks on the same land, but as later this art grew in importance the husbandry of live stock was separated, and it befel that some men were called farmers and others shepherds. the art of feeding live stock should really be divided into two branches, as is not yet fully appreciated, one relating to the stock kept at the steading, the other to the stock pastured in the fields. the latter, which is designated by the name _pecuaria_, is well known and highly esteemed so that rich men, either lease or buy much pasture land in order to carry it on: the other, which is known as _villatice_, has, because it seemed to be of less importance, been treated by some as an incident of the husbandry of agriculture, when in fact it should be made a part of the husbandry of live stock: nor has it been described separately and at length by any one, so far as i know. and so, as i think that there are three branches of farm management which are undertaken for profit, namely: agriculture, live stock and the industries peculiar to the steading, i have planned three books, of which i have already written two, the first concerning the husbandry of agriculture, which i dedicated to my wife fundania, and the second concerning the husbandry of live stock to turranius niger: the third, relating to the profits of those industries which are carried on at the steading, i now send herewith to you; for the fact that we are neighbours and entertain a mutual affection seems to demand that it should be dedicated to you above all others. although you have a villa, which is remarkable for the beauty of its workmanship within and without, and for the splendour of its mosaic pavements, still you deem it to be bare unless you have the walls decorated also with books: so in like manner that your villa may be more distinguished by the profits you derive from it than by the character of its construction, and that i may be of assistance to that end, so far as may be, i have sent you this book, which is a summary of some conversations which we have had on the subject of what makes the perfectly equipped villa: and so i begin as follows: _of the definition of a roman villa_ ii. the senator q. axius, my fellow tribesman, and i had cast our votes at the comitia for the election of aediles, and, although it was the heat of the day, we wished to be on hand when the candidate whom we were supporting should go home. so axius said to me: "what would you think of taking shelter in the _villa publica_[ ] while the votes are being sorted rather than in the booth of our candidate." "i hold," said i, "not only with the proverb that bad advice is worst for him who gives it, but that good advice is good for both the giver and the taker." and so we made our way to the _villa publica_, where we found appius claudius,[ ] the augur, seated on a bench waiting for any call for his services by the consul: on his left was cornelius merula (blackbird) of the consular family of that name, and fircellius pavo (pea-cock) of reate, and on his right minutius pica (mag-pie) and m. petronius passer (sparrow). when we had approached them axius, smiling, said to appius: "may we come into your aviary where you are sitting among the birds?" "by all means," replied appius, "and especially you who set before me such birds as still make my mouth water, when i was your guest a few days ago at your reatine villa on my way to lake velinus to settle the controversy between the people of interamna and reate.[ ] "but" he added, "is not this villa, which our ancestors constructed, simpler and so better than that elaborate one of yours at reate: do you see any where here any furniture of citrus wood or ormolu, any decorations of vermillion or blue, any tessellations or mosaic work, all of which on the other hand were displayed in your house? and while this is open to the entire people, yours is available to you alone: this is the resort for the citizens after the comitia in the campus martius, and for all alike, while yours is reserved for mares and asses. and furthermore it should be considered that this building is useful in carrying on the public business, for here the consuls review the army on parade, here the arms are inspected, here the censors enumerate the people." "tell me," retorted axius, "which is useful, this villa of yours giving on the campus martius, more extravagantly arrayed with objects of art than all reate put together, so bedizened is it with pictures and garnished with statues, or mine where there is no trace of the artists lysippus or antiphilus, but there are many of the farm hand and the shepherd? "and since there can be no villa where there is no farm and that well cultivated, how can you call this house of yours a villa which has no land appurtenant to it and no cattle or horses? again, tell me, pray, how does your villa compare with that of your grandfather and great grandfather, for one cannot see at yours, as one could always see at theirs, cured hay in the mows, the vintage in the cellar, and the harvest in the granary? because, forsooth, a house is situated out of town, it is no more a villa for that reason than the houses of those who dwell beyond the porta flumentaria or in the aemiliana suburb." "since it appears that i do not know what a villa is," replied appius, smiling, "i wish you would be good enough to instruct me, so that i may not make a fool of myself, as i am planning to buy from m. seius his villa at ostia: for if a mere house is not a villa unless it is equipped with a jackass costing forty thousand sesterces ($ , ), like that you showed me at your place, i fear that i would be making a mistake in buying seius' house on the shore at ostia in the belief that it is a villa. but it was our friend merula here who put me in mind of buying this house, for he told me that he had spent several days there and that he had never seen a more delightful villa, and yet he saw there no paintings, nor any bronze or marble statues, neither did he see any wine press, or oil mill, or oil jars." "and what kind of a villa is this," said axius, turning to merula, "where there are neither the ornaments of a town house nor the utensils of a farm?" "do you consider," said merula, "that your house on the bank of velinus, which neither painter nor architect has ever seen, is any less a villa than the one you have in rosea so elegantly decorated with the work of an architect and which you share with your famous jackass?" axius admitted, with a nod, that a simple farm house was as much entitled to be called a villa as any house which united the characteristics of both town and country, and asked what he deduced from this. "what?" said merula. "why, if your estate in rosea is to be approved by reason of the husbandry which you carry on, and is properly called a villa because there cattle are fed and stabled, then, by the same reasoning, all those houses should be called villas in which large profits are derived from husbandry: for what difference does it make whether you derive your profit from sheep or from birds? is the income any sweeter which comes from cattle in which bees are generated, than from the bees themselves, such as work in their hives at the villa of seius? do you sell to the butcher the hogs which you raise at your farm for more than seius sells his wild boars to the meat market?" "am i any less able," replied axius, "to have these things at my farm at reate: is sicilian honey made at seius' place and only corsican honey at reate,[ ] and does the mast which he buys for his wild boars make them fat while that which i get for nothing from my woods makes mine lean?" "but," said appius, "merula does not deny that you _can_ carry on at your villa the kind of husbandry which seius does at his, yet i myself have seen that you don't. "for there are two kinds of husbandry of live stock: one in the fields, as of cattle; and the other at the steading, as of chickens and pigeons and bees and other such things which are usually kept at a villa. "about the latter, mago the carthaginian, and cassius dionysius and others have treated specially in different parts of their books, and it would seem that seius has read their precepts and so has learned how to make more profit from his villa alone by such husbandry than others make out of an entire farm." "certainly," agreed merula, "for i have seen there great flocks of geese, chickens, pigeons, cranes and pea-cocks: also dormice, fish, wild boars and other such game.[ ] the freedman who keeps his books which varro has seen, assured me when he was doing the honours in the absence of his master, that seius derives an income of more than fifty thousand sesterces ($ , ) per annum from his villa." as axius seemed astonished, i asked him: "surely you know the estate of my aunt in the sabine country which is at the twenty-fourth mile stone from rome on the via salaria." "of course, i do," axius replied, "for it is there that i am wont to divide the day in summer on my way from reate to town and to spend the night when i come thence in winter." "well," i continued, "in that villa there is an aviary from which i know that there were taken in one season five thousand thrushes, which, at three deniers apiece, means that that department of the establishment brought in a revenue of sixty thousand sesterces that year, or twice the yield of the entire two hundred jugera of your farm at reate."[ ] "what, sixty thousand," exclaimed axius, "sixty thousand: you are making game of me!" "sixty thousand," i affirmed, "but in order that you might realize such a lucky throw you will require either a public banquet or a triumph on the scale of that of scipio metellus, or club dinners, which indeed have now become so frequent as to raise the price of provisions of the market." "you will perchance expect this return every year," said merula, "so i trust that your aviary may not lead you into a loss. but surely in such good times as these it could not happen that you would fail, except rarely, for what year is there that does not see such a feast or a triumph, or club dinners, such as now-a-days consume victuals without number. nay," he added, "it seems that in our habit of luxury such a public banquet is a daily occurrence within the gates of rome."[ ] to supplement the examples of such profits: l. albutius, a learned man and, as you know, the author of certain satires in the manner of lucilius, has said that the returns from feeding live stock on his alban farm are always less than his income from his villa, for the farm yields less than ten thousand sesterces and the villa more than twenty. he even maintains that if he should establish a villa near the sea in such a place as he might choose he could derive from it an income of more than a hundred thousand sesterces. did not m. cato recently sell forty thousand sesterces worth of fishes from the fish ponds of lucullus after he had accepted the administration of his estate?" "my dear merula," exclaimed axius, "take me, i beg of you, as your pupil in the art of the husbandry of the steading." "i will begin," replied merula, "as soon as you promise me a minerval in the form of a dinner."[ ] "you shall have it," said axius, "both today, and hereafter as well, off those delicacies you will teach me to rear." "i fear," replied merula, "that what you may offer me at the beginning of your experience with villa feeding will be dead geese or deceased pea-cocks." "and what difference will it make to you," retorted axius, "if i do serve you fish or fowl which has come to an untimely end: for in no event could you eat them unless they were dead: but i beg you," he added, "matriculate me in the school of villa husbandry and expound to me the theory and the practice of it." merula accepted the invitation cheerfully. _of the roman development of the industries of the steading_ iii. "in the first place," he said, "you should know what kind of creatures you may raise or feed in or about a villa, either for your profit or for your pleasure. there are three divisions for this study: poultry houses, warrens and fish ponds. "i include under the head of poultry houses the feeding of all kinds of fowls which are usually kept within the walls of a steading: under the head of warrens not merely what our great grandfathers meant--places where rabbits were usually kept--but any enclosure adjoining a villa in which game animals are enclosed to be fed. in like manner i include under the head of fish ponds all those places in which fish are kept at a villa either in fresh or salt water. "each of these divisions may be separated into at least two parts: thus the first, that with respect to poultry houses, should be treated with reference to a classification of fowls as between those which are content on land alone, such as pea-cocks, turtle doves, thrushes; and those which require access to water as well as land, such as geese, widgeons and ducks. so the second division, that relating to game, has two different classifications: one which includes the wild boar, the roe buck and hares; the other bees, snails and dormice. "the third, or aquatic division, likewise has two classifications, one including fresh water fish, the other salt water fish. "in order to secure and maintain a supply of these six classes of stock it is necessary to provide a force of three kinds of artificers, namely: fowlers, hunters and fishermen, or else you may buy breeding stock from such men, and trust to the diligence of your servants to rear and fatten their offspring until they are ready for market. certain of them, such as dormice, snails and chickens, may, however, be obtained without the aid of a hunter's net, and doubtless the business of keeping them began with the stock native to every farm: for the breeding even of chickens has not been a monopoly of the roman augurs, to make provision for their auspices, but has been practised by all farmers from the beginning of time.[ ] from such a start in the kind of husbandry we are now discussing, the next step was to provide masonry enclosures near the steading to confine game, and these served as well for shelter for the bee-stand, for originally the bees were wont to make their hives under the eaves of the farm house itself. "the third division, that of keeping fish, had its origin in simple fresh water ponds in which fish taken in the streams were kept. "there have been two steps in the development of each of these three conveniences; the earlier distinguished by the ancient simplicity, the later by our modern luxury. the earlier stage was that of our ancestors, who had but two places for keeping poultry: one the court yard of the steading in which chickens were fed and their profit derived from eggs and pullets, the other above ground, for their pigeons were kept in the dormers or on the roof of the farm house. "now-a-days, on the contrary, what our ancestors called hen-houses are known as _ornithones_, and serve to house thrushes and pea-cocks to cater to the delicate appetite of the master: and indeed such structures now have larger roofs than formerly sufficed to cover an entire farm house. "such has been the progress in respect of warrens also: your father, axius, never saw any game but rabbits, nor did there exist in his time any such extensive enclosures as now are made, many jugera in extent, to hold wild boars and roe bucks. you can witness," he said, turning to me, "that you found many wild boars in the warren of your farm at tusculum, when you bought it from m. piso." in respect of the third class, who was there who used to have any kind of a fish pond, except of fresh water, stocked merely with cat fish and mullets, while today our elegants declare that they would as soon have a pond stocked with frogs as with those fish i have named. you will recall the story of philippus when he was entertained at casinum by ummidius: a pickerel caught in your river, varro, was put before him, he tasted it and forthwith spat it out, exclaiming "may i perish, but i thought it was fish!"[ ] as the luxury of this age has enlarged our warrens, so has it carried our fish ponds even to the sea itself and has herded shoals of sea fish into them. have not sergius orata (goldfish) and licinius murena (lamprey) taken their cognomens from fishes for this reason? and who does not know the fame of the fish ponds of philippus, of hortensius, and of the brothers lucullus? "where, then, axius, do you wish me to begin?" _of aviaries_ iv. "i prefer," replied axius, "that you should begin with the sequel--_postprincipia_, as they say in the camps--that is, with the present day rather than with the past, because the profits from pea-cocks are greater than those from hens, i will not dissemble that i wish to hear first of _ornithones_ because the thrushes which are kept in them make the very name sound like money: indeed, the , sesterces of fircelina have consumed me with avarice." "there are two kinds of _ornithones_," replied merula; "one for pleasure, like that so much admired which our friend varro here has at his villa near casinum: the other for profit, such as are maintained commercially, some even indoors in town, but chiefly in the sabine country which abounds in thrushes. there is a third kind, consisting of a combination of the two i have mentioned, such as lucullus maintained at his tusculan villa, where he contrived a dining room under the same roof as his aviary to the end that he might feast delicately, satisfying two senses, now by eating the birds cooked and spread on a platter, now by seeing them flying about the windows: but the truth is that he was disappointed, for the eyes did not take as much pleasure from the sight of the flying birds as the nostrils were offended by their odour." _a. for profit_ v. "but, as i gather you would prefer, axius, i will speak of that kind of _ornithon_ which is established for profit, whence, but not where, fat thrushes are served. "for this purpose is built a dome, in the form of a peristyle, with a roof over it and enclosed with netting, sufficiently large to accommodate several thousand thrushes[ ] and blackbirds; indeed, some also include other kinds of birds, such as ortolans and quail, which sell for a good price when fat. into this enclosure water should be conducted through a conduit and so disposed as to wind through the aviary in channels narrow enough to be cleaned easily (for if the water spreads out it is quickly polluted and rendered unfit to drink) and draining like a running stream to find its vent through another conduit, so that the birds may not be exposed to the risk of mud. the door should be low and narrow and well balanced on its hinges like the doors they have in the amphitheatres where bulls are fought: few windows and so placed that the birds cannot see trees and wild birds without, for that makes the prisoners pine and grow thin. the place should have only so much light as may be necessary to enable the birds to see where they are to perch and to eat and drink. the doors and the windows should be lightly stuccoed round about to keep out rats and other such vermin. "around the wall of the building on the inside are fastened many perches where the birds can sit, and another such convenience should be contrived from poles set on the ground and leaning against the walls and tied together with other poles fastened transversely at regular intervals, thus giving the appearance of the rising degrees of a theatre. down on the ground near the drinking water you should place the birds' food, which usually consists of little balls of a paste made out of figs and corn meal: but for twenty days before you intend to market your thrushes it is customary to feed them more heavily, both by giving them more food and that chiefly of finer meal. "in this enclosure there should also be cages with wooden floors which may serve the birds as resting places supplementing the perches. "next to the aviary should be contrived a smaller structure, called the _seclusorium_, in which the keeper may array the birds found dead, to render an account of them to his master, and where he may drive the birds which are ready for market from the larger aviary: and to this end this smaller room is connected with the main cage by a large door and has more light: and there, when he has collected the number he wishes to market, the keeper kills them, which is done secretly, lest the others might despond at the sight and themselves die before they are ready for market. "thrushes are not like other birds of passage which lay their eggs in particular places, as the swan does in the fields and the swallows under the roof, but they lay anywhere: for, despite their masculine name (_turdus_) there are female thrushes, just as there are male blackbirds, although they have a purely feminine name (_merula_). "all birds are divided as between those which are of passage, like swallows and cranes, and those which are domestic, like chickens and pigeons: thrushes are birds of passage and every year fly from across the sea into italy about the time of the autumn equinox, returning about the spring equinox. at another season doves and quail do the same in immense numbers, as may be seen in the neighbouring islands of pontia, palmaria and pandataria, for there they are wont to rest a few days on their arrival and again before they set out across the sea from italy." _b. for pleasure_ "so," said appius to axius, "if you enclose five thousand thrushes in such an aviary as merula has described and there happens to be a banquet or a triumph, you will gain forthwith that sixty thousand sesterces which you so keenly covet and be able to lend the money out at good interest." and then, turning to me, he added, "do you tell us of that other kind of ornithon, namely: for pleasure merely, for it is said that you have constructed one near casinum which surpasses not only the original built by the inventor of such flying cages, our friend m. laenius strabo of brundisium (who was the first to keep birds confined in the chamber of a peristyle and to feed them through the net), but also the vast structures of lucullus at tusculum." "you know," i said, "that there flows through my estate near casinum[ ] a stream which is both deep and clear and fifty-seven feet wide between the masonry embankments, so that it is necessary to use bridges to get from one part of the property to the other. on the upper reach of this stream is situated my museum[ ] and at a distance of feet below is an island formed by the confluence of another stream. along the bank for this distance is an uncovered walk ten feet broad and between this walk and the field is the location of my aviary enclosed on both sides, right and left, with high masonry walls. the _ornithon_ itself is built in the shape of a writing tablet with a capital on it, the main quadrangle being forty-eight feet wide and seventy-two feet long, the capital semi-circular with a radius of twenty-seven feet. to this a covered walk or portico is joined, as it were across the bottom of the page of the tablet, with passages leading on either side of the _ornithon_ proper which contains the cages, to the upper end of the interior quadrangle [_adjoining the capital_]. this portico is constructed of a series of stone columns between which and the main outside walls are planted dwarf shrubs, a net of hemp being stretched from the top of the walls to the architrave of the portico, and thence down to the stylobate or floor. the exterior spaces thus enclosed are filled with all kinds of birds which are fed through the net, water being provided by a small running stream. on the interior sides of the porticos, and adjoining them at the upper end of the interior quadrangle, are constructed on both sides two narrow oblong basins. between these basins a path leads to the _tholus_, or rotunda, which is surrounded with two rows of columns, like that in the house of catulus, except that i have substituted columns for walls. beyond these columns at the end is a grove of large transplanted trees forming a roof of leaves, but admitting light underneath, as that is entirely cut off by the high walls on the sides. between the exterior row of columns of the _tholus_, which are of stone, and the interior row, which are of pine, there is a narrow space, five feet in width. the exterior columns are filled in with a transparent net instead of walls, thus permitting the birds to look out upon the grove and the wild birds there but without escaping: the interior columns being filled in with the net of the main aviary. the space between the two rows of columns thus enclosed is equipped with perches for the birds in the form of many rods let into all the columns in ascending array like the degrees of a theatre; and here are enclosed all kinds of birds, but chiefly singing birds, like nightingales and blackbirds, for whom water is conducted by means of a small canal and food is supplied under the net. [_under the lantern of the tholus is a basin of water: and around this_] a foot and nine inches below the stylobate or pedestal of the interior row of columns, runs a stone platform. this is five feet in width and two feet above the level of the basin, thus affording a space on which my bird guests may hop about from the cushions to the little columns [_which are there provided for them_].[ ] "the basin is immediately surrounded with a quay a foot in width adjoining [but below the level of] the platform and has a little island in the middle. around the platform and the quay are contrived docks for ducks. on the island is a little column arranged to turn on its axis and carrying a wheel-shaped table with hollow drum-like dishes fashioned at the ends of the spokes two and a half feet wide and a palm in depth. this is turned by a boy whose business that is, so that meat and drink is put before all my bird guests in turn. from the elevation of the platform, where mats are usually placed, the ducks go out to swim in the basin, and from this streams flow into the two basins i have already described, and little fish may be seen darting from one to the other, while warm or cold water may be turned on the guests from the circumference of the revolving table, which i have described as equipped with spokes. "within the dome is an arrangement to tell the hours by marking the position in the heavens of the sun by day and hesperus by night: and furthermore, as in the clock which [andronicus] cyrrestes constructed at athens, the eight winds are depicted on the dome, and, by means of an arrow connecting with a vane, the prevailing wind is indicated to those within."[ ] as we were talking an uproar was heard on the campus martius. while this did not astonish old parliamentary hands[ ] like ourselves, who knew the enthusiasm of an election, yet we were anxious to know what it meant, and at this moment pantuleius parra came up and told us that while the votes were being sorted some one was caught stuffing the ballot box[ ] and had been haled before the consul by the supporters of the rival candidate. pavo rose to go, for it was understood that he who had been arrested was the campaign manager of pavo's own candidate. _of pea-cocks_ vi. "now that fircellius is gone you can speak freely of pea-cocks," said axius, "for if you should say any thing to their disadvantage in his presence, you might perchance have a crow to pluck with him on account of his relationship."[ ] "within my memory," said merula, "the practice of keeping commercial flocks of pea-cocks has largely developed and it has so developed that m. aufidius lurco is said to derive an income of sixty thousand sesterces per annum from them. if you keep them for profit it is well to have somewhat fewer males than females; while the contrary is true if you keep them for pleasure, for the pea-cock far surpasses his hen in beauty. with us they are fed in the country, but abroad it is said that they are kept on islands, as at samos in the grove of juno and at planasia, the island of m. piso. in setting up a flock age and beauty must be considered, for nature has given the palm of beauty to the pea-cock among all the birds. the hens are not fit for breeding under two years of age, nor when they are aged. they are fed all kinds of grain but chiefly barley. scius makes a practice of feeding them a modius of barley apiece for the month before they begin to breed, his purpose being to make them more productive. he expects his overseer to raise three pea fowl for every hen, and he sells them when matured for fifty deniers ($ ) a piece, a price such as one never obtains for a sheep.[ ] "furthermore, he buys eggs and sets them under dunghill hens, transferring the young pea fowls so hatched to the shelter set apart for their kind. this house should be built large enough for the number of pea fowl to be kept and should be equipped with separate roosting places smoothly stuccoed, so that snakes and such vermin may not be able to get into it: and, furthermore, it should have attached to it a run in which the pea fowl may feed on sunny days, and both these places should be kept clean, as this kind of fowl demands. the keeper should make the rounds often with a shovel to collect and preserve their manure, which is not only fit for use in agriculture but serves also as bedding for your pea chicks. "it is said that q. hortensius was the first to serve pea-cocks at dinner, on the occasion of his inauguration as an augur, an evidence of prodigality which was more approved by the luxurious than by good men of simple manners: but many others quickly followed his example, so that the price of pea fowl was raised until an egg sold for five deniers ($ ) and a pea fowl itself readily for fifty ($ ), thus a flock of an hundred of them easily yields an income of forty thousand sesterces, ($ , ), or even sixty ($ , ), if, as abuccius advises, one obtains three chickens from every pea hen." _of pigeons_ vii. in the meanwhile an apparitor came to appius from the consul and said that the augurs were summoned. as appius went out from the _villa publica_, a flock of pigeons flew in, whereupon merula said to axius: "if you had established a [greek: peristerogropheion] you would think that these were your pigeons, although they are wild, for it is the custom to keep both kinds in a [greek: peristerotropheion]. one is the wild dove (or, as some call them the rock dove, or _saxatilis_), such as live in the towers and dormers (_columines_) of a farm house, whence they get the name _columbae_, because, on account of their natural timidity, they seek the highest places on the roof. on this account wild doves usually frequent towers, to which they may fly from the fields of their own accord, and return.[ ] the other kind of pigeons is tamer and are wont to seek their food at the very threshold of a house. this kind is usually white in colour, the wild variety being mottled but without any white. from these two stocks a third or mixed variety has been developed for commercial profit and these are collected in the place which some call a _peristereon_ (pigeon house), and others a _peristerotropheion_ (place for raising pigeons), where there are often confined as many as five thousand at a time. "a pigeon house is made like a great dome, with arched roof, a narrow entrance, and grilled windows or with wider lattices on all sides so that the interior may be well lighted and yet no snake or other such pest may have access. the walls and the dome within and the edges of the windows without should be smeared with light stucco to keep out rats and lizards, for nothing is so timid as a pigeon. a round nest should be provided for each pair of pigeons and these should be arranged in close order so that there may be established as many as possible of them ranked from the ground to the very dome. each nest should have a door no bigger than necessary to enable the pigeons to go in and out but within should be of three palms in diameter. under each rank of nests should be fastened planks two palms broad for the use of the pigeons as a vestibule on coming out. water should be led into the pigeon house, both for them to drink and to bathe in, for pigeons are very clean birds. for this reason the keeper of the pigeons should sweep out the house several times a month, for that which soils it has so great a. value in agriculture that some writers even claim that it is the best of all manures. furthermore, the keeper in these rounds may tend any pigeon which is ailing, remove any which are dead, and take out such squabs as are fit for market. likewise, those which are setting should be transferred to a particular place, separated from the others by a net but from which the mothers may be free to get out of doors: which is done for two reasons: first, because if they become weary or decrepit from being cooped too long, they will be refreshed by the free air when they go abroad: secondly, because they serve as decoys for other pigeons, for their squabs will always bring them home themselves unless they are struck down by a crow or cut off by a hawk. pigeon breeders rid themselves of the last mentioned pests by planting in the ground two rods smeared with birdlime and bent in one upon the other, and then tie on some bait so disposed that when the hawk falls upon his prey he finds himself entangled in the birdlime and is taken. "it may be noted that the pigeon has a homing instinct, as is proved by the practice of many in letting pigeons loose from their bosoms in the theatre expecting them to return home, for if they did not return the practice would not persist. "the food for pigeons is placed in mangers fastened around the walls and filled from the outside by means of conduits. they thrive on millet, wheat, barley, peas, beans and vetch. this regimen should be followed also, as far as possible, in the care of the wild pigeons, which live on the towers and the roofs of the barn. "in equipping a [greek: peristereon] pigeons of good age should be secured, neither squabs nor veterans, and as many males as females. nothing is more prolific than the pigeon, for in forty days they conceive, lay, hatch and raise a brood, and they keep this up nearly all the year, stopping only from the winter solstice until spring. squabs are hatched in pairs, and as soon as they have grown up and have strength breed with their own mothers. those who fatten squabs in order to sell them dearer, make a practice of isolating them as soon as they are covered with feathers, then they cram them with white bread which has been chewed:[ ] in winter this is fed twice a day, in summer three times a day, morning, noon and night, the midday meal being omitted in winter. those which are just beginning to have feathers are left in the nests, but their legs are broken, and, in order that they may be crammed, the food is put before the mothers, for they will feed themselves and their squabs on it all day long. squabs which are reared in this way become fat more quickly than others and have whiter flesh. "a pair of pigeons will commonly sell at rome for two hundred _nummi_, if they are well made, of good colour, without blemish, and of good breed: some times they even bring a thousand _nummi_, and there is a report that recently l. axius, a roman of the equestrian order, declined that sum, refusing to sell for less than four hundred deniers."[ ] "if i could procure a fully equipped [greek: peristereon]," cried axius, "as readily as i have bought a supply of earthen ware nests, i would have had it already on the way to my farm." "as if," remarked pica, "there were not many of them here in town. but perhaps those who have pigeon houses on their roofs do not seem to you to be justified in calling them [greek: peristereonas] even though some of them represent an investment of more than one hundred thousand sesterces. i advise you to buy out one of them and learn how to pocket a profit here in town, before you build on a large scale in the country." _of turtle doves_ viii. "so much for that then," said axius. "proceed, please, to the next subject, merula." "for turtle doves," said merula, "in like manner a house should be constructed proportioned to the number you intend to feed, and this, like the pigeon house, i have described, should have a door and windows and fresh water and walls and a vaulted roof, but in place of breeding nests the mutules should be extended through the walls or poles set in them in regular order with hempen mats on them, the lowest rank being not more than three feet from the floor, the rest at intervals of nine inches, the top rank six inches from the vault, and of equal breadth as the mutule stands out from the wall. on these the doves are fed day and night. for food they are given dry wheat, usually a half modius for every one hundred and twenty doves. every day the house should be cleaned out, that they may not be injured by the accumulation of manure, and because also it has its place in the economy of the farm. the best time for fattening doves is about the harvest, for then the mothers are in their best condition and produce young ones not only in the largest number but the best for cramming: so that is the time when they are most profitable." _of poultry_ ix. "tell me now, if you please, merula," said axius, "what i should know of raising and fattening poultry and wood pigeons, then we can proceed to the discussion of the remainder of our programme." "there are three kinds of fowls usually classed as poultry," replied merula, "dunghill fowl, jungle fowl and guinea fowl. the dunghill fowl are those which are constantly kept in the country at farms. "he who wishes to establish an [greek: ornithoboskeion] from which, by the exercise of intelligence and care, he can take large profits, as the people of delos do with such great success,[ ] should observe five principal rules: ° in regard to buying, what kind and how many he will keep: ° in regard to breeding: ° in regard to eggs, how they are set and hatched: ° in regard to chicks, how and by whom they are reared, and °, which is a supplement of all the foregoing, how they are fattened. "the females of the dunghill fowl are called hens, the breeding males cocks, and the males which have been altered capons. cocks are caponized by burning the spurs[ ] with a hot iron until the skin is broken, the wound being poulticed with potters' clay. "he who wishes to have a model [greek: ornithoboskeion] should equip it with all three kinds of fowls, though chiefly the dunghill variety. in purchasing these last it is important to choose fertile hens, which are indicated by red feathers, black wings, unequal toes, large heads, combs upstanding and heavy, for such hens are more likely to lay. "a lusty cock may be known by his muscular carriage, his red comb, a beak short, strong and sharp, eyes tawny or black, wattles a whitish red, neck spotted or tinged with gold, the second joint of his legs well covered with feathers, short legs long spurs, a heavy tail, and profuse feathers, also by his spirit and his frequent crowing, his readiness to fight, and that he is not only not afraid of such animals as do the hens harm, but even goes out to fight them. you must be careful, however, not to buy for breeding any fowls of the breeds known as tanagran, medean and chalcidean, for, while they are beautiful to look at and are fit for fighting with one another, they are practically sterile. "if you wish to keep a flock of two hundred, choose an enclosed place and there construct two large poultry houses side by side and looking to the east, each about ten by five feet and a little less than five feet in height, and furnished with windows three by four feet in which are fitted shutters of wickerwork, which will serve to let in plenty of fresh air and light and yet keep out such vermin as prey upon chickens. "between the two houses should be a door by which the _gallinarius_ who takes care of them, may have access. within the houses enough poles are arranged to serve as roosts for all the chickens: opposite each roost a nest should be set in the wall. in front of the house should be an enclosed yard to which the fowls may have access in the day time and where they can dust themselves,[ ] and there should be constructed the keeper's house, which should be equipped all about with nests, either set into the walls or firmly fastened to them, for the least disturbance injures eggs when they are setting. "when the hens begin to lay, straw should be spread in their nests and this should be renewed when they begin to set, for in such bedding are bred mites and other insects which will not suffer the hen to be quiet, with the result that the eggs are hatched unequally or rot. "a hen should not be allowed to set on more than twenty-five eggs, although such is her fecundity that she lays more than that in a season. the best time for hatching is from the spring to the autumn equinox. eggs laid before or after this season, or the first eggs laid by a pullet, should never be set. hens used for setting should be old rather than young, without sharp beaks and claws, for those so equipped are better employed in laying than in setting. hens a year or two years old are better fitted for laying. "if you set pea-cock eggs under a hen, you should wait ten days before adding hen eggs to the nest, to insure them all hatching together, for the period of incubation of chicken eggs is thrice seven days and that of the eggs of pea-fowl is thrice nine. sitting hens should be shut up day and night, except for a time in the morning and evening, when they are let out to eat and drink. "the keeper should make the rounds every few days and turn the eggs, so that they may be kept warm all over. it is said that you can tell whether an egg is fertile or sterile by putting it in water: for if it is sterile it will float, while if it is fertile it will sink. those who shake their eggs to ascertain this fact make a mistake for thereby they destroy the germ in them. it is also said that you can tell a sterile egg by the fact that it is transparent when held against the light. "to preserve eggs they should be rubbed with fine salt or soaked for three or four hours in brine, and then cleaned off or packed in chaff or straw. care should be taken to set eggs only in uneven numbers. the keeper can tell whether an egg is fertile or not four days after it is set, by holding it to the light, when he should throw it out if it is found to be empty and substitute another for it. "the new hatched chickens should be taken from every nest and given to a hen who has only a few to care for. when in this way a setting hen has less than half her eggs left unhatched, they should be taken from her and put under another hen which has eggs still unhatched. it is not well to give more than thirty chicks to a hen. chicks should be fed for the first fifteen days in the dust to protect them from injuring their tender beaks on the hard ground: their diet being crushed barley mixed with cress seed and soaked in wine, for prepared in this way the grain is digestible. they should be kept away from water in the beginning. when they begin to have feathers on their legs the mites should be carefully picked off their heads and necks, for these banes often destroy them. deer's horn should be burnt around their coops to keep snakes away, for the very smell of those vermin is fatal to young chickens. they should be allowed to run in the sun and to scratch in a dung heap, which serves to develop them. this rule applies not only to young chickens but also to the entire [greek: ornithoboskeion], and should be practised all summer and even in winter on mild and sunny days. a net should be stretched over the chicken yard to keep the fowls themselves from flying out and to protect them from hawks and other birds of prey. fowls should be protected from heat as well as cold, for both are harmful to them. when the chicks have got their feathers it is best to accustom them to follow one or two hens, leaving the other hens free to go to laying, in which occupation they are more useful than in rearing chicks. "a hen should be set after the new moon, for those which begin earlier seldom hatch many chicks. "they hatch usually in twenty days. "and now since i have discussed the dunghill fowl at some length, i will make up to you by brevity with respect to the other kinds of fowls. "jungle fowl are rarely seen at rome, and then usually in cages. they resemble guinea chickens more than dunghill fowls. when perfect in form and appearance they are often carried in the public processions with parrots and white blackbirds and other such rarities. they do not usually lay or raise their chickens on a farm, but in the forests. the island of gallinaria, which lies in the tuscan sea off the coast of italy, opposite the ligurian mountains (and the towns of intermelii and alba ingannua) derives its name from them, though some maintain that the name comes from dunghill fowl which were carried to that island by sailors and have there run wild. guinea fowl (_gallinae africanae_) are large, mottled and have their humps in their backs. the greeks call them [greek: meleagrís].[ ] they are the last fowls which the culinary art has introduced to our dining tables, on account of their gamy flavour.[ ] by reason of their rarity they sell for a high price. "of the three kinds of fowls, the ordinary dunghill fowl is used chiefly for cramming. for this purpose they are shut up in a small confined and darkened coop, because both exercise and light are enemies of fat. any large chickens may be selected for this operation, not necessarily of that breed which the peasants call melica incorrectly, for as the ancients said thelis when they meant thetis, so the country people still say melica for medica. this name was given at first to the fowls which were imported from medea on account of their great size and then to all of that breed, but now the name is given indiscriminately to all large fowls by reason of their general resemblance. after the feathers have been pulled from their tails and wings they are crammed with balls of barley paste, with which may be mixed darnel meal, or flax seed soaked in soft water. they are fed twice a day but care must be taken to see that the last meal is digested before another is put before them. after they have been fed and their heads have been cleaned of mites, they are shut up again. this process is kept up for twenty-five days, when they will be fat. "some cram them on wheat bread soaked in water, or even in wine of good flavour and bouquet, claiming that they are thereby made fat and tender in twenty days.[ ] "if in the process of cramming the fowls lose their appetite from too much food, the ration should be reduced daily during the last ten days in the same proportion as it was increased during the first ten days, so that the ration will be the same on the twentieth as on the first day. "wood pigeons are crammed and fattened in the same way." _of geese_ x. "let us now pass," said axius, "to that tribe which cannot live in the barn yard all the time, or even on land, but requires access to ponds. i mean those whom you philhellenes call amphibia. i understand that you call the places in which geese are kept by the greek name [greek: chaenoboskeion], and that scipio metellus and m. seius have several large flocks of geese." "it is seius' practice," said merula, "to maintain his flocks of geese[ ] in accordance with the five rules i have laid down for poultry, namely: with respect to choice of individuals, breeding, eggs, goslings and the process of cramming. "on the first point he requires the slave who buys his geese to select them of good size and of white plumage, because they reproduce their own qualities in their goslings. this is necessary for there is another kind of geese of variegated plumage, which are called wild, and do not flock freely with the other kind and are domesticated with difficulty. "the best time for breeding geese is at the end of winter and for laying and hatching from the beginning of february or march until the summer solstice. they breed usually in the water, diving to the bottom of the stream or pond.[ ] a goose lays only three times a year: and each one should be furnished with a coop about two and a half feet square and bedded with straw: each of their eggs should be marked for identification, for they will not hatch any eggs but their own. they are usually set on nine or eleven eggs, never more than fifteen, nor less than five. in cold weather they set for thirty days, in warm weather twenty-five. when they are hatched the goslings are suffered to remain with their mother for five days, and then daily, when the weather is fine, they are driven out to the meadows or to the ponds or some swampy place. the gosling houses may be built either above or below ground, but never more than twenty should be housed together and care must be taken lest the floor be damp and that they are bedded on chaff or some thing of that kind, and that the house is so constructed as to keep out weasels and other beasts which prey on goslings. geese are fed in wet places and it is the practice to sow especially for their food supply, using for this purpose any kind of grain, but particularly that salad plant called endive[ ] which keeps green wherever there is water, freshening at the mere contact of water however dry it may be. this is gathered to be fed to them, for if they have access to the place where it is growing they will destroy the plant by trampling on it, or else kill themselves by eating too much of it, for they are greedy by nature. for this reason they must be watched, as often in feeding their greediness leads them to seize a root and to break their own necks in attempting to pull it from the ground: for the neck is weak, as the head is soft. "if there is none of this plant they should be fed barley or some other grain. when the farrago season is on, feed that to them, but in the same manner as i have described in respect of endive. while they are setting they may be fed ground barley soaked in water. the goslings may be fed for the first two days on barley cake (_pollenta_) or raw barley, and for the next three days fresh water cress chopped fine in a dish. when they are of an age to be kept by themselves in flocks of twenty, in the kind of house i have described, they are fed on barley meal or farrago or some kind of young herbage cut up. "for cramming, goslings are picked out when they are about six months old, and are shut up in the fattening pen and there are fed three times a day as much as they will eat, of crushed barley and flour dust mixed with water, and after meals they should be made to drink copiously. kept on this diet they will be fat in about two months.[ ] after every meal the feeding place must be cleaned, for, while geese like a clean place, they never leave any place clean in which they have been." _of ducks_ xi. "whoever wishes to keep a flock of ducks and to establish a [greek: naessotropheion], should choose for it, above all others if it is possible, a swampy location because that is most agreeable to the ducks, but, if not, then a situation sloping to a natural lake or pool, or to an artificial pond, with steps leading down to it, practicable for the ducks. the enclosure where they are kept should have a wall fifteen feet high, such as you saw at seius' villa, with only one door opening into it. all around the wall on the inside should run a broad platform on which are built against the wall the duck houses, fronting on a level concrete vestibule in which is constructed a permanent channel in which their food can be placed in water, for ducks are fed in that way. the entire wall should be given a smooth coating of stucco to keep out polecats[ ] and other animals of prey, and the enclosure should be covered with a net of large mesh to prevent eagles from pouncing in and the ducks themselves from flying out.[ ] "for food they are given wheat, barley, grape marc, and some times even lobsters and other such aquatic animals. the pond in the enclosure should be fed with a large head of water so that it may be kept always fresh. "there are other kinds of similar birds, like teals and coots which may be fed in the same way. "some even keep partridges, which, as archelaus writes, conceive when they hear the voice of the male bird. by reason of the natural abundance and the delicacy of their flesh, these last are not crammed like those domestic fowls i have described, but they are fattened by feeding in the ordinary way. "and now, as i think that i have completed the first act of the drama of the barn yard, i am done." _of rabbits_ xii. at this point appius returned and, after an exchange of questions and answers as to what had been said and done during his absence, he said: "here beginneth the second act of those industries which are wont to be practised at a villa, namely of those enclosures which are still known as _leporaria_ from their ancient special designation. today a warren no longer means an acre or two in which hares are kept, but some times forests of vast extent in which troops of red deer and roe deer are enclosed. q. fulvius lippinus is said to have forty jugera enclosed in the neighbourhood of tarquinii[ ] where he keeps not only those animals i have named but wild sheep as well. parks of still larger extent are found in the territory of statonia (in etruria) and in certain other places: indeed, in transalpine gaul t. pompeius has so great a game preserve that the enclosure is about four miles in extent.[ ] "it is the practice to keep in such enclosures not only the animals i have named, but also snail houses and bee hives and jars in which dormice are fed, but the care and the increase and the feeding of all these things are easy, except in the case of bees. who does not know that a _leporarium_ should be enclosed with masonry walls which are at once smooth and high the one to keep out wild cats and badgers and other such beasts: the other to prevent wolves from getting over. within should be coverts where the hares may lurk in the day time under bushes and grass, and trees with broad spreading branches to ward off the attacks of the eagle. "who does not know also that if he introduces only a few hares of both sexes in a short time the place will be full of them, for such is the fecundity of this quadruped that two pair are enough to stock an entire warren in a short time. often a mother who has just had her litter is found to be big with another: indeed, archelaus says that if you want to know how old a hare is you have only to count the number of openings in her belly, for without doubt there is one for every year of her life. "it has recently become the practice to cram hares as well as poultry, and for this purpose they are taken out of the warren and shut up in small hutches where they are fattened. there are three kinds of hares: the first, our common italian kind, which has short front legs and long hind legs, the upper part of the body dark coloured, the belly white, and long ears. some say that our hare conceives a second time while it is still big. in transalpine gaul and macedonia they grow to a great size, but in spain and in italy they are not so large. the second kind is native in gaul near the alps, and is white all over the body: these are brought to rome, but rarely. the third kind is native in spain and is like our hare in every way except that it is smaller and is called rabbit (_cuniculus_).[ ] l. aelius thinks that the hare (_lepus_) gets his name from his swiftness, as it were that he is light of foot (_levipes_), but i think the name is derived from the ancient greek, because the aeolians of boeotia call him [greek: leporis]. the rabbits derive their latin name of _cuniculi_ from the habit of making underground burrows to hide in [for _cuniculus_ is a spanish word for mine]. if possible you should have all these three kinds in your warren. i am sure you already have the first two kinds," apius added, turning to me, "and, as you were so many years in spain doubtless some rabbits followed you home."" _of game preserves_ xiii. then addressing himself again to axius, appius continued: "you know, of course, that wild boars are kept in game parks, and that those which are brought in wild are fattened with as little trouble as the tame ones which are born in the park, for you have doubtless seen at the farm near tusculum, which varro here bought from m. pupius piso, wild boars and roe bucks assemble at the sound of the trumpet to be fed at regular hours, when from a platform, the keeper scatters mast to the wild boars and vetch or some such forage to the roe bucks." "i saw this done," put in axius, "more dramatically when i was a visitor at the villa of q. hortensius in the country near laurentum. he has there a wood of more than fifty jugera in extent, all enclosed, but it might better be called a [greek: theriotropheion] than a warren; there on high ground he caused his dinner table to be spread, and while we supped hortensius gave orders that orpheus be summoned: when he came, arrayed in his long robe, with a cithara in his hands, he was desired to sing. at that moment a trumpet was sounded and at once orpheus was surrounded by a large audience of deer and wild boars and other quadrupeds: it seemed to be not less agreeable a spectacle than the shows of game, without african beasts, which the aediles provide in the circus maximus." _of snails_ xiv. and turning to merula, axius continued: "appius has lightened your task, my dear merula, so far as concerns the matter of game, and briefly the second act of our drama may be brought to an end, for i do not seek to learn any thing about snails and dormice, which is all that is left on the programme, for there can be no great trouble in keeping them." "it is not so simple as you seem to think, my dear axius," replied merula, "for a place suitable for keeping snails[ ] i must be not only in the open air but entirely surrounded by water, otherwise you will be kept running not only after the children but also the parents which you have supplied for breeding." "in other words," said i, "they must be enclosed by water to save the maintenance of a slave catcher." "a place which is not baked by the sun and on which the dew remains is preferable," continued merula. "if the place you use for your snails is not supplied with dew naturally, as often is the case in sunny situations, and there is no available shady recess, such as is found under rocks or hills whose feet are laved by a lake or a stream, then you must supply dew artificially. this may be done by leading into the snailery a pipe on the end of which is fixed a rose nozzle, through which water is forced against a rock so that it scatters in spray. the problem of feeding snails is small, for they supply themselves without help, finding what they require as they creep over the level ground and also while clinging to the sides of a wall, if no running water prevents their access to it. on the hucksters' stands they keep alive a long time, as it were chewing their own cud, all that is done for them being to supply a few laurel leaves and scatter a little bran over them: so a cook never knows whether he is cooking them alive or dead. "there are many kinds of snails, such as the small white ones, which come from reate: the large variety which are imported from illyricum, and the medium size which come from africa: but they vary in size in certain localities of each of those countries. thus, there is found in africa a variety which are called _solitannae_ of so great size that their shells will hold ten quarts:[ ] and so in the other countries i have named they are found together of all sizes. they produce an innumerable progeny, which at first are very small and soft but develop their hard shell with time. if you have large islands in the enclosure you may expect a rich haul from your snails. "snails are fattened by placing them in a jar smeared with boiled must and corn meal, on which they feed, and pierced with holes to admit the air, but they are naturally hardy." _of dormice_ xv. "dormice[ ] are preserved on a different systern than snails, for while the one is confined by barriers of water, the other is kept in by a wall which must be coated on the inside with smooth stone or stucco to prevent their escape. young nut trees should be planted in the enclosure, and when these are not bearing, mast and chestnuts should be thrown in to the dormice, for that is what makes them fat. roomy cages should be provided for them in which to rear their young.[ ] little water is necessary, for dormice do not require much water, but on the contrary affect dry places. they are fattened in jars which are usually kept indoors. the potters make these jars in different shapes, but with paths for the dormice to use contrived on the sides and a hollow to hold their food, which consists of mast, walnuts and chestnuts.[ ] covers are placed on the jars and there in the dark the dormice are fattened." _of bees_ xvi. "it remains now," said appius, "to rehearse the third and last act of our drama of the husbandry of the steading and to discuss the keeping of fishes." "the third, indeed," exclaimed axius, "shall we deprive ourselves of honey because in your youth you never drank mead in your own house, such was your practice of frugality?" "he speaks the truth," said appius, to us, "for i was indeed left a poor orphan with two brothers and two sisters to provide for, and it was not until i had married one of them to lucullus without portion and he had named me his heir that i began to drink mead in my own house and to supply it to my household: but there never was a day when i did not offer it to all my guests. but apart from that, it has been my fortune, not yours,[ ] axius, to have known these winged creatures whom nature has endowed so richly with industry and art, and that you may appreciate that i know more than you do of their almost incredible natural art, listen to what i am to say. it will then be for merula to develop the practice of the bee keeper, or, as the greeks call it, [greek: melittourgia], as methodically as he has his other subjects. "to begin then,[ ] bees are generated partly by other bees and partly from the decaying carcase of an ox: so archelaus in one of his epigrams calls them 'flitting offspring of decaying beef,' and else where he says, 'wasps spring from horses, bees from calves.' "bees are not of a solitary habit like eagles, but are of a social nature, like men, a characteristic they share with daws, but not for the same reason, for bees live in colonies, the better to work and build, while daws congregate for gossip. thus the life of a bee is one of intelligence and art, for man has learned from them to manufacture, to build, and to store his food: three occupations which are not the same but are diverse in their nature, for it is one thing to provide food, another to manufacture wax and honey, and still another to build a house. has not each cell in a honey comb six sides, or as many as a bee has feet, the art of which arrangement appears in the teaching of the geometricians that of all polygons the hexagon covers the largest area within a circle.[ ] bees feed out of doors, but it is at home that they manufacture that which is the sweetest of all things, acceptable to gods and men alike: for honey comb is offered on the altars and honey is served at the beginning of a dinner and again at dessert. "bees have institutions like our own, consisting of royalty, government and organized society. cleanliness in all things is their aim: and so they never alight in any place where there is filth or an evil odour, or even where there is a strong savour of such an unguent as we may consider agreeable. for the same reason if one who approaches them is covered with perfume,[ ] they do not lick him as flies do, but they sting him, and by the same token no one ever sees bees crawling on meat and blood and grease, as flies do. and so they only settle in places of sweet savour. they do a minimum of damage because in their harvesting they leave what they touch none the worse.[ ] they are not so cowardly as not to resist who ever attempts to disturb them, and yet they are fully conscious of their own weakness. they are called the winged servants of the muses, because when they swarm they are quickly brought together by the music of cymbals and the clapping of hands: and as men assign helicon and olympus to be the haunts of the muses, so nature has attributed the flowery and uncultivated mountains to the bees. they follow their king[ ] wheresoever he goes, supporting him when he is tired and even taking him upon their backs if he is unable to fly, so do they wish to serve him.[ ] as they are not idlers themselves, so do they hate those who are, and thus driving out the drones, they exclude them from the hive, because they are of no service but merely consume honey: and it happens that a few bees, buzzing with wrath, will drive out a number of drones. "they smear every thing about the entrance to the hive with a gum which is found between the cells which the greeks call [greek: erithakae]. they live under the discipline of an army, taking turns in resting and all doing their equal share of work, and they send out colonies and carry out the orders of their leaders, given with the voice, but as it were with a trumpet: and in like manner they have signs of peace and of war. "but, merula, now in my course i pass on the torch to you, as our axius here is doubtless languishing while he has listened to all this natural history, for i have said nothing of profit." "i do not know," said merula, "whether what i can say on the subject of the profit to be derived from bees will satisfy you, axius, but i have as my authorities not only seius, who takes five thousand pounds of honey every year from the hives he leases,[ ] but also our friend varro here, for i have heard him tell of two brothers veiani, from the falerian territory, whom he had under his command in spain and who, although their father left them only a small house with a curtilage of not exceeding a jugerum in extent, nevertheless made themselves rich. they set bee hives all about the house and planted part of the land in a garden and filled up the rest with thyme and clover and that bee plant known to us as _apiastrum_, though some call it [greek: meliphullon], others [greek: mellissophullon] and still others _melittaena_: and by this means they were wont to derive, as they estimated, an average income of not less than ten thousand sesterces per annum from honey; but they did this by being willing to wait until they could sell at their own time and price rather than by forcing the market." "tell me," exclaimed axius, "where and how i should establish a bee-stand to make such a handsome profit." "the apiary," replied merula, "which some call by the greek names [greek: melitton] and [greek: melittotropheion], and others _mellarium_, should preferably be placed near the house[ ] in a location where there is no echo (for such sounds are deemed to put them to flight, as timid men are by the din of a battle) and where the temperature is mild, exposed neither to the heat of summer nor the cold of winter, giving preferably to the southeast and near of access to places where their food is abundant and there is a supply of fresh water. if there is no natural supply of food available you should plant such things as best serve bees for pasture, namely: roses, thyme, bee balm,[ ] poppies, beans, lentils, peas, basil, gladiolus, alfalfa, and especially clover which is of great service to the bees which are sick, for it begins to bloom at the vernal equinox and lasts until that of autumn. as clover is the best food for sick bees, so thyme is the best for making honey, and it is because sicily abounds in good thyme that it takes the palm for producing honey. on this account some men bruise thyme in a mortar and mix warm water with it and then spray all their nursery plants with it for the sake of the bees. "the hives should be set as near the house as convenient: some men even put them under the very portico for greater safety. hives are made in various shapes and sizes and of different material;[ ] thus some make them round out of wicker work: others of frame covered with bark: others use hollow tree trunks: others vessels of pottery: some even build them square out of rods, allowing about three feet in length and a foot in height, but these dimensions should be reduced where you have not enough bees to fill a hive of that size, for fear that the bees might become discouraged by too large an empty space. "the bee hive derives its name _alvus_, which is the same as our word for belly, from the fact that it holds food, that is to say, honey; and it is on this analogy that hives are usually shaped to imitate the form of the belly, small in the waist and bulging out below. when the hives are made of wicker work they should be coated evenly within and without with ox dung[ ] so that the bees may not be driven away by the roughness of their roof. the hives should be so ordered under the shelter of a wall that they may not be disturbed nor touch one another when arranged in ranks, for it is the practice to place hives in two and some times three separated ranks, but the opinion is that it is better to reduce the ranks to two than to increase them to four. in the middle of the hive small openings are made on the right and the left to serve as entrances for the bees, and on top is placed a practicable cover, which may be removed to give access to the honey comb. this is best when made of bark, and worst of pottery, because that is strongly affected both by the cold of winter and the heat of summer. in spring and summer the bee keeper should inspect each hive at least three times a month, fumigating them lightly, cleaning and throwing out dirt and worms. at the same time he should take precautions to keep down the number of princes, for they keep the bees from work by stirring up sedition. there are said to be three kinds of royalties among the bees: the black, the red and the mottled, or, as menecrates writes, two: the black and the mottled: and as the latter is the better it behooves the bee keeper, when he finds both kinds in a hive, to kill the black one, as he is forever playing politics[ ] against the other king, whereby the hive must suffer, for inevitably one of the kings will flee or be driven out, in either case taking his party with him. "of working bees the small round mottled variety is considered the best. the drone, or, as some call him, the thief,[ ] is black with a large belly. the wasp, which has some resemblance to a bee, is not, however, a fellow labourer, but attacks the bees with his sting, wherefore the bees keep him at a distance. "bees are themselves distinguished as wild and tame. i call those wild which feed in the forests, and those tame which feed in cultivated places. the forest bees are smaller in size and hairy but better workmen. "in buying bees it behooves the purchaser to see whether they are well or ailing. the signs of health are a thick swarm, well groomed appearance and a hive being filled in a workmanlike manner. the signs of lack of condition on the other hand are a hairy and bristling appearance and a dusty coat, unless this last is caused by a pressure of work, for under such circumstances they often wear themselves down and become thin. "if the hives are to be transferred from one place to another it is necessary to choose a fit time to make the move and a suitable place to receive them. as to time, spring is preferable to winter because in winter they have difficulty in adjusting themselves to a new location and so often run away, as they do also if you move them from a good location to a place where proper pasture is not available. nor is a transfer from one hive to another in the same place to be undertaken carelessly, but that to which the bees are to be transferred should be rubbed with bee balm, which will serve as a bait for them, and some pieces of honey comb should be placed in it, not far from the entrances, for fear that the bees might run away if they found the larder of their new home empty. "menecrates says that bees contract a malady of the bowels from their first spring pasture on the blossoms of the almond and the cornel cherry and are cured by giving them urine to drink.[ ] "that gummy substance which the bees use, chiefly in summer to construct a sort of curtain between the entrance and the hive, is called _propolis_, and by the same name is used by physicians in making plasters: by reason of which use it sells in the via sacra for more than honey itself. that substance which is called _erithacen_, and is used to glue the cells together, is different from both honey and _propolis_: it is supposed to have a quality of attraction for bees and is accordingly mixed with bee balm and smeared on the branch or other place on which it is desired to have a swarm light. the comb is made of wax and is multicellular, each cell in it having six sides or as many as nature has given the bee feet. it is said that bees do not gather from the same plants all the materials which enter in these four substances which they manufacture, namely: propolis, erithacen, wax and honey. thus from the pomegranate and the asparagus they gather food alone, wax from the olive tree, honey from the fig, but not of good quality: other plants like the bean, the bee balm, the gourd and the cabbage serve a double purpose and yield both wax and food: while the apple and the wild pear serve a similar double purpose but for food and honey and the poppy again for wax and honey. "others again provide material for three purposes, food, honey and wax, such as the almond and the charlock.[ ] in like manner there are flowers from each of which they derive a different one of these substances, and others from which they derive several of them: while they make distinctions in respect of plants according to the quality of the product they yield,--or rather the plants make the distinction for them--as with respect to honey, some yield liquid honey, like the skirwort,[ ] and others thick honey like the rosemary. so again honey of insipid flavour is made from the fig, good honey from clover, and the best of all from thyme. "and since drink is part of a bee's diet and water is the liquid they use, there should be provided near the stand a place for them to drink, which may be either a running stream or a reservoir not more than two or three fingers deep in which bricks or stones are placed in such a way as to project a little from the water, and so furnish a place for the bees to sit and drink; but the greatest care must be taken to keep this water fresh, as it is of high importance to the making of good honey. "as the bees cannot go out to distant pasture in all weathers, food must be prepared for them, as otherwise they will live on their supply of honey and so deplete the store in the hive. for this purpose ten pounds of ripe figs may be boiled in six congii of water and bits of the paste thus prepared should be set out near the hives. others provide honey water in little dishes and float flocks of clean wool on them through which the bees may suck without risk of either getting more than is good for them or of being drowned. one such dish should be provided for each hive and they should be kept filled. others again bray dried grapes and figs together and, mixing in some boiled must, make a paste of which bits are exposed near the hives during such part of the winter as the bees are still able to go forth in search of food. "when a swarm is about to come out of the hive (which happens when a number of young bees have matured, and the hive determines to send their youth out to found a colony, as formerly the sabines often were compelled to do on account of the number of their children)[ ] there are two signs by which the intention may be known: one that for several days before hand, and especially in the evening, many bees weave themselves together and hang upon the entrance of the hive like grapes: the other that when they are about to go forth or have already begun to go they buzz together lustily, as soldiers do when they break camp. those who have come forth first fly about the hive waiting for the others, who have not yet collected, to join them. when the bee keeper notices this he has only to throw dust on them and at the same time beat upon some copper vessel to collect them, thoroughly frightened, where he desires in some nearby place on which he has smeared erithacen and bees' balm and other things in which they delight. when they have settled down he should place near them a hive smeared within with the same baits, and then, by blowing a light smoke around them, compel them to enter the hive. when thus introduced into their new abode the swarm makes itself at home cheerfully, so that even if placed next to the parent hive they will prefer their new colonial settlement. "and now, having told you all i know about the care of bees, i will speak of that for which the industry is carried on, that is to say, of the profit. "the honey is taken off when the hive is full, as may be determined by removing the cover of the hive, for if the openings of the combs are seen to be sealed, as it were with a skin, then the hive is full of honey: but the bees themselves give notice of this condition by keeping up a loud buzzing within, by their agitation when they go in and out and by driving out the drones. "in taking off honey some say that you should be content with nine parts, leaving the tenth, because if you take it all the bees will desert the hive: others leave a still larger proportion than i have mentioned. "as those who crop their corn land every year obtain good yields only at intervals, so it is with bee hives: you will have more industrious and more profitable bees if you do not exact of them the same tribute every year. "it is considered that honey should be taken off for the first time at the rising of the pleiades, for the second time at the end of summer before arcturus has reached the zenith, and for the third time after the setting of the pleiades, but this last time beware not to take more than one-third of the store even if the hive is full, leaving the other two-thirds for the winter supply, but if the hive is only partially filled nothing should be taken off. in any event, when a large amount of honey is to be taken off a hive it should not be done all at once or ostentatiously less the bees be discouraged. those combs which, on being taken off, are found to be partly unfilled with honey or to be soiled, should be pared with a knife. "care must be taken that the weaker bees in a hive are not oppressed by the stronger, for this diminishes the profit: to this end the minority party[ ] may be colonized under another king. when bees are given to fighting with one another, you should sprinkle them with honey water, upon which they will not only cease fighting but will crowd together and kiss one another: and this will prove the case even more if they are sprinkled with mead, for the savour of the wine in it will cause them to apply themselves so greedily that they will fuddle themselves in sucking it. if the bees seem lazy about coming out to work and any part of them get the habit of remaining in the hive, they should be fumigated and odoriferous herbs, like bees' balm and thyme, should be placed near the hive. watchful care is necessary to protect them from ruin by heat or cold. if the bees are overtaken by a sudden rain or cold while at pasture (which rarely happens for they usually foresee such things) and are stricken down by the heavy rain drops and laid low and stunned, you should gather them in a dish and place them under cover in a warm place until the weather has cleared, when they should be sprinkled with ashes of fig wood (making sure that the ashes are rather hot than warm) the dish should then be shaken gently without touching the bees with your hand, and placed in the sun. when the bees feel this warmth they revive and get on their feet again, just as flies do after they have been apparently drowned. this should be done near the hive so that when the bees have come to themselves they may return home and to work." _of fish ponds_ xvii. here pavo returned and said: "you may weigh anchor now if you wish. the drawing of the lots of the tribes to determine a tie vote is over and the herald is announcing the result of the election." appius arose without delay and went to congratulate his candidate, and escort him home. merula said: "i will leave the third act of our drama of the husbandry of the steading to you, axius," and went out with the others, leaving axius with me to wait for our candidate whom we knew would come to join us. axius said to me: "i do not regret merula's departure at this point, for i am quite well up on the subject of fish ponds, which still remains to complete our programme. "there are two kinds of fish ponds, of fresh water and salt water. the former are commonly maintained by farmers and without much expense, for the lymphae, the homely goddesses of the fountains, supply the water for them, while the latter, the sea ponds, are the play things of our nobles and are furnished with both water and fishes, as it were by neptune himself: serving more the purposes of pleasure than of utility, their accomplishment being rather to empty than to fill the exchequers of their lords. for in the first place they are built at great expense, then they are stocked at great expense, and finally they are maintained at great expense. "hirrus was wont to derive an income of twelve thousand sesterces from the buildings surrounding his fish ponds, all of which he spent for food for his fishes: and no wonder, for i remember that on one occasion he lent two thousand _murenae_ to caesar[ ] by weight (stipulating for their return in kind), so that his villa (which was not otherwise extraordinary) sold for four million sesterces on account of the stock of fish. "in sooth, the inland ponds of our farmer folk may well be called _dulcis_, and those other _amara_.[ ] "a single fish pond suffices us simple folk, but those amateurs must have a series of them linked together: for as pausias and other painters of his school have boxes with as many compartments as they have different coloured wax, so must they fain have as many ponds as they have different varieties of fish. "these fish are furthermore sacred, more sacred, indeed, than those fish which you, varro, say you saw in lydia, (at the same time that you saw the dancing isles)[ ] which came to the shore, where the altar was erected for a sacrifice, in shoals at the sound of the greek pipe, because no one ever ventured to molest them; so no cook has ever been known to have 'sauced' one of these fishes.[ ] "when our friend hortensius had those fish ponds at baulii, which represented so large an investment, he was wont to send to puteoli to buy the fish he served on his table, as i have often seen when i was visiting him. and it was not enough that his fishes did not supply his table, but he was at pains to supply theirs, taking greater precautions lest his mullets (_mulli_) should go hungry than i do for my mules in rosea, and it was not at less cost that he supplied meat and drink to his stock than i do to mine. for i raise my asses, which bring such fancy prices, at the cost of one servant, a little barley and the water which springs from my land, while hortensius must needs maintain a fleet of fishermen to keep him supplied with small fry to feed to his fish, or, when the sea runs high and such deep sea forage is cut off by a storm, and it is not possible even to draw live bait ashore in a net, he is fain to buy in the market for the delectation of the denizens of his ponds the very salt fish which is the food of the people." "doubtless," said i, "hortensius would prefer to have you take the carriage mules out of his stable than one of his barbel mules from the fish pond." "yes, indeed," agreed axius, "and he would rather have a sick slave drink cold water than that his beloved fish should be risked in that which is fresh. on the other hand, m. lucullus was reputed to be so careless and neglectful of his fish ponds that he did not provide any suitable quarters for his fishes in hot weather, but permitted them to remain in ponds which were unhealthy with stagnant water: a practice very different from that of his brother l. lucullus, who yielded nothing to neptune himself in his care of his fishes, for he pierced a mountain at naples, and so contrived that the sea water in his fish ponds should be renewed by the action of the tides. furthermore, he has arranged that his beloved fishes may be driven into a cool place during the heat of the day, just as the apulian shepherds do when they drive their flocks along the drift ways to the sabine mountains: for so great was his ardour for the welfare of his fishes that he gave a commission to his architect to drive at his sole cost a tunnel from his fish ponds at raise to the sea, and by throwing out a mole contrived that the tide should flow in and out of his fish ponds twice a day, from moon to moon, and so cool them off." at this moment, while we were talking, there was a sound of foot steps on the right and our candidate came into the _villa publica_ arrayed in the broad purple of his new rank as an aedile. we went to meet him and, after congratulations, escorted him to the capitol, whence he departed for his home and we to ours. so there, my dear pinnius, is the brief record of our discourse on the husbandry of the steading. footnotes: [footnote : "the manner in which the ancients managed their fallow is certainly most worthy of our attention: their care in ploughing, according to the situation of the land, and nature of the climate, and their manner of adapting the kind of ploughing to answer the purposes intended by the operation, are also most worthy of our imitation. their exactness in these things exceeds any thing of the kind found amongst the moderns, and is even beyond what any practical writer on agriculture has proposed. this is an evidence that tillage is not even in this age brought to that perfection of which it is capable: and that, notwithstanding all the improvements lately introduced, we may yet receive some instruction from a proper attention to the precepts and practices of the ancients. i am desirous to add that this attention may be useful by preventing improvers from running into every specious scheme of agriculture produced by a lively imagination and engaging them to study the great variety of soils and even climates in this island, and to be careful in adapting to these their several operations." dickson _husbandry of the ancients_, xxiii. the rev. andrew dickson, who died in , was minister of aberlady in the county of east lothian, the son of a progressive and successful scots farmer, and had experience in practical agriculture, as well as in scholarship, as his book shows.] [footnote : the compilation of rural lore, known as the _geoponica_, which exists in greek, was made at byzantium for the emperor constantine vii about the middle of the tenth century a.d. it is very largely a paraphrase of the roman authors, and is useful principally in elucidating their textual difficulties.] [footnote : donald g. mitchell made an interesting collation, in his _wet days at edgewood_, of the large number of books on agriculture which have been written in old age and by men of affairs, in many lands and many languages.] [footnote : it is interesting to record, however, that varro received the _navalis corona_ for personal gallantry in the war against the pirates. this distinction was even more rare than our modern medal of honor or victoria cross, and was awarded only to a commander who leapt under arms on the deck of an enemies' ship and then succeeded in capturing her.] [footnote : caesar did not live to accomplish this, but some years after his death a public library was established at rome by asinius pollio, which pliny says (h.n. vii, ) was the first ever built, those at alexandria and pergamus having been private institutions of the kings. in a land where public libraries have been every where founded out of the accumulations of big business, it is interesting to note that pollio derived the funds with which this the first of their kind was endowed, from the plunder of the illyrians!] [footnote : cf. sellar, _roman poets of the augustan age_. virgil ch. v. boissier, _etudes sur m.t. varron_, ch. ix. servius _comm. in verg. georg_. i, . it does not appear that many of the commentators on virgil have taken the trouble to study varro thoroughly. they are usually better scholars than farmers.] [footnote : it is not remarkable that virgil failed to make acknowledgment to varro in the _georgics_ when he failed to make acknowledgment to homer in the _aeneid_. see petrarch's _epistle to homer_ for a loyal but vain attempt to justify this neglect.] [footnote : _cf_. w.h. myers' _classical essays_, p. : "for in the face of some german criticism it is necessary to repeat that in order to judge poetry it is, before all things, necessary to enjoy it. we may all desire that historical and philological science should push her dominion into every recess of human action and human speech, but we must utter some protest when the very heights of parnassus are invaded by a spirit which surely is not science, but her unmeaning shadow; a spirit which would degrade every masterpiece of human genius into the mere pabulum of hungry professors, and which values a poet's text only as a field for the rivalries of sterile pedantry and arbitrary conjecture."] [footnote : it was perhaps this encomium upon the farmer at the expense of the banker which inspired horace's friend alfius to withdraw his capital from his banking business and dream a delicious idyl of a simple carefree country life: but, it will be recalled (epode ii, the famous "beatus ille qui procul negotiis") that alfius, like many a modern amateur farmer, recruited from town, soon repented that he had ever listened to the alluring call of "back to the land" and after a few weeks of disillusion in the country, returned to town and sought to get his money out again at usury. columella (i, praef.) is not content with cato's contrast of the virtue of the farmer with the iniquity of the banker, but he brings in the lawyer's profession for animadversion also. this, he says, the ancient romans used to term a canine profession, because it consisted in barking at the rich.] [footnote : the roman numerals at the beginning of the paragraphs indicate the chapters of cato from which they are translated. if cato had not pretended to despise every thing which smacked of greek literary art he might have edited and arranged his material, in which event his book would have been easier to read than it is, and no less valuable. modern scholarship would not now venture to perform such an office for such a result, because it involves tampering with a text (as who should say, shooting a fox!) and yet modern scholarship wonders at the decay of classical studies in an impatient age. at the risk of anathema the present version has attempted to group cato's material, and in so doing has omitted most of those portions which are now of merely curious interest.] [footnote : this, of course, means buying at a high price, except in extraordinary cases. there is another system of agriculture which admits of the pride of making two blades of grass grow where none was before, and the profit which comes of buying cheap and selling dear. this is farming for improvement, an art which was well described two hundred years before cato. xenophon (_economicus_ xx, ) says: "for those who are able to attend to their affairs, however, and who will apply themselves to agriculture earnestly, my lather both practised himself and taught me a most successful method of making profit; for he would never allow me to buy ground already cultivated, but exhorted me to purchase such as from want of care or want of means in those who had possessed it, was left untilled and unplanted. he used to say that well cultivated land cost a great sum of money and admitted of no improvement, and he considered that land which is unsusceptible of improvement did not give the same pleasure to the owner as other land, but he thought that whatever a person had or bought up that was continually growing better afforded him the highest gratification."] [footnote : every rural community in the eastern part of the united states has grown familiar with the contrast between the intelligent amateur, who, while endeavoring earnestly to set an example of good agriculture, fails to make expenses out of his land, and the born farmer who is self-supporting in the practice of methods contemned by the agricultural colleges. too often the conclusion is drawn that scientific agriculture will not pay; but cato puts his finger on the true reason. the man who does not depend on his land for his living too often permits his farm to get what cato calls the "spending habit." pliny (_h.n._ xviii, ) makes some pertinent observations on the subject: "i may possibly appear guilty of some degree of rashness in making mention of a maxim of the ancients which will very probably be looked upon as quite incredible, 'that nothing is so disadvantageous as to cultivate land in the highest style of perfection.'" and he illustrates by the example of a roman gentleman, who, like arthur young in eighteenth century england, wasted a large fortune in an attempt to bring his lands to perfect cultivation. "to cultivate land well is absolutely necessary," pliny continues, "but to cultivate it in the very highest style is mere extravagance, unless, indeed, the work is done by the hands of a man's own family, his tenants, or those whom he is obliged to keep at any rate."] [footnote : in this practice has been the delight of men of affairs of all ages who turn to agriculture for relaxation. horace cites it with telling effect in the ode (iii, ) in which he describes the noble serenity of mind with which regulus returned to the torture and certain death which awaited him at carthage: and homer makes an enduring picture of it in the person of the king supervising his fall ploughing, which hephsestus wrought upon the shield of achilles (_iliad_, xviii, ). "furthermore, he set in the shield a soft fresh ploughed field, rich tilth and wide, the third time ploughed, and many ploughers therein drove their yokes to and fro as they wheeled about. whensoever they came to the boundary of the field and turned, then would a man come to each and give into his hands a goblet of sweet wine: while others would be turning back along the furrows, fain to reach the boundary of the deep tilth, ... and among them the king was standing in silence, with his staff, rejoicing in his heart."] [footnote : this advice to sell the worn out oxen and the sick slaves justly excited plutarch's generous scorn, and has been made the text of a sweeping denunciation by mommsen of the practice of husbandry by men of affairs in cato's time. "the whole system," says mommsen, "was pervaded by the utterly unscrupulous spirit characteristic of the power of capital." and he adds, "if we have risen to that little-to-be-envied elevation of thought which values no feature of an economy save the capital invested in it, we cannot deny to the management of the roman estates the praise of consistency, energy, punctuality, frugality and solidity." without any desire to defend cato, one may suggest, out of an experience in a kind of farm management not very different from that cato pictures, that it is doubtful whether even cato himself was quite as economical and efficient, and so as capitalistic in his farming, as he advises others to be: certainly a whole race of contemporary country gentlemen was not equal to it. it is much easier to write about business-like farming than to practise it.] [footnote : hesiod (w. & d. ) had already given this same advice to the greek farmer: "invite the man that loves thee to a feast, but let alone thine enemy, and especially invite him that dwelleth near thee, for if, mark you, any thing untoward shall have happened at home neighbours are wont to come ungirt, but kinsfolk gird themselves first." this agreement of the socialist hesiod with the capitalist cato is remarkable only as it illustrates that both systems when wisely expounded rest on human nature. that upon which they here agree is the foundation of the modern european societies for rural co-operative credit which president taft recommended to the american people. these societies, says the bulletin of the international institute of agriculture published at rome in , rest on three chief safeguards: (a) that membership is confined to persons residing within a small district, and, therefore, the members are personally known to one another; (b) that the members, being mutually responsible, it will be to the interest of all members to keep an eye upon a borrower and to see that he makes proper use of the money lent to him; (c) that in like manner, it is to the interest of all members to help a member when he is in difficulties.] [footnote : this was an estate of average size, probably within virgil's precept, (_georgic_ ii, ). "laudato ingentia rura, exiguum colito." some scholars have deemed this phrase a quotation from cato, but it is more likely derived from mago the carthaginian who is reported to have said: "imbecilliorem agrum quam agricolam, esse debere,"--the farmer should be bigger than his farm.] [footnote : the philosophy of cato's plan, of laying out a farm is found in the agricultural history of the romans down to the time of the punic wars. mommsen (ii, ) gives the facts, and ferrero in his first volume makes brilliant use of them. there is sketched the old peasant aristocrat living on his few acres, his decay and the creation of comparatively large estates worked by slaves in charge of overseers, which followed the conquest of the italian states about b.c. . this was the civilization in which cato had been reared, but in his time another important change was taking place. the roman frontier was again widened by the conquest of the mediterranean basin: the acquisition of sicily and sardinia ended breadstuff farming as the staple on the italian peninsular. the competition of the broad and fertile acres of those great islands had the effect in italy which the cultivation of the dakota wheat lands had upon the grain farming of new york and virginia. about b.c. the vine and the olive became the staples of italy and corn was superseded. although this was not accomplished until after cato's death, he foresaw it, and recommended that a farm be laid out accordingly, and his scheme of putting one's reliance upon the vine and the olive was doubtless very advanced doctrine, when it first found expression.] [footnote : pliny quotes cato as advising to buy what others have built rather than build oneself, and thus, as he says, enjoy the fruits of another's folly. the _cacoethes aedificandi_ is a familiar disease among country gentlemen.] [footnote : columella (i, ) makes the acute observation that the country house should also be agreeable to the owner's wife if he wishes to get the full measure of enjoyment out of it. mago, the carthaginian, advised to, "if you buy a farm, sell your house in town, lest you be tempted to prefer the cultivation of the urban gods to those of the country."] [footnote : according to german scholarship the accepted text of cato's version of this immemorial epigram is a model of the brevity which is the test of wit, "frons occipitio prior est." pliny probably quoting from memory, expands it to "frons domini plus prodest quam occípitíum." palladius (i, ) gives another version: "praesentia domini provectus est agri." it is found in some form in almost every book on agriculture since cato, until we reach the literature in which science has taken the place of wisdom--in the byzantine _geoponica_, the italian _crescenzi_, the dutch _heresbach_, the french _maison rustique_, and the english _gervase markkam. poor richard's almanack_ gives it twice, as "the foot of a master is the best manure" and "the eye of a master will do more work than both his hands." it is perennial in its appeal. the present editor saw it recently in the german comic paper _fliegende blätter_. but the jest is much older than cato. it appears in aeschylus, _persae_, and xenophon employs it in _oeconomicus_ (xii, ): "the reply attributed to the barbarian," added ischomachus, "appears to me to be exceedingly to the purpose, for when the king of persia having met with a fine horse and wishing to have it fattened as soon as possible, asked one of those who were considered knowing about horses what would fatten a horse soonest, it is said that he answered 'the master's eye.'"] [footnote : the english word "orchard" scarcely translates _arbustum_, but every one who has been in italy will recall the endless procession of small fields of maize and rye and alfalfa through which serried ranks of mulberry or feathery elm trees, linked with the charming drop and garland of the vines, seem to dance toward one in the brilliant sunlight, like so many greek maidens on a frieze. these are _arbusta_.] [footnote : cato was a strong advocate of the cabbage; he called it the best of the vegetables and urged that it be planted in every garden for health and happiness. horace records (odes. iii, , ) that old cato's virtue was frequently warmed with wine, and cato himself explains (clvi) how this could be accomplished without loss of dignity, for, he says, if, after you have dined well, you will eat five cabbage leaves they will make you feel as if you had had nothing to drink, so that you can drink as much more as you wish--"bibesque quantum voles!" this was an ancient egyptian precaution which the greeks had learned. cf. athenaeus, i, .] [footnote : henry home, lord kames, a scots judge of the eighteenth century, whom dr. johnson considered a better farmer than judge and a better judge than scholar, but who had many of the characteristics of our _priscus_ cato, argues (following an english tradition which had previously been voiced by walter of henley and sir anthony fitzherbert) in his ingenious _gentleman farmer_ against the expense of ploughing with horses and urges a return to oxen. he points out that horses involve a large original investment, are worn out in farm work, and after their prime steadily depreciate in value; while, on the other hand, the ox can be fattened for market when his usefulness as a draught animal is over, and then sell for more than his original cost; that he is less subject to infirmities than the horse; can be fed per tractive unit more economically and gives more valuable manure. these are strong arguments where the cost of human labour is small and economical farm management does not require that the time of the ploughman shall be limited if the unit cost of ploughing is to be reasonable. the ox is slow, but in slave times he might reasonably have been preferred to the horse. today lord kames, (or even old hesiod, who urged that a ploughman of forty year and a yoke of eight year steers be employed because they turned a more deliberate and so a better furrow) would be considering the economical practicability of the gasolene motor as tractive power for a gang of "crooked" ploughs.] [footnote : cato adds a long list of implements and other necessary equipment.] [footnote : the roman overseer was usually a superior, and often a much indulged, slave. cf. horace's letter (_epist._ i, ) to his overseer.] [footnote : this was the traditional wisdom which was preached also in virginia in slave times. in his arator ( ) col. john taylor of caroline says of agricultural slaves: "the best source for securing their happiness, their honesty and their usefulness is their food.... one great value of establishing a comfortable diet for slaves is its convenience as an instrument of reward and punishment, so powerful as almost to abolish the thefts which often diminish considerably the owner's ability to provide for them."] [footnote : reading "compitalibus in compito," literally "the cross roads altar on festival days."] [footnote : it is evident that cato's housekeeper would have welcomed a visit from mr. roosevelt's rural uplift commission. we may add to this sir anthony fitzherbert's description of the duties of a farmer's wife in sixteenth century england: "it is a wyues occupation to wynowe all maner of cornes, to make malte, to wasshe and wrynge, to make heye, shere corne, and in tyme of nede to helpe her husbande to fyll the mucke-wayne or dounge-carte, dryue the ploughe, to loode hey, corne and suche other. and to go or ride to the market, to sel butter, chese, mylke, egges, chekyns, capons, hennes, pygges, gese, and all maner of cornes. and also to bye all maner of necessarye thynges belongynge to houssholde, and to make a trewe rekenynge and acompte to her husbande what she hath payed." sir anthony fitzherbert ( - ) was the english judge whose law books are, or should be, known to all lawyers. his _boke of husbandry_, published in , is one of the classics of english agriculture, and justly, for it is full of shrewd observation and deliberate wisdom expressed in a virile style, with agreeable leaven of piety and humour. fitzherbert anticipated a modern poet, henley, in one of his most happy phrases: "ryght so euery man is capitayne of his owne soule". the husbandry is best available to the modern reader in the edition by skeat published for the english dialect society in .] [footnote : cato is careful not to undertake to say how this may be assured; another evidence of his wisdom.] [footnote : in his instructive discourse on ploughing, columella (ii, ) gives the key to cato's warning against ploughing land when it is in the condition he calls rotten (_cariosa_): "rich land, which holds moisture a long time, should be broken up (_proscindere_) at the season when the weather is beginning to be warm and the weeds are developing, so that none of their seed may mature: but it should be ploughed with such close furrows that one can with difficulty distinguish where the plough share has been, for in that way all the weeds are uprooted and destroyed. "the spring ploughing should be followed up with frequent stirring of the soil until it is reduced to dust, so that there may be no necessity, or very little, of harrowing after the land is seeded: for the ancient romans said that a field was badly ploughed which had to be harrowed after the seed had been sown. "a farmer should himself make sure that his ploughing has been well done, not alone by inspection, for the eye is often amused by a smooth surface which in fact conceals clods, but also by experiment, which is less likely to be deceived, as by driving a stout stick through the furrows: if it penetrates the soil readily and without obstruction, it will be evident that all the land there about is in good order: but if some part harder than the rest resists the pressure, it will be clear that the ploughing has been badly done. when the ploughmen see this done from time to time they are not guilty of clod hopping. "hence wet land should be broken up after the ides of april, and, when it has been ploughed at that season, it should be worked again, after an interval of twenty days, about the time of the solstice, which is the eighth or ninth day before the kalends of july, and again the third time about the kalends of september, for it is not the practice of experienced farmers to till the land in the interval after the summer solstice, unless the ground shall have been soaked with a heavy down-pour of sudden rain, like those of winter, as does some times happen at this season. in that event there is no reason why the fallow should not be cultivated during the month of july. but when you do till at this season beware lest the land be worked while it is muddy: or when, having been sprinkled by a shower, it is in the condition which the country people call _varia_ and _cariosa_, that is to say, when, after a long drought, a light rain has moistened the surface of the upturned sod but has not soaked to the bottom of the furrow. "those plough lands which are cultivated when they are miry are rendered useless for an entire year--they can be neither seeded nor harrowed nor hoed--but those which are worked when they are in the state which has been described as varia, remain sterile for three years on end. we should, therefore, follow a medium course and plough when the land neither lacks moisture nor yet is deep in marsh."] [footnote : columella (ii, ) justly says about manure, "wherefore if it is, as it would seem to be, the thing of the greatest value to the farmer, i consider that it should be studied with the greatest care, especially since the ancient authors, while they have not altogether neglected it, have nevertheless discussed it with too little elaboration." he goes on (ii, ) to lay down rules about the compost heap which should be written in letters of gold in every farm house. "i appreciate that there are certain kinds of farms on which it is impossible to keep either live stock or birds, yet even in such places it is a lazy farmer who lacks manure: for he can collect leaves, rubbish from the hedge rows, and droppings from the high ways: without giving offence, and indeed earning gratitude, he can cut ferns from his neighbour's land: and all these things he can mingle with the sweepings of the courtyard: he can dig a pit, like that we have counselled for the protection of stable manure, and there mix together ashes, sewage, and straw, and indeed every waste thing which is swept up on the place. but it is wise to bury a piece of oak wood in the midst of this compost, for that will prevent venomous snakes from lurking in it. this will suffice for a farm without live stock." one can see in flanders today the happy land smiling its appreciation of farm management such as this, but what american farmer has yet learned this kind of conservation of his natural resources.] [footnote : the occupants of the motor cars which now roll so swiftly and so comfortably along the french national highway from paris to tours, through the pleasant _pays de beauce_, can see this admirable and economical method of manuring still in practice. the sheep are folded and fed at night, under the watchful eye of the shepherd stretched at ease in his wheeled cabin, on the land which was ploughed the day before.] [footnote : these of course are all legumes. the intelligent farmer today sits under his shade tree and meditates comfortably upon the least expensive and most profitable labour on his farm, the countless millions of beneficent bacteria who, his willing slaves, are ceaselessly at work during hot weather forming root tubercles on his legumes, be it clover or cow peas, and so fixing for their lord the free atmospheric nitrogen contained in the soil. as macaulay would say, "every school boy knows" now that leguminous root nodules are endotrophic mycorrhiza,--but the romans did not! nevertheless their empirical practice of soil improvement with legumes was quite as good as ours. varro (i, ) explains the roman method of green manuring more fully than cato. columella (ii, ) insists further that if the hay is saved the stubble of legumes should be promptly ploughed for he says the roots will evaporate their own moisture and continue to pump the land of its fertility unless they are at once turned over. if the romans followed this wise advice they were better farmers than most of us today, for we are usually content to let the stubble dry out before ploughing.] [footnote : was this ensilage? the ancients had their silo pits, but they used them chiefly as granaries, and as such they are described, by varro (i, , ), by columella (i, ), and by pliny (xviii, , ).] [footnote : the extravagant american farmer has not yet learned to feed the leaves of trees, but in older and more economical civilizations the practice is still observed.] [footnote : amurca was the dregs of olive oil. cato recommends its use for many purposes in the economy of the farm, for a moth proof (xcviii), as a relish for cattle (ciii), as a fertilizer (cxxx), and as an anointment for the threshing floor to kill weevil (xci).] [footnote : there is a similar remedy for scratches in horses, which is traditional in the cavalry service today, and is extraordinarily efficacious.] [footnote : cf. pliny _h.n._ xvii, and fraser, _the golden bough_, xi, . the principle is one of magical homeopathy: as the split reed, when bound together, may cohere and heal by the medicine of the incantation, so may the broken bone.] [footnote : these examples will serve to illustrate how far cato's veterinary science was behind his agriculture, and what a curious confusion of native good sense and traditional superstition there was in his method of caring for his live stock. on questions of preventing malady he had the wisdom of experience, but malady once arrived he was a simple pagan. there was a notable advance in the roman knowledge of how to treat sick cattle in the century after cato. cf. varro, ii, . the words of the incantations themselves are mere sound and fury signifying nothing, like the "counting out" rhythms used by children at their games.] [footnote : cato gives many recipes of household as well as agricultural economy. out of respect for the pure food law most of them have been here suppressed, but these samples are ventured because varro mentions them and the editor is advised that some enterprising young ladies in wisconsin have recently had the courage to put them to the test, and vow that they ate their handiwork! as they live to tell the tale, it is assumed that the recipes are harmless.] [footnote : cf. the following traditional formula as practised in virginia: a virginia recipe for curing hams "rub each ham separately with ½ teaspoonful of saltpetre (use a small spoon); then rub each ham with a large tablespoonfulof best black pepper; then rub each ham with a gill of molasses (black strap is best). then for , lbs. of ham take - / pecks of coarse salt, - / lbs. of saltpetre, qts. hickory ashes, qts. molasses, teacupfuls of red pepper. "mix all together on the salting table. then rub each ham with this mixture, and, in packing, spread some of it on each layer of ham. use no more salt than has been mixed. pack skin down and let stand for five weeks, then hang in the smoke house for five or six weeks, and smoke in damp weather, using hickory wood. "as a ham, however well cured, is of no use to civilized man until it is cooked, and as this crowning mystery is seldom revealed out of virginia, it may not be out of place to record here the process." a virginia recipe for cooking hams soak over night in cold water, having first scrubbed the ham with a small brush to remove all the pepper, saltpetre, etc., left from the curing process. put on to boil next morning in tepid water, skin downwards, letting it simmer on back of stove, never to boil hard. this takes about four hours (or until it is done, when the ham is supposed to turn over, skin upwards, of its own accord, as it will if the boiler is large enough). set aside over another night in the water it has boiled in. the _following_ day, skin and bake in the oven, having covered the ham well with brown sugar, basting at intervals with cider. when it is well baked, take it out of the oven and baste another ten to twenty minutes in the pan on top of the stove. the sugar crust should be quite brown and crisp when done. to be thoroughly appreciated a ham should be carved on the table, by a pretty woman. a thick slice of ham is a crime against good breeding.] [footnote : it is interesting that varro has realized the hope, here expressed, that his wisdom might survive for the benefit of the "uttermost generations of men" chiefly in the case of this treatise on husbandry among the many monuments of his industry and learning. petrarch in his _epistle to varro_ in that first delightful book of letters to dead authors (_de rebus familiaribus_ xxiv, ) rehearses the loss of varro's books and, adapting the thought here expressed in the text, regrets for that reason that varro cannot be included in that company of men "whom we love even after their death owing to the good and righteous deeds that live after them, men who mold our character by their teaching and comfort us by their example, when the rest of mankind offends both our eyes and our nostrils; men who, though they have gone hence to the common abode of all (as plautus says in casina), nevertheless continue to be of service to the living." if petrarch had been a farmer he might have saved some of his regret, for varro is surely, by virtue of the _rerum rusticarum_, a member of the fellowship petrarch describes.] [footnote : varro was essentially an antiquary and it is amusing to observe that he is unable to suppress his learning even in his prayers. one is reminded of the anecdote of the new england minister, who, in the course of an unctuous prayer, proclaimed, with magisterial authority, "paradoxical as it may appear, o lord, it is nevertheless true, etc."] [footnote : following plato and xenophon and cicero, varro cast his books into the form of dialogues to make them entertaining ("and what is the use of a book," thought alice in wonderland, "without pictures or conversations."): for the same reason he was careful about his local colour. thus the scene of this first book, which relates to agriculture proper, is laid at rome in the temple of earth on the festival of the seed sowing, and the characters bear names of punning reference to the tilling of the soil. varro was strong on puns, avowing (cicero _acad_. i, ) that that form of humour made it easier for people of small intelligence to swallow his learning.] [footnote : the story is that when scipio captured carthage he distributed the punic libraries among the native allies, reserving only the agricultural works of mago, which the roman senate subsequently ordered to be translated into latin, so highly were they esteemed. probably more real wealth was brought to rome in the pages of these precious volumes than was represented by all the other plunder of carthage. "the improving a kingdom in matter of husbandry is better than conquering a new kingdom," says old samuel hartlib, milton's friend, in his _legacie_. it is a curious fact that as the romans derived agricultural wisdom from their ancient enemies, so did the english. cf. thorold rogers' _six centuries of work and wages_. "we owe the improvements in english agriculture to holland. from this country we borrowed, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the cultivation of winter roots, and, at that of the eighteenth, the artificial grasses. the dutch had practised agriculture with the patient and minute industry of market gardeners. they had tried successfully to cultivate every thing to the uttermost, which could be used for human food, or could give innocent gratification to a refined taste. they taught agriculture and they taught gardening. they were the first people to surround their homesteads with flower beds, with groves, with trim parterres, with the finest turf, to improve fruit trees, to seek out and perfect edible roots and herbs at once for man and cattle. we owe to the dutch that scurvy and leprosy have been banished from england, that continuous crops have taken the place of barren fallows, that the true rotation of crops has been discovered and perfected, that the population of these islands has been increased and that the cattle and sheep in england are ten times what they were in numbers and three times what they were in size and quality."] [footnote : the roman proverb which agrius had in mind reminds one of the witty french woman's comment upon the achievement of st. denis in walking several miles to montmartre, after his head had been cut off, (as all the world can still see him doing in the verrières of notre dame de chartres): "en pareil cas, ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte."] [footnote : to this glowing description of agricultural italy in the augustan age may be annexed that of machiavelli on the state of tuscany in his youth: "ridotta tutta in somma pace e tranquillità, coltivata non meno ne' luoghi più montuosi e più sterili che nelle pianure e regioni più fertili...." it is our privilege to see the image of this fruitful cultivation of the mountain tops not only in machiavelli's prose, but on the walls of the palazzo riccardi in gozzoli's _journey of the magi_, where, like king robert of sicily, the magi crossed "into the lovely land of italy whose loveliness was more resplendent made by the mere passing of that cavalcade." it seems almost a pity to contrast with these the comment of a careful and sympathetic student of the agricultural italy of the age of king umberto: "to return to the question of the natural richness of agricultural italy," says dr. w.n. beauclerk in his _rural italy_ ( ), "we may compare the words of the german ballad: 'in italy macaroni ready cooked rains from the sky, and the vines are festooned with sausages,' with the words today rife throughout the kingdom, 'rural italy is poor and miserable, and has no future in store for her.' the fact is that italy is rich in capabilities of production, but exhausted in spontaneous fertility. her vast forests have been cut down, giving place to sterile and malarious ground: the plains and shores formerly covered with wealthy and populous cities are now deserted marshes: sardinia and other ancient granaries of the roman empire are empty and unproductive: two-thirds of the kingdom are occupied by mountains impossible of cultivation, and the remainder is to a large extent ill-farmed and unremunerative. to call italy the 'garden of europe' under these circumstances seems cruel irony."] [footnote : as we may assume that the yields of wine of which fundanius boasts were the largest of which varro had information in the italy of his time, it is interesting to compare them with the largest yields of the most productive wine country of france today. fifteen cullei, or three hundred amphorae per jugerum, is the equivalent of gallons per acre: while according to p. joigneaux, in the _livre de la ferme_, the largest yields in modern france are in the midi (specifically herault), where in exceptional cases they amount to as much as hectolitres to the hectare, or say gallons per acre. it may be noted that the yields of the best modern wines, like burgundy, are less than half of this, and it is probable that the same was true of the _vinum setinum_ of augustus, if not of the horatian massic.] [footnote : the modern italian opinion of farming in a fertile but unhealthy situation is expressed with a grim humour in the tuscan proverb: "in maremma s'arricchisce in un anno, si muore in sei mesi."] [footnote : this is keil's ingenious interpretation of an obscure passage. we may compare the english designation of a church yard as "god's acre." what licinius crassus actually did was, while haranguing from the rostra, to turn his back upon the comitium, where the senators gathered, and address himself directly to the people assembled in the forum. the act was significant as indicating that the sovereignty had changed place.] [footnote : tremelius scrofa was the author of a treatise on agriculture, which columella cites, but which has not otherwise survived.] [footnote : "it was a received opinion amongst the antients that a large, busy, well peopled village, situated in a country thoroughly cultivated, was a more magnificent sight than the palaces of noblemen and princes in the midst of neglected lands." harte's _essays on husbandry_, p. . this is a delightful book, the ripe product of a gentleman and a scholar. in the middle of the eighteenth century it advocated what we are still advocating--that agriculture, as the basis of national wealth, deserves the study and attention of the highest intelligence; specifically it proposed the introduction of new grasses and forage crops (alfalfa above all others) to enable the land to support more live stock. it was published in , just after france had ceded to england by the treaty of paris all of her possessions in america east of the mississippi river; and not the least interesting passages of harte's book are those proposing an agricultural development of the newly acquired territory between lake illinois (michigan) and the mississippi, which he suggests may be readily brought under cultivation with the aid of the buffaloes of the country. he shrewdly says: "maize may be raised in this part of canada to what quantity we please, for it grows there naturally in great abundance." it happened, however, that a few years later, in , col. george rogers clark of virginia made a certain expedition through the wilderness to the british outpost at vincennes, which saved england the trouble of taking harte's advice, but that it has not been neglected may be evident from the fact that less than a century and a half later, or in , the state of illinois produced million bushels of maize, besides twice as much oats and half as much wheat as did old england herself in the same year of grace. harte was the travelling governor of that young mr. stanhope, to whom my lord chesterfield wrote his famous worldly wise letters. he was the author also of a _life of gustavus adolphus_, which was a failure. dr. johnson, who liked harte, said: "it was unlucky in coming out on the same day with robertson's _history of scotland_. his _husbandry_, however, is good." (_boswell_, iv, ). with this judgment of dr. johnson there has been, and must be, general concurrence.] [footnote : pliny records (h.n. xviii, ) that at lucullus' farm there was less ground for ploughing than of floor for sweeping.] [footnote : eggs were the first course, as apples were the last, at a roman dinner, hence the saying "ab ovo usque ad mala."] [footnote : cf. gilbert murray's version of euripides' _troades_, : in salamis, filled with the foaming of billows and murmur of bees, old telamon stayed from his roaming, long ago, on a throne of the seas; looking out on the hills olive laden, enchanted, where first from the earth. the gray-gleaming fruit of the maiden athena had birth. the physical reason why the olive flourished in attica, as theophrastus points out (c.p.v. ii, ), was because it craves a thin soil, and that of attica, with its out-croppings of calcareous rock, suits the olive perfectly, while fit for little else agricultural.] [footnote : in the _geoponica_ (xiii, ) there has been preserved a remedy for a similar evil, which, in all fairness, should be credited to saserna. in any event, it is what the newspapers used to call "important, if true," viz: "if ever you come into a place where fleas abound, cry och! och! ([greek: och, och]) and they will not touch you."] [footnote : the editor of an iowa farm journal, who has been making a study of agricultural europe, has recently reported an interesting comparison between the results of extensive farming as practised in iowa and intensive farming as practised in bavaria. he begins with the thesis that the object of agriculture is to put the energy of the sun's rays into forms which animals and human beings can use, and, reducing the crop production of each country to thermal units, he finds "that for every man, woman and child connected with farming in iowa , therms of sun's energy were imprisoned, while for every man, woman and child connected with farming in bavaria only , therms were stored up. in other words, the average iowa farmer is six times as successful in his efforts to capture the power of the sun's rays as the average bavarian farmer. on the other hand, the average acre of iowa land is only about one-seventh as successful as the average acre of bavarian land in supporting those who live on it. if we look on land as the unit, then the bavarians get better results than we in iowa, but if we look on human labor as the unit, then the iowa farmers are far ahead of those of bavaria." it may be remarked that if the iowa farmer, who gets his results by the use of machinery, was to adopt also the intensive practice of the bavarian farmer, he would secure at once the greatest efficiency per acre and per man, and that is the true purpose of agriculture.] [footnote : it is one of the charms of varro's treatise that he always insists cheerfully on the pleasure to be derived from the land. it is the same spirit which conington has remarked cropping out in many places in virgil's _georgics_--the joy of the husbandman in his work, as in the "iuvat" of "iuvat ismara baccho conserere, atque olea magnum vestire taburnum." this is the blessed "surcease of sorrow" of which the crowded life of the modern city knows nothing: but, as the practical roman indicates, it will not support life of its own mere motion. cf. dr. johnson's picture of shenstone: "he began from this time to entangle his walks and to wind his waters: which he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skillful. his house was mean, and he did not improve it: his care was of his grounds.... in time his expences brought clamours about him, that overpowered the lambs' bleat and the linnets' song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fawns and fairies."] [footnote : walter of henley, in thirteenth century england, drove home a shrewd comment on the country gentleman who farms without keeping accounts and thinks he is engaged in a profitable industry. "you know surely," he says, "that an acre sown with wheat takes three ploughings, except lands which are sown yearly, and that one with another each ploughing is worth six pence, and harrowing a penny, and on the acre it is necessary to sow at least two bushels. now two bushels at michaelmas are worth at least twelve pence, and weeding a half penny and reaping five pence, and carrying in august a penny: the straw will pay for the threshing. at three times your sowing you ought to have six bushels, worth three shillings; and the cost amounts to three shillings and three half pence, and the ground is yours and not reckoned." of walter of henley little is known, but it is conjectured that he was the bailiff of the manors near henley which belonged to the abbey of canterbury. his curious and valuable _dite de hosebondrie_, which is as original in its way as cato's treatise, being entirely free from mere literary tradition, is now available to the modern reader in a translation, from the original barbarous english law french, by elizabeth lamond, made for the royal historical society in .] [footnote : this was just before pharsalia, and the army was that of pompey which varro had joined after surrendering to caesar in spain.] [footnote : in this enumeration of trees varro does not include the chestnut which is now one of the features of the italian mountain landscape and furnishes support for a considerable part of the italian population, who subsist on _necci_, those indigestible chestnut flour cakes, just as the irish peasants do on potatoes. the chestnut was late in getting a foothold in italy but it was there in varro's day. he mentions the nuts as part of the diet of dormice (iii, ). by the thirteenth century chestnuts had become an established article of human food in italy. pietro crescenzi ( - ) describes two varieties, the cultivated and the wild, and quotes the arabian physician avicenna to the effect that chestnuts are "di tarda digestione ma di buono nuttimento." it is perhaps for this very reason that chestnut bread is acceptable to those engaged in heavy labor. fynes moryson says in his _itinerary_ ( ) that maslin bread made of a mixture of rye and wheat flour was used by labourers in england because it "abode longer in the stomach and was not so soon digested with their labour." crescenzi, who was a lawyer and a judge, says in his preface that he had left his native bologna because of the civil strifes, had taken foreign service in several parts of italy, and so had opportunity to see the world. he wrote his book on agriculture because, as he says, of all the things he learned on his travels there was nothing "piu a bondevole, niuna piu dolce, et niuna piu degna de l'huomo libero," a sentiment which socrates had expressed sixteen hundred years earlier and which was echoed six hundred years later by another far-sighted italian, the statesman cavour.] [footnote : the white chalk which scrofa saw used as manure in transalpine gaul, when he was serving in the army under julius caesar, was undoubtedly marl, the use of which in that region as in britain was subsequently noted by pliny (h.n. xvii, ). there were no deposits of marl in italy, and so the romans knew nothing of its use, from experience, but pliny's treatment of the subject shows a sound source of information. in england, where several kinds of marl are found in quantities, its use was probably never discontinued after the roman times. walter of henley discusses its use in the thirteenth century, and sir anthony fitzherbert continues the discussion in the sixteenth century. in connection with the history of the use of marl in agriculture may be cited the tender tribute which arthur young recorded on the tombstone of his wife in bradfield church. the lady's chief virtue appears to have been, in the memory of her husband, that she was "the great-grand-daughter of john allen, esq. of lyng house in the county of norfolk, the first person according to the comte de boulainvilliers, who there used marl." the romans did not have the fight against sour land which is the heritage of the modern farmer after years of continuous application to his land of phosphoric and sulphuric acid in the form of mineral fertilizers. what sour land the romans had they corrected with humus making barnyard manure, or the rich compost which cato and columella recommend. they had, however, a test for sourness of land which is still practised even where the convenient litmus paper is available. virgil (_georgic_ ii, ) gives the formula: "fill a basket with soil, and strain fresh water through it. the taste of water strained through sour soil will twist awry the taster's face."] [footnote : this sounds like the boast of the modern proprietor of an old blue grass sod in northern virginia or kentucky. on the general question of pasture vs. arable land, cf. hartlib's _legacie_: "it is a misfortune that pasture lands are not more improved. england abounds in pasturage more than any other country, and is, therefore, richer. in france, acre for acre, the land is not comparable to ours: and, therefore, fortescue, chancellor to henry vi, observes that we get more in england by standing still (alluding to our meadows) than the french do by working (that is, cultivating their vineyards and corn lands)." we may permit montesquieu (_esprit des lois_ ii, , ) to voice the french side of this question. "les pais de pâturage sont pen peuplês. les terres à bled occupent plus d'hommes et les vignobles infiniment d'avantage. en angleterre on s'est souvent plaint que l'augmentation des pâturage diminuoit les habitans." in the introduction to his book two (_post_, p. ) varro states the sound conclusion, that the two kinds of husbandry should be combined on the same land. sir anthony fitzherbert knew this: "an housbande can not well thryue by his corne without he haue other cattell, nor by his cattell without corne. for els he shall be a byer, a borrower or a beggar."] [footnote : this is the explanation of why aesop's fox found the grapes to be sour which grew on a trellis, for he had expected to find them of easy access on the ground. aesop was a phrygian, and, while bentley has proved that aesop never wrote the existing fables which go by that name, yet it is recognized that they are of oriental origin and it is evident that that of the fox and the grapes came out of asia, where, as varro says, the grapes were usually allowed to grow on the ground.] [footnote : one is tempted to include here pliny's observations upon the tests of good soil if only for the sake of his description of one of the sweetest sensations of the farmer every where, the aroma of new ploughed fertile land:-- "those unguents which have a taste of earth are better," says cicero, "than those which smack of saffron," it seeming to him more to the purpose to express himself by the word taste than smell. and such is the fact no doubt, that soil is the best which has the savour of a perfume. if the question should be put to us, what is this odour of the earth that is held in such estimation; our answer is that it is the same that is often to be recognized at the moment of sunset without the necessity even of turning up the ground, at the spots where the extremities of the rainbow have been observed to meet the earth: as also, when after long continued drought, the rain has soaked the ground. then it is that the earth exhales the divine odour that is so peculiarly its own, and to which, imparted to it by the sun, there is no perfume however sweet that can possibly be compared. it is this odour which the earth, when turned up, ought to emit, and which, when once found, can never deceive any person: and this will be found the best criterion for judging of the quality of the soil. such, too, is the odour that is usually perceived in land newly cleared when an ancient forest has been just cut down; its excellence is a thing that is universally admitted.] [footnote : the _actus_ was the head land or as much land as a yoke of oxen could plough at a single spell without stopping, and measured feet in length and four feet in width. cf. pliny, h.n. xviii, . hence the square of the head land became the basis of the roman land measure. with the derivation of the _actus_ may be compared that of the english furlong (furrow-long) and the french _arpent_ (literally, head land).] [footnote : on the socialistic principle of strepsiades in aristophanes' _clouds_ that the use of geometry is to divide the land into _equal_ parts.] [footnote : as it is difficult to appreciate that the roman campagna was formerly populous with villas, when one contemplates its green solitudes today, so when one faces the dread malaria which there breeds, one wonders how the romans of the republic maintained so long their hardy constitutions. it is now agreed that there was no malaria in the land of saturn so long as the volcanos in the alban hills were active, because their gases purified the air and kept down the mosquitoes, and geology tells us that monte pila was in eruption for two or three centuries after the foundation of rome. by the beginning of the second century b.c. the fever seems to have become endemic. plautus and terence both mention it and cato (clvii) describes its symptoms unmistakably. in his book on the effect of malaria in history, w.h. jones expresses the opinion that the malady was brought into italy from africa by hannibal's soldiers, but it is more probable that it was always there. see the discussion in lanciani's _wanderings in the roman campagna_. in varro's time the roman fever had begun to sap the vitality of the roman people, and the "animalia minuta" in this passage suggests that varro had a curious appreciation of what we call the modern science of the subject. columella (i, , ) indeed specifically mentions mosquitoes (infestis aculeis armata animalia) as one of the risks incident to living near a swamp.] [footnote : in the thirteenth century ibn-al-awam, a learned moor, wrote at seville his _kitab al-felahah_, or book of agriculture, which has preserved for us not only the wisdom of the moorish practice in agriculture and gardening which made spain an enchanted paradise, but also the tradition of the arabs in such matters, purporting to go back, through the nabataeans to the chaldaean books, which recorded the agricultural methods that obtained "by the waters of babylon." ibn-al-awam's book has, therefore, a double interest for us, and we are fortunate in having it available in an admirable french translation from the arabic by j.j. clement-mullet (paris, librairie a. franck, ). not the least profitable chapters in this book are those devoted to the preparation of manure in composts, to be ripened in pits as varro advises in the text. they show a thoroughness, a care and an art in the mixing of the various animal dungs, with straw, woodsearth and cinders, which few modern gardeners could equal. german scholarship has questioned the chaldaean origin of the authorities quoted, but there is internal evidence which smacks of an oriental despotism that might well be babylonian. in a recipe for a rich compost suitable for small garden plants, we are advised (i, , i, p. ), without a quiver, to mix in blood--that of the camel or the sheep if necessary--_but human blood is to be preferred!_] [footnote : what varro describes as the military fence of ditch and bank was doubtless the typical herefordshire fence of modern england which arthur young, in _the farmers' letters_, recommends so highly as at once most effective and most economical. the bank is topped with a plashed hedge of white thorn in which sallow, ash, hazel and beech are planted for "firing." the fencing practice of the american farmer has followed the line of least resistance and is founded on the lowest first cost: the original "snake" fences of split rails, upon the making of which a former generation of pioneer american boys qualified themselves for presidential campaigns, being followed by woven wire "made by a trust" and not the most enduring achievement of big business. the practical farmer, as well as the lover of rural scenery, has cause for regret that american agricultural practice has not yet had the patience to enclose the land within live hedges and ditches.] [footnote : the kind of fence which varro here describes as "ex terra et lapillis compositis in formis" is also described by pliny (h.n. xxxv, ), as formaceos or moulded, and he adds, "aevis durant." it would thus clearly appear to have been of gravel concrete, the use of which the manufacturers of cement are now telling us, is the badge of the modern progressive farmer. cato (xxxviii) told how to burn lime on the farm, and these concrete fences were, of course, formed with lime as the matrix. when only a few years ago, portland cement was first produced in america at a cost and in a quantity to stimulate the development of concrete construction, engineers began with rough broken stone and sand as the constituents of what they call the aggregate, but some one soon "discovered" that the use of smooth natural gravel made more compact concrete and "gravel concrete" became the last word in engineering practice. but it was older even than varro. a chicago business man visiting mycenae picked up and brought home a bit of rubbish from schliemann's excavations of the ancient masonry: lying on his office desk it attracted the attention of an engineering friend who exclaimed, "that is one of the best samples of the new gravel concrete i have seen. did it come out of the illinois tunnel?" "no," replied the returned traveller, "it came out of the tomb of agamemnon!"] [footnote : varro here seems to forget the unities. he speaks in his own person, when scrofa has the floor.] [footnote : it will be recalled that aristotle described slaves as living tools. in roman law a slave was not a _persona_ but a _res_. cf. gaius ii, .] [footnote : one of the most interesting of these freemen labourers of whom we know is that ofellus whom horace (satire ii, ) tells us was working with cheerful philosophy as a hired hand upon his own ancestral property from which he had been turned out in the confiscations following the battle of philippi. this might have been the fate of virgil also had he not chanced to have powerful friends.] [footnote : "mais lorsque, malgré le dégoût de la chaîne domestique, nous voyons naître entre les males et les femelles ces sentiments que la nature a partout fondés sur un libre choix: lorsque l'amour a commencé a unir ces couples captifs, alors leur esclavage, devenu pour eux aussi doux que la douce liberté, leur fait oublier peu à peu leur droits de franchise naturelle et les prérogatives de leur état sauvage; et ces lieux des premiers plaisirs, des premières amours, ces lieux si chers à tout être sensible, deviennent leur demeure de prédilection et leur habitation de choix: l'éducation de la famille rend encore cette affection plus profonde et la communique en même temps aux petits, qui s'étant trouvés citoyens par naissance d'un séjour adopté par leur parents, ne cherchent point à en changer: car ne pouvant avoir que pen ou point d'idée d'un état different ni d'un autre séjour ils s'attachent au lieu ou ils sont nés comme à leur patrie; et l'on sait que la terre natale est chère a ceux même qui l'habitent en esclaves." one might assume that this eloquent and comfortable essay on contentment in slavery had been written to illustrate varro's text at this point, but, as a matter of fact, it is buffon's observation (viii, ) on the domestication of wild ducks!] [footnote : saserna's rule would be the equivalent of one hand to every five acres cultivated. with slave labour, certainly with negro slave labour, the experience of american cotton planters in the nineteenth century very nearly confirmed this requirement, but one of the economic advantages of the abolition of slavery is illustrated by this very point. in latimer's _first sermon before king edward vi_, animadverting on the advance in farm rents in his day, he says that his father, a typical substantial english yeoman of the time of the discovery of america, was able to employ profitably six labourers in cultivating acres, or, say, one hand for each twenty acres, which was precisely what arthur young recommended as necessary for high farming at the end of the eighteenth century. at the beginning of the twentieth century the american farmer seldom employs more than one hand for every eighty acres cultivated, but this is partly due to the use of improved machinery and partly to the fact that his land is not thoroughly cultivated.] [footnote : this example of roman cost accounting is matched by walter of henley in thirteenth century england. "some men will tell you that a plough cannot work eight score or nine score acres yearly, but i will show you that it can. you know well that a furlong ought to be forty perches long and four wide, and the king's perch is sixteen feet and a half: then an acre is sixty-six feet in width. now in ploughing go thirty-six times round to make the ridge narrower, and when the acre is ploughed then you have made seventy-two furlongs, which are six leagues, for be it known that twelve furlongs are a league. and the horse or ox must be very poor that cannot from the morning go easily in pace three leagues in length from his starting place and return by three o'clock. and i will show you by another reason that it can do as much. you know that there are in the year fifty-two weeks. now take away eight weeks for holy days and other hindrances, then are there forty-four working weeks left. and in all that time the plough shall only have to plough for fallow or for spring or winter sowing three roods and a half daily, and for second fallowing an acre. now see if a plough were properly kept and followed, if it could not do as much daily."] [footnote : stolo is quibbling. cato's unit of jugera was based on the duodecimal system of weights and measures which the romans had originally derived from babylon but afterwards modified by the use of a decimal system. the enlightened and progressive nations of the modern world who have followed the romans in adopting a decimal system may perhaps approve stolo's remarks, but it behooves those of us who still cling to the duodecimal system to defend cato, if only to keep up our own courage.] [footnote : here, in a few words, is the whole doctrine of intelligent agriculture. cf. donaldson's _agricultural biography, tit_. jethro tull. "the name of tull will ever descend to posterity as one of the greatest luminaries, if not the very greatest benefactor, that british agriculture has the pride to acknowledge. his example furnishes the vast advantages of educated men directing their attention to the cultivation of the soil, as they bring enlightened minds to bear upon its practice and look at the object in a naked point of view, being divested of the dogmas and trammels of the craft with which the practitioners of routine are inexpugnably provided and entrenched."] [footnote : pliny quotes cato: "what ever can be done by the help of the ass costs the least money," which is the philosophy of modern power machinery on the farm, as elsewhere. it is largely a question of the cost of fuel, as varro says.] [footnote : green manuring is one of the oldest, as it is one of the best, of agricultural practices. long before varro, theophrastus (ii.p. , i) had recorded what the agricultural colleges teach today--that beans are valuable for this purpose because they rot readily, and, he adds, in macedonia and thessaly it has always been the custom to turn them under when they bloom.] [footnote : although varro advises the first ploughing in the spring, the ancients were not unmindful of the advantages of winter ploughing of stiff and heavy clay. theophrastus, who died in b.c. , advises it "that the earth may feel the cold." indeed, he was fully alive to the reasons urged by the modern professors of agronomy for intensive cultivation. "for the soil," he says (c.p. iii, ), "often inverted becomes free, light and clear of weeds, so that it can most easily afford nourishment." king solomon gives the same advice, "the sluggard will not plough by reason of the winter, therefore shall he begin harvest and have nothing." _proverbs_, xx, .] [footnote : the romans understood the advantages of thorough cultivation of the soil. as appears from the text, they habitually broke up a sod in the spring, ploughed it again at midsummer, and once more in september before seeding. pliny prescribes that the first ploughing should be nine inches deep, and says that the etruscans some times ploughed their stiff clay as many as nine times. the accepted roman reason for this was the eradication of weeds, but it also accomplished in some measure the purpose of "dry farming"--the conservation of the moisture content of the soil, as that had been practised for countless generations in the sandy valley of mesopotamia. varro makes no exception to this rule, but virgil was here, as in other instances, induced to depart from varro's wisdom, with the result that he imposed upon roman agriculture several thoroughly bad practices. thus, while he applies varro ploughing rules to rich land and bids the farmer "exercetque frequens tellurem atque imperat arvis," he says (geo. i, ) that it will suffice to give sandy land a single shallow ploughing in september immediately before seeding, for fear, forsooth, that the summer suns will evaporate whatever moisture there is in it! again, virgil recommends, what varro does not, cross-ploughing and burning the stubble and virgil's advice was generally followed. in william benson's edition ( ) of the _georgics_ "with notes critical and rustick," it is stated that "the husbandry of england in general is virgilian, which is shown by paring and burning the surface: by raftering and cross-ploughing, and that in those parts of england where the romans principally inhabited all along the southern coast latin words remain to this hour among shepherds and ploughmen in their rustick affairs: and what will seem more strange at first sight to affirm though in fact really true, there is more of virgil's husbandry put in practice in england at this instant than in italy itself." that this was the fact in the thirteenth century is clear from the quotations we have made from walter of henley's _dite de hosebondrie_. cf. also sir anthony fitzherbert and the account of the manorial system of farming in england in prothero's _english farming past and present_. it remained for jethro tull of the _horseshoeing husbandry_ to unloose in england the long spell of the magic of virgil's poetry upon practical agriculture.] [footnote : the julian calendar, which took effect on january , b.c. , had been in use only eight years when varro was writing.] [footnote : schneider and others have attempted to emend the enumeration of the days in this succession of seasons, but keil justly observes: "as we do not know what principle varro followed in establishing these divisions of the year, it is safer to set them down as they are written in the codex than to be tempted by uncertain emendation." i have accordingly followed keil here.] [footnote : the practice of ridging land seeded to grain was necessary before the invention of the modern drill. dickson, in his _husbandry of the ancients_, xxiv, argues that, while wasteful of land, it had the advantage of preventing the grain from lodging. walter of henley, who followed the roman methods by tradition without knowing it, advises with them that to be successful in this kind of seeding the furrow at the last ploughing of the fallow should be so narrow as to be indistinguishable. "at sowing do not plough large furrows," he says, "but little and well laid together that the seed may fall evenly: if you plough a large furrow to be quick you will do harm. how? i will tell you. when, the ground is sown then the harrow will come and pull the corn into the hollow which is between the two ridges and the large ridge shall be uncovered, then no corn shall grow there. and will you see this? when the corn is above ground go to the end of the ridge and you will see that i tell you truly. and if the land must be sown below the ridge see that it is ploughed with small furrows and the earth raised as much as you are able. and see that the ridge which is between the two furrows is narrow. and let the earth, which lies like a crest in the furrow under the left foot after the plough, be over-turned, and then shall the furrow be narrow enough."] [footnote : farrago was a mixture of refuse _far_, or spelt, with vetch, sown thick and cut green to be fed to cattle in the process now called soiling. the english word "forage" comes from this latin original.] [footnote : spanish american engineers today insert in their specifications for lumber the stipulation that it be cut on the wane of the moon. the rural confidence in the influence of the moon upon the life of a farm still persists vigorously: thus as pliny (h.n. xviii, ) counselled that one wean a colt only when the moon is on the wane, so it will be found that the moon is consulted before a colt is weaned on most american farms today: for that may be safely done, says the rural oracle, only when the moon's sign, as given in the almanack, corresponds with a part of the almanack's "moon's man" or "anatomic" at or below the knees, i.e., when the moon is in one or the other of the signs pisces, capricornus or aquarius: but never at a time of day when the moon is in its "southing."] [footnote : modern agricultural chemistry has contradicted this judgment of cassius, for the manure of sea birds, especially that brought from the south american islands in the pacific, known commercially as peruvian guano, is found on analysis to be high in the elements which are most beneficial to plant life.] [footnote : seed selection, which is now preached so earnestly by the agricultural department of the united states as one of the things necessary to increase the yield of wheat and corn, has ever been good practice. following varro virgil (_georgic_ i, ) insists upon it: "i have seen those seeds on whose selection much time and labour had been spent, nevertheless degenerate if men did not every year rigorously separate by hand all the largest specimens."] [footnote : cicero (de div. ii, ) records a _mot_ of cato's that he wondered that an haruspex did not laugh when he saw another--"qui mirari se aiebat, quod non rideret aruspex, aruspicem quum vidisset."] [footnote : this process of propagation which varro describes as "new" is still practised by curious orchardists under the name "inarching." the free end of a growing twig is introduced into a limb of its own tree, back of a specimen fruit, thus pushing its development by means of the supplemental feeding so provided. cf. cyc. am. hort. ii, .] [footnote : _alfalfa_ is the moorish name which the spaniards brought to america with the forage plant _medicago sativa_, linn., which all over southern europe is known by the french name _lucerne_. it is proper to honour the moors by continuing in use their name for this interesting plant, because undoubtedly they preserved it for the use of the modern world, just as undoubtedly they bequeathed to us that fine sentiment known as personal honour. alfalfa was one of the standbys of ancient agriculture. according to pliny, it was introduced into italy from greece, whence it had been brought from asia during the persian wars, and so derived its greek and roman name _medica_. as cato does not mention it with the other legumes he used, it is probable that the romans had not yet adopted it in cato's day, but by the time of varro and virgil it was well established in italy. in columella's day it was already a feature of the agriculture of andalousia, and there the moors, who loved plants, kept it alive, as it were a vestal fire, while it died out of italy during the dark ages: from spain it spread again all over southern europe, and with america it was a fair exchange for tobacco. alfalfa has always been the subject of high praise wherever it has been known. the greek amphilochus devoted a whole book to it, as have the english walter harte in the middle of the eighteenth century and the american coburn at the beginning of the twentieth century, but none of them is more instructive on the subject of its culture than is columella in a few paragraphs. because of the difficulty of getting a stand of it in many soils, it is important to realize the pains which the romans took with the seed bed, for it is on this point that most american farmers fail. says columella (ii, ): "but of all the legumes, alfalfa is the best, because, when once it is sown, it lasts ten years: because it can be mowed four times, and even six times, a year: because it improves the soil: because all lean cattle grow fat by feeding upon it: because it is a remedy for sick beasts: because a jugerum (two-thirds of an acre) of it will feed three horses plentifully for a year. we will teach you the manner of cultivating it, as follows: the land which you wish to set in alfalfa the following spring should be broken up about the kalends of october, so that it may mellow through the entire winter. about the kalends of february harrow it thoroughly, remove all the stones and break up the clods. later, about the month of march, harrow it for the third time. when you have so got the land in good order, lay it off after the manner of a garden, in beds ten feet wide and fifty feet long, so that it may be possible to let in water by the paths, and access on every side may be had by the weeders. then cover the beds with well rotted manure. at last, about the end of april, sow plentifully so that a single measure (cyanthus) of seed will cover a space ten feet long and five wide. when you have done this brush in the seed with wooden rakes: this is most important for otherwise the sprouts will be withered by the sun. after the sowing no iron tool should touch the beds; but, as i have said, they should be cultivated with wooden rakes, and in the same manner they should be weeded so that no foreign grass can choke out the young alfalfa. the first cutting should be late, when the seed begins to fall: afterwards, when it is well rooted, you can cut it as young as you wish to feed to the stock. feed it at first sparingly, until the stock becomes accustomed to it, for it causes bloat and excess of blood. after cutting, irrigate the beds frequently, and after a few days, when the roots begin to sprout, weed out all other kinds of grass. cultivated in this way alfalfa can be mowed six times a year, and it will last for ten years."] [footnote : see the explanation of what the romans meant by _terra varia_ in the note on cato v. _ante_, p. .] [footnote : it is interesting to note from the statements in the text that in varro's time the roman farmer in italy both sowed and reaped substantially the same amount of wheat as does the american farmer today. varro says that the romans sowed five modii of wheat to the jugerum and reaped on the maximum fifteen for one. as the modius was nearly the equivalent of our peck, the roman allowance for sowing corresponds to the present american practice of sowing seven pecks of wheat to the acre: and on this basis a yield of bushels to the acre, which is not uncommon in the united states, is the equivalent of the roman harvest of fifteen for one. it is fair to the average italian farmer of the present day who is held up by the economists to scorn because he does not produce more than eleven bushels of wheat to the acre, to record that in columella's time, when agriculture had declined as compared with varro's experience, the average yield of grain in many parts of italy did not exceed four for one (_columella_, iii, ), or say seven and a half bushels to the acre. varro's statement that at byzacium in africa wheat yielded for one, which pliny (_ii.n._ xviii, ) increases to for one, means from to bushels per acre, seems incredible to us, but is confirmed by the testimony of agricultural practice in palestine. isaac claimed to reap an hundred fold, and the parable of the sower alludes to yields of , and fold. harte _essays on husbandry_, , says that the average yield in england in the middle of the eighteenth century was seven for one, though he records the case of an award by the dublin society in to an irish gentleman who raised bushels of wheat from a single peck of seed! harte was a parson, but apparently he did not bring the same unction into his agriculture as did the rev. robert herrick to the husbandry of his devonshire glebe, a century earlier. in herrick's _thanksgiving to god for his house_ he sings: "lord, 'tis thy plenty dropping hand that soils my land and giv'st me for my bushel sown twice ten for one. thou makst my teeming hen to lay her egg each day: besides my healthful ewes to bear me twins each year."] [footnote : as the gallic header here described by varro is the direct ancestor of our modern marvellous self-binding harvester, it is of interest to rehearse the other ancient references to it. pliny (_h. n_. xviii, ) says: "in the vast domains of the provinces of gaul a large hollow frame armed with teeth and supported on two wheels is driven through the standing corn, the beasts being yoked behind it, the result being that the ears are torn off and fall within the frame." palladius (vii, ) goes more into detail: "the people of the more level regions of gaul have devised a method of harvesting quickly and with a minimum of human labour, for thereby a single ox is made to bear the burden of the entire harvest. a cart is constructed on two low wheels and is furnished with a square body, of which the side boards are adjusted to slope upward and outward to make greater capacity. the front of the body is left open and there across the width of the cart are set a series of lance shaped teeth spaced to the distance between the grain stalks and curved upward. behind the cart two short shafts are fashioned, like those of a litter, where the ox is yoked and harnessed with his head towards the cart: for this purpose it is well to use a well broken and sensible ox, which will not push ahead of his driver. when this machine is driven through the standing grain all the heads are stripped by the teeth and are thrown back and collected in the body of the cart, the straw being left standing. the machine is so contrived that the driver can adjust its height to that of the grain. thus with little going and coming and in a few short hours the entire harvest is made. this method is available in level or prairie countries and to those who do not need to save the straw." that ingenious dutchman conrad heresbach refers, in his _husbandry_, to palladius' description of the gallic header with small respect, which indicates that in the sixteenth century it was no longer in use. i quote from barnaby googe's translation of heresbach (the book which served izaak walton as the model for his _compleat angler_): "this tricke might be used in levell and champion countries, but with us it would make but ill-favoured worke." dondlinger, in his excellent _book of wheat_ ( ), which should be in the hands of every grain farmer, gives a picture reproducing the gallic header and says: "after being used during hundreds of years the gallic header disappeared, and it seems to have been completely forgotten for several centuries. only through literature did it escape the fate of permanent oblivion and become a heritage for the modern world. the published description of the machine by pliny and palladius furnished the impulse in which modern harvesting inventions originated. its distinctive features are retained in several modern inventions of this class, machines which have a practical use and value under conditions similar to those which existed on the plains of gaul. toward the close of the eighteenth century, the social, economic and agricultural conditions in england, on account of increasing competition and the higher value of labour, were ripe for the movement of invention that was heralded by the printed account of the gallic header. the first header was constructed by william pitt in . it was an attempted improvement on the ancient machine in that the stripping teeth were placed in a cylinder which was revolved by power transmitted from the wheels. this 'rippling cylinder' carried the heads of the wheat into the box of the machine, and gradually evolved into the present day reel." it may be added that the william pitt mentioned was not the statesman, but a contemporary agricultural writer of the same name.] [footnote : according to sir anthony fitzherbert it was the custom in england to shear wheat and rye and to leave the straw standing after the third method described by varro, the purpose being to preserve the straw to be cut later for thatching, as threshing it would necessarily destroy its value for thatching. it was the custom in england, however, to mow barley and oats.] [footnote : pliny advises that the grain which collects on the circumference of a threshing floor of this description be saved for seed because it is evidently the heaviest.] [footnote : in the apennines today the threshing floor, or _aja_, is anointed with cow dung smeared smooth with water, doubtless for the same reason that the romans so used amurca.] [footnote : between harvests the winnowing basket is quite generally used in italy today for a cradle, as it was from the beginning of time, for there is an ancient gem representing the infant bacchus asleep in a winnowing basket.] [footnote : what the french call, from the same practice, _vin de rognure_.] [footnote : varro does not mention the season of the olive harvest, but virgil tells us (g. ii, ) that in their day as now it was winter. cato (xx-xxii) described the construction and operation of the _trapetus_ in detail. 'it can still be seen in operation in italy, turned by a patient donkey and flowing with the new oil of an intense blue-green colour. it is always flanked by an array of vast storage jars (cato's _dolii_ now called _orci_), which make one realize the story of _ali baba and the forty thieves_.] [footnote : the roman waste of amurca, through ignorance of its value, was like the american waste of the cotton seed, which for many years was thrown out from the gin to rot upon the ground, even its fertilizing use being neglected. now cotton seed has a market value equivalent to nearly per cent of that of the staple. it is used for cattle feed and also is made into lard and "pure olive oil," being exported in bulk and imported again in bottles with italian labels.] [footnote : cf. fowler, _social life at rome in the age of cicero_. "let us consider that in a large city today the person and property of all, rich or poor, are adequately protected by a sound system of police and by courts of first instance which are sitting every day. assault and murder, theft and burglary are exceptional. it might be going too far to say that at rome they were the rule: but it is the fact that in what we may call the slums of rome there was no machinery for checking them.... it is the great merit of augustus that he made rome not only a city of marble but one in which the persons and property of all citizens were fairly secure." there are several contemporary references to the crowded and dangerous condition of the streets of rome at the end of the republic. cicero (_plancius_, ) tells how he was pushed against the arch of fabius while struggling through the press of the via sacra, and exonerates from blame the man who was the immediate cause of his inconvenience, holding that the one next beyond was more responsible: in which judgment cicero was of the opinion of mr. justice blackstone in the famous leading case of scott _v_. shepherd ( _smith's l.c._, ), where the question was who was liable for the damage eventually done by the burning squib which was passed about the market house by successive hands. the majority of the court held, however, against blackstone and cicero, and established the doctrine of proximate cause.] [footnote : the roman week (_nundinum_, or more properly _inter nundinum_) was of eight days, the last being the market day on which the citizens rested from agricultural labour and came into town to sell and buy and talk politics. cf. pliny, xviii, . this custom which varro regrets had fallen into desuetude so far as rome was concerned was in his day still practised in the provinces. thus the five tenants on horace's sabine farm were wont to go every _nundinum_ to the market town of varia (the modern vicovaro) to transact public business (_epist_. i, , ).] [footnote : varro here refers to the great economic change which was coming over italian husbandry in the last days of the republic, the disappearance of the small farms, the "septem jugera" which nurtured the early roman heroes like cincinnatus and dentatus, and even the larger, but still comparatively small, farms which cato describes, and the development of the _latifundia_ given over to grazing.] [footnote : the tradition is, says pliny, that king augeas was the first in greece to use manure, and that hercules introduced the practice into italy. to the wise farmer the myth of the augean stables is the genesis of good agriculture.] [footnote : this was the "crowded hour" in varro's life, and, as m. boissier has pointed out, he loved to dwell upon its episodes. it will be recalled that pompey divided the mediterranean into thirteen districts for the war with the pirates and put a responsible lieutenant in command of each, thus enabling him by concurrent action in all the districts to clear the seas in three months. appian gives the list of officers and the limits of their commands, saying: "the coasts of sicily and the ionian sea as far as acarnania were entrusted to plotius and varro." it is difficult to understand varro's own reference to delos, but appian makes clear how it happened that varro was stationed on the coast of epirus and so fell in with the company of "half greek shepherds" who are the _dramatis personae_ of the second book. as the scene of the first book was laid in a temple of tellus, so this relating to live stock is cast in a temple of pales, the goddess of shepherds, on the occasion of the festival of the parilia, and the names of the characters have a punning reference to live stock.] [footnote : the codices here contain an interpolation of the words "hic intermisimus," to indicate that a part of the text is missing, with which judgment of some early student of the archetype victorius, scaliger and ursinus, as well as their successors among the commentators on varro, have all agreed. it is a pleasure to record the agreement on this point, because it is believed to be unique: but many precedents for plunging the reader _in medias res_, as does the surviving text, might be found in the modern short story of the artist in style. as m. boissier points out varro might have cited the beginning of the odyssey as a precedent for this.] [footnote : this is a paraphase of a favorite locution of homer's heroes, whose characteristic modesty does not, however, permit them to apply it to themselves, as varro does. thus in _iliad_, vii, , agamemnon advises menelaos not to venture against hector, whom "even achilles dreadeth to meet in battle, wherein is the warrior's glory, and achilles is better far than thou."] [footnote : virgil (aen. vii, ) made a fine line out of this tradition, endowing the sturdy race of fauns and nymphs who inhabited the land of saturn before the golden age, with the qualities of the trees on whose fruit they subsisted, "gensque virum truncis et duro robore nata."] [footnote : in the registers of the censors every thing from which the public revenues were derived was set down under the head of _pascua_, or "pasture lands," because for a long time the pasture lands were the only source of such revenue. cf. pliny, _h.n._ xviii, .] [footnote : olisippo is the modern lisbon. this tradition about the mares of the region is repeated by virgil (geo. iii, ) by columella (vi, ) and by pliny (viii, ). professor ridgeway in _the origin and influence of the thoroughbred horse_ describes it as "an aetiological myth to explain the swiftness of horses" for the fleetest horses came out of the west; thus pegasus was born at the springs of the ocean, and there is the passage in homer (_iliad_, xvi, ) about the horses "that flew as swift as the winds, the horses that the harpy podarge (swift foot) bare to the west wind as she grazed on the meadows by the stream of the ocean." hence we may conclude that there was a race of swift horses in portugal in the earliest times, which professor ridgeway would doubtless like very much to prove, in support of his interesting thesis, were derived from libya.] [footnote : _hypenemia_, or barren eggs, are described intelligently by aristotle (h.a.v. , , vi. , ), and, with varro's confidence in the country traditions, by pliny, h.n. x, . if he had known it, varro might have here cited the fact that the unfertilized queen bee is parthenogenetic, though producing only male bees; i.e., drones: but it remained for a german clergyman, dzierzon, to discover this in the eighteenth century.] [footnote : cf. plautus _menaechmi_, ii, , . one of the two menaechmi is, on his arrival at epidamnus, mistaken for his brother, of whose existence he does not know, and much to his amazement is introduced into the brother's life and possessions. at first he expostulates, accusing the slave of the brother, who has mistaken his identity, of being crazy and offers to exorcise him by a sacrifice of weanling pigs, wherefore he asks the question quoted in the text. varro was evidently fond of this passage, as he quotes it again, _post_, p. . the _menaechmi_ is one of the immortal comedies and has survived in many forms on the modern stage all over europe. from it shakespeare derived the plot of the _comedy of errors_.] [footnote : it is interesting to compare these sane therapeutics with cato's practice less than two hundred years previous (_ante_, p. ), which was characteristic of the superstitious peasant who in italy still seeks the priest to bless his ailing live stock.] [footnote : this atticus was cicero's intimate friend to whom he addressed so many of his charming letters. he changed his name as stated in the text, the new name being that of an uncle who adopted him, as we learn from his life by nepos. as is well known to all students of cicero, atticus had dwelt in athens many years and derived his income from estates in epirus, which is the point of scrofa's jest.] [footnote : this requirement of short legs is the more remarkable because of the long journeys which varro says the roman sheep were required to make between their summer and winter pastures. a similar necessity and bad roads created in england, before the eighteenth century, a demand for long legged sheep. prothero (_english farming past and present_) quotes a description of the "true old warwickshire ram" in : "his frame large and remarkably loose. his bone throughout heavy. his legs long and thick, terminating in large splaw feet." one of the things which bakewell accomplished was to shorten the legs as well as to increase the mutton on his new leicesters. of bakewell, mr. prothero justly says, "by providing meat for the million he contributed as much to the wealth of the country as arkwright or watt."] [footnote : shepherds still look for the black or spotted tongue in the mouth of the ram, for the reason given by varro, but the warning is no longer put in the shepherds' manual.] [footnote : varro would still feel at home in apulia, for there the sheep industry is carried on much as it was in his time, and thence the _calles publicae_, to which he refers, still lead to the summer pastures in the apennines. cf. beauclerk _rural italy_, chap. v. "the extensive pasturages of the 'tavoliere di puglia' (apulia) are of great importance and have a history of their own. this vast domain covers , acres: its origin belongs to the time of the roman conquests and the protracted wars of the republic, which were fought out in the plains, whence they became deserted and uncultivated, fit only for public pastures in winter time ... the periodical emigrations of the flocks continue as in the past times: they descend from the mountains into the plains by a network of wide grassy roads which traverse the region in every direction and are called _tratturi_. these lanes are over yards in width and cover a total length of miles.... not less than , animals are pastured on the tavoliere, requiring over , square miles of land for their subsistence.... five thousand persons are employed as shepherds."] [footnote : varro quite uniformly uses words which indicate that he was accustomed to see sheep driven (_abigere, propellere, adpellere_) but we can see the flocks _led_ in italy today, as they were in palestine soon after varro's death, according to the testimony of that beautiful figure of the good shepherd (_st. john_, x, ): "and when he putteth forth his own sheep he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice." r. child, in his "large letter" in hartlib's _legacie_, gives the explanation of the difference in the custom: "our sheep do not follow their shepherds as they do in all other countries: for the shepherd goeth before and the sheep follow like a pack of dogs. this disobedience of our sheep doth not happen to us, as the papist priests tell their simple flocks, because we have left their great shepherd the pope; but because we let our sheep range night and day in our fields without a shepherd: which other countries dare not for fear of wolves and other ravenous beasts, but are compelled to guard them all day with great dogs and to bring them home at night, or to watch them in their folds."] [footnote : cf. dante, _purg_. xxvii, . "le capre tacite all' ombra mentre che'l sol ferve guardate dal pastor che'n su la verga poggiato s'e, e lor poggiato serve."] [footnote : it will be recalled that when odysseus, disguised as a beggar, was making his way to his house in company with the faithful swineherd eumaeus, they met the goatherd melanthius "leading his goats to feast the wooers, the best goats that were in all the herds." (_odyssey_, xvii, ), and that subsequently he suffered a terrible punishment for this unfaithfulness to his master's interests.] [footnote : pliny (viii, ) calls these excrescences _lanciniae_, or folds, and attributes them exclusively to the she goat, as varro seems to do also, but columella (vii, ) attributes them to the buck.] [footnote : aristotle (h.a. i, . ) refers to this opinion and denounces it as erroneous.] [footnote : the roman _denarius_, which has been here and later translated _denier_, may be considered for the purpose of comparing values as, roughly, the equivalent of the modern franc, or lira, say cents united states money.] [footnote : macrobius (_saturn_. i, ) tells another story of the origin of this cognomen, which, if not so heroic as that in the text, is entertaining. it is related that a neighbour's sow strayed on tremelius' land and was caught and killed as a vagrant. when the owner came to claim it and asserted the right to search the premises tremelius hid the carcass in the bed in which his wife was lying and then took a solemn oath that there was no sow in his house except that in the bed.] [footnote : it would seem, as gibbon says of the empress theodora, that this passage could be left "veiled in the obscurity of a learned language"; but it may be noted that the _locus classicus_ for the play on the word is the incident of the megarian "mystery pigs" in aristophanes' _acharnians_, ff. cf. also athenaeus, ix, , .] [footnote : cf. pliny (_h.n._ viii, ): "there is no animal that affords a greater variety to the palate of the epicure: all the others have their own peculiar flavour, but the flesh of the hog has nearly fifty different flavours."] [footnote : in his stimulating book, _comment la route crée le type social_, edmond desmolins submits an ingenious hypothesis to explain the pre-eminence of the gauls in the growing and making of pork, and how that pre-eminence was itself the explanation of their early success in cultivating the cereals. he describes their migrating ancestors, the celts, pushing their way up the danube as hordes of nomad shepherds with their vast flocks and herds of horses and cattle, on the milk of which they had hitherto subsisted. so long as they journeyed through prairie steppes, the last of which was hungary, they maintained their shepherd character, but when they once passed the site of the present city of vienna and entered the plateau of bavaria, they found new physical conditions which caused them to reduce and to separate their herds of large cattle--an unbroken forest affording little pasture of grass. here they found the wild boar subsisting upon the mast of the forest, and him they domesticated out of an economic necessity, to take the place of their larger cattle as a basis of food supply. until then they had not been meat eaters, and so had known no necessity for cereals, for milk is a balanced ration in itself. but this change of diet required them also to take to agriculture and so to abandon their nomad life. 'by reason of the habits of the animal, swine husbandry has a tendency in itself to confine those engaged in it to a more or less sedentary life, but we are about to see how the celts were compelled to accomplish this important evolution by an even more powerful force. meat cannot be eaten habitually except in conjunction with a cereal ... and of all the meats pork is the one which demands this association most insistently, because it is the least easily digested and the most heating of all the meats.... so that is how the adoption of swine husbandry and a diet of pork compelled our nomad celts to take the next step and settle down to agriculture.'] [footnote : this gallic _tomacina_ was doubtless the ancestor of the _mortadella_ now produced in the emilia and known to english speaking consumers as "bologna" sausage.] [footnote : the gaul of which cato was here writing is the modern lombardy, one of the most densely populated and richest agricultural districts in the world. here are found today those truly marvellous "marchite" or irrigated meadows which owe the initiative for their existence to the cistercian monks of the chiaravalle abbey, who began their fruitful agricultural labours in the country near milan in the twelfth century. there is a recorded instance of one of these meadows which yielded in a single season tons of grass per hectare, equal to tons of hay, or tons per acre! the meadows are mowed six times a year, and the grass is fed green to swiss cows, which are kept in great numbers for the manufacture of "frommaggio di grana," or parmesan cheese. this system of green soiling maintains the fertility of the meadows, while the by-product of the dairies is the feeding of hogs, which are kept in such quantity that they are today exported as they were in the times of cato and varro. there is no region of the earth, unless it be flanders, of which the aspect so rejoices the heart of a farmer as the milanese. well may the lombard proverb say, "chi ha prato, ha tutto."] [footnote : virgil (_aen_. vii, ) subsequently made good use of this tradition of the founding of lavinium, the sacred city of the romans where the penates dwelt and whither solemn processions were wont to proceed from rome until christianity became the state religion. the site has been identified as that of the modern village of practica, where a few miserable shepherds collect during the winter months, fleeing to the hills at the approach of summer and the dread _malaria_.] [footnote : cf. polybius, xii, : 'for in italy the swineherds manage the feeding of their pigs in the same way. they do not follow close behind the beasts, as in greece, but keep some distance in front of them, sounding their horn every now and then: and the animals follow behind and run together at the sound. indeed, the complete familiarity which the animals show with the particular horn to which they belong seems at first astonishing and almost incredible. for, owing to the populousness and wealth of the country, the droves of swine in italy are exceedingly large, especially along the sea coast of the tuscans and gauls: for one sow will bring up a thousand pigs, or some times even more. they, therefore, drive them out from their night styes to feed according to their litters and ages. when if several droves are taken to the same place they cannot preserve these distinctions of litters: but they, of course, get mixed up with each other both as they are being driven out and as they feed, and as they are being brought home. accordingly, the device of the horn blowing has been invented to separate them when they have got mixed up together, without labour or trouble. for as they feed one swineherd goes in one direction sounding his horn, and another in another and thus the animals sort themselves of their own accord and follow their own horn with such eagerness that it is impossible by any means to stop or hinder them. but in greece when the swine get mixed up in the oak forests in their search for the mast, the swineherd who has most assistants and the best help at his disposal, when collecting his own animals drives off his neighbours' also. some times, too, a thief lies in wait and drives them off without the swineherd knowing how he has lost them, because the beasts straggle a long way from their drivers in their eagerness to find acorns, when they are just beginning to fall.' bishop latimer in one of his sermons quotes the phrase used in his youth, at the time of the discovery of america, in calling hogs: 'come to thy minglemangle, come pur, come pur.' it would be impossible to transcribe the traditional call used in virginia. one some times thinks that it was the original of the celebrated 'rebel yell' of general lee's army.] [footnote : the use of the greek salutation was esteemed by the more austere romans of the age of scipio an evidence of preciosity, to be laughed at: and so lucienus' jesting apology for the use of it here doubtless was in reference to lucilius' epigram which cicero has preserved, _de finibus_, i, . "graece ergo praetor athenis id quod maluisti te, quum ad me accedi, saluto [greek: chaire] inquam, tite: lictores turma omni cohorsque [greek: chaire] tite! hinc hostis mi albucius, hinc inimicus." it was the word which the romans taught their parrots. cf. persius, _prolog_. .] [footnote : the working ox was respected by the ancient romans as a fellow labourer. valerius maximus (viii, _ad fin_.) cites a case of a roman citizen who was put to death, because, to satisfy the craving of one of his children for beef to eat, he slew an ox from the plough. ovid puts this sentiment in the mouth of pythagoras, when he agrees that pigs and goats are fit subjects for sacrifice, but protests against such use of sheep and oxen. (_metamor_. xv, .) "quid meruere boves, animal sine fraude dolisque innocuum, simplex, natum tolerare labores? immemor est demum, nee frugum manere dignus qui potuit curvi demto modo pondere arati ruricolam mactare suum: qui trita labore ilia quibus toties durum renovaverat arvum tot dederse messes, percussit colla securi."] [footnote : the learned commentators have been able to discover nothing about either this plautius or this hirrius, but it appears that archelaus wrote a book under the title bugonia, of which nothing survives. it may be conjectured, however, on the analogy of samson's riddle to the philistines, "out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness," (_judges_, xiv, ), that plautius meant to imply that some good might be the consequence of the evil hirrius had done: and that vaccius cited the allusion to suggest to varro that, while he might know nothing much about cattle, his attempt to deal with the subject might provoke some useful discussion.] [footnote : darwin, _animals and plants_, ii, , cites this passage and says that "at the present day the natives of java some times drive their cattle into the forests to cross with the wild banteng." the crossing of wild blood on domestic animals is not, however, always successful. a recent visitor to the german agricultural experiment station at halle describes "a curious hairy beast with great horns, a wild look in his eye, a white streak down his back and a bumpy forehead, which had in it blood from cattle which had lived on the plains of thibet, which had grazed on the lowland pastures of holland, which had roamed the forests of northeast india and of the malay peninsular, and had wandered through the forests of germany. we americans had sympathy for this beast. he was some thing like ourselves, with the blood of many different races flowing through his veins."] [footnote : pliny (viii, ) cites the fact that the scythians always preferred mares to stallions for war, and gives an ingenious reason for the preference. aristotle (_h.a._ vi, ) says that the scythians rode their pregnant mares until the very last, saying that the exercise rendered parturition more easy. every breeder of heavy draft horses has seen a mare taken from the plough and have her foal in the field, with no detriment to either: and the story of the mare keheilet ajuz, who founded the best of the arab families, is well known, but bears repetition. i quote from spencer borden, _the arab horse_, p. : "it is related that a certain sheik was flying from an enemy, mounted on his favourite mare. arab warriors trust themselves only to mares, they will not ride a stallion in war. the said mare was at the time far along toward parturition: indeed she became a mother when the flying horseman stopped for rest at noonday, the new comer being a filly. being hard pressed the sheik was compelled to remount his mare and again seek safety in flight, abandoning the newborn filly to her fate. finally reaching safety among his own people, great was the surprise of all when, shortly after the arrival of the sheik on his faithful mare, the little filly less than a day old came into camp also, having followed her mother across miles of desert. she was immediately given into the care of an old woman of the tribe (ajuz = an old woman), hence her name keheilet ajuz, 'the mare of the old woman,' and grew to be the most famous of all the animals in the history of the breed."] [footnote : varro does not describe the livery of the horses of his day, as he does of cattle, but virgil (_georg_. iii, ) supplies the deficiency, asserting that the best horses were bay (_spadices_) and roan (_glauci_) while the least esteemed were white (_albi_) and dun (_gilvi_), which is very interesting testimony in support of the most recent theory of the origin of the thoroughbred horse. professor ridgeway who, opposing darwin's conclusion, contends for a multiple origin of the historic and recent races of horses, has collected a mass of information about the marking of famous horses of all ages in his _origin and influence of the thoroughbred horse_. he maintains that a bay livery, with a white star and stockings, the development of protective coloration from an originally striped coat, such as has gone on more recently in the case of the quaggas, is absolute evidence of the north african origin of a horse, and he shows that all the swiftest horses mentioned in history are of that race, while the heavier and less mettlesome horses of northern origin have been, when pure bred, dun coloured or white. of the italian breeds mentioned by varro, professor ridgeway conjectures that the etruscan (or rosean) was probably an improved northern horse, while the apulian, from the south of italy, represented an admixture of libyan blood.] [footnote : aristotle (_h.a._ vi, ) preceded varro with this good advice, saying that a mare "produces better foals at the end of four or five years. it is quite necessary that she should wait one year and should pass through a fallow, as it were--[greek: poiein osper neion]."] [footnote : mules were employed in antiquity from the earliest times. in homer they were used for drawing wagons: thus nausicaa drove a mule team to haul out the family wash, and priam made his visit to achilles in a mule litter. homer professes to prefer mules to oxen for ploughing. there were mule races at the greek games. aristotle (_rhetoric_, iii, ) tells an amusing story of simonides, who, when the victor in the mule race offered him only a poor fee, refused to compose an ode, pretending to be shocked at the idea of writing about "semi-asses," but, on receipt of a proper fee, he wrote the ode beginning: "hail, daughters of storm-footed mares," although they were equally daughters of the asses.] [footnote : the breed of maremma sheep dogs, still preferred in italy, is white. he is doubtless the descendant of the large woolly "spitz" or pomeranian wolf dog which is figured on etruscan coins.] [footnote : in his essay,_notre ami le chien_, maeterlinck maintains eloquently that the dog alone among the domestic animals has given his confidence and friendship to man. "we are alone, absolutely alone, on this chance planet: and amid all the forms of life that surround us not one excepting the dog has made alliance with us. a few creatures fear us, most are unaware of us, and not one loves us. in the world of plants, we have dumb and motionless slaves: but they serve us in spite of themselves.... the rose and the corn, had they wings, would fly at our approach, like birds. among the animals, we number a few servants who have submitted only through indifference, cowardice or stupidity: the uncertain and craven horse, who responds only to pain and is attached to nothing ... the cow and the ox happy so long as they are eating and docile because for centuries they have not had a thought of their own.... i do not speak of the cat, to whom we are nothing more than a too large and uneatable prey: the ferocious cat whose side long contempt tolerates us only as encumbering parasites in our own homes. she at least curses us in her mysterious heart: but all the others live beside us as they might live beside a rock or a tree." the effective use of this thesis in the scene of the revolt of the domestic animals in the blue bird will be remembered.] [footnote : this method of securing the faithful affection of a dog is solemnly recommended, without acknowledgment to saserna, in the seventeenth century editions of the _maison rustique_ (i, ).] [footnote : keil happily points out that in his book on the latin language (vii, ), varro quotes the "ancient proverb" to which he here refers, viz.: "canis caninam non est" dog doesn't eat dog.] [footnote : aristotle (_h.a._ vi, ) says that puppies are blind from twelve to seventeen days, depending upon the season of the year at which they are born. pliny (_h n._ viii, ) says from seven to twenty days, depending upon the supply of the mother's milk.] [footnote : it was among these hardy shepherd slaves that spartacus recruited his army in - b.c., as did caelius and milo in b.c., while their descendants were the brigands who infested southern italy even in the nineteenth century.] [footnote : gaius, i, , ii, , , describes in detail the processes here referred to by which a slave was acquired under the roman law.] [footnote : dennis, in his _cities and cemeteries of etruria_, draws a picture of modern italy which may serve to illustrate varro's sketch of the mountain life of the shepherds of his day: "occasionally in my wanderings on this site (veii) i have entered, either from curiosity or for shelter, one of the _capanne_ scattered over the downs. these are tall conical thatched huts which the shepherds make their winter abode. for in italy, the lowlands being generally unhealthy in summer, the flocks are driven to the mountains about may, and as soon as the great heats are past are brought back to the rich pastures of the plains. it is a curious sight, the interior of a _capanna_, and affords an agreeable diversity to the antiquity hunter. a little boldness is requisite to pass through the pack of dogs, white as new dropt lambs, but large and fierce as wolves, which, were the shepherd not at hand, would tear in pieces whoever might venture to approach the hut: but with one of the _pecoraj_ for a teucer, nothing is to be feared. the _capanne_ are of various sizes. one i entered not far from veii was thirty or forty feet in diameter and fully as high, propped in the centre by two rough masts, between which a hole was left in the roof for the escape of smoke. within the door lay a large pile of lambs, there might be a hundred, killed that morning and already flayed, and a number of shepherds were busied in operating on the carcases of others: all of which were to be dispatched forthwith to the roman market. though a fierce may sun blazed without, a huge fire roared in the middle of the hut: but this was for the sake of the _ricotta_, which was being made in another part of the _capanna_. here stood a huge cauldron, full of boiling ewes' milk. in a warm state this curd is a delicious jelly and has often tempted me to enter a _capanna_ in quest of it, to the amazement of the _pecoraj_, to whom it is _vilior alga_. lord of the cauldron, stood a man dispensing ladlefuls of the rich simmering mess to his fellows, as they brought their bowls for their morning allowance: and he varied his occupation by pouring the same into certain small baskets, the serous part running off through the wicker and the residue caking as it cooled. on the same board stood the cheeses, previously made from the cream. in this hut lived twenty-five men, their nether limbs clad in goat skins, with the hair outwards, realizing the satyrs of ancient fable: but they had no nymphs to tease, nor shepherdesses to woo, and never 'sat all day playing on pipes of corn, and versing love to amorous phillida.' they were a band of celibates without the vows. in such huts they dwell all the year round, flaying lambs or shearing sheep, living on bread, _ricotta_ and water, very rarely tasting meat or wine and sleeping on shelves ranged round the hut, like berths in a ship's cabin. thus are the dreams of arcadia dispelled by realities."] [footnote : in modern italy the shepherds do not take their women with them to the _saltus_, but, as dennis says, lead there the life of "celibates, without the vows."] [footnote : in the venitian provinces of italy today the women are still seen at work in the harvest and rice fields with their babes in their bosoms: but the most amazing modern spectacle of this kind is that of women coaling ships in the east, carrying their unhappy youngsters up and down the coal ladders throughout the work.] [footnote : the author of _maison rustique_ did not agree with varro in this opinion. i quote from surflet's translation of (i, ): "and for writing and reading it skilleth not whether he be able to doe it or no, or that he should have any other charge to looke unto besides that of yours, or else that he should use another to set downe in writing such expences as he hath laid out: for paper will admit any thing."] [footnote : this temple and fig tree stood in rome at the foot of the palatine hill, in the neighbourhood of the lupercal. it was under this fig tree that romulus and remus were supposed to have been suckled by the wolf.] [footnote : 'that is the beste grease that is to a shepe, to grease hym in the mouthe with good meate,' says sir anthony fitzherbert.] [footnote : pliny (vii, ) says that most nations learn the use of barbers next after that of letters, but that the romans were late in this respect. varro himself wore a beard, as appears on the coin he struck during the war with the pirates. it is reproduced in smiths _dict. gr. and rom. biog_., iii, p. .] [footnote : cowper's verse in _the task_ seems to be all that is happy in the way of translation of varro's text, "divina natura dedit agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes": but cowley's "god the first garden made, and the first city cain" was probably cowper's source. cowley was a reader of varro, as his pleasant and sane essay _of agriculture_ shows.] [footnote : following the precedent of the first and second books in the matter of local colour, the scene of this third book, relating to villas and the "small deer," which were there reared, is laid in the _villa publica_ at rome, and the characters of the dialogue are selected for the suggestion which their names may make of the denizens of the aviary, the barn yard and the bee-stand.] [footnote : this appius claudius pulcher served in asia under his brother-in-law lucullus, was augur in b.c. , consul in and censor in . he wrote a book on augural law and the habits of birds at which cicero poked some rather mean fun. he fixes the date of the dialogue.] [footnote : in varro's time, as today, the river velinus drained the fresh pastures of the umbrian prairie of rosea, "the nurse of italy," which lay below the town of reate (the modern rieti), and was originally the bed of a lake. its waters are so strongly impregnated with carbonate of lime that by their deposit of travertine they tend to block their own channel. the drainage of rosea has, therefore, always been a matter of concern to the live stock industry of reate, and in b.c. m. curius dentatus opened the first of several successful artificial canals (the last dating from the sixteenth century, a.d.), which still serve to lead the velinus into the nar at the renowned cascate delle marmore. for two hundred years the people of interamna (the modern terni) had complained that their situation below the falls was endangered by curius' canal, and finally in b.c. the roman senate appointed the commission to which appius claudius refers in the text, to hear the controversy. cicero was retained as counsel for the people of reate, and during the hearing stopped, as appius claudius did, with our friend axius at his reatine villa, and wrote about the visit to the same atticus whom we met in varro's second book, as follows (_ad atticum_, iv, ): "after this was over the people of reate summoned me to their tempe to plead their cause against the people of interamna, before the consul and ten commissioners, the question being concerning the veline lake, which, drained by m. curius by means of a channel cut through the mountain, now flows into the nar: by this means the famous rosea has been reclaimed from the swamp, though still fairly moist. i stopped with axius, who took me also to visit the seven waters." what was once deemed a danger is a double source of profit to the modern folk of interamna. tourists today crowd to see the same waterfall which cicero visited, taking a tram from the busy little industrial town of terni: and the waters which flow from velinus now serve to generate power with which armour plates are manufactured for the italian navy on the site of the ancient interamna.] [footnote : sicilian honey was famous for its flavour because of the bee pasture of thyme which there abounded, especially at hybla. theophrastus (h.p. iii, , ) explains that the honey of corsica had an acrid taste, because the bees pastured there largely on box trees.] [footnote : these denizens of the roman villa are all enumerated by martial in his delightful verses (iii, ) upon faustinus' villa at baiae. the picture of the barn yard is very true to life in all ages, especially the touch of the hungry pigs sniffing after the pail of the farmer's wife: "vagatur omnis turba sordidae cortis argutus anser, gemmeique pavones nomenque debet quae rubentibus pennis, et picta perdix, numidicaeque guttatae et impiorum phasiana colchorum. rhodias superbi feminas prement galli sonantque turres plausibus columbarum, gemit hinc palumbus, inde cereus turtur avidi sequuntur villicae sinum porci: matremque plenam mollis agnus exspectat."] [footnote : the _sestertius_ was one quarter of a _denarius_, or, say, the equivalent of five cents. it was also called _nummus_, as we say "nickel." the ordinary unit used by the romans in reckoning considerable sums of money was , sesterces, which may accordingly be translated as the equivalent of (say) $ . axius' jackass thus cost $ , , while seius' income from his villa was $ , per annum, that of varro's aunt from her aviary was $ , , and that of axius from his farm $ , . cicero records that axius was a money lender, which explains the fun here made of his avarice.] [footnote : columella, writing about one hundred years after varro, refers to this passage and says that luxury had so developed since varro's time that it no longer required an extraordinary occasion, like a triumph, to bring the price of thrushes to three _denarii_ a piece, but that that had become a current quotation.] [footnote : a minerval was the fee (of minerva) paid to a school teacher.] [footnote : the inventor of the auspices _ex tripudiis_ or the feeding of chickens was evidently an ingenious poultry fancier who succeeded in securing the care of his favourites at the public charge.] [footnote : this was l. marcius philippus, the orator mentioned by horace (_epist_. i, , ), who was consul in b.c. , and was celebrated for his luxurious habits, which his wealth enabled him to gratify. his son married the widow of c. octavius and so became the step-father of the emperor augustus.] [footnote : this was _turdus pilaris_, the variety of thrush which is called field fare.] [footnote : the traveller by railway from rome to naples passes near varro's estate of casinum, and if he stops at the mediaeval town of san germano to visit the neighbouring badia di monte cassino, where the "angelic doctor" thomas aquinas was educated, he will find varro's memory kept green: for he will be entertained at the _albergo varrone_ ("very fair but bargaining advisable," sagely counsels mr. baedeker) and on his way up the long winding road to the abbey there will be pointed out to him the river rapido, on the banks of which varro's aviary stood, and nearby what is reputed to be the site of the old polymath's villa which antony polluted with the orgies cicero described in the second philippic. antony's destruction of his library was a great blow to varro, but one likes to think that his ghost can take satisfaction in the maintenance, so near the haunts of his flesh, of such a noble collection of books as is the continuing pride of the abbey on the mountain above.] [footnote : varro's museum, or study where he wooed the muses, on his estate at casinum was not unlike that of cicero at his native arpinum, which he described (de leg. ii, ) agreeably as on an island in the cold and clear fibrenus just above its confluence with the more important river liris, where, like a plebeian marrying into a patrician family, it lost its name but contributed its freshness. the younger pliny built a study in the garden of his laurentine villa near ostia, which he describes (ii, ) with enthusiasm: "horti diaeta est, amores mei, re vera amores": and here he found refuge from the tumult of his household during the festivities of the saturnalia, which corresponded with our christmas. in the ante bellum days every virginia gentleman had such an "office" in his house yard where he pretended to transact his farm business, but where actually he was wont to escape from the obligations of family and continuous hospitality.] [footnote : the commentators on this interesting but obscure description of varro's aviary have at this point usually endeavoured to explain the arrangements of the chamber under the lantern of the _tholus_ with respect to its use as a dining room which varro frequented himself, and hence have been amused into all kinds of difficulties of interpretation. the references to the _convivae_ are what lead them astray, and it remained for keil to suggest that this was a playful allusion to the birds themselves, a conclusion which is strengthened by varro's previous statement of the failure of lucullus' attempt to maintain a dining room in his aviary.] [footnote : cf. vitruvius, i, : "andronicus cyrrhestes built at athens an octagonal marble tower, on the sides of which were carved images of the eight winds, each on the side opposite that from which it blew. on the pyramidal roof of this tower he placed a bronze triton holding a rod in his right hand, and so contrived that the triton, revolving with the wind, always stood opposed to that which prevailed, and thus pointed with his rod to the image on the tower of the wind that was blowing at the moment." the ruins of this tower of the winds may still be seen in athens. there is a picture of it in harper's dictionary of classical antiquities in the article _andronicus_.] [footnote : one ventures to translate _athletoe comitiorum_ by mr. gladstone's famous phrase.] [footnote : reading "tesserulas coicientem in loculum."] [footnote : a french translator might better convey the intention of the pun, contained in the _ducere serram_ of the text, by the locution, _une prise de bec_.] [footnote : it probably will not comfort the ultimate consumer who holds in such odium the celebrated "schedule k" of the payne-aldrich tariff, to realize that the american wool grower puts no higher value on his sheep than did his roman ancestor, as revealed by this quotation from the stock yards of varro's time. it is interesting, however, to the breeder to know that a good price for wool has always stimulated the production of the best stock. strabo says that the wool of turdetania in spain was so celebrated in the generation after varro that a ram of the breed (the ancestors of the modern merino) fetched a talent, say $ , ; a price which may be compared with that of the prize ram recently sold in england for export to the argentine for as much as a thousand pounds sterling, and considered a good commercial investment at that. doubtless the market for rosean mules comforted axius in his investment of the equivalent of £ in a breeding jack.] [footnote : in feudal times the right to maintain a dove cote was the exclusive privilege of the lord of the manor. according to their immemorial custom, which varro notices, the pigeons preyed on the neighbourhood crops and were detested by the community in consequence. during the french revolution they were one of the counts in the indictment of the land-owning aristocracy, and in the event the pigeons as well as their owners had the sins of their forefathers justly visited upon them. the american farmer who has a pigeon-keeping neighbour and is restrained by the pettiness of the annoyance from making a point on their trespasses, feels something of the blind and impotent wrath of the french peasant against the whole pigeon family.] [footnote : it appears that the romans actually hired men to chew the food intended for cramming birds, so as to relieve the unhappy victims even of such exercise as they might get from assimilating their diet. columella (vii, ) in discussing the diet of thrushes deprecates this practice, sagely saying that the wages of the chewers are out of proportion to the benefit obtained, and that any way the chewers swallow a good part of what they are given to macerate. the typical tramp of the comic papers who is forever looking for occupation without work might well envy these roman professional chewers. not even dr. wiley's "poison squad" employed to test food products could compare with them.] [footnote : these prices of $ and $ and even $ a pair for pigeons, large as they seem, were surpassed under the empire. columella says (viii, ): "that excellent author, m. varro, tells us that in his more austere time it was not unusual for a pair of pigeons to sell for a thousand sesterces, a price at which the present day should blush, if we may believe the report that men have been found to pay for a pair as much as four thousand _nummi_." ($ .)] [footnote : the market for chickens and eggs in the united states would doubtless astonish the people of delos as much as the statistics do us (ipsa suas mirantur gargara messes!). it is solemnly recorded that the american hen produces a billion and a quarter dozen eggs per annum, of a value greater than that of either the wheat or cotton crops, and yet there are many of us who cannot get our hens to lay more than a hundred eggs a year!] [footnote : reading _ad infirma crura_. this practice is explained more at length by columella (viii, , ) who specifies the spurs, _calcaribus inustis_. buffon, who describes a 'practice of trimming the combs of capons, adds (v, ) an interesting account of an experiment which he says he had made "une espece de greffe animale": after trimming the comb of a growing cockerel his budding spurs were cut out and grafted on the roots of the comb, where they took root and flourished, growing to a length of two and a half inches, in some cases curving forward like the horns of a ram, and in others turning back like those of a goat.] [footnote : the dusting yard which varro here describes was in the open, but columella (viii, ) advises what modern poultry farmers pride themselves upon having recently discovered,--a covered scratching pen strewn with litter to afford exercise for the hens in rough weather. it will be observed that, so far as ventilation is concerned, varro recommends a hen house open to the weather: this is another standard of modern practice which has had a hard struggle against prejudice. columella adds two more interesting bits of advice, that for the comfort of the hens the roosts should be cut square, and for cleanliness their water trough should be enclosed leaving only openings large enough to receive a hen's head. with so much enlightenment and sanitation one would expect one or the other of these romans to tell us of some "teeming hen" like herrick's who laid "her egg each day." we are proud to be able to cite the eminent roseburg industrious biddy who, in the year of grace , achieved the championship of america with a record of eggs in ten months and nineteen days, and was sold for $ : but varro is content to suggest that a hen will lay more eggs in a season than she can hatch, and the conservative columella (viii, ) that the number of eggs depends upon diet.] [footnote : the guinea fowl got their greek name, _meleagrides_, because the story was that the sisters of meleager were turned into guinea hens. pliny (_h.n._ x, ) says that they fight every year on meleager's tomb. it is a fact that they are a pugnacious fowl. buffon says that guinea fowl disappeared from europe in the dark ages and were not known again until the route to the indies via the cape of good hope was opened when they were imported anew from the west coast of africa.] [footnote : reading, "propter fastidium hominum." cf. pliny (x, ), whose explanation is "propter ingratum virus."] [footnote : there is a virginia practice of feeding a fat turkey heavily on bread soaked in wine or liquor just before he is killed, the result being that as the turkey gets into that condition which used to put our ancestors under the table, he relaxes all his tendons and so is sweeter and more tender when he comes above the table. there is a humanitarian side to the practice which should recommend it even to the w.c.t.u. as well as to the epicure.] [footnote : many thousands of geese used to be driven every year to rome from the land of the morini in northern gaul, but the germans are the modern consumers. a british consular report says that in addition to the domestic supply a special "goose train" of from fifteen to forty cars is received daily in berlin from russia. it would seem that the goose that lays the golden egg has emigrated to muscovy. buffon says that the introduction of the virginia turkey into europe drove the goose off the tables of all civilized peoples.] [footnote : columella (viii, ) repeats this myth, but aristotle (_h.a._ v, , ) says that geese bathe _after_ breeding. buffon gives a gallic touch, "ces oiseaux preludent aux actes de l'amour en allant d'abord s'egayer dans l'eau."] [footnote : reading _seris_. it is the _cichorium endivia_ of linnaeus. cf. pliny (_h.n._ xx, .)] [footnote : varro does not mention it, but the romans knew and prized _pâté de foie gras_ under the name _ficatum_, which indicates that they produced it by cramming their geese with a diet of figs. cf. horace's verse "pinguibus et ficis pastum iecur anseris albi." in toulouse, whence now comes the best of this dainty of the epicure, the geese are crammed daily with a dough of corn meal mixed with the oil of poppies, fed through a tin funnel, which is introduced into the esophagus of the unhappy bird. at the end of a month the stertorous breathing of the victim proclaims the time of sacrifice to apicius. the liver is expected to weigh a kilogram, (say two pounds), while at least two kilograms of fat are saved in addition, to garnish the family _plat_ of vegetables during the remainder of the year.] [footnote : reading _foeles_, which keller, in his account of the fauna of ancient italy in the cambridge _companion to latin studies_, identifies with _martes vulgaris_. sir anthony fitzherbert calls them fullymartes. it does not appear that the romans had in varro's time brought from egypt our household cat, _f. maniculata_. they used weasels and tame snakes for catching mice.] [footnote : darwin (_animals and plants_, i, ) cites this passage and argues that varro's advice to cover the duck yard with netting to keep the ducks from flying out is evidence that in varro's time ducks were not entirely domesticated, and hence that the modern domestic duck is the same species as the wild duck. it may be noted, however, that varro gives the same advice about netting the chicken yard, having said that chickens had been domesticated from the beginning of time.] [footnote : the ancient etruscan city of tarquinii is now known as corneto. the wild sheep which lippinus there kept in his game preserves were probably the _mouflon_ which are still hunted in sardinia and corsica, though they may have been the phrygian wild sheep (_aegoceros argali_) which varro mentions in book ii. pliny (_h.n._ viii, ) says that this lippinus was the first of the romans to keep wild animals enclosed; that he established his preserves shortly before the civil wars, and that he soon had imitators.] [footnote : reading * * * * [transcriber's note: the preceding four *s are actually four instances of the "infinity" symbol (like a digit rotated horizontally)]_passum_. the roman mile, _mille passuum_, was yards less than the english mile.] [footnote : of the three kinds of hares mentioned by varro the "common italian kind" was _l. timidus_, a roast shoulder of which horace vaunts as a delicacy: the alpine hare was _l. variabilis_, which grows white on the approach of winter: and the _cuniculus_ was the common rabbit known to our english ancestors as the coney. strabo records (casaub, ) that the inhabitants of the gymnesian (balearic) islands in spain sent a deputation to augustus to request a military force to exterminate the pest of rabbits, for such was their multitude that the people were being crowded out of their homes by them, in which their plight was that of modern australia. they were usually hunted in spain with muzzled ferrets imported from africa.] [footnote : the edible snail, _helix pomatia_, l., is still an article of commerce in france and italy. they prey upon vines and give evidence of their appreciation of the best by abounding in the vineyards of the _cote d'or_, the ancient burgundy. there at the end of summer they are gathered for the double purpose of protecting the vines and delighting the epicure: are then stored in a safe place until cold weather, when they considerately seal up their own shells with a calcareous secretion and so are shipped to market. here is the recipe for 'escargots à la bourguignonne,' which despite the prejudice engendered by _leviticus_ (xi, .) may be recommended to the american palate jaded by beefsteak and potatoes and the high cost of living: "mettre les escargots a bouillir pendant a minutes dans de l'eau salée, les retirer de leur coquille, les laver a l'eau froide pour les debarrasser du limon, les cuire dans un court-bouillon fortement assaisonné. apres cuisson les replacer dans le coquille bien nettoyee, en les garnissant au fond et par dessus d'une farce de beurre frais manipule avec un fin hachis de persil, cerfeuil, ail, echalote, sel et poivre. avant de servir, faire chauffer au four."] [footnote : reading lxxx _quadrantes_. a comparison may be made of this capacity with that of the ordinary snail known to the romans, for their smallest unit of liquid measure was called a _cochlear_, or snail shell, and contained. of a modern pint, or, as we may say, a spoonful: indeed the french word _cuiller_ is derived from _cochlear_.] [footnote : it is perhaps well to remind the american reader that the european dormouse (_myoxus glis_. fr. _loir_. ger. _siebenschlafer_) is rather a squirrel than a mouse, and that he is still esteemed a dainty edible, as he was by the romans: indeed when fat, just before he retires to hibernate, he might be preferred to 'possum and other strange dishes on which some hospitable americans regale themselves and the patient palates of touring presidents. in his treatise _de re culinaria_ apicius gives a recipe for a ragout of dormice which sounds appetizing.] [footnote : darwin (_animals and plants_, xviii) says: "i have never heard of the dormouse breeding in captivity."] [footnote : varro makes no mention of tea and bread and butter as part of the diet of a dormouse; so we are better able to understand his abstinence at the mad tea party in _alice in wonderland_. as martial (iii, ) calls him _somniculosus_, it is probable that his table manners on that occasion were nothing new and that his english and german names were always justified.] [footnote : this is one of varro's puns which requires a surgical operation to get it into one's head. appius is selected to talk about bees because his name has some echo of the sound of _apis_, the word for bee.] [footnote : the study of bees was as interesting to the ancients as it is to us. there have survived from among many others the treatises of aristotle, varro, virgil, columella and pliny, but they are all made up, as maeterlinck has remarked, of "erreurs charmantes," and for that reason the antique lore of bees is read perhaps to best advantage in the mellifluous verses of the fourth _georgic_, which follow varro closely.] [footnote : he might have said also that the hexagonal form of construction employed by bees produces the largest possible result with the least labour and material. maeterlinck rehearses (_la vie des abeilles_, ) the result of the study of this problem in the highest mathematics: "réaumur avait proposé au célèbre mathematicien koenig le problem suivant: 'entre toutes les cellules hexagonales a fond pyramidal compose de trois rhombes semblables et égaux, determiner celle qui peut être construite avec le moins de matière?' koenig trouva qu'une telle cellule avait son fond fait de trois rhombes dont chaque grand angle était de degrés, minutes et chaque petit de degrés, minutes. or, un autre savant, maraldi, ayant mesuré aussi exactement que possible les angles des rhombes construits par les abeilles fixa les grands à degrés, minutes, et les petits a degrés, minutes. il n'y avait done, entre les deux solutions qu'une difference de minutes. ii est probable que l'erreur, s'il y en a une, doit être imputee a maraldi plutot qu'aux abeilles, car aucun instrument ne permet de mesurer avec une precision infaìllible les angles des cellules qui ne sont pas assez nettlement definis." maclaurin, a scotch physicist, checked koenig's computations and reported to the royal society in london in that he found a solution in exact accord with maraldi's measurements, thereby completely justifying the mathematics of the bee architect.] [footnote : the romans were as curious and as constant in the use of perfumes as we are of tobacco. it is perhaps well to remember that they might find our smoke as offensive as we would their unguents.] [footnote : indeed one of the marvels of nature is the service which certain bees perform for certain plants in transferring their fertilizing pollen which has no other means of transportation. darwin is most interesting on this subject.] [footnote : the ancients, even aristotle, did not know that the queen bee is the common mother of the hive. they called her the king, and it remained for swammerdam in the seventeenth century to determine with the microscope this important fact. from that discovery has developed our modern knowledge of the bee; that the drones are the males and are suffered by the (normally) sterile workers to live only until one of them has performed his office of fertilizing once for all the new queen in that nuptial flight, so dramatically fatal to the successful swain, which maeterlinck has described with wonderful rhetoric, whereupon the workers massacre the surviving males without mercy. this is the "driving out" which varro mentions.] [footnote : this picture of the queen bee is hardly in accord with modern observations. it seems that while the queen is treated with the utmost respect, she is rather a royal prisoner than a ruler, and, after her nuptial flight, is confined to her function of laying eggs incessantly unless she may be unwillingly dragged forth to lead a swarm. maeterlinck thus pictures (_la vie des abeilles_, ) her existence with a gallic pencil: "elle n'aura aucune des habitudes, aucunes des passions que nous croyons inherentes à l'abeille. elle n'eprouvera ni le desir du soleil, ni le besoin de l'espace et mourra sans avoir visite une fleur. elle passera son existence dans l'ombre et l'agitation de la foule à la recherche infatigable de berceaux à peupler. en revanche, elle connaitra seule l'inquietude de l'amour."] [footnote : it would have interested axius to know that the annual consumption of honey in the united states today is from to million pounds and that the crop has a money value of at least ten million dollars. to match seius, we might put forward a bee farmer in california who produces annually , pounds of honey from , hives.] [footnote : maeterlinck has made a charming picture of this habit of propinquity of the bee-stand to the human habitation. he describes (_la vie des abeilles_, ) the old man who taught him to love bees when he was a boy in flanders, an old man whose entire happiness "consistait aux beautés d'un jardin et parmi ces beautés la mieux aimee et la plus visitées etait un roucher, composé de douze cloches de paille qu'il avait peint, les unes de rose vif, les autres de jaune clair, la plupart d'un bleu tendre, car il avail observé, bien avant les experiences de sir john lubbock, que le bleu est la couleur preferée des abeilles. il avait installé ce roucher centre le mur blanchi de la maison, dans l'angle que formait une des ces savoureuses et fraiches cuisines hollondaises aux dressoirs de faience ou étincalaient les etains et les cuivres qui, par la porte ouverte, se reflétaient dans un canal paisible. et l'eau chargés d'images familières, sous un rideau de peupliers, guidait les regards jusqu'au répos d'un horizon de moulins et de prés."] [footnote : reading _apiastro_. this is the _melissa officinalis_ of linnaeus. cf. pliny, xx, and xxi, .] [footnote : bee keepers attribute to reaumur the invention of the modern glass observation hive, which has made possible so much of our knowledge of the bee, but it may be noted that pliny (_h.n._ xxi, ) mentions hives of "lapis specularis," some sort of talc, contrived for the purpose of observing bees at work. the great advance in bee hives is, however, the sectional construction attributed to langstroth and developed in america by root.] [footnote : columella, (ix, ) referring to the myth of the generation of bees in the carcase of an ox (out of which virgil made the fable of the pastor aristaeus in the fourth georgic), explains the practice mentioned in the text with the statement "hic enim quasi quadam cognatione generis maxime est apibus aptus." the plastering of wicker hives with ox dung persisted and is recommended in the seventeenth century editions of the _maison rustique_.] [footnote : reading _seditiosum_.] [footnote : this is a mistake upon which aristotle could have corrected varro.] [footnote : after studying the commentators on this obscure passage, i have elected to follow the emendation of ursinus, which, although keil sneers at its license, has the advantage of making sense.] [footnote : _sinapis arvensis_, linn.] [footnote : _sium sisarum_, linn.] [footnote : the philosophy of the bee is not as selfish as that human principle which varro attributes to them. the hive does not send forth its "youth" to found a colony, but, on the contrary, abandons its home and its accumulated store of wealth to its youth and itself ventures forth under the leadership of the old queen to face the uncertainties of the future, leaving only a small band of old bees to guard the hive and rear the young until the new queen shall have supplied a new population.] [footnote : reading _imbecilliores_.] [footnote : pliny (_h.n_. ix, ) relates that this loan was made to supply the banquet on the occasion of one of the triumphs of caesar the dictator, but pliny puts the loan at six thousand fishes.] [footnote : it is impossible to translate this pun into english, _dulcis_ being the equivalent of both "fresh" and "agreeable," and _amara_ of "salt" and "disagreeable." a french translator would have at his command _doux_ and _amer_.] [footnote : cf. pliny (_h.n_. ii, ): "in lydia the islands called calaminae are not only driven about by the wind, but may even be pushed at pleasure from place to place, by which means many people saved themselves in the mithridatic war. there are some small islands in the nymphaeus called the dancers, because, when choruses are sung, they move in tune with the measure of the music."] [footnote : reading _in ius vocare_, with the _double entendre_ of service in a sauce and bringing to justice.] index _actus (actus guadratus)_, unit of area in land measurement aegean sea, derivation of name aesop's fable of the fox agriculture, distinguished from grazing, pottery-making, etc. definition of scope of purposes of, are profit and pleasure four divisions for the study of effect of conformation of the land on, effect of character of soil albutius, l. alfalfa, advice concerning alfius, roman farmer banker alpine hares amurca, farm uses of used for anointing threshing floors waste of, by romans method of preserving condensing apiaries, location of _see_ bees. apicius, recipe for ragout of dormice by, appian, quoted appius claudius pulcher apples, storing apulian breed of horses aquinas, thomas _arbusta_, the italian _arista_, etymology of word aristotle, on blindness of puppies cited on goats' breathing through their ears on exercising of pregnant mares on breeding of mares story related by _arpent_, derivation of asparagus planting, asses, use of, as compared with other draught animals manure of certain choice breeds of buying, breeding, care of, etc. milk of atticus, t. pomponius augeas, king, tradition concerning augustine, st., on varro indebtedness of, to works of varro aviaries, profits from two classes of those kept for profit those kept for pleasure aviary, varro's, at casinum b bakewell, breeding of sheep by barbers, the first, in italy barn yards, arrangement of barrows, hogs called bavaria, agriculture in iowa contrasted with that in beans, use of, for green manuring storing beauclerk, w.n., on agriculture in modern italy quoted bees, eggs of unfertilized queen the keeping of theories concerning generation of treatises on, by ancient writers habits and houses of money to be made from location of stands for food for; structure and care of hives kinds of selection of moving swarming of removal of honey general care of benson, william, edition of _georgics_ by, quoted birds, manure of blackbirds, houses for keeping blackstone, opinion by, cited bleat, etymology of word blood, use of, in composts boars, advice concerning altering; wild boissier, gaston quoted and cited _boke of husbandry_, fitzherbert's bologna sausages bones, remedy for injuries to borden, spencer, _the arab horse_ by, quoted boundaries, protection of farm buffon, quotations from cited bugs, recipe for exterminating buildings on farm c cabbage, cato's advocacy of the planting seeding cakes, recipes for calendar of agricultural operations capons, chickens called method of caponizing cocks _caprae_, goats, derivation of word _capreolus_, a spiral tendril cascate delle marmore casinum, varro's estate of cassius, quoted cassius dionysius cat, the modern household, unknown to varro cato, marcus porcius the _de re rustica_ of literary style of, compared with varro cats, contrasted with dogs in relations with man cattle, leaves as fodder for feeding of care of number and selection of, for a farm honour paid to, in naming zodiacal signs and the constellations advice on breeding and feeding number of, to be kept advice on neat cattle _centuria_, defined chaff, derivation of word cheese, varieties and qualities of cheese cake chestnuts as food in italy child, r., quoted cicero, quoted concerning varro verse from cleaning grain clement-mullet, j.j., translation by climate, choice of, in buying a farm connection between conformation of land and clover, advice on seeding coburn, book on alfalfa by colours of horses, significance of columella cited on ploughing rules about the compost heap on soil improvement with legumes on dangers from mosquitoes on alfalfa quoted _comedy of errors_, origin of compost heap, rules concerning the concrete, fences of conformation of land, effect of, on agriculture constellations, names of cattle given to coots corn, structure of plant storing _see_ grain corn land as distinguished from plough land corsican honey cotton seed, utilization of country life, antiquity of cowper and cowley, lines by crescenzi, pietro, cited cultivating time curing hams cuttage of plants cyrrhestes, tower of the winds built by d dante, quotation from darwin, charles, _animals and plants_ by quoted on dormice dates, eating preserved _denarius_, value of the dennis, _cities and cemeteries of etruria_ by, quoted _de re rustica_, cato's desmolins, edmond, cited dickson, andrew, quoted cited diophanes of bithynia disease in cattle, and remedies dislocations of bones, remedy for dogs, watch herd donaldson's _agricultural biography_, quoted dondlinger, _book of wheat_ by, quoted dormice, enclosures for, feeding, etc. draining period for draught animals on farm number and choice of dry farming ducks, housing, care of, etc. dunghill fowl dusting yard for poultry e eggs, the first course in roman dinners barren number for setting preserving elm trees, planting of for marking boundaries endive, as food for geese ensilage, question of use of, by ancients equipment of a farm f fallow, as managed by the romans farm, buying a laying out of the stocking the as a source of both profit and pleasure effect of conformation of the land effect of character of the soil farm hands, allowances for selection, treatment, number of, etc., _farrago_, mixed fodder as food for geese feast days, observance of feed racks, construction of fences ferrero, cited field crops, planting of figs, season for propagating eating preserved fining the soil fishes, feeding and care of fish ponds fresh-water and salt-water number of, on one estate fitzherbert, sir anthony quoted; cited on combining two kinds of husbandry on greasing of sheep flock masters, duties of forage, derivation from _farrago_ forage crops foremen of farm hands, qualifications of fowl. _see_ poultry fowler, _social life at rome_ by, quoted france, yields of wine in freemen as agricultural labourers fruits, preserving time for using stored furlong, derivation of g game preserves gauls, pre-eminence of, in growing and making of pork high qualities as shepherds geese, selection of, breeding, care, etc. geldings, horses called _geoponica_, the; cited _georgics_, virgil's, passages based on information from varro gestation, periods of gleaning of grain fields _gluma_, etymology of word goats, as foes of agriculture characteristics, breeding and handling milk of; use of hair and skins of; shearing of googe, barnaby, translation of heresbach by graftage of plants grain, advice on seeding storing of cleaning, when taken out of storage time for marketing granaries, varieties of _granum_, etymology of word grapes, harvesting of advice on storing grapevines, trellises and props for grazing, to be distinguished from agriculture greek writers on agriculture green manuring guano guinea fowl h _haeredium_, defined hair, removal of superfluous hams, recipes for curing and cooking hares, varieties of _see_ rabbits harte, walter, _essays on husbandry_ by on alfalfa quoted hartlib, samuel quoted on pasture _vs._ arable land harvester, ancient forerunners of the modern harvest time hay, harvesting the storing of haymaking health, location of farm steading with regard to healthfulness of farms, importance of hedges, myrtle heliotrope, habits of the hens herd dogs heresbach, conrad, cited herrick, robert, quoted hesiod quoted and cited hinnies hives for bees, location and structure inventors of modern devices hogs homer, quoted on use of mules honey, sicilian and corsican profits from removal of, from hive honeycomb, structure of the horace, cited quoted horses, oxen _vs._ manure of breeding, feeding, care of, etc. house for residence on farm housekeeper, duties of the i ibn-al-awam, book of agriculture by implements, farming inarching, propagation by incantations as cures interamna, town of iowa, farming in bavaria and italy, agriculture in modern j johnson, samuel, on harte's _husbandry_ quoted on shenstone joigneaux, p., on yields of wine in france jones, w.h., on malaria in the roman campagna _jugerum_, defined _jugum_, defined jungle fowl k kames, lord, quoted keil, quoted cited keller, cited _kitab al-felahah_ of ibn-al-awam l labourers, agricultural lanciani, cited land, effect of conformation of, on agriculture leaves as fodder for cattle legumes, soil improvement with storing _leporaria_ library, public, at rome literature of farm management, ancient live stock, feeding care of origin and importance of husbandry of _see_ cattle lombardy, agriculture in ancient and modern m machiavelli, quoted maeterlinck, quoted on dogs on the antique lore of bees on the mathematics of the honeycomb on the queen bee's life on the nearness of the bee-stand to the dwelling-house mago the carthagenian, treatise on farm management by quoted varro's account of _maison rustique_, cited and quoted malaria in roman campagna manure, preparation of best kinds of manure pits, arrangement of manuring, importance of green maremma sheep dogs mares, use of, for war horses milk of market day among the romans marl, use of, as manure marrying the vine martial, quotation from meadows, protection of irrigated, of lombardy measurement of land, units of area used in mile, the roman military fences milk and milking, advice on minerval, a mitchell, donald g. mommsen, quoted montesquieu, quoted moon, influence of, on agriculture moryson, fynes, quoted mosquitoes, perception by varro of damages from mules, remarks on foaling by uses, care of, etc. murray, gilbert, translation of euripides by must cake myers, f.w.h., cited n neat cattle, buying, breeding, feeding, etc. neighbourhood, considerations of, in locating farm neighbours, treatment of one's _nummus_, a "nickel," _nundinum_, the roman week nurseries, protection of nuts, eating preserved o oaks, effect of, on olive trees _oboerati_, class of bondservants called _ocinum_, basil oil, manufacture of, from olives oil-making implements olive farm, number of hands for working an olives, allowances of, for farm hands reasons for growth in attica effect of oaks in neighbourhood of advice on planting propagating from truncheons harvesting of methods of preserving eating preserved olive salad onager, wild ass orchards laying out and planting of olive _ornithones_ _see_ aviaries ortolans, houses for keeping overseer duties of the location of room of ovid, quoted oxen selling of worn-out comparison of horses and care of hoofs of treatment of sick number of, suitable for a farm qualities of, to be considered breaking of respect in which held by ancient romans p palladius quoted on the gallic harvester _palma_, palm partridges pastures care of _vs_. arable land pâté de foie gras, known and prized by romans peacocks, discussion of perfumes among the romans persius, cited petrarch on varro on the loss of varro's books philippus, l. marcius pigeon houses pigeons manure of kinds and care of pigs, weanling, called "sacred" planting field crops olives vines time of plants four methods of propagating transplanting cuttage graftage inarching time for using different methods of propagation mechanical action of plautus _menaechmi_ of quoted plautius pleasure as a main purpose of agriculture pliny quoted use of marl as manure noted by on the gallic harvester cited pliny the younger, study in garden of ploughing, importance of thorough of rotten land plough land, as distinguished from corn land polecats pollio, asinius, library at rome founded by polybius, quoted pome fruits, storing pomegranates, preserving poultry, kinds, feeding, and care of poultry houses protection of nurseries and meadows prothero, quoted punning, varro's use of pythagoras q quail, houses for keeping migrations of queen bees, recency of knowledge about quinces, storing quintilian, on varro r rabbits, warrens for breeding and feeding of derivation of latin name for racking wine reate, asses from recipes _rerum rusticarum_ of varro virgil's indebtedness to rest room for farm hands ridgeway, quoted on markings of horses ridging land, custom of rogers, thorold, quoted roman fever rome, insecurity of life in ancient rosea, drainage of, by artificial canals rosean breed of horses rotten land, precautions regarding s sacred pigs salad, olive salt, allowance of, for farm hands _saltus_, defined salutations, greek, as used by romans saserna, as a writer on agriculture quoted on number of farm hands necessary on securing allegiance of dogs sausages scab among sheep and cattle scratches in horses, remedy for scratching pen for hens _scripulum_, defined scrofa, tremelius origin of name sea birds, manure of seasons, agricultural seed, selection of seed bed, preparing the sellar, cited seneca, on virgil's farming _sestertius_, value of the sheep, value of, for their manure buying of feeding, breeding, and care of shearing of sheep dogs shepherds, distinguished from farmers number and kind of, requisite purchase of slaves for life of sicilian honey silos size of farm slaves, selling of old and sick importance of food to contentment of selection of, for farm hands number of, for operating a farm buying, to act as shepherds snails, recipe for preparing cooked method of keeping in enclosures varieties of fattening of snakebite, remedy for soil, improvement of effect of character of, on agriculture different kinds of fining the solar measure of year solomon, quotation on ploughing from sour land, treatment of sowing, period for spring ploughing squabs stables for live stock steading, building a husbandry of the development of the industries of the stamen, etymology of stocking a farm storing crops strabo, inventor of aviaries cited straw, derivation of word swine, selecting, feeding, breeding, etc. t tarquinii, ancient etruscan city taylor, john, _arator_ by, quoted teals teeth, telling age of animals by the _terra_, different senses of word thales of miletus thebes, derivation of name theophrastus, works by cited quoted on honey of corsica thessalian horses thinning vines threshing threshing floor, the thrushes, profits from houses for keeping tillage, advice on time, standards of the roman week tools, farming toulouse, production of pâté de foie gras in transplanting transportation, importance of ease of trellises in vineyards trumpet, training hogs to obey sound of assembling wild boars and roebucks by the tull, jethro turkeys, fattening effect of introduction into europe, on geese turtle doves, housing and care of v varro, marcus terentius the _rerum rusticarum_ of works of, besides _rerum rusticarum_, activities of, in war against pirates estate and museum of vegetable gardens _versus_, the, defined vetch, derivation of name veterinary science of ancient romans villa, discussion of the roman vines, for marking farm boundaries advice on planting thinning vineyards, the maintenance of implements for vintage, work of the virgil indebtedness of, to varro formula for testing sour land by advice on ploughing cited on colours of horses vitruvius, quoted on cyrrhestes' tower of the winds w walnut trees, effect of, on surrounding land walter of henley quoted on use of marl as manure warrens, defined watch dogs, water for cattle water supply for a steading weaning, of young cattle of lambs weanling pigs week, the roman wheat, seeding yields of structure of plant harvesting of wild asses wild boars, keeping of, in game preserves wind, impregnating of mares by the wind breaks for olive orchards wine, cabbage as an offset to effects of allowances of, for farm hands yields of, in ancient italy racking, used in cramming fowls winnowing winnowing basket, use of, for a cradle winter ploughing wood pigeons, cramming and fattening wool, shearing sheep for x xenophon, as a writer on agriculture quoted y year, solar measure of the young, arthur inscription on tombstone of wife fences recommended by on necessary number of farm labourers z zeno of citium zodiacal signs, honour paid to cattle in the fight for conservation by gifford pinchot contents introduction i. prosperity ii. home-building for the nation iii. better times on the farm iv. principles of conservation v. waterways vi. business vii. the moral issue viii. public spirit ix. the children x. an equal chance xi. the new patriotism xii. the present battle index introduction the following discussion of the conservation problem is not a systematic treatise upon the subject. some of the matter has been published previously in magazines, and some is condensed and rearranged from addresses made before conservation conventions and other organizations within the past two years. while not arranged chronologically, yet the articles here grouped may serve to show the rapid, virile evolution of the campaign for conservation of the nation's resources. i am indebted to the courtesy of the editors of _the world's work, the outlook_, and of _american industries_ for the use of matter first contributed to these magazines. the fight for conservation chapter i prosperity the most prosperous nation of to-day is the united states. our unexampled wealth and well-being are directly due to the superb natural resources of our country, and to the use which has been made of them by our citizens, both in the present and in the past. we are prosperous because our forefathers bequeathed to us a land of marvellous resources still unexhausted. shall we conserve those resources, and in our turn transmit them, still unexhausted, to our descendants? unless we do, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day. when the natural resources of any nation become exhausted, disaster and decay in every department of national life follow as a matter of course. therefore the conservation of natural resources is the basis, and the only permanent basis, of national success. there are other conditions, but this one lies at the foundation. perhaps the most striking characteristic of the american people is their superb practical optimism; that marvellous hopefulness which keeps the individual efficiently at work. this hopefulness of the american is, however, as short-sighted as it is intense. as a rule, it does not look ahead beyond the next decade or score of years, and fails wholly to reckon with the real future of the nation. i do not think i have often heard a forecast of the growth of our population that extended beyond a total of two hundred millions, and that only as a distant and shadowy goal. the point of view which this fact illustrates is neither true nor far-sighted. we shall reach a population of two hundred millions in the very near future, as time is counted in the lives of nations, and there is nothing more certain than that this country of ours will some day support double or triple or five times that number of prosperous people if only we can bring ourselves so to handle our natural resources in the present as not to lay an embargo on the prosperous growth of the future. we, the american people, have come into the possession of nearly four million square miles of the richest portion of the earth. it is ours to use and conserve for ourselves and our descendants, or to destroy. the fundamental question which confronts us is, what shall we do with it? that question cannot be answered without first considering the condition of our natural resources and what is being done with them to-day. as a people, we have been in the habit of declaring certain of our resources to be inexhaustible. to no other resource more frequently than coal has this stupidly false adjective been applied. yet our coal supplies are so far from being inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of consumption shown by the figures of the last seventy-five years continues to prevail, our supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty years and of bituminous coal less than two hundred years. from the point of view of national life, this means the exhaustion of one of the most important factors in our civilization within the immediate future. not a few coal fields have already been exhausted, as in portions of iowa and missouri. yet, in the face of these known facts, we continue to treat our coal as though there could never be an end of it. the established coal-mining practice at the present date does not take out more than one-half the coal, leaving the less easily mined or lower grade material to be made permanently inaccessible by the caving in of the abandoned workings. the loss to the nation from this form of waste is prodigious and inexcusable. the waste in use is not less appalling. but five per cent, of the potential power residing in the coal actually mined is saved and used. for example, only about five per cent, of the power of the one hundred and fifty million tons annually burned on the railways of the united states is actually used in traction; ninety-five per cent, is expended unproductively or is lost. in the best incandescent electric lighting plants but one-fifth of one per cent, of the potential value of the coal is converted into light. many oil and gas fields, as in pennsylvania, west virginia, and the mississippi valley, have already failed, yet vast amounts of gas continue to be poured into the air and great quantities of oil into the streams. cases are known in which great volumes of oil were systematically burned in order to get rid of it. the prodigal squandering of our mineral fuels proceeds unchecked in the face of the fact that such resources as these, once used or wasted, can never be replaced. if waste like this were not chiefly thoughtless, it might well be characterized as the deliberate destruction of the nation's future. many fields of iron ore have already been exhausted, and in still more, as in the coal mines, only the higher grades have been taken from the mines, leaving the least valuable beds to be exploited at increased cost or not at all. similar waste in the case of other minerals is less serious only because they are less indispensable to our civilization than coal and iron. mention should be made of the annual loss of millions of dollars worth of by-products from coke, blast, and other furnaces now thrown into the air, often not merely without benefit but to the serious injury of the community. in other countries these by-products are saved and used. we are in the habit of speaking of the solid earth and the eternal hills as though they, at least, were free from the vicissitudes of time and certain to furnish perpetual support for prosperous human life. this conclusion is as false as the term "inexhaustible" applied to other natural resources. the waste of soil is among the most dangerous of all wastes now in progress in the united states. in , professor shaler, than whom no one has spoken with greater authority on this subject, estimated that in the upland regions of the states south of pennsylvania three thousand square miles of soil had been destroyed as the result of forest denudation, and that destruction was then proceeding at the rate of one hundred square miles of fertile soil per year. no seeing man can travel through the united states without being struck with the enormous and unnecessary loss of fertility by easily preventable soil wash. the soil so lost, as in the case of many other wastes, becomes itself a source of damage and expense, and must be removed from the channels of our navigable streams at an enormous annual cost. the mississippi river alone is estimated to transport yearly four hundred million tons of sediment, or about twice the amount of material to be excavated from the panama canal. this material is the most fertile portion of our richest fields, transformed from a blessing to a curse by unrestricted erosion. the destruction of forage plants by overgrazing has resulted, in the opinion of men most capable of judging, in reducing the grazing value of the public lands by one-half. this enormous loss of forage, serious though it be in itself, is not the only result of wrong methods of pasturage. the destruction of forage plants is accompanied by loss of surface soil through erosion; by forest destruction; by corresponding deterioration in the water supply; and by a serious decrease in the quality and weight of animals grown on overgrazed lands. these sources of loss from failure to conserve the range are felt to-day. they are accompanied by the certainty of a future loss not less important, for range lands once badly overgrazed can be restored to their former value but slowly or not at all. the obvious and certain remedy is for the government to hold and control the public range until it can pass into the hands of settlers who will make their homes upon it. as methods of agriculture improve and new dry-land crops are introduced, vast areas once considered unavailable for cultivation are being made into prosperous homes; and this-movement has only begun. the single object of the public land system of the united states, as president roosevelt repeatedly declared, is the making and maintenance of prosperous homes. that object cannot be achieved unless such of the public lands as are suitable for settlement are conserved for the actual home-maker. such lands should pass from the possession of the government directly and only into the hands of the settler who lives on the land. of all forms of conservation there is none more important than that of holding the public lands for the actual home-maker. it is a notorious fact that the public land laws have been deflected from their beneficent original purpose of home-making by lax administration, short-sighted departmental decisions, and the growth of an unhealthy public sentiment in portions of the west. great areas of the public domain have passed into the hands, not of the home-maker, but of large individual or corporate owners whose object is always the making of profit and seldom the making of homes. it is sometimes urged that enlightened self-interest will lead the men who have acquired large holdings of public lands to put them to their most productive use, and it is said with truth that this best use is the tillage of small areas by small owners. unfortunately, the facts and this theory disagree. even the most cursory examination of large holdings throughout the west will refute the contention that the intelligent self-interest of large owners results promptly and directly in the making of homes. few passions of the human mind are stronger than land hunger, and the large holder clings to his land until circumstances make it actually impossible for him to hold it any longer. large holdings result in sheep or cattle ranges, in huge ranches, in great areas held for speculative rise in price, and not in homes. unless the american homestead system of small free-holders is to be so replaced by a foreign system of tenantry, there are few things of more importance to the west than to see to it that the public lands pass directly into the hands of the actual settler instead of into the hands of the man who, if he can, will force the settler to pay him the unearned profit of the land speculator, or will hold him in economic and political dependence as a tenant. if we are to have homes on the public lands, they must be conserved for the men who make homes. the lowest estimate reached by the forest service of the timber now standing in the united states is , billion feet, board measure; the highest, , billion. the present annual consumption is approximately billion feet, while the annual growth is but a third of the consumption, or from to billion feet. if we accept the larger estimate of the standing timber, , billion feet, and the larger estimate of the annual growth, billion feet, and apply the present rate of consumption, the result shows a probable duration of our supplies of timber of little more than a single generation. estimates of this kind are almost inevitably misleading. for example, it is certain that the rate of consumption of timber will increase enormously in the future, as it has in the past, so long as supplies remain to draw upon. exact knowledge of many other factors is needed before closely accurate results can be obtained. the figures cited are, however, sufficiently reliable to make it certain that the united states has already crossed the verge of a timber famine so severe that its blighting effects will be felt in every household in the land. the rise in the price of lumber which marked the opening of the present century is the beginning of a vastly greater and more rapid rise which is to come. we must necessarily begin to suffer from the scarcity of timber long before our supplies are completely exhausted. it is well to remember that there is no foreign source from which we can draw cheap and abundant supplies of timber to meet a demand per capita so large as to be without parallel in the world, and that the suffering which will result from the progressive failure of our timber has been but faintly foreshadowed by temporary scarcities of coal. what will happen when the forests fail? in the first place, the business of lumbering will disappear. it is now the fourth greatest industry in the united states. all forms of building industries will suffer with it, and the occupants of houses, offices, and stores must pay the added cost. mining will become vastly more expensive; and with the rise in the cost of mining there must follow a corresponding rise in the price of coal, iron, and other minerals. the railways, which have as yet failed entirely to develop a satisfactory substitute for the wooden tie (and must, in the opinion of their best engineers, continue to fail), will be profoundly affected, and the cost of transportation will suffer a corresponding increase. water power for lighting, manufacturing, and transportation, and the movement of freight and passengers by inland waterways, will be affected still more directly than the steam railways. the cultivation of the soil, with or without irrigation, will be hampered by the increased cost of agricultural tools, fencing, and the wood needed for other purposes about the farm. irrigated agriculture will suffer most of all, for the destruction of the forests means the loss of the waters as surely as night follows day. with the rise in the cost of producing food, the cost of food itself will rise. commerce in general will necessarily be affected by the difficulties of the primary industries upon which it depends. in a word, when the forests fail, the daily life of the average citizen will inevitably feel the pinch on every side. and the forests have already begun to fail, as the direct result of the suicidal policy of forest destruction which the people of the united states have allowed themselves to pursue. it is true that about twenty per cent, of the less valuable timber land in the united states remains in the possession of the people in the national forests, and that it is being cared for and conserved to supply the needs of the present and to mitigate the suffering of the near future. but it needs no argument to prove that this comparatively small area will be insufficient to meet the demand which is now exhausting an area four times as great, or to prevent the suffering i have described. measures of greater vigor are imperatively required. the conception that water is, on the whole, the most important natural resource has gained firm hold in the irrigated west, and is making rapid progress in the humid east. water, not land, is the primary value in the western country, and its conservation and use to irrigate land is the first condition of prosperity. the use of our streams for irrigation and for domestic and manufacturing uses is comparatively well developed. their use for power is less developed, while their use for transportation has only begun. the conservation of the inland waterways of the united states for these great purposes constitutes, perhaps, the largest single task which now confronts the nation. the maintenance and increase of agriculture, the supply of clear water for domestic and manufacturing uses, the development of electrical power, transportation, and lighting, and the creation of a system of inland transportation by water whereby to regulate freight-rates by rail and to move the bulkier commodities cheaply from place to place, is a task upon the successful accomplishment of which the future of the nation depends in a peculiar degree. we are accustomed, and rightly accustomed, to take pride in the vigorous and healthful growth of the united states, and in its vast promise for the future. yet we are making no preparation to realize what we so easily foresee and glibly predict. the vast possibilities of our great future will become realities only if we make ourselves, in a sense, responsible for that future. the planned and orderly development and conservation of our natural resources is the first duty of the united states. it is the only form of insurance that will certainly protect us against the disasters that lack of foresight has in the past repeatedly brought down on nations since passed away. chapter ii home-building for the nation the most valuable citizen of this or any other country is the man who owns the land from which he makes his living. no other man has such a stake in the country. no other man lends such steadiness and stability to our national life. therefore no other question concerns us more intimately than the question of homes. permanent homes for ourselves, our children, and our nation--this is a central problem. the policy of national irrigation is of value to the united states in very many ways, but the greatest of all is this, that national irrigation multiplies the men who own the land from which they make their living. the old saying, "who ever heard of a man shouldering his gun to fight for his boarding house?" reflects this great truth, that no man is so ready to defend his country, not only with arms, but with his vote and his contribution to public opinion, as the man with a permanent stake in it, as the man who owns the land from which he makes his living. our country began as a nation of farmers. during the periods that gave it its character, when our independence was won and when our union was preserved, we were preeminently a nation of farmers. we can not, and we ought not, to continue exclusively, or even chiefly, an agricultural country, because one man can raise food enough for many. but the farmer who owns his land is still the backbone of this nation; and one of the things we want most is more of him. the man on the farm is valuable to the nation, like any other citizen, just in proportion to his intelligence, character, ability, and patriotism; but, unlike other citizens, also in proportion to his attachment to the soil. that is the principal spring of his steadiness, his sanity, his simplicity and directness, and many of his other desirable qualities. he is the first of home-makers. the nation that will lead the world will be a nation of homes. the object of the great conservation movement is just this, to make our country a permanent and prosperous home for ourselves and for our children, and for our children's children, and it is a task that is worth the best thought and effort of any and all of us. to achieve this or any other great result, straight thinking and strong action are necessary, and the straight thinking comes first. to make this country what we need to have it, we must think clearly and directly about our problems, and above all we must understand what the real problems are. the great things are few and simple, but they are too often hidden by false issues, and conventional, unreal thinking. the easiest way to hide a real issue always has been, and always will be, to replace it with a false one. the first thing we need in this country, as president roosevelt so well set forth in a great message which told what he had been trying to do for the american people, is equality of opportunity for every citizen. no man should have less, and no man ought to ask for any more. equality of opportunity is the real object of our laws and institutions. our institutions and our laws are not valuable in themselves. they are valuable only because they secure equality of opportunity for happiness and welfare to our citizens. an institution or a law is a means, not an end, a means to be used for the public good, to be modified for the public good, and to be interpreted for the public good. one of the great reasons why president roosevelt's administration was of such enormous value to the plain american was that he understood what st. paul meant when he said: "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." to follow blindly the letter of the law, or the form of an institution, without intelligent regard both for its spirit and for the public welfare, is very nearly as dangerous as to disregard the law altogether. what we need is the use of the law for the public good, and the construction of it for the public welfare. it goes without saying that the law is supreme and must be obeyed. civilization rests on obedience to law. but the law is not absolute. it requires to be construed. rigid construction of the law works, and must work, in the vast majority of cases, for the benefit of the men who can hire the best lawyers and who have the sources of influence in lawmaking at their command. strict construction necessarily favors the great interests as against the people, and in the long run can not do otherwise. wise execution of the law must consider what the law ought to accomplish for the general good. the great oppressive trusts exist because of subservient lawmakers and adroit legal constructions. here is the central stronghold of the money power in the everlasting conflict of the few to grab, and the many to keep or win the rights they were born with. legal technicalities seldom help the people. the people, not the law, should have the benefit of every doubt. equality of opportunity, a square deal for every man, the protection of the citizen against the great concentrations of capital, the intelligent use of laws and institutions for the public good, and the conservation of our natural resources, not for the trusts, but for the people; these are real issues and real problems. upon such things as these the perpetuity of this country as a nation of homes really depends. we are coming to see that the simple things are the things to work for. more than that, we are coming to see that the plain american citizen is the man to work for. the imagination is staggered by the magnitude of the prize for which we work. if we succeed, there will exist upon this continent a sane, strong people, living through the centuries in a land subdued and controlled for the service of the people, its rightful masters, owned by the many and not by the few. if we fail, the great interests, increasing their control of our natural resources, will thereby control the country more and more, and the rights of the people will fade into the privileges of concentrated wealth. there could be no better illustration of the eager, rapid, unwearied absorption by capital of the rights which belong to all the people than the water-power trust, perhaps not yet formed but in process of formation. this statement is true, but not unchallenged. we are met at every turn by the indignant denial of the water-power interests. they tell us that there is no community of interest among them, and yet they appear by their paid attorneys, year after year, at irrigation and other congresses, asking for help to remove the few remaining obstacles to their perpetual and complete absorption of the remaining water-powers. they tell us it has no significance that there is hardly a bank in some sections of the country that is not an agency for water-power capital, or that the general electric company interests are acquiring great groups of water-powers in various parts of the united states, and dominating the power market in the region of each group. and whoever dominates power, dominates all industry. have you ever seen a few drops of oil scattered on the water spreading until they formed a continuous film, which put an end at once to all agitation of the surface? the time for us to agitate this question is now, before the separate circles of centralized control spread into the uniform, unbroken, nation-wide covering of a single gigantic trust. there will be little chance for mere agitation after that. no man at all familiar with the situation can doubt that the time for effective protest is very short. if we do not use it to protect ourselves now, we may he very sure that the trust will give hereafter small consideration to the welfare of the average citizen when in conflict with its own. the man who really counts is the plain american citizen. this is the man for whom the roosevelt policies were created, and his welfare is the end to which the roosevelt policies lead. i stand for the roosevelt policies because they set the common good of all of us above the private gain of some of us; because they recognize the livelihood of the small man as more important to the nation than the profit of the big man; because they oppose all useless waste at present at the cost of robbing the future; because they demand the complete, sane, and orderly development of all our natural resources; because they insist upon equality of opportunity and denounce monopoly and special privilege; because, discarding false issues, they deal directly with the vital questions that really make a difference with the welfare of us all; and, most of all, because in them the plain american always and everywhere holds the first place. and i propose to stand for them while i have the strength to stand for anything. chapter iii better times on the farm ever since i came to have first-hand knowledge of irrigation, i have been impressed with the peculiar advantages which surround the irrigation rancher. the high productiveness of irrigated land, resulting in smaller farm units and denser settlement, as well as the efficiency and alertness of the irrigator, have combined to give the irrigated regions very high rank among the most progressive farming communities of the world. such rural communities as those of the irrigated west are useful examples for the consideration of regions in which life is more isolated, has less of the benefits of coöperation, and generally has lacked the stimulus found in irrigation farming. the object of education in general is to produce in the boy or girl, and so in the man or woman, three results: first, a sound, useful, and usable body; second, a flexible, well-equipped, and well-organized mind; alert to gain interest and assistance from contact with nature and coöperation with other minds; and third, a wise and true and valiant spirit, able to gather to itself the higher things that best make life worth while. the use and growth of these three things, body, mind, and spirit, must all be found in any effective system of education. the same three-fold activity is equally necessary in a group of individuals. take for example the merchants of a town, who have established a chamber of commerce or board of trade. they have three objects: first, sound and profitable business; second, organized coöperation with each other to their mutual advantage, as in settling disputes, securing satisfactory rates from railroads, and inducing new industries to settle amongst them; and third, to make their town more beautiful, more healthful, and generally a better place to live in. take a labor union as another example, and you will find the same three-fold purpose. a good union admits only good workmen to membership in its sound body; the members get from the union the advantages of organized coöperation in selling their labor to the best advantage; and in addition they enjoy certain special advantages often of overwhelming importance. the practical value of organization and coöperation is obvious, and they are being utilized very widely in nearly every branch of our national life. but what is the case with the farmer? the farmers are the only great body of our people who remain in large part substantially unorganized. the merchants are organized, the wage-workers are organized, the railroads are organized. the men with whom the farmer competes are organized to get the best results for themselves in their dealings with him. the farmer is engaged, usually without the assistance of organization, in competing with these organizations of other groups of citizens. thus the farmer, the man on whose product we all live, too often contends almost single-handed against his highly organized competitors. how have the agricultural schools and colleges and the departments of agriculture of state and nation met this situation? largely by the assertion, in word or in act, that there is only one thing to be done for the farmer. so far as his personal education is concerned, they have tried to give him a sound body, a trained mind, and a wise and valiant spirit. but so far as his calling is concerned, they have stopped with the body. they have said in effect: we will help the farmer to grow better crops, but we will take no thought of how he can get the best returns for the crops he grows, or of how he can utilize those returns so as to make them yield him the best and happiest life. it is not wise to stop the education of a boy or a girl with the body, and to neglect the mind and the spirit. but we have done the equivalent of that in dealing with farm life. along the line of better crops we have done more for the farmer, and have done it more effectively, than any other nation. hut we have done little, and far less than many other nations, for better business and better living on the farm. hereafter we shall need in state and nation not only the work of departments of agriculture such as we have now, but we shall need to have added to their functions such duties as will make them departments of rural business and rural life as well. our departments of agriculture should cover the whole field of the farmer's life. it is not enough to touch only one of the three great country problems, even though that is the first in time and perhaps in importance. of course we all realize that the growing of crops is the great foundation on which the well-being not only of the farmer but of the whole nation must depend. first of all we must have food. but after that has been achieved, is there nothing more to be done? it seems to me clear that farmers have as much to gain from good organization as merchants, plumbers, carpenters, or any of the other trades and businesses of the united states. after we have secured better crops, the next logical and inevitable step is to secure better business organization on the farm, so that each farmer shall get from what he grows the best possible return. consider what has been accomplished in ireland through agricultural coöperation. the irish have discovered that it is not good for the farmer to work alone. since they have been organizing agricultural societies to give the farmer a chance to sell at the right time and at the right price. the result is impressive. in ireland the coöperative creameries produce about half the butter exported. there are , farmers in the societies for coöperative selling, which, as we know in this country, means better prices. there are about agricultural credit societies with a membership of , and a capital of more than $ , . in a word, in ireland, which we have been apt to consider as far behind us in all that relates to agriculture, there are nearly , agricultural societies with a total membership of , persons. since their total business has been more than $ , , . but, after the farmer has begun to make use of his right to combine for his advantage in selling his products and buying his supplies, is there nothing else he can do? as well might we say that, after the body and the mind of a boy have been trained, he should be deprived of all those associations with his fellows which make life worth living, and to which every child has an inborn right. life is something more than a matter of business. no man can make his life what it ought to be by living it merely on a business basis. there are things higher than business. what is the reason for the enormous movement from the farms into the cities? not simply that the business advantages in the city are better, but that the city has more conveniences, more excitement, and more facility for contact with friends and neighbors: in a word, more life. there ought then to be attractiveness in country life such as will make the country boy or girl want to live and work in the country, such that the farmer will understand that there is no more dignified calling than his own, none that makes life better worth living. the social or community life of the country should be put by the farmer--for no one but himself can do it for him--on the same basis as social life in the city, through the country churches and societies, through better roads, country telephones, rural free delivery, parcels post, and whatever else will help. the problem is not merely to get better crops, not merely to dispose of crops better, but in the last analysis to have happier and richer lives of men and women on the farm. chapter iv principles of conservation the principles which the word conservation has come to embody are not many, and they are exceedingly simple. i have had occasion to say a good many times that no other great movement, has ever achieved such progress in so short a time, or made itself felt in so many directions with such vigor and effectiveness, as the movement for the conservation of natural resources. forestry made good its position in the united states before the conservation movement was born. as a forester i am glad to believe that conservation began with forestry, and that the principles which govern the forest service in particular and forestry in general are also the ideas that control conservation. the first idea of real foresight in connection with natural resources arose in connection with the forest. from it sprang the movement which gathered impetus until it culminated in the great convention of governors at washington in may, . then came the second official meeting of the national conservation movement, december, , in washington. afterward came the various gatherings of citizens in convention, come together to express their judgment on what ought to be done, and to contribute, as only such meetings can, to the formation of effective public opinion. the movement so begun and so prosecuted has gathered immense swing and impetus. in few knew what conservation meant. now it has become a household word. while at first conservation was supposed to apply only to forests, we see now that its sweep extends even beyond the natural resources. the principles which govern the conservation movement, like all great and effective things, are simple and easily understood. yet it is often hard to make the simple, easy, and direct facts about a movement of this kind known to the people generally. the first great fact about conservation is that it stands for development. there has been a fundamental misconception that conservation means nothing but the husbanding of resources for future generations. there could be no more serious mistake. conservation does mean provision for the future, but it means also and first of all the recognition of the right of the present generation to the fullest necessary use of all the resources with which this country is so abundantly blessed. conservation demands the welfare of this generation first, and afterward the welfare of the generations to follow. the first principle of conservation is development, the use of the natural resources now existing on this continent for the benefit of the people who live here now. there may be just as much waste in neglecting the development and use of certain natural resources as there is in their destruction. we have a limited supply of coal, and only a limited supply. whether it is to last for a hundred or a hundred and fifty or a thousand years, the coal is limited in amount, unless through geological changes which we shall not live to see, there will never be any more of it than there is now. but coal is in a sense the vital essence of our civilization. if it can be preserved, if the life of the mines can be extended, if by preventing waste there can be more coal left in this country after we of this generation have made every needed use of this source of power, then we shall have deserved well of our descendants. conservation stands emphatically for the development and use of water-power now, without delay. it stands for the immediate construction of navigable waterways under a broad and comprehensive plan as assistants to the railroads. more coal and more iron are required to move a ton of freight by rail than by water, three to one. in every case and in every direction the conservation movement has development for its first principle, and at the very beginning of its work. the development of our natural resources and the fullest use of them for the present generation is the first duty of this generation. so much for development. in the second place conservation stands for the prevention of waste. there has come gradually in this country an understanding that waste is not a good thing and that the attack on waste is an industrial necessity. i recall very well indeed how, in the early days of forest fires, they were considered simply and solely as acts of god, against which any opposition was hopeless and any attempt to control them not merely hopeless but childish. it was assumed that they came in the natural order of things, as inevitably as the seasons or the rising and setting of the sun. to-day we understand that forest fires are wholly within the control of men. so we are coming in like manner to understand that the prevention of waste in all other directions is a simple matter of good business. the first duty of the human race is to control the earth it lives upon. we are in a position more and more completely to say how far the waste and destruction of natural resources are to be allowed to go on and where they are to stop. it is curious that the effort to stop waste, like the effort to stop forest fires, has often been considered as a matter controlled wholly by economic law. i think there could be no greater mistake. forest fires were allowed to burn long after the people had means to stop them. the idea that men were helpless in the face of them held long after the time had passed when the means of control were fully within our reach. it was the old story that "as a man thinketh, so is he"; we came to see that we could stop forest fires, and we found that the means had long been at hand. when at length we came to see that the control of logging in certain directions was profitable, we found it had long been possible. in all these matters of waste of natural resources, the education of the people to understand that they can stop the leakage comes before the actual stopping and after the means of stopping it have long been ready at our hands. in addition to the principles of development and preservation of our resources there is a third principle. it is this: the natural resources must be developed and preserved for the benefit of the many, and not merely for the profit of a few. we are coming to understand in this country that public action for public benefit has a very much wider field to cover and a much larger part to play than was the case when there were resources enough for every one, and before certain constitutional provisions had given so tremendously strong a position to vested rights and property in general. a few years ago president hadley, of yale, wrote an article which has not attracted the attention it should. the point of it was that by reason of the xivth amendment to the constitution, property rights in the united states occupy a stronger position than in any other country in the civilized world. it becomes then a matter of multiplied importance, since property rights once granted are so strongly entrenched, to see that they shall be so granted that the people shall get their fair share of the benefit which comes from the development of the resources which belong to us all. the time to do that is now. by so doing we shall avoid the difficulties and conflicts which will surely arise if we allow vested rights to accrue outside the possibility of governmental and popular control. the conservation idea covers a wider range than the field of natural resources alone. conservation means the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time. one of its great contributions is just this, that it has added to the worn and well-known phrase, "the greatest good to the greatest number," the additional words "for the longest time," thus recognizing that this nation of ours must be made to endure as the best possible home for all its people. conservation advocates the use of foresight, prudence, thrift, and intelligence in dealing with public matters, for the same reasons and in the same way that we each use foresight, prudence, thrift, and intelligence in dealing with our own private affairs. it proclaims the right and duty of the people to act for the benefit of the people. conservation demands the application of common-sense to the common problems for the common good. the principles of conservation thus described--development, preservation, the common good--have a general application which is growing rapidly wider. the development of resources and the prevention of waste and loss, the protection of the public interests, by foresight, prudence, and the ordinary business and home-making virtues, all these apply to other things as well as to the natural resources. there is, in fact, no interest of the people to which the principles of conservation do not apply. the conservation point of view is valuable in the education of our people as well as in forestry; it applies to the body politic as well as to the earth and its minerals. a municipal franchise is as properly within its sphere as a franchise for water-power. the same point of view governs in both. it applies as much to the subject of good roads as to waterways, and the training of our people in citizenship is as germane to it as the productiveness of the earth. the application of common-sense to any problem for the nation's good will lead directly to national efficiency wherever applied. in other words, and that is the burden of the message, we are coming to see the logical and inevitable outcome that these principles, which arose in forestry and have their bloom in the conservation of natural resources, will have their fruit in the increase and promotion of national efficiency along other lines of national life. the outgrowth of conservation, the inevitable result, is national efficiency. in the great commercial struggle between nations which is eventually to determine the welfare of all, national efficiency will be the deciding factor. so from every point of view conservation is a good thing for the american people. the national forest service, one of the chief agencies of the conservation movement, is trying to be useful to the people of this nation. the service recognizes, and recognizes it more and more strongly all the time, that whatever it has done or is doing has just one object, and that object is the welfare of the plain american citizen. unless the forest service has served the people, and is able to contribute to their welfare it has failed in its work and should be abolished. but just so far as by coöperation, by intelligence, by attention to the work laid upon it, it contributes to the welfare of our citizens, it is a good thing and should be allowed to go on with its work. the natural forests are in the west. headquarters of the service have been established throughout the western country, because its work cannot be done effectively and properly without the closest contact and the most hearty coöperation with the western people. it is the duty of the forest service to see to it that the timber, water-powers, mines, and every other resource of the forests is used for the benefit of the people who live in the neighborhood or who may have a share in the welfare of each locality. it is equally its duty to coöperate with all our people in every section of our land to conserve a fundamental resource, without which this nation cannot prosper. chapter v waterways the connection between forests and rivers is like that between father and son. no forests, no rivers. so a forester may not be wholly beyond his depth when he talks about streams. the conquest of our rivers is one of the largest commercial questions now before us. the commercial consequences of river development are incalculable. its results cannot be measured by the yard-stick of present commercial needs. river improvement means better conditions of transportation than we have now, but it means development too. we cannot see this problem clearly and see it whole in the light of the past alone. the actual problems of river development are not less worthy of our best attention than their commercial results. every river is a unit from its source to its mouth. if it is to be given its highest usefulness to all the people, and serve them for all the uses they can make of it, it must be developed with that idea clearly in mind. to develop a river for navigation alone, or power alone, or irrigation alone, is often like using a sheep for mutton, or a steer for beef, and throwing away the leather and the wool. a river is a unit, but its uses are many, and with our present knowledge there can be no excuse for sacrificing one use to another if both can be subserved. a progressive plan for the development of our waterways is essential. pending the completion of that plan, which should neither be weakened by excessive haste nor drowned in excessive deliberation, work should proceed at once on some of the greater projects which we know already will be essential under any plan that may be devised. first and foremost of these by unanimous consent is the improvement of the mississippi river. a comprehensive and progressive plan of the kind we need can be made in one way only, and that is by a commission of the best men in the united states appointed directly by the president of the united states. such a plan must consider every use to which our rivers can be put, and every means available for their control. it must deal with such great questions as the relation of the states and the nation in the construction and control of the work, and with terminals and the coordination of rail and river transportation. the engineering difficulties may be larger than any we have yet solved. the adjustment of opposite demands between conflicting interests and localities, and other questions of large reach and often of great legal complexity will tax the powers of the best men we have. no part of the work will require greater temperance, wisdom, and foresight than certain questions of policy and law. i have observed in the course of some experience that difficulties originating with the law are peculiarly apt to foster misconceptions. it happens that the forest service has recently supplied a typical example. certain men and certain papers have said that the forest service has gone beyond the law in carrying out its work. this assertion has been repeated so persistently that there is danger that it may be believed. the friends of conservation must not be led to think that before the forest service can proceed legally with its present work all the hazards and compromises of new legislation must be faced. fortunately, the charge of illegal action is absolutely false. the forest service has had ample legal authority for everything it has done. not once since it was created has any charge of illegality, despite the most searching investigation and the bitterest attack, ever led to reversal or reproof by either house of congress or by any congressional committee. since the creation of the forest service the expenditure of nearly $ , , has passed successfully the scrutiny of the treasury of the united states. most significant of all, not once has the forest service been defeated as to any vital legal principle underlying its work in any court or administrative tribunal of last resort. thus those who make the law and those who interpret it seem to agree that the work has been legal. but it is not enough to say that the forest service has kept within the law. other qualifications go to make efficiency in a government bureau. a bureau may keep within the law and yet fail to get results. when action is needed for the public good there are two opposite points of view regarding the duty of an administrative officer in enforcing the law. one point of view asks, "is there any express and specific law authorizing or directing such action?" and, having thus sought and found none, nothing is done. the other asks, "is there any justification in law for doing this desirable thing?" and, having thus sought and found a legal justification, what the public good demands is done. i hold it to be the first duty of a public officer to obey the law. but i hold it to be his second duty, and a close second, to do everything the law will let him do for the public good, and not merely what the law compels or directs him to do. it is the right as well as the duty of a public officer to be zealous in the public service. that is why the public service is worth while. to every public officer the law should be, not a goad to drive him to his duty, but a tool to help him in his work. and i maintain that it is likewise his right and duty to seek by every proper means from the legal authorities set over him such interpretations of the law as will best help him to serve his country. let the public officer take every lawful chance to use the law for the public good. the better use he makes of it the better public servant he becomes. one man with a jack-knife will build a ladder. another with a full tool-chest cannot make a footstool. the man with the jack-knife will often reach the higher level. i am for the man with the jack-knife. i believe in the man who does all he can and the best he can, with the means at his command. that is precisely what the forest service has been trying to do with the money and law congress has placed in its hands. every public officer responsible for any part of the conservation of natural resources is a trustee of the public property. if conservation is vital to the welfare of this nation now and hereafter, as president roosevelt so wisely declared, then few positions of public trust are so important, and few opportunities for constructive work so large. such officers are concerned with the greatest issues which have come before this nation since the civil war. they may hope to serve the nation as few men ever can. their care for our forests, waters, lands, and minerals is often the only thing that stands between the public good and the something-for-nothing men, who, like the daughters of the horse-leech, are forever crying, "give, give." the intelligence, initiative, and steadfastness that can withstand the unrelenting pressure of the special interests are worth having, and the forest service has given proof of all three. but the counter-pressure from the people in their own interest is needed far more often than it is supplied. the public welfare cannot be subserved merely by walking blindly in the old ruts. times change, and the public needs change with them. the man who would serve the public to the level of its needs must look ahead, and one of his most difficult problems will be to make old tools answer new uses--uses some of which, at least, were never imagined when the tools were made. that is one reason why constructive foresight is one of the great constant needs of every growing nation. the forest service proposes to use the tools--obey the law--made by the representatives of the people. but the law cannot give specific directions in advance to meet every need and detail of administration. the law cannot make brains nor supply conscience. therefore, the forest service proposes also to serve the people by the intelligent and purposeful use of the law and every lawful means at its command for the public good. and for that intention it makes no apology. fortunately for the forest service, the point of view which it worked out for itself under the pressure of its responsibilities was found to be that of the supreme court. in the case of the u.s. vs. macdaniel ( pet., - ), involving the administrative powers of the head of a department, the supreme court of the united states said: "he is limited in the exercise of his powers by the law; but it does not follow that he must show statutory provision for everything he does. no government could be administered on such principles. to attempt to regulate, by law, the minute movements of every part of the complicated machinery of government, would evince a most unpardonable ignorance on the subject. whilst the great outlines of its movements may be marked out, and limitations imposed on the exercise of its powers, there are numberless things which must be done, that can neither be anticipated nor defined, and which are essential to the proper action of the government." congress has given to the secretary of agriculture, acting through the forest service, the specific task of administering the national forests, with full power to perform it, and has provided that he "may make such rules and regulations and establish such service as will ensure the objects of said reservations, namely, to regulate their occupancy and use and to preserve the forests thereon from destruction." every exercise of the powers granted to the secretary of agriculture by statute has been in accordance with the principles laid down by chief justice marshall ninety years ago in the case of mcculloch vs. maryland ( wheat., ), when he said as to powers delegated by the federal constitution to congress: "let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional." after the transfer of the national forests from the interior department to the forest service in , some things were done that had never been done before, such as initiating government control over water-power monopoly in the national forests, giving preference to the public over commercial corporations in the use of the forests, and trying to help the small man make a living rather than the big man make a profit (but always with the effort to be just to both). always and everywhere we have set the public welfare above the advantage of the special interests. because it did these things the forest service has made enemies, of some of whom it is justly proud. it has been easy for these enemies to raise the cry of illegality, novelty, and excess of zeal. but in every instance the service has been fortified either by express statutes, or by decisions of the supreme court and other courts, of the secretary of the interior, of the comptroller, or the attorney-general, or by general principles of law which are beyond dispute. if there is novelty, it consists simply in the way these statutes, decisions, and principles have been used to protect the public. the law officers of the forest service have had the nation for their client, and they are proud to work as zealously for the public as they would in private practice for a fee. so i think the ghost of illegality in the forest service may fairly be laid at rest. but it is not the only one which is clouding the issues of conservation in the public mind. another misconception is that the friends of conservation are trying to prevent the development of water power by private capital. nothing could be farther from the truth. the friends of conservation were the first to call public attention to the enormous saving to the nation which follows the substitution of the power of falling water, which is constantly renewed, for our coal, which can never be renewed. they favor development by private capital and not by the government, but they also favor attaching such reasonable conditions to the right to develop as will protect the public and control water-power monopoly in the public interest, while at the same time giving to enterprising capital its just and full reward. they believe that to grant rights to water power in perpetuity is a wrongful mortgage of the welfare of our descendants, and to grant them without insisting on some return for value received is to rob ourselves. i believe in dividends for the people as well as taxes. fifty years is long enough for the certainty of profitable investment in water power, and to fix on the amount of return that will be fair to the public and the corporation is not impossible. what city does not regret some ill-considered franchise? and why should not the nation profit by the experience of its citizens? there is no reason why the water-power interests should be given the people's property freely and forever except that they would like to have it that way. i suspect that the mere wishes of the special interests, although they have been the mainspring of much public action for many years, have begun to lose their compelling power. a good way to begin to regulate corporations would be to stop them from regulating us. the sober fact is that here is the imminent battle-ground in the endless contest for the rights of the people. nothing that can be said or done will suffice to postpone longer the active phases of this fight; and that is why i attach so great importance to the attitude of administrative officers in protecting the public welfare in the enforcement of the law. from time to time a few strong leaders have tried to unite the people in the fight of the many for the equal opportunities to which they are entitled. but the people have only just begun to take this fight, in earnest. they have not realized until recently the vital importance and far-reaching consequences of their own passive position. now that the fight is passing into an acute stage it is easily seen that the special interests have used the period of public indifference to manoeuvre themselves into a position of exceeding strength. in the first place, the constitutional position of property in the united states is stronger than in any other nation. in the second place, it is well understood that the influence of the corporations in our law-making bodies is usually excessive, not seldom to the point of defeating the will of the people steadily and with ease. in the third place, cases are not unknown in which the special interests, not satisfied with making the laws, have assumed also to interpret them, through that worst of evils in the body politic, an unjust judge. when an interest or an enemy is entrenched in a position rendered impregnable against an expected mode of attack, there is but one remedy, to shift the ground and follow lines against which no preparation has been made. fortunately for us, the special interests, with a blindness which naturally follows from their wholly commercialized point of view, have failed to see the essential fact in this great conflict. they do not understand that this is far more than an economic question, that in its essence and in every essential characteristic it is a moral question. the present economic order, with its face turned away from equality of opportunity, involves a bitter moral wrong, which must be corrected for moral reasons and along moral lines. it must be corrected with justness and firmness, but not bitterly, for that would be to lower the nation to the moral level of the evil which we have set ourselves to fight. this is the doctrine of the square deal. it contains the germ of industrial liberty. its partisans are the many, its opponents are the few. i am firm in the faith that the great majority of our people are square dealers. chapter vi business the business of the people of the united states, performed by the government of the united states, is a vast and a most important one; it is the house-keeping of the american nation. as a business proposition it does not attract anything like the attention that it ought. unfortunately we have come into the habit of considering the government of the united states as a political organization rather than as a business organization. now this question, which the governors of the states and the representatives of great interests were called to washington to consider in , is fundamentally a business question, and it is along business lines that it must be considered and solved, if the problem is to be solved at all. manufacturers are dealing with the necessity for producing a definite output as a result of definite expenditure and definite effort. the government of the united states is doing exactly the same thing. the manufacturer's product can be measured in dollars and cents. the product of the government of the united states can be measured partly in dollars and cents, but far more importantly in the welfare and contentment and happiness of the people over which it is called upon to preside. the keynote of that conservation conference in washington was forethought and foresight. the keynote of success in any line of life, or one of the great keynotes, must be forethought and foresight. if we, as a nation, are to continue the wonderful growth we have had, it is forethought and foresight which must give us the capacity to go on as we have been going. i dwell on this because it seems to me to be one of the most curious of all things in the history of the united states to-day that we should have grasped this principle so tremendously and so vigorously in our daily lives, in the conduct of our own business, and yet have failed so completely to make the obvious application in the things which concern the nation. it is curiously true that great aggregations of individuals and organized bodies are apt to be less far-sighted, less moral, less intelligent along certain lines than the individual citizen; or at least that their standards are lower; a principle which is illustrated by the fact that we have got over settling disputes between individuals by the strong hand, but not yet between nations. so we have allowed ourselves as a nation, in the flush of the tremendous progress that we have made, to fail to look at the end from the beginning and to put ourselves in a position where the normal operation of natural laws threatens to bring us to a halt in a way which will make every man, woman, and child in the nation feel the pinch when it comes. no man may rightly fail to take a great pride in what has been accomplished by means of the destruction of our natural resources so far as it has gone. it is a paradoxical statement, perhaps, but nevertheless true, because out of this attack on what nature has given we have won a kind of prosperity and a kind of civilization and a kind of man that are new in the world. for example, nothing like the rapidity of the destruction of american forests has ever been known in forest history, and nothing like the efficiency and vigor and inventiveness of the american lumberman has ever been developed by any attack on any forests elsewhere. probably the most effective tool that the human mind and hand have ever made is the american axe. so the american business man has grasped his opportunities and used them and developed them and invented about them, thought them into lines of success, and thus has developed into a new business man, with a vigor and effectiveness and a cutting-edge that has never been equalled anywhere else. we have gained out of the vast destruction of our natural resources a degree of vigor and power and efficiency of which every man of us ought to be proud. now that is done. we have accomplished these big things. what is the next step? shall we go on in the same lines to the certain destruction of the prosperity which we have created, or shall we take the obvious lesson of all human history, turn our backs on the uncivilized point of view, and adopt toward our natural resources the average prudence and average foresight and average care that we long ago adopted as a rule of our daily life? the conservation movement is calling the attention of the american people to the fact that they are trustees. the fact seems to me so plain as to require only a statement of it, to carry conviction. can we reasonably fail to recognize the obligation which rests upon us in this matter? and, if we do fail to recognize it, can we reasonably expect even a fairly good reputation at the hands of our descendants? business prudence and business common-sense indicate as strongly as anything can the absolute necessity of a change in point of view on the part of the people of the united states regarding their natural resources. the way we have been handling them is not good business. purely on the side of dollars and cents, it is not good business to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, to burn up half our forests, to waste our coal, and to remove from under the feet of those who are coming after us the opportunity for equal happiness with ourselves. the thing we ought to leave to them is not merely an opportunity for equal happiness and equal prosperity, but for a vastly increased fund of both. conservation is not merely a question of business, but a question of a vastly higher duty. in dealing with our natural resources we have come to a place at last where every consideration of patriotism, every consideration of love of country, of gratitude for things that the land and the institutions of this nation have given us, call upon us for a return. if we owe anything to the united states, if this country has been good to us, if it has given us our prosperity, our education, and our chance of happiness, then there is a duty resting upon us. that duty is to see, so far as in us lies, that those who are coming after us shall have the same opportunity for happiness we have had ourselves. apart from any business consideration, apart from the question of the immediate dollar, this problem of the future wealth and happiness and prosperity of the people of the united states has a right to our attention. it rises far above all matters of temporary individual business advantage, and becomes a great question of national preservation. we all have the unquestionable right to a reasonable use of natural resources during our lifetime, we all may use, and should use, the good things that were put here for our use, for in the last analysis this question of conservation is the question of national preservation and national efficiency. chapter vii the moral issue the central thing for which conservation stands is to make this country the best possible place to live in, both for us and for our descendants. it stands against the waste of the natural resources which cannot be renewed, such as coal and iron; it stands for the perpetuation of the resources which can be renewed, such as the food-producing soils and the forests; and most of all it stands for an equal opportunity for every american citizen to get his fair share of benefit from these resources, both now and hereafter. conservation stands for the same kind of practical common-sense management of this country by the people that every business man stands for in the handling of his own business. it believes in prudence and foresight instead of reckless blindness; it holds that resources now public property should not become the basis for oppressive private monopoly; and it demands the complete and orderly development of all our resources for the benefit of all the people, instead of the partial exploitation of them for the benefit of a few. it recognizes fully the right of the present generation to use what it needs and all it needs of the natural resources now available, but it recognizes equally our obligation so to use what we need that our descendants shall not be deprived of what they need. conservation has much to do with the welfare of the average man of to-day. it proposes to secure a continuous and abundant supply of the necessaries of life, which means a reasonable cost of living and business stability. it advocates fairness in the distribution of the benefits which flow from the natural resources. it will matter very little to the average citizen, when scarcity comes and prices rise, whether he can not get what he needs because there is none left or because he can not afford to pay for it. in both cases the essential fact is that he can not get what he needs. conservation holds that it is about as important to see that the people in general get the benefit of our natural resources as to see that there shall be natural resources left. conservation is the most democratic movement this country has known for a generation. it holds that the people have not only the right, but the duty to control the use of the natural resources, which are the great sources of prosperity. and it regards the absorption of these resources by the special interests, unless their operations are under effective public control, as a moral wrong. conservation is the application of common-sense to the common problems for the common good, and i believe it stands nearer to the desires, aspirations, and purposes of the average man than any other policy now before the american people. the danger to the conservation policies is that the privileges of the few may continue to obstruct the rights of the many, especially in the matter of water power and coal. congress must decide immediately whether the great coal fields still in public ownership shall remain so, in order that their use may be controlled with due regard to the interest of the consumer, or whether they shall pass into private ownership and be controlled in the monopolistic interest of a few. congress must decide also whether immensely valuable rights to the use of water power shall be given away to special interests in perpetuity and without compensation instead of being held and controlled by the public. in most cases actual development of water power can best be done by private interests acting under public control, but it is neither good sense nor good morals to let these valuable privileges pass from the public ownership for nothing and forever. other conservation matters doubtless require action, but these two, the conservation of water power and of coal, the chief sources of power of the present and the future, are clearly the most pressing. it is of the first importance to prevent our water powers from passing into private ownership as they have been doing, because the greatest source of power we know is falling water. furthermore, it is the only great unfailing source of power. our coal, the experts say, is likely to be exhausted during the next century, our natural gas and oil in this. our rivers, if the forests on the watersheds are properly handled, will never cease to deliver power. under our form of civilization, if a few men ever succeed in controlling the sources of power, they will eventually control all industry as well. if they succeed in controlling all industry, they will necessarily control the country. this country has achieved political freedom; what our people are fighting for now is industrial freedom. and unless we win our industrial liberty, we can not keep our political liberty. i see no reason why we should deliberately keep on helping to fasten the handcuffs of corporate control upon ourselves for all time merely because the few men who would profit by it most have heretofore had the power to compel it. the essential things that must be done to protect the water powers for the people are few and simple. first, the granting of water powers forever, either on non-navigable or navigable streams, must absolutely stop. it is perfectly clear that one hundred, fifty, or even twenty-five years ago our present industrial conditions and industrial needs were completely beyond the imagination of the wisest of our predecessors. it is just as true that we can not imagine or foresee the industrial conditions and needs of the future. but we do know that our descendants should be left free to meet their own necessities as they arise. it can not be right, therefore, for us to grant perpetual rights to the one great permanent source of power. it is just as wrong as it is foolish, and just as needless as it is wrong, to mortgage the welfare of our children in such a way as this. water powers must and should be developed mainly by private capital and they must be developed under conditions which make investment in them profitable and safe. but neither profit nor safety requires perpetual rights, as many of the best water-power men now freely acknowledge. second, the men to whom the people grant the right to use water-power should pay for what they get. the water-power sites now in the public hands are enormously valuable. there is no reason whatever why special interests should be allowed to use them for profit without making some direct payment to the people for the valuable rights derived from the people. this is important not only for the revenue the nation will get. it is at least equally important as a recognition that the public controls its own property and has a right to share in the benefits arising from its development. there are other ways in which public control of water power must be exercised, but these two are the most important. water power on non-navigable streams usually results from dropping a little water a long way. in the mountains water is dropped many hundreds of feet upon the turbines which move the dynamos that produce the electric current. water power on navigable streams is usually produced by dropping immense volumes of water a short distance, as twenty feet, fifteen feet, or even less. every stream is a unit from its source to its mouth, and the people have the same stake in the control of water power in one part of it as in another. under the constitution, the united states exercises direct control over navigable streams. it exercises control over non-navigable and source streams only through its ownership of the lands through which they pass, as the public domain and national forests. it is just as essential for the public welfare that the people should retain and exercise control of water-power monopoly on navigable as on non-navigable streams. if the difficulties are greater, then the danger that the water powers may pass out of the people's hands on the lower navigable parts of the streams is greater than on the upper non-navigable parts, and it may be harder, but in no way less necessary, to prevent it. it must be clear to any man who has followed the development of the conservation idea that no other policy now before the american people is so thoroughly democratic in its essence and in its tendencies as the conservation policy. it asserts that the people have the right and the duty, and that it is their duty no less than their right, to protect themselves against the uncontrolled monopoly of the natural resources which yield the necessaries of life. we are beginning to realize that the conservation question is a question of right and wrong, as any question must be which may involve the differences between prosperity and poverty, health and sickness, ignorance and education, well-being and misery, to hundreds of thousands of families. seen from the point of view of human welfare and human progress, questions which begin as purely economic often end as moral issues. conservation is a moral issue because it involves the rights and the duties of our people--their rights to prosperity and happiness, and their duties to themselves, to their descendants, and to the whole future progress and welfare of this nation. chapter viii public spirit violent crises in the lives of men and nations usually produce their own remedies. they grasp the attention and stir the consciences of men, and usually they evolve leaders and measures to meet their imperious needs. but the great evident crises are by no means the only ones of importance. the quiet turning point, reached and passed often with slight attention and wholly without struggle, is frequently not less decisive. great decisions are made or great impulses given or withheld in the life of a man or a nation often so quietly that their critical character is seen only in retrospect. it is only the historian who can say just when some unnoticed, yet decisive and irrevocable, step was actually accomplished. the united states has been in the midst of such a period of decision since the spanish war called into blossom the quiet growth of years, and we are still face to face with questions of the most vital bearing upon our future. the changes now in progress are accompanied by no convulsions, yet the whole character of our civilization is being rapidly crystallized anew as our country takes its inevitable place in the world. so quietly are the great forces at work that some of our most vital problems have remained almost unrecognized by the public until the last two years. yet the fact that these decisions are being made is almost appalling in its magnitude, and their indescribable consequence not only to the united states, but to all the nations of the earth, needs to be vividly realized by every one of us, for it is one of the great compelling reasons why the public spirit of young men is needed so urgently and at once. and more specific reasons press upon us from every side. recently the attention of our people, thanks largely to president roosevelt, was focussed upon the presence or absence of the common virtues and the common decencies in public life. the revelation of corruption in politics, in business, and here and there in the public service, is a testimony not of unwonted wickedness in high places, but of unwonted sensitiveness in public opinion, and so far as it goes it is a most hopeful sign; but it does not yet go far enough. the opportunity to set a new standard in political morality is here now. public sensitiveness on every subject ebbs and flows and must be taken at the flood if the use of it is to be really effective. decision made now as to the character of our public life will be valid for many years, for it is but seldom that the question comes so clearly before us. the war for righteousness is endless, but this is one of the great battles, and its results will endure. we are now in the throes of decision on the whole question of business in politics, of politics for business purposes, and we must take our share in determining whether the object of our political system is to be unclean money or free men. the present strong movement to prevent the political control of public men, law-courts, and legislatures by great commercial enterprises will either flash in the pan or it will succeed; it will leave either the man or the dollar in control. the decision will be made by the young men, and it is not far ahead. the question of efficiency in public office has been brought to the front as never before in the history of the nation. as a whole, our public service is honest, but we should be able to take honesty for granted. what we lack is the tradition of high efficiency that makes great enterprises succeed. the national house-keeping, the government's vast machinery, should he the cleanest, the most effective, and the best in methods and in men, for its touch upon the life of the nation at every point is constant and vital. there is no hunger like land hunger, and no object for which men are more ready to use unfair and desperate means than the acquisition of land. under the influence of this compelling desire, assisted by obsolete land laws warped from their original purpose, we are facing in the public-land states west of the mississippi the great question whether the western people are to be predominately a people of tenants under the degrading tyranny of pecuniary and political vassalage, or free-holders and free men; and there is no exaggerating the importance of the decision. we have been deciding, and the decision is not yet fully made, whether the future shall suffer the long train of ills which everywhere has followed, and must always follow, the abuse of the forest, or whether by protecting the timberlands we shall assure the prosperity of all of the users of the wood, the water, and the forage which our forests supply. nothing less than the whole agricultural and commercial welfare of the country is in the balance. no other conservation question compares with this in the vital intimacy of its touch on every portion of our national life. other great questions only less vital i cannot even refer to, but one of the central ones remains--our whole future is at stake in the education of our young men in politics and public spirit. the greatest work that theodore roosevelt did for the united states, the great fact which will give his influence vitality and power long after we shall all have gone to our reward, greater than his great services in bringing peace, in settling strikes, in preaching the crusade of honesty and decency in business and in daily life, is the fact that he changed the attitude of the american people toward conserving the natural resources, and toward public questions and public life. the time was, not long ago, when it was not respectable to be interested in politics. the time is coming, and i do not believe it is far ahead, when it will not be respectable not to be interested in public affairs. few changes can mean so much. among the first duties of every man is to help in bringing the kingdom of god on earth. the greatest human power for good, the most efficient earthly tool for the future uplifting of the nations, is without question the united states; and the presence or absence of a vital public spirit in the young men of the united states will determine the quality of that great tool and the work that it can do. this is the final object of the best citizenship. public spirit is the means by which every man can help toward this great end. public spirit is patriotism in action; it is the application of christianity to the commonwealth; it is effective loyalty to our country, to the brotherhood of man, and to the future. it is the use of a man by himself for the general good. public spirit is the one great antidote for all the ills of the nation, and greatly the nation needs it now. in a day when the vast increase in wealth tends to reduce all things, moral, intellectual and material, to the measure of the dollar; in a day when we have with us always the man who is working for his own pocket all the time; when the monopolist of land, of opportunity, of power or privilege in any form, is ever in the public eye--it is good to remember that the real leaders are the men who value the right to give themselves more highly than any gain whatsoever. it is given to few men to serve their country as greatly as president roosevelt has done, yet vastly smaller services are still tremendously worth while. i question whether there has ever been a time and place (except in violent crises) when the demand for public spirit was greater than now and the results of it more assured. public spirit is never needed more than in times of prosperity, and it is never more effective. it is the boat which is floating easily and rapidly with the stream that is most in danger of striking the rocks. the reasons why public opinion may be so effective in the united states are not far to seek. the extreme sensitiveness of our form of government to political control is one of the commonplaces that has real meaning. we seldom realize that ours is actually what it pretends to be--a representative government--and our legislatures are extraordinarily sensitive to what the people, the politically effective people, really want. the senators and representatives in congress do actually and accurately represent the men who send them there, and they respond like lightning to a clear order from the controlling element at home. it is in the power of public spirit to say whether men or money shall control. if public spirit is in the saddle, the fundamental purpose of all the people, which is good, will govern. if not, the bosses and the great private interests will have their way. without the backing of the public spirit of good men, even the president himself loses by far the greater portion of his power. for the power to do what we hope to see accomplished, we must look most of all to the public spirit of the young men. but some one will say that great service is beyond his individual power. i do not believe that great service is beyond the power of any young man. this is not a matter in which obstacles decide. the man for whom all the barriers to success have been broken down is not, as a rule, the man who succeeds. on the contrary, conflict is the condition of success. the quality of the man himself decides. the more i study men, which is the daily occupation of every man in affairs, the more firmly i am assured that the great fundamental difference between men, the reason why some fail and some succeed, is not a difference in ability or opportunity, but a difference in vision and in relentless loyalty to ideals--vision to see the great object, and relentless, unwavering, uninterrupted loyalty in its service. what young men determine to do at whatever cost of effort, self-denial, and endurance, provided that their objects are good and within the possibility of attainment, they will surely accomplish in so large a proportion of cases that the failures are negligible. if all that a man has or is, if his death and his daily life, are wholly and relentlessly at the service of his ideal, without hesitancy or reservation, then he will achieve his object. either by himself or his successors he will achieve it, for he disposes of the greatest power to which humanity can attain. under such conditions there is no man among us who cannot render high service to our beloved country. chapter ix the children the success of the conservation movement in the united states depends in the end on the understanding the women have of it. no forward step in this whole campaign has been more deeply appreciated or more welcomed than that which the national society of the daughters of the american revolution and other organizations of women have taken in appointing conservation committees. patriotism is the key to the success of any nation, and patriotism first strikes its roots in the mind of the child. patriotism which does not begin in early years may, though it does not always, fail under the severest trials. i say "not always," for many men and women have proved their patriotic devotion to this country although they were born elsewhere. yet, as a rule, it must begin with the children. and almost without exception it is the mother who plants patriotism in the mind of the child. it is her duty. the growth of patriotism is first of all in the hands of the women of any nation. in the last analysis it is the mothers of a nation who direct that nation's destiny. the fundamental task of patriotism is to see to it that the nation exists and endures in honor, security, and well-being. fortunately there is no question as to our existing in honor, and little if any as to our continuing to exist in security. the great fundamental problem which confronts us all now is this: shall we continue, as a nation, to exist in well-being? that is the conservation problem. if we are to have prosperity in this country, it will be because we have an abundance of natural resources available for the citizen. in other words, as the minds of the children are guided toward the idea of foresight, just to that extent, and probably but little more, will the generations that are coming hereafter be able to carry through the great task of making this nation what its manifest destiny demands that it shall be. women should recognize, if this task is to be carried out, one great truth above all others. that this nation exists for its people, we all admit; but that the natural resources of the nation exist not for any small group, not for any individual, but for all the people--in other words, that the natural resources of the nation belong to all the people--that is a truth the whole meaning of which is just beginning to dawn on us. there is no form of monopoly which exists or ever has existed on any large scale which was not based more or less directly upon the control of natural resources. there is no form of monopoly that has ever existed or can exist which can do harm if the people understand that the natural resources belong to the people of the nation, and exercise that understanding, as they have the power to do. it seems to me that of all the movements which have been inaugurated to give power to the conservation idea, the foresight idea, there is none more helpful than that the women of the united states are taking hold of the problem. we must make all the people see that now and in the future the resources are to be developed and employed, yet at the same time guarded and protected against waste--not for small groups of men who will control them for their own purposes, but for all the people through all time. the question of the conservation of our natural resources is not a simple question, but it requires, and will increasingly require, thinking out along lines directed to the fundamental economic basis upon which this nation exists. i think it can not be disputed that the natural resources exist for and belong to the people; and i believe that the part of the work which falls to the women (and it is no small part) is to see to it that the children, who will be the men and women of the future, have their share of these resources uncontrolled by monopoly and unspoiled by waste. what specific things can the women of the nation do for conservation? the daughters of the american revolution have begun admirably in the appointment of a conservation committee, and other organizations of women are following their example. few people realize what women have already done for conservation, and what they may do. some of the earliest effective forest work that was done in the united states, work which laid the lines that have been followed since, was that of the pennsylvania forestry association, begun and carried through first of all by ladies in philadelphia. one of the bravest, most intelligent and most effective fights for forestry that i have known of was that of the women of minnesota for the minnesota national forest. it was a superb success, and we have that forest to-day. i have known of no case of persistent agitation under discouragement finer in a good many ways than the fight that the women of california have made to save the great grove of calaveras big trees. as a result the government has taken possession of that forest and will preserve it for all future generations. time and again, then, the women have made it perfectly clear what they can do in this work. obviously the first point of attack is the stopping of waste. women alone can bring to the school children the idea of the wickedness of national waste and the value of public saving. the issue is a moral one; and women are the first teachers of right and wrong. it is a question of seeing what loyalty to the public welfare demands of us, and then of caring enough for the public welfare not to set personal advantage first. it is a question of inspiring our future citizens while they are boys and girls with the spirit of true patriotism as against the spirit of rank selfishness, the anti-social spirit of the man who declines to take into account any other interest than his own; whose one aim and ideal is personal success. women both in public and at home, by letting the men know what they think, and by putting it before the children, can make familiar the idea of conservation, and support it with a convincingness that nobody else can approach. however important it may be for the lumberman, the miner, the wagon-maker, the railroad man, the house-builder,--for every industry,--that conservation should obtain, when all is said and done, conservation goes back in its directest application to one body in this country, and that is to the children. there is in this country no other movement except possibly the education movement--and that after all is in a sense only another aspect of the conservation question, the seeking to make the most of what we have--so directly aimed to help the children, so conditioned upon the needs of the children, so belonging to the children, as the conservation movement; and it is for that reason more than any other that it has the support of the women of the nation. chapter x an equal chance the american people have evidently made up their minds that our natural resources must be conserved. that is good, but it settles only half the question. for whose benefit shall they be conserved--for the benefit of the many, or for the use and profit of the few? the great conflict now being fought will decide. there is no other question before us that begins to be so important, or that will be so difficult to straddle, as the great question between special interest and equal opportunity, between the privileges of the few and the rights of the many, between government by men for human welfare and government by money for profit, between the men who stand for the roosevelt policies and the men who stand against them. this is the heart of the conservation problem to-day. the conservation issue is a moral issue. when a few men get possession of one of the necessaries of life, either through ownership of a natural resource or through unfair business methods, and use that control to extort undue profits, as in the recent cases of the sugar trust and the beef-packers, they injure the average man without good reason, and they are guilty of a moral wrong. it does not matter whether the undue profit comes through stifling competition by rebates or other crooked devices, through corruption of public officials, or through seizing and monopolizing resources which belong to the people. the result is always the same--a toll levied on the cost of living through special privilege. the income of the average family in the united states is less than $ a year. to increase the cost of living to such a family beyond the reasonable profits of legitimate business is wrong. it is not merely a question of a few cents more a day for the necessaries of life, or of a few cents less a day for wages. far more is at stake--the health or sickness of little babies, the education or ignorance of children, virtue or vice in young daughters, honesty or criminality in young sons, the working power of bread-winners, the integrity of families, the provision for old age--in a word, the welfare and happiness or the misery and degradation of the plain people are involved in the cost of living. to the special interest an unjust rise in the cost of living means simply higher profit, but to those who pay it, that profit is measured in schooling, warm clothing, a reserve to meet emergencies, a fair chance to make the fight for comfort, decency, and right living. i believe in our form of government and i believe in the golden rule. but we must face the truth that monopoly of the sources of production makes it impossible for vast numbers of men and women to earn a fair living. right here the conservation question touches the daily life of the great body of our people, who pay the cost of special privilege. and the price is heavy. that price may be the chance to save the boys from the saloons and the corner gang, and the girls from worse, and to make good citizens of them instead of bad; for an appalling proportion of the tragedies of life spring directly from the lack of a little money. thousands of daughters of the poor fall into the hands of the white-slave traders because their poverty leaves them without protection. thousands of families, as the pittsburg survey has shown us, lead lives of brutalizing overwork in return for the barest living. is it fair that these thousands of families should have less than they need in order that a few families should have swollen fortunes at their expense? let him who dares deny that there is wickedness in grinding the faces of the poor, or assert that these are not moral questions which strike the very homes of our people. if these are not moral questions, there are no moral questions. the people of this country have lost vastly more than they can ever regain by gifts of public property, forever and without charge, to men who gave nothing in return. it is true that, we have made superb material progress under this system, but it is not well for us to rejoice too freely in the slices the special interests have given us from the great loaf of the property of all the people. the people of the united states have been the complacent victims of a system of grab, often perpetrated by men who would have been surprised beyond measure to be accused of wrong-doing, and many of whom in their private lives were model citizens. but they have suffered from a curious moral perversion by which it becomes praiseworthy to do for a corporation things which they would refuse with the loftiest scorn to do for themselves. fortunately for us all that delusion is passing rapidly away. president hadley well said that "the fundamental division of powers in the constitution of the united states is between voters on the one hand and property-owners on the other." when property gets possession of the voting power also, little is left for the people. that is why the unholy alliance between business and politics is the most dangerous fact in our political life. i believe the american people are tired of that alliance. they are weary of politics for revenue only. it is time to take business out of politics, and keep it out--time for the political activity of this nation to be aimed squarely at the welfare of all of us, and squarely away from the excessive profits of a few of us. a man is not bad because he is rich, nor good because he is poor. there is no monopoly of virtue. i hold no brief for the poor against the rich nor for the wage-earner against the capitalist. exceptional capacity in business, as in any other line of life, should meet with exceptional reward. rich men have served this country greatly. washington was a rich man. but it is very clear that excessive profits from the control of natural resources, monopolized by a few, are not worth to this nation the tremendous price they cost us. we have allowed the great corporations to occupy with their own men the strategic points in business, in social, and in political life. it is our fault more than theirs. we have allowed it when we could have stopped it. too often we have seemed to forget that a man in public life can no more serve both the special interests and the people than he can serve god and mammon. there is no reason why the american people should not take into their hands again the full political power which is theirs by right, and which they exercised before the special interests began to nullify the will of the majority. there are many men who believe, and who will always believe, in the divine right of money to rule. with such men argument, compromise, or conciliation is useless or worse. the only thing to do with them is to fight them and beat them. it has been done, and it can be done again. it is the honorable distinction of the forest service that it has been more constantly, more violently and more bitterly attacked by the representatives of the special interests in recent years than any other government bureau. these attacks have increased in violence and bitterness just in proportion as the service has offered effective opposition to predatory wealth. the more successful the forest service has been in preventing land-grabbing and the absorption of water power by the special interests, the more ingenious, the more devious, and the more dangerous these attacks have become. a favorite one is to assert that the forest service, in its zeal for the public welfare, has played ducks and drakes with the acts of congress. the fact is, on the contrary, that the service has had warrant of law for everything it has done. not once since it was created has any charge of illegality, despite the most searching investigation and the bitterest attack, ever led to reversal or reproof by either house of congress or by any congressional committee. not once has the forest service been defeated or reversed as to any vital legal principle underlying its work in any court or administrative tribunal of last resort. it is the first duty of a public officer to obey the law. but it is his second duty, and a close second, to do everything the law will let him do for the public good, and not merely what the law directs or compels him to do. unless the public service is alive enough to serve the people with enthusiasm, there is very little to be said for it. another, and unusually plausible, form of attack, is to demand that all land not now bearing trees shall be thrown out of the national forests. for centuries forest fires have burned through the western mountains, and much land thus deforested is scattered throughout the national forests awaiting reforestation. this land is not valuable for agriculture, and will contribute more to the general welfare under forest than in any other way. to exclude it from the national forests would be no more reasonable than it would be in a city to remove from taxation and municipal control every building lot not now covered by a house. it would be no more reasonable than to condemn and take away from our farmers every acre of land that did not bear a crop last year, or to confiscate a man's winter overcoat because he was not wearing it in july. a generation in the life of a nation is no longer than a season in the life of a man. with a fair chance we can and will reclothe these denuded mountains with forests, and we ask for that chance. still another attack, nearly successful two years ago, was an attempt to prevent the forest service from telling the people, through the press, what it is accomplishing for them, and how much this nation needs the forests. if the forest service can not tell what it is doing the time will come when there will be nothing to tell. it is just as necessary for the people to know what is being done to help them as to know what is being done to hurt them. publicity is the essential and indispensable condition of clean and effective public service. since the forest service called public attention to the rapid absorption of the water-power sites and the threatening growth of a great water-power monopoly, the attacks upon it have increased with marked rapidity. i anticipate that they will continue to do so. still greater opposition is promised in the near future. there is but one protection--an awakened and determined public opinion. that is why i tell the facts. chapter xi the new patriotism the people of the united states are on the verge of one of the great quiet decisions which determine national destinies. crises happen in peace as well as in war, and a peaceful crisis may be as vital and controlling as any that comes with national uprising and the clash of arms. such a crisis, at first uneventful and almost unperceived, is upon us now, and we are engaged in making the decision that is thus forced upon us. and, so far as it has gone, our decision is largely wrong. fortunately it is not yet final. the question we are deciding with so little consciousness of what it involves is this: what shall we do with our natural resources? upon the final answer that we shall make to it hangs the success or failure of this nation in accomplishing its manifest destiny. few americans will deny that it is the manifest destiny of the united states to demonstrate that a democratic republic is the best form of government yet devised, and that the ideals and institutions of the great republic taken together must and do work out in a prosperous, contented, peaceful, and righteous people; and also to exercise, through precept and example, an influence for good among the nations of the world. that destiny seems to us brighter and more certain of realization to-day than ever before. it is true that in population, in wealth, in knowledge, in national efficiency generally, we have reached a place far beyond the farthest hopes of the founders of the republic. are the causes which have led to our marvellous development likely to be repeated indefinitely in the future, or is there a reasonable possibility, or even a probability, that conditions may arise which will check our growth? danger to a nation comes either from without or from within. in the first great crisis of our history, the revolution, another people attempted from without to halt the march of our destiny by refusing to us liberty. with reasonable prudence and preparedness we need never fear another such attempt. if there be danger, it is not from an external source. in the second great crisis, the civil war, a part of our own people strove for an end which would have checked the progress of development. another such attempt has become forever impossible. if there be danger, it is not from a division of our people. in the third great crisis of our history, which has now come squarely upon us, the special interests and the thoughtless citizens seem to have united together to deprive the nation of the great natural resources without which it cannot endure. this is the pressing danger now, and it is not the least to which our national life has been exposed. a nation deprived of liberty may win it, a nation divided may reunite, but a nation whose natural resources are destroyed must inevitably pay the penalty of poverty, degradation, and decay. at first blush this may seem like an unpardonable misconception and over-statement, and if it is not true it certainly is unpardonable. let us consider the facts. some of them are well known, and the salient ones can be put very briefly. the five indispensably essential materials in our civilization are wood, water, coal, iron, and agricultural products. we have timber for less than thirty years at the present rate of cutting. the figures indicate that our demands upon the forest have increased twice as fast as our population. we have anthracite coal for but fifty years, and bituminous coal for less than two hundred. our supplies of iron ore, mineral oil, and natural gas are being rapidly depleted, and many of the great fields are already exhausted. mineral resources such as these when once gone are gone forever. we have allowed erosion, that great enemy of agriculture, to impoverish and, over thousands of square miles, to destroy our farms. the mississippi alone carries yearly to the sea more than , , tons of the richest soil within its drainage basin. if this soil is worth a dollar a ton, it is probable that the total loss of fertility from soil-wash to the farmers and forest-owners of the united states is not far from a billion dollars a year. our streams, in spite of the millions of dollars spent upon them, are less navigable now than they were fifty years ago, and the soil lost by erosion from the farms and the deforested mountain sides, is the chief reason. the great cattle and sheep ranges of the west, because of overgrazing, are capable, in an average year, of carrying but half the stock they once could support and should still. their condition affects the price of meat in practically every city of the united states. these are but a few of the more striking examples. the diversion of great areas of our public lands from the home-maker to the landlord and the speculator; the national neglect of great water powers, which might well relieve, being perennially renewed, the drain upon our non-renewable coal; the fact that but half the coal has been taken from the mines which have already been abandoned as worked out and by caving-in have made the rest forever inaccessible; the disuse of the cheaper transportation of our waterways, which involves comparatively slight demand upon our non-renewable supplies of iron ore, and the use of the rail instead--these are other items in the huge bill of particulars of national waste. we have a well-marked national tendency to disregard the future, and it has led us to look upon all our natural resources as inexhaustible. even now that the actual exhaustion of some of them is forcing itself upon us in higher prices and the greater cost of living, we are still asserting, if not always in words, yet in the far stronger language of action, that nevertheless and in spite of it all, they still are inexhaustible. it is this national attitude of exclusive attention to the present, this absence of foresight from among the springs of national action, which is directly responsible for the present condition of our natural resources. it was precisely the same attitude which brought palestine, once rich and populous, to its present desert condition, and which destroyed the fertility and habitability of vast areas in northern africa and elsewhere in so many of the older regions of the world. the conservation of our natural resources is a question of primary importance on the economic side. it pays better to conserve our natural resources than to destroy them, and this is especially true when the national interest is considered. but the business reason, weighty and worthy though it be, is not the fundamental reason. in such matters, business is a poor master but a good servant. the law of self-preservation is higher than the law of business, and the duty of preserving the nation is still higher than either. the american revolution had its origin in part in economic causes, and it produced economic results of tremendous reach and weight. the civil war also arose in large part from economic conditions, and it has had the largest economic consequences. but in each case there was a higher and more compelling reason. so with the third great crisis of our history. it has an economic aspect of the largest and most permanent importance, and the motive for action along that line, once it is recognized, should be more than sufficient. but that is not all. in this case, too, there is a higher and more compelling reason. the question of the conservation of natural resources, or national resources, does not stop with being a question of profit. it is a vital question of profit, but what is still more vital, it is a question of national safety and patriotism also. we have passed the inevitable stage of pioneer pillage of natural resources. the natural wealth we found upon this continent has made us rich. we have used it, as we had a right to do, but we have not stopped there. we have abused, and wasted, and exhausted it also, so that there is the gravest danger that our prosperity to-day will have been bought at the price of the suffering and poverty of our descendants. we may now fairly ask of ourselves a reasonable care for the future and a natural interest in those who are to come after us. no patriotic citizen expects this nation to run its course and perish in a hundred or two hundred, or five hundred years; but, on the contrary, we expect it to grow in influence and power and, what is of vastly greater importance, in the happiness and prosperity of our people. but we have as little reason to expect that all this will happen of itself as there would have been for the men who established this nation to expect that a united states would grow of itself without their efforts and sacrifices. it was their duty to found this nation, and they did it. it is our duty to provide for its continuance in well-being and honor. that duty it seems as though we might neglect--not in wilfulness, not in any lack of patriotic devotion, when once our patriotism is aroused, but in mere thoughtlessness and inability or unwillingness to drop the interests of the moment long enough to realize that what we do now will decide the future of the nation. for, if we do not take action to conserve the nation's natural resources, and that soon, our descendants will suffer the penalty of our neglect. let me use a homely illustration: we have all known fathers and mothers, devoted to their children, whose attention was fixed and limited by the household routine of daily life. such parents were actively concerned with the common needs and precautions and remedies entailed in bringing up a family, but blind to every threat that was at all unusual. fathers and mothers such as these often remain serenely unaware while some dangerous malady or injurious habit is fastening itself upon a favorite child. once the evil is discovered, there is no sacrifice too great to repair the damage which their unwitting neglect may have allowed to become irreparable. so it is, i think, with the people of the united states. capable of every devotion in a recognized crisis, we have yet carelessly allowed the habit of improvidence and waste of resources to find lodgment. it is our great good fortune that the harm is not yet altogether beyond repair. the profoundest duty that lies upon any father is to leave his son with a reasonable equipment for the struggle of life and an untarnished name. so the noblest task that confronts us all to-day is to leave this country unspotted in honor, and unexhausted in resources, to our descendants, who will be, not less than we, the children of the founders of the republic. i conceive this task to partake of the highest spirit of patriotism. chapter xii the present battle conservation has captured the nation. its progress during the last twelve months is amazing. official opposition to the conservation movement, whatever damage it has done or still threatens to the public interest, has vastly strengthened the grasp of conservation upon the minds and consciences of our people. efforts to obscure or belittle the issue have only served to make it larger and clearer in the public estimation. the conservation movement cannot be checked by the baseless charge that it will prevent development, or that every man who tells the plain truth is either a muck-raker or a demagogue. it has taken firm hold on our national moral sense, and when an issue does that it has won. the conservation issue is a moral issue, and the heart of it is this: for whose benefit shall our natural resources be conserved--for the benefit of us all, or for the use and profit of the few? this truth is so obvious and the question itself so simple that the attitude toward conservation of any man in public or private life indicates his stand in the fight for public rights. all monopoly rests on the unregulated control of natural resources and natural advantages, and such control by the special interests is impossible without the help of politics. the alliance between business and politics is the most dangerous thing in our political life. it is the snake that we must kill. the special interests must get out of politics, or the american people will put them out of business. there is no third course. because the special interests are in politics, we as a nation have lost confidence in congress. this is a serious statement to make, but it is true. it does not apply, of course, to the men who really represent their constituents and who are making so fine a fight for the conservation of self-government. as soon as these men have won their battle and consolidated their victory, confidence in congress will return. but in the meantime the people of the united states believe that, as a whole, the senate and the house no longer represent the voters by whom they were elected, but the special interests by whom they are controlled. they believe so because they have so often seen congress reject what the people desire, and do instead what the interests demand. and of this there could be no better illustration than the tariff. the tariff, under the policy of protection, was originally a means to raise the rate of wages. it has been made a tool to increase the cost of living. the wool schedule, professing to protect the wool-grower, is found to result in sacrificing grower and consumer alike to one of the most rapacious of trusts. the cotton cloth schedule was increased in the face of the uncontradicted public testimony of the manufacturers themselves that it ought to remain unchanged. the steel interests by a trick secured an indefensible increase in the tariff on structural steel. the sugar trust stole from the government like a petty thief, yet congress, by means of a dishonest schedule, continues to protect it in bleeding the public. at the very time the duties on manufactured rubber were being raised, the leader of the senate, in company with the guggenheim syndicate, was organizing an international rubber trust, whose charter made it also a holding company for the coal and copper deposits of the whole world. for a dozen years the demand of the nation for the pure food and drug bill was outweighed in congress by the interests which asserted their right to poison the people for a profit. congress refused to authorize the preparation of a great plan of waterway development in the general interest, and for ten years has declined to pass the appalachian and white mountain national forest bill, although the people are practically unanimous for both. the whole nation is in favor of protecting the coal and other natural resources in alaska, yet they are still in grave danger of being absorbed by the special interests. and as for the general conservation movement, congress not only refused to help it on, but tried to forbid any progress without its help. fortunately for us all, in this attempt it has utterly failed. this loss of confidence in congress is a matter for deep concern to every thinking american. it has not come quickly or without good reason. every man who knows congress well knows the names of senators and members who betray the people they were elected to represent, and knows also the names of the masters whom they obey. a representative of the people who wears the collar of the special interests has touched bottom. he can sink no farther. who is to blame because representatives of the people are so commonly led to betray their trust? we all are--we who have not taken the trouble to resent and put an end to the knavery we knew was going on. the brand of politics served out to us by the professional politician has long been composed largely of hot meals for the interests and hot air for the people, and we have all known it. political platforms are not sincere statements of what the leaders of a party really believe, but rather forms of words which those leaders think they can get others to believe they believe. the realities of the regular political game lie at present far beneath the surface; many of the issues advanced are mere empty sound; while the issues really at stake must be sought deep down in the politics of business--in politics for revenue only. all this the people realize as they never did before, and, what is more, they are ready to act on their knowledge. some of the men who are responsible for the union of business and politics may be profoundly dishonest, but more of them are not. they were trained in a wrong school, and they cannot forget their training. clay hardens by immobility--men's minds by standing pat. both lose the power to take new impressions. many of the old-style leaders regard the political truths which alone insure the progress of the nation, and will hereafter completely dominate it, as the mere meaningless babble of political infants. they have grown old in the belief that money has the right to rule, and they can never understand the point of view of the men who recognize in the corrupt political activity of a railroad or a trust a most dangerous kind of treason to government by the people. when party leaders go wrong, it requires a high sense of public duty, true courage, and a strong belief in the people for a man in politics to take his future in his hands and stand against them. the black shadow of party regularity as the supreme test in public affairs has passed away from the public mind. it is a great deliverance. the man in the street no longer asks about a measure or a policy merely whether it is good republican or good democratic doctrine. now he asks whether it is honest, and means what it says, whether it will promote the public interest, weaken special privilege, and help to give every man a fair chance. if it will, it is good, no matter who proposed it. if it will not, it is bad, no matter who defends it. it is a greater thing to be a good citizen than to be a good republican or a good democrat. the protest against politics for revenue only is as strong in one party as in the other, for the servants of the interests are plentiful in both. in that respect there is little to choose between them. differences of purpose and belief between political parties to-day are vastly less than the differences within the parties. the great gulf of division which strikes across our whole people pays little heed to fading party lines, or to any distinction in name only. the vital separation is between the partisans of government by money for profit and the believers in government by men for human welfare. when political parties come to be badly led, when their leaders lose touch with the people, when their object ceases to be everybody's welfare and becomes somebody's profit, it is time to change the leaders. one of the most significant facts of the time is that the professional politicians appear to be wholly unaware of the great moral change which has come over political thinking in the last decade. they fail to see that the political dogmas, the political slogans, and the political methods of the past generation have lost their power, and that our people have come at last to judge of politics by the eternal rules of right and wrong. a new life is stirring among the dry bones of formal platforms and artificial issues. morality has broken into politics. political leaders, trust-bred and trust-fed, find it harder and harder to conceal their actual character. the brass-bound collar of privilege has become plain upon their necks for all men to see. they are known for what they are, and their time is short. but when they come to be retired it will be of little use to replace an unfaithful public servant who wears the collar by another public servant with the same collar around his neck. above all, what we need in every office is free men representing a free people. the motto in every primary--in every election--should be this: no watch-dogs of the interests need apply. the old order, standing pat in dull failure to sense the great forward sweep of a nation determined on honesty and publicity in public affairs, is already wearing thin under the ceaseless hammering of the progressive onset. the demand of the people for political progress will not be denied. does any man, not blinded by personal interest or by the dust of political dry rot, suppose that the bulk of our people are anything else but progressive? if such there be, let him ask the young men, in whose minds the policies of to-morrow first see the light. the people of the united states demand a new deal and a square deal. they have grasped the fact that the special interests are now in control of public affairs. they have decided once more to take control of their own business. for the last ten years the determination to do so has been swelling like a river. they insist that the special interests shall go out of politics or out of business--one or the other. and the choice will lie with the interests themselves. if they resist, both the interests and the people will suffer. if wisely they accept the inevitable, the adjustment will not be hard. it will do their business no manner of harm to make it conform to the general welfare. but one way or the other, conform it must. the overshadowing question before the american people to-day is this: shall the nation govern itself or shall the interests run this country? the one great political demand, underlying all others, giving meaning to all others, is this: the special interests must get out of politics. the old-style leaders, seeking to switch public attention away from this one absorbing and overwhelming issue are pitifully ridiculous and out of date. to try to divert the march of an aroused public conscience from this righteous inevitable conflict by means of obsolete political catchwords is like trying to dam the mississippi with dead leaves. to drive the special interests out of politics is a vast undertaking, for in politics lies their strength. if they resist, as doubtless they will, it will call for nerve, endurance, and sacrifice on the part of the people. it will be no child's play, for the power of privilege is great. but the power of our people is greater still, and their steadfastness is equal to the need. the task is a tremendous one, both in the demands it will make and the rewards it will bring. it must be undertaken soberly, carried out firmly and justly, and relentlessly followed to the very end. two things alone can bring success. the first is honesty in public men, without which no popular government can long succeed. the second is complete publicity of all the affairs in which the public has an interest, such as the business of corporations and political expenses during campaigns and between them. to these ends, many unfaithful public servants must be retired, much wise legislation must be framed and passed, and the struggle will be bitter and long. but it will be well worth all it will cost, for self-government is at stake. there can be no legislative cure-all for great political evils, but legislation can make easier the effective expression and execution of the popular will. one step in this direction, which i personally believe should be taken without delay, is a law forbidding any senator or member of congress or other public servant to perform any services for any corporation engaged in interstate commerce, or to accept any valuable consideration, directly or indirectly, from any such corporation, while he is a representative of the people, and for a reasonable time thereafter. if such a law would be good for the nation in its affairs, a similar law should be good for the states and the cities in their affairs. and i see no reason why members and senators and state legislators should not keep the people informed of their pecuniary interest in interstate or public service corporations, if they have any. it is certain such publicity would do the public no harm. this nation has decided to do away with government by money for profit and return to the government our forefathers died for and gave to us--government by men for human welfare and human progress. opposition to progress has produced its natural results. there is profound dissatisfaction and unrest, and profound cause for both. yet the result is good, for at last the country is awake. for a generation at least there has not been a situation so promising for the ultimate public welfare as that of to-day. our people are like a hive of bees, full of agitation before taking flight to a better place. also they are ready to sting. out of the whole situation shines the confident hope of better things. if any man is discouraged, let him consider the rise of cleaner standards in this country within the last ten years. the task of translating these new standards into action lies before us. from sea to sea the people are taking a fresh grip on their own affairs. the conservation of political liberty will take its proper place alongside the conservation of the means of living, and in both we shall look to the permanent welfare by the plain people as the supreme end. the way out lies in direct interest by the people in their own affairs and direct action in the few great things that really count. what is the conclusion of the whole matter? the special interests must be put out of politics. i believe the young men will do it. index american revolution, economic results of, daughters of, better times on the farm, business and politics, unholy alliance, business problem, a, children and patriotism, citizenship and public spirit, civilization, essentials of, coal, resources, waste in mining, necessity of civilization, control of, congress, loss of confidence in, conservation, means prosperity, of public lands, nation's first duty, principles of, misconceptions about, and the future, first principle of, covers wide field, and common sense, of waterways, president roosevelt's views, a business problem, key-note of, foresight, welfare of average man, a democratic movement, danger to, woman's work for, and patriotism, economic side of, corporations, strategy of cost of living, increase of, country life, problem of, daughters of american revolution, department of agriculture, scope of, destruction, period of, dividends for the people, education, object of, efficiency, national, lack of tradition of, equal opportunity, the real issue, erosion, losses from, soil, farmer, backbone of the nation, organization and coöperation, farms, abandonment of, foresight, a conservation principle, forestry, beginning of conservation, leads conservation fight, pennsylvania association, forests, duration of supply, perils of exhaustion, fires, control of, and rivers, minnesota national, forest service, value to the west, and the law, powers of, attacks on, and publicity, franchises, limits on, future, disregard of, and conservation, golden rule and politics, governors, convention of, grazing, evils of overgrazing, home-building for the nation, ireland, agricultural coöperation in, iron ore, irrigation, value of, better times on the farm, land hunger, law, not absolute, forest service and the, marshall, chief justice, opinion, mineral fuels, waste of, mining, wastes in, minnesota national forests, mississippi, plan for development of, monopoly, of water power, of natural resources, moral issues involved, nation, preservation of, conservation first duty of, home-building for the, natural resources, development of, water, monopolization of, moral wrong, belong to the people, pillage of, overgrazing, evils of, patriotism and conservation, children and, a new, pennsylvania forestry association, pittsburg survey, politics, golden rule and, protest against for revenue only, population, forecast of, private interests, water power and, property and voting power, prosperity, the basis of, destruction of, publicity, forest service and, public lands, conservation of, evils of present system, menace of tenantry, public morality, new standard, public spirit, fostering of, roosevelt and, and the "bosses," and citizenship, resources, not inexhaustible, rivers and forests, unit from source to mouth, roosevelt, president, home-making policy, message, the common people, and conservation, thanks due to, and young men, policies, the, and public spirit, soil erosion, special privileges, danger of, victims of grab system, must be driven out of politics, square deal, doctrine of, success, conditions of, tariff, a tool to increase cost of living, tenantry _vs._ freehold, menace to public lands, united states, destiny of, crisis and history of, voting power, property and, waste, prevention of, in mining coal, period of destruction, water-power trust, monopoly, and private capital, grants in perpetuity, and private interests, control of, sites, water resources, waterways, development of, conservation of, woman's work for conservation, the philippine agricultural review vol. viii first quarter, no. special articles citrus fruits in the philippines by p. j. wester by-products of sugar manufacture by c. w. hines a quarterly publication issued in english by the bureau of agriculture the government of the philippine islands department of public instruction manila bureau of printing (entered at the post office at manila as second-class matter.) contents. page. editorial citrus fruits in the philippines by-products of sugar manufacture coffee in the philippines cane-juice clarification book review: "la fabricación de azucar blanco en los ingenios" current notes: first quarter--shield budding the mango; experiments in shield budding; improvement of tropical fruits in the philippines; petioled vs. nonpetioled budwood; new sugar industry; world's sugar supply; progress in sugar manufacture illustrations. plate i. plant propagation shed at lamao experiment station frontispiece. facing page-- ii. citrus fruits: (a) talamisan; (b) tizon; (c) philippine pomelo iii. herbarium specimens of citrus: (a) talamisan; (b) alemow; (c) limao iv. citrus fruits: (a) canol; (b) cabuyao; (c) limao v. herbarium specimens of citrus: (a) canci; (b) cabuyao; (c) biasong vi. citrus fruits: (a) tihi-tihi; (b) biasong; (c) alemow vii. herbarium specimens of citrus: (a) colo-colo; (b) samuyao; (c) balincolong text figure. fig. seedling of c. histrix dc editorial. the sugar industry. it is supposed that the sugar cane (saccharum officinarum) was originally found in india, probably in the region of the ganges. there is no sugar cane known anywhere to-day in the wild state although there are several species of mammoth grasses closely akin to this plant. as various portions of the earth's surface were explored and finally settled the sugar industry was extended until to-day one finds it flourishing in practically all tropical countries and many subtropical countries as well. perhaps the last semitropical region to attempt this industry in a commercial way was the state of arizona, u. s. a., where the desert wastes were turned into flourishing beet and cane fields by the aid of irrigation from the government storage dam. during the reign of napoleon in france trade in the sugars from british and other foreign possessions was destroyed by the war with england but this decline in the cane-sugar trade served only as an impetus to the new beet-sugar industry then being started. in the meantime there was such a dearth of sugar and such a fabulous rise in prices, that attempts were made to secure sugar from various plants and fruits growing in france, such as beets, sorghum, maize, grapes, apples, pears, figs, etc. at that time the manufacture of a kind of sugar from grapes became quite important so that during the period from to considerable quantities of this class of sugar were made. simultaneously with this new venture the beet root was gaining in importance year by year, especially in france, and to a certain extent as well in other european countries, until after extensive experiments in plant breeding it was learned that the sucrose value of the root could be very much improved. from this work varieties of beets used to-day have evolved which often contain as high as to per cent sucrose. another obstacle in the way was the bad taste and odor of the low-grade sugars from the beets and the difficulty of making a high-grade sugar. to-day the heavy liming and the carbonation process give a sugar equal in all respects to the best grade of granulated cane sugar, and one finds a great deal of beet sugar either mixed with cane sugar or marketed alone under the name of cane sugar. at the present time the beet-sugar industry has become so important that more than eight million tons, or about one-half of all the sugar produced, comes from this source. there is a greater consumption of sugar each year which necessitates greater production either through larger areas, heavier yields, or its manufacture from other sacchariferous plants. the maximum in both area and yield have by no means been reached, while in recent years a large number of sacchariferous plants have attracted the attention of various investigators throughout the sugar world, and this will in all probability lead to a new source of supply. the most promising of these plants is the sugar palm (arenga saccharifera). extensive work was conducted on this palm by this bureau and reported in the may, , number of the philippine agricultural review. during the above-mentioned year an entirely new method of juice clarification was elaborated which is applicable to the juices of various other palms as well as to that of the sugar cane. in bengal the wild date palm (phoenix silvestris) has produced a low grade of molasses sugar for consumption by the natives for a great number of years. the main obstacle encountered in making a good grade of sugar from this palm has been caused by the difficulty of clarification and the susceptibility of the juice to fermentation. it is thought that the above-mentioned process may bring this palm into greater prominence in the sugar world. there are also the palmera (borassus flabelliformis) of southern india, and the nipa (nipa fructicans) of the philippines. either of these could undoubtedly be made profitable sugar producers. the latter is used commercially only as a source of alcohol. there is practically no limit to the number of sacchariferous plants one might name in the tropics and subtropics, but many of these do not contain a sufficient percentage of sucrose, or else they contain such a high percentage of impurities that the low yield of sugar and the high cost of manufacture make their use unprofitable. citrus fruits in the philippines. [ ] by p. j. wester, horticulturist in charge of lamao experiment station. preliminary remarks. de candolle, in his "origin of cultivated plants," discusses species belonging to the genus citrus: the pomelo, c. decumana l.; the citron, lemon, and lime, here considered as distinct species, which he includes under the one species, c. medica l.; the sweet orange, c. aurantium l., which he separates from the sour orange and which is also by him considered as a distinct species, c. vulgaris risso; and finally the mandarin, c. nobilis lour. of these, the pomelo, orange, mandarin, lemon, lime, and citron are important pomologically, the sour orange being grown principally as stock for the other species. the pomelo is by the same author considered to be indigenous to the pacific islands east of java, the citron and affiliated species to have originated in india, and the sour orange east of india, and all to have been in cultivation for over two thousand years. the antiquity of the orange and mandarin is less, both species being from china and cochin china. all these species have been introduced into the philippine archipelago, and are well distributed excepting the sour orange, which is rarely seen. the discussion of all species refers to them as found in the philippines except when otherwise stated. no very distinct types are found among the oranges or mandarins; the variation in the pomelo is considerable, although, so far as the writer has noted, scarcely enough to warrant the distinction of separate varieties. both the white and red-fleshed types occur with many gradations, but no studies have been made to note which other correlative characters, if any, are identified with these different forms. the very primitive pomelos (pl. ii, c) that are not infrequently seen in cultivation might indicate that this species is indigenous to the philippines, though so far as the writer knows the tree has never been seen in the virgin forest. closer observations have been made on the general type represented by the citron, including the lemon and lime, and several distinct forms have been recognized. the calamondin, c. mitis blanco, is well known to be indigenous, as well as the cabuyao and related plants that have been referred to c. histrix dc. in the first-named species there seem to be no very marked variations. c. histrix was described by de candolle, flowers and fruits excepted, from a plant growing in montpellier, being recognized principally by its long broad-winged petioles and free stamens. the writer has not had the opportunity to see the original description of c. histrix or examine the type specimen, but swingle refers to it in jour. of agri. research, vol. i, no. , page , , as having broadly winged petioles, often larger than the blades, the wings being more gradually narrowed toward the base and usually more abruptly truncate at the tip than c. ichangensis swingle, making then somewhat triangular in outline. within these broad limitations a number of otherwise remarkably distinct forms may be recognized some of which were illustrated in a previous publication, bureau of agriculture bulletin no. , citriculture in the philippines, , and referred to c. histrix with the statement that "some of these forms unquestionably will be recognized as subspecies on closer study, or possibly as separate species." since then several plants of this type in the citrus collection assembled at lamao by the bureau of agriculture have bloomed and fruited, affording an opportunity for fuller observations, and these have been further complemented during a trip to bohol and cebu in may, , and by the fruits forwarded by mr. e. f. southwick. however, assuming that c. histrix (or some of its subspecies) is the c. histrix of de candolle, there still remain, on one hand the limao, and on the other the biasong, balincolong, samuyao, samuyao-sa-amoo, as widely different from each other and the cabuyao and its subspecies as for instance the orange, and pomelo, or the mandarin and the calamondin. a very interesting characteristic has been discovered in several of the citrus fruits that have free stamens in the form of a more or less distinct nucleus in the juice cells; this, so far as the writer knows, has not been previously recorded in a citrus fruit. the fact that the presence of these nuclei is not here referred to in some species with free stamens does not necessarily mean that they are absent, considering that fruits of these particular species have not been examined since the first nuclear cells were discovered. the writer is inclined to believe that these nuclei are correlative to those species having free stamens. to the student in the citrus-growing sections of the united states the characterization of the citron, lemon and lime as given herein is no doubt satisfactory, but in the philippines various forms called "limon" will appear that do not agree with this and it would then be necessary either to make the descriptions more general so as to cover the additional forms or to classify these as species or subspecies. if the barely margined petioles, comparatively small leaves, the green, tender growth and the white corolla are insisted upon for the lime, for instance, it is difficult to know where to place the purple-growthed, thorny, wide-winged, purplish-petaled, subglobose limes with wide-winged leaves of the philippines. they cannot well be placed with the lemons, and still less with the citron, though they of course show strong relationship to each. the citron group of the genus perhaps more than any other shows the need of further study and systematization of the entire genus. attention should be called to the presence in the philippines of the extremely primitive types of the citron and the lemons; for instance, the fruit illustrated in bulletin no. , plate xvi (c), and colo-colo, as well as the lombog, referred to c. pseudolimonum in this paper. of all the plants here discussed, c. micrantha var. microcarpa is botanically furthest removed from the cultivated citrus fruits. each considered as a separate species and constituting perhaps the most complete description of these species published in english, mr. h. h. hume's characterization of the orange, sour orange, mandarin, pomelo, citron, lemon, and lime in his "citrus fruits and their culture," is here reproduced without alteration. some writers have grouped several of these as subspecies under one great comprehensive species, but, as mr. hume aptly says: "what advantage is there in throwing the sour orange, sweet orange, pomelo, kumquat, and a few other distinctly different trees into one conglomerate species * * * and then placing each of the aforementioned plants under this species as subspecies and varieties. such a procedure is more likely to result in further confusion than order." the species of the genus citrus that have come under the observation of the writer, with two exceptions, seem naturally to divide themselves into two groups,--( ) those with more or less united filaments and hypogeal cotyledons, and ( ) those with free filaments, and (in all instances where there has been an opportunity for observations) with supra-terraneous, distinct cotyledons (fig. ). in so far as these characteristics have been observed in the philippine citrus fruits, long and broad-winged petioles are a third correlative feature distinguishing group no. ; c. ichangensis recently described by swingle from china also possesses this last feature, but has connate filaments. the alsem and alemow seem to be intermediate between these forms, the alsem being most closely related to those in the first division, the filaments being connate, while the cotyledons in some lots that have been propagated appeared above ground. the alemow is most closely related to group no. , the filaments being nearly always free. the general character of the talamisan together with the presence of hypogeal cotyledons tends to the belief that this species has more or less united filaments and thus would belong to the first group. all descriptions have been made from living plant material either during tours of collection by the writer, or from plants grown at the lamao experiment station from material sent to the bureau of agriculture from time to time since april, . also, all the material has been collected from plants growing in the yard of some filipino and so may lay claim to having been domesticated. while this statement may not be altogether reliable it is interesting to note that in bohol the filipinos stated that the following trees grew wild in the forest: among-pong, amontay, balincolong, biasong, canci, colo-colo, limoncito, limao, lombog, and samuyao. while it is believed that the species described in this paper include most of the more distinctive philippine citrus fruits, and several hitherto unknown even to the botanist, they do not by any means exhaust the philippine forms of this genus. several other forms have been noted, and constitute a part of the citrus collection at lamao but are not here referred to, for the reason that the material on hand is too incomplete to warrant their description at this time. acknowledgements.--the writer is greatly indebted to mr. e. f. southwick, superintendent of the demonstration station at cebu, for his untiring zeal in repeatedly forwarding sets of citrus fruits and budwood from bohol and cebu, and for his most valuable assistance during a collection trip made by him and the writer to cebu and bohol in may, , without which it would not have been possible to obtain much of the data and material collected. all the species and varieties credited to bohol were first called to the attention of the bureau by mr. southwick. mr. g. w. weathersbee, formerly agricultural inspector of this bureau, first called attention to the alemow and has also assisted in the collection of citrus material in cebu. mr. a. m. burton, formerly superintendent of the trinidad garden, benguet, has forwarded fruits and budwood of the cabugao and other fruits. mr. d. b. mackie, entomologist of the bureau, first called attention to a variety of alsem in bontoc of superior quality. m. g. b. mead sent the first specimens of panuban. descriptions and comments. citrus aurantium l. orange. a tree . to meters in height, with a compact, conical head; bark grayish brown; thorns generally present, to millimeters long, sharp, stout; leaves oval or ovate oblong, . to centimeters long, smooth, shining, somewhat lighter below than above, margins entire, or very slightly serrate; petiole to millimeters long, slightly winged (occasionally with quite a broad wing); flowers axillary in clusters of one to six, white, sweet scented, smaller than those of c. vulgaris; calyx cupped; sepals four to five, awl-shaped, thick, greenish, persistent; petals usually five, oblong, to millimeters long, thick, fleshy, recurved; stamens twenty to twenty-five, hypogenous, filaments flattened, united in groups, shorter than the petals; pistil distinctly divided into stigma, style and ovary; stigma knob-like; style long and slender; ovary rounded, to loculed; fruit globose to oblate, light orange to reddish; rind smooth; pulp juicy, subacid; juice sacs spindle shaped, sometimes larger than those of c. vulgaris; seeds few or many, oblong ovoid, planoconvex, generally broad, wedged or pointed at the micropylar end, marked with oblique ridges surrounding one or two plain areas. native to china or cochin china. while the orange is nowhere planted in orchards it is fairly well distributed. judging from the prevalence of the citrus fruits in the markets in the various parts of the archipelago it ranks fifth in production, as compared with the mandarin, pomelo, lime, and calamondin, the only citrus fruits beside the orange that may claim to be of any economic importance even from a philippine point of view. excepting a few budded trees of recent importation or distribution by the bureau of agriculture all trees are seedlings and nearly always the fruit is poor in quality. so far as noted, there are no variations worthy of notice. citrus vulgaris risso. sour orange. (seville orange, bigarade orange.) a small tree, to meters in height, with a dense compact head; young shoots light green, thorny; thorns alternate, small, sharp and pointed, on older wood larger, strong, stiff; leaves unifoliate, evergreen, alternate, ovate, pointed, strongly and peculiarly scented; petiole to millimeters long, broadly winged; flowers in small, axillary cymes, white, strongly sweet scented, somewhat larger than those of c. aurantium; calyx cupped, segments to , blunt; petals linear oblong, conspicuously dotted with oil cells; stamens to ; filaments united in groups; pistil club shaped, smooth; ovary to loculed; fruit orange colored or frequently reddish when well matured, inclined to be rough; rind strongly aromatic, bitter; pulp acid; juice sacs spindle shaped, rather small; seeds flattened and wedged toward the micropylar end, marked with ridged lines. native to southeastern asia, probably in cochin china. hardier than the sweet orange. samples of what seems to be the sour orange have been received from davao, mindanao. citrus nobilis lour. mandarin. a small tree . to meters in height, with a dense head of upright or willowy, drooping branches; bark dark brownish or streaked with gray; branchlets light green or dark in color, small, slender, round or angled, thornless, or provided with small sharp spines; leaves small, lanceolate to oval, slightly crenate; petioles short, wingless, or with very small wings; flowers terminating the branchlets or axillary, sometimes clustered, to millimeters across, sweet scented; calyx small, shallow, cupped, the petals small; petals white, fleshy, recurved; stamens to in number, shorter than the petals; pistil small, resembling that of c. aurantium; ovary to loculed; fruit distinctly oblate, orange to reddish in color; pulp sweet or subacid; juice sacs broad and blunt; seeds top shaped, beaked, cotyledons pistache green; embryos one or more; sections separating readily from each other and from the rind; rind thin, oil cell somewhat balloon shaped or oval. native to cochin china. generally admitted to be somewhat hardier than the sweet orange. the mandarin is the only species in the genus citrus that has been at all systematically planted and cared for, even though this mostly consists in the planting the trees, now and then the clearing away of the weeds with cutlasses and the harvesting of the fruit. nevertheless the quality of the fruit is uniform and very good. the mandarin district of the philippines is confined to a small area principally around santo tomás and tanauan, in the province of batangas, and, excepting imported fruit, all mandarins marketed in the philippines are grown in the above-mentioned region. scattered trees are found in most parts of the archipelago. aside from the tizon, which is described later, and which it is believed may be referred to this species, there are no well-defined varieties of the mandarin. citrus nobilis var. papillaris blanco. tizon. (plate ii, b) a spreading, small tree, attaining a height of meters or more, in habit similar to the pomelo; spines small, or wanting; leaves to centimeters long, to centimeters broad, ovate to elliptical oblong, crenate, dark-green and shining above, crinkly, base broadly acute, apex narrowly acute to almost acuminate and caudate; petioles to millimeters long with narrow wing margin; flowers not seen; fruit large from to centimeters in diameter, to grams in weight, somewhat compressed at basal half, usually ending in a more or less conspicuous nipple which, however, is sometimes wanting; apex flattened, or even depressed; surface smooth, pale greenish turning to orange yellow; skin medium thin; locules to , separable from each other and the skin like the mandarin; pulp yellowish, subacid, very juicy, and of good flavor with marked "quinine" taste; juice cells large; seeds very few, rarely more than . the tizon is extremely rare and only a few trees are found in cultivation, confined to the citrus district of batangas, luzon. the trees are said to be quite prolific, and the fruit matures from september to december. this fruit, on account of its scarcity, is of no commercial importance. however, it would be an acceptable dessert or breakfast fruit, being a little more acid than the orange. it is said to be an introduction from spain. the tizon is without doubt the c. papillaris described by blanco in "flora filipinas." the tizon is believed to be a natural hybrid between the mandarin and the pomelo. it has inherited the loose-skinned character, large juice cells, and partial absence of spines, and leaf character of the first-named species to which it is (without the writer having had the opportunity to examine the flowers) unquestionably more closely related than to any other species in the genus. the tizon is represented in the citrus collection at the lamao experiment station under bureau of agriculture no. and . citrus decumana l. pomelo. a tree to meters in height, with a rounded or conical head, and a trunk upwards of centimeters in diameter; bark smooth, grayish brown; young leaves and shoots sparsely pubescent, light green; leaves ovate, blunt, pointed or rounded, emarginate, smooth, dark, glossy green, leathery, margin crenate; petioles articulated, broadly winged; flowers produced singly or in cymose clusters of to , sweet scented; calyx cupped, large; sepals to , pointed; corolla white, to millimeters across; petals to , slightly reflexed, fleshy, oblong; stamens to ; anthers large, abundantly supplied with pollen, proterandrous; pistil stout; stigma when ripe covered with a sticky, milky fluid; ovary to loculed; fruit large, oblate, globose or pyriform, light lemon or orange colored; flesh grayish or pink; juice sacs large, spindle shaped; flavor a mingling of acid, bitterness and sweetness or subacid; seeds large, light colored, wedge shaped or irregular, with prominent ridges surrounding broad, flat areas. native to the polynesian and malayan archipelagos. the pomelo is the most widely distributed species in the genus, but here as in the orange the quality of practically all the fruit is wretchedly poor, dry and insipid with a very thick skin. with the exception of the panuban, described below, there are no variations worthy of notice in this genus. citrus decumana l. pomelo, var. panuban. a spiny tree, to meters tall of robust growth; young growth pubescent; leaves to centimeters long, . to centimeters wide, oblong ovate, crenate, coriaceous; base rounded; petiole to millimeters long, wing margins narrow, at most millimeters broad, and cuneiform; flowers not seen; fruit . centimeters long, centimeters in transverse diameter, oblate, with shallow apical cavity; surface smooth, lemon yellow; skin very thin; pulp contained in to locules, yellowish, fairly juicy, subacid, acidity and sweetness well blended, aromatic and well flavored; seeds large, polyembryonic. the panuban is said to bloom about new year and the fruit ripens in september to november; the trees are reported to be very prolific. the panuban has been reported only from lias, bontoc, where half a dozen trees are said to grow. possibly the panuban may be an accidental hybrid between the pomelo and the orange or mandarin; if it is simply a mutation it is certainly one of the most striking in this species. however this may be, the pomelo character is strongly dominant in both the foliage and the fruit. very well flavored, the fruit is too dry to be acceptable to a discriminating public, but it is not improbable that under cultivation the juiciness would increase. in such a case the panuban might become a fruit of commercial importance. b. a. no. (lias, bontoc). citrus mitis blanco. calamondin. a small, somewhat spiny tree, to meters tall; young growth greenish; leaves elliptic oblong, to centimeters long and about centimeters wide, crenulate; base acute; apex usually emarginate; petiole scarcely winged, to millimeters long; flowers axillary, solitary, rarely in pairs, millimeters in diameter, fragrant; petals white, reflexed; stamens to , unequal; filaments united into groups; ovary globose, to loculed; style slender, distinct; stigma knoblike; fruit globose, orange yellow, to centimeters in diameter; skin smooth, thin, brittle, separable from the flesh; pulp orange colored, juicy, acid, with distinct aroma; juice cells rather large, short, and blunt; seeds comparatively large, smooth, plump, sometimes beaked; polyembryonic. the calamondin is widely distributed in the philippines and occurs wild as well as cultivated. the plant makes an attractive, ornamental, small tree and the fruit may be made into marmalade or utilized in making ade. there are no particularly distinct forms of this species. the trees are almost invariably very prolific and almost everbearing. in bohol the species is known as "limoncito." b. a. no. (tanauan, batangas). citrus webberii. alsem. a shrubby tree with small, sharp spines; leaves averaging millimeters in length, and millimeters in width, oblong-ovate, crenulate, dark green and shining above; base broadly acute; apex emarginate, petiole millimeters long; wings rarely exceeding millimeters in width; flowers terminal, rarely axillary, solitary, millimeters in diameter, sweet scented; calyx small; petals white, reflexed; stamens to , about equal; filaments united into groups of several; ovary small, obovoid, to loculed; style distinct, slender; stigma small, club shaped; fruit sometimes attaining a weight of grams, form oblate, millimeters long to millimeters long to across, to roundish oblate, sometimes compressed and wrinkled toward base ending in a pronounced nipple; apex a shallow depression, or mammilate with the circular depression more or less pronounced; surface smooth to fairly smooth; color greenish yellow to lemon yellow, lenticels few, depressed; skin thin, the "kid-glove" character more or less pronounced; flesh whitish to grayish, very juicy, aromatic; juice cells variable, from short and blunt to medium slender and tapering to one end; seeds ovate, flattened, smooth, sometimes beaked. plants of the alsem have never been seen by the writer in the provinces, the description of the plant having been made from budded plants growing at lamao, propagated from material collected in bulacan. the trees have a long flowering season, as fruits are offered in manila throughout the summer to late in autumn. the variation in the fruit is very great, some being of little value, while others are extremely thin skinned, well flavored, juicy, aromatic, with less rag than perhaps any citrus fruit that has been examined by the writer. the floral characters correspond closely to those of the mandarin, which the fruit in some forms also resembles in appearance and in its loose-skinned character. flavor and aroma place the alsem in close relationship with the cabuyao, c. histrix, and it is a curious fact that the tagalogs always call it "cabuyao." in common with the cabuyao it is frequently infested with the rindborer, prays citri, while the mandarin is practically immune to this pest. an analysis made by the bureau of science in november, , of alsem fruits purchased by the writer in manila gave the following results: weight of-- grams. fruit . peel seed . pulp (rag) . juice . analysis of juice. per cent. acidity (citric) . sucrose none. sugar . protein . ash . analysis of pulp. per cent. acidity (citric) . protein . ash . the alsem was considered a variety of the mandarin in bulletin no. , plate iv, but a closer study of the plant and fruit shows that it differs so greatly from all other philippine species of the genus as to be entitled to specific rank, and it has been named in honor of dr. h. j. webber, director of the citrus experiment station, riverside, california, the association with whom, in connection with his citrus and pineapple breeding work, more than any other cause influenced the writer to take up the improvement of tropical economic plants. the bontoc local name "alsem" is here proposed as the vernacular name for c. webberii. in previous publications by the writer it was called the "mandarin lime," which is hardly suitable, however, since while it has certain resemblances to the mandarin yet is distinct from it, and again, its only resemblance to the lime lies in its acidity and ade-making qualities; moreover the name "mandarin lime" is too long for popular use. b. a. no. (bulacan), (manila), (bontoc). citrus webberii var. montana. cabugao. a shrubby tree with slender branches and small, weak spines, sometimes absent; young growth green; leaves . to centimeters long, to . centimeters broad, ovate to ovate oblong, crenate, dark green above, shining; base broadly acute to rounded; apex blunt pointed, usually retuse; petiole to millimeters long, with narrow wing margin, in large leaves sometimes millimeters broad; flowers not seen; fruit roundish oblate, about millimeters across, somewhat corrugate, loculed. budwood and fruits of the cabugao were forwarded to the bureau by mr. a. m. burton, from the mountain province. the writer did not have the opportunity of examining the fruit, of which, however, an excellent photograph was made, and, to date of writing the plants at lamao not having bloomed there has been no chance to examine the floral characters. the general character of the plant and fruit indicates that the cabugao is a form of the alsem. through a typographical error in bulletin no. , plate xvi (a), the cabugao is credited to bohol. b. a. no. (benguet, mountain province). citrus longispina. talamisan. (pls. iia, iiia.) an arborescent, very thorny shrub about meters tall, with numerous suckers and interlocking branches, the spines on the stems frequently centimeters long; young growth bright green, nearly always angular; leaves . to centimeters long, to . centimeters broad, ovate to broadly elliptical, crenate; base obtuse to broadly acute; apex acute to rounded, usually emarginate; petioles to millimeters long, rather narrowly winged, though in large leaves the wings are up to millimeters broad; flowers not seen; fruit roundish, somewhat flattened at apex, millimeters in diameter, smooth, deep lemon colored; skin thin; locules to ; pulp very juicy, mildly acid, with a tinge of orange yellow, aromatic and pleasantly flavored; juice cells large, plump, blunt or pointed at one end; seeds rather few, of medium size, fairly plump, more or less reticulate, polyembryonic, and of poor germinating qualities. the talamisan is exceedingly rare, and is found in cultivation in bohol (one plant has been seen in cebu) and is fairly productive. excepting the mandarin, which is also of rare occurrence, it is much superior to all other citrus fruits grown in these two islands, and is eaten by the inhabitants; it is nevertheless very rare and of no economic importance at present. the fruit ripens in january and february, and is a poor keeper. introduced into cultivation, the fruit of the talamisan could to advantage be used as an ade fruit, and with a little sugar it would make a good breakfast fruit. the dense growth of the plant, with numerous suckers, armed also with formidable spines, would make it a good live fence. the talamisan, or tamisan as it is also called, is one of the most interesting citrus fruits that has come to the attention of the writer. its angular growth, formidable spines, broad, sometimes almost orbicular, distinct leaves and fruit easily distinguish the talamisan from all other species in the genus. b. a. no. , (bohol). citrus macrophylla. alemow. (pls. iiib, vic.) a tree attaining a height of meters, of upright growth, and rather long, stout, sharp spines; leaves to centimeters long, to centimeters wide, elliptical to ovate, crenate to serrate; base rounded; apex acute; petioles to millimeters long, broadly winged, wings frequently exceeding millimeters in width; flowers to , in compact cymes, sessile, to millimeters in diameter; calyx cupped; petals to , oblong; stamens to ; filaments nearly always free; ovary small, to loculed; style distinct; stigma club shaped, small; fruit to sometimes exceeding millimeters in length, attaining a weight of to grams, subglobose to roundish oblong, more or less compressed towards base, which is nippled and with stem inserted in a shallow cavity; apex flattened with a circular depression around the raised stigmatic area; surface greenish lemon yellow, rather rough, with transverse corrugations; oil cells small, sunken; skin comparatively thin; pulp grayish, rather dry, sharply acid, lemon flavored; juice cells rather slender, long, and pointed; seed medium large, short and plump, smooth, sometimes beaked. the alemow is a very rare fruit occurring in cultivation in cebu, and considered inedible even by the natives. the description of the flowers was made from fresh specimens collected in may. the tree is said to bloom later in the year during the rainy season having then larger flowers. partly grown fruit was then seen on the tree and since mature fruit has been examined by the writer from december to late in february the alemow is evidently nearly if not quite everbearing. the principal distinguishing features in this species are the large, broad leaves, the comparatively short but quite broad-winged petioles, the free rarely united filaments, and the quite large, peculiarly shaped fruit; it is thus apparently one of the links between the two branches of the genus, one of which has the filaments more or less united and the other the filaments free, being in the first group most closely related to the pomelo. the alemow was first forwarded to the writer under the name of colo: bulletin , plate xiv. b. a. no. , , , (cebu). citrus southwickii. limao. (pls. iiie, ivc.) a thorny tree, with dense head and drooping branches, attaining a height of meters; spines small but sharp, leaves . to centimeters long, to millimeters broad, ovate to roundish ovate, conspicuously crenate, dark green and shining above, leathery; base acute; apex acute to obtuse, frequently emarginate; petioles to millimeters long, the wings to millimeters broad in large leaves, the average wing area somewhat less than half of the leaf blade; flowers to , in compact axillary or terminal cymes, sometimes solitary, to millimeters in diameter, white, with trace of purple on the outside; calyx very small; stamens to , free; ovary globose to oblate; locules to ; stigma almost sessile; fruit to millimeters long, to millimeters in equatorial diameter, oblate, with shallow cavity at apex, smooth, with slight longitudinal corrugations; lenticels sparse, small; oil cells usually raised; skin thin; pulp fairly juicy, sharply acid, bitter, with distinct aroma from c. histrix; juice cells short, plump, granulate, small, containing a small, greenish nucleus; seeds numerous. the limao, though rare, is not uncommon in bohol, where it is cultivated and has also been collected by the writer in baganga, mindanao. the flowers appear late in april and during the early part of may, with the fruit ripening in january and february; a few fruits nearly full grown were collected in may. no. has flowered irregularly from may to december. the fruit is not eaten, but used in washing by the boholanos and is of no economic importance. the tree is evidently quite drought resistant, and succeeds well in very scanty soil underlaid with limestone. the limao belongs in that group of the citrus fruits having free filaments, the most conspicuous characters being the compact growth of the crown, the dark-green, thick, and distinct leaves, the almost sessile stigma, and the attractive, oblate, regular-shaped fruit with its many locules, exceeding in number those in all other citrus fruits known to the writer. this species has been named in honor of mr. e. f. southwick, elsewhere referred to in the paper. b. a. no. (baganga, mindanao), , (bohol). citrus histrix dc. cabuyao. (pl. vb; fig. .) a thorny tree, sometimes exceeding . meters in height; spines medium large and sharp; leaves . to centimeters long, to centimeters broad, ovate to oblong ovate, coriaceous, dark green and shining above, crenate; base rounded to broadly acute; apex acute, sometimes emarginate; petiole . to centimeters long, broadly margined, sometimes . centimeters wide, wing area inferior or equal to sometimes exceeding leaf area; flowers to , in axillary or terminal, compact cymes, to millimeters in diameter; calyx small, not cupped; petals to , oblong ovate, white, with trace of purple on the outside; stamens to , equal, free, with abundant pollen; ovary rather large, globose, to loculed; style short and stout; stigma knob like; fruit subglobose to short pyriform or turbinate, attaining a length of centimeters and a diameter of centimeters; surface smooth; color greenish yellow to lemon yellow; rind medium thick; pulp greenish, juicy, sharply acid, aromatic; juice sacs rather short and blunt, usually containing a more or less distinct nucleus; seeds usually many, flat, reticulate. this fruit, commonly called cabuyao by the tagalogs in central luzon, is without question the "copahan" of bohol. near manila the tree has been found in flower in september, while in bohol flowers were collected in may. the fruit may be used in making ade, but is inferior to the lemon or lime. the native inhabitants eat it together with fish, and also use the fruit in washing. it is of practically no importance. the "amongpong," found in bohol, and considered a distinct fruit from the copahan by the native inhabitants, differs chiefly in having only to stamens, and a large oblate ovary with a short and slender style. the first has not been examined by the writer and is said to be smooth and short, pyriform, centimeters in diameter. flowers examined in may. "calo-oy" is another fruit also found in bohol considered by the inhabitants as distinct from the "copahan" and "amongpong." the leaf characters in the calo-oy scarcely differ sufficiently to entitle it to rank even as a subspecies; the flowers were just gone when the visit was made to bohol. the fruit is said to be globose, smooth and about centimeters in diameter. "amontay" (pl. ivb) is still another form of c. histrix found in bohol. this plant was also out of its flowering stage at the time of the visit. the fruit, forwarded to the writer in february by mr. southwick, is about millimeters in diameter, irregularly globose, with flattened or depressed base, and rounded apex, smooth, lemon yellow; oil cells mostly raised; skin thick; the pulp, contained in to locules, juicy, and rather pleasantly aromatic; juice cells medium large, short and plump, containing a minute, greenish nucleus; cotyledons supraterraneous, distinct. so far as observed, the amongpong, amontay and the calo-oy are not sufficiently distinct from the cabuyao to entitle them even to rank as subspecies. the various forms above referred to are in the bureau of agriculture citrus collection at lamao, represented as follows: cabuyao, no. (lamao); copahan, no. , (bohol); amongpong, no. , (bohol); calo-oy, no. (bohol); amontay, no. , (bohol). citrus histrix var. boholensis. canci. (pls. iva, va.) a small tree, rarely exceeding meters in height, with compact crown and small, sharp spines; leaves to centimeters long, to millimeters broad, ovate to elliptical ovate, crenulate, coriaceous; base broadly acute; apex acute to acuminate; petioles to millimeters long, to millimeters wide, wing area less than one-half of leaf area; flowers to in compact axillary cymes; petals white, with purplish tinge outside; stamens to , equal, free; ovary quite large, oblate; locules to ; style short, distinct; stigma knob like; fruit millimeters long, millimeters in transverse diameter, oblate, smooth, lemon yellow; oil cells numerous, uniform, raised; skin medium thick; pulp quite juicy with very pronounced acidity; juice cells short, plump, and granular; seeds many, wedge shaped, monoembryonic; cotyledons supraterraneous. the canci is found in cultivation in bohol and is rather rare. flowers were collected in may, and ripe fruits have been examined in january. the fruit is eaten with fish by the filipinos, but is really so little grown that it has no economic importance. the fruit makes a fairly good ade. while the canci undoubtedly belongs to c. histrix yet an examination of its parts shows that it is very distinct from that species as already described. in the leaves, the comparatively short petioles with small, cuneiform wings, as compared with the oblong-spatulate, broad-winged petioles in the cabuyao, etc., is very noticeable; the stamens are to only in the canci, while the locules are to , and the fruit is shorter than broad unlike that in c. histrix. everything considered the plant is apparently an intermediate type between c. histrix and c. webberii. b. a. no. , (bohol). citrus histrix var. torosa blanco. colobot. a spiny tree, attaining a height of or more meters; young growth green with a tinge of purple; leaves to centimeters long, . to . centimeters broad, ovate to short ovate, bicrenate, dark green and glossy; base rounded, apex emarginate; petiole to . centimeters long, . to centimeters wide, oblong, with a broadly acute to obtuse base; wing area nearly equal to or frequently exceeding the leaf area; flowers millimeters across, in axillary clusters of to ; pedicel slender; calyx small, not cupped; petals to , white, with a tinge of purple on the outside; stamens to , free, equal; ovary subglobose, millimeters long, to loculed; style short, millimeter long, distinct; fruit to millimeters long, and about millimeters in transverse diameter, irregularly globose to oblate, usually compressed towards base, ending in a small nipple, more or less wrinkled, greenish lemon yellow; pulp greenish, fairly juicy, acid, scarcely edible; juice cells small, short, containing a small greenish nucleus; seeds small, oblong, reticulate. this plant is the c. torosa of blanco, which has been considered a synonym of c. histrix, and here raised to the rank of a subspecies. a comparative study of c. histrix and the variety torosa shows considerable differences between the two. c. histrix is generally larger in all parts; the wings of c. h. torosa are oblong, maintaining an almost equal width over a large part of the petiole, ending in a rounded to a broadly acute base, while in c. histrix, and in fact in all the species herein described with free stamens, the wings are more or less cuneate to elongate cuneate or oblong-spatulate, ending usually in an acuminate, sometimes an acute base, the one closest approaching the c. h. torosa in this respect being the "balincolong," referred to c. micrantha. the flower of c. h. torosa corresponds with that of c. histrix except that the former has to stamens as compared with to in c. histrix, which also averages more locules to a fruit. b. a. no. , (batangas). citrus micrantha. biasong. (pls. vc, vib, viic.) a tree attaining a height of . to meters, with comparatively small but sharp spines; leaves to centimeters long, to millimeters broad, broadly elliptical to ovate, crenate, rather thin; base rounded or broadly acute; apex acutely blunt pointed; petioles to millimeters long, broadly winged, up to millimeters wide; wing area sometimes exceeding leaf area; flowers small, to millimeters in diameter, white, with a trace of purple on the outside, to , in axillary or terminal cymes; petals ; stamens free, equal, to ; ovary obovoid, locules to ; style slender, distinct; fruit to centimeters long, to centimeters in transverse diameter, averaging grams in weight, obovate to oblong-obovate, somewhat compressed towards base; apex blunt pointed; surface fairly smooth or with transverse corrugations, lemon yellow; skin comparatively thick; pulp rather juicy, grayish, acid; aroma similar to that of the samuyao; juice cells short and blunt to long, slender and pointed, sometimes containing a minute, greenish nucleus; seeds many, flat, pointed, more or less reticulate. the biasong has been collected in cebu, bohol, dumaguete, negros, and in the zamboanga and misamis provinces in mindanao, in all of which it is sparingly cultivated. the flowers were described from material collected in bohol in may. ripe fruit has been obtained in may, june, august, november, and february, indicating that the species is more or less everbearing. the fruit is used by the native inhabitants as a hair wash, is not eaten, and is of no economic importance. particularly noticeable in the biasong are the small flowers, with less stamens than any other species, and the oblong-obovate, few-loculed fruits. the "balincolong," by the filipinos regarded as quite a different fruit, found in bohol and in misamis, mindanao, is a more robust tree attaining a height of meters, and has longer wings and thicker leaves, with smoother fruits which sometimes are almost round, but these differences scarcely justify this form to rank as a subspecies even. beginning in may, the balincolong ( ) has bloomed continuously at lamao until date of writing (dec. ). biasong, b. a. no. , (bohol), balincolong, no. (bohol), , (misamis, mindanao). citrus micrantha var. microcarpa. samuyao. (pl. viib.) a shrubby tree, . meters tall, with slender branches and small, weak spines; leaves to millimeters long, to millimeters broad, ovate to ovate-oblong or elliptical, crenulate, thin, of distinct fragrance, base rounded to broadly acute; apex obtuse, sometimes notched, petioles to millimeters long, broadly winged, about millimeters wide, wing area somewhat less than one-half of the leaf blade; flowers in compact axillary or terminal cymes, to , small, to millimeters in diameter, white, with trace of purple on the outside; calyx small, not cupped, petals to ; stamens to , free, equal; ovary very small, globose to obovate; locules to , style distinct; stigma small, knob like; fruit to millimeters in diameter, roundish in outline; base sometimes nippled; apex an irregular, wrinkly cavity; surface corrugate, greenish lemon yellow; oil cells usually sunken; skin very thin; pulp fairly juicy, acid, bitter with distinct aroma; juice cells very minute, blunt, containing a small, greenish nucleus; seeds small, flattened, sometimes beaked. the samuyao occurs sparingly in cultivation in cebu and bohol. flowers were collected in may, partly grown fruits were also obtained, and ripe fruits have been collected in june, and from november to february, showing that the plant is more or less everbearing. the fruit is used by the filipinos as a hair wash, and is of no economic importance. throughout, the samuyao gives an impression of dwarfness, by its small size, weak spines, small, and thin leaves; the flowers are even smaller than in the biasong and the fruit is in all probability the smallest in the genus. in bohol a somewhat more vigorous variety of samuyao was found which is named "samuyao-sa-amoo." the fruits of samuyao-sa-amoo are a little larger, and smoother, and longer than broad, otherwise similar to the samuyao. samuyao, b. a. no. , (cebu), , (bohol); samuyao-sa-amoo , (bohol). citrus medica l. citron. a shrub or small tree, about meters high, with a short, indistinct trunk and short, thick, irregular, straggling, thorny branches; bark light gray; thorns short, sharp, rather stout; young shoots smooth, violet colored or purplish, stiff; leaves large, to centimeters long, oval oblong, serrate or somewhat crenate, dark green above, lighter beneath; flowers small, axillary, in compact clusters of to , often uninsexual; calyx small, cupped; corolla white within, tinged with purple on the outside; petals oblong, the tips incurved; stamens short, irregular in length, to in number; pistil small; [ ] ovary to loculed or occasionally more; fruit lemon yellow, large, to centimeters long, oblong, rough or warty, sometimes ridged; apex blunt pointed; rind thick, white, except for the outer colored rim; pulp sparse; juice scant, acid, and somewhat bitter or sweetish; juice sacs small, slender; seeds oval, plump, light colored, smooth. probably native to india, or it may have been introduced there from farther east, china or cochin china. extremely sensitive to cold. the citron is the rarest of all the old cultivated citrus in the philippines and is very seldom seen in the markets. citrus medica var. odorata. tihi-tihi. (pl. viia.) a small, thorny shrub, seldom exceeding . meters in height, with sharp, stout spines; young growth bright green; leaves . to centimeters long, . to . centimeters broad, elliptical, rather thick and leathery, serrate, of distinct fragrance; base rounded; apex notched; petioles very short to millimeters long, not winged; flowers to in axillary compressed cymes, sessile, rarely exceeding millimeters in diameter; calyx large, prominently cupped; petals to , fleshy, white, with a tinge of purple on the outside; stamens to , unequal, shorter than stigma; filaments united in groups of to ; pollen abundant; gynoecium frequently aborted; ovary elevated on a bright green disk, large, millimeters long, to loculed; style tapering from ovary, scarcely more slender, rather short; stigma large, knob like, and cleft; fruit to millimeters long, to centimeters in transverse diameter, weighing to grams, oblate, with a shallow basal cavity, and sometimes a mammilate apex, more or less ridged longitudinally, fairly smooth, clear lemon yellow; lenticels scattered, depressed; oil cells large, equal or a trifle raised; skin rather thick; pulp grayish, rather dry, sharply acid, of lemon flavor; juice cells long and slender; seeds many--sometimes in a single fruit--short, broad, and flattened. the tihi-tihi is a rare plant found in cultivation in cebu and bohol; one plant has been seen in misamis, mindanao. the plant is very precocious, fruiting as early as the third year from seed, everbearing, and is used by the filipinos in washing the hair. it is not eaten, and is of no commercial importance. the tihi-tihi differs from the citron in its green, tender, highly aromatic growth, the leaves having been found to contain . per cent essential oil as analyzed by the bureau of science. the fruit is strikingly different from the citron. b. a. no. (cebu). citrus medica var. nanus. a small, thorny shrub, rarely exceeding meters in height, with small, sharp spines; leaves to centimeters long, . to . centimeters broad, narrowly oblong ovate to elliptical oblong, serrate, darker above than beneath; base rounded; apex frequently notched; petiole to millimeters long, wingless; flowers to , in axillary or terminal, rather loose cymes, to centimeters in diameter; calyx large, cupped; petals linear oblong, with tips slightly incurved, white, with trace of purple on the outside; stamens to , unequal; filaments usually united into groups, sometimes free; gynoecium sometimes wanting; ovary large, oblong, to loculed; style not distinct, of nearly the same thickness as ovary; stigma large, superior to anthers, knob shaped; fruit or more millimeters long, millimeters in diameter, ellipsoid to almost roundish, pointed at apex, lemon yellow, smooth; rind medium thick; pulp grayish to greenish, acid, rather dry; juice cells long and slender, almost linear; seeds many, rather small, flattened, smooth. the plant is rather common in the archipelago, and has been noted in tarlac, pampanga, bulacan, laguna, and cebu. it is frequently grown and fruited in small pots, and is probably the smallest species in the genus. it is surprisingly productive and precocious, fruiting as early as the second year from seed, and is practically everbearing. the fruit is eaten by the filipinos but is too dry to be cultivated for the flesh and the skin is too thin for utilization as citron peel. b. a. no. (cebu), (laguna). citrus limonum risso. lemon. a small tree to meters in height, with rather open head of short, round or angular branches, thorny; bark grayish; young shoots purplish, smooth; leaves evergreen, alternate, to millimeters in length, ovate oval, sharp pointed, light green, margin serrate; petioles entirely wingless; flowers solitary, occasionally in pairs, axillary, on distinct peduncles; calyx persistent, segments or ; corolla large, to millimeters across, white inside, purplish outside; petals oblong, spreading, strongly reflexed; stamens to , separate, or more or less united in small groups; ovary considerably elevated on a prominent disk, to loculed; fruit ripening at all seasons, ovoid or oblong, and pointed at both base and apex, about millimeters long, smooth or rough, light yellow in color; rind thin, flesh light colored; pulp acid; juice sacs long and pointed; seeds oval, pointed at the micropylar end, quite smooth. native of the same regions as the citron. the true lemon is very rarely cultivated in the philippines and all lemons used are imported from california, australia and spain. citrus pseudolimonum. colo-colo. (pl. viia.) a thorny shrub, meters tall, with interlocking branches, and short, sharp spines; leaves to centimeters long, to millimeters broad, elliptical to oblong-ovate, crenulate to serrulate; base rounded; apex obtuse, frequently slightly notched; petioles to millimeters long, with narrow wing margin, rarely exceeding millimeters in width; flowers to , in terminal or axillary short cymes, to millimeters in diameter, white, purplish outside; calyx cupped; stamens to , nearly always free, unequal; ovary broadly obovoid, to loculed; style distinct; fruit roundish to pyriform, small, usually compressed at base; apex irregular; surface greenish lemon, more or less corrugate; oil cells raised; skin comparatively thick; pulp acid; juice cells small, short and plump; seeds undeveloped and sterile. the colo-colo is another of these peculiar philippine species with more or less winged petioles affiliated to the lemon, etc. flowers were collected in may, and ripe fruit has been examined in january and february. the nearly always free stamens in a plant belonging to the same general group as the lemon is of interest. near the colo-colo is the "lombog," considered a distinct fruit, also found in bohol. this variety is less vigorous than the colo-colo and also differs from the plant in having narrower wing margins and to stamens and to locules. the fruit is said to be about . centimeters in diameter and similar in shape to that of the colo-colo. the "kunot" is a third variety considered distinct by the boholanos that also may be referred to c. pseudolimonum. to c. pseudolimonum may perhaps also be referred a thorny, arborescent shrub, attaining a height of . meters, found in siquijor, a little island south of negros. material of this was collected in august, , by the writer, at which time the tree bore partly grown, oblong, rough, small fruits. the plants at lamao have flowered during the last two months but have not set fruit. the principal difference in this variety from the colo-colo and lombog is in the number of stamens, here to . the fruits of c. pseudolimonum have no economic value. colo-colo, b. a. no. , ; lombog, no. , (bohol), (siquijor). citrus limetta risso. lime. a shrub or tree of straggling habit, with small, stiff interlocking or drooping, thorny branches, the thorns small, sharp, numerous; bark grayish brown; young branchlets light green, becoming darker with age; leaves elliptic-oval, glossy green in color, margin slightly indented; petioles margined; flowers small, produced in axillary clusters of to ; calyx small, four to five pointed; corolla white on both inner and outer surfaces; petals to , oblong, fleshy; stamens small, to , united in a number of groups; ovary about loculed; fruit rounded or oblong, frequently mammilate, light yellow; rind thin; pulp greenish, acid; juice sacs small, slender, pointed; seeds small, oval, pointed. native to india and southeastern asia. the lime, in luzon known as "dayap," ranks third in importance among the citrus fruits cultivated in the philippines, and now and then excellent fruit is found in the market, showing what could be done in growing first-class fruit if pains were taken to do a little selection work and plant budded trees. citrus limetta var. aromatica. a spiny shrub, with rather slender, willowly, drooping branches, and sharp spines; young growth light green, of pleasant and distinct odor when bruised; leaves . to centimeters long, . to centimeters broad, ovate oblong to elliptical, serrate to crenate, dull green above; base rounded to broadly acute; apex frequently notched; petiole to millimeters long with a narrow wing margin; flowers solitary or in cymes to , terminal or axillary, to millimeters across; calyx rather large, cupped; petals to , white with a trace of purple on the outside; stamens unequal, to , more or less united; ovary large, oblong, to loculed; style not distinct as in c. aurantium but rather similar to that in c. medica, a trifle more slender than the ovary; fruit centimeters long, to . centimeters across, roundish to roundish oblong, lemon yellow, smooth; skin thin; pulp pale green, juicy, sharply acid, sometimes almost bitter; juice cells long, slender and pointed; seeds very numerous, small and plump, polyembryonic. this form seems to be fairly well distributed and material has been propagated at lamao from such distinct points as mindoro, palawan and benguet. unquestionably a lime, it is quite distinct from the ordinary lime in habit, and in the aromatic tender foliage and purplish-petaled flowers on the outside, which are larger than those in the lime, the number of stamens also exceeding those of the lime. b. a. no. (palawan), (mindoro), (benguet). citrus excelsa. limon real. a thorny, tall shrub of vigorous growth, straggly habit and interlocking branches, with stout, long, sharp thorns; young growth purplish; leaves . to centimeters long, . to centimeters wide, elliptical oblong to ovate oblong, crenate to serrate, thick and leathery; base rounded; apex retuse; petiole to millimeters long, quite broadly winged, in large leaves the wings frequently exceeding centimeters in width; flowers to , in axillary, rather loose cymes, millimeters in diameter; calyx medium large, cupulate; petals showing trace of purple on the outside; stamens to , unequal; filaments occasionally free, usually united into groups of to ; ovary roundish, to loculed, . millimeters across; style distinct, millimeters long; stigma large; fruit to . centimeters long, . to . centimeters in equatorial diameter, weight to grams; form subglobose; base rounded; apex flattened; surface smooth, greenish to clear lemon yellow; skin thin; pulp greenish to grayish, in good varieties very juicy, mildly acid, and of excellent flavor; juice cells long, slender and pointed. plant material of the limon real has been collected in tarlac, bontoc, and bohol, and the fruit is at rare intervals offered for sale in small quantities in manila. the name of the plant, "royal lemon," indicates the esteem in which the fruit is held by the people, and while it is unfortunately true that most fruits tested have been too dry to be of any value, yet in the best types the fruits in quality and aroma surpass all lemons and limes that the writer has had the opportunity to sample. with its robust, thorny growth, large leaves and broad-winged petioles and considering its affinity to the lime and lemon together with the roundish oblate fruit with to stamens as against the to in those species and with its to locules, this plant is apparently as distinct from the lemon and lime as these species are from each other. b. a. no. (bontoc?). citrus excelsa var. davaoensis. a thorny, arborescent shrub of straggly habit, with interlocking, drooping branches, and of vigorous growth; young growth green with tinge of purple; leaves . to . centimeters long, . to centimeters wide, ovate to oblong ovate, crenulate to serrulate; base rounded; apex sometimes retuse; petiole to millimeters long, with wings ordinarily narrow, in large leaves sometimes millimeters wide; flowers not seen; fruit . centimeters long, centimeters in equatorial diameter, weighing grams, oblate; base rounded; apex flattened to depressed, wrinkled, with a circular depression around the raised stigmatic area; surface otherwise fairly smooth, lemon yellow; skin thin, central cavity large; pulp contained in about locules, light colored, quite juicy, sharply acid, and of good flavor; juice cells long and slender. ripe fruit of this species has been received from davao, mindanao, in december and january. the fruit is perhaps too large for retail trade, but might possibly be utilized in the manufacture of lime juice and allied products. full-grown plants of c. excelsa or the variety above described have not been seen, but c. e. davaoensis appears to be smaller than c. excelsa in all respects, the fruits excepted. there has been no opportunity for an examination of the flowers but so far as observed the plant appears more closely related to c. excelsa than any other species herein described. b. a. no. (davao, mindanao). economic value of the new or little known species. the horticulturist and plantbreeder, ever on the alert for new plant material that may enhance his profits, extend the cultivable area of his crop, or be used in making new cross combinations, will naturally ask himself of what value are these new plants and fruits. briefly stated, it may be said that the "tizon" is a dessert or breakfast fruit of high, if not perhaps the highest, order, its main defect being the unsightly basal projection. then, as stated elsewhere, the best "limon real" is unsurpassed in quality for "ade" making. perhaps third in importance are the better types of the alsem for the manufacture of citric acid, etc., and it might find a sale in competition with the lemon and lime, depending to a great extent upon its keeping qualities. the juicy, thin-skinned, and few-seeded talamisan may find lovers as a breakfast fruit and is also of the right size for an ade fruit. if cultivation would increase the juiciness of the panuban, this fruit may find favor with many. a good marmalade may be made of the calamondin. the above species or varieties have more or less of a future on account of their pomological merits, and the plant breeder, by crossing them and the cabuyao and canci with old cultivated species, might obtain valuable results. there is also the prospective value of the new species as stocks. to determine the congeniality of these species and the old cultivated citrus fruits and their value as stocks under various soil conditions would of course require the labor and close observations of many years. the calamondin is quite drought resistant and would probably dwarf the scion. one year old buds of the pomelo, lime, mandarin and orange at lamao have made satisfactory growth, the buds taking without difficulty. the cabuyao is a very vigorous tree and is also drought resistant. it has recently been budded with the cultivated citrus fruits, the buds "taking" very well. the orange has been budded on the alsem, resulting in a good growth, being now (december, ) nine months old. during the trip to bohol in may, the limao, growing in a coraline lime-stone formation overlaid with a little humus, the exact counterpart of the bahama islands or the "hammock lands" in southeast florida, impressed the writer as one of the best examples of drought resistance among citrus fruits under such conditions. the talamisan also appeared quite drought resistant, and is furthermore of value as a live fence because of its large spines. the "limon real" is of great vigor and hence may be a desirable stock for certain varieties and under certain conditions. by-products of sugar manufacture. by cleve. w. hines, m. s., station superintendent. in various lines of manufacturing there are certain by-products which, years ago, constituted a waste and great loss, but which now under modern methods have become in many cases of considerable importance. this is especially true with the sugar industry. extreme care and attention is required to keep the balance on the right side of the ledger, and often the proper handling of the by-products forms the deciding factor between success and failure. in order to build up a great sugar industry in these islands, more attention must be given to the details of the work, and many of the present losses must be turned into profits before great progress can be expected. cane tops and trash. first in the series of by-products in the manufacture of sugar, comes cane tops. the amount of this material produced per hectare will depend upon various factors, including the variety of cane, its stage of maturity, etc. the less of these tops, of course, that may be produced for a given amount of cane, the better it will be for the growers, nevertheless they have a good feeding value if properly handled. professor dodson, [ ] director of the louisiana experiment station, states that he found cane tops to have the following composition: per cent. protein . fat . carbohydrate . fiber . water . ash . the fiber content would be slightly higher and the water content lower, for tropical cane, since maturity is completely reached before harvest begins. it may be seen from the above analyses that this makes a most excellent feed for work animals. certainly greater advantage should be taken of this feeding stuff than is usually done, since there is a scarcity of pasturage near the end of the harvest season and the animals become needlessly thin on account of lack of feed. at present very little of this material is utilized, but instead is burned on the field with the rest of the trash. if the tops are removed and used as a stock feed, only the leaves and pieces of stalk remain, and these make a good fertilizer for cane lands. it is the general custom in these islands to burn all of this material as soon as the crop is harvested. the object of this burning is to destroy any insects that may be present, as well as to facilitate subsequent cultivation. in the writer's opinion neither of these reasons is sufficiently well based, since in this country large numbers of troublesome cane insects are not found. if they were present in sufficient quantities, the trouble could be handled by placing the trash between the rows and properly treating it before plowing it under. this should be the method of disposing of the trash at all times. in this manner the waste material could be utilized, and the organic matter would be even more valuable than that contained in many of the commercial fertilizers. the nitrogen contained, which amounts to from . to per cent, would be practically all saved, while with the burning method this is completely lost. in louisiana, cotton-seed meal forms one of the principal nitrogenous fertilizers for cane lands. this material costs from p to p per ton and dr. stubbs, [ ] in his research, found that the trash burned from each ton of cane caused a loss of nitrogen equal to that contained in pounds of cotton-seed meal. besides this loss of nitrogen encountered in the burning of the trash, the organic matter which would later form humus is completely destroyed. soils would retain moisture better during the dry season and be more easily handled if the conservation of organic matter were given greater attention. there is also a great injury done to the remaining stumps and top roots by this burning which is very detrimental when the field is to be used for a ratoon crop. where cane is badly infested with destructive insects, it is quite another thing. this again brings up the fact that the cane points should be treated with chemicals before planting, in order to complete the work of destroying these insects. use of ashes. the ash of sugar cane constitutes the mineral matter that has been taken out of the soil. this usually runs about . per cent of the total weight, according to payson's classical analyses. chemically this contains the following: silica, iron, aluminum, lime, magnesia, potash, sodium, phosphorus, sulphur, chlorine, oxygen, water, etc. of these various elements, the phosphorus and potash are the most valuable to the planter. lime is also useful for many soils in correcting the acidity, and occasionally in supplying that element, when it happens to be lacking in a particular soil. the cost of different fertilizers is governed by the percentage of these plant-food elements contained. phosphoric acid is worth $ . per pound (p . per kilo) in crude fertilizers. at this rate the value of this element recovered from a crop of tons of cane per hectare would be from p to p . potash is valued at about p . per kilo and that removed with a crop of tons would cost about p . the lime contained is a cheaper element but will not act as a detriment on any soil, while on many it will be found very helpful. in spite of the great deficiency in these elements in the cane lands here, and the high cost of commercial fertilizers, this waste material is not only neglected at the majority of the factories but is actually thrown away, yet the same elements that command a high price in commercial fertilizers are contained in these ashes. filter-press refuse. in the defecation of cane juice, certain chemicals are often used to precipitate the impurities, which are removed from the subsiders after the clear juice has been drawn off, and sent to the filter presses, where it is filtered through heavy cloths. this material contains coarse particles of bagasse together with other impurities including the lime and phosphoric acid which were used in this work. the composition of the material depends upon the original composition of the juice and the amount of the different chemicals that has been used in the clarification. in any event, it makes a most valuable fertilizer because of the organic matter, nitrogenous bodies, phosphoric acid, and lime that it contains. this organic material is an ideal substance to be applied to the worn-out cane lands (which consist almost entirely of mineral substances) since it induces bacterial action, and during its decomposition certain acids are freed, such as carbonic, nitric, and organic acids. these have the power to act upon the mineral constituents and thus liberate other plant-food elements. the filter-press mud can very well be mixed with the bagasse ashes, and scattered about the cane rows as an almost complete fertilizer for sugar cane, the only element lacking being nitrogen, which was lost in the burning of the bagasse. it will be remembered that in the synthesis of sucrose, which consists of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, there are none of the plant-food elements used which are sought for in commercial fertilizers. these are used only in building the fibrous stalk of the cane and they may all be recovered in the bagasse and cane-juice impurities. the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen which are used practically all come from the air and water. it is a custom to-day to cart this ash to piles or depressions some distance from the factory. in some places it is thrown into the river, or cast into the sea--an absolute loss. planters must not depend upon commercial fertilizers for their supply of plant-food material, when there is such an abundance of natural fertilizer being wasted. the cost of the artificial fertilizers in many cases is considered prohibitive and often unnecessary. in order to build up a great sugar industry here, the material at hand must be used, while money should be spent for modern apparatus and equipment. molasses. the dark-colored viscous substance remaining after the large crystals of sucrose have been removed is called molasses. this contains small crystals of sucrose, which has passed through the perforations of the centrifugal screens, sucrose in solution, glucose, fructose, and other organic substances, such as pectin bodies, albumenoids, coloring substances, etc., besides the inorganic matter constituting the ash upon incineration of the molasses. the composition of the molasses varies with the working of each factory, also with the condition of cane, time of harvest, etc. the juice from green cane and that which has reached ultramaturity will contain a higher percentage of invert sugar and organic non-sugars than a properly matured cane. then factories that have ample boiling-house provision, and crystallizers as well as magma tanks, will be able to send out a molasses with lower purity, thus recovering more of the crystallizable sugar. in any case there will be some molasses produced, and this constitutes a valuable sugar-house by-product, if properly cared for. it may be disposed of in one of several forms, namely, as a human food, a stock feed, a source of alcohol, factory fuel, and a fertilizer. cane molasses as a human food.--for many years low-grade cane molasses has been used as a human food in the united states. it was originally sold under the name of new orleans molasses, but in recent years a number of companies have employed clarifying and bleaching agents and thus turned out a very fancy article, under various trade names, for baking purposes. with the boiling at low temperatures practiced to-day, there is little or no caramel formed during this work, and consequently it is only necessary to clarify and bleach the organic non-sugars, in order to make a salable molasses. the bleaching is usually accomplished by the use of a hydrosulphite, either in the form of sodium or calcium, but sometimes only the sulphurous acid gas is used. the bleaching effect of none of these reagents is permanent, especially when the product is exposed to the air and light. such chemicals must therefore be used with great caution, and as late in the process as possible. care must be exercised too that an excessive amount is not employed, since an undesirable tint is liable to result as well as an excessive amount of the sulphites to be admitted, which is not permitted by the pure-food law. it is astonishing how much of this low-grade molasses is thus manufactured and used in the united states for cooking purposes, and what a high price this product commands. cane molasses as a stock feed.--perhaps more of the exhausted molasses is used for this purpose in these islands than for any other. ordinary molasses contains from to per cent of sucrose and almost as much glucose. these being purely carbohydrates, it is necessary to combine them with some protein-bearing feed in order to make a perfect ration. many leguminous plants, such as alfalfa, cowpeas, peanut vines, etc., may be cut fine and used as an absorbent for molasses. this makes a most excellent feed as it contains a sufficient amount of roughage, and at the same time offers a balanced ration if properly composed. in this country there is a great amount of exhausted cake from the coconut-oil factories, which is exported to europe each year. there is no good reason why this should not be used as an absorbent for the molasses in making a concentrated feed, which could be transported to various parts of the islands or exported abroad for stock. to-day the philippines are dependent upon australia and other countries for many thousand head of cattle each year. the by-products from sugar factories are thrown into the rivers or flushed away from the factories through drains, and the leaves and tops of the cane are burned on the ground in order to facilitate cultivation. in the attempt to grow our own beef, these feeds should be an important factor. cane molasses as a source of alcohol.--alcohol can be made from a great variety of substances containing the necessary constituents, viz, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. of the numerous alcohols possible, ethyl alcohol is the one ordinarily sought and the easiest produced. this alcohol is represented by the following chemical formula: c h -oh. while glucose is the substance which may be easily transferred into alcohol by fermentation, sucrose may also be used, providing it is first changed into glucose or invert sugar. even cellulose and starch may be used after being transferred into reducing sugars. the process of changing glucose into alcohol and carbon dioxide is called fermentation and is accomplished by a minute organism. sucrose will not directly ferment, consequently it must first be changed into glucose. this is usually accomplished by an enzyme which is secreted by a ferment. the following chemical formula will serve to show the steps necessary to pass from sugar to an alcohol: c h o (sucrose) + h o (water) presence of an m. w. enzyme --> invert sugar ------------------------------------------ (c h o (dextrose) c h o (levulose)) m. w. m. w. --> c h -oh (ethyl alcohol) + co (carbon dioxide) ( m. w.) cm. w. the theoretical yield then of alcohol from sucrose would be per cent and from invert sugar per cent. in practice, however, this yield would not be experienced on account of the yeast converting some of the sugars into substances other than alcohol and carbon dioxide. these will consist mostly of glycerine and succinic acid and will amount to or per cent. since the working conditions determine to a very great extent the yield of alcohol, it is obvious that a thoroughly efficient person should be in charge of this work. in the selecting of cultures for the fermenting, the manufacturer should use only the purest, otherwise acetic acid and other foreign substances will be formed during fermentation, thus decreasing the yield of the alcohol as well as lowering its purity. where the percentage of sucrose and glucose of a molasses is known, it is a simple matter to calculate the theoretical amount of alcohol to be recovered and by knowing the efficiency of the factory, a factor may be obtained which multiplied by the theoretical yield will give the true amount of alcohol to be expected. in this manner it is easy to determine the price that may be paid for any molasses. the separation of the alcohol from the water and dirt (lees) is accomplished in an apparatus termed a "still." in this the liquor is heated by steam which causes the alcohol to evaporate. since ethyl alcohol boils at a temperature of ° or a little higher, depending upon the percentage present, it may be separated from the water and impurities during the evaporation, and recovered from the coils of the condenser in a fairly pure state. there is always, however, more or less water vapor escaping with the alcohol and consequently it is impossible to secure absolute alcohol without after-treatment, although in the modern still a very high grade is often recovered in the first distillation. in this connection the strength of alcohol is usually determined by referring it to "proof," which is an old english system used before modern methods of testing spirits were available. in its original application, gunpowder was moistened with the spirit and the mixture subjected to the flame of a match. when just enough alcohol was present to set fire to the powder, it was said to be "proof spirit." if not enough alcohol was present to accomplish this, it was said to be "under proof," and when the gunpowder was lighted easily by it, it was said to be "over proof." by an act of the english parliament, the term "proof spirit" was fixed as one which contains exactly / of an equal volume of water (distilled) at ° f., which represents . per cent of alcohol by volume, or . per cent by weight. the simplest method of determining the percentage of alcohol is by the use of a gravity spindle for liquids lighter than water, and by referring to the accompanying table for this purpose, the percentage of alcohol may be ascertained. table for calculating the percentage of alcohol. [ ] =================================================================================================== |specific gravity| |specific gravity| |specific gravity| |specific gravity | at-- | | at-- | | at-- | | at-- volume.|----------------|volume.|----------------|volume.|----------------|volume.|---------------- | . ° ° | | . ° ° | | . ° ° | | . ° ° | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | | | | p. ct.| | p. ct.| | p. ct.| | p. ct.| | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . | . . | | . . | | . . | | . . =================================================================================================== molasses as a fuel.--many experiments have been made, using this substance as a sugar-house fuel, and while ordinarily it may be better employed in some other manner, at the same time where no other provision is made for the use of this material, and where there is a scarcity of fuel as well, satisfactory results may be secured in its combustion if it is properly handled. waste molasses consists mainly of gums, sucrose, glucose, albuminoids, other organic compounds, water, and a small amount of ash. sucrose has the chemical formula of carbon (atoms), hydrogen (atoms), and oxygen (atoms). the burning of carbon consists in uniting oxygen to that element, forming carbon dioxide. when hydrogen burns, the oxygen combines with it, forming water. during this oxidation, two atoms of hydrogen combine with one of oxygen, but in the molecule of sugar, these two elements are already present in this proportion, consequently only the carbon may be oxidized and thus give off heat. this is found to be true also of sucrose, reducing sugars, and many organic compounds. an instrument called a calorimeter is used to determine the amount of heat a substance will give off upon oxidation. tests may be made on molasses in order to determine its value as a fuel, and thus a comparison may be obtained of a pound of this material and one of coal having a standard value. the ash from the molasses contains a great deal of potassium and some magnesium, consequently care must be exercised in the burning of the molasses so that this material does not come in direct contact with the tubes of the boiler, since a heavy coating will be formed that will greatly lower the coefficient of heat transmission. on account of the high potash content, these ashes make a valuable fertilizer, which should be mixed with the bagasse ashes and mud cake, and applied to the cane lands. molasses as a fertilizer.--while molasses is not used to any great extent as a fertilizer, there is no good reason why exhaustive experiments should not be carried out with this by-product on philippine soils, when it is now being thrown into drains or wasted, until a better use is provided for the molasses. experiments have been made in hawaii, mauritius, and other places with this form of fertilizer, and very encouraging results were reported. the plant-food elements themselves contained in molasses are small in amount, since they are contained in the low percentage of ash after burning, except, of course, nitrogen, which will be entirely saved. its main value, however, lies in the power to induce bacterial growth, which is so necessary in worn-out soils. among the organisms induced by these organic matters may be included certain azotobacter species, which contrary to other forms of plant life, have the power of using nitrogen from the air. carbohydrates form especially good mediums for their development, and it has been found that the activities of these organisms are increased by an increased amount of this substance. while excellent results have been attained by the use of low-grade molasses for fertilizer in other countries yet it remains for the planters here to determine results under philippine conditions, and the best method of handling their material. in some places where irrigation water is applied, the molasses is mixed with the water and applied in the usual manner. the plant-food material contained in molasses will vary somewhat with the methods of its production, clarifying agents previously used, etc. the following table will indicate the composition of ash from different molasses: [ ] ================================================================================== | | | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | mill | diffusion | open |carbonitation. |sulphitation.|sulphitation.| kettle. | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | per cent. | per cent. |per cent.| per cent. potash | . | . | . | . soda | . | . | . | . lime | . | . | . | . magnesia | . | . | . | . iron oxide | . | . | . | . alumina | . | . | . | . silica | . | . | . | . phosphoric acid | . | . | . | . sulphuric acid | . | . | . | . carbonic acid | . | . | . | . chlorine | . | . | . | . ----------------------------------------------------- | . | . | . | . deduct o minus cl. | . | . | . | . ----------------------------------------------------- | . | . | . | . ----------------------------------------------------- undetermined (carbon, etc.) | . | . | . | . alkalinity (cc. tenth normal | | | | per gram ash) cc. | | | | ================================================================================== in order to make a wise selection of the method of handling the different by-products the manufacturer must take into consideration many factors. among them will be the quantity of his output, the facilities for handling it in any specified manner, the demand for different finished products to be made therefrom, etc. all of these and many other points must receive due consideration by a manager who expects to attain success in his work. coffee in the philippines. [ ] by p. j. wester, horticulturist in charge of lamao experiment station. preliminary remarks. while it cannot be said that the philippines have ever grown coffee on a scale that made it an important factor in the world's market, yet, before the advent of the coffee blight, coffee growing, from a philippine point of view, was an industry of considerable magnitude and unquestionably of great promise. however, in the philippines as in other parts of the eastern tropics, the blight destroyed the coffee industry, and while in the last few years previous to the appearance of the blight there was an average annual export of about , tons of coffee, valued at p , , , in the philippines produced only , kilograms of arabian coffee with an average production of kilograms per hectare, the coffee imports during the same period amounting to , , kilograms, valued at p , . the leading coffee-producing provinces of the archipelago were, during , the mountain, , kilograms; moro, , kilograms; nueva vizcaya, , kilograms; and batangas, , kilograms. varying quantities of coffee, less than , kilograms in any one, were produced in each of the remaining provinces, excepting agusan, bataan, batanes, ilocos sur, leyte, pampanga, and surigao, where coffee is not grown. from a study of the coffee situation in the eastern hemisphere it is evident that arabian coffee will never again become of importance in this part of the world, including of course the philippines. however, it seems that a satisfactory substitute has been discovered in the robusta coffee. this variety, while not immune to the blight, is so resistant to the effects thereof that the disease ceases to affect the profits of the crop, or at least very slightly. this and other reasons, which will be explained later, have resulted in the planting of robusta coffee on a very large scale in java and adjacent dutch possessions, and the reports relative to this variety are such as to recommend it to the serious consideration of philippine planters. the present paper has been prepared with a view of meeting the almost daily requests that reach this bureau for information on the subject of coffee, and particularly to give some information relative to the robusta coffee, with which practically all planters in the archipelago are unfamiliar. it might perhaps be well to state that propagation, handling of the plants from the seed bed to the plantation, culture, etc., are the same for both arabian and robusta coffee, except where so stated. arabian coffee. the decrease in the cultivation of coffee and the present status thereof in the philippines show conclusively that arabian coffee cannot be profitably grown here below an altitude of meters. at and above this elevation the climate is so favorable for the growth of the plant that when kept in good condition it is capable of resisting the attack of the blight sufficiently to yield a profitable crop. nevertheless, the planting of arabian coffee on a large scale is not recommended even here, because the disease is everywhere present, waiting for a favorable opportunity to spread, and a drought, typhoon, or in fact anything that would devitalize the plants, would be sure to render them liable to a severe attack that might wipe out an entire plantation or district. it is true that arabian coffee grows below an altitude of meters; in fact, coffee bushes are found at sea level, but a prospective investor should always remember that there is a very great difference between being able to merely grow coffee and to produce it in such quantities that its cultivation becomes profitable. this cannot be done at a low elevation. it is perhaps well to state here that exhaustive experiments have so far failed to yield a fungicide or spray by which the coffee blight can be satisfactorily controlled in the field. everything considered then, only in certain districts of the mountain province and on the table lands of mindanao may arabian coffee be successfully and profitably cultivated to any considerable extent. robusta coffee. robusta coffee in java.--when the blight appeared in java, coffee growing was one of the most important industries in that island, and after the plantations had been destroyed by the disease, the dutch government, having failed to control the blight by repressive measures, instituted investigations with a view of discovering a blight-resistant coffee, in the course of which work several species were introduced and tested. among these were liberian coffee (coffea liberica) and robusta coffee, considered by wildeman to be a variety of coffea canephora. robusta coffee was discovered in the belgian congo, and seeds were sent to brussels, belgium, and propagated, where plants were first offered for sale in . some of these plants found their way to java. like most new introductions the robusta coffee was at first looked upon rather askance, but as its greater climatological range as compared with that of arabian coffee, and its productivity, precocity, and resistance to the coffee blight (hemileia vastatrix) became apparent, it rapidly gained popularity--so rapidly in fact that the javanese coffee plantations today consist almost entirely of robusta coffee. the fact that in the total crop of robusta coffee was only , kilograms, and that in , , kilograms were produced, with an estimated yield of , , kilograms for , and that during the period from to , , , robusta coffee plants were planted, is ample proof of its popularity in the dutch east indies. introduction into the philippines.--robusta coffee has not been introduced into the philippines to any extent. bearing trees are reported from basilan, near zamboanga, and a few plants are also growing at the lamao experiment station in bataan. the latter are in good condition with no indication of blight. soil and climate.--robusta grows well from sea level to an altitude of , meters, doing best at an elevation ranging from to meters. less particular than arabian coffee, the robusta thrives well on both light and heavy soils provided they have the necessary fertility. however, good drainage is essential for a good growth and therefore robusta should not be planted on sticky and very heavy, water-holding soils. poor and sandy soils should also be avoided. this variety is also somewhat sensitive to drought and should be planted only where the rainfall is fairly evenly distributed, and where the dry season is of comparatively short duration. generally speaking, where the soil conditions are favorable, the cacao, abacá, and coconut growing districts of the archipelago are perhaps better adapted than other sections to the culture of robusta coffee. culture. propagation.--the place selected for seedbed and nursery should be well drained, with a loamy soil, the richer in humus the better. a light bamboo frame should be erected above the nursery plot about . meters high, and covered with grass or split bamboo to provide about half shade. the land should be spaded thoroughly to a depth of centimeters, and all stones, roots, etc., removed. one meter is a convenient width for seed and plant beds. the seeds should be sown broadcast, not too thick, covered with not more than centimeter of earth, and then watered thoroughly. hereafter the seedbed should be well watered from time to time whenever the soil appears dry. frequent light sprinklings that do not allow the water to penetrate more than a few millimeters below the surface are harmful rather than beneficial both in the seedbed and the nursery, in that they encourage a shallow root formation. as soon as the first leaves are fully expanded the seedlings should be transplanted to the nursery beds, which should be prepared like the seedbed. if the land is poor it is well to spade in a liberal quantity of well-decayed manure or compost. the plants should be taken up carefully, the taproot nipped off with the thumb nail, and then transplanted with the aid of a pointed stick or small dibber spacing them to centimeters apart each way. in doing this care should be taken that the roots are not doubled up in the hole and that the soil is well packed around them. more plants should never be removed at one time from the seedbed than can be conveniently transplanted before they show signs of wilting, and the dug plants should not be left exposed until the roots dry out. the plants should be thoroughly watered before and after transplanting, and the beds kept free from weeds and watered as often as necessary. clearing and planting.--wherever possible, the land to be planted in coffee should be stumped, and plowed once or twice, so that after the plants have been set out animal-drawn cultivators can be used to keep down the weeds. thus the cost of weeding is lessened during the early years of the plantation while the plants are small. if plowing is not feasible holes meter in diameter and at least centimeters deep should be grubbed where the plants are to be set. on moderately rich land robusta coffee should be planted . meters apart each way, , plants to the hectare; on very fertile land the distance may be increased to . meters, or , plants to the hectare. arabian coffee should be spaced from to . meters apart or on poor lands even closer. when the plants are to months old they should be about centimeters tall and ready for transplanting. about one-half of the foliage should now be cut off; a trench should be dug at the end of the nursery bed about centimeters or more deep; then a thin, sharp spade or bolo (cutlass) should be passed through the soil, underneath and around the plant, neatly severing all straggling roots, and leaving the plant in the center of a ball of earth. the plants should be set out in the field at the same depth at which they grew in the nursery, great care being taken not to break the ball. if the soil is so loose that it falls away from the roots in the removal from the nursery, great care should be exercised in not allowing the roots to dry out and in setting out the plant so that the roots fall in a natural position. in the course of the planting the soil should be firmly packed about the roots. the sowing of the seed in a given locality should be so timed that the plants are ready for transplanting at the beginning of the rainy season in order to avoid the expense of artificial watering. if transplanted during the dry season the plants necessarily would have to be watered by hand from time to time until they are established. plants for shade.--as a temporary shade and cover crop of rapid growth while the coffee trees are small, perhaps no plant can compete with the cadios (cajanus indicus). the plants may be cut down to serve as mulch whenever they grow too high, and may be expected to grow from the stubble twice before the plants die, provided they are not cut off too close to the ground. in java, where robusta coffee is more extensively planted than anywhere else, permanent shade is considered advisable. malaganit (leucaena glauca), a leguminous shrub which grows everywhere in the philippines, seems to be preferred there to other plants for shade. it is planted alternately with the coffee plants and, as is the case with all plants utilized for shade, thinned out later according to need. madre de cacao (gliricidia maculata) and dapdap (erythrina indica and e. subumbrans) are other leguminous trees readily obtainable in most localities and are adapted for shade. madre de cacao should be planted at the same distance as the malaganit while the dapdap should be planted one plant to every two coffee trees. all these plants are readily propagated by cutting off limbs or branches to . meters long and inserting them to centimeters deep in the ground during the rainy season. (this is most conveniently done by the aid of a crowbar.) in a limited way fruit trees, such as the soursop, custardapple, breadfruit, and jak may also be used as shade, and these should be planted from to meters apart according to size. the necessary shading between these trees while they are small may be provided by planting malaganit, etc. robusta coffee has also been successfully interplanted with coconuts. in this case the palms and coffee should of course be planted at the same time, the palms perhaps not closer than to meters apart, the coffee to be used as a "filler" between the coconuts. in this connection it is perhaps well to state that in java robusta coffee is very frequently planted as a "catch crop" in the hevea rubber plantations. among the shade plants available to the philippine planter, malaganit, dapdap, and "guango," or raintree (pithecolobium saman), have given the best results in java for the robusta with the following ratio yield of coffee: . , . , and . . cultivation.--on level and well-cleared land, close attention should be paid to keeping the coffee plantation free from weeds during the first year or two by means of animal-drawn shallow cultivators, supplemented with hand-hoeing. where the topography of the land or the presence of stumps renders this impossible the weeding must of course be done by hand. all weeds should be left in the field where they serve both as a mulch in preserving the moisture and to enrich the soil. as soon as the plants begin to shade the land they thereby aid in the weed eradication, and weeding then becomes less expensive. pruning.--if the trees are allowed to grow without pruning they become too tall (robusta coffee attains a height of meters or more), and the topmost berries are then difficult to pick. furthermore unpruned coffee trees (including robusta), have the peculiar habit of bearing their branches near the ground and at the top, leaving the middle bare or nearly so which decreases the producing capacity of the plant. on this account up-to-date planters have generally adopted a system of pruning by which the coffee trees are headed low, giving a maximum yield coupled with easy access to the berries. the pruning consists of topping the robusta trees when they are from to . meters tall and of subsequent pruning to keep the trees at this height. this work should preferably be done while the plants are of the proper height and the green shoots easily broken off, and not after the trees have exceeded the height limit by several decimeters. the plant, if allowed to do so, usually sends up a large number of suckers from the base, which constitute a drain on the vitality of the plant. therefore, all superfluous suckers should be removed and not more than to stems to a plant should be permitted to develop. occasionally robusta plants appear that are more than ordinarily subject to blight, and these should be at once pulled up and burned. yield.--the yield of robusta coffee is quite variable, much depending upon the fertility of the soil. on the more fertile soils in java the yield per hectare in the third year was approximately kilograms, and in the fourth and fifth years, , and , kilograms, respectively. in old coffee or cacao fields the yields were , and kilograms per hectare, respectively, during the third, fourth, and fifth years after planting. it is perhaps well to recall the fact that the average yield of arabian coffee in the philippines is kilograms per hectare, which is of course much less than it should be, and it is not believed that the philippine planter with his present methods of cultivation could equal with robusta coffee the yields quoted from java. the immense superiority of the robusta as a cropper over the ordinary arabian coffee is best illustrated in a table published by the department of agriculture, java. we learn here that in java, under identical conditions, the yield per plant was of arabian coffee, to grams; of robusta, grams; and of quilloi (a new very rare coffee) , grams. the maragogipe hybrid on its own roots yielded to grams, while grafted on robusta the yield was grams, a larger crop than any arabian coffee has given in java. this would tend to show the possibilities of robusta as a stock. further, comparative studies by cramer have shown that to kilograms of fresh robusta berries make kilogram of coffee while of the arabian coffee to kilograms of fruit are required to make kilogram of coffee. owing to the fact that the pulp on the robusta coffee (though smaller in amount) is more difficult to remove than that on the arabian, robusta needs at least two and one-half days of fermentation. the bean requires rapid drying in order to loosen the silver skin and the drying is therefore done in an artificially heated shed. quality and marketability.--relative to the quality of the robusta coffee doctor hall says: the appearance of the average marketable robusta is not very beautiful; the beans are small and irregular, and the average product shows little uniformity. there are, however, great differences between the many different types of robusta. some of them have comparatively large beans, larger even than arabica, others again have very small ones. as regards the quality, though being inferior to java-arabica, the taste is generally considered to be good and superior to the ordinary arabica sorts, as santos. doctor wildeman states: it is objected that the berries of the robusta group and of other african coffees are small in size and inferior in flavor; but the continually increasing quantities of these coffees sold in holland, and the satisfactory prices they fetch show that the public is beginning to appreciate them. no objections will be made to the size of the berries when by means of careful cultivation and especially of right preparation, a coffee is obtained equal in flavor to the (old) java and arabian coffee. summary. arabian coffee cannot be successfully grown in the philippines below an altitude of meters, and even at this elevation, due to its susceptibility to the coffee blight, extensive planting of arabian coffee cannot be recommended. success with arabian coffee is obtainable only by keeping the plantations clean of weeds and the plants in the best possible condition. for the rehabilitation of the philippine coffee industry robusta coffee appears more promising at present than any other kind. the advantages of robusta coffee are that it thrives under more varied conditions than arabian coffee, that it is an earlier and a more prolific bearer and that it is resistant to the blight. blight resistance in robusta coffee does not mean that it is immune, but that notwithstanding the presence of the blight it grows well and produces abundant crops. robusta coffee is by some authorities regarded as inferior in quality to arabian coffee. nevertheless, considering the optimism with which robusta coffee is regarded by conservative european experts in tropical crops, coupled with the results obtained in java, it is confidently believed that robusta coffee is worthy of extended planting in the philippines. from the dutch department of agriculture in java the bureau of agriculture has imported seed of the best robusta coffee available for distribution, as well as a considerable quantity of seed of the ordinary robusta cultivated in that island. all readers who are interested in planting robusta coffee are cordially invited to communicate with the bureau of agriculture. cane-juice clarification. by cleve. w. hines, m. s., station superintendent. the clarification of the juice forms one of the most important operations in sugar manufacture, since the higher the purity of the juice to be concentrated, the greater the percentage of sucrose that will crystallize, and the easier it will be to make a marketable sugar. if a high-grade sugar, or even yellow clarified sugar is to be made, this work should receive still greater attention. before considering the methods to pursue and the reagents to use, it is well to decide first upon the grade of sugar it is desirable to make. if ordinary centrifugal sugar testing ° is desired, it will usually be practical to use only lime in the clarification, since in these islands cane reaches full maturity, and consequently the purity of the normal juice will be quite high, sometimes as high as ° or ° (apparent purity). if, however, it is desired to make a white plantation sugar, or granulated sugar, it will be advisable to subject the juice to an acidifying or bleaching treatment, as well as to the lime treatment. usually sulphurous acid is used for this purpose, but sometimes phosphoric acid, or a form of it, is employed. it is generally best to administer the acidifying agent before the application of the lime, since this raises the acidity and permits a larger amount of the lime to be used. however, this process is reversed by some manufacturers, and very good results are often reported. in the acidifying of any cane juice, care must be exercised that too high an acidity is not reached, since acids have an inverting effect upon sucrose, thus causing a noticeable loss. this of course depends upon the degree of acidity carried, the temperature maintained, and the methods followed during the time the juice remains acid. when it is desired to make a high-grade crystal for granulated sugar, the clarification must be more complete, and a water-white thick liquor should result, without subsequent treatment by bleaching agents and other chemicals, except the neutralizing of the slightly yellowish tint, which will be mentioned later. reagents used in clarification. there is a great variety of reagents at the command of the sugar manufacturer, each of which has certain merits over others, and all are valuable in their place when properly used. it will therefore be the duty of the operator to select those which best meet his individual conditions. it is the purpose of this article to give a brief survey of the more common reagents which, under certain conditions, may be used to advantage in these islands. lime.--this is perhaps one of the most common and most widely used of all the reagents. since the object in view is to increase the purity of the juice, it is obvious that the purest rock obtainable should be used in the preparation of the lime. another reason why a good lime should be employed, is that one of the main impurities of the lime rock is magnesium, which, when mixed with cane juice, becomes very troublesome in the incrusting of the evaporator tubes, thus greatly lowering the coefficient of heat transmission. much of the lime on the market in the philippines has been made without any attempt to select pure clean limestone or shells. this is not suitable for putting into cane juice, and will result in a great deal of trouble whenever used in modern evaporating plants. there is, however, an abundant supply of limestone found in various parts of the philippines, which analyses show to be almost free from impurities, and which will make a most excellent lime for clarifying purposes if burned properly. at present there is no modern plant for burning this rock on a large scale and consequently much of the work is done in a very crude and unsatisfactory manner. most of the lime for clarification, in modern sugar factories, is imported, and constitutes a very heavy expense. if a lime kiln were installed in conjunction with some of our sugar factories, fresh and well-burned lime might be made as needed. the carbon dioxide could be used in the juice clarification, as is done in java, and thus a good grade of plantation sugar could easily be manufactured. any excess of burned lime might very readily be sold to other factories, which now use only high-priced imported lime. the lime used should be of the unslaked type, and should be protected from the air until a short time before using. the process of preparing this consists of heating lime rock to a very high temperature, in a kiln for that purpose, whereby the limestone is broken into two component parts, expressed by the following chemical equation: caco (limestone) heated to high temperature-->cao (calcium oxide) + co (carbon dioxide). this calcium oxide, commonly known as "quick lime," is the substance desired in clarification. it should be slaked by being placed in water just before it is desired for use. this milk of lime should not be used until after the high temperature caused by the violent chemical action has subsided. on account of the heat involved and the high alkalinity in local portions, it is never safe to apply crude lime to the juice without previously slaking it in water, nor is it advisable to use a quantity of juice to mix this lime, as is quite often practiced in these islands, since in this case there may be a loss of sucrose, with a resulting dark-colored product, which will impair the color of the clarified juice. the following chemical equation will express the reaction when this lime is slaked: cao (calcium oxide) + h o (water)-->ca(oh) (calcium hydroxide). this calcium hydroxide is a substance which is very caustic, and care must be exercised in handling it. like all bases, it has a great affinity for acid, and consequently its first action is to neutralize part of the acids present. it then coagulates albumins and albuminoids, which form a part of the impurities, and throws down insoluble salts of sulphates, carbonates and phosphates, and of the bases iron and aluminum. these act as mechanical precipitants, assisting in bringing down other impurities. the compounds of calcium are practically insoluble in cold cane juices, and may be readily filtered, or settled, and the supernatant liquor drawn off. in the addition of lime, as well as in the application of other reagents, much care must be observed that the proper amount is added. if too little is used, there will be poor clarification and settling of the precipitate, while if too much is used, so that alkalinity is reached, and the juice heated to a high temperature, there will be a darkening of the juice caused by the decomposition of the reducing sugars by the calcium, and the formation of dark-colored compounds, which are very hard to remove. if the juice is limed to three-tenths or four-tenths cubic centimeter acidity against n/ naoh, using phenolphthalein as an indicator, there will be little or no chance of trouble. with the above dangers in view, it is not safe to employ the haphazard methods of liming usually practiced here, but the milk of lime should always be made of stated density and a measured or weighed amount should be supplied to each clarifier of juice, corresponding to prevailing conditions. sulphur dioxide.--where a better grade of sugar than ° test is desired, it is often advisable to subject the juice to further treatment, one reason for which is to increase the acidity so that a larger amount of lime may be added to effect the clarification. in addition to this the sulphur acts to some extent directly as a clarifying agent, by precipitating some of the impurities. it also acts as a bleaching agent by extracting the oxygen from the impurities and lastly it acts as a disinfectant. it is formed by burning crude sulphur in a stove made for that purpose. s (sulphur) + o (oxygen heat)-->so (sulphur dioxide). sometimes bombs filled with liquid sulphur dioxide are purchased for this purpose. these are inconvenient to use, and this method is ordinarily more expensive than the usual one of burning the sulphur and producing the gas directly at the factory. sulphur dioxide is a heavy gas which is very readily absorbed in water, and at a temperature of zero c. nearly per cent by volume of the gas will be taken up. at ° c. only about per cent by volume of the gas will be absorbed. it may readily be seen that the percentage of gas contained in the juice when saturated will be determined by the temperature. the following equation expresses the absorption of sulphur dioxide in water at ordinary temperature: so (sulphur dioxide) + h o (water at low temperature)-->h so (sulphurous acid). another thing of very great importance is the cooling of the gases to condense any water that may be present so that no hot gas will reach the juice to be treated or combine with water in the pipes. the equation represented when high temperatures are used is as follows: so (sulphur dioxide) + h o (water) + o (high temperature)-->h so (sulphuric acid). this last-named acid is very corrosive and a powerful investing agent. it therefore has the property of rapidly destroying sucrose, especially at a high temperature. in the burning of sulphur it is well that as thorough a combination as possible be obtained, else there will be a loss of sulphur, which will deposit in the tubes and choke them, and more time will be required for the process. the fumes from a well-regulated sulphur furnace should contain from to per cent sulphurous acid. the theoretical percentage obtainable is about per cent of the acid. carbon dioxide.--in recent years carbon dioxide gas has found a very useful application in the cane-sugar factories, where a good grade of plantation sugar is desired. java factories have been the foremost in elaborating a system, through their eminent technologists, so that today one may find the bulk of the sugars they turn out from certain factories of a very satisfactory grade and color. the method they use requires a great deal of skill and attention in order to yield results that are satisfactory. it is patterned after the process used in beet-sugar factories, with some distinct modifications, which make it applicable to a juice containing glucose, as is always the case with cane juices. the object of applying any clarifying material is to effect a rise in purity, and it is especially desirable to remove, in all cases, the substance added, since this itself would tend to act as an impurity and thus give a lower coefficient, if not properly removed. the lime, which has been added previously, may be partly removed, as the original precipitate formed, and any free lime or compound which may be easily decomposed will combine with carbon dioxide, forming calcium carbonate or limestone, which is quite insoluble and may be very easily filtered off. ca(oh) (calcium hydroxide) + co -->caco (calcium carbonate) + h o (water). whether single or double carbonation is used, the same general methods are employed, and results are expressed by the same chemical equation. as stated before, the carbon dioxide may be recovered from the kilns during the burning of lime, as is commonly done in the beet-sugar industry, or it may be purchased in the form of liquid co contained in heavy iron containers. it is also feasible to use flue gases for this purpose, where a good combustion is obtained, and after they have been properly treated. phosphoric acid.--it is sometimes advisable to apply a form of phosphoric acid as a clarifying and precipitating agent after the lime. this may be used in various forms depending upon the individual desires of the operator. the compound usually found on the market may consist of one of the following (or a combination of them): h po (ortho phosphoric acid). cah (po ) (mono-calcium phosphate). ca h (po ) (dicalcium phosphate). na hpo (sodium phosphate). the sodium phosphate contains very little acidity, and the main purpose of its use is based on the principle that the sodium is readily given up for any soluble calcium that may be present. this forms the insoluble calcium phosphate, which is easily removed as a precipitate or filtered off. the "reserve factory" in louisiana has been using this reagent in their clarification for a long time, where a very good grade of granulated sugar is made. besides these forms of phosphorous, various compounds may be found on the market, under trade names, which have as their base the above acid. "clariphos" is one of these compounds, which has found extensive use in many of the louisiana sugar factories. another is known as "phospho-gelose," which is a combination of dicalcium phosphate ca h (po ) and infusorial silica. it is a patented preparation and is made by the absorption of phosphoric acid by a powdery compound known as "kieselguhr." after the absorption, the compound is heated to expel the water, and then resaturated. this work is repeated several times until the finished product, which is very hydroscopic, contains about per cent of phosphoric acid. kieselguhr.--this is a fine light powder containing a high percentage of silica. it is used purely for its mechanical effect in forming particles upon which the impurities may collect, and thus be more readily carried to the bottom. this material often prolongs the workings of the filter presses by collecting the gummy material, which would otherwise gather on the filter cloths. kieselguhr was used in the beet-sugar industry of europe many years ago, and is extensively used now for the same purpose in the united states. hydrosulphites.--these are preparations of great bleaching power, found on the market under various trade names. one of these, widely used in the united states, in both the beet and cane-sugar industries, is known as "blankit." this is dehydrated sodium hydrosulphite with the chemical formula, na s o . it has a much greater bleaching and reducing action than sulphurous acid, and oxydizes very readily in combination with moisture, forming sulphate. on this account it is well to purchase the reagent in small parcels for this climate, and to carefully guard the stored material from moisture. this substance, which is a white powder, dissolves very easily in water, forming an alkaline liquid, although this point is sometimes hard to distinguish on account of hydrogen atoms liberated. there is a bleaching preparation made in france known as "redo," which is simply calcium hydrosulphite (cas o ). this is used in the sugar industry to some extent, but it is claimed by many that the results obtained are not as good as those obtained from the sodium compound and that it deteriorates more easily. hydrosulphites, unlike sulphurous acid, will bleach equally as well in alkaline or neutral medium, as in an acid medium. there is therefore less danger from loss of sugar by inversion when they are used, while the permanency of their effect is about the same. in any case where juices have been bleached by sulphites, the result may be considered as but temporary, since upon exposure to air and light the product assumes a darker color. hydrosulphites should therefore be introduced as late in the process as possible. where the material in the vacuum pan is to be bleached, it is well to introduce this reagent just before striking grain, thus furnishing a bright clear material which will act as film over the nucleous of sucrose in the grain. the chemical equation representing the change which takes place with this reagent is as follows: na s o (sodium hydrosulphite) + o (oxygen) + h o (water)--> (na h s o ). the amount to be used will depend absolutely upon individual conditions, which may be ascertained only by experimentation. the manufacturers of this product state that the amount of the material used to that of dry sugar should be as is to , . in the writer's experience, two or even three times this amount will usually be required to give maximum results. as stated before, since there is such a variance in the material to be treated, each operator will be required to judge this to a great extent from the condition of his product. in these islands where a very low grade of open-kettle sugar is still made, which sells very cheaply, attempts are often made to bleach it and recrystalize in order to make a centrifugal sugar. while ordinary clarifying agents help to a great extent, if the melted sugars are very dark from caramel and the decomposition products of calcium glucosate, these reagents can not be expected to give a light-colored juice. while they may improve conditions somewhat, the only solution to such a problem is the use of the boneblack process. bluing.--in the production of plantation clarified sugars, and sometimes of refinery crystals made from low-grade sugars, there is a thin film surrounding each sugar crystal, which has a yellowish tint. it is this that gives rise to the different grades of white sugars, when color test only is considered. since this yellowish tinge will give way to a lighter color when neutralized with the proper shade of blue, it is a very common practice to use some form of bluing--usually that known as ultramarine--for this purpose. the action of this reagent is only mechanical and great care must be exercised that the proper quantity is used. this must be determined by trials with the different amounts of the reagent, since the density of the yellowish tint is different in each case. the place of application will also depend very much upon conditions. some operators apply it only at the centrifugals and others apply it in the pan just at the graining point. again others use a quantity at both the pan and in the last charge of water at the centrifugals. in any case, a good grade only of the reagent should be used. this must be thoroughly dissolved in clear water, condensed steam being preferred, and passed through cloth or felt filters in order to remove any trace of lumps which would tend to produce uneven bluing, or bluish streaks. while this is an excellent reagent in its place, it must not be expected to whiten molasses sugars as was attempted by a local manufacturer. animal charcoal or boneblack.--this material is made from bones of animals, by burning them in a kiln built for that purpose. the object of this burning is to remove the organic matter and leave the remainder in a porous condition, so that it may be crushed into particles the proper size. it is not desirable to have a great amount of char dust present, since this retards the passage of the liquors through the filters, as well as impairing the efficiency of the work. bone char, being very porous, absorbs a great volume of gases, among which is oxygen, and it is ordinarily presumed that its bleaching power may be attributed to this fact. extensive experiments have been made to determine definitely this point, and the char has been subjected to an atmosphere of other gases than oxygen. this proved that the char still contained great clarifying power. char also has a great surface attraction, which causes it to collect particles of coloring matter that may be present, and thus acts as an excellent filtering agent. new char should be thoroughly washed with pure water until all the impurities are removed. with the end in view of determining when the last traces of chlorine have disappeared, chemical tests are made on the wash waters. nitric acid and silver nitrate are employed for this purpose. after animal char has been used for some time in the filters and fails to do its work efficiently, it is reburned, or revived, as it is called. ordinarily the best results are obtained after a char has been used several times. reburning of the char at too high a temperature should be avoided, as it incurs an unnecessary loss of fuel, besides causing serious injury to the char by a contraction of the pores. since, as stated previously, the main value of the char as a clarifying and filtering medium lies in the fact of its porosity, anything which reduces this will greatly impair its efficiency. one thing in connection with the bone-char process of making white sugars is that it is expensive and should not be attempted except on a large scale, since the initial expense of installation, as well as the cost of running, is very great. the writer is sometimes asked by managers of small factories, turning out plantation yellow clarified sugars, if it would not pay them to employ bone-char filters to use in connection with the remainder of their factory, in order to be able to work up an industry with the low-grade open-kettle sugars, during the intercampaign. most assuredly such a combination of small plantation factory and refinery would not be a paying affair. it takes men of experience and special training to carry out successfully the more detailed work in any technical line. one thing, however, can be very successfully done by these factories, and that is to make a first-class plantation white sugar which will command a ready price in the local markets, or even suffice for export, if the proper manufacturing methods are used. it is not presumed that any one planter will use all of the clarifying reagents mentioned above, but he should choose the ones to fit his individual needs, and secure his supply early, since a great deal of time is required to transport supplies from the place of manufacture to these islands. this is especially the case when the place of manufacture happens to be in europe, as is true with a number of the patented clarifying reagents. then, again, a suitable place should be selected for the storage of reagents, where they may be protected from dampness. the quick-lime and sulphites are especially susceptible to moisture, while the greatest danger of loss, when phosphoric acid compounds are stored, will result from leakage. this is on account of the great oxydizing effect of the acid on the iron loops surrounding the barrels, whereby a great quantity may be lost within a very short time. the writer observed this needless waste in one of the small factories here, when twenty barrels of a high-priced acid were stored on the damp ground of the factory, and a great percentage of it wasted. there are a number of clarifying agents offered on the market under fancy names. planters are advised to be cautious about the purchasing of such supplies until they have been thoroughly tried out and proven a success. even then, it is better to experiment only on a small scale until it is known that they will meet their individual needs. some of these are not only deficient in clarifying power, but actually act as an absolute detriment by introducing impurities which lower the value of the juice as well as increasing the subsequent work of boiling and after working of the sugar. la fabricacion de azucar blanco en los ingenios. by w. h. th. harloff and h. schmidt. translated into spanish by c. j. bourbakis. (reviewed by cleve. w. hines, m. s., station superintendent.) this book is edited by two of the foremost sugar producers of the world, mr. harloff, who is manager of a large sugar factory in java, and mr. schmidt, a very able consulting chemist and engineer. the book was originally written in dutch and was translated into english, and now the spanish edition has been completed, which will be welcomed by spanish readers throughout the sugar world. while dealing with a purely technical subject, this work is so simple in its diction that it may be readily comprehended even by those of little technical training. the introduction is divided into five parts as follows: part i.--the influence of alkalies and alkaline earths on the constituents of cane juice. mention is here made of the formation of saccharates of barium, strontium, and calcium in low concentrations. the latter is made use of in the famous steffens process of the beet-sugar industry. part ii.--the influence of acids on the constituents of sugar cane and the hydrolizing effect of dilute acids on sucrose and the resulting constituents, laevulose and dextrose or invert sugar, are explained. part iii.--the influence of heating on the constituents of cane juice is shown. part iv.--the coloring substances of cane and those produced in the process of manufacture. part v.--the different fermentations that occur in the sugar factory including lactic, butyric, alcoholic and dextran are discussed. the main part of the text deals with the manufacture of white sugar by the carbonitation and sulphitation processes, and particular attention is given to the acid-thin-juice-method which has been elaborated in the java factories with such great success during the past few years. this book may be obtained from norman roger, st. dunstan's hill, london, england. price s. d. net (p philippine currency). current notes--first quarter. notes by p. j. wester, horticulturist in charge of lamao experiment station. shield budding the mango. the one defect in the pound method of shield budding the mango described in bureau of agriculture bulletin no. , the mango, consists of the necessity of placing an apron to protect the long petiole left on the bud from the sun and the entrance of water, which work necessarily requires more time than if the bud could be wrapped as is the case in budding citrus trees. however, a possible use of scarred or nonpetioled budwood as a means of obviating the need of the apron was suggested in the above-mentioned publication. the results obtained in recent experiments conducted at the lamao experiment station (november and december, ) have fully come up to the expectations of this modification, and if the work is carefully performed, the operator should have no trouble in obtaining per cent of live buds by proceeding in accordance with the following directions: ( ) select budwood that is well matured, from the first, second, and third flushes from the end of a branch. this budwood is always green and smooth. ( ) three weeks or more in advance of the date when the budding is to be performed, cut off the leaf blades of the budwood selected. this causes the petioles to drop. when the scars left after the petioles have fallen are well healed the budwood is in condition for budding. ( ) the buds should be cut about centimeters long, with an ample wood shield, and inserted in the stock at a point where the bark is green and smooth like the budwood, not where it is rough and brownish. ( ) use waxed tape in tying and cover the entire bud. ( ) when in the course of two to three weeks a good union has formed, unwind the wrapping so as to expose the leaf bud from which the growth is to issue, and cut off the top of the stock to centimeters above the bud. ( ) every ten days after unwrapping the buds go through the nursery and carefully rub off all stock sprouts in order to force the buds to grow. all other precautions that are taken in ordinary shield budding must, of course, also be attended to in order to insure success. experiments in shield budding. after repeated attempts the shield-budding experiments at the lamao experiment station with the camia (averrhoa bilimbi) and the santol (sandoricum koetjape) have been successful, and it has also been found that the barobo (diplodiscus paniculatus), a nut tree indigenous to the philippines (dillenia indica), and the sea grape (coccoloba uvifera), may be propagated by means of shield budding. detailed information relative to the budding of these plants will be published on the completion of the experiments. improvement of tropical fruits in the philippines. the average fruit is so poor that most foreigners never give any attention to the santol, and the fruit is a drug even in the native markets and enormous quantities annually rot on the ground. few are aware that there are mutations among the santol trees the fruit of which in point of flavor vies with the best fruits in the tropics, and that in this respect it is superior even to its celebrated relative, the lanzon (lansium domesticum), the greatest defects being the large seeds and the adherence of the flesh to the seeds. if the seed in these superior santols were abortive in the same proportion as those in the mangosteen, the now despised santol, with its translucent pulp, separable from the pericarp as that of the mangosteen, subacid, juicy and of a vinous, excellent flavor, would rapidly become one of the most popular fruits in the tropics. its thick, tough "rind" should make the santol at least equal to the mangosteen as a shipper. what is probably the first horticultural, asexually propagated variety of the santol is now being established at the lamao experiment station from buds obtained by mr. f. galang, assistant agricultural inspector, from a tree in pampanga, the fruit of which is so highly prized locally that the fruit never retails below the relatively high price of centavos apiece even when other santols are so plentiful as to be literally unsalable. mr. b. malvar, assistant agricultural inspector, has obtained in batangas budwood of a sweet-fruited camia which is also being propagated. this is the first mutation of this kind coming to the attention of the writer. the collection of philippine citrus fruits of economic value or of botanical interest has been in progress since in , but no systematized selection work in the mandarin district has been attempted until december, , when mr. b. malvar was detailed to visit the citrus region in batangas. mr. malvar returned with sample fruits of some twenty odd trees, a number of which were found to be of very good quality. these are being propagated for future distribution. mr. malvar also found another "tizon" (citrus nobilis var. papillaris) of excellent flavor and quality which has been added to the citrus collection at lamao. petioled vs. nonpetioled budwood. the last three years' experiments in shield budding tropical fruits which have been conducted by the writer at the lamao experiment station indicate that for practical purposes in propagation work the tropical fruits may be divided into two groups: ( ) those species the budwood of which may be cut at the time of budding and the petioles cut off close to the bud--for instance, the citrus fruits, avocado, guava, and carambola; and ( ) those species in which decay enters the bud from the adhering remnant of the petiole so frequently as to make impracticable budding from newly cut budwood from twigs with the leaves still adhering, such as the mango, hevi, and cacao. it has been found, however, that this trouble may be easily overcome by the simple method of cutting off the leaf blade about three weeks in advance of when the budding is to be done so as to induce the formation of a leaf scar. then when the petioles have dropped and a well-healed scar has formed, the budwood may be cut and the buds inserted and tied as in ordinary shield budding. in the case of some species, whether or not the bud is of the same age as the stock at the point of insertion is of little or no practical importance, but in other species this condition is one of the requirements for success. therefore, two chances of failure are insured against in experimental work with species that hitherto have not been budded--(a) by defoliating the budwood previously to the budding operation, and using what may be termed nonpetioled or scarred budwood; and (b) by inserting the buds at a point in the stock which approximately is of the same age and appearance as the budwood. notes by cleve. w. hines, m. s., station superintendent. a new sugar industry. the beginning of a tropical industry in what would be considered a semitropical climate was noted in , when the southwestern sugar company of arizona milled their first crop of sugar cane and made it into sugar. the factory had been used previously for the manufacture of beet sugar only. it is a singular coincidence to find a region where both cane and beets will thrive well and where sugar is made from both sources in the same factory, and the sugar world is looking forward with great interest to the results of this new venture. the world's sugar supply. the world's production of sugar amounts to nearly seventeen million tons, practically one half of which is derived from the beet root, the greater percentage of which is produced in europe. now that the ravages of war have devastated many of the better beet-sugar regions of europe a greater demand will be made on the more fortunate sugar countries as soon as the present supply of storage sugar is exhausted and trade resumes its normal condition. progress in sugar manufacture. the past few years have shown great progress in the method of sugar making. it used to be thought that a high grade of sugar could be made only by the use of the bone-black or animal-char process. the beet-sugar producers were the first to diverge from this method and succeeded in making a perfectly satisfactory sugar in their factories in one continuous process by the aid of the carbonitation system. louisiana had been making a fairly good sugar known as yellow clarified for a number of years, but the great step in improvements along these lines was brought about by the acid-thin-juice process of java. this was a combination of the carbonitation and sulphitation processes which gave a satisfactory sugar, though unfortunately the yield of resulting molasses was also quite high. the latest improvement in this work was the introduction of the "battille process" which has certain similarities to the steffens process of beet-sugar manufacture. this method has given an excellent grade of sugar and the maximum rendement since practically all of the sugar is extracted in crystalized form. publications of the bureau of agriculture. subscription rates for the philippine agricultural review are as follows: in the philippine islands and the united states p ($ united states currency) per year; in foreign countries in the postal union p ($ united states currency) per year. a limited number of the following-named bulletins are available for free distribution. all communications should be addressed to the director of agriculture, manila, p. i. bulletins. no. . the garden. (spanish.) ( pp., ill.) no. . abacá (manila hemp). (revised.) (english and spanish.) ( pp., ill.) no. . the cultivation of maguey in the philippine islands. (spanish.) ( pp., ill.) no. . the cultivation of sesamum in the philippine islands. (spanish.) ( pp.) no. . cultivation of tobacco in the philippines (spanish, english, ilocano, and ibanag.) ( pp., ill.) no. . coconut culture. (spanish.) ( pp., ill.) no. . the mango. (english.) ( pp., ill.) (out of print.) no. . tests of the efficiency of antirinderpest serum. (english.) ( pp., charts and diagrams.) no. . notes on the muscular changes brought about by intermuscular injection of calves with the virus of contagious pleuropneumonia (english.) ( pp., ill.) no. . a study of the normal blood of carabao. (english) ( pp.) no. . the role of stomoxys calcitrans in the transmission of trypanosoma evansi. (english.) ( pp., . ill.) no. . the philippine coconut industry. (english.) ( pp., ill.) no. . the kapok industry. (english.) ( pp., ill.) no. . citriculture in the philippines. (english.) ( pp., ill.) no. . the mechanical transmission of surra by tabanus striatus. ( pp.) notes [ ] bureau of agriculture bulletin no. , citriculture in the philippines, , contains illustrations of several unnamed citrus fruits described in this paper. those readers who possess the above-mentioned bulletin may be interested to know that in accordance with the classification herein these fruits should be named as follows: bull. no. , plate iv, mandarin lime = c. webberii; viii, lime (mindanao type) = c. excelsa var. davaoensis; viii, lime, "limon real" = c. excelsa; x, cabuyao = c. histrix; xi, cabuyao = c. histrix var. torosa; xii, biasong = c. micrantha; xii, type from bohol = c. histrix var. torosa; xii, type from bohol = c. histrix var. boholensis; xiv, colo = c. macrophylla; xiv, samuyao = c. micrantha var. microcarpa; xv, talamisan = c. longispina; xv, tizon = c. nobilis var. papillaris; xv, tihi-tihi = c. medica var. odorata; xvia = c. webberii var. montana; xvib = c. southwickii. [ ] in the above description the pistil is said to be small. citron flowers examined by the writer have been found to have large pistils similar to those in c. m. var. odorata and c. m. var. nanus. [ ] paper read before the louisiana sugar planters assn., june , . [ ] cultivation of sugar cane, by dr. stubbs. [ ] from united states department of agriculture bulletin, no. , p. . [ ] bulletin , louisiana sugar experiment station. [ ] all statistics, and much of the information that applies specifically to robusta coffee have been adapted from "robusta and some allied coffee species" by dr. c. j. j. van hall, of the department of agriculture, buitenzorg, java, published in the agr. bul. of the f. m. s., vol. i: no. , , and from a review of a series of articles on robusta coffee by dr. e. wildeman, in the monthly bul. of agr. intelligence, etc., vol. iv: no. , . none version by al haines. three acres and liberty by bolton hall author of "things as they are," "thrift," etc. revised edition _"a sower went out to sow and he sowed that which was in his heart--for what can a man sow else!"_ from "the game of life." or, as the vulgate has it,-- _"exitt qui seminat seminare semen suum."_ new york the macmillan company all rights reserved._ copyright and by the macmillan company set up and electrotyped. published march, . reprinted april, july, ; march, ; june, september, ; april, ; april . new edition, revised february, . foreword we are not tied to a desk or to a bench; we stay there only because we think we are tied. in montana i had a horse, which was hobbled every night to keep him from wandering; that is, straps joined by a short chain were put around his forefeet, so that he could only hop. the hobbles were taken off in the morning, but he would still hop until he saw his mate trotting off. this book is intended to show how any one can trot off if he will. it is not a textbook; there are plenty of good textbooks, which are referred to herein. intensive cultivation cannot be comprised in any one book. it shows what is needed for a city man or woman to support a family on the proceeds of a little bit of land; it shows how in truth, as the old book prophesied, the earth brings forth abundantly after its kind to satisfy the desire of every living thing. it is not necessary to bury oneself in the country, nor, with the new facilities of transportation, need we, unless we wish to, pay the extravagant rents and enormous cost of living in the city. a little bit of land near the town or the city can be rented or bought on easy terms; and merchandising will bring one to the city often enough. neither is hard labor needed; but it is to work alone that the earth yields her increase, and if, although unskilled, we would succeed in gardening, we must attend constantly and intelligently to the home acres. every chapter of this book has been revised by a specialist, and the authors wish to express their appreciation of the aid given them, particularly by mr. e. h. moore, arboriculturist in the brooklyn department of parks; mr. collingwood of the rural new yorker and mr. george t. powell; and to thank mrs. mabel osgood wright, and also mr. joseph morwitz, for many valuable suggestions; also all those from whom we have quoted directly or in substance. we have endeavored in the text to give full acknowledgment to all, but in some cases it has been impossible to credit to the originator every paragraph or thought, since these have been selected and placed as needed, believing that all true teachers and gardeners are more anxious to have their message sent than to be seen delivering it. in truth, teaching is but another department of gardening. practical points and criticisms from practical men and women, especially from those experiences in trying to get to the land, will be welcomed by the authors. address in care of the publishers. the report of the country life commission, with special message from the president of the united states, is especially important as showing the connection of intensive cultivation with thrift for war time. it tells us that: "the handicaps (on getting out of town) that we now have specially in mind may be stated under four heads: speculative holding of lands; monopolistic control of streams; wastage and monopolistic control of forests; restraint of trade. "certain landowners procure large areas of agricultural land in the most available location, sometimes by questionable methods, and hold it for speculative purposes. this not only withdraws the land itself from settlement, but in many cases prevents the development of an agricultural community. the smaller landowners are isolated and unable to establish their necessary institutions or to reach the market. the holding of large areas by one party tends to develop a system of tenantry and absentee farming. the whole development may be in the direction of social and economic ineffectiveness. "a similar problem arises in the utilization of swamp lands. according to the reports of the geological survey, there are more than , , acres of swamp land in this country, the greater part of which are capable of reclamation at probably a nominal cost as compared to their value. it is important to the development of the best type of country life that the reclamation proceed under conditions insuring subdivision into small farms and settlement by men who would both own them and till them. "some of these lands are near the centers of population. they become a menace to health, and they often prevent the development of good social conditions in very large areas. as a rule they are extremely fertile. they are capable of sustaining an agricultural population numbering many millions, and the conditions under which these millions must live are a matter of national concern. the federal government should act to the fullest extent of its constitutional powers in the reclamation of these lands under proper safeguards against speculative holding and landlordism. "the rivers are valuable to the farmers as drainage lines, as irrigation supply, as carriers and equalizers of transportation rates, as a readily available power resource, and for raising food fish. the wise development of these and other uses is important to both agricultural and other interests; their protection from monopoly is one of the first responsibilities of government. the streams belong to the people; under a proper system of development their resources would remain an estate of all the people, and become available as needed. "river transportation is not usually antagonistic to railway interests. population and production are increasing rapidly, with corresponding increase in the demands made on transportation facilities. it may be reasonably expected that the river will eventually carry a large part of the freight that does not require prompt delivery, while the railway will carry that requiring expedition. this is already foreseen by leading railway men; and its importance to the farmer is such that he should encourage and aid, by every means in his power, the large use of the rivers. the country will produce enough business to tax both streams and railroads to their utmost. "in many regions the streams afford facilities for power, which, since the inauguration of electrical transmission, is available for local rail lines and offers the best solution of local transportation problems. in many parts of the country local and interurban lines are providing transportation to farm areas, thereby increasing facilities for moving crops and adding to the profit and convenience of farm life. however, there seems to be a very general lack of appreciation of the possibilities of this water-power resource as governing transportation costs. "the streams may be also used as small water power on thousands of farms. this is particularly true of small streams. much of the labor about the house and barn can be performed by transmission of power from small water wheels running on the farms themselves or in the neighborhood. this power could be used for electric lighting and for small manufacture. it is more important that small power be developed on the farms of the united states than that we harness niagara. "unfortunately, the tendency of the present laws is to encourage the acquisition of these resources on easy terms, or on their own terms, by the first applicants, and the power of the streams is rapidly being acquired under conditions that lead to the concentration of ownership in the hands of the monopolies. this constitutes a real and immediate danger, not to the country-life interests alone, but to the entire nation, and it is time that the whole people become aroused to it. "the forests have been exploited for private gain not only until the timber has been seriously reduced, but until streams have been ruined for navigation, power, irrigation, and common water supplies, and whole regions have been exposed to floods and disastrous soil erosion. probably there has never occurred a more reckless destruction of property that of right should belong to all the people. "the wood-lot property of the country needs to be saved and increased. wood-lot yield is one of the most important crops of the farms, and is of great value to the public in con trolling streams, saving the run-off, checking winds, and adding to the attractiveness of the region. [taken up in a special chapter of this book.] "in many regions where poor and hilly lands prevail, the town or county could well afford to purchase forest land, expecting thereby to add to the value of the property and to make the forests a source of revenue. such communal forests in europe yield revenue to the cities and towns by which they are owned and managed." these revenues would furnish good roads even in the poorest and most sparsely settled districts. there are a number of other reasons why people do not like to live outside of cities--or do not succeed in farm work. there is the difficulty of finding help. this, however, rejoices the heart of the modern sociologist. consider--we first teach our children independence and train them for everything but farm help or household services. then we degrade the "help" below a mill "hand" so that people will not even sit at table with them at an hotel. next we fix a theory of conduct for them that keeps them constantly under orders and pay them wages that make it hardly possible for them to rise above the station to which we have appointed them. finally, when we move away from the haunts of men out to sandtown-by-the-puddle we blame them that they do not rush to join us. most of them would be happier in penal servitude than in the country. the work is as hard and requires as much skill as a mechanic's work, besides personal qualities that are demanded of no mechanic, and commands half its wages. those who, like henry ford, can afford to pay mechanics' wages for help can get all they want. many people go to the country without plan, preparation, or vocation, to make a living. they usually start to build a bungalow but seldom get further than the bungle. don't build anything without plan. get a comfortable house proof against cold and heat as soon as possible and, above all, well ventilated. at present the air in the country is good, because the farmers shut all the bad air up in their bedrooms. they say "the farmer works from sun to sun for the summer's work is never done." we might add, it's never even half done--naturally. a donkey engine can work like that, but then it hasn't any brains. no man can work from sun to sun all summer and think at all or be good for anything at the end of it. above all things don't work long hours, even in learning, with the idea of saving that way. all up-to-date employers are agreed that an eight-hour day produces more and better results than a ten-hour day and that a twelve-hour day brings sheriffs and suicides instead of profits. that's just as true of the individual worker as it is of the factory "hand." yet most men and a few women proudly say that they "work like a horse" (it's usually not true). they don't; a horse won't work and can't work over eight hours a day steadily. neither can you: you may keep buzzing around much longer--but the best work requires the best conditions and the best hours. you think, or you flatter yourself that you think, that it is necessary; but nothing is necessary that is stupid and wrong. it is hardly too much to say that when we are tired out or ill either we have been doing the wrong thing or doing it wrong. there is besides, as an anti-rusticant, railroad discrimination in favor of long hauls, but the main reason that the small farms of the eastern coast are less settled than those farther west is the great difficulty in getting farm loans or loans on farm buildings. new york companies and others in the great cities will loan on farms west of the alleghenies, but even the otherwise excellent eastern building loan associations usually restrict themselves to places within twenty-five miles of a city. the jewish agricultural and industrial aid society will help approved jewish farmers to buy and build: and there is a federal land bank in springfield, mass., which lends to some farmers' associations, of which some four thousand are already formed. it is hoped that the state land bank of new york city may improve the situation in new york for farmers' organizations, but "generally nearly all available funds of the local banks seem to be drawn off for investments in wall street." however, it is not to be forgotten that this difficulty is reflected in the lower prices of eastern land. one more thing that keeps many people from the country and drives some people back to the city is the mosquito (of course there are mosquitoes in town, but we are not out as much, so we notice them less). mosquitoes breed or rather we breed them, in still water in which there are no fish, in pools, hollows in trees, wells, etc., and above all in old tin cans. they can no more breed without water than sharks could. mosquitoes do not breed in grass, but rank growths of weeds or grass may conceal small breeding puddles, and form a favorite nursery for mamma skeet. a teacupful of water standing ten days is enough for wrigglers; their needs are modest. different species of mosquitoes have as well-defined habits as other birds and are classified as follows: domestic, migratory, and woodland. the common domestic or pet species breed in fresh water, usually in the house yard, fly comparatively short distances, and habitually enter houses. they winter in cellars, barns, and outhouses. some of them are conveyors of malaria. the migratory species breed on the salt marshes, fly long distances, do not habitually enter houses, and are not carriers of diseases so far as known. certain varieties of woodland mosquitoes breed only in woodland pools, appearing in the early spring, and travel a greater distance than the domestic species. they are not usually troublesome indoors. it has been proved that malaria is transmitted only by certain species of anopheles, one of which is the domestic mosquito. eliminate this one species of mosquito and the disease will disappear as a direct consequence. so if you hear that pretty little song in the house, don't swear, thank the lord that effects always follow causes. you need never be without a bite in the house if you have a nice cesspool handy for sis mosquito, for each one will have a first-class feed with you every second or third day. they are needless and dangerous pests or pets. their propagation can be prevented by draining or filling wet areas, by emptying or screening water receptacles, and by spraying with oil where better measures are not available. oil should be sprinkled in any cesspools, sewers, and catch basins, rain barrels, water troughs, roof gutters, marshes, swamps, and puddles that cannot be done away with. all ponds and large bodies of water should have clean sharp edges, because in shallow, grassy edges larvae of the malarial species are commonly found. large ponds with clean edges, inhabited by fish or predatory insects, are safe; smaller ponds, if wind swept, and all ponds in the "ripple area" are safe. all rain pools, stagnant gutters, overgrown edges of large ponds, and all receptacles holding water not constantly renewed, are dangerous. you raise most of your own mosquitoes. now a word specially concerning this revised edition. the farm papers are supported mainly by men with large acreage, it is the rise in value of these acres more than the rise in farm products that has pulled the land-owning farmers out of the hole that they were in up to about the year . farmers' knowledge, liking, and equipment was for big fields, half cultivated, and at first they did not like to hear that they had been wasting so much of the labor that had bent their backs. nor did they want to hear that it would have been far more profitable to them to have cultivated a few acres and left the goats and hogs or sheep to attend to the rest as wild land until the long-expected settlers came along to buy the land at dreamland prices. consequently, all the faults in the book there were, and some more besides, have been picked out by these critics. it is surprising as well as a notable compliment to the agricultural experts who revised the first edition that, with one exception, no material error or omission has been pointed out. the more so because there is absolutely no limit to the advances in methods and results in doing things, and in growing things, all born of intelligent toil. your suggestions may help the world to better and bigger things. if you will listen at the 'phone you may sometime hear a conversation like this: "hello, this is mrs. wise, send me two strawberries, please." "you'd better take three, madam, i've none larger than peaches to-day." "all right; good-bye." you may sometime see that kind of strawberry in new jersey at kevitt's athenia, or henry joralamon's, or in the berry known by various names, such as giant and different joe's. but lots of people have failed in their war garden work even on common things; lots more ought to have failed but haven't--yet. years ago, we, the book and its helpers, started the forward-to-the-land movement which has resulted in probably two million extra garden patches this war year. i have had carloads of letters, at least hand carloads, about the book, but not one worker who even tried to follow its counsels has reported failure. so don't let us have a wail from you because your "garden stuff never comes up." of course it doesn't; you have to bring it up, just like a baby. that's what i've been crying for long years in the wilderness ever since the first edition of this book. the three acres may be bought on credit but eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and crops. to raise good crops costs time and attention and sweat of body and of brains. here is a chunk of wisdom out of the excellent garden primer (which you can get free by asking me for it): "one hour a day spent in a garden ten yards long by seven wide will supply vegetables enough for a family of six"; but the value of this remark lies in the application of it. if you figure a bit on that you will find that ten minutes a day will provide enough for one person, but six hours once a week won't do. six hours a day will bring up a baby; but two days a week is criminal neglect for the other five days. if you once let the weeds get a good start, say after a rain, they will make even the angels swear. it's regular attention that the baby and the garden and your education and your best girl will require. if you want more minute instructions about how to grow each vegetable, put in words that anybody can understand without getting a headache or a dictionary, look up "the garden yard" by the author. it is in nearly all libraries now, and it is the only book that makes perfectly plain everything that a plain man needs to know about growing plain things. so there is little to add in this new edition except to reinforce what was not strong enough. in the present jumping market to revise the prices quoted would be absurd, but it may be noted that, as in the prices of 'cowers, the minimum prices are still about correct, but the maximum prices have jumped almost out of sight. every year there are more and more very wealthy people who will pay nearly any price for the very best. the world seems to be dividing into those who have to count their pennies and those who couldn't count their thousands. of course, where war has prohibited the importation of the strong bulbs and roots needed for forcing flowers, the prices are about what any one who has any chooses to ask. monopoly can always get its own price. this new edition does not attempt to bring prices quoted up to date. in these times not even a stock exchange telegraph ticker can do that. prices of goods in general have advanced at least per cent. by the day that this book is off the press they may have decreased, or more likely advanced some more. the next day they may slump. prices of labor advance more slowly and do not slump so fast. wages of men gardeners have risen perhaps per cent in the last ten years, but women and children have learned to do much of the work. they do the work cheaper because most of them have some one on whom they can partly depend for support. similarly, when an example of total product given in the earlier edition is still typical and has stood investigation, it is not discarded in favor of a more modern instance. it would have been easy to have revised all the figures, but of little advantage to our readers. for example, it is encouraging to the citizen to know that the average wheat yield per acre has increased more than two bushels since the first edition of this book, but it would not help the garden maker. the increase of possible products tends to counterbalance the increased cost of labor. so only the musty parts have been cut out of the book, which is more needed now than ever. table of contents chapter i: making a living--where and how chapter ii: present conditions chapter iii: how to buy the farm chapter iv: vacant city lot cultivation chapter v: results to be expected chapter vi: what an acre may produce chapter vii: some methods chapter viii: the kitchen garden chapter ix: tools and equipment chapter x: advantages from capital chapter xi: hotbeds and greenhouses chapter xii: other uses of land chapter xiii: fruits chapter xiv: flowers chapter xv: drug plants chapter xvi: novel live stock chapter xvii: where to go chapter xviii: clearing the land chapter xix: how to build chapter xx: back to the land chapter xxi: coming profession for boys chapter xxii: the wood lot chapter xxiii: some practical experiments chapter xxiv: some experimental foods chapter xxv: dried truck chapter xxvi: home cold pack canning chapter xxvii: retail cooperation chapter xxviii: summer colonies for city people chapter i making a living--where and how by thought and courage, we can help ourselves to own a home, surrounded by acres of fruit and vegetables, flowers and poultry, and learn the best methods so as to insure success. in olden times any one could "farm," but it is necessary to-day to teach people to obtain a livelihood directly from the earth. scientific methods of agriculture have revealed possibilities in the soil that make farming the most fascinating occupation known to man. people in every city are longing for the freedom of country life, yet hesitate to enter into its liberty because no one points the way. most sociologists are agreed that the great problem of our day is to stop the drift of population toward the cities. seeing the overcrowding, the want and misery of our great towns, the philanthropist chimes in with "get the people to the country, that is the need." but there is no such need. man is a social animal, he naturally goes in flocks, he earns more and learns more in crowds. to transport him to the country, even if he would stay, which happily he won't, would be to doctor a symptom. as in typhoid, what is needed is not to suppress the fever, that is easy, but to remove the cause of it. it is not the growth of the cities that we want to check, but the needless want and misery in the cities, and this can be done by restoring the natural condition of living, and among other things, by showing that it is easier and making it more attractive to live in comfort on the outskirts of the city as producers, than in the slums as paupers. we know already that the natural and healthy life is, that in the sweat of our faces we should eat bread. we observe that everything we eat or use or make comes from the earth by labor; but no one knows how abundantly the mother can supply her children. it is well said that no man yet knows the capacity of a square yard of earth. the farmer thinks that he has done well if he gets a hundred and fifty or two hundred bushels of potatoes from an acre; he does not know that others have gotten bushels. ("mr. knight, whose name is well known to every horticulturist in england, once dug out of his fields no less than bushels of potatoes, or thirty-four tons and nine hundreds weight (about bushels to the ton), on a single acre; and at a recent competition in minnesota, bushels, or thirty tons, could be ascertained as having been grown on one acre." p. kropotkin's "fields, factories and workshops," page .) let us realize what an acre means. an acre is a square about feet each way, square yards of land. a new york city avenue block is about feet long from house corner to house corner. it has eight city lots x in its front; about double that space ( - / lots) makes an acre. an ordinary one-horse cart holds twenty bushels, so then a full crop of potatoes from that space would fill carts. to raise potatoes as an ordinary farmer raises them, requires him to go over the ground not less than a dozen times, plowing, harrowing, marking, planting, cultivating, three times weeding, three times for bugs, and digging; it would pay him to go over it much oftener. if he plants his rows of potatoes three feet apart, to allow for horse cultivation, he has rows of feet each; which makes him walk at least thirty-three miles over each acre. if he has a twenty-acre lot in potatoes, he walks each year more than miles over the field and gets, let us say, bushels of poor potatoes per acre, or bushels off his twenty-acre field. now suppose he cultivates the soil, instead of just "raising a crop," and gets bushels of fine potatoes to the acre, he need plant only five acres, walk only miles, and, because his potatoes are choice and early, get many times the price that his pedestrian neighbor gets. it is much easier to grow , lb. of feed on one acre than to grow them on ten acres. to cultivate is to watch the soil as you would watch your cooking and to tend the crop as you would tend your animals. the crop is as alive as the stock and as easily gets sick. if an ordinary farmer rents acres at $ . per acre, a moderate rent for good land, he pays out in cash $ , besides farm wages. if he buys it, his interest and taxes will amount to nearly as much; but if he tills but five acres intelligently, he can get as much out of it as out of an ordinary farm, and even if his rent be as high as $ per acre for well situated land, he is $ to the good; besides, doing the work himself, he has no drain of capital for wages. large barns and shelter for help being unnecessary, he can live in a cheap shack till he accumulates enough for proper buildings. many of the successful vacant lot farmers live in a tent or in shanties made of old boxes and such like. of course, if we have the knowledge and ability and the capital and can give it the attention, it is more profitable to cultivate on a large scale than on a small one, because in that case each worker necessarily produces more than he gets as wages--and we pocket the difference. most american farmers are holding land that somebody ought to pay them a bonus for working, else they must come out of the little end of the horn. they get poor or poorly situated land, because it costs less, and then put three or four hundred dollars' worth of labor and money a year into the land and take out four or five hundred dollars' worth of crops. the farmer thinks he must have big fields to feed his cattle, and that he must have cattle to keep the big fields fertilized, so he raises hay. in that he makes two mistakes; hay, like most other low-priced crops, is risky--the cost of harvesting is high and the margin of profit small. a week of wet weather at cutting time or the impossibility of getting enough men and machines in the week when it should be cut, may make a loss. but the scientific dairy man does not take that risk, nor let his cattle use up this fodder by wandering over the fields in search of tid-bits of grass or clover, or, goaded by the flies, trampling more grass than they eat and wasting their manure. he keeps the cows in cool sheds, feeds them on cut fodder, and saves every ounce of the manure. the modern cow is a ruminating machine for producing milk and cares little for exercise and needs little. to exploit the cattle as employers exploit the factory hands, he gives the cows a cool, shady place and food, and they stand there all day long to their profit and his. (united states agricultural bulletin no. says: "the new jersey experiment station has been conducting a practical trial in soiling dairy cows for a number of years past, and finds that complete soiling is entirely practicable, i.e. that green foliage crops may serve as the sole food of the dewy herd, aside from the grain ration, without injury to the animals and with a considerable saving in the cost of milk. "under the soiling system a large number of animals can be kept upon a given acreage and by allowing open-air exercises in a large yard or pasture the practice has been demonstrated as entirely feasible for dairy animals. "one acre of soiling crops produced sufficient fodder for an equivalent of cows for six months. rye, corn, crimson clover, alfalfa, oats and peas, and millets have been found to furnish food more economically than any other green crops in that locality. a grain rotation was always fed in addition to the soiling crops.") although we can feed a cow on less than an acre by raising forage crops, she needs to be milked every day at regular hours, and the milk, as well as the cans and the cow, need to be cared for--and she cannot wait. the stock-raiser has a different proposition; he needs fields and grass; but if time and available labor is limited, we had better specialize on the garden--unlike the farmers. the farmers are not to blame that they do not usually cultivate the land intelligently. they are mostly cut off from the educational advantages of the cities by distance and by bad roads. usually, that is because, desirable land being held at speculative prices, they are forced to places where the farm itself is worth less than the good improvements on it cost. sometimes it is because, also, the land is poor or worn out; more often because it is thoughtlessly managed, nearly always because the land-hungry farmer has taken ten times as much land as he needs for farming. in the hope of a rise that often does not come, nearly all have bought more land than they can take good care of with limited capital and scarcity of help. in addition, the farms have held out such poor prospects of fortune that the smarter and more enterprising boys and girls have left them for the towns, leaving behind the duller and more conservative to the mercy of the railroads and other monopolies. what wonder, then, that the overworked and struggling farmer finds little chance to study, or to investigate and invest in fertilizers or even in modern methods of agriculture. no wonder farming does not pay if a "farmer" means a stupid man with neither training for, nor knowledge of, his business. those who have the knowledge seldom have the experience and those who have the experience seldom have the knowledge. the bonanza farms of the west are other samples of great areas of the most productive land in the united states being used most unscientifically. by the methods used, the land produces less per acre than land in the east which is not so good. accordingly, we find that the bonanza farm plan, where great areas of wheat are worked by machines with labor employed only in the seed time and harvest, is rapidly breaking up. as the land becomes valuable and is taxed, such wasteful, wholesale methods do not pay as well as it pays to rent or sell the land to farmers, who each for themselves attend to details of the business. consequently, most of those farms are being sold off. the whole amount of wheat ever raised on them, however, is small compared to the rice, millet, and wheat raised in china, india, and russia, and is insignificant compared to the amount of produce grown on the myriad little farm plots. a comparison of productions as taken from the th and th united states censuses in the bonanza farm states shows that the yield of wheat was: while new england shows . bu. per acre. in in minnesota . bu. per acre . north dakota . bu. per acre . south dakota . bu. per acre . by these largely increased, but the differences remain. "the average extent of land tilled by one family in japan does not exceed one hectare" ( . acres), less than two and a half acres. ("japan in the beginning of the twentieth century," page . published by the department of agriculture and commerce of japan.) "farm households contain on an average . persons, of whom two and a half persons per family may be regarded of an age capable of doing effective work." "so that here we have more than one person working on each acre and each acre supporting more than two persons, notwithstanding that their , , tenant farmers pay sometimes four fifths of their product as rent." (same, page .) denmark, one of the best agricultural countries and probably one of the happiest communities on earth, reported , farms of - acres, , farms averaging acres, , farms averaging to acres, , cooperative dairies, and so on. and so impressed has the ruling class there become with the advantage of this that the government will supply the poor worker nine tenths of the means necessary to buy a small farm. says kropotkin, "the small island of jersey, eight miles long and less than six miles wide, still remains a land of open field culture; but, although it comprises only , acres (nearly square miles), rocks included, it nourishes a population of about two inhabitants to each acre, or inhabitants to the square mile, and there is not one writer on agriculture who, after having paid a visit to this island, does not praise the well-being of the jersey peasants and the admirable results which they obtain in their small farms of from five to twenty acres--very often less than five acres--by means of a rational and intensive culture. "most of my readers will probably be astonished to learn that the soil of jersey, which consists of decomposed granite, with no organic matter in it, is not at all of surprising fertility, and that its climate, though more sunny than the climate of the british isles, offers many drawbacks on account of the small amount of sun heat during the summer and of the cold winds in spring." ("the successes accomplished lately in jersey are entirely due to the amount of labor which a dense population is putting on the land; to a system of land-tenure, land-transference, and inheritance very different from those which prevail elsewhere; to freedom from state taxation; and to the fact that communal institutions have been maintained down to quite a recent period, while a number of communal habits and customs of mutual support, derived there-from, are alive to the present time." ("fields, factories and workshops.") "it will suffice to say that on the whole the inhabitants of jersey obtain agricultural products to the value of $ to each acre of the aggregate surface of land." (same, page .)) in a small plot the character of the soil is of little consequence. we hear of one garden in new york city on the roof of a big building where the janitor smuggled up the needed soil in baskets. the school gardens in new york city, some in a space as small as a hearth rug, one yard by two, show how to use a very small patch of land to the best advantage. nor need it take more time than you can afford. "some of the cultivators of city lots on long island who kept count of the number of days they worked, show the surprising conclusion that they earned, not farm wages (seventy-five cents a day with board and lodging for the worker), but mechanics' wages (four dollars per day) for every working day; as, for instance, a stone-cutter, assisted by his two boys, worked fifty hours and made $ . ." ("cultivation of vacant lots, new york," page ); and four city lots is a very little farm. but though one may not own even a little farm, almost any one who wants to can have a home garden--it needs but a small plot of land. nor need we be discouraged because acquaintances who play at gardening tell us that their vegetables cost them more than if they bought them. they naturally would, with thoughtless methods of cultivation, with the selection of crops and the purchase of seeds left to an uneducated man who does all his work the way he saw his grandfather do it. nor are we to be discouraged even by the "gentleman farmer" who runs a model farm, a model of how not to do it, for, notwithstanding its large capital, it seldom pays. i am passing such a farm now as i write in the train--it is surrounded by a cut stone wall. do you suppose the owner business would pay if it were run in the same way that his farm is run? we know the story of the white sparrow to find which would bring luck to the farm--but it was out only at daybreak; the farmer got up each morning to find the sparrow and found a lot of other things to attend to, which did bring luck to the farm. i don't think the owner of that wall worked at it, at daybreak. the time is not far distant when the builders of homes in our american cities will be compelled to leave room for a garden, in order to meet the requirements of the people in the mad rush for wealth we have overlooked the natural state, but we see a healthy reaction setting in. with the improvements in steam and electricity, the revolutionizing of transportation, the cutting of the arbitrary telephone charges, it is becoming possible to live at a distance from our business. may we not expect in the near future to see one portion of our cities devoted entirely to business, with the homes of the people so separated as to give light, sunshine, and air to all, besides a piece of ground for a garden sufficient to supply the table with vegetables? you raise more than vegetables in your garden: you raise your expectation of life. life belongs in the garden. do you remember--the first chapters of genesis show us our babyhood in a garden--the garden that all babyhood remembers, and the last chapter of the apocalypse leaves us with the vision of the garden in the holy city, on either side of the river, where the trees yield their fruits every month and bear leaves of universal healing. just so will it be in our holy cities of the future--the garden will be right there "in the midst." chapter ii present conditions up to the civil war and for some years after, our people were almost wholly agricultural. national activity contented itself with settling and developing the vast areas of the public lands, whose virgin richness cried aloud in the wilderness for men. the policy of the government, framed to stimulate rapid occupation of the public lands, had attracted hordes of settlers over the mountains from the older states, and immigration flowed in a steady stream into the valleys of the ohio and the mississippi. a system had grown up in the south almost patriarchal, based upon cultivation by slave labor of enormous areas devoted exclusively to cotton. in the north, new england had developed some few centers of industry, drawing their support from the manufacture of the great southern staple. new york, boston, and philadelphia were growing as outlets for foreign commerce, but as yet manufacturing flourished but feebly and in few localities. such manufacturing and commercial enterprises as existed had been laboriously built up by long years of honest working. the free lands of the government, by giving laborers an alternative, kept up wages, forcing employers to bid against each other for labor; and monopoly thus being checked, individual equality was possible. the mineral resources of pennsylvania and ohio were all but unsuspected, and the calm of a people devoted to the peaceful pursuits of agriculture rested over the country. railroads were few and inefficient: telegraph lines but in their infancy. intercourse among the people, outside of a narrow fringe on the atlantic coast, was cumbersome, and impeded by many obstacles. primitive conditions everywhere prevailed, and communities brooded in silence, growing stragglingly in sluggish indifference, content with coarse food and coarser living. such, in general, were the conditions up to . then came the storm of shot and shell, the rain of blood, the elemental rage of passion called the civil war. there was a total upset of business. such periods of hard times as had occurred prior to that time had been caused by the tinkering of untrained minds with the money system or by land speculation, and not by lack of access to the riches of nature. after four years our people awoke, as from a nightmare, to find the old life swept away forever. in the south, the confederates, bitter and sullen, groping amid the ruins of their institutions, sought to find some substitute for the agricultural despotism exercised for generations by their slaveholding families. in the east, the first families of the revolution, secure in their preeminence, assumed again the manufacturing-banking-social prestige. the far west was still almost unknown, and remained in possession of the buffalo and the indian. settlers poured, in increasing numbers on to the unappropriated lands still left in the states of the central west, and the center of political power shifted rapidly to this fertile region. already men of keen insight foresaw a time when oil, timber, coal, and iron must become the stay of a vastly expanding industrial system, and bent their energies to secure the chief sources of supply. from the nature of their work the men who built railways first became aware of the riches of nature, and aided by an enormous public sympathy with their efforts, monopolized all the natural opportunities of value. coupled with industrial development was the gradual appropriation of the land. the time soon arrived when the late comers either stayed in the manufacturing centers at the railways terminals or were pushed farther and farther away from the centers. as the landowning families multiplied, the young men were confined to the same choice. forced off the land, the tendency has been to crowd the brainiest blood of america into the cities. in addition, the competition of the new western lands, brought into use by railway development, has exiled the youth of new england, who found in their rocky acres no incentive to toil. they, too, joined the ever-increasing flow to the cities, and entered into the savage competition of our great towns. in our time the pendulum has swung to its extreme. at every depression of business, armies of the unemployed perish in sight of the land they abandoned in the hope of a brighter future. their children have forgotten the traditions of the soil, and the energies of our people must now be concentrated to reverse the aimless tide of human sufferers, which under stress continues to flow city-ward, and to send it to repeople the silent places whence it came. the fight will not be easily won. changes in the national land policy are imperative. to give one generation privileges which enslave all who succeed it, is intolerable and will not be permanently endured. it is easy to determine upon a policy in the quiet of the study; different is the problem of applying a comprehensive scheme to repeople the idle land. in the first place, where is the idle land? in all parts of our country it exists in abundance. almost every state in the union has lands which either have never been alienated, or which have reverted to the state through nonpayment of taxes. in the east, particularly, the competition of western lands, aided by discriminating freight rates, now so notorious, has resulted in the abandonment to the mortgagee of vast areas in new york, connecticut, new hampshire, maine, and to some extent in new jersey. these are now largely resold. declining fertility and exorbitant and oppressive transportation charges have helped to keep these lands out of use, and some still lie idle and neglected, to excite the wonder of the social and economic student. to use the abandoned lands of the east, equal rates on agricultural products is a basic necessity. the first step, now well under way, is railroad control by the government. equal access to transportation is as essential as equal access to land, for transportation is indeed an attribute of land. extending the inquiry westward, the coal and oil areas of pennsylvania and ohio are all controlled by a few hands. the original fertility of the farming areas of these states, together with the fact that they have been producing for only about a century, has enabled them to hold their own until recently, but now only the best located tracts are in maximum production, and this can be maintained only by the most advanced agricultural science. in spite of greater advantages, the crowded cities and deserted country districts are beginning to repeat in the fertile alluvial valleys of the interior, the tragic story of the east. in the mississippi valley, conditions seem better. values of farming lands are increasing rapidly; the farms are rich and growing richer; food products are cheap and abundant; certain staples are produced in enormous quantities and sent to feed the cities of the east and the industrial population of europe. the railroads transport these products nearly one thousand miles for the same prices as they charge in the east for transporting them one hundred miles. wealth, activity, and political power concentrate at the inlet and outlet of the railway funnel, leaving vast areas of unused and unusable land between the terminals. access to markets determines value. that is why the favored lands of illinois, iowa, kansas, michigan, and wisconsin, one to two thousand miles from market, have risen in value to as high as three hundred dollars per acre, and the lands of new england, new york, and new jersey go begging at twenty to sixty dollars per acre, unless they lie within the artificial prosperity of the cities. farther west in the irrigated regions of colorado and utah, restricted areas are held for special fruit crops, at prices ranging from three hundred to two thousand dollars and up, per acre. but here, again, monopoly, now a monopoly of natural opportunity, is a factor in creating prices; on this, however, the vast irrigation projects of the government, bringing into use larger and larger areas of these favored lands, were expected to exercise a check. up to little has been sold. their reclamation cost too much. the willingness of the southern planters to sell their lands, and so to release them for intensive cultivation, has partly turned the tide of immigration from the eastern ports to the south, and the market garden system is reaching increasing areas. the development of factories to make cotton fabrics and to utilize the formerly wasted cotton seed by turning it into meal for cattle and other animals, as well as into the various food products, such as cotton-seed oil, cottolene, etc., has stimulated the use of the waste land around these budding factory centers, thus tending to encourage intensive use of small, well-located tracts. with a climate much milder and more equable than that of the northern states, with a potential fertility of soil, equally great under proper management, the south is making greater strides than any other part of the country. the foregoing shows that in every section opportunities of getting the people to the land exist. where a man should go is determined by a variety of things. if he be a newly arrived immigrant used to land work in southern europe, he would find his best chance in the south; if a german or russian, or from any of the northern european countries, he would find the beet-sugar sections of michigan colorado, or california more to his liking; if american born, without much knowledge of out-door work, and feeling the need of social life, the cheap farms of new york, new jersey, and new england would probably be most attractive. many persons write me that i say it is necessary to get good land near population or with cheap and assured transportation facilities--and that it must not cost more than it is worth for gardening. "i find," they say, "that such acres are held as 'lots' at wildly speculative prices" and they ask "where can i find such land?" but this is a book on agricultural use of land. why land costs too much and where the remedy lies are other questions, dealt with in my "things as they are." however, probably the best chances now for intensive cultivation are in new jersey, in the backwoods of the middle states now made accessible by cheap autos--and in the south. what can be undertaken with good prospects of success will be outlined in the following chapters. chapter iii how to buy the farm before the purchase of the land for a home in the country, some consideration ought to be given to probable increase in land values. even if you are primarily interested in your early sales of produce, you will not object to reaping an additional profit from the presence of other people. inasmuch as density of population determines land values, it follows that vacant land near a large city at $ per acre may be cheaper than similar land at a distance would be at $ per acre. if you buy real estate, you become a silent partner who does nothing, but takes most of the profits of the business of others. some persons see so clearly that money is often easily gotten by investing in land, that sometimes they make mistakes, in trying to get in. it is as easy to be a lamb in the real estate market as it is in the stock market. foresight, judgment, and experience or luck are essential to success in real estate dealing, but help, at least in keeping out of danger, may be had by following a few simple rules, if one can command a little capital, borrowed or owned. the following points, suggested by a professional land shark, will certainly be of interest and possibly of profit to the intending buyer. i believe myself that they contain the whole philosophy of land speculation. for a sure profit buy low-priced land, keeping as near the "raw material" as possible; high-priced property is risky and expensive to carry. an acre which costs one or two hundred dollars, or ten dollars per lot, will cost but six to twelve dollars per year to carry and half a dollar for taxes, and if a stable does come next you, why, you can sell your land for a blacksmith shop. besides this, a ten-dollar lot, if restricted for residence or available for business, often advances to $ in a year; one good house which some one else built near it may raise its value that much. if the land _is_ high priced, see that there is some kind of a building on it; even a shanty will usually bring in enough or save you enough by its use to pay the taxes; so you will have that working for you whilst you are away. if possible, buy at auction and of reputable people who are not boomers, or at least buy at forced sale; that is how real estate is sold when it must be sold. choose lots level with the curb and on high ground, lest the expense of grading and sewering eat up your profit. keep in mind that in buying land for speculation one really buys the opportunity to tax other people, by taking part of their earnings in the shape of rent or price. do not then be deluded by boom schemes in inaccessible or desolate places; choose rather that land which in the natural course of events others must have in order to work or to live. home buying in small communities is safer than in the outskirts of a large city, because public improvements are much less costly. if you put $ in a $ home and carry the balance on mortgage, an assessment of $ for streets or sewers, which helps the vacant lots, will probably put you out of business. whether for use or speculation, buy in an established neighborhood or where the circumstances and neighbors are such that restrictions or expenditures will make its character sure. the increase in your land value depends first upon the presence, then upon the efforts, of others; it is by their labor you hope to profit. therefore, buy property on leading thoroughfares; except in a very small section devoted to the residence of millionaires, the price of residence property has a limit; even there the merest accident or the whim of fashion may destroy the value, but there is no telling what figure business property may reach. do not build unless you have to. it is rare that a building pays five per cent net on the value of the land and the cost of the house. "who buys a house already wrought, gets many a brick and nail for naught." if, however, you can get a piece of ground in a growing neighborhood and live on it till you can sell at an advance, that is the safest, and surest of investments. it delivers you from the power of the landlord. lastly--in real estate--don't bite off more than you can chew. most of these rules apply to the purchase of suburban land. in farm buying, keep as close to your market as you can. see that railway facilities are all right; get land likely to be needed for other purposes. the best way to begin is by securing all information possible from state agricultural departments. write to the industrial agents of important railroads traversing the section in which you want to locate. they have detailed information regarding land, markets, social conditions, etc.; get from the united states agricultural department a map showing the soil survey of the section of your choice. it must be borne in mind that personal aid is not to be expected from state agricultural departments, bureaus of immigration, railway companies, or any public agency. from the big farm agencies run for profit you can get lists of thousands of properties for sale. some state agricultural departments cooperate with real estate men in their own states, by referring inquiries for farms to them. some states issue from time to time lists of "abandoned farms," but these change so constantly that they help but little except in the way of suggestion. when you start farm-hunting take along a good map. then you will know a few things on your own account. verify railroad maps and "facts," as they are often biased. don't waste your time wandering around a strange locality by yourself. the local real estate man knows more about his community than you can learn in five years. in trying to find out things for yourself you will waste in aimless journeys, undertaken in ignorance of real conditions, more time and money than a real estate man's commission amounts to. the only way to form a correct idea of the production of any given section is to examine a particular farm in detail. within well-recognized limits, all the farms thereabouts will be found of similar character. before spending money to look at land, learn all you can by correspondence. whether it is more profitable in the long run to buy that good plot of land in a high state of cultivation with good buildings on it, at a high price, than to buy this exhausted piece of land with poor buildings or none at all, is a question for the individual to decide. it depends on your energy, grit, age, and how much money you have. it is much easier to take advantage of what the other fellow has done, than it is to build from the stump. you must bear in mind, however, that well kept land in a high state of cultivation seldom goes begging in the market. on the whole, if you have the capital to do it, you can make the biggest wages by buying rough or neglected land, and hewing it into shape. if you have a knowledge of soils, you may be able to find land that will grow something that no one supposes it will grow. this will be particularly useful in the case of land thought to be valueless. the lands about miles, michigan, were considered sterile until some one found out that they would grow mint, a valuable crop, which made the land salable at high prices. get hold of a desirable bit of the earth. all that men wear or eat or use; everything--shelter, food, tools, and toys comes from the land by labor. even the capital used to make more of those things is taken from the land. the employer and the capitalist are, at bottom, only men who control the land or its products, who own rights of way, mining rights, or the fee of valuable lands. thousands have "made" money by finding unexpected products in their land or of their lands, oil, coal, mineral, plants; thousands more because their land was needed by some one else, and they were paid to get out of the way. to speculate on these chances is risky business; to keep land that enables you to make good pay while you wait, is profitable. chapter iv vacant city lot cultivation in this book, necessarily, we have to take much upon the reports of others, checking them by our own judgment and experience. the startling accounts of what has been done and is being done on plots of about a quarter acre to each family, however, can be easily re-verified by any one who will go or write to philadelphia, or examine any present experiment or model gardens. these show what can be done even by unskilled labor, with hardly any capital, on small plots where the soil was poor, but which are well situated. the directors say: "the first vacant lot cultivation associations were organized when relief agencies were vainly striving to provide adequate assistance for the host of unemployed. the cultivation of vacant city lots by the unemployed had already been tried successfully in other cities. the first year we provided gardens, seeds, tools, and instruction only, for about one hundred families on twenty-seven acres of ground. at a total cost to contributors of about $ , our gardeners produced $ , worth of crops." the applicant is allowed a garden on the sole condition that he cultivate it well through the season, and that he do not trespass upon his neighbors. he must respect their right to what their labor produces. a failure to observe these rules forfeits his privilege. during twenty years, more than eight thousand families have been assisted, many old people who could no longer keep up the rapid pace of our industrial life, cripples whose physical condition held them back in the race for work, persons who on account of sickness or other misfortunes have been thrown out of the competition in modern business, and unfortunate beings who, though clear in mind and strong in muscle, have been forced to the ranks of the unemployed--these have all had an opportunity opened to them: opportunity to enjoy all of the fruits from nature's great storehouse which their own labor and skill might secure. the war has forced france, italy, and england similarly to utilize natural opportunities for subsistence in their enormous tracts of unproductive lands. in mexico all proprietors will be required to designate what they propose to cultivate and the remainder will either be allotted temporarily for agricultural purposes to those desiring them or it will be cultivated under government management. there is no remedy like that for poverty. the first man who applied for a vacant lot garden came to the philadelphia office after the announcement in the papers, so weak and emaciated that the doctor was afraid the poor fellow would be unable to get out of his office without assistance. he was a widower with three girls and a boy, the oldest girl about seventeen. he received a garden which contained only about one fifth of an acre. later he observed that a part of another little farm was left untouched on account of being very rough, full of holes, and covered with stone and bricks. part of this farm was below the street grade and subject to overflow, but it was larger than the others--nine tenths of an acre. he offered to exchange, saying he did not mind the extra work. his offer was accepted. in a few days the stones and bricks had been thrown into the holes and covered with dirt. the low places had been filled in. it was a work in which the whole family joined. a small house was rented in the immediate neighborhood in lieu of their one room near the foul alleys of the city slum. every inch of the soil was utilized. a rosy hue took the place of the pale, wan cheek of a few months before. and now the harvest has come, and the winter's store can be enumerated. thirty bushels of potatoes, four bushels of turnips, one bushel of carrots, thirty gallons of sauerkraut, fifteen gallons of catsup, five gallons of pickled beans, one hundred quarts of canned tomatoes, fifty quarts of canned corn, twenty quarts of beans, one thousand or more fine celery stalks, and many other things. warm clothing has replaced the badly worn garments of nine months ago. a few pieces of furniture have been added. the boy has been provided with a small capital for his little business. ("vacant lot cultivation," reprint from n. y. _charities review._) better labor would of course get even better results. the personal benefits that have come to a few individual cases, are largely the same that all the gardeners enjoyed in new york and elsewhere. an old colored woman--a grandmother--who had just been released from one of the hospitals where she had been treated for a long time for pleurisy, asked for a garden. it was more than a mile to the nearest plot, but she was quite willing to go even that distance if she could get a garden. at first, owing to her weakened condition, she was forced to work slowly and for short periods only, but a little assistance enabled her to get a garden started. the work proceeded so well that more land was added to her small holding, and most of her waking hours were now spent either in or near the garden, working among the tender plants or watching them grow. before the season was half spent she had developed one of the best gardens in the whole plot. her surplus produce became so large that she had to devote most of her time to gathering and selling it. finally she rented a small shed on a prominent street and passers-by often stopped, and regular customers came to buy the freshly gathered produce, the supply being not only abundant, but of great variety. one of the best gardens, from the standpoint of value of produce as well as for the varieties of products it contained and the artistic arrangement, was worked by a man who had but one arm. many other successful and profitable gardens were cultivated by men and women of an age when we generally expect them to depend entirely upon others for support. many incidents were found where such habits as drinking and loafing around saloons and clubs and abusing the family have been checked on account of the gardener's time and attention being occupied in the little farm. one of the workers came for work in a condition of mind and body which rendered his services almost worthless. he was scarcely able to carry on his work for a minute beyond what he was shown. each new move had to be explained constantly, and even then he was often found doing the work in the wrong way only a few minutes afterwards. before long, however, he began to see that his place had its responsibilities and that the work of mother nature depended on his doing his part and doing it well. by the time the crops were ready to gather and market he came to realize that the cost of production must come under the amount received from the sale of the produce so as to prevent loss. by the end of the season he had learned so to utilize his time and to organize his work and execute our plans that we were able to recommend him to a farmer who was looking for a handy man about the place. in twenty years our associations have made demonstrations of the following facts, each demonstration proving more clearly than the former ones: first. that many people out of employment must have help of some kind. second. that a great majority of them prefer self-help, and many will take no other. nearly all are able and willing to improve any opportunities open to them. third. that to open opportunities to them does not pauperize or degrade, but has the opposite effect of elevating and ennobling. it quickly establishes self-respect and self-confidence. the best and most effective way of helping people in need is to open a way whereby they may help themselves. the most effective charity is opportunity accompanied with kindly advice and a personal interest in those less fortunate than ourselves. fourth. that the offering of gardens to the unemployed with proper supervision and some assistance by providing seeds, fertilizers, and plowing accompanied with instruction, is the cheapest and easiest way of opening opportunities yet devised. fifth. that it possesses many advantages in addition to providing profitable employment; among others, that the worker must come out into the open air and sunshine; must exercise, and put forth exertion,--all of which are conducive to health, and, most important of all, he knows that all he raises is to be his own. this is the greatest incentive to industry. the vacant lot cultivation system is a school wherein gardeners are taught a trade (to most of them a new trade), farming, which offers employment for more people than all the other trades and professions combined: a trade susceptible of wide diversification and offering many fields for specializing. but little capital is required; any other field would require large outlay. its greatest advantage, however, is that the idle men and the idle land are already close to each other--the men can reach their gardens without changing their domiciles or being separated from their families. it was not until after several years that the full effect of the work was realized. a few gardeners each year from the beginning have, after one or two years' experience, taken small farms or plots of land to cultivate on their own account, or have sought employment on farms near the city; but the number is quite small compared to the whole number helped. now more than ten per cent of those that had gardens previously have for the last two years been working on their own account. out of nearly eight hundred gardeners, more than eighty-five either rented or secured the loan of gardens that season and cultivated them wholly at their own expense, and many others would have done so had suitable land been available. the number of gardens forfeited on account of poor cultivation or trespassing was only two out of plots given out. the first important advance was early in the spring of , when it became known that a large tract of land that had been in gardens for several years would be withdrawn from use. a number of the gardeners came together to talk over the situation. one proposed that they form a club to lease a tract of land and divide it up among themselves. the plan was readily agreed to, and a nine-acre tract on lansdowne avenue was rented at $ per acre per annum. some sixteen families became interested' and mr. d. f. rowe, who had been one of the most successful gardeners, became manager they had the land thoroughly fertilized and plowed, and then subdivided. some took separate allotments, as under the vacant lot association's plan, and others worked for the manager at an agreed rate of wages per hour. the whole nine acres were thoroughly well cultivated, and a magnificent crop harvested. as soon as there was produce for sale, a market was established on the ground and a regular delivery system organized which later attracted much attention. it was carried on by the children, of nine to twelve years of age, from the various families. each child was provided with a pushcart. there were many and various styles, made from little express wagons, baby coaches, and produce boxes. the children built up their own routes, and went regularly to their customers for orders. they made up the orders, loaded them into their little pushcarts, charged themselves up with the separate amounts in a small book, and at the end of each day's sales each child settled with the manager and was paid his commission (twenty per cent of the receipts) in cash. these little salesmen and salesgirls often took home four to five dollars per week and yet never worked more than three to five hours per day. the work was done under such circumstances that to them it was not work but play. you can get the full report from the philadelphia "vacant lot cultivation associations." it's interesting. "the greatest value that our little garden has brought us," said a french woman, mother of a goodly number of rather small children, "has not been in the fine vegetables it has yielded all summer, or the good times that i and the children have had in the open air, but in the glasses of beer and absinthe that my husband hasn't taken." "quite right, mother, quite right," came from a man near by. "the world can never know the evil we men don't do while we are busy in our little gardens." further, pillage of crops, which was always urged as an objection to raising fruits or truck on open grounds, has proved to be a baseless fear. where any of the gardeners are allowed to camp or put up shacks on the patches, theft does not occur and various superintendents repeat that "the few and trivial cases of stealing from vacant lot plots or school gardens were almost all at the places that were fenced." perhaps our locks and bolts tend to suggest breaking in. the garden primer issued by the new york city food supply committee gives simple but incomplete directions for planting and tending a vegetable garden. for those who need that sort of thing, these are just the sort of thing they need. they will be useful if you do not follow them. the primer tells you how to get some kind of parsnips, chard, spinach, common onions, radishes, cabbage, lettuce, beets, tomatoes, beans, turnips, peas, peppers, egg plants, cucumbers, corn, and potatoes. don't grow these things, unless it be for your own immediate use. every one grows them and ripens them all at the same time. in many places these are given away or thrown away this year. grow anything that every one wants and has not got, like okra, small fruits, etc.; you can get a much better return in cash or in trade than by spending your time "like other folks" who do not think. so i refer to these directions for their instruction, and for your warning however, they give the following admirable injunctions. "help your country and yourself by raising your own vegetables." as we will likely have to send to europe in coming years as much or even more food than we did last year, there is only one way to avoid a shortage among our own people, that is by raising a great deal more than usual. to do this we must plant every bit of available land. (of course, we can't; the owners won't let us. ed.) if you have a back yard, you can do your part and help the world and yourself by raising some of the food you eat. the more you raise the less you will have to buy, and the more there will be left for some of your fellow countrymen who have not an inch of ground on which to raise anything. if there is a vacant lot in your neighborhood, see if you cannot get the use of it for yourself and your neighbors, and raise your own vegetables. an hour a day spent in this way will not only increase wealth and help your family, but will help you personally by adding to your strength and well-being and making you appreciate the eden joy of gardening. an hour in the open air is worth more than a dozen expensive prescriptions by an expensive doctor. the only tools necessary for a small garden are a spade or spading fork, a hoe, a rake, and a line or piece of cord. first of all, clear the ground of all rubbish, sticks, stones, bottles, etc. (especially whisky bottles). choose the sunniest spot in the yard for your garden. dig up the soil to a depth of to inches, using a spade or spading fork. (deeper for parsnips and some other roots. ed.) break up all the lumps with the spade or fork. if you live in a section where your neighbors have gardens, you might club together to hire a teamster for a day to do the plowing and harrowing for you all, thus saving a large amount of labor. after your garden has been well dug, it must be fertilized before any planting is done. in order to produce large and well-grown crops it is often necessary to fertilize before each planting. very good prepared fertilizers can be bought at seed stores, but horse or cow manure is much better, as it lightens the soil in addition to supplying plant food. use street sweepings if you can get them. the manure should be well dug into the ground, at least to the full depth of the top soil. the ground should then be thoroughly raked, as seeds must be sown in soil which has been finely powdered. lay out the garden, keeping the rows straight with a line. straight rows are practically a necessity, not only for easier culture but for economy in space. after you have marked all of your rows, the next step is opening the furrow. (a furrow is a shallow trench.) that is done with the hoe. (best and quickest with a wheel hoe. ed.) after the furrow is opened, it is necessary that the seed be sown and immediately covered before the soil has dried in covering the seeds the soil must be firmly pressed down with the foot. this is important. in buying seed it is best to go to some well-established seed house, or, if that can't be done, to order by mail rather than to take needless chances. with most kinds of seeds a package is sufficient for a twenty-foot row. begin to break up the hard surface of the soil between the plants soon after they appear, using a hand cultivator or hoe, and keep it loose throughout the season. this kills weeds; it lets in air to the plant roots and keeps the moisture in the ground. by constantly stirring the top soil after your plants appear, the necessity of watering can be largely avoided except in very dry weather. an occasional soaking of the soil is better than frequent sprinkling. water your garden either very early in the morning or after sundown. it is better not to water when the sun is shining hot. the planting scheme can be altered to suit your individual taste. for instance, peas and cabbage are included because almost everybody likes to have them fresh from their garden; but they occupy more space in proportion to their value than beets and carrots. therefore a small garden could be made more profitable by omitting them altogether, or cutting them down in amount and increasing the amount of carrots, beets, and turnips planted; or any of the vegetables mentioned which may not be in favor with the family can be left out. the kind of season we have would change the date of planting. in raising vegetables, as in everything else, one should use one's common (or garden variety of) sense. a good rule is to wait until the ground has warmed up a bit. never try to work in soil wet enough to be sticky, or muddy; wait until it dries enough to crumble readily. gardening is not a rule of thumb business. each gardener must bring his plants up in his own way in the light of his own experience and in accordance with the conditions of his own garden. a garden lover who has a bit of land will speedily learn if his eyes and his mind, as well as his hands, are always busy, no matter how meager his knowledge at the beginning. there is plenty of land--if you can only get it. says carl vrooman, assistant secretary of agriculture, in regard to the food problem: "millions of acres of farm land are being held out of use and other millions of acres are being cultivated on a wasteful and inefficient basis. land values have risen at an unprecedented rate. they are based not upon what the farm will earn at the present time, but on an expectancy of what it will be worth in the future. the farmer's son or the tenant farmer, with little or no capital, cannot hope to acquire possession of a farm w hen the price of land is so high that his earnings would not pay the interest on the investment. the result is that land remains idle or in the hands of tenants, and thousands of farmers' boys desert the country for the city. ". . . . what we need, and need badly, is a program of taxation which, without throwing additional burdens on the bona fide farmer, will place land now idle within the reach of men of limited means who possess the ambition and the ability to cultivate it." you can see that poor ignorant people, women, boys, cripples, old men, often on less than x feet each, not only in philadelphia, but as war gardeners in new york, and most other towns, have been able to support themselves by their work on the land. you can do much better. to be sure, they had valuable land and often seeds free, but for such little pieces of land these are small items, and many of them had no certainty of having the land even for a second year, consequently they could not have hotbeds or any permanent improvement. you can make all these things. then what can you do? only remember they had intelligent instruction and did the work themselves, and got the whole product; often the children helped--they thought it fun. it does not pay to farm a small piece of land where all the workers have to be hired. nor does it pay if one calculates merely to stick in seeds with one hand and pull out profits with the other. chapter v results to be expected. "if we get every one out on the farms, then there will be an over-production of farm products and a fall in prices." true, but there are farmers who could do better in towns; what we want to do is to make it easy for people to get on the land about the cities, then it would be equally easy for those farmers who are better adapted for city life to get near the cities. under present conditions, where the worker is forced out fifteen or twenty miles from the town by the high price of land and the large amount of land required, the farmer is as much cut off from the city as the city dweller is cut off from rural life. we need not be afraid to teach men better ways; there will always be plenty too stupid or too old or too isolated to learn; these will remain a bulwark against too sudden change. dr. engel, former head of the prussian statistical bureau, informs us that "scientific farming succeeds because a given amount of effort, when more intelligently directed, produces greater results. inasmuch, then, as the amount of food which the world can consume is limited, the smaller will be the number of farmers required to produce the needed supply, and the larger will be the number driven from the country to the city. it has already been observed that if scientific methods were universally adopted in the united states, doubtless one half of those now engaged in agriculture could produce the present crops, which would compel the other half to abandon the farm." this is "engel's law." this "argument" assumes that we are now utilizing all the land possible and that every one is fully supplied with food. but when we consider the great masses of people in the slums of all cities who are always underfed and whose constant thought is about their next meal; when we see hundreds of able-bodied men waiting in line until midnight for half a loaf of stale bread, surely it seems that there is a possibility of keeping all of the present farmers at work, if not of finding new fields for others, if we make our conditions such that there will be opportunities for every able-bodied worker to labor at remunerative employment. professor l. h. bailey, a most industrious and accurate observer, says: "dr. engel's argument rests on the assumption that agriculture produces only or chiefly food; but probably more than half of the agricultural products of the united states is not food. it is cotton, flax, hemp, wool, hides, timber, tobacco, dyes, drugs, flowers, ornamental trees and plants, horses, pets, and fancy stock, and hundreds of other non-edible commodities. the total food produce of the united states, according to the twelfth census, was $ , , . the cost of material used in the three industries of textile, lumber and leather manufactories alone was $ , , , . "dr. engel thinks that the outlay for subsistence diminishes as income increases; but comforts and luxuries increase in intimate ratio with the income, and the larger part of these come from the farm and forest. dr. engel, in fact, allows this, for he says that 'sundries become greater as income increases."' we have already abundance of information about almost every county in the union, published by boards of trade and land boomers, like the following about "oxnard, ventura county, the center of the famous lima bean district in california. for a year the returns from farm products alone, in this vicinity, are estimated at over $ , , . the sugar factory, which uses tons of beets every twenty-four hours, requires the yield of about acres every season. the beet crop is rotated with beans, and the factory's supply is kept good by systematic methods. two thousand head of cattle are being fattened at the present time in the company's yard on the beet pulp. much of the pulp is also sold to local stockmen, who value it highly for feed. the factory turns out bags of sugar every day." and again: "eastern farm lands steadily declined in price up to about , so that eastern land sold for less than western land of the same quality and of like situation; but the tide seems at last to have turned, and much money is now being made in buying up cheap farms and especially in sub-dividing them for small cultivators." that sort of thing is interesting; but it is not what a man wants to know--he is anxious to learn how much he can make and where and how to do it. the man who seeks a comfortable living will do better to rent on long lease or buy a few acres convenient to trolley or railroad communication with a city; besides the returns which will come to the farmer from the use of a few acres, if he is the owner he will get a constant increase in the value of the land, due to the growth of the city. if the city grows out so that the land becomes too valuable to farm, he will be well paid for leaving. (although progress is continually forcing laborers back upon less desirable land, their loss, unless they are the owners, is the landowner's gain.) the amount of product to be grown for one's own use depends on the size of the family and its fondness for vegetables. "an area of x feet [about two fifths of an acre] is generally sufficient to supply a family of five persons with vegetables, not considering the winter supply of potatoes; but the acres must be well tilled and handled." (bailey, "principles of vegetable gardening.") "the produce that could thus be obtained from an acre of land well situated would abundantly supply with nearly all the vegetables named, nineteen families, comprising in all individuals." in our garden we must know what we want and know how to get it. (it is impossible to treat exhaustively of the various crops in a book of this kind. on onion culture alone there are four standard books, besides seven or eight recent experimental station bulletins. "in a family garden x feet (which equals six new york city lots), the rows running the long way of the area, eight or ten feet may be reserved along one side for asparagus, rhubarb, sweet herbs, flowers, and possibly a few berry bushes. a strip twenty feet wide may be reserved for vines, as melons, cucumbers and squashes. there remains a strip seventy feet wide, or space for twenty rows three and one half feat apart. this area is large enough to allow of appreciable results in rotation of crops; and i! it is judiciously managed, it should maintain high productiveness for a lifetime." (bailey, "principles of vegetable gardening.")) "the things to be considered in the home garden are: ( ) a sufficient product to supply the family; ( ) continuous succession of crops; ( ) ease and cheapness of cultivation; ( ) maintenance of the productivity of the land year after year. "the ease and efficiency of cultivation are much enhanced if all crops are in long rows, to allow of wheel-tool tillage either by horse or wheel-hoe." the experience of the vacant lot gardeners (chapter iv) shows that if the land be near a large market where the product can be peddled or sold by the producers or by those (as in mr. rowe's case), with whom he directly deals, more than twenty-five dollars capital is not necessary, but peter henderson ("gardening for profit") estimates that to get the best results, $ capital per acre is required for anything less than ten acres. where the land is favorably situated a fortune may be made in cultivation of a few acres--with brains. quinn says ("money in the garden") that he knows a large number of market gardeners worth from ten to forty thousand dollars each, none of whom had five hundred dollars to begin with. if one has not enough money to get all that can be gotten out of his plot, it is best to put part of the land into clover to fit it for later use or to use it for raising grass. results undoubtedly come from hard work; but it is not necessary, in order to cultivate a little land successfully, that you should work all day on your hands and knees; if you can raise fruit or nuts, this is not needed at all. but for vegetables a certain amount of it is necessary--when there is a large job of that kind of weeding to be done, you can hire italians or other foreigners to do it better and cheaper than you can do it yourself. those who will read this book can earn more with their heads than their hands; but when weeding is needed after a sudden shower and there is no one else, you must do some of it yourself; the weather will not wait for you to "get a man," and if you are not willing to do such things, your chances of success are greatly lessened. here is the experience of one who "got a man": "my garden, to begin with, was in the most rudimentary condition, having been allowed to run to grass. after digging up a spot about ten feet square in the turf, taking the early morning for the work, i decided that it would require all summer to get the garden fairly spaded up, so i hired a stalwart irishman to do the work for me, which he did in a week, charging me nine dollars for the job. as he professed to be also an expert in planting vegetables, i bought a supply of seeds in the city and intrusted them to him, assuring myself that once in the ground the rest of the work would fall to me; if i could not keep a garden patch fifty feet square clear of weeds, i had better abandon the business at once, and all hopes of making a living out of scientific gardening. the beginning was an unfortunate one. the weather happened to be first very wet, and then so dry and hot that my vegetables were unable to break their way through the baked earth. when my peas and beans still gave no signs after being in the ground for two weeks, i discovered that the whole work would have to be done over again. a presidential campaign was beginning, which kept me in town often late at night, so that the chief labor of the garden fell to my faithful irishman, who got far more satisfaction out of it than i did. the vegetables finally did come up above the surface, and many an evening i finished a hard day's work by pumping and carrying hundreds of gallons of water to pour upon potato plants, tomatoes, beans, and other things which a friend of mine, an expert in such matters, assured me were curiosities of malformation and backwardness. my irishman told me that it was all for want of manure, and by his advice i bought six dollars' worth of manure from a neighboring stable, and had it spread over the ground. the bills for my garden were meanwhile mounting up. i had begun the spring with a garden ledger, keeping an accurate account of every penny spent, and hoping to put on the other side of the page a tremendous list of fine vegetables. the accounts are before me now, and i presume that every one who has been through the same experience has preserved some such record." (naturally, if he began that way.) ("liberty and a living," by p. g. hubert.) if your idea of farming is to bury "some seeds" in untilled ground, regardless of suitability, and "wait till they come up," you will wait in vain for a decent crop. says professor roberts in the "farmstead" (macmillan), "mushrooms sell at fifty cents per pound; maize for one half cent per pound. why? because anybody, even a squaw, can raise maize, but only a specially skilled gardener can succeed in mushroom culture." but enough has been said to show that you must cultivate with brains. the germans say, "what your head won't do, your legs have to." "we'll have a little farm, a pig, a horse and cow and you will drive the wagon while i drive the plow," is very pretty. the horse and the pigs are practical, if you can take care of them yourself; pigs are good farm catch-alls. if you have to pay a man to do it, you had better hire your horses and buy your pork. two well-groomed, healthy cows, one calving in the spring and one in the autumn, can be made a source of profit, and of valuable manure, if you have land enough in a neighborhood where up-to-date parents are willing to pay ten to twenty cents a quart for pure milk for their infants or even for family use. but your land and your own baby's care and milk will probably be enough for you to attend to promptly and thoroughly every day--and night. it is an age-old experience that if we take care of a little land, the land will take care of us. in ferrero's "grandezza e decadenza di roma" is an interesting account of marcus terentius varro's "de re rustica." varro wrote in the year b.c., and as he was then eighty years old, he had seen the transformation of italy from an agricultural to a manufacturing, trading community and the accompanying wreck of the old agricultural system, which, of course, he laments. the growth of vast landed estates largely held by imperial favorites, as pliny said, destroyed italy. so fearful has the destruction been that it is only in our generation that the campagna at rome, which was once an intensely fruitful quilt of garden patches, has been reclaimed from the fever-smitten swamp to which vast landlordism had reduced it. in the third book of "de re rustica," varro recommends as his remedy, intensive cultivation close to the cities, and the breeding of "fancy stock," including pigeons' snails, peacocks, deer, and wild boars. he tells how an aunt of his made , sesterces ($ ) in one year by raising thrushes for the roman market, at a time when an excellent farm of about acres only yielded , sesterces per annum. he quotes another case of one who made , sesterces per annum from a flock of one hundred peacocks, by selling the eggs and the young. those old roman women weren't so slow. ferraro calls varro's work one of the most important for the history of ancient italy and says historians have made a mistake in not reading it. at the time of the migration of the barbarians ( to a.d.), the lot of each able-bodied man was about thirty morgen (equal to twenty acres) on average lands, on very good ground only ten to fifteen morgen (equal to seven or ten acres), four morgen being equal to one hectare. of this land, at least a third, and sometimes a half, was left uncultivated each year. the remainder of the fifteen to twenty morgen sufficed to feed and fatten into giants the immense families of these child-producing germans, and this in spite of the primitive technique, whereby at least half the productive capacity of a day was lost. (from "the state," by franz oppenheimer, p. .) in the orange judd prize contest, merely for the clearest account of a garden, not for results at all, a number of the contestants raised produce at the rate of $ to $ per acre and over, even in semi-arid regions; for instance, l. e. burnham says that he raised on his first garden of about one third of an acre in eastern massachusetts, garden stuff which he sold to summer cottagers for $ . . this took about eight days' work, nearly all with a wheel hoe. remember about the present increased and changing prices and costs? at the present writing, , the advances in costs and prices would probably average about three quarters, and those of common labor perhaps one third over those given in the text. in other respects, the instances and authorities, still pertinent, have been retained in this revision. it would have been waste, not thrift, to get a new authority to tell us that straw makes the cleanest mulch for strawberries; that's the reason they were called strawberries; and they grew just the same way ten years ago. l. e. dimosh of connecticut raised on one quarter of an acre $ . , of which over $ was profit. in other cases the profits were $ (gianque, nebraska) per acre; and over $ (dora dietrich, pennsylvania); with the rather exceptional profit at the rate of $ (mrs. hall, connecticut). some showed a loss. some of the town or city lots yielded very high profits; one of a third of an acre gave a profit of $ . (edge darlington, md.). the summary "based upon the reports of five hundred and fifteen gardens in nearly every state and territory and in canada and the provinces, may be considered accurate and reliable. covering such a vast territory local conditions are avoided." it shows that "the average size of farm gardens was , square feet, or about half an acre, the average labor cost $ . , the average value of product was at the rate of $ per acre, and the net profit over $ per acre." to get results we must first learn and then teach what we know. the finest game in the world is to teach. no one ever knows anything thoroughly till he tries to teach it. when you tell a person how to do a thing, he doesn't know how to do it himself. when you show him how to do it, still he doesn't know that he could do it himself. but when you get him to do it himself, then he knows. country boys will believe that early tomatoes can be raised by starting them in the house; but like the rest of us they don't know how to do it, and when spring comes and it is time to do such things, they are busy on the farm. there are several schools trying the experience of allowing the children to plant in window boxes in early april and are showing them how to do it. but as there is not room for all the children to plant in these window boxes, there is a new idea which originated in the country, where the children are engaged in the fall and the spring assisting their parents at agricultural work. it was hard to get up any interest in school gardens, but it was all the more important that they should have agricultural instruction in the winter time. at berkeley heights, n. j., we devised this simple plan, and it works. we made a number of wooden boxes, one foot wide, two feet long, so they will just fit on the ledge of a school desk. they are only three inches deep, with a bottom of tin, turned up at the edges, or of well painted pine, white-leaded at the joints. there is no drainage, since we discovered that if they are not watered too much, they do better without drainage. the holes usually made in the bottoms of flower boxes carry off a lot of plant food with the water that runs through. now, how to store these boxes when they are not in the sunny places near the windows? why, we set up four posts of one-inch stuff at the four corners, so that the box looks like a kitchen table turned upside down (see illustration). now the boxes filled with earth and with the young plants growing can be stored at night, one on top of the other, by the wall of the schoolroom. if it is going to be cold, and over sundays, the pile of them can be covered with newspapers, which keep them from getting chilled and from drying up, or the boxes can be covered and carried home by the children. we found that for most plants nine inches is high enough for the posts, and that well-seasoned one-inch lumber is heavy enough not to warp if it is painted inside and out, and it is not too heavy to lift. by the way, better paint the joints before the sides are nailed together. it makes them more water-tight. four screws at the corners will make them still tighter. the scholars raise lettuce, parsley, onions, and strawberries, and all kinds of small plants, as well as flowers, in the winter; and when the plants get too big or two crowded for the boxes, they are separated and transplanted into other boxes to be taken home. this was so successful that we devised a big window box which is suited for home use also; it is just as wide as the window and half as long again as it is wide. but this box does not stand outside on the window sill; if it did, the plants would freeze. one end only rests on the inside window sill where it gets the sun; the end is supported by two legs of the same height that the window sill is from the floor. when a nice warm day comes, the other end of the box is pushed out of the window and the sash closed down on it to keep it from falling out. a couple of cleats or nails in the window jamb help to hold it in place. of course, the box has to be watched and taken in if it turns cold, but it's astonishing how much can be raised and how much more can be learned out of season by the school desk boxes and the home window sliding boxes. try it and see for yourself. the children can learn as much about some things from a box x ft. as they can from a children's garden. here are a couple of samples of what the kids themselves in a city school think of it. "department of education _"office of the principal of public school no. _ "van alst ave., astoria, queens "i inclose a few compositions that were written by some of our boys and girls of the fourth year. you will recognize the descriptions of your garden trays for classroom use unfortunately the free space in the classroom is limited, so we have found it necessary to allow each pupil only part of a box. "the children themselves are delighted, as you can see by their compositions. "very sincerely yours, (signed)" agnes a. cording "asst. principal." p. s. no. grade a--april l, . arthur miller, age our garden at first we planted radishes then onions and lettuce and beans and sunflowers. each one of us have / of a box. when we had finished that we brought them up to the front of the room and then watered them and went home. anna duerr, age my garden i have a garden. it is a box. i have a quarter of a box for my very own. my garden has five rows. in the first there are radishes, in the second lettuce, in the third onions, in the fourth beans, in the fifth sunflowers. i hope my garden grows up. of course these are only preparatory for profitable work. we have cases in which $ has been recorded from sales in one year from one acre, and many cases in which at least $ worth of produce has been sold from an acre. these are sales, not profits. such results are not due to the boundless and fertile soil of the new world nor to small farming alone--they are due to intelligence. professor ronna gives the following figures of crops per acre at romford (breton's farm): tons of potatoes (say bushels), tons of marigold, tons of beets, tons of carrots, to tons of various cabbages, and so on. it was suggested to the agricultural department that it might fix standards of what is a good attainable crop. on every golf links we have what is called a bogie score posted up. that is a score that a certain mythical captain bogie, supposed to be an average good player, could make on those links. on one typical club-course, for instance, the bogie score is . though it has been done in , the ordinary player congratulates himself when he gets down to the bogie score. now, if there were standards attainable to ordinary intelligent and good cultivation set in each section, it would enormously encourage farmers to reach them, which may be of great importance. one of the heads of the department replied as follows: '"in regard to fixing a standard for each farmer to strive to attain, i think that a very good idea; but the standard for each crop in each particular locality would necessarily be somewhat different from that in every other locality. persons who have had experience in experimental work keenly appreciate these points. the work which is done upon one soil formation under different climatic conditions in one season, does not necessarily find a duplicate in any other locality, and the experience is that what is accomplished in one year would not be duplicated on the same soil and under the same management again in several years, for the conditions under which agriculture is carried on are so many of them outside of the control of the operator that it is very difficult to predict results or to attain any fixed standard. this is necessarily so with an operation which has so many uncertain factors to deal with as agriculture. humidity of the atmosphere and of the soil, the available plant food in the soil, methods of tillage, fertilizers used, recurrence of frosts, amount of sunlight, the altitude and latitude of different localities, all have a bearing upon crop production. it is, therefore, very difficult to fix any approximate standard or average production for any particular locality without basing it upon a long series of years. i think, however, that it is a subject worthy of agitation, and it might inspire agriculturists to better work were such an ideal fixed upon." this indicates that each experiment station or progressive farmer or teacher of agriculture might advantageously establish the local "bogie score" of what might fairly be expected. we know how misleading averages are. the man who tried to wade across a stream whose average depth was two feet, was drowned. "the writer used to go to a fishing club of which cornelius vanderbilt was a member. one of the standard jokes there was that the thirty members are worth on an average over two million apiece, that is, cornelius sixty millions, and the rest of us (comparatively) nothing. which are you to be? a vanderbilt among cultivators, or the other fellow who makes the 'average'?" ("money making in free america," by the author.) but even making all allowances we see that we must cultivate much better than the "average," to make anything more than the farmer's hard living off the land. peter dunne tells us what kind of a grind that is. "this pa-aper says th' farmer niver sthrikes. he hasn't got th' time to. he's too happy. a farmer is continted with his farm lot. there's nawthin' to take his mind off his wurruk. he sleeps at night with his nose against th' shingled roof iv his little frame home an' dhreams iv cinch bugs. while th' stars are still alight he walks in his sleep to wake th' cows that left th' call f'r four o'clock. thin it's ho! f'r feedin' th' pigs an' mendin' th' reaper. th' sun arises as usual in th' east, an' bein' a keen student iv nature he picks a cabbage leaf to put in his hat. breakfast follows, a gay meal beginnin' at nine an' endin' at nine-three. thin it's off f'r th' fields where all day he sets on a bicycle seat an' reaps the bearded grain an' th' hessian fly, with nawthin' but his own thoughts an' a couple iv horses to commune with. an' so he goes an' he's happy th' livelong day if ye don't get in ear-shot iv him. in winter he is employed keeping th' cattle fr'm sufferin' his own fate an' writin' testymonyals iv dyspepsia cures." ("mr. dooley says.") chapter vi what an acre may produce we have shown what an acre has produced. you must figure out for yourself what you can make your acres produce and what the product can be sold for. all progress in agriculture has come heretofore through experiments, made mostly by uninformed and untrained men. what may not be done by practical learning and applied intelligence? the wonderful recent advances have been made in just that way. "the modern improved methods in agriculture, known collectively as intensive farming, have nearly all had their origin in the hands of truck farmers and market gardeners. no class of the rural population is more alert in utilizing the newest researches and discoveries in all lines of agricultural science, and none keeps in closer touch with the agricultural colleges and experiment stations." ("development of the trucking interests," by f. s. earle.) still, it is not advisable for the ordinary city dweller, however intelligent, without other means and without either experience or study, to cast himself upon a small patch of ground for a living; but if he can give it most of his time mornings and evenings, or if he sees, as many do, that he will be forced out of a position, it would be well for him seriously to consider intensive cultivation as a resource. it would be the greatest blessing to our day laborers if they could secure an acre of land which they could till in conjunction with their other labor. if time and change works upon society as to put the laborer out of a job, he will be safe in his acre home and can live from it and be happy and contented. the time required to cultivate an acre is much less than is generally supposed. the maximum time required seems to be that given in the university of illinois experiment station at urbana, bulletin , by j. w. lloyd, at the rate of hours (say days) with one horse and hours (say days) for hand labor. with a great variety of crops, or with poor labor add one half to this time allowance. the results vary greatly. an acre of northeastern long island will produce to bushels of potatoes at a selling price of fifty to seventy five cents per bushel, which wholesale, at those figures much below present prices, bring an income of $ to $ to the grower. the actual cash outlay in one instance was: seed potatoes $ . commercial fertilizer . spraying for blight and pests . total $ . bu. selling at the minimum price $ . less the cash outlay . income to the grower from an acre $ . a production of bushels costs no more cash outlay per acre, while the income is big wages to the farmer. if but one acre be grown and hand labor is used, the labor might cost an average of $ per acre, with wages at $ . to $ . per day, and if the produce is shipped any distance by rail and consigned, it would cost $ to $ to pay selling charges, leaving you a profit of about $ per acre on this crop. other crops in the rotation might not be so profitable, hence it is not fair to figure an income on one. but, of course, in the above estimate, we are considering mainly the cases where the gardener does the work and earns the wages himself. an acre will bear if devoted to each crop, of: blackberries, , qt., which at cent a qt., would bring $ . dewberries, , qt., say at cent a qt. . gooseberries, bu. at $ . a bu. . strawberries, , qt. at cent a qt. . currants, plants yield bu. . raspberries, per acre . to . peaches, per acre . to . pears, per acre . to . apples, per acre . to . grapes . five, or even three acres will give a good living if this can be approximated: an acre will produce in vegetables--either asparagus, bunches at cent a bunch, would be $ . cauliflower, to bbl. at $ . , say . onions, bu. at cent per bu. . cabbage seed, lb., at cent a lb. . brussels sprouts, qt. at cent a qt. . celery, bunches at cent a bunch . parsnips, bu. at . a bu. . lettuce, heads at cent a head . lima beans, bu. at $ . a bu. . we may hope to get from an acre, respectively in potatoes, bu. at cent a bu, would be $ . cabbages, tons at $ . a ton . carrots and beets, to bu . tomatoes, crates at cent a crate . early peas, bu. at $ a bu. . turnips, bu. at cent a bu . spinach, bbl. at cent a bbl. . mr. d. l. hartman, whose experience in the north is given on a later page, has since moved to little river, florida. he writes in : "i have recently sold the last strawberries of a small plot. owing to a combination of circumstances it produced, i think, the largest value per area of any crop i have ever cultivated. the main factors were high prices realized and heavy yield. area of plot, a trifle over one fifth acre. total yield, quarts, total receipts, $ . . first berries picked january nd; last berries picked june th; variety, brandywine. "this shows a yield of , quarts per acre worth at the same rate, $ . . "the fruit was all sold to stores in miami (five miles distant) and brought an average you notice of - / cents per quart for the crop, the highest bringing fifty cents per quart. the average price during the ordinary seasons is about twenty cents per quart. my ordinary average yield is less than half of this yield or about quarts per acre, and that is much above the average of most yields of other growers. the crop was started with northern plants, set just as for matted rows in the north, then early in november plants were dug up and set out in order in rows inches apart and - / inches apart in the row, leaving every fifth row vacant for paths. it is super close culture; one plant per square foot for the total area or a little more. "i often think that if i were operating in the north again i would like to try strawberries the same way, except that i would do the transplanting september st instead of november st as here, since i would expect them to grow larger and of course i would plan to mulch them during the winter. it would take a lot of planting but i think it would insure a tremendous yield. i find that the digging and planting including watering of plants makes ten hours' work with elimination of all waste motion." you will not get as good results as mr. hartman's average, unless you learn as much as he has learned; he has succeeded by well-directed work in different places and circumstances. the south and west are not the only places in the united states where a man can live on one acre of ground, by intensive culture and with irrigation. the eastern and middle states can present just as good, if not better, opportunities, especially where land in small tracts is available near the large cities. _the farmers' advocate_ (topeka, kansas) says of lands which ten years ago were among the much advertised "abandoned farms" of the eastern states: "all over the eastern states where farming twenty years ago was pronounced a failure under western competition there has sprung up this intensive cultivation. violets are grown in one place and tuberoses by the acre in another. celery is making one man's large profit near williamsburg. special fruits are cultivated. currants are grown by the ton and sold by the pound, yielding a profit. this is in progress over the entire range of farming." at hyde park, a little village three miles north of reading, pa., there is a small farm owned by oliver r. shearer, who may be said to be one of the most successful farmers in the united states. this farm contains - / acres, only - / of which are cultivated, but they yield the owner annually from $ to $ . from the profits of his intensive farming, mr. shearer has paid $ for his property, which, besides the land, consists of a modern two-story brick house, with barn, chicken-yard, and orchard, the whole surrounded by a neat fence. he has also raised and educated a family of three children. there are no secrets, mr. shearer says, about his method of farming. a study of conditions, the application of common-sense methods and untiring energy, he asserts, will enable others to do what he has done, but that most men would kill themselves with the work. in an agricultural exchange a small farmer tells that he makes a living and saves some money from a ten-acre farm. before he was through paying for his land, which cost $ an acre, building his house, fences, and outbuildings, he went in debt $ , having about the same amount to start with. he is near a good market, and in five years has paid off the debt, and has been getting ahead ever since. he raises poultry and small fruits, and says that it is a good combination, as most of the work with poultry comes in winter, while he can do nothing out of doors. he maintains that a ten-acre farm rightly managed will bring a good living, including the comforts and some of the luxuries of life, and says: "this i have fully demonstrated, and what i have done others may do." _maxwell's talisman_ says: "e. j. o'brien of citronelle, alabama, received $ clear from an acre of cucumbers shipped to the st. louis market. he was two weeks late in getting them on the market. he says those two weeks would have meant nearly double the net returns. he does not consider this an extraordinary return and hopes to do better next year." "professor thomas shaw writes of a plot of ordinary ground in minnesota comprising the nineteenth part of an acre, which for years kept a family of six matured persons abundantly supplied with vegetables all the year, with the exception of potatoes, celery, and cabbage. in addition, much was given away, more especially of the early varieties, and in many instances much was thrown away." "in the market-gardens of florida we see such crops as to bushels of onions per acre, bushels of tomatoes, bushels of sweet potatoes; which testify to a high development of culture." we select from bailey's "principles of vegetable gardening" the following general estimates: _beets--_average crop is - bushels per acre. _carrots--_good crop is - bushels per acre. _cabbage--_ heads per acre. _potatoes--_the yield of potatoes averages about bushels per acre, but with forethought and good tillage and some fertilizer the yield should run from to bushels, and occasionally yields will much exceed the latter figure. _rhubarb--_from to stalks are tied in a bunch for market, and an acre should produce dozen bunches. _salsify--_good crop - bushels per acre. _onions--_a good crop of onions is - bushels to the acre, but - are secured under the very best conditions. the price per ton for horseradish varies from ten to fifty dollars, and from two to four tons should be raised on an acre, the latter quantity when the ground is deep and rich and when the plants do not suffer for moisture. averages are very misleading and it would be better to pay little attention to them. they are like the average wealth possessed by a class of twenty schoolchildren. the schoolmaster who had $ asked what was the average wealth of each, if the total wealth of the class was $ . the brightest boy answered, "one dollar." the schoolmaster asked tommy at the foot of the class if he did not think they would be a prosperous class. he answered, "it depends on who has the 'twenty.'" but, all the more, good averages imply some wonderful yields. the following are actual averages in the united states twelfth and thirteenth census report, respectively. flowers and plants, $ and $ ; nursery products, $ and $ ; sugar cane, $ ( tons per acre) and $ ; small fruits, $ and $ ; hops, $ ( lb. per acre) and $ ; sweet potatoes, $ ( but per acre) and $ ; hemp, $ ( lb. per acre) and $ ; potatoes, $ ( bu. per acre) and $ ; sugar beets, $ ( tons per acre) and $ ; sorghum cane, $ ( ton per acre) and $ ; cotton, $ ( - bale per acre) and $ . flaxseed, $ ( bu. per acre) and $ ; cereals, $ and $ . . specialties, however, often do much better. for example, r. b. handy, in farmers' bulletin no. , united states department of agriculture, tells us that a prominent and successful new jersey grower says: "i cannot give the cost in detail of establishing asparagus beds, as so much would depend upon whether one had to buy the roots, and upon other matters. where growers usually grow roots for their own planting the cost is principally the labor, manure, and the use of land for two years upon which, however, a half crop can be had. "the cost of maintaining a bed can only be estimated per acre as follows: manure (applied in the spring) $ . labor, plowing, cultivating, hoeing, etc . cutting and bunching . fertilizer (applied after cutting) . total $ . "an asparagus bed well established, say five years after planting, when well cared for should, for the next ten or fifteen years, yield from to bunches per annum, or at cents per bunch (factory price) $ to $ ." "if the rent, labor, etc., for a crop of asparagus is $ per acre, and the crop is three tons of green shoots at $ per ton, on the farm, the profit is $ per acre. if we get six tons at $ per ton, the profit, less the extra cost of labor and manure, is $ per acre." ("food for plants," by harris and myers, page .) around bethlehem, indiana, the farmers raise hundreds of tons of sunflower seed every year, and the industry pays better than anything else in the farming line. a good deal of the seed is made into condition powder for stock, occasionally some is made into so-called "olive oil" which is said to surpass cotton-seed oil. large quantities are used for feeding parrots and poultry, or consumed by the russian hebrews who eat them as we would eat peanuts. a careful investigation made in of the value of certain productions taken from farms in new york state shows that the culture of apples is very profitable. from twenty adjoining farms in one neighborhood in western new york, the report gave an average annual return of $ per acre at the orchard, covering a period of five years. another report gave an average of $ annual income per acre for three years, and these results were obtained where only ordinary care was given to the orchard. but note this.-- one orchard, where the trees had been well sprayed to protect the fruit from insect injuries, and the soil well cultivated and properly fertilized, gave a return in one year of $ per acre, and for three years an average income of $ per acre. one man bought a farm of acres in central new york with a much-neglected orchard upon it of acres, paying $ for the whole. he cultivated the orchard, pruned and sprayed the trees thoroughly, and in seven months from the time he purchased the farm, sold the apple crop from it for $ cash. "peanuts: culture and uses," by r. b. handy in farmers' bulletin no. of the united states department of agriculture says: "according to the census the average yield of peanuts in the united states was . bushels per acre, the average in virginia being about , and in tennessee bushels per acre. this appears to be a low average, especially as official and semiofficial figures give to bushels as an average crop, and bushels is not an uncommon yield. fair peanut land properly manured and treated to intelligent rotation of crops should produce in an ordinary season a yield of bushels to the acre and from to tons of excellent hay. (of course better land with more liberal treatment and a favorable season will produce heavier crops, the reverse being true of lands which have been frequently planted with peanuts without either manuring or rotation of crops.) besides the amount of peanuts gathered, there are always large quantities left in the ground which have escaped the gathering, and on these the planter turns his herd of hogs, so that there is no waste of any part of the plant." tobacco is a paying crop if the soil is just right. two thousand pounds per acre can be raised on favorable sites. connecticut tobacco brings, in ordinary times, from twenty to thirty cents a pound; from four to over six hundred dollars being the possible return. some connecticut soils raise sumatra tobacco equal to the imported crop that sells in this country at fancy prices. the department of agriculture claims that the cuban type of tobacco can be closely approximated in pennsylvania and ohio. but it must be remembered that the soil is of paramount importance in tobacco raising. the department has prepared soil maps of most of the important tobacco districts of the united states. if you think your land may be suited to tobacco, apply there for information. you may make your land invaluable. d. l. hartman, _rural new yorker,_ gave the following facts and figures: "during last season the sales from one acre of early tomatoes amounted to $ , and from a trifle more than two and one half acres, including the acre of 'earlies,' the remainder mid-season and late plantings, the total sales amounted to over $ . from a little less than one acre and a half $ worth of strawberries were sold, while the returns from early cabbages during the last few years have been at the rate of about $ per acre. these statements are not made in the spirit of challenge. the results are gratifying to me, because larger than anticipated; but much greater values can be and are produced. in fact, the limit of value that may be grown on an acre of land no one can tell. i have a small plot of ground containing less than one sixth of an acre, planted one year with radishes and lettuce, followed by eggplant and cauliflower, and the next year to radishes alone, followed by egg-plant, and each year the total sales amounted to over $ , at the rate of $ per acre. greatly exceeding even this was a smaller plot, measuring x feet, last year, planted first to pansies, plants sold when in bloom, followed by radishes, of which one half proved to be a worthless variety (it lay idle long enough to have produced another crop of radishes), then half was planted to late lettuce, the other half being sown for winter cabbage, plants yielding no cash return. yet the total sales for the season from this small plot, less than one thirty-second of an acre, was $ . at the rate of the surprising sum of $ per acre, and could easily have been raised to the rate of $ , , and that without the use of any glass whatever, truly the possibilities of the soil are unknown." the cooperative features used by northeastern long island intensive farmers are worthy of imitation. in the community of riverhead a club buys at wholesale rates commodities which the farm and household require. the club does a large business, and has a high rating in the commercial agencies. in another instance at riverhead an association markets the crop of cauliflower, sending cars of such produce to cincinnati and chicago. these are the best forms of cooperation. "in the market-gardening sections the banks show prosperity. in the towns of riverhead and southold there are savings banks with deposits of $ , , each, and five business banks which are doing a thriving business. in this stretch of thirty miles on eastern long island the farms are mostly free from encumbrance of any kind. "it should be noted, however, that their towns have the open sound with its bays which furnish open ways for transportation and an unowned field for work." (from circular of the long island guild of new york city.) chapter vii some methods we must not put all our time into one crop unless we are rich enough to do our own insurance; for drought, or damp; or accident, ill-adapted seed, or general unfavorable conditions may make failures of one or more crops. but in variety and succession of crops is safety and profit. in order to succeed, crop must be made to follow crop, so that the ground is used to its full capacity. to leave it fallow for even a week is to invite weeds and to lose much of the advantage of tillage, as well as so much time. in the north, seeds of many kinds should be sown from the first of march to the first of august; in the south they should be sown in every month. by following the simple time tables for planting you will find work ready and crops maturing and ready for sale in every month in the year. there is an admirable table of the time to plant, given in "how to make a vegetable garden," though it does embrace some weird vegetables, explaining, for instance, that pats-choi is used like chards, and that "scolymus is sowed like scorzonera." one can live while waiting for the crops to come up, for many crops mature rapidly. specialties give employment only during a few months of each year and bring returns only at periods of the year, but the returns can be made almost immediate and the work almost continuous. long island and jersey farmers in marketing their crops sell spinach and radishes in april peas, early onions, and lettuce in may asparagus and strawberries in june tomatoes, cucumbers, and cabbage seeds in july early potatoes, peaches, and beans in august onions and potatoes in september celery in october cauliflower in november cauliflower and brussels sprouts in december cauliflower and brussels sprouts in january brussels sprouts in february brussels sprouts in march this order of crops can be varied to suit conditions. "the old practice of growing vegetables in beds usually entails more labor and expense than the crop is worth; and it has had the effect of driving more than one boy from the farm. these beds always need weeding on saturdays, holidays, circus days, and the fourth of july. even if the available area is only twenty feet wide, the rows should run lengthwise and be far enough apart (from one to two feet for small stuff) to allow of the use of the hand wheelhoes, many of which are very efficient. if land is available for horse tillage, none of the rows should be less than thirty inches apart, and for late growing things, as large cabbage, four feet is better. if the rows are long, it may be necessary to grow two or three kinds of vegetables in the same row; in this case it is important that vegetables requiring the same general treatment and similar length of season be grown together. for example, a row containing parsnips and salsify, or parsnips, salsify, and late carrots would afford an ideal combination; but a row containing parsnips, cabbages, and lettuce would be a very faulty combination. one part of the area should be set aside for all similar crops. for example, all root crops might be grown on one side of the plot, all cabbage crops in the adjoining space, all tomato and eggplant crops in the center, all corn and tall things on the opposite side. perennnial crops, as asparagus and rhubarb, and gardening structures, as hotbeds and frames, should be on the border, where they will not interfere with the plowing and tilling." ("principles of vegetable gardening," page .) usually where large acreages are worked there is a tendency to devote a greater portion of the land to one crop and sometimes a failure in this crop will mean ruin to the farmer, whereas, where small areas are used, there is generally a diversity of the higher-priced crops and a failure in one is not so likely to be disastrous. to get the greatest production from the soil two crops can be grown in the same soil at the same time--one of which will mature much earlier than the other, thereby giving its place up just about the period of growth when the second crop would need more room. this is known as companion cropping. "in companion cropping there is a main crop and a secondary crop. ordinarily the main crop occupies the middle part and later part of the season. the secondary crop matures early in the season, leaving the ground free for the main crop. in some cases the same species is used for both crops, as when late celery is planted between the rows of early celery. following are examples of some companion crops: radishes with beets or carrots. the radishes can be sold before the beets need the room. corn with squashes, citron, pumpkin, or beans in hills. early onions and cauliflower or cabbage. horseradish and early cabbage. lettuce with early cabbage." ("principles of vegetable gardening," page .) if fruit trees be planted, vegetables may be grown in rows. as soon as the early vegetables mature they are removed, and a midsummer crop planted. these are followed by a fall or winter crop. radishes, lettuce, and cabbage grow at the same time and on the area formerly used for one crop. early potatoes and early cauliflower are followed by brussels sprouts and celery, two crops being as easily grown as one by intelligent handling. the best beans are grown among fruit trees. the principles of "double-cropping" are summarized by professor thomas shaw, in _the market garden._ "onion sets may be planted early in the season and onion seeds may then be sown. between the rows cauliflower may be planted. later between the cauliflower, two or three cucumber seeds may be dropped. the onion sets up around the cauliflower may be taken out first, and the cauliflowers in turn may be removed in time to let the cucumbers develop. "midway between the rows of onions grown from seeds, we can plant radishes, lettuce, peppergrass, spinach, or some other early relish, which will have ample time to grow and to be consumed before harm can come to the onions from the shade of any one of these crops. when the onions are well grown, turnips can be sown midway between their rows." so we get two crops of onions, besides cauliflowers, cucumbers, and turnips off the same place. weeds won't have much chance in soil treated like that. "multum in parvo gardening" (samuel wood) claims l ($ ) from one acre by the expenditure of considerable capital in growing fruit against brick walls--it cost over $ to prepare the land, of which the walls cost $ . in this system the fruit trees are pruned and trained till they look like firemen's ladders. "in the suburbs of paris, even without such costly things with only thirty-six yards of frames for seedlings, vegetables are grown in the open air to the value of l per acre." ("fields, factories and workshops," page .) "at the present time, for fully miles along the rhone, and in the lateral valleys of the ardeche and the drome, the country is an admirable orchard, from which millions worth of fruit is exported, and the land attains the selling price of from l ($ ) to l ($ ) the acre. small plots of land are continually reclaimed for culture upon every crag." (same, page .) in california we hear (from george p. keeney) that while good truck and fruit lands usually sell for $ to $ per acre, the land with full-bearing fruit or nut trees often sells at $ , and even up to $ per acre. there is no reason why any intelligent persons should not make their land increase in the same way. the london daily news reports that in one year, which was not a good season for all crops, on a half acre of land, mr. henry vincent, of brighton, england, raised the following products: cabbages, bushels spinach, cauliflowers, parsley, lettuces, broccoli, bushels potatoes, - / bushels brussels sprouts, - / gallons peas, gallons artichokes, flowers, vegetable marrows, carrots, bundles radishes, gallons french beans, gallons currants' - / punnets mustard, pounds mushrooms, rhubarb, bushels sprout tops, dozen leeks, plants, - / gallons broad beans, bundles sea-kale, bundles of asparagus-kale, beet roots, gallons gooseberries, bundles mint, bundles sage, bundles of fennel, thyme, besides one cartload of stones. mr. vincent explains how he came to go into intensive cultivation: "a few years ago the doctors said if i did not go out more i could not live. very well, just at that time there was an outcry about the land not paying for cultivation. i could not understand this, for as a boy at seven years of age i had to go out to farm work, therefore i never went to school. anyhow i thought something was very wrong if the land would not pay; so, to compel myself to go out in the fresh air, i took an allotment on the sussex downs to work in the early morning before my daily duties began. i might say that i am a waiter, and have been in my present situation forty years, so you can understand i could not know much of land or garden work i could not see my way clear in the few spare hours i get to take more than half an acre of land to garden early, especially as i started knowing practically nothing about such work, but i can manage to do my half acre all alone. "my garden is situated on the brighton race hill ridge, and twelve years ago it was but four inches of soil on chalk, but i now have a foot of soil on the whole of the half acre, and year by year my profits increase. "yes, get the men to stop on the land in this country. we ought not to have workhouses. every man could live, and live well, if he could get the land, and would work it as it should be worked. "farmers and landowners grumble because the land does not pay. now for the fault. it is quite evident it is not the land, therefore, it must be the fault of the man. very well, get the land from these landed proprietors, by sale preferred, and let it out to men, not by acres, as no man can farm well a thousand acres in england; let the farms be greatly reduced, and then the land can be treated as it should be. most of us have children, and we all know how we love and treat them. treat the land in the same manner, feed it, and keep it clean, and you will have no cause to complain. the land of old england is as good as it ever was. "i have serious thoughts of opening a kind of school for people who would like to make $ a year on an acre. it is to be done, and done easily. i do know that one man alone can manage two acres, and at the end of this year i shall be able to tell how much more he can manage alone, so under my system one can gain l a week off two acres and do all one's self. "if the land will produce over one hundred pounds per year per acre, is it not wrong for a man to have, say, or acres which in no way can he properly manage; as, in the first place, he cannot feed such an acreage, let alone keep it clean and gather in his crops?" in truth, what an acre may produce depends on time, place, and circumstances the product of the best acre of land so situated that its product could be sold at retail in a near-by market, and which has been cultivated under the best management for a term of years, would provide a very comfortable living. the product of other acres, measured by what they produce to the cultivator in living, declines through various grades down to almost nothing on the acre far from railroads or difficult of access. while in quantity and quality the least favored acre could be made to produce as much as one best situated, yet, almost none of its production would be available to sell, while the product of the favorably located acre could be sold as rapidly as grown. chapter viii the kitchen garden the aim of the kitchen garden is to provide an abundance and variety of food for the family. as the object of the cultivator is to get the largest product for his labor, he ought to produce all that he can consume on the least possible area. though one may go into mushrooms or frog raising as a money crop, the kitchen garden is the first indispensable and should first be given attention. for a garden choose a piece of land with a southern exposure, sheltered on the north and west by woods, buildings, hedge, or any kind of a windbreak. this arrangement will give the earliest garden, for it gets all the sun there is. by running the rows north and south, the rays of the sun strike the eastern side of the row in the morning, and the western side in the afternoon. the best time to take hold of a piece of land is in the fall, because then it can be plowed ready for the spring planting. the alternate freezing and thawing during the winter breaks up the sod and the stiff lumps thrown up by the plow, so rendering the soil pliable and easily worked. this is especially true of land that has been reclaimed from the forest, or which has not been farmed for many years. before the plowing is done, the land for the garden should be manured at the rate of twenty-five large wagon loads to the acre. if you can get a suitable plot that has been in red clover, alfalfa, soy beans, or cowpeas for a number of years, so much the better. these plants have on their roots nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which draw nitrogen from the air. nitrogen is the great meat-maker and forces a prolonged and rapid growth of all vegetables. after manuring and plowing, harrow repeatedly with a disk or cutaway harrow until the soil is as fine as dust. then you have a seed bed which will give the fine roots a chance to grow as soon as the seeds sprout. too much stress cannot be laid upon the importance of thoroughly working the soil at this time. every stone, weed, or clod that is left in the soil destroys to that extent the source from which the plants can get their food. a quarter-acre garden, which is big enough to supply the whole family with a succession of vegetables for summer and fall, as well as some potatoes and turnips for winter, will take a diligent workman about four days to dig over and three days to plant. the four days' work of digging will need to be done only once. the time spent upon planting succession crops will depend upon the amount of the garden reserved for rotation. the part kept for lettuce, radishes, spinach, beets, swiss chard, peas, string and wax beans may be digged over in a favorable season for three successive plantings, while the part devoted to early potatoes would need to be digged only twice--once when the planting is done, and again when crop is gathered and the ground be prepared for a crop of late cabbage or turnips. a planting table for vegetables, which is complete and comprehensive, is distributed free by the national emergency food garden commission at washington, d.c. it is far more important to plant seeds at the proper depth than that they should be planted thinly or thickly, for if they are planted too thin, it makes a sort of advantage by giving the individual plants ample room to develop to large size; and if planted too thick, the evil can easily be remedied by thinning or transplanting. after the seeds come up, the size of almost all the vegetables can be increased by transplanting, in favorable soil, which gives each plant room for complete development. it is too expensive to risk part of the land being unused or half used on account of seeds dying, or to put in so many seeds in order to insure growth that they will crowd one another. where possible, therefore, seeds should be sprouted and planted, not "sown." lima beans planted on edge with eye down will come up much sooner than if dropped in carelessly so they have to turn themselves over. in a small garden the time saved by such planting will repay the extra trouble. in some things like onions and radishes, however, it is better to sow them thick, and then thin them out, so as to get the effect of transplanting without so much labor. in others, like lettuce and all the salad plants, transplanting gives new life and energy and develops the individual plants in a way that will astonish those not familiar with what free development means. it is wise to plant corn after lettuce and radishes are gathered, and more lettuce, corn, or salad, after the beans are picked. then late crops, cabbage, cauliflower or spinach, can go where early corn grew, so that the small patch may earn your living and pay big dividends. do not let two vegetables of the same botanical family follow each other. for instance, lima beans should not follow green beans or peas, as all the family draw about the same elements from the soil, and are likely to have the same insects and diseases. do not plant cucumbers, squash, or pumpkins too near each other, as they will often inter-impregnate and produce uneatable hybrids. decide what you are going to do with your crop before you plant it, whether to sell it, at wholesale or at retail, to eat it, or to feed it to stock. c. e. hunn, in the garden magazine, gives the following arrangement: "for the beginner who wants to get fresh vegetables and fruits from may until midwinter, a space x feet is enough. " . plant in rows, not beds, and avoid the backache. " . plant vegetables that mature at the same time near one another. " . plant vegetables of the same height near together--tall ones back. " . run the rows the short way, for convenience in cultivation and because one hundred feet of anything is enough. " . put the permanent vegetables (asparagus, rhubarb, sweet herbs) at one side, so that the rest will be easy to plow. " . practice rotation. do not put vines where they were last. put corn in a different place. the other important groups for rotation are root crops (including potatoes and onions); cabbage tribe, peas and beans, tomatoes, eggplant and pepper, salad plants. " . don't grow potatoes in a small garden. they aren't worth the bother. "by training on trellis or wire, the smaller fruit plantings can be made much closer. "if fruits are wanted in the garden, plant a row of apple trees along the northern border, plums and pears on the western sides, cherries and peaches on the eastern side. next the apple trees run a grape trellis; and then in succession east and west, run a row of blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and currants. these rows, with the apple trees, form a windbreak, and besides adding to the income, protect the vegetables. next to the bush fruits, between them and the ends of the vegetable rows, put rhubarb, asparagus, and strawberries." insect pests must be watched for and their destructive work checked. ashes, slaked lime, or any kind of dust or powder destroy most insects which prey on the leaves of plants. the reason for this is that the dust closes the pores through which the insects breathe. it should therefore be applied when the leaves are dry. cutworms can be destroyed by winter plowing. rotation of vegetables will reduce the damage from insects, because each family has its peculiar bugs. by constant change to new soil, the pests have no opportunity to get a foothold. with bugs, as with boys, only those who are interested in them and therefore understand them can manage them. it is fun to study the insects--and it pays. here's another use of "land." maybe a pool in your garden or a dam in a little brook in it may help out your home garden bank account. of course a pond a few square yards in extent will give even better returns if you can sell its produce at retail near by. w. b. shaw, a seventy-year-old veteran who lost his right arm during the civil war, lives in kenilworth, d. c., and clears $ an acre every year out of mud puddles--if mud puddles can be measured by the acre. mr. shaw is a pond lily farmer, and despite his lack of his good right arm, he poles his boat about his mud puddles and gathers in the pond lilies. his is not exactly a "dry farm" and neither wet nor cloudy weather bothers him. furthermore, the demand for his pond lilies in baltimore, washington, philadelphia, and even new york, and chicago, is greater than he can supply. mr. shaw secured this swamp for almost nothing, as it was considered worthless. he divided it into fifteen pools with little dams between them, and rollers on the dams to enable him to drag his boat from one to the other. from may to late in september he is busy every morning gathering lilies. his average is about a morning, which he ships in little galvanized iron tanks with wet moss. many school children know how to get results on a little land. mr. mahoney, superintendent of the fairview garden school, yonkers, new york, estimates that the total value of produce grown on the gardens, composing the school plot, in all about one and one quarter acres of land, was $ , or at the rate of more than a thousand dollars per acre. when it is taken into consideration that all the labor was done by boys ranging in age from eight to twelve years, this result is truly astonishing. what may not adult skilled labor produce when applied freely to the land. chapter ix tools and equipment--specialized crops to subdue the land with an ax, a plow and a spade is possible; millions of acres have been so subdued. this method, however, is the most expensive of all, as in our times, markets won't wait, and the man who wants to get on must produce as quickly as possible. to do so, he must have the best tools. they will pay for themselves many times over in a single year. for the farm, the following list, in addition to a well-stocked tool chest (hammer, saw, plane, ax, etc.) covers the indispensible: team horses (these may be hired) $ . walking plow . disk or cutaway harrow . farm wagon . cultivator (two horse) . one-horse cultivator . shovels, pick, mattock or grubbing hoe . work harness for two horses . total $ . these things you must have to get the land in proper shape for seeds or plants; but special crops require special tools. a scythe is good to keep weeds away from fences. a sickle is handy to keep down grass. to reduce living expenses, a cow for $ , and fifty hens at fifty cents each, say $ , will supply a large family with milk and eggs. most people make the mistake of buying too many things and these poorly selected. it is better to have too few tools than too many, for tools are often dropped where last used, and so are lost. then if money is scarce, you may not be able to make a shelter for your machines and tools, and they will rust through the winter. many farmers, through neglect, have to replace their tool equipment every four or five years, but with attention and care, the original equipment, even to the team, ought still to be in use twenty years after their purchase. i know many instances where this is true. the above equipment is the minimum for beginning work. the character of additions to it will depend much upon the crops which you select as the money getters. for general market gardening and the kitchen garden too, the following tool list, together with the above, will include everything absolutely necessary. wheel hoe $ . spade and fork, each $ . . push hoe . watering can . rake and common hoe . bulb sprayer . trowel . total $ . the wheel hoe is a great saver--of backache, especially to the beginner; as warner says, "at the best you will conclude that for gardening purposes a cast-iron back with a hinge in it is preferable to the ones now in use." the dibble, an old tool handle, or a bit of broomstick sharpened, and garden lines to get the rows straight, labels, tomato supports, plant protectors and stakes earl all be homemade out of old material. the full outfit would include the following: roller $ . wheel-hoe with seeder . sprayer . wheelbarrow . crowbar . weeder . for such crops as admit of horse cultivation a horse hoe will save a great deal of time. the weeder is a cousin to the push hoe and has a zigzag blade for cutting off young weeds which are just starting above ground. it is pushed backward and forward and cuts both ways. it is very good for soft ground; on a harder patch use the push hoe. a market garden is really a big kitchen garden, from which the cultivator supplies not only his own family, but his neighbors, the public. to run a successful market garden for profit, land suitably situated near transportation and markets, a large supply of stable manure, hotbeds for raising plants, crates for shipping, wagons for delivering, and a complete outfit of tools are necessary. you must raise all sorts of vegetables and salad plants in quantities sufficiently large to justify you in giving your whole time to the work. an acre devoted to general market gardening could be attended to by two men with some extra help for marketing. to get a place fully established on new, rich land requires two or three years. on worn-out land it would take longer to build it up to the high fertility needed for maximum production. crops like asparagus and rhubarb take two years to establish on a remunerative basis. if bush fruits are raised, three years are required to get maximum results. so in starting, land should be bought outright or leased for ten years. in market gardening for profit, one acre might be devoted to vegetables, one acre to small fruits; strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, currants, gooseberries, etc. and one acre kept for buildings, poultry, etc. an energetic man could clear one thousand dollars a year besides his living, after he got a start, and be absolutely independent; that is, unless some predatory railroad corporation could confiscate his profits before his product reached the market. some persons are just naturally so successful with plants that if they stuck an umbrella in the ground we should expect to see it blossom out into parasols--but they don't know why it does, and they can't teach any one else how to do it. any fool can sneer at "book farming" or at anything else, but you can hardly succeed without the best books by practical men. do not let some experienced ignoramus talk you out of experimenting under their guidance. you will learn little without experience, and unless you have the grower's instinct, you will learn less without books. don't be hypnotized by long experience or by success. hardly anybody knows his own business. you must have noticed that few of the people you buy of or sell to, know any more of their goods than you do. it is just the same with trades. hardly a barber knows that he should not shave you against the grain of the skin. even the cat won't stand being rubbed up the wrong way; but the barber never thought of that. we lawyers and the doctors are supposed to be thorough in our own field--i said lately to one of the ablest men at the new york bar, "about one lawyer in a hundred knows his business." he said, "that is a gross overestimate." shortly after i talked with three judges, one of the city court, one of the supreme court, and one of the united states circuit, and they each agreed that my friend's remark was about true, and that in most cases litigants would do as well without lawyers as with them. if that is true, what chance is there that an uneducated man who has "raised garden sass ever since he was a boy, and seen his father do it before him," can teach you correctly? men learn very slowly by experience, because no two experiences are exactly alike, unless they perceive and apply the principles under the experience. an intelligent man accustomed to investigation can learn more about a specialty in a week's study than an untrained practitioner can believe in a year. what the untrained teacher can tell us is of little account; what he shows us is another matter. therefore get help who know that they don't know anything about a garden and who consequently will do with a will exactly what you tell them to do; such labor is cheap--why should you pay extravagant prices for skill to a man who has succeeded so poorly that he can only earn day's wages? you can get much better knowledge at less cost from a book. study and put your knowledge into practice yourself, where you see promise of a profit. almost every crop can be made a specialty. in proportion as special crops are profitable when conditions are right, so are they sources of loss when things go wrong. if, after your first season in the country, some special crop takes your fancy, give extra space and time to it the second year and see if you are successful in handling an eighth or a quarter acre. if so, you may extend your operations as rapidly as purse and market permit. before concentrating upon any crop as the chief source of income, a careful study must be made of all the conditions surrounding its production; a crop is not produced in the broad meaning of that term until it is actually in the hands of the consumer. potatoes, for instance, are grown by the hundred acres in sections adapted to their growth, and special machinery costing hundreds of dollars is used in planting, cultivating, and harvesting the crop. the good shipping and keeping qualities of the potato enable it to be raised far from markets and so brings into competition cheap land worked in large areas, with large capital. in spite of this, however, the small cultivator can usually make money if he can sell his potatoes directly to the consumer. if your land is so situated that you can put your individuality into the crop and can control all the circumstances, preparation of land, planting, cultivation, harvesting, and marketing, your chances of success are immeasurably increased. as soon as any important part must be trusted to some one beyond your control, danger arises. assiduous care in planting, cultivating, and packing will avail nothing if the product falls into the hands of transportation companies or commission merchants indifferent as to what becomes of it. it is therefore better to be quite independent, sell your own crop, and have the whole operation in your own hands from the very beginning. generally speaking, seed growing for the market is a highly developed special business which is usually carried on by companies operating with large capital, able to employ the best experts, and to avail themselves of all the advantages of scientific methods in culture, regardless of expense. so uncertain is the business, that even with all these facilities, they rarely guarantee seeds. it is obvious that the amateur has little chance of succeeding in such a difficult business. nevertheless, he will be able after a few seasons of increasing experience to gather seeds from selected plants and so furnish his own supply. it must be borne in mind, however, that plants can be improved by cross breeding and that by keeping a variety too long on the same ground its quality deteriorates, and the plant tends to revert to the type natural to it before domestication. when land is cropped every season, the nitrogen, potash, and phosphorus removed from the soil must be replaced in some form, otherwise you have diminishing returns, while the expense for labor is the same. in farming small areas for specialties you cannot easily invoke the principle of rotation by enriching the land with legumes, to be plowed under while green, the bacteria on the roots of which gather nitrogen from the air, but you must get stable manure or buy chemical fertilizers to maintain the fertility. special crops divide themselves naturally into two classes: those raised for immediate shipment to market, and those to be hauled to canneries. the first type are generally prepared in a more expensive way, and need more care and attention. each class requires its own special forms of packing to conform to market peculiarities fixed by the taste of consumers. for the cultivation of all specialties, many items of preparation are identical. land must be well drained, it must contain a sufficient amount of humus, or decaying vegetable matter, to make it loose and porous; it must be free from sticks and stones or any foreign matter likely to impede cultivation or obstruct growth. the proper formation of a seed bed is a prime prerequisite to successful cropping. after the land is manured and plowed it should be gone over in all directions with a disk and smoothing harrow, until it is of a dustlike fineness. in thorough cultivation before the crop is planted, lies the secret of many a success, and in its neglect the cause of many failures. intelligent handling of crops is in a large measure knowledge of the influence of wind and rain, sunshine and darkness, on the particular nature of the plant delicate plants, for example, ought to be grown where buildings or forests break the force of prevailing winds. sheltered valleys in irrigated sections have proved the best for intensive cultivation. for thousands of years in china and japan the conditions of successful intensive cultivation have been well understood, and to-day the most efficient gardeners are the chinese. in some parts of mexico, for the same reasons, intensive cultivation has reached a high development. in our own west we are catching up on vegetables and fruits. chapter x the advantages from capital we have seen what a worker with very little money can do and how he can succeed. a small capital, however, can be used to increase the returns to as great advantage on a small farm as large capital can be used on a large farm and with much less risk. stable manure is still the favorite article with the masses of gardeners. one ton of ordinary stable manure contains about pounds of organic matter, carrying eight pounds of nitrogen, ten pounds of potash, and four pounds of phosphoric acid. when thoroughly rotted, the manure acquires a still larger percentage of plant food; it is more valuable, not only for that reason, but also on account of its immediate availability. further, the mechanical effect of this manure in opening and loosening the soil, allowing air and warmth to enter more freely, adds greatly to its value. it is easily gotten and often goes wholly or in part to waste. on the outskirts of some towns may be seen a collection of manure piles that have been hauled out and dumped in waste places. the plant food in each ton of this manure is worth at least two dollars--that is the least eastern farmers pay for similar material, and they make money doing it. yet almost every liveryman has to pay some one for hauling the manure away. this is simply because farmers living near these towns are missing a chance to secure something for nothing--because, perhaps, the profit is not directly in sight. but from most soils there is a handsome profit possible from a very small application of stable manure. while writing this, i saw a man in new rochelle, n. y.; dumping a load of street sweepings into a hole in a vacant lot. it would have been less wasteful to have dumped a bushel of potatoes into the hole. commercial fertilizers are coming more and more in use by market gardeners, and with reason. if we examine a good fertilizer, analyzing five per cent available nitrogen, six per cent phosphoric acid, and per cent potash, we shall find that one ton of it contains, besides less valuable ingredients: lb. nitrogen, lb. phosphoric acid, lb. potash. such fertilizers probably retail at forty to sixty dollars per ton, and are fully worth it. all this plant food, and perhaps one half more, can be drawn in a single load, while it will take ten such loads of stable manure to supply the same amount of plant food. there is no reason to be afraid of too much fertilizer, provided it is evenly distributed and thoroughly mixed through properly prepared soil. stinginess in this item is poor economy. nitrogen is the most essential food for plant growth. it is an important element of plant food in manure. in ordinary manure most of the value is due to the nitrogen, although phosphoric acid and potash are also present. it is found in the most available form in nitrate of soda. nitrate of soda will benefit all crops, but it does not follow that it will pay to use it on all crops. its cost makes it unprofitable to use on cheap crops; but on those that yield a large return nitrate of soda is a very profitable investment. "it is shown in the experiments conducted with nitrate of soda on different crops that in the case of grain and forage crops, which utilized the nitrate quite as completely as the market garden crops, the increased value of crops due to nitrate does not in any case exceed $ per acre, or a money return at the rate of $ . per pounds of nitrate used, while in the case of the market-garden crops the value of the increased yield reaches, in the case of one crop, the high figure of over $ per acre, or at the rate of about $ per pounds of nitrate." (new jersey agricultural experiment stations, page , no. .) professor voorhees, of the same station, experimented with tomatoes, with these results: manure and fertilizer used cost per acre value of crop no manure $ . tons barnyard manure $ . . tons manure and lb. fertilizer . . pounds nitrate of soda alone . . such common crops as tomatoes, cabbage, turnips, beets, etc., in order to be highly profitable, must be grown and harvested early; any one can grow them in their regular season; their growth must be promoted or forced as much as possible, at the time when the natural agencies are not active in the change of soil nitrogen into available forms, and the plants must, therefore, be supplied artificially with the active forms of nitrogen, if a rapid and continuous growth is to be maintained. it is quite possible to have a return of $ per acre from the use of $ worth of nitrate of soda on crops of high value, as, for example, early tomatoes, beets, cabbage, etc. this is an extraordinary return for the money and labor invested; still, if the increased value of the crop were but $ , or even $ , it would be a profitable investment, since no more land and but little additional capital was required in order to obtain the extra $ or $ per acre. the results of all the experiments conducted in different parts of the country and in different seasons, show an average gain in yield of early tomatoes of about fifty per cent, with an average increased value of crop of about $ per acre. the rest of the report shows similar results with other crops. (new jersey agricultural experiment station, bulletin .) joseph harris says, "some years ego we used nitrate of soda cautiously as a top dressing on the celery plants. the effect was astonishing. the next year, having more confidence, we spread the nitrate at the time we sowed the seed, and again after the plant came up, and twice afterward during a rain. "instead of finding it difficult to get the plants early enough for the celery growers who set them out, they were ready three weeks before the usual time of transplanting. "at the four applications, we probably used lb. of nitrate of soda per acre, and this would probably furnish more nitric acid to the plants than they could get from five hundred tons of manure per acre, provided it had been possible to have worked such a quantity into the soil. never were finer plants grown. as compared with the increased value of the plants, the cost of the nitrate is not worth taking into consideration." as a means of fertilization without the use of artificial fertilizer, soil inoculation has come. it has grown out of the discovery of the dependence of leguminous plants on bacteria which live on their roots. the discovery is one of the most important of those made in modern agriculture. it has received its greatest impetus in america, under the experiments of professor moore of the united states agricultural department. the department supplied free to farmers the bacteria for inoculation. now they supply it only for experimental purposes. a laboratory has been fitted up for the work. the method is to propagate bacteria for each of the various leguminous plants such as clover, alfalfa, soy beans, cow peas, tares, and velvet beans. all of these plants are of incalculable value in different sections of the country as forage for farm animals. in the west, alfalfa is the main reliance for stockraisers. the farmers of the east are trying to establish it, but meet with difficulty chiefly for want of the special bacteria which should be found on the roots. the function of these bacteria is to gather the nitrogen of the air and supply it as plant food. without the bacteria the plant can get only the nitrogen which is supplied from the soil in fertilizers. with the aid of the bacteria the growing plant can derive the greater part of its food from the air. here is one of the results of the use of inoculated seed as reported by the united states agricultural bulletin no. . g. l. thomas, experimenting with field peas on his farm near auburn, me., made a special test with fertilized and unfertilized strips, and stated that "inoculated seed did as much without fertilizers of any kind, as uninoculated seed supplied with fertilizer (phosphate) at the rate of pounds and a ton of barnyard manure per acre." this seems to be only in its infancy. the department warns us that nitrogen inoculation is useless where the soil already has enough nitrogen and where other plant foods are absent. the experiments are most important, and we are probably on the eve of as great advances in agriculture as in electricity, but the human race has a great love for "inoculation," and indeed for all unnatural processes. you remember the story of the wonderful coon that chandler harris tells? no? they were constantly seeing this enormous coon, but always just as they almost got their hands on him, he disappeared. one night the boys came running in to say that the wonderful coon was up in a persimmon tree in the middle of a ten-acre lot; so they got the dogs and the lanterns and guns and ran out, and sure enough they saw the wonderful big coon up in a fork of the tree. it was a bright moonlight night, but to make doubly sure they cut down the tree and the dogs ran in--the coon wasn't there. "well, but, uncle remus," said the little boy, "i thought you said you saw the coon there." "so we did, honey," said the old man, "so we did; but it's very easy to see what ain't there when you're looking for it." another method of increasing fertility at increased expense deserves notice. the vacant public lands are for the most part desert-like, and their utilization can come about only through irrigation. this land can be made to produce the finest crops in the world; and the tremendous volumes of water that flow from the mountains to the sea, once harnessed and piped or ditched to this land, will transform it into beautiful gardens and farms. with the work being done by the united states government, and that of the various states, we may look forward in the not distant future to this land being made habitable to man. it is well known that with the dry, even climate and with an abundance of water applied as vegetation needs, this now arid waste is far more productive than the eastern states, where the crops are at the mercy of the elements, sometimes having too much moisture and at other times not having enough. "irrigation offers control of conditions such as is found nowhere except in greenhouse culture. the farmer in the humid country cannot control the amount of starch in potatoes, sugar in beets, protein in corn, gluten in wheat, except by planting varieties which are especially adapted to the production of the desired quality. the irrigation farmer, on the other hand, can produce this or that desirable quality by the control of the moisture supply to the plant. he can hasten or retard maturity of the plant, produce early truck or late truck on the same soil, grow wheat or grow rice as he deems advisable." "on the irrigated fields of the vosges, vaucluse, etc., in france, six tons of dry hay becomes the rule, even upon ungrateful soil; and this means considerably more than the annual food of one milch cow (which can be taken as a little less than five tons) grown on each acre." "the irrigated meadows round milan are another well known example. nearly , acres are irrigated there with water derived from the sewers of the city, and they yield crops of from eight to ten tons of hay as a rule; occasionally some separate meadows will yield the fabulous amount--fabulous to-day but no longer fabulous to-morrow--of eighteen tons of hay per acre; that is, the food of nearly four cows to the acre, and nine times the yield of good meadows in this country." ("fields, factories, and workshops," pages - .) "if irrigation pays"--and no one now questions that--"the whole western country of rich soil, which asks but a drink now and then, will be turned into a garden of eden." _(maxwell's talisman.)_ agriculture may be revolutionized with the advent of irrigation. a new method of disposing of sewage and at the same time irrigating the soil, has come into use recently, and will be found valuable to those who are situated so that they can make use of it. the sewage from buildings is drained into a large tank where the heavier matter can settle to the bottom. when the water rises nearly to the top of the tank it is siphoned into another tank, and from there it is piped about the field. the piping is very simple--ordinary drain tile conveys the water. beginning at the highest point of the field to be irrigated, a six-inch (or larger) line of tile should be laid along the highest ground with a fall of not over one inch to each ten feet. from this main trunk should be branch lines of "laterals," laid from eight to twelve feet apart, as they would be laid for draining a field. these branch lines may be laid at an angle to the main trunk as may be most convenient; all the joints must be covered so as to keep out the flirt. the whole system should be laid deep enough in the ground to be secure from frost; but to be most effective it should not be over fourteen to sixteen inches below the surface, hence sub-irrigation cannot be used very successfully in the northern states. in a sandy loam soil with a clay subsoil it works best at sixteen to twenty-four inches. this is substantially colonel waring's method of sewage disposal. to get the best use of it for plants, the water should be assembled and kept in the sun for ten to twelve days, then turned into the pipes until the ground is well soaked, and then shut off and not allowed in the pipes again for ten to fifteen days, according to the weather and condition of moisture in the soil. the crop should be cultivated between each watering. however, as bailey says, "evidently in all regions in which crops will yield abundantly without irrigation, as in the east, the main reliance is to be placed on good tillage." "most vegetable gardeners in the east do not find it profitable to irrigate. now and then a man who has push and the ability to handle a fine crop to advantage, finds it a very profitable undertaking." ("principles of vegetable gardening," page .) bailey, however, was not thinking of "overhead irrigation." the late j. m. smith, green bay, wisconsin, was one of the expert market gardeners of his region. "the longer i live," wrote mr. smith, then in the midst of a serious drought, "the more firmly am i convinced that plenty of manure and then the most complete system of cultivation make an almost complete protection against ordinary droughts." (same, page .) if the soil is cultivated carefully and intensively, it will hold water within itself and carry a storage reservoir underneath the growing crop. finely pulverizing and packing the seed bed, makes it retain the greatest possible percentage of the moisture that falls, just as a tumbler full of fine sponge or of birdshot will retain many times the amount of water that a tumbler full of buckshot will. the atmosphere quickly drinks up the moisture from the soil unless we prevent it. this we do by means of a soil "blanket," called a "mulch" this finely pulverized surface largely prevents the moisture below from evaporating, and at the same time keeps the surface in such condition that it readily absorbs the dew and the showers. water moves in the soil as it does in a lamp wick, by capillary attraction; the more deeply and densely the soil is saturated with moisture, the more easily the water moves upward, just as oil "climbs up" a wet wick faster than it does a dry one. one can illustrate the effect of this fine soil "mulch" in preventing evaporation by placing some powdered sugar on a lump of loaf sugar and putting the lump sugar in water. the powdered sugar will remain dry even when the lump has become so thoroughly saturated that it crumbles to pieces. "we have no useless american acres," said secretary wilson. "we shall make them all productive. we have agricultural explorers in every far corner of the world; and they are finding crops which have become so acclimated to dry conditions, similar to our own west, that we shall in time have plants thriving upon our so-called arid lands. we shall cover this arid area with plants of various sorts which will yield hundreds of millions of tons of additional forage and grains for western flocks and herds. our farmers will grow these upon land now considered practically worthless." in this way it has been estimated that in the neighborhood of one hundred million acres of the american desert can be reclaimed to the most intensive agriculture. (see a study of the possible additions to available land in prof. w. s. thompson's "population, a study of malthusianism": col. u, .) frederick v. coville, the chief botanist of the department of agriculture, does not hesitate to say that in the strictly arid regions there are many millions of acres, now considered worthless for agriculture, which are as certain to be settled in small farms as were the lands of illinois. land that was thought to be absolute desert has been made to yield heavy crops of grain and forage by this method without irrigation. macaroni wheat will grow with ten inches of rainfall, and yield fifteen bushels to the acre. this however is less than the average wheat yield in the united states. much can be done by dry farming; that is, by plowing the soil very deep and cultivating six or eight times a season, thus retaining all the moisture for the crops and reducing evaporation to a minimum. there are thousands of acres in different sections of montana that grow good crops without irrigation. in fergus county, for instance, the wonderful yield of bushels of wheat per acre is grown without irrigation. heavy crops of grain and vegetables are grown in the vicinity of great falls by the dry farming system. the money and time spent in spraying is also well invested. the new york agricultural experiment station began a ten-year experiment in potato-spraying to determine how much the yield can be increased by spraying with pyrox or with bordeaux mixture. in the gain due to spraying was larger than ever before. five sprayings with bordeaux increased the yield bushels per acre, while three sprayings increased it bushels. the gain was due chiefly to the prolongation of growth through the prevention of late blight. the sprayed potatoes contained one ninth more starch and were of better quality. the average increase of profit per acre from spraying potatoes was figured to be about $ on each acre. the result was arrived at from experiment, two thirds of which was by independent farmers. (particulars will be found in bulletin no. , issued by the department.) in fourteen farmers' business experiments, including acres of potatoes, the average gain due to spraying was - / bushels per acre, the average total cost of spraying cents per acre; and the average net profit, based on the market price of potatoes at digging time, $ . per acre. "one class of gardeners," burnet landreth explains, "may be termed experimental farmers, men tired of the humdrum rotation of farm processes and small profits, men looking for a paying diversification of their agricultural interests. their expenses for appliances are not great, as they have already on hand the usual stock of farm tools, requiring only one or two seed drills, a small addition to their cultivating implements, and a few tons of fertilizers. their laborers and teams are always on hand for the working of moderate areas. in addition to the usual expense of the farm, they would not need to have a cash capital of beyond to dollars per acre for the area in truck." "other men, purchasing or renting land, especially for market gardening, taking only improved land of suitable aspect, soil, and situation, and counting in cost of building, appliances, and labor, would require a capital of $ to $ per acre. for example, a beginner in market gardening in south jersey, on a five-acre patch, would need $ to set up the business, and run it until his shipments began to return him money. with the purpose of securing information on this interesting point, the writer asked for estimates from market gardeners in different localities, and the result has been that from florida the reports of the necessary capital per acre, in land or its rental (not of labor), fertilizers, tools, implements, seed and all the appliances, average $ , from texas $ , from illinois $ , from the norfolk district of virginia the reports vary from $ to $ , according to location, and from long island, new york, the average of estimates at the east end is $ , and at the west end $ ." i have before me now one of the roseate advertisements, which we so often see in the newspapers, telling how fortunes can be made by investing a few dollars in a tropical plantation in mexico. it gives what are supposed to be startling yields per acre, and yet the returns, which must necessarily be taken with considerable allowance, are only from $ to $ per acre on various plantations. there are market gardeners and nurserymen near new york city who are making their acres produce better returns than this. it is not necessary to go off into the tropical wilderness seeking a fortune which is usually a gold brick that some fellow is trying to sell you, when as good results can be secured right at home. market gardeners in and near philadelphia pay $ to $ an acre and upwards rent for land, and work from five to forty acres. this is as much as similar land in many parts of the country could be bought for. but it is not a high rent when they are right at the market--one man makes the round trip in two and one half hours--manure costs them nothing--for years they have been using the excavations from the old style privy wells, which has been hauled to their farm and deposited where they wished it, free. they have modern facilities, such as trolley and telephone, and are as much city men as any clerk in an office. they clear far higher profits from an acre than the average farmer, raising never less than two, and often three crops in a season. they employ several men to the acre, and at certain times many more, working the men in gangs. only the difficulty of getting good help at their prices prevents them from using twice the number. however, the possibilities of putting capital into land at a profit are still infinite. what chiefly attracts the gardener to the great cities is stable manure; this is not wanted so much for increasing the richness of the soil--one ninth part of the manure used by the french gardeners would do for that purpose--but for keeping the soil at a certain temperature. early vegetables pay best, and in order to obtain early produce, not only the air, but the soil as well, must be warmed; that is done by putting great quantities of properly mixed manure into the soil; its fermentation heats it. but with the present development of industrial skill, heating the soil could be done more economically and more easily by hot-water pipes. consequently, the french gardeners begin more and more to make use of portable pipes, or thermosiphons, provisionally established in the cool frames. competition that stands in with the railroads can be met only by being near the market or having water transportation. indeed, the erect of water transportation in getting manure, and in delivering the produce from the railroads, appears in the early history of trucking. the railroads often crush out boat competition by absorbing docks and standing in with the commission men. this could be met by such cooperative selling agencies as the flower growers already have. "one of the earliest centers for the development of truck farming in its present sense was along the shores of chesapeake bay, where fast sailing oyster boats were employed for sending the produce to the neighboring markets of baltimore and philadelphia. in a similar way the gardeners about new york early began pushing out along long island, using the waters of the sound for transporting their produce. the trucking region on the eastern shore of lake michigan is another sample of the effect of convenient water transportation in causing an early development of this industry. the building of the illinois central railroad opened up a region in southern illinois that was supposed to be particularly adapted to fruit growing." ("development of the trucking interests," by f. s. earle, page .) if one goes into the trucking business on so large a scale as to be able to make deals with the railroads, such as the standard oil company has made, of course additional prices could be gotten, owing to the possibility of putting competitors at a disadvantage. that business is a large one. in doing business on this scale, much will depend on your ability as a merchant. "it is useless to grow good crops unless they can be sold at a profit; yet it is safe to say that ten men grow good truck crops for one who markets them to the best advantage." three acres and liberty: ch. xi-xv chapter xi hotbeds and greenhouses whether to get an early start on the garden or for raising plants for field crops, a hotbed is all but indispensable. in making a hotbed what we seek to do is to imitate nature at her best, so get the best soil and the sunniest spot you can find. in all hotbeds the underlying principle is the same: they are right-angled boxes covered with glass panes set in movable frames and placed over heated excavations. the bed may be of any size or shape, but the standard one is six feet wide, since the stock glass frames are usually six feet long by three feet wide. you can have any length needed to supply your requirements. "tomato culture," by a. j. root, tells us that the cheapest plan is to get some old planks, broken brickbats or stone, and piece together a box-like affair in proper shape: to provide drainage, the front should be at least ten inches above the ground and the rear fourteen inches. a hotbed knocked together in this way is all right to start with, if you cannot do any better, but will last only two or three seasons. for a permanent bed, probably the best way is to make cement walls extending to the bottom of the manure. the bed ought to face south or southeast and be well protected on the north. it should be banked all around with earth or straw to keep out the cold, and mats or shutters should be provided for extra cold weather. the best material for heating the bed and the most easily obtained, is fresh horse manure in which there is a quantity of straw or litter. this will give out a slow, moist heat and will not burn out before the crops or the plants mature. get all the manure you need at one time. pile it in a dry place and let it ferment; every few days work the pile over thoroughly with a dung fork; sometimes two turnings of the manure are enough, but it is better to let it stand and heat three or four times. "you can make a hotbed also on top of the ground without any excavation. spread a layer of manure evenly one foot in depth and large enough to extend around the frame three feet each way. pack this down well, especially around the edge, put on a second and third layer until you have a well-trodden and compact bed of manure at least two and one half feet in depth. place the frame in the center of this bed and press it down well." a two-inch layer of decayed leaves, cut straw, or corn fodder, spread over the manure in the frame and well packed down, will help to retain the heat. ventilate the bed every day to allow steam and ammonia fumes to pass off. "the soil inside should be equal parts of garden loam and well-rotted barnyard manure. tramp well the first layer of three inches. to make it entirely safe for the plant seeds in the hotbed, add another layer of the same depth. use no water with garden loam and manure if you can possibly help it." "before sowing any seeds put a thermometer in the bed three inches deep in the soil. if it runs over degrees fahrenheit, do not sow. if below degrees it is too cold; you will have to fork it over and add more manure. if the bed gets too hot, you can ventilate it with a sharp stick by thrusting it down into the soil." another way that the old gardeners have to make a hot bed is with fire. on a large scale this is cheaper, though more complicated than the fermentation of manure. in making this kind choose your location and build the frames as before. "cut a trench with a slight taper from the east end of the plot to the end of the hotbed, and on under the ground to about four feet beyond the end of the bed. this taper to the outlet will create a draught and so keep a better fire. arch this over with vitrified tile. the furnace end where the fire is should be about six feet away from the bed. when the trenches are completed, cover over with the dirt that was taken out of them. two such trenches under the frames will make a good hotbed. anyone can do this sort of work." a hotbed can also be heated by running steam pipes through the ground, but unless you happen to be where exhaust steam could be used, this method is not economical except for big houses. the care and expense of a separate steam plant would be too great to pay, unless for growing winter vegetables for market or flower culture. if you go into that on a scale large enough to pay, new problems at once demand solution. vegetables under glass have kept pace with other crops. within fifteen miles of boston are millions of square feet of glass devoted to vegetables, chiefly lettuce. there are more than five million feet in the united states used for other crops. ordinarily, under favorable conditions, glass devoted to this work will yield an average of fifty cents per year per square foot. about the lowest estimate of cost per sash is five dollars; this amount includes the cost of one fourth of the frame and covers. there are usually four sashes to one frame. a well-made mortised plank frame costs four to six dollars. a sash, unglazed, costs from one to two dollars. glazing costs seventy-five cents. mats and shutters cost from fifty cents to two dollars per sash, depending upon the material used. double thick glass pays better in the end as being less liable to breakage. these prices vary greatly, however. the following sample estimate by a gardener is for a market garden of one acre, in which it is desired to grow a general line of vegetables. it supposes that half of the acre is to be set with plants from hotbeds. one eighth acre to early cauliflower and cabbage, about plants, if transplanted, would require two x frames, from two hundred to two hundred and fifty plants being grown under each sash. these frames may be used again for tomato plants for the same area, using about plants. this will allow a sash for every plants. one frame should be in use at the same time for eggplants and peppers, two sashes of each, growing fifty transplanted plants under each sash. two frames will be required for cucumbers, melons, and early squashes; for extra early lettuce, an estimate of sixty to seventy heads should be made to a sash. it is assumed that celery and late cabbages are to be started in seed beds in the open. in the fashionable suburbs of boston "one hotbed x feet was used in which to start the seeds of early vegetables. plantings were made in the open ground as soon as the weather permitted, and were continued at intervals throughout the season whenever there was a vacant spot in the garden. the following varieties of vegetables, mostly five-and ten-cent packets, were planted: pole and wax beans, beets, kale, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, corn, cucumbers, corn salad, endive, eggplant, kohlrabi, lettuce, muskmelon, onions, peppers, peas, salsify, radish, spinach, squash, tomatoes, turnips, rutabagas, escarole, chives, shallot, parsley, sweet and irish potatoes, and nearly a dozen different kinds of sweet herbs." "in the larger garden, tomatoes followed peas, turnips the wax beans, early lettuce for fall use took the place of refugee beans. corn salad succeeded lettuce." "the spinach was followed by cabbage, while turnips, beets, carrots, celery, and spinach gave a second crop in the plot occupied by gardus peas and emperor william beans." "winter radishes came after telephone peas, paris golden celery was planted in between the hills of stowell's blanching. the plot of early corn was sown to turnips. the hotbed was used during the late fall and winter to store some of the hardy vegetables, and the latter part of october there was placed in it some endive, escarole, celeriac, and the remaining space was filled up by transplanting leeks, chives, and parsley." (bailey, "principles of vegetable gardening," page .) "if spinach is grown in frames, the sash used for one of the late crops above may be used through the following winter. "this, like the last case, makes a total of five frames, the cost, depending on make and material, from one to five dollars; twenty sash and covers, at, say, $ . , $ ; manure at market price, calculating at least three or four loads per frame. this is a liberal estimate of space, and should allow for all ordinary loss of plants, and for discarding the weak and inferior ones. it supposes that most or all of the plants are to be transplanted once or more in the frames. many gardeners have less equipment of glass." (same, pages - ) growing vegetables under glass gives smaller returns than flowers; as, for instance, a head of lettuce brings much less than a plant of carnations, and suffers more from the competition of southern crops. nevertheless, the greenhouse-grown vegetables have come into prominence lately because they can be raised in houses that are not good enough for flowers. lettuce and tomatoes are the principal crops; some growers raise thousands of dollars' worth each year. the greenhouse is also used for forcing plants which are afterwards transplanted to the open air. this develops them at a time when they could not grow outdoors and gives them such a start that they are very early on the market, thereby realizing the highest prices. "nearness to market is the most important feature in a greenhouse. in large cities, manure, which is the chief fertilizer, can be had in most cases for the hauling. the short haul is an important item, and, most important of all, the gardener who is near the market can take advantage of high prices, if the grower is near enough to the city to make two or three trips; in such a fluctuating market as new york, it is to his advantage." some kind of a greenhouse is necessary, but one large enough to produce a living would cost a very large sum. vegetable raising under glass has been made profitable in special localities where nearly the whole community gives its time to building up the industry, but complete success can be attained only by having absolute control of all the conditions entering into production, and giving assiduous and undivided attention to detail. leonard barron, in the _garden magazine,_ says: "the best type of greenhouse for all-round purposes is unquestionably what is known as the even span--that is, a house in which the roof is in the form of an inverted v, so as to be exposed as much as possible to sunlight, and having the ridge-pole in the center. all other types of houses are modifications from the simplest form, and are designed in some way or other to fit some special requirements. these requirements may be: the cultural necessities for some particular crop; a desire to have the atmospheric conditions inside more or less abnormal at given seasons (as in a forcing house); or an adaptation to some peculiarity of the situation, as when a greenhouse is built as an adjunct to other buildings." "it is plain common sense that the ideal greenhouse is one in which the light is most nearly that which exists outside, and in which the heat is as evenly distributed. it is practical experience that a structure with as few angles and turns m it as possible and with a minimum of woodwork in its superstructure, best answers these conditions.... greenhouse building has developed into a special industry, and the modern american greenhouse is the highest type of construction. it is built with as careful calculation to its situation and its requirements as is the country dwellinghouse. such a thing naturally is not cheap." "the low-priced 'cheap greenhouse' is a makeshift of some sort. perhaps its roof is constructed of hotbed sash, a perfectly feasible method of construction, which for ordinary, commonplace gardening will answer admirably. or, its foundation is merely the plain earth. such a building does admirably in the summer time, and even in the late spring and early autumn; but woe betide the enthusiastic amateur in winter, who, being possessed of one of these light greenhouse structures, has indulged in a few costly, exotic plants. they will be frozen, to a certainty! it is economy to pay a fair price in the beginning to secure a properly built greenhouse that will withstand the trials of winter." "if iron frame is used instead of wood there is greater durability, and the structure being more slender, will admit more light, but the cost will be increased." "it makes very little difference in cost what shape of house is to be erected. the cost per lineal foot for an even span is practically the same as for a lean-to of the same length and width. in the lean-to, in order to get the sufficient bench and walk space inside, it is necessary to carry the roof to a point much higher than in the even span. the extra framework and material for the roof cost a good deal, yet add practically nothing to the efficiency of the house." "heating of greenhouses is best done by hot water, and in a small house the pipes may well be connected with the heating system used for the dwelling, if the greenhouse and the home are within any sort of reasonable distance from each other. for large houses, or ranges of several houses together, the independent heating plant is necessary. steam is used for heating by commercial florists, but it is economical only on a large scale." "as a uniform temperature must be maintained in the house, the fires, where steam is used, need watching continuously during cold weather, for the moment the water ceases to boil, the pipes cool off and a considerable time is consumed in starting the heat running again. with hot water there is much more latitude in attention, for though the fires dwindle' the water which fills the pipes will carry heat for a long time, and it will circulate until the last degree is radiated. but a hot-water system costs in the installation about one fourth more than steam. very small houses may be successfully heated by kerosene stoves, which may be placed inside the house. a much better way would be to use oil heaters for an inside water circulation, carrying off all products of combustion by means of a flue. coal stoves should never be installed inside the house. it has been done successfully by some amateurs, but the danger of coal gas being driven back into the house by a down draft in the chimney is too great a risk. coal gas and illuminating gas are two virulent poisons to plants." it is obvious that the amateur must proceed with great caution in undertaking intensive cultivation under glass. build at first the simplest and least expensive kind of hotbeds or greenhouses. it takes three to five seasons to train even an experienced farmer along these special lines. separate crops require special treatment. do not experiment, but follow well-tried procedure. it is comparatively easy to farm an acre under glass, but it should be worked up to, each step being taken only after a solid foundation is ready to build on. learn by your mistakes. don't get discouraged by failure. by not making the same mistake twice, you will soon learn by experience just what is essential to production. the more you learn about the way nature does things, the more likely you will be to succeed when you seek to imitate her. chapter xii other uses of land we had intended to write an interesting chapter on the use of a few acres of land for poultry, and another on raising a vast drove of rabbits, both from practical men, but a good average man, just such as this book is written for, sent the following: "i am very sorry that i cannot comply with your request to write a chapter on poultry for your new book. it is true that i am physically and mentally capable of performing that feat, and it would be possible for me to prepare an essay that might entertain the reader, and even make him believe that there is money in commercial poultry. i prefer, however, to leave that sort of romancing to the poultry journals who, by much practice, are adepts in the art. the fact is, i did not make poultry raising pay, and had i remained on my chicken ranch, i would have gone broke. i do not mean to say, however, that there is no money in poultry, but merely that i could not get it out. perhaps others who are better equipped for the work can make a success of such an undertaking, but i could not. the numerous poultry journals are filled with instructions how to do it and with letters from people who assert that they have done well with poultry; but, really, during the four years that i was in the business i cannot recall a single case of success, and, on the other hand, i learned of failures without end. i had the reputation of having the best planned and most completely equipped in this part of washington, and perhaps in the entire state. my stock was thoroughbred and healthy, and they seemed to attend to business strictly. i devoted about all my waking hours to them, did everything that seemed necessary that was suggested by my own success, and yet i could not make it go, am glad i am clear of it, and have no desire to try it again. i am perfectly willing to admit my possible unfitness for the business, but i am also compelled to admit that i could not succeed and that no advice of mine could help others." although many, either under exceptional circumstances or because of exceptional ability, have made a success of wholesale poultry raising, it seems on reflection that mr. wolf's ideas are in the main correct. the price of chickens is fixed, like all other prices, by supply and demand, and toward the supply every farmer contributes his chickens and their eggs which cost him practically nothing; at least he counts that they cost him nothing. now it is clear that if you considerably increase the supply at any place, the price will fall, and the farmer, whose chickens and eggs cost him almost nothing in money, will sell them low enough to command a market and will continue to raise them, however little he gets for them. so you are against inexhaustible competitors who can neither be driven out nor combined with. it is worse than competing with bankrupt dealers. to make much money you must have at least some monopoly, and even a little bit of the earth that is well suited to your purpose where there is no unreasonable and unreasoning competition, will give you a chance. but while it is true that the farmer's subsidized hens have a very disastrous effect at times upon the market, the fact is that, notwithstanding the tariff, we import millions of dozens of eggs laid each year by the pauper hens of canada and often of denmark. another fact to be considered is, that it is when eggs are most plentiful that the farmers depress the market. with their ways of handling their poultry, their hens lay only when conditions are most favorable, and in the winter when eggs are as high as fifty cents a dozen in cities, they have no eggs to market. like the market gardener, to be timely in market is to succeed. a week may mean an annihilation of profits. it is a different proposition to raise a few chickens as a side line as the farmers do. a workman at the connecticut place of one of the experts who has revised this book had a bit of land not more than x feet, and for several years cleared $ a year by raising eggs and broilers, doing the work together with that of a little garden of small fruits before and after working hours the chickens fed largely on green food in summer. in selling your surplus at a profit, the same principles apply as in raising a surplus to sell at a profit. while poultry and egg raising does not require that you must be first, it does require that you market your produce at a time when the prices are highest. you must hatch at a time which will allow the young hens to begin laying as winter approaches; the food must keep up animal heat and the house must be warm enough to make the hens comfortable, and the conditions must be such as to keep them laying. as an experiment, we once raised six pullets. they were hatched in may, and in december they began laying. all during the winter they laid never less than four and some times six eggs a day, and kept this up until spring. they were fed on wheat and corn and plenty of meat scraps and green food. they were kept in what was practically a glass house, receiving the benefit of the sun during the day, and were protected from the winds. the effect was to bring as near as possible the condition of the warm months; these paid very well. ducks are less frequently raised than chickens and often realize good returns. the popular fallacy that ducks require a stream or pond is gradually passing away. there was a time when nearly all ducks were raised in this way, feeding on fish as the principal diet, but experience has proved that ducks raised without a stream or pond tend to put on flesh instead of feathers, and they have not the oily, fishy flavor of those raised on the water. nearly all of the successful duck raisers now use this method. this is bringing the duck more into prominence as an article of food; as james rankin says in "duck culture," "people do not care to eat fish and flesh combined. they would rather eat them separate." the white pekins are the popular birds, because they are larger, have white meat, and are splendid layers. they lay from to eggs in a season and are the easiest to raise. they can do entirely without water; and rankin tells of selling a flock to a wealthy man, who afterwards wrote asking him to take them back, because he had bought them for an artificial lake in front of his house, so that his wife and children could watch them disporting in the water. he complained that they would not go into the water unless he drove them in and would remain only so long as he stood over them. ducks are easier to raise than any other fowl and are freer from disease. they are ready for market when eight weeks old. the industry is assuming large proportions, and ranches are now raising ducks by the tens of thousands and are finding better markets each year. in starting any poultry business, it is better to begin with twenty-five fowls and master details with those, then double the number as fast as they have been made to return profits. the atlantic squab company, of hammonton, n. j., says "it is a simple matter for the beginner to figure out on paper net profits of four or five dollars per year from each pair of breeders, but we doubt if it can be made. it is, however, 'pigeon nature' to lay ten or eleven times a year, but hardly natural to presume that each and every egg will ultimately mean a jumbo squab in the commission man's hands. "a loft [that is, a pair] of high-class homers, properly mated, should average six pair of squabs per year. for one year our squabs averaged us a fraction over cent per pair; say $ . has been the returns from each pair of breeders. it has cost us cent per pair to feed for twelve months; remember, we buy in large quantities; it would cost the small breeder $ a year per pair to feed. it would be well to allow cent a pair for labor and supplies, such as grit, charcoal, tobacco stems, etc., although the bird manure, which we find ready sale for at cent. per bushel, has covered these incidental expenses for us. the inexperienced beginner, with good management and close attention to details, should clear $ a year from each pair of birds, provided he starts with well-mated pure homer stock." pigeons are particular about their mates, and will rather go single than take a disagreeable partner. raising belgian hares at one time promised to be a most profitable industry. the belgian hare is a distant relation of the ordinary rabbit. its flesh is white, close-grained, and tender, resembling the legs of the frog, and has a very savory flavor. it is considered by many superior to poultry, and the rapidity with which they breed gave promise of fortunes. the doe brings forth a litter of about eleven every sixty days, and with prices ranging from $ . to $ . , as they were about the year , with the cost of raising from thirty to forty cents, the reason for this promise is evident. in southern california thousands turned their attention to it, and some firms entered the business with equipment to the value of fifty thousand dollars. besides the ordinary market prices realized for the hares, some went extensively into breeding fancy stock, and realized from $ to $ apiece for them. this industry had indications of becoming extensive and enduring, but by so many went into the business that the markets became glutted and prices fell with disastrous effect. whether it will pay you depends largely on the attitude of your customers toward the hare as a food product. bee-keeping offers an interesting and remunerative field of employment. more than the average living awaits those only who will make a careful and intelligent study of bees and their habits and will give them the proper care and attention. one need not be a practical bee-keeper to enter this field. he can purchase even one hive and, while increasing from this, he can gain an experience that he could get in no other way. how shall one start bee-keeping? get one hive or a few hives. if you have no room in the yard, put them upon the roof. one man in cincinnati, ohio, makes his living from bees kept on the roof of his house. wm. a. selzer, a large dealer in bee-keepers' supplies, in philadelphia, established many colonies on the roof of his place right in the heart of the business district, where it would seem impossible for bees to find a living. very little space is required for bee-keeping; hives can be set two feet apart in rows, and the rows six to ten feet apart. no pasture need be provided for them. there are always fields of flowers to supply the nectar. white clover produces a large yield of nectar of very fine flavor. the basswood or linden tree blossom produces a fine nectar which some consider better than white clover. buckwheat also gives a good yield of nectar, but it is dark in color and brings a lower price for that reason. there are other plants which yield large quantities of nectar, and it would be necessary to know the locality to say what would be the best plants; but as white clover is found almost everywhere in the northern states, it is safe to say this will be the best producer in the spring, and goldenrod, where found, the best for the fall supply. frank benton, in united states department of agriculture bulletin , says: "it may be safely said that any place where farming, gardening, or fruit raising can be successfully followed is adapted to the profitable keeping of bees." there is always a farmer here and there who keeps a few hives of bees. these often can be purchased at a very reasonable price, but unless they are italian bees and are in improved hives, it would be better to purchase from some dealer. he may sell you a very weak colony, but after the first year these ought to be as strong as any. start in the spring; when you have your bees, read good literature on the subject. a. i. root's "a b c of bee culture" is good for beginners; subscribe for the _american bee journal,_ of chicago, or _gleanings in bee culture,_ medina, ohio. they are full of the latest ideas on the subject. a yield of fifty pounds of honey in a season can be obtained from one hive of bees in almost any locality. in fact, this is often done where bees are kept in built up cities. one hundred pounds would be considered a very small yield by many apiarists, and twice this amount is often gathered in favored localities where up-to-date methods are followed. one man can take care of two hundred hives or colonies, as they are termed, if he is working for comb honey, and perhaps twice that number if for extracted honey. comb honey is stored usually in one-pound boxes set in a super or small box over the main hive body, which is itself a box about seventeen inches long, eleven inches wide, and ten inches deep into which frames of comb are slid side by side. these combs are accessible and can be lifted out, exposing to view the inner workings of the hive. it is in these combs that the queen lays as many as three thousand eggs some days, and in which the young bees are hatched. they are also used for storing honey for winter use. the extractor has been invented to remove this honey without damaging the comb. the economy of this can readily be seen, as ten pounds of honey can be stored while one pound of comb is being built. this leaves the bees free to gather honey instead of using a portion of their force to build comb, as is necessary when comb honey is desired. the extractor is a round tin can on a central pivot with a revolving mechanism. into this the full combs of honey are placed and are whirled around, throwing the honey out into the can by centrifugal force. it is then run out at the bottom into bottles or barrels, and the empty combs are replaced in the hive for the bees to fill again. twice as many pounds of honey can be produced by this method; but the price of extracted honey is much less than that of comb honey. adulteration of extracted honey with glucose is becoming so prevalent that it threatens to ruin this branch of the industry. but there will always be a good market for honey sold direct by the producer to residents, or even through storekeepers, in medium size towns, where customers can be sure that the honey is pure. the average wholesale prices of honey are about fifteen cents a pound for extracted and twenty cents for fancy comb, so if the apiarist with two hundred hives produces the small average of fifty pounds of comb honey and sells it at fifteen cents a pound, he will receive $ for his season's work. if he goes in for extracted honey and produces one hundred pounds per hive, he will receive even more. of course, expenses will have to come out of this. that this has been done over and over again is proved by men who started in with only a few hives and have accumulated considerable property from the business. but no one need expect to do this unless he is willing to give the bees the attention which they will require. to neglect them once means often a total loss. most of the work will have to be done during the swarming season in may, june, and july. there has been so much written on the subject and so many inventions and improvements made in the hives that bee-keeping more than any other branch of similar employment has been reduced to a science, and any one can thoroughly master it in two or three years. it is because its possibilities are not generally recognized that so few are now engaged in it. the fear of stings will always deter many from entering this business and so check competition from forcing prices down. the price of honey makes it a luxury, and there will be an unlimited opportunity in the crop as long as the price does not get near the cost of producing, which is far below the present prices. to use land directly is to open almost infinite opportunities. department of agriculture, farmers' bulletin , says: "in the united states the term 'mushroom' refers commercially to but a single species _(agaricus campestris)_ of the fleshly fungi, a plant common throughout most of the temperate regions of the world, and one everywhere recognized as edible." it is unfortunate that the commercial use of the term "mushroom" restricts it to a single species. there are about twenty-five common varieties of edible fungi in the northern states. the successful cultivation of mushrooms in america has not been so general as in most european countries. it is in france and in england that the mushroom industry has been best developed. france is the home of the industry. unusual interest has been shown in the united states in the growth of mushrooms within the past few years, and it is to be hoped and expected that within the next ten years the industry will develop to the fullest limit of the market demands. the demand will, of course, be stimulated by the increasing popular appreciation of this product. in some cities and towns there is already a good market for mushrooms, while in others they may be sold directly to special customers. this should be borne in mind by prospective growers. while many american growers have been successful, a much larger number have failed. in most cases their failures have been due to one or more of the following causes: ( ) poor spawn, or spawn which has been killed by improper storage. ( ) spawning at a temperature injuriously high. ( ) too much water either at the time of spawning or later. ( ) unfavorable temperature during the growing period. it is therefore important to the prospective grower that careful attention be given to the general discussion of conditions which follow. mushrooms may be grown in any place where the conditions of temperature and moisture are favorable. a shed, cellar, cave, or vacant space in a greenhouse may be utilized to advantage for this purpose. the most essential factor, perhaps, is that of temperature. the proper temperature ranges from degree to degree f., with the best from degree to degree f. it is unsafe to attempt to grow mushrooms on a commercial basis, according to our present knowledge of the subject, in a temperature much less than degree or greater than degree f. any severe changes of temperature would entirely destroy the profits of the mushroom crop. from this it is evident that in many places mushrooms may not be grown as a summer crop. with artificial heat they may be grown almost anywhere throughout the winter. moreover, it is very probable that in this country open-air culture must be limited to a few sections. a second important factor is moisture. the place should not be very damp, or constantly dripping with water. under such conditions successful commercial work is not possible. a place where it is possible to maintain a fairly moist condition of the atmosphere, and having such capability for ventilation as will cause at least a gradual evaporation, is necessary. with too rapid ventilation and the consequent necessity of repeated applications of water to the mushroom bed, no mushroom crop will attain the highest perfection. even a little iron rust in the soil is reported as fatal to the campestris, the only fungus so far successfully propagated. if other fungi than the campestris come up wild, don't throw them away as worthless. many are better eating than the one you seek, and you can avoid the risk of poisonous ones by learning to recognize the dangerous family--send for the agricultural department's bulletin no. . meanwhile, ( ) all mushrooms with pink gills, ( ) all coral-like fungi, ( ) all that grow on wood, and ( ) all puffballs, are good to eat if they are young and tender--only don't mistake an unspread aminita for a puffball. an ingenious person may find other sources of income in the country. a young hotel porter in ulster county, new york, bought seventy acres of mountain woodland four miles from the railroad for two hundred and fifty dollars, and puts in his winters cutting barrel hoops, at which he makes two dollars a day. meanwhile the land is maturing timber. that is hard work, but to gather wild mushrooms or to cut willows, or sweet pine needles to make cushions, or to catch young squirrels for sale, is lighter, if less steady employment. and with all our uses of land, we must not forget a little corner for the hammock and the croquet hoops for the wife and the children. in the province of quebec, where the land is held in great tracts under the seigniors, i have seen croquet grounds no bigger than a bed quilt in front of the little one-room cottages. the frenchman knows the importance of such things as that, has meals out of doors in fine weather, goes on little picnics, and keeps madame contented in the country. a swing, or a seesaw, and a tether ball (a ball swinging from the top of a pole eight feet high) for the children will help to keep the family peace. chapter xiii fruits fruit raising can succeed in either of two ways. either planting the orchard in some one fruit and specializing thereon, or diversifying the operation to cover many varieties. in the first way it is usual to establish orchards in favorable localities without special regard to nearness to market; because in these days of refrigerator car lines the product of an orchard in any part of the country can be sent to market quickly enough to avoid loss. where many varieties are grown, the best site is usually near a large city where the grower can market his own product on wagons and get the benefit of retail prices. remember that it is far more profitable to raise twenty baskets of fine, well-shaped, clean, handsome apples or peaches or any other hand-eaten fruit, than to raise a hundred barrels of stuff that is good only for the common drier or for the mill or hogpen. care and common sense are the jackscrews to use in raising fine fruit. the apple is the great american fruit for extensive orcharding. the question is whether there is a profit in apple growing. the answer is, where the conditions are favorable and when the business is well conducted there is. under average conditions, with poor business management, there is little or none. as professor s. t. maynard in _suburban life_ tells us, "in a suburban garden of one of our eastern cities are seven astrachan trees, about twenty years old, from which have been sold in a single season over one hundred dollars' worth of fruit. a friend near boston put three thousand barrels of picked baldwins into cold storage. none of the fancy apples sold for less than three dollars a barrel, and the others netted more than two dollars. they were the product of less than forty acres of trees which had been planted about twenty-five years. another fruit grower showed me several returns of commission men of five, six, and even seven dollars a barrel for fancy baldwins. at such prices, and under such conditions, there is a large profit in apple growing." "the other side of the picture, however, is the more common one. a friend sent fifty barrels of fancy baldwins to a commission house, to be shipped to european markets, the returns for which were just enough to pay for the barrels. the majority of apples grown in the united states are sold to buyers, one buyer in each section, for a dollar to two dollars for no. quality, and a dollar for no. . with the cost of barrels at about forty cents, labor for picking, sorting, and packing, these prices leave little or nothing for the use of the land, cost of fertilizers, spraying, thinning, etc., all of which are necessary for growing fruit of the best quality." holmes further says, in substance, that we must make the trees grow vigorously, whether upon poor or good soil. growth is the first requirement. to do this, we need a strong, deep, moist soil,--good grass land well underdrained makes the best. if this is on an elevation with a northern or western exposure, it will be better than a southern or an eastern one. while apple trees will grow on a thin soil, so much care and fertilizing is required that the crop will be of little or no profit upon such land. lastly, we must protect our fruit from insect and fungous pests. on land that is free from stones and not too steep, thorough and frequent cultivation will give the quickest and largest returns. on such land, hoed garden or farm crops may be profitable while the trees are small, but after five or six years it will generally be found best to cultivate it entirely for the growth of trees. organic matter in the form of stable manure or cover crops will be needed, and must be applied in the fall or very early in the spring to keep up the supply of humus in the soil. stony land that cannot be plowed or cultivated except at a great cost may be made to grow good crops of fruit. while the trees are young, the soil should be worked about them for the space of a few feet and then the moisture retained by a mulch system, making use of any waste organic matter like straw, leaves, meadow hay, brush, and weeds cut before they seed. most of the first prize apples at the pan-american exposition at buffalo were grown under the "turf-culture" system. unless you have trees already on your land, it is too long to wait six or seven years for a crop. we can graft good fruit on almost any tree, though the new dwarf trees will bear much sooner, and if we have trees we need not even wait for the harvest of our crop, since the windfalls will keep us in apple sauce, jellies, and pies, for no apple is too green for apple sauce, not even the ones that the boys can't bite. the greatest difficulty in the profitable growth of the apple is the market. much of the profit in apple growing, whether in the east or the west, will depend upon the extent of the business done, especially if one is a considerable distance from markets. the above are the essentials noted by this practical scientist. next to the apple crop, perhaps the most important fruit crop for shipping is the peach. the locality is perhaps the most important consideration in a peach orchard. in the eastern and southern states, and in connecticut, delaware, new jersey, maryland, and virginia, and, of late years, georgia, peaches flourish and produce enormous crops. as a general rule, the nearer the orchard is to large bodies of water, the more likely one is to get a crop, as the temperature of the water prevents a too early budding out in the spring and delays killing autumn frosts. generally speaking, a sandy, porous soil is best for peaches, but they may be raised on clay lands if provided with plenty of humus. another fruit which is profitable in districts suited to its growth is the grape. bulletin no. , cornell experiment station, says: "grapes are a dessert fruit. they are not used to a large extent in the kitchen (though they might be), so there are few incidental or secondary products; that is, they are not dried, canned, made into jellies, and the like, to any extent, that is, in the united states. the grape is peculiarly a sectional product. central new york has a large area devoted to it. in northern ohio, a strip along lake erie, and some of its islands, are devoted almost exclusively to grape vineyards. in districts where grapes are intensively grown, a great part of the crop is used for wine, and american wine is extensively sold m our home markets, although it frequently has foreign labels. any one purchasing a farm should plant some grapevines for home use. grape juice is easily made and kept and is a pleasing beverage. grape jelly is excellent and could be readily marketed in any nearby town, since there is very little, comparatively, on sale. a grape arbor gives shade, needs little care, and can be planted near the house where it will not interfere with the crops. for you cannot cultivate all of your land; some grassy space must be left around the house if only for drying clothes. but if ground is scarce, vines or lima beans can be trained up the back porch or up the sunny side of the house; or a few climbing nasturtiums will give decorations without care, while the young leaves make a good salad. of home orchard fruits, the plum, pear, and quince are all profitable specialties, especially for intensive acre raising. in general, the same remark may be made of them as of the other fruits, that they need careful selection of land to get the best results. the cherry has recently come to be recognized as a good commercial specialty. mr. george t. powell, in _the american agriculturist,_ says: "the crop is a precarious one to market.... the risk and loss may be largely reduced by making a proper selection of site for the orchard. this should be on high ground where the air generally circulates freely. this is especially necessary for sweet varieties. the soil should be rich, with naturally good drainage." he says: "i have had rockport trees produce four hundred pounds each and the fruit net ten cents a pound for the entire crop. the english morello trees may be grown fifteen feet apart each way, which will allow two hundred trees to the acre. the larger trees ought to be planted somewhat thinner.... cherries are packed largely in eight-pound baskets and in strawberry quarts. each basket is filled with carefully assorted fruit, every imperfect specimen being taken out, after which they are faced by placing the stems downward so that the cherry shows in regular rows upon the face. girls and women do this work. the eastern fruit grower must bear in mind that he has to meet in his market the competition of the pacific coast growers, who excel in fine packing; and although our eastern grown cherries are of a finer flavor, they are sent to the market in such a crude manner and in such unattractive condition that they sell for much less than the california fruit." regarding bush berries, he says, you will get a small crop the second year after planting and for the third and subsequent years a full crop. the important thing is to keep the dead canes well pruned out, as the cane borer is one of the worst insect pests. when they appear they can be stopped by cutting off the shoot several inches below the puncture as soon as it begins to droop, and burning the part cut off. again, mr. powell says, "currants require rich soil. a clay or heavy loam is better than a heavy dry soil. they should be planted in the fall. the average from ten thousand bushes should be about four quarts each. the cherry currant is perhaps the largest in size, but not so prolific as some others. currants are shipped and sold in thirty-two quart crates and have to be carefully packed to get to market in good condition." gooseberries are raised by the acre. mr. a. m. brown, kent county, delaware, in _the american agriculturist,_ tells of a plantation in central delaware where over twenty four thousand pounds were gathered from a scant four acres. the product was sold to the baltimore canners for six cents a pound, making $ in all. in addition to the gooseberries grown on six acres, a large crop each of apples and pears were grown on the same ground. like currants, the gooseberry must be sprayed to destroy the worms, and cut back and burnt to destroy the cane borer. there is little special knowledge required, however, in raising this fruit, and it is well adapted for growers with small acreage and little money. in going into the cultivation of bush fruits, it is usually best to grow them in great variety near the market where they are to be sold. the bush fruits are then uniformly profitable. in _suburban life_ mr. e. c. powell tells us that the spring is the best time for planting raspberries and blackberries, just as soon as the ground is dry enough to work. the first season the plots should be well tilled. it is possible to grow vegetables between the rows the first year before the berries begin to bear, but unless pressed for space, it probably doesn't pay. perhaps the best of small fruits, however, and most largely used is the strawberry. the strawberry can be planted by the acre. the ground must be rich loam and plenty of humus, well drained, with a southern exposure. well-grown plants set out in the open will bear a small crop the first season, but will not become of maximum bearing till the second year. after the crop is taken off in the fall a mulch of straw or leaves should be placed over the plants to protect them during the winter. the strawberries are picked by boys and girls. the strawberry is an exceedingly profitable crop if properly handled, and is one of the best small fruits for people with little capital. while the price in the general market varies from fifteen to thirty cents per quart, they sometimes run as high as fifty in the early spring; yet it is possible to grow strawberries worth six dollars a quart by intensive culture in greenhouses. mr. s. w. fletcher, in _country life in america,_ says: "the forcing of strawberries is a specialized industry of the highest type. everybody cannot make it pay everywhere.... strawberries are forced in pots or in benches. the pot method is preferred by those who find a demand for the highest quality of fruit regardless of expense.... if fruit is desired for christmas, the plants are not checked to any extent, but are kept in continuous growth. the conditions of springtime are simulated as far as possible. at christmas time a quart box of forced marshall strawberries sells at from one-fifty to eight dollars per quart, averaging about four dollars." our most valuable allies against the insect armies are toads, bats, wasps, dragon flies, and birds; they enjoy the battle. there cannot be too many toads or bats. toads will eat all sorts of flies, potato bugs, squash bugs, rose bugs, caterpillars, and almost anything that crawls. if the wasps become a nuisance, it is easy to poison them; but the birds are often a nuisance--the robins eat the strawberries and cherries the instant they are ripe. they soon get used to scarecrows; and to cover the fruit with nets gives the insects a free hand. some growers raise sweet cherries or other fruits specially to feed up the birds so that they will let the rest alone. early rising and a plenty of cats is about the best remedy. a man, or even a woman, working on the land is the best scarecrow. there are a few other fruits that grow wild in certain sections and are gathered and sent to market. among these the cranberry is the most important. it grows in nearly inaccessible bogs, principally in new jersey, and the usual custom is for owners of land on which there are cranberry bogs to let out the bog to pickers on a percentage basis. cranberries can be cultivated, and there is a considerable profit in the business. the swampy nature of the ground needed, however, will deter all except the most persistent from this industry. some cranberry bogs bring as high as a thousand dollars an acre. the blueberry or huckleberry, or, as we call it in ireland, the bilberry, or frohen, grows wild in the northerly states, and is much sought after in the market. many efforts have been made to grow the blueberry commercially; but, as is well said by mr. j. h. hale in the _rural new yorker,_ "the blueberry proved to be a good deal like indians--it would not stand civilization, and was never satisfactory, although i monkeyed with it for a period of about ten years." mr. fred w. card, of rhode island, in the same issue reports a similar experience. with our present knowledge of the blueberry, it is doubtful if it can be made a commercially cultivated crop. lately, however, it is claimed that it can be grown in very poor, non-nitrogenous soil. a variety, however, called the garden blueberry, gives almost incredible yields, five bushels being reported from sixty plants. it keeps all winter _on the branches,_ if stored in a cellar, and is of fine flavor and especially good for preserves. a little frost improves it. but wild berries, crab apples, and elderberries and others, are good to preserve and find a ready sale if attractively put up; they also help out the table greatly. then think of the fun! in recent years, certain varieties of nuts, like the english walnut, the pecan, and the hickory nuts have been grown commercially. in the south particularly, the pecan has been found a good crop to plant on cotton plantations which have been overworked. in the _rural new yorker,_ mr. h. e. vandevan gives an account of an old cotton plantation of acres iying on the west bank of the mississippi river in louisiana. the pecan tree was indigenous to the land, and the wooded portion of the plantation has thousands of giant pecan trees growing on it. the previous owners of this plantation had done all in their power to destroy these trees, but they flourished in spite of that. mr. vandevan, however, saw in the pecan a large profit, and he has planted ten thousand trees on six hundred acres, all in a solid block. the trees are set fifty feet apart both ways, except where a roadway is left. between the pecan trees mr. vandevan has planted fig trees for early returns, with the intention of canning the fruit. the english walnut is grown principally in california. its value has been recognized only recently, as all of the nut crops take a good many years before the trees begin to bear. nut growing on a small scale is not of much value to a man with a little bit of land, except as an additional source of income. if you find a sweet chestnut tree or a shell-bark hickory or two in your wood lot, they will well repay protection and careful cultivation. if you don't, why--there are great promises in quick maturing nut trees. there is now an english walnut which is claimed to bear the third or even the second year after setting out. my own small experience with these in new jersey, however, has not been a success. chapter xiv flowers every city in the united states affords an opportunity for flower gardening and nurseries, but a study must be made of the market in order to know what is best to raise and where to raise it. the choice of crops depends on the popular taste. the flowers which are now in greatest demand are the rose, carnation, violet, and chrysanthemum. near every large city there are hundreds of florists with glass houses, some covering twenty acres or more. there were over acres of flower land under glass reported at the last census. as almost all industries to-day are specialized, so is floriculture; in one place we see ten acres of glass given over to the rose, in another thousands of dollars devoted to the carnation or the violet, while one grower in queens, long island, has , square feet of glass for carnations. the specialist who devotes his thoughts and energies to raising one flower can produce better results than if he raised a variety. he has only one crop to market, and can do it more successfully than with a number of crops. if he raises enough to make himself a factor in the market, he can sell direct instead of sending his product to a commission man, thereby receiving better prices. little capital is required to start; intelligent effort is the road to success. very few, indeed, who are now leaders in floriculture, started with more than $ capital, and many with much less. one of the largest growers of roses in the united states, whose plant covers more than ten acres, did not have $ when he started, and many others not so well known are making handsome livings and have accumulated thousands of dollars of property from a start of less than $ . but practical knowledge is much more necessary than in raising vegetables, as small mistakes will have more serious results. therefore, if you have some capital and wish to go into flower raising, it will pay you, if circumstances permit, to hire out to a florist, even at small wages, till you have learned the business--even though you have raised flowers successfully in a home garden. mr. frank hamilton, manager of c. w. ward's of queens, tells of at least a dozen men, who have been in their employ during his twenty-five years' experience, some of whom got only twenty dollars a month at first, and afterwards started in a small way for themselves, who are now making a substantial living. although the market depends largely on the wealthy class in the large cities, many florists devote considerable time and space to flowers which are bought by the poorer class of city dwellers who have no space or time to raise their own. there are always good markets somewhere for the crop, and it is not an uncommon thing to ship flowers from new york to chicago, buffalo, boston, philadelphia, baltimore, and washington, or vice versa. the chances of success for a lover of flowers are better in this business than in any in which one with a like amount of capital can engage. if the business at first is not large enough to use all his time he will find no trouble in securing employment in his immediate vicinity. there are always some who want such a person to care for their lawns or to give some time to their conservatories. in the last ten years the business has doubled, and while many have gone into it, the profit they are making indicates that supply has not kept pace with demand, and that it is not likely to be overdone the near future. professor b. t. galloway, in an article in _the world's work,_ says, "an acre of soil under glass pays fifty times as much as an acre outdoors. there are annually sold in this country six to seven million dollars' worth of carnation flowers there are no less than eight to ten million square feet of glass in the united states devoted to this flower alone." although mr. rockefeller's place at tarrytown is the largest competitor in the new york market for violets, there is no local monopoly in that, and the local producer with personal attention can do well. in the _country gentleman_ an account is given of a violet farm on the north shore of illinois, where two women are supplying local florists.. one of them says: "we started our farm last spring in the face of most discouraging prophecies from our friends and the keenest competition of violet growers of new york. but we believed we could be successful. we had studied the best scientific methods of growing the plants, had imported the best soil obtainable, and built a greenhouse fully adapted to our needs, so we just went ahead and we found it to be a paying proposition. "our first experiment was in using cuttings from the violet farm of a lady at lansing, michigan, who has been a most successful grower. these did not thrive, and we next imported cuttings from the tarrytown neighborhood, where violet culture has been most successful. "the first rule is to keep the temperature of the greenhouse between forty-five and fifty degrees. violets are spring flowers, and wither and droop if the temperature is not at the right degree. most people think the double violets have no fragrance because most of those that we get lose their fragrance in transit. "we supply flowers a week, and as they reach our patrons within two or three hours at the most from the time of cutting, they retain their fragrance. they are also larger and of a deeper color than the new york flowers. next year we hope to go in on a much larger scale. "while the work is not hard, it requires infinite care and vigilance when the little plants are growing. as a career for a woman, violet growing offers greater inducements than anything i can think of." then, surely, others can succeed in other flowers at other places. while there is little choice between the standard styles of greenhouses for violets, there should be abundant provision for supplying fresh air, either from the sides or top, whichever is chosen. the system of ventilation should admit of operation either from the inside or the outside of the house, as fumigation with hydrocyanic acid gas is sometimes necessary, in the fumes of which it is impossible to enter, unless with a gas mask. the arrangement of the house should secure the greatest possible supply of sunshine in december and january, and the least possible during the growing season, when, as miss howard points out, it is necessary to secure as low a temperature as possible, so as to obtain good, vigorous, healthy-growing plants. the best site is a level piece of ground, or one sloping gently to the south. of the diseases to which cultivated violets are subject mr. p. h. dorsett, of the department of agriculture, names four as especially dangerous: spot disease, producing whitish spots on the foliage; root rot, apt to attack young plants transplanted in hot, dry weather; wet rot, a fungus apt to appear in too moist air or where ventilation is insufficient; and yellowing, of the cause of which little is known. any of these diseases is difficult to exterminate when it once gains a foothold. the best thing to do is to get strong, vigorous cuttings, and then to give careful attention to watering, cultivation, and ventilation, and the destruction of dead and dying leaves and all runners as fast as they appear. among insect enemies, the aphids, red spiders, eel worms, gall flies, and slugs may be mentioned. most of these can be easiest controlled by hydrocyanic acid gas treatment. chrysanthemums, especially of preternatural size and bizarre colors--the college colors at football games, for instance--are in great demand. they are extremely decorative, and their remarkable lasting quality insures their permanent popularity. i have heard that the unexpanded bud can be cooked like cauliflower for the table; but we have not learned to use them in that way. in japan and china the leaves of the chrysanthemum are esteemed as a salad. one attempt has been made by english gardeners to introduce this use of them into england, but it was unsuccessful. the annual shows of chrysanthemums and of roses indicate the importance of the business. it is not generally known, but the poppies are coming into favor for cut flowers in spite of the fact that they do not keep very well. miss edith granger avoids this difficulty, as she explains in the _garden magazine,_ "by picking off all blooms that have not already lost their petals in the evening, so that in the morning all the open flowers will be new ones. these are cut as early as possible, even while the dew is still upon them, and plunged immediately into deep water." you need not be discouraged by the low prices at which flowers, especially violets and roses, are often offered in the streets. those flowers are the discarded stock or delayed shipments of the swell florists. you will find that those flowers are fading, or revived with salt, and will not keep. that they are so peddled, shows that everybody, at hotels, dinners, funerals, weddings, in the home, and the young men for the young women, want flowers, the loveliest things ever made without souls. we have only to supply such a want to find our place in life. as a side line the common flowers will bring good prices; mignonette, bachelor buttons, cosmos, and even nasturtiums, which you can't keep from growing if you just stick the seed in the ground, or lilies of the valley, which you can hardly get rid of once they start, never go begging, if they are fresh. a favorite flower with many is the sweet pea, which can be grown out of doors in the summer time where you have a good depth and quality of soil. i have seen may blossoms and autumn leaves on the branch and even goldenrod brought into town and sold at good prices. enterprises often look attractive at a distance; for instance, raising orchids, especially as some of the flowers remain on the plants ready for market for weeks and bring high prices. but to ship flowers at a profit they must be in quantities, else the expenses eat up the returns, and they must be shipped with considerable regularity, else you lose your customers. to get such a supply of orchids would take a very large capital and involve so much labor that it is doubtful if more than good interest could be realized on it. many florists make money by keeping constantly on hand ferns, palms, and other plants like rubber trees, which they rent out for social functions, weddings, and other occasions. most florists in the larger cities have also quite a thriving business in tree planting, which is everywhere on the increase. a highly specialized department of horticulture is that of raising young trees and plants to sell for improving grounds, planting orchards, or similar uses. the nursery business bears much the same relation to the commercial florist or orchardist as seed growing does to the market gardener. certain communities, through favorable soil or climate, are best adapted to the production of nursery stock. consequently, one finds this industry most highly developed in scattered localities. it is true that people with small capital should not tackle a business so technical as this. the business of bulb production is another highly specialized department. in certain sections of holland large areas of the rich lowlands are given over to bulbs of various kinds of lilies, nearly all of which are propagated in that manner. to attain perfection, at least in the north, most bulbs require deep, rich, warm, and highly manured soils; and assiduous attention at every stage. in many plant specialties, the gardeners of europe still far surpass our own, because conditions there have forced them to make use of every available means to increase production. the immense price that european gardeners have to pay for land has been a most potent factor in forcing them to seek out and apply the most ingenious forcing methods. the time is upon us here in america also when we must find out the highest use of land and apply it to that use. as the aesthetic qualities of our people become more highly developed, the business of raising flowers must become of increasing importance, and will readily reward any one who goes into it conscientiously. flower growing is peculiarly adapted to women, since the work is light there are few disagreeable features, unless it be the handling of the manure incidental to the best results. still, the enjoyments of agriculture depend upon individual tastes. i have seen "lady gardeners" picking strawberries with the footman holding up an umbrella to screen them from the sun. some women would like that, some not. chapter xv drug plants a source of profit from land to which little attention has been given in the united states is collecting or raising plants, some part of which may be used for medicinal purposes. we condense from farmers' bulletin no. , united states department of agriculture: certain well-known weeds are sources of crude drugs at present obtained wholly or in part from abroad. roots, leaves, and flowers of several of the species most detrimental in the united states are gathered, cured, and used in europe, and supply much of the demands of foreign lands. some of these plants are in many states subject to anti-weed laws, and farmers are required to take measures toward their extermination. the prices paid for crude drugs from these sources save in war time are not great and would rarely tempt any one to this work as a business. yet if in ridding the farm of weeds and thus raising the value of the land the farmer can at the same time make these pests the source of a small income instead of a dead loss, something is gained. one rather alluring fact contained in an article by dr. true, is that a shortage has become keenly felt in "golden seal," which the early american settlers learned from the indians to use as a curative for sore and inflamed eyes, as well as for sore mouth. the plant grows in patches in high open woods, and was formerly found in great abundance in ohio, indiana, kentucky, and west virginia, but is now so rare that its price has risen from thirty-five cents wholesale in to over seventy-five cents a pound. persons in different parts of the country have undertaken the production of golden seal on a commercial scale. more than six hundred dollars' worth can be grown on an acre: so a crop this year would be a fortune. the methods of raising it can be ascertained upon application to the department of agriculture. ginseng is one of the drug crops which paid handsome returns a few years ago, perhaps because it takes from five to seven years to grow from seeds; but so many went into that line that few men to-day make anything at it. furthermore, the chinese, who use a large part of it, will buy only the wild roots--and they know the difference. those who control the trade have burned quantities in the effort to keep up the price. there are some drug plants which might be raised with success by those who would specialize in one plant, but the lesson we learn from ginseng should act as a warning. raising drugs is one of those things that seems to be more profitable to teach others to do than to do yourself. a well known professor said to me: "if i were twenty-five and knew what i know about drugs and the market for them, i should go into the drug-raising business. but i should expect to lose money for some years. if i were a small clerk, say, or an old man who wanted to get out of city life, and i had $ i really wanted to venture in drug raising, i should divide it in half--half i should put in the bank and the other half i should throw into the hudson river. then i should be sure of $ instead of being drawn on to spend it all." "most of the people who have been in the business, notably the shakers, who used to do the most of it, are gradually getting out of it. the few men who make money raising drugs keep it to themselves." in many cases when weeds have been dug the work of handling and curing them is not excessive and can readily be done by women and children. too much emphasis cannot be placed upon the importance of carefully and thoroughly drying all crude drugs, whether roots, herbs, leaves, barks, flowers, or seeds, and putting them under cover at nightfall. if poorly dried, they will heat and become moldy in shipping, and the collector will find his goods rejected by the dealer and have all his trouble for nothing. leaves, herbs, and flowers should never be washed. it is important also to collect in proper season only, as drugs collected out of season are unmarketable on account of inferior medicinal qualities, and there will also be a greater shrinkage in a root dug during the growing season than when it is collected after growth has ceased. the roots of annual plants should be dug in the autumn of the first year just before the flowering period, and those of biennial and perennial plants in the fall of the second or third year, after the tops have dried. after the roots have been dug the soil should be well shaken from them, and all foreign particles, such as dirt, roots, and parts of other plants, should be removed. if the roots cannot be sufficiently cleared of soil by shaking, they should be thoroughly washed in clean water. drugs must look wholesome at least. it does not pay to be careless in this matter. the soil increases the weight of the roots, but the purchaser is not willing to pay by weight for dirt, and grades the uncleaned or mixed drugs accordingly. it is the bright, natural looking root, leaf, or plant that will bring a good price. after washing, the roots should be carefully dried by exposing them to light and air, on racks or shelves, or on clean well-ventilated barn floors, or lofts. they should be spread out thinly and turned occasionally from day to day until completely cured. when this point is reached, in perhaps three to six weeks, the roots will snap readily when bent. if dried out of doors they should be placed under shelter at night and upon the approach of rain. some roots require slicing and removing fibrous rootless. in general, large roots should be split or sliced when green in order to facilitate drying. barks of trees should be gathered in spring, when the sap begins to flow, but may also be peeled in winter. in the case of the coarser barks (as elm, hemlock, poplar, oak, pine, and wild cherry) the outer layer is shaved off before the bark is removed from the tree, which process is known as "rossing." only the inner bark of these trees is used medicinally. barks may also be cured by exposure to sunlight, but moisture must be avoided. leaves and herbs should be collected when the plants are in full flower. the whole plant may be cut and the leaves may be stripped from it, rejecting the coarse and large stems as much as possible, and keeping only the flowering tops and more tender stems and leaves. both leaves and herbs should be spread out in thin layers on clean floors, racks, or shelves, in the shade, but where there is free circulation of air, and turned frequently until thoroughly dry. moisture will darken them. flowers are collected when they first open or immediately after, not when they are beginning to fade. seeds should be gathered just as they are ripening, before the seed pods open, and should be winnowed in order to remove fragments of stems, leaves, and shriveled specimens. the collector should be sure that the plant is the right one. many plants closely resemble one another, and some "yarbs," contrary to the popular impression, are deadly poison--nightshade (belladonna) and the wild variety of parsnips, for instance. therefore, where any doubt exists, send a specimen of the entire plant, including leaves, flowers, and fruits, to a drug dealer or to the nearest state experiment station for identification. samples representative of the lot of drugs to be sold should be sent to the nearest commission merchant, or drug store, for inspection and for quotation on the amount of drug that can be furnished, or for information as to where to send the article. in writing to the different dealers for information and for prices, which vary greatly, it should be stated how much of a particular drug can be furnished and how soon this can be supplied, and postage should always be inclosed for reply. the collector should bear in mind that freight is an important item, and it is best, therefore, to address the dealers accessible to the place of production. the package containing the sample should be plainly marked with contents and the name and address of the sender. when ready for shipment crude drugs may be tightly packed in burlap or gunny sacks, or in dry, clean barrels. burdock root brings from three to eight cents per pound, and seed five to ten cents. about fifty thousand pounds of the root is imported annually, and the best has come from belgium. of dock roots, about , pounds are imported annually, at from two to eight cents. the field for the sale of dandelion root is large. of couch grass, the roots of which cause much profanity in this country, there are some , pounds annually imported at from three to seven cents per pound. a common weed with which there is a considerable trouble is the pokeweed, the root of which brings from two to five cents per pound and the dried berries five cents per pound. forty to sixty thousand pounds of foxglove are imported from europe. analysis has shown that the leaves of the wild american foxglove are as good as the european article, the price of which per pound ranges from six to eight cents. of mullein flowers about five thousand pounds used to be imported, chiefly from germany. the leaves are also imported. dried leaves and tops of lobelia bring from three to eight cents per pound, while the seed commands fifteen to twenty cents per pound. of tansy about thirty-five thousand pounds have been imported annually at a price rallying from three to six cents. the flowering tops and leaves of the gum plant are used as drug. they bring from five to twelve cents per pound. boneset leaves and tops bring from two to eight cents per pound. catnip tops and leaves two to eight cents per pound. of horehound about , pounds are imported annually, prices being three to eight cents per pound. blessed thistle is cultivated in germany, and it is imported to a limited extent. yarrow is a weed common from the new england states to missouri. it is imported in small quantities, and brings from two to five cents per pound. canada fleabane brings from six to eight cents per pound. of jimsonweed, leaves are imported, from , to , pounds annually, and , pounds of seed. leaves bring two and one half to eight cents per pound, and seeds from three to seven cents per pound. of poison hemlock, seeds are imported from ten to twenty thousand pounds annually. price for the seed is three cents per pound, for the leaves about four cents. the flowers are also used. the american wormseed has been naturalized from tropical america to new england; the seed commands from six to eight cents per pound; the oil distilled from this seed brings one dollar and a half per pound. black mustard, which is a troublesome weed in almost every state in the union, is nevertheless imported in enormous quantities, the total imports of the seeds of the black and white mustard amounting annually to over five million pounds, the prices being from three to six cents per pound. all these prices and quantities were before the war and may greatly change after it. in studying the wild drug plants, one may learn the immense variety of field salads and greens. on a visit to the spirit fruit society at ingleside, illinois, one of the girls took me out to gather wild vegetables for dinner. we pulled up about a dozen varieties out of the corners of a field; two or three of the nice looking ones that i gathered the young lady threw out, saying she did not know them; but it seemed to me that she took almost anything that was not too tough. the following are commonly used as salads: dandelion, yellow racket, purslane (pusley), watercress, nasturtium; and the following as greens for cooking: narrow or sour dock, stinging nettle, pokeweed, pigweed or lamb's quarters, black mustard. young milkweed is better than spinach, and also makes an excellent salad. probably all the salad leaves could be cooked to advantage. rhubarb leaves and horseradish tops are garden greens usually neglected most unfairly. osage orange _(maclura aurantiaca)_ is generally supposed to be poison, and is described in webster's dictionary as "a hard and inedible fruit," but i have found one kind, at least, superior to quinces. capsicum or red pepper, licorice (the imports of which have all been in the hands of one person), camphor, belladonna, henbane, and stramonium are possible fields for culture; but they are all experiments. if you are growing poppies for the flowers it might be worth while to gather some opium, especially if the new process succeeds in separating morphine directly from the plant. caraway seeds, anise, coreander, and sage are common garden plants that may be sold as drugs. chapter xvi novel live stock occasionally we hear stories of the wealth which is being made on a frog farm here or there. but as a rule little commercial success has attended attempts in this direction. the difficulty lies in feeding them. a single frog can be fed by dangling a piece of meat before it, but it would be impossible to feed thousands this way. there are so many enemies that few tadpoles become adult frogs; besides, the frog is a cannibal and will eat not only the larvae or eggs, but the tadpoles and young frogs as well. frog culture is successful in some places where ponds are large enough to be partitioned, separating the tadpoles and young frogs from the old ones, and where insects are abundant enough to supply food naturally for them. near san francisco there are a number of frog ranches. even in , according to mary heard in _out west,_ one ranch sold to san francisco markets dozen frogs' legs, netting $ . this was considered poor. frogs' legs are sold to hotels and restaurants, and bring in new york, according to size and season, from fifty cents to a dollar a pound. tons of frogs come to new york markets each year from canada, michigan, and from the south and west. few people outside of the cities eat them. the united states fish commissioners reported the product in one year: arkansas, , lb., valued at $ ; indiana, , lb., valued at $ ; ohio, , lb., valued at $ ; vermont, lb., valued at $ , etc.--a total of $ , . the enormous and increasing prices of large diamond backed turtles, and the cheapness of little ones shows that maturing, at least, if not actually breeding them, would be well worth investigation. many wealthy new yorkers send direct to maryland for their supplies. where turtle meat is bottled or canned, the snapping turtle and the common box tortoise are sometimes used as "substitutes." both are capital eating. the carp is one of the most excellent fresh water fish, and is of great value on account of the facility of culture and the enormous extent to which this is carried on. "in europe some artificial ponds comprise an area of no less than , acres, and the proceeds amount to about , pounds of carp per annum." (hessel, in "carp and its culture.") it attains the weight of three to four pounds in three years without artificial feeding, and much more under more favorable conditions. it lives to a great age and continues to grow all the while. "in europe it is common to see carp weighing from thirty to forty pounds and more, measuring nearly three and one half feet in length and two and three quarters feet in circumference." it lives on vegetable food, insects, larvae, and worms, and will not attack other fishes or their spawn. it is easy to raise, and, provided certain general rules are followed, success will attend its culture. the localities best adapted to a carp pond are those in which there is sufficient water at hand for the summer as well as the winter. a mud or loam soil is best adapted for such a pond. a rocky, gravelly ground is not suited for carp; the water should be the same depth all the year, as variation has an injurious effect on the fish. carp spawn in the spring. in stocking a pond three females are calculated to two males. the females lay a great number of eggs, but only a small number are impregnated. the most liberal estimate will not exceed from to to one spawner, the aggregate per acre amounting to from to . the large cities containing large numbers of europeans furnish the principal markets for carp. the jewish people will not, as a rule, buy carp unless they are alive, so it is not an uncommon thing to see fish dealers in the hebrew quarters pushing through the streets carts constructed as tanks and peddling the carp alive. some years ago carp ponds were quite a fad among farmers of the central west. americans have been slow to adopt the german carp as a food fish. trout, of course, can be raised, and the high prices which they bring, both in market and for fishing privileges, make them very attractive; but the cold running water needed makes opportunity for breeding them with access to a good market generally unavailable to owners of five acres. there is another fish, famous for its eating qualities, which well repays effort put upon its production. i refer to the black bass. it is indigenous to the waters of the eastern states, where it is usually found in creeks or rivers. it can be successfully bred in properly constructed ponds. mr. dwight lyell, in forest and stream, has this to say about a breeding place for the small-mouthed black bass. "the pond should be six feet deep in the center and two feet around the edge; the bottom should be of natural sand; water plants should be growing in profusion, particularly such aquatic plants as the daphnia, bosmina, and the corix, to furnish food for the young bass. a good size for a breeding pond is x feet." for spawning, artificial nest frames are built in rectangular form. they are made two feet square without bottoms. on two adjoining sides these frames are four inches high and on the other two adjoining sides sixteen inches high. these frames are made because the bass needs a barrier behind which the spawning may be done and which will protect the nest when made. for raising the fish to a size large enough for food, ponds can be of any convenient size. in order to keep the water in healthful condition the pond must be fed by a flowing brook with some provision to prevent the water being disturbed by freshets. this can usually be arranged by a sluice to carry off the surplus water during heavy rains. black bass raised in shallow ponds will take the fly all summer, so that considerable may be made from fishing privileges. in the absence of minnows, which are the food of the bass, they must be fed on fresh liver cut in threads like an angle worm to tempt the fish. even then the liver diet must be varied by feeding minnows from september until the bass goes into winter quarters. in no other way can fertile eggs be assured for the spring hatching. minnows left in the pond all winter will breed and so furnish fry on which the young bass can feed the next summer." what has been said refers particularly to the small-mouthed black bass. the conditions are substantially the same for the large-mouthed bass (which grows to a much larger size), except that the bottom may be made of spanish moss imbedded in cement. there is a growing market for the young bass or fingerlings to stock streams and ponds. the relation between the producer of stock fish and those who expect to raise bass of a marketable size is about the same as exists between the professional seed grower and the market gardener. it is much better for the small farmer who has or can make an artificial pond to buy his fingerlings from the professional breeder, who has facilities which are too elaborate to be duplicated on a small scale. fish culture, except under government auspices, is little known in the united states. _american homes and gardens_ has an account of the breeding of pheasants, which is of interest. that it is possible to breed pheasants, even around an ordinary suburban home, is shown by mr. homer davenport, the famous cartoonist, who succeeded in breeding and raising some of the choicest pheasants on his place at morris plains, new jersey. a great variety of species are commonly bred, but all of them came from china or india. the pheasant can be tamed by careful handling, but cats and dogs and other small animals must be kept away. the pheasantry should be placed on high, well-drained ground with a southern exposure, where the soil is good enough to raise clover, oats, and barley. the quarters for pheasants and the management are very much like those for fancy chickens. the yard should be inclosed by wire netting both on sides and top to keep the birds from wandering away; and there should be houses for roosting and breeding with nesting quarters attached. in central park, new york, the running space allotted to three or four birds is not more than ten by twenty feet, and mr. george ethelbert walsh tells of a case where sixty pheasants were kept in excellent condition in a house ten by fifty feet, with five yards attached, averaging x feet. however, with pheasants, as with all the bird family, especially turkeys, the more ground they have for ranging the less liable they will be to disease. the chief difficulty in breeding game birds like the pheasant is to secure the insects, such as flies, maggots, and ant eggs, which are the natural food of the young. sufficient green food like lettuce, turnip tops, cabbage, etc., must also be provided. there is always a market at fancy prices for more of the matured birds than can possibly be supplied. some people make money in breeding or training fancy birds like canaries, mocking birds, finches, parrots, and so on; but this industry can be carried on almost as well in rooms in the city as in the country. specializing on any kind of animal rearing must be gone into with extreme caution, because in the breeding of animals there are many factors to be dealt with which do not confront the breeder of plants. make haste slowly, and before branching out be sure that you master each step in its turn. an industry which is practically unknown in this country, but which flourishes in burgundy, france, is the raising of snails for food. those who are shocked by this will be surprised to learn that snail culture was practiced by the romans at the time of the civil war between caesar and pompey, as jacques boyer says in_ american homes and gardens._ the snail lays from fifty to sixty eggs annually. they are deposited in a smooth hole prepared for them in the ground and hatched within twenty days. so rapidly do they grow that they are ready for market six or eight weeks after hatching. the snail park is made by inclosing a plot of damp, limy soil with smooth boards coated with tar to prevent the snails climbing out, and held in place by outside stakes strong enough to withstand the wind. the boards must penetrate the soil to the depth of eight inches at least, and at a level with the ground they must have a sort of shelf to prevent the snails from burrowing under them. when the snail encounters an obstacle in its path, it lays its eggs, sensible beast. ten thousand snails can be raised on a plot of land one hundred by two hundred feet. the ground is plowed deeply in the spring, the snails are placed on it and covered with from two to four inches of moss or straw which is kept damp. they must be fed daily with lettuce, cabbage, vine leaves, or grass; as they eat at night, they are fed shortly before sunset. aromatic herbs, like mint, parsley, etc., are planted in the inclosure to improve the flavor of the snails. in october, the snails having become fat through the summer, retire into their shells, the mouths of which they close with a thin gelatinous covering. they are now ready for picking, and are put on screens or trays which are piled together in storehouses, where they remain several months without food. when the fast has been sufficiently prolonged, the shells are brushed up and the snails cooked in salt water in a great pot holding about ten thousand. when cooked, they are immediately sent to the consumer in wooden boxes holding from fifty to two hundred. the business is a very profitable one, as the snail is considered a great delicacy by epicures. perhaps the silkworm is not exactly in place in a chapter on novel live stock. it is at present not much more than an interesting experiment, but there will be money in silkworm culture as soon as a market for the product is developed. the main difficulty is lack of food, as the worm thrives best on the leaf of the white mulberry tree. until a substitute is found, it will be necessary therefore to set out young trees, which in two years will bear enough leaves to supply food. the labor of silkworm rearing all comes in one month. it can be carried on in any large, airy room the eggs are hatched by the summer heat, and the worm does not become a heavy eater until the last two weeks. it sheds its skin four times, and after the final moult it climbs into loose brush prepared for it and spins the cocoon. these are then dried and shipped. at the south, where the climate is well suited for silk culture, an obstacle has been found in the unadaptability of the cheap labor, particularly colored labor, to the delicate handling, and especially winding of the silk from the cocoons. many people make money by breeding dogs. not much land is required and very little capital, as kennels can be multiplied as demand increases. there is always a profitable market for dogs, and some of the lap species, like the king charles spaniel, bring fabulous prices. hunting dogs, such as setters, pointers, retrievers, really require a game country and a practical hunter who can train the puppies, to make much of a success of it; with these, if properly handled, the business is a safe one, as there is little other technical skill required beyond ordinary care, such as is given to domestic animals. cats are a better venture than dogs because they are sold to women who will pay any price for what strikes their fancy. fashions in cats change about as fast as fashions in coats, but cats breed faster than coats wear out, so it is quick business. just now, coon cats, tortoise-shell cats, and bizarre colors of persian cats are mostly in vogue, but the tailless manx cat, and even freaks like the six-toed cat and iynx cats always find a ready market. of course, these can be raised in the city, but if it is done in a large enough way to make a living out of it, the board of health and the neighbors will raise--something else. fishing and hunting are primitive industries of which we think only in connection with wild land. but every bay and pond and wood will supply at least some subsistence or profit to the intelligent seeker. oysters, clams, crabs, mussels, frogs, and common fish are found in abundance in many places, and help out with table expenses. even english sparrows are delicious. almost any wild animal is much more wholesome to eat than pork. squirrels and even weasels are cleaner feeders than pigs, and the indians eat them with great relish, while everybody knows the keenness of the darkies for "coon." most snakes are better eating than eels and not near so repulsive--when you get used to them. the woodchuck is a nuisance to the farmer, covering his field with loads of subsoil from the burrow and then eating the tender sprouts; and the farmer does not know enough to eat his tender corpse, but he is good to eat. if a rabbit and a chicken could have young, it would taste like a woodchuck. muskrats, mink, raccoons, and gray and fox squirrels are easily trapped; and the skins of those killed in that way find a steady market. skins of poisoned animals do not sell so well, as they are rough and dry. in order to be profitable, these do not need to pay very well in proportion to the time they take, since they are hunted as recreation and at odd times. but there is a larger field in raising wild animals, which our western people have not been slow to avail themselves of, and we hear of men being prosecuted for breeding wolves, coyotes, and bobcats, a kind of lynx, to get the government bounty for the snouts or scalps. in a legitimate way profit may be had from such animals. ernest thompson seton has an article in _country life in america,_ on raising fur-bearing animals for profit; this offers a good chance for small capital and large intelligence. he suggests the beaver, mink, otter, skunk, and marten, and says that whoever would begin fur farming is better off with five acres than with five hundred. he describes two fox ranches at dover, maine. they raise twenty to forty silver foxes a year, on a little more than half an acre of land. the silver fox's fur is one of the most valuable on the market and sells at an average of $ a pelt, that is, $ to $ gross for the year's work. foxes are not expensive to breed, their food consisting chiefly of sour milk and cornmeal or flour made into a cake, and a little meat about once a week. the capital required is small. a fence for the inclosure should be of one and a half inch mesh no. galvanized wire, ten feet high, with an overhang of eighteen inches to keep the foxes from escaping, and is about the only outlay except for purchase of stock. stakes should be driven close to the fence to keep them from burrowing out. they are naturally clean animals, and with careful attention are free from disease. mr. stevens reports that in his two years' experience he has had twenty to thirty foxes and lost none by disease, while mr. norton, with five years' experience, carrying thirty to forty, reports that one to two die each year. they breed as well in captivity as in their wild state, usually bringing forth a litter of six or seven in the spring. these breed the following spring and their fur is ready for market the following december. and now breeders sell fine stock to other breeders who are entering the industry, sometimes getting three to four hundred dollars per pair. mr. seton remarks, "i am satisfied that any man who has made a success of hens can make a success of foxes, with this advantage for the latter a fox requires no more space or care than a hen, but is worth twenty times as much, and so gives a chance for returns twenty times as large." this is an infant industry, but if others can get the same results, it will pay handsomely. to get the best furs, however, requires a district where the winters are cold and long. there are a few skunk farms in the west. it is said that the scent gland can be taken out, though that is not necessary, and that the farms do well. their oil is also said to be valuable. but while skunks are so common there cannot be much in breeding them. if your fancy goes to "critters" rather than crops it is much better to raise game birds. wild turkeys raised under a hen or in an incubator and made pretty tame (if too tame they do not thrive so well in a small area), "wild" ducks, grouse, partridges, quails, even wood ducks which build their nests in trees are no longer experiments. all the common enemies you have to contend against are foxes, dogs, cats, rats, mink, skunks, hawks, owls, crows, frogs, turtles, snakes, poachers, game legislators, and disease. it has been calculated that one pair of quails and its progeny would produce five or six million birds in eight years if there were no losses. but so would chickens; and probably you will not get that many. all about these game birds is set forth in an advertising booklet called, "game farming" of the hercules powder co., which has offices in a dozen cities, so we need not enlarge. chapter xvii where to go intensive cultivation, raising a big crop on little land, can be carried on most profitably near areas of dense population; for perishable products, like fruits and vegetables, can be best marketed near the consumer. the limit for delivery by auto is about fifteen to twenty miles, and then only if roads are good; if the land selected lies on the line of a railroad which gives equal terms to way freight and to through freight, you will fare nearly as well. railroads control agricultural development. sparsely settled regions always practice extensive cultivation, raising light crops on big farms, because only such crops can be grown as can be raised on large areas by machinery, and are not perishable. staples like corn, wheat, pork, and beef are transported at low prices for long distances by the railroads. this forces the settlers in newly opened portions of the country to sell in a market created by the railroads, in competition with what is produced within the areas of intensive cultivation, that is, with access to adjacent markets. so we find the bonanza wheat farms of california, the dakotas, and the canadian northwest, the pampas of the argentine, the steppes of russia, and the indian uplands devoted to wheat raising; in the united states corn belt, fields of from five to twenty thousand acres are still not uncommon. conversely, intensive cultivation is most advanced in china, where a dense population forced the people long ago to bring into use every foot of tillable soil that is left open to them. near the towns of the united states a few market gardeners supply such vegetables as the people do not raise for themselves. the states along the atlantic seaboard have all the facilities for successful intensive cultivation--a dense population and idle, cultivable land. in choosing a location, the home crofter should well consider his experience, and try to enter a community where he can engage in analogous pursuits. dairy regions never have enough men who understand cattle and horses; fruit-growing districts always need experienced pickers; market garden regions need men who understand rotating crops and making hotbeds, transplanting, etc. if you have a little money, you can probably do best by buying and draining some swamp land, which is the most productive of all, as it contains the washings of the upland for centuries. swamp land can usually be cleared and drained for from thirty to forty dollars per acre. it can be bought very cheap and when ready to cultivate will have increased many times in value. the next best is the "abandoned" or worn-out farm. proper methods of cultivation will bring it back to more than its original fertility. the eastern states from maine to virginia abound with them at from five to twenty-five dollars per acre. in many cases the buildings are worth more than the whole price asked. the nearest land easily available in the east is in the state of new york. the writer believes it is true that "there are twenty thousand farms for sale in this state, and nearly, all at such low prices and upon such favorable terms as to make them available for any one desiring to engage in agriculture or have a farm home. the soil of these farms is not exhausted, but on the contrary is, with proper cultivation, very productive. nearly all have good buildings and fences, are supplied with good water and plenty of wood for farm purposes, and in nearly all cases have apple and other fruit trees upon them." (list of farms, occupied and unoccupied, for sale in new york state. bureau of information and statistics, bulletin, state of new york, department of agriculture.) these farms are distributed all over the state, some in nearly every county. in sullivan county, for example, there are farms for sale ranging in price from ten to one hundred dollars per acre. these can, almost without exception, be bought by small payments, balance on long mortgages, and it is wonderful how cheap they are. in ulster county thirty farms, some of which i have seen, are offered for sale at trifling prices. of course, many of these farms have been sold since the first editions of this book, and the prices have advanced, perhaps on the average doubled; but cheap automobiles have improved roads and have made others available that were useless ten years ago. the development of the southern states, with eradication of the cattle tick (the cause of "texas fever") and irrigation and rotation of crops, has opened up new countries. n. o. nelson writes he has bought many louisiana farms for his cooperative enterprise for about what the improvements are worth. cut over woodlands which we have learned to make produce incomes of about five dollars each year per acre by intelligent forestry, as well as swamp lands which we now know how to make healthful by drainage and by the extinction of mosquitoes, can still be had at low prices in new york and other states. numerous others are in the market from five dollars per acre up, and so it goes through the state, from wyoming county in the extreme western end, where farms ranging from thirty to three hundred acres are in the market at from thirty to forty dollars per acre, to st. lawrence county in the north, where land can be bought as low as fifteen dollars per acre. when it is considered that these lands are within easy access to established markets with transportation and mail facilities, rural delivery, and telephone a proper idea may be formed of their value in opportunity. the authority quoted further states that "probably fifty thousand agricultural laborers can find employment on the farms of new york at good wages. families particularly are wanted to rent houses and work farms on shares." wages for new hands run from twenty to thirty dollars and upwards per month with board. men who know how to milk are especially in demand throughout the dairy regions. these conditions make it possible for experienced farmers, although entirely without money, to get to the soil. over three hundred thousand aliens annually settled in the cities of new york state during some years in the last decade. these people could be got out of the cities, where in normal times they are little needed, into adjacent country districts where they are much needed. in the _real estate record and guide,_ mr. a. l. langdon says: "it is most remarkable that there are on long island, within from thirty-five to seventy miles of new york, thousands of acres of land which have never been cultivated, which have for years produced nothing but cordwood, and which the owners allow to be overrun with fire almost every year. a large part of this land has soil two or three feet deep underlaid with gravel. the best water in the world is abundant and the climate is more equable than on the mainland, and in each locality where any reasonable effort has been made to cultivate the soil, it has produced plentifully of all fruits and vegetables which can be grown in this latitude." long island should produce all the fruit, vegetables, poultry, eggs, and milk needed by its own residents, with a large surplus for the city markets, instead of getting, as it does, a large part of its supply of these things from the city. when it is considered that about a quarter of a million acres of this land so close to the city is now scrub oak and uncultivated waste, and that there are about a million adult workers in the city, the importance of the experiment is obvious; especially as we learn from the united states census that over ten thousand of these workers are already in agricultural pursuits within the city limits. "here midway on long island, and just beyond the limits for a man to locate who expects to earn his living by daily work in the city, is a territory about forty miles long and ten miles wide which by intensive farming would yield a good living for more than two hundred thousand inhabitants. in this agricultural section, a man of small means who expects to live on the land the year round, should purchase a plot not too small to produce enough to support himself and family and a surplus to sell, not less than six acres. probably all men have more or less land hunger a desire to own land and it is a worthy object to encourage to the extent of inducing a man to purchase what he can pay for and be satisfied with, but it is a shameful thing to induce a poor man, who has to earn his living in new york, to buy on the installment plan a small lot so far from his place of employment that he cannot live on it and travel to and from his work every day, and where there is the strongest probability that he will never make more than two or three payments, and will consequently lose what he does pay." the writer hears of one plot which was sold nineteen times and the contracts defaulted on after payments, before any one took title. if the seeker is not satisfied with the opportunities which the state of new york offers, he may turn to new jersey, equally accessible and equally rich in chances. new jersey year-book: "there are in the southern part of the state large tracts of land which are still uncleared, or covered with brushwood, and which are adapted to tillage and capable of producing large crops of small fruits and market garden vegetables. the wood on them is mainly scrub oak, with some dwarfed pitch pine and yellow pine, and hence they are called oak lands to distinguish them from the more sandy lands and tracts on which the pitch pine grows almost exclusively. the latter are known as pine lands. the total area of cleared (farm) lands in the southern division of the state, southeast of the marl belt, is about , acres. the pineland belts have an aggregate area of , acres, making at least , acres accessible by railways from the large cities and also near to tidewater navigation. the maps of the geological survey show the location and the extent of these lands, their railway lines, and their relation to the settlements already made and to the cities. "the soils of these tracts are sandy and not naturally so rich and fertile as the more heavy clay soils of the limestone, the red shale, and the marl districts of the state, but they are not so sandy and so coarse-grained as to be non-productive, like some of the pineland areas. the latter are often deficient in plant food and are deservedly characterized as pine barrens, being too poor for farm purposes. the growth of oak and pine, as well as chemical analyses, shows that the oak-land soils contain the elements of plant production. they are not so well suited to pasturage or to continuous cropping as naturally rich virgin soils; they are better fitted for raising vegetables, melons, sweet potatoes, small fruits, peaches, and pears than wheat, indian corn, hay, and other staples. the eminent superiority of this kind of farming in new jersey over the old routine of wheat, corn, hay, and potatoes is well known. these south jersey soils are easily cleared of brushwood or standing timber, and of stumps, with a hand or horse-power puller which is a cheap affair, and the wood is salable in all this part of the state at remunerative prices, often bringing more than the original cost of the land. the long working season and the short and mild winter favor the arrangement of work, so that all is done with the least outlay for help. they also favor the mosquitoes. "the success of hammonton, egg harbor city, vineland, and other places is notable, and equally good results are to be had at a hundred or more places as well situated as they are. these lands are sold at low figures, and the settler saves in capital and interest account. only the difficulty of getting money to help in building interferes with rapid settlement. "the west jersey railway, the pennsylvania, and the philadelphia and reading's atlantic city railroad, the philadelphia and seashore railway, the new jersey southern railroad, and other branch roads afford excellent facilities for access to new york, philadelphia, and the cities of the state. the cohansey, maurice, and mullica rivers head well up near the northwest limits of these lands, and their navigable reaches run for miles across them. the waters of the delaware bay and the ocean are within a few miles of a large part of this oak-land domain. "the advantages of an old settled and eastern state, within easy reach of these large markets, of land which is easily tilled and generous and quick in its response to feeding, and at low prices, make them equal to, if not better than, the rich prairie soils of a new west, or the low prices and cheap lands of the abandoned hillsides of new england." wages for unskilled farm labor are about the same as for new york--twenty to twenty-five dollars per month. the canning and fruit industries make room for a large number of people in the late summer and fall, who may thus, by taking a temporary place, kind some permanent location where they may improve their health and fortunes. "delaware also offers unequalled opportunities to immigrants. it is ideally situated on the atlantic ocean and the delaware bay, and is penetrated by numerous creeks and rivers. "the railroad, steam, and electric facilities of the state are developing steadily year by year, while every section of the state possesses easily navigable streams, with vessels for carrying freight and passengers. "over fifteen millions of people live within a radius of three hundred miles; the large majority reside in cities and towns and furnish the finest markets in the world. within five hundred miles are more than one third of the people of all north america. "wilmington is a city of seventy-five thousand people, is growing rapidly, and is becoming a great manufacturing place. "these people may be reached in one day by the luscious fruits that grow in delaware, and every one of them is perfectly happy when he gets a delaware peach. many other delaware products are as good as the peaches. "as cattle and wheat raising developed in the great west, delaware people thought that they were ruined. they did not change at once, but slowly discovered that the light lands are wonderfully productive of fruits and vegetables, and that they pay much better than cattle and grain ever could. but these new methods have not been adopted in all parts of the state, so that land neglected and unprofitable is for sale. the tides of immigration have swept westward and left delaware untouched. men, money, and enterprise are needed. "there are few unoccupied or 'abandoned' farms in delaware." the land is mostly held by descendants of the early settlers, who form a species of landed aristocracy. lately, owing to the younger members of these families having become established in the newer states and on account of the death or incapacity of the older members left in possession, there has been a marked tendency to sell off these farms. however, "a large proportion of the farms in delaware are not for sale at any price. some of them have been in the same family for generations, and if put on the market would sell for from one to two hundred dollars per acre." the soil is all the way from a heavy white oak clay, which is too stiff and too sticky for most crops, to very light sand. the heaviest clay is made lighter and more porous, and the lightest sand is readily made retentive of moisture and extremely productive, by plowing in different kinds of crops as green manure, such as cow peas, soy beans, the vetches, etc.; crimson clover, winter oats, rye, turnips, and numerous other crops may be sown in august or later, and produce a fine crop for turning under early in the spring. crimson clover grows nearly all winter. pure cold water is reached at from twenty to fifty feet by dug or driven wells. the climate is good; there are no cyclones. there is some damp weather in winter, but there are no malignant fevers, and there is little or no malaria, except in a few marshy places. there are some mosquitoes and flies, but they are not especially troublesome, and there are no poisonous reptiles. the population is mostly native, five sixths white, one sixth colored. the white population is almost entirely of anglo saxon descent. "perfect titles may be secured, but all titles everywhere should always be searched by a competent lawyer, the usual fee for which is ten to twenty dollars. "farm hands receive from twenty to twenty-five dollars per month and board, for a season of nine or ten months, sometimes for the whole year. day hands receive from seventy-five cents to two dollars per day and board themselves." those who are tempted by the advertisements for fruitpickers should beware. delaware, like some other states, allows fees to constables and to the "squires"--justices of the peace they would be elsewhere--for arrests, and it is a common practice to advertise for fruit pickers, then arrest them as tramps when they come, and the next day release them on condition that they will leave the county at once--and leave the trap open for the next comer. delaware peaches have made fortunes for many, but will make still greater fortunes in the future for the owners of the land. pears, plums, grapes, watermelons, and cantaloupes thrive, and find an ideal home, and small fruits all flourish. sweet potatoes yield bountifully and are of the finest quality. asparagus and early white potatoes pay handsome profits. tomatoes, the great canning crop, are grown by the thousands of acres. "the grasses and clovers grow in luxuriance, and hence dairying and beef production are profitable. poultry pays as well as anywhere else; chickens often run on green clover all through the open winter. "the game consists of various species of ducks, quails, reed birds, hares, marsh rabbits, and other small creatures. shad, trout, herring, crocus, black bass, pike, white fish, rock fish, oysters, clams, crabs, and terrapin are abundant in delaware waters." the tax in the rural counties is generally sixty cents on the hundred dollars. besides this there are taxes on business and a very light school tax. there is no state tax, yet the state makes large appropriations for the support of the public schools, which are free to everybody. maryland has established a state bureau of immigration in baltimore to give information to home seekers, and advise them as to choice of location, opportunities for getting started in agricultural production, and aid them in any way consistent with a state bureau. most of these facts are taken from such reports. southern maryland and the eastern shore are especially adapted to gardening and trucking, as well as fruit growing. land is cheap and can be purchased in tracts of any size from an acre upwards, at from ten to fifty dollars per acre. farms from twenty acres to seven hundred acres and up are for sale in nearly every county in the state. the removal of a large part of the negro population from the country to the cities has resulted in the partition of the large estates into smaller farms, thus affording an opportunity for home seekers who are seeking cheap land amid congenial surroundings. nearly all of these farms have buildings, some in need of repair, others in very good condition. for those who wish to avoid the hard work of breaking woodlands, the eastern and western shores offer abundant well-cultivated lands with buildings, orchards, and woods, in the immediate vicinity of navigable rivers and railways, on good roads at from twenty dollars per acre upwards. that seems cheap. for settlers who are accustomed to mountainous regions, western maryland has land for sale at even cheaper rates. "there are many large tidal marshes in maryland, as might be expected in a territory watered like this state. they are of the richest soil to be found, because the chesapeake bay is a great river valley, receiving the drainage of a vast area of fertile land, comprising nearly one third of new york and nearly all of the great agricultural states of pennsylvania, maryland, and virginia. every year this drainage brings down a black sediment, called oyster mud, which is deposited on the marshlands and enriches the soil, making it, with proper cultivation, of productivity like that of the rice and wheat fields of egypt. these unreclaimed lands are used chiefly for grain." proper drainage of small tracts of this land would bring unsurpassed and absolutely untouched fertility. the chesapeake river valley is not so large as that of the nile or ganges, but is of enough consequence to play an important part in human affairs and to support in comfort and prosperity a population as large as that of many famous states. "the eastern shore is uniformly level, with good roads. the proximity of the ocean and the bay greatly modifies the temperature. it has a great trunk railway, with connections along its entire length, called the delaware division of the pennsylvania railroad, which furnishes direct transportation to philadelphia, new york, and other northern cities." "on the eastern shore there are many thousand acres of land devoted to garden truck, and the strawberry crop has of late years become of importance. over one hundred carloads of strawberries are shipped daily during the season to the baltimore, philadelphia, new york, and boston markets." land properly cultivated will yield four thousand quarts of strawberries to an acre. the canning of various fruits and vegetables has grown to be larger than that of any other state and is one of the most profitable of the industries of maryland. the principal articles canned are peaches, peas, and tomatoes. the tomato crop is also profitable to the grower. the young plants are set out in the spring; many do this with a machine, but two persons can easily plant seven acres in a day by hand. an acre will produce from six to eighteen tons of tomatoes, according to the quality of the soil. all such products bring better prices now in maryland markets than they did before canning was resorted to. the maryland tin can is known wherever civilization reaches. tobacco is extensively produced only in southern maryland, although it can be raised in any section of the state. in the neighborhood of the larger cities trucking and fruit growing are profitable, combined with poultry raising, often on farms of not more than five or ten acres. many farmers devote part of their time successfully to bees, and there is nowhere a better climate for flowers than that of maryland. two english florists who have settled in baltimore county, ten and thirteen miles northeast of the city, daily send to all parts of the united states and even to canada many large boxes of beautiful roses, carnations, violets, and other choice flowers. both of these men began on a small scale and have prospered. the farmer who has a couple of thousand dollars to pay cash for a small farm in maryland is assured of a good living. but also a less favored settler, if he has only from four to eight hundred dollars, can have a good start in maryland, and probably as good a chance for independence and prosperity as anywhere. families of immigrants when traveling to the western, northwestern, and southern states of america have to spend from one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars for railroad tickets from new york to their destination; by going to these adjoining states they can save all that money, and invest it in land. the virginia department of agriculture and immigration also publishes information for the home seeker. to most people the name virginia carries with it limitless vistas of tobacco fields covered with darkies plying the hoe, or picking off the ubiquitous worm. before the war this picture would have been a true one; but since the awakening of the younger generation to a better understanding of her resources, together with the withdrawal of large numbers of the colored people into industrial occupations, no state offers more attractive inducements to the homecrofter than virginia. in climate, diversity of soils, fruits, forests, water supply, mineral deposits, including mountain and valley, she offers unsurpassed advantages. truly did captain john smith, the adventurous father of virginia, suggest that "heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation." virginia lies between the extremes of heat and cold, removed alike from the sultry, protracted summers of the more southern states, and the longer winters and devastating storm and cyclones of the north and northwest. its limits north and south correspond to california and southern europe. the climate is mild and healthful. the winters are less severe than in the northern and northwestern states, or even the western localities of the same latitude, while the occasional periods of extreme heat in the summer are not more oppressive than in many portions of the north. tidewater virginia, or the coastal plain, as it is sometimes called, receives the name from the fact that the streams that penetrate it feel the ebb and flow of the tides from the ocean up to the head of navigation. it consists chiefly of broad and level plains, while a considerable portion, nearest to the bay, has shallow bays and estuaries, and marshes that are in most instances reached only by the ocean tides. these marshes abound with wild duck and sora. tidewater is mainly an alluvial country. the soil is chiefly light, sandy loam, underlaid with clay. its principal productions are fruits and early vegetables, which are raised in extensive "market gardens," and shipped in large quantities to northern cities. the fertilizing minerals--gypsum, marl, and greensand--abound, and their judicious use readily restores the lands when exhausted by improvident cultivation. middle virginia is a wide, undulating plain, crossed by many rivers that have cut their channels to a considerable depth and are bordered by alluvial bottom lands that are very productive. the soil consists of clays with a subsoil of disintegrated sandstone rocks, and varies according to the nature of the rock from which it is formed. the principal productions of middle virginia are corn, wheat, oats, and tobacco. the tobacco raised in this section and in piedmont, known as the "virginia leaf," is the best grown and the best known in the united states. in this section, as in tidewater, the low bottom lands formed by the sediment of the waters are exceptionally productive. the piedmont section is diversified and surpassingly picturesque. the soil is heavier than that of middle virginia, the subsoil being of stiff and dark red clay. on the slopes of the blue ridge grapes of delicious flavor grow luxuriantly. these produce excellent wines, and the clarets have a wide fame. the pippin apples of this section are of unrivaled excellence. the "great valley," as it is descriptively called, is in the general configuration one continuous valley, included between the two mountain chains that extend throughout the state; it is one of the most abundantly watered regions on the face of the globe. deep limestone beds form the floor of the great valley, and from these beds the soil derives an exceeding fertility, peculiarly adapted to the growth of grasses and grain, and it bears the name of the "garden spot" of the state. five trunk lines of railroads penetrate and intersect the state. the lines of steamboats that ply the navigable streams of eastern virginia afford commercial communication for large sections of the state with the markets of this country and of europe. norfolk and newport news maintain communication with the european markets by steamers and vessels, while from these ports is also kept up an extensive commerce along the atlantic seaboard. the seaports are nearer than is new york to the great centers of population, and areas of production, of the west and northwest. market garden crops of every description can be grown. the following result was obtained on a four-acre patch near norfolk: "the owner stated that in september he sowed spinach on four acres. between christmas and the first of march following he cut and sold the spinach at the rate of one hundred barrels to the acre, at a price ranging from two to seven dollars per barrel--an average of $ . per barrel. early in march the four acres were set out to lettuce, setting the plants in the open air with no protection whatever, , plants on the four acres. he shipped half-barrel baskets of lettuce to the acre, at a price ranging from $ to $ . per basket. "early in april, just before the lettuce was ready to ship, he planted snap beans between the lettuce rows; and today, june d, these are the finest beans we have seen this season. "the last week in may he planted cantaloupes between the bean rows, which, when marketed in july, will make four crops from the same land in one year's time. the cantaloupes will be good for crates to the acre, and the price will run from $ to $ . per crate. a careful investigation of these 'facts, figures, and features' will show that his gross sales will easily reach $ per acre; his net profits depend largely upon the man and the management; but they surely should not be less than $ clear, clean profit to the acre." "this is for farming done all out of doors. no hothouse or hotbed work--not a bit of it, with no extra expense for hotbeds, cold frames, or hothouses." "intensive," thorough tillage and care of the soil will probably pay as well here as at any point in the united states. apples are the principal fruit crop of the state. there is a yearly increasing number of trees. in one of the valley counties a seventeen-year-old orchard of trees produced an apple crop as far back as which brought the owner $ , , another of fifty twenty-year-old trees brought $ . mr. h. e. vandeman, one of the best-known horticulturists in the country, says that there is not in all north america a better place to plant orchards than in virginia; on account of its "rich apple soil, good flavor and keeping qualities of the fruit, and nearness to the great markets of the east and europe." the trees attain a fine size and live to a good old age, and produce abundantly. in patrick county there is a tree nine feet five inches around which has borne bushels of apples at a single crop; other trees have borne even more. one farmer in albemarle county has received more than $ , for a single crop of albemarle pippins grown on twenty acres of land. this pippin is considered the most delicious apple in the world. the fig, pomegranate, and other delicate fruits flourish in the tidewater region. new england, from maine to rhode island, is suffering from one disease--lack of intelligent labor. thirty years ago the sons and daughters who, in the natural course of events, would have stayed to cultivate the home acres, left to form a part of the westward throng making for the level, untouched prairies of illinois and iowa. the old folks have died or become incapacitated. new interests chain their children to adopted homes. result,--unoccupied lands by the hundred thousand acres, awaiting energy, skill, and faith. ten dollars an acre is a common price for the rocky hills of new england. the choice river bottoms, and land near the larger cities is as high priced as similar land anywhere else. intending settlers can buy small areas for little money; usually the smallest farms have good buildings worth in many cases more than the price asked for the whole farm. climatic conditions are not favorable to single cropping. in the old days general farming, grain, beef, sheep, and hogs were the rule; nowadays, special crops, dairying, fruit growing, etc. tobacco is the great staple in the rich connecticut river bottoms, and even on the uplands, if properly manured, it pays from one to three hundred dollars per acre. tobacco can be raised on small areas far from the railroad, as, when properly cured and packed for shipment, it is not perishable. to many the worst feature of new england is the climate--long, cold winters and short summers. maine being farthest north suffers most in this respect, but that does not prevent her producing hundreds of thousands of tons of sweet corn for canning and vast quantities of eggs and butter. fruit does well on the lower coast; a small orchard of peaches or plums will in three or four years from planting make a comfortable living. bush fruits grow in abundance and give never-failing crops. poultry is peculiarly successful on the rocky hills, because they are nearly always dry or well drained. dairying can be made to pay if near a creamery, or where milk can be sold at retail. the prospective settler here should bear in mind that wherever he goes, the first year will produce little more than a kitchen garden; the second enable him barely to pull through, and the third give him a start at a permanent income. in farming, as in all other businesses, only those will succeed who know what they want and how to get it; who have selected with care the locality best suited to the special crops they intend to raise; and after having once made a selection, stick until they have compelled success. the lure of the vast west and of the new south is not forgotten; but the time has passed when the young man could go west to take a farm of uncle sam's. desirable land is too expensive for the pioneer, and the constant toil and comparative isolation of the prairie farm offers but a poor sort of liberty, though it still affords a living. but close to the growing towns in those states small plots of land can still be had to work with the same bright prospects that are offered near the great metropolis. in nearly all the sections within the area of intensive cultivation, timber is still plentiful enough to make it the cheapest building material; and persons who really want to get to the land can contrive a sufficient shelter, like a pioneer's, for from two to five hundred dollars. chapter xviii clearing the land it is pretty good fun to hack at bushes and to chop trees down and then to chop them up. if there is only a small part of the land to be cleared, a man can easily learn skill with the ax and do it at odd times, but he was a wise old man of whom his little girl said, "when grandpa wants anything, that moment he wants it." it is now that we need the land; but even if it is covered with trees, there is no cause for discouragement. lumber is so high that the local or portable sawmill men will buy the timber by the acre. they will cut the trees and haul the logs. if you decide to cut a tree yourself, a little inquiry will show for what purpose it will bring the highest price. locust sticks, for example, four to six inches thick, will bring in new york ten or fifteen cents a running foot for insulator pinions. if a maple proves to be either "curly" or "bird'seye" (this depending not on the variety, but on the accidental undulations of the fiber), it will be in demand for the manufacture of furniture. sugar maples ten or fifteen feet high can be transplanted or sold. nut and fruit trees will nearly always be worth keeping. cedar sticks fourteen feet long will bring twenty cents in most places for hop and bean poles. see what can be sold instead of burned, and don't cut down recklessly; an unsalable tree may be valuable as a windbreak or as shade for your house. the wrong tree for shade is the dense foliaged, low-branched tree which forms a solid dome from the ground up. the right tree, in the opinion of henry hicks (in _country life in america),_ is the american elm, which ought to be called the umbrella tree. pliny speaks of the plane tree, our sycamore or buttonwood, as excellent, because of the horizontal branches which, like window blinds, allow free passage of the breezes while intercepting the heat of the sun. the ideal shade tree is a canopy like a parasol over the house, with high, leafy branches that do not shut off light and air from the windows. this cools a house by keeping the sun off and cools the air by the rapid evaporation from its leaves, and will make it ten to fifteen degrees cooler in summer. it will be cheaper and more effective than a combination of awnings, piazza, and eaves. woodman, spare that tree. stumps may be burned out to get a good draught, bore a hole in a slanting direction far down among the roots. the smoke goes through the hole first and then the flame, boring the body to the roots deep enough to plow. land can also be cleared by dynamite. we condense from edith loring fullerton in _farming,_ on what has been done. to go into the desolate, uncultivated, burned over "waste lands" near a great city and put ten acres under cultivation in the shortest possible space of time was our problem. we undertook it at short notice in an uncertain season--the autumn--with the determination to get at least a portion of the land seeded down to winter rye before cold weather prohibited further work. united to this problem was that of working a small farm to its utmost capacity rather than half cultivation of a large one, which is difficult to handle from lack of time and labor and an unwise proposition for the east under the most favorable circumstances. ten acres of scraggy-looking woodland was purchased, sixty-eight miles from new york city on the north shore of long island. the plot had a few second and third growth oak and chestnut trees and "sprouts" along the borders. all else had been burned, and the center of the acreage exhibited the mangled and blackened remains of a once thrifty woodland. we proceeded to choose as our helpers native long islanders whom we were desirous of allowing to work. we succeeded by strenuous efforts in getting together a "gang" of both colored and white men to the stupendous number of eight. they fell to work with a right good will, at first cutting down here and trimming up there as directed. however, after giving them a fair trial, we decided that they must be replaced by italians. the question of housing the eighteen italians soon came up. tents might be adopted or even the unsanitary "dugout" be allowed to mar the landscape. a shanty was entirely too ugly to suit our tastes, and also expensive, and useless when the men were through with it. tents were too airy, as we knew the work would continue until freezing weather, and perhaps well into the winter. we "passed" on the "dugout." the ideal was something that would be of use after the work of clearing was completed, and for that purpose we decided upon "condemned freight cars." they cost but ten dollars each, the railroad being glad to get rid of them. we bought two, ultimately using one for a chicken house and the other as a barn. in the meantime it was decided to remove the stumps by dynamite, as trying to yank them out by stump pullers or by mattock and plow was both slow and brutal. the ordinary custom of allowing nature to work six years at the stumps and gradually eliminate them by decay was not to be thought of. dynamiter kissam, a long island expert, arrived and set to work, using fuses for small stumps up to two feet in diameter. with the advent of the italians work began in earnest; they cleared out every useless tree, cutting cord wood where any could be obtained and burning the branches and charred trees as they went. they also cleared out all underbrush thoroughly. the dynamiter with his helper followed them up. this is the most exciting and interesting part of clearing land by modern methods. the dynamite is put up in half-pound sticks. they are a little larger than an ordinary candle and are wrapped in heavy yellow paraffined paper. one folded end of this paper is opened up and a hole made by a wooden skewer into the dynamite stick, which is plastic and resembles graham bread in color and consistency. for magneto-battery work where several charges are required, a copper cap in which is a minute quantity of fulminate of mercury, and which is exploded by a spark, is attached to fine electric wires and sealed by sulphur. this cap is placed in holes in the sticks of dynamite, and then securely tied by drawing string tightly around the paper which is raised to admit the cap. in preparing a charge for fuse ignition, the cap is crimped to the end of a piece of mining fuse and this is inserted in the dynamite stick and securely fastened as previously described. these prepared charges are placed in a basket and carried very tenderly to the stumps which have been prepared by the dynamiter's assistant. all the work is handled very carefully, for while there is not much danger of an accident unless fire is placed near the explosive, nevertheless extreme caution is used at all times. it requires a nature serene, calm, and deliberate. deep oblique holes were then made with a round crowbar under the stump singled out for execution. this hole should be as nearly horizontal as possible and directly under the stump so that all the explosive force may be expended on the wood and not on the earth between the dynamite and the stump. the earth acts as a cushion and the natural tendency of dynamite to exert force downward is counteracted. as soon as a small strip was blown, the italians, gathering up all the stumps, roots, and fragments, removing any pieces that were loosened but not completely torn out, and piling them at intervals, immediately burned them. this cannot be done when stumps are removed by any other method, for by the digging process the earth must be picked and scraped from them and ultimately the stump hacked in pieces before it will burn. by our method the stump is burned and the finest kind of unleached wood ashes--containing lime to "sweeten" and potash and phosphoric acid to furnish plant food--are spread upon the ground a few hours after the stumps are blown out. these ashes would under other circumstances have to be purchased at a cost of perhaps two dollars a barrel, and as five barrels at least to the acre are required for good fertilization, these ashes gave us the first credit upon the books. following the burners came the manure spreaders; five carloads of manure had been purchased and was delivered before it was needed. when the manure was spread upon the land (one half carload to the acre), the plow started its work smoothly and with none of the strain and jerk on man and beast usual in new land. the soil was turned over with the greatest ease, for the explosions had shivered and torn out even the smallest roots, so the plow ran through the ground much more easily than in sod land. our friable, sandy loam, with a light admixture of clay, pulverized and aerated by the explosions, was in market garden condition at once and without the year's loss of crops assured by old methods. a tooth harrow was next run over the plowed section, and gleaners followed the harrow, picking up the fine roots as they were brought to the surface. as piles of these fine roots grew, they were burned and the ashes immediately spread upon the land. the tooth harrow was run again across the rows, the disk harrow following chopped and pulverized the earth into the finest possible condition. thirty five and one half working days after larry and his gang arrived, rye was drilled into three and one half acres. the condemned freight cars were placed upon skids and drawn to the desired position over soaped planks. they were raised from the ground to give good under ventilation. the north and east sides are filled or banked up with sand which came out of the well. this keeps out the cold winds, and, in the case of the chicken-house car, allows the fowls a shaded shelter on hot summer days. the chicken-house car was placed facing the southeast. the western end has a large glazed sash placed on it, and two in the southern side. one half the car was partitioned off for roosting quarters, while the other half serves as a laying and scratching house. this farm keeps only a few chickens for family use. the artesian well was started in october. the well was, naturally, a necessity, but there was much to be considered in regard to the method of pumping. under ordinary circumstances a windmill would do, and is generally a good auxiliary; a ten-foot iron tower and a ten-foot fan wheel cost about fifty dollars, but our farm is not to be allowed to be a failure for lack of water in a dry season. in case of drought (and every summer brings one of greater or less duration) water must be on hand, and as a drought usually is accompanied by windless weather, the windmill could not be depended upon. an engine was obviously necessary. both gasoline and kerosene engines were closely investigated, with the result that a kerosene oil engine was decided upon. (the new style of heavy oil engine is better and cheaper to run. ed.) an advantage of the engine over a windmill is that it will furnish power for cutting wood, grinding grain, or lighting the buildings, a two and one half horsepower engine running twenty-five c.p. lights easily. the rye was turned under green in the spring to furnish humus, the greatest and only vital need of this particular spot of virgin soil. since that was written an excellent and cheap stump puller has been introduced, but the account of work is still typical. dynamiting is still the modern way to clear land as well as to break up a stiff subsoil or hardpan, so as to loosen the earth to let deep roots like trees or alfalfa go down and to secure drainage. primitive american man regarded trees as "lumber" instead of as timber and still destroys countless millions in valuable wood as he "clears the ground." after it is cleared, it is vital to keep it cleared of weeds, which worse garroters of crops than trees. to do that we don't need to bow to the earth, nor to hammer her with a hand hoe. "the man with the hoe" began to be a back number when arkwright invented the ark or the mule or whatever he did invent. the man with the wheel hoe is the man that is "it." a wheel hoe costs from $ to $ , and will do the work of several men without breaking the heart or even the back of one of them. it has as many attachments as a summer girl and is equally versatile. it must be run between the rows as soon as the ground is dry after every rain, so as to slay the weeds before they are born. if you don't they will slay your profits, if not yourself. crops grown on that experimental farm are: asparagus, berries, beans, beets, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, carrots, cucumbers, corn, eggplant, endive, fruit trees, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, limes, melons, martynias, onions, okra, parsley, parsnips, peas, potatoes (sweet and white), pumpkins, radishes, rhubarb, salsify, squash, tomatoes, etc. marketed strictly choice radishes may , peas june , lettuce june , beans june , beets july , carrots july , cabbage july . surely a rapid result. hemp is hardly worth your growing for itself under ordinary circumstances; the returns per acre are not sufficient. but charles richard dodge, in one of the united states yearbooks of the department of agriculture, says that as a weed killer it has practically no equal. in proof of this, a north river farmer stated that thistles heretofore had mastered him in a certain field, but after sowing it with hemp not a thistle survived; and while ridding the land of this pest, the hemp yielded him nearly sixty dollars an acre, where previously nothing valuable could be produced. as it grows from minnesota to the mississippi delta, its value for this purpose is considerable. but there is a way easier and cheaper of clearing land than by blasting, if we can afford to wait a little; and mr. george fayette thompson, in bulletin no. , bureau of animal industry, tells us how, giving some interesting facts about angora goats, of which the following is a condensation: to people taking up raw land, particularly where there is a heavy undergrowth to be cleared away, goats of some kind are an invaluable aid. in its browsing qualities the common goat is as good as any, but, aside from the clearing of the land, the profit in his keep is very little, though some demand is growing up for goat's milk for infants and for some fancy cheeses. a much better animal from the standpoint of profit, while in use as a scavenger, is the angora goat. their long, silky hair has been used for centuries in making blankets, lap robes, rugs, carpets, and particularly the "cashmere" shawls, formerly a great luxury in this country. much of the camel's hair dress goods is in reality made from the hair of the angora goat, or mohair, as it is called. angora goats thrive best in high altitudes with dry climates. they exist in greatest number in the united states in california, new mexico, and texas. they have been used successfully in the willamette valley of oregon to eat the underbrush off the land, doing for nothing that for which the farmers pay chinese laborers twenty-five to forty dollars per acre. the cost of angora goats is about ten to thirty dollars each for does, with bucks at fifty to two hundred dollars, so that even with a small area of land to clear it would pay to buy a little flock for that purpose. dr. shandley, of iowa, says that two to three goats to the acre is sufficient for cleaning up land, and that in two years the goats will eat all of the underbrush from woodland, such as briers, thistles, scrub oak, sumac, and, in fact, any shrub undergrowth. they need no other food than what they can secure from the woods themselves. consequently, the income from the sale of mohair is nearly net. the more nearly thoroughbred the goats are, the better the mohair and the higher the price. the meat of the angora goat is superior to mutton, although if sold in the market under the name of goat meat, it commands only half the price of mutton. as an example of the angora's utility in cleaning up land, the country gentleman says: "mr. landrum exhibited ten head at the oregon state fair. in order to demonstrate their effectiveness as substitutes for grubbing, he left them on three acres of brush. at the end of the second year the land was mellow and ready for the plow." it might be possible to build up a business in clearing lands for others by means of a herd of angoras. chapter xix how to build if you find an "abandoned farm" on which the buildings are worth more than the whole price asked, as frequently happens, you are all right. even if the buildings are somewhat dilapidated, you can fix them up for a few dollars. but in buying small plots of ground, larger farms have to be broken up. if you buy from the resident owner, he may sell you five acres off his larger tract, and keep his house to live in. certain it is that if a farm of acres is subdivided into twenty five-acre farms, at least nineteen new houses must be built, although sometimes an old barn can be made into a fair residence. if you can do no better, it is possible to start by tenting. an outfit large enough for a family of six would be about as follows: wall tent with fly, x , for sleeping wall tent with fly, x , for dining old cook stove (to be erected outdoors), floors, x , at $ each brown tents, at least for the sleeping rooms, are best; they last longer, are cooler, and do not attract the flies; though indeed we need not have house flies if we keep the horse manure covered up--they are all bred in that. if the tents are in the shade, the cost of the cover or fly can be saved in the dining tent; but it is necessary in the living tent, because wet canvas will leak when touched on the inside. to make the tent warm for the winter, we must bank up to the edges of the platform with earth and cover the whole with another tent of the same shape, but a foot larger in every dimension. these are commonly used in montana. it is to be presumed that no one would attempt moving in without household utensils, which may be as simple or elaborate as you please. if there is a sawmill in the vicinity, a temporary shack for winter, say x feet, could be built for from $ to $ , depending on the interior finish. partitions can be made very cheap by erecting panels covered with canvas, burlap, old carpet, etc. such a building does not need to be plastered, but can be made warm enough by an inside covering of burlap, heavy builders' paper, or composition board. tar paper laid over solid sheeting makes a roof that will last for two or three years. for such a shack draw the plans yourself. all you really need is a living room, bedroom, and kitchen. a cheap and effective water supply can be gotten from a driven well, which in most places costs about one dollar per foot. have it where the kitchen is to be, so that the water can be pumped into a barrel or other tank over the stove. with a good range you can have as good a supply of hot and cold water as you had in the city. if so fortunate as to find a piece of land with a good spring on it, you can lay pipes and draw the water from that. if you can get twelve or fifteen feet fall from the spring to the kitchen, you don't need a pump at all. for a toilet closet, build a shed four feet wide, six feet long, and eight feet high. use a movable pail or box. lime slaked or unslaked or dry dust or ashes must be scattered every time the closet is used. always clean before it shows signs of becoming offensive: keep it covered fly tight and mix the contents with earth or litter, and scatter on the garden. a shack can be built of logs which will do for comfort and will look dignified. horace l. pike, in _country life in america,_ says: "the lot on which we meant to build our log house stood thirty-five feet above the lake. the problem was how to build a cabin roomy, picturesque, inexpensive, and all on the ground. "the ground dimensions are thirty-two by thirty feet outside. this gives a living room sixteen by fourteen; bedrooms twelve by twelve, twelve by ten, and nine by seven; kitchen eleven by nine; a five-by four-foot corner for a pantry and refrigerator; closet four by six, front porch sixteen by six feet six inches, and rear porch five by five-- square feet of inside floor space and square feet of porch. "a dozen pine trees stand on the lot, and maneuvering was required to set a cottage among them without the crime of cutting one. the front received the salutes of a leaning oak, the life of which was saved by the sacrifice of six inches from the porch eaves, the trunk forming a newel post for the step railing. "we closed the contract immediately for norway or red pine logs, thirty feet long and eight by ten inches diameter at butts. the price was low--one or two dollars their like should have brought. we used, however, only eighty-one logs; forty thirty-foot, fourteen eighteen-foot, thirteen sixteen-foot, and fourteen fourteen-foot. "work was begun on april . two days sufficed for the owner and one man to clear and level the ground, dig post holes, set posts, and square the foundation. the soil was light sand with a clay hardpan three feet down. "twenty-seven days each were put in by two men from start to finish, with assistance rendered by the owner. there were seven days by the mason, eight by carpenters, and four teen and one half by other labor. on june the cabin was ready for occupancy, and the family moved in. the prices, as in most cases cited, are higher to-day. cheaper transportation or lower tariff may reduce them again. "making allowances for increased cost of logs and differences in any of the material cost, this cabin can be duplicated for less than $ by any one who has the ground, a few tools, and some building ability. it is compact, convenient, and more roomy than a superficial glance reveals, and it can be occupied (slight care is required) from april to november with only the kitchen stove and the fireplace supplying the heat. the same plan can be used for an all-frame structure, perhaps at less cost. it could be sheathed and slab covered in a locality where slabs, edged to six or eight inches wide, could be had; or slabs could be used perpendicularly in the gable ends and on the outside of the rear extension." we must not overlook the differences in cost of lumber and labor in different places, sometimes more than doubling nor the fact that different contractors will vary often twenty-five per cent in their bids. a mere cabin, like a wooden tent, x with a platform adjoining, will accommodate one or even two persons and can be built by a contractor even at war prices for about fifty to one hundred dollars. this will serve for tool house or storeroom when a more convenient residence can be afforded. a number of such can be seen at "free acres," new jersey, an hour from new york city on the d. l. & w. railroad. thoughtful provision and planning will go far to reduce costs. a stove pipe which should run up inside the house, not outside, so as to conserve heat and fuel, serves as chimney and fireplace. a franklin stove, practically an open fireplace set out entirely inside the house, is a practical device, though it costs from $ to $ . it gives a cheerful open fire to burn wood or coal and has a flat top to keep things hot, a clutch oven of sheet iron, and a bob can be attached to the front of the grate. but remember that though you may have trees or fallen wood for the cutting it takes a lot of time to cut it. a cylindrical self-feeding coal burner is most economical for heating and a lined sheet iron cooking stove for the kitchen. a fireless cooker, which retains the heat all day by means of soapstone or insulation and slowly cooks the food without losing the juices, is an economical device. it can be made at home by copying what you see in the stores or by getting directions from the u. s. department of agriculture. don't forget double windows at least toward the north; and on all windows have heavy holland shades which make an air space between the cold windowpanes and the atmosphere of the room. portable houses sound attractive, but they do not pay unless you will need to move them. manifestly it costs more to make a house like a trunk than like a shed. the houses shipped ready made of the "aladdin" type, with all the parts ready marked to be nailed together by unskilled labor are a much better investment and are not shaky. it is true that living is expensive in the train suburbs, when almost all that is eaten comes from the city, with freight and monopoly rates added. but one can raise most of what the family eats, and save besides in car fares and doctor's bills. the rent, perhaps a quarter of the income, that was paid for a place so small that the cat had to jump on a chair when the baby sat down, will be a clear gain. mrs. warrington's cottage at rose valley, pennsylvania, forms a very interesting subject, and is built from designs of well-known architects of philadelphia, who have taken up building small, inexpensive modern houses in a practical manner. the house is built with a stone foundation and a wooden superstructure with exterior walls covered with metal lath and cement stucco which is stained a cream color. the trimmings are stained a soft brown and the sashes are painted white. the roof is covered with shingles, and is left to weather finish. the front porch, from which a vestibule leads into the house, has a hooded cover formed by the main roof sweeping down sufficiently to form a protection. the vestibule forms an entrance to both the living room and the kitchen; the kitchen is at the front of the house, allowing the main rooms and a private porch to be at the south side. the interior throughout is trimmed with cypress and stained a soft brown. the second floor joists are exposed to view and are stained in a similar manner, while the ceiling space between the joists is plastered. a broad archway separates the living and the dining rooms, and while it forms a separation, it does not preclude the possibility, when desired, of throwing the two rooms into one large apartment. the large, open fireplace is built of clinker brick, and its facings extend from the floor to the ceiling; it has a wooden shelf supported on corbeled brackets. a semi-boxed stairway rises out of the living room to the second floor. there are three bedrooms with good-sized closets, and a bathroom on the second floor. a cellar, under the entire house, has a cemented bottom, and contains a laundry. this house costs about $ complete. houses built of cement blocks are growing in favor. cement blocks can be made anywhere by unskilled labor. all that is needed is a competent foreman to direct the making and seasoning of the blocks and laying them in the walls. the cost of concrete compared to frame or brick structures is, if anything, all things considered, in favor of concrete. houses built of wood are likely to become increasingly expensive because of the deforesting which is going on in all parts of the united states. there are abundant books of plans and costs published, showing what may be built, and several responsible publishers recklessly offer to refund the cost of the plans if the expense of building the house exceeds their estimates. there are also a number of manufacturers of ready-made portable houses, running in cost from about three hundred dollars for four rooms, upward. some of these are adapted to all-the-year-round use and may be used where land is taken experimentally. chapter xx back to the land "life, to the average man, means hard, anxious work, with disappointment at the end, whereas it ought to mean plenty of time for books and talk. there is something wrong about a system which condemns ninety-nine hundredths of the race to an existence as bare of intellectual activity and enjoyment as that of a horse, and with the added anxiety concerning the next month's rent. is there no escape? through years of hard toil i suspected that there might be such an escape. now, having escaped, i am sure of it, so long as oatmeal is less expensive than hour, so long as the fish and the cabbage grows, i shall keep out of the slavery of modern city existence, and live in god's sunshine." (hubert, "liberty and a living.") the wealthy class are taking up farming as a healthy and beautifying diversion, and we may expect others to follow, as it certainly promotes happiness and adds to the attractions of those who adopt it. with the aids which science has given, a farmer can now make good profits with less labor than was formerly necessary to get a bare living. the amount that a single well-managed, well-tilled acre will produce in a season is simply incredible. this accounts for the increased demand for farming lands wherever they are to be had on reasonable terms. the wage earners are learning this, and it is only a question of a little time when manufacturing plants will have to be convenient to lands where the families of the hands can have a small tract of land to cultivate. this requires good transportation facilities from the homes to the factories. corporate operation has been a great aid to human progress. organization is man's orderly way of following the divine plan for his economic salvation vet the far mer has profited less by organization than trades unions. where farmers have organized to aid each other to buy and sell, they have gained wonderfully, but a beginning in this direction has but served to show how much more is needed. to the individual farmer with large area and small means, the improvements in machinery that cheapen his production are not at present available. the discoveries in methods of fertilization of the soil only make it more difficult for him to earn a living in competition with those whose ample capital increases production by its use. improvements in fruits and vegetation, by hybridization and various methods that add wealth to those of means, only add to the troubles of our present small farmers. hitherto corporate operation has been mainly for the benefit of stockholders. the cases where those whose labor creates dividends get more than wages have been rare. "a living wage" has been the ambition of labor itself: all profit beyond this is supposed to be the right of capital. there is with some persons an unconscious reluctance to share profits with labor lest the laborers become independent, and thus reduce their number to an extent to raise the labor market, so that it is difficult to get fair consideration of any business proposition that promises better conditions for the producer or independence for the laborer. this is undoubtedly short sighted, as the higher intelligence of the people who have land increases production and gives enlarged opportunities for the profitable employment of money. however, if capitalists persist in this narrow view, the money of the people when they learn and think, can be applied to this purpose instead of being deposited in savings banks, where much of it is used in increasing the wealth of those who already have abundance. the idea of "helping others to help themselves" finds a responsive chord in the hearts of many wealthy people. but the question is, how can all be helped? no business method by which this can be accomplished has, as yet, been practically demonstrated. in no field does corporate operation promise more for the betterment of human conditions, for a higher standard of morals and of education, or great certainty of profit for capital, than by systematically aiding men to obtain farms. progress proceeds on the line of returns for expenditure. when a man's economic condition permits, his first thought is to give his children an education and a better chance in life than he had. those who extol the simple life as the ideal condition of happiness do not mean that want and deprivation of necessities is the ideal condition. if they did, they would put their children in that condition to make them happy. both extremes of wealth and of poverty are burdens and retard mental and moral progress. the ideal condition is to be found on a farm where the land is paid for and ample means are at hand to supply the necessities for physical demands, with leisure to learn and enjoy those pleasures of the mind which come with knowledge of nature's laws, and wisdom to live in harmony with them, and in a measure comprehend the purposes of creation. mr. g. w. smith, founder of the hundred year club, suggests that there is an opening in intensive farming for the benevolent but canny wealthy who are interested in the soil and want to combine philanthropy and percentage. his plan is to get capital to secure land and all the necessary means, give to each approved applicant perpetual leases of land for a small farm and a lot in a village site convenient thereto, with a house merely sufficient for shelter, requiring as a first payment sufficient to secure capital against loss in case the farmer forfeits his contract, say $ . let the company provide scientific supervision and conduct the operation mainly as though the farmers were employees, all the necessaries to be charged to each with only sufficient profit to pay the expense and a fair interest on the capital employed. through a purchasing and sales department all products should be sold in the best market and each farmer credited with the net result of his productions until the agreed sale price is received, when title should pass in fee to the farmer, who, during the time, has become scientific so far as that piece of land is concerned, and in future can operate it with the advantages which progress has made. a public building would be necessary for a storehouse, in which rooms for meetings of various kinds should be provided, also such shelter as might be necessary for assembling and storage of products for shipment. the expense of public buildings and other utilities could be paid for out of the increased value that they bring to the land. the company should have a nursery to provide fruit tree, etc., the growth of which, with the increase of population would make the farms, when paid for, worth far more than their cost. such opportunities as this, opened to all, would do away with the tramps who are now able to live on the charitable, only because of the known difficulties of finding work. the farmers should be utilized as far as possible in the purchasing and sales department, and should divide into committees to try various experiments connected with their business, that through their reports all may be benefited by the knowledge gained. dairying and large orchards on land suitable and not of use in the general farming plan could be conducted by the community, each farmer being a stockholder. the labor performed on these cooperative undertakings should be paid for and charged to cost of production, each one who performs a share of the labor participating in the profits as near as may be. as money is received by the company from products, it can be used in similar operations. when the farms are paid for, the farmers can continue the cooperative features that experience has proved useful and extend the business principle to other fields, such as heating, light, and power by electricity, machinery for preparing products for market, drying, canning, etc., as well as for the cultivation of the soil. where the land is level the farms can be laid out on a general plan that will admit of the use of steam plows to reduce the cost of plowing, save hard labor, and reduce the number of work animals. among the multitude of advantages the individual would have in these communities, social, educational, and economic, health and physical development appear as not the least. the farm, as it is, still furnishes a horde of recruits for insane asylums; its isolation and monotony of everyday life, with its lack of social intercourse and educational advantages, nearly counterbalance the strain and poverty of the cities. but the greatest difficulty is the growing inability of the farmers' sons to secure land and the means to cultivate it when they arrive at a marriageable age. those who have seen for threescore years the ever-increasing flow of boys and girls from the farms to the cities, greater in proportion to the rural population than in any other age, realize the necessity for aid in this direction. while it is true that the farm has contributed largely to the numbers of our successful city men, the fact remains that the mass of boys who come to the cities as well as the city born, lack the faculty to grab or save, and fail, while the healthy girls swell the ranks of prostitution, where an average of eight years lands them in a pauper's grave. our soldiers, as well as those of other countries, are not up to former physical standards. degeneracy, disintegration is apparent in every direction. the power of a nation depends on the physical and mental condition of the great mass of people, and to leave the people in ignorance that they may be controlled by the intelligent few who understand their needs and may have their welfare at heart, is a mistake that other nations than russia have made. the law of the survival of the fittest has wiped out races and nations who have ignored this fundamental law, that all men must progress together. a race or civilization with such a basis of farmers as this plan would create would be enduring. the nation or race, like the individual, must have intelligent organization and live in harmony with the laws of nature in order to survive. opposition to them means destruction cooperation is constructive. if we are to profit by this lesson, it is necessary that we improve the conditions surrounding our lower classes. that this is recognized by a large number of leading minds is proved by the efforts of the many who are engaged in educational and other social movements, most of which result in little net good to the wage-earners. obstacles to small farming near large cities are that farms of three to ten acres with buildings are not plentiful, and that mortgage loans are hard to get in the east and loans to help in building are hardly to be had at all. land is either held intact as large farms or is sold entire to speculators who hold it until it can be divided into city lots. here, it would seem, is an opportunity for those who are interested in bettering the condition of their fellow men by wholesale, and can invest large capital, but little time, in the work. let them buy up land in large acreages and cut it up into small plots of from one to ten acres, charging enough advance to return interest on the money invested and to meet the necessary expenses in such operation. then make liberal building loans to buyers. inquiries among real estate men show that they always have a larger demand for small acreage than they can meet, so an immediate market with large profits would await those who are first in this field. there is no use in blaming people for not leaving the cities to go to the farms; they don't know enough to go, they don't know enough to make a living if they do go, and they don't know enough to enjoy it. besides this, they have not the capital. we must teach them and help them. george h. maxwell's homecrofters' guild at watertown, mass., where boys are taught what to do with the earth and how to do it, is worth whole shelves of books on "the exodus to the cities" or the "prosperity of the settler." it is reported that the state of texas offered six million acres of land for sale to settlers, at one dollar per acre. it has been suggested that it would be better that the states should rent out the land at four per cent of the sale price. this would leave more money in the hands of settlers and enable many to get farms who cannot pay the price and have enough left to raise a crop. in reality it would be better for the state to help farmers get a start rather than to tax them one dollar per acre to begin with. however, under our system of government, we permit only those who have money to have land. there can be no doubt that the state of texas and her people would be better off if the land were leased than to have it sold. probably a tax on the value of the land instead of a rent would be the best for all the people, especially as it would check speculation. chapter xxi the coming profession for boys in order that as little as possible may seem to be taken for granted or as mere expressions of the opinions of the author, we cite the views of specialists as to the possibilities of this field, so new in this country, of intensive agriculture. these will show that the conviction has become general that, as workers, as teachers, and as discoverers, there is no career more inviting or more lucrative or more dignified than that of the skillful foster-father of plants. "children brought up in city tenements tend to become vicious and sickly, but if transported to country homes they may grow up strong and self-respecting men and women. "there are hundreds of applicants for every position in the cities, and competition forces the pay down to the lowest level. living expenses are heavier. the risk to health from sedentary occupations, long hours in ill-ventilated offices, stores, and workshops is serious. "there are few inducements to out-door exercise. even if he lives at home, the boy who is forced to the street or into the factory before he has the strength or education to do good work remains an unskilled worker all his life. "manufacturing is upon a larger and larger scale. the division of labor is greater and greater. not only does the gulf between capitalist and laborer widen, but with it the gulf between skilled and unskilled labor." ("what shall our boys do for a living?" charles f. wingate.) it is the city that breeds or attracts most of the pauperism and crime. the country has its own healthy life. every one is born with some natural gift, and it is a good thing to discover early in life what one's natural gifts are so that each may be educated in the direction suited to natural capacity. how are you to treat a lad who has naturally an inclination for the work on the farm? in the first place do not provide him with any spending money unless he earns it. the prime thing necessary is to give the boy a personal interest in what is going on upon the farm. give him a plot of land as his own, let him understand that anything he may grow upon this land shall belong to him, but do not give him this plot and say, "there, take that; do as you like with it," he will wonder what to do with it. he will need somebody to help him by teaching him what he is to do. enter into a partnership with him at the start, give him some instruction as to what it is best for him to do with his plot. find out his inclinations; give him sympathy and help. bring out his natural aptitude for farming life, teach him method in his work; teach him to think his way out; and, best of all, teach him to work for definite results; that is what is wanted in any line of life, especially in farm life. let the work of the boy have a meaning and a purpose. let him understand that certain results cannot be accomplished in any other way, and give him chances to go outside and see what other people are doing. let him see good scientific agriculture and be encouraged to pursue such methods. provide for him the very best reading that can be found in agricultural journals and books. let him have three or four years at an agricultural college. all the influences there point to agriculture as the best calling for a young man who is fit for it, whereas in other colleges the influences are all in the opposite direction. at our agricultural colleges a youth has all the necessary advantages of general education, and also an education in the lines fitting him especially for the calling he has selected. (united states department of agriculture, bulletin , condensed.) "among farmers and gardeners not enough thought is given to the whys and wherefores, or cause and effect; as a rule, they go on year after year without profiting by the personal opportunity afforded them of observation, or by the results of experiments at scientific stations. "with rare exceptions the young farmer and gardener takes up his work, not from the scientific side, but strictly from the labor side; and he begins at the bottom, meeting the same difficulties as did his father and too often not acquiring information beyond what his father possessed. "this should not be; agriculture should be taught in all our public schools in country districts, as it has been taught for years in germany and austria. it should be elevated as an art; in its higher estate it is already an art. no pursuit possesses a greater scope for development; the field is almost unoccupied by leaders, scientific and practical." (burnett landreth, in _ queries and answers._) in accordance with these ideas, the baron de hirsch agricultural school at woodbine, new jersey, is giving practical courses in agriculture to jewish boys, on the principle of individual plots--all free where necessary. the trustees of the state agricultural college of new jersey, at new brunswick, have established winter courses in agriculture, open to all residents of new jersey over sixteen years of age. courses will be for twelve weeks, and only a small entrance fee is required; few books will be needed. other states are doing likewise; all will need many teachers and experimenters. at present all who know anything about intensive agriculture are snapped up by the numerous government experiment stations at good salaries. the land like that of the rockefellers, the paynes, the cuttings, on which farming is carried on by unnecessarily expensive methods, needs the services of trained agriculturists and professional foresters. the division of forestry at the start employed eleven persons, but now it has in the field as many hundreds of employees, including a lot of trained foresters. the railroads also see the profit in teaching farming, and are devoting more and more money to experiments and lectures to show the farmers that they can get more and better crops with the same effort by intelligent selection of seeds. the chicago, burlington, and quincy railway company ran its first seed and soil special over the entire system in the winter of - , and has lectured to hundreds of thousands of farmers since. they report to us that "there is no doubt that the lectures did a great deal of good, and necessarily the larger increase of crops which followed is due to the scientific methods of farming expounded by the various professors." the late president james j. hill wrote much about the small farms' large yields. the hundreds of thousands of "war gardens" unskillfully conducted and glutting the local markets with crops all matured at about the same local time will unreasonably disgust many with intensive cultivation, especially those who work but do not think. the remedy is more instruction. the effect the agricultural colleges and experiment stations is plain to the eye in the better appearance of farms as we near the centers of instruction. some years ago a clergyman published a book upon the adirondacks; it was full of poetry, and he sent men up there who afterwards became known as "murray's fools." they knew nothing about the life and had no suitability and little preparation for it. we do not wish to bring out a crop of "three acres and liberty fools." we are telling what has been done and what can be done again. it does not follow that every man can or will do it, much less teach it or advance the art, but the field is a large one and holds out great promise to those who persevere and excel in it. if any one thinks that the profit of the earth will come to the cultivator without very intelligent and steady work, he is mistaken. no owner of land, unless others require it to live upon, can make money by neglecting it. says _maxwell's talisman:_ "the greatest good that can be done to the american farmer to-day is to teach him to make the greatest possible profit from the smallest tract of land from which a family can be supported in comfort. a great influence operating to-day against keeping the boys in the country is that the boy does not have money enough to buy a farm. it is unfortunately true that in some places there is a trend in the direction of absorbing farms into still larger farms with a consequent diminution of population, as in iowa and other sections. the remedy for this is to demonstrate that if the value is in the boy rather than in the farm, and the boy is taught intensive, diversified, scientific farming, a good living with a surplus profit that will provide amply for old age, may be made from a comparatively small tract of land. the tract may be, say, ten acres, with ample cultivation, irrigation, and fertilization, or even without irrigation because a hoe and a cultivator in the hands of a scientific farmer may bring as good and better results in providing moisture for growing plants as can be had from a ditch and unlimited water in the hands of an ignorant farmer." the field of discovery is always limitless, and it is to those boys or girls who devote their attention to this that the greatest return will come. "what a fine thing it would be to find even one plant free from rust in the midst of a rusted field. it would mean a rust-resistant plant. its off-spring would probably be also rust resistant. if you should ever find such a plant, be sure to save its seed and plant in a plot by itself. the next year again save seed from those plants least rusted. possibly you can develop a rust proof race of wheat! keep your eyes open." ("agriculture for beginners," by burkett, stevens, and hill, pages - .) so you may pluck gain out of loss. if you want to do experiments, the influence of ether on plants is one new and wonderful field. it seems to induce artificial rest, so that lilacs, for instance, can be made to bloom twice by a treatment, the last time near christmas. e. v. wilcox says in _farming_ that in a small quantity of durum or macaroni wheat was introduced into this country for trial. it was found profitable in localities where there was too little rain for ordinary wheat. six years later, , , bushels per year of the wheat was grown in the united states. its production has increased greatly every season and has added materially to the total of the wheat crop.. thorough fall cultivation has been found to increase the yield, and in some parts of the wheat belt one in five of the farmers has already adopted the practice. in certain states where manuring has been thought unnecessary, experiments have demonstrated that the yield may be increased per cent by this simple practice. the wheat production of nebraska was increased more than , , bushels by the introduction of a hardy strain of turkey red wheat. swedish select oats in wisconsin have greatly augmented the oat yield of the state. in six pounds of the seed was brought to the state and from this small beginning a crop of , , bushels was harvested five years later. "mr. gideon, of minnesota, planted many apple seeds, and from them all raised one tree that was very fruitful, finely flavored, and able to withstand the cold minnesota winter. this tree he multiplied by grafts and named it the wealthy apple. it is said that in this one apple he benefited the world to the value of more than one million dollars. you must not let any valuable bud or seed variant be lost." ("agriculture for beginners," page .) "this fact ought to be very helpful to us next year when planting corn. we should plant seed secured only from stalks that produced the most corn. if we follow this plan year by year, each acre of land will be made to produce more kernels and hence a larger crop of corn, and yet no more expense will be required to raise the crop." (same, page .) _the world's work_ tells how the country got a new industry. mr. george gibbs, of clearbrook, wash., has made his "stake" by growing tulip and hyacinth bulbs. he had a little place on orcas island, in puget sound. he did not know anything about growing flowers, but he did know that certain varieties of bulbs brought good prices in the east. he was observant enough to see that the moist, warm, climate and rich soil of the puget sound country were peculiarly favorable to flowers. he had bad luck with his bulbs; that only meant that he still had something to learn. he kept his nerve even when he went bankrupt. his friends told him he was wasting time, but they could not shake his faith. in twelve years he found that he was right. his wonderful gardens were making him rich. other men have gone into the business, but he was first and has kept his lead. he has made the puget sound country the greatest rival of holland in the sale of flowering bulbs. quantities of wild herbs, fruits, and roots that no one eats are good; the jesuits had a list of over two hundred kinds that the indians ate, but it was lost. some one can do a great service by making it up again by research and experiment. thousands more of the wild things must be good for dyes, fabrics, and fodder. fame like burbank's and fortune awaits the one who is a good self-advertiser and can find the use of the poetic daisies, goldenrod, and thistle, the all-pervading "pusley," and such other vegetable vermin. an interesting experiment is conducted in growing tea with colored child labor, at tea, south carolina, by the aid of education and machinery and the cooperation of the agricultural department at washington, who will furnish particulars. whatever may be its outcome, this will give an opening to some intelligent cultivators, and it points the way to other fields. those who are first in raising new or improved plants find a waiting market for them. _the market growers gazette,_ of london, england, reports that mr. a. findlay, mairsland, auchtermuchty, scotland, sold one season to five leading growers whose names are given five seed potatoes at l each (which would be, perhaps, $ a peck). he says enthusiastically: "it is as perfectly round-shaped a potato as can be imagined. there is a slight dash of pink on the outer rim of the eye. my stock of it is very small, only lb. and i do not care to sell any. if next year's crop yields as well as this year's, we shall have twenty times that quantity." mr. findlay has other seed potatoes, just as high priced, for which he wants $ per lb., which, he says, "means that i do not want to sell any." this shows what progressive people think of the real value of good seed. it is worth mentioning that "the land on which these are grown is not highly manured; the only artificial manure that it has received is about lb. of potash per acre. it has the drawback of being rather stony." of course this is "a fad"; it is doubtful if it will pay any one to give such prices for seed except to sell to some bigger fool than himself. of course, also, the market for a particular fancy thing may soon be overstocked, but it seems to be a nice thing for the findlays meanwhile, and it does good in teaching people to appreciate good things. yet the average potato patcher prudently saves his small potatoes for next year's seed, which is just as if a breeder were to keep the colts that were too poor to sell, to be the parents of his herd. in the dark ages of farming--to wit, in , for this is a true story--a minister of the gospel came into possession, by inheritance, of a fifteen-acre farm a short way from philadelphia. he found the soil a reddish, somewhat gravelly clay, and so worn out from years of cropping that it did not support two cows and a horse. city born and bred, he was encumbered with no knowledge of agriculture which had to be unlearned. he began a careful and systematic study of the agricultural literature, and ultimately developed a novel system of dairy farming to which he adhered religiously. the farm iying near the city is high-priced land; for this reason, and because of the limited acreage, the cows were kept in the barn the year round. for six years his bill for veterinary services was $ . , while the income from the milk of his seventeen cows was about $ a year. in addition, from four to six head of young cattle were sold annually, netting about $ a year. as the stock on the farm was stall fed every particle of plant food contained in the stable manure, liquid as well as solid, was utilized. no fertilizer was ever purchased. yet all of the "roughage" for thirty head of stock was raised on the thirteen acres of available soil. only $ a year was expended for concentrated feeding stuffs. the net earnings of the farm for the period averaged more than $ a year. and this was during the early days of his experience; later he made more. professor w. j. spillman, of the agricultural department, visited him in , and studied the methods employed. then, he says, the rush to see the farm became so great that the owner had to give it up. few people who know nothing about it, and won't learn, can take even three acres and make anything off it. to get the phenomenal yields takes capital--sometimes large capital, wisely spent. sometimes we read of immense products "per acre"; this often means the product of a single rod of ground, this gives at the rate of so much "per acre," or might, if extended. but any one can take a little bit of ground and use it thoroughly and increase his borders and his knowledge as he goes on. he will find plenty to pay him for doing or teaching whatever he has learned to do that no one else has done "if a man make but a mousetrap better than his fellows, though he makes his tent in the wilderness, the world will beat a path to his door." the mission of this book is accomplished if it interests you to consider the possibilities of making a living on a few acres and leads you to investigate. it is not written as a textbook, for, as has been shown, there are authorities enough cited to supply all the technical information needed. its sole object is to show what has been done and what can be done on small areas and to show that life in the country need not be so laborious if the same methods are used which make successes of business in other lines. if it does this and is the means of checking in any degree the reckless trend of people from the country to the cities, the author will feel that his efforts have been well repaid. chapter xxii the wood lot if you have a bit of woods on your little farm, take care of it. by intelligent thinning you can make an average income of five dollars per acre from ordinary second growth wild woods. the cord wood, barrel hoops, fence posts, and so on will decrease your expenses, while the timber will increase in value. that lot is the place to start your boy as a forester. instructions how to treat the trees can be obtained from your state forestry department or from the national forest service at washington: the care of growing timber is a big subject and requires study, but don't sell your standing timber without their advice. forestry can hardly be made to pay on a small lot with hired labor or hired teams, and you must not pay much for your wood lot, else interest and taxes will eat up the returns. to be of high quality, timber must be, to a considerable proportion of its height, free of limbs, which are the cause of knots; it must be tall; and it must not decrease rapidly in diameter from the butt to the top of the last log. in a dense stand of timber there is very great competition for sunlight among the individual trees, with the result that height growth is increased. trees in crowded stands are taller than those in uncrowded stands of the same age. when the trees are crowded so that sunlight does not reach the lower branches, these soon die and become brittle they then fall off or are broken off by the wind, snow, or other agencies. by this process trunks are formed which are free from limbs, and hence of high quality. it is evident, therefore, that trees in the wood lot should be so crowded that the crown or top of each individual tree may be in contact with those of its nearest neighbors. a crowded stand of trees produces not only a larger number but also a greater proportion of high quality sawlogs than an uncrowded stand. so vital a matter is their forest shade that it does not do to set out young trees which have grown in the forest. ordinarily, the exposure to the sunlight stunts them and often kills them. nursery trees are best; the next best are trees that have grown at the edge of the woods. the actual value of woodland as pasture is small. one dollar per acre per year is probably a liberal estimate of the value of its forage. thrifty fully stocked stands of timber will grow at the rate of or more board feet of lumber per year. adopting only board feet as the growth and assuming the value of the standing timber to be from $ to $ per feet board measure, the value of the timber growth is from $ . to $ per acre per year. if the timber is given good care, moreover, the growth should be as much as board feet per acre per year. the larger value of the wood lot for growing timber, as compared to the value of its forage only, is therefore apparent. it must not be thought possible to secure this growth of timber and utilize the wood lot for pasture at the same time, because the stock eat the seedlings and damage the trees. if shade, however, rather than forage is the wood lot's chief value to stock, it can doubtless be provided by allowing the stock to range in only a portion of the lot. the remainder can more profitably be devoted to the production of wood. owners are doubtless in some instances indifferent about fires in their wood lots, because they do not realize that these may do great harm without giving striking evidence of the fact. they burn the fallen leaves and accumulated litter of several years, thus destroying the material with which trees enrich their own soil. the soil becomes exposed, evaporation is greater, and more of the rain and melted snow runs off the surface. the roots may also be exposed and burned. the vitality of the trees is weakened and their rate of growth decreased. don't burn leaves or waste growth: it is dangerous and they are valuable for mulch and for manure. it has been found in the prairie region that through the protection afforded by the most efficient grove windbreaks, the yield in farm crops is increased to the extent of a crop as large as could be grown on a strip three times as wide as the height of the trees. at present the following states maintain nurseries and distribute young trees either free or practically at cost to planters within the state: maine, new hampshire, vermont, new york, maryland, pennsylvania, ohio, michigan, north dakota, and kansas. the names of nurseries which handle stock of certain trees and their quoted prices for all the more important species can be secured from the forest service, washington, d. c. whether your wood lot pays a profit or not, like the profit from the rest of your land, depends largely on how it is taxed. the higher it is taxed the harder it is to make it pay. in most states timberland is assessed on the basis of its value, timber and land together. woodland assessed on this basis is overtaxed as compared with land assessed on the basis of what it produces each year. the value of plowland for farm purposes is established by what it will earn. if the owner can make $ an acre a year over all expenses by growing say wheat, corn, cotton or alfalfa on it, his land will have a value of perhaps $ an acre. if it took two years to grow a crop, the land would be worth only half as much. its owner in that case would kick vigorously if he could not get his assessment lowered. he would kick still more vigorously if he had to pay a tax also on the value of the standing crop, after having to pay too much on the land. "the lord loveth a cheerful kicker." with woodland the case is still worse. each year the owner may have to pay a tax on the merchantable crops of many past years. it is as though the owner of plowland had to pay a tax on the value of his field crops twice a week throughout the growing season. when a full-grown tree is cut down or burned up in a forest fire, it may have been taxed or times over. each year the land on which it grew has been valued not on the basis of its earning power, but on the basis of what it would bring if sold, timber and all. a tax levied on the income-earning value of the land would be much more equitable. certain states have applied this principle by legislation under which land to be used for growing timber can be classified so that the timber can be taxed separately from the land. the land there is taxed annually on its value, without timber. the tax on the timber is not paid until the crop is harvested. it is therefore a tax on the yield. in new york this yield tax is per cent of the value of the crop harvested; michigan per cent of it; massachusetts per cent; and vermont, connecticut, and pennsylvania per cent, with different provisions for forests already established. such a method is much better than that adopted by a number of states which exempt, under certain conditions, reforested or reforesting lands for a term of years, or allow rebates or bounties on such lands. the profit of a growing forest crop will depend largely on relief from excessive taxation. it is unthrifty public policy to discourage putting waste land to work. ("the farm woodlot problem," by herbert a. smith, editor forest service--from yearbook of department of agriculture for .) chapter xxiii some practical experiments the department of agriculture at washington, also cornell university and various other schools publish special studies and monographs of different branches. for some a small charge is made, but they are mostly distributed free. many of them are very valuable. the united states department's pamphlet on the diseases of the violet is a notable example. the average person does not know how these can be obtained or even that they exist. the department's year books are most interesting reading, and both its professors and the state colleges will answer particular questions of citizens. these and the various united states and state experiment station publications will serve instead of most books (except this one), if properly filed, indexed, and crossindexed so that you can readily turn to all the information on a given subject--on bugs, for instance, before the insects have harvested your crop. i am trying only to suggest things, not to advise, nor to induce my readers to try to do anything that they don't like or have no capacity for. it is difficult to make people understand that. one reader of this book, a dear creature, wrote her experience for a crafts magazine. she got the acres, built her house, and raised one fine crop of--swans? nuts grafted on wild trees? partridge berries? no--three tons of hay! she called it "three acres and starving"; i called it "three acres and stupidity." she didn't eat the hay, and the editor wouldn't publish my reply. everybody raises hay and potatoes; so don't you raise any unless for your own use. potatoes are a laborious crop, requiring constant care, manuring, cutting the seed eyes (on which there is much uncertain lore), hilling up or down according to drainage and rainfall, spraying with pyrox or dusting with paris green, and, neither least nor last, bug hunting. the seed is expensive, but for your own use you may plant from whatever seed, otherwise wasted, may grow on the potato vine, on the tops of the plants. the crop will be small potatoes and all kinds of varieties, which won't sell in the market but which make each dinner a surprise party. you may strike a new and improved strain, though there are over a thousand varieties of potato listed already. new creations of merit bring good returns, and 'tis the enterprising experimenter that reaps the honor and the harvest, and he is worthy of his reward. to select the most productive plants and breed again from these is, however, a more promising profit plan. even then don't plant the tubers unless you will take the pains to soak the seed potatoes in scab preventer. if you won't, likely you will raise mostly scab, and the spores thereof will spoil your ground for potatoes for years. it costs little in money to make it--half a pint of formalin to fifteen gallons of water. not guessed but measured gallons. then soak for an hour and a half by the ingersoll. don't reckon that one little hour or a few will do just as well. with one hour they will be under-done and spotty, with three over-done and weakly. there is lots to be discovered yet about "the spuds." sawdust is an excellent mulch for them, as for small fruits. when you store any seeds to plant, put carbolic moth balls with them. it checks insects and mice and helps to protect the planted seeds from birds. in a general way, with potatoes and with other things that you want good and plenty, get specific directions and follow them. most people won't read directions; more can't follow them. those people have their knives out for "book farmers and professors," but you can't improve on experience and experiment by the light of laziness or of nature. a delicate jelly is made out of the red outer pulp of rose berries. it would be romantic to develop a rose fruit from those seed pods, as the peach was developed from the almond. we have invented stranger fruits than that, such as the logan-berry and the pomato. but there is better chance for profit in doing the old things better, especially when the experiment costs little or nothing. you can have a strawberry garden on your roof or even on a balcony. this need not be costly. clinch all the nails on the inside of a stout barrel. bore half a dozen two-inch holes in the bottom, or put in a layer of stones, for drainage. bore a row of eight holes about eight inches from the bottom of the barrel and about eight inches apart. eight inches above this bore a second row of holes "staggered," and a third eight inches above those. pile several old tomato cans with perforated bottoms one on the other in the center of the barrel: these should be the height of the barrel and placed upright in its middle. this is the conductor down which water should be poured at intervals before the soil gets quite dry. fill the barrel with soil made of one half loam and one half well-rotted manure. be sure the manure is not fresh. a little bone meal is a good addition. now plant the first row of strawberry plants ("ever-bearing" are best, though they don't ever-bear). put each plant inside, spread the roots, and pull the leaves of each out through one of the holes. press the soil down firmly around each root. repeat the process for the other two rows; fill the barrel and set say six plants on the top. that will give you thirty plants, which should grow ten to twenty-five quarts of fine berries, or more. the illustration makes the holes twelve inches apart--for big leafy plants. if there are any more, those will be you. anyhow, you will know a lot about strawberries at the end of the season. other things can be grown in the same way. better than growing vegetables, or where dry land can't be obtained, is to raise some crop like water cress that usually comes from a distance. often an otherwise poor season will help a specialty. one year wet weather jumped the price of mint and it sold at double prices. hot, dry weather is required to make it produce its best. most of the mint produced in this country for peppermint oil is grown in michigan. more than acres are reported from a single county. mint oil is worth about $ . a pound and costs about a dollar to produce. nice bright dried leaves sell for about cent a pound. the production of mint is sometimes as high as fifty pounds of oil to the acre. the bulk of it is grown on marshlands, which a few years ago were nowhere worth more than a few dollars an acre. the mint is sent to the manufacturers, where it is purified and made into flavoring extract or used in chewing gum, etc. why should we, with our infinite variety of climates, soils, and labor, import from england the coarser varieties of seeds of the cabbage family, savoy, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, or kale? we owe england enough already for the seed of liberty we got from her. california now supplies some seed for onions, carrots, parsnips, and a few others. the finest cauliflower comes mostly from denmark now. turnip seed, too, mangel-wurzel and swedes, onion, pea, bean, carrot, parsnip, radish, and beet seeds could be grown here by the same skill, care, and training as they are grown abroad. an interesting method of forcing plants by the use of hot water baths is described in _la nature_ (paris), by henri coupin. the process is much simpler than others now in use and may be employed by any one who has a small greenhouse, no expert treatment being necessary. says mr. coupin: "most trees in our countries undergo a period of rest, during which all growth appears to be suspended. branches do not enlarge and the buds on them remain as they are. they do not arouse from their torpor until spring, first, because they then find the conditions necessary for their development, and again, because, during the period of rest, chemical changes have taken place in them. these are indispensable, because if they did not occur, the trees, even in the most favorable conditions, would not open their buds. for example, plant branches that have quite recently dropped their leaves, in a warm greenhouse. they will not bud; but make the same experiment at the end of several months and the buds will appear. "there are several ways of shortening this period of rest, some of which are rather odd. the best known is the process of etherification, which has been so much discussed recently, and which consists in placing the plants to be forced in the vapor of ether or chloroform for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. afterwards when placed in a hothouse, the branches begin to develop almost immediately. "a very ingenious botanist, hans molisch, professor in the university of prague, has devised a method of forcing, simpler still and quite as effective. it consists in plunging the branches into warm water during a time that varies with the species. the best method is to plunge the plants in a reservoir of warm water, head downward, without moistening the roots, which would injure them. after a certain time, the plants are withdrawn, turned right side up with care, and placed in a greenhouse, where they develop at once. "the duration of the warm bath should be nine to twelve hours at most. the best temperature is degree to degree [ degree to degree f] . . . that is to say, in the majority of cases, one may simply employ the water available in hothouses, which is just at the proper temperature. the process is thus at the disposal of all gardeners. "it should be said that the good effects of the hot baths are confined to the parts actually immersed and do not extend to the whole plant. thus, on the same stem we may see developing only the branches that have been treated with the bath, while the others remain torpid. this is easy to verify with the lilac or the willow. "if lobner is to be believed, we may substitute for the water bath one of steam. he has obtained good results with the lily of the valley. the thing is possible, but the method used by molisch is more practical. "how shall we explain the good effect of warm water on branches in a resting state? we are absolutely ignorant of its mechanism, as we are also in the case of etherification. but if we knew everything, science would be no longer amusing!"--condensed, from _the literary digest._ there are many new uses for water: it will not be long before every truck and every commercial flower garden will have overhead irrigation. this is merely gas pipes ("seconds" rejected for blow holes or porosity are usually used) supported on posts say six feet above the ground. they are usually placed parallel about fifty feet apart, which will make four to the acre square, and have a single row of holes and a handle on each pipe, so that the spray can be turned in either direction; with a high-water pressure, often supplied by gravity, they may be farther apart with larger holes. these not only have saved us from fear of drought, but they supply the moisture in the natural manner and at the right time and increase fertility to an astonishing degree. when you take a shower bath yourself, that is overhead irrigation. the gasoline, kerosene, or heavy oil one man farm tractor, so made that it can be used to plow, to climb a side hill, to run a saw or a pump, is the coming factor in garden and farm advance. huge fortune awaits the first manufacturer who will standardize it, cheapen it, and specialize on it. the horse is the greatest care and the greatest risk on the little farm. he costs more than a tractor would, he is eating his head off half the time, he can't he worked overtime without injury, not even as much as a man can be; all too soon he dies, more missed than any member of the family. when this is popularized the "three acres" can well be extended to five. chapter xxiv some experimental foods fifty-eight years ago abraham lincoln said "population must increase rapidly, more rapidly than in former times, and ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving subsistence from the smallest area of soil. no community whose every member possesses this art can ever be the victim of oppression in any of its forms. such community will alike be independent of crowned kings, money kings, and land kings." the future, it seems, has many strange dishes in store for the american stomach. whether you are rich or one of the plain people that have to work, whether the idea of new fantastic food appeals to your palate or to your pocketbook, you will be attracted by the array of foreign viands with curious names which have already been successfully introduced and are now beginning to be marketed in this country. mr. william n. taft, in the technical world magazine, presents the following wild menu for the dinner table: jujube soup brisket of antelope boiled petsai dasheen au gratin creamed udo soy bean and lichee nut salad yang taw pie mangoes kaki sake. this, he assures us, is not the bill of fare of a chinese eating house, nor yet of a japanese restaurant, it is the daily meal of an american family two decades hence, if the department of agriculture succeeds in its attempt to introduce a large number of new foods to this country for the dual purpose of supplying new dainties and reducing the cost of living. uncle sam has determined to decrease the price of food as much as possible, and, for this purpose, delegated dr. david s. fairchild, agricultural explorer in charge of the foreign plant section of the bureau of plant industry, in particular, to see what can be done about it. more than , fruits and vegetables have been tested by uncle sam's experts and, according to dr. fairchild, a goodly portion of the foodstuffs which have been regarded as staples since the days of the first settler are doomed. consider for example "jujube soup!" mention that to the average person and he will answer: "but i thought the jujube was a fruit, like an apple. how can you make soup of it?" the average person is right. the jujube is a fruit--but a most remarkable one. "it is about the size and appearance of a crab apple, but contains only a single seed. it grows on a spiny tree, long and bare of trunk, with its foliage cropping out at the very top like a royal palm of the tropics. the jujube itself has been used for years to flavor candies and other confections. but the essence is very expensive and comparatively rare, despite the profusion with which the fruit grows in its native habitat. "dr. fairchild, however, imported several specimens for the department's gardens in california, where they are bearing prolifically. the arid sands of the southwest, where nothing but cactus and sage-brush formerly would grow, have been found to be excellent soil for the jujube, and it is the hope of uncle sam's food experts to see the entire arizona and new mexico deserts dotted with jujube orchards, with income to their owners. the jujube is delicious eaten raw, but it may be cooked in any manner in which apples are prepared, used as a sauce or for pie, preserved or dried. finally, its juice may be used as a delicious and highly nutritive fruit broth." petsai, or, as the chinese have it, pe-tsai, is a substitute for the cabbage. in appearance it is as different from cabbage as can be imagined. it is tall and cylindrical and its leaves are narrow, delicately curled, with frilled edges. the petsai can, however, be grown on any soil where the ordinary cabbage could be cultivated and in many sections where the native vegetable would languish. we are told it is no uncommon thing for a petsai to reach sixty pounds in weight. department of agriculture officials, however, advise that it be plucked when about eight pounds in weight, its flavor being then the most delicate and appealing. this new importation, uncle sam's experts hope, will cause a drop in the price of dinners. cabbage long ago ceased to be a cheap dish. but petsai requires none of the care which has to be lavished on cabbage and will thrive in almost any climate and any soil. the soy bean, once started, grows wild and yields several crops a season. it can be prepared in a multitude of ways, from baking to a delicious salad. according to doctor yamei kin, the head of the women's medical school near pekin, milk can be made from it to cost about six cents a quart and equal to cows' milk. it would be a blessing if we could get rid of the sacred but unclean cow. one of the state dairy inspectors told me, "we consider milk a filthy product." it may be remembered that, only twenty years ago, almost all the dates consumed here came from the oases of arabia and the valley of the euphrates. to-day there are more than a hundred varieties successfully produced in california and arizona. the wonders of today are the commonplaces of to-morrow, and there is no telling to what apparently impossible lengths science will go to relieve people of the burden they now bear in the price of food. it has scoured the ends of the earth for new delicacies and now experts will do their best to teach the people to use them. have you ever heard of _"whitloof"_ or _"belgian chicory"_ or have you ever dined in one of the better restaurants of large city where they have served during the winter months a salad composed of golden blanched oblong leaves about inches wide and inches long, only the outer edges showing a faint green? it is as delicate as the perfume of roses, as crisp as young lettuce, as delicious as asparagus, and as ornamental upon the table as the freshest fruit. in former years this salad had to be imported and you had to pay dear for a portion of it, a good reason why so few people know it. a belgian farmer located near new york has grown many thousands of these plants this past summer. how would you like to grow this dainty salad right in your living room and cut several crops from a single planting lasting nearly three months? secure an -inch pot and plant in it roots packed in light sandy soil or pure sand. invert another but empty -inch pot over this to keep out the light, place in a heated room, water daily, and in from three to four weeks you will find full-grown crowns, beautifully blanched ready for cutting. six of such crowns make a large portion, sufficient for an entire family. in cutting, do not cut too close to the root, for another growth is made directly after the cutting, which matures in from three to four weeks, and still two other crops can be grown in this way, so that from a single planting four full crops can be had. considering, then, that eight such treats can be had for the cost of a single dozen roots, we can all now enjoy what was formerly a luxury. this method is most interesting, for you can watch the daily progress of the growth of the roots, fascinating to young and old, and with three weekly plantings of a pot each this treat can be enjoyed twice a week from the st of february until may. for those who wish to enjoy it more often or in larger quantities, we suggest the following: prepare a bed of soil inches deep in your cellar in a dark place where the temperature is always above freezing. plant the roots as close as their size will permit and cover the crowns with at least inches of soil. on top of this put straw so that when the crowns come through the soil they will not strike the light. when ready to cut, remove the soil as far back as the original root so that you can intelligently cut the growth to produce the crops to follow. as a substitute for the potato of commerce the "dasheen" long ago passed the experimental stage. it has been served at a number of banquets in washington, philadelphia, and new york. while the tops of potatoes are useless as food, the tops of the dasheen make delicious greens, and tests indicate that good growers can depend on a crop of from four hundred to four hundred and fifty bushels per acre. the udo is the plant intended by the department of agriculture as a substitute for asparagus, a delicacy which it closely resembles. it is more prolific than asparagus, grows in the same soil, and requires less attention. not only plants but animals are experimented with by uncle sam's experts. officials of the bureau of animal industry claim that before long we will partake of antelope steak. for the antelope has been found to be particularly adapted to the more arid western sections of the country. and beyond that the gastronomist of the future will have to reckon with loin of hippopotamus! the lower valley of the mississippi is admirably suited to these huge beasts, the flesh of one of which equals a score of cattle. african traveled epicures maintain that hippopotamus steak is as tender and inviting as the choicest beef. "for those who like that sort of thing, it is just the sort of thing they would like." it seems a bit remote to urge hippopotamus on us who do not yet know enough to eat sharks, tortoises, painted turtles, or even english sparrows. anyhow the small gardener is more likely to succeed raising pheasants than to muss with a hippopotamus, at least in the suburbs. pigs are more practical and make prettier pets. our population bids fair to approximate two hundred million within the next fifty years, and, because of the exigencies of business, an increasing number of people will be engaged in non-food-producing vocations. these people, however, are all consumers and must be fed and clothed, and even now america offers the greatest market for the produce of the farm that any farmer in any country has ever had in all history. one of the coming ways of feeding them is the discovery and use of new foods. as in other things, after the war, whether we live in a better world or not, we shall live in an entirely different world, new ways, strange thoughts, and other foods. for the most of the following, _business america_ and _current opinion_ are responsible. for the creation of new crop varieties or the improvement of those now in use we must depend upon the practical scientists who are engaged in plant breeding. the work of one of these, professor buffum, has been accomplished in a region that is apparently sterile and where plants grow only by coaxing through artificial moisture. his plant-breeding farms near worland in the big horn basin of northern wyoming lie at an elevation of feet, in a region of almost total natural aridity. after twenty years' work in western agricultural colleges and government experiment stations, professor buffum chose his present location because nowhere in the united states could he find conditions of soil and climate that induce to such a remarkable degree the breaking up of species, and mutation or "sporting" of plants. when the modern plant breeder seeks to produce something new by cross-fertilization a problem is encountered. for many years we were ignorant of the principle upon which nature operated in these hybrids or crosses. finally a bohemian priest named mendel discovered the law. the central principle is that when the seed produced from a cross between two different species is planted, the progeny breaks up into well-defined groups. a certain percentage of the plants resemble one of the parents, a smaller percentage are like the other parent, and the rest seem to be a blend of both parents. these intermediates will not breed true to themselves, however; if seed from them is planted the progeny will split up into groups, showing the same percentages as the first generation to which they belonged. this has been generally accepted by scientists. in many of his productions professor buffum apparently has set the mendelian law at defiance, for, by cross-fertilization, he has evolved plants which breed true to themselves, and their progeny does not break up into groups, according to the accepted theory. they show specimens resembling each parent, with the third composed of seemingly, but not really, blended specimens. these results are particularly vital in the development of plants adapted by selection for semi-arid agriculture. the professor believes that the great areas of high plain country to be found from canada to mexico can be made more productive through planting crop varieties that have been bred to withstand the existing conditions which produce meagre returns from the vast expanse of territory under the present methods. in place of corn, which is difficult to mature even at moderate elevations, professor buffum has introduced improved emmers and the various hybrids resulting from crosses with other grains. emmer itself is not a new grain, having been grown for centuries in russia and southern europe, and it is believed to have been the corn of pliny, which he said was used by the latins for several centuries before they knew how to make bread. several years ago emmer began receiving attention as a stock food. the first planting of the grain at worland resulted in some exceptional "sports," seemingly of a different type, with coarse straw and very large heads. with this as a basis, the seed was replanted and subjected to many experiments to increase its drouth and winter resisting qualities. continued selections have shown, a yield of from a third more to twice as much as corn, that it is thirty per cent more valuable than oats for feeding horses, and that for stock fattening it is equal to corn, pound for pound. it is the most drouth-resistant and prolific of small grains, has been successfully raised from montana to mexico, and is being planted in louisiana to replace oats because it is not affected by rust. some of the yields recorded are enormous, varying from to bushels per acre under dry farming, and as high as bushels under irrigation. one stalk of turkey red wheat was noticed as differing in many ways from all varieties, principally that the head was over eight inches in length, whereas the ordinary turkey red wheat commonly used in the west has a head of only four or five inches. from this one stalk has been developed the buffum no. winter wheat. the heavy beards were eliminated and the grains or kernels in each spikelet increased from the normal number of three to five, seven, and even nine. the hardiness of the new variety, together with its remarkably large head, means that when it is placed on the market the farmers who sow it need not fear winter killing and will have a splendid flouring grain, which will produce nearly double the average crop per acre. it is said that if a single kernel could be added to each head of wheat, the increase in annual production of this country would amount to over fifteen million bushels. if fodder crops can be substituted for a part of the corn now used for stock, it will be a great gain. in his alfalfa-breeding garden, professor buffum is raising over seventy different kinds, gathered from all parts of the world, showing that the plant is capable of wide variations. one hybrid has been obtained by crossing sweet clover with alfalfa; the clover grows wild in every state in the union. there seems to be no limit to man's ingenuity and skill in plant improvement. perhaps sometime we will try it with our children. in thirty years an exceptional ear of dent corn, through continued planting and careful selection each succeeding season, resulted in a few days' shortening of the growing period and an increased resistance to the cool nights of the higher elevation where it was under improvement; to-day, this corn matures about the middle of august at an altitude of feet, and has been yielding forty to sixty bushels per acre. chapter xxv dried truck as a war measure the surplus vegetables in many city markets have been forced by the governments into large municipal drying plants. community driers have been established in the trucking regions and even itinerant drying machines have been sent from farm to farm drying the vegetables which otherwise would have gone to waste. the drying of vegetables may seem strange to the present generation, but we are very young; to our grandmothers it was no novelty. many housewives even to-day prefer dried sweet corn to the canned, and find also that dried pumpkin and squash are excellent for pie making. snap beans often are strung on threads and dried above the stove. cherries and raspberries still are dried on bits of bark for use instead of raisins. this country is producing large quantities of perishable foods every year, which should be saved for storage, canned, or properly dried. drying is not a panacea for the waste evil, nor should it take the place of storing or canning to any considerable extent where proper storage facilities are available or tin cans or glass jars can be obtained cheap. for the farmer's wife the new methods of canning are probably better than sun drying, which requires a somewhat longer time. but dried material can be stored in receptacles which cannot be used for canning. then, too, canned fruit and vegetables freeze and cannot be shipped as conveniently--in winter. dried vegetables can be compacted and shipped or stored with a minimum of risk. string them up to the ceiling of the storeroom or attic. a few apples or sweet potatoes or peas or even a single turnip can be dried and saved. even when very small quantities are dried at a time, a quantity sufficient for a meal will soon be secured. small lots of dried vegetables, such as cabbage, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and onions, can be combined to advantage for soups and stews. in general, most fruits or vegetables, to be dried quickly, must first be shredded or cut into slices, because many are too large to dry quickly, or have skins the purpose of which is to prevent drying out. if the air applied at first is too hot, the cut surfaces of the sliced fruits or vegetables become hard, or scorched, covering the juicy interior so that it will not dry. generally it is not desirable that the temperature in drying should go above deg to deg f., and it is better to keep it well below this point. insects and insect eggs are killed by the heat. it is important to know the degree of heat in the drier, and this cannot be determined accurately except by a thermometer. inexpensive oven thermometers can be found on the market, or an ordinary chemical thermometer can be suspended in the drier. drying of certain products can be completed in some driers within two or three hours. when sufficiently done they should be so dry that water cannot be pressed out of the freshly cut pieces, they should not show any of the natural grain of the fruit on being broken, and yet not be so dry as to snap or crackle. they should be leathery and pliable. when freshly cut fruits or vegetables are spread out they immediately begin to evaporate moisture into the air, and if in a closed box will very soon saturate the air with moisture. this will slow down the rate of drying and lead to the formation of molds. if a current of dry air is blown over them continually, the water in them will evaporate steadily until they are dry and crisp. certain products, especially raspberries, should not be dried hard, because if too much moisture is removed from them they will not resume their original form when soaked in water. the rotary hand slicer is adapted for use on a very wide range of material. don't slice your hand with it. from an eighth to a quarter of an inch is a fair thickness for most of the common vegetables to be sliced. to secure fine quality, much depends upon having the vegetables absolutely fresh, young, tender, and perfectly clean; one decayed root may flavor several kettles of soup if the slices from it are scattered through a batch of material. high-grade "root" vegetables can only be made from peeled roots. blanching consists of plunging the vegetables into boiling water for a short time. use a wire basket or cheesecloth bag for this. after blanching as many minutes as is needed, drain well and remove the surface moisture from vegetables by placing them between two towels or by exposing them to the sun and air for a short time. a mosquito net is thrown over the product to protect the slices from flies and other insects. fruits and vegetables, when dried in the sun, generally are spread on large trays of uniform size which can be stacked one on top of the other and protected from rain by covers made of oilcloth, canvas, or roofing paper. a very cheap tray can be made of lath three fourths of an inch thick and inches wide, which form the sides and ends of a box, and smoothed lath which is nailed on to form the bottom. as builders' laths are feet long, these lath trays are most economical of material when made feet in length. a cheap and very satisfactory drier for use over the kitchen stove can be made by any handy man of small-mesh galvanized-wire netting and laths or strips of wood about / inch thick and inches wide. by using two laths nailed together the framework can be stiffened and larger trays made if desirable. this form can be suspended from the ceiling over the kitchen range or over a clear burning oil, gasoline, or gas stove, and it will utilize the hot air which rises during the cooking hour. it can be raised out of the way or swung to one side by a pulley or by a crane made of lath. when the stove is required for cooking, the frame is lowered or swung back to utilize the heat which otherwise would be wasted. still another home drier is the cookstove oven. bits of food, left overs, especially sweet corn, can be dried on plates in a very slow oven or on the back of the cookstove and saved for winter use. where the electric "juice" is not monopolized, an electric fan in drying is economical, especially for those who already have a fan. many sliced fruits placed in long trays by foot and stacked in two tiers, end to end, before an electric fan can be dried within twenty-four hours. some require much less time. for instance, sliced string beans and shredded sweet potatoes will dry before a fan running at a moderate speed within a few hours. the dried fruit or vegetables must be protected from insects and rodents, also from the outside moisture, and will keep best in a cool, dry, well-ventilated place. in the more humid regions, moisture-tight containers should be used. if a small amount of dried product is put in each receptacle, just enough for one or two meals, it will not be necessary to open a large container. your american ingenuity and the american practice of reading will show you a lot of ways of saving waste: for example, frozen potatoes are not necessarily spoiled, we are told by mr. de ronsic, a writer in the _reveil agricole_. they may be dried and then cooked as usual. the _revue scientifique_ (paris), abstracting the article in question, says: "the potatoes must be dried to prevent decomposition, which takes place very rapidly after they have thawed out. . . ." the oven should be heated as for baking bread. then, when it has reached the necessary temperature, which is easily recognized, the potatoes are put in, cutting up the largest. they are spread out in a layer so that evaporation may easily take place, the door of the oven being left open. from time to time the mass is stirred up with a poker to facilitate the evaporation. when the drying has gone far enough, the potatoes having become hard as bits of wood, they are withdrawn to make room for others. "potatoes thus dried may be boiled with enough water to make a paste similar to that which they would have furnished if mashed in the ordinary manner, and which will answer very well, at least to feed stock. the potatoes will be found to have lost none of their nutritive value." even if you haven't any acres--yet, there isn't any law against drying in the city. either in sales or in saving it will help to pay for the country place later and the country place can be made to pay it back again. call your product say "landers' desiccated beans" or "glory's dehydrated corn." they will sell better, they may even taste better, trying to live up to the description. there's dollars in a name. as a preservative ice must not be neglected. the _country gentleman_ says: while the temperature is below the freezing point we should take advantage of even short frosts to lay up ice for next summer. the man without an ice pond need not be, without ice--he can freeze it in pans outdoors. an ice plant of this sort will cost from fifteen to twenty dollars. a double tank should be made of galvanized iron. the inner compartment of this tank should be ten feet long, two feet wide, and twelve inches deep. the top of the tank should be slightly wider than the bottom. the inner tank should be divided into six compartments by means of galvanized iron strips. the double tank should be placed near the outdoor pump, or stream, where it can easily be filled. being exposed on all sides, the water will freeze in from one hour to three hours. a bucket of hot water poured into the space between the tanks will loosen the cakes of ice, each weighing pounds. four tons of ice will last the average family a year. the cakes may be packed away in the icehouse as they are frozen. chapter xxvi home cold-pack canning to save vegetables and fruits by canning is a patriotic duty. the war makes the need for food conservation more imperative than at any time in history. america is mainly responsible for the food supply of the world. in this way the abundance of the summer may be made to supply the needs of the winter. by the modern cold-pack method it is as easy to can vegetables as to can fruits. some authorities say it is easier. at any rate, it is more useful. in the cold-pack method of canning, sterilization does away with the danger of spoilage by fermentation or "working." sterilization consists in raising the temperature of the filled jar or can to a germ-killing point and holding it there until bacterial life is destroyed. the word "container" is used to designate either the tin can or the glass jar. single-period cold-pack canning, as distinguished from old-fashioned preserving, offers a saving in time, labor, and expense, and satisfactory results. as the foodstuffs are placed in the containers before sterilization, they are cold and may be handled quickly and easily. then the sterilization period is frequently short. this is time-saving. finally, no rich preservatives, such as thick syrups or heavily spiced solutions, are required. fruits may be put up in thin syrups. vegetables require only salt for flavoring and water to fill the container. another advantage of this method is that it is practicable to put up food in small quantities. it pays to put up even a single container. thus, when there is a small surplus of some garden crop, or something left over from the order from the grocer's, one can take the short time necessary to place this food in a container and store it for future use. this is true household efficiency--the kind which, if practiced on a national scale, will conserve our war food supply and will, after the war, cut heavily into the high cost of living. there are five principal methods of canning: ( ) the cold-pack, single-period method; ( ) the intermittent, or fractional sterilization method; ( ) the cold-water method; ( ) the open kettle or hot-pack method; and ( ) the vacuum-seal method. of these the one worked out on scientific lines by leading experts and used by many commercial canners is so much the best method for home canning, because of its simplicity and effectiveness, that it is recommended by the national emergency food commission and the details are explained in their manual. the cold-water method can be used effectively in putting up rhubarb, green gooseberries, and a few other sour berry fruits. the process is simple. the fruit is first prepared and washed and then blanched, and finally packed practically raw in containers, which are next filled with cold water and then sealed. some sour fruits packed in this way will keep indefinitely. a serviceable outfit may be made of materials found in any household. all that is necessary is a vessel to hold the jars or cans--such as a wash boiler or a large tin pail. this should have a tight-fitting cover. provide a false bottom of wood or a wire rack to allow for free circulation of water under the containers. while suburban gardeners with large surplus of vegetables find it desirable to use tin cans, being more easily handled for commercial purposes, most of us find glass jars the more satisfactory and economical containers for canned vegetables and fruits. this is especially true when there is a shortage of tin cans. all types of jars that seal perfectly may be used. use may be made of those to which one is accustomed or which may be already on hand. the rubbers must be sound but the glass jars may be used indefinitely. glass jars are adapted for use in any of the cold-pack canning outfits. be sure that no jar is defective. for use in the storing of products which are already sterilized, such as jellies, jams, and preserves, and the bottling of fruit juices, housewives may practice effective thrift by saving all jars in which they receive dried beef, bacon, peanut butter, and other products and bottles that have contained olives, catsup, and kindred goods. blanching is important with most vegetables and many fruits. it consists of plunging them into boiling water for a short time. spinach and other greens should be blanched in steam. to do this, place them in an ordinary steamer or suspend them in a tightly closed vessel above an inch or two of boiling water. blanching should be followed by the cold dip, plunging into cold water after removal from the hot water. cold dipping hardens the pulp and preserves the original color, enhancing the appearance. blanching cleanses the articles and removes excess acids and strong flavors and odors. it also causes shrinkage, so that a larger quantity may be packed in a container. after blanching and cold dipping, surface moisture should be removed by placing the vegetables or fruits between two towels or by exposure to the sun. all this is so simple and the directions so easily followed that the average -year-old may successfully can vegetables or fruits. the steps and the precautions are: . select sound vegetables and fruits. (if possible can them the same day they are picked.) wash, clean, and prepare them. . have ready, on the stove, a can or pail of boiling water. . place the vegetables or fruits in cheesecloth, or in some other porous receptacle--a wire basket is excellent--for dipping and blanching them in the boiling water. . put them whole into the boiling water. the commission gives a time-table for blanching. after the water begins to boil, begin to count the blanching time; this varies from one to twenty minutes, according to the vegetable or fruit. . when the blanching is complete, remove the vegetables or fruits from the boiling water and plunge them a number of times into cold water, to harden the pulp and check the flow of coloring matter. do not leave them in cold water. . the containers must be thoroughly clean. it is not necessary to sterilize them in steam or boiling water before filling them, as in the cold-pack process both the insides of containers and the contents are sterilized. the jars should be heated before being filled, in order to avoid breakage. . pack the product into the containers, leaving about a quarter of an inch of space at the top. . with vegetables add one level teaspoonful of salt to each quart container and fill with boiling water. with fruits use syrups. . with glass jars always use a good rubber. test the rubber by stretching or turning inside out. fit on the rubber and put the lid in place. if the container has a screw top do not screw up as hard as possible, but use only the thumb and little finger in tightening it. this makes it possible for the steam to escape and prevents breakage. if a glass top jar is used, snap the top bail only, leaving the lower bail loose during sterilization. tin cans should be completely sealed. . place the filled and capped containers on the rack in the sterilizer. if the homemade or commercial hot-water bath outfit is used, enough water should be in the boiler to come at least one inch above the tops of the containers, and the water, in boiling out, should never be allowed to drop to the level of these tops. begin to count processing time when the water begins to boil. at the end of the sterilizing period remove the containers from the sterilizer. fasten covers on tightly at once, turn the containers upside down to test for leakage, leave in this position until cold, and then store in a cool, dry place. be sure that no draft is allowed to blow on glass jars, as it may cause breakage. . if jars are to be stored where there is strong light, wrap them in paper, preferably brown, as light will fade the color of products canned in glass jars, and sometimes deteriorate the food value. that's the whole trick. chapter xxvii retail cooperation cooperation in buying supplies at wholesale, in standardizing and shipping crops, in keeping grain in elevators, and fruit and some meats and poultry in cold storage has reached a high development among the farmers largely in the northwest, much ahead of us "city folks." there are more than five thousand active farmers' cooperation associations in the united states. minnesota alone has over six hundred cooperative creameries, some of which have a laundry annex. the associations have six hundred and sixty thousand members and do a business of nearly a thousand dollars a year for each member. these are the people that we call "hayseeds"; if we could plant some more such "seeds," it would be a good job. but in cooperative retail domestic supply we are far behind england and other countries, even behind russia. that is partly because our better retail business methods leave less room for the savings. a simple and easy but important beginning of cooperation was where each one took turns in delivering the milk and fetching supplies. one farmer might do it all every day for a small charge. the new south is developing a great business in this line. when you go to new orleans look up the stores whose letter head reads: nelson co-operative association, inc. _food suppliers_ office, so. peters street. creamery, erato st. warehouse, so. peters st. bakery, elysian fields ave. retail stores meat markets in august, , n. o. nelson of the above concern writes in answer to my request: "it does not take words to tell all i know about cooperation. i trust the inclosed may be serviceable for your book, and shall feel proud if it is. "i am doing my job here for two very practical reasons; first, the immediate service of reducing the cost of living to say , families, mostly poor; second, to introduce economy in retailing. "the readers of such a book as yours are well aware of the wasteful ways of retailing goods. in every town and city there is a multiplication of stores, advertising clerks, teams, and other incidentals. "likewise there is a lot of middle men and drummers, the buyers at the producer's end, the wholesalers or middle men at the consumer's end, with speculator and landowner at both ends. all of these have to be supported by the system, and the dear consumer pays for it. "the cooperative store system, which was started in england years ago, eliminates most of these waste expenses. the system has kept spreading at an astonishing rate; in great britain there are now / million members, and more than a billion of sales a year. other european countries are full of these stores. many of the retail stores have from twelve thousand to fifty thousand members; their sales run into the millions. they are federated in a wholesale agency which buys for them and manufactures on an extensive scale. "by the economies thus introduced they are able to save regularly about %, besides paying interest on the capital employed, and accumulating a liberal surplus. it is simply a question of people getting together (all civilization is), contributing their own money and their trade, and thus avoiding all the waste expenses. "it is a very democratic plan; anybody is welcome to join it; every member has one vote and no more, they elect their directors, the directors elect the managers, and the managers employ the clerks. they sell at the market prices and every three or six months take account of stock and rebate the profits in proportion to each member's purchases, with half rate to non-members. "it appeals to the economical sense of the ordinary housekeeper, and to the ethical sense of those who want no advantage of their neighbor. it prevents some from getting unduly rich and it helps to keep many from being unduly poor. "the same principle has spread into farmer's work, especially creameries. in cooperative creameries and stores russia has grown faster in the last years than any other country, having at last reports over thirteen million members. this orderly getting together for common social needs has much to do with the orderliness of the russian revolution. "the united states has made large progress in producers' cooperative associations, but not much in stores. "i have in new orleans a system of stores on a modified system; it is a cooperative association but we sell at as low prices as can be afforded, for cash in hand. the sales amount to about / millions, the most of it in the winter. the association owns a bakery, a creamery, condiment factory; and coffee factory, and a -acre plantation. we are able to undersell the market about %. "people anywhere can make a cooperative store if they take it seriously. there should be about members and $ in cash to start with: then get an honest and intelligent manager; start with a grocery, buy and sell for cash, either on the rochdale plan of selling at full market prices and dividing the profits periodically, or on my plan of selling as cheaply as can be afforded. in either plan it works out into producing a large part of the goods sold, thus eliminating entirely the superfluous middleman. "three acres and liberty is the correct way of producing a living; with the adjunct of a cooperative store to do the selling of the surplus produced and the buying of goods needed, the small farmer is free from all the waste and trammels of trade." now what's the matter with your helping your county and country and humanity by organizing those two hundred waiting buyers in your own town? you can be the "honest and intelligent manager" at a decent salary. if, later, the cooperators want another manager, why you can easily organize another store. the best information on this subject is the cooperative news, manchester, england; subscription two dollars. evidence is daily accumulating that the food and farm problem is not so easy as many thought it to be a few months ago. this is made clear when economists say: "the really important question in the food problem is not distribution, it is production." it is unfortunate that this statement should gain belief at this time, when those who prey upon the producer are watching for any support from whatever direction. passing by the obvious fact that production must precede distribution, notice that, with all the energy that has been devoted to production of farm products by the government experts, it is clear that not only is there a shortage, but that it has required all kinds of inducements, from the president down, to get the farmers to increase their output, the most potent of all being the cry of patriotism. some explain this by showing how land monopoly prevents men going back to the farms. while this is perfectly true, it does not answer the question why farmers now in possession of farms are not working them near their capacity. the answer of the ordinary man to this is inefficiency on the part of the farmer, and up to the present this idea has passed as sufficient to account for the situation. the publicity given the whole farm question during the past six months, however, has to a large extent dispelled the inefficiency answer, as the farmer has responded so completely to the call, and the amateurs are beginning to realize that there is something in farming besides tickling the earth with a feather. all the facts so far brought out show the farmer abundantly able to produce all the foodstuffs needed, provided he has a reasonable certainty that he will be able to dispose of his produce at a price that will give him a fair return for his labor. this being the case, it is easy to see that putting more men back on farms would not remedy the condition we are now in; but would rather increase the difficulty. the fact is, the two blades of grass theory has been exploded, the increased production cry has been tried out, carried to its logical conclusion, and found wanting, and the inefficiency explanation has been proved a falsehood on its face. it is, therefore, obvious that with a proper system of distribution, the entire question of production will take care of itself; but just so long as the producers find it unprofitable to produce food, just so long will they have to figure carefully not to grow too much, or it would be better for them had they grown nothing at all. the reason why we have such divergent ideas on this subject is that so many people write about it who have had no experience in farming, while on the other hand there are few farmers who can state the case so the public can grasp the most obvious facts. finally, it is a question of the government doing what it ought not to have done and leaving undone those things it ought to have done. it has granted to a few monopolies transportation and terminal facilities which enable them to hold up deliveries and thus control prices. the remedy lies in seeing that the government attend to its own business, which is securing equality of opportunity for all, and special privileges to none. it follows that cooperation should not stop either at production or at distribution. it must embrace the source of both, nor even stop at governmental plans of small holdings. as a business enterprise, combining philanthropy and percentage, capital has an opportunity. accordingly an option should be secured upon a large piece of land not over forty miles from a large city, near a railroad station. the transportation at first is not important, as the new commuters will make a demand for it, and cheap autos will largely fill the gap; it will improve rapidly. if possible it should have a lake or a fair stream on it for irrigation and small water power; the soil should be examined by experts, to see that it is suitable for trucking and market gardening. the object should be to make a sort of vacant lot gardening plan on a grand scale. heretofore the trouble has been that we have been unable to get land where there was any assurance that we could have it again the second year, and that the limited amount of land makes it impossible to give the men as much as they ought to have. they do not need much land, because a man working at intensive culture with only the rough plowing done for him cannot take good care of much more than one acre of land. he will probably make as much money out of one acre of land as he will out of two. those who are willing to work should be given one acre of land, with the assurance that they can have it as long as they work it faithfully and comply with the simple rules which we have found so effective in the vacant lot gardening work,--which are practically, that a man should attend to business and not annoy his neighbors. no contract or lease should be given the men, or indeed the women, for both work such gardens, as they have been doing for the past twenty years in several large cities, making at least a living upon the land and often a very large return. there must be a competent superintendent, for everything depends upon him, who would show the men what land they should use, what they should put in, instruct them how to do it, and market their products cooperatively. experience in philadelphia, and in some score of other cities where they have established vacant lot gardens, shows that about ten per cent annually of the people prefer to work for others, and consequently take places in the country after they have learned to do market gardening. some others, being dissatisfied with so little land, and wanting to own their own place, go off and buy land or lease it for themselves. this makes a constant drain from the gardens, leaving openings for others who will learn in time their trade; it is possible to make in this way a steady drain out of the cities to the country, and what is better still, an automatic drain. the land must be so near to a center of population that it may be possible to take a gang of men down there in the morning, show them what it is, and send back those who do not seem likely to make good, or who are dissatisfied; and that when men get their gardens successfully running, they may be able to bring their friends there to see what they have done, and say to them, "go thou and do likewise." i have been at trudeau, saranac lake, and at stony wold, the consumptive sanitariums, and found there both by observation and by testimony that to send back the convalescents to the bench or the workshop from which they came is practically to repronounce upon them the sentence of death from which the sanitarium has offered them a reprieve. the only practical thing to do with such convalescents, and with such persons who are not capable of their ordinary avocations, is to get them in some way upon the land. there is a large demand for persons who understand the new intensive gardening, and places can be found for more than we can hope to educate in that line. there should be buildings upon the land sufficient to bunk one hundred to one hundred and fifty men; accommodations could be made with the small timber for a considerable number. many of these men would need some help, but most of them would shift for themselves if only they could get the opportunity to build upon the land and to have a secure tenure of it. a mere tenant knows that it is bunkum when he says "our country." it is perfectly practicable to sell about one half of the land in a year or two, and have a thousand acres or more left free and clear, which will cost the promoters nothing. renting this out or selling it will repay the whole cost, and probably bring a large profit besides. this is no experiment, it is only to do the thing that we have been doing under various conditions with various sorts of men in different localities for the past twenty years in the vacant lot gardens: namely, to give men the opportunity of living upon and cultivating land, putting up their own tents, shacks, or bungalows, and giving them such instruction and such help as does not cost anything more than the salary of the superintendent. there are abundant men who can make good and shift for themselves under those circumstances; the men who are available are single men, such men as those for whom mr. hallimond, a clergyman working in the bowery, has been finding rural employment in the past ten years. also many families will come to us through the vacant lot gardens and the little land agitation. people such as these will increase the land value, for every decent man carries around with him at least five hundred dollars' worth of increase in land values which his presence adds to somebody's holdings of land. the struggle to pocket this increase accounts for much of the human drift from the field to the factory. god made the country; man made the city--and the devil made the suburbs, by the aid of the speculator. alpha of the plough says in the london _star:_ "i was walking with a friend along the spaniards-road the other evening talking on the inexhaustible theme of these days, when he asked, 'what is the biggest thing that has happened to this country as the outcome of the war?' "'it is within two or three hundred yards from here,' i replied. 'come this way and i'll show it to you.' "he seemed a little surprised, but accompanied me cheerfully enough as i turned from the road and plunged through the gorse and the trees towards parliament fields, until we came upon a large expanse of allotments, carved out of the great playground, and alive with figures, men, women, and children, some earthing up potatoes, some weeding onion beds, some thinning out carrots, some merely walking along the patches, and looking at the fruits of their labor springing from the soil. 'there,' i said, 'is the most important result of the war.' "he laughed, but not contemptuously. he knew what i meant, and i think he more than half agreed. "and i think you will agree, too, if you will think what that stretch of allotments means. it is the symptom of the most important revival, the greatest spiritual awakening this country has seen for generations. wherever you go, that symptom meets you. here in hampstead allotments are as plentiful as blackberries in autumn. a friend of mine who lives in beckenham tells me there are fifteen hundred in his parish. in the neighborhood of london there must be many thousands. in the country as a whole there must be hundreds of thousands. if dear old joseph fels could revisit the glimpses of the moon and see what is happening, see the vacant lots and waste spaces bursting into onion beds and potato patches, what joy would be his! he was the forerunner of the revival, the passionate pilgrim of the vacant lot: but his hot gospel fell on deaf ears, and he died just before the trumpet of war awakened the sleeper. "do not suppose that the greatness of this thing that is happening can be measured in terms of food. that is important, no doubt, but it is not the most important thing. i am confident that it will add more than anything else to the spiritual resources of the nation. it is the beginning of a war on the disease that is blighting our people. what is wrong with us? what is the root of our social and spiritual ailment? is it not the divorce of the people from the soil? for generations the wholesome red blood of the country has been sucked into the great towns, and we have built up a vast machine of industry that has made slaves of us, shut out the light of the fields from our lives, left our children to grow like weeds in the slums, rootless and waterless, poisoned the healthy instincts of nature implanted in us, and put in their place the rank growths of the streets. can you walk through a working-class district or a lancashire cotton town, with their huddle of airless streets, without a feeling of despair coming over you at the sense of this enormous perversion of life into the arid channels of death? can you take pride in an empire on which the sun never sets when you think of the courts in which, as will crooks says, the sun never rises? "and now the sun is going to rise. we have started a revolution that will not end until the breath of the earth has come back to the soul of the people. the tyranny of the machine is going to be broken. the tyranny of the land monopoly is going to be lifted. yes, you say, but these people that i see working on the allotments are not the people from the courts and the slums; but professional men, the superior artisan, and so on. that is true. but the movement must get hold of the _intelligenzia_ first. the important thing is that the breach in the prison is made; the fresh air is filtering in; the idea is born--not still-born, mind you, but born a living thing. it is a way of salvation that will not be lost, and that all will travel. "we have found the land, and we are going back to possess it. take a man out of the street and put him in a garden, and you have made a new creature of him. i have seen the miracle again and again. i know a bus conductor, for example, outwardly the most ordinary of his kind. but one night i mentioned allotments, touched the key of his soul, and discovered that this man was going about his daily work irradiated by the thought of his garden triumphs. he had got a new purpose in life. he had got the spirit of the earth in his bones. it is not only the humanizing influence of the garden, it is its democratizing influence too. "when adam delved and eve span where was then the gentleman?' you can get on terms with the lowliest if you will discuss gardens." chapter xxviii summer colonies for city people (condensed from the annual report of the u. s. department of the interior of the commissioner of education. vol. , now out of print.) berlin has not been boastful of a new sociological feature which it has developed within the last fifteen years, a feature so revolutionary in its bearing upon education and upon the general health of future generations, that it should be made known to the world. as yet little has been said about this new agency. it may be because it is not a governmental institution, but the result of self-help and of the recognition of a plain necessity. it may be assumed that if the summer colonies had been instituted by the government for the great majority who are poor it would not have succeeded so well as it has. the teachers, seeing that the horizon of their pupils was limited by brick and mortar (for open park spaces are rare in berlin), came to the conclusion that only by giving their pupils opportunity to live in the open air could they lay a sound foundation of knowledge of natural objects and processes as a basis for school studies. the teachers of themselves, however, could apply only palliative remedies, such as having sent to them, from the botanical gardens, thousands of specimens of plants, twigs, flowers, fruit, etc., for nature study in the schoolroom; planting flower beds around the schoolhouses; also, brief excursions into parks, and hanging up before the class colored pictures of landscapes and rural scenery. while in many cases, especially in large cities, the necessity was recognized of getting the children out of the great desert of brick and mortar into the open air and into companionship with life in the field, the garden, the brooks, and the woods, it had nowhere resulted in a systematic effort to aid the children of an entire city in that way until it was tried in berlin. of course it is well understood, not only abroad, but in new york and in other large cities of this country, that something must be done to alleviate the want of space and fresh air, and so recreation piers and roof gardens are provided, excursions of schools into parks are undertaken, open-air playgrounds are instituted, and similar efforts are made tending to mitigate the evil effects of city life; but all these efforts are merely sporadic or temporary; they do not attack the evil at the roots; moreover they are only drops in the bucket when compared with that which is necessary. this tendency to cooperative and collective action has resulted in this particular case in thousands of the children's _"arbor gardens"_ round about the city. it is an experience "en gros," one of such dimensions that cavil ceases and admiration rises supreme. the german poor are very poor indeed, but parents were induced to rent, at a price of marks ($ ) or about cents a month from may to october for the summer season, a patch of land in the suburbs of berlin unfit for farmland because cut up by railroad tracks and newly laid-out streets. on one of these patches a family might erect an arbor, or a small structure of boards with a wide veranda and a corrugated iron roof, for housing themselves and children during the summer months. the dwellings are of the most primitive kind and rather flimsy; no permanent structure can be allowed, for at any time the owner of the land may give notice to vacate for the purpose of erecting a row of houses, railroad buildings, or other permanent structures. the tenants themselves build fences of wire or plant hedges to keep the different plots apart. on these patches the children, under the guidance of teachers, parents, and appointed guardians, began to sow flower seeds, plant shrubs, vines, and trees, or raise kitchen vegetables, each group or family according to its own desires and needs. since the "arbors" are small they do not decrease the arable land of the allotments much, and there is still room left for swings, gymnastic apparatus, and similar contrivances, as well as bare sandy spots for little tots to play in. the various allotments are mostly uniform in size and are reached by narrow three- or four-foot lanes, on which occasionally are seen probationary officers or guardians who keep the peace and settle cases of disturbance. the "arbor gardens" are established on every square rod of unused land round about the city, on vacant lots, far out to the borders of the well-trained woods and royal forests. small tradesmen, laboring men, civil officials of low degrees, etc., have found it profitable to forsake their tenements in the city and move kith and kin into those "arbor colonies." the tenements in berlin are as bad as in our own big cities, only better policed. not all of these arbor gardens are occupied by families during the night. thousands return to their city homes evenings. some parents, unable to free themselves from toil in town, send their children under guidance of servants, and spend only occasional sundays and holidays with them. the people, especially the children, getting some information concerning the treatment of the crops from competent advisers in school and out in the arbor colonies, derive great good from their horticultural and floricultural work. families who are aesthetically inclined devote their space to flowers and trailing vines exclusively; others, utilitarians from necessity, plant potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets, beans, strawberries, and the like. the feeling of ownership being strongly developed in the children in seeing the results of their own labor, the crops are respected by the neighbors and pilfering rarely occurs, except perhaps in a case of great hunger. several hundred or a thousand of such patches of land, or gardens, situated in close proximity to each other, form an arbor colony, which has a governor, or mayor, who is an unpaid city official. he arranges the leasing of the land, collects the rents, and hands them over to the gratified landowners who don't even have to collect them. there is always a retired merchant or civil officer to fill the office, to which is attached neither title, emolument, nor special honor. he is assisted by a "colonial committee" of trustees selected from the colonists, who act as justices of the peace, in case disturbances should arise. if colonists prove frequent disturbers of the peace or are found incapable of living quietly, their leases are not renewed. of course there are such cases, but they are rare. since the size of an "arbor garden" is from about two sixteenths to three sixteenths of an acre, say two or three new york city lots, those forming a colony make a considerable community, in which the authority of the committee, or board of trustees, is absolute, and the few cases they have had to adjudicate have generally been caused by nagging women. it is claimed in the press that these colonists are literally without scandals, and that the life led by young and old is a most peaceful and happy one. people who are hard at work are not likely to be quarrelsome: good wholesome food, much exercise in play and labor, and an abundance of fresh air and sunshine are conducive to happiness, especially as the clothing may be of a primitive kind, or need not conform to the dictates of fashion. a teacher remarked: "it is noticeable that since these school children are engaged in lucrative work which does not go beyond their strength, and since they see with their own eyes the results of their labor, a sense of responsibility is engendered which has a beneficial influence upon school work also. respect for all kinds of labor and a decrease in the destructiveness so often found among boys are unmistakable effects of the arbor gardens. it is not easy work which the children perform, for spade and rake require muscular effort; but it is ennobling work, for it leads to self-respect, self-dependence, and respect for others, as well as willingness to aid others. the most beautiful sight is afforded when, on a certain date agreed on by the members of a colony, a harvest festival is held. then flag raisings and illuminations and singing and music make the day a memorable one." most of the families had not the means to buy the lumber and hardware to erect an "arbor," and yet they were the very ones to whom the life in the open would be of the greatest benefit. hence philanthropy erected the structures. the patriotic woman's league of the red cross built half of all the "arbors" of the colony found on the "jungfernheide." many colonies reach into the woods, and naturally are of a different character from those in the open, for there tents are used instead of wooden structures. for protection during the night watchmen pace up and down the lanes; this before the war entailed a cost of / cents a month to each family. the season lasts from may to october . the school-going population meanwhile attend their schools, which used to be reached by means of the elevated cars or surface tramways for / cents and much cheaper if they have commuters' tickets. many schools are near enough to be reached on foot. the children do not loiter on the way, but when school is out they hurry "home" to begin work in the garden, or to sit down to a meal on the veranda, which is relished far more than a meal in a city tenement house filled with fetid air and wanting in light. nearly every one of these gardens has a flagpole, and at night a japanese paper lantern with a tallow dip in it illuminates the veranda. these, with flags by day, make a festive appearance. the teachers find that city children who spend the five months in the open air are well equipped with elementary ideas in physical geography and astronomy. their mental equipment is better, indeed, in all fields of thought, their physical health is improved, as well as their ethical motives and conduct. to realize the full extent of these wholesale efforts (for put children into close contact with nature and they will improve in all directions), it is well to take a ride on the north belt line (elevated steam railroad), the trains of which start from the friedrich's street depot and bring one back after a ride of an hour and a half. then one may do the same on the south belt line. on these two trips one will see, not hundreds, but tens of thousands of such "arbor gardens" full of happy women and children at work or play. the men come out on the belt line when their work in town is done. the writer was riding through the city on an open cab, and seeing hardly any children on the streets and in the parks, he asked, "how is it that we see no children out?" "ah, sir," was the reply, "if you will see the children of berlin you must go out to the arbor colonies outside of the city. there is where our children are." subsequent visits to these colony gardens showed that berlin is by no means a childless city. to judge from the multitudinous arbors to be seen from the windows of the belt line cars there must be , to , of them. as far as the eye reaches the flagpoles, the orderly fences, and the little structures can be seen; and since the city has , , inhabitants, it is very likely that an estimate made by a city official of several hundred thousands of children thus living in the open air, is not excessive. the most beautiful and best-arranged gardens are not found in the vicinity of railroads, but several miles out toward the north and the south of the city. here, where the soil is better, fine crops are raised. if we turn our eyes homeward and contemplate the many thousands of small efforts made in this country toward the alleviation of city children's misery, we can say truthfully that we in america are perhaps fully alive to the necessity which has prompted the people of berlin to action; we only need to be reminded of mayor pingree's potato patches on empty city lots, our children's outing camps, our occasional children's excursions, and the like. still, there is nothing in this country to compare with the thousands of berlin "arbor gardens" and their singularly convincing force. like a circus, all this is supposed to be for the children, though it usually seems to need about two grown people to escort each child. the elders enjoy the gardens even more than the circus. the arbor gardens of berlin should not be mistaken for the numerous "forest schools" (waldschulen) in germany. these schools "in the woods" are for sickly children, both physically crippled and mentally weak. the pupils have their lessons in the open, and the teachers live, play, and work with them; long recesses separate the various lessons and a two-hour nap in the middle of the day out in the open is on the time-table of every one of these schools. these special open-air schools for weaklings and defectives are now found in many parts of germany, notably in charlottenburg, strassburg, and the industrial regions of the rhineland. the example of berlin has been followed in other german cities, such as munich, notably in dusseldorf on the rhine, where the arbor gardens are called "schreber gardens" in honor of the man who promoted their establishment. there is a large colony of such gardens along the hans-sachs street, where lima beans, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, potatoes, and many other garden vegetables are raised; even strawberries, raspberries, and fruit trees are found here. but the city being more lavishly provided with parks and open spaces than others of its size, the necessity for open-air life has not made itself felt as forcibly as in berlin. and think of the cleansing influence of all this. light and air and labor--these are the medicines not of the body only, but of the soul. it is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets and seasons and of all the intangible things to which we can give no name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the compass of our speech. the god that dwells in gardens is sufficient for all our needs--let the theologians say what they will. "'not god! in gardens? when the eve is cool? nay, but i have a sign-- 'tis very sure--god walks in mine.'" this ebook was created by steve solomon (www.soilandhealth.org) and charles aldarondo (pg@aldarondo.net). farmers of forty centuries or permanent agriculture in china, korea and japan by f. h. king, d. sc. preface by dr. l. h. bailey. we have not yet gathered up the experience of mankind in the tilling of the earth; yet the tilling of the earth is the bottom condition of civilization. if we are to assemble all the forces and agencies that make for the final conquest of the planet, we must assuredly know how it is that all the peoples in all the places have met the problem of producing their sustenance out of the soil. we have had few great agricultural travelers and few books that describe the real and significant rural conditions. of natural history travel we have had very much; and of accounts of sights and events perhaps we have had too many. there are, to be sure, famous books of study and travel in rural regions, and some of them, as arthur young's "travels in france," have touched social and political history; but for the most part, authorship of agricultural travel is yet undeveloped. the spirit of scientific inquiry must now be taken into this field, and all earth-conquest must be compared and the results be given to the people that work. this was the point of view in which i read professor king's manuscript. it is the writing of a well-trained observer who went forth not to find diversion or to depict scenery and common wonders, but to study the actual conditions of life of agricultural peoples. we in north america are wont to think that we may instruct all the world in agriculture, because our agricultural wealth is great and our exports to less favored peoples have been heavy; but this wealth is great because our soil is fertile and new, and in large acreage for every person. we have really only begun to farm well. the first condition of farming is to maintain fertility. this condition the oriental peoples have met, and they have solved it in their way. we may never adopt particular methods, but we can profit vastly by their experience. with the increase of personal wants in recent time. the newer countries may never reach such density of population as have japan and china; but we must nevertheless learn the first lesson in the conservation of natural resources, which are the resources of the land. this is the message that professor king brought home from the east. this book on agriculture should have good effect in establishing understanding between the west and the east. if there could be such an interchange of courtesies and inquiries on these themes as is suggested by professor king, as well as the interchange of athletics and diplomacy and commerce, the common productive people on both sides should gain much that they could use; and the results in amity should be incalculable. it is a misfortune that professor king could not have lived to write the concluding "message of china and japan to the world." it would have been a careful and forceful summary of his study of eastern conditions. at the moment when the work was going to the printer, he was called suddenly to the endless journey and his travel here was left incomplete. but he bequeathed us a new piece of literature, to add to his standard writings on soils and on the applications of physics and devices to agriculture. whatever he touched he illuminated. contents preface introduction first glimpses of japan grave lands of china to hongkong and canton up the si-kiang, west river extent of canalization and surface fitting of fields some customs of the common people the fuel problem, building and textile materials tramps afield the utilization of waste in the shantung province orientals crowd both time and space rice culture in the orient silk culture the tea industry about tientsin manchuria and korea return to japan introduction a word of introduction is needed to place the reader at the best view point from which to consider what is said in the following pages regarding the agricultural practices and customs of china, korea and japan. it should be borne in mind that the great factors which today characterize, dominate and determine the agricultural and other industrial operations of western nations were physical impossibilities to them one hundred years ago, and until then had been so to all people. it should be observed, too, that the united states as yet is a nation of but few people widely scattered over a broad virgin land with more than twenty acres to the support of every man, woman and child, while the people whose practices are to be considered are toiling in fields tilled more than three thousand years and who have scarcely more than two acres per capita,* more than one-half of which is uncultivable mountain land. *[footnote: this figure was wrongly stated in the first edition as one acre, owing to a mistake in confusing the area of cultivated land with total area.] again, the great movement of cargoes of feeding stuffs and mineral fertilizers to western europe and to the eastern united states began less than a century ago and has never been possible as a means of maintaining soil fertility in china, korea or japan, nor can it be continued indefinitely in either europe or america. these importations are for the time making tolerable the waste of plant food materials through our modern systems of sewage disposal and other faulty practices; but the mongolian races have held all such wastes, both urban and rural, and many others which we ignore, sacred to agriculture, applying them to their fields. we are to consider some of the practices of a virile race of some five hundred millions of people who have an unimpaired inheritance moving with the momentum acquired through four thousand years; a people morally and intellectually strong, mechanically capable, who are awakening to a utilization of all the possibilities which science and invention during recent years have brought to western nations; and a people who have long dearly loved peace but who can and will fight in self defense if compelled to do so. we had long desired to stand face to face with chinese and japanese farmers; to walk through their fields and to learn by seeing some of their methods, appliances and practices which centuries of stress and experience have led these oldest farmers in the world to adopt. we desired to learn how it is possible, after twenty and perhaps thirty or even forty centuries, for their soils to be made to produce sufficiently for the maintenance of such dense populations as are living now in these three countries. we have now had this opportunity and almost every day we were instructed, surprised and amazed at the conditions and practices which confronted us whichever way we turned; instructed in the ways and extent to which these nations for centuries have been and are conserving and utilizing their natural resources, surprised at the magnitude of the returns they are getting from their fields, and amazed at the amount of efficient human labor cheerfully given for a daily wage of five cents and their food, or for fifteen cents, united states currency, without food. the three main islands of japan in had a population of , , maintained on , square miles of cultivated field. this is at the rate of more than three people to each acre, and of , to each square mile; and yet the total agricultural imports into japan in exceeded the agricultural exports by less than one dollar per capita. if the cultivated land of holland is estimated at but one-third of her total area, the density of her population in was, on this basis, less than one-third that of japan in her three main islands. at the same time japan is feeding horses and cattle, nearly all laboring animals, to each square mile of cultivated field, while we were feeding in but horses and mules per same area, these being our laboring animals. as coarse food transformers japan was maintaining , , domestic fowl, per square mile, but only one for almost three of her people. we were maintaining, in , , , poultry, but only per square mile of cultivated field and yet more than three for each person. japan's coarse food transformers in the form of swine, goats and sheep aggregated but to the square mile and provided but one of these units for each of her people while in the united states in there were being maintained, as transformers of grass and coarse grain into meat and milk, cattle, sheep and swine per each square mile of improved farms. in this reckoning each of the cattle should be counted as the equivalent of perhaps five of the sheep and swine, for the transforming power of the dairy cow is high. on this basis we are maintaining at the rate of more than of the japanese units per square mile, and more than five of these to every man, woman and child, instead of one to every of the population, as is the case in japan. correspondingly accurate statistics are not accessible for china but in the shantung province we talked with a farmer having in his family and who kept one donkey, one cow, both exclusively laboring animals, and two pigs on . acres of cultivated land where he grew wheat, millet, sweet potatoes and beans. here is a density of population equal to , people, donkeys, cattle and swine per square mile. in another instance where the holding was one and two-thirds acres the farmer had in his family and was maintaining one donkey and one pig, giving to this farm land a maintenance capacity of , people, donkeys and pigs to the square mile, or people, donkeys and pigs to one of our forty-acre farms which our farmers regard too small for a single family. the average of seven chinese holdings which we visited and where we obtained similar data indicates a maintenance capacity for those lands of , people, cattle or donkeys and swine,-- , consumers and rough food transformers per square mile of farm land. these statements for china represent strictly rural populations. the rural population of the united states in was placed at the rate of per square mile of improved farm land and there were horses and mules. in japan the rural population had a density in of , per square mile, and of horses and cattle together . the population of the large island of chungming in the mouth of the yangtse river, having an area of square miles, possessed, according to the official census of , a density of , per square mile and yet there was but one large city on the island, hence the population is largely rural. it could not be other than a matter of the highest industrial, educational and social importance to all nations if there might be brought to them a full and accurate account of all those conditions which have made it possible for such dense populations to be maintained so largely upon the products of chinese, korean and japanese soils. many of the steps, phases and practices through which this evolution has passed are irrevocably buried in the past but such remarkable maintenance efficiency attained centuries ago and projected into the present with little apparent decadence merits the most profound study and the time is fully ripe when it should be made. living as we are in the morning of a century of transition from isolated to cosmopolitan national life when profound readjustments, industrial, educational and social, must result, such an investigation cannot be made too soon. it is high time for each nation to study the others and by mutual agreement and co-operative effort, the results of such studies should become available to all concerned, made so in the spirit that each should become coordinate and mutually helpful component factors in the world's progress. one very appropriate and immensely helpful means for attacking this problem, and which should prove mutually helpful to citizen and state, would be for the higher educational institutions of all nations, instead of exchanging courtesies through their baseball teams, to send select bodies of their best students under competent leadership and by international agreement, both east and west, organizing therefrom investigating bodies each containing components of the eastern and western civilization and whose purpose it should be to study specifically set problems. such a movement well conceived and directed, manned by the most capable young men, should create an international acquaintance and spread broadcast a body of important knowledge which would develop as the young men mature and contribute immensely toward world peace and world progress. if some broad plan of international effort such as is here suggested were organized the expense of maintenance might well be met by diverting so much as is needful from the large sums set aside for the expansion of navies for such steps as these, taken in the interests of world uplift and world peace, could not fail to be more efficacious and less expensive than increase in fighting equipment. it would cultivate the spirit of pulling together and of a square deal rather than one of holding aloof and of striving to gain unneighborly advantage. many factors and conditions conspire to give to the farms and farmers of the far east their high maintenance efficiency and some of these may be succinctly stated. the portions of china, korea and japan where dense populations have developed and are being maintained occupy exceptionally favorable geographic positions so far as these influence agricultural production. canton in the south of china has the latitude of havana, cuba, while mukden in manchuria, and northern honshu in japan are only as far north as new york city, chicago and northern california. the united states lies mainly between degrees and degrees of latitude while these three countries lie between degrees and degrees, some seven hundred miles further south. this difference of position, giving them longer seasons, has made it possible for them to devise systems of agriculture whereby they grow two, three and even four crops on the same piece of ground each year. in southern china, in formosa and in parts of japan two crops of rice are grown; in the chekiang province there may be a crop of rape, of wheat or barley or of windsor beans or clover which is followed in midsummer by another of cotton or of rice. in the shantung province wheat or barley in the winter and spring may be followed in summer by large or small millet, sweet potatoes, soy beans or peanuts. at tientsin, deg north, in the latitude of cincinnati, indianapolis, and springfield, illinois, we talked with a farmer who followed his crop of wheat on his small holding with one of onions and the onions with cabbage, realizing from the three crops at the rate of $ , gold, per acre; and with another who planted irish potatoes at the earliest opportunity in the spring, marketing them when small, and following these with radishes, the radishes with cabbage, realizing from the three crops at the rate of $ per acre. nearly , , people are being maintained, chiefly upon the products of an area smaller than the improved farm lands of the united states. complete a square on the lines drawn from chicago southward to the gulf and westward across kansas, and there will be enclosed an area greater than the cultivated fields of china, korea and japan and from which five times our present population are fed. the rainfall in these countries is not only larger than that even in our atlantic and gulf states, but it falls more exclusively during the summer season when its efficiency in crop production may be highest. south china has a rainfall of some inches with little of it during the winter, while in our southern states the rainfall is nearer inches with less than one-half of it between june and september. along a line drawn from lake superior through central texas the yearly precipitation is about inches but only inches of this falls during the months may to september; while in the shantung province, china, with an annual rainfall of little more than inches, of these fall during the months designated and most of this in july and august. when it is stated that under the best tillage and with no loss of water through percolation, most of our agricultural crops require to tons of water for each ton of dry substance brought to maturity, it can be readily understood that the right amount of available moisture, coming at the proper time, must be one of the prime factors of a high maintenance capacity for any soil, and hence that in the far east, with their intensive methods, it is possible to make their soils yield large returns. the selection of rice and of the millets as the great staple food crops of these three nations, and the systems of agriculture they have evolved to realize the most from them, are to us remarkable and indicate a grasp of essentials and principles which may well cause western nations to pause and reflect. notwithstanding the large and favorable rainfall of these countries, each of the nations have selected the one crop which permits them to utilize not only practically the entire amount of rain which falls upon their fields, but in addition enormous volumes of the run-off from adjacent uncultivable mountain country. wherever paddy fields are practicable there rice is grown. in the three main islands of japan per cent of the cultivated fields, , square miles, is laid out for rice growing and is maintained under water from transplanting to near harvest time, after which the land is allowed to dry, to be devoted to dry land crops during the balance of the year, where the season permits. to anyone who studies the agricultural methods of the far east in the field it is evident that these people, centuries ago, came to appreciate the value of water in crop production as no other nations have. they have adapted conditions to crops and crops to conditions until with rice they have a cereal which permits the most intense fertilization and at the same time the ensuring of maximum yields against both drought and flood. with the practice of western nations in all humid climates, no matter how completely and highly we fertilize, in more years than not yields are reduced by a deficiency or an excess of water. it is difficult to convey, by word or map, an adequate conception of the magnitude of the systems of canalization which contribute primarily to rice culture. a conservative estimate would place the miles of canals in china at fully , and there are probably more miles of canal in china, korea and japan than there are miles of railroad in the united states. china alone has as many acres in rice each year as the united states has in wheat and her annual product is more than double and probably threefold our annual wheat crop, and yet the whole of the rice area produces at least one and sometimes two other crops each year. the selection of the quick-maturing, drought-resisting millets as the great staple food crops to be grown wherever water is not available for irrigation, and the almost universal planting in hills or drills, permitting intertillage, thus adopting centuries ago the utilization of earth mulches in conserving soil moisture, has enabled these people to secure maximum returns in seasons of drought and where the rainfall is small. the millets thrive in the hot summer climates; they survive when the available soil moisture is reduced to a low limit, and they grow vigorously when the heavy rains come. thus we find in the far east, with more rainfall and a better distribution of it than occurs in the united states, and with warmer, longer seasons, that these people have with rare wisdom combined both irrigation and dry farming methods to an extent and with an intensity far beyond anything our people have ever dreamed, in order that they might maintain their dense populations. notwithstanding the fact that in each of these countries the soils are naturally more than ordinarily deep, inherently fertile and enduring, judicious and rational methods of fertilization are everywhere practiced; but not until recent years, and only in japan, have mineral commercial fertilizers been used. for centuries, however, all cultivated lands, including adjacent hill and mountain sides, the canals, streams and the sea have been made to contribute what they could toward the fertilization of cultivated fields and these contributions in the aggregate have been large. in china, in korea and in japan all but the inaccessible portions of their vast extent of mountain and hill lands have long been taxed to their full capacity for fuel, lumber and herbage for green manure and compost material; and the ash of practically all of the fuel and of all of the lumber used at home finds its way ultimately to the fields as fertilizer. in china enormous quantities of canal mud are applied to the fields, sometimes at the rate of even and more tons per acre. so, too, where there are no canals, both soil and subsoil are carried into the villages and there between the intervals when needed they are, at the expense of great labor, composted with organic refuse and often afterwards dried and pulverized before being carried back and used on the fields as home-made fertilizers. manure of all kinds, human and animal, is religiously saved and applied to the fields in a manner which secures an efficiency far above our own practices. statistics obtained through the bureau of agriculture, japan, place the amount of human waste in that country in at , , tons, or . tons per acre of her cultivated land. the international concession of the city of shanghai, in , sold to a chinese contractor the privilege of entering residences and public places early in the morning of each day in the year and removing the night soil, receiving therefor more than $ , , gold, for , tons of waste. all of this we not only throw away but expend much larger sums in doing so. japan's production of fertilizing material, regularly prepared and applied to the land annually, amounts to more than . tons per acre of cultivated field exclusive of the commercial fertilizers purchased. between shanhaikwan and mukden in manchuria we passed, on june th, thousands of tons of the dry highly nitrified compost soil recently carried into the fields and laid down in piles where it was waiting to be "fed to the crops." it was not until , and then after a prolonged war of more than thirty years, generaled by the best scientists of all europe, that it was finally conceded as demonstrated that leguminous plants acting as hosts for lower organisms living on their roots are largely responsible for the maintenance of soil nitrogen, drawing it directly from the air to which it is returned through the processes of decay. but centuries of practice had taught the far east farmers that the culture and use of these crops are essential to enduring fertility, and so in each of the three countries the growing of legumes in rotation with other crops very extensively for the express purpose of fertilizing the soil is one of their old, fixed practices. just before, or immediately after the rice crop is harvested, fields are often sowed to "clover" (astragalus sinicus) which is allowed to grow until near the next transplanting time when it is either turned under directly, or more often stacked along the canals and saturated while doing so with soft mud dipped from the bottom of the canal. after fermenting twenty or thirty days it is applied to the field. and so it is literally true that these old world farmers whom we regard as ignorant, perhaps because they do not ride sulky plows as we do, have long included legumes in their crop rotation, regarding them as indispensable. time is a function of every life process as it is of every physical, chemical and mental reaction. the husbandman is an industrial biologist and as such is compelled to shape his operations so as to conform with the time requirements of his crops. the oriental farmer is a time economizer beyond all others. he utilizes the first and last minute and all that are between. the foreigner accuses the chinaman of being always long on time, never in a fret, never in a hurry. this is quite true and made possible for the reason that they are a people who definitely set their faces toward the future and lead time by the forelock. they have long realized that much time is required to transform organic matter into forms available for plant food and although they are the heaviest users in the world, the largest portion of this organic matter is predigested with soil or subsoil before it is applied to their fields, and at an enormous cost of human time and labor, but it practically lengthens their growing season and enables them to adopt a system of multiple cropping which would not otherwise be possible. by planting in hills and rows with intertillage it is very common to see three crops growing upon the same field at one time, but in different stages of maturity, one nearly ready to harvest one just coming up, and the other at the stage when it is drawing most heavily upon the soil. by such practice, with heavy fertilization, and by supplemental irrigation when needful, the soil is made to do full duty throughout the growing season. then, notwithstanding the enormous acreage of rice planted each year in these countries, it is all set in hills and every spear is transplanted. doing this, they save in many ways except in the matter of human labor, which is the one thing they have in excess. by thoroughly preparing the seed bed, fertilizing highly and giving the most careful attention, they are able to grow on one acre, during to days, enough plants to occupy ten acres and in the mean time on the other nine acres crops are maturing, being harvested and the fields being fitted to receive the rice when it is ready for transplanting, and in effect this interval of time is added to their growing season. silk culture is a great and, in some ways, one of the most remarkable industries of the orient. remarkable for its magnitude; for having had its birthplace apparently in oldest china at least years b. c.; for having been laid on the domestication of a wild insect of the woods; and for having lived through more than years, expanding until a million-dollar cargo of the product has been laid down on our western coast and rushed by special fast express to the cast for the christmas trade. a low estimate of china's production of raw silk would be , , pounds annually, and this with the output of japan, korea and a small area of southern manchuria, would probably exceed , , pounds annually, representing a total value of perhaps $ , , , quite equaling in value the wheat crop of the united states, but produced on less than one-eighth the area of our wheat fields. the cultivation of tea in china and japan is another of the great industries of these nations, taking rank with that of sericulture if not above it in the important part it plays in the welfare of the people. there is little reason to doubt that this industry has its foundation in the need of something to render boiled water palatable for drinking purposes. the drinking of boiled water is universally adopted in these countries as an individually available and thoroughly efficient safeguard against that class of deadly disease germs which thus far it has been impossible to exclude from the drinking water of any densely peopled country. judged by the success of the most thorough sanitary measures thus far instituted, and taking into consideration the inherent difficulties which must increase enormously with increasing populations, it appears inevitable that modern methods must ultimately fail in sanitary efficiency and that absolute safety can be secured only in some manner having the equivalent effect of boiling drinking water, long ago adopted by the mongolian races. in the year japan had , acres of land in tea plantations, producing , , pounds of cured tea. in china the volume annually produced is much larger than that of japan, , , pounds going annually to tibet alone from the szechwan province and the direct export to foreign countries was, in , , , pounds, and in it was , , , so that their annual export must exceed , , pounds with a total annual output more than double this amount of cured tea. but above any other factor, and perhaps greater than all of them combined in contributing to the high maintenance efficiency attained in these countries must be placed the standard of living to which the industrial classes have been compelled to adjust themselves, combined with their remarkable industry and with the most intense economy they practice along every line of effort and of living. almost every foot of land is made to contribute material for food, fuel or fabric. everything which can be made edible serves as food for man or domestic animals. whatever cannot be eaten or worn is used for fuel. the wastes of the body, of fuel and of fabric worn beyond other use are taken back to the field; before doing so they are housed against waste from weather, compounded with intelligence and forethought and patiently labored with through one, three or even six months, to bring them into the most efficient form to serve as manure for the soil or as feed for the crop. it seems to be a golden rule with these industrial classes, or if not golden, then an inviolable one, that whenever an extra hour or day of labor can promise even a little larger return then that shall be given, and neither a rainy day nor the hottest sunshine shall be permitted to cancel the obligation or defer its execution. i first glimpses of japan we left the united states from seattle for shanghai, china, sailing by the northern route, at one p. m. february second, reaching yokohama february th and shanghai, march st. it was our aim throughout the journey to keep in close contact with the field and crop problems and to converse personally, through interpreters or otherwise, with the farmers, gardeners and fruit growers themselves; and we have taken pains in many cases to visit the same fields or the same region two, three or more times at different intervals during the season in order to observe different phases of the same cultural or fertilization methods as these changed or varied with the season. our first near view of japan came in the early morning of february th when passing some three miles off the point where the pacific passenger steamer dakota was beached and wrecked in broad daylight without loss of life two years ago. the high rounded hills were clothed neither in the dense dark forest green of washington and vancouver, left sixteen days before, nor yet in the brilliant emerald such as ireland's hills in june fling in unparalleled greeting to passengers surfeited with the dull grey of the rolling ocean. this lack of strong forest growth and even of shrubs and heavy herbage on hills covered with deep soil, neither cultivated nor suffering from serious erosion, yet surrounded by favorable climatic conditions, was our first great surprise. to the southward around the point, after turning northward into the deep bay, similar conditions prevailed, and at ten o'clock we stood off uraga where commodore perry anchored on july th, , bearing to the shogun president fillmore's letter which opened the doors of japan to the commerce of the world and, it is to be hoped brought to her people, with their habits of frugality and industry so indelibly fixed by centuries of inheritance, better opportunities for development along those higher lines destined to make life still more worth living. as the tosa maru drew alongside the pier at yokohama it was raining hard and this had attired an army after the manner of robinson crusoe, dressed as seen in fig. , ready to carry you and yours to the customs house and beyond for one, two, three or five cents. strong was the contrast when the journey was reversed and we descended the gang plank at seattle, where no one sought the opportunity of moving baggage. through the kindness of captain harrison of the tosa maru in calling an interpreter by wireless to meet the steamer, it was possible to utilize the entire interval of stop in yokohama to the best advantage in the fields and gardens spread over the eighteen miles of plain extending to tokyo, traversed by both electric tram and railway lines, each running many trains making frequent stops; so that this wonderfully fertile and highly tilled district could be readily and easily reached at almost any point. we had left home in a memorable storm of snow, sleet and rain which cut out of service telegraph and telephone lines over a large part of the united states; we had sighted the aleutian islands, seeing and feeling nothing on the way which could suggest a warm soil and green fields, hence our surprise was great to find the jinricksha men with bare feet and legs naked to the thighs, and greater still when we found, before we were outside the city limits, that the electric tram was running between fields and gardens green with wheat, barley, onions, carrots, cabbage and other vegetables. we were rushing through the orient with everything outside the car so strange and different from home that the shock came like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky. in the car every man except myself and one other was smoking tobacco and that other was inhaling camphor through an ivory mouthpiece resembling a cigar holder closed at the end. several women, tiring of sitting foreign style, slipped off--i cannot say out of--their shoes and sat facing the windows, with toes crossed behind them on the seat. the streets were muddy from the rain and everybody japanese was on rainy-day wooden shoes, the soles carried three to four inches above the ground by two cross blocks, in the manner seen in fig. . a mother, with baby on her back and a daughter of sixteen years came into the car. notwithstanding her high shoes the mother had dipped one toe into the mud. seated, she slipped her foot off. without evident instructions the pretty black-eyed, glossy-haired, red-lipped lass, with cheeks made rosy, picked up the shoe, withdrew a piece of white tissue paper from the great pocket in her sleeve, deftly cleaned the otherwise spotless white cloth sock and then the shoe, threw the paper on the floor, looked to see that her fingers were not soiled, then set the shoe at her mother's foot, which found its place without effort or glance. everything here was strange and the scenes shifted with the speed of the wildest dream. now it was driving piles for the foundation of a bridge. a tripod of poles was erected above the pile and from it hung a pulley. over the pulley passed a rope from the driving weight and from its end at the pulley ten cords extended to the ground. in a circle at the foot of the tripod stood ten agile japanese women. they were the hoisting engine. they chanted in perfect rhythm, hauled and stepped, dropped the weight and hoisted again, making up for heavier hammer and higher drop by more blows per minute. when we reached shanghai we saw the pile driver being worked from above. fourteen chinese men stood upon a raised staging, each with a separate cord passing direct from the hand to the weight below. a concerted, half-musical chant, modulated to relieve monotony, kept all hands together. what did the operation of this machine cost? thirteen cents, gold, per man per day, which covered fuel and lubricant, both automatically served. two additional men managed the piles, two directed the hammer, eighteen manned the outfit. two dollars and thirty-four cents per day covered fuel, superintendence and repairs. there was almost no capital invested in machinery. men were plenty and to spare. rice was the fuel, cooked without salt, boiled stiff, reinforced with a hit of pork or fish, appetized with salted cabbage or turnip and perhaps two or three of forty and more other vegetable relishes. and are these men strong and happy? they certainly were strong. they are steadily increasing their millions, and as one stood and watched them at their work their faces were often wreathed in smiles and wore what seemed a look of satisfaction and contentment. among the most common sights on our rides from yokohama to tokyo, both within the city and along the roads leading to the fields, starting early in the morning, were the loads of night soil carried on the shoulders of men and on the backs of animals, but most commonly on strong carts drawn by men, bearing six to ten tightly covered wooden containers holding forty, sixty or more pounds each. strange as it may seem, there are not today and apparently never have been, even in the largest and oldest cities of japan, china or korea, anything corresponding to the hydraulic systems of sewage disposal used now by western nations. provision is made for the removal of storm waters but when i asked my interpreter if it was not the custom of the city during the winter months to discharge its night soil into the sea, as a quicker and cheaper mode of disposal, his reply came quick and sharp, "no, that would be waste. we throw nothing away. it is worth too much money." in such public places as rail way stations provision is made for saving, not for wasting, and even along the country roads screens invite the traveler to stop, primarily for profit to the owner more than for personal convenience. between yokohama and tokyo along the electric car line and not far distant from the seashore, there were to be seen in february very many long, fence-high screens extending east and west, strongly inclined to the north, and built out of rice straw, closely tied together and supported on bamboo poles carried upon posts of wood set in the ground. these screens, set in parallel series of five to ten or more in number and several hundred feet long, were used for the purpose of drying varieties of delicate seaweed, these being spread out in the manner shown in fig. . the seaweed is first spread upon separate ten by twelve inch straw mats, forming a thin layer seven by eight inches. these mats are held by means of wooden skewers forced through the body of the screen, exposing the seaweed to the direct sunshine. after becoming dry the rectangles of seaweed are piled in bundles an inch thick, cut once in two, forming packages four by seven inches, which are neatly tied and thus exposed for sale as soup stock and for other purposes. to obtain this seaweed from the ocean small shrubs and the limbs of trees are set up in the bottom of shallow water, as seen in fig. . to these limbs the seaweeds become attached, grow to maturity and are then gathered by hand. by this method of culture large amounts of important food stuff are grown for the support of the people on areas otherwise wholly unproductive. another rural feature, best shown by photograph taken in february, is the method of training pear orchards in japan, with their limbs tied down upon horizontal over-bead trellises at a height under which a man can readily walk erect and easily reach the fruit with the hand while standing upon the ground. pear orchards thus form arbors of greater or less size, the trees being set in quincunx order about twelve feet apart in and between the rows. bamboo poles are used overhead and these carried on posts of the same material . to . inches in diameter, to which they are tied. such a pear orchard is shown in fig. . the limbs of the pear trees are trained strictly in one plane, tying them down and pruning out those not desired. as a result the ground beneath is completely shaded and every pear is within reach, which is a great convenience when it becomes desirable to protect the fruit from insects, by tying paper bags over every pear as seen in figs. and . the orchard ground is kept free from weeds and not infrequently is covered with a layer of rice or other straw, extensively used in japan as a ground cover with various crops and when so used is carefully laid in handfuls from bundles, the straws being kept parallel as when harvested. to one from a country of -acre farms, with roads four rods wide; of cities with broad streets and residences with green lawns and ample back yards; and where the cemeteries are large and beautiful parks, the first days of travel in these old countries force the over-crowding upon the attention as nothing else can. one feels that the cities are greatly over-crowded with houses and shops, and these with people and wares; that the country is over-crowded with fields and the fields with crops; and that in japan the over-crowding is greatest of all in the cemeteries, gravestones almost touching and markers for families literally in bundles at a grave, while round about there may be no free country whatever, dwellings, gardens or rice paddies contesting the tiny allotted areas too closely to leave even foot-paths between. unless recently modified through foreign influence the streets of villages and cities are narrow, as seen in fig. , where however the street is unusually broad. this is a village in the hakone district on a beautiful lake of the same name, where stands an imperial summer palace, seen near the center of the view on a hill across the lake. the roofs of the houses here are typical of the neat, careful thatching with rice straw, very generally adopted in place of tile for the country villages throughout much of japan. the shops and stores, open full width directly upon the street, are filled to overflowing, as seen in fig. and in fig. . in the canalized regions of china the country villages crowd both banks of a canal, as is the case in fig. . here, too, often is a single street and it very narrow, very crowded and very busy. stone steps lead from the houses down into the water where clothing, vegetables, rice and what not are conveniently washed. in this particular village two rows of houses stand on one side of the canal separated by a very narrow street, and a single row on the other. between the bridge where the camera was exposed and one barely discernible in the background, crossing the canal a third of a mile distant, we counted upon one side, walking along the narrow street, eighty houses each with its family, usually of three generations and often of four. thus in the narrow strip, feet broad, including feet of street and feet of canal, with its three lines of houses. lived no less than families and more than and probably nearer people. when we turn to the crowding of fields in the country nothing except seeing can tell so forcibly the fact as such landscapes as those of figs. , and , one in japan, one in korea and one in china, not far from nanking, looking from the hills across the fields to the broad yangtse kiang, barely discernible as a band of light along the horizon. the average area of the rice field in japan is less than five square rods and that of her upland fields only about twenty. in the case of the rice fields the small size is necessitated partly by the requirement of holding water on the sloping sides of the valley, as seen in fig. . these small areas do not represent the amount of land worked by one family, the average for japan being more nearly . acres. but the lands worked by one family are seldom contiguous, they may even be widely scattered and very often rented. the people generally live in villages, going often considerable distances to their work. recognizing the great disadvantage of scattered holdings broken into such small areas, the japanese government has passed laws for the adjustment of farm lands which have been in force since . it provides for the exchange of lands; for changing boundaries; for changing or abolishing roads, embankments, ridges or canals and for alterations in irrigation and drainage which would ensure larger areas with channels and roads straightened, made less numerous and less wasteful of time, labor and land. up to japan had issued permits for the readjustment of over , acres, and fig. is a landscape in one of these readjusted districts. to provide capable experts for planning and supervising these changes the government in intrusted the training of men to the higher agricultural school belonging to the dai nippon agricultural association and since the agricultural college and the kogyokusha have undertaken the same task and now there are men sufficient to push the work as rapidly as desired. it may be remembered, too, as showing how, along other fundamental lines, japan is taking effective steps to improve the condition of her people, that she already has her imperial highways extending from one province to another; her prefectural roads which connect the cities and villages within the prefecture; and those more local which serve the farms and villages. each of the three systems of roads is maintained by a specific tax levied for the purpose which is expended under proper supervision, a designated section of road being kept in repair through the year by a specially appointed crew, as is the practice in railroad maintenance. the result is, japan has roads maintained in excellent condition, always narrow, sacrificing the minimum of land, and everywhere without fences. how the fields are crowded with crops and all available land is made to do full duty in these old, long-tilled countries is evident in fig. where even the narrow dividing ridges but a foot wide, which retain the water on the rice paddies, are bearing a heavy crop of soy beans; and where may be seen the narrow pear orchard standing on the very slightest rise of ground, not a foot above the water all around, which could better be left in grading the paddies to proper level. how closely the ground itself may be crowded with plants is seen in fig. , where a young peach orchard, whose tree tops were six feet through, planted in rows twenty-two feet apart, had also ten rows of cabbage, two rows of large windsor beans and a row of garden peas. thirteen rows of vegetables in feet, all luxuriant and strong, and note the judgment shown in placing the tallest plants, needing the most sun, in the center between the trees. but these old people, used to crowding and to being crowded, and long ago capable of making four blades of grass grow where nature grew but one, have also learned how to double the acreage where a crop needs more elbow than it does standing room, as seen in fig. . this man's garden had an area of but by feet and two square rods of this was held sacred to the family grave mound, and yet his statement of yields, number of crops and prices made his earning $ a year on less than one-tenth of an acre. his crop of cucumbers on less than . of an acre would bring him $ . he had already sold $ worth of greens and a second crop would follow the cucumbers. he had just irrigated his garden from an adjoining canal, using a foot-power pump, and stated that until it rained he would repeat the watering once per week. it was his wife who stood in the garden and, although wearing trousers, her dress showed full regard for modesty. but crowding crops more closely in the field not only requires higher feeding to bring greater returns, but also relatively greater care, closer watchfulness in a hundred ways and a patience far beyond american measure; and so, before the crowding of the crops in the field and along with it, there came to these very old farmers a crowding of the grey matter in the brain with the evolution of effective texture. this is shown in his fields which crowd the landscape. it is seen in the crops which crowd his fields. you see it in the old man's face, fig. , standing opposite his compeer, prince ching, fig. , each clad in winter dress which is the embodiment of conversation, retaining the fires of the body for its own needs, to release the growth on mountain sides for other uses. and when one realizes how, nearly to the extreme limits, conservation along all important lines is being practiced as an inherited instinct, there need be no surprise when one reflects that the two men, one as feeder and the other as leader, are standing in the fore of a body of four hundred millions of people who have marched as a nation through perhaps forty centuries, and who now, in the light and great promise of unfolding science have their faces set toward a still more hopeful and longer future. on february st the tosa maru left yokohama for kobe at schedule time on the tick of the watch, as she had done from seattle. all japanese steamers appear to be moved with the promptness of a railway train. on reaching kobe we transferred to the yamaguchi maru which sailed the following morning, to shorten the time of reaching shanghai. this left but an afternoon for a trip into the country between kobe and osaka, where we found, if possible, even higher and more intensive culture practices than on the tokyo plain, there being less land not carrying a winter crop. and fig. shows how closely the crops crowd the houses and shops. here were very many cement lined cisterns or sheltered reservoirs for collecting manures and preparing fertilizers and the appearance of both soil and crops showed in a marked manner to what advantage. we passed a garden of nearly an acre entirely devoted to english violets just coming into full bloom. they were grown in long parallel east and west beds about three feet wide. on the north edge of each bed was erected a rice-straw screen four feet high which inclined to the south, overhanging the bed at an angle of some thirty-five degrees, thus forming a sort of bake-oven tent which reflected the sun, broke the force of the wind and checked the loss of heat absorbed by the soil. the voyage from kobe to moji was made between in the morning, february th, and . p. m. of february th over a quiet sea with an enjoyable ride. being fogbound during the night gave us the whole of japan's beautiful inland sea, enchanting beyond measure, in all its near and distant beauty but which no pen, no brush, no camera may attempt. only the eye can convey. before reaching harbor the tide had been rising and the strait separating honshu from kyushu island was running like a mighty swirling river between moji and shimonoseki, dangerous to attempt in the dark, so we waited until morning. there was cargo to take on board and the steamer must coal. no sooner had the anchor dropped and the steamer swung into the current than lighters came alongside with out-going freight. the small, strong, agile japanese stevedores had this task completed by : p. m. and when we returned to the deck after supper another scene was on. the cargo lighters had gone and four large barges bearing tons of coal had taken their places on opposite sides of the steamer, each illuminated with buckets of blazing coal or by burning conical heaps on the surface. from the bottom of these pits in the darkness the illumination suggested huge decapitated ant heaps in the wildest frenzy, for the coal seemed covered and there was hurry in every direction. men and women, boys and girls, bending to their tasks, were filling shallow saucer-shaped baskets with coal and stacking them eight to ten high in a semi-circle, like coin for delivery. rising out of these pits sixteen feet up the side of the steamer and along her deck to the chutes leading to her bunkers were what seemed four endless human chains, in service the prototype of our modern conveyors, but here each link animated by its own power. up these conveyors the loaded buckets passed, one following another at the rate of to per minute, to return empty by the descending line, and over the four chains one hundred tons per hour, for tons of coal passed to the bunkers in two and a half hours. both men and women stood in the line and at the upper turn of one of these, emptying the buckets down the chute, was a mother with her two-year-old child in the sling on back, where it rocked and swayed to and fro, happy the entire time. it was often necessary for the mother to adjust her baby in the sling whenever it was leaning uncomfortably too far to one side or the other, but she did it skillfully, always with a shrug of the shoulders, for both hands were full. the mother looked strong, was apparently accepting her lot as a matter of course and often, with a smile, turned her face to the child, who patted it and played with her ears and hair. probably her husband was doing his part in a more strenuous place in the chain and neither had time to be troubled with affinities for it was : p. m. when the baskets stopped, and somewhere no doubt there was a home to be reached and perhaps supper to get. shall we be able, when our numbers have vastly increased, to permit all needful earnings to be acquired in a better way? we left moji in the early morning and late in the evening of the same day entered the beautiful harbor of nagasaki, all on board waiting until morning for a launch to go ashore. we were to sail again at noon so available time for observation was short and we set out in a ricksha at once for our first near view of terraced gardening on the steep hillsides in japan. in reaching them and in returning our course led through streets paved with long, thick and narrow stone blocks, having deep open gutters on one or both sides close along the houses, into which waste water was emptied and through which the storm waters found their way to the sea. few of these streets were more than twelve feet wide and close watching, with much dodging, was required to make way through them. here, too, the night soil of the city was being removed in closed receptacles on the shoulders of men, on the backs of horses and cattle and on carts drawn by either. other men and women were hurrying along with baskets of vegetables well illustrated in fig. , some with fresh cabbage, others with high stacks of crisp lettuce, some with monstrous white radishes or turnips, others with bundles of onions, all coming down from the terraced gardens to the markets. we passed loads of green bamboo poles just cut, three inches in diameter at the butt and twenty feet long, drawn on carts. both men and women were carrying young children and older ones were playing and singing in the street. very many old women, some feeble looking, moved, loaded, through the throng. homely little dogs, an occasional lean cat, and hens and roosters scurried across the street from one low market or store to another. back of the rows of small stores and shops fronting on the clean narrow streets were the dwellings whose exits seemed to open through the stores, few or no open courts of any size separating them from the market or shop. the opportunity which the oriental housewife may have in the choice of vegetables on going to the market, and the attractive manner of displaying such products in japan, are seen in fig. . we finally reached one of the terraced hillsides which rise five hundred to a thousand feet above the harbor with sides so steep that garden areas have a width of seldom more than twenty to thirty feet and often less, while the front of each terrace may be a stone wall, sometimes twelve feet high, often more than six, four and five feet being the most common height. one of these hillside slopes is seen in fig. . these terraced gardens are both short and narrow and most of them bounded by stone walls on three sides, suggesting house foundations, the two end walls sloping down the hill from the height of the back terrace, dropping to the ground level in front, these forming foot-paths leading up the slope occasionally with one, two or three steps in places. each terrace sloped slightly down the hill at a small angle and had a low ridge along the front. around its entire border a narrow drain or furrow was arranged to collect surface water and direct it to drainage channels or into a catch basin where it might be put back on the garden or be used in preparing liquid fertilizer. at one corner of many of these small terraced gardens were cement lined pits, used both as catch basins for water and as receptacles for liquid manure or as places in which to prepare compost. far up the steep paths, too, along either side, we saw many piles of stable manure awaiting application, all of which had been brought up the slopes in backets on bamboo poles, carried on the shoulders of men and women. ii grave lands of china the launch had returned the passengers to the steamer at : ; the captain was on the bridge; prompt to the minute at the call "hoist away" the signal went below and the yamaguchi's whistle filled the harbor and over-flowed the hills. the cable wound in, and at twelve, noon, we were leaving nagasaki, now a city of , and the western doorway of a nation of fifty-one millions of people but of little importance before the sixteenth century when it became the chief mart of portuguese trade. we were to pass the koreans on our right and enter the portals of a third nation of four hundred millions. we had left a country which had added eighty-five millions to its population in one hundred years and which still has twenty acres for each man, woman and child, to pass through one which has but one and a half acres per capita, and were going to another whose allotment of acres, good and bad, is less than . . we had gone from practices by which three generations had exhausted strong virgin fields, and were coming to others still fertile after thirty centuries of cropping. on january th we crossed the head waters of the mississippi-missouri, four thousand miles from its mouth, and on march st were in the mouth of the yangtse river whose waters are gathered from a basin in which dwell two hundred millions of people. the yamaguchi reached woosung in the night and anchored to await morning and tide before ascending the hwangpoo, believed by some geographers to be the middle of three earlier delta arms of the yangtse kiang, the southern entering the sea at hangchow miles further south, the third being the present stream. as we wound through this great delta plain toward shanghai, the city of foreign concessions to all nationalities, the first striking feature was the "graves of the fathers", of "the ancestors". at first the numerous grass-covered hillocks dotting the plain seemed to be stacks of grain or straw; then came the query whether they might not be huge compost heaps awaiting distribution in the fields, but as the river brought us nearer to them we seemed to be moving through a land of ancient mound builders and fig. shows, in its upper section, their appearance as seen in the distance. as the journey led on among the fields, so large were the mounds, often ten to twelve feet high and twenty or more feet at the base; so grass-covered and apparently neglected; so numerous and so irregularly scattered, without apparent regard for fields, that when we were told these were graves we could not give credence to the statement, but before the city was reached we saw places where, by the shifting of the channel, the river had cut into some of these mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of river silt. a closer view of these graves in the same delta plain is given in the lower section of fig. , where they are seen in the midst of fields and to occupy not only large areas of valuable land but to be much in the way of agricultural operations. a still closer view of other groups, with a farm village in the background, is shown in the middle section of the same illustration, and here it is better seen how large is the space occupied by them. on the right in the same view may be seen a line of six graves surmounting a common lower base which is a type of the larger and higher ones so suggestive of buildings seen in the horizon of the upper section. everywhere we went in china, about all of the very old and large cities, the proportion of grave land to cultivated fields is very large. in the vicinity of canton christian college, on honam island, more than fifty per cent of the land was given over to graves and in many places they were so close that one could step from one to another. they are on the higher and dryer lands, the cultivated areas occupying ravines and the lower levels to which water may be more easily applied and which are the most productive. hilly lands not so readily cultivated, and especially if within reach of cities, are largely so used, as seen in fig. , where the graves are marked by excavated shelves rather than by mounds, as on the plains. these grave lands are not altogether unproductive for they are generally overgrown with herbage of one or another kind and used as pastures for geese, sheep, goats and cattle, and it is not at all uncommon, when riding along a canal, to see a huge water buffalo projected against the sky from the summit of one of the largest and highest grave mounds within reach. if the herbage is not fed off by animals it is usually cut for feed, for fuel, for green manure or for use in the production of compost to enrich the soil. caskets may be placed directly upon the surface of a field, encased in brick vaults with tile roofs, forming such clusters as was seen on the bank of the grand canal in chekiang province, represented in the lower section of fig. , or they may stand singly in the midst of a garden, as in the upper section of the same figure; in a rice paddy entirely surrounded by water parts of the year, and indeed in almost any unexpected place. in shanghai in , , exposed coffined corpses were removed outside the international settlement or buried by the authorities. further north, in the shantung province, where the dry season is more prolonged and where a severe drought had made grass short, the grave lands had become nearly naked soil, as seen in fig. where a shantung farmer had just dug a temporary well to irrigate his little field of barley. within the range of the camera, as held to take this view, more than forty grave mounds besides the seven near by, are near enough to be fixed on the negative and be discernible under a glass, indicating what extensive areas of land, in the aggregate, are given over to graves. still further north, in chihli, a like story is told in, if possible, more emphatic manner and fully vouched for in the next illustration, fig. , which shows a typical family group, to be observed in so many places between taku and tientsin and beyond toward peking. as we entered the mouth of the pei-ho for tientsin, far away to the vanishing horizon there stretched an almost naked plain except for the vast numbers of these "graves of the fathers", so strange, so naked, so regular in form and so numerous that more than an hour of our journey had passed before we realized that they were graves and that the country here was perhaps more densely peopled with the dead than with the living. in so many places there was the huge father grave, often capped with what in the distance suggested a chimney, and the many associated smaller ones, that it was difficult to realize in passing what they were. it is a common custom, even if the residence has been permanently changed to some distant province, to take the bodies back for interment in the family group; and it is this custom which leads to the practice of choosing a temporary location for the body, waiting for a favorable opportunity to remove it to the family group. this is often the occasion for the isolated coffin so frequently seen under a simple thatch of rice straw, as in fig. ; and the many small stone jars containing skeletons of the dead, or portions of them, standing singly or in rows in the most unexpected places least in the way in the crowded fields and gardens, awaiting removal to the final resting place. it is this custom, too, i am told, which has led to placing a large quantity of caustic lime in the bottom of the casket, on which the body rests, this acting as an effective absorbent. it is the custom in some parts of china, if not in all, to periodically restore the mounds, maintaining their height and size, as is seen in the next two illustrations, and to decorate these once in the year with flying streamers of colored paper, the remnants of which may be seen in both figs. and , set there as tokens that the paper money has been burned upon them and its essence sent up in the smoke for the maintenance of the spirits of their departed friends. we have our memorial day; they have for centuries observed theirs with religious fidelity. the usual expense of a burial among the working people is said to be $ , mexican, an enormous burden when the day's wage or the yearly earning of the family is considered and when there is added to this the yearly expense of ancestor worship. how such voluntary burdens are assumed by people under such circumstances is hard to understand. missionaries assert it is fear of evil consequences in this life and of punishment and neglect in the hereafter that leads to assuming them. is it not far more likely that such is the price these people are willing to pay for a good name among the living and because of their deep and lasting friendship for the departed? nor does it seem at all strange that a kindly, warm-hearted people with strong filial affection should have reached, carry in their long history, a belief in one spirit of the departed which hovers about the home, one which hovers about the grave and another which wanders abroad, for surely there are associations with each of these conditions which must long and forcefully awaken memories of friends gone. if this view is possible may not such ancestral worship be an index of qualities of character strongly fixed and of the highest worth which, when improvements come that may relieve the heavy burdens now carried, will only shine more brightly and count more for right living as well as comfort? even in our own case it will hardly be maintained that our burial customs have reached their best and final solution, for in all civilized nations they are unnecessarily expensive and far too cumbersome. it is only necessary to mentally add the accumulation of a few centuries to our cemeteries to realize how impossible our practice must become. clearly there is here a very important line for betterment which all nationalities should undertake. when the steamer anchored at shanghai the day was pleasant and the rain coats which greeted us in yokohama were not in evidence but the numbers who had met the steamer in the hope of an opportunity for earning a trifle was far greater and in many ways in strong contrast with the japanese. we were much surprised to find the men of so large stature, much above the chinese usually seen in the united states. they were fully the equal of large americans in frame but quite without surplus flesh yet few appeared underfed. to realize that these are strong, hardy men it was only necessary to watch them carrying on their shoulders bales of cotton between them, supported by a strong bamboo; while the heavy loads they transport on wheel-barrows through the country over long distances, as seen in fig. , prove their great endurance. this same type of vehicle, too, is one of the common means of transporting people, especially chinese women, and four six and even eight may be seen riding together, propelled by a single wheelbarrow man. iii to hongkong and canton we had come to learn how the old-world farmers bad been able to provide materials for food and clothing on such small areas for so many millions, at so low a price, during so many centuries, and were anxious to see them at the soil and among the crops. the sun was still south of the equator, coming north only about twelve miles per day, so, to save time, we booked on the next steamer for hongkong to meet spring at canton, beyond the tropic of cancer, six hundred miles farther south, and return with her. on the morning of march th the tosa maru steamed out into the yangtse river, already flowing with the increased speed of ebb tide. the pilots were on the bridge to guide her course along the narrow south channel through waters seemingly as brown and turbid as the potomac after a rain. it was some distance beyond gutzlaff island, seventy miles to sea, where there is a lighthouse and a telegraph station receiving six cables, that we crossed the front of the out-going tide, showing in a sharp line of contrast stretching in either direction farther than the eye could see, across the course of the ship and yet it was the season of low water in this river. during long ages this stream of mighty volume has been loading upon itself in far-away tibet, without dredge, barge, fuel or human effort, unused and there unusable soils, bringing them down from inaccessible heights across two or three thousand miles, building up with them, from under the sea, at the gateways of commerce, miles upon miles of the world's most fertile fields and gardens. today on this river, winding through six hundred miles of the most highly cultivated fields, laid out on river-built plains, go large ocean steamers to the city of hankow-wuchang-hanyang where , , people live and trade within a radius less than four miles; while smaller steamers push on a thousand miles and are then but feet above sea level. even now, with the aid of current, tide and man, these brown turbid waters are rapidly adding fertile delta plains for new homes. during the last twenty-five years chungming island has grown in length some feet per year and today a million people are living and growing rice, wheat, cotton and sweet potatoes on square miles of fertile plain where five hundred years ago were only submerged river sands and silt. here people per square mile have acquired homes. the southward voyage was over a quiet sea and as we passed among and near the off-shore islands these, as seen in japan, appeared destitute of vegetation other than the low herbaceous types with few shrubs and almost no forest growth and little else that gave the appearance of green. captain harrison informed me that at no time in the year are these islands possessed of the grass-green verdure so often seen in northern climates, and yet the islands lie in a region of abundant summer rain, making it hard to understand why there is not a more luxuriant growth. sunday morning, march th, passing first extensive sugar refineries, found us entering the long, narrow and beautiful harbor of hongkong. here, lying at anchor in the ten square miles of water, were five battleships, several large ocean steamers, many coastwise vessels and a multitude of smaller craft whose yearly tonnage is twenty to thirty millions. but the harbor lies in the track of the terrible east indian typhoon and, although sheltered on the north shore of a high island, one of these storms recently sunk nine vessels, sent twenty-three ashore, seriously damaged twenty-one others, wrought great destruction among the smaller craft and over a thousand dead were recovered. such was the destruction wrought by the september storm of . our steamer did not go to dock but the nippon yusen kaisha's launch transferred us to a city much resembling seattle in possessing a scant footing between a long sea front and high steep mountain slopes behind. here cliffs too steep to climb rise from the very sidewalk and are covered with a great profusion and variety of ferns, small bamboo, palms, vines, many flowering shrubs, all interspersed with pine and great banyan trees that do so much toward adding the beauty of northern landscapes to the tropical features which reach upward until hidden in a veil of fog that hung, all of the time we were there, over the city, over the harbor and stretched beyond old and new kowloon. hongkong island is some eleven miles long and but two to five miles wide, while the peak carrying the signal staff rises , feet above the streets from which ascends the peak tramway, where, hanging from opposite ends of a strong cable, one car rises up the slope and another descends every fifteen to twenty minutes, affording communication with business houses below and homes in beautiful surroundings and a tempered climate above. extending along the slopes of the mountains, too, above the city, are very excellent roads, carefully graded, provided with concrete gutters and bridges, along which one may travel on foot, on horseback, by ricksha or sedan chair, but too narrow for carriages. over one of these we ascended along one side of happy valley, around its head and down the other side. only occasionally could we catch glimpses of the summit through the lifting fog but the views, looking down and across the city and beyond the harbor with its shipping, and up and down the many ravines from via-ducts, are among the choicest and rarest ever made accessible to the residents of any city. it was the beginning of the migratory season for birds, and trees and shrubbery thronged with many species. many of the women in hongkong were seen engaged in such heavy manual labor with the men as carrying crushed rock and sand, for concrete and macadam work, up the steep street slopes long distances from the dock, but they were neither tortured nor incapacitated by bound feet. like the men, they were of smaller stature than most seen at shanghai and closely resemble the chinese in the united states. both sexes are agile, wiry and strong. here we first saw lumber sawing in the open streets after the manner shown in fig. , where wide boards were being cut from camphor logs. in the damp, already warm weather the men were stripped to the waist, their limbs bare to above the knee, and each carried a large towel for wiping away the profuse perspiration. it was here, too, that we first met the remarkable staging for the erection of buildings of four and six stories, set up without saw, hammer or nail; without injury to or waste of lumber and with the minimum of labor in construction and removal. poles and bamboo stems were lashed together with overlapping ends, permitting any interval or height to be secured without cutting or nailing, and admitting of ready removal with absolutely no waste, all parts being capable of repeated use unless it be some of the materials employed in tying members. up inclined stairways, from staging to staging, in the erection of six-story granite buildings, mortar was being carried in baskets swinging from bamboo poles on the shoulders of men and women, as the cheapest hoists available in english hongkong where there is willing human labor and to spare. the singer sewing machine, manufactured in new jersey, was seen in many chinese shops in hongkong and other cities, operated by chinese men and women, purchased, freight prepaid, at two-thirds the retail price in the united states. such are the indications of profit to manufacturers on the home sale of home-made goods while at the same time reaping good returns from a large trade in heathen lands, after paying the freight. industrial china, korea and japan do not observe our weekly day of rest and during our walk around happy valley on sunday afternoon, looking down upon its terraced gardens and tiny fields, we saw men and women busy fitting the soil for new crops, gathering vegetables for market, feeding plants with liquid manure and even irrigating certain crops, notwithstanding the damp, foggy, showery weather. turning the head of the valley, attention was drawn to a walled enclosure and a detour down the slope brought us to a florist's garden within which were rows of large potted foliage plants of semi-shrubbery habit, seen in fig. , trained in the form of life-size human figures with limbs, arms and trunk provided with highly glazed and colored porcelain feet, hands and head. these, with many other potted plants and trees, including dwarf varieties, are grown under out-door lattice shelters in different parts of china, for sale to the wealthy chinese families. how thorough is the tillage, how efficient and painstaking the garden fitting, and how closely the ground is crowded to its upper limit of producing power are indicated in fig. ; and when one stops and studies the detail in such gardens he expects in its executor an orderly, careful, frugal and industrious man, getting not a little satisfaction out of his creations however arduous his task or prolonged his day. if he is in the garden or one meets him at the house, clad as the nature of his duties and compensation have determined, you may be disappointed or feel arising an unkind judgment. but who would risk a reputation so clad and so environed? many were the times, during our walks in the fields and gardens among these old, much misunderstood, misrepresented and undervalued people, when the bond of common interest was recognized between us, that there showed through the face the spirit which put aside both dress and surroundings and the man stood forth who, with fortitude and rare wisdom, is feeding the millions and who has carried through centuries the terrible burden of taxes levied by dishonor and needless wars. nay, more than this, the man stood forth who has kept alive the seeds of manhood and has nourished them into such sturdy stock as has held the stream of progress along the best interests of civilization in spite of the driftwood heaped upon it. not only are these people extremely careful and painstaking in fitting their fields and gardens to receive the crop, but they are even more scrupulous in their care to make everything that can possibly serve as fertilizer for the soil, or food for the crop being grown, do so unless there is some more remunerative service it may render. expense is incurred to provide such receptacles as are seen in fig. for receiving not only the night soil of the home and that which may be bought or otherwise procured, but in which may be stored any other fluid which can serve as plant food. on the right of these earthenware jars too is a pile of ashes and one of manure. all such materials are saved and used in the most advantageous ways to enrich the soil or to nourish the plants being grown. generally the liquid manures must be diluted with water to a greater or less extent before they are "fed", as the chinese say, to their plants, hence there is need of an abundant and convenient water supply. one of these is seen in fig. , where the chinaman has adopted the modern galvanized iron pipe to bring water from the mountain slope of happy valley to his garden. by the side of this tank are the covered pails in which the night soil was brought, perhaps more than a mile, to be first diluted and then applied. but the more general method for supplying water is that of leading it along the ground in channels or ditches to a small reservoir in one corner of a terraced field or garden, as seen in fig. , where it is held and the surplus led down from terrace to terrace, giving each its permanent supply. at the upper right corner of the engraving may be seen two manure receptacles and a third stands near the reservoir. the plants on the lower terrace are water cress and those above the same. at this time of the year, on the terraced gardens of happy valley, this is one of the crops most extensively grown. walking among these gardens and isolated homes, we passed a pig pen provided with a smooth, well-laid stone floor that had just been washed scrupulously clean, like the floor of a house. while i was not able to learn other facts regarding this case, i have little doubt that the washings from this floor had been carefully collected and taken to some receptacle to serve as a plant food. looking backward as we left hongkong for canton on the cloudy evening of march th, the view was wonderfully beautiful. we were drawing away from three cities, one, electric-lighted hongkong rising up the steep slopes, suggesting a section of sky set with a vast array of stars of all magnitudes up to triple jupiters; another, old and new kowloon on the opposite side of the harbor; and between these two, separated from either shore by wide reaches of wholly unoccupied water, lay the third, a mid-strait city of sampans, junks and coastwise craft of many kinds segregated, in obedience to police regulation, into blocks and streets with each setting sun, but only to scatter again with the coming morn. at night, after a fixed hour, no one is permitted to leave shore and cross the vacant water strip except from certain piers and with the permission of the police, who take the number of the sampan and the names of its occupants. over the harbor three large search lights were sweeping and it was curious to see the junks and other craft suddenly burst into full blazes of light, like so many monstrous fire-flies, to disappear and reappear as the lights came and went. thus is the mid-strait city lighted and policed and thus have steps been taken to lessen the number of cases of foul play where people have left the wharves at night for some vessel in the strait, never to be heard from again. some ninety miles is the distance by water to canton, and early the next morning our steamer dropped anchor off the foreign settlement of shameen. through the kindness of consul-general amos p. wilder in sending a telegram to the canton christian college, their little steam launch met the boat and took us directly to the home of the college on honam island, lying in the great delta south of the city where sediments brought by the si-kiang--west, pei-kiang--north, and tung-kiang--east--rivers through long centuries have been building the richest of land which, because of the density of population, are squared up everywhere to the water's edge and appropriated as fast as formed, and made to bring forth materials for food fuel and raiment in vast quantities. it was on honam island that we walked first among the grave lands and came to know them as such, for canton christian college stands in the midst of graves which, although very old, are not permitted to be disturbed and the development of the campus must wait to secure permission to remove graves, or erect its buildings in places not the most desirable. cattle were grazing among the graves and with them a flock of some of the brown chinese geese, two-thirds grown, was watched by boys, gleaning their entire living from the grave lands and adjacent water. a mature goose sells in canton for $ . , mexican, or less than cents, gold, but even then how can the laborer whose day's wage is but ten or fifteen cents afford one for his family? here, too, we saw the chinese persistent, never-ending industry in keeping their land, their sunshine and their rain, with themselves, busy in producing something needful. fields which had matured two crops of rice during the long summer, had been laboriously, and largely by hand labor, thrown into strong ridges as seen in fig. , to permit still a third winter crop of some vegetable to be taken from the land. but this intensive, continuous cropping of the land spells soil exhaustion and creates demands for maintenance and restoration of available plant food or the adding of large quantities of something quickly convertible into it, and so here in the fields on honam island, as we had found in happy valley, there was abundant evidence of the most careful attention and laborious effort devoted to plant feeding. the boat standing in the canal in fig. had come from canton in the early morning with two tons of human manure and men were busy applying it, in diluted form, to beds of leeks at the rate of , gallons per acre, all carried on the shoulders in such pails as stand in the foreground. the material is applied with long-handled dippers holding a gallon, dipping it from the pails, the men wading, with bare feet and trousers rolled above the knees, in the water of the furrows between the beds. this is one of their ways of "feeding the crop," and they have other methods of "manuring the soil." one of these we first met on honam island. large amounts of canal mud are here collected in boats and brought to the fields to be treated and there left to drain and dry before distributing. both the material used to feed the crop and that used for manuring the land are waste products, hindrances to the industry of the region, but the chinese make them do essential duty in maintaining its life. the human waste must be disposed of. they return it to the soil. we turn it into the sea. doing so, they save for plant feeding more than a ton of phosphorus ( pounds) and more than two tons of potassium ( pounds) per day for each million of adult population. the mud collects in their canals and obstructs movement. they must be kept open. the mud is highly charged with organic matter and would add humus to the soil if applied to the fields, at the same time raising their level above the river and canal, giving them better drainage; thus are they turning to use what is otherwise waste, causing the labor which must be expended in disposal to count in a remunerative way. during the early morning ride to canton christian college and three others which we were permitted to enjoy in the launch on the canal and river waters, everything was again strange, fascinating and full of human interest. the cantonese water population was a surprise, not so much for its numbers as for the lithe, sinewy forms, bright eyes and cheerful faces, particularly among the women, young and old. nearly always one or more women, mother and daughter oftenest, grandmother many times, wrinkled, sometimes grey, but strong, quick and vigorous in motion, were manning the oars of junks, houseboats and sampans. sometimes husband and wife and many times the whole family were seen together when the craft was both home and business boat as well. little children were gazing from most unexpected peek holes, or they toddled tethered from a waist belt at the end of as much rope as would arrest them above water, should they go overboard. and the cat was similarly tied. through an overhanging latticed stern, too, hens craned their necks, longing for scenes they could not reach. with bare heads, bare feet, in short trousers and all dressed much alike, men, women, boys and girls showed equal mastery of the oar. beginning so young, day and night in the open air on the tide-swept streams and canals, exposed to all of the sunshine the fogs and clouds will permit, and removed from the dust and filth of streets, it would seem that if the children survive at all they must develop strong. the appearance of the women somehow conveyed the impression that they were more vigorous and in better fettle than the men. boats selling many kinds of steaming hot dishes were common. among these was rice tied in green leaf wrappers, three small packets in a cluster suspended by a strand of some vegetable fiber, to be handed hot from the cooker to the purchaser, some one on a passing junk or on an in-coming or out-going boat. another would buy hot water for a brew of tea, while still another, and for a single cash, might be handed a small square of cotton cloth, wrung hot from the water, with which to wipe his face and hands and then be returned. perhaps nothing better measures the intensity of the maintenance struggle here, and better indicates the minute economies practiced, than the value of their smallest currency unit, the cash, used in their daily retail transactions. on our pacific coast, where less thought is given to little economies than perhaps anywhere else in the world, the nickel is the smallest coin in general use, twenty to the dollar. for the rest of the united states and in most english speaking countries one hundred cents or half pennies measure an equal value. in russia kopecks, in mexico centavos, in france two-centime pieces, and in austria-hungary two-heller coins equal the united states dollar; while in germany pfennigs, and in india pie are required for an equal value. again penni in finland and of stotinki in bulgaria, of centesimi in italy and of half cents in holland equal our dollar; but in china the small daily financial transactions are measured against a much smaller unit, their cash, to of which are required to equal the united states dollar, their purchasing power fluctuating daily with the price of silver. in the shantung province, when we inquired of the farmers the selling prices of their crops, their replies were given like this: "thirty-five strings of cash for catty of wheat and twelve to fourteen strings of cash for catty of wheat straw." at this time, according to my interpreter, the value of one string of cash was cents mexican, from which it appears that something like of these coins were threaded on a string. twice we saw a wheelbarrow heavily loaded with strings of cash being transported through the streets of shanghai, lying exposed on the frame, suggesting chains of copper more than money. at one of the go-downs or warehouses in tsingtao, where freight was being transferred from a steamer, the carriers were receiving their pay in these coin. the pay-master stood in the doorway with half a bushel of loose cash in a grain sack at his feet. with one hand he received the bamboo tally-sticks from the stevedores and with the other paid the cash for service rendered. reference has been made to buying hot water. in a sampan managed by a woman and her daughter, who took us ashore, the middle section of the boat was furnished in the manner of a tiny sitting-room, and on the sideboard sat the complete embodiment of our fireless cookers, keeping boiled water hot for making tea. this device and the custom are here centuries old and throughout these countries boiled water, as tea, is the universal drink, adopted no doubt as a preventive measure against typhoid fever and allied diseases. few vegetables are eaten raw and nearly all foods are taken hot or recently cooked if not in some way pickled or salted. houseboat meat shops move among the many junks on the canals. these were provided with a compartment communicating freely with the canal water where the fish were kept alive until sold. at the street markets too, fish are kept alive in large tubs of water systematically aerated by the water falling from an elevated receptacle in a thin stream. a live fish may even be sliced before the eyes of a purchaser and the unsold portion returned to the water. poultry is largely retailed alive although we saw much of it dressed and cooked to a uniform rich brown, apparently roasted, hanging exposed in the markets of the very narrow streets in canton, shaded from the hot sun under awnings admitting light overhead through translucent oyster-shell latticework. perhaps these fowl had been cooked in hot oil and before serving would be similarly heated. at any rate it is perfectly clear that among these people many very fundamental sanitary practices are rigidly observed. one fact which we do not fully understand is that, wherever we went, house flies were very few. we never spent a summer with so little annoyance from them as this one in china, korea and japan. it may be that our experience was exceptional but, if so, it could not be ascribed to the season of our visit for we have found flies so numerous in southern florida early in april as to make the use of the fly brush at the table very necessary. if the scrupulous husbanding of waste refuse so universally practiced in these countries reduces the fly nuisance and this menace to health to the extent which our experience suggests, here is one great gain. we breed flies in countless millions each year, until they become an intolerable nuisance, and then expend millions of dollars on screens and fly poison which only ineffectually lessen the intensity and danger of the evil. the mechanical appliances in use on the canals and in the shops of canton demonstrate that the chinese possess constructive ability of a high order, notwithstanding so many of these are of the simplest forms. this statement is well illustrated in the simple yet efficient foot-power seen in fig. , where a father and his two sons are driving an irrigation pump, lifting water at the rate of seven and a half acre-inches per ten hours, and at a cost, including wage and food, of to cents, gold. here, too, were large stern-wheel passenger boats, capable of carrying thirty to one hundred people, propelled by the same foot-power but laid crosswise of the stern, the men working in long single or double lines, depending on the size of the boat. on these the fare was one cent, gold, for a fifteen mile journey, a rate one-thirtieth our two-cent railway tariff. the dredging and clearing of the canals and water channels in and about canton is likewise accomplished with the same foot-power, often by families living on the dredge boats. a dipper dredge is used, constructed of strong bamboo strips woven into the form of a sliding, two-horse road scraper, guided by a long bamboo handle. the dredge is drawn along the bottom by a rope winding about the projecting axle of the foot-power, propelled by three or more people. when the dipper reaches the axle and is raised from the water it is swung aboard, emptied and returned by means of a long arm like the old well sweep, operated by a cord depending from the lower end of the lever, the dipper swinging from the other. much of the mud so collected from the canals and channels of the city is taken to the rice and mulberry fields, many square miles of which occupy the surrounding country. thus the channels are kept open, the fields grow steadily higher above flood level, while their productive power is maintained by the plant food and organic matter carried in the sediment. the mechanical principle involved in the boy's button buzz was applied in canton and in many other places for operating small drills as well as in grinding and polishing appliances used in the manufacture of ornamental ware. the drill, as used for boring metal, is set in a straight shaft, often of bamboo, on the upper end of which is mounted a circular weight. the drill is driven by a pair of strings with one end attached just beneath the momentum weight and the other fastened at the ends of a cross hand-bar, having a hole at its center through which the shaft carrying the drill passes. holding the drill in position for work and turning the shaft, the two cords are wrapped about it in such a manner that simple downward pressure on the hand bar held in the two hands unwinds the cords and thus revolves the drill. relieving the pressure at the proper time permits the momentum of the revolving weight to rewind the cords and the next downward pressure brings the drill again into service. iv up the si-kiang, west river on the morning of march th we took passage on the nanning for wuchow, in kwangsi province, a journey of miles up the west river, or sikiang. the nanning is one of two english steamers making regular trips between the two places, and it was the sister boat which in the summer of was attacked by pirates on one of her trips and all of the officers and first class passengers killed while at dinner. the cause of this attack, it is said, or the excuse for it, was threatened famine resulting from destructive floods which had ruined the rice and mulberry crops of the great delta region and had prevented the carrying of manure and bean cake as fertilizers to the tea fields in the hill lands beyond, thus bringing ruin to three of the great staple crops of the region. to avoid the recurrence of such tragedies the first class quarters on the nanning had been separated from the rest of the ship by heavy iron gratings thrown across the decks and over the hatchways. armed guards stood at the locked gateways, and swords were hanging from posts under the awnings of the first cabin quarters, much as saw and ax in our passenger coaches. both british and chinese gunboats were patrolling the river; all chinese passengers were searched for concealed weapons as they came aboard, even though government soldiers, and all arms taken into custody until the end of the journey. several of the large chinese merchant junks which were passed, carrying valuable cargoes on the river, were armed with small cannon and when riding by rail from canton to sam shui, a government pirate detective was in our coach. the sikiang is one of the great rivers of china and indeed of the world. its width at wuchow at low water was nearly a mile and our steamer anchored in twenty-four feet of water to a floating dock made fast by huge iron chains reaching three hundred feet up the slope to the city proper, thus providing for a rise of twenty-six feet in the river at its flood stage during the rainy season. in a narrow section of river where it winds through shui hing gorge, the water at low stage has a depth of more than twenty-five fathoms, too deep for anchorage, so in times of prospective fog, boats wait for clearing weather. fluctuations in the height of the river limit vessels passing up to wuchow to those drawing six and a half feet of water during the low stage, and at high stage to those drawing sixteen feet. when the west river emerges from the high lands, with its burden of silt, to join its waters with those of the north and east rivers, it has entered a vast delta plain some eighty miles from east to west and nearly as many from north to south, and this has been canalized, diked, drained and converted into the most productive of fields, bearing three or more crops each year. as we passed westward through this delta region the broad flat fields, surrounded by dikes to protect them against high water, were being plowed and fitted for the coming crop of rice. in many places the dikes which checked off the fields were planted with bananas and in the distance gave the appearance of extensive orchards completely occupying the ground. except for the water and the dikes it was easy to imagine that we were traversing one of our western prairie sections in the early spring, at seeding time, the scattered farm villages here easily suggested distant farmsteads; but a nearer approach to the houses showed that the roofs and sides were thatched with rice straw and stacks were very numerous about the buildings. many tide gates were set in the dikes, often with double trunks. at times we approached near enough to the fields to see how they were laid out. from the gates long canals, six to eight feet wide, led back sometimes eighty or a hundred rods. across these and at right angles, head channels were cut and between them the fields were plowed in long straight lands some two rods wide, separated by water furrows. many of the fields were bearing sugar cane standing eight feet high. the chinese do no sugar refining but boil the sap until it will solidify, when it is run into cakes resembling chocolate or our brown maple sugar. immense quantities of sugar cane, too, are exported to the northern provinces, in bundles wrapped with matting or other cover, for the retail markets where it is sold, the canes being cut in short sections and sometimes peeled, to be eaten from the hands as a confection. much of the way this water-course was too broad to permit detailed study of field conditions and crops, even with a glass. in such sections the recent dikes often have the appearance of being built from limestone blocks but a closer view showed them constructed from blocks of the river silt cut and laid in walls with slightly sloping faces. in time however the blocks weather and the dikes become rounded earthen walls. we passed two men in a boat, in charge of a huge flock of some hundreds of yellow ducklings. anchored to the bank was a large houseboat provided with an all-around, over-hanging rim and on board was a stack of rice straw and other things which constituted the floating home of the ducks. both ducks and geese are reared in this manner in large numbers by the river population. when it is desired to move to another feeding ground a gang plank is put ashore and the flock come on board to remain for the night or to be landed at another place. about five hours journey westward in this delta plain, where the fields lie six to ten feet above the present water stage, we reached the mulberry district. here the plants are cultivated in rows about four feet apart, having the habit of small shrubs rather than of trees, and so much resembling cotton that our first impression was that we were in an extensive cotton district. on the lower lying areas, surrounded by dikes, some fields were laid out in the manner of the old italian or english water meadows, with a shallow irrigation furrow along the crest of the bed and much deeper drainage ditches along the division line between them. mulberries were occupying the ground before the freshly cut trenches we saw were dug, and all the surface between the rows had been evenly overlaid with the fresh earth removed with the spade, the soil lying in blocks essentially unbroken. in fig. may be seen the mulberry crop on a similarly treated surface, between canton and samshui, with the earth removed from the trenches laid evenly over the entire surface between and around the plants, as it came from the spade. at frequent intervals along the river, paths and steps were seen leading to the water and within a distance of a quarter of a mile we counted thirty-one men and women carrying mud in baskets on bamboo poles swung across their shoulders, the mud being taken from just above the water line. the disposition of this material we could not see as it was carried beyond a rise in ground. we have little doubt that the mulberry fields were being covered with it. it was here that a rain set in and almost like magic the fields blossomed out with great numbers of giant rain hats and kittysols, where people had been unobserved before. from one o'clock until six in the afternoon we had traveled continuously through these mulberry fields stretching back miles from our line of travel on either hand, and the total acreage must have been very large. but we had now nearly reached the margin of the delta and the mulberries changed to fields of grain, beans, peas and vegetables. after leaving the delta region the balance of the journey to wuchow was through a hill country, the slopes rising steeply from near the river bank, leaving relatively little tilled or readily tillable land. rising usually five hundred to a thousand feet, the sides and summits of the rounded, soil-covered hills were generally clothed with a short herbaceous growth and small scattering trees, oftenest pine, four to sixteen feet high, fig. being a typical landscape of the region. in several sections along the course of this river there are limited areas of intense erosion where naked gulleys of no mean magnitude have developed but these were exceptions and we were continually surprised at the remarkable steepness of the slopes, with convexly rounded contours almost everywhere, well mantled with soil, devoid of gulleys and completely covered with herbaceous growth dotted with small trees. the absence of forest growth finds its explanation in human influence rather than natural conditions. throughout the hill-land section of this mighty river the most characteristic and persistent human features were the stacks of brush-wood and the piles of stove wood along the banks or loaded upon boats and barges for the market. the brush-wood was largely made from the boughs of pine, tied into bundles and stacked like grain. the stove wood was usually round, peeled and made from the limbs and trunks of trees two to five inches in diameter. all this fuel was coming to the river from the back country, sent down along steep slides which in the distance resemble paths leading over hills but too steep for travel. the fuel was loaded upon large barges, the boughs in the form of stacks to shed rain but with a tunnel leading into the house of the boat about which they were stacked, while the wood was similarly corded about the dwelling, as seen in fig. . the wood was going to canton and other delta cities while the pine boughs were taken to the lime and cement kilns, many of which were located along the river. absolutely the whole tree, including the roots and the needles, is saved and burned; no waste is permitted. the up-river cargo of the nanning was chiefly matting rush, taken on at canton, tied in bundles like sheaves of wheat. it is grown upon the lower, newer delta lands by methods of culture similar to those applied to rice, fig. showing a field as seen in japan. the rushes were being taken to one of the country villages on a tributary of the sikiang and the steamer was met by a flotilla of junks from this village, some forty-five miles up the stream, where the families live who do the weaving. on the return trip the flotilla again met the steamer with a cargo of the woven matting. in keeping record of packages transferred the chinese use a simple and unique method. each carrier, with his two bundles, received a pair of tally sticks. at the gang-plank sat a man with a tally-case divided into twenty compartments, each of which could receive five, but no more, tallies. as the bundles left the steamer the tallies were placed in the tally-case until it contained one hundred, when it was exchanged for another. wuchow is a city of some , inhabitants, standing back on the higher ground, not readily visible from the steamer landing nor from the approach on the river. on the foreground, across which stretched the anchor chains of the dock, was living a floating population, many in shelters less substantial than indian wigwams, but engaged in a great variety of work, and many water buffalo had been tied for the night along the anchor chains. before july much of this area would lie beneath the flood waters of the sikiang. here a ship builder was using his simple, effective bow-brace, boring holes for the dowel pins in the planking for his ship, and another was bending the plank to the proper curvature. the bow-brace consisted of a bamboo stalk carrying the bit at one end and a shoulder rest at the other. pressing the bit to its work with the shoulder, it was driven with the string of a long bow wrapped once around the stalk by drawing the bow back and forth, thus rapidly and readily revolving the bit. the bending of the long, heavy plank, four inches thick and eight inches wide, was more simple still, it was saturated with water and one end raised on a support four feet above the ground. a bundle of burning rice straw moved along the under side against the wet wood had the effect of steaming the wood and the weight of the plank caused it to gradually bend into the shape desired. bamboo poles are commonly bent or straightened in this manner to suit any need and fig. shows a wooden fork shaped in the manner described from a small tree having three main branches. this fork is in the hands of my interpreter and was used by the woman standing at the right, in turning wheat. when the old ship builder had finished shaping his plank he sat down on the ground for a smoke. his pipe was one joint of bamboo stem a foot long, nearly two inches in diameter and open at one end. in the closed end, at one side, a small hole was bored for draft. a charge of tobacco was placed in the bottom, the lips pressed into the open end and the pipe lighted by suction, holding a lighted match at the small opening. to enjoy his pipe the bowl rested on the ground between his legs. with his lips in the bowl and a long breath, he would completely fill his lungs, retaining the smoke for a time, then slowly expire and fill the lungs again, after an interval of natural breathing. on returning to canton we went by rail, with an interpreter, to samshui, visiting fields along the way, and fig. is a view of one landscape. the woman was picking roses among tidy beds of garden vegetables. beyond her and in front of the near building are two rows of waste receptacles. in the center background is a large "go-down", in function that of our cold storage warehouse and in part that of our grain elevator for rice. in them, too, the wealthy store their fur-lined winter garments for safe keeping. these are numerous in this portion of china and the rank of a city is indicated by their number. the conical hillock is a large near-by grave mound and many others serrate the sky line on the hill beyond. in the next landscape, fig. , a crop of winter peas, trained to canes, are growing on ridges among the stubble of the second crop of rice, in front is one canal, the double ridge behind is another and a third canal extends in front of the houses. already preparations were being made for the first crop of rice, fields were being flooded and fertilized. one such is seen in fig. , where a laborer was engaged at the time in bringing stable manure, wading into the water to empty the baskets. two crops of rice are commonly grown each year in southern china and during the winter and early spring, grain, cabbage, rape, peas, beans, leeks and ginger may occupy the fields as a third or even fourth crop, making the total year's product from the land very large; but the amount of thought, labor and fertilizers given to securing these is even greater and beyond anything americans will endure. how great these efforts are will be appreciated from what is seen in fig. , representing two fields thrown into high ridges, planted to ginger and covered with straw. all of this work is done by hand and when the time for rice planting comes every ridge will again be thrown down and the surface smoothed to a water level. even when the ridges and beds are not thrown down for the crops of rice, the furrows and the beds will change places so that all the soil is worked over deeply and mainly through hand labor. the statement so often made, that these people only barely scratch the surface of their fields with the crudest of tools is very far from the truth, for their soils are worked deeply and often, notwithstanding the fact that their plowing, as such, may be shallow. through dr. john blumann of the missionary hospital at tungkun, east from canton, we learned that the good rice lands there a few years ago sold at $ to $ per acre but that prices are rising rapidly. the holdings of the better class of farmers there are ten to fifteen mow--one and two-thirds to two and a half acres--upon which are maintained families numbering six to twelve. the day's wage of a carpenter or mason is eleven to thirteen cents of our currency, and board is not included, but a day's ration for a laboring man is counted worth fifteen cents, mexican, or less than seven cents, gold. fish culture is practiced in both deep and shallow basins, the deep permanent ones renting as high as $ gold, per acre. the shallow basins which can be drained in the dry season are used for fish only during the rainy period, being later drained and planted to some crop. the permanent basins have often come to be ten or twelve feet deep, increasing with long usage, for they are periodically drained by pumping and the foot or two of mud which has accumulated, removed and sold as fertilizer to planters of rice and other crops. it is a common practice, too, among the fish growers, to fertilize the ponds, and in case a foot path leads alongside, screens are built over the water to provide accommodation for travelers. fish reared in the better fertilized ponds bring a higher price in the market. the fertilizing of the water favors a stronger growth of food forms, both plant and animal, upon which the fish live and they are better nourished, making a more rapid growth, giving their flesh better qualities, as is the case with well fed animals. in the markets where fish are exposed for sale they are often sliced in halves lengthwise and the cut surface smeared with fresh blood. in talking with dr. blumann as to the reason for this practice he stated that the chinese very much object to eating meat that is old or tainted and that he thought the treatment simply had the effect of making the fish look fresher. i question whether this treatment with fresh blood may not have a real antiseptic effect and very much doubt that people so shrewd as the chinese would be misled by such a ruse. v extent of canalization and surface fitting of fields on the evening of march th we left canton for hongkong and the following day embarked again on the tosa maru for shanghai. although our steamer stood so far to sea that we were generally out of sight of land except for some off-shore islands, the water was turbid most of the way after we had crossed the tropic of cancer off the mouth of the han river at swatow. over a sea bottom measuring more than six hundred miles northward along the coast, and perhaps fifty miles to sea, unnumbered acre-feet of the richest soil of china are being borne beyond the reach of her four hundred millions of people and the children to follow them. surely it must be one of the great tasks of future statesmanship, education and engineering skill to divert larger amounts of such sediments close along inshore in such manner as to add valuable new land annually to the public domain, not alone in china but in all countries where large resources of this type are going to waste. in the vast cantonese delta plains which we had just left, in the still more extensive ones of the yangtse kiang to which we were now going, and in those of the shifting hwang ho further north, centuries of toiling millions have executed works of almost incalculable magnitude, fundamentally along such lines as those just suggested. they have accomplished an enormous share of these tasks by sheer force of body and will, building levees, digging canals, diverting the turbid waters of streams through them and then carrying the deposits of silt and organic growth out upon the fields, often borne upon the shoulders of men in the manner we have seen. it is well nigh impossible, by word or map, to convey an adequate idea of the magnitude of the systems of canalization and delta and other lowland reclamation work, or of the extent of surface fitting of fields which have been effected in china, korea and japan through the many centuries, and which are still in progress. the lands so reclaimed and fitted constitute their most enduring asset and they support their densest populations. in one of our journeys by houseboat on the delta canals between shanghai and hangchow, in china, over a distance of miles, we made a careful record of the number and dimensions of lateral canals entering and leaving the main one along which our boat-train was traveling. this record shows that in miles, beginning north of kashing and extending south to hangchow, there entered from the west and there left on the coast side canals. the average width of these canals, measured along the water line, we estimated at and feet respectively on the two sides. the height of the fields above the water level ranged from four to twelve feet, during the april and may stage of water. the depth of water, after we entered the grand canal, often exceeded six feet and our best judgment would place the average depth of all canals in this part of china at more than eight feet below the level of the fields. in fig. , representing an area of square miles in the region traversed, all lines shown are canals, but scarcely more than one-third of those present are shown on the map. between a, where we began our records, before reaching kashing, and b, near the left margin of the map, there were forty-three canals leading in from the up-country side, instead of the eight shown, and on the coast side there were eighty-six leading water out into the delta plain toward the coast, instead of the twelve shown. again, on one of our trips by rail, from shanghai to nanking, we made a similar record of the number of canals seen from the train, close along the track, and the notes show, in a distance of miles, canals between lungtan and nansiang. this is an average of more than three canals per mile for this region and that between shanghai and hangchow. the extent, nature and purpose of these vast systems of internal improvement may be better realized through a study of the next two sketch maps. the first, fig. , represents an area by miles, of which the last illustration is the portion enclosed in the small rectangle. on this area there are shown , miles of canals and only about one-third of the canals shown in fig. are laid down on this map, and according to our personal observations there are three times as many canals as are shown on the map of which fig. represents a part. it is probable, therefore, that there exists today in the area of fig. not less than , miles of canals. in the next illustration, fig. , an area of northeast china, by miles, is represented. the unshaded land area covers nearly , square miles of alluvial plain. this plain is so level that at ichang, nearly a thousand miles up the yangtse, the elevation is only feet above the sea. the tide is felt on the river to beyond wuhu, miles from the coast. during the summer the depth of water in the yangtse is sufficient to permit ocean vessels drawing twenty-five feet of water to ascend six hundred miles to hankow, and for smaller steamers to go on to ichang, four hundred miles further. the location, in this vast low delta and coastal plain, of the system of canals already described, is indicated by the two rectangles in the south-east corner of the sketch map, fig. . the heavy barred black line extending from hangchow in the south to tientsin in the north represents the grand canal which has a length of more than eight hundred miles. the plain, east of this canal, as far north as the mouth of the hwang ho in , is canalized much as is the area shown in fig. . so, too, is a large area both sides of the present mouth of the same river in shantung and chihli, between the canal and the coast. westward, up the yangtse valley, the provinces of anhwei, kiangsi, hunan and hupeh have very extensive canalized tracts, probably exceeding , square miles in area, and figs. and are two views in this more western region. still further west, in szechwan province, is the chengtu plain, thirty by seventy miles, with what has been called "the most remarkable irrigation system in china." westward beyond the limits of the sketch map, up the hwang ho valley, there is a reach of miles of irrigated lands about ninghaifu, and others still farther west, at lanchowfu and at suchow where the river has attained an elevation of , feet, in kansu province; and there is still to be named the great canton delta region. a conservative estimate would place the miles of canals and leveed rivers in china, korea and japan equal to eight times the number represented in fig. . fully , miles in all. forty canals across the united states from east to west and sixty from north to south would not equal, in number of miles those in these three countries today. indeed, it is probable that this estimate is not too large for china alone. as adjuncts to these vast canalization works there have been enormous amounts of embankment, dike and levee construction. more than three hundred miles of sea wall alone exist in the area covered by the sketch map, fig. . the east bank of the grand canal, between yangchow and hwaianfu, is itself a great levee, holding back the waters to the west above the eastern plain, diverting them south, into the yangtse kiang. but it is also provided with spillways for use in times of excessive flood, permitting waters to discharge eastward. such excess waters however are controlled by another dike with canal along its west side, some forty miles to the east, impounding the water in a series of large lakes until it may gradually drain away. this area is seen in fig. , north of the yangtse river. along the banks of the yangtse, and for many miles along the hwang ho, great levees have been built, some-times in reinforcing series of two or three at different distances back from the channel where the stream bed is above the adjacent country, in order to prevent widespread disaster and to limit the inundated areas in times of unusual flood. in the province of hupeh, where the han river flows through two hundred miles of low country, this stream is diked on both sides throughout the whole distance, and in a portion of its course the height of the levees reaches thirty feet or more. again, in the canton delta region there are other hundreds of miles of sea wall and dikes, so that the aggregate mileage of this type of construction works in the empire can only be measured in thousands of miles. in addition to the canal and levee construction works there are numerous impounding reservoirs which are brought into requisition to control overflow waters from the great streams. some of these reservoirs, like tungting lake in hupeh and poyang in hunan, have areas of , and , square miles respectively and during the heaviest rainy seasons each may rise through twenty to thirty feet, then there are other large and small lakes in the coastal plain giving an aggregate reservoir area exceeding , square miles, all of which are brought into service in controlling flood waters, all of which are steadily filling with the sediments brought from the far away uncultivable mountain slopes and which are ultimately destined to become rich alluvial plains, doubtless to be canalized in the manner we have seen. there is still another phase of these vast construction works which has been of the greatest moment in increasing the maintenance capacity of the empire,--the wresting from the flood waters of the enormous volumes of silt which they carry, depositing it over the flooded areas, in the canals and along the shores in such manner as to add to the habitable and cultivable land. reference has been made to the rapid growth of chungming island in the mouth of the yangtse kiang, and the million people now finding homes on the square miles of newly made land which now has its canals, as may be seen in the upper margin of fig. . the city of shanghai, as its name signifies, stood originally on the seashore, which has now grown twenty miles to the northward and to the eastward. in b. c. the town of putai in shantung stood one-third of a mile from the sea, but in it was forty-seven miles inland, and is forty-eight miles from the shore today. sienshuiku, on the pei ho, stood upon the seashore in a. d. we passed the city, on our way to tientsin, eighteen miles inland. the dotted line laid in from the coast of the gulf of chihli in fig. marks one historic shore line and indicates a general growth of land eighteen miles to seaward. besides these actual extensions of the shore lines the centuries of flooding of lakes and low lying lands has so filled many depressions as to convert large areas of swamp into cultivated fields. not only this, but the spreading of canal mud broadcast over the encircled fields has had two very important effects,--namely, raising the level of the low lying fields, giving them better drainage and so better physical condition, and adding new plant food in the form of virgin soil of the richest type, thus contributing to the maintenance of soil fertility, high maintenance capacity and permanent agriculture through all the centuries. these operations of maintenance and improvement had a very early inception; they appear to have persisted throughout the recorded history of the empire and are in vogue today. canals of the type illustrated in figs. and have been built between and , both on the extensions of chungming island and the newly formed main land to the north, as is shown by comparison of stieler's atlas, revised in , with the recent german survey. earlier than b. c., more than years ago, emperor yao appointed "the great" yu "superintendent of works" and entrusted him with the work of draining off the waters of disastrous floods and of canalizing the rivers, and he devoted thirteen years to this work. this great engineer is said to have written several treatises on agriculture and drainage, and was finally called, much against his wishes, to serve as emperor during the last seven years of his life. the history of the hwang ho is one of disastrous floods and shiftings of its course, which have occurred many times in the years since before the time of the great yu, who perhaps began the works perpetuated today. between a. d. and the hwang ho emptied into the yellow sea south of the highlands of shantung, but in that year, when in unusual flood, it broke through the north levees and finally took its present course, emptying again into the gulf of chihli, some three hundred miles further north. some of these shiftings of course of the hwang ho and of the yangtse kiang are indicated in dotted lines on the sketch map, fig. , where it may he seen that the hwang ho during years, poured its waters into the sea as far north as tientsin, through the mouth of the pei ho, four hundred miles to the northward of its mouth in . this mighty river is said to carry at low stage, past the city of tsinan in shantung, no less than , cubic yards of water per second, and three times this volume when running at flood. this is water sufficient to inundate thirty-three square miles of level country ten feet deep in twenty-four hours. what must be said of the mental status of a people who for forty centuries have measured their strength against such a titan racing past their homes above the level of their fields, confined only between walls of their own construction? while they have not always succeeded in controlling the river, they have never failed to try again. in this river broke its banks, inundating a vast. area, bringing death to a million people. again, as late as , fifteen hundred villages to the northeast of tsinan and a much larger area to the southwest of the same city were devastated by it, and it is such events as these which have won for the river the names "china's sorrow," "the ungovernable" and "the scourge of the sons of han." the building of the grand canal appears to have been a comparatively recent event in chinese history. the middle section, between the yangtse and tsingkiangpu, is said to have been constructed about the sixth century b. c.; the southern section, between chingkiang and hangchow, during the years to a. d.; but the northern section, from the channel of the hwang ho deserted in , to tientsin, was not built until the years - . while this canal has been called by the chinese yu ho (imperial river), yun ho (transport river) or yunliang ho (tribute bearing river) and while it has connected the great rivers coming down from the far interior into a great water-transport system, this feature of construction may have been but a by-product of the great dominating purpose which led to the vast internal improvements in the form of canals, dikes, levees and impounding reservoirs so widely scattered, so fully developed and so effectively utilized. rather the master purpose must have been maintenance for the increasing flood of humanity. and i am willing to grant to the great yu, with his finger on the pulse of the nation, the power to project his vision four thousand years into the future of his race and to formulate some of the measures which might he inaugurated to grow with the years and make certain perpetual maintenance for those to follow. the exhaustion of cultivated fields must always have been the most fundamental, vital and difficult problem of all civilized people and it appears clear that such canalization as is illustrated in figs. and may have been primarily initial steps in the reclamation of delta and overflow lands. at any rate, whether deliberately so planned or not, the canalization of the delta and overflow plains of china has been one of the most fundamental and fruitful measures for the conservation of her national resources that they could have taken, for we are convinced that this oldest nation in the world has thus greatly augmented the extension of its coastal plains, conserving and building out of the waste of erosion wrested from the great streams, hundreds of square miles of the richest and most enduring of soils, and we have little doubt that were a full and accurate account given of human influence upon the changes in this remarkable region during the last four thousand years it would show that these gigantic systems of canalization have been matters of slow, gradual growth, often initiated and always profoundly influenced by the labors of the strong, patient, persevering, thoughtful but ever silent husband-men in their efforts to acquire homes and to maintain the productive power of their fields. nothing appears more clear than that the greatest material problem which can engage the best thought of china today is that of perfecting, extending and perpetuating the means for controlling her flood waters, for better draining of her vast areas of low land, and for utilizing the tremendous loads of silt borne by her streams more effectively in fertilizing existing fields and in building and reclaiming new land. with her millions of people needing homes and anxious for work; who have done so much in land building, in reclamation and in the maintenance of soil fertility, the government should give serious thought to the possibility of putting large numbers of them at work, effectively directed by the best engineering skill. it must now be entirely practicable, with engineering skill and mechanical appliances, to put the hwang ho, and other rivers of china subject to overflow, completely under control. with the hwang ho confined to its channel, the adjacent low lands can be better drained by canalization and freed from the accumulating saline deposits which are rendering them sterile. warping may be resorted to during the flood season to raise the level of adjacent low-lying fields, rendering them at the same time more fertile. where the river is running above the adjacent plains there is no difficulty in drawing off the turbid water by gravity, under controlled conditions, into diked basins, and even in compelling the river to buttress its own levees. there is certainly great need and great opportunity for china to make still better and more efficient her already wonderful transportation canals and those devoted to drainage, irrigation and fertilization. in the united states, along the same lines, now that we are considering the development of inland waterways, the subject should be surveyed broadly and much careful study may well be given to the works these old people have developed and found serviceable through so many centuries. the mississippi is annually bearing to the sea nearly , acre-feet of the most fertile sediment, and between levees along a raised bed through two hundred miles of country subject to inundation. the time is here when there should he undertaken a systematic diversion of a large part of this fertile soil over the swamp areas, building them into well drained, cultivable, fertile fields provided with waterways to serve for drainage, irrigation, fertilization and transportation. these great areas of swamp land may thus be converted into the most productive rice and sugar plantations to be found anywhere in the world, and the area made capable of maintaining many millions of people as long as the mississippi endures, bearing its burden of fertile sediment. but the conservation and utilization of the wastes of soil erosion, as applied in the delta plain of china, stupendous as this work has been, is nevertheless small when measured by the savings which accrue from the careful and extensive fitting of fields so largely practiced, which both lessens soil erosion and permits a large amount of soluble and suspended matter in the run-off to be applied to, and retained upon, the fields through their extensive systems of irrigation. mountainous and hilly as are the lands of japan, , square miles of her cultivated fields in the main islands of honshu, kyushu and shikoku have been carefully graded to water level areas bounded by narrow raised rims upon which sixteen or more inches of run-off water, with its suspended and soluble matters, may be applied, a large part of which is retained on the fields or utilized by the crop, while surface erosion is almost completely prevented. the illustrations, figs. , and show the application of the principle to the larger and more level fields, and in figs. , and may be seen the practice on steep slopes. if the total area of fields graded practically to a water level in japan aggregates , square miles, the total area thus surface fitted in china must be eight or tenfold this amount. such enormous field erosion as is tolerated at the present time in our southern and south atlantic states is permitted nowhere in the far east, so far as we observed, not even where the topography is much steeper. the tea orchards as we saw them on the steeper slopes, not level-terraced, are often heavily mulched with straw which makes erosion, even by heavy rains impossible, while the treatment retains the rain where it falls, giving the soil opportunity to receive it under the impulse of both capillarity and gravity, and with it the soluble ash ingredients leached from the straw. the straw mulches we saw used in this manner were often six to eight inches deep, thus constituting a dressing of not less than six tons per acre, carrying pounds of soluble potassium and pounds of phosphorus. the practice, therefore, gives at once a good fertilizing, the highest conservation and utilization of rainfall, and a complete protection against soil erosion. it is a multum in parvo treatment which characterizes so many of the practices of these people, which have crystallized from twenty centuries of high tension experience. in the kiangsu and chekiang provinces as elsewhere in the densely populated portions of the far east, we found almost all of the cultivated fields very nearly level or made so by grading. instances showing the type of this grading in a comparatively level country are seen in figs. and . by this preliminary surface fitting of the fields these people have reduced to the lowest possible limit the waste of soil fertility by erosion and surface leaching. at the same time they are able to retain upon the field, uniformly distributed over it, the largest part of the rainfall practicable, and to compel a much larger proportion of the necessary run off to leave by under-drainage than would be possible otherwise, conveying the plant food developed in the surface soil to the roots of the crops, while they make possible a more complete absorption and retention by the soil of the soluble plant food materials not taken up. this same treatment also furnishes the best possible conditions for the application of water to the fields when supplemental irrigation would be helpful, and for the withdrawal of surplus rainfall by surface drainage, should this be necessary. besides this surface fitting of fields there is a wide application of additional methods aiming to conserve both rainfall and soil fertility, one of which is illustrated in fig. , showing one end of a collecting reservoir. there were three of these reservoirs in tandem, connected with each other by surface ditches and with an adjoining canal. about the reservoir the level field is seen to be thrown into beds with shallow furrows between the long narrow ridges. the furrows are connected by a head drain around the margin of the reservoir and separated from it by a narrow raised rim. such a reservoir may be six to ten feet deep but can be completely drained only by pumping or by evaporation during the dry season. into such reservoirs the excess surface water is drained where all suspended matter carried from the field collects and is returned, either directly as an application of mud or as material used in composts. in the preparation of composts, pits are dug near the margin of the reservoir, as seen in the illustration, and into them are thrown coarse manure and any roughage in the form of stubble or other refuse which may be available, these materials being saturated with the soft mud dipped from the bottom of the reservoir. in all of the provinces where canals are abundant they also serve as reservoirs for collecting surface washings and along their banks great numbers of compost pits are maintained and repeatedly filled during the season, for use on the fields as the crops are changed. fig. shows two such pits on the bank of a canal, already filled. in other cases, as in the shantung province, illustrated in fig. , the surface of the field may be thrown into broad leveled lands separated and bounded by deep and wide trenches into which the excess water of very heavy rains may collect. as we saw them there was no provision for draining the trenches and the water thus collected either seeps away or evaporates, or it may be returned in part by underflow and capillary rise to the soil from which it was collected, or be applied directly for irrigation by pumping. in this province the rains may often be heavy but the total fall for the year is small, being little more than twenty-four inches hence there is the greatest need for its conservation, and this is carefully practiced. vi some customs of the common people the tosa maru brought us again into shanghai march th, just in time for the first letters from home. a ricksha man carried us and our heavy valise at a smart trot from the dock to the astor house more than a mile, for . cents, u. s. currency, and more than the conventional price for the service rendered. on our way we passed several loaded carryalls of the type seen in fig. , on which women were riding for a fare one-tenth that we had paid, but at a slower pace and with many a jolt. the ringing chorus which came loud and clear when yet half a block away announced that the pile drivers were still at work on the foundation for an annex to the astor house, and so were they on may th when we returned from the shantung province, days after we saw them first, but with the task then practically completed. had the eighteen men labored continuously through this interval, the cost of their services to the contractor would have been but $ . . with these conditions the engine-driven pile driver could not compete. all ordinary labor here receives a low wage. in the chekiang province farm labor employed by the year received $ and board, ten years ago, but now is receiving $ . this is at the rate of about $ . and $ . , gold, materially less than there is paid per month in the united states. at tsingtao in the shantung province a missionary was paying a chinese cook ten dollars per month, a man for general work nine dollars per month, and the cook's wife, for doing the mending and other family service, two dollars per month, all living at home and feeding themselves. this service rendered for $ . , gold, per month covers the marketing, all care of the garden and lawn as well as all the work in the house. missionaries in china find such servants reliable and satisfactory, and trust them with the purse and the marketing for the table, finding them not only honest but far better at a bargain and at economical selection than themselves. we had a soil tube made in the shops of a large english ship building and repair firm, employing many hundred chinese as mechanics, using the most modern and complex machinery, and the foreman stated that as soon as the men could understand well enough to take orders they were even better shop hands than the average in scotland and england. an educated chinese booking clerk at the soochow railway station in kiangsu province was receiving a salary of $ . , gold, per month. we had inquired the way to the elizabeth blake hospital and he volunteered to escort us and did so, the distance being over a mile. he would accept no compensation, and yet i was an entire stranger, without introduction of any kind. everywhere we went in china, the laboring people appeared generally happy and contented if they have something to do, and showed clearly that they were well nourished. the industrial classes are thoroughly organized, having had their guilds or labor unions for centuries and it is not at all uncommon for a laborer who is known to have violated the rules of his guild to be summarily dealt with or even to disappear without questions being asked. in going among the people, away from the lines of tourist travel, one gets the impression that everybody is busy or is in the harness ready to be busy. tramps of our hobo type have few opportunities here and we doubt if one exists in either of these countries. there are people physically disabled who are asking alms and there are organized charities to help them, but in proportion to the total population these appear to be fewer than in america or europe. the gathering of unfortunates and habitual beggars about public places frequented by people of leisure and means naturally leads tourists to a wrong judgment regarding the extent of these social conditions. nowhere among these densely crowded people, either chinese, japanese or korean, did we see one intoxicated, but among americans and europeans many instances were observed. all classes and both sexes use tobacco and the british-american tobacco company does a business in china amounting to millions of dollars annually. during five months among these people we saw but two children in a quarrel. the two little boys were having their trouble on nanking road, shanghai, where, grasping each other's pigtails, they tussled with a vengeance until the mother of one came and parted their ways. among the most frequent sights in the city streets are the itinerant vendors of hot foods and confections. stove, fuel, supplies and appliances may all be carried on the shoulders, swinging from a bamboo pole. the mother in fig. was quite likely thus supporting her family and the children are seen at lunch, dressed in the blue and white calico prints so generally worn by the young. the printing of this calico by the very ancient, simple yet effective method we witnessed in the farm village along the canal seen in fig. . this art, as with so many others in china, was the inheritance of the family we saw at work, handed down to them through many generations. the printer was standing at a rough work bench upon which a large heavy stone in cubical form served as a weight to hold in place a thoroughly lacquered sheet of tough cardboard in which was cut the pattern to appear in white on the cloth. beside the stone stood a pot of thick paste prepared from a mixture of lime and soy bean flour. the soy beans were being ground in one corner of the same room by a diminutive edition of such an outfit as seen in fig. . the donkey was working in his permanent abode and whenever off duty he halted before manger and feed. at the operator's right lay a bolt of white cotton cloth fixed to unroll and pass under the stencil, held stationary by the heavy weight. to print, the stencil was raised and the cloth brought to place under it. the paste was then deftly spread with a paddle over the surface and thus upon the cloth beneath wherever exposed through the openings in the stencil. this completes the printing of the pattern on one section of the bolt of cloth. the free end of the stencil is then raised, the cloth passed along the proper distance by hand and the stencil dropped in place for the next application. the paste is permitted to dry upon the cloth and when the bolt has been dipped into the blue dye the portions protected by the paste remain white. in this simple manner has the printing of calico been done for centuries for the garments of millions of children. from the ceiling of the drying room in this printery of olden times were hanging some hundreds of stencils bearing different patterns. in our great calico mills, printing hundreds of yards per minute, the mechanics and the chemistry differ only in detail of application and in dispatch, not in fundamental principle. in almost any direction we traveled outside the city, in the pleasant mornings when the air was still, the laying of warp for cotton cloth could be seen, to be woven later in the country homes. we saw this work in progress many times and in many places in the early morning, usually along some roadside or open place, as seen in fig. , but never later in the day. when the warp is laid each will be rolled upon its stretcher and removed to the house to be woven. in many places in kiangsu province batteries of the large dye pits were seen sunk in the fields and lined with cement. these were six to eight feet in diameter and four to five feet deep. in one case observed there were nine pits in the set. some of the pits were neatly sheltered beneath live arbors, as represented in fig. . but much of this spinning, weaving, dyeing and printing of late years is being displaced by the cheaper calicos of foreign make and most of the dye pits we saw were not now used for this purpose, the two in the illustration serving as manure receptacles. our interpreter stated however that there is a growing dissatisfaction with foreign goods on account of their lack of durability; and we saw many cases where the cloth dyed blue was being dried in large quantities on the grave lands. in another home for nearly an hour we observed a method of beating cotton and of laying it to serve as the body for mattresses and the coverlets for beds. this we could do without intrusion because the home was also the work shop and opened full width directly upon the narrow street. the heavy wooden shutters which closed the home at night were serving as a work bench about seven feet square, laid upon movable supports. there was barely room to work between it and the sidewalk without impeding traffic, and on the three other sides there was a floor space three or four feet wide. in the rear sat grandmother and wife while in and out the four younger children were playing. occupying the two sides of the room were receptacles filled with raw cotton and appliances for the work. there may have been a kitchen and sleeping room behind but no door, as such, was visible. the finished mattresses, carefully rolled and wrapped in paper, were suspended from the ceiling. on the improvised work table, with its top two feet above the floor, there had been laid in the morning before our visit, a mass of soft white cotton more than six feet square and fully twelve inches deep. on opposite sides of this table the father and his son, of twelve years, each twanged the string of their heavy bamboo bows, snapping the lint from the wads of cotton and flinging it broadcast in an even layer over the surface of the growing mattress, the two strings the while emitting tones pitched far below the hum of the bumblebee. the heavy bow was steadied by a cord secured around the body of the operator, allowing him to manage it with one hand and to move readily around his work in a manner different from the custom of the japanese seen in fig. . by this means the lint was expeditiously plucked and skillfully and uniformly laid, the twanging being effected by an appliance similar to that used in japan. repeatedly, taken in small bits from the barrel of cotton, the lint was distributed over the entire surface with great dexterity and uniformity, the mattress growing upward with perfectly vertical sides, straight edges and square corners. in this manner a thoroughly uniform texture is secured which compresses into a body of even thickness, free from hard places. the next step in building the mattress is even more simple and expeditious. a basket of long bobbins of roughly spun cotton was near the grandmother and probably her handiwork. the father took from the wall a slender bamboo rod like a fish-pole, six feet long, and selecting one of the spools, threaded the strand through an eye in the small end. with the pole and spool in one hand and the free end of the thread, passing through the eye, in the other, the father reached the thread across the mattress to the boy who hooked his finger over it, carrying it to one edge of the bed of cotton. while this was doing the father had whipped the pole back to his side and caught the thread over his own finger, bringing this down upon the cotton opposite his son. there was thus laid a double strand, but the pole continued whipping hack and forth across the bed, father and son catching the threads and bringing them to place on the cotton at the rate of forty to fifty courses per minute, and in a very short time the entire surface of the mattress had been laid with double strands. a heavy bamboo roller was next laid across the strands at the middle, passed carefully to one side, back again to the middle and then to the other edge. another layer of threads was then laid diagonally and this similarly pressed with the same roller; then another diagonally the other way and finally straight across in both directions. a similar network of strands had been laid upon the table before spreading the cotton. next a flat bottomed, circular, shallow basket-like form two feet in diameter was used to gently compress the material from twelve to six inches in thickness. the woven threads were now turned over the edge of the mattress on all sides and sewed down, after which, by means of two heavy solid wooden disks eighteen inches in diameter, father and son compressed the cotton until the thickness was reduced to three inches. there remained the task of carefully folding and wrapping the finished piece in oiled paper and of suspending it from the ceiling. on march th, when visiting the boone road and nanking road markets in shanghai, we had our first surprise regarding the extent to which vegetables enter into the daily diet of the chinese. we had observed long processions of wheelbarrow men moving from the canals through the streets carrying large loads of the green tips of rape in bundles a foot long and five inches in diameter. these had come from the country on boats each carrying tons of the succulent leaves and stems. we had counted as many as fifty wheelbarrow men passing a given point on the street in quick succession, each carrying to pounds of the green rape and moving so rapidly that it was not easy to keep pace with them, as we learned in following one of the trains during twenty minutes to its destination. during this time not a man in the train halted or slackened his pace. this rape is very extensively grown in the fields, the tips of the stems cut when tender and eaten, after being boiled or steamed, after the manner of cabbage. very large quantities are also packed with salt in the proportion of about twenty pounds of salt to one hundred pounds of the rape. this, fig. , and many other vegetables are sold thus pickled and used as relishes with rice, which invariably is cooked and served without salt or other seasoning. another field crop very extensively grown for human food, and partly as a source of soil nitrogen, is closely allied to our alfalfa. this is the medicago astragalus, two beds of which are seen in fig. . tender tips of the stems are gathered before the stage of blossoming is reached and served as food after boiling or steaming. it is known among the foreigners as chinese "clover." the stems are also cooked and then dried for use when the crop is out of season. when picked very young, wealthy chinese families pay an extra high price for the tender shoots, sometimes as much as to cents, our currency, per pound. the markets are thronged with people making their purchases in the early mornings, and the congested condition, with the great variety of vegetables, makes it almost as impressive a sight as billingsgate fish market in london. in the following table we give a list of vegetables observed there and the prices at which they were selling. ----------------------------------------------------------- list of vegetables displayed for sale in boone road market, shanghai, april th, , with prices expressed in u. s. currency.-- --------------------------------------------------------- cents lotus roots, per lb. . bamboo sprouts, per lb. . english cabbage, per lb. . olive greens, per lb. . white greens, per lb. . tee tsai, per lb. . chinese celery, per lb. . chinese clover, per lb. . chinese clover, very young, lb. . oblong white cabbage, per lb. . red beans, per lb. . yellow beans, per lb. . peanuts, per lb. . ground nuts, per lb. . cucumbers, per lb. . green pumpkin, per lb. . maize, shelled, per lb. . windsor beans, dry, per lb. . french lettuce, per head . hau tsai, per head . cabbage lettuce, per head . kale, per lb. . rape, per lb. . portuguese water cress, basket . shang tsor, basket . carrots, per lb. . string beans; per lb. . irish potatoes, per lb. . red onions, per lb. . long white turnips, per lb. . flat string beans, per lb. . small white turnips, bunch . onion stems, per lb. . lima beans, green, shelled, lb. . egg plants, per lb. . tomatoes, per lb. . small flat turnips, per lb. . small red beets, per lb. . artichokes, per lb. . white beans, dry, per lb. . radishes, per lb. . garlic, per lb. . kohl rabi, per lb. . mint, per lb. . leeks, per lb. . large celery, bleached, bunch . sprouted peas, per lb. . sprouted beans, per lb. . parsnips, per lb. . ginger roots, per lb. . water chestnuts, per lb. . large sweet potatoes, per lb. . small sweet potatoes, per lb. . onion sprouts, per lb. . spinach, per lb. . fleshy stemmed lettuce, peeled, per lb. . fleshy stemmed lettuce, unpeeled, per lb. . bean curd, per lb. . shantung walnuts, per lb. . duck eggs, dozen . hen's eggs, dozen . goat's meat, per lb. . pork, per lb. . hens, live weight, per lb. . ducks, live weight, per lb. . cockerels, live weight, per lb. . -- --------------------------------------------------------- this long list, made up chiefly of fresh vegetables displayed for sale on one market day, is by no means complete. the record is only such as was made in passing down one side and across one end of the market occupying nearly one city block. nearly everything is sold by weight and the problem of correct weights is effectively solved by each purchaser carrying his own scales, which he unhesitatingly uses in the presence of the dealer. these scales are made on the pattern of the old time steelyards but from slender rods of wood or bamboo provided with a scale and sliding poise, the suspensions all being made with strings. we stood by through the purchasing of two cockerels and the dickering over their weight. a dozen live birds were under cover in a large, open-work basket. the customer took out the birds one by one, examining them by touch, finally selecting two, the price being named. these the dealer tied together by their feet and weighed them, announcing the result; whereupon the customer checked the statement with his own scales. an animated dialogue followed, punctuated with many gesticulations and with the customer tossing the birds into the basket and turning to go away while the dealer grew more earnest. the purchaser finally turned back, and again balancing the roosters upon his scales, called a bystander to read the weight, and then flung them in apparent disdain at the dealer, who caught them and placed them in the customer's basket. the storm subsided and the dealer accepted c, mexican, for the two birds. they were good sized roosters and must have dressed more than three pounds each, yet for the two he paid less than cents in our currency. bamboo sprouts are very generally used in china, korea and japan and when one sees them growing they suggest giant stalks of asparagus, some of them being three and even five inches in diameter and a foot in height at the stage for cutting. they are shipped in large quantities from province to province where they do not grow or when they are out of season. those we saw in nagasaki referred to in fig. , had come from canton or swatow or possibly formosa. the form, foliage and bloom of the bamboo give the most beautiful effects in the landscape, especially when grouped with tree forms. they are usually cultivated in small clumps about dwellings in places not otherwise readily utilized, as seen in fig. . like the asparagus bud, the bamboo sprout grows to its full height between april and august, even when it exceeds thirty or even sixty feet in height. the buds spring from fleshy underground stems or roots whose stored nourishment permits this rapid growth, which in its earlier stages may exceed twelve inches in twenty-four hours. but while the full size of the plant is attained the first season, three or four years are required to ripen and harden the wood sufficiently to make it suitable for the many uses to which the stems are put. it would seem that the time must come when some of the many forms of bamboo will be introduced and largely grown in many parts of this country. lotus roots form another article of diet largely used and widely cultivated from canton to tokyo. these are seen in the lower section of fig. , and the plants in bloom in fig. , growing in water, their natural habitat. the lotus is grown in permanent ponds not readily drained for rice or other crops, and the roots are widely shipped. sprouted beans and peas of many kinds and the sprouts of other vegetables, such as onions, are very generally seen in the markets of both china and japan, at least during the late winter and early spring, and are sold as foods, having different flavors and digestive qualities, and no doubt with important advantageous effects in nutrition. ginger is another. crop which is very widely and extensively cultivated. it is generally displayed in the market in the root form. no one thing was more generally hawked about the streets of china than the water chestnut. this is a small corm or fleshy bulb having the shape and size of a small onion. boys pare them and sell a dozen spitted together on slender sticks the length of a knitting needle. then there are the water caltropes, grown in the canals producing a fruit resembling a horny nut having a shape which suggests for them the name "buffalo-horn". still another plant, known as water-grass (hydropyrum latifolium) is grown in kiangsu province where the land is too wet for rice. the plant has a tender succulent crown of leaves and the peeling of the outer coarser ones away suggests the husking of an ear of green corn. the portion eaten is the central tender new growth, and when cooked forms a delicate savory dish. the farmers' selling price is three to four dollars, mexican, per hundred catty, or $. to $ . per hundredweight, and the return per acre is from $ to $ . the small number of animal products which are included in the market list given should not be taken as indicating the proportion of animal to vegetable foods in the dietaries of these people. it is nevertheless true that they are vegetarians to a far higher degree than are most western nations, and the high maintenance efficiency of the agriculture of china, korea and japan is in great measure rendered possible by the adoption of a diet so largely vegetarian. hopkins, in his soil fertility and permanent agriculture, page , makes this pointed statement of fact: " bushels of grain has at least five times as much food value and will support five times as many people as will the meat or milk that can be made from it". he also calls attention to the results of many rothamsted feeding experiments with growing and fattening cattle, sheep and swine, showing that the cattle destroyed outright, in every pounds of dry substance eaten, . pounds, this passing off into the air, as does all of wood except the ashes, when burned in the stove; they left in the excrements . pounds, and stored as increase but . pounds of the . with sheep the corresponding figures were . pounds; . pounds and pounds; and with swine they were . pounds; . pounds and . pounds. but less than two-thirds of the substance stored in the animal can become food for man and hence we get but four pounds in one hundred of the dry substances eaten by cattle in the form of human food; but five pounds from the sheep and eleven pounds from swine. in view of these relations, only recently established as scientific facts by rigid research, it is remarkable that these very ancient people came long ago to discard cattle as milk and meat producers; to use sheep more for their pelts and wool than for food; while swine are the one kind of the three classes which they did retain in the role of middleman as transformers of coarse substances into human food. it is clear that in the adoption of the succulent forms of vegetables as human food important advantages are gained. at this stage of maturity they have a higher digestibility, thus making the elimination of the animal less difficult. their nitrogen content is relatively higher and this in a measure compensates for loss of meat. by devoting the soil to growing vegetation which man can directly digest they have saved pounds per of absolute waste by the animal, returning their own wastes to the field for the maintenance of fertility. in using these immature forms of vegetation so largely as food they are able to produce an immense amount that would otherwise be impossible, for this is grown in a shorter time, permitting the same soil to produce more crops. it is also produced late in the fall and early in the spring when the season is too cold and the hours of sunshine too few each day to permit of ripening crops. vii the fuel problem, building and textile materials with the vast and ever increasing demands made upon materials which are the products of cultivated fields, for food, for apparel, for furnishings and for cordage, better soil management must grow more important as populations multiply. with the increasing cost and ultimate exhaustion of mineral fuel; with our timber vanishing rapidly before the ever growing demands for lumber and paper; with the inevitably slow growth of trees and the very limited areas which the world can ever afford to devote to forestry, the time must surely come when, in short period rotations, there will be grown upon the farm materials from which to manufacture not only paper and the substitutes for lumber, but fuels as well. the complete utilization of every stream which reaches the sea, reinforced by the force of the winds and the energy of the waves which may be transformed along the coast lines, cannot fully meet the demands of the future for power and heat; hence only in the event of science and engineering skill becoming able to devise means for transforming the unlimited energy of space through which we are ever whirled, with an economy approximating that which crops now exhibit, can good soil management be relieved of the task of meeting a portion of the world's demand for power and heat. when these statements were made in we did not know that for centuries there had existed in china, korea and japan a density of population such as to require the extensive cultivation of crops for fuel and building material, as well as for fabrics, by the ordinary methods of tillage, and hence another of the many surprises we had was the solution these people had reached of their fuel problem and of how to keep warm. their solution has been direct and the simplest possible. dress to make fuel for warmth of body unnecessary, and burn the coarser stems of crops, such as cannot be eaten, fed to animals or otherwise made useful. these people still use what wood can be grown on the untillable land within transporting distance, and convert much wood into charcoal, making transportation over longer distances easier. the general use of mineral fuels, such as coal, coke, oils and gas, had been impossible to these as to every other people until within the last one hundred years. coal, coke, oil and natural gas, however, have been locally used by the chinese from very ancient times. for more than two thousand years brine from many deep wells in szechwan province has been evaporated with heat generated by the burning of natural gas from wells, conveyed through bamboo stems to the pans and burned from iron terminals. in other sections of the same province much brine is evaporated over coal fires. alexander hosie estimates the production of salt in szechwan province at more than million pounds annually. coal is here used also to some extent for warming the houses, burned in pits sunk in the floor, the smoke escaping where it may. the same method of heating we saw in use in the post office at yokohama during february. the fires were in large iron braziers more than two feet across the top, simply set about the room, three being in operation. stoves for house warming are not used in dwellings in these countries. in both china and japan we saw coal dust put into the form and size of medium oranges by mixing it with a thin paste of clay. charcoal is similarly molded, as seen in fig. , using a by-product from the manufacture of rice syrup for cementing. in nanking we watched with much interest the manufacture of charcoal briquets by another method. a chinese workman was seated upon the earth floor of a shop. by his side was a pile of powdered charcoal, a dish of rice syrup by-product and a basin of the moistened charcoal powder. between his legs was a heavy mass of iron containing a slightly conical mold two inches deep, two and a half inches across at the top and a heavy iron hammer weighing several pounds. in his left hand he held a short heavy ramming tool and with his right placed in the mold a pinch of the moistened charcoal; then followed three well directed blows from the hammer upon the ramming tool, compressing the charge of moistened, sticky charcoal into a very compact layer. another pinch of charcoal was added and the process repeated until the mold was filled, when the briquet was forced out. by this simplest possible mechanism, the man, utilizing but a small part of his available energy, was subjecting the charcoal to an enormous pressure such as we attain only with the best hydraulic presses, and he was using the principle of repeated small charges recently patented and applied in our large and most efficient cotton and hay presses, which permit much denser bales to be made than is possible when large charges are added, and the chinese is here, as in a thousand other ways, thoroughly sound in his application of mechanical principles. his output for the day was small but his patience seemed unlimited. his arms and body, bared to the waist, showed vigor and good feeding, while his face wore the look of contentment. with forty centuries of such inheritance coursing in the veins of four hundred millions of people, in a country possessed of such marvelous wealth of coal and water power, of forest and of agricultural possibilities, there should be a future speedily blossoming and ripening into all that is highest and best for such a nation. if they will retain their economies and their industry and use their energies to develop, direct and utilize the power in their streams and in their coal fields along the lines which science has now made possible to them, at the same time walking in paths of peace and virtue, there is little worth while which may not come to such a people. a shantung farmer in winter dress, fig. , and the kiangsu woman portrayed in fig. , in corresponding costume, are typical illustrations of the manner in which food for body warmth is minimized and of the way the heat generated in the body is conserved. observe his wadded and quilted frock, his trousers of similar goods tied about the ankle, with his feet clad in multiple socks and cloth shoes provided with thick felted soles. these types of dress, with the wadding, quilting, belting and tying, incorporate and confine as part of the effective material a large volume of air, thus securing without cost, much additional warmth without increasing the weight of the garments. beneath these outer garments several under pieces of different weights are worn which greatly conserve the warmth during the coldest weather and make possible a wide range of adjustment to suit varying changes in temperature. it is doubtful if there could he devised a wardrobe suited to the conditions of these people at a smaller first cost and maintenance expense. rev. e. a. evans, of the china inland mission, for many years residing at sunking in szechwan, estimated that a farmer's wardrobe, once it was procured, could be maintained with an annual expenditure of $ . of our currency, this sum procuring the materials for both repairs and renewals. the intense individual economy, extending to the smallest matters, so universally practiced by these people, has sustained the massive strength of the mongolian nations through their long history and this trait is seen in their handling of the fuel problem, as it is in all other lines. in the home of mrs. wu, owner and manager of a -acre rice farm in chekiang province, there was a masonry kang seven by seven feet, about twenty-eight inches high, which could be warmed in winter by building a fire within. the top was fitted for mats to serve as couch by day and as a place upon which to spread the bed at night. in the shantung province we visited the home of a prosperous farmer and here found two kangs in separate sleeping apartments, both warmed by the waste heat from the kitchen whose chimney flue passed horizontally under the kangs before rising through the roof. these kangs were wide enough to spread the beds upon, about thirty inches high, and had been constructed from brick twelve inches square and four inches thick, made from the clay subsoil taken from the fields and worked into a plastic mass, mixed with chaff and short straw, dried in the sun and then laid in a mortar of the same material. these massive kangs are thus capable of absorbing large amounts of the waste heat from the kitchen during the day and of imparting congenial warmth to the couches by day and to the beds and sleeping apartments during the night. in some manchurian inns large compound kangs are so arranged that the guests sleep heads together in double rows, separated only by low dividing rails, securing the greatest economy of fuel, providing the guests with places where they may sit upon the moderately warmed fireplace, and spread their beds when they retire. the economy of the chimney beds does not end with the warmth conserved. the earth and straw brick, through the processes of fermentation and through shrinkage, become open and porous after three or four years of service, so that the draft is defective, giving annoyance from smoke, which requires their renewal. but the heat, the fermentation and the absorption of products of combustion have together transformed the comparatively infertile subsoil into what they regard as a valuable fertilizer and these discarded brick are used in the preparation of compost fertilizers for the fields. on account of this value of the discarded brick the large amount of labor involved in removing and rebuilding the kangs is not regarded altogether as labor lost. our own observations have shown that heating soils to dryness at a temperature of deg c. greatly increases the freedom with which plant food may be recovered from them by the solvent power of water, and the same heating doubtless improves the physical and biological conditions of the soil as well. nitrogen combined as ammonia, and phosphorus, potash and lime are all carried with the smoke or soot, mechanically in the draft and arrested upon the inner walls of the kangs or filter into the porous brick with the smoke, and thus add plant food directly to the soil. soot from wood has been found to contain, as an average, . per cent of nitrogen; . per cent of phosphorus and . per cent of potassium. we practice burning straw and corn stalks in enormous quantities, to get them easily out of the way, thus scattering on the winds valuable plant food, thoughtlessly and lazily wasting where these people laboriously and religiously save. these are gains in addition to those which result from the formation of nitrates, soluble potash and other plant foods through fermentation. we saw many instances where these discarded brick were being used, both in shantung and chihli provinces, and it was common in walking through the streets of country villages to see piles of them, evidently recently removed. the fuel grown on the farms consists of the stems of all agricultural crops which are to any extent woody, unless they can be put to some better use. rice straw, cotton stems pulled by the roots after the seed has been gathered, the stems of windsor beans, those of rape and the millets, all pulled by the roots, and many other kinds, are brought to the market tied in bundles in the manner seen in figs. , and . these fuels are used for domestic purposes and for the burning of lime, brick, roofing tile and earthenware as well as in the manufacture of oil, tea, bean-curd and many other processes. in the home, when the meals are cooked with these light bulky fuels, it is the duty of some one, often one of the children, to sit on the floor and feed the fire with one hand while with the other a bellows is worked to secure sufficient draft. the manufacture of cotton seed oil and cotton seed cake is one of the common family industries in china, and in one of these homes we saw rice hulls and rice straw being used as fuel. in the large low, one-story, tile-roofed building serving as store, warehouse, factory and dwelling, a family of four generations were at work, the grandfather supervising in the mill and the grandmother leading in the home and store where the cotton seed oil was being. retailed for cents per pound and the cotton seed cake at cents, gold, per hundredweight. back of the store and living rooms, in the mill compartment, three blindfolded water buffalo, each working a granite mill, were crushing and grinding the cotton seed. three other buffalo, for relay service, were lying at rest or eating, awaiting their turn at the ten-hour working day. two of the mills were horizontal granite burrs more than four feet in diameter, the upper one revolving once with each circuit made by the cow. the third mill was a pair of massive granite rollers, each five feet in diameter and two feet thick, joined on a very short horizontal axle which revolved on a circular stone plate about a vertical axis once with each circuit of the buffalo. two men tended the three mills. after the cotton seed had been twice passed through the mills it was steamed to render the oil fluid and more readily expressed. the steamer consisted of two covered wooden hoops not unlike that seen in fig. , provided with screen bottoms, and in these the meal was placed over openings in the top of an iron kettle of boiling water from which the steam was forced through the charge of meal. each charge was weighed in a scoop balanced on the arm of a bamboo scale, thus securing a uniform weight for the cakes. on the ground in front of the furnace sat a boy of twelve years steadily feeding rice chaff into the fire with his left hand at the rate of about thirty charges per minute, while with his right hand, and in perfect rhythm, he drew back and forth the long plunger of a rectangular box bellows, maintaining a forced draft for the fire. at intervals the man who was bringing fuel fed into the furnace a bundle of rice straw, thus giving the boy's left arm a moment's respite. when the steaming has rendered the oil sufficiently fluid the meal is transferred, hot, to ten-inch hoops two inches deep, made of braided bamboo strands, and is deftly tramped with the bare feet, while hot, the operator steadying himself by a pair of hand bars. after a stack of sixteen hoops, divided by a slight sifting of chaff or short straw to separate the cakes, had been completed these were taken to one of four pressmen, who were kept busy in expressing the oil. the presses consisted of two parallel timbers framed together, long enough to receive the sixteen hoops on edge above a gap between them. these cheeses of meal are subjected to an enormous pressure secured by means of three parallel lines of wedges forced against the follower each by an iron-bound master wedge, driven home with a heavy beetle weighing some twenty-five or thirty pounds. the lines of wedges were tightened in succession, the loosened line receiving an additional wedge to take up the slack after drawing back the master wedge, which was then driven home. to keep good the supply of wedges which are often crushed under the pressure a second boy, older than the one at the furnace, was working on the floor, shaping new ones, the broken wedges and the chips going to the furnace for fuel. by this very simple, readily constructed and inexpensive mechanism enormous pressures were secured and when the operator had obtained the desired compression he lighted his pipe and sat down to smoke until the oil ceased dripping into the pit sunk in the floor beneath the press. in this interval the next series of cakes went to another press and the work thus kept up during the day. six hundred and forty cakes was the average daily output of this family of eight men and two boys, with their six water buffalo. the cotton seed cakes were being sold as feed, and a near-by chinese dairyman was using them for his herd of forty water buffalo, seen in fig. , producing milk for the foreign trade in shanghai. this herd of forty cows one of which was an albino, was giving an average of but catty of milk per day, or at the rate of six and two-thirds pounds per head! the cows have extremely small udders but the milk is very rich, as indicated by an analysis made in the office of the shanghai board of health and obtained through the kindness of dr. arthur stanley. the milk showed a specific gravity of . and contained . per cent total solids; . per cent fat; . per cent milk sugar and . per cent ash. in the family of rev. w. h. hudson, of the southern presbyterian mission, kashing, whose very gracious hospitality we enjoyed on two different occasions, the butter made from the milk of two of these cows, one of which, with her calf, is seen in fig. , was used on the family table. it was as white as lard or cottolene but the texture and flavor were normal and far better than the danish and new zealand products served at the hotels. the milk produced at the chinese dairy in shanghai was being sold in bottles holding two pounds, at the rate of one dollar a bottle, or cents, gold. this seems high and there may have been misunderstanding on the part of my interpreter but his answer to my question was that the milk was being sold at one shanghai dollar per bottle holding one and a half catty, which, interpreted, is the value given above. but fuel from the stems of cultivated plants which are in part otherwise useful, is not sufficient to meet the needs of country and village, notwithstanding the intense economies practiced. large areas of hill and mountain land are made to contribute their share, as we have seen in the south of china, where pine boughs were being used for firing the lime and cement kilns. at tsingtao we saw the pine bough fuel on the backs of mules, fig. , coming from the hills in shantung province. similar fuels were being used in korea and we have photographs of large pine bough fuel stacks, taken in japan at funabashi, east from tokyo. the hill and mountain lands, wherever accessible to the densely peopled plains, have long been cut over and as regularly has afforestation been encouraged and deliberately secured even through the transplanting of nursery stock grown expressly for that purpose. we had read so much regarding the reckless destruction of forests in china and japan and had seen so few old forest trees except where these had been protected about temples, graves or houses, that when rev. r. a. haden, of the elizabeth blake hospital, near soochow insisted that the chinese were deliberate foresters and that they regularly grow trees for fuel, transplanting them when necessary to secure a close and early stand, after the area had been cleared, we were so much surprised that he generously volunteered to accompany us westward on a two days journey into the hill country where the practice could be seen. a family owning a houseboat and living upon it was engaged for the journey. this family consisted of a recently widowed father, his two sons, newly married, and a helper. they were to transport us and provide sleeping quarters for myself, mr. haden and a cook for the consideration of $ . , mexican, per day and to continue the journey through the night, leaving the day for observation in the hills. the recent funeral had cost the father $ and the wedding of the two sons $ each, while the remodeling of the houseboat to meet the needs of the new family relations cost still another $ . to meet these expenses it had been necessary to borrow the full amount, $ . on $ the father was paying per cent interest; on $ he was compelled to pay per cent interest. the balance he had borrowed from friends without interest but with the understanding that he would return the favor should occasion be required. rev. a. e. evans informed us that it is a common practice in china for neighbors to help one another in times of great financial stress. this is one of the methods: a neighbor may need cash. he prepares a feast and sends invitations to a hundred friends. they know there has been no death in his family and that there is no wedding, still it is understood that he is in need of money. the feast is prepared at a small expense. the invited guests come, each bringing eighty cash as a present. the recipient is expected to keep a careful record of contributing friends and to repay the sum. another method is like this: for some reason a man needs to borrow , cash. he proposes to twenty of his friends that they organize a club to raise this sum. if the friends agree each pays cash to the organizing member. the balance of the club draw lots as to which member shall be number two, three, four, five, etc., designating the order in which payments shall be made. the man borrowing the money is then under obligation to see that these payments are met in full at the times agreed upon. not infrequently a small rate of interest is charged. rates of interest are very high in china, especially on small sums where securities are not the best. mr. evans informs me that two per cent per month is low and thirty per cent per annum is very commonly collected. such obligations are often never met but they do not outlaw and may descend from father to son. the boat cost $ . in u. s. currency; the yearly earning was $ . to $ . . the funeral cost $ and $ more was required for the wedding of the two sons. they were receiving for the services of six people $ . per day. an engagement for two weeks or a month could have been made for materially lower rates and their average daily earning, on the basis of three hundred days service in the year, and the $ . total earning, would be only . cents, less than seven cents each, hence their trip with us was two of their banner days. foreigners in shanghai and other cities frequently engage such houseboat service for two weeks or a month of travel on the canals and rivers, finding it a very enjoyable as well as inexpensive way of having a picnic outing. on reaching the hill lands the next morning there were such scenes as shown in fig. , where the strips of tree growth, varying from two to ten years, stretched directly up the slope, often in strong contrast on account of the straight boundaries and different ages of the timber. some of these long narrow holdings were less than two rods wide and on one of these only recently cut, up which we walked for considerable distance, the young pine were springing up in goodly numbers. as many as eighteen young trees were counted on a width of six feet across the strip of thirty feet wide. on this area everything had been recently cut clean. even stumps and the large roots were dug and saved for fuel. in fig. are seen bundles of fuel from such a strip, just brought into the village, the boughs retaining the leaves although the fuel had been dried. the roots, too, are tied in with the limbs so that everything is saved. on our walk to the hills we passed many people bringing their loads of fuel swinging from carrying poles on their shoulders. inquiries regarding the afforestation of these strips of hillside showed that the extensive digging necessitated by the recovery of the roots usually caused new trees to spring up quickly as volunteers from scattered seed and from the roots, so that planting was not generally required. talking with a group of people as to where we could see some of the trees used for replanting the hillsides, a lad of seven years was first to understand and volunteered to conduct us to a planting. this he did and was overjoyed on receipt of a trifle for his services. one of these little pine nurseries is seen in fig. , many being planted in suitable places through the woods. the lad led us to two such locations with whose whereabouts he was evidently very familiar, although they were considerable distance from the path and far from home. these small trees are used in filling in places where the volunteer growth has not been sufficiently close. a strong herbaceous growth usually springs up quickly on these newly cleared lands and this too is cut for fuel or for use in making compost or as green manure. the grass which grows on the grave lands, if not fed off, is also cut and saved for fuel. we saw several instances of this outside of shanghai, one where a mother with her daughter, provided with rake, sickle, basket and bag, were gathering the dry stubble and grass of the previous season, from the grave lands where there was less than could be found on our closely mowed meadows. in fig. may be seen a man who has just returned with such a load, and in his hand is the typical rake of the far east, made by simply bending bamboo splints, claw-shape, and securing them as seen in the engraving. in the shantung province, in chihli and in manchuria, millet stems, especially those of the great kaoliang or sorghum, are extensively used for fuel and for building as well as for screens, fences and matting. at mukden the kaoliang was selling as fuel at $ . to $ . , mexican, for a -bundle load of stalks, weighing seven catty to the bundle. the yield per acre of kaoliang fuel amounts to pounds and the stalks are eight to twelve feet long, so that when carried on the backs of mules or horses the animals are nearly hidden by the load. the price paid for plant stem fuel from agricultural crops, in different parts of china and japan, ranged from $ . to $ . , u. s. currency, per ton. the price of anthracite coal at nanking was $ . per ton. taking the weight of dry oak wood at pounds per cord, the plant stem fuel, for equal weight, was selling at $ . to $ . . large amounts of wood are converted into charcoal in these countries and sent to market baled in rough matting or in basketwork cases woven from small brush and holding two to two and a half bushels. when such wood is not converted into charcoal it is sawed into one or two-foot lengths, split and marketed tied in bundles, as seen in fig. . along the mukden-antung railway in manchuria fuel was also being shipped in four-foot lengths, in the form of cordwood. in korea cattle were provided with a peculiar saddle for carrying wood in four-foot sticks laid blanket-fashion over the animal, extending far down on their sides. thus was it brought from the hills to the railway station. this wood, as in manchuria, was cut from small trees. in korea, as in most parts of china where we visited, the tree growth over the hills was generally scattering and thin on the ground wherever there was not individual ownership in small holdings. under and among the scattering pine there were oak in many cases, but these were always small, evidently not more than two or three years standing, and appearing to have been repeatedly cut back. it was in korea that we saw so many instances of young leafy oak boughs brought to the rice fields and used as green manure. there was abundant evidence of periodic cutting between mukden and antung in manchuria; between wiju and fusan in korea; and throughout most of our journey in japan; from nagasaki to moji and from shimonoseki to yokohama. in all of these countries afforestation takes place quickly and the cuttings on private holdings are made once in ten, twenty or twenty-five years. when the wood is sold to those coming for it the takers pay at the rate of sen per one horse load of forty kan, or pounds, such as is seen in fig. . director ono, of the akashi experiment station, informed us that such fuel loads in that prefecture, where the wood is cut once in ten years, bring returns amounting to about $ per acre for the ten-year crop. this land was worth $ per acre but when they are suitable for orange groves they sell for $ per acre. mushroom culture is extensively practiced under the shade of some of these wooded areas, yielding under favorable conditions at the rate of $ per acre. the forest covered area in japan exclusive of formosa and karafuto, amounts to a total of , , acres, less than twenty millions of which are in private holdings, the balance belonging to the state and to the imperial crown. in all of these countries there has been an extensive general use of materials other than wood for building purposes and very many of the substitutes for lumber are products grown on the cultivated fields. the use of rice straw for roofing, as seen in the hakone village, fig. , is very general throughout the rice growing districts, and even the sides of houses may be similarly thatched, as was observed in the canton delta region, such a construction being warm for winter and cool for summer. the life of these thatched roofs, however, is short and they must be renewed as often as every three to five years but the old straw is highly prized as fertilizer for the fields on which it is grown, or it may serve as fuel, the ashes only going to the fields. burned clay tile, especially for the cities and public buildings, are very extensively used for roofing, clay being abundant and near at hand. in chihli and in manchuria millet and sorghum stems, used alone or plastered, as in fig. , with a mud mortar, sometimes mixed with lime, cover the roofs of vast numbers of the dwellings outside the larger cities. at chiao tou in manchuria we saw the building of the thatched millet roofs and the use of kaoliang stems as lumber. rafters were set in the usual way and covered with a layer about two inches thick of the long kaoliang stems stripped of their leaves and tops. these were tied together and to the rafters with twine, thus forming a sort of matting. a layer of thin clay mortar was then spread over the surface and well trowelled until it began to show on the under side. over this was applied a thatch of small millet stems bound in bundles eight inches thick, cut square across the butts to eighteen inches in length. they were dipped in water and laid in courses after the manner of shingles but the butts of the stems are driven forward to a slope which obliterates the shoulder, making the courses invisible. in the better houses this thatching may be plastered with earth mortar or with an earth-lime mortar, which is less liable to wash in heavy rain. the walls of the house we saw building were also sided with the long, large kaoliang stems. an ordinary frame with posts and girts about three feet apart had been erected, on sills and with plates carrying the roof. standing vertically against the girts and tied to them, forming a close layer, were the kaoliang stems. these were plastered outside and in with a layer of thin earth mortar. a similar layer of stems, set up on the inside of the girts and similarly plastered, formed the inner face of the wall of the house, leaving dead air spaces between the girts. brick made from earth are very extensively used for house building, chaff and short straw being used as a binding material, the brick being simply dried in the sun, as seen in fig. . a house in the process of building, where the brick were being used, is seen in fig. . the foundation of the dwelling, it will be observed, was laid with well-formed hard-burned brick, these being necessary to prevent capillary moisture from the ground being drawn up and soften the earth brick, making the wall unsafe. several kilns for burning brick, built of clay and earth, were passed in our journey up the pei ho, and stacked about them, covering an area of more than eight hundred feet back from the river were bundles of the kaoliang stems to serve as fuel in the kilns. the extensive use of the unburned brick is necessitated by the difficulty of obtaining fuel, and various methods are adopted to reduce the number of burned brick required in construction. one of these devices is shown in fig. , where the city wall surrounding kashing is constructed of alternate courses of four layers of burned brick separated by layers of simple earth concrete. in addition to the multiple-function, farm-gown crops used for food, fuel and building material, there is a large acreage devoted to the growing of textile and fiber products and enormous quantities of these are produced annually. in japan, where some fifty millions of people are chiefly fed on the produce of little more than , square miles of cultivated land, there was grown in more than , , pounds of cotton, hemp, flax and china grass textile stock, occupying , acres of the cultivated land. on , other acres there grew , , pounds of paper mulberry and mitsumata, materials used in the manufacture of paper. from still another , acres were taken , , pounds of matting stuff, while more than , acres were occupied by mulberry trees for the feeding of silkworms, yielding to japan , , pounds of silk. here are more than , , pounds of fiber and textile stuff taken from square miles of the cultivated land, cutting down the food producing area to , square miles and this area is made still smaller by devoting , acres to tea, these producing in , , pounds, worth nearly five million dollars. nor do these statements express the full measure of the producing power of the , square miles of cultivated land, for, in addition to the food and other materials named, there were also made $ , , worth of braid from straw and wood shavings; $ , , worth of rice straw bags, packing cases and matting; and $ , , worth of wares from bamboo, willow and vine. as illustrating the intense home industry of these people we may consider the fact that the , , households of farmers in japan produced in , in their homes as subsidiary work, $ , , worth of manufactured articles. if correspondingly exact statistical data were available from china and korea a similarity full utilization of cultural possibilities would be revealed there. this marvelous heritage of economy, industry and thrift, bred of the stress of centuries, must not be permitted to lose virility through contact with western wasteful practices, now exalted to seeming virtues through the dazzling brilliancy of mechanical achievements. more and more must labor be dignified in all homes alike, and economy, industry and thrift become inherited impulses compelling and satisfying. cheap, rapid, long distance transportation, already well started in these countries, will bring with it a fuller utilization of the large stores of coal and mineral wealth and of the enormous available water power, and as a result there will come some temporary lessening of the stress for fuel and with better forest management some relief along the lines of building materials. but the time is not a century distant when, throughout the world, a fuller, better development must take place along the lines of these most far-reaching and fundamental practices so long and so effectively followed by the mongolian races in china, korea and japan. when the enormous water-power of these countries has been harnessed and brought into the foot-hills and down upon the margins of the valleys and plains in the form of electric current, let it, if possible, be in a large measure so distributed as to become available in the country village homes to lighten the burden and lessen the human drudgery and yet increase the efficiency of the human effort now so well bestowed upon subsidiary manufactures under the guidance and initiative of the home, where there may be room to breathe and for children to come up to manhood and womanhood in the best conditions possible, rather than in enormous congested factories. viii tramps afield on march st we took the a. m. train on the shanghai-nanking railway for kunshan, situated thirty-two miles west from shanghai, to spend the day walking in the fields. the fare, second class, was eighty cents, mexican. a third class ticket would have been forty cents and a first class, $ . , practically two cents, one cent and half a cent, our currency, per mile. the second class fare to nanking, a distance of miles, was $ . , u. s. currency, or a little less than one cent per mile. while the car seats were not upholstered, the service was good. meals were served on the train in either foreign or chinese style, and tea, coffee or hot water to drink. hot, wet face cloths were regularly passed and many chinese daily newspapers were sold on the train, a traveler often buying two. in the vicinity of kunshan a large area of farm land had been acquired by the french catholic mission at a purchase price of $ , mexican, per mow, or at the rate of $ . per acre. this they rented to the chinese. it was here that we first saw, at close range, the details of using canal mud as a fertilizer, so extensively applied in china. walking through the fields we came upon the scene in the middle section of fig. where, close on the right was such a reservoir as seen in fig. . men were in it, dipping up the mud which had accumulated over its bottom, pouring it on the bank in a field of windsor beans, and the thin mud was then over two feet deep at that side and flowing into the beans where it had already spread two rods, burying the plants as the engraving shows. when sufficiently dry to be readily handled this would be spread among the beans as we found it being done in another field, shown in the upper section of the illustration. here four men were distributing such mud, which had dried, between the rows, not to fertilize the beans, but for a succeeding crop of cotton soon to be planted between the rows, before they were harvested. the owner of this piece of land, with whom we talked and who was superintending the work, stated that his usual yield of these beans was three hundred catty per mow and that they sold them green, shelled, at two cents, mexican, per catty. at this price and yield his return would be $ . , gold, per acre. if there was need of nitrogen and organic matter in the soil the vines would be pulled green, after picking the beans, and composted with the wet mud. if not so needed the dried stems would be tied in bundles and sold as fuel or used at home, the ashes being returned to the fields. the windsor beans are thus an early crop grown for fertilizer, fuel and food. this farmer was paying his laborers one hundred cash per day and providing their meals, which he estimated worth two hundred cash more, making twelve cents, gold, for a ten-hour day. judging from what we saw and from the amount of mud carried per load, we estimated the men would distribute not less than eighty-four loads of eighty pounds each per day, an average distance of five hundred feet, making the cost . cents, gold, per ton for distribution. the lower section of fig. shows another instance where mud was being used on a narrow strip bordering the path along which we walked, the amount there seen having been brought more than four hundred feet, by one man before a. m. on the morning the photograph was taken. he was getting it from the bottom of a canal ten feet deep, laid bare by the out-going tide. already he had brought more than a ton to his field. the carrying baskets used for this work were in the form of huge dustpans suspended from the carrying poles by two cords attached to the side rims, and steadied by the hand grasping a handle provided in the back for this purpose and for emptying the baskets by tipping. with this construction the earth was readily raked upon the basket and very easily emptied from it by simply raising the hands when the destination was reached. no arrangement could be more simple, expeditious or inexpensive for this man with his small holding. in this simple manner has nearly all of the earth been moved in digging the miles of canal and in building the long sea walls. in shanghai the mud carried through the storm sewers into soochow creek we saw being removed in the same manner during the intervals when the tide was out. in still another field, seen in fig. , the upper portion shows where canal mud had been applied at a rate exceeding seventy tons per acre, and we were told that such dressings may be repeated as often as every two years though usually at longer intervals, if other and cheaper fertilizers could be obtained. in the lower portion of the same illustration may be seen the section of canal from which this mud was taken up the three earthen stairways built of the mud itself and permitted to dry before using. many such lines of stairway were seen during our trips along the canals, only recently made or in the process of building to be in readiness when the time for applying the mud should arrive. to facilitate collecting the mud from the shallow canals temporary dams may be thrown across them at two places and the water between either scooped or pumped out, laying the bottom bare, as is often done also for fishing. the earth of the large grave mound seen across a canal in the center background of the upper portion of the engraving had been collected in a similar manner. in the chekiang province canal mud is extensively used in the mulberry orchards as a surface dressing. we have referred to this practice in southern china, and fig. is a view taken south of kashing early in april. the boat anchored in front of the mulberry orchard is the home of a family coming from a distance, seeking employment during the season for picking mulberry leaves to feed silkworms. we were much surprised, on looking back at the boat after closing the camera, to see the head of the family standing erect in the center, having shoved back a section of the matting roof. the dressing of mud applied to this field formed a loose layer more than two inches deep and when compacted by the rains which would follow would add not less than a full inch of soil over the entire orchard, and the weight per acre could not be less than tons. another equally, or even more, laborious practice followed by the chinese farmers in this province is the periodic exchange of soil between mulberry orchards and the rice fields, their experience being that soil long used in the mulberry orchards improves the rice, while soil from the rice fields is very helpful when applied to the mulberry orchards. we saw many instances, when traveling by boat-train between shanghai, kashing and hangchow, of soil being carried from rice fields and either stacked on the banks or dropped into the canal. such soil was oftenest taken from narrow trenches leading through the fields, laying them off in beds. it is our judgment that the soil thrown into the canals undergoes important changes, perhaps through the absorption of soluble plant food substances such as lime, phosphoric acid and potash withdrawn from the water, or through some growth or fermentation, which, in the judgment of the farmer, makes the large labor involved in this procedure worth while. the stacking of soil along the banks was probably in preparation for its removal by boat to some of the mulberry orchards. it is clearly recognized by the farmers that mud collected from those sections of the canal leading through country villages, such as that seen in fig. , is both inherently more fertile and in better physical condition than that collected in the open country. they attribute this difference to the effect of the village washing in the canal, where soap is extensively used. the storm waters of the city doubtless carry some fertilizing material also, although sewage, as such, never finds its way into the canals. the washing would be very likely to have a decided flocculating effect and so render this material more friable when applied to the field. one very important advantage which comes to the fields when heavily dressed with such mud is that resulting from the addition of lime which has become incorporated with the silts through their flocculation and precipitation, and that which is added in the form of snail shells abounding in the canals. the amount of these may be realized from the large numbers contained in the mud recently thrown out, as seen in the upper section of fig. , where the pebbly appearance of the surface is caused by snail shells. in the lower section of the same illustration the white spots are snail shells exposed in the soil of a recently spaded field. the shells are by no means as numerous generally as here seen but yet sufficient to maintain the supply of lime. several species of these snails are collected in quantities and used as food. piles containing bushels of the empty shells were seen along the canals outside the villages. the snails are cooked in the shell and often sold by measure to be eaten from the hand, as we buy roasted peanuts or popcorn. when a purchase is made the vender clips the spiral point from each shell with a pair of small shears. this admits air and permits the snail to be readily removed by suction when the lips are applied to the shell. in the canals there are also large numbers of fresh water eel, shrimp and crabs as well as fish, all of which are collected and used for human food. it is common, when walking through the canal country, to come upon groups of gleaners busy in the bottoms of the shallow agricultural canals, gathering anything which may serve as food, even including small bulbs or the fleshy roots of edible aquatic plants. to facilitate the collection of such food materials sections of the canal are often drained in the manner already described, so that gleaning may be done by hand, wading in the mud. families living in houseboats make a business of fishing for shrimp. they trail behind the houseboat one or two other boats carrying hundreds of shrimp traps cleverly constructed in such manner that when they are trailed along the bottom and disturb the shrimps they dart into the holes in the trap, mistaking them for safe hiding places. on the streets, especially during festival days, one may see young people and others in social intercourse, busying their fingers and their teeth eating cooked snails or often watermelon seeds, which are extensively sold and thus eaten. this custom we saw first in the streets of a city south of kashing on the line of the new railway between hangchow and shanghai. the first passenger train over the line had been run the day before our visit, which was a festival day and throngs of people were visiting the nine-story pagoda standing on a high hill a mile outside the city limits. the day was one of great surprises to these people who had never before seen a passenger train, and my own person appeared to be a great curiosity to many. no boy ever scrutinized the face of a caged chimpanzee closer, with purer curiosity, or with less consideration for his feelings than did a woman of fifty scrutinize mine, standing close in front, not two feet distant, even bending forward as i sat upon a bench writing at the railway station. people would pass their hands along my coat sleeve to judge the cloth, and a boy felt of my shoes. walking through the street we passed many groups gathered about tables and upon seats, visiting or in business conference, their fingers occupied with watermelon seeds or with packages of cooked snails. along the pathway leading to the pagoda beggars had distributed themselves, one in a place, at intervals of two or three hundred feet, asking alms, most of them infirm with age or in some other way physically disabled. we saw but one who appeared capable of earning a living. travel between shanghai and hangchow at this time was heavy. three companies were running trains, of six or more houseboats, each towed by a steam launch, and these were daily crowded with passengers. our train left shanghai at : p. m., reaching hangchow at : p. m. the following day, covering a distance along the canal of something more than miles. we paid $ . , gold, for the exclusive use of a first-cabin, five-berth stateroom for myself and interpreter. it occupied the full width of the boat, lacking about fourteen inches of footway, and could be entered from either side down a flight of five steps. the berths were flat, naked wooden shelves thirty inches wide, separated by a partition headboard six inches high and without railing in front. each traveler provided his own bedding. a small table upon which meals were served, a mirror on one side and a lamp on the other, set in an opening in the partition, permitting it to serve two staterooms, completed the furnishings. the roof of the staterooms was covered with an awning and divided crosswise into two tiers of berths, each thirty inches wide, by board partitions six inches high. in these sections passengers spread their beds, sleeping heads together, separated only by a headboard six inches high. the awning was only sufficiently high to permit passengers to sit erect. ventilation was ample but privacy was nil. curtains could be dropped around the sides in stormy weather. meals were served to each passenger wherever he might be. dinner consisted of hot steamed rice brought in very heavy porcelain bowls set inside a covered, wet, steaming hot wooden case. with the rice were tiny dishes, butterchip size, of green clover, nicely cooked and seasoned; of cooked bean curd served with shredded bamboo sprouts; of tiny pork strips with bean curd; of small bits of liver with bamboo sprouts; of greens, and hot water for tea. if the appetite is good one may have a second helping of rice and as much hot water for tea as desired. there was no table linen, no napkins and everything but the tea had to be negotiated with chop sticks, or, these failing, with the fingers. when the meal was finished the table was cleared and water, hot if desired, was brought for your hand basin, which with tea, teacup and bedding, constitute part of the traveler's outfit. at frequent intervals, up to ten p. m., a crier walked about the deck with hot water for those who might desire an extra cup of tea, and again in the early morning. at this season of the year chinese incubators were being run to their full capacity and it was our good fortune to visit one of these, escorted by rev. r. a. haden, who also acted as interpreter. the art of incubation is very old and very extensively practiced in china. an interior view of one of these establishments is shown in fig. , where the family were hatching the eggs of hens, ducks and geese, purchasing the eggs and selling the young as hatched. as in the case of so many trades in china, this family was the last generation of a long line whose lives had been spent in the same work. we entered through their store, opening on the street of the narrow village seen in fig. . in the store the eggs were purchased and the chicks were sold, this work being in charge of the women of the family. it was in the extreme rear of the home that thirty incubators were installed, all doing duty and each having a capacity of , hens' eggs. four of these may be seen in the illustration and one of the baskets which, when two-thirds filled with eggs, is set inside of each incubator. each incubator consists of a large earthenware jar having a door cut in one side through which live charcoal may be introduced and the fire partly smothered under a layer of ashes, this serving as the source of heat. the jar is thoroughly insulated, cased in basketwork and provided with a cover, as seen in the illustration. inside the outer jar rests a second of nearly the same size, as one teacup may in another. into this is lowered the large basket with its hens' eggs, ducks' eggs or geese' eggs, as the case may be. thirty of these incubators were arranged in two parallel rows of fifteen each. immediately above each row, and utilizing the warmth of the air rising from them, was a continuous line of finishing hatchers and brooders in the form of woven shallow trays with sides warmly padded with cotton and with the tops covered with sets of quilts of different thickness. after a basket of hens' eggs has been incubated four days it is removed and the eggs examined by lighting, to remove those which are infertile before they have been rendered unsalable. the infertile eggs go to the store and the basket is returned to the incubator. ducks' eggs are similarly examined after two days and again after five days incubation; and geese' eggs after six days and again after fourteen days. through these precautions practically all loss from infertile eggs is avoided and from to per cent of the fertile eggs are hatched, the infertile eggs ranging from to per cent. after the fourth day in the incubator all eggs are turned five times in twenty-four hours. hens' eggs are kept in the lower incubator eleven days; ducks' eggs thirteen days, and geese' eggs sixteen days, after which they are transferred to the trays. throughout the incubation period the most careful watch and control is kept over the temperature. no thermometer is used but the operator raises the lid or quilt, removes an egg, pressing the large end into the eye socket. in this way a large contact is made where the skin is sensitive, nearly constant in temperature, but little below blood heat and from which the air is excluded for the time. long practice permits them thus to judge small differences of temperature expeditiously and with great accuracy; and they maintain different temperatures during different stages of the incubation. the men sleep in the room and some one is on duty continuously, making the rounds of the incubators and brooders, examining and regulating each according to its individual needs, through the management of the doors or the shifting of the quilts over the eggs in the brooder trays where the chicks leave the eggs and remain until they go to the store. in the finishing trays the eggs form rather more than one continuous layer but the second layer does not cover more than a fifth or a quarter of the area. hens' eggs are in these trays ten days, ducks' and geese' eggs, fourteen days. after the chickens have been hatched sufficiently long to require feeding they are ready for market and are then sorted according to sex and placed in separate shallow woven trays thirty inches in diameter. the sorting is done rapidly and accurately through the sense of touch, the operator recognizing the sex by gently pinching the anus. four trays of young chickens were in the store fronting on the street as we entered and several women were making purchases, taking five to a dozen each. dr. haden informed me that nearly every family in the cities, and in the country villages raise a few, but only a few, chickens and it is a common sight to see grown chickens walking about the narrow streets, in and out of the open stores, dodging the feet of the occupants and passers-by. at the time of our visit this family was paying at the rate of ten cents, mexican, for nine hens' and eight ducks' eggs, and were selling their largest strong chickens at three cents each. these figures, translated into our currency, make the purchase price for eggs nearly cents, and the selling price for the young chicks $ . , per hundred, or thirteen eggs for six cents and seven chickens for nine cents. it is difficult even to conceive, not to say measure, the vast import of this solution of how to maintain, in the millions of homes, a constantly accessible supply of absolutely fresh and thoroughly sanitary animal food in the form of meat and eggs. the great density of population in these countries makes the problem of supplying eggs to the people very different from that in the united states. our , , fowl in was at the rate of three to each person but in japan, with her , , fowl, she had in but one for every three people. her number per square mile of cultivated land however was , while in the united states, in , the number of fowls per square mile of improved farm land was but . to give to japan three fowls to each person there would needs be an average of about nine to each acre of her cultivated land, whereas in the united states there were in nearly two acres of improved farm land for each fowl. we have no statistics regarding the number of fowl in china or the number of eggs produced but the total is very large and she exports to japan. the large boat load of eggs seen in fig. had just arrived from the country, coming into shanghai in one of her canals. besides applying canal mud directly to the fields in the ways described there are other very extensive practices of composting it with organic matter of one or another kind and of then using the compost on the fields. the next three illustrations show some of the steps and something of the tremendous labor of body, willingly and cheerfully incurred, and something of the forethought practiced, that homes may be maintained and that grandparents, parents, wives and children need neither starve nor beg. we had reached a place seen in fig. , where eight bearers were moving winter compost to a recently excavated pit in an adjoining field shown in fig. . four months before the camera fixed the activity shown, men had brought waste from the stables of shanghai fifteen miles by water, depositing it upon the canal bank between layers of thin mud dipped from the canal, and left it to ferment. the eight men were removing this compost to the pit seen in fig. , then nearly filled. near by in the same field was a second pit seen in fig. , excavated three feet deep and rimmed about with the earth removed, making it two feet deeper. after these pits had been filled the clover which was in blossom beyond the pits would be cut and stacked upon them to a height of five to eight feet and this also saturated, layer by layer, with mud brought from the canal, and allowed to ferment twenty to thirty days until the juices set free had been absorbed by the winter compost beneath, helping to carry the ripening of that still further, and until the time had arrived for fitting the ground for the next crop. this organic matter, fermented with the canal mud, would then be distributed by the men over the field, carried a third time on their shoulders, notwithstanding its weight was many tons. this manure had been collected, loaded and carried fifteen miles by water; it had been unloaded upon the bank and saturated with canal mud; the field had been fitted for clover the previous fall and seeded; the pits had been dug in the fields; the winter compost had been carried and placed in the pits; the clover was to be cut, carried by the men on their shoulders, stacked layer by layer and saturated with mud dipped from the canal; the whole would later be distributed over the field and finally the earth removed from the pits would be returned to them, that the service of no ground upon which a crop might grow should be lost. such are the tasks to which chinese farmers hold themselves, because they are convinced desired results will follow, because their holdings are so small and their families so large. these practices are so extensive in china and so fundamental in the part they play in the maintenance of high productive power in their soils that we made special effort to follow them through different phases. in fig. we saw the preparation being made to build one of the clover compost stacks saturated with canal mud. on the left the thin mud had been dipped from the canal; way-farers in the center were crossing the foot-bridge of the country by-way; and beyond rises the conical thatch to shelter the water buffalo when pumping for irrigating the rice crop to be fed with this plant food in preparation. on the right were two large piles of green clover freshly cut and a woman of the family at one of them was spreading it to receive the mud, while the men-folk were coming from the field with more clover on their carrying poles. we came upon this scene just before the dinner hour and after the workers had left another photograph was taken at closer range and from a different side, giving the view seen in fig. . the mud had been removed some days and become too stiff to spread, so water was being brought from the canal in the pails at the right for reducing its consistency to that of a thin porridge, permitting it to more completely smear and saturate the clover. the stack grew, layer by layer, each saturated with the mud, tramped solid with the bare feet, trousers rolled high. provision had been made here for building four other stacks. further along we came upon the scene in fig. where the building of the stack of compost and the gathering of the mud from the canal were simultaneous. on one side of the canal the son, using a clam-shell form of dipper made of basket-work, which could be opened and shut with a pair of bamboo handles, had nearly filled the middle section of his boat with the thin ooze, while on the other side, against the stack which was building, the mother was emptying a similar boat, using a large dipper, also provided with a bamboo handle. the man on the stack is a good scale for judging its size. we came next upon a finished stack on the bank of another canal, shown in fig. , where our umbrella was set to serve as a scale. this stack measured ten by ten feet on the ground, was six feet high and must have contained more than twenty tons of the green compost. at the same place, two other stacks had been started, each about fourteen by fourteen feet, and foundations were laid for six others, nine in all. during twenty or more days this green nitrogenous organic matter is permitted to lie fermenting in contact with the fine soil particles of the ooze with which it had been charged. this is a remarkable practice in that it is a very old, intensive application of an important fundamental principle only recently understood and added to the science of agriculture, namely, the power of organic matter, decaying rapidly in contact with soil, to liberate from it soluble plant food; and so it would be a great mistake to say that these laborious practices are the result of ignorance, of a lack of capacity for accurate thinking or of power to grasp and utilize. if the agricultural lands of the united states are ever called upon to feed even millions of people, a number proportionately less than one-half that being fed in japan today, very different practices from those we are now following will have been adopted. we can believe they will require less human bodily effort and be more efficient. but the knowledge which can make them so is not yet in the possession of our farmers, much less the conviction that plant feeding and more persistent and better directed soil management are necessary to such yields as will then be required. later, just before the time for transplanting rice, we returned to the same district to observe the manner of applying this compost to the field, and fig. is prepared from photographs taken then, illustrating the activities of one family, as seen during the morning of may th. their home was in a near-by village and their holding was divided into four nearly rectangular paddies, graded to water level, separated by raised rims, and having an area of nearly two acres. three of these little fields are partly shown in the illustration, and the fourth in fig. . in the background of the upper section of fig. , and under the thatched shelter, was a native chinese cow, blindfolded and hitched to the power-wheel of a large wooden-chain pump, lifting water from the canal and flooding the field in the foreground, to soften the soil for plowing. riding on the power-wheel was a girl of some twelve years, another of seven and a baby. they were there for entertainment and to see that the cow kept at work. the ground had been sufficiently softened so that the father had begun plowing, the cow sinking to her knees as she walked. in the same paddy, but shown in the section below, a boy was spreading the clover compost with his hands, taking care that it was finely divided and evenly scattered. he had been once around before the plowing began. this compost had been brought from a stack by the side of a canal, and two other men were busy still bringing the material to one of the other paddies, one of whom, with his baskets on the carrying pole appears in the third section. between these two paddies was the one seen at the bottom of the illustration, which had matured a crop of rape that had been pulled and was lying in swaths ready to be moved. two other men were busy here, gathering the rape into large bundles and carrying it to the village home, where the women were threshing out the seed, taking care not to break the stems which, after threshing, were tied into bundles for fuel. the seed would be ground and from it an oil expressed, while the cake would be used as a fertilizer. this crop of rape is remarkable for the way it fits into the economies of these people. it is a near relative of mustard and cabbage; it grows rapidly during the cooler portions of the season, the spring crop ripening before the planting of rice and cotton; its young shoots and leaves are succulent, nutritious, readily digested and extensively used as human food, boiled and eaten fresh, or salted for winter use, to be served with rice; the mature stems, being woody, make good fuel; and it bears a heavy crop of seed, rich in oil, which has been extensively used for lights and in cooking, while the rape seed cake is highly prized as a manure and very extensively so used. in the early spring the country is luxuriantly green with the large acreage of rape, later changing to a sea of most brilliant yellow and finally to an ashy grey when the leaves fall and the stems and pods ripen. like the dairy cow, rape produces a fat, in the ratio of about forty pounds of oil to a hundred pounds of seed, which may be eaten, burned or sold without materially robbing the soil of its fertility if the cake and the ashes from the stems are returned to the fields, the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen of which the oil is almost wholly composed coming from the atmosphere rather than from the soil. in japan rape is grown as a second crop on both the upland and paddy fields, and in she produced more than , , bushels of the seed; $ , , worth of rape seed cake, importing enough more to equal a total value of $ , , , all of which was used as a fertilizer, the oil being exported. the yield of seed per acre in japan ranges between thirteen and sixteen bushels, and the farmer whose field was photographed estimated that his returns from the crop would be at the rate of pounds of seed per acre, worth $ . , and , pounds of stems worth as fuel $ . per acre. ix the utilization of waste one of the most remarkable agricultural practices adopted by any civilized people is the centuries-long and well nigh universal conservation and utilization of all human waste in china, korea and japan, turning it to marvelous account in the maintenance of soil fertility and in the production of food. to understand this evolution it must be recognized that mineral fertilizers so extensively employed in modern western agriculture, like the extensive use of mineral coal, had been a physical impossibility to all people alike until within very recent years. with this fact must be associated the very long unbroken life of these nations and the vast numbers their farmers have been compelled to feed. when we reflect upon the depleted fertility of our own older farm lands, comparatively few of which have seen a century's service, and upon the enormous quantity of mineral fertilizers which are being applied annually to them in order to secure paying yields, it becomes evident that the time is here when profound consideration should be given to the practices the mongolian race has maintained through many centuries, which permit it to be said of china that one-sixth of an acre of good land is ample for the maintenance of one person, and which are feeding an average of three people per acre of farm land in the three southernmost of the four main islands of japan. from the analyses of mixed human excreta made by wolff in europe and by kellner in japan it appears that, as an average, these carry in every pounds . pounds of nitrogen, pounds of potassium and . pounds of phosphorus. on this basis and that of carpenter, who estimates the average amount of excreta per day for the adult at ounces, the average annual production per million of adult population is , , pounds of nitrogen; , , pounds of potassium, and , pounds of phosphorus carried in , tons of excreta. the figures which hall cites in fertilizers and manures, would make these amounts , , pounds of nitrogen; , , pounds of potassium, and , , pounds of phosphorus, but the figures he takes and calls high averages give , , of nitrogen; , , pounds of potassium, and , , pounds of phosphorus. in the international concessions of the city of shanghai sold to one chinese contractor for $ , , gold, the privilege of collecting , tons of human waste, under stipulated regulations, and of removing it to the country for sale to farmers. the flotilla of boats seen in fig. is one of several engaged daily in shanghai throughout the year in this service. dr. kawaguchi, of the national department of agriculture and commerce, taking his data from their records, informed us that the human manure saved and applied to the fields of japan in amounted to , , tons, which is an average of . tons per acre of their , square miles of cultivated land in their four main islands. on the basis of the data of wolff, kellner and carpenter, or of hall, the people of the united states and of europe are pouring into the sea, lakes or rivers and into the underground waters from , , to , , pounds of nitrogen; , , to , , pounds of potassium, and , to , , pounds of phosphorus per million of adult population annually, and this waste we esteem one of the great achievements of our civilization. in the far east, for more than thirty centuries, these enormous wastes have been religiously saved and today the four hundred million of adult population send back to their fields annually , tons of phosphorus; , tons of potassium, and , , tons of nitrogen comprised in a gross weight exceeding million tons, gathered from every home, from the country villages and from the great cities like hankow-wuchang-hanyang with its , , people swarming on a land area delimited by a radius of four miles. man is the most extravagant accelerator of waste the world has ever endured. his withering blight has fallen upon every living thing within his reach, himself not excepted; and his besom of destruction in the uncontrolled hands of a generation has swept into the sea soil fertility which only centuries of life could accumulate, and yet this fertility is the substratum of all that is living. it must be recognized that the phosphate deposits which we are beginning to return to our fields are but measures of fertility lost from older soils, and indices of processes still in progress. the rivers of north america are estimated to carry to the sea more than tons of phosphorus with each cubic mile of water. to such loss modern civilization is adding that of hydraulic sewage disposal through which the waste of five hundred millions of people might be more than , tons of phosphorus annually, which could not be replaced by , , tons of rock phosphate, per cent pure. the mongolian races, with a population now approaching the figure named; occupying an area little more than one-half that of the united states, tilling less than , square miles of land, and much of this during twenty, thirty or perhaps forty centuries; unable to avail themselves of mineral fertilizers, could not survive and tolerate such waste. compelled to solve the problem of avoiding such wastes, and exercising the faculty which is characteristic of the race, they "cast down their buckets where they were", as *a ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. from the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, "water, water; we die of thirst!" the answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, "cast down your bucket where you are." a second time the signal, "water, water; send us water!" ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, "cast down your bucket where you are." and a third and fourth signal for water was answered, "cast down your bucket where you are." the captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh sparkling water from the mouth of the amazon river. *booker t. washington, atlanta address. not even in great cities like canton, built in the meshes of tideswept rivers and canals; like hankow on the banks of one of the largest rivers in the world; nor yet in modern shanghai, yokohama or tokyo, is such waste permitted. to them such a practice has meant race suicide and they have resisted the temptation so long that it has ceased to exist. dr. arthur stanley, health officer of the city of shanghai, in his annual report for , considering this subject as a municipal problem, wrote: "regarding the bearing on the sanitation of shanghai of the relationship between eastern and western hygiene, it may be said, that if prolonged national life is indicative of sound sanitation, the chinese are a race worthy of study by all who concern themselves with public health. even without the returns of a registrar-general it is evident that in china the birth rate must very considerably exceed the death rate, and have done so in an average way during the three or four thousand years that the chinese nation has existed. chinese hygiene, when compared with medieval english, appears to advantage. the main problem of sanitation is to cleanse the dwelling day by day, and if this can be done at a profit so much the better. while the ultra-civilized western elaborates destructors for burning garbage at a financial loss and turns sewage into the sea, the chinaman uses both for manure. he wastes nothing while the sacred duty of agriculture is uppermost in his mind. and in reality recent bacterial work has shown that faecal matter and house refuse are best destroyed by returning them to clean soil, where natural purification takes place. the question of destroying garbage can, i think, under present conditions in shanghai, be answered in a decided negative. while to adopt the water-carriage system for sewage and turn it into the river, whence the water supply is derived, would be an act of sanitary suicide. it is best, therefore, to make use of what is good in chinese hygiene, which demands respect, being, as it is, the product of an evolution extending from more than a thousand years before the christian era." the storage of such waste in china is largely in stoneware receptacles such as are seen in fig. , which are hard-burned, glazed terra-cotta urns, having capacities ranging from to pounds. japan more often uses sheltered cement-lined pits such as are seen in fig. . in the three countries the carrying to the fields is oftenest in some form of pail, as seen in fig. , a pair of which are borne swinging from the carrying pole. in applying the liquid to the field or garden the long handle dipper is used, seen in fig. . we are beginning to husband with some economy the waste from our domestic animals but in this we do not approach that of china, korea and japan. people in china regularly search for and collect droppings along the country and caravan roads. repeatedly, when walking through city streets, we observed such materials quickly and apparently eagerly gathered, to be carefully stored under conditions which ensure small loss from either leaching or unfavorable fermentation. in some mulberry orchards visited the earth had been carefully hoed back about the trunks of trees to a depth of three or four inches from a circle having a diameter of six to eight feet, and upon these areas were placed the droppings of silkworms, the moulted skins, together with the bits of leaves and stem left after feeding. some disposition of such waste must be made. they return at once to the orchard all but the silk produced from the leaves; unnecessary loss is thus avoided and the material enters at once the service of forcing the next crop of leaves. on the farm of mrs. wu, near kashing, while studying the operation of two irrigation pumps driven by two cows, lifting water to flood her twenty-five acres of rice field preparatory to transplanting, we were surprised to observe that one of the duties of the lad who had charge of the animals was to use a six-quart wooden dipper with a bamboo handle six feet long to collect all excreta, before they fell upon the ground, and transfer them to a receptacle provided for the purpose. there came a flash of resentment that such a task was set for the lad, for we were only beginning to realize to what lengths the practice of economy may go, but there was nothing irksome suggested in the boy's face. he performed the duty as a matter of course and as we thought it through there was no reason why it should have been otherwise. in fact, the only right course was being taken. conditions would have been worse if the collection had not been made. it made possible more rice. character of substantial quality was building in the lad which meant thrift in the growing man and continued life for the nation. we have adverted to the very small number of flies observed anywhere in the course of our travel, but its significance we did not realize until near the end of our stay. indeed, for some reason, flies were more in evidence during the first two days on the steamship, out from yokohama on our return trip to america, than at any time before on our journey. it is to be expected that the eternal vigilance which seizes every waste, once it has become such, putting it in places of usefulness, must contribute much toward the destruction of breeding places, and it may be these nations have been mindful of the wholesomeness of their practice and that many phases of the evolution of their waste disposal system have been dictated by and held fast to through a clear conception of sanitary needs. much intelligence and the highest skill are exhibited by these old-world farmers in the use of their wastes. in fig. is one of many examples which might be cited. the man walking down the row with his manure pails swinging from his shoulders informed us on his return that in his household there were twenty to be fed; that from this garden of half an acre of land he usually sold a product bringing in $ , mexican,--$ , gold. the crop was cucumbers in groups of two rows thirty inches apart and twenty-four inches between the groups. the plants were eight to ten inches apart in the row. he had just marketed the last of a crop of greens which occupied the space between the rows of cucumbers seen under the strong, durable, light and very readily removable trellises. on may the vines were beginning to run, so not a minute had been lost in the change of crop. on the contrary this man had added a month to his growing season by over-lapping his crops, and the trellises enabled him to feed more plants of this type than there was room for vines on the ground. with ingenuity and much labor he had made his half acre for cucumbers equivalent to more than two. he had removed the vines entirely from the ground; had provided a travel space two feet wide, down which he was walking, and he had made it possible to work about the roots of every plant for the purpose of hoeing and feeding. four acres of cucumbers handled by american field methods would not yield more than this man's one, and he grows besides two other crops the same season. the difference is not so much in activity of muscle as it is in alertness and efficiency of the grey matter of the brain. he sees and treats each plant individually, he loosens the ground so that his liquid manure drops immediately beneath the surface within reach of the active roots. if the rainfall has been scanty and the soil is dry he may use ten of water to two of night soil, not to supply water but to make certain sufficiently deep penetration. if the weather is rainy and the soil over wet, the food is applied more concentrated, not to lighten the burden but to avoid waste by leaching and over saturation. while ever crowding growth he never overfeeds. forethought, after-thought and the mind focused on the work in hand are characteristic of these people. we do not recall to have seen a man smoking while at work. they enjoy smoking, but prefer to do this also with the attention undivided and thus get more for their money. on another date earlier in may we were walking in the fields without an interpreter. for half an hour we stood watching an old gardener fitting the soil with his spading hoe in the manner seen in fig. , where the graves of his ancestors occupy a part of the land. angleworms were extremely numerous, as large around as an ordinary lead pencil and, when not extended, two-thirds as long, decidedly greenish in color. nearly every stroke of the spade exposed two to five of these worms but so far as we observed, and we watched the man closely, pulverizing the soil, he neither injured nor left uncovered a single worm. while he seemed to make no effort to avoid injuring them or to cover them with earth, and while we could not talk with him, we are convinced that his action was continually guarded against injuring the worms. they certainly were subsoiling his garden deeply and making possible a freer circulation of air far below the surface. their great abundance proved a high content of organic matter present in the soil and, as the worms ate their way through it, passing the soil through their bodies, the yearly volume of work done by them was very great. in the fields flooded preparatory to fitting them for rice these worms are forced to the surface in enormous numbers and large flocks of ducks are taken to such fields to feed upon them. in another field a crop of barley was nearing maturity. an adjacent strip of land was to be fitted and planted. the leaning barley heads were in the way. not one must be lost and every inch of ground must be put to use. the grain along the margin, for a breadth of sixteen inches, had been gathered into handfuls and skillfully tied, each with an unpulled barley stem, without breaking the straw, thus permitting even the grains in that head to fill and be gathered with the rest, while the tying set all straws well aslant, out of the way, and permitted the last inch of naked ground to be fitted without injuring the grain. in still another instance a man was growing irish potatoes to market when yet small. he had enriched his soil; he would apply water if the rains were not timely and sufficient, and had fed the plants. he had planted in rows only twelve to fourteen inches apart with a hill every eight inches in the row. the vines stood strong, straight, fourteen inches high and as even as a trimmed hedge. the leaves and stems were turgid, the deepest green and as prime and glossy as a prize steer. so close were the plants that there was leaf surface to intercept the sunshine falling on every square inch of the patch. there were no potato beetles and we saw no signs of injury but the gardener was scanning the patch with the eye of a robin. he spied the slightest first drooping of leaves in a stem; went after the difficulty and brought and placed in our hand a cutworm, a young tuber the size of a marble and a stem cut half off, which he was willing to sacrifice because of our evident interest. but the two friends who had met were held apart by the babel of tongues. nothing is costing the world more; has made so many enemies, and has so much hindered the forming of friendships as the inability to fully understand; hence the dove that brings world peace must fly on the wings of a common language, and the bright star in the east is world commerce, rising on rapidly developing railway and steamship lines, heralded and directed by electric communication. with world commerce must come mutual confidence and friendship requiring a full understanding and therefore a common tongue. then world peace will be permanently assured. it is coming inevitably and faster than we think. once this desired end is seriously sought, the carrying of three generations of children through the public schools where the world language is taught together with the mother tongue, and the passing of the parents and grandparents, would effect the change. the important point regarding these far east people, to which attention should be directed, is that effective thinking, clear and strong, prevails among the farmers who have fed and are still feeding the dense populations from the products of their limited areas. this is further indicated in the universal and extensive use of plant ashes derived from fuel grown upon cultivated fields and upon the adjacent hill and mountain lands. we were unable to secure exact data regarding the amount of fuel burned annually in these countries, and of ashes used as fertilizer, but a cord of dry oak wood weighs about pounds, and the weight of fuel used in the home and in manufactures must exceed that of two cords per household. japan has an average of . people per family. if we allow but pounds of fuel per capita, japan's consumption would be , , tons. in view of the fact that a very large share of the fuel used in these countries is either agricultural plant stems, with an average ash content of per cent, or the twigs and even leaves of trees, as in the case of pine bough fuel, . per cent of ash may be taken as a fair estimate. on this basis, and with a content of phosphorus equal to . per cent, and of potassium equal to per cent, the fuel ash for japan would amount to , , tons annually, carrying tons of phosphorus and , tons of potassium, together with more than , tons of limestone, which is returned annually to less than , square miles of cultivated land. in china, with her more than four hundred millions of people, a similar rate of fuel consumption would make the phosphorus and potassium returned to her fields more than eight times the amounts computed for japan. on the basis of these statements japan's annual saving of phosphorus from the waste of her fuel would be equivalent to more than , tons of rock phosphate having a purity of per cent, or in the neighborhood of seven pounds per acre. if this amount, even with the potash and limestone added, appears like a trifling addition of fertility it is important for americans to remember that even if this is so, these people have felt compelled to make the saving. in the matter of returning soluble potassium to the cultivated fields japan would be applying with her ashes the equivalent of no less than , tons of pure potassium sulphate, equal to pounds per acre; while the lime carbonate so applied annually would be some pounds per acre. in addition to the forest lands, which have long been made to contribute plant food to the cultivated fields through fuel ashes, there are large areas which contribute green manure and compost material. these are chiefly hill lands, aggregating some twenty per cent of the cultivated fields, which bear mostly herbaceous growth. some , , acres of these lands may be cut over three times each season, yielding, in , an average of pounds per acre. the first cutting of this hill herbage is mainly used on the rice fields as green manure, it being tramped into the mud between the rows after the manner seen in fig. . this man had been with basket and sickle to gather green herbage wherever he could and had brought it to his rice paddy. the day in july was extremely sultry. we came upon him wading in the water half way to his knees, carefully laying the herbage he had gathered between alternate rows of his rice, one handful in a place, with tips overlapping. this done he took the attitude seen in the illustration and, gathering the materials into a compact bunch, pressed it beneath the surface with his foot. the two hands smoothed the soft mud over the grass and righted the disturbed spears of rice in the two adjacent hills. thus, foot following foot, one bare length ahead, the succeeding bunches of herbage were submerged until the last had been reached, following between alternate rows only a foot apart, there being a hill every nine to ten inches in the row and the hands grasping and being drawn over every one in the paddy. he was renting the land, paying therefor forty kan of rice per tan, and his usual yield was eighty kan. this is forty-four bushels of sixty pounds per acre. in unfavorable seasons his yield might be less but still his rent would be forty kan per tan unless it was clear that he had done all that could reasonably be expected of him in securing the crop. it is difficult for americans to understand how it is possible for the will of man, even when spurred by the love of home and family, to hold flesh to tasks like these. the second and third cuttings of herbage from the genya lands in japan are used for the preparation of compost applied on the dry-land fields in the fall or in the spring of the following season. some of these lands are pastured, but approximately , , tons of green herbage grown and gathered from the hills contributes much of its organic matter and all of its ash to enrich the cultivated fields. such wild growth areas in japan are the commons of the near by villages, to which the people are freely admitted for the purpose of cutting the herbage. a fixed time may be set for cutting and a limit placed upon the amount which may be carried away, which is done in the manner seen in fig. . it is well recognized by the people that this constant cutting and removal of growth from the hill lands, with no return, depletes the soils and reduces the amount of green herbage they are able to secure. through the kindness of dr. daikuhara of the imperial agricultural experiment station at tokyo we are able to give the average composition of the green leaves and young stems of five of the most common wild species of plants cut for green manure in june. in each pounds the amount of water is . pounds; of organic matter, . pounds; of ash, . pounds; nitrogen, . pounds; potassium, . pounds, and phosphorus, . pound. on the basis of this composition and an aggregate yield of , , tons, there would be annually applied to the cultivated fields tons of phosphorus and , tons of potassium derived from the genya lands. in addition to this the run-off from both the mountain and the genya lands is largely used upon the rice fields, more than sixteen inches of water being applied annually to them in some prefectures. if such waters have the composition of river waters in north america, twelve inches of water applied to the rice fields of the three main islands would contribute no less than tons of phosphorus and , tons of potassium annually. dr. kawaguchi, of the national department of agriculture and commerce, informed us that in japanese farmers prepared and applied to their fields , , tons of compost manufactured from the wastes of cattle, horses, swine and poultry, combined with herbage, straw and other similar wastes and with soil, sod or mud from ditches and canals. the amount of this compost is sufficient to apply . tons per acre of cultivated land of the southern three main islands. from data obtained at the nara experiment station, the composition of compost as there prepared shows it to contain, in each pounds, pounds of organic matter; . pounds of nitrogen; . pounds of potassium, and . pounds of phosphorus. on this basis , , tons of compost will carry , tons of phosphorus and , tons of potassium. the construction of compost houses is illustrated in fig. , reproduced from a large circular sent to farmers from the nara experiment station, and an exterior of one at the nara station is given in fig. . this compost house is designed to serve two and a half acres. its floor is twelve by eighteen feet, rendered watertight by a mixture of clay, lime and sand. the walls are of earth, one foot thick, and the roof is thatched with straw. its capacity is sixteen to twenty tons, having a cash value of yen, or $ . in preparing the stack, materials are brought daily and, spread over one side of the compost floor until the pile has attained a height of five feet. after one foot in depth has been laid and firmed, . inches of soil or mud is spread over the surface and the process repeated until full height has been attained. water is added sufficient to keep the whole saturated and to maintain the temperature below that of the body. after the compost stacks have been completed they are permitted to stand five weeks in summer, seven weeks in winter, when they are forked over and transferred to the opposite side of the house. if we state in round numbers the total nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium thus far enumerated which japanese farmers apply or return annually to their twenty or twenty-one thousand square miles of cultivated fields, the case stands , tons of nitrogen, , tons of phosphorus and , tons of potassium. these values are only approximations and do not include the large volume and variety of fertilizers prepared from fish, which have long been used. neither do they include the very large amount of nitrogen derived directly from the atmosphere through their long, extensive and persistent cultivation of soy beans and other legumes. indeed, from to the average area of paddy field upon which was grown a second crop of green manure in the form of some legume was . per cent of the total area of such fields aggregating , square miles. in over per cent of the upland fields also produced some leguminous crop, these fields aggregating between , and , square miles. while the values which have been given above, expressing the sum total of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium applied annually to the cultivated fields of japan may be somewhat too high for some of the sources named, there is little doubt that japanese farmers apply to their fields more of these three plant food elements annually than has been computed. the amounts which have been given are sufficient to provide annually, for each acre of the , square miles of cultivated land, an application of not less than pounds of nitrogen, pounds of phosphorus and pounds of potassium. or, if we omit the large northern island of hokkaido, still new in its agriculture and lacking the intensive practices of the older farm land, the quantities are sufficient for a mean application of , and pounds respectively of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium per acre, and yet the maturing of pounds of wheat crop, covering grain and straw as water-free substance, removes from the soil but . pounds of nitrogen, . pounds of phosphorus and . pounds of potassium, from which it may be computed that the pounds of nitrogen added is sufficient for a crop yielding bushels of wheat; the phosphorus is sufficient for a crop of bushels, and the potassium for a crop of bushels per acre. dr. hopkins, in his recent valuable work on "soil fertility and permanent agriculture" gives, on page , a table from which we abstract the following data: approximate amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium removable per acre annually by nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, pounds. pounds. pounds. bush. crop of corn bush. crop of oats bush. crop of wheat bush. crop of soy beans bush. crop of rice ton crop of timothy hay ton crop of clover hay ton crop of cow pea hay ton crop of alfalfa hay lb. crop of cotton . bush. crop of potatoes . ton crop of sugar beets annually applied in japan, more than we have inserted in this table, for comparison, the crop of rice, and have increased the crop of potatoes from three hundred bushels to four hundred bushels per acre, because such a yield, like all of those named, is quite practicable under good management and favorable seasons, notwithstanding the fact that much smaller yields are generally attained through lack of sufficient plant food or water. from this table, assuming that a crop of matured grain contains per cent of water and the straw per cent, while potatoes contain per cent and beets per cent, the amounts of the three plant food elements removable annually by pounds of crop have been calculated and stated in the next table. approximate amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium removable annually per , pounds of dry crop substance nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, pounds. pounds. pounds. cereals. wheat . . . oats . . . corn . . . legumes. soy beans . . . cow peas . . . clover . . . alfalfa . . . roots. beets . . . potatoes . . . grass. timothy . . . rice . . . from the amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium applied annually to the cultivated fields of japan and from the data in these two tables it may be readily seen that these people are now and probably long have been applying quite as much of these three plant food elements to their fields with each planting as are removed with the crop, and if this is true in japan it must also be true in china. moreover there is nothing in american agricultural practice which indicates that we shall not ultimately be compelled to do likewise. x in the shantung province on may th we left shanghai by one of the coastwise steamers for tsingtao, some three hundred miles farther north, in the shantung province, our object being to keep in touch with methods of tillage and fertilization, corresponding phases of which would occur later in the season there. the shantung province is in the latitude of north carolina and kentucky, or lies between that of san francisco and los angeles. it has an area of nearly , square miles, about that of wisconsin. less than one-half of this area is cultivated land yet it is at the present time supporting a population exceeding , , of people. new york state has today less than ten millions and more than half of these are in new york city. it was in this province that confucius was born years ago, and that mencius, his disciple, lived. here, too, seventeen hundred years before confucius' time, after one of the great floods of the yellow river, b. c., and more than years ago, the great yu was appointed "superintendent of public works" and entrusted with draining off the flood waters and canalizing the rivers. here also was the beginning of the boxer uprising. tsingtao sits at the entrance of kiaochow bay. following the war of japan with china this was seized by germany, november , , nominally to indemnify for the murder of two german missionaries which had occurred in shantung, and march th, , this bay, to the high water line, its islands and a "sphere of influence" extending thirty miles in all directions from the boundary, together with tsingtao, was leased to germany for ninety-nine years. russia demanded and secured a lease of port arthur at the same time. great britain obtained a similar lease of weihaiwei in shantung, while to france kwangchow-wan in southern china, was leased. but the "encroachments" of european powers did not stop with these leases and during the latter part of the "policy of spheres of influence" culminated in the international rivalry for railway concessions and mining. these greatly alarmed china and uprisings broke out very naturally first in shantung, among the people nearest of kin to the founders of the empire. as might have been expected of a patriotic, even though naturally peaceful people, they determined to defend their country against such encroachments and the boxer troubles followed. tsingtao has a deep, commodious harbor always free from ice and germany is constructing here very extensive and substantial harbor improvements which will be of lasting benefit to the province and the empire. a pier four miles in length encloses the inner wharf, and a second wharf is nearing completion. germany is also maintaining a meteorological observatory here and has established a large, comprehensive forest garden, under excellent management, which is showing remarkable developments for so short a time. our steamer entered the harbor during the night and, on going ashore, we soon found that only chinese and german were generally spoken; but through the kind assistance of rev. w. h. scott, of the american presbyterian mission, an interpreter promised to call at my hotel in the evening, although he failed to appear. the afternoon was spent at the forest garden and on the reforestation tract, which are under the supervision of mr. haas. the forest garden covers two hundred and seventy acres and the reforestation tract three thousand acres more. in the garden a great variety of forest and fruit trees and small fruits are being tried out with high promise of the most valuable results. it was in the steep hills about tsingtao that we first saw at close range serious soil erosion in china; and the returning of forest growth on hills nearly devoid of soil was here remarkable, in view of the long dry seasons which prevail from november to june, and fig. shows how destitute of soil the crests of granite hills may become and yet how the coming back of the forest growth may hasten as soon as it is no longer cut away. the rock going into decay, where this view was taken, is an extremely coarse crystalline granite, as may be seen in contrast with the watch, and it is falling into decay at a marvelous rate. disintegration has penetrated the rock far below the surface and the large crystals are held together with but little more tenacity than prevails in a bed of gravel. moisture and even roots penetrate it deeply and readily and the crystals fall apart with thrusts of the knife blade, the rock crumbling with the greatest freedom. roadways have been extensively carved along the sides of the hills with the aid of only pick and shovel. close examination of the rock shows that layers of sediment exist between the crystal faces, either washed down by percolating rain or formed through decomposition of the crystals in place. the next illustration, fig. , shows how large the growth on such soils may be, and in fig. the vegetation and forest growth are seen coming back, closely covering just such soil surfaces and rock structure as are indicated in figs. and . these views are taken on the reforestation tract at tsingtao but most of the growth is volunteer, standing now protected by the german government in their effort to see what may be possible under careful supervision. the loads of pine bough fuel represented in fig. were gathered from such hills and from such forest growth as are here represented, but on lands more distant from the city. but tsingtao, with its forty thousand chinese, and kiaochow across the bay, with its one hundred and twenty thousand more, and other villages dotting the narrow plains, maintain a very great demand for such growth on the hill lands. the wonder is that forest growth has persisted at all and has contributed so much in the way of fuel. growing in the forest garden was a most beautiful wild yellow rose, native to shantung, being used for landscape effect in the parking, and it ought to be widely introduced into other countries wherever it will thrive. it was growing as heavy borders and massive clumps six to eight feet high, giving a most wonderful effect, with its brilliant, dense cloud of the richest yellow bloom. the blossoms are single, fully as large as the rosa rugosa, with the tips of the petals shading into the most dainty light straw yellow, while the center is a deep orange, the contrast being sufficient to show in the photograph from which fig. was prepared. another beautiful and striking feature of this rose is the clustering of the blossoms in one-sided wreath-like sprays, sometimes twelve to eighteen inches long, the flowers standing close enough to even overlap. the interpreter engaged for us failed to appear as per agreement so the next morning we took the early train for tsinan to obtain a general view of the country and to note the places most favorable as points for field study. we had resolved also to make an effort to secure an interpreter through the american presbyterian college at tsinan. leaving tsingtao, the train skirts around the kiaochow bay for a distance of nearly fifty miles, where we pass the city of the same name with its population of , , which had an import and export trade in valued at over $ , , . at sochen we passed through a coal mining district where coal was being brought to the cars in baskets carried by men. the coal on the loaded open cars was sprinkled with whitewash, serving as a seal to safe-guard against stealing during transit, making it so that none could be removed without the fact being revealed by breaking the seal. this practice is general in china and is applied to many commodities handled in bulk. we saw baskets of milled rice carried by coolies sealed with a pattern laid over the surface by sprinkling some colored powder upon it. cut stone, corded for the market, was whitewashed in the same manner as the coal. as we were approaching weihsien, another city of , people, we identified one of the deeply depressed, centuries-old roadways, worn eight to ten feet deep, by chancing to see half a dozen teams passing along it as the train crossed. we had passed several and were puzzling to account for such peculiar erosion. the teams gave the explanation and thus connected our earlier reading with the concrete. along these deep-cut roadways caravans may pass, winding through the fields, entirely unobserved unless one chances to be close along the line or the movement is discovered by clouds of dust, one of the methods that has produced them, and we would not be surprised if gathering manure from them has played a large part also. weihsien is near one of the great commercial highways of china and in the center of one of the coal mining regions of the province. still further along towards tsinan we passed tsingchowfu, another of the large cities of the province, with , population. all day we rode through fields of wheat, always planted in rows, and in hills in the row east of kaumi, but in single or double continuous drills westward from here to tsinan. thousands of wells used for irrigation, of the type seen in fig. , were passed during the day, many of them recently dug to supply water for the barley suffering from the severe drought which was threatening the crop at the time. it was : p. m. before our train pulled into the station at tsinan; : when we had finished supper and engaged a ricksha to take us to the american presbyterian college in quest of an interpreter. we could not speak chinese, the ricksha boy could neither speak nor understand a word of english, but the hotel proprietor had instructed him where to go. we plunged into the narrow streets of a great chinese city, the boy running wherever he could, walking where he must on account of the density of the crowds or the roughness of the stone paving. we had turned many corners, crossed bridges and passed through tunneled archways in sections of the massive city walls, until it was getting dusk and the ricksha man purchased and lighted a lantern. we were to reach the college in thirty minutes but had been out a full hour. a little later the boy drew up to and held conference with a policeman. the curious of the street gathered about and it dawned upon us that we were lost in the night in the narrow streets of a chinese city of a hundred thousand people. to go further would be useless for the gates of the mission compound would be locked. we could only indicate by motions our desire to return, but these were not understood. on the train a thoughtful, kindly old german had recognized a stranger in a foreign land and volunteered useful information, cutting from his daily paper an advertisement describing a good hotel. this gave the name of the hotel in german, english and in chinese characters. we handed this to the policeman, pointing to the name of the hotel, indicating by motions the desire to return, but apparently he was unable to read in either language and seemed to think we were assuming to direct the way to the college. a man and boy in the crowd apparently volunteered to act as escort for us. the throng parted and we left them, turned more corners into more unlighted narrow alleyways, one of which was too difficult to permit us to ride. the escorts, if such they were, finally left us, but the dark alley led on until it terminated at the blank face, probably of some other portion of the massive city wall we had thrice threaded through lighted tunnels. here the ricksha boy stopped and turned about but the light from his lantern was too feeble to permit reading the workings of his mind through his face, and our tongues were both utterly useless in this emergency, so we motioned for him to turn back and by some route we reached the hotel at p. m. we abandoned the effort to visit the college, for the purpose of securing an interpreter, and took the early train back to tsingtao, reaching there in time to secure the very satisfactory service of mr. chu wei yung, through the further kind offices of mr. scott. we had been twice over the road between the two cities, obtaining a general idea of the country and of the crops and field operations at this season. the next morning we took an early train to tsangkau and were ready to walk through the fields and to talk with the last generations of more than forty unbroken centuries of farmers who, with brain and brawn, have successfully and continuously sustained large families on small areas without impoverishing their soil. the next illustration is from a photograph taken in one of these fields. we astonished the old farmer by asking the privilege of holding his plow through one round in his little field, but he granted the privilege readily. our furrow was not as well turned as his, nor as well as we could have done with a two-handled oliver or john deere, but it was better than the old man had expected and won his respect. this plow had a good steel point, as a separate, blunt, v-shaped piece, and a moldboard of cast steel with a good twist which turned the soil well. the standard and sole were of wood and at the end of the beam was a block for gauging the depth of furrow. the cost of this plow, to the farmer, was $ . , gold, and when the day's work is done it is taken home on the shoulders, even though the distance may be a mile or more, and carefully housed. chinese history states that the plow was invented by shennung, who lived - b. c. and "taught the art of agriculture and the medical use of herbs". he is honored as the "god of agriculture and medicine." through my interpreter we learned that there were twelve in this man's family, which he maintained on fifteen mow of land, or . acres, together with his team, consisting of a cow and small donkey, besides feeding two pigs. this is at the rate of people, cows, donkeys and pigs on a forty-acre farm; and of a population density equivalent to people, cows, donkeys and swine per square mile of cultivated field. on another small holding we talked with the farmer standing at the well in fig. , where he was irrigating a little piece of barley feet wide and feet long. he owned and was cultivating but one and two-thirds acres of land and yet there were ten in his family and he kept one donkey and usually one pig. here is a maintenance capacity at the rate of people, donkeys and pigs on a forty-acre farm; and a population density of people, donkeys and pigs per square mile. his usual annual sales in good seasons were equivalent in value to $ , gold. in both of these cases the crops grown were wheat, barley, large and small millet, sweet potatoes and soy beans or peanuts. much straw braid is manufactured in the province by the women and children in their homes, and the cargo of the steamer on which we returned to shanghai consisted almost entirely of shelled peanuts in gunny sacks and huge bales of straw braid destined for the manufacture of hats in europe and america. shantung has only moderate rainfall, little more than inches annually, and this fact has played an important part in determining the agricultural practices of these very old people. in fig. is a closer view than fig. of the farmer watering his little field of barley. the well had just been dug over eight feet deep, expressly and solely to water this one piece of grain once, after which it would be filled and the ground planted. the season had been unusually dry, as had been the one before, and the people were fearing famine. only . inches of rain had fallen at tsingtao between the end of the preceding october and our visit, may st, and hundreds of such temporary wells had been or were being dug all along both sides of the two hundred and fifty miles of railway, and nearly all to be filled when the crop on the ground was irrigated, to release the land for one to follow. the homes are in villages a mile or more apart and often the holdings or rentals are scattered, separated by considerable distances, hence easy portability is the key-note in the construction of this irrigating outfit. the bucket is very light, simply a woven basket waterproofed with a paste of bean flour. the windlass turns like a long spool on a single pin and the standard is a tripod with removable legs. some wells we saw were sixteen or twenty feet deep and in these the water was raised by a cow walking straight away at the end of a rope. the amount and distribution of rainfall in this province, as indicated by the mean of ten years' records at tsingtao, obtained at the german meteorological observatory through the courtesy of dr. b. meyermanns, are given in the table in which the rainfall of madison, wisconsin, is inserted for comparison. mean monthly rainfall. mean rainfall in days. tsingtao, madison, tsingtao, madison, inches. inches. inches. inches. january . . . . february . . . . march . . . . april . . . . may . . . . june . . . . july . . . . august . . . . september . . . . october . . . . november . . . . december . . . . ------------ total . . while shantung receives less than inches of rain during the year, against wisconsin's more than inches, the rainfall during june, july and august in shantung is nearly . inches, while wisconsin receives but . inches. this greater summer rainfall, with persistent fertilization and intense management, in a warm latitude, are some of the elements permitting shantung today to feed , , people from an area equal to that upon which wisconsin is yet feeding but , , . must american agriculture ultimately feed sixteen people where it is now feeding but one? if so, correspondingly more intense and effective practices must follow, and we can neither know too well nor too early what these old world people have been driven to do; how they have succeeded, and how we and they may improve upon their practices and lighten the human burdens by more fully utilizing physical forces and mechanical appliances. as we passed on to other fields we found a mother and daughter transplanting sweet potatoes on carefully fitted ridges of nearly air-dry soil in a little field, the remnant of a table on a deeply eroded hillside, fig. . the husband was bringing water for moistening the soil from a deep ravine a quarter of a mile distant, carrying it on his shoulder in two buckets, fig. , across an intervening gulch. he had excavated four holes at intervals up the gulch and from these, with a broken gourd dipper mended with stitches, he filled his pails, bailing in succession from one to the other in regular rotation. the daughter was transplanting. holding the slip with its tip between thumb and fingers, a strong forward stroke plowed a furrow in the mellow, dry soil; then, with a backward movement and a downward thrust, planted the slip, firmed the soil about it, leaving a depression in which the mother poured about a pint of water from another gourd dipper. after this water had soaked away, dry earth was drawn about the slip and firmed and looser earth drawn over this, the only tools being the naked hands and dipper. the father and mother were dressed in coarse garb but the daughter was neatly clad, with delicate hands decorated with rings and a bracelet. neither of the women had bound feet. there were ten in his family; and on adjacent similar areas they had small patches of wheat nearly ready for the harvest, all planted in hills, hoed, and in astonishingly vigorous condition considering the extreme drought which prevailed. the potatoes were being planted under these extreme conditions in anticipation of the rainy season which then was fully due. the summer before had been one of unusual drought, and famine was threatened. the government had recently issued an edict that no sheep should be sold from the province, fearing they might be needed for food. an old woman in one of the villages came out, as we walked through, and inquired of my interpreter if we had come to make it rain. such was the stress under which we found these people. one of the large farmers, owning ten acres, stated that his usual yield of wheat in good season was catty per mow, equivalent to . bushels per acre. he was expecting the current season not more than one half this amount. as a fertilizer he used a prepared earth compost which we shall describe later, mixing it with the grain and sowing in the hills with the seed, applying about pounds per acre, which he valued, in our currency, at $ . , or $ . per ton. a pile of such prepared compost is seen in fig. , ready to be transferred to the field. the views show with what cleanliness the yard is kept and with what care all animal waste is saved. the cow and donkey are the work team, such as was being used by the plowman referred to in fig. . the mounds in the background of the lower view are graves; the fence behind the animals is made from the stems of the large millet, kaoliang, while that at the right of the donkey is made of earth, both indicative of the scarcity of lumber. the buildings, too, are thatched and their walls are of earth plastered with an earthen mortar worked up with chaff. in another field a man plowing and fertilizing for sweet potatoes had brought to the field and laid down in piles the finely pulverized dry compost. the father was plowing; his son of sixteen years was following and scattering, from a basket, the pulverized dry compost in the bottom of the furrow. the next furrow covered the fertilizer, four turned together forming a ridge upon which the potatoes were to be planted after a second and older son had smoothed and fitted the crest with a heavy hand rake. the fertilizer was thus applied directly beneath the row, at the rate of pounds per acre, valued at $ . , our currency, or $ . per ton. we were astonished at the moist condition of the soil turned, which was such as to pack in the hand notwithstanding the extreme drought prevailing and the fact that standing water in the ground was more than eight feet below the surface. the field had been without crop and cultivated. to the question, "what yield of sweet potatoes do you expect from this piece of land?" he replied, "about catty," which is bushels of pounds per acre. the usual market price was stated to be $ . , mexican, per one hundred catty, making the gross value of the crop $ . , gold, per acre. his land was valued at $ , mexican, per mow, or $ . per acre, gold. my interpreter informed me that the average well-to-do farmers in this part of shantung own from fifteen to twenty mow of land and this amount is quite ample to provide for eight people. such farmers usually keep two cows, two donkeys and eight or ten pigs. the less well-to-do or small farmers own two to five mow and act as superintendents for the larger farmers. taking the largest holding, of twenty mow per family of eight people, as a basis, the density per square mile would be people, and an area of farm land equal to the state of wisconsin would have , , people; , , cows; , , donkeys and , , swine. these observations apply to one of the most productive sections of the province, but very large areas of land in the province are not cultivable and the last census showed the total population nearly one-half of this amount. it is clear, therefore, that either very effective agricultural methods are practiced or else extreme economy is exercised. both are true. on this day in the fields our interpreter procured his dinner at a farm house, bringing us four boiled eggs, for which he paid at the rate of . cents of our money, but his dinner was probably included in the price. the next table gives the prices for some articles obtained by inquiry at the tsingtao market, may rd, , reduced to our currency. cents old potatoes, per lb . new potatoes, per lb . salted turnip, per lb . onions, per lb . radishes, bunch of . string beans, per lb . cucumbers, per lb . pears, per lb . apricots, per lb . pork, fresh, per lb . fish, per lb . eggs, per dozen . the only items which are low compared with our own prices are salted turnips, radishes and eggs. most of the articles listed were out of season for the locality and were imported for the foreigners, turnips, radishes, pork, fish and eggs being the exceptions. prof. ross informs us that he found eggs selling in shensi at four for one cent of our money. our interpreter asked a compensation of one dollar, mexican, or cents, u. s. currency, per day, he furnishing his own meals. the usual wage for farm labor here was $ . , per year, with board and lodging. we have referred to the wages paid by missionaries for domestic service. as servants the chinese are considered efficient, faithful and trustworthy. it was the custom of mr. and mrs. league to intrust them with the purse for marketing, feeling that they could be depended upon for the closest bargaining. commonly, when instructed to procure a certain article, if they found the price one or two cash higher than usual they would select a cheaper substitute. if questioned as to why instructions were not followed the reply would be "too high, no can afford." mrs. league recited her experience with her cook regarding his use of our kitchen appliances. after fitting the kitchen with a modern range and cooking utensils, and working with him to familiarize him with their use, she was surprised, on going into the kitchen a few days later, to find that the old chinese stove had been set on the range and the cooking being done with the usual chinese furniture. when asked why he was not using the stove his reply was "take too much fire." nothing jars on the nerves of these people more than incurring of needless expense, extravagance in any form, or poor judgment in making purchases. daily we became more and more impressed by the evidence of the intense and incessant stress imposed by the dense populations of centuries, and how, under it, the laws of heredity have wrought upon the people, affecting constitution, habits and character. even the cattle and sheep have not escaped its irresistible power. many times in this province we saw men herding flocks of twenty to thirty sheep along the narrow unfenced pathways winding through the fields, and on the grave lands. the prevailing drought had left very little green to be had from these places and yet sheep were literally brushing their sides against fresh green wheat and barley, never molesting them. time and again the flocks were stampeded into the grain by an approaching train, but immediately they returned to their places without taking a nibble. the voice of the shepherd and an occasional well aimed lump of earth only being required to bring them back to their uninviting pastures. in kiangsu and chekiang provinces a line of half a dozen white goats were often seen feeding single file along the pathways, held by a cord like a string of beads, sometimes led by a child. here, too, one of the most common sights was the water buffalo grazing unattended among the fields along the paths and canal banks, with crops all about, one of the most memorable shocks came to us in chekiang, china, when we had fallen into a revery while gazing at the shifting landscape from the doorway of our low-down chinese houseboat. something in the sky and the vegetation along the canal bank had recalled the scenes of boyhood days and it seemed, as we looked aslant up the bank with its fringe of grass, that we were gliding along whitewater creek through familiar meadows and that standing up would bring the old home in sight. that instant there glided into view, framed in the doorway and projected high against the tinted sky above the setting sun, a giant water buffalo standing motionless as a statue on the summit of a huge grave mound, lifted fully ten feet above the field. but in a flash this was replaced by a companion scene, and with all its beautiful setting, which had been as suddenly fixed on the memory fourteen years before in the far away trossachs when our coach, hurriedly rounding a sharp turn in the hills, suddenly exposed a wild ox of scotland similarly thrust against the sky from a small but isolated rocky summit, and then, outspeeding the wireless, recollection crossed two oceans and an intervening continent, bringing us back to china before a speed of five miles, per hour could move the first picture across the narrow doorway. it was through the fields about tsangkow that the stalwart freighters referred to, fig. , passed us on one of the paths leading from kiaochow through unnumbered country villages, already eleven miles on their way with their wheelbarrows loaded with matches made in japan. many of the wheelbarrow men seen in shanghai and other cities are from shantung families, away for employment, expecting to return. during the harvest season, too, many of these people go west and north into manchuria seeking employment, returning to their homes in winter. alexander hosie, in his book on manchuria, states that from chefoo alone more than , chinese laborers cross to newchwang every spring by steamer, others finding their way there by junks or other means, so that after the harvest season , more return by steamer to chefoo than left that way in the spring, from which he concludes that shantung annually supplies manchuria with agricultural labor to the extent of , men. about the average condition of wheat in shantung during this dry season, and nearing maturity, is seen in fig. , standing rather more than three feet high, as indicated by our umbrella between the rows. beyond the wheat and to the right, grave mounds serrate the sky line, no hills being in sight, for we were in the broad plain built up from the sea between the two mountain islands forming the highlands of shantung. on may nd we were in the fields north of kiaochow, some sixty miles by rail west from tsingtao, but within the neutral zone extending thirty miles back from the high water line of the bay of the same name. here the germans had built a broad macadam road after the best european type but over it were passing the vehicles of forty centuries seen in figs. and . it is doubtful if the resistance to travel experienced by these men on the better road was enough less than that on the old paths they had left to convince them that the cost of construction and maintenance would be worth while until vehicles and the price of labor change. it may appear strange that with a nation of so many millions and with so long a history, roads have persisted as little more than beaten foot-paths; but modern methods of transportation have remained physical impossibilities to every people until the science of the last century opened the way. throughout their history the burdens of these people have been carried largely on foot, mostly on the feet of men, and of single men wherever the load could be advantageously divided. animals have been supplemental burden bearers but, as with the men, they have carried the load directly on their own feet, the mode least disturbed by inequalities of road surface. for adaptability to the worst road conditions no vehicle equals the wheelbarrow, progressing by one wheel and two feet. no vehicle is used more in china, if the carrying pole is excepted, and no wheelbarrow in the world permits so high an efficiency of human power as the chinese, as must be clear from figs. and , where nearly the whole load is balanced on the axle of a high, massive wheel with broad tire. a shoulder band from the handles of the barrow relieves the strain on the hands and, when the load or the road is heavy, men or animals may aid in drawing, or even, when the wind is favorable, it is not unusual to hoist a sail to gain propelling power. it is only in northern china, and then in the more level portions, where there are few or no canals, that carts have been extensively used, but are more difficult to manage on bad roads. most of the heavy carts, especially those in manchuria, seen in fig. , have the wheels framed rigidly to the axle which revolves with them, the bearing being in the bed of the cart. but new carts of modern type are being introduced. in the extent of development and utilization of inland waterways no people have approached the chinese. in the matter of land transportation they have clearly followed the line of least resistance for individual initiative, so characteristic of industrial china. there are government courier or postal roads which connect peking with the most distant parts of the empire, some twenty-one being usually enumerated. these, as far as practicable, take the shortest course, are often cut into the mountain sides and even pass through tunnels. in the plains regions these roads may be sixty to seventy-five feet wide, paved and occasionally bordered by rows of trees. in some cases, too, signal towers are erected at intervals of three miles and there are inns along the way, relay posts and stations for soldiers. we have spoken of planting grain in rows and in hills in the row. in fig. is a field with the rows planted in pairs, the members being inches apart, and together occupying inches. the space between each pair is also inches, making five feet in all. this makes frequent hoeing practicable, which is begun early in the spring and is repeated after every rain. it also makes it possible to feed the plants when they can utilize food to the best advantage and to repeat the feeding if desirable. besides, the ground in the wider space may be fitted, fertilized and another crop planted before the first is removed. the hills alternate in the rows and are to inches from center to center. the planting may be done by hand or with a drill such as that in fig. , ingenious in the simple mechanism which permits planting in hills. the husbandman had just returned from the field with the drill on his shoulder when we met at the door of his village home, where he explained to us the construction and operation of the drill and permitted the photograph to be taken, but turning his face aside, not wishing to represent a specific character, in the view. in the drill there was a heavy leaden weight swinging free from a point above the space between the openings leading to the respective drill feet. when planting, the operator rocks the drill from side to side, causing the weight to hang first over one and then over the other opening, thus securing alternation of hills in each pair of rows. counting the heads of wheat in the hill in a number of fields showed them ranging between and , the distance between the rows and between the hills as stated above. there were always a larger number of stalks per hill where the water capacity of the soil was large, where the ground water was near the surface, and where the soil was evidently of good quality. this may have been partly the result of stooling but we have little doubt that judgment was exercised in planting, sowing less seed on the lighter soils where less moisture was available. in the piece just referred to, in the illustration, an average hill contained stalks and the number of kernels in a head varied between and . taking richardson's estimate of , kernels of wheat to the pound, this field would yield about twelve bushels of wheat per acre this unusually dry season. our interpreter, whose parents lived near kaomi, four stations further west, stated that in , one of their best seasons, farmers there secured yields as high as catty per legal mow, which is at the rate of bushels per acre. such a yield on small areas highly fertilized and carefully tilled, when the rainfall is ample or where irrigation is practiced, is quite possible and in the kiangsu province we observed individual small fields which would certainly approach close to this figure. further along in our journey of the day we came upon a field where three, one of them a boy of fourteen years, were hoeing and thinning millet and maize. in china, during the hot weather, the only garment worn by the men in the field, was their trousers, and the boy had found these unnecessary, although he slipped into them while we were talking with his father. the usual yield of maize was set at to catty per mow, and that of millet at catty, or to . bushels of maize and bushels of millet, of fifty pounds, per acre, and the usual price would make the gross earnings $ . to $ . per acre for the maize, and $ . , gold, for the millet. it was evident when walking through these fields that the fall-sowed grain was standing the drought far better than the barley planted in the spring, quite likely because of the deeper and stronger development of root system made possible by the longer period of growth, and partly because the wheat had made much of its growth utilizing water that had fallen before the barley was planted and which would have been lost from the soil through percolation and surface evaporation. farmers here are very particular to hoe their grain, beginning in the early spring, and always after rains, thoroughly appreciating the efficiency of earth mulches. their hoe, seen in fig. , is peculiarly well adapted to its purpose, the broad blade being so hung that it draws nearly parallel with the surface, cutting shallow and permitting the soil to drop practically upon the place from which it was loosened. these hoes are made in three parts; a wooden handle, a long, strong and heavy iron socket shank, and a blade of steel. the blade is detachable and different forms and sizes of blades may be used on the same shank. the mulch-producing blades may have a cutting edge thirteen inches long and a width of nine inches. at short intervals on either hand, along the two hundred and fifty miles of railway between tsingtao and tsinan, were observed many piles of earth compost distributed in the fields. one of these piles is seen in fig. . they were sometimes on unplanted fields, in other cases they occurred among the growing crops soon to be harvested, or where another crop was to be planted between the rows of one already on the ground. some of these piles were six feet high. all were built in cubical form with flat top and carefully plastered with a layer of earth mortar which sometimes cracked on drying, as seen in the illustration. the purpose of this careful shaping and plastering we did not learn although our interpreter stated it was to prevent the compost from being appropriated for use on adjacent fields. such a finish would have the effect of a seal, showing if the pile had been disturbed, but we suspect other advantages are sought by the treatment, which involves so large an amount of labor. the amount of this earth compost prepared and used annually in shantung is large, as indicated by the cases cited, where more than five thousand pounds, in one instance, and seven thousand pounds in another, were applied per acre for one crop. when two or more crops are grown the same year on the same ground, each is fertilized, hence from three to six or more tons may be applied to each cultivated acre. the methods of preparing compost and of fertilizing in kiangsu, chekiang and kwangtung provinces have been described. in this part of shantung, in chihli and north in manchuria as far as mukden, the methods are materially different and if possible even more laborious, but clearly rational and effective. here nearly if not all fertilizer compost is prepared in the villages and carried to the fields, however distant these may be. rev. t. j. league very kindly accompanied us to chengyang on the railway, from which we walked some two miles, back to a prosperous rural village to see their methods of preparing this compost fertilizer. it was toward the close of the afternoon before we reached the village, and from all directions husbandmen were returning from the fields, some with hoes, some with plows, some with drills over their shoulders and others leading donkeys or cattle, and similar customs obtain in japan, as seen in fig. . these were mostly the younger men. when we reached the village streets the older men, all bareheaded, as were those returning from the fields, and usually with their queues tied about the crown, were visiting, enjoying their pipes of tobacco. opium is no longer used openly in china, unless it be permitted to some well along in years with the habit confirmed, and the growing of the poppy is prohibited. the penalties for violating the law are heavy and enforcement is said to be rigid and effective. for the first violation a fine is imposed. if convicted of a second violation the fine is heavier with imprisonment added to help the victim acquire self control, and a third conviction may bring the death penalty. the eradication of the opium scourge must prove a great blessing to china. but with the passing of this most formidable evil, for whose infliction upon china england was largely responsible, it is a great misfortune that through the pitiless efforts of the british-american tobacco company her people are rapidly becoming addicted to the western tobacco habit, selfish beyond excuse, filthy beyond measure, and unsanitary in its polluting and oxygen-destroying effect upon the air all are compelled to breathe. it has already become a greater and more inexcusable burden upon mankind than opium ever was. china, with her already overtaxed fields, can ill afford to give over an acre to the cultivation of this crop and she should prohibit the growing of tobacco as she has that of the poppy. let her take the wise step now when she readily may, for all civilized nations will ultimately be compelled to adopt such a measure. the united states in had more than a million acres growing tobacco, and harvested , , pounds of leaf. this leaf depleted those soils to the extent of more than twenty eight million pounds of nitrogen, twenty-nine million pounds of potassium and nearly two and a half million pounds of phosphorus, all so irrecoverably lost that even china, with her remarkable skill in saving and her infinite patience with little things, could not recover them for her soils. on a like area of field might as readily be grown twenty million bushels of wheat and if the twelve hundred million pounds of grain were all exported it would deplete the soil less than the tobacco crop in everything but phosphorus, and in this about the same. used at home, china would return it all to one or another field. the home consumption of tobacco in the united states averaged seven pounds per capita in . a like consumption for china's four hundred millions would call for million pounds of leaf. if she grew it on her fields two million acres would not suffice. her soils would be proportionately depleted and she would be short forty million bushels of wheat; but if china continues to import her tobacco the vast sum expended can neither fertilize her fields nor feed, clothe or educate her people, yet a like sum expended in the importation of wheat would feed her hungry and enrich her soils. in the matter of conservation of national resources here is one of the greatest opportunities open to all civilized nations. what might not be done in the united states with a fund of $ , , annually, the market price of the raw tobacco leaf, and the land, the labor and the capital expended in getting the product to the men who puff, breathe and perspire the noxious product into the air everyone must breathe, and who bespatter the streets, sidewalks, the floor of every public place and conveyance, and befoul the million spittoons, smoking rooms and smoking cars, all unnecessary and should be uncalled for, but whose installation and up-keep the non-user as well as the user is forced to pay, and this in a country of, for and by the people. this costly, filthy, selfish tobacco habit should be outgrown. let it begin in every new home, where the mother helps the father in refusing to set the example, and let its indulgence be absolutely prohibited to everyone while in public school and to all in educational institutions. mr. league had been given a letter of introduction to one of the leading farmers of the village and it chanced that as we reached the entrance way to big home we were met by his son, just returning from the fields with his drill on his shoulder, and it is he standing in the illustration, fig. , holding the letter of introduction in his hand. after we had taken this photograph and another one looking down the narrow street from the same point, we were led to the small open court of the home, perhaps forty by eighty feet, upon which all doors of the one-storied structures opened. it was dry and bare of everything green, but a row of very tall handsome trees, close relatives of our cottonwood, with trunks thirty feet to the limbs, looked down into the court over the roofs of the low thatched houses. here we met the father and grandfather of the man with the drill, so that, with the boy carrying the baby in his arms, who had met his father in the street gateway, there were four generations of males at our conference. there were women and girls in the household but custom requires them to remain in retirement on such occasions. a low narrow four-legged bench, not unlike our carpenter's sawhorse, five feet long, was brought into the court as a seat, which our host and we occupied in common. we had been similarly received at the home of mrs. wu in chekiang province. on our right was the open doorway to the kitchen in which stood, erect and straight, the tall spare figure of the patriarch of the household, his eyes still shining black but with hair and long thin straggling beard a uniform dull ashen gray. no chinese hair, it seems, ever becomes white with age. he seemed to have assumed the duties of cook for while we were there be lighted the fire in the kitchen and was busy, but was always the final oracle on any matter of difference of opinion between the younger men regarding answers to questions. two sleeping apartments adjoining the kitchen, through whose wide kang beds the waste heat from the cooking was conveyed, as described on page , completed this side of the court. on our left was the main street completely shut off by a solid earth wall as high as the eaves of the house, while in front of us, adjoining the street, was the manure midden, a compost pit six feet deep and some eight feet square. a low opening in the street wall permitted the pit to be emptied and to receive earth and stubble or refuse from the fields for composting, against the pit and without partition, but cut off from the court, was the home of the pigs, both under a common roof continuous with a closed structure joining with the sleeping apartments, while behind us and along the alley-way by which we had entered were other dwelling and storage compartments. thus was the large family of four generations provided with a peculiarly private open court where they could work and come out for sun and air, both, from our standards, too meagerly provided in the houses. we had come to learn more of the methods of fertilizing practiced by these people. the manure midden was before us and the piles of earth brought in from the fields, for use in the process, were stacked in the street, where we had photographed them at the entrance, as seen in fig. . there a father, with his pipe, and two boys stand at the extreme left; beyond them is a large pile of earth brought into the village and carefully stacked in the narrow street; on the other side of the street, at the corner of the first building, is a pile of partly fermented compost thrown from a pit behind the walls. further along in the street, on the same side, is a second large stack of soil where two boys are standing at either end and another little boy was in a near-by doorway. in front of the tree, on the left side of the street, stands a third boy, near him a small donkey and still another boy. beyond this boy stands a third large stack of soil, while still beyond and across the way is another pile partly composted. notwithstanding the cattle in the preceding illustration, the donkey, the men, the boys, the three long high stacks of soil and the two piles of compost, the ten rods of narrow street possessed a width of available travelway and a cleanliness which would appear impossible. each farmer's household had its stack of soil in the street, and in walking through the village we passed dozens of men turning and mixing the soil and compost, preparing it for the field. the compost pit in front of where we sat was two-thirds filled. in it had been placed all of the manure and waste of the household and street, all stubble and waste roughage from the field, all ashes not to be applied directly and some of the soil stacked in the street. sufficient water was added at intervals to keep the contents completely saturated and nearly submerged, the object being to control the character of fermentation taking place. the capacity of these compost pits is determined by the amount of land served, and the period of composting is made as long as possible, the aim being to have the fiber of all organic material completely broken down, the result being a product of the consistency of mortar. when it is near the time for applying the compost to the field, or of feeding it to the crop, the fermented product is removed in waterproof carrying baskets to the floor of the court, to the yard, such as seen in fig. , or to the street, where it is spread to dry, to be mixed with fresh soil, more ashes, and repeatedly turned and stirred to bring about complete aeration and to hasten the processes of nitrification. during all of these treatments, whether in the compost pit or on the nitrification floor, the fermenting organic matter in contact with the soil is converting plant food elements into soluble plant food substances in the form of potassium, calcium and magnesium nitrates and soluble phosphates of one or another form, perhaps of the same bases and possibly others of organic type. if there is time and favorable temperature and moisture conditions for these fermentations to take place in the soil of the field before the crop will need it, the compost may be carried direct from the pit to the field and spread broadcast, to be plowed under. otherwise the material is worked and reworked, with more water added if necessary, until it becomes a rich complete fertilizer, allowed to become dry and then finely pulverized, sometimes using stone rollers drawn over it by cattle, the donkey or by hand. the large numbers of stacks of compost seen in the fields between tsingtao and tsinan were of this type and thus laboriously prepared in the villages and then transported to the fields, stacked and plastered to be ready for use at next planting. in the early days of european history, before modern chemistry had provided the cheaper and more expeditious method of producing potassium nitrate for the manufacture of gunpowder and fireworks, much land and effort were devoted to niter-farming which was no other than a specific application of this most ancient chinese practice and probably imported from china. while it was not until to that men of science came to know that the processes of nitrification, so indispensable to agriculture, are due to germ life, in simple justice to the plain farmers of the world, to those who through all the ages from adam down, living close to nature and working through her and with her, have fed the world, it should be recognized that there have been those among them who have grasped such essential, vital truths and have kept them alive in the practices of their day. and so we find it recorded in history as far back as that judge samuel lewell copied upon the cover of his journal a practical man's recipe for making saltpeter beds, in which it was directed, among other things, that there should be added to it "mother of petre", meaning, in judge lewell's understanding, simply soil from an old niter bed, but in the mind of the man who applied the maternity prefix,--mother,--it must have meant a vital germ contained in the soil, carried with it, capable of reproducing its kind and of perpetuating its characteristic work, belonging to the same category with the old, familiar, homely germ, "mother" of vinegar. so, too, with the old cheesemaker who grasped the conception which led to the long time practice of washing the walls of a new cheese factory with water from an old factory of the same type, he must have been led by analogies of experience with things seen to realize that he was here dealing with a vital factor. hundreds, of course, have practiced empyrically, but some one preceded with the essential thought and we feel it is small credit to men of our time who, after ten or twenty years of technical training, having their attention directed to a something to be seen, and armed with compound microscopes which permit them to see with the physical eye the "mother of petre", arrogate to themselves the discovery of a great truth. much more modest would it be and much more in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due to admit that, after long doubting the existence of such an entity, we have succeeded in confirming in fullness the truth of a great discovery which belongs to an unnamed genius of the past, or perhaps to a hundred of them who, working with life's processes and familiar with them through long intimate association, saw in these invisible processes analogies that revealed to them the essential truth in such fullness as to enable them to build upon it an unfailing practice. there is another practice followed by the chinese, connected with the formation of nitrates in soils, which again emphasizes the national trait of saving and turning to use any and every thing worth while. our attention was called to this practice by rev. a. e. evans of shunking, szechwan province. it rests upon the tendency of the earth floors of dwellings to become heavily charged with calcium nitrate through the natural processes of nitrification. calcium nitrate being deliquescent absorbs moisture sufficiently to dissolve and make the floor wet and sticky. dr. evans' attention was drawn to the wet floor in his own house, which be at first ascribed to insufficient ventilation, but which be was unable to remedy by improving that. the father of one of his assistants, whose business consisted in purchasing the soil of such floors for producing potassium nitrate, used so much in china in the manufacture of fireworks and gunpowder, explained his difficulty and suggested the remedy. this man goes from house to house through the village, purchasing the soil of floors which have thus become overcharged. he procures a sample, tests it and announces what he will pay for the surface two, three or four inches, the price sometimes being as high as fifty cents for the privilege of removing the top layer of the floor, which the proprietors must replace. he leaches the soil removed, to recover the calcium nitrate, and then pours the leachings through plant ashes containing potassium carbonate, for the purpose of transforming the calcium nitrate into the potassium nitrate or saltpeter. dr. evans learned that during the four months preceding our interview this man had produced sufficient potassium nitrate to bring his sales up to $ , mexican. it was necessary for him to make a two-days journey to market his product. in addition he paid a license fee of cents per month. he must purchase his fuel ashes and hire the services of two men. when the nitrates which accumulate in the floors of dwellings are not collected for this purpose the soil goes to the fields to be used directly as a fertilizer, or it may be worked into compost. in the course of time the earth used in the village walls and even in the construction of the houses may disintegrate so as to require removal, but in all such cases, as with the earth brick used in the kangs, the value of the soil has improved for composting and is generally so used. this improvement of the soil will not appear strange when it is stated that such materials are usually from the subsoil, whose physical condition would improve when exposed to the weather, converting it in fact into an uncropped virgin soil. we were unable to secure definite data as to the chemical composition of these composts and cannot say what amounts of available plant food the shantung farmers are annually returning to their fields. there can be little doubt, however, that the amounts are quite equal to those removed by the crops. the soils appeared well supplied with organic matter and the color of the foliage and the general aspect of crops indicated good feeding. the family with whom we talked in the village place their usual yields of wheat at catty of grain and catty of straw per mow,--their mow was four-thirds of the legal standard mow--the grain being worth strings of cash and the straw to strings, a string of cash being cents, mexican, at this time. their yields of beans were such as to give them a return of strings of cash for the grain and to strings for the straw. small millet usually yielded catty of grain, worth strings of cash, per mow, and catty of straw worth to strings of cash; while the yields of large millet they placed at catty per mow, worth strings of cash, and catty of straw worth to strings of cash. stating these amounts in bushels per acre and in our currency, the yield of wheat was bushels of grain and pounds of straw per acre, having a cash value of $ . for the grain and $ . for the straw. the soy bean crop follows the wheat, giving an additional return of $ . for the beans and $ . for the straw, making the gross earning for the two crops $ . per acre. the yield of small millet was bushels of seed and pounds of straw per acre, worth $ . and $ . for seed and straw respectively, while the kaoliang or large millet gave a yield of bushels of grain and pounds of stalks per acre, worth $ . for the grain, and $ . for the straw. a crop of wheat like the one stated, if no part of the plant food contained in the grain or straw were returned to the field, would deplete the soil to the extent of about pounds of nitrogen, pounds of phosphorus and pounds of potassium; and the crop of soy beans, if it also were entirely removed, would reduce these three plant food elements in the soil to the extent of about pounds of nitrogen, pounds of phosphorus and pounds of potassium, on the basis of bushels of beans and pounds of stems and leaves per acre, assuming that the beans added no nitrogen to the soil, which is of course not true. this household of farmers, therefore, in order to have maintained this producing power in their soil, have been compelled to return to it annually, in one form or another, not less than pounds of phosphorus and pounds of potassium per acre. the pounds of nitrogen they would have to return in the form of organic matter or accumulate it from the atmosphere, through the instrumentality of their soy bean crop or some other legume. it has already been stated that they do add more than to pounds of dry compost, which, repeated for a second crop, would make an annual application of five to seven tons of dry compost per acre annually. they do use, in addition to this compost, large amounts of bean and peanut cake, which carry all of the plant food elements derived from the soil which are contained in the beans and the peanuts. if the vines are fed, or if the stems of the beaus are burned for fuel, most of the plant food elements in these will be returned to the field, and they have doubtless learned how to completely restore the plant food elements removed by their crops, and persistently do so. the roads made by the germans in the vicinity of tsingtao enabled us to travel by ricksha into the adjoining country, and on one such trip we visited a village mill for grinding soy beans and peanuts in the manufacture of oil, and fig. shows the stone roller, four feet in diameter and two feet thick, which is revolved about a vertical axis on a circular stone plate, drawn by a donkey, crushing the kernels partly by its weight and partly by a twisting motion, for the arm upon which the roller revolves is very short. after the meal had been ground the oil was expressed in essentially the same way as that described for the cotton seed, but the bean and peanut cakes are made much larger than the cotton seed cakes, about eighteen inches in diameter and three to four inches thick. two of these cakes are seen in fig. , standing on edge outside the mill in an orderly clean court. it is in this form that bean cake is exported in large quantities to different parts of china, and to japan in recent years, for use as fertilizer, and very recently it is being shipped to europe for both stock food and fertilizer. nowhere in this province, nor further north, did we see the large terra cotta, receptacles so extensively used in the south for storing human excreta. in these dryer climates some method of desiccation is practiced and we found the gardeners in the vicinity of tsingtao with quantities of the fertilizer stacked under matting shelters in the desiccated condition, this being finely pulverized in one or another way before it was applied. the next illustration, fig. , shows one of these piles being fitted for the garden, its thatched shelter standing behind the grandfather of a household. his grandson was carrying the prepared fertilizer to the garden area seen in fig. , where the father was working it into the soil. the greatest pains is taken, both in reducing the product to a fine powder and in spreading and incorporating it with the soil, for one of their maxims of soil management is to make each square foot of field or garden the equal of every other in its power to produce. in this manner each little holding is made to yield the highest returns possible under the conditions the husbandman is able to control. from one portion of the area being fitted, a crop of artemisia had been harvested, giving a gross return at the rate of $ . per acre, and from another leeks had been taken, bringing a gross return of $ . per acre. chinese celery was the crop for which the ground was being fitted. the application of soil as a fertilizer to the fields of china, whether derived from the subsoil or from the silts and organic matter of canals and rivers, must have played an important part in the permanency of agriculture in the far east, for all such additions have been positive accretions to the effective soil, increasing its depth and carrying to it all plant food elements. if not more than one-half of the weight of compost applied to the fields of shantung is highly fertilized soil, the rates of application observed would, in a thousand years, add more than two million pounds per acre, and this represents about the volume of soil we turn with the plow in our ordinary tillage operations, and this amount of good soil may carry more than pounds of nitrogen, pounds of phosphorus and more than , pounds of potassium. when we left our hotel by ricksha for the steamer, returning to shanghai, we soon observed a boy of thirteen or fourteen years apparently following, sometimes a little ahead, sometimes behind, usually keeping the sidewalk but slackening his pace whenever the ricksha man came to a walk. it was a full mile to the wharf. the boy evidently knew the sailing schedule and judged by the valise in front, that we were to take the out-going steamer and that he might possibly earn two cents, mexican, the usual fee for taking a valise aboard the steamer. twenty men at the wharf might be waiting for the job, but he was taking the chance with the mile down and back thrown in, and all for less than one cent in our currency, equivalent at the time to about twenty "cash". as we neared the steamer the lad closed up behind but strong and eager men were watching. twice he was roughly thrust aside and before the ricksha stopped a man of stalwart frame seized the valise and, had we not observed the boy thus unobtrusively entering the competition, he would have had only his trouble for his pains. thus intense was the struggle here for existence and thus did a mere lad put himself effectively into it. true to breeding and example he had spared no labor to win and was surprised but grateful to receive more than he had expected. xi orientals crowd both time and space time is a function of every life process, as it is of every physical, chemical and mental reaction, and the husbandman is compelled to shape his operations so as to conform with the time requirements of his crops. the oriental farmer is a time economizer beyond any other. he utilizes the first and last minute and all that are between. the foreigner accuses the chinaman of being always "long on time", never in a fret, never in a hurry. and why should he be when he leads time by the forelock, and uses all there is? the customs and practices of these farthest east people regarding their manufacture of fertilizers in the form of earth composts for their fields, and their use of altered subsoils which have served in their kangs, village walls and dwellings, are all instances where they profoundly shorten the time required in the field to affect the necessary chemical, physical and biological reactions which produce from them plant food substances. not only do they thus increase their time assets, but they add, in effect, to their land area by producing these changes outside their fields, at the same time giving their crops the immediately active soil products. their compost practices have been of the greatest consequence to them, both in their extremely wet, rice-culture methods, and in their "dry-farming" practices, where the soil moisture is too scanty during long periods to permit rapid fermentation under field conditions. western agriculturalists have not sufficiently appreciated the fact that the most rapid growth of plant food substances in the soil cannot occur at the same time and place with the most rapid crop increase, because both processes draw upon the available soil moisture, soil air and soluble potassium, calcium, phosphorus and nitrogen compounds. whether this fundamental principle of practical agriculture is written in their literature or not it is most indelibly fixed in their practice. if we and they can perpetuate the essentials of this practice at a large saving of human effort, or perpetually secure the final result in some more expeditious and less laborious way, most important progress will have been made. when we went north to the shantung province the kiangsu and chekiang farmers were engaged in another of their time saving practices, also involving a large amount of human labor. this was the planting of cotton in wheat fields before the wheat was quite ready to harvest. in the sections of these two provinces which we visited most of the wheat and barley were sowed broadcast on narrow raised lands, some five feet wide, with furrows between, after the manner seen in fig. , showing a reservoir in the immediate foreground, on whose bank is installed one of the four-man foot-power irrigation pumps in use to flood the nursery rice bed close by on the right. the narrow lands of broadcasted wheat extend back from the reservoir toward the farmsteads which dot the landscape, and on the left stands one of the pump shelters near the canal bank. to save time, or lengthen the growing season of the cotton which was to follow, this seed was sown broadcast among the grain on the surface, some ten to fifteen days before the wheat would be harvested. to cover the seed the soil in the furrows between the beds had been spaded loose to a depth of four or five inches, finely pulverized, and then with a spade was evenly scattered over the bed, letting it sift down among the grain, covering the seed. this loose earth, so applied, acts as a mulch to conserve the capillary moisture, permitting the soil to become sufficiently damp to germinate the seed before the wheat is harvested. the next illustration, fig. , is a closer view with our interpreter standing in another field of wheat in which cotton was being sowed april nd in the manner described, and yet the stand of grain was very close and shoulder high, making it not an easy task either to sow the seed or to scatter sufficient soil to cover it. when we had returned from shantung this piece of grain had been harvested, giving a yield of . bushels of wheat and . tons of straw per acre, computed from the statement of the owner that catty of grain and catty of straw had been taken from the beds measuring square feet. on the morning of may th the photograph for fig. was taken, showing the same area after the wheat had been harvested and the cotton was up, the young plants showing slightly through the short stubble. these beds had already been once treated with liquid fertilizer. a little later the plants would be hoed and thinned to a stand of about one plant per each square foot of surface. there were thirty-seven days between the taking of the two photographs, and certainly thirty days had been added to the cotton crop by this method of planting, over what would have been available if the grain had been first harvested and the field fitted before planting, it will be observed that the cotton follows the wheat without plowing, but the soil was deep, naturally open, and a layer of nearly two inches of loose earth had been placed over the seed at the time of planting. besides, the ground would be deeply worked with the two or four tined hoe, at the time of thinning. starting cotton in the wheat in the manner described is but a special case of a general practice widely in vogue. the growing of multiple crops is the rule throughout these countries wherever the climate permits. sometimes as many as three crops occupy the same field in recurrent rows, but of different dates of planting and in different stages of maturity. reference has been made to the overlapping and alternation of cucumbers with greens. the general practice of planting nearly all crops in rows lends itself readily to systems of multiple cropping, and these to the fullest possible utilization of every minute of the growing season and of the time of the family in caring for the crops. in the field, fig. , a crop of winter wheat was nearing maturity, a crop of windsor beans was about two-thirds grown, and cotton had just been planted, april nd. this field had been thrown into ridges some five feet wide with a twelve inch furrow between them. two rows of wheat eight inches wide, planted two feet between centers occupied the crest of the ridge, leaving a strip sixteen inches wide, seen in the upper section, ( ) for tillage, ( ) then fertilization and ( ) finally the row of cotton planted just before the wheat was harvested. against the furrow on each side was a row of windsor beans, seen in the lower view, hiding the furrow, which was matured some time after the wheat was harvested and before the cotton was very large. a late fall crop sometimes follows the windsor beans after a period of tillage and fertilization, making four in one year. with such a succession fertilization for each crop, and an abundance of soil moisture are required to give the largest returns from the soil. in another plan winter wheat or barley may grow side by side with a green crop, such as the "chinese clover" (medicago denticulata, willd.) for soil fertilizer, as was the case in fig. , to be turned under and fertilize for a crop of cotton planted in rows on either side of a crop of barley. after the barley had been harvested the ground it occupied would be tilled and further fertilized, and when the cotton was nearing maturity a crop of rape might be grown, from which "salted cabbage" would be prepared for winter use. multiple crops are grown as far north in chihli as tientsin and peking, these being oftenest wheat, maize, large and small millet and soy beans, and this, too, where the soil is less fertile and where the annual rainfall is only about twenty-five inches, the rainy season beginning in late june or early july, and fig. shows one of these fields as it appeared june th, where two rows of wheat and two of large millet were planted in alternating pairs, the rows being about twenty-eight inches apart. the wheat was ready to harvest but the straw was unusually short because growing on a light sandy loam in a season of exceptional drought, but little more than two inches of rain having fallen after january st of that year. the piles of pulverized dry-earth compost seen between the rows had been brought for use on the ground occupied by the wheat when that was removed. the wheat would be pulled, tied in bundles, taken to the village and the roots cut off, for making compost, as in fig. , which shows the family engaged in cutting the roots from the small bundles of wheat, using a long straight knife blade, fixed at one end, and thrust downward upon the bundle with lever pressure. these roots, if not used as fuel, would be transferred to the compost pit in the enclosure seen in fig. , whose walls were built of earth brick. here, with any other waste litter, manure or ashes, they would be permitted to decay under water until the fiber had been destroyed, thus permitting it to be incorporated with soil and applied to the fields, rich in soluble plant food and in a condition which would not interfere with the capillary movement of soil moisture, the work going on outside the field where the changes could occur unimpeded and without interfering with the growth of crops on the ground. in this system of combined intertillage and multiple cropping the oriental farmer thus takes advantage of whatever good may result from rotation or succession of crops, whether these be physical, vito-chemical or biological. if plants are mutually helpful through close association of their root systems in the soil, as some believe may be the case, this growing of different species in close juxtaposition would seem to provide the opportunity, but the other advantages which have been pointed out are so evident and so important that they, rather than this, have doubtless led to the practice of growing different crops in close recurrent rows. xii rice culture in the orient the basal food crop of the people of china, korea and japan is rice, and the mean consumption in japan, for the five years ending , per capita and per annum, was pounds. of japan's , square miles she devoted, in , , to the rice crop. her average yield of water rice on , square miles exceeded bushels per acre, and the dry land rice averaged bushels per acre on square miles. in the hokkaido, as far north as northern illinois, japan harvested , , bushels of water rice from , acres. in szechwan province, china, consul-general hosie places the yield of water rice on the plains land at bushels per acre, and that of the dry land rice at bushels. data given us in china show an average yield of bushels of water rice per acre, while the average yield of wheat was bushels per acre, the normal yield in japan being about bushels. if the rice eaten per capita in china proper and korea is equal to that in japan the annual consumption for the three nations, using the round number pounds per capita per annum, would be: population. consumption. china , , , , tons korea , , , , tons japan , , , tons ----------------------- total , , , , tons if the ratio of irrigated to dry land rice in korea and china proper is the same as that in japan, and if the mean yield of rice per acre in these countries were forty bushels for the water rice and twenty bushels for the dry land rice, the acreage required to give this production would be: area. water rice, dry land rice, sq. miles. sq. miles. in china , , in korea , in japan , ------- ------ sum , , total , our observations along the four hundred miles of railway in korea between antung, seoul and fusan, suggest that the land under rice in this country must be more rather than less than that computed, and the square miles of canalized land in china, as indicated on pages to , would indicate an acreage of rice for her quite as large as estimated. in the three main islands of japan more than fifty per cent of the cultivated land produces a crop of water rice each year and . per cent of the entire land area of the empire, omitting far-north karafuto. in formosa and in southern china large areas produce two crops each year. at the large mean yield used in the computation the estimated acreage of rice in china proper amounts to . per cent of her total area and this is square miles greater than the acreage of wheat in the united states in . our yield of wheat, however, was but , , tons, while china's output of rice was certainly double and probably three times this amount from nearly the same acreage of land; and notwithstanding this large production per acre, more than fifty per cent, possibly as high as seventy-five per cent, of the same land matures at least one other crop the same year, and much of this may be wheat or barley, both chiefly consumed as human food. had the mongolian races spread to and developed in north america instead of, or as well as, in eastern asia, there might have been a grand canal, something as suggested in fig. , from the rio grande to the mouth of the ohio river and from the mississippi to chesapeake bay, constituting more than two thousand miles of inland water-way, serving commerce, holding up and redistributing both the run-off water and the wasting fertility of soil erosion, spreading them over , square miles of thoroughly canalized coastal plains, so many of which are now impoverished lands, made so by the intolerable waste of a vaunted civilization. and who shall venture to enumerate the increase in the tonnage of sugar, bales of cotton, sacks of rice, boxes of oranges, baskets of peaches, and in the trainloads of cabbage, tomatoes and celery such husbanding would make possible through all time; or number the increased millions these could feed and clothe? we may prohibit the exportation of our phosphorus, grind our limestone, and apply them to our fields, but this alone is only temporizing with the future. the more we produce, the more numerous our millions, the faster must present practices speed the waste to the sea, from whence neither money nor prayer can call them back. if the united states is to endure; if we shall project our history even through four or five thousand years as the mongolian nations have done, and if that history shall be written in continuous peace, free from periods of wide-spread famine or pestilence, this nation must orient itself; it must square its practices with a conservation of resources which can make endurance possible. intensifying cultural methods but intensifies the digestion, assimilation and exhaustion of the surface soil, from which life springs. multiple cropping, closer stands on the ground and stronger growth, all mean the transpiration of much more water per acre through the crops, and this can only be rendered possible through a redistribution of the run-off and the adoption of irrigation practices in humid climates where water exists in abundance. sooner or later we must adopt a national policy which shall more completely conserve our water resources, utilizing them not only for power and transportation, but primarily for the maintenance of soil fertility and greater crop production through supplemental irrigation, and all these great national interests should be considered collectively, broadly, and with a view to the fullest and best possible coordination. china, korea and japan long ago struck the keynote of permanent agriculture but the time has now come when they can and will make great improvements, and it remains for us and other nations to profit by their experience, to adopt and adapt what is good in their practice and help in a world movement for the introduction of new and improved methods. in selecting rice as their staple crop; in developing and maintaining their systems of combined irrigation and drainage, notwithstanding they have a large summer rainfall; in their systems of multiple cropping; in their extensive and persistent use of legumes; in their rotations for green manure to maintain the humus of their soils and for composting; and in the almost religious fidelity with which they have returned to their fields every form of waste which can replace plant food removed by the crops, these nations have demonstrated a grasp of essentials and of fundamental principles which may well cause western nations to pause and reflect. while this country need not and could not now adopt their laborious methods of rice culture, and while, let us hope, those who come after us may never be compelled to do so, it is nevertheless quite worth while to study, for the sake of the principles involved, the practices they have been led to adopt. great as is the acreage of land in rice in these countries but little, relatively, is of the dry land type, and the fields upon which most of the rice grows have all been graded to a water level and surrounded by low, narrow raised rims, such as may be seen in fig. and in fig. , where three men are at work on their foot-power pump, flooding fields preparatory to transplanting the rice. if the country was not level then the slopes have been graded into horizontal terraces varying in size according to the steepness of the areas in which they were cut. we saw these often no larger than the floor of a small room, and professor ross informed me that he walked past those in the interior of china no larger than a dining table and that he saw one bearing its crop of rice, surrounded by its rim and holding water, yet barely larger than a good napkin. the average area of the paddy field in japan is officially reported at . se, or an area of but by feet. excluding hokkaido, formosa and karafuto, fifty-three per cent of the irrigated rice lands in japan are in allotments smaller than one-eighth of an acre, and seventy-four per cent of other cultivated lands are held in areas less than one-fourth of an acre, and each of these may be further subdivided. the next two illustrations, figs. and , give a good idea both of the small size of the rice fields and of the terracing which has been done to secure the water level basins. the house standing near the center of fig. is a good scale for judging both the size of the paddies and the slope of the valley. the distance between the rows of rice is scarcely one foot, hence counting these in the foreground may serve as another measure. there are more than twenty little fields shown in this engraving in front of the house and reaching but half way to it, and the house was less than five hundred feet from the camera. there are more than eleven thousand square miles of fields thus graded in the three main islands of japan, each provided with rims, with water supply and drainage channels, all carefully kept in the best of repair. the more level areas, too, in each of the three countries, have been similarly thrown into water level basins, comparatively few of which cover large areas, because nearly always the holdings are small. all of the earth excavated from the canals and drainage channels has been leveled over the fields unless needed for levees or dikes, so that the original labor of construction, added to that of maintenance, makes a total far beyond our comprehension and nearly all of it is the product of human effort. the laying out and shaping of so many fields into these level basins brings to the three nations an enormous aggregate annual asset, a large proportion of which western nations are not yet utilizing. the greatest gain comes from the unfailing higher yields made possible by providing an abundance of water through which more plant food can be utilized, thus providing higher average yields. the waters used, coming as they do largely from the uncultivated hills and mountain lands, carrying both dissolved and suspended matters, make positive annual additions of dissolved limestone and plant food elements to the fields which in the aggregate have been very large, through the persistent repetitions which have prevailed for centuries. if the yearly application of such water to the rice fields is but sixteen inches, and this has the average composition quoted by merrill for rivers of north america, taking into account neither suspended matter nor the absorption of potassium and phosphorus by it, each ten thousand square miles would receive, dissolved in the water, substances containing some , tons of phosphorus; , tons of potassium; , tons of nitrogen; and , tons of sulphur. in addition, there are brought to the fields some , tons of dissolved organic matter and a still larger weight of dissolved limestone, so necessary in neutralizing the acidity of soils, amounting to , , tons; and such savings have been maintained in china, korea and japan on more than five, and possibly more than nine, times the ten thousand square miles, through centuries. the phosphorus thus turned upon ninety thousand square miles would aggregate nearly thirteen million tons in a thousand years, which is less than the time the practice has been maintained, and is more phosphorus than would be carried in the entire rock phosphate thus far mined in the united states, were it all seventy-five per cent pure. the canalization of fifty thousand square miles of our gulf and atlantic coastal plain, and the utilization on the fields of the silts and organic matter, together with the water, would mean turning to account a vast tonnage of plant food which is now wasting into the sea, and a correspondingly great increase of crop yield. there ought, and it would seem there must some time be provided a way for sending to the sandy plains of florida, and to the sandy lands between there and the mississippi, large volumes of the rich silt and organic matter from this and other rivers, aside from that which should be applied systematically to building above flood plain the lands of the delta which are subject to overflow or are too low to permit adequate drainage. it may appear to some that the application of such large volumes of water to fields, especially in countries of heavy rainfall, must result in great loss of plant food through leaching and surface drainage. but under the remarkable practices of these three nations this is certainly not the case and it is highly important that our people should understand and appreciate the principles which underlie the practices they have almost uniformly adopted on the areas devoted to rice irrigation. in the first place, their paddy fields are under-drained so that most of the water either leaves the soil through the crop, by surface evaporation, or it percolates through the subsoil into shallow drains. when water is passed directly from one rice paddy to another it is usually permitted some time after fertilization, when both soil and crop have had time to appropriate or fix the soluble plant food substances. besides this, water is not turned upon the fields until the time for transplanting the rice, when the plants are already provided with a strong root system and are capable of at once appropriating any soluble plant food which may develop about their roots or be carried downward over them. although the drains are of the surface type and but eighteen inches to three feet in depth, they are sufficiently numerous and close so that, although the soil is continuously nearly filled with water, there is a steady percolation of the fresh, fully aerated water carrying an abundance of oxygen into the soil to meet the needs of the roots, so that watermelons, egg plants, musk melons and taro are grown in the rotations on the small paddies among the irrigated rice after the manner seen in the illustrations. in fig. each double row of egg plants is separated from the next by a narrow shallow trench which connects with a head drain and in which water was standing within fourteen inches of the surface. the same was true in the case of the watermelons seen in fig. , where the vines are growing on a thick layer of straw mulch which holds them from the moist soil and acts to conserve water by diminishing evaporation and, through decay from the summer rains and leaching, serves as fertilizer for the crop. in fig. the view is along a pathway separating two head ditches between areas in watermelons and taro, carrying the drainage waters from the several furrows into the main ditches. although the soil appeared wet the plants were vigorous and healthy, seeming in no way to suffer from insufficient drainage. these people have, therefore, given effective attention to the matter of drainage as well as irrigation and are looking after possible losses of plant food, as well as ways of supplying it. it is not alone where rice is grown that cultural methods are made to conserve soluble plant food and to reduce its loss from the field, for very often, where flooding is not practiced, small fields and beds, made quite level, are surrounded by low raised borders which permit not only the whole of any rain to be retained upon the field when so desired, but it is completely distributed over it, thus causing the whole soil to be uniformly charged with moisture and preventing washing from one portion of the field to another. such provisions are shown in figs. and . extensive as is the acreage of irrigated rice in china, korea and japan, nearly every spear is transplanted; the largest and best crop possible, rather than the least labor and trouble, as is so often the case with us, determining their methods and practices. we first saw the fitting of the rice nursery beds at canton and again near kashing in chekiang province on the farm of mrs. wu, whose homestead is seen in fig. . she had come with her husband from ningpo after the ravages of the taiping rebellion had swept from two provinces alone twenty millions of people and settled on a small area of then vacated land. as they prospered they added to their holding by purchase until about twenty-five acres were acquired, an area about ten times that possessed by the usual prosperous family in china. the widow was managing her place, one of her sons, although married, being still in school, the daughter-in-law living with her mother-in-law and helping in the home. her field help during the summer consisted of seven laborers and she kept four cows for the plowing and pumping of water for irrigation. the wages of the men were at the rate of $ , mexican, for five summer months, together with their meals which were four each day. the cash outlay for the seven men was thus $ . of our currency per month. ten years before, such labor had been $ per year, as compared with $ at the time of our visit, or $ . and $ . of our currency, respectively. her usual yields of rice were two piculs per mow, or twenty-six and two-thirds bushels per acre, and a wheat crop yielding half this amount, or some other, was taken from part of the land the same season, one fertilization answering for the two crops. she stated that her annual expense for fertilizers purchased was usually about $ , or $ . of our currency. the homestead of mrs. wu, fig. , consists of a compound in the form of a large quadrangle surrounding a court closed on the south by a solid wall eight feet high. the structure is of earth brick with the roof thatched with rice straw. our first visit here was april th. the nursery rice beds had been planted four days, sowing seed at the rate of twenty bushels per acre. the soil had been very carefully prepared and highly fertilized, the last treatment being a dressing of plant ashes so incompletely burned as to leave the surface coal black. the seed, scattered directly upon the surface, almost completely covered it and had been gently beaten barely into the dressing of ashes, using a wide, flat-bottom basket for the purpose. each evening, if the night was likely to be cool, water was pumped over the bed, to be withdrawn the next day, if warm and sunny, permitting the warmth to be absorbed by the black surface, and a fresh supply of air to be drawn into the soil. nearly a month later, may th, a second visit was made to this farm and one of the nursery beds of rice, as it then appeared, is seen in fig. , the plants being about eight inches high and nearing the stage for transplanting. the field beyond the bed had already been partly flooded and plowed, turning under "chinese clover" to ferment as green manure, preparatory for the rice transplanting. on the opposite side of the bed and in front of the residence, fig. , flooding was in progress in the furrows between the ridges formed after the previous crop of rice was harvested and upon which the crop of clover for green manure was grown. immediately at one end of the two series of nursery beds, one of which is seen in fig. , was the pumping plant seen in fig. , under a thatched shelter, with its two pumps installed at the end of a water channel leading from the canal. one of these wooden pump powers, with the blindfolded cow attached, is reproduced in fig. and just beyond the animal's head may be seen the long handle dipper to which reference has been made, used for collecting excreta. more than a month is saved for maturing and harvesting winter and early spring crops, or in fitting the fields for rice, by this planting in nursery beds. the irrigation period for most of the land is cut short a like amount, saving in both water and time. it is cheaper and easier to highly fertilize and prepare a small area for the nursery, while at the same time much stronger and more uniform plants are secured than would be possible by sowing in the field. the labor of weeding and caring for the plants in the nursery is far less than would be required in the field. it would be practically impossible to fit the entire rice areas as early in the season as the nursery beds are fitted, for the green manure is not yet grown and time is required for composting or for decaying, if plowed under directly. the rice plants in the nursery are carried to a stage when they are strong feeders and when set into the newly prepared, fertilized, clean soil of the field they are ready to feed strongly under these most favorable conditions both time and strength of plant are thus gained and these people are following what would appear to be the best possible practices under their condition of small holdings and dense population. with our broad fields, our machinery and few people, their system appears to us crude and impossible, but cut our holdings to the size of theirs and the same stroke makes our machinery, even our plows, still more impossible, and so the more one studies the environment of these people, thus far unavoidable, their numbers, what they have done and are doing, against what odds they have succeeded, the more difficult it becomes to see what course might have been better. how full with work is the month which precedes the transplanting of rice has been pointed out,--the making of the compost fertilizer; harvesting the wheat, rape and beans; distributing the compost over the fields, and their flooding and plowing. in fig. one of these fields is seen plowed, smoothed and nearly ready for the plants. the turned soil had been thoroughly pulverized, leveled and worked to the consistency of mortar, on the larger fields with one or another sort of harrow, as seen in figs. and . this thorough puddling of the soil permits the plants to be quickly set and provides conditions which ensure immediate perfect contact for the roots. when the fields are ready women repair to the nurseries with their low four-legged bamboo stools, to pull the rice plants, carefully rinsing the soil from the roots, and then tie them into bundles of a size easily handled in transplanting, which are then distributed in the fields. the work of transplanting may be done by groups of families changing work, a considerable number of them laboring together after the manner seen in fig. , made from four snap shots taken from the same point at intervals of fifteen minutes. long cords were stretched in the rice field six feet apart and each of the seven men was setting six rows of rice one foot apart, six to eight plants in a hill, and the hills eight or nine inches apart in the row. the, bundle was held in one hand and deftly, with the other, the desired number of plants were selected with the fingers at the roots, separated from the rest and, with a single thrust, set in place in the row. there was no packing of earth about the roots, each hill being set with a single motion, which followed one another in quick succession, completing one cross row of six hills after another. the men move backward across the field, completing one entire section, tossing the unused plants into the unset field. then reset the lines to cover another section. we were told that the usual day's work of transplanting, for a man under these conditions, after the field is fitted and the plants are brought to him, is two mow or one-third of an acre. the seven men in this group would thus set two and a third acres per day and, at the wage mrs. wu was paying, the cash outlay, if the help was hired, would be nearly cents per acre. this is more cheaply than we are able to set cabbage and tobacco plants with our best machine methods. in japan, as seen in figs. and , the women participate in the work of setting the plants more than in china. after the rice has been transplanted its care, unlike that of our wheat crop, does not cease. it must be hoed, fertilized and watered. to facilitate the watering all fields have been leveled, canals, ditches and drains provided, and to aid in fertilizing and hoeing, the setting has been in rows and in hills in the row. the first working of the rice fields after the transplanting, as we saw it in japan, consisted in spading between the hills with a four-tined hoe, apparently more for loosening the soil and aeration than for killing weeds. after this treatment the field was gone over again in the manner seen in fig. , where the man is using his bare hands to smooth and level the stirred soil, taking care to eradicate every weed, burying them beneath the mud, and to straighten each hill of rice as it is passed. sometimes the fingers are armed with bamboo claws to facilitate the weeding. machinery in the form of revolving hand cultivators is recently coming into use in japan, and two men using these are seen in fig. . in these cultivators the teeth are mounted on an axle so as to revolve as the cultivator is pushed along the row. fertilization for the rice crop receives the greatest attention everywhere by these three nations and in no direction more than in maintaining the store of organic matter in the soil. the pink clover, to which reference has been made, figs. and , is extensively sowed after a crop of rice is harvested in the fall and comes into full bloom, ready to cut for compost or to turn under directly when the rice fields are plowed. eighteen to twenty tons of this green clover are produced per acre, and in japan this is usually applied to about three acres, the stubble and roots serving for the field producing the clover, thus giving a dressing of six to seven tons of green manure per acre, carrying not less than pounds of potassium; pounds of phosphorus, and pounds of nitrogen. where the families are large and the holdings small, so they cannot spare room to grow the green manure crop, it is gathered on the mountain, weed and hill lands, or it may be cut in the canals. on our boat trip west from soochow the last of may, many boats were passed carrying tons of the long green ribbon-like grass, cut and gathered from the bottom of the canal. to cut this grass men were working to their armpits in the water of the canal, using a crescent-shaped knife mounted like an anchor from the end of a -foot bamboo handle. this was shoved forward along the bottom of the canal and then drawn backward, cutting the grass, which rose to the surface where it was gathered upon the boats. or material for green manure may be cut on grave, mountain or hill lands, as described under fig. . the straw of rice and other grain and the stems of any plant not usable as fuel may also be worked into the mud of rice fields, as may the chaff which is often scattered upon the water after the rice is transplanted, as in fig. . reference has been made to the utilization of waste of various kinds in these countries to maintain the productive power of their soils, but it is worth while, in the interests of western nations, as helping them to realize the ultimate necessity of such economies, to state again, in more explicit terms, what japan is doing. dr. kawaguchi, of the national department of agriculture and commerce, taking his data from their records, informed me that japan produced, in , and applied to her fields, , , tons of human manure; , , tons of compost; and she imported , tons of commercial fertilizers, of which were phosphates in one form or another. in addition to these she must have applied not less than , , tons of fuel ashes and , , tons of green manure products grown on her hill and weed lands, and all of these applied to less than , , acres of cultivated field, and it should be emphasized that this is done because as yet they have found no better way of permanently maintaining a fertility capable of feeding her millions. besides fertilizing, transplanting and weeding the rice crop there is the enormous task of irrigation to be maintained until the rice is nearly matured. much of the water used is lifted by animal power and a large share of this is human. fig. shows two chinese men in their cool, capacious, nowhere-touching summer trousers flinging water with the swinging basket, and it is surprising the amount of water which may be raised three to four feet by this means. the portable spool windlass, in figs. and , has been described, and fig. shows the quadrangular, cone-shaped bucket and sweep extensively used in chihli. this man was supplying water sufficient for the irrigation of half an acre, per day, lifting the water eight feet. the form of pump most used in china and the foot-power for working it are seen in fig. . three men working a similar pump are seen in fig. , a closer view of three men working the foot-power may be seen in fig. and still another stands adjacent to a series of flooded fields in fig. . where this view was taken the old farmer informed us that two men, with this pump, lifting water three feet, were able to cover two mow of land with three inches of water in two hours. this is at the rate of . acre-inches of water per ten hours per man, and for to cents, our currency, thus making sixteen acre-inches, or the season's supply of water, cost to cents, where coolie labor is hired and fed. such is the efficiency of human power applied to the chinese pump, measured in american currency. this pump is simply an open box trough in which travels a wooden chain carrying a series of loosely fitting boards which raise the water from the canal, discharging it into the field. the size of the trough and of the buckets are varied to suit the power applied and the amount of water to be lifted. crude as it appears there is nothing in western manufacture that can compete with it in first cost, maintenance or efficiency for chinese conditions and nothing is more characteristic of all these people than their efficient, simple appliances of all kinds, which they have reduced to the lowest terms in every feature of construction and cost. the greatest results are accomplished by the simplest means. if a canal must be bridged and it is too wide to be covered by a single span, the chinese engineer may erect it at some convenient place and turn the canal under it when completed. this we saw in the case of a new railroad bridge near sungkiang. the bridge was completed and the water had just been turned under it and was being compelled to make its own excavation. great expense had been saved while traffic on the canal had not been obstructed. in the foot-power wheel of japan all gearing is eliminated and the man walks the paddles themselves, as seen in fig. . some of these wheels are ten feet in diameter, depending upon the height the water must be lifted. irrigation by animal power is extensively practiced in each of the three countries, employing mostly the type of power wheel shown in fig. . the next illustration, fig. , shows the most common type of shelter seen in chekiang and kiangsu provinces, which are there very numerous. we counted as many as forty such shelters in a semi-circle of half a mile radius. they provide comfort for the animals during both sunshine and rain, for under no conditions must the water be permitted to run low on the rice fields, and everywhere their domestic animals receive kind, thoughtful treatment. in the less level sections, where streams have sufficient fall, current wheels are in common use, carrying buckets near their circumference arranged so as to fill when passing through the water, and to empty after reaching the highest level into a receptacle provided with a conduit which leads the water to the field. in szechwan province some of these current wheels are so large and gracefully constructed as to strongly suggest ferris wheels. a view of one of these we are permitted to present in fig. , through the kindness of rollin t. chamberlin who took the photograph from which the engraving was prepared. this wheel which was some forty feet in diameter, was working when the snap shot was taken, raising the water and pouring it into the horizontal trough seen near the top of the wheel, carried at the summit of a pair of heavy poles standing on the far side of the wheel. from this trough, leading away to the left above the sky line, is the long pipe, consisting of bamboo stems joined together, for conveying the water to the fields. when the harvest time has come, notwithstanding the large acreage of grain, yielding hundreds of millions of bushels, the small, widely scattered holdings and the surface of the fields render all of our machine methods quite impossible. even our grain cradle, which preceded the reaper, would not do, and the great task is still met with the old-time sickle, as seen in fig. , cutting the rice hill by hill, as it was transplanted. previous to the time for cutting, after the seed is well matured, the water is drawn off and the land permitted to dry and harden. the rainy season is not yet over and much care must be exercised in curing the crop. the bundles may be shocked in rows along the margins of the paddies, as seen in fig. , or they may be suspended, heads down, from bamboo poles as seen in fig. . the threshing is accomplished by drawing the heads of the rice through the teeth of a metal comb mounted as seen at the right in fig. , near the lower corner, behind the basket, where a man and woman are occupied in winnowing the dust and chaff from the grain by means of a large double fan. fanning mills built on the principle of those used by our farmers and closely resembling them have long been used in both china and japan. after the rice is threshed the grain must be hulled before it can serve as food, and the oldest and simplest method of polishing used by the japanese is seen in, fig. , where the friction of the grain upon itself does the polishing. a quantity of rice is poured into the receptacle when, with heavy blows, the long-headed plunger is driven into the mass of rice, thus forcing the kernels to slide over one another until, by their abrasion, the desired result is secured. the same method of polishing, on a larger scale, is accomplished where the plungers are worked by the weight of the body, a series of men stepping upon lever handles of weighted plungers, raising them and allowing them to fall under the force of the weight attached. recently, however, mills worked by gasoline engines are in operation for both hulling and polishing, in japan. the many uses to which rice straw is put in the economies of these people make it almost as important as the rice itself. as food and bedding for cattle and horses; as thatching material for dwellings and other shelters; as fuel; as a mulch; as a source of organic matter in the soil, and as a fertilizer, it represents a money value which is very large. besides these ultimate uses the rice straw is extensively employed in the manufacture of articles used in enormous quantities. it is estimated that not less than , , bags such as are seen in figs. and , worth $ , , are made annually from the rice straw in japan, for handling , , bushels of cereals and , , bushels of beans; and besides these, great numbers of bags are employed in transporting fish and other prepared manures. in the prefecture of hyogo, with square miles of farm land, as compared with rhode island's square miles, hyogo farmers produced in , on , acres, , , bushels of rice worth $ , , , securing an average yield of almost forty bushels per acre and a gross return of $ for the grain alone. in addition to this, these farmers grew on the same land, the same season, at least one other crop. where this was barley the average yield exceeded twenty-six bushels per acre, worth $ . in connection with their farm duties these japanese families manufactured, from a portion of their rice straw, at night and during the leisure hours of winter, , , pieces of matting and netting of different kinds having a market value of $ , ; , , bags worth $ , ; , , slippers worth $ , ; , , sandals worth $ , ; and miscellaneous articles worth $ , . this is a gross earning of more than $ , , from eleven and a half townships of farm land and the labor of the farmers' families, an average earning of, $ per acre on nearly three-fourths of the farm land of this prefecture. at this rate three of the four forties of our -acre farms should bring a gross annual income of $ , and the fourth forty should pay the expenses. at the nara experiment station we were informed that the money value of a good crop of rice in that prefecture should be placed at ninety dollars per acre for the grain and eight dollars for the unmanufactured straw; thirty-six dollars per acre for the crop of naked barley and two dollars per acre for the straw. the farmers here practice a rotation of rice and barley covering four or five years, followed by a summer crop of melons, worth $ per acre and some other vegetable instead of the rice on the fifth or sixth year, worth eighty yen per tan, or $ per acre. to secure green manure for fertilizing, soy beans are planted each year in the space between the rows of barley, the barley being planted in november. one week after the barley is harvested the soy beans, which produce a yield of kan per tan, or pounds per acre, are turned under and the ground fitted for rice, at these rates the nara farmers are producing on four-fifths or five-sixths of their rice lands a gross earning of $ per acre annually, and on the other fifth or sixth, an earning of $ per acre, not counting the annual crop of soy beans used in maintaining the nitrogen and organic matter in their soils, and not counting their earnings from home manufactures. can the farmers of our south atlantic and gulf coast states, which are in the same latitude, sometime attain to this standard? we see no reason why they should not, but only with the best of irrigation, fertilization and proper rotation, with multiple cropping. xiii silk culture another of the great and in some ways one of the most remarkable industries of the orient is that of silk production, and its manufacture into the most exquisite and beautiful fabrics in the world. remarkable for its magnitude; for having had its birthplace apparently in oldest china, at least years b. c.; for having been founded on the domestication of a wild insect of the woods; and for having lived through more than four thousand years, expanding until a $ , , cargo of the product has been laid down on our western coast at one time and rushed by special fast express to new york city for the christmas trade. japan produced in , , pounds of raw silk from , , bushels of cocoons, feeding the silkworms from mulberry leaves grown on , acres. at the export selling price of this silk in japan the crop represents a money value of $ , , , or more than two dollars per capita for the entire population of the empire; and engaged in the care of the silkworms, as seen in figs. , , and , there were, in , , , families or some , , people. richard's geography of the chinese empire places the total export of raw silk to all countries, from china, in , at , , pounds, and this, at the japanese export price, represents a value of $ , , . richard also states that the value of the annual chinese export of silk to france amounts to , , pounds sterling and that this is but twelve per cent of the total, from which it appears that her total export alone reaches a value near $ , , . the use of silk in wearing apparel is more general among the chinese than among the japanese, and with china's eightfold greater population, the home consumption of silk must be large indeed and her annual production must much exceed that of japan. hosie places the output of raw silk in szechwan at , , pounds, which is nearly a quarter of the total output of japan, and silk is extensively grown in eight other provinces, which together have an area nearly fivefold that of japan. it would appear, therefore, that a low estimate of china's annual production of raw silk must be some , , pounds, and this, with the output of japan and korea, would make a product for the three countries probably exceeding , , pounds annually, representing a total value of perhaps $ , , ; quite equalling in value the wheat crop of the united states, but produced on less than one-eighth of the area. according to the observations of count dandola, the worms which contribute to this vast earning are so small that some , of them weigh at hatching only one pound, but they grow very rapidly, shed their skins four times, weighing pounds at the time of the first moult, pounds at the second, pounds at the third, pounds at the fourth moulting and when mature have come to weigh nearly five tons-- pounds. but in making this growth during about thirty-six days, according to paton, the , worms have eaten pounds by the time of the first moult; pounds by the second; pounds by the third; pounds by the fourth, and in the final period, before spinning, , pounds, thus consuming in all nearly twelve tons of mulberry leaves in producing nearly five tons of live weight, or at the rate of two and a half pounds of green leaf to one pound of growth. according to paton, the cocoons from the , worms would weigh between and pounds and these, according to the observations of hosie in the province of szechwan, would yield about one-twelfth their weight of raw silk. on this basis the one pound of worms hatched from the eggs would yield between and pounds of raw silk, worth, at the japanese export price for , between $ and $ , and pounds of green mulberry leaves would be required to produce a pound of silk. a chinese banker in chekiang province, with whom we talked, stated that the young worms which would hatch from the eggs spread on a sheet of paper twelve by eighteen inches would consume, in coming to maturity, pounds of mulberry leaves and would spin . pounds of silk. this is at the rate of pounds of leaves to one pound of silk. the japanese crop for , , , pounds, produced on , acres, is a mean yield of . pounds of raw silk per acre of mulberries, and this would require a mean yield of pounds of green mulberry leaves per acre, at the rate of pounds per pound of silk. ordinary silk in these countries is produced largely from three varieties of mulberries, and from them there may be three pickings of leaves for the rearing of a spring, summer and autumn crop of silk. we learned at the nagoya experiment station, japan, that there good spring yields of mulberry leaves are at the rate of kan, the second crop, kan, and the third crop, kan per tan, making a total yield of over thirteen tons of green leaves per acre. this, however, seems to be materially higher than the average for the empire. in fig. is a near view of a mulberry orchard in chekiang province, which has been very heavily fertilized with canal mud, and which was at the stage for cutting the leaves to feed the first crop of silkworms. a bundle of cut limbs is in the crotch of the front tree in the view. those who raise mulberry leaves are not usually the feeders of the silkworms and the leaves from this orchard were being sold at one dollar, mexican, per picul, or . cents per one hundred pounds. the same price was being paid a week later in the vicinity of nanking, kiangsu province. the mulberry trees, as they appear before coming into leaf in the early spring, may be seen in fig. . the long limbs are the shoots of the last year's growth, from which at least one crop of leaves had been picked, and in healthy orchards they may have a length of two to three feet. an orchard from a portion of which the limbs had just been cut, presented the appearance seen in fig. . these trees were twelve to fifteen years old and the enlargements on the ends of the limbs resulted from the frequent pruning, year after year, at nearly the same place. the ground under these trees was thickly covered with a growth of pink clover just coming into bloom, which would be spaded into the soil, providing nitrogen and organic matter, whose decay would liberate potash, phosphorus and other mineral plant food elements for the crop. in fig. three rows of mulberry trees, planted four feet apart, stand on a narrow embankment raised four feet, partly through adjusting the surrounding fields for rice, and partly by additions of canal mud used as a fertilizer. on either side of the mulberries is a crop of windsor beans, and on the left a crop of rape, both of which would be harvested in early june, the ground where they stand flooded, plowed and transplanted to rice. this and the other mulberry views were taken in the extensively canalized portion of china represented in fig. . the farmer owning this orchard had just finished cutting two large bundles of limbs for the sale of the leaves in the village. he stated that his first crop ordinarily yields from three to as many as twenty piculs per mow, but that the second crop seldom exceeded two to three piculs. the first and second crop of leaves, if yielding together twenty-three piculs per mow, would amount to . tons per acre, worth, at the price named, $ . . mulberry leaves must be delivered fresh as soon as gathered and must be fed the same day, the limbs, when, stripped of their leaves, at the place where these are sold, are tied into bundles and reserved for use as fuel. in the south of china the mulberry is grown from low cuttings rooted by layering. we have before spoken of our five hours ride in the canton delta region, on the steamer nanning, through extensive fields of low mulberry then in full leaf, which were first mistaken for cotton nearing the blossom stage. this form of mulberry is seen in fig. , and the same method of pruning is practiced in southern japan. in middle japan high pruning, as in chekiang and kiangsu provinces, is followed, but in northern japan the leaves are picked directly, as is the case with the last crop of leaves everywhere, pruning not being practiced in the more northern latitudes. not all silk produced in these northern countries is from the domesticated bombyx mori, large amounts being obtained from the spinnings of wild silkworms feeding upon the leaves of species of oak growing on the mountain and hill lands in various parts of china, korea and japan. in china the collections in largest amount are reeled from the cocoons of the tussur worm (antheraea pernyi) gathered in shantung, honan, kweichow and szechwan provinces. in the hilly parts of manchuria also this industry is attaining large proportions, the cocoons being sent to chefoo in the shantung province, to be woven into pongee silk. m. randot has estimated the annual crop of wild silk cocoons in szechwan at , , pounds, although in the opinion of alexander hosie much of this may come from kweichow. richard places the export of raw wild silk from the whole of china proper, in , at , , pounds. this would mean not less than , , pounds of wild cocoons and may be less than half the home consumption. from data collected by alexander hosie it appears that in the export of raw tussur silk from manchuria, through the port of newchwang by steamer alone, was , , pounds, valued at $ , , , and the production is increasing rapidly. the export from the same port the previous year, by steamer, was , , pounds. this all comes from the hilly and mountain lands south of mukden, lying between the liao plain on the west and the yalu river on the east, covering some five thousand square miles, which we crossed on the antung-mukden railway. there are two broods of these wild silkworms each season, between early may and early october. cocoons of the fall brood are kept through the winter and when the moths come forth they are caused to lay their eggs on pieces of cloth and when the worms are hatched they are fed until the first moult upon the succulent new oak leaves gathered from the hills, after which the worms are taken to the low oak growth on the hills where they feed themselves and spin their cocoons under the cover of leaves drawn about them. the moths reserved from the first brood, after becoming fertile, are tied by means of threads to the oak bushes where they deposit the eggs which produce the second crop of tussur silk. to maintain an abundance of succulent leaves within reach the oaks are periodically cut back. thus these plain people, patient, frugal, unshrinking from toil, the basic units of three of the oldest nations, go to the uncultivated hill lands and from the wild oak and the millions of insects which they help to feed upon it, not only create a valuable export trade but procure material for clothing, fuel, fertilizer and food, for the large chrysalides, cooked in the reeling of the silk, may be eaten at once or are seasoned with sauce to be used later. besides this, the last unreelable portion of each cocoon is laid aside to be manufactured into silk wadding and into soft mattresses for caskets upon which the wealthy lay their dead. xiv the tea industry the cultivation of tea in china and japan is another of the great industries of these nations, taking rank with that of sericulture, if not above it, in the important part it plays in the welfare of the people. there is little reason to doubt that the industry has its foundation in the need of something to render boiled water palatable for drinking purposes. the drinking of boiled water has been universally adopted in these countries as an individually available, thoroughly efficient and safe guard against that class of deadly disease germs which it has been almost impossible to exclude from the drinking water of any densely peopled country. so far as may be judged from the success of the most thorough sanitary measures thus far instituted, and taking into consideration the inherent difficulties which must increase enormously with increasing populations, it appears inevitable that modern methods must ultimately fail in sanitary efficiency and that absolute safety must be secured in some manner having the equivalent effect of boiling water, long ago adopted by the mongolian races, and which destroys active disease germs at the latest moment before using. and it must not be overlooked that the boiling of drinking water in china and japan has been demanded quite as much because of congested rural populations as to guard against such dangers in large cities, while as yet our sanitary engineers have dealt only with the urban phases of this most vital problem and chiefly, too, thus far, only where it has been possible to procure the water supply in comparatively unpopulated hill lands. but such opportunities cannot remain available indefinitely, any more than they did in china and japan, and already typhoid epidemics break out in our large cities and citizens are advised to boil their drinking water. if tea drinking in the family is to remain general in most portions of the world, and especially if it shall increase in proportion to population, there is great industrial and commercial promise for china, korea and japan in their tea industry if they will develop tea culture still further over the extensive and still unused flanks of the hill lands; improve their cultural methods; their manufacture; and develop their export trade. they have the best of climatic and soil conditions and people sufficiently capable of enormously expanding the industry. both improvement and expansion of methods along all essential lines, are needed, enabling them to put upon the market pure teas of thoroughly uniform grades of guaranteed quality, and with these the maintenance of an international code of rigid ethics which shall secure to all concerned a square deal and a fair division of the profits. the production of rice, silk and tea are three industries which these nations are preeminently circumstanced and qualified to economically develop and maintain. other nations may better specialize along other lines which fitness determines, and the time is coming when maximum production at minimum cost as the result of clean robust living that in every way is worth while, will determine lines of social progress and of international relations. with the vital awakening to the possibility of and necessity for world peace, it must be recognized that this can be nothing less than universal, industrial, commercial, intellectual and religious, in addition to making impossible forever the bloody carnage that has ravaged the world through all the centuries. with the extension of rapid transportation and more rapid communication throughout the world, we are fast entering the state of social development which will treat the whole world as a mutually helpful, harmonious industrial unit. it must be recognized that in certain regions, because of peculiar fitness of soil, climate and people, needful products can be produced there better and enough more cheaply than elsewhere to pay the cost of transportation. if china, korea and japan, with parts of india, can and will produce the best and cheapest silks, teas or rice, it must be for the greatest good to seek a mutually helpful exchange, and the erection of impassable tariff barriers is a declaration of war and cannot make for world peace and world progress. the date of the introduction of tea culture into china appears unknown. it was before the beginning of the christian era and tradition would place it more than years earlier. the japanese definitely date its introduction into their islands as in the year a. d., and state its coming to them from china. however and whenever tea growing originated in these countries, it long ago attained and now maintains large proportions. in japan had , acres of land occupied by tea gardens and tea plantations. these produced , , pounds of cured tea, giving a mean yield of pounds per acre. of the more than sixty million pounds of tea produced annually on nearly two hundred square miles in japan, less than twenty-two million pounds are consumed at home, the balance being exported at a cash value, in , of $ , , , or a mean of sixteen cents per pound. in china the volume of tea produced annually is much larger than in japan. hosie places the annual export from szechwan into tibet alone at , , pounds and this is produced largely in the mountainous portion of the province west of the min river. richard places her direct export to foreign countries, in , at , , pounds; and in at , , pounds, so that the annual export must exceed , , pounds, and her total product of cured tea must be more than , , . the general appearance of tea bushes as they are grown in japan is indicated in fig. . the form of the bushes, the shape and size of the leaves and the dense green, shiny foliage quite suggests our box, so much used in borders and hedges. when the bushes are young, not covering the ground, other crops are grown between the rows, but as the bushes attain their full size, standing after trimming, waist to breast high, the ground between is usually thickly covered with straw, leaves or grass and weeds from the hill lands, which serve as a mulch, as a fertilizer, as a means of preventing washing on the hillsides, and to force the rain to enter the soil uniformly where it falls. quite a large per cent of the tea bushes are grown on small, scattering, irregular areas about dwellings, on land not readily tilled, but there are also many tea plantations of considerable size, presenting the appearance seen in fig. . after each picking of the leaves the bushes are trimmed back with pruning shears, giving the rows the appearance of carefully trimmed hedges. the tea leaves are hand picked, generally by women and girls, after the manner seen in fig. , where they are gathering the tender, newly-formed leaves into baskets to be weighed fresh, as seen in fig. . three crops of leaves are usually gathered each season, the first yielding in japan one hundred kan per tan, the second fifty kan and the third eighty kan per tan. this is at the rate of pounds, pounds, and pounds per acre, making a total of pounds for the season, from which the grower realizes from a little more than . to a little more than cents per pound of the green leaves, or a gross earning of $ to $ . per acre. we were informed that the usual cost for fertilizers for the tea orchards was to yen per tan, or $ to $ per acre per annum, the fertilizer being applied in the fall, in the early spring and again after the first picking of the leaves. while the tea plants are yet small one winter crop and one summer crop of vegetables, beans or barley are grown between the rows, these giving a return of some forty dollars per acre. where the plantations are given good care and ample fertilization the life of a plantation may be prolonged continuously, it is said, through one hundred or more years. during our walk from joji to kowata, along a country road in one of the tea districts, we passed a tea-curing house. this was a long rectangular, one-story building with twenty furnaces arranged, each under an open window, around the sides. in front of each heated furnace with its tray of leaves, a japanese man, wearing only a breech cloth, and in a state of profuse perspiration, was busy rolling the tea leaves between the palms of his hands. at another place we witnessed the making of the low grade dust tea, which is prepared from the leaves of bushes which must be removed or from those of the prunings. in this case the dried bushes with their leaves were being beaten with flails on a threshing floor. the dust tea thus produced is consumed by the poorer people. xv about tientsin on the th of june we left central china for tientsin and further north, sailing by coastwise steamer from shanghai, again plowing through the turbid waters which give literal exactness to the name yellow sea. our steamer touched at tsingtao, taking on board a body of german troops, and again at chefoo, and it was only between these two points that the sea was not strongly turbid. nor was this all. from early morning of the th until we anchored at tientsin, : p. m., our course up the winding pei ho was against a strong dust-laden wind which left those who had kept to the deck as grey as though they had ridden by automobile through the colorado desert; so the soils of high interior asia are still spreading eastward by flood and by wind into the valleys and far over the coastal plains. over large areas between tientsin and peking and at other points northward toward mukden trees and shrubs have been systematically planted in rectangular hedgerow lines, to check the force of the winds and reduce the drifting of soils, planted fields occupying the spaces between. it was on this trip that we met dr. evans of shunking, szechwan province. his wife is a physician practicing among the chinese women, and in discussing the probable rate of increase of population among the chinese, it was stated that she had learned through her practice that very many mothers had borne seven to eleven children and yet but one, two or at most three, were living. it was said there are many customs and practices which determine this high mortality among children, one of which is that of feeding them meat before they have teeth, the mother masticating for the children, with the result that often fatal convulsions follow. a scotch physician of long experience in shantung, who took the steamer at tsingtao, replied to my question as to the usual size of families in his circuit, "i do not know. it depends on the crops. in good years the number is large; in times of famine the girls especially are disposed of, often permitted to die when very young for lack of care. many are sold at such times to go into other provinces." such statements, however, should doubtless be taken with much allowance. if all the details were known regarding the cases which have served as foundations for such reports, the matter might appear in quite a different light from that suggested by such cold recitals. although land taxes are high in china dr. evans informed me that it is not infrequent for the same tax to be levied twice and even three times in one year. inquiries regarding the land taxes among farmers in different parts of china showed rates running from three cents to a dollar and a half, mexican, per mow; or from about eight cents to $ . gold, per acre. at these rates a forty acre farm would pay from $ . to $ . , and a quarter section four times these amounts. data collected by consul-general e. t. williams of tientsin indicate that in shantung the land tax is about one dollar per acre, and in chihli, twenty cents. in kiangsi province the rate is to cash per mow, and in kiangsu, from to cash per mow, or, according to the rate of exchange given on page , from to cents, or cents to $ . per acre in kiangsi; and $ . to $ . or $ . to $ . in kiangsu province. the lowest of these rates would make the land tax on acres, $ , and the highest would place it at $ , gold. in japan the taxes are paid quarterly and the combined amount of the national, prefectural and village assessments usually aggregates about ten per cent of the government valuation placed on the land. the mean valuation placed on the irrigated fields, excluding formosa and karafuto, was in , . yen per tan; that of the upland fields, . yen, and the genya and pasture lands were given a valuation of . yen per tan. these are valuations of $ . , $ . and $. , gold, per acre, respectively, and the taxes on forty acres of paddy field would be $ . ; $ . on forty acres of upland field, and $ . , gold, on the same area of the genya and weed lands. in the villages, where work of one or another kind is done for pay, dr. evans stated that a woman's wage might not exceed $ , mexican, or $ . , gold, per year, and when we asked how it could be worth a woman's while to work a whole year for so small a sum, his reply was, "if she did not do this she would earn nothing, and this would keep her in clothes and a little more." a cotton spinner in his church would procure a pound of cotton and on returning the yarn would receive one and a quarter pounds of cotton in exchange, the quarter pound being her compensation. dr. evans also described a method of rooting slips from trees, practiced in various parts of china. the under side of a branch is cut, bent upward and split for a short distance; about this is packed a ball of moistened earth wrapped in straw to retain the soil and to provide for future watering; the whole may then be bound with strips of bamboo for greater stability. in this way slips for new mulberry orchards are procured. at eight o'clock in the morning we entered the mouth of the pei ho and wound westward through a vast, nearly sea-level, desert plain and in both directions, far toward the horizon, huge white stacks of salt dotted the surface of the taku government salt fields, and revolving in the wind were great numbers of horizontal sail windmills, pumping sea water into an enormous acreage of evaporation basins. in fig. may be seen five of the large salt stacks and six of the windmills, together with many smaller piles of salt. fig. is a closer view of the evaporation basins with piles of salt scraped from the surface after the mother liquor had been drained away. the windmills, which were working one, sometimes two, of the large wooden chain pumps, were some thirty feet in diameter and lifted the brine from tide-water basins into those of a second and third higher level where the second and final concentration occurred. these windmills, crude as they appear in fig. , are nevertheless efficient, cheaply constructed and easily controlled. the eight sails, each six by ten feet, were so hung as to take the wind through the entire revolution, tilting automatically to receive the wind on the opposite face the moment the edge passed the critical point. some feet of sail surface were thus spread to the wind, working on a radius of fifteen feet. the horizontal drive wheel had a diameter of ten feet, carried eighty-eight wooden cogs which engaged a pinion with fifteen leaves, and there were nine arms on the reel at the other end of the shaft which drove the chain. the boards or buckets of the chain pump were six by twelve inches, placed nine inches apart, and with a fair breeze the pump ran full. enormous quantities of salt are thus cheaply manufactured through wind, tide and sun power directed by the cheapest human labor. before reaching tientsin we passed the government storage yards and counted two hundred stacks of salt piled in the open, and more than a third of the yard had been passed before beginning the count. the average content of each stack must have exceeded cubic feet of salt, and more than , , pounds must have been stored in the yards. armed guards in military uniform patrolled the alleyways day and night. long strips of matting laid over the stacks were the only shelter against rain. throughout the length of china's seacoast, from as far north as beyond shanhaikwan, south to canton, salt is manufactured from sea water in suitable places. in szechwan province, we learn from the report of consul-general hosie, that not less than , tons of salt are annually manufactured there, largely from brine raised by animal power from wells seven hundred to more than two thousand feet deep. hosie describes the operations at a well more than two thousand feet deep, at tzeliutsing. in the basement of a power-house which sheltered forty water buffaloes, a huge bamboo drum twelve feet high, sixty feet in circumference, was so set as to revolve on a vertical axis propelled by four cattle drawing from its circumference. a hemp rope was wound about this drum, six feet from the ground, passing out and under a pulley at the well, then up and around a wheel mounted sixty feet above and descended to the bucket made from bamboo stems four inches in diameter and nearly sixty feet long, which dropped with great speed to the bottom of the well as the rope unwound. when the bucket reached the bottom four attendants, each with a buffalo in readiness, hitched to the drum and drove at a running pace, during fifteen minutes, or until the bucket was raised from the well. the buffalo were then unhitched and, while the bucket was being emptied and again dropped to the bottom of the well, a fresh relay were brought to the drum. in this way the work continued night and day. the brine, after being raised from the well, was emptied into distributing reservoirs, flowing thence through bamboo pipes to the evaporating sheds where round bottomed, shallow iron kettles four feet across were set in brick arches in which jets of natural gas were burning. within an area some sixty miles square there are more than a thousand brine and twenty fire wells from which fuel gas is taken. the mouths of the fire wells are closed with masonry, out from which bamboo conduits coated with lime lead to the various furnaces, terminating with iron burners beneath the kettles. remarkable is the fact that in the city of tzeliutsing, both these brine and the fire wells have been operated in the manufacture of salt since before christ was born. the forty water buffalo are worth $ to $ per head and their food fifteen to twenty cents per day. the cost of manufacturing this salt is placed at thirteen to fourteen cash per catty, to which the government adds a tax of nine cash more, making the cost at the factory from cents to $ . , gold, per hundred pounds. salt manufacture is a government monopoly and the product must be sold either to government officials or to merchants who have bought the exclusive right to supply certain districts. the importation of salt is prohibited by treaties. for the salt tax collection china is divided into eleven circuits each having its own source of supply and transfer of salt from one circuit to another is forbidden. the usual cost of salt is said to vary between one and a half and four cash per catty. the retail price of salt ranges from three-fourths to three cents per pound, fully twelve to fifteen times the cost of manufacture. the annual production of salt in the empire is some , , tons, and in salt paid a tax close to ten million dollars. beyond the salt fields, toward tientsin, the banks of the river were dotted at short intervals with groups of low, almost windowless houses, fig. , built of earth brick plastered with clay on sides and roof, made more resistant to rain by an admixture of chaff and cut straw, and there was a remarkable freshness of look about them which we learned was the result of recent preparations made for the rainy season about to open. beyond the first of these villages came a stretch of plain dotted thickly and far with innumerable grave mounds, to which reference has been made. for nearly an hour we had traveled up the river before there was any material vegetation, the soil being too saline apparently to permit growth, but beyond this, crops in the fields and gardens, with some fruit and other trees, formed a fringe of varying width along the banks. small fields of transplanted rice on both banks were frequent and often the land was laid out in beds of two levels, carefully graded, the rice occupying the lower areas, and wooden chain pumps were being worked by hand, foot and animal power, irrigating both rice and garden crops. in the villages were many stacks of earth compost, of the shantung type; manure middens were common and donkeys drawing heavy stone rollers followed by men with large wooden mallets, were going round and round, pulverizing and mixing the dry earth compost and the large earthen brick from dismantled kangs, preparing fertilizer for the new series of crops about to be planted, following the harvest of wheat and barley. large boatloads of these prepared fertilizers were moving on the river and up the canals to the fields. toward the coast from tientsin, especially in the country, traversed by the railroad, there was little produced except a short grass, this being grazed at the time of our visit and, in places, cut for a very meagre crop of hay. the productive cultivated lands lie chiefly along the rivers and canals or other water courses, where there is better drainage as well as water for irrigation. the extensive, close canalization that characterizes parts of kiangsu and chekiang provinces is lacking here and for this reason, in part, the soil is not so productive. the fuller canalization, the securing of adequate drainage and the gaining of complete control of the flood waters which flow through this vast plain during the rainy season constitute one of china's most important industrial problems which, when properly solved, must vastly increase her resources. during our drive over the old peking-taku road saline deposits were frequently observed which had been brought to the surface during the dry season, and the city engineer of tientsin stated that in their efforts at parking portions of the foreign concessions they had found the trees dying after a few years when their roots began to penetrate the more saline subsoil, but that since they had opened canals, improving the drainage, trees were no longer dying. there is little doubt that proper drainage by means of canals, and the irrigation which would go with it, would make all of these lands, now more or less saline, highly productive, as are now those contiguous to the existing water courses. it had rained two days before our drive over the taku road and when we applied for a conveyance, the proprietor doubted whether the roads were passible, as he had been compelled to send out an extra team to assist in the return of one which had been stalled during the previous night. it was finally arranged to send an extra horse with us. the rainy season had just begun but the deep trenching of the roads concentrates the water in them and greatly intensifies the trouble. in one of the little hamlets through which we passed the roadway was trenched to a depth of three to four feet in the middle of the narrow street, leaving only five feet for passing in front of the dwellings on either side, and in this trench our carriage moved through mud and water nearly to the hubs. between tientsin and peking, in the early morning after a rain of the night before, we saw many farmers working their fields with the broad hoes, developing an earth mulch at the first possible moment to conserve their much needed moisture. men were at work, as seen in figs. and , using long handled hoes, with blades nine by thirteen inches, hung so as to draw just under the surface, doing very effective work, permitting them to cover the ground rapidly. walking further, we came upon six women in a field of wheat, gleaning the single heads which had prematurely ripened and broken over upon the ground between the rows soon to be harvested. whether they were doing this as a privilege or as a task we do not know; they were strong, cheerful, reasonably dressed, hardly past middle life and it was nearly noon, yet not one of them had collected more straws than she could readily grasp in one hand. the season in chihli as in shantung, had been one of unusual drought, making the crop short and perhaps unusual frugality was being practiced; but it is in saving that these people excel perhaps more than in producing. these heads of wheat, if left upon the ground, would be wasted and if the women were privileged gleaners in the fields their returns were certainly much greater than were those of the very old women we have seen in france gathering heads of wheat from the already harvested fields. in the fields between tientsin and peking all wheat was being pulled, the earth shaken from the roots, tied in small bundles and taken to the dwellings, sometimes on the heavy cart drawn by a team consisting of a small donkey and cow hitched tandem, as seen in fig. . millet had been planted between the rows of wheat in this field and was already up. when the wheat was removed the ground would be fertilized and planted to soy beans. because of the dry season this farmer estimated his yield would be but eight to nine bushels per acre. he was expecting to harvest thirteen to fourteen bushels of millet and from ten to twelve bushels of soy beans per acre from the same field. this would give him an earning, based on the local prices, of $ . , gold, for the wheat; $ . for the beans, and $ . per acre for the millet. this land was owned by the family of the emperor and was rented at $ . , gold, per acre. the soil was a rather light sandy loam, not inherently fertile, and fertilizers to the value of $ . gold, per acre, had been applied, leaving the earning $ . per acre. another farmer with whom we talked, pulling his crop of wheat, would follow this with millet and soy beans in alternate rows. his yield of wheat was expected to be eleven to twelve bushels per acre, his beans twenty-one bushels and his millet twenty-five bushels which, at the local prices for grain and straw, would bring a gross earning of $ , gold, per acre. before reaching the end of our walk through the fields toward the next station we came across another of the many instances of the labor these people are willing to perform for only a small possible increase in crop. the field was adjacent to one of the windbreak hedges and the trees had spread their roots far afield and were threatening his crop through the consumption of moisture and plant food. to check this depletion the farmer had dug a trench twenty inches deep the length of his field, and some twenty feet from the line of trees, thereby cutting all of the surface roots to stop their draft on the soil. the trench was left open and an interesting feature observed was that nearly every cut root on the field side of the trench had thrown up one or more shoots bearing leaves, while the ends still connected with the trees showed no signs of leaf growth. in chihli as elsewhere the chinese are skilled gardeners, using water for irrigation whenever it is advantageous. one gardener was growing a crop of early cabbage, followed by one of melons, and these with radish the same season. he was paying a rent of $ . , gold, per acre; was applying fertilizer at a cost of nearly $ per acre for each of the three crops, making his cash outlay $ . per acre. his crop of cabbage sold for $ , gold; his melons for $ , and his radish for something more than $ , making a total of $ . per acre, leaving him a net value of $ . . a second gardener, growing potatoes, obtained a yield, when sold new, of , pounds per acre; and of , pounds when the crop was permitted to mature. the new potatoes were sold so as to bring $ . and the mature potatoes $ . per acre, making the earning for the two crops the same season a total of $ . , gold. by planting the first crop very early these gardeners secure two crops the same season, as far north as columbus, ohio, and springfield, illinois, the first crop being harvested when the tubers are about the size of walnuts. the rental and fertilizers in this case amounted to $ . per acre. still another gardener growing winter wheat followed by onions, and these by cabbage, both transplanted, realized from the three crops a gross earning of $ . , gold, per acre, and incurred an expense of $ . per acre for fertilizer and rent, leaving him a net earning of $ per acre. these old people have acquired the skill and practice of storing and preserving such perishable fruits as pears and grapes so as to enable them to keep them on the markets almost continuously. pears were very common in the latter part of june, and consul-general williams informed me that grapes are regularly carried into july. in talking with my interpreter as to the methods employed i could only learn that the growers depend simply upon dry earth cellars which can be maintained at a very uniform temperature, the separate fruits being wrapped in paper. no foreigner with whom we talked knew their methods. vegetables are carried through the winter in such earth cellars as are seen in fig. , page , these being covered after they are filled. as to the price of labor in this part of china, we learned through consul-general williams that a master mechanic may receive cents, mexican, per day, and a journeyman cents, or at a rate of . cents and . cents, gold. farm laborers receive from $ to $ , mexican, or $ . to $ . , gold, per year, with food, fuel and presents which make a total of $ . to $ . . this is less for the year than we pay for a month of probably less efficient labor. there is relatively little child labor in china and this perhaps should be expected when adult labor is so abundant and so cheap. xvi manchuria and korea the th parallel of latitude lies just south of tientsin; followed westward, it crosses the toe of italy's boot, leads past lisbon in portugal, near washington and st. louis and to the north of sacramento on the pacific. we were leaving a country with a mean july temperature of deg f., and of deg in january, but where two feet of ice may form; a country where the eighteen year mean maximum temperature is . deg and the mean minimum . deg; where twice in this period the thermometer recorded deg above zero, and twice deg below, and yet near the coast and in the latitude of washington; a country where the mean annual rainfall is . inches and all but . inches falls in june, july, august and september. we had taken the : a. m. imperial north-china train, june th, to go as far northward as chicago,--to mukden in manchuria, a distance by rail of some four hundred miles, but all of the way still across the northward extension of the great chinese coastal plain. southward, out from the coldest quarter of the globe, where the mean january temperature is more than deg below zero, sweep northerly winds which bring to mukden a mean january temperature only deg above zero, and yet there the july temperature averages as high as deg and there is a mean annual rainfall of but . inches, coming mostly in the summer, as at tientsin. although the rainfall of the northern extension of china's coastal plain is small, its efficiency is relatively high because of its most favorable distribution and the high summer temperatures. in the period of early growth, april, may and june, there are . inches; but in the period of maximum growth, july and august, the rainfall is . inches; and in the ripening period, september and october, it is . inches, while during the rest of the year but . inch falls. thus most of the rain comes at the time when the crops require the greatest daily consumption and it is least in mid-winter, during the period of little growth. as our train left tientsin we traveled for a long distance through a country agriculturally poor and little tilled, with surface flat, the soil apparently saline, and the land greatly in need of drainage. wherever there were canals the crops were best, apparently occupying more or less continuous areas along either bank. the day was hot and sultry but laborers were busy with their large hoes, often with all garments laid aside except a short shirt or a pair of roomy trousers. in the salt district about the village of tangku there were huge stacks of salt and smaller piles not yet brought together, with numerous windmills, constituting most striking features in the landscape, but there was almost no agricultural or other vegetation. beyond pehtang there are other salt works and a canal leads westward to tientsin, on which the salt is probably taken thither, and still other salt stacks and windmills continued visible until near hanku, where another canal leads toward peking. here the coast recedes eastward from the railway and beyond the city limits many grave mounds dot the surrounding plains where herds of sheep were grazing. as we hurried toward the delta region of the lwan ho, and before reaching tangshan, a more productive country was traversed. thrifty trees made the landscape green, and fields of millet, kaoliang and wheat stretched for miles together along the track and back over the flat plain beyond the limit of vision. then came fields planted with two rows of maize alternating with one row of soy beans, but not over twenty-eight inches apart, one stalk of corn in a place every sixteen to eighteen inches, all carefully hoed, weedless and blanketed with an excellent earth mulch; but still the leaves were curling in the intense heat of the sun. tangshan is a large city, apparently of recent growth on the railroad in a country where isolated conical hills rise one hundred or two hundred feet out of the flat, plains. cart loads of finely pulverized earth compost were here moving to the fields in large numbers, being laid in single piles of five hundred to eight hundred pounds, forty to sixty feet apart. at kaiping the country grows a little rolling and we passed through the first railway cuts, six to eight feet deep, and the water in the streams is running ten to twelve feet below the surface of the fields. on the right and beyond kuyeh there are low hills, and here we passed enormous quantities of dry, finely powdered earth compost, distributed on narrow unplanted area over the fields. what crop, if indeed any, had occupied these areas this season, we could not judge. the fertilization here is even more extensive and more general than we found it in the shantung province, and in places water was being carried in pails to the fields for use either in planting or in transplanting, to ensure the readiness of the new crops to utilize the first rainfall when it comes. then the bed of a nearly dry stream some three hundred feet wide was crossed and beyond it a sandy plain was planted in long narrow fields between windbreak hedges. the crops were small but evidently improved by the influence of the shelter. the sand in places had drifted into the hedges to a height of three feet. at a number of other places along the way before mukden was reached such protected areas were passed and oftenest on the north side of wide, now nearly dry, stream channels. as we passed on toward shanhaikwan we were carried over broad plains even more nearly level and unobstructed than any to be found in the corn belt of the middle west, and these too planted with corn, kaoliang, wheat and beans, and with the low houses hidden in distant scattered clusters of trees dotting the wide plain on either side, with not a fence, and nothing to suggest a road anywhere in sight. we seemed to be moving through one vast field dotted with hundreds of busy men, a plowman here, and there a great cart hopelessly lost in the field so far as one could see any sign of road to guide their course. some early crop appeared to have been harvested from areas alternating with those on the ground, and these were dotted with piles of the soil and manure compost, aggregating hundreds of tons, distributed over the fields but no doubt during the next three or four days these thousands of piles would have been worked into the soil and vanished from sight, to reappear after another crop and another year. it was at lwanchow that we met the out-going tide of soy beans destined for japan and europe, pouring in from the surrounding country in gunny sacks brought on heavy carts drawn by large mules, as seen in fig. , and enormous quantities had been stacked in the open along the tracks, with no shelter whatever, awaiting the arrival of trains to move them to export harbors. the planting here, as elsewhere, is in rows, but not of one kind of grain. most frequently two rows of maize, kaoliang or millet alternated with the soy beans and usually not more than twenty-eight inches apart, sharp high ridge cultivation being the general practice. such planting secures the requisite sunshine with a larger number of plants on the field; it secures a continuous general distribution of the roots of the nitrogen-fixing soy beans in the soil of all the field every season, and permits the soil to be more continuously and more completely laid under tribute by the root systems. in places where the stand of corn or millet was too open the gaps were filled with the soy beans. such a system of planting possibly permits a more immediate utilization of the nitrogen gathered from the soil air in the root nodules, as these die and undergo nitrification during the same season, while the crops are yet on the ground, and so far as phosphorus and potassium compounds are liberated by this decay, they too would become available to the crops. the end of the day's journey was at shanhaikwan on the boundary between chihli and manchuria, the train stopping at : p. m. for the night. stepping upon the veranda from our room on the second floor of a japanese inn in the early morning, there stood before us, sullen and grey, the eastern terminus of the great wall, winding fifteen hundred miles westward across twenty degrees of longitude, having endured through twenty-one centuries, the most stupendous piece of construction ever conceived by man and executed by a nation. more than twenty feet thick at the base and than twelve feet on the top; rising fifteen to thirty feet above the ground with parapets along both faces and towers every two hundred yards rising twenty feet higher, it must have been, for its time and the methods of warfare then practiced, when defended by their thousands, the boldest and most efficient national defense ever constructed. nor in the economy of construction and maintenance has it ever been equalled. even if it be true that , masons toiled through ten years in its building, defended by , soldiers, fed by a commissariat of , more and supported by , others in the transport, quarry and potters' service, she would then have been using less than eight tenths per cent of her population, on a basis of , , at the time; while according to edmond théry's estimate, the officers and soldiers of europe today, in time of peace, constitute one per cent of a population of , , of people, and these, at only one dollar each per day for food, clothing and loss of producing power would cost her nations, in ten years, more than $ , million. china, with her present habits and customs, would more easily have maintained her army of , men on thirty cents each per day, or for a total ten-year cost of but $ , , . the french cabinet in approved a naval program involving an expenditure of $ , , during the next ten years, a tax of more than $ for every man, woman and child in the republic. leaving shanhaikwan at : in the morning and reaching mukden at : in the evening, we rode the entire day through manchurian fields. manchuria has an area of , square miles, equal to that of both dakotas, minnesota, nebraska and iowa combined. it has roughly the outline of a huge boot and could one slide it eastward until port arthur was at washington, shanhaikwan would fall well toward pittsburgh, both at the tip of the broad toe to the boot. the foot would lie across pennsylvania, new york, new jersey and all of new england, extending beyond new brunswick with the heel in the gulf of st. lawrence. harbin, at the instep of the boot, would lie fifty miles east of montreal and the expanding leg would reach northwestward nearly to james bay, entirely to the north of the ottawa river and the canadian pacific, spanning a thousand miles of latitude and nine hundred miles of longitude. the liao plain, thirty miles wide, and the central sungari plain, are the largest in manchuria, forming together a long narrow valley floor between two parallel mountain systems and extending northeasterly from the liao gulf, between port arthur and shanhaikwan, up the liao river and down the sungari to the amur, a distance of eight hundred or more miles. these plains have a fertile, deep soil and it is on them and other lesser river bottoms that manchurian agriculture is developed, supporting eight or nine million people on a cultivated, acreage possibly not greater than , square miles. manchuria has great forest and grazing possibilities awaiting future development, as well as much mineral wealth. the population of tsitsihar, in the latitude of middle north dakota, swells from thirty thousand to seventy thousand during september and october, when the mongols bring in their cattle to market. in the middle province, at the head of steam navigation on the sungari, because of the abundance and cheapness of lumber, kirin has become a shipbuilding center for chinese junks. the sungari-milky-river, is a large stream carrying more water at flood season than the amur above its mouth, the latter being navigable miles for steamers drawing twelve feet of water, and miles for those drawing four feet, so that during the summer season the middle and northern provinces have natural inland waterways, but the outlet to the sea is far to the north and closed by ice six months of the year. not far beyond the great wall of china, fast falling into ruin, partly through the appropriation of its material for building purposes now that it has outlived its usefulness, another broad, nearly dry stream bed was crossed. there, in full bloom, was what appeared to be the wild white rose seen earlier, further south, west of suchow, having a remarkable profusion of small white bloom in clusters resembling the rambler rose. one of these bushes growing wild there on the bank of the canal had over spread a clump of trees one of which was thirty feet in height, enveloping it in a mantle of bloom, as seen in the upper section of fig. . the lower section of the illustration is a closer view showing the clusters. the stem of this rose, three feet above the ground, measured . inches in circumference. if it would thrive in this country nothing could be better for parks and pleasure drives. later on our journey we saw it many times in bloom along the railway between mukden and antung, but nowhere attaining so large growth. the blossoms are scant three-fourths inch in diameter, usually in compact clusters of three to eleven, sometimes in twos and occasionally standing singly. the leaves are five-foliate, sometimes trifoliate; leaflets broadly lanceolate, accuminate and finely serrate; thorns minute, recurrent and few, only on the smaller branches. in a field beyond, a small donkey was drawing a stone roller three feet long and one foot in diameter, firming the crests of narrow, sharp, recently formed ridges, two at a time. millet, maize and kaoliang were here the chief crops. another nearly dry stream was crossed, where the fields became more rolling and much cut by deep gullies, the first instances we had seen in china except on the steep hillsides about tsingtao. not all of the lands here were cultivated, and on the untilled areas herds of fifty to a hundred goats, pigs, cattle, horses and donkeys were grazing. fields in manchuria are larger than in china and some rows were a full quarter of a mile long, so that cultivation was being done with donkeys and cattle, and large numbers of men were working in gangs of four, seven, ten, twenty, and in one field as high as fifty, hoeing millet. such a crew as the largest mentioned could probably be hired at ten cents each, gold, per day, and were probably men from the thickly settled portions of shantung who had left in the spring, expecting to return in september or october. both laborers and working animals were taking dinner in the fields, and earlier in the day we had seen several instances where hay and feed were being taken to the field on a wooden sled, with the plow and other tools. at noon this was serving as manger for the cattle, mules or donkeys. in fields where the close, deep furrowing and ridging was being done the team often consisted of a heavy ox and two small donkeys driven abreast, the three walking in adjacent rows, the plow following the ox, or a heavy mule instead. the rainy season had not begun and in many fields there was planting and transplanting where water was used in separate hills, sometimes brought in pails from a nearby stream, and in other cases on carts provided with tanks. holes were made along the crests of the ridges with the blade of a narrow hoe and a little water poured in each hill, from a dipper, before planting or setting. these must have been other instances where the farmers were willing to incur additional labor to save time for the maturing of the crop by assisting germination in a soil too dry to make it certain until the rains came. it appears probable that the strong ridging and the close level rows so largely adopted here must have marked advantages in utilizing the rainfall, especially the portions coming early, and that later also if it should come in heavy showers. with steep narrow ridging, heavy rains would be shed at once to the bottom of the deep furrows without over-saturating the ridges, while the wet soil in the bottom of the furrows would favor deep percolation with lateral capillary flow taking place strongly under the ridges from the furrows, carrying both moisture and soluble plant food where they will be most completely and quickly available. when the rain comes in heavy showers each furrow may serve as a long reservoir which will prevent washing and at the same time permit quick penetration; the ridges never becoming flooded or puddled, permit the soil air to escape readily as the water from the furrows sinks, as it cannot easily do in flat fields when the rains fall rapidly and fill all of the soil pores, thus closing them to the escape of air from below, which must take place before the water can enter. when rows are only twenty-four to twenty-eight inches apart, ridging is not sufficiently more wasteful of soil moisture, through greater evaporation because of increased surface, to compensate for the other advantages gained, and hence their practice, for their conditions, appears sound. the application of finely pulverized earth compost to fields to be planted, and in some cases where the fields were already planted, continued general after leaving shanhailkwan as it had been before. compost stacks were common in yards wherever buildings were close enough to the track to be seen. much of the way about one-third of the fields were yet to be, or had just been, planted and in a great majority of these compost fertilizer had been laid down for use on them, or was being taken to them in large heavy carts drawn sometimes by three mules. between sarhougon and ningyuenchow fourteen fields thus fertilized were counted in less than half a mile; ten others in the next mile; eleven in the mile and a quarter following. in the next two miles one hundred fields were counted and just before reaching the station we counted during five minutes, with watch in hand, ninety-five fields to be planted, upon which this fertilizer had been brought. in some cases the compost was being spread in furrows between the rows of a last year's crop, evidently to be turned under, thus reversing the position of the ridges. after passing lienshan, where, the railway runs near the sea, a sail was visible on the bay and many stacks of salt piled about the evaporation fields were associated with the revolving sail windmills already described. here, too, large numbers of cattle, horses, mules and donkeys were grazing on the untilled low lands, beyond which we traversed a section where all fields were planted, where no fertilizer was piled in the field but where many groups of men were busy hoeing, sometimes twenty in a gang. chinese soldiers with bayonetted guns stood guard at every railway station between shanhaikwan and mukden, and from chinchowfu our coach was occupied by some chinese official with guests and military attendants, including armed soldiers. the official and his guests were an attractive group of men with pleasant faces and winning manners, clad in many garments of richly figured silk of bright, attractive, but unobtrusive, colors, who talked, seriously or in mirth, almost incessantly. they took the train about one o'clock and lunch was immediately served in chinese style, but the last course was not brought until nearly four o'clock. at every station soldiers stood in line in the attitude of salute until the official car had passed. just before reaching chinchowfu we saw the first planted fields littered with stubble of the previous crop, and in many instances such stubble was being gathered and removed to the villages, large stacks having been piled in the yards to be used either as fuel or in the production of compost. as the train approached taling ho groups of men were hoeing in millet fields, thirty in one group on one side and fifty in another body on the other. many small herds of cattle, horses, donkeys and flocks of goats and sheep were feeding along stream courses and on the unplanted fields. beyond the station, after crossing the river, still another sand dune tract was passed, planted with willows, millet occupying the level areas between the dunes, and not far beyond, wide untilled flats were crossed, on which many herds were grazing and dotted with grave mounds as we neared koupantze, where a branch of the railway traverses the liao plain to the port of newchwang. it was in this region that there came the first suggestion of resemblance to our marshland meadows; and very soon there were seen approaching from the distance loads so green that except for the large size one would have judged them to be fresh grass. they were loads of cured hay in the brightest green, the result, no doubt, of curing under their dry weather conditions. at ta hu shan large quantities of grain in sacks were piled along the tracks and in the freight yards, but under matting shelters. near here, too, large three-mule loads of dry earth compost were going to the fields and men were busy pulverizing and mixing it on the threshing floors preparatory for use. nearly all crops growing were one or another of the millets, but considerable areas were yet unplanted and on these cattle, horses, mules and donkeys were feeding and eight more loads of very bright new made hay crossed the track. when the train reached sinminfu where the railway turns abruptly eastward to cross the liao ho to reach mukden we saw the first extensive massing of the huge bean cakes for export, together with enormous quantities of soy beans in sacks piled along the railway and in the freight yards or loaded on cars made up in trains ready to move. leaving this station we passed among fields of grain looking decidedly yellow, the first indication we had seen in china of crops nitrogen-hungry and of soils markedly deficient in available nitrogen. beyond the next station the fields were decidedly spotted and uneven as well as yellow, recalling conditions so commonly seen at home and which had been conspicuously absent here before. crossing the liao ho with its broad channel of shifting sands, the river carrying the largest volume of water we had yet seen, but the stream very low and still characteristic of the close of the dry season of semi-arid climates, we soon reached another station where the freight yards and all of the space along the tracks were piled high with bean cakes and yet the fields about were reflecting the impoverished condition of the soil through the yellow crops and their uneven growth on the fields. since the japanese-russian war the shipments of soy beans and of bean cake from manchuria have increased enormously. up to this time there had been exports to the southern provinces of china where the bean cakes were used as fertilizers for the rice fields, but the new extensive markets have so raised the price that in several instances we were informed they could not then afford to use bean cake as fertilizer. from newchwang alone, in , between january st and march st, there went abroad , , pounds of beans and bean cake, but in the amount had increased to , , pounds. but a report published in the tientsin papers as official, while we were there, stated that the value of the export of bean cake and soy beans from dalny for the months ending march st had been, in , only $ , , , gold, compared with $ , , in the corresponding period of , and of $ , , in , showing a marked decrease. edward c. parker, writing from mukden for the review of reviews, stated: "the bean cake shipments from newchwang, dalny and antung in amounted to , tons; beans, , tons; bean oil, tons; having a total value of $ , , (u. s. gold)". according to the composition of soy beans as indicated in hopkins' table of analyses, these shipments of beans and bean cake would remove an aggregate of tons of phosphorus, , tons of potassium, and , tons of nitrogen from manchurian soils as the result of export for that year. could such a rate have been maintained during two thousand years there would have been sold from these soils , , tons of potassium; , , tons of phosphorus and , , tons of nitrogen; and the phosphorus, were it thus exported, would have exceeded more than threefold all thus far produced in the united states; it would have exceeded the world's output in more than eighteen times, even assuming that all phosphate rock mined was seventy-five per cent pure. the choice of the millets and the sorghums as the staple bread crops of northern china and manchuria has been quite as remarkable as the selection of rice for the more southern latitudes, and the two together have played a most important part in determining the high maintenance efficiency of these people. in nutritive value these grains rank well with wheat; the stems of the larger varieties are extensively used for both fuel and building material and the smaller forms make excellent forage and have been used directly for maintaining the organic content of the soil. their rapid development and their high endurance of drought adapt them admirably to the climate of north china and manchuria where the rains begin only after late june and where weather too cold for growth comes earlier in the fall. the quick maturity of these crops also permits them to be used to great advantage even throughout the south, in their systems of multiple cropping so generally adopted, while their great resistance to drought, being able to remain at a standstill for a long time when the soil is too dry for growth and yet be able to push ahead rapidly when favorable rains come, permits them to be used on the higher lands generally where water is not available for irrigation. in the shantung province the large millet, sorghum or kaoliang, yields as high as to pounds of seed per acre, and to pounds of air-dry stems, equal in weight to . to . cords of dry oak wood. in the region of mukden, manchuria, its average yield of seed is placed at thirty-five bushels of sixty pounds weight per acre, and with this comes one and a half tons of fuel or of building material. hosie states that, the kaoliang is the staple food of the population of manchuria and the principal grain food of the work animals. the grain is first washed in cold water and then poured into a kettle with four times its volume of boiling water and cooked for an hour, without salt, as with rice. it is eaten with chopsticks with boiled or salted vegetables. he states that an ordinary servant requires about two pounds of this grain per day, and that a workman at heavy labor will take double the amount. a chinese friend of his, keeping five servants, supplied them with pounds of millet per month, together with pounds of native flour, regarded as sufficient for two days, and meat for two days, the amount not being stated. two of the small millets (setaria italica, and panicum milliaceum), wheat, maize and buckwheat are other grains which are used as food but chiefly to give variety and change of diet. very large quantities of matting and wrappings are also made from the leaves of the large millet, which serve many purposes corresponding with the rice mattings and bags of japan and southern china. the small millets, in shantung, yield as high as pounds of seed and pounds of straw per acre. in japan, in the year , there were grown , acres of foxtail, barnyard and proso millet, yielding , , bushels of seed or an average of twenty-three bushels per acre. in addition to the millets, japan grew, the same year, , , bushels of buckwheat on , acres, or an average of fifteen bushels per acre. the next engraving, fig. , shows a crop of millet already six inches high planted between rows of windsor beans which had matured about the middle of june. the leaves had dropped, the beans had been picked from the stems, and a little later, when the roots had had time to decay the bean stems would be pulled and tied in bundles for use as fuel or for fertilizer. we had reached mukden thoroughly tired after a long day of continuous close observation and writing. the astor house, where we were to stop, was three miles from the station and the only conveyance to meet the train was a four-seated springless, open, semi-baggage carryall and it was a full hour lumbering its way to our hotel. but here as everywhere in the orient the foreigner meets scenes and phases of life competent to divert his attention from almost any discomfort. nothing could be more striking than the peculiar mode the manchu ladies have of dressing their hair, seen in fig. , many instances of which were passed on the streets during this early evening ride. it was fearfully and wonderfully done, laid in the smoothest, glossiest black, with nearly the lateral spread of the tail of a turkey cock and much of the backward curve of that of the rooster; far less attractive than the plainer, refined, modest, yet highly artistic style adopted by either chinese or japanese ladies. the journey from mukden to antung required two days, the train stopping for the night at tsaohokow. our route lay most of the way through mountainous or steep hilly country and our train was made up of diminutive coaches drawn by a tiny engine over a three-foot two-inch narrow gauge track of light rails laid by the japanese during the war with russia, for the purpose of moving their armies and supplies to the hotly contested fields in the liao and sungari plains. many of the grades were steep, the curves sharp, and in several places it was necessary to divide the short train to enable the engines to negotiate them. to the southward over the liao plain the crops were almost exclusively millet and soy beans, with a little barley, wheat, and a few oats. between mukden and the first station across the hun river we had passed twenty-four good sized fields of soy beans on one side of the river and twenty-two on the other, and before reaching the hilly country, after travelling a distance of possibly fifteen miles, we had passed other and similar fields close along the track. in this distance also we had passed two of the monuments erected by the japanese, marking sites of their memorable battles. these fields were everywhere flat, lying from sixteen to twenty feet above the beds of the nearly dry streams, and the cultivation was mostly being done with horses or cattle. after leaving the plains country the railway traversed a narrow winding valley less than a mile wide, with gradient so steep that our train was divided. fully sixty per cent of the hill slopes were cultivated nearly to the summit and yet rising apparently more than one in three to five feet, and the uncultivated slopes were closely wooded with young trees, few more than twenty to thirty feet high, but in blocks evidently of different ages. beyond the pass many of the cultivated slopes have walled terraces. we crossed a large stream where railway ties were being rafted down the river. just beyond this river the train was again divided to ascend a gradient of one in thirty, reaching the summit by five times switching back, and matched on the other side of the pass by a down grade of one in forty. at many of the farm houses in the narrow valleys along the way large rectangular, flat topped compost piles were passed, thirty to forty inches high and twenty, thirty, forty and even in one case as much as sixty feet square on the ground. more and more it became evident that these mountain and hill lands were originally heavily wooded and that the new growth springs up quickly, developing rapidly. it was clear also that the custom of cutting over these wooded areas at frequent intervals is very old, not always in the same stage of growth but usually when the trees are quite small. considerable quantities of cordwood were piled at the stations along the railway and were being loaded on the cars. this was always either round wood or sticks split but once; and much charcoal, made mostly from round wood or sticks split but once, was being shipped in sacks shaped like those used for rice, seen in fig. . some strips of the forest growth had been allowed to stand undisturbed apparently for twenty or more years, but most areas have been cut at more frequent intervals, often apparently once in three to five, or perhaps ten, years. at several places on the rapid streams crossed, prototypes of the modern turbine water-wheel were installed, doing duty grinding beans or grain. as with native machinery everywhere in china, these wheels were reduced to the lowest terms and the principle put to work almost unclothed. these turbines were of the downward discharge type, much resembling our modern windmills, ten to sixteen feet in diameter, set horizontally on a vertical axis rising through the floor of the mill, with the vanes surrounded by a rim, the water dropping through the wheel, reacting when reflected from the obliquely set vanes. american engineers and mechanics would pronounce these very crude, primitive and inefficient. a truer view would regard them as examples of a masterful grasp of principle by some, man who long ago saw the unused energy of the stream and succeeded thus in turning it to account. both days of our journey had been bright and very warm and, although we took the train early in the morning at mukden, a young japanese anticipated the heat, entering the train clad only in his kimono and sandals, carrying a suitcase and another bundle. he rode all day, the most comfortably, if immodestly, clad man on the train, and the next morning took his seat in front of us clad in the same garb, but before the train reached antung he took down his suitcase and then and there, deliberately attired himself in a good foreign suit, folding his kimono and packing it away with his sandals. from antung we crossed the yalu on the ferry to new wiju at : a. m., june , and were then in quite a different country and among a very different people, although all of the railway officials, employes, police and guards were japanese, as they had been from mukden. at antung and new wiju the yalu is a very broad slow stream resembling an arm of the sea more than a river, reminding one of the st. johns at jacksonville, florida. june nd proved to be one of the national festival days in korea, called "swing day", and throughout our entire ride to seoul the fields were nearly all deserted and throngs of people, arrayed in gala dress, appeared all along the line of the railway, sometimes congregating in bodies of two to three thousand or more, as seen in fig. . many swings had been hung and were being enjoyed by the young people. boys and men were bathing in all sorts of "swimming holes" and places. so too, there were many large open air gatherings being addressed by public speakers, one of which is seen in fig. . nearly everyone was dressed in white outer garments made from some fabric which although not mosquito netting was nearly as open and possessed of a remarkable stiffness which seemed to take and retain every dent with astonishing effect and which was sufficiently transparent to reveal a third undergarment. the full outstanding skirts of five korean women may be seen in fig. , and the trousers which went with these were proportionately full but tied close about the ankles. the garments seemed to be possessed of a powerful repulsion which held them quite apart and away from the person, no doubt contributing much to comfort. it was windy but one of those hot sultry, sticky days, and it made one feel cool to see these open garments surging in the wind. the korean men, like the chinese, wear the hair long but not braided in a queue. no part of the head is shaved but the hair is wound in a tight coil on the top of the head, secured by a pin which, in the case of the korean who rode in our coach from mukden to antung, was a modern, substantial tenpenny wire nail. the tall, narrow, conical crowns of the open hats, woven from thin bamboo splints, are evidently designed to accommodate this style of hair dressing as well as to be cool. here, too, as in china and manchuria, nearly all crops are planted in rows, including the cereals, such as wheat, rye, barley and oats. we traversed first a flat marshy country with sandy soil and water not more than four feet below the surface where, on the lowest areas a close ally of our wild flower-de-luce was in bloom. wheat was coining into head but corn and millet were smaller than in manchuria. we had left new wiju at : in the morning and at : we passed from the low land into a hill country with narrow valleys. scattering young pine, seldom more than ten to twenty-five feet high, occupied the slopes and as we came nearer the hills were seen to be clothed with many small oak, the sprouts clearly not more than one or two years old. roofs of dwellings in the country were usually thatched with straw laid after the manner of shingles, as may be seen in fig. , where the hills beyond show the low tree growth referred to, but here unusually dense. bundles of pine boughs, stacked and sheltered from the weather, were common along the way and evidently used for fuel. at : we passed through the first tunnel and there were many along the route, the longest requiring thirty seconds for the passing of the train. the valley beyond was occupied by fields of wheat where beans were planted between the rows. thus far none of the fields had been as thoroughly tilled and well cared for as those seen in china, nor were the crops as good. further along we passed hills where the pines were all of two ages, one set about thirty feet high and the others twelve to fifteen feet or less, and among these were numerous oak sprouts. quite possibly these are used as food for the wild silkworms. in some places appearances indicate that the oak and other deciduous growth, with the grass, may be cut annually and only the pines allowed to stand for longer periods. as we proceeded southward and had passed kosui the young oak sprouts were seen to cover the hills, often stretching over the slopes much like a regular crop, standing at a height of two to four feet, and fresh bundles of these sprouts were seen at houses along the foot of the slopes, again suggesting that the leaves may be for the tussur silkworms although the time appears late for the first moulting. after we had left seoul, entering the broader valleys where rice was more extensively grown, the using of the oak boughs and green grass brought down from the hill lands for green manure became very extensive. after the winter and early spring crops have been harvested the narrow ridges on which they are grown are turned into the furrows by means of their simple plow drawn by a heavy bullock, different from the cattle in china but closely similar to those in japan. the fields are then flooded until they have the appearance seen in fig. . over these flooded ridges the green grass and oak boughs are spread, when the fields are again plowed and the material worked into the wet soil. if this working is not completely successful men enter the fields and tramp the surface until every twig and blade is submerged. the middle section in this illustration has been fitted and transplanted; in front of it and on the left are two other fields once plowed but not fertilized; those far to the right have had the green manure applied and the ground plowed a second time but not finished, and in the immediate foreground the grass and boughs have been scattered but the second plowing is not yet done. we passed men and bullocks coming from the hill lands loaded with this green herbage and as we proceeded towards fusan more and more of the hill area was being made to contribute materials for green manure for the cultivated fields. the foreground of fig. had been thus treated and so had the field in fig. , where the man was engaged in tramping the dressing beneath the surface. in very many cases this material was laid along the margin of the paddies; in other cases it had been taken upon the fields as soon as the grain was cut and was lying in piles among the bundles; while in still other cases the material for green manure had been carried between the rows while the grain was still standing, but nearly ready to harvest. in some fields a full third of a bushel of the green stuff had been laid down at intervals of three feet over the whole area. in other cases piles of ashes alternated with those of herbage, and again manure and ashes mixed had been distributed in alternate piles with the green manure. in still other cases we saw untreated straw distributed through the fields awaiting application. at shindo this, straw had the appearance of having been dipped in or smeared with some mixture, apparently of mud and ashes or possibly of some compost which had been worked into a thin paste with water. after passing keizan, mountain herbage had been brought down from the hills in large bales on cleverly constructed racks saddled to the backs of bullocks, and in one field we saw a man who had just come to his little field with an enormous load borne upon his easel-like packing appliance. thus we find the koreans also adopting the rice crop, which yields heavily under conditions of abundant water; we find them supplementing a heavy summer rainfall with water from their hills, and bringing to their fields besides both green herbage for humus and organic matter, and ashes derived from the fuel coming also from the hills, in these ways making good the unavoidable losses, through intense cropping. the amount of forest growth in korea, as we saw it, in proximity to the cultivated valleys, is nowhere large and is fairly represented in figs. , and . there were clear evidences of periodic cutting and considerable, amounts of cordwood split from timber a foot through were being brought to the stations on the backs of cattle. in some places there was evident and occasionally very serious soil erosion, as may be seen in fig. , one such region being passed just before reaching kinusan, but generally the hills are well rounded and covered with a low growth of shrubs and herbaceous plants. southernmost korea has the latitude of the northern boundary of south carolina, georgia, alabama and mississippi, while the northeast corner attains that of madison, wisconsin, and the northern boundary of nebraska, the country thus spanning some nine degrees and six hundred miles of latitude. it has an area of some , square miles, about equaling the state of minnesota, but much of its surface is occupied by steep hill and mountain land. the rainy season had not yet set in, june rd. wheat and the small grains were practically all harvested southward of seoul and the people were everywhere busy with their flails threshing in the open, about the dwellings or in the fields, four flails often beating together on the same lot of grain. as we journeyed southward the valleys and the fields became wider and more extensive, and the crops, as well as the cultural methods, were clearly much better. neither the foot-power, animal-power, nor the wooden chain pump of the chinese were observed in korea in use for lifting water, but we saw many instances of the long handled, spoonlike swinging scoop hung over the water by a cord from tall tripods, after the manner seen in fig. , each operated by one man and apparently with high efficiency for low lifts. two instances also were observed of the form of lift seen in fig. , where the man walks the circumference of the wheel, so commonly observed in japan. much hemp was being grown in southern korea but everywhere on very small isolated areas which flecked the landscape with the deepest green, each little field probably representing the crop of a single family. it was : p. m. when our train reached fusan after a hot and dusty ride. the service had been good and fairly comfortable but the ice-water tanks of american trains were absent, their place being supplied by cooled bottled waters of various brands, including soda-water, sold by japanese boys at nearly every important station. close connection was made by trains with steamers to and from japan and we went directly on board the iki maru which was to weigh anchor for moji and shimonoseki at p. m. although small, the steamer was well equipped, providing the best of service. we were fortunate in having a smooth passage, anchoring at : the next morning and making close connection with the train for nagasaki, landing at the wharf with the aid of a steam launch. our ride by train through the island of kyushu carried us through scenes not widely different from those we had just left. the journey was continuously among fields of rice, with korean features strongly marked but usually under better and more intensified culture, and the season, too, was a little more advanced. here the plowing was being done mostly with horses instead of the heavy bullocks so exclusively employed in korea. coming from china into korea, and from there into japan, it appeared very clear that in agricultural methods and appliances the koreans and japanese are more closely similar than the chinese and koreans, and the more we came to see of the japanese methods the more strongly the impression became fixed that the japanese had derived their methods either from the koreans or the koreans had taken theirs more largely from japan than from china. it was on this ride from moji to nagasaki that we were introduced to the attractive and very satisfactory manner of serving lunches to travelers on the trains in japan. at important stations hot tea is brought to the car windows in small glazed, earthenware teapots provided with cover and bail, and accompanied with a teacup of the same ware. the set and contents could be purchased for five sen, two and a half cents, our currency. all tea is served without milk or sugar. the lunches were very substantial and put together in a neat sanitary manner in a three-compartment wooden box, carefully made from clear lumber joined with wooden pegs and perfect joints. packed in the cover we found a paper napkin, toothpicks and a pair of chopsticks. in the second compartment there were thin slices of meat, chicken and fish, together with bamboo sprouts, pickles, cakes and small bits of salted vegetables, while the lower and chief compartment was filled with rice cooked quite stiff and without salt, as is the custom in the three countries. the box was about six inches long, four inches deep and three and a half inches wide. these lunches are handed to travelers neatly wrapped in spotless thin white paper daintily tied with a bit of color, all in exchange for sen,-- . cents. thus for fifteen cents the traveler is handed, through the car window, in a respectful manner, a square meal which he may eat at his leisure. xvii return to japan we had returned to japan in the midst of the first rainy season, and all the day through, june th, and two nights, a gentle rain fell at nagasaki, almost without interruption. across the narrow street from hotel japan were two of its guest houses, standing near the front of a wall-faced terrace rising twenty-eight feet above the street and facing the beautiful harbor. they were accessible only by winding stone steps shifting on paved landings to continue the ascent between retaining walls overhung with a wealth of shrubbery clothed in the densest foliage, so green and liquid in the drip of the rain, that one almost felt like walking edgewise amid stairs lest the drip should leave a stain. over such another series of steps, but longer and more winding, we found our way to the american consulate where in the beautifully secluded quarters consul-general scidmore escaped many annoyances of settling the imagined petty grievances arising between american tourists and the ricksha boys. through the kind offices of the imperial university of sapporo and of the national department of agriculture and commerce, professor tokito met us at nagasaki, to act as escort through most of the journey in japan. our first visit was to the prefectural agricultural experiment station at nagasaki. there are four others in the four main islands, one to an average area of square miles, and to each , , people. the island of kyushu, whose latitude is that of middle mississippi and north louisiana, has two rice harvests, and gardeners at nagasaki grow three crops, each year. the gardener and his family work about five tan, or a little less than one and one-quarter acres, realizing an annual return of some $ per acre. to maintain these earnings fertilizers are applied rated worth $ per acre, divided between the three crops, the materials used being largely the wastes of the city, animal manure, mud from the drains, fuel ashes and sod, all composted together. if this expenditure for fertilizers appears high it must be remembered that nearly the whole product is sold and that there are three crops each year. such intense culture requires a heavy return if large yields are maintained. good agricultural lands were here valued at yen per tan, approximately $ per acre. when returning toward moji to visit the agricultural experiment station of fukuoka prefecture, the rice along the first portion of the route was standing about eight inches above the water. large lotus ponds along the way occupied areas not readily drained, and the fringing fields between the rice paddies and the untilled hill lands were bearing squash, maize, beans and irish potatoes. many small areas had been set to sweet potatoes on close narrow ridges, the tops of which were thinly strewn with green grass, or sometimes with straw or other litter, for shade and to prevent the soil from washing and baking in the hot sun after rains. at kitsu we passed near government salt works, for the manufacture of salt by the evaporation of sea water, this industry in japan, as in china, being a government monopoly. many bundles of grass and other green herbage were collected along the way, gathered for use in the rice fields. in other cases the green manure had already been spread over the flooded paddies and was being worked beneath the surface, as seen in fig. . at this time the hill lands were clothed in the richest, deepest green but the tree growth was nowhere large except immediately about temples, and was usually in distinct small areas with sharp boundaries occasioned by differences in age. some tracts had been very recently cut; others were in their second, third or fourth years; while others still carried a growth of perhaps seven to ten years. at one village many bundles of the brush fuel had been gathered from an adjacent area, recently cleared. a few fields were still bearing their crop of soy beans planted in february between rows of grain, and the green herbage was being worked into the flooded soil, for the crop of rice. much compost, brought to the fields, was stacked with layers of straw between, laid straight, the alternate courses at right angles, holding the piles in rectangular form with vertical sides, some of which were four to six feet high and the layers of compost about six inches thick. just before reaching tanjiro, a region is passed where orchards of the candleberry tree occupy high leveled areas between rice paddies, after the manner described for the mulberry orchards in chekiang, china. these trees, when seen from a distance, have quite the appearance of our apple orchards. at the fukuoka experiment station we learned that the usual depth of plowing for the rice fields is three and a half to four and a half inches, but that deeper plowing gives somewhat larger yields. as an average of five years trials, a depth of seven to eight inches increased the yield from seven to ten per cent over that of the usual depth. in this prefecture grass from the bordering hill lands is applied to the rice fields at rates ranging from to , pounds green weight per acre, and, according to analyses given, these amounts would carry to, the fields from to pounds of nitrogen; . to . pounds of potassium, and . to . pounds of phosphorus per acre. where bean cake is used as a fertilizer the applications may be at the rate of pounds per acre, carrying . pounds of nitrogen, nearly pounds of phosphorus and . pounds of potassium. the earth composts are chiefly applied to the dry land fields and then only after they are well rotted, the fermentation being carried through at least sixty days, during which the material is turned three times for aeration, the work being done at the home. when used on the rice fields where water is abundant the composts are applied in a less fermented condition. the best yields of rice in this prefecture are some eighty bushels per acre, and crops of barley may even exceed this, the two crops being grown the same year, the rice following the barley. in most parts of japan the grain food of the laboring people is about per cent naked barley mixed with per cent of rice, both cooked and used in the same manner. the barley has a lower market value and its use permits a larger share of the rice to be sold as a money crop. the soils are fertilized for each crop every year and the prescription for barley and rice recommended by the experiment station, for growers in this prefecture, is indicated by the following table: fertilization for naked barley. pounds per acre. fertilizers. n p k manure compost , . . . rape seed cake . . . night soil , . . . superphosphate . ---------------------- sum , . . . fertilization for paddy rice. manure compost , . . . green manure, soy beans , . . . soy bean cake . . . superphosphate . ---------------------- sum , . . . ====== ===== ==== ===== total for year , . . . where these recommendations are followed there is an annual application of fertilizer material which aggregates some ten tons per acre, carrying about pounds of nitrogen, pounds of phosphorus and pounds of potassium. the crop yields which have been associated with these applications on the station fields are about forty-nine bushels of barley and fifty bushels of rice per acre. the general rotation recommended for this portion of japan covers five years and consists of a crop of wheat or naked barley the first two years with rice as the summer crop; in the third year genge, "pink clover" (astragalus sinicus) or some other legume for green manure is the winter crop, rice following in the summer; the fourth year rape is the winter crop, from which the seed is saved and the ash of the stems returned to the soil, or rarely the stems themselves may be turned under; on the fifth and last year of the rotation the broad kidney or windsor bean is the winter crop, preceding the summer crop of rice. this rotation is not general yet in the practice of the farmers of the section, they choosing rape or barley and in february plant windsor or soy beans between the rows for green manure to use when the rice comes on. it was evident from our observations that the use of composts in fertilizing was very much more general and extensive in china than it was in either korea or japan, but, to encourage the production and use of compost fertilizers, this and other prefectures have provided subsidies which permit the payment of $ . annually to those farmers who prepare and use on their land a compost heap covering twenty to forty square yards, in accordance with specified directions given. the agricultural college at fukuoka was not in session the day of our visit, it being a holiday usually following the close of the last transplanting season. one of the main buildings of the station and college is seen in fig. , and figs. , and , placed together from left to right in the order of their numbers, form a panoramic view of the station grounds and buildings with something of the beautiful landscape setting. there is nowhere in japan the lavish expenditure of money on elaborate and imposing architecture which characterizes american colleges and stations, but in equipment for research work, both as to professional staff and appliances, they compare favorably with similar institutions in america. the dormitory system was in vogue in the college, providing room and board at eight yen per month or four dollars of our currency. eight students were assigned to one commodious room, each provided with a study table, but beds were mattresses spread upon the matting floor at night and compactly stored on closet shelves during the day. the japanese plow, which is very similar to the korean type, may be seen in fig. , the one on the right costing . yen and the other yen. with the aid of the single handle and the sliding rod held in the right hand, the course of the plow is directed and the plow tilted in either direction, throwing the soil to the right or the left. the nursery beds for rice breeding experiments and variety tests by this station are shown in fig. . although these plots are flooded the marginal plants, adjacent to the free water paths, were materially larger than those within and had a much deeper green color, showing better feeding, but what seemed most strange was the fact that these stronger plants are never used in transplanting, as they do not thrive as well as those less vigorous. we left the island of kyushu in the evening of june th, crossing to the main island of honshu, waiting in shimonoseki for the morning train. the rice-planted valleys near shimonoseki were relatively broad and the paddies had all been recently set in close rows about a foot apart and in hills in the rows. mountain and hill lands were closely wooded, largely with coniferous trees about the base but toward and at the summits, especially on the south slopes, they were green only with herbage cut for fertilizing and feeding stock. many very small trees, often not more than one foot high, were growing on the recently cut-over areas; tall slender graceful bamboos clustered along the way and everywhere threw wonderful beauty into the landscape. cartloads of their slender stems, two to four inches in diameter at the base and twenty or more feet long, were moving along the generally excellent, narrow, seldom fenced roads, such as seen in fig. . on the borders and pathways between rice paddies many small stacks of straw were in waiting to be laid between the rows of transplanted rice, tramped beneath the water and overspread with mud to enrich the soil. the farmers here, as elsewhere, must contend against the scouring rush, varieties of grass and our common pigweeds, even in the rice fields. the large area of mountain and hill land compared with that which could be tilled, and the relatively small area of cultivated land not at this time under water and planted to rice persisted throughout the journey. if there could be any monotony for the traveller new to this land of beauty it must result from the quick shifting of scenes and in the way the landscapes are pieced together, out-doing the craziest patchwork woman ever attempted; the bits are almost never large; they are of every shape, even puckered and crumpled and tilted at all angles. here is a bit of the journey: beyond habu the foothills are thickly wooded, largely with conifers. the valley is extremely narrow with only small areas for rice. bamboo are growing in congenial places and we pass bundles of wood cut to stove length, as seen in fig. . then we cross a long narrow valley practically all in rice, and then another not half a mile wide, just before reaching asa. beyond here the fields become limited in area with the bordering low hills recently cut over and a new growth springing up over them in the form of small shrubs among which are many pine. now we are in a narrow valley between small rice fields or with none at all, but dash into one more nearly level with wide areas in rice chiefly on one side of the track just before reaching onoda at : a. m. and continuing three minutes ride beyond, when we are again between hills without fields and where the trees are pine with clumps of bamboo. in four minutes more we are among small rice paddies and at : have passed another gap and are crossing another valley checkered with rice fields and lotus ponds, but in one minute more the hills have closed in, leaving only room for the track. at : we are running along a narrow valley with its terraced rice paddies where many of the hills show naked soil among the bamboo, scattering pine and other small trees; then we are out among garden patches thickly mulched with straw. at : we are between higher hills with but narrow areas for rice stretching close along the track, but in two minutes these are passed and we are among low hills with terraced dry fields. at : we are spinning along the level valley with its rice, but are quickly out again among hills with naked soil where erosion was marked. this is just before passing funkai where we are following the course of a stream some sixty feet wide with but little cultivated land in small areas. at : we are again passing narrow rice fields near the track where the people are busy weeding with their hands, half knee-deep in water. at : we enter a broader valley stretching far to the south and seaward, but we had crossed it in one minute, shot through another gap, and at : are traversing a much broader valley largely given over to rice, but where some of the paddies were bearing matting rush set in rows and in hills after the manner of rice. it is here we pass oyou and just beyond cross a stream confined between levees built some distance back from either bank. at : this plain is left and we enter a narrow valley without fields. thus do most of the agricultural lands of japan lie in the narrowest valleys, often steeply sloping, and into which jutting spurs create the greatest irregularity of boundary and slope. the journey of this day covered miles in fourteen hours, all of the way through a country of remarkable and peculiar beauty which can be duplicated nowhere outside the mountainous, rice-growing orient and there only during fifteen days closing the transplanting season. there were neither high mountains nor broad valleys, no great rivers and but few lakes; neither rugged naked rocks, tall forest trees nor wide level fields reaching away to unbroken horizons. but the low, rounded, soil-mantled mountain tops clothed in herbaceous and young forest growth fell everywhere into lower hills and these into narrow steep valleys which dropped by a series of water-level benches, as seen in fig. , to the main river courses. each one of these millions of terraces, set about by its raised rim, was a silvery sheet of water dotted in the daintiest manner with bunches of rice just transplanted, but not so close nor yet so high and over-spreading as to obscure the water, yet quite enough to impart to the surface a most delicate sheen of green; and the grass-grown narrow rims retaining the water in the basins, cemented them into series of the most superb mosaics, shaped into the valley bottoms by artizan artists perhaps two thousand years before and maintained by their descendants through all the years since, that on them the rains and fertility from the mountains and the sunshine from heaven might be transformed by the rice plant into food for the families and support for the nation. two weeks earlier the aspect of these landscapes was very different, and two weeks later the reflecting water would lie hidden beneath the growing and rapidly developing mantle of green, to go on changing until autumn, when all would be overspread with the ripened harvest of grain. and what intensified the beauty of it all was the fact that only along the widest valley bottoms were the mosaics level, except the water surface of each individual unit and these were always small. at one time we were riding along a descending series of steps and then along another rising through a winding valley to disappear around a projecting spur, and anywhere in the midst of it all might be standing japanese cottages or villas with the water and the growing rice literally almost against the walls, as seen in fig. , while a near-by high terrace might hold its water on a level with the chimney-tops. can one wonder that the japanese loves his country or that they are born and bred landscape artists? just before reaching hongo there were considerable areas thrown into long narrow, much-raised, east and west beds under covers of straw matting inclined at a slight angle toward the south, some two feet above the ground but open toward the north. what crop may have been grown here we did not learn but the matting was apparently intended for shade, as it was hot midsummer weather, and we suspect it may have been ginseng. it was here, too, that we came into the region of the culture of matting rush, extensively grown in hiroshima and okayama prefectures, but less extensively all over the empire. as with rice, the rush is first grown in nursery beds from which it is transplanted to the paddies, one acre of nursery supplying sufficient stock for ten acres of field. the plants are set twenty to thirty stalks in a hill in rows seven inches apart with the hills six inches from center to center in the row. very high fertilization is practiced, costing from to yen per acre, or $ to $ annually, the fertilizer consisting of bean cake and plant ashes, or in recent years, sometimes of sulphate of ammonia for nitrogen, and superphosphate of lime. about ten per cent of the amount of fertilizer required for the crop is applied at the time of fitting the ground, the balance being administered from time to time as the season advances. two crops of the rush may be taken from the same ground each year or it is grown in rotation with rice, but most extensively on the lands less readily drained and not so well suited for other crops. fields of the rush, growing in alternation with rice, are seen in fig. , and in fig. , with the government salt fields lying along the seashore beyond. with the most vigorous growth the rush attain a height exceeding three feet and the market price varies materially with the length of the stems. good yields, under the best culture, may be as high as . tons per acre of the dry stems but the average yield is less, that of being pounds, for acres, the value of the product ranges from $ to $ per acre. it is from this material that mats are woven in standard sizes, to be laid over padding, upholstering the floors which are the seats of all classes in japan, used in the manner seen in fig. and in fig. , which is a completely furnished guest room in a first class japanese inn, finished in natural unvarnished wood, with walls of sliding panels of translucent paper, which may open upon a porch, into a hallway or into another apartment; and with its bouquet, which may consist of a single large shapely branch of the purple leaved maple, having the cut end charred to preserve it fresh for a longer time, standing in water in the vase. "two little maids i've heard of, each with a pretty taste, who had two little rooms to fix and not an hour to waste. eight thousand miles apart they lived, yet on the selfsame day the one in nikko's narrow streets, the other on broadway, they started out, each happy maid her heart's desire to find, and her own dear room to furnish just according to her mind. when alice went a-shopping, she bought a bed of brass, a bureau and some chairs and things and such a lovely glass to reflect her little figure--with two candle brackets near-- and a little dressing table that she said was simply dear! a book shelf low to hold her books, a little china rack, and then, of course, a bureau set and lots of bric-a-brac; a dainty little escritoire, with fixings all her own and just for her convenience, too, a little telephone. some oriental rugs she got, and curtains of madras, with 'cunning' ones of lace inside, to go against the glass; and then a couch, a lovely one, with cushions soft to crush, and forty pillows, more or less, of linen, silk and plush; of all the ornaments besides i couldn't tell the half, but wherever there was nothing else, she stuck a photograph. and then, when all was finished, she sighed a little sigh, and looked about with just a shade of sadness in her eye: 'for it needs a statuette or so--a fern--a silver stork oh, something, just to fill it up!' said alice of new york. when little oumi of japan went shopping, pitapat, she bought a fan of paper and a little sleeping mat; she set beside the window a lily in a vase, and looked about with more than doubt upon her pretty face: 'for, really--don't you think so?--with the lily and the fan. it's a little overcrowded!' said oumi of japan." (margaret johnson in st. nicholas magazine) in the rural homes of japan during there were woven , , sheets of these floor mats and , , sheets of other matting, having a combined value of $ , , , and in addition, from the best quality of rush grown upon the same ground, aggregating acres that year, there were manufactured for the export trade, fancy mattings, having the value of $ , , . here is a total value, for the product of the soil and for the labor put into the manufacture, amounting to $ per acre for the area named. at the akashi agricultural experiment station, under the directorship of professor ono, we saw some of the methods of fruit culture as practiced in japan. he was conducting experiments with the object of improving methods of heading and training pear trees, to which reference was made on page . a study was also being made of the advantages and disadvantages associated with covering the fruit with paper bags, examples of which are seen in figs. and . the bags were being made at the time of our visit, from old newspapers cut, folded and pasted by women. naked cultivation was practiced in the orchard, and fertilizers consisting of fish guano and superphosphate of lime were being applied twice each year in amounts aggregating a cost of twenty-four dollars per acre. pear orchards of native varieties, in good bearing, yield returns of yen per tan, and those of european varieties, yen per tan, which is at the rate of $ and $ per acre. the bibo, so extensively grown in china was being cultivated here also and was yielding about $ per acre. it was here that we first met the cultivation of a variety of burdock grown from the seed, three crops being taken each season where the climate is favorable, or as one of three in the multiple crop system. it is grown for the root, yielding a crop valued at $ to $ per acre. one crop, planted, in march, was being harvested july st. during our ride to akashi on the early morning train we passed long processions of carts drawn by cattle, horses or by men, moving along the country road which paralleled the railway, all loaded with the waste of the city of kobe, going to its destination in the fields, some of it a distance of twelve miles, where it was sold at from cents to $ . per ton. at several places along our route from shimonoseki to osaka we had observed the application of slacked lime to the water of the rice fields, but in this prefecture, hyogo, where the station is located, its use was prohibited in , except under the direction of the station authorities, where the soil was acid or where it was needed on account of insect troubles. up to this time it had been the custom of farmers to apply slacked lime at the rate of three to five tons per acre, paying for it $ . per ton. the first restrictive legislation permitted the use of pounds of lime with each pounds of organic manure, but as the farmers persisted in using much larger quantities, complete prohibition was resorted to. reference has been made to subsidies encouraging the use of composts, and in this prefecture prizes are awarded for the best compost heaps in each county, examinations being made by a committee. the composts receiving the four highest awards in each county are allowed to compete with those in other counties for a prefectural prize awarded by another committee. the "pink clover" grown in hyogo after rice, as a green manure crop, yields under favorable conditions twenty tons of the green product per acre, and is usually applied to about three times the area upon which it grew, at the rate of . tons per acre, the stubble and roots serving for the ground upon which the crop grew. on july rd we left osaka, going south through sakai to wakayama, thence east and north to the nara experiment station. after passing the first two stations the route lay through a very flat, highly cultivated garden section with cucumbers trained on trellises, many squash in full bloom, with fields of taro, ginger and many other vegetables. beyond hamadera considerable areas of flat sandy land had been set close with pine, but with intervening areas in rice, where the growers were using the revolving weeder seen in fig. . at otsu broad areas are in rice but here worked with the short handled claw weeders, and stubble from a former crop had been drawn together into small piles, seen in fig. , which later would be carefully distributed and worked beneath the mud. much of the mountain lands in this region, growing pine, is owned by private parties and the growth is cut at intervals of ten, twenty or twenty-five years, being sold on the ground to those who will come and cut it at a price of forty sen for a one-horse load, as already described, page . the course from here was up the rather rapidly rising kiigawa valley where much water was being applied to the rice fields by various methods of pumping, among them numerous current wheels; an occasional power-pump driven by cattle; and very commonly the foot-power wheel where the man walks on the circumference, steadying himself with a long pole, as seen in the field, fig. . it was here that a considerable section of the hill slope had been very recently cut over, the area showing light in the engraving. it was in the vicinity of hashimoto on this route, too, that the two beautiful views reproduced in figs. and were taken. at the experiment station it was learned that within the prefecture of nara, having a population of , , and , acres of cultivated land, two-thirds of this was in paddy rice. within the province there are also about one thousand irrigation reservoirs with an average depth of eight feet. the rice fields receive . inches of irrigation water in addition to the rain. of the uncultivated hill lands, some acres contribute green manure for fertilization of fields. reference has been made to the production of compost for fertilizers on page . the amount recommended in this prefecture as a yearly application for two crops grown is: organic matter , to , lbs. per acre nitrogen to lbs. per acre phosphorus to lbs. per acre potassium to lbs. per acre these amounts, on the basis of the table, p. , are nearly sufficient for a crop of thirty bushels of wheat, followed by one of thirty bushels of rice, the phosphorus being in excess and the potassium not quite enough, supposing none to be derived from other sources. at the nara hotel, one of the beautiful japanese inns where we stopped, our room opened upon a second story veranda from which one looked down upon a beautiful, tiny lakelet, some twenty by eighty feet, within a diminutive park scarcely more than one hundred by two hundred feet, and the lakelet had its grassy, rocky banks over-hung with trees and shrubs planted in all the wild disorder and beauty of nature; bamboo, willow, fir, pine, cedar, red-leaved maple, catalpa, with other kinds, and through these, along the shore, wound a woodsy, well trodden, narrow footpath leading from the inn to a half hidden cottage apparently quarters for the maids, as they were frequently passing to and fro. a suggestion of how such wild beauty is brought right to the very doors in japan may be gained from fig. , which is an instance of parking effect on a still smaller scale than that described. on the morning of july th, with two men for each of our rickshas, we left the yaami hotel for the kyoto experiment station, some two miles to the southwest of the city limits. as soon as we had entered upon the country road we found ourselves in a procession of cart men each drawing a load of six large covered receptacles of about ten gallons capacity, and filled with the city's waste. before reaching the station we had passed fifty-two of these loads, and on our return the procession was still moving in the same direction and we passed sixty-one others, so that during at least five hours there had moved over this section of road leading into the country, away from the city, not less than ninety tons of waste; along other roadways similar loads were moving. these freight carts and those drawn by horses and bullocks were all provided with long racks similar to that illustrated in fig. , page , and when the load is not sufficient to cover the full length it is always divided equally and placed near each end, thus taking advantage of the elasticity of the body to give the effect of springs, lessening the draft and the wear and tear, one of the most common commodities coming into the city along the country roads was fuel from the hill lands, in split sticks tied in bundles as represented in fig. ; as bundles of limbs twenty-four to thirty inches, and sometimes four to six feet, long; and in the form of charcoal made from trunks and stems one and a half inches to six inches long, and baled in straw matting. most of the draft animals used in japan are either cows, bulls or stallions; at least we saw very few oxen and few geldings. as early as the government began definite steps looking to the improvement of horse breeding, appointing at that time a commission to devise comprehensive plans. this led to progressive steps finally culminating in in the horse administration bureau, whose duties were to extend over a period of thirty years, divided into two intervals, the first, eighteen and the second, twelve years. during the first interval it is contemplated that the government shall acquire , stallions to be distributed throughout the country for the use of private individuals, and during the second period it is the expectation that the system will have completely renovated the stock and familiarized the people with proper methods of management so that matters may be left in their hands. as our main purpose and limited time required undivided attention to agricultural matters, and of these to the long established practices of the people, we could give but little time to sight-seeing or even to a study of the efforts being made for the introduction of improved agricultural methods and practices. but in the very old city of kyoto, which was the seat of the mikado's court from before a. d. until , we did pay a short visit to the kiyomizu temple, situated some three hundred yards south from the yaami hotel, which faces the maruyaami park with its centuries-old giant cherry tree, having a trunk of more than four feet through and wide spreading branches, now much propped up to guard against accident, as seen in fig. . these cherry trees are very extensively used for ornamental purposes in japan with striking effect. the tree does not produce an edible fruit, but is very beautiful when in full bloom, as may be seen from fig. . it was these trees that were sent by the japanese government to this country for use at washington but the first lot were destroyed because they were found to be infested and threatened danger to native trees. kyoto stands amid surroundings of wonderful beauty, the site apparently having been selected with rare acumen for its possibilities in large landscape effects, and these have been developed with that fullness and richness which the greatest artists might be content to approach. we are thinking particularly of the kiyomizu-dera, or rather of the marvelous beauty of tree and foliage which has overgrown it and swept far up and over the mountain summit, leaving the temple half hidden at the base. no words, no brush, no photographic art can transfer the effect. one must see to feel the influence for which it was created, and scores of people, very old and very young, nearly all japanese, and more of them on that day from the poorer rather than from the well-to-do class, were there, all withdrawing reluctantly, like ourselves, looking backward, under the spell. so potent and impressive was that something from the great overshadowing beauty of the mountain, that all along up the narrow, shop-lined street leading to the gateway of the temple, seen in fig. , the tiniest bits of park effect were flourishing in the most impossible situations; and as professor tokito and myself were coming away we chanced upon six little roughly dressed lads laying out in the sand an elaborate little park, quite nine by twelve feet. they must have been at it hours, for there were ponds, bridges, tiny hills and ravines and much planting in moss and other little greens. so intent on their task were they that we stood watching full two minutes before our presence attracted their attention, and yet the oldest of the group must have been under ten years of age. one partly hidden view of the temple is seen in fig. , the dense mountain verdure rising above and beyond it. and then too, within the temple, as the peasant men and women came before the shrine and grasped the long depending rope knocker, with the heavy knot in front of the great gong, swinging it to strike three rings, announcing their presence before their god, then kneeling to offer prayers, one could not fail to realize the deep sincerity and faith expressed in face and manner, while they were oblivious to all else. no christian was ever more devout and one may well doubt if any ever arose from prayer more uplifted than these. who need believe they did not look beyond the imagery and commune with the eternal spirit? a third view of the same temple, showing resting places beneath the shade, which serve the purpose of lawn seats in our parks, is seen in fig. . that a high order of the esthetic sense is born to the japanese people; that they are masters of the science of the beautiful; and that there are artists among them capable of effective and impressive results, is revealed in a hundred ways, and one of these is the iris garden of fig. . one sees it here in the bulrushes which make the iris feel at home; in the unobtrusive semblance of a log that seems to have fallen across the run; in the hard beaten narrow path and the sore toes of the old pine tree, telling of the hundreds that come and go; it is seen in the dress and pose of the ladies, and one may be sure the photographer felt all that he saw and fixed so well. the vender of oumi's lily that margaret johnson saw, is in fig. . there another is bartering for a spray of flowers, and thus one sold the branch of red maple leaves in our room at the nara inn. his floral stands are borne along the streets pendant from the usual carrying pole. when returning to the city from the kyoto experiment station several fields of japanese indigo were passed, growing in water under the conditions of ordinary rice culture, fig. being a view of one of these. the plant is poligonum tinctoria, a close relative of the smartweed. before the importation of aniline and alizarin dyes, which amounted in to , pounds and , , pounds respectively, the cultivation of indigo was much more extensive than at present, amounting in to , , pounds of the dried leaves; but in the production had fallen to , , pounds, forty-five per cent of which was grown in the prefecture of tokushima in the eastern part of the island of shikoku. the population of this prefecture is , , or . people to each of the , acres of cultivated field, and yet , of these acres bore the indigo crop, leaving more than five people to each food-producing acre. the plants for this crop are started in nursery beds in february and transplanted in may, the first crop being cut the last of june or first of july, when the fields are again fertilized, the stubble throwing out new shoots and yielding a second cutting the last of august or early september. a crop of barley may have preceded one of indigo, or the indigo may be set following a crop of rice. such practice, with the high fertilization for every crop, goes a long way toward supplying the necessary food. the dense population, too, has permitted the manufacture of the indigo as a home industry among the farmers, enabling them to exchange the spare labor of the family for cash. the manufactured product from the reduced planting in was worth $ , , , forty-five per cent of which was the output of the rural population of the prefecture of tokushima, which they could exchange for rice and other necessaries. the land in rice in this prefecture in was , acres, yielding , , pounds, or more than pounds to each man, woman and child, and there were , acres bearing other crops. besides this there are , acres of mountain and hill land in the prefecture which supply fuel, fuel ashes and green manure for fertilizer; run-off water for irrigation; lumber and remunerative employment for service not needed in the fields. the journey was continued from kyoto july th, taking the route leading northeastward, skirting lake biwa which we came upon suddenly on emerging from a tunnel as the train left otani. at many places we passed waterwheels such as that seen in fig. , all similarly set, busily turning, and usually twelve to sixteen feet in diameter but oftenest only as many inches thick. until we had reached lake biwa the valleys were narrow with only small areas in rice. tea plantations were common on the higher cultivated slopes, and gardens on the terraced hillsides growing vegetables of many kinds were common, often with the ground heavily mulched with straw, while the wooded or grass-covered slopes still further up showed the usual systematic periodic cutting. after passing the west end of the lake, rice fields were nearly continuous and extensive. before reaching hachiman we crossed a stream leading into the lake but confined between levees more than twelve feet high, and we had already passed beneath two raised viaducts after leaving kusatsu. other crops were being grown side by side with the rice on similar lands and apparently in rotation with it, but on sharp, narrow close ridges twelve to fourteen inches high. as we passed eastward we entered one of the important mulberry districts where the fields are graded to two levels, the higher occupied with mulberry or other crops not requiring irrigation, while the lower was devoted to rice or crops grown in rotation with it. on the kisogawa, at the station of the same name, there were four anchored floating water-power mills propelled by two pair of large current wheels stationed fore and aft, each pair working on a common axle from opposite sides of the mill, driven by the force of the current flowing by. at kisogawa we had entered the northern end of one of the largest plains of japan, some thirty miles wide and extending forty miles southward to owari bay. the plain has been extensively graded to two levels, the benches being usually not more than two feet above the rice paddies, and devoted to various dry land crops, including the mulberry. the soil is decidedly sandy in character but the mean yield of rice for the prefecture is bushels per acre and above the average for the country at large. an analysis of the soils at the sub-experiment station north of nagoya shows the following content of the three main plant food elements. nitrogen phosphorus potassium pounds per million in paddy field soil subsoil in upland field soil subsoil the green manure crops on this plain are chiefly two varieties of the "pink clover," one sowed in the fall and one about may th, the first yielding as high as sixteen tons green weight per acre and the other from five to eight tons. on the plain distant from the mountain and hill land the stems of agricultural crops are largely used as fuel and the fuel ashes are applied to the fields at the rate of kan per tan, or pounds per acre, worth $ . , little lime, as such, being used. in the prefecture of aichi, largely in this plain, with an area of cultivated land equal to about sixteen of our government townships, there is a population of , , , or a density of . per acre, and the number of households of farmers was placed at , , thus giving to each farmer's family an average of . acres, their chief industries being rice and silk culture. soon after leaving the agricultural experiment station of aichi prefecture at an jo we crossed the large yahagigawa, flowing between strong levees above the level of the rice fields. mulberries, with burdock and other vegetables were growing upon all of the tables raised one to two, feet above the rice paddies, and these features continued past okasaki, koda, and kamagori, where the hills in many places had been recently cut clean of the low forest growth and where we passed many large stacks of pine boughs tied in bundles for fuel. after passing goyu sixty-five miles east from nagoya, mulberry was the chief crop. then came a plain country which had been graded and leveled at great cost of labor, the benches with their square shoulders standing three to four feet above the paddy fields; and after passing toyohashi some distance we were surprised to cross a rather wide section of comparatively level land overgrown with pine and herbaceous, plants which had evidently been cut and recut many times. beyond futagawa rice fields were laid out on what appeared to be, similar land but with soil a little finer in texture, and still further along were other flat areas not cultivated. at maisaka quite half the cultivated fields appear to be in mulberry with ponds of lotus plants in low places, while at hamamatsu the rice fields are interspersed with many square-shouldered tables raised three to four feet and occupied with mulberry or vegetables. as we passed upon the flood plain of the tenryugawa, with its nearly dry bed of coarse gravel half a mile wide, the dwellings of farm villages were, many of them surrounded with nearly solid, flat-topped, trimmed evergreen hedges nine to twelve feet high, of the umbrella pine, forming beautiful and effective screens. at nakaidzumi we had left the mulberry orchards for those of tea, rice still holding wherever paddies could be formed. here, too, we met the first fields of tobacco, and at fukuroi and homouchi large quantities of imported manchurian bean cake were stacked about the station, having evidently been brought by rail. at kanaya we passed through a long tunnel and were in the valley of the oigawa, crossing the broad, nearly dry stream over a bridge of nineteen long spans and were then in the prefecture of shizuoka where large fields of tea spread far up the hillsides, covering extensive areas, but after passing the next station, and for seventeen miles before reaching shizuoka we traversed a level stretch of nearly continuous rice fields. the shizuoka experiment station is devoting special attention to the interests of horticulture, and progress has already been made in introducing new fruits of better quality and in improving the native varieties. the native pears and peaches, as we found them served on the hotel tables in either china or japan, were not particularly attractive in either texture or flavor, but we were here permitted to test samples of three varieties of ripe figs of fine flavor and texture, one of them as large as a good sized pear. three varieties of fine peaches were also shown, one unusually large and with delicate deep rose tint, including the flesh. if such peaches could be canned so as to retain their delicate color they would prove very attractive for the table. the flavor and texture of this peach were also excellent, as was the case with two varieties of pears. the station was also experimenting with the production of marmalades and we tasted three very excellent brands, two of them lacking the bitter flavor. it would appear that, in japan, korea and china there should be a very bright future along the lines of horticultural development, leading to the utilization of the extensive hill lands of these countries and the development of a very extensive export trade, both in fresh fruits and marmalades, preserves and the canned forms. they have favorable climatic and soil conditions and great numbers of people with temperament and habits well suited to the industries, as well as an enormous home need which should be met, in addition to the large possibilities in the direction of a most profitable export trade which would increase opportunities for labor and bring needed revenue to the people. in fig. are three views at this station, the lower showing a steep terraced hillside set with oranges and other fruits, holding out a bright promise for the future. peach orchards were here set on the hill lands, the trees six feet apart each way. they come into bearing in three years, remain productive ten to fifteen years, and the returns are to yen per tan, or at the rate of $ to $ per acre. the usual fertilizers for a peach orchard are the manure-earth-compost, applied at the rate of pounds per acre, and fish guano applied in rotation and at the same rate. shizuoka is one of the large prefectures, having a total area of square miles; of which are in forest; in pasture and genya land, and square miles cultivated, not quite one-half of which is in paddy fields. the mean yield of paddy rice is nearly bushels per acre. the prefecture has a population of , , , or about four to the acre of cultivated field, and the total crop of rice is such as, to provide pounds to each person. at many places along the way as we left shizuoka july th for tokyo, farmers were sowing broadcast, on the water, over their rice fields, some pulverized fertilizer, possibly bean cake. near the railway station of fuji, and after crossing the boulder gravel bed of the fujikawa which was a full quarter of a mile wide, we were traversing a broad plain of rice paddies with their raised tables, but on them pear orchards were growing, trained to their overhead trellises. about. suduzuka grass was being cut with sickles along the canal dikes for use as green manure in the rice fields, which on the left of the railway, stretched eastward more than six miles to beyond hara where we passed into a tract of dry land crops consisting of mulberry, tea and various vegetables, with more or less of dry land rice, but we returned to the paddy land again at numazu, in another four miles. here there were four carloads of beef cattle destined for tokyo or yokohama, the first we had seen. it was at this station that the railway turns northward to skirt the eastern flank of the beautiful fuji-yama, rising to higher lands of a brown loamy character, showing many large boulders two feet in diameter. horses were here moving along the roadways under large saddle loads of green grass, going to the paddy fields from the hills, which in this section are quite free from all but herbaceous growth, well covered and green. considerable areas were growing maize and buckwheat, the latter being ground into flour and made into macaroni which is eaten with chopsticks, fig. , and used to give variety to the diet of rice and naked barley. at gotenba, where tourists leave the train to ascend fuji-yama, the road turns eastward again and descends rapidly through many tunnels, crossing the wide gravelly channel of the sakawagawa, then carrying but little water, like all of the other main streams we had crossed, although we were in the rainy season. this was partly because the season was yet not far advanced; partly because so much water was being taken upon the rice fields, and again because the drainage is so rapid down the steep slopes and comparatively short water courses. beyond yamakita the railway again led along a broad plain set in paddy rice and the hill slopes were terraced and cultivated nearly to their summits. swinging strongly southeastward, the coast was reached at noduz in a hilly country producing chiefly vegetables, mulberry and tobacco, the latter crop being extensively grown eastward nearly to oiso, beyond which, after a mile of sweet potatoes, squash and cucumbers, there were paddy fields of rice in a flat plain. before hiratsuka was reached the rice paddies were left and the train was crossing a comparatively flat country with a sandy, sometimes gravelly, soil where mulberries, peaches, eggplants, sweet potatoes and dry land rice were interspersed with areas still occupied with small pine and herbaceous growth or where small pine had been recently set. similar conditions prevailed after we had crossed the broad channel of the banyugawa and well toward and beyond fujishiwa where a leveled plain has its tables scattered among the fields of paddy rice, this being the southwest margin of the tokyo plain, the largest in japan, lying in five prefectures, whose aggregate area of , , acres of arable lands was worked by , families of farmers; , acres of which was in paddy rice, producing annually some , , bushels, or pounds for each of the , , men, women and children in the five prefectures, , , of whom were in the capital city, tokyo. three views taken in the eastern portion of this plain in the prefecture of chiba, july th, are seen in fig. , in two of which shocks of wheat were still standing in the fields among the growing crops, badly weathered and the grain sprouting as the result of the rainy season. peanuts, sweet potatoes and millet were the main dry land, crops then on the ground, with paddy rice in the flooded basins. windsor beans, rape, wheat and barley had been harvested. one family with whom we talked were threshing their wheat. the crop had been a good one and was yielding between . and. . bushels per acre, worth at the time $ to $ . on the same land this farmer secures a yield of to bushels of potatoes, which at the market price at that time would give a gross earning of $ to $ per acre. reference has been made to the extensive use of straw in the cultural methods of the japanese. this is notably the case in their truck garden work, and two phases of this are shown in fig. . in the lower section of the illustration the garden has been ridged and furrowed for transplanting, the sets have been laid and the roots covered with a little soil; then, in the middle section, showing the next step in the method, a layer of straw has been pressed firmly above the roots, and in the final step this would be covered with earth. adopting this method the straw is so placed that ( ) it acts as an effective mulch without in any way interfering with the capillary rise of water to the roots of the sets; ( ) it gives deep, thorough aeration of the soil, at the same time allowing rains to penetrate quickly, drawing the air after it; ( ) the ash ingredients carried in the straw are leached directly to the roots where they are needed; ( ) and finally the straw and soil constitute a compost where the rapid decay liberates plant food gradually and in the place where it will be most readily available. the upper section of the illustration shows rows of eggplants very heavily mulched with coarse straw, the quantity being sufficient to act as a most effective mulch, to largely prevent the development of weeds and to serve during the rainy season as a very material fertilizer. in growing such dry land crops as barley, beans, buckwheat or dry land rice the soil of the field is at first fitted by plowing or spading, then furrowed deeply where the rows are to be planted. into these furrows fertilizer is placed and covered with a layer of earth upon which the seed is planted. when the crop is up, if a second fertilization is desired, a furrow may be made alongside each row, into which the fertilizer is sowed and then covered. when the crop is so far matured that a second may be planted, a new furrow is made, either midway between two others or adjacent to one of them, fertilizer applied and covered with a layer of soil and the seed planted. in this way the least time possible is lost during the growing season, all of the soil of the field doing duty in crop production. it was our privilege to visit the imperial agricultural experiment station at nishigahara, near tokyo, which is charged with the leadership of the general and technical agricultural research work for the empire. the work is divided into the sections of agriculture, agricultural chemistry, entomology, vegetable pathology, tobacco, horticulture, stock breeding, soils, and tea manufacture, each with their laboratory equipment and research staff, while the forty-one prefectural stations and fourteen sub-stations are charged with the duty of handling all specific local, practical problems and with testing out and applying conclusions and methods suggested by the results obtained at the central station, together with the local dissemination of knowledge among the farmers of the respective prefectures. a comprehensive soil survey of the arable lands of the empire has been in progress since before , excellent maps being issued on a scale of to , , or about . inch-to the mile, showing the geological formations in eight colors with subdivisions indicated by letters. some eleven soil types are recognized, based on physical composition and the areas occupied by these are shown by means of lines and dots in black printed over the colors. typical profiles of the soil to depths of three meters are printed as insets on each sheet and localities where these apply are indicated by corresponding numbers in red on the map. elaborate chemical and physical studies are also being made in the laboratories of samples of both soil and subsoil. the imperial agricultural experiment station is well equipped for investigation work along many lines and that for soils is notably strong. in fig. may be seen a portion of the large immersed cylinders which are filled with typical soils from different parts of the empire, and fig. shows a portion of another part of their elaborate outfit for soil studies which are in progress. it is found that nearly all cultivated soils of japan are acid to litmus, and this they are inclined to attribute to the presence of acid hydro-aluminum silicates. the island empire of japan stretches along the asiatic coast through more than twenty-nine degrees of latitude from the southern extremity of formosa northward to the middle of saghalin, some statute miles; or from the latitude of middle cuba to that of north newfoundland and winnipeg; but the total land area is only , square miles, and less than that of the three states of wisconsin, iowa and minnesota. of this total land area only , square miles are at present cultivated; square miles in the three main islands are weed and pasture land. less than fourteen per cent of the entire land area is at present under cultivation. if all lands having a slope of less than fifteen degrees may be tilled, there yet remain in the four main islands, , square miles to bring under cultivation, which is an addition of . per cent to the land already cultivated. in there were in the empire some , , households of farmers tilling , , acres and feeding , , additional households, or , , people. this is an average of . people to the acre of cultivated land, each farmer's household tilling an average of . acres. the lands yet to be reclaimed are being put under cultivation rapidly, the amount improved in being , acres. if the new lands to be reclaimed can be made as productive as those now in use there should be opportunity for an increase in population to the extent of about , , without changing the present ratio of . people to the acre of cultivated land. while the remaining lands to be reclaimed are not as inherently productive as those now in use, improvements in management will more than compensate for this, and the empire is certain to quite double its present maintenance capacity and provide for at least a hundred million people with many more comforts of home and more satisfaction for the common people than they now enjoy. since there has been an increase in the population of japan amounting to an annual average of about . per cent, and if this rate is maintained the one hundred million mark would be passed in less than sixty years. it appears probable however that the increased acreage put under cultivation and pasturage combined, will more than keep pace with the population up to this limit, while the improvement in methods and crops will readily permit a second like increment to her population, bringing that for the present empire up to millions. against this view, perhaps, is the fact that the rice crop of the twenty years ending in is only thirty-three per cent greater than the crop of . in japan, as in the united states, there has been a strong movement from the country to the city as a natural result of the large increase in manufactures and commerce, and the small amount of land per each farmer's household. in only . per cent of the population of japan were living in villages of less than , while . per cent were in towns and villages of less than , people, . per cent living in those larger. but in . per cent of the population were living in towns and villages of less than , , and only . per cent were in cities, towns and villages of over , people; and while during these ten years the rural population had increased at the rate of per , , in cities the increase had been , per , . japan has been and still is essentially an agricultural nation and in there were , , farmers' households, whose chief work was farming, and , , others whose subsidiary work was farming, or . per cent of the entire number of households. a like ratio holds in formosa. wealthy land owners who do not till their own fields are not included. of the farmers in japan some . per cent own and work their land. those having smaller holdings, who rent additional land, make up . per cent of the total farmers; while . per cent are tenants who work . per cent of the land. in only one per cent of the land holders owned more than twenty-five acres each; those holding between twenty-five acres and five acres made up . per cent; while . per cent held less than five acres each. a man owning seventy-five acres of land in japan is counted among the "great landholders". it is never true, however, except in the hokkaido, which is a new country agriculturally, that such holdings lie in one body. statistics published in "agriculture in japan", by the agricultural bureau, department of agriculture and commerce, permit the following statements of rent, crop returns, taxes and expenses, to be made. the wealthy land owners who rent their lands receive returns like these: for paddy field, for upland field, per acre. per acre. rent $ . $ . taxes . . expenses . . total expenses $ . $ . net profit . . it is stated, in connection with these statistics, that the rate of profit for land capital is . per cent for the paddy field, and . per cent for the upland field. this makes the valuation of the land about $ and $ per acre, respectively. a land holder who owns and rents ten acres of paddy field and ten acres of upland field would, at these rates, realize a net annual income of $ . . peasant farmers who own and work their lands receive per acre an income as follows: for paddy field, for upland field, per acre. per acre. crop returns $ . $ . taxes . . labor and expenses . . ------- ------- total expense $ . $ . net profit . . the peasant farmer who owns and works five acres, . of paddy and . of upland field, would realize a total net income of $ . . this is after deducting the price of his labor. with that included, his income would be something like $ . tenant farmers who work some per cent of the farm lands of japan, would have accounts something as follows: for paddy field, for upland field, crop. crops. per acre. per acre. crop returns $ . $ . $ . tenant fee . . . labor . . . fertilization . . . seed . . . other expenses . . . ------------- ------- total expenses $ . $ . $ . net profit --. --. --. this statement indicates that tenant farmers do not realize enough from the crops to quite cover expenses and the price named for their labor. if the tenant were renting five acres, equally divided between paddy and upland field, the earning would be $ . or $ . according as one or two crops are taken from the paddy field, this representing what he realizes on his labor, his other expenses absorbing the balance of the crop value. but the average area tilled by each japanese farmer's household is only . acres, hence the average earning of the tenant household would be $ . or $ . . a clearer view of the difference in the present condition of farmers in japan and of those in the united states may be gained by making the japanese statement on the basis of our -acre farm, as expressed in the table below: for paddy field. for upland field. total. for acres. for acres. acres. crop returns $ , . $ , . $ , . ---------- ---------- ---------- taxes $ . $ . $ . expenses , . . , . labor , . , . , . ---------- ---------- ---------- total cost $ , . $ , . $ , . net return . . , . return including labor , . , . , . in the united states the -acre farm is managed by and supports a single family, but in japan, as the average household works but . acres, the earnings of the acres are distributed among some households, making the net return to each but $ . , instead of $ , and including the labor as earning, the income would be $ . more, or $ . per household instead of $ . , the total for a -acre farm worked under japanese conditions. these figures reveal something of the tense strain and of the terrible burden which is being carried by these people, over and above that required for the maintenance of the household. the tenant who raises one crop of rice pays a rental of $ . per acre. if he raises two crops he pays $ . ; if it is upland field, he pays $ . . to these amounts he adds $ . , $ . or $ . respectively for fertilizer, seed and other expenses making a total investment of $ . , $ . or $ . per acre, which would require as many bushels of wheat sold at a dollar a bushel to cover this cost. in addition to this he assumes all the risks of loss from weather, from insects and from blight, in the hope that he may recoup his expenses and in addition have for his services $ . , $ . or $ . for the season's work. the burdens of society, which have been and still are so largely burdens of war and of government, with all nations, are reflected with almost blinding effect in the land taxes of japan, which range from $ . , on the upland, to $ . per acre on the paddy fields, making a quarter section, without buildings, carry a burden of $ to $ annually. japan's budget in was $ , , , which is at the rate of $ . for each man, woman and child; $ . for each acre of cultivated land, and $ , for each household in the empire. when such is the case it is not strange that scenes like fig. are common in japan today where, after seventy years, toil may not cease. there is a bright, as well as a pathetic side to scenes like this. the two have shared for fifty years, but if the days have been full of toil, with them have come strength of body, of mind and sterling character. if the burdens have been heavy, each has made the other's lighter, the satisfaction fuller, the joys keener, the sorrows less difficult to bear; and the children who came into the home and have gone from it to perpetuate new ones, could not well be other than such as to contribute to the foundations of nations of great strength and long endurance. reference has been made to the large amount of work carried on in the farmers' households by the women and children, and by the men when they are not otherwise employed, and the earnings of this subsidiary work have materially helped to piece out the meagre income and to meet the relatively high taxes and rent. images produced by core historical literature in agriculture (chla), cornell university) village improvements and farm villages. by geo. e. waring, jr. consulting engineer for sanitary and agricultural works. boston: james r. osgood and company, (late ticknor & fields, and fields, osgood, & co.) . copyright, , by geo. e. waring, jr. franklin press: rand, avery, & co., boston. the following papers on village improvements and farm villages are reprinted, with some amendments, from "scribners monthly." these constitute the more practical part of the book, so far as villages are concerned. it has, however, been judged appropriate to add to them a paper on eastern farming, which originally appeared in "the atlantic monthly," and which continues the discussion of the question of village residence as a means for mitigating some of the hardships which beset the lives of isolated country families. the wide-spread and growing interest in the topics considered makes it seem worth while to give these short essays a more permanent form. g. e. w., jr. newport, r.i., june, . contents. page village improvements village sanitary work farm villages life and work of the eastern farmer list of illustrations. page fig. .--drainage of hill-side foot-path fig. .--section of road with drains fig. .--pipes resting on their shoulders fig. .--pipes resting on their full length fig. .--grease-trap fig. .--field's flush-tank fig. .--the emerson ventilator fig. .--diagram illustrating manner of sewage disposal at lenox, mass. fig. .--settling basin fig. .--arrangement of absorption drains, fig. .--division of four square miles with central village fig. .--division of the central village fig. .--division of the central open space of the village fig. .--present division and settlement of tract in rhode island fig. .--the rhode island tract with its buildings gathered together into a compact village fig. .--proposed arrangement of the rhode island farm village village improvements. it may be because the newness of our country and the fragile character of our early structures have prevented the accumulation of inferior, ugly, and uncomfortable houses, as the nucleus around which later building has crystallized; it may be from circumstances which have prevented the isolated residence of the better classes of our people; or it may be the result of accident. whatever the reason, it is beyond dispute that the united states is _par excellence_ a land of beautiful villages. north, south, east, and west, there are plenty of hideous conglomerations of poor-looking houses, with an absence of every element of beauty; but there are thousands of other villages scattered all over the land, which are full of the evidences of good taste in their regulation and in their management. as a rule, these more attractive features are very much modified by the presence of badly-kept private places or neglected public buildings, and by a general air of untidiness. still, the foundation of attractiveness is there; and nothing is needed beyond a well-organized and well-guided control of public sentiment, to remove or to hide the more objectionable features, and to permit such beauty as the village may possess to manifest itself. the real elements of beauty in a village are not fine houses, costly fences, paved roadways, geometrical lines, mathematical grading, nor any obviously costly improvements. they are, rather, cosiness, neatness, simplicity, and that homely air that grows from these and from the presence of a home-loving people. to state the case tersely, the shiftless village is a hideous village, while the charm which we often realize without analyzing it comes of affectionate care and attention. there are villages in new england, in western new york, and all over the west, even to the far side of arkansas, which impress the visitor at once as being homelike and full of sociability and kindliness; which delight him, and lead him almost to wish that his own lot had been cast within their shades. these are chiefly villages where the evidences of public and private care predominate, or are at least conspicuous. a critical examination would, in almost every case, develop very serious evidence of neglect, unwholesomeness, and bad neighborhood. within a few years, beginning, i believe, in massachusetts, the more thoughtful of those whose affections are centred in their village homes have united in organized efforts to make their villages more tidy, to interest all classes of society in attention to those little details the neglect of which is fatal, and to make the village, what it certainly should be, an expression of the interest of its people in their homes and in the surroundings of their daily life. the first of these associations of which i have any knowledge (though, as such work is unobtrusive, there may have been many before it) was the "laurel hill association" of stockbridge, mass. it takes its name from a wooded knoll in the centre of the village, which had been dedicated to public use. the first object of the association was to convert this knoll into a village park. then they took in hand the village burial-ground, which was put in proper condition and suitably surrounded with hedge and railing. then the broad village street was properly graded and drained, and agreeable walks were made at its sides. incidentally to this, the people living along both sides of the streets were encouraged to do what they could to give it an appropriate setting by putting their own premises into tasteful condition and maintaining them so. the organization worked well, and accomplished good results. the rev. n. p. eggleston, formerly of stockbridge, in a paper on village improvements written for the "new york tribune," thus describes the collateral work and influences of the laurel hill association:-- "next followed the planting of trees by the roadside wherever trees were lacking. the children, sometimes disposed in their thoughtlessness to treat young trees too rudely, were brought in as helpers of the association, while at the same time put under a beneficial culture for themselves. any boy who would undertake to watch and care for a particular tree for two years was rewarded by having the tree called by his name. other children were paid for all the loose papers and other unsightly things which they would pick up and remove from the street. "gradually the work of the association extended. it soon took in hand the streets connected with the main street. year by year it pushed out walks from the centre of the village toward its outer borders; year by year it extended its line of trees in the same manner; and year by year there has been a marked improvement in the aspect of the village. little by little, and in many nameless ways, the houses and barns, the dooryards and farms, have come to wear a look of neatness and intelligent, tasteful care, that makes the stockbridge of to-day quite a different place from the stockbridge of twenty years ago. travellers passing through it are apt to speak of it with admiration as a finished place, and, compared with most even of our new england villages, it has such a look; but the laurel hill association does not consider its home finished, nor its own work completed. still the work goes on. committees are even now conning plans for further improvements. by itself, or by suggestions and stimulations offered to others, the association is aiming at the culture of the village people through other agencies than those of outward and physical adornment. it fosters libraries, reading-rooms, and other places of resort where innocent and healthful games, music and conversation will tend to promote the social feeling, and lessen vice by removing some of its causes." no one can drive through this beautiful old place without realizing the effect of some influence different from that which has usually been at work in country towns. one feels that it is a village of homes; that the people who live in it love it, and that it has no public or private interest so insignificant as to be neglected. i have cited this instance somewhat at length, because it was the first, as it is the most complete, that has come to my notice. in other places, more serious work of improvement has been undertaken in the direction of sewerage, gas-lighting, &c. in fact, the present writing was suggested by frequent requests for information and advice on the more practical parts of the subject. at the outset it is to be said that the organization and control of the village society is especially woman's work. it requires the sort of systematized attention to detail, especially in the constantly-recurring duty of "cleaning up," that grows more naturally out of the habit of good housekeeping than out of any occupation to which men are accustomed. then, too, it calls for a degree of leisure which women are the most apt to have, and it will especially engage their interest as being a real addition to the field of their ordinary routine of life. the sort of enthusiasm which has led to marked success in the dorcas society and other organized action outside of the household, for which american country women are noted, will find here a new and engaging object. this, however, is only a suggestion by the way, and one which may or may not be appropriate under varying circumstances. if we assume, which is not altogether true, that the main purpose of village improvement is to improve the _appearance_ of the village, we must still understand that the direct object of the society should not be alone nor chiefly in the direction of appearance. what it is especially desirable that a village should appear to be is: a wholesome, cleanly, tidy, simple, modest collection of country homes, with all of its parts and appliances adapted to the pleasantest and most satisfactory living of its people. all improvements should therefore have this fundamental tendency, and every element of adornment, and every evidence of careful attention, should be only an outgrowth of the effort to obtain the best practical results. costly park railing where no railing is needed, width of roadway greater than the needs of the community require, formal geometric lines and surfaces where more natural slopes and curves would be practically better, elaborate fountains or statuary out of keeping with the general character of the village, (the gift of a public-spirited, ambitious, and pretentious fellow-townsman,) and isolated examples, as in a church or schoolhouse, of a style of architecture which would be more appropriate for a city,--all these are obtrusive and objectionable, and are consequently in bad taste. in so far as these or any other elements of improvement are unsuited to the conditions in which they are placed, they are undesirable; and it would be well for those having the interest of the village in charge, to adopt an early resolution to accept no gifts, and to allow no work of construction or embellishment, which is not, first of all, appropriate to the modest character of a well-regulated country village. if every public building is sufficient for its uses and suggests no undue outlay for show alone; if the roads and walks are such as the uses of the people require; if the fountain suggests a tasteful ornament and centre of freshness and coolness, rather than a monument of some citizens liberality and ambition; if the village green or park is a proper pleasure-ground for old and young; and, in short, if every thing that is done and every dollar that is expended has for its object only the improvement of the conditions of living,--then there will be needed only the element of careful keeping to maintain always the best sort of beauty that is possible under the circumstances. no satisfactory result can be attained without organization. the work will necessarily require much money and more time in order to avoid an undue tax upon individuals. it is desirable, too, that, so far as possible, every member of the community should be interested in the work, and should contribute in labor or in money according to his means. this general interest can be secured much better through the influence of an organization in which all are interested, than by any individual effort. the association should become the distributor, not only of the moneys accruing from membership fees, &c., but of contributions made by citizens, or subscriptions raised by combined effort for general or specific works of improvement. it should be, in fact, not only the inciter of public spirit, but the director of public effort. the precise form of constitution for such an association must necessarily depend more or less on circumstances; and i sketch only as a basis for discussion, the following form suggested by the regulations governing the laurel hill association of stockbridge:-- article i. this association shall be called "the village improvement association of ----." article ii. the object of this association shall be to improve and ornament the streets and public grounds of the village by planting and cultivating trees, establishing and maintaining walks, grading and draining roadways, establishing and protecting good grass plats and borders in the streets and public squares, securing a proper public supply of water, establishing and maintaining such sewerage as shall be needed for the best sanitary condition of the village, providing public fountains and drinking-troughs, breaking out paths through the snow, lighting the streets, encouraging the formation of a library and reading-room, and generally doing whatever may tend to the improvement of the village as a place of residence. article iii. the officers of this association shall be a president, two vice-presidents, a secretary, and a treasurer, who shall constitute the executive committee. these officers shall be elected at the annual meeting, and shall hold their offices until their successors shall have been elected. article iv. it shall be the duty of the president, and in his absence of the senior vice-president, to preside at all meetings of the association, and to carry out all orders of the executive committee. article v. it shall be the duty of the secretary to keep a correct and careful record of all proceedings of the association, and of the executive committee, in a book suitable for their preservation; to give notice of all meetings of the association and of the executive committee; to make all publications, and to give all public and private notices ordered by the executive committee, and to attend to all the correspondence of the association. article vi. it shall be the duty of the treasurer to keep the funds of the association, and to make such disbursements as may be ordered by the executive committee. article vii. it shall be the duty of the executive committee to manage all the affairs of the association, to employ all laborers, to make all contracts, to expend all moneys, and generally to direct and superintend all improvements which in their discretion, and with the means at their command, will best serve the public interest. the executive committee shall hold a meeting at least once in each month, and as much oftener as they may deem expedient. the executive committee shall have power to institute premiums to be awarded for planting and protecting ornamental trees, and for doing such other acts as may seem to them worthy of such encouragement. they shall also encourage frequent public meetings of the association and of citizens generally, both with a view to maintain an interest in their work, and for the general encouragement of the habit of meeting for discussion and amusement. article viii. three members of the executive committee present at any meeting shall constitute a quorum for transacting business; and the vote of a majority of those present shall be binding on the association. article ix. no debt shall be contracted by the executive committee beyond the amount of available funds within their control to pay it; and no member of this association shall be liable for any debt of the association beyond the amount of his or her subscription. article x. every person over fourteen years of age who shall plant and protect a tree under the direction of the executive committee, or who shall pay the sum of one dollar annually, and shall obligate him or herself to pay the same for three years, shall be a member of this association; and every child under fourteen years of age, who shall pay or shall become obligated to pay as before the sum of twenty-five cents annually for three years, shall be a member of this association. article xi. the payment of ten dollars annually for three years, or of twenty-five dollars in one sum, shall constitute a person a member of this association for life. article xii. the autograph signatures of all members of the association shall be preserved in a book suitable for that purpose. article xiii. an annual meeting of the association shall be held at such place as the executive committee may direct, on the fourth wednesday of august, at two o'clock, p.m. notice of such meeting shall be posted on each of the churches and at the post-office at least seven days prior to the time of holding said meetings, and a written notice shall be sent to all non-resident members. other meetings of the association may be called by the executive committee on seven days' notice as above prescribed. article xiv. at the annual meeting, the executive committee shall report the amount of money received during the year, and the source from which it has been received; the amount of money expended during the year, and the objects for which it has been expended; the number of trees planted at the cost of the association; the number planted by individuals, with the location, the kind of tree, and the name of the planter; and generally all of the acts of the committee. this report shall be entered on the record of the association. article xv. any person who shall plant a tree under the direction of the executive committee, and shall protect it for five years, shall be entitled to have such tree known forever by his or her name. article xvi. this constitution may be amended by the executive committee with the approval of the majority of the members present at any annual meeting of the association, or at any special meeting, the notice of which shall have been accompanied by a copy of the proposed amendment, with the statement that the amendment is to be voted on at such meeting. i have provided, in the above draft of a constitution, for an executive committee of only five members; for the reason that, while it will be comparatively easy to secure the services of this number, the duties and responsibilities of a larger committee would be so distributed that there would be too often occasion for the application of the old adage: "what is everybody's business is nobody's business." the laurel hill association has an executive committee of fifteen, in addition to seven officers. this large committee (twenty-two) serves to secure the interest of a larger number of citizens; but the same thing may be as well accomplished by inviting the co-operation of citizens in the work of sub-committees, the chairman of each of which would be a member of the regular executive committee. in easthampton, mass., there is a board of fourteen directors, and there are committees on sanitary matters, on setting out trees, on sidewalks and hitching-posts, &c. it would be prudent to restrict the number of members of these sub-committees to three; one from the executive committee and two from outside. besides special executive work, a vast deal has been done wherever improvement societies have been organized, in the way of stimulating citizens to adorn their private grounds, or at least to keep their grounds and fences in good order, removing weeds and rubbish from the sidewalk, keeping the grass well trimmed and free from litter and leaves. what most detracts from the good appearance of any village is the slovenly look which comes from badly hung gates, crooked fences, absent pickets, and general shiftlessness about private places; and it is by encouraging citizens to take a pride in attention to these minor details, that the association will do its best work. this result may be accomplished almost entirely without the expenditure of money. it is in attention to little things and in securing the co-operation of private owners,--a co-operation which will call for an inappreciable amount of labor,--that the most telling work of the officers of the society is to be done. so far as these details are concerned, it is hardly necessary in a paper of this sort to do more than to call attention to them. they are within the capacity of every citizen, and they will naturally suggest themselves to any person who would be likely to undertake the direction of an improvement association. there are other and really more important objects looking to a certain amount of landscape gardening and engineering, on which specific instruction may be desired, and often in cases where it will be impracticable to employ professional assistance. these are as follows:-- . the construction of sidewalks. . the construction and care of roadways. . the supply of water, and the construction of drinking-troughs. . the laying-out and adornment of public squares and other open spaces. . the establishment of a system of sewerage or sanitary drainage, including the removal of excessive soil moisture. sidewalks. no one thing has more to do with the comfort of those living in country villages than sidewalks which are good at all seasons of the year. those fortunate villages which are built on a gravelly soil, with a perfect natural drainage, need little more in this direction than such a conformation of the surface as will prevent water from standing on the footway when the ground is frozen. at all other times it sinks naturally away into the earth. it is much more often the case that the character of the soil or subsoil prevents a settling away of water, or that subterranean oozing from higher ground keeps the earth throughout the spring and autumn, and after heavy rains in summer, damp, and often sloppy. wherever the ground is of such a character as to prevent the rapid sinking to a considerable depth of all excessive moisture, there is sure to be a disagreeable condition of the footway whenever the lower soil is locked with frost, and the surface is thawed. even with the best drainage, natural or artificial, this condition will exist for a short time while frost is coming out of the ground; but with good drainage it is of so temporary a character as hardly to justify any expensive finishing of the surface, except perhaps in the case of the most frequented walks. to overcome occasional sloppiness where the difficulty is not deep-seated, there is no cheaper nor better device than to dress the surface with coal-ashes. indeed, if these are used to a sufficient thickness, they are practically as good as concrete or the best gravel. when first applied, they are dusty and unpleasant; but the first wetting lays the dust, and they soon settle to a firm consistency, and make a very pleasant walk, with the great advantage of being entirely barren, and preventing the growth of weeds and grass. if the ashes of a village are collected and screened, the cinders being used at the bottom, and the surface being smoothly dressed with the finer material, they will make as satisfactory walks, even where the use is considerable, as any other material. the color is unobtrusive, and the surface soon becomes hard enough to bear sweeping. those who are more ambitious for effect may prefer a walk made of tar-and-gravel concrete; and this, if well made, is good, durable, and satisfactory. so far as the improvement association is concerned, it can find many ways for expending the difference of cost between ashes and concrete, which will accomplish a much more telling result. if gravel can be obtained without too much expense, it may be used with excellent results to a depth of from one to three inches, according to the porosity of the subsoil,--more being needed where the ground is inclined to become soft. in using gravel it is best either to screen it, using the coarser parts below and the finer parts at the surface, or, after applying it, to add a thin layer of earth, barely sufficient to fill its spaces,--to "bind" it so as to give it a firm and solid consistency. loose and rattling gravel makes a handsome walk to look at, but an unpleasant one to walk upon. nothing is more agreeable than well-trodden, dry, root-bound earth, as where grass has been worn away by frequent use; but this becomes at once objectionable on being saturated with rain or moistened by melting frost. [illustration: fig. .] it is a common impression, that all thoroughly good foot-paths must be dug out to a considerable depth, filled with loose stones, and dressed at the top with some good finishing material; but this is not necessary even for the best work. the great point is to secure a thorough draining of the sub-stratum, so that there shall be no rising of ooze-water from below, and so that the ground shall be free from such saturation as to cause heaving during frost. this condition may be secured by a suitable draining of the ground immediately under the walk, and by the use of a well-compacted and tightly-bound surface covering of such form as to shed or turn away rain-water. figure (p. ) shows the cross section of a foot-path six feet wide on slightly sloping ground, where we have to apprehend an oozing of subsoil water from the land at the highest side. the centre of the walk is slightly crowning,--say one inch higher than the sides,--so that rain falling upon it will flow readily toward the grass-border at either side. to prevent the ponding of water at the sides when the ground is frozen, the surface of the walk at its edges should be well above the level of the adjoining ground; but it may be necessary under some circumstances to furnish, here and there, a channel or surface-gutter across the walk, to allow the accumulation at the higher side to escape. rarely will deep gutters at the sides be necessary or desirable. if the walk is laid at a sufficient height to turn water on to the adjoining ground instead of receiving water from this, it will be easy to keep it dry. we will assume that the path in question is to be made over a tenacious clay soil, with a considerable oozing from the hillside,--the most unfavorable condition that can be found, especially in cold climates. the first thing to be secured is the cutting-off of the subsoil water from the hill. this may be done by digging a trench as narrow as possible,--six inches will be better than more, as requiring less filling material,--to a depth of three feet. in the bottom of this drain lay a common land-tile drain, with collars at the joints if these can be procured, and, if not, with a bit of paper laid over the joints to prevent the entrance of loose material, and to hold the pipes in place during construction. the ditch should then be filled with cinders, gravel, or coarse sand. if stones are to be used, they should be broken to a small size,--not more than one inch in diameter,--and the loose bits should be mixed with them in the filling. very small interstices will be sufficient to allow water to pass freely through, while if large stones are used, with large interstices, there will be danger of a washing-in of earth sufficient in time to obstruct both the stonework and the tile. the smaller the tile, so long as it is sufficient for its purpose, the better; for lengths of five hundred feet or less, an interior diameter of an inch and a quarter will be sufficient; from this to one thousand feet, use an inch and a half bore. if possible, before exceeding this length, secure an outlet for the water in the roadside gutter or some other channel of exit. the tile-drain, at a depth of three feet, will remove all subsoil water from under the walk, and all that may be delivered into the loosely filled trench at its side. the loose filling of the trench should not be carried nearer than within six inches of the surface of the ground, and should be covered with fine and well-packed earth to prevent the entrance of _surface_-water which would soon carry in silt enough to stop its action. whatever covering is adopted for the walk itself, it must be of such a character as to prevent any thing like a free admission of surface-water. concrete will do this perfectly; and either ashes, or gravel dressed at the top with ashes, if well raked and rolled at the outset to a smooth surface, will soon become so bound together as to shed pretty nearly all rain falling upon it. the difference in cost between a walk made in this way, and one dug out for its whole width to a depth of two feet, and filled first with stone and then with gravel and a suitable surface dressing, will be very important; and it is safe to say that the cheaper will be at least as good and durable as the more expensive method. in all construction of sidewalks, whether public or private, regard must be had to the surface conformation, and some device must be adopted for preventing the flow of water upon the walk from the adjoining ground, and for the easy delivery of storm-water falling upon the walk itself. roadways. the great expense of macadamizing or telfordizing puts these systems almost out of the reach of small communities. wherever the original expense can be borne, the subsequent cost of maintenance will be so slight, and the result generally will be so satisfactory, as to make it always a good investment. the circumstances under which these costly forms of construction may be adopted will be greatly extended if we can overcome the prevalent american prejudice in favor of _wide_ roadways. against wide _streets_ there is, as a rule, no objection, though exceptional narrow and well-shaded lanes have a rural charm that will always commend them to persons of taste. a wide street, that is, broad spaces between fences, by no means implies a broad roadway. all we need in the principal thoroughfare of a busy village is such a width as will allow of the easy passing of vehicles in the middle of the road, and the standing of one vehicle at rest at each side. this will be accomplished, even in the business street of a village, by a width of roadway of thirty feet. under most other circumstances twenty feet of roadway will be ample. this will allow of the moving of three vehicles side by side, and will give a leeway of six feet between two vehicles passing each other. on both sides of this roadway, except for the necessary sidewalks, the whole space to the fences should be in well-kept grass, which is the cheapest to secure, the most economical to maintain, and the most agreeable to see, of all ground covering. it is not unusual in country towns to find a width of from sixty to eighty feet devoted to a muddy, dusty, and ill-kept roadway. from one-half to two-thirds of this width is waste space, which must either remain an eyesore, or entail an undue cost for maintenance. when both sides of the street are occupied by places of business, it may be necessary to provide for some occasional driving close to the buildings for the delivery of merchandise; but this occasion will rarely be so regular as to cause any serious damage to grass. if the line of hitching-posts is placed within fifteen feet of the centre of the roadway on each side, it will be seldom that any one will drive over the bordering grass, especially if there is, as there generally should be, a well-defined gutter or well-kept grass with a curbstone border at each side. in considering the width to be given to roadways, it should be understood that every form of road is more or less costly to make and to keep in order, and that the cost of both items is in direct proportion to the width. if to the cost of making and grading an ordinary roadway sixty feet wide, we add the capital sum whose interest would be necessary to keep this width in good repair, we shall have an amount that would go far toward the construction and maintenance of a road of the very best quality only thirty feet wide. furthermore, while it is impossible to estimate such items exactly, and while the amount thus saved cannot be controlled for the road-making account, the saving in the wear and tear of vehicles, and in the team force needed to move heavy loads, constitutes an important argument in favor of the best construction. the amount thus saved in the short streets of the village, where the principal traffic is over rough country roads, would not be very great, but it would enable the road authorities of the township to realize the advantage of first-rate roads and the degree to which the narrowing of the roadway cheapens construction. as a result, there would soon be an extension of the improvement over the more important highways into the country; where a well-metalled width of twelve feet would accommodate nearly the whole traffic, and where the proper application of a cheap system of under-drainage would make well-metalled roads extremely cheap to maintain. in the island of jersey, there are many excellent roads only six feet wide. these are provided with frequent little bays or turn-outs to allow teams to pass each other. although such extremely narrow roads are not to be recommended, the difference in comfort and economy of teampower between these and the average american dirt road is enormously in their favor. the widest roads in jersey, leading from a busy town of thirty thousand inhabitants into a thickly settled farming region where business and pleasure travel is very active, and where "excursion cars" carrying thirty or forty persons are constantly passing, are only twenty-four feet wide; often only of this width between the hedge-rows, the road itself being an excellent footpath for its whole width. nowhere else in the world is the rural charm more perfectly developed than in jersey, and no element of its great beauty is so conspicuous and so constantly satisfactory as its narrow and embowered lanes and roadways. this, however, by the way, and only as a suggestion, for the sake of variety. as a rule, we may at least accept much less width than is now usual for our country and village roads. wherever it is intended to build expensive stone roads, those having the work in charge will naturally employ a competent engineer, or will at least appeal to prof. gillespie's work on road-making, or to some other authority. space need not be given here to engineering details, which would require a lengthy elucidation. there is, however, a sort of road-making materially more costly at the outset than that now in vogue, but much less costly in the long-run, if we consider the element of practical value and the cost of maintenance. it depends more on fundamental principles of construction than on special processes of finishing, and will be more or less satisfactory according to the character of the soil and of the covering material available. the great enemy of all roads is excessive moisture; and the chief purpose of all methods of improvement is to get rid of this, or to counteract its effect. as in the case of foot-paths, wherever the porous character of the subsoil, and the absence of higher-lying wet lands, is such that no accumulation of water upon or under the roadway need be feared, the greatest difficulty is at once set aside. roads lying on such a soil may be over-dusty in dry weather. when the subsoil is temporarily impervious because of its frozen condition, they may become unduly muddy, or, when the situation is such as to lead hill-water upon them, they may be badly washed; but they are free from the great difficulties that beset all roads which for a large part of the year are underlaid by an over-saturated, compact subsoil. where such natural drainage is secured, no artificial under-drainage will be needed. in many more instances, all that will be required in the way of draining will be to lead away the sources of wet-weather springs, which break through the road-bed and cause deep sloughs. where incomplete or partial artificial under-draining is needed, the need is absolute; and whether we consider the durability of the road, or the degree to which its traffic is interfered with by its wet condition, we may be confident that every dollar spent in well-directed under-draining will be invested to the very best advantage. the varying conditions of wetness, and the different sources of surplus water, must be regarded in deciding precisely how much of this work is needed, and how it should be done. details cannot be fully considered here; but as a general rule it may be said, that where the subsoil generally is of an impervious character, and where the road is more or less wet and weeping after long rains, a continuous system of under-drains is required. if the trouble is local, here and there in spots, and is obviously caused by the breaking up of springs from the road-bed, such partial work may be adopted as will tap the sources of these springs, and lead their water harmlessly away. gisborne, one of the best agricultural writers of england, put the case tersely and well when--objecting to the system of circumventing springs--he said, "_hit him straight in the eye_, is as good a maxim in draining as in pugilism." it is best not to pass up at the side of a spring, and so creep around behind it to head off its water; but to drive the drain straight through it, and far enough beyond it to tap and lead away at a lower level the water which causes it. these drains, as well as all others intended simply to remove subsoil water, and not to cut off a weeping stream, are best made with common drain-tiles laid as before directed, and covered immediately with well-packed earth. water enters an under-drain, not from above, but from below; that is to say, as water, from whatever source, fills the subsoil, it rises therein until it reaches the floor of the drain, when it enters and is led away, just as water falling into a cask which stands on end flows off at the under side of the bung-hole when it reaches its level. even if the cask be filled to the top with earth, the rain falling upon it will descend perpendicularly to the bottom, and will flow off at the bung only when the soil to that level has become saturated. it will descend through the soil by the straightest course, and will raise the general level. it will not violate the laws of gravitation, and run diagonally toward the point of outlet, as seems to be the general supposition when the perplexing question, "how does water get into the drain?" is first considered. when we drive a drain through a spring and into the water-bearing stratum which feeds it, we simply make it easier for the water to escape by the drain than to keep on at the higher level, and break out at the surface of the ground. as in the case of the sidewalk illustrated in figure , in cutting off a continuous weeping or ooze from higher land, it is best to introduce a vertical filling of porous material through which the water will descend and enter the drain; but, excepting this single instance, all that we need to do, so far as subterranean work is concerned, is to furnish an easy and sufficient channel for the removal of subsoil water. what constitutes a sufficient drain is something very much less than what is generally supposed. in ordinary agricultural drainage, where the lines of tiles are forty feet apart, a well-laid tile an inch and a quarter in diameter is sufficient for a length of one thousand feet--that is, it is sufficient to remove the water of filtration from an acre of land. if laid with only an inclination of six inches in one hundred feet, its delivery will be so rapid as to amount to more than a heavy continuous rain-fall upon this area. in road drainage, the same rule would hold true; but, as the soil offers a certain resistance to the rapid descent of water, it is best to give a means of outlet at smaller intervals; and for the best work in roads thirty feet wide or more, three drains could be used with advantage. in no case, however, need the size of pipes be larger than above indicated, if the form of the tiles is true, and if they are well joined together at their ends. tiles of less perfect form had better be an inch and a half or even two inches in diameter; but, as a rule, they should not be of a larger size, for the reason that the amount of water that they may be expected to carry will not be sufficient to keep them prop erly freed from silt unless the flow is concentrated within a narrow channel. [illustration: fig. .] figure shows the cross section of a country road thirty feet wide, with three lines of tile-drain laid at a depth of about three feet below it. except in case of necessity, these drains should have an inclination of not less than six inches in one hundred feet. there is no objection to their having more than this wherever the lay of the land permits or requires it. they may often have considerably less in case of need; but, the smaller the rate of inclination, the greater the care needed in securing a true grade. the water of these drains should be collected into a single drain, and led away at intervals of from five hundred to one thousand feet. it may be delivered into a roadside gutter, or into a collecting under-drain, according to the requirements of the situation. it is now possible to procure drain-tiles at reasonable cost in almost all parts of the country; and these are not only very much better than any form of stone drain, but they are also much cheaper in construction,--the labor of preparing and handling the stone, and of excavating the wider trench that stone requires, amounting to more than the cost of the tile, even with a high charge of transportation added. incidentally it is proper to say that where tiles cannot be had, a mass of gravel or fine cinders, six inches wide and six inches deep, placed at the bottom of the drain, and _covered with well-packed soil_, is preferable even to broken stone or any other form of channel that would permit of the rapid running of water and the washing into the drains of even a slight amount of silt. the removal of excessive subsoil moisture being secured, attention should next be given to the surface of the road, which should be finished with the firmest material at hand,--with the common earth of the subsoil where nothing better can be afforded,--and which should be brought to a true grade, with a _very slight_ slope from the centre to the edge. for a road thirty feet wide, the elevation of the centre above the level of the edges should not be more than four to six inches, and the grade should be made on a straight line rather than on a curve. if the road is made as flat as the turning-off of surface-water will permit, it will be travelled upon in all its parts; while if it is crowned to a high arch, as is often the case, it will soon be found that the best place to drive is in the middle of the road, and foot-tracks and wheel-tracks will soon form slight channels or ruts which will lead water lengthwise along the road, and which will cause an undue amount of wear and washing. a road may be actually flat to the eye, and equally convenient for travel at every part of its width, and still have enough lateral slope to cause water to run off from it. it is especially desirable that no surface-water flowing from the roadside (above all, when frost is coming out of the ground in the spring) be permitted to run on to the road. this should be effectively prevented by the formation of sufficient gutters, with such outlets as will prevent ponding at the sides of the road. when it is necessary to carry the water of the gutters from one side of the road to the other, culverts should be provided; and wherever the slope of the road is sufficient to cause water to flow along it lengthwise,--that is, wherever the inclination is more than about one in fifty,--there should be frequent slight depressions from the centre diagonally toward the gutters to carry the flow away before it can accumulate sufficiently to form a washing current. if it can be done without hauling additional material, it is always well to raise the road-bed somewhat above the level of the adjoining land, and this may usually be accomplished by throwing upon it the subsoil of the gutters. in no case should surface-soil sods or fine road-mud be used for repairs. the most serious objection to the absurd system of road-mending so common in this country lies in the fact that the annual repairing is little more than the ploughing up and throwing back upon the roadway of the soft and unsuitable material which has been washed into the gutters. what is said above applies especially to country roads; but it is appropriate, so far as it goes, to the better-made and better-kept roads of a village. in the case of these latter, except where the soil is naturally dry and firm, some attention should be given to the improvement of the surface; and it is to be considered whether to adopt the expensive process of covering with broken stone road-metal, or to use gravel. one or the other of these is desirable in all cases where there is much tendency to sloppiness in wet weather; but any form of artificial covering is so costly that the early efforts of the improvement association will produce a more telling result if applied in other directions. the necessary cross-walks may be satisfactorily made with coal-ashes. it is even more easy in a village than in the country, to have the grades of all roadways so regulated as to shed rain-water falling upon them, and to have them so furnished with side gutters so as to prevent water from the roadside from running on to them. the simplest way to effect this, and the neatest way too, is to make gutters outside of the line of the road, say six inches deep and eight feet wide, these being at once sodded or sown with grass and grain to give an early protection against washing; made on such a shallow curve, they will afford no obstruction to any system of mowing that may be adopted, while their great width will give them sufficient capacity to carry away the water of considerable storms. the work of construction having been duly attended to, it is no less important to provide for regular and constant care. any rutting that comes of heavy traffic in bad weather should be obliterated either by raking, or, better still, by filling the ruts with gravel or ashes. if such work is attended to immediately on the occasion for it arising, the amount of labor required will be very slight; for it is especially true with reference to roads, that "a stitch in time saves nine." if the filling of ruts and wheel-tracks be done in time, the serious damage that comes from guttering flows of water lengthwise along the road may be almost entirely avoided. the mere cleaning work of both the roadway and roadside grass spaces, it will be easy to induce children to perform for slight rewards and encouragement. the daily removal of bits of paper and other rubbish will have an excellent effect on the general appearance of the village. in the autumn the removal of the fallen leaves will call for something more than children's work; but ordinarily this source of cheap labor will be found sufficient if properly directed. public water supply. as a field for encouragement, rather than as an object for the expenditure of the association's funds, the furnishing of an ample supply of water is entitled to very early consideration. not only is the question of public health very seriously involved in the water problem; but as a mere beautifying element an abundance of water, to be obtained without labor, will have a very telling effect by the facility it gives for preserving the fresh appearance of lawns and shrubbery, and for the cultivation of flowers and vines. regarded from the horticulturist's point of view, the climate of pretty nearly the whole of this country is simply detestable. we may arrange to withstand very well the severity of our northern winters; we expect an entire shutting-up of all garden industries, and long cold seasons are an accustomed matter of necessity: but we have never yet learned to accept with patience the almost annual destruction of our lawns and gardens and flower-beds by scathing drought. no public water supply available for an ordinary village would suffice to overcome the effects of a dry season over the whole of even a small homestead; but we may hope to secure enough to keep one or two small sprinklers flowing steadily through the hot months, and so keep a little grass measurably green, and preserve a semblance of life and beauty in flower-beds and delicate shrubbery. it is very rarely that it will be possible to supply water enough in a whole week to equal in its effect a half-hour's rain; but the difference between towns where even the small amount of water is available for the garden and those which are hopelessly given over to drought shows how much may be accomplished in this direction even with limited means. as in the case of road-making in any thing like a complete and thorough manner, the providing of a water supply must necessarily be directed by professional advice. although the simpler principles of hydraulics are sufficiently understood, and although it would be quite within the ability of a number of the more intelligent men of any village to secure and distribute a satisfactory amount of water, the cost of doing such work in an experimental way by persons unaccustomed to its details, as compared with the cost of doing it under the direction of an engineer whose natural judgment and capacity are supplemented by experience and skill, would be without doubt far beyond the fee demanded for his services. in this case, as in many others connected with public and private works, it is always bad economy to save the cost of proper knowledge. very likely--perhaps indeed very generally--the actual performance of the work, the buying and laying of the pipe, and all that, can be as cheaply done under home direction as under that of a public contractor; but the making of the plans--the deciding upon the source of the supply, upon the means for securing a sufficient head, the sizes of the pipes, the location and construction of fire-plugs, and all the minor details of the work--will be more or less economical, according to the skill, experience, and capacity of the person who directs it. the sources from which water may be obtained are various. often enough water of the best quality may be procured by driven, dug, or artesian wells; but, whenever this course is adopted, the wells should be located far enough away from the village, or on land sufficiently high, to make it impossible that there shall be any fouling of the water-bearing strata by the filtration from barn-yards, privy-vaults, or cesspools. generally, water so secured will have to be raised to an elevated reservoir by some mechanical force. if the demand is to be a large one, and if the community can afford the cost, the most reliable plan will be to use steam-power for pumping; but in smaller places, and where economy is a great object, wind-power may serve an excellent purpose. if a stream of pure water is available at a sufficient height, it may be led directly to the reservoir, or its current may be used to drive a water-wheel sufficient to do the pumping. in a majority of cases there will be found at no great distance a stream capable of supplying the water needed throughout the dryest season of the year, but not entirely free from organic impurities. in such cases it is often feasible, by excavating a filtering sump or pump-well at a little distance from the side of the stream, and at a sufficient depth below the level of its bed to secure a supply tolerably purified by filtration through the intervening earth. the distance at which this sump should be placed from the bed of the stream will depend on the character of the soil. the more porous this is, the greater should the distance be. this question as to the source from which the water is to be taken is one which, more than any other, calls for experienced judgment. frequently the conformation of the surrounding country is such that, even where there is no constant stream, it is possible by the construction of dams to pond an amount of water, to be furnished by surface washing, sufficient to supply the demands of the longest drought. in this case, as in all others where reservoirs are used, it is important to have a good depth of water, and not to allow, even toward the edges, any considerable shallow area. so far as possible, the depth should be everywhere great enough to prevent vegetation, and in all the shallower parts the surface soil should be entirely removed. as a rule, there should be a depth of at least fifteen feet of water, except near the very edges of the pond, and as much more than this as circumstances will allow. the distribution of water for private use is a simple question of construction; but, as a matter of taste, too vehement a protest cannot be entered against the common misconception as to what is desirable in the way of public fountains. an instance in point is furnished by the public drinking-fountain in newport. some years ago there stood at the foot of the parade a grand old stone bowl, hewn out of a solid block of granite, and filled by a pipe leading from a copious spring. this was a good, sensible, substantial drinking-trough, perfectly adapted to its use, unpretending and handsome. later, a public-spirited gentleman, desiring to leave a monument of his regard for the city, gave a considerable sum to be used in providing a suitable drinking-fountain at this point. those who had the control of the fund lacked either the good taste or the courage to refuse to expend it. the result is that this granite horse-basin--one of the best of its sort--has been removed to an obscure position; and there has been erected in its place a wretched cast-iron combination of bad architecture and bad statuary, such as form a conspicuous defacement of the public squares in philadelphia, where they serve the double purpose of furnishing water to the people, and advertising a cheap clothing establishment. the one compensation for the violation of good taste inseparable from these constructions is to be found in the fact that they must, sooner or later, lead the public to realize the absolute unfitness of cast iron for monumental and decorative uses. with the artistic influences which are now so active in the instruction of the american people, it is not perhaps unreasonable to look forward to the day when all of these piles of pot-metal shall be relegated to the scrap-heap, and when less offensive fountains shall take their place. we may even hope to see the iron statue and its stove-like support which supplies water to the horses of newport condemned to the foundry, and its solid old predecessor restored to the position which it ornamented for so many years. a wide margin may be allowed for the exercise of taste in the arrangement of village fountains; and where private munificence enables the expenditure of a considerable sum, a good amount of exterior decoration may be admissible: but it should always be borne in mind that so much of the outlay as is needed for the purpose should go to secure a good artistic design. especially should the use of cast iron be avoided, as being from every point of view, and under all circumstances, whether in the shape of cast-iron dogs or deer, or attempts at the divine human form, absolutely and entirely inadmissible for artistic uses. better a dug-out log horse-trough, overflowing through a notch in its side, as an ornament to the best-kept village green, than the most elaborate pitcher-spilling nymph that was ever cast in an iron-foundry. so far as the mere construction work of public drinking-fountains and horse-troughs is concerned, not much need be said except in connection with the overflow. in cold climates, there is apt to be from all such structures a spilling of water which covers the ground for some distance with ice. this may be avoided by carrying the overflow by a vertical pipe descending through the body of the water by some well-protected channel directly into a drain in the ground, at a depth beyond the direct action of frosts. if the stream is constant, this depth need be nothing like that to which frost penetrates into the soil,--for the constant movement of the water will prevent its freezing, even if covered only a foot deep, though to something more than this depth it will be desirable to have the metal pipe enclosed in a larger pipe of earthenware, giving a space of enclosed air. * * * * * where there is no public supply of water, it is better in most cases (considering the nearness of wells in villages to cesspools and privy-vaults), to depend entirely upon cisterns. in our climate, where rain is abundant during a considerable portion of the year, the water falling upon the roof of any house, if properly collected and stored, is ample for the whole supply of the family which that roof shelters. this water as it falls is ordinarily free from any impurity that can affect its taste, and from every source of serious fouling; though, after a long-continued drought, it is well to divert and discharge upon the surface of the ground the first ten minutes' flow of a shower, so that the impurities of the air and the dust of the roof may first be removed. after this first dash, lead to the cistern all that follows. even with this precaution, the water will be more agreeable for use if filtered. there are numerous systems for making filters in cisterns, but no other is so simple nor so durable and satisfactory as the separation of that part of the cistern from which the suction-pipe leads by a wall of brick and cement. it is simply necessary to build a wall of brick set on edge (two and a half inches thick), so as to include about one-quarter of the area of the bottom, sloping it back so as to terminate against the side of the cistern at a height of from four to six feet. this wall should be so well cemented at its joints that water can only pass through the material of brick, and for strength its form should be slightly bulging. a wall of this sort, measuring say six feet at its base, and rising to a height of six feet at its highest point, will transmit an amount of water sufficient to supply the demand of the most constant pumping that any domestic use can require. squares and public spaces. as a rule, the open spaces in a country village are subject to no other criticism than that of neglect; but the exceptions are not rare where an attempt at improvement has resulted in a sort of cemetery look that gives any thing but a cheerful, pleasure-ground aspect. there is not much danger that persons who are enthusiastic for the improvement of the town in which they live will err on the side of too great simplicity. the public squares and parks of large and wealthy cities are regulated and maintained at great cost and under skilful and artistic management; and they cannot fail to strike country visitors as being in all ways desirable. so indeed they are. they are a chief element of the city's beauty, and, from an æsthetic point of view, their influence is the best to which its people are subjected. but their beauty and their æsthetic influence are both the result of a well-directed expenditure of large sums of money. it is quite natural that an enriched manufacturer or merchant, proud of his native village, should be ambitious to perpetuate the memory of his benefaction by providing for some corresponding decoration of its public green, and that he should attempt to reproduce there, on the smaller scale proportionate to the circumstances, the sort of magnificence that he has seen in the city park. if left to his own sweet will,--as he often is if he is willing to spend money for the public benefit,--he will, unless a rich man of the rarer sort, succeed only in producing a conspicuous imitation. a park-railing of artistically-worked wrought-iron will be represented by a cast-iron substitute of much more elaborate device; and there will probably be "piled on," here and there, an amount of cheap ornamentation which at the first glance will have a certain imposing effect. in the matter of planting there may be an amount and variety of foreign shrubbery and sub-tropical plants, which, under proper care, would be of great value and beauty, but which, with the neglect to which they are doomed in their village home, are quite certain to abort. in fact, we may expect to see, what indeed we may now see, in painful degree, in many of our smaller towns, a halting attempt at the outside show of the city park, which, in the absence of those elements of artistic selection and appropriateness to the conditions which are to prevail, develop, as time goes on, into an ignominious failure. the trouble is, that, in all expenditures of this sort, we are apt to begin at the wrong end. in the making of a park, every step that is taken, whether the park be large or small, is a costly one; and, if taken in their reverse order, every step is a wasted one. the chief reason why the final decoration of a city park is so satisfactory is that it is only the crowning work of many processes which have had the best and most careful attention from the outset. the wrought-iron grille, the architectural fountain, the bronze statue, the delicate trees and shrubbery, and the smoothly-finished walks and drives, depend for their success upon a vast amount of costly fundamental work, and a provision for constant skilful care, which have cost a deal of money, and which look to a large permanent outlay. the elaborate fence must stand on no unstable foundation; the fountain must be only the ornamental central point of artistic and well-kept lawns and approaches; the statue must stand amid appropriate surroundings; and all but the simpler native vegetation must have its suitable soil, and be insured its needed protection and care at all seasons. the degree to which these more ornamental features may be given to the village green with any hope of satisfaction will depend almost entirely upon the thoroughness with which it has been prepared to receive them. could the enthusiastic members of the improvement association be brought face to face with the cost that is needed for quite hidden fundamental work in order to prepare their green for the more elaborate artistic decoration, they would be deterred at the outset from attempting any thing so ambitious. could they know the cost of the mere work of grading and subsoil cultivation, under-draining, manuring, laying the deep foundation for foot-paths, and securing that perfect growth of grass without which all park-like ornament is robbed of half its value, they would set their faces resolutely against all propositions on the part of public-spirited citizens to veneer their unprepared grounds with misplaced exterior adornment. if money enough can be provided to do the work thoroughly well from its very foundation, then of course nothing more is needed than that its direction be placed in accomplished hands; but unless this is fully assured, if--as is nearly always the case,--economy is the first thing to be considered, then the rule of action is fully stated in two words, _simplicity_ and _thoroughness_. avoid all fantastic ornament, and all decoration of every sort, that would be appropriate only to work of a more complete and substantial character. let whatever is done be done in the most thorough way. if the ability is only enough to secure good grass, then do every thing that is necessary to furnish the best conditions for the growth of grass, make suitable provision for its care, and attempt nothing further. good lawn-like grass surfaces, crossed only by foot-worn pathways over the turf, will be more beautiful and more satisfactory than will poor grass and cheaply made and ill-kept walks. if something more than securing the best grass is possible, then let the next expenditure be in the direction of paths, applying to the construction of these the principles set forth in what has hitherto been said about sidewalks. in the case of level walks, with imperfect means of drainage, it is often desirable to secure the better foundation that is given by filling in to the depth of a foot or more with small stone. * * * * * whatever may be the natural character of the soil, unless always well drained by a porous subsoil, the first step toward establishing a good lawn is to secure perfect underdrainage. establish a good outlet at the depth of three and a half or four feet below the surface at the lowest point of the area to be drained, and then, selecting the necessary lines for main drains, lay out parallel lines (thirty feet apart at a depth of three and a half feet, or forty feet apart at a depth of four feet) to include the whole area, and on these lines lay well-constructed drains of small open-jointed tiles. cover these tiles with the most compact earth that has been excavated, and, after filling to a depth of one foot, tramp or ram this earth tightly. then fill the rest of the trench, heaping over the lines any excess of material that may need the settling effect of heavy rains to work it into place. the next step is to reverse or thoroughly mix the whole soil to a depth of at least fifteen inches. this work can be completely done only with the aid of hand-shovelling, but the aid of the plough will greatly facilitate it. its purpose is to secure such an admixture of the organic matter of the surface soil with the more compact material of the subsoil as will make it sufficiently porous and fertile for the easy penetration of roots. it is best that this work should be done in autumn; and, if the land is level, that the freshly raised subsoil should be left exposed in its rough and lumpy condition--without harrowing--to the frosts of winter. if washing is to be apprehended, then sow the ground thickly with rye, harrowing in the seed only roughly. if the seed is sown early enough, the growth will be sufficient to protect the surface from washing. during the winter, let the whole surface be heavily covered with stable-manure,--the more heavily the better, as there is no limit to the amount of coarse manure that may with advantage be used for the establishment of permanent grass. in the spring, as soon as the ground is dry enough to work easily, plough in the manure with as shallow furrows as will suffice to cover the most of it; then harrow repeatedly, bringing the surface to as true a grade as possible, and sow it heavily with a mixture of rhode island bent grass, kentucky blue grass, and white clover. as soon as the seed is well sprouted, showing green over the whole ground, roll the area repeatedly and thoroughly until it is as smooth and hard as it is possible to make it. as soon as the grass has attained the height of three inches, let it be cut with a lawn-mower, and let the cutting be repeated at least weekly throughout the season of rapid growth, and as often as necessary until the end of autumn. if paths are to be made, it will simplify matters to make them after the grass has become well established, supposing only a good surface footway of ashes or concrete to be needed; for the small amount of excavation necessary under either of these systems may be scattered over the grass spaces without injury. but if the more thorough system is adopted of underlaying the walk with a foot or more of stones, then the work, except the final dressing of gravel or ashes, should be done in the autumn, or, in any case, before the final preparation of the soil for seeding. * * * * * concerning trees and ornamental shrubbery for parks and open spaces, it is not possible to give detailed directions here, beyond recommending, as in the case of roadside plantations, that, unless the work is to remain permanently in the charge of an experienced gardener, with the necessary appliances for the care and protection of the more delicate specimens, the arrangement and the selection should be confined to the more hardy and vigorous trees and shrubs which experience has shown to be adapted to the climate and soil of the locality. for roadsides, and largely in parks and village greens, the world offers no tree that can compare in dignity and grace with the broad-spreading american elm; though, for the sake of variety, and for the sake of an earlier effect, many other trees may be added. village sanitary work. it is a recently recognized but an old and universal truth, that human life involves the production of refuse matters, which, unless proper safeguards are taken, are sure to become a source of disease and death. the danger is not confined alone nor chiefly to that element of household waste which is most manifestly offensive, but in almost equal degree to all manner of organic refuse. it is true that fæcal matters are often accompanied by the inciting agent of the propagation of infectious diseases. for convenience, and as indicating the more probable means for disseminating infection, we may call this agent "germs." it has not yet been demonstrated with scientific completeness that a disease is spread by living germs whose growth in a new body produces a corresponding disorder; but all that is known of the circumstances of infection, and of the means for preventing it, may be fully explained by this theory. typhoid fever, cholera, epidemic diarrh[oe]a, and some other prevalent diseases, are presumed by the germ theory to be chiefly, if not entirely, propagated by germs thrown off by a diseased body. so far as these ailments are concerned, there is therefore a very serious element of danger added in the case of fæces to the other evil effects which are produced by an improper disposal of any refuse organic matter. that any one or all of these diseases can originate from the decomposition, under certain circumstances of fæcal matters, is not clearly determined. there is, however, good reason for believing that one common effect of the gases arising from improperly treated matters of this kind is to debilitate the human system, and so to create a disposition to receive contagion, or to succumb to minor diseases which are not contagious. the same debilitating effect and the same injurious influences often result from the neglect of other organic wastes. the refuse of the kitchen sink is free from fæcal matter; but it contains, in a greater or less degree, precisely the kind of organic material which has gone to make up the more offensive substance. if its final disposition is such as to contaminate the water that we drink or the air that we breathe with the products of their decay, the danger to life is hardly less than that from the decomposition of fæcal accumulations. it is proposed now to set forth, in the simplest way and without much discussion of principles (which may be studied elsewhere), the methods and processes by which village households and communities may be protected against the influences that come from an excess of soil-moisture, from damp walls, and from imperfect removal or improper disposal of organic filth. we will assume that a village has a water supply sufficient to admit of the use of water-closets in all houses, and to furnish a good flushing for kitchen sinks, &c. a necessary complement of this work--indeed, it should properly precede it--is the establishment of a system of sewers by which all of this liquid outflow may be carried safely away. it would be out of the question in a small or scattered community, especially where roadways are unpaved, to establish any system which should include in its working the removal of surface water. the moment we undertake to make sewers of sufficient capacity to carry away the storm water of large districts, then we enormously increase the scale and cost of the work. so far as the removal of house sewage alone is concerned, the work need by no means be very costly. if a tolerable inclination can be given to the line of sewers,--say a fall of one in two hundred,--a six-inch pipe will have a capacity quite up to the requirements of a village of two thousand inhabitants using one hundred gallons of water per day per head. it will, however, be safe to use a pipe of this size only when it is true in form and carefully laid, so that there shall be no retarding of the flow at the joints from the intrusion of mortar, or any other form of irregularity. unless the joints are wiped quite smooth, the roughness remaining will serve as a nucleus for the accumulation of hair, shreds of cloth, and other matters which will hold silt and grease, and form in time a serious obstruction. nothing smaller than six-inch pipe should be adopted for a street sewer. unless the work is to be most carefully done, for all but the branch lines, for a population of five thousand, or less according to the fall of the sewer, it will be safer to use eight-inch pipes. these pipes must be laid with great accuracy as to grade and direction. all corners should be turned with curves of large radius and regular sweep, and with an additional fall to compensate for the increased resistance of curves. the weight of the pipe should not be supported upon the sockets (see figure ), partly as a question of strength, and partly because any irregularity of form or thickness of the socket would change the inclination of the sewer. the bottom of the trench being brought exactly to the required grade, let there be dug out a depression greater than the projection of the socket, the pipe resting upon its finished bottom for its whole length. (see figure .) too much care cannot be given to the thorough filling with cement of the space between the socket and the pipe inserted into it; the whole circle being well flushed and wiped, so that there may be no possibility of leakage. [illustration: fig. pipes resting on their shoulders.] [illustration: fig. . pipes resting on their full length.] the objection to leakage is twofold: sewage matters escaping into the soil might contaminate wells and springs; and it would also rob the flow through the pipes of water needed to carry forward the more solid contents. the continued efficiency of these small drains for carrying away the solid or semi-solid outflow of the house is dependent very largely upon the presence of sufficient water to create a scouring current. while eight-inch pipes are admissible as a safeguard against imperfect laying, they are liable to the grave objection, that, where the service to be performed is greatly less than their capacity, the stream flowing through them will not be sufficiently concentrated to carry forward the more solid parts of the sewage. up to the limit of their capacity, six-inch pipes properly laid are greatly to be preferred, as insuring a deeper stream which will more generally attain the velocity of three feet per second, needed to move the heavier constituents of the sewage. the difference in cost between six-inch and eight-inch pipes will be sufficient to cover any extra cost of the most careful workmanship. however much attention may be given to the cementing of the joints, it will be impossible to prevent the running into the pipes of a certain amount of mortar; and the workman should have a swab or a disk of india rubber of the exact size of the bore of the pipe, with a short handle attached to its middle, to draw forward as each joint is finished, and so scrape away any excess of mortar before it hardens. wherever it is, or may probably become, necessary to attach a house-drain or land-drain, there should be used a length of pipe having a side branch, oblique to the direction of the flow, to receive such connection. the location of these branches should be accurately indicated on the plan; and they should be closed with a flat stone or a bit of slate, well cemented in place. it will at times be necessary to use larger conduits than even an eight-inch pipe. up to a diameter of fifteen inches, it is cheapest to use pipes, but for eighteen inches or more, brick-work is cheaper; and at that size--a considerable regular flow of water being insured--the slight roughness of brick-work offers no serious objection. the use of oval or egg-shaped sewers will rarely be necessary under the circumstances that we are considering; but there may be exceptional conditions where the covering-in of a brook, or storm-water course, cannot be avoided; and in such cases the volume of water may vary so greatly that there will at times be a mere thread of a stream, and at times a torrent. here the oval form is the best, as concentrating a small flow within a narrow and deep channel, and still giving the capacity needed for exceptionally large volumes. all bricks used for sewers, man-holes, &c., should be of the very hardest quality, and true in form. the general rule is to be kept in mind, that the thickness of the wall of a brick sewer should not be less than one-ninth of the inner diameter; that is to say, that up to a diameter of three feet the thickness of the wall should equal the width of a brick,--four inches. this applies to circular sewers only: the oval form, being less strong, calls for a wall of a thickness equal to one-eighth of the largest diameter. connecting drains leading from houses to the sewer are to be made at private cost; but they should be made in accordance with plans furnished by the public authority, and by a workman acceptable to that authority. the householder might be permitted to take the responsibility of the finishing of his drain, but for the fact that the working of the public sewer calls for the largest amount of water in proportion to the amount of solid matters that it is possible to secure, and thus makes it imperative that this drain should be absolutely tight, so that the liquid parts of the house outflow shall not trickle away through its joints, leaving only the more solid parts to flow into the public sewer. properly graded and smoothly jointed, a four-inch pipe will carry more water than even the largest boarding-house or country hotel is likely to discharge. there is, however, a tendency in all house-drains to become filled in the early part of their course by the accumulation of grease and solid matters caught in the grease. where no form of grease-trap is used, there is a certain argument in favor of the use of six-inch pipes for the upper part of house-drains. the use of a grease-trap, however, should always be insisted upon; and with its aid these obstructing matters will be retained, and the outflow may be perfectly carried by a four-inch pipe. so far as the public sewer is concerned, it makes little difference what is the size of the house connection drain through the greater part of its course; but the junction with the sewer should, under no circumstances, where six-inch sewer-pipes are adopted, be more than four inches. i should even insist on four-inch connections with an eight-inch sewer. through neglect, or by reason of improper management, many kinds of rubbish find their way into house-drains; and a four-inch opening will admit as many of these into the sewer as it will be able to carry away. if, by reason of bad construction or neglect, an obstruction is to be caused at any point, it should be in the drain, which the person responsible for it must cleanse or repair. the grease-trap referred to above may be any form of reservoir which will retain the flow from the kitchen sink until it has time to cool, when its grease will be solidified, and will float at the surface. the outlet from this trap should be at such a distance below the surface of the water, that there will be no danger of its floating matter passing in with the discharge. a very simple device for this purpose is shown in figure . from a trap of this sort the flow is constant whenever additions are made to its contents. [illustration: fig. .--grease-trap. i, inlet; v, ventilator; o, outlet.] [illustration: fig. .--field's flush-tank. a, receiver; b, grating; c, ventilator; d, siphon; f, entrance to drain; i, delivery from sink.] figure shows the invention of an english engineer, mr. rogers field, which has the effect of retaining all of the outflow from the kitchen sink until it is entirely filled,--say thirty gallons. when filled, any sudden addition of a few quarts of water, as from the emptying of a dish-pan, brings into action a siphon whose entrance is near the bottom of the tank; and this siphon rapidly discharges all of the contents above its mouth in a flow having sufficient force to carry forward not only any solid matters which it may contain, but also any ordinary obstructing accumulations in the drain below. the soil-pipe, carrying the discharge of water-closets, should not be delivered into the flush-tank, but at a point farther down the drain, so that any solid matter it may deposit shall be swept forward by the next action of the flush-tank. the more often the flush-tank is filled, and the greater the proportion of its water to its impurities, the more efficient will be its action. therefore the slop closet waste leading from the upper story, and even the outlet pipes of bathing-tubs, may with advantage be delivered into it. although the flush-tank may receive no fæcal matter, and even though the housemaid's sink may not deliver into it, it will contain in the discharge from the kitchen alone an amount of organic matter which will produce offensive and dangerous gases by its decomposition. to provide for the safe removal of these gases, a ventilating pipe should be carried up to some point not near to any window or chimney-top. from the time the sewers are ready for service no accumulation of fæcal matter or other organic household waste should be allowed to remain in the village. all old vaults and cesspools should be filled with earth, and disinfected by the admixture of lime with the upper layers of the filling. the use of water-closets in all houses should be made imperative; and the construction and arrangement of soil-pipes and of all outlets should be regulated by the health authorities. it is not worth while here to discuss the details of the construction of water-closets and other interior plumbing work, except with reference to soil-pipes and such drains as may deliver the outflow of soil-pipes to the public sewer. the soil-pipe should be of cast iron, carefully jointed with lead, not less than four inches in diameter, and carried by the straightest course possible up through the roof and generally higher than the ridge-pole. its open top must not be near any window, and if within ten feet of a chimney it should be at least one foot below the level of the top of that chimney. there should be no trap in the soil-pipe, and no trap in a private drain between the outlet of the soil-pipe and the sewer. the reasons for this rule are twofold:-- . no matter what amount of water may be used for flushing out the soil-pipe, its sides will always be more or less coated with organic filth; and, however slight this coating, there will be a certain amount of decomposition. the decomposition of all such matters must be rapid and complete, not slow and partial. a necessary condition of complete destructive decomposition is an abundance of atmospheric air to supply the oxygen which complete decomposition demands. if the soil-pipe is closed at its top, or if it is obstructed by a trap in the lower part of its course, there can be no such circulation of air as safety requires. if there is an opportunity for the free admission of air from the well-ventilated sewer to feed the upward current almost constantly prevailing in a soil-pipe open at both ends, the gases resulting from the decomposition will be of a different and less injurious character than where the air is confined,--and by the mere volume of air passing through the pipe they will be so diluted that even were they originally poisonous their power for harm will be lessened. the gases formed by the decomposition of organic matter in the sewer itself, or in the soil-pipe, have a certain expansive force which is greatly increased by the elevation of temperature, caused, for example, by the discharge of hot water into the pipe or sewer. if the soil-pipe is open at its upper end this expansion will be at once relieved; but if the top of the pipe be closed there will always be danger of the forcing of the feeble barrier offered by the ordinary water-seal trap of a branch pipe leading from a wash-basin or sink. then, too, the sealing-water of the trap readily absorbs any foul gases presented at its outer end, toward the soil-pipe, and gives it off in an unchanged condition at the inner or house end. such traps retard, but do not prevent, the entrance of sewer gases into the house. water-seal traps which are unused for any considerable time are emptied by evaporation, and thus open a channel through which the air of the soil-pipe may find its way into the house. it is usual in modern plumbing to relieve the pressure of gas in the soil-pipe by what is called a "stench-pipe." this is a pipe from one to two inches in diameter, leading from the highest point of the soil-pipe to the outside of the roof, where it is bent over to prevent the entrance of foreign matter, or is closed at the top and perforated with holes to allow the gas to escape. this small stench-pipe is inadequate for the necessary work. it is very important that there be the freest possible channel for the movement of air; and nothing will suffice for this save the continuing of the pipe, at its full size, to its very outlet. indeed, angles and bends in a pipe by increasing friction form a serious obstruction. the arrangement of the soil-pipe here indicated, although excellent and efficient, is susceptible of further improvement by the use of a ventilating cowl or hood at its top. there are many forms of such cowls in use which are effective whenever there is a sufficient current of wind; but most of them require a certain force to bring them into action, and when this force is absent they usually retard the flow they are intended to increase. this is true of a recent invention known as "banner's ventilating cowl," which so long as the wind blows is a most effective device. when the air is perfectly still, however, it offers by its curved air-way a certain resistance to the current, and in the case of baffling winds and flaws the air may blow directly into its opening. among the various inventions of this sort nothing seems so free from objection as the old arrangement known as the "emerson" ventilator, shown in figure . this gives a straight outlet, protected by a disk far enough above it not to prevent its delivery of air; and it becomes an effective suction cowl, with the least movement of the wind from any side or from above or below. no eddy caused by the angles of gable roofs can give it a backward draught; and if a pipe armed with it be held toward the strongest gale a puff of smoke blown into its other end will be instantly drawn through. as the patent for this invention has run out, it is competent for any tinsmith to make it, and it is a common article of manufacture. [illustration: fig. .--the emerson ventilator.] . what is said above concerning the ventilation of the soil-pipe from end to end relates to the interest of the private owner. the interest of the public gives an equally strong argument in its favor. the sewer should be as far as possible removed from the condition of an "elongated cesspool." there must be no halting of its contents, and no deposit of filth or silt at any point. within the shortest time possible, every thing received into the sewer must be passed on and delivered at its outlet. still, however perfectly this may be accomplished, there will always be a certain adhesion of slime to the walls of the sewer; and this slime must always be in a state of decomposition, a constant source of offence and possible danger. the only way to avert this danger is to give the sewer such a thorough ventilation that the decomposition shall be rapid and safe, and that the resultant gases shall be at once diluted with fresh air. this may be measurably accomplished by the simple ventilation of the sewer itself, through open-topped man-holes; but such ventilation is less effective in the case of small sewers than of large ones. in the case of either large or small sewers, it will be vastly increased if we compel every householder who makes a connection with the sewer, to carry a drain and soil pipe, nowhere less than four inches in diameter, from the point of junction with the main line to the open air above the roof. where houses are near enough to make the use of a public sewer advisable, the aggregate of these soil-pipes, having almost constantly an upward current, will make such a draught upon the sewer, to be supplied by a downward current through the man-hole covers, as will maintain a perfect and continuous ventilation. * * * * * important as it is to secure the proper arrangement and construction of sewers and house-drains, it is still more important to provide for the safe disposition of the sewage. we must begin at the outset with the understanding that all sewage matters not only are of no value to the community, but that it will cost money to get rid of them. there is hardly an instance, after all the efforts that have been made, of the _profitable_ disposal of the outflow of public sewers. the _theoretical_ value of the wastes of human life is very great, but the cost of any method for utilizing them seems at least equally great. the question of cost is so much more important (to the community) than the question of agricultural value, that the practical thing to do is to make such disposition as will cost the least, while fully meeting the best sanitary requirements. so far as village sewage is concerned, there are three means open for its disposal: to discharge it into running water or into deep tide-water, to use it for the surface irrigation of land, or to distribute it through sub-irrigation pipes placed at little distance below the surface of the soil. experiments are being made with more or less promise of success in the direction of the chemical treatment of this liquid so as to purify its effluent water, and retain in a solid form, and in combination with certain valuable added ingredients, all of its undissolved impurities. none of these processes can as yet claim consideration in regulating public works. the cheapest way to get rid of sewage is to discharge it into a running stream or into tide-water. so far as the community itself is concerned, this is often the best way; but there will very often arise the objection that the community has no moral or legal right to foul a stream of which others make use in its further course. where the amount of water constantly flowing is very large, and where the discharge is rapid,--any given part of the sewage reaching the open air within a few hours from the time of its entering the pipes,--and where it flows in moving water for a considerable distance before reaching others who may have occasion to use the stream, no practical danger is to be apprehended. but where the sewage is more foul, more sluggish, or exposed in the open current for a shorter time, the danger may be serious. the pouring of sewage into tide-water is always admissible where floats show that there is no danger of a return and deposit of solid filth; but the delivery at all stages of the tide, in the immediate neighborhood of salt marshes and mud flats, and in land-locked harbors, is to be avoided. where an unobjectionable natural outflow cannot be provided, the irrigation of agricultural lands affords the best relief. the action of vegetation, the oxidation which takes in the upper and well-aërated layers of soil, and the well-known but not yet fully explained disinfecting qualities of common earth, are effective in removing the dangerous and offensive impurities, and in converting them into a more or less important source of fertility. precisely how far this system may be available during winter, it is not easy to say. while the earth is locked with frost, there must be very little, if any, infiltration; but, as an offset, the action of a low temperature upon the sewage matters will clearly be antiseptic; and it is only necessary to provide against an undue washing away of the surface of the ground during thaws, and against the flowing of the sewage beyond the proper limits. generally in the neighborhood of villages it will be easy to find lands over which the delivery may be carried on throughout the year without objection. the sewer, or some form of covered channel, should lead far enough from any public road to avoid offence. from this point it may be led by open gutters to the land over which it is to be spread,--or rather through such a system of surface gutters as will enable us to deliver it at different parts of the field, according to the requirements of the crops, and so as to use fresh land at frequent intervals, leaving that which has been saturated to the purifying processes of vegetation and atmospheric action. the gutters having been made, it is easy, by the use of portable dams,--of thin boiler-iron, like broad shovels,--which may be set in the course of the flow, to divert the current into any branch channel, or to stop it at any desired part of this channel. all the gutters having sufficient descent to lead the sewage rapidly forward, it is usual to set a dam near the far end of the gutter, and allow the sewage to overflow and run down over the surface until it has reached as far as the formation of the ground and the quantity of the liquid will allow it to spread. this portion having received its due amount of the liquid, the dam is moved to a higher point, and the overflow is allowed to spread over a second area. in this way, step by step, we irrigate all that may be reached by a single gutter. then the moving of the dam in the main line turns the water into another gutter, and this is proceeded with in like manner. in practice it is found best to begin the overflow at the farthest end of the lowest-lying gutter, working back step by step until the higher parts of the field are reached. it would be better that there should be land enough to require the irrigation of any given area not oftener than once in one or two weeks. the amount required for a given population cannot be determined by any fixed rule,--so much depending on the amount of water used _per capita_, and on the absorptive character of the irrigated soil. in the case of villages, one acre to each five hundred of the population would generally be found ample. there are several instances of the successful use of a much smaller area than is here indicated, by the use of intermittent downward filtration. the most noted success in this direction is that at merthyr-tydvil in wales, a large mining town, where the allowance is only one acre to each two thousand of the population. there are two filter-beds of light loam over a gravelly subsoil thoroughly underdrained with tiles at a depth of six feet. one of these beds is cultivated with some crop like italian rye-grass, which bears copious irrigation; and the other by some crop like wheat, which, in the absence of irrigation, will thrive on the fertility left over from the previous season. the volume of sewage is very great, but the action of the six feet of earth in removing its impurities seems to be complete; the water flowing out from the drains having been proved by analysis to be really far purer than the standard fixed by the rivers pollution commission. it is an important condition of this system that the sewage, where its quantity is small, shall be stored in tanks until a large volume has accumulated, and that it then be rapidly discharged over the soil. there is no objection to an actual saturation of the ground, provided the soil is not of such a retentive character as to be liable to become puddled, and so made impervious. the tanks being emptied, the flow ceases until they are again filled. during the interval, the liquid settles away in the soil, by which its impurities are removed. its descent is followed by the entrance of fresh air, and the oxidizing action of this, accompanied during the growing season by the purifying effect of the growing crop, leads to an entire decomposition or destruction of all organic matters. the third system--the distribution of sewage through irrigation-pipes laid at a depth of ten or twelve inches below the surface of the ground--has its efficiency attested by numerous instances in private grounds. i have adopted this system for disposing of the sewage of the village of lenox, mass., where there was no other means available short of cutting an outlet, at great expense, through a considerable elevation. this method is an extremely simple one, and is available in every instance where even a small area of land lying slightly below the level of the outlet is to be commanded. the arrangement of the sub-irrigation pipes is easily made: suppose that in land having an inclination of about one in two hundred, occupied by grass or other growth, a trench be dug twelve inches deep, that there be laid upon the bottom of this trench a narrow strip of plank to insure a uniform grade, and that upon this plank is laid a line of common agricultural land-drain tiles, say two inches in diameter. however carefully these tiles may be placed, there will be at their joints a sufficient space for the leaking out of any liquid they may contain; the tiles being laid either with collars around the joints, or with bits of paper laid over them, to prevent the rattling in of loose earth during the filling. the excavated earth is to be returned to its place, well compacted, and covered with its sod. suppose this drain to have a cross-section equal to three square inches, and a length of one hundred feet, its capacity will equal about sixteen gallons, or a half-barrel. if this amount of liquid be rapidly discharged into the drain, the inclination being slight, it will at once be filled or nearly filled for its whole length, and the liquid will leak away in tolerably uniform proportion at every joint along the line, and will saturate the surrounding earth. the plan adopted at lenox, and recommended for all small villages which cannot secure a better outlet, is simply a multiplication of these drains to a sufficient extent. a description of the manner in which the lenox work is arranged will illustrate the adaptation of the system to its circumstances. as circumstances vary, the adaptation must be modified. (see figure .) [illustration: fig. .--diagram illustrating manner of sewage disposal at lenox, mass.] the main outlet sewer delivers at a distance of about one-half mile from the last junction with a branch sewer. it is a six-inch pipe five feet below the surface of the ground, and it delivers into a flush-tank like that shown in figure , but having a capacity of about five hundred cubic feet. this tank stands at the upper side of a field having an inclination of seven in one hundred. there is a branch from the main sewer, above the tank, supplied with a stop-cock, by which, in case of need, the sewage may be carried on down the hill without going into the tank. the outlet from the chamber below the siphon leads off in another direction down the hill, and has a stop-cock and a branch which will allow its flow to be diverted. the discharge of this diverted stream and the discharge through the branch of the main above the tank, both deliver into a horizontal surface gutter to be well grassed, and lying at the top of the land to be irrigated. by this arrangement, should repairs become necessary in the tank, the flow may be turned into the gutter; or, should it be desired for any reason to use the outflow of the tank for surface irrigation, the second branch outlet will deliver it into the same gutter, where, the outflow being uniform along the whole length of five hundred feet, the stream will pass in a thin sheet off on to the descending ground. the hill-side, immediately below the gutter, is brought to a true grade and covered with grass. as its inclination is much greater than would be admissible for sub-irrigation drains, these are laid _obliquely_ in parallel lines at intervals of six feet from one end to the other over the whole graded slope. these drains are connected at their upper ends with the direct outlet-pipe leading from the siphon chamber. they have an aggregate length of about ten thousand feet. the method of operation is as follows:-- the capacity of the tank is supposed to equal about two days' discharge, or about thirty-five hundred gallons; and the whole capacity of the drains is about half that of the tank, so that the rapid emptying of the whole volume into them will insure their being pretty thoroughly filled from end to end. this arrangement will provide for the saturation of the soil about once in two days, and will leave a sufficient interval between the periods of saturation for the thorough dispersal and aëration of the filth. the extent to which this system will be interfered with by frost, it is impossible to say. this will probably be less than would be supposed, for the reason that the ground would often be covered with snow, and that the sewage will have sufficient warmth to exert considerable thawing influence. whenever the discharge of the liquid through irrigation pipes is shown to have become obstructed by freezing, it will only be necessary to divert the flow, and turn it into the surface gutter to be distributed over the ground. it is possible that in this case, as in the one which has been under my observation for six years past, there will be no interruption of the working because of cold; but, should the interruption become serious, i shall propose the planting of evergreen trees in parallel rows midway between the drains. the protection that would thus be afforded, both by the trees and by the drifting snow which they would gather, would probably keep the ground free throughout the winter. incidentally to the chief advantage of this system, there will be, so long as the land is in grass, quite an addition to its product. * * * * * there are hundreds of villages, with and without a water supply, where the houses are too scattering and the street lengths too great to make it advisable that the cost of any form of public sewerage should be assumed. in all such villages, the public authority or the active influence of the village improvement association should be exerted to secure a regular and systematic adoption of some more perfect system for the private disposal of household drainage than is usual. fortunately, the best system is the cheapest. no form of cesspool, no leaching vault, and no cemented tank, should be allowed under any circumstances. neither should there be permitted any form of the old-fashioned out-of-door privy with a vault. every household should be supplied with water-closets or well-arranged earth-closets, to which reference will be made below. [illustration: fig. .--settling basin.] the foul water discharge of kitchen sinks, or of whatever form of slop-sink is used for the water of bedrooms, should discharge into a flush-tank, and should be led from this by a tightly cemented four-inch drain to a tight settling basin in the ground beyond. if water-closets are used, the soil-pipe should deliver into the drain between the flush-tank and the settling basin. the settling basin should be constructed as shown in figure ; and this, as well as the flush-tank, the soil-pipe, and the connecting drains, should be amply ventilated. the outlet from the settling basin should be carried by well-cemented vitrified pipes (four-inch) to the connection with the subsoil irrigation pipes. the flush-tank discharging at each operation of its siphon about thirty gallons of liquid, two hundred feet of drain, unless the soil is very compact, will dispose of the whole discharge with sufficient rapidity. the tank being emptied, the flow ceases; and within a very short time the drain becomes empty of its contents, which are absorbed by the sponge-like action of the earth, and are subjected to the combined influence of the roots of plants, and of the concentrated oxygen contained among the particles of the soil. they will soon have their character entirely changed, so that the earth will become purified, and will be ready to receive the next discharge from the tank. in the case of my own drains, after five years of unremitted use, the gradual accumulation of bits of grease and more solid matters obstructed the drains, and there appeared undue moisture about their upper ends. all that was then necessary was to re-open the trenches, and remove, wash, and replace the tiles. this operation cost, for a length of two hundred feet, less than three dollars. for any ordinary household of six or eight persons, where the water-closet is not used, two hundred feet of drain of this sort will be sufficient. if there are water-closets, it may be well to duplicate the length; and, to provide for the necessary connections to lead the liquid to the drains, we may assume that in all five hundred feet of length will be required. the cost of two-inch tiles at the works, in small lots, and where collars are furnished, is about three cents per foot; and we will suppose that transportation will increase the cost to five cents per foot, making the cost of this item twenty-five dollars. the strips of board (three inches wide) will cost, at a very liberal estimate, five dollars more, and the cost of digging and laying not more than another five dollars; so that the establishment of this means of disposal, under the most liberal allowance of prices, will not exceed thirty-five dollars. ordinarily, especially where neighbors combine to buy their material in larger quantities, it will hardly exceed one-half of this amount. this, be it understood, is for a complete and permanent substitute for the expensive and nasty cesspool now so generally depended upon in the country. a piece of ground fifty feet square, having ten rows of tile five feet apart and fifty feet long, will suffice for even a large household with an abundant water supply. for the better illustration of the arrangement of this system, i give in figure a plan for the work in the case of a lot fifty feet wide, with a depth of open ground behind the house of somewhat more than fifty feet. the leaching drains may safely begin at a distance of even ten feet from the back of the house, requiring for the whole a clear area of only fifty feet by sixty feet. with small households, the length of drain may be very much shortened. in my own case, where water-closets are not used, the total length of irrigation drain is, as before stated, only two hundred feet. [illustration: fig. .] the earth-closet was invented by the rev. henry moule, vicar of fordington, in england, more than ten years ago. its progress in england has been considerable, and its introduction there has resulted in a profit to the company undertaking it. in this country it has met with less general favor. two companies with large capital, after expending all their resources, have been obliged to abandon their attempts to build up a profitable business. having been actively interested in the enterprise from its inception, and having given constant attention to the merits of the system, i am to-day more than ever convinced that the solution of one of the most difficult problems connected with country and village life is to be sought in its general adoption. the public reports of sanitary officers in england, who have investigated the subject to its foundation, fully confirm every thing that has been claimed by the advocates of the earth-closet, unless perhaps in connection with the incidental question of the value of the product as a manure. the only thing which now deters the authorities of some of the larger manufacturing towns of the north of england from adopting the dry-earth-system as a means of relief, under the sharp exaction of the law that prohibits their further fouling of water-courses, is the belief that the labor of bringing into the town the enormous amount of earth required to supply such an immense number of closets, and the labor of removing the product at frequent intervals, would be so great as to constitute an insurmountable obstruction. prof. voelcker, in a paper published in the journal of the royal agricultural society, shows pretty conclusively that even the use of the same earth four or five times over, although perfectly successful in accomplishing the chief purpose of deodorization, fails to add to it a sufficient amount of fertilizing matter to make it an available commercial manure. extended experience in small villages and public institutions seems to confirm his view, that, if the earth-closet is to be adopted by towns, they cannot depend either on farmers buying the manure, or undertaking the labor of supplying and removing it. it is estimated, that, for a population of one hundred thousand persons, there would be required seventy-five tons of earth per day, to say nothing of heavy refuse matters which would be thrown into the closets, and would increase the amount to be removed. even the quantity required for a village of a few hundred inhabitants, if it were to be brought in and carried out, would entail a considerable cost for handling. i have recently concluded an experiment of six years' duration, the result of which seems to show that this objection to the adoption of the earth-closet system may be set aside, or at least reduced to such proportions as to make it unimportant. in the autumn of i had brought to my house, where only earth-closets are used, two small cart-loads of garden earth, dried and sifted. this was used repeatedly in the closets; and, when an increased quantity was required, additions were made of sifted anthracite ashes. i estimate that the amount of material now on hand is about two tons. we long since stopped adding to the quantity, finding that the amount was ample to furnish a supply of dry and decomposed material whenever it becomes necessary to refill the reservoirs of the closets. the accumulation under the seats is discharged through simply arranged valves into bricked vaults in the cellar. when these vaults become filled,--about three times in a year,--their contents, which are all thoroughly decomposed, are piled up in a dry and ventilated place with a slight covering of fresh earth to keep down any odor that might arise. after a sufficient interval these heaps are ready for further use, there being no trace, in any portion, of foreign matter nor any appearance or odor differing from that of an unused fresh mixture of earth and ashes. in this way the material has been used over and over again, at least ten times; and there is no indication to the senses of any change in its condition. a sample of this material has recently been analyzed by prof. atwater, at the connecticut agricultural station at middletown. the analysis shows that it contains no more organic matter than prof. voelcker found in fresh earth prepared for use in the closet,--say about two hundred pounds,--nearly all of which organic matter it undoubtedly contained when first made ready for use. in my case, there was an addition, at a moderate calculation of at least, pounds of solid dry matter during the six years' use by an average of four adult persons. prof. voelcker's analysis showed that the unused earth contained about twelve pounds of nitrogen. prof. atwater's analysis shows that my two tons contained only about eleven pounds of nitrogen. by calculation, the pounds of solid dry matters added in the use of my material contained pounds of nitrogen. doubtless the constitution of prof. voelcker's sample was somewhat different from the original constitution of my own; but practically, except perhaps for the addition of a trifling amount of residual carbon remaining after the decomposition, they were about the same; and, after being used ten times over, the whole of the pounds of organic matter added, including pounds of nitrogen, seem to have entirely disappeared. it becomes interesting and important to know what has become of this added matter. that it was absorbed into the particles of the earth, is a matter of course; and the result proves that after such absorption it was subjected to such a chemical action of the concentrated oxygen always existing in porous dry material as led to its entire destruction. porous substances condense gases--air, oxygen, etc.--in proportion to the extent of their interior surface. the well-known disinfecting action of charcoal--the surface of the interior particles of which equal from fifty to one hundred square feet to each cubic inch of material, and all of which surface is active in condensing oxygen--is due not simply to an absorption of foul-smelling odors, but to an actual destruction of them by slow combustion, so that the same mass of charcoal, if kept dry and porous, will continue almost indefinitely its undiminished disinfecting action. the earth used in the closet is a porous material, sufficiently dry for the free admission of air or of oxygen. the foulest materials when covered with dry earth at once lose their odor, and are in time as effectively destroyed by combustion (oxidized) as though they had been burned in a furnace. the process is more slow, but none the less sure; and it is clear that in the case of my dirt-heap the foul matters added have thus been destroyed. the practical bearings of this fact are of the utmost importance. earth is not to be regarded as a vehicle for the inoffensive removal beyond the limits of the town of what has hitherto been its most troublesome product, but as a medium for bringing together the offensive ingredients of this product, and the world's great scavenger, oxygen. my experiment seems to demonstrate the fact that there is no occasion to carry away the product from the place where it has been produced, as after a reasonable time it has ceased to exist, and there remains only a mass of earth which is in all respects as effective as any fresh supply that could be substituted. the quantity necessary to be provided can be determined only by extended trial. my experiment proves that the amount needed does not exceed one thousand pounds for each member of the household, and that this amount once provided will remain permanently effective to accomplish its purpose. with a suitable public supply of water for the purpose, and with a suitable means of disposal, nothing can be better and nothing is more easily kept in good condition than well-regulated and properly ventilated water-closets. where these are available, with enough water for their flushing, their use is to be recommended. where there is not sufficient water, there a well-regulated system of earth-closets seems to be imperatively demanded. by one process or the other we must prevent the fouling of the lower soil, and the consequent tainting of wells and springs, and the ground under houses and adjoining their cellars. with a system of sub-irrigation pipes which deliver foul matters into earth that is subject to the active operation of oxidizing influences, we need fear no contamination of the deep and unaërated soil. it would be better, however, where this system is used for the disposal of the outflow of soil-pipes, to avoid the use of wells. as a general rule, it is safer not to use for drinking purposes the water of any well near a house or a stable: practically, it is better not to use wells at all as a source of water for domestic supply. filtered cistern-water is greatly to be preferred. farm villages. "god made the country, and man made the town." cowper's view of the charm of country life as compared with life in the town is a very natural one. the same view suggests itself to every cultivated denizen of the city who finds himself in the country on a beautiful june morning, or under a warm september sun, or during the time of brilliant autumn foliage, or when the sun sets with a warm glow, gilding the clean, bare boughs of november trees, or when the whole countryside is covered with spotless snow, or when grass and leaves and buds and birds first feel the awakening warmth of spring. the scene is full of a charm and a novelty which appeal to him most strongly; and he believes, for the moment at least, that nothing could make him so entirely happy as to spend his life away from the noise and confusion of the town, and amid such scenes of rural peace and beauty. filled with this enthusiasm, one builds with reference to a magnificent view, and without regard to the practical inconveniences of the site, fancying that true happiness requires only a continuance of the novel charms which have enraptured him. the cultivated countryman, too,--one who has learned to use his eyes, and to see what nature has to offer him,--appreciates even more thoroughly, if not so keenly, the never-ending and ever-changing interest by which he is surrounded. his admiration and enthusiasm, however, are tempered by familiarity with some disadvantages of country life,--just as the romantic house-builder finds on closer acquaintance that, magnificent though a hill-top view may be, a hill-top residence is not without its grave drawbacks, nor free from annoyances and practical objections which too often throw a veil over the most majestic outlook. a blue-sided, white-capped mountain, reflected in a broad, placid, shimmering lake, and framed between fleeting clouds, graceful trees, and verdant lawn, is beyond compare the strongest inducement and the best reward one can offer to a visiting friend; but vile roads, distant neighbors, discontented and transitory servants, and all the thousand and one obstructions to the machinery of domestic life, soon blind the eye of the unhappy householder to the beauty which lies ever before him, until at last the one great good thing which commands his constant thought is that romantic and pecunious friend who shall come some happy day to purchase his estate. there is another class, and a very large one, whose opinion concerning the godlike character of the country it is our especial purpose to consider here. the farmer and the farmer's family may or may not be cultivated persons. cultivation does not come by nature; and the incessant and increasing duties of farm life leave one, however well disposed, but little time and but scant strength for æsthetic study. the farmhouse is the centre of the home life and of the homely thought and feeling of its inmates. the farm on which one has been born and bred is the centre and standpoint from which he regards the world without. all those more tender emotions which are common to our nature, and which attach themselves to the home, find their development on the farm as well as in the town. sentimentally considered, it matters little whether the object of these emotions be on the farm, in the wilderness, in the village, or in the city. fortunately, man is by no means a creature of emotion alone; and the satisfaction and good of living are less a matter of feeling than of activity, industry, and intelligence. the place in which one lives is more or less satisfactory in proportion as it facilitates and encourages the better and more useful living. just as the citizen feels the attractions of the country, which are so novel to his town-bred taste, so the countryman finds a charm in the novelty of the town. as one is led toward the quiet and solitude of the fields and woods, so the other is drawn by the life and interest of the community. as a rule, at least in america, where the facilities for pleasant country living are far less than in england, the countryman who goes to town is less likely to wish himself back on the farm than is the town-bred farmer to long for the comforts and conveniences of his former condition. "man is a social animal," and the aphorism is especially true of his wife and daughter. as the lives of the wife and daughter are much more confined to the immediate surroundings of the domicile than is that of the man himself, so the question as between town and country should be considered more especially with reference to them. there is a certain amount of truth on both sides of every question; and the one which we are now considering is not to be answered by a decision in favor of the heart of a great city, or of the entire solitude of an outlying farm. as is so often the case, its solution lies between the two extremes. if one may be permitted to imagine the conditions best suited to the perfect physical, intellectual, and social development of the human being, one would naturally think of a small town or a large village where society is sufficient, where the facilities for instruction are good, where communication with the large centres is easy, where the conveniences and facilities for household economy are complete, and where the country with its beauty and quiet and freshness is close at hand,--where one feels on this side the influence of a complete social organization, and on that the sweet breath of mother earth. unfortunately, these imaginings can never be freed from the practical bearing of the bread-winning and money-making interests. men must live, not where they prefer to live, but where their interests compel them to live. the town and the country have their mutual economic duties by which their life must be controlled. all that we can hope to do is, on one hand, to ameliorate the hardness and solitude of country living, and, on the other, to bring the citizen into nearer relation with the invigorating fields and woods and boundless air of the country. devising no modern sybaris, where all possible good of life may follow from the unaided operation of a perfect social and industrial organization, i propose to confine myself to the simple question of the best practical development of village life for farmers. the village or its immediate vicinity seems to me to offer the urbanist the nearest approach to the country that is available for his purposes; and in like manner village life, so far as it can be made to fit his conditions, offers to the farmer as much of the benefit of town life as the needs of his work will allow him to obtain. if those who now seek the pleasures of retirement in costly and soul-wearying country-seats would congregate into spacious and well-kept villages, and if those who now live in the solitary retirement of the mud-bound farmhouse would congregate into villages, we should secure far more relief from the confinement of the town and a wider-reaching attractiveness in agricultural life; this latter leading to the improvement of our farming by a solution of that long-mooted problem, "how to keep the boys on the farm." nearly everywhere on the continent of europe those who are engaged in the cultivation of the land live in villages. an observation of the modes of life and industry of these villages has led me to consider whether some similar system might not tend to the improvement of the conditions of our own farmers, and to the amelioration of some hardships to which their families are subjected. in europe, as here, the methods of living have grown from natural causes. there it was a necessary condition of agricultural industry, that those who tilled the soil should be protected by the military power of their lord or chief; and their houses were clustered under the shadow of his castle wall. the castles have crumbled away, and the protecting arm of the old baron has been replaced by the protecting arm of the nation. the community of living, which grew from necessity, having proved its fitness by long trial, is still maintained; but there seems to have been no general tendency toward the formation of such little communities here. save in a few exceptional cases,--as in the old villages of the connecticut valley, where protection against indians or safety from inundation compelled the original settlers to gather into communities,--the pioneer built his cabin in his new clearing, and, as his circumstances improved, changed his cabin for a house, and his small house for a larger one, and finally established his comfortable home in connection with his fertile fields. this method has been adopted throughout the whole country; and the peculiarly american system of isolated farm-life has become almost universal throughout the length and breadth of the land. i am not so enthusiastic as to believe that a radical change from this universal system is to be hoped for at any early day; but i believe that it is worth while for farmers to consider how far they may, without permanent harm to the interests for which they are working, secure for themselves, and especially for their families, the benefits of village life. to this end are adduced the following examples, both of which are of course purely imaginary. the first has reference to a new settlement of wild land, where, by the government's system of division, the boundaries are rectangular, and where the political subdivisions are of uniform measurement. the second relates to the necessary change of conditions now existing in the longer-settled parts of the country. for this latter, the illustration is taken from an actual accurate survey[ ] of a purely agricultural district in rhode island, showing the roads, houses, and field boundaries as they now exist, followed by a suggestion as to the manner in which the same division of estates might be made to conform to the assembling of their owners into a village. [footnote : a map of the united states coast survey.] the government division is into townships six miles square. it is proposed to divide each township into nine settlements, giving to each a square of two miles, or , acres. each of these settlements should have its whole population concentrated in a village at its centre. a suitable method of division would be that indicated in figure , where a public road crosses the middle of the tract north and south, and east and west. the outside of the tract, for the width of half a mile all around, is laid off in farms of acres and acres. these are bounded on the inner sides by a road. inside of this road again is a series of smaller farms ( acres), and inside of these a tier of still smaller places ( acres), separated from the central village by a narrow road. the village itself occupies acres. the division of the agricultural land is as follows:-- farms of acres " " , " " " " in all, tracts, aggregating , acres, and averaging nearly acres each, the most distant being less than a mile from the village green. this division is arbitrary; in practice, the more industrious members of the community would buy land from their less industrious neighbors, and the size and arrangement of the farms would vary. often, too, the division would be into farms averaging more than sixty acres. in such cases there would usually be about the same population, as the larger holders would employ more workmen. [illustration: fig. .--division of four square miles with central village.] what is attempted is chiefly to show how four square miles of land may be so divided that its occupiers may be conveniently gathered into a village; and it may fairly be assumed, that, except in the more remote grazing and grain-growing regions, the population (including laborers) would generally be about one household for each sixty acres. in the more thickly settled regions, this limit is exceeded now; and, as population increases, this condition will extend. in any case, the principle advanced remains the same, whether there be thirty households or sixty. a suitable division of the village is shown in figure . its centre is occupied by a public square at the intersection of the main roads. the road surrounds a piece of ornamental ground, containing about one acre. north and south of the square are the sites of two churches, a schoolhouse, and a store and public house. this is again arbitrary; the purpose is to have these spaces occupied by somewhat important buildings, which it will not be necessary to enclose by fences, so that an appearance of more size may be given to the central feature of the village. [illustration: fig. .--division of the central village.] the spaces set apart for these buildings, as well as the village green, should be surrounded by regularly planted trees, such as will grow to a large size, like the american elm. but the whole open space should remain otherwise free from planting. smooth, well-kept grass, and large trees planted in formal lines, with an entire absence of fences, posts, chains, bushes, and all decorations, will give a dignity and character which an excess of ornamentation would spoil. a certain amount of judicious bedding would be permissible, but it would be best that even this should be confined to private places. any fund available for embellishing the village green will be best used in keeping its grass cut and its walks clean,--entire neatness and simplicity being its most effective characteristics. on the streets leading east and west from the green there are shown sixteen lots x (one-half acre), eight x (one-quarter acre). these lots all open on narrow lanes at the rear. on the streets leading north and south there are twelve lots x (three-quarters acre), and eight lots x (one and one-half acres). these are the village lots proper, but the twelve ten-acre tracts which front on its surrounding street would be the residences of their owners; and these semi-detached houses--the most distant not a quarter of a mile from the green--would form a part of the village, and come within the operation of its rules of association. probably the blacksmith, the wheelwright, and the builder would occupy these outlying places, with an "annex" of farming to supplement their trades. the village lots proper are all large enough for a kitchen-garden, barn, barn-yard, &c.; and all have means of access from the rear, so that their street fronts may be kept for ornamental purposes. it would be a good rule that no house should stand nearer to the street line than thirty feet, and that no fence should be made nearer to the street than sixty feet. this would add very much to the largeness of appearance of the whole village; would decorate every street with the ornamental fronts of the houses and with their plants and shrubbery, and would, at the same time, shut off from the ornamental parts every thing belonging to the working department of the village life. even the baker and the shoemaker should conform to this rule, and their shops should be made to help the neatness of appearance of the village. the larger farmers, having the most cattle, would occupy the largest lots, which would readily accommodate their larger needs. the more ambitious of them would probably buy land, for night pasture or for cultivation, from a ten-acre neighbor opposite their rear line. the village population would be somewhat as follows: two clergymen, one doctor, one teacher, one baker, one shoemaker, one tailor, two store-keepers, one carpenter, one wheelwright, one blacksmith, one dressmaker, one innkeeper, forty-four farmers: total, fifty-eight heads of families. probably, including hired laborers and servants, the average would be six persons to each household. this would make the population of the village about . no part of the whole scheme is more arbitrary than this arrangement of its human element; and no part of it would be more modified in different cases by the element of human nature. still, this sketch of the industrial division of the community would probably be approximated in any purely agricultural village of this size,--with such changes in the detail as would come from individual enterprise or indolence. taking the whole area at , acres, and the population at persons, we have an area of about - / acres to furnish the support and home of each member of the community,--an amount ample for the purpose. figure suggests the arrangement of the central open space of the village,--all of which should be in well-kept grass, except where roads and paths are needed. paths should be reduced to the least amount that will furnish the necessary accommodation, and they should be kept in neat condition. if no provision can be made for this, it will be better to leave the people to beat their own tracks across the grass as their needs direct. these beaten foot-paths are never unsightly (in small villages), for the reason that they are never large, and that they are only of such width as their regular use will keep clean: the grass maintains its effort to spread, and grows always close up to the necessary foot-way. even in hyde park (london), where the people have made short cuts across the broad lawns, the paths thus marked out, and receiving no attention, are not only unobjectionable, but are a charming feature of that beautiful pleasure-ground. [illustration: fig. .--division of the central open space of the village.] the foot-path indicated for the village green will be demanded by the more ambitious village improvers; but were i making an ideal village for moderate and tasteful people, the road surrounding the green should enclose only a level, close-cropped lawn, neatly trimmed at its edges, surrounded by fine and simple trees, and traced here and there with the foot-paths that honest use had marked out and made, and by the suggestive diamond-shaped track and bases of the village base-ball club. it should be perfect in grade, in outline, in regularity of planting, and in mowing; but it should be a perfect lawn _plus_ the wear of constant use and frequent pleasure. * * * * * the second example is taken from existing conditions in my own neighborhood. the united states coast survey has furnished all the necessary details save the _farm_ boundaries. the field boundaries and roads are exact. the tract is of the same size with the one just considered,--two miles square. its centre is in one direction about two miles from a small village, and in the other about seven miles from a large town which furnishes the chief market for its agricultural products, and is the source of all (or nearly all) of its supplies. [illustration: fig. .--present division and settlement of tract in rhode island, two miles square.] figure shows the present settlement of this area, the houses, about sixty in number, being scattered over the whole tract, with no near approach to a "neighborhood" at any point. these are practically all farmers' houses, some trade being carried on here and there in connection with the farm-work. a few of the houses belong to farms which lie mainly outside of my lines. deducting a fair proportion for this, and others for the wheelwright, blacksmith, &c., we shall have about the same number of farmers as in the former instance, say forty-four; and, taking the same area for the village, we shall have the same amount of farm and village property for their support. figure shows a suitable division of property and the location of the village, on a short cross street running from one to the other of the main public roads, and extending a short distance up and down these roads. it would be a necessary condition precedent, that the whole property taken for the village should be set apart for the purpose. this requirement and the cost of moving buildings from the farms to the village would doubtless be an serious obstacle to the immediate carrying out of the plan. and thus the theory must long remain a theory only. no sudden change of the sort could be made in practice. [illustration: fig. .--the rhode island tract, with its buildings gathered into a compact village.] it would not be impossible, however, to bring about the end in time, if a few of the larger proprietors could secure possession of the village tract by exchange, and would dedicate it to the purpose, agreeing at any future time to sell small lots for building at a fixed low rate. in the instance under consideration, the village tract is thinly settled, and so situated as to be available at moderate cost. if a church, a schoolhouse, and a store could be established as a nucleus of the village, the young couples of the neighborhood might incline to settle there; and in time the settlement could be made so attractive--as compared with the outlying farmhouses--as to lead to the concentration of the whole population. this part of the subject is, however, foreign to the present purpose. if the _desirability_ of village life for farmers can be established, the ways and means may safely be left to those interested in securing it. the influences now at work to make the farmers' children seek a better social condition, together with the necessity which confines them to some form of agricultural work, must be depended on to secure the relief suggested, unless some better relief can be found. in this case, as in every other of village construction, the original plan should include some quality or feature, which, while appropriate to the modest end in view, will give character to the place. every village has in its situation, its uses, or its origin, some characteristic which may be developed into a leading and an attractive feature. especially when the work is to be begun from the foundation, and when there are no buildings to be torn down or removed, a consistent and dignified result may be planned for at the outset. the characteristic feature of the village we are now considering is that it is to consist of a single long, straight street cut off at each end by other roads. after removing one unimportant house, there remains no obstacle to the laying-out of one straight street two hundred feet wide, with either two or four rows of spreading elms. this street, two thousand feet long, mainly in well-kept grass, with only the necessary width of road and the requisite paths,--having perhaps a well-kept and home-like private place opposite each of its ends,--would stamp the village at once with an attraction which would have a constant civilizing effect on those living under its influence. such a village street, entirely without costly ornamentation, and requiring only the simplest care, would soon take on a look of appropriate neatness and freshness; and, as the trees grew, it would acquire a dignity and beauty which could in no other way be so well secured. the church and the schoolhouse, being placed in broad recesses opposite the central point of the street, would gain importance from their position; and, these main features being attended to, the _character_ of the village would be fixed, and it would be difficult to make any arrangement of its private places which would spoil its beauty. neatness and a reasonable care in the matter of house-gardening, the planting of flower-beds, vines, etc., are all that would be needed. with so wide a street, it would be as well to bring all house-fronts to the street line, completing this line with simple fences, and paying some attention to the ornamentation of the enclosed yards. in this village, as in the other, all meretricious ornamentation should be avoided, whether public or private. all money available for such improvement should be spent in securing perfect neatness. in fact, the two radical requirements of good taste in all such cases are an absence of obvious money-spending, and the evidence of constant care and attention. "showiness" is common in every trumpery village in the land. what we should seek in our farm-villages is the most modest simplicity, shining with the polish of an affectionate care. every spot should breathe of homely influences and moral peacefulness. [illustration: fig. .--proposed arrangement of the rhode island farm village.] figure shows the general plan of the village. if other public buildings are needed, they might very well be placed opposite the ends of the main street. it is not possible, in remodelling an old farming district, where boundaries and roads are irregular, to apportion the division of land among the population with especial reference to its distance from the village; so, for example, that the small farmers, who have little team-force, shall not have so far to go as the larger ones who are better equipped; but, even in this case, the most distant farm will be rarely a mile from the village, where all the farmers, their families, and their work-people, and their flocks and herds, would be gathered together, under the best circumstances for getting out of their lives as much good as the need for earning a living by arduous work will allow them to get anywhere,--more than they could hope to get in the isolation of the distant farmhouse. having now considered the methods by which farmers may congregate their homes and their farm-buildings, and live in villages, let us take up the more important question of policy. which would be better for a young man, just starting in life with a young wife,--to go to a distant farmhouse to found his home, or to settle in a well-ordered farm-village under substantially the conditions described above? there is much more to be said, on both sides of this question, than there is room to say here; but certain points are worthy of consideration. there is no doubt that in a strictly money-making aspect there is an advantage in having the animals on the land from which they are fed, and the men on the farm which they are to work. it is certain, also, that the men and the women must be near the stables, that the early and late work of feeding and milking may be promptly and regularly performed. if the family is to live in the village, the cattle must live in the village too. this involves the hauling home of all the hay and grain, and the hauling out again of all manure,--no slight task. if the work is all concentrated on the farm, under the immediate supervision of the farmer, there will be a certain convenience and economy of time. the same principle holds true in all other relations. the merchant would find a certain advantage in living at his warehouse, the engine-builder at his factory, the cotton-spinner at his mill, the carpenter at his shop, and the grocer at his store. all of these have found that, so far as may be, they get certain other and greater advantages in living away from their business. one and all carry to their homes, at least occasionally, books, papers, and plans for work that needs attention out of the regular business hours. the farmer alone--and in this country especially--disregards the benefits of living away from his shop, and passes his whole life--day and night--in close contact with his field of operations. he might, if he chose, make his home nearer to other homes, taking with him so much of his work as is not necessarily confined to the farm. for his own sake, it does not make so much difference; but for the sake of his wife and children it makes all the difference between life and stagnation. the business needs which call him to town, and the habit he has of passing his evenings at "the store," give him a certain amount--and a certain kind--of social intercourse which keeps him from absolute rust. the amount of society available for his family is not usually great, and the dulness and confinement of farmhouse life need no description. the main reason for preferring village life is principally because it is better for the women and children; but there are reasons, in the same direction, why better social conditions would give the farmer himself decided benefits. the life, too, would be more _attractive_ for both boys and girls, and would be divested of that naked and dismal gloom and dryness which now drive so much of the best farmer blood of the whole country to work-benches and counters,--to any position, in fact, which promises relief from the stifling isolation of the country. while conceding that, just as a cabinet-maker would make more money if he lived in his back shop, and had little thought from early dawn until late evening except for his work, so the farmer may make more money if he lives on his farm than if he lives at a distance, still it must be said that the difference in profit is by no means so great as would be supposed. it may be fairly assumed, that, at least in the more thickly settled farming regions at the east, the average distance at which farmers live from the nearest centre of population that supplies their "shopping," and from church, is not less than three miles. the visiting acquaintance of the family is nearly or quite as remote; and there is, altogether, so much driving to be done, as to make it necessary to keep a decent carriage and horses, and to supply a certain amount of extra horse service. indeed, among those who are tolerably well off it would be moderate to set down the total services of one good horse as needed to supply the family's demand for transportation. then, too, the need of the farmer himself to go to town to sell and to buy, to get repairs and information, and (a much more generally gratified taste than he would always care to confess to his wife) to satisfy his craving after intercourse with his kind,--who shall estimate the aggregate of all this travel, or even of that part of it which, under the pretext of business, is really only an habitual going for gossip? all of this driving is confined to no season; it is perennial,--in good weather and in bad,--and it costs an amount of time and money that few farmers would like to put down in black and white, and charge to their expense accounts. it would form one of the most serious items of their budget. did the farmer live in a pleasant and attractive village, among neighbors and friends, nearly all of this driving would be saved. the appliances for the family's pleasure-driving might be entirely done away with, for the wife and daughters would gladly exchange the means for occasional visiting and for distant shopping, for an agreeable circle of friends near at hand and a good village store and post-office within five minutes' walk. in such a settlement as is contemplated, most of the business needs of the farmer would be amply supplied, and he would find the companionship at hand even more satisfactory, because more familiar, than that which he now finds in the town. it is not worth while to calculate the cash saving that would come of this reduction of road-*work. it is enough to consider it as an important offset to the cost of carrying men and manure to the field and of bringing crops to the village. under the present system the women have the worst of it. they have the confinement and seclusion and dulness. under the village system the men would have the discomfort, and this is why it will be less easy to secure its adoption; for the men control, and prefer _not_ to have the heavy end of life's log to carry. under either of the plans given herewith, the greatest--not the average--distance from the house to the farm would be about one mile, and it would have to be travelled only during the working weather of the warmer months, and during the good wheeling of winter. in summer, all hands would have to set off early, and come home late, often carrying their dinner with them as mechanics do; but when field-work did not call them out, as during rains, or when the ground is too wet to be disturbed, their barn-work and shop-work would be at home; and, all the winter through, the only road-work to be done would be to send the teams to haul out the manure, and to bring home the hay, which would be best stored under "dutch hay-barracks" in the fields when it was made. this work would be systematic and simple; and it may fairly be questioned whether it would not, in many cases, amount to _less_ than the cost of the "driving" that is now done, and which in the village might be foregone. especially would this be the case when all the heavy farm-work is done by oxen, which when idle, instead of eating their heads off like horses, are accumulating valuable flesh. with sufficient ox-power to do the work easily, the whole transportation of tools and men, and all the hay-tedding and hay-raking, would be easily done by one horse, with leeway enough to allow for a fair amount of business or pleasure travel. so far as the presence of the farmer himself is concerned, it is to be considered that if his farm and cattle are near his house in the village, he will be within easy reach of them very often at times when his visits to the distant town would take him away from them if they were on the farm. in the village, during the whole winter, and in bad weather at other seasons, he would have little necessity or temptation to absent himself from home. indeed, those who have had an opportunity to watch the life of the exceptional farmers whose houses and barns and stables are in a village cannot have failed to notice how much more home-like and engaging is the whole farm establishment than it usually is in the country. it is hardly too much to say that the few instances that we have, as in the farm-villages of new england, show that these village-living farmers are apparently more attentive to their home duties than are their isolated brethren, at least in the matter of tidiness. to complete the comparison with the merchant or manufacturer, who takes his papers or plans home with him for work out of regular hours, one might say that the farmer who lives at a distance from his land, with his flocks and herds gathered about his homestead, has such of his work as needs early and late attention close at hand, while his regular workshop, the farm, calls him away for certain regular hours and regular duties. it is not worth while here to enter into the details of the question. they are of serious moment, and involve among other things the driving of animals to and from pasture, _versus_ the raising of soiling crops to be fed in the stall or yard. all of these questions have been satisfactorily solved in the experience of many exceptional cases in this country, and of the almost universal conditions obtaining in europe. they present no practical difficulty, and need constitute no serious objection to the general plan. the items of economical working and money-making being fully weighed, the more serious considerations of the mode of life, and the good to be got from it, demand even greater attention. it may seem a strange doctrine to be advanced by a somewhat enthusiastic farmer, but it is a doctrine that has been slowly accepted after many years' observation, a conviction that has taken possession of an unwilling mind, that the young man who takes his young wife to an isolated farmhouse dooms her and himself and their children to an unwholesome, unsatisfactory, and vacant existence,--an existence marked by the absence of those more satisfying and more cultivating influences which the best development of character and intelligence demand. it is a common experience of farmers' wives to pass week after week without exchanging a word or a look with a single person outside of their own family circles. the young couple start bravely, and with a determination to struggle against the habit of isolation which marks their class. but this habit has grown from the necessity of the situation; and the necessities of their own situation bring them sooner or later within its bonds. during the first few years they adhere to their resolution, and go regularly to church, to the lecture, and to the social gatherings of their friends; but home duties increase with time, and the eagerness for society grows dull with neglect. those who have started out with the firmest determination to avoid the rock on which their fathers have split, give up the struggle at last, and settle down to a humdrum, uninteresting, and uninterested performance of daily tasks. in saying all this,--and i speak from experience, for i have led the dismal life myself,--it is hardly necessary to disclaim the least want of appreciation of the sterling qualities which have been developed in the american farm household. but it may be safely insisted that these qualities have been developed, not because of the american mode of farm life, but in spite of it; and, as i think over the long list of admirable men and women whose acquaintance i have formed on distant and solitary farms, i am more and more impressed with certain shortcomings which would have been avoided under better social conditions. if any of these is disposed to question the justice of this conclusion, i am satisfied to leave the final decision with his own judgment, formed after a fair consideration of what is herein suggested. if american agriculture has an unsatisfied need, it is surely the need for more intelligence and more enterprising interest on the part of its working men and women. from one end of the land to the other, its crying defect--recognized by all--is, that its best blood, or, in other words, its best brains and its best energy, is leaving it to seek other fields of labor. the influence which leads these best of the farmers' sons to other occupations is not so much the desire to make more money, or to find a less laborious occupation, as it is the desire to lead a more satisfactory life,--a life where that part of us which has been developed by the better education and better civilization for which in this century we have worked so hard and so well, may find responsive companionship and encouraging intercourse with others. it so happens that the few farm villages to which we can refer--such as farmington, hadley, and deerfield--have become so attractive by means of their full-grown beauty, or have been so encroached upon by the wealth that has come over the district to which they belong, that they are no longer to be taken as types of pure country villages; nor do i recall a single village in the land which is precisely what i have now in mind. assuming that a farming neighborhood--two miles, or at the utmost three miles, square--had been so arranged as to have all of its buildings (with the exception of hay-barracks in the fields, and cattle-shelters in the pastures) in a village, let us consider what would be the advantages in the manner of living which it would have to offer. the social benefits, and the facilities for frequent neighborly and informal intercourse, are obvious. to say nothing of the companionships and intimacies among the young people, their fathers and mothers would be kept from growing old and glum by constant friction with their kind; and, in so far as a more satisfactory social relation with one's fellow-men gives cheerfulness and the richness of a wider human interest, in that proportion would the village life have a wholesome, mellowing effect that is not to be found in the remote farmhouse, nor even in the sort of neighborhood we sometimes find in the country where several farmhouses are within a quarter of a mile of each other. the habit of "running in" for a moment's chat with a neighbor is a good one, and it gets but scant development among american farmers. this view of the case will suggest itself quite naturally on the first consideration of the subject. if the first need of the rising generation--the men and women of the future--is education, then the village beats the farm by long odds. the country school-district, sparsely settled and chary of its taxes, is apt to obey the law in the scantiest way possible. three months school in winter and three months more in summer, under the supervision--it can hardly be called the instruction--of a young miss who is by no means well educated herself, and who is entirely often without training as a teacher, gathers together all of the school-going children of a wide neighborhood. big and little, boys and girls, are huddled together in a sort of mental jumble, where the best that the most skilful manager can hope for is to regulate the instruction and the discipline to suit the average of the scholars. the best result attainable is to secure a good amount of _schooling_: the word "education" would be quite misapplied here. in the village, the number of scholars would be sufficiently large to warrant the establishment and to bear the maintenance of one good school, with one, if not more, teachers, regularly employed, and worthy to be called teachers rather than "school-marms." pupils would be graded according to their ages and acquirements, and a due use could be made of the stimulus of competition. a real school, a real instrument of education, would take the place of the noisy congregation of uncontrolled boys and girls, who, in the country district-school, are apt to acquire less of valuable learning than of the minor viciousness that prevails among country children. in this connection, i was forcibly struck with the announcement of a german farmer once in my employ, whose reason for leaving me, after his children had reached the ages of seven and eleven, to return to his little village in germany, was that it was impossible in this country--and this, be it remembered, was in new england--to secure satisfactory instruction for them. he thought that in their experience at school here they had gained little beyond a familiarity with english, and with a large admixture of "bad words" at that. at home they would have, within the elementary range of a primary-school education, a thorough training and a severe drilling which he could not hope for here, and without which he was unwilling that they should grow up. i have seen his village school in germany, and the cloud of tow-headed children who fill it; and i am prepared to believe that his preference was not without foundation. of course we have all the material for as good or better schools in this country. what we need is longer terms, better trained and educated teachers, graded classes, and better books and appliances. these cannot be afforded in the small country school-district. they can be had in their perfection in even a small village; and this consideration alone, even if this were all, should be a controlling argument in favor of village life. but this is by no means all. another great benefit is to be found in the post-office near at hand, with its daily mail as an encouragement to correspondence and to interest in the affairs of the outside world. a village, such as is here pictured, could afford its weekly or semi-monthly public lecture, furnishing a means for instruction and entertainment, and for frequent gatherings. the church, too, would probably be conducted in a more satisfactory way than is usual in the country; and the conditions would be the best suited for fostering that interest in the collateral branches of the church, the bible-class, the sunday school, and the dorcas society, by which the women of the community get, aside from the other good that they receive and do, advantages of a character somewhat corresponding to those which men get from their clubs. i should hope further, as an outgrowth from the community of living, for a modest village library and reading-room. indeed, if i could have my own way, i should not confine the attraction and entertainment of the village to strictly "moral" appliances. it would probably be wiser to recognize the fact that young men find an attraction in amusements which our sterner ancestors regarded as dangerous; and i would not eschew billiards, nor even, "by rigorous enactment," the milder vice of social tobacco. better have a little _harmless_ wickedness near home and under the eye of parents than to encounter the risk that boys, after a certain age, would seek a pretext for more uncontrolled indulgences in the neighboring town. one might go on through the long range of incidental arguments--such as lighted streets, well-kept sidewalks, winter snow-ploughs, and good drainage, and a wholesome pride in a tidy, cosey village, until even the most close-fisted of all our class would confess that the extra cost would bring full value in return, and until he would recognize the fact that the attractions of such a home as the village would make possible would be likely to insure his being succeeded in his wholesome trade by the brightest and best of his sons,--a result that would surely be worth more than all it would cost. but my purpose has been only to suggest a scheme which seems to me entirely, even though remotely, practicable, and in which i hope for the sympathy and help of the country-bound farmers' wives and daughters,--a scheme which promises what seems the easiest, if not the only, relief for the dulness and desolation of living which make american farming loathsome to so many who ought to glory in its pursuit, but who now are only bound to it by commanding necessity. life and work of the eastern farmer. we are all familiar with the lavish praise bestowed--especially when votes are to be secured--upon the "bone and sinew of the country;" but the farmers themselves are very far from accepting as true, even if sincere, the estimate of their qualities which the editor and the public speaker so loudly profess. the average farmer is precisely what any other average man would be who had grown up under the same conditions. there is no mysterious charm belonging to his occupation which removes him beyond the reach of the influences by which all mankind are controlled. coming from the same original stock and inheriting the same peculiarities of race, he is essentially the same as men in other vocations. the character of his work, the necessities of his financial condition, and the social surroundings amid which he has been reared, have had the same influence in moulding his character that similar conditions have had in moulding the characters of others. farming is in a certain sense the basis of all individual and national prosperity; but the case would be more fairly stated were we to say that farming happens to be the first step in an industrial process, many steps of which are alike essential to civilization. the farmer produces raw material, and without raw material the world must come to a stop; but the butcher, the baker, the spinner, the weaver, and every artisan, render as essential service in the development of this raw material into the forms demanded by modern life, as does the farmer in growing it. as a member of the farmer class, i hasten to disclaim for it any _especial_ consideration given it because of its contribution to the welfare of mankind. we are as useful as any other hard-working people, no more and no less. we claim no higher appreciation for muscular effort exerted in swinging the flail than for that applied to the wielding of the hammer. the controlling motive of a farmer in performing his work and carrying on his business is the hope of material gain. he works for the money that he expects to earn, and not with any conscious reference to the service he is rendering to the world. in this capacity as a farmer he is neither a philanthropist nor a patriot, only a man of business. if we wish properly to estimate his character and his value as a factor of modern civilization, we must not be misled by sentimental considerations as to his relation with nature and his "noble" occupation. the conditions of eastern farming and of eastern farm life are the true index, as they are the true cause, of the character of the eastern farmer. these conditions are constantly varying, and their effect is always modified by individual qualities. it may be possible to strike such an average as shall afford a tolerably good suggestion of the real character and condition of the farmer, and a hint as to his future; that is to say, certain prevalent influences tend to mark the type, and certain modifications of these influences may lead to its improvement. any attempt to portray the class as a whole would be met by such a list of exceptions as would seriously affect the result; but the following may be considered true in a large number of cases, and applicable, with minor changes, to many more. let us take the case of an outlying farm in new england, of one hundred acres,--a farm that has been in cultivation from the earlier settlement of the country, and which is of the average degree of improvement, with the usual division into arable, mowing, pasture, and wood land. it lies two or three miles away from a considerable town or village, and its chief industry is the selling of milk in the town. with an allowance of two acres per cow for summer pasture, and of one and a half acres of mowing-land for winter feeding, the cows it keeps number about a dozen. for team-work on the farm and for road-work and pleasure-driving, there are kept two horses and two oxen. in addition to these there will be a greater or less amount of young stock and the usual swine and poultry, and perhaps a few sheep. the farmer himself is the chief workman on the place, and he has the regular help of a hired man or a grown son. an extra hand during the working season is usual; but in winter the farmer and his one assistant will do all of the work of feeding, milking, delivering the milk, hauling out manure, etc. a few years ago the housework was done almost entirely by the mother of the family and her daughters, or by a girl taken to "bring up;" but latterly the more troublesome element of an irish girl in the kitchen has become general, for the daughter of the farmer has aspirations and tastes which disqualify her for efficient household drudgery. in spite of all modern appliances, much of the work of the farmer's household must be so characterized. the life of american farm women is, however, not now under discussion: the subject is a fruitful one, and has important bearings upon the development of the race; but what we are to consider here is simply the work and condition of the farmer himself. the milk-selling farmer--and this industry is one of the most wide-spread in eastern farming--is more regularly employed than any other. winter and summer his cows must be milked twice a day. evening's milk must be cooled and safely kept until morning; and morning's milk must be ready for early delivery. it is usual for the farmer to rise at three every morning, winter and summer, to milk his cows,--with one assistant,--and to start as early as five o'clock to deliver his milk. returning about the middle of the forenoon, he is able to attend to the details of barn-work in winter and field-work in summer, until half-past two or three o'clock in the afternoon, less the brief interval needed for the consumption of food. early in the afternoon the cows must be again milked, and the cans of milk must in summertime be set in spring water for cooling. then comes the feeding of the stock and the greasing of axles, the mending of harness, the repairing of tools, and the thousand and one odds and ends of the farmer's irregular work. in the winter, save for the early rising and the work of cold mornings, life is by no means hurried; and after a very early supper there is often a stroll to the corner store or to a neighbor's house, for a little wholesome idleness and gossip,--the latter not invariably wholesome. at about the hour when the average reader of "the atlantic" has finished his after-dinner cigar, all lights are extinguished, and the farm household is wrapped in heavy slumber; for such early rising as the milk-farmer is condemned to must needs trench upon the valuable evening hours for requisite rest and sleep. in summer the conditions of life are immeasurably hardened. the farmer himself is necessarily absent several hours every morning with his milk-wagon; but, although he cannot lend a hand at the early field work, this work must go on with promptness, and he must arrange in advance for its proper performance. from the moment when he has finished his late breakfast until the last glimmer of twilight, he is doomed to harrowing and often anxious toil. there is no wide margin of profit that will admit of a slackening of the pace. land must be prepared for planting; planting must be done when the condition of the ground and the state of the weather permit. weeds grow without regard to our convenience, and they must be kept down from the first; and well on into the intervals of the hay-harvest the corn-field needs all of the cultivation that there is time for. regularly as clock-work, in the late hours of the night and the early hours of the afternoon, the milking must be attended to; and the daily trip to town knows no exception because of heat, rain, or snow. at rigidly fixed hours this part of the work _must_ be done; and all other hours of the growing and of the harvest seasons are almost more than filled with work of imperative need. these alone seem to make a sufficient demand on the patience and endurance of the most industrious farmer; but, aside from these, he is loaded with the endless details of an intricate business, and with the responsibility of the successful management of a capital of from fifteen to twenty thousand dollars, upon the safety and the economical management of which his success entirely depends; he must avoid leakage and waste, and make every dollar paid for labor, or seed, or manure, or live stock, bring its adequate return. probably no occupation in the world can compare with farming in the opportunity that it offers for the _losing_ of money. nothing is so enticing as slate-and-pencil farming. ten acres of land can be ploughed, manured, and planted with corn, and the crop can be well cultivated and harvested for so many dollars. such land with such manuring and cultivation may be trusted to yield so many bushels of corn to the acre; and, after making due allowance for chance, the balance of the calculation shows a snug profit. in like manner we may figure out a corresponding return from the hay-fields, from the root-crops, from two or three acres of potatoes, and from a patch of garden-truck for which the neighboring village will furnish a good market. then the poultry will return a profitable income in eggs and in "broilers;" and altogether it is easy for an enthusiastic person to show how interest on invested capital and good compensation for labor are to be secured in agriculture. but when the test of practice is applied to our well-studied and proven scheme; when we see how far our allowance for "chances" has fallen below what is needed to cover the contingencies of late springs, dry summers, early frosts, grasshoppers, wire-worms, colorado beetles, midge, weevil, pip, murrain, garget, milk-fever, potato-rot, oats-rust, winter-killing, and all the rest; when we learn the degree of vigilance needed to keep every minute of hired labor and team-work effectively employed; and when we come finally to the items of low markets and bad debts,--we shall see how far these and similar drawbacks have undone our arithmetic, and how often our well-contrived balance must be taken into the footings of the other column of figures. the regular work of the farmer, as indicated in the foregoing sketch of his occupations, and as perceptible to the summer boarder who watches his work from the piazza, although arduous and exacting, may be quite compatible with a happy life; and, when we estimate the promise of the occupation as offering a pleasant livelihood, no able-bodied man need be deterred by it. but when we add this long list of contingencies, and consider the ceaseless anxiety that they bring, we may well hesitate before adopting such a life for ourselves or desiring it for our children. no true estimate of the developed character of the farmer can be formed without giving due value to this uncertain factor in the calculation. instances are hardly exceptional where a clear natural intelligence, an indomitable courage, and great industry, have turned themselves into a real source of mental and moral strength. success achieved in spite of such drawbacks is all the sweeter and all the more inspiriting because of them. but if we take the case of the average farmer with average human weaknesses, we cannot fail to see, that, however well he may have borne up against the more obvious requirements of his work, he has been warped and cramped, and often made in many ways unlovely, by the hard and anxious toil through which his halting success has been attained. in nearly every other occupation than farming, the hardest worker finds a daily relief from his toil, and from the suggestion of toil, in a home that is entirely apart from his industry. however arduous and anxious and long-continued the work, there comes a time when it is laid aside, and when the workman goes into a new sphere, where the atmosphere is entirely changed. his home is a place of rest and pleasure, or at least a place of change. the pen and the hammer are left in the counting-room and in the shop; and, however far the home may fall below his desires and ambition, it is at least free from the cares of the day's occupation. the american farmer has no such relief. his house is a part of his farm; his fireside is shared by an uncongenial hired man, his family circle includes too often a vulgar and uninteresting servant; and from one year to another, his living-room being the kitchen and work-room of the busy farmhouse, he rarely knows what it is to divest himself of the surroundings of his labor and business, and to give himself over to the needed domestic enjoyment and recreation. it is this feature of his life, more than any other, which seems objectionable. if it is objectionable for him, it is infinitely more so for his wife and daughters, who, lacking the frequent visit to the town or occasional chat with strangers, and the invigorating effect of open-air work, yield all the more completely to depressing cares. they become more and more deficient in the lightness and cheerfulness and mental gayety to which in any other occupation the chief toiler of the family would look for recreation at his own fireside. so far as interest in his business is concerned, the farmer's condition is in every way elevated when he devotes himself to some improved form of agriculture, or to some special industry which gives him better compensation for his work. this benefit by no means generally results from an attempt at "scientific" agriculture, nor is the adoption of a special industry by any means generally successful. failure in either of these directions is disheartening and discouraging to those who are watching his example. there are many well-tried improvements upon the old methods of our fathers which are universally adopted, especially in the direction of the use of better implements and more judicious care in the application of manure. but the average agricultural newspaper, while doing great good, has naturally led enthusiastic men to see a chance for ameliorating their condition by the adoption of processes which are not suited to their circumstances, or which they themselves are not qualified to carry out. it is this that has led to the outcry--much more prevalent a generation ago than now--against "book-farming." on the whole, whatever may have been the influences of agricultural writers upon the fortunes of their early converts, they have vastly modified and improved all modern farm-work, and have greatly benefited the more recent farmer. the conditions of the industry are hard, chiefly because the business of farming is a laborious one, and one in which an enormous population is working, with dogged industry, for a moderate reward. however enterprising and intelligent a farmer may be, when he goes to market to sell his crops he finds himself in active competition with men who are working for their bare subsistence. much is said about the competition of the farmers of the rich west as a serious obstacle to success at the east. this is the case only in so far as the eastern farmer attempts to compete with the western in the production of crops which will bear storage and long transportation. as a business proposition, it seems clear that this drawback is to be overcome only by the cultivation at the east of such products as it is not within the power of western competition to supply, or only such as our situation and the good quality of our land will enable us to produce at low cost. milk, fresh butter, and hay are the three most promising staples, for which so large a demand exists as to furnish employment for the whole farming population. hay from its bulk does not bear a very long transportation. milk will always bring a higher price when produced near to the point where it is to be consumed. butter-making is not an especially profitable industry if we depend upon the average grocery-store demand; but it is possible for any farmer at the east, who will take the trouble to make and to retain a good reputation for his dairy, to secure a price enough higher than that of the regular market to constitute a good margin of profit. so far as relief in eastern farming is to be achieved with no material change in the character of life and work, it must apparently be sought in these directions. in his relation to eastern civilization, past, present, and prospective, it may fairly be questioned whether the influence of the eastern farmer is increased since the general introduction of railroads; and we are justified in looking with some anxiety to the relative position which he is to hold hereafter. there are well-known influences at work which are not promising. the desire of the sons and daughters of the farmer to obtain some other means of livelihood, and the too frequent yielding to this temptation on the part of the more intelligent of these young persons, is the most obvious danger to the future of the industry. much has been said of the dignity and independence which come of the ownership of land; but it is possible that this influence has been over-estimated, and that our ideas of it have been derived more or less from our european traditions. perhaps, after all, we ought to and do attach the most importance to that which is the most rare. in england, where the ownership of land carries with it a certain social dignity, and where the mere possession of money has a less marked influence in this direction, there is no doubt that the title-deeds to broad acres constitute a certain sort of patent of nobility. in this country, where land is plenty and cheap and where large fortunes are rare, a farmer gets consideration less for the amount of land that he himself owns, than for the sum-total of the mortgages which he holds upon his neighbors' land. that is to say, it is better to be rich in money than in land; and instances are comparatively rare, even among those who are cultivating their ancestral acres, where the farm would not be gladly sold for a sum of which the income would secure a better and easier mode of life. the farm is not regarded with especial affection: it is mainly regarded--along with its stock and tools--as an instrument for making money. the american farmer is distinguished from the english farmer chiefly by having his capital invested in the land which he cultivates, rather than in the tools and live stock and working capital needed to carry on his business. as a general rule the farmer's whole fortune is invested in his land. often his farm is mortgaged, and he has little loose money with which to improve his system of work. the necessity for making a living and paying interest, without sufficient capital for the best management, makes the life of the farmer too often a grinding one. if he is skilful and industrious and prudent, he may hope with certainty to free himself from debt, and to accumulate a respectable support for his old age. when we consider any class of working people, as a class, this is perhaps all that we can hope for under any circumstances. the unhopeful thing about it all is that while farmers work less hard than their fathers did, and while they get a better return for their work, the surroundings of their life have not improved as have those of men engaged in other industries, so that although actually much better off than their ancestors were, they are relatively less well off in the more attractive conditions of other classes of workmen; and this deficiency is driving away the children on whom they ought to depend for assistance and for succession. in the abstract, farming is a dignified occupation, and in proportion as it borrows aid from science it becomes more dignified. so far as the casual observer can see, it combines more of what is desirable than does any other pursuit. while it promises no brilliant reward, it insures a steady, reliable, and sufficient return for the capital and labor invested in it. it promises a sure provision for old age, and it secures the wholesome pride that comes of the ownership of visible property. indeed, look at it and argue about it as we may, it is not easy to see why it is not the best occupation for a wholesome and intelligent man. those who know the condition of the art intimately, and who have studied the influences of its work and its life upon those who are engaged in it, recognize serious drawbacks which must in some way be removed unless it is to fall away still more from its original character, and is to be given over to german and irish immigrants, who, during one or two generations, will be contented with what it has to offer. it is difficult even to theorize as to the means of relief, if farming must be considered, first of all, as a means for obtaining a livelihood and for making money; and no effort to improve the situation of the farmer will be successful which does not keep this prime necessity always in view. it is easy to see how the condition of any farmer's family might be improved by a large additional income; but there is no obvious source from which this increase is to be drawn, nor will he adopt any scheme that will endanger the income that he now receives. if we could convert the farmer into a chemist and physiologist, and give him the satisfaction that comes of controlling the combinations of physical and chemical materials according to laws which he understands, and of securing his results with scientific accuracy, we should accomplish our purpose; for no man with such scientific knowledge, realizing its relation to his daily work, could fail of an enthusiastic fondness for his profession. but the worst of it is that all efforts in this direction have generally ended in producing a "smatterer," whose theories are baffled by constant disappointment, and whose worldly prosperity is lessened by his mistaken experiments. successful farming implies, first of all, steady and dogged hard work, coupled with prudent and watchful skill. when the hopes of enthusiastic agricultural reformers are considered with the practical eye of cold common sense, they must inevitably be condemned to disappointment. in so far as they constitute an incentive towards improvement, they work great good; but the success of the future is to be attained too often through the distressing failure of the present. the art is an experimental one, and the temptations to extend experiments are enticing. unfortunately, novel processes depend for their success upon contingencies which are likely to be disregarded at the outset; and, however much any improvement may be destined to prosper after its application shall have been practically tested and modified, it is altogether likely that its first introduction will result in failure. the mere money losses coming of these failures are not so serious; but the discouragement and disappointment that they entail exert the gravest influence where what is chiefly needed is the encouragement of success. it is something to know the direction that improving effort should take; and it seems to be generally conceded that what american agriculture needs, at the east and at the west, but especially at the east, is _an improvement in the character of its personnel_. there is everywhere ample opportunity for the profitable and successful introduction of modified processes and of new industries. there is, too, hardly an instance where the processes and industries now pursued are not susceptible of great improvement of detail. there are few farms so well managed and so successful, that if given into the hands of better, more intelligent, and more enterprising farmers, they would not produce better results. the father is working according to his light, and is directing his work by such intelligence as his natural capacity and his training have given him. his brighter son, with more natural intelligence, with a better education, and less trammelled by traditions and prejudices, might so modify the same industry as to make it more certain, more profitable, and in every way more satisfactory. the change that is now taking place, especially in new england, is toward the greater economy of living, and the harder work and closer management of business, that comes with immigrant proprietorship; and this element is by no means to be depended upon for the improvement of our farming. it may result in a more money-making agriculture, but it will supplant our best political element by the introduction of what has thus far seemed to be one of the worst. look at this question as we will, it is difficult to see how else than by improving the race of american farmers we are to accomplish any result whose good effect will be radical and lasting. this brings us around to that threadbare subject of the vague discussion of agricultural writers: "how to keep the boys on the farm." the devices recommended for accomplishing this result have thus far failed of their object. the average farmer boy is not a sentimentalist, and he is not likely to be moved by the sort of talk so often lavished upon him. to use a vulgarism, he has an extremely "level head." he fails to realize the attraction and the dignity which are implied by what he is told of the nobleness of his father's calling, of the purifying and elevating influences of a daily intercourse with nature. he is not to be caught with this sort of chaff. his cultivation has not been of that æsthetic character that he has an especial drawing toward nobleness, or purity, or elevation. nature, as he knows it, shows at times an unattractive side; and he fails to recognize precisely what is meant by mother earth as a source of dignity. to him mother earth is an exacting parent, calling for constant and regular toil, and whipping him on day by day with weeds to be hoed, dry gardens to be watered, snowdrifts to be shovelled, and an almost endless round of embarrassments to be overcome. as for the purity and simplicity of the farmer's life, he knows very much better than to pin his faith to it. to him the farmer's house is too often a place where the mother is overworked, tired, wearied with constant annoyance, and made peevish and fretful. the conversation of hired men and young neighbors and brothers is not marked by refined delicacy and simplicity, as he understands these terms. at the end of all our preaching he will say, at least to himself, that this is probably the sort of talk that we consider appropriate to the occasion, but that, if we knew what he knows about farming, we should see how little effect it is likely to have. if he sought our motive in saying it, he would conclude that we were interested in keeping up the supply of farm labor; and that so far as _he_ was concerned, since he must work for a living, he would work at some other industry if he could get a chance, and leave those who were less fortunate to work on the farm. the more sentimental and more influential considerations governing in this matter were very well set forth by dr. holland in a paper on farm life in new england, published in "the atlantic monthly" some twenty years ago. while acknowledging the frequency of bright exceptions to the rule, he does not hesitate to set it down as a rule that the life described is in every way a hateful one; where every member of the family, from father to child, is driven by the lash of stern necessity, and where many conditions which are deemed requisite in the life of all other classes of the same wealth are comparatively rare; where the expectant mother of the child is worked without stint to her last day, while the mother of the colt is relieved from all hard toil and treated with consideration throughout the last months of her time; where, in short, whether from interest or from a mistaken idea of necessity, hard work long hours, poor food, and dismal surroundings are the rule of the farmer's household. since that time there have been noticeable modifications, involving the introduction of more or less tastefulness, because of the cheap literature and cheap music of these later days. but, much as these have done to affect the individual characters of the younger members of the family, they have only aggravated the evil, so far as farm-work is concerned, by creating a desire, born of knowledge, for the pleasanter manner of life which the town has to offer. the young girls whom one now sees about railway stations in the most distant part of the country are dressed after the instructions of "harper's bazar" and "peterson's magazine;" and they know more than their older sisters did of the difference between their own life and that of their city cousins. they are certainly not to be blamed if they long for some vocation in which they can more freely indulge their growing ideas of luxury, and gratify their growing desire for better dress and more interesting companionship. all that has here been said is seriously true and important. the circumstances described are so generally prevalent as to constitute, with constant minor variations, an almost universal rule. where we are to look for relief, is the most serious problem. relief must be found, or the character of our farming class must assuredly degenerate. in one way or another we must change, in a radical degree, the conditions of the farmer's life. we can perfectly understand why it should be distasteful to any young person of ordinary ambition or intelligence; and we know, from the constant flocking of farmers' sons and daughters to even the least attractive employments of the town or village, that this distaste is everywhere a controlling one. it is easy to say that the farmer's life must be made more cheerful, attractive, and refined, and less arduous; but it is by no means easy to see how the improvement is to be brought about. the cardinal defect is the loneliness and dulness of the isolated farmhouse. intelligent and educated young women, brought up among the pleasantest surroundings, marry young farmers, and undertake their new life with the determination that, in their case at least, the more obvious social requirements shall be met. during the earlier years after marriage they adhere to their resolution, and are regular in attendance at the church and public lecture; and they keep up, so far as possible, social intercourse with their neighbors. but as time goes on, as the family increases, as toil begins to tell on health and strength and energy, they drop out, little by little, from the habit of going abroad, until often for weeks together they never exchange a look or thought with any human being outside of their own households. aside from the overworked members of their own families, their companionship is confined to hired men who smell of the stable, and to hired girls with whom they are yoked in the daily round of household duties. having given much consideration to the subject, i have come to believe that the agriculture of continental europe is far more wisely arranged than ours; for there, almost as a universal rule, isolated farm-life is unknown. the reward of the cultivator is less, and his labor is at least as great. the people are of a very much lower order, and are lacking in the cultivated intelligence which distinguishes so many of our own farming class. women and even young girls perform rude labor in the field and in the stable; and those aspirations which are born of a universal diffusion of periodical literature are almost unknown. at the same time, when the hard and long day's work is over, there comes to all the inexpressible relief and delight of the active social intercourse of the village, where the tillers of the country for a mile around have gathered together their homes and their herds, and where the most intimate social life prevails. observation even indicates that the habit of out-of-door labor has had no injurious effect upon the women of these villages. the "nut-brown maid" grows too fast into the wrinkled-brown woman; but better a sunburnt and weather-beaten cheek than that pallor that comes of anthracite and in-door toil. better the broad back and stout limb of the peasant mother than the hollow chest and wasted energy of the american farmer's wife. i by no means intend to say that our own farming class is not far superior to the peasantry of europe; but i do believe that if a good system of village life for farmers could be adopted here under the modifying influences of the more refined and intelligent american character, we should have gained a most important step in advance. we have in new england many villages almost exclusively of farmers,--villages where the old-time settlers gathered together for defence against the indians, and for the protection of houses and stock and store from river floods. these villages are as different as it is possible to conceive from the ordinary european cluster of unattractive cottages, lining both sides of a street which is filled for one-half of its width with manure-heaps. it may be naturally assumed that any adaptation of the village system among us would be governed by the same refining influences which have made our few existing agricultural villages so beautiful and attractive. that which most distinguishes american people is the general spread of education among them; but it is, after all, an education which soon reaches its limit, and, so far as the district-school of a sparsely-settled country neighborhood is concerned, it goes little beyond the simplest rudiments. an inexperienced young miss holds school for not more than one-half the year in an unattractive and inconvenient room, in which are gathered together most of the boys and girls of the school-going age from all the farms about. the books and other appliances of instruction are inadequate. there is no grading of the pupils, and the frequent change of teachers prevents the possibility of experienced instructions. even in the meanest peasant village of germany, a village always prolific in children, an inexorable law compels all between the ages of five and fourteen to attend regularly the teaching of a master, an officer of the state, who has generally adopted his profession for life, and who adds to a certain specified degree of capability the advantages of long experience. no thoughtful person can fail to be convinced, after a due consideration of the argument in its favor, that, if the social influences inseparable from village-life could be secured to the american farmer, the greatest drawback of his life would be done away with. it remains, unfortunately, a serious question, how far such a radical change is practicable. there is little doubt that the family would naturally drift into some more costly style of living; and the necessity for hauling to a distant home all the crops of the fields, and of hauling out the manure made at the homestead, would add somewhat to the expenses of the business. in the case of the individual farmer now cultivating land upon which he lives, it is not unlikely that he would find a certain pecuniary disadvantage in the change. but, as a broad question of the future benefit of our agriculture, it must be conceded that whatever will tend to make the occupation more attractive cannot fail, by enlisting the services of more intelligent minds, to insure its very decided improvement. as the case now stands, the farmer's son will become a clerk or a mechanic rather than remain a farmer, because clerks and mechanics live in communities where there is more to interest the mind, and where, too, the opportunities for enjoyment and amusement are greater. the farmer's daughter will marry the clerk or the mechanic rather than a farmer, because she knows the life of a farmer's wife to be a life of dulness and dearth, while she believes that the wife of the clerk or mechanic will be condemned to less arduous labor, and will have much more agreeable surroundings. i have no means of judging what may have been the experience in deerfield, mass., for instance; but i am confident that many a mechanic's daughter, and indeed many young women of much higher position in life, would consider her lot a fortunate one in becoming the wife of a farmer whose homestead lay on the beautiful street of this old village. all that is here said is, to a certain extent, mere theory; but the subject is one that has not thus far met any practical solution, and in which, therefore, nothing except theorizing is possible. the broad fact is that the farming class in this country is degenerating by the withdrawal of its best blood; and still more serious injury is being done to it by the introduction of the lower class of foreigners. it may well be doubted whether it is possible so to modify the manner of life of the isolated farmhouse as to make it materially more attractive to american boys and girls. all that can be done is to rob it of its isolation by withdrawing its people, and placing them under better conditions of life. in a word, the only way that seems to offer to keep the boys on the farm is to move everybody off of the farm, bringing them together into snug little communities, where they may secure, without abandoning the manifest advantages of their occupation, the greater social interest and stimulus which they now hope to enjoy by going into other callings whose natural advantages are less. that such a course as this would restore the farmer to his former position as a leading element in eastern civilization, cannot be questioned. that he will retain even the relative influence that he exercises to-day, unless some radical change is made, is at least very doubtful. in considering the questions here suggested, we must never lose sight of the fact that the controlling element is economy. the farmer exists because he is needed. the world demands the products that he produces, and the world must needs pay him a living compensation for them. no change will be possible which disregards this; and all who know the present circumstances which control the reward of the farming class know that these circumstances would be inadequate to maintain him in a life of greater ease, while calling for greater expense. this gives the added embarrassment that we must not only change the mode of life, but must also increase the ratio of profit, if this is possible. this is possible only through a reduction of the area cultivated, the cultivation of this reduced area in a more thorough and profitable way, and the turning of farming industry into channels better adapted to securing a profitable return. to discuss a modification of the whole system of farming would involve far more detail than is possible in this paper, since such a discussion must include the consideration of features which would change with changing locality; but, by way of illustration, we may take the previously supposed case of a farmer owning one hundred acres of land, and milking a dozen cows, selling the milk as before in the distant town. assume that he and his neighbors within a radius of about a mile are living in a central village, from which his land is one mile distant. during the working season, say from the middle of april until late in october, he must, with his teams and assistants, spend the whole day on the land. the cows are milked and all stable work done before breakfast, and some one drives them out to pasture. the men remain a-field until an hour before sunset. they must be content with a cold dinner, as is the usual custom with mechanics and laborers. the cows are driven home in time for the evening milking, and are put into the barnyard at night with green fodder brought home by the returning teams. after the "chores" are done, and a hearty and substantial supper is eaten,--the principal meal of the day,--all hands will be too weary for much enjoyment of the evening, but not so weary that they will not appreciate the difference between the lounging places of a village and the former dulness at the farm. other farmers in the neighborhood will, many of them, also be milk producers; and, as the stables are near together, they will naturally co-operate, sending their milk to market with a single team, employing the services of a single man in the place of five or six men and teams heretofore needed to market the same milk. i have recently received an account of this sort of co-operation, where the cost of selling was reduced to a fraction over eight cents for each hundred quarts. this arrangement will have the still further benefit of allowing the farmer to remain at home and attend to his more important work, leaving the detail of marketing to be done by a person especially qualified for it and therefore able to do it more cheaply than he could do it in person. during the working season there will be enough rainy weather to allow the work of the stable, the barnyard, and the woodshed to be properly attended to. there will of course be sudden showers and occasional storms, and other inconveniences, which will make the farmer regret at times that he lives at such a distance from his field work; but he will find more than compensation in the advantages that come naturally from living in a village. for his wife and children the improvement will be absolute; and it will be no slight argument in favor of the change, that both in doors and out of doors a better class of servants will be available, because of the better life that can be offered. it will be easier to secure the services of laborers who are married and who live in their own houses, and so avoid the serious annoyance to the household that attends the boarding of hired men. to make this radical change in any farming neighborhood as at present constituted, would be impracticable. it would probably take a generation to convince the farmers of a community of its advantages; it would cost too much, even if not entirely impracticable, to move the house and stables to the central point; and it would involve such a change of habits of labor and of living as must necessarily be the work of time. however, if the principle commends itself to the leading men of the neighborhood, and especially to young men about to marry, the nucleus of a village may be established, and sooner or later the present or the coming generation will find a way to come into the fold. if we assume that by this or some other means the more intelligent of the young men are induced to remain farmers, it is interesting to consider in what way their greater intelligence is to be made to tell on their work so as to secure the necessary improvement. it would not be unreasonable to suppose that young men of the class we have in mind, those who now seek occupations which afford a better field for their intelligence, and who seek them because of their intelligence, would establish such centres of discussion and interest in improved farming as would not only mitigate the worthless gossip now so common at the country store, but would awaken a real enthusiasm in better processes and systems. not only would there be this tendency toward improvement; but where farmers are close neighbors, and are able to conduct their interests in such a way as to help each other, there would naturally grow up some sort of co-operative business. by the establishment of a butter-factory or cheese-factory, or by the common ownership of a milk-route, or where tobacco is grown by the undertaking of its manufacture as an employment for winter, or by the raising of honey or of poultry, or by the establishment of some valuable breed of live stock with a reputation for excellence that will cause it to be sought for from abroad, or by some other combination, they would secure profitable business. of course all the farmers in new england cannot within the next ten years move into villages; but what is suggested is that the farmers of some one community should try the experiment. their success might induce others to follow the example; and little by little, in proportion to the promise of a good result, more and more would seek the advantages which the system would offer, so that sooner or later the benefits which are now experienced in village life in europe might be felt here in the higher degree which greater intelligence and greater freedom would be sure to produce. while advancing these suggestions, with much confidence in their practical value, i would by no means confine the outlook for eastern farming to this single road to success. co-operative industry may be largely adopted among farmers living at some distance from each other. the cheese-factory has become an institution. the better quality of the product when made in large quantities, and the better price that its quality and the improved system for marketing have secured, constitute a very decided success in our agriculture. butter-factories are coming into vogue with a promise of equally good results. a very good substitute for the co-operative management of a milk route is in very general adoption throughout new england, where some single farmer who devotes himself to selling milk buys the product of his neighbor's dairies for a certain fixed price, taking upon himself the labor, the risk, and the profit of marketing. the co-operative breeding of live stock cannot as yet be said to have become well established, but its possibilities of success are considerable. a community can afford to buy and keep a thorough-bred horse, or bull, or boar, or buck, which would cost far too much for the means of a single owner, and thus gradually give to the stock of the whole neighborhood a superiority that will secure it a wide-spread reputation and insure good prices. let us keep always in view the important principle of making two blades of grass grow where but one grew before; but let us remit no effort which may tend to make one blade worth what two were worth before. incidentally, there may be combinations to secure good outlet drainage for tracts of land belonging to different owners, and later a provision for the general irrigation of these lands. it is not to be hoped, that, either as a whole or in its details, agricultural improvement is to be advanced with any thing like a rush. farmers are generally "conservative" in the worst sense of the term. they have during the past generation adopted many improvements and modifications in the methods of their work, the mere suggestion of which would have been scouted by their fathers; but they are themselves as ready as their fathers were to scout any further new suggestion, and it is only by iteration and reiteration that the shorter steps of tentative experiment can be urged upon their acceptance. in reviewing what is written above, the thought arises that the one impression that it will surely produce will be that its writer fails to appreciate the better influences that cluster around the better class of farmers' homes. such an inference would be quite unjust. knowing as i do the intrinsic worth and the charming qualities of very many of these households, i appeal to the best of the thoughtful men and women whom they include, to confirm my statement that they find many elements of their life to be pinching and hard, and that however admirable they may now be, they would be in no way injured, but in many ways improved, by more frequent intercourse with their equals, and especially with their betters. that the picture i have sketched of the average farmer's family is not overdrawn, i appeal to every country clergyman and physician to bear witness. the truths suggested are patent to all. they are set forth in no spirit of hypercriticism, and with no other view than to help to ameliorate the condition of those to whom they refer. knowing the farmer more intimately than does the average editor or orator, i am confident that my estimate of his character and of his life will strike him as being more just, if not more honest. * * * * * by the same author. ~a farmer's vacation.~ sketches of travel in europe; with a very complete account of the drainage of the great haarlem lake in holland; notes on dutch farming; a journey in normandy and brittany; and an elaborate description of the channel islands,--their agriculture, social customs, scenery, &c. beautifully illustrated. price $ . . ~whip and spur.~ papers reprinted from the "atlantic monthly,"--largely about army experiences; and certain horses, at home and in the field. price $ . . ~the elements of agriculture.~ a work of practical science for farmers. price $ . . ~the sanitary drainage of houses and towns.~ illustrated. price $ . . ~draining for profit, and draining for health.~ complete directions for the drainage of agricultural lands, swamps, malarious districts, &c. fully illustrated. price $ . . ~the handy book of husbandry.~ a manual for american farmers. fully illustrated. price $ . . ~the sanitary condition of town and country houses.~ price cents. in press. _the bride of the rhine; two hundred miles in a mosel row-boat._ united states department of agriculture farmers' bulletin washington, d. c. january , contribution from the bureau of biological survey, henry w. henshaw, chief. cottontail rabbits in relation to trees and farm crops. by d. e. lantz, _assistant biologist_. [transcriber's note: words surrounded by tildes, like ~this~ signifies words in bold. words surrounded by underscores, like _this_, signifies words in italics.] contents. page. introduction habits of cottontail rabbits protection of rabbits means of repressing rabbits natural enemies hunting trapping poisoning bacterial diseases protection of crops from rabbits rabbit-proof fences tree protection washes mechanical contrivances other means note.--this bulletin discusses the distribution and habits of cottontail rabbits and methods of controlling their ravages on trees and cultivated crops by means of trapping, poisoning, and supplying safeguards. for general distribution. introduction. among the serious pests in orchards and tree plantations are the several native species of rabbits. these animals do considerable damage to garden truck and other farm crops also, especially on lands recently opened to cultivation. north american rabbits belong to two general classes easily distinguished by their size and habits. the larger forms[ ] include the arctic and varying hares, or snowshoe rabbits, and the jack rabbits, and are found throughout nearly all of alaska and canada and in all the states west of the mississippi except arkansas and louisiana. east of the mississippi they inhabit the northern parts of minnesota, wisconsin, and michigan, most of new york and new england, and southward in the appalachian mountains, parts of pennsylvania, maryland, and virginia. [footnote : genus _lepus_.] the smaller forms,[ ] generally called "cottontail rabbits," occur in every state, but are absent from the greater part of maine, the northern parts of new hampshire, vermont, new york, michigan, wisconsin, and minnesota, and from the western parts of washington and oregon. in recent years they have extended their range northward in the new england states, new york, and portions of the west, and have invaded and occupied a considerable part of the province of ontario. in habits they differ materially from the larger rabbits. they live in copses and thickets more than in open fields. the young are born blind, naked, and helpless, while those of the larger rabbits have the eyes open, are partially furred, and active when born. [footnote : genus _sylvilagus_.] rabbits of both genera, however, feed exclusively on vegetation, and are at times harmful to crops and especially to trees. because of their size and great abundance in parts of their range, jack rabbits are by far the most destructive, but, except in a few places where they have been introduced, none are found east of the mississippi. epizootics (diseases which attack many animals at the same time) are an effectual natural check, and after such attack occurs, jack rabbits are usually so reduced in numbers that they are not troublesome again for several years. traps and other devices that are effective with cottontail rabbits do not always succeed with jack rabbits. the recommendations contained in this bulletin will, therefore, apply only to cottontail rabbits, but they may suggest methods that, with modifications, may be used against the larger forms. habits of cottontail rabbits. cottontail rabbits (fig. ) are so well known that little need be said of their habits. they breed several times each year during the warmer months, the litters averaging five or six young. the nest is usually placed in a hollow or depression of the ground, often in open fields or meadows. it is composed of dead grass and warmly lined with fur which the female pulls from her own body. the male rabbit takes no part in caring for the young, and the female weans them as soon as they are able to leave the nest. these animals breed so rapidly that in spite of many natural enemies, and of the fact that they are hunted for human food, they often become numerous enough to inflict serious losses on farmers and fruit growers in many parts of the united states (fig. ). cottontail rabbits eat all sorts of herbage--leaves, stems, flowers, and seeds of herbaceous plants and grasses--and leaves, buds, bark, and fruits of woody plants or trees. they usually prefer the most succulent foods, as young shoots, tender garden vegetables, clover, alfalfa, and fallen ripe fruits; but they exhibit also a remarkable delicacy of taste in their selection of certain varieties of cultivated plants and in their neglect of others of the same species. prof. c. v. piper reports that in oregon rabbits ate arabian alfalfa down to the ground, while they did little or no damage to other varieties grown in surrounding plats. prof. c. a. mooers, of the tennessee agricultural experiment station, reports similar observations in regard to their taste for soy beans, stating that they greatly relish the mammoth yellow variety and that it is practically the only one that suffers from their depredations. when favorite foods are absent rabbits resort to whatever is available. it is during summer droughts or when deep snows cut off ordinary supplies that the animals attack the bark of growing trees or shrubs. [illustration fig. .--cottontail rabbit in its "form."] protection of rabbits. cottontail rabbits are valuable for food and afford excellent sport for gunners. in many states, especially east of the mississippi river, they are protected as game. in fruit-growing and truck-farming districts farmers regard them with disfavor, and there is considerable rivalry between sportsmen and farmers to have their opposing views reflected in game laws. the interests of the two classes do not seriously differ, however, for when rabbits are closely hunted losses from their depredations are usually reduced to a minimum. still there is danger that in years favorable for their increase the animals may inflict serious injury to trees during severe winters. rabbits are protected ( ) by close seasons in states and provinces as shown in table i. twenty-eight states, alaska, and the canadian provinces not mentioned in the table do not protect rabbits of any kind. in the district of columbia all shooting is prohibited except on certain river marshes. in kentucky rabbits may be taken with dog, trap, or snare at any time, and the close season for shooting is evidently solely for the purpose of keeping gunners out of fields and woods during the two months immediately preceding the open season for quails. in wisconsin counties, mostly in the southern half of the state, have no close season for rabbits. in california only cottontails, or bush rabbits, are protected. [illustration fig. .--apple tree killed by rabbits.] table i.--_lengths of open season for rabbits or hares._ ----------------------+-----------+-----------+--------- | beginning | beginning | length state or province. | of | of | of open | open | close | season. | season. | season. | ----------------------+-----------+-----------+--------- | | | _months._ maine | oct. | apr. | new hampshire | do. | mar. | vermont | sept. | do. | - / massachusetts | oct. | do. | - / rhode island | nov. | jan. | connecticut | oct. | do. | - / new york | oct. | feb. | long island | nov. | jan. | new jersey | nov. | dec. | - / pennsylvania | nov. | dec. | delaware | nov. | jan. | - / maryland | nov. | dec. | - / district of columbia | nov. | feb. | virginia | do. | do. | kentucky | nov. | sept. | ohio | do. | dec. | / indiana | apr. | jan. | - / illinois | aug. | feb. | - / michigan | oct. | mar. | - / wisconsin: | | | counties | sept. | feb. | - / counties | oct. | do. | - / counties | nov. | jan. | colorado | oct. | mar. | california | july | feb. | - / british columbia | sept. | jan. | ontario | oct. | dec. | - / quebec: | | | zone | oct. | feb. | - / zone | do. | mar. | - / newfoundland | sept. | jan. | - / prince edward island | nov. | feb. | nova scotia | oct. | mar. | ----------------------+-----------+-----------+--------- in about half the states that have a close season for rabbits the laws permit farmers and fruit growers to destroy the animals to protect crops or trees. such provision might well be incorporated in game laws of all states. for lack of it farmers have sometimes suffered severe losses, and not a few have been compelled to pay fines for trying to protect their property from rabbits. in states that protect rabbits it is well for the farmer to be acquainted with the game laws and in case of doubt to have a clear understanding with local and state game, wardens before undertaking to destroy rabbits. means of repressing rabbits. natural enemies. among the agencies that help to keep down the numbers of rabbits few are more effective than carnivorous birds and mammals. these include large hawks and owls, eagles, coyotes, wildcats, foxes, minks, weasels, dogs, and cats. eagles, the larger species of hawks, and all the large and medium-sized owls make rabbits a great part of their food. from the standpoint of the farmer and fruit grower these birds and certain carnivorous mammals are far more beneficial than harmful. on the other hand, poultry growers and sportsmen regard them as enemies to be destroyed whenever possible. in the absence of such natural enemies, rabbits, as well as rats and mice, often become a menace to valuable crops. indiscriminate slaughter of carnivorous birds and mammals should be suppressed whenever rodent pests are to be controlled. hunting. hunting has been the most important factor in keeping down the numbers of rabbits in america. in some parts of the country the animals have been so reduced in numbers by shooting that sportsmen have invoked legislation to prevent their extermination. shooting is undoubtedly the best method for hunting this animal. ferreting is often impracticable, since our native rabbits do not habitually burrow; besides, the use of ferrets is forbidden by law in many states that protect the rabbit. coursing with greyhounds is popular in the west, where the swifter jack rabbits are abundant. cottontails are often chased with foxhounds, but the beagle is rapidly taking precedence as a favorite for hunting these animals, the gun being used to secure the game. where the country is sufficiently open for the purpose, the organized hunt, in which everyone who owns a gun is supposed to take part, is a good means of reducing the number of rabbits. these organized hunts are popular in the west, where they are also varied, in the case of jack rabbits, by what is known as the "rabbit drive." a large territory is surrounded by men and the animals are driven into a corral built of wire netting. while a few cottontails are sometimes included in the catch, these usually find refuge in open burrows or under cover of rocks or brush, so that this method is hardly applicable to them. trapping. rabbits are easily trapped or snared, and while these methods of taking them are slow, they are always feasible when cottontails infest woodlot, orchard, nursery, field, or garden. many are caught in old-fashioned box traps set with a figure- trigger with cord attached to hold up the box lid. an improvement on this familiar trap, widely used in the middle west, and often called the wellhouse[ ] trap, is a box inches long and about inches high and inches wide (inside measurements) made of -inch fence boards, preferably old ones. the box is closed at the rear and has a wire door in front which swings inward from the top, a cleat at the bottom preventing its opening outward. the trap is set and the wire door kept open by a wire trigger-rod held in place by two staples in the top of the box. the trigger-rod is bent downward into a loop or figure near the rear of the trap. as the rabbit enters the trap and crowds into the back part it presses against the loop, moves the trigger-rod backward and is imprisoned as the wire door is released and falls. bait may be used but is unnecessary, since cottontails frequently take refuge in dark places from enemies or inclement weather. [footnote : after the late mr. fred wellhouse, of topeka, kans.] [illustration: fig. .--details of a wellhouse rabbit trap.] the materials needed for making a wellhouse trap are: four boards by , inches long, for the sides; a piece by , inches long, for the back; a small cleat for the door stop; - / inches of wire for the door; inches of wire for the trigger; small staples for hanging the door and trigger; and nails (fig. ). [illustration: fig. .--cross section of a walmsley tile trap for rabbits.] mr. j. m. walmsley recently sent to the department photographs and a description of a permanent rabbit trap made of sewer tile and used on his and other farms in kansas (fig. ). a by inch "tee" is set with the long end downward and buried so that the -inch opening is below the surface of the ground. two lengths of -inch sewer pipe are then connected horizontally with the opening. soil is placed over the joints to exclude light. the upright tile should be fitted with a tight removable cover--mr. walmsley uses old harrow disks for the purpose. the projecting end of the small tile is surrounded with rocks, brush, or wood, so as to make the hole look inviting to rabbits (fig. ), and that they may appropriate the den as a place of concealment and shelter. a number of these traps in various places, and especially in the vicinity of the orchard, have kept mr. walmsley's farm comparatively free of rabbits. rabbits occupy these tile traps, go in or out at will, and may be captured when desired. whenever mr. walmsley visits his traps he is accompanied by a trained dog that locates the trapped animals. the cover is lifted from the upright tile and the rabbit captured by hand; if it bolts from the side opening it is caught by the dog. a short pole fitted with a -inch wooden disk may be inserted in the side opening to prevent escape. [illustration: fig. .--a walmsley tile trap in use.] these traps are especially suitable for open lands and prairies, where rabbits can not find many natural hiding places. built on waste land, they may become a permanent part of the farm equipment and will cost nothing for repairs from year to year. their first cost may be greatly reduced by use of second-grade or even broken tiles. if one wishes to poison rabbits, the baits may be placed inside these traps and domestic animals or birds will not be endangered. the walmsley trap also furnishes an excellent means of obtaining rabbits for the table or even for market without damaging them by shooting. poisoning. poison for killing rabbits has been used in the west with considerable success. only in exceptional cases, however, is its use advisable in states that protect rabbits. the most favorable season for using poison is in winter or after a long drought in summer has made green food scarce. in some localities summer poisoning is interfered with by crickets or grasshoppers consuming the bait. the following method is adapted for general use: insert crystals of strychnine or powdered strychnine in pieces of apple or melon rind and place these baits at intervals along rabbit runs or paths. ~take care to put the poisoned baits where children and domestic animals can not get them.~ where no well-defined runs are visible in orchards, artificial ones may be made with a narrow drag or scraper. along such runs or the dead furrows of plowed fields rabbits habitually travel. baits may be placed on the ground or elevated on short sticks along the path, and should be looked after with care. ~any baits left after poisoning operations are finished should be destroyed.~ for poisoning rabbits in winter or during droughts the following formula is recommended: good oats, quarts; powdered strychnine, ounce; laundry starch, tablespoonful; soda (bicarbonate), ounce; saccharine, / ounce; water, quart. mix the starch with / pint of cold water. pour this into - / pints of boiling water and continue the boiling for a minute or two until the starch is clear. mix the dry strychnine and soda in a small pan and sift it over the hot starch, stirring thoroughly to form a smooth paste. add the saccharine and stir again. pour the mixture over the oats in a metal tub, mixing until all the grain is wet. allow the oats to dry before distributing. not over a tablespoonful of the grain should be put in a single bait and this should be scattered considerably. a little alfalfa hay will help attract rabbits to the poisoned grain. this poison is recommended for use when snow covers the ground. it is effective against both cottontails and large rabbits. partly ripened heads of barley or wheat soaked in a solution of strychnine and saccharine or coated with the starch-strychnine solution just described have also proved effective baits for rabbits, but ~great care must be exercised~ in using them, as ~they are likely to be eaten by live stock~. cottontail rabbits may be poisoned in winter by baiting them with twigs cut from apple trees and dipped in or thinly coated with the starch-strychnine poison. these twigs are scattered along rabbit trails and are effective against both meadow mice and rabbits. they are less dangerous to domestic animals than grain baits. bacterial diseases. the fact that when rabbits become excessively abundant in any locality epizootic diseases often destroy them in large numbers has led many people to expect that a micro-organism would be found which would afford a ready means of rabbit control. the biological survey receives many applications for such bacterial preparations. in reply to all of them it has been necessary to state that thus far all attempts to spread contagious disease artificially among wild rabbits have failed to give practical results. protection of crops from rabbits. complete extermination of rabbits in any part of the united states is not desirable, even if possible. they should be reduced in numbers only sufficiently to secure comparative safety to crops, and before active wholesale destruction of the animals is attempted the possibility of crop protection by other means should be carefully considered. in many cases one of these means would probably be the more economical method. rabbit-proof fences. when rabbits are abundant and the area to be protected is not too great, a rabbit-proof fence may profitably be used. woven-wire netting is recommended for this purpose. this material is in general use, not only against the rabbit pests of australia and europe, but in our own country against both large and small rabbits. as our species burrow less than the european rabbit the requirements for rabbit proofing a fence here are not so great. even the cottontails, when driven by hunger, will dig under a fence, but this may be prevented either by use of wire with close barbs in contact with the ground or by plowing a furrow against the lower edge. a netting of galvanized wire with - / -inch mesh and - / to feet high is a sufficient barrier against cottontails. where snow is infrequent market gardeners and nurserymen use a -foot fence, but in the north they prefer to use a netting - / feet wide, and to turn from to inches of the lower edge flat and cover it with soil. netting made of no. wire costs from to cents a rod. heavier netting slightly increases the cost, but adds to the durability of the fence. where lumber is cheap, a picket fence or one made of laths and wire is practicable. when deep snows fall and drifts form, fences offer no protection to crops against rabbits. tree protection. washes. many devices for protecting trees from rabbits have been recommended, the majority of which are paints, smears, or washes supposed to be distasteful to the animals. many are not sufficiently permanent to afford protection for an entire winter, and most of those that are lasting are injurious to trees. coal tar, pine tar, tarred paper, and oils, under certain conditions, are dangerous to young trees. carbolic acid and other volatile substances afford only temporary protection, and must be renewed too often to warrant their use. bitter substances, like commercial aloes and quassia, are useless against rabbits. the most promising simple washes for protecting large trees from rabbits are those containing lime mixed with sulphur or copperas in various combinations. lime alone is not sufficiently permanent, especially where much rain falls. when mixed with sufficient copperas it has a deep green color and sticks much better. the lime-sulphur wash commonly used to destroy san jose scale in winter has often proved successful as a rabbit repellent, but its lack of adhesive qualities often makes it fail. the defects may be partly corrected by mixing salt, soap, or a cheap glue with the lime and sulphur while the wash is still hot. a poisoned wash of starch and glycerin, tried during the winter of - in idaho by a field agent of the biological survey, gave excellent results in protecting young orchards from jack rabbits, and would probably be equally effective where cottontails are concerned. the wash is prepared as follows: dissolve ounce of strychnine (sulphate) in quarts of boiling water. dissolve / pound of laundry starch in pint of cold water. pour the starch into the vessel containing the strychnine and boil the mixture a short time until it is clear, adding ounces of glycerin and stirring thoroughly. when it is cool enough apply with a paint brush to the tree trunks. the glycerin and starch adhere well and form a thin coating to the bark. rabbits attacking the trees will be quickly killed. in the idaho experiments none of the trees were damaged badly enough to affect their growth and all the rabbits in the orchards were destroyed. the method is well worth trying; but ~care should be taken not to endanger domestic animals~. mechanical contrivances. among the best mechanical contrivances for protecting trees from rabbits are cylinders of woven wire netting. poultry netting of -inch mesh, made of no. galvanized wire, will answer every requirement. rolls inches wide are used for cottontails, and the material is cut into -foot lengths. one of the sections is rolled into cylindrical shape about the trunk of each tree and fastened at several places by bending and twisting the projecting ends of wire. no other fastening is needed, but stakes or spreaders may be used to prevent rabbits from pressing the wire against the bark and doing injury through the meshes. these guards should be left on the trunks, and will last as long as the trees require protection. the cost of material is less than cents for each tree. these protectors may vary in size to suit the requirements of any particular locality or kind of tree. they may be adapted to protection from the larger rabbits by using wider rolls and to protection from both meadow mice and rabbits by using wire of finer mesh and by pressing the lower edges into the ground. veneer and other forms of wooden protectors are popular, and have several advantages when used for cottontail rabbits. when left permanently upon the trees, however, they furnish retreats for insect pests. for this reason they should be removed each spring. while the labor of removing and replacing them is considerable, they have the advantage when pressed well into the soil of protecting from both mice and rabbits. they cost from cents a hundred upward, and are much superior to building paper or newspaper wrappings. the writer has known instances where rabbits tore wrappings of building paper from apple trees and in a single night injured hundreds. "gunny-sack" and other cloth wrappings well tied on are effective protectors. cornstalks furnish a cheap material for orchard protection when cut into lengths of to inches, split, and tied with the flat side against the tree, so as fully to cover the trunk. however, they last but one season and putting them in place involves much labor. other means. few of these methods for the protection of individual trees in orchards or elsewhere are applicable to young woodlands or forest plantations where trees grow close together. in these cases the only remedy is the destruction of the animals or their exclusion by wire nettings. clean cultivation, generally, possesses advantages in preventing rabbit depredations, since it reduces the number of places of refuge for the animals; but rabbits go long distances in search of food, especially in winter, and clean cultivation can not be applied on the western plains, where dense windbreaks are essential to successful orcharding. feeding rabbits in winter to prevent their attacks on orchards has been practiced successfully, on the theory that it is cheaper to feed than to fight them. one plan is to leave the winter prunings of apple trees scattered about the orchard. another is to furnish corn, cabbage, or turnips in sufficient quantity to provide food for the rabbits during cold weather. these methods have considerable merit, particularly the first, which seems to give satisfactory results when both mice and rabbits are present. washington: government printing office: contributions from the museum of history and technology: paper john deere's steel plow _edward c. kendall_ deere and andrus the first plow steel or iron why a steel plow reconstructions in summary-- _by edward c. kendall_ john deere's steel plow _john deere in invented a plow that could be used successfully in the sticky, root-filled soil of the prairie. it was called a steel plow. actually, it appears that only the cutting edge, the share, on the first deere plows was steel. the moldboard was smoothly ground wrought iron._ _deere's invention succeeded because, as the durable steel share of the plow cut through the heavy earth, the sticky soil could find no place to cling on its polished surfaces._ americans moving westward in the beginning of the th century soon encountered the prairie lands of what we now call the middle west. the dark fertile soils promised great rewards to the farmers settling in these regions, but also posed certain problems. first was the breaking of the tough prairie sod. the naturalist john muir describes the conditions facing prairie farmers when he was a boy in the early 's as he tells of the use of the big prairie-breaking plows in the following words:[ ] they were used only for the first ploughing, in breaking up the wild sod woven into a tough mass, chiefly by the cord-like roots of perennial grasses, reinforced by the tap roots of oak and hickory bushes, called "grubs," some of which were more than a century old and four or five inches in diameter.... if in good trim, the plough cut through and turned over these grubs as if the century-old wood were soft like the flesh of carrots and turnips; but if not in good trim the grubs promptly tossed the plough out of the ground. the second and greater problem was that the richer lands of the prairie bottoms, after a few years of continuous cultivation, became so sticky that they clogged the moldboards of the plows. clogging was such a factor in prairie plowing that farmers in these regions carried a wooden paddle solely for cleaning off the moldboard, a task which had to be repeated so frequently that it seriously interfered with plowing efficiency. it seems probable that by the 's blacksmiths in the prairie country were beginning to solve the problem of continuous cultivation of sticky prairie soil by nailing strips of saw steel to the face of wooden moldboard of the traditional plows. figure is a photograph of an th century new england plow in the collection of the u. s. national museum. this is one type of plow which was brought west by the settlers. it contributed to the development of the prairie breaker shown in figure . the first plow on record with strips of steel on the moldboard is attributed to john lane in chicago in .[ ] steel presented a smoother surface which shed the sticky loam better than the conventional wooden moldboards covered with wrought iron, or the cast iron moldboards of the newer factory-made plows then coming into use. it is generally accepted as historical fact that john deere made his first steel plow in at grand detour, illinois. the details of the construction of this plow have been variously given by different writers. ardrey[ ] and davidson[ ] describe deere's original plow as having a wooden moldboard covered with strips of steel cut from a saw, in the manner of the john lane plow. [sidebar: the author: _edward c. kendall is curator of agriculture, museum of history and technology, in the smithsonian institution's united states national museum._] in recent years the deere plow has been pictured quite differently. this has apparently come about as the result of the discovery of an old plow identified as one made by john deere at grand detour in and sold to joseph brierton from whose farm it was obtained in by the maker's son, charles h. deere. he brought it to the office of deere & company at moline, illinois, for preservation and display. this plow is shown in figures and . in deere & company presented it to the u. s. national museum, where it is on display. it can be seen that the moldboard is made of one curved diamond-shaped metal slab. this plow bottom conforms to the description of the "diamond" plows manufactured by deere in the 's.[ ] the company states that according to its records, this was one of three plows made by deere in and that it was probably substantially identical with the first one made in .[ ] it may be difficult to prove that the museum's specimen was made in , but a comparison of this plow (fig. ) with the moldboard (fig. ) and the plow (fig. ) suggests that the museum's plow is the earliest of the three, since there is particularly evident an evolution of the shape of the moldboard from a simple, almost crude form to a more sophisticated shape. [illustration: figure .--new england strong plow, mid- th century. colter locked into heavy, broad share; wooden moldboard covered with iron strips. (_cat. no. f _; _smithsonian photo _.)] deere and andrus writers of the th century describing the making of the first john deere steel plow have in mind the plow. one[ ] has john deere pondering the local plowing problem and getting an idea from the polished surface of a broken steel mill saw. another[ ] claims that leonard andrus, the founder and leading figure of grand detour and part owner of the sawmill, conceived the design of the plow and employed deere, the blacksmith newly arrived from vermont, to build it. this idea may have originated with and was certainly promoted by the late fred a. wirt, as advertising manager of the j. i. case company. it is difficult, at this distance, to determine the parts played at the beginning by deere and andrus. [illustration: figure .--large prairie-breaking plow, mid- th century. wheels underneath the beam regulate the depth of plowing; large wheel runs in the furrow, small wheel on the land. the colter is braced at the bottom as well as at the top. the share cuts a broad, shallow strip of sod which the long, gently curving moldboard turns over unbroken.] the earliest existing partnership agreement involving andrus and deere is dated march , .[ ] the existing copy is unsigned, but its conditions are the same as those in the agreements executed during the next few years. it began by stating that deere and andrus had agreed "to become copartners together in the art and trade of blacksmithing, ploughmaking and all things thereto belonging at the said grand detour, and all other business that the said parties may hereafter deem necessary for their mutual interest and benefit ..." one of the terms was that the copartnership should continue from the date of the agreement "under the name and firm of leonard andrus." a second agreement dated october , ,[ ] which brought in a third partner, horace paine, described the business as "the art and trade of blacksmithing plough making iron castings and all things thereto belonging ..." and stated that the copartnership should be conducted "under the name and firm of l. andrus and co." the third agreement, dated october , , in which another man appeared in place of paine, gave the name of the firm as andrus, deere, and lathrop.[ ] this carried an addendum dated june , , in which andrus and deere bought out lathrop's interest in the business and agreed to continue under the name of andrus and deere. this is the only mention of the firm of andrus and deere. it could only have lasted a few months because it was in that deere moved to moline and established his plow factory there. [illustration: figure .--reconstructions of john deere's plow. for a discussion of the position and attachment of the handles see p. . (_deere & company photo_.)] these agreements suggest that leonard andrus was the capitalist of the young community of grand detour, as well as its founder. the dominance of the name andrus tends to back up the opinion which holds that andrus was the leading figure in the development of the successful prairie plow. on the other hand, the general tone of the agreements suggests that two or more people were participating in an enterprise in which each contributed to the business and shared in the results. deere contributed his plow and his blacksmith shop, tools, and outbuildings; andrus contributed money and business experience. there is no indication that they were formally associated prior to the agreement of march , . an advertisement (it is quoted later) dated february , , and appearing in the march , , issue of the _rock river register_, carries an announcement by john deere that he is ready to fill orders for plows, which he then describes. there is no mention of andrus or of an andrus and deere firm. i am inclined by the evidence to the view that deere worked out his plow by himself, began to manufacture it in small numbers, needed money to enlarge and expand his operations, and went to the logical source of capital in the community, leonard andrus. in support of this view i quote a statement by mr. burton f. peek[ ] who has spent most of his life in deere & company and who may now be the only person living who knew john deere: andrus removed to grand de tour from some place in new york [rochester, though originally from vermont]. some years later john deere came along from rutland, vermont leaving his family behind him. whether deere ever heard of andrus or andrus of deere no one knows. having decided to remain in grand de tour, deere sent for his family asking my paternal grandfather, william peek, to bring them and also the peek family out to grand de tour. this was done via covered wagon the journey occupying some six weeks. my father, henry c. peek, was then an infant age six weeks and charles deere, the son of john, an infant of about the same age. of course these infants came along sleeping in the feed box of the wagon. my grandfather "took up land" adjacent to grand de tour and john deere continued in the manufacturing business. incidentally, john deere and william peek were brothers-in-law having married sisters and what i have said, and much more that i might say to you, is based upon what i have been told by my grandfather, by john deere and by others who had a part in the early history of the company. so far as i know, i am the only living person who ever knew or saw john deere.... ... i joined the deere company on october , , at the age of and retired on the th of april, --nearly years. c. h. deere was my great friend and benefactor. i was educated at his expense as a lawyer and practiced for thirteen years. during this time i was his personal attorney, i drew his will, was made trustee thereunder, and probably was more intimate with him than any living person. i have seen and read the manuscript of an early history of the company which he wrote, but never published and there was nothing in it to indicate that andrus had any part in the manufacture of the first successful steel plow and it is my firm belief that he had no part other than perhaps a friendly interest in it. the first plow most writers describe deere cutting a diamond-shaped piece out of a broken steel mill saw. there is usually no further identification of the type of saw beyond the statement that it came from the andrus sawmill. neil clark, author of a brief biography of john deere, states that the diamond-shaped piece was cut out of a circular saw.[ ] there is no evidence given to support this. there are some powerful arguments against it. the circular saw, especially of the larger size, was probably not very common in america in the 's. although an english patent for a circular saw was issued in the first circular saw in america is attributed to benjamin cummins of bentonsville, new york, about .[ ] [illustration: figure .--how deere probably cut and bent the flat plate of his plow to form the moldboard and landside. because of the shape of the moldboard it became known as the diamond plow.] [illustration: figure .--moldboard of john deere plow, showing how the diamond shape of the original design has been slightly modified. (_deere & company photo -d_.)] in a small, new, pioneering community it seems unlikely that the local sawmill would have been equipped with the newer circular saw rather than the familiar up and down saw which remained in use throughout the th century and, in places, well into the th century. the up and down saw was a broad strip of iron or steel with large teeth in one edge. driven by water power it slowly cut large logs into boards. it is doubtful that the circular saws of that period were large enough for this kind of mill work. the second argument is the shape of the moldboard itself. the photograph of the plow in figure shows that the shape of the moldboard is unconventional. it is essentially a parallelogram curved to present a concave surface to the furrow slice and thus to make a simple, small but workable plow. a parallelogram or diamond would be an easy shape to cut out of a mill saw with the teeth removed. the moldboard on the plow is from . to . inches thick and its width is inches. these dimensions approximate those given in an disston catalog[ ] which describes mulay saws, a type of mill saw, from to inches wide and from to gauge. gauge number is the thickest and is . inches. examination of the plow suggests that deere cut the moldboard and landside as one piece, which was then heated and bent to the desired form. the pattern of this piece is shown in figure . some additional metal appears to be forged into the sharp bend at the junction of the moldboard and the landside apparently to strengthen this part, which may have begun to open during the bending. if, however, deere had used a large circular saw with plenty of room for cutting out a moldboard of the usual shape and size, it seems likely that he would have made a plow of more conventional appearance. in any event his moldboard of one jointless piece of polished metal would scour better than one of wood covered with strips of steel since the nailheads and the joints between the strips would provide places for the earth to stick. [illustration: figure .--the shape of the moldboard continued to evolve, as illustrated by this john deere plow. (_deere & company photo -a_.)] a very great majority of writers describing john deere and his plow attribute his fame to his development of a successful steel plow which made cultivation of rich prairie soil practical. the emphasis is always on the development of a steel moldboard and the assumption is that from the plow onward stretched an unbroken line of steel moldboard plows. an advertisement for john deere plows in the march , , issue of the _rock river register_, published weekly in grand detour, illinois, gives a detailed description, here presented in full: john deere respectfully informs his friends and customers, the agricultural community, of this and adjoining counties, and dealers in ploughs, that he is now prepared to fill orders for the same on presentation. the moldboard of this well, and so favorably known plough, is made of wrought iron, and the share of steel, / of an inch thick, which carries a fine sharp edge. the whole face of the moldboard and share is ground smooth, so that it scours perfectly bright in any soil, and will not choke in the foulest of ground. it will do more work in a day, and do it much better and with less labor, to both team and holder, than the ordinary ploughs that do not scour, and in consequence of the ground being better prepared, the agriculturalist obtains a much heavier crop. the price of ploughs, in consequence of hard times, will be reduced from last year's prices. grand detour, feb. , . this raised two questions: why, and for how long, was wrought iron used for the moldboards of the deere plows? of what material is the moldboard of the plow made? during the first few years, when production was very small, there were probably enough worn out mill saws available for the relatively few plows made. as production increased this source must have become inadequate. ardrey gives the following figures for the production of plows by deere and andrus:[ ] , plows; , plows; , plows; , plows; , plows. ardrey states further that "by this time the difficulty of obtaining steel in the quantity and quality needed had become a serious obstacle in the way of further development." the statement, quoted above, that the moldboard was of wrought iron and the statistics on production of plows during the 's and 's belie ardrey's claim that it was a serious obstacle, nor is there any suggestion in the advertisement that wrought iron was being substituted for steel. in john deere amicably severed relations with the firm of andrus & deere and moved to moline, illinois, to continue plow manufacturing in a site that had better transportation facilities than grand detour. the new firm produced plows in the first year, in , and , in .[ ] swank[ ] states that the first slab of cast plow steel ever rolled in the united states was in and that it was shipped to john deere of moline, illinois. a little later he says that it was not until the early 's in this country that several firms succeeded in making high grade crucible cast steel of uniform quality as a regular product. [illustration: figure .--john deere's plow, right side, showing large iron staple used to fasten end of right handle to the standard. note remains of wooden pin near rear end of plow beam. (_cat. no. f _; _smithsonian photo -a_.)] based on a visit to deere's factory in the _country gentleman_[ ] gave the yearly output as , plows. it pictured four of seven models and stated, "these are all made of cast steel, and perfectly polished before they are sent out, and are kept bright by use, so that no soil adheres to them." the article then gives the tonnages of iron and steel used by the deere factory in a year. they are as follows: tons cast steel, tons german steel, tons pittsburgh steel, tons castings, tons wrought iron, tons malleable castings in clevises, etc. in addition , plow bolts and , feet of oak plank were used. these figures do not indicate what the different parts of the plows were made of but, if approximately correct, they do show that more than half the metal used was iron rather than steel. steel accounts for tons; wrought iron for . although it is conceivable, under this weight distribution, that the shares and moldboards were made of steel while the landsides and standards were made of wrought iron, other distributions are also possible, and it is quite conceivable that at this period some of the plows had steel moldboards while others had wrought-iron ones. an analysis of the metal in different parts of an john deere plow, now at the factory in moline, may shed some light on this, but from these figures and dates it seems likely that most of john deere's plows during the 's and 's had wrought-iron moldboards with steel shares. (it should be borne in mind that the poorer grades of steel available at this time were probably no more satisfactory than cast iron as far as scouring clean in sticky soil was concerned.) [illustration: figure .--reconstruction of deere's plow, right side, with handles shown in what is believed to be their original position. (_smithsonian photo _.)] the question of the material in the moldboard of the plow was answered when a spark-test analysis was made of the metal in the moldboard and share. in this test the color, shape, and pattern of the spark bursts produced by a high-speed grinding wheel indicate the type of iron or steel. several spots along the edges and back surface of the moldboard were tested. no carbon bursts were seen in the spark patterns, indicating that the material was wrought iron. the share consists of a piece, wedge shaped in cross section, welded on to the lower, or front, edge of the moldboard. this was tested at several spots along its sharp edge, all of which gave a pattern and color indicating that the material was medium high carbon steel. this test was corroborated by a chemical analysis of filings from the moldboard and share in a metallurgical laboratory. a small trace of carbon was found in the moldboard. it may be present as the result of contamination from several sources, a likely one being the charcoal fire in the forge when it was heated for bending and shaping.[ ] these tests agree perfectly with the description in the advertisement. it seems, therefore, that deere's success in making plows that worked well in prairie bottom lands depended as much on the smooth surface he produced by grinding and polishing as on the material used. the filing of the edge of the moldboard for the metallurgical test disclosed that the wrought-iron slab consisted of five thin laminations apparently forged together but with separations visible. the length and regularity of the lines of separation seem to preclude their being striations resulting from the fibrous structure of wrought iron. this calls into question the theory that the moldboard and landside were cut from a mill saw, since it hardly seems likely that a saw would be made of laminated material. the possibility exists that the body of the mill saw might have been made this way, with a tooth-bearing steel edge welded on, but there seems little reason for making a saw out of thin laminations. it is also possible that this laminated iron originally had been intended for some other purpose, such as boiler plate, and may have been available in rectangular pieces. in making the plow deere followed a pattern (fig. ), which suggests that he cut it out of such a piece. [illustration: figure .--john deere's plow, left side, showing details of construction and relationship of landside to moldboard. (_cat. no. f _; _smithsonian photo _.)] since the moldboard of the plow is of wrought iron, and since this plow is thought to be essentially identical with the first one deere made in , it is highly probable that the plow also had a wrought-iron moldboard, a condition which appears to have been the basic pattern for john deere plows until the middle 's. why a "steel" plow in view of the facts and the probabilities based on them, how is the legend of the john deere steel plow to be explained? there are several likely reasons. it is possible that the first plow, in , was made from a broken steel mill saw. it is also possible that within a few years puddled iron came to be used for the moldboards because of the scarcity of suitable steel, either in the form of broken mill saws or as plates ordered from foundries in america (the high price of steel imported from england made this an impractical source). however, it seems more likely that it became known as a steel plow owing to the importance deere attached to his plows having steel shares, as shown in his advertisement in . a steel share, tougher than cast iron, would hold an edge much better than wrought iron, and john muir's description of prairie plowing, quoted earlier, substantiates the importance of a tough, sharp share. deere's plows, probably distinctive by reason of their steel shares, may have been called "steel" plows, in the regions where they were used, to distinguish them from the standard wooden plows and from the newer cast-iron implements. the term "wooden plow" has a similar history. for well over years in europe some plows have been made with iron shares and the rest of the structure wood. plows in th-century america were made principally of wood with iron shares, colters, and clevises, and with strips of iron frequently covering the wooden moldboard. these implements were called, simply, plows of various regional types. not until the development and spread of the factory-made plows with cast-iron moldboards, landsides, and standards did the term "wooden plow" come into use to differentiate all these plows from the newer ones. subsequently writers have been led to assume that "wooden plow" meant a plow with no iron parts and consequently to make unwarranted statements about the primitiveness of the th-century implements. a second reason for use of the term "steel plow" may have developed from the supposition that the moldboards of the first john deere plows were made of diamond-shaped sections cut from old mill saws, which later writers seem to have assumed were made of steel. (it is probable that from the late 's on deere plows had steel moldboards.) however, mill saws of the early th century were not necessarily made of steel, which was then relatively expensive. i have been told of an old mill saw made of wrought iron on which was welded a steel edge that carried the teeth.[ ] rees' _cyclopaedia_[ ] describes saws as being made of either wrought iron or steel, the latter being preferable. therefore, it seems most likely that deere's plows, from his first until the middle 's were made with highly polished wrought-iron moldboards and steel shares. reconstructions the remains of the plow are shown in figures and . one's curiosity is aroused as to what the plow looked like in its original state, complete with handles. several full-scale -dimensional reconstructions and a number of sketches of the plow have been made. the reconstructions all must have been based on the remains of the plow, since they resemble it closely and it is the only surviving plow of this type known. recently i received a photograph (fig. , right) of a plow which has been boxed and in storage for many years at deere & company which may be an early deere plow. as it appears in the photograph, the plow looks unconvincing. the handles are fastened by bolts and nuts, a manner uncommon in american plow making in the early th century. the shape of the handles is that of stock handles available for small plows and cultivators in such a catalog as belknap's. the plow seems very high and weakly braced. there is no logical reason for curving the end of the beam down and cutting it off at a slant if the handles are attached in the manner shown. the edges of the tenon on the upper end of the standard where it goes through the mortise in the beam have been neatly beveled in a manner i have never seen before on any other plow. all of this leads me to think that this is an early reconstruction based on the remains of the plow which it only roughly approximates in proportion and design. another of these reconstructions is shown in figure , left. although superficially like the plow it varies considerably in its proportions, in the angular relations of its parts, and in other details such as the use of iron bolts and nuts in place of wooden pins. all these reconstructions agree in one thing. they show a plow with handles fastened to both sides of the plow beam and standard. during an examination of the plow it occurred to me that there was no indication of an attachment of a handle on the landside in the same manner as on the furrow side. the position and attachment of the handle in figure is clearly indicated by the remains of a wooden pin in the side of the plow beam near the rear end and by the large iron staple, in the side of the standard, which must have held the tapered lower end of the handle. figure is a sketch showing this handle in position. the landside view of this plow in figure shows that the pin did not extend through the beam nor are there marks on the standard to indicate the position of a staple like that on the furrow side. the four holes approximately in line on the standard and beam show where a piece of sheet metal had been nailed to hold the beam and standard in about the right position. the outline of the sheet metal can be seen on the side of the beam. this was removed at the time this examination was made. how was the landside handle attached? w. e. bridges of the national museum suggests that it might have been attached to the lower side of the standard and the rear end of the plow beam. this seems, beyond doubt, to be correct. the wood has deteriorated considerably over the years and the joints are loose, but, within the limits of the existing structure, the plow beam can easily be set in such a position that its sloping rear end lines up with the slope of the underside of the standard. furthermore, a long bolt runs from the upper part of the moldboard through the standard and projects quite far beyond its lower surface, as can be seen in figure . the end of the bolt is threaded only part way and it has been necessary to put a cylindrical metal spacer on it in order to draw up the nut snugly. this long bolt must originally have passed through the lower end of the handle, which, in turn, was fastened to the end of the plow beam by a tenon on the end of the beam, now broken off, passing through a mortise in the handle. this was the common method of fastening the handle to the beam. the square hole in the plow's iron landside (fig. ), which at first might seem meant for another bolt passing through the lower end of the handle at right angles to the long bolt, seems too close to the other bolt and to the edges of the handle. it may simply be a first try for the bolt through the bottom of the standard. in this manner the handle would have been strongly attached to the plow frame and, at the same time, would have materially helped to make it rigid by forming one side of a triangular structure. figures and show what i believe to be the correct reconstruction of the deere plow along the lines just described and, therefore, the probable appearance of the plow. [illustration: figure .--reconstruction of deere's plow, left side, showing how left handle is believed to have been attached. (_smithsonian photo _.)] it should also be noted that it was general practice in making fixed moldboard plows to have the plow beam, standard, handle, and landside (or sharebeam, on the old plows) in the same plane. symmetrical handles branching from both sides of the beam are found on cultivators, shovel plows, middle busters, and sidehill plows where the moldboard is turned alternately to each side. in summary-- the existing evidence, i believe, indicates that: . the successful prairie plow with a smooth one-piece moldboard and steel share was basically deere's idea. . the moldboards of practically all of his plows, from and for about years, were made of wrought iron rather than steel. . the success of his plows in the prairie soils depended on a steel share which held a sharp edge and a highly polished moldboard to which the sticky soils could not cling. . the importance attached to the steel share led to the plows being identified as steel plows. . the correct reconstruction of the plow, and, by inference, the plow, is shown in figures and , previous reconstructions being wrong primarily in the position and attachment of the handles. . the museum's john deere plow (cat. no. f ), shown in figures and , is a very early specimen, on the basis of a comparison of it with deere moldboards of and and its conformity to deere's description of his plows in an advertisement; and the date associated with it is plausible. footnotes: [ ] john muir ( - ), _the story of my boyhood and youth_, boston, , pp. , . [ ] r. l. ardrey, _american agricultural implements_, chicago, , p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] j. b. davidson, "tillage machinery," in l. h. bailey's _cyclopedia of american agriculture_, new york, , vol. , p. . [ ] leo rogin, _the introduction of farm machinery in its relation to the productivity of labor in the agriculture of the united states during the nineteenth century_, berkeley, , p. . [ ] u. s. national museum records under accession . [ ] neil m. clark, _john deere_, moline, , pp. , . [ ] stewart h. holbrook, _machines of plenty_, new york, , pp. , . to an inquiry by this author, mr. holbrook replied that most if not all of the material about andrus came from the files of the j. i. case company. [ ] photographic copies of partnership agreements between andrus, deere, and others are in u. s. national museum records under accession . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] _ibid._ [ ] letter from burton f. peek to m. l. putnam, december , , in u. s. national museum records under accession . [ ] clark, _op. cit._ (footnote ), p. . [ ] e. h. knight, _american mechanical dictionary_, boston, , vol. , p. . [ ] henry disston & sons, _price list_, philadelphia, , p. . [ ] ardrey, _op. cit._ (footnote ), p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] james m. swank, _history of the manufacture of iron in all ages_..., philadelphia, , pp. , . [ ] _country gentleman_, , vol. , p. . [ ] reports on spark test by e. a. battison, u. s. national museum, and on metallurgical investigation by a. h. valentine, metallographic laboratory of the bethlehem steel company's sparrows point plant. [ ] for this information i am indebted to mr. e. a. battison of the u. s. national museum staff. [ ] abraham rees, _the cyclopaedia; or universal dictionary of arts, sciences, and literature_, philadelphia, - , vol. , under saw. frying pan farm by elizabeth brown pryor office of comprehensive planning fairfax county, virginia september, fairfax county board of supervisors john f. herrity, chairman martha v. pennino, vice chairman joseph alexander warren i. cikins alan h. magazine audrey moore james m. scott john p. shacochis marie b. travesky fairfax county history commission donie rieger, chairman john p. liberty, vice chairman denzil o. evans bernard n. boston c. j. s. durham mary m. fahringer ceres gaskins dana k. greene william a. klene virginia b. peters edith m. sprouse mayo s. stuntz gloria m. matthews, layout carolynn j. castellucci, copy preparation library of congress catalog number - table of contents list of illustrations iv acknowledgments v introduction part i, continuity part ii, change part iii, professionalization and an increased standard of living part iv, the new deal part v, community part vi, frying pan park list of illustrations holden harrison, harrison dairy barn, mcnair guernsey bull, interior harrison dairy barn spring plowing on mcnair farm shock of wheat, ellmore farm, mechanical hay loader, small orchard apiary, inventory of farmer plan of smith farm, rebecca rice canning fruit elizabeth harrison, herndon homemade manure sled broadcast harvester, wheat being mechanically harvested, tractor-drawn drill, mcnair aboard a row crop tractor soybeans on a demonstration farm, a wild cherry tree destroyed by web worms "hard work made easy and quick" the fairfax county grange meeting, the floris home demonstration club, a -h club, "achievement day" displays, a community fair, a suggested model farm for fairfax county, the -h girls camp at woodlawn, a piedmont dairy festival parade float, map of improved and unimproved roads, stuck in the mud on one of county's roads aerial of kidwell farm and floris vicinity map of floris community g. ray harrison, early threshing machine laura parham and kim stanton work in vegetable garden the farmyard at frying pan farm in the early fall farmer's house--frying pan farm two young girls meet two young goats john hopkins in the moffett blacksmith shop pat middleton at -h club fair cattle judging, floris school, dressage competition at frying pan park, acknowledgments cooperation and goodwill were the essential characteristics of the agricultural communities examined in this study, and it has been my pleasure to discover that those qualities are still very evident today among the county's rural folk. many residents of the herndon area shared their personal memories and offered really old-fashioned virginia hospitality to those doing research. without the help of neal bailey, elizabeth ellmore, emma ellmore, virginia greear, holden harrison, mr. and mrs. ray harrison, margaret mary lee, edna middleton, john middleton, rebecca middleton, richard peck, elizabeth rice, louise ryder, and mary scott, this monograph could not have been completed. special mention must be made of retired county agricultural extension agent joseph beard, who shared his detailed knowledge of county agricultural practices on numerous occasions. he willingly arranged interviews with county farmers, and often helped to break the ice by accompanying the interviewer. this was always done with abundant good humor and his enthusiasm was infectious. i am also particularly grateful to dr. john t. schlebecker of the extractive industries division of the smithsonian institution. his expertise in the field of agricultural technology and special interest in living historical farms added significantly to the quality of the monograph. additional thanks go to anthony pryor of the rockefeller foundation who read this paper and helped to put its conclusions in perspective with trends of agricultural economics. nan netherton originally conceived the project and did much of the initial groundwork. the majority of interviews with floris area farmers were conducted by her. mrs. netherton's reputation in the county made it possible for us both to acquire private papers and photographs which might otherwise have been overlooked or withheld. what is more, she sympathetically "initiated" me into the project, offering suggestions and constructive aid without discouraging my own ideas about the direction the study should take. elizabeth brown pryor fairfax, virginia june , introduction in fairfax county was still predominantly rural in character. farmers occupied over half of the county's land, living on individual holdings which averaged . acres. nearly % of these farmers were white and of this group only % did not own their own farm. they shared their domain with , horses, , head of cattle, , swine, , chickens and mules. one-tenth of the farms enjoyed the use of a tractor and % had a radio. the average capital holding on land and buildings was $ , , and the fairfax county farmer netted something less than $ , income annually.[ ] these figures give a skeleton picture of fairfax county's most prominent citizen in the period between the two world wars; when the statistics are translated in prose, his shadowy form gains weight. the farmer at this time was a small landowner, possessing a farm only as large as his own family and a few hired laborers could manage. although his capital holdings were not huge, they were well above the state average. he had the prestige of being a homeowner, and the pride of working his own soil, perhaps the same soil his grandparents had tilled. the rural family raised livestock for their own use, but principally for the market, and favored draft horses over tractors, mules or oxen to power farm equipment. this farmer's time was spent on a myriad of duties and details--his function was not yet totally specialized--ranging from butchering hogs to building chicken coops to thinning corn. he worked for himself, planning the day's activities, relying on his own judgment and initiative to cope with the varying responsibilities he shouldered. his numerical prominence gave him political and social leverage. it was the rural way of life that shaped the county and his demands which needed to be met. at first glance this farmer's life seems tempered by nature and largely self-contained. the daily routine was established by seasons and sunlight; fortunes were made or lost at the mercy of the wind and rain. a farm was not only the farmer's livelihood and workshop but his home. thus, unlike the city worker whose occupation was entirely separate from home concerns, country life had a total integration.[ ] moreover, the family farmer possessed a sense of continuity with the long tradition of the small landowner in america. in many respects his life was little changed from that of the thrifty, energetic and shrewd subsistence farmer whom thomas jefferson had praised in the eighteenth century as the ideal citizen of a democracy.[ ] in both startling and subtle ways, however, the traditional role of the family farmer was changing in the s and s. in ellen glasgow's novel _barren ground_, which examines the uncertainties of life on a northern virginia dairy farm, the heroine, dorinda oakley, describes her emotional and economic reaction to the post world war i period: with the return of peace she hoped that the daily life on the farm would slip back into orderly grooves; but before the end of the first year she discovered that the demoralization of peace was more difficult to combat than the madness of war. there was no longer an ecstatic patriotism to inspire one to fabulous exploits. the world that had been organized for destruction appeared to her to become as completely disorganized for folly.... the excessive wages paid for unskilled labour were ruinous to the farmer, for the field hands who had earned six dollars a day from the government were not satisfied to drive a plough for the small sum that had enabled her to reclaim the abandoned meadows of five oaks.... she was using two tractor-ploughs on the farm; but the roads were almost impassable again because none of the negroes could be persuaded to work on them. even when she employed men to repair the strip of "corduroy" road between the bridge and the fork, it was impossible to keep the bad places firm enough for any car heavier than a ford to travel over them....[ ] thus, social and technical advances that had long been desired in rural areas bolstered the farmer's optimism. yet curiously enough this same progress often jarred his expectations and financial security. improved roads meant improved markets, and increased contact with outside communities but, along with the advent of the radio, they resulted in a homogenizing of city and country ways, and lured many away from the farm. concern for rural welfare prompted all levels of government to design programs to aid the farmer--programs which indeed furthered agriculture, but at the price of well-meaning interference in a previously highly individual sphere. amid regulations and forms the farmer felt a nagging loss of independence. perhaps most strikingly, widespread use of gasoline-powered equipment changed the pace of work, made him reliant on outside sources for fuel and parts, and involved investments which often prohibited purchase or encouraged specialization. hence, the family farm retained its size and shape but it could no longer revel in complete self-reliance. the model farm at frying pan park is a representation of this changing way of life. it recognizes especially the role of the family subsistence farmer and his contributions to the economy and solidarity of fairfax county's rural communities. although this study focuses on the institutions and personalities of the floris-herndon area, it is meant to be generic in scope. dairying, which forms one emphasis of this monograph, was widespread in the area, and though each district had its distinctive elements, the underlying social values and farming methods were consistent throughout the county. in essence, frying pan farm works much as a snapshot would to recall an important phase in fairfax county's history. it gives a brief glance at a world we have lost, but which lingers significantly in the region's memory. notes _introduction_ [ ] _united states census of agriculture, , statistics for virginia_ (washington. d.c., ). [ ] see, e. p. thompson, _the making of the english working class_ (london, ), - . [ ] for an overview of jefferson's political beliefs, including his admiration for the small farmer, see john c. miller, _the federalist era_ (new york, ), - . [ ] ellen glasgow, _barren ground_ (richmond, ), - . part i _continuity_ tradition and personal experience colored the th century farmer's reactions. he was accustomed to a world in which his occupation and social status were assured, and childhood experience probably led him to assume the farmer's role naturally. the rhythms of farm life were based on the immutable round of the seasons. each day's sun and wind pulled the tiller in its direction as did the unceasing need to tame the growth and habits of beasts and land. nature was the farmer's clock, and though he bid the land to produce what he desired, it was the earth which fixed his hours and chores. from this close association with nature came a continuity and special bond between farmers, which defied both time and place. although the early years of the th century heralded a new era of specialization in agriculture, the farmers of fairfax county persisted in executing the varied functions of general farming. dairying might be the emphasis on many farms, but it was rarely pursued at the expense of production of grain or food for home consumption. variety continued to be an important quality of farm work. families on large and specialized farms still did chores similar to those done by subsistence farmers, though the amount of time allotted for each task might differ. the relentlessness of certain activities, such as feeding the stock, was the same whether the farm boasted one cow or fifty. thus distinctions between general and specialized farmers were not so clear-cut in this period. the following pages detail the work done on a small dairy farm, yet the kinds and methods of activities also pertain to the farmer whose acreage was devoted solely to general farming. perpetuity--a continual need to perform certain tasks and watch over specific events on a daily basis--was the most fundamental aspect of farming. the farmer's day began with such an interminable chore: milking the cows. this twice-daily task was, of course, particularly important on dairy farms and its relentlessness is often the first aspect to be mentioned in any farming recollection. "when you have dairy cows," joseph beard, who grew up in the floris area, acknowledged, "that's a -day proposition regardless of whether you're sick or anything like that." another resident, margaret mary lee, explained it more tersely: "cows and hens and milk trucks did not take holidays."[ ] the first milking was early in the morning and most farmers rose around four a.m.[ ] the men and any hired hands usually began milking around : a.m., while the women prepared breakfast. what might initially appear to the outsider as a pleasing novelty was hard and demanding work. this was especially true in the morning when both the new and often the previous night's milk needed to be hauled to herndon for the early train into washington. ray harrison, with his brother the owner of one of the area's biggest herds, could milk a cow in six minutes--"quicker than a lot people could do it"[ ]--but even at this rate, milking his -odd cows was a formidable undertaking. john middleton, who lived down the road from the harrisons, estimated it took about - / hours for seven people to milk his herd of cows; they barely finished in time for the hired man, who took the milk to herndon, to grab a sandwich and cup of coffee to eat en route.[ ] [illustration: portrait of a confident and successful farmer. holden harrison, c. . photo courtesy of ray harrison.] [illustration: the well-equipped dairy barn owned by the harrison brothers, c. . the harrisons owned one of the county's largest herds. photo courtesy holden and ray harrison.] [illustration: a guernsey bull owned by wilson d. mcnair. acquired in , it was among the earliest pure-bred stock in the area. photo courtesy of louise mcnair ryder.] [illustration: the interior of a large and well-maintained dairy barn on the farm of holden and ray harrison. the barn could house over cows. photo courtesy of holden and ray harrison.] the milk which traveled to herndon was strained to remove any extraneous matter and cooked to about ° f to retard spoilage and reduce the risk of spreading bacterial infections. this was a real problem until mechanized refrigerators became available, and the farmers had to use considerable ingenuity to keep their milk chilled. some, like the middletons, kept the milk in the well overnight, and wilson mcnair wrote that his family stored the milk in tall cans set in cold water. occasionally more drastic action was needed. "can you imagine going out to herndon and getting great big chunks of ice and putting it in a washing tub and setting a can of milk in and keeping it cool all night long?" queried joseph beard.[ ] milk earmarked for home use underwent the further process of separating the thick cream from the rest of the milk. in the days before mechanical separators the milk had to stand several hours for the cream to rise, and it was then skimmed by hand or the milk drawn off from the bottom of a can with a spigot. mechanical separators streamlined this task by allowing the milk to be separated while still warm, using centrifugal action to bring the heavier cream particles to the bottom of the machine. while the farmers sat down to breakfast the roads started filling with wagons and trucks bringing the day's milk from the entire area. like alexandria and falls church, the county's other major shipping centers, herndon served what was known as a "milkshed" area, that is a community whose milk could be transported to that locality without spoiling. here too the freshness of the milk was of crucial concern. herndon, with its electric cars on the washington and old dominion railroad, served most of the county's dranesville district; however, floris' close proximity to herndon gave it an added advantage, for even packed in ice water, milk could easily spoil during the sultry summer months.[ ] a farmer with a good-sized herd such as john middleton would haul eight or more ten-gallon cans of milk to the depot depending on the time of year. the milk was transported in a light wagon with two horses, which generally held only one farm's milk, though sometimes two or more families shared this duty. rebecca middleton recalled her brother collecting cans in an early model truck with a canvas top; he traded hauling with the neighboring bradleys.[ ] for a short time a community co-op, based in floris, was also established to collect milk for shipment to washington, d.c.[ ] as this milk-laden caravan approached herndon, the small station there bustled suddenly with activity. for at least one local resident, the sight and sounds were memorable. the "banging of the milk cans at the depot," recalled lottie schneider, who grew up in herndon, "... resounded far and wide." "i liked to hear [it] ... for busy men were working and it was a friendly sound."[ ] milking was, of course, just one of many chores involved on the family farm. after a : breakfast (still early in the eyes of many city dwellers) there were stalls to clean, equipment to sterilize, other farm animals to be cared for. most fairfax farms retained a few animals for home use even when concentrating on milk production. before mechanization completely revolutionized farm work, draft horses provided the farm's muscle and a fifty-acre farm would need two to four for plowing, raking hay, and cutting wheat with a binder. the feeding and grooming of these animals formed a vital task. though lang and hurst's commercial meat wagon came through floris and other communities each saturday, many families kept hogs and chickens for their own consumption.[ ] elizabeth rice from the oakton area stated that, despite her husband's reluctance to spend energy on any facet of farming outside dairying, they raised hogs, "kept on the back end of the farm in the woods."[ ] in floris nearly every family also raised hogs and chickens and holden harrison remembered that they "used to get about a hundred chicks each spring--we'd eat them all up by fall."[ ] few floris area farms kept sheep, though census figures show about , in the county during this period.[ ] in addition, dogs, cats, mules and an occasional goat made up the farm population, all demanding the farmer's attention and time. with the stock watered, fed, given fresh bedding, and possibly turned out to pasture, the farmer could turn his attention to crops and other matters. census records show hay and corn to be fairfax county's most important crops. little of these were sold commercially, however, rather they were used as support crops for the dairy industry.[ ] hay and feed stores abounded in neighboring towns but most dairymen attempted to supply their own straw, ensilage and grain, thus cutting costs by making the most efficient use of their land. this involved raising several crops and a year-round effort of cultivation. work began in early spring when a team of horses--later a tractor--pulled a steel plow across each field, turning up the earth into a rough and lumpy mass. little was known of contour plowing or planting at this time, and the team was driven back and forth in straight rows. c. t. rice and county agricultural extension agent h. b. derr both noted that erosion was a major problem in the area at the time.[ ] the newly broken ground was then worked with a "drag," generally made of heavy logs chained together and topped with a platform on which the driver stood. the purpose of this implement was to use the weight of the "drag" to break up the soil clods. after this was finished, a field still needed to be worked once more before planting, this time with a harrow. the harrow resembled a large, spike-toothed rake, with two sections, each containing four rows of teeth. passed over the field, it stirred up the ground and continued the pulverization of the soil to make a mellow, friable seed bed.[ ] these chores were exacting and time-consuming. neal bailey, who has spent many of his years in working fields around floris, estimated that a man and strong team could harrow or drag but a ten-acre field in about - / hours. plowing took even longer. "most of the land was hard to plow and we had to start as soon as possible in the spring in order to get through before it got too hard and sometimes we didn't make it," wrote wilson mcnair. the majority of farmers could plow only an acre or acre and a half in a day's time.[ ] fairfax county's soil (principally chester loam, a clay soil with a slightly acidic base) was deep, fertile and, as joseph beard put it, "adapted to growing the kinds of things cows like to eat at a reasonable price."[ ] because it was somewhat acidic, the soil benefitted from the addition of lime and, of course, needed other fertilizers. fertilization techniques had been known for hundreds of years (george washington burned oyster shells to obtain lime for his fields), however, their benefits were not always fully understood. most farmers spread manure and some guano on their cropland, but correct chemical balances for specific crops were achieved only infrequently. often the small landowner did not have spare fields to lie fallow for a year--the ideal situation for soil enrichment. "we spread some lime a time or two, but not nearly enough," admitted wilson mcnair. "we got burned lump lime and dumped it on the ground in piles of one bushel and when it had slaked we spread it with a shovel." the spreading itself could be a problem, especially when the earliest trucks began to be used in the mid- s. a truck hauling seven or eight tons of lime would bog down in a wet field: "the only way you could get out was to dump the lime, and if you dumped the lime you were in the hole you got stuck in." thus, a lack of understanding of soil building techniques was coupled with the physical difficulty of fertilization, to inhibit the optimum efficiency of the land in the early th century.[ ] with the soil prepared, the crops could be sown. in the fall, generally between mid-october and thanksgiving, winter wheat was planted. a "drill" or mechanical planter drawn by horses was used, which could be adapted for use with oats, barley or rye. the area had once been a principal wheat-growing region, but in the early th century dairymen cultivated wheat chiefly for the straw which was used for bedding. in the mid- s, however, the availability of certified seed (seed which was grown to be of a uniform and established varietal type, much as genetically pure livestock was bred) raised the quality of fairfax wheat and slightly increased the grain's marketability.[ ] edith rogers, a long-time floris resident and for many years a member of the fairfax county board of supervisors, grew wheat on her family's farm to use in chicken feed, and to have milled into flour for home use. it was ground at the herndon milling company.[ ] like the use of certified seed, increased understanding of fertilization and crop rotation practices boosted production of wheat per acre, yet it never gained prominence as even a secondary crop. in large part this was due to the fact that wheat was a less desirable ingredient in cattle feed than was corn or even soybeans.[ ] corn was planted in the spring, generally in late april. again a drill was employed, which, planting two rows at a time, enabled the farmer to plant about ten acres in one day. the wide variety of uses for corn made it fairfax county's most important grain crop and a report on the area's agriculture observed that "nearly every farm has more or less corn."[ ] not only was the grain a chief ingredient in the dairy cattle's "concentrate" or feed mixture, but it was used to feed horses, chickens and to fatten pigs near butchering time. the leaves and stalks were ground for ensilage or stored in the shock for dry fodder. during the s, county agent derr promoted a continual campaign to improve the area's corn production and even introduced a new variety, dubbed "fairfax county white corn," because of its local success. he also worked to increase yields of other popular strains, notably reid's yellow dent. in a report on his work in this field in , derr shows his methods to be not far removed from the early genetic experimentation of gregor mendel. for the past four years the writer has assisted one of his best demonstrators in improving his crop of reid's yellow dent corn. the first year the best ears were planted in separate rows and at harvest time the best yielding rows were selected for the next year's work. this work was continued, each year the number of rows being reduced. this year the results show a very uniform type of corn....[ ] soybeans began to be introduced into the area during this period and fairfax county farmers also sowed various grasses for summer pasturage and to make hay for winter feeding. timothy and clover predominated among pasture crops. some farmers persisted in raising alfalfa, despite h. b. derr's repeated protests that it was unprofitable on the county's lime-poor soil.[ ] a few ambitious farmers even experimented with grasses attempting to find those which produced the highest milk yields and one went so far as to have a special ladino clover seed brought from oregon because he felt it increased the richness of his milk.[ ] as with wheat and corn, improved varietal types and stricter control over the uniformity of the seed greatly aided the cultivator. [illustration: spring plowing on the mcnair farm near floris. the serene aspect of the pre-mechanization farm is evident in this photograph taken in the first decade of the twentieth century. photo courtesy of louise mcnair ryder.] naturally, the farmer's work only began with the sowing of the seed, for activity continued throughout the year. the work of calving, of pruning orchard trees, digging garden beds, and trimming cattle hooves occurred in the spring. in early summer the corn was thinned from four to two stalks per hill, by using a sharp stick to dig the stalks out. then, toward the end of june the winter wheat was harvested. cut with a binder and tied in bundles, it was shocked (put in stacks of ten to twelve bundles, wigwam fashion, with a bundle on top to shed water, or stacked on poles in a mound with the outside sloping a bit to let the rain run off) and left to dry in the field. if threshed by hand after about a month it had to be gathered and taken to the barn for further drying. in the s, however, only a few farmers still wielded the flail; most threshing was done by steam and later gas-powered threshing machines which travelled from farm to farm. wilson mcnair described these cumbersome and sometimes dangerous machines this way: the thresher was run and pulled by a traction engine. they moved slowly only about mi. an hour. the engine had a water tank mounted on each side in the rear to carry water while it was moving from one place to another.... the engines all had whistles and they would blow them every once in a while when they were on the road so we would know they were coming. we had to haul up some wood to fire the engine before we threshed.... in later years we had self-packing and weighing threshers with blowers that moved the straw further from the thresher. one time mr. hornbaker threshed for us. we had a small engine and thresher that was pulled by a team. while we were washing up for dinner some one looked up and saw smoke, [on] the other side of the barn where the thresher was. all hands ran up there and pulled the thresher out of the way and saved the wheat that was threshed, but the straw burned up. a spark from the engine had fallen into the straw.[ ] during the summer months of the cultivation process, insect control was also a major consideration. by the late s a few large farms, such as the harrisons, could hire an airplane to dust their crops, but modest farms of necessity relied on hand labor for this, as most other chores. "as ... new varieties of clover, alfalfa, and other plants came to be used, seems like the insects came along with them," lamented one farmer.[ ] the japanese beetle, introduced into america in the s, wrecked particular havoc with the crucial corn crop. "the japanese beetle was just awful," recalled ray harrison, "it would eat the tassel up which pollinated the corn ... then would get right into the ear of the corn and go right down into the shuckings."[ ] against these pests, and the inevitable destruction of wildlife, weather, and weeds, the farmer had to maintain an eternal vigilance. much of the growing season was spent in monitoring these destructive forces. the benefits of this watchfulness became apparent with the harvest. as mentioned above, wheat was the earliest crop reaped but the major harvesting was done early in september. corn was cut and shocked at this time, and the large task of filling the silo was undertaken. to do this stalks and leaves of the corn were chopped by an ensilage cutter. like the thresher, this machine was generally owned by an outside agent; it travelled from farm to farm to process each farmer's fodder. the early cutters were powered by steam, but like numerous other farm instruments, gasoline-driven equipment was developed during world war i. on a large farm up to twenty men were needed to keep a threshing machine or ensilage cutter going. bundles of corn were chopped by the machine and then conveyed to a fan which blew the ensilage through a pipe into the silo. there one to four men tamped it down and guided the nozzle on the blower pipe to insure even distribution. it was dirty work, the corn stalks oozing juice and sticking as tenaciously as burrs to the clothes, hands and hair of those working in the silo. a small landowner might complete the silo filling process in a day, but for large farms it often took the better part of a week.[ ] just as the spring brought forth a burgeoning activity, so did things happen with a rush in the fall. haying was done just before the corn harvest, in the hot, late summer days which would cure the new-mown grass in the field. to cut the hay the county's farmers often used a one- or two-horse rake with a single attachment to raise or lower the rake's teeth when passing over a meadow. the dried hay, with its almost overpoweringly sweet smell, was lifted by forks into a wagon, tramped down, then transported to fill bursting barns. the least mechanized farms forked the hay into the lofts by hand but later barns were equipped with a mechanical fork for lifting the hay. haying had to be done at precisely the right time or the grass would not cure properly and the hay would spoil. the combination of heat, hard, backbreaking work, and the necessity for hurry made haying a particularly fatiguing time.[ ] most of the harvest was used right on the farm. like manure, which was recycled to enrich fields and gardens, the grain and hay crops went to nourish the farm's dairy animals. little was marketed and little was wasted. "that proved to be the best thing you could do," noted holden harrison, "grow as much of your own feed for your cattle as you could. you sold your ... crop production through your milk can."[ ] [illustration: a shock of wheat on the ellmore farm near floris. on this particularly successful farm the wheat was sold for seed to help improve the stock on other area farms. photo in annual report of county agent h. b. derr, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration: this mechanical hay loader on the harrison brothers' farm near floris dates from . photo courtesy of holden harrison.] the fruits of the year's labor came not only from the hay fields but from garden and orchard, whose abundance had to be gathered, preserved and stored in the late summer season. fairfax county had once been a major truck farming section but the onslaught of insects and competition from large commercial orchards (such as those in the shenandoah valley) had relegated this produce to the realm of home use. the a. s. harrison farm included plum, apple, peach and cherry trees and margaret mary lee recalled that cherries, pears and apples grew in her family's orchard. sometimes pears and apples were made into cider but most of the fruit was dried or canned for winter use. many farmers made the extra effort to keep bees under their fruit trees because they aided pollination and produced honey from the blossoms. the lees were among those who enjoyed the soft hum of the bees among the orchard trees. margaret lee especially liked to recall them darting busily between the fragrant white sheets, when the washing was hung in the yard.[ ] the vegetable garden, too, had a prominent place in the farm scheme. elizabeth rice noted that "everyone had a good garden, growing such things as sweet corn, limas, string beans, potatoes, tomatoes, and asparagus."[ ] others mentioned lettuce, herbs and popcorn in the family vegetable patch and many farms had grape arbors.[ ] like other areas of cultivation, the garden plot required care and attention for three seasons of the year. the round of soil preparation, planting, nourishing and harvesting added additional responsibilities to the multitude of duties which already crowded the sunlight hours. still, the rewards were great: self-sufficiency, economy, and the enjoyment of the earth's fresh bounty. with the harvest over the farmer would fill the less hectic winter hours with the unending minutia of the farm. fence and equipment mendings, cutting ice from ponds and rivers, chopping wood, and grubbing up trees all had a part in his busy life. another burst of activity occurred in early winter when animals were butchered for the year's meat. most farm families bought their beef in herndon, but nearly everyone kept hogs for home consumption.[ ] neal bailey, a veteran of many local butcherings, described them in this particularly detailed manner: two to three meat hogs per year were raised and slaughtered, all about thanksgiving. farmers used to do everything by the almanac. two men would grab a hog and throw it on its back and cut the jugular vein with a butcher knife. the pig was thrown then into a scalding trough--a metal trough with water placed over a wood fire burning in a trench.... in the old days, the local farmers heated rocks red hot and threw them in a big barrel of water. it was a day's work to haul rocks for this. the hair was scalded and scraped off. then the hog was gutted. old folks used to take the insides and make chitlins out of them. i never ate them myself. the hogs were hung up overnight in a shed or in a tree where dogs couldn't get it, to let the carcasses cure. the skin was left on the carcass, and next day, it was cut up and salted down in a box. it was kept tight so flies and mice couldn't get in.... anything that was left in spring was smoked to preserve it through the summer.[ ] [illustration: a small orchard apiary kept to provide honey and aid pollination of the fruit trees. photo in annual report of county agent h. b. derr, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] each family preserved its own meat and as emma ellmore related, "everybody had his own pet recipe ... for mixing the salt and the brown sugar--and some smoked the meat and some didn't." lard had to be rendered for storage in the cellar, sausage hand-ground and canned or frozen, the heads boiled until the meat left the bones, then chopped and pressed into a pan with the pot liquor to make headcheese. butchering time seems to have been an especially unforgettable occasion, for its details stand out sharply in the minds of many. "after butchering each year, mother made ... buckwheat cakes to eat with fresh sausage," reminisced margaret peck. "baked on a long black griddle, over a wood stove, spread with homemade butter and topped with corn syrup, they were the right beginning for a winter day."[ ] for floris residents, the smells and tastes of a time seem to whirl the memory backward with particular acuity. even in the hectic activity of harvest, a farmer was obliged to move through the evening routine of milking, feeding and bedding his animals. with these tasks completed, and a final check on the barns to see that all was snug, the farmer's day was nearly complete by about : . he ate a hearty supper, then read _the southern planter_, and possibly mended farm machinery or did a little work in the barn.[ ] for those who arose at : a.m. "in all kinds of weather," sleep came early and the house was usually dark by : p.m.[ ] * * * * * in all of this activity of cultivation, the rush of harvest, and regularity of day-to-day chores, the farmer worked, not alone, but in conjunction with his family. unlike the industrial worker, whose employment was discrete and separate from his home life, the farmer's home was his workshop, and his labor directly connected to his sustenance. his family was an integral part of this scheme; far from being removed from the household's form of support, they were intimately bound up in it. wife, husband, children and grandparents all contributed in their distinct sphere. the term "family farm" was no idle denomination, but a recognition of the importance the entire family played in the smooth operation of the farm. the relationship of a farm husband and wife was in many ways a truer partnership than that of the urban marriage. "a farmer needs a wife like he needs the rain," is an old farm saying, expounded for decades in the farmer's almanacs. it has now been collaborated by rural sociologists to show that farm efficiency was based largely on the partners' shared duties.[ ] the farmers themselves seemed to realize this. in a nationwide survey of factors which farmers regarded as most important to their success, "co-operation of wives" was ranked second.[ ] the activities of rural men and women were co-equal, not identical. women rarely worked in the fields except in the press of harvesting when they might drive a horse to pull up the hay fork--"what we've all done, i guess," agreed one group of floris women.[ ] they only occasionally aided the men in the barn. edith rogers remembered working with the stock as did margaret mary lee, who helped with milking and also recalled washing the milk storage tank and other equipment. this pleased the local milk inspector who told her, "when women are in the barn, i know the equipment is clean."[ ] except for such intermittent work, the outside duties were left to the men. instead, most women's activity was to be found in the farmhouse and garden. her responsibilities encompassed the expected areas of housekeeping, decorating and sewing, and often the less obvious work of bookkeeping or lawnmowing. the farm woman's most demanding task probably centered around the preparation and preservation of food, a vitally important function, for to waste or misuse food was to negate the hard labor of a year. in the current era of convenience foods, the time-consuming nature of cooking is easily forgotten. just operating a wood-burning stove was a complicated task, attested to by the directions for laying a fire in a contemporary cookbook. to build a fire, first let down the grate, and take up the ashes and cinders carefully to avoid raising a dust, sifting the cinders to use in building the fire; brush the soot and dust out of the upper part of the stove, and from the flues which can be reached; be sure that all parts of the ovens and hot-boxes are clean; if there is a water-back attached to the stove, see that it is filled with water; if it is connected with water-pipes, be sure in winter that they are not frozen; brush up the hearth-stone. lay the fire as follows: put a few handfuls of dry shavings or paper in the bottom of the grate; upon them, some small sticks of pine wood laid across each other; then a few larger sticks, and some cinders free from ashes; a few small lumps of coke or coal may be mixed with the cinders. open all the draughts of the stove, close all the covers, and light the fire; when the cinders are lighted, add fresh coke and coal gradually and repeatedly until a clear, bright fire is started; then partly close the draughts. to keep up a fire, add fuel often, a little at once, in order not to check the heat: letting the fire burn low, and then replenishing it abundantly, is a wasteful method, because the stove grows so cold that most of the fresh heat is lost in raising the temperature again to the degree necessary for cooking.[ ] inventory of the estate of george w. kidwell december , article value. grade guernsey cows, $ . each $ . holstein cows . bull . holstein calf . black heiffers, $ . each . small black heiffers . black horses . double sets harness . milk cans . milk buckets . strainer . shocks fodder . barrels corn . / tons hay bailed, $ . ton . lbs. loose hay @. . tons ensilage . bu. wheat @ $ . per bu . high wheel wagon . truck wagon . top wagon . manure spreader . hay ladder . blizzard ensilage cutter . gasoline engine . milk wagon . platform scale . set single harness . buggy . / ton $ . rock . oil drum . one horse wagon . basket sleigh . top wagon . smoothing harrow . single shovel plows . single cultivator . oliver horse plow . spring tooth harrow . set blacksmith tools . lot of lumber at mill house . lot of tools and repairs in mill house . cut off saw . contents of well house . dort automobile . contents of garage . lot of ladders and contents of wood house . contents of tool house . grindstone . iron boiler . wheelbarrow . hay rake . mowing machines, $ . each . riding cultivator . corn planter . lath mill and bench . grain drill . hay tedder . dish harrow . three horse plow . binder . note dated aug. th, payable yrs. after date . interest on above note from aug. th, , to the present time @ % . cash in herndon national bank . cash on savings account farmers & mechanics national . cash on savings account the potomac savings bank . liberty bonds . ------ . this inventory, attached to the will of a small farmer, shows the diverse equipment found on the 's farm. [illustration: plan of the family farm of mason f. smith, drawn by mason smith, jr., for a -h club project. the farm was bought in by floyd kidwell and now constitutes the nucleus of frying pan farm park. from mason smith, jr. livestock record books in annual report of county agent h. b. derr, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] though the wood-burning stoves often imparted a special flavor to the food prepared on them (for example, one farm cooking devotee opined that no waffles could taste like those from a wood-burning stove[ ]), the stoves were fearfully hot in the summer and needed constant refueling and expert attention to heat evenly. few fairfax county farm women had the luxury of electricity in their kitchens until well after . statistics show that only % of farm women cooked with electricity even in .[ ] in addition to the large regular meals required by a hard-working family, the farm woman prepared the gargantuan harvest meals shared by all who worked in the fields. cooking these meals in the late summer heat was a chore which took several days. "an ordeal" one veteran called it and enumerated some parts of the expected menu: corn bread, hot biscuits, pork shoulder, pressed chicken, fried chicken, vegetables and pie. "we'd put food enough together for them--and did they eat!"[ ] even at other times of the year, a farm wife needed to count on unexpected visitors and accommodate her activities to an unforeseen need to entertain. her adaptability is attested to by joseph beard who described the open farm hospitality of the era: when anybody came around to your farm in those days, when dinnertime came, you'd say, 'well, it's time for dinner. let's go eat.' it didn't seem to matter if you had somebody drop in on you on short notice. women, ladies, mothers, wives, were accustomed to this kind of thing. it never seemed to upset them. they just took it in stride. they put on another plate and said, 'we haven't got much, but you're welcome to what we have.' they'd go on like this. they would bring out the best they could find. that was the kind of condition that prevailed.[ ] the lady of the house in this period did not merely cook her family's food; she was instrumental in its production and processing. the family garden was generally her responsibility. it was she who planted the early radishes, herbs, flowers and all the multitude of summer vegetables in the cool, moist spring soil, weeded and nurtured them through the summer months, and finally gathered them in the lingering indian summer days. if there were daughters in the family, they aided her in this as in her other activities. when the produce was finally all picked, peeled and cut, she combined them with vinegar, sugar, and spices to preserve the vegetables as pickles, jelly or canned goods. it was warm and tiring, but highly rewarding work. "never will i forget the pungent fragrances that pervaded the air when it was catsup or pickle-making season," wrote lottie schneider. when our mothers made apple butter in great kettles each child took a turn at stirring the delicious mixture. the wonderful fragrance made the task easier even though the thickening ingredients sometimes sputtered and caused burns as they popped out on the hands who used the stirring paddle.[ ] the pantry shelves filled with glass jars displaying their highly colored contents produced feelings of pride and plenty in the farm woman. poultry keeping also fell to the farmer's wife. there were a sizable number of commercial poultry farms in the county--it was in fact the area's second most important farm industry--but most dairy and general farms kept just enough for their own use.[ ] egg collecting, feeding and cleaning of the chicken house and yard, even killing, dressing and plucking the poultry were done by female members of the farm family. thrifty women saved the feathers for pillows and coverlets and nearly all sold their excess eggs to the "hucksters" who travelled from farm to farm buying surplus goods. these peddlars also bought rabbits, turkeys, and other poultry, as well as home-churned butter from the farms. this was yet another area in which women utilized and processed the raw materials of the land. twice a week the cream that had been skimmed and saved was churned (generally in round barrel churns with wooden paddles), salted, and packed in stone jars to be picked up and transported to the alexandria and washington markets. one of the early hucksters was earl robey who collected eggs and chickens once a week. "he travelled with horses hitched to a covered wagon," wrote one farmer. "in later years he had a model t truck." the money made by the women was theirs to keep, for running the house and personal expenses, and the austerity or comparative comfort of a farmstead was often the direct result of the energy and efficiency of the farm woman.[ ] the rural woman's place was respected and secure on the farms of fifty years ago. the farmer might consider himself the overall manager but he recognized his spouse's vital contributions. "mutually they both decided to make things go and they did go," wrote one s farm boy of his parents. "mother did not feel inferior to father and she never felt that he expected her to feel so."[ ] if the woman's role and duties were firmly set in this rural society, then so was her status. an additional responsibility was that of caring for children, but in the farm family this was more clearly a joint obligation of the father and mother than in families in which the male parent left home to work. too, children were more closely tied to the family as a working unit; they felt both the necessity of aiding their parents with the running of the farm and the pride of contributing in a real sense to the family's well-being. of course, farm children attended school, but they also shared the pattern of their parents' life. with father and mother they awoke in the early hours of the morning to help with barn or household chores: "it didn't make any difference how small they were, they got up at six o'clock."[ ] many learned to milk before the age of ten. on weekends, summer holidays and after school, they were also expected to help on the farm. both boys and girls performed the unending job of gathering firewood for the kitchen stove. carrying water was another constant chore which often fell to the family's children, for as late as nearly % of the county's homes still lacked running water.[ ] farm youngsters learned to drive a team and ride horseback at an early age, and this enabled them to take a horse to be shod, fetch a mower section from the general store, or run other unexpected errands. margaret lee stated that as a girl she used to hitch up a mule and buggy each monday to take the family's laundry to be washed by a local negro laundress, and pick it up again on thursday.[ ] girls also helped with the dishes, fed chickens, and cooked while boys tackled plowing, threshing and animal husbandry. one woman recalled the special satisfaction she felt when, at the age of thirteen, she shocked an entire field of wheat.[ ] by doing these chores and errands, farm children were not merely assisting in the farm operation. in the emulation of their parents' activity, they benefitted from a kind of on-the-job training which both sharpened their skills for a later farm career and furthered their identity with the family group and farm life in general. the farm child's close connection to his parents' life and the necessity for performing a variety of chores also acted in some measure as a force for social control: the child who worked with his parents was expected to act in a manner acceptable to them. furthermore, the close-knit nature of the community reinforced the parents' values when their offspring were away from home. "a farmer was always busy, and his kids didn't run the streets," noted joseph beard.[ ] another native of northern virginia explained the prevalent philosophy in more detail: papa was a firm believer that work was a therapy that kept young people out of mischief. it was unthought of for youngsters to get into serious trouble in those days other than smoking corn silk or grapevine, and that was a punishment in itself. all were assigned specific chores and the youngest started out picking up chips and other small pieces of wood from the 'woodpile' for kindling to start the fire in the kitchen range at daylight in the morning.... as we grew a little older bringing in the firewood was added to the list of chores and when you grew big enough to chop and split cordwood, usually around the age of - years, one found the chores around the home were endless.[ ] [illustration: rebecca rice, daughter of c. t. rice, canning fruit in her home near oakton, virginia. note the ice box and wood burning stove, standard features of the early th century kitchen. photo in h. b. derr reports, virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration: elizabeth harrison in her room on a farm near herndon, virginia. she refurbished the room herself as part of a -h project. photo in h. b. derr reports, virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] the round of chores might seem endless, but farm kids had their fun, too. joseph beard and richard peck both recall swimming in horse pen run and peck also reminisced about fishing in the local streams.[ ] margaret lee was sometimes treated to a baked sweet potato after school; she rode the family mule for recreation.[ ] at halloween, much secret giggling went on as plans were afoot to take an outhouse and sit it on the school porch, or sneak all of the milk cans out of the dairy and set them outside.[ ] skating on the baptismal pond of frying pan baptist church, and neighborhood events such as picnics, watermelon feasts and oyster suppers also lent excitement to the child's life. perhaps the most pervasive enjoyment came from the ever-changing delights of the countryside itself. wrote one resident of the herndon area: "we could ramble through the woods, finding huckleberries, wild flowers, sassafras roots and stems, chestnuts and lovely mosses."[ ] * * * * * although children provided a great deal of supplemental labor on the county's small farms, the "hired hand" was also an important part of the community's work force. one local resident estimated that approximately half of the farms in the herndon area used hired labor, and this figure is collaborated by the agricultural census of . other evidence shows that the largest single expense (about % of total farm expenditures) for the owner of thirty or more acres was hired help.[ ] in fairfax county, as in most of the south, this hired labor was composed almost entirely of the community's black residents, though occasionally a family would employ a white man. the ellmore family, who often had a white man as their hired help, was such an exception.[ ] [illustration: a homemade sled used for hauling manure to the fields. note the two young boys who, by driving the sled, shared the family's responsibility for the farm. photo in annual report of county agent h. b. derr, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] extra help was engaged in several ways. larger farms frequently kept one or two men throughout the year, sometimes supplying them with a house and their noon meal as well as a salary.[ ] on most farms, however, extra help would be hired at particularly busy seasons by the day or the week. "in the summertime you'd get seasonal help, gather them up here and there, wherever you could," stated holden harrison. "if you could carry those men, at least the best ones, over the winter, then you'd have a good force that you could depend on for your summer work, your planting and harvesting."[ ] in some cases the hired man would come with his team of horses for which he received additional wages. in another variation groups of workers would organize into crews to perform a specific function (for example, to fill a silo) and travelled from farm to farm accomplishing this special task.[ ] many of the laborers in the floris area came from willard, a community of both whites and blacks, just over the loudoun county line. about % of fairfax county's black population owned no land in and supported themselves solely by agricultural labor.[ ] unlike this large landless majority, many of willard's families owned three to fifteen acres of land. most of these families grew vegetables on their land and nearly all kept a cow.[ ] a few black families tried to support themselves by truck gardening, a difficult task when competing with larger more economical farms. one such farmer, ernest e. webb, struggled to maintain his children by selling vegetables in the city market. biweekly he took his goods by wagon across the low, unstable chain bridge and along canal road to the markets in washington, but for this long, exhausting trip his profits were slim: "we made enough to come back home, feed the horses, and feed ourselves a little for another trip."[ ] to eke out an existence, most blacks had to supplement any farming income they might have by working as agricultural laborers. those laborers who did not have steady employment had to wait for work until they were needed for a specific job. when a farmer wanted extra help, he went to the black community, or sent word by someone else, and detailed the number of men needed and the job to be done. "in the spring my father would go up there [to willard] or send me up there to see if i could get three or four fellows to help get the spring work going," remarked holden harrison. "maybe you could get them and maybe you couldn't."[ ] sometimes there was a labor shortage, but frequently more men wanted work than there were jobs to go around. several area residents remembered that if word got out that ten men were needed for a job, often fifteen or more would show up.[ ] this was especially true during the agricultural depression of the s and s, which hit blacks far worse than the county's white population. the blacks' landholdings were of inferior quality and generally too small for efficient operation, and this, combined with their meagre operating capital and inadequate reserves, made the black agriculturalist more dependent than ever on work from the large landowner.[ ] the hired man was expected to arrive in time for the early morning milking and work the lengthy fifteen-hour day alongside the farmer. his chores ranged from making hay to cutting wood and building fences. neal bailey recalled that he spent his entire first day as a laborer driving fence posts with a -pound hammer. the standard salary was $ . to $ . per day plus all he could eat for lunch. some farmers paid by the job rather than by the day though they found the latter system preferable. when the help was not so concerned with completing a task rapidly, farmers believed it produced a better quality work. occasionally the white farmers shared or traded work with their black counterparts. more frequently, hired hands worked for a share of the fruits of their labor. at butchering time, the hired help might go home with sausage, side meat (bacon) or a pork shoulder for his pay. at berry season they picked a farmer's blackberries or wild cherries for half of the take.[ ] the women and children of the black communities in fairfax county also worked. black women took in laundry, picked fruit and sometimes came to the white farmer's houses to help with canning or meat preservation at butchering time. one woman worked as a midwife; according to margaret lee, the only one in the area. she delivered miss lee's younger sister around .[ ] children as young as nine would thin corn or pluck potato bugs off the dark, leafy plants for ¢ a day. girls used to pick berries and pull field cress when it was going to seed, and some children worked in the farmhouses running errands.[ ] the ellmore family often had a young boy to help do odds and ends, and another floris resident noted that "there was some twins of about twelve years old and we needed a little help so i took one of them in the house and my brother had the other out to help him with things."[ ] neal bailey recalled going out to help his father cut corn at a very young age and being told to "keep working--you have no back," even when it felt as if it were breaking.[ ] within these labor relationships the white employer retained the most control since he set wages and hours, and because he worked with the knowledge that the black families were dependent on him for employment. yet the blacks had their influence too, for the larger landowners needed their labor to keep the farms operating smoothly. the farmer's dependence was apparent in instances such as that related by ray harrison, who remembered one christmas night when no help at all showed up. that night he milked fifty-two cows by hand, something he could not afford to do every day.[ ] in numerous ways the hired hands exercised some control over their working conditions. for example, seasoned workmen reserved the right to "break in" a field hand new to the neighborhood, thus both initiating him into local work patterns and assuring that his expectations and treatment corresponded to that of the veteran help.[ ] in times of intense activity, the labor supply would be short and the workers raised their prices accordingly. one farmer recalled that during an exceptionally busy silo-filling season the help were "jacking up the price ... ten cents an hour about four times in one day.... they were putting pressure on because they thought they had the leverage there." in this case the farmer called their bluff and sent the workers home, but in many instances, the laborers held sway and received higher wages during peak work periods.[ ] the white attitude toward their black workers seems to have been paternalistic, as was the pattern of most racial relations in the post-bellum south. though area farmers maintain that their hired laborers were liked and respected--"as much a part of the neighborhood as anyone else"--in conversation capable workers were referred to as "boy" or by the old plantation epithets of "aunt" and "uncle." a hearty noon meal was part of the hired man's pay, but the help ate outside by themselves, rather than with the family.[ ] moreover, rather than admit his need for the laborers, the white employer sometimes viewed his hiring in an altruistic light. "i remember my brother went over to these colored people that had been working for him at different times, in the middle of the winter, and told them to come over and cut some wood, and he paid them for it so that they would have something, because they were pretty bad off. so he just made work for them," stated one county woman.[ ] undoubtedly, charitable motives were truly meant, but the outcome was a paternalistic attitude which failed to recognize the mutual dependence of land and labor. this reliable supply of labor eliminated the county's need for migratory workers, and also reduced the amount of tenancy since most farmers found labor enough to manage all of their acreage. nevertheless, during the period between - , about - % of the white farm population and % of the black were tenants.[ ] statistical evidence shows over half of the tenants to be cash croppers in and % in . many historians believe this to be the least beneficial system for the tenant as his obligation was to pay the landlord a fixed rent on the land regardless of the success of his crop.[ ] however, joseph beard stated that most of the tenants with whom he had contact when he was county agent in the late s were sharecroppers. by this system, the renting farmer supplied his tools and labor, the landlord furnished the land, and the crop was split. fairfax county never harbored the kind of perpetual tenancy described by james agee's _let us now praise famous men_, in which families lived in squalor and humiliation with little hope of pulling their way out of debt. this occurred more frequently in the one-crop areas of the deep south where exhausted soil and crop dependency made for a high debt risk each year. beard maintained that the sharecroppers of the late s were respectable people, merely renting land until they could afford to purchase their own. in several instances, they were young local couples who went on to buy their tenured land and to become established members of the community.[ ] still, at best, any tenure system was a demoralizing one for the renter because his profits were consistently skimmed off to the landlord. part i--notes _continuity_ [ ] interview with joseph beard by elizabeth pryor, fairfax, virginia, january , ; notes from interview with margaret mary lee by nan netherton, herndon, virginia, march , . all transcripts and notes from interviews used in this paper are deposited in the fairfax county library virginiana collection (hereafter cited "virginiana"). [ ] notes on interview with elizabeth and emma ellmore by nan netherton, herndon, virginia, march , . [ ] interview with holden harrison, ray harrison and virginia presgraves harrison by elizabeth pryor, chantilly, virginia, february , . [ ] notes on interview with john and edna middleton by nan netherton, herndon, virginia, february , . [ ] interview with joseph beard and holden harrison by elizabeth pryor, floris, virginia, march , ; wilson day mcnair, "what i remember," unpublished manuscript, n.d., copy courtesy of louise mcnair ryder; author's conversation with rebecca middleton, floris, virginia, april , . [ ] john middleton/netherton, february , ; and interview with joseph beard by nan netherton and patrick reed, fairfax, virginia, november, . [ ] ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] "floris producers active," _herndon news-observer_, january , . [ ] lottie dyer schneider, _memoirs of herndon, virginia_ (marion, virginia, ), and . [ ] notes on interview with richard peck by nan netherton, herndon, virginia, february , ; notes on interview with virginia mcfarland greear by nan netherton, herndon, virginia, march , ; and schneider, _memoirs of herndon, virginia_, . [ ] elizabeth rice to author, wilmington, delaware, january , . [ ] beard/netherton/reed, november, ; peck/netherton, february , ; ellmore/netherton, march , ; and harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] _agricultural census, _; and federal crop reporting service, _virginia farm statistics, - _ (richmond, ). [ ] _ibid._; and beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] lehman nickell and cary j. randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_ (charlottesville, ), - ; notes on interview with neal bailey by nan netherton, herndon, virginia, december , ; "fairfax farmer threw away his plow in and amazing results have been revolutionary," _richmond times-dispatch_, september , ; and annual reports of county agricultural extension agent h. b. derr, , and , in virginiana. [ ] bailey/netherton, december , . [ ] _ibid._; and mcnair, "what i remember." [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] derr reports, , ; mcnair, "what i remember"; and joseph beard quoted in beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] notes on interview with edith rogers by nan netherton, herndon, virginia, n.d. (c. spring, ). [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] bailey/netherton, december , ; rogers/netherton; derr report, , . [ ] derr report, , . [ ] _agricultural census, _; and derr reports, and . [ ] "fairfax farmer threw away plow." [ ] bailey/netherton, december , ; and mcnair, "what i remember." [ ] harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] bailey/netherton, december , ; notes on interview with joseph beard by elizabeth pryor, fairfax, virginia, february , ; and harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] bailey/netherton, december , ; mcnair, "what i remember." [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] harrison/pryor, february , ; lee/netherton, march , ; elizabeth rice to mary scott, n.d. (c. fall, ), copy courtesy of mary scott. [ ] elizabeth rice to author, january , . [ ] -h record books, copy in annual report of county agricultural extension agent; derr report, ; beard/pryor, january , ; and mcnair, "what i remember." [ ] rogers/netherton; greear/netherton, march , . [ ] bailey/netherton, december , . [ ] margaret peck quoted in _out of the frying pan_ (herndon, virginia, ), . [ ] j. middleton/netherton, february , . [ ] ellmore/netherton, march , ; and beard/pryor, january , . [ ] see _hills southern almanac_, (virginia fire and marine insurance company, ); j. h. kolb and edmund s. de brunner, _a study of rural society_ (boston, ), - . [ ] _ibid._, . [ ] ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] rogers/netherton; lee/netherton, march , . [ ] juliet corson, _miss corson's practical american cookery_ (new york, ), ; and adeline goessling, _the farm and home cook book_ (chicago, ). [ ] frances darlington simpson, _virginia country life and cooking_ (washington, d.c., ). [ ] virginia polytechnical institute, _the housing of virginia's rural folk_ (blacksburg, ), . [ ] rebecca middleton quoted in ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] schneider, _memoirs of herndon, virginia_, . [ ] derr reports, , ; nearly all interviews collaborated this information, see especially peck/netherton, february , . [ ] greear/netherton, march , ; mcnair, "what i remember." [ ] unidentified s farmer quoted in kolb and brunner, _a study of rural society_, . [ ] _ibid._; beard/pryor, january , . [ ] vpi, _housing_, . [ ] lee/netherton, march , . [ ] _ibid._; ellmore/netherton, march , ; peck/netherton, february , . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] edwin w. beitzell, _life on the potomac river_ (abell, maryland, ), . [ ] beard/pryor, january , ; peck/netherton, february , . [ ] lee/netherton, march , . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] schneider, _memoirs of herndon, virginia_, . [ ] lee/netherton, march , ; and w. c. funk, "an economic study of small farms near washington, d.c.," _united states department of agriculture bulletin _, june , . this study concludes that the farmer with thirty or more acres spent % of his revenue for labor, as compared with % for feed, % for marketing and % for insurance and taxes. see table iv of this study for a complete breakdown. [ ] ellmore/netherton, march , . [ ] harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] _ibid._; and william edward garnett and john w. ellison, "negro life in rural virginia, - ," _virginia polytechnical institute bulletin _, june, . [ ] beard/pryor, february , ; and bailey/netherton, december , . [ ] dana gumb, "pioneer recalls mclean," _echoes of history_, (march and may, ), . [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] beard/pryor, february , ; and beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] garnett and ellison, "negro life in rural virginia," . [ ] beard/pryor, february , ; bailey/netherton, december , ; beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] lee/netherton, march , . [ ] bailey/netherton, december , . [ ] ellmore/netherton, march , ; interview with edith rogers by patty corbat, craig smith and phyllis hirshman, june , . [ ] bailey/netherton, december , . [ ] harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] bailey/netherton, december , ; beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , ; beard/pryor, february , . [ ] greear/netherton, march , ; peck/netherton, february , . [ ] rogers/corbat, et al., june , . [ ] nickell and randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_, - ; and _agricultural census, _. nickell gives a % tenancy and lists out of tenants to be working on a cash-tenant basis. the agricultural census for also shows a % tenancy figure. [ ] beard/pryor, january , . for a grim but revealing view of what tenancy could mean during this period, see james agee and walker evans, _let us now praise famous men_, (new york, ). [ ] harold barger and hans m. lansburg, _american agriculture - _ (new york, ), ; and beard/pryor, january , . part ii _change_ in its seasonal cycle of activity, the close and interdependent family relationships, and the singular self-motivation of the farmer, the early th century farm carried on many of the traditions of the past. except for the change from slave to free labor and the marginal use of mechanical equipment, these elements made up a world in which the farmer of , , or even would have felt comfortable. but running concurrently with these expected qualities of rural life were major changes which jarred and fractured the constant trends of farming. change in attitude, technology or society occurs during all periods, but the s and s were a particularly dynamic time in the field of agriculture. advances in the understanding of plant biology, animal husbandry and soil conservation, together with higher living standards through rural electrification and improved communications, were a cause for optimism about the future of the family farm. yet these advances irrevocably altered the familiar rural life patterns. to maintain his own station within this changing world, the farmer's outlook and methods would also have to change. * * * * * perhaps the most obvious modification of the traditional methods of farming was the increased mechanization of many farm functions during the early part of the th century. not only were plows improved (by the addition of a vertical disk which made for deeper cutting and more thorough turning of the soil) and heavier harrows developed, but gasoline-powered machinery began to be widely used.[ ] the diesel tractor had actually been available as early as , but was not generally adopted until world war i at which time military experimentation improved the engine's construction and worker shortages made the labor-efficient machinery especially valuable. the introduction in of an all-purpose tractor, which could cultivate as well as prepare the soil, increased the machinery's usefulness and gave an additional thrust to its popularity.[ ] the tractor was meant to replace the work of draft horses, the large, gentle creatures who, along with oxen and mules, had supplied the farm's power for centuries. the saving the new machinery incurred was chiefly in time, an intangible element of economics which farmers were just beginning to consider in their appraisal of income and farm value. often the use of a tractor cut work time by half or more. ray harrison recalled that it took five horses and three men several days work to clean out the trees and brush for a potential field; his brother could do it with only one helper in a single day.[ ] [illustration: a broadcast harvester capable of picking four rows at a time. this mechanical picker was developed by a county farmer, h. c. clapp. photo in h. b. derr report, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration: wheat being mechanically harvested, c. . few farms could afford the luxury of such equipment at this time. photo in h. b. derr report, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] the early tractors were not without their problems. initially their wheels were of steel, which packed down the wet earth making plowing difficult, or lost traction and became mired in the ever-present red mud; the addition of spiked wheels or heavy chains helped only a little before pneumatic tires were introduced in .[ ] the machinery was also expensive and complicated to repair. few farms were as fortunate as the harrisons' on which one brother had taken numerous mechanical courses and had even worked in a tractor repair shop.[ ] for farmers who could not always correlate time savings with financial advantage, the large capital outlay seemed unnecessary or even unwise. as the machinery was best adapted to large farms and intensive cultivation, this was especially true in situations where the farmer did not feel overworked, or held few ambitions to expand production. thus, fairfax county farmers were slow to embrace the newfangled technology. a survey of the county showed that only % of the farmers owned a tractor despite county agent derr's assertion that the "cutting of wheat with the tractor had been found the most economical way for many reasons. the principle being rapidity and saving of labor."[ ] as late as derr wrote that the majority of the small farmers could not afford to purchase mechanized equipment and were compelled to continue with their horses. the cost was partially offset by machinery loaned by the united states department of agriculture (usda), for example, a seed corn grader and wheat smut treater which travelled "like a missionary ... from farm to farm in their crop improvement work."[ ] nevertheless even men such as a. s. harrison, one of the area's most progressive farmers, were hesitant about the new machines, as holden harrison relates: he knew i was sort of a tractor bug, and one day he called me in and he said, 'now son, now we don't use tractors out here, we grow the feed for the horses ... we do our farm work with horses.' but that very spring it got so hot that an old broken down tractor that i rounded up did more work than the twelve horses we had.[ ] economics, custom and suspicion of objects so divorced from nature's cadence reduced the farmers' enthusiasm for new machinery. mechanized milking equipment was also held in suspicion initially. milking machines were developed around , but a prejudice against them lasted well into the s. older cows, accustomed to hand milking, did not like the sound and feel of the machines and many farmers contended that they impaired the milk-producing capabilities of some animals.[ ] separators were likewise mistrusted by some who felt that they skimmed the cream inadequately. moreover, most of the dairy equipment required electricity for its operation and for many years this was not readily available in the area. these factors kept milking machines from being swiftly adopted in fairfax county. conversations with farmers of the inter-war period indicate that such equipment was not generally acquired until the mid s.[ ] farmers learned of the new labor-saving devices by word of mouth, through agricultural organizations, catalogs and manufacturer's salesmen. the latter could be a nuisance to the already preoccupied farmer, but he also acted as an invaluable informational source. one dairyman explained: that was a very useful service that salesmen performed. salesmen sort of get a black eye from some quarters but they kept the farmers up to date on the new machines.... we had a very good tractor with steel wheels, and a salesman came in and said, 'i'm representing goodrich rubber company. we're making tractor tires now and if you'll let us put a set of tires on your tractor we'll let you try them out, and if you don't like them, we'll take them off and go back home with them.' so we did, we tried them and they worked.[ ] the new equipment, attachments and improvements could be bought on credit, or by deferred payment (that is, extended credit) until a crop was harvested. this was frequently necessary as the machinery was costly. joseph beard indicated that a tractor cost about $ to $ in . the sears and roebuck catalog for offered an electric milker for $ (including a / horsepower engine) and a harrow attachment to be used with a tractor for $ . cream separators ranged from $ . to $ without a motor, which could cost as much as $ . . "don't make a horse out of yourself," the catalog cajoled. but with the additional cost of parts, maintenance and fuel, a farmer earning only $ , annually could at best hope to equip his farm only gradually.[ ] to offset costs, farmers retained their old tools while gradually acquiring up-to-date equipment. an inventory of the equipment on a fifty-acre farm shows the mix of old and new owned by the typical farmer of this transition period. in the farm of george w. kidwell near hunter was equipped with harnesses, a two-horse plow, and blacksmithing tools, but also a gasoline engine, an oil drum and automobile.[ ] ultimately, of course, the machines were of tremendous advantage to the large and specialized dairyman. they speeded and streamlined the twice-daily milkings, efficiently strained and separated the milk while warm. later, the machines cooled the milk to the optimum temperature required to retard spoilage. this latter development was an especially noteworthy improvement over the old well or ice-water coolings. similar advances were made with electric incubators and chicken feeders for poultry specialists and improved spraying equipment for orchardists. warren mcnair was a pioneer in the floris neighborhood in the use of mechanized hatcheries, establishing one which was powered by coal before world war i. like the dairy equipment, poultry technology offered efficiency and improved production.[ ] [illustration: a tractor-drawn drill which could plant four rows at a time. this snapshot shows a black agricultural laborer planting soybeans, which were used as high protein livestock feed. photo in annual report of county agent h. b. derr, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration: wilson d. mcnair aboard a row crop tractor, featuring rubber tires, c. . in the background is the farm's chicken house. growing poultry and eggs was the specialty of this farmer. photo courtesy of louise mcnair ryder.] along with a slow-growing recognition of the advantages of automated farm equipment came a quantum leap in knowledge of the agricultural sciences. some experimentation in plant and animal breeding was attempted around the turn of the century, but the real impetus for extended research was the passage of the smith-lever act in . in virginia the work was undertaken at the virginia polytechnical institute (vpi) in blacksburg. the early efforts of the united states department of agriculture were enlarged at this time and, most significantly, were made accessible to individual farmers through the county agricultural extension program. interconnected with the state agricultural colleges, the program used representatives known as county agents to advise and educate the farmers. working on a personal level, they were able to, in the words of one fairfax agent, "bring the college to the people." as a result of the improved access to information, new ideas on breeding, animal care, soil improvements, and planting almost inundated the farmer.[ ] of special importance was an increased understanding of livestock breeding and a change in the desired criteria for a prime animal. as more and more emphasis was placed on pragmatic qualities, the old show points of stature, color or markings lost prestige next to reproductive capacity or productivity. one maryland farmer who marketed his products in the same areas as fairfax dairymen, stated the case emphatically. "what does a man want a cow for? _milk!_ and to get milk you've got to have a ... female animal with some size to her, strong bone, a good bag and a big barrel--a real machine ... producing quality milk."[ ] a fairfax county poultry raiser concurred. complaining to the editor of the _fairfax herald_ in , he wrote: as is now being done, fowls are being judged by the show standard rather than from a utility standpoint. as one member [of the poultrymen's organization] present stated ... one of his birds won the blue ribbon as the best marked bird in her class but shortly after the fair he sold her in the market owing to [her] being such a poor layer.[ ] actually some disagreement occurred over exactly which qualities should be stressed in breeding. experts in animal husbandry found that cross-breeding often produced the highest yield of milk, a conclusion which was at odds with those who wanted to emphasize pure-bred stock. in fairfax county, h. b. derr followed the latter persuasion. in the end both parties hoped to achieve the same result: a controlled breeding program which would allow the farmer to predetermine the type and characteristics of the stock on his farm. to improve the county's stock, farmers were urged to breed their livestock with purebred animals whenever possible, and keep accurate records of milk and egg production. an especially successful tool was the establishment of dairy herd improvement associations which tested the yield and butter fat content of each cow's milk. the aim of these organizations was to identify the high and low producers in a herd so that poor producers could be sold and breeding done to best advantage. agricultural agent h. b. derr moved quickly to establish these groups in the county. by two of the fourteen dairy herd improvement associations in virginia were in fairfax county, and the result was a continual improvement in the stock owned by fairfax farmers. derr reported with pleasure that within the first year of the program % of the cows were eliminated and replaced by better stock and that "one dairyman said the first month's test paid for the year's work."[ ] similar improvements were taking place in the grading and standardization of seed. when derr first arrived in fairfax county in , he complained that it was "the dumping ground of about as bad a lot of seed as he had ever seen."[ ] old or genetically mixed seed yielded poor crops and derr organized volunteer farmers to help test new strains as well as established varieties in the area's soil. the experimentation for crop return and quality and controlled breeding done at the virginia polytechnical institute and similar institutions increased the variety of seed available and made for highly predictable returns. an additional help was the increased dependability of seed distributors. holden harrison recalled that southern states cooperative was particularly conscientious in this regard. "other seed companies had begun to improve their seed stocks, but southern states put the emphasis on it. the seed wheat we got from southern states outproduced any other that we could find."[ ] whereas traditionally many had merely been saving the most likely ears of corn or a random bushel of wheat for seed, the farmer now demanded certified seed of a variety most responsive to his area's soil type and weather. agriculturalists were also making huge strides in understanding the physical needs of animals and disease prevention. the discoveries about bacterial and viral infections made by medical researchers during the s and s were beginning to be understood in veterinary circles and applied to animal care. mastitis and chicken cholera were among the common diseases brought under control by new drugs. county agents carried medicine and veterinary equipment with them using it both in emergency cases and to instruct farmers in sanitation and preventative care.[ ] health standards, especially for dairy products sold in washington, d.c., had been stiffened during the first world war, and it was important for the farmer to understand disease prevention not only to save his animals but to keep his produce marketable. [illustration: soybeans on a demonstration field showing the improvements made by the addition of lime to the soil. photo in h. b. derr report, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] veterinarians abounded in the area, but were called in generally for required tests (such as tuberculin) or when the situation was really grave; most farmers relied on their own experience for delivering calves or treating common ailments.[ ] among the prominent vets in the county were dr. harry drake, dr. bernard poole and c. l. kronfeld. all of these men made house calls, bringing medical kits and medicine with them. their fee was $ . per visit which included the price of follow-up medicine. perhaps because this fee was prohibitive to some, or through a desire for self-reliance, farmers often neglected to call the veterinarian until an animal was critically ill. "the farmer in what i suspect was fifty percent of the cases lost the animal anyway after the vet got there," acknowledged joseph beard, because so many times instead of having preventative medicine ... they never called him until things were in very bad shape. i suspect that the vet would have been able to save so many of the animals that he didn't by virtue of the fact that he didn't get there on time.... they weren't interested in prevention; they were interested in the cure.[ ] the farmers were not entirely to blame since preventative medicine was a new concept, the benefits of which were not always immediately obvious. county agents derr and beard both waged exhaustive battles to convince local agriculturalists of the advantage of vaccination and show them the proper methods of inoculating their own animals. derr found the farmers unwilling to do their own vaccinating, preferring to rely on specialists; yet with classic inconsistency they were also reluctant to call in a veterinarian for such a purpose.[ ] in the end, the agents found that, like many other progressive techniques which seemed new and unsubstantiated to the farmer, demonstration worked better than rhetoric. an example of this occurred in when a farmer let some cattle onto a pasture, believed to be infested with a calf disease known as blackleg. when one of his best calves died, he panicked and turned to the county agent. the farmer's animals were all inoculated, as were those on several neighboring farms, and there were no further losses. "this incident has done more to place confidence in vaccinations than several years' talking could do," wrote a pleased h. b. derr. "there are no more doubting thomases in that community at least."[ ] similar work was undertaken to convince orchardists and crop producers of the advantages of preventative spraying to eliminate bacterial diseases and aid in insect control. the county's production of fruits, vegetables and grains had suffered less from direct neglect than from ignorance of proper care.[ ] the value of chemical pesticides was just beginning to be understood (their use would not reach major proportions until the years after world war ii) and joseph beard noted that the agents were frequently "bombarded with all these new advertisements coming from the supplier or chemical company...."[ ] the agents refrained from recommending products that had not been tested for at least three years at the state agricultural experiment station, insuring some safety in the pesticides, though beard admitted that the principles of chemical buildup were not yet recognized.[ ] slowly word travelled through the county of the advantages of protecting crops from disease. by the program was progressing nicely, as derr reported to the state agency. driving through the county one day, he met a successful orchardist whom he had previously urged to use fungicides. "derr," the farmer remarked to him, "you sure keep me busy; every time my wife sees your spray notices she makes me get the machine out and go to work, but it surely does pay to spray."[ ] here too the farmer relied on his own verification and judged personal experience stronger than the words of experts. [illustration: a wild cherry tree destroyed by web worms. insect pests such as these were a chief reason for the decline of orchards in the area. photo in h. b. derr report, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] * * * * * in this period of exciting and crucial advances in agricultural knowledge, the individual landowner was sometimes at a loss to, in his parlance, separate the wheat from the chaff. radio programs, bulletins from the usda and vpi, local newspaper columns and talks by visiting experts all vied for the farmer's time, as did the news in _the southern planter_, _country gentleman_ and _farm journal_, favorite periodicals in the area. "these programs came so rapidly the farmers just about got familiar with one until another appeared," derr reported in . "as one farmer put it, 'just one durned thing after another."[ ] furthermore, the information was often confusing, at odds with the handed-down teachings of generations, or juxtaposed with other advice with which it was dramatically opposed. the _herndon news-observer_, for example, carried several articles on "scientific feeding" in its early issues and advocated crop rotation and strict attention to cleanliness. only a year later, however, it printed a column advising farmers to feed kerosene and lard to hens to rid them of vermin.[ ] in an even more blatant example, this paper contained an article written by virginia state dairy specialist john a. avery, which counseled area farmers to increase their dairy herds; the same edition ran a piece by h. b. derr which bemoaned the surplus of milk then glutting the washington market.[ ] it is not surprising that the farmer, caught in the midst of a bewildering amount of concrete advice and misinformation, sometimes preferred to stick to his ancestors' ways. thus, the old adages--that corn should be planted when the leaves were as large as squirrel's ears, or that when a hen's comb isn't bright red, it isn't laying--were relinquished with reluctance.[ ] the only consistently accepted source on scientific farming seems to have been virginia polytechnical institute's _handbook of agronomy_, which more than one farmer stated he held in one hand while directing the plow with the other.[ ] a particularly difficult question for the farmer to consider was the problem of specialization. general farming had been the rule for so long, and one-crop systems had such a reputation for running farms into debt, that many were doubtful of the advantages of specialization. here, too, they received mixed signals. on one hand farmers were advised to sink their all into poultry or dairying, only to hear that to concentrate too completely on one area would limit their self-sufficiency and mitigate the integrated quality of the farm. in an increasingly technical world, however, specialization had many attractions. expensive machinery needed to be purchased for only one kind of production, the farmer could cut down the vast influx of information to only those subjects which directly interested him, and the methods of mass production, first pioneered in factories, could be applied to his concentrated effort. moreover, specialization in market commodities produced the cash which had become ever more important to buy equipment, pay taxes and purchase manufactured goods which were no longer made on the farm. in the end, fairfax county farmers generally effected a compromise: while focusing on one aspect of farming, they retained many of the advantages of the general farmer. vegetable gardens, poultry houses, orchards, and sometimes sheep all kept their place on the family farm. even c. t. rice, who liked to refer to his farm as a milk producing plant, with "little time or space for anything else" kept a few chickens and hogs.[ ] an early specialization in the county was truck gardening. the long growing season and potential markets in alexandria and washington in theory seemed to point to success in this field. the list of vegetables and fruits grown for the commercial market was impressive and included potatoes, corn, tomatoes, spinach, black-eyed peas, parsnips and rhubarb, apples and several varieties of berries.[ ] one man even grew artichokes, making quite a substantial profit, but decided to move his operation to more productive soils in new jersey.[ ] yet those who attempted raising large quantities of these crops found it difficult to show clear profits. fruit growers had to compete with the world-famous produce of the shenandoah valley, whose strong cooperative organization gave an added advantage to the area's natural abundance. hay and forage grains were of decreasing importance in a country rapidly becoming enamored of the automobile. in addition, a slump in farm prices had begun in - , the after-effect of the inflated agricultural revenues of the world war i years. a study of small truck farms in the washington, d.c. area showed that despite intensive labor and a double cropping system, a farmer was often clearing only $ annually by raising produce for the city markets. the study concluded that it took "the best management and a considerable knowledge of farm practice and markets" to till such a farm to advantage. on the smallest farms it was only the exceptional farmer who could make more than a living without any outside source of income.[ ] marketing the produce was a special problem of truck farming. the vegetables had to be delivered and sold at the peak of their ripeness and their highly perishable nature made this somewhat difficult in the days before refrigeration. it was generally undesirable to sell through a middleman, and therefore the farmer was responsible for personally marketing as well as raising his produce. moreover, the trip to washington was tedious and time consuming, especially in the early s when the condition of the area's roads was at a notoriously low point. one market farmer's trip was described in this way: he planted all sorts of garden produce and he had what you'd call a market wagon; it was a covered wagon.... during the day he would fill that wagon with his produce and in the evening he would hook his ... two horses to the wagon to get to washington. he'd aim to get there by six o'clock in the morning when the markets opened. he would sell his produce as much as he could [directly from the wagon] ... to individuals at the old center market.... they paid a higher price. if he had any left over he had to sell it at whatever he could get to the people who owned the stalls.... it took him three or four hours ... to sell his load of produce. then it was the next night before he came home.[ ] conditions at the city markets were also less than perfect as large companies tried to dump cheap produce from outside areas on the washington consumer. not only did they compete with the local farmer for the lowest prices, but they misused the stall space itself. even when a new market was built in , this remained a problem. one irate farmer angrily stated to the editor of the _herndon news-observer_ that the large retail trucks held all the available spaces while the area farmers "stand out doors (sic) all day and part of the night, trying to eke out money for taxes, interest and other arbitrary costs." the streets were filthy, he continued, and the market protection itself inadequate. "the only pretense of shelter barely covers the sidewalk, leaving the farmer's truck or car outdoors where produce is in danger from heat, cold, or rain."[ ] partially because of these problems, the specialty which gained in distinction and profitability at this time was dairy farming. there were several additional reasons for this. the land itself was well adapted to the raising of milk cows; its gently undulating terrain--which formed numerous natural water depressions--coupled with the abundance of small streams or "runs," made water easily available. to the dairy farmer who must water his stock regardless of seasonal conditions, this was essential. as previously mentioned, fairfax county also possessed soil types which worked up well and produced high yields of the pasturage and ensilage crops required to support large dairy herds. and, one observer noted, the weather was favorable for the dairy industry: "the winters are relatively short in fairfax, thus allowing cattle to stay out often until the latter part of november, returning to pasture by april or may."[ ] these natural assets tell only part of the story for, as stated above, fairfax county continually produced well above the state per acre average in both corn and orchard fruits and its market crops were considerably varied as late as . although dairying required more capital initially and more land than did market gardening, it held an advantage in that the plummeting farm prices did not affect milk products as disasterously as crops. the really great asset that the fairfax county dairy industry possessed, however, was its proximity to the large milk-consuming markets in alexandria and washington, d.c., and the speedy access afforded by rail lines connecting the two areas. where truck farmers needed to sell their produce personally in order to make the best profit, milk producers sold to distributors, who collected at the depot, making rail transportation a feasible marketing device. in the earliest days of the century milk was shipped by boat to the city markets, but the lack of river access for many farms and the ease of spoilage on this slow mode of transportation retarded the growth of the commercial milk market. it was not until the old and unreliable steam railway lines, such as the washington and old dominion railway, were converted to electricity around and refrigerated cars were widely used, that the shipment of milk became really profitable.[ ] communities such as floris, situated only a few miles from the herndon depot, began to flourish as dairy centers when only a few years earlier poor transportation would have made marketing of such a highly perishable product unthinkable. so successful and rapid was the dairy boom that by over , gallons of milk were shipped daily from the county to washington, and its production was the highest in virginia.[ ] other factors served to enhance the burgeoning dairy industry. around milk pasteurization and bottling plants were established in washington. this created a large market for whole milk, which had formerly been held in suspicion by many people who believed milk to be a carrier of disease. another important aspect was the well-directed efforts of the two county agricultural extension agents who, in addition to introducing the previously mentioned dairy herd improvement associations, encouraged the use of pure-bred bulls for breeding, often acquiring the free loan of usda animals for the purpose. the use of these bulls was an added incentive for farmers to pay the nominal fee and join the dairy herd improvement associations, since membership was required in order to borrow a government animal. by these methods and repeated admonitions to "get out of the scrub class and join the pure-bred bunch," the county agents helped fairfax farmers develop so fine a reputation for quality dairy cows that buyers came from many states to procure these high-testing animals for their farms.[ ] another factor affecting the rise of dairying in fairfax county was the early formation of the maryland and virginia milk producers association. the organization had been informally started in as a clearinghouse for grievances among some producers in the vicinity of washington, d.c., but for many years it "amounted to little more than an occasional general meeting for the purpose of some united effort toward raising the price of milk."[ ] in it was incorporated and a full-time manager employed. each member paid a fee of one cent per gallon of milk sold (a fund which was accumulated and refunded when a farmer left the organization) and the association handled the business of selling to the distributors in washington. by such collective action the dairymen were able to control milk prices more effectively, and their unity assured a measure of security against unscrupulous action by distributors. in the early years of fairfax county dairying this was a very real threat as former association member holden harrison attests: there were four or five principal distributors in washington. i don't know whether they got together on this or not, but to start out with they had a two price program. they paid you more in the winter than they did in the summer.... the dairy farmer was at the mercy of the milk distributor then. they set prices just as low as they thought the best dairyman could continue to produce.... the distributors were about to starve the farmers out, that's what brought it around. we weren't getting a fair deal. so when we formed this association the management of the association could say, 'we've got these farmers lined up. they pretty well depend on us and we can pretty well tell them what to do.' through that leverage they could pretty well tell the distributors what to do, too.[ ] the association furthered its prestige--and its bargaining power--by waging a battle against "bootleg," or uninspected, milk being brought into the area from pennsylvania and new jersey. it had the additional advantage of stabilizing prices so that the farmer with only a small amount of milk for the market could compete with the larger producer whose more economical methods had previously allowed him to undersell his smaller neighbor. better methods of testing and pasteurizing the milk were also concerns and the cooperative used its muscle to negotiate loans for its members.[ ] furthermore, in the late s, the association became concerned about the drop in prices due to an overabundance of milk in the area and developed a system of handling the surplus. "it eventually built itself into a position where the association itself either rented or purchased a plant that could take care of surplus milk...," stated holden harrison. "this surplus milk was processed into cheese or butter or ice cream or maybe even powdered milk.... they had a plant in frederick, maryland, and they would divert whatever amount of producers' milk to frederick to the processing plant and keep it out of the hands of the distributors."[ ] this action had the double advantage of avoiding waste and preventing a profit-lowering glut of milk. by the maryland and virginia milk producers association was the largest farmer's cooperative in virginia. it included % of the washington area producers in its membership, despite the effort of distributors to dissuade some of the better producers from joining. they exercised bargaining control of over $ , , annually. though they never actually went on strike, their large membership fund gave them a strong bargaining position. "the distributors knew when that fund accumulated to a good-sized sum that we weren't just a fly-by-night outfit that could be pushed around, that we had resources we could rely on."[ ] furthermore, the organization wisely kept its clout by avoiding political issues and exercising minimum control over individual methods of production. its purpose was to streamline the commercialization of a farm product, and in this effort it was highly successful. northern virginia's reputation for dairy excellence grew both in local circles and throughout the state as a result of published census reports and statewide comparisons of milk volume and butterfat content. the agricultural census shows fairfax county to be the largest producer in the state, with average yield per cow % above the statewide figure; in this margin was even greater.[ ] dairy herd improvement association # , based in the herndon area, had especially impressive results. in , for example, it had the second highest overall average in virginia and included four of the state's five most productive herds. in the county's high-testing cow, a holstein owned by dr. f. w. huddleston, gave , pounds of milk ( . pounds to a gallon) per month to a statewide average of .[ ] as a result of these impressive showings, many local farmers shied away from general farming and began to put their energies into milk production; new farmers were drawn to the area specifically for the possibilities in dairy farming. of ten families interviewed in the floris area, all save one connected their family's removal to fairfax county to the combination of transportation ease and excellent prices afforded by the washington milk market. "in this period there was an immigration of farmers from other parts of the country, particularly in the valley of virginia, who did not have an opportunity to market their farm products and their livestock very readily up there in the valley," related joseph beard, "... the southern railway, the richmond, fredericksburg and potomac [railways were] quite an asset to people who wanted to market their farm products so a lot of them moved up here."[ ] many of the newcomers became outstanding in the field of dairy husbandry, for example, c. t. rice, a celebrated dairy owner of the oakton area, whose animals consistently scored highly on milk production. he came to the county in but "threw away his plow" during the s to concentrate solely on dairying, citing erosion problems and the more constant income of dairying as his reasons.[ ] so widespread was this tendency to embrace dairy farming that a traveller riding through the county in sensed that "it is not farming country at all, because there is very little planting done. we saw few fields in which a crop had been recently harvested ... it is apparently a grazing country."[ ] despite its spectacular achievements, the fairfax county dairy industry did not rise with an unchecked ascent but suffered a certain share of problems and setbacks. in one sense its very success was its worst enemy. although many farmers continued to focus on dairying, by there was a surplus of milk on the washington market and the county agent noted that "it appears as if we had sufficient dairies."[ ] still, while prices dropped steadily between and ,[ ] farmers continued to increase their yields in hopes of increasing profits by shear quantities of milk sold. one county farmer commenting on the futility of this, remarked: we were getting about ¢ a gallon for our base milk. seventy-five gallons a day at ¢ a gallon wasn't paying the interest and the mortgage on [his farm loan]. so we decided in that we would put in some more cows and get a little extra money to help pay off this mortgage and this loan. so we started shipping, instead of gallons of milk a day, to gallons of milk a day. then milk went down from ¢ a gallon to ¢ a gallon. well, we couldn't do that, so we put some more stalls on the barn and built a new silo and put in enough cows to ship gallons of milk a day ... it was only netting us to ¢ a gallon ... the more we worked, the more we produced, and the harder we worked, it seemed like the less net income we had.[ ] against this turn of events the state agricultural service advocated poultry and truck farming for those entering the county and urged a more uniform distribution of the county's cattle. some farmers had too few cows for even their own use. others had too many and no feed. "a few good cows well kept, rather than a large number poorly fed, will bring in a steady income, that will do much for our farmers in their present conditions," advised county agent derr.[ ] he also hoped to see farmers concentrate on the butterfat content of their milk and to increase their production of cream for which there was a continual market; the skim milk left after the removal of cream could be fed to calves, pigs or children. most often derr cautioned against the dangers of complete specialization at the expense of an integrated farm in which each facet of the farm was both aided and benefitted by every other part. "the old slogan, 'the cow, the sow and the hen,' is a very true one," he wrote, "especially in the south."[ ] derr did well to emphasize the quality of milk products. a ruling in the district of columbia requiring a % butterfat content in milk sold there occurred just as derr was complaining that "with many the quality of the milk is not such a vital question as the quantity." holstein cattle, which gave higher yields but less rich milk than did jerseys or guernseys, predominated in the county, making the new demand a difficult one to meet. in desperation some farmers tried cross-breeding the two strains with mixed results; the inevitable outcome was to compromise the county's movement towards establishing herds of pure-bred animals.[ ] the mixing of breeds to increase butterfat content was not the only element which undercut the breeding program. one problem, the selling of highly profitable animals, was yet another hazard of success. "owing to the excellent reports being made by our cow testing associations, numerous buyers from other states have come into the county and by paying almost fabulous prices have taken away quite a number of our best animals," derr wrote in . "in some cases this has proved a costly undertaking for our dairymen, as by bringing new animals into their herds ... either t b or abortion has been introduced."[ ] another factor working against pure-bred stock was the depression, which for farmers encompassed not only the s, but the entire period following the deflation of world war i prices. with less cash available, many farmers bought poor quality bulls rather than invest the money for a pure-bred animal.[ ] notwithstanding these setbacks, dairy farming continued to be fairfax county's predominant (and most prestigious) industry during the s and s. indeed, it flourished well into the s and was eclipsed only by the overwhelming spread of urban workers into the area in the second half of the century. until this development occurred, it was the dairy farmer's life which set the style and pace of life in the county. * * * * * mechanization and specialization of the family farm did not necessarily lighten the farmer's workload. an electric machine could cut several hours per week off milking time, but this time gain was offset by the hours spent on sterilization and maintenance. threshers eliminated the time-consuming chore of hand-flailing the grain, but the farmer still had to cut and stack his harvest, and it took several men a number of days to run the machine. the grower was at the mercy of the machine's owner as to the day and time he was able to thresh; here again, he lost a measure of independence.[ ] the excellent efforts of the dairy herd improvement associations also produced work for the farmers, especially those unaccustomed to bookkeeping. the landowner who had kept his records in an old shoe box was now expected to record the precise weight and butterfat content of the milk given by each cow, as well as the market value, number of days tested and amount and cost of grain fed the animal. the data shown in the herd record books belonging to c. t. rice reveal them to be complex documents which required in addition to the above information, hereditary records, descriptions of physical features, and yearly and monthly production averages.[ ] the efforts were rewarding, of course, but, added to the farmer's already overloaded day, the recordkeeping could be burdensome. both agents derr and beard complained constantly of the farmer's reluctance to keep records and in their attempts to increase the area's professional methods and pride, they stressed the need to keep accurate accounts of the farm's transactions.[ ] * * * * * the advent of technological application in the farming sector was a cause of both optimism and disquiet. it eliminated some drudgery, it streamlined and modernized, but it also uprooted traditions and added financial and emotional burdens to the already pressured farmer. to cope with the new agricultural methods and outlook, farmers increasingly chose to relinquish some of their independence and band together to solve their problems. [illustration: "hard work made easy and quick" wrote a local farmer on the back of this photograph. the mechanical hay loader eliminated the taxing work of pitching hay into a barn loft, c. . photo courtesy of holden harrison.] part ii--notes _change_ [ ] barger and lansberg, _american agriculture, - _, . [ ] _ibid._, - . [ ] harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] _ibid._; bailey/netherton, december , ; barger and lansberg, _american agriculture, - _, . [ ] harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] nickell and randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_, - ; and derr report, , photo section. [ ] derr report, . in there were still only tractors in the county. see _agricultural census, _. [ ] harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] barger and lansberg, _american agriculture, - _, ; richard peck was among those in the floris vicinity who believed that the early machines "ruined" a good cow; see peck/netherton, february , . [ ] harrison/pryor, february , . the harrisons bought their equipment quite early--around ; mcnair, "what i remember"; peck/netherton, february , ; j. middleton/netherton, february , ; bailey/netherton, december , . [ ] advertisements in _herndon news-observer_; and holden harrison quoted in harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] author's conversation with joseph beard, april , ; and sears and roebuck catalog, - . [ ] inventory of property of george w. kidwell, april , , fairfax county will book liber , - . [ ] mcnair, "what i remember"; and notes on conversation with joseph beard, april , . [ ] beard/pryor, february , ; congressional record. [ ] russell lord, _men of earth_ (new york, ), . [ ] "poultry men confer," _fairfax herald_, february , . [ ] virginia agricultural advisory council, _a five year program for the development of virginia's agriculture_ (richmond, ), ; and derr report, . [ ] derr report, . [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] derr reports, nearly every year. see, for example, , . [ ] beard/pryor, january , ; and harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] derr report, , . [ ] _ibid._, , . [ ] _ibid._, , . [ ] beard/netherton/reid, november, . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] derr report, , . [ ] _ibid._, , ; and notes following interview, beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] "farm notes" and "scientific feeding," january , ; and "rid houses and hens of vermin," october , ; all in _herndon news-observer_. [ ] _ibid._, april , . [ ] bailey/netherton, december , ; and _the southern planter_, april, . [ ] statements of holden harrison and joseph beard in beard/pryor, february , ; and harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] "the way out for the farmer," _washington star_, june , ; _agricultural census, _; nickell and randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_, ; "a unique fairfax county farm," undated newspaper clipping (c. ) belonging to mrs. mary scott; elizabeth rice to author, wilmington, delaware, january , . [ ] funk, "an economic history of small farms near washington, d.c.," . [ ] derr report, , . mr. d. h. mcaslan made about $ the first year from a $ investment. [ ] funk, "an economic history of small farms near washington, d.c.," - ; nickell and randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_; and derr report, , . [ ] description of a. s. harrison by holden harrison, harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] "fairfax farmer states facts," _herndon news-observer_, march , . [ ] nickell and randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_, - . [ ] nan netherton, donald sweig, janice artemel, patricia hickin, and patrick reed, _fairfax county, virginia: a history_ (fairfax virginia, ), - . [ ] nickell and randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_, - . [ ] "pure bred bulls," _herndon news-observer_, may , , ; and derr report, , . [ ] "history of the maryland and virginia milk producers association," _herndon news-observer_, may , . [ ] _ibid._; and beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] william edward garnett, "rural organization in relation to rural life in virginia," _virginia agricultural extension station bulletin _ (blacksburg, may ), ; and nickell and randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_, . [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] garnett, "rural organization in relation to rural life in virginia," and _ibid._ [ ] _agricultural censes, , ._ the figures show milk production per farm in fairfax county to be % above the average in the state. [ ] derr report, ; and "state dairy herd improvement association," _herndon news-observer_, august , . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] "fairfax farmer threw away his plow in and amazing results have been revolutionary," _richmond times-dispatch_, september , . [ ] oliver martin, _on and off the concrete in maryland, virginia and west virginia_ (washington, ), . [ ] derr reports, , , and , . [ ] milk prices dropped from $ . per gallons in to a low of $ . in . by they were still low, but had risen some to $ . . the prices given are july figures; january listings were generally a bit higher. see _virginia farm statistics_ (richmond, ), . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] h. b. derr, "helping farmers," _herndon news-observer_, april , ; and derr report, , . [ ] derr, "helping farmers." [ ] derr report, , . [ ] derr report, , . [ ] derr report, , . [ ] mcnair, "what i remember"; and _ th census of the united states, , agriculture--volume i, statistics for counties_ (washington, ). [ ] c. t. rice herd record books, - , in possession of mrs. mary scott. [ ] derr and beard reports, nearly every year, see especially , . part iii _professionalization and an increased standard of living_ specialization, whether in truck farming, dairying or poultry raising, streamlined the farmer's work and gave him an in-depth body of knowledge in a particular field. this expertise made for occupational prestige and increased status in non-farm communities; acknowledgment of the farmer as a professional developed markedly during the s and s. detailed knowledge had been essential to the general farmer but it was not widely recognized as a specialized skill. the professionalization taking place was also due to the farmer's own recognition of his unique role and his attempts to enhance it through farmer's clubs, educational opportunities and community projects. it also reflected a larger concern in the nation with upgrading standards and promoting solidarity among discrete occupational groups, a remnant from the movement towards efficiency and proficiency of the progressive era.[ ] an important advance for the farmer was the increased opportunities in agricultural education. the hatch act had provided for agricultural programs to be established in the land grant colleges, and ensuing legislation in called for farm courses to be added to the high school curriculum.[ ] this significant step was resisted for a short time in fairfax county, where the school board preferred to teach latin rather than agriculture in the schools, a policy held in disdain by local farmers: "latin was of no use unless you want to go around the barn and swear at some creature in an old language."[ ] when vocational training was finally adopted in , the chances for farm children to keep up with the burgeoning technology and sharpen their acquired skills were immeasurably increased. in virginia practical skills were taught but so were a program of social studies dealing with the quality of life in rural areas, focusing on problems of transportation, recreation, resource protection and consumption patterns.[ ] such official sanction for agricultural education was a recognition that farming was not merely a plodding or unskilled activity, but an exacting science which required intelligence and application to master. extensive study of agriculture in high school or college was the ideal, of course, but a number of programs were developed to further the established farmer's basic skills. ray harrison went to baltimore to take a farmer's course in veterinary medicine and wilson d. mcnair travelled all the way to new brunswick, new jersey, to learn the most advanced methods of poultry farming. mcnair later enrolled in a two-year course at vpi. another farmer, fred curtice, from the navy area, had degrees from cornell university and took veterinary courses from george washington university.[ ] the county agent also designed extension schools for interested farmers. in february, , for example, a two-day poultry school was attended by farmers who heard reports by local farmers, talks by experts from usda and vpi and workshops on topics such as "egg grading," "growing the pullets," and "the poultry outlook for virginia."[ ] less intensive programs were also offered, such as the free showing of a dairy-oriented film, "safeguarding the foster mothers of the world." "a profitable evening is promised," announced the film's advertisement, "especially to those interested in the economical production of milk by up-to-date methods."[ ] [illustration: the fairfax county grange meeting at a schoolhouse near fairfax, c. . photo, library of congress.] perhaps of even greater benefit to the farmer's image and expertise was the growth of local farmer's organizations and cooperatives. the largest and most prominent nationally was the grange, a farmer's association initially started in washington, d.c., in . fairfax county boasted four chapters of this organization, formed in the late years of the s. the grange interested itself in agricultural activities and civic matters and it was upon its recommendation that the county agent was appointed.[ ] of more immediate concern, however, were the local farmer's clubs, and the unofficial associations of orchardists or dairymen who met to discuss surpluses, crop problems or the need to advertise. the farmer's clubs were the outgrowth of community groups which sprang up spontaneously in the county from the mid-nineteenth century on, but which were expanded and formalized by h. b. derr in the mid- s. as he described them they were unique in their plans in that they are composed of twelve families and they meet once a year at each home.... they meet in time for dinner and after dinner ... the men go over the farm and discuss current farm problems. then they return to the house and listen to some speaker who has been invited for an informal talk.[ ] broadening and sociable, the clubs became an outstanding feature of fairfax county farm organization. the minutes from the meetings of farmer's club # , which was based in herndon and was made up predominantly of members from the floris area, show the variety of subjects discussed. a meeting in march, , included a lecture on contagious abortion (a disease chiefly affecting dairy cows). road conditions were discussed in april, . problems of milk cooling and the effectiveness of the agricultural high school were topics in march, , and the following month state legislator h. e. hanes addressed the club on farm issues and voting procedures in the upcoming elections. the club members also joined together to buy seed in quantity in order to reduce cost and effort. informative as the meetings were, of equal importance was the bond of friendship and professional affiliation which the farmer's clubs fostered. by working closely with men of similar interests, a network was built up which increased the agriculturalists' pride and effectiveness; not only could the farmer identify with the attitudes and problems of his associates, but could work with them to fulfill mutual needs. the sincere respect felt among members of this group is shown in the following tribute, written after the death of one associated farmer, s. l. chapin: be it resolved: that we pause to drop a tear of sympathy and love, to express in our humble way the deep feeling of our loss. bold and fearless in the expression of his opinion, kind and considerate at all times, and under all conditions. his life and association with his fellow men were full of love and tenderness.... to his bereaved family we tender our deepest sympathy and may the recolections (sic) of his cheerful disposition ever remain fresh in our memories, as we recall many pleasant incidents of his associations.[ ] as farmers organized, they reinforced their own values and occupational identity, and what is more, they combined their efforts to work for the change they sought most. the maryland and virginia milk producers association is an obvious example of this. smaller cooperatives, many of them outgrowths of the farmer's clubs, sprang up throughout the county, though none of them had the longevity or impact of the maryland and virginia milk producers association. a floris milk producers association was founded in to operate and repair milk collecting trucks and the dairy marketing company and fairfax county farmer's service company (which featured cooperative buying of seed) started a few years later. none of these bodies remained permanent features of the area's organizations, but all helped the farmer to see the advantage of collective effort. the professional attitude adopted by the farmers' groups is evident in the stringent standards required in their service contracts. no longer was an informal gentleman's agreement sufficient. farmers expected seed to be of a certain weight and quality, milk to be delivered "at a coolness satisfactory to the dealer," and sanitary measures to be strictly followed.[ ] in effect the cooperative movement enlarged the farmer's working partners to include not only his family and hired labor, but the community as a whole. * * * * * [illustration: the floris home demonstration club, winners of the county championship for most effective club. photo in h. b. derr reports, virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration] [illustration: a -h club display at the county "achievement day," showing the stress on nutrition of the oakton and pope's head clubs. photos in h. b. derr report, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration: a community fair, c. , similar to those held in the floris area. photo in h. b. derr report, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration: a suggested model farm for fairfax county developed in by county agent h. b. derr. the model includes crop rotation, annual budget and a schedule of livestock feeding and purchase. photo in h. b. derr report, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] women and children were also encouraged to professionalize. working jointly with the agricultural agent was a "home demonstration agent" who gave advice, lectures and demonstrations geared toward increased economy and convenience for the homemaker. home demonstration clubs were organized in each community to acquaint farm women with the newest research on food preservation, household efficiency and organizational skills. courses in fancy needlework and cake-baking were sometimes featured but the home demonstration agents' work more frequently took a pragmatic bent. the seriousness with which the homemaker was regarded, and the new image of professionalism which she hoped to evoke is evidenced in the schedule of classes led by agent lucy blake in early : january home lighting and wiring february the homemaker as planner--her job and the planning center march schedules and deadlines april citizenship may the homemaker as handyman june the homemaker as buyer[ ] in addition, the clubs raised money for neighborhood beautification and worked on community projects. the floris club annually canned fruits, vegetables and meats for a hot school lunch program and also donated their time to serve it. as in the more male-oriented farmer's clubs, the organizations fostered pride and identity among the farm women, as well as concretely improving conditions on the farm.[ ] the home demonstration agent also ran the county's -h clubs, branches of a nationwide organization founded in . four-h members dedicated their "heads, hearts, hands and health" to improving rural conditions; the club's goal was to give practical training to children whose life was likely to be spent on the farm. boys were schooled in agronomy, mechanics and animal husbandry and pursued individual projects in these fields. girls also worked both with groups and individually in such areas as "food for health," clothes remodeling and room improvement. summer camps, rallies and fairs were also sponsored by -h clubs. at one camp, held near woodlawn, the week-long program included workshops in canning, basketry and utilization of dairy products, a sidetrip to see fireworks, and those perennial camp favorites of swimming, "weenie roasts" and stunt nights.[ ] [illustration: the -h girls camp at woodlawn. fewer boys were able to attend such camps since their labor was needed on the farm. photo in h. b. derr report, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration: the cream of the crop of fairfax county girlhood on a float meant for the piedmont dairy festival parade. photo in h. b. derr report, , virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] the -h clubs never caught on in fairfax county to the satisfaction of the home demonstration and agricultural agents. "the past year has not been a banner year for club work," wrote derr in . "four clubs were organized ... but the agent is inclined to think that with a number of [members] this was done to be excused from a study period. the small amount of work done on their projects seems to substantiate this belief."[ ] the clubs grew slowly partly because they overlapped the work of the floris vocational high school and the future farmers of america club, founded in .[ ] there is also some evidence that parents were reluctant to release their children from farm work to attend meetings.[ ] for those who did join, the meetings seem to have been fun and profitable. "not only do you learn from -h how to make a home and a living," an enthusiastic member commented in , "but you also learn how to make life worthwhile. we now realize more than ever our duties, as the child of today will be the adult of tomorrow."[ ] as is evident in the above quotation, groups such as the -h or future farmers of america encouraged a child to identify with and improve on rural life. these organizations not only stressed occupational pride, but benefitted the community by training leaders who had early experience with professional farming techniques. * * * * * aside from the need to influence milk and produce prices, two chief concerns of the farmer's organizations were the establishment of electricity throughout the county and the improvement of the area's roads. the move towards rural electrification was a popular one across the nation, cited continually as the one item most useful to the farmer for advancing mechanization and of greatest importance in raising the farm family's standard of living. with electricity the family could use a radio, rid themselves of smoky kerosene lighting and enjoy the use of more efficient and cleaner stoves and refrigeration. the pragmatic desire for electrical equipment to operate milking machines and water pumps was intensified by advertisements such as one which appeared in the _herndon news-observer_ claiming that electricity would make life "convenient and happy" as well as add fifteen to twenty years to the farm woman's life.[ ] unfortunately, the route to establishing electrical facilities in the county was not an easy one. some farmers used small gasoline engines to produce power, but these, the "contrariest little machines," were unreliable and frequently too weak to run milking equipment. derr reported that % of the farmers desired this convenience but the expense seemed prohibitive. commercial electric companies were reluctant to build lines through sparsely settled areas, and the farmers were forced to finance their own power plants. in the federal government began a program to subsidize local electrification programs and make them financially viable the only drawback being the undue amount of red tape to go through involved in qualifying. "the cost of building new lines was found to range from one thousand to two thousand dollars a mile," stated a discouraged derr. "we were hardly prepared to be told that the farmers ... must organize a farm cooperative ... borrow the money from the government and build their own lines to be self-liquidating in twenty years at % interest."[ ] difficult as the process seemed, the farmers had little choice if they hoped to electrify their neighborhoods. in this instance, an organization was not only an advantage for success in furthering the community's amenities, but a necessity. that the floris community was one of the earlier areas to enjoy the benefits of electrification was a result of great effort on the part of its citizens. a franchise for an electric power plant was granted to herndon in but never materialized, and prior to the nearest generating operation was in alexandria.[ ] a group of farmers from loudoun and fairfax counties, headed by a. s. harrison, hired an engineer and travelled throughout the dranesville district to encourage farmers to contribute time and money towards an electrical plant. eventually they raised enough cash to form a stock company and a power line was built between alexandria and herndon, and subsequently on to leesburg.[ ] the initiative shown by the floris farmers was rewarded by a distinct advantage over non-electrified communities. as late as over % of the county's farms were without electric power. a survey conducted in that year showed these non-electrified areas to be the least productive, and most depressed in morale and way of life.[ ] water and sanitation systems were also difficult to establish despite concerted efforts by the home demonstration agents. slightly over % of the county's farm homes contained "complete water systems" in , though a larger percentage had partial plumbing facilities. even in , only % of the homes in the dranesville area (and % in the county as a whole) boasted running water. low as these figures seem, however, they were the highest in the state. because good water was abundant in the area, farmers saw less need to campaign for extended water mains or sewer lines, in spite of their advantages for health and convenience. it was not until the population boom of world war ii that really modern utilities were established in the county on a large scale.[ ] of greater significance was the effort to better the county's road system. southern roads in general--and virginia's in particular--had been notorious since their inception for ruts, abrupt endings and, especially, mud. in there were only a few miles of surfaced road in fairfax county, and any roadbuilding or repairs were made at the discretion of individual landowners.[ ] the inconveniences caused by the poor roads became legendary. one woman remembered the roads being so rough that eggs would break on the way to market, and another, emma millard, stated that conditions were bad enough that "you would lose your boots when you went through so much mud and had to go back and retrieve the boots."[ ] when automobiles became more common on the county's thoroughfares, they increased the problem of dust, deeply worn grooves and splashing muddy water. at the same time they pointed up the necessity for improvement. the early solid tire vehicles could barely operate in the thick red virginia mud, thus greatly retarding transportation of produce and milk. "if you had three drops of rain on the road, [the tires] started spinning and you couldn't go anywhere much without chains," recollected one early farmer. "every truck carried a set of tire chains in the event it rained. in the summertime if it rained, you stuck right on the first little grade you hit." not until did farmers attempt to haul their goods in trucks, and even then they "broke more axles than anything else."[ ] farmers were acutely aware of the situation and some of their earliest united efforts were focused on road improvement. records of farmer's club # show the topic to be the subject of discussion at several meetings a year, beginning in . initially they tried only to interest the county in undertaking repairs but as conditions worsened, the landowners began to appeal to county judges and the board of supervisors for bond issues to surface little river turnpike and other main roads. resolutions, such as the following from a herndon-based club, were regularly sent to government officials: resolved: that we, farmer's club # ... favor petitioning the circuit judge of the county to order an election for the purpose of determining whether bonds shall be issued for the sum of $ , for the construction of a macadam road from little river turnpike at chantilly to the leesburg pike at dranesville, and as much more as possible.[ ] in some cases the clubs even worked together to build their own roads.[ ] after ten years of pressure by farm groups, a bond issue was presented to the voters to pave the leesburg pike, the road from chantilly to herndon which ran through floris, and a thoroughfare extending beyond herndon to mock corner. the weight with which area residents viewed this issue is shown in a statement made by the herndon chamber of commerce: "if this bond issue fails, it will be the greatest calamity that has befallen this community in many years." happily the bond issue did pass and this, plus the statewide road program sponsored under the leadership of governor harry f. byrd from to , eliminated the bulk of the road problems. only a few years later, in , fairfax was one of the foremost counties in virginia in the area of transportation, with over miles of surfaced roads.[ ] [illustration: improved and unimproved roads in the herndon area, c. . note that the only surfaced roads ran between herndon and centreville. map surveyed by the office of the county engineer, fairfax county. copy courtesy of library of congress map division.] [illustration: stuck in the mud on one of the county's roads, c. . photo, virginia department of highways and transportation.] surfaced roads were an obvious boon to marketing but they also had a number of unexpected positive effects. conscientious and efficient as the farmers had tried to be, the county had worn a rather untidy appearance for several years. a traveler observed that "the fences are not as trigly mended or the buildings as trimly painted as in the [shenandoah] valley. a haystack is merely a pile of hay and not a neatly fashioned cock...."[ ] county agent derr also admitted that "in at least percent of the farm homes there is little or no attention to the improvement of the home surroundings." the extension service worked valiantly to mitigate this problem by offering courses in landscaping and home maintenance, but to their surprise they found that the chief stimulus to home improvement was the repair of roads. those areas which appeared most untidy were found on unimproved thoroughfares, which derr maintained had a depressing effect on the farm family. "there is a direct correllation (sic)," he noted, "between the improvement of the roads and the painting and fixing up of things around the house."[ ] another beneficial side effect of the surfaced highway network was the birth of the roadside stand for selling surplus produce, dairy and poultry products. there were some distinct advantages to the stands, as farmers could sell directly to the customer without the costly use of a middleman, and did not have to transport his goods to city consumers. a count made in found roadside stands in the county.[ ] earlier, the _herndon news-observer_ had reported the success of the new markets which lent themselves "to the disposal of second-grade products or fruits and vegetables too ripe for distant shipping [and had] grown to an unusual business ... for the farmers fortunate enough to live along popular highways." business indeed seems to have been brisk; by the farmers were pocketing over $ , per month from the roadside markets.[ ] * * * * * new discoveries in technology, educational opportunities and a refurbished transportation network were naturally considered advances in their time; they could be loosely headed under the term "progress." but progress does not run along a perfectly straight path, rather it dips and weaves ignoring some people and places in its circuitous route. consequently, many of the changes so eagerly embraced by the farmer of modest means were the very factors which eventually crowded out the family farm. the farmers of fairfax county were for the most part unaware of their impending doom, being instead optimistic and relatively prosperous during the s and s. but the small, varied and preindustrial farm could not compete for long against the lure of city wages, highly mechanized and specialized farms, and the inroads of the city into rural areas. mechanization most drastically altered life on the family farm. work rhythms and patterns, previously geared to hand labor, were disrupted, and even the sounds on the farm changed. older cows, for example, disliked the noise of the electric milking machines, and wilson mcnair wrote that horses were generally scared of traction engines with their hissing steam, etc. when the engine met a team it would stop and one man would lead the horses by the bridle past the engine.... at the railroad crossing in herndon there was a bell that rung when a train was coming. our pony, if the bell was ringing when we crossed the track coming home would break into a dead run. you couldn't hold her.[ ] to the interim farmer, caught between completely automated equipment and the tradition of hand labor, the change in work habits, knowledge and goals could be more than vaguely disquieting. as mechanization increased, many began to speak of agriculture in industrial terms, believing that "factorizing" the farm would solve its problems. this meant dispensing with any unnecessary tasks, such as raising sheep or making soap, and as much as possible replacing manpower with machinery. technical terminology started to creep into farm talk. c. t. rice referred to his dairy as "a milk producing plant,"[ ] ancient terms such as "culling" became "selective breeding," and even the animals were referred to as machines, which if "poorly constructed must be ... discarded by the good breeder."[ ] to independent-minded farmers, who, as sinclair lewis had observed, jealously guarded the ability to escape the mill and turmoil of the city, this industrialization seemed the ultimate compromise. the findings of the commission to study the condition of the farmers of virginia ( ) show the rural values of a most fundamental character to be those most prized by the agriculturalist: among these are: a) the advantages of the country for bringing up a family ... a greater sharing of responsibilities, a closer knit, more stable family life.... b) the satisfactions ... of contacts with forces of nature, of caring for plants and animals, and of seeing them grow.... c) greater freedom from various types of restraints, including somewhat greater control over time and freedom of personal action; also less intense struggle to keep up with or ahead of others.... d) somewhat greater freedom from illness, together with a better prospect of attaining old age. e) greater security against unemployment as well as less prospect of falling into absolute want.[ ] yet in the post-world war i period the farmer had increasingly to commercialize and mechanize his business to remain solvent and to "citify" his life, destroying in numerous instances the standards he held dear. "i used to 'farm' some and made money at it; now i'm 'engaged in the pursuit of agriculture' and can't make ends meet," commented one u. s. secretary of agriculture, echoing the sentiments of many small landowners.[ ] the new farm mechanization was, in many cases, not particularly well adapted to the family farm in this period. gasoline-powered tractors, harvesters and other equipment worked most economically on the large, level acres of midwestern farms, and the east coast farmer with modest landholdings could not hope to compete on the market with the streamlined efficiency of western farms. mechanized farming was also capital intensive. besides the initial cost of equipment there were expenses for maintenance and fuel. whereas the farmer had been able to raise feed for horses or mules inexpensively, he could not grow gasoline. farmers usually had to borrow money to purchase equipment and sometimes they over-indulged. "i know one or two that did," said joseph beard. when you have several thousand dollars invested in machinery, and you only use it three, five, ten, fifteen days a year, the rest of the time it's sitting idle ... it would have been ... better if they had hired their work done from someone else rather than put that much into it.[ ] more cash was needed to buy manufactured goods as the farm became less self-supporting, but prices for raw materials remained low during the agricultural slump of the s and s. "agriculture was much less distressed when the farm was a self-supporting home," reflected the _washington star_: but when factories began producing commodities in quantity the farmer could buy them easier than he could make them at home. at first glance this looks like an admirable situation. but the hitch arose when the farmer found himself unable to maintain a fair basis of exchange.[ ] the result was that many farms of long-standing ownership had to be mortgaged. in the space of one year (between and ) county mortgages rose a dramatic % and by they had risen another %.[ ] worse yet, a small but significant number of farmers and farm laborers were beginning to leave the countryside altogether to work in the city. [illustration: the kidwell farm and floris vicinity shown in an aerial photograph taken in . photo, national archives and records service.] the county's improved transportation system was partially responsible for this. access to markets had been facilitated by surfaced roads but an easy avenue to city jobs was also opened. short and regular hours, higher pay and city amenities were strong attractions to the farmer who had had to work "from daybreak to backbreak" for a scanty living.[ ] in recognition of this problem, derr wrote plaintively in his annual report of : the worst feature is the fact that our small farmers in the main have such a hard time to get along that many of them are actually training their children along more lucrative lines, and occupations other than farming. many of these farmers have sold their farms or abandoned their leases and moved into the cities and are earning more money per day than they made per week in the country. another important factor in this exodus from the farm is the fact that so many of our farm boys with good health and strength, and not afraid of hard work are making good in the city.[ ] continuing on, derr quoted one discouraged farmer: "one of my daughters is making dollars a week, and my wife is talking of getting a job too. my wife can earn more in the city than i am getting so i guess i will take care of the house and let them go to work."[ ] ironically, additions such as electrification, intended to improve the rural standard of living, seem to have done little to check the migration. usda and united nations studies show that the very amenities which should have made life in the country more attractive often resulted in a large flow of the population towards urban areas, a trend which continues today in developing countries. even increased education, which had as its goal professional quality in agricultural training, sometimes simply broadened the farmer to possibilities outside his own realm. sociologists and agriculturalists have found these repercussions puzzling and have not discovered clear-cut reasons for them. perhaps with country and city life being ever homogenized by the use of radios, automobiles, consumer goods and the interflow of people, the step of leaving the farm to try city life seemed less foreign and formidable. in fairfax county the proximity of washington and alexandria made it especially tempting.[ ] it was not only farm owners who left home for city jobs, but the farm laborers. the effect of this exodus was devastating to the county's small farmer. initially the scarcity of help meant cutting back additional farm activities, the products of which were not earmarked for the market. rebecca middleton remembered, for instance, that farmers stopped raising their own hogs chiefly because of the difficulty of hiring laborers to help with butchering.[ ] as labor shortages grew, the available help raised their prices significantly, eventually outpricing themselves for most farmers. as joseph beard observed, this trend did not affect fairfax county in a really dramatic way until after world war ii, "by virtue of the fact that most farmers raised anywhere from two to five children. most every farmer's hired hand raised from two to five children. now there just wasn't room on this farm to employ ten to twelve children." with such large families the drain to washington did not so clearly affect the farms at the outset.[ ] nevertheless, the trend retains its significance, for the high cost of labor, which contributed greatly to the demise of the self-supporting farm, had its roots in the optimistic improvement of transportation systems in the second and third decades of the century.[ ] the improved roads carried yet another liability: an increase in land value and the consequent rise in taxation. in the average acre in the county was worth $ to $ ; it had more than doubled in value by the end of that decade.[ ] taxes rose accordingly. the editors of the _fairfax herald_ complained in that in addition to the cost of living which had risen % from , they paid federal taxes which were % over the pre-world war i figure.[ ] the farmer also carried the burden of cost for his much-desired roads. in addition to bond issues, there was a virginia state gasoline tax which fell heavily on the farmer with his gas-driven machinery and need to haul produce to market.[ ] taxation, like labor, machinery and manufactured goods, called for additional cash, which was more and more difficult for the family farmer to raise. "there's only one thing that has driven the dairy industry out of fairfax county, and that's taxes," concluded holden harrison. "the land was suitable, the location was suitable, but who's going to run a dairy on $ , an acre land?"[ ] * * * * * an editorial in the _fairfax herald_ for september , , reflects well the changes seen on farms of the depression era. housewives throughout the county are becoming more and more incensed over the steadily rising prices of foodstuffs, particularly meats.... in many places housewives are actually boycotting merchants who attempt to sell meat at the present price level. the blame for the present rise in prices lies directly at the door of the raw dealers and brain trusters. these smart young gentlemen had a theory and in pursuance of that theory they slaughtered a great number of hogs, in order to keep prices at an unnaturally high level. they succeeded only too well.[ ] that the farm family was no longer raising its own meat, that they had lost a good deal of control over the quality and availability of their daily necessities, that housewives viewed themselves as important and cohesive enough to organize a boycott, that farm commodities were no longer strictly under the regulation of the farmer, and that the government's interference was beginning to be questioned and resented were signs of radical change in rural economic and social structure. the farmer was no longer so isolated, nor so overtaxed with sheer physical labor. the price he paid for these advantages was diminishing control over a way of life which had begun to slip away. part iii--notes _professionalization and an increased standard of living_ [ ] thomas a. bailey, _the american pageant_ (boston, d. c. heath, ), . [ ] _united states congressional record_, , , . [ ] beard/pryor, february , . [ ] kolb and brunner, _a study of rural society_, . [ ] harrison/pryor, february , ; mcnair, "what i remember" and "fred curtice, fairfax dairy farmer," _washington post_, october , . [ ] "poultry school at fairfax," february , ; and "two day poultry school a success," march , , both in _herndon news-observer_. [ ] advertisement in _herndon news-observer_, june , . [ ] beard/netherton/reed, november, . [ ] derr report, , ; and report. [ ] minutes of meetings, farmer's club # , herndon, virginia, october , to january , , copy courtesy of rebecca middleton. [ ] "dairymen to meet," _fairfax herald_, august , ; "floris producers active," _herndon news-observer_, january , ; derr report, ; for an outstanding example of a contract such as the one described, see contract between burden s. athey and windsor lodge farm, huntley, virginia, may , , in possession of mrs. mary scott. [ ] lucy blake report, , . [ ] see all of the annual reports of home demonstration agents, especially sarah e. thomas reports, and ; and lucy steptoe report, . [ ] for -h club activity, see annual reports of home demonstration agents; and "the short course," _fairfax herald_, july , . [ ] derr report, . [ ] "floris 'aggies' organize," _herndon news-observer_, january , (sic, ); and ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] "influence of club members," _herndon news-observer_. [ ] muriel wheeler, -h record book, herndon club, , in -h record file, in virginiana. [ ] _ th census of the united states, agricultural summary, _; kolb and brunner, _a study of rural society_, ; and advertisement in _herndon news-observer_, march , . [ ] derr report, , ; and harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] harrison/pryor, february , ; and rita shug, "the town of herndon," unpublished monograph, george mason university, may, , . [ ] harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] vpi, _housing_, . [ ] _ibid._, and ; "farm home water supply for fairfax county," _herndon news-observer_, june , ; and netherton, et al., _fairfax county_, . [ ] fairfax county board of supervisors, _historic progressive fairfax county in old virginia_ (alexandria, ), ; harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] greear/netherton, march , ; and interview with emma millard, by dana gumb, november , . [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] minutes of farmer's club # ; and resolution of farmer's club # , n.d., copy found in minutes of farmer's club # . [ ] derr report, , . [ ] publicity committee of herndon chamber of commerce, "facts regarding bond issue every voter should know," , copy courtesy of holden harrison; robert t. hawkes, jr., "the emergence of a leader: harry flood byrd, governor of virginia, - ," _virginia magazine of history and biography_, lxxxii, july , , ; _historic progressive fairfax county_, . [ ] agnes rothery, _virginia: the new dominion_ (new york, ), - . [ ] derr report, . [ ] lucy blake report, , . [ ] "improved highways are big aid to the farmer," _herndon news-observer_, december , . [ ] mcnair, "what i remember." [ ] "a unique fairfax county farm." [ ] "cows like machines," _herndon news-observer_, april , . [ ] _report of the commission to study the condition of the farmers of virginia to the general assembly of virginia_ (richmond, ), ; and lord, _men of earth_, . [ ] jere rusk quoted in joseph schafer, _the social history of american agriculture_ (new york, ), . this book also contains an excellent summary of the problems mechanization produced for the small farmer. [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] "the way out for the farmer," _washington star_, june , , section , . [ ] nickell and randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_, ; and _agricultural censes, _ and _ _. the figures are . % mortgaged in , . % in and . % in . [ ] j. middleton/netherton, february , . [ ] derr report, , . [ ] derr report, , . [ ] national rural electric cooperative association, _proceedings of long range study committee i-iii_, november -march , (washington, d.c., ); and _rural electric fact book_ (washington, d.c., ). [ ] ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] beard/netherton/reed, november, . [ ] see _ibid._, derr reports, and ; and schaefer, _the social history of american agriculture_, . [ ] virginia agricultural advisory council, _a five year program for development of virginia agriculture_ (richmond, ), ; and fairfax county land record books, - , in virginiana. [ ] "tax rate," editorial in _fairfax herald_, april , . [ ] hawkes, "harry flood byrd," . [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] editorial in _fairfax herald_, september , . part iv _the new deal_ one of the most important changes to influence farming in the years between the two world wars was the new interest the government took in agriculture and its problems. for many years the nation had considered agriculture to be not just the fundamental, but the ideal way of life. it was with a start, therefore, that people began to realize, soon after the turn of the century, that rural population was in fact decreasing, and that farm life fell short of the rosy dream of pastoral independence so cherished by americans. a survey of farm conditions undertaken during the administration of president theodore roosevelt revealed that many rural areas lacked the most basic amenities offered in cities and that low farm prices retarded the agriculturist's efforts to better his condition. farm conditions improved during the world war i years when the cries of "feed the world" expanded markets and expectations. inevitably, though, this increased agricultural production became a liability, for when the european and domestic markets shrunk at the close of the war farm prices fell drastically. many farmers, hoping to offset the low prices with higher yields, took advantage of the new technology to produce bumper crops; the result was an additional surplus and even lower prices. throughout the s, the farm situation remained critical.[ ] the stock market crash of marked an extension and exacerbation of the grim farm conditions rather than a sudden decline. it rocked the farmer's market, of course, by further decreasing the amount of raw products being sold; unemployed workers bought less of everything, and often kept gardens themselves. more crucial than the crash of to the farmer's well-being in northern virginia were two severe droughts, one in the late s and the other in . the latter was particularly harsh. wheat planted in october did not come up until april, and one woman recalled that the cherry trees failed to blossom until the late fall.[ ] thousands of tons of hay and grain feeds had to be brought in from other parts of the country to feed the livestock, at enormous cost to the farmers. the combination of these unfortunate elements meant more mortgaged farms and tighter belts for the county's farmers.[ ] relief came in the form of the agricultural adjustment act (aaa) which went into effect in the spring of . one of the earliest of franklin roosevelt's new deal policies, it offered a radically new approach to farm recovery. whereas earlier governmental policies had relied on tariffs or half-hearted attempts to buy up surpluses to protect farm profits, the aaa promoted a scheme of "artificial scarcity." this was accomplished by price supports and through elimination of price-depressing surpluses by paying the growers to cut down their crop acreage. payments were financed by taxing food processors, such as millers, who in turn shifted the burden to the consumer.[ ] many of the aaa provisions were aimed at the large producers of the lower south and midwest, but they also had their effect in areas of smaller farms such as fairfax county. few county citizens were in absolute want during the depression, in part because the effective work of the maryland and virginia milk producers association insured steady milk prices. yet these and later policies were embraced as being the only available hope for turning around the farm situation. "they were distressed enough so that they were willing to cooperate in a considerable degree with anything that would help them out."[ ] implementing the programs created some initial problems. a system of acreage allotment had to be devised for each farmer, and this involved setting up an intricate bureaucracy which included a county committee (made up of three local farmers), new responsibilities for the county agent, and close association with representatives of the new federal programs. confusion existed about the allowances made in the act for home consumption and the process by which allotments were decided. to arrive at the allowances for wheat, for example, the farmer had to complete two forms, on which it was necessary to compute his average yield for a three-year period ( - ) then adjust it to relate to a five-year nationwide average; this figure, reduced by to percent was his allowed production. the ultimate decision was made by the members of the county committee who had been elected by the taxpayers. "i've often wondered whether our judgment was accurate enough to really be used, but it was used," commented holden harrison who sat on the board.[ ] the aaa county committee sought to be equitable in its determinations, but as in any process which tries to fit a series of requirements to individual cases, the decisions sometimes seemed arbitrary or unfair. derr cited a case resulting from the potato act (which required a farmer to pay a penalty for yields exceeding his allotment) in which an older couple had "had poor luck with their potatoes for the base years; [they] almost wept when they learned that their future lease would be only forty bushels and they would have to pay a tax on what they sold over that amount."[ ] snags also occurred in the administration of the farm loan program, designed by the government to aid farmers in the purchase of seed and fertilizer. not only were elaborate accounts of mortgage, store and personal debts, unpaid taxes and notes required (sometimes for a loan of $ . ), but repayment of the loan was set for dates such as july , when the crops were not yet harvested and ready cash was scarce. as a result, much of the money designated for aid to fairfax county was never applied for.[ ] to the farmer, accustomed to deciding for himself what and when he would plant, and unfamiliar with the niceties of bureaucratic finagling, the government sometimes seemed more geared to interference than assistance. in reality, the programs affected fairfax county less than other parts of northern virginia. statistics from the virginia department of agriculture and the usda show that only wheat adjustment contracts were taken out in fairfax county in , compared to for fauquier county and for loudoun county. as each of these neighboring counties contained over , farms, these are small figures indeed.[ ] the federal government set few limits on milk or poultry production, the county's two main economic sources, so the benefits of the aaa programs were often indirect. the principal effect was to force farmers to set aside about % of their land from wheat or corn production. because fairfax county farmers marketed little of their grain production, the outcome was that they received a bounty for planting another crop on this acreage, or allowing it to lie fallow and be fertilized. the policy resulted in a strong soil improvement program in the county, which was additionally aided by the cooperative buying power of the county committee. this meant, for instance, that purchases of lime needed to improve fairfax county's acidic soil could be had for $ . a ton, the cost at the quarry, plus handling charges.[ ] of even greater benefit to fairfax county farmers was the moratorium on mortgage and even interest payments during the depression's most severe period. individual banks, such as the national bank of leesburg, which held many farm mortgages, also voluntarily followed the government's policy of leniency on collection of farm debts. this relieved much of the stress on the area's producers, allowing them to retain their land and, in some cases, even improve their holdings.[ ] the depression years saw the advent of a radical new policy of government influence in farm affairs. where laissez-faire had been the federal rule (and the farmers' desire), a control was now exercised over production, marketing and farm improvement. though the farmer might believe this mitigated his independence and tied his judgment to that of an impersonal bureaucracy, he was forced to accept uncle sam's interference. the role of the government in designing agricultural policy proved to be a lasting one, still felt by the farmer of the s. part iv--notes _the new deal_ [ ] barger and lansburg, _american agriculture, - _, - . [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , ; rogers/corbat, et al., june , . [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] bailey, _the american pageant_, - . [ ] rogers, corbat, et al., june , ; ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , ; joseph beard quoted in beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] "wheat production control plan," _herndon news-observer_, july , ; "wheat allotment based on averages," _ibid._, august , ; beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] derr report, , . the potato act, which would in fact have been disasterous for small farmers, was actually before any crop was harvested. however, its effect was still to create some hostility to government programs among farmers. [ ] derr reports, , , . [ ] _virginia farm statistics_ (richmond, , , ). [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , . [ ] _ibid._ part v _community_ beyond the family, with its special working relationship, the neighborhood community was the chief social unit for the farmer. it made available services the family could not provide for itself and added sociability and security to the farmer's life. it also had some influence on the tenor of his work because a dynamic community spirit prompts individual enterprise. the floris neighborhood on which this study is focused was such a vigorous community. fairfax county was filled with similar crossroads which gave an identity to each farming area and, with post office, blacksmith and general store, fulfilled the farmer's simple requirements. floris seems to have shown an outstandingly progressive impulse, however, and a social interaction which made it an area of particular cohesiveness and community longevity.[ ] the root of community interaction is neighborliness--an interest in and concern for other people. villages contain the same variety of human relations and personality as large cities, with the advantage that the smaller number of people are more easily known and understood. there could be irritating aspects to this (privacy was not always available in abundance) but also a warm familiarity. the people of floris were so well acquainted that each man's favorite kind of pie was community knowledge.[ ] lottie schneider, who grew up near herndon, gave a charming description of village life in her book, _memoirs of herndon, virginia_: everyone was interested in his neighbor. we shared our joys and sorrows, were sympathetic to each other. when we went down the street we knew everybody and would stop to greet each other. there was a village atmosphere of friendliness and kindness. how often i pause over every memory and savor again the charm of the friendly neighbors, the school and church relationships, the simple everyday happenings which like a weaver's shuttle steadily wove the lights and shadows into the tapestry of life.[ ] neighborliness went beyond social interaction; it was also the basis for mutual aid and cooperation. work on hauling projects, barn raisings and emergency assistance was readily available. "if somebody got sick and couldn't milk his cows, why the neighbors would go over and help him," related joseph beard. i remember the neighbor next door to me had the flu, and everybody thought he was going to die and the snow was about twenty inches deep.... there was a wife left there with three ... small children, not of school age. my father not only did our work, but he went over and did their work too.[ ] mutual assistance, concern and hospitality were the bedrock of community relations. [illustration: a map of the floris community, c. , drawn from memory by joseph beard.] rapid communications made information on everyone's activities neighborhood knowledge. county agent derr noted that it was "remarkable how rapidly news travels, whether good or bad," and that this was in fact an asset to his work.[ ] the postal agent and telephone operator were two other information catalysts. the postmaster, thomas walker, was notorious for reading the postcards which passed his way, and often called the recipients to inform them of impending visits by relatives, or tidings of birth or death.[ ] telephone lines were put up in , "strung on trees, just old poles up and down the road"[ ] and this greatly speeded channels of gossip and necessary information. the telephone operator worked from her own bedroom and was the source for all the latest news. "if you didn't know what was going on in the neighborhood, all you had to do was ask the telephone operator," one floris resident observed. "she knew everything."[ ] in a more pragmatic sense the operator was depended upon for help during emergencies. the fear of isolation, a chief liability of rural areas, was much reduced by the improved roads and telecommunications of the first decade of the th century. the telephone operator was particularly helpful in locating rural doctors when they were needed in an emergency. like the veterinarians, doctors were not relied on for minor illnesses but were called on in extreme cases. jack day and william robey were among the doctors who travelled by horse and buggy (and later in early model fords) to make housecalls. they were loved and accepted by the community: "we thought of a family doctor about like we did our minister."[ ] fees were usually $ . for a housecall though farmers would sometimes offer a bushel of corn or a chicken in payment for their treatment.[ ] the doctors contributed a great deal to the well-being of the community. rural families, however, were resourceful in finding home remedies for many ailments. some of these were long-respected herbal preparations, but others were used more because of tradition than effectiveness. frances simpson described the special folk medicines of her family near herndon: when an epidemic was reported in the village during the winter, she prepared the dreadful smelling _asafetida_ bags which she tied about our necks under our dresses. they were supposed to ward off diseases. when my sisters and i had colds, mutton _tallow plasters_ were put on our chests and fastened to our underwear. these sticky, clammy plasters were worn until all signs of cold had disappeared. _sulpher and molasses_ by the spoonful were given in the spring 'to help clear out our systems....' calomel was an often used remedy for the liver until the doctor forbade its use. my mother had a bad case of erysipelas and her leg was in a fearful state. nothing seemed to help it. one night she dreamed my sister dora, who had recently died, came to her, told her to make _poultices of cabbage leaves_ wrung in hot water and apply them to her leg. she followed instructions and in due season her leg was healed.[ ] [illustration: g. ray harrison, c. . photo courtesy of ray harrison.] [illustration: the harrison family's mule team on a shopping trip to herndon about . a young ray harrison is riding in the wagon. the stores in herndon provided basic supplies and services for the floris community. photo courtesy of ray harrison.] the floris community was an early outgrowth of a mining settlement near frying pan run. robert carter, of nomini hall in westmoreland county, owned the land which he believed contained rich copper ore. though roads were built and several mining attempts made, the mineral proved to be of poor quality. the access offered by roads built by the miners (for example, west ox road on which frying pan farm is located) opened the area to agriculture. the first permanent community was formed by a group of baptists, who successfully petitioned carter for permission to build a church on his property. one of their early churches, a simple, frame structure built in , still stands near the center of the community.[ ] the origins of the area's unusual name are obscure--some believe either indians or early miners who camped in the vicinity mislaid a frying pan and named the creek after their loss. others feel that the circular shape of a round pool into which the run flows influenced its appellation. until the community at the crossroads of the west ox and centreville roads was also called frying pan, at which time it was thought too undignified a name. it was rechristened floris, according to one source, after the prettiest girl in the neighborhood. another story relates that summer boarders near frying pan post office thought such a lowly name would cause ridicule among their city friends. they called the town floris, which means "flower" in latin, to tone up the image of their warm weather "resort." by the time of the name change, the village had expanded somewhat from an description of "four log huts and a meeting house,"[ ] but it retained its small personal character. in the s and s it consisted of a blacksmith shop, general store and post office, a boarding house, three churches and two schools, as well as the surrounding farms. * * * * * the focal point of the floris community during this period, and the factor which gave it a countywide importance, was the floris vocational high school. the school was the result of the smith-hughes act, passed in to organize agriculture and home economics courses on the secondary level of education. h. b. derr tried unsuccessfully for two years to establish such a course in fairfax county but met with little support from the members of the school board, who favored traditional academics. it was finally through the farmer's clubs and community leagues (forerunners of the pta), especially those in the floris area, that derr was able to convince the county of the program's potential. by farmers and merchants had donated some $ , to start construction of a building, and in honor of the special efforts of agriculturalists in floris, it was decided to locate the school there.[ ] [illustration: a sketch of the plot of land originally deeded to the school board in by george kenfield for a floris school. fairfax county deedbook h- , p. .] [illustration: mr. jack walker, the engineer in charge of the construction of the floris school . copy of photo in virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration: floris vocational high school under construction, c. . note the tennis game being played in the front of the old building. copy of photo in virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] the floris vocational high school was the third to be built in virginia.[ ] it was extended from an existing, two-year high school, founded in , but the property on which it was built had actually been deeded to the school board over forty years earlier. in george kenfield deeded about six acres of land to the frying pan school association and the property remained in school use through several owner changes.[ ] one- and two-room schools stood on the land until when a larger building was completed.[ ] the citizens of floris had worked together to raise money for the vocational school; they also contributed their skills and time to its construction. under the direction of two (often dissenting) contractors, a mr. sheffield and jack walker, pupils and parents helped to raise the three-story brick structure, and later to build a smaller agricultural shop a short distance from the main schoolhouse. the school was open to the entire county but the immediate community continued to feel a special interest in it. the floris home demonstration club served hot lunches in the school for many years and around they sponsored the hiring of a music teacher at their own expense until the county and state finally gave support to the teacher.[ ] floris vocational high school was an immediate success. in it had pupils, evenly divided between primary and secondary grades, and hailing chiefly from the herndon area. students walked or rode horseback to reach their classes; some, such as virginia presgraves harrison from loudoun county, boarded with local families.[ ] the high school offered the standard curriculum courses of english, american and european history, algebra, geography, physics and chemistry. courses in higher mathematics (plane geometry and trigonometry) were optional as were english history and foreign languages. the school differed from the county's other secondary institutions in the varied agriculturally oriented courses it taught. boys learned the principles of agronomy, animal husbandry, soil control and veterinary science, and were expected to put the theoretical knowledge into practice with test animals and acreage on their home farms. they also sharpened their skills in agricultural shop courses. under the guidance of ford lucas and, later, harvey d. seale, they were taught carpentry, motor repair, blacksmithing, indeed, everything from building chicken coops to "how to put a roof on a barn and keep it from leaking."[ ] classes for the girls also stressed the relationship between theory and practice. the rudiments of nutrition, food preparation, fabric and clothing construction, were carried over into "hominy hall," a house owned by william ellmore, which housed the kitchen and serving areas for domestic science courses. the girls spent several hours a week in this building, gaining proficiency in the work which would probably occupy most of their lives. like the majority of the students' homes, hominy hall had no running water, and baking was done on a large, wood-burning stove.[ ] the classes were taught by, among others, may calhoun and louisa glassal. elizabeth ellmore, principal of floris vocational high school in - , noted that because of the school's personal nature the teachers had a fair amount of leeway in the character and depth of the courses they taught--as much, in fact, as their students would allow them.[ ] one early teacher found the pupils very apt indeed, with abilities equal to those of the town children she had previously taught. stated lulah ferguson: so far as the interest was concerned you'd find that maybe those children in falls church were a little more interested in affairs in general, a little better informed generally, than these were, but so far as their attitude towards studying or wanting to know, you wouldn't find any difference. these country children were really just as eager or maybe more so than some of the small town....[ ] [illustration: the championship girl's basketball team of floris vocational high school, - .] [illustration: the "floris follies," a minstrel presented at the floris school in march, . such activities were usually staged to benefit a community activity. photo courtesy of louise mcnair ryder.] [illustration: the students of floris vocational high school, . identified in july, , as follows: top row left to right: jay leith, warren rosenburger, jessie torreyson, george t. mcwhorter, iii, marie poland bonde, stella sibley jones, eunice milam middleton (teacher), audrey barton, kelsie hornbaker; second row: irving mcnair, louise melcher ritter, kate patton kincheloe, sarah patton middleton, rebecca middleton, bradley shear, gilbert presgrave; third row: amy rogers nixon, elsie andrews brown, georgeanna brogden harrison, camilla carson harnsburger, kneeland leith, irene rogers deuterman, welby nalls, wade bennett; fourth row: frances leith greenwade, lena andrews, gladys robey embrey, emma ellmore, gem thompson, alan allison fleming, howard armfield, george harrison, allan shear, edgar reeves; fifth row: sue creel, grafton utterback, richard lee, john keyes; sixth row: william mcwhorter, martha smith, harriet moulthrop cheek, erline bready, oliver keyes, withers murphy, charles austin, john hessick, joseph beard; seventh row: ruth higdon, rosalie smith, eleanor bowers matthews, mary smith douglas, daniel nalls, ralph armfield, turner hornbaker, frank kidwell, carroll murphy; eighth row: bessie beard garrett, ruby hyatt, gladys utterback, elma middleton nalls, ned sutphin; ninth row: katherine hummer, bernice west, lillian adrian munday, ruby ambler bocato, elizabeth powell austin, mae blevins, virginia presgrave harrison, dora cox robey, kathlene adrian presgrave. photo courtesy of emma ellmore.] studious or not, the floris pupils also had their share of fun at school. richard peck recalled playing several pranks during school hours, such as catching copperhead snakes and letting them loose in the classroom, or mixing together soil samples painstakingly collected for county agent derr. much to the mischievous students' hilarity, a puzzled derr remarked, "i had no idea the soil was so uniform out here."[ ] though afternoon farmwork occupied most of the pupils' spare time, some extra-curricular activities were also offered. plays were given annually by the senior class, an example being the production of "home times" billed as "very attractive" by the _herndon news-observer_.[ ] the floris vocational high school also boasted highly competitive athletic teams, especially in basketball and track. for a school of its size, it showed unusual competence and enthusiasm, winning both boys' and girls' county basketball championships several years running. in their track team competed with high schools in the state, finishing fifth overall and claiming two of the seven records which were broken.[ ] in this, as in the academic standing of the vocational school, the community's dynamism and interest influenced its high degree of excellence. graduation exercises were also community events. the students worked for weeks planning a memorable evening for proud parents, friends and relations. the graduation from floris vocational high school featured an invocation by reverend glenn cooper of the floris methodist church, valedictory and salutatory addresses given by virginia presgraves and joseph beard, respectively, and a talk on the promising future for farmers by professor walter newman of vpi which the local paper described as "worthy of the attention of any farming community in our state." these formalities were followed by musical selections, including a duet by gilbert presgraves and joseph beard, who sang the school song, "our old high." next came the presentation of diplomas "in a most pleasing fashion." wrote the _herndon news-observer_: "each student was complimented on his success while his classmates were roused to great hilarity by some well-directed humor."[ ] [illustration: a maypole dance held at the floris elementary school in . celebrations of this sort were held each may . miss katie grok is the teacher on the right. photo courtesy of margaret mary lee.] [illustration: a photograph of the floris elementary school, built in . the building was replaced by a two-year high school the next year. copy of photo in virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] floris vocational high school graduated its last class in . the previous year the school board had voted to consolidate the county's schools. the school consolidation movement was aimed principally at small one and two-room schoolhouses; by combining these local institutions, better facilities could be afforded and, consequently, teachers of high caliber attracted. the county's farm families had clamoured for just such a reorganization for many years, but the measure was contingent on the availability of good roads because rural children would have to travel some distance to the new district schools. the purpose of the judgment as passed did not really pertain to the floris school, yet it came under the school-board's jurisdiction and consequently the floris high school pupils were moved with those of forestville to join herndon high school.[ ] agriculture courses were also offered at herndon high school, for example, in , boys were enrolled in farm-oriented programs. yet, the closing of the vocational high school was a decisive loss for floris. the school had been built and maintained by local money and labor and was thus a strong focal point in the neighborhood. it had encouraged community self-esteem and the area's pride had been reflected in the strong academic programs the school produced. the district high schools were less personal in nature and broader in scope; they did not so accurately fulfill an individual locale's needs. an illustration of this was the rigid adherence to school attendance regulations at herndon high school. whereas a neighborhood school would often allow a farm boy or girl to be excused from classes during peak work periods of harvesting or butchering, the new consolidated schools were less flexible. in one case a student who persisted in helping his family was continually kept behind and never did graduate. like other "progressive" movements, consolidation of rural schools advanced the quality of life in only some areas. it made available more modern equipment and a wider range of teachers and curriculum, but in social relations and community benefit, the advantages were not so clearcut.[ ] * * * * * [illustration: the home economics and future farmer's club of floris vocational high school in the mid- s. photo courtesy of emma ellmore.] the other main institutions which gave character and definition to the floris community were the churches. there were three places of worship there in the s and s, all of them protestant. the old frying pan baptist church had been a continuous congregation since the mid-eighteenth century. they were the least social and most dogmatic in their religious practice; members of the other churches used adjectives such as "old school" or "hard-shell" to describe the baptists. after the turn of the century and during the depression, the baptist church was less regenerative than the others in floris and most of the members were older people.[ ] less doctrinaire, the floris methodist church and floris presbyterian church, were a more active part of the community. the church buildings, with their large seating capacity, made natural auditoriums for farmers' meetings, lectures and entertainments. the two churches cooperated in sponsorship of an epworth youth league, which, though it held its sunday night meetings in the more centrally located methodist church, was non-denominational in character. the reverend glenn cooper reported in that "the floris league, being an independent and a community organization does not take up any denominational work, but is interested in local charities and its own entertainment."[ ] the presbyterian and methodist churches also worked together in planning holiday programs and avoided conflicts by considerately scheduling their important festivals on different dates. at christmastime, they were especially careful to plan their carol programs so that the entire community could attend both services. as there was a great deal of intermarriage between the two churches, this also reduced family strife.[ ] both groups welcomed members of other faiths. one presbyterian recalled an occasion when his father greeted a new family just moving into the neighborhood and invited them to attend the local services. "this man said, 'well, you know i'm a roman catholic.' my dad said, 'it doesn't make any difference what you are, we'd sure like to have you come if you can.' this was the general attitude."[ ] indeed, so ecumenical had the organizations become that the general conference of the methodist church became somewhat alarmed. as early as this body noted that although its members were leading quiet, orderly lives and attended church services frequently, still the congregation was "not satisfactory in some very essential respects." "our people have been in the past and are now very negligent and indifferent as to the duty of informing themselves about our doctrines and church policy," stated the minutes of the church's quarterly conference. "there must be a more general study of the church discipline and a larger circulation and a close and careful reading of our church papers."[ ] the churches were rarely used for political purposes. instead, the farmers relied on their farmer's clubs to exert this kind of pressure and seemed to feel that the religious bodies should concentrate on paving the spiritual road to heaven rather than the connecting road to the market. in addition to the regular activities of sunday school, bible classes and regular worship services, however, these institutions fulfilled a strong need for fellowship and social interaction. sunday school picnics and ice cream socials were perennial favorites sponsored each summer by the churches. the picnics were frequently held on attractive parts of neighboring farms, or sometimes as far away as seneca or great falls. each family would bring a large hamper of food, but the fried chicken, watermelon and pies were spread out on the tables to be shared by everyone. while the parents gossiped or talked politics, the children played and sometimes went swimming. these picnics, like other community events, were held jointly by the methodists and presbyterians.[ ] the ice cream socials, however, were another story. here a mild rivalry set in as ladies vied with one another to produce the most admirable cake, and even a slight competition arose over the ice cream. an area resident confided that there was some speculation about which denomination's members owned cows giving the creamiest milk, thus producing the "most sinfully rich" ice cream.[ ] no doubt this comparison diminished in importance when one was faced with the wide variety of homemade flavors, using fresh fruits and extracts. sometimes in early summer the socials would feature strawberries along with the ice cream. on a quiet summer evening, with the fireflies flickering like beacon lights and a whispering breeze lapping at tableclothes and skirts, these must have been particularly pleasant events.[ ] significant holidays also brought about special church programs. at easter the churches were banked with flowers and a singular rejoicing occurred, and on mother's day an appropriate program was offered. the service included a suitable sermon and original mother's prayer by the minister and several selections by the choir, among them "when mother sang to me," "don't forget the old folks," and "our mother."[ ] the year's main celebration was, of course, at christmas. each church had a christmas tree, cut by an adult, but decorated with "feet and almost miles" of popcorn strings by the neighborhood's young people, including those just returning home for the holidays. the warm ambiance of these services is evident in the following description, recounted by joseph beard: they always had the little people from what you consider the primary grades on up to sixth or seventh grade recite some little poem or some story or something of this kind. you nearly always had a chorus or choir, small, of people in the neighborhood that would sing christmas carols. you always had a minister who read or recited the christmas story from the bible.... the churches were lighted with oil lamps, and they would put candles on the christmas tree, wax candles and they would light those wax candles and then blow out the lights. it's a wonder we never set the church on fire.... but there would be this beautiful tree with all these lights on it, and hidden down under the tree somewhere would be a great big crate of oranges. santa claus usually came in and ... he would ring sleigh bells and walk down through the aisle and make some kind of remark. he would have a sack on his back. this always held tiny little sacks of candy. they started with the smallest children and gave each one of them one orange and one sack of hard candy. they went on up the line as far as the oranges and the candy lasted. if you didn't have a crowd even the adults would get a sack of candy and an orange, but if you had a large crowd, why it stopped at whatever age it ran out along the line. this was an affair at which the program would probably take an hour, an hour and fifteen minutes. but it was cold in there you know ... they'd have a great big, old pot bellied stove, but it was in one place in the church. everybody couldn't sit around that stove, so you sat there in your overcoats sometimes.[ ] [illustration: miss gladys thompson and the floris community orchestra, . the members at this time included: front row: haley smith, louise cockerill, louise mcnair; second row: richard peck, unidentified, miss gladys thompson (director), jack patton, mary peck, franklin ellmore; back row: helen presgraves, ethel andrews, mary win nickell, elizabeth ellmore, helen peck. the old car in the background is the one in which miss thompson first traveled. note the old four-room schoolhouse also in the background. photo courtesy of louise mcnair ryder.] other groups offered activities to fill the farm family's leisure hours. an elementary school teacher who taught music as a sideline, gladys thompson, organized an orchestra about . it consisted of her violin pupils and other musically inclined citizens and was called the floris community orchestra. twelve violins, and mandolins, saxophones, piano, drums and banjo made up the group which played for school plays and community events. they also put on an annual recital and one year even gave a vaudeville show. "i remember she used to fill up her small one-seated roadster with music students going to practices and performances," fondly wrote a member of the orchestra, louise mcnair ryder. "one of my greatest pleasures was clambering into the rumble seat with my violin."[ ] musical groups also sprang up spontaneously. one, which joseph beard referred to as a "little old hillybilly band," included besides himself on fiddle, virginia presgraves (piano) and her uncle austin wagstaff on ukulele. richard peck played banjo and saxophone for the group. they played together over a period of several years, using no sheet music, but becoming so comfortable with each other's playing that they could anticipate the variations and style of their fellow musicians. they practiced in the schoolhouse, playing country tunes such as "camp town races," "old black joe," and "shortnin' bread" for their own amusement. they rarely entertained an audience.[ ] sometimes too the school or an unofficial group sponsored musical events, a notable one being the concert by "al hopkins and his buckle-busters," a celebrated country band from north carolina.[ ] in addition, serious organizations like the farmer's clubs, community league or church-affiliated women's clubs, mixed work and play by sponsoring picnics, quilting bees, and oyster suppers. the record made of a pleasant outing by farmer's clubs # and # to the great falls in was typical of many excursions in later years: it goes without saying that all present had a very enjoyable day. the children spent much time on the swings and merry-go-rounds while the older members spent the day in viewing the falls.... while still others enjoyed fishing.[ ] home demonstration clubs also put on their share of entertainments, with buffet suppers and skits, rounding off one year with a "husband-calling contest."[ ] even the business meetings themselves were social occasions at which dinner and friendly conversation were mixed with more critical concerns. oyster suppers were a regional specialty held all over the county, of which floris sponsored its share. they were often money-making events (as were the ice cream socials) at which dinner cost from twenty-five to fifty cents and featured stewed and fried oysters. lottie schneider recalled the bustle of preparation for an oyster supper given in herndon, involving the setting up of tables and benches and flower arrangements, and the difficult choice to be made between fried or stewed oysters and the many different relishes brought by each lady.[ ] the suppers in fact generally held an overabundance of food. again, joseph beard described the scene: there were always a few who didn't like oysters and they always had ham for those.... anything that you would have in a farming neighborhood like that, when you sat down to eat it was just like having a thanksgiving dinner. everything from sweet potatoes to scalloped potatoes to macaroni and cheese to string beans to corn-on-the-cob to tomatoes [would be served]. most anything that could be raised or produced in a vegetable garden or in a truck patch they'd bring. then we had custard pies and lemon pies and apple pies....[ ] the money made at the oyster dinners was used for school projects, to buy church furnishings or aid in mission work. * * * * * professional interest and pleasure were likewise combined at the various fairs held in the area during the late summer. the county sponsored a fair at fairfax courthouse until which featured new farm machinery, exemplary produce and livestock, and a gay carnival atmosphere. the _herndon news-observer_ gave a colorful account of the county festivities in its september , edition: the first day was largely devoted to judging, the second day saw a large picnic by dranesville farmers, the county chamber of commerce and the -h clubs frolicked on the third day while the visible and invisible empire [of the ku klux klan] held sway on the last day. good racing cards filled much of the afternoon. the prizes were more substantial and the performances proportionally good. every exhibit building was loaded with all varieties and grades of exhibits, while the livestock was as equally interesting in its magnitude and diversification. the flower department was carried partly out of the building where loving hands [had] specially devoted time and energy toward perfection. the woman's department, with nearly a thousand entries, was a wonder of culinary art. the poultry building with every squeek and squawk imaginable, fairly dazzled the farmers and their friends, who came to see what fairfaxians and their friends are doing. certainly no other fair in virginia presented an arena of keener competition and the prize winners deserve to be most highly congratulated....[ ] the midway was a swirl of ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds and every variety of game by which you might separate yourself from surplus funds. the region boasted a similar fair held generally in prince william county and having the dual purpose of promoting and celebrating the dairy industry. the piedmont dairy festival, as it was called, was modeled after the famous shenandoah apple blossom festival and was jocularly known locally as the "cow blossom festival."[ ] floris itself held a substantial fair in the years following the decision to stop running a county exhibition. it grew out of the yearly "flower and vegetable show" which had been sponsored by the -h and home demonstration clubs and took place on the school grounds. the community divided itself into committees which met year-round to plan the produce and homemaking judgings, livestock shows and entertainment and the result was an event of countywide interest. a program from the fair lists among the categories "three summer squash," "best adult clothing," "best buttonhole," and "best holstein heifer." prizes consisted of cash (usually one to two dollars) or practical items such as five gallons of fly spray. ironically the award for the best team of draft horses was three gallons of oil.[ ] a good deal of pride in everyday achievements resulted from the contests. elizabeth rice, writing of the excitement caused by the fairs, recalled the year she entered a devil's food cake in the county exhibition and "received the blue ribbon and a prize from swann's down company of a cake mold, measuring cups, spoons and a box of swann's down cake flour." "i still feel 'up' over it," she concluded.[ ] others took their entries a little less seriously. emma ellmore remembered the year her mother simply cut a tangled mass of clematis from the back trellis, stuck it in a white vase and entered it in the flower-arranging contest, to win a blue ribbon from judges who admired its exceptional artistry.[ ] the day was concluded with a "tournament," in which the neighborhood's young manhood vied with one another for the honor of crowning their lady queen. lance in hand, "sir lancelot" or "sir frying pan" rode at a gallop on a "steed" (often a draft horse) attempting to spear a ring suspended above the track. the winner reigned at the square dance that evening which capped the day's entertainment.[ ] blue ribbons and fair championships were respected and admired by the neighbors and gave the recipient a certain amount of status. in a community in which no one had much ready money, this evidence of leadership or skill counted for a great deal. one person suggested that a large family gave a farmer a certain standing among his peers, and that homemaking was equally respected with the outdoor work. a clever manager was perhaps most admired of all. as joseph beard remarked: "there are some people who have very little money, but have the ability to use it in the right place at the right time and get a great deal more out of it than others. i suspect that the person that had the highest standard of living with what they had to do with was respected more than any one thing."[ ] farmers from the floris area also held private entertainments, such as the peck family reunion of , or the bridge parties which became so fashionable in the late s and s.[ ] on rare occasions they travelled to washington to see a show or to shop. more often they went to herndon which had long catered to the farmer's needs. stores, grain companies and mills, blacksmith and livery stables built their business on fulfilling the farmer's everyday requirements, while ice cream parlors and movie theaters provided pleasant distractions. the latter was an especially popular form of entertainment for young couples on dates. frances simpson recalled the excitement of going to the movies and the unique personality of the herndon theater: what a fascination was that theater or 'movie hall' as it was called.... it was a real treat to go with our friends to the movies at the movie hall, not that we always saw one when we got there. sometimes the reel would break, other times a tremendous storm would come up and the electric power would be shut off, leaving the player piano to carry on alone in the darkness while we crept home with flashlights, and more than once an angry skunk sought refuge under the movie hall causing the audience to disperse in three minutes flat. still, it was great fun.[ ] all of these community events--ice cream socials, fairs, community league meetings, and school events--were attended by the whole family. social activities were less strictly drawn along age lines than they are today; young and old enjoyed the same amusements. the ladies chatted while preparing the dinners at farmer's club meetings, and the children came along and played together. funerals and weddings were also family events for children were expected to learn of life's joys and sorrows through participation. this too encouraged community cohesiveness, as all parts of the society were included in its rituals, and children learned at an early age that they played an active role in the neighborhood's well-being; there was a place for them within the community which would last the length of their life. strong evidence of this community identity is seen in the large numbers of floris young people who, even in the face of urban opportunities, elected to stay on the family farm, or chose careers in the agriculture-related fields of veterinary medicine, extension work or fish and wildlife protection.[ ] * * * * * floris and the other closely knit agricultural villages of fairfax county were exceptionally unified and supportive. yet even these communities had fringe groups, which were not entirely fulfilled within the neighborhood or accepted by the majority of farmers. in some cases, this was caused by under-stimulation and exasperation at the slow patterns of rural movement. "we were bored to tears," wrote one floris resident of the long sunday afternoons spent discussing nothing but politics.[ ] more frequently an individual was ignored or shunned by the society because of personal problems which had become a community nuisance: drinking, drugs or sexual indiscretions. the families of such social deviants were pitied and aided, but the offending individuals were avoided--"to whatever extent we could we would ostracize them." in one extreme case the neighborhood took the law into its own hands and lynched a man suspected of rape. "this man may have been innocent as you look back on it now but they thought he did it and they got rid of him right then," related one local citizen. "they just wouldn't put up with that. it just wasn't tolerated, that's all."[ ] the largest group outside the community's mainstream was the black agricultural workers. except in the realm of employer/employee relations they had little social intercourse with their neighbors. floris vocational high school was not open to negro students and the schools that were available to blacks were much inferior to those which taught white children. no high school existed at all for the blacks and the one-to three-room schools that existed were "in the most dilapidated condition," with no water, heat or adequate toilet facilities.[ ] edith rogers made a revealing comment about the quality of the teachers when she stated that she knew of one that had a degree.[ ] in extension activities blacks were also often overlooked. the first black -h club was organized in without the help of the county agent's office, and it was only after two years of exceptional work that he belatedly recognized its existence. "the colored club at the vienna school was organized, but we did not expect much from it," derr reported in . a few days ago we were considerably surprised to have the principal of the school send in her report ... nearly every colored boy and girl nine years up to eighteen did some work ... taking it in we feel it is a credible showing for a colored school that has not received its full share of assistance in club work.[ ] black activities in churches and farmer's clubs were similarly ignored. some black families appear to have been respected for their industry or farming ability. the george coates family near floris was one. white neighbors exchanged work and admired the coates progressive techniques, but still "never went so far as to sit down to dinner with them."[ ] blacks were excluded from the area's fairs, socials and concerts, except in rare cases when a rope kept the audience segregated.[ ] among themselves they, of course, had their own entertainments, but in general the broader opportunities and amusements of the county were closed to the blacks. in the inter-war period another group was increasingly on the fringe of the established community. these were the urban migrants who came along the new roads and railroad lines, seeking an escape from city stresses. the earliest to arrive were summer residents, then came the part-time farmers who wanted country air but city pay. finally the unabashed suburbanite who looked only for a quiet place to rest between bouts of urban employment moved in. nearly all came seeking how they could benefit by living in the country, not what they could contribute to it. at first county residents welcomed this influx with open arms; they saw the expansion as a boon to employment and markets. only later did they begin to realize that, in small ways and large, the forces of economic expansion would alter the shape of their community.[ ] those who migrated chiefly in order to farm were welcomed by the county farm families, but those who were unaccustomed to country ways caused some problems for the rural folk. an editorial in the _fairfax herald_ for april , , bemoaned the loss of many of the county's lovely wildflowers, for the suburban residents frequently ignored trespass rules to pick the flowers.[ ] also alarming were the differing habits and manners of the city migrants and threat of an infiltration of "unusual and often undesirable" people. hearing rumors that a nudist colony was to be established in the county's dranesville district, the _herndon news-observer_ declared stoutly we have a lot of objectionable people in the county, who have spilled over from washington, but we will at least require that they bring their 'duds' along before they can hope to experience a cordial reception.[ ] a more critical matter was the importation and propagation of insects from the city, such as the oriental fruit moth, which thrived in the carelessly kept backyard plantings of suburbanites and then wreaked havoc in commercial orchards. county agents derr and beard spent considerable time advising these newcomers and helping them plant their gardens.[ ] aside from these minor alarms, the urban influx had really serious consequences for the farmers of fairfax county. as the numbers of non-farm residents grew, political interest lines began to be drawn and in some cases the farmers began losing control over local governing policies. this did not happen in all areas; for example, the county board of supervisors consisted solely of farmers well into the s. however, in some vicinities there were definite political repercussions from the suburban population, such as in herndon, which although commercially oriented, had always been sympathetic to the farmer's views. in the years after the arrival of the electric trolley, city workers and farmers battled at the polls over mayoral candidates and council representatives; by the s the town council was dominated by businessmen and professionals.[ ] this growing tendency towards political alienation for the farmer was foreshadowed in a letter of complaint written by the farmer's club # to the governor of virginia in october, : the attention of the fairfax farmer's club no. has been called to the fact that the delegates from this county to the farmer's national congress are not farmers, one being sheriff of the county, the other a merchant--both reputable citizens but neither interested directly in agriculture.[ ] like the other changes shaking the farmers' world, the loss of government influence created a disturbing sense of impermanence and estrangement. this, coupled with the previously mentioned tax rise (which was exacerbated by the influx of people, all purchasing land and creating a rise in prices due to demand) indicated to the farmer that he was losing control over a world which had for generations remained secure and settled. ultimately, these forces crowded him out altogether, and simultaneously destroyed most of the pastoral communities to which the suburbanites had hoped to escape. part v--notes _community_ [ ] for an extensive study of community relations, see kolb and brunner, _a study of rural society_, - . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] schneider, _memoirs of herndon, virginia_, . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] derr report, , . [ ] ellmore/netherton, march , . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] _ibid._ [ ] andrew m. d. wolf, "country medicine in fairfax county, virginia, at the turn of the twentieth century," unpublished monograph, january , , copy in virginiana, - . [ ] frances darlington simpson quoted in _out of frying pan_, . [ ] louise ryder, "some thoughts about frying pan baptist church," unpublished monograph, june, ; and "how frying pan park got its name," _fairfax herald_, n.d. (clipping), and miscellaneous notes on frying pan by louise ryder, june, , courtesy of louise ryder. [ ] john davis quoted in ryder, "some thoughts about frying pan baptist church," ; schneider, _memoirs of herndon, virginia_; and ryder notes. [ ] derr reports, and ; and beard/pryor, february , . [ ] _ th census of the united states_, , national archives and records service. [ ] fairfax county deed books, liber e- , - ; and liber h- , - . [ ] nickell and randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_, - . [ ] _ibid._; beard/pryor, february , ; "floris home demonstration club," _herndon news-observer_, march , ; howard simmons, "history of floris vocational high school," unpublished monograph, n.d., copy courtesy of elizabeth and emma ellmore; ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , ; and gladys t. spencer to mrs. ernest ryder, february , , copy courtesy of louise ryder. [ ] harrison/pryor, february , ; nickell and randolph, _an economic and social survey of fairfax county_, ; peck/netherton, february , ; greear/netherton, march , . [ ] simmons; ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , ; beard/pryor, february , ; and harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] simmons; ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] interview with lulah ferguson by steve matthews, falls church, virginia, august , . [ ] peck/netherton, february , . [ ] _herndon news-observer_, march , . [ ] simmons, "floris retains high rating at blacksburg," _herndon news-observer_, april , . [ ] "commencement exercises in our county high schools," _herndon news-observer_, june , . [ ] simmons; minutes of farmer's club # , june , ; and ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] rogers/corbat, et al., june , . [ ] ryder, "some thoughts about frying pan baptist church"; beard/pryor, january , ; beard/harrison/pryor, march , ; and schneider, _memoirs of herndon, virginia_, . [ ] _floris united methodist church: an historical account, - _, (herndon, virginia, ), . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] _floris methodist church_, . [ ] ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , ; beard/pryor, january , ; harrison/pryor, february , ; peck/netherton, january , . [ ] telephone conversation with louise ryder, january , . [ ] _ibid._; r. middleton/netherton, february , ; ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , ; beard/pryor, january , . [ ] ellmore/netherton, march , ; and _herndon news-observer_, may , . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] gladys spencer to louise ryder, february , ; and note to author by louise mcnair ryder, n.d., (spring, ). [ ] beard/pryor, january , (notes taken after interview); and harrison/pryor, february , . [ ] beard/pryor, january , ; and peck/netherton, february , . [ ] farmer's club # , minutes, august , . [ ] lucy steptoe report, . [ ] schneider, _memoirs of herndon, virginia_, - . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] "fairfax county fair," _herndon news-observer_, september , . [ ] derr report, ; and peck/netherton, february , . [ ] program, fifth annual floris community fair, thursday, august , , copy in beard report, . [ ] rice to author, january , . [ ] ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] nearly everyone spoke enthusiastically of the floris fair. see especially harrison/pryor, february , ; beard/pryor, january , ; ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , ; and beard/pryor, january , . [ ] "family reunion at floris," _herndon news-observer_, may , ; "events in floris," _herndon news-observer_, march , . [ ] simpson, _virginia country life and cooking_, . [ ] among those who chose such careers were joseph beard and john beard (county extension agents); franklin ellmore, on the staff of virginia polytechnic institute; chester mclaren, head of agricultural education at virginia polytechnic institute; and jack patton, of the fish and wildlife commission in north carolina; see ellmore/middleton/pryor, march , . [ ] peck/netherton, february , . [ ] beard/pryor, january , . [ ] e. b. henderson and edith hussey, _history of the fairfax county branch of the naacp_, october, , - . [ ] rogers/corbat, et al., june , . [ ] derr report, . [ ] beard/harrison/pryor, march , ; and beard/pryor, february , . [ ] peck/netherton, february , . [ ] see, for example, "the future of fairfax county," _herndon news-observer_, october , . [ ] editorial, _fairfax herald_, april , ; and beard/pryor, january , . [ ] "the nudist camp," _herndon news-observer_, october , . [ ] derr report, ; and louis a. stearns, "the present state of the oriental fruit moth in northern virginia," _virginia agricultural extension bulletin _. [ ] netherton, et al., _fairfax county_, . [ ] farmer's club # , minutes, october , . part vi _frying pan park_ the population boom of the post-world war ii period (with the consequent demand for land), the huge jump in land taxes, and competition from larger, more efficient farms, spelled doom for the family farm in fairfax county. the county's farmers had spent much of the inter-war period adjusting to the new agricultural modes, but they could not adapt to the burgeoning metropolitan area's desire for expansion. the construction of dulles international airport in the late s further depleted the county's agricultural areas, wiping out both the willard community and much of the farmland around floris. even those farmers who had noticed the trends of twenty years felt a nagging sense of loss and resentment at the passing of their traditional way of life.[ ] frying pan park is an attempt to give citizens a glimpse of their heritage by recreating the familiar patterns of family farming. its location (near the corner of west ox and centreville roads) in the still-quiet floris center makes it ideal for interpretation of the more tranquil past. the park's purpose is primarily educational and historical, however it also offers recreational activities. these include equestrian facilities, bridle paths and nature walks, as well as the model farm. the idea for such a park began in when joseph beard, then the county agent, began proposing uses for the old floris school property which was no longer needed by the county schoolboard. he advised the fairfax county government that the land and school buildings be established as a youth center. as such, it would be available to the future farmers of america, the -h club, scouting groups, and similar organizations to stage fairs, hold meetings and provide recreation.[ ] this proposal was accepted and in the land was deeded to the fairfax county park authority whose powers of police protection and maintenance were superior to those of the individual young people's organizations. an independent citizen board was also established at this time and the park has been continually administered by the park authority and frying pan park supervisory board.[ ] the latter consists of representatives of agricultural, homemaking and youth organizations such as the agricultural extension advisory board, the fairfax county granges and the future homemakers of america. under their direction, the -h not only began to clean the grounds, but staged a few tentative activities. the early success of the events, coupled with a growing interest in the park by equestrian groups, led the fairfax county park authority to acquire bits and pieces of adjoining property throughout the s and s, enlarging the original holding of . acres to . acres. they also constructed several buildings for use in livestock exhibitions and horse shows.[ ] a model farm, strongly advocated by the county agent, grange and other farm-oriented groups was also proposed in this first decade. a dearth of development money and popular pressure to expand the equestrian facilities combined to delay its inception.[ ] [illustration: master plan of frying pan park showing ideal arrangement of the model farm, exhibition halls, and equestrian facilities. fairfax county park authority, .] in the park authority bought the floyd kidwell farm next to the original school tract which consisted of some acres with several farm buildings. the kidwells had owned the property since ; their farm being the very sort of family operation that proponents of the model farm project hoped to show.[ ] money was still scarce for the farm's development, however; therefore, most of the land was earmarked for equestrian use--only a third was set aside for the model farm. additional acreage, purchased in (and again in ) and the acquisition of the kidwell farm buildings made more extensive and authentic cultivation possible; the farm was finally established in .[ ] because the land was pieced together from numerous sources, the farm is presented as a representation of small-scale farming in the county, not an exact recreation of the kidwell farm. in its patchwork composition, it echoes the trends of the county for few farms stayed intact during the fluctuations of the s and s, but were added to or diminished depending on the cash flow. model farms originated in scandinavia, where entire villages were preserved during the late th century in order to save the folkways which were rapidly eroding in the wake of industrial development. in this country the earliest efforts at such preservation took place in the s. they had only scanty growth until a thoughtful article by marion clawson was published in _agricultural history_ in april, . this piece alerted preservationists and historians to the possibility of such projects and influenced the establishment of nearly one hundred such "open-air museums," among them the national park service's turkey run farm near mclean, virginia.[ ] frying pan farm differs from most of these restorations in its portrayal of th century farming, a time and way of working that many older people can still recall. rather than show the slow and hand-operated life of a pre-mechanization farmer, frying pan farm shows the farm in a dynamic transition. in the words of the supervisory board, it recreates a time that "had not given up the idea of home-cured meats, home vegetable gardens, home orchards, apple butter, sorghum molasses ... but it was considering the use of farm tractors, milking machines, and tractor-drawn equipment...."[ ] the farm thus portrays crop and pasturage rotation, and some mechanized activity with a tractor, yet the farmer harvests his grain with a horse-drawn binder. most of the equipment is from the pre-world war ii period and animals have been chosen or bred to conform to those available in the s. a volunteer program, established in , aids the farmer in tending the large vegetable garden, and the livestock which consists of poultry, hogs, rabbits, goats, sheep, dairy cows and draft horses. frying pan farm cultivates corn, wheat and hay crops and includes a late- th century farmstead, a frame barn, shed, henhouse, and rabbit hutch and a machine and separator shed. an orchard and additional crop acreage and fencing are planned. far from being a zoo or a site of isolated craft or mechanical demonstrations, the farm is operated daily as if agriculture were its only aim. crops are grown not merely for show but to feed the animal stock and manure is used to fertilize garden and grain fields. the visitor who stops by the farm does not see a prearranged interpretive display, but chances on the farmer performing that day's necessary work: milking, haying, repairing fences, or plowing.[ ] [illustration: laura parham and kim stanton work in the vegetable garden at frying pan farm. volunteers do much of the garden work at the site. photo, fairfax county park authority.] [illustration: this early threshing machine is one of the pieces of period equipment owned by frying pan farm. photo, virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration: the farmyard at frying pan farm in early fall. the barn houses livestock such as horses, pigs, sheep, goats, and dairy cows. photo, fairfax county park authority.] the farm boasts one structure not properly belonging to it, but nonetheless most relevant to the interpretation of early th century farm life: the moffett blacksmith shop. the shop was owned by henry moffett and stood in herndon for years, from until the frying pan park supervisory board bought it in . at this time the shop was torn down and reassembled near the model farm as a memorial to their former chairman (and donor of the funds to save the moffett shop), hatcher ankers. henry moffett, realizing that the advent of the tractor and automobile would eliminate the need for his business, displayed considerable foresight by collecting blacksmithing tools all over the washington area. his shop now houses some of this equipment and another portion is in the smithsonian institution, though moffett no longer does any smithing. the park offers courses in ornamental iron working at the shop.[ ] the presence of the moffett blacksmith shop at frying pan park emphasizes the interdependence of farmer and smith. the machinist of his day, the blacksmith repaired wagon tongues, and mended heavy plows and other farm equipment. as late as the th century, the smith produced tools, and ornamental items in addition to his steady business of shoeing horses. his work required a sensitive understanding of farming and the quirks and habits of the farmer and his animals. henry moffett himself owned a farm, giving him special insight into the agriculturalist's needs, a factor which may have been partially responsible for the comparative success and longevity of his business. "i had more trade than any man around here," moffett admitted. "during the depression we showed more profit per man than any other business." blacksmithing was a trade which required skill, but also courage, to wield heavy instruments, work with molten metals and face stiff competition and the sometimes ugly customers. henry moffett seems to have combined these qualities with a rare integrity. when competition became keen among the many herndon forges, moffett refused to resort to the accepted practice of defaming the other smiths to build up his own business. stated moffett, "i figured if i can't make it without bringing somebody else down i shouldn't bother."[ ] [illustration: the farmer's house at frying pan farm. photo, fairfax county park authority.] [illustration: two young girls meet two young goats at an exhibition at frying pan park. photo, fairfax county park authority.] [illustration: john hopkins, a park employee, demonstrates the use of period blacksmithing tools in the moffett blacksmith shop. photo, fairfax county park authority.] [illustration: pat middleton, a contestant in a -h club fair, held at frying pan park. copy of photo in virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] [illustration: a cattle judging on the grounds of the floris school, . the shed, built in , was used continually in the early twentieth century to house exhibits and fairs. copy of photo in virginiana collection, fairfax county public library.] the continuance of farming and limited blacksmithing in the floris area provides a continuity with earlier eras that is also reflected in the equestrian and youth activities of the park. the site of the old floris school was used during the s for the floris community fair and has for several decades been the site of the -h fair, which features many of the same activities as earlier exhibitions. a description of the -h fair of reads much as the accounts of years previous: highlight of the opening ceremonies on thursday evening, august , will be a goat-milking contest.... the program will open : p.m. with the posting of the colors by twenty -h members on horseback.... projects on exhibit will include everything from animals to a rocketry display.... six performances of local dance and instrumental groups have been scheduled and square dancing will take place at p.m. saturday. horse shows will run continuously in the park's two rings during both days.... in addition the extension homemakers club will present more than working crafts exhibits on how to make everything from cottage cheese to doll-house furniture....[ ] in addition, several minor judgings are held each year. during for example, events at the park included a poultry judging, four dog shows, four sewing club events and one rabbit show.[ ] agriculturally oriented youth groups are also encouraged to meet at the park, and the master plan for development of frying pan park calls for space for home economics and mechanical shops, areas for crafts instruction, an agriculture library, and dormitory rooms. in all of these pursuits, frying pan park carries on the traditions of professional training in the field of agriculture established by the floris vocational high school.[ ] the use of park space for equestrian activities likewise mirrors the county citizens' continued interest in rural pleasures. the horse shows and facilities are the park's most popular feature, drawing over a thousand people per day for some events. fifty-five equestrian events were staged in , and the schedule now includes three class "a" weekend shows sponsored by the american quarterhorse association, and judging for points in dressage, jumping, and other standard events. the construction of an indoor show ring was begun in the summer of , and is expected to further expand the park's activities, especially providing space for winter shows. the park also expects to continue its program of week-long camps for pony clubs, and its extensive network of bridle paths.[ ] frying pan park is unique both in its attempt to interpret a style of living which has not yet completely vanished, and in its combination of educational and recreational facilities. its aim is not merely to display old-fashioned implements or provide for the enjoyment of a special interest group. rather it seeks to maintain a tradition of interest in rural life and culture by continuing to pursue it actively. the trials, hopes, and quiet pleasures of the countryside can be best appreciated where the farm is a living entity. the richness of the farmer's achievement is evident to the park's visitors through fairs, horse shows, and simply in gazing at a lushly billowing field of corn. [illustration: dressage competition at frying pan park, . equestrian activities have proved to be among the most popular events at the park. photo, fairfax county public library.] part vi--notes _frying pan park_ [ ] netherton, et al., _fairfax county_, - ; and beard/pryor, february , . [ ] joseph beard to w. t. woodson, fairfax, virginia, march , , copy in frying pan farm files, fairfax county park authority (hereafter cited as fcpa). [ ] copy of deed, december , , in land acquisitions files, frying pan farm, fcpa; and telephone conversation with joseph beard, april , . [ ] additional land was acquired as follows: . acre on condemnation award from floyd lee, july , (cost $ , ); acres bought from floyd kidwell, june , (cost $ , per acre); . acres on condemnation award from emma neal lee, january , (cost $ , ); . acres (including house and outbuildings) bought from floyd kidwell, march , (cost $ , ); . acres bought from annie may poole whittier, september, (cost $ , . ); and . acres on condemnation award from robert e. clark, may , (cost $ , ). it is interesting to note the rise in land prices during these years. see land acquisitions records, fcpa. [ ] beard/pryor, february , . [ ] see deed between asa e. bradshaw and floyd kidwell, in fairfax county deed books, liber l- , . [ ] memorandum from frying pan park supervisory board, april, ; notes from farm committee, june, ; and "proposed plan for kidwell farm," frying pan park, january, , all in frying pan park files, fcpa. [ ] john schlebecker, _living historical farms: a walk into the past_ (washington, d.c., ), - . [ ] memorandum, april, . [ ] interview with john hopkins, farm manager, march , . [ ] "henry moffett: 'a mighty man,'" _washington star_, april , ; notes on interview with henry moffett by nan netherton, herndon, virginia, n.d., ( ). [ ] _ibid._ [ ] " -h bicentennial fair at frying pan farm," _fairfax journal_, august , . [ ] annual report, frying pan farm files, fcpa. [ ] master plan, frying pan farm, , copy in files, fcpa. [ ] annual report, , frying pan park; untitled memorandum, may , , both in files, fcpa; and hopkins, march , . bibliography manuscripts and interviews all transcripts and notes from interviews are in the virginiana collection, fairfax county public library. bailey, neal. interview by nan netherton. herndon, virginia, december , . beard, joseph. interview by nan netherton and patrick reed. fairfax, virginia, november, . beard, joseph. interview by elizabeth pryor. fairfax, virginia, january , , and february , . beard, joseph and holden harrison. interview by elizabeth pryor. floris, virginia. march , . carey, patricia m. _a selected bibliography of resources on the history of fairfax county, virginia._ unpublished monograph, catholic university, . deed books, fairfax county, libers e- , h- and l- . fairfax, virginia, fairfax county courthouse. derr, h. b. and joseph beard. annual reports of county extension agents, - , in virginiana collection, fairfax county public library. ellmore, elizabeth and emma. interview by nan netherton, herndon, virginia, march , . ellmore, elizabeth and emma and rebecca middleton. interview by elizabeth pryor. herndon, virginia. march , . ferguson, lulah. interview by steve mathews. august , . greear, virginia. interview by nan netherton. herndon, virginia, march , . harrison, holden and ray, and virginia presgraves harrison. interview by elizabeth pryor. chantilly, virginia, february , . land books, fairfax county - in virginiana collection, fairfax county public library. lee, margaret mary. interview by nan netherton. oakton, virginia, march , . mcnair, wilson d. "what i remember." unpublished manuscript in possession of mrs. louise ryder. middleton, john and edna. interview by nan netherton. herndon, virginia, february , . millard, emma. interview by dana gumb. november , . minutes of meetings, farmer's club # . herndon, virginia, october , to january , , in possession of rebecca middleton, herndon, virginia. peck, richard. interview by nan netherton. herndon, virginia, february , . publicity committee of herndon chamber of commerce. "facts regarding bond issue every voter should know." fairfax, virginia, . copy in possession of holden harrison. rice, elizabeth. letters to author, january and february, . rogers, edith. interview by patty corbat, craig smith and phyllis hirshman. herndon, virginia, june , . rogers, edith. interview by nan netherton. herndon, virginia, n.d. (c., spring, ). ryder, louise. "some thoughts about frying pan baptist church." unpublished monograph, june, . scott collection. letters, herd record books and memorabilia of c. t. rice. oakton, virginia. shug, rita. "the town of herndon." unpublished monograph, george mason university, may, . simmons, howard. "history of floris vocational high school." unpublished monograph, n.d. copy in possession of elizabeth and emma ellmore. spencer, gladys t. to mrs. ernest ryder. february , . copy in possession of louise ryder. will books, fairfax county, . fairfax virginia, fairfax county courthouse. published works agee, james and walker evans. _let us now praise famous men._ new york: dodd, mead and company, . bailey, thomas a. _the american pageant._ boston: d.c. heath, . barger, harold and hans m. lansburg. _american agriculture, - ._ new york: the arno press, . beitzeel, edwin w. _life on the potomac river._ washington, d.c.: privately published, . corson, juliet. _miss corson's practical american cookery._ new york: dodd, mead and company, . _country gentleman._ february and march, . fairfax county board of supervisors. _historic progressive fairfax county in old virginia._ alexandria, virginia: newell-cole company, . "fairfax farmer threw away his plow in and amazing results have been revolutionary." _richmond times-dispatch._ september , . _fairfax herald._ fairfax, virginia, - . federal crop reporting service. _virginia farm statistics, - ._ richmond, virginia, . _fifteenth census of the united states: agricultural summary, - ._ washington, d.c.: government printing office, . _floris united methodist church: an historical account, - ._ herndon, virginia, privately published, . funk, w. c. "an economic study of small farms near washington, d.c." _united states department of agriculture bulletin ._ june , . garnett, william edward. "rural organization in relation to rural life in virginia." _virginia agricultural extension station bulletin ._ blacksburg, virginia, may, . garnett, william edward and john w. ellison "negro life in rural virginia, - ." _virginia polytechnical institute bulletin ._ june, . gilliam, sara k. _virginia people, a study of the growth and distribution of the population of virginia from - ._ richmond: virginia state planning board, . glasgow, ellen. _barren ground._ richmond: hill and wang, . goessling, adeline. _the farm and home cookbook._ chicago: phelps, . gumb, dana. "pioneer recalls mclean." _echoes of history._ march and may . hawkes, robert t., jr. "the emergence of a leader: harry flood byrd, governor of virginia, - ." _virginia magazine of history and biography._ volume , number , july, . henderson, e. b. and edith hussey. _history of fairfax county branch of the naacp._ privately published, . _herndon news-observer._ herndon, virginia, - . _hill's southern almanac._ richmond: virginia fire and marine insurance company, . kolb, j. h. and edmund s. de brunner. _a study of rural society._ boston: houghton mifflin company, . lord, russell. _men of earth._ new york: longman's green and company, . martin, oliver. _on and off the concrete in maryland, virginia and west virginia._ washington, d.c.: privately published, . miller, john c. _the federalist era._ new york: harper and row, . murphy, arthur morton. _the agricultural depression: a proposed measure for its relief._ washington, d.c.: catholic university, . national rural electric cooperative association. _proceedings of the long range study committee i-iii._ washington, d.c.: government printing office, november -march . netherton, nan, and donald sweig, janice artemel, patricia hickin, patrick reed. _fairfax county, virginia: a history._ fairfax, virginia: fairfax county board of supervisors, . nickell, lehman and cary j. randolph. _an economic and social survey of fairfax county._ charlottesville, virginia: university of virginia, . _out of frying pan._ herndon, virginia: privately published, . rasmussen, wayne d. and gladys l. baker. _price-support and adjustment programs from - : a short history._ washington, d.c.: united states department of agriculture, . _report of the commission to study the condition of the farmers of virginia to the general assembly of virginia._ richmond: state department of agriculture, . richmond and danville railroad. _country homes near the nation's capital._ washington, d.c.: . rothery, agnes. _virginia: the new dominion._ new york: d. appleton--century company, . _rural electric fact book._ washington, d.c.: government printing office, . schaefer, joseph. _the social history of american agriculture._ new york: mcmillan company, . schlebecker, john. _living historical farms: a walk into the past._ washington, d.c.: smithsonian institution, . schneider, lottie dyer. _memoirs of herndon, virginia._ marion, virginia: privately published, . sears, roebuck and company. _catalogue._ chicago, - . simpson, frances darlington. _virginia country life and cooking._ washington, d.c.: privately published, . _sixteenth census of the united states: agriculture. statistics for counties._ volume i. washington, d.c.: government printing office, . stearns, louis a. "the present state of the oriental fruit moth in northern virginia." _virginia agricultural extension bulletin ._ thompson, e. p. _the making of the english working class._ london: penguin books, . _united states census of agriculture, : statistics for virginia._ washington, d.c.: government printing office, . _united states congressional records_, , , . united states department of agriculture. _abandoned or idle farms: statistics for counties and summary for the united states._ washington, d.c.: government printing office, . _virginia agriculture, - . handbook of information._ blacksburg: virginia polytechnical institute, . virginia agriculture advisory council. _a five year program for the development of virginia's agriculture._ richmond: state department of agriculture, . _virginia farm statistics._ richmond: virginia department of agriculture and united states department of agriculture, . virginia polytechnical institute. _the housing of virginia's rural folk._ blacksburg, virginia, . _washington evening star._ washington, d.c., , , . wilkinson, charles kirk. "reminiscences of sherwood farm and the surrounding area." _yearbook of historical society of fairfax county, virginia, inc._ volume , - . work progress administration of virginia. _part time farming in virginia._ richmond: division of rural research, . transcriber's notes: underlined passages are indicated by _underline_. punctuation has been corrected without note. the following misprints have been corrected: "buildings" corrected to "building" (page ) "acomplishing" corrected to "accomplishing" (page ) missing "¢" added (page ) "for" corrected to "from" (page ) "commuity" corrected to "community" (page ) "febrary" corrected to "february" (page ) "mongraph" corrected to "monograph" (page ) "innnocent" corrected to "innocent" (page ) "familes" corrected to "families" (page ) "politlcal" corrected to "political" (page ) "alientation" corrected to "alienation" (page ) the prairie farmer a weekly journal for the farm, orchard and fireside. established in . entire series vol --no . chicago, saturday, march , . price $ . per year in advance. [transcriber's note: the table of contents was originally located on page of the periodical. it has been moved here for ease of use.] the contents of this number. agriculture--drainage and good husbandry page ; plan for a flood gate, ; great corn crops, ; a charming letter, ; prairie roads, ; experiments with indian corn, ; specialty farming, . horticulture--sand mulching of orchard trees, page ; pear blight, ; the black walnut, . notes on current topics, ; prunings, - . floriculture--some new plants, page . our book table--page . entomological--insects in illinois, page . silk culture--osage for silk-worms, page . scientific and useful--items, page . literature--the gentleman farmer (poetry), page ; frank dobb's wives, - . field and furrow--items, . humorous--items, page . poultry notes--chicken chat, page . the apiary--spring care of bees, page ; extracted honey, ; southern wisconsin bee-keepers' association, . editorial--items, page ; lumber and shingles, ; foot-and-mouth disease, ; premiums on corn, - ; the first unfortunate result, ; questions answered, ; wayside notes, . young folks--little dilly dolly (poetry) page ; uncle jim's yarn, ; puddin tame's fun, ; the alphabet, ; what a child can do, . live stock--items, page ; polled aberdeen cattle, ; grass for hogs, ; a stock farm and ranch, ; western wool-growers, ; the cattle diseases near effingham, - . the dairy--camembert cheese, page ; few words and more butter, . compiled correspondence--page . veterinary--symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease, page ; shyness and timidity, ; glanders, . household--how he ventilated the cellar, page ; an old roman wedding, ; mr. smith's stovepipe, ; progress, ; a family jar, ; mouce trap and other sweetemetes, ; a sonnet on a ronnet, ; pleasantries, . news of the week--page . markets--page . [illustration: aberdeen-angus bullock, "black prince." owned by geary bros., london, ont.] drainage and good husbandry. by c. g. elliott, drainage engineer. i. the practical advantage of drainage as it appears to the casual observer, is in the increased production of valuable crops. ordinary land is improved, and worthless land so far reclaimed as to yield a profit to its owner, where once it was a source of loss and a blemish upon an otherwise fair district. the land-buyer who looks for a future rise in his purchase, recognizes the value of drainage, being careful to invest his capital in land which has natural drainage, or is capable of being drained artificially with no great expense, if it is suitable for use as an agricultural domain. the physician, though perhaps unwilling, is obliged to admit drainage as an important agency in the reduction of malignant diseases and much general ill-health among dwellers in both country and village. our state board of health recognizes the influence of land drainage upon the healthfulness of districts where it is practiced. the secretary of this board gives it as his opinion that even good road drainage would diminish the number of preventable diseases per cent. such are now some of the impressions as to the value of drainage among those who judge from acknowledged effects. that a great change has been brought about by this practice is apparent to the most superficial observer, if he compares pre-drainage with the present. a few facts. the indiana bureau of statistics made an investigation about two years ago of the influence of tile drainage upon production and health in that state. two periods of five years were selected, one before drainage was begun, and the other after most of the farms had been drained, the area examined being one township in johnson county. as near as could be determined, the average yearly yield of wheat for a period of five consecutive years before drainage was nine and a half bushels per acre. the same land and tillage after drainage in a period of five consecutive years produced an average of nineteen and one-fourth bushels per acre. comparing the corn crops in the same way for the same time, it was found that the average yearly yield before drainage was thirty-one and three-fourths bushels per acre, and after drainage seventy-four and one-fourth bushels per acre. in order to determine the influence of drainage upon health, physicians, who had, during the same two periods of five years each, answered all calls in cases of disease, were asked to report from their books all cases of malarial fever. it was found from this data that, for the first period of five years before drainage, there had been , cases of malarial disease. during the next five years under a pretty good system of drainage, there were but cases of such disease. these facts show that drainage not only brings material prosperity to the individual, but promotes the general healthfulness of the climate of that district, in which all are interested and all enjoy. it is a matter of note that the campagne about rome, which in ancient days was the healthful home of a dense population, is now afflicted with the most deadly fevers. it is claimed by high authorities that this is due to the destruction and choking of the drains which in excavating are found everywhere, but always filled and useless. it will be readily seen that this subject has at least two important bearings upon our prosperity, and though in considering and perfecting general farm drainage, the effect upon health may be manifested without effort being put forth in that direction, yet it should always be kept in mind and receive that consideration which it deserves. drainage and fancy farming. it is thought by many who have not yet tested the value of tile drainage, that it is one of those luxuries often indulged in by so-called fancy farmers. by such farmers is meant those who farm for pleasure rather than for profit; those who raise wheat which costs them $ per bushel, but which is worth only eighty cents on the market; those who raise beef at a cost of ten cents per lb. and sell it for six cents per lb.; in short, they are men (and there are many of them) who receive their income from some other source, and cultivate a farm for recreation. that drainage properly belongs to this class of farmers is a mistaken notion, as hundreds of thrifty, money-making farmers in the west would prove, could they now give their experience. in the example previously given, drainage increased the production of wheat and corn fully per cent, which was a township report for five years. in order to emphasize these statements, we will insert a few practical examples communicated to the drainage journal during last year. geo. p. robertson: "one ten-acre field failed to produce anything except a few small ears. i drained it, and have cropped it for eight years successively, and have paid time and again for husking bushels of corn per acre." "mr. losee, norwich, canada, says that as a matter of actual test, his underdrained land yields one-third larger crops than his undrained fields, although the same treatment in other respects is applied, and the land is of the same character throughout. the average wheat yield of his undrained land is twenty bushels per acre, while the drained fields yielded an average of thirty bushels. as the cost of draining on his farm is estimated at $ per acre, this preparation of the soil pays for itself in two years." horton ferguson, indiana: "the swamp contained twenty-seven acres, and was regarded by all neighbors as utterly worthless except for hunting grounds. mr. ferguson, who has great faith in underdraining, determined to undertake to reclaim the land, confident if successfully done, it would be a paying investment. last year he tile drained and grubbed it, paying customary rates for all the labor and tile, and this year put it in corn, with the following result: dr. cr. tile used for acres $ paid for ditching expense for clearing and grubbing ------- total expense $ -------- by , bushels of corn at cents $ , the land proved to be remarkably rich, having produced, as shown, ninety bushels to the acre, and mr. f. assures us that several acres exceeded bushels to the acre. it will thus be observed that he realized the first year of cultivation enough to pay the entire expense of reclaiming and had $ . left to pay on the crop expense. next season, if favorable, he expects a still better yield." every farmer knows that, in these times of easy transportation, profits do not depend so much upon the price his product brings in the market as upon the quantity he has to dispose of. in other words, abundant crops are the farmer's source of income. there is evidence enough at hand to justify the statement that of all improvements put upon farms containing wet land valued at $ per acre and upwards, drainage pays the largest profit for the outlay. just what this profit will be will depend upon the soil drained, the necessary cost required to improve it, and the use and management of it after it is drained. all of these things vary so that each case must be considered by itself. drainage is simply a necessary part of good husbandry which merits the careful consideration of all thinking farmers. plan for a flood gate. to maintain a fence across a water course, is one of the trials and tribulations of the farmer. after a heavy rain, generally fences in such places are either badly damaged or entirely washed away. having been troubled this way for years, i have hit upon the following plan, which, after two years' trial i find to be a success. a stick of timber, three or four inches in diameter, is placed where the gate is needed, and fastened down with stakes, driven slanting, on each side, the tops of the stakes lapping over the piece so as to hold it securely, and driven well down, so as not to catch the drift, but allowing the piece to turn freely; inch and half holes are bored in the piece and uprights are fitted in them; the material of which the gate is made is fastened to these uprights. a light post is driven on the lower side and the gate fastened to it. this will keep the gate in place in any ordinary flood, but when a noah comes along, it turns down on the bottom of creek, and waters and drifts pass over it. when the water subsides all that is necessary to do is to turn the gate back to its upright position. if the gate is not needed during the winter, it is better to lay it down and let it remain in that position until spring, for if it is fastened with the post in an upright position, it will be broken with the spring floods. a. e. b. carthage, ill. great corn crops. it having been mentioned in the iowa state register some weeks ago that mr. hezekiah fagan, of polk county, in that state, had once grown one hundred and fifty-eight bushels of corn per acre, a son of mr. fagan writes the following regarding the kinds of corn, the ground, and the manner of cultivation: "father's farm joined brown's park on the north and run a mile north; the corn was raised where the old orchard now is; it was part prairie and part brush land, and was about the third crop. the ground was plowed in the spring, harrowed and marked out with a single shovel both ways, the rows being four feet apart each way. the corn was dropped by hand and covered with a hoe, and left without harrowing until large enough to plow, and was plowed twice with single shovel, and once with the two horse stirring plow and hilled up as high as possible, and hoed enough to keep clean. the seed was from corn father brought from rockville, ind., with him when he moved to des moines, in the spring of , and was of the large, yellow variety which matured then and matures now with anything like a good season, and i verily believe that with as good ground and as good treatment and as much care in having every hill standing, and from three to four stalks in every hill, that the amount might be raised again, if it was over bushels per acre, and i must say that i have never seen a large variety of corn that suited me so well, that would yield so much, or mature so well, and if any iowa farmer will come and look at my crib of corn of this year's raising, and if he will say he can show a better average ear raised on similar ground, with similar treatment, i would like to speak for a few bushels for seed at almost any price, and i will not except the much-puffed leaming variety." the young man adds that his advice to iowa farmers is, "to raise big horses, big cattle, big hogs, big corn, and big grass, and if the profits are not big, too, they had better make up their minds farming isn't their forte, and go at something else." being desirous of knowing something of his big corn yield we wrote to mr. clarkson, of the register, for further information, and received the following reply: dear sir: yours of the th inst., relative to the fagan corn received. the corn raised by hezekiah fagan was thirty years ago, and he received the premium for it at the iowa state fair in . the only facts i have relative to it are in the published proceedings of the state agricultural society. it states that he raised in polk county, iowa, on five acres, at the rate of - / bushels per acre, shelled corn. the whole, shelled, measured - / bushels, but weighed, it made bushels and fifty-three pounds per acre. at the same fair, j. w. inskip exhibited, with all of the necessary proofs, bushels per acre. i think there was no mistake in these matters, as great care was taken to have statement correct; it is to this crop which his son refers in a late number of the register. yours truly, c. f. clarkson. des moines, iowa. a charming letter. at the head of the agricultural department in the prairie farmer i notice a standing invitation, viz.: "farmers, write for your paper." all right! now, if you will just move up a little i'll take a seat in your communicative association. we, that is my wife and myself, eagerly read and discuss the interesting articles with which the prairie farmer is replete every week, and many are the practical hints that we have found therein. it is not strange that, in the heart of a new country with vast undeveloped resources and unlimited possibilities, a young farmer who has his fortune yet to make, should be particularly enthusiastic. tired of the atmosphere of the school-room, fagged out by ten years of study and teaching, and plainly seeing the improbability of being able to lay by enough for a rainy day or old age in this noble, but as a rule, unremunerative calling, my mind involuntarily reverted back to my early life on the old homestead in illinois, to substantials implied in that word, and to its pleasant memories. my mind was made up. with my portion of the old homestead in my pocket, i turned the key in the school-house door, grateful for the experience and lessons of patience gained inside of it, a friend of education, and with a heart full of sympathy for the teachers of our public schools. i came to "the land of the dakotas" once more to break the "stubborn glebe" and enjoy the sweets of farm life. next june i shall have had three years' experience in my new undertaking. i have succeeded fairly well. at some future time i may communicate something about raising wheat and vegetables in dakota, to the readers of "our paper." this winter is proving to be rather long and stormy, but with plenty of fuel, good books and papers, time has not hung heavily on my hands. indeed, i consider these long northern winters a decided advantage to those who regard the cultivation of the mind as important as the cultivation of the fields. i am afraid the majority of farmers do not lay enough stress upon mental culture. in this age of cheap books there can be no excuse for being without them. systematic reading leads to the best results in mental culture just as systematic farming leads to the best results in agriculture. at the beginning of the winter i select some standard work as my principal reading matter and stick to it until i have it completed, reading for an interlude, good weekly newspapers, and one or two of the standard magazines, with which i always like to be supplied. this breaks up all monotony, and makes reading thoroughly enjoyable and instructive. this winter i am reading the works of goethe, the great german author. march, the last winter month, has come, and although the wind is still howling and snow flying, before the first of april we expect to see the railroads thronged with emigrant cars bringing new settlers, more thrift and more capital. thousands of new homes will be established on the fertile prairies next summer. will you please regard this as a kind of an introduction into your "association?" if we find that we are mutually agreeable perhaps we shall find occasion to meet again. kasper von eschenbach, prairie park farm, bath, d. t. prairie roads. the article on prairie roads in the prairie farmer of march st, , by a. g. h., of champaign county, was good, and i would like to see more on the same subject. if we get any better roads, we must keep the ball rolling. the great objection to the ross plan, or any plan of road-tiling here, is this. when tile is laid in the roadway the teams will travel right over it, and the black soil gets packed and puddled until it is as impervious to water as clay, and the water can't get into the tile. and on the clay hillsides, if the tile is covered with clay, the water can't get into it. this has been well tested here, for we have been road-tiling for six years. the question seems to be to get the water into the tile. the answer is simple enough. we must provide sink holes for it. we must fill the ditch over the tile with sand, gravel, or anything that will let the water in, a yard in length, say, once every rod. then i think the ross plan would be perfect. as to the cost, well, $ per mile seems large, but to take an average of the roads in our county one-half that sum would answer, for it is only the worst places would need the full ross plan. in a good many places, one string of tile with gravel sinks would do, and others with the laterals to drain all to one side, thus saving the cost of one string of tile, or more than one-third of the whole cost. now, if we get the commissioners to commence the work, we must vote for men who are in favor of road-tiling as commissioners. there is where the battle must be fought. buckle on the armor comrades and see that the work is done. w. h. s., mclean co., ill. experiments with indian corn. on may , kinds of corn were planted in the garden, with the intention of promoting the cross fertilization of the varieties in order to study the effects. the seed used was some of it selected on account of its purity; other seed was from named varieties, still other seed from varieties purposely hybridized, or presumed from their appearance or location on the ear to be hybridized; and seed which possessed peculiarities in appearance. the types represented were the three kinds of pop-corns, the flint pop, the pearl pop, and the rice pop; the flints in eight-rowed and twelve-rowed varieties, and soft or tuscarora's; the sweets in two or more types of ear, the one corresponding to the flint, another to the dent corn ear; and the dents also in two or more types, the eight-rowed with broad kernel, and another, the many rowed, with deep kernel. we also had a pod or husk corn. through a study of the crop from these various seeds, we are enabled to make some general conclusions, which probably are sufficient to generalize from, but which certainly apply to the case in hand. the seed of the preceding year gives uniformity of ear; that is, a dent corn seed may produce an eight-rowed flint, or an eighteen-rowed dent, but each ear will be perfect of its kind, and will be free from kernels of other type than its own. the flint corn kernel may produce several varieties of flint corn ear, or dent corn ear, but there will be no variety in the kernel upon the ear; a dent corn seed may furnish a sweet corn ear, and dent corn ears, but not mixed upon the cob. a pop-corn kernel may produce a sweet corn ear, of sweet corn type, a sweet corn ear of pop-corn type, or a pop-corn ear of the various types, without admixture of kernels upon the ears. on the other hand, hybridization of the current year produces changes in the kernel, so that one ear of corn may bear kernels of various colors, and of various types, the tendency, however, being for the shape of the kernel to be governed by the type of the maize ear upon which it is found. the appearance of various types upon an ear allow of some curious generalizations. thus, the rice pop kernel form does not appear upon ears of other character, nor does the pearl pop kernel form appear upon the rice pop ear. the flint pop does not seem to appear upon either the rice or the pearl pop type, so far as form is concerned, but its structure, however, influences. sweet corn, however, appears upon the three types of pop-corn indiscriminately, but, on the other hand, the pop-corns do not appear upon the flint corn ears. while flint corn appears abundantly on sweet corn ears, on the other hand, sweet corn does not appear upon the flint corns. dent corn kernels will appear upon the sweet corn whose type of ear is that of the dent ear, but not upon sweet corn whose type is that of the flint ear. the dent corn, again, does not appear upon the flint ear, but in some isolated instances the flint corn kernel may appear upon the dent ear. the appearance of kernels of one variety upon ears of another variety, for each of the types, is of frequent and constant occurrence, except in the case of red ears. the red ears have a constancy of color which is truly remarkable: where sweet corn appears upon red pop and red dent ears the sweet corn partakes of the red color. the practical value of these deductions consists in the guide they afford toward the improvement of the varieties of corn that we grow. for instance: by planting in adjoining hills, or, better still, the mixed seed of two varieties of corn, one of which is distinguished for its length of ear and smallness of cob, and the other for the large size of its kernel, we should anticipate, in many instances, the transfer of the large kernel to the small ear and of the small kernel to the large ear. by selecting from the crop those ears which have length and the large kernel, we should anticipate, by a series of selections, the attaining of a new variety, in which the large kernel and length of cob would be persistent. the same remarks hold true with the dent corns. but in the matter of selections the true principle would seem to be to plant but one kernel of the desired type from an ear of the desired type, and to keep the plant from this kernel free from the influence of plants of another type, and securing the crop through self-fertilization. after the first year of this procedure, by the selection of two or more kernels of the same type from different plants, cross fertilization should be used, the crop being gradually purified by selection. while the maize plant, as a rule, is not self-fertilized, that is, as a general thing the pollen from one plant fertilizes the silk of another, yet in very many cases the pollen and the silk upon the same plant is synchronous, and self-fertilization becomes possible, and undoubtedly is of frequent occurrence. the pollen ripens from below upward, and thus the fall of the pollen, through the successive ripening of the blooms, may last for three or four days, and there is a great variation in period of blooming as between individual plants. the silk maintains its receptivity for pollen for some little time, but for how long a period we do not yet know from direct observation. it seems, however, true, that closely following pollination, the silk loses its transparent structure and begins to shrivel, while before pollination is effected the silk retains its succulency for several days.--_e. lewis sturtevant, director n. y. exp. station._ specialty farming. i noticed in the prairie farmer of february d, a communication from cape girardeau, mo., on "the dignity of our calling." it contains some very good reasoning, but i do not indorse it all, and take this mode of expressing my views upon the subject. the point upon which i beg leave to differ from the gentleman is, should a farmer have a smattering idea of everything pertaining to farming? i believe that a man should make a specialty of some particular branch of farming, for it is universally conceded by all competent authority that no man can succeed in a given pursuit unless his time and energies are concentrated in that direction, consequently we have successful men in all the avenues of life--and why? from the simple fact that these men make a specialty of some particular branch of their calling; they are no jack-of-all-trades--not by any means. so it is with farming; the man who endeavors to be proficient in all its departments is apt to be a failure, while his specialist neighbor succeeds, simply because he has his course marked out, and bends his energies in that direction. life is too short for a man to comprehend everything. it is true, that the farmer has no fixed law by which to guide him; however, he must, in measure, be governed by past experience. if the farmer does his part, god will do the rest. in my opinion, what we want, is not learning in every branch of farming by the same individual, but we do want lore in a given direction, and then success will crown our every effort. take as an example one of our large machine shops; do we find its workmen, each one, commencing a machine and completing it in all its parts. no; each man has a special task to perform, only that and nothing more. as to farmers' sons longing for other callings, i am forced to admit that it is a lamentable fact which can not be ignored. i believe the reason for this is that they are constantly coming in contact with nature in all her varied forms, and before they have yet reached their majority, they become inspired with an ambition which is prone to go beyond the boundary of farm life, hence we find them, step by step, climbing the ladder of fame. however, we have one consoling fact, and that is, they make some of the most noted men we have--find them where you may. a glorious example of this is in the person of a man who rose from the humble position of plowboy, to that of chief executive of the nation. a few words more and i am done. if the fathers of this land would have their sons follow the noble vocation of farming, let them educate them thoroughly for the branch which they would have them pursue, and by so doing teach them that proficiency in any given direction is sure to command respect and success. subscriber. field and furrow. one of the strong points in preparing horses for spring work is in having their shoulders in a good, sound condition. with this to start with and soft and well-fitting collars there need be but little fear of any difficulty in keeping them all right, no matter how hard the labor horses have to endure. by keeping the collars well cleared of any dirt which may accumulate upon them from the sweating of the horse, and by bathing them daily with cold water, there need be but little fear of bad shoulders. husbandman: every member of the elmira farmers' club present had used sapling clover, more or less, and all regarded it with favor, although for making hay common red clover is worth more, as it is also for pasture. mr. ward expressed the opinion, in which all shared, that there were really but two varieties of field clover in common use at the north, red clover, usually called medium, and the large, or sapling clover. the chief function of the clover root as a fertilizer is in bringing nitrogen from the lower soil upward within reach of succeeding crops and changing its form to meet the requirements of the plant and crops that follow. brow chemical co. circular: the wise farmer will change his seed from year to year. a remarkable feature of the variety in potatoes is that no two kinds of potato are made up of the same chemical components in precisely the same proportion. there are now over varieties of potatoes of greater or less merit. some are celebrated for their large size, some for their fineness of texture and some for the great increase which may be expected from them. one hundred and thirteen years ago there were but two known varieties of potatoes, one being white, the other red. if the soil is too poor potatoes starve, if too wet they catch cold, and refuse to grow to perfection. farmer's advocate: spring operations will soon commence, and with these a demand for good farm hands. the general rule that is followed in this country is to put off the hiring of men to the last moment, and trust to chances for some one coming along, and then probably some inferior workman has to be taken, or none at all. men who know their business on a farm will not wait, and are early picked up in the neighborhood in which they may reside. the trusting to men coming along just at the exact moment you are crowded, is a bad policy. there should always be profitable employment for a man in the early spring months before seeding commences, and it will pay any farmer to secure good farm hands early; and pay them good wages. peoria transcript: we prepared a half acre of ground as good as we knew how. upon one-half of this plat we planted one bushel of seed obtained from michigan, and upon the other half of home-grown seed, both being of the variety known as snowflake. the two lots of seed cut for planting were similar in appearance, both as regards size and quality. the whole lot received the same treatment during the growing season. the plants made about the same growth on the two plats and suffered equally from bugs; but when it came to digging, those from new seed yielded two bushels of large potatoes for every one that could be secured on the land planted with seed of our own growing. this difference in yield could be accounted for on no other theory than the change in seed, as the quality of seed, soil, and culture were the same. this leads to the belief that simply procuring seed of favorite varieties from a distance would insure us good crops at much less expense than can be done experimenting with new, high-priced seeds. in another column a kansas correspondent speaks of the crab grass in an exceedingly favorable way. we find the following regarding this grass in a late new york times: every northern farmer knows the common coarse grass called door-yard grass, which has long, broad leaves, a tough, bunchy root, and a three-fingered spreading head, which contains large, round seeds. it is known as eleusine indica, and grows luxuriously in open drains and moist places. it appears late in the summer. this is an extremely valuable grass in the south. a friend who went to georgia soon after the war bought an abandoned plantation on account of the grass growing upon it. it was this door-yard grass. he pastured sheep upon it and cut some for hay. northern baled hay was selling at $ a ton at that time. he wrote asking me to buy him two mowers and a baling press, and went to baling hay for the southern market, selling his sheep and living an easy life except in haying time. his three hundred acres of cleared land has produced an average of tons of hay every year which gives him about four times as much profit as an acre of cotton would do. perhaps there may come an end to this business, and the grass will run out for want of fresh seed, but with a yearly dressing of charleston phosphate the grass has kept up its original vigor. now why could we not make some use of this grass, and of others, such as quack-grass, which defy so persistently all our efforts to destroy them? [illustration: entomological] insects in illinois. prof. forbes, state entomologist, makes the following report to the state board of agriculture: "now that our year's entomological campaign is completed, a brief review of some of its most important features and results will doubtless be of interest. early attention was given to the insects attacking corn in the ground, before the sprout has appeared above the surface. a surprising number were found to infest it at this period, the results of their injuries being usually attributed by farmers to the weather, defective seed, etc. among these the seed corn maggot (anthomyia zeæ) was frequently noted, and was received from many parts of the state. a small, black-headed maggot, the larva of a very abundant, gnat-like fly (seiara), was excessively common in ground which had been previously in grass, and attacked the seed corn if it did not germinate promptly and vigorously, but apparently did not injure perfectly sound and healthy grains. a minute yellow ant (solenopsis fugax) was seen actually gnawing and licking away the substance of the sound kernels in the ground, both before and after they had sprouted. the corn plant-louse (aphis maidis) was an early and destructive enemy of the crop, often throttling the young shoot before it had broken ground. it was chiefly confined to fields which had been just previously in corn or grass. "the chinch-bug was found in spring depositing the eggs for its first brood of young about the roots of the corn, a habit not hitherto reported. "with the increasing attention to the culture of sorghum, its insect enemies are coming rapidly to the front. four species of plant-lice, two of them new, made a vigorous attack upon this crop in the vicinity of champaign, and two of them were likewise abundant in broom-corn. "the corn root-worm (diabrotica longicornis) was occasionally met with in sorghum, but does not seem likely to do any great mischief to that plant. it could not be found in broom-corn. in fields of maize, however, it was again very destructive, where corn had been raised on the same ground a year or two before. the hessian fly did great damage throughout the winter wheat region of the state, many fields not being worth harvesting in consequence of its ravages. several facts were collected tending to show that it is three brooded in the southern part of the state. nearly or quite all the last brood passed the summer as "flax seeds" in the stubble, where they might easily have been destroyed by general and concerted action. fortunately, the summer weather was unfavorable to their development; and the drouth conspired with their parasites to greatly diminish their numbers. in the regions under our observation, not one in a thousand emerged from the midsummer pupa-cases, and numbers of the larvæ were found completely dried up. "the wheat straw-worm (isosoma tritici), a minute, slender, yellow grub, which burrows inside the growing stem, dwarfing or blighting the forming head, was abundant throughout the winter wheat region of southern illinois, causing, in some places, a loss scarcely exceeded by that due to the hessian fly. our breeding experiments demonstrate that this insect winters in the straw as larvæ or pupa, emerging as an adult fly early in spring, these flies laying their eggs upon the stems after they commence to joint. as the flies are very minute, and nearly all are wingless, their spread from field to field is slow, and it seems entirely within the power of the individual farmer to control this insect by burning or otherwise destroying the stubble in summer or autumn, and burning the surplus of the straw not fed to stock early in spring. a simple rotation of crops, devoting land previously in wheat to some other grain or to grass, will answer instead of burning the stubble. "the life history of the wheat bulb-worm (meromyza americana) was completed this year. the second or summer brood did decided injury to wheat in fulton county, so many of the heads being killed that some of the fields looked gray at a little distance. this species was also injurious to rye, but much less so than to wheat. it certainly does not attack oats at all; fields of that grain raised where winter wheat had been destroyed by it, and plowed up, being entirely free from it, while wheat fields adjacent were badly damaged. we have good evidence that postponement of sowing to as late a date as possible prevents the ravages of this insect, in the same way as it does those of the hessian fly. "the common rose chafer (macrodactylus subspinosus) greatly injured some fields of corn in will county, the adult beetle devouring the leaves. "the 'flea negro-bug' (thyreocoris pulicarius) was found injurious to wheat in montgomery county, draining the sap from the heads before maturity, so that the kernel shriveled and ripened prematurely. in parts of some fields the crop was thus almost wholly destroyed. "the entomological record of the orchard and the fruit garden is not less eventful than that of the farm. in extreme southern illinois, the forest tent caterpillar (clislocampa sylvatica) made a frightful inroad upon the apple orchard, absolutely defoliating every tree in large districts. it also did great mischief to many forest trees. its injuries to fruit might have been almost wholly prevented, either by destroying the eggs upon the twigs of the trees in autumn, as was successfully done by many, or by spraying the foliage of infested trees in spring with paris green, or similar poison, as was done with the best effect and at but slight expense by mr. david ayres, of villa ridge. great numbers of these caterpillars were killed by a contagious disease, which swept them off just as they were ready to transform to the chrysalis; but vast quantities of the eggs are now upon the trees, ready to hatch in spring. "a large apple orchard in hancock county dropped a great part of its crop on account of injuries done to the fruit by the plum curculio (conotrachelus nenuphar). there is little question that these insects were forced to scatter through the apple orchard by the destruction, the previous autumn, of an old peach orchard which had been badly infested by them. "in southern strawberry fields, very serious loss was occasioned by the tarnished plant-bug (lygus lineolaris), which i have demonstrated to be at least a part of the cause of the damage known as the 'buttoning' of the berry. the dusky plant-bug (deræcoris rapidus) worked upon the strawberries in precisely the same manner and at the same time, in some fields being scarcely less abundant than the other. i have found that both these species may be promptly and cheaply killed by pyrethrum, either diluted with flour or suspended in water, and also by an emulsion of kerosene, so diluted with water that the mixture shall contain about per cent of kerosene. "the so-called 'strawberry root-worm' of southern illinois proves to be not one species merely, but three--the larvæ of colaspsis brunnae, paria aterrima and scelodonta pubescens. the periods and life histories of these three species are curiously different, so that they succeed each other in their attacks upon the strawberry roots, instead of competing for food at the same time. the three together infest the plant during nearly the whole growing season--colaspsis first, paria next, and scelodonta last. the beetles all feed upon the leaves in july and august, and may then be poisoned with paris green. "the season has been specially characterized by the occurrence of several widespread and destructive contagious diseases among insects. elaborate studies of these have demonstrated that they are due to bacteria and other parasitic fungi, that these disease germs may be artificially cultivated outside the bodies of the insects, and that when sown or sprinkled upon the food of healthy individuals, the disease follows as a consequence. we have in this the beginning of a new method of combating insect injuries which promises some useful results." illinois central railroad. the elegant equipment of coaches and sleepers being added to its various through routes is gaining it many friends. its patrons fear no accidents. its perfect track of steel, and solid road-bed, are a guarantee against them. farm implements, etc. nichols & murphy's centennial wind mill. [illustration of a windmill] contains all the valuable features of his old "nichols mills" with none of their defects. this is the only balanced mill without a vane. it is the only mill balanced on its center. it is the only mill built on correct scientific principles so as to govern perfectly. all vanes are mechanical devices used to overcome the mechanical defect of forcing the wheel to run out of its natural position. this mill will stand a heavier wind, run steadier, last longer, and crow louder than any other mill built. our confidence in the mill warrants us in offering the first mill in each county where we have no agent, at agents' prices and on days' trial. our power mills have per cent more power than any mill with a vane. we have also a superior feed mill adapted to wind or other power. it is cheap, durable, efficient. for circulars, mills, and agencies, address nichols & murphy, elgin, ill. (successors to the batavia manf. co., of batavia, ill.) the chicago double hay and straw press [illustration of a straw press] guaranteed to load more hay or straw in a box car than any other, and bale at a less cost per ton. send for circular and price list. manufactured by the chicago hay press co., nos. to state st., chicago. take cable car to factory. mention this paper. dederick's hay presses. are sent anywhere on trial to operate against all other presses, the customer keeping the one that suits best. [illustration of men working with a hay press] order on trial, address for circular and location of western and southern storehouses and agents. take notice.--as parties infringing our patents falsely claim premiums and superiority over dederick's reversible perpetual press. now, therefore, i offer and guarantee as follows: first. that baling hay with one horse, dederick's press will bale to the solidity required to load a grain car, twice as fast as the presses in question, and with greater ease to both horse and man at that. second. that dederick's press operated by one horse will bale faster and more compact than the presses in question operated by two horses, and with greater ease to both man and beast. third. that there is not a single point or feature of the two presses wherein dederick's is not the superior and most desirable. dederick press will be sent any where on this guarantee, on trial at dederick's risk and cost. p. k. dederick & co., albany, n. y. sawing made easy monarch lightning sawing machine! sent on days test trial. a great saving of labor & money. [illustration of a male figure using a sawing machine] a boy years old can saw logs fast and easy. miles murray, portage, mich., writes: "am much pleased with the monarch lightning sawing machine. i sawed off a -inch log in minutes." for sawing logs into suitable lengths for family stove-wood, and all sorts of log-cutting, it is peerless and unrivaled. illustrated catalogue, free. agents wanted. mention this paper. address monarch manufacturing co., e. randolph st., chicago ill. monarch horse hoe and cultivator combined for hoeing & hilling potatoes, corn, onions, beets, cabbages, turnips, &c. [illustration of hoe-cultivator] sent on days' test trial. an immense saving of labor and money. we guarantee a boy can cultivate and hoe and hill potatoes, corn, etc., times as easy and fast as one man can the old way. illustrated catalogue free. agents wanted. mention this paper. address monarch mfg. co., state st., chicago, ill. [illustration of boiler] the profit farm boiler is simple, perfect, and cheap; the best feed cooker; the only dumping boiler; empties its kettle in a minute. over , in use; cook your corn and potatoes, and save one-half the cost of pork. send for circular. d. r. sperry & co., batavia, illinois. "the best is the cheapest." saw mills, engines threshers, horse powers, (for all sections and purposes.) write for free pamphlet and prices to the aultman & taylor co., mansfield, ohio. remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _one year and, the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ [illustration: live stock department] stockmen, write for your paper. well-informed live stock men estimate the drive from texas the coming spring at , head, unless shipping rates are unusually favorable, when it may go above , head. a careful estimate of the stock on the range near the black hills is as follows: cattle, , head; horses, , ; sheep, , . it is asserted that the stock has wintered remarkably well, the loss not exceeding - / per cent. a virulent disease resembling blind staggers has appeared among the horses of oregon, and a large number of valuable animals have succumbed to it. over have died in two counties. so far the veterinarians have been unable to stay its progress. the period of gestation in the mare is in general forty-eight weeks; the cow forty six weeks; the ewe twenty-one weeks, and the sow sixteen weeks. having the date of service, the date at which birth is due may be easily ascertained. careful breeders always keep strict record of each animal. the illinois state board of agriculture has adopted a rule requiring the slaughter of all sweepstakes animals at the next fat stock show, in order that the judgment of the committees may be verified as to the quality of the animals. the premiums for dressed carcasses have been largely increased over last year. polled aberdeen cattle. the subject of our st page illustration, black prince, is a representative of that black, hornless race, which had its foundation in scotland several hundred years ago, known as polled aberdeen-angus cattle. this breed of cattle has grown into very high favor in america during the last five or six years; so much so, that, while in the number of representatives of this race in america were very few, now the demand for them is so great that the number imported yearly is easily disposed of at prices ranging from $ to $ , . messrs. geary bros., london, ont., say that the demand for such cattle during the past winter has never been equaled in their long experience. as the prevalence of the foot-and-mouth disease in great britain, will, without a doubt cause the importation of cattle from that country to be prohibited at an early day, it is safe to say that the value of such stock must rise, as the number of its representatives in america is limited, and those who have such stock in their possession fully appreciate their value; and not being under the necessity of selling, will hold their aberdeen-angus cattle unless enticed by a very high price. therefore, the coming public sale of aberdeen-angus cattle in chicago may be looked forward to as going to show unequaled average prices and especially of individual prize animals. black prince was bought by messrs. geary bros., london, ont., in scotland, and brought to america last year. in him are to be found all the fine characteristics of his race. he took the second place at the smithfield fat stock show of ; at the kansas fat stock show of the same year he was placed second to the short-horn steer starlight; and at the last fat stock show of chicago he took first place among the best three-year-olds of the country. at the time of entry for the chicago show he was , days old, and his weight , pounds, almost pounds less than he weighed before leaving scotland for this country. besides the prizes above mentioned, black prince won numerous honors in his own country before coming here. their black, glossy, thick coats, their hornless heads, and particularly their low-set, smooth, round and lengthy bodies are the principal features of this breed. beef consumers will find them in the front rank for yielding wholesome, nourishing food, juicy, tender, and of the best flavor, free from all unpalatable masses of fat or tallow. it is these favorable characteristics which have gained such an excellent, and widespread reputation for the aberdeen-angus cattle. the growing belief that the best breed of beeves is the one that for a given quantity of food, and in the shortest time will produce the greatest weight of nutritious food combined with the smallest amount of bone, tallow, and other waste is going to make these cattle as popular with our beef consumers and producers generally as they have been with those who have long been familiar with their many superior qualities. grass for hogs. with plenty of milk and mill-feed to mix with the corn, good hogs may be grown without grass. but with corn alone, the task of growing and fattening a hog without grass costs more than the hog is worth. to make hog-growing profitable to the farmer, he must have grass. in the older states where the tame grasses are plenty, it is a very thoughtless farmer who has not his hog pasture. but out here in kansas and nebraska, where we have plenty of corn, but no grass, except the wild varieties, the most enterprising of us are at our wits' ends. hogs will eat these wild grasses while tender in the spring, and, even without corn, will grow long, tall, and wonderfully lean, and in the fall will fatten much more readily than hogs grown on corn. but fattening the lean hogs takes too much corn. we must have a grass that the hogs will relish, and on which they will both grow and fatten. they will do this on clover, orchard grass, bluegrass, and other tame grasses. but we have not got any of these, nor do we know how to get them. hundreds of bushels of tame grass seeds are sold every spring by our implement dealers. a few have succeeded in getting some grass, but nine out of ten lose their seed. we either do not know how to grow it, or the seed is not good, or the soil is too new. the truth, perhaps, lies a little in all three. our agricultural colleges are claiming to have success with these grasses, and their experience would be of value to the farmers if these reports could ever reach them. not one farmer in a hundred ever sees them. i know of but one farmer of sufficient political influence to receive these reports through the mails. the rest of us can get them for the asking. but not many of us know this, fewer know whom to ask, and still fewer ask. i do not know a farmer that orders a single copy. farmers, living about our county towns, and doing their trading there, and having leisure enough to loaf about the public offices, and curiosity enough to scratch through the dust-covered piles of old papers and rubbish in the corner, are usually rewarded by finding a copy of these valuable reports. but we, who live far away from the county seat, do our farming without this aid, and mostly without any knowledge of their existence. this looks like a lamentable state of agricultural stupidity. notwithstanding this dark picture we would all read, and be greatly profited by these reports, if they were laid on our tables. if it pays to expend so much labor and money in preparing these reports and sending them half way to the people, would it not be wise to expend a little more and complete the journey, by making it the duty of the assessor to leave a copy on every farmer's table? compulsory education. as an explanation of much of the above, it must be remembered that we are nearly all recently from the east, that we have brought with us our eastern experience, education, literature, and household gods; and that not until we have tried things in our old eastern ways and failed, do we realize that we exist under a new and different state of things and slowly begin to open our eyes to the existence of western agricultural reports and papers giving us the conditions on which the best results have been obtained. there will be more grass seed planted this spring than ever before, and the farmers will be guided by the conditions on which the best successes seem to have been obtained. but this seeding will not give us much grass for this coming summer. what must we do? i write for our western farmers who have no clover, orchard grass, blue grass, but have in their cultivated fields. crab grass. this grass, the most troublesome weed of the west, smothering our gardens and converting our growing corn-fields into dense meadows, makes the best hog pasture in the world, while it lasts. put hogs into a pasture containing all the tame grasses, with one corner in crab grass, and the last named grass will all be consumed before the other grasses are touched. not only do they prefer it to any other grass, but on no grass will they thrive and fatten so well. last spring i fenced twelve acres of old stalk ground well seeded to crab grass. with the first of june the field was green, and from then until frost pastured sixty large hogs, which, with one ear of corn each, morning and evening, became thoroughly fat. these were the finest and cheapest hogs i ever grew. this grass is in its glory from june till frosts. by sowing the ground early in oats, this will pasture the hogs until june, when the crab grass will occupy all the ground, and carry them through in splendid condition, and fat them, with an ear or corn morning and evening. a. d. lee. centerville, kan. note.--many of our readers may be unfamiliar with the variety of grass spoken of by our correspondent. it is known as crop grass, crab grass, wire grass, and crow's foot (_eleusine indica_). flint describes it as follows: stems ascending, flattened, branching at the base; spikes, two to five, greenish. it is an annual and flowers through the season, growing from eight to fifteen inches high, and forming a fine green carpeting in lawns and yards. it is indigenous in mississippi, alabama, and adjoining states, and serves for hay, grazing, and turning under as a fertilizer. it grows there with such luxuriance, in many sections, as never to require sowing, and yields a good crop where many of the more northern grasses would fail.--[ed. p. f.] a stock farm and ranch. some years ago prof. j. b. turner, of jacksonville, ill., whom almost every reader of the prairie farmer in days gone by knows, personally, or by his writings, in company with one of his sons conceived the idea of running an illinois stock farm in connection with a ranch in texas. the young animals were to be reared on the cheap lands in the latter state where care and attention amount to a trifle, and to ship them north to finish them off for market on the blue grass and corn of the illinois farm. to carry out this purpose they purchased nearly , acres in coleman county, texas, and they converted , acres in a body in montgomery county, illinois, into a home stock farm. unfortunately, just as all things were in readiness for extensive operations, the son died, leaving the business to prof. turner, now nearly an octogenarian and entirely unable to bear the burden thus forced upon him. as a consequence, he desires to sell these large and desirable possessions, separate or together, as purchasers may offer. the illinois farm is well fenced and in a high state of cultivation. there are growing upon it more than , large evergreens, giving at once protection to stock and beauty to the landscape. there are also , bearing fruit trees, a vineyard, and a large quantity of raspberries, blackberries, currants, etc. besides a good farm-house, there is a large barn, in which there are often fed at one time head of horses, with plenty of room for each animal; and an abundance of storage room in proportion for grain and hay. also a large sheep shed, the feeding capacity of which is , head. also a large hog house, conveniently divided into pens with bins for grain. other numerous out-buildings, granary, hay sheds, stock and hay scales, etc., etc. there are on the farm twelve miles of osage orange hedge, the best kind of fence in the world, in perfect trim and full growth; and four miles of good rail fence, dividing the farm off into conveniently sized fields of forty, eighty and one hundred and sixty acres each, access to which is easily obtained by means of gates which open from each field into a private central road belonging to the farm, and directly connected with the stock yards near the house, so that it is not necessary to pass over other fields in the handling of stock. stockmen will appreciate this arrangement. owing to its special advantages for handling stock, it has become widely known as a "model stock farm." the lands are all naturally well drained; no flat or wet land, and by means of natural branches, which run through every eighty acres, the whole farm is conveniently and easily watered, by an unfailing supply. there are besides three large wind mills, with connecting troughs for watering the stock yards and remotest field. this supply of stock water has never failed. it is therefore specially adapted for all kinds of stock raising, and is well stocked. it has on it a fine drove of hereford cattle and norman horses, and is otherwise fully equipped with all the recent improvements in farming implements. this farm is only about fifty miles from st. louis, mo., two miles from a railroad station, and six miles from litchfield, illinois. besides its location commercially, and its advantages for handling stock, this farm is in one of the best wheat and fruit producing sections of illinois, and has now on it acres of fine wheat. the ranch in texas consists of one body of , acres of choice land. by means of an unfailing supply of living water the whole ranch is well watered, and has besides a very large cistern. the soil is covered with the curly mesquite grass, the richest and most nutritious native stock grass known in texas. there is also on the ranch a splendid growth of live oak trees, the leaves of which remain green the year round, furnishing shade in summer, and an ample protection for stock in winter. there is on the ranch a large well built stone house, and also a fine sheep shed, with bins for , bushels of grain. this shed is covered with florida cypress shingles and affords protection for , head of sheep, and can be used just as well for other kinds of stock. here can be bred and raised to maturity at a mere nominal cost, all kinds of cattle, horses, mules, and other stock, no feed in winter being required beyond the natural supply of grass. after the stock reaches maturity they can be shipped to the illinois farm; and while all the cattle easily fatten in texas enough for the market, still as they are generally shipped to st. louis or chicago, it costs but little more, and greatly increases the profits, to first ship them to the illinois farm, and put them in prime condition, besides being near the markets, and placing the owner in position to take advantage of desirable prices at any time. with horses and mules this is a special advantage readily apparent to every one. it will be seen at once that any individual with capital, or a stock company, or partnership of two or more men, could run this farm and ranch together at a great profit. all the improvements on both being made solely for convenience and profit and not anything expended for useless show. i do not write this communication from any selfish motive, for i have not a penny's worth of interest in either farm or ranch, but i want to let people who are looking for stock farms know that here is one at hand such as is seldom found, and at the same time to do my life-long friend and yours a slight favor in return for the great and lasting benefits he has, in the past, so freely conferred upon the farmers of the state and country. i know these lands can be bought far below their real value, and the purchaser will secure a rare bargain. i presume the professor will be glad to correspond with parties, giving full particulars as to terms. subscriber. montgomery co., ill. western wool-growers. the western wool-growers, in convention at denver, colorado, march th, unanimously adopted the following memorial to congress: whereas, the wool-growers of colorado, kansas, utah, wyoming, nebraska, idaho, new mexico, and minnesota, assembled in convention in the city of denver, the th of march, , representing , , head of sheep, $ , , invested capital, and an annual yield of , , pounds of wool, and whereas, said industry having been greatly injured by the reduction of the tariff bill of may, , and being threatened with total destruction by the reduction of per cent, as proposed by the morrison tariff bill just reported to the house of representatives by the committee on ways and means; therefore resolved, that we, the wool-growers in convention assembled, are opposed to the provisions of the morrison bill now before congress which aim to make a further reduction of per cent on foreign wools and woolens, and that we ask a restoration of the tariff of in its entirety as relates to wools and woolens, by which, for the first time in the industrial history of the country, equitable relations were established between the duties on wool and those on woolen goods. resolved, that we pledge ourselves to work for and to aid in the restoration of the tariff of on wools and woolens, and request all persons engaged or interested in the wool-growing industry to co-operate with us. resolved, that we as wool-growers and citizens pledge ourselves to stand by all committees and associations in giving full and complete protection to all american industries in need of the same, and cordially invite their co-operation in this matter. the memorial concludes with an appeal to western senators and representatives in congress to do all in their power to restore the tariff of . the cattle disease near effingham. saturday, march , i visited the herds of messrs. du brouck, schooley and fannce northeast of effingham, illinois, and carefully examined them with mr. f. f. hunt, of the university, as they were reported affected with foot-and-mouth disease. in each herd diseased cattle were found; about distinctly marked cases, a few others having symptoms. the disease is unlike anything i have known, but does not resemble foot-and-mouth disease as described by any authority. only the hind feet are affected, and these without ulceration. in most cases "scouring" was first noticed, followed by swelling above the hoofs. in the most severe cases, the skin cracked about the pastern joint or at the coronet. in four cases one foot had come off. swelling of pastern and "scouring" were the only symptoms in several cases. the mouth and udders were healthful; appetites good. in one case there was slight vesicle on nostril and slight inflammation of gum. some animals in contact with diseased ones for weeks remained healthful. others were attacked after five weeks' isolation. the most marked cases were of eight to ten weeks standing. but one animal had died. what we saw is not foot and mouth disease as known abroad, nor is the contagious character of the disease proven from the cases in these herds. g. e. morrow, university, champaign, ill. [illustration: the dairy] dairymen, write for your paper. camembert cheese. the camembert is one of the variety of french cheeses that find ready sale in england at high prices. mr. jenkins describes the process of making this cheese in a late number of the journal of the royal agricultural society of england which information we find condensed in the dublin farmer's gazette: the cows are milked three times a day, at . and . a. m., and at p. m. in most dairies the evening's milk is highly skimmed in the morning, butter being made from the cream, and the milk divided into two portions one of which is added to the morning's and the other to the midday's milking. the mixture is immediately put into earthen vessels holding twelve to fifteen gallons each, and after it has been raised to the temperature of about deg. fahr., a sufficient quantity of rennet is added to make the curd fit to be transferred to the cheese moulds in three or four hours, or, perhaps, a longer interval in winter. the mixture of the rennet with the milk is insured by gentle stirring, and the pots are then covered with a square board. the curd is ready for removal when it does not adhere to the back of the finger placed gently upon it, and when the liquid that runs from the fingers is as nearly as possible colorless. the curd is transferred, without breaking it more than can be avoided, to perforated moulds four inches in diameter. the moulds are placed on reed mats resting on slightly inclined slabs, made of slate, cement, or other hard material, and having a gutter near the outer edge. the curd remains in the moulds twenty-four or even forty-eight hours, according to the season, being turned upside down after twelve or twenty-four hours; that is, when sufficiently drained at the bottom. after turning the face of the cheese, the inside of the mould is sprinkled with salt, and twelve hours afterward the opposite face and the rim of the cheeses are treated in the same way. the cheeses are then placed on movable shelves round the walls of the dairy for a day or two, after which the curing process commences by the cheeses being transferred to the "drying-room," and there placed on shelves made of narrow strips of wood with narrow intervals between them, or of ordinary planks with reed mats or clean rye straw. here the greatest ingenuity is exerted to secure as dry an atmosphere and as equable a temperature as possible--the windows being numerous and small, and fitted with glass, to exclude air, but not light, when the glass is shut, with a wooden shutter to exclude both light and air; and with wire gauze to admit light and air, and exclude flies and winged insects, which are troublesome to the makers of soft cheese. the cheeses are turned at first once a day, and afterward every second day, unless in damp weather, when daily turning is absolutely necessary. in three or four days after the cheeses are placed in the drying-room they become speckled; in another week they are covered with a thick crop of white mold, which by degrees deepens to a dark yellow, the outside of the cheese becoming less and less sticky. at the end of about a month, when the cheese no longer sticks to the fingers, it is taken to the finishing room, where light is nearly excluded, and the atmosphere is kept very still and slightly damp. here they remain three or four weeks, being turned every day or every second day, according to the season, and carefully examined periodically. when ready for market--that is to say, in winter, when ripe, and in summer, when half ripe--they are made up in packets of six, by means of straw and paper, with great skill and neatness. few words and more butter. the wisconsin dairymen's association last year offered prizes for the best essays on butter-making, the essays not to exceed words. competition was active, and many valuable little treatises was the result. the first prize was won by d. w. curtis, of fort atkinson, and reads as follows. we commend it to all butter-makers and to all writers of essays as a model of the boiled-down essence of brevity: cows. select cows rich in butter-making qualities. feed. pastures should be dry, free from slough-holes, well seeded with different kinds of tame grasses, so that good feed is assured. if timothy or clover, cut early and cure properly. feed corn, stalks, pumpkins, ensilage and plenty of vegetables in winter. grain. corn and oats, corn and bran, oil meal in small quantities. water. let cows drink only such water as you would yourself. care of cows. gentleness and cleanliness. milking. brush the udder to free it from impurities. milk in a clean barn, well ventilated, quickly, cheerfully, with clean hands and pail. seldom change milkers. care of milk. strain while warm; submerge in water degrees. open setting degrees. skimming. skim at twelve hours; at twenty-four hours. care of cream. care must be exercised to ripen cream by frequent stirrings, keeping at degrees until slightly sour. utensils. better have one cow less than be without a thermometer. churns without inside fixtures. lever butter worker. keep sweet and clean. churning. stir the cream thoroughly; temper to degrees; warm or cool with water. churn immediately when properly soured, slowly at first, with regular motion, in to minutes. when butter is formed in granules the size of wheat kernels, draw off the buttermilk; wash with cold water and brine until no trace of buttermilk is left. working and salting. let the water drain out; weigh the butter; salt, one ounce to the pound; sift salt on the butter, and work with lever worker. set away two to four hours; lightly re-work and pack. a machine that can take hay, corn fodder, grass, and grain and manufacture them into good, rich milk at the rate of a quart per hour for every hour in the twenty-four, is a valuable one and should be well cared for. there are machines--cows--which have done this. there are many thousands of them that will come well up to this figure for several months in the year, and which will, besides, through another system of organisms, turn out a calf every year to perpetuate the race of machines. man has it in his power to increase the capacity of the cow for milk and the milk for cream. he must furnish the motive power, the belts, and the oil in the form of proper food, shelter, and kindly treatment. by withholding these he throws the entire machinery out of gear and robs himself. compiled correspondence. kane county, march .--snow is nearly all gone. there is but little frost in the ground. the spring birds have come. hay is plenty, winter wheat and winter rye look green, and have not been winter-killed to any great extent. cattle and horses are looking well and are free from disease. we fear the spread of the foot-and-mouth disease. every effort should be made to confine it within its present limits. its spread in this county of so great dairy interests would be a great calamity. our factory men will make full cream cheese during the summer months. the hard, skim cheese made last season, and sold at cts per pound, paid the patrons nothing. we hear of factory dividends for january of $ . to $ . . j. p. b. grand prairie, tex., march .--the spring is cold and late here; but little corn planted yet. winter oats killed; many have sown again. farmers are well up with their work. g. e. r. * * * * * brown's bronchial troches will relieve bronchitis, asthma, catarrh, consumption and throat diseases. _they are used always with good success._ [illustration: veterinary] symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease. this disease, which is one of the most easily transmitted of contagious and infectious diseases of domestic animals, is characterized by the appearance of vesicles or small bladders on the mucous surfaces and those parts of the skin uncovered by hair, such as in the mouth, on the gums and palate, on the tongue, and the internal surface of the lips and cheeks; on the surface of the udder and teats, and between the claws. the disease passes through four different stages or periods; but for present purposes it will be sufficient to merely mention the most prominent of the successive changes and appearances, as they occur to the ordinary observer. the incubatory stage, or the time between contamination and the development of the disease, is very short (from twenty-four hours to one or two weeks), and the disease is ushered in by the general symptoms of fever, such as shivering, increased temperature, staring coat, dry muzzle, dullness and loss of appetite. the animals seek seclusion, preferably in sheltered places, where they assume a crouched position, or lie down, and there is more or less stiffness and unwillingness to move. the mouth becomes hot and inflamed looking, and covered with slime, the breath fetid; the animal grinds the teeth, smacks with mouth, and has difficulty in swallowing. there is more or less tenderness of feet and lameness, and in cows the udder becomes red and tender, the teats swollen, and they refuse to be milked. depending upon the intensity of the fever and the extent to which the udder is affected, the milk secretion will be more or less diminished, or entirely suspended; but throughout the disease the quality or constituents of the milk become materially altered; its color changes to a yellow; it has a tendency to rapid decomposition, and possesses virulent properties. soon yellowish-white blisters, of various sizes, from that of a small pea to a small hickory nut, appear on the mucous surface within the mouth, and which blisters often in the course of development become confluent or coalesce. they generally break within two to three days, and leave bright red, uneven, and ragged sores or ulcers, to the edges of which adheres shreds of detached epithelial tissue. the animal now constantly moves the tongue and smacks the mouth, while more or less copious and viscid saliva continually dribbles from the mouth. the lameness increases in proportion as the feet are affected, and if the fore feet are most affected, the animal walks much like a floundered horse, with the hinder limbs advanced far under the body, and with arched back. the coronet of the claws, especially toward the heels, becomes swollen, hot, and tender, causing the animal to lie down most of the time. the blisters, which appear at the interdigital space of the claws, and especially at the heels, break in the course of a day and discharge a thick, straw-colored fluid; the ulcers, which are of intensely red or scarlet color, soon become covered with exudating lymph, which dries and forms scabs. on the udder, the blisters appear more or less scattered and variable, and they are most numerous at the base and on the teats. ordinarily, the disease terminates in two or three weeks, while the animal, which during its progress refuses to partake of any other than sloppy food, gradually regains strength and flesh, and the udder resumes its normal functions. the mortality at times has proved very great in this disease when it has appeared with unusual virulency. shyness and timidity. in common "horse language," these propensities are confounded one with the other or else no proper and right distinction is made between them. a horse may be timid without being shy, though he can hardly be said to be shy without being timid. young horses in their breaking are timid, frightened at every fresh or strange object they see. they stand gazing and staring at objects they have not seen before, fearful to approach them; but they do not run away from, or shy at them; on the contrary, the moment they are convinced there is nothing hurtful in them, they refuse not to approach or even trample upon them. this the shy horse will not do. he can not be persuaded to turn toward or even to look at the object he shies at; much less to approach it. timid horses, through usage and experience, get the better of their timidity, and in time become very opposite to fearful; but shy horses, unless worked down to fatigue and broken-spiritedness, rarely forget their old sins. the best way to treat them is to work them, day by day, moderately for hours together, taking no notice whatever of their shying tricks, neither caressing nor chastising them, and on no account whatever endeavoring to turn their heads either towards or away from the objects shied at. glanders. with a view of shedding light on the important question of the contagiousness of glanders, we will mention the following deductions from facts brought forth by our own experience. . that farcy and glanders, which constitute the same disease, are propagable through the medium of stabling, and this we believe to be the more usual way in which the disease is communicated from horse to horse. . that infected stabling may harbor and retain the infection for months, or even years; and though, by thoroughly cleansing and making use of certain disinfecting means, the contagion may probably be destroyed, it would not perhaps be wise to occupy such stables _immediately_ after such supposed or alleged disinfection. . that virus (or poison of glanders) may lie for months in a state of incubation in the horse's constitution, before the disease breaks out. we have had the most indubitable evidence of its lurking in one horse's system for the space of fifteen weeks. . that when a stud or stable of horses becomes contaminated, the disease often makes fearful ravages among them before it quits them; and it is only after a period of several months' exemption from all disease of the kind that a clean bill of health can be safely rendered. miscellaneous. "facts about arkansas and texas." a handsome book, beautifully illustrated, with colored diagrams, giving reliable information as to crops, population, religious denominations, commerce, timber, railroads, lands, etc., etc. sent free to any address on receipt of a -cent stamp. address h. c. townsend, gen. passenger agt., st. louis, mo. disease cured without medicine. _a valuable discovery for supplying magnetism to the human system. electricity and magnetism utilized as never before for healing the sick._ the magneton appliance co.'s magnetic kidney belt! for men is warranted to cure _or money refunded_, the following diseases without medicine;--_pain in the back, hips, head, or limbs, nervous debility, lumbago, general debility, rheumatism, paralysis, neuralgia, sciatica, diseases of the kidneys, spinal diseases, torpid liver_, gout, seminal emissions, impotency, asthma, heart disease, dyspepsia, constipation, erysipelas, indigestion, hernia or rupture, catarrh, piles, epilepsy, dumb ague, etc. when any debility of the generative organs occurs, lost vitality, lack of nerve force and vigor, wasting weakness, and all those diseases of a personal nature, from whatever cause, the continuous stream of magnetism permeating through the parts, must restore them to a healthy action. there is no mistake about this appliance. to the ladies:--if you are afflicted with lame back, weakness of the spine, falling of the womb, leucorrhoea, chronic inflammation and ulceration of the womb, incidental hemorrhage or flooding, painful, suppressed, and irregular menstruation, barrenness, and change of life, this is the best appliance and curative agent known. for all forms of female difficulties it is unsurpassed by anything before invented, both as a curative agent and as a source of power and vitalization. price of either belt with magnetic insoles, $ sent by express c. o. d., and examination allowed, or by mail on receipt of price. in ordering send measure of waist, and size of shoe. remittance can be made in currency, sent in letter at our risk. the magneton garments are adapted to all ages, are worn over the under-clothing (not next to the body like the many galvanic and electric humbugs advertised so extensively), and should be taken off at night. they hold their power forever, and are worn at all seasons of the year. send stamp for the "new departure in medical treatment without medicine," with thousands of testimonials. the magneton appliance co., state street, chicago, ill. note.--send one dollar in postage stamps or currency (in letter at our risk) with size of shoe usually worn, and try a pair of our magnetic insoles, and be convinced of the power residing in our other magnetic appliances. positively no cold feet when they are worn, or money refunded. consumption. i have a positive remedy for the above disease; by its use thousands of cases of the worst kind and of long standing have been cured. indeed, so strong is my faith in its efficacy, that i will send two bottles free, together with a valuable treatise on this disease, to any sufferer. give express & p. o. address. dr. t. a. slocum pearl st., n. y. remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _one year, and the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ [illustration: horticultural] horticulturists, write for your paper. sand mulching of orchard trees. in the prairie farmer i notice the interesting note of "o." of sheboygan falls, wis., on the apparent benefit resulting from sand and manure mulching of pear trees. in the very near future i expect to see much of this kind of work done by commercial orchardists. already we have many trees in iowa mulched with sand. i wish now to draw attention to the fact that on the rich black prairie soils west of saratov--about five hundred miles southeast of moscow--every tree in the profitable commercial orchards is mulched with pure river sand. the crown of the tree when planted is placed about six inches lower than usual with us in a sort of basin, about sixteen feet across. this basin is then filled in with sand so that in the center, where the tree stands, it is three or four inches higher than the general level of the soil. the spaces between these slight depressions filled with sand are seeded down to grass, which is not cut, but at time of fruit gathering is flattened by brushing to make a soft bed for the dropping fruit and for a winter mulch. the close observer will not fail to notice good reasons for this treatment. ( .) the sand mulch maintains an even temperature and moisture of the surface roots and soil and prevents a rapid evaporation of the moisture coming up by capillary attraction from the sub soil. ( .) the soil under the sand will not freeze as deeply as on exposed surfaces, and we were told that it would not freeze as deeply by two feet or more as under the tramped grass in the interspaces. ( .) with the light colored sand about the trees, and grass between, the lower beds of air among the trees would not be as hot by several degrees as the exposed surface, even when the soil was light colored clay. ( .) a bed of sand around the trunks of the trees will close in with the movement of the top by the summer and autumn winds, thus avoiding the serious damage often resulting from the swaying of the trunk making an opening in the soil for water to settle and freeze. still another use is made of this sand in very dry seasons, which as with us would often fail to carry the fruit to perfection. on the upper side of large commercial orchards, large cisterns are constructed which are filled by a small steam pump. when it is decided that watering is needed the sand is drawn out, making a sort of circus ring around the trees which is run full of water by putting on an extra length of v spouting for each tree. when one row is finished the conductors are passed over to next row as needed. to water an orchard of , trees--after the handy fixtures are once provided--seems but a small task. after the water settles away, the sand is returned to its place. in the province of saratov we saw orchards with and without the sand, and with and without the watering. we did not need to ask if the systematic management paid. the great crops of smooth apples and pears, and the long lived and perfect trees on the mulched and watered orchards told the whole story of the needs of trees planted on black soil on an open plain subject to extreme variations as to moisture and temperature of air and soil. j. l. budd., iowa agricultural college. pear blight.--no. . the mere "experience" of an individual, whether as a doctor of medicine, horticulture, or agriculture--however extensive, is comparatively worthless. indeed the million "demonstrate it to be mischievous, judging from the success of quacks and empyrics as to money. an unlimited number of facts and certificates prove nothing, either as to cause or remedy." sir isaac newton's corpuscular theory "explained all the phenomena of light, except one," and he actually assumed, for it "fits." nevertheless it will ever remain the most thinkable mode of teaching the laws of light, and it is not probable that any more than this will ever be accomplished as to any natural science--if that can be called science about which we must admit that "it is not so; but it is as if it were so." of more than "osband summer" which i grafted on the anger quince successfully, one remains, and this one was transplanted after they had fruited in a clay soil, to the same sort of soil between "the old standard" and a stable, both of which have occupied the same locality and within twenty yards, during much more than fifty years of my own observation--this "osband summer" flourishes. it has borne fruit in its present site, but grew so rapidly last year that the blossoms aborted thus illustrating the large proportion of vital force necessary to the production of fruit, as the site has a perennial supply of manure from the old stable. a number of standard trees, of the same variety, developed beautifully until they attained twenty or thirty feet, but then succumbed to the blight, after the first effort at fruiting. so also the beurre clairgean etc., etc. their exposure to the same influences, and their growth during several years did not occasion the blight, but the debility which must inevitably attend fruiting seems the most prolific cause. all the phenomena of pear blight can be accounted for, and we are greatly encouraged in protecting the trees therefrom if, we assume, it is only the result of weakness and deficient vitality; if so, as in epidemics, all the pear trees may be poisoned or ergotized, but only the weakest succumb; and perhaps this debility may be confined to one limb. the practical value of this view is manifest, as it is impracticable to avoid using the same knife, and remove every blighted leaf from the orchard. moreover, if the limb is a large one, its prompt removal shocks the vitality of the whole tree[ ] and thus renders other parts more vulnerable. on the contrary view, the limb may be allowed to drop by natural process, precisely as all trees in a forest shed their lower limbs, leaving hardly a cicatrice or scar, and this may be insured at any season by a cord of hemp twine, firmly bound around the limb. the inevitable strangulation, and the healing of the stump (without the mycelium of fungi which the knife or saw inevitably propagates by exposing a denuded surface, if not more directly) proceed more rapidly than the natural slough of limbs by starvation. moreover the fruit may mature on such limbs during their strangulation, as this may not be perfected before the subsequent winter. the next practical result of my view is the fundamental importance of all those means which are calculated to husband the vital force of the tree during its first effort to fruit; one of these is the use of a soil that will not produce more than twenty bushels of corn without manure, thus a large proportion of the setts will be aborted, but one half of what remains should be removed, and subsequently the area beneath the limbs should have a wheelbarrow of good compost. d. s. footnote : note.--the shock as to vital force is demonstrated by the fact that when young trees are not trimmed at all their girth increases more rapidly, and they bear fruit sooner. moreover, when old trees are severely pruned (though not half the proportion of wood is removed) they fail to bear during the next year. i find that a hemp cord about the size of the stem of a tobacco pipe (one-fourth inch diameter) will soon become imbedded in the bark if firmly tied around a limb, and perhaps this size is more efficient than a thicker cord. the black walnut. the black walnut is without doubt the most valuable tree we have for the rich lands of the "corn belt," west, and one which is very easily grown everywhere if the farmer will only learn how to get it started. how few we see growing on our prairies. why? simply because to have it we must grow it from the nuts. it is nearly impossible to transplant black walnut trees of any size and have them live; although it is a fact that whenever a non-professional attempts to grow them from the nuts he is almost sure to fail, it is also a fact that there is no tree that is more easily grown from the seed than this, if we only know how to do it. it is my purpose in this note to tell how to do it, and also how not to do it. in the first instance we will suppose a man lives where he can gather the nuts in the woods. when the nuts begin to fall let him plow deeply the plot of ground he wishes to plant and furrow it off three or four inches deep, the distance apart he wishes his rows to be. he will then go to the woods and gather what nuts he wishes to plant, and plant them at once, just as they come from the tree, covering them just out of sight in the furrows. this is all there is of it; simple, is it not? but it will not do to gather a great wagon box full, and let them stand in it until they heat, or to throw them in a great heap on the ground and let them lay there until they heat. it will not do, either, to hull them and let them lay in the sun a week or two, or hull them, dry them and keep them until spring, and then plant; none of these plans will do if you want trees. of course if the nuts are hulled and planted at once they will grow; but this hulling is entirely unnecessary. besides, the hulls seem to act as a special manure for the young seedlings, causing them to grow more vigorously. next, we will suppose one wishes to plant walnuts where they can not be had from the woods, but must be shipped in. there seems to be only one plan by which this can be done safely every time, which is as follows: gather the nuts as they fall from the trees--of course when they begin to fall naturally all may be shaken down at once--and spread them not over a foot deep, on the bare ground under the shade of trees. cover out of sight with straw or leaves, with some sticks to hold in place called a "rot heap;" then after they are frozen and will stay so, they may be shipped in bags, boxes, barrels, or in bulk by the car-load, and then, again, placed in "rot heaps," as above, until so early in the spring as the soil is in workable condition. then plant as directed in the fall, except the soil should be firmly packed around the nuts. keep free from weeds by good cultivation, and in due time you will have a splendid grove. there was an immense crop of walnuts in this district last fall, and thousands of bushels were put up carefully, in this way, all ready for shipment before the weather became warm; many more thousands were planted to grow seedlings from, for, notwithstanding the walnut transplants poorly when of considerable size, the one year seedlings transplant with as little loss as the average trees. there is no tree better adapted for planting to secure timber claims with than the black walnut, and none more valuable when the timber is grown. for this purpose the land should be plowed deeply, then harrowed to fineness and firmness, and furrowed out in rows four, six, eight, or ten feet apart. the nuts may then be planted as directed. it is best to plant thickly in the rows, then if too thick they can be thinned out, transplanting the thinnings, or selling them to the neighbors. they should be thoroughly cultivated, until large enough to shade the ground, and thinned out as necessary as they grow larger. a walnut grove thoroughly cultivated the first ten years will grow at least twenty feet high, while one not cultivated at all would only grow two to three feet in that time. d. b. wier., lacon, ill. notes on current topics. arbor day. why can not illinois have an arbor day as well as nebraska, or any other state. there ought to be ten millions of trees planted the coming spring within its borders--saying nothing of orchard trees--by the roadside, on lawns, for shade, for wind breaks, for shelter, for mechanical purposes, and for climatic amelioration. nearly all our towns and villages need more trees along the streets or in parks; thousands of our farms are suffering for them; hundreds of cemeteries would be beautified by them, and numberless homes would be rendered more pleasant and homelike by an addition of one, two, or a dozen, to their bleak places. can not the prairie farmer start a boom that will lead to the establishment of an arbor day all over the state? why not? there is yet time. hot-beds. for the benefit of those who can not command the usual appliances for hot-beds, i will say that they can be made so as to answer a good purpose very cheaply. take a nice sunny spot that is covered with a sod, if to be had. dig off the sod in squares and pile them carefully on the north side and the ends of the pit, to form the sides of the bed, with a proper slope. the soil thrown out from the bottom may be banked up against the sods as a protection. after the bed is finished, the whole may be covered with boards, to turn the water off. these answer in the place of glass frames. as the main use for a hot-bed is to secure bottom heat, very good results can be obtained in these cheaply constructed affairs. after the seeds are up, and when the weather will permit, the boards must be removed to give light and air--but replaced at night and before a rain. of course, where large quantities of plants are to be grown, of tender as well as hardy sorts, it would be better and safer to go to the expense of board frames and glass for covering. don't do it. of course, all the peach trees, and many of the other stone fruits, and most of the blackberry and raspberry plants, will show discoloration of wood when the spring opens--so much so that many will pronounce them destroyed, and will proceed to cut them away. don't do it. peaches have often been thus injured, and by judicious handling saved to bear crops for years afterward. but they will need to be thoroughly cut back. trees of six or seven years old i have cut down so as to divest them of nearly all their heads, when those heads seemed badly killed, and had them throw out new heads, that made large growth and bore good crops the following season. cut them back judiciously, and feed them well, but don't destroy them. and so with the berry plants. wait and see, before you destroy. pears from russia. no one who reads prof. budd's articles on russian pears, can fail to be interested and struck with the prospect of future successful pear culture in the united states. it is highly probable that russia is yet to give us a class of that fruit that will withstand the rigors of our climate. but how is this to be accomplished? individual enterprise can, and doubtless will, accomplish much in that direction; but the object seems to me to be of sufficient importance to justify state or national action. the great state of illinois might possibly add millions to her resources by giving material aid in the furtherance of this purpose--and a liberal expenditure by the general government, through the department of agriculture, or the american pomological society, would be more usefully applied than many other large sums annually voted. at all events, another season of fruitage ought not to be allowed to pass without some concerted action for the purpose of testing the question. some of our strongest nurserymen will likely be moving in the work, but that will not be enough. the propagator of that fruit, however, who will succeed in procuring from the european regions a variety of pears that will fill the bill required by the necessities of our soil and climate, has a fortune at his command. old winter lingers in the lap of spring, truly, this year of grace, . here it is the th of march, and for over one hundred days we have had winter--winter; but very few real mild and bright days, such as we had "when i was a boy." the mississippi is frozen over still, with no signs of breaking up, and men, women, and children are sighing for sunshine and showers, and daisies and violets. the wood and coal bills have been enormous; the pigs squeal in the open pens, and cattle roam, as usual, shivering in the lanes and along the streets. the song of a robin to-morrow morning would be a joyous sound to hear. t. g. prunings. tree-worship among the ancients had a most important influence on the preservation of forests in circumscribed places. beautiful groves, which would otherwise have been sacrificed on the altar of immediate utility, were preserved by the religious respect for trees.--milwaukee sentinel. f. k. phoenix. "small trees have larger roots in proportion, ( ) they cost less, ( ) expressage of freight is less--expressing small trees is usually cheaper than freighting large ones, and then so much more speedy, ( ) less labor handling, digging holes, etc., ( ) less exposed to high winds which loosen roots, and kill many transplanted trees, ( ) planters can form heads and train them to their own liking, ( ) with good care in, say five years, they will overtake the common larger sized trees. without good care, better not plant any size." the coming currant is fay's prolific. it originated with lincoln fay, of chautauqua county, n. y. for many years he endeavored to raise a currant that would combine the size of the cherry currant with the productiveness of the victoria. to this end he fertilized one with the pollen of the other, and raised some thousands of seedlings, from out of which he selected this as the one that most nearly realized his desires. it is now sixteen years since this seedling was obtained. for some eight or nine years mr. fay tested this variety by the side of all the sorts in cultivation, until becoming convinced of its superiority in several particulars over any of these, he planted it extensively for his own marketing. at a late meeting of the pennsylvania horticultural society, the currant worm came in for a good deal of talk. mr. satterthwaite said that hellebore, as we have often printed, was the most effectual "remedy." he mixed it with water and applied it with a brush or whisk of straw. if not washed off by rain for twenty-four hours and used every year, the worms were easily got rid of. mr. saunders, superintendent of the government gardens at washington, and a gentleman thoroughly conversant with every branch of horticulture, said that there was nothing so effectual with insects as london purple, and, though equally poisonous as paris green, was much cheaper. tobacco stems and refuse have also been found of great value in fruit culture. pyrethrum, he said, would also kill all sorts of leaf-eating insects; it is now largely cultivated in california, and is hardy at least as far north as washington. josiah hoopes in new york tribune: in eastern pennsylvania and new jersey, where, literally, no pears have been grown of late years, the kieffer is doing well. i know of no fruit so variable. i ate specimens last season finely flavored and delicious; again when they were weak and watery. this fruit needs thinning on the trees and careful ripening in the house. don't understand me to say that kieffer is "best of all." but here it is the most profitable for market that i know of, as this is not a pear country, as are portions of new york state. as we go further south the kieffer seems to improve, and i think mr. berckmans, of georgia, will give it a good name with him. yes, the kieffer will command a higher price in philadelphia than any other pear, and we think some people there know what good fruit is. don't imagine i have any axe on the grindstone in this matter; pecuniarily the kieffer is no more to me than the bartlett or dozens of other varieties. [illustration: floriculture] some new plants. abutilon thomsonii plena. it is one of the peculiarities of plant culture, that after a certain number of years of cultivation, any plant having the properties of sporting freely, that is, changing greatly from the original wild character of the plant, will become double. in most cases it first arises from seed, but with the plant under notice it appears that it was what is called a bud variation, that is, that from some freak of a particular branch of a plant of the well-known a. thomsonii, the ordinary single flowers were found to be double. this happening on a plant under the eye of a professional florist was taken off the plant and rooted, and at once became its established character. this phenomena of variation being "fixed" by separate propagation, is by no means rare, and not a few of our choice fruits, flowers, and vegetables had their origin by the same means. it remains to be seen whether in this case it will be of much value except as a curiosity, it having precisely the same leaf markings as the original, which are a very distinct yellow mottling of the leaf in a field of green, and for which the plant is valuable alone, the flowers being quite of a secondary character. the flowers are said to be perfectly double, resembling in form a double hollyhock, color deep orange, shaded and streaked with crimson. this is the first year it has been sent out, and we shall not be surprised if it is soon followed by others, for usually, when the "double" condition of things has arrived no one has a monopoly of the curiosity. alternanthera aurea nana. this is a charming new plant of decided merit to the carpet style of bedding or edging, being very compact in growth, easily kept to a line of the finest character, and producing what is of great importance in the summer, a line of golden yellow. at times the old kind, a. aurea, would come very good, but more often it had far too much of a green shade to furnish the contrast sought after, and, as a result, failed to bring out the effect the planter studied to produce. it is a fitting companion to a. amabilis, a. paronychioides, and a. versicolor, and will be hailed with delight by our park florists and other scientific planters. bouvardia thomas meehan. here we have a double scarlet bouvardia from the same raisers, nanz and neuner, that astonished the floral world a few years back, with the double white b. alfred neuner. this new addition, unlike the old, which was another "bud variation," was secured by a cross between the old b. leiantha, scarlet with a single flower, and alfred neuner, double white. if this is the real origin of the kind, which we somewhat doubt, for if our theory is correct, that a certain amount of cultivation predisposes to double variation, then it is not necessary to cross the double, which in fact can not be done with a perfectly double flower--the organs of fructification being wanting with that of a single and seed-producing kind, to account for the origin of a new double. as is well known the old leiantha is one of the best scarlets yet, and this new candidate for favor is said to unite the brilliant color and profuse blooming qualities of the old favorite b. leiantha with the perfect double flowers of b. alfred neuner. there are now of this class of plants the three colors--white, scarlet, and pink--in double as well as single; for instance, a pink president garfield sported from and was "fixed" from the white a. neuner, a year or two ago. statice suworowii regal. in this we have a right regal plant. we first heard of it from the german catalogues, early in the past winter. this plant is now offered for sale by the florists of this country. its description from the catalogues is as follows: "one of the finest novelties in the list of showy annuals lately introduced. its branching flower spikes, of a very bright rose, with a crimson shade, appear successively from ten to fifteen on each plant, and measure, each, fully fifteen to eighteen inches in height, and from one-half to one inch in breadth; the foliage, laying flat on the ground, is comparatively small, and completely hidden by the numerous flower spikes, each leaf being five inches long, and from one-half to two inches broad, undulated and glaucous. it is constantly in bloom during the summer and autumn, and when in full bloom is a truly magnificent sight, being one mass of flowers." this class of plants are great favorites, and we should judge by the colored flowers and description that this variety is a decided novelty. tea roses, white bon silene. this is another new aspirant for favor, and comes out with the high sounding character of being in a white what the old bon silene is as a red winter tea rose. the description from the catalogue is: "the buds are larger and more double than its parent (the red b. s.) and will produce more flower buds than any other white rose in cultivation." it was raised by francis morat, of louisville, ky., four years ago; it is also a "sport," and from the old b. silene. should it retain the good flowering qualities, fragrance, and substance of the original kind, with a pure white bud, it will very soon work its way into popular favor. usually a white variation has not the vitality that its colored progenitor had, so that we say, wait and see. edgar sanders. [illustration: our book table] pamphlets, etc., received. a full and detailed account of the polled galloway breed of cattle is sent us by the rev. john gillespie, m. a., dumfries, scotland. the catalogue has also an appendix containing a correspondence on polled-angus versus galloway cattle for the western states of america. jabez webster's descriptive wholesale and retail price list of fruit and ornamental nursery stock, etc., centralia, ill. illustrated catalogue and price list of grape vines, small fruits, etc. john g. burrow, fishkill village, dutchess county, n. y. the canadian entomologist, by william saunders, london, ontario. this is an exceedingly neat little pamphlet, and contains articles upon many of the most important subjects relating to entomology, by a number of prominent and well-known writers of the day. the argus almanac for . this almanac is replete with useful information concerning the government, public debt, state elections from to , finances of state of new york, biographical sketches of state officers and members of the legislature, etc., etc. price, cents, albany, n. y. "a primer of horticulture for michigan fruit growers." this pamphlet has been prepared for the use of beginners in horticulture by charles w. garfield, secretary of the michigan state horticultural society, and will be found very helpful to all such. price, cents. waldo f. brown's illustrated spring catalogue of vegetable and flower seeds. oxford, ohio. r. h. allen & co.'s descriptive catalogue of choice farm, garden, and flower seeds. nos. and water st, n. y. the manifesto, a pamphlet devoted to the interests of our shaker friends. compliments of charles clapp, lebanon, ohio. "the third house." its good and bad members--the remarkable experiences of a close observer of its workings during a long residence at washington. [_correspondence rochester democrat._] no city upon the american continent has a larger floating population than washington. it is estimated that during the sessions of congress twenty-five thousand people, whose homes are in various parts of this and other countries, make this city their place of residence. some come here, attracted by the advantages the city offers for making the acquaintance of public men; others have various claims which they wish to present, while the great majority gather here, as crows flock to the carrion, for the sole purpose of getting a morsel at the public crib. the latter class, as a general thing, originate the many schemes which terminate in vicious bills, all of which are either directed at the public treasury or toward that revenue which the black-mailing of corporations or private enterprises may bring. while walking down pennsylvania avenue the other day i met mr. william m. ashley, formerly of your city, whose long residence here has made him unusually well acquainted with the operations of the lobby. having made my wants in this particular direction known, in answer to an interrogative, mr. ashley said: "yes, during my residence here i have become well acquainted with the workings of the 'third house,' as it is termed, and could tell you of numerous jobs, which, like the 'heathen chinee,' are peculiar." "you do not regard the lobby, as a body, vicious, do you?" "not necessarily so, there are good and bad men comprising that body; yet there have been times when it must be admitted that the combined power of the 'third house' has overridden the will of the people. the bad influence of the lobby can be seen in the numerous blood-bills that are introduced at every session." "but how can these be discovered?" "easily enough, to the person who has made the thing a study. i can detect them at a glance." "tell me, to what bills do you refer?" "well, take the annual gas bills, for instance. they are introduced for the purpose of bleeding the washington gas light company. they usually result in an investigating committee which never amounts to anything more than a draft upon the public treasury for the expenses of the investigation. another squeeze is the _abattoir_ bills, as they are called. these, of course, are fought by the butchers and market-men. the first attempt to force a bill of this description was in , when a prominent washington politician offered a fabulous sum for the franchise." "anything else in this line that you think of, mr. ashley?" "yes, there's the job to reclaim the potomac flats, which, had it become a law, would have resulted in an enormous steal. the work is now being done by the government itself, and will rid the place of that malarial atmosphere of which we hear so much outside the city." "during your residence here have you experienced the bad results of living in this climate?" "well, while i have not at all times enjoyed good health, i am certain that the difficulty which laid me up so long was not malarial. it was something that had troubled me for years. a shooting, stinging pain that at times attacked different parts of my body. one day my right arm and leg would torture me with pain, there would be great redness, heat and swelling of the parts; and perhaps the next day the left arm and leg would be similarly affected. then again it would locate in some particular part of my body and produce a tenderness which would well nigh drive me frantic. there would be weeks at a time that i would be afflicted with an intermitting kind of pain that would come on every afternoon and leave me comparatively free from suffering during the balance of the twenty-four hours. then i would have terrible paroxysms of pain coming on at any time during the day or night when i would be obliged to lie upon my back for hours and keep as motionless as possible. every time i attempted to move a chilly sensation would pass over my body, or i would faint from hot flashes. i suffered from a spasmodic contraction of the muscles and a soreness of the back and bowels, and even my eyeballs become sore and distressed me greatly whenever i wiped my face. i became ill-tempered, peevish, fretful, irritable and desperately despondent." "of course you consulted the doctors regarding your difficulty?" "consulted them? well i should say i did. some told me i had neuralgia; others that i had inflammatory rheumatism, for which there was no cure, that i would be afflicted all my life, and that time alone would mitigate my sufferings." "but didn't they try to relieve your miseries?" "yes, they vomited and physicked me, blistered and bled me, plastered and oiled me, sweat, steamed, and everything but froze me, but without avail." "but how did you finally recover?" "i had a friend living in michigan who had been afflicted in a similar way and had been cured. he wrote me regarding his recovery and advised me to try the remedy which cured him. i procured a bottle and commenced its use, taking a teaspoonful after each meal and at bed-time. i had used it about a week when i noticed a decrease of the soreness of the joints and a general feeling of relief. i persevered in its use and finally got so i could move around without limping, when i told my friends that it was warner's safe rheumatic cure that had put me on my feet." "and do you regard your cure as permanent?" "certainly, i haven't been so well in years as i am now, and although i have been subjected to frequent and severe changes of weather this winter, i have not felt the first intimation of the return of my rheumatic trouble." "do you object to the publication of this interview, mr. ashley?" "not at all, sir. i look upon it as a duty i owe my fellow creatures to alleviate their sufferings so far as i am able, and any communication regarding my symptoms and cure that may be sent to me at maine avenue will receive prompt and careful attention." "judging from your recital, mr. ashley, there must be wonderful curative properties about this medicine?" "indeed, there is, sir, for no man suffered more nor longer than did i before this remedy gave me relief." "to go back to the original subject, mr. ashley, i suppose you see the same familiar faces about the lobby session after session?" "no, not so much so as you might think. new faces are constantly seen and old ones disappear. the strain upon lobbyists is necessarily very great, and when you add to this the demoralizing effect of late hours and intemperate habits and the fact that they are after found out in their steals, their disappearance can easily be accounted for." "what proportion of these blood-bills are successful?" "a very small percentage, sir. notwithstanding the power and influence of the lobby, but few of these vicious measures pass. were they successful it would be a sad commentary upon our system of government, and would virtually annihilate one branch of it. the great majority of them are either reported adversely or smothered in committee by the watchfulness and loyalty of our congressmen." j. e. d. miscellaneous. one cent invested in a postal card and addressed as below will give to the writer full information as to the best lands in the united states now for sale; how he can buy them on the lowest and best terms, also the full text of the u. s. land laws and how to secure acres of government lands in northwestern minnesota and northeastern dakota. address: james b. power, land and emigration commissioner, st. paul, minn. [illustration of a scale] chicago scale co. ton wagon scale, $ , ton, $ . ton $ , beam box included. lb. farmer's scale, $ . the "little detective," / oz. to lb. $ . other sizes. reduced price list free. [illustration of a tool] forges, tools, &c. best forge made for light work, $ . lb. anvil and kit of tools. $ . farmers save time and money doing odd jobs. blowers, anvils, vices & other articles at lowest prices, wholesale & retail. hoosier auger tile mill. [illustration of a tile machine] mills on hand. prompt delivery. for prices and circulars, address nolan, madden & co., rushville, ind. don't you want a $ , shot repeating rifle for $ , a $ breech loading shot gun for $ , a $ concert organette for $ , a $ magic lantern for $ . . you can get any of these articles free, if you get up a club for the new american dictionary. send $ . for a sample copy and try it. if you have a lantern you can start a business that will pay you from $ to $ every night. want send at once for our illustrated catalogue of watches, self-cocking revolvers, spy glasses, telescopes, telegraph instruments, organ accordeons, violins, &c. it may start you on the road to rapid wealth. world manufacturing co., nassau street, new york. [illustration of a magnetic truss] rupture absolutely cured in to days, by dr. pierre's patent magnetic elastic truss. warranted the only electric truss in the world. entirely different from all others. perfect retainer, and is worn with ease and comfort night and day. cured the renowned dr. j. simms of new york, and hundreds of others. new illustrated pamphlet free, containing full information. magnetic elastic truss company., madison st., chicago, ill. a prize. send six cents for postage, and receive free, a costly box of goods which will help all, of either sex, to more money right away than anything else in this world. fortunes await the workers absolutely sure. at once address true & co., augusta, maine. $ every days positively sure to agents everywhere selling our new silver mould white wire clothes-line. warranted. pleases at sight. cheap. sells readily at every house. agents clearing $ per day. farmers make $ to $ during winter. _handsome samples free._ address, girard wire mills, philadelphia, pa. publishers' notice. the prairie farmer _is printed and published by the prairie farmer publishing company, every saturday, at no. monroe street._ _subscription, $ . per year, in advance, postage prepaid._ _subscribers wishing their addresses changed should give their old at well as new addresses._ _advertising, cents per line on inside pages; cents per line on last page--agate measure; lines to the inch. no less charge than $ . ._ _all communications, remittances, &c, should be addressed to_ the prairie farmer publishing company, _chicago. ill._ [illustration: the prairie farmer] entered at the chicago post office as second-class matter. chicago, march , . when subscriptions expire. we have several calls for an explanation of the figures following the name of subscribers as printed upon this paper each week. the first two figures indicate the volume, and the last figure or figures the number of the last paper of that volume for which the subscriber has paid: example: john smith, - . john has paid for the prairie farmer to the first of july of the present year, volume . any subscriber can at once tell when his subscription expires by referring to volume and number as given on first page of the paper. renew! renew!! remember that every yearly subscriber, either new or renewing, sending us $ , receives a splendid new map of the united states and canada-- x inches--free. or, if preferred, one of the books offered in another column. it is not necessary to wait until a subscription expires before renewing. [transcriber's note: original location of table of contents.] the next fair of the jefferson county, wisconsin, agricultural society will be held the second week in september. * * * * * the potato which has sold for the highest price in boston all the season is the early rose. this has been one of the most remarkable potatoes known in the history of this esculent. * * * * * a gentleman residing at milk's grove, iroquois county, illinois has obtained a patent for a new and cheap building material; this material is straw and concrete pressed together and bound with wires. he thinks he has a good thing. time will tell. * * * * * the chamber of commerce at lyons, france, protests to the government against the embargo on american pork. trichiniasis prevails in various parts of the german empire. it is traced to the use of uncooked home-grown pork. here we score two points in favor of the american hog product. * * * * * the excellent articles on silk culture by e. l. meyer, esq., have attracted very general attention, as is proven by the number of letters we have received asking for his address. this was unintentionally omitted. mr. meyer resides at hutchinson, kan. the article was originally prepared for the quarterly report of the kansas board of agriculture. * * * * * our indiana friends should remember that in that state, arbor day occurs april th. a general effort is being made to interest the teachers, pupils, and directors of the district schools in the observance of the day by planting of trees and shrubs in the school yards. it is to be hoped that the people generally will countenance the observance in all possible ways. * * * * * prof. s. a. forbes writes us that there is needed for the library of the state natural history society, back numbers of the prairie farmer for the following years and half years: , , , , , , , second half year of , , and . persons having one or all of these volumes to dispose of will confer a favor by addressing the professor to that effect at normal, ill. * * * * * florida vegetables are coming into chicago quite freely. cucumbers are selling on south water street at from $ . to $ per-dozen. they come in barrels holding thirty dozen. radishes now have to compete with the home-grown, hot-house article, and do not fare very well, as the latter are much fresher. lettuce is comparatively plenty, as is also celery. apples sell at from $ to $ per barrel, and the demand is good. * * * * * mercedes, the famous holstein cow owned by thos. b. wales, jr., of iowa city, died on the th inst., of puerperal fever, having previously lost her calf. mercedes enjoyed the reputation of being the greatest milk and butter cow in the world. her last year's calf it will be remembered was sold for $ , . the cow and calf just dropped were valued at $ , . the butter record alluded to was ninety-nine pounds six and one-half ounces in thirty days. the test was in . * * * * * the mark lane express in its review of the british grain trade last week says the trade in cargoes off coast was more active, but the supply bare. california was taken at @ s per quarter. two cargoes have gone to havre at s - / d@ s d without extra freight. seven cargoes have arrived, ten were sold, eight withdrawn, and one remained. sales of english wheat for a week, , quarters at s. d. per quarter, against , quarter at s. d. the corresponding week of last year. * * * * * at the next american fat stock show in chicago, there promises to be an extensive exhibit of dairy products. the illinois dairymen's association will have it in charge, and the state board of agriculture has decided to appropriate $ as a premium fund for the dairymen's association. it is rather strange, yet nevertheless true, that illinois has never yet had an exhibition of dairy products at all commensurate with the importance of the dairy interest of the state. it may now be reasonably predicted that this remark will not remain true after november next. we have heard nothing said about it, but it is to be presumed there will be no extra charge to visit this exhibit. the managers of the fat stock show have not been satisfied, we believe, with experiments in this direction. * * * * * many years ago a young scotch gardener brought from mexico to kenosha, wis., a specimen of the century plant. it was then supposed to be about twenty years old. for more than forty years this man cared for his pet with unflagging faithfulness. dying at the age of sixty-five he left it to the care of a little daughter of a lady who had shown him kindness. this girl grew to womanhood and to middle age caring tenderly for the plant. about two years ago the plant exhibiting signs of blooming, a gentleman joined with the lady and erected a building for it near the exposition building, in this city. here it has since been, but through carelessness it was unduly exposed to the terrible freeze of the first week in january last, and the plant is now past recovery. the lady had expended upon it about all the means she possessed expecting to reap from admission fees to see it a rich reward. thus eighty years of care and constant expense came to naught in a single night. a neglect to order coal resulted in the fire going out just when the cold was the most intense. one can hardly imagine the disappointment and regret of the lady who had nursed it with such care for nearly a lifetime. lumber and shingles. the white pine lumber product of the northwest last year was according to latest returns, , , , feet against , , , in , and more than double what it was in . in the production was nearly , , feet less than last year. the smallest product of the decade was in -- , , , feet. what is termed the chicago district, including the points of green bay, cheboygan, manistee, ludington, white lake, muskegon, grand haven, and spring lake, and a few scattering mills gave a product in of , , , feet. at ludington and grand haven there has been a decline in the product since ; at all the other points the increase has been considerable, amounting to a total of nearly , , feet. the largest cut is on the mississippi river in what is known as the west of chicago district. here in the product amounted to , , feet; last year it reached , , , feet. the saginaw valley gives the next greatest yield , , feet. the total saginaw district gave last year , , , feet against , , ten years ago. the total of the west of chicago district was , , , against , , , in . the railroad and interior mills district has increased something over , , feet in this period. in shingles we have the grand product in all the northwest of , , , against , , , in . the greatest increase was in the chicago district as given above, and here ludington and grand haven come in for an increase at the former place of over , , , and the latter of more than , , . the total production of shingles in was larger than last year by about , , , but with that exception was the largest ever known. the census of placed the annual lumber product of the united states at , , , feet. the northwest then produced , , , feet or nearly one-third the entire product of the country. if this ratio has been uniform since we must now have a yield of over , , , feet. these are figures of enormous magnitude and of varied import. they mean employment to an army of men, a large shipping interest, vast investments in mills and machinery, and vast incomes to owners of pine lands; they mean houses and barns and fences to a new and populous empire; they mean numberless farms and millions of live stock. they also signify a rapid destruction of our immense forests from the face of the earth, enormous prices for lumber to future generations, and possible floods to devastate our river bottoms, and drouths to scourge the highlands. they should impress us all with the necessity and the profitableness of timber planting on the unsettled and newly settled prairies and in thousands of places in all the older states. foot-and-mouth disease. alarming reports from different parts of the country announcing the presence of foot-and-mouth disease have caused no inconsiderable excitement among the people and in government circles. first there came news of an outbreak in effingham county, illinois, then in louisa county, iowa, quickly followed by similar information from adair county, missouri. dr. paaren, dispatched to effingham county by the governor, reports the trouble there not foot-and-mouth disease. there does exist a disease there, however, similar to foot-rot in sheep, that is proving fatal to many cattle. there have also been outbreaks of disease among cattle near duquoin and xenia, illinois, which dr. paaren has been directed to investigate. no official reports as to the disease in iowa and missouri have been received, though government veterinary inspectors are now upon the ground making their investigations. it is said that several hundred head of cattle are affected in missouri, though this is probably an exaggeration. there is no news regarding the disease in maine. reports from kansas say the infected herds are strictly quarantined, and that as yet no fresh outbreaks have occurred. it is proposed to annihilate the five infected herds. gov. glick has convened the legislature of kansas in order that proper measures may be taken to protect the cattle interests of the state. a des moines dispatch dated the th, says letters from louisa county to the governor in regard to the new cattle disease were read in the house, and on motion of mr. watrous that body adopted the substitute for the bill providing for the appointment of a state veterinary surgeon. the substitute authorizes the veterinary surgeon to destroy all stock affected with contagious disease. the bill is intended to enable the state to take action in the foot-and-mouth disease now affecting the stock. discussion then followed upon the substitute, which was taken up section by section, and it was for the most part adopted. the series of reported outbreaks mentioned has aroused congress to the necessity of action. the senate on monday passed a joint resolution appropriating $ , for the suppression of the disease in whatever state or territory it appears. it is to be hoped that the animal industry bill will at once pass and become a law. the cattle dealers at the chicago union stock yards have organized a live stock exchange, and the first action taken by it is to fight this bill in congress. emory a. storrs, attorney for the heavy brokers, is in washington working might and main for its defeat. he finds it uphill work, evidently, for on monday he sent a dispatch to nelson morris in these words: "send to-day a delegation of strong men; everything now depends on backing; wire me at once protest; have seen several senators this morning; advise me when delegation starts; have them stop at riggs house." acting under this advice the exchange passed the following resolutions of "unbelief." whereas, it is the universal sentiment of the chicago live stock exchange, at the union stock yards in chicago, that the bill now pending before congress, known as the "animal industry bill," is dangerous in its design, not called for by the condition of the live stock interest in this country, and tends to place too much power in the department of agriculture at washington; therefore, resolved, that elmer washburn, allan gregory, f. d. bartlett, b. f. harrison, and h. h. conover, members of this exchange, be, and hereby are, appointed a committee, with instructions to proceed forthwith to washington, and present these resolutions to the proper authorities to prevent the passage of said "animal industry bill." resolved, further, that owing to the present excitement throughout the united states over the false alarm of pleuro-pneumonia and "foot-and-mouth" disease, that we, as a body, should express our views fully upon this question. . we do not believe there is such a disease as contagious pleuro-pneumonia existing throughout the united states. . we do not believe that such a disease as the foot-and-mouth disease exists in either illinois, iowa, or kansas. . that at no time within the space of twenty years have the cattle, sheep, or hogs of this country been in as healthy a condition as at the present time; for while we are in favor of strict quarantine laws to prevent any importation of disease into this country from abroad, we believe if any disease should break out in this state, or any other state, that the citizens would be interested sufficiently to stamp it out without expense to the national government. while these resolutions were being discussed dr. detmers appeared in the hall (accidentally of course!) and gave it as his opinion that not a single case of foot-and-mouth disease existed in america to-day. but the doctor has so often put his foot in it in his mouthings about animal diseases in the past that his beliefs or disbeliefs have little weight with the public. the doctor is evidently "put out" because he was not called upon to visit the infected districts, for he is reported as ending his harangue by declaring he was tired of working for the government, and offered his services to the live stock exchange. such, in brief, is a summary of the news of the week concerning the foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in the states. premiums on corn. as briefly stated in a previous issue of the prairie farmer, the illinois state board of agriculture offers a premium of $ for the best bushel of corn (in ear) grown this year in the northern division of the state, and $ for the second best bushel: and a like premium for the best and second best bushel grown in the central and southern divisions. these divisions correspond with the three judicial divisions of the state. the following are the conditions: each of the parties awarded the first premium to deliver twenty-five bushels, and each of the parties awarded the second premium to deliver fifteen bushels of corn in the ear in sacks to the state board of agriculture at springfield, ill. the corn delivered to be equal in quality to the samples awarded the respective premiums. the premiums to be paid when the premium bushels of corn and the amounts called for are compared at the rooms of the department of agriculture and favorably reported upon by the committee. affidavit as to measurement of land and yield of corn are required. we suppose also that competitors are to furnish characteristics of soil, variety of seed, kinds of manure used, mode of cultivation etc., as these facts would seem to be necessary if the public is to receive the full benefits of the experiments the premiums are likely to bring out. it is understood that the corn delivered to the state board as per above conditions is to be in some judicious manner distributed to the corn-growers of the state for planting in . the first unfortunate result. there recently began in scotland an earnest movement to induce the british government to remove the restrictions regarding the importation of american cattle, so far at least as to allow the admission of store cattle for feeding purposes. meetings have been held in various parts of scotland at which petitions like the following were adopted. to the right honorable william ewart gladstone. we, the undersigned, farmers and others, respectfully submit that the present law which allows the importation of cattle from the united states, and shuts out store cattle, is unjust and oppressive to the farmers of this country, and enhances the price of meat to the public. we therefore crave that her majesty's government would open the scottish ports to the introduction of store cattle from the western states where disease does not exist. at a meeting at montrose, where the above petition was favorably acted upon, mr. falconer, an angus farmer, in supporting the motion, said that the first great remedy for the present depression was to get cheap store cattle, and that would never be got until they opened their ports to the western states of america. he held that if farmers would agree to insist on live store cattle being allowed to be landed in britain, they would soon get them. when they get them, he, if then alive, would be quite willing to take all the responsibility if they found an unsound or unhealthy animal amongst them. he appealed to butchers in montrose, who had been in the way of killing states or canadian cattle, if they were not totally free of disease; and he would like to ask them how many irish cattle they killed which were perfectly healthy. if they got stores from america, they would not effect a saving in price, but, as they all knew, sound healthy cattle fed much quicker than unsound, and were of better quality, and thus an additional item of profit would be secured to the farmer. mr. a. milne, cattle-dealer, montrose, corroborated mr. falconer's statements as to the healthiness of american stock, while irish cattle, as a rule, he said, had very bad livers. mr. adamson, morphie, said he had recently been in the western states of america, and had seen a number of the ranches in nebraska, wyoming, and colorado. the cattle there were certainly fine animals--well bred, as a rule, either from herefords or short-horns, with a dash of the texan cattle in them. when there, he made careful inquiries as to the existence of disease, and he was universally told that such a thing as epidemic disease was unknown. no doubt in the southern part of texas there was a little texan fever, but that, like yellow fever, was merely indigenous to the district. it was never seen out of these parts. he considered it would be a great boon to the farmers of scotland if they could get cattle £ or £ cheaper than at present. it would save a very considerable amount of money in stocking a farm, and would also tell on the profits of the feeders, and the prices paid by the consumers. they had them to spare in america in the greatest possible abundance. at a late meeting of the prairie cattle company, having headquarters in scotland, sheriff guthrie smith expressed the opinion that the great profit in the future of american ranch companies must be the trade in young cattle. he believed that scottish farmers would ere long get all their young cattle, not from ireland, but from the united states. it did not pay them to breed calves; they were better selling milk. the fattening of cattle for the butcher was the paying part of the business, but the difficulty was to get yearlings or two-year-olds at their proper price. here promised to arise a new outlet for american stock, and one which most of us probably never thought of. the proposition had in it the elements for the building up of a great commercial industry and of affording a new and rapid impetus to the breeding of cattle upon the plains. but just at this time comes the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in kansas, maine, and illinois, and of course puts an end to all hopes in this direction, for many months at least. this is the result of the disease at its first appearance. here is prospective loss before the government veterinary surgeons fairly reach the field of operations against its spread--the loss of a trade which would have been worth many millions to the cattle raisers of the great west. it is to be feared that this is but the beginning of the losses the disease will entail upon us. can congress longer hesitate in this matter of providing an efficient law for protection from contagious animal diseases? it would seem not. our state authorities, also, must be alert, and render all possible aid in preventing the spread of this wonderfully infectious disease. * * * * * we have a large number of letters and postal cards asking where various seeds, plants, shrubs, trees, silk-worm eggs, bone dust and so on and so forth to an indefinite extent, may be obtained. we have answered some of these inquiries by letter, some through the paper, but they still keep coming. we have one favor to ask of those seeking this sort of information: first look through the advertisements carefully, and see if what is wanted is not advertised. the seedsmen's advertisements do not, of course, enumerate all the parties have for sale, but it may be taken for granted that they keep nearly all kinds of grass, grain, and vegetable seeds. we would also say to seedsmen that it will probably be found to pay them to advertise the seeds of the new grasses, alfalfa, the special fertilizers, etc., that are now being so much inquired about. we have a large number of inquiries about where to obtain silk-worm eggs. persons who have them certainly make a mistake in not advertising them freely. questions answered. o. g. b., sheboygan falls, wis.--will you give directions which will be practical for tanning skins or pelts with the fur or hair on by the use of oak bark? answer.--we know of no way the thing can be done unless a part of the methods are used that are employed in the tanning of goat skins for making morocco leather. these are: to soak the skins to soften them; then put them into a lime vat to remove the hair, and after to take the lime out in a douche consisting of hen and pigeon dung. this done, the skins are then sewed up so as to hold the tanning liquid, which consists of a warm and strong decoction of spanish sumac. the skins are filled with this liquid, then piled up one above the other and subsequently refilled, two or three times, or as fast as the liquid is forced through the skins. if the furs or pelts were first soaked to soften them, all the fatty, fleshy matter carefully removed, after sewed up as goat skins are, and then filled and refilled several times with a strong decoction of white oak bark, warm, but not hot, no doubt the result would prove satisfactory. dr. j. f. schlieman, hartford, wis.--are there any works on the cultivation of the blueberry, and if so could you furnish the same? do you know of any parties that cultivate them? answer.--we have never come across anything satisfactory on the cultivation of the blueberry except in le bon jardiniere, which says: "the successful cultivation of the whole tribe of vacciniums is very difficult. the shrubs do not live long and are reproduced with much difficulty, either by layers or seeds." the blueberry, like the cranberry, appears to be a potash plant, the swamp variety not growing well except where the water is soft, the soil peaty above and sandy below. the same appears also to be true of the high land blueberry; the soil where they grow is generally sandy and the water soft. you can procure le bon jardiniere (a work which is a treasure to the amateur in fruit and plants) of jansen, mcclurg & co., of chicago, at cents, the franc. some parties, we think, offer blueberry plants for sale, but we do not recollect who they are. h. harris, holt's prairie, ill.--will it do to tile drain land which has a hard pan of red clay twelve to eighteen inches below the surface? answer.--it will do no harm to the land to drain it if there is a hard pan near the surface, but in order to make tile draining effective on such land, the drains will have to be at half the distance common on soils without the hard pan. subscriber, decatur, ill.--in testing seed corn, what per cent must sprout to be called first-class. i have some twenty bushels of stowell's evergreen that was carefully gathered, assorted, and shelled by hand. this i have tested by planting twenty-one grains, of which sixteen grew. how would you class it? answer.--ninety-five, certainly. if five kernels out of twenty-one failed to grow, that would be per cent of bad seed, and we should consider the quality inferior. but further, if under the favorable condition of trial, percent failed, ten grains in every twenty-one would be almost sure to, in the field. it was a mistake to shell the corn; seed should always remain on the cob to the last moment, because if it is machine or hand-shelled at low temperature, and put away in bulk, when warm weather comes, it is sure to sweat, and if it heats, the germ is destroyed. better spread your corn out in the dry, and where it will not freeze, as soon as you can. l. c. leaniartt (?) nebraska.--i wish to secure a blue grass pasture in my timber for hogs. . will it be necessary to keep them out till the grass gets a good start? . shall i follow the directions you gave mr. perkins in the prairie farmer, february ? . is not blue grass pasture the best thing i can give my hogs? answer.-- . better do so, and you will then be more likely to get a good catch and full stand. . certainly, if the conditions are the same. . blue grass is very good for hogs, but it is improved by the addition of clover. c. c. samuels, springfield, ill.-- . what pears would you recommend for this latitude? . are there any which do not blight? . i have some grape vines, light colored fruit, but late, elvira, i think the nurseryman told me, which appear to be suffering from something at the roots. what is the phylloxera, and what shall i do to my grape vines if they infest the roots? answer.--the bartlett for _certain_--it being the best of all the pears--and the kieffer and le conte for _experiment_. if the latter succeed you will have lots of nice large fruit just about as desirable for eating as a ben davis apple in may. . we know of one only, the tyson, a smallish summer pear that never blights, at least in some localities, where all others do more or less. . if your elviras are afflicted with the phylloxera, a root-bark louse, manure and fertilize them at once, and irrigate or water them in the warm season. the french vine-growers seem at last to have found out that lice afflict half starved grape roots, as they do half starved cattle, and that they have only to feed and water carefully to restore their vines to health. j. s. s., springfield, ill.--i am not a stock man nor a farmer; but i have some pecuniary interests, in common with others, my friends, in a kansas cattle ranch. i am therefore a good deal exercised about this foot-and-mouth disease. is it the terrible scourge reported by one cattle doctor, who, according to the papers, says, "the only remedies are fire or death." what do you say? answer.--the disease is a bad one, very contagious, but easily yields to remedies in the first stages. thomas v. johnson, lexington, ky.--there is a report here that your draft horses of all breeds are not crossing with satisfaction on your common steeds in illinois, and that not more twenty five in one hundred of the mares for the last three years have thrown foal, nor will they the present season. can you give me the facts? answer.--our correspondent has certainly been misinformed, or is an unconscious victim of local jealousy, as he may easily convince himself by visiting interior towns, every one of which is a horse market. wayside notes. by a man of the prairie. a neighbor of mine who has been intending to purchase store cattle and sheep at the chicago stock yards soon, asked me last night what i thought about his doing so. i asked him if he had read what the prairie farmer and other papers had contained of late regarding foot-and-mouth disease in maine, kansas, illinois, and iowa. he had not; did not take the papers, and had not heard anything about the disease here or in england. then i explained to him, as best i could, its nature, contagious character, etc., and having a prairie farmer in my pocket, read him your brief history of the ailment in great britain. well, that man was astonished. finally, said he, what has that got to do with my question about buying cattle and sheep at the stock yards? just this, i replied: every day there are arrivals at the stock yards of many thousands of cattle from these infected states. perhaps some of them come from the very counties where this disease is known to exist. the disease may break out any day in scores of places in all these states. it may appear--indeed is quite likely to do so at the stock yards. for aught i know it may be there now. the cattle brokers will not be very likely to make known such an unwelcome fact a minute sooner than they are obliged to. in fact, from what they have lately been saying about the absurdity of new and stringent enactments concerning animal diseases, i conclude they will labor to conceal cases that may really exist. now you go there to pick up cattle to consume your pasturage this spring and summer, and don't you see you run the risk of taking to your home and neighborhood a disease that may cost you and your neighbors many thousands of dollars? if i were you i would pick up the stock i want in my own neighborhood and county, even though not exactly the kind i would like to have, and though it would cost me a great deal more time and trouble. you see to a man of the prairie things look a little squally in this cattle business. we have all got to be careful about this thing. we have a terrible enemy at our stable doors and pasture gates, and we must guard them well. i am not an alarmist, but i would run any time, almost, rather than get licked, and i have always tried to keep a lock on the stable door before the horse is stolen. i am in favor of _in_-trenchment. perhaps my advice to my neighbor was not sound, but according to the light i have, i have no desire to recall it till i hear more from the infected districts. to show the difference between the winter in colorado and the states this way and further west, the farmer, of denver, mentions the fact that it knows a farmer who has had about two hundred acres of new land broken between the middle of november and the first of march. still, these eastern states have advantages which render them rather pleasant to live in. our farmers find plenty of time in fall and spring in which to do their plowing and sowing, and our severe winters don't seem to hurt the ground a bit. in fact, i suppose it has got used to them, sort of acclimated, as it were. we have pretty good markets, low railway fares, good schools and plenty of them, and we manage to enjoy ourselves just as well as though we could hitch up to the plow and do our breaking in december and january. we can't all go to colorado, dakota, montana, or washington territory, nor to those other edens at the south and southwest where a man, so far as winter is concerned, may work about every day in the year; but don't do so any more than we here at the north where we have the excuse of severe weather for our laziness between november and april. i like colorado and wyoming, arkansas and texas, alabama and florida--for other people who like to make their homes there, but my home is here and i like it. "i don't _have_ to" plow in winter, and i don't need to. i am going to try to do my duty and be happy where i am, believing heaven to be just as near illinois as any other state or any territory. i read in the dispatches this morning that the barns on a ranch near omaha burned the other night. with the barns were consumed twenty-six cows, eighteen horses, , bushels of corn and a large lot of hay and oats. in all the loss amounted to above $ , and there was no insurance. from all over the country and at all times of the year i read almost daily of similar losses varying from $ up into the thousands, and the closing sentence of about nine out of ten of these announcements is "no insurance." now i am neither an insurance agent nor a lightning rod peddler, but there are two luxuries that i indulge in all the time, and these are an insurance policy to fairly cover my farm buildings and their contents, and what i believe to be well constructed lightning rods in sufficient number to protect the property from electric eccentricities. true, my buildings have never suffered from fire or lightning and these luxuries have cost me no inconsiderable amount of cash, but this money has brought me relief from a heap of anxiety, for i know in case my property is swept away i am not left stripped and powerless to provide for my family, and i know that it will not be necessary to mortgage the farm to furnish them a shelter. i don't take _cheap_ insurance either, but invest my money in the policy of a company which i believe has abundant capital and is cautiously managed. a wealthy man can take his fire risks in his own hands if he chooses, but for a man of small or moderate means it seems to me the height of folly to do so. i would rather go without tobacco or "biled shirts" than insurance and lightning rods. i don't know that an american farmer ever had the gout. certainly i never heard of such a case. if one does get the ailment, however, if he keeps bees he always has a sure remedy at hand. a german has discovered that if a bee is allowed to sting the affected part, a cure is instantaneous. why don't bismarck try this home remedy for his complication of gout and trichinæ? remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _one year, and the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ [illustration: poultry notes.] poultry-raisers. write for your paper. chicken chat. one of my correspondents writes: "my hens don't eat well--they just pick over the food as if it were not good enough for them--and they don't lay well; in fact they don't do much of anything except to mope about--not as if sick, but as if lazy." probably you have fed the same thing every day for the last six months, and the hens are getting tired of it. hens are like other people--they like a change of provender once in awhile--especially when confined indoors. sometimes over-feeding will cause indigestion, and then the biddies will exhibit the symptoms you describe. in either case, let the fowls fast for a whole day, and then for a few days feed lightly with food that is different from what they have been living on. give plenty of green food, also douglas' mixture in the drinking water twice a week. another correspondent wants to know why i always advise giving cooked food to fowls and chicks when uncooked food is the natural diet. i advise cooked food because experience has taught me that it is much better for poultry than the raw articles would be. because raw bugs and worms constitute the "natural diet" of fowls in their wild state, it does not follow that raw meal and potatoes would be the best and most economical food for our domestic fowls. other things being equal, chicks that are fed on cooked food grow fatter, are less liable to disease, and thrive better generally than those who worry along on uncooked rations. if you are short of sitting hens and don't own an incubator, make the hens do double duty. set two or more at the same time, and when the chicks come out, give two families to one hen, and set the other over again. to do this successfully, the chicks must be taken from the nest as soon as dry and given to the hen that is to raise them; for if a hen once leaves the nest with her chicks, no amount of moral suasion will induce her to go back. before giving the hen fresh eggs, the nest should be renovated and the hen dusted with sulphur or something to prevent lice. a lady who commenced raising thoroughbred poultry last season writes me that she proposes to sell eggs for hatching this season, and asks for information about advertising, packing eggs, etc. the advertising is easy enough: all you have to do is to write a copy of your "ad.," send it to the prairie farmer and other papers that circulate among farmers, pay the bills, and answer the postals and letters as they come. but if i were in your shoes, i would "put my foot down" on the postals to begin with; they don't amount to anything anyway; the people who ask a long string of questions on a postal card are not, as a rule, the ones who become customers. before we went into the poultry business an old poultry-breeder said: "don't have anything to do with postals, it don't pay." we thought differently, but to satisfy ourselves, we kept track of the postals, and to-day i have the addresses of over people who wrote us on postal cards. how many of those people became customers? just one, and he was an ohio man. when i go into that branch of the poultry business again, my advertisements will contain a postscript which will read thusly: "no postals answered." and you need not expect that every letter will mean business; people who have not the remotest idea of buying eggs will write and ask your prices, etc., and you must answer them all alike. here is where circulars save lots of work and postage. i have sent you by mail what i call a model circular, and from that you can get up something to fit your case. pack your eggs in baskets in cut straw or chaff, first wrapping each egg separately in paper. the eggs should not touch each other or the basket. put plenty of packing on top, and with a darning needle and stout twine sew on a cover of stout cotton cloth. for the address use shipping tags, or else mark it plainly on the white cotton cover; i prefer the latter way. a day or two before you ship the eggs send a postal telling your customer when to look for them; that's all that postals are good for. concerning the duplicating of orders in cases of failure of the eggs to hatch, i quote from one of my old circulars: "i guarantee to furnish fresh eggs, true to name, from pure-bred, standard fowls, packed to carry safely any distance. in cases of total failure, when the eggs have been properly cared for and set within two weeks after arrival, orders will be duplicated free of charge." i furnished just what i promised, and when a total failure was reported i sent the second sitting free--though sometimes i felt sure that the eggs were not properly cared for, and once a man reported a failure when, as i afterwards learned, eight eggs of the first sitting hatched. but, generally speaking, my customers were pretty well satisfied. it sometimes happens that only one or two eggs out of a sitting will hatch, and naturally the customer feels that he has not received the worth of his money. in such cases, if both parties are willing to do just what is right, the matter can be arranged so that all will be satisfied. and you will sometimes get hold of a customer that nothing under the heavens will satisfy; when this happens, do just exactly as you would wish to be done by, and there let the matter end. if the lady who wrote from carroll county, illinois, concerning an incubator, will write again and give the name of her postoffice, she will receive a reply by mail. fanny field. [illustration: the apiary.] spring care of bees. although yesterday was very cold and inclement, to-day (march th) is warm and pleasant, and bees that are wintered upon their summer stands will be upon the wing. it would be well on such days as this to see that all entrances to hives are open, so that no hindrances may be in the way of house-cleaning. this is all we think necessary for this month, provided they have plenty of stores to last until flowers bloom. handling bees tends to excite them to brood rearing, and veterans in bee-culture claim that this uses up the vitality of bees in spring very fast. although more young may be reared, it is at the risk of the old ones, as they leave the hive in search of water; many thus perish, which often results in the death of the colony, as the young perish for want of nurses. sometimes, also, in handling bees early in the season the queens are lost, as they may fall upon the ground, yet chilled, and perish. bees consume food very fast while rearing brood; naturalists tells us that insects during the larvæ state consume more food than they do during the remainder of their existence. where a bee-keeper has been so improvident as to neglect to provide abundance of stores for his bees he should examine them carefully, and if found wanting, remove an empty frame, substituting a full one in its place. where frames of honey are not to be had, liquid honey and sugar can be kneaded together, forming cakes, which can be placed over the cluster. care should be taken that no apertures are left, thus forming a way for cold drafts through the hive. these cakes are thought to excite bees less than when liquid food is given; they have another advantage, also, viz., bees can cluster upon them while feeding, and do not get chilled. bees that have been wintered in cellars, or special repositories, are often injured by being removed too early to their summer stands. it would be better to let them remain, and lower the temperature during warm days with ice, until warm weather has come to stay. an aged veteran in vermont that we visited the season following the disastrous winter of - , told us that his neighbors removed their bees from the cellar during a warm spell early in spring, and they were then in splendid condition. he let his bees remain until pollen was plentiful, and brought them out, all being in fine order; by this time his neighbors' colonies were all dead. good judgment and care must be exercised in removing bees from the cellar, or disastrous results will follow. we know of an apiary of over one hundred colonies that was badly injured, indeed nearly ruined, by all being taken from the cellar at once on a fine, warm day. the bees all poured out of the hives for a play spell, like children from school, and having been confined so long together in one apartment had acquired, in some measure, the same scent, and soon things were badly mixed. some colonies swarmed, others caught the fever, and piled up together in a huge mass. this merry making may have been fun for the bees, but it was the reverse of this for the owner, as many queens were destroyed, and hives that were populous before were carried from the cellar and left without a bee to care for the unhatched brood. when it is time to remove bees from the cellar the stands they are to occupy should be prepared beforehand. they should be higher at the back, inclining to the front; if the height of two bricks are at the back, one will answer for the front. this inclination to the front is an important matter; it facilitates the carrying out of dead bees and debris from the hive, the escape of moisture, and last, and most important item, bees will build their comb straight in the frame instead of crosswise of the hive, and their surplus comb in boxes correspondingly. if a few hives are removed near the close of the day and put in different parts of the apiary, the danger from swarming out is avoided, for the bees will become quiet before morning, and being far apart will not mix up when they have their play spell. the success of bee-keeping depends upon the faithful performance of infinite little items. the many friends of the rev. l. l. langstroth will be pained to learn that he has a severe attack of his old malady and unable to do any mental work. may the lord deal kindly and gently with him. during the last fall and winter he has been the light of many conventions, and it will be remembered as a pleasant episode in the lives of many bee-keepers that they had the privilege of viewing his beaming countenance, hearing the words of wisdom as they escaped from his lips, and taking the hand of this truly great and good man. mrs. l. harrison extracted honey. a couple of copies of the prairie farmer have lately come to my desk, a reminder of my boyhood days, when, in the old home with my father, i used to contribute an article now and then to its columns. there is an old scrap-book on the shelf, at my right, now, with some of those articles in it, published nearly thirty years ago. but my object in writing now is to add something to mrs. harrison's article on extracted honey. last year my honey crop was about , pounds, and half of this was extracted, or slung honey, as we bee-keepers often call it; but for next year i have decided to raise nearly all comb honey, for the reason that i do not get customers so readily for extracted honey. i have never extracted until the honey was all, or nearly all, capped over, and then admitted air into the vessels holding it, so as to be absolutely sure of getting it "dry," and proof against souring. this method has given me about half the amount others obtained by extracting as soon as the combs were filled by the bees, and ripening afterward. but in spite of all these precautions i find so much prejudice against extracted honey, growing out of the ignorance of the public with regard to this sweet, ignorance equaled only by the ignorance in regard to bees themselves, that the sale of such honey has been very slow; so slow that while my comb honey is reduced at this date to about pounds, i have several ten-gallon kegs of pure white honey still on hand. especially is there a prejudice against candied honey, though that is an absolute test of purity, and it can be readily liquified, as mrs. h. says, without injury. when i say that it is an absolute test of purity i mean that all honey that candies evenly is pure, though some of the best honey i have ever had never candied at all. in one case i knew the honey to candy in the combs of a new swarm early in autumn; but some seasons, particularly very dry ones, it will hardly candy at all. this difference seems to be due to the varying proportion of natural glucose, which will crystallize, and levulose, or mellose, which will not crystallize. manufactured glucose will not crystallize; and some of our largest honey merchants, even the thurbers, of new york, have mixed artificial glucose with honey to avoid loss by the ignorant prejudice of the public. wm. camm., morgan co., ill. south'n wisconsin bee-keepers' ass'n. the bee-keepers met in janesville, wis., on the th inst., and organized a permanent society, to be known as the southern wisconsin bee-keepers' association. the following named persons were elected officers for the ensuing year: president, c. o. shannon; vice-president, levi fatzinger; secretary, j. t. pomeroy; treasurer, w. s. squire. the regular sessions of the association will be held on the first tuesday of march in each year. special meetings will also be held, the time of which will be determined at previous meeting. the object of the association is to promote scientific bee-culture, and form a bond of union among bee-keepers. any person may become a member by signing the constitution, and paying a fee of fifty cents. the next meeting will be held at the pember house, janesville, on the first tuesday in may at o'clock a. m. all bee-keepers are cordially invited to attend. the secretary, of edgerton, rock co., wis., will conduct the correspondence of the association. * * * * * blue stem spring wheat!! the best variety of prairie wheat known. yields largely and is less liable to blight than any other variety. also celebrated judson oats for sale in small lots. samples, statement of yield and prices sent free upon application to sampson & french, woodstock, pipestone co., minn., or storm lake, iowa. maps. rand, mcnally & co.'s new railroad --and-- county map --of the-- united states --and-- dominion of canada. size, x - / feet, mounted on rollers to hang on the wall. this is an entirely new map, constructed from the most recent and authentic sources. --it shows-- _all the railroads_, --and-- every county and principal town --in the-- united states and canada. a useful map in every one's home, and place of business. price, $ . . agents wanted, to whom liberal inducements will be given. address rand, mcnally & co., chicago, ill. by arrangements with the publishers of this map we are enabled to make the following liberal offer: to each person who will remit us $ . we will send copy of the prairie farmer one year and this map post-paid. address prairie farmer publishing co., chicago. ill. publications. marshall m. kirkman's books on railroad topics. do you want to become a railroad man if you do, the books described below point the way. the most promising field for men of talent and ambition at the present day is the railroad service. the pay is large in many instances, while the service is continuous and honorable. most of our railroad men began life on the farm. of this class is the author of the accompanying books descriptive of railway operations, who has been connected continuously with railroads as a subordinate and officer for years. he was brought up on a farm, and began railroading as a lad at $ per month. he has written a number of standard books on various topics connected with the organization, construction, management and policy of railroads. these books are of interest not only to railroad men but to the general reader as well. they are indispensable to the student. they present every phase of railroad life, and are written in an easy and simple style that both interests and instructs. the books are as follows: "railway expenditures their extent, object and economy."-a practical treatise on construction and operation. in two volumes, pages $ . "hand book of railway expenditures."--practical directions for keeping the expenditure accounts . "railway revenue and its collection."--and explaining the organization of railroads . "the baggage, parcel and mail traffic of railroads."--an interesting work on this important service; pages . "train and station service."--giving the principal rules and regulations governing trains; pages . "the track accounts of railroads."--and how they should be kept. pamphlet . "the freight traffic way-bill."--its uses illustrated and described. pamphlet "mutual guarantee."--a treatise on mutual suretyship. pamphlet any of the above books will be sent post-paid on receipt of price, by prairie farmer publishing co., monroe st. chicago, ill. money should be remitted by express, or by draft check or post office order. you can secure a nice rubber gossamer circular, or a nice decorated chamber set, or a nice imported gold band, or moss rose tea set, or a nice white granite dinner set free, in exchange for a few hours' time among your friends, getting up a little club order for our choice teas, coffees, etc., at much lower prices than stores sell them. we are the cheapest tea house east of san francisco. a guarantee given to each club member. testimonials and full particulars for getting up clubs free. write at once to the old reliable san francisco tea co., state st., chicago. mention this paper.--a reliable firm--_editor_. corn, grass, and fruit farms by andrews & babcock, humboldt, kan. money loaned netting investors per cent. write us. silk culture. osage for silk-worms. in a private letter to the editor of the prairie farmer dr. l. s. pennington, of whiteside county, illinois, says: "many thanks for your instructive articles on silk culture. could the many miles of osage orange found in this state be utilized for this purpose, the industry would give employment to thousands of dependent women and children, by which means they could make themselves, at least in part, self-supporting. i hope that you will continue to publish and instruct your many readers on this subject." anent this subject we find the following by prof. c. v. riley in a late issue of the american naturalist: "there is a strong disposition on the part of those who look for making money by the propagation and sale of mulberry trees, to underrate the use of osage orange as silk-worm food. we have thoroughly demonstrated, by the most careful tests, on several occasions, that when maclura aurantiaca is properly used for this purpose, the resulting silk loses nothing in quantity or quality, and we have now a strain of sericaria mori that has been fed upon the plant for twelve consecutive years without deterioration. there has been, perhaps, a slight loss of color which, if anything, must be looked upon as an advantage. it is more than likely, how ever, that the different races will differ in their adaptability to the maclura, and that for the first year the sudden transition to maclura from morus, upon which the worms have been fed for centuries, may result in some depreciation. mr. virion des lauriers, at the silk farm at genito, has completed some experiments on the relative value of the two plants, which he details in the opening number of the silk-grower's guide and manufacturer's gazette. four varieties of worms were reared. the race known as the "var" was fed throughout on mulberry leaves. the "pyrenean" and "cevennes" worms were fed throughout on leaves and branches of osage orange, while the "milanese" worms were fed on maclura up to the second molt and then changed to mulberry leaves. at the close examples of each variety of cocoons were sent to the secretary of the silk board at lyons, and appraised by him the maclura-fed cocoons were rated at cents per pound, those raised partly on osage and partly on mulberry at cents per pound, and those fed entirely on mulberry at $ . per pound. "this, mr. des lauriers thinks, seems to show that the difference between maclura and morus as silk-worm food is some 'twenty-five to thirty per cent in favor of the latter, while it is evident that the leaf of the osage orange can be used with some advantage during the first two ages of the worms, thus allowing the mulberry tree to grow more leafy for feeding during the last three ages.' the experiment, although interesting, is not conclusive, from the simple fact that different races were used in the different tests and not the same races, so that the result may have been due, to a certain extent, to race and not to food." scientific and useful. a writer in an english medical journal declares that the raising of the head of the bed, by placing under each leg a block of the thickness of two bricks, is an effective remedy for cramps. patients who have suffered at night, crying aloud with pain, have found this plan to afford immediate, certain, and permanent relief. california stands fifth in the list of states in the manufacture of salt, and is the only state in the union where the distillation of salt from sea water is carried on to any considerable extent. this industry has increased rapidly during the last twenty years. the production has risen from , bushels in to upwards of , bushels in . the amount of attention given to purely technical education in saxony is shown by the fact that there are now in that kingdom the following schools: a technical high school in dresden, a technical state institute at chemnitz, and art schools in dresden and leipzig, also four builders' schools, two for the manufacture of toys, six for shipbuilders, three for basket weavers, and fourteen for lace making. besides these there are the following trade schools supported by different trades, foundations, endowments, and districts: two for decorative painting, one for watchmakers, one for sheet metal workers, three for musical instrument makers, one for druggists (not pharmacy), twenty-seven for weaving, one for machine embroidery, two for tailors, one for barbers and hairdressers, three for hand spinning, six for straw weaving, three for wood carving, four for steam boiler heating, six for female handiwork. there are, moreover, seventeen technical advanced schools, two for gardeners, eight agricultural, and twenty-six commercial schools. the patrie reports, with apparent faith, an invention of dr. raydt, of hanover, who claims to have developed fully the utility of carbonic acid as a motive agent. under the pressure of forty atmospheres this acid is reduced to a liquid state, and when the pressure is removed it evaporates and expands into a bulk times as great as that it occupied before. it is by means of this double process that the hanoverian chemist proposes to obtain such important benefits from the agent he employs. a quantity of the fluid is liquified, and then stowed away in strong metal receptacles, securely fastened and provided with a duct and valve. by opening the valve free passage is given to the gas, which escapes with great force, and may be used instead of steam for working in a piston. one of the principal uses to which it has been put is to act as a temporary motive power for fire engines. iron cases of liquified carbonic acid are fitted on to the boiler of the machine, and are always ready for use, so that while steam is being got up, and the engines can not yet be regularly worked in the usual way, the piston valves can be supplied with acid gas. there is, however, another remarkable object to which the new agent can be directed, and to which it has been recently applied in some experiments conducted at kiel. this is the floating of sunken vessels by means of artificial bladders. it has been found that a bladder or balloon of twenty feet diameter, filled with air, will raise a mass of over tons. hitherto these floats have been distended by pumping air into them through pipes from above by a cumbrous and tedious process, but dr. raydt merely affixes a sufficient number of his iron gas-accumulators to the necks of the floats to be used, and then by releasing the gas fills them at once with the contents. dairy supplies, etc. the davis swing churn. the most popular churn on the market. [illustration of a swing churn] because it makes the most butter. because no other churn works so easy. because it makes the best grained butter. because it is the easiest cleaned. it has no floats or paddles inside. also the eureka butter worker, the nesbitt butter printer, and a full line of butter making utensils for dairies and factories. send for illustrated circulars. vermont farm machine co., bellows falls, vt. the cooley creamer [illustration of a creamer] saves in labor its entire cost every season. it will produce enough more money from the milk to pay for itself every days over and above any other method you can employ. don't buy infringing cans from irresponsible dealers. by decision of the u. s. court the cooley is the only creamer or milk can which can be used water sealed or submerged without infringement. send for circular to john boyd, manufacturer, lake st., chicago, ill. chocolates. grateful--comforting. epps's cocoa. breakfast. "by a thorough knowledge of the natural laws which govern the operations of digestion and nutrition, and by a careful application of the fine properties of well-selected cocoa, mr. epps has provided our breakfast tables with a delicately flavored beverage which may save us many heavy doctors' bills. it is by the judicious use of such articles of diet that a constitution may be gradually built up until strong enough to resist every tendency to disease. hundreds of subtle maladies are floating around us ready to attack wherever there is a weak point. we may escape many a fatal shaft by keeping ourselves well fortified with pure blood and a properly nourished frame."--_civil service gazette._ made simply with boiling water or milk. sold only in half-pound tins by grocers, labeled thus: james epps & co., homoeopathic chemists, london, england. when you write mention the prairie farmer. miscellaneous. % loans, for men of moderate means. money loaned in any part of the country. address, with -cent stamp. michigan loan & pub. co., charlotte, mich. [illustration of a ring] this elegant solid plain ring, made of heavy k. rolled gold plate, packed in velvet casket, warranted years, post-paid. c., for $ . . cards, "beauties," all gold, silver, roses, lilies, mottoes, &c., with name on, c., packs for a $ . bill and this gold ring free. u. s. card co., centerbrook, conn. seeds, etc. the dingee & conard co's beautiful ever-blooming roses the only establishment making a special business of roses. large houses for roses alone. we give away, in premiums and extras, more roses than most establishments grow. strong pot plants suitable for immediate bloom delivered safely, post-paid, to any post office. splendid varieties, your choice, all labeled, for $ ; for $ ; for $ ; for $ ; for $ ; for $ ; for $ . our new guide, _a complete treatise on the rose_, pp, _elegantly illustrated_ free the dingee & conard co., rose growers, west grove, chester co., pa. --spring-- . trees now is the time to prepare your orders for new and rare fruit and ornamental shrubs, evergreens, roses, vines, etc. besides many desirable novelties; we offer the largest and most complete general stock of fruit and ornamental trees in the u. s. abridged catalogue mailed free. address ellwanger & barry, mt. hope nurseries, rochester, n. y. [illustration of trees] forest trees. _largest stock in america._ catalpa speciosa, box-elder, maple, larch, pine, spruce, etc. _forest and evergreen tree seeds._ r. douglas & sons, _waukegan, ill._ evergreens for everybody. nursery grown, all sizes from inches to feet. also european larch and catalpa and a few of the extra early illinois potatoes. price list free. address d. hill, nurseryman, dundee, ill. forest tree seeds! i offer a large stock of walnuts, butternuts, ash, and box elder seeds, suitable for planting. all the growth of . i control the entire stock of the salome apple, a valuable, new, hardy variety. also a general assortment of nursery stock. send for catalogue, circular, and price lists. address bryant's nursery, princeton, ill. seed corn. yellow and white dent, michigan early yellow dent, chester-white king phillip, yellow yankee, etc., etc. also the celebrated murdock corn. l. b. fuller & co., state st., chicago. cuthbert raspberry plants! , for sale at elmland farm by l p. wheeler, quincy, ill. specialty for . bush. onion sets, , asparagus roots, raspberry and strawberry roots, and champion potatoes. italian bees a specialty. send for price list for . send early to a. j. norris, cedar falls, iowa. seeds our new catalogue, best published. free _to all_. , _varieties_, _illustrations_. you ought to have it. benson, maule & co., philadelphia, pa. a descriptive, illustrated nursery catalogue and guide to the fruit and ornamental planter. sent free to all applicants. wm. h. moon, morrisville, bucks co., pa. seed corn northern grown, very early. also flower vegetable and field seeds new varities of potatoes order early. catalogue free. fred. n. lang, baraboo, wis. [illustration of a fruit evaporator] culls and windfall apples worth cents per bushel net. save them by the "plummer patent process." illustrated and descriptive catalogue and full particulars mailed free. plummer fruit evaporator co., no. delaware st., leavenworth, kan. when you write mention the prairie farmer. ferry's seed annual for will be mailed free to all applicants and to customers of last year without ordering it. it contains illustrations, prices, descriptions and directions for planting all vegetable and flower seeds, plants, etc. invaluable to all. d.m. ferry & co. detroit, mich. [illustration of a cabbage with a face] j. b. root & co.'s illustr'd garden manual of vegetable and flower seeds, ready for all applicants. market gardeners seeds a specialty. write for wholesale price list. --> sent free rockford, illinois. floral gifts! [illustration of a ring with hearts] [illustration: magnifies , times] cards souvenirs of friendship beautiful designs, name neatly printed, c. packs, this elegant ring, microscopic charm and fancy card case, $ . get ten of your friends to send with you, and you will obtain these three premiums and your pack free. agent's album of samples, cts. northford card co., northford, conn. onion seed for sale. early red globe, raised in . james baker, davenport, iowa. new choice varieties of seed potatoes a specialty. twenty-five kinds. will not be under-sold. satisfaction guaranteed. send postal, with full address, for prices. ben f. hoover, galesburg, illinois. for sale one hundred bushels of native yellow illinois seed corn, grown on my farm, gathered early and kept since in a dry room. warranted to grow. price $ per bu. h.p. humphreys & son, sheffield, ill. onion sets wholesale & retail j. c. vaughn, _seedsman_, lasalle st., chicago, ill. maryland farms.--book and map _free_, by c. e. shanahan, attorney, easton, md. now is the time to subscribe for the prairie farmer. price only $ . per year is worth double the money. peter henderson & co's collection of seeds and plants embraces every desirable novelty of the season, as well as all standard kinds. a special feature for is, that you can for $ . select seeds or plants to that value from their catalogue, and have included, without charge, a copy of peter henderson's new book, "garden and farm topics," a work of pages, handsomely bound in cloth, and containing a steel portrait of the author. the price of the book alone is $ . . catalogue of "everything for the garden," giving details, free on application. peter henderson & co. seedsmen & florists, & cortlandt st., new york. garden seeds. direct from the farm at the lowest wholesale rates. seed corn that i know will grow; white beans, oats, potatoes, onions, cabbage, mangel wurzel, carrots, turnips, parsnips, celery, all of the best quality. catalogue with directions of cultivation free. --> seeds for the children's garden. per cent. discount. let the children send for my catalogue and try my seeds. they are warranted good or money refunded. address joseph harris, moreton farm, rochester, n.y. seeds albert dickinson, dealer in timothy, clover, flax, hungarian, millet, red top, blue grass, lawn grass, orchard grass, bird seeds, &c. pop-corn. warehouses { , & kinzie st. { , , & michigan st. office. kinzie st., chicago, ill. fay grapes currant head-quarters. all best, new and old. small, fruits and trees. low to dealers and planters. stock first-class. free catalogues. geo. s. josselyn, fredonia, n. y. remember _that $ . pays for_ the prairie farmer _one year, and the subscriber gets a copy of_ the prairie farmer county map of the united states, free! _this is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country._ [illustration: household.] for nothing lovelier can be found in woman than to study _household_ good.--_milton._ how he ventilated the cellar. the effect of foul air upon milk, cream, and butter was often alluded to at the dairymen's meeting at dekalb. a great bane to the dairyman is carbonic acid gas. in ill ventilated cellars it not only has a pernicious effect upon milk and its products, but it often renders the living apartments unhealthful, and brings disease and death to the family. in the course of the discussion mr. w. d. hoard, president of the northwestern dairymen's association, related the following incident showing how easily cellars may be ventilated and rendered fit receptacles for articles of food: "in the city of fort atkinson, where i do reside, mr. clapp, the president of the bank told me that for twenty years he had been unable to keep any milk or butter or common food of the family in the cellar. i went and looked at it, and saw gathered on the sleepers above large beads of moisture, and then knew what was the matter. the cellar was full of foul air. i said to him, 'prof. wilkins is here and will tell you in a few moments how to remedy this difficulty, and make your cellar a clean and wholesome apartment of your house.' i went down and got the professor, and he went up and looked at the cellar, and he says, 'for ten dollars i will put you in possession of a cellar that will be clean and wholesome.' he went to work and took a four-inch pipe, made of galvanized iron, soldered tightly at the joints, passing it down the side of the cellar wall until it came within two inches of the bottom of the cellar, turned a square elbow at the top of the wall, carried it under the house, under the kitchen, up through the kitchen floor and into the kitchen chimney, about four feet above where the kitchen stovepipe entered. you know the kitchen stove in all families is in operation about three times a day. the heat from this kitchen stove acting on the column of air in that little pipe caused a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum, and the result was that in twenty-four hours that little pipe had drawn the entire foul air out of the cellar, and he has now a perfect cellar. i drop this hint to show you that it is within easy reach of every one, for the sum of only about ten dollars, to have a perfectly ventilated cellar. this carbonic acid gas is very heavy. it collects in the cellar and you can not get it out unless you dip it out like water, or pump it out; and it becomes necessary to apply something to it that shall operate in this way." this is a matter of such importance, and yet so little thought about, that we had designed having an illustration made to accompany this article, but conclude the arrangment is so simple that any one can go to work and adapt it to the peculiar construction of his own house, and we hope thousands will make use of mr. hoard's suggestion. an old roman wedding. as far as the nuptial ceremony itself was concerned, the romans were in the habit of celebrating it with many imposing rites and customs, some of which are still in use in this country. as soon, therefore, as the sooth-sayer had taken the necessary omens, the ceremony was commenced by a sheep being sacrificed to juno, under whose special guardianship marriage was supposed to rest. the fleece was next laid upon two chairs, on which the bride and bridegroom sat, over whom prayers were then said. at the conclusion of the service the bride was led by three young men to the home of her husband. she generally took with her a distaff and spindle filled with wool, indicative of the first work in her new married life--spinning fresh garments for her husband. five torches were carried to light her. the threshold of the house was gaily decorated with flowers and garlands; and in order to keep out infection it was anointed with certain unctuous perfumes. as a preservative, moreover, against sorcery and evil influences, it was disenchanted by various charms. after being thus prepared, the bride was lifted over the threshold, it being considered unlucky for her to tread across it on first entering her husband's house. the musicians then struck up their music, and the company sang their "epithalamium." the keys of the house were then placed in the young wife's hands, symbolic of her now being mistress. a cake, too, baked by the vestal virgins, which had been carried before her in the procession from the place of the marriage ceremony to the husband's home, was now divided among the guests. to enhance the merriment of the festive occasion, the bridegroom threw nuts among the boys, who then, as nowadays enjoyed heartily a grand scramble. mr. smith's stovepipe. once upon a time there lived a certain man and wife, and their name--well, i think it must have been smith, mr. and mrs. john smith. one chilly day in october mrs. smith said to her husband: "john, i really think we must have the stove up in the sitting-room." and mr. smith from behind his newspaper answered "well." three hundred and forty-six times did mr. and mrs. smith repeat this conversation, and the three hundred and forty-seventh time mr. smith added: "i'll get brown to help me about it some day." it is uncertain how long the matter would have rested thus, had not mrs. smith crossed the street and asked neighbor brown to come over and help her husband set up a stove, and as she was not his wife he politely consented and came at once. with a great deal of grunting, puffing, and banging, accompanied by some words not usually mentioned in polite society, the two men at last got the stove down from the attic. mrs. smith had placed the zinc in its proper position, and they put the stove way to one side of it, but of course that didn't matter. then they proceeded to put up the stovepipe. mr. smith pushed the knee into the chimney, and mr. brown fitted the upright part to the stove. the next thing was to get the two pieces to come together. they pushed and pulled, they yanked and wrenched, they rubbed off the blacking onto their hands, they uttered remarks, wise and otherwise. presently it occurred to mr. smith that a hammer was just the thing that was needed, and he went for one. mr. brown improved the opportunity to wipe the perspiration from his noble brow, totally oblivious of the fact that he thereby ornamented his severe countenance with several landscapes done in stove blacking. the hammer didn't seem to be just the thing that was needed, after all. mr. smith pounded until he had spoiled the shape of the stovepipe, and still the pesky thing wouldn't go in, so he became exasperated and threw away the hammer. it fell on mr. brown's toe, and that worthy man ejaculated--well, it's no matter what he ejaculated. mr. smith replied to his ejaculation, and then mr. brown went home. why continue the tale? everybody knows that mr. smith, after making a great deal of commotion, finally succeeded in getting the pipe into place, that he was perfectly savage to everybody for the rest of the day, and that the next time he and brown met on the street both were looking intently the other way. but there is more to tell. it came to pass in the course of the winter that the pipe needed cleaning out. mrs. smith dreaded the ordeal, both for her own sake and her husband's. it happened that the kitchen was presided over by that rarest of treasures, a good-natured, competent hired girl. this divinity proposed that they dispense with mr. smith's help in cleaning out the pipe, and mrs. smith, with a sigh of relief, consented. they carefully pulled the pipe apart, and, holding the pieces in a horizontal position that no soot might fall on the carpet, carried it into the yard. after they had swept out the pipe and carried it back they attempted to put it up. that must have been an unusually obstinate pipe, for it steadily refused to go together. the minds of mrs. smith and her housemaid were sufficiently broad to grasp this fact after a few trials; therefore they did not waste their strength in vain attempts, but rested, and in an exceedingly un-masculine way held a consultation. the girl went for a hammer, and brought also a bit of board. she placed this on the top of the pipe, raised her hammer, mrs. smith held the pipe in place below, two slight raps, and, lo, it was done. see what a woman can do. this story is true, with the exception of the names and a few other unimportant items. i say, and will maintain it, that as a general thing a woman has more brains and patience and less stupidity than a man. i challenge any one to prove the contrary.--_n. e. homestead._ progress. in the course of a lecture on the resources of new brunswick, professor brown, of the ontario agricultural college, told the following story by an arabian writer: "i passed one day by a very rude and beautifully situated hamlet in a vast forest, and asked a savage whom i saw how long it had been there. 'it is indeed an old place,' replied he. 'we know it has stood there for years as the hunting home of the great st. john, but how long previous to that we do not know.' "one century afterward, as i passed by the same place, i found a busy little city reaching down to the sea, where ships were loading timber for distant lands. on asking one of the inhabitants how long this had flourished, he replied: 'i am looking to the future years, and not to what has gone past, and have no time to answer such questions.' "on my return there years afterward, i found a very smoky and wonderfully-populous city, with many tall chimneys, and asked one of the inhabitants how long it had been founded. 'it is indeed a mighty city,' replied he. 'we know not how long it has existed, and our ancestors there on this subject are as ignorant as ourselves.' "another century after that as i passed by the same place, i found a much greater city than before, but could not see the tall chimneys, and the air was pure as crystal; the country to the north and the east and the west, was covered with noble mansions and great farms, full of many cattle and sheep. i demanded of a peasant, who was reaping grain on the sands of the sea-shore, how long ago this change took place? 'in sooth, a strange question!' replied he. 'this ground and city have never been different from what you now behold them.' 'were there not of old,' said i, 'many great manufacturers in this city?' 'never,' answered he, 'so far as we have seen, and never did our fathers speak to us of any such.' "on my return there, years afterward, i found the city was built across the sea east-ward into the opposite country; there were no horses, and no smoke of any kind came from the dwellings. "the inhabitants were traveling through the air on wires which stretched far into the country on every side, and the whole land was covered with many mighty trees and great vineyards, so that the noble mansions could not be seen for the magnitude of the fruit thereof. "lastly, on coming back again, after an equal lapse of time, i could not perceive the slightest vestige of the city. i inquired of a very old and saintly man, who appeared to be under deep emotion, and who stood alone upon the spot, how long it had been destroyed. 'is this a question,' said he, 'from a man like you? know ye not that cities are not now part of the human economy? every one travels through the air on wings of electricity, and lives in separate dwellings scattered all over the land; the ships of the sea are driven by the same power, and go above or below as found to be best for them. in the cultivation of the soil,' said he, 'neither horse nor steam-power are employed; the plow is not known, nor are fertilizers of any more value in growing the crops of the field. electricity is carried under the surface of every farm and all over-head like a net; when the inhabitants require rain for any particular purpose, it is drawn down from the heavens by similar means. the influence of electricity has destroyed all evil things, and removed all diseases from among men and beasts, and every living thing upon the earth. all things have changed, and what was once the noble city of my name is to become the great meeting place of all the leaders of science throughout the whole world.'" a family jar. "yes," said mrs. gunkettle, as she spanked the baby in her calm, motherly way, "it's a perfect shame, mr. g., that you never bring me home anything to read! i might as well be shut up in a lunatic asylum." "i think so, too," responded the unfeeling man. "other people," continued mrs. gunkettle, as she gave the baby a marble to swallow, to stop its noise, "have magazines till they can't rest." "there's one," said mr. g., throwing a pamphlet on the table. "oh, yes; a horrid old report of the fruit interests of michigan; lots of news in that!" and she sat down on the baby with renewed vigor. "i'm sure it's plum full of currant news of the latest dates," said the miserable man. mrs. gunkettle retorted that she wouldn't give a fig for a whole library of such reading, when 'apple-ly the baby shrieked loud enough to drown all other sounds, and peace was at once restored. mouce traps and other sweetemetes. the following advertisement is copied from the fairfield gazette of september , , or ninety-seven years ago, which paper was "printed in fairfield by w. miller and f. fogrue, at their printing office near the meeting house." beards taken, taken of, and registurd by issac fac-totum barber, peri-wig maker, surgeon, parish clerk, school master, blacksmith and man-midwife. shaves for a penne, cuts hair for two pense, and oyld and powdird into the bargain. young ladys genteeely edicated; lamps lited by the year or quarter. young gentlemen also taut their grammer langwage in the neatest manner, and great care takin of morels and spelin. also salme singing and horse shewing by the real maker! likewice makes and mends, all sorts of butes and shoes, teches the ho! boy and jewsharp, cuts corns, bleeds. on the lowes term--glisters and pur is, at a peny a piece. cow-tillions and other dances taut at hoam and abrode. also deals holesale and retale--pirfumerry in all its branchis. sells all sorts of stationary wair, together with blacking balls, red herrins, ginger bread and coles, scrubbing brushes, trycle, mouce traps, and other sweetemetes, likewise. red nuts, tatoes, sassages and other gardin stuff. p. t. i teches joggrefy, and them outlandish kind of things----a bawl on wednesday and friday. all pirformed by me. isaac fac-totum. * * * * * a sonnet on a bonnet. a film of lace and a droop of feather, with sky-blue ribbons to knot them together; a facing (at times) of bronze-brown tresses, into whose splendor each furbelow presses; two strings of blue to fall in a tangle, and chain of pink chin in decorous angle; the tip of the plume right artfully twining where a firm neck steals under the lining; and the curls and braids, the plume and the laces. circle about the shyest of faces, bonnet there is not frames dimples sweeter! bonnet there is not that shades eyes completer! fated is he that but glances upon it, sighing to dream of that face in the bonnet. --_winnifred wise jenks._ * * * * * little pleasantries. a sweet thing in bonnets: a honey bee. it will get so in illinois, by and by, that the marriage ceremony will run thus: "until death--or divorce--do us part." he had been ridiculing her big feet, and to get even with him she replied that he might have her old sealskin sacque made over into a pair of ear-muffs. a toronto man waited until he was years old before he got married. he waited until he was sure that if he didn't like it he wouldn't have long to repent. how a woman always does up a newspaper she sends to a friend, so that it looks like a well stuffed pillow, is something that no man is woman enough to understand. "yes, my dear," said mrs. ramsbothom, speaking of her invalid uncle, "the poor old gentleman has had a stroke of parenthesis, and when i last saw him he was in a state of comma." "uncle, when sis sings in the choir sunday nights, why does she go behind the organ and taste the tenor's mustache?" "oh, don't bother me, sonny; i suppose they have to do it to find out if they are in tune." a couple of vassar girls were found by a professor fencing with broomsticks in a gymnasium. he reminded the young girls that such an accomplishment would not aid them in securing husbands. "it will help us keep them in," replied one of the girls. a clergyman's daughter, looking over the mss. left by her father in his study, chanced upon the following sentence: "i love to look upon a young man. there is a hidden potency concealed within his breast which charms and pains me." she sat down, and blushingly added: "them's my sentiments exactly, papa--all but the pains." "my dear," said a sensible dutchman to his wife, who for the last hour had been shaking her baby up and down on her knee: "i don't think so much butter is good for the child." "butter? i never give my artie any butter; what an idea!" "i mean to say you have been giving him a good feed of milk out of the bottle, and now you have been an hour churning it!" we wish to keep the attention of wheat-raisers fixed upon the saskatchewan variety of wheat until seeding time is over, for we believe it worthy of extended trial. read the advertisement of w. j. abernethy & co. they will sell the seed at reasonable figures, and its reliability can be depended upon. [illustration: our young folks] little dilly-dally. i don't believe you ever knew any one so silly as the girl i'm going to tell about-- a little girl named dilly, dilly-dally dilly, oh, she is very slow, she drags her feet along the street, and dilly-dallies so! she's always late to breakfast without a bit of reason, for bridget rings and rings the bell and wakes her up in season. dilly-dally dilly, how can you be so slow? why don't you try to be more spry, and not dilly-dally so? 'tis just the same at evening; and it's really quite distressing to see the time that dilly wastes in dreaming and undressing. dilly-dally dilly is always in a huff; if you hurry her or worry her she says, "there's time enough." since she's neither sick nor helpless, it is quite a serious matter that she should be so lazy that we still keep scolding at her. dilly-dally dilly, it's very wrong you know, to do no work that you can shirk, and dilly-dally so. uncle jim's yarn. old "uncle jim," of stonington, conn., ought to have a whole drawer to himself, for nothing short of it could express the easy-going enlargement of his mind in narratives. uncle jim was a retired sea captain, sealer, and whaler, universally beloved and respected for his lovely disposition and genuine good-heartedness, not less than for the moderation of his statements and the truthful candor of his narrations. it happened that one of the yale professors, who devoted himself to ethnological studies, was interested in the patagonians, and very much desired information as to the alleged gigantic stature of the race. a scientific friend, who knew the stonington romancer, told the professor that he could no doubt get valuable information from uncle jim, a captain who was familiar with all the region about cape horn. and the professor, without any hint about uncle jim's real ability, eagerly accompanied his friend to make the visit. uncle jim was found in one of his usual haunts, and something like the following ethnological conversation ensued: professor--they tell me, capt. pennington, that you have been a good deal in patagonia. uncle jim--made thirty or forty voyages there, sir. professor--and i suppose you know something about the patagonians and their habits? uncle jim--know all about 'em, sir. know the patagonians, sir, all, all of 'em, as well as i know the stonington folks. professor--i wanted to ask you, captain, about the size of the patagonians--whether they are giants, as travelers have reported? uncle jim--no, sir--shaking his head slowly, and speaking with the modest tone of indifference--no, sir, they are not. (it was quite probable that the captain never had heard the suggestion before). the height of the patagonian, sir, is just five feet nine inches and a half. professor--how did you ascertain this fact, captain? uncle jim--measured 'em, sir--measured 'em. one day when the mate and i were ashore down there, i called up a lot of the patagonians, and the mate and i measured about of them, and every one of them measured five feet nine inches and a half--that's their exact height. professor--that's very interesting. but, captain, don't you suppose there were giants there long ago, in the former generations? all the travelers say so. uncle jim--not a word of truth in it, sir--not a word. i'd heard that story and i thought i'd settle it. i satisfied myself there was nothing in it. professor--but how could you know that they used not to be giants? what evidence could you get? mightn't the former race have been giants? uncle jim--impossible, sir, impossible. professor--but how did you satisfy yourself? uncle jim--dug 'em up, sir--dug 'em up speaking with more than usual moderation. i'd heard that yarn. the next voyage, i took the bo'sen and went ashore; we dug up old patagonians and measured 'em. they all measured exactly five feet nine inches and a half; no difference in 'em--men, women, and all ages just the same. five feet nine inches and a half is the natural height of a patagonian. they've always been just that. not a word of truth in the stories about giants, sir.--_harper's magazine_. puddin' tame's fun. "nice child, very nice child," observed an old gentleman, crossing the aisle and addressing the mother of the boy who had just hit him in the eye with a wad of paper. "how old are you, my son?" "none of your business," replied the youngster, taking aim at another passenger. "fine boy," smiled the old man, as the parent regarded her offspring with pride. "a remarkably fine boy. what is your name, my son?" "puddin' tame!" shouted the youngster, with a giggle at his own wit. "i thought so," continued the old man, pleasantly. "if you had given me three guesses at it, that would have been the first one i would have struck on. now, puddin', you can blow those things pretty straight, can't you?" "you bet!" squealed the boy, delighted at the compliment. "see me take that old fellow over there!" "no, no!" exclaimed the old gentleman, hastily. "try it on the old woman i was sitting with. she has boys of her own, and she won't mind." "can you hit the lady for the gentleman, johnny?" asked the fond parent. johnny drew a bead and landed the pellet on the end of the old woman's nose. but she did mind it, and, rising in her wrath, soared down on the small boy like a blizzard. she put him over the line, reversed him, ran him backward till he didn't know which end of him was front, and finally dropped him into the lap of the scared mother, with a benediction whereof the purport was that she'd be back in a moment and skin him alive. "she didn't seem to like it, puddin'," smiled the gentleman, softly. "she's a perfect stranger to me, but i understand she is a matron of truants' home, and i thought she would like a little fun; but i was mistaken." and the old gentleman sighed sweetly as he went back to his seat. the alphabet. the discovery of the alphabet is at once the triumph, the instrument and the register of the progress of our race. the oldest abecedarium in existence is a child's alphabet on a little ink-bottle of black ware found on the site of cere, one of the oldest of the greek settlements in central italy, certainly older than the end of the sixth century b. c. the phoenician alphabet has been reconstructed from several hundred inscriptions. the "moabite stone" has yielded the honor of being the most ancient of alphabetic records to the bronze plates found in lebanon in , fixed as of the tenth or eleventh century, and therefore the earliest extant monuments of the semitic alphabet. the lions of nineveh and an inscribed scarab found at khorsabad have furnished other early alphabets; while scarabs and cylinders, seals and gems, from babylon and nineveh, with some inscriptions, are the scanty records of the first epoch of the phoenician alphabet. for the second period, a sarcophagus found in , with an inscription of twenty-two lines, has tasked the skill of more than forty of the most eminent semitic scholars of the day, and the literature connected with it is overwhelming. an unbroken series of coins extending over seven centuries from b. c. to a. d., hebrew engraved gems, the siloam inscription discovered in jerusalem in , early jewish coins, have each and all found special students whose successive progress is fully detailed by taylor. the aramæan alphabet lived only for seven or eight centuries; but from it sprang the scripts of five great faiths of asia and the three great literary alphabets of the east. nineveh and its public records supply most curious revelations of the social life and commercial transactions of those primitive times. loans, leases, notes, sales of houses, slaves, etc., all dated, show the development of the alphabet. the early egyptian inscriptions show which alphabet was there in the reign of xerxes. fragments on stone preserved in old roman walls in great britain, spain, france, and jerusalem, all supply early alphabets. alphabets have been affected by religious controversies, spread by missionaries, and preserved in distant regions by holy faith, in spite of persecution and perversion. the arabic alphabet, next in importance after the great latin alphabet, followed in eighty years the widespread religion of mohammed; and now the few englishmen who can read and speak it are astonished to learn that it is collaterally related to our own alphabet, and that both can be traced back to the primitive phoenician source. greece alone had forty local alphabets, reduced by careful study to about half a dozen generic groups, characterized by certain common local features, and also by political connection. of the oldest "a, b, c's" found in italy, several were scribbled by school-boys on pompeian walls, six in greek, four in oscan, four in latin; others were scratched on children's cups, buried with them in their graves, or cut or painted for practice on unused portions of mortuary slabs. the earliest was found as late as , a plain vase of black ware with an etruscan inscription and a syllabary or spelling exercise, and the greek alphabet twice repeated. what a child can do. "pa, i have signed the pledge," said a little boy to his father, on coming home one evening; "will you help me keep it?" "certainly," said the father. "well, i have brought a copy of the pledge; will you sign it, papa?" "nonsense, nonsense, my child! what could i do when my brother-officers called--the father had been in the army--if i was a teetotaler?" "but do try, papa." "tut, tut! why you are quite a little radical." "well, you won't ask me to pass the bottle, papa?" "you are quite a fanatic, my child; but i promise not to ask you to touch it." some weeks after that two officers called in to spend the evening. "what have you to drink?" said they. "have you any more of that prime scotch ale?" "no," said he; "i have not, but i shall get some. here, willie, run to the store, and tell them to send some bottles up." the boy stood before his father respectfully, but did not go. "come, willie; why, what's the matter? come, run along." he went, but came back presently without any bottles. "where's the ale, willie?" "i asked them for it at the store, and they put it upon the counter, but i could not touch it. o pa, pa! don't be angry; i told them to send it up, but i could not touch it myself!" the father was deeply moved, and turning to his brother-officers, he said: "gentlemen, do you hear that? you can do as you please. when the ale comes you may drink it, but not another drop shall be drank in my house, and not another drop shall pass my lips. willie, have you your temperance pledge?" "o pa! i have." "bring it, then." and the boy was back with it in a moment. the father signed it and the little fellow clung round his father's neck with delight. the ale came, but not one drank, and the bottles stood on the table untouched. children, sign the pledge, and ask your parents to help you keep it. don't touch the bottle, and try to keep others from touching it. miscellaneous. stock farms for sale; one of the very best in central illinois, the finest agricultural region in the world; , acres, highly improved; unusual facilities for handling stock; also a smaller farm; also one of the finest stock ranches in central texas, , acres. each has never-failing water, and near railroads; must be sold; terms easy; price low. for further particulars address j. b. or f. c. turner, jacksonville, ill. cut this out & return to us with ten cts. & you'll get by mail a golden box of goods that will bring you in more money, in one month than anything else in america. absolute certainty need no capital. m. young, greenwich st. n. york self cure free nervous debility lost manhood weakness and decay a favorite prescription of a noted specialist (now retired). druggists can fill it. address dr. ward & co., louisiana, mo. map of the united states and canada, printed in colors, size x - / feet, also a copy of the prairie farmer for one year. sent to any address for $ . . breeders directory. the following list embraces the names of responsible and reliable breeders in their line, and parties wishing to purchase or obtain information can feel assured that they will be honorably dealt with: swine. chester whites. w. a. gilbert, wauwatosa, wis. live stock, etc. public sale of polled aberdeen-angus and short-horn cattle. [illustration of a cow] we will, on march and , at dexter park, stock yards, chicago, offer at public sale head of polled aberdeen-angus, and head of short-horns, mostly imported and all highly bred cattle, representing the best strains of their respective breeds. sale each day will begin at p. m., sharp. catalogues now ready. address as below. note--english shire horses,--three stallions and four mares of this breed (all imported) will be offered at the close of the second day's sale of cattle. geo. whitfield, model farm, model farm, geary bros., bli bro. stock farm, london, canada. at kansas city, mo., on april , , and , the same parties will offer at public sale a choice lot of aberdeen-angus and short-horn cattle. when you write mention the prairie farmer. holsteins at living rates. dr. w. a. pratt, elgin, ill., now has a herd of more than one hundred head of full-blooded holsteins mostly imported direct from holland. these choice dairy animals are for sale at moderate prices. correspondence solicited or, better, call and examine the cattle, and select your own stock. scotch collie shepherd pups, --from-- imported and trained stock --also-- newfoundland pups and rat terrier pups. concise and practical printed instruction in training young shepherd dogs is given to buyers of shepherd puppies; or will be sent on receipt of cents in postage stamps. for printed circular, giving full particulars about shepherd dogs, enclose a -cent stamp, and address n. h. paaren, p. o. box .--chicago, ill. victoria swine. [illustration: falstaff.] winner of first prize chicago fat stock show . originators of this famous breed. also breeders of pekin ducks and light brahma fowls. stock for sale. send for circular a. schiedt & davis, dyer, lake co. ind stewart's healing powder. [illustration of two people and a horse] sold by harness and drug stores. warranted to cure all open sores on animals from any cause. chester white pigs. good as the best at prices to suit the times. also, short-horn cattle. send for price list. s. h. olmstead, freedom, la salle co., ill. reduced rates by express. lbs. w'ght of two ohio improved chester hogs. send for description of this famous breed, also fowls, l. b. silver, cleveland, o. silver springs herd, jersey cattle, combining the best butter families. correspondence solicited. t. l. hacker, madison, wis. pig extricator to aid animals in giving birth. send for free circular to wm. dulin, avoca, pottawattamie co., ia. cards satin finish cards, new imported designs, name on and present free for c. cut this out. clinton bros. & co., clintonville, ct. ( ) chromo cards, no alike, with name, c., pks. $ . george i. reed & co., nassau, n. y. the prairie farmer is the cheapest and best agricultural paper published. only $ . per year. [illustration: literature.] the gentleman farmer. he owned the farm--at least 'twas thought he owned, since he lived upon it,-- and when he came there, with him brought the men whom he had hired to run it. he had been bred to city life and had acquired a little money; but, strange conceit, himself and wife thought farming must be something funny. he did not work himself at all, but spent his time in recreation-- in pitching quoits and playing ball, and such mild forms of dissipation. he kept his "rods" and trolling spoons, his guns and dogs of various habits,-- while in the fall he hunted coons, and in the winter skunks and rabbits. his hired help were quick to learn the liberties that might be taken, and through the season scarce would earn the salt it took to save their bacon. he knew no more than child unborn, one-half the time, what they were doing,-- whether they stuck to hoeing corn, or had on hand some mischief brewing. his crops, although they were but few, with proper food were seldom nourished, while cockle instead of barley grew, and noxious weeds and thistles flourished. his cows in spring looked more like rails set up on legs, than living cattle; and when they switched their dried-up tails the very bones in them would rattle. at length the sheriff came along, who soon relieved him of his labors. while he became the jest and song of his more enterprising neighbors. back to the place where life began, back to the home from whence he wandered, a sadder, if not a wiser man, he went with all his money squandered. moral. on any soil, be it loam or clay, mellow and light, or rough and stony, those men who best make farming pay find use for brains as well as money. _--tribune and farmer._ frank dobb's wives. "the great trouble with my son," old dobb observed to me once, "is that he is a genius." and the old gentleman sighed and looked with melancholy eyes at the picture on the genius's easel. it was a clever picture, but everything frank dobb did was clever, from his painting to his banjo playing. clever was the true name for it, for of substantial merit it possessed none. he had begun to paint without learning to draw, and he could pick a tune out of any musical instrument extant without ever having mastered the mysteries of notes. he talked the most graceful of airy nothings, and could not cover a page of note paper without his orthography going lame, and all the rest of his small acquirements and accomplishments were proportionately shallow and incomplete. paternal partiality laid it to his being too gifted to study, but the cold logic, which no ties of consanguinity influenced, ascribed it to laziness. frank was, indeed, the idlest and best-natured fellow in the world. you never saw him busy, angry, or out of spirits. he painted a little, thrummed his guitar a little longer or rattled a tune off on his piano, smoked and read a great deal, and flirted still more, all in the same deliberate and easy-going way. any excuse was sufficient to absolve him from serious work. so he lead a pleasant, useless life, with dobb senior to pay the bills. he had the handsomest studio in new york, a studio for one of ouida's heroes to luxuriate in. if the encouragement of picturesque surroundings could have made a painter of him he would have been a master. the fame of his studio, and the fact that he did not need the money, made his pictures sell. he was quite a lion in society, and it was regarded as a favor to be asked to call on him. he was the beau ideal of the artist of romance, and was accorded a romantic eminence accordingly. so, with his pictures to provide him with pocket money, and his father to see to the rest, he lived the life of a young prince, feted and flattered and spoiled, artistically despised by all the serious workers who knew him, and hated by some who envied him the commercial success he had no necessity for, but esteemed by most of us as a good fellow and his own worst enemy. frank married his first wife while dobb senior was still at the helm of his own affairs. she was a charming little woman whose acquaintance he had made when she visited his studio with a party of friends. she had not a penny, but he made a draft upon "the governor," as he called him, and the happy pair digested their honeymoon in europe. they were absent six months, during which time he did not set brush to canvas. then they returned, as he fancifully termed it, to go to work. he commenced the old life as if he had never been married. the familiar sound of pipes and beer, and supper after the play, often with young ladies who had been assisting in the representation on the stage, was traveled as if there had been no mrs. dobb at home in the flat old dobb provided. frank's expenditures on himself were as lavish as they had been in his bachelor days. as little brown said, it was lucky that mrs. dobb had a father-in-law to buy her dinner for her. she rarely came to her husband's studio, because he claimed that it interfered with the course of business. he had invented a fiction that she was too weak to endure the strain of society, and so he took her into it as little as possible. in brief, married by the caprice of a selfish man, the poor little woman lived through a couple of neglected years, and then died of a malady as nearly akin to a broken heart as i can think of, while frank was making a trip to the bahamas on the yacht of his friend munnybagge, of the stock exchange. he had set out on the voyage ostensibly to make studies, for he was a marine painter, on the principle, probably, that marines are easiest to paint. when he came back and found his wife dead, he announced that he would move his studio to havana for the purpose of improving his art. he did so, putting off his mourning suit the day after he left new york and not putting it on again, as the evidence of creditable witnesses on the steamer and in havana has long since proved. his son's callousness was a savage stab in old dobb's heart. a little, mild-looking old gentleman, without a taint of selfishness or suspicion in his own nature, he had not seen the effect of his indulgence of him on his son till his brutal disregard for his first duty as a man had told him of it. the old man had appreciated and loved his daughter-in-law. in proportion as he had discovered her unhappiness and its just cause, he had lost his affection for his son. i hear that there was a terrible scene when frank came home, a week after his wife had been buried. he claimed to have missed the telegram announcing her death to him at nassau, but munnybagge had already told some friends that he had got the dispatch in time for the steamer, but had remained over till the next one, because he had a flirtation on hand with little gonzales, the cuban heiress, and old dobb had heard of it. munnybagge never took him yachting again; and, speaking to me once about him, he designated him, not by name, but as "that infernal bloodless cad." however, as i have said, there was a desperate row between father and son, and frank is said to have slunk out of the house like a whipped cur, and been quite dull company at the supper which he took after the opera that night in gillian trussell's jolly bohemian flat. when he emigrated, with his studio traps filling half a dozen packing cases, none of the boys bothered to see him off. they had learned to see through his good fellowship, and recalled a poor little phantom, to whose life and happiness he had been a wicked and bitter enemy. about a year after his departure i read the announcement in the herald of the marriage of franklin d. dobb, sr., to a widow well-known and popular in society. i took the trouble to ascertain that it was frank's father, and being among some of the boys that night, mentioned it to them. "well," remarked smith, "that's really queer. you remember frank left some things in my care when he went away? yesterday i got a letter asking about them, and informing me that he had got married and was coming home." he did come home, and he settled in his old studio. what sort of a meeting he had with his father this time i never heard. the old gentleman had been paying him his allowance regularly while he was away, and i believe he kept up the payment still. but otherwise he gave him no help, and if he ever needed help he did now. his wife was a cuban, as pretty and as helpless as a doll. she had been an heiress till her brother had turned rebel and had his property confiscated. unfortunately for frank, he had married her before the culmination of this catastrophe. in fact, he had been paying court to her with the dispatch announcing his wife's death in his pocket, and had married her long before the poor little clay was well settled in the grave he had sent it to. in marrying her he had evidently believed he was establishing his future. so he was, but it was a future of expiation for the sins and omissions of his past. the new mrs. dobb was a tigress in her love and her jealousy. she was childish and ignorant, and adored her husband as a man and an artist. she measured his value by her estimation of him, and was on the watch perpetually for trespassers on her domain. the domestic outbreaks between the two were positively blood curdling. one afternoon, i remember, gillian trussell, who had heard of his return, called on him. mrs. d. met her at the studio door, told her, "frank," as she called him, was out; slammed the door in her face, and then flew at him with a palette scraper. we had to break the door in, and found him holding her off by both wrists, and she frothing in a mad fit of hysterics. from that day he was a changed man. she owned him body and soul. the life the pair lived after that was simply ridiculously miserable. he had lost his old social popularity, and was forced to sell his pictures to the cheap dealers, when he was lucky enough to sell them at all. the paternal allowance would not support the flat they first occupied, and they went into a boarding house. inside of a month they were in the papers, on account of outbreaks on mrs. dobb's part against one of the ladies of the house. a couple of days after he leased a little room opening into his studio, converted it into a bed-room, and they settled there for good. such a housekeeping as it was--like a scene in a farce. the studio had long since run to seed, and a perpetual odor of something to eat hung over it along with the sickening reek of the florida water mrs. d., like all other creoles, made more liberal use of than of the pure element it was half-named from. crumbs and crusts and chop-bones, which the dog had left, littered the rugs; and i can not recall the occasion on which the caterer's tin box was not standing at the door, unless it was when the dirty plates were piled up, there waiting for him to come for them. i dined there once. frank had had a savage quarrel with her that day, and wanted me for a bender. but the scheme availed him nothing, for she broke out over the soup and i left them to fight it out, and finished my feast at a chop house. all of his old flirtations came back to curse him now. his light loves of the playhouse and his innocent devotions of the ball room were alike the instruments fate had forged into those of punishment for him. the very names of his old fancies, which, with that subtle instinct all women possess, she had found out, were sufficient to send his wife into a frenzy. she was a chronic theatre-goer, and they never went to the theatre without bringing a quarrel home with them. if he was silent at the play she charged him with neglecting her; if he brisked up and tried to chat, her jealousy would soon pick out some casus belli in the small talk he strove to interest her with. a word to a passing friend, a glance at one of her own sex, was sufficient to set her going. i shall never question that jealousy is a form of actual madness, after what i saw of it in the lives of that miserable man and woman. a year after his return he was the ghost of his old self. he was haggard and often unshaven; his attire was shabby and carelessly put on; he had lost his old, jaunty air, and went by you with a hurried pace, and his head and shoulders bent with an indescribable suggestion of humility. the fear of having her break out, regardless of any one who might be by, which hung over him at home, haunted him out of doors, too. the avenger of mrs. dobb the first had broken his spirit as effectually as he had broken mrs. dobb's heart. smith occupied the next studio to him, and one evening i was smoking there, when an atrocious uproar commenced in the next room. we could distinguish frank's voice and his wife's, and another strange one. smith looked at me, grinned, and shrugged his shoulders. the disturbance ceased in a couple of minutes, and a door banged. then came a crash, a shrill and furious scream, and the sound of feet. we ran to the door, in time to see mrs. dobb, her hair in a tangle down her back, in a dirty wrapper and slipshod slippers, stumbling down stairs. we posted after her, smith nearly breaking his neck by tripping over one of the slippers which she had shed as she ran. the theatres were just out and the streets full of people, among whom she jostled her way like the mad woman that she was. we came up with her as she overtook her husband, who was walking with mcgilp, the dealer who handled his pictures. she seized him by the arm and screamed out: "i told you i would come with you." his face for a moment was the face of a devil, full of fury and despair. i saw his fist clench itself and the big vein in his forehead swell. but he slipped his hands into his pockets, looked appealingly at mcgilp, and said, shrugging his shoulders, "you see how it is, mac?" mcgilp nodded and walked abruptly away, with a look full of contempt and scorn. we mingled with the crowd and saw the poor wretches go off together, he grim and silent, she hysterically excited--with all the world staring at them. smith slept on a lounge in my room that night. "i couldn't get a wink up there," he said, "and i don't want to be even the ear witness of a murder." the night did not witness the tragedy he anticipated, though. next day, frank dobb came to see me--a compliment he had not paid me for months. he was the incarnation of abject misery, and so nervous that he could scarcely speak intelligibly. "i saw you in the crowd last night, old man," he said, looking at the floor and twisting and untwisting his fingers. "what do you think of it? a nice life for a fellow to lead, eh?" what else could i reply than, "why do you lead it then?" "why?" he repeated, breaking into a hollow, uneasy laugh. "why, because i love her, damn me! and i deserve it all." "is this what you came to tell me?" i asked. "no," he answered, "of course not. the fact is, i want you to help me out of a hole. that row last night has settled me with mcgilp. he came to see me about a lot of pictures for a sale he is getting up out west, and the senora kept up such a nagging that he got sick and suggested that we should go to 'the studio' for a chop and settle the business there. she swore i shouldn't go, and that she would follow us if i did. i thought she'd not go that far; but she did. so the mcgilp affair is off for good, i know. he's disgusted, and i don't blame him. what i want of you is this. buy that hoguet you wanted last year." the picture was one i had fancied and offered him a price for in his palmy days, one that he had picked up abroad. i was only too glad to take it and a couple more, for which i paid him at once; and next evening, at dinner, i heard that he had levanted. "walked out this morning," said smith, "and sent a messenger an hour after with word that he had already left the city. she came in to me with the letter in one hand and a dagger in the other. she swears he has run away with another woman, and says she's going to have her life, if she has to follow her around the world." she did not carry out her sanguinary purpose, though. there were some consultations with old dobb and then the studio was to let again. some one told me she had returned to cuba, where she proposed to live on the allowance her father-in-law had made her husband and which he now continued to her. i had almost forgotten her when, several years later, in the lobby of the academy of music, she touched my arm with her fan. she was promenading on the arm of a handsome but beefy-looking englishman, whom she introduced to me as her husband. i had not heard of a divorce, but i took the introduction as information that there had been one. the englishman was a better fellow than he looked. we supped together after the opera, and i learned that he had met mrs. dobb in havana, where he had spent some years in business. i found her a changed woman--a new woman, indeed, in whom i only now and then caught a glimpse of her old indolent, babyish and foolish self. she was not only prettier than ever, but she had become a sensible and clever woman. the influence of an intelligent man, who was strong enough to bend her to his ways, had developed her latent brightness and taught her to respect herself as well as him. i met her several times after that, and at the last meeting but one she spoke of frank for the first time. her black eyes snapped when she uttered his name. the devil was alive in them, though love was dead. i told her that i had heard nothing of him since his disappearance. "but i have," she said, showing her white teeth in a curious smile. "indeed!" i replied, quite astounded. "the coward!" she went on bitterly; "and to think i could ever have loved such a thing as he! do you know, mr. x., that i never knew he had been married till after he had fled? then his father told me how he had courted my father's money, with his wife lying dead at home. oh! senor francisco, senor francisco! before i heard that, i wanted to kill the woman who had stolen you from me. the moment after i could have struck you dead at my feet." she threw her arm up, holding her fan like a dagger. i believed her, and so would any one who had seen her then. "i had hardly settled in havana," she continued, "before i received a letter from him. already he wanted to come back to me. had the other woman tired of him already? i asked myself, or was it really true, as his father had told me, that he had fled alone? i answered the letter, and he wrote again. again i answered, and so it was kept up. for two years i played with the love i now knew was worthless. he was traveling round the world, and a dozen times wanted to come directly to me. i insisted that he should keep his journey up--as a probation, you see. he submitted. but oh! how he did love me!" the exultation with which she told this was absolutely fiendish. i could see in it, plainer than any words could tell it to me, the scheme of vengeance she had carried out, the alternating hopes and torments to which she had raised, and into which she had plunged him. i could see him wandering around the globe, scourged by remorses, agonized by doubts, and maddened by despairs, accepting the lies she wrote him as inviolable pledges, and sustaining himself with the vision of a future never to be fulfilled. she read the expression of my face, and laughed. "was it not an idea?" she asked. "was that not better than this?" and again she stabbed the air with her fan. "but--pardon me the question--but you have begun the confidence," i said. "how will it end?" "it has ended," she answered. "how?" "i had been divorced while i was writing to him. a year ago he was to be in london, where i was to meet him. while he was sailing from the cape of good hope i was being married to a man who loved me for myself, and to whom i had confided all. instead of my address at the london post office he received a notification of my marriage, addressed to him in my own hand and mailed to him by myself. he wrote once or twice still, but my husband indorsed the letters with his own name and returned them unopened. he may be dead for all i know, but i hope and pray he is still alive, and will remain alive and love me for a thousand years." she opened her arms, as if to hug her vengeance to her heart, and looked at me steadily with eyes that thrilled me with their lambent fire. no wonder the wretched vagabond loved her! what a doom his selfishness and his duplicity had invoked upon him! i believe if he could have seen her as i saw her then, so different from and better than he knew her to be, he would have gone mad on the spot. poor mrs. dobb the first was indeed avenged. we sipped our chocolate and talked of other things, as if such a being as frank dobb had never been. her husband joined us and we made an evening of it at the theatre. i knew from the way he looked at me, and from the increased warmth of his manner, that he was conversant with his wife's having made a confidant of me. but i do not think he knew how far her confidence had gone. i have often wondered since if he knew how deep and fierce the hatred she carried for his predecessor was. there are things women will reveal to strangers which they will die rather than divulge to those they love. i saw them off to europe, for they were going to establish themselves in london, and i have never seen or directly heard from them since. but some months after their departure i received a letter from robinson, who has been painting there ever since his picture made that great hit in the salon of ' --. "i have odd news for you," he wrote. "you remember frank dobb, who belonged to our old pen and pencil club, and who ran away from that cuban wife of his just before i left home? well, about a year ago i met him in fleet street, the shabbiest beggar you ever saw. he was quite tight and smelled of gin across the street. he was taking a couple of drawings to a penny dreadful office which he was making pictures for at ten shillings a piece. i went to see him once, in the dismalest street back of drury lane. he was doing some painting for a dealer, when he was sober enough, and of all the holes you ever saw his was it. i soon had to sit down on him, for he got into the habit of coming to see me and loafing around, making the studio smell like a pub, till i would lend him five shillings to go away. i heard nothing of him till the other day i came across an event which this from the telegraph will explain." the following newspaper paragraph was appended: "the man who shot himself on the door-step of mr. bennerley green, the west india merchant, last monday, has been discovered to be an american who for some time has been employed furnishing illustrations to the lower order of publications here. he was known as allan, but this is said to have been an assumed name. he is stated to be the son of a wealthy new yorker, who discarded him in consequence of his habits of dissipation, and to have once been an artist of considerable prominence in the united states. all that is known of the suicide is the story told by the servant, who a few minutes after admitting his master and mistress upon their return from the theatre, heard the report of a pistol in the street, and on opening the door found the wretched man dead upon the step. the body was buried after the inquest at the charge of the eminent american artist, mr. j. j. robinson, a. r. a., who had known him in his better days." the second husband of mrs. frank dobb is mr. bennerley green, the west india merchant.--_the continent._ * * * * * consumption cured. an old physician, retired from practice, having had placed in his hands by an east india missionary the formula of a simple vegetable remedy for the speedy and permanent cure of consumption, bronchitis, catarrh, asthma and all throat and lung affections, also a positive and radical cure for nervous debility and all nervous complaints, after having tested its wonderful curative powers in thousands of cases, has felt it his duty to make it known to his suffering fellows. actuated by this motive and a desire to relieve human suffering, i will send free of charge, to all who desire it, this recipe, in german, french, or english, with full directions for preparing and using. sent by mail by addressing with stamp, naming this paper. w. a. noyes, _ power's block_, _rochester_, _n. y._ [illustration: humorous] many cures for snoring have been invented, but none have stood the test so well as the old reliable clothes-pin. a clergyman says that the baby that pulls whiskers, bites fingers, and grabs for everything it sees has in it the elements of a successful politician. a hartford man has a bible bearing date . it is very easy to preserve a bible for a great many years, because--because--well, we don't know what the reason is, but it is so, nevertheless. a vermont man has a hen thirty years old. the other day a hawk stole it, but after an hour came back with a broken bill and three claws gone, put down the hen and took an old rubber boot in place of it. alexander gumbleton ruffleton scufflton oborda whittleton sothenhall benjaman franklin squires is still a resident of north carolina, aged ninety-two. the census taker always thinks at first that the old man is guying. a little five-year-old friend, who was always allowed to choose the prettiest kitten for his pet and playmate before the other nurslings were drowned, was taken to his mother's sick room the other morning to see the two tiny new twin babes. he looked reflectively from one to the other for a minute or two, then, poking his chubby finger into the plumpest baby, he said decidedly, "save this one." in promulgating your esoteric cogitation on articulating superficial sentimentalities and philosophical psychological observation, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. let your conversation possess a clarified conciseness, compact comprehensiveness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cognancy; eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity and jejune babblement. in other words, don't use such big words. how he was "sleighed." a boy once took it in his head that he would exercise his sled. he took the sled into the road and, lord a massy! how he slode. and as he slid, he laughing cried, "what fun upon my sled to slide." and as he laughed, before he knewed, he from that sliding sled was slude. upon the slab where he was laid they carved this line: "this boy was sleighed." "a farmer's wife" wants to know if we can recommend anything to destroy the "common grub." we guess the next tramp that comes along could oblige you. miscellaneous the union broad-cast seeder. [illustration of a seeder] the only -foot seeder in the market upon which the operator can ride, see his work, and control the machine. no gear wheels, feed placed directly on the axle, a positive force feed, also force feed grass seed attachment. we also manufacture the seeder with cultivators of different widths. for circulars and prices address the manufacturers, hart, hitchcock, & co., peoria, ill. when you write mention the prairie farmer. [illustration of coulter parts] don't be humbugged with poor, cheap coulters. all farmers have had trouble with their coulters. in a few days they get to wobbling, are condemned and thrown aside. in our "boss" coulter we furnish a tool which can scarcely be worn out; and when worn, the wearable parts, a prepared wood journal, and movable thimble in the hub (held in place by a key) can be easily and cheaply renewed. we guarantee our "boss" to plow more acres than any other three coulters now used. our "o.k." clamp attaches the coulter to any size or kind of beam, either right or left hand plow. we know that after using it you will say it is the best tool on the market. ask your dealer for it. manufactured by the boss coulter co., bunker hill, ill. "the golden belt" along the kansas division u. p. r'way. kansas lands stock raising buffalo grass pasture summer and winter. wool-growing unsurpassed for climate, grasses, water. corn and wheat , , bus. corn. , , wheat. fruit the best in the eastern market. pamphlets and maps free. b. mcallaster, land commis'r, kansas city, mo. [illustration of a typewriter] the standard remington type-writer is acknowledged to be the only rapid and reliable writing machine. it has no rival. these machines are used for transcribing and general correspondence in every part of the globe, doing their work in almost every language. any young man or woman of ordinary ability, having a practical knowledge of the use of this machine may find constant and remunerative employment. all machines and supplies, furnished by us, warranted. satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded. send for circulars wyckoff, seamans & benedict. east madison st. chicago, ill. grateful--comforting. epps's cocoa. breakfast. "by a thorough knowledge of the natural laws which govern the operations of digestion and nutrition, and by a careful application of the fine properties of well-selected cocoa, mr. epps has provided our breakfast tables with a delicately flavored beverage which may save us many heavy doctors' bills. it is by the judicious use of such articles of diet that a constitution may be gradually built up until strong enough to resist every tendency to disease. hundreds of subtle maladies are floating around us ready to attack wherever there is a weak point. we may escape many a fatal shaft by keeping ourselves well fortified with pure blood and a properly nourished frame."--_civil service gazette_. made simply with boiling water or milk. sold only in half-pound tins by grocers, labeled thus: james epps & co., homoeopathic chemists, london, england. when you write mention the prairie farmer. nebraska seed corn. i have about , bushels of very choice selected yellow corn, which i have tested and know all will grow, which i will put into good sacks and ship by freight in not less than -bushel lots at $ per bushel of lbs., ears. it is very large yield and early maturing corn. this seed is well adapted to ohio, indiana, michigan, illinois, and the whole northwest. send money by p.o. order, registered letter, or draft. address: c. h. lee, silver creek, merrick co., neb. note--mr. c. h. lee is my brother-in-law, and i guarantee him in every way reliable and responsible. m. j. lawrence, ed. ohio farmer. [illustration of a pocket watch] we will send you a watch or a chain by mail or express, c. o. d., to be examined, before paying any money and if not satisfactory, returned at our expense. we manufacture all our watches and save you per cent. catalogue of styles free. every watch warranted. address: standard american watch co., pittsburgh pa. [illustration of an anvil-vise tool] anvil, vise, out off tool for farm and home use. sizes, $ . , $ . , $ . . sold by hardware dealers. to introduce, one free to first person who gets up club of four. agents wanted. write for circulars. cheney anvil & vise co., detroit, mich. agents wanted everywhere to solicit subscriptions for this paper. write prairie farmer publishing co., chicago, for particulars. to preserve the health use the magneton appliance co.'s magnetic lung protector! price only $ . they are priceless to ladies, gentlemen, and children with weak lungs; no case of pneumonia or croup is ever known where these garments are worn. they also prevent and cure heart difficulties, colds, rheumatism, neuralgia, throat troubles, diphtheria, catarrh, and all kindred diseases. will wear any service for three years. are worn over the under-clothing. catarrh it is needless to describe the symptoms of this nauseous disease that is sapping the life and strength of only too many of the fairest and best of both sexes. labor, study, and research in america, europe, and eastern lands, have resulted in the magnetic lung protector, affording cure for catarrh, a remedy which contains no drugging of the system, and with the continuous stream of magnetism permeating through the afflicted organs, must restore them to a healthy action. we place our price for this appliance at less than one-twentieth of the price asked by others for remedies upon which you take all the chances, and we especially invite the patronage of the many persons who have tried drugging their stomachs without effect. how to obtain this appliance. go to your druggist and ask for them. if they have not got them, write to the proprietors, enclosing the price, in letter at our risk, and they will be sent to you at once by mail, post-paid. send stamp for the "new departure in medical treatment without medicine," with thousands of testimonials, the magneton appliance co., state street, chicago, ill. note.--send one dollar in postage stamps or currency (in letter at our risk) with size of shoe usually worn, and try a pair of our magnetic insoles, and be convinced of the power residing in our magnetic appliances. positively _no cold feet where they are worn, or money refunded_. [illustration of person holding a card] print your own cards labels, envelopes, etc. with our # printing press. larger sizes for circulars, et., $ to $ . for pleasure, money-making, young or old. everything easy, printed instructions. send stamps for catalogue of presses type, cards, etc., to the factory. kelsey & co., meriden, conn. general news. st. louis is to have a dog show about the middle of april. south chicago had a $ , fire on the night of the th. new york is to have a new water supply to cost $ , , . there are about , northern tourists in florida at this time. another conspiracy against the government is brewing in spain. a sister of john brown, of osawatomie is a resident of des moines. dakota will spend nearly a million and a half for school purposes this year. king's opera house and several adjacent buildings at knoxville, tenn., were burned monday night. a child in philadelphia has just been attacked by hydrophobia from the bite of a dog three years ago. captain traynor, who once crossed the atlantic in a dory, now proposes to make the trip in a rowboat. during the present century , , copies of the bible have been printed in different languages. the governor general at trieste was surprised tuesday by the explosion of a bomb in front of his residence. the man who fired the first gun in the battle of gettysburg lives in malvern, iowa. his name is dick gidley. st. patrick's day was appropriately (as the custom goes) celebrated in chicago, and the other large cities of the country. kansas has newspapers, including dailies, weeklies, semi-weeklies, monthlies, semi-monthlies, tri-monthlies, and quarterlies. a dubuque watchmaker has invented a watch movement which has no dial-wheels, and is said will create a revolution in watch-making. in the trial of orrin a. carpenter for the murder of zura burns, now in progress at petersburg, illinois, the prosecution has rested its case. all the members of the united states senate signed a telegram to simon cameron, now in florida, congratulating him on his eighty-fifth birthday. the inventor of a system of electric lighting announces that he is about to use the water-power at niagara to furnish light to sixty-five cities. the british leaders in egypt have offered a reward of $ , for the capture of osman digma, the rebel leader, whom gen. graham has now defeated in two battles. the gulf, colorado and santa fe road is at war with the western union telegraph company in texas, and sends ten-word messages through that state for fifteen cents. thirty-four counties and twenty-one railroads between pittsburg and cairo report fifty-five bridges destroyed by the february flood. the estimated cost of replacing them is $ , . there is a movement on foot in chicago which may result in the holding of both the national conventions in battery d hall, which is said to have better acoustic properties than the exposition building. it is reported that more than six thousand indians are starving at fort peck agency. game has entirely disappeared, and those indians who have been turning their attention to farming, raised scarcely anything last year. the announcement is made at st. louis that the pacific express company lost $ , by prentiss tiller and his accomplices, and that $ , of the amount is still missing. tiller, the thief, and a supposed accomplice, are under arrest. the british house of commons was in session all last saturday night, considering war measures. it is rumored that parliament will be dissolved, and a new election held to ascertain if the ministry measures are pleasing to the majority of the people. the crevasse at carrollton, louisiana, has been closed. a break occurred monday morning in the mulatto levee, near baton rouge, and at last advices was forty feet wide and six feet deep, threatening all the plantations down to plaquemine. the egyptian rebels, as they are called, fight with great bravery. so far, however, they have been unable to cope with their better armed and disciplined enemy, but it is reported that they are not at all discouraged, but swear they will yet drink the blood of the turks and their allies from england. [illustration: markets] financial and commercial. office of the prairie farmer,} chicago. march , . } there was a better feeling in banking circles on monday but transactions were not heavy. interest rates remain at @ per cent. eastern exchange sold between banks at c per $ , premium. foreign exchange unchanged. the failures in the united states during the past seven days are reported to have numbered , and in canada and the provinces , a total of , as compared with for the previous week, a decrease of . the decrease is principally in the western, middle, and new england states. canada had the same number of failures as for the preceding week. grain and provisions. the week opened with the bears on top and prices were forced downward. speculation was heavy. ocean freights are low, yet but little grain comparatively is going out. london and liverpool advices were not encouraging and the new york markets were easy. corn was unusually dull. wheat.--red winter, in store no. , c; spring no. @ c; no. . @ c on track. corn.--moderately active. car lots no , @ - / c; rejected, c; new mixed, - / c. oats.--no. on track closed - / @ c. rye.--no. @ c. barley.--no. , c; no. , f.o.b. l@ c; no. c. flax.--closed at $ @ on track. timothy.--$ @l per bushel. little doing. clover.--quiet at $ @ for prime. hungarian.--prime @ - / c. buckwheat.-- @ c. millet.-- @ c. provisions.--mess pork. may $ @ . green hams, - / c per lb. short ribs, $ @ per cwt. lard.--$ @ . country produce. note.--the quotations for the articles named in the following list are generally for commission lots of goods and from first hands. while our prices are based as near as may be on the landing or wholesale rates, allowance must be made for selections and the sorting up for store distribution. bran.--quoted at $ @ per ton on track. beans.--hand picked mediums $ @ . hand picked navies, $ @ . butter.--choice to extra creamery, @ c per lb.; fair to good do @ c; fair to choice dairy @ c; common to choice packing stock fresh and sweet, @ c; ladle packed @ c. broom-corn.--good to choice hurl @ c per lb; green self-working @ - / c; red-tipped and pale do @ c; inside and covers @ c; common short corn - / @ - / c; crooked, and damaged, @ c, according to quality. cheese.--choice full-cream cheddars @l c per lb; medium quality do @ c; good to prime full-cream flats @ - / c; skimmed cheddars @ c; good skimmed flats @ c; hard-skimmed and common stock @ c. eggs.--the best brands are quotable at @ c per dozen, fresh. feathers.--quotations: prime live geese feathers @ c per lb.; ducks @ c; duck and geese mixed @ c; dry picked chicken feathers body @ - / c; turkey body feathers @ - / c; do tail @ c; do wing @ c; do wing and tail mixed @ c. hay.--no timothy $ @ per ton; no do $ @ ; mixed do $ @ ; upland prairie $ @ ; no prairie $ @ ; no do $ @ . small bales sell at @ c per ton more than large bales. hides and pelts.--green-cured light hides - / c per lb; do heavy cows c; no damaged green-salted hides - / c; green-salted calf @ - / cents; green-salted bull c; dry-salted hides cents; no. two-thirds price; no. dry flint @ - / c, sheep pelts salable at @ c for the estimated amount of wash wool on each pelt. all branded and scratched hides are discounted per cent from the price of no. . hops.--prime to choice new york state hops @ c per lb; pacific coast of @ c; fair to good wisconsin @ c. honey and beeswax.--good to choice white comb honey in small boxes @ c per lb; common and dark-colored, or when in large packages @ c; beeswax ranged at @ c per lb, according to quality, the outside for prime yellow. poultry.--prices for good to choice dry picked and unfrozen lots are: turkeys @l c per lb; chickens @ c; ducks @ c; geese @ c. thin, undesirable, and frozen stock @ c per lb less than these figures; live offerings nominal. potatoes.--good to choice @ c per bu. on track; common to fair @ c. illinois sweet potatoes range at $ @ per bbl for yellow. tallow and grease.--no country tallow @ - / c per lb; no do - / @ - / c. prime white grease @ - / c; yellow - / @ - / ; brown - / @ . vegetables.--cabbage, $ @ per ; celery, @ c per per doz bunches; onions, $ @ per bbl for yellow, and $ for red; turnips, $ @ per bbl for rutabagas, and $ for white flat. pie plant, c per lb. spinach, $ @ per bbl. cucumbers, $ @ per doz; radishes, c per doz; lettuce, c per doz. wool.--from store range as follows for bright wools from wisconsin, illinois, michigan, indiana, and eastern iowa--dark western lots generally ranging at @ c per lb. less. coarse and dingy tub @ good medium tub @ unwashed bucks' fleeces @ fine unwashed heavy fleeces @ fine light unwashed heavy fleeces @ coarse unwashed fleeces @ low medium unwashed fleeces @ fine medium unwashed fleeces @ fine washed fleeces @ coarse washed fleeces @ low medium washed fleeces @ fine medium washed fleeces @ colorado and territory wools range as follows: lowest grades @ low medium @ medium @ fine @ wools from new mexico: lowest grades @ part improved @ best improved @ burry from c to c off; black c to c off. live stock markets. the total receipts and shipments for last week were as follows: received. shipped. cattle , , calves hogs , , sheep , , cattle.--diseased cattle of all kinds, especially those having lump-jaws, cancers, and running sore, are condemned and killed by the health officers. shippers will save freight by keeping such stock in the country. receipts were fair on sunday and monday and the demand not being very brisk prices dropped a little. the supply of choice beeves was light. we quote choice to prime steers $ @ good to choice steers @ fair to good shipping steers @ common to medium dressed beef steers @ very common steers @ cows, choice to prime @ cows, common to choice @ cows, inferior @ common to prime bulls @ stockers, common to choice @ feeders, fair to choice @ milch cows, per head @ veal calves, per lbs @ hogs.--all sales of hogs in this market are made subject to a shrinkage of lbs for piggy sows and lbs for each stag. dead hogs sell at - / c per lb for weight of lbs and over, and c for weights of less than lbs. with the exception of cripples and milch cows, all stock is sold per lbs live weight. there were about , head more on sunday and monday than for same days last week, the receipts reaching , head. all but the poorest lots were readily taken at steady prices. common to choice light bacon hogs were sold from $ to $ , their weights averaging @ lbs. rough packing lots sold at $ @ . and heavy packing and shipping hogs averaging @ lbs brought $ @ . skips were sold at $ @$ . sheep.--this class of stock seems to be on the increase at the yards. sunday and monday brought hither , head, an increase of , over receipts a week ago. prices weakened a little. sales ranged at $ - / @ for common to choice, the great bulk of the offerings consisting of nebraska sheep. markets by telegraph. new york, march .--cattle--steers sold at $ @ per cwt, live weight; fat bulls $ @ ; exporters used car-loads, and paid $ @ per cwt, live weight, for good to choice selections; shipments for the week, head live cattle; , qrs beef; , carcasses mutton. sheep and lambs--receipts , head; making , head for the week; strictly prime sheep and choice lambs sold at about the former prices, but the market was uncommonly dull for common and even fair stock, and a clearance was not made; sales included ordinary to prime sheep at $ @ - / per cwt, but a few picked sheep reached $ ; ordinary to choice yearlings $ @ ; spring lambs $ @ per head. hogs--receipts , head, making , for the week; live dull and nearly nominal; car-loads sold at $ @ per pounds. st. louis, march .--cattle--receipts , head; shipments , head; wet weather and liberal receipts caused weak and irregular prices, and some sales made lower; export steers $ @ ; good to choice $ @ ; common to medium $ @ ; stockers and feeders $ @ ; corn-fed texans $ @ . sheep--receipts head; shipments head; steady; common to medium $ @ ; good to choice $ @ ; extra $ @ ; texans $ @ . kansas city, march --cattle--receipts , head; weak and slow; prices unsettled; native steers, , to , lbs, $ @ ; stockers and feeders $ @ ; cows $ @ . hogs--receipts , head; good steady; mixed lower; lots to lbs, $ to ; mainly $ @ . sheep--receipts , head; steady; natives, lbs, $ . east liberty, march .--cattle--dull and unchanged; receipts , head; shipments , head. hogs--firm; receipts , head; shipments , head; philadelphias $ @ ; yorkers $ @ . sheep--dull and unchanged; receipts , head; shipments head. cincinnati, o., march .--hogs--steady; common and light, $ @ ; packing and butchers', $ @ ; receipts, , head; shipments, head. miscellaneous. [illustration of a steamer] sperry's agricultural steamer. the safest and best steam generator for cooking feed for stock, heating water, etc.; will heat a barrel of cold water to boiling in minutes. d. r. sperry & co, mfgs. of the profit farm boiler. caldrons, etc., batavia, ill. f. rettig, de kalb, ill., breeder of light brahmas, plymouth rocks, black and partridge cochin fowls, white and brown leghorns, w. c. bl. polish fowls and pekin ducks. send for illustrated catalogue. musical. knabe pianofortes. unequalled in tone, touch, workmanship and durability. william knabe & co. nos. and west baltimore street, baltimore. no. fifth avenue, n. y. miscellaneous. farmers read what a wheat-grower says of his experience with the saskatchawan fife wheat it is the best wheat i ever raised or saw. i sowed one quart and got from it three bushels of beautiful wheat weighing pounds to the bushel, which took the first premium at our county fair. i have been offered $ a bushel for my seed, but would not part with a handful of it. if i could not get more like it, i would not sell the three bushels i raised from the quart for $ . wm. steabner, sorlien's mill, yellow medicine co., minn. farmers, if you want to know more of this wheat, write to w. j. abernethy & co, minneapolis, minn., for their -page circular describing it. when you write mention the prairie farmer. the sugar hand book a new and valuable treatise on sugar canes, (including the minnesota early amber) and their manufacture into syrup and sugar. although comprised in small compass and _furnished free to applicants_, it is the best practical manual on sugar canes that has yet been published. blymer manufacturing co, cincinnati o. _manufacturers of steam sugar machinery, steam engines, victor cane mill, cook sugar evaporator, etc._ farms. minnesota. dakota. less than railroad prices, on long time. send for lists and prices. graves & vinton, st. paul, minn. by mail post-paid: choice year apple, $ per ; , $ root-grafts, , $ . ; , , $ . strawberries, doz., c.; , $ . blackberries, raspberries, red and black, c. dozen; , $ . two year concord and other choice grapes, doz $ . . early telephone, our best early potato, lbs. $ . this and other choice sorts by express or freight customer paying charges, pk. c., bu. $ . . price list free. f. k. phoenix & son, delavan, wis. lang's pig forceps. [illustration of forceps] to aid animals in giving birth. $ . post-paid. agents wanted. for particulars address g. j. lang. malcom, iowa. gossamer garments free. to any reader of this paper who will agree to show our goods and try to influence sales among friends we will send post-paid two full size ladies' gossamer rubber waterproof garments as samples, provided you cut this out and return with cts,. to pay cost, postage, etc. empire mfg. co. williamsburg. n. y. valuable farm of acres in wisconsin _to exchange for city property_. beautiful situation on bank of lake. fine hunting and fishing, suitable for summer resort. rods from village and railway station. acres under cultivation. good buildings. milwaukee or chicago property preferred. k., care of lord & thomas. strawberries and other small fruit plants a specialty. catalogues free on application. address, phil. strubler, naperville, du page county, ill. root grafts , best varieties for the northwest. in lots from , upward to suit planter, at $ to $ per thousand. now ready. send for list. j. c. plumb & son, milton, wis. silver globe onion seed. send in your order for a supply of genuine silver globe onion seed. guaranteed pure, at $ . per lb. we have a sample of the onion at our store! watts & wagner s. water st., chicago. free extra large cards, imported designs, name on cts, pks. and lady's velvet purse or gent's pen knife blades, for $ . acme card factory, clintonville, ct. silks plushes and brocade velvets for crazy patchwork. send for c. or $ package. empire silk works, clintonville, ct. chromo cards, no alike, name on, and sheets scrap pictures, c. j. b. husted, nassau, n. y. the biggest thing out illustrated book sent free. (new) e. nason & co., fulton st., new york. transcriber's notes: italics are indicated with underscores. punctuation and hyphenation were standardized. missing letters within words were added, e.g. 'wi h' and 't e' were changed to 'with' and 'the,' respectively. footnote was moved to the end of the section to which it pertains. duplicate words, e.g. 'in in,' were removed. substitutions: --> for pointing hand graphic. 'per' for a graphic in the 'markets' section, e.g. 'lambs $ @ per head.' other corrections: 'pagn' to 'page' ... table of contents entry for 'entomological' 'frauk' to 'frank' ... frank dobb's wives, ... in table of contents ' ' to ' ' ... ' - .' table of contents entry for 'literature' 'dolly' to 'dally' to ... 'dilly dally' ... in table of contents 'whcih' to 'which' ... point upon which i beg leave ... 'pollenation' to 'pollination' ... before pollination ... following pollination ... 'some' to 'same' ... lot received the same treatment ... 'two' to 'to' ... asking me to buy him ... 'gurantee' to 'guarantee' ... are a guarantee against them ... 'farmr' to 'farmer' ... prairie farmer county map ... 'or' to 'of' ... with an ear of corn ... ' ' to ' ' ... tariff of on wools ... 'earthern' to 'earthen' ... earthen vessels ... 'of' added ... the inside of the mould ... 'factorymen' to 'factory men' ... our factory men will make ... 'hear.' missing in the original. 'heigth' to 'height' ... eighteen inches in height,... 'holstien' to 'holstein' ... the famous holstein cow ... 'us' to 'up' ... the skins are sewed up so as to ... 'postcript' to 'postscript' ...contain a postscript which will read ... 'whlie' to 'while' ... cluster upon them while feeding ... 'varities' to 'varieties' ... new varieties of potatoes ... 'arrangment' to 'arrangement' ... conclude the arrangment ... 'purfumes' to 'perfumes' ... with certain unctuous perfumes ... 'mr.' to 'mrs.' ... continued mrs. gunkettle,... 'accordi?gly' to 'accordingly' ... a romantic eminence accordingly... 'ridicuously' to 'ridiculously' ... was simply ridiculously miserable. 'wabbling' to 'wobbling' ... they get to wobbling,... 'sutble' to 'subtle' ... hundreds of subtle maladies ... 'weightt' to 'weight' ... for weight of lbs ... 'recipts' to 'receipts' ... lambs--receipts , head;... proofreading canada team (http://www.pgdpcanada.net) note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h.zip) transcriber's note: text in italics is contained within underscores, i.e.: _italics_. additional notes can be found at the end of the text. the rural science series edited by l. h. bailey farm boys and girls * * * * * the rural science series the soil. the spraying of plants. milk and its products. the fertility of the land. the principles of fruit-growing. bush-fruits. fertilizers. the principles of agriculture. th ed. irrigation and drainage. the farmstead. rural wealth and welfare. the principles of vegetable-gardening. farm poultry. the feeding of animals. the farmer's business handbook. the diseases of animals. the horse. how to choose a farm. forage crops. bacteria in relation to country life. the nursery-book. plant-breeding. th ed. the forcing-book. the pruning-book. fruit-growing in arid regions. rural hygiene. dry-farming. law for the american farmer. farm boys and girls. the training and breaking of horses. _others in preparation._ * * * * * [illustration: plate i. fig. .--at least once each day the busy farm father may think of a way to combine his work with the children's play.] farm boys and girls by william a. mckeever professor of philosophy kansas state agricultural college new york the macmillan company all rights reserved copyright, , by the macmillan company. set up and electrotyped. published february, . reprinted august, ; january, june, . norwood press j. s. cushing co.--berwick & smith co. norwood, mass., u.s.a. dedicated to the service of the ten million boys and girls who are enrolled in the rural schools of america preface in the preparation of this book i have had in mind two classes of readers; namely, the rural parents and the many persons who are interested in carrying forward the rural work discussed in the several chapters. it has been my aim to give as much specific aid and direction as possible. the first two chapters constitute a mere outline of some of the fundamental principles of child development. it would be fortunate if the reader who is unfamiliar with such principles could have a course of reading in the volumes that treat them extensively. nearly every suggestion given in the main body of the book is based on what has already either been undertaken with a degree of success or planned for in some rural community. i am very greatly indebted to the following persons and firms for their kindness and generosity in lending pictures and cuts for illustrating the book: e. t. fairchild, state superintendent of public instruction, topeka, kansas; j. w. crabtree, principal state normal school, river falls, wisconsin; george w. brown, superintendent of edgar county, paris, illinois; o. j. kern, superintendent of winnebago county, rockford, illinois; miss jessie fields, superintendent of page county, clarinda, iowa; a. d. holloway, general secretary, county y.m.c.a., marysville, kansas; dr. myron t. scudder, of rutgers college; doubleday, page & company, garden city, new york; _rural manhood_, new york city; _the farmer's voice_, chicago, illinois; _the american agriculturist_, new york city; _the oklahoma farmer_, oklahoma city, oklahoma; _the inland farmer_, lexington, kentucky; _the farmer's advocate_, winnipeg, canada. my thanks are also due _successful farming_, of des moines, iowa, for permission to use excerpts from president kirk's article on the model school, and portions of a series of brief articles written for the same magazine by myself. the references given at the close of the chapters have been selected with considerable care. it will be found in nearly every case that they give helpful and more extended discussions of the several topics treated in the preceding chapter. william a. mckeever. manhattan, kansas. table of contents chapter page i. building a good life what is a good life? . good health . usefulness . moral strength . social efficiency . religious interest . happiness is the human stock comparatively sound? ii. the time to build what of the human instincts the dawning instincts social sensitiveness helpful iii. the rural home and character development what agencies build up character? . play . work . recreation moving to town for the children a back-to-the-country club iv. the country mother and the children poor conditions of women for the sake of the children . surplus nerve energy . a rest period . the home conveniences . the mother's outings . the home help . the children shield the mother . planning for the children . a common conspiracy v. constructing the country dwelling plans and specifications not available what appeals to the children the house plan how one farmer does it outbuildings and equipment human rights prior to animal rights the children's room the evening hour vi. juvenile literature in the farm home how good thinking grows up and flourishes types of literature a selected list literature on child-rearing . periodicals on child-rearing . books on child-rearing vii. the rural church and the young people decadence of rural life work for the ministry the country minister a mistake in training rural child-rearing the churches too narrow constructive work of the church an innovation in the rural church spiritualize child life a summary viii. the transformation of the rural school radical changes in the view-point and method all have a right to culture work for a longer term compulsory attendance laws needed better schoolhouses and equipment . location . the water supply . size and adaptation of grounds . improvement of school grounds a model rural school the cornell schoolhouse help make a school play ground general instruction in agriculture domestic economy and home sanitation consolidation of rural schools more high schools needed better rural teachers needed ix. the county young men's christian association boys leave the farm too young purposes of the county young men's christian association how to organize a county organization . select a good leader . local leaders necessary . a committee on finance . little property ownership how to conduct the work . local and county athletic clubs . debating and literary clubs . receptions and suppers . educational tours and problems . camping and hiking . exhibitions spirituality not lost sight of work in a sparsely settled country x. the farmer and his wife as leaders of the young preparation for the service work persistently for social unity corn-raising and bread-baking clubs other forms of contests the improvement of the school situation home and school play problems a neighborhood library holidays and recreation for the young many over-work their children federation for country-life progress the vocations of boys and girls other local possibilities the boy scout movement rural boy scouts in kansas xi. how much work for the country boy see that the work is for the boy's sake not enforced labor, but mastery provide vacations for the boy a tentative schedule of hours think out a reasonable plan xii. how much work for the country girl a balanced life for the girl work begins with obedience working the girls in the field some specific suggestions do you own your daughter? difficult to make a schedule teach the girl self-supremacy summary xiii. social training for farm boys and girls a happy mean is needed a social renaissance in the country conditions to guard against . the social companionship of girls . bad companionships for boys . secret sex habits . the so-called bad habits a center of community life invite the young to the house how to conduct a social entertainment what about the country dance? additional forms of entertainment . the social hour at the religious services . a country literary society . the social side of the economic clubs some concluding suggestions xiv. the farm boy's interest in the business what is in your boy? much experimentation necessary . willingness to work . ability to save start on a small scale give your son a square deal keep the boy's perfect good will some will be retained on the farm the awakening often comes from without an awakening in the south partnership between father and son summary and concluding suggestions xv. business training for the country girl is the country girl neglected? why the girl leaves the farm certain rules to be observed . teach the girl to work . teach her business sense . train her to transact personal business . make her the family accountant . miserliness to be avoided . teach her to give . teach the meaning of a contract . prepare her to deal with grafters should there be an actual investment? xvi. what schooling should the country boy have changes in rural school conditions the boy a bundle of possibilities classes of native ability the great talented class round out the boy's nature other important matters develop an interest in humanity xvii. what schooling should the country girl have special problems relating to the girl protecting the girl at school lessons in music and art the reward will come in time the mother's office as teacher home-life education education for supremacy an outlook for social life xviii. the farm boy's choice of a vocation should the farmer's son farm? impatience of parents what of predestination? three methods of vocational training . the apprentice method . the cultural method . the developmental method the farmer fortunate what college for the country boy? the foundation in work clean up the place money value of an agricultural education a successful vocation certain xix. the farm girl's preparation for a vocation what is the outlook? desirable occupations for women . may teach the young . may take up stenography . may do social work . may secure clerkships a college course for the girl associations with refined young men make the daughter attractive summary and conclusion xx. conclusion and future outlook strive for preconceived results consult expert advice meet each awakening interest work for social democracy the outlook very promising the modern service training the state doing its part the new era of religion final conclusion index illustrations plate i. fig. . at least once each day the busy farm father may think of a way to combine his work with the children's play _frontispiece_ facing page ii. fig. . canadian boys breaking young oxen iii. fig. . an attractive kansas home iv. fig. . a day nursery in the country v. fig. . a rural home in the south vi. fig. . a well-equipped farmhouse vii. fig. . children playing under the shade trees viii. figs. - . rural church, plainfield, illinois ix. fig. . village church at ogden, kansas x. fig. . corn sunday in an illinois church xi. fig. . a country schoolhouse in california fig. . type of model rural school used in kansas xii. fig. . model rural school at kirksville, missouri. normal xiii. fig. . rear view of the kirksville school xiv. fig. . using babcock tester xv. figs. - . consolidated school and those it displaced xvi. fig. . the cornell rural schoolhouse xvii. fig. . a.y.m.c.a. play club xviii. fig. . y.m.c.a. convention in ohio xix. fig. . jerry moore, champion corn raiser xx. fig. . a lonely schoolhouse xxi. fig . tennis in the country fig. . country play festival xxii. fig. . industrial exhibit in rural school xxiii. fig. . agricultural and domestic science club xxiv. fig. . school and church in canada xxv. fig. . kansas prize winners xxvi. fig. . girls' doll display xxvii. fig. . boys whittling xxviii. fig. . study of corn xxix. fig. . school gardeners xxx. fig. . country schoolgirls xxxi. fig. . a girls' class in sewing xxxii. fig. . girl sowing seed fig. . boy thinning vegetables farm boys and girls chapter i _building a good life_ if you were about to begin the construction of a dwelling house, what questions would most likely be uppermost in your mind? if this house were intended for your own use, you would doubtless consider among other important matters those of comfort, convenience of arrangement, attractiveness of appearance, strength, and durableness. the great variety of dwellings to be seen on every hand is outwardly expressive of the great variety of ideals in the minds of the people who construct them. no matter what means there may be available for the purpose, it may be said that he who builds a house thereby illustrates in concrete form his inner character. with practically the same quality of materials, one man will construct a house apparently with the thought that its chief purpose is to be looked at. much work and expense will be put upon outer show and embellishment, while in its inner arrangements it may be exceedingly cramped and thoughtlessly put together. another will erect his building with a thought of placing it on the market. cheap workmanship, weak and faulty joinings, and the like, will be concealed by some thin covering meant to last until a profitable sale has been made and some innocent purchaser caught with a mere shell of a house in his possession. occasionally, however, there is found a man whose plans conform to such ideals as those first named. what is a good life? as with the construction of a house, so it is in some measure with the building of a character. some lives apparently are constructed to look at; that is, with the thought that outer adornment and a mere appearance of worth and beauty constitute the essential qualities. other lives are, in a sense, made to sell. not infrequently parents are found developing their boys and girls as if the chief purpose were to place them somewhere or other in the best possible money market. a life is worth only as much as it will bring in dollars and cents, is apparently the predominating thought of such persons. and then, occasionally, a life is built to _live in_; that is, with the idea that intrinsic worth constitutes the essential nature of the ideal character. but what _is_ a good life? and why is not this precisely the question for all parents to ask themselves at the time they begin the development of the lives of their own boys and girls? assuming a fairly sound physical and mental inheritance on the part of the child and the given environment as the raw materials of construction, what ideals should parents have uppermost in mind before undertaking the tremendously important and interesting duties of constructing worthy manhood and womanhood out of the inherent natures of their children? . _good health._--it is a difficult task to develop a sound, efficient life without the fundamental quality of good health. so it may be well to remind parents of this fact and to urge them especially to avoid in the lives of the children, first, the beginnings of those lighter ailments which frequently grow into menacing habits--for example, the diseases that become chronic as a result of unnecessary exposure to the weather--and second, those various contagious diseases which so often permanently deplete the health of children, such as scarlet fever and whooping cough. it is now held by medical authority that every reasonable effort should be made to prevent children from taking such infectious ailments--that the so-called diseases of children can and should be practically all avoided. . _usefulness._--the newer ideals of character-building call for the early training of all children as if they were to enter permanently upon some bread-winning pursuit. such training is a most direct means of culture and refinement, provided it be correlated with the proper amount of book learning and play and recreation. such uniform and character-building discipline tends to preserve the solidarity of the race, and to acquaint all the young with the thoughts and feeling of the great productive classes. it may be this is now regarded as both a direct means of culture and of leading the young mind into an intimate acquaintance with the lives of the masses. such training is regarded also as one of the best means of preserving our social democracy. therefore, although on account of inherited wealth the child may apparently be destined for a life of comparative ease, even then there is every justification for teaching him early how to work as if he must do so to earn his own living. much more will be said about this point later. . _moral strength._--in the construction of a good life, moral strength must be estimated as one of the important foundation stones. but this quality is not so much a gift of nature or an inheritance as it is an acquisition. it cannot be bought or acquired through merely hearing about it, but it must come as a result of a large number of experiences of trial and error. the child acquires moral self-reliance from the practice of overcoming temptation in proportion to his strength, the test being made heavier as fast as his ability to withstand temptation increases. as will be shown later, it proves weakening to the character of the growing child to keep him entirely free from temptation and the possible contamination of his character in order that he may grow up "good." . _social efficiency._--the good life is not merely self-sustaining in an economic way, but it is also trained in the performance of altruistic deeds. in building up the lives of the young it will be necessary and most helpful to think of the matter of social efficiency. therefore, it will be seen to that the child have practice in assuming the leadership among his fellows, in taking the initiative on many little occasions, and in some instances to the extent of standing out against the combined sentiment of his young associates. of course, during all this time he will be backed strongly by the advice and the insistent direction of his parents, the idea being to induce him to think out his own social problems and to carry forward any suitable plans of a social nature that he may devise. . _religious interest._--few parents will deny that religious instruction is just as essential to the development of a good society as is intellectual instruction. indeed, there is much evidence to bear out the conviction that religion is a deep and permanent instinct in all normal human beings. this being the case, it is fair to say that such an instinct should have some form of awakening and indulgence in the life of the child. however, there is no thought or intention of prescribing any particular form of religious faith. he might at least be sent to sunday school and to church regularly where he may be led to do a small amount of religious thinking on his own account. . _happiness._--the good life is a happy life. but nearly all the students of human problems seem to think that happiness eludes the grasp of the one who seeks it in a direct way. "i want my children to be happy and enjoy life," is often the remark of well-meaning parents. they then proceed as if joy and happiness could be had for money. it is true that during his early years of indifference to any serious concern or personal responsibility, the child may be made extremely happy by giving him practically everything his childish appetites may call for and allowing him to grow up in idleness. but there comes a time when the normal individual begins to question his own personal and intrinsic worth. the instincts and desires of mature life come on and if there be not available the means for the realization of the better instinctive ambitions, then bitterness and woe are likely to become one's permanent portion. however, it may be put down as a certainty that happiness and contentment will naturally come in full measure into the life that has been well built during the years of childhood and youth. if the good health has been conserved, a life of usefulness and service prepared for, moral strength built into the character, social efficiency looked after continuously, and something of religious experience not neglected--it will most certainly follow as the day follows the night that the wholesome enjoyments and the durable satisfactions of living will come to such an individual. [illustration: plate ii. fig. .--these canadian lads are enjoying their first lessons in live-stock management. we call their conduct play, but surely no one was ever more in earnest than they.] is the human stock comparatively sound? there are now among the students of the home problems many who are seriously interested in the matter of breeding a better human stock. many noteworthy conclusions have already been reached, and ample proofs have been produced to show that the human animal follows the same general lines of evolution as do the lower animal orders. it is shown in general, for example, that little or nothing that man has learned or acquired during his life is transmitted to his offspring. that is, even though a man devote many years to the intensive study of music or mathematics or the languages, such study will not affect the ability of his child in the study of the specialized subject. the same unaffected result obtains in respect to any other form of expertness of the merely acquired sort. for example, the fact that a man through long practice becomes expert in the use of the typewriter does not affect the character of the child in respect to such ability. it is a no less difficult task for the child to learn to master the use of the typewriter keyboard. on the other hand, it is shown very conclusively that physical and mental characters inborn in the life of a parent tend at all times to be transmitted to the child, although many traits are known to be wanting in the first generation of children and to appear in the second or successive generations. according to the law of mendel, the traits of the parents are transmitted to the child about as follows: one-half of the elements of one's physical and mental natures are inherited from his parents, one-fourth from his grandparents, one-eighth from his great-grandparents, and so on. in any given case, however, there might be great variation from this rule of the averages, just as actual men and women vary more or less widely from the average human height of so many feet and inches. there is no thought here of discussing the intricate problems of eugenics. the purpose of this brief dogmatic sketch is that of attempting to induce parents to believe that the great mass of our american-born children are comparatively sound in their physical and mental inheritances. the pathologists profess to be able to prove that nature is most kind to the new-born child in respect to inheritance of disease. in fact, it is shown that very few diseases are directly transmitted through the blood, and that many once so regarded are now found to be infectious in their natures. there is considerable indication, however, that the children of the diseased--tuberculous parents, for example,--inherit a weakened power of resistance for such disease. but this matter is somewhat foreign to our present discussion. best of all, for our present consideration, is the great mass of evidence sustaining the theory that about ninety-nine per cent of our new-born infants are potentially good in an economic and moral sense. that is to say, this great majority of the young humanity have latent within their natures at the beginning of life the possibilities of development into sound, self-reliant manhood and womanhood. so, the writer of these lines would gladly lead rural parents to the point of being very courageous and optimistic about their infant children. he would have them see in the latter all the possibilities of good and efficiency that they may care to attempt to bring out by thoughtful and conscientious training. for that matter, it can be shown that many of the leaders of men are constantly springing up out of the ranks of the common masses and from those of humble parentage. some of these great leaders, it is true, are what may be called accidental geniuses in respect to their native strength and their persistent life purposes. but many others, and perhaps the majority of them, are merely men and women who have been reasonably sound at birth and who have been trained from childhood to maturity in a manner that best served to build up strong, efficient character. references the references given at the close of each chapter are meant to direct the reader to specific treatment of the topics named. it is thought that nearly every chapter or book referred to will be found helpful and instructive to such persons as may naturally become interested in this volume. in some instances a line of comment is given to make clearer the contents of the reference. must children have children's diseases? newton. _ladies' home journal_, april, . _dietetic and hygienic gazette._ gazette publishing company, new york. $ per year, monthly. the miracle of life. j. h. kellogg, m.d. good health publishing company, battle creek, mich. read especially pp. - , "how to be strong." our duty to posterity. editorial. _the independent_, february. . relation of science to man. professor a. w. small. _american journal of sociology_, february, . character building. marian m. george. a. flanagan company. treats the ethical problems of the home. through boyhood to manhood. ennis richmond. chapter , "usefulness." longmans. making the most of our children. mary wood-allen, m.d. chapter ix, "keeping the boy on the farm." mcclurg. youth. g. stanley hall. chapter xii, "moral and religious training." appleton. the contents of a boy. e. l. moore. chapter vi, "social interests." jennings & graham, cincinnati. mind in the making. e. j. swift. chapter ii, "the criminal natures of boys." scribners. the young malefactor. dr. thomas travis. chapter ii, "the child born centuries too late." crowell. the family health. m. solis-cohen, m.d. chapter i, "the preservation of health." penn publishing company, philadelphia. the durable satisfactions of life. dr. charles w. eliot. crowell. points out ably the higher way. the study of children. francis warner, m.d. chapter iv, "observing the child. what to look at and for." the macmillan company. what makes a liberal education. editorial. _the independent_, july , . relation of the physical nature of the child to his mental and moral development. george w. reed. _annual report national educational association_, , p. . chapter ii _the time to build_ we shall continue to assume that the reader, if a parent, is thinking of his child as being in the position of one whose character requires constant attention in order that it may be built up through the right sort of training and the right sort of practices. just as certainly as there is a best time in the season to plow corn and also a time not to plow, as there is a time to plow deep and another time to plow shallow, so there is unquestionably a best time to give the child any particular form of training or to withhold it. in general, it may be said that the most effective training in respect to the human young is that which centers most closely around the childish interests and instincts. what of the human instincts by observing critically for a few days the conduct of an infant child, one may notice two or three pronounced instincts at work producing helpful results in the little life. . there is the instinct to nurse, which is so fundamental in securing the food with which to sustain and build up the body. . there is the accessory instinct of crying, also often necessary as nature's signal for another intake of the food supply. associated with these two instincts are a number of reflexes which take care of the important organic processes, such as digestion, assimilation, and excretion. now, we have practically all there is to the "character" of the human infant. he has, as yet, no instinct for fighting, for sexual love, or for business. and any effort to arouse and make use of the last-named dormant qualities would be futile as well as ridiculous. in respect to a vast majority of the things to be learned, the child is a mere bundle of potentialities, all of which must bide their time for an awakening. in short, wise parents soon learn that the center of life in the infant child is in the stomach, and that if he be fed rightly, kept much in the open air, clothed comfortably, and bathed frequently, the body-building processes will usually go on in a satisfactory manner. . although the little life seems so tiny and the daily round of infantile activities so simple and monotonous, the character-developing processes are already making their subtle beginnings. for example, the first lessons in habit are being inculcated through the comparative rhythm in the infant's life. it will be found both conducive to good health and helpful to character-development to attend to all the infant's needs with strict regularity. let us follow the new-born child around his little cycle and see what happens. first, he is given a hearty meal, which is followed at once by perhaps two hours of profound sleep. then, there is a gradual waking, the body writhes and wiggles slightly, and then more, and then still more, until a loud cry is set up. under healthy conditions the crying should go on for a very few minutes, as it helps to send the good blood through every part of the body, purifying and building up the parts and carrying out the effete matter. the function of excretion is not only thus much aided, but the nervous equilibrium is completely restored. the little life has now swung completely round to the beginning point of two hours previously and it is ready to start on another journey with the intake of another hearty meal. it will be found that the life circle described above continues with slight variations for the first few weeks, the child sleeping probably twenty to twenty-two hours out of twenty-four, if it be in a natural state of health. but slowly the conduct of the infant will become more complex, and that in response to the growths and changes taking place within his body. it will be found that he can take a heartier meal, can stay awake longer, kick harder, wriggle more, and cry louder as the days multiply. in a month or so his eyes will be seen following some brilliant or attractive moving body, while the impulsive movements of the hands will begin to suggest some slight definition of their conduct. not long thereafter, the baby smile will break out in a reflex fashion and the hands will likewise grasp objects placed in the little palms. coördinate with these new activities, nature is at work storing up new nerve structures and cells, especially in the region of the spinal cord and the cranial centers. . the child is all the while learning. as yet, there is little for the caretaker to do other than to feed the infant with exceeding care and regularity, and to enjoy the awakening of the new infant activities. in four to six months, the young learner will lead a much more complex life,--sitting alone, holding things in his hands, and looking about the room. but it must be understood that he still hears and sees very few things in a definite way. then, in the next two or three months he will first creep,--he should in time be induced to do so if possible for the sake of his health,--at length he will stand upright, and finally walk. none of these processes must be hastened, although they may be aided when the inner prompting and strength warrant such conduct. . during the second year there will probably break out with sudden and surprising strength the new instinct of anger. it has been latent there all the time, but the low degree of intelligence and of nerve structure has not given it proper support and indulgence. but on an occasion there is perhaps taken from the child some cherished plaything, when he suddenly flies into a rage, yelling, screaming, kicking, and growing red in the face. this outburst of rage is a most interesting and enjoyable aspect to the parent who rightly understands children, although some ignorantly make it a matter of deep concern, regarding it as significant of a vicious character in the coming boy and man. the purpose of this present discussion is to illustrate how the human instincts come into their functions at various times during the life of the growing child. and the further purpose is to urge that such thing be _watched for and met with just the sort of training necessary for permanent and helpful results_. now, let the little child fly into a rage two or three times and have his anger appeased through indulgence in the thing he cries for, and he has acquired his first lesson in the management of the parent or nurse. he has learned that if he wants a thing, all he needs to do is to squall or yell and the desired results will be forthcoming. but this childish rage really furnishes the occasion for the beginning of some disciplinary lessons. "should i give the child everything he cries for, or withhold the desired object until he quits?" asks an anxious parent. neither rule is necessarily the right one, and yet both, on occasions, may be correct. suppose, instead of the infant you have a five-year-old boy who cries for a loaded revolver he happens to see in your hand. would you give it to him to stop his crying, or withhold it? suppose again he should cry for the return of his own plaything which some one unjustly snatched from him. would you return his plaything to stop his crying, or let him cry it out? now, here is implied the correct answer in dealing with the outburst of anger in the infant. it is all a matter of justice and fairness. if some agency, human or otherwise, snatches his food from his mouth, and the child squalls for its return, indulge the infant at once. if he has been well fed, comfortably clad and bathed, and under every proper consideration should lie still and behave himself, then do not run and take him up because he happens to be trying your patience with his squalling. hold him to it and let him bawl it out. there is really nothing better coming to him if you are thinking of the development of his character--and your own. . so, somewhat later on you will find this same instinct of anger showing itself in the various forms of fighting and quarreling. the parent who understands the true natures of healthy children will not worry for a moment because the children show natural dispositions for contention and combativeness. on the other hand, it will be understood that these very tendencies furnish the occasion of many a lesson in social ethics. how can the child ever learn to be just and fair to his mates or square and considerate in his dealings with adults unless it be through the give-and-take experiences that come from attempting to get more than his share,--and failing much of the time,--and from attempting to over-ride the rights and privileges of others, and having such attempts properly thwarted? indeed, it may be regarded as a great misfortune to the child if he has to grow up as the only one in a home and is denied the daily companionship of those of his own age from whom he may learn justice and fairness as a result of his attempts to get more than is just and fair for himself. . the watchful parents will observe that perhaps some time during the second half year, and with some pronounced repetitions later, there will be clear manifestations of the instinct of fear on the part of the child. again, there is nothing for deep concern other than to meet this instinct in a general way as has been observed for the others named and to give the proper training. fear must have been a human necessity during many years of savagery and barbarism. it still has its positive and negative values in the development of character. it serves as a deterrent from dangerous and criminal acts. it is also found to deter the growing infant from doing many a thing which he ought to be learning to do. fear shows its most interesting aspects in the form of what has been called social sensitiveness; that is, bashfulness, shyness, reticence, and the like. parents should by all means watch closely the various childish and youthful tendencies to fear, allowing those fears which promise to be helpful to remain in the life or to die out slowly through counteracting conduct; and eliminating those other forms which would seem to serve no useful purpose. examples of the latter sort would be the fear of ferocious animals and of murderers. such mortal enemies are so uncommon in this civilized land that fear of them will probably be of no service to life. on the other hand, it may stunt and deter the development of courage. especially do such fears tend to induce the habit of unnecessary concern and deep worry, thus destroying the peace and happiness and cutting off the length of years of many members of our society. . there is no questioning the value of social sensitiveness in respect to the development of character in the young. some degree of bashfulness and embarrassment in dealing with people, especially those regarded by him as of superior worth, may be considered an actual asset in the life of the growing boy. this bashfulness will give him a rich inner experience of doubts and fears, and of hopes and triumphs. slowly, under proper guidance and direction, the sensitiveness wears away through repeated experience of a contrary sort, and such qualities as create a self-reliance take its place. on the other hand, it is doubtless a misfortune, especially for the boy, to become blasé--indifferent and unembarrassed in the presence of people of all ranks and conditions--while he is yet a mere lad. under our present organization of society, the boy who would win the life race must have much experience of trial and error, of failure and success, and of tribulation and triumph; and all that for the sake of a self-reliant character. now, the boy who has lost all sense of embarrassment in the presence of others is likely to be denied the stirring inner experiences just named, and to settle down in an indifferent, self-satisfied attitude toward the big problems of human conduct. it may be counted, therefore, as an indication of much promise and advantage that the country youth and the country maiden continue to be comparatively "green" and bashful during the period of their adolescence. . the instinct of sexual love will manifest itself at the proper time and age. before so doing, certain organic changes and inner nerve developments must take place. parents may learn some lessons from observation of this instinct that will apply to practically all the others. for example, there should be no attempt to hurry the manifestation and the functioning of the instinct, nor should the training necessary for its development and refinement be denied or withheld. of all the many inner awakenings that come to the developing human being, there is probably none that quite matches the surging energy of sexual love in healthy young manhood and womanhood. and to an extraordinary degree, opportunities for instruction and development of the character become present at this time. first of all, parents need to be reminded of the naturalness and wholesomeness of the sex instincts in adolescent boys and girls. they must be urged to provide carefully for its natural growth through the proper commingling of the sexes in a social way, and yet there must be preserved in the young lives just enough strangeness and mystery about the sex matters as to indulge the poetic and the romantic aspects of the unfolding natures. it need not, therefore, be a matter of worry and unusual concern to parents if their fifteen-year-old son and a neighbor's thirteen-year-old daughter show pronounced tendencies to be "crazy in love" with each other. however, this situation furnishes most fitting opportunities for teaching the boy courtly manners, gallantry, consideration for women of all ages; and that through and by means of his own personal experience. in fact, this stirring period of sex-love opens up in the mind of the boy reflections that tend to run out into every possible avenue of his future life. likewise, the girl. that same little girl who shortly ago hated boys and declared she would never have anything to do with them is now manifesting much interest in the youth of her acquaintance. this thing cannot be laughed to scorn, or scolded away, or whipped out of the life of either boy or girl. its roots are in the sex organs as well as in the heart. this first love period furnishes the rarest opportunities for teaching the girl proper lessons in respect to her comeliness, her purity of thought, and the sweetness of her own personal character. if during this time she be withheld entirely from wholesome association with boys and young men, there is a probability that she may become a drone or a mope, and especially that she may lose valuable training in the acquisition of those winsome ways so helpful to young women in the matter of their obtaining suitable life companions. perhaps less need be said in respect to giving the growing son those forms of social training which make it possible for him to win to his side an attractive helpmate. but beyond the question of a doubt there can and should be much done by way of training the daughter in this respect. in addition to her good health, her moral self-reliance, and those other desirable qualities illustrated in a preceding paragraph, the young woman who is thoroughly prepared for meeting successfully the issues of life has had careful training in all the practices that refine and beautify her character. this duty of rural parents to the growing daughter is no less imperative than in the case of city parents. it may be considered as an excellent way of planning for the future happiness and well-being, not merely for one, but doubtless for an entire family, if the growing girl be indulged and directed reasonably in social matters during this period of greatest strength of her natural sex instinct. this thing cannot be safely put off a few years with the thought that the family will move to town and then the girl may have her proper opportunities of training. after such procrastination and neglect, it becomes too late ever to correct the many faults of omission. . there develops somewhat late in the lives of young men and young women what might be called the "homing" instinct, which amounts to nothing other than a deep and pronounced prompting from within to set definitely about the matter of getting into a home of one's own and providing for and building it up. this is different from the mere sex instinct named above, although perhaps an outgrowth of it. it must be noted in passing that this homing instinct, when at its strongest, furnishes the proper occasion for instruction in respect to the home and the home-building affairs. happy indeed is the young man or the young woman who, after a period of such instruction, may have the opportunity of settling down in a suitable dwelling place and there beginning the establishment of the ideal family life. . unquestionably there dawns in the life of normal young men--and perhaps to a milder degree in respect to young women--a pronounced instinct of a business and economic sort. this inner prompting is doubtless associated with the two last named. it may be observed by any person who knows how to study the lives of children and young people that some particular youth who a few months ago was a spendthrift, indifferent of his future needs and welfare, is now heard to declare emphatically again and again that he must get into business, must save and invest his means and provide for his future needs. so, there is not a little evidence in effect that we have here another inner development of the nerve mechanism. and the time is most fit and opportune for the parents to exhaust every reasonable effort to discover what the youth is best suited for as a life practice and to guide him on toward the realization of that purpose. much more will be said in another chapter in respect to the choice of a vocation. references rural parents who develop an intensive interest in the child-training problems will find it most profitable to read somewhat extensively in the texts that are not too direct but that give a careful treatment of the fundamental principles of child psychology. king's and o'shea's books listed below are of this special character. for a fuller list, see chapter vi. the child: a study in the evolution of man. a. f. chamberlain. chapter iv, "the period of childhood." scribner. a sound and somewhat scholarly treatment. boy wanted. nixon waterman. chapter i, "the awakening"; chapter ii, "am i a genius?" forbes & co., chicago. education of the central nervous system. reuben p. halleck. chapter vii, "special sensory training." american book company. the moral life. arthur e. davies. chapter v, "motive: the beginnings of morality." review publishing company, baltimore. psychology. j. r. angell. chapter xvi, "the important human instincts." holt. essentials of psychology. w. b. pillsbury. chapter x, "instinct." macmillan. rural parents will find this entire text a non-technical and fundamental help. development and education. m. v. o'shea. chapter xii, "the critical period." houghton, mifflin company. psychology of child development. irving king. chapter on "instinct." university of chicago press. your boy: his nature and nurture. george a. dickinson, m.d. chapter ii, "elements of character." hodder & stoughton, new york. an introduction to child study. w. b. drummond. chapter xii, "the instincts of children"; chapter xiii, "instincts and habit." longmans. the book is worthy an entire reading. a study of child nature. elizabeth harrison. chapter i, "the instinct of activity." chicago kindergarten college. observing childhood. a. s. draper. _annals american academy_, march, . are we spoiling our boys who have the best chances in life? henry van dyke. scribner's magazine. october, . how to civilize the young savage. dr. g. stanley hall. _mind and body_, june, . chapter iii _the rural home and character development_ that the farm home is an ideal place in which to build up the lives of growing boys and girls has become almost a trite saying. but that rural parents are yet failing to realize the child-nurturing possibilities of such a place may be exemplified in thousands of instances. when we point to the farm home as being the best possible place for rearing children, we mean that it contains all the crude materials for such work, and that there must be in charge of that work some one who is conscious of the many aspects of the problem. so we hope to show the fathers and mothers of the farm community, not what they might do if they were differently situated, but as specifically as possible what there is in the present rural home situation that can be made directly available in the construction of the lives of their children. what agencies build up character? first of all, we must ask, what are the ordinary forces which need to be brought into service in the development of children? at the head of the list, we should name play, as furnishing a great variety of instructive activities; then, work and industry; after that, the recreation that comes properly after the performance of work. so, we have with all their implied meanings the three great child-developing agencies: play, work, recreation. now the question naturally presents itself, can the ordinary farm life be made to furnish in right amount and proportion these three essential elements of character development? . _play._--the necessity of indulging and training properly the play instinct of the child is becoming so fully appreciated of late that many of the state legislatures, and even the national congress, have seen fit to make it a matter of deep concern. in order that all children may have full exercise of the divine, inherent right to play and to learn through play, many so-called child labor laws have been passed. these enactments have prescribed conditions under which children will be permitted to work at gainful occupations, and in the majority of cases they have strictly forbidden such child labor below the ages of fourteen to sixteen. but the foregoing efforts in behalf of the young have been of a somewhat negative sort, merely guaranteeing the child the right to play. on the positive side, much is also being done. the scientific students of child life have been pointing to the great benefits of play and to the present need for larger means and fuller opportunities for play on the part of the masses of children. as an outcome of all this research and public agitation, there is now in progress a general movement which looks to the placing at the disposal of children everywhere the equipment and apparatus necessary for building up the character by means of play experience. the large cities are expending millions of dollars on municipal playgrounds, and the towns and rural communities are catching the spirit also. it has been shown beyond a question that adult life can be prepared for and enriched in many ways by means of scientifically provided play during childhood. two or three results are especially sought through the playground training: ( ) better physical health and increased power to resist disease; ( ) enlarged opportunities for the outlet of the spontaneous activities through the use of the hands and other parts of the body; ( ) the provision of a powerful deterrent of evil thought and deed and of juvenile crime; ( ) the manifold opportunities for learning how to get along with one's fellows and to treat them in fairness and justice. [illustration: plate iii. fig. .--this beautiful kansas home, with its large orchard and many shade trees adjoining, was constructed "away out on the barren plains where no tree will grow." in this place an excellent family of nine children grew up.] it has already been urged that sound health constitutes one of the foundation stones of good character. play is especially conducive to sound health. some may think that work without much if any play will bring about the same results in the child life, but such proves not to be the case. the monotony and drudgery of enforced labor have been crushing the lives of children everywhere, especially until the wise legislation of very recent years prevented such thing. strange to say, the same amount of exertion in spontaneous play may build up and strengthen the physical and mental life of the child. what is the secret of the striking difference in the result? spontaneity! is the answer. the child goes at his play with a joy and an eagerness which are entirely absent from work--a sufficient guarantee that his nature is being fed upon the very stuff which his soul craves. it is true that children will play in a bare room containing nothing more than a pile of trash, but such a situation is woefully lacking on the side of instruction. very little will be learned from a year of such ill-provided play. so, there is every necessary reason for urging that the farm home provide not only the time and the occasion for the play life of the children, but that the means and proper materials also be looked after. at a certain rural home in the state of michigan, where two boys and one girl were growing up, were found the following nearly ideal arrangements for the play life: a small clump of trees, which afforded opportunities for climbing and ample shade during the warm weather; a swing hung between two of the trees; a pole serving as a horizontal bar between two others; and a ladder leading to a rude playhouse constructed between the forks of a branching maple tree. thereabout were seen also a boy's wagon, two home-made sleds and other materials of this same general class, not to mention a fairly well-kept lawn, where the children could romp. now the cost of all the foregoing materials would be trifling in a money sense and not very expensive in point of preparation and work, while they would pay for themselves a hundred-fold in their results for character-development. if necessary, it could even be shown how just such provision for the play of the boys and girls on the farm will in time add to the actual cash value of the place and to the money-earning power of the boys and girls whose lives are being served. it seems altogether fitting to remind rural parents of their duty in respect to their children even though the mortgage may not yet have been lifted, and even though some of the live stock may have to suffer a little, and some of the farm crops deteriorate slightly. let there be provided, first of all, some adequate materials for the indulgence of the play instinct of the child. . _work._--this term implies a wide meaning, and deserves a lengthy discussion. in a chapter to follow under the title "how much work for the country boy," we shall give due attention to it. the purpose here is to advise the parent to make a study of the situation and to make provision for the amount and kind of work and industry necessary for the proper culture of the growing child. first of all, there must be appreciated the sharp distinction between work and play. the latter is spontaneous, allowing the child to follow his caprice of mind. he may take up one play activity and drop it at any moment that another appeals to him more strongly. but with work, the situation is different. the purpose is outside of and not within the performance, as in the case of play. the work looks toward some end necessary of achievement and carries with it the elements of sacrifice, of giving out of one's life something that is his very own in order that some other thing may be acquired. in the case of work the normal child probably at first finds almost any assigned task irksome. he feels that he is being more or less unfairly or unnecessarily driven to it and that when he grows to be a man, he will have a lot of money and hire somebody else to do the work. all natural, healthy-minded boys are at first somewhat stubborn and rebellious in regard to work. no matter how good their parents may be, if merely turned loose in the world without direction and the spur of authority, they will almost invariably avoid manual labor. so it might as well be put down at once as a rule that every boy who is to become a real worker and an industrious character must be set definitely at his tasks while a mere child and held strictly to their performance. after much persistent urging, the young worker begins to forget the thought of being driven to his duty and to acquire instead a habit of industry. by slow degrees he develops within a sense of obligation in relation to work, also a feeling of responsibility for tasks done or left undone. finally, after years of this sort of experience, the young industrialist reaches a point in his life when he can throw himself enthusiastically into some sort of well chosen occupation. and then and there emerges from his inner consciousness the exceeding great joy known to so many of the industrious men and women whose worthy life-long devotion to work is constantly reconstructing this good world in which we live. it will be understood, of course, that the term work as here used includes the school training. the ordinary child regards the appointed duties of lesson getting in the nature of work and feels the same pressure of insistence and compulsion in relation to them. unquestionably, the ordinary school course goes part way toward furnishing discipline in industry. the course of the newer schools about to be instituted throughout the country will reach still farther in this direction. it is very encouraging indeed to observe that the public school curriculum is destined to include, not only the study of books and the recitation of lessons learned from books, but also the many forms of manual labor and industry applicable to the character of the growing child. but until the public school authorities have provided such an ideal course of training, parents must see to it that the class-room duties be thoroughly supplemented with carefully assigned home tasks of the industrial training sort. in a later chapter specific attention will be given the question of the schooling of the country boy and the country girl. . _recreation._--what a vast amount of misunderstanding and misuse there is of this term! observe, if you will, the real meaning of the term or of the kindred word, to re-create. it implies in this use that the body has been depleted, worn out, or fatigued by work and that there is to be a rebuilding of the same. but it is amusing--or would be if it were not so pathetic--to see how city parents often bestir themselves in an effort to provide recreation for their idle boys. many of these boys who are seen loafing about the home town during practically the entire summer vacation period are given an outing in order that they may thus be furnished "recreation"--from indolence. but farm parents are inclined to err on the other side. that is, they tend to over-work their boys and not to give them enough outings to furnish proper recreation and renewed zeal for the work required of them. hence, the need of carefully considering the matter of the outings for the farm boy and girl. it can most probably be shown, for example, that the boy who works on the farm five and a half days of the week and who is given the other half day for rest and recreation--that he does more work in the five and one-half days and does it better than he would do in six full days without the half-holiday. the question here is that of a balanced schedule. how long should the boy be held to his task before being allowed a holiday or recreation period? just how can these half-holidays, outings, and the like, be worked into the farm boy's program so as to make them contributive to the up-building of his character? what of this sort can be done to cause him to return to his assigned tasks with greater zeal and enthusiasm? how can it be provided that the boy may look forward to these outings with a thrill of joy during the long days he has to spend behind the plow or in the harvest field? finally, how can these recreation periods, large and small, be so associated with his work-a-day tasks that he may come to regard farm life as a wholesome type of vocation--one that he may follow with pleasure and profit for himself, and one in which he may succeed so well as to make his achievements constitute a living commendation of such a calling to others? in a later discussion there will be shown many methods whereby the recreation experience of the farm boys and girls may be properly looked after. few persons seem to appreciate the value of solitude as a means of recreating and building up the inner life. probably one of the greatest agencies in the development of many a powerful personality is the fact that its possessor was compelled by force of circumstances while young to spend much time in the company of his or her own thoughts. it is impossible to think intelligently while one is doing any body-straining work; for example, wood sawing or hay pitching. but there are many forms of occupation for boys and girls on the farm which permit of comparative rest of the body. so the foundations of many a worthy career have been laid in the silent reflections of the boy spending the day alone in the woods or on the prairies with his cattle and dog and pony, or sitting on the seat of the riding plow. likewise, the farmer's daughter, during the performance of many simple, non-fatiguing tasks, reflects perforce upon the larger meanings of life and makes out in mind many plans for the time when she hopes to undertake the mastery of various trying and interesting problems. lack of this enforced solitude and its attendant reflections--lack of the discovery of the joy of being at regular intervals alone with the great soul of nature and with one's inner consciousness--doubtless contributes in some measure to the undoing of city boys and girls. the constant turmoil of the street, the excitement of the ever changing scenes and situations, give an over-indulgence to the senses, ripen the judgments too early, and rob the character of those soberer habits which later enable one to find good in the common situations and the common people of the world. it is, therefore, recommended that farm parents provide for a part of the sterner duties of the boys and girls such tasks as will allow for comparative rest of the body while the mind may tarry undisturbed with the reflections of the inner life. moving to town for the children the practice of the well-to-do farmer who moves to town to "educate his children" is an old story and is fraught with many a hidden tragedy, to say nothing of the impoverishment of the land and of the social order left behind. why cannot the intelligent farmer remain on the home place and join a movement having for its purpose that of making the neighborhood a more desirable place of human habitation? one of the dullest places in the world is the country town which has been filled up with retired farmers. these are usually men who came into the place for the purpose of getting all the possible advantages at the lowest possible cost. in the typical case the new city dweller of this class secures a very good residence, and that often, if possible, just outside the city limits, in order to avoid local taxes. he takes little or no interest in the town's municipal affairs and votes against nearly all proposed improvements. he keeps his own cow, horse, chickens, and garden, and brings extra supplies in from the farm. gradually he takes on a few of the city ways. that is, he uses less home produce and does some buying at the stores. but for want of stimulating employment he gradually grows stouter and mentally more stupid, sleeping away many of the hours of the day in his chair--an indication that he is dying at the top and that he is soon to be cut down. really, the retired farmer is a nuisance to the town and the town is a bore to him. but what of the children whom he brought in to "educate"? they learn rapidly, soon taking on the city manners. the natural restraints from evil conduct, which the farm home furnished, are now wanting. the blare and bluster of the town both excite and delight them, while the parents have positively no rules or standards by which to govern and direct their young in the new situation. all the boys and girls need to do in order to gain parental consent for going out at night is to declare that "everybody is going" or that they are "expected" to be there, and the thing is settled. thus the young ruralists newly come to town go dancing and prancing off into a veritable world of sweet dreams and delights--spoiled forever for any service that they might have rendered in building up the country community--and finally destined to become mere cogs in the ever grinding wheel of some city. a back-to-the-country club nearly every town and city of the united states has had a so-called commercial club. this has been in reality a boosters' club bent first of all on bringing big business to the place and thus opening the way for a bigger population. anything for the sake of more people has been the watchword. now, i would reverse this order of things. nearly every one of these towns and cities needs a club or committee that might have for its purposes: ( ) to show the would-be retired farmer how to shift the burdens from his wife as housekeeper, how to provide better social and intellectual advantages for his children and yet _stay on the farm_; ( ) to find means and methods whereby to plant in the rural community those persons of the city population who are not making a fair living in their present positions, seeking first of course to choose those who are capable of transplanting and then preparing them with care for the change. i am satisfied that this thing can be successfully thought out,--that is, how the worthy poor city family may be removed to the country and there through hard work gradually acquire enough land whereon to earn a fair living at least. this end will never be accomplished by merely driving out the poor families, but rather by means of scientific and sympathetic practice of re-establishing them. well-conducted research shows that these poor people are nearly all constituted of good, sound, human stock. so, if transported under the conditions named, there may be expected to come forth in the second generation a splendid crop of rural boys and girls. references report of the commission on country life. introduction by theodore roosevelt. sturgis-walton company, new york. a brief but epoch-making book. the student of rural problems will find it a splendid outline guide. cutting loose from the city. e. g. hutchins. _country life_, jan. , . back to the farm. j. smith. _collier's_, feb. , . value of a country education to every boy. _craftsman_, january, . why back to the farm? editorial. _craftsman_, february, . the country-life movement. l. h. bailey. the macmillan co. contains a contrast of the back-to-the-land movement and the country-life movement. drift to the city in relation to the rural problem. j. m. gillette. _american journal of sociology_, march, . the new country boy. _independent_, june , . overworked children on the farm and in the school. dr. woods hutchinson. _annals american academy_, march, . why one hundred boys ran away from home. l. e. jones. _ladies' home journal_, april, . the country girl who is coming to the city. batchelor. _delineator_, may, . play and playground literature. for most helpful and inexpensive literature on this subject address: the playground association of america, madison ave., new york city. conservation in the rural districts. james w. robertson, d.sc. the association press, new york. education for country life. willet m. hays. free bulletin, u.s. department of agriculture. treats ably consolidation and rural agricultural high schools. child problems. george b. mangold. ph.d. book ii, chapters i-ii, "play and the playground"; book iii, chapters i-v, "child labor problems." the last reference contains accurate information as to child-labor legislation up to date of publication. influence of heredity and environment upon race improvements. kelsey. _annals american academy_, july, . burning up the boys. editorial. _north american_, september, . chapter iv _the country mother and the children_ greater attention needs to be given to the conservation of the farmer's wife. although there are many other justifications for giving more thought to the care and the comfort of the country mother, the single fact of her very close relation to the children growing up in the home, and of her peculiar responsibilities as center of life there, warrant us in devoting a chapter to her interests. recently, while passing upon a country highway, the author met a funeral procession. a little inquiry revealed a pathetic situation, one that has been repeated thousands of times throughout the length and breadth of this fair country. the deceased was the wife of a young farmer, both of them under thirty-five years of age, hard working and ambitious for success, but thoughtless of their own health and comfort. their farm was somewhat new and unimproved, there were hundreds of things to do other than the routine affairs of home keeping and crop raising. worst of all, there was a mortgage to be lifted. after all reasonable improvements were made and the mortgage paid off, then, according to their plans, they were going to take matters easy. but the delicate cord of life suddenly broke in the case of the wife, and left the young husband as overseer of the farm and home and sole caretaker of three little children. how can parents hope to produce a better crop of boys and girls in the farm communities so long as the typical farm wife is crushed into the earth with the over-weight of the burdens placed upon her? a few minutes' enumeration in this same rural neighborhood brought out the startling fact that in fully half of the homes a scene similar to the one just described had been enacted during the last score of years. that is to say, during the twenty years, fully one-half of the farm mothers living in that particular neighborhood had died before their time from one cause or another. in most instances the death occurred during what we usually speak of as the prime years of life, and at a time when the rose bloom should naturally be fresh upon the cheek. fortunately, this serious condition, still present in some communities, is being gradually improved by the improved methods. poor conditions of women the report of the country life commission makes the following suggestions:-- "the relief to farm women must come through a general elevation of country living. the women must have more help. in particular these matters may be mentioned: development of a coöperative spirit in the home, simplification of the diet in many cases, the building of convenient and sanitary houses, providing running water in the house and also more mechanical help, good and convenient gardens, a less exclusive ideal of money getting on the part of the farmer, providing better means of communication, as telephones, roads, and reading circles, and developing of women's organizations. these and other agencies should relieve the woman of many of her manual burdens on the one hand and interest her in outside activities on the other. the farm woman should have sufficient free time and strength so that she may serve the community by participating in its vital affairs." [illustration: plate iv. fig. .--a day nursery at the country social center. it may be otherwise called "an institution designed to lengthen the lives of tired country mothers."] in discussing this same matter, henry wallace, a member of the commission, says in his paper, _wallaces' farmer_:-- "they have been saying that the mother is the hardest worked member of the family, which is often and we believe generally true. they have been saying that in the anxiety of the farmer to get more land, he not only works himself too hard, but his wife too hard, and the boys and girls so hard that the boys get disgusted and leave the farm, and the girls marry town fellows and go to town. "now the farmer's wife is really the most important and essential person on the farm. as such she needs the most care and consideration. you are careful, very careful, not to over-work your horses. how much more careful you should be not to over-work the mother of your children. you rein back the free member of the team. you take special care of the brood mare, and the cow that gives three hundred pounds of butter. have you always kept the freest of all workers, your wife, from doing too much? how about this?" for the sake of the children but this chapter, as well as the entire book, is being prepared in the interest of boys and girls. so we shall attempt to show a number of specific conditions that may be sought as tending to conserve the strength and the life of the rural mother, with a view to her continuing to be in every best sense of the word a caretaker and conserver of the lives of her own children. . _surplus nerve energy._--however it may be achieved, the thing to work for in this connection is a surplusage of nerve energy. if the child training is to go on in a satisfactory manner, the mother especially, and if possible both parents, must have stated times and occasions for looking after such training and for inculcating a series of important fundamental lessons. the first and best test of this child-rearing situation may be made at evening. if, after the work of the ordinary day, the mother is still fresh enough to take a real interest in the children's affairs, to read to them briefly and perhaps tell them a story or two, or to read for further preparations of her work with them,--then it may be said that her life energies are being conserved in a fairly satisfactory manner. the children will most certainly reap the benefits. but if the close of the ordinary day's work finds the farm mother suffering from physical and nervous exhaustion, cross and impatient with the other members of the family, depressed in spirit and gloomy as to the future, these are signs which should give alarm to the head of the household and arouse him to the point of looking into such distressful conditions, and setting them right. . _a rest period._--how would it do to plan for the mother a daily period of rest and relaxation? would not such a program furnish something of a guarantee of length of life in her own case and of peace and contentment in the home, and of improved well-being in respect to the children? how shall we state this question? must the very lives of the rural mother and her children be run through the mill of over-work as a grist for the improvement and up-building of the farm animals and the farm crops? or should all of these material things be valued only in proportion as they contribute to the happiness and contentment and the long life of the members of the family? too many farmers seem to say, as expressed by their conduct: "i _must_ lift that mortgage this year! i _must_ market so many bushels of corn and so many head of live stock! so here goes my wife, and here go my children into the hopper! perhaps they will have to give up their lives. at any cost i _must_ make this thing pay!" then, how would it be to set apart an hour or more each day, regularly, for the rest and relaxation of the mother, and call it "mother's hour"? during that time let it be the policy of the entire family to require no work, no assistance, no favors of her, unless it be in case of illness. during such a time of recuperation, the delicate organism of the ordinary woman would tend to regain its poise. the nerve energy would be more or less restored, while she would tend to view the better things of life more nearly from their right angle. best of all, she would regather during the hour not a little strength to be used later in the caretaking of her children. try it for a week. . _the home conveniences._--this is not the place for a detailed discussion of what might or ought to be put into the house for the sake of the convenience of the home-maker. but if such materials be thoughtfully arranged, they may be made most effective, even though they be small and inexpensive. a little inquiry among the ordinary homes will show what is meant here, by either the presence or the lack of the things indicated. it is not so much a question of expense as it is one of thoughtful provision. the guiding principle of the home convenience is that of saving and conserving the strength of the housekeeper. there is especially one day in the week which might be appropriately called the "mother-killing day." that is the occasion of her doing the washing and ironing for the family. not infrequently two or three days thereafter are required for the restoration of her normal strength and health. now, it is clearly the specific duty of the farmer to take hold of just such matters as this and attempt seriously to put them right. doing the washing for four or five, and that with the use of the wash tub, is a man's work so far as required muscular energy is concerned, and very few women are able to do it regularly and live out their allotted lives. therefore, let the conscientious farmer see to it first of all that some kind of machinery be installed for lightening such wife-killing tasks as that just named. let him provide such household helps and conveniences _first_, and for the sake of the house mother and her children. and then, if there be other means available, let him provide the man-saving machinery about the barn and the fields. in the chapter on "constructing a country dwelling," fuller attention will be given to these matters. . _the mother's outings._--the farmer who is seriously interested in providing for the care and comfort of his family, and for the instruction and intelligent direction of his children, will see to it that his life companion be allowed her share of outings. this matter must be just as much on his mind as that of marketing the produce. the usual habit of the farmer's wife is to give up willingly her rights and opportunities of this sort. but she cannot well continue to be spiritually strong and mentally well disposed toward the world unless she be permitted to get out among her friends and acquaintances at frequent intervals. so, arrange carefully a series of outings for the country mother. the beginning of such a program is to provide that there be available for her use and at her command a horse and carriage. this equipment need not be of the finest quality, and it may be used for other purposes, but when her needs appear, it should be given up to her purposes. at least one afternoon a week she should go away from the place and be free as much as possible temporarily from the cares of the household while she finds congenial company among some of the neighboring women, or at the library or elsewhere. . _the home help._--the unending problem of the home life throughout much of the civilized world is that of obtaining adequate assistance in the performance of the household work. much of the time such assistance from outside sources is practically unavailable. and yet something must be done to meet the situation. if there be young girls growing up in the home, the solution of the problem may, and should, be met by means of requiring the daughters to assist with the home duties. but in case there be no daughters it is seriously recommended that either the father or the boys do certain parts of the heavier housework. it is not necessarily beneath the dignity of the best and most brilliant man of this country for him to get down on his knees in his own home and help perform the menial work there which threatens to break the health of his life companion. if there be growing sons in the family, there is every justification for training them to assist in the housework in a case where such assistance is needed to shield the health and strength of the mother. it prepares for better manhood and for more sympathetic protection of his own wife to be, if the boy be required to do such things and thus to become intimately acquainted with what it means to perform the many burdensome tasks that tend to wear away the lives of so many good women. . _the children shield the mother._--there will perhaps be no better occasion than this to remind parents of the necessity of carefully training the growing children to perform such deeds as will shield the mother in the home, and show a sympathetic interest in her welfare. these matters will not naturally be acquired by children. the country to-day is full of grown men whose mothers and wives have worked themselves to death; and yet these men did not detect the seriousness of the situation until it was too late. there are many men of this same general class who are willing and even anxious to protect the women of the home from the crush of over-work, but who know not how to do it. such faults as we have just named might easily have been avoided had these men, during very early boyhood, been brought into an intimate acquaintance with the burdensome tasks of the household. especially should they have been drilled time after time in the performance of deeds of love and sympathy in respect to their mother. it may seem a little thing for a younger child to rush to the table, call for and partake of the best the table provides and, inattentive to the wants of any other members of the family, hurry off to his play full fed and happy. and yet this very thing may be indicative of a serious lack of attention to the rights and requirements of others, such as may be carried over into his future home life and there amount to serious abuse. again, it must be insisted that deeds of sympathy and altruism are acquired through the actual and continued practice of the performance of such deeds. . _planning for the children._--among the other splendid results of the conservation of the nerve energy and the vital interests of the house mother may be mentioned that of her ability to plan thoughtfully for the instruction of the boys and girls. it is not an easy task to select appropriate stories and readings for the young. it is neither an easy nor a trifling matter for the parent to be able to read suitable stories to them and to interpret helpfully such stories. it is not a trifling matter for the parents to converse together an hour at evening and there plan as to the future home instruction of their young. when should this be introduced into the boy's life and when that into the girl's life? what is a fair allowance for the boy for what he does and for his spending money for the fourth of july, christmas, and the like? what is a fair allowance for the girl with which to purchase her clothes and for her pin money? when should each of them be told this and that about the secrets of life, and where may helpful literature thereon be obtained? just when and how much should the boy and girl be allowed to go among the young people of the community? when we consider the far-reaching results which their solution may mean for the developing young lives, these and many other such questions become exceedingly important. . _a common conspiracy._--in many a farm home to-day there is a secret compact which goes far to shape the destiny of a great number of lives. go if you will to the farm home where the life of the mother is being gradually crushed out by the over-work and the lack of sympathetic protection on the part of the husband, and you will almost invariably find a secret understanding between the mother and the growing children in reference to the future careers of the latter. it is implied by these words put into the mouth of the mother: "your father is too ambitious about the work and in his desire for accumulating wealth about the farm. he is over-working me, is thoughtless of me, and indifferent to your present needs and your future welfare. work on as you must, driven by him, but do as little as you can and grow up to manhood and womanhood. study your books, get through with your schooling, and in time find something easier for your own life work. perhaps we can persuade him to give it up after a while and move to town, where you can go out more, dress better, and get more enjoyment out of life." thus, the children grow up to mistrust and dislike their father, and to despise the vocation in which he is engaged. such a state of affairs will precipitate their flight from the home nest. this will take place at the earliest possible moment and will often be in the nature of a leap into the dark, anything to get away from the drudgery of the farm. mark you this situation well, you farm fathers, and attack it in all possible haste with the best available relief. a happy, contented, well-protected farm mother almost certainly means the same sort of farm children, while the converse situations will also run in the same unvarying parallel. do not satiate your desire for more hogs and more land with the sacrifice of the peace and happiness and the very life-blood of your wife and children! references the nervous life. g. e. partridge, ph.d. sturgis-walton company, new york. this book is especially recommended as an aid to the relief of the tired farm mother. parenthood and race culture. charles w. saleeby, m.d. chapter ix, "the supremacy of motherhood." moffat, yard & co., new york. this is a book of great value for students of race improvement. from kitchen to garret. virginia van de water. chapter i, "a heart-to-heart talk with the house wife." sturgis-walton company. wholesome advice concerning the conservation of the mother's strength. proceedings of child conference for research and welfare, . l. pearl boggs, ph.d. page , "home education." g. e. stechart & co., new york. the efficient life. dr. l. h. gulick. chapter xviii, "growth in rest." this entire volume is highly recommended as being suitable for over-worked mothers. what the farmer can do to lighten his wife's work. t. blake. _ladies' home journal_, feb. , . the higher tide of physical conscience. dr. l. h. gulick. _world's work_, june, . education for motherhood. charles w. saleeby. _good housekeeping_, april, . the profession of motherhood. dr. lyman abbott. _outlook_, april , . power through repose. annie payson call. chapter xii, "training for rest." little, brown & co. _wallaces' farmer_, des moines, ia., is especially to be commended for its editorial championship of the farm mother. the freedom of life. annie payson call. chapter iv, "hurry, worry, and irritability." little, brown & co. ideas of a plain country mother. _ladies' home journal_, may , . _american motherhood_. coopertown, new york monthly, $ . this magazine publishes many short articles bearing on the subject of this chapter. how to conduct mothers' clubs. (pamphlet no. , cents.) _american motherhood_. coopertown, new york. chapter v _constructing the country dwelling_ much has been written in books, and more has been spoken from platform and pulpit, relative to the patriotism of the american people. in addition to all this the public schools of city and country have been consciously instructing the children with a view to laying a permanent foundation in their lives for love of the native land and for defense of the national ideals. but it seems to me that the best word on the subject of patriotic instruction has never as yet been given wide publicity. so long as a boy has to grow up in a home where there are meanness and turmoil and strife and hatred and degradation, one may point a thousand times with pride to our great nation, display again and again before his eyes the proud banner of freedom, sing with him numberless times the patriotic songs eulogistic of the fatherland and its national heroes,--under such circumstances a boy can never be expected to develop into anything other than a superficial patriot. but give him a good home, simple and unadorned though it may be, where love reigns, where his childish needs are thoughtfully ministered unto, whereinto he may go at nightfall after a hard day's work and find rest and peace and comfort; a home whereinto he may take his childish cares and perplexities and place them before the affectionate consideration of his parents and perhaps his elder brothers and sisters; a place where he is carefully taught the rudiments of filial respect and a wholesome regard for work and industry,--bring up the boy in the midst of these plain, sympathetic situations, and you have a real patriot. although he may be reminded only occasionally of the meaning of the national flag, and although he may read with no unusual interest about the blood that was spilled on the national field of battle, a life so reared would mean that the love of home has become rooted in the heart of the young patriot, and that he would rise up if need be and give his life in defense of that home. in such a case, only a small stretch of the imagination would make it possible for the youth to regard the nation as his home in the larger sense, while his willingness to defend that home in time of real need would be none the less present and strong. plans and specifications not available there are hundreds of types and thousands of varieties of rural dwelling houses. it would perhaps be impracticable to attempt to furnish definite plans and specifications in connection with this chapter. the wide variation in the nature of the selected sites, in the means available for building the home, in the size of the family to be accommodated, and the like, would hinder us in the attempt. but there are certain principles that may perhaps apply in nearly every instance and that especially in thought of serving the first and best needs of the juvenile members of the household. it is altogether possible to make a two-room cottage out on the open prairie a place suggestive of repose, of beauty, and of other high ideals. so, no matter how small and inexpensive the rural dwelling may be, let the builders work first of all for that simple beauty and attractiveness which may most certainly invest the heart of the indweller with a feeling of comfort and satisfaction. let it be a place, though humble, that may soon become to the members of the family the most beloved spot on earth. for, after all, the best things of life cannot possibly be bought with money. there are often misery and dissension and bitterness in the finest palatial dwelling, while the essential elements of beauty and worth may have lodgment in the hearts of the humblest cottage dwellers. however, it is not the intention here to argue any one into the thought of building a humble cot for the mere sake of humility. the point we desire to make is merely this: that, although possessed of very meager means with which to build, one can actually construct a home in which the inhabitants thereof may dwell in peace and contentment, and a place over which the spirit of the most high may brood in great strength and beauty. [illustration: plate v. fig. .--an attractive old country residence in the south, built in . at least one good family has been matured therein. and to them "how many sacred memories bring back those childhood scenes."] what appeals to the children in the selection of a location and a site for the dwelling the welfare of the children must be thought of, second only to that of the house mother. now, what material arrangements will appeal to the growing children and add much interest and romance to their lives as in future time they view them in retrospect? first of all, perhaps, a broken landscape might well be mentioned, a hill or two near by the place, with a sharp cliff or embankment to the crest of which the children may climb and there cast down missiles. such things tend to add a charm to the young lives. and then, if possible, have a brook or larger stream of fresh running water. a large river is less desirable on account of the danger to child life. but a stream which may furnish, not merely water for the live-stock, but a swimming and bathing place for the children in summer and a skating pond for them in winter, to say nothing about the pleasures of fishing and boating--these will appeal most strongly to the boys and girls. and then, the woodland, or at least the shady grove with trees to climb, and possibly nuts and wild flowers to gather--a place where chipmunks and song birds and the like may have their natural habitat, and wherefrom there may proceed the weird and doleful sound of the night owl and the whip-poor-will; herein one may find many of the crude materials well suited to give proper nourishment to the souls of the young. but the things just named will not nearly always be accessible. throughout many of the commonwealths there are vast stretches of level plateaus with scarcely a hill or woodland in sight, and yet covered with a rich, tillable soil. these places may for good reasons be selected for the site of a dwelling. but they demand more work and heavier expense of money and time before the best material surroundings of an ideal home for boys and girls may be realized. before the house is scarcely laid out in such a place, the shade and ornamental trees should be planted, selecting for part of the planting a quick-growing species that may be removed later after more permanent and more valuable trees have reached a suitable height. of course, a stream of water cannot always be diverted so as to make it pass the place, but a fair substitute may be had by the construction of a pond. and this thing should be accomplished at the earliest possible moment. if there be a small dry ravine, dam it up with concrete and catch it full of surplus water during a rainy season. it is a positive injustice to boys and not a little unfair to girls to require them to grow up without any access to open water of some kind. and it is almost a matter of criminal neglect to require children to live permanently in a home about which there are no trees growing. so it is recommended, even if the house construction must in part be delayed or cut off, that the surroundings just named be sought in all earnestness. the house plan in planning and arranging the house, the matters to be thought of in addition to those named above are convenience and comfort. while it is somewhat important that the house look well to those who may be passing upon the highway, it is vastly more important that it be good within and serve such needs of the home-maker and the children as will conserve the strength of the former and render the lives of all happy and contented. in addition to the matters just named, that of placing the dwelling to face in the right direction will be thought of. that is, arrange the house so as to take advantage of the morning sunlight, the evening shade, the winter blasts and the summer breezes. while for the sake of entertainment it may be well to place the rural dwelling near the public highway, rather than sacrifice the child-developing factors of shade trees and streams and the like, it is often better to build back from the road and make a private lane leading thereto. in arranging for the heat and light in the house, think first of all of the health and sanitation of the family. ordinarily, the windows of the farmhouse are too small; while worse still, many of them, even in the bed chambers, are permanently nailed down. so, if the health and the general well-being of the boys and girls, as well as the parents, are worth anything at all, attend religiously to these small and inexpensive conveniences, not neglecting to provide most carefully for keeping out flies and other insects. the wise farmer will find the secret of getting along with his own household and of rearing a strong, healthy family to lie in the strict attention he gives to just such small matters as these. the things that overstrain the physique, that try the temper and patience of the housewife, must especially be looked after and something of a better nature substituted for them. how one farmer does it mr. w. f. mottier, living in ford county, illinois, gives in _farmer's voice_ his plan of providing for the children, as follows:-- "i have always tried to farm intelligently. one of my favorite ideas in regard to farm life is that of making the home as attractive as possible for the children. so i put on the place all the modern improvements that i can afford, in order that the children may not feel that town life is the best. and our children do not have any desire to go to town. it would bring a sad thought to me to hear my children talk against the farm life or home life on the farm." outbuildings and equipment with few exceptions, the money available for building the home should be expended first in putting the house into the ideal condition just named. after that, if any means remain, the outbuildings may be constructed. otherwise, crude, temporary arrangements may easily suffice. there is one thing, however, that must be provided with scrupulous care and that is the water for the household use. it must be, first of all, wholesome and comparatively free from impurities. then, if at all possible, it should be cool and taste well. actual records have shown that one will not drink enough water to satisfy the demands of his health in case the taste be in any degree unpleasant to him. so the ideal water for household use is comparatively soft, is cool, highly pleasing to the taste, and is free from disease-carrying germs. this comparatively simple matter of providing the water will prove most important in relation to the well-being of the household and the up-building of the family life. see to it at any cost that the well be situated out of the way of seepage from any barn or outbuilding, even though it may from such necessity be placed somewhat out of the reach of convenience. human rights prior to animal rights if the farmer cannot afford to erect a good barn he may take reasonable care of his horses with the use of a cheap, improvised one. actual test will show that horses may be made comfortable in the summer time with the use of a straw-thatched shed for a barn, provided the drainage be reasonably good and the earth floor be kept in good order. the thatched covering may be made to keep out the rain. during the winter, with the use of a few slender poles, the entire shed may be inclosed with a hay or straw wall and the place thus be made very satisfactory for the time being. similar sheds and protection may be provided for the other live-stock, all to await the time when the means are at hand for better conveniences. it is especially suggestive of a mean lack of consideration of human rights in the case of the farmer who has a big, expensive farm barn towering up beside a little dingy shanty of a dwelling house. and yet this thing is all too common, particularly in new prairie regions. such is the place out of which beastliness and criminality and anarchy tend to be germinated from the lives of boys and girls, to say nothing about the hidden tragedies that surround the lives of the many women who are forced to put up with such an arrangement for half a lifetime. just one illustration of a situation of the sort described will suffice to point out the moral. on an occasion two strangers drew up to a farmhouse. one of them was a land agent, and the other a home seeker. their mission was that of purchasing a farm. the owner of the farm showed them about the place with considerable enthusiasm, but his heart swelled with pride when he reached the magnificent barn, one side of which was devoted to the propagation of a high-grade strain of duroc jersey swine. every convenience and comfort for the hogs was provided. he boasted about his success with them, showed an affectionate regard for the different individuals, calling them by name. the horses, too, might have aroused the envy of the entire neighborhood. they were sleek and well-fed, full in flesh and fair in form. there was provided every convenience for feeding and caring for the horses and the hogs, so that the hired men found the work about the barn exceedingly easy and pleasant. then the attention of the visitors was turned to the farmhouse. yes, it was small and run down and poor, the intention being to build a larger one "some time." but that same intention was known to have been expressed repeatedly for a period of twenty years past. and where were the boys? well, that was the trouble, and furnished the excuse for his willingness to sell the place. he simply could not induce the boys to stay there and take an interest in things. two of them, barely more than boys, had left the home nest in its meanness and degradation and hired out in town. the mother of the boys was living there because she had to, but upon her face were lines of suffering and disappointment and degradation. yet in the midst of it all, strange to say, the father seemed to blame the boys and their mother for having conspired against the interests of the farm home and plotted to get away. in the course of his conversation he made it somewhat evident that he would have sold out and left sooner had the other members of the family not been so urgent about the matter, and that he was now holding on partly to indulge his spite and feeling of stubbornness in reference to them. the cheap novels one may pick up depict many a fictitious tragedy. but in the place just described lies the typical scene of thousands of real tragedies during the course of which numberless lives of boys and girls have been wrecked forever,--lives latent with possibilities of goodness and beauty, of mental and moral strength. and then, the bitterness and anguish of soul of the mothers of these lost members of a high humanity--what of that? the silent walls of an untimely grave in many cases closed them in, while much of the memory of their secret suffering lies buried with them. the children's room even though the means available will not allow for more than the humblest sort of cottage, there should be definite thought of providing therein some room or niche or corner to be considered as the private property of the children. in a three-room dwelling on the kansas prairie in which lives a happy family of five, and about which thrifty young shade trees and orchards are growing, there may be seen a children's room that would surprise and inspire any ordinary observer. in a little attic room facing the east and reached by a mere step-ladder arrangement, may be found the "den," which is the private place of the three children. a small window opens out to the east and a small improvised dormer window about twelve by twenty inches admits light and air from the south. there is no plastering or other expensive covering upon the sloping roof walls, but the artistic mother has provided dainty white muslin for concealing the rough places, and with the help of the children she has decorated the little room in a manner that would attract the very elect. none of this has required a money cost, but it has all been done beautifully at the expense of thought and good sense and artistic taste, prompted by rare consideration for the needs of the boys and girls. [illustration: plate vi. fig. .--a commodious farmhouse in canada, equipped throughout with a complete water system. many farmers waste enough trying to build a house without a modern plan to pay for this extra convenience.] the two little girls and their brother, ranging in age from five to ten years, spend many a happy hour in their attic chamber. the heat from the room below comes through a small aperture and warms the little place in winter time, while the breeze passes through the little windows in summer, tempering the room satisfactorily excepting upon extremely hot days. upon the walls are arranged beautiful post cards, larger pictures gathered from magazines and other sources, and small though beautiful home decorations of every conceivable sort. the little seven-year-old boy has a small assortment of curios collected from the hills and streams, while the girls have a small display of their childish needlework, their dolls, and some of their best school drawings. how suggestive and how helpful it would be if this little den could be displayed before the eyes of all the humble cottagers throughout the rural districts! yes, the hogs may live out-of-doors and the horses get along very well indeed with a temporary barn thatched with straw, but the places of the boys and girls must be looked after and that in the interest of making them happy, of filling their lives with every good, clean sentiment, and of preparing them for that large sphere of usefulness which may mark their future. if the house be larger than the one we have described, then provide accordingly for the children. give them a good room of their own. put their ornaments and playthings in it. if there be space, provide a library containing a few suitable volumes. and after this thoughtful provision has been made, see to it carefully that their schedule for work, schooling, and the other duties allows for ample time and opportunity for their enjoyment of the apartment set aside for them. in years to come, that sweet poetic sentiment running back to the home of one's childhood will be given greater strength and beauty because of the fact that this thing just urged has been done. and more than that, the man (or woman) who has the blessed privilege of recalling these bygone scenes of childhood receives from such contemplation a new sense of inner strength and new enduement of power to go on with life's struggle and master the larger problems that come to him. the evening hour no matter what the cares of the day may have been, how many things may have gone wrong, how much hay left out in the field unprotected from the rain, how many acres of corn unplowed and losing in the battle with the weeds, how many items of household duties unperformed--there is every justification for laying aside these work-a-day affairs at the approach of bedtime and for the spending of a precious hour with the problems of the children. farm parents as well as other parents can thus preserve their youth and add immeasurably to the joys of their own lives. this thing of being with the children at evening may seem slightly awkward and prosaic at first, but it will slowly grow into a habit and will become transformed into an experience of great charm and beauty. best of all the high refinement, potential in the lives of the children, will thus be gradually brought to an expression, and the foundation stones of substantial manhood and womanhood will be laid in their lives. yes, it is true, even farm parents may learn to lay aside their cares and perplexities and enjoy the splendid privilege of getting intimately acquainted with the hopes and desires and aspirations of their boys and girls! references the outlook to nature. revised edition. l. h. bailey. page , "the country home." macmillan. low cost country homes. a. embury, jr. _collier's_, june , . a primer of sanitation. john o. ritchie. chapter xxxiii, "public sanitation." world book company, yonkers, n.y. recommended for general use. from kitchen to garret. virginia van de water. chapter x, "the boy's room." sturgis-walton company. home waterworks. carleton j. lynde. sturgis-walton. "comforts and conveniences in farmers' homes." w. r. beattie. yearbook, department of agriculture, . washington, d.c., pp. - . see also in same volume, "hygienic water supply for farms," pp. - . water supply for farm residences, the plan of the farm-house, saving steps. cornell reading-courses. rural hygiene. h. n. ogden. the macmillan company. rural hygiene. i. n. brewer. j. p. lippincott company, philadelphia. earn your child's friendship. j. balfield. _lippinott's magazine_, january, . fireside child study. patterson dubois. dodd, mead & co. home decorations. dorothy t. priestman. chapter xiv, "rooms for young people." penn publishing company, philadelphia. chapter vi _juvenile literature in the farm home_ it may be truly said that the strength and impressiveness of the personality depend on the nature of the inner thought of the individual. now, thoughts are not unlike the trees and the growing grain, or, for that matter, any other living thing; unless they have proper nourishment they wither, perish, or dwindle away to a puny shadow of their possible selves. how shall we measure the strength and force of the human character other than by the bigness and the purity of the daily thoughts of the individual? it matters little what the occupation may be--a hewer of stone, a hauler of wood, a captain of industry, or a governor of a state--each of these may be mean and little in his respective position provided his thoughts be sensuous and groveling. on the other hand, each of these can shine in his allotted place in a light all his own, provided he have the habit of entertaining clean and inspiring ideas in his secret consciousness. now, one of the larger problems of the rural life is that of supplying the many hours necessarily devoted to silent reflection with a suitable form of thought culture. proverbially, the farmer and his wife and their children are hurried along with the work-a-day affairs and tend gradually to acquire the non-reading habit. this is bad for the parents in that it keeps their minds running around upon a little cycle of hard, industrial facts. it is worse for the children in that it fails to supply the proper nourishment for the dream period through which their lives are necessarily passing. what can be done, therefore, to nourish and build up the best possible thought activities, especially in case of the rural boys and girls? how good thinking grows up and flourishes it may not be out of place to show here somewhat more definitely how attractive forms of literature gradually work themselves into the lives of the young. in the first place, the young person cannot invent his own ideas. he does not manufacture his thoughts out of something latent within his organism. the latent situation consists merely of a nervous system prepared to receive manifold impressions and to retain them and give them back through the process of ideation. that is, the young person thinks only about things that have actually happened in his life. all he knows has come to him through the avenue of his senses; what he has seen and heard and felt, and so on, constitutes the "stuff" out of which his thoughts are made. so he must have the widest possible experience, while young, in the use of his natural senses. the literature best adapted to the child would be that which appeals to the interests predominating in his life at any given time. during his early years not hard, prosaic facts, but situations that stretch the truth and sport with the fixed condition of things are especially appealing to him. he should therefore be indulged in the classic myths, fables, fairy tales, and the like. the parent will of course be on guard against his acquiring any seriously erroneous beliefs in respect to such things, and also against his receiving any serious shock or fright from the tragic aspects of the tale. later on, during the early teens, the boys and girls will become more and more interested in the stories of the wars of old and in the fact and romance of history. stories supplementing the text-book history of the home country may now be introduced. as a possible means of bringing the minds of the boys and girls into a more intimate knowledge of the rural situation, nature studies and nature stories should be offered. it must be remembered that it is quite possible for the boy to grow up within a stone's throw of many of the living things of nature and yet scarcely recognize their presence, much less know anything definite about them. therefore, nature-study books and leaflets written perhaps in story form and containing attractive illustrations of the birds, bees, flowers, and trees to be found near about the rural home will prove most interesting and instructive to the young. through such helpful literature the mind will gradually acquire the habit of casting about in the home environment for the description of possible objects and conditions new to one. one of the best and most helpful results accruing to the young person who indulges the habit of reading good literature is this: he acquires a large vocabulary of words and phrases in which to clothe his secret thought and with which to express himself to others. all this furnishes, not merely a splendid form of entertainment for the silent reflections, but it also gives the thinker a sense of the power and the worth of his own personality. types of literature it may be stated as a foregone conclusion that no farm is well equipped for the happiness and well-being of those who dwell thereon unless there be an ample supply of good literature in the house. no matter how well stocked with high-grade farm animals, how productive in point of farm crops, how well kept the hedges and lanes may be, secret poverty and littleness of mind lurk in that home if the literature is wanting. so, first of all, let us lay the foundation by means of enumerating some periodicals and books of a more general nature. [illustration: plate vii. fig. .--it is a mistake to try to make bookworms of children. many of their best books are "green fields and running brooks," also frequent opportunity to play together in groups and neighborhoods.] . _the best reading._--of course the bible might head the list. whether or not there be a large "family" bible, there should be at least a text of convenient size and form for everyday use. this book should contain a good concordance. then there should come into the home a first-class weekly newspaper; possibly the local paper will supply this need. many farm homes now receive a daily paper regularly. in addition there should be available a weekly or monthly summary of the current events of the nation and the world. the _literary digest_, the _world's work_, and the _review of reviews_ are examples of standard magazines of this particular class. either one of them will stimulate most helpfully the quiet thought of the farmer and the members of his family and keep one in touch with the most important movements of the country. along with the foregoing, there should be kept constantly at hand a first-class farm magazine. there are numberless periodicals of this sort, but perhaps among those of the first rank and those which especially give definite helps for the boy-and-girl life of the farm may be mentioned _wallaces' farmer_, des moines, iowa, the _farmer's voice_, chicago, illinois, and the _farmer's guide_, huntington, indiana. also, the semi-official state paper well known in many of the commonwealths is usually very helpful. look out for trash. there are many papers published, ostensibly in the interest of farm life, which are in fact cheap and trashy sheets made use of almost wholly as a medium of advertising quack medicines, get-rich-quick schemes, and other frauds. a reliable means of testing the value of any one of these so-called "farm" or "home" papers is to examine the advertisements. if there be any considerable number of advertisements which offer sure cures for chronic diseases, confidential treatments for secret troubles, fortune telling, and attractive high-priced articles at a trifling cost, then the whole thing is probably fraudulent and not worthy to come into your home. also avoid the paper or magazine which advertises intoxicating liquors. it is very low in moral tone, to say the least. . _books for children._--in selecting a list of books for farm boys and girls, we should make little or no distinction between them and the children of the city homes. their earlier literary needs are practically all alike and their youthful minds must be nourished in about the same fashion. in offering the lists to follow we do not pretend to have selected nearly all the profitable books available, but rather to have named a few examples of volumes already found enticing and helpful to the young mind. the majority of them are standard and well known. while the price and publisher are given in many instances, often a cheaper edition may be had. in order to proceed with greater certainty and economy in purchasing books for the children, the rural parent is advised to consult some one near at hand who is thoroughly familiar with children's literature. perhaps the superintendent of schools of the town near by, or some local minister, or some well-informed leader of a mothers' club, may furnish the desired assistance. it would also be helpful to write for the general catalogues of a number of the large publishing and distributing houses and from their lists select a number of suitable titles. many of them publish the older classics in very attractive form for ten to twenty-five cents, the original unchanged and unabridged. in order to stimulate interest in forming the nucleus of a home library the farmer should either make or purchase a small set of book shelves. important as it may seem to build a first-class house for the thoroughbred hogs, this matter of the children's reading is even more important and should be attended to first, before it becomes too late to catch the attentive ear of the boys and girls. a selected list the following lists are taken chiefly from those selected by such well-known critics as mary mapes dodge, kate douglas wiggin, edward everett hale, thomas wentworth higginson, and hamilton w. mabie. _ages four to six years_ various authors. boston collection of kindergarten stories. j. l. hammett company, boston. cents. bryant. stories to tell to children. houghton, mifflin company. holbrook. hiawatha primer. cents. houghton, mifflin company. eggleston. story of great america for little americans. cents. houghton, mifflin company. scudder. fables and folk stories. stevenson. a child's garden of verses. lang. blue fairy book. ruskin. king of the golden river. field. lullaby land. wiggin. the story hour. sewell. black beauty. _ages six to seven years_ norton and stephens. the heart of oak books, no. . cents. heath. gilbert. mother goose. carroll (charles l. dodgson). alice in wonderland. $ . harper. cents. crowell. andrews. the seven little sisters. cents. ginn. kingsley. water babies. kipling. the jungle book. greene. king arthur and his court. _ages seven to eight years_ grimm. fairy tales. translated mrs. e. lucas. $ . . lippincott. goldsmith. goody two-shoes. cents. heath �sop. fables. selected by jacobs. $ . . macmillan. harris. nights with uncle remus. $ . . houghton, mifflin. bible stories. cents. a. l. burt company, new york. hawthorne. wonderbook and tanglewood tales. irving. rip van winkle and the legend of sleepy hollow, or the sketch book. _ages eight to nine years_ baldwin. fifty famous stories retold. cents. american book company. longfellow. hiawatha, the village blacksmith, the children's hour, etc. mabie. norse stories retold from edda. $ . . dodd, mead. miller. out-of-door diary for boys and girls. sturgis-walton company. _ages nine to ten years_ norton and stephens. heart of oak books, no. . cents. heath. hodges. the garden of eden. (bible stories.) $ . . houghton, mifflin. mathews. familiar trees and their leaves. $ . . appleton. burroughs. wake robin. _ages ten to eleven years_ higginson. tales of the enchanted islands of the atlantic. dana. how to know the wild flowers. $ . scribner. blanchan. bird neighbors. cents. doubleday, page. norton and stephens. heart of oak books, no. . cents. heath. church. stories from virgil. morley. a song of life. stevenson. treasure island. _ages eleven to twelve years_ alcott. little women. $ . . little men. $ . . little, brown & co. lucas. a wanderer in london. $ . . macmillan. aldrich. story of a bad boy. $ . . houghton, mifflin. shakespeare. the tempest. scott. tales of a grandfather. the talisman. edgeworth. parent's assistant. _ages twelve to thirteen years_ kipling. just so stories. $ . . doubleday, page. seton-thompson. wild animals i have known. $ . scribner. wyss. swiss family robinson. cents. mckay; also dutton. palmer. the odyssey. $ . houghton, mifflin. goldsmith. the vicar of wakefield. dickens. a christmas carol. the cricket on the hearth. hughes. tom brown at rugby. _ages thirteen to fourteen years_ swift. gulliver's travels. $ . . macmillan. longfellow. evangeline. dana. two years before the mast. $ . houghton, mifflin. norton and stephens. heart of oak books, no. . cents. heath. lamb. tales from shakespeare. coffin. old times in the colonies. franklin. autobiography. stowe. uncle tom's cabin. _ages fourteen to fifteen years_ defoe. robinson crusoe. $ . mcloughlin. $ . . harper. bunyan. pilgrim's progress. norton and stephens. heart of oak books, no. . cents. heath. austen. pride and prejudice. thoreau. walden. _ages fifteen to sixteen years_ cooper. leather stocking tales. burroughs. birds and bees. cents. strawbridge and clothier. pyle. robin hood. cents. scribner. scott. ivanhoe. cents. appleton. lady of the lake. cents. ginn. lay of the last minstrel. cents. macmillan. _sixteen years old and older_ irving. the alhambra. cents. macmillan. macaulay. lays of ancient rome. cents. macmillan. kipling. captains courageous. $ . . century. nicolay and hay. boy's life of lincoln. $ . . century. eggleston. hoosier school boy. $ . scribner; also heath. in addition to the foregoing, there is beginning to come from the press a mass of juvenile literature that promises to furnish most practical inspiration and guidance to the juvenile mind on the farm. much of this new rural life literature may be had for the asking or for the mere price of publication. the following are recommended:-- _the rural school leaflet._ edited by alice g. mccloskey, and issued under the general direction of l. h. bailey at ithaca, n.y. the country life publications, issued by d. w. working, superintendent of agricultural extension, morgantown, w.va. the series published by a. b. graham, superintendent of the extension department, ohio university, columbus. the annual reports of county superintendent o. j. kern, rockford, ill., and of county superintendent george w. brown, paris, ill. the wisconsin arbor and bird day annual, issued by state superintendent c. p. cary, madison, wis. the extension departments of many of the state universities and nearly all of the state agricultural colleges are now issuing a series of small pamphlets on such matters as stock judging, grain breeding, soil testing, and home economics. this literature should be given the widest possible circulation in the country home, as it will prove helpful both to the young and to the parents in their direction of the young. _literature on child-rearing_ parents who are seriously in earnest in the matter of developing the lives of their children will find great assistance and much inspiration through the reading of books and magazines on the child-rearing problems. in fact, it may be put down as a practical certainty that the work of child training cannot go on effectively and continue in its interest except one have some aids of the kind just named. therefore, the interested parent should cast about for the books and magazines that promise to serve in the solution of the particular problems at hand. it happens that the author has collected a large number of books and periodicals of this class and that he has made a somewhat critical examination of them. in listing the titles below, a word or phrase is used to indicate the contents or purpose of the text. . periodicals on child-rearing _the american baby._ american publishing company, madison ave., new york city. $ per year, cents per copy. contains much detailed and most helpful instruction on the care of the child. _american motherhood._ coopertown, n.y. $ per year, cents per copy. helpful and sympathetic. especially strong in respect to health and sanitation and in methods of instructing children in regard to the secrets of life. _the child-welfare magazine._ official organ of the national congress of mothers, north th street, philadelphia. cents per year, cents per copy. the educational pamphlets published by the society of sanitary and moral prophylaxis, e d street, new york city. excellent monographs, each treating some urgent child problem in relation to morals, sanitation, and the like. the home-training bulletins, prepared and issued by william a. mckeever, professor of philosophy, state agricultural college, manhattan, kan. cents each. each of these pamphlets contains about sixteen pages and covers a particular home-training problem. the numbers thus far issued are:-- . the cigarette smoking boy. . teaching the boy to save. . training the girl to help in the home. . assisting the boy in the choice of a vocation. . a better crop of boys and girls. . training the boy to work. . teaching the girl to save. . instructing the young in regard to sex. others are in course of preparation. . books on child-rearing holt. care and feeding of children. $ appleton. most helpful and practical. curley. short talks with young mothers. $ . . putnams. helpful from the medical side. harrison. a study of child nature. $ . chicago kindergarten college. excellent. a standard help. allen. civics and health. $ . . ginn & co. most helpful on the side of sanitation. hall. youth. $ . . appleton. a great book on child study by one of the world's leading authorities. king. psychology of child development. $ . university of chicago press. a fundamental work for those who wish to make a scientific study of child life. ritchie. a primer of sanitation. cents. world book company. a clear, helpful presentation of the facts. chance. the care of the child. $ . penn publishing company. full of detailed information about infants, especially. mangold. child problems. $ . . macmillan. presents the matter ably and in the light of the freshest information. call. the freedom of life. $ . little, brown & co. a great and inspiring book. will give rest and poise to tired mothers. gulick. mind and work. $ . doubleday, page & co. a companion book to the one above, only more suitable for the father. saleeby. parenthood and race culture. $ . . moffat, yard & co., new york. a remarkably instructive volume on race improvement. references how to direct children's reading. mae e. schreiber. annual volume n.e.a., , p. . a suggestive list for a children's library, titles. helen t. kennedy. democrat printing company. minneapolis. a mother's list of books for children. catherine w. arnold. a. c. mcclurg & co. children's rights. kate douglas wiggin. pages ff. "what shall children read?" houghton, mifflin company. fingerposts of children's reading. walter taylor field. mcclurg & co. gives extensive lists. books for boys and girls. brooklyn public library, new york. a carefully selected list of titles, of them being especially marked for their value. chapter vii _the rural church and the young people_ there was never a greater demand for efficient leadership in the rural communities than there is to-day. the country has continued for many years past to become richer in farm products and equipment, but it has steadily grown poorer in social and spiritual values. in fact we have unconsciously acquired a distorted idea of values. hogs are too high in proportion to boys. beef cattle are absorbing too much interest in proportion to the time and money expended in perfecting the character of girls. it has long been the proud boast of the middle western states that they could feed the entire country. and we have continued so long in this way as now to regard big crops and the great abundance of farm animals and other such material possessions as ends in themselves. so it is high time that we ask ourselves what this material wealth is all for. looked at from at least one high vantage point, it may be properly regarded as so much encumbrance unless we shall be able to convert it into a means to some worthy and spiritual purpose. decadence of rural life the open country in the middle western states has for some time been the breeding place for sterling manhood and ideal womanhood, and the recruiting ground wherefrom have been drawn many men and women to undertake the management of the larger enterprises of the country. the enforced self denial and discipline of work; the continued practice of quiet reflection; the comparative freedom from the evil and degrading influences peculiar to much of the child life in the cities; and many other character-building experiences could be set down on the favorable side of rural child-rearing in the past. but this situation is rapidly changing. the ten-year period just closing has witnessed a decadence of country life, the rural population actually showing a decrease. large numbers of the best families have moved to the cities and towns, and their places on the farm have been taken by irresponsible laborers and transient renters. yes, the wealth of the rural community is still there, lying more or less dormant, and all the other means of a splendid civilization are there. but in the usual instance there is no one to assume the leadership in bringing about the reconstruction of the rural life. now that he has accumulated such an abundance of material things, the typical farmer needs to be shown how to deal more fairly and helpfully with the various members of his family. some farmers' wives are gradually being dragged to death with the over-burden of work, which might be obviated if the farmer and his wife were both shown specifically a better way of getting things done. many boys and girls growing up in the country are being cheated out of their natural heritage of good health, spontaneous play, and the joy of social intercourse, all because of the fact that farm products are too much regarded as an end rather than a means to the higher development of the members of the rural family. so a good soil and excellent crops are essentials for a substantial rural society, but they are not a certain evidence of such thing. it is possible to go into some of the country communities where these material things are accumulated in great abundance and yet find the people there living a little, mean, and narrow form of life, and that chiefly because they do not quite understand how to use the splendid means at hand in the accomplishment of some high and worthy purposes. work for the ministry and so we hereby issue a call and a challenge for workers to enter the great fallow field just named and make it blossom with new social and spiritual life. and it is the conviction of some that the ministers of the town and village churches can undertake this work much better than any other class of persons, for they are already in many respects trained leaders. let these ministers be provided if possible with an assistant, a layman it may be, for both their town and country work. then let each of them have a rural appointment to which they may go from one to four times each month; and, inspired by a vision of all the possibilities ahead of them and endued with divine power and guidance, enter earnestly into the great work of rehabilitating the country community. it is evident that the minister who will leave his town congregation with perhaps only one sunday sermon and go to a country church and preach to the adults, and teach and lead the young, while his assistant takes charge of the second sunday service at home--it is evident that such a minister will not only wear longer in the locality in which he is stationed, but that he will find in the rural work just mentioned such a flood of zeal and inspiration as will more than make up for and repay the effort. many of the town ministers are preaching to audiences that are more or less irresponsive to what they have to say. under present conditions they are compelled to preach to the same audiences too much. their sermons grow stale. but under the arrangement here recommended, such conditions would not obtain. they would come back from the rural appointment so laden with new ideas and ideals as to appear to the home congregation in a most advantageous light. the country minister there is at present not a little promise that there may be developed throughout the country a new type of country-dwelling ministers. it is certainly a logical position for the effective religious worker to assume; namely, that of actually dwelling among those whom he is attempting to serve. he acquires an intimate knowledge of their problems, their point of view, including the status of their individual beliefs and prejudices. [illustration: plate viii. fig. .--the fifty-year-old country church at plainfield. fig. .--the new country church at plainfield, illinois, erected through the inspiration and leadership of reverend matthew b. mcnutt.] as an example of what the country minister can achieve one needs to read an account of the splendid work of the rev. mathew b. mcnutt of plainfield, illinois. mr. mcnutt was called to this charge in when a fresh graduate from a presbyterian seminary. at the time of his call there was in the locality a small dead or nominal church membership and an occasional weak, ineffective service held in the little old church of fifty years' standing. this devoted and far-seeing man got down among the people with whom he settled, made a careful survey of the economic, the social, and the religious life of the place, and began his wonderful work of reconstructing all this. the ultimate purpose was the improvement of the spiritual well-being. he organized singing schools, granges, literary and debating societies, sewing societies, and clubs of various other sorts, all as a means of awakening the life of the community and bringing the people together in a spirit of mutual sympathy and helpfulness. after less than a decade of hard work a marvelous transformation of the rural life thereabout was achieved. among other notable changes was a new church to supplant the old one. the new building was erected at a cash cost of ten thousand dollars; has an audience room seating five hundred or more, several sunday school class rooms, a choir room, a cloak room, a pastor's study and a mothers' room, all on the main floor. in the basement below there is a good kitchen, a dining room with equipment, also a furnace, a store room, and the like. the church membership has grown to one hundred sixty-three with many non-members attending, while the sunday school enrollment increased to three hundred. now there are always a few minds who wish to measure all earthly things in terms of a money value. to such it may be shown that the land values in the vicinity of this new country church have gone up to a marked degree and that the economic conditions are all of a most satisfactory nature. as further evidence of what a rural community working together may achieve for the spiritual welfare, there may be cited the instance of the little side station by the name of ogden in riley county, kansas. here the people got together and voted to build a country church, and that without determining as to the denominational affiliation. a committee of leaders was appointed to raise funds and to draw plans for the building. in a short time, arrangements were perfected for constructing the building at a cost of four thousand dollars. it was later voted to place this new church temporarily under the direction of the congregational church in manhattan, fifteen miles away. in one or two instances the religious leaders in a country community have succeeded admirably in establishing a "commission" form of church administration. the method pursued has been that of having a committee of three, each a member of a different church, to call by turn from the towns near by the ministers of the various denominations. further details of the plans provide for the committee to raise funds so that the minister may be paid a definite amount for the service conducted. one of the first essential steps in the establishment of a rural church is a careful survey or study of the situation. while it may be accounted a sin against god and humanity to add another church where there are already more than the people can support, often it will be found that very large, well populated country districts are wholly without access to any religious service whatever. verily, the field is white unto the harvest and the laborers as yet are few. a mistake in training too long we have been training young people in the school and in the home to struggle for the best of everything--a sort of rivalry that results in envy, jealousy, and strife, and a falling apart where there should be coöperation and sympathy and a spirit of mutual helpfulness. the craze for clothes, the glare of the electric lights, and the lure of the cheap theater have struck the country people and are drawing away much of the best young blood there. it seems that we have over-done this thing of pointing to the top and urging our young people to scramble for that, until as a result no one is looking for a place to serve, while all are looking for a place to shine. now, there may be "plenty of room at the top" for selfish scrambling, but in some respects the top is woefully over-crowded. on the other hand, there is a vast amount of good room at the bottom, acres of it, and we might well commend it to every one who may be imbued with the idea of doing some effective work in the world. all over the broad, open country, in thousands of rural districts, the situation at the bottom is literally crying out for constructive workers who will come in there with their good courage, their scientific training, and in the name of the most high get down among the people and the common things in the midst of which the people live and lay a substantial foundation for a new and beautiful structure--an edifice erected out of the plain materials to be found in any ordinary rural community, and that by means of transforming such things and making them contributive to the high and lofty spirit-purposes for which they are really designed. rural child-rearing we are not half awake as yet to the meaning and possibilities of the rural community as a place for rearing children. the city environment ripens youths too fast and too early and works all the spontaneity and aggressiveness out of the boys and girls before their mature judgments are ready to function. as a result of this city hot-bed, we have as a type the blasé sort of young man, and a young woman who is overly smart in respect to the "proper things to do." either of them has little power of initiative and less power of persistence. one of the greatest virtues of the somewhat isolated rural home is that it matures human character more slowly and keeps the boys and girls fresh and "green" and spontaneous while there is being gradually worked into their characters the habit of industry and the power of doing constructive work. if one should desire to obtain a sterling specimen of manhood, he would not take up with the "smart" city youth who at the age of sixteen has had all the experiences known to men. the latter is too ripe. he knows it all. from his own point of view, his knowledge of the world is nearly completed. no, one would prefer to go to the most remote country district and, if need be, lasso some green, gawky, sixteen-year-old who is afraid of the cars and the big girls and who has never had a suit of clothes that fits him. this scared, unbroken youth would go through a tremendous amount of rough-and-tumble, trial-and-error experiences during the course of his college training; and he would live intensively and rush into many unknown places and commit many blunders, between whiles catching countless inspiring visions of how he might be or become a man of great strength and ruggedness of character. such a man might be relied upon to shoulder the heavy burdens of the world. such a man could be called out to join in the forefront of battle when the moral and religious rights of the people were at issue. such a man when fully matured could be sent into some kind of missionary field and be expected to labor there for a long time alone, courageous and persistent, finally winning a very small following; then a larger number of adherents; and then the entire population at his heels, applauding and backing him up in his every worthy effort. the author has long had a vision of a man trained and developed through the seasoning experiences just sketched and who, under the inspiration and the guidance of the most high, will go into these rural communities which are latent with material life, and there begin his labors in behalf of the higher things into which all the elements of this typical rural situation may be transformed. just as fast as men hear this divine call and heed it and take up this work, so fast will our country life be reconstructed and the best that is in our society become gloriously transformed and everlastingly saved as a heritage of the oncoming generations. and it is evident that the rural minister, working through the rural church, is the person to whom this divine call may most naturally come. the churches too narrow not a few of the country churches are too narrow in their limitations, tending to chill out those who do not happen to be adherents of the creed, and to foster dissensions and hatred among neighbors. and they are not touching in a vital way the lives of country boys and girls. [illustration: plate ix. fig. .--this attractive and modern church building was erected by the christian people living in the vicinity of the country village of ogden, kansas. four different denominations participated at its dedication. its ruling body is undenominational.] it will be agreed that the gospel of the master of men may be made so broad and inviting as to attract all who have a spark of religion in their natures, and that means practically every one in the community. but there is no good reason why the rural church should stand alone as such. it should and can be made a social as well as a religious center for the whole community. so, let there be constructed a modern building with big windows, and several apartments for sunday school classes, and for meetings of social groups, such as the grange, the farmers' institute, the sewing society, and the literary and debating clubs. then there should be apparatus for the preparation of meals, with a room in which a long table might be spread as occasion demands. outside of this building there should be a children's playground with some simple apparatus for play. not less frequently than one afternoon of the month--and twice would be better--the people of the community should drop everything and come together for a good social time and a general exchange of ideas. on an occasion of this kind the town minister could be present or someone from the outside who would bring with him at least one helpful and practical idea about building up country life. let this building be regarded as the property of every man, woman, and child in the community and strive to bring it to pass that the legitimate and worthy interest of all shall be actually served there. constructive work of the church this country church here thought of need be no less a religious affair, but it must become distinctively a socializing agency. it must not merely save souls, but it must save and conserve and develop for this present life the bodily, the moral, and the intellectual powers of the young. one cannot adequately develop those splendid latent powers in young people solely by means of teaching them the sunday school lesson or preaching to them, no matter how true the gospel may be. the evidence is ample to show that boys and girls who attend church and sunday school are nevertheless falling into many vicious habits of conduct, and are growing up without many of the forms of discipline and training essential for stable christian character and social and moral efficiency. in fact as a means of temporal salvation the old-fashioned church and sunday school are proving more and more a failure. now, as soon as the church realizes the meaning of the foregoing situation and acts accordingly, just so soon will this splendid old institution be enabled to do efficient work in vitalizing the practical affairs of the community in which it is located. to illustrate this point: the great curse of boyhood to-day is the tobacco habit, and this vitiating practice is slowly working its way among the country youth. the youth who acquires the smoking habit before becoming physically matured thereby depletes his physical health to a marked degree, reduces his mental efficiency ten to fifty per cent, and almost completely destroys his power of initiative. such a youth is never found contending for any moral issue or any high and worthy cause of the people. his constructive instinct is made more quiescent, while his disposition to condone evil is greatly and permanently increased. boys who attend church and sunday school are also, like others, falling victims to the sex evils of various forms. an innovation in the rural church perhaps there is no better illustration of how the economic affairs of the neighborhood may be vitally linked with the church service than the work carried on under the direction of superintendent george w. brown, of paris, illinois. during one year mr. brown conducted on seven different occasions an over-sunday program, somewhat as follows:-- on saturday either at the country school house or in the basement of the country church there was arranged an exhibition of corn, while during the day class exercises in the study of corn were in progress. on the day following, sunday, there were two sermons, the theme of each being closely allied to the economic problems studied the day previously. the ministers are reported to have coöperated enthusiastically in this work, each one attempting in his sermon to show how better economic life may be made contributive to a better religious life. on the monday following, the program was continued with a farmers' institute representative of the several interests of the adults and the young people. at this monday meeting a number of the faculty of the state university were in attendance and gave helpful addresses appropriate to the occasion. at night the county superintendent gave an illustrated lecture, using the stereopticon to show the audience just what was being done in the various parts of the county and country by way of improvement of the social and economic conditions. in many places in the new england and other eastern states the rural communities are attacking the social-religious problems in practically the same manner as is being done at plainfield, illinois. at danbury, new hampshire, there is a country settlement association, which is accomplishing some epoch-making things. at the official building there is provided a trained nurse to assist the entire community. the organization conducts social-betterment work for the local neighborhood and leads in a campaign for social reform throughout the state. likewise, at lincoln, vermont, there is an interesting example of coöperation between the religious and social interests. three churches have formed a federated society. in a building maintained in common by them, the meetings of the ladies' aid society, the good templars, the grange, the grand army post, and many others of a social nature are held. such coöperative work is certain to have a helpful and far-reaching effect on any community. [illustration: plate x. fig. .--an illustration of "corn sunday," as instituted by superintendent jessie field, clarinda, iowa, in the rural churches thereabout.] spiritualize child life above all things else, let the country church be reorganized with reference to the interests of the young. let the minister and the other leaders take a firm stand for a square deal for the farm boys and girls in respect to work and play and sociability. let them place before country parents clear, concrete models and methods as to how to accord fair treatment to the children in every particular thing. let them organize the young people of the community into groups for play and sociability and direct them in both of these matters. it is high time we were considering all of our legitimate interests as a part of our religion. indeed, there is no good reason why the young people could not meet together at the rural church and on the same evening have an oyster supper and a prayer meeting. they could very consistently discuss and participate in both a temporal and a spiritual affair on the same occasion and in such a way that each part of the program would be vitalized by the others. and likewise the smaller children. it should not be considered at all irreverent for one to go directly with them to the playground after the sunday school lesson is ended and there lead and direct them in their health-giving enjoyments. try this in your rural-church society centers and see if the boys and girls do not run with great enthusiasm to the whole affair. one great error committed by many of us in the past is that of regarding work and things as arbitrarily high or low. but the author does not see why plowing corn may not be made just as sacred and just as divine a calling as preaching the gospel, provided the former be regarded in the light of service of some high spiritual purpose; as indeed it may be. so, here is a distinctive part of the function of the rural church; namely, to spiritualize work as well as workers--to urge upon the attention of the rural inhabitants the thought that their work must all be regarded as a means to the transformation of the community life and of each individual life into a thing of transcendent worth and beauty. a summary now, here is the proposed plan in a nutshell. the country community is the best place in the world for bringing up a sturdy race of men and women and the country church is or can be made one of the greatest agencies in the achievement of this work. but such achievement can best be brought about only when the country church goes to work to save the whole boy and the whole girl. and that means that the church must understand better how human life grows up--that it must meet these growing boys and girls on their own level of everyday interest and socialize and spiritualize these interests through close contact with them. then, make the rural church a social center for the young, including exercises in work and play and recreation, as well as a place for religious instruction. the child is a creature of activity and not of passivity. you cannot preach him into the kingdom in a lifetime; but you can get down with him and work with him and play with him and guide and direct him through his self-chosen, everyday interests, to the end that he may afterwards enter the ranks of the lord's anointed. again, it is urged, make your country church a center for the entire life of the community. not only have the adults bring their practical affairs to this center for consideration, but have the boys and girls come with their implements of work and play, with their specimens of farm and home produce and handiwork, with their miniature menageries and workshops--all this with joy and reverence before and after the religious services. references efficient democracy. w. h. allen. chapter x. "efficiency in religious work." dodd, mead & co. rural christendom. charles roads. prize essay. american sunday-school union, philadelphia. report of the commission on country life, pp. - , sturgis-walton co. the country church and the library. john cotton dana. _outlook_, may , . the country church and the rural problem. kenyon l. butterfield. university of chicago press. a strong presentation of the entire situation. the rural church and community development. president kenyon l. butterfield. the association press, new york. a collection of practical papers and discussions on several important topics. the day of the country church. j. o. ashenhurst. funk & wagnalls co., new york. read especially the excellent chapter on "leadership." the church and the rural community. symposium. _american journal of sociology._ march, . philanthropy, a trained profession. lewis. forum, march, . _rural manhood._ the association press, new york monthly. this magazine publishes many excellent articles on the rural church. the inefficient minister. _literary digest_, april , . a report of the criticisms of dr. henry s. pritchett, of the carnegie foundation, and dr. henry aked, of san francisco. _world's work_, december, . an interesting account of reverend matthew mcnutt's work in building up a country church. the country church. george f. wells, in cyclopedia of american agriculture, by l. h. bailey, volume iv, page . chapter viii _the transformation of the rural school_ the country districts are slowly waking up to an appreciation of the fact that within their bounds lie, not only all the elements fundamental to the material wealth of the world, but that they also contain in a more or less dormant form all the essential factors of intellectual and spiritual wealth. the rural school is theoretically the best place on earth for the education of the child, not only because of its close proximity to the sources of material wealth, but because of the openness and comparative freedom of its surroundings. then, the country school is especially effective as a place of instruction on account of its happy relation to work and industry. too often the boys and girls of the town school go unwillingly to their class rooms with the feeling that the lessons are heavily imposed tasks. but in the typical country school the pupils are young persons who have already experienced much of the strain of work and who go somewhat eagerly to the schoolroom, because it is in a sense recreative to them, and because of their being in a position to see more clearly what substantial training is to mean to them in the future. that is to say, a distinctive difference between the typical country child and the typical city child is this: the former believes that he is pursuing the course of instruction in a more voluntary spirit and for the sake of his own personal interests and up-building, while the latter is inclined to feel that he is performing the school tasks for the sake of some one else and because of the strict requirements of outside force or law. radical changes in the view-point and method but if the theoretic worth of the rural school is to be made at all actual, some very radical changes in view-point and method must come to pass. first of all, we must keep asking the question, what is education for? and perhaps we must accept the answer that in its best form education serves the higher needs and requirements of the life we are trying to live to-day. in case of rural teachers and parents it has been too common a practice to urge the child on in his lesson-getting with the statement, or at least the suggestion, that lessons well mastered in time furnish a guarantee of a life of comparative ease and freedom from heavy toil. the sermonette preached to the boy in this situation is too often substantially as follows: "go on, my boy, master your lessons, pass up through the grades, and be graduated. behold so and so, a great captain of wealth, and such and such a one, a great statesman. now, these persons are in a position to take life easy. they have wealth to spend for the employment of labor and need to do little of such thing themselves." in other words, the view-point of the school has been radically wrong. we have been advancing the idea that education enables one to get _out of_ work, whereas we should have been urging that education of the right sort enables one to get _into_ work. that is, it means enlarged capacity for work and service and proportionately enlarged joy and contentment in the performance of worthy work of any nature whatsoever. let rural parents once inculcate the last-named point of view upon their growing boys and girls and the attitude of the latter toward the school and its tasks will be likewise radically changed. all have a right to culture and then, a second question we need to ask ourselves is, whom is education for? or, what classes should have the benefits of it? a close comparison of the school ideals of twenty-five years ago with the most progressive ones of to-day reveals a surprising situation. without seemingly realizing the fact, we continued for generations in this country to tax ourselves heavily for the purpose of supporting schools almost exclusively in behalf of the so-called professional classes. we said, especially to the growing boy: "now, if you wish to become a lawyer, a physician, a minister, or a teacher, here is your opportunity. pursue this well-arranged course, finish it up, and that all at our expense. but if you wish to become a farmer, a merchant, a craftsman of any sort, then this institution is not at your service. we will teach you to read and write and cipher, after which you may look out for yourself." thus we were taxing the masses for the exclusive education of a few classes. to-day the best ideal is a radically different one, as it attempts to serve all worthy classes and vocations through the school administration. it assumes that artisans as well as artists and the professional classes have the same inherent right to both the practical aid and the direct culture which an educational course may furnish. as a practical result of this new ideal, now rapidly advancing throughout the country, we are about to have an age of cultured farmers, high-minded stock raisers, refined architects and builders, and so on. that is, our newest and best educational courses are beginning to provide the means and opportunities for the education of all worthy classes. so it behooves all interested rural parents to turn their best efforts toward the transformation and the betterment of the country school. certain specific achievements in relation thereto are now being planned for and in many instances accomplished. let every one concerned take notice of this situation and join with all possible earnestness in the forward movement. in his instructive monograph entitled "changing conceptions of education," professor e. p. cubberley states the new ideal as follows:-- "the school is essentially a time- and labor-saving device, created--with us--by democracy to serve democracy's needs. to convey to the next generation the knowledge and the accumulated experience of the past is not its only function. it must equally prepare the future citizen for the to-morrow of our complex life. the school must grasp the significance of its social connections and relations, and must come to realize that its real worth and its hope of adequate reward lie in its social efficiency. there are many reasons for believing that this change is taking place rapidly at present, and that an educational sociology, needed as much by teachers to-day as an educational psychology, is now in the process of being formulated for our use." work for a longer term one of the first steps toward a more helpful schooling for the country youth is that of lengthening the yearly school term. in many thousands of instances, the country school is conducted for only three to five months during the year, and even this short term is indifferently attended. but the actual length of the year should be seven months or more. many of the country districts can easily provide for eight months. the farmer should not concern himself about a small additional tax, but should have in mind rather the larger additional gain to the well-being of the young in the community. if the local tax be not sufficient for supporting a longer term and a better school, then seek to have laws authorizing the distribution of state aid to the weaker districts. this law has been actually passed in a number of the commonwealths. the act in the usual case provides a general school fund out of which the deficit for the smaller rural districts may be made up. compulsory attendance laws needed the far-seeing country dweller will be glad to join in a movement in behalf of compulsory attendance at the public schools. already a number of states have enacted fairly good laws on this subject, but some of them allow "loopholes" providing for the too easy avoidance of their requirements. perhaps the best and most effective type of law of this class is that which requires the child under fourteen years of age to attend the entire term of the public schools, allowing for his absence only in case of sickness or in cases where it is shown upon investigation and beyond question that he is the main support and breadwinner of a family. in connection with the legal requirements for compulsory attendance, there must, of course, be provision for the truant. truant officers, who may be required to serve only part time and who may receive pay for actual services, are set over specified districts and required to bring in all truant school children. although this compulsory attendance law has been in force only a few years, reports show an almost unanimous belief in its effectiveness. the reader will understand the justification of such a law to be this; namely, the inherent right of the child to be educated whether he may appreciate such right or advantage or not, and the implied right of the community to have his best service as a well-educated member of society. the effects upon crime and criminality of the neglect of the education of the young have been so thoroughly discussed of late as to require no restatement here. better schoolhouses and equipment a survey of the entire country from one side to another reveals a deplorable state of affairs in respect to the conditions of the typical rural schoolhouse. in thousands of cases, there is nothing more than a dingy, little, old one-room building, scarcely suitable as a place wherein to shelter chickens or pigs, and with nothing in the surroundings to suggest or even hint at a place where young minds are taught how to aim at the high things of life. now, these crude structures were once a necessity. in pioneer days the little, old box schoolhouse, or even the sod structure, served a mighty purpose in the transformation of the plains and the wilderness. but times are now radically changed. the wealth of the country is abundant. improvements of nearly every other sort have gone on as the times advanced. but too often the little, old cheap schoolhouse on the bleak country slope became a fixed habit. in setting forth plans for a newer and better country school building, the author cannot improve upon those prepared by e. t. fairchild, state superintendent of public instruction in kansas, and published in his seventeenth biennial report. we therefore quote as follows:-- . _location._--"in selecting a site for a school building, the questions of drainage, convenience, beauty of surroundings, and accessibility should have prime consideration. select, if possible, some plat of ground slightly elevated, and of which the surface may be properly drained and kept free from mud. it should be especially seen to that water may not stand under the building. if the elevation is not sufficient, this trouble should be overcome by proper filling in beneath the building. the location should be as nearly as possible central with reference to the pupils of the district. but other things should also be considered. it is better that some pupils should be put to a slight disadvantage than that attractiveness of surroundings, remoteness from environment likely to interfere with the work of the school, or other essentials, should be sacrificed." [illustration: plate xi. fig. .--a cozy little country schoolhouse in the tall, picturesque woods of california. fig .--this model country school building, planned by state superintendent e. t. fairchild, of kansas, is being copied in many places.] . _the water supply._--the purity of the water supply for the school is no less important from the standpoint of health than that of the air supply. the greatest danger lies in the use of water taken from wells that are used only a portion of the year. such water is certain to become stagnant. in the autumn before the term commences special care should be taken to pump all water out of the well and to clean the same if necessary; thereby much sickness may be avoided. the well, of course, should be so located as to avoid any contamination owing to vaults or drains. . _size and adaptation of grounds._--the school grounds should contain at least three acres, and five acres would not be too much. while the cities are cramped for playgrounds and purchase them only at a high cost, the latter can be secured in the country in sufficient size and at a relatively small expense. let it be kept constantly in mind that the school grounds should be adapted for play, that they should afford a protection from winds, and that they should also be attractive. they should likewise be adapted for school gardening and experiments in agriculture. for the purpose of play, the breadth should exceed the depth where there are separate grounds for boys and girls. where the playground is large, the building should be centrally located with relation to the size of the grounds and should be situated well toward the front. this will provide two fair-sized and well-proportioned playgrounds. where the grounds are small and contain but one acre, symmetry must yield to utility and the building should be located well to the front and to one side, so as to leave one well-arranged playground. . _improvement of school grounds._--in writing of the value of well-arranged school grounds, professor albert dickens of the kansas state agricultural college says:-- "this sermon on school ground improvement is one that i have tried to preach for some time. in my judgment, it is the most important and the most difficult of any of the problems in civic improvement. the average country cemetery is sorrowfully neglected, as a rule, but its treatment is careful and generous compared with the school grounds of the average country district. some day we shall realize that all these factors of environment are formative influences, and shall not wonder that the character formed in surroundings devoid of beauty has hard, coarse, and cruel lines in its make-up. "it is an easy matter to picture an ideal country school--its clean-swept walk to the road, its ample playground, its windbreak of evergreens, its groups of hard- and soft-wood species, borders of shrubs and beds of bulbs for early spring and perennials for summer and fall. but to get it--to find some way to overcome the serious obstacles--is worthy the attention of statesmen and club women. "nearly every district has made an attempt. that is one of the hard things to forget--one of the reasons so many districts fear to try again. they had a spasm of civic righteousness--an arbor day revival--and every patron dug a hole in the hard, dry ground; every child brought a tree, some of which were carried for miles with the roots exposed to sun and wind--and then they were planted and, in some cases, watered for the summer; and the days grew warm and the weeds grew high; and by the next fall the two or three trees yet alive were not noticed when the director went over with his mower the friday before school opened; and so ended that attempt at a schoolyard beautiful. "it ought to be possible to convince the patrons of every district that a single acre of land is not sufficient ground upon which to grow big, bright, broad-minded boys and girls; that two, or three, or four acres of land, well planned as to baseball diamond, basketball court and a good free run for dare-base and pull-away--that such would give the state and the world better results than if the land were devoted to corn and alfalfa. this, i believe, is the first problem of great magnitude--to get the ground--and it must be considered. children must play. the noon hour, when they eat for five minutes and play fifty-five minutes, is all-important in a child's life." in order to carry out the suggestions given by professor dickens, why not organize a general rally, perhaps on the occasion of arbor day, and all hands join in preparing and planting the school grounds to suitable shade trees, shrubs, and the like? the playgrounds could also be laid out and equipped on this occasion. then, after this excellent start has been made, have the school board appoint some reliable man as caretaker of the grounds with payment of reasonable wages for what he does. thus the good beginning will not be lost. a model rural school the state normal school at kirksville, missouri, has built and equipped a model rural school for use in practical demonstration work. president john r. kirk gives a detailed description of this building in _successful farming_ (april, ) as follows:-- "this schoolhouse has three principal floors. the basement and main floor are the same size, x feet, outside measurement. the basement measures feet from floor to ceiling. its floor is of concrete, underlaid with porous tile and cinders. the basement walls are of rock and concrete, protected by drain tile on outside. the basement has eight compartments. [illustration: plate xii. fig. .--the model rural school building, as constructed for practice and demonstration work at the kirkville (missouri) normal school.] " . furnace room, containing furnace inclosed by galvanized iron, also double cold air duct with electric fan, also gas water heater. " . coal bin, x feet. " . bulb or plant room, x feet, for fall, winter, and spring storage. " . darkroom, x feet, for children's experiments in photography. " . laundry room, x feet, with tubs, drain, and drying apparatus. " . gymnasium or play room, x feet. " . tank room containing a -gallon pneumatic pressure tank, storage battery for electricity, hand pump for emergencies, water gauge, sewer pipes, floor drain, etc. " . engine room, containing gasoline engine, water pump, electrical generator, switchboard, water tank for cooling gasoline engine, weight for gas pressure, gas mixer, batteries, pipes, wires, etc. "the pumps lift water from a well into pressure tank through pipes below the frost line. gasoline is admitted through pipes below the frost line from two -gallon tanks underground, feet from building. all rooms are wired for electricity and plumbed for gas. the basement is thoroughly ventilated. "the main floor contains a school room x feet in the clear, lighted wholly from the north side. a ground glass in the rear admits sunlight for sanitation. schoolroom has adjustable seats and desks, telephone, and teachers' desk. stereopticon is hung in wall at rear. alcove or closet on east side for books, teachers' wraps, etc. schoolroom has a small organ, ample book cases, shelves, and apparatus. pure air enters from above children's heads and passes out at floor into ventilating stack through fireplace. "main floor has two toilet rooms, each of these having lavatories, wash bowl with hot and cold water, pressure tank for hot water and for heat, shower bath with hot and cold water, ventilating apparatus, looking glass, towel rack, soap box, etc. each toilet room is reached by a circuitous passageway furnishing room for children's wraps, overshoes, etc. the scheme secures absolute privacy in toilet rooms. all toilet room walls contain air chambers to deaden sound. the toilet rooms are clean, decent, and beautiful. they are never disfigured with vile language or other defacement. "all rural schoolhouses with the comb of the roof running one way have attics, but the attic of this rural school is the first one and the only one that has been well utilized. this attic is x feet, inside measurement, all in one room; distance from floor to ceiling ½ feet in the middle part. it is abundantly lighted through gable lights and roof lights. it contains modern manual-training benches for use of eight or ten children at one time, a gas range and other apparatus for experimental cooking. it is furnished with both gas and electric light. it has a wash bowl with hot and cold water, looking glass, towels, etc. it has a large typical kitchen sink and a drinking fountain, but no drinking cup, either common or uncommon. it has cupboards, boxes, and receptacles for various experiments in home economics. it has a disinfecting apparatus, a portable agricultural-chemistry laboratory and numerous other equipments. [illustration: plate xiii. fig. .--a rear view of the model rural school building at the kirkville normal.] "a rural school can be built here from beginning to completion with all the above-mentioned equipments of every kind, including furniture, for $ . the heating and ventilating apparatus, the pressure tanks, gasoline engine, water pumps, dynamo, furnace, etc., can all be easily adapted to a two-room model, a three-room school, or a six-room school by having each fixture slightly larger. "this model therefore solves the schoolbuilding question for villages, towns, and consolidated rural schools." the cornell schoolhouse an attractive rural schoolhouse was erected some years ago at the new york state college of agriculture, to serve as a suggestion architecturally and otherwise to rural districts. it is a one-teacher building, and yet allows for the introduction of the new methods of teaching. it is a wooden building, with cement stucco interior, heated with hot-air furnace, and with two water toilets attached. the total cost was about $ . the college writes as follows of the house:-- "the prevailing rural schoolhouse is a building in which pupils sit to study books. it ought to be a room in which pupils do personal work with both hands and mind. the essential feature of this new schoolhouse, therefore, is a workroom. this room occupies one-third of the floor space. perhaps it would be better if it occupied two-thirds of the floor space. if the building is large enough, however, the two kinds of work could change places in this schoolhouse. "the building is designed for twenty-five pupils in the main room. the folding doors and windows in the partition enable one teacher to manage both rooms. "it has been the purpose to make the main part of the building about the size of the average rural schoolhouse, and then to add the workroom as a wing or projection. such a room could be added to existing school buildings; or, in districts in which the building is now too large, one part of the room could be partitioned off as a workroom. "it is the purpose, also, to make this building artistic, attractive, and homelike to children, sanitary, comfortable, and durable. the cement-plaster exterior is handsomer and warmer than wood, and on expanded metal lath it is durable. the interior of this building is very attractive. nearly any rural schoolhouse can secure a water-supply and instal toilets as part of the school building. "the openings between schoolroom and workroom are fitted with glazed swing sash and folding doors, so that the rooms may be used either singly or together, as desired. "the workroom has a bay-window facing south and filled with shelves for plants. slate blackboards of standard school heights fill the spaces about the rooms between doors and windows. the building is heated by hot air; vent flues of adequate sizes are also provided so that the rooms are ventilated. "on the front of the building, and adding materially to its picturesque appearance, is a roomy veranda with simple square posts, from which entrance is made directly into the combined vestibule and coatroom and from this again by two doors into the schoolroom." help make a school play ground throughout the entire country there is at last rising a wave of enthusiasm in behalf of affording the child a better means of play. first the cities took the matter up, then the towns, and now the country districts are beginning to do their part. the farmer and his wife should feel an interest in such a matter, for they can render no better service to their community than that of joining the district teacher in an effort to equip the school grounds with play apparatus. as a suggestive outline of what materials to procure, the dimensions and cost of the same, there is given below the equipment worked out by certain officials in colorado and described briefly in superintendent fairchild's report, as follows:-- a turning pole for boys may be made by setting two posts in the ground, six or eight feet apart, and running a or ¼ inch gas pipe through holes bored in the tops of the posts. the cost of such a piece of apparatus should be as follows, assuming that the necessary work will be done by the teachers and boys: two posts, " x ", ft. long, cents; one piece gas pipe, ft. long, cents. teeter boards may be made by planting posts ten or twelve feet apart, and placing a pole or a rounded x on top of them, and then placing boards, upon which the children may teeter. individual teeter boards may be made by placing a x board in the ground, and fastening the teeter board to it by means of iron braces placed on each side of the upright piece. the cost of the above apparatus would be, for several teeters: two upright posts, " x ", ft. long, cents; one piece, " x ", ft. long, $ . ; four teeter boards, " x ", ft. long, $ . . for individual teeter: one piece " x ", ft. long, cents--to make upright piece ft. long and teeter board ft. long; two iron braces and four large screws, cents. a very attractive and desirable piece of apparatus may be made as follows: secure a pole about ten or fifteen feet long. to the small end attach by the use of bolts one end of a wagon axle, spindle up. upon the spindle place a wagon wheel, and to the wheel attach ropes, about as long as the pole. place the big end of the pole in the ground three or four feet, and brace it from the four points of the compass. the ropes will hang down from the wheel in such a way that the children may take hold of them, swing, jump, and run around the pole. the one described was rather inexpensive. a telephone company donated a discarded pole, a farmer a discarded wagon wheel and axle. the only expense was that of paying a blacksmith for attaching the wheel to the pole and the cost of the ropes--about $ . it furnished one of the most attractive pieces of apparatus on the playground. an inexpensive swing may be constructed by placing four x 's in the ground in a slanting position, two being opposite each other and meeting at the top in such a way as to form a fork. the pairs may be ten or twelve feet apart, and a pole or heavy galvanized pipe, to which swings may be attached, wired, nailed, or bolted to the crotches formed by the pieces placed in the ground. the cost of this apparatus will be: four pieces, " x ", ft. long, $ . , one piece galvanized pipe, ", ft. long, $ . . boards of education could well afford to purchase one or more basketballs, and a few baseballs and bats for the boys. these things more than pay for themselves in the added interest which boys and girls who have them take in the school. for much of the apparatus suggested above the wide-awake board of education and teacher will see opportunities to use material less expensive than that suggested. and to such persons many pieces of apparatus not specified here will suggest themselves to fit particular needs and opportunities. general instruction in agriculture a great fault with the district schools has been an inclination to think that anything close at hand is too mean and common to be considered as subject matter for instruction. the thought has usually been that the school would prepare the learner for some brilliant calling away off where things are better and life is easier and more beautiful. as a result, the country schools have been educating boys and girls away from the farm. the new method is that of educating them to appreciate what is under their feet and all around them, through an intimate knowledge of the processes of nature and industry as carried on in their midst. [illustration: plate xiv. fig. .--using the babcock milk-tester in a new york school.] one of the more direct means of educating the boys and girls for a happy, contented life on the farm is to teach them while young the rudiments of agriculture. this method is now actually being put into practice in thousands of the rural schools. the state of kansas recently enacted a law requiring all candidates for teachers' certificates to pass a test in the elements of agriculture and also requiring that the rudiments of this subject be taught in every district school. other states have similar laws. as a result of this and like provisions, there is now a tremendous awakening in the direction named. the boys and girls in the country schools are finding new meaning and a new interest in the fields and farms upon which they are growing up. it is a comparatively simple matter, that of teaching the young how the plant germinates and grows, how the seed is produced, and how farm crops are cared for and harvested. likewise, it is easy to describe the elements of the various types of soil and to show how these elements contribute to the life and growth of the plant. the questions of moisture in its relation to plant life, of insects harmful and helpful to growing crops and animals, of the bird life as related in its economic aspects to farming--all such matters can be easily taught to children by the young-woman school teacher. it is only necessary for the latter to take an elementary course of instruction herself, to read a number of collateral texts, and to get into the spirit of the undertaking. in a similar manner, instruction in regard to farm animals may be given, the emphasis being placed upon the consideration of the types of live stock actually raised and marketed in the home neighborhood. it must be emphasized that these matters relating to elementary agriculture and animal husbandry can be made just as interesting and quite as cultural as any of the subjects in the general curriculum of the schools. wherefore, the rural dweller who catches the spirit of such instruction should lead out in the securing of public measures and public improvements looking toward an early embodiment of these new subjects within the prescribed course of study. domestic economy and home sanitation the time is now at hand when the district school failing to give any attention to practical household affairs is to be classed as out of date and unprogressive. well-written texts and pamphlets covering the home-keeping subjects are now both available and cheap, so that the excuse for deferring their use is approaching the zero point. of course it is impracticable as yet to have apparatus for cooking and sewing installed in the one-teacher district school, but the bare rudiments of these subjects may nevertheless be taught with the expectation that home practice may be thereby improved and better understood. perhaps the most practical method of present procedure is that of organizing an independent class of the girls of suitable age and meeting them informally. the texts and pamphlets furnished by the college extension departments may be followed. in case of graded and high school courses this work should by all means be carried on as a regular class exercise. home sanitation may easily and profitably be taught in the district school, even though only one or two periods per week be set apart for the purpose. perhaps the best method of instruction is that of presenting carefully one specific lesson at a time. for example, pure drinking water, clean milk, food contamination by house flies may be treated each in its turn. adequate charts and illustrations should be brought into service. consolidation of rural schools there is much agitation nowadays in regard to consolidating the rural schools. although present progress is slow, it seems comparatively certain that the one-teacher rural school is destined in time to become a thing of the past. however, there is no particular haste in the matter, provided some such plans as the foregoing be put into effect in case of the single school. perhaps the sparsely settled district has the greatest justification for looking toward consolidation. it happens that there are thousands of small schools having an attendance of from five to ten pupils. in such an instance, it is practically impossible to do the best work, the children lacking the spur of rivalry and enthusiasm and the helpful lessons in social ethics offered only by the larger massing of the young at play. in many places, three or four rural districts are uniting in this movement, the general plan being that of constructing a central building with ample working space for all, and then transporting the children to and from the school. the scheme is working well as a rule. among the great advantages is that of a possible grading of the school so that the teacher may have time for each subject and more opportunity for specialization. perhaps the most serious and difficult part of the plan is that of providing a safe and suitable means of conveyance to and from the school. some excellent patterns of school wagons are already on the market, while manufacturers are constantly at work improving them. so we may expect better results as time goes on. it has already been shown very satisfactorily that the conveyance, when in charge of a well-trained driver, furnishes improved moral and physical safeguards for the child. more high schools needed not only every county, but also every rural township, should have its well-equipped high school. it is a serious matter to send boys and girls in their middle teens away to college. many lives are thus more or less ruined simply from too early loss of the personal restraints and influence of the parents. but with a first-class high school in easy reach the young people may at least return home for the saturday-sunday recess and thereby continue in the close councils of their parents. and then, the rightly-managed high school will bring the student into closer touch with the local rural problems that may not be possible in case of the distant institution. [illustration: plate xv. figs. - .--this magnificent consolidated school in winnebago county, illinois, was inspired by the excellent work of the well-known superintendent o. j. kern. the four little one-room buildings illustrated above gave way to it.] in the location of high schools intended to serve the rural interests there should be an effort to keep away from the towns and cities. in the latter places the allurements of the cheap theater and the snobbery that often invades the city high school are illustrations of the evils that serve to entice the young away from the substantial things of life. a good county or township high school located centrally and in the open country is ideal. at such a location it is vastly easier than in the city to center the attention of the students upon the rural problems, not to mention the greater availability of demonstrations on farm and garden plots. better rural teachers needed the ideal preparation for a teacher in the rural school is a complete course in a first-class agricultural college, with the inclusion of a few terms' work in the educational subjects. so long as we send into the district schools young teachers who have been taught merely in the common text-book branches, and whose training has been exclusively pedagogical, the practice of educating the boys and girls away from the farm will go on. the country school is, in its best sense, an industrial school; and only those teachers can do best work therein who have had the personal experience in industrial training and the changed point of view which only the agricultural college can give. so if the board of trustees in any rural district really wishes to unite in supporting an effective back-to-the-farm movement, let them offer to some country-reared graduate of the agricultural college a salary of about twice or three times the amount usually paid. after a few terms of school taught by such a person, the good effects on the rural uplift will most certainly reveal themselves. but so long as school trustees continue to try to drive a sharp bargain in the employment of teachers--securing the one with the passable county certificate who will teach for the least wages--the boys will continue to run off to town for "jobs" and the parents will continue to "move to town to educate their children." there is some hope of a new ideal in relation to the country school teacher; namely, that he shall be a man in every sense, worthy of a salary large enough to support himself and his family the year round as residents of the community. then we shall have a profession of teaching in the rural school work. [illustration: plate xvi. fig. .--the cornell schoolhouse. a one-teacher building, with a workroom or laboratory at one side that the teacher can control through the folding doors and glass partitions. every effort is made to render the building and place attractive and homelike.] references annual report page county (iowa) schools. miss jessie field, superintendent (clarinda). the reader who is especially interested in this chapter is urged to become acquainted with the splendid work accomplished for the district schools of page county, ia., by superintendent jessie field. as indicated by her published annuals, and otherwise, she has led all the other young women superintendents in the work of organizing the boys and girls into clubs and classes for the study of school gardening, bread making, grain propagation, and the like. report of the committee on industrial education in schools for rural communities, of the national educational association. among country schools. o. j. kern. ginn & co. a clear helpful, and inspiring text. the american rural school. h. w. foght. macmillan. covers the entire subject carefully. the school and society. john dewey. mcclure, phillips & co., new york. the school and its life. charles d. gilbert. chapter xxii, "home and school." mcclurg. efficient democracy, wm. h. allen. chapter vii, "school efficiency." dodd, mead & co. a most helpful and stimulating volume. the school as a social institution. henry suzzallo. monograph. houghton mifflin company. wider use of the school plant, clarence arthur perry. chapter vi, "school playgrounds." charities publication committee, new york. education in the country for the country. j. w. zeller. annual volume n.e.a., , p. . teachers for the rural schools; kind wanted; how to secure them. l. j. alleman. annual volume n.e.a., , p. . the state board of health of maine (augusta) issues a series of practical pamphlets on health and sanitation in the school and the home. the most practical industrial education for the country child. superintendent o. j. kern. annual volume n.e.a., , p. . among school gardens. m. louise green, ph.d. charities publication committee, new york. a model rural school house. henry s. curtis. educational foundations, april, . a. s. barnes & co. dr. curtis is a national authority on the question of the school playground. education for efficiency. e. davenport. d. c. heath. a most able plea for making the schools serve every worthy interest. changing conceptions of education. e. p. cubberly. monograph. houghton mifflin company. methods of conducting book and demonstration work in teaching elementary agriculture. o. h. benson. bureau of plant industry, washington, d.c. an excellent guide. report of committee to investigate rural school conditions. superintendent e t. fairchild and others. address the secretary n.e.a., winona, minn. chapter ix _the county young men's christian association_ among the movements of first importance looking toward the uplift of young men is that named at the head of this chapter. parallel with the intensive and systematic effort to build up the commercial life of the city and allow the country district to take care of itself, has been a like effort to provide for the care and development of the city boy and the uniform neglect of the needs and interests of the country boy. now, here at last is a movement that is proving a real means of salvation of the rural youth, mind, body, and soul. president henry j. waters, of the kansas state agricultural college, struck the keynote of this young country-life movement most effectively in a recent address when he said: "we believe in the existence of a social renaissance. one needs only to read the daily and weekly papers printed in hundreds of prosperous villages and cross roads corners, the faithful chroniclers of the community's activities, to find buoyant hope of the future of farm life. "the dignity of labor; the close connection between heads and hands; the monthly or weekly meetings of farmers' institutes in hundreds of counties; the special lectures provided by agricultural colleges; the movable schools; the farmers' winter short courses, in which thousands of men and women and boys and girls participate; corn contests; bread contests; sewing contests; play carnivals; poultry-raising contests; stock-raising contests; conferences on the country church, country school, good roads--all these activities denote the growth of a new and mighty spirit in the country life of america. "we need further demonstrations, together with concrete thinking, a lot of constructive programs, and a deal of hard work and self-sacrifice, in which the county work department of the young men's christian association can have no little share, to speed on the great epoch of rural social renaissance." boys leave the farm too young it is a tragic story when the whole truth is known, that of the young boy running off to town in search of some employment that will bring him a little ready cash for spending money, and also in search of the sociability so woefully lacking in the rural home environment. too long have the country parents attempted to argue and scold and force their boys to remain at home where they are confronted only with the monotony of hard work and a very dim prospect of a possible land or other property inheritance. so at last there is being raised the very important questions, what is the matter with the country boy? and what can be done to help him? knowledge of the fact that more than one-half of the boys of the united states are living in farm homes makes the problem of their individual salvation assume momentous proportions. there can be no reasonable thought of holding all the boys on the farm. many of them are best fitted by nature to go elsewhere and find suitable employment, but there is every good reason for preventing the great exodus of immature youths who run off to the cities, not knowing what they are to face and without any well-defined purpose. yes, the great concerns of the towns and cities must continue to call many of the brainiest young men from the rural districts. in fact, the country may with every good reason be considered the proper breeding ground for the virile minds destined to control the great affairs of nation, state, and municipality. but every reasonable effort must be put forth to keep the boy in his country home until his character is relatively matured and his plans for a future career are fairly well defined. purposes of the county y.m.c.a. doubtless the first chief purpose of the county association is that of building up the boy's character and finally perfecting his spiritual nature. but this high aim is not sought in the old-fashioned, direct manner. instead, there is a studied effort to build up the boy gradually through the enlistment of his natural interests in matters that lie dormant in his home environment. the truly scientific method in this field is first concerned with providing means whereby the boy may work out his own spiritual salvation. along with the farm labors, tedious and irksome to him when undertaken as exclusive requirements, the country boy is given an opportunity to take part in certain athletic and social exercises which appeal to his instincts and arouse the spontaneity from the depths of his own nature. in carrying on the country work, an attempt is made to approach the boy from the peculiar situations of his home environment. what specific readjustments are needed in his home life in respect to the amount of work required of him? what of the recreation he enjoys? the local society in which he moves? the home church and sunday school? the temptations that may lie near about him? and so on. these and many other such inquiries are made with a view to dealing with the boy in an individual way and reëstablishing his life for the better. how to organize a county association unless it may chance that, after a brief survey of the field, some person from the outside comes in to perfect the organization of the county association, any interested person within the limits of the county must make the start. devotion to the cause, persistence, and unfailing enthusiasm are perhaps the best personal equipment for the local beginner of this new work. his first concern should be that of gathering a committee of men like himself from different parts of the county. doubtless these will form themselves into a sort of brotherhood committee. after such temporary organization, the next important step is that of securing an able county leader. [illustration: plate xvii. fig. .--these y.m.c.a. members find time for play as well as work. try a club like this as a means of keeping the boy interested in the farm.] . _choose a good leader._--now, the success of the movement is to depend very largely upon the character of the leader to be chosen. if the right man be selected, no matter how hard the conditions, he will be able finally to bring system and order and spiritual progress out of it all. the important characteristics of the ideal leader of country boys are comparatively few. first of all, he must, of course, be moved by a sense of devotion to the cause of christianity--the up-building of the characters, especially the spiritual natures, of young men. he should be a man who has been trained in a good college, if possible a graduate, with experience in the y.m.c.a. and other like organizations. he should have had some special training in such subjects as psychology, sociology, and economics, and should be fairly well versed in the literature of these subjects. he should be especially fond of boys and boy life and interested in the conduct of people of every kind and sort. he should be somewhat trained in athletics and an enthusiastic supporter of clean sports. he should have what is known as good business sense. it may not be essential, but it will certainly prove advantageous, if the chosen leader has himself been reared in the country. . _local leaders necessary._--after the leader has been selected, the next step is that of the appointment of carefully chosen leaders for the local neighborhoods. these may be men of almost any age from middle life down, but perhaps the ideal age would be that of a few years older than any of the boys of the neighborhood. all must be enlisted if possible, not one being slighted or offended. . _a committee on finance._--an able finance committee is also of high importance. this should consist of men chosen especially for their unusual ability as solicitors and persuaders of men in a financial way. let these workers go over the county soliciting funds for the organization, providing from the first especially that the secretary shall be well paid for his services. close-fisted residents, as well as all others, in every nook and corner of the territory must be seen and asked to contribute. it should be a comparatively easy matter to show men who cannot appreciate the social and spiritual needs of the boys that the new movement will most certainly increase general property values and bring up the price of land. . _little property ownership._--while new, the county organization should guard against attempting to own and control any considerable amount of property or equipment. not the material goods possessed, but the strength and force of the spiritual enthusiasm will have greatest value in carrying on the work. it will be found quite satisfactory in nearly every case to have the boys meet in some farm home, village club room, or country schoolhouse. and then, there is always danger of developing a y.m.c.a. too exclusively as a business organization. there are many instances in the towns and cities where this is deplorably true. the best spirit of the work is submerged by the continuous hounding of the people in the skirmish for funds to keep going the over-heavy business machinery of the institution. there often develops, in such cases, a large body of men who regard the y.m.c.a. as an organization of loafers and easy-going money spenders. once such sentiment develops, it is desperately difficult to eradicate it. so the country y.m.c.a. should preserve the semblance of humility, and that partly by getting along with almost no property or equipment other than what its own members may provide in a crude fashion and what may be necessary to furnish the office of the general secretary. how to conduct the work one of the first steps in conducting the new work is that of making a survey of the entire county. the names, ages, and location of all the boys must be secured, together with some items respecting their present social and religious affiliations. in fact, the more personal items included in the first survey, the better. some boys will at first look with disfavor upon the new movement, believing that it is merely another scheme to convert them to religion and get them into a church. care must be taken to disabuse the boy's mind of this thought from the very beginning. therefore, it may be well not to try to hustle him into a bible-study class the first time he is invited out. while the main issue, namely, that of spiritual development of the boy, is not to be forgotten, he must nevertheless be led to this goal through the path of many very common instrumentalities. a y.m.c.a. athletic meet would most probably prove a better opening number than a bible-study class or merely a religious service. as the work proceeds, the occasions for a great variety of exercises and programs will present themselves. among these perhaps there would be the following:-- . _local and county athletic clubs._--the athletic event is one of the easiest to put on in a newly organized boys' club. an able leader, perhaps the county secretary, should be present to preside over the event, inducing the boys to form a baseball club, or a basketball team; or at least to arrange for some event in which they can all participate, although that may be as simple a thing as swimming or jumping. introduce at once the thought of practice and the development of skill, holding out the plan of a county organization and a county field meet in the future, which all may attend and in which the ablest shall have promise of a conspicuous part. . _debating and literary clubs._--there is always the possibility of a literary society, provided the thing be carefully instituted. the secret of successful debates among persons of any class is to find a "burning" question. so, avoid such matters as tariff reform and the world peace movement and come right down home to some perplexing problem in the lives of the boys of the club. something about their work, their lack of recreation, their chances against those of city boys, and so on, will arouse interest and bring out rough debating material. find latent talent of other sorts in the club. some boy can sing; perhaps another can play a musical instrument; still another one may be a natural-born storyteller; a fourth may be an expert acrobat and tree climber; a fifth a shrewd hunter or trapper of wild animals. in this way, nearly every boy can be led to take part in a general program. thus, while contributing something toward the entertainment of all, each boy's active participation will go far by way of awakening his personal interest in the new life. . _receptions and suppers._--after the boys get fairly under way with their club, they may need to arrange an oyster supper or some such affair at which they will discuss their many mutual problems. on some such occasions they may desire to invite their parents to come and enjoy the program, also to participate in the discussion of their affairs. this form of close association will be found especially enticing to the boys, giving them a good, clean place to go for social enjoyment and something to look forward to in their thoughts during the somewhat prosaic hours of the day in the field. . _educational tours and problems._--the boys may find it feasible to go in a body once or twice a year on an educational tour--to the state fair; to study some particular thing in the city; to gather data for the solution of some local problem; to make a study of the habitat of some bird or animal; to gather specimens of rocks or plants; and so on. in case of any such trip there is not a little necessity of some college-trained person as overseer, so that the study may be made intensive and not become dissipated in mere sport and fun. it is usually advisable to make a careful study of only one thing at a time. [illustration: plate xviii. fig. --a great y.m.c.a. convention in ohio. let the boy attend one of these great gatherings if possible, and he will return with a year's supply of enthusiasm.] . _camping and hiking._--the boys of the county should be brought together at least once a year in a summer camp. farmers will soon learn to appreciate the value of such things in the life of the boy and will gladly allow him a few days' vacation for the purpose. the boy who enjoys such a privilege will more than pay it back through the extra amount of work his enthusiasm will naturally prompt him to perform. for the camp site there should be selected some shady woodland with a good stream of water for fishing and swimming. a crude lodge may be constructed and all the necessary crude camp equipment provided. each boy will want to carry his own blanket and extra clothing. one matter must be considered in all seriousness; namely, the sanitation of the camp. even at the outlay of a comparatively heavy expense, the camp food supplies, including the dining table, should be screened off from flies. the garbage therefore will all be scrupulously buried, and it will be ascertained with certainty that the drinking water is free from disease organisms. then, the boys may sleep on the ground, wallow in the dirt, splash in the water and mud as they please and return home in the best of health. . _exhibitions._--it has been found practicable to have the boys prepare during the season for coming together with a county exhibit, including a wide variety of things peculiar to their interests. this exhibition should be made as a big annual event, if possible, such as will attract all manner of persons and make friends for the county association. in its ideal arrangement the money expense will be kept down to a minimum. also keep out the idea of premiums. the contest plan of promotion will some day receive its desired consideration and lose its place as a means of promoting social and spiritual well-being. as a matter of fact it fosters much envy, ill-feeling, and bitter strife and thus strikes at the root of the good-fellowship which you are striving to encourage. _but, urge every boy to bring something for the sake of the help he may contribute and let the honor of this service and the approbation of his fellows be his high reward._ one boy may come with a mammoth pumpkin; another with a device of his own invention for catching ground squirrels; still another with a new method of tying a knot; another with a bushel of highly bred corn; others with farm and garden produce of the same attractive nature; others with wild grasses, curios, or geological specimens; others with the parts of a miniature menagerie. one boy may have caught a badger alive; another a coyote; another a jack rabbit; another a huge turtle. another may bring a cage of rattlesnakes or a box full of snakes of all sorts; another a set of original plans and specifications--for an ideal farmhouse, or farm barn and surroundings; for making the well sanitary; for a milk house; for keeping flies out of the house or barn; a recipe for driving ants and other insects from the house. the boys in one family may come with a lot of samples of soil, showing how differently each must be treated for the same general crop results. others may bring specimens of "cheat" and noxious weeds, and the like, with a scheme for destroying them. another may have a plan for a patent churn or a labor-saving device in the kitchen. thus there may be brought to the boys' fair an interesting and most instructive variety of objects, plans, and devices, all looking toward the improvement of home conditions. such a gathering as this will bring not only the parents and other adults from the home county, but great flocks of outsiders will also come in and learn and become deeply interested in the affairs of the county young men's christian association. spirituality not lost sight of it ought to be easy for the average thinker to appreciate the fact that all the foregoing rough-and-ready work in the lives of the boys can be made a practical means of the salvation of their souls as well as of their bodies and intellects. spiritual perfection is not reached at a bound. there must be much doing of the crude yet worthy things which grow naturally out of his inner nature before the boy can finally achieve a degree of spiritual development that may prove a permanent and fixed part of his adult life. yes, there will be some bible study, an occasional short prayer, and now and then a real sermonette in connection with the work of the organization, but much more frequently the christian life and character will come as a sort of discovery in the boy's life and that through his own conduct. through all this wholesome exercise of his better and cleaner interests, the youth will gradually be led away and kept away from those things which contaminate both the body and the spirit and introduce the individual to a coarse, debauched life. in other words, christianity will be a thing achieved and that through the young man's efforts rather than a thing instantly caught in some emotional revival meeting only gradually to waste away in the months immediately following. one well-built specimen of christian manhood--a character of the sort which the ideal work of the county y.m.c.a. may finally construct--is worth a dozen of those suddenly converted men whose secret lives are so often embittered with the consciousness of backsliding and following ever after the old evil ways. it will be observed at a glance that in the foregoing outline there is an avoidance of the heavier work-a-day tasks and problems. it is the thought of the author that the boys have quite enough of such labor as it is and that the county y.m.c.a. can do its best service if it provides a set of new activities of a more recreative sort. the central idea--second to the perfection of his spiritual nature--is that of giving the boy a larger amount of social experience through self-training in matters that will bring out his latent unselfishness and his self-reliance. the heavier problems of an economic sort suitable for discussion among the boys and the girls of the country districts will have due consideration in another chapter. in planning the various parts of the county work and the club life of the boys, there must be extreme care not to arrange for too many and too frequent meetings. it is especially to be desired that the boy do not acquire the runabout habit, even though he may in every case go to a desirable place. therefore, in arranging the programs it will be seen to that the meetings are held somewhat infrequently, but that on each occasion the meeting be continued until some intensive work has been done. for example, it would be much preferable to have all or a major part of one afternoon and evening of the week for the exercises rather than to have brief evening meetings a number of times during the week. work in a sparsely settled country the following statement will show what was achieved during the first year in the y.m.c.a. of washington county, kansas, which has a rural population of about ten thousand people. _general statement_:-- boys enrolled in bible-study groups, meeting weekly. men give time to the supervision and planning of the work. boys attended ten boys' banquets. out-of-town delegates attended the county convention. men and boys attended the convention banquet. boys took part in the relay race. men and boys on baseball teams. boys played basketball. men attended leaders' conferences. men conducted one day financial canvass. boys given physical examination. took part in the annual athletic meet. young men's sundays conducted by secretary. miles (approx.) traveled by secretary. citizens back of work. _financial statement_:-- pledges unpaid from previous year $ . pledges for year . $ . ------- received during year . due unpaid pledges . $ . ------- amount paid . due unpaid . available balance . $ . ------- references neighborhood improvement clubs. professor e. l. holton. agricultural extension bulletin, manhattan, kan. camping for boys. h. w. gibson. association press, new york. careful directions for camp life. training for boys; symposium. _harper's bazaar_, march, april, august, september, november, . keeping home ties from breaking. e. a. halsey. _world to-day_, january, . training men to work for men. e. a. halsey. _world to-day_, march, . the organization and administration of athletics. dr. clark w. hetherington. annual volume n.e.a., , p. . _rural manhood_, issue of june, . rural leadership number. social activities for men and boys. albert m. chisley. y.m.c.a. press, new york. a valuable book covering a wide variety of activities. _rural manhood._ henry israel, editor. cents per year. a most valuable exponent of the county y.m.c.a. work. the physical life of the boy. dr. d. g. wilcox. (pamphlet.) address, federated boys' clubs, boston. chapter x _the farmer and his wife as leaders of the young_ no less urgent and divine is the call for spiritual aid and leadership in the rural districts to-day than was that which came to the apostle paul of old in form of a vision and a voice crying, "come over into macedonia and help us." in the open country field, far removed from church or social center, is the demand for leaders and directors especially great. men engage for a lifetime in an enthusiastic endeavor to amass wealth and to build up great business concerns. but the man or woman who heeds the call to go forth into the country districts and save the bodies and souls of the young--that person will not only experience exceeding great joy and enthusiasm in his work, but he will thereby lay up for himself in the memories of the redeemed a precious treasury of golden deeds. country parents as a rule are not in a position to do the best things even for their own children, much less to go out as leaders of the young at large. they are sometimes lacking in the necessary means, more frequently too busy, and most frequently not sufficiently informed as to be fully awake to the meanings and possibilities of any such undertaking. however, in nearly every country neighborhood there is a man or woman, or both, who possess many of the big opportunities for enlisting in the service of the young. those who have no small children of their own to care for would naturally be freest to get away from the present home duties. then, some parents having children of their own not infrequently catch the inspiration and heed the call. at any rate, it is entirely fair and reasonable to assume that some one of the neighborhood could do it were there the disposition. as a means of arousing any such persons to attempt to do some constructive work among country boys and girls, the following detailed suggestions are offered. those who feel at all called to undertake this service may be assured that the interest grows more intense with time and effort put forth, and that the joy of accomplishing something in behalf of the young people of one's own vicinity is perhaps unsurpassed by that of any other type of human endeavor. in the discussions to follow we assume that some farmer and his wife have heeded this divine call. preparation for the service since very few are sufficiently versatile to undertake any and every kind of social work, perhaps the first step is that of choosing a definite line of action. and let the choice be in the direction of the chooser's leading social interest. as a means of preparation for efficient work a brief course of training is to be much commended. it may be found practicable to slip away from home during the winter months and take a farmers' short course in one of the agricultural colleges. or, one may find the peculiar instruction and inspiration needed by attending a convention or conference of the ablest leaders representative of the work. one of the rural-life conferences now frequently held might be found ideal. go prepared to take notes, to ask questions, and especially to obtain a large number of literary references. the use of helpful literature is most important at this stage. a magazine which admirably covers this particular field is _rural manhood_, published by the association press, new york city. then, secure the report of the country life commission, and a number of the latest works of a similar nature, some of which are listed below. write to the department of agriculture at washington for their bulletin on the organization of boys' and girls' clubs. also from the extension department of the agricultural college may be obtained for the asking all available literature of this same general class. now, make a careful survey of the neighborhood, or the larger field, with a view to finding out the specific conditions in relation to the chosen line of service. make lists of names and ages of the boys and girls, including all other data of a helpful nature. proceed with the thought that the work to be undertaken is not to be merely a means of entertainment, but of education for the young. work persistently for social unity in his most instructive volume "the rural church and community achievement," president butterfield says: "we are in great need in this country of an institution or institutions which have for their definite objective the study of the conditions and problems of farm home-life; not merely the matter of home management, or home keeping, but the fundamental relationships of the family to the development of a better community life in the rural regions." now, let the newly enlisted social worker assume that he is to undertake something by way of bringing about a fuller integration and unity of the people of the neighborhood. every new worker in the social field needs a word of warning against the rebukes and discouragements with which he may at first meet. to say the best, the neighborhood will doubtless be indifferent in regard to the newly proposed organization. but let the social worker go on persistently, unmindful of any such hindrance, even though scarcely a person in the neighborhood seems ready to join in the movement. in the typical case of valuable constructive work of this sort, it will be found at first that the masses are practically all opposed to the plan. however, as fast as it wins its way through unrelenting effort and unswerving devotion, the doubters and opposers will come over to its support. and after the movement has established itself reasonably well and achieved something worth while, the same people who once stood out will then fall enthusiastically into line and help with the undertaking. it will be impossible, of course, to point out definitely to the local, self-appointed leader just what plan of social endeavor to follow. since there is such a great variety of conditions, it seems advisable here to make a somewhat extended list of possible lines of work in the rural districts. corn-raising and bread-baking clubs perhaps among the easiest organizations to effect among the young people of any farm district are the clubs or contests in juvenile farm work and home economics. the beginning of such a purpose will consist of getting into communication with the extension department of the state agricultural college. after obtaining their literature and learning their methods of procedure, call the boys and girls together, asking their parents to come along. it may be found practicable to call a general meeting of the entire neighborhood, inviting old and young possibly to a basket dinner, and there to lay before them the plans of the organizations. while the contest in corn-raising or bread-baking has proved a marked success where tried, if possible arrange matters so that every earnest endeavor on the part of the young shall receive a suitable reward, not merely the winners of the first and second prizes. [illustration: plate xix. (courtesy of american magazine.) fig. .--jerry moore, the champion boy corn raiser of the united states. he raised bushels on a single acre of ground.] it is usually an easy matter to secure funds for paying the way of the boys to the state-wide farmers' institute or the boys' institute usually held at the agricultural college during the holiday season. provide that every boy who reaches a certain standard--say, that of raising so many bushels of corn on an acre of land--shall go at the expense of the fund. likewise, organize the girls into a bread-baking club or something of the sort. prizes may be offered for the best bread, but all the girls whose home-making work meets a certain fixed standard of requirement should have promise of a suitable reward. perhaps they too may be sent without expense to themselves to a state conference on home economics. in case of these trips to the state meetings it will be necessary to appoint responsible chaperons for the boys and girls. other forms of contests it may be found advisable to start a good-roads contest among the boys of the home township, offering an attractive prize to the one who shows the best results at the end of a given period and a per diem payment of money to every boy who faithfully takes care of his half mile or quarter mile of public road. then, there may be instituted on a small scale stock shows and poultry shows in the hands of the boys of the neighborhood. to this the girls too may come with any such thing as display specimens of their home sewing and fancy work, house plants, and the like. in fact, these exhibitions may gradually develop into a sort of neighborhood or township fair for the special benefit of the young. to this display may be brought, not only the items named immediately above, but the larger variety of things mentioned in the chapter on the rural y.m.c.a. the improvement of the school situation rural leaders will nearly always find many opportunities for improving the local school situation. but let the organizer keep unfailingly in view the high aims of all this rural work; namely, the awakening of a deeper interest in the affairs that normally belong to the neighborhood life, and the fuller measure of joy and contentment to result from every such achievement. so, there may be undertaken the redirection of the work of the country school. for example, bring forces to bear upon it that will result in the introduction of the study of elementary agriculture and the simple elements of home keeping and home sanitation therein. work for a better class of teachers and a higher salary payment. endeavor to have the length of the school term extended and the school attendance made more regular. institute a series of red-letter days for the school during the year. it may be practicable to have a "parents' day," an occasion on which all will be invited to come out and join the pupils in a noonday lunch and learn more about the progress and the needs of the school. provide a half-day for free and open discussion of school matters and if possible organize among the patrons a sort of "boosters' club." another form of endeavor in behalf of the schools is that of striving for improvement of the high school facilities of the neighborhood. perhaps there is not a high school within riding distance of the homes. cannot one be instituted, say, for the township? or, what can be done to improve the present neighborhood relations to the high school that may be already within reach? is there a prohibitive tuition fee? does the high school now in existence actually serve through its courses the best interests of young people who come in from the neighborhood? again, perhaps it would be feasible to organize the grown boys and girls who have dropped out of the country school into a neighborhood group and provide a daily conveyance for taking them to and from the town high school by this means, many may be induced to go to school who are idling away the valuable winter months. during the last decade, what has been the trend of the young men and women who have gone from the home district to high school or college? have any of the best of them returned to the farm? or, have these institutions been a means of sending them away as permanent city dwellers? does this thing need to continue? cannot some movement be instituted for bringing about a radical change? so long as the country boys and girls attend the town high schools and there be required to take the old-fashioned classical courses--which have always served to introduce their minds to the city life and to the professional callings--the country districts will continue to be depleted of their best brains and energy. home and school play problems start a movement in the interest of better provided play opportunities for the children of the neighborhood. the possibilities of enriching and extending the young life through the avenue of better play are just beginning to be understood. we have always accepted the theory that young children must have some time to play, but we have given little or no heed to the matter of providing for their play such apparatus as might furnish scientific contributions to the development of their characters. make a brief inquiry throughout the neighborhood and you will perhaps find that not a single farm home has apparently given this matter any definite attention. now, what playthings may easily be provided in such homes? after having determined that matter, begin a campaign of education of the rural parents. first, write to the playground association of america in new york city and ask for a list of their literature on play. from this source you will obtain pamphlets and larger volumes giving specific suggestions for installing rural play apparatus, and details as to dimensions, prices, and the like. now, you are ready for work. appeal to a centrally located family for their coöperation in establishing a model. induce them to provide for their children a full set of the apparatus, seeing to it that the expense is kept down to the minimum. nearly all of the materials of construction are lying about the ordinary farm home and need only to be assembled and put into place. once you have established your model home playground, then invite your neighbors in to see it, perhaps making a sort of picnic or holiday occasion out of the affair. at any rate, you may be sure that the parents of the neighborhood will begin at once to copy the models and many will even improve upon them. along with your efforts there may be necessary a campaign of instruction and admonition in relation to the play of the children. many parents may be working their small boys and girls too hard and allowing not enough time for play. in this respect your persistent effort will in time show excellent results. let us suppose that the farm home selected for the model playthings has at least one small boy and one small girl therein. then, the following might be set up:-- a swing, a seesaw, a sliding board or pole, a pair of rings, a trapeze, and a horizontal bar. have all under shade if possible. provide also a small play wagon and a cart or two, with a sand box for the small child. inspect the district school in reference to play facilities and you may find nothing other than the bare ground with perhaps a baseball diamond. here, then, is a rare opportunity for constructive work. organize in your own way a boosters' club and provide play apparatus. in chapter viii you will find full details as to the equipment best suited for the purpose. provide in every case that the expense be minimized. nearly all of the apparatus may be constructed free of cost by interested persons in the home neighborhood or in the near-by village. a neighborhood library another very enticing line of endeavor for the rural leader is that of establishing the country library. some one in the neighborhood has a big house, one room or more of which may conveniently be set apart for the purpose. induce the owners of this house to clear up a room and remodel it, if need be, and make their home a sort of intellectual center for the district. of course the schoolhouse or rural church may be available for the purpose, but the farm home will be better for a great many reasons, among them being the possibility of having the library open at all hours of the day so that books may be exchanged on the occasion of one's passing the place. now, go after the well-to-do residents of the district and gather a fund for the library. paint in glowing terms the visions you have of this thing when it has been set on foot. declare your purpose as that of helping and uplifting the community life. show the "close-fisted" resident that the establishment of a neighborhood library will attract desirable settlers into the district and improve prices of land and produce. after having obtained a small fund, consult the best authorities for advice in selecting the books. by all means avoid cheap stories and trash of every other sort. since your work is in behalf of the young, obtain a few attractive and instructive picture books. there can probably be obtained a book which treats and illustrates fully the bird life of the local state, giving a brief description and pictures in their natural color. young people may be very much attracted by authentic books of the nature-study class, including those descriptive of wild animals and of hunting and exploring tales. consult the lists given under the chapter on the literature in the country home for additional titles and suggestions. if it be found difficult or impracticable to purchase books for the neighborhood library, then, the next best thing will be the traveling library. communicate with the state library association and learn definitely what may be obtained from that source. then, proceed to bring the best available volumes into the neighborhood. in the selection of the library do not forget the local interest. secure every attractive volume that will help to make the boys and girls acquainted with the best meanings of their own community life and more interested in staying by the home affairs and building them up. not the least among the valuable elements of the neighborhood library will be the periodicals, in the selection of which expert advice is recommended. holidays and recreation for the young in an ably written article published in _rural manhood_ of january, , john r. boardman, international county work secretary, says: "a new gospel of the recreation life needs to be proclaimed in the country. rural america must be compelled to play. it has to a degree toiled itself into deformity, disease, depravity, and depression. its long hours of drudgery, its jealousy of every moment of daylight, its scorn of leisure and of pleasure must give way to shorter hours of labor, occasional periods of complete relaxation and whole-hearted participation in wholesome plays, festivals, picnics, games, and other recreative amusements. better health, greater satisfaction, and a richer life wait on the wise development of this recreative ideal." a brief survey of the neighborhood will doubtless show the lack of general method in dealing with the farm boys' and girls' holidays and vacations during the long summer months. here, then, is apparent another field for constructive leadership. in proceeding to change the present situation, it may be well to gather a considerable list of authoritative statements like the one just quoted. farm parents gradually fall into the habit of over-working their half-grown children. now, if we can institute a custom of weekly half holidays for the young people of the neighborhood, a splendid work will be done in behalf of a higher community life. begin work by selecting an attractive central location, and plan that the young, and the older ones, too, may come to this place one afternoon every week, or at least two afternoons every month, and have a good time generally. games may be played, local clubs may meet in the shade of the trees, the sewing society and other groups of women having their interests served. the farmers' clubs may have opportunity for helpful exchange of ideas, while the little children may play and romp about the premises. invite all to come early in the afternoon and bring an evening lunch to be enjoyed in common. thus, you may give the young people who regard their everyday work as drudgery, such interest and inspiration as to tone up their lives noticeably for every hour of the long days of toil. many over-work their children in connection with your efforts in behalf of the holiday or weekly picnic, take up carefully the matter of the proper amount of work for the farm boys and girls of any given age. you will find such willingness on the part of parents to do the right thing by their children and a proportionate amount of ignorance as to what ought to be done. therefore, you may be able to carry on most profitably to all a campaign of instruction in regard to such thing. you will, of course, first make out as best you can with the aid of all available literature, an ideal schedule of hours of work and play and recreation suitable for the boys and girls of the different ages. at the holiday picnic it may be found advisable to organize the boys into a club of their own and the girls, likewise, for the promotion of their several and mutual interests. inspire all with your earnestness and enthusiasm and lead them to consider the latent possibilities of the neighborhood, of how it might be transformed into a place of great worth and attractiveness. at the same country picnic, look to the practicability of organizing into a club the tired mothers of the district. they are many. you will know them by their careworn looks. create a sentiment in behalf of more frequent outings and more recreation for these women. help them obtain literature relative to their own affairs, to exchange ideas and plans in behalf of their own betterment. show them especially the possibility of quitting the work at stated times even though that work be less than half finished, and getting away from the tedium thereof--all in the interest of longer life for themselves and better service for their homes and families. almost any sort of club which these mothers can be induced to attend will achieve the purpose desired. federation for country life progress federations for country-life progress are now arising in many parts of the country. one of the first was organized in new england, under the leadership of president butterfield. the illinois movement may be described, as an example. the illinois state federation for country life progress is composed of nearly half a hundred subordinate organizations. their platform of ten principles given below sets forth a number of most important and practical purposes, as follows:-- . local country community building. . the federation of all the rural forces of the state of illinois in one big united effort for the betterment of country life. . the development of institutional programs of action for all rural social agencies. this means a program of work for the school, another for the church, another for the farmers' institute, and so on. . the stimulation of farmer leadership in the country community. . the increase and improvement of professional leadership among country teachers, ministers, and all others who serve the rural community in offices of educational direction. . the perpetuation among all the people of country communities of a definite community ideal, and the concentrated effort of the whole community in concrete tasks looking toward the realization of this ideal. . the recognition of the country school as the immediate initiator of progress in the average rural community of illinois. . the study and investigation of country life facts and conditions. . the holding of annual country life conferences. . the protection of this federation and of all country life from any form of exploitation. the vocations of boys and girls a most commendable work for the rural social leader would be that of showing the possibilities of guiding country boys and girls more scientifically in the direction of their coming vocational life. too often, there may be found a mistaken farmer who is attempting to force his boy to take up the farm life when as a matter of fact the boy is in no sense fitted for such vocation and should be trained for a distinctly different line of work. then, on another occasion, you will meet a man who is farming simply because he has to do it, and who is over-anxious that his boy be guided in the direction of something else. the point especially to be emphasized here is that the parent cannot choose arbitrarily a vocation for his child. the native interests of the latter must be consulted again and again, while the child is growing up, and in the end the young person must decide the matter for himself. the world is full of wrecks of human character who are such largely because of the single fault of their never having been trained scientifically in a vocational way. so advance as best you can the idea that parents must be most patient in awaiting the development of the various instincts and desires in their growing children, and for the final decision of the latter in respect to a calling. it should be made clear that many of the best and ablest men in the world floundered about not a little in deciding upon the final choice. this very important matter of choosing a vocation for the young man and the young woman will be taken up in chapters xviii and xix of this book. other local possibilities it will be understood that the possibilities of church and sunday school work in a rural neighborhood are not intentionally slighted. little is said in regard to them here simply because of the fact that there is a country-wide organization with well-directed local branches and with a flood of excellent literature constantly at work in building up the church and sunday school life. the reader may be reminded, however, that this field still presents many excellent opportunities for serving the highest interests of the home community. the matter of purely social gatherings for the boys and girls is important. it will perhaps be found that they are running to cheap, degrading dances, either in the home neighborhood or in a near-by town. if the rural leader can break this thing up and substitute a literary club, a better form of social intercourse, or any other gathering, for the cheap dance and its resultant debauch, the effort will certainly be most commendable. it is not as a rule advisable to condemn and denounce these cheap affairs, but rather to begin at once a movement in the interest of the better substitute. just as soon as the latter begins to take form, the young people will naturally discontinue their degrading affairs. chapter xiii of this book will offer a more extended discussion of the social problems of country youth. [illustration: plate xx. fig. .--an example of the little lonely school in the woods, a problem of the social worker. not enough children to stimulate one another properly in the lesson-getting and play activities.] the boy-scout movement there is much to commend the boy-scout movement as a country organization. it must be thought of as an educative institution. in discussing its best meanings and possibilities, professor e. l. holton, of the kansas state agricultural college, says: "education as used here means habits of health, of work, of thrift, of observation, and of research. it is habit that determines the health of an individual and the sanitary conditions of a community; the social and moral level of the worker and the quality of his work; the returns from the farm and the ideals of the farmer; a man's bank account and his insight into the secrets of his environment. habit has its physical basis in the flesh, the blood, and the nerve cells. there must be actual first-hand experience and leadership hitched up with text-book knowledge in educating the boy. the old elemental instincts of adventure, pugnacity, gang life, and following leadership must be taken into account and made to work out into life-compelling desires." before attempting the organization of the local boy scouts, one is advised first to send to the national organization and that of the state, if there be any, for literature and directions. the only caution which it seems necessary to give here is that there be connected with the conduct of the organization some serious problems and requirements and that it be not given over exclusively to merely doing wild and daring "stunts" and "hiking" about the country. rural boy-scouts in kansas as an example of what is being done by way of organizing the rural boy scout movement, the kansas plan under the direction of professor e. l. holton is here given:-- the agricultural college council is organizing companies of rural-life boy scouts in all parts of kansas. the aim of the council is "a company in every community." there are , boys in kansas eligible to membership. it seeks to encourage boys to learn the secrets of the prairies, the streams and the forests, and be able to read nature as well as books; to have a growing bank account, and to do some type of work better than it has been done by anyone else. during the month of july or august there is to be a five to ten days' rural-life camp of instruction in each county, which is to be attended by all companies of the county. this camp of instruction will be under the direction and management of the county council. the program will consist of:-- . games and athletic contests. . contest in judging farm crops and stock. . naming birds, wild animals, fish, flowers, trees, shrubs, etc. . reporting on the savings bank accounts. . contests in any other line of work carried on in the county. . talks on rural life subjects. the duties of the individual scout are as follows:-- for the third class-- . know by sight and call ten common birds. . know by sight and track ten wild animals. . know by sight five common game fish. . know in the fields ten wild flowers. . know by leaf, bark, and general outline ten common trees or shrubs. . know the sixteen points of the compass. . know the elementary rules for the prevention of typhoid fever. . plant and cultivate according to the latest scientific methods not less than one-half acre of some farm or garden crop. (the town boy may substitute a town lot.) . own and care for according to the latest scientific methods some type of pure bred domestic animal. (this includes poultry.) value not less than $ . . maintain a bank account of not less than $ . . shall strive to graduate from the common schools. for the second class-- . know by sight and call twenty common birds. . know by sight and track twenty wild animals. . know by sight seven common game fish. . know in the fields twenty wild flowers. . know by leaf, bark, and general outline twenty common trees and shrubs. . know the elementary rules for the prevention of tuberculosis. . plant and cultivate according to the latest scientific methods not less than one acre of some farm or garden crop. (the town boy may substitute town lots.) . own and care for according to the latest scientific methods some type of pure bred domestic animal. (this includes poultry.) value not less than $ . . maintain a bank account of not less than $ . . read the books of the young people's reading circle for the eighth and ninth grades. for the first class-- . know by sight and call fifty common birds of kansas. . know by sight and track all wild animals of kansas. . know by sight all the common game fish of kansas. . know in the fields twenty-five wild flowers. . know by leaf, bark, and general outline all common trees and shrubs of kansas. . know by sight twenty-five common weeds. . plant and cultivate according to the latest scientific methods not less than two acres of farm crops. (the town boy may substitute town lots.) . own and care for according to the latest scientific methods some type of pure bred domestic animal. (this includes poultry.) value not less than $ . . maintain a bank account of not less than $ . . shall read at least two of a list of books on rural life. the motto is: "know the secrets of the open country." references see rural leadership number of _rural manhood_, june, . play for the country boy. clark w. hetherington. _rural manhood_, may, . the y.m.c.a. socializing the country. farman s. vance. _the independent_, april , . holiday plays. marguerite merington. duffield & co. suitable for rural leaders. the county and local fair. l. h. bailey. _the country-life movement_, . this article contains many practical and stimulating suggestions for making a successful county fair, on a new basis. farmers' institutes for young people. circular no. of the u.s. department of agriculture. (free.) this circular gives a large fund of details of all sorts of clubs and movements. kindergarten at home. v. m. hillyer. baker-taylor company. n.y. contains much constructive work. the young farmer's practical library. edited by ernest ingersoll and published by sturgis-walton company, n.y. ( cents each.) contains some excellent matter. the following volumes are included: from kitchen to garret. virginia t. van de water. neighborhood entertainments. renée b. stern. the farm mechanic. l. w. chase. home waterworks. carleton j. lynde. the satisfaction of country life. dr. james w. robertson. roads, paths and bridges. l. w. page. health on the farm. dr. l. f. harris. farm machinery. j. b. davidson. electricity on the farm. county superintendent j. f. haines, noblesville, indiana, has a fund of helpful data on agricultural fairs by young people. the extension of industrial and agricultural education. (pamphlet.) extension department, university of wisconsin, madison. children's singing games old and new. mari ruef hofer. a. flanagan company. chicago. miss hofer is an authority of national reputation on the subject of play and games. chapter xi _how much work for the country boy_ over-work, poor pay, and little recreation are the agencies which annually drive thousands of good, promising youths from the rural districts into the cities, where their splendid native abilities for serving the world and society are most likely to become subordinated. all too often it is a case of a young man leaving the home place, surrounded by opportunities which he has not been allowed to avail himself of, and going into a place where he will take up the monotonous round of merely "holding a job." in the former position, under intelligent care and direction, he might have grown into a strong, self-reliant man, full of resources, endued with good purposes; and at last have taken rank among those who are lifting the race to higher things. in the position obtained in the city he is almost certain to find his surroundings badly cramped, his spontaneity largely restricted, and his power of initiative without a motive for its indulgence. in short, his city position will press him continually and insistently to the end that he reduce himself to a mere machine, or a mere cog in a great machine. see that the work is for the boy's sake one of the means whereby rural parents may assist their boy to develop into that fullness of life which the latter's native abilities and excellent environment guarantee him, is to provide a scientific relation of the young life to the work which he may be required to perform. first of all, what is the proper way in which to regard the boy's work? ordinarily, the farmer is inclined to think of the work rather than the worker, and to ask himself what he can put the boy at in order to make his services most profitable to the business. now, no evil intention is charged here, but this erroneous point of view is almost certain to lead gradually to an abuse of the boy. why not put the question in this way: how much work and what sort of work will be most conducive to the boy's present development and to his future welfare? the radical difference between the two positions may be readily seen. and while the latter may be less profitable in form of material and monetary gain, it will prove to be far more serviceable in the production of sterling manhood. it is not an easy matter to determine offhand as to the amount of work a boy of any given age should perform. conditions vary greatly. the safest mode of procedure is to study the individual boy carefully. let the parent first acquaint himself with the general principles of human development through the service of suitable literature, as recommended in a former chapter. then, the boy's physical strength, his aptitudes, and his native interests should be taken into account. among other aims, seek that of a happy adjustment of the boy to his work. some of the tasks required of him will be and should be somewhat irksome, as a means of discipline. on the other hand, much of the work he does should be backed up by his hearty approval and good will. it is probably true that no boy is instinctively fond of work and that the average boy must be held to his tasks whether he chooses to perform them or not. but the final pleasant relations of the boy to his work can best be secured by means of counseling with him on the subject. explain to the lad the fact that industry is the greatest factor in the world's progress and development. point out to him instances of worthy men, young and old, who are faithful workers. make him to see that he can the better become an honorable man through an intimate knowledge of labor. point out to him instances of men who are failures in life, and others who are criminals, explaining--as statistics prove--that the majority of these delinquent persons were never trained during youth in the performance of any specific work. show him if possible how even the wealthy person who has nothing important to do, is a burden to himself and a menace to society. not enforced labor, but mastery as stated above, no natural boy probably takes up hard work willingly or voluntarily. parents may as well accept it as their peculiar duty to direct and discipline their boys with required tasks. but after considerable persistent and conscientious enforcement of the boy's labors the parent is almost certain to be rewarded with the latter's manifest willingness and fondness in doing what was at first thought of as pain and punishment. it is a serious matter, however, to observe how many grown men there are who look upon their work with the dread and disfavor natural to little boys. one is inclined to wonder at this and at the cause of it. so far as can be learned by inquiry among workmen and those who dread their enforced labor, their view of the situations is about as follows, to render liberally the language of a stonemason-philosopher: "work is something no man is naturally fond of. every worker would quit if he could afford to and take life easy. if i had ten thousand dollars ahead, i would never work another day. of course somebody has to work or we should all starve, but my advice to a boy is that he get a good education and thus learn how to make a living some other way." here the parent who has true foresight in respect to his child's development is confronted with a serious problem. it is not merely a matter of teaching the boy to work, but rather that of teaching him to become master of his work in order that personal pleasure may finally come from the performance thereof. so, one must follow the boy most thoughtfully in the latter's initial steps toward satisfactory industry. while it is sometimes advisable to take him forcibly back to the place where he failed and even to enforce obedience and effort with the rod, it is most certainly the parent's duty to praise the small lad for his first light tasks well performed, and otherwise to show appreciation thereof. "it took me a year to get this boy down to business," said the proud father of a fifteen-year-old who had just won a second prize in a state-wide corn-raising contest. "during the summer of his sixth year i took him with me into the field on occasions when he could do something light and learn from it. but my chief plan was to train him in garden work. i gave him a small plot to tend and helped him lay it out and plant it. at first he showed great interest, but i knew that it was of the playful kind and that it would soon wane. sure enough, in a short time he was dodging and slighting his garden work. then, i began a more definite method. at morning i would instruct him very carefully what he must do for the day, and at each evening i required him to compare results and instructions with me. punishment was necessary more than once, but slowly he began to catch my point of view." "i bought the boy's first spring radishes for table use and permitted him to spend half the money. this seemed to open his eyes. later i paid him for his other produce. during the second season i emphasized such matters as carefulness in selecting seed and the arrangement and cultivation of the garden produce. several of the neighbors expressed surprise and delight when they saw the attractive garden. this merited approbation was noticeably effective. since that time i have had little trouble. i can give that boy any ordinary farm problem to-day and he will work it out most enthusiastically. he has learned the joy of mastery in his work." the foregoing somewhat lengthy statement is given with the thought that it may furnish illustrative material to others. it is a mistake to keep driving boys to their work "just because they ought to do it," as one stern father put the matter. but it is altogether fair and advisable that a series of rewards be offered. the youth must be made to feel that his work is to serve some worthy personal end. this well-trained boy's reward came gradually as follows: ( ) parental approbation. ( ) a money return. ( ) the praise of the neighbors, ( ) the joy of self-reliance and mastery. provide vacations for the boy it is unreasonable to expect the growing boy to have the same vital interest in the work as that of his parents. the wise father will see to it that his youthful son has some outside incentive for work, as well as money payments and words of praise. vacation periods and holidays judiciously placed will prove a splendid tonic for the working boy's mind. the schedule given below will indicate the relative amount of time that should be given to such recreative indulgences. even in the matter of holidays there is a tendency of some fathers to regard them as so much stock in trade to exchange for the boy's extra effort. so, some farmers will map out more than a reasonable week's work and say, "now, boys, finish that up by saturday noon and you may quit." in such case we have mere exploitation of the boy's strength and energy in the interest of the work and the profits. the scheme will fall flat sooner or later and leave the boy still despising the work and mistrustful of his employer. the plan pursued by a prosperous farmer in dealing with his two sons may serve to illustrate a very good method. this thoughtful father reports substantially as follows:-- "the work on our place is never ended, but whenever i find that the boys need a vacation they get it just the same. they are fourteen and sixteen and splendid help during the summer. i never permit them to work more than ten hours a day, while they are allowed a full half day off each week to use as they please, and about once each month they have an entire day to themselves. also during the hot weather in the middle of the summer they have from three days to a week for some special outing. last summer they camped out five days with some other good boys. it is my theory that the boys who are given such vacations will do more work and do it better than those who are not." the foregoing plan may seem to sacrifice the interests of the work, but in fact it really does not. after all, it is merely a question of the right point of view. is the boy for the sake of the work, or the work for the sake of the boy? answer the question conscientiously for yourself, dear reader. and may the boy be forever the gainer! a tentative schedule of hours obedience may be regarded as a pre-requisite for successful boy training. so, the first light tasks required of the small lad will be intended as merely a means of training him to obey and to feel the meaning of responsibility. no one has thus far seemed to think it worth while to attempt to prescribe for the work and play of children. how different in the case of the school requirements! even in the district schools the thing is reduced to a system--_both the quantity and the quality of the work necessary for each age and grade are carefully scheduled_. now, why not the same forethought in planning the necessary amount of the other exercises? and why not have this scheme made out by _highly trained experts_ as is the case with the school course? there seems to be no plausible defense for this traditional expensive oversight on the part of society. the schedule below is offered as merely schematic and possibly suggestive. in any given case there may be wide departures from it. but the thought is that of training the whole boy, and that for the sake of his own and society's future good. age or younger.--may be taught the nature of a required duty from being sent on an occasional small errand about the place. practically all the time should be given to play. age .--use substantially the same methods as for age , but add the requirement of one regular light task daily and follow him up in the performance of it. age .--continue as above, adding to the required tasks slightly. if the lad now be taken to the field, he must go more in the spirit of play than of work. of course he will learn much about farm matters at this age, but his activities will be largely spontaneous. note the plan reported above. age .--at this age, the boy should be required to do light chores at evening after school--such as carrying in wood and kindling and attending to the stock. or he may help in the house. during vacation he may help for two to four hours daily with some easy tasks, preferably about the house. of course there is much work about the barn and fields which is not too heavy for him. age .--some boys are put to plowing at this age, but such a thing is little short of criminal. moreover, they should be held regularly to _no sort of work_ all day long at this age; that is, unless the parent desires to reduce his boy to a little old dried-up man before the age of twenty is reached, and perhaps drive him from home. age .--intermittently half-day or all-day tasks may now be imposed; provided the lad be taken along as a mere helper and may, about two-thirds of the time, either play at his work or regard it in the light of a playful pastime. do not work the joyousness and spontaneity out of him at this young age. age .--an average of five hours solid work per day is all that the -year-old farm boy should be required to do. much play and recreation of the rougher sort should supplement it. the desire to construct something with tools is now strong and should be indulged. or, see that he has a pony to ride as he hurries about the place in the performance of his many errands. age .--increase the required tasks about one hour per day with similar treatment as for age . this is the age for training the boy to be a sort of "page" in service of his mother and sister. [illustration: plate xxi. fig. .--a tennis court in connection with the country boys' camp. there should be more of these. fig. .--a country play festival. we cannot answer rightly the question, how much work for the country boy? and at the same time neglect to provide for his play.] age .--many -year-old boys are required to do a man's work every day. but such a thing is done in the interest of the work and the profits and not for the sake of the boy. a good way to measure his worth at this age is to see that he does not earn more than half as much as the full-grown man. give many half-holidays. his interest in fishing, rowing, swimming, and the like, needs much indulgence. age .--from this age to , watch the boy for the beginning of adolescence and be unusually careful not to over-work him. most of his bodily strength must go into making new bone and muscle. frequent intervals of rest and relaxation should be the rule, together with avoidance of too long and too heavy a day's work. even permit some crops to be lost rather than abuse the boy. age - .--this is the time to begin to interest the boy in working to serve his own ends. his social instincts will now appear strong and he will desire many new possessions not hitherto thought of. therefore, adjust his work to these new interests and lead him to feel as much as possible that he is working for his own advantage. there is still danger of over-work. so see to it that rests and vacations with opportunities for social experience are frequent. it is a matter for parental concern if the farm boy be not able to return to his labors at the beginning of each new day with freshness of spirits and overflowing energy. think out a reasonable plan finally, the farmer is urged to take up the matter for consideration early and make out what seems a reasonable plan of relating the boy to his work, and then to adhere persistently thereto. it has been charged repeatedly that the typical well-to-do farmer works his wife and children hard all day and until late bed time in the evening; that heavy chores are piled upon the boys after they have already worked overtime in the field; that they are routed out at four o'clock every morning, when they go half asleep and moaning to their work again. if the foregoing accusation be at all true, its truth must certainly be the result of carelessness and ignorance of human rights, and not premeditative inhumanity and criminality as it seems to be! the reading of good farm literature, together with some intensive study of books and periodicals on the care and management of children--these will most certainly prove corrective agencies of some of the abuses named herein. references standards in education. arthur h. chamberlain. chapter iii, "industrial training: its aim and scope." american book company. child labor and the republic. homer folks. national child labor committee, n.y. teaching the boy to work. (pamphlet.) wm. a. mckeever. published by the author, manhattan, kansas. half time at school and half time at work. f. p. stockbridge. _world's work_, april, . an interesting experiment at the university of cincinnati. care of the child. mrs. burton chance. chapter x, "the awkward age." penn publishing company. chapter xii _how much work for the country girl_ imagine a wedding scene in a rural home. the only daughter, a young woman of ideal age for marriage, is joining her heart and her hand, for weal or for woe, to those of a young man of suitable character. but strange and unexpected as it may seem, there are many tears on the part of the immediate relatives of the girl. her parents are manifesting the strange emotion of solemnity at a time when gaiety might be expected. why is it? you ask. the whole situation has an interesting and inspiring history. it is simply this: during all her years the parents of this girl have watched her grow up, through infancy, childhood, maidenhood, and finally into the full maturity of a woman; and every stage of her growth has been carefully safe-guarded by them. they have made the home life and the home work serve her needs and purposes in a most beautiful and instructive manner. they seem to have attempted at all times to put into their daughter's life just such experience as would become a helpful part of her growing character. and what a reward! what a splendid satisfaction to the worthy parents to be able to contribute to society such a product of their affectionate care and training! a balanced life for the girl should we follow it out, the biography of the good young woman mentioned above would teach many a valuable lesson to the parents of other girls--would teach them that a growing girl has her specific needs and her inherent rights, which must be provided for by her parents through the proper kind of directing and caretaking. a certain amount of restraint, of work, of play, of recreation, of social experiences, of practice in self-dependence, of opportunity for service of others--yes, a certain amount of all these things must be conscientiously supplied for the life of the growing girl so that she may develop into a well-rounded character. parents are not accused of intentional wrong to their daughters. such cases are rare. the chief sins against the daughters of the rural homes are the sins of neglect, of indifference, and of ignorance as to what were necessary to be done. so what we may accomplish in this chapter is, first to arouse parents to an appreciation of the seriousness of the problem before them; and second, to offer some specific aids to the better achievement of the task of bringing up a girl to the rural home. it is a well-established principle in plant propagation that certain nutrient elements must be present in the soil before growth will go on properly. it does not satisfy the needs of the plant for some of the chemical substances to be present in large amount if the others be absent. there must be a sort of balanced ration for the vegetable life. similarly in case of that tender plant of the household, the young girl; she can be kept alive on work and study alone, but for beautiful and symmetrical growth other elements of character-nourishment are necessary. what are they? the reader is referred to chapter i for a general list. the hurry of work and the isolation of the ordinary country home tend to foster an over-serious disposition in girls. there is too little to provoke a smile and not half enough practice in smiling. laughter is also too infrequent. a boy may grow up habitually stern and sedate and yet be able to fight his way through a successful manhood. but with the girl it is different. her habit of smiling and of being pleasant and agreeable may prove to be one of her most valuable charms. so, the early and continuous training of the girl in sociability must be considered among the parental duties to her; and that by encouraging her to be sociable at home and by providing that she have frequent companionship with others of her age. work begins with obedience one of the initial steps in the training of a child is that of securing a willing obedience, a habitual performance of required tasks and duties. it may prove an easy matter to drive the girl to the work. but how about the problem of teaching her to take up her daily tasks willingly and with a joyous heart? girls are little different from boys at this stage of their education. they do not take naturally and fondly to work. they will slight and neglect it. worse than that, if untrained in faithfulness to household duties, they will lounge about the place or run much in society and allow their mothers to work themselves slowly to death--and scarcely seem to realize what is taking place. similarly as in case of the boy, some forcing, some rebuke, and occasional punishment will be necessary to initiate the girl into the work habit. but shortly obedience and willingness will come, and with them a deeper consciousness than is manifested in her young brother. after that, the danger of over-work will soon begin to be apparent to the watchful mother, and be guarded against. habit formation is a prominent factor in the first lessons of obedience in work. it will be highly advisable to start everything right. after a few instances of slighting one kind of work or expending too much energy upon another kind the young character begins to take on these faults permanently. many women scrub floors and wash dishes unto their death. others perform these endless tasks quite as well "in a jiffy" and go on their way singing. why is this? is it not a matter which the mother should think about most seriously in relation to the training of her daughter? working the girls in the field is there any justification for requiring a girl to work in the field with the men and boys? many girls are doing so, whether required or not. careful consideration of the matter seems to bring out a few suggestions. the farm girl while a child under ten years may accompany the father or the brothers into the field and there be permitted to do some light work occasionally, provided she regard it in a semi-playful way. on very rare occasions, when older, she may be rightfully called on to drive a rake for a day or take some similar part of the work in order to help prevent the loss of a valuable crop. but the practice followed by some farmers, of often requiring their daughters to do a man's work in the field, and excusing the fault with the thought that it is for the sake of laying up wealth for her future enjoyment--that is abominable and should be prohibited by law. among other objections, it is probably most hurtful to the young woman's pride and self-respect to be forced to perform farm labor. and then, during such time as she works in the field her much needed opportunities for the practice of the womanly arts and refinements are slipping away. of course we should not take away from the country-reared woman the poetic sentiment about the days of her childhood when she helped rake the hay and drive the cattle home, "just for fun." some specific suggestions it is difficult, of course, to lay down specific rules here, because every case is a special one. but nearly all intelligent parents can easily determine whether or not they are fair to their girls. it would seem reasonable that in addition to the affection and interest properly bestowed upon her in the home, the daughter should have at least the same measure of value--money value--put upon her work as is the rule with the hired helper. certainly no worthy parent would ask her to work for a smaller sum. too many of these good, promising girls are cramped and limited in their lives until the self-pride is crushed well-nigh out of them. often such young women will be seen moping about in a stooped attitude of body, stiff and awkward in their manners, lacking in self-confidence and in that beautiful grace and ease of movement which mark the well-developed young woman of twenty years. all of this is more or less indicative of parental disregard and mistreatment--indicative that some one has cheated her out of the time that should have been allowed for rest and recreation and social improvement and given her in exchange an over-amount of grinding toil and enforced seclusion--_all for the sake of the work and the profits_. it is a singular fact that so many country mothers make no provision for throwing extra safeguards around their young daughter during the monthly period of physical drain and weakness. it could probably be shown that her lowered vitality and the increased susceptibility to fatigue at this time make almost complete rest and relaxation highly advisable. it is also most probable that the strain of work and the exposure to inclement weather, so often allowed during the monthly period, are the incipient causes of life-long weakness and disease. do you own your daughter? there are still not a few parents who are possessed of the old-fashioned idea that their children belong to them, that they have a proprietary right in their own sons and daughters. just now there is thought of a father who is intelligent, in many ways above the average man, but who seems to regard his twenty-three-year-old daughter as a sort of chattel. being a widower, he needs her services, so he would employ her at the least possible wages, or none, to take charge of the home, rear the two or three smaller children, and cook and keep house for himself and three or four hired men. the best excuse that may be offered for this man's attitude toward his daughter is sheer ignorance of the true meaning of the situation. but such treatment of a mature daughter is little short of cruelty. this young woman should have every possible opportunity just now to prepare herself for the future. her conduct for the present may even have the appearance of being somewhat selfish in order that her future well-being and that of those dependent upon her may be safe-guarded. further details of the foregoing case need not be given. the issue to be made out of it is this: the parent who is doing the fair and square thing by his daughter not only trains her to work and then safeguards her life against an over-amount of work, but he also sees to it that the labor she performs is contributive to her enjoyment, to the strengthening of her character, and to the perfection of her life for the future. parents are justified in using every possible means as contributory to the future well-being of their growing daughters, and all this for the sake of the generations yet unborn. thus, perhaps without realizing the fact at all, the former may return to the race life that measure of assistance which they themselves received. difficult to make a schedule it is difficult to make out a schedule of hours for the growing girl as we did for the boy, but the former chapter may be taken as a general guide. as with the boy, so with the girl, the first step in discipline is that of securing a willing obedience. then the tasks may be assigned in accordance with the girl's age and strength. there is no good reason for attempting to get work out of the child through a make-believe policy of play. children had better be made to understand from the first that the world we live in is constructed largely through work; and that labor is honorable and may even be made pleasurable. "i should rather do the work myself than be bothered with trying to get the children to do it," is a very common expression, and one which indicates an erroneous idea of the problem we are considering. so long as parents put their children at the tasks merely for the sake of getting the tasks done, the children will suffer as a consequence. but if the thought of the child's need of the discipline coming from work be uppermost, then, the results are likely to be wholesome. teach the girl self-supremacy one of the greatest problems of the future of the race is involved in the fact that many thousands of the best young women in the land--young women who are well fitted to be the mothers of a better race of human beings than we now have--are choosing an independent calling for themselves. it is the author's belief that one of the most tragic experiences known to any considerable portion of the american people is this gradual starvation of the maternal instinct usually necessary in the case of the well-sexed young woman of the class just mentioned. [illustration: plate xxii. fig. .--an industrial exhibit in a country school. if the boys and girls could enjoy frequently the refining experience of having their work observed by approving eyes, their appointed tasks would seem lighter.] and yet much of this fatal choice of an independent vocation on the part of many young women doubtless results from bad management of the growing girl. in too many country homes especially, the work is complete master of the housekeeper and not the converse, as the case should be. as a result, thousands of good women who ought to be in the pink and prime of life are going pathetically to the only rest which the conditions seem to allow--the grave. it is an awful thing, this wreck of so many good lives through over-work. under such conditions, may we reasonably censure the many young women who foresee such a fate as a possibility for themselves and avoid it through choice of an unmarried life and independent support? girls are more readily enslaved to work than boys. it is comparatively easy to teach a young woman to work, but it is an extremely difficult matter to teach her when and how to quit work. here, then, is the point whereat we would center the attention of the parents of the country girl. make her mistress of her work. develop in her by actual concrete lessons the ability to stop and rest or take recreation at the necessary time, even though the work be not half done. summary . give the girl a trifling daily task at four or five years of age, merely for the sake of discipline. see to it, however, that her young life be occupied chiefly in play and enjoyment and outdoor recreation. . gradually increase the amount of work required, but always with an eye single to the girl's physical growth and character-development. some definite thing to do as a regular daily requirement will prove most helpful. . continue throughout the daughter's growing years to provide for her pleasure. her schooling, her personal belongings, her social advantages, and the like, must all be made to serve the purpose of making her life in the home a happy one. as she grows in strength and years, she will assume the increased amount of work with willingness and even with pleasure, provided the assigned duties be vitally related to her present purposes and her life interests. . moreover, country parents must learn to think of themselves as first of all engaged in bringing up their children for a better human society; and secondly, as engaged in farming and housekeeping. if this point of view be held to persistently, the crops may often suffer and the housework frequently remain unfinished, but the vital interests of the boys and girls will continue ever to be served. . finally, let us continue to appreciate the value of outings and vacations as potent factors in relieving the drudgery of work about the country household. women's work in the country home naturally calls for much isolation and seclusion. the pre-adolescent girl should be taken out of the farm home once or twice per week during the summer vacation. it is good for her to go with her mother to the town market and to the women's club meetings. as soon as she enters young womanhood, a square deal for the girl who helps in the home will call for a weekly outing of some kind and a careful provision for her social needs. all of this outside intercourse will serve to quicken the body and the intellect of the girl as she goes daily about the household duties, and to give her "thoughts that on easy pinions rise and hopes that soar aloft to the skies." references the author has been able to find little printed matter of worth on the important problems outlined in this chapter. the industrial training of the country girl is a neglected subject. it seems to have been taken for granted that she needed none. sex and society. w. i. thomas, pp. - , "sex and primitive industry." university of chicago press. shows in outline the emancipation of women from the bondage of work. growth and education. john m. tyler. chapter xii, "manual training needed for girls." houghton mifflin company. mind and work. dr. l. h. gulick. chapter ii, "the habit of success"; also chapter xiii, "the need of adequate work." doubleday, page company. motive for work. margaret e. schallenbeyer. annual report n.e.a. . _wallaces' farmer._ des moines, iowa. weekly. this periodical prints many articles, editorial and contributed, which discuss the subjects treated in the foregoing chapter. the mother of the living. mrs. catherine barton. published by the author. kansas city, mo. the girl wanted. nixon waterman. chapter viii, "the purpose of life." forbes & co., chicago. life's day. william l. bainbridge, m.d. chapter viii, "the irresponsible age." frederic a. stokes company. n.y. chapter xiii _social training for farm boys and girls_ we have been exceedingly slow in realizing the social needs of our children, in the usual instance depending on chance conditions to determine the matter for us. the city and the rural communities present a striking contrast in this respect. it does not seem possible that both can be right, while there is much to support the opinion that both are wrong. that is to say, in the city community the majority of the children are allowed to spend too much time in the company of others. as a result, they take on social manners and customs in a mere formal way and by far too early for the good of their character-development. the city ripens young life too fast. it produces the manners and refinements of adult life before the child becomes matured mentally. in the ordinary rural community there is not enough social experience for the young; and hence, a certain amount of crudeness, awkwardness, and lack of refinement tend to linger permanently in the character. a happy mean is needed what seems necessary, therefore, is the establishment of a social life which will be a compromise between the excess of the city and the deficit of the country. so far as can be learned, very little has been achieved in the matter of establishing just such a social order in the rural communities as will tend to develop the lives of the boys and girls in an ideal, symmetrical way. we may not feel very certain as to just how this ideal juvenile society should be constructed. nevertheless, an attempt will be made to sketch in this chapter a working plan therefor. some may see fit to adapt it, while others may improve it through practice. what especially needs to be thought of in the development of any normal young life is the problem of rounding out the character on all sides. there are certain fundamental character-forming experiences and disciplines, such as work, play, recreation, and social intercourse. many parents seem to be possessed of the idea that they can develop their children through play and social training alone. others seem to believe that hard work and plenty of it is all that is necessary for the development of a substantial character in the young. still others appear to allow their boys and girls to roam at will and to indulge them only in the recreative experiences. but how indefensible the idea that anyone should try to find permanent joy and satisfaction through recreative experiences without first having had as their counterpart the experience of work and the responsibilities that pertain thereto! so, again, it may be contended that there is a happy mean between the over-work and the absence of social experience so common in the farming communities and the lack of work and the extreme social excitement that so often obtains in the life of the city child. a social renaissance in the country there is becoming more and more apparent the necessity of not only a revival of the social life in the country, but also the demand for its reconstruction. it is especially to be desired that the reorganization be effected under the guidance of sound principles of psychology and sociology. that is, it must be based on the fundamental fact of the sex instinct so prominent during the adolescent period, and the further fact of the imperative demand at this time for a large amount of social intercourse. how differently this point of view persistently held will shape the matter as compared with the older ideal of merely "giving the young folks a good time"! yes, the social life of adolescent boys and girls has its source in the sex instinct then so predominant. it is not therefore to be viewed as a piece of superficial sentimentality, but rather as a profound law of nature. as suggested by two or three of the preceding chapters, there may be organized a social center in the church, or other such centers may develop independently through the leadership of some mature persons. but instances of this class of effective organization are as yet few and far between. meanwhile, the young are growing up and their present social needs are very pressing. individual farmers cannot wait for neighborhood movements; and so the parents of the children requiring the social life must themselves take the initiative in the matter. conditions to guard against before proceeding to a detailed outline of various plans for supplying the social needs of rural young people, it may be well to point out a few of the pitfalls to be guarded against. in reference to the latter, it is not the purpose to advise parents to try to place their children in an exclusive social set. far from that. the purpose is rather the converse; namely, to urge parents to attempt to build up good, clean characters in their boys and girls and yet permit the latter to mingle freely with common humanity. an aristocracy in the towns and cities is bad enough and a thing wholly out of harmony with the best and highest interpretation of our national life; but an aristocracy in the country neighborhood is an abomination. but while the so-called best families must think of their young as growing members of the entire social community and not as belonging to an exclusive set, there is nevertheless great need of constant watchfulness in respect to certain evils that always threaten the lives of farmers' sons and daughters. . _the social companionships of girls._--of course it must be admitted that there is frequently present in the country neighborhood some vile or wicked young character whose influence is very pernicious. on one occasion this person may appear in the guise of an exemplary young man, smooth in manners, stylishly dressed, and apparently interested in the best affairs. but as a matter of fact, he may be secretly an agent for some infamous institution in the city. the records show that thousands of country girls have been enticed away to the cities by such characters only to meet an untimely and awful fate. the parents of the country girl should therefore know who the young man is with whom she keeps company. usually it is a comparatively easy matter to test his worth. if he have no fixed local attachment in a home, and no permanent business relations in the community, he may be regarded with suspicion at least, and may be compelled to furnish evidence of his moral integrity. another type of the young country man unworthy of the company and companionship of the young woman is the one who is known by the men of the community as being habituated to the use of vile and indecent language, or to the practice of drinking intoxicants. if such be among his known characteristics, the evidence is decidedly unfavorable, making him unsuitable as a social companion of the country girl. it is reasonable to predict that he will never change his ways very radically, and especially that he will not develop into a desirable life companion for the daughter. some good parents make the fatal blunder of allowing their girl to keep company with such a coarse-grained young man simply because he is so "good hearted," and "means well," and the like. to say the least, a depraved social taste will gradually develop in the girl's life if she continue in such company. another contamination for the country girl sometimes results from the depraved young woman who has drifted into the neighborhood. the girl herself will be in the best position to detect such a type, as the latter will be marked by her coarse manners when in the presence of the girls, and by her practice of discussing obscene matters in private conversation with them. this is the situation in which the innocent young girl's mind may become forever poisoned and her wholesome faith in humanity entirely too much unsettled. . _bad companionships for boys._ similar warnings as those given above need to be sounded with reference to the young country boys, and others as well. farm boys are necessarily much in the company of men of very common tastes and low ideals. they hear not a little evil conversation and profanity, as it is used by such men. as a result, there will be need of much constructive teaching at home. admonitions, warnings, and advice will be necessary. in every instance it is well for the parents to remind the boy of the great interest they have in his welfare, of how deeply he may grieve them by taking up any of the evil practices in question, and of the high ideal which they hold in mind for his future. farm parents will need to keep up an intimate and frank exchange of ideas with their youthful son on the general subjects discussed in this chapter. they may ask him to repeat all he has heard and to relate all he has seen, good and bad, they then offering their corrections and admonitions. the especial danger is that the boy may acquire evil forms of speech, pernicious ideas for his secret thoughts, and a too low estimate of the worth of humanity. the vile companion is especially inclined to make the youth believe that there is no purity of character among girls and women--a most lamentable state of mind for a boy or a man of any age. the boy in the country is not only very much in danger of having his mind contaminated by the evil speech and the evil misinformation mentioned above, but there is always the possibility of his being enticed by some older and depraved companion into the company of evil women. strange to say, there are a few men who seem to plan deliberately this form of downfall for innocent boys and to regard the success of their vile plot in the light of a mere joke. it is perhaps a fault of society that such men are permitted to run at large. and it is especially the fault of fathers if such men keep company with their boys. no matter how excellent the family history, how well-born the boy may be, and how carefully he has been admonished, there is always some danger of his yielding to an evil sex temptation--a situation which the parent should always be watchful about and ready to meet. . _secret sex habits._--it is probable that country boys are more prone to secret perversions of their sex life than are city boys. the enforced solitude of the former and the increased opportunities for such secret evil may be accountable for the difference. in any event, there is necessity of constant watchfulness, and that especially until the son has reached comparative maturity of the physical body. the danger is at its height at the beginning of the adolescent period, fourteen to sixteen years of age. but the preparation for meeting the possible sex perversion should be begun very early and consist in frank talks and admonitions. the small boy's questions about the origin of life must be answered frankly but only to the extent of imparting to him enough information to satisfy his present curiosity. thus to satisfy his childish curiosity will prove a means of counteracting the evil influences of the bad companionships referred to above. then, the youth needs to be shown some instances of the ruinous effects of sex perversion in boys and men, together with the inculcation of the idea that any such evil practice will cut off the possibility of his realizing the high standards of moral character set for him. it is well also to remember that prevention of the boy's misuse of his sex life is comparatively easy and that cure is extremely difficult. . _the so-called bad habits._--when we speak of the "bad habits" among boys and men we are inclined to think of swearing, smoking, and the use of intoxicants. without thought of defending the practice of profanity, we may say that it is often acquired in an innocent fashion and that it ordinarily implies no conscious or intentional evil. that is, it is usually not so bad in its actual analysis as it sounds to the listener. moreover, it is a habit which many boys take up and afterwards discontinue when once they have set up for themselves high standards of manliness. with juvenile smoking the case is different. without the thought of offending the adult smoker or defending adult smoking, we may say with a high degree of certainty that the use of tobacco is extremely hurtful to growing boys. it weakens and deranges the organic processes, leaves its deleterious effects in the throat, eyes, and lungs, and breaks down the natural constitutional defense so essential in time of such diseases as pneumonia and typhoid fever. on the mental side, tobacco lessens the boy's ability to study. very wide investigations have shown that the habitual smokers among school boys rank low in scholarship; that they are prone to fail in their classes and quit the schools; that almost none of them take high rank as students. the moral effects are even worse. in times of temptation the young boy who smokes is more inclined to yield and to choose the worse form of conduct instead of the better. he lacks especially that fine sense of inner worth so necessary for the one who would succeed in arousing his own moral courage sufficiently to withstand the temptations that naturally beset young life. the rural parents will not of course despair about the boy or turn against him should they discover that he has secretly become confirmed in the use of tobacco. there are still possibilities of his development into a substantial character; but because of his smoking the problem becomes a much more involved and difficult one. all that has just been said in reference to tobacco may be emphasized many fold in respect to intoxicants. to allow a growing boy to begin the use of intoxicating drink in any form seems to be wholly indefensible. however, if there are open saloons in the adjoining town or city, even the best country boys are always somewhat in danger of taking the first false step. rural parents must not be satisfied with the thought that their boy is "too good" to take up such a thing; they must be assured that he is not doing so. now, the only way to obtain such assurance is by means of keeping in intimate touch with the boy and his movements--by knowing when and where he goes, why he goes there, and whom he meets in the various places visited on his rounds. thus, he may be saved from a life of debauch and degradation, and that by means of providing carefully that he reach his full maturity of mind and body without any knowledge of the taste of intoxicating drinks. a center of community life as explained in a number of preceding chapters, there are being carried out several plans for bringing about a social awakening in the farm districts. some of these are succeeding admirably, especially the county y.m.c.a., and in a few instances the rural church. but presumably there are many thousands of country districts wherein these helpful agencies will not be found for many years to come. so, in the following lines there will be an attempt to furnish detailed methods and suggestions to rural parents who are under the necessity of assisting their own children in a social way. the discussion thus far has been of a somewhat destructive order. now, something of a constructive nature will be offered. the first essential in the awakening of a clean social life for the young is a center of effort. if there be no church or clubhouse of any kind within easy access of all, then the farm home may be made use of for this service. there are many advantages in the common country home as a social center for the young, among them being the probable presence of some sympathetic parent to offer guidance and to keep down unbecoming conduct. invite the young to the house so, if country parents are really in earnest about doing something to develop their own children in a social way, let them throw open their own homes for the purpose. in a certain iowa home this thing was done in an admirable manner. let the father tell the story in his own language:-- "for years we had a room in the house which we called the 'parlor.' it contained some expensive furniture which the members of the family scarcely ever saw, as the place was usually kept closed up and dark. why we reserved such a dark, musty room for the 'special company' that came two or three times each year, i do not know. at any rate, we decided to make the place useful. in remodeling the house we enlarged it to by feet in size and added one very large window. [illustration: plate xxiii. fig. .--an agricultural and domestic science club in oklahoma. without being so named, it is also distinctively a social club, and a splendid socializing and refining agency.] "here we made a society room for the young people of the neighborhood. extra chairs were obtained, also a large new stove and fixtures for gaslights. there were also some simple wall decorations and a small library and reading table. that was two years ago. since then our two boys and two girls have given many parties in that room and no one has got more enjoyment out of the affairs than their parents. we feel as if that room was the best investment we ever made." not nearly all anxious parents may be so situated as to follow the excellent plan described above, but it is certainly worthy of a trial by all who can avail themselves of its benefits. best of all, the young people in whose behalf this thoughtful endeavor is put forth will most certainly grow to maturity confirmed in the belief that the country life is not lacking in its social enjoyments. how to conduct a social entertainment in giving a social entertainment to the young people of the country, there are a few simple yet common matters to be observed. first of all, there is the frequent tendency toward reticence or backwardness. it will be remembered, of course, that the object of the occasion is not merely passing amusement for the young, but also that of furnishing some means of character-development. in fact, the author wishes that every chapter of this book be thought of as contributing something toward the building up of young lives. so, in case of the home party, it will be necessary to see that every one present takes some active part. the bashful youth who is merely permitted to sit by and look on will go home secretly displeased, if not much pained, at his own backwardness. he may even fail to appear again on such an occasion, and thus the availability of a most helpful agency be permanently lost to him. it is not therefore so much a question of the dignity and importance of the games played as it is a question of the active engagement of every one present in the amusements. much will depend on leadership. an able leader will have the group organized before the several members realize what is being done. an expert student and director of young people was seen on a certain occasion to take charge of a party of forty boys and girls ranging in age from fifteen to twenty years. these were quickly placed standing in two parallel lines of twenty each. each side was given a dish of unhulled peanuts and asked to engage in a contest of passing the nuts down the line one at a time, from hand to hand, the one at the farther end of the line placing the nuts in a receptacle. this simple game "broke the ice" for the entire evening. after that it was easy to keep the entertainment going. the supervisor of the social affair is advised to discourage all games that tend to an over-amount of silliness and that allow for undue familiarity of the sexes. there is, however, a dignified form of fun and merriment quite as enjoyable as the baser sort. and, too, the leader of the evening need not be reminded of the many little opportunities for inculcating wholesome lessons in dignified manners. many a "green" and awkward country youth is started on the way to salvation through the courteous treatment he receives from some older and much respected person. simply to treat him as if he were a dignified young gentleman amounts to inciting him to put forth his greatest effort to make a show of manliness. a close student of young nature will often observe that merely to address such a youth as "mister" so-and-so causes him to straighten up and try to look the part. the hostess and guide at the rural party of young people will err not a little if she feels under the necessity of preparing a banquet or even a heavy luncheon for the occasion. something as simple as a light drink and a wafer or two will be quite enough. the object of the refreshments is not merely to feed the young people to the point of stupefaction, but rather to give physical tone to support the vivacity of all. what about the country dance unless the country dance can be radically reformed, it must be very strongly advised against. there is something about this occasion as usually conducted which seems to invite coarse characters and disreputable conduct. the country dance has so often been the scene of vice, drunkenness, and other such evils as to have received a permanent stigma of cheapness. the only seeming possibility of making a success of it is by the method of inviting a very exclusive set to attend, and this thing is so suggestive of aristocracy and snobbishness as to cause not a little ill feeling in the neighborhood. under present conditions the country dance cannot be so managed as to make it contribute to the social and moral uplift of country young people. there are many better forms of entertainment which may be substituted for it. along with the country dance should be rated the cheap professional entertainments that are so often given in the country school houses. many of these are not only degrading but are morally evil in their suggestions, while they tend to give the young a depraved taste in respect to public shows and theaters. the school trustees may well exclude all such "shows" from the building. additional forms of entertainment the farm parents most desirous of leading in the young people's entertainments, and best fitted to do so, may find it impracticable to invite the young into their home. in such case, there are several other ways whereby the desired ends may be achieved. [illustration: plate xxiv. fig. .--a rural scene in canada, where the church and the school are situated together. the large barn in the background is significant. much of the daily thought and conversation is centered here.] . _the social hour at the religious services._--it is deemed quite advisable that those who plan the religious service in the country have thought of a social hour in connection therewith. the latter may prove fully as helpful in a constructive sense as the former, and it can in no wise detract from the value of the religious meeting. this combination of events is already being successfully tried in a number of places. for example, at the mid-week evening service, there is given first an hour to the prayer meeting or the discussion of the religious topics and the church work. after that, the scene is changed into one of clean, wholesome amusement with the special thought of giving the young people social entertainment and training. it has been found that this very method of uniting the religious and social service under a carefully planned program sometimes more than doubles the attendance. of course the first essential for the success of such a meeting is that an able leader be in charge of it. . _a country literary society._--in times gone by the country literary society has played a mighty part indirectly in the building of the nation. many a statesman or leader of the people has received his first aid and inspiration at the little old country "literary and debating society." there is no good reason why this same general form of society might not continue to do its effective work. however, in its best form, there will be some additions to the old procedure of merely debating the important public questions. the program makers may well have in mind the ideal of bringing out every form of talent latent among the young of the community. it is especially advisable that every young attendant be given an invitation to do the part of which he is most capable, and that he be urged to do it. it is quite possible to arrange a program upon which only the ablest and most capable young persons of the neighborhood may appear. but such would be a violation of the best purpose of the society; namely, not merely to provide a first-class entertainment, but an entertainment _which shall bring out the greatest possible variety of talent and awaken interest and enthusiasm on the part of every member_. then, let the motto of the ideal country literary society be, "something worth while for every member to do." the old-fashioned country society, like the older public school, was too narrow. it touched life and awakened interests in only a few places. the old school tested a boy in the three r's and geography. if he did well in these, he was "smart." if he failed in the traditional subjects, he was branded as a dullard and crowded out of the school, although in respect to some other untested activities he may have been a slumbering genius. so with the primitive "literary and debating society"; debating and "speaking pieces" were practically the only numbers on the program and usually only the ablest were allowed to appear. ordinary talent in debating and reciting and all manner of promising talent in other lines was allowed to slumber on in the lives of many of the young people in attendance. now, it is practically a certainty that every member of the young literary society can perform a part very acceptably, provided the discerning leader know what that part is. and best of all, the bringing out of such talent means the awakening of many other splendid interests among the youthful members of the community, and finally the development of moral courage and other forms of manliness and womanliness. now, to come to the point of a social result, the so-called literary entertainment can easily be made up in two parts, the literary and the social; and there should be set apart an hour for the latter. . _the social side of the economic clubs._--in many instances, there will be organized boys' corn-raising or crop-improvement clubs, and with them country clubs of the girls interested in household economy. these club meetings may be made the occasion of not a little social improvement. the boys and girls may meet at the same hour and place, and after the business has been disposed of there may be a coming together in a social way. such arrangement is highly advisable for two reasons. first, it will certainly increase the membership of the clubs; and, second, the social instincts of the young people may be suitably indulged. some concluding suggestions the leader interested in the foregoing plans may again be reminded of the necessity of instituting a social organization of such a nature as to touch all the young lives in the neighborhood. the rules and regulations governing the society should therefore be drawn on broad and liberal lines, not forgetting the great possibilities of awakening slumbering interests and aptitudes, and of building up a social community that will draw young people to it. if one will take the time to drive for a hundred miles in a direct line through the farm districts, as the author has done, he will be not a little surprised at the striking contrast in the social conditions of the various neighborhoods passed through. in one instance he will be told that there is absolutely nothing present to invite the young--a dull, dead place with perhaps many run-down farms and farm homes to keep it company. he will learn that the young people of such a community are running off to some neighboring town where many of them find a cheap and degrading class of entertainment. but the next adjoining neighborhood may present a converse situation. one will be told that the young people are happy and contented there, that they have frequent meetings of their social clubs and other forms of organization; most probably the appearance of the neighborhood will be likewise much better than that of the other one mentioned. attractive homes, well-kept roads and hedges, and other evidences of prosperity will meet one's view. in one district visited, the author found that this better situation had an interesting history and that it was nearly all traceable to a quarter of a century of public-spiritedness of one man. this resident had settled upon a quarter section of good land. while he was reconstructing his own home and its surroundings into a place of attractiveness, he was continually engaged in awakening the entire neighborhood in behalf of better things. he had led out in establishing a well-attended sunday school in the district, had been instrumental in instituting regular preaching service there twice each month, had led the entire neighborhood out on more than one occasion for a day's work in improving and beautifying the school grounds, had been the organizer and director of the country literary society, and of more than one club of farmers and their wives. during all this time he was correspondent for one or two county papers and used every occasion for advertising the home community. all together, it was a most commendable and far-reaching service which this one man performed for his own neighborhood. so, it may be said that wherever there is one inspired leader in a country community, there is life. finally, it may be urged that the biggest thing in the rural community is not the big crop of corn or wheat or the excellent breeds of live stock. important as these things are, the great concern of the community should be the development of sterling character in the lives of the growing boys and girls and the cleanness and integrity of the personalities of every one within the neighborhood limits. to that end let this social center ideal be actualized, becoming a place toward which the thoughts of all will go frequently and fondly during the hours of care and toil. let it be made a place the thought of which will forever impart a full measure of good cheer, of contentment, and of honest courage to the mind of every member of the society thereabout. let it be a place so ordered and arranged that things sacred and divine may reach down to the things often thought of as very commonplace and mean, and exalt the latter to their true and proper place. lastly, let it be earnestly desired and planned for that every heart in the rural district shall be rekindled with a living fire of enthusiasm in behalf of the general improvement--of interest in the things that are high and divine, and of affection and good will toward all in the community. let some local resident rise up as leader and bring this order of things to pass, and the social experiences of the young people will naturally become of such a nature as to develop them into men and women of great worth and efficiency. references wider use of the school plant. clarence arthur perry. chapter ix, "social centers." charities publication committee, n.y. chapters on rural progress. kenyon l. butterfield. chapter xiv, "the social side of the farm question." university of chicago press. development and education. m. v. o'shea. chapter xiv, "problems of training." houghton, mifflin company. social control. edward a. ross. ph.d. chapters vii and viii, "the need and direction of social control." macmillan. the girl wanted. nixon waterman. forbes & co., chicago. a wholesome and cheering book for girls. confidences. edith b. f. lowry, m.d. forbes & co. plain, helpful talks regarding the sex life of girls. see the excellent editorial article, "forces that move upward," _farmer's voice_, june , . causes of delinquency among girls. falconer. _annals american academy_. vol. , p. . democracy and education. dr. j. b. storms. annual volume n.e.a., , p. . the efficient life. dr. l. h. gulick. chapter iii, "life that is worth while." doubleday, page company. the ideals of a country boy. a. d. holloway in _rural manhood_, may, . why not education on the sex question. editorial article. _review of reviews_, january, . report of vice commission of chicago. chapter v, "child protection and education." guntorf-warren printing co., chicago. the spirit of democracy. charles fletcher dole. chapter xxix, "the education for a democracy." crowell & co. the education of the boy of to-morrow. a. d. dean. _world's work_, april, . prize essay. college and the rural districts. w. n. stearns. _education_, april, . the boy problem. educational pamphlet no. . society for sanitary and moral prophylaxis, n.y. cents. treats ably the question of social purity. genesis. a manual for instruction of children in matters of sex. b. s. talmey, m.d. practitioners' publishing company, n.y. chapter xiv _the farm boy's interest in the business_ the theory that the boys and girls who grow up in the country must in time become settled in farm homes of their own has neither logic nor psychology nor common sense to support it. it is never a question of whether or not a boy will take up the work of his father, but whether or not he will find at length the true and only calling for which his nature is best fitted. if the parents of the country boy will keep the latter question clearly in mind, many a problem in the latter's rearing will be made much easier. in order to break the monotony of the style of expression, much of this chapter will be addressed somewhat directly to the father of the country boy. what is in your boy? if a man should come suddenly into possession of a piece of land having a productive soil, one of his first questions in regard to the soil would be, what will it best grow? farmers blundered and starved along for generations in an attempt to make a first-class farm produce the wrong crops, or to produce the right crop through the wrong manner of treatment; and this simply because they used methods of tradition and guess rather than those of science. now apply the foregoing situation to the boy problem, if you will. so long as we attempt to secure from him the wrong results and deal with him by wrong methods, we are likely to conclude that there is "nothing in him." therefore, in order to act intelligently and helpfully in the matter of giving the young son a business relation to farm life, it is first necessary to determine, as far as may be possible, the bent of his mind, remembering that the great artist, the great writer, or the great captain of industry is just as likely to be born in the country home as elsewhere. in fact, we shall learn in time, much to our advantage, that there must be a careful sifting process which will result in sending some of the country-bred young men directly to their important places in the city, and some of the city-bred youths to the rural industries. much experimentation necessary the one who undertakes to develop a boy's interest in business affairs has really before him a problem in experimental psychology. many of the youth's best aptitudes are necessarily still slumbering and unknown to either himself or others. the fundamental steps preparatory for a successful commercial venture on the part of a young man are comparatively few but none of them can safely be omitted. they are as follows:-- . _willingness to work._--in this connection, perhaps something will be recalled from chapter ix. we may at least be reminded of the difference in the attitude of mind of the boy who regards labor as a painful necessity and the one who enjoys a willingness to work. so long as the youth feels as if he were driven to his tasks there is little hope of arousing his interest in the business side of it. his mind will continue too much on the problem of avoiding work and on ways and means by which to get something for nothing. there is probably a period of dishonesty in the life of every normal youth. following the dawn of adolescence there is a great wave of new interest and new meaning coming to him out of the business and social world. the world is so full of interesting enticements. everything looks to be good and within easy reach. he is especially prone to accept material things at their advertised value. he spends his dimes for prize boxes thought to contain gold rings and other such finery. his quarters and half dollars frequently go in payment for the "valuable" things offered "free for the price of the transportation," the purpose of this tempting gift being "simply for the sake of introducing the goods." but it is well to see the boy safe through this period of allurement. so long as the world seems to hold out so many highly valued things which may be had for a trifle the youth will see little need of his working to obtain them. so, attend him in his efforts to get something for nothing. permit him to be stung a few times and thus teach him how and where to look for the sting. finally, impress him with the thought that every material thing worth while represents the price of somebody's honest labor. at length he will see the reasonableness of industry and settle down with a purpose of making his way through life by means of honest endeavor. you now have the youth so far on his way to successful business undertaking. . _ability to save._--all healthy boys are naturally inclined to be spendthrifts. saving a part of one's means is a fine art acquired only through judicious practice. it is assumed that the young son is being reasonably paid for certain required tasks. so the next duty is to see that he saves a part of his earnings. for the purpose of this training in saving, a toy bank may be procured; or he may be directed in depositing a small weekly sum in a penny savings bank. still another way is to teach him to keep a book account of his earnings, giving him due-bills for the amounts withheld from his wages. there is one small business practice, the importance of which for the boy is too frequently overlooked; that is, the practice of carrying a small amount of change in his pocket. he must learn to use his money thoughtfully and not merely on every occasion of his being allowed to have it. he must acquire the habit of self-restraint in the use of money. to do this is to learn to spend judiciously. to have reached this stage of financial training is a sufficient guarantee that the youth is proceeding well on his way toward success in business enterprise. start on a small scale then, give your growing son as wide a variety of experience in work and in watching business affairs as the situation will permit of. during the process of this mental growth help him to make a small investment in something that will grow and increase under his intelligent care. let us assume that your specialty is a certain strain of corn or a certain breed of cattle. if the boy shows an interest in this matter, start him in at an early age, say ten to fourteen, on his own account. give him in exchange for his work a small plot of ground on which to grow corn, perhaps with a view to his later entering the boys' contest for a prize. or, help him to get a small beginning in the cattle business. but in case the lad shows no interest in your business, do not let the matter seriously trouble you for a moment. simply continue to give him his general education, including the best school course available and a training in the performance of work as well as the judicious use of the spending money that may come into his hands. careful study of the boy may indicate to you that his aptitude for business runs in the direction of something to which you are giving little or no attention but to which you may in time bring him. there is the case of a successful wheat raiser who discovered his son's fondness for thoroughbred cattle. so the boy was carefully started on a small scale in the business of raising short-horns. to-day that son is known far and wide as an able specialist in this line of stock breeding. now, if the father in this case had done as thousands of other farmers are still doing; namely, if he had attempted to force the boy, against the latter's natural inclination, to take up wheat raising or any other undesirable business, then, the son would have most probably skipped off for the city and secured a fourth-rate place for the mere wages it would bring. some day this tragic, oft-repeated story of mismanagement and misdirection of the growing boy will come out in all its distressing details. give your son a square deal deal with your young son on business principles from the beginning. do not hastily and unwisely give him a piece of property that will have to be taken from him in the future because of its having grown into a disproportionate value. this old form of mistreatment of the country boy has been the means of thwarting the business integrity of many a promising youth. if the boy's small beginning develops under his care into a business of large proportions, the only check or hindrance that the ethics of the case will allow is that you treat with him on fair business terms, just as you would with any good business man. you may cause him to bear all his own personal expenses and all the expense connected with the care and development of his live stock or crop. then the matter of curtailing him must stop. and if the son soon becomes able to buy you out, it is certainly an affair to be proud of, not a thing to hinder by unfair means. keep the boy's perfect good will it is a serious matter to lose the boy's confidence or in any way break faith with him, even though there be nothing about the place in which you can make him take a business interest. as he grows to maturity his own inner nature must gradually guide him into the way of a calling--and a divine calling at that it may prove to be. it may not seem out of place to quote the words of a religious teacher who says: "do you not know that if one's inner nature points out clearly and inspiringly what he should undertake for a life work, such thing may be regarded as the voice of the divine one speaking faithfully through the instrumentality of one of his own creatures?" so it may prove at length that you will have to sell a load of corn in order to set up in the garret of your house a miniature art studio of some kind for your young son. or, perhaps you may have to establish a small machine shop as an adjunct to the barn or wood shed, wherein the budding genius may blossom into that beauty of manly power and efficiency which all the world is glad to admire. out of just such a wise indulgence as that last named a certain kansas boy finally became enabled to revolutionize the old farm home and the work done there through the installation of an excellent motor power plant. electric light for the house and barn, power for operating feed grinder, washing machine, grindstone, fanning mill, and many other such machines--all this has resulted from the rightly directed work of a youth who could have easily been driven to the city into some treadmill of mere wage earning. but, occasionally the boy will prove himself a versatile character, succeeding in a measure in every line of small business to which you introduce him, yet showing a marked success in none. in such case the advisable thing to do is to continue his general education for a longer period than is necessary for the boy who shows an early inclination toward a given line of work. some will be retained on the farm it is admittedly desirable, all things fairly considered, that many of the very best boys remain on the farm and help develop rural life into what it should be. hence the necessity of finding a way to interest such boys in some of the many business affairs connected with the farm home. perhaps there is no better way to develop the lad's interest in the affairs of the place than that of allowing him to participate in the practical business transactions as the conditions may allow. let the parents take him to the store, the bank, and other such places for the benefit of his experience. send him in with the produce with authority to sell and to invest a part of the proceeds in whatever the family may need. the father should have the boy with him when selecting and buying machinery or live stock at public sales. send him to the bank with checks or drafts to be deposited or collected. give him an opportunity to keep the family accounts, or at least to keep his own recorded in a book. the ordinary farmer can think of more ways than the foregoing whereby to give his growing son the needed experience in money matters. the best result of such practice is that if there be anything in connection with the affairs of the farm in which the boy will have a native interest this aptitude will be discovered; and it can then be made the basis of the young man's introduction into a successful participation in some practical business. the boy's permanent calling is seriously involved in this discussion. on page of this book will be found a description of three methods of vocational training. the awakening often comes from without parents who find it difficult to arouse the farm boy's interest in any part of the home business may sometimes easily secure the desired result by sending the youth away on a trip to the county fair or other such place. as a means of stimulating boys in respect to some kind of productive home industry the oklahoma agricultural and mechanical college instituted a school of agriculture for country youths at the state fair. each organized farmers' institute and each county superintendent was asked to send one boy. a large tent was furnished by the college. this served for a lecture and display room during the day and a boys' sleeping room during the night. at the first session boys attended, coming from counties. the lectures covered such subjects as farm crops, veterinary science, track and field athletics. the displays at the fair were used for illustrative matter. so far the results of the school have been reported most favorable. an increasing number of boys throughout the state are making preparation for it. an awakening in the south it is most encouraging to observe the changing ideals of business and industry now in progress throughout the nation. the many vocational-training schools and the increasing attendance at the mechanical and industrial colleges bear witness of this fact. the american negro, ever a faithful laborer, is now being taught in such institutions as tuskegee and hampton, not only to perform some honest work well but also to plan and prepare for a business of his own. the son of the southern planter is becoming more and more imbued with the new spirit of efficiency through personal industry. on this matter a member of the faculty of the louisiana agricultural and mechanical college says: "it is a mistake to think that the best of the country youth of the south are continuing in the old-fashioned ideal of becoming mere gentlemen of culture and leisure. in there were nearly , boys living in a dozen of the southern states, who astonished the entire country with their achievements in corn-raising. they ranged in age from fifteen to eighteen years. at the national exhibit held in columbus, ohio, one hundred of them showed an average yield of bushels of corn to the acre. this corn-growing practice is under the direction of the national government, and is more than a big, exciting contest, it is a splendid course in rural home education. [illustration: plate xxv. fig. .--a group of "coming" kansans. every boy pictured here carried away some sort of prize at a state corn show.] "we have at this college hundreds of young men from the plantations and they are intensely interested in working out the industrial problems that pertain to their own home affairs. i have been surprised at their eagerness to get into the soil and to do the mechanical work connected with their studies. all over the south there seems to be an awakening among the boys and young men, of an interest in the industrial and commercial problems of the plantation." the farm papers and the educational magazines in the southern states give much evidence of this same sort of awakening. the farmers' and planters' organizations, the local improvement and school betterment clubs, and many other movements, are giving both incentive and direction to the country youths who are at all inclined to find an interest in the home affairs. the rural parents who desire outside aid in arousing their boys' interest in the home business may well seek such assistance by bringing the latter into closer touch with one of these progressive organizations. partnership between father and son after the farmer's son has fully settled upon his father's business as an ideal one for himself, there may be brought to the latter a gradual relief from the worry of details, and that through a partnership management. a. g. hulting, jr., of geneseo, illinois, thus describes such a plan of coöperation in a letter to arthur j. bill, the agricultural writer:-- "we have acres of land in the farm. my father owns the land. i do the work, provide all the labor, horses, and machinery, and we have an equal interest in the live stock and we share equally in the net returns." other terms of coöperation have proved successful. in many cases, the son rents all or a part of the place on terms similar to those allowed the outside renter; excepting that he is usually given the advantages of free board and the use of the home conveniences. in all such business transactions between father and son it is highly advisable that the contract be carefully drawn in writing. the verbal contract is proverbially a trouble maker, and that even among relatives. summary and concluding suggestions . not nearly all promising youths can be encouraged to take a vital interest in the father's business. . in case the boy cannot be induced to take a permanent interest in anything on the home farm, he may at least have much practice in the transaction of the small business connected therewith. . the ability to work willingly, the ideal that an honest living is to be earned through personal effort, and the practice of saving a part of the weekly or monthly earnings--these will give any boy an excellent start on the road to success and affluence. . deal with the young son on business principles from the first, seeing that he shares reasonably in the losses as well as in the gains. although his interest in any chosen line of work may not become vital till he makes some money out of it, hold him persistently in line during the "lean" years and thus allow him to learn the excellent lessons of failure. . it may prove unfair to the members of the family to permit one of the sons to secure control of the business of the home farm. some pathetic instances of this kind have really occurred. for the sake of the peace and well-being of all, such an occurrence must be prevented by careful forethought. . on the other hand, in case where the boy has started with a scrawny pig or through renting a piece of the home place, and, after dealing fair and square with all, has come into possession of considerable property of his own, do not wrest it from him or in any way take advantage of his minority. such a youth will in time most probably reflect high credit upon the family. . finally, the farm parent needs to be warned against the possibility of developing his son into a mere money-maker. such is a poor standard of success. the man whose only aim in life is merely to prosper financially is a poor citizen of any community. teach the boy to succeed in his business ventures, but at the same time imbue him with the thought that his money wealth must be regarded as so much opportunity to help build up the community, the state, and the nation. teach him that financial success is worthy of the name only when it is linked with social efficiency. references again we find the field of literature treating the subject directly an exceedingly scant one. in forming a business partnership with his son the farmer should be guided by well-tried precedent. a letter of specific inquiry to one of the leading agricultural papers will most usually bring a helpful reply. a first lesson in thrift. horace ellis. _psychological clinic_, march , . industrial education for rural communities. annual volume n.e.a., , p. . the child's sense of the value of money. dr. william e. ashcroft. _s.s. times_, july , . psychology and higher life. william a. mckeever. chapter xiv, "the psychology of work." a. flanagan company, chicago. industrial education. various authors. (pamphlet, cents.) _the survey_, n.y. industrial education. kimball. no. , educational monograph series, school of education, cornell university. chapter xv _business training for the country girl_ during a two-hour ride on a railway train the author had as a seat companion a sixty-year-old farmer and stock raiser, whose specialty was that of raising mules for the market. and what of definite information this good husbandman possessed about the long-eared beast of burden would fill a volume of considerable size. he knew just what time of year the mule should be foaled, when weaned, when broken to the halter and to work; how to feed and groom a mule in order to get the best physical growth; how to train the animal so as to develop all the latent good qualities and repress the bad ones. after the natural life history of the faithful mule had been carefully reviewed by the rural companion the conversation was turned to the subject of girls. had he a daughter? "yes, twenty-two years old." what did she know about money and the common affairs of business? "business! mighty little any woman knows about business," said he. "we buy our girl what she needs and have put her through the town high school. i expect her to get married sometime. her mother has taught her how to do housework." further than that the father seemed to know very little about his daughter, and he showed plainly that he did not consider this second topic of conversation half so interesting as the first one. is the country girl neglected? inquiry will prove that the foregoing case of parental ignorance and indifference about the daughter is all too common, especially the ignorance. it seems never to have occurred to many parents who have growing daughters that unless the young woman have a fair amount of knowledge of the value and use of money her future happiness and well-being and that of her family are in danger of becoming seriously jeopardized. it is a singular and yet lamentable fact that so many american parents,--parents too who are intensely desirous that their growing children have the best possible moral and religious teaching--that these same good parents fail to understand how one of the very foundation stones of efficient moral and religious life is constituted of a definite body of knowledge of common business affairs. they do not seem to realize that the young man or the young woman who knows from experience just how money is earned, and how it may be judiciously expended and profitably invested, is far on the way to a high plane of moral and religious living. however, there is probably no place of greater opportunities for developing sober judgment in the growing girl than that afforded by the ordinary farm home. for here the business management of the household and of the farm affairs are practically merged. there is the further advantage of a considerable variety of ways whereby the daughter may be remunerated for what she does. but, how may we best interpret this question? first of all, what in a practical sense is a satisfactory business training for a young woman, a farmer's daughter in particular? do we desire that she become a shrewd money-maker and successful a some sort of commercial life? few would take such a position. but in order that the young woman may be fully prepared to fill her heaven-ordained place as the center and source of love and influence in a family, we must provide that she be given just such instruction in the use of money as will enable her to occupy her high position with the greatest possible success. why the girl leaves the farm under the title above the farmer's voice prints portions of two letters which help to throw not a little light on this much-neglected subject. miss alta hooper writes:-- "the one great cry going out from the people, and one also much in need of an answer, is 'how to keep the boy on the farm.' it is very seldom that the girl of the farm is alluded to, although it may be that she is included, in a general way, in the great amount of literature concerning her brother. but, take it from the farmer girl that she is a live one, and unless money is coming into her pockets, unless she is comparatively independent and has some interest to keep her awake, she isn't going to 'stay put,' but will get out where she can earn some money of her very own, to buy the little things so dear to the hearts of girls; and she will not be questioned and lectured and scolded over every little expenditure. "oh, the girls on the farm have minds and pride and ambition just as big as their brothers' too; and in many cases they are not given half a chance to realize one iota of this ambition. it is then that a career off the farm and away from the farm home appeals to them. then the thought comes that even though the salary to be earned may be small, still it is all one's own, and there is no fear in planning where and in what it shall be invested." likewise, mrs. f. l. stevens, writing for _progressive farmer_, says:-- "how often have we seen young girls leaving comfortable farm homes to go into typewriting, clerking, or bookkeeping, in order to have their own money. an allowance for personal expenses in the beginning would have solved this problem. but the father has not seen it that way. [illustration: plate xxvi. fig. .--at a tender age girls are instinctively fond of doing such work as is displayed here. strange to say, some mothers deny their little daughters the character-forming benefits of this childish occupation.] "it is not necessary that the daughter be given a monthly or yearly allowance of so much cash, but the really better way, it would seem, would be to start her in some special branch of work, say, poultry-raising. or perhaps she might be given a cow or a horse or a pig, which would in time bring in sums of money by careful management; and the business, a small one perhaps in the beginning, would easily develop. many young girls like to work in a garden as the produce is always a good source of income and an interesting and educational work." certain rules to be observed if we are to give up the idea that the young woman naturally possesses the necessary business judgment, and to substitute the better idea that she must be taught how to manage her own affairs; then, what are the fundamental steps necessary to impart such instruction? it seems to the author that they are these:-- . _teach the girl to work._--as was shown in a previous chapter, the girl must be taught carefully and conscientiously how to work. even though she may be so fortunate--or unfortunate--as not to be compelled to do any of her own housework, only a first-hand knowledge of how such work goes on will enable her successfully to direct it. the strength of our democracy is much dependent upon the character of our women. the modern tendency toward the development of a leisure class among the women and girls of the wealthier families is quite as much a menace to social solidarity as was the older order of keeping women in ignorance and servitude. the problem of household help is much intensified because of the disfavor with which the so-called better classes of women look upon the vocation of the domestic employee. the necessary inequality of rank of the home mistress and her employees is more a matter of tradition and imagination than of reality. the social inequality which follows and which drives many young women into less advantageous places of employment will disappear just as soon as all growing girls are conducted through a carefully planned course of work and household industry. no farm parents can afford to deny the daughter the excellent disciplinary results of careful training in the performance of every ordinary household duty. . _teach her business sense._--in cases where the growing boy or girl is simply given spending money for the asking--or the begging--there results a perverted idea of the meaning of money. a girl so trained during her youthful years is inclined to take this same attitude toward her husband in the future. that is, she will probably regard it as necessary to beg for an allowance and deem it right and proper to spend all she can obtain in this way. the seriousness of such relations between man and wife is easily seen. but the growing girl can be taught that money is merely a convenient unit of measurement of values which are produced chiefly by means of work. advanced students of our social life are putting forth much effort to solve the divorce problem. in their efforts to determine causes and to provide cures for divorce, some of them have gone so far as to advocate a school for matrimony, one of the ends being that of preventing incompatible persons from entering into the life union. among the causes contributing to the divorce evil have been the radically different ideals of the use of money on the part of the contracting pair. an attorney of long standing experience with divorce cases says:-- "as a rule the woman who alleges non-support in her petition for divorce reveals the fact, before the case is ended, that she is lacking in the proper idea of the use of money, is often especially weak in knowledge of how the family income should be spent if the family affairs are to go on satisfactorily." . _train her to transact personal business._--then, begin early in her life to teach the girl to transact business affairs that relate to her personal interests and to the home life of women. do not buy all the little articles necessary for her, but allow her, with money reasonably provided, to make her own minor purchases under your advice and direction. the intelligent farmer knows somewhat definitely what his yearly income and outlay are. why should not his daughter be told how these accounts run, in the usual year, and she then be asked to keep an account of all her own personal affairs for a year? such required practice will do more than all the arithmetic lessons in the schools to inculcate an intimate knowledge of the value of money in relation to her own affairs--to say nothing of the good business judgment likely to be acquired. thus the country girl may receive a better business training than her city cousin whose nearness to the attractive stores and shops proves a constant incentive for over-indulgence and wastefulness in the use of money. . _make her the family accountant._--as soon as she becomes old enough, take the daughter into your confidence as regards the family expense account. make her acquainted with the items of income and expenditure in detail. and also make it appear to her that the business of the home is not being conducted satisfactorily unless some portion of the income be set aside for the emergencies of the future. at this point there is offered an opportunity to give the daughter some much-needed business training. there is much being said of late by way of urging the farmer to keep an accurate book account of all his transactions. out of the experiment stations have come published letters and bulletins urging that such things be done and showing methods. but the evidence goes to show that the majority of farmers do not find time for it. so it will in many cases be found practicable to turn this important task of bookkeeping over to the growing daughter. among the many benefits to be derived will be the excellent business training it will furnish her. as a diversion from the common household duties the accounting will prove most refreshing. and, then, the farmer will soon find this service to the farm business so important as to justify him in paying his daughter reasonably for the work. . _miserliness to be avoided._--while the habits of a spendthrift are perhaps above all things else to be avoided, a close second to this as an evil practice is the habit of expending in a miserly and begrudging manner. so, teach the girl to give her money willingly for all the ordinary necessities and comforts of life and for such luxuries as the conditions will reasonably warrant. the far-sighted parent and the one really interested in the future of his daughter will readily observe how much enslaved adults finally become in the use of money. there are perhaps as many well-to-do persons who are miserly because they cannot help it as there are improvident persons who are spendthrifts because they cannot longer prevent it. both classes manifest the certain results of training and habit. in his interesting chapter on the psychology of habit professor james explains so aptly how the man, long practiced in enforced economy, but at length having ample means, goes to the store with the determination of paying liberally for an article; and how he finally comes away with something cheap. a "golden mean" is therefore to be sought in training the girl in the use of money. not how to save at all hazards, but how to spend judiciously, with conscious thought of the right relation between income and outlay--this is perhaps the more acceptable ideal. . _teach her to give._--while inculcating business ideas into the mind of your growing daughter, guard against her acquiring a mere passion for money-making and the accumulation of wealth. for example, one of the best means of achieving this end would be to see that she gives a part of her earnings to some worthy cause or other. explain to her again and again that she must keep up in her life a sort of equipoise of receiving and giving, if the highest sense of inner satisfaction is always to be her portion. the young must learn sooner or later that there is other than a money profit to be derived from the investment of money. accordingly, it will not be found difficult for the rural parents to point out to their daughter some place merely where she may invest a small part of her earnings in human welfare. an orphan child living in the neighborhood may be sorely in need of a new dress or school books, a lonely and aged widow may be cheered by the gift of a wall picture, a crippled child may be accumulating funds for hospital treatment, or another person may have lost heavily from flood or fire. these and many more like them may be made the occasion of teaching the girl a beautiful lesson of sympathy and sacrifice. and the sacrifice should come out of what she has accumulated through her own small business enterprise. . _teach the meaning of a contract._--it is often declared that women fail to appreciate the obligations of a contract, that they will enter into a strict agreement to buy an article or to pay for another and then refuse to carry out such agreement. merchants have been so often called on to deal with this feminine change of mind that they have seen fit to establish a custom of taking back at cost any article not found satisfactory upon trial. this failure of women to adhere strictly to the terms of an agreement has given currency to the opinion that they are naturally dishonest. weininger in his volume "sex and character" even offers a line of questionable proof to confirm the correctness of the opinion. but dr. g. stanley hall in many of his researches shows that falsehood and deception are common and natural practices among ordinary children. all forms of honest and fair moral and business practice are less natural than acquired. they must have actual experience, and much of it, as a basis for their becoming a permanent part of character. hence, the so-called dishonesty of women in relation to the obligations of a business agreement--that is probably nothing more than a matter of sheer ignorance. farm girls are proverbially lacking in business practice and in knowledge of the rights and obligations of a contract. it is obligatory upon their parents to remove such ignorance through business training. . _prepare her to deal with grafters._--"the majority of his victims were women," is the statement so often read in connection with the fraudulent schemes of the exposed money shark. millions of dollars are annually taken from credulous women by the get-rich-quick money trader. this polite form of theft has become so flagrant as to necessitate much vigilance and many prosecutions on the part of the national government. widows and other dependent women are especially the sufferers. the necessity of preparing the innocent young woman to deal with the enticing business fraud is very apparent. two or three matters must especially be attended to in giving the required instruction. first, take advantage of many occasions to explain to the girl just how a given case is being worked, so that she may be on guard against such allurements; second, it is well to advise the untrained young woman against investing in any scheme of profit sharing that offers above a good current rate of interest. should there be an actual investment? then, what if anything should be done in the ordinary farm home by way of providing an investment for the growing daughter so that she may daily have some practice in business affairs, as well as an income for use in meeting her personal expenses? before attempting to answer this question, let us be certain that we have the correct point of view of the growing daughter's ideal relation to the practical affairs in the rural home. it seems to the author that there is only one safe rule of procedure here and that is, whatever the investment,--if there be any at all,--it must be understood that the ideal is one of developing the girl into a beautiful womanhood and not one of making the investment pay in the mere money sense of the term. in other words, the business of the farm and the farm home must serve directly the highest interests of the members of the household, even though money accumulations cannot, as a result, go on quite so fast. or, as we have put it several times before: the farm and the live stock and all that pertains thereto must be so managed as to contribute directly to the development of the high aspects of character in the boys and girls, and not as materials which the growing boys and girls are to help build up and multiply. now, if it still be insisted upon that the country girl have a definite business relation to the affairs of the home, there are two or three ways whereby this may be accomplished. one method is to give the girl a fixed and reasonable sum of money for whatever she may do by way of helping in the house. another is that of providing a small investment in something that may be expected to increase reasonably in value and finally bring her a money return. of the two methods of procedure mentioned, it would seem that the first is the more desirable. if the daughter be given an interest in anything like the live stock or some farm crop, the thing will not appeal to her directly, and whatever interest she may have in it will be a purely borrowed one. on the other hand, if she be given a generous allowance for her services, and during the younger years be trained in the expenditure of this allowance, good results may be expected. similarly as with the boy, the growing girl must be taught to look toward the future. a system of restraints must be placed against her tendency to squander her small income, and gradually she may be trained to set aside a small portion of what she has with a view to its being applied upon something of her own later in life. it is perhaps too much to ask the girl to save enough money to pay her way through college, but there are many advantages in training her to save for a certain portion of that expense. perhaps she may be able to buy her own clothes. it is not reasonable to assume that every well-trained country girl will find it advisable to take a college course. so, instead of saving up for college expenses, she may be taught to lay by something for the day of her marriage and with the thought of helping equip a home of her own. as a matter of fact, it is not a question of the specific purpose for which the money may be set apart. the main issue is that of staying by her day after day and week after week, and guiding and advising her until she finally acquires good sense, mature judgment, and self-reliance in regard to the business affairs that may be expected to constitute a part of her life as a keeper of a home of her own. _how the southern girls earn money._--one of the most interesting and significant modern movements in behalf of juvenile industry is that of the southern girls' tomato clubs, originated in by miss marie cromer, a rural school teacher of north carolina. thousands of young girls are now participants in the new work, each one tending a small plat of tomatoes and canning the produce for the market. one girl is reported to have cleared $ from one season's crop raised on one fourth of an acre. the general education board and the national department of agriculture have given liberal support to this tomato-growing work. chapter xvi _what schooling should the country boy have?_ it is a well-known fact that rural life conditions have been changing rapidly within the past decade or more. it has taken us a long while to get away from the thought that the farmer is to be anything other than merely a plain, coarse man, comparatively uneducated and innocent of the ways of the world. but we are at last seeing the light in respect to this and many another such traditional belief of a menacing nature. we are now looking forward expectantly to the time when the rural community shall contain its proportionate share of people educated or cultured in the full sense of either of these words. changes in rural school conditions many of those now in middle life can easily remember when the farmer boy was sent to school only during the time when his services were not required for the performance of the work about the field and the home. this period was narrowed down to about three months in the year. after the corn was husked in the fall, he entered school, usually about december first. and at the first sign of spring, about march first, he was called away to begin preparations for the new season's crop. during these sixty days, more or less, the growing lad was supposed to pick up the rudiments of learning and by the time maturity was reached to have worked himself out of the ranks of the illiterate. so he did, for he learned to read falteringly, to write a scrawling hand, and to solve a few arithmetical problems. we observe the new order of things. in practically all the states there have been recently enacted laws requiring every normal child to attend school during the entire term and to continue for a period of seven or eight years. the splendid results of this provision have only begun to be apparent, but another decade will reveal them in large proportions. back of this new legislation in behalf of the boys and girls is the new ideal of the possibilities and the worth of the ordinary human being. we are just beginning to understand this splendid truth; namely, that with very few exceptions all of our new-born young have latent within them all the aptitudes necessary for the development of beautiful and symmetrical character. the modern ideal of public education recognizes two things: first, the right of the child to the fullest possible development; and second, the duty of society to see that the child receive such training whether the parent may wish to accord it to him or not. the author is especially desirous that the reader appreciate the situation sketched in the foregoing paragraph. what does it mean? it means that our children are at last to have more nearly equal opportunities of development, that their worthy aptitudes or traits are to be brought out through instruction and made to do service in the construction of a sterling character. it means that we shall have cultured artisans as well as cultured artists; that the plain man behind the plow or in the workshop shall be capable of thinking the big, inspiring thoughts as well as the little, puny ones. it means that there will spring up everywhere among the ranks of those once regarded as low and coarse, a magnificent society of men and women who, as individuals, will feel and realize a secret sense of power and worth, and who will shine in the light of a new inspiration. the boy a bundle of possibilities it has been proved beyond question that the ordinary child contains at birth potentialities of development far greater in amount and variety than any amount of schooling can ever bring into full realization. if you will make a list of one hundred different and highly specialized vocations, and pause for a moment to contemplate the matter, you will doubtless agree that any common boy might be so trained as to some degree in any one of the hundred that he might be made to do fairly well in several of them; and that he might become an expert in at least one of them. [illustration: plate xxvii. fig. .--only whittling. but in the case of these country boys it is thought of as not mere idling, but as a pastime that leads toward the world of industry.] so, there is little need of being worried over the thought that the boy is a natural-born dullard, without native ability to learn and finally to make his way in the world. it is true that there is occasionally a real "blockhead" among children, but such cases are quite as rare as imbecility and physical deformity. indeed, such cases are nearly always connected with one or both of the defects just named. then, while in the usual instance the child is to be assumed to possess an ample amount of native talent, one of the specific problems of his parents and teachers is that of learning in time what his best latent talent is, so that it may give proper incentive and direction for his vocational life. classes of native ability roughly speaking there are three classes of native ability in the human offspring: the super-normal, the normal, and the sub-normal. the first is constituted of the geniuses--few and far between, perhaps one in a hundred to five hundred. the second is composed of the great mass of humanity upon which the stability of the race is built and out of which the geniuses--and the majority of the sub-normals--spring through fortuitous variation. the third class is constituted of the feeble-minded, the imbeciles, and the exceedingly rare natural-born criminals--altogether, perhaps one in every two hundred or more of the population. now, what we are trying to get at here is a fair estimate of what the parent may reasonably look for by way of a stock of native ability in his child. the natural-born genius will be known by one special mark; namely, he will be so strongly inclined toward one special line of work or calling as to need no outside stimulus or incentive to make him take it up. indeed, in the usual case of a pronounced genius it is a very difficult matter to prevent the individual from following out his one over-mastering predisposition. the marks of feeble-mindedness or idiocy are too well known to need description. such cases are also so rare and so special in their manner of treatment as to call for no extended discussion. the great talented class the great masses of humanity are constituted of what we mean here by the talented. that is, as described above, at birth they possess a large and abundant stock of potentialities of learning and achievement--much more than can ever become actualized because of the comparatively limited time and means for education and training. of course, we recognize that among the talented classes there is an endless variety of combinations of abilities. so are there many degrees of ability. but in addition to the foregoing marks of latent ability in the great middle classes we must note a distinctive feature of the development and education of such classes. it is this: _the two great conditions necessary for the successful development of the ordinary child are stimulus and opportunity._ unless the slumbering talents be awakened by the proper stimuli, they may slumber on throughout the whole lifetime and no one detect their presence; and unless opportunities for development be given to satisfy the awakened talent, it may return permanently to its condition of quiescence. in attempting to furnish the necessary stimuli and opportunities for the development of his boy, the farmer has--if he will only use it--a great advantage over the city father. the great variety of work-and-play experience afforded by the rural situation, the fairly good general schooling now coming more and more into reach of all farm homes, the many conditions contributory to self-reliance and independent thinking in the case of the boy--all these raw materials of stimulus and opportunity lie hidden about the common country home. but the parents must themselves become wider awake to the meanings and purposes of such materials, or otherwise their value is lost through disuse. and again, it is urged that parents make the same careful study of their children as they do of farm crops and live stock. see the reference lists following the first five chapters. round out the boy's nature fortunately, the new provisions of the schools are furnishing more and more definitely the equipment and the course of training most necessary for the masses of the growing children. fortunately, too, the illiterate father is not to be permitted to dictate as to what subjects his boy is to study in the school, there being not only compulsory attendance, but strict requirements that every child pursue the prescribed course. the time is fast approaching when the rural parent in any community can feel assured that this course of study has been mapped out by expert authority in just such a way as to serve the highest needs of his boy, the idea being to teach and awaken every side of the young nature into its highest possible activity. in the usual case it is a waste of time to attempt to predetermine the boy's vocational life before he has gone at least well up through the intermediate grades of the common school; and even then, there is usually not much indication of what he is best suited for. so, one of the great purposes of the common school course is that of sounding the boy on every side and in every depth of his nature, so to speak, in order to find what is there, and to determine what he is by inheritance best suited to do as a life work. [illustration: plate xxviii. fig. .--an illustration of how to keep the boy on the farm. every boy needs to acquire early an intimate knowledge of some great industrial pursuit.] the usual inclination of the rural parent is that of looking at his son's education too strictly in terms of dollars and cents and to be impatient at the thought of the boy's taking a broad, fundamental course of schooling. such school subjects as language and composition are especially thought of as a useless waste of time. but fortunately, as indicated above, the choice is no longer left either to the boy or his father. the former must pursue the subjects assigned him and allow time to prove the wisdom of such a procedure, as it most certainly will. wherefore, let the rural father attempt to think of his boy, not merely as a coming money-maker, but as a coming _man_; a man of power and worth and influence in the community in which he is to live, a man of whom his aged father in future time will be most proud, and by whom he will be highly honored. other important matters as suggested above, the evidence is very overwhelming in effect that it is the duty of rural parents to give their children a broad, general course of training as a foundation for efficient life in any place or position. moreover, it must not be thought for a moment that the legacy of money or property will in any wise furnish a satisfactory substitute for such a course of training. mean-spiritedness and narrow-mindedness are almost invariably prominent traits of the man who has been prepared to know nothing outside of his business even though that may be a big business. on the other hand, extensive culture, including a character well developed in all of its essential elements, is by far the best equipment that can possibly be furnished the boy for his start in life. now, while the growing boy's education must not be especially prejudiced in favor of any particular calling, there is no good reason why the farmer's son should not be given the benefit of every possible intimate and wholesome relation to the father's work and business. that is, he must not be forced to take up the vocation of farming, but he must be given every opportunity to know its best meanings and advantages. and if he is finally to leave for some foreign occupation, he must go with a profound sense of the possible worth and integrity of the calling of his father. then, in order that there may be maintained most friendly relations between the farm boy and the farm life, see to it that he has an occasional outing. widen the scope of his home environment by means of sending him outside occasionally. let him go off to the state and county fair and learn what he can there. let him participate in the grain and stock judging contests, as heretofore recommended. let him attend some of the larger sales of blooded stock and learn there to know more intimately the possibilities of animal husbandry. accompany him on a trip to the big city occasionally--under proper provisions and restrictions--and help him to acquire some valuable lesson which may be taken back to the rural community and used to the advantage of the latter. also, what about the literature in the home? although a chapter has already been given to the matter, for the sake of emphasizing its great importance it is again referred to here. why not see to it that there be secured a few enticing volumes of the clean and uplifting sort? a very few dollars will furnish the nucleus of a library of which the boy will soon become proud. ask the school superintendent or teacher to make out a list of ten of the best books for your boy and then secure these at once. bring into the home also one or two of the best standard magazines and keep constantly on the table one or more of the best and cleanest newspapers. then, see to it that the boy's life be not so nearly dragged out during the day's work that he cannot spend thirty minutes or more of each evening at the reading table. develop an interest in humanity all education is for the sake of human welfare. the thing learned like the material thing possessed is most worth while in proportion as it serves some high human purpose or need. there is abundant opportunity to teach the country boy that education cannot well exist for its own sake or purely for one's own selfish uses. so it is well early to awaken the youth's interest in people. have him compare his own lot with that of others in very different circumstances. take him occasionally to the orphanage, the industrial (reform) school, the imbecile and insane asylums, the prisons, and the sweat-shops in the city. thus through acquainting him with how the other half lives you may cause the boy to reflect seriously on the best meanings and possibilities of his own life, and to plan in his mind a splendid ideal of integrity for his own coming manhood. the boy's education is not going on rightly if he is not being introduced to the current affairs of the world. the literature suggested above should be made to serve the purpose of bringing his attention to these matters. he should become interested in the political welfare of his community, his state, and his nation, and learn to feel his responsibility in regard to such things. but he will probably not voluntarily acquire these better relations to society at large. it should therefore be regarded as the urgent duty of the parent to give the necessary guidance and instruction. finally, we must again be reminded of the high ideals of education and culture necessary to, and consistent with, substantial country life. the greatest of producing classes--the agronomists--must and can in time rank at the head of all others in moral and intellectual worth. so, let the rural parent look ahead and formulate in his own mind the splendid vision of his son grown up to full maturity of all his best powers. let him see this future citizen as a man of magnanimity, of splendid personal force, and of great constructive ability in the important work of budding up the affairs of the community in which he is to live. references chapters in rural progress. president kenyon l. butterfield. chapter vi. "education for the farmer." university of chicago press. education for the iowa farm boy. h. c. wallace. pamphlet. (free.) chamber of commerce, des moines. value during education of a life career motive. c. w. eliot. annual volume n.e.a., . to keep boys on the farm. m. e. carr. _country life._ april , . education best suited for boys. r. p. halleck. annual volume n.e.a., . p. . the training of farmers. dr. l. h. bailey. the century company. contains a statistical study of why boys leave the farm. the best thing a college does for a man. president charles f. tawing. _forum_, volume . p. . the care of freshmen. president w. o. thompson. annual volume n.e.a., . p. . proceedings of child conference for research and welfare. page . "the discipline of work." frederick p. fish. g. e. stechert & co., new york. the young man's problem. educational pamphlet no. . society of sanitary and moral prophylaxis. new york. cents. every parent should read this excellent discussion on sex education. chapter xvii _what schooling should the country girl have?_ perhaps it need not be urged that the country girl be provided with the same general educational advantages as those outlined for the country boy, as the plain demands of justice would mean as much. she, too, must be thought of as possessing all the beautiful latent possibilities, and high ideals of personal worth and character should be constantly entertained for her in the minds of her parents. and then, they must allow no ordinary business concern about the farm home to stand in the way of her unfoldment in the direction of these higher ideals. special problems relating to the girl over and above those provisions which relate to the general development of the country boy there are several special considerations in reference to his sister. for example, she has a more delicate physical organism which must be shielded, especially at times, against the heavy drudgery that will naturally fall upon her willing shoulders. and then, the standards require of her rather more of refined manners than they do of her brother. moreover, it may be shown that a refined and attractive personality will become a larger asset in her life than in his. comeliness and habitual cheerfulness and numerous other like qualities must be thought of as necessary and helpful characteristics of the well-reared country girl. it will also be much to her advantage to have some special training in at least one of the so-called fine arts. let her have her musical education or some advanced work in literature or painting. a sum of money invested in something of this sort while the daughter is growing may be considered a far better investment than if the same amount were laid away to invest in a dowry. protecting the girl at school it is not merely obligatory that the farmer send his young girl to the district school regularly, and thus round out her nature symmetrically through instruction in all the common branches. the delicate nature of the normal girl requires far more protection than is often accorded it. unlike the city walks and pavements, the country road leading to the schoolhouse is often menaced by muddy sloughs, tall vegetation, and deep snow banks. wading through such places, especially in bad weather, gives undue exposure, the feet frequently becoming wet and the body thoroughly chilled. many children sit all day in the schoolroom in this condition. as a result of the lowered vitality the incipient forms of various diseases enter the body, there perhaps to return intermittently and with more serious effects as the life advances. what may be done as preventive measures, it is asked. simply this: prepare a better road from the home to the schoolhouse, by putting in foot crossings over ravines, by mowing weeds and grass, by filling and draining low places, and the like. on stormy days and on occasions when the young adolescent girl is passing through her monthly period of weakness--one especially endangering the health--it will be advisable to provide a conveyance to school and back. country parents also often need to be cautioned in regard to over-working the school girl. some even require her to do practically the same amount of work as she could well endure were there no extra burdens at school. manifestly, this is both unjust and injurious. observe the conduct of the young school girl for a few days. if there is no song and laughter in her life; if she is not ruddy in complexion and buoyant of step; if she mopes and drones about the place; do not censure her, but seek a constitutional cause and watch for evidences of an over-requirement of work. the close inspection of the health of school children, now conducted in many cities, brings out the somewhat startling fact that many boys and girls come to the class room every morning fatigued and depressed beyond the point of effective study. the old way was to call them dullards, to punish them, to shame them out of the school, to humiliate their parents. the new method of dealing with such children calls for scientific measures. first, the exact conditions are ascertained by experts; second, the parents are urged and helped to provide for the child more sleep, better food, more fresh air in the living chambers, more recreation, a relief from over-work, or some special medical care--as the particular case may demand. if one wishes full evidence of the effective gain for studentship that results from the new manner of treatment of the dull and backward pupil, let him examine the many reports of individual cases as published in the _psychological clinic_ at the university of pennsylvania, especially the issues of - . the indifference or the thoughtlessness of country parents may easily allow for the existence of the foregoing bad physical conditions in the case of their own daughter, and as a result her otherwise promising life may become permanently blighted. lessons in music and art the ordinary farmer needs to learn to take more pride in his daughter and in her accomplishments. the time will come when he will be far more proud of her wealth of character than he will be of her wealth of material goods. a country father of moderate means bought a first-class piano for his two girls and employed a music teacher. "you may think that i cannot afford such things," said he. "but i can. i am running this farm for the good it will do my family." he was a true philosopher, as well as a successful farmer. it is entirely practicable and most helpful to her development to provide that the country girl be given instruction in music, or art, or something special and advanced in the form of needlework. in its best sense this special instruction will not be thought of as vocational training, but rather as a necessary manner of giving permanent expression to her æsthetic nature. the author believes that the matter should be stated even more emphatically. that is, not to give the normal girl some such means of indulging her æsthetic tastes is seriously to neglect her education, if not to do her a permanent wrong. while vocational training and economic advantages are important secondary considerations in connection with the daughter's instruction in the fine arts, the father who helps her become an amateur in one of these lines thereby renders her a splendid service for life. it is neither very difficult nor very expensive to arrange to have the girl go to the near-by town or to a neighbor's once or twice per week where she may receive competent instruction in music or painting. to make the arrangement most effective there will need to be a musical instrument in her own home, a conveyance at her ready disposal, and a regular allowance of time for practice. no just and affectionate parents can deny their young daughter any fewer advantages than these, if the means for securing them can at all be acquired. the reward will come in time the lessons in painting or fine needlework may be provided for in the same way. if the expense seems heavy, the far-sighted parents will think of their declining days of the future and imagine the large return the daughter may render them through the skill which they have been instrumental in developing in her. but without waiting for old age to overtake them the father and mother of the girl artist may derive some benefits from her work. she may furnish the table service with hand-painted chinaware or adorn the walls of the home with attractive paintings. and also, as heretofore indicated, the daughter may herself in time conduct a class of amateur students of the fine art in which she has made preparation. one word of precaution must be offered in reference to the training here considered. in the usual case the girl is not started young enough. her advancement in the music, for example, is likely to be much more rapid and her skill much more marked, if the age nine to eleven, rather than five or six years later, be chosen as the beginning time. the author has witnessed many pathetic instances of adult girls in a desperate attempt to master the mechanical part of the introductory music. the extra amount of desire and effort possible at this more advanced age do not nearly compensate for the better memory and the greater facility of hand and finger movement possible at the earlier age. this same general law of early beginning probably holds good in respect to the other fine arts. in relation to all the foregoing seemingly trivial matters there comes to mind what is perhaps the most serious problem that confronts practically every well-reared young woman; namely, that of her successful marriage to a worthy young man--a subject to be discussed at length in another paper. and so it is contended that if her future happiness or well-being be a consideration, if the realization of her fondest hopes and her instinctive desires be worthy of the thought of her parents; then, they must by all means see that some of the foregoing refining qualities become woven into her whole character during the formative period. thus she may be given practically every possible advantage in finding that true life companion. the mother's office as teacher in his usual familiar and straightforward way "uncle" henry wallace thus addresses the country mother through the medium of an editorial in _wallaces' farmer_:-- "it is the mother that shapes and molds the character of the girl. if she is sweet spirited, looks out upon the world hopefully and desirous of seeing the best in men and women, her daughters will as a rule have the same sort of outlook. if she permits gossip and fault-finding at the table, her daughters may reasonably be expected to do likewise. if she sharply criticises the preacher's sermon at the sabbath dinner, she need not expect her daughters to become devout. if she is a poor housekeeper, how can she expect her daughters to excel in that finest of all arts? we know something of the depth and tenderness of a mother's love, how earnestly she seeks the welfare of her daughter; but if she has a wrong conception of what is best in life, even this unspeaking affection may be the source of evil instead of good. "one of the first things you should consider about that girl of yours is her health. give her plain food and plenty of it, sensible clothing, a well-ventilated and well-lighted room, and all the exercise that she wants, even if she does seem to be something of a tomboy; and, barring accidents, she will usually be healthy through early girlhood. when she begins to develop into womanhood is the time for you, mother, to do what no one else can. tell her about herself, about the changes that must come, and about the care she must take of herself if she is to be a healthy and happy wife and mother. a mistake here through false modesty is often the source of trouble for years to come." home-life education this book is based on the assumption that every good young woman is good for something of a practical nature. in considering the make-up of such a character, it seems reasonable to assert that no other qualities stand out more prominently than the trained ability to carry on successfully the work of the household. the necessary drudgery of the home life seems to be the greatest burden that modern society has placed upon women. proportionately great should be the preparation to bear this burden. the ideal to be realized is, perhaps, not that the girl may be enabled to do more of such work, but that she may be trained to be true mistress of it. woman's work is never done, and it never will be, no matter how many worthy women kill themselves in an attempt to finish it. so the greatest thing to be desired in respect to this unending round of toil and drudgery is that of a well-poised, spiritually-minded character, such as may enable its possessor to sit down at the end of a working period unusually long and in spite of the confusion and unfinished business restore the composure and keep in touch with the higher implications of life. it is not really a difficult matter to teach the ordinary growing girl to work and perform faithfully all of her assigned duties. it is more of a task to teach her how to quit when she has worked long enough and thereby to preserve her health and prolong her services. [illustration: plate xxix. fig. .--these country boys and girls supply the home neighborhood with the produce from the school garden. such work is first-class vocational training.] education for supremacy it is unquestionably a splendid aid to successful womanhood for the growing girl to be taught how to cook and sew and take care of a house. but as a guarantee of peace and happiness throughout life she had better be taught many specific lessons in self-mastery. and it seems certain that the farm home offers many more advantages for developing a poised character in the young woman than does the city home. so let it be seen to by country parents that their girls be trained from childhood to meet life's stress and storm with calm composure and sweet serenity. only such training will suffice to tide the latter over the great crushing ordeals that tend at some time to fall to the lot of every good woman. conditions in the well-ordered country home may be made to contribute to another form of self-mastery in the growing girl. that is, she may be made supreme over the conventionalities of dress and the social customs that touch her life. by this it is not intended to prescribe in respect to such things as the style or appearance of the young woman's clothing. she may be first or last or medium in the list of the well-dressed. but it is here contended that she can be trained to subordinate these matters to a personal charm that is her very own, and that emanates from a beautiful and well-poised life within. it is quite as destructive to good character for one to be meanly clothed through necessity and at the same time envy and despise those who are better dressed as it is to be among the richly adorned and try to make mere adornment a mark of better and superior rank in society, or a means of lacerating the feelings of one's associates. the country mother will let pass one of the rarest forms of opportunity for refining and beautifying the character of her daughter if she does not educate the latter rightly in respect to these conventionalities. train her to be neat and attractive in appearance, but at the same time teach her that no manner of outer adornment can cover up or substitute for sweetness and purity of the inner life. the splendid effects of such an education will reveal themselves to best advantage in the young woman when she has finally entered a home of her own. if she cannot then and there shine in a light that emanates from her own soul, the sacrificial work of ministering to the needs of her own household will never be well performed. an outlook for social life provision will by all means be made that the growing country girl be introduced to the best social life within reach. she must mingle with those of her own age and learn how others think and act. she must attend parties and the other social gatherings, especially the literary societies if there be any available. for the sake of her training, if for no better reason, she may be brought into close relation to the sunday school and the church. it will be good, indeed, if she find some congenial work in one or both of these organizations. let it be remembered that the healthy-minded, well-matured woman is very probably at her best and is most highly satisfied and contented with life only when she has opportunities to perform some kind of worthy social service. farm parents may well bring it about, therefore, that their young daughter have some specific deeds of altruism to perform. let her carry a small gift or a word of cheer to the door of the sick or the infirm. let her make with her own hands some simple, inexpensive present to be carried to the one who needs it most and whose heart will be made glad by it. above all things else, it must be provided that something more than the mere grasping nature of the young country girl be indulged and developed. some there are who still contend that life for men is, at its best, a game of chance and contention. but such an ideal, if held up to the growing girl, will tend to check or destroy all that is best and most beautiful in the feminine nature. young women especially must learn through practice that the best and most beautiful character is altogether consistent with the performance of deeds of service and altruism. finally, educate into the daughter as much habitual cheerfulness as possible, let her heart be made glad again and again, not merely because of what she has, and because of what she receives day by day, but also and especially on account of what she gives out of the best and sweetest of her own nature in behalf of those whom she may find occasion to help and cheer on their way over the journey of life. all this will help to make her a creature of whom not only the other members of her family, but also the entire community will be most proud. references my escape from household drudgery. mary patterson. _success magazine_, august, . proceedings of child conference of research and welfare. beulah kennard. page , "the play life of girls." g. e. stechert & co., new york. women's school of agriculture. i. h. harper. _independent_, june , . the girl of to-morrow--her education. e. h. baylor. _world's work_, july, . prize essay. education of women for home making. mrs. w. n. hutt. annual volume n.e.a., , p. . give the girls a chance. canfield. _collier's_, march , . the durable satisfactions of life. charles w. eliot. pages - , "the happy life." crowell. the kind of education best suited for girls. anna j. hamilton. annual volume n.e.a., . p. . parasitic culture. dr. george e. dawson. _popular science monthly_, september, . training the girl to help in the home. william a. mckeever. pamphlet. cents. published by the author. manhattan, kan. chapter xviii _the farm boy's choice of a vocation_ turn which way you will upon the great broad highway of life and there you will always be able to find the wrecks and broken forms of humankind--men and women who have failed in their life purposes. strange to say, that particular aspect of the science of character-building which has to do with the substantial preparation for vocational life has been very much neglected. by what rule do men succeed in their callings and by what different rule do other men fail? are some foreordained to success and others to failure? is there an inherent strength in some and a native weakness in others? is there a type of education and training which specifically fits and prepares for each of the native callings? none of these questions has been thoroughly gone into with a view to finding out what were best to be done and what best to leave undone. so, we blunder away, hit or miss, in the vocational training of our boys and girls. should the farmer's son farm? in attempting to give helpful suggestions to farm parents relative to their boy's vocation, perhaps this question will first demand an answer. the tentative reply to it is this: the farmer's son, or any other man's son, should follow that calling for which he is best suited by nature and in which he will thereby have the greatest amount of native interest; provided it be practicable to prepare him for such calling. some farm boys are destined by nature for mechanical pursuits, others for social or clerical work, others for captains of industry, and so on. likewise, the city boys may reveal in their natures a great variety of instinctive tendencies and interests which will be found of great worth in guiding them into a successful life occupation. yes, the farmer's son should by all means take up his father's business; provided that at maturity he may have both native and acquired interest in the same and that to a degree predominating any other native or acquired interest. impatience of parents it can be proved that the country boy matures more slowly than the city boy. for example, at the age of sixteen, he is behind the latter in height, weight, school training, and sociability. but while the city boy matures more rapidly, the country boy makes up for the loss by a longer period of development. it is the author's firm belief that this fact of slow growth proves a tremendous advantage to the country youth in that it allows for greater stability of character, and especially for a greater amount of courage and aggressiveness in form of permanent life habits. but one might well wish that all rural parents could realize the evil consequences of being impatient with the son in respect to his choice of a life work. many a good boy yet in his teens is hounded and driven about by the continuous nagging of his parents, who ignorantly believe that he should have his future destiny all planned and ready for its realization. as a result, this same good boy is often driven to desperation and to the point of leaving the home place--of breaking away from the affectionate ties that bind him to parents, and of seeking the position wherein he might earn a living. as a matter of fact, few young men have any very clear or reliable vision of their future life at the age of eighteen, or even twenty. many of the best men in the world are faltering and uncertain even as late as twenty-five. however, if the relatives and friends would only exercise all due patience, offering only such helps and suggestions as can be given, and trusting the future finally to throw upon the problem a light from within the youth himself--then, we may be assured, practically every man will finally come to some line of effort that will bring him a comfortable living. what of predestination? the old-fashioned idea of a boy's being marked by the hand of destiny, "cut out for" some particular calling in life, still has a place in the minds of the masses. the kindred belief that some men are "natural-born failures" has also wide currency. a third superstition is the very common opinion that others are "just naturally lucky." all these traditional opinions are the outgrowth of ignorance of human nature such as may be dispelled by means of a course of instruction, or a carefully arranged course of home reading, in modern psychology. none of the foregoing superstitions would be worthy of our attention were it not for the gross injustice which they entail upon children. parents everywhere--in both city and country--are dealing with their children upon the assumption that one and all of these fallacies are true. "my oldest boy just naturally has no luck," said the father of three sons and two daughters. "he changes around from one thing to another and fails every time." but what of this particular boy's early training? was it the same as that of the others? did he enjoy equal advantages? did his parents when married really know anything about rearing children? or, did they really mistreat their first-born through ignorance and use him as a sort of practice material from which they learned how to do better by the succeeding ones? until the foregoing inquiries about the "unlucky" son's boyhood life be fully answered, we cannot reasonably permit ourselves to condemn him. there is nothing more in predestination than this; namely, it can be shown that the child is born with not a few latent abilities--aptitudes for doing and learning this and that--and that one of these aptitudes is likely to have correlated with it more than the average amount of nerve development in the corresponding brain center. as a result, that particular aptitude will require less training than the others and will tend to predominate over them as maturity is approached. the reply of the psychologist to the statement that some men are "natural-born failures," is this: few if any of those possessed of ordinary physical and mental qualities at birth are necessarily so. excepting the feeble-minded and the like,--whose marks of degeneracy are usually apparent to all,--it may be asserted on the highest authority that none are "natural-born failures" to any greater extent than they are "natural-born successes"; but that they have within the inherited nerve mechanisms many possibilities of both success and failure. three methods of vocational training we should be willing to overlook almost any other interest in this discussion for the sake of inducing in the farm father the belief that his young boy is a potential success--the belief that this boy is furnished by nature with the latent ability to shine somewhere in the broad field of human endeavor--provided he be rightly trained and disciplined during his growing years. here, then, is probably the greatest of all the human-training problems; namely, the vocational one. roughly speaking, there have been three methods of vocational training. . _the apprentice method._--first, historically there has been the apprentice method, the youth being "bound out to learn a trade." the chief faults of this traditional way of teaching the boy to be self-supporting were these: it made no allowance for intellectual development, and it gave the father too much authority to choose the calling for the boy. a modern offshoot of the old-time apprentice course is the trade school which flourishes in many of the big cities to-day. this new institution has one great advantage over its prototype. it offers such a great variety of forms of training that the youth may exercise much free choice. but it preserves one of the serious defects of apprenticeship in its neglect of the intellect of the learner. the modern trade school can never hope to do more than prepare young men and women to make a good living. it is a get-ready-quick institution, and can never be expected to give the student breadth of view and depth of insight into the great problems of human life. . _the cultural method._--the second-oldest method of preparing men for a vocation is what has been called the cultural method. it has aimed at high advancement in book learning with the thought of finally enabling the student to enter a professional class comparatively few in numbers and supposed to possess a superior advantage over the great mass of human kind. one fault of this method has been to emphasize learning for its own sake and to defer too long the training of the individual in the material and practical side of his calling. but the chief fault of this cultural method has been its contempt for common labor and ordinary industry, its theory being that true education prepares one to avoid such practices. if the young man wished to prepare for law or medicine or teaching or the ministry,--one of the "learned professions,"--then the old classical school was at his service. but if he would become a mere artisan or industrial worker, there was no advanced course of schooling available. . _the developmental method._--the third and newest method of preparing the young person for his vocational life is in reality a compromise between the first and second. it provides that the learner shall have book instruction and industrial training at the same time, and that both of these are to be regarded as cultural, since taken together they prepare for independence of thought and action, and for the vocation, as well. this new method of preparing young people for their life work would call nothing mean or low. it aims to serve all impartially in their struggle for self-improvement and vocational success. but its motto is the development of head and hand together. it seeks to produce cultured handicraftsmen as well as cultured artists and professional men. the farmer fortunate our justification for the foregoing somewhat lengthy discussion of the different theories of education is that of wishing to be certain of bespeaking the father's patience and forbearance in the preparation of his son for the vocational life. the farmer is most fortunate in having ready at hand a large amount and variety of industrial practice to supplement the boy's book lessons. in this respect he probably has a superior advantage over all other classes. but in guiding his boy gradually toward the vocational life the farm father can easily mistake what is merely a passing interest on the former's part for a permanent one. the carefully kept records of farm boys show that they take up many different lines of work with great enthusiasm, and yet soon tire of them and drop them. these serial and transitory interests are usually mere juvenile responses to the awakening of some new nerve centers. they are not much different in nature from the brief passing interest which the child has in his various playthings. now, the chief function of these transitory interests in special forms of work and learning as shown by the young growing boy is this: to furnish the occasions for a great variety of activities and practices for trying him out on all the possible sides of his nature. not one of these intense boyish interests is necessarily very directly preparatory to his final choice of a vocation, while all are indirectly so. therefore, if the fifteen-year-old son chances to win in a corn-raising contest, or at a live-stock exhibition, or if he manifests unusual interest in arithmethic, declamation, or nature study, do not regard any of these as necessarily pointing to his best possible vocational work. presumably, at such an undeveloped age, he is still in possession of some latent interests and aptitudes, one of which may far outweigh any such thing hitherto awakened in his life. give him time to mature and, if at all practicable, send him on to college. what college for the country boy it is the opinion of the author that the state agricultural college, as now situated and organized, is the ideal institution of higher learning for the country-bred youth. it offers him every reasonable incentive and opportunity for continuing in the calling of his father, if he be so inclined, while at the same time it gives instruction in many other departments of learning. whether the state institution be a separate one or merely a college within the organization of the state university matters little. in either case the young man will be brought within reach of a course in scientific farming, stock raising, horticulture, and the like, either to choose or let alone--and the so-called cultural work will still be there for the taking. the foundation in work many rural parents, weighted down with the over-work of the farm, cherish and express a very earnest desire that their sons may find some easier form of earning a living. so they deliberately plan with the boy the "easy" course to be pursued. said one such farmer: "wife and i decided that there would not be much in it for henry except hard work if he settled down on the home place, so we decided to send him to college and educate him for something that offered less work and more pay." so they shielded the son from the heavier duties of the farm and encouraged in every way the boy's thought of an easy way to success. but one thing these well-meaning parents failed to foresee. that is, when the boy entered college, he began to look for that same sort of royal road to learning. the assigned lessons and tasks soon took the appearance of drudgery and he dodged and avoided them wherever possible. in less than a year the youth had failed at college and was back home. "the confinement of the college did not agree with his health." more than three years have passed since, and the boy has spent the time drifting from one "job" to another and all the while growing weaker in character and integrity. here we have but another instance of the old, old story, with its tragic aspects. yet, nearly all the faltering, vacillating men now drifting about the country might have been saved through careful training in the performance of work. the boy who would be insured success in his coming vocation must be required to buckle down to solid work of a kind and amount to suit his years and strength. he must learn through the character-building experience of toil, not only what it means to stay by an assigned duty till it is performed, but he must also experience the unfailing joy of work well done. he will thus have the advantage of the spur of successful effort and acquire the beginnings of that splendid self-reliance which is a distinguishing mark of all successful men. clean up the place but there is a sort of drudgery and of ugliness against which the boy's nature instinctively rebels, and it ought to. by this we mean to refer to the actual conditions of over-work and the accompanying run-down appearance that characterizes so many farm homes to-day. no wonder the boys hasten away to the city to find a "job." why not clean up the place by cutting away the underbrush and weeds, by planting shade trees and repairing fences and out buildings, by painting and renovating the house and barn?--and all this as an investment in behalf of the children and their possible future interest in the farm home as the best place on earth in which to dwell? all this and more might be urged as means of guiding the thoughts of the farm boy towards the possibilities of his taking up the calling of his father. and while all these material advantages may not serve to overcome the natural tendency of the young man to seek a radically different type of occupation, they will at least make it more certain that his natural abilities for an agricultural pursuit were not left unawakened. money value of an agricultural education the college of agriculture in cornell university some time ago made an inquiry into the educational status of the farmers in a certain county of new york. it was found that out of farmers, had not advanced farther than the district school, had attended high school one or more years, and had received a college education. the who had attended district school only were receiving yearly for their labor $ ; the farmers of high school education were receiving annually $ ; and the who had attended college one or more years were receiving an average of $ income for their services. the foregoing investigation is at least suggestive in its results. it tends to prove that there is an actual earning-capacity value in the higher agricultural education. while the matter has never been extensively studied, it can doubtless be shown that the graduates of the agricultural course are receiving much larger incomes than any of the classes named above. in addition it can doubtless be shown that these graduates are better equipped, not only for earning a livelihood, but for substantial citizenship. of course there are many notable exceptions to this rule, but the rule is, nevertheless, general. now, if the farm parent wishes to figure his boy's future on the basis of money-earning capacity, he can easily be shown that the higher schooling in the average case increases such capacity. in addition there is abundant evidence of the fact that the higher schooling gives the young man a much better equipment for serving the society in which he is to live. a successful vocation certain finally, it may be said that the successful vocational life of the ordinary country-bred boy may be guaranteed as practically certain, provided he have every ordinary advantage of development and training of which he is capable. train him early in lessons of obedience and work; make his life more wholesome through ample play and recreation; see that he learns how to earn money and how to save a part of his earnings; provide that he attend the public school regularly until at least the grammar grades be finished; give him an opportunity to become personally interested in the business side of the farm life; allow him opportunities to mingle with the cleanest possible society of his own age; and then await patiently his own inner promptings as to what line of work he should take up. a college course may prove necessary in order to help him uncover deeper and better levels that lie hidden in his nature. then, after he has chosen a calling in this careful and reliable way, with all your might, mind, and soul encourage and support him in his efforts! this is practically the only way to make a big, efficient man and citizen of your boy and to make his calling a _divine_ calling. references _vocational education._ published bi-monthly. $ . per year. the manual arts press, peoria, ill. vocational education. john m. gillette. chapter vi, "importance of the economic interest in society." american book company. vocational guidance of youth. meyer bloomfield. chapter ii, "vocational chaos and its consequences." houghton, mifflin company. the entire volume is most timely and helpful. the problem of vocational education. david snedden, ph.d. houghton, mifflin company. new type of rural school house. w. h. jenkins. _craftsman_, may, . vocational direction, or the boy and his job. _annals american academy_, march, . education for a vocation. president's address before the n.e.a. annual volume, , p. . vocational direction. e. w. lord. _annals academy of political and social science_ (philadelphia), march, . social phase of education. samuel t. dutten. page , "the relation of education to vocation." macmillan. the entire book is sound and sane. income of college graduates ten years after graduation. h. a. miller. _science_, feb. , . occupations of college graduates as influenced by the undergraduate course. f. p. keppel. _educational review_, december, . assisting the boy in the choice of a vocation. pamphlet. wm. a. mckeever. manhattan, kan. chapter xix _the farm girl's preparation for a vocation_ what, may we ask, are rural parents doing in regard to the careful preparation of their growing daughters for the vocational life? the author has frequently asserted that many a farmer is to-day giving vastly more thought to the question of preparing his live stock for the money market than to preparing his girls for their life work. the seriousness, the well-nigh cruelty, of this situation becomes apparent only when we inquire into the facts. how long must this carelessness continue? how long will farmers remain indifferent to the tremendous responsibility of giving their children every possible aid in the direction of a high and worthy occupation? their chief concern continues to be centered too exclusively upon the cattle and the hogs and the corn. are the boys and girls to be left to shift for themselves? and are they to continue to have their careers determined by mere chance and incident? [illustration: plate xxx. fig. .--country school girls learning the rudiments of cooking. in no distant future such work will be required along with the traditional subjects.] what is the outlook so, if the country father having a young family were here before us, we should ask him: what is the outlook in regard to a happy future for your growing daughter? do you want her to take her place among the men and be forced to do some sort of man's work in order to obtain her bread? or, do you earnestly desire that she find some sort of worthy woman's work? and if the latter be your choice, what helpful agencies are you bringing to bear upon the situation? in the midst of all your consideration of these matters touching your daughter, we should have you most earnestly and prayerfully consider at least one thing; namely, with few possible exceptions, the healthy, growing girl looks forward instinctively to the time when she is to become mistress of a household of her own. and in every case, if the girl fails to become such a mistress, there is only one reasonable alternative to be thought of and that is to provide that she engage in some sort of work which will give expression in the largest possible measure to that which is best and truest in her feminine nature. ordinarily, in planning for the future of their daughter, parents might as well consider the problem as having a two-fold aspect. assuming first of all that the girl instinctively desires to preside over a home of her own, how can she best be prepared for that place? second, in case that, by some miscarriage of plans, she fails to reach this most worthy ambition, what may she safely fall back upon as an adequate means of self-support? now, if this statement of the matter be a correct one, it seems that the general scope of the problem of preparing a girl for her vocation ought to be fairly clear. still another way of putting the situation is this: the girl must be carefully prepared, not only for her first choice of an occupation, but also for her second choice, because of grave danger of the failure of her first choice to be realized. there is a perplexing aspect of the whole question implied here, and every parent who has a daughter should become aware of it and also prepared to confront it. that is to say, almost any ordinary man may go out into the open market and push his quest for a life companion and be able to return in the course of a very short period with one at his side. but with the girl it is radically different. practically her only stock-in-trade consists of her personal charm and her pecuniary advantages. and many a young woman with both of these qualities very strongly in her favor fails, by some chance or other, to receive an acceptable offer of marriage. statistics widely gathered will show that age is also a very positive factor in this matter, and that the ratio of probability of marriage of a single woman begins to fall very rapidly before she reaches thirty. desirable occupations for women while there is abundant evidence to prove that the great majority of normal young women desire instinctively and above all things else a happy marriage, including a contented home life and children to care for, some alternatives must be now pointed out in case of failure to realize the highest ambition. . _may teach the young._--school teaching is perhaps the most common, as well as the most commendable, occupation for unmarried women. in many a case, the farmer's daughter will find it greatly to her advantage to engage in this occupation for one or more terms. thousands of the most worthy young women in our land are devoting their lives to this highest of secondary vocations for women. the work of teaching gives exercise to the altruistic feminine nature and approaches in a fair degree the satisfaction which comes to the mother who is sacrificing for children of her own. but school teaching wears heavily on the vitality of nearly all young women who follow it long. diseases peculiar to the sex are said to be very prevalent among such teachers, probably resulting from an excessive amount of standing. tens of thousands of girls are going from the farm home to the school room, some of them to remain permanently in the business, but the majority to earn money of their own and to place themselves in better position for successful marriage. so, perhaps the first duty of the country parents to the daughter who takes up school teaching is to see that the latter's health be not seriously impaired thereby. after that, the young woman's proper advancement in the profession may be thought of. the ungraded district school is an excellent trying-out and testing position for the young teacher. but if she continues many terms in the school room, graded work will prove more advantageous, especially in the important matter of bringing the young woman into the company of marriageable young men. . _may take up stenography._--a vast army of young women now support themselves with the use of the typewriter. this work pays slightly more the year round than school teaching. it is somewhat more confining; but, for various other reasons, it is less deleterious to the general health. such office business, however, subjects the young woman to many temptations. it is the opinion of the author that stenography is not at all a desirable occupation for the farmer's daughter to enter. the continued absence from home, the constant association with people differing radically in tastes and manners from the rural population, not to mention again the many temptations to accept lower moral standards--these and other matters will tend to estrange the farm daughter from her parents and to make them feel that something of the former charm of sweet simplicity and home affection has passed permanently out of her life. one thing at least is to be considered before the daughter be permitted to leave the country home for an office position. that is, the work is not to be considered as permanent, but rather as a possible means of preparing for marriage and the contented home life that should follow. . _may do social work._--next to the work of teaching, perhaps the social-service work now being developed and carried on in the cities would make its appeal to the true-hearted young woman. here again we have a sort of task that dips into the affections and sympathies of the worker and furnishes an opportunity for her to give freely out of the best she has in her make-up. among the fortunate considerations of teaching and social work are the opportunities they offer for the sympathetic care and guidance of children--the indulgence of altruism and the mother instinct in the young woman. parents will observe as a rule that their daughter returns from such occupations as these with increased affections for the home family and the home life and a broader and more general interest in people. in recent years there has developed a new and remarkably promising field of social work for both young men and young women. charitable, philanthropic, and other social-welfare institutions have been greatly multiplied, while their work has been put on a scientific basis. the modern method of securing employees in such places is that of calling persons especially trained and fitted to do the work required, and to pay reasonably for the service. several new, first-class schools and institutions for training workers in this human field have been recently organized. now, if country parents become anxious to have their daughter go away to the city and find desirable employment and that at living wages, the author recommends this new line of social work most highly. for reasons given above, and for others, it will prove an excellent stepping-stone to the home life--the work is in the general field of human betterment so inviting to the natural instincts of the well-reared young woman; the associates are persons likewise interested in human welfare and ranking high in moral and religious character; the required work is usually of a nature to awaken the deepest sympathies and affections and to make the countenance of the worker shine with a new spiritual light. . _may secure clerkships._--clerking and general store work is much followed by young women to-day, but such work may be put down in the list of hazardous occupations for women of any age. close economic conditions in the cities force many thousands of girls to leave home and seek clerkships at a wage so low as indirectly to undermine the health and more directly to impair the morals. great armies of these girls are compelled to live in dingy, cramped quarters, to subsist on much less than the quantity of wholesome food necessary for good health, to practice the strictest economy in matters of dress--to say nothing of the constant temptation to sell their virtue as a means of increasing the small income to the living margin. only in extreme cases, therefore, will intelligent farm parents consent to their daughter's leaving home to take up a clerkship, and that when her home life and her social surroundings can be satisfactorily foreseen and arranged for in advance. even then, the question must be raised: will this new position probably prove helpful as an introduction to a better form of occupation? no other possible occupations for the farmer's daughter will be listed here excepting that of trained nurse--a position in which many young women are doing a splendid service for humanity and at the same time supporting themselves adequately. but of course such a position should not be thought of unless the girl feels an inner call to take it up. practically all other outside lines of work for women are too masculine. parents should by no means allow their daughters to take up a life task that means nothing other than mere money-making. many women, it is true, are succeeding to-day in business callings, but they are doing so as a rule in violation of certain laws of nature. many of these business women are masculine in their dispositions and they become more so as the unnatural calling continues to be pursued. a college course for the girl at first thought it would seem that ability to prepare a good meal and to do her own sewing might constitute all the education in household economy necessary for any young woman. but such proves not to be the case. there are hundreds of home-making problems, great and small, for which mere knowledge of the two important affairs just named will provide no answer. while the ability to cook and sew well are doubtless essential characteristics of the good housekeeper, they are not at all a guarantee that their possessor is a good home maker. parents must learn to take the larger and more liberal view of the future of their children. not merely practice in the culinary art, but also a developed and refined personality; not merely industrial efficiency, but also constructive ability of a social nature; not merely mechanical skill in managing the details of housework, but a set of well-matured, effective plans for making the home over which she presides a place of joy and contentment for the other members of the family--these are some of the evidences of character which the wise, far-seeing parent might well desire for his daughter. now, it is the thesis of this chapter that the normal woman is at her best only when she has become mistress of her own well-managed household. but such an exalted position can scarcely be reached except through a broad, general course of preparation. the one-sided, classical college training has spoiled for life many otherwise good and happy women. such a course tends strongly to draw the mind and the affections of the young woman away from the home and from motherhood and other such matters so fundamental to the well-being of the race. but in seeking for an ideal school for the daughter the farmer will find unsurpassed that institution which offers extensive courses in household art and management, supplemented fully with work in the so-called culture subjects--language, literature, history, sociology, psychology, and economics. this work constitutes what might be called a balanced schedule of instruction for the young woman. if pursued to its conclusion, such a course of training enriches her personality and multiplies her opportunities for future usefulness many fold. associations with refined young men if the young woman's preparation for her life work be satisfactory to all, she must have extensive experience in the society of young men such as only the co-educational college can give. as her position in the rural home has been already too much isolated, an exclusive women's college is least to be desired as a place to educate the country girl. but the domestic science course in a state university or a state agricultural college will be found almost ideal. here the girl may be held to a reasonable performance of her assigned duties, while at the same time she may mingle freely in the society of both sexes. indeed, if the thesis of this chapter be a sound and tenable one,--namely, that normally woman's highest satisfaction is to be sought through helping her attain efficient home life,--then, there is every reason for agreeing with the late professor james in his contention that every young woman ought to be taught how to know a good man. it is distinctively the business of the young college woman, not only to prepare well all her lessons in household economy and the literary subjects, but also to keep her eye out for a suitable life companion. and her father should be made to realize that her opportunities for marrying a man of high worth and ability are increased many fold through the completion of a course in the ideal form of co-educational college. marriages among college mates are usually most successful, both in the final establishment of substantial home life and in point of resulting in a reasonable number of well-reared children. statistics gathered widely show that the young woman college graduate marries somewhat later than her non-attending sister, that she has slightly better health, that her children are somewhat fewer, but better reared. [illustration: plate xxxi. fig. .--a girls' class in sewing. no girl of this age needs to wear any better garment than she can make with her own needle if she be rightly trained. such training is a part of real preparation for life.] make the daughter attractive it may therefore be urged upon all rural parents, as a cold business proposition, as well as a duty, that they take every reasonable precaution to develop in their growing daughters both an attractive personality and a beauty of the inner character, whether she be so fortunate as to attend a good college or not. all this must be done with a thought of rendering the daughter as attractive as possible in respect to any worthy young man who may in time seek her heart and hand in marriage. it is time for parents to cease passing this thing by as a mere piece of sentimentalism and to begin to do the fair thing by their girls. why should it longer come to pass in this enlightened age that some parents break down the physical health of their girls with the burden of over-work and thus consign them to a life of moping and bitter disappointment for the future; that other parents indulge their girls in the giddy, butterfly type of life and thus blight their prospects of a substantial and satisfactory place in human society? summary and conclusion in summarizing and concluding this chapter we wish to remind the reader of what has been said in the preceding ones. there are a number of distinctive elements that must be carefully wrought into the character of the farmer's daughter with a view to laying a substantial foundation for her future career. . first of all, the girl's health must be kept in mind. she must not have an over-burden of work heaped upon her delicate shoulders, nor must she be allowed to expose herself unnecessarily to the inclemencies of the weather so common in the ordinary rural districts. there are many women moping about to-day, ill and despondent much of the time because of the negligence of parents who permitted them when growing girls to wade about through mud and slush and thus impair permanently their physical well-being. many of the minor ailments of mature life recur habitually, and that because they were permitted to be acquired when the organism was young and sensitive. . the daughter must be taught how to carry on practically all the necessary details of the housework. the plain cooking and sewing and the general care of the home must be required as duties on the part of every promising girl. it is especially obligatory on the part of rural parents that they train the daughter in such a way as to make her a true mistress of the household over which she may sometime preside. she must learn through specific guidance how to subordinate the heavy home tasks to her spiritual well-being. . it is also essential that the girl learn how to manage the business affairs of the home; especially, how to purchase the supplies of the kitchen and the larder in the most economic fashion. she must also learn both how to secure her own personal belongings at a reasonable cost and how to make them serve her real needs without unnecessary expenditure of money. it will be a great achievement in her behalf if the girl approach her marriage day thoroughly imbued with the thought of coöperating with her husband in the general business of maintaining a home. . we would remind the reader again of the necessity of giving attention to the development of an attractive personality in the growing girl. pleasing manners, refined expressions, neat and attractive apparel, kindliness and sympathy, frankness and straightforwardness--all these should enter into her make-up and be thought of as parts of her permanent character. they will also go far toward winning to her side a suitable life companion. . the young girl on the farm should have much advice in respect to the nature and character of men. this will be achieved partly through her well-ordered social life and partly through specific talks from thoughtful parents. country girls are probably less informed in respect to the natures of men than are city girls. many beautiful and innocent young women are led astray either before or after marriage by evil and designing men; many of them consummate marriages with men who have an outer appearance of trustworthiness, but who harbor within some most serious and insurmountable evil and disease. although she may not for a time be conscious of what her parents are doing, the latter should be for years purposely engaged in preparing their daughter to know at sight a good man. finally, it may be said that there is no greater charm or thing of more superior beauty in this good world of ours than the character of a woman who has been well-born and well-reared, and who has been safely guided into the home of her own wherein she reigns as mistress supreme. in this ideal home the love and sympathy and the kindly deeds of the true home-maker will reveal themselves permanently in the lives of her children and her husband and the many others who come into contact with her constructive personality. references women's ways of earning money. cynthia westover alden. a. s. barnes & co. the home builder. dr. lyman abbott. houghton, mifflin company. sympathetic and cheering. almost a woman. mary wood allen, m.d. crist, scott & parshall, coopertown, n.y. a plain talk to the young woman about her sex nature. the problem of vocational education. david snedden, ph.d. chapter xii, "the problem of women in industry." houghton, mifflin company. the vocational guidance of youth. meyer bloomfield. chapter i, "the choice of life work and its difficulties." houghton, mifflin company. parenthood and race culture. charles w. saleeby m.d. chapter x, "marriage and maternalism." moffat, yard & co., new york. should women work for their living? m. yates. _westminster review_, october, . social diseases and marriage. educational pamphlet, no. . american society of sanitary and moral prophylaxis, new york. cents. every parent should read this booklet. vocational training for girls. isabelle mcglaufin. _education_, april, . a healthy race; woman's vocation. c. m. hill. _westminster review_, january, . social adjustment. s. nearing. pages - , "dependence of women." macmillan. purposes of women. f. w. saleeby, m.d. _forum_, january, . does the college rob the cradle? h. boice. _delineator_, march, . the college woman as a home maker. m. e. wooley. _ladies' home journal_, oct. , . the american woman and her home. symposium. _outlook_, april , . teaching the girl to save. home-training bulletin no. . cents. wm. a. mckeever, manhattan, kan. chapter xx _conclusion, and future outlook_ in concluding this volume we wish again to remind parents of the necessity of working for specific results in the rearing of their children. modern man, unlike his ancestor, who roamed over the earth, is a creature of complex and highly refined make-up which no primitive or natural environment could possibly produce. the forces that work upon his character development are so radically different from those which formed the life of his remote forbears as possibly to account for the contrasts in the two forms of finished personality. although there is evidence to support the theory that man belongs to the general evolutionary scheme of animal life, the progress of the race has been so very slow that a thousand years of time can show no very distinct improvement either in physical form or mental quality. while the human young is exceedingly plastic as an individual,--yielding easily from one side of his inherent activities to another,--the race is relatively fixed and stable. strive for preconceived results parents and other instructors of the young must therefore accept their charges as made up of very complex potentialities of learning and achievement--each a bundle of latent characters transmitted to him from the ancestral line. many of these inherited characters are too weak in any given individual ever to show in his life conduct; many others will come to the surface only in response to proper stimuli and practice; still others will break out and show a predominance almost in defiance of any training intended to counteract them. but the teacher and trainer of the infant child may accept the theory that the latter, if taken in time, can be bent and modified many ways in his character formation; that such plasticity is, however, always subject to the relative strength or weakness of the many inherited aptitudes and activities latent within the individual. there is no good reason, therefore, why the parent should not begin early to build up the character of his child in accordance with a preconceived plan; provided such plan do no violence to any of nature's stubborn and inexorable laws. the parent may also accept this task as a long and tedious undertaking, and expect to get results in proportion as he works intelligently for them. the farmer does not even think of producing good crop results from his land without hard work and much thought; then, why should he expect so delicate a plant as the human young to reach satisfactory maturity without much care and consideration? by far the greatest sin against the child is neglect of his training. consult expert advice we must not be unmindful of the necessity of a balanced schedule of activities for the child. the vegetable plant must have air, sunlight, moisture, nitrogen, and so on, to support its growth. if one of these essential elements be lacking, the result is fatal to the fruitage. so with the child. if the best character results are to be expected, certain essential elements must be put into use. we have named them as play, work, recreation, and social experience. but as one approaches the individual problem of child training it does not prove so simple and easy as these terms imply. when and how to give each of these necessary exercises, how much of each to furnish, the means thereof, and the like--these and many other such questions begin to arise. when the parent reaches the point of perplexity in dealing with his child, it is a fairly good indication that his interest is aroused, at least. but what is to be done? simply the same thing he would do at the point of perplexity in the wheat propagation, _consult an expert_. if one of the work mules becomes lame or reveals a bad disposition, should the owner take it to an electrician for advice? if the family cow becomes locoed or shows an unusual result in her milk product, should one consult a piano tuner? yet, strange to say, parents are often known to do similarly in dealing with the perplexing problems of child-rearing. consult the popular magazines and the book shelves any day and you will find many lengthy dissertations on the boy and the girl, written not infrequently by persons who have spent a lifetime studying _something else_. but they are very fond of children and they mistake this fondness for knowledge of an expert kind; and worst of all, they offer it as such. the farm parents who wish to receive expert advice in the treatment of their children must learn to consult directly or through literature only those who have made a long and intensive study of child problems. and in the latter case they need not expect to obtain all necessary help from one source alone. usually the child-study expert is a specialist in only one certain part of the field. for example, at the university of pennsylvania under dr. lightner witmer, there has been made a specialty of the sub-normal child. we should probably obtain from that source more expert help in that one phase of child welfare than from any other source in america. if one wishes reliable help on the subject of diseases of children, he should naturally expect to obtain it from some medical authority, from one who has spent long years practicing in a general hospital for children. one of the very few great sources of information on the general psychology of child development is clark university, where many child-welfare problems have been worked out by experts under the able direction of dr. g. stanley hall. meet each awakening interest a very reliable general rule of guidance for the parent child trainer is to strive to furnish intensive practice for each and every childish and juvenile interest at the time of its awakening. as stated in chapter ii the most predominant interests in the young emerge in response to the unfoldment of instincts and the development of organic growths within. perhaps all do so. but the point of importance for the parent is to meet each of these awakenings at the time of its highest activity with intensive training. the instinct to play, to fight, to steal, to run away, to work (?), to fall in love, to engage in some occupation, to marry and make a home, to have children--these have been named as especially important by virtue of their awakening successively the individual's interests in matters of great consequence to character development. but instincts are blind. their possessor does not foresee the way they point. they come suddenly and catch the subject unprepared to direct their force in what we call intelligent ways. hence, the extreme necessity of there being present at the side of the child, at the time of his instinctive awakening, some mature and intelligent person who has been through the experiences the former is about to begin, and who will sympathetically point the right way and insist that it be followed. work for social democracy one can scarcely become deeply interested in the future of his own child without coming intimately into touch with the child welfare problems at large. even country parents, isolated though they may be, will discover that serious study of the matter of bringing up a family of good children will require that they study the lives of other human young. moreover, they will need the use of other children as "laboratory" material for training their own. all this will gradually lead the way to a fuller social sympathy in such parents and to the inculcation of more wholesome social ideals in the minds of their offspring. finally, the rural parents who are seeking a full and adequate development of the young members of their own family will most probably see their way clear to assume a helpful leadership of the young people of the neighborhood as advocated in chapter x of this volume. while many agencies for the betterment of rural youth have been discussed,--such as the county y.m.c.a., the boy scout movement, and the social and economic clubs,--the neighborhood which has at least one of these agencies intensively at work may be considered fortunate. and it may be said that such a neighborhood is well on the way to economic improvement as well as social improvement. the outlook very promising throughout the united states there is being manifested a general tendency to accept the theory that our human stock is relatively sound. while there are seemingly large numbers of the criminal, delinquent, and dependent classes, they are in reality comparatively few in proportion to the entire population. and when we accept the estimate of the experts that about ninety per cent of the cases included in the classes just named are preventable through wise foresight and training, the outlook for a better race of human beings becomes most cheering. "the proper study of mankind is man," says the poet. but for many generations we have regarded this statement as mere poetry and not necessarily truth. our policy up to the recent past has been rather this: the proper study of mankind is everything _except_ man, leaving the all-important problems of child-rearing to the decisions of wise old grand-mothers and debating societies. but a radical change has come, and that within this present generation. men and women highly trained in the colleges and universities are now applying their scientific methods to the study of man with no less zeal and earnestness than that which has characterized the student of the non-human problems for many generations of time. [illustration: plate. xxxii. fig. .--sowing the seed, all by herself. fig. .--thinning the vegetables. new york scenes.] through the able conclusions of the painstaking expert the so-called institutional life has been especially improved. the industrial (reform) schools are now practicing a system of balanced activities--of study, work, play, and the like--such as the findings of these investigators have warranted. the method of paroling the delinquent child, after he has spent a term of preparation, was proved most helpful through the careful tests of a large number of cases. recently the parole system has been effectively applied to certain classes of penitentiary convicts. a most productive agency for good now in use in many of the prisons and all the industrial schools is that of building up the waste places in the individual life through specific training and instruction. the first question raised in such cases is, what is the particular moral defect of the individual? second, what are the causes? third, what will reconstruct his character and give permanent relief? that is, the expert psychologist and the expert sociologist are being called into service with the expert alienist and physician. the purpose is to save and reconstruct the whole man. compulsory education and trade schooling are now very common in state prisons. in the care and protection of the insane and the feeble-minded our country can boast of but slow progress. many of the members of these classes are permitted to run at large and even to marry and beget their kind. now, while our human stock is in its mass very sound and sane, there are constantly being thrown off from it these mentally defective classes. the complete obliteration of all such classes to-day would not result in their complete disappearance from the race. others would be born as variants from normal parentage. but the evil of it all lies in the fact that we are still permitting many of these defectives to multiply, and that in the face of the fact that a normal child has never been reported among the offspring of two feeble-minded parents. the modern service training of all the institutions contributing to the direct improvement of the race there is perhaps none surpassing in importance the modern training school for social workers. in new york, chicago, philadelphia, st. louis, and other large cities such may be found usually affiliated with some university or college. the general purpose is that of training men and women to go into the field of social service and apply the methods and conclusions worked out by the research student. hitherto, much of the social work has been conducted by persons possessing merely religious zeal and enthusiasm. their efforts were praiseworthy, but they lacked the training necessary for coping with modern educational and economic problems. the distinctive feature of the new methods is that it is based on scientific and business principles. that is, the social worker is trained in the same methodical way as the prospective lawyer or school teacher, and is also paid reasonably for his services. the modern social worker not only proceeds with a well-defined plan, but he usually makes or requires a survey of his newly-opened field. the social survey--now becoming more common as a means of beginning a campaign of improvement in the cities--has revealed some most interesting, as well as distressing, situations in the submerged districts. the housing situation, sanitary conditions, wages and incomes of different classes, sweat-shop employment, the protection of workmen in shops and factories, child-labor conditions, and so on--these are examples of the problems of the investigator, while his tabulated reports serve to guide the social worker. now, the duties of the latter are many, but in general they lie in the direction of improvement of the conditions as found. among the undertakings that often fall to his lot are: establishing new social centers in congested districts, providing for new parks and playgrounds, locating reading and recreation rooms, organizing self-help and home-improvement clubs among the lower classes, conducting cooking and sewing schools, and the like. of special interest to the rural dweller is the fact that the modern methods of first making surveys and then applying remedial agencies is now being extended into the country districts, giving many marked results already and promising greater ones for the future. the state doing its part that the nation and the state are active participants in these new forms of child-conserving and man-saving endeavor is indicated on every side. the national government has encouraged the states in the enactment of stringent child-labor laws. in the usual instance children under fourteen to sixteen years of age are prohibited from working away from home at gainful occupations. correlated with this is the compulsory-education law in the several states. the national and state governments have also coöperated in the enactment of laws prohibiting the adulteration of foods and foodstuffs and in enforcing better sanitation. as a result of such measures, state and local, together with the help of greatly improved hospital practice, the infant mortality in several of the large cities has been reduced more than fifty per cent in the past decade. inspired by the splendid pioneer work of the national playground association, the cities and towns have recently made very rapid progress in the establishment of playgrounds and recreative centers for old and young. many millions of dollars have already been expended for such purposes. now the country districts are adopting the same means of social improvement. the primary system of selecting candidates for political office is proving to be a most potent agency for the general uplift. by means of it, better men are being inducted into office. better still, the old corrupt practice of the ward politician, so deleterious to the character of youth, is losing its once powerful influence on government. the so-called social evil, so damaging to the health and morals of thousands of our best young men and young women, is now under fair promise of improvement. the remarkable survey of the chicago vice commission and the work of the other well-planned organizations looking to the solution of the same general problem have proved most effective in revealing the true conditions and of awakening the public conscience. all of these activities in the interest of putting down the sex evils point very clearly one moral to all conscientious parents; namely, that the best and most certain method of inculcating lessons of purity in the case of the young is through preventive measures, and through the practice of purity during the years of growth. open and frank discussion of the sex problems as they arise normally out of the experiences of the child, admonitions and prohibitions in regard to impure associates, the insistence upon a single, and not a double, standard of purity for the two sexes--these are some of the specific duties of parents. as an instance of what may be achieved by way of helping the weak and depraved to defend themselves against debasing habit, and especially of what may be done by way of prevention of a character-destroying habit in time of youth, the kansas prohibitory law is cited. the longer this statute remains, the more effective its work and the more unanimous the public sentiment supporting it. so popular has this measure become that no political party and no faction of any other class has been able to take any effective stand against it. it can be shown to any fair-minded investigator that the great majority of the citizens of kansas are total abstainers from the use of intoxicants; also that the state has brought up a new generation of tens of thousands of men, now mostly voters, who have no personal knowledge of the use and abuse of alcoholic drinks and who have become confirmed as total abstainers for life. another unique kansas measure--ignored and derided at first only less than was the prohibitory liquor law when new--is the statute forbidding the use of tobacco in any form on the part of minors. the wisdom of this statute is supported by the conclusions of scientific study of the effects of tobacco on the young. the general purpose of the law is to prevent the youth from taking up the tobacco-using habit before reaching full maturity of years and judgment. the general result will be the gradual development of a generation of total abstainers from the use of tobacco. the new era of religion even into the sanctuary of the modern church is the new scientific spirit finding its way. it has become an accepted principle of procedure among ministers and other church workers of late that the best way to save souls is not to depend wholly upon divine grace, but to assist this subtle power by means of the constructive work of many human agencies. preventive measures that aim at safeguarding the young against evil contaminations, the institution of social improvement organizations and of literary and economic clubs, the formation of good-fellowship societies, of societies for conducting social surveys, of committees for giving vocational guidance and for the administration of spiritual healing--these and numerous endeavors of the same class give evidence of the great service which the modern church is rendering young humanity. and all this splendid work is being carried forward without doing any violence to the essential doctrines of the great historical institution so long engaged in its serious efforts in behalf of human salvation. final conclusion as a closing remark the author can only express again his belief that no past age ever held out such inspiring hope and such splendid encouragement to the many parents who appreciate the needs of intelligent care and training for their children. and because of the natural advantages of the surroundings, country parents have the greatest justification of all for being enthusiastic over the outlook. now, let them go patiently and reverently at the work of bringing up for the service of the world a magnificent race of men and women--men who have brain and brawn and moral courage and religious devotion; women who have a profound sense of maternal responsibility, an inspiring superiority over the perplexing duties of the household, a deep and far-reaching social sympathy, and such a poise and sublimity of thought as to reveal the divinity inherent in their characters. for lo! in the hidden depths of the natures of the common boys and girls there lie slumbering these splendid possibilities! references the meaning of social science. albion w. small. university of chicago press. an epoch-making book, restating ably the general problem of social reconstruction. report of committee on rural social problems, national conference charities and corrections. address porter r. lee, sec'y for organizing charity, philadelphia, pa. annual report. association for study and prevention of infant mortality, cathedral street, baltimore. government report on children as wage-earners. department of commerce and labor, washington, d.c. this department is bringing out nineteen volumes in all, each covering a particular problem of women and children as wage-earners. the following are especially related to the subject matter of this chapter:-- the beginnings of child labor legislation in certain states; a comparative study. conditions under which children leave school to go to work. juvenile delinquency and its relation to employment. causes of death among women and child cotton mill operatives. family budgets of typical cotton mill workers. hook worm disease among cotton mill operatives. employment of women and children in selected industries. reports and circulars national christian league for promotion of purity, east th street, new york. annual report of national conference of charities and corrections, . charities publication committee, new york. see this valuable volume for reports of progress in the different lines of child-welfare effort. the white slave traffic. _outlook_, july . . the rockefeller grand jury report of white slave traffic. _mcclure_, may, august, . moral research in social and economic problems. g. connell. _westminster review_, february, . my lesson from the juvenile court. judge ben. b lindsey. _survey_, feb. , . index acquired characters, not transmissible, . agricultural education, money value of, . agriculture, as a rural school subject, ff. anger, a healthful instinct, ; right treatment of, f. aristocracy, fostered in the schools, , . bank account, necessary for boys, . bill, arthur j., . boardman, john r., advocate of rural play, . books, for children, how to choose, ; a selected list, ff.; on child-rearing, , . boys, bad companionships for, f. boy scouts movement, . boy scouts, professor holton's definition of, ; how to organize, f.; in kansas, ff. boys leave the farm, why, , . bread-making clubs, f. bread-winning, cultural, . building site, suited to children, . business career, instinct for, . business, training for farm boy, ff.; finding the boy's interest in, f.; dealing fair with the boy in, . butterfield, president kenyon l., , . character-building, agencies of, ff.; must go on with schooling, f.; requires religious training, . chicago vice commission, . child-rearing, rural, ff. children's hour, recommended for evening, . children's room, good illustration of, f. child study, a necessity, ff. cigarettes, law against, in kansas, . college education, for farm boy, f. compulsory education, now general, . consolidation of rural schools, illustrated, , . cornell university, model rural school ff. cornell university, . corn-plowing, may be divine calling, . corn-raising clubs, f. corn sunday, in rural church, . country boy, the right schooling for, ff.; his interest in humanity, ; must know current affairs, . country church at plainfield, ill., ; at ogden, kan., , ; commission management of, ; too narrow, ; as social center, ff.; at danbury, n. h., ; at lincoln, vt., ; federated society in, . country dwelling, its relation to juvenile character, ff.; plan it for the children, , . country girl, business training for, ff.; why she leaves home, f.; rules for training in business, ; not to be a money-maker, ; earning money in the south, ; schooling for, ff.; to be taught music, f.; vocation for, ff. country life commission, f., . country mother, as teacher, ; report of country life commission, ; conservation of her energies, ff.; conspiring with the children, f. country school, to be redirected, ff. crying, good for infants, . dance, usually degrading, ; hard to control, f. department of agriculture, . dickens, professor albert, f. disease, relation to habit, ; avoidance of by care, . domestic economy, for girls, f.; in the rural school, . exhibitions, by rural y.m.c.a., f. fairchild, supt. e. t., f., . farm barn, not to be better than the dwelling, . _farmer's voice_, , . farm girls, danger of over-working, f.; working in the field, ; sometimes misjudged, f.; work schedule difficult to make, ; and self-supremacy, f.; social companions for, . fear, nature and purpose of, , . federation for country life in illinois, f. good health, fundamental to development, . good life, definition, . hall, dr. g. stanley, . happiness, a part of the good life, ; how obtained, . high school, rural provisions for, f. holton, professor e. l. on boy scouts, . home conveniences, necessity for farm women, . home life education, . home sanitation, in the rural school, . "homing" instinct, . house help, training the children for, . human stock, mostly sound, , ; potentially good, . humble parentage and leadership, . instincts, of children to be studied, ; two are fundamental, ; related to impulse, ; for home life, ; for business, . james, professor william, . kansas, rural boy scouts in, ff.; a boy genius of, . kansas state agricultural college, . kirk, president john r., quoted, f. leadership, of farmer and wife, ff.; preparation for, ; in y.m.c.a., f. library, for neighborhood in farm home, . _literary digest_, . literature, purpose of in country home, f.; best adapted to the child, , ; types of, f.; on child-rearing, . marriage, planning for the daughter's, f.; to be studied, ff.; training the girl for, , . mcnutt, rev. m. b., and his work, , ; church built by, . mendel's law, and human inheritance, . minister, of city should preach in the country, ; a country type, ff. moral strength, an aim in character-building, ; acquired through trial and error, . mothers' club, organization of, f. "mother's hour," recommended, . moving to town, to educate the children, ; how it affects the farmer, , . national corn exhibit, . native ability, three classes of, ff.; how stimulus and opportunity assist, . newspaper, kind for the farmer, . occupations for women, ff. oklahoma agricultural college, work at county fair, . play, growing interest in, , ; practical uses of, ff.; an excellent set of materials for, ; sharply distinguished from work, ; after sunday school, ; neighborhood center for, . play apparatus, model in farm home, . playground, apparatus for, ff.; for home and school, f. playground association of america, , . population, decrease in country, . prohibitory law, in kansas, . psychological clinic, . recreation, meaning of misunderstood, ; how related to farm work, ff.; for rural youth, . religion, the new era in, ; interest in a part of life, . _review of reviews_, . rural manhood, , . rural school, changes in view-point of, ; to serve all, f.; compulsory attendance upon, ; model at kirksville, . rural schoolhouse, better ones needed, ; location of, ; in kansas, ; model at cornell, . saloons, a menace to boys, f. school grounds, size, and adoption of, . school playground, ff. sex evils, to be studied, . sex habits, secret, . sex instinct, as socializing agency, . sexual love, instructive and extremely helpful, ; necessity of careful treatment, ff. smoking, bad for boys, f. social democracy, fostered by training, . social efficiency, training for, . social entertainment, how to conduct, f.; several forms of, ff. social renaissance, in the country, . social sensitiveness, a form of fear, ; great value in training, , . social training of farm youths, ff.; in economic clubs, ; a working plan for, ff.; based on sex instinct, ; menaces to, ff.; in ideal country home, . social training schools, . social work, for girls, f. solitude, a means of culture, . stenography, for girls, . teaching, hard on young women, . tuberculosis, is it inheritable? , . university of pennsylvania, . usefulness, as ideal of education, . vacations, based on instincts and desires, , . vacations, necessity of providing for, f.; a father's plan for, f. vocation, for farm boy, ff.; should it be farming, ; go slow in choosing, f.; three methods of training for, f.; preparation of farm girl for, ff. vocational schools, in the south, f. _wallaces' farmer_, , , . waters, president h. j., . wealth, not evidence of substantial country society, . witmer, dr. lightner, . women, occupations for, ff. work, as basis of society, ff.; for the boy's sake, f.; wrong attitude of workmen toward, ; a father's method of training boy for, f.; a schedule of hours for, ff.; how much for the girl, ff.; foundation for vocation, ; necessary as discipline, , ; not liked by natural children, ; acquired fondness for, ; a part of the good school course, ; spiritualized by country church, . _world's work_, . y.m.c.a., rural ff.; purposes of, ; how to organize, ff.; leader for, f.; how to conduct, ; example of rural in kansas, f. the following pages contain advertisements of a few of the macmillan books on kindred subjects. the rural outlook set by professor l. h. bailey director of the new york state college of agriculture at cornell university _four volumes. each, cloth, mo. uniform binding, attractively boxed $ . net per set; carriage extra. each volume also sold separately._ in this set are included three of professor bailey's most popular books as well as a hitherto unpublished one,--"the country-life movement." the long and persistent demand for a uniform edition of these little classics is answered with the publication of this attractive series. the country-life movement _cloth, mo, pages, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ this hitherto unpublished volume deals with the present movement for the redirection of rural civilization, discussing the real country-life problem as distinguished from the city problem, known as the back-to-the-land movement. the outlook to nature (new and revised edition) _cloth, mo, pages, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ in this alive and bracing book, full of suggestion and encouragement, professor bailey argues the importance of contact with nature, a sympathetic attitude toward which "means greater efficiency, hopefulness, and repose." the state and the farmer (new edition) _cloth, mo, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ it is the relation of the farmer to the government that professor bailey here discusses in its varying aspects. he deals specifically with the change in agricultural methods, in the shifting or the geographical centers of farming in the united states, and in the growth of agricultural institutions. the nature study idea (new edition) _cloth, mo, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ "it would be well," the critic of _the tribune farmer_ once wrote, "if 'the nature study idea' were in the hands of every person who favors nature study in the public schools, of every one who is opposed to it, and, most important, of every one who teaches it or thinks he does." it has been professor bailey's purpose to interpret the new school movement to put the young into relation and sympathy with nature,--a purpose which he has admirably accomplished. new books on agriculture how to keep bees for profit by d. e. lyon _cloth, mo, illustrated, $ . net_ dr. lyon is an enthusiast on bees. he has devoted many years to the acquisition of knowledge on this subject, and his book is a practical one. in it he takes up the numerous questions that confront the man who keeps bees, and deals with them from the standpoint of long experience. how to keep hens for profit by c. s. valentine _cloth, mo, illustrated, $ . net_ mr. valentine is a well-known authority upon the subject. his knowledge is extensive and accurate; the information that he gives will be of service, not only to the amateur who keeps poultry for his own pleasure, but to the man who wishes to derive from it a considerable portion of his income. manual of gardening by l. h. bailey _cloth, mo, illustrated, $ . net_ this new work is a combination and revision of the main parts of two other books by the same author, "garden making," and "practical garden-book," together with much new material and the results of the experience of ten added years. how to grow vegetables by allen french _new edition._ _decorated cloth, mo, illustrated, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ "it is what it purports to be, a practical handbook and planting table for the vegetable garden. its directions for growing in our northern climate are detailed and explicit, and will be of invaluable assistance to those who follow them intelligently."--_boston budget._ "the instructions are terse, yet complete, and cover everything as to method of preparing the ground, sowing seed, cultivation, etc. practicality and clearness of direction are the dominant notes of mr. french's book."--_brooklyn eagle._ a self-supporting home by kate v. st. maur _cloth, mo, fully illustrated from photographs, $ . net_ "each chapter is the detailed account of all the work necessary for one month--in the vegetable garden, among the small fruits, with the fowls, guineas, rabbits, cavies, and in every branch of husbandry to be met with on the small farm."--_louisville courier-journal._ the earth's bounty by kate v. st. maur _cloth, mo, illustrated, $ . net_ the present volume, though in no sense dependent on "a self-supporting home," is in a sense a sequel to it. the feminine owner is still the heroine, and the new book chronicles the events after success permitted her to acquire more land and put to practical test the ideas gleaned from observation and reading. the fat of the land: the story of an american farm by john williams streeter _cloth, mo, $ . net_ "the fat of the land" is the sort of book that ought to be epoch-making in its character, for it tells what can be accomplished through the application of business methods to the farming business. never was the freshness, the beauty, the joy, the freedom of country life put in a more engaging fashion. from cover to cover it is a fascinating book, practical withal, and full of common sense. three acres and liberty by bolton hall _cloth, mo, illustrated, $ . net_ possibilities of the small suburban farm, and practical suggestions to city dwellers how to acquire and make profitable use of them. the feeding of animals by whitman howard jordan _cloth, mo, illustrated, pages, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ "a valuable contribution to agricultural literature. not a statement of rules or details of practice, but an effort to present the main facts and principles fundamental to the art of feeding animals."--_new england farmer._ rural hygiene by henry n. ogden, c.e. professor of sanitary engineering, college of civil engineering, cornell university, and special assistant engineer of the new york state department of health _illustrated, decorated cloth, mo, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ "farmers and other dwellers outside of cities will find professor henry n. ogden's 'rural hygiene' an invaluable treatise on all matters pertaining to the health of the individual and the community. the author, a civil engineer in the faculty of cornell university, deals with the structural side of public hygiene rather than with the medical side. he tells how houses and barns should be built so as to promote the good health of their occupants; how to manage ventilation, drainage, water supply, etc.; how waterworks should be built, what are the best kinds of power, how to arrange the plumbing, guard against sewage, and so on. . . . it is an unusually complete, practical, and readable treatise." --_chicago record-herald._ law for the american farmer by john d. green, of the new york bar. _decorated cloth, mo, $ . net; by mail, $ . _ "the book is superior to any of its class."--_law review._ "very comprehensive and valuable."--_kansas farmer._ "written with great thoroughness and accuracy."--_chicago inter-ocean._ the macmillan company publishers - fifth avenue new york * * * * * transcriber's note: punctuation has been made consistent without note. archaic or alternate spellings have been retained. plate x: st edition has a different caption for this plate: an illustration of "corn sunday," as instituted by superintendent george w. brown in the rural churches in the vicinity of paris, illinois. page , references: "colton" changed to "cotton" (john cotton dana). page , references: st edition has , not , as publication date for "the most practical industrial education for the country child." page , "one boy may have have caught" changed to "one boy may have caught" page : "county-life" changed to "country-life" ("the country-life movement.") philippine bureau of agriculture. farmer's bulletin no. . cacao culture in the philippines by william s. lyon, in charge of seed and plant introduction. prepared under the direction of the chief of the bureau. manila: bureau of public printing. . contents. page. letter of transmittal introduction climate the plantation site the soil preparation of the soil drainage forming the plantation selection of varieties planting cultivation pruning harvest enemies and diseases manuring supplemental notes new varieties residence cost of a cacao plantation letter of transmittal. sir: i submit herewith an essay on the cultivation of cacao, for the use of planters in the philippines. this essay is prompted first, because much of the cacao grown here is of such excellent quality as to induce keen rivalry among buyers to procure it at an advance of quite per cent over the common export grades of the java bean, notwithstanding the failure on the part of the local grower to "process" or cure the product in any way; second, because in parts of mindanao and negros, despite ill treatment or no treatment, the plant exhibits a luxuriance of growth and wealth of productiveness that demonstrates its entire fitness for those regions and leads us to believe in the successful extension of its propagation throughout these islands; and lastly because of the repeated calls upon the chief of the agricultural bureau for literature or information bearing upon this important horticultural industry. the importance of cacao-growing in the philippines can hardly be overestimated. recent statistics place the world's demand for cacao (exclusive of local consumption) at , , pounds, valued at more than $ , , gold. there is little danger of overproduction and consequent low prices for very many years to come. so far as known, the areas where cacao prospers in the great equatorial zone are small, and the opening and development of suitable regions has altogether failed to keep pace with the demand. the bibliography of cacao is rather limited, and some of the best publications, [ ] being in french, are unavailable to many. the leading english treatise, by professor hart, [ ] admirable in many respects, deals mainly with conditions in trinidad, west indies, and is fatally defective, if not misleading, on the all-important question of pruning. the life history of the cacao, its botany, chemistry, and statistics are replete with interest, and will, perhaps, be treated in a future paper. respectfully, wm. s. lyon, in charge of seed and plant introduction. hon. f. lamson-scribner, chief of the insular bureau of agriculture. cacao culture in the philippines. introduction. cacao in cultivation exists nearly everywhere in the archipelago. i have observed it in several provinces of luzon, in mindanao, joló, basilan, panay, and negros, and have well-verified assurances of its presence in cebú, bohol, and masbate, and it is altogether reasonable to predicate its existence upon all the larger islands anywhere under an elevation of , or possibly , meters. nevertheless, in many localities the condition of the plants is such as not to justify the general extension of cacao cultivation into all regions. the presence of cacao in a given locality is an interesting fact, furnishing a useful guide for investigation and agricultural experimentation, but, as the purpose of this paper is to deal with cacao growing from a commercial standpoint, it is well to state that wherever reference is made to the growth, requirements, habits, or cultural treatment of the plant the commercial aspect is alone considered. as an illustration, attention is called to the statement made elsewhere, that "cacao exacts a minimum temperature of °"; although, as is perfectly well known to the writer, its fruit has sometimes matured where the recorded temperatures have fallen as low as °. there is much to be learned here by experimentation, for as yet the cultivation is primitive in the extreme, pruning of any kind rudimentary or negative, and "treatment" of the nut altogether unknown. elsewhere in cacao-producing countries its cultivation has long passed the experimental stage, and the practices that govern the management of a well-ordered cacao plantation are as clearly defined as those of an orange grove in florida or a vineyard in california. in widely scattered localities the close observer will find many young trees that in vigor, color, and general health leave nothing to be desired, but before making final selection for a plantation he should inspect trees of larger growth for evidences of "die back" of the branches. if "die back" is present, superficial examination will generally determine if it is caused by neglect or by the attacks of insects. if not caused by neglect or insect attacks, he may assume that some primary essential to the continued and successful cultivation of the tree is wanting and that the location is unsuited to profitable plantations. with due regard to these preliminary precautions and a close oversight of every subsequent operation, there is no reason why the growing of cacao may not ultimately become one of the most profitable horticultural enterprises that can engage the attention of planters in this archipelago. climate. it is customary, when writing of any crop culture, to give precedence to site and soil, but in the case of cacao these considerations are of secondary importance, and while none of the minor operations of planting, pruning, cultivation, and fertilizing may be overlooked, they are all outweighed by the single essential--climate. in general, a state of atmospheric saturation keeps pace with heavy rainfall, and for that reason we may successfully look for the highest relative humidity upon the eastern shores of the archipelago, where the rainfall is more uniformly distributed over the whole year, than upon the west. there are places where the conditions are so peculiar as to challenge especial inquiry. we find on the peninsula of zamboanga a recorded annual mean rainfall of only mm., and yet cacao (unirrigated) exhibits exceptional thrift and vigor. it is true that this rain is so evenly distributed throughout the year that every drop becomes available, yet the total rainfall is insufficient to account for the very evident and abundant atmospheric humidity indicated by the prosperous conditions of the cacao plantations. the explanation of this phenomenon, as made to me by the rev. father algué, of the observatory of manila, is to the effect that strong equatorial ocean currents constantly prevail against southern mindanao, and that their influence extend north nearly to the tenth degree of latitude. these currents, carrying their moisture-laden atmosphere, would naturally affect the whole of this narrow neck of land and influence as well some of the western coast of mindanao, and probably place it upon the same favored hygrometric plane as the eastern coast, where the rainfall in some localities amounts to meters a year. while , mm. of mean annual rainfall equably distributed is ample to achieve complete success, it seems almost impossible to injure cacao by excessive precipitation. it has been known to successfully tide over inundation of the whole stem up to the first branches for a period covering nearly a month. irrigation must be resorted to in cases of deficient or unevenly distributed rainfall, and irrigation is always advantageous whenever there is suspension of rain for a period of more than fifteen days. concerning temperatures the best is that with an annual mean of ° to °, with ° as the mean minimum where any measure of success may be expected. a mean temperature of over ° is prejudicial to cacao growing. the last but not least important of the atmospheric phenomena for our consideration are the winds. cacao loves to "steam and swelter in its own atmosphere" and high winds are inimical, and even refreshing breezes are incompatible, with the greatest success. as there are but few large areas in these islands that are exempt from one or other of our prevailing winds, the remedies that suggest themselves are: the selection of small sheltered valleys where the prevailing winds are directly cut off by intervening hills or mountains; the plantation of only small groves in the open, and their frequent intersection by the plantation of rapid growing trees; and, best of all, plantings made in forest clearings, where the remaining forested lands will furnish the needed protection. location. it is always desirable to select a site that is approximately level or with only enough fall to assure easy drainage. such sites may be planted symmetrically and are susceptible to the easiest and most economical application of the many operations connected with a plantation. provided the region is well forested and therefore protected from sea breezes, the plantation may be carried very near to the coast, provided the elevation is sufficient to assure the grove immunity from incursions of tide water, which, however much diluted, will speedily cause the death of the plants. excavations should be made during the dry season to determine that water does not stand within / meters of the surface, a more essential condition, however, when planting is made "at stake" than when nursery reared trees are planted. hillsides, when not too precipitous, frequently offer admirable shelter and desirable soils, but their use entails a rather more complicated system of drainage, to carry away storm water without land washing, and for the ready conversion of the same into irrigating ditches during the dry season. further, every operation involved must be performed by hand labor, and in the selection of such a site the planter must be largely influenced by the quantity and cost of available labor. the unexceptionable shelter, the humidity that prevails, and the inexhaustible supply of humus that is generally found in deep forest ravines frequently lead to their planting to cacao where the slope is even as great as °. such plantations, if done upon a considerable commercial scale, involve engineering problems and the careful terracing of each tree, and, except for a dearth of more suitable locations, is a practice that has little to commend it to the practical grower. the soil. other things being equal, preference should be given to a not too tenacious, clayey loam. selection, in fact, may be quite successfully made through the process of exclusion, and by eliminating all soils of a very light and sandy nature, or clays so tenacious that the surface bakes and cracks while still too wet within or inches of the surface to operate with farm tools. these excluded, still leave a very wide range of silt, clay, and loam soils, most of which are suitable to cacao culture. where properly protected from the wind a rocky soil, otherwise good, is not objectionable; in fact, such lands have the advantage of promoting good drainage. preparation of the soil. when the plantation is made upon forest lands, it is necessary to cut and burn all underbrush, together with all timber trees other than those designed for shade. if such shade trees are left (and the advisability of leaving them will be discussed in the proper place), only those of the pulse or bean family are to be recommended. it should also be remembered that, owing in part to the close planting of cacao and in part to the fragility of its wood and its great susceptibility to damage resulting from wounds, subsequent removal of large shade trees from the plantation is attended with difficulty and expense, and the planter should leave few shade trees to the hectare. clearing the land should be done during the dry season, and refuse burned in situ, thereby conserving to the soil the potash salts so essential to the continued well-being of cacao. the land should be deeply plowed, and, if possible, subsoiled as well, and then, pending the time of planting the orchard, it may be laid down to corn, cotton, beans, or some forage plant. preference should be given to "hoed crops," as it is essential to keep the surface in open tilth, as well as to destroy all weeds. the common practice in most cacao-growing countries is to simply dig deep holes where the trees are to stand, and to give a light working to the rest of the surface just sufficient to produce the intermediate crops. this custom is permissible only on slopes too steep for the successful operation of a side hill plow, or where from lack of draft animals all cultivation has to be done by hand. cacao roots deeply, and with relatively few superficial feeders, and the deeper the soil is worked the better. drainage. the number and size of the drains will depend upon the amount of rainfall, the contour of the land, and the natural absorbent character of the soil. in no case should the ditches be less than meter wide and cm. deep, and if loose stones are at hand the sloping sides may be laid with them, which will materially protect them from washing by torrential rains. these main drains should all be completed prior to planting. connecting laterals may be opened subsequently, as the necessities of further drainage or future irrigation may demand; shallow furrows will generally answer for these laterals, and as their obliteration will practically follow every time cultivation is given, their construction may be of the cheapest and most temporary nature. owing to the necessity of main drainage canals and the needful interplanting of shade plants between the rows of cacao, nothing is gained by laying off the land for planting in what is called "two ways," and all subsequent working of the orchard will consequently be in one direction. the plantation. cacao, relatively to the size of the tree, may be planted very closely. we have stated that it rejoices in a close, moisture-laden atmosphere, and this permits of a closer planting than would be admissible with any other orchard crop. in very rich soil the strong-growing forastero variety may be planted . meters apart each way, or trees to the hectare, and on lighter lands this, or the more dwarf-growing forms of criollo, may be set as close as meters or rather more than , trees to the hectare. the rows should be very carefully lined out in one direction and staked where the young plants are to be set, and then (a year before the final planting) between each row of cacao a line of temporary shelter plants are to be planted. these should be planted in quincunx order, i. e., at the intersecting point of two lines drawn between the diagonal corners of the square made by four cacaos set equidistant each way. this temporary shelter is indispensable for the protection of the young plantation from wind and sun. the almost universal custom is to plant, for temporary shelter, suckers of fruiting bananas, but throughout the visayas and in southern luzon i think abacá could be advantageously substituted. it is true that, as commonly grown, abacá does not make so rank a growth as some of the plantains, but if given the perfect tillage which the cacao plantation should receive, and moderately rich soils, abacá ought to furnish all necessary shade. this temporary shade may be maintained till the fourth or fifth year, when it is to be grubbed out and the stalks and stumps, which are rich in nitrogen, may be left to decay upon the ground. at present prices, the four or five crops which may be secured from the temporary shelter plants ought to meet the expenses of the entire plantation until it comes into bearing. in the next step, every fourth tree in the fourth or fifth row of cacao may be omitted and its place filled by a permanent shade tree. the planting of shade trees or "madre de cacao" among the cacao has been observed from time immemorial in all countries where the crop is grown, and the primary purpose of the planting has been for shade alone. observing that these trees were almost invariably of the pulse or legume family, the writer, in the year , raised the question, in the proceedings of the southern california horticultural society, that the probable benefits derived were directly attributable to the abundant fertilizing microörganisms developed in the soil by these leguminous plants, rather than the mechanical protection they afforded from the sun's rays. to mr. o. f. cook, of the united states department of agriculture, however, belongs the credit of publishing, in , [ ] a résumé of his inquiries into the subject of the shades used for both the coffee and the cacao, and which fully confirmed the previous opinions that the main benefit derived from these trees was their influence in maintaining a constant supply of available nitrogen in the soil. that cacao and its wild congenors naturally seek the shelter of well-shaded forests is well established; but having seen trees in these islands that were fully exposed at all times showing no evidences of either scald, burn, or sun spot, and in every respect the embodiment of vigor and health, we are fully justified in assuming that here the climatic conditions are such as will permit of taking some reasonable liberties with this time-honored practice and supply needed nitrogen to the soil by the use of cheap and effective "catch crops," such us cowpeas or soy beans. here, as elsewhere, an erythrina, known as "dap-dap," is a favorite shade tree among native planters; the rain tree (pithecolobium saman) is also occasionally used, and in one instance only have i seen a departure from the use of the leguminosæ, and that in western mindanao, there is a shade plantation composed exclusively of cananga odorata, locally known as ilang-ilang. while not yet prepared to advocate the total exclusion of all shade trees, i am prepared to recommend a shade tree, if shade trees there must be, whose utility and unquestioned value has singularly escaped notice. the tree in question, the royal poinciana (poinciana regia), embodies all of the virtues that are ascribed to the best of the pulse family, is easily procured, grows freely and rapidly from seed or cutting, furnishes a minimum of shade at all times, and, in these islands, becomes almost leafless, at the season of maturity of the largest cacao crop when the greatest sun exposure is desired. the remaining preparatory work consists in the planting of intersecting wind breaks at intervals throughout the grove, and upon sides exposed to winds, or where a natural forest growth does not furnish such a shelter belt. unless the plantation lies in a particularly protected valley, no plantation, however large in the aggregate, should cover more than or hectares unbroken by at least one row of wind-break trees. nothing that i know of can approach the mango for this purpose. it will hold in check the fiercest gale and give assurance to the grower that after any storm his cacao crop is still on the trees and not on the ground, a prey to ants, mice, and other vermin. selection of varieties. all the varieties of cacao in general cultivation may be referred to three general types, the criollo, forastero, and calabacillo; and of these, those that i have met in cultivation in the archipelago are the first and second only. the criollo is incomparably the finest variety in general use, and may perhaps be most readily distinguished by the inexperienced through the ripe but unfermented seed or almond, as it is often called. this, on breaking, is found to be whitish or yellowish-white, while the seeds of those in which the forastero or calabacillo blood predominates are reddish, or, in the case of forastero, almost violet in color. for flavor, freedom from bitterness, facility in curing, and high commercial value, the criollo is everywhere conceded to be facile princeps. on the other hand, in point of yield, vigor, freedom from disease, and compatibility to environment it is not to be compared with the others. nevertheless, where such perfect conditions exist as are found in parts of mindanao, i do not hesitate to urge the planting of criollo. elsewhere, or wherever the plantation is tentative or the conditions not very well known to the planter, the forastero is to be recommended. the former is commercially known as "caracas" and "old red ceylon," and may be obtained from ceylon dealers; and the latter, the forastero, or forms of it which have originated in the island, can be procured from java. it seems not unlikely that the true forastero may have been brought to these islands from acapulco, mexico, two hundred and thirty-two years ago, [ ] as it was at that time the dominant kind grown in southeastern mexico, and, if so, the place where the pure type would most likely be found in these islands would be in the camarines, southern luzon. aside from the seed characters already given, forastero is recognized by its larger, thicker, more abundant, and rather more abruptly pointed fruit than criollo, and its coarse leaves which are from to cm. long by to cm. wide, dimensions nearly double those reached by the criollo or calabacillo varieties. planting. planting may be done "at stake" or from the nursery. for the unskilled or inexperienced planter, who has means at hand to defray the greater cost, planting "at stake" is perhaps to be recommended. this is no more than the dropping and lightly covering, during the rainy season, of three or four seeds at the stake where the plant is to stand, protecting the spot with a bit of banana leaf, left till the seeds have sprouted, and subsequently pulling out all but the one strongest and thriftiest plant. the contingencies to be met by this system are many. the enemies of the cacao seed are legion. drought, birds, worms, ants, beetles, mice, and rats will all contribute their quota to prevent a good "stand" and entail the necessity of repeated plantings. success by planting "at stake" is so doubtful that it is rarely followed by experienced planters. the consequent alternative lies in rearing seedlings in seed beds that are under immediate control, and, when the plants are of sufficient size, in transplanting them to their proper sites in the orchard. in view of the remarkable short-lived vitality of the cacao seed, it is in every way advisable that the untrained grower procure his plants from professional nurserymen, or, if this resource is lacking, that he import the young plants in wardian cases from some of the many firms abroad who make a specialty of preparing them for foreign markets. both of these expedients failing, then it is advised that the seeds be sown one by one in small pots, or, if these are not procurable, in small bamboo tubes, and, for the sake of uniform moisture, plunge them to their rims in any free, light soil in a well-shaded easily protected spot where they may be carefully watered. in three to six months (according to growth) the tube with its included plant may be planted in the open field, when the former will speedily decompose and the growth of the cacao proceed without check or injury. at best, all of the above suggested methods are but crude expedients to replace the more workmanlike, expeditious, and satisfactory process of planting the conventional nursery grown stock. there is nothing more difficult in the rearing of cacao seedlings than in growing any other evergreen fruit tree. briefly stated, it is only the finding of a well-prepared, well-shaded seed bed and sowing the seeds in rows or drills, and, when the seedlings are of proper size, in lifting and transferring them to the plantation. but in actual practice there are many details calling for the exercise of trained judgment from the preparation of the seed bed down to the final process of "hardening off," concerning which the reader is referred to the many available text-books on general nursery management. it may be said for the benefit of those unable to adopt more scientific methods: let the seed bed be selected in a well-shaded spot, and, if possible, upon a rather stiff, plastic, but well-drained soil. after this is well broken up and made smooth, broadcast over all or inches of well-decomposed leaf mold mixed with sand, and in this sow the seed in furrows about inch deep. this sowing should be made during the dry season, not only to avoid the beating and washing of violent storms but to have the nursery plants of proper size for planting at the opening of the rainy season. the seed bed should be accessible to water, in order that it may be conveniently watered by frequent sprinklings throughout the dry season. the rich top dressing will stimulate the early growth of the seedling, and when its roots enter the heavier soil below it will encourage a stocky growth. four or five months later the roots will be so well established in the stiffer soil that if lifted carefully each plant may be secured with a ball of earth about its roots, placed in a tray or basket, and in this way carried intact to the field. plants thus reared give to the inexperienced an assurance of success not always obtained by the trained or veteran planter of bare rooted subjects. cultivation. planters are united in the opinion that pruning, cutting, or in any way lacerating the roots is injurious to the cacao, and in deference to this opinion all cultivation close to the tree should be done with a harrow-tooth cultivator, or shallow scarifier. all intermediate cultivation should be deep and thorough, whenever the mechanical condition of the soil will permit it. a plant stunted in youth will never make a prolific tree; early and continuous growth can only be secured by deep and thorough cultivation. of even more consideration than an occasional root cutting is any injury, however small, to the tree stem, and on this account every precaution should be taken to protect the trees from accidental injury when plowing or cultivating. the whiffletree of the plow or cultivator used should be carefully fendered with rubber or a soft woolen packing that will effectually guard against the carelessness of workmen. wounds in the bark or stem offer an inviting field for the entry of insects or the spores of fungi, and are, furthermore, apt to be overlooked until the injury becomes deep seated and sometimes beyond repair. with the gradual extension of root development, cultivation will be reduced to a narrow strip between the rows once occupied by the plantain or the abacá, but, to the very last, the maintenance of the proper soil conditions should be observed by at least one good annual plowing and by as many superficial cultivations as the growth of the trees and the mechanical state of the land will admit. pruning. when left to its own resources the cacao will fruit for an almost indefinite time. when well and strenuously grown it will bear much more abundant fruit from its fifth to its twenty-fifth year, and by a simple process of renewal can be made productive for a much longer time. a necessary factor to this result is an annual pruning upon strictly scientific lines. the underlying principle involved is, primarily, the fact that the cacao bears its crop directly upon the main branches and trunk, and not upon spurs or twigs; secondly, that wood under three years is rarely fruitful, and that only upon stems or branches of five years or upward does the maximum fruitfulness occur; that the seat of inflorescence is directly over the axil of a fallen leaf, from whence the flowers are born at irregular times throughout the year. with this necessary, fundamental information as a basis of operations, the rational system of pruning that suggests itself is the maintenance of as large an extension at all times of straight, well-grown mature wood and the perfecting of that by the early and frequent removal of all limbs or branches that the form of the tree does not admit of carrying without overcrowding. it is desirable that this extension of the branch system should be lateral rather than vertical, for the greater facility with which fruit may be plucked and possible insect enemies fought; and on this account the leading growths should be stopped when a convenient height has been attained. when well grown and without accident to its leader, the cacao will naturally branch at from to . meters from the ground. these primary branches are mostly three to five in number, and all in excess of three should be removed as soon as selection can be made of three strongest that are as nearly equidistant from each other as may be. when these branches are from cm. to meter long, and preferably the shorter distance, they are to be stopped by pinching the extremities. this will cause them and the main stem as well to "break," i. e., to branch in many places. at this point the vigilance and judgment of the planter are called into greater play. these secondary branches are, in turn, all to be reduced as were the primary ones, and their selection can not be made in a symmetrical whorl, for the habit of the tree does not admit of it, and selection of the three should be made with reference to their future extension, that the interior of the tree should not be overcrowded and that such outer branches be retained as shall fairly maintain the equilibrium of the crown. this will complete the third year and the formative stage of the plant. subsequent prunings will be conducted on the same lines, with the modification that when the secondary branches are again cut back, the room in the head of the tree will rarely admit of more than one, at most two, tertiary branches being allowed to remain. when these are grown to an extent that brings the total height of the tree to or meters, they should be cut back annually, at the close of the dry season. such minor operations as the removal of thin, wiry, or hide-bound growths and all suckers suggest themselves to every horticulturist, whether he be experienced in cacao growing or not. when a tree is exhausted by overbearing, or has originally been so ill formed that it is not productive, a strong sucker or "gourmand" springing from near the ground may be encouraged to grow. by distributing the pruning over two or three periods, in one year the old tree can be entirely removed and its place substituted by the "gourmand." during the third year flowers will be abundant and some fruit will set, but it is advisable to remove it while small and permit all of the energy of the plant to be expended in wood making. from what we know of its flowering habit, it is obvious that every operation connected with the handling or pruning of a cacao, should be conducted with extreme care; to see that the bark is never injured about the old leaf scars, for to just the extent it is so injured is the fruit-bearing area curtailed. further, no pruning cut should ever be inflicted, except with the sharpest of knives and saws, and the use of shears, that always bruise to some extent, is to be avoided. all the rules that are laid down for the guidance of the pruning of most orchard trees in regard to clean cuts, sloping cuts, and the covering of large wounds with tar or resin apply with fourfold force to the cacao. its wood is remarkably spongy and an easy prey to the enemies ever lying in wait to attack it, and the surest remedies for disease are preventive ones, and by the maintenance of the bark of the tree at all times in the sound condition, we are assured that it is best qualified to resist invasion. of the great number of worm-riddled trees to be seen in the archipelago, it is easy in every case to trace the cause to the neglect and brutal treatment which left them in a condition to invite the attacks of disease of every kind. harvest. the ripening period of cacao generally occurs at two seasons of the year, but in these islands the most abundant crop is obtained at about the commencement of the dry season, and the fruits continue to ripen for two months or longer. the time of its approaching maturity is easily recognized by the tyro by the unmistakable aroma of chocolate that pervades the orchard at that period, and by some of the pods turning reddish or yellow according to the variety. the pods are attached by a very short stalk to the trunk of the tree, and those within reach of the hand are carefully cut with shears. those higher up are most safely removed with an extension american tree pruner. a west indian hook knife with a cutting edge above and below and mounted on a bamboo pole, if kept with the edges very sharp, does excellently well, but should only be intrusted to the most careful workmen. there is hardly a conceivable contingency to warrant the climbing of a cacao tree. if it should occur, the person climbing should go barefooted. as soon as the fruit, or so much of it as is well ripened, has been gathered, it is thrown into heaps and should be opened within twenty-four hours. the opening is done in a variety of ways, but the practice followed in surinam would be an excellent one here if experienced labor was not at command. there, with a heavy knife or cutlass (bolo), they cut off the base or stem end of the fruit and thereby expose the column to which the seeds are attached, and then women and children, who free most of the seeds, are able to draw out the entire seed mass intact. it is exceedingly important that the seeds are not wounded, and for that reason it is inexpedient to intrust the more expeditious method of halving the fruit with a sharp knife to any but experienced workmen. the process of curing that i have seen followed in these islands is simplicity itself. two jars half filled with water are provided for the cleaners, and as the seeds are detached from the pulp they are sorted and graded on the spot. only those of large, uniform size, well formed and thoroughly ripe, being thrown into one; deformed, small, and imperfectly matured seeds going to the other. in these jars the seeds are allowed to stand in their own juice for a day, then they are taken out, washed in fresh water, dried in the sun from two to four days, according to the weather, and the process from the filipino standpoint is complete. much of the product thus obtained is singularly free from bitterness and of such excellent quality; as to be saleable at unusually high prices, and at the same time in such good demand that it is with some hesitancy that the process of fermentation is recommended for general use. but it is also equally certain that localities in these islands will be planted to cacao where all the conditions that help to turn out an unrivaled natural product are by no means assured. for such places, where the rank-growing, more coarse-flavored, and bitter-fruited forastero may produce exceptionally good crops, it will become incumbent on the planter to adopt some of the many methods of fermentation, whereby he can correct the crudeness of the untreated bean and receive a remunerative price for the "processed" or ameliorated product. undoubtedly the strickland method, or some modification of it, is the best, and is now in general use on all considerable estates where the harvest is piculs or upward per annum, and its use probably assures a more uniform product than any of the ruder processes in common use by small proprietors. but it must not be forgotten that the present planters in the philippines are all small proprietors, and that until such time as the maturing of large plantations calls for the more elaborate apparatus of the strickland pattern, some practice whereby the inferior crude bean may be economically and quickly converted into a marketable product can not be avoided. as simple and efficacious as any is that largely pursued in some parts of venezuela, where is produced the famous caracas cacao. the beans and pulp are thrown into wooden vats that are pierced with holes sufficient to permit of the escape of the juice, for which twenty-four hours suffices. the vat is then exposed to the sun for five or six hours, and the beans, while still hot, are taken out, thrown into large heaps, and covered with blankets. the next day they are returned to the box, subjected to a strong sun heat and again returned to the heap. this operation is repeated for several days, until the beans, by their bright chocolate color and suppleness, indicate that they are cured. if, during the period of fermentation, rain is threatened or occurs, the beans are shoveled, still hot, into bags and retained there until they can once more be exposed to the sun. before the final bagging they are carefully hand rubbed in order to remove the adherent gums and fibrous matters that did not pass off in the primary fermentation. in ceylon, immediately after the beans have been fermented they are washed, and the universally high prices obtained by the ceylon planters make it desirable to reproduce here a brief résumé of their method. the fermentation is carried on under sheds, and the beans are heaped up in beds of cm. to meter in thickness upon a platform of parallel joists arranged to permit of the escape of the juices. this platform is elevated from the ground and the whole heap is covered with sacks or matting. the fermentation takes from five to seven days, according to the heat of the atmosphere and the size of the heap, and whenever the temperature rises above ° the mass is carefully turned over with wooden shovels. immediately after the fermentation is completed the ceylon planter passes the mass through repeated washings, and nothing remains but to dry the seed. this in ceylon is very extensively done, in dryers of different kinds, some patterned after the american fruit dryer, some in slowly rotating cylinders through the axis of which a powerful blast of hot air is driven. the process of washing unquestionably diminishes somewhat the weight of the cured bean; for that reason the practice is not generally followed in other countries, but in the case of the ceylon product it is one of the contributing factors to the high prices obtained. enemies and diseases. monkeys, rats, and parrots are here and in all tropical countries the subject of much complaint, and if the plantation is remote from towns or in the forest, their depredations can only be held in check by the constant presence of well-armed hunter or watchman. of the more serious enemies with which we have to deal, pernicious insects and in particular those that attack the wood of the tree, everything has yet to be learned. mr. charles n. banks, an accomplished entomologist, now stationed at maao, occidental negros, is making a close study of the life history of the insect enemies of cacao, and through his researches it is hoped that much light will be thrown upon the whole subject and that ways will be devised to overcome and prevent the depredations of these insect pests. the most formidable insect that has so far been encountered is a beetle, which pierces and deposits its eggs within the bark. when the worm hatches, it enters the wood and traverses it longitudinally until it is ready to assume the mature or beetle state, when it comes to the surface and makes its escape. these worms will frequently riddle an entire branch and even enter the trunk. the apertures that the beetle makes for the laying of its eggs are so small--more minute than the head of a pin--that discovery and probing for the worm with a fine wire is not as fruitful of results as has been claimed. of one thing, however, we are positively assured, i. e., that the epoch of ripening of the cacao fruit is the time when its powerful fragrance serves to attract the greatest number of these beetles and many other noxious insects to the grove. this, too, is the time when the most constant and abundant supply of labor is on the plantation and when vast numbers of these insects can be caught and destroyed. the building of small fires at night in the groves, as commonly practiced here and in many tropical countries, is attended with some benefits. lately, in india, this remedy has been subject to an improvement that gives promise of results which will in time minimize the ravages of insect pests. it is in placing powerful acetylene lights over broad, shallow vats of water overlaid with mineral oil or petroleum. some of these lamps now made under recent patents yield a light of dazzling brilliancy, and if well distributed would doubtless lure millions of insects to their death. the cheap cost of the fuel also makes the remedy available for trial by every planter. there is a small hemipterous insect which stings the fruit when about two-thirds grown, and deposits its eggs within. for this class of insects m. a. tonduz, who has issued publications on the diseases of cacao in venezuela, recommends washing the fruit with salt water, and against the attacks of beetles in general by painting the tree stem and branches with bordeaux mixture, or with the vassiliére insecticide, of which the basis is a combination of whale-oil soap and petroleum suspended in lime wash. there can be no possible virtue in the former, except as a preventive against possible fungous diseases; of the sanitive value of the latter we can also afford to be skeptical, as the mechanical sealing of the borer's holes, and thereby cutting off the air supply, would only result in driving the worm sooner to the surface. the odor of petroleum and particularly of whale-oil soap is so repellent, however, to most insects that its prophylactic virtues would undoubtedly be great. the philippine islands appear to be so far singularly exempt from the very many cryptogamic or fungous diseases, blights, mildews, rusts, and cankers that have played havoc with cacao-growing in many countries. that we should enjoy continued immunity will depend greatly upon securing seeds or young plants only from noninfested districts or from reputable dealers, who will carefully disinfect any shipments, and to supplement this by a close microscopical examination upon arrival and the immediate burning of any suspected shipments. another general precaution that will be taken by every planter who aims to maintain the best condition in his orchard is the gathering and burning of all prunings or trimmings from the orchard, whether they are diseased or not. decaying wood of any kind is a field for special activity for insect life and fungous growth, and the sooner it is destroyed the better. on this account it is customary in some countries to remove the fruit pods from the field. but unless diseased, or unless they are to be returned after the harvest, they should be buried upon the land for their manurial value. manuring. there are few cultivated crops that make less drain upon soil fertility than cacao, and few drafts upon the land are so easily and inexpensively returned. from an examination made of detailed analyses by many authors and covering many regions, it may be broadly stated that an average crop of cacao in the most-favored districts is about piculs per hectare, and that of the three all-important elements of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, a total of slightly more than . kilograms is removed in each picul of cured seeds harvested. these kilos of plant food that are annually taken from each hectare may be roughly subdivided as follows: kilos of nitrogen, kilos of potash, kilos of phosphoric acid. on this basis, after the plantation is in full bearing, we would have to make good with standard fertilizers each year for each hectare about kilos of nitrate of soda, or, if the plantation was shaded with leguminous trees, only one-half that amount, or kilos. of potash salts, say the sulphate, only one-half that amount, or kilos, if the plantation was unshaded. if, however, it was shaded, as the leguminous trees are all heavy feeders of potash, we would have to double the amount and use kilos. in any case, as fixed nitrogen always represents a cost quite double that of potash, from an economical standpoint the planter is still the gainer who supplies potash to the shade trees. there still remains phosphoric acid, which, in the form of the best superphosphate of lime, would require kilos for unshaded orchards, and about if dap-dap, pionciana, or any leguminous tree was grown in the orchard. these three ingredients may be thoroughly incorporated and used as a top dressing and lightly harrowed in about each tree. if the commercial nitrates can not be readily obtained, then recourse must be had to the sparing use of farm manures. until the bearing age these may be used freely, but after that with caution and discrimination. although i have seen trees here that have been bearing continuously for twenty-two years, i have been unable to find so much as one that to the knowledge of the oldest resident has ever been fertilized in any way, yet, notwithstanding our lack of knowledge of local conditions, it seems perfectly safe to predicate that liberal manuring with stable manure or highly ammoniated fertilizers would insure a rank, succulent growth that is always prejudicial to the best and heaviest fruit production. in this i am opposed to professor hart, [ ] who seems to think that stable manures are those only that may be used with a free hand. we have many safe ways of applying nitrogen through the medium of various catch crops of pulse or beans, with the certainty that we can never overload the soil with more than the adjacent tree roots can take up and thoroughly assimilate. when the time comes that the orchard so shades the ground that crops can no longer be grown between the rows, then, in preference to stable manures i would recommend cotton-seed cake or "poonac," the latter being always obtainable in this archipelago. while the most desirable form in which potash can be applied is in the form of the sulphate, excellent results have been had with the use of kainit or stassfurth salts, and as a still more available substitute, wood ashes is suggested. when forest lands are near, the underbrush may be cut and burned in a clearing or wherever it may be done without detriment to the standing timber, and the ashes scattered in the orchard before they have been leached by rains. the remaining essential of phosphoric acid in the form of superphosphates will for some years to come necessarily be the subject of direct importation. in the cheap form of phosphate slag it is reported to have been used with great success in both grenada and british guiana, and would be well worthy of trial here. lands very rich in humus, as some of our forest valleys are, undoubtedly carry ample nitrogenous elements of fertility to maintain the trees at a high standard of growth for many years, but provision is indispensable for a regular supply of potash and phosphoric acid as soon as the trees come into heavy bearing. it is to them and not to the nitrogen that we look for the formation of strong, stocky, well-ripened wood capable of fruit bearing and for fruit that shall be sound, highly flavored, and well matured. the bearing life of such a tree will surely be healthfully prolonged for many years beyond one constantly driven with highly stimulating foods, and in the end amply repay the grower for the vigilance, toil, and original expenditure of money necessary to maintaining a well-grown and well-appointed cacao plantation. supplemental notes. new varieties.--cacao is exclusively grown from seed, and it is only by careful selection of the most valuable trees that the planter can hope to make the most profitable renewals or additions to his plantations. it is by this means that many excellent sorts are now in cultivation in different regions that have continued to vary from the three original, common forms of theobroma cacao, until now it is a matter of some difficulty to differentiate them. residence.--the conditions for living in the philippines offer peculiar, it may be said unexampled, advantages to the planter of cacao. the climate as a whole is remarkably salubrious, and sites are to be found nearly everywhere for the estate buildings, sufficiently elevated to obviate the necessity of living near stagnant waters. malarial fevers are relatively few, predacious animals unknown, and insects and reptiles prejudicial to human life or health extraordinarily few in number. in contrast to this we need only call attention to the entire caribbean coast of south america, where the climate and soil conditions are such that the cacao comes to a superlative degree of perfection, and yet the limits of its further extension have probably been reached by the insuperable barrier of a climate so insalubrious that the caucasian's life is one endless conflict with disease, and when not engaged in active combat with some form of malarial poisoning his energies are concentrated upon battle with the various insect or animal pests that make life a burden in such regions. nonresidence upon a cacao plantation is an equivalent term for ultimate failure. every operation demands the exercise of the observant eye and the directing hand of a master, but there is no field of horticultural effort that offers more assured reward, or that will more richly repay close study and the application of methods wrought out as the sequence of those studies. estimated cost and revenues derived from a cacao plantation. estimates of expenses in establishing a cacao farm in the visayas and profits after the fifth year. the size of the farm selected is hectares, the amount of land prescribed by congress of a single public land entry. the cost of procuring such a tract of land is as yet undetermined and can not be reckoned in the following tables. the prices of the crop are estimated at cents per kilo, which is the current price for the best grades of cacao in the world's markets. the yield per tree is given as catties, or . kilos, a fair and conservative estimate for a good tree, with little or no cultivation. the prices for unskilled labor are per cent in advance of the farm hand in the visayan islands. no provision is made for management or supervision, as the owner will, it is assumed, act as manager. charges to capital account are given for the second, third, and fourth year, but no current expenses are given, for other crops are to defray operating expenses until the cacao trees begin to bear. no estimate of residence is given. all accounts are in united states currency. expendable the first year. capital account: clearing of average brush and timber land, at $ per hectare $ . four carabaos, plows, harrows, cultivators, carts, etc. . breaking and preparing land, at $ per hectare . opening main drainage canals, at $ per hectare . tool house and storeroom . purchase and planting , abacá stools, at cents each . seed purchase, rearing and planting , cacao, at cents each . contingent and incidental . ------- total $ , . second year. interest on investment $ . depreciation on tools, buildings, and animals ( per cent of cost) . ------- . third year. interest on investment $ . depreciation as above . ------- . fourth year. interest on investment $ . depreciation as above . building of drying house and sweat boxes, capacity , kilos . ------- . -------- total capital investment , . fifth year. income account: from , cacao trees, grams cacao each, equals , kilos, at cents , . expense account: fixed interest and depreciation charges on investment of $ , . $ . taxes / per cent on a one-third valuation basis of $ per hectare . cultivating, pruning, etc., at $ . per hectare . fertilizing, at $ per hectare . harvesting, curing, packing , kilos cacao, at cents per kilo . contingent . ------- , . -------- credit balance . sixth year. income account: from , cacao trees, at grams cacao each, equals , kilos, at cents , . expense account: fixed interest and depreciation charges as above $ . taxes as above . cultivating, etc., as above . fertilizing, at $ per hectare . harvesting, etc., , kilos cacao, at cents per kilo . contingent . ------- , . -------- credit balance , . seventh year. income account: from , cacao trees, at grams cacao each, equals , kilos, at cents , . expense account: fixed interest charges as above $ . taxes as above . cultivating, etc., as above . fertilizing, at $ per hectare . harvest, etc., of , kilos of cacao, at cents per kilo . contingent . ------- , . -------- credit balance , . eighth year. income account: from , cacao trees, at kilo cacao each, equals , kilos, at cents , . expense account: fixed interest charges as above $ . taxes as above . cultivating, etc., as above . fertilizing, at $ . per hectare . harvest, etc., , kilos of cacao, at cents per kilo , . contingent . -------- , . -------- credit balance , . ninth year. income account: from , trees, at "catties" or . kilos cacao each, equals , kilos, at cents , . expense account: fixed interest charges as above $ . taxes at / per cent on a one-third valuation of $ per hectare . cultivation and pruning as above . fertilizing, at $ per hectare . harvesting, etc., of , kilos of cacao, at cents per kilo , . contingent . -------- , . -------- credit balance , . in the tenth year there should be no increase in taxes or fertilizers, and a slight increase in yield, sufficient to bring the net profits of the estate to the approximate amount of $ , . this would amount to a dividend of rather more than $ per hectare, or its equivalent of about $ per acre. these tables further show original capitalization cost of nearly $ per acre, and from the ninth year annual operating expenses of rather more than $ per acre. it should be stated, however, that the operating expenses are based upon a systematic and scientific management of the estate; while the returns or income are based upon revenue from trees that are at the disadvantage of being without culture of any kind, and, while i am of the opinion that the original cost per acre of the plantation, nor its current operating expenses may be much reduced below the figures given, i feel that there is a reasonable certainty that the crop product may be materially increased beyond the limit of two "catties." in camerouns, dr. preuss, a close and well-trained observer, gives the mean annual yield of trees of full-bearing age at . pounds. mr. rousselot places the yield on the french congo at the same figure. in the caroline islands it reaches pounds and in surinam, according to m. nichols, the average at maturity is / pounds. in mindanao, i have been told, but do not vouch for the report, of more than ten "catties" taken in one year from a single tree; and, as there are well-authenticated instances of record, of single trees having yielded as much as pounds, i am not prepared to altogether discredit the mindanao story. the difference, however, between good returns and enormous profits arising from cacao growing in the philippines will be determined by the amount of knowledge, experience, and energy that the planter is capable of bringing to bear upon the culture in question. notes [ ] a short introduction to cacao and its cultivation in the philippines. [ ] le cacaoyer, par henri jumelle. culture de cacaoyer dans guadaloupe par dr paul guerin. [ ] cacao, by j. h. hart, f. l. s. trinidad. [ ] "shade in coffee culture." u. s. dept. ag., washington, . [ ] according to "historia de filipinas," by p. fr. gaspar de s. augustin, cacao plants were first brought here in the year by a pilot named pedro brabo, of laguna province, who gave them to a priest of the camarines named bartoleme brabo. [ ] "cacao," p. . our farm of four acres and the money we made by it. miss coulton _from the twelfth london edition._ with an introduction by peter b. mead, editor of the horticulturist. preface to the twelfth london edition. this little volume has been received with so much favor, both by the public and the press, that i cannot refrain from expressing my gratitude for the kind treatment i have experienced. from many of the criticisms which have appeared respecting "our farm of four acres," i have received not only complimentary remarks, but likewise some useful hints on the subjects of which i have written. with the praise comes some little censure; and i am charged by more than one friendly critic with stupidity for not ordering the legs of our first cow to be strapped, which would, they consider, have prevented both milk and milker from being knocked over. now this was done, but the animal had a way of knocking the man and pail down with her side; every means was tried, but nothing succeeded till her calf was parted with. we have been asked whether we had to keep gates, hedges, &c., in repair, or whether it was done at the expense of the landlord. as far as regarded the gates and buildings, that gentleman was bound by agreement to keep them in order, and as for hedges we have none. a stream runs round the meadows, and forms the boundary of our small domain. since our little work was written we have had nearly eighteen months' further experience, and have as much reason now as then to be satisfied with the profits we receive from our four acres. i must add a few words concerning our butter-making. some doubts have been expressed relative to our power of churning for four hours at a time. now it certainly was not pleasant, but it was not the hard work that some people imagine: fatiguing certainly; but then h. and myself took it, as children say, "turn and turn about." we did not entrust the churn to tom, because he was liable to be called away to perform some of his many duties. had we not had the toil, we should not have acquired the knowledge which now enables us to complete our work in three-quarters of an hour. we have been pitied for being always employed, and told that we can never know the luxury of leisure. we answer this remark with the words of "poor richard," that "leisure is the time for doing something useful." introduction to the american edition. this little volume will possess rare interest for all who own a "four-acre farm," or, indeed, a farm of any number of acres. its chief value to the american reader does not consist in its details of practice, but in the enunciation and demonstration of certain principles of domestic economy of universal application. the practice of terra-culture must be varied to meet the different conditions of soil and climate under which it is pursued; but sound general principles hold good everywhere, and only need the exercise of ordinary judgment and common sense for their application to our own wants. this is now better understood than heretofore, and hence we are better prepared to profit by draughts from the fount of universal knowledge. we would not be understood as intimating, however, that only the general principles set forth in this little book are of value to us; the details of making butter and bread, feeding stock, etc., are just as useful to us as to the english reader. the two chapters on making butter and bread are admirable in their way, and alone are worth the price of the book. so, too, of domestics and their management; we have to go through pretty much the same vexations, probably a little intensified, as there is among us a more rampant spirit of independence on the part of servants; but many of these vexations may be avoided, we have no doubt, by following the suggestion of our author, of procuring "country help" for the country. domestics accustomed to city life not only lack the requisite knowledge, but are unwilling to learn, and will not readily adapt themselves to the circumstances in which they are placed; in fact, the majority of them "know too much," and are altogether too impatient of control. a woman, however, must be mistress in her own house; this is indispensable to economy and comfort; and the plan adopted by our author will often secure this when all others fail. we have not deemed it advisable to add anything in the way of notes; we have made a few alterations in the text to adapt it better to the wants of the american reader, and for the same reason we have altered the english currency to our own. in other respects the work remains intact. in some works of this kind notes would have been indispensable, but in the present case we have thought we could safely trust to the judgment of the reader to appropriate and adapt the general principles set forth, leaving the application of details to the shrewdness and strong common sense characteristic of the american mind. the object of the work is rather to demonstrate a general principle than to furnish all the minutiae of practice, though enough of these are given to serve the purpose of illustration. the american reader will not fail, of course, to make due allowance for the difference of rent, prices, etc., between this country and england, and the matter of adaptation then becomes a very simple affair. in conclusion we present the work as a model in style. it is written with a degree of simplicity which makes it readily understood, and is a fine specimen of good old anglo-saxon. portions of it are fully as interesting as a romance. it is written by a lady, which fact gives it an additional interest and value as a contribution to the economy of country life, in which it may be admitted that women are our masters. the incidents connected that women are our masters. the incidents connected with hiring "our farm of four acres" are related in a life-like manner, and will be appreciated by our own may-day hunting country-women, who, we trust, will also appreciate the many important facts set forth in this little volume, which we heartily commend to them and to all others, with the wish that it may be as useful and popular as it has been at home. p.b.m. chap. i.--where shall we live? ii.--our first difficulty. iii.--our second cow. iv--how to make butter. v.--what we made by our cows. vi.--our pigs. vii.--our poultry. viii.--our losses. ix.--our pigeons. x.--how we cured our hams. xi.--our bread. xii.--our kitchen-garden. xiii--the money we made. xiv.--the next six months. xv.--our pony. xvl.--conclusion. our farm of four acres. chapter i. where shall we live? "where shall we live?" that was a question asked by the sister of the writer, when it became necessary to leave london, and break up a once happy home, rendered desolate sudden bereavement. "ah! where, indeed?" was the answer. "where can we hope to find a house which will be suitable for ourselves, six children, and a small income?" "oh," answered h., "there can be no difficulty about that. send for the 'times' and we shall find dozens of places that will do for us." so that mighty organ of information was procured, and its columns eagerly searched. "but," said i, "what sort of place do we really mean to take?" "that," replied h., "is soon settled. we must have a good-sized dining-room, small drawing-room, and a breakfast-room, which may be converted into a school-room. it must have a nursery and five good bed-chambers, a chaise-house, and stable for the pony and carriage, a large garden, and three or four acres of land, for we must keep a cow. it must not be more than eight miles from 'town,' or two from a station; it must be in a good neighborhood, and it must--" "stop! stop!" cried i; "how much do you intend to give a-year for all these conveniences:" "how much?" why, i should say we ought not to give more than $ ." "we ought not," said i, gravely, "but i greatly fear we shall for that amount have to put up with a far inferior home to the one you contemplate. but come, let us answer a few of these advertisements; some of them depict the very place you wish for." so after selecting those which, when they had described in bright colors the houses to be let, added, "terms very moderate," we "presented compliments" to messrs. a., b., c., d., and in due time received cards to view the "desirable country residences" we had written about. but our hopes of becoming the fortunate occupants of any one of those charming abodes were soon dashed to the ground; for with the cards came the terms; and we found that a "very moderate rental" meant from $ to $ per annum. we looked at each other rather ruefully; and the ungenerous remark of "i told you so" rose to my lips. however, i did not give it utterance, but substituted the words, "never mind, let us send for another 'times,' and only answer those advertisements which state plainly the rent required." this time we enlarged our ideas on the subjects of rent and distance, and resolved that if that beautiful place _near_ esher would suit us, we would not mind giving $ a-year for it. in a few days arrived answers to our last inquiries. we fixed on the one which appeared the most eligible, but were a little dismayed to find that "near esher" meant six miles from the station. "never mind," said h., resolutely, "the pony can take us to it in fine weather, and in winter we must not want to go to london." we started the next morning by rail, and found the "cottage" almost as pretty as it had appeared on paper. but, alas! it been let the day previous to our arrival, and we had to return to town minus five dollars for our expenses. the next day, nothing daunted,--indeed, rather encouraged by finding the house we had seen really equal to our expectations,--we set off to view another "villa," which, from the particulars we had received from the agent, appeared quite as attractive. this time we found the place tenantless; and, as far as we were concerned, it would certainly remain so. it had been represented as a "highly-desirable country residence, and quite ready for the reception of a family of respectability." it was dignified with the appellation of "middlesex hall," and we were rather surprised when we found that this high-sounding name signified a mean-looking place close to the road; and when the door was opened for our admission, that we stepped at once from the small front court into the drawing-room, from which a door opened into a stone kitchen. the rest of the accommodation corresponded with this primitive mode of entrance; the whole place was in what is commonly called a "tumble-down" condition: there was certainly plenty of garden, and two large meadows, but, like the rest of the place, they were sadly out of order. when we said it was not at all the house we had expected to find from reading the advertisement, we asked what sort of house we expected to get for $ with five acres of land. now that was a question we could not have answered had we not seen the pretty cottage with nearly as much ground at esher; however, we did not give the owner the benefit of our experience, but merely said that the house would not suit us, and drove back four miles to the station, rather out of spirits with the result of our day's work. for more than a fortnight did we daily set forth on this voyage of discovery. one day we started with a card to view "a delightful cottage ornee, situated four miles from weybridge;" this time the rent was still higher than any we had previously seen. when we arrived at the village in which the house was represented to be, we asked for "heathfield house," and were told that no one knew of any residence bearing that name; we were a little perplexed, and consulted the card of admittance to see whether we had brought the wrong one--but no; there it was, "heathfield house," four miles from weybridge, surrounded by its own grounds of four acres, tastefully laid out in lawn, flower and kitchen-gardens, &c, &c. rent only $ . we began to imagine that we were the victims of some hoax, and were just on the point of telling the driver to return to the station, when a dirty-looking man came to the carriage, and said, "are you looking for heathfield house?" "yes," said we. "well, i'll show it to you." "is it far?" we asked; as no sign of a decent habitation was to be seen near us. "no; just over the way," was the answer. we looked in the direction he indicated, and saw a "brick carcase: standing on a bare, heath piece of ground, without enclosure of any kind. "that!" cried we; "it is impossible that can be the place we came to see!" "have you got a card from mr.--?" was the query addressed to us. "yes," was the reply. "very well; then if you will get out i'll show it to you." as we had come so far we thought we might as well finish the adventure, and accordingly followed our guide over the piece of rough muddy ground which led to the brick walls before us. we found them on a neared inspection quite as empty as they appeared from the road; neither doors nor windows were placed in them, and the staircases were not properly fixed. it was with much trouble we succeeded in reaching the floor where the bed-chambers were to be, and found that not even the boards were laid down. we told our conductor, that the place would not suit us, as we were compelled to remove from our present residence in three weeks. "well, if that's all that hinders your taking it, i'll engage to get it all ready in that time." "what! get the staircases fixed, the doors and windows put in, the walls papered and painted?" "yes," was answered, in a confident tone, which expressed indignation at the doubt we had implied. we then ventured to say, that, "allowing he could get the house ready by the time we required to move, we saw no sign of the coach-house and stable, lawn or flower-garden, kitchen or meadow." "as for the coach-house and stable," said the showman, "i can get your horses put up in the village." we hastened to disclaim the _horses_, and humbly confessed that our stud consisted of one pony only. "the less reason to be in a hurry for the stable, for you can put one pony anywhere; and as for the lawn and gardens, they will be laid out when the house is let; and the heath will be levelled and sown for a meadow, and anything else done for a good tenant that is in reason." we were likewise assured that wonders had been done already, for that four months ago the ground was covered with furze. we got rid of our talkative friend with the promise that we would "think of it;" and indeed, we _did_ think, that mr.--, who was a very respectable house-agent, ought to ascertain what sort of places were place in his hands before he sent people on such profitless journeys. the expense attending this one amounted to nearly eight dollars. another week as passed in a similar manner, in going distances varying from ten to twenty-five miles daily in pursuit of houses which we were induced to think must suit us, but when seen proved as deceptive a those i have mentioned. we gained nothing by our travels but the loss of time, money, and hope. at last the idea entered our heads of going to some of the house-agents, and looking over their books. our first essay was at the office of mr. a. b., in bond street. "have you any houses to let at such a distance from town, with such a quantity of land, such a number of rooms?" &c. "oh, yes madam," said the smiling clerk, and immediately opened a large ledger; "what rent do you propose giving?" "from $ to $ yearly," answered we, and felt how respectable we must appear in the opinion of the smart gentleman whom we addressed; how great then was our surprise when he closed his large volume with a crash, and with a look of supreme contempt said, "_we_ have nothing of that kind in _our_ books." to use one of fanny kemble's expressions, "we felt mean," and left the office of this aristocratical house-agent half ashamed of our humble fortunes. i fear i should tire the patience of the reader, did i detail all our "adventures in search of a house," but we must entreat indulgence for our last journey. we once more started on the south-western line, to see a house which, from the assurances we had received from the owner, resident in london, must a last be _the_ house, and for which the rent asked was $ ; but once more were we doomed to disappointment by finding that the "handsome dining and drawing-rooms" were two small parlors, with doors opening into each other; and that "five excellent bed-chambers" were three small rooms and two wretched attics. from the station to this place was four miles; and, as weary and hopeless we were returning to it, it occurred to h. to ask the driver if he knew of any houses to let in the vicinity. he considered, then said he only knew of one, which had been vacant some time, and that parties who had been to see it would not take it because it was situated in a bad neighborhood. at the commencement of our search that would have been quite sufficient to have deterred us from looking at it, but we could not now afford to be fastidious. our own house was let, and move from it we must in less than a fortnight; so we desired the driver to take us into this bad neighborhood, and were rewarded for the additional distance we travelled by finding an old-fashioned, but very convenient house, with plenty of good-sized rooms in excellent repair, a very pretty flower-garden, with greenhouse, good kitchen-garden of on acre, an orchard of the same extent well stocked with fine fruit-trees, three acres of good meadow-land, an excellent coach-house and stabling, with houses for cows, pigs, and poultry, all in good order. the "bad neighborhood" was not so very bad. the cottages just outside the gates were small, new buildings; and once inside, you saw nothing but your own grounds. it possessed the advantage of being less than two miles from a station, and not more than twelve from london. "this will do," we both exclaimed, "if the rent is not too high." we had been asked $ for much inferior places; so that it was with great anxiety we directed our civil driver to take us to the party who had the disposal of the house. when there, we met with the welcome intelligence, that house, gardens, orchard, meadows, and buildings, were all included in a rental of $ per annum. we concluded the bargain there and then, and on that day fortnight took possession of "our farm of four acres." before we close this chapter, we will address a few words to such of our readers as may entertain the idea that houses in the country may be had "for next to nothing." we had repeatedly heard this asserted, and when we resolved to give $ a year, we thought that we should have no difficulty in meeting with a respectable habitation for that sum, large enough for our family and with the quantity of land we required, as well as within a moderate distance of london. we have already told the reader how fallacious we found this hope to be. houses within forty or fifty miles of london, in what are called "good situations," are nearly, if not quite as high rented, as those in the suburbs, and land worth quite as much. if at any time a "cheap place" is to be met with, be quite sure that there is some drawback to compensate for the low price. in our pilgrimages to empty houses, we frequently found some which were low-rented, that is from $ $ per annum; but either they were much smaller than we required, or dreadfully out of repair, or else they were built "cockney fashion," semi-detached, or, as was frequently the case, situated in a locality which for some reason or other was highly objectionable. we always found rents lower in proportion to the distance from a station. we one day went to beaconsfield to view a house, and had a fly from slough, a drive of several miles. the house was in the middle of the town, large and convenient, with good garden and paddock; the whole was offered us for $ yearly; and we should have taken it, had it not been in such a dismantled condition that the agent in whose hands it was placed informed us that though he had orders to put it in complete repair, he would not promise it would be fit for occupation under several months. the office of this gentleman was next door to mr. a. b.'s, in bond street; and we are bound to state, that though we said that we did not wish to give more than $ , we were treated with respect; and several offered us under these terms, though attended with circumstances which prevented our availing ourselves of them. the house we at last found was not, as regarded situation, what we liked; not because of the cottages close to the entrance, but for the reason that there was no "view," but from the top windows; as far as the lower part of the house was concerned, we might as well have been in the clapham road. it is true we looked into gardens, front and back, but that was all; and we had to go through two or three streets of the little town in which we were located whenever we left the house for a walk. still we were, on the whole, well pleased with our new home, and in the next chapter will tell the reader how we commenced a life so different to that we had been accustomed to lead. chapter ii. our first difficulty. once fairly settled in our new habitation, and all the important affairs attending the necessary alterations of carpets, curtains, etc., being nearly finished, we began to wonder what we were to do with "our farm of four acres." that we must keep a cow was acknowledged by both; and the first step to be taken was to buy one. the small town in which our house was situated boasted of a market weekly, and there we resolved to make the important purchase. accordingly, we sent our man-of-all-work to inspect those offered for sale. shortly he returned, accompanied by a small black cow, with a calf a week old. we purchase these animals for $ ; and it was very amusing to see all the half-dozen children running into the stable-yards, with their little cups to enjoy the first-fruits of their country life. but what proved far more of a treat than the new milk was the trouble of procuring it, for the cow proved a very spiteful one, and knocked the unfortunate milker, with his pail, "heels-over-head." as he was not in the least hurt, the juveniles were allowed to laugh as long as they pleased; but h. and myself looked rather grave at the idea having the milk knocked down as soon as there was about a quart in the pail. we were, therefore, greatly reassured when told that "madam sukey" would be quiet and tractable as soon as her calf was taken away. "then why not take it at one?" said i; but was informed that we must not deprive her of it for a week. however, i am bound to confess that our first week's farming turned out badly, for the cow would not be milked, quietly, and every morning we were informed that two men were obliged to be called in to hold her while she was milked. at the end of the week we sold the calf for five dollars, and after a month the cow became on quite friendly terms with her milker, and has proved ever since very profitable to our small diary. we did not contemplate making butter with one cow, as we thought so large a household would consume all the milk. very soon, however, "nurse" complained that "the milk was 'too rich' for the children; it was not in the least like london milk; it must either be watered or skimmed for the little ones: but she would rather have it skimmed." that was done, and for a whole fortnight h. and myself used nothing but cream in our tea and coffee. at first this was a great luxury, and we said continually to each other, how delightful it was to have such a dainty in profusion. soon, like the children, we began to discover it was "too good for us," and found that we liked plenty of new milk much better for general use; besides, consume as much as we would, we had still more than was wanted: so we invested fifteen dollars in a churn and other requisites, and thought with great satisfaction of the saving we should effect in our expenses by making our own butter. but now arose a difficulty which had not previously occurred to us: who was to make it? our domestic servants both declared that they could not do so; and the elder one, who had been many years in the family, was born and bred in london, and detested the country and everything connected with it, gave her opinion in the most decided manner, that there was quite enough "muck" in the house already, without making more work with butter-making, which she said confidently, would only be fit for the pig when it was made. here was a pretty state of things! what were we to do? must we give up all hope of eating our own butter, and regard the money as lost which we had just expended for the churn, etc.? after a few minutes' bewilderment, the idea occurred to both of us at the same moment: "cannot we make the butter, and be independent of these household rebels?" "but," said i, dolefully, "we don't in the least know how to set about it." "what of that?" replied h.: "where was the use of expending so much money in books relative to a country life as you did before we left town, if they are not to enlighten our ignorance on country matters? but one thing is certain, we cannot make butter till we have learnt _how_; so let us endeavor to obtain the requisite knowledge to do so to-morrow." we accordingly devoted the remainder of the day to consulting the various books on domestic and rural economy we had collected together previous to leaving london. greatly puzzled we were by them. on referring to the subject ob butter-making, one authority said, "you must never was the butter, but only knock it on a board, in order to get the buttermilk from it." another only told us to "well cleanse the buttermilk from it," without giving us an idea how the process was to be accomplished; while the far-famed mrs. rundle, in an article headed "dairy," tells the dairy-maid to "keep a book in which to enter the amount of butter she makes," and gives butt little idea how the said butter is to be procured. another authority said, "after the butter is come, cut it in pieces to take out cow-hairs;" this appeared to us the oddest direction of all, for surely it was possible to remove them from the cream before it was put into the churn. we were very much dissatisfied with the amount of practical knowledge we gleaned from our books; they seemed to us written for the benefit of those who already were well acquainted with the management of a dairy, and consequently of very little service to those who wished to acquire the rudiments of the art of butter-making. the next morning we proceeded to make a trial, and the first thing we did was to strain the cream through a loose fine cloth into the churn, then taking the handle we began to turn it vigorously;* [ninety times in a minute is the proper speed with which the handle should be turned.] the weather was hot, and after churning for more than an hour, there seemed as little prospect of butter as when we commenced. we stared at each other in blank amazement. must we give it up? no; that was not to be thought of. h. suddenly remembered, that somewhere she had heard that in warm weather you should put the churn in cold water. as ours was a box one, we did not see how we could manage this; but the bright idea entered her head, that if we could not put the water outside the churn we might _in_: so we pumped a quart of spring-water into it and churned away with fresh hopes: nor were we disappointed; in about a quarter of an hour we heard quite a different sound as we turned the handle, which assured us that the cream had undergone a change, and taking off the lid--(how many times had we taken it off before!)--we saw what at that moment appeared the most welcome sight in the world--some lumps of rich yellow butter. it was but a small quantity, but there it was: the difficulty was overcome so far. but now there arose the question of what we were to do with it in order to clean if from the butter milk, for all our authorities insisted on the necessity of this being done, though they did not agree in the mode of doing it. one said, that "if it was washed, it would not keep good, because water soon became putrid, and so would the butter." we were told by another book, "that if it was _not_ washed it would be of two colors, and dreadfully rank." we thought that it would be easier not to wash it, and it was bad enough to justify the term "muck," which was applied to it by the kitchen oracles, who rejoiced exceedingly in our discomfiture. we left the dairy half inclined to abjure butter-making for the future. in a day or two we began to reflect, that as we had a "farm of four acres," we must mange to do something with it, and what so profitable to a large family as making butter? so, when we had collected sufficient cream, we tried again, and this time with great success. we commenced as before, by straining the cream, and then taking the handle of the churn we turned it more equally than we had done before; in half an our we heard the welcome sound which proclaimed that the "butter was come." this time we washed it well; it was placed in a pan under the pump, and the water suffered to run on it till not the least milkiness appeared in it; we then removed it to a board that had been soaking for some time in cold water, salted it to our taste, and afterwards, with two flat boards, such as butter-men use in london shops, made it up into rolls. it was as good as it could be, and we were delighted to think that we had conquered all the difficulties attending its manufacture: but we had yet to discover the truth of the proverb, that "one swallow does not make a summer." chapter iii. our second cow. we soon found that we could not expect to supply our family with butter from one cow, and we thought that, as we had to perform the duties of dairy-women, we might as well have the full benefit of our labor. we, therefore, purchased another cow; but before doing so, were advised not this time to have welsh one, but to give more money and have a larger animal. this we did, and bought a very handsome strawberry-colored one, for which, with the calf, we gave $ ; and here it will be as well to say that we think it was $ thrown away, for in respect did she prove more valuable than the black one, for which we had given but $ . for a small dairy, we think the black welsh cow answers as well, or better, than any other. the price is very small, and, judging from our own, they are very profitable. they are also much hardier than those of a larger breed, and may be kept out all winter, excepting when snow is on the ground. after our new cow had been in our possession just a week, we received one morning the unwelcome intelligence that the "new cow" was very bad. we went into the meadow, and saw the poor creature looking certainly as we had been told, "very bad." we asked our factotum what was the matter with her. to this he replied, that he did not know, but that he had sent for a man who was "very clever in cows." in a short time this clever man arrived, bringing with him a friend, likewise learned in cattle. he went to see the patient, and returned to us looking very profound. "a bad job!" said he, with a shake of the head worthy of sheridan's lord burleigh. "a sad job, indeed! and you only bought her last market-day. well, it can't be helped." "but what ails her?" said i. "what ails her! why, she's got the lung disease." "but what it is that? said i. "what's that! why, it's what kills lots of cows; takes 'em off in two or three days. you must sell her for what she'll fetch. perhaps you may get $ for her. i'll get rid of her for you." "but," said h., "if she has the 'lung disease' you talk of, you tell us she must die." "yes; she'll die, sure enough." "well, then, who will buy a cow that is sure to be dead to-morrow or next day?" "oh, that's no concern of yours! _you_ get rid of her, that's all." to this dictum we rather demurred, and resolved to send for a cow-doctor, and see if she could be cured; if not, to take care she was not converted after her death into "country sausages," for the benefit of london consumers of those dainties. our friendly counsellor was very indignant at our perversity in not getting rid of a cow with "the lung disease," and stumped out of the yard in a fit of virtuous indignation. with proper treatment the cow soon got well. we still had occasional trouble with our butter-making; sometimes it would come in half an hour, sometimes we were hard at work with the churn for two or three hours, and then the butter was invariably bad. we tried to procure information on the subject, and asked several farmer's wives in the neighborhood "how long butter ought to be in coming." we always received the same answer:-- "why, you see, ma'am, that depends." "well," we asked, "what does it depend on?" "oh, on lots of things." "well, tell us some of the things on which it depends." "why, you see it's longer coming in hot weather, and it's longer coming in cold weather; and it depends on how long the cow has calved, and how you churn, and on lots beside." we found we must endeavor to discover for ourselves the reason why we were half an hour in getting it one day, and the next, perhaps, two or three hours. as the weather became colder we found it more troublesome, and one frosty day we churned four hours without success. we put in cold water, we put in hot we put in salt, we talked of adding vinegar, but did not; we churned as fast as we could turn the handle, and then as slowly as possible, but still no butter. at the end of more than four hours our labors were rewarded. the butter came; strong, rank stuff it was. we determined before the next churning day to try and find out the reason of all this trouble. we once more took to our books, but were none the wiser, for none of them told us anything about the particular thing we searched for. after many experiments we tried the effect of bringing the cream into the kitchen over night, and see if warmth would make any difference. it was guess-work for two or three churnings, but the discovery was made at last, that we were always sure of our butter in half an hour, provided the cream was, when put into the churn, at a temperature of from ' to '.* [we kept a small thermometer for the purpose of plunging into the cream-pot. if it was lower than ' we waited till it reached that degree: if the weather was very warm, and it rose higher than we have specified, we did not attempt to churn till by some means we had lowered it to the proper temperature.] no matter how long the cow had calved, how hot or how cold the weather, if we put the cream into the churn at that degree of heat the butter was sure to come, in as near as possible the time we have specified. this, in the winter, was effected by bringing the cream-pot into the kitchen over night, and if the weather was very cold, placing it on a chair a moderate distance from the fire for about a quarter of an hour in the morning: boiling water was likewise put into the churn for half an hour before it was used. now, no doubt, a regular dairymaid would "turn up her nose" at all these details; but i do not write for those who know their business, but for the benefit of those ladies who, as is now so much the custom, reside a few miles from the city or town in which the business or profession their husbands may be situated. in many cases they take with them town-bred servants to a country residence; and then, like ourselves, find they know nothing whatever of the duties required of them. to those who have several acres of pasture land, of course this little book is all "bosh." they employ servants who know their work and perform it properly; but most "suburbans" require the cook to undertake the duties of the dairy, and unless they are regular country servants they neither do their work well nor willingly. if any lady who has one or two cows will instruct her servant to follow our directions, she will always be sure of good butter, with very little trouble. all that is required is a churn, milk-pans (at the rate of three to each cow), a milk-pail, a board (or, better still, a piece of marble), to make the butter up on, a couple of butter-boards, such as are used in the shops to roll it into form, and a crock for the cream. in the next chapter we will give, as concisely as we can, the whole process that we ourselves used in our dairy. chapter iv. how to make butter. let the cream be at the temperature of ' to '; if the weather is cold, put boiling water into the churn for half an hour before you want to use it: when that is poured off, strain in the cream through a butter-cloth. when the butter is coming, which is easily ascertained by the sound, take off the lid, and with one of the flat boards scrape down the sides of the churn; and do the same to the lid: this prevents waste. when the butter is come, the buttermilk is to be poured off and spring-water put in the churn, and turned for two or three minutes: this is to be then poured away, and fresh added, and again the handle turned for a minute or two. should there be the least appearance of milkiness when this is poured from the churn, more is to be put. this we found was a much better mode of extracting all the buttermilk than placing it in a pan under the pump, as we did when we commenced our labors. the butter is then to be placed on the board or marble, and salted to taste; then, with a cream-cloth, wrung out of spring-water, press all the moisture from it. when it appears quite dry and firm, make it up into rolls with the flat boards. the whole process should be completed in three-quarters of an hour. we always used a large tub which was made for the purpose, and every article we were going to use was soaked in it for half an hour in boiling water; then that removed, and cold spring-water substituted; and the things we required remained in it till they were wanted. this prevents the butter form adhering to the boards, cloth, &c., which would render the task of "making it up" both difficult and disagreeable. in hot weather, instead of bringing the cream-crock into the kitchen it must be kept as cool as possible; for as it is essential in the winter to raise the temperature of the cream to the degree i have stated, so in the summer it must be lowered to it. should your dairy not be cool enough for the purpose, it is best effected by keeping the cream-pot in water as cold as you can procure it, and by making the butter early in the morning, and placing cold water in the churn some time before it is used. by following these directions you will have good butter throughout the year. the cows should be milked as near the diary as possible, as it prevents the cream from rising well if the milk is carried any distance.* [in very cold weather the milk-pans must be placed by the fire some time before the milk is strained into them, or the cream will not rise.] it should be at once strained into the milk-pans, and not disturbed for forty-eight hours in winter, and twenty-four in summer. in hot weather it is highly important that the cream should be perfectly strained from the milk, or it will make it very rank. half a dozen moderate-sized lumps of sugar to every two quarts of cream tend to keep it sweet. in summer always churn twice a week. some persons imagine that cream cannot be "too sweet," but that is a mistake; it must have a certain degree of acidity, or it will not produce butter, and if put into the churn without it, must be beaten with the paddles till it acquires it. the cream should, in the summer, be shifted each morning into a clean crock, that has first been well scalded and then soaked in cold water; and the same rule applies to all the utensils used in a dairy. the best things to scrub the churn and all wooden articles with, are wood ashes and plenty of soap. in some parts of the country, the butter made by the farmers' wives for sale is not washed at all; they say, "it washes all the taste away." they remove it from the churn, and then taking it in their hands, dash it repeatedly on the board; that is what they call "smiting" it. the butter so made is always strong, and of two colors, as a portion of the buttermilk remains in it: if any of it were put into a cup, and that placed in hot water, for the purpose clarifying, there would, when it was melted, be found a large deposit of buttermilk at the bottom of the cup. we have tried the butter made our way, and there was scarcely any residuum. besides, this "smiting" is a most disgusting process to witness. in warm weather the butter adheres to the hands of the "smiter," who puffs and blows over it as if it were very hard work. indeed, i once heard a strong-looking girl; daughter of a small farmer in kent, say she was never well, for "smiting" the butter was such dreadful hard work it gave her a pain in her side. after this "smiting" is over, it is put on a butter-print, and pressed with the hands till it is considered to have received the impression. it is then, through a small hole in the handle, blown off the print with the _mouth_. i don't think i shall ever again eat butter which appears at table with the figures of cows, flowers, &c., stamped on it. i should always think of the process it has gone through for the sake of looking pretty. nearly all the fresh butter which is sold in london is made up in large rolls, and, like that we make ourselves, need not be touched by the fingers of the maker. chapter v. what we made by our cows. every week we kept an account of the milk and butter we consumed, and entered it in our housekeeping-book at the price we should have paid for it, supposing we had purchased the articles. we did not put down london prices, but country ones: thus, we charged ourselves with milk at cents the quart, and butter cents the pound; at the end of six months we made up our accounts, and found we should have paid for milk from the th to the th of january, $ , and $ for butter. the food for the cows during this period cost us but $ , which we paid for oil-cake, of which, when the weather became cold, they had two pounds each daily. we do not reckon the value of the hay they consumed during winter, because we included the land in our rent. we mowed three acres, which produced rather more than six loads of hay.* [we always had good crops, as the land had been always well kept. it was not "upland" hay, but our man said it had good "heart" in it for the cows.] getting in the crop and thatching it cost, as nearly as possible, $ , and this quantity was quite sufficient to supply the two cows--with the calf of the strawberry, which we reared--and the pony. an acre of grass is usually considered sufficient to support a cow during the year. if that had to be rented apart from the house, the average price would be about $ . supposing we place that value on our land, the accounts for six months would stand thus: expenses. land at $ the acre, for half a year, . . . . . . . . . $ oil-cake, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . half the expense of getting the hay, . . . . . . . . . . $ produce. value of milk and butter, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $ leaving a balance in our favor, at the end of six months of $ . at the commencement of the winter, a cow-keeper in the neighborhood told our man that we should give our cows a little mangel-wurzel. we inquired, why? and were told that we should "keep our cows better together;" so we paid a guinea for a ton of that vegetable. the first time we made butter after they had been fed with it, we found it had a very strong, bitter taste. still, we did not condemn the mangel-wurzel, but tried it another week. the butter was again bad, so we abandoned the roots, and resolved to give the animals nothing but hay. when they were quite deprived of green food the milk began to decrease; and as we had heard that oil-cake was given to cattle, we thought we would try some. we did so, and with complete success; we had plenty of milk, and the butter was as good as in the middle of summer, and nearly as fine a color. we did not make so much as when the cows had plenty of grass,--besides, it was now several months since the black cow had calved,--but we had sufficient for the consumption of the family. the children, it is true, did not have so many tarts as when the fruit and butter were more plentiful. we hope that we have made all our statements clearly, and that the reader will have no difficulty in following us through this narrative of "buttermaking." of one thing we are quite sure, that it is false economy to feed cows during the winter on anything but what we have mentioned. grains from the brewer and distiller are extensively used by cow-keepers in large towns, but they cannot be procured in the country; and we have been told that cows fed with grains, though they may yield plenty of milk, will not make much butter. one winter, when hay was scarce, we found that they did very well with carrots occasionally, and that they did not impart any unpleasant taste to the butter. they are likewise found of potatoes unboiled; but these things are only required when you keep more stock than your land can support,--a fault very common to inexperienced farmers on a small scale. chapter vi. our pigs. we had every reason to be satisfied with the profit we had derived from our dairy, and next proceeded to examine the accounts we had kept of our pigs for six months. we commenced by purchasing, on the th of july, one for which we paid $ . for the first month it had nothing but the wash from the house, the skim-milk from the dairy, and greens from the garden. when we began to dig the potatoes, we found we could not hope to save the whole crop from the disease; we had, therefore, a quantity boiled and put in the pig-tub, and upon these it was fed another month. at the end of that time we began to give it a little meal and a few peas. it was killed three months after we had purchased it, and the cost for meal and peas was just $ . thus, altogether, we paid for it $ , and when killed it weighed thirteen stone ( pounds). this we reckoned worth $ ½ the stone, which made the value of the meat $ ½; we had, therefore, a clear profit of $ ½. of course, it would have been very different had we bought all the food for it; but the skim-milk, and vegetables from the garden would have been wasted, had we been without a pig to consume them: as it was, the profit arose from our "farm of four acres." these particulars are given for the reason that the writer has frequently heard her friends in the country say, "oh, i never keep either pigs or poultry: the pork and the fowls always cost twice the price they can be purchased for." this we could never understand, when the despisers of home-cured hams and home-fed poultry used to assert it. supposing there was no actual profit, still it seemed strange that those who had the option of eating pork fed on milk and vegetables, and fowls which were running about the meadows a few hours before they were killed, should prefer those which are kept in close confinement and crammed with candle-graves and other abominations, till they are considered what dealers call "ripe" enough to kill; and as for pork, much of that which is sold in towns is fed on the offal from the butchers' shops, and other filth. it is well known that pigs will eat anything in the shape of animal food; and for myself, i would much rather, like the jew and the turk, abjure it altogether, than partake of meat fed as pork too commonly is. how few people can eat this meat with impunity! but they might do so if the animal had been properly fed. it is a great mistake to make pork so fat as it usually is: it is not only great waste, but deters many persons from partaking of it. servants will not eat it, and those who purchase it, as well as those who kill their own pigs, may be certain that the surplus fat finds its way into the "wash-tub," for the benefit of a future generation of "piggies." our next venture proved equally fortunate. we bought three small pigs, for which we gave $ each; and as we wished to have pickled pork and small hams, they were killed off as we required them. the first cost $ for barley-meal and peas, and weighed six stone, which, at $ ½ a stone, was worth $ . as the cost of the pig and the food came to just $ , we had a profit of $ ; but we considered we had no right to complain: the meat was delicious, and partaken of by the children as freely as if it had been mutton. we kept the other pigs somewhat longer, and they cost us no more for food; for, as i have already stated, they were entirely kept with the produce of our "four-acre farm," till about three weeks before they were killed. about a bushel and a half of barley meal and a peck of peas was all that was purchased for them. the best way to ensure the healthy condition of the animals is to let them have the range of a small meadow; they should likewise be occasionally well scrubbed with soap and water. if they are thus treated, how much more wholesome must the meat be than when the poor creatures are shut up in dirty styes, and suffered to eat any garbage which is thrown to them! we always had all their food boiled. at first there was a great deal of opposition to the "muck" being introduced into the scullery; but in a little time that was overcome, and a "batch" of potatoes used to be boiled in the copper about once a month. when the skim-milk was removed from the dairy, it was taken to the "trough," and some of it mixed with a portion of the boiled potatoes, and with this food they were fed three times daily. we have been told by a practical farmer on a larger scale, that when potatoes are not to be procured, a pig of thirty-five stone may be fattened in ten days on something less than two hundred weight of carrots. we intend to try if this is the case, and have half an acre of our orchard (which is arable) sown with carrot-seed, and feed our "stock" in the winter with the produce. with the surplus milk of two cows we find we can always keep three pigs with very little expense. of course, if we did not plant plenty of potatoes, we must purchase more meal for them; but as we have an acre of kitchen-garden, we can very well spare half of it to grow roots for the cows and pigs. we do not reckon labor in our expenses, as we must have had a gardener, even if we had not so much spare ground, for our flower-garden and greenhouse require daily work. we hope we have convinced those who may think of having a "little place" a few miles from town, that it may be made a source of profit as well as of amusement, and that any trouble which may be experienced by the lady superintending her own dairy and farm will be repaid by having her table well supplied with good butter, plenty of fresh eggs, (of the poultry-yard we shall speak presently,) well-cured hams, bacon, delicate and fresh pork, well-fed ducks, and chickens. all those country dainties are easily to be procured on a "farm of four acres." nor must another item be omitted--health; for if you wish to be fortunate in your farming, you must look after things yourself, and that will necessitate constant exercise in the open air. we think that we have given full particulars for the management of the cow and pig. in the next chapter we will relate our experience of the poultry-yard. chapter vii. our poultry. we commenced stocking our poultry-yard in july, by purchasing twenty-eight chickens and twenty ducks, for which we paid $ in the market. some of them were too young for the table at the time we purchased them, but were all consumed at the end of four months, with the exception of seven hens and a cock, which we saved for "stock." thus in the time i have mentioned we killed ten couple of ducks, and the same of fowls. these we entered in our housekeeping expenses at $ a couple, though they were larger and better than could have been purchased in a london shop for $ . we must now proceed to reckon what they cost for food, and then see if any balance remained in our favor. they consumed during the time they were getting in order for the table, three bushels of barley, at $ the bushel, one bushel of meal at the same price, and one hundred weight of what is called "chicken rice," at $ . the cost of the barley and meal was, . . . . $ rice, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cost of poultry, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . making the total price, $ ten couple of ducks, and the same number of chickens, would amount to, $ thus, at the first sight, it would appear that we gained but $ by four months' trouble in attending to our fowl-yard; but we have now to take from the purchase money the value of the eight we saved for stock, and likewise to deduct from the barley and rice the quantity consumed by them in the four months. now these eight were large fowls when bought, and well worth cents each. we must allow for their food at least a fourth part of that consumed. we have then to take off $ from the first cost of the poultry, and $ from the value of the food, which will add $ to the $ , leaving on the whole transaction a profit of $ . we have still another small item to add. one of the hens we saved began to lay in the middle of september, and by the time the four months were expired had given us two dozen eggs, which at that time of year, even in the country, were not to be procured under ½ cents the dozen; so that we have to add cents to $ , making a clear profit in four months of $ . it was a source of great amusement to ourselves, as well as to the children, by whom it was always considered a treat to run in the meadows, with barley in their little baskets, to the "coobiddies." when we first had the poultry we kept them in the stable-yard; but we soon found they did not thrive: they had been taken from a farm where they had the free range of the fields, and drooped in confinement, and from want of the grass and worms which they had been accustomed to feed on. we had a house constructed for them in the meadow nearest the house, and soon found that they throve much better, and did not require so much food. we had no trouble with them, except in seeing that the house was cleaned out daily. through the fields flowed a stream of clean water, consequently our ducks throve well. the bushel of meal which figures in our accounts was for them; they used to have a little mixed in hot water once a day. we soon left it off, for we found the rice boiled in skim-milk was equally good for them, and much cheaper. poultry of all kinds are very fond of "scraps;" the children were always told to cut up pieces of potatoes, greens, or meat, which they might leave on their plates at the nursery dinner; and when they were removed to the kitchen, they were collected together and put into the rice-bowl for the chickens. we always fed them three times daily: in the morning with rice, in the middle of the day with "scraps," and in the evening they had just as much barley thrown to them as they cared to pick up eagerly. we have heard some persons complain of the great expense attending a poultry-yard, but this arises from the person who has the charge of them throwing down just as much again grain as the fowls can consume. we have ourselves often seen barley trodden into the ground, if occasionally we left the task of feeding to the lad. it must, of course, be impossible at all times for a lady to go into the fields for the purpose of feeding her chickens; the only plan to prevent waste is to have a meal-room in the house, and as much given out daily as is considered necessary for the consumption of the poultry. this is some little trouble, but will be well repaid by having at all times cheap and wholesome fowls, etc. we have hitherto only spoken of the profit which may be obtained from a fowl-yard, when the stock is purchased. the farmer's wife, from whom we bought _ours_, of course gained some money by their sale. when we reared our own chickens from our own eggs, we received much more emolument from our yard; but in this little volume it is my purpose to show how a person should _commence_, who leaves london or any other large town for a suburban residence. it must always be borne in mind, that nothing will prosper if left wholly to servants; the country proverb of "the master's eye fattens the steed," is a very true one, and another is quite as good: "the best manure you can put on the ground is the foot of the master." as a proof of our assertion we will, in the next chapter, detail the disasters we experienced when we left the charge of rabbits to the superintendence of a servant. chapter viii. our losses. our young people were very anxious to add some rabbits to their playthings, and as we always like to encourage a love of animals in children, we consented that they should become the fortunate share-holders in a doe and six young ones. these were bought early in september, and, as long as the weather would allow, the children used to take them food; by and by, however, one died, and then came the complaint that master harry had killed it by giving it too much green meat. the young gentleman was thereupon commanded not to meddle with them for the future, but the rabbits did not derive any benefit from his obedience; two or three times weekly we heard of deaths taking place in the hutch, till at last the whole half-dozen, with their mamma, reposed under the large walnut-tree. one day the lad who had attended to them knocked at the drawing-room door, and on entering with a large basket, drew from it a most beautiful black-and-white doe, and held it up before our admiring eyes; this was followed by the display of seven young ones, as pretty as the mother. "please, ma'am," said tom, "these are the kind of rabbits you ought to have bought. my brother keeps rabbits, and these are some of his; i'll warrant they won't die!" willing once more to gratify the children, as well as to solve the enigma of whether it must be inevitable to lose by keeping these animal, we became the possessors of these superior creatures, with the understanding that no one was to have anything to do with them but tom, the said tom saying, with perfect confidence, that "he would 'warrant' they should weigh five pounds each in six weeks." not being learned in rabbits, we trusted to his experience and promises that we should always from that have a brace for the table whenever we wished for them. what was our disappointment, then, when a week after we heard of the death of one of them! this was soon followed by another, and another, till the whole seven little "bunnies" shared the grave under the walnut-tree, and in a day or two the doe likewise departed: i concluded she died of grief for the loss of her offspring. in vain did we endeavor to discover the reason of this mortality; it could not have been for want of food, for they consumed nearly as many oats as the pony. at last tom thought of the hutch, or "locker," as he called it. "it must," said he, gravely, "have had _the_ disease." so what that fatal complaint among rabbits is, remains a profound mystery to us. now this hutch was made of new wood, in a carpenter's shop, at a cost of nearly $ , and how it could have become infected with this fearful complaint we could not comprehend. however, from that time we abandoned rabbit-keeping, and resolved not, for the future, to keep any live stock which we could not look after ourselves. we did not attempt to do so in this case, because we were frightened at the responsibility tom threw on our shoulders, if we looked at them the doe always eating her young ones was one of the evils to be dreaded by our interference. i suppose profit is to be made by keeping them, or tame rabbits would not be placed in the poulterers' shops by the side of ducks and chickens, but we are quite at a loss to know how it is accomplished. it did not much matter in a pecuniary point of view, as it was very doubtful if the children's pets would ever have died for the benefit of the dinner-table, and i only insert this chapter for the purpose of proving what i stated, viz.; that if a lady wishes her stock of any kind to prosper, she must look after it herself. when i say prosper, i mean without the expense being double the value of the produce she would receive from her "four-acre farm." we did not enter these disasters in our housekeeping book, it went under the title of children's expenses. for my own part, i am disposed to think that it must always be expensive to keep live stock of any kind for which all the food has to be purchased. had we continued to keep our fowls in the yard, i am convinced they would have brought us little or no profit; but the grass, worms, and other things they found for themselves in the field, half supplied them in food, as well as keeping them healthy. we had not one death among our poultry from disease in the six months of which i have been relating this experience of our farming. our next venture proved more prosperous than the rabbits, and will be related in the following chapter. chapter ix. our pigeons. after we had been a few months in the country, a friend, who was a great pigeon-fancier, wished to add some new varieties to his cote, and offered to send us, as a present, seven or eight pairs of those he wished to part with. we were greatly pleased with his offer, and at once set the carpenter at work to prepare a house for them. as soon as it was ready we received sixteen beautiful pigeons. for the first fortnight the pigeon-holes were covered with net, that the birds might be enabled to survey at a distance their new abode, and become accustomed to the sight of the persons about the yard. when the net was removed, they eagerly availed themselves of their freedom to take flights round and round the house. one couple, of less contented disposition than the others, never came back, nor did we ever hear that they had returned to their old home. our number was not, however, lessened by their desertion, for we received, at nearly the same time, from another friend, a pair of beautiful "pouters." as we resolved to keep a debtor-and-creditor account of all the things we kept, we found that our eighteen pigeons consumed in every seven weeks. two pecks of peas . . . . . . . . . . . $ one peck of tares . . . . . . . . . . . ditto maize . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $ in the first fourteen weeks we kept them, we received but two pairs of young ones, which were most mercilessly slaughtered for a pie. the price of these in the market would have been cents per pair, so that we were losers on our stock; but we must say that we did not receive them till nearly the end of september, and we were agreeably surprised at finding we had young ones fit the table at christmas. from that time we have been well recompensed for our peas, tares, and maize, as each couple produces on an average a pair every six weeks; thus the produce was worth $ , while the cost was something less than $ . even had there been no profit derived, we should still have kept them, as we consider no place in the country complete without these beautiful and graceful little creatures. it was a subject of never-failing delight to the children, watching them as they wheeled round and round the house of an evening, and it was always considered a great privilege to be allowed to feed them. at first the food was kept in the stable, and tom was the feeder; but we were soon obliged to alter this, as we never went into the yard without treading on the corn. it was afterwards removed to the back kitchen, round the door of which they used to assemble in a flock, till one of the servants threw them out their allowance. they were considered "pets," by all the household, and were so tame that they would allow themselves to be taken in the hand and stroked. as for the young ones, who were doomed to the _steak_, we never saw them till they made their appearance in the pie. they were taken from the nest as soon as they were fledged. i mention this, because we were sometimes accused by our visitors (for whose especial benefit the young ones were sometimes slain) of cruelty, in eating the "pretty creatures;" but we never found that they had any scruples in partaking of them at dinner. it was usually as they were watching of a summer evening the flight of the parent birds that we were taxed with our barbarity. we were one day much amused by a clergyman of our acquaintance, who kept a great number of these birds in a room, and who, in default of children to pet, made pets of his pigeons. at dinner, a pigeon-pie made part of the repast. this was placed opposite a visitor, who was requested to carve the dainty. he did so, and sent a portion of it to his host. the reverend gentleman looked at the plateful sent him attentively, and then said with a sigh, "i will trouble you to exchange this for part of the other bird. _this_ was a peculiar favorite, and i always fed it myself. i put a mark on the breast after it was picked, for i could not bear to eat the little darling!" we always thought that this sentimental divine had better either not have had the "little darling" put into the pie, or have swallowed his feelings and his favorite at the same time. this dish seems to occasion wit as well as sentiment, for we were once asked by a facetious friend, "why is a pigeon in a pie like shakspeare's richard iii?" we "gave it up," and were told, "because it was bound unto the steak (stake), and could not fly." this may perhaps be a worn-out jest, but it was fresh to the writer, and so perhaps it may be to some of her readers. we will say a few words on the management of pigeons before we conclude this chapter. it is necessary that a pan of water should be place in their house each day for them to wash in, and that a large lump of bay-salt should likewise be kept there. it should be occasionally cleaned out, and this is all the trouble attending keeping them. feed them three times a day; and never throw more down than they pick up at a meal. as i have said nothing of the profit derived from chickens when they are _reared_ by the owner, so i now say nothing of the saving in keeping pigeons, when we came to sow a large patch of indian corn, as well as some tares. we did so successfully in the acre of ground called the orchard; and though we had abundance of fine fruit from it, the trees were not planted so thickly as to prevent any kind of crop from flourishing. but we repeat, this little book is a manual for the use of the beginner; and to such we hope it may prove both useful and encouraging. chapter x. how we cured our hams. i have now recounted our experience in keeping cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, rabbits, and pigeons; and with everything but the rabbits we were amply satisfied with the return we received for our labor. we had a constant supply of milk, butter, eggs, ducks, chickens, and pork, not only fresh, but in the shape of good hams and bacon. i do not know whether it is not presumptuous, in the face of miss acton, mrs. rundle, and so many other authorities, not forgetting the great alexis soyer, to give "our method of curing" the last-mentioned dainties; but we think we may as well follow up the history of our pigs, from the sty to the kitchen. i always found that the recipes usually given for salting pork contained too much saltpetre, which not only renders the meat hard, but causes it to be very indigestible. the following is the manner in which they were cured by ourselves: for each ham of twelve pounds weight: two pounds of common salt. two ounces of saltpetre. ¼ pound of bay salt. ¼ pound of coarse sugar. the hams to be well rubbed with this mixture, which must be in the finest powder. it is always the best plan to get your butcher to rub the meat, as a female hand is hardly heavy enough to do it effectually; they are then placed in a deep pan, and a wine-glass of vinegar is added. they should be turned each day; and for the first three or four should be well rubbed with brine. after that time it will be sufficient, with a wooden or iron spoon, to well ladle it over the meat. they should remain three weeks in the pickle. when removed from it, they must be well wiped, put in brown-paper bags, and then smoked the _wood_ smoke for three weeks. we once had nearly a whole pig spoiled by its being taken to a baker's, where it was _dried_, but not smoked. when it came back it resembled very strong tallow. in villages it is usual to send bacon and hams to be dried in the chimneys of farm-houses where wood is burnt, in the old-fashioned manner, on dogs; but if resident in or near a small town, there is always a drying-house to be met with, where we believe sawdust is used for fuel. we have had our own dried in this manner, and always found them excellent. we used the same pickle for twenty-four pounds' weight of bacon, with the exception that we allow two pounds more of common salt, and when it is turned the second time the same quantity of salt is rubbed into it. some persons make a pickle of water, salt, sugar, and saltpetre, boiled together, and when cold put in the hams, etc., without any rubbing. we have never tried that way for meats that are to be dried, but can strongly recommend it for salt beef, pork, or mutton. the following is the pickle always used in our kitchen: three gallons of _soft_ water. one pound of coarse sugar. two ounces of saltpetre. three pounds of common salt. boil together, and let it be well skimmed; then, when cold, the meat to be well wiped and put into it. it will be fit to cook in ten days, but may be kept without injury for two months, when the pickle should be reboiled and well skimmed. the meat should be covered with brine and the pan have a cover. we have put legs of mutton into this pickle, and can assure the reader it is an excellent mode of cooking this joint; and as it is one which frequently makes its appearance at table where the family is large, it is sometimes a pleasant method of varying the dish. it is the best way of any we know of, for curing tongues; it has the great advantage of being always ready for use, and you are not fearful of the carelessness of servants, who not unfrequently forget to look to the salting-pans. we can recommend a dish not often seen at table, and that is a sirloin of beef put into this pickle for about a fortnight. it is infinitely superior either to the round or edgebone, and certainly not so extravagant as the last-named joint. a friend has told us that we should procure some juniper-berries to put into our ham-pickle, but there were none to be purchased in our neighborhood, and as we were quite ignorant of the flavor they might impart, we did not trouble ourselves to get them. i am fond of old proverbs, and as our hams and bacon were always good, we determined to "let well alone." chapter x . our bread. any lady who thinks of trying a country residence, should see that it possess a small brick oven, for "home-made" bread ought always to be considered indispensable in the country. we did not discover that our new home was without one till after we entered it. we were laughed at by our landlord when we mentioned our want of this convenience. "why!" cried he, "there is a baker's shop not five minutes walk from the house." "never mind," said i, "how near the baker's shop may be; we mean to have all our bread made at home. it will be, we are sure, better to do so, both on the score of health and economy." "but i really," said the gentleman, "cannot afford to build you an oven; it would cost me $ at the least." at this, h., who had resided for a short time in a house where the bread was made at home, laughed, and said, "really, mr. l., you need not fear that we wish to put you to so much expense, and it is perhaps but fair that we should meet you half-way in the matter; so if you will find labor we will find materials: or reverse it, if you please." mr. l. remembered that he had in some outhouse a quantity of "fire bricks," and it was arranged that we should pay for the labor of constructing a three-peck oven. this occasioned on our part an outlay of $ , and this small sum was the source of considerable saving to us yearly. we were more fortunate with our bread than with our butter-making, for mary was a capital baker; our bread was always made from the best flour. we all liked it much better than bakers' bread, and it was much more nourishing. indeed, when i was once in kent during "hopping," and saw that the women who resided in the neighborhood always gave up half a day's work weekly for the purpose of going home to bake, i used to wonder why they did not purchase their bread from a baker in the village. i was informed by one of them to whom i put the question, "lord, ma'am, we could not work on bakers' bread, we should be half-starved; it's got no _heart_ in it." to a small family, perhaps, the saving might not be considered an object, but any one who has for a few months been accustomed to eat home-made bread, would be sorry to have recourse to the baker's; the loaves purchased are usually spongy the first day, and dry and harsh the second. it is not only that other ingredients than flour, yeast, and water are mixed in the dough, but it is seldom sufficiently baked; bread well made at home and baked in a brick oven for a proper time, is as good at the end of a week as it is the second day. i have heard several persons say, "i should like home-made bread if it were baked every day, but i don't like eating stale bread four or five days out of the seven." if they stayed with us a day or two, they became convinced that bread which had been made three or four days did not deserve the epithet of "stale." i will now proceed to show the reader how much flour was consumed in our household, consisting of thirteen persons. we used to bake weekly twenty-eight pounds of flour, of the best quality; this produced _forty-two_ pounds of bread. i will give in the most explicit manner i can directions for making it, which i imagine any servant will be able to comprehend: place in a large pan twenty-eight pounds of flour; make a hole with the hand in the centre of it like a large basin, into which strain a pint of yeast from the brewer's; this must be tasted, and if too bitter a little flour sprinkled in it, and then strained directly; then pour in two quarts of water, of the temperature of ', that is, what is called blood-heat, and stir the flour round from the bottom of the hole you have formed with the hand, till that part of the flour is quite thick and well mixed, though all the rest must remain unwetted; then sprinkle a little flour over the moist part, and cover with a cloth: this is called "sponge," and must be left half an hour to rise. during this time the fire must be lighted in the oven with fagots, and the heat well maintained till the bread is ready to enter it. at the end of the half-hour add four quarts of water, of the same heat as the previous two quarts, and well knead the whole mass into a smooth dough. this is hard work, and requires strength to do it properly. it must be again covered and left for one hour. in cold weather both sponge and dough must be placed on the kitchen-hearth, or it will not rise well. before the last water is put in, two table-spoonfuls of salt must be sprinkled over the flour. sometimes the flour will absorb another pint of water. when the dough has risen, it must be made up into loaves as quickly as possible; if much handled then, the bread will be heavy. it will require an hour and an half to bake it, if made into four-pound loaves. while the dough is rising the oven must be emptied of the fire, the ashes swept from it, and then well wiped with a damp mop kept for the purpose. to ascertain if it is sufficiently heated, throw a little flour into it, and if it brown _directly_, it will do. i think i have stated every particular necessary to enable a novice to make a "batch" of good bread. i will sum up the articles requisite to produce forty-two pounds of the best quality: flour, pounds. water at ', or pints. two table-spoonfuls of salt. yeast, pint. bake one hour and a half. the quantity made was ten and a half quarterns, or four-pound loaves; and, as i have said, supplied our family of thirteen persons for the week. for the same number, when we were residing in town, the baker used to leave _thirteen_ quarterns weekly. one day, in the country, when, from the accidental absence of the bread-maker, we had to be supplied from the baker, we were surprised to hear that at the nursery-breakfast the children (six) and nurse consumed more than a two-pound loaf, and then were complaining of being "so hungry" two hours after. i thought of the words of the kentish hopper, "that there was no heart in bakers' bread." the servant who has the management of the oven should be instructed to take care that the wood-ashes are not thrown into the dust-hole with the ashes from the grates. they are always valuable in the country; and, as i have mentioned, the wooden articles used in the dairy should always be scrubbed with them. should the water which is used in the house be hard, and any washing done at home, they should be place in a coarse cloth over a tub, and water poured over them several times to make lye, which softens the water, and saves soap much more than soda, and is likewise better for the linen. the brick oven will often prove a source of great convenience, independent of bread-making. it is just the size to bake hams or roasting pigs, and will, when dinner-parties are given, frequently prove much more useful to the cook than an extra fire. the fagots are sold by the hundred, and the price is usually $ for that quantity. chapter xii. our kitchen-garden. as i wish to make this little work a complete manual to the "farm of four acres," i must insert a few remarks on the management of the kitchen-garden. ours consisted of an acre; and, large as our family was, we did not require more than half of it to supply us with vegetables, independent of potatoes. we strongly advise any one who may have more garden than they may want for vegetables, to plant the surplus with potatoes. even if the "disease" does affect part of the crop, the gain will still be great, providing you keep animals to consume them; for they must indeed be bad if the pigs will not thrive on them when boiled. poultry, likewise, will eat them in preference to any other food. we had something more than half an acre planted one year when the disease was very prevalent; the crop suffered from it to a considerable extent, but the yield was so large that we stored sufficient to supply the family from september till the end of april, and had enough of those but slightly affected to fatten four pigs, beside having a large bowlful boiled daily for the poultry. the worst parts were always cut out before they were boiled, and neither pigs nor poultry were allowed to touch them raw. it is much the best plan to consume all the potatoes you may grow, rather than save any of them for seed. it will be but a slight additional expense to have fresh kinds sent from quite a different locality, and they will thrive better, and not be so liable to the disease. they should always be dug before the slightest appearance of frost, and place on straw in a dry place, where they can be conveniently looked over once a fortnight, when any that show symptoms of decay should be removed and boiled at once for the pigs. by this method very few will be wholly wasted; instead of eating potatoes you will eat pork, that is, if you have plenty of skim-milk. i do not at all know how pigs would like them without they were mixed up with that fluid. we have tried, with great success, planting them in rows alternately with other vegetables. when they are all together, the haulms in wet seasons grow so rankly that they become matted together; and then, as the air is excluded from the roots, it renders them liable to disease. we have tried cutting the haulm off to within a few inches of the ground; but this, the gardener said, proved detrimental to the roots. we afterwards tried a row of potatoes, then cabbages, then carrots, and then again came the potatoes. we once planted them between the currant and gooseberry bushes, but it was as bad, or worse, than when a quantity of them were by themselves; for when the trees made their midsummer shoots the leaves quite shut out air and light from the potatoes, and when dug they proved worse than any other portions of the crop. we always found that the deeper the sets were placed in the ground the sounder were the roots: we tried every experiment with them; and as our gardener was both skilful and industrious, we were usually much more fortunate with our produce than our neighbors. carrots rank to the "small farmer" next in value to the potatoes; not only pigs and cows are fond of them, but likewise horses. the pony always improved in condition when he was allowed to have a few daily. our arable acre was a model farm on a very small scale. we grow in it maize for the poultry, tares for the pigeons, lucerne for the cows, and talked of oats for the pony. this our gardener objected to, so the surplus bit of ground was sown with parsnips, which turned out very profitable, as both pigs and cows liked them. we have told the reader that we reared the calf of the strawberry cow, and it cost us hardly anything to do so, for it was fed in the winter with the roots we had to spare. the first winter it had to consume the greater part of the ton of mangel-wurzel we had bought "to keep our cows together." some we had boiled with potatoes for the pigs, and they liked it very well. an acre of land may appear a laughably small piece of ground to produce such a variety of articles, but if well attended to the yield will astonish those who are ignorant of gardening. the one important thing to be attended to is, to see that all seed-crops are well thinned out as soon as they are an inch above the surface. in very few kitchen-gardens is this attended to, and for want of this care a dozen carrots, parsnips, or turnips, are allowed to stand where one would be sufficient. the one would prove a fine root; the dozen are not worth the trouble of pulling, as they can get neither air nor room to grow. to be well done they should be thinned by hand, and that being a tedious "job," gardeners seldom can be induced to perform the work properly. as our ground became productive we added another cow, and more pigs and poultry, but i shall not now say with what success. this little book in only intended for the novice in farming, and details only the results of the first six months of our "farm of four acres." perhaps i should have called it _five_ acres, as nearly the whole of the acre of kitchen-garden was devoted to the cultivation of food for our "stock." we had a very broad sunny border at the back of the flower-garden, which grew nearly all the spring and summer vegetables we required: such as seakale, early potatoes, peas cauliflowers, and salads. we have not yet said anything of the money we saved by our kitchen-garden, but we must add to the profits of our six months' farming the average amount we should have paid to a green-grocer for fruit and vegetables. twenty-five cents a day to supply thirteen persons with these necessary articles is certainly not more than must have been expended. still, $ per annum is a considerable item of household expenditure, and scanty would have been the supply it would have furnished; as it was we had a profusion of fruit of all kinds, from the humble gooseberry and currant to the finest peaches, nectarines, and hothouse grapes, as well as an abundant supply of walnuts and filberts. had we bought all the produce of our garden, the value would have more than paid our gardener's wages. nor must i omit the luxury of having beautiful flowers from the greenhouse throughout the winter; these superfluous items did not figure in our accounts. we should have purchased but bare necessaries, and therefore entered but twenty-five cents a day for "garden stuff" in our housekeeping book. those only who have lived in the country can appreciate the luxury of not only having fruit and vegetables in abundance, but of having them fresh. early potatoes fresh dug, peas fresh gathered, salad fresh cut, and fruit plucked just before it makes its appearance at table, are things which cannot be purchased by the wealthiest residents in a great city. not far from our residence there were large grounds, which were cultivated with fruit and vegetables for the london market. i have frequently seen the wagons packed for covent garden. the freshest that can be procured there would be considered "stale" in the neighborhood in which they were grown. any fruit or vegetables in that far-famed market must have been gathered twenty-four hours before they could find their way into the kitchen of the consumer; and it is not only the time which has elapsed, but the manner in which they are packed, which so much deteriorates their quality. have any of our readers ever seen the densely-loaded wagons which enter that market? the vegetables are wedged as closely together as they can be pressed, which very soon causes, in warm weather, cabbages, greens, &c., to ferment and become unwholesome. i have often seen them so loaded in the middle of the day before they reached london. they are left in the hot sun till the time arrives, when the horses are placed in them, and they begin their slow journey towards town. this is seldom till late at night when the distance does not exceed a dozen miles. the finer kinds of fruit such as peaches, grapes, etc., do not injure so much by being kept a few days before the are eaten; indeed, _ripe_ peaches and nectarines are seldom gathered for sale: they would spoil too quickly to enable the fruiterer to realize much profit. they are plucked when quite hard, and then placed in boxes till they gradually _soften_; but the flavor of fruit thus treated is very inferior to that of a peach or nectarine ripened by the sun. seed-fruits, such as strawberries, come very vapid in four or five hours after they have been picked, if they were then quite ripe. i know that the last few pages have nothing to do with "the money we made" by our farm, but i wish to show the reader all the advantages which a country residence possess over a town one. some persons, who cannot live without excitement, think that nothing can compensate for the want of amusement and society. i was once speaking of the pleasure i experienced from residing in the country, and placed _health_ among its many advantages, when i was answered, "it is better to die in london than live in the country!" i think i have said enough to cause my lady readers to wish that the time may not be far distant when they may, like ourselves,--for we did all sorts of "odd jobs" in our garden,--cut their own asparagus, and assist in gathering their own peas. it is indeed impossible to over-estimate the value of a kitchen-garden in a large family which numbers many children among its members. chapter xiii. the money we made. some time ago we showed our first six months' accounts to a friend, who was very sceptical as to the profit we always told him we made by our farming. after he had looked over our figures, he said,-- "well! and after all, what have you made by your butter-making, pig-killing, and fowl-slaughtering?" "what have we made?" said i, indignantly. "why, don't you see that, from july to january, we realized a profit of $ from our cows, $ from our pigs, $ from our poultry-yard, and $ at the least from our kitchen-garden, which, altogether, amounts to no less a sum than $ ; and all this in our 'salad-days, when we were green in judgment?' what shall we not make now that we have more stock, our ground well cropped, and, better still, have gained so much experience?" "well," said our friend, "the more 'stock,' as you call it, you have, the more money you will lose." at this rejoinder, h. looked at the speaker as if she thought he had "eaten of the insane root, which takes the reason prisoner." "_lose more money_!" when you can yourself see, by looking at this book, that in our first six months we have cleared $ ! and, indeed, it was absurd of a. to put down so little, for she has allowed $ for the land; and if she take that off the rent, she ought to enter it as profit from the "farm." besides, think of only putting down a shilling a day for fruit and vegetables! very few puddings would the children get at that rate, supposing we were in london." "if we were in london," interrupted i, "you know that $ yearly would be as much as we could afford to expend for that item in our family. i have made out all our farming accounts as fairly as i can. i am as well aware as you can be that a shilling a day would not give us the luxuries of the garden as we now have them; and though that plenty may form one of the advantages of residing in the country, we have no right to put down as a saving of money the value of articles we should never have thought of purchasing." "i must allow," said mr. n., "that you appear to have been strictly honest in your entries as regards the value of the produce you have received, but you do not appear to have put down your losses. you keep a one-sided ledger. you have the credit, but not the debit entry. you say nothing of the money you have lost by pigeons and rabbit-keeping." now the utmost we had lost by our pigeons in the six months was $ , and he knew perfectly well how profitable they had since been to us. he used jokingly to say, that we fed our guest with them in every mode of cookery so frequently, that they would alter the old grace of "for rabbits hot," &c., and substitute the word "pigeon" in its place; so we thought it was ungenerous to reproach the poor birds with the scanty number they gave us the first few weeks they were in our dove-cote. silenced on that point, he returned to our unfortunate rabbit speculation, and complained that we had kept no account of the money we had lost by them. here h. stopped him saying, "pray, mr. n., did you not purchase your children a pony, and did it not catch cold and die in a month afterwards? i suppose mrs. n. did not enter that in her housekeeper's book as meat at so much a pound, and why should we put down the cost of the rabbits in our farming accounts? no; of course it was entered among the 'sundries.'" "but you must allow," said mr. n., "that if you had done as i advised you, and taken a house in a street leading into one of the squares, you would have lived more cheaply than here. why, your gardener's wages must more than swallow up any profit which you may _think_ you make from your farm. you must acknowledge you would have saved that expense." "granted," said i; "but we should most likely have paid quite as much to a doctor. we never got through a year in town without a heavy bill to one; and we must have had all the expense and trouble of taking the children out of town during the hot weather, while the have had excellent health ever since they have been here; and with the exception, when some kind friend like yourself has asked one of them on a visit, neither of them has left home since we came here. of one thing i am quite sure, that we are much happier than we should have been in london; and that in every point of view, as regards expenditure, we are gainers. i have not entered any profit arising from baking at home, though the difference is just three four-pound loaves weekly; and mrs. n. will tell you what must be the saving by our having our own laundry." "enough! enough!" said mr. n., laughingly; "your evidence is overwhelming. you almost force me to believe that i could live in the country, feed my own pork, and drink my own milk, without paying half a crown a pound for the one or a shilling a quart for the other, and this was what i never before believed possible; and i am quite sure, that if i were to put the assertion in a book, no one would believe me." "then," exclaimed i, "it shall be asserted in a book whenever i can find time to transcribe all the particulars from my diary; and i hope that i may be able to convince my readers--should i be fortunate enough to obtain any--not only that they may keep cows, pigs, and poultry without loss, but that they may derive health, recreation, and profit from doing so. none know better than yourself how worn-out in health and spirits we were when we came to this place; how oppressed with cares and anxieties. without occupation, we should most likely have become habitual invalids, real or fancied; without some inducement to be out of doors, we should seldom have exerted ourselves to take the exercise necessary to restore us to health and strength. but you will lose your train, if i keep you longer listening to the benefits we have experienced by our residence in this place. give the fruit and flowers to mrs. n. with our love; and tell her, that with god's blessing we have improved in 'mind, body, and estate,' by occupying ourselves with 'our farm of four acres.'" chapter xiv. the next six months. it was not my intention when i commenced this little work to do more than give our first six months' experience in farming our four acres of land; but as perhaps the reader may think that time hardly sufficient to form a correct opinion of the advantages to be derived from a residence in the country, i think it as well to add some particulars relating to the following six months. in the spring came a new source of profit and amusement. we commenced our labors in the poultry-yard in february, by setting a hen on thirteen eggs, which, early in march, produced the same number of chickens: these were all ready for the table in the middle of may. at that time we could not have purchased them under $ the couple. the cost of thirty-eight chickens till ready to kill was $ . we always knew exactly the expense attending the poultry, because we had a separate book from the miller, in which every article was entered as it came into the house; and as the chickens were kept distinct from the other fowls, i could tell the exact sum they had cost us when they made their appearance at table. the first thing that was given them to eat was egg, boiled quite hard, chopped very fine, and mixed with bread-crumbs. after that they had groats. i find they consumed: three quarts of whole groats . . . . . $ two bushels of barley . . . . . . . . one bushel of middlings . . . . . . . twenty-five lbs. of chicken-rice . . . making altogether . . . . $ the reader must be told that those thirty-eight chickens had other things to eat than those i have put down; they had nearly all the scraps from the house, consisting of cold potatoes, bits of meat, pudding, &c., and any pieces of bread which were left at table were soaked in skim-milk; and the rice was also boiled in it. o course, in a smaller family there would not have been so many "scraps" for them; but, however strict you may be with children, you cannot prevent their leaving remnants on their plates, all of which would have been wasted had it not been for the chickens and pig-tub. we were not so fortunate with the ducks. we did not keep any through the winter, consequently we had to purchase the eggs, which were placed under hens; for those eggs we paid four cents each, and out of thirteen, which was the number given to each hen, we never reared more than eight ducks. thus, in the first instance, they cost us six cents each; and they were likewise more expensive to feed than the chickens. they were never fit for the table till they had cost us sixty-three cents the couple. one reason of this was, that as the chickens had all the waste bids, they had nothing but what was bought for them; but then they were such ducks as could not have been purchased at the poulterers'. we never killed one unless it weighed four pounds; they used to be brought in at night, and placed in the scale: if it was the weight i have mentioned it was killed, if not it was respited till it did so. at first we tried cooping them to fatten, but found it did not answer, as they moped and refused to eat by themselves; so we abandoned that plan, and were content to let them run in the meadows till fit to kill, which was not till they were three months old. they were never "fat," but very meaty, and fine flavored,--not in the least like those which are bought, which, however fat they may appear before they are cooked, come to table half the size they were when put down to the fire. i remember being rather puzzled once when resident in london. i wanted a particularly fine couple of ducks for a "company dinner," and went myself to the shop where i dealt to order them. "now, mrs. todd," said i, "the ducks i require are not fat ducks, but meaty ones; the last i had from you had nothing on them when they came to table, though they looked so plump when you sent them." "oh, yes, ma'am," was the rejoinder. "i know just what you want; but they are very difficult to get: you want _running_ ducks." i was obliged to ask what she meant by the term _running_, and was then informed that the ducks for the london market were put up to fatten, and as they were crammed with grease to hasten the process, the fat all went into the dripping-pan. now a _running_ duck was one well fed, and allowed to roam or _run_ till it was killed. i am now able from experience to say, that they are incomparably superior to their fattened brethren. the novice in poultry-rearing must be told that it is almost useless to set a hen in very hot weather. as we had more eggs than were required, we did so during part of june, july, and august, but had very bad fortune with them; the hen seldom hatching more than three or four, and those puny little creatures. there is an old kentish proverb which says, "between the sickle and the scythe, whatever's born will never thrive;" and as it was just between the hay and corn-harvest that we tried to rear our ducks and chickens, i am induced to believe that, like many other old saws, it was founded on experience. they may be reared in september, though they require great care, and must not be allowed to run on the grass, which at that season is seldom dry. a friend once told me she reared a brood of seventeen chickens, which were hatched the last week in september; they were placed in an empty greenhouse, and were consequently kept warm and dry. march is _the_ month for poultry; the hatches are better, and they grow much more rapidly than at any other time. i am quite sure that a poultry-yard may be made very profitable to any one who will bestow a little trouble on it. great care must be taken with the young chickens at night; the hen should be securely cooped with them: for want of this precaution we in one night lost eight, when they were a few days old, being, as we supposed, carried off by the cats. the best food for ducks when first hatched is bread and milk; in a few days barley-meal, wetted with water into balls about as big as peas, should be given to them. it is usual, as soon as both ducks and chickens come out of the shell, to put a pepper-corn down their throats. i don't know that it is really of service to them, but it is a time-honored custom, and so perhaps it is as well to follow it. as for our butter-making, it continued to prosper; we had some little trouble with it in the spring, when the weather set in suddenly very hot. it was certainly much more difficult to reduce the temperature of the cream to ' than it was to raise it to that degree. i often thought with vain longing of the shop in the strand, where we used to purchase wenham lake ice: how firm would the butter have come, could we have had a few lumps to put in the churn half and hour before we required to use it! farmers' wives tell us, that to get firm butter in very hot weather they get up at three o'clock in the morning, in order that it may be made before the sun becomes powerful. now this is a thing that would not have suited h. or myself at all, and therefore we never mustered up courage to attempt it. one day in march--and this is the last disaster i have to record concerning our butter--we were particularly anxious to have it good, as we expected visitors, to whom we had frequently boasted of our skill as dairywomen: the day was very warm, and the cream appeared much thicker than usual; we churned for more than an hour without its appearing to undergo any change; we frequently removed the lid to see if there was any sign of butter coming, but each time we were disheartened when we discovered it looked just the same as when placed in the churn. at last the handle went round as easily as if no cream were in it, and presently it began to run over the top of the churn. when we looked in a curious sight presented itself: the cream had risen to the top, just as milk does when it boils! we were greatly astonished. in nine months' butter-making we had seen nothing like it. tom, who milked the cows was supposed to know something of the art of churning; he was, therefore, called into the dairy: as soon as he saw the state of the matter he exclaimed, "why, the cream's gone to sleep!" "the cream gone to sleep!" what in the world could that mean? such a propensity we had never discovered in cream before; we could gain no solution of the mystery from tom; all he said was, that we must go on churning till it "waked up." h. and myself had been hard at work for two hours, so willingly yielded to his request that he might be allowed to rouse the cream from its slumber. he, the cook, and housemaid, churned away by turns till seven in the evening, but the sleep of the cream remained unbroken, and as it was then considered a hopeless affair, the slothful fluid was consigned to the pig-tub. now we have never felt quite sure of our butter since. every time we churn there is a lurking fear that the cream may choose to take a nap; however, it is as yet the first and last time in our experience. i can give no advice to my readers on the subject, because i am wholly ignorant on the subject, though i have consulted every farmer's wife in the neighborhood on the matter. they all say that cream will go to sleep sometimes, though it usually wakes up after a few hours.* [i have since been told by an old woman conversant with sleepy cream, that a quart of milk nearly boiling hot will wake it up.] perhaps, after all, we were too impatient, and should not have given in after _only_ nine hours' churning. with this solitary exception our butter-making progressed as favorably as we could desire. i do not quite know how to believe the stories i am told of wonderful cows which my friends are fortunate enough to possess. one gentleman has informed me that he has one which gives fifteen pounds of butter weekly. now we have had several, but never made more on the average than eight pounds per week. i believe that a great deal depends on the manner in which they are milked, and once in the hands of a beginner in that art the cows decreased in milk so rapidly, that we did not get more than a gallon daily from both animals; after they had been three weeks under his management we changed the milker, but did not get anything like the proper quantity again till after they had calved. i believe the usual average is one pound of butter from every ten quarts of milk. ours used to give us thirteen or fourteen quarts each daily, and yet we never made more than eight pounds. we used about two quarts of new milk, so that if ten quarts will give a pound of butter, we did not get so much as we ought. still we were very well satisfied with the produce we received. there requires management with two cows, in order that one may always be in full milk when the other calves. if you rear a calf for the butcher, it will require the whole of the milk for six or seven weeks, which is about the age they are killed for fine veal. we once--it was in the winter--received $ for one. with two cows this may usually be done, and its is more profitable than making butter. where only one is kept, it is better to part with the calf when a few days old, and then the price is $ . if a lady wishes her dairy to be very nicely finished, she should have all the articles she requires of glass, instead of wood and earthenware. everything for the diary of that material can be purchased in leicester square, and certainly, if expense had been no object to us, we should much have preferred a glass churn, pans, &c. they have the great advantage of being kept beautifully clean with very little labor; but they are so liable to be broken, that they should never be used unless servants are very careful. a marble table is, however, in every respect better than a board to make the butter upon. it is expensive at first, but will, with ordinary care, last several generations of butter-makers. whilst on the subject of the dairy, i must say a few words respecting the great care required in washing the articles used in it. as soon as the butter was taken from the churn i was in the habit of half filling it with boiling water, into which i had put some lumps of soda, and then turning the handle a few times, in order that it might be well washed round. it was then left till it was convenient for "cook" to cleanse all the utensils we had used. from some cause or other i neglected for two or three weeks to do this, and one day, when the freshmade butter was brought to table, there were complaints that it was _cheesy_; it certainly had a peculiar and very unpleasant taste, for which we could not account. the next time it was made it had the same fault; and it then occurred to me that it might be the churn. i accordingly returned to my old mode of washing it, and never after was there a complaint of any unpleasant flavor in the butter. i mention this to show the amateur dairywoman how very essential is cleanliness in every article she uses. a regular dairymaid would have known this, but a town-servant thinks that if she washes a thing it is sufficient: but more than mere washing is required; every article must be _scrubbed_ with soap, wood-ashes, and soda, and then placed for hours in the open air. now glass is much easier kept sweet and clean, and for that reason is greatly to be preferred; but i am writing for those who may wish to reap profit from their "farm of four acres," and i fear little would be gained if nothing but glass were used in the dairy. our land turned out better the second summer than the first. we made nearly two tons and a half of hay from each acre. we were enabled to mow the whole three acres, as we had "common rights" in our neighborhood, where the cows could pasture during the spring. had we been without this privilege we could have mown only two acres, and as hay was $ the load, the additional acre was worth $ to us, with the exception of $ for making it. we were advised to have an after-crop, but did not; it would have made the land very poor for the next year, so that what we gained in hay we must have expended in manure. we were well satisfied with the profit we derived from our pigs during this second six months. all the summer we kept four, at an expense of fifty-eight cents weekly, which was expended for two bushels of fine pollard (bran and meal). we had such an abundance of vegetables from the garden and orchard, that we must have wasted cartloads, if we had not kept pigs to consume them. as soon as the hay was carried they were turned into the meadows, and suffered to remain there till they were put up to fatten; a process which pigs must go through, though ducks can dispense with it. i have already stated the expense of fattening them, and we never found it vary more than a shilling or two in a pig. we always found for our family that a bacon pig of sixteen stone ( pounds) was the best size, and for porkers about eight ( pounds). our fruit was as plentiful as our vegetables,--indeed we might have sold the surplus for many dollars; but we soon found that to do so was to lose _caste_ in the neighborhood. one piece of extravagance we were guilty of the first winter and spring we passed at a. the gardener had a little fire in the grapery during the severe weather, because he had placed some plants in it. we were told we could continue it till the grapes ripened for a "mere nothing." now "mere nothings" mount up to a "considerable something." the coal and coke consumed before they were ripe cost $ . it is true we had them in july instead of september, but we should have liked them quite as well in that month. it was a bad grape year, too,--at least with us. i don't think we cut more than twenty pounds weight. hothouse grapes are not dear at $ the pound; but we should have had them equally good by waiting two months later, when they would have cost us nothing. had we purchased the produce we received from our garden during the year, it would have been worth two guineas weekly. our peaches, apricots, and nectarines, were abundant, and very fine. we had two splendid walnut-trees, and a mulberry-tree of immense size, which was an object of special abhorrence to "nurse," as for more than two months in the summer the children's frocks, pinners, &c., were dyed with the juice of the fruit. they could hardly pass near it in the season without some of the ripe berries falling on their heads, and it was hardly possible to prevent them escaping from her to pick them up. mulberry-pudding made its appearance often on the nursery-table, and jars of mulberry-jam were provided to secure the same dainty through the winter. the luxury of a good garden can hardly be appreciated till you have been in possession of one, more especially where there are many children. the way we used to preserve currants, gooseberries, plums, damsons, and, indeed, almost every description of fruit, was this: the wide-mouth bottles which are sold for the purpose were filled with fruit, six ounces of powdered loaf-sugar was shaken in among it; the bottles were then tied down as closely as possible with bladder, and placed up to the neck in a copper, or large saucepan, of cold water, which was allowed to come slowly to the boil. they remained in it till the water was quite cold, when they were taken from the water and wiped quite dry. before placing them in the store-room the bottle was turned upside down, in order to see that they were perfectly air-tight, for on this depends the fruit keeping good. the fruit will sink down to about the middle of the bottle, and we once tried to fill them up with some from another, but opening them admitted the air, and the contents did not keep well. if properly done, they will be good at the end of a year. if any lady undertake the management of a four-acre farm, she must expect it to occupy a great deal of her time; if she leaves it to servants, however honest, she will lose by it. it is not that things are stolen, but that they are wasted, unless the mistress herself knows what quantities of barley, oats, etc., her poultry and pigs consume; and unless she look daily into her dairy and see that the mild is well skimmed, half the cream will be thrown into the wash-tub. a six-months' longer experience of the country only confirmed my sister and myself in the conviction that we had in every way made a most desirable change when we quitted london for our small farm; but if we had been too fine or too indolent to look after our dairy and poultry-yard, i believe that our milk, butter, eggs, poultry, and pork, would have cost us quite as much as we could have purchased them for in town. all the good things we were daily consuming in the country would have come to us in london, "like angels' visits, few and far between." i know that many of our old friends were really shocked when we told them, laughingly, of our new pursuits, and that the butter they so much praised, and the apricot-cheese they ate with so much gust, were manufactured by our own hands. we were "poor-thinged" to our faces in a very pitying manner, but we always laughed at these compassionate people, and endeavored to convince them we spoke the truth in sober earnest, when we assured them we found great amusement in our new pursuits. they shook their heads and sighed in such a manner, that we knew perfectly well that, as soon as we were out of ear-shot, they would say, "poor things! it is very sad, but they are quite right to try and make the best of it." i believe some of them thought that it was impossible we could have "souls above butter;" for a lady who called one day, taking up one of mudie's volumes from the table, said,-- "it is possible you care to subscribe to mudies's?" "and why should we not care to do so?" replied h. "why," was the answer, "i do not see any connection between a love of reading and a love of butter-making." now i do not think that either of us had any love of butter-making; and if we could have afforded to give $ a year to a dairymaid, no doubt we should have left all to her management; but as it was we were obliged to buy it--and very bad it was in our town--or make it ourselves: nor do either my sister or myself regret our resolution to do so. at first we were quite proud of our skill, and told every one of our success with great triumph. now--for womanhood is weak--we are content to hear our dairymaid praised for her beautiful butter by our acquaintance, and tom extolled for his care of the chickens. it is only our friends, among whom i reckon my readers, who know that the butter is made, and the chickens fed, by the mistresses of "the four-acre farm." chapter xv. our pony. i have been told by several friends that, in order to render this little book complete, i should add a chapter detailing the expenses we incurred by keeping a pony and carriage. some persons imagine that this is an article of luxury which may well be dispensed with; but, though it may not be and absolute necessary, the expense attending one is so slight, in comparison with the comfort and pleasure derived from its possession, that i believe such of my readers as may contemplate residing in the country will readily agree with me, when i have told them the amount it will cost them to keep it,--that if it is a luxury, it is one of the very cheapest in which they can indulge. without such a convenience a carriage must be hired every time any member of the family has occasion to go to the railway station; and besides that, it is useful for bringing home a variety of articles which in the country are frequently purchased at places five or six miles from home. then it is a great pleasure to be able to meet your friends at the station, whenever they are kind enough to leave london for the purpose of passing a few days with you in the country. my sister and myself contrived to extract profit as well as pleasure from our little equipage. during the summer months we frequently drove up to london; the short journey was very pleasant, and this mode of making it possessed the great advantage of costing nothing but cents for the pony, and cents for turnpikes. not that we had the temerity to drive through london. we always left the pony two miles before we reached town, with strict orders to the civil ostler to whose care we confided him to great care of him, and be sure and give him a "good feed." we then proceeded on our way in a cab, which cost us no more than we should have paid for one from the station. where there is a gentleman in the family, a dogcart is the most convenient vehicle which can be kept; but as that would not be suitable for a lady, we contrived to make the back seat of the carriage do duty for the well of the dog-cart, and it was astonishing how many light packages we managed to "stow away" in it. i will not dilate on the pleasant drives through quiet lanes, of the delight afforded to the children when allowed to have a ride on "bobby," nor of the great facility it gave us of being out of doors in winter, when, as was very frequently the case, the state of the roads was such as to render walking an impossibility; still, i hope i have stated sufficient to give my readers a good idea of the great pleasure they will derive from keeping a pony; and i will now, with the bills of the miller and farrier before me, proceed to show the sum for which it may be kept. our pony cost for food, from the th of january to the th of december in the same year, $ . . he consumed during that period five quarters of oats, at $ the quarter, and five bushels of beans, which cost $ . . the farrier's bill for the same time amounted to $ . . perhaps it will be as well to copy this account, as it will clearly show how often it is requisite to change the shoes of a horse. of course a great deal must depend on the quantity of work he does; ours was certainly not spared, though we do not deserve the character so usually given to ladies, of being unmerciful to horses: "running them off their legs," "thinking they can never get enough out of the poor beasts," "driving them as if they thought they could go for ever," are accusations brought against the ladies of a family where horses are kept. the following is a copy of the bill for our pony's shoes for twelve months:-- feb. . four removes $ . march . four shoes . april . four removes . may . two shoes . / june . four shoes . july . four shoes . aug. four shoes . sept. . four shoes . oct. . two shoes . / oct. . two shoes . / dec. . two shoes . / $ . add to this the miller's bill $ . $ . and we have the whole expense of keeping a pony for one year. "oh! but," some one may exclaim, "you have put down nothing for straw and hay, and horses require a great deal of both." quite true; but then in the country, if you do not keep a horse, you must buy manure for your garden, and that will cost you quite as much as if you purchased straw; and as for the hay, did it not come off the "four-acre farm?" it is one of the great advantages of the country that nothing is lost, and thus the straw which figures so largely in the bill of a london corn-chandler, and which, when converted into manure, is the perquisite of your groom, becomes in the country the means of rendering your garden productive. before i resided in the country the pony cost me more than four times the sum i have mentioned; the stable was apart from the house, and i knew nothing for months of the bills run up on his account. i had once a bill sent in for sugar! "why, george, what can the pony want with sugar?" "why, ma'am, you said some time ago that the pony looked thin, so lately i have always mixed sugar with his corn; nothing fattens a horse like sugar." now what could i complain of? this man had been recommended to me as a "treasure," and one who would do his duty by the pony, which, i may mention, was a very beautiful one, and a great pet; so if george considered sugar good for him, what could i do but pay the bill, and say, "let him have sugar, by all means?" not that "bobby" was a bit the fatter or better for having his corn sweetened. an intimate friend of mine, who always kept three or four horses, laughed outright when i told him that the pony had consumed such a quantity of sugar, and expressed his opinion that very little of that article had ever been in his manger. under the same superintendence "bobby" wore out four times the number of shoes; and as at that time i had to purchase hay and straw as well as corn, all on the same scale of magnitude, the expense of keeping the little carriage really did cost more than the convenience attending it was worth; and had not the pony been the gift of a beloved friend, we should have parted with it when we quitted london, as at that time we were ignorant how cheaply it could be maintained in the country. there we had a servant who was content with his wages, and did not seek to make them greater by combining with tradesmen to defraud his employers. if any of my readers commence keeping a pony in the country, they may rely that it need not cost them a penny more than i have put down. of course they must have the hay from their own grounds, and neither reckon the cost of the straw nor the labor of the man who attends to the pony. ours did all the "jobs" about the place--cleaned the knives and shoes, milked the cows, fed the pigs and poultry, helped in the gardens, and, in short, made himself "generally useful." now, a servant who is able and willing to do all this, besides properly attending to a pony and carriage, is very difficult to be met with, but he is absolutely necessary for a place in the country where economy has to be studied. something must be allowed yearly for the wear and tear of carriage, harness, etc., but it need not be much. any gentleman can easily calculate the sum which may fairly be allowed for these items; i only think it my part to show the expense attending a pony in the country; and though those who have been in the habit of keeping horses in london, either in a livery or private stable, may think it impossible to maintain one for $ . yearly, let them leave town for a four-acre farm, and they will find that i have spoken the truth on this point, as well as on all the other subjects of which i have given my experience in this little volume. chapter xvi. conclusion. it is with considerable diffidence the writer ventures to give the public this slight sketch of her experience in farming four acres of land. when she finally resolved to fix her residence in the country, she was wholly ignorant how she ought to manage, so that the small quantity of land she rented might, if not a source of profit, be at least no loss. she was told by a friend, who for a short time had tried "a little place" at chiselhurst, that it was very possible to lose a considerable sum yearly by under taking to farm a very small quantity of land. "be quite sure," said the friendly adviser--"and remember, i speak from experience--that whatever animals you may keep, the expense attending them will be treble the value of the produce you receive. your cows will die, or, for want of being properly looked after, will soon cease to give any milk; your pigs will cost you more for food than will buy the pork four times over; your chickens and ducks will stray away, or be stolen; your garden-produce will, if worth anything, find its way to covent garden; and each quarter your bills from the seedsman and miller will amount to as much as would supply you with meat, bread, milk, butter, eggs, and poultry, in london." certainly this was rather a black state of things to look forward to; but the conviction was formed, after mature reflection, that a residence some miles from town was the one best suited to the writer's family. she was compelled to acknowledge to those friends who advised her to the contrary, her ignorance on most things appertaining to the mode of life she proposed to commence, but trusted to that often-talked-of commodity, common sense, to prevent her being ruined by farming four acres of land. she thought, if she could not herself discover how to manage, she might acquire the requisite knowledge from some of the little books she had purchased on subjects connected with "rural economy." they proved, however, quite useless. they appeared to the writer to be merely compilations from larger works; and, like the actors in the barn, who played the tragedy of "hamlet," and omitted the character of the hero, so did these books leave out the very things which, from the title-pages, the purchaser expected to find in them. some time after experience had shown how butter could be made successfully, a lady, who had been for years resident in the country, said, during a morning call, "my dairy-maid is gone away ill, and the cook makes the butter; but it is so bad we cannot eat it: and besides that nuisance, she has this morning given me notice to leave. she says she did not 'engage' to 'mess' about in the dairy." "well," said the writer, "why not make the butter yourself, till you can suit yourself with a new servant?" "i have tried," said the visitor, "but cannot do it. my husband is very particular about the butter being good, so i was determined to see if i could not have some that he could eat; therefore i _pored_ over mrs. rundle, and other books, for a whole day, but could not find how to begin. none of them told me how to _make_ the butter, though several gave directions for potting it down when it was made. i made the boy churn for more than three hours yesterday morning, but got no butter after all. _it would not come!_ the weather was very cold, and it occurred to the listener to ask the lady _where_ the boy churned, and where the cream had been kept during the previous night. "why, in the dairy, to be sure," was the answer; "and my feet became so chilled by standing there, that i can hardly put them to the ground since. cook could not succeed more than i did, and said, the last time she made it, it was between four and five hours before the butter came; and then, as i have told you, it was not eatable." the writer explained to her friend that the reason why she could not get the butter, as well as why cook's was so bad, was on account of the low temperature of the cream when it was put into the churn. she then gave her plain directions how to proceed for the future, and was gratified by receiving a note from her friend, in a couple of days, containing her thanks for the "very plain directions;" and adding, "i could not have thought it was so little trouble to procure _good_ butter, and shall for the future be independent of a saucy dairymaid." i believe that a really clever servant will never give any one particulars respecting her work. she wraps them up in an impenetrable mystery. like the farmers' wives, who, to our queries, gave no other answer than, "why, that depends," they take care that no one shall be any the wiser for the questions asked. the reader may safely follow the directions given in these pages; not one has been inserted that has not been tested by the writer. to those who are already conversant with bread-making, churning, etc., they may appear needlessly minute; but we hope the novice may, with very little trouble, become mistress of the subjects to which they refer. even if a lady does keep a sufficient number of servants to perform every domestic duty efficiently, still it may prove useful to be able to give instructions to one who may, from some accidental circumstance, be called on to undertake a work to which she has been unaccustomed. a friend of the writer's, a lady of large fortune, and mistress of a very handsome establishment, said, when speaking of her dairy, "my neighborhood has the character of making very bad butter; mine is invariably good, and i always get a penny a pound more for it at the 'shop' than my neighbors. if i have occasion to change the dairymaid, and the new one sends me up bad butter, i tell her of it. if it occurs the second time, i make no more complaints; i go down the next butter-day, and make it entirely myself, having her at my side the whole time. i find i never have to complain again. she sees how it is made, and she is compelled to own it is good. i believe that a servant who is worth keeping will follow any directions, and take any amount of trouble, rather than see 'missus' a second time enter the kitchen or dairy to do her work." perhaps the allusion this lady made to the "shop" may puzzle the london reader, but in country places, where more butter is made in a gentleman's family than is required for the consumption of the household, it is sent to--what is frequently--_the_ "shop" of the place, and sold for a penny per pound less than the price for which it is retailed by the shopkeeper. the value of the butter is set off against tea, sugar, cheese, and various other articles required in the family in which the butter is made. when the writer purchased a third cow, it was in anticipation of sending any surplus butter to "shop," and receiving groceries in exchange, nor has she been disappointed. every month's additional experience strengthens her conviction of the advantages to be derived from living in the country; and she takes farewell of her readers, in the hope that she has succeeded in conving them that a "farm of four acres" may be made a source of health, profit, and amusement, though many of their "town" friends may threaten them with ruin, should they be rash enough to disregard their advice to take a house in a "nice quiet street," leading into one of the squares. a living from the land [illustration: (_frontispiece_) country homes backed by intensive types of agriculture serve modern human needs.] a living from the land by william b. duryee, m.sc. _secretary of agriculture, state of new jersey_ whittlesey house mcgraw-hill book company, inc. new york and london _copyright, , by the_ mcgraw-hill book company, inc. all rights reserved. this book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission of the publishers. third printing published by whittlesey house a division of the mcgraw-hill book company, inc. _printed in the united states of america by the maple press co., york, pa._ _to my friend_ henry w. jeffers preface homesteading days are here again. the present movement of people back to the land is of a different type and has different objectives from those which prevailed when a continent was to be conquered and exploited. today we know that many urban industries will operate on a seasonal basis and we know too that periods of unemployment and shorter working days will provide more leisure and probably lower incomes for hundreds of thousands of families. the utilization of this leisure time to supplement incomes, to raise the standards of living and of health, and to attain some measure of economic security will tend more and more to settlement on the land. in these days of rapid transportation and all the attributes and conveniences of modern country life, the hardships of the earlier period of land development are non-existent. although urban industrial development has reached a point which will not be exceeded for many years to come, the individual who needs additional income may adjust himself to such circumstances by establishing a country homestead. industrial activity is tending to decentralize, largely as the result of widespread power distribution, and a home in the country accessible to some form of manufacturing or business employment offers undeniable attractions. this book is prepared primarily for the family that is inexperienced in country living and in soil culture. such a family should know about the nature of the soil on which it lives, how to make it serve the family's needs and purposes, what to do, and what to avoid in order that success may be attained and failure averted. students of agriculture as a vocation and practical farmers may find, beyond the elementary facts presented, information of value and help to them. to know and to understand the science and practice of agriculture is to have power to cope with and to enjoy soil culture and animal husbandry. if this little volume helps to answer clearly and definitely the many inquiries that are in the minds of prospective and active homesteaders, it will have served its purpose. the knowledge of many practical people and the resources of agricultural institutions and agencies have been drawn upon for this book. grateful acknowledgment is made to those who have contributed constructive criticism and have helped in the preparation of material. especial credit is due to the personnel of the new jersey and new york colleges of agriculture and to my associates in the new jersey department of agriculture. william b. duryee. trenton, n. j., _december, _. contents page preface ix chapter i. turning from the city to the country ii. getting established in the country iii. financing and protecting the investment iv. attributes of a house in the country v. servicing the home vi. making the soil produce crops vii. food from the garden viii. home fruits and bees ix. poultry as a source of income x. successful management of poultry xi. the family milk supply xii. marketing farm products a living from the land _chapter_ i turning from the city to the country america was founded on the rock base of agriculture. the early settlers tilled the soil and derived from it the simple things that they needed. necessity compelled them to be self-reliant, courageous and resourceful. the establishment of a home in early days meant the clearing of land, the erection of a house for human habitation and the building of shelters for a few farm animals. each farm home became practically self-sufficient so far as the family needs were concerned. clothing was made there for each member of the family. after clearing and subduing the land, the settlers were able to produce their cereal foods. animals were slaughtered and the meat processed to provide sustenance throughout the year. through the exchange of commodities and ideas with neighbors, advances in living conditions were made. the family that was not resourceful in those days failed to survive. neighbors were too busy working out their own existence problems to succor the incompetent. resourcefulness was called upon in meeting onslaughts of beasts or human marauders. thus there was built up a tradition of seeking and utilizing resources that has gone on to make our country great and the wonder of the rest of the world. since pioneer days we have built a great industrial, commercial and financial machine. american inventive genius, coupled with the best brains of the civilized world, attracted by resources and opportunities on every hand, has invaded every field and created a great industrial superstructure. with the genesis and development of a great industrial era in the united states there started a movement of population from farms to established centers of population. the application of the sciences to the problems of filling human wants gave this movement greater impetus. mining and the refining of metal ores, the exploiting of coal deposits, the building of railroads, the construction of buildings for business and residential purposes, as well as dozens of other great enterprises, served to draw from the country the best of its human resources. inventive genius began to concentrate on the solution of engineering and construction problems created by congestion of population and successive steps in industrialization. this same technical genius was applied also to farm operations which required laborious effort by men and work animals. that this development itself progressed rapidly is demonstrated by the fact that while in the effort of nearly every person was required to produce enough food to sustain the population, in the efforts of one-third of the people were sufficient to provide food for the nation and export vast quantities to other countries. while the nation continued to grow rapidly in population and sought to apply to ordinary practices the newer labor-saving devices, all was well. it was inevitable, however, that the great industrial machine should become over-developed, at least temporarily. instead of machinery being a servant of mankind it became an octopus that could not be checked. individual initiative, the wellspring of earlier developments in the process, became atrophied. there came about such a high degree of specialization in human effort as to make men dependent upon others for work to do. consequently, even a slight throwing out of gear of the machine created unemployment, which reduced buying power for the machine-made products and started a vicious downward spiral accompanied by every form of economic distress. when such partial or complete breakdown of the superstructure occurs, thoughtful people are brought "down to earth," both collectively and very intimately in thousands of individual cases. they begin to get back to fundamentals and to seek means of becoming so reestablished as to avoid future cataclysms. the family attracted to the city by the lure of high industrial wages and by crowded avenues finds in such a breakdown that it has lost its moorings. in seeking means of reestablishment free of the terrifying complications of industrial life, the mind turns to the country, to the soil, to growing things that are not visibly affected by economic cycles. the open country seems ready to welcome back her errant children graciously and to enfold them within her protecting bosom. we cannot go back, however, to pioneer days. free land is not available and we have not the arts or the patience to practice the means of livelihood of those days. to make the new or renewed relationship with the soil a success, it is necessary to understand that country life, too, has changed during industrial revolutions. mother earth is now, as ever, a generous but exacting parent. to try to reestablish relationships in a blind and haphazard manner is likely to lead to further disaster. such a debacle is quite needless, provided some fundamental principles and practices are understood and followed. unquestionably, the open country is now making the greatest appeal as a place of residence that it has made at any time in the history of the nation. to list the conveniences which now exist in the country is to duplicate those which many people have considered as available only in cities. in most areas of the country, for example, there are daily mail delivery, telephone service, some measure of fire protection, and transportation by automobile, bus or train. it is quite possible, for example, to step into a bus at one's dooryard and be carried to any part of the united states by the same method of transportation. the development of the radio has brought to the country home all the surging activities of national life and varied educational and entertainment programs. the spread of electric light and power lines through the country constitutes a boon that makes possible the use of all kinds of electrical appliances known in the city, including refrigerators, cooking ranges, washing machines, water pumps, water heaters and hundreds of other machines and appliances, some of which are in their infancy. no great difficulty is experienced in locating in the open country where such electrical facilities are available. [illustration: (_courtesy u. s. department of agriculture_) an attractive farmstead offering requisites of a home in the open country.] [illustration: (_courtesy u. s. department of agriculture_) floor plan of house shown on opposite page.] on the main highways in the northern sections of the country a heavy fall of snow used to mean isolation for weeks. today the snow is removed as rapidly as it falls, and these highways are kept open. the problems and perils of isolation are thus removed. tradesmen of all kinds are directing their sales toward country homes, and supplies of ice and all kinds of food can be obtained almost daily at the farm doorstep. there is also a tendency to develop factories in the country away from the high-rent areas of cities and to utilize the services of persons living in the vicinity of the factory for full or partial time in the plants. the cost of living can be reduced by living in the country, and opportunities for purchasing foods and other products at wholesale prices and storing them against the time of need make further economies possible. the greatest asset that the country has to offer relates to the health and character of those who live close to nature. it has long been recognized by many european countries that the ownership of even a small tract of land, no larger than a city lot, perhaps, is a definite asset in building a nation and in building individual character. in germany, in denmark and in many other nations, the government lends its aid toward the establishment of people in the country and makes it possible for them to acquire and retain small holdings of land which they may call "home." it is on these small tracts that one sees veritable bowers of pastoral industry and beauty. residence in the open country, in contact with the soil, contributes to physical strength and to mental health. when a man lives in the country, his house, his way of living and his contribution to the community stand out where all may see them. these latter assets have always been inherent in country life. when to these are added the conveniences and the opportunities for community enjoyment that are now a part of rural life, its appeal is not difficult to understand. anyone who intends to live in the country has his individual problems to meet and to solve. in the solution of these problems there are many resources and avenues to which he may turn in the present day for help and for guidance. the tragic mistakes that have been made in the past can and should be largely eliminated in the future. a clearer understanding should be gained as to what one may obtain in the country in the form of a better way of living, serving as an anchor to the windward even under favorable economic conditions. _chapter_ ii getting established in the country in the selection of a residence in the country, the settler must decide whether he wishes to locate on a farm of considerable acreage or whether he wants to have a relatively small tract ranging from to acres. in the latter case, he is thinking primarily of a place of residence with sufficient acreage to make it possible to secure a partial living from the land immediately surrounding the home. the trend in such purchases is toward the smaller place for a number of reasons. a large farm acquired by a relatively inexperienced person means a very considerable burden in the development and maintenance of the land itself on a producing basis. capital is required for the purchase of equipment and power. parts of the land may need to be drained, and taxes must be paid whether the land is productive or not. a person acquiring a farm of or more acres will find that the major portion of his time, thought and capital will be called upon to make it a success. if he has definitely cut off his city connections and the idea of having a job there, and has had experience in farming, then he may be in a position to take over a large acreage so that his full time and possibly that of other members of his family can be spent on various projects on the land he acquires. we are here primarily concerned, not with those who desire to enter upon farming on a large scale, but with the family which would like to live in the country, secure a partial living from the land surrounding the home and still have the opportunity of gaining a livelihood from some industrial or commercial activity located in a near-by city or town. it is quite likely that we shall have a shorter working week and probably periods of unemployment for hundreds of thousands of ambitious people. therefore, a place in the country that is well located with respect to hard-surfaced highways and accessible to urban centers offers opportunities for combining the advantages and economic assets of country life with urban employment. _getting started right._--too much emphasis cannot be laid upon getting the right start, particularly with respect to location. this is not only essential for the satisfaction of the present occupant of the premises, but also gives definite sales value in case circumstances make a change of location desirable or necessary. it will often appear that the best location is on the outskirts of a city or town and from some angles this is good reasoning. there are some factors, however, that make such a location undesirable. for one thing, the tax rate is likely to be higher in such areas than in the open country, thus adding to overhead without compensating advantages. in the second place, urban centers develop without regard to soil type and this is an essential factor to the family that expects to engage in some agricultural pursuit. again, the type of inhabitants that live on the fringe of towns and cities may not make good neighbors or associates for children, especially. none of these disadvantages may be present in locations close to centers of population, but the prospective settler should give all these factors full consideration. the sales argument frequently advanced that such locations will grow in value due to growth of population may be fallacious. many have found that the higher costs of living in these areas often prevent the owner from holding on until the slow growth of population outward makes a worth-while profit possible from his real estate. furthermore, the growth of cities and towns is definitely slowing down. the expansion of city areas is greatly curtailed and is not likely to be resumed soon. the most important time to get expert opinion as to location is at the beginning and not after purchasing. there are available in every locality persons whose advice is useful in such matters. the county agricultural agent located in nearly every county seat knows the countryside and his advice on the subject of definite location should be sought once one has decided upon the general area which seems attractive. in determining on specific location the bank which has a clientele in the country will often be found a helpful guide through suggestions or through ability to refer the questioner to reputable and informed persons with more definite knowledge. another source of information is the local dealer in farm supplies. he will be found to know general soil types in the vicinity, especially those types which bring business to him because they are productive. owners of such land are able to buy and use to advantage the supplies he has to offer to the grower. _size of tract._--there is the possibility that a person who goes back to the land may acquire too little land as well as too much. inadequate land resources may seriously hinder possibilities of revenue from the place and cramp facilities for his enterprises. in this connection it may be helpful to point out that an acre of land comprises , square feet. a city lot measuring by feet contains , square feet. an acre therefore would comprise about eight and one-half such city lots. a -acre tract is usually a minimum area for a small agricultural enterprise and many have found it entirely adequate. the size of the tract to be acquired and the enterprises that can be engaged in will depend in considerable measure upon the size of the occupant's family--whether they can assist in its operation and whether the owner himself intends to put in all or only a part of his time. the possibility of securing extra labor should also be looked into before larger operations are attempted. no definite formula can be set down for desirable area and enterprises in relation to time available for operating. however, the owner will realize that one pair of hands can do only so much work. to try to operate beyond the capacity of his own time and that of others available is to become involved in striving to keep up with exigencies that may make country life a struggle instead of a pleasurable existence. it may result, too, in losses due to inability to get things done on time, and nature deals harshly with those who neglect the seasonable operations that come in any agricultural enterprise. "bulling through" or skimping or cutting corners simply will not work when one is dealing with plant and animal life and only failure will come to him who undertakes to bluff nature. the successful operator of a farming endeavor must always be on top of his work, that is, able to plan and direct his energies in the most productive way at the right time. this is really managing and is likely to lead to success and satisfaction. to have so much to do that one emergency after another must be met brings the operator down under his farming projects. he ceases to manage under these conditions and becomes driven by his own creations. to avoid this unhappy state, which is entirely unnecessary, planning must be effectively done and operations undertaken in a gradual way up to one's capacity. _cost of land._--the price one should pay for land in a relatively small tract cannot be arbitrarily fixed. those who own large farms or tracts expect to receive a bonus for the acres located along a highway as compared with an average price for the entire place. it should be possible to buy a - or -acre tract of land in the open country with highway frontage for from $ to $ an acre, depending on location. if the land is located near town or city where speculative operations have enhanced values, the cost will be considerably more. where an entire farm is desired, the buildings are frequently given no value, the cost being the price of the land only. as has been stated, it is quite possible to acquire too much land as well as too little. a few acres selected from a tract of good, productive soil will usually be found a better investment than a large farm that has been abandoned because of lack of fertility. _accessibility to cities._--in deciding upon the location of a farm, methods of transportation that are available are as important as nearness to cities. a location near a railroad station offers the possibility of low commutation rates to a point of industrial or commercial employment. a location abutting upon an improved highway means that transportation by bus or by personally owned automobile can be utilized at the least expense and trouble the year round. the recent development of bus lines covering almost every main artery of travel offers facilities for quick and economical transportation unknown to country residents even a few years ago. furthermore, the selection of a place of residence accessible to transportation to and from it is a factor to be borne in mind in connection with the possible resale of the property, should that at any time be desirable or necessary. _the soil._--the type of soil is a highly important factor in determining upon location; also important is its crop-producing capacity. for all general purposes, a soil which is loamy in texture is desirable. types to be avoided are the extremes of clay and sand. a heavy clay soil, particularly where the land is in a depression, not only inhibits plant growth of all kinds but is often undesirable as a place of residence from the standpoint of healthfulness. a condition of extreme muddiness in wet weather creates an unpleasant reaction on those forced to live near it. on the other hand, areas which are so sandy in character as to furnish no fertility for the growth of plants will be found undesirable in making the surroundings of the home attractive and in growing the vegetables and fruits which should constitute a part of the living. one method of judging the soil consists of examining the vegetation that is already growing upon it and determining on that basis whether it is likely to be favorable for the growth of desirable plants. for this reason, the selection of a site during the growing season is recommended, rather than during a dormant season when it is difficult to form an estimate of the vegetation that the soil will support. _availability of electricity._--while it is possible to secure individual electrical generating plants, it is far preferable to establish a home where electric lines may be tapped. the obtaining of electrical energy from a commercial line is desirable because of its greater dependability, generally lower cost and the fact that unlimited use of electricity may be obtained without the overloading that frequently occurs where individual plants are set up. probably the availability of public utility lines is the greatest asset of comfortable country life and one of the most important factors in creating genuine resale value. these lines bring to the country dweller most of the advantages that are enjoyed by city residents. this is true not only because of the advantages of electric lights, but also because electricity makes possible the use of such modern appurtenances to the home as electric refrigerators, washers, radios, water pumps and various devices and machines for use in connection with poultry keeping and vegetable growing. _type of buildings._--especial attention should be given to the adaptability to the buyer's needs of the residence and the other buildings that may already be in existence. if the plot being considered is on a main highway, it is highly desirable to have the residence located back from the highway a hundred feet or more as a means of eliminating noise and promoting safety especially if children are in the family. the location of a home directly on one of the main arteries of traffic destroys many of the advantages of country life, owing to the distracting noises that accompany intensive truck and passenger traffic. the age of buildings and their previous care have a direct relation to their value, particularly if they are of frame construction. if the buildings have been standing for a number of years, full allowance must be made for depreciation and repairs incident to weathering and long usage. the actual investment represented in a building erected under war or post-war conditions may not be in line with present values. in measuring the value of the principal buildings that are already on a tract, careful consideration should be given to the cost of replacement. consideration should be given also to the outbuildings that may be on such a place. instead of being an asset to the property, they may be a distinct liability if they are not directly useful to the intending purchaser. from the standpoint of economy of maintenance and generally good appearance, it is much better to have one building serve a number of purposes than to have a number on different parts of the property, adding to the cost of maintenance and multiplying steps. _educational facilities._--where there are children in the family, the location of schools and the facilities which they offer should be investigated by the prospective buyer. it is desirable to locate as near to schools as possible. in recent years there has been a strong tendency throughout the country to do away with local schools and to consolidate educational facilities in one building. coupled with this trend is the free transportation of pupils to consolidated schools. therefore, it is highly important to locate either near a school which will be kept in operation or where transportation facilities are available to and from the home and the school. it should be said that the trend toward consolidation of schools has carried with it great benefits to children who live in the open country by affording them educational facilities that are not exceeded by most city schools. _community advantages._--the community, in addition to educational facilities that are available, should include those opportunities that appeal especially to the family. the accessibility of the church of one's preference should not be overlooked, and the general type of community life is highly important too. some communities are known for the law-abiding proclivities of their residents while others do not have a savory reputation from the standpoint of the peace and security of their more respectable inhabitants. one should establish a residence in the community with the thought that he is to become a factor in the life of that community. he should be sure that there is a genuine spirit of healthy and cooperative activity which constantly tends to upbuild the neighborhood, by keeping out or suppressing undesirable elements and by developing a concerted feeling of responsibility for the welfare of all who live within its boundaries. a resident of a city moving to the country frequently finds a difference in his neighbors' viewpoint that surprises him. there is, and must be, in the rural community a closer relationship between the people in that community than ever exists in an apartment dwelling in the city. in the country, one's neighbors are apt to show a surprising amount of friendly interest in one's doings, since the whole trend of the community is based upon the actions and attitude of the relatively few people who live within it. it should be repeated, therefore, that the type of community and the facilities which the people of that community have developed should be given careful attention by the prospective resident and he should determine for himself whether the particular community that he has in mind is in accord with his ideas and ideals. to be out of step with the community in which one lives is apt to create dissatisfactions and a critical attitude on both sides that is not conducive to happiness. a home in the country has more of the attributes of genuine ownership than has a home anywhere else. the country home must be established with an idea of permanence and of becoming really rooted in the soil where one locates, if the true benefits of rural home ownership are to be secured. _do's_ decide either on large farm or on house and small acreage. determine accessibility at all times of the year. purchase soil of loam texture, mixture of sand and clay. determine whether electricity is available. locate back from highway. if present buildings are to be used, be sure of their condition and need of repair. find out type and accessibility of schools and other community buildings. prepare to be _of_ the community as well as _in_ it. remember there are advantages of small tract over large farm where available time is an important element. use local sources of information as to desirability of tract before purchasing. work out a plan of management that fits into the time available for the farm duties. _don'ts_ don't overlook intrinsic values of the location, such as soil, low tax rate and good neighbors. avoid excessive capital outlay. avoid extra heavy or extra sandy soils or evidently unproductive ones. don't overlook advantages of electric light and power. don't buy a place just because it has buildings. they may not be adapted to your needs. don't buy too much land. it can be a burden. don't let the farm become your master. don't pay too much for land. there is plenty of it. _chapter_ iii financing and protecting the investment acquiring land for residence and for subsistence calls for the exercise of good business judgment. not only must the site and general location be acceptable to the family, but the investment involved should be within the capacity of the owner to finance without undue strain on his resources. it should be recognized that there will be ordinary living expenses to be met in the country and perhaps some extraordinary demands resulting from emergencies. consequently, adequate thought and preparation must be made for financing the investment and making sure, as far as that is possible, that the investment in a country home will not be lost through inability to meet possible contingencies. it goes without saying that the capital investment should be kept as low as possible. wherever feasible, the cash available should take care of the full investment without the necessity for additional financing. this reduces the drain upon resources through obviating the necessity of meeting interest payments on mortgages and makes possible the use of any surplus funds for improvement, for education and for giving the family the advantages which country life offers. if it is necessary to borrow funds for financing the purchase, special attention should be given to the type of mortgage which is obtained. _mortgage financing._--one of the most desirable types of financing is through a financially sound building and loan association whereby the interest and the amortization of the mortgage are taken care of through monthly payments. such building and loan mortgages are available in most localities throughout the country. a series of monthly payments can be made which will take care of the interest payments and the mortgage itself so that within a period of from ten to twelve years, in most cases, the mortgage is amortized and the owner has the advantages of a home that is free of encumbrance. for example, if the mortgage amounts to $ , , subscription to fifteen shares of a building and loan association at $ a share per month would make it possible to clear off the mortgage in about eleven years. this would call for the payment to the association of $ per month and interest. through the compounding of interest, the mortgage can be lifted at less expense than any other procedure. another satisfactory plan is to place the mortgage with a bank or financing company or insurance company that will not call the mortgage so long as the payments are met, and at the same time start saving through a building and loan association so as to complete the payments over a series of years. there is a far greater sense of security in having no mortgage or in setting up a definite and practical procedure for eliminating it than in always having a mortgage encumbrance with its interest payments and the possibility of having it called at an inopportune moment. a home that is free from mortgage can be carried at small cost, especially where the owner is willing to make most of the repairs and attend to the upkeep himself. the demand for outlay of cash for mortgage interest may be financially embarrassing, especially where income is not guaranteed or may be jeopardized through a drastic reduction at critical periods or as the result of emergency expenses in the family, such as are entailed by serious illness. _taxes._--one of the factors that is frequently overlooked in the purchase of a residence in the country is the cost of meeting taxes. since taxes must be met if the property is to be held, it is highly important that the location be one in which tax rates are not excessive. on the other hand, an exceedingly low tax rate may indicate lack of progressiveness in the community and lack of facilities which from many angles would lessen the value of the tract as a place of residence. in most localities, the tax rate is based principally upon the costs of building and maintaining highways and schools. good facilities in both of these respects are highly desirable, and yet excessive expenditures in either direction may so advance the tax rate as to make them expensive luxuries. in many rural communities, taxing districts are burdened with the costs of building monumental schools or a very elaborate system of roads, undertaken at some time through the flotation of bond issues. the establishment of a sinking fund for payment of interest and amortization of these bonds frequently constitutes a very heavy drain upon the residents of the district. it is, therefore, necessary to determine not only the tax rate in the locality under consideration, but also to know definitely what are the current charges for maintenance of government. taxing methods vary so widely, even in adjoining districts, that the only method of determining the annual charges for taxes is to secure from the present owner or from the local tax assessor the definite payments that must be made. as a means of saving trouble later, an investigation should be made of the property under consideration to make sure that taxes have been paid to the date of purchase. this is distinctly the obligation of the owner. unpaid taxes constitute a lien on the property, and an investigation of the status of the tax payments is essential in protecting the proposed investment. _the title and survey._--a great deal of possible trouble can be eliminated by making sure that the title is clear. an investigation should be made along this line by an attorney or agency equipped to secure information from appropriate county offices. very often the owner has had a recent search made and is willing to pass this on to the purchaser, thus saving expense and delay in tracing back the records over a long period of years. such study will show whether there are encumbrances or liens of any kind on the property, and these, of course, must be cleared up before any transaction is entered into. the potential buyer should also have a survey made by a competent engineer to definitely fix the boundaries of the property. stakes can then be placed, indicating the corners and any irregularities in the outline of the area under consideration, showing the new owner exactly where his property extends. in many sections of the country the buyer is in a position to demand of the owner that such a survey be made at the owner's expense. this survey is particularly important where an area of considerable size has been cut up into parcels for sale to individuals. the steps that have been outlined to protect the investment are only those which a prudent purchaser will insist upon before transfer of ownership takes place. frequently a buyer becomes so enamored with a property that he hopes nothing will interfere with his acquisition of it, and he is apt to mentally minimize the possibilities of a cloud on the title or the exactness of the property lines. so many people have suffered serious losses from failure to look thoroughly before leaping that emphasis is given to these points as a means of securing ample protection for the buyer. _an income from the investment._--it is presumed that in most cases the owner of even a small tract expects to secure some financial returns from the land as a means of adding to his income. the plan that is proposed as a means of securing an income from the land should not be too complicated and should be of a type that can be carried on when the owner is necessarily engaged in other work. this, of course, may run the gamut from a small home garden to supply the vegetable needs of the household to the operation of a larger tract on a commercial basis. furthermore, as we get into the commercial type of production, that may be planned as a means of materially supplementing an income or eventually supplying the entire family income. especial attention has been given in recent years to the use of poultry as a means of supplying an income to the family which is willing to use its own resources for taking care of the flock. another means of securing an income is the growing of vegetables and the sale of these vegetables at a stand erected near the house for the convenience of the traveling public. many who engage in vegetable growing or egg production on a relatively small scale will find an outlet for their products through associates in some other line of work, who will be glad to buy from their country friends on the basis of quality and freshness that may not be obtainable through their community stores. it should be pointed out that where the area under cultivation is small, the production must be intensive. in other words, it would be uneconomic for the owner of a small tract to try to supplement his income through the growth of staple crops. he must specialize in some particular phase of agriculture, horticulture or animal industry that will bring the largest possible net returns per acre even though that implies a considerably larger labor cost per unit of operation than would be the case in the growing of the staple crops, such as the cereals. the successful production of vegetable crops or poultry products, for example, and their successful merchandizing, rest primarily on the interest and the adaptability of the individual. _avoiding causes of failure._--to know what procedures to avoid is to be fortified against failure and to be prepared to take advantage of those constructive measures which are conducive to success. a recent survey has been made in an eastern state on the causes of failure in farming, frequently followed by necessitous abandonment of the farm and home. this survey shows that one of the principal causes of failure is the effort to manage a farm that is too large for the operator's capacity; his inexperience and lack of knowledge constitute too great a handicap on a large acreage. best results can be secured in farming only by seeding, cultivating and harvesting at the proper time in each case. to a greater extent than is usually realized, success depends upon good management, which means doing the things that need to be done at the right time. if the farm is large there is a necessity for employing hired labor, and the costs of this labor, especially under inexperienced management, are likely to be out of line with the value of the products raised. in many instances the lack of technical experience can be corrected by dependence upon governmental agencies, such as experiment stations, county agricultural agents and departments of agriculture. these services are available to every farmer, in most cases without cost, and all that he needs is the will to avail himself of such expert help. in the cases of farms that have been abandoned, we find that the operators did not make contacts with dependable sources of information, an indication of the necessity of cooperating with the agricultural agencies or with experienced and successful neighboring farmers. still another cause of failure lies in the purchase of a farm at a price which requires the assumption of a mortgage which is too high in relation to the income from the farm. in short, an attempt to operate on an overcapitalized basis will, sooner or later, lead to disaster. failure to locate on a productive type of soil may easily lead to loss of the investment. if the local conditions, including good roads, school advantages and a healthy community spirit, are lacking, there will develop a feeling of discouragement and mental dissatisfaction which destroys morale and creates the desire to get out from under at any cost. _the stocked farm._--the question is frequently raised as to whether a farm should be bought already stocked with work and domestic animals and with farm equipment or whether it should be stocked by the operator himself. this will depend, of course, upon the type of equipment which may be available in the individual case. sometimes fairly good equipment will be sold with the farm as a means of facilitating a sale, but the value of each item should be determined by someone experienced in prices of such livestock or commodities as may be sold with the farm. in many cases the buyer has loaded himself with animals or equipment that are ill adapted to the farm or that are of no particular value, and in struggling to get along with them he may seriously handicap the efficiency of his labors. in most cases it will be found a better practice to add stock and equipment as the need becomes definite and the finances of the operator make it possible for him to add them to the farm. in this way he will be fairly sure of acquiring only those items which will be of direct use and benefit to him and will avoid an accumulation of worn-out or antiquated articles which will not meet the requirements he must observe in selecting tools for his work. _avoiding fire loss._--possibility of loss by fire is an ever-present reality to the owner of a country place. there are two methods of preventing loss, and the observance of both will contribute to the peace of mind of the owner. in the first place, he should make sure that adequate insurance is carried on his buildings and equipment so that in case of loss through fire there will be sufficient indemnity to permit the rebuilding of the destroyed or damaged structures. lightning heads the list of the causes of farm fires and is frequently not reckoned with by urban residents who have seen little evidence of its destructiveness. in cities, points of electrical concentration are avoided by diffusion through piping, metal poles and a number of other conductors of electricity. the owner of a country home can secure quite complete protection from damage through lightning by the use of electrical conductors, usually called lightning rods, properly installed. such equipment does away with per cent of the risk caused by lightning. in installing a system of lightning rods, it is well to observe a few simple precautions. the most exposed parts of a building should be provided with rods and the rod points should extend to feet above the structure. conductors from the rod point should go in the most direct line possible to the ground and sharp bends in the conductors should be avoided. one of the most essential precautions is to thoroughly ground the conductors. water pipes on the buildings furnish excellent grounding. the grounds for the conductors must be deep enough in the soil to reach permanent moisture. lightning rods that are not properly constructed or properly grounded may be a worse menace than if no such protection is attempted. specific methods of protecting farm buildings from lightning damage can be secured from state agricultural agencies or from reliable commercial firms which make a practice of erecting them. another cause of fires lies in unsound chimney construction. by using care and the proper materials in the building of chimneys, fire may be avoided. chimney bricks should be laid flat rather than on edge, thereby practically eliminating the development of chimney cracks through which sparks can escape into floor spaces, attics and roofs. fire risks to residences and other buildings can be reduced by building the roof of fireproof or fire-resistant materials. wooden shingles, while attractive and inexpensive, may become so dry at certain seasons of the year as to furnish tinder for sparks that may rise from a brush fire or from burning buildings in the vicinity. the use of slate or asbestos shingles is recommended for roofs and there are other materials now on the market which have fire-resistant qualities and can be safely utilized. flying sparks carried along on high winds constitute little menace to those who have equipped their roofs with non-inflammable materials. it is important to see that electrical wiring has been properly installed, and for this purpose it is safest to secure expert help. if the menace of fire is properly evaluated by the owner, he will naturally take suitable precautions to cope with it, both through utilizing adequate preventive measures and through having available equipment to make possible the smothering of accidental fires which may develop. the application of these available common-sense methods of fire prevention will practically eliminate the fire risk. an ounce of such prevention effort is to be stressed rather than placing dependence on means of fire suppression after the combustion occurs. _do's_ keep capital investment as low as possible. if part of capital must be borrowed, select type of mortgage that can be paid off most conveniently. determine tax rate before buying. make sure that title is clear and the property lines definitely fixed. if some income is expected, check on possibilities of location with that in mind. plan to secure income from intensive crop and animal projects, _e.g._, vegetables and poultry. use governmental aids to the fullest extent. carry adequate insurance on buildings, equipment and furniture as protection against fire loss. install protection against lightning. be sure electrical wiring is properly installed. _don'ts_ don't become heavily involved with fixed financial obligations at outset. avoid localities with heavy bonded indebtedness, resulting in excessive taxes. don't expect to get an income from growing staple crops such as grains. don't become dependent on hired labor if it can be avoided. avoid unproductive soil and top-heavy investment of capital. don't buy a stocked farm unless the stock is adapted to needs and properly valued. don't neglect to take every precaution against fire. don't forget chimney flues are potential risks. avoid roofs of inflammable materials. _chapter_ iv attributes of a house in the country the problem of selecting a home is always a serious one. success in choosing a satisfactory location and home in the country calls for careful study and good judgment throughout the procedure. in urban centers many services are taken for granted, such as water supply, sewerage, public utility connections and delivery systems. the establishment of a home in the country calls for the consideration of all these services. some may not be available and preparations must be made to do without them or to set up such procedures as will take care of the family's needs on the basis of the individual home. _the rural home._--to give the elements of satisfactory living under modest circumstances, the country home should be so located and serviced as to give the maximum of comfort and convenience for the money invested. the location, type of construction and interior arrangement of the home are important factors in attaining these objectives. unless the location selected already has buildings on it which meet the needs of the purchaser and his family, there will be the immediate problem of building the home or remodeling the structure already in existence. in recent years a great deal of attention has been given to rural homes, stimulated no doubt by the very evident trend of population from the city to the country. these homes should have attributes distinctly their own and should harmonize with the purpose and the location in mind. a house with lines that look well in town or city may be only a blot on the landscape when set in the open country. many excellent recommendations have been made for country houses by the united states department of agriculture, the president's conference on home building and home ownership (december, ) and by architects who have given this problem the specific attention it deserves. in general, we may say that the exterior of the house should have simple lines and should not be ostentatious or covered with inappropriate decorative effects. this is especially the case where the house is comparatively small and is located in the open country where there is a simple and pleasing natural background. the country house should be low and broad, rather than tall and narrow. the windows and doors should be of a size and shape that will meet utilitarian requirements and be so situated as to give a pleasing and attractive appearance to the whole structure. the materials used should be selected to meet the needs of economy in the original construction and should be of long-lasting type, assuring economy in maintenance. _essential requirements._--in planning the house there are certain minimum requirements which should be kept in mind. for example, the sleeping facilities should include at least one bedroom for every two persons and should contain not less than square feet per room. all sleeping rooms should be provided with cross ventilation, that is, with a window on each of two sides, and sufficient closet or wardrobe space should be provided, equipped with shelves and hangers for taking care of clothing. ordinary lighting facilities for each room include at least one window, with the kitchen, living room and sleeping areas preferably having two. windows should be so placed as to permit direct sunlight to enter at least three-fourths of the rooms. there should be daylight and artificial lights on all work surfaces such as the stove, the sink, work tables and in the family reading center. especial attention given in advance to the kitchen will be more than repaid by the convenience and efficiencies secured. there should be ample built-in kitchen equipment for small and large utensils, kitchen tools and linens. ample lighting devices should be employed and step-saving arrangements provided so as to eliminate as much effort as possible in carrying out the daily duties that are conducted in this important part of the country home. where the funds available for construction or remodeling are limited, it is important to know what the cost will be before the job is started. this procedure calls for a plan which will show the exterior appearance, the interior arrangement, and the cost of the completed job. plans can be secured from many sources in addition to those already mentioned. persons with architectural experience and ability may often be employed directly to plan the house and to supervise its construction. if the prospective builder wishes to select his own plans and to know in advance the complete cost, he can secure from processors of lumber a catalog of plans which are accompanied by costs of every item needed. such processors cut the material to fit at the factory and identify each piece so that the mechanically minded man can do much of the work himself with help he may employ. these companies will also quote prices on the cost of erection by their own employees in addition to the cost of materials. the outlay needed for lighting, plumbing and heating facilities can also be obtained from the same source. [illustration: (_courtesy u. s. department of agriculture_) a modest country home.] [illustration: (_courtesy u. s. department of agriculture_) floor plans of house shown on opposite page.] another method of procedure is to draw a plan of the house that contains the rooms considered necessary, submit such plans to a lumber merchant and get quotations on costs of various types of material necessary to construct it. such construction will usually require the services of a skilled carpenter and mason but permits of more latitude in most cases than is available under a set building arrangement. _types of country houses._--illustrations of small houses suitable for the country are shown on pages and . the floor plans of these houses are shown on the facing pages. there are many other types of small houses adapted to use in the country and the selection of any one is largely a matter of individual preference and ability to finance. because of the variation in prices of material in different locations, the kind and quality of material that the owner may desire and also the amount of labor that may be furnished by the owner, it is difficult to give in definite terms the cost of various types of buildings. estimates of costs of materials and construction may easily be obtained from contractors in the vicinity. simply with the idea of giving approximate costs, the conference on home building gives the following cost bases for building frame dwellings, obtained roughly by multiplying the volume by the cost per cubic foot. naturally the cost will vary in different sections of the country, and the level of artistry that is set up by the builder himself will be a factor. approximate costs per cubic foot for frame dwellings ----------------------------------------------+-----------+----------- | southern | northern ----------------------------------------------+-----------+----------- first recommended level-- , or rooms with | | masonry base, fire-resistive flue, both sides| | of studs covered, painted exterior, interior | | finish. | * - ¢ | * - ¢ second level--bathroom space, better finish | - | - medium level-- - rooms, with plumbing | - | - fourth level--adequate standard plumbing and | | hardwood floors | - | - fifth level--comparable to better type of | | middle-class city home | - | - ----------------------------------------------+-----------+----------- * the cheapest type of shelter (shack) may be built for perhaps half this cost. _pre-fabricated houses._--the field of house construction has been occupied almost exclusively by the individual architect or builder who has wrought according to the general ideas of the intending occupant or the real estate developer. when the plans are completed and approved, the contractor assembles the necessary materials from local sources, builds and equips the house and turns it over to the buyer in completed condition. under such a procedure there is little application of mass production measures which have reduced costs and raised quality standards in many industries, notably in automobile construction, for example. thousands of houses built to sell in the recent construction era of the 's have proved unsatisfactory and costly to the occupants as the result of shoddy building methods. such methods seem to be typically american as distinguished from the far more solid and permanent old world procedure. it now seems likely that the problem of economical and substantial housing will be met in the method that is also american--namely, by the pre-fabricated house to which various natural resources of the country contribute. the parts of such houses are made under mass production methods and easily assembled on the owner's lot. the same idea can be applied with ease to apartment house construction in any location. the first step in this direction has already been mentioned in the case of mail-order companies which cut the lumber to fit and supply every needed accessory to the last detail. the next step, and the one that bids fair to inaugurate an entirely new house-building procedure, is now in the making, although as yet it is in the experimental and testing stage. examples of such construction made their first public appearance at the century of progress exposition at chicago in . materials that enter into the construction of these new-type houses include steel, asbestos, aluminum and cement. as a rule, the buildings have a steel frame erected on cement foundations and without a cellar; the walls and partitions are of asbestos composition and the roof constructed of steel sheets with aluminum insulation. such a building is fireproof and proof also against vermin, lightning, wind and earthquake. the house is also adapted to and equipped with heating, lighting, plumbing and air conditioning facilities. the whole building is pre-planned and pre-fabricated as a unit with its component parts constructed under economical and interchangeable mass production methods. modifications of the construction above mentioned include the use of sound-proofed steel panels or insulation board for partitions and walls with an exterior of painted steel. many other modifications are being developed to insure individuality, stability, insulation and economy in first cost and maintenance. the lines of most of these houses are severe and modernistic in design, although decorative and unique effects are easily obtainable. the costs of the complete house unit range from $ for a one-room type to $ , to $ , for a complete home of modest size. the principal fabricators of these houses and their addresses are: general houses, inc., chicago, illinois; american houses, inc., new york city; american rolling mill company, cleveland, ohio; american radiator and standard sanitary company, new york city; columbian steel tank company, kansas city, missouri, and national steel homes, inc., los angeles, california. information on types and costs can be obtained by addressing these companies. _rural home life._--to have a successful experience in country life, one must become identified with one's surroundings and become a part of the community. those who seek to establish a country residence simply as a place from which to commute to city attractions will not only miss the greatest asset in country living but will probably find this existence unsatisfactory. to become interested in the growing plants and animals at home, to do with one's own hands the things that make the home more attractive and to develop a contact with the community that helps to increase its normal activities mean the attainment of pleasure and satisfaction so far beyond that obtainable in congested urban quarters that there is no comparison. in many cases this direct affinity with one's surroundings will come gradually and not always easily. it can be cultivated and should be a part of the plan of every family expecting to reside in the country. _trees as assets._--one of the greatest assets that can be secured in the country is well-developed shade. if the house under consideration is already built and has around it trees that serve as a softening and beautifying factor, as well as for shade purposes, the value is decidedly enhanced. if the home is to be newly built and a site is available where trees are already well grown, the house can often be placed in the midst of such trees, thereby gaining a number of years in the benefits that trees give and for which there is no substitute. few persons can resist the charm of trees. that they also have a definite economic value is shown by the added desirability we all attach to an attractively landscaped home where trees of various kinds and sizes furnish the motif. in acquiring a place in the country the newcomer will at once wish to plant trees, shrubs and ornamentals to beautify his holdings. if this is carefully planned at the beginning, succeeding years and a little care will add to the attractiveness and intrinsic value of the home. the saying, "a house is not a home until it is planted," has a great deal of truth behind it. most nurserymen will be glad to render assistance in properly planning and setting the ornamental landscaping of the home, helping the owner avoid mistakes and costly movings and replacements later. _commercial horticulture._--in addition to the plantings around his home, the owner of a few acres can at slight expense start small trees for later ornamental use or for sale at a roadside stand, for example. such small trees and ornamental plants can often be purchased at wholesale prices from nursery companies which have "laying out" stock, as it is called, for sale. the standard large-growing evergreens and deciduous shade trees can be thus transplanted to one's own acres, as can the popular dwarf types of evergreens and flowering shrubs. these may be planted in one area where they can be cared for as a growing crop, or they may be planted in groups for beautifying the premises while they are growing. again, single plants may be set by themselves and given special attention, later becoming "specimens" which are much in demand by admirers of the species. an appreciation of tree habits can be thus developed by all the members of the family, and considerable income may be obtained in later years, as the trees become "of age," through their sale. we are entering upon an era of making homes attractive as places in which to live and not as houses to go away from. all forms of plant life that contribute to this end will be admired and sought after in the years to come. _do's_ give special consideration to location, type of construction and interior arrangement. if building a home, select a type that fits surroundings. strive for simplicity of lines and full utilization of every cubic foot of space. remember pre-fabricated houses are practical and likely to supplant some other types of construction. in buying a pre-fabricated house, be sure plans and construction fit needs of family and materials used are adapted to the climatic conditions. give special attention to convenience and cheerfulness of kitchen. develop a plan of planting ornamental plants and trees to be carried out in due course. _don'ts_ don't try to build a city house in the country. don't neglect windows in number or size. don't overlook costs of completed job before commencing building or improvements. don't neglect the asset value of trees. _chapter_ v servicing the home many types of services are available to the country home owner, including rural mail delivery, the telephone and electricity. rural mail delivery in particular is so common that, on practically every highway, mail service is secured by the placing of a mail box along the highway at the entrance to the residence. telephone service is available along practically all the main-traveled highways and on a majority of the other types of roads. where the lines are not already installed, extensions may be obtained to new locations, and this is facilitated when more than one residence is to be served by the same line. the majority of families accustomed to city conveniences will want to have electricity available so as to use electric lights and the labor-saving devices that are operated by electric power. with the expansion that has taken place in the development of rural electric lines in recent years, there is not a great deal of difficulty in getting a location which will give the housewife the advantages that electricity offers. telephone service and electrical facilities may fall into the class of luxuries for those with limited resources. it may be pointed out in this connection that millions of farm homes are still using petroleum products for lighting purposes and are finding it no hardship. practically all would, of course, use electricity if it were available and financially possible. the new home owner in the country will find it advantageous to locate where electric service is obtainable. other services for the country residents are pretty largely up to the owner as to their utilization and type. it is necessary, of course, to have an ample water supply, to maintain sanitary conditions through sewerage of some description, to provide a method of heating the home during cold weather and to provide storage facilities for food during the dormant season. _the water supply._--perhaps the most important attribute of the country home is an adequate supply of water. this is particularly true where families have been accustomed to utilizing municipal water supplies which are safe and pure as to quality and unlimited in amount. in most country homes it is necessary to construct a water-supply system, which means reaching a supply of underground water, pumping it to the surface and piping it to locations where it is wanted. higher standards of living create new and increased demands for water. water for domestic use should be clear, colorless, odorless, soft, neither strongly acid nor alkaline, with a temperature averaging degrees fahrenheit. such water supplies can be obtained in nearly every section of the country. hot water is necessary in every home and there must be a heater of some type, using coal, petroleum products, natural or artificial gas or electricity for fuel. for this purpose a hot-water storage boiler or tank must be installed. _the dug well._--a dug well is one of the older types of wells. it should be large enough in diameter to permit ingress and egress to all parts of it for repairs or for cleaning. most dug wells require cleaning occasionally, due to the entrance of dirt at the top and to the washing in of clay and silt with the ground water. many of these wells contain harmful gases which have proved fatal to those entering them. before an attempt is made to clean such a well or to make any repairs, a lighted candle should be lowered into it. if the candle is extinguished, it will be dangerous to enter until the well has been thoroughly ventilated. a dug well will vary in depth from to feet, depending upon the distance it is necessary to dig for an adequate supply of water. types of pumping apparatus are on the market to cope with any depth in digging such a well. if dug wells are shallow, the water supply depends very largely upon current rainfall and in times of prolonged drouth there may be a serious shortage. fairly deep wells of this type are usually very satisfactory and will supply surprisingly large amounts of water when the demand is made upon them. [illustration: well drilling--an early step in locating in the country. in the foreground may be seen part of the excavation for the house.] _artesian water supply._--artesian wells have distinct advantages over dug wells although they are more expensive to construct. the water from such wells is absolutely pure and it never fails. this is because subterranean streams have been tapped which are not subject to possible surface contamination, nor are they dependent upon showers for replenishment. special power apparatus is necessary for constructing an artesian or drilled well. the drilling costs from $ per foot up, depending upon the nature of the subsoil and whether rock is encountered. unless such a well has been drilled in the immediate vicinity it is not possible to hazard even a guess as to when water will be struck. the consolation that such an undertaking has for the owner is in knowing there will be no doubt as to quantity or purity when the strike occurs. _water pumps._--pumps are now available which operate automatically by electricity and constantly supply the home with fresh water drawn from the earth as needed. the requirements for the pump and the motor will vary with the depth of the well and the water requirements of the family. in all such cases, therefore, it is desirable to call in for consultation engineers or competent representatives of pump manufacturers or distributors. it should be borne in mind that adequacy of supply is most important and that economy in first cost, achieved at the sacrifice of an adequate supply, may be a definite handicap to necessary home services. _heating facilities._--the type of heating apparatus that is used will depend upon the size of the house and its arrangement as well as upon the funds available. the simplest type of heaters are those which do not have a complete system of extending radiation through the home but depend upon circulation of the air within the house to equalize the temperature. in deciding upon the type of apparatus, it is necessary to make sure that the system is as low in original cost as possible; that it will probably have a long life, thereby spreading the first cost over a period of years; that it be economical in operation through efficient consumption of fuel, and that the system be easily controlled. the health of the family and the ability to live in a satisfactory manner will depend to a considerable extent upon the method of heating the home, especially in cold climates. particular care should be taken to make sure that whatever type of heating is employed is adequate in size. it is more economical to operate a heater that is somewhat oversized than to "rush" one which cannot easily maintain a comfortable temperature in cold weather. heating engineers and contractors are available to furnish information on heating costs in every locality. the generally used types of heating include stoves, circulator heaters, warm air, hot water and steam systems, and fireplaces. specialists of the united states department of agriculture have developed a great deal of information to enable the home owner to cope with the heating problems in a practical manner. it is estimated by the department that if a two-pipe hot-water system for a six-room house costs $ , the other systems for the same house ordinarily would cost about as follows: two-pipe vapor system $ one-pipe steam system $ a piped warm air furnace $ pipeless furnace $ circulator heater or stove $ of course, these systems vary in efficiency and in providing comfort as much as they vary in cost, but these estimates will provide the home owner with an idea of the outlay for taking care of the heating problem. the ability to maintain a satisfactory temperature depends as much upon the construction of the house as upon the heating apparatus itself. heat is readily lost through walls, roofs and windows. most houses can be made more comfortable at small cost by applying insulation or by correcting defects in construction. the use of storm doors or storm vestibules where doors are frequently opened to the out-of-doors will prevent drafts and conserve heat. metal weather stripping is the most effective means of preventing air leaks around windows and doors and making the entire house weather-tight. the fuel that is used will depend upon the type of furnace and the relative prices prevailing for different kinds. recent developments in oil heating bring this fuel in close competition from the standpoint of economy with coal or coke. oil is particularly adaptable as a source of fuel in homes in the country since tank trucks can readily deliver oil to the home owner. improvements in securing the maximum efficiency from all types of fuel are being developed continually; and there are now on the market furnaces, using anthracite or bituminous coal as fuel, which offer many advantages that were unknown to older types. _fireplace construction._--an open fireplace where wood can be used as fuel is a great source of satisfaction and pleasure, as well as a comfort, in country homes. wood of proper length for fireplace burning can be readily secured in the country and there is ample room for storing it. where the house is small in size, such wood fires can be used for heating the house satisfactorily in spring and fall and can be used to supplement other types of heating when desired. no country home can be considered complete without a fireplace. the comfort and homelike atmosphere that it gives make it a general asset for the enjoyment of the family circle. fireplaces should be constructed so as to insure a good draft with a maximum of heat radiation. it is desirable to build in the fireplace flue a damper which can be open when the fire is burning and can be shut when it is desired to keep heat from escaping from the room via the chimney. it is also a convenience to have a trap opening placed in the back of the fireplace on the floor so that ashes may be removed in this manner, eliminating the labor of carrying them from the fireplace. _sewerage of farm homes._--all wastes from the farm home coming under the term of sewage should go direct to a septic tank. here the sewage is held in a quiet state for a period of time, and through bacterial processes, the organic matter is destroyed. a septic-tank installation consists of four parts: first, the house sewer from house to tank; second, the sewage tank, consisting of one or more chambers; third, the sewer from tank to distribution field; fourth, the distribution field where the sewage is distributed, sometimes called the absorption field. plans for sewerage construction may be obtained from state and local boards of health and from federal health and agricultural agencies. [illustration: (_courtesy new jersey agricultural extension service_) an adequate sewage disposal plant is essential and inexpensive. a practical one is shown here.] the rural engineering department of the new jersey agricultural experiment station recommends that the septic tank have a capacity adequate to hold all the water used by the family for two entire days. for a family of six persons the inside dimensions of the tank should be feet in width with a length of feet in the first chamber and feet in the second chamber. the depth of water should be feet, giving the tank a capacity of over gallons, thus allowing gallons for each person during the forty-eight-hour period. the entire tank will be feet wide, - / feet long and - / feet deep. septic tanks are usually built of solid concrete, concrete blocks or brick, waterproofed on the inside to prevent escape of the contents except through the outlets described. these outlets should be to feet away from any source of water supply to prevent contamination of potable water. leading from the outlet of the second chamber, several lines of tile to inches in depth should be laid at a gentle slope away from the tank, permitting escape of the effluent at each joint. for a family of six persons a total length of feet of tile pipe will be sufficient in most types of soil. _food storage._--every country home should have a basement in which a room can be set apart for cold storage. such a place is suitable for keeping supplies of potatoes and other root crops, as well as commodities that deteriorate under conditions of warmth. surplus supplies of food from the garden can be placed in such storages and be readily available for use during the winter. with the surplus of perishable food products in cans and with a good supply of non-perishable products in such a type of storage room, economies in food purchase can be effected and the healthfulness of the family maintained through their use when fresh products are difficult to secure or are unseasonable and expensive. if a basement is not available for food storage, root crops can be stored outside the house and kept during the winter. these products should be piled in a heap, covered with straw or other clean, loose material and the mound then covered with earth. in this manner, potatoes and similar crops can be kept throughout the winter and until late in the spring without serious deterioration. it is important to select a site for such outdoor storage that is well drained so that water will not collect and freeze in the storage area. _services available to the country resident._--public agencies are available for help in solving the problems of country residents, varying from agricultural and horticultural practices to building construction, water supply and sewage disposal. as a rule, these services are of advice and suggestion, are free of cost and may be utilized freely by those living in the country. most of the counties in the united states have a county agricultural agent, who is located at the county seat and whose territory covers only the county in which he resides. the costs of such service are paid by federal and state appropriations, frequently supplemented by county appropriations, and also frequently through annual individual subscriptions. the county agricultural agent is really a field representative of the united states department of agriculture and of the state agricultural college in the state where he works. there is hardly a problem of the country resident for which he cannot obtain aid from the county agricultural agent. in many of the more thickly populated areas the problems of the family getting a location on the land for a home are already well known to the agricultural agent and he is therefore in a position to guide the newcomer and help him to prevent mistakes. in many counties there is also a home economics service connected with the office of the county agricultural agent and supported in the same general manner. this service, along the lines which the name implies, is available to the country home maker. groups of women are organized and meet at intervals for discussions on food preparation, canning and storage and the making of clothing for the family. in nearly every state there is a state department of agriculture with regulatory and promotional activities and dealing especially with law enforcement provisions passed by the respective legislatures. these agencies are also concerned with development of marketing facilities in many states. they are supported by state and federal funds and carry on such projects as the testing of cattle for tuberculosis, treatment in prevention of communicable animal diseases and the control of insect and fungous pests through quarantine and inspection activities. these departments are located at the state capitols and information on the services available can be secured by addressing the department in the state where one resides. because there is a lack of understanding among newcomers to the country of the services that are available through these agencies without cost, this particular mention of them is made. it is recommended that each family get in touch with the county agricultural agent, the college of agriculture and the department of agriculture and learn definitely of the help that can be secured without cost in meeting the problems of country life. _electric wiring principles._--public utilities are organized to furnish electric service and it will be found that they are ready to assist customers in securing the most satisfactory use of electricity. such knowledge, based on experience, will be valuable in helping owners to avoid costly mistakes and to provide for a wiring system that will be economical and yet complete. when the plans and specifications of the wiring system have been worked out, it is important to secure bids from reliable contractors. only those contractors who can do the work in a capable manner should be employed and it should be determined in advance that the installation will be in strict compliance with the national electrical code. for wiring work it is necessary to know the number of amperes the wire is to carry. this may be determined by dividing the load in watts by the voltage which is to be used. the service lateral is a system of wires which form a path over which electricity is carried from the main line to the house. this is generally built by the utility company and its cost will depend upon the distance of the residence from the main line and whether the owner furnishes poles, labor, etc. wires should be of such size as to give sufficient mechanical strength to stand up under sleet conditions. usually three entrance wires are used to carry the electric energy from the utility connection to the house. the lateral is the electrical doorway to the farm and is the most essential part of the wiring system. the wires should be of adequate size so as to provide proper voltage and give complete electrical service for all ordinary requirements of current. it is important to see that the electrical equipment is properly "grounded," that is, the connecting to earth of certain metallic objects which are near power conductors. the purpose is to carry to the earth any heavy electrical charge which might exist on such objects and cause electrical shocks when they are touched. grounding may be secured by connecting with water pipes that reach some depth under ground, or driven pipe may be used as a means of securing intimate contact with moist earth. recommendations for outlets from the electrical wires in the house call for centering ceiling lighting outlets, and placing wall brackets about - / feet above the floor. convenient outlets in the kitchen and bathroom should be about inches above the floor. in other locations they are usually best placed in the baseboard. wall switches are usually located feet above the floor. a switch should be located at each door to a room or entrance to a hall and in many cases three-way switches can be used to advantage, since these afford control over the same lighting from two separate locations. with these general observations on a rather complicated subject, most of which are based on the excellent recommendations of the national committee on the relation of electricity to agriculture, the home owner should be in a position to take care of his needs properly, bearing in mind that the system of wiring should be adequate in every respect and the number of outlets sufficiently numerous to provide easy and convenient service throughout the house. an official check-up should be made of all installations after completion. the method of securing such inspection can be obtained through a local electrical contractor. [illustration: (_courtesy new jersey agricultural extension service_) ground floor plan of a house, showing the number, the type, and the location of electrical current outlets.] _tank gas supply._--a service of supplying compressed gas in portable tanks has recently been developed for country homes located away from public gas lines. this gas can be used either with a specially adapted range which is supplied as part of the service or in some cases with an ordinary gas range. companies offering this service are located in most cities and are understood to be willing to supply residences anywhere with gas. the cost of first installation of the system is about $ . renewals cost approximately $ per cylinder of gas. each cylinder will supply a family of four with gas for three to four months, making a monthly bill of from $ to $ , which compares favorably with artificial gas supply through a meter from pipe lines. this gas may be used for any purpose for which any other gas is adapted. the gas and the servicing of it constitute a boon to country residents from the standpoint of utility and economy. it is especially desirable for those previously accustomed to city gas supplies and to whom the use of any other type of fuel is strange and somewhat of a problem. _do's_ remember that important service factors include mail delivery, telephone, electricity, water supply and sewage disposal. be sure of adequate water supply of good quality. obtain artesian water supply wherever possible. provide for such heating facilities as the budget can stand. select the heating system in relation to fuel costs. make sure that the sewerage system is adequate for waste disposal. use fully such governmental agencies as county agents, home demonstration agents, experiment stations and agricultural colleges, state and federal departments of agriculture. provide storage space for surplus food products. remember electric wiring requires skilled workmanship. investigate advantages and costs of tank gas as a cooking fuel. _don'ts_ don't forget that services automatically available to urban residents must be planned for in the country. don't neglect construction defects that prevent full benefits from heating system. don't overlook the advantages of a well-built fireplace. don't install electrical service without full attention to principles of convenience, safety and economy involved. _chapter_ vi making the soil produce crops there are many treatises available that deal with the soil, its composition and its treatment. no attempt will be made here to go exhaustively into that subject. there are a few fundamental factors, however, which the potential owner should know regarding soil treatment, for that is the base upon which he will build his income-producing operations. the particles of soil have had their genesis in rock. the rock has become disintegrated and decomposed through natural processes. the action of the weather is the most important factor in creating soil. water falling on rock not only wears it away mechanically, but through certain mild acid elements which it acquires, disintegrates the binding materials that hold rock segments together. in addition, there is the action of frost and freezing, too, making the moisture in rock expand and contract and thereby causing the breaking down of the segments. with this action is coupled that of hot suns which cause expansion and breaking up of the rock as it becomes heated and cooled under atmospheric influence. a great deal of the soil surface in many sections of the country is the result of glacial action. these glaciers not only eroded the surface, thereby creating millions of rock particles, but they also carried large deposits of the rock particles to more distant areas and deposited them over a subsoil that may be totally different in character from the surface soil thus deposited. _how tillable soil is made._--the action of plants themselves has a great effect in adding to our supply of tillable soil. seeds of plants or seeds of trees become established in some slightly weathered rock areas and begin to grow. the roots penetrate wherever there is any loose soil, and partly by their pressure and partly through the acidity accompanying decomposing plant tissue, complete a further breaking down of the rock. there is a continuous process of destruction of rocks and leveling off of mountains and hills to fill the valleys below. many groups of deep-rooted plants tend to increase the depth of the surface soil by growth of the roots in the subsoil and by creating therein a condition approaching that which already exists on the surface. the action of earth worms and similar forms of life in bringing subsoil to the top and in opening channels through which water and surface air can penetrate constitutes another continually operating force in the creation of a productive soil. a deeper layer of productive soil can also be created through a plan of consistently deeper plowing, bringing up with each annual plowing operation a small portion of subsoil which, when mixed with the surface soil, tends to become like it. [illustration: (_courtesy new jersey department of conservation and development_) soil is created from rock by nature's weathering processes and by plant growth. at the bottom may be seen solid rock; just above are disintegrating rock fragments, and at the top, the soil.] every type of real soil contains all the elements of plant growth. this plant food results from a breaking down of soil particles and the setting free of chemical elements which, either singly or in combination, serve as food for plants. whatever the type of soil may be, it will be found that certain crops will make better growth in it than others. as a general rule, it may be said that the only way to determine which plants will grow best on a given soil is by the trial-and-error method. however, by observation of the growth on similar types of soil we can learn something of a soil's crop adaptability. there are some crops that will grow in almost any soil and there are others that need an exactness of texture, moisture and plant food which makes them highly specialized products. the operator must learn how to work in harmony with the peculiarities of his own soil before he can hope to get the best results. in acquiring a tract for the growing of plants of any kind it is desirable to get a soil type that will meet the requirements of most plants. as a general rule, this type contains enough clay to be retentive of moisture, enough sand to be easily worked and is generally suitable for bacterial growth. in other words, what is commonly called a loam is the ideal type for general agricultural and horticultural purposes. this may be a heavy loam, in which clay predominates, or a so-called light loam, in which sand particles predominate. an examination of a handful of soil by a person experienced in farming will indicate its nature and its adaptability to ordinary crop production. _essential elements of plant food._--countless scientific experiments in plant growth show that potassium, lime, phosphorus, magnesium, iron, sulphur, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen are essential to normal development. the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen elements make up nearly per cent of the entire composition of the plant and are derived from the atmosphere. all of the other elements are derived from the soil except in the case of peas, beans, clovers and other legumes which secure most of their nitrogen from the air. the mineral elements are not needed in large amounts but well-balanced plant growth is strictly dependent upon their presence in available form. of these elements, those most likely to be deficient either in total amount or in availability are nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium. it is entirely feasible and economical to apply concentrated chemical fertilizers containing the first three elements so that their lack will not constitute a limit to size of crops harvested. in many cases it is necessary to apply chemical fertilizers to get satisfactory yields, even where natural manures are available and can be applied as well. in addition to supplying essential plant food, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium perform specific functions in plant growth. the application of nitrogen in one of its readily available forms (e.g., nitrate of soda and sulphate of ammonia) will stimulate vegetative growth. if too much of this one element is applied, leaf and branch development may occur at the expense of the crop. good results follow the use of nitrogen on grass sods and on leafy vegetables like spinach. on the other hand, corn, peas, beans and other seed-forming crops need to have the nitrogen balanced with phosphorus. potatoes, in common with other tuber and root crops, will utilize plenty of potassium in the development of starch. _sources of plant food._--chemical fertilizers can be purchased at supply stores in ready mixed condition and of analyses that will meet general crop needs. a good formula for such a general purpose fertilizer is to per cent nitrogen, to per cent phosphoric acid and to per cent potash to the ton. it is known that such a mixture will supply the food needs of a large variety of plants in balanced amounts. highly concentrated mixtures are now on the market providing double the amount of plant food in the example quoted, costing nearly twice as much but effecting a saving by cutting in half the material handled to get the same result. care should be taken, in using these highly concentrated fertilizers, to avoid contact with tender roots. a mixture for general farm and garden purposes may contain the following ingredients: pounds nitrate of soda pounds sulphate of ammonia pounds animal tankage ( per cent nitrogen) , pounds superphosphate ( per cent phosphoric acid) pounds muriate of potash ( per cent potash) ----- , pounds. this mixture will have a formula of - - ( per cent nitrogen, per cent phosphoric acid and per cent potassium). the individual who wishes to mix his own fertilizer may do so by purchasing the finely ground ingredients separately, and by means of a shovel, integrate them all into a mixture. home mixing will not be found profitable where small amounts of fertilizer are used. those who practice home mixing for the first time should realize that most combinations of ingredients will "set" or harden if not used immediately, necessitating the breaking up and pulverizing of the mass. when it is broken up after curing, no further difficulty should be experienced with "setting" if the mixture is kept in a dry place. the advantages of home mixing for the large user lie in lower cost per ton of plant food as a rule; confidence in the quality of the ingredients which he should purchase on the basis of guaranteed analysis; and the setting up of a mixture which study of his soil and the plant requirements has convinced him is best suited for his individual case. _chemical soil analysis not helpful._--there is a mistaken notion that it is necessary to analyze soils chemically in order to fertilize them intelligently. such an analysis of a reasonably fertile soil will show the presence of the essential elements of plant food, though perhaps not all in sufficient amounts, to produce ordinary crops for centuries to come. only a small amount of the elements become available for root absorption each year and a chemical analysis will not bring out this most important factor--availability. the use of a few simple tests, mainly of a physical nature by a competent soils specialist, will prove of some assistance in the treatment of the soil. such tests will show the presence of adequate amounts of humus, and indicate the acidity content. the soil texture will give some index of its crop adaptability and thereby serve as a basis for fertilizing treatment that will meet the needs of both soil and crop. the practical man will not expect any considerable aid from a highly technical and costly chemical analysis of his soil. another factor that militates against worth-while benefits of chemical soil analysis is the great variation in soil types frequently occurring in the same field. to attempt to draw a representative sample by mixing soil from several areas might result in a specimen that would not be really typical of any area. for the purpose of ordinary physical examination and testing for acidity, representative soil samples should be taken from several parts of the same soil type, mixed together and a composite sample for testing drawn from the mixture, weighing not less than a pound in each case. if the soil is quite apparently variable it may be necessary to draw two or more composite samples from the same area. very helpful service in intelligent soil treatment may be secured from the county agricultural agent and the state college of agriculture in the county or state of residence. _legumes as soil improvers._--a means of soil improvement that is well understood by progressive farmers is the use of legumes to improve the soil. the legumes include a large family of plants of which the bean, the pea and the clovers are outstanding examples. such plants have on their roots nodules which house nitrogen-gathering bacteria. these bacteria absorb nitrogen from the air in the soil and, in the ordinary process of growth, death and decay, make this nitrogen available to the host plants, leaving a residue in the soil for the roots of plants that are to follow. thus this group of plants, known as legumes, have been used for generations as a method of increasing the nitrogen content of soils. nitrogen, incidentally, is the most costly element to buy in commercial fertilizers. the soil-improving benefits of legumes may be secured by growing them either for harvest as a source of animal food or for plowing under as a means of utilizing them entirely for the development of soil fertility. in reading of the studies of soil fertility that were made by george washington at mount vernon, we learn of the improvement that he made in the relatively poor soils of that area by growing plants of the legume family. the actual reason why such improvement was brought about was not known in washington's time, but the results were apparent. today, the value of legumes as soil builders is well recognized and we understand much more definitely than washington did the reasons for their being so helpful in increasing crop production. many soil areas do not contain the particular type of bacteria necessary to the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen by legumes. this is frequently the cause of failure in growing alfalfa, soybeans, cowpeas and less well known members of the legume family. each legume has its own type of nodule-forming bacteria. in order to assure the presence of the proper bacterial family, means often must be employed to add them to the soil where the specific crop is to be grown. this may be accomplished by adding soil from an area where the legume does well to the new area, or the seed may be inoculated with commercial cultures before seeding. either method is effective. if soil is used it should be drilled in or spread on a cloudy day to prevent the destructive action of the sun's rays on the exposed minute forms of plant life we call bacteria. if it is not known that the legume to be planted has been grown successfully in a given field within the previous several years, the precaution of adding the proper bacteria should be taken. in some sections, such legumes as red, alsike, crimson and white clovers have been grown for many years and the bacteria for these plants are well distributed. there, inoculation is not necessary for these crops, but it probably should be practiced if other legumes such as alfalfa, cowpeas or soybeans are to be grown on land for the first time. _the value of humus._--in addition to the chemical elements of plant food, all productive soils contain decaying vegetable matter, generally classified under the term "humus." humus serves as a source of acid-generating material which further breaks down soil particles and, most important of all, serves as a food for millions of microscopic plants which develop and die quite beyond the scope of human vision. these constitute a type of bacteria which are distinctly beneficial and essential to human life since they make possible the growth of larger plants that serve as human food. green plants, straw or leaves, when plowed under or spaded in the soil, are attacked by bacterial agencies which gradually turn these products into humus. the same process occurs when a "compost" is set up. this is made of leaves, manure, soil, straw and other materials thrown into a heap and allowed to decay. such compost is excellent for placing around plants when setting them out, since it holds moisture, supplies fertility and creates optimum conditions for young root growth. under practical field conditions, humus may be added to soils by spreading animal manures, followed by plowing them down, or by the growing of heavy green crops such as wheat, rye, cowpeas or vetch and turning the entire mass under with the plow when they are at their height. _lime and its application._--reference has been made to the fact that calcium is an essential plant food and is frequently deficient in soils. as a matter of fact, the great majority of soils are deficient in calcium and their productiveness is inhibited thereby. lime supplies calcium and also magnesium as food for plants. its application accomplishes many other desirable things such as correcting soil acidity. the growth of beneficial bacteria is greatly stimulated in a soil that has had its acidity neutralized by the application of lime. this product, therefore, creates a more congenial condition for the growth of bacteria, which, in turn, make for better crop production. lime is also beneficial through furnishing the element calcium with which other plant foods combine chemically and thereby become soluble in the soil water. unless plant foods are in a state of solution, they cannot be absorbed by plant roots. lime is a potent force in creating chemical reactions in the soil, resulting in the stimulation of growth through increased absorption of essential elements in solution. lime also benefits soils of a clayey nature through its ability to cement together the fine clay particles and in that way create air spaces so greatly needed in tight clay soils. lime is beneficial, too, in the case of soils which have a large proportion of sand or large particles, and serves as an agent in creating a better condition of tilth and of moisture retention. it makes little difference in what form lime is applied. it may be purchased and applied in the form of ground limestone, a rock rich in calcium which has been mechanically ground to a very great degree of fineness. it can also be applied in the form of hydrated lime. this is obtained by heating ground limestone and slaking it by adding water. a common example of this is the slaking of lime for whitewashing purposes. another good source of lime is finely ground shells of oysters or other forms of sea life which collect the calcium from sea water and deposit it in their shells. _adjusting the water content of soils._--aside from the supplying of water by irrigation, a rather costly process under most conditions, the water resources of most soils can be greatly increased by adding to their humus content. humus, which, it has been pointed out, is decaying vegetable matter, serves as a sponge for the absorption of soil water and for underground water supplies. therefore, the more humus that can be plowed into the soil, other conditions being equal, the greater is the ability of the plants growing in that soil to withstand drouth. as soils are cultivated, the tendency is for the humus to become "burned out" and to have a reduced moisture-holding capacity. to overcome this tendency, it is necessary to add vegetable matter to the soil whenever it is possible. incidentally, the incorporation of large quantities of humus in the soil creates a condition of acidity which may call for the application of lime as a corrective. there are many acres of land which contain too much water in the area that roots should penetrate to permit of optimum plant growth. roots of most plants will not penetrate where there is an excess of water, and air cannot circulate where moisture is superabundant. usually these conditions exist where the soil is of a clayey nature. the abundance of water may be caused by the inability of surface water to percolate through the soil. it may take so long, due to the nature of the soil, for this water to pass through the lower depths of subsoil that the roots of plants are destroyed by lack of oxygen. in such cases the application of lime, increasing the humus content, and deeper plowing will be found helpful. occasionally, the discharge of dynamite or blasting powder in the area, if it appears to be in the form of a pocket, will break up the hard pan subsoil and permit the water to escape. less dependence is now being placed on this means of correcting a wet condition of the soil than was the case some years ago. a similar condition of overabundant water in soil may be due to the presence of springs or to a high water table. little can be done to correct a condition where the water table itself is so close to the surface as to inhibit plant growth and this is assuredly one of the factors to be looked into before a tract is purchased. where the surplus water is evidently being supplied by a spring, an underdrain made of tile pipe, or inches in diameter, can be laid as a means of conducting the water into a ditch or adjoining drain. in laying such a drain, it should be placed above the area where the wet soil surface is most evident. if such a drain is laid inches to feet deep above the wet area, it will cut off the water seeping down underground and carry it away. good results cannot be secured if the drain is laid directly in the area of extreme wetness or if it does not cut off the flow of water before it reaches the area that is consistently too wet for plant growth. from what has been said in this brief description of soil treatment and soil improvement, it is evident that one must live with his soil for some time in order to understand it and to be able intelligently to correct its deficiencies, overcome its weaknesses and make it capable of supporting plants which are desirable from the owner's point of view. in the great majority of cases, the improvement process, while a slow one, is far from hopeless and almost any soil that is not extremely sandy or clayey can be so intelligently treated as to make it productive. _cultivation._--any discussion of soil treatment is not complete without mention of cultivation. intelligent cultivation is an essential factor in securing adequate crops. it is interesting to recall that the word "manure," which has come to mean fertilization or fertilizer, is derived from the latin word "_manus_" meaning "hand" and implying "manipulation" of the soil, which we now call cultivation. cultivation has been most frequently practiced as a method of destroying weeds, thereby making all of the available plant food subject to absorption by the roots of the desired plants and not by the intruders we call weeds. cultivation does more than destroy weeds, however. it opens up the soil so that air containing atmospheric nitrogen can penetrate it and so that the bacteria requiring air for their best growth may have it available. furthermore, cultivation conserves moisture and is more essential during dry periods in the growing season than at any other time. we know that in entering the soil the rain water follows certain channels in and around the soil particles on its way to the subsoil. when the rain has ceased and the top layer of soil becomes dry, the tendency is for the water to work up through these same channels to the surface, where it evaporates. cultivation, by breaking up these channels, or capillary tubes, checks the escape of moisture into the air. it creates a blanket of dry surface soil which insulates the soil moisture from the air above. the tendency of soil moisture to reestablish capillary methods of escape makes recultivation necessary from time to time in dry weather. care must, of course, be taken that the cultivation is not harmful to roots of growing plants. if these roots are disturbed or destroyed through cultivation, more harm than good may result because of the damage to the root systems. _farm power and equipment._--where the land area to be cultivated is larger than the family garden some type of equipment for working the land, propelled by horse or motor, will be found desirable and in larger areas essential. one or more horses may be used where there are stabling facilities and where arrangements can be made for the daily care and feeding that these animals require. a horse suitable for work purposes may be obtained for less than $ . the price will, of course, depend upon the age and physical soundness of the animal, but should not exceed $ for a physically sound animal under ten years old. a person unskilled in the assessing of animal values should obtain the services of a veterinarian or an experienced horseman in making a selection. a horse for this purpose should be of quiet, tractable disposition, bred and broken for work purposes. the cost of caring for a horse for one year will approximate $ , including feed and bedding, but without labor charge. leather harness costing $ to $ will be required and in addition tools, including a plow, a harrow, and a cultivator costing about $ each. other special equipment such as a mower will cost considerably more, depending upon the type used. if the members of the family are fond of animals and willing to assume the responsibility for their daily care, the horse will be found an efficient and useful source of power for tilling the land. in this connection it should be pointed out that flies breed with great rapidity in the strawy manure of the stable, and such wastes should be spread upon the land almost daily or treated to prevent fly-breeding. _tractor power._--just as large tractors have supplanted horses and horse-drawn equipment on thousands of farms in the united states, the so-called garden tractor has become increasingly popular for the tilling of small acreages. the tractor requires "feed" only when it is working, is not subject to the ills that beset animals, and may be used for twenty-four hours a day if necessary. it makes an appeal to the mechanically minded members of the household and, if properly cared for, will give economical and lasting service. the usual type of garden tractor consists of two large wheels with lugs on them to give traction and is driven by a one- or two-cylinder motor. a plow, a cultivator, or mower may be attached to the drawbar, the operator walking behind and regulating the speed and guiding the outfit by handles provided for the purpose. earlier types of these machines were not always satisfactory owing to construction weaknesses and occasionally balky motors. those now on the market, however, are greatly improved, require less attention, and rival their big brothers, the powerful farm tractors, in dependability. there are a number of types and makes of garden tractors now on the market, ranging in price from $ or less to $ , the cost depending largely upon the size and capacity of the motor. in selecting a satisfactory garden tractor attention should be directed to the simplicity and power of the motor, the type of bearings, the method of lubrication of all moving parts, the working speed and the economy of fuel. bearings ought to be of standard, long-wearing type since these are subject to hard service. two speeds are desirable, a slow one for heavy duty and a faster one for lighter work. the tractor should operate all day on about gallons of gasoline and a quart of oil. in addition to power applied at the drawbar where special tools are attached, a pulley will be found a desirable accessory for operating belt machinery such as small feed mills, pumps, and cream separators. the rating of the motor should be not less than horsepower at the drawbar for the ordinary tasks it will be called upon to perform. all types of attachments are available for the garden tractor. these include plows, disks, harrows, cultivators, mowers, fertilizer distributors, planters, sowers and seeding accessories. the prices of these vary according to make and quality. levers are provided for adjusting the depth of plowing, cultivating and seeding. some of the large type garden tractors are equipped with a seat on a sulky attached to the machine so that the operator can ride and have complete control over speed and the type of work he wishes to do. a modern garden tractor will be found very useful in taking care of a lawn or garden. in the case of larger areas under cultivation, but not of field size, this type of machine is rapidly gaining popularity for performing efficiently and economically the numerous jobs that are to be done on every small farm. _do's_ select a soil type that is inherently productive, fertile, retentive of moisture and easily cultivated. supplement soil fertility by adding chemical fertilizers either singly or in combination. buy mixed fertilizers on the basis of guaranteed analyses. use legumes (peas, beans, etc.) to add nitrogen to soils and increase humus content. add specific bacteria for the production of various legumes. use manure and green crops to supply humus. apply lime when soil test shows need for it as plant food and general soil improver. practice methods that make soils absorptive of moisture and permit escape of excess water. cultivate the soil to check escape of moisture and to kill weeds. use a horse or garden tractor for cultivation of areas larger than the family garden. _don'ts_ don't buy land that is continually wet and swampy. don't expect to produce satisfactory crops on soils that are extremely heavy or clayey or so sandy as to quickly lose moisture and fertility. don't try to produce crops without maintaining the humus supply in the soil. don't neglect cultivation as a means of conserving moisture, destroying weeds and stimulating root growth. _chapter_ vii food from the garden the home vegetable garden should supply an important part of the food for every family living in the country. vegetables that are of the right varieties and that are fresh and properly prepared are nutritious, wholesome and economical. not only does the well-organized home garden reduce the cost of feeding the family, but it constitutes an effective method of maintaining better health among all members of the household. even common vegetables that are grown from the best varieties and served fresh will be a revelation to those accustomed to buying them in stores. deterioration in quality and palatability begins immediately in vegetables when they are harvested. the more perishable the commodity, the greater is the rate of deterioration. the commercial vegetable grower usually inclines toward varieties that are capable of producing a heavy yield per acre or that stand shipment and temporary storage with the least apparent loss from deterioration. in order to have his products reach the consumer in an attractive condition, the commercial grower usually must harvest them before they are at their best. the channels through which vegetables and fruits pass on their way to the city consumer are devious, slow and costly. such a consumer therefore usually receives so-called fresh products that have been removed from the plant or the soil before maturity is attained and after such already poor quality has deteriorated through aging processes. all these disadvantages of vegetables purchased in the city are eliminated by the possessor of a garden where he may produce his family's needs (and they are genuine needs) in the way of fresh vegetables. these products are essential in supplying such necessary elements as minerals, vitamins, acids, and cellulose. dietary authorities advise that leafy vegetables, sometimes called "greens," contain food elements not found in root vegetables. for the maintenance of health, the diet should include a variety of vegetables besides potatoes. _assets of a garden._--a garden is a source of recreation, pleasure and satisfaction to every member of the family. real enjoyment can be had by working in it a little time each day. to those whose work may be sedentary and of a routine nature, the garden furnishes a source of inspiration and adventure. daily evidences of plant growth and the novelty of having vegetables of one's own growing stimulate interest in it. the garden is an aid in maintaining health through physical exercise and the liberal consumption of the fruits of labor. there is no other avenue of activity that can afford so much in the way of health, economical recreation and pleasure as a well-planned garden. [illustration: (_courtesy new jersey agricultural extension service_) the well-planned garden furnishes food throughout the year for the entire family.] having decided on a garden, the question immediately arises as to the procedure to be followed to get the most out of it. special attention has been given to this problem by experts throughout the country and specific recommendations are now available on the subject at state agricultural colleges. these cover varieties, planting dates, adequate area, fertilization, rotation of crops and storage. typical recommendations along these lines are given here for the north-central and eastern states. readers living elsewhere may wish to check them with the practices recommended by authorities in their home states. _vegetable growing by rule._--the most effective method of presenting the story of recommended vegetables, desirable varieties, seed required, average yields and other pertinent data is in tabular form, such as that used in table i, which has been prepared for the aid of home vegetable gardeners by the new jersey agricultural experiment station, and which is based on years of study of the subject. table ii, prepared by the michigan state college of agriculture, shows the amount of seed that should be purchased to supply an adequate quantity and variety of important vegetables for a family of six persons. examination of the planting table will show that the setting of plants or roots is occasionally recommended instead of the use of seed. this is desirable in some cases to get quicker results and in other cases is essential if a crop is to be secured during a normal growing season. while it is possible for the grower to raise these plants, or sets, himself, usually more satisfactory results can be obtained through buying them from a capable plant grower. the growing of sets is a specialized business requiring conditions of heat, moisture, fertility and skill, frequently beyond the patience and capacity of the amateur. there are plant growers in nearly every neighborhood who will grow the needed plants at small cost. arrangements should be made in advance for growing the varieties or strains that are wanted, and usually the grower can furnish his own seed for the plants if that seems desirable to him. one desiring to grow one's own plants from seed can secure full information from a practical grower or from state and county agricultural agencies. table i planting table for vegetables[ ] -----------------+----------------------+-------+-------+------------+ | | | | distance | | | | | between | | | seed | depth | rows for | name of | variety | for |to sow |cultivation,| vegetable | | - | seed, | inches | | | row |inches | | | | | +------+-----+ | | | |horse | hand| -----------------+----------------------+-------+-------+------+-----+ asparagus |washington, palmetto | -yr.- | - | ft.| ft.| | |old |roots | | | | |roots | | | | beans | | | | | | green bush |stringless green pod, | / pt.| - - / | | | |bountiful | | | | | | | | | | | yellow bush |currie's rust proof, | / pt.| - - / | | | |davis' white wax | | | | | | | | | | | pole green |kentucky wonder, | / pt.| - - / | | | |old homestead | | | | | bush lima |fordhook | / pt.| - - / | | | | | | | | | pole lima |king of the garden | / pt.| - - / | | | beets--early |crosby's egyptian | oz. | | | | late |detroit dark red | | | | | cabbage--early |jersey wakefield, | pkt. | / | | | |copenhagen market | | | | | cabbage--late |danish ball head, | pkt. | / | | | |succession, | | | | | cantaloupe |early knight, | / oz.| | - | | |fordhook | | | | | carrots |chantenay, | oz. | / | | | |oxheart | | | | | celery |golden self-blanching,| pkt. | / | | | |easy blanching | | | | | corn--early |golden bantam, | / lb.| | | | |howling mob | | | | | corn--late |golden bantam, | / lb.| | | | |evergreen | | | | | cucumber |white spine, | / oz.| / - | - | | |davis perfect | | | | | | | | | | | eggplant |new york improved, | pkt. | / | | | |black beauty | | | | | endive |green curled, broad | pkt. | / | | | |leaved batavian | | | | | kale |scotch curled, | pkt. | / | | | |siberian (over winter)| | | | | kohlrabi |white vienna | pkt. | / | | | lettuce | | | | | | spring and fall|green-leaved big bos. | pkt. | / | - | | summer | n. y. salamander | pkt. | / | - | | romaine | g. r. exp., trianon | pkt. | / | - | | okra |perkins long pod | oz. | | | | onion sets |yellow strasburg, | qt. | | | | |japanese (eberheser) | | | | | onion seed |yellow globe danvers, | oz. | / | | | |southport globe | | | | | parsnips |hollow crown | / oz.| / | | | | | | | | | peas |little marvel, | pt. | - - / | | | |laxtonian, telephone | | | | | peppers |ruby king, pimento | pkt. | / | | | | | | | | | potatoes |irish cob., green mts.| / pk.| - | | | pumpkins |cheese, small sugar | oz. | / | | | | | | | | | radish |scarlet globe, icicle | / oz.| | | | | | | | | | rhubarb |victoria |roots | - | | | | | | | | | spinach--spring |bloomsdale, savoy | / oz.| / | | | spinach--summer |new zealand | oz. | | | | | | | | | | spinach--fall |va. dis., resist. | / oz.| / | | | |savoy | | | | | squash--summer |gold. sum. crookneck, | oz. | - - / | | | |white bush scallop | | | | | squash--winter |boston marrow, | oz. | - - / | | | |warted hubbard | | | | | sweet potatoes |yel. jersey |plants | -- | | | swiss chard |lucullus | oz. | / | | | | | | | | | tomatoes--early |chalk's early |plants | / | | | |jewel, bonny best | | | | | tomatoes--late |matchless, stone |plants | / | | | turnips |purple top strap. leaf| pkt. | / | | | rutabagas |golden ball, | pkt. | / | | | |lg. island improved | pkt. | / | | | -----------------+----------------------+-------+-------+------+-----+ --------+--------+------------+-------------+------- | | | | | | | |average distance|time of | | average | days between |planting| time of | yield | from plants |seed | harvest | -foot | seed in row, |outdoors| | row | to inches | | | |harvest | | | | --------+--------+------------+-------------+------- | -- |spring- | -lb. | yr. | |july |bunches | | | | | | | | | |apr |june | bu. | - |july |sept. - | | | | frost | | |apr. |june | bu. | - |july |sept. - | - - / bu. | - | | frost | | - |may - |aug. | - - / bu. | - | | | | |may - |aug. -frost| bu. | - |july | | | |may |aug. -frost| bu. | - - |apr. |july | - / / bu. | - |july |nov. | | |apr. |july-sept. | - heads | - | | | | |july |oct.-nov. | - heads | - | | | | hill |may |aug. | - fruits | - l | | |per hill | - - / |apr. |aug. | bu. | - |july |nov. | | |june |sept. | stalks | - | | | | or |may |july | doz. ears | - hill | | | | or |june |aug. - | doz. ears | - hill |july | frost | | hill |may |july | cucumbers| - | |aug. | - / bu. | | | | pickles | |june | aug. - | fruits | - | | frost | | |apr. |june | plants | - |july |oct.-nov. | | |apr. |june | bu. | - |sept. |apr. | | - |apr. |june | bu. | - |apr. -|aug. -oct.| | - |june |oct. | head | - - |may |june | head | - - |aug. |july-aug. | head | - - |may |aug. | - pod | - |apr |may | bunches | - | | | | |apr. |aug. | - / - bu. | - | | | | - |apr. - |sept.-nov. | bu. | - | may | | | |apr. - |june -july| bu. | - | | | (in pods) | - |may |aug. - | bu. | - | | frost |( per plant)| |apr. |july | bu. | - |may |sept. - | pumpkins | - | | frost | | |apr. |june | bunches | - |sept. |oct. | | |mar.-apr|may-nov. | - stalks | yr. | | |plant | |mar. |may | bu. | |apr. |june |cut all | - | | |summer | |aug. -|oct.-nov. | bu. | - |sept. | | | |may |july | squash | - | | | | |june |oct. | squash | - | | | | |may |oct. - | bu. | - |apr. |june - |pull until | | | frost | frost | |may |july -aug.| bu. | - | | | | |june |aug. l-frost| bu. | - |apr. |june | bu. | - |aug. |oct.-nov. | bu. | - |aug. |oct.-nov. | bu. | - --------+--------+------------+-------------+------- table ii amount of seed to purchase for family of six[ ] -------------------------+------------------------ vegetable | amount to purchase -------------------------+------------------------ | asparagus | plants beans, snap (in variety) | to pounds beans, bush lima | pound beet | ounces cabbage: | early | packet late | / ounce carrot | ounce cauliflower | packet celery | packet corn, sweet | pounds cucumber | ounce eggplant | packet kale | ounce lettuce | / ounce muskmelon | ounce onion sets | quarts onion seed | ounce peas | to pounds parsley | packet parsnip | ounce radish (in variety) | ounces rhubarb | plants salsify | ounce spinach | pound new zealand spinach | ounce summer pumpkin | ounce winter pumpkin | ounces squash | ounces tomatoes | packet or plants turnip | ounces rutabaga | ounce watermelon | ounces -------------------------+------------------------ _planning and operating a home garden._--in planning the home vegetable garden there are a few essential points to be kept in mind. the time to plan the garden is in winter when adequate consideration can be given to the selection of those vegetables that the family likes best and can use in large amounts. seeds required should be ordered early for the entire garden. by drawing the plan of the garden on paper and following it, the procedure is simplified and the most efficient results attained. vegetables should be planted in rows rather than in beds, and those maturing at about the same time should be grouped together to facilitate succession planting. after the early-maturing crops have been harvested, other crops can be sown on the same area, thus fully utilizing the land throughout the growing season. perennial crops, including asparagus and rhubarb, should be kept by themselves. a practical farmer wanting to express perfection in soil preparation is apt to say, "it is just like a garden." this implies good fertility, optimum moisture conditions and proper tilth. to attain these conditions in garden soil it is desirable to cover it with strawy manure some time previous to plowing, in order that rains may carry the soluble fertility elements into the surface inches of the soil. in the early spring a thorough job of plowing or spading should be done to reasonable depth, completely covering the surface straw or dead plants. every two or three years lime should be applied after plowing and worked into the top soil at the rate of pound of hydrated lime to every square feet of soil. _fertilizing and culture._--the fertility supplied through application of manure should be supplemented by the use of commercial fertilizer. this can be purchased in burlap bags from local supply agencies and should contain about per cent nitrogen, per cent phosphoric acid and per cent potash. moderate variations in analysis from - - , as above, are not important so long as the amounts of each element are well balanced. the fertilizer should be broadcast over the garden after plowing, at the rate of pound to every square feet and worked into the soil before planting. poultry or sheep manure may be used as top dressing to alternate with commercial fertilizer. it should be borne in mind that such animal manures are richer in nitrogen than in other elements and if used to excess may stimulate leaf growth at the expense of yield and quality. frequent shallow cultivations are desirable. the ordinary wheel hoe will be found helpful in the cultivating procedure. it should be well understood that cultivation is essential to prevent weed growth and conserve moisture. if watering or irrigating is necessary in dry weather, it should be thoroughly done. one soaking of the soil to a depth of to inches is far more effective than frequent light sprinklings. the latter may be more harmful than beneficial through reestablishing capillary movement, permitting the escape of subsoil moisture. water should be applied under the same conditions that apply when rain falls--on cloudy days or after sunset to prevent "baking" or encrusting of the surface soil as well as to conserve the amount of water needed. _meeting the insect problem._--the sponsor of a garden in which diversified vegetables are grown must be prepared to meet the onslaught of equally diversified insect species. while it is true that insects are multiplying as to species and voraciousness, it is equally true that methods of control are becoming available to cope adequately with most of them. one unfamiliar with our insect infestations will be amazed to find that certain species apparently have had advance notice of his intentions and are sitting about the planted rows awaiting the appearance of the tender shoots. one of the best methods of combating insects is to create ideal conditions for plant growth. plants that are underfed through inadequate soil fertility or are weakened by other causes suffer severely from insect attack, while vigorous plants will come through with much less damage. it is advisable to insure rapid germination of seed through careful soil preparation, to seed at the proper time for a quick and vigorous start and to have sufficient available fertility to stimulate growth once the plants have started. there are two distinct classes of insects, the division being based upon their feeding habits. the larger group, both in the size of the insects themselves and in the number of species, is the leaf-chewing group. these can be destroyed by the application of stomach poisons to the plants under attack. the other group consists of the sucking insects, which penetrate the veins carrying nourishment to the leaves and appropriate it for themselves. such insects multiply with extreme rapidity, generally feed on the underside of the leaves and may cause complete wilting of the plant before their presence is suspected. in such cases a "contact" spray or dust must be used. this is based on the principle of causing the insect to "inhale" the material through breathing pores along its body. the insecticide must be composed of extremely fine particles or must be of such an oily nature that it will readily penetrate such pores. in addition to these, certain repellent materials are being developed which cause the insect to seek food where the disagreeable conditions do not prevail. table iii principal insects and remedies[ ] -----------------+--------------+---------------+--------------------- plants attacked | chewing | character | treatment | insects | of damage | -----------------+--------------+---------------+--------------------- tomato, pepper, |flea beetles |they gnaw or |dust or spray with eggplant, turnip,| |eat small holes|a prepared nicotine cabbage, etc. | |in the leaves. |or pyrethrum mixture. | | |bordeaux mixture | | |sprayed, or dusting | | |for disease is also | | |effective as | | |a repellent. | | | | | | asparagus |asparagus |feeds on the |dust with either |beetle |shoots and |arsenate of lead or | |brush. |calcium arsenate, | | |mixed with part of | | |wheat flour. spray | | |with arsenate of lead | | |or calcium arsenate, | | | tablespoonful if a | | |paste or / | | |tablespoonful if a | | |powder, and | | |tablespoonful of lime | | |to gallon of water. | | | | | | all kinds of |mexican bean |eats the under |dust with part of beans |beetle |side of leaves |magnesium arsenate | | |mixed with parts of | | |lime, or dust the | | |yellow larva under | | |the leaves with a | | |pyrethrum dust. | | | | | | {|cabbage maggot| |keep the ground {| | |thoroughly cultivated {| | |around the base of early cabbage {| | |the plant or use tar and cauliflower {| | |paper discs for {| | |larger plantings. {| | | {|common cabbage|feed on the |same as for asparagus {|worm |shoots and |beetle. pyrethrum {|and cabbage |brush. |dust is also very {|looper | |effective. | | | | | | cucumber, squash,|striped |eats the leaves|protect with a and melons. |cucumber |and the stem of|cheesecloth or do the |beetle |the very young |same as for the | |plants. |asparagus beetle. | | | | | | pumpkins and |squash vine |kills the vines|take a sharp squashes |borer |by eating in |thin-bladed penknife | |the stem. |and slit the stem | | |lengthwise, opening | | |it and killing the | | |borer. then bank the | | |ground around the | | |stem of the plant. | | | | | | tomato, eggplant,|potato beetle |eats the |same as for cabbage potato | |leaves. |worm. | | | | | | tomato |tomato horn |eats the |same as for common |worm |leaves. |cabbage worm. | | | | | | tomato fruits |tomato fruit |eats the tomato|same as for cabbage |worm |fruits. |worm. | | | tomato, eggplant,|cutworms |cut the plants |protect with paper pepper, cabbage, | |off near |collars placed and other crops. | |the surface |around the stem of | |of the ground. |the plant, extending | | | or inches above | | |the ground, or | | |distribute poisoned | | |bran mash, placing | | |it near the plant. | | |thoroughly mix | | | level | | |tablespoonfuls of | | |paris green in | | | pounds of dry bran, | | |then add from to | | |quarts of water in | | |which / pint of | | |cheap molasses has | | |been mixed. cutworms | | |work at night, | | |therefore apply the | | |mash in the late | | |afternoon or | | |evening. -----------------+--------------+---------------+--------------------- plants attacked | sucking | character | treatment | insects | of damage | -----------------+--------------+---------------+--------------------- tomato, potato, |leaf hopper |feeds under the|dust or spray with strawberries, | |leaf, causing |a prepared nicotine and beans. | |a whitening and|or pyrethrum mixture. | |curve of the |bordeaux mixture is | |leaves with |also effective as | |a dying of the |a repellent. | |edges. | | | | | | | practically all |aphis |sucks the |either dust or spray garden vegetable |(plant lice) |juices on the |with a nicotine or plants. | |under side of |pyrethrum mixture as | |the leaves and |recommended on the | |on the stems. |package. be sure to | | |hit the insects on | | |the under side of the | | |leaves. | | | | | | cabbage group, |red spider |sucks the |apply a dusting strawberries, | |juices from the|sulfur. and beans. | |under side of | | |the leaves, | | |producing | | |a whitish cast | | |on the cabbage | | |group and | | |a brownish cast| | |on the other | | |groups. | | |especially | | |prevalent | | |during | | |prolonged dry | | |hot spells. | -----------------+--------------+---------------+--------------------- table iii (pages - ) describes the character of damage done by both groups of insects, the plants attacked and the most effective methods of control. _do's_ grow vegetables for health, recreation and economy. organize the vegetable garden for a maximum of output, variety of foods and to facilitate its care. use lime and chemical fertilizer or manure liberally for intensive culture. combat insects by stimulating plant growth and by using appropriate lethal products. _don'ts_ don't plant a garden in hit-or-miss fashion, if maximum food return is expected. don't neglect first appearances of insect damage. find out the cause of injury and use recommended measures for control. _chapter_ viii home fruits and bees a wide variety of fruits may be grown satisfactorily for home use. where no fruit trees are growing the best plan is to set out individual trees or bush fruits of the standard types and varieties, adding to the collection later as the needs of the family develop and the adaptability of the area for varieties manifests itself through crop production. all fruits thrive best on a deep, well-drained soil. it is difficult to secure good results where the area is depressed and air drainage is poor. elevation of the area planted is desirable therefore from the standpoint of both water and air drainage. a number of questions confront the prospective grower of fruits. he needs to know, among other things, the kind of fruit to plant, the necessary distance between the trees or plants and the probable yield. the following planting guide will be found helpful in answering these questions. home fruits and bees planting guide[ ] -------+----------------+--------+--------+------------------------- average| | | | number | | | | estimated yield of | |distance|distance| at maturity plants | kind of fruit |between |between +------------+------------ to | | rows, | plants,| average | average the | | feet | feet | per acre | per plant acre | | | | | -------+----------------+--------+--------+------------+------------ |apples | | | bushels | bushels |pears | | | bushels | bushel |quinces | | | bushels | / bushel |peaches | | | bushels | bushel |nectarines | | | bushels | bushel |plums | | | bushels | bushel |cherries (sour) | | | bushels | bushel |cherries (sweet)| | | bushels | bushel , |strawberries | - / | | , quarts| / pint | (matted row) | | | | per stool , |raspberries | | | , quarts| quart , |blackberries | | | , quarts| - / quarts , |dewberries | | | , quarts| quart | (hill system) | | | | , |gooseberries | | | , quarts| quarts , |currants | | | , quarts| quarts |grapes | | | , pounds| pounds -------+----------------+--------+--------+------------+------------ the selection of varieties of tree fruits is highly important. some sorts are preeminently adapted to home use because of their high quality of edibility while others are preferred for commercial production on account of their good shipping qualities and high yields per acre. it is advisable for the grower to inquire of his state agricultural college regarding varieties to plant. responsible nursery firms will also advise on varieties that will best meet the needs of the purchaser from the standpoint of family use and adaptability to soil and climatic conditions. the following varieties are recommended for general home use in north-central areas of the united states, subject to check by local authorities. the apple and peach varieties are given in the order of ripening. apples: william wealthy mcintosh rome stayman peaches (all freestone): golden jubilee georgia belle elberta j. h. hale pears: bartlett seckel cherries: montmorency or early richmond (sour) black tartarian (sweet) plums: damson (blue) burbank (red) about fifty strawberry plants will be needed for a row feet long. because of weed infestations in old beds, it will be more satisfactory to set a new row each year and destroy the old one. the plants during the season of setting should be trained to form a matted row about feet wide. mulching the plants after a freeze in the fall with straw or other similar material will prevent injury caused by "heaving" of the soil. currants and gooseberries should be pruned annually and only the one- or two-year-old wood retained for production. thinning out in this manner will give better size and quality. where the currant worm is troublesome the foliage should be dusted with arsenate of lead or paris green as soon as it is well developed and before the fruit is started. about thirty currant or gooseberry plants will be needed for a -foot row, and they can be planted along a fence or other boundary line. blackberries and raspberries should be set feet apart in the row, feet requiring thirty to thirty-five plants. old canes should be pruned out after fruiting and the weaker new canes should be removed when dormant, leaving or inches between the standing canes. lateral branches should be cut back in early spring to about foot in length and the upright canes cut back to uninjured wood, thus removing about two-thirds of the growth. grapes need severe pruning to produce satisfactory yields of good quality. this is best done in late winter. it is a good plan to prune so that from to or possibly buds are left on each mature vine, depending upon the vitality of the plant. two or three clusters of fruit will develop on the shoot that grows from each bud. a -foot row of grapes will require twelve plants. there are many fine varieties of grapes and several can be used in a single row. in ordering stock for planting, care should be exercised in making sure of the reliability of the nursery. as a general rule it is better to order from a nursery in the vicinity, thus eliminating losses due to shipping great distances and also making sure that the varieties or strains were grown for use in the area in question. upon the arrival of the stock from the nursery, it should be "heeled in" at once. that is, the roots should be covered in a trench so that they will not dry out before they can be planted in the desired location. in the case of a few trees that can be set immediately, this is not necessary. nearly all country places have sufficient area for planting small fruits and, as is the case with vegetables, freshness and fine-flavored varieties will compensate for the labor involved in growing them. strawberries, currants, gooseberries, blackberries, red and black raspberries and grapes are especially desirable for home plantings. some high-quality varieties are given for the choice of the home owner, subject to confirmation by authorities acquainted with specific conditions and intended primarily for home use. strawberries (in order of ripening): howard fairfax aberdeen joe chesapeake mastodon is recommended for the everbearing type. currants: fay wilder gooseberries: chautauqua poorman blackberries: russell ward eldorado for bush types black diamond for the trailing type requiring a trellis and ripening late in the season. red raspberries (in order of ripening): ranere viking latham black raspberries: cumberland quillen grapes (general list, in order of ripening): ontario (white) fredonia (black) delaware (red) brighton (red) golden muscat (white) concord (blue) sheridan (black) for those desiring a succession of blue-black varieties, fredonia, concord and sheridan are recommended. _controlling insect and fungous pests._--plant pests of various kinds infest tree fruits and small fruits. in general, the best method of controlling leaf-chewing insects is by applying arsenate of lead on the foliage. care must be taken to avoid staining the fruit with poisonous spray or thorough washing will be necessary before it is safe to consume. the control of other insect pests and fungous plant diseases has been well worked out by agricultural experiment stations throughout the country, and these methods should be sought before attempting any campaign of suppression. a barrel spray pump, mounted on a hand truck or on a vehicle, equipped with plenty of hose will be found satisfactory for spraying plantings of modest size. _rejuvenating an old orchard._--the purchaser of an old-established farm will usually find he has acquired some apple trees of uncertain age and health. in many instances these trees can be renovated and rejuvenated so that they will again bear fruit. if the trees have several sound limbs and are making some growth each year, they may be considered worth saving. on the other hand, broken tops and limbs accompanied by large rotted cavities will create too great an expense if an attempt is made to restore them to usefulness. the varieties should be determined before serious efforts at renovation are undertaken, so that the strenuous work necessary for restoration may not be wasted on undesirable fruit. _steps in renovation._--the first operation in renovation is pruning. most of this should be done in early spring during the dormant season and supplemented in june or july when the trees are in leaf. large broken limbs and dead wood should be removed, together with interfering branches, and those reaching too high should be headed back. at about the same time that pruning is started the loose bark should be thoroughly scraped off and burned, thus destroying insects and fungi that attack the fruit. harboring places for further infestations are also thus removed. if the trees are badly in need of pruning, it is best to do the job over a period of two or three years rather than all at one time, due to the tendency of trees to "sucker" and develop a multiplicity of small non-bearing branches. spraying, fertilizing and cultivation, where that is possible, should follow the pruning and scraping jobs. spray schedules and cultural practices best adapted to the region can be obtained without cost by applying to state or county agricultural agencies. ordinarily two or three years are required to rejuvenate these trees and begin to secure a crop. production will then increase in quantity and quality during succeeding years. _bees as pollinators._--the production of fruits of all kinds is dependent upon pollination of their blossoms by bees and other winged insects. bees of many species are useful in pollen distribution, but the most important is the honey bee, which is available in larger numbers just at flowering time, seeking nectar from the flowers. in large commercial orchards colonies of honey bees are set at regular intervals to insure adequate pollination, usually one hive per acre. a practical method of adding to county life enjoyment and adding to income as well is the keeping of bees for honey production. _securing a honey crop._--bee husbandry can be carried on successfully as a specialized side line where only small areas of land are available. colonies can be located at one side of the garden or placed under trees where they will not be disturbed either through accident or by cultivation of the plot immediately surrounding them. the activity of the bees during the nectar-gathering season, accompanied by the well-known hum as they dart in and out of the hive, makes a genuine appeal to the country dweller. this appeal is heightened by the fact that they are working for him, in part at least, and without his having to pay for their raiding the nectar from the flowers around. he knows that his efforts in providing favorable working conditions for the bees will be repaid by a harvest of salable honey. a colony at full strength just at the right time will invariably gather a surplus. _first principles in beekeeping._--the beginner in bee husbandry should purchase established colonies from a reputable business concern or from beekeepers in the neighborhood of his home. he should begin in a small way with a few colonies, learn the business with a small investment and then increase as his liking for the work develops and the market for the product expands. being able to read the signs at the entrance to the hive is the surest way to success. too much manipulation is just as harmful as neglect. the novice in beekeeping who is really interested and follows carefully a few details gained from a reliable bee book should harvest at least pounds of honey a year from each colony. experts get much larger yields and have been known to secure pounds per colony and sections of comb honey from one hive. the deciding factor in producing honey is the skill of the watchful beekeeper, assuming of course that there is a sufficient supply of nectar-secreting blossoms in the area. the cost of engaging in bee husbandry is nominal. an established colony of the preferred italian bees should cost about $ . the equipment should include two fitted supers for each colony in which the bees may store the honey, costing about $ each; a veil to protect the head and face, linseed-oil-soaked canvas gloves, a bee smoker, a hive tool and a bee escape (needed for removing the bees from filled supers), each item costing less than a dollar. an additional piece of apparatus, a queen "excluder," is needed for each hive, to keep the queen in the lower chamber and prevent the mixing of stored honey surplus and developing bees. the principal nectar-secreting plants are the clovers, sumac, buckwheat, cranberry and blueberry blossoms, goldenrod, asters and mallows. since these plants bloom at varying periods during the growing season, the beekeeper will find it necessary to adjust his operations in accordance with the nectar-producing capacity of his own region. the experience of successful beekeepers will be found helpful as a guide in taking the successive and orderly steps necessary to secure maximum honey crops. in many states there are associations of beekeepers formed for mutual advantage and the promotion of the industry. the novice can hardly expect to learn unless he affiliates himself with such groups and attends their meetings. subscription to a good bee journal is also desirable. [illustration: colonies of honey bees located near the source of nectar supply.] _selling the product._--honey can be marketed in the comb or in glass jars in the extracted or crystal form. many suburban beekeepers dispose of their crop in their own neighborhood or at roadside stands. many food products are being promoted which contain honey as one ingredient, and this opens an attractive field to the resourceful beekeeper. the healthful qualities of honey for human consumption are being given greater recognition and it appears that the market for locally produced honey of high quality is steadily expanding. _do's_ fruit trees should be included in every country homeowner's plan. be sure varieties are such as will yield, plentifully, good quality fruit. use bush fruits as ornamentals and sources of food to be put in cans. seek advice on fruit problems from the state agricultural college. old orchards may be rejuvenated under proper systems of management. use colonies of bees to pollinate fruit blossoms and to produce honey. begin bee husbandry in a small way at first and get advice from experienced bee culturists. sell surplus honey in home markets. _don'ts_ don't plant varieties of fruits that are ill adapted to climatic conditions. don't overlook the necessity of preparing for insect attacks in advance of appearance. don't establish bee colonies without making sure that proper care of them can be taken. don't try to practice horticulture or bee husbandry without frequently obtaining expert advice. _chapter_ ix poultry as a source of income the majority of the owners of small farm properties are interested in the possibilities of poultry keeping as a means of adding to the family income. efforts in this direction are logical from a number of angles. for example, the keeping of poultry appeals to them as an interesting line of work for the sake of the activity itself. furthermore, the cost of housing a comparatively large number of laying hens is not expensive, as compared with the investment required in other agricultural enterprises. again, there is a ready market for the eggs and for the poultry in the neighborhood where the enterprise is carried on. no doubt, too, the more or less fabulous stories of easy profits have stimulated a desire to get into this business and to make it a rather important source of income. again, there is the thought that the work involved in feeding and caring for the flock can be carried on by another member of the family when the owner or principal bread-winner is engaged in some other activity temporarily. all these factors have tended to develop in the mind of the settler in the country a pretty definite idea that he can supplement the family income with poultry. sometimes this idea is erroneous and there is apt to be little definite knowledge on the part of the new owner as to costs, problems and profits that are likely to accrue. it is the thought of the writer to outline some definite recommendations for the prospective poultryman which will enable him to safeguard his investment and prevent the very serious losses that have occurred to many who have not taken into consideration all of the factors involved. _soil type._--the prospective poultryman will, if he is wise, make sure that the soil is adapted to the project. the ideal soil for poultry raising is sufficiently porous to furnish good water drainage and yet not so open or sandy as to be incapable of crop production. a porous soil is warmer than a clay soil and is more conducive to good sanitation through permitting moisture and debris to be carried quickly to the subsoil. if the subsoil is of a gravelly nature the natural condition will be improved. presumably the same type of soil that will bear the poultry plant should be capable of producing garden crops, growing shade or fruit trees satisfactorily and producing grass and short-rooted crops that can be used in conjunction with the poultry plant or the beautification of the home surroundings. consequently, the soil type must be productive and capable of improvement while being well drained and conducive to good sanitation. heavy clay soils or those with rock strata close to the surface are to be avoided. successful poultry farms are operated on both level and rolling lands. extremely flat topography should be avoided and also precipitous slopes. if the site is on rolling land the poultry plant should be located on a slope with southern exposure to secure warmth, quicker drying conditions and protection from cold north winds. _breeds of poultry._--fowls have been domesticated and bred for ages all over the world. as the result of various crossings a large number of types or breeds of poultry are available for present-day use and propagation. some of these breeds are maintained for show or novelty purposes only and furnish an interesting field for the fancier. for the person who is engaging in the commercial poultry business the choice of breed narrows to a very few utility types. for purely egg-producing purposes or for broilers weighing slightly over a pound at killing time, the light mediterranean breeds are the most efficient. less feed is needed for maintaining the egg machine itself and less room per bird required. of these so-called egg breeds, the white leghorn is in a class by itself. this breed is noted for its large white-shelled eggs which top the markets where this color egg is in demand. in the most intensive egg-producing areas of the country the white leghorn predominates. on the other hand, this breed is not a good meat producer, the mature birds being light in weight. for the dual purpose of egg and meat production the american breeds are the most popular. the principal commercial types of this general purpose group are plymouth rocks, wyandottes and rhode island reds. in some instances crosses of these breeds are proving good layers and highly efficient meat producers. the rocks, wyandottes and reds have bright yellow skin, shanks and beak which are desired in market poultry. they are good winter layers, particularly, and some strains have been developed that rival the leghorn in the number of eggs per bird. both the white and the barred plymouth rocks are popular among those seeking a dual purpose breed, and being slightly heavier than white wyandottes and rhode island reds they are preferred by many poultrymen. the latter two breeds are rapidly increasing in popularity and their best qualities are being brought out more uniformly by careful selection of breeding stock in each case. all of these american breeds lay brown eggs. in addition to the egg and the dual purpose types of poultry epitomized by the leghorn and the plymouth rock, respectively, there are breeds which are primarily meat producers. less attention is paid to the egg-producing ability of these than is the case with the others mentioned. the brahmas, cochins and langshans stand in high regard as economical meat producers. the jersey black giant is a more recent addition to the popular heavy breeds, especially for the capon trade. these asiatic types grow slowly and are phlegmatic in movement so that they utilize feed for the economical development of high quality meat and attain great weight. for broilers of more than - / pounds each, for roasting chickens and for capons, the dual purpose breeds are becoming more popular than the extremely heavy breeds due to their more rapid growth and more popular weight average at marketing time. _buying stock._--the advantages of buying and maintaining definite breeds of poultry are now so well understood that the mixed or mongrel flock is fast disappearing. having decided which type of fowl is best adapted to one's market and ideas, there is no difficulty in finding a breed that will fit the need. as has been pointed out, the attributes of high egg production or fine quality of meat are inherent in certain breeds. a single breed means uniformity in color, size and shape of the eggs which increases their marketability. more attractive appearance of the flock and greater efficiency from feeding without additional cost are other advantages pertaining to standardizing the flock as to breed. stock may be acquired as day-old chicks, as ten- to twelve-week-old pullets or as adult birds ready to lay. hatching eggs may also be bought if desired, but it will be found more satisfactory and just as economical for the inexperienced person to buy the hatched chick or the more mature birds. the hatching and brooding processes are fraught with difficulties which may be especially acute for the amateur. the greatest demand at the present time, and properly so, is for day-old chicks. a highly specialized industry has been developed for the purpose of supplying this demand and a reputation for reliability has been established by many concerns catering to this trade. _poultry house construction._--where flocks of poultry are to be kept for egg production, special laying houses must be provided in addition to brooder houses that will be needed in any case. one of the best types of brooder house is the two-room type developed by cornell university, ithaca, new york. such a house should be about by feet, and mounted on skids for convenience in moving. a movable partition divides the house into two rooms. thus a cold room is provided for exercising and a warm room for sleeping. the marked difference in temperature between the two rooms helps to harden the chicks, while the reduced space about the hover conserves the heat. a great deal of study has been given to the construction of laying houses for poultry. the purposes in mind have been to obtain maximum sunlight throughout the day, protection from storms and from dampness, and adequate ventilation. in the construction of a modern laying house, square foot of glass should be provided for every square feet of floor space. the windows should be hinged so that they may be opened in warm weather. one of the commercial glass substitutes that are now on the market may be used instead of ordinary glass to allow violet light rays to reach the birds. the other openings permit free circulation of air through the house. they should be equipped with muslin curtains to be used during storms and in extremely cold weather. such a house can be used the year round. [illustration: (_courtesy of poultry tribune_) this sketch shows an end view of a practical and inexpensive shed-roof laying house. detailed blue prints for use in constructing such a house can usually be obtained from county agricultural agents or state agricultural colleges.] [illustration: a fine flock of layers. the hoppers furnish laying mash and the fountains supply drinking water. scratch grain is thrown in the litter.] the floor of the laying house must be dry at all times if vigor and health are to be maintained. during the winter there should be about inches of dry litter in the form of straw, peat moss or shavings mixed with the straw. small windows in the rear wall will make for better distribution of the litter, since the birds scratch away from the light. _equipment and appliances._--a great deal of hand labor and daily drudgery can be eliminated by equipping the house with properly constructed appliances. these will not only save labor but will also supply the birds with their needs at the time the need for certain materials is felt and thus contribute to health and flock efficiency. the best method of feeding dry mash is from a hopper. this should be so constructed as to hold a reserve supply at all times that will run into the feed trough as it is consumed. care should be taken in construction to prevent the birds from throwing out the mash with their beaks and thus wasting it. water fountains of a standard type that will furnish the birds with a constant amount of fresh water are available at poultry supply houses. receptacles should also be provided for grit, ground oyster shell and charcoal which can be easily filled. a sloping board should be placed over these receptacles to prevent the birds from roosting on them and soiling the contents. bins so constructed as to be vermin-proof and moisture-proof should be available for storing the scratch grain and other concentrated feeds. provision for storing litter where it can be kept clean and dry will be necessary. if long straw is to be used, a cutter operated by hand or by a motor will prove useful in fining the straw. the scratch grain will be spread through the litter on the floor, compelling the birds to scratch for it and thus obtain needed exercise. _artificial lighting._--modern laying houses are equipped with electric lights that are turned on and off automatically. artificial lighting prolongs the hen's working day when the days are short, resulting in greater food consumption and more exercise which will increase egg production and give better health and stamina at seasons when more eggs augment profits. a -watt bulb should be placed in one receptacle with reflector for each square feet of floor space, located midway between the front wall and the front line of perches. _investment needed for the start._--the prospective poultryman should be familiar with the principal items of cost before engaging in the business. to be thus forewarned is to be forearmed. the scale upon which one takes up commercial poultry production should depend upon experience in coping with the industry's peculiar problems and upon the amount of capital available. success depends, of course, both upon skill in handling the poultry and upon the capitalization of the plant. it should be recognized that costs can be only approximate and are usable as guides only. they will vary according to geographical location, general economic conditions, labor costs and the bargaining power of the individual. the figures here given are for a plant comprised of , laying hens--the minimum number from which a living can be obtained and probably the maximum number that can be cared for by one person. the houses for the flock will necessarily include a laying house of the multiple unit or other similar type, which should cost about $ , . in addition, eight brooder houses will be needed to care for the chicks and growing stock, costing about $ each, or a total of $ . the growing stock when on range will need shelters for protection against hot sun and rain, and these should be built for about $ each, or a total of $ , making a total cost for buildings and the necessary interior equipment about $ , . in addition to this item, there will be needed about $ , for the purchase of pullets at $ . each, making a grand total of $ , . if baby chicks are purchased, it will be necessary to buy not less than , of these if the operator is to obtain , desirable laying birds. the cost of these chicks will depend upon the breeding that is behind them, upon whether they are blood-tested to eliminate bacillary white diarrhea (a scourge of young chicks) and the general care that has been taken in the hatchery to produce good, livable chicks. this care, incidentally, must extend to flocks from which the hatching eggs are secured, as well as to the final incubating process. chicks sold at extremely low prices are rarely bargains. quality is far more important than low first cost. assuming a cost of cents per chick as an average for chicks that will produce virile, productive layers, the initial investment for this item will be between $ and $ . therefore, if chicks are purchased, it will reduce the item for stock from the amount of $ , given above, which would represent the cost of partly grown pullets. assuming that the complete poultry plant already stocked will cost $ , , we must add to the budget of the prospective poultryman a sum for the purchase of a farm of from acres upward, including a residence. in most localities a small tract with a modest house can be purchased for about $ , . if only the land is purchased, that should be available at $ an acre as a subdivision of a larger tract. assuming that a house costing $ , will be suitable for the operator and his family, the total outlay will be in the neighborhood of $ , . experienced poultrymen estimate that a modest poultry farm of the type above described can be put into operation for an investment of $ per bird. if it is planned to begin with a smaller flock than , individual layers, the same figures can be applied in proportion to the number of birds to be kept. in short, the poultry house and equipment should be estimated on the basis of not less than $ . per bird and the cost of the farm, residence and stock will be in addition to such a charge. the allowance of $ . per bird provides only for simple housing facilities for the flock. using these figures, it will be easy to understand the reason for the general recommendation that a total investment of $ , is a requisite for a poultry establishment from which a modest living can be obtained. while the investment in housing, land, residence and stock may not exceed $ , , there will need to be sufficient capital for paying the living expenses of the family until the flock begins laying and to enable the operator to purchase feed and other necessary adjuncts to his establishment before an income is obtained. for a flock of smaller size than the so-called maximum one-man type above described, the costs per bird for the various items will apply in most cases. it is, in fact, advisable to begin with a smaller flock if the owner is inexperienced. _do's_ poultry keeping must be efficiently carried on to yield returns to the country home owner. select well-drained soil that is free of infection. for egg production, use the leghorn; for both meat and egg purposes, the american breeds are best. standardize on one breed if possible. buy the best chicks or mature stock available. use a brooder house for the young birds. the laying house must be well ventilated, fully lighted and easily cleaned. use latest mechanical feeding and watering devices to save labor. employ artificial lighting to lengthen the hen's working day. work toward the "one-man plant"--a total of , laying hens--for most efficient results. _don'ts_ don't try to raise poultry in buildings that may still carry infection. don't economize by buying cheap chicks or breeding stock. don't overlook importance of health factors and productive qualities in determining value of stock purchased. don't try to operate a poultry plant with ill-adapted buildings and equipment. _chapter_ x successful management of poultry the successful poultryman will have set up his establishment with due attention to adequate housing, good stock, facilities for maintaining sanitation and for creating generally favorable conditions for egg production. his next problem will be that of adopting successful methods of management so that he may obtain a satisfactory net income from the investment. _feeds and feeding._--there are two groups of materials that are essential in food rations for all ages of poultry. the organic feeds include grains and grain by-products, hays, grasses and vegetables. the inorganic feeds include salt to increase palatability and digestibility of the ration; lime, to aid in building bone and body tissue as well as to furnish the shell material; bone ash, especially for growing chicks, and water in liberal amounts supplied by a fountain as well as from succulent green foods. the fact that a dozen eggs contain approximately one pint of water demonstrates the necessity of having drinking water before the flock at all times. the feeding of baby chicks, young stock and laying hens has been scientifically worked out by research and practical experience over a period of many years. the poultryman, especially if he is a novice, will do well if he carefully observes the recommendations of competent authorities. the ration for each of the three ages will consist of a grain feed and a dry mash composed of grain by-products reinforced with materials that supply the birds' daily nutrition requirements. the following rations and recommendations for management have been prepared by the new jersey agricultural experiment station, new brunswick, new jersey: chick ration baby chick grain pounds finely cracked yellow corn pounds cracked wheat fed morning and evening, beginning when chicks are hours old. baby chick mash pounds ground yellow corn pounds wheat bran pounds flour middlings pounds pinhead oats pounds meat scrap ( per cent protein) pounds dried buttermilk or skim-milk pounds oyster shell meal or limestone flour or bone meal pounds cod liver oil (mixed with the pinhead oats) pound table salt this mash is fed to the chicks as soon as they are placed under the brooder stove. it may be placed in hoppers. let the chicks have all they want to eat; some of the mash should be before them at all times. teach the chicks where to find the warmth by enclosing them for a few days with a / inch mesh wire one foot high and set from to inches from the edge of the hover. put some clean grit on bits of cardboard in several places around the hover when the chicks are first brought from the incubator. a little sour skim-milk or semi-solid buttermilk, diluted to in founts should be available from the beginning. after the chicks are hours old or when you are sure they are hungry, begin to feed, using cardboard in the same manner as before. follow the feeding chart. feed little and often. keep the chicks slightly hungry. watch for dead chicks and remove them as soon as they are noticed. attend to heaters early and late; be sure at all times that they are in good working order. clean out litter, particularly beneath the hover as often as it becomes soiled. induce exercise and keep the youngsters occupied. get them out-of-doors as early as possible, even if only for a few minutes in the warmer part of the day. feed green feed. feed early and late. keep the chicks growing. _growing stock ration._--the baby chick mash can be used for feeding the growing birds, omitting the cod liver oil if they are on range. the baby chick grain ration can be used also during this period but it need not be so finely cracked. plenty of grain should be available at all times. _laying ration._--when the birds are getting ready to lay, the ration should be changed so that during the winter laying season the mash will include equal amounts of yellow corn meal, wheat bran, wheat middlings, ground heavy oats and meat scrap. twenty-five per cent of dried buttermilk or skim-milk may be substituted for an equal amount of meat scrap. the grain ration should consist of equal amounts of cracked or whole yellow corn and wheat. this should be fed in the late afternoon, giving sufficient to satisfy the appetites of the birds between the time of going to roost and a light morning meal. it should be fully consumed by eight o'clock in the morning. adequate consumption of mash is a prime requisite in egg production. the feeding of semi-solid buttermilk at the rate of to pounds to hens daily is recommended. ten pounds of mangel beets per hens or square inch of well-sprouted oats per bird will supply needed green food during the winter. in many cases it will be found more satisfactory to purchase ready mixed rations from a local dealer who handles reliable and scientifically compounded feeds for poultry. this is particularly applicable where the number of birds is of ordinary proportions. little, if any, economy will be found in purchasing small quantities of each ingredient and attempting to thoroughly mix them at home. if the flock is very large there may be worth-while economy in home-mixing of the ration. the efficient poultryman will compare the cost of branded feeds with ingredient costs to guard against being overcharged. in addition to the standard rations the growing stock and laying birds should have access at all times to grit, shell and charcoal, kept in suitable containers. these may be obtained of the local dealer. _sanitation._--when growing stock and laying hens are kept under modern intensive conditions the observance of the rules of sanitation is essential. failure to observe them is likely to result in loss of production, serious sickness of the flock and the nullifying of all other constructive factors. dropping boards beneath the roosts must be cleaned frequently and regularly to prevent accumulation of filth. if the dropping boards are constructed of matched lumber with the boards running in the direction in which they are to be scraped it will facilitate the cleaning process. before the birds are placed in winter quarters the laying house should be thoroughly cleaned of all litter and debris. the interior may then be thoroughly sprayed with a disinfectant composed of some good coal tar preparation, and this repeated in the spring. the surface will need to be painted with a good disinfectant, of which there are a number of commercial preparations on the market. a close watch should be made for vermin in the house and on the birds, and if lice or similar parasites are discovered, immediate action should be taken to destroy both the adults and the eggs, since these parasites will debilitate the flock and prevent their development and may seriously check their ability to lay. _management of artificial lights._--the electric lights mentioned in the previous chapter should be turned on about four-thirty in the morning and kept on until daylight or used for an hour in the late evening. when lights are used there should be plenty of food and water available to enable the birds to take advantage of the additional feeding period. the scratch grain should be increased by pounds daily for each hundred birds when lights are used. many poultrymen find it advantageous to have a low wattage light burning all night so that hungry individuals may get a meal and return to the perches at all times. three to five kilowatt hours per month for each hundred birds represents the average current consumption where lights are used. _practical suggestions for efficient management._--a number of successful poultrymen were recently asked to state the requisites for success in the poultry industry, with particular reference to what is known as the one-man poultry flock. such a flock is of adequate size to take practically the full time of one person in its operation. as the result of the development of standardized feeding practices, improved equipment and better methods of management, the maximum number of birds that can be successfully managed by one person has greatly increased in recent years. likewise, the problems of proper feeding, adequate disease control and successful selling have increased as the size of the unit has grown and as greater intensiveness is practiced. all of the successful men questioned advised that the keeping of poultry should be begun in a small way in order that experience can be gained without the risk of losing the initial investment, or that the intending operator should gain practical knowledge of the business by working on a poultry farm for a year. valuable knowledge can also be gained by attending short courses in poultry husbandry that are being offered at most agricultural colleges with a very moderate expenditure of funds. one of these successful men writes as follows: "we are working with a man now who was let out of a position recently but who has some savings and who desires to go into the poultry business. he has purchased six acres of ground, has built a bungalow on it and has the foundations in for three laying houses of birds' capacity each. he will have ample range for a two-yards system for each laying house, and, in addition, will have two ranges to alternate yearly for growing his young stock. his program calls for putting out about , chicks yearly from which he should have at least , pullets, which he will house in two of the laying houses. the following year he will carry over about of these birds and can fill up with , pullets. this is to be a one-man plant with possibly some assistance in the spring. "i feel that , birds is the minimum required from which one man can make a living, and five acres devoted to poultry, properly laid out, is sufficient area for this purpose. if more land is available, so much the better. these are minimum requirements, as i see it, and with regular feed deliveries directly to the poultry house, running water and other labor-saving devices, there is no reason why one man cannot successfully take care of this number of birds, particularly where a man is starting on new ground where there have never been any chickens and therefore less chance of disease. we advise buying baby chicks rather than partly grown or mature stock. if he follows a definite economic and sanitary program right from the start, there is no reason why his plant should not carry on profitably, indefinitely." this practical man says further: "it is our experience that the majority of the people going into the poultry business go in 'blind.' their chicken houses are put up irrespective of range facilities and then after two or three years when they begin to run into trouble they find their mistakes. i would suggest that you point out to prospective poultrymen the advisability of first, buying land and developing their own poultry plant rather than trying to make over someone else's plant; second, buying in a location where buying and selling facilities have been developed; third, getting in touch with a reliable local poultryman for guidance in laying out his plant and following only one advisor. by hooking up with only one poultryman he is presented with one way of doing things which this poultryman has found successful in his own business." another successful man states that the most economical time to start the business is in the spring when day-old chicks can be secured and purchased at a lower cost than is possible in the buying of laying stock at other seasons of the year. he further advises that the greatest mistake made by many starting in the poultry business is the lack of adequate capital. too many invest all of their money before any income can be secured, according to this man. should there be a set-back during the first year or two, there is no way of continuing and the whole investment may be lost. still another practical man states that "site is, in my opinion, the most important factor to be considered after the decision is made that a person wishes to go into the poultry business. successful poultry keeping probably requires more careful selection of a farm than any other agricultural industry. there should be light soil with good air and water drainage and an area of sufficient size to permit shifting the poultry on different areas as a means of preventing disease infection and as a means of securing vigor in the birds." he, too, points out that old poultry farms should not be considered by prospective poultrymen unless they have been approved by an expert in these lines, for the reason that these farms are frequently offered for sale because of persistent disease infection which it is very difficult to eliminate, or because of some fundamental difficulty, such as poor soil drainage. "in the construction of buildings," continues this experienced poultryman, "sufficient housing should be provided to prevent overcrowding and the difficulties that come in the train of that condition. about three square feet of floor space per bird is required for the lighter breeds such as leghorns, and four to five square feet per bird for the heavier breeds. for the one-man plant, the recommendation is for a maximum of about , birds. this would require from , to , square feet of floor space suitably arranged for the lighter breeds of the leghorn type. for the young stock to be used as replacements, seven to ten brooder houses, by feet in size, would be required and about the same number of range shelters, usually by feet, for the purpose of sheltering growing young stock from hot sun and heavy rains when they are out on range." _probable net income._--many persons who have started in the poultry business have been misled as to the amount of net income they will be likely to receive from a one-man plant. it is pretty well established that in normal times a net income of from $ , to $ , annually can be secured from a plant housing , birds. a great deal depends, of course, upon the skill of the operator, and a plant of this size requires the full time of one competent person. it should be borne in mind that this net income is in addition to the residence and such food as would be taken in the form of poultry products and from the garden. _sales management._--every prospective poultry keeper should determine the marketing possibilities for the product in the area under consideration before he makes a choice of location. there are at least four methods of marketing eggs and poultry meat, any one of which can be used exclusively or two or more used in combination as a means of disposing of the product to the best advantage. the system that he will adopt will depend largely upon his location, as well as upon his individual preference, and upon the facilities that are available in the area where he operates. in many sections of the country there are cooperative egg marketing associations where the eggs are received in bulk from the producers, are graded and marketed in large quantities, the producer receiving the full selling value less, of course, the costs of operating the distributing agency. in the northeastern states, egg auctions have been very successfully developed. under this system the individual producer brings his eggs to the auction market where they are graded and sold on the basis of weight, size and other factors pertaining to quality. in this method of selling the producer receives a definite price for his eggs less a small charge per case made by the selling agency. a successful type of direct marketing is through roadside stands. this is especially successful in or near large centers of population where eggs can be purchased, together with other farm commodities, at the same stand. another method is the operation of a retail route in which the producer sells the eggs by the door-to-door method in a near-by city. this method is followed successfully by many poultrymen who deliver eggs as regularly as the milk distributor or the baker deliver their products. still another method is the use of mail or express as a means of transporting the eggs to consumers in urban centers. this method, while largely in use some years ago, has not proved so generally successful as have some of the other methods previously given. a well-organized program of work is essential in successful poultry keeping. the following schedule is followed by many successful poultrymen as a means of distributing their time to the best advantage during the day. a poultryman's daily time table based on a one-man , -bird farm producing market eggs : - : a.m.--feed and water all stock. : - : a.m.--fill mash hoppers and clean dropping boards. : - : a.m.--two hours for cleaning houses, cultivating yards, repairing of buildings, preparation of egg cases, packing eggs and miscellaneous jobs. : - : m.--feed green feed and collect eggs. : - : p.m.--lunch hour. : - : p.m.--water all stock. : - : p.m.--same work as from : to : a.m. : - : p.m.--feed and collect eggs. _ducks, geese, turkeys and other fowl._--while the raising and keeping of chickens occupy the largest and most important part of the general operation of poultry keeping, there is a growing interest in the production of other types of fowl, including ducks, geese, turkeys, and in some instances, guinea fowl and pheasants. each of these really constitutes a separate and distinct poultry industry, requiring specific feeding, breeding and management practices. some of the fundamental factors in the care of these types of poultry are given for the beginner. in the case of these fowl, as in chickens, it is essential to start in a small way and develop as experience dictates. _ducks._--from a rather obscure and unknown source of poultry meat, the duck and the duckling have become common to restaurants and the home table. this has been accomplished through the operations of large commercial duck farms which sell hundreds of thousands of birds annually. the selection of breed types, proper feeding and management and skillful marketing have made it possible to attract a wide public interest and an appetite for these fowls on a permanent basis. the best known varieties of ducks are the indian runner, a small type and primarily an egg producer; the muscovy and the pekin, both of which are used for meat purposes, the former being best adapted to general farm use and the latter to intensive breeding on large establishments devoted solely to the purpose of duck raising. the old simile, "like a duck takes to water," implies the fondness of ducks for the aquatic element. however, ducks will do well without swimming facilities. incubation of duck eggs can be carried on in the same manner as chicken eggs, except that more moisture is essential to good hatches. the period of incubation is days for all types, except for the muscovy, for which it is to days. the growing birds, like mature ducks, are hardy and ordinarily show a much lower mortality percentage than chickens. if only a few ducks are kept, they will follow the habits of a flock of chickens and need be given no special attention. when they are raised without other poultry an open shed is all that is necessary for winter quarters and some shade arrangement for protection against hot summer sun. the feed rations that have been given for baby chicks and growing stock can be used for ducks, or any standard commercial feed for the respective ages. it is recommended that the chick and growing mashes be mixed with fine, chopped greens such as cabbage or lawn clippings, and sufficient water added to the mixture to make it moist. one pound of sand or grit may be added to furnish the duck with grinding material. fresh water in shallow dishes should be available during the feeding periods which ought to be three times a day. for the mature birds, the laying mash, previously given, and moistened, will be found satisfactory with fresh greens added, unless grass is available on range. hoppers containing sand or grit should be available if a number of ducks are kept. _geese._--geese can be raised successfully wherever other types of poultry will grow. that they are not so popular as ducks is shown by the fact that only about one-third as many geese as ducks are raised in this country. the most popular breeds, in order of popularity, are toulouse, embden, african and chinese. the toulouse is the largest and most favored, the mature gander weighing pounds and the adult goose about pounds. geese are usually kept in small numbers in areas where there is an abundance of grass and a supply of water for swimming. they, like ducks, are hardy and are rarely affected with diseases or parasites. a plentiful supply of grass is sufficient feed for the growing goslings. the demand and prices for geese are lower than for most other types of poultry. for housing, only a shed in winter and a sun-shade in summer are required. the period of incubation varies from to days, depending upon the size of the breed. the young goslings are easily killed by excessive moisture or may become lost and therefore they require considerable attention during the early stages. a good food for the goslings is stale bread soaked in milk or water, fed after they are hours old. scalded cracked corn may also be given or a mash made of four parts corn meal and one part grain middlings. plenty of drinking water is essential. whole grain may be fed after the goslings are well feathered. when the geese near the marketing period they should be kept in confinement and fed a moist mash made of one part grain shorts and two parts corn meal. a bedding of short straw will keep the fattening pens clean and provide roughage. best prices are obtainable during the late fall and early winter months. _turkeys._--because the turkey is such a popular form of meat during the holidays and so much attention is directed to it as an indigenous native bird, it rivals the american eagle as a national emblem. turkey raising on a commercial scale has had its ups and downs for a great many years. one of the principal scourges has been the so-called black-head disease and this has destroyed the industry in many areas. it is now known that this disease is carried by a small parasitic worm common to chickens, which, however, it apparently does not seriously injure. the black-head germ, carried by this worm, clogs the blood in the head of the turkey and causes quick death. for this reason, it has been found impracticable to raise turkeys where chickens are present, unless they are kept entirely separate by confinement. the principal varieties of domesticated turkeys are the bronze, white holland, bourbon red, black, narragansett and slate. all are large, handsome birds, each breed having a following of admirers. the bronze is the largest and heaviest and most popular, the mature adult male weighing pounds and the mature hen pounds. under ordinary conditions turkeys do not require much in the way of housing, except in cold weather when covered roosting sheds should be available. the period of incubation is days and they may be hatched under the same conditions as chickens. the day-old young birds, or poults as they are called, can be shipped in the same manner as day-old chicks. for feeding the poults, the united states department of agriculture recommends fine-chopped hard-boiled eggs, including the shell, mixed with green feed for the first ten days. this may be followed by feeding the chick ration previously mentioned. milk, especially buttermilk, is excellent for the poults, and grit must be provided if it is not available on range. cod liver oil will be found helpful if added to the ration. turkeys are great rangers and travelers if they have the opportunity and will pick up enough insects to keep them going through the day. a grain ration should be fed just before they go to roost. where they are raised in confinement, or semi-confinement, more food must be given and under these conditions the strictest sanitation must be practiced. both old and young turkeys should be protected from dampness, and the growing birds, especially, kept free from lice. the turkey grower who practices the best systems of management and feeding will be successful and will find a ready market for his product at thanksgiving and during the christmas holidays. a few birds may be successfully kept in confinement and used as a home-raised source of high quality meat during a considerable portion of the year. _guinea fowl._--the guinea is known for its watch-dog proclivities, making a characteristic raucous noise when strangers appear; for the rich quality of the eggs which are produced in good quantity; and for the delectability of the breast meat when properly prepared. the young guinea may be fed as has been recommended for young chicks. the older birds are excellent foragers and require little attention. the country home owner, if he does not object to their noise, will find a few of these unusual birds an interesting and valuable asset. _pheasants._--many persons with a flair for the new and unusual are successfully raising pheasants, the ring neck variety being the most popular. while they are not so hardy as chickens and must be given some added care for that reason, they may be fed in the same manner and kept successfully in confinement. pheasants may be used as an additional source of income since they are nearly always in demand for meat. the eggs may be hatched in incubators or by hens and the young pheasants brooded like chicks. the period of incubation is days. shelter is not necessary except in extremely cold weather and not then if trees or shrubs are available. detailed information on game bird production can be obtained from more game birds in america, inc., fifth avenue, new york city. _do's_ net income depends upon efficient management and each phase of the latter must be mastered. feed a well-balanced chick ration to the very young and growing stock. be sure the ration fed to laying stock is adapted to their needs in egg production. sanitation measures are fundamental in good management and their neglect may be fatal. follow the management recommendations of practical and successful poultrymen. use the marketing system best adapted to the locality and the personal factor of sales ability. determine possibilities of selling ducks, geese, turkeys and other fowl as a means of supplementing income from chickens. remember each type of poultry requires specific management. _don'ts_ don't neglect scientific feeding of the poultry flock. don't go into poultry production on a large scale without experience. don't neglect local markets as outlets for the sale of eggs and poultry and don't make shipment of eggs and stock to commission houses of unknown rating. don't over-extend in poultry investment to the point where temporary reversal would be disastrous. _chapter_ xi the family milk supply living in the country should make possible an adequate and safe milk supply for the family. the transportation of milk from the farm and its distribution in the city constitute a costly process under present methods, and this limits consumption. furthermore, the ordering in advance of a definite quantity each day means as a rule that only the milk delivered will be consumed. a maximum amount of milk is thereby set, based upon factors that may be alien to real needs of the family for this food beverage. using milk and dairy products freely from a near-by supply will contribute much to the health of the entire family and especially of the children. the term "family" is used in this case to denote two or three adults and the same number of children. nutritional experts declare that milk is the most important of the "protective" foods. scientists agree that milk protects by providing in the best form those necessities which are often lacking in other foods. milk supplies calcium so necessary for sound bones and teeth, phosphorus, easily digested protein, butter fat and milk sugar. most important of all are the vitamins found in milk. milk acquires these properties from the cow, a living factory manufacturing milk from raw products, which are the foods the cow eats--the pasture grasses and the cured hay, supplemented with carefully blended grain rations. nutrition authorities recommend at least a quart of milk daily for every child and ample amounts for adults as well. _sources of milk supply._--the country resident will have little difficulty in securing an adequate supply of wholesome milk at low cost. he may obtain it from a neighbor who is in the dairy business or he may maintain a cow or two where the area is large enough to provide some pasturage and where a building for stabling is available. if the milk is bought from some near-by farm it is important that the purchaser assure himself of the health of the cows producing the milk and of the sanitary conditions surrounding production and handling. quality in milk is much more than cream content. cleanliness in production and handling is far more important, and this the country resident can personally determine by occasional visits to the source of supply, an advantage difficult for the urban resident to attain. quality in milk is not necessarily measured by the investment in the milking barn or the showy external features of the producing and handling plant. the essential factors in the production of clean, wholesome milk are healthy, clean cows; healthy milkers; clean, sterile utensils; and sanitary stables and premises. these conditions can be attained by any careful dairyman and can be checked by any layman interested in securing a dependable supply of safe milk. the purchaser should insist that the cows be tested regularly under government supervision for tuberculosis and the reactors to the test removed from the herd. this is important in all circumstances and particularly so where the milk is consumed in the unprocessed state by children. _producing milk at home._--it is entirely feasible for the rural family to produce at home an ample supply of milk at low cost. to do this it is only necessary to have stabling facilities for one or two cows and to have a member of the family sufficiently interested to feed, care for and milk the cow or cows. if this plan is to be followed the owner, if he is inexperienced, should enlist the aid of a neighbor or friend in making the purchase. the animal should be fresh, that is, just starting the period of lactation, and preferably not more than four or five years of age. a cow that is fresh can be judged as to ability to produce good milk from all four quarters of the udder in adequate amount. _selecting the family cow._--the breed to be selected is not important, except that for family use a cow of the so-called channel breeds (guernsey or jersey) is considered better adapted because of the higher butter fat content of the milk as compared with the holstein-friesian, for example, which usually produces a larger total quantity of milk with less butter fat. it is not necessary to purchase a pure-bred animal of any of the breeds, so far as milk production is concerned. on the other hand, a pure-bred registered cow may often be purchased at moderate cost. the owner will undoubtedly take greater pride in such an animal and her offspring will have higher selling value. in making a purchase the new owner should insist upon having a tuberculin test chart delivered with the animal, and certification as to freedom from contagious abortion (b. abortus) should also be obtained if possible. if production records have been kept during the animal's previous lactation periods, these should be secured, as they will definitely indicate milk-producing ability over a considerable period of time. for family use a cow that produces milk steadily in uniform amounts over eight or ten months is far more desirable than one which produces a large volume following freshening and then slumps off rapidly. [illustration: desirable types of utensils for a small dairy. _a._ crock for temporary milk storage or for gravity separation of cream. _b._ milking stool. _c._ twenty-quart milk can and cover. _d._ strainer. _e._ stirrer. _f._ circulating water cooler for freshly drawn milk (not essential for a one- or two-cow dairy if other cooling practices are followed). _g._ sanitary covered-top milk pail. _h._ measuring rod. _i._ small churn for family butter making.] _importance of pasture._--pasturage plays so important a part in economical milk production and in contributing to the health of the animal that it is unwise to consider keeping one's own cow unless or acres of pasture land per animal are available. when the cow is on pasture from may until november no other roughage is required, provided of course the grasses and clovers are plentiful. plenty of water is essential, and if this is not made available by a stream in the pasture, it will be necessary to furnish drinking water three times daily. _stabling and feeding._--from early november until may it will be necessary to provide stabling facilities, roughage in the form of hay, ensilage or beet pulp, and concentrated feed to keep the animal producing. about tons of good timothy-and-clover hay or alfalfa will be needed per animal during these six months. storage room will be needed in the building for the hay and for the concentrated feed. a good practice is to keep the cow in a box stall by feet in size. ample bedding should be provided, consisting of straw, wood shavings, shredded corn stalks, peat moss or dried leaves. these will absorb the liquid manure and after such use should be applied to the garden or other land areas for fertilizing purposes. the daily ration of the cow when stabled will consist of from to pounds of hay daily and pound of concentrated feed for each - / pounds of milk being produced. (a quart of milk weighs about . pounds.) milk flow can be stimulated and the health of the cow conserved by feeding moistened beet pulp, where silage is not available. this may be purchased locally at the feed store, where the grain concentrate may also be obtained. the latter can be bought in bags and a mixture analyzing about per cent protein is recommended. when the cow is on pasture the grain ration may be reduced by one-third or one-half, depending upon the quality of the pasture available. _cost of milk production._--where all of the feed mentioned above is purchased, the cost per quart of the milk will approximate cents, excluding labor and overhead costs of buildings, etc. this cost can be reduced if pasture does not have to be rented and if some of the other food requirements are raised at home. _management._--feeding the cow twice daily and milking at the same interval will give the best results. morning and evening are usually the most convenient times for milking and the same hourly routine should be observed daily. feeding the grain ration after milking is desirable. a good practice is to furnish hay and beet pulp between milkings. to insure cleanliness of the milk, the udder and teats may be wiped with a damp cloth before milking. flanks and the udder should be clipped of hair, thus facilitating a clean condition of the animal at all times. soiled bedding should be removed and clean material substituted as required. the normal cow should produce an average of quarts of milk daily over a period of ten months. in the remaining two months the cow will not be producing milk but will be resting and building up body reserves for the coming period of lactation. the cow should be bred about nine months before it is desired to have her bear a calf. the time of year when such freshening should occur is not important, although either spring or fall months are considered best, to avoid weather and temperature extremes at the critical calving period. under this plan it will be noted that the family will not have milk from home sources for two months during the year. the alternative is to have two cows, one freshening in april and the other in october, ensuring a continuous supply, or to purchase milk during the "dry" period. _utilizing a large supply of milk._--the urban consumer of milk accustomed to or quarts daily may wonder how an average of quarts or more per day can be utilized. plenty of uses will be found for the product. milk will be used more often as a beverage; cream will be found delightful in many ways, in the form of butter and home-made ice cream, for example; and cheeses will provide an outlet for surplus whole or skimmed milk. milk of good quality can be disposed of readily to neighbors. if two families own one cow each, a plan may be worked out for furnishing each other with milk when one cow or the other is not producing. wherever facilities are available and there is a willingness to care for a family cow or two, the availability of large amounts of milk will compensate for the trouble and bring health and vigor to the rural family. _the goat as a source of milk supply._--the milk goat is especially useful to those who desire a smaller quantity of milk than that produced by a cow and where the space is inadequate for keeping a larger milk-producing animal. in composition, goat's milk closely resembles that of the cow, the butter fat ranging from . per cent to . per cent with total solids of nearly per cent. the average production of a good milk goat is about quarts of milk daily, sufficient for many a family. the milk is pure white in color and the cream rises very slowly. if goat's milk is properly produced and handled, the bad odor, associated with the animal in the public mind, should not be present. keeping dirt or hair out of the milk when it is being drawn, and clean quarters, are essential in eliminating odor in the milk. it has been proved that goat's milk is especially valuable for children and invalids and exceeds cow's milk in ease of digestibility. goats are in their prime at about five years of age, but will continue to produce milk for several years after that. they should be bred twice a year. the usual number of kids is two, although occasionally four are born at one time. the period between breeding and giving birth is about five months. goats may be successfully fed with the same rations as the dairy cow. although they consume only about one-seventh as much feed as the cow, the common impression that the goat can produce milk on practically no feed is erroneous. a ration for winter feeding, suggested by the united states department of agriculture, consists of pounds of alfalfa or clover hay, - / pounds of silage or roots and from to pounds of a concentrated grain ration, composed of pounds of corn, pounds of oats, pounds of bran and pounds of linseed meal. in the summer when pasture is available they should be fed to - / pounds of the grain mixture. data from experiment stations indicate that the annual feed cost of a milk goat is about $ and the feed cost per quart of milk produced, about - / cents. good milk goats bring good prices and in most instances will cost almost as much as a cow. they are much more prolific, however, permitting more rapid additions and offering greater revenue from the sales of young animals, wherever there is a market for them. the two principal breeds are the toggenburg and the saanen, both originating in switzerland, and the spanish maltese whose original home was in the island of malta. goats are thoroughly domesticated, are contented with a small grazing area and may be easily handled. they are subject to stomach worms, indicated by loss of flesh and weakness, and to malta fever, which can be transmitted to man, in whom it is evidenced by recurring high temperatures. the former can be controlled by using, as a drench, a copper sulfate solution of ounce to quarts of water. where the latter trouble is present the milk should be pasteurized or scalded before it is consumed. as an economical source of easily digested milk, the goat is recommended, especially to those families with rather small acreage. they can make the most of poorer pasturage, are clean in habits and docile. _do's_ use milk freely for its food value to every member of the family. make sure of the quality of the milk purchased. acquiring a family cow is the best and cheapest source of an adequate milk supply. management of the right kind will make the family cow an invaluable asset. learn to use surplus milk in nutritious and palatable ways. determine the possibilities of securing from the goat an adequate milk supply for a small family. _don'ts_ don't use canned milk except as supplement to liberal, fresh supply. don't overlook the need of pasturage for economical milk production. don't supply family with milk of doubtful sanitary quality. don't neglect to have a veterinarian make health tests of the cow or goat. _chapter_ xii marketing farm products the distribution of farm products on an efficient basis is one of the most difficult problems in agriculture. because of the demand of the consumer for small quantities of products at each purchase, the breaking up of wholesale packages, involving additional labor and containers and the elimination of unfit specimens, increases handling costs and delays the arrival of the product from the farm to the consumer. in recent years the producer has sought various means of eliminating some of these costs of distribution so that he could get a larger share of the consumer's dollar, and the consumer has welcomed the opportunity of buying products direct from the producer. unquestionably, one of the best means of selling farm commodities is through the medium of roadside markets that have now become so common along the principal highways of the country. these range in type from the display of a few baskets of farm commodities on the ground or on a table, with sales of $ a year or less, to those of a more pretentious nature in which buildings and equipment are erected suitable to the purpose. that there are great possibilities of developing a successful business in selling products in this manner is evidenced by some of the more elaborate markets, transacting an annual business of $ , or more. in most cases these have been developed from small beginnings and the facilities have increased as the good reputation of the market has spread. _advantages of roadside marketing._--from the standpoint of the producer or the operator of the roadside stand, there are certain advantages that have contributed to the growth of the movement. for example, there is no expense or time involved in delivering the products to a distant market, since the produce is sold by a member of the household, or by the operator's employees in the larger types of markets. it is possible through such a market to build up a clientele of buyers who will return for further purchases. they will tell their friends about the good quality, dependable produce which they have been able to purchase at some particular stand. furthermore, a wide variety of products can be sold in this way at one stand, which might have to be segregated and shipped to different markets if some other method of marketing were being followed. this would add considerably to the expense of selling, especially where the volume of each commodity is small. furthermore, in such a method of selling, the producer comes in direct contact with the consumer. ideas are exchanged, mutual confidence is developed and both should share financially in the advantages accruing from eliminating ordinary means of distribution. _problems in roadside marketing._--on the other hand, there are certain disadvantages of roadside selling which operate against successful merchandising in such a manner. these should be fully considered in deciding how the surplus farm products are to be disposed of. due to the difficulty experienced by many potential buyers in getting satisfactory produce, they have become discouraged and will often drive by all roadside markets rather than take a chance on buying commodities that may be misrepresented. naturally, this works against the development of adequate business and makes it necessary for the individual to spend considerable time and effort in selling himself and his market to the public and in creating confidence and good will. there is necessarily some loss due to depreciation in the quality of perishable commodities. in many cases it is necessary to expose these commodities to the sun and weather, and if they are not sold promptly they will not long maintain the standard of quality which the operator must have identified with his market. the operator has no knowledge of the number of customers he will have when he displays his products, nor does he know the whims of the individuals who may patronize his market that day. to avoid the losses resulting from unsold products it is desirable to have some other outlet which will absorb unused quantities, even though the price is not so good as would be secured from ordinary sales at the market. many of the commodities can be delivered to some wholesale market to be sold for what they will bring. another outlet that is available is through canning or preserving the commodities and selling them later in the season under the label carried by the roadside stand. it should be borne in mind that the business of operating a roadside market has its own peculiar problems and success in it depends upon following good merchandising principles, to which are added those finer points which pertain to direct selling. the attitude of the public must be studied and plans for promoting sales must be adopted which will result in attracting and holding customers. beyond doubt, the two most important factors in the operation of a successful roadside market are attractiveness of the stand itself and the quality of the products that are offered for sale. _plans for a roadside market._--a roadside market need not be expensive to be attractive. the thought motivating the whole project should be to create in the buyer's mind a farm scene, laying emphasis upon such factors as are easily associated in the public mind with farming. these include neatness of the establishment, cleanliness and honesty in every phase of the operation. one should not undertake to run a roadside market in competition, so far as appearance goes, with the corner grocery store in the city. it should have an individuality of its own and be _of_ the country as well as _in_ the country. the location of the market has a great deal to do with its attractiveness. it is well to locate it a short distance from the house, so that it stands out as a market, and it should be placed back from the highway to permit motorists to drive off the highway in making stops for purchases. in some states, highway regulations require that such stands be located far enough from the highway to permit all four wheels of a standing vehicle to be off the road surface. if the stand can be located under some good shade trees, that in itself constitutes an invitation to the sun-blinded traveler to stop and partake of the commodities offered for sale. [illustration: a wayside market that meets every need and attracts buyers.] so far as the design of the market itself is concerned, there are endless opportunities for one's genius to be brought into operation. it should be borne in mind that, while there are certain standard requirements in the way of display shelves and facilities for keeping reserve stocks immediately available, as well as a safe container for funds, originality in design attracts attention. here again, the design should not be obtrusive, but one that blends with the atmosphere of the place where the stand is set up. it must convey the impression that the owner of the property is himself the operator of the stand and has transferred to the stand the same interest which is manifested in his home and its immediate surroundings. most purchasers at roadside stands want to see the whole display without having to stumble over baskets and other articles to find out what is offered, and they expect prompt attention. as a general rule, the more nearly the stand can supply the complete needs of the purchaser in that field, the more likely are buyers to stop and become regular patrons. in addition to the display of seasonable fruits and vegetables, it is desirable to have eggs and dairy products, including butter, cottage cheese, canned fruits or jellies that have the home-made farm atmosphere about them. in most cases, ice is available or electric refrigeration can be utilized for keeping cold milk, buttermilk, cider and other products available for immediate consumption for the hot and thirsty traveler in the summertime. hot coffee or hot chocolate can be made available for service in colder weather. very often the road-stand operator destroys the genuine sales appeal that such stands have by specializing in manufactured concoctions that have no relation whatever to the location where they are sold. too often the stands are covered with advertisements of such commodities, and this immediately creates sales resistance so far as the promotion of fresh farm products is concerned. _origin of products offered._--the ordinary purchaser at a roadside market likes to think that he is buying products raised or processed on the place where they are sold, and believes that he is thereby securing fresher and better commodities in which the seller has had an interest from planting time to harvest. certainly some of the commodities sold should come directly from the tract where the market is located, and visual evidence should be given of that fact. on the other hand, there is no objection to the addition of other commodities so long as they are in accord with what a producer might be expected to have for sale at that season of the year. many operators have found that the sale of gasoline and lubricating oil and tobacco in various forms can be offered for sale to good advantage simply as a part of the service being offered by the market to the public. _quality the keystone._--the fundamental basis for success in the operation of any roadside market lies in the quality of the products that are offered for sale. this is a rather difficult condition for the operator to maintain consistently, but it is fundamental in securing customers and in keeping them. products that have become stale, unattractive or unpalatable for any reason should never be offered for sale and should be discarded, made into some by-product or sold through some channel which will not identify the article with the stand itself. a satisfied customer who develops confidence in the integrity and good faith of the stand operator is a decided asset, and no effort spent in cultivating such confidence is wasted. every successful roadside stand operator has built his business on honest dealing and a personal interest in seeing that the buyer is satisfied. this contact between the owner of a small business and a buyer is one that can be capitalized to a very great extent. it is one of the handicaps which a chain-store organization has to face and one that must be developed by the person who wishes to establish a permanent and satisfactory business in this merchandising field. very often the sale of farm products can be supplemented to the advantage of the stand by offering small ornamental plants or by the display of pet animals, particularly for the younger members of the traveling public. _success factors._--a definite program of advertising can be developed with many original features that apply directly to the type of business. if the operator has pride in his products he will be glad to have his name on every package of commodities that he sells. this is good sales propaganda even if it only indicates the confidence of the seller in his products and his willingness to stand behind them. besides that, however, it creates a knowledge of his name or the designation of his farm or stand among purchasers who will then have a means of identifying it to their friends. a small leaflet, describing the products that are offered for sale and the intention of the operator to give the customer service, can be put in each package at very small cost with good results. it is also possible to prepare leaflets dealing with methods of cooking or of preparation of the commodities sold that will build good will on the part of customers. the most successful operators, again, are those who do not depend upon casual visitors for their trade but who make of the casual visitor a regular customer and one who will speak a good word to others. in other words, genuine effort must be made to identify the location as a place to which buyers will wish to return as they do to any other place of business that gives satisfactory service. in this way the operator distinguishes himself from his fly-by-night competitors who exist during a week or two when surpluses of commodities are available at low prices and who have no thought beyond that of the immediate sale. wherever possible, the attention of the passing consumer should be directed to the stand before he reaches it so that he will be prepared to stop when he comes upon it. signs of this type on either side of the stand, but some distance each way from it, are more important than is generally recognized. they constitute invitation cards and should be so worded as to excite curiosity and create a feeling in the intending purchaser's mind that he will make no mistake in stopping to fill his wants at the stand. it goes without saying that both the advertising and the stand itself must be so planned as to attract the purchaser, and every effort should be concentrated on the psychology of such an appeal, avoiding any appearance of slouchiness, which would be more repellent than attractive. the purchaser forms a quick opinion of the stand from the way in which it is conducted and from the appearance of the one who is there to make sales. an attitude of cordial cooperation on the part of the attendant, who is, of course, appropriately dressed and in the right mental attitude, is a factor that must not be overlooked in the effort to create a favorable impression. _meal service amid farm surroundings._--many operators, located at strategic points near main highways, have found that maximum profits are obtained by serving meals prepared from the vegetables supplemented by poultry or other products of the little farm. these meals may be served in a booth or building adjoining the roadside stand or in a room of the house turned into a seasonal dining room. persons who are city residents quickly learn to appreciate the virtues of fresh vegetables and freshly killed poultry that may be thus served. a schedule of reasonable prices must be maintained if trade is to be built up. usually special dinners or lunches can be prepared from available products in season, thereby giving the customer more for his money at the least cost and trouble to the operator. this small home restaurant business can be handled frequently by members of the operator's household and countless examples can be given of real financial success following such ventures. expansion can take place as consumer demand develops. cleanliness, good home cooking, generous portions and prompt and courteous service will work wonders in such a project. _tourist guest houses._--a large number of country homes are now open to the public as tourist guest houses, their owners finding that they can obtain a modest but worth while supplement to other forms of income from them. these tourist guest houses are largely a development of the past several years. their popularity with automobile travelers appears to be increasing, and there is genuine opportunity for the housewife on a small farm to operate one of these establishments. it should be kept in mind by the housewife who thinks of opening her home to tourists that the proposition has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. only a modest fee, often $ . for a room and or cents for breakfast, is obtained from each tourist guest. however, a great number of american women have found that the work and trouble occasioned by taking in tourists are worth while and actually enjoy their contacts with the traveling public. the tourist guest house, obviously, should be located on a road that is well traveled by tourists. a simple and attractive "tourists accommodated" sign and a neat and pleasing front yard are needed to interest passers-by in the place. the porch should be neat and attractive and the interior of the house should give the appearance of restfulness, simplicity and comfort. tourists usually inquire about prices and look over a place before deciding to stop there; if there are women in the party, one of them usually makes the inquiry. the family should be courteous in answering questions and showing the prospective customers about. they should not be indifferent, and yet must not seem to be too anxious for business. when the travelers decide to stay, the family should endeavor at once to make them feel at home. the guests will frequently ask questions about roads, local resorts and near-by recreational facilities, and the family will find it useful to be informed on these matters. _dog breeding as a source of income._--many persons who have located in the country, and who have a liking for domestic animals, have found dog breeding an interesting and frequently profitable enterprise. by placing a wire cage along the highway the attention of the traveling public is attracted to the puppies. some of the more popular breeds of dogs include the airedale; the boston, fox and irish terriers; the chow chow; the collie, and the english and irish setters. the breeding of dogs is a highly specialized activity, particularly where it is carried on under intensive conditions and with little range. dogs are subject to external and internal parasites requiring preventive and curative measures. as in the case of all other animals, sanitation is an essential factor to success and feeding methods must be adjusted to the age and the breed. the beginner in dog raising should consult a recognized veterinarian who specializes in small animal practice, and observe his recommendations. such professional men are located in most communities and their advice will be found most helpful. the prices obtainable for male and female young animals vary with the locality. there is usually an established scale of prices which may easily be obtained and which it will pay to observe. dog shows are growing in popularity and exhibitions at these expositions will serve to advertise the breeder's stock. advertising in local papers is effective in bringing to the public the availability of stock of distinctive breeds. fashions in dog breeds change with the times and the public must be catered to along the lines of current interest. _do's_ use the roadside market or near-by outlets for disposing of excess farm products. fully utilize the possibilities of roadside stands in building a permanent business. road stands, as well as the products on display, must have sales appeal. produce at home all farm products offered for sale, if possible, and make the growing area the background of the market. stress quality of products and the responsibility of the operator. advertising of the right type will multiply sales. offer meal service with farm surroundings wherever possible. if considerable traffic passes the premises, try out possibilities of accommodating tourists. _don'ts_ don't try to dispose of miscellaneous surplus of farm commodities by shipment to market if a roadside market can be set up. don't ruin standing of roadside market by selling inferior or stale products. don't try to run a city fruit stand with a farm background. don't destroy country home life by over-commercialization. suggested reference list timely and valuable publications of the united states department of agriculture, state departments of agriculture and state agricultural colleges and experiment stations are available to country residents. copies of them may be obtained by writing to the agencies mentioned. to supplement them and also to supplement advice received from county agricultural agents, a number of useful books are listed below. those interested in them may, in many cases, obtain them from local libraries, or may find it useful to own certain of them themselves. author title year publisher agee, alva "first steps in farming" harper arnold, schuyler "wayside marketing" de la mare auchter, e. c., "orchard and small wiley and knapp, h. b. fruit culture" ayres, q. c., and "land drainage and reclamation" mcgraw-hill scoates, d. bailey, l. h. "manual of gardening," macmillan rev. ed. bear, e. "soil management" wiley "theory and practice in wiley the use of fertilizers" bottomley, m. e. "design of small properties; macmillan a book for the home-owner in city and country." bush-brown, mrs. "flowers for every garden" little louise (carter) chenoweth, w. w. "food preservation; a wiley textbook for student, teacher, homemaker and home factory operator" chupp, c. "manual of vegetable macmillan garden diseases" "manual of vegetable macmillan garden insects" cline, l. e. "turkey production" orange judd cox, j. f. "crop production and wiley management" crosby, c. r., and "manual of vegetable macmillan leonard, m. d. garden insects" davenport, eugene "the farm" macmillan foster, w. h., and "farm buildings" wiley carter, d. g. fraser, samuel "american fruits; their judd propagation, cultivation, harvesting and distribution" fraser, w. j. "dairy farming" wiley galpin, c. j. "rural social problems" century gustafson, a. f. "handbook of fertilizers" orange judd hottes, a. c. " garden questions de la mare answered" hurd, l. m. "practical poultry farming" macmillan jull, m. a. "poultry husbandry" mcgraw-hill knott, j. e. "vegetable growing" lea langstroth, l. l., "honey bee," rev. by american bee and dadant, c. p. dadant, ed. journal charles larson, c. w., and "dairy cattle feeding wiley putney, f. s. and management" lewis, h. r. "productive poultry lippincott husbandry" lippincott, w. a. "poultry production" lea & febiger millar, c. e. "soils and soil management" webb pub. co. murray, p. "planning and planting orange judd the home garden" pellett, f. c. "productive bee-keeping" lippincott phillips, e. f. "bee keeping; a discussion macmillan of the honey bee and of the production of honey," rev. ed. powers, w. l., and "land drainage wiley teeter, t. a. h. for farmers" rice, j. e. "practical poultry management" wiley rice, j. e., and "practical poultry management" wiley botsford, h. e. root, a. i., and "abc and xyz of bee root root, e. r. culture" rose, m. s. "feeding the family" macmillan rowe, h. g. "starting right with bees" a. i. root co. sanderson, e. d. "insects pests of farm, wiley garden and orchard," ed. , rev. and enl. by l. m. peairs sears, f. c. "productive orcharding; lippincott modern methods of growing and marketing fruit" "productive small fruit lippincott culture" sharp, m. a. "principles of farm mechanics" wiley smith, r. h. "agricultural mechanics" lippincott thompson, h. c. "vegetable crops" mcgraw-hill thorne, c. e. "maintenance of soil orange judd fertility" watts, r. l. "vegetable gardening" orange judd worthen, e. l. "farm soils, their management wiley and fertilization" some farm and garden magazines _general_ american agriculturist new york, n. y. country gentleman philadelphia, pa. farm journal philadelphia, pa. new england homestead springfield, mass. new jersey farm and garden sea isle city, n. j. pennsylvania farmer pittsburgh, pa. rural new yorker new york, n. y. _beekeeping_ american bee journal hamilton, ill. american honey producer producers' league, fargo, n. d. bee-cause watertown, wis. gleanings in bee culture medina, ohio _dairying_ ayrshire digest spencer, mass. dairy farmer des moines, iowa guernsey breeders' journal peterboro, n. h. hoard's dairyman fort atkinson, wis. holstein-friesian world laconia, n. y. jersey bulletin indianapolis, ind. _flower gardening_ american home garden city, n. y. better homes and gardens des moines, iowa flower grower calcium, n. y. gardener's chronicle of america new york, n. y. horticulture boston, mass. _fruit growing_ american fruit grower chicago, ill. better fruit portland, ore. _livestock_ breeders' gazette chicago, ill. _market gardening_ market growers' journal louisville, ky. _poultry_ american poultry journal chicago, ill. everybody's poultry magazine hanover, pa. new england poultryman boston, mass. poultry garden and home dayton, ohio poultry item sellersville, pa. poultry success springfield, ohio poultry tribune mt. morris, ill. footnotes: [ ] prepared by new jersey agricultural experiment station. [ ] prepared by michigan state college of agriculture. [ ] prepared by new jersey agricultural experiment station. [ ] new york state college of agriculture, cornell university, ithaca, new york. what i know of farming: a series of brief and plain expositions of practical agriculture as an art based upon science: by horace greeley. "i _know_ that where the spade is deepest driven, the best fruits grow." john g. whittier. new-york: published by the tribune association. . entered, according to act of congress, in the year , by horace greeley, at the office of the librarian of congress, at washington. to the man of our age, who shall make the first plow propelled by steam, or other mechanical power, whereby not less than ten acres per day shall be thoroughly pulverized to a depth of two feet, at a cost of not more than two dollars per acre, this work is admiringly dedicated by the author. contents by chapters. page i. will farming pay? ii. good and bad husbandry iii. where to farm iv. preparing to farm v. buying a farm vi. laying off a farm; pasturing vii. trees; woodlands; forests viii. growing timber; tree-planting. ix. planting and growing trees x. draining; my own xi. draining generally xii. irrigation; means and ends xiii. possibilities of irrigation xiv. plowing, deep or shallow xv. plowing, good and bad xvi. thorough tillage xvii. commercial fertilizers--gypsum. xviii. alkalis--salt, ashes, lime. xix. soils and fertilizers xx. bones, phosphates, guano xxi. muck--how to utilize it xxii. insects; birds xxiii. about tree-planting xxiv. fruit-trees--the apple xxv. more about apple-trees xxvi. hay and hay-making xxvii. peaches, pears, cherries, grapes xxviii. grain-growing--east and west xxix. esculent roots--potatoes xxx. roots--turnips, beets, carrots xxxi. the farmers' calling xxxii. a lesson of to-day xxxiii. intellect in agriculture xxxiv. sheep and wool-growing xxxv. accounts in farming xxxvi. stone on a farm xxxvii. fences and fencing xxxviii. agricultural exhibitions xxxix. science in agriculture xl. farm implements xli. steam in agriculture xlii. co-operation in farming xliii. farmers' clubs xliv. western irrigation. xlv. sewage xlvi. more of irrigation xlvii. undeveloped sources of power xlviii. rural depopulation xlix. large and small farms l. exchange and distribution. li. winter work lii. summing up preface. men have written wisely and usefully, in illustration and aid of agriculture, from the platform of pure science. acquainted with the laws of vegetable growth and life, they so expounded and elucidated those laws that farmers apprehended and profitably obeyed them. others have written, to equally good purpose, who knew little of science, but were adepts in practical agriculture, according to the maxims and usages of those who have successfully followed and dignified the farmer's calling. i rank with neither of these honored classes. my practical knowledge of agriculture is meager, and mainly acquired in a childhood long bygone; while, of science, i have but a smattering, if even that. they are right, therefore, who urge that my qualifications for writing on agriculture are slender indeed. i only lay claim to an invincible willingness to be made wiser to-day than i was yesterday, and a lively faith in the possibility--nay, the feasibility, the urgent necessity, the imminence--of very great improvements in our ordinary dealings with the soil. i know that a majority of those who would live by its tillage feed it too sparingly and stir it too slightly and grudgingly. i know that we do too little for it, and expect it, thereupon, to do too much for us. i know that, in other pursuits, it is only work thoroughly well done that is liberally compensated; and i see no reason why farming should prove an exception to this stern but salutary law. i may be, indeed, deficient in knowledge of what constitutes good farming, but not in faith that the very best farming is that which is morally sure of the largest and most certain reward. i hope to be generally accorded the merit of having set forth the little i pretend to know in language that few can fail to understand. i have avoided, so far as i could, the use of terms and distinctions unfamiliar to the general ear. the little i know of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, &c., i have kept to myself; since whatever i might say of them would be useless to those already acquainted with the elementary truths of chemistry, and only perplexing to others. if there is a paragraph in the following pages which will not be readily and fully understood by an average school-boy of fifteen years, then i have failed to make that paragraph as simple and lucid as i intended. many farmers are dissuaded from following the suggestions of writers on agriculture by the consideration of expense. they urge that, though men of large wealth may (perhaps) profitably do what is recommended, their means are utterly inadequate: they might as well be urged to work their oxen in a silver yoke with gold bows. i have aimed to commend mainly, if not uniformly, such improvements only on our grandfathers' husbandry as a farmer worth $ , , or over, may adopt--not all at once, but gradually, and from year to year. i hope i shall thus convince some farmers that draining, irrigation, deep plowing, heavy fertilizing, &c., are not beyond their power, as so many have too readily presumed and pronounced them. that i should say very little, and that little vaguely, of the breeding and raising of animals, the proper time to sow or plant, &c., &c., can need no explanation. by far the larger number of those whose days have mainly been given to farming, know more than i do of these details, and are better authority than i am with regard to them. on the other hand, i have traveled extensively, and not heedlessly, and have seen and pondered certain broader features of the earth's improvement and tillage which many stay-at-home cultivators have had little or no opportunity to study or even observe. by restricting the topics with which i deal, the probability of treating some of them to the average farmer's profit is increased. and, whatever may be his judgment on this slight work, i _know_ that, if i could have perused one of like tenor half a century ago, when i was a patient worker and an eager reader in my father's humble home, my subsequent career would have been less anxious and my labors less exhausting than they have been. could i then have caught but a glimpse of the beneficent possibilities of a farmer's life--could i have realized that he is habitually (even though blindly) dealing with problems which require and reward the amplest knowledge of nature's laws, the fullest command of science, the noblest efforts of the human intellect, i should have since pursued the peaceful, unobtrusive round of an enthusiastic and devoted, even though not an eminent or fortunate, tiller of the soil. even the little that is unfolded in the ensuing pages would have sufficed to give me a far larger, truer, nobler conception of what the farmer of moderate means might and should be, than i then attained. i needed to realize that observation and reflection, study and mental acquisition, are as essential and as serviceable in his pursuit as in others, and that no man can have acquired so much general knowledge that a farmer's exigencies will not afford scope and use for it all. i abandoned the farm, because i fancied that i had already perceived, if i had not as yet clearly comprehended, all there was in the farmer's calling; whereas, i had not really learned much more of it than a good plow-horse ought to understand. and, though great progress has been made since then, there are still thousands of boys, in this enlightened age and conceited generation, who have scarcely a more adequate and just conception of agriculture than i then had. if i could hope to reach even one in every hundred of this class, and induce him to ponder, impartially, the contents of this slight volume, i know that i shall not have written it in vain. we need to mingle more thought with our work. some think till their heads ache intensely; others work till their backs are crooked to the semblance of half an iron hoop; but the workers and the thinkers are apt to be distinct classes; whereas, they should be the same. admit that it has always been thus, it by no means follows that it always should or shall be. in an age when every laborer's son may be fairly educated if he will, there should be more fruit gathered from the tree of knowledge to justify the magnificent promise of its foliage and its bloom. i rejoice in the belief that the graduates of our common schools are better ditch-diggers, when they can no otherwise employ themselves to better advantage, than though they knew not how to read; but that is not enough. if the untaught peasantry of russia or hungary grow more wheat per acre than the comparatively educated farmers of the united states, our education is found wanting. that is a vicious and defective if not radically false mental training which leaves its subject no better qualified for any useful calling than though he were unlettered. but i forbear to pursue this ever-fruitful theme. i look back, on this day completing my sixtieth year, over a life, which must now be near its close, of constant effort to achieve ends whereof many seem in the long retrospect to have been transitory and unimportant, however they may have loomed upon my vision when in their immediate presence. one achievement only of our age and country--the banishment of human chattelhood from our soil--seems now to have been worth all the requisite efforts, the agony and bloody sweat, through which it was accomplished. but another reform, not so palpably demanded by justice and humanity, yet equally conducive to the well-being of our race, presses hard on its heels, and insists that we shall accord it instant and earnest consideration. it is the elevation of labor from the plane of drudgery and servility to one of self-respect, self-guidance, and genuine independence, so as to render the human worker no mere cog in a vast, revolving wheel, whose motion he can neither modify nor arrest, but a partner in the enterprise which his toil is freely contributed to promote, a sharer in the outlay, the risk, the loss and gain, which it involves. this end can be attained through the training of the generation who are to succeed us to observe and reflect, to live for other and higher ends than those of present sensual gratification, and to feel that no achievement is beyond the reach of their wisely combined and ably self-directed efforts. to that part of the generation of farmers just coming upon the stage of responsible action, who have intelligently resolved that the future of american agriculture shall evince decided and continuous improvement on its past, this little book is respectfully commended. h. g. _new york, feb. , ._ what i know of farming. i. will farming pay? i commence my essays with this question, because, when i urge the superior advantages of a rural life, i am often met by the objection that _farming doesn't pay_. that, if true, is a serious matter. let us consider: i do not understand it to be urged that the farmer who owns a large, fertile estate, well-fenced, well-stocked, with good store of effective implements, cannot live and thrive by farming. what is meant is, that he who has little but two brown hands to depend upon cannot make money, or can make very little, by farming. i think those who urge this point have a very inadequate conception of the difficulty encountered by every poor young man in securing a good start in life, no matter in what pursuit. i came to new-york when not quite of age, with a good constitution, a fair common-school education, good health, good habits, and a pretty fair trade--(that of printer.) i think my outfit for a campaign against adverse fortune was decidedly better than the average; yet ten long years elapsed before it was settled that i could remain here and make any decided headway. meantime, i drank no liquors, used no tobacco, attended no balls or other expensive entertainments, worked hard and long whenever i could find work to do, lost less than a month altogether by sickness, and did very little in the way of helping others. i judge that quite as many did worse than i as did better; and that, of the young lawyers and doctors who try to establish themselves here in their professions, quite as many earn less as earn more than their bare board during the first ten years of their struggle. john jacob astor, near the close of a long, diligent, prosperous career, wherein he amassed a large fortune, is said to have remarked that, if he were to begin life again, and had to choose between making his first thousand dollars with nothing to start on, or with that thousand making all that he had actually accumulated, he would deem the latter the easier task. depend upon it, young men, it is and must be hard work to earn honestly your first thousand dollars. the burglar, the forger, the blackleg (whether he play with cards, with dice, or with stocks), may seem to have a quick and easy way of making a thousand dollars; but whoever makes that sum honestly, with nothing but his own capacities and energies as capital, does a very good five-years' work, and may deem himself fortunate if he finishes it so soon. i _have_ known men do better, even at farming. i recollect one who, with no capital but a good wife and four or five hundred dollars, bought (near boston) a farm of two hundred mainly rough acres, for $ , , and paid for it out of its products within the next five years, during which he had nearly doubled its value. i lost sight of him then; but i have not a doubt that, if he lived fifteen years longer and had no very bad luck, he was worth, as the net result of twenty years' effort, at least $ , . but this man would rise at four o'clock of a winter morning, harness his span of horses and hitch them to his large market-wagon (loaded over night), drive ten miles into boston, unload and load back again, be home at fair breakfast-time, and, hastily swallowing his meal, be fresh as a daisy for his day's work, in which he would lead his hired men, keeping them clear of the least danger of falling asleep. such men are rare, but they still exist, proving scarcely anything impossible to an indomitable will. i would not advise any to work so unmercifully; i seek only to enforce the truth that great achievements are within the reach of whoever will pay their price. an energetic farmer bought, some twenty-five years ago, a large grazing farm in northern vermont, consisting of some acres, and costing him about $ , . he had a small stock of cattle, which was all his land would carry; but he resolved to increase that stock by at least ten per cent. per annum, and to so improve his land by cultivation, fertilizing, clover, &c., that it would amply carry that increase. fifteen years later, he sold out farm and stock for $ , , and migrated to the west. i did not understand that he was a specially hard worker, but only a good manager, who kept his eyes wide open, let nothing go to waste, and steadily devoted his energies and means to the improvement of his stock and his farm. walking one day over the farm of the late prof. mapes, he showed me a field of rather less than ten acres, and said, "i bought that field for $ , , a year ago last september. there was then a light crop of corn on it, which the seller reserved and took away. i underdrained the field that fall, plowed and sub-soiled it, fertilized it liberally, and planted it with cabbage; and, when these matured, i sold them for enough to pay for land, labor, and fertilizers, altogether." the field was now worth far more than when he bought it, and he had cleared it within fifteen months from the date of its purchase. i consider that a good operation. another year, the crop might have been poor, or might have sold much lower, so as hardly to pay for the labor; but there are risks in other pursuits as well as in farming. a fruit-farmer, on the hudson above newburg, showed me, three years since, a field of eight or ten acres which he had nicely set with grapes, in rows ten feet apart, with beds of strawberries between the rows, from which he assured me that his sales per acre exceeded $ per annum. i presume his outlay for labor, including picking, was less than $ per annum; but it had cost something, to make this field what it then was. say that he had spent $ , per acre in underdraining, enriching and tilling this field, to bring it to this condition, including the cost of his plants, and still there must have been a clear profit here of at least $ per acre. i might multiply illustrations; but let the foregoing suffice. i readily admit that shiftless farming doesn't pay--that poor crops don't pay--that it is hard work to make money by farming without some capital--that frost, or hail, or drouth, or floods, or insects, may blast the farmer's hopes, after he has done his best to deserve and achieve success; but i insist that, as a general proposition, good _farming_ does _pay_--that few pursuits afford as good a prospect, as full an assurance, of reward for intelligent, energetic, persistent effort, as this does. i am not arguing that every man should be a farmer. other vocations are useful and necessary, and many pursue them with advantage to themselves and to others. but those pursuits are apt to be modified by time, and some of them may yet be entirely dispensed with, which farming never can be. it is the first and most essential of human pursuits; it is every one's interest that this calling should be honored and prosperous. if not adequately recompensed, i judge that is because it is not wisely and energetically followed. my aim is to show how it may be pursued with satisfaction and profit. ii. good and bad husbandry. necessity is the master of us all. a farmer may be as strenuous for deep plowing as i am--may firmly believe that the soil should be thoroughly broken up and pulverized to a depth of fifteen to thirty inches, according to the crop; but, if all the team he can muster is a yoke of thin, light steers, or a span of old, spavined horses, which have not even a speaking acquaintance with grain, what shall he do? so he may heartily wish he had a thousand loads of barn-yard manure, and know how to make a good use of every ounce of it; but, if he has it not, and is not able to buy it, he can't always afford to forbear sowing and planting, and so, because he cannot secure great crops, do without any crops at all. if he does the best he can, what better _can_ he do? again: many farmers have fields that must await the pleasure of nature to fit them for thorough cultivation. here is a field--sometimes a whole farm--which, if partially divested of the primitive forest, is still thickly dotted with obstinate stumps and filled with green, tenacious roots, which could only be removed at a heavy, perhaps ruinous, cost. a rich man might order them all dug out in a month, and see his order fully obeyed; but, except to clear a spot for a garden or under very peculiar circumstances, it would not pay; and a poor man cannot afford to incur a heavy expense merely for appearance's sake, or to make a theatrical display of energy. in the great majority of cases, he who farms for a living can't afford to pull green stumps, but must put his newly-cleared land into grass at the earliest day, mow the smoother, pasture the rougher portions of it, and wait for rain and drouth, heat and frost, to rot his stumps until they can easily be pulled or burned out as they stand. so with regard to a process i detest, known as pasturing. i do firmly believe that the time is at hand when nearly all the food of cattle will, in our eastern and middle states, be cut and fed to them--that we can't afford much longer, even if we can at present, to let than roam at will over hill and dale, through meadow and forest, biting off the better plants and letting the worse go to seed; often poaching up the soft, wet soil, especially in spring, so that their hoofs destroy as much as they eat; nipping and often killing in their infancy the finest trees, such as the sugar maple, and leaving only such as hemlock, red oak, beech, &c., to attain maturity. our race generally emerged from savageism and squalor into industry, comfort and thrift, through the pastoral condition--the herding, taming, rearing and training of animals being that department of husbandry to which barbarians are most easily attracted: hence, we cling to pasturing long after the reason for it has vanished. the radical, incurable vice of pasturing--that of devouring the better plants and leaving the worse to ripen and diffuse seed--can never be wholly obviated; and i deem it safe to estimate that almost any farm will carry twice as much stock if their food be mainly cut and fed to them as it will if they are required to pick it up where and as it grows or grew. i am sure that the general adoption of soiling instead of pasturing will add immensely to the annual product, to the wealth, and to the population, of our older states. and yet, i know right well that many farms are now so rough and otherwise so unsuited to soiling as to preclude its adoption thereon for many years to come. let me indicate what i mean by good farming, through an illustration drawn from the great west: all over the settled portions of the valley of the upper mississippi and the missouri, there are large and small herds of cattle that are provided with little or no shelter. the lee of a fence or stack, the partial protection of a young and leafless wood, they may chance to enjoy; but that it is a ruinous waste to leave than a prey to biting frosts and piercing north-westers, their owners seem not to comprehend. many farmers far above want will this winter feed out fields of corn and stacks of hay to herds of cattle that will not be one pound heavier on the st of next may than they were on the st of last december--who will have required that fodder merely to preserve their vitality and escape freezing to death. it has mainly been employed as fuel rather than as nourishment, and has served, not to put on flesh, but to keep out frost. now i am familiar with the excuses for this waste; but they do not satisfy me. the poorest pioneer might have built for his one cow a rude shelter of stakes, and poles, and straw or prairie-grass, if he had realized its importance, simply in the light of economy. he who has many cattle is rarely without both straw and timber, and might shelter his stock abundantly if he only would. nay, he could not have neglected or omitted it if he had clearly understood that his beasts must somehow be supplied with heat, and that he can far cheaper warm them from without than from within. the broad, general, unquestionable truths, on which i insist in behalf of good farming are these; and i do not admit that they are subject to exception: i. it is very rarely impracticable to grow good crops, if you are willing to work for them. if your land is too poor to grow wheat or corn, and you are not yet able to enrich it, sow rye or buckwheat; if you cannot coax it to grow a good crop of anything, let it alone; and, if you cannot run away from it, work out by the day or month for your more fortunate neighbors. the time and means squandered in trying to grow crops, where only half or quarter crops can be made, constitute the heaviest item on the wrong side of our farmers' balance-sheets; taxing them more than their national, state, and local governments together do. ii. good crops rarely fail to yield a profit to the grower. i know there are exceptions, but they are very few. keep your eye on the farmer who almost uniformly has great grass, good wheat, heavy corn, &c., and, unless he drinks, or has some other bad habit, you will find him growing rich. i am confident that white blackbirds are nearly as abundant as farmers who have become poor while usually growing good crops. iii. the fairest single test of good farming is the increasing productiveness of the soil. that farm which averaged twenty bushels of grain to the acre twenty years ago, twenty-five bushels ten years ago, and will measure up thirty bushels to the acre from this year's crop, has been and is in good hands. i know no other touchstone of farming so unerring as that of the increase or decrease from year to year of its aggregate product. if you would convince me that x. is a good farmer, do not tell me of some great crop he has just grown, but show me that his crop has regularly increased from year to year, and i am satisfied. --i shall have more to say on these points as i proceed. it suffices for the present if i have clearly indicated what i mean by good and what by bad farming. iii. where to farm. when my father was over sixty years old, and had lived some twenty years in erie county, pennsylvania, he said to me: "i have several times removed, and always toward the west; i shall never remove again; but, were i to do so, it would be toward the east. experience has taught me that the advantages of every section are counterbalanced by disadvantages, and that, where any crop is easily produced, there it sells low, and sometimes cannot be sold at all. i shall live and die right here; but, were i to remove again, it would not be toward the west." this is but one side of a truth, and i give it for whatever it may be worth. had my father plunged into the primitive forest in his twenty-fifth rather than his forty-fifth year, he would doubtless have become more reconciled to pioneer life than he ever did. i would advise no one over forty years of age to undertake, with scanty means, to dig a farm out of the dense forest, where great trees must be cut down and cut up, rolled into log-heaps, and hurried to ashes where they grew. where half the timber can be sold for enough to pay the cost of cutting, the case is different; but i know right well that digging a farm out of the high woods is, to any but a man of wealth, a slow, hard task. making one out of naked prairie, five to ten miles from timber, is less difficult, but not much. he who can locate where he has good timber on one side and rich prairie on the other is fortunate, and may hope, if his health be spared, to surround himself with every needed comfort within ten years. still, the pioneer's life is a rugged one, especially for women and children; and i should advise any man who is worth $ , and has a family, to buy out an "improvement" (which, in most cases, badly needs improving) on the outskirt of civilization, rather than plunge into the pathless forest or push out upon the unbroken prairie. i rejoice that our public lands are free to actual settlers; i believe that many are thereby enabled to make for themselves homes who otherwise would have nothing to leave their children; yet i much prefer a home within the boundaries of civilization to one clearly beyond them. there is a class of drinking, hunting, frolicking, rarely working, frontiersmen, who seem to have been created on purpose to erect log cabins and break paths in advance of a different class of settlers, who regularly come in to buy them out and start them along after a few years. i should here prefer to follow rather than lead. if co-operation shall ever be successfully applied to the improvement of wild lands, i trust it may be otherwise. he who has a farm already, and is content with it, has no reason to ask, "whither shall i go?" and he may rest assured that thoroughly good farming will pay as well in new england as in kansas or in minnesota. i advise no man who has a good farm anywhere, and is able to keep it, to sell and migrate. i know men who make money by growing food within twenty miles of this city quite as fast as they could in the west. if you have money to buy and work it, and know how to make the most of it, i believe you may find land really as cheap, all things considered, in vermont as in wisconsin or arkansas. and yet i believe in migration--believe that there are thousands in the eastern and the middle states who would improve their circumstances and prospects by migrating to the cheaper lands and broader opportunities of the west and south. for, in the first place, most men are by migration rendered more energetic and aspiring; thrown among strangers, they feel the necessity of exertion as they never felt it before. needing almost everything, and obliged to rely wholly on themselves, they work in their new homes as they never did in their old; and the consequences are soon visible all around them. "a stern chase is a long chase," say the sailors; and he who buys a farm mainly on credit, intending to pay for it out of its proceeds, finds interest, taxes, sickness, bad seasons, hail, frost, drouth, tornadoes, floods, &c., &c., deranging his calculations and impeding his progress, until he is often impelled to give up in despair. there are men who can surmount every obstacle and defy discouragement--these need no advice; but there are thousands who, having little means and large families, can grow into a good farm more easily and far more surely than they can pay for it; and these may wisely seek homes where population is yet sparse and land is consequently cheap. doubtless, some migrate who might better have forborne; yet the instinct which draws our race toward sunset is nevertheless a true one. the east will not be depopulated; but the west will grow more rapidly in the course of the next twenty years than ever in the past. the railroads which have brought kansas and minnesota within three days, and california within a week of us, have rendered this inevitable. but the south also invites immigration as she never did till now. her lands are still very cheap; she is better timbered, in the average, than the west; her climate attracts; her unopened mines and unused water-power call loudly for enterprise, labor and skill. it is absurd to insist that her soil is exhausted when not one-third of it has ever yet been plowed. i do not advise solitary migration to the south, because she needs schools, mills, roads, bridges, churches, &c., &c., which the solitary immigrant can neither provide nor well do without: and i have no assurance that he, if obliged to work out for present bread, would find those ready to employ and willing to pay him; but let a hundred northern farmers and mechanics worth $ , to $ , each combine to select (through chosen agents) and buy ten or twenty thousand acres in some southern state, embracing hill and vale, timber and tillage, water-power and minerals, and divide it equitably among themselves, after laying it out with roads, a park, a village-plat, sites for churches, schools, &c., and i am confident that they can thus make pleasant homes more cheaply and speedily there than almost anywhere else. good farming land, improved or unimproved, is this day cheaper in the united states, all things considered, than in any other country--cheaper than it can long remain. so many are intent on short cuts to riches that the soil is generally neglected, and may be bought amazingly cheap in parts of connecticut as well as in iowa or nebraska. when i was last in illinois, i rode for some hours beside a gray-coated farmer of some sixty years, who told me this: "i came here thirty years ago, and took up, at $ - / per acre, a good tract of land, mainly in timber. i am now selling off the timber at $ per acre, reserving the land." that seems to me a good operation--not so quick as a corner in the stock-market, but far safer. and, while i would advise no man to incur debt, i say most earnestly to all who have means, "look out the place where you would prefer to live and die; take time to suit yourself thoroughly; choose it with reference to your means, your calling, your expectations, and, if you can pay for it, _buy_ it. do not imagine that land is cheap in the west or the south only; it is to be found cheap in _every_ state by those who are able to own and who know how to use it." i earnestly trust that the obvious advantages of settling in colonies are to be widely and rapidly improved by our people, nearly as follows: one thousand heads of families unite to form a colony, contribute $ to $ each to defray the cost of seeking out and securing a suitable location, and send out two or three of the most capable and trustworthy of their number to find and purchase it; and now let their lands be surveyed and divided into village or city lots at or near the center, larger allotments (for mechanics' and merchants' homes) surrounding that center, and far larger (for farms) outside of these; and let each member, on or soon after his arrival, select a village-lot, out-lot, farm, or one of each if he chooses and can pay for them. let ample reservations of the best sites for churches, school-houses, a town hall, public park, etc., be made in laying out the village, and let each purchaser of a lot or farm be required to plant shade-trees along the highways which skirt or traverse it. if irrigation by common effort be deemed necessary, let provision be made for that. run up a large, roomy structure for a family hotel or boarding-house; and now invite each stockholder to come on, select his land, pay for it, and get up some sort of a dwelling, leaving his family to follow when this shall have been rendered habitable; but, if they insist on coming on with him and taking their chances, so be it. iv. preparing to farm. i write mainly for beginners--for young persons, and some not so young, who are looking to farming as the vocation to which their future years are to be given, by which their living is to be gained. in this chapter, i would counsel young men, who, not having been reared in personal contact with the daily and yearly round of a farmer's cares and duties, purpose henceforth to live by farming. to these i would earnestly say, "no haste!" our boys are in too great a hurry to be men. they want to be bosses before they have qualified themselves to be efficient journeymen. i have personally known several instances of young men, fresh from school or from some city vocation, buying or hiring a farm and undertaking to work it; and i cannot now recall a single instance in which the attempt has succeeded; while speedy failure has been the usual result. the assumption that farming is a rude, simple matter, requiring little intellect and less experience, has buried many a well-meaning youth under debts which the best efforts of many subsequent years will barely enable him to pay off. in my opinion, half our farmers now living would say, if questioned, that they might better have waited longer before buying or hiring a farm. when i was ten years old, my father took a job of clearing off the mainly fallen and partially rotten timber--largely white pine and black ash--from fifty acres of level and then swampy land; and he and his two boys gave most of the two ensuing years ( - ) to the rugged task. when it was finished, i--a boy of twelve years--could have taken just such a tract of half-burned primitive forest as that was when we took hold of it, and cleared it by an expenditure of seventy to eighty per cent. of the labor we actually bestowed upon that. i had learned, in clearing this, how to economize labor in any future undertaking of the kind; and so every one learns by experience who steadily observes and reflects. he must have been a very good farmer at the start, or a very poor one afterward, who cannot grow a thousand bushels of grain much cheaper at thirty years of age than he could at twenty. to every young man who has had no farming experience, or very little, yet who means to make farming his vocation, i say, hire out, for the coming year, to the very best farmer who will give you anything like the value of your labor. buy a very few choice books, (if you have them not already,) which treat of geology, chemistry, botany, and the application of their truths in practical agriculture; give to these the close and thoughtful attention of your few leisure hours; keep your eyes wide open, and set down in a note-book or pocket-diary each night a minute of whatever has been done on the farm that day, making a note of each storm, shower, frost, hail, etc., and also of the date at which each planted crop requires tillage or is ripe enough to harvest, and ascertaining, so far as possible, what each crop produced on the farm has cost, and which of them all are produced at a profit and which at a loss. at the year's end, hire again to the same or another good farmer and pursue the same course; and so do till you shall be twenty-four or twenty-five years of age, which is young enough to marry, and quite young enough to undertake the management of a farm. by this time, if you have carefully saved and wisely invested your earnings, you will have several hundred dollars; and, if you do not choose to migrate to some region where land is very cheap, you will have found some one willing to sell you a small farm on credit, taking a long mortgage as security. your money--assuming that you have only what you will have earned--will all be wanted to fix up your building, buy a team and cow, with the few implements needed, and supply you with provisions till you can grow some. if you can start thus experienced and full-handed, you may, by diligence, combined with good fortune, begin to make payments on your mortgage at the close of your second year. i hate debt as profoundly as any one can, but i do not consider this really running into debt. one has more land than he needs, and does not need his pay for it forthwith; another wants land, but lacks the means of present payment. they two enter into an agreement mutually advantageous, whereby the poorer has the present use and ultimate fee-simple of the farm in question, in consideration of the payment of certain sums as duly stipulated. technically, the buyer becomes a debtor; practically, i do not regard him as such, until payments fall due which he is unable promptly to meet. let him rigorously avoid all other debt, and he need not shrink from nor be ashamed of this. i have a high regard for scientific attainments; i wish every young man were thoroughly instructed in the sciences which underlie the art of farming. but all the learning on earth, though it may powerfully help to make a good farmer, would not of itself make one. when a young man has learned all that seminaries and lectures, books and cabinets, can teach him, he still needs practice and experience to make him a good farmer. --"but wouldn't you have a young man study in order that he may become a good farmer?" --if he has money, yes. i believe a youth worth four or five thousand dollars may wisely spend a tenth of his means in attending lectures, and even courses of study, at any good seminary where natural science is taught and applied to agriculture. but life is short at best; and he who has no means, or very little, cannot really afford to attend even an agricultural college. he can acquire so much of science as is indispensable in the cheaper way i have indicated. he cannot wisely consent to spend the best years of his life in getting ready to live. he who has already mastered the art of farming, and has adequate means, may of course buy a farm to-morrow, though he be barely or not quite of age. he has little to learn from me. yet i think even such have often concluded, in after years, that they were too hasty in buying land--that they might profitably have waited, and deliberated, and garnered the treasures of experience, before they took the grave step of buying their future home; with regard to which i shall make some suggestions in my next chapter. but i protest against a young man's declining or postponing the purchase of a farm merely because he is not able to buy a great one. twenty acres of arable soil near a city or manufacturing village, forty acres in a rural district of any old state, or eighty acres in a region just beginning to be peopled by white men, is an ample area for any one who is worth less than $ , . if he understands his business, he will find profitable employment hereon for every working hour: if he does not understand farming, he will buy his experience dear enough on this, yet more cheaply than he would on a wider area. until he shall have more money than he needs, let him beware of buying more land than he absolutely wants. v. buying a farm. no one need be told at this day that good land is cheaper than poor--that the former may be bought at less cost than it can be made. yet this, like most truths, may be given undue emphasis. it should be considered in the light of the less obvious truth that _every farmer may make advantageous use of_ some _poor land_. the smallest farm should have its strip or belt of forest; the larger should have an abundance and variety of trees; and sterile, stony land grows many if not most trees thriftily: even at the risk of arousing western prejudice, i maintain that new-england, and all broken, hilly, rocky countries, have a decided advantage (abundantly counterbalanced, no doubt) over regions of great fertility and nearly uniform facility, in that human stupidity and mole-eyed greed can never wholly divest them of forests--that their sterile crags and steep acclivities must mainly be left to wood forever. avarice may strip them of their covering of to-day; but, defying the plow and the spade, they cannot be so denuded that they will not be speedily reclothed with trees and foliage. i am not a believer that "five acres" or "ten acres" suffice for a farm. i know where money is made on even fewer than five acres; but they who do it are few, and men of exceptional capacity and diligence. their achievements are necessarily confined to the vicinage of cities or manufacturing villages. the great majority of all who live by agriculture want room to turn upon--want to grow grass and keep stock--and, for such, no mere garden or potato-patch will answer. they want genuine farms. yet, go where you may in this country, you will hear a farmer saying of his neighbor, "he has too much land," even where the criticism might justly be reciprocated. we cannot all be mistaken on this head. there are men who can each manage thousands of acres of tillage, just as there are those who can skillfully wield an army of a hundred thousand men. napoleon said there were two of this class in the europe of his day. there are others who cannot handle a hundred acres so that nothing is lost through neglect or oversight. rules must be adapted to average capacities and circumstances. he who expects to live by cattle-rearing needs many more acres than he who is intent on grain-growing; while he who contemplates vegetable, root, and fruit culture, needs fewer acres still. as to the direction of his efforts, each one will be a law unto himself. if i were asked, by a young man intent on farming, to indicate the proper area for him, i would say, _buy just so large a farm as half your means will pay for_. in other words, "if you are worth $ , , invest half of it in land, the residue in stock, tools, etc.; and observe the same rule of proportion, whether you be worth $ , , or only $ , . if you are worth just nothing at all, i would invest in land the half of that, and no more. in other words, i would either wait to earn $ or over, or push westward till i found land that costs practically nothing." this, then, i take to be the gist of the popular criticism on our farmers as having unduly enlarged their borders: _they have more land than they have capital to stock and till to the best advantage._ he who has but fifty acre has too much if he lets part of his land lie idle and unproductive for lack of team or hands to till it efficiently; while he who has a thousand acres has none too much if he has the means and talents wherewith to make the best of it all. i have said that i consider the soil of new england as cheap, all things considered, for him who is able to buy and work it, as that of minnesota or arkansas--that i urge migration to the west only upon those who cannot pay for farms in the old states. i doubt whether the farmers of any other section have, in the average, done better, throughout the last ten years, than the butter-makers of vermont, the cheese-dairymen of this state. and yet there is, in the ridgy, rocky, _patchy_ character of most of our eastern farms, an insuperable barrier to the most economic, effective cultivation. if the ridges were further apart--if each rocky or gravelly knoll were not in close proximity to a strip of bog or morass--it would be different. but the genius of our age points unmistakably to cultivation by steam or some other mechanical application of power; and this requires spacious fields, with few or no obstacles to the equable progress of the plow. i apprehend that, for this reason, the growth of bread-corn eastward of the hudson can never more be considerably extended, so long as the boundless, fertile prairies can so easily pour their exhaustless supplies upon us. fruits, vegetables, roots and grass, we must continue to grow, probably in ever-increasing abundance; but we of the east will buy our bread-corn largely if not mainly from the west. he, therefore, who bays land in the eastern states should regard primarily its capacity to produce those crops in which the east can never be supplanted--grass, fruits, vegetables, timber. if a farm will also produce good corn or wheat, that is a recommendation; but let him place a higher value on those capacities which will be more generally required and drawn upon. in the west, the case is different; for, though wheat-culture still recedes before the footsteps of advancing population, and minnesota may soon cease to grow for others, as western new-york, ohio, indiana, and northern illinois, have already done, yet indian corn, being the basis of both beef and pork, will long hold its own in the valley of the ohio and in that of the upper mississippi. as it recedes slowly westward, clover and timothy, butter and cheese, will press closely on its footsteps. good neighbors, good roads, good schools, good mechanics at hand, and a good church within reach, will always be valued and sought: few farmers are likely to disregard them. let whoever buys a farm whereon to live, resolve to buy once for all, and let him not forget that health is not only wealth but happiness--that an eligible location and a beautiful prospect are elements of enjoyment not only for ourselves but our friends; let him not fancy that all the land will soon be gobbled up and held at exorbitant prices, but believe that money will almost always command money's worth of whatever may be needed, so that he need not embarrass himself to-day through fear that he may not be able to find sellers to-morrow, and he can hardly fail to buy judiciously, and thus escape that worst species of home-sickness--sickness of home. vi. laying off a farm--pasturing. whoever finds himself the newly installed owner and occupant of a farm, should, before doing much beyond growing a crop in the ordinary way, study well its character, determine its capacities, make himself well acquainted with its peculiarities of soil and surface, with intent to make the most of it in his future operations. i would devote at least a year to this thoughtful observation and study. to one reared amid the rugged scenery of new-england; or on either slope of the allegheny ridge, all prairie farms look alike, just as a european supposes this to be the case with all negroes. a better acquaintance will show the average prairie quarter-section by no means an unbroken meadow, "level as a house-floor," but diversified by water-courses, "sloughs," and gentle acclivities--sometimes by considerable ravines and "barrens" or elevated "swales," thinly covered with timber, or brush, or both. but i will contemplate more especially a northern farm, made up of hill and vale or glade, rocky ridge and skirting bog or other low land, with a wood-lot on the rear or not far distant, and clumps or belts of timber irregularly lining brook and ravine, or lurking in the angles and sinuosities of walls and wooden fences, and a ragged, mossy orchard sheltered in some quiet nook, or sprawling over some gravelly hill-side. a brook, nearly dry in august, gurgles down the hill-side or winds through the swamp; while fields, moderately sloping here and nearly level there, interposed as they can be, have severally been devoted, for a generation or more, alternately to grain and grass--the latter largely preponderating. we will suppose this farm to measure from to acres. now, the young man who has bought or inherited this farm may be wholly and consciously unable to enter upon any expensive system of improvement for the next ten years--may fully realize that four or five days of each week must meantime be given to the growing or earning of present bread--yet he should none the less study well the capacities and adaptations of each acre, and mature a comprehensive plan for the ultimate bringing of each field into the best and most useful condition whereof it is susceptible, before he cuts a living tree or digs a solitary drain. he is morally certain of doing something--perhaps many things--that he will sadly wish undone, if he fails to study peculiarities and mature a plan before he begins to improve or to fit his several fields for profitable cultivation. and the first selection to be made is that of a pasture, since i am compelled to use an old, familiar name for what should be essentially a new thing. this pasture should be as near the center of the farm as may be, and convenient to the barns and barn-yard that are to be. it should have some shade, but no very young trees; should be dry and rolling, with an abundance of the purest living water. the smaller this pasture-lot may be, the better i shall like it, provided you fence it very stoutly, connect it with the barn-yard by a lane if they are not in close proximity, and firmly resolve that, outside of this lot, this lane, this yard and the adjacent stable, your cattle shall never be seen, unless on the road to market. very possibly, the day may come wherein you will decide to dispense with pasturing altogether; but that is, for the present, improbable. _one_ pasture you will have; if you live in the broad west, and purpose to graze extensively, it will doubtless be a large one; but permitting your stock to ramble in spring and fall all over your own fields--(and perhaps your neighbors' also)--in quest of their needful food, biting off the tops of the finer young trees, trampling down or breaking off some that are older, rubbing the bark off of your growing fruit-trees, and doing damage that years will be required to repair, i most vehemently protest against. the one great error that misleads and corrupts mankind is the presumption that _something may be had for nothing_. the average farmer imagines that whatever of flesh or of milk may accrue to him from the food his cattle obtain by browsing over his fields or through his woods, is so much clear gain--that they do the needful work, while he pockets the net proceeds. but the universe was framed on a plan which requires so much for so much; and this law will not submit to defiance or evasion. under the unnatural, exceptional conditions which environ the lone squatter on a vast prairie, something may be made by turning cattle loose and letting them shift for themselves; but this is at best transitory, and at war with the exigencies of civilization. whoever lives within sight of a school-house, or within hearing of a church-bell, is under the dominion of a law alike inexorable and beneficent--the law that requires each to pay for all he gets, and reap only where he has sown. you can hardly have a pasture so small that it will not afford hospitality to weeds and prove a source of multiform infestations. the plants that should mature and be diffused will be kept down to the earth; those which should be warred upon and eradicated will flourish untouched, ripen their seed, and diffuse it far and wide. thistles, white daisy, and every plant that impedes tillage and diminishes crops, are nourished and diffused by means of pastures. i hold, therefore, that the good farmer will run a mowing-machine over his pasture twice each summer--say early in june, and then late in july--or, if his lot be too rough for this, will have it clipped at least once with a scythe. cutting all manner of worthless if not noxious plants in the blossom, will benefit the soil which their seeding would tax; it will render the eradication of weeds from your tillage a far easier task; and it will prevent your being a nuisance to your neighbors. i am confident that no one who has formed the habit of keeping down the weeds in his pasture will ever abandon it. i think each pasture should have (though mine, as yet, has not) a rude shed or other shelter whereto the cattle may resort in case of storm or other inclemency. how much they shrink as well as suffer from one cold, pelting rain, few fully realize; but i am sure that "the merciful man" who (as the scripture says) "is merciful to his beast," finds his humanity a good paying investment. i doubt that the rule would fail, even in texas; but i am contemplating civilized husbandry, not the rude conditions of tropical semi-barbarism. if only by means of stakes and straw, give cattle a chance to keep dry and warm when they must otherwise shiver through a rainy, windy day and night on the cold, wet ground, and i am sure they will pay for it. in confining a herd of cattle to such narrow limits, i do not intend that they shall be stinted to what grows there. on the contrary, i expect them to be fed on winter rye, on cut grass, on sowed corn, sorghum, stalks, roots, etc., etc., as each shall be in season. with a good mower, it is a light hour's work before breakfast to cut and cart to a dozen or twenty head as much grass or corn as they will eat during the day. but let that point stand over for the present. vii. trees--woodland--forests. i am not at all sentimental--much less mawkish--regarding the destruction of trees. descended from several generations of timber-cutters (for my paternal ancestors came to america in ), and myself engaged for three years in land-clearing, i realize that trees exist for use rather than for ornament, and have no more scruple as to cutting timber in a forest than as to cutting grass in a meadow. utility is the reason and end of all vegetable growth--of a hickory's no less than a corn-stalk's. i have always considered "woodman, spare that tree," just about the most mawkish bit of badly versified prose in our language, and never could guess how it should touch the sensibilities of any one. understand, then, that i urge the planting of trees mainly because i believe it will _pay_, and the preservation, improvement, and extension, of forests, for precisely that reason. yet i am not insensible to the beauty and grace lent by woods, and groves, and clumps or rows of trees, to the landscape they diversify. i feel the force of emerson's averment, that "beauty is its own excuse for being," and know that a homestead embowered in, belted by, stately, graceful elms, maples, and evergreens, is really _worth_ more, and will sell for more, than if it were naked field and meadow. i consider it one positive advantage (to balance many disadvantages) of our rocky, hilly, rugged eastern country, that it will never, in all probability, be so denuded of forests as the rich, facile prairies and swales of the great valley may be. our winds are less piercing, our tornadoes less destructive, than those of the great west. i doubt whether there is another equal area of the earth's surface whereon so many kinds of valuable trees grow spontaneously and rapidly, defying eradication, as throughout new england and on either slope of the alleghenies; and this profusion of timber and foliage may well atone for, or may be fairly weighed against, many deficiencies and drawbacks. the yankee, who has been accustomed to see trees spring up spontaneously wherever they were not kept down by ax, or plow, or scythe, and to cross running water every half mile of a summer day's journey, may well be made homesick, by two thousand miles of naked, dusty, wind-swept plains, whereon he finds no water for fifty to a hundred miles, and knows it impossible to cut an ax-helve, much more an axle-tree, in the course of a wearying journey. no eastern farmer ever realized the blessedness of abundant and excellent wood and water until he had wandered far from his boyhood's home. no one may yet be able fully to explain the inter-dependence of these two blessings; but the fact remains. all over "the plains," there is evidence that trees grew and flourished where none are now found, and that springs and streams were then frequent and abiding where none now exist. a prominent citizen of nevada, who explored southward from austin to the colorado, assured me that his party traveled for days in the bed of what had once been a considerable river, but in which it was evident that no water had flowed for years. and i have heard that since the mormons have planted trees over considerable sections of utah, rains in summer are no longer rare, and salt lake evinces, by a constant though moderate increase of her volume of waters, that the equilibrium of rain-fall with evaporation in the great basin has been fully restored--or rather, that the rain-fall is now taking the lead. i have a firm faith that all the great deserts of the temperate and torrid zones will yet be reclaimed by irrigation and tree-planting. the bill which congress did not pass, nor really consider, whereby it was proposed, some years since, to give a section of the woodless public lands remote from settlement to every one who, in a separate township, would plant and cherish a quarter-section of choice forest-trees, ought to have been passed--with modifications, perhaps, but preserving the central idea. had ten thousand quarter-sections, in so many different townships of the plains, been thus planted to timber ten to twenty years ago, and protected from fire and devastation till now, the value of those plains for settlement would have been nearly or quite doubled. a capital mistake, it seems to me, is being made by some of the dairy farmers of our own state. one who has a hundred acres of good soil, whereof twenty or thirty are wooded, cuts off his timber entirely, calculating that the additional grass that he may grow in its stead will pay for all the coal he needs for fuel, so that he will make a net gain of the time he has hitherto devoted each winter to cutting and hauling wood. he does not consider how much his soil will lose in summer moisture, how his springs and runnels will be dried up, nor how the sweep of harsh winds will be intensified, by baring his hill-tops and ravines to sun and breeze so utterly. in my deliberate judgment, a farm of one hundred acres will yield _more_ feed, with far greater uniformity of product from year to year, if twenty acres of its ridge-crests, ravine-sides, and rocky places, are thickly covered with timber, than if it be swept clean of trees and all devoted to grass. hence, i insist that the farmer who sweeps off his wood and resolves to depend on coal for fuel, hoping to increase permanently the product of his dairy, makes a sad miscalculation. spain, italy, and portions of france, are now suffering from the improvidence that devoured their forests, leaving the future to take care of itself. i presume the great empires of antiquity suffered from the same folly, though to a much greater extent. the remains of now extinct races who formerly peopled and tilled the central valleys of this continent, and especially the territory of arizona, probably bear witness to a similar recklessness, which is paralleled by our fathers' and our own extermination of the magnificent forests of white pine which, barely a century ago, covered so large a portion of the soil of our northern states. vermont sold white pine abundantly to england through canada within my day: she is now supplying her own wants from canada at a cost of not less than five times the price she sold for; and she will be paying still higher rates before the close of this century. i entreat our farmers not to preserve every tree, good, bad, or indifferent, that may happen to be growing on their lands--but, outside of the limited districts wherein the primitive forest must still be cut away in order that land may be obtained for cultivation, to _plant and rear at least two better trees for every one they may be impelled to cut down_. how this may, in the average, be most judiciously done, i will try to indicate in the succeeding chapter. viii. growing timber--tree-planting. in my judgment, the proportion of a small farm that should be constantly devoted to trees (other than fruit) is not less than one-fourth; while, of farms exceeding one hundred acres in area, that proportion should be not less than one-third, and may often be profitably increased to one-half. i am thinking of such as are in good part superficially rugged and rocky, or sandy and sterile, such as new-england, eastern new-york, northern new-jersey, with both slopes of the alleghenies, as well as the western third of our continent, abound in. it may be that it is advisable to be content with a smaller proportion of timber in the prairie states and the broad, fertile intervales which embosom most of our great rivers for at least a part of their course; but i doubt it. and there is scarcely a farm in the whole country, outside of the great primitive forests in which openings have but recently been made, in which _some_ tree-planting is not urgently required. "too much land," you will hear assigned on every side as a reason for poor farming and meager crops. ask an average farmer in new-england, in virginia, in kentucky, or in alabama, why the crops of his section are in the average no better, and the answer, three times in four, will be, "our farmers have too much land"--that is, not too much absolutely, but too much relatively to their capital, stock, and general ability to till effectively. the habitual grower of poor crops will proffer this explanation quite as freely and frequently as his more thrifty neighbor. and what every one asserts must have a basis of truth. now, i do not mean to quarrel with the instinct which prompts my countrymen to buy and hold too much land. they feel, as i do, that land is still cheap almost anywhere in this country--cheap, if not in view of the income now derived from it, certainly in contemplation of the price it must soon command and the income it might, under better management, be made to yield. under this conviction--or, if you please, impression--every one is intent on holding on to more land than he can profitably till, if not more than he can promptly pay for. what i _do_ object to is simply this--that thousands, who have more land than they have capital to work profitably, will persist in half-tilling many acres, instead of thoroughly farming one-half or one third so many, and getting the rest into wood so fast as may be. i am confident that two-thirds of all our farmers would improve their circumstances and increase their incomes by concentrating their efforts, their means, their fertilizers, upon half to two-thirds of the area they now skim and skin, and giving the residue back to timber-growing. in my own hilly, rocky, often boggy, westchester--probably within six of being the oldest agricultural county in the union--i am confident that ten thousand acres might to-morrow be given back to forest with profit to the owners and advantage to all its inhabitants. it is a fruit-growing, milk-producing, truck-farming county, closely adjoining the greatest city of the new world; hence, one wherein land can be cultivated as profitably as almost anywhere else--yet i am satisfied that half its surface may be more advantageously devoted to timber than to grass or tillage. nay; i doubt that one acre in a hundred of rocky land--that is, land ribbed or dotted with rocks that the bar or the rock-hook cannot lift from their beds, and which it will not as yet pay to blast--is now tilled to profit, or ever will be until it shall be found advisable to clear them utterly of stone breaking through or rising within two feet of the surface. the time will doubtless arrive in which many fields will pay for clearing of stone that would not to-day; these, i urge, should be given up to wood now, and kept wooded until the hour shall have struck for ridding them of every impediment to the steady progress of both the surface and the subsoil plow. were all the rocky crests and rugged acclivities of this county bounteously wooded once more, and kept so for a generation, our floods would be less injurious, our springs unfailing, and our streams more constant and equable; our blasts would be less bitter, and our gales less destructive to fruit; we should have vastly more birds to delight us by their melody and aid us in our not very successful war with devouring insects; we should grow peaches, cherries, and other delicate fruits, which the violent caprices of our seasons, the remorseless devastations of our visible and invisible insect enemies, have all but annihilated; and we should keep more cows and make more milk on two-thirds of the land now devoted to grass than we actually do from the whole of it. and what is true of westchester is measurably true of every rural county in the union. i have said that i believe in cutting trees as well as in growing them; i have not said, and do not mean to say, that i believe in cutting everything clean as you go. that was once proper in westchester; it is still advisable in forest-covered regions, where the sun must be let in before crops can be grown; but, in nine cases out of ten, timber should be thinned or culled out rather than cut off; and, for every tree taken away, at least two should be planted or set out. we have pretty well outgrown the folly of letting every apple-tree bear such fruit as it will; though in the orchard of my father's little farm in amherst, n. h., whereon i was born, no tree had ever been grafted when i bade adieu to it in ; and i presume none has been to this day. by this time, almost every farmer realizes that he _can't afford_ to grow little, gnarly, villainously sour or detestably bitter-sweet apples, when, by duly setting a graft at a cost of two dimes, he may make that identical tree yield greenings or pippins at least as bounteously. i presume the cumulative experience of fifty or sixty generations of apple-growers has ripened this conclusion. why do they not infer readily and generally that growing indifferent timber where the best and most valued would grow as rapidly, is a stupid, costly blunder? it seems to me that whoever has attained the conviction that apple-trees should be grafted ought to know that it is wasteful to grow red oak, beech, white maple, and alder, where white oak, hickory, locust, and white pine, might be grown with equal facility, in equal luxuriance, provided the right seeds were planted, and a little pains taken to keep down, for a year or two, the shoots spontaneously sent up by the wrong ones. north of the potomac, and east of the ohio, and (i presume) in limited districts elsewhere, rocky, sterile woodlands, costing $ to $ per acre according to location, etc., are to-day the cheapest property to be bought in the united states. even though nothing were done with them but keep out fire and cattle, and let the young trees grow as they will, money can be more profitably and safely invested in lands covered by young timber than in anything else. the parent, who would invest a few thousands for the benefit of children or grandchildren still young, may buy woodlands which will be worth twenty times their present cost within the next twenty years. but better even than this would it be to buy up rocky, craggy, naked hill-sides and eminences which have been pastured to death, and, shutting out cattle inflexibly, scratch these over with plow, mattock, hoe, or pick, as circumstances shall dictate, plant them thickly with chestnut, walnut, hickory, white oak, and the seeds of locust and white pine. i say locust, though not yet certain that this tree must not be started in garden or nursery-beds and transplanted when two or three years old, so puny and feeble is it at the outset, and so likely to be smothered under leaves or killed out by its more favored neighbors. i have experiments in progress not yet matured, which may shed light on this point before i finish these essays. _plant thickly_, and of diverse kinds, so as to cover the ground promptly and choke out weeds and shrubs, with full purpose to thin and prune as circumstances shall dictate. many farmers are averse to planting timber, because (they think) nothing can be realized therefrom for the next twenty or thirty years, which is as long as they expect to live. but this is a grave miscalculation. let us suppose a rocky, hilly pasture-lot of ten or twenty acres rudely scratched over as i have suggested, and thickly seeded with hickory nuts and white oak acorns only: within five years, it will yield abundantly of hoop poles, though the better, more promising half be left to mature, as they should be; two years later, another and larger crop of hoop-poles may be cut, still sparing the best; and thenceforth a valuable crop of timber may be taken from that land; for, if cut at the proper season, at least two thrifty sprouts will start from every stump; and so that wood will yield a clear income each year while its best trees are steadily growing and maturing. i do not advise restriction to those two species of timber; but i insist that a young plantation of forest-trees may and should yield a clear income in every year after its fourth. as to the far west--the plains, the parks, and the great basin--there is more money to be made by dotting them with groves of choice timber than by working the richest veins of the adjacent mountains. whoever will promptly start, near a present or prospective railroad, forty acres of choice trees--hickory, white oak, locust, chestnut, and white pine--within a circuit of three hundred miles from denver, on land which he has made or is making provision to irrigate--may begin to sell trees therefrom two years hence, and persist in selling annually henceforth for a century--at first, for transplanting; very soon, for a variety of uses in addition to that. * * * * * --but this paper grows too long, and i must postpone to the next my more especial suggestions to young farmers with regard to tree-planting. ix. planting and growing trees. whoever has recently bought, inherited, or otherwise become the owner of a farm, has usually found some part or parts of it devoted to wood; and this, if not in excess, he will mainly preserve, while he studies and plans with a view to the ultimate devotion to timber of just those portions of his land that are best adapted to that use. in locating that timber, i would have him consider these suggestions: i. land wisely planted with trees, and fenced so far as need be to keep out cattle, costs nothing. whatever else you grow involves labor and expenditure; trees grow of their own accord. you may neglect them utterly--may wander over the earth and be absent for ten or twenty years, while your fences decay and your fields are overcropped to exhaustion; even your meadows may be run out by late mowing and close feeding at both ends of the season, till a dozen acres will hardly subsist a span of horses and a cow; but your woods need only to be let alone to insure that their value shall have decidedly increased during your absence. they will richly reward labor and care in thinning, trimming, and transplanting--you may profitably employ in them any time that you can spare them--but they will do very well if simply let alone. and, unlike any other product with which i am acquainted, you may take crop after crop of wood from the same lot, and the soil will be richer and more productive after the last than it was before the first. whether wholly because their roots permeate and break up the soil during their life and enrich it in their decay, or for diverse reasons, it is certainly true that land--and especially _poor_ land--is enriched by growing upon it a crop of almost any timber, the evergreens possibly excepted. so, should you ever have land that you cannot till to profit, whether because it is too poor, or because you have a sufficiency that is better, you should at once devote it to wood. ii. your springs and streams will be rendered more equable and enduring by increasing the area and the luxuriance of your timber. they may have become scanty and capricious under a policy of reckless, wholesale destruction of trees; they will be rëenforced and reinvigorated by doubling the area of your woods, while quadrupling the number, and increasing the average size, of your trees. iii. all ravines and steep hill-sides should be devoted to trees. every acre too rocky to be thoroughly cleared of stone and plowed should be set apart for tree-growing. wherever the soil will be gullied or washed away by violent rains if under tillage, it should be excluded from cultivation and given up to trees. men often doubt the profit of heavy manuring; and well they may, if three-fourths of the fertilizers applied are soaked out and swept away by flooding rains or sudden thaws and floated off to some distant sea or bay; but let all that is applied to the soil only remain there till it is carted away in crops, and it will hardly be possible to manure too highly for profit. iv. trees, especially evergreens, may be so disposed as to modify agreeably the average temperature of your farm, or at least of the most important parts of it. when i bought my place--or rather the first installment of it--the best spot i could select for a garden lay at the foot of a hill which half surrounded it on the south and east, leaving it exposed to the full sweep of north and north-west winds; so that, though the soil was gravelly and warm, my garden was likely to be cold and backward. to remedy this, i planted four rows of evergreens (balsam fir, pine, red cedar, and hemlock), along a low ridge bounding it on the north, following an inward curve of the ridge at its west end; and those evergreens have in sixteen years grown into very considerable trees, forming a shady, cleanly, inviting bower, or sylvan retreat, daintily carpeted with the fallen leaves of the overhanging firs. i judge that the average temperature of the soil for some yards southward of this wind-break is at least five degrees higher, throughout the growing season, than it formerly was or would now be if these evergreens were swept away; while the aspect of the place is agreeably diversified, and even beautified, by their appearance. i believe it would sell for some hundreds of dollars more with than without that thrifty, growing clump of evergreens. v. i have already urged, though not strongly enough, that crops, as well as springs, will be improved by keeping the crests of ridges thickly wooded, thus depositing moisture in winter and spring, to be slowly yielded to the adjacent slopes during the heat and drouth of summer. i firmly believe that the slopes of a hill whose crest is heavily wooded will yield larger average crops than slope and crest together would do if both were bare of trees. vi. the banks of considerable streams, ponds, etc., may often be so planted with trees that these will shade more water than land, to the comfort and satisfaction of the fish, and the protection of those banks from abrasion by floods and rapid currents. sycamore, elm, and willow, do well here; if choice grape-vines are set beside and allowed to run over some of them, the effect is good, and the grapes acceptable to man and bird. vii. never forget that a good tree grows as thriftily and surely as a poor one. many a farmer has to-day ten to forty acres of indifferent cord-wood where he might, at a very slight cost, have had instead an equal quantity of choice timber, worth ten times as much. hickory, chestnut, and walnut, while they yield nuts that can be eaten or sold, are worth far more as timber than an equal bulk of beech, birch, hemlock, or red oak. chestnut has more than doubled in value within the last few years, mainly because it has been found excellent for the inside wood-work of dwellings. locust also seems to be increasing in value. ten acres of large, thrifty locust near this city would now buy a pretty good farm; as i presume it would, if located near any of our great cities. viii. where several good varieties of timber are grown together, some insect or atmospheric trouble may blast one of them, yet leave the residue alive and hearty. and, if all continue thrifty, some may be cut out and sold, leaving others more room to grow and rapidly attain a vigorous maturity. ix. wherever timber has become scarce and valuable, a wood-lot should be thinned out, nevermore cleared off, unless it is to be devoted to a different use. it seems to me that destroying a forest because we want timber is like smothering a hive of bees because we want honey. x. timber should be cut with intelligent reference to the future. locust and other valuable trees that it is desirable should throw up shoots from the stump, and rapidly reproduce their kind, should be cut in march or april; while trees that you want to exterminate should be cut in august, so that they may _not_ sprout. there may be exceptions to this rule; but i do not happen to recollect any. evergreens do not sprout; and i think these should be cut in winter--at all events, not in spring, when full of sap and thus prone to rapid decay. xi. your plantation will furnish pleasant and profitable employment at almost any season. i doubt that any one in this country has ever yet bestowed so much labor and care on a young forest as it will amply reward. sow your seeds thickly; begin to thin the young trees when they are a foot high, and to trim them so soon as they are three feet, and you may have thousands thriving on a fertile acre, and pushing their growth upward with a rapidity and to an altitude outrunning all preconception. xii. springs and streams will soon appear where none have appeared and endured for generations, when we shall have reclothed the nakedness of the plains with adequate forests. rains will become moderately frequent where they are now rare, and confined to the season when they are of least use to the husbandman. i may have more to say of trees by-and-by, but rest here for the present. the importance of the topic can hardly be overrated. x. draining--my own. my farm is in the township of newcastle, westchester county, n. y., miles from our city hall, and a little eastward of the hamlet known as chappaqua, called into existence by a station on the harlem railroad. it embraces the south-easterly half of the marsh which the railroad here traverses from south to north--my part measuring some fifteen acres, with five acres more of slightly elevated dry land between it and the foot of the rather rugged hill which rises thence on the east and on the south, and of which i now own some fifty acres, lying wholly eastward of my low land, and in good part covered with forest. of this, i bought more than half in , and the residue in bits from time to time as i could afford it. the average cost was between $ and $ per acre: one small and poor old cottage being the only building i found on the tract, which consisted of the ragged edges of two adjacent farms, between the western portions of which mine is now interposed, while they still adjoin each other beyond the north and south road, half a mile from the railroad, on which their buildings are located and which forms my eastern boundary. my stony, gravelly upland mainly slopes to the west; but two acres on my east line incline toward the road which bounds me in that direction, while two more on my south-east corner descend to the little brook which, entering at that corner, keeps irregularly near my south line, until it emerges, swelled by a smaller runnel that enters my lowland from the north and traverses it to meet and pass off with the larger brooklet aforesaid. i have done some draining, to no great purpose, on the more level portions of my upland; but my lowland has challenged my best efforts in this line, and i shall here explain them, for the encouragement and possible guidance of novices in draining. let me speak first of _my difficulties._--this marsh or bog consisted, when i first grappled with it, of some thirty acres, whereof i then owned less than a third. to drain it to advantage, one person should own it all, or the different owners should coöperate; but i had to go it alone, with no other aid than a freely accorded privilege of straightening as well as deepening the brook which wound its way through the dryer meadow just below me, forming here the boundary of two adjacent farms. i spent $ on this job, which is still imperfect; but the first decided fall in the stream occurs nearly a mile below me; and you tire easily of doing at your own cost work which benefits several others as much as yourself. my drainage will never be perfect till this brook, with that far larger one in which it is merged sixty rods below me, shall have been sunk three or four feet, at a further expense of at least $ . this bog or swamp, when i first bought into it, was mainly dedicated to the use of frogs, muskrats and snapping-turtles. a few small water-elms and soft maples grew upon it, with swamp alder partly fringing the western base of the hill east of it, where the rocks which had, through thousands of years, rolled from the hill, thickly covered the surface, with springs bubbling up around and among them. decaying stumps and imbedded fragments of trees argued that timber formerly covered this marsh as well as the encircling hills. a tall, dense growth of blackberry briers, thoroughwort, and all manner of marsh-weeds and grasses, covered the center of the swamp each summer; but my original portion of it, being too wet for these, was mainly addicted to hassocks or tussocks of wiry, worthless grass; their matted roots rising in hard bunches a few inches above the soft, bare, encircling mud. the bog ranged in depth from a few inches to five or six feet, and was composed of black, peaty, vegetable mold, diversified by occasional streaks of clay or sand, all resting on a substratum of hard, coarse gravel, out of which two or three springs bubbled up, in addition to the half a dozen which poured in from the east, and a tiny rivulet which (except in a very dry, hot time) added the tribute of three or four more, which sprang from the base of a higher shelf of the hill near the middle of what is now my farm. add to these that the brook which brawled and foamed down my hill-side near my south line as aforesaid, had brought along an immensity of pebbles and gravel of which it had mainly formed my five acres of dryer lowland, had thus built up a pretty swale, whereon it had the bad habit of filling up one channel, and then cutting another, more devious and eccentric, if possible, than any of its predecessors--and you have some idea of the obstacles i encountered and resolved to overcome. one of my first substantial improvements was the cutting of a straight channel for this current and, by walling it with large stones, compelling the brook to respect necessary limitations. it was not my fault that some of those stones were set nearly upright, so as to veneer the brook rather than thoroughly constrain it: hence, some of the stones, undermined by strong currents, were pitched forward into the brook by high spring freshets, so as to require rësetting more carefully. this was a mistake, but, not one of _my blunders._--these, the natural results of inexperience and haste, were very grave. not only had i had no real experience in draining when i began, but i could hire no foreman who know much more of it than i did. i ought to have begun by securing an ample and sure fall where the water left my land, and next cut down the brooklet or open ditch into which i intended to drain to the lowest practicable point--so low, at least, that no drain running into it should ever be troubled with back-water. nothing can be more useless than a drain in which water stagnates, choking it with mud. then i should have bought hundreds of hemlock or other cheap boards, slit them to a width of four or five inches, and, having opened the needed drains, laid these in the bottom and the tile thereupon, taking care to _break joint_, by covering the meeting ends of two boards with the middle of a tile. laying tile in the soft mud of a bog, with nothing beneath to prevent their sinking, is simply throwing away labor and money. i cannot wonder that tile-draining seems to many a humbug, seeing that so many tile are laid so that they can never do any good. having, by successive purchases, become owner of fully half of this swamp, and by repeated blunders discovered that making stone drains in a bog, while it is a capital mode of getting rid of the stone, is no way at all to dry the soil, i closed my series of experiments two years since by carefully rëlaying my generally useless tile on good strips of board, sinking them just as deep as i could persuade the water to run off freely, and, instead of allowing them to discharge into a brooklet or open ditch, connecting each with a covered main of four to six-inch tile; these mains discharging into the running brook which drains all my farm and three or four of those above it just where it runs swiftly off from my land. if a thaw or heavy rain swells the brook (as it sometimes will) so that it rises above my outlet aforesaid, the strong current formed by the concentration of the clear contents of so many drains will not allow the muddy water of the brook to back into it so many as three feet at most; and any mud or sediment that may be deposited there will be swept out clean whenever the brook shall have fallen to the drainage level. for this and similar excellent devices, i am indebted to the capital engineering and thorough execution of messrs. chickering & gall, whose work on my place has seldom required mending, and never called for reconstruction. _my success._--i judge that there are not many tracts more difficult to drain than mine was, considering all the circumstances, except those which are frequently flowed by tides or the waters of some lake, or river. had i owned the entire swamp, or had there been a fall in the brook just below me, had i had any prior experience in draining, or had others equally interested coöperated in the good work, my task would have been comparatively light. as it was, i made mistakes which increased the cost and postponed the success of my efforts; but this is at length complete. i had seven acres of indian corn, one of corn fodder, two of oats, and seven or eight acres of grass, on my lowland in ; and, though the spring months were quite rainy, and the latter part of summer rather dry, my crops were all good. i did not see better in westchester county; and i shall be quite content with as good hereafter. of my seven hundred bushels of corn (ears,) i judge that two-thirds would be accounted fit for seed anywhere; my grass was cut twice, and yielded one large crop and another heavier than the average first crop throughout our state. my drainage will require some care henceforth; but the fifteen acres i have reclaimed from utter uselessness and obstructions are decidedly the best part of my farm, uplands may be exhausted; these never can be. the experience of another season ( ) of protracted drouth has fully justified my most sanguine expectations. i had this year four acres of corn, and as many of oats, on my swamp, with the residue in grass; and they were all good. i estimate my first hay-crop at over two and a half tuns per acre, while the rowen or aftermath barely exceeded half a tun per acre, because of the severity of the drouth, which began in july and lasted till october. my oats were good, but not remarkably so; and i had bushels of ears of sound, ripe corn from four acres of drained swamp and two and a half of upland. i estimate my upland corn at seventy (shelled) bushels, and my lowland at fifty-five (shelled) bushels per acre. others, doubtless, had more, despite the unpropitious season; but my crop was a fair one, and i am content with it. my upland corn was heavily manured; my lowland but moderately. there are many to tell you how much i lose by my farming; i only say that, as yet, no one else has lost a farthing by it, and i do not complain. xi. draining generally. having narrated my own experience in draining with entire unreserve, i here submit the general conclusions to which it has led me: i. while i doubt that there is _any_ land above water that would not be improved by a good system of underdrains, i am sure that there is a great deal that could not at present be drained to profit. forests, hill-side pastures, and most dry gravelly or sandy tracts, i place in this category. perhaps one-third of new-england, half of the middle states, and three-fourths of the mississippi valley, may ultimately be drained with profit. ii. _all_ swamp lands without exception, nearly all clay soils, and a majority of the flat or gently rolling lands of this country, must eventually be drained, if they are to be tilled with the best results. i doubt that there is a garden on earth that would not be (unless it already had been) improved by thorough underdraining. iii. the uses of underdrains are many and diverse. to carry off surplus water, though the most obvious, stands by no means alone. . underdrained land may be plowed and sowed considerably earlier in spring than undrained soil of like quality. . drained fields lose far less than others of their fertility by washing. . they are not so liable to be gullied by sudden thaws or flooding rains. . where a field has been deeply subsoiled, i am confident that it will remain mellow and permeable by roots longer than if undrained. . less water being evaporated from drained than from undrained land, the soil will be warmer throughout the growing season; hence, the crop will be heavier, and will mature earlier. . being more porous and less compact, i think the soil of a drained field retains more moisture in a season of drouth, and its growing plants suffer less therefrom, than if it were undrained. in short, i thoroughly believe in underdraining. iv. yet i advise no man to run into debt for draining, as i can imagine a mortgage on a farm so heavy and pressing as to be even a greater nuisance than stagnant water in its soil. labor and tile are dear with us; i do not expect that either will ever be so cheap here as in england or belgium. what i _would_ have each farmer in moderate circumstances do is to _drain his wettest field_ next fall--that is, after finishing his haying and before cutting up his corn--taking care to secure abundant fall to carry off the water in time of flood, and doing his work thoroughly. having done this, let him subsoil deeply, fertilize amply, till carefully, and watch the result. i think it will soon satisfy him that such draining pays. v. i do not insist on tile as making the only good drain; but i have had no success with any other. the use of stone, in my opinion, is only justified where the field to be drained abounds in them and no other use can be made of them. to make a good drain with ordinary boulders or cobble-stones requires twice the excavation and involves twice the labor necessarily expended on tile-draining; and it is neither so effective nor so durable. earth will be carried by water into a stone drain; rats and other vermin will burrow in it and dig (or enlarge) holes thence to the surface; in short, it is not the thing. better drain with stone where they are a nuisance than not at all; but i predict that you will dig them up after giving them a fair trial and replace them with tile. in a wooded country, where tile were scarce and dear, i should try draining with slabs or cheap boards dressed to a uniform width of six or eight inches, and laid in a ditch dug with banks inclined or sloped to the bottom, so as to form a sort of v; the lower edge of the two side-slabs coming together at the bottom, and a third being laid widely across their upper edges, so as to form a perfect cap or cover. in firm, hard soil, this would prove an efficient drain, and, if well made, would last twenty years. uniformity of temperature and of moisture would keep the slabs tolerably sound for at least so long; and, if the top of this drain were two feet below the surface, no plowing or trampling over it would harm it. vi. as to draining by what is called a mole plow, which simply makes a waterway through the subsoil at a depth of three feet or thereabout, i have no acquaintance with it but by hearsay. it seems to me morally impossible that drains so made should not be lower at some points than at others, so as to retain their fill of water instead of carrying it rapidly off; and i am sure that plowing, or even carting heavy loads over them, must gradually choke and destroy them. yet this kind of draining is comparatively so cheap, and may, with a strong team, be effected so rapidly, that i can account for its popularity, especially in prairie regions. where the subsoil is rocky, it is impracticable; where it is hard-pan, it must be very difficult; where it is loose sand, it cannot endure; but in clays or heavy loams, it may, for a few years, render excellent service. i wish the heavy clays of vermont, more especially of the champlain basin, were well furrowed or pierced by even such drains; for i am confident that they would temporarily improve both soil and crop; and, if they soon gave out, they would probably be replaced by others more durable. --i shall not attempt to give instructions in drain-making; but i urge every novice in the art to procure waring's or some other work on the subject and study it carefully: then, if he can obtain at a fair price the services of an experienced drainer, hire him to supervise the work. one point only do i insist on--that is, draining into a main rather than an open ditch or brook; for it is difficult in this or any harsher climate to prevent the crumbling of your outlet tile by frost. below the potomac or the arkansas, this may not be apprehended; and there it may be best to have your drains separately discharge from a road-side bank or into an open ditch, as they will thus inhale more air, and so help (in summer) to warm and moisten the soil above them; but in our climate i believe it better to let your drains discharge into a covered main or mains as aforesaid, than into an open ditch or brook. tile and labor are dear with us; i presume labor will remain so. but, in our old states, there are often laborers lacking employment in november and the winter months; and it is the wisest and truest charity to proffer them pay for work. some will reject it unless the price be exorbitant; but there are scores of the deserving poor in almost every rural county, who would rather earn a dollar per day than hang around the grog-shops waiting for spring. get your tiles when you can, or do not get them at all, but let it be widely known that you have work for those who will do it for the wages you can afford, and you will soon have somebody to earn your money. having staked out your drains, set these to work at digging them, even though you should not be able to tile them for a year. cut your outlet deep, and your land will profit by a year of open drains. xii. irrigation--means and ends. while few can have failed to realize the important part played by water in the economy of vegetation, i judge that the question--"how can i secure to my growing plants a sufficiency of moisture at all times?"--has not always presented itself to the farmer's mind as demanding of him a practical solution. to rid his soil and keep it free of superfluous, but especially of stagnant water, he may or may not accept as a necessity; but that, having provided for draining away whatever is excessive, he should turn a short corner and begin at once to provide that water shall be supplied to his fields and plants whenever they may need it, he is often slow to apprehend. yet this provision is but the counterpart and complement of the other. i had sped across europe to venice, and noted with interest the admirable, effective irrigation of the great plain of lombardy, before i could call any land my own. i saw there a region perhaps thirty miles wide by one hundred and fifty along the east bank of the po, rising very gently thence to the foot of the austrian alps, which providence seems to have specially adapted to be improved by irrigation. the torrents of melted snow which in spring leap and foam adown the southern face of the alps, bringing with them the finer particles of soil, are suddenly arrested and form lakes (garda, maggiore, como, etc.) just as they emerge upon the plain. these lakes, slowly rising, often overflow their banks, with those of the small rivers that bear their waters westward to the po; and this overflow was a natural source of abiding fertility. to dam these outlets, and thus control their currents, was a very simple and obvious device of long ago, and was probably begun by a very few individuals (if by more than one), whose success incited emulation, until the present extensive and costly system of irrigating dams and canals was gradually developed. when i traversed lombardy in july, , the beds of streams naturally as large as the pemigewasset, battenkill, canada creek, or humboldt, were utterly dry; the water which would naturally have flowed therein being wholly transferred to an irrigating canal (or to canals) often two or three miles distant. the reservoirs thus created were filled in spring, when the streams were fullest and their water richest, and gradually drawn upon throughout the later growing season to cover the carefully leveled and graded fields on either side to the depth of an inch or two at a time. if any failed to be soon absorbed by the soil, it was drawn off as here superfluous, and added to the current employed to moisten and fertilize the field next below it; and so field after field was refreshed and enriched, to the husbandman's satisfaction and profit. it may be that the rich glades of english lancashire bear heavier average crops; but those of lombardy are rarely excelled on the globe. why should not our atlantic slope have its lombardy? utah, nevada, and california, exhibit raw, crude suggestions of such a system; but why should the irrigation of the new world be confined to regions where it is indispensable, when that of the old is not? i know no good reason whatever for leaving an american field unirrigated where water to flow it at will can be had at a moderate cost. when i first bought land (in ) i fully purposed to provide for irrigating my nearly level acres at will, and i constructed two dams across my upland stream with that view; but they were so badly planned that they went off in the flood caused by a tremendous rain the next spring; and, though i rebuilt one of them, i submitted to a miscalculation which provided for taking the water, by means of a syphon, out of the pond at the top and over the bank that rose fifteen or twenty feet above the surface of the water. of course, air would work into the pipe after it had carried a stream unexceptionably for two or three days, and then the water would run no longer. had i taken it from the bottom of the pond through my dam, it would have run forever, (or so long as there was water covering its inlet in the pond;) but bad engineering flung me; and i have never since had the heart (or the means) to revise and correct its errors. my next attempt was on a much humbler scale, and i engineered it myself. toward the north end of my farm, the hill-side which rises east of my lowland is broken by a swale or terrace, which gives me three or four acres of tolerably level upland, along the upper edge of which five or six springs, which never wholly fail, burst from the rocks above and unite to form a petty runnel, which dries up in very hot or dry weather, but which usually preserved a tiny stream to be lost in the swamp below. north of the gully cut down the lower hill-side by this streamlet, the hill-side of some three acres is quite steep, still partially wooded, and wholly devoted to pasturage. making a petty dam across this runnel at the top of the lower acclivity, i turned the stream aside, so that it should henceforth run along the crest of this lower hill, falling off gradually so as to secure a free current, and losing its contents at intervals through variable depressions in its lower bank. dam and artificial water-course together cost me $ , which was about twice what it should have been. that rude and petty contrivance has now been ten years in operation, and may have cost $ per annum for oversight and repairs. its effect has been to double the grass grown on the two acres it constantly irrigates, for which i paid $ , or more than thrice the cost of my irrigation. but more: my hill-side, while it was well grassed in spring, always gave out directly after the first dry, or hot week; so that, when i most needed feed, it afforded none; its herbage being parched up and dead, and thus remaining till refreshed by generous rains. i judge, therefore, that my irrigation has _more_ than doubled the product of those two acres, and that these are likely to lose nothing in yield or value so long as that petty irrigating ditch shall be maintained. i know this is small business. but suppose each of the hundred thousand new-england farms, whereof five to ten acres might be thus irrigated at a cost not exceeding $ per farm, had been similarly prepared to flow those acres last spring and early summer, with an average increase therefrom of barely one tun of hay (or its equivalent in pasturage) per acre. the , tuns of hay thus realized would have saved , head of cattle from being sent to the butcher while too thin for good beef, while every one of them was required for further use, and will have to be replaced at a heavy cost. shall not these things be considered? shall not all who can do so at moderate cost resolve to test on their own farms the advantages and benefits that may be secured by irrigation? xiii. the possibilities of irrigation. i have given an account of my poor, little experiment in irrigation, because it is one which almost every farmer can imitate and improve upon, however narrow his domain and slender his fortune. i presume there are half a million homesteads in the united states which have natural facilities for irrigation at least equal to mine; many of them far greater. along either slope of the alleghenies, throughout a district at least a thousand miles long by three hundred wide, nearly every farm might be at least partially irrigated by means of a dam costing from twenty-five to one hundred dollars; so might at least half the farms in new-england and our own state. on the prairies, the plans must be different, and the expense probably greater, but the results obtained would bounteously reward the outlay. i shall not see the day, but there are those now living who _will_ see it, when artesian wells will be dug at points where many acres may be flowed from a gentle swell in the midst of a vast plain, or at the head of a fertile valley, expressly, or at least mainly, that its waters may be led across that plain, adown that valley, in irrigating streams and ditches, until they have been wholly drank up by the soil. i have seen single wells in california that might be made to irrigate sufficiently hundreds of acres, by the aid of a reservoir into which their waters could be discharged when the soil did not require them, and there retained until the thirsty earth demanded them. an old and successful farmer in my neighborhood affirms that water is the cheapest and best fertilizer ever applied to the soil. if this were understood to mean that no other is needed or can be profitably applied, it would be erroneous. still, i think it clearly true that the annual product of most farms can be increased, and the danger of failure averted, more cheaply by the skillful application of water than by that of any other fertilizer whatever, plaster (gypsum) possibly excepted. i took a run through virginia last summer, not far from the st of august. that state was then suffering intensely from drouth, as she continued to do for some weeks thereafter. i am quite sure that i saw on her thirsty plains and hillsides not less than three hundred thousand acres planted with indian corn, whereof the average product could not exceed ten bushels per acre, while most of it would fall far below that yield, and there were thousands of acres that would not produce one sound ear! every one deplored the failure, correctly attributing it to the prevailing drouth. and yet, i passed hundreds if not thousands of places where a very moderate outlay would have sufficed to dam a stream or brooklet issuing from between two spurs of the blue ridge, or the alleghenies, so that a refreshing current of the copious and fertilizing floods of winter and spring, warmed by the fervid suns of june and july, could have been led over broad fields lying below, so as to vanquish drouth and insure generous harvests. nay; i feel confident that i could in many places have constructed rude works in a week, after that drouth began to be felt, that would have saved and made the corn on at least a portion of the planted acres through which the now shrunken brooks danced and laughed idly down to the larger streams in the wider and equally thirsty valleys. of course, i know that this would have been imperfect irrigation--a mere stop-gap--that the cold spring-water of a parched summer cannot fertilize as the hill-wash of winter and spring, if thriftily garnered and warmed through and through for sultry weeks, would do; yet i believe that very many farmers might, even then, have secured partial crops by such irrigation as was still possible, had they, even at the eleventh hour, done their best to retrieve the errors of the past. for the present, i would only counsel every farmer to give his land a careful scrutiny with a view to irrigation in the future. no one is obliged to do any faster than his means will justify; and yet it may be well to have a clear comprehension of all that may ultimately be done to profit, even though much of it must long remain unattempted. in many cases, a stream may be dammed for the power which it will afford for two or three months of each year, if it shall appear that this use is quite consistent with its employment to irrigation, when the former alone would not justify the requisite outlay. it is by thus making one expense subserve two quite independent but not inconsistent purposes that success is attained in other pursuits; and so it may be in farming. as yet, each farmer must study his own resources with intent to make the most of them. if a manageable stream crosses or issues from his land, he must measure its fall thereon, study the lay of the land, and determine whether he can or cannot, at a tolerable cost, make that stream available in the irrigation of at least a portion of his growing crops when they shall need water and the skies decline to supply it. on many, i think on most, farms situated among hills, or upon the slopes of mountains, something may be done in this way--done at once, and with immediate profit. but this is rudimentary, partial, fragmentary, when compared with the irrigation which yet shall be. i am confident that there are points on the carson, the humboldt, the weber, the south platte, the cache-le-poudre, and many less noted streams which thrid the central plateau of our continent, where an expenditure of $ , to $ , may be judiciously made in a dam, locks and canals, for the purposes of irrigation and milling combined, with a moral certainty of realizing fifty per cent. annually on the outlay, with a steady increase in the value of the property. if my eye did not deceive me, there is one point on the carson where a dam that need not cost $ , would irrigate one hundred square miles of rich plain which, when i saw it eleven years ago, grew nought but the worthless shrubs of the desert, simply because nothing else could endure the intense, abiding drouth of each nevada summer. such palpable invitations to thrift cannot remain forever unimproved. in regions like this, where summer rains are the rule rather than the exception, the need of irrigation is not so palpable, since we do or may secure decent average crops in its absence. yet there is no farm in our country that would not yield considerably more grain and more grass, more fruit and more vegetables, if its owner had water at command which he could apply at pleasure and to any extent he should deem requisite. most men, thus empowered, would at first irrigate too often and too copiously; but experience would soon temper their zeal, and teach them "the precious art of not too much;" and they would thenceforth be careful to give their soil drink yet, not drown it. * * * * * whoever lives beyond the close of this century, and shall then traverse our prairie states, will see them whitened at intervals by the broad sails of windmills erected over wells, whence every gale or breeze will be employed in pumping water into the ponds or reservoirs so located that water may be drawn therefrom at will and diffused in gentle streamlets over the surrounding fields to invigorate and impel their growing crops. and, when all has been done that this paper faintly foreshadows, our people will have barely indicated, not by any means exhausted, the beneficent possibilities of irrigation. the difficulty is in making a beginning. too many farmers would fain conceal a poverty of thought behind an affectation of dislike or contempt for novelties. "humbug!" is their stereotyped comment on every suggestion that they might wisely and profitably do something otherwise than as their grandfathers did. they assume that those respected ancestors did very well without irrigation; wherefore, it cannot now be essential. but the circumstances have materially changed. the disappearance of the dense, high woods that formerly almost or quite surrounded each farm has given a sweep to the heated, parching winds of summer, to which our ancestors were strangers. our springs, our streams, do not hold out as they once did. our summer drouths are longer and fiercer. even though our grandfathers did not, we _do_ need and may profit by irrigation. xiv. plowing--deep or shallow. rules absolutely without exception are rare; and they who imagine that i insist on plowing all lands deeply are wrong for i hold that much land should never be plowed at all. in fact, i have seen in my life nearly as large an area that ought not as i have that ought to be plowed, by which i mean that half the land i have seen may serve mankind better if devoted to timber than if subjected to tillage. i personally know farmers who would thrive far better if they tilled but half the area they do, bestowing on this all the labor and fertilizers they spread over the whole, even though they threw the residue into common and left it there. i judge that a majority of our farmers could increase the recompense of their toil by cultivating fewer acres than they now do. nor do i deny that there are soils which it is not advisable to plow deeply. prof. mapes told me he had seen a tract in west jersey whereof the soil was but eight inches deep, resting on a stratum of copperas (sulphate of iron,) which, being upturned by the plow and mingled with the soil, poisoned the crops planted thereon. and i saw, last summer, on the intervale of new river, in the western part of old virginia, many acres of corn which were thrifty and luxuriant in spite of shallow plowing and intense drouth, because the rich, black loam which had there been deposited by semi-annual inundations, until its depth ranged from two to twenty feet, was so inviting and permeable that the corn-roots ran _below_ the bottom of the furrow about as readily as above that line. i do not doubt that there are many millions of acres of such land that would produce tolerably, and sometimes bounteously, though simply scratched over by a brush harrow and never plowed at all. in the infancy of our race, when there were few mouths to fill and when farming implements were very rude and ineffective, cultivation was all but confined to these facile strips and patches, so that the utility, the need, of deep tillage was not apparent. and yet, we know the crops often failed utterly in those days, plunging whole nations into the miseries of famine. the primitive plow was a forked stick or tree-top, whereof one prong formed the coulter, the other and longer the beam; and he who first sharpened the coulter-prong with a stone hatchet was the whitney or mccormick of his day. the plow in common use to-day in spain or turkey is an improvement on this, for it has an iron point; still, it is a miserable tool. when, at five years old, i first rode the horse which drew my father's plow in furrowing for or cultivating his corn, it had an iron coulter and an iron share; but it was mainly composed of wood. in the hard, rocky soil of new-hampshire, as full of bowlders and pebbles as a christmas pudding is of plums, plowing with such an implement was a sorry business at best. my father hitched eight oxen and a horse to his plow when he broke up pebbly green-sward, and found an acre of it a very long day's work. i hardly need add that subsoiling was out of the question, and that six inches was the average depth of his furrow. i judge that the best steel plows now in use do twice the execution that his did with a like expenditure of power--that we can, with equal power, plow twelve inches as easily and rapidly as he plowed six. ought we to do it? will it pay? i first farmed for myself in on a plat of eight acres, in what was then the open country skirting the east river nearly abreast the lower point of blackwell's island, near fiftieth-st., on a little indentation of the shore known as turtle bay. none of the avenues east of third was then opened above thirtieth-st.; and the neighborhood, though now perforated by streets and covered with houses, was as rural and secluded as heart could wish. one fine spring morning, a neighbor called and offered to plow for $ my acre of tillage not cut up by rows of box and other shrubs; and i told him to go ahead. i came home next evening, just as he was finishing the job, which i contemplated most ruefully. his plow was a pocket edition; his team a single horse; his furrows at most five inches deep. i paid him, but told him plainly that i would have preferred to give the money for nothing. he insisted that he had plowed for me as he plowed for others all around me. "i will tell you," i rejoined, "exactly how this will work. throughout the spring and early summer, we shall have frequent rains and moderate heat: thus far, my crops will do well. but then will come hot weeks, with little or no rain; and they will dry up this shallow soil and every thing planted thereon." the result signally justified my prediction. we had frequent rains and cloudy, mild weather, till the st of july, when the clouds vanished, the sun came out intensely hot, and we had scarcely a sprinkle till the st of september, by which time my corn and potatoes had about given up the ghost. like the seed which fell on stony ground in the parable of the sower, that which i had planted had withered away "because there was no root;" and my prospect for a harvest was utterly blighted, where, with twelve inches of loose, fertile, well pulverized earth at their roots, my crops would have been at least respectable. when i became once more a farmer in a small way on my present place, i had not forgotten the lesson, and i tried to have plowed deeply and thoroughly so much land as i had plowed at all. my first summer here ( ) was a very dry one, and crops failed in consequence around me and all over the country; yet mine were at least fair; and i was largely indebted for them to relatively deep plowing. i have since suffered from frost (on my low land), from the rotting of seed in the ground, from the ravages of insects, etc.; but never by drouth; and i am entirely confident that deep plowing has done me excellent service. my only trouble has been to get it done; for there are apt to be reasons?--(haste, lateness in the season, etc.)--for plowing shallowly for "just this time," with full intent to do henceforth better. * * * * * i close this paper with a statement made to me by an intelligent british farmer living at maidstone, south of england. he said: "a few years ago there came into my hands a field of twelve acres, which had been an orchard; but the trees were hopelessly in their dotage. they must be cut down; then their roots must be grubbed out; so i resolved to make a clean job of it, and give the field a thorough trenching. choosing a time in autumn or early winter when labor was abundant and cheap, i had it turned over three spits ( inches) deep; the lowest being merely reversed; the next reversed and placed at the top; the surface being reversed and placed below the second. the soil was strong and deep, as that of an orchard should be; i planted the field to garden peas, and my first picking was very abundant. about the time that peas usually begin to wither and die, the roots of mine struck the rich soil which had been the first stratum, but was now the second, and at once the stalks evinced a new life--threw out new blossoms, which were followed by pods; and so kept on blossoming and forming peas for weeks, until this first crop far more than paid the cost of trenching and cultivation." thus far my english friend. who will this year try a patch of peas on a plat made rich and mellow for a depth of at least two feet, and frequently moistened in summer by some rude kind of irrigation? the fierceness of our summer suns, when not counteracted by frequent showers, shortens deplorably the productiveness of many vegetables and berries. our strawberries bear well, but too briefly; our peas wither up and cease to blossom after they have been two or three weeks plump enough to pick. our raspberries, blackberries, etc., fruit well, but are out of bearing too soon after they begin to yield their treasures. i am confident that this need not be. with a deep, rich soil, kept moistened by a periodical flow of water, there need not and should not be any such haste to give over blooming and bearing. the fruit is nature's attestation of the geniality of the season, the richness and abundance of the elements inhering in the soil or supplied to it by the water. double the supply of these, and sterility should be postponed to a far later day than that in which it is now inaugurated. xv. plowing--good and bad. there are so many wrong ways to do a thing to but one right one that there is no reason in the impatience too often evinced with those who contrive to swallow the truth wrong end foremost, and thereupon insist that it won't do. for instance: a farmer hears something said of deep plowing, and, without any clear understanding of or firm faith in it, resolves to give it a trial. so he buys a great plow, makes up a strong team, and proceeds to turn up a field hitherto plowed but six inches to a depth of a foot: in other words, to bury its soil under six inches of cold, sterile clay, sand, or gravel. on this, he plants or sows grain, and is lucky indeed if he realizes half a crop. hereupon, he reports to his neighbors that deep plowing is a humbug, as he suspected all along; but now he knows, for he has tried it. there are several other wrong ways, which i will hurry over, in order to set forth that which i regard as the right one. here is a middling farmer of the old school, who walks carefully in the footsteps of his respected grandfather, but with inferior success, because sixty annual harvests, though not particularly luxuriant, have partially exhausted the productive capacity of the acres he inherited. he now garners from fifteen to thirty bushels per acre of corn, from ten to twenty of wheat, from fifteen to twenty of rye, from twenty to thirty of oats, and from a tun to a tun and a half of hay, as the season proves more or less propitious, and just contrives to draw from his sixty to one hundred acres a decent subsistence for his family; plowing, as his father and grandfather did, to a depth of five to seven inches: what can deep plowing do for _him_? i answer--by itself, nothing whatever. if in every other respect he is to persist in doing just as his father and his grandfather did, i doubt the expediency of doubling the depth of his furrows. true, the worst effects of the change would be realized at the outset, and i feel confident that his six inches of subsoil, having been made to change places with that which formerly rested upon it, must gradually be wrought upon by air, and rain, and frost, until converted into a tolerably productive soil, through which the roots of most plants would easily and speedily make their way down to the richer stratum which, originally surface, has been transposed into subsoil. but this exchange of positions between the original surface and subsoil is not what i mean by deep plowing, nor anything like it. what i _do_ mean is this: having thoroughly underdrained a field, so that water will not stand upon any part of its surface, no matter how much may there be deposited, the next step in order is to increase the depth of the soil. to this end, procure a regular sub-soil plow of the most approved pattern, attach to it a strong team, and let it follow the breaking-plow in its furrow, lifting and pulverizing the sub-soil to a depth of not less than six inches, but leaving it in position exactly where it was. the surface-plow turns the next furrow upon this loosened sub-soil, and so on till the whole field is thus pulverized to a depth of not less than twelve inches, or, better still, fifteen. now, please remember that you have twice as much soil per acre to fertilize as there was before; hence, that it consequently requires twice as much manure, and you will have laid a good foundation for increased crops. i do not say that all the additional outlay will be returned to you in the increase of your next crop, for i do not believe anything of the sort; but i _do_ believe that this crop will be considerably larger for this generous treatment, especially if the season prove remarkably dry or uncommonly wet; and that you will have insured better crops in the years to come, including heavier grass, after that field shall once more be laid down; and that, in case of the planting of that field to fruit or other trees, they will grow faster, resist disease better, and thrive longer, than if the soil were still plowed as of old. (i shall insist hereafter on the advantage and importance of subsoiling orchards.) take another aspect--that of subsoiling hill-sides to prevent their abrasion by water: i have two bits of warm, gravelly hill-side, which bountifully yield corn, wheat and oats, but which are addicted to washing. i presume one of these bits, at the south-east corner of my farm, has been plowed and planted not less than one hundred times, and that at least half the fertilizers applied to it have been washed into the brook, and hence into the hudson. to say that $ , have thus been squandered on that patch of ground, would be to keep far within the truth. and, along with the fertilizers, a large portion of the finer and better elements of the original soil have thus been swept into the brook, and so lavished upon the waters of our bay. but, since i had those lots thoroughly subsoiled, all the water that falls upon them when in tillage sinks into the soil, and remains there until drained away by filtration or evaporation; and i never saw a particle of soil washed from either save once, when a thaw of one or two inches on the surface, leaving the ground solidly frozen beneath, being quickly followed by a pouring rain, washed away a few bushels of the loosened and sodden surface, proving that the law by virtue of which these fields were formerly denuded while in cultivation is still active, and that deep plowing is an effective and all but unfailing antidote for the evil it tends to incite. we plow too many acres annually, and do not plow them so thoroughly as we ought. in the good time coming, when steam shall have been so harnessed to a gang of six to twelve plows that, with one man guiding and firing, it will move as fast as a man ought to walk, steaming on and thoroughly pulverizing from twelve to twenty-five acres per day, i believe we shall plow at least two feet deep, and plow not less than twice before putting in any crop whatever. then we may lay down a field in the confident trust that it will yield from two and a half to three tuns of good hay per annum for the next ten or twelve years; while, by the help of irrigation and occasional top-dressing, it may be made to average at least three tuns for a life-time, if not forever. when my grass-land requires breaking up--as it sometimes does--i understand that it was not properly laid down, or has not been well treated since. a good grazing farmer once insisted in my hearing that grass-land should _never_ be plowed--that the vegetable mold forming the surface, when the timber was first cut off; should remain on the surface forever. considering how uneven the stumps and roots and cradle-knolls of a primitive forest are apt to leave the ground, i judge that this is an extreme statement. but land once thoroughly plowed and subsoiled ought thereafter to be kept in grass by liberal applications of gypsum, well-cured muck, and barn-yard manure to its surface, without needing to be plowed again and reseeded. put back in manure what is taken of in hay, and the grass should hold its own. xvi. thorough tillage. my little, hilly, rocky farm teaches lessons of thoroughness which i would gladly impart to the boys of to-day who are destined to be the farmers of the last quarter of this century. i am sure they will find profit in farming better than their grandfathers did, and especially in putting their land into the best possible condition for effective tillage. there were stones in my fields varying in size from that of a brass kettle up to that of a hay-cock--some of them raising their heads above the surface, others burrowing just below it--which had been plowed around and over perhaps a hundred times, till i went at them with team and bar, or (where necessary) with drill and blast, turned or blew them out, and hauled them away, so that they will interfere with cultivation nevermore. i insist that this is a profitable operation--that a field which will not pay for such clearing should be planted with trees and thrown out of cultivation conclusively. dodging and skulking from rock to rock is hard upon team, plow, and plowman; and it can rarely pay. land ribbed and spotted with fast rocks will pay if judiciously planted with timber--possibly if well set in fruit--but tilling it from year to year is a thankless task; and its owner may better work by the day for his neighbors than try to make his bread by such tillage. so with fields soaked by springs or sodden with stagnant water. if you say you cannot afford to drain your wet land, i respond that you can still less afford to till it without draining. if you really cannot afford to fit it for cultivation, your next best course is to let it severely alone. a poor man who has a rough, rugged, sterile farm, which he is unable to bring to its best possible condition at once, yet which he clings to and must live from, should resolve that, if life and health be spared him, he will reclaim one field each year until all that is not devoted to timber shall have been brought into high condition. when his summer harvest is over, and his fall crops have received their last cultivation, there will generally be from one to two autumn months which he can devote mainly to this work. let him take hold of it with resolute purpose to improve every available hour, not by running over the largest possible area, but by dealing with one field so thoroughly that it will need no more during a long life-time. if it has stone that the plow will reach, dig them out; if it needs draining, drain it so thoroughly that it may hereafter be plowed in spring so soon as the frost leaves it; and now let soil and subsoil be so loosened and pulverized that roots may freely penetrate them to a depth of fifteen to twenty inches, finding nourishment all the way, with incitement to go further if ever failing moisture shall render this necessary. drouth habitually shortens our fall crops from ten to fifty per cent.; it is sure to injure us more gravely as our forests are swept away by ax and fire; and, while much may be done to mitigate its ravages by enriching the soil so as to give your crops an early start, and a rank, luxuriant growth, the farmer's chief reliance must still be a depth of soil adequate to withstand weeks of the fiercest sunshine. i have considered what is urged as to the choice of roots to run just beneath the surface, and it does not signify. roots seek at once heat and moisture; if the moisture awaits them close to the surface, of course they mainly run there, because the heat is there greatest. if moisture fails there, they must descend to seek it, even at the cost of finding the heat inadequate--though heat increases and descends under the fervid suns which rob the surface of moisture. make the soil rich and mellow ever so far down, and you need not fear that the roots will descend an inch lower than they should. _they_ understand their business; it is _your_ sagacity that may possibly prove deficient. i suspect that the average farmer does far too little plowing--by which i mean, not that he plows too few acres, for he often plows too many, but that he should plow oftener as well as deeper and more thoroughly. i spent three or four of my boyish summers planting and tilling corn and potatoes on fields broken up just before they were planted, never cross-plowed, and of course tough and intractable throughout the season. the yield of corn was middling, considering the season; that of potatoes more than middling; yet, if those fields had been well plowed in the previous autumn, cross-plowed early in the spring; and thoroughly harrowed just before planting-time, i am confident that the yield would have been far greater, and the labor (save in harvesting) rather less--the cost of the fall plowing being over-balanced by the saving of half the time necessarily given to the planting and hoeing. fall plowing has this recommendation--it lightens labor at the busier season, by transferring it to one of comparative dullness. i may have said that i consider him a good farmer who knows how to make a rainy day equally effective with one that is dry and fair; and, in the same spirit, i count him my master in this art who can make a day's work in autumn or winter save a day's work in spring or summer. show me a farmer who has no land plowed when may opens, and is just waking up to a consciousness that his fences need mending and his trees want trimming, and i will guess that the sheriff will be after him before may comes round again. * * * * * there is no superstition in the belief that land is (or may be) enriched by fall plowing. the autumn gales are freighted with the more volatile elements of decaying vegetation. these, taken up wherever they are given of in excess, are wafted to and deposited in the soils best fitted for their reception. regarded simply as a method of fertilizing, i do not say that fall plowing is the cheapest; i _do_ say that any poor field, if well plowed in the fall, will be in better heart the next spring, for what wind and rain will meantime have deposited thereon. frost, too, in any region where the ground freezes, and especially where it freezes and thaws repeatedly, plays an important and beneficial part in aerating and pulverizing a freshly plowed soil, especially one thrown up into ridges, so as to be most thoroughly exposed to the action of the more volatile elements. the farmer who has a good team may profitably keep the plow running in autumn until every rood that he means to till next season has been thoroughly pulverized. in this section, our minute chequer-work of fences operates to obstruct and impede plowing. our predecessors wished to clear their fields, at least superficially, of the loose, troublesome bowlders of granite wherewith they were so thickly sown; they mistakenly fancied that they could lighten their own toil by sending their cattle to graze, browse, and gnaw, wherever a crop was not actually on the ground; so they fenced their farms into patches of two or ten acres, and thought they had thereby increased their value! that was a sad miscalculation. weeds, briars and bushes were sheltered, and nourished by these walls; weasels, rats and other destructive animals, found protection and impunity therein; a wide belt on either side was made useless or worse; while plowing was rendered laborious, difficult, and inefficient, by the necessity of turning after every few hundred steps. we are growing slowly wiser, and burying a part of these walls, or building them into concrete barns or other useful structures; but they are still far too plentiful, and need to be dealt with more sternly. o squatter on a wide prairie, on the bleak plains, or in a broad pacific valley, where wood must be hauled for miles and loose stone are rarely visible, thank god for the benignant dispensation which has precluded you from half spoiling your farm by a multiplicity of obstructing, deforming, fences, and so left its soil free and open to be everywhere pervaded, loosened, permeated, by the renovating plow! xvii. commercial fertilizers--gypsum. prices vary so widely in different localities that no fertilizer can be pronounced everywhere cheapest or best worth buying; and yet i doubt that there is a rood of our country's surface in fit condition to be cultivated to which gypsum (plaster of paris) might not be applied with profit. where it costs $ or over per tun, i would apply it sparingly--say, one bushel per acre--while i judge three bushels per acre none too much in regions where it may be bought much cheaper. even the poor man who has but one cow, should buy a barrel of it, and dust his stable therewith after cleaning it each day. he who has a stock of cattle should never be without it, and should freely use it, alike in stable and yard, to keep down the noisome odors, and thus retain the volatile elements of the manure. every meadow, every pasture, should be sown with it at least triennially; where it is abundant and cheap, as in central new-york, i would apply it each year, unless careful observation should satisfy me that it no longer subserved a good purpose. as to the _time_ of application, while i judge any season will do, my present impression is that it will do most good if applied when the summer is hottest and the ground driest. if, for instance, you close your haying in mid-summer, having been hurried by the rapid ripening of the grass, and find your meadows baked and cracked by the intense heat, i reckon that you may proceed to dust those meadows with gypsum with a moral certainty that none of it will be wasted. so if your corn and other fall crops are suffering from and likely to be stunted by drouth, i advise the application of gypsum broadcast, as evenly as may be and as bounteously as its price and your means will allow. i do not believe it so well to apply it specially to the growing stalks, a spoon-full or so per hill; and i doubt that it is ever judicious to plant it _in_ the hill with the seed. the readiest and quickest mode of application is also, i believe, the best. _how_ gypsum impels and invigorates vegetable growth, i do not pretend to know; but that it _does_ so was demonstrated by nature long before man took the hint that she freely gave. the city of paris and a considerable adjacent district rest on a bed of gypsum, ranging from five to twenty feet below the surface, and considerably decomposed in its upper portion by the action of water. this region produces wheat most luxuriantly, and i presume has done so from time immemorial. at length it crawled through the hair of the tillers of this soil that the substance which did so much good fortuitously, and (as it were) because it could not do otherwise, might do still more if applied to the soil, with deliberate intent to test its value as a fertilizer. the result we all understand. gypsum is a chemical compound of sulphur and lime--so much is agreed; and the theory of chemists has been that; as the winds pass over a surface sown with it, the ammonia which has been exhaled by a thousand barn-yards, bogs, &c., having a stronger affinity for sulphur than lime has, dissolves the gypsum, combines with the sulphur, forming a sulphate of ammonia, and leaves the lime to get on as it may. i accept this theory, having no reason to distrust it; and, knowing that sulphate of ammonia is a powerful stimulant of vegetable growth (as any one may be assured by buying a little of it from some druggist and making the necessary application), i can readily see how the desired result _might_ in this way be produced. for our purpose, however, let it suffice that _it is_ produced, of which almost any one may be convinced by sowing with gypsum and passing by alternate strips or belts of the same clover field. i suspect that not many fertilizers repay their cost out of the first crop; but i account gypsum one of them; and i submit that no farmer can afford not to try it. that its good effect is diminished by many and frequent applications, is highly probable; but there is no hill or slope to which gypsum has never yet been applied which ought not to make its acquaintance this very year. i am confident that there are pastures which might be made to increase their yield of grass one-third by a moderate dressing of it. i have heard andrew b. dickinson, late of steuben county, and one of the best unscientific, unlearned farmers ever produced by our state, maintain that he can not only enrich his own farm but impoverish his neighbors' by the free use of gypsum on his woodless hills. the chemist's explanation of this effect is above indicated. the plastered land attracts and absorbs not only its own fair proportion of the breeze-borne ammonia, but much that, if the equilibrium had not been disturbed by such application, would have been deposited on the adjacent hills. as mr. d. makes not the smallest pretensions to science, the coincidence between his dictum and the chemist's theory is noteworthy. now that our country is completely gridironed with canals and railroads, bringing whatever has a mercantile value very near every one's door, i suggest that no township should go without gypsum. five dollars will buy at least two barrels of it almost anywhere; and two barrels may be sown over five or six acres. let it be sown so that its effect (or non-effect) may be palpable; give it a fair, careful trial, and await the result. if it seem to subserve no good purpose, be not too swift to enter up judgment; but buy two barrels more, vary your time and method of application, and try again. if the result be still null, let it be given up that gypsum is not the fertilizer needed just there--that some ill-understood peculiarity of soil or climate renders it there ineffective. then let its use be there abandoned; but it will still remain true that, in many localities and in countless instances, gypsum has been fully proved one of the best and cheapest commercial fertilizers known to mankind. i never tried, but on the strength of others' testimony believe in the improvement of soils by means of calcined clay or earth. mr. andrew b. dickinson showed me where he had, during a dry autumn plowed up the road-sides through his farm, started fires with a few roots or sticks, and then piled on sods of the upturned clay and grass-roots till the fire was nearly smothered, when each heap smoked and smouldered like a little coal-pit till all of it that was combustible was reduced to ashes, when ashes and burned clay were shoveled into a cart and strewn over his fields, to the decided improvement of their crops. whoever has a clay sod to plow up, and is deficient in manure, may repeat this experiment with a moral certainty of liberal returns. xviii. alkalis ... salt--ashes--lime. i do not know a rood of our country's surface so rich in _all_ the materials which enter into the production of the grains, grasses, fruits, and vegetables, which are the objects and rewards of cultivation, that it could not be improved by the application of fertilizers; if there be such, i heartily congratulate the owners, and advise them not to sell. nor do i believe that there are many acres so fertile that they would not produce more indian corn, more hemp, more cotton, and more of whatever may be their appropriate staple, if judiciously fertilized. if there be farms or fields originally so good that manure would not increase their yield, i am confident that the first half-dozen crops will have taken that conceit out of them. prairies and river-bottoms may yield ever so bounteously; but that very luxuriance of growth insures their gradual exhaustion of certain elements of crops, which must needs be replaced or their product will dwindle. whoever has sold a thousand bushels of grain, or its equivalent in meat, from his farm, has thereby impoverished that farm, unless he has applied something that balances its loss. "i perceive that virtue has gone out of me," observed the saviour, because the hem of his garment had been touched; and every field that had been cropped might make a similar report whenever its annual loss by abstraction has not been balanced by some kind of fertilizer. the farmer who grows the largest crops is the most merciless exhauster of the soil, unless he balances his annual drafts (as good farmers rarely fail to do) by at least equal reënforcements of the productive capacity of his fields. the good farmer begins by inquiring, "wherein was my soil originally deficient? and of what has it been exhausted by subsequent crops?" i judge that my gravelly hill-sides would reward the application of two hundred loads (or tuns) of pure clay per acre, as i think the clay flats which border lake champlain would pay for a like application of sand or fine gravel where that material is found in convenient proximity; and yet, i know very well that, on at least three-fourths of our country's area, such application would cost far more than it would be worth. every farmer must act on his knowledge of his soil and its peculiar needs, and not blindly follow the dictum of another. yet i know few farms which, were they mine, i would not consider enhanced in value by a vigorous application of _some_ alkaline substance--lime, salt, ashes, or some of the cheaper nitrates. i should be very glad to apply one thousand bushels of good house-made, hard-wood ashes to my twenty acres of arable upland, if i could buy them, delivered, at twenty five cents per bushel; but they are not to be had. i doubt that there are a hundred acres of warm, dry, gravelly or sandy soil east of the alleghanies that would not amply reward a similar application. but ashes in quantity are unattainable, since no good farmer sells them, and coal is the chief fuel of cities and villages. the marls of new-jersey i judge fully equal in average value to ashes which have been nearly deprived of their potash by leaching, but not quite half equal, bushel for bushel, to _un_leached ashes. i judge that average marl is worth cents per bushel where ashes may be had for . but marl is found only in a few localities, and a material worth but cents per bushel will not bear transportation beyond miles by wagon or by water. salt is only found or made at a few points, and is too dear for general use as a fertilizer. where the refuse product of salt-works can be cheaply bought, good farmers will eagerly compete for it, if their lands at all resemble mine. i judge the tun of potash i ordered fifteen years ago from syracuse, paying $ and transportation, was the cheapest fertilizer i ever bought. it was so impregnated with salt (from the boiling over of the salt-kettles into the ashes) as to be worthless for other than agricultural purposes; but i mixed it with a large pile of muck that i had recently dug, and, six or eight months thereafter, applied the product to a very poor, gravelly hill-side which i had just broken up; and the immediate result was a noble crop of corn. that hill-side has not yet forgotten the application. --if i should try to explain just how and why lime is a fertilizer, i should probably fail; and i am well assured that liming has in some cases been overdone; yet i think most observers will concur in my statement that _any region which has been limed year after year produces crops of noticeable excellence_. i cite as examples chester and lancaster counties, pennsylvania, with stark and adjacent counties of ohio. possibly, results equally gratifying might be secured by applying some other substance; i only _know_ that frequently limed lands are generally good lands, as their crops do testify. i heartily wish that the flat clay intervales of western vermont could have a fair trial of the virtues of liming. i should expect to see them thereby rendered friable and arable; no longer changing speedily from the semblance of tar to that of brick, but readily plowed and tilled, and yielding liberally of grain as well as grass. i am confident that most farms in our country will pay for liming to the extent of fifty bushels per acre where the cost of quick-lime does not exceed ten cents per bushel; and most farmers, by taking, hot from the kiln, the refuse lime that is deemed unfit for building purposes, can obtain it cheaper than that. i wish some farmer who gives constant personal attention to his work--as i cannot--would make some careful tests of the practical value of alkalis. for instance: the abundance and tenacity of our common sorrel is supposed to indicate an acid condition of the soil; and all who have tried it know that sorrel is hard to kill by cultivation. i suggest that whoever is troubled with it should cover two square rods with one bushel of quick-lime just after plowing and harrowing this spring; then apply another bushel to _four_ square rods adjacent; then make similar applications of ashes to two and four square rods respectively, taking careful note of the boundaries of each patch, and leaving the rest of the field destitute of either application. i will not anticipate the result: more than one year may be required to evolve it; but i am confident that a few such experiments would supply data whereof i am in need; and there are doubtless others whose ignorance is nearly equal to mine. many have applied lime to their fields without realizing any advantage therefrom. in some cases, there was already a sufficiency of this ingredient in the soil, and the application of more was one of those many wasteful blunders induced by our ignorance of chemistry. but much lime is naturally adulterated with other minerals, especially with manganese, so that its application to most if not to all soils subserves no good end. in the absence of exact, scientific knowledge, i would buy fifty bushels of quick-lime, apply them to one acre running through a field, and watch the effect. if it doesn't pay, you have a bad article, or your soil is not deficient in lime. xix. soils and fertilizers. a farmer is a manufacturer of articles wherefrom mankind are fed and clad; his raw materials are the soil and the various substances he mingles therewith or adds thereto in order to increase its productive capacity. his art consists in transforming by cultivation crude, comparatively worthless, and even noxious, offensive materials into substances grateful to the senses, nourishing to the body, and sometimes invigorating, even strengthening, to the mind. i have heard of lands that were naturally rich enough; i never was so lucky or perchance so discerning as to find them. yet i have seen illinois bottoms whereof i was assured that the soil was fully sixteen feet deep, and a rich, black alluvium from top to bottom; and i do not question the statements made to me from personal observation that portions of the strongly alkaline plain or swale on which salt lake city is built, being for the first time plowed, irrigated, and sown to wheat, yielded ninety bushels of good grain per acre. i never saw, yet on evidence believe, that pioneer settlers of the miami valley, wishing, some years after settling there, to sell their farms, advertised them as peculiarly desirable in that the barns stood over a creek or "branch," which swept away the manure each winter or spring without trouble to the owner; and i have myself grown both wheat and oats that were very rank and heavy in straw, yet which fell so flat and lay so dead that the heads scarcely bore a kernel. had i been a wiser, better farmer, i should have known how to stiffen the straw and make it do its office, in spite of wind and storm. [and let me here say, lest i forget it in its appropriate place, that i am confident that most farmers sow grain too thickly for any but very poor land. if one thinks it necessary to scatter three bushels of oats per acre, i tell him that he should apply more manure and less seed--that land which requires three bushels of seed is not rich enough to bear oats. he might better concentrate his manure on half so much land, and save two-thirds of his seed.] i do not hold that the remarkably rich soils i have instanced needed fertilizing when first plowed; i will presume that they did not. yet, having never yet succeeded in manuring a corn-field so high that a few loads more would not (i judge) have increased the crop, i doubt whether even the richest illinois bottoms would not yield more corn, year by year, if reënforced with the contents of a good barn-yard. and, when the first heavy crop of corn has been taken from a field, that field--no matter how deep and fertile its soil--is less rich in corn-forming elements than it was before. just so sure as that there is no depletion or shrinkage when nothing is taken from nothing, so sure is it that something cannot be taken from something without diminishing its capacity to yield something at the next call. rotation of crops is an excellent plan; for one may flourish on that which another has rejected; but this does not overbear nature's inflexible exaction of so much for so much. hence, if there ever was a field so rich that nothing could be added that would increase its productive capacity, the first exacting crop thereafter taken from it diminished that capacity, and rendered a fresh application of some fertilizer desirable. years ago, a western man exhibited at our farmers' club a specimen of the soil of his region which was justly deemed very rich, taken from a field whereon corn had been repeatedly grown without apparent exhaustion. a chemical analysis had been made of it, which was submitted with the soil. it was claimed that nothing could improve its capacity for producing the great illinois staple. prof. mapes dissented from this conclusion. "this soil," said he, "while very rich in nearly every element which enters into the composition of corn, gives barely a trace of chlorine, the base of salt. hence, if five bushels per acre of salt be applied to that field, and it does not thereupon yield five bushels more per annum of corn, i will agree to eat the field." many men fertilize their poor lands only, supposing that the better can do without. i judge that to be a mistake. my rule would be to plant the poorest with such choice trees as thrive without manure, and pile the fertilizers upon the better. it seems to me plain that of two fields, one of which has a soil containing nine-tenths of the elements of the desired crop, while the other shows but one to three-tenths, it is a more hopeful and less thankless task to enrich the former than the latter. if you are required to supply to a field nearly everything that your proposed crop will withdraw from it, i do not see where the profit comes in; but if you are required to supply but a tenth, because the soil as you found it stood ready to contribute the remaining nine-tenths, it seems to me that the margin for profit is here decidedly the greater. how many tuns of earth ought a farmer to be obliged to turn over and over in order to obtain therefrom a hundred bushels of corn? two hundred? five hundred? a thousand? _five_ thousand? other things being equal, no one will doubt that, if he can make the corn from one hundred tuns of soil, it were better to do so than to employ five hundred or five thousand. it seems clear to my mind that, though other conditions be unequal, it is generally well to endeavor to produce the required quantity from the smaller rather than the larger area. i fully share the average farmer's partiality for barn-yard manure in preference to most, if not all, commercial fertilizers. in my judgment, almost any farmer who has cattle, with fit shelter and winter fodder, can make fertilizers far cheaper than he can buy them. i judge that almost every farmer who has paid $ or over for guano (for instance), might have more considerably enriched his farm by drawing muck from some convenient bog or pond into his barn-yard in august or september and carting it thence to his fields the next fall. if he can get no muck within a mile, let him cut, when they are in blossom, all the weeds that grow near him, especially by the road-side, cart them at once into his barn-yard, and there convert them into fertilizers. in autumn, replace the hay-rack on the wagon or cart, and pile load after load of freshly-fallen leaves into your yard; taking them, if you may, from the sides of roads and fences, and from any place where they may have been lodged or heaped by the winds, your own wood-lot excepted. plow the turf off of any scurvy lot or road-side, and pile it into the barn-yard; nay, dig a hundred loads of pure clay, and place it there, if you can get it at a small expense, and your average soil is gravelly or sandy. the farmer who is unable or reluctant to buy commercial fertilizers should apply his whole force every autumn to replenishing his barn-yard with that material which he can obtain most easily which the trampling of his cattle may readily convert into manure. a month is too little, two months would not be too much, to devote to this good work. some may seem obliged to postpone it to winter; but that is to run the risk of embarrassment by frost or snow, and encounter the certainty that your material will be inferior in quality, or not so well fitted to apply to grain-crops the ensuing fall. --all this, you may say, is not instruction. we ought to know exactly what lands are enriched by gypsum, and what, if any, are not; why these are fertilized, why those are not, by a common application; how great is the profit of such application in any case; and what substitute can most nearly subserve the same ends where gypsum is not to be had. i admit all you claim, and do not doubt that there shall yet be a scientific agriculture that will fully answer your requirements. as yet, however, it exists but in suggestions and fragments; and attempts to complete it by naked assertions and sweeping generalizations tend rather to mislead and disgust the young farmer than really to enlighten and guide him. at all events, i shall aim to set forth as true no more than i know, or with good reason confidently believe. i close by rëiterating my belief that no farmer ever yet impoverished himself by making too much manure or by applying too much of his own manufacture. i cannot speak so confidently of _buying_ commercial fertilizers; but these i will discuss in my next chapter. xx. bones--phosphates--guano. i hate to check improvement or chill the glow of faith; yet i do so keenly apprehend that many of our people, especially among the southern cotton-growers, are squandering money on commercial fertilizers, that i am bound to utter my note of warning, even though it should pass wholly unheeded. let me make my position as clear as i can. i live in a section which has been cultivated for more than two centuries, while its proximity to a great city has tempted to crop it incessantly, exhaustively. wheat while its original surface soil of six to twelve inches of vegetable mold (mainly composed of decayed forest-leaves) remained; then corn and oats; at length, milk, beef, and apples--have exhausted the hill-sides and gentler slopes of westchester county, except where they have been kept in heart by judicious culture and liberal fertilizing; and, even here, that subtle element, phosphorus, which enters minutely but necessarily into the composition of every animal and nearly every vegetable structure has been gradually drawn away in grain, in milk, in bones, and not restored to the soil by the application of ordinary manures. i am convinced that a field may be so manured as to give three tuns of hay per acre, yet so destitute of phosphorus that a sound, healthy animal cannot be grown therefrom. for two centuries, the tillers of westchester county knew nothing of chemistry or phosphorus, and allowed the unvalued bones of their animals to be exported to fatten british meadows, without an effort to retain them. hence, it has become absolutely essential that we buy and apply phosphates, even though the price be high; for our land can no longer do without them. wherever a steer or heifer can occasionally be caught gnawing or mumbling over an old bone, there phosphates are indispensable, no matter at what cost. better pay $ per tun for a dressing of one hundred pounds of bone per acre than try to do without. but no lands recently brought into cultivation--no lands where the bones of the animals fed thereon have been allowed, for unnumbered years past, to mingle with the soil--can be equally hungry for phosphates; and i doubt that any cotton-field in the south will ever return an outlay of even $ per tun for any phosphatic fertilizer whatever. that _any_ preparation of bone, or whereof bone is a principal element, will increase the succeeding crops, is undoubted; but that it will ever return its cost and a decent margin of profit, is yet to be demonstrated to my satisfaction. no doubt, there are special cases in which the application even of peruvian guano at $ per tun is advisable. a compost of muck, lime, &c., equally efficient, might be far cheaper; but months would be required to prepare and perfect it, and meantime the farmer would lose his crop, or fail to make one. if a tun of guano, or of some expensive phosphate, will give him six or eight acres of clover where he would otherwise have little or none, and he needs that clover to feed the team wherewith he is breaking up and fitting his farm to grow a good crop next year, he may wisely make the purchase and application, even though he may be able to compost for next year's use twice the value of fertilizers for the precise cost of this. but i am so thorough in my devotion to "home industry," that i hold him an unskillful farmer who cannot, nine times in ten, make, mainly from materials to be found on or near his farm, a pile of compost for $ that will add more to the enduring fertility of his farm than anything he can bring from a distance at a cost of $ . understand that this is a general rule, and subject, like all general rules, to exceptions. gypsum, i think every farmer should buy; lime also, if his soil needs it; phosphates in some shape, if past ignorance or folly has allowed that soil to be despoiled of them; wood ashes, if any one can be found so brainless as to sell them; marl, of course, where it is found within ten miles; guano very rarely, and mainly when something is needed to make a crop before coarser and colder fertilizers can be brought into a condition of fitness for use; but the general rule i insist on is this: a good farmer will, in the course of twenty or thirty years, make at least $ worth of fertilizers for every dollar's worth he buys from any dealer, unless it be the sweepings or other excretions of some not distant city. i have used guano frequently, and, though it has generally made its mark, i never yet felt sure that it returned me a profit over its cost. phosphates have done better, especially where applied to corn in the hill, either at the time of planting or later; yet my strong impression is that flour of bone, applied broadcast and freely, especially when wheat or oats are sown on a field that is to be laid down to grass, pays better and more surely than anything else i order from the city, gypsum, and possibly oyster-shell lime, excepted. my experience can be no safe guide for others, since it is not proved that the anterior condition and needs of their soils are precisely like those of mine. i apprehend that guano has not had a fair trial on my place--that carelessness in pulverizing or in application has caused it to "waste its sweetness on the desert air," or that a drouth following its application has prevented the due development of its virtues. and still my impression that guano is the brandy of vegetation, supplying to plants stimulus rather than nutrition, is so clear and strong that it may not easily be effaced. it seems to me plainly absurd to send ten thousand miles for this stimulant, when this or any other great city annually poisons its own atmosphere and the adjacent waters with excretions which are of very similar character and value, and which science and capital might combine to utilize at less than half the cost of like elements in the form of guano. my object in this paper is to incite experiment and careful observation. no farmer should absolutely trust aught but his own senses. a rhode islander once assured me that he applied to four acres of thin, slaty gravel one hundred pounds per acre of nitrate of soda which cost him $ per hundred, and obtained therefrom four additional tuns of good hay, worth $ per tun: net profit (after allowing for the cost of making the hay), say $ . he might not be so fortunate on a second trial, and there may not be another four acres of the earth's surface where nitrate of soda would do so well; but, should i ever have a fair opportunity, i mean to see what a little of that nitrate will do for _me_. and i hope farmers may more and more be induced to conform in practice to the apostolic precept, "prove all things: hold fast that which is good." no one's success or failure in a particular instance should be conclusive with others, because of the infinite diversity of antecedent and attendant circumstances; but if every thrifty farmer would give to each of the commercial fertilizers--lime, gypsum, guano, raw bone, phosphates, ashes, salt, marl, etc.--such a careful trial as he might, observing closely and recording carefully the results, we should soon have a mass of facts and results, wherefrom deductions might be drawn of signal practical value to the present and to future generations. i firmly believe that great results of signal beneficence are to be slowly but surely achieved by means of the household convenience known as the earth-closet, and by kindred devices for rendering inoffensive and utilizing the most powerful fertilizer produced on every farm and in every household. that is a vulgar squeamishness which leaves it to poison the atmosphere and offend the senses on the assumption that it is too noisome to be dealt with or utilized. a true refinement counsels that it be daily covered, and its odor absorbed or suppressed by earth, or muck, or ashes, and thus prepared for removal to and incorporation with the soil. it is far within the truth to estimate our national loss by the waste of this material at $ per head, or $ , , in all per annum: a waste which is steadily diminishing the productive capacity of our soil. this cannot, must not, be allowed to continue. we must devise or adopt _some_ mode of securing and applying this powerful fertilizer; and i defer to that which is already in extensive and daily expanding use. let whoever can do better; but meantime let us welcome and diffuse the earth closet. xxi. muck--how to utilize it. the time will be, i cannot doubt, when chemists can tell us the exact positive or relative value of a cord of muck--how this swamp or that pond affords a choice article, while the product of another will hardly pay for digging. there may be chemists whose judgment on these points is now worth far more than mine, since mine is worth exactly nothing. i _do_ know, however, that muck is a valuable fertilizer, and that digging and composting it _does pay_. i judge that i have transferred at least three thousand loads of it from my swamp to my upland; and the effect had been all that i expected. let me speak of muck generally, in the light, of my own experience. wherever rocks in ridges come to the surface of a valley, plain, or gentle slope, water is apt to be collected or retained by them, forming ponds or shallower pools, which may or may not dry up in summer, but which are seldom dry late in autumn, when plants are dying and leaves are falling. the latter, caught in their descent by the harsh winds of the season, are swept along the bare, dry ground, till they strike the water, which arrests their progress and soon engulfs them. thus an acre of watery surface will often collect, and retain the dead foliage of five to ten acres of forest; and next fall will render its kindred tribute, and the next, and the next, for ever. there cannot be less than fifty millions of acres of swamps in our old states (including maine); whereof i presume the larger area was covered with water until the slow contributions of leaves and weeds filled them above the level at which water is no longer retained on the surface. and still, they are so moist and boggy, and their rank vegetation is so retentive, that the leaves swept in from the adjacent hills and glades are firmly retained and aid to increase the depth of their vegetable mold, which varies from a few inches to twenty and even thirty feet. in my old county of westchester, i roughly estimate that there are at least five thousand acres of bog, whereof but a very few hundreds have yet been subdued to the uses of cultivation. whoever digs a quantity of swamp muck and applies it _directly_ to his fields or garden, will derive little or no immediate benefit therefrom. it is green, sour, cold, and more likely to cover his farm thickly and persistently with sorrel, eye-smart, rag-weed, parsley, and other infestations, than to add a bushel per acre to his crop of grain or roots. and thus many have tried muck, and, on trial, pronounced it a pestilent humbug. but let any farmer turn his whole force into a bog or marsh directly after finishing his summer harvest (when it is apt to be driest and warmest), and, having freed it of water to the best of his ability, dig and draw out one hundred cords of its black, oozy substance, and he will know better than to unite in that hasty judgment. if the bog be near his farm-yard, let the muck be shoveled at once into a cart and drawn thither; but, if not, let it be simply brought out in wheel-barrows and deposited, not more than two feet deep, on the most convenient bank that is well drained and perfectly dry. here let it dry and drain till after fall harvest, and then begin to draw it gradually into the yards, and especially where it may be worked over by swine and scratched over for seeds and insects by fowls. assuming that the farm-yard is lowest in the centre and allows no liquid to escape save by evaporation, the muck may well be dumped on the drier sides; thence, after being worked over and trampled through and through, to be shoveled into the centre and replaced by fresh arrivals. a hundred cords may thus be so mixed and ripened as to be fit to draw out next may and used as a fertilizer for grain or roots, though, if not so treated, it should lie exposed to sun and wind a full year; being applied in the fall to crops of winter grain or spread upon the fields to be planted or sowed next spring. all the manure made during the winter should be spread over that which lies in the yard at least monthly; and then new muck drawn in, to be rooted or scratched over, trampled into the underlying strata, and overspread in its turn. thus treated, i am confident that each hundred cords of muck will be equal in value to an equal quantity of manure, though it may not give up its fertilizing properties so freely to the first crop that follows its application. i have land that did not yield (in pasture) the equivalent of half a tun of hay pet annum when i bought it, that now yields at least three tuns of good hay per annum; and its renovation is mainly due to a free application of swamp muck. to those who have a good stock of animals, with muck convenient to their yards, i would not recommend any other treatment than the foregoing; but there are many who keep few animals, or whose muck-beds lie at the back of their farms, two or three hundred rods from their barns; while they wish to fertilize the fields in this quarter, which have been slighted in former applications, because of the distance over which manure had to be hauled. if these possess or can buy good hard-wood, house-made ashes at twenty-five cents or less per bushel, i would say, mix these well, at the rate of two or three bushels to the card, with your muck as you dig it; work it over the next spring, and apply it the ensuing fall, so as to give it a full year to ripen and sweeten, and it will be all right. but, if you have not and cannot get the ashes, and _can_ procure dirty, refuse salt from some meat-packer or wholesale grocer, apply this as you would have applied the ashes, but in rather larger quantity; and, if you can get neither ashes nor salt, use quick lime, as fresh and hot from the kiln as you can apply it. the best lime is that from burned oyster-shells; i consider this, if nowise slaked, nearly equal to refuse salt; but oyster-shell lime is too dear at most inland points; and here the refuse of the kilns--that which is not good enough for mason-work--must be used. usually, the lime-burner has a load or more of this at the clearing out of every kiln, which he will sell quite cheap if it be taken out of his way at once; and this should be looked for and secured. being inferior in quality (often because imperfectly burned), it should be applied in larger quantity--not less than four bushels to each cord of muck. * * * * * i will not here describe the process of mixing salt with lime commended by prof. mapes, because it is not easy to bring these two ingredients together so as to mix them with the muck as it is dug: and, though i have used them after prof. mapes's recipe, and purpose to do so hereafter, i do not feel certain that any positive advantage results from their blended application as a chloride of lime. if i should gain further light on this point before completing this series, i shall not fail to impart it. xxii. insects--birds. if i were to estimate the average absolute loss of the farmers of this country from insects at $ , , per annum, i should doubtless be far below the mark. the loss of fruit alone by the devastations of insects, within a radius of fifty miles from this city, must amount in value to millions. in my neighborhood, the peach once flourished, but flourishes no more, and cherries have been all but annihilated. apples were till lately our most profitable and perhaps our most important product; but the worms take half our average crop and sadly damage what they do not utterly destroy. plums we have ceased to grow or expect; our pears are generally stung and often blighted; even the currant has at last its fruit-destroying worm. we must fight our paltry adversaries more efficiently, or allow them to drive us wholly from the field. now, i have no doubt that our best allies in this inglorious warfare are the birds. they would save us, if we did not destroy them. the british plowman, turning his sod with a myriad of crows, blackbirds, etc., chasing his steps and all but getting under his feet in their eager quest of grubs, bugs, etc., is a spectacle to be devoutly thankful for. whenever clouds of birds shall habitually darken our fields in may and (less notably) throughout the summer months, we may reasonably hope to grow fair crops of our favorite fruits from year to year, and realize that we owe them to the constant, and zealous, though not quite disinterested, efforts of our friends, the birds. but i do not regard the ravages of insects as entirely due to the reckless destruction and consequent scarcity of our birds. i hold that their multiplication and their devastations are largely incited by the degeneracy of our plants caused by the badness of our culture. on this point, consider a statement made to me, some fifteen or twenty years ago, by the late gov. william f. packer, of pennsylvania: "i know (said gov. p.) the narrow valley of a stream that runs into the west branch of the susquehanna, which was cleared of the primitive forest some forty or fifty years since, and has ever since been alternately in tillage and grass. a road ran through the middle of it, dividing it into two narrow fields. a few years ago, this road was abandoned, and the whole of this little valley, including the road-way, thrown into a single field, which was thereupon sown to wheat. at harvest-time, this remarkable phenomenon was presented: a good crop of sound grain on the strip four or fire rods wide formerly covered by the road; while nearly every berry on either side of it was destroyed by the weevil or midge." now i do not infer from this fact that insect ravages are _wholly_ due to our abuse and exhaustion of the soil. i presume that wheat and other crops would be devastated by insects if there were no slovenly, niggard, exhausting tillage. but i do firmly hold that at least half our losses by insects would be precluded if our fields were habitually kept in better heart by deep culture, liberal fertilizing, and a judicious rotation of crops. i heard little of insect ravages in the wheat-fields of western new-york throughout the first thirty years of this century; but, when crop after crop of wheat had been taken from the same fields until they had been well nigh exhausted of their wheat-forming elements, we began to hear of the desolation wrought by insects; and those ravages increased in magnitude until wheat-culture had to be abandoned for years. i believe that we should have heard little of insects had wheat been grown on those fields but one year in three since their redemption from the primal forest. but, whatever might once have been, the philistines are upon us. we are doomed, for at least a generation, to wage a relentless war against insects multiplied beyond reason by the neglect and short-comings of our predecessors. we are in like condition with the inhabitants of the british isles a thousand years ago, whose forefathers had so long endured and so unskillfully resisted invasion and spoliation by the northmen that they had come to be regarded as the sea-kings' natural prey. for generations, it has been customary hereabout to slaughter without remorse the birds, and let caterpillars, worms, grasshoppers, etc., multiply and ravage unresisted. we must pay for past errors by present loss and years of extra effort. and, precisely because the task is so arduous, we ought to lose no time in addressing ourselves to its execution. the first step to be taken is very simple. let every farmer who realizes the importance and beneficence of birds teach his own children and hirelings that, except the hawk, they are to be spared, protected, kindly treated, and (when necessary) fed. they are to be valued and cherished as the voluntary police of our fields and gardens, constantly employed in fighting our battles against our ruthless foes. the boy who robs a bird's nest is robbing the farmer of a part of his crops. he who traverses a farm shooting and mangling its feathered sentinels diminishes its future product of grain and nearly destroys that of fruit. the farmer might as well consent that any strolling ruffian should shoot his horses or cattle as his birds. begin at home to make this truth felt and respected, and it will be the easier to impress it also on your neighbors. next, there should be neighborhood or township associations for the protection of insect-eating birds. we must not merely agree to let them live--we must cherish and protect them. i believe that very simple cups or bowls of cast-iron, having each a hole in its centre of suitable size, that need not cost sixpence each, and could be fastened to the side of a tree with one nail lightly driven, would in time be adopted by many birds as nesting strongholds, whence they might laugh to scorn their predacious enemies. if every harmless bird could build its nest among us in a place where its eggs would be safe from hawks, crows, cats, boys, and other robbers, the number of such birds would quickly be doubled and quadrupled. and we must summon the law to our aid. though law can do little or nothing against stealthy, skulking nest-plunderers, it can help us materially in our warfare with the cowardly vagabonds who traverse our fields with musket or rifle, blazing away at every unsuspecting robin or thrush that they can discover. make it trespass, punishable with fine and imprisonment, to shoot on another's land without his express permission, and the cowardly massacre of the farmers' humble allies would be checked at once, and, when public sentiment had been properly enlightened, might, in civilized regions, be arrested altogether. xxiii. about tree-planting. i have had so little experience in tree-planting that i should have preferred to say no more about it; but letters that have reached me imply that the ignorance of others is even denser than mine. for the sake of those only who are conscious that they know nothing, yet are not unwilling to learn, i venture a few timid suggestions with regard to tree-planting. i. ten or twelve years ago, i bought a pound or more of locust seed rather late in the spring, scalded it by plunging for a moment the little cotton bag which held it into a pot of boiling water, and letting the seed steep and steam in the bag till next morning, when the seed was planted in rows in a newly broken bit of poor old pasture-land. this was a mistake; i should have given that seed the richest available spot in my garden, to say nothing of planting it as early as april th. my locusts came up slowly and grew feebly that year, not to speak of the many seeds that did not sprout at all. still many came up and survived, and my place is this day the richer for them. it might have been still richer had i seasonably known more. ii. what i would now advise as to locust and most other trees is that the best seed be procured in the fall, or so soon as it drops from the trees; that part of it be sown in drills, two feet apart, with two inches between seeds in the drills, and that the richest of dry, warm garden-soil be devoted to this purpose. fill a large box with rich loam, stir four ounces of seed into this, and set the box in a cool cellar where frost does not enter, and here let it remain till april; then take out the seed and earth together, and sow in drills as above. if some one who cuts locust during the winter or spring will allow you to trace the smaller surface-roots from the new-made stumps and cut or dig them up, cut fifty or a hundred pieces of root the size of your finger each two feet long, and plant these, about may , in the places where you want locusts to come forward most rapidly. some of them may not grow, but i think many will; and, from all these sources, i judge that you will obtain a good supply of young trees. let those you start from the seed get two years' growth before you take them up and set them where you want trees, whether in your present woods, in rugged, rocky pastures, on the sides of steep ravines, or around your buildings. you cannot fail to obtain _some_ trees if you follow these directions. iii. begin early this fall to gather chestnuts, hickory nuts, walnuts, white oak, acorns, etc., to plant. select the largest and finest nuts, giving the preference to those which ripen and fall earliest. keep them in cool, damp earth in some barn or cellar where rats and mice cannot reach them, and persist in collecting till december. then plant a part in your garden or in any rich ground where they are not likely to be disturbed; letting the residue remain in the boxes of moist earth where you first placed them till early spring; then plant these, like the former, in rows two feet apart, with six inches between seed and seed in each row, and give the rows careful culture for two years; after which, set them where you wish them to grow. i venture to suggest that he who has a ragged, stony hill or other lot which he wishes to surrender to forest should plow it, if it can be plowed, next september or october; if too rocky to be even imperfectly plowed, dig up the earth with pick and spade, and sow it thickly with hickory nuts, walnuts, chestnuts, locust and other tree-seeds, expecting that some will be dug up and carried off by squirrels, etc., and that others will fail to germinate. go over it with hoes the ensuing june or july, killing all weeds and other infestations; and, nearly a year later, repeat the operation, taking up young trees from your garden or nursery, and filling them in wherever there is room. plant thickly in order to force an upward rather than a scraggy growth; and so that you may begin to cut out the superfluous saplings for bean-poles, hoop-poles, etc., three or four years thereafter. cut late in winter or early in spring, so that the stumps will each throw up two or more shoots or sprouts, which usually grow much faster than the original tree did. and the process of thinning may thus be continued indefinitely, while the choicer trees are allowed to attain their stateliest proportions. and thus a rocky, sterile hill-side or knoll may be made to yield a crop annually after the first two or three years from planting, while growing trees of decided value. i judge that almost any land within fifty miles of a great city and not more than two miles from a railroad depot or from navigable water may thus be made to earn a good interest on $ per acre, after meeting all the cost of breaking up and planting. i confidently assert that many thousands of sterile, rocky acres, which now yield less than $ per acre annually in pasturage, would net at least double that sum to the owner if wisely devoted to forest-trees. * * * * * i have a hearty love of forests. they proffer gentle companionship to the thoughtful and rest to the overworked, fevered brain. our streams will be fuller and less capricious, our gales less destructive, our climate more equable, when we shall have reclothed our rugged slopes and rocky crests with trees. timber grows yearly scarcer and dearer, when it ought to be becoming more plentiful and accessible, and _would_ be if we devoted to trees all the land which we cultivate at a loss or fail to cultivate at all. let our boys be incited to gather seeds and plant nurseries; let young trees be bought by the thousand where they now are by the dozen, and let us all coöperate in covering our unsightly rocks and making glad our waste places by a superabundance of choice, thrifty, healthy trees. many of our young men have a taste for adventure and excitement which leads them to the ocean, the mines, to australia or some other far-off land recently and scantily peopled by civilized beings. i will not quarrel with their taste; but i judge that there are openings for their enterprise and daring within the area of our own country. let one thousand of them resolve to devote the next five years to planting forests on the treeless plains and virtual deserts of the great basin and on either side of it; let them select locations where some acres may cheaply and surely be irrigated, and, having carefully provided themselves with an abundance of the best seeds, let them start patches of woodland at points the most remote from present timber, until a thousand different forests--one to each of the associates--shall have been started and guarded till their roots have taken firm hold of the earth. i presume congress would grant them preëmptions to each section on which they thus planted at least forty acres of forest, and that most of these preëmption rights could, within ten years, be sold to settlers for many times their original cost. xxiv. fruit-trees--the apple. if i were asked to say what single aspect of our economic condition most strikingly and favorably distinguished the people of our northern states from these of most if not all other countries which i have traversed, i would point at once to the fruit-trees which so generally diversify every little as well as larger farm throughout these states, and are quite commonly found even on the petty holdings of the poorer mechanics and workmen in every village and in the suburbs and outskirts of every city. i can recall nothing like it abroad, save in two or three of the least mountainous and most fertile districts of northern switzerland. italy has some approach to it in the venerable olive-trees which surround or flank many, perhaps most, of her farm-houses, upholding grape-vines as ancient and nearly as large as themselves; but the average new-england or middle state homestead, with its ample apple-orchard and its cluster of pear, cherry and plum-trees surrounding its house and dotting or belting its garden, has an air of comfort and modest thrift, which i have nowhere else seen fairly equaled. upland virginia and the mountainous portion of the states southward of her may in time surpass the most favored regions of the north in the abundance, variety and excellence of their fruits; for the peach and the grape find here a congenial climate, while they are grown with difficulty, where they can be grown at all, in the north; but, up to this hour, i judge that our country north of the potomac is better supplied with wholesome and palatable tree-fruits than any other portion of the earth's surface of equal or nearly equal area. on the whole, i deem it a misfortune that our northern states were so admirably adapted to the apple and kindred fruit-trees that our pioneer forefathers had little more to do than bury the seeds in the ground and wait a few years for the resulting fruit. the soil, formed of decayed trees and their foliage, thickly covered with the ashes of the primitive forest, was as genial as soil could be; while the remaining woods, which still covered seven-eighths of the country, shut out or softened the cold winds of winter and spring, rendering it less difficult, a century ago, to grow fine peaches in southern new-hampshire than it now is in southern new-york. devastating insects were precluded by those great, dense woods from diffusing themselves from orchard to orchard as they now do. snows fell more heavily and lay longer then than now, protecting the roots from heavy frosts, and keeping back buds and blossoms in spring, to the signal advantage of the husbandman. i estimate that my apple-trees would bear at least one-third more fruit if i could retard their blossoming a fortnight, so as to avoid the cold rains and cutting winds, often succeeded by frosts, which are apt to pay their unwelcome farewell visits just when my trees are in bloom or when the fruit is forming directly thereafter. hence, i say to every one who shall hereafter set an orchard, give it the northward slope of a hill if that be possible. other things being equal, the orchard which blossoms latest will, in a series of years, yield most fruit, and will be most likely to bear when the apple-crop of your vicinity proves a failure. i do not recommend storing ice to plant or bury under the trees in april, for that involves too much labor and expense; yet i have no doubt that even that has been and sometimes might be done with profit. in the average, however, i judge that it would not pay. in locating and setting an orchard, the very first consideration is thorough drainage. nothing short of a destructive fire can be more injurious to an apple-tree than compelling it to stand throughout winter and spring in sour, stagnant water. barrenness, dead branches, and premature general decay, are the natural and righteous consequences of such crying abuse. there are many reasons for choosing sloping or broken ground for an apple-orchard, whereof comparative exemption from frost and natural facility of drainage are the most obvious. a level field, thoroughly undrained to-day, may, through neglect and the mischiefs wrought by burrowing animals, have become little better than a morass thirty years hence; but an orchard set on a tolerably steep hillside is reasonably secure against wet feet to the close of its natural life. a gravelly or sandy loam is generally preferred for orchards; yet i have known them to flourish and bear generously on heavy clay. whoever has a gravelly field will wisely prefer this for apples, not merely to clay but to sand as well. and, while many young orchards have doubtless been injured by immoderate applications of rank, green manures, i doubt that any man has ever yet bestowed too much care and expense on the preparation of his ground for fruit-trees. where ridges or plateaus of fast stone do not forbid, i would say, turn over the soil to a depth of at least fifteen inches with a large plow and a strong team; then lift and pulverize the subsoil to a depth of not less than nine inches; apply all the wood-ashes you can get, with one thousand bushels of marl if you are in a marl region; if not, use instead from thirty to fifty bushels of quick lime (oyster-shell if that is to be had) with one hundred loads per acre of swamp muck which has lain a year on dry upland, baking in the sun and wind; and now you may think of setting your trees. if your soil was rich western prairie or middle-state garden to begin with, you can dispense with all these fertilizers; yet i doubt that there is an acre of western prairie that would not be improved by the lime or (perhaps better still) a smaller quantity of refuse salt from a packing-house or meat retailing grocery. there are not many farms that would not repay the application of five bushels per acre of refuse salt at twenty-five cents per bushel. your trees once set--(and he who sets twenty trees per day as they should be set, with each root in its natural position, and the earth pressed firmly around its trunk, but no higher than as it originally grew, is a faithful, efficient worker), i would cultivate the land, (for the trees' sake), growing crops successively of ruta bagas, carrots, beets, and early potatoes, but no grain whatever, for six or seven years, disturbing the roots of the trees as little as may be, and guarding their trunks from tug, or trace, or whiffle-tree, by three stakes set firmly in the ground about each tree, not so near it as to preclude constant cultivation with the hoe inside as well as outside of the stakes, so as to let no weed mature in the field. apply from year to year well-rotted compost to the field in quantity sufficient fully to counterbalance the annual abstraction by your crops. make it a law inflexible and relentless that no animal shall be let into this orchard to forage, or for any purpose whatever but to draw on manures, to till the soil, and to draw away the crops. thus until the first blossoms begin to appear on the trees; then lay down to grass _without_ grain, unless it be a crop of rye or oats to be cut and carried off for feed when not more than half grown, leaving the ground to the young grass. let the grass be mowed for the next two or three years, and thenceforward devote it to the pasturage of swine, running over it with a scythe once or twice each summer to clear it of weeds, and taking out the swine a few days before beginning to gather the apples, but putting them back again the day after the harvest is completed. let the swine be sufficiently numerous and hungry to eat every apple that falls within a few hours after it is dropped, and to insure their rooting out every grub or worm that burrows in the earth beneath the trees, ready to spring up and apply himself to mischief at the very season when you could best excuse his absence. i do not commend this as all, or nearly all, that should be done in resistance to the pest of insect ravage; but i begin with the hog as the orchardist's readiest, cheapest, most effective ally or servitor in the warfare he is doomed unceasingly to wage against the spoilers of his heritage. i will indicate some further defensive enginery in my next chapter. xxv more about apple-trees. in my opinion, apple-trees, in most orchards, are planted too far apart and allowed to grow taller and spread their limbs more widely than is profitable. i judge that a pruner or picker should be able to reach the topmost twig of any tree with a ten-foot pole, and that no limb should be allowed to extend more than eight feet from the trunk whence it springs. our autumnal equinox occurs before our apples are generally ripe for harvest, and, finding our best trees bending under a heavy burden of fruit, its fierce gales are apt to make bad work with trees as well as apples. the best tree i had, with several others, was thus ruined by an equinoctial tempest a few years since. barren trees escape unharmed, while those heavily laden with large fruit are wrenched and twisted into fragments. and, even apart from this peril, a hundred weight of fruit at or near the extremity of limbs which extend ten or twelve feet horizontally from the trunk, tax and strain a tree more than four times that weight growing within four or five feet of the trunk, and on limbs that maintain a semi-erect position. i diffidently suggest, therefore, that no apple-tree be allowed to exceed fifteen feet in height, nor to send a limb more than eight feet from its trunk, and that trees be set (diamond-fashion) twenty-four feet apart each way, instead of thirty-two, as some of mine were. i judge that the larger number of trees ( per acre) will produce more fruit in the average than the larger but fewer trees grown on squares of two by two rods to each, that they will thrive and bear longer, and that not one will be destroyed or seriously harmed by winds where a dozen would if allowed to grow as high and spread as far as they could. * * * * * every apple-tree should be pruned each year of its life: that is, it should be carefully examined with intent to prune if that be found necessary. it should be pruned with a careful eye to giving it the proper shape, which, from the point where it first forks upward, should be that of a tea-cup, very nearly. i have seen young trees so malformed that they could rarely, if ever, bear fruit enough to render them profitable. and the pruning should be so carefully, judiciously done from the outset that no wood two years old should ever be cut away. with old, malformed, diseased, worm-eaten, decaying trees, the best must be done that can be; but he who, pruning a tree that he set and has hitherto cared for, finds himself obliged to cut off a limb thicker than his thumb, may justly suspect himself of lacking a mastery of the art of fruit-growing. sprouts from the root of an apple-tree remind me of children who habitually play truant or are kept out of school. they not merely can never come to good, but they are a nuisance to the neighborhood and bring reproach on the community. the apple-grower should never forget that every producer needs to be fed in proportion to his product. if a cow gives twenty quarts of milk per day, she needs more grass or other food than if she gave but two quarts; and an acre of orchard that yields a hundred barrels of apples per annum needs something given to the soil to balance the draft made upon it. nature offers us good bargains; but she does not trust and will not be cheated. when she offers a bushel of corn for a bushel of dirty salt, shell lime, or wood-ashes, a load of hay for a load of muck, we ought not to stint the measure, but pay her demand ungrudgingly. * * * * * and now a last word on insects. my township (newcastle) is said to have formerly grown more apples per annum than any other township in the united states; its apple-trees are still as numerous as ever, but their product has fallen off deplorably. i estimate the average yield of the last three years at less than a bushel per annum for each full-grown tree; i think a majority of the trees have not borne a bushel each in all these three years. unseasonable frosts, storms, etc., have borne the blame of this barrenness--perhaps justly, if we consider only immediate causes--but the caterpillar and other vermin are, in my view, our more potent, though remoter, afflictions. not less than four times within the last sixteen years have our trees been covered with nests and worms; and i have seen whole orchards stripped of nearly every leaf till they were as bare (of every thing but caterpillars) in july as they should have been in december. after the scourge had passed, the trees reclad themselves with leaves; but they grew old under that visitation faster in one year than they would have done in ten of healthful fruit-bearing; and they are now prematurely gray and moss-covered because of the terrible infliction. i lay down the general proposition that no man who harbors caterpillars has any moral right to apples--that each grower should be required to make his choice between them. slovenly farmers say, "o there are so many of them that i cannot kill half so fast as they multiply." then i say, cut down and burn up the trees you can best spare, until you have no more left than you can keep clear of worms. if it were the law of the land that whoever allowed caterpillars to nest and breed in his fruit-trees should pay a heavy fine for each nest, we should soon be comparatively clear of the scourges. in the absence of such salutary regulation, one man fights them with persistent resolution, only to see his orchard again and again invaded and ravaged by the pests hatched and harbored by his careless neighbors. he thus pays and repays the penalty of others' negligence and misdoing until, discouraged and demoralized, he abandons the hopeless struggle, and thenceforth repels the enemy from a few favorite trees around his dwelling, and surrenders his orchard to its fate. thus bad laws (or no laws) are constantly making bad farmers. the birds that would help us to make head against our insect foes are slaughtered by reckless boys--many of them big enough to know better--and our perils and losses from enemies who would be contemptible if their numbers did not render them formidable increase from year to year. we must change all this; and the first requisite of our situation is a firm alliance of the entire farming and fruit-growing interest defensive as to birds, offensive toward their destroyers, and toward the vermin multiplied and shielded by the ruthless massacre of our feathered friends. since the foregoing was written we have had (in ) the greatest apple-crop throughout our section that mine eyes did ever yet behold. it was so abundant that i could not sell all my cider-apples to the vinegar-makers, even at fitly cents per barrel. this establishes the continued capacity of our region to bear apples, and should invite to the planting of new orchards and the fertilization and renovation of old ones. xxvi. hay and hay-making the grass-crop of this, as of many, if not most, other countries, is undoubtedly the most important of its annual products; requiring by far the largest area of its soil, and furnishing the principal food of its cattle, and thus contributing essentially to the subsistence of its working animals and to the production of those meats which form a large and constantly increasing proportion of the food of every civilized people. but i propose to speak in this essay of that proportion of the grass-crop--say to per cent. of the whole--which is cut, cured and housed (or stacked) for hay, and which is mainly fed out to animals in winter and spring, when frost and snow have divested the earth of herbage or rendered it inaccessible. the seventh census ( ) returned the hay-crop of the preceding year at , , tuns, which the eighth census increased to , , tuns as the product of . confident that most farmers underestimate their hay-crops, and that hundreds of thousands who do not consider themselves farmers, but who own or rent little homesteads of two to ten acres each, keeping thereon a cow or two and often a horse, fail to make returns of the two to five tuns of hay they annually produce, considering them too trivial, i estimate the actual hay-crop of all our states and territories for the current year at , , tuns, or about a tun to each inhabitant, although i do not expect the new census to place it much, if any, above , , tuns. the estimated average value of this crop is $ (gold) per tun, making its aggregate value, at my estimate of its amount, $ , , --and the quantity is constantly and rapidly increasing. that quantity should be larger from the area devoted to meadows, and the quality a great deal better. i estimate that , , acres are annually mowed to obtain these , , tuns of hay, giving an average yield of - / tuns per acre, while the average should certainly not fall below two tuns per acre. my upland has a gravelly, rocky soil, not natural to grass, and had been pastured to death for at least a century before i bought it; yet it has yielded me an average of not less than - / tuns to the acre for the last sixteen years, and will not yield less while i am allowed to farm it. my lowland (bog when i bought it) is bound henceforth to yield more; but, while imperfectly or not at all drained, it was of course a poor reliance--yielding bounteously in spots, in others, little or nothing. in nothing else is shiftless, slovenly farming so apt to betray itself as in the culture of grass and the management of grass lands. pastures overgrown with bushes and chequered by quaking, miry bogs; meadows foul with every weed, from white daisy up to the rankest brakes, with hill-sides that may once have been productive, but from which crop after crop has been taken and nothing returned to them, until their yield has shrunk to half or three-fourths of a tun of poor hay, these are the average indications of a farm nearly run out by the poorest sort of farming. such farms were common in the new england of my boyhood; i trust they are less so to-day; yet i seldom travel ten miles in any region north or east of the delaware without seeing one or more of them. fifty years ago, i judge that the greater part of the hay made in new-england was cut from sour, boggy land, that was devoted to grass simply because nothing else could be done with it. i have helped to carry the crop off on poles from considerable tracts on which oxen could not venture without miring. it were superfluous to add that no well-bred animal would eat such stuff, unless the choice were between it and absolute starvation. in many cases, a very little work done in opening the rudest surface-drains would have transformed these bogs into decent meadows, and the product, by the help of plowing or seeding, into unexceptionable hay. there are not many farmers, apart from our wise and skillful dairymen, who use half enough grass-seed; men otherwise thrifty often fail in this respect. if half our ordinary farmers would thoroughly seed down a full third of the area they usually cultivate, and devote to the residue the time and efforts they now give to the whole, they would grow more grain and vegetables, while the additional grass would be so much clear again. we sow almost exclusively timothy and clover, when there are at least different grasses required by our great diversity of soils, and of these three or four might often be sown together with profit; especially in seeding down fields intended for pasture, we might advantageously use a greater variety and abundance of seed. i believe that there are grasses not yet adopted and hardly recognized by the great body of our farmers--the buffalo-grass of the prairies for one--that will yet be grown and prized over a great part of our country. as for hay-making, my conviction is strong that our grass is cut in the average from two to three weeks too late, and that not only is our hay greatly damaged thereby, but our meadows needlessly impoverished and exhausted. the formation and perfection of seed always draw heavily upon the soil. a crop of grass cut when the earliest blossoms begin to drop--which, in my judgment, is the only right time--will not impoverish the soil half so much as will the same crop cut three weeks later; while the roots of the earlier cut grass will retain their vitality at least thrice as long as though half the seed had ripened before the crop was harvested. grass that was fully ripe when cut has lost at least half its nutriment, which no chemistry can ever restore. hay alone is dry fodder for a long winter, especially for young stock; but hay cut after it was dead ripe, is proper nutriment for no animal whatever--not even for old horses, who are popularly supposed to like and thrive upon it. the fact that our farmers are too generally short-handed throughout the season of the summer harvest, while it seems to explain the error i combat, renders it none the less disastrous and deplorable. i estimate the depreciation in the value of our hay-crop, by reason of late cutting, as not less than one-fifth; and, when we consider that a full half of our farmers turn out their cattle to ravage and poach up their fields in quest of fodder a full month earlier than they should, because their hay is nearly or quite exhausted, the consequences of this error are seen to diffuse themselves over the whole economy of the farm. * * * * * from the hour in which grass falls under the mower, it ought to be kept in motion until laid at rest in the stack or the barn; keep stirring it with the tedder until it is ready to be raked into light winrows, and turn these over and over until they will answer to go upon the cart. in any bright, hot day, the grass mowed in the morning should be stacked before the dew falls at night; while, if any is mowed after noon, it should be cocked and capped by sunset, even though it be necessary to open it out the next fair morning. i have a dream of hay-making, especially with regard to clover, without allowing it to be scalded by fierce sunshine. in my dream, the grass is raked and loaded nearly as fast as cut, drawn to the barn-yard, and there pitched upon an endless apron, on which it is carried slowly through a drying-house, heated to some ° fahrenheit by steam or by charcoal in a furnace below, somewhat after the manner of a hop-kiln. while passing slowly through this heated atmosphere, the grass is continually forked up and shaken so as to expose every lock of it to the drying heat, until it passes off thereby deprived of its moisture and is precipitated into a mow or upon a stack-bottom at the opposite side; load after load being pitched upon the apron continuously, and the drying process going steadily forward by night as well as by day, and without regard to the weather outside. i do not assert that this vision will ever be realized; but i have known dreams as wild as this transformed by time and thought into beneficent realities. i ask no one to share my dreams or sympathise with their drift and purpose. i only insist that hay-making, as it is managed all around me, is ruder in its processes and more uncertain in its results than it should or need be. we cut our grass rapidly and well; we gather and house it with tolerable efficiency; but we cure much of it imperfectly and wastefully. the fact that most of it is over-ripe when cut aggravates the pernicious effects of its subsequent exposure to dew and rain; and the net result is damaged fodder which is at once unpalatable and innutritious. xxvii. peaches--pears--cherries--grapes. our harsh, capricious climate north of the latitudes of philadelphia, cincinnati, and st. louis--so much severer than that of corresponding latitudes in europe--is unfavorable, or at least very trying, to all the more delicate and luscious fruits, berries excepted. except on our pacific coast, of which the winter temperature is at least ten degrees milder than that of the atlantic, the finer peaches and grapes are grown with difficulty north of the fortieth degree of latitude, save in a few specially favored localities, whereof the southern shore of lake erie is most noted, though part of that of lake ontario and of the west coast of lake michigan are likewise well adapted to the peach. it is not the mere fact that the mercury in fahrenheit's thermometer sometimes ranges below zero, and the earth is deeply frozen, but the suddenness wherewith such rigor succeeds and is succeeded by a temperature above the freezing point, that proves so inhospitable to the most valued tree-fruits. and, as the dense forests which formerly clothed the alleghenies and the atlantic slope, are year by year swept away, the severity of our "cold snaps," and the celerity with which they appear and disappear, are constantly aggravated. a change of °, or from ° above to ° below zero, between morning and the following midnight, soon followed by an equally rapid return to an average november temperature, often proves fatal even to hardy forest-trees. i have had the red cedar in my woods killed by scores during an open, capricious winter; and my observation indicates the warmest spots in a forest as those where trees are most likely to be thus destroyed. after an arctic night, in which they are frozen solid, a bright sun sends its rays into the warmest nooks, whence the wind is excluded, and wholly or partially thaws out the smaller trees; which are suddenly frozen solid again so soon as the sunshine is withdrawn; and this partly explains to my mind the fact that peach-buds are often killed in lower and level portions of an orchard, while they retain their vitality on the hill-side and at its crest, not rods distant from those destroyed. the fact that the colder air descends into and remains in the valleys of a rolling district contributes also to the correct explanation of a phenomenon which has puzzled some observers. unless in a favored locality, it seems to the unadvisable for a farmer who expects to thrive mainly by the production of grain and cattle, to attempt the growing of the finer fruits, except for the use of his own family. in a majority of cases, a multiplicity of cares and labors precludes his giving to his peaches and grapes, his plums and quinces, the seasonable and persistent attention which they absolutely require. quite commonly, a farmer visits a grand nursery, sees with admiration its trees and vines loaded with the most luscious fruits, and rashly infers that he has only to buy a good stock of like trees and vines to insure himself an abundance of delicious fruit. so he buys and sets; but with no such preparation of the soil, and no such care to keep it mellow and free from weeds, or to baffle and destroy predatory insects, as the nurseryman employs. hence the utter disappointment of his hopes; borers, slugs, caterpillars, and every known or unknown species of insect enemies, prey upon his neglected favorites. at intervals, some domestic animal or animals get among them, and break down a dozen in an hour. so, the far greater number come to grief, without having had one fair chance to show what they could do, and the farmer jumps to the conclusion that the nurseryman was a swindler, and the trees he sells scarcely related to those whose abundant and excellent fruits tempted him to buy. i counsel every farmer to consider thoughtfully the treatment absolutely required for the production of the finer fruits before he allows a nurseryman to make a bill against him, and not expect to grow duchesse pears as easily as blackberries, or ionas and catawbas as readily as he does fox-grapes on the willows which overhang his brook; for if he does he will surely be disappointed. some of our hardier and coarser grapes--the concord preëminent among them--are grown with considerable facility over a wide extent of our country; and many farmers, having planted them in congenial soil, and tended them well throughout their infancy, are rewarded by a bounteous product for two or three years. believing their success assured, they imagine that their vines may henceforth be neglected, and in the course of two or three more years they are often utterly ruined. i know that there are wild grapes of some value, in the absence of better, which thrive and bear without attention; but i do not believe that any grape which will sell in a market where good fruit was ever seen, can be grown north of philadelphia but by constant care and labor, or at a cost of less than five cents per pound, under the most judicious and skillful treatment. in california, and i presume in most of our states south of the potomac and ohio, choice grapes may be grown more abundantly and more cheaply. yet i think the localities are few and far between in which a tun of good grapes can be grown as cheaply as a tun of wheat, under the most judicious cultivation in either case. i do not mean to discourage grape-growing; on the contrary, i would have every farmer, even so far north as vermont and wisconsin, experiment cautiously with a dozen of the most promising varieties, including always the more hardy, in the hope of finding some one or more adapted to his soil, and capable of enduring his climate. even in france, the land of the vine, one farm will produce a grape which the very next will not: no man can satisfactorily say why. the farmer, who has tried half a dozen grapes and failed with all, should not be deterred from further experiments, for the very next may prove a success. i would only say, be moderate in your expectations and careful in your experiments; and never risk even $ on a vineyard, till you have ascertained, at a cost of $ or under, whether the species you are testing will thrive and bear on your soil. in my own case, my upland mainly sloping to the west, with a hill rising directly south of it, i have had no luck with grapes, and i have wasted little time or means upon them. i have done enough to show that they can be grown, even in such a locality, but not to profit or satisfaction. i would advise the farmer who proposes to grow pear, peaches, and quinces, for home use only or mainly, to select a piece of dry, gravelly or sandy loam, underdrain it thoroughly, plow or trench it very deeply, and fertilize it generously, in good part with ashes and with leaf-mold from his woods. locate the pig-pen on one side of it, fence it strongly, and let the pigs have the run of it for a good portion of each year. in this plat or yard, plant half a dozen cherry and as many pear trees of choice varieties, the bartlett foremost among them; keep clear of all dwarfs, and let your choicest trees have a chance to run under the pig-pen if they will. plant here also, if your climate does not forbid, a dozen well-chosen peach-trees, and two each year thereafter to replace those that will soon be dying out; and give half a dozen quinces moist and rich locations by the side of your fences; surrounding each tree with stakes or pickets that will preclude too great familiarity on the part of the swine, and will not prevent a sharp scrutiny for borers in their season. do not forget that a fruit-tree is like a cow tied to an immovable stake, from which you cannot continue to draw a pail of milk per day unless you carry her a liberal supply of food; and every fall cart in half a dozen loads of muck from some convenient swamp or pond for your pigs to turn over: should they leave any weeds, cut them with a scythe as often as they seem to need it; never allowing one to ripen seed. there may be easier and surer ways to obtain choice fruits; but this one commends itself to my judgment as not surpassed by any other. i think few have grown fruits to profit but those who make this a specialty; and i feel that disappointment in fruit-culture is by no means near the end. you _can_ grow plums, or grapes, or peaches, outside of the climate most congenial to them, but this is a work wherein success is likely to cost more than its worth. try it first on a small scale, if you will try it; and be sure you do it thoroughly. xxviii. grain-growing--east and west. i disclaim all pretensions to ability to teach western farmers how to grow indian corn abundantly and profitably, while i cheerfully admit that they have taught _me_ somewhat thoroughly worth knowing. in my boyhood, i hoed corn diligently for weeks at a time, drawing the earth from between the rows up about the stalks to a depth of three or four inches; thus forming hills which the west has since taught me to be of no use, but rather a detriment, embarrassing the efforts of the growing, hungry plants to throw out their roots extensively in every direction, and subjecting them to needless injury from drouth. i am thoroughly convinced that corn, properly planted, will, like wheat and all other grains, root itself just deep enough in the ground, and that to keep down all weeds and leave the surface of the corn-field open, mellow and perfectly flat, is the best as well as the cheapest way to cultivate corn. and i do not believe that so much human food, with so little labor, is produced elsewhere on earth as in the spacious fields of wheat and corn in our grand mississippi valley. and yet i have seen in that valley many ample stretches covered with corn, whereof the tillage seemed susceptible of improvement. riding between these great corn-fields in october, after everything standing thereon had been killed by frost, it seemed to my observation that, while the corn-crop was fair, the weed-crop was far more luxuriant; so that, if everything had been cut clean from the ground, and the corn and the weeds placed in opposite scales, the latter would have weighed down the former. i cannot doubt that the cultivation, or lack of cultivation, which produces or permits such results, is not merely slovenly, but unthrifty. the west is for the present, as for a generation she has been, the granary of the east. in my judgment, she will not long be content to remain so. fifty years ago, the genesee valley supplied most of the wheat and flour imported into new-england; ten years later, northern ohio was our principal resource; ten years later still, michigan, indiana, northern illinois, and eastern wisconsin, had been added to our grain-growing territory. another decade, and our flour manufacturers had crossed the mississippi, laying iowa and minnesota under liberal contributions, while western new-york had ceased to grow even her own breadstuffs, and ohio to produce one bushel more than she needed for home consumption. can we doubt that this steady recession of our egypt, our hungary, is destined to continue? twenty-three years ago, when i first rode out from the then rising village of chicago to see the illinois prairies, nearly every wagon i met was loaded with wheat, going into chicago, to be sold for about fifty cents per bushel, and the proceeds loaded back in the form of lumber, groceries, and almost everything else, grain excepted, needed by the pioneers, then dotting, thinly and irregularly, that whole region with their cabins. now, i presume the district i then traversed produces hardly more grain than it consumes; taking illinois altogether, i doubt that she will grow her own breadstuffs after ; not that she will be unable to produce a large surplus, but that her farmers will have decided that they can use their lands otherwise to greater advantage. iowa and minnesota will continue to export grain for perhaps twenty years longer; but even their time will come for saying, "new-york and new-england (not to speak of _old_ england) are too far away to furnish profitable markets for such bulky products; the cost of transportation absorbs the larger part of the cargo. we must export instead wool, meat, lard, butter, cheese, hops, and various manufactures, whereof the freight will range from up to not more than per cent. of the value." they thus save their soil from the tremendous exaction made by taking grain-crop after grain-crop persistently, which long ago exhausted most of new-england and eastern new-york of wheat-forming material, and has since wrought the same deplorable result in our rich genesee valley; while eastern pennsylvania, though settled nearly two centuries ago, having pursued a more rational and provident system of husbandry, grows excellent wheat-crops to this day. i insist that the states this side of the delaware; though they will draw much grain from the canadas after the political change that cannot be far distant, will be compelled to grow a very considerable share of their own breadstuff; that the west will cease to supply them unless at prices which they will deem exorbitant; and that grain-growing eastward of a line drawn from baltimore this north to the lakes will have to be very considerably extended. let us see, then, whether this might not be done with profit even now, and whether the east is not unwise in having so generally abandoned grain-growing. i leave out of the account most of new-england, as well as of eastern new-york, and the more rugged portions of new-jersey and pennsylvania, where the rocky, hilly, swampy face of the country seems to forbid any but that _patchy_ cultivation, wherein machinery and mechanical power can scarcely be made available, and which seem, therefore, permanently fated to persevere in a system of agriculture and horticulture not essentially unlike that they now exhibit. in the valleys of the penobscot, the kennebec, the hudson, and of our smaller rivers, there are considerable tracts absolutely free from these natural impediments, whereon a larger and more efficient husbandry is perfectly practicable, even now; but these intervales are generally the property of many owners; are cut up by roads and fences; and are held at high prices: so that i will simply pass them by, and take for illustration the "pine barrens" of southern new-jersey, merely observing that what i say of them is equally applicable, with slight modifications, to large portions of long island, delaware, maryland, virginia, and the carolinas. the "pine barrens" of new-jersey are a marine deposit of several hundred feet in depth, mainly sand, with which more or less clay is generally intermingled, while there are beds and even broader stretches of this material nearly or quite pure; the clay sometimes underlying the sand at a depth of to or inches. vast deposits of muck or leaf-mold, often of many acres in extent and from two to twenty feet in depth, are very common; so that hardly any portion of the dry or sandy land is two miles distant from one or more of them, while some is usually much nearer; and half the entire region is underlaid by at least one stratum of the famous marl (formed of the decomposed bones of gigantic marine monsters long ago extinct) which has already played so important and beneficent a part in the renovation and fertilization of large districts in monmouth, burlington, salem, and other counties. let us suppose now that a farmer of ample means and generous capacity should purchase four hundred acres of these "barrens," with intent to produce therefrom, not sweet potatoes, melons, and the "truck" to which southern jersey is so largely devoted, but substantial grain and meat; and let us see whether the enterprise would probably pay. let us not stint the outlay, but, presuming the tract to be eligibly located on a railroad not too distant from some good marl-bed, estimate as follows: purchase-money of acres at $ per acre $ , clearing, grubbing, fencing and breaking up ditto at $ per acre, over and above the proceeds of the wood , one thousand bushels of best marl per acre, at cents per bushel delivered , one hundred loads of swamp muck, per acre, at cents per load , fifty bushels (unslaked) of oyster-shell lime (to compost with the muck), per acre, at cents per bushel, delivered , one hundred tuns of bone flour at $ per tun , ------- [net cost, $ per acre.] total $ , i believe that this tract, divided by light fences into four fields of acres each, and seeded in rotation to corn, wheat, clover and other grasses, would produce fully bushels of corn and of wheat per acre, with not less than tuns of good hay; and that by cutting, steaming, and feeding the stalks and straw on the place, not pasturing, but keeping up the stock, and feeding them, as indicated in a former chapter of these essays, and selling their product in the form of milk, butter, cheese and meat, a greater profit would be realized than could be from a like investment in iowa or kansas. the soil is warm, readily frees itself, or is freed, from surplus water; is not addicted to weeds; may be plowed at least days in a year; may be sowed or planted in the spring, when minnesota is yet solidly frozen; while the crop, early matured, is on hand to take advantage of any sudden advance in the european or our own seaboard markets. labor, also, is cheaper and more rapidly procured in the neighborhood of this great focus of immigration than it is or can be in the west; and our capable farmers may take their pick of the workers thronging hither from europe, at the moment of their landing on our shore. of course, the owner of such an estate as i have roughly outlined, would be likely to keep a part of his purchase in timber, proving the quality thereof by cutting out the less desirable trees, trimming up the rest, and planting new ones among them; and he would be almost certain to devote some part of his farm annually to the growth of roots, vegetables, and fruits. but i have aimed to show only that he would grow grain here at a profit, and i think i have succeeded. his bushels of corn (shelled) per acre could be sold at his crib, one year with another, for silver dollars; and he need seldom wait a month after husking it for customers who would gladly take his grain and pay the money for it. this would be just about double what the iowa or missouri farmer can expect to average for _his_ corn. the abundant fodder would also be worth in new-jersey at least double its value in iowa; and i judge that the farmer able to buy, prepare, fertilize, and cultivate , acres of the jersey "barrens," could make more than thrice the profit to be realized by the owner of acres. he would plow and seed as well as thrash, shell, cut stalks and straw, and prepare the food of his animals, wholly by steam-power, and would soon learn to cultivate a square mile at no greater expense than is now involved in the as perfect tillage of acres. this essay is not intended to prove that grain is not or may not be profitably cultivated at the west, nor that it is unadvisable for eastern farmers to migrate thither in order so to cultivate it. what i maintain is, that wheat, indian corn, and nearly all our great food staples, may also be profitably produced on the seaboard, and that thousands of square miles, now nearly or quite unproductive, may be wisely and profitably devoted to such production. let us regard, therefore, without alarm, the prospect of such a development and diversification of western industry as will render necessary a large and permanent extension (or rather revival) of eastern grain-growing. xxix. esculent roots--potatoes. in no other form can so large an amount and value of human food be obtained from an acre of ground as in that of edible roots or tubers; and of these the potato is by far the most acceptable, and in most general use. our ancestors, it is settled, were destitute and ignorant of the potato prior to the discovery of america, though europe would now find it difficult to subsist her teeming millions without it. in travelling pretty widely over that continent, i cannot remember that i found, any considerable district in which the potato was not cultivated, though ireland, western england, and northern switzerland, with a small portion of northern italy, are impressed on my mind as the most addicted to the growth of this esculent. other roots are eaten occasionally, by way of variety, or as giving a relish to ordinary food; but the potato alone forms part of the every day diet alike of prince and peasant. it is an almost indispensable ingredient of the feasts of dives, while it is the cheapest and commonest resort for satiating or moderating the hunger of lazarus. i recollect hearing my parents, fifty years ago, relate how, in their childhood and youth, the poor of new-england, when the grain-crop of that region was cut short, as it often was, were obliged to subsist through the following winter mainly on potatoes and milk; and i then accorded to those unfortunates of the preceding generation a sympathy which i should now considerably abate, provided the potatoes were of good quality. roasted potatoes, seasoned with salt and butter and washed down with bounteous draughts of fresh buttermilk, used in those days to be the regular supper served up in farmers' homes after a churning of cream into butter; and i have since eaten costly suppers that were not half so good. the potato, say some accredited accounts, was first brought to europe from virginia, by sir walter raleigh in or ; but i do not believe the story. authentic tradition affirms that the potato was utterly unknown in new-england, or at all events east of the connecticut, when the scotch-irish who first settled londonderry, n. h., came over from _old_ londonderry, ireland, bringing the potato with them. they spent the winter of in different parts of massachusetts and maine--quite a number of them at haverhill, mass., where they gave away a few potatoes for seed, on leaving for their own chosen location in the spring; and they afterward learned that the english colonists, who received them, tried hard to find or make the seed-balls edible the next fall but were obliged to give it up as a bad job; leaving the tubers untouched and unsuspected in the ground. i doubt that the potato was found growing by europeans in any part of this country, unless it be in that we have acquired from mexico. it is essentially a child of the mountains, and i presume it grew wild nowhere else than on the sides of the great chain which traversed spanish america, at a height of from , to , feet above the surface of the ocean. here it found a climate cooled by the elevation and moistened by melting snows from above and by frequent showers, yet one which seldom allowed the ground to be frozen to any considerable depth, while the pure and bracing atmosphere was congenial to its nature and requirements. in this country, the potato is hardiest and thriftiest among the white mountains of new-hampshire, the green mountains of vermont, on the catskills and kindred elevations in our own state, and in similar regions of pennsylvania and the states further south and west. my own place is at least miles from, and feet above, long island sound; yet i cannot make the potato, by the most generous treatment, so prolific as it was in new-hampshire in my boyhood, where i dug a bushel from hills, grown on rough, hard ground, but which, having just been cleared of a thick growth of bushes and briars, was probably better adapted to this crop than though it had been covered an inch deep with barn-yard manure. he who has a tolerably dry, warm sandy soil, covered two or three inches deep with decayed or decaying leaves and brush, may count with confidence on raising from it a good crop of potatoes, provided his seed be sound and healthy. on the other hand, all authorities agree that animal manures, unless very thoroughly rotted and intimately mixed with the soil, are injurious to the quality of potatoes grown thereon, stimulating any tendency to disease, if they do not originally produce such disease. i believe that swamp muck, dug in summer or autumn, deposited on a dry bank or glade, and cured of its acidity by an admixture of wood-ashes, of lime, or of salt (better still, of lime and salt chemically compounded by dissolving the salt in the least possible quantity of water, and slaking the lime with that water), forms an excellent fertilizer for potatoes, if administered with a liberal hand. a bushel of either of these alkalies to a cord of muck is too little; the dose should be doubled if possible; but, if the quantity be small, mix it more carefully, and give it all the time you can wherein to operate upon the muck before applying the mixture to your fields. where the muck is not easily to be had, yet the soil is thin and poor, i would place considerable reliance on deep plowing and subsoiling in the fall, and cross-plowing just before planting in the spring. give a good dressing of plaster, not less than lbs. to the acre, directly after the fall plowing; if you have ashes, scatter them liberally in the drill or hill as you plant; and, if you have them not, supply their place with superphosphate or bone-dust. i think many farmers will be agreeably surprised by the additional yield which will accrue from this treatment of their soil. those who have no swamp muck, and feel that they can afford the outlay, may, by plowing or subsoiling early in the fall, seeding heavily with rye, and turning this under when the time comes for planting in the spring, improve both crop and soil materially. but even to these i would say: apply the gypsum in the fall, and the ashes or lime and salt mixture in the spring; and now, with good seed and good luck, you will be reasonably sure of a bounteous harvest. if a farmer, having a poor worn-out field of sandy loam, wants to do his very best by it, let him plow, subsoil, sow rye and plaster in the fall, as above indicated, turn this under, and sow buckwheat late in the next spring; plow this under in turn when it has attained its growth, and sow to clover; turn this down the following spring, and plant to late potatoes, and he will not merely obtain a large crop, but have his land in admirable condition for whatever way follow. i am quite well aware that such an outlay of labor and seed, with an entire loss of crop for one season, will seem to many too costly. i do not advise it except under peculiar circumstances; and yet i am confident that there are many fields that would be doubled in value by such treatment, which would richly repay all its cost. that most farmers could not afford thus to treat their entire farms at once, is very true; yet it does not follow that they might not deal with field after field thus thoroughly, living on the products of or acres, while they devoted five or six annually to the work of thorough renovation. a quarter of a century ago, we were threatened with a complete extinction of the potato, as an article of food: the stalks, when approaching or just attaining maturity, were suddenly smitten with fatal disease--usually, after a warm rain followed by scalding sunshine--the growing tubers were speedily affected; they rotted in the ground, and they rotted nearly as badly if dug; and whole townships could hardly show a bushel of sound potatoes. a desolating famine in ireland, which swept away or drove into exile nearly two millions of her people, was the most striking and memorable result of this wide-spread disaster. for several succeeding seasons, the potato was similarly, though not so extensively, affected; and the fears widely expressed that the day of its usefulness was over, seemed to have ample justification. speaking generally, the potato has never since been so hardy or prolific as it was half a century ago; it has gradually recovered, however, from its low estate, and, though the malady still lingers, and from time to time renews its ravages in different localities, the farmer now plants judiciously and on fit ground, with a reasonable hope that his labor will be duly rewarded. it seems to be generally agreed that clayey soils are not adapted to its growth; that, if the quantity of the crop be not stinted, its quality is pretty sure to be inferior; and i can personally testify that the planting of potatoes on wet soil--that is, on swampy or spongy land which has not been thoroughly drained and sweetened--is a hopeless, thriftless labor--that the crop will seldom be worth the seed. as to the ten or a dozen different insects to which the potato-rot has been attributed, i regard them all as consequences, not causes; attracted to prey on the plant by its sickly, weakly condition, and not really responsible for that condition. if any care for my reasons, let him refer to what i have said of the wheat-plant and its insect enemies.[ ] there has been much discussion as to the kind of seed to be planted; and i think the result has been a pretty general conviction that it is better to cut the tuber into pieces having two or three eyes each, than to plant it whole, since the whole potato sends up a superfluity of stalks, with a like effect on the crop to that of putting six or eight kernels of corn in each hill. small potatoes are immature, unripe, and of course should never be planted, since their progeny will be feeble and sickly. select for seed none but thoroughly ripe potatoes, and the larger the better. my own judgment favors planting in drills rather than hills, with ample space for working between them; not less than inches: the seed being dropped about inches apart in the drill. the soil must be deep and mellow, for the potato suffers from drouth much sooner than indian corn or almost any other crop usually grown among us. i believe in covering the seed from to - / inches; and i hold to flat or level culture for this as for everything else. planting on a ridge made by turning two furrows together may be advisable where the land is wet; but then wet land never can be made fit for cultivation, except by underdraining. and i insist upon setting the rows or drills well apart, because i hold that the soil should often be loosened and stirred to a good depth with the subsoil plow; and that this process should be persevered in till the plant is in blossom. hardly any plant will pay better for persistent cultivation than the potato. as to varieties, i will only say that planting the tubers for seed is an unnatural process, which tends and must tend to degeneracy. the new varieties now most prized will certainly run out in the course of twenty or thirty years at furthest, and must be replaced from time to time by still newer, grown from the seed. this creation of new species is, and must be, a slow, expensive process; since not one in a hundred of these varieties possess any value. i don't quite believe in selling--i mean in buying--potatoes at $ per pound; but he who originates a really valuable new potato deserves a recompense for his industry, patience, and good fortune; and i shall be glad to learn that he receives it. footnotes: [ ] see chapter xxii. xxx. roots--turnips--beets--carrots if there be any who still hold that this country must ultimately rival that magnificent turnip-culture which has so largely transformed the agricultural industry of england and scotland, while signally and beneficently increasing its annual product, i judge that time will prove them mistaken. the striking diversity of climate between the opposite coasts of the atlantic forbids the realization of their hopes. the british isles, with a considerable portion of the adjacent coast of continental europe, have a climate so modified by the gulf stream and the ocean that their summers are usually moist and cool, their autumns still more so, and their winters rarely so cold as to freeze the earth considerably; while our summers and autumns, are comparatively hot and dry; our winters in part intensely cold, so as to freeze the earth solid for a foot or more. hence, every variety of turnip is exposed here in its tenderer stages to the ravages of every devouring insect; while the st of december often finds the soil of all but our southern and pacific states so frozen that cannon-wheels would hardly track it, and roots not previously dug up must remain fast in the earth for weeks and often for months. hence, the turnip can never grow so luxuriantly, nor be counted on with such certainty, here as in great britain; nor can animals be fed on it in winter, except at the heavy cost of pulling or digging, cutting off the tops and carefully housing in autumn, and then slicing and feeding out in winter. it is manifest that turnips thus handled, however economically, cannot compete with hay and corn-fodder in our eastern and middle states; nor with these and the cheaper species of grain in the west, as the daily winter food of cattle. still, i hold that our stock-growing farmers profitably may, and ultimately will, grow _some_ turnips to be fed out to their growing and working animals. a good meal of turnips given twice a week, if not oftener, to these, will agreeably and usefully break the monotony of living exclusively on dry fodder, and will give a relish to their hay or cut stalks and straw, which cannot fail to tell upon their appetite, growth and thrift. let our cattle-breeders begin with growing an acre or two each of swedes per annum, so as to give their stock a good feed of them, sliced thin in an effective machine, at least once in each week, and i feel confident that they will continue to grow turnips, and will grow more and more of them throughout future years. the beet seems to me better adapted to our climate, especially south of the fortieth degree of north latitude, than any variety of the turnip with which i am acquainted, and destined, in the good time coming, when we shall have at least doubled the average depth of our soil, to very extensive cultivation among us. i am not regarding either of these roots with reference to its use as human food, since our farmers generally understand that use at least as well as i do; nor will i here consider at length the use of the beet in the production of sugar. i value that use highly, believing that millions of the poorer classes throughout europe have been enabled to enjoy sugar through its manufacture from the beet who would rarely or never have tasted that luxury in the absence of this manufacture. the people of europe thus made familiar with sugar can hardly be fewer than , , ; and the number is annually increasing. the cost of sugar to these is considerably less in money, while immeasurably less in labor, than it would or could have been had the tropical cane been still regarded as the only plant available for the production of sugar. but the west indies, wherein the cane flourishes luxuriantly and renews itself perennially, lie at our doors. they look to us for most of their daily bread, and for many other necessaries of life; while several, if not all of them, are manifestly destined, in the natural progress of events, to invoke the protection of our flag. i do not, therefore, feel confident that beet sugar now promises to become an important staple destined to take a high rank among the products of our national industry. with cheap labor, i believe it might to-day he manufactured with profit in the rich, deep valleys of california, and perhaps in those of utah and colorado as well. on the whole, however, i cannot deem the prospect encouraging for the american promoters of the manufacture of beet sugar. but when we shall have deepened essentially the soil of our arable acres, fertilized it abundantly, and cured it by faithful cultivation of its vicious addiction to weed-growing, i believe we shall devote millions of those acres to the growth of beets for cattle-food, and, having learned how to harvest as well as till them mainly by machinery, with little help from hand labor, we shall produce them with eminent profit and satisfaction to the grower. on soil fully two feet deep, thoroughly underdrained and amply fertilized, i believe we shall often produce one thousand bushels of beets to the acre; and so much acceptable and valuable food for cattle can hardly be obtained from an acre in any other form. * * * * * so with regard to carrots. i have never achieved eminent success in growing these, nor beets; mainly because the soil on which i attempted to grow them was not adapted to, or rather not yet in condition for, such culture. but, should i live a few years longer, until my reclaimed swamp shall have become thoroughly sweetened and civilized, i mean to grow on some part thereof , bushels of carrots per acre, and a still larger product of beets; and the carrot, in my judgment, ought now to be extensively grown in the south and west, as well as in this section, for feeding to horses. i hold that bushels of carrots and of oats, fed in alternate meals, are of at least equal value as horse-feed with bushels of oats alone, while more easily grown in this climate. the oat-crop makes heavy drafts upon the soil, while our hot summers are not congenial to its thrift or perfection. since we must grow oats, we must be content to import new seed every or years from scotland, norway, and other countries which have cooler, moister summers than our own; for the oat will inevitably degenerate under such suns as blazed through the latter half of our recent june. believing that the carrot may profitably replace at least half the oats now grown in this country, i look forward with confidence to its more and more extensive cultivation. the advantage of feeding roots to stock is not to be measured and bounded by their essential value. beasts, like men, require a variety of food, and thrive best upon a regimen which involves a change of diet. admit that hay is their cheapest winter food; still, an occasional meal of something more succulent will prove beneficial, and this is best afforded by roots. xxxi the farmer's calling. if any one fancies that he ever heard _me_ flattering farmers as a class, or saying anything which implied that they were more virtuous, upright, unselfish, or deserving, than other people, i am sure he must have misunderstood or that he now misrecollects me. i do not even join in the cant, which speaks of farmers as supporting everybody else--of farming as the only indispensable vocation. you may say if you will that mankind could not subsist if there were no tillers of the soil; but the same is true of house-builders, and of some other classes. a thoroughly good farmer is a useful, valuable citizen: so is a good merchant, doctor, or lawyer. it is not essential to the true nobility and genuine worth of the farmer's calling that any other should be assailed or disparaged. still, if one of my three sons had been spared to attain manhood, i should have advised him to try to make himself a good farmer; and this without any romantic or poetic notions of agriculture as a pursuit. i know well, from personal though youthful experience, that the farmer's life is one of labor, anxiety, and care; that hail, and flood, and hurricane, and untimely frosts, over which he can exert no control, will often destroy in an hour the net results of months of his persistent, well-directed toil; that disease will sometimes sweep away his animals, in spite of the most judicious treatment, the most thoughtful providence, on his part; and that insects, blight, and rust, will often blast his well-grounded hopes of a generous harvest, when they seem on the very point of realization. i know that he is necessarily exposed, more than most other men, to the caprices and inclemencies of weather and climate; and that, if he begins responsible life without other means than those he finds in his own clear head and strong arms, with those of his helpmeet, he must expect to struggle through years of poverty, frugality, and resolute, persistent, industry, before he can reasonably hope to attain a position of independence, comfort, and comparative leisure. i know that much of his work is rugged, and some of it absolutely repulsive; i know that he will seem, even with unbroken good fortune, to be making money much more slowly than his neighbor, the merchant, the broker, or eloquent lawyer, who fills the general eye while he prospers, and, when he fails, sinks out of sight and is soon forgotten; and yet, i should have advised my sons to choose farming as their vocation, for these among other reasons: i. there is no other business in which success is so nearly certain as in this. of one hundred men who embark in trade, a careful observer reports that ninety-five fail; and, while i think this proportion too large, i am sure that a large majority do, and must fail, because competition is so eager and traffic so enormously overdone. if ten men endeavor to support their families by merchandise in a township which affords adequate business for but three, it is certain that a majority must fail; no matter how judicious their management or how frugal their living. but you may double the number of farmers in any agricultural county i ever traversed, without necessarily dooming one to failure, or even abridging his gains. if half the traders and professional men in this country were to betake themselves to farming to-morrow, they would not render that pursuit one whit less profitable, while they would largely increase the comfort and wealth of the entire community; and, while a good merchant, lawyer, or doctor, may be starved out of any township, simply because the work he could do well is already confided to others, i never yet heard of a temperate, industrious, intelligent, frugal, and energetic farmer who failed to make a living, or who, unless prostrated by disease or disabled by casualty, was precluded from securing a modest independence before age and decrepitude divested him of the ability to labor. ii. i regard farming as that vocation which conduces most directly and palpably to a reverence for honesty and truth. the young lawyer is often constrained, or at least tempted, by his necessities, to do the dirty professional work of a rascal intent on cheating his neighbor out of his righteous dues. the young doctor may be likewise incited to resort to a quackery he despises in order to secure instant bread; the unknown author is often impelled to write what will sell rather than what the public ought to buy; but the young farmer, acting _as_ a farmer, must realize that his success depends upon his absolute verity and integrity. he deals directly with nature, which never was and never will be cheated. he has no temptation to sow beach sand for plaster, dock-seed for clover, or stoop to any trick or juggle whatever. "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap," while true, in the long run, of all men, is instantly and palpably true as to him. when he, having grown his crop, shall attempt to sell it--in other words, when he ceases to be a farmer and becomes a trader--he may possibly be tempted into one of the many devious ways of rascality; but, so long as he is acting simply as a farmer, he can hardly be lured from the broad, straight highway of integrity and righteousness. iii. the farmer's calling seems to me that most conducive to thorough manliness of character. nobody expects him to cringe, or smirk, or curry favor, is order to sell his produce. no merchant refuses to buy it because his politics are detested or his religious opinions heterodox. he may be a mormon, a rebel, a millerite, or a communist, yet his grain or his pork will sell for exactly what it is worth--not a fraction less or more than the price commanded by the kindred product of like quality and intrinsic value of his neighbor, whose opinions on all points are faultlessly orthodox and popular. on the other hand, the merchant, the lawyer, the doctor, especially if young and still struggling dubiously for a position, are continually tempted to sacrifice or suppress their profoundest convictions in deference to the vehement and often irrational prepossessions of the community, whose favor is to them the breath of life. "she will find that _that_ won't go down here," was the comment of an old woman on a mississippi steamboat, when told that the plain, deaf stranger, who seemed the focus of general interest, was miss martineau, the celebrated unitarian; and in so saying she gave expression to a feeling which pervades and governs many if not most communities. i doubt whether the social intolerance of adverse opinions is more vehement anywhere else than throughout the larger portion of our own country. i have repeatedly been stung by the receipt of letters gravely informing me that my course and views on a current topic were adverse to public opinion: the writers evidently assuming, as a matter of course, that i was a mere jumping-jack, who only needed to know what other people thought to insure my instant and abject conformity to their prejudices. very often, in other days, i was favored with letters from indignant subscribers, who, dissenting from my views on some question, took this method of informing me that they should no longer take my journal--a superfluous trouble, which could only have meant dictation or insult, since they had only to refrain from renewing their subscriptions, and their _tribune_ would stop coming, whenever they should have received what we owed them; and it would in no case stop till then. that a journalist was in any sense a public teacher--that he necessarily had convictions, and was not likely to suppress them because they were not shared by others--in short, that his calling was other and higher than that of a waiter at a restaurant, expected to furnish whatever was called for, so long as the pay was forthcoming--these ex-subscribers had evidently not for one moment suspected. that such persons have little or no capacity to insult, is very true; and yet, a man is somewhat degraded in his own regard by learning that his vocation is held in such low esteem by others. the true farmer is proudly aware that it is quite otherwise with _his_ pursuit--that no one expects him to swallow any creed, support any party, or defer to any prejudice, as a condition precedent to the sale of his products. hence, i feel that it is easier and more natural in his pursuit than in any other for a man to work for a living, and aspire to success and consideration, without sacrificing self-respect, compromising integrity, or ceasing to be essentially and thoroughly a gentleman. xxxii. a lesson of to-day. the current season is quite commonly characterized as the coldest, the hottest, the wettest, or the dryest, that was ever known. men undoubtingly assert that they never knew a summer so hot, or a winter so cold, when in fact several such have occurred within the cycle of their experience. hardly anything else is so easily or so speedily forgotten as extremes of temperature or inclemencies of weather, after they have passed away. i presume there have been six to ten summers, since the beginning of this century, as hot and as dry as that of ; yet the fact remains that, throughout the eastern section of our country, to say nothing of the rest, the heat and drouth of the current summer have been quite remarkable. for two months past, counting from the th of june, nearly every day has been a hot one, with blazing sunshine throughout, rarely interrupted and slightly modified by infrequent and inadequate showers; and, as a general result of this tropical fervor, the earth is parched and baked from ten to forty inches from the surface; streams and ponds are dried up or shrunk to their lowest dimensions; forests are often ravaged and desolated by fires; our pastures are dry and brown; while crops of hay, oats, potatoes, buckwheat, etc., either have proved, or certainly must prove, a disappointment to the hopes of the growers. i estimate the average product for of the farms of new-england, eastern new-york and new-jersey, as not more than two-thirds of a full harvest; while the earth remains at this moment so baked and incrusted that several days' rain is needed to fit it for fall plowing and the sowing of winter grain. such seasons must not be regarded as extraordinary. the summer of was nearly or quite as dry as this; and i presume one or two such have intervened since that time. the heat of is remarkable for its persistence rather than its intensity. every summer has its heated term; that of has been longer in this region than any before it that i can remember, though doubtless the recollection of others might supply its perfect counterpart. nearly every summer has its drouth; the present is peculiar rather for its early commencement than its extreme duration. as our country is more and more denuded of its primitive forests, drouths longer and severer even than this may naturally be expected. what our farmers have to do is, to prepare for and provide against them. such seasons are disastrous to those only who farm as if none such were to be expected. those who plow deeply, fertilize bountifully, and cultivate thoroughly, need not fear them, as fields of hay and oats already harvested, and of corn and potatoes now hastening to maturity in almost every township of the suffering region, abundantly attest. i doubt that more luxuriant crops of corn, tobacco, or onions, were ever grown on the bottom-lands of the connecticut valley than may be seen there to-day, with failures all about them, and under drouth so fierce that blackberries and whortleberries are withered when half grown; even the bushes in some cases perishing for lack of moisture. my last trip took me along the banks of the upper hudson, through the rugged county of warren, n. y. the narrow, irregular intervale of this mountain stream appear to have been cultivated for the last fifty or sixty years by a hardy race, who look mainly to the timber of the wild region north of them for a subsistence. in such a district, whatever ministers to the sustenance of man or beast bears a high price; and corn, rye, oats, buckwheat, apples and grass, are grown wherever the soil is not too rugged or too sterile for culture. i presume half a crop of hay has been secured throughout this valley, with perhaps a full crop of rye where rye was sown; but of oats the yield will be considerably less than that, while of corn and buckwheat it will range from ten bushels per acre down to nothing. when i, last summer, passed through spacious field after field of corn in virginia that would not mature a single ear, i spoke of it as something unknown at the north; but there are fields planted to corn, in the upper valley of the hudson, that will not produce a single sound ear, nor one bushel even of the shortest and poorest "nubbins;" and alongside of these are acres of buckwheat, blossoming at an average hight of four inches, and not likely to get two inches higher. now, if this land were so poor or so rocky that good crops could not be extracted from it, far be it from me to disparage the agriculture whereof the results are so meagre; but i am speaking of a river intervale of considerable natural fertility, from which deep and thorough cultivation would insure ample harvests, subject only to the contingency of early frosts in autumn. were these lands fertilized and cultivated as they might be, and as mine are, they would yield bushels of rye or of indian corn per acre, and would richly repay the husbandman's outlay and efforts. now, i venture to say that all the grain i saw growing in the valley of the hudson through warren county will not return the farmer cents for each day's labor expended thereon, allowing nothing for the use of the land. "but how shall we obtain fertilizers?" i am often asked. "we are poor; we can afford to keep but few cattle; guano, phosphate, bones, lime, etc., are beyond our means. even if we could pay for them, the cost of transportation to our out-of-the-way nooks would be heavy. we cannot deal with our lands so bountifully as you do, but must be content to do as we can." to all which i make answer: no man ever lacked fertilizers who kept his eyes wide open and devoted two months of each fall and winter to collecting and preparing them. wherever swamp muck may be had, wherever bogs exist or flags or rushes grow, there are materials which, carted into the barn-yard in autumn or winter, may be drawn out fertilizers in season for corn-planting next spring. wherever a pond or slough dries up in summer or autumn, there is material that may be profitably transformed into next year's grass or grain. in the absence of all these--and they are seldom very far from one who knows how to look for them--rank weeds of all sorts, if cut while green and tender, or forest leaves, gathered in the fall, used for litter in the stable, and thence thrown into the yard, will serve an excellent purpose. nay, more: i am confident that the farmer who lacks these, but has access to a bed or bank of simple clay, may cart loads of it in november into an ordinary farm-yard, have it trampled into and mixed with his manure in the winter, and draw it out in the spring, excellently fitted to enrich his sandy or gravelly land, and insure him, in connection with deep and thorough culture, a generous yield of corn, even in such a season as the present. dr. george b. loring, the most successful farmer in massachusetts, uses naked beach sand in abundance as litter for his cows, mixes it with his manure throughout the winter, and draws out the compound to fertilize his clay meadows in the spring, with most satisfactory results. depend on it, no man need lack fertilizers who begins in season and is willing to work for them. and yet once more: from the hills which inclose this valley of the upper hudson (and from ever so many other valleys as well), brooks and rivulets, copious in spring, when their waters are surcharged and discolored by the richest juices of the uplands, pour down in frequent cascades and dance across the intervale to be lost in the river. there is scarcely an acre of that intervale which might not be irrigated from these streams at a very moderate outlay of work at the season when work is least pressing: the water thus held back by dams being allowed to flow thence gently and equably across the intervale, conveying not moisture only, but fertility also, to every plant growing thereon. i am confident that i passed many places on the upper hudson, as well as on the connecticut and ammonoosuc, where faithful days' work providing for irrigation would have given bushels of grain, or tuns of hay additional this year, and as much per annum henceforth, at a cost of not more than two days' work in each year hereafter. farmers, but above all farmers' sons, think of these things. xxxiii. intellect in agriculture. if a man whose capital consists of the clothes on his back, $ in his pocket, and an ax over his right shoulder, undertakes to hew for himself a farm out of the primitive forest, he must of course devote some years to rugged manual labor, or he will fail of success. it is indeed possible that he should find others, even on the rude outposts of civilization, who will hire them to teach school, or serve as county clerk, or survey lands, or do something else of like nature: thus enabling him to do his chopping trees, and rolling logs, and breaking up his stumpy acres, by proxy; but the fair presumption is that he will have to chop and log, and burn off and fence, and break up, by the use of his own proper muscle; and he must be energetic and frugal, as well as fortunate, if he gets a comfortable house over his head, with forty arable acres about him, at the end of fifteen years' hard work. if he has brains, and has been well educated, he may possibly shorten this ordeal to ten years; but, should he begin by fancying hard work beneath him, or his abilities too great to be squandered in bushwhacking, he is very likely to come out at the little end of the horn, and, straggling back to some populous settlement, more needy and seedy than when he set forth to wrest a farm from the wilderness, declare the pioneer's life one of such dreary, hopeless privation that no one who can read or cypher ought ever to attempt it. a poor man, who undertakes to live by his wits on a farm that he has bought on credit, is not likely to achieve a brilliant success; but the farmer whose hand and brain work in concert will never find nor fancy his intellect or his education too good for his calling. he may very often discover that he wasted months of his school-days on what was ill-adapted to his needs, and of little use in fighting the actual battle of life; but he will at the same time have ample reason to lament the meagerness and the deficiency of his knowledge. i hold our average common schools defective, in that they fail to teach geology and chemistry, which in my view are the natural bases of a sound, practical knowledge of things--knowledge which the farmer, of all men, can least afford to miss. however it may be with others, he vitally needs to understand the character and constitution of the soil he must cultivate, the elements of which it is composed, and the laws which govern their relations to each other. instruct him in the higher mathematics if you will, in logic, in meteorology, in ever so many languages; but not till he shall have been thoroughly grounded in the sciences which unlock for him the arcana of nature; for these are intimately related to all he must do, and devise, and direct, throughout the whole course of his active career. whatever he may learn or dispense with, a knowledge of these sciences is among the most urgent of his life-long needs. hence, i would suggest that a simple, lucid, lively, accurate digest of the leading principles and facts in geology and chemistry, and their application to the practical management of a farm, ought to constitute the reader of the highest class in every common school, especially in rural districts. leave out details and recipes, with directions when to plant or sow, etc.; for these must vary with climates, circumstances, and the progress of knowledge; but let the body and bones, so to speak, of a primary agricultural education be taught in every school, in such terms and with such clearness as to commend them to the understanding of every pupil. i never yet visited a school in which something was not taught which might be omitted or postponed in favor of this. out of school and after school, let the young farmer delight in the literature illustrative of his calling--i mean the very best of it. let him have few agricultural books; but let these treat of principles and laws rather than of methods and applications. let him learn from these how to ascertain by experiment what are the actual and pressing needs of his soil, and he will readily determine by reflection and inquiry how those needs may be most readily and cheaply satisfied. all the books in the world never of themselves made one good farmer; but, on the other hand, no man in this age can be a thoroughly good farmer without the knowledge which is more easily and rapidly acquired from books than otherwise. books are no substitute for open-eyed observation and practical experience; but they enable one familiar with their contents to observe with an accuracy, and experiment with an intelligence, that are unattainable without them. the very farmer who tells you that he never opened a book which treats of agriculture, and never wants to see one, will ask his neighbor how to grow or cure tobacco, or hops, or sorgho, or any crop with which he is yet unacquainted, when the chances are a hundred to one that this particular neighbor cannot advise him so well as the volume which embodies the experience of a thousand cultivators of this very plant instead of barely one. a good book treating practically of agriculture, or of some department therein, is simply a compendium of the experience of past ages combined with such knowledge as the present generation have been enabled to add thereto. it may be faulty or defective on some points; it is not to be blindly confided in, nor slavishly followed--it is to be mastered, discussed, criticised, and followed so far as its teachings coincide with the dictates of science, experience, and common sense. its true office is suggestion; the good farmer will lean upon and trust it as an oracle only where his own proper knowledge proves entirely deficient. by-and-by, it will be generally realized that few men live or have lived who cannot find scope and profitable employment for all their intellect on a two-hundred-acre farm. and then the farmer will select the brightest of his sons to follow him in the management and cultivation of the paternal acres, leaving those of inferior ability to seek fortune in pursuits for which a limited and special capacity will serve, if not suffice. and then we shall have an agriculture worthy of our country and the age. meantime, let us make the most of what we have, by diffusing, studying, discussing, criticizing, liebig's agricultural chemistry, dana's muck manual, waring's elements, and the books that each treat more especially of some department of the farmer's art, and so making ourselves familiar, first, with the principles, then with the methods, of scientific, efficient, successful husbandry. let us, who love it, treat agriculture as the elevated, ennobling pursuit it might and should be, and thus exalt it in the estimation of the entire community. we may, at all events, be sure of this: just so fast and so far as farming is rendered an intellectual pursuit, it will attract and retain the strongest minds, the best abilities, of the human race. it has been widely shunned and escaped from, mainly because it has seemed a calling in which only inferior capacities were required or would be rewarded. let this error give place to the truth, and agriculture will win votaries from among the brightest intellects of the race. xxxiv. sheep and wool-growing. ours is eminently an agricultural country. we produce most of our food, and export much more than we import of both grain and meat. of cotton, we grow some three millions of bales annually, whereof we export fully two-thirds. but of this we rëimport a portion in the shape of fabrics and of thread; and yet, while we are largely clothed in woolens, and extensive sections of our country are admirably adapted to the rearing of sheep and the production of wool, we not only import a considerable share of the woolens in which we are clad, but we also import a considerable proportion of the wool wherefrom we manufacture the woolens fabricated on our own soil. in other words: while we are a nation of farmers and herdsmen, we fail to grow so much wool as is needed to shield us against the caprices and inclemencies of our diverse but generally fitful climates. there is a seeming excuse for this in the fact that extensive regions in south america and australia, are devoted to sheep-growing where animals are neither housed nor herded, and where they are exclusively fed, at all seasons, on those native grasses which are the spontaneous products of the soil. i presume wool is in those regions produced cheaper than it can permanently be on any considerable area of our own soil; and yet i believe that the united states should, and profitably might, grow as much wool as is needed for their own large annual consumption. here are my reasons: i. when the predominant interest of british manufactures constrained the entire repeal of the duties on imported wool, whereby sheep-growing had previously been protected, the farmers apprehended that they must abandon that department of their industry; but the event proved this calculation a mistake. they grow more sheep and at better profit to-day than they did when their wool brought a higher price under the influence of protective duties, because the largely increased price of their mutton more than makes up to them their loss by the reduced prices of their wool. so, while i do not expect that american wool will ever again command such high prices as it has done at some periods in the past, i am confident that the general appreciation in the prices of meat, which has occurred within the last ten or fifteen years, and which seems likely to be enduring, will render sheep-growing more profitable in the future than it has been in the past. at all events, while our farmers are generally obliged to sell their grain and meat at prices somewhat below the range of the british markets, it is hardly conceivable that they should not afford to grow wool, for which they receive higher average prices than the british farmers do, who feed their sheep on the produce of lands worth from $ to $ (gold) per acre. ii. interest being relatively high in this country, and capital with most farmers deficient, it is a serious objection to cattle-growing that the farmer must wait three or four years before receiving a return for his outlay. if he begins poor, with but a few cows and a team, he naturally wants to rear and keep all his calves for several years in order to adequately stock his farm, so that little or no income is meantime realized from his herd; whereas a flock of sheep yields a fleece per head each year, though not even a lamb is sold, while its increase in numbers is far more rapid than that of a herd of cattle. iii. almost every farmer, at least in the old states, finds some part of his land infested with bushes and briers, which seem to flourish by cutting, if he finds time to cut them, and which the ruggedness of his soil precludes his exterminating by the plow. in every such case, sheep are his natural allies--his unpaid police--his vigilant and thorough-going assistants. give them an even start in spring with the bushes and briers; let their number be sufficient; and they are very sure to come out ahead in the fall. iv. our farmers in the average are too much confined in summer and autumn to salt meats, and especially to pork. however excellent in quality these may be, their exclusive use is neither healthful nor palatable. with a good flock of sheep, the most secluded farmer may have fresh meat every week in haying and harvest-time if he chooses; and he will find this better for his family, and more satisfactory to his workmen, than a diet wherefrom fresh meat is excluded. v. now, i do not insist that every farmer should grow sheep, for i know that many are so situated that they cannot. in stony regions, where walls are very generally relied on for fences, i am aware that sheep are with difficulty kept within bounds; and this is a serious objection. in the neighborhood of cities and large villages, where fresh meat may be bought from day to day, one valid reason for keeping them has no application; yet i hold that twice as many of our farmers as now have flocks ought to have them, and would thereby increase their profits as well as the comfort of their families. the most serious obstacle to sheep husbandry in this country is the abundance and depredations of dogs. farmers by tens of thousands have sold off, or killed off, their flocks, mainly because they could not otherwise protect themselves against their frequent decimation by prowling curs, which were not worth the powder required to shoot them. it seems to me that a farmer thus despoiled is perfectly justifiable in placing poisoned food where these cut-throats will be apt to find it while making their next raid on his sheep. i should have no scruple in so doing, provided i could guard effectually against the poisoning of any other than the culprits. in a well-settled, thrifty region, where ample barns are provided, i judge that the losses of sheep by dogs may be reduced to a minimum by proper precautions. elsewhere than in wild, new frontier settlements, every flock of sheep should have a place of refuge beneath the hay-floor of a good barn, and be trained to spend every night there, as well as to seek this shelter against every pelting storm. even if sent some distance to pasture, an unbarred lane should connect such pasture with their fold; and they should be driven home for a few nights, if necessary, until they had acquired the habit of coming home at nightfall; and i am assured that sheep thus lodged will very rarely be attacked by dogs or wolves. as yet, our farmers have not generally realized that enhancement of the value of mutton, whereby their british rivals have profited so largely. their fathers began to breed sheep when a fleece sold for much more than a carcase, and when fineness and abundance of wool were the main consideration. but such is no longer the fact, at least in the eastern and middle states. to-day, large and long-wooled sheep of the cotswold and similar breeds are grown with far greater profit in this section than the fine-wooled merino and saxony, except where choice specimens of the latter can be sold at high prices for removal to texas and the far west. the growing of these high-priced animals must necessarily be confined to few hands. the average farmer cannot expect to sell bucks at $ , , and even at $ , , as some have been sold, or at least reported. he must calculate that his sheep are to be sold, when sold at all, at prices ranging from $ down to $ , if not lower, so that mechanics and merchants may buy and eat them without absolute ruin; and he must realize that pounds of mutton at cents, with pounds of wool at cents, amount to more than pounds of mutton at cents, and pounds of wool at cents. farmers who grow sheep for mutton in this vicinity, and manage to have lambs of good size for sale in june or july, assure me that their profit on these is greater than on almost anything else their farms will produce; and they say what they know. the satisfactory experience of this class may be repeated to-day in the neighborhood of any considerable city in the union. sheep-growing is no experiment; it is an assured and gratifying success with all who understand and are fitly placed for its prosecution. wool may never again be so high as we have known it, since the far west and texas can grow it very cheaply, while its transportation costs less than five per cent. of its value, where that of grain would be per cent.; but mutton is a wholesome and generally acceptable meat, whereof the use and popularity, are daily increasing; so that its market value will doubtless be greater in the future than it has been in the past. i would gladly incite the farmers of our country to comprehend this fact, and act so as to profit by it. but the new region opened to sheep-growing by the pioneers of colorado, and other territories, is destined to play a great part in the satisfaction of our need of wool. the elevated plains and valleys which enfold and embrace the rocky mountains are exceedingly favorable to the cheap production of wool. their pure, dry, bracing atmosphere; the rarity of their drenching storms; the fact that their soil is seldom or never sodden with water; and the excellence of their short, thin grasses, even in winter, render them admirably adapted to the wants of the shepherd and his flocks. i do not believe in the wisdom or humanity, while i admit the possibility, of keeping sheep without cured fodder on the plains or elsewhere; on the contrary, i would have ample and effective shelter against cold and wet provided for every flock, with hay, or grain, or roots, or somewhat of each of them, for at least two months of each year; but, even thus, i judge that fine wool can be grown in colorado or wyoming far cheaper than in new england or even minnesota, and of better quality than in texas or south america. and i am grievously mistaken if sheep husbandry is not about to be developed on the plains with a rapidity and success which have no american precedent. xxxv. accounts in farming. farmers, it is urged, sometimes fail; and this is unfortunately true of them, as of all others. some fail in integrity; others in sobriety; many in capacity; most in diligence; but not a few in method or system. quite a number fail because they undertake too much at the outset; that is, they run into debt for more land than they have capital to stock or means to fertilize, and are forced into bankruptcy by the interest ever-accruing upon land which they are unable to cultivate. if they should get ahead a little by active exertion throughout the day, the interest would overtake and pass them during the ensuing night. few of the unsuccessful realize the extent to which their ill fortune is fairly attributable to their own waste of time. men not naturally lazy squander hours weekly in the village, or at the railroad station, without a suspicion that they are thus destroying their chances of success in life. to-day is given up to a monkey-show; half of to-morrow is lost in attendance on an auction; part of next day is spent at a caucus or a jury trial; and so on until one-third of the year is virtually wasted. now, the men who have achieved eminent success, within my observation, have all been rigid economists of time. they managed to transact their business at the county-seat while serving there as grand or petit jurors, or detained under subpoena as witnesses; they never attended an auction unless they really needed something which was there to be sold, and then they began their day's work earlier and ended it later in order to redeem the time which they borrowed for the sale. i do not believe that any american farmer who could count up three hundred full days' work in every year between his twenty-first and his thirtieth ever yet failed, except as a result of speculation, or endorsing, or inordinate running into debt. i would, therefore, urge every farmer to keep a rigid account current of the disposal of his time, so as to be able to see at the year's end exactly how many days thereof he had given to productive labor; how many to such abiding improvements as fencing and draining; and how many to objects which neither increased his crop nor improved his farm. i am sure many would be amazed at the extent of this last category. if every youth who expects to live by farming would buy a cheap pocket-book or wallet which contains a diary wherein a page is allotted to each day of the year, and would, at the close of that day, or at least while its incidents were still fresh in his mind, set down under its proper head whatever incidents were most noteworthy--as, for instance, a soaking rain; a light or heavy shower; a slight or killing frost; a fall of snow; a hurricane; a hail-storm; a gale; a decidedly hot or notably cold temperature; the turning out of cattle to pasture or sheltering them against the severity of winter; also the planting or sowing of each crop or field, and whether harm was done to it by frost in its infancy or when it approached maturity--he would thus provide himself with annual volumes of fact which would prove instructive and valuable throughout his maturer years. the good farmer will of course keep accounts with such of his neighbors as he sees fit to deal with; and he ought to charge a lent or credit a borrowed plow, harrow, reaper, log-chain, or other implement, precisely as though it were meal or meat of an equal value. i judge that borrowed implements, if regularly charged at cost, and credited at their actual value when returned, would generally come home sooner and in better condition. but the farmer, like every one else, should be most careful to keep debt and credit with himself and his farm. if a dollar is spent or lent, his books should show it; and let items and sum total stare him in the face when he strikes a balance at the close of the year. if there has been no leakage either of dimes or of hours, he will seldom be poorer on the st of december than he was on the st of the preceding january. most farmers fail to keep accounts with their several fields and crops; yet what could be more instructive than these? here are ten acres of corn, with a yield of to bushels per acre--a like area and like yield of oats; a smaller or larger of rye, buckwheat, or beans, as the case may be. if the produce is sold, most farmers know how much it brings; but how many know how much it cost? say the corn brings cents per bushel, and the oats cents: was either or both produced at a profit? if so, at what profit? here is a farmer who has grown from to bushels of corn per annum for the last years; ought he not to know by this time what corn costs him in the average, and whether it could or could not with profit give place to something else? most farmers grow some crops at a profit, others at a loss; ought they not to know, after an experience of five or ten years, what crops have put money into their pockets, and what have made them poorer for the growing? of course, there is complication and some degree of uncertainty in all such account-keeping; for every one is aware that some crops take more from the soil than others, and so leave it in a worse condition for those that are to follow, and that some exact large reënforcements of fertilizers, whereof a part only is fairly chargeable to the first ensuing product, while a large share inures to the subsequent harvests. each must judge for himself how much is to be credited for such improvement, and how much charged against other crops for deterioration. he, for example, whose meadows will cut from two to three tuns per acre of good english hay may generally sell that hay for twice if not thrice the immediate cost of its production, and so seem to be realizing a large profit; but, if he gives nothing to the soil in return for the heavy draft thus made upon it, his crop will dwindle year by year, until it will hardly pay for cutting; and the diminution in value of his meadows will nearly or quite balance the seeming profit accruing from his hay. but account-keeping in every business involves essentially identical calculations; and the merchant who this year makes no net profit on his goods, but doubles the number of his customers and the extent of his trade, has thriven precisely as has the farmer whose profit on his crops has all been invested in drains permeating his bogs, and in lime, plaster, and other fertilizers, applied to and permanently enriching his dryer fields. "to make each day a critic on the last," was the aspiration of a wise man, if not a great poet. so the farmer who will keep careful and candid accounts with himself, annually correcting his estimates by the light of experience, will soon learn what crops he may reasonably expect to grow at a profit, and to reject such as are likely to involve him in loss; and he who, having done this, shall blend common sense with industry, will have no reason to complain thereafter that there is no profit in farming, and no chance of achieving wealth by pursuing it. xxxvi. stone on a farm. this earth, geologists say, was once an immense expanse of heated vapor, which, gradually cooling at its surface, as it whirled and sped through space, contracted and formed a crust, which we know as rock or stone. this crust has since been broken through, and tilted up into ranges of mountains and hills, by the action of internal fires, by the transmutation of solid bodies into more expansive gases; and the fragments torn away from the sharper edges of upheaved masses of granite, quartz, or sandstone, having been frozen into iceberg, floating, or soon to be so, have been carried all over the surface of our planet, and dropped upon the greater part, as those icebergs were ultimately resolved, by a milder temperature, into flowing water. when the seas were afterward reduced nearly or quite to their present limits, and the icebergs restricted to the frigid zones and their vicinity, streams had to make their way down the sides of the mountains and hills to the subjacent valleys and plains, sweeping along not merely sand and gravel, but bowlders also, of every size and form, and sometimes great rocks as well, by the force of their impetuous currents. and, as a very large, if not the larger portion of our earth's surface bears testimony to the existence and powerful action through ages, of larger and smaller water-courses, a wide and general diffusion of stones, not in place, but more or less triturated, smoothed, and rounded, by the action of water, was among the inevitable results. these stones are sometimes a facility, but oftener an impediment, to efficiency in agriculture. when heated by fervid sunshine throughout the day, they retain a portion of that heat through a part of the succeeding night, thereby raising the temperature of the soil, and increasing the deposit of dew on the plants there growing. when generally broken so finely as to offer no impediment to cultivation, they not merely absorb heat by day, to be given off by night, but, by rendering the soil open and porous, secure a much more extensive diffusion of air through it than would otherwise be possible. thus do slaty soils achieve and maintain a warmth unique in their respective latitudes, so as to ripen grapes further north, and at higher elevations, than would otherwise be possible. the great prairies of the west, with a considerable portion of the valleys and plains of the atlantic slope, expose no rock at their surfaces, and little beneath them, until the soil has been traversed, and the vicinity of the underlying rock in place fairly attained. to farmers inured to the perpetual stone-picking of new-england, and other hilly regions, this is a most welcome change; but when the pioneer comes to look about him for stone to wall his cellar and his well, to underpin his barn, and form the foundations of his dwelling, he realizes that the bowlders he had exulted in leaving behind him were not wholly and absolutely a nuisance; glad as he was to be rid of them forever, he would like now to call some of them back again. yet, the eastern farmer of to-day has fewer uses for stone than his grandfather had. he does not want his farm cut up into two or three-acre patches, by broad-based, unsightly walls, which frost is apt to heave year after year into greater deformity and less efficiency; nor does he care longer to use them in draining, since he must excavate and replace thrice as much earth in making a stone as in making a tile drain; while the former affords shelter and impunity to rats, mice, and other mischievous, predatory animals, whose burrowing therein tends constantly to stimulate its natural tendency to become choked with sand and earth. of the stone drains, constructed through parts of my farm by foremen whose wills proved stronger than my own, but two remain in partial operation, and i shall rejoice when these shall have filled themselves up and been counted out evermore. happily, they were sunk so low that the subsoil plow will never disturb them. still, my confidence that nothing was made in vain is scarcely shaken by the prevalence and abundance of stone on our eastern farms. we may not have present use for them all; but our grandsons will be wiser than we, and have uses for them which we hardly suspect. i rëinsist that land which is very stony was mainly created with an eye to timber-growing, and that millions of acres of such ought forthwith to be planted with hickory, white oak, locust, chestnut, white pine, and other valuable forest-trees. every acre of thoroughly dry land, lying near a railroad, in the eastern or middle states, may be made to pay a good interest on from $ up to $ , provided there be soil enough above its rocks to afford a decent foothold for trees; and how little will answer this purpose none can imagine who have not seen the experiment tried. sow thickly, that you may begin to cut out poles six to ten feet long within three or four years, and _keep_ cutting out (but never cutting off) thenceforward, until time shall be no more, and your rocky crests, steep hillsides and ravines, will take rank with the most productive portions of your farm. in the edges of these woods, you may deposit the surplus stones of the adjacent cultivated fields, in full assurance that moth and rust will not corrupt nor thieves break through and steal, but that you and your sons and grandsons will find them there whenever they shall be needed, as well as those you found there when you came into possession of the farm. i am further confident that we shall build more and more with rough, unshapen stone, as we grow older and wiser. in our harsh, capricious climate, walls of stone-concrete afford the cheapest and best protection alike against heat and frost, for our animals certainly, and, i think, also for ourselves. let the farmer begin his barn by making of stone, laid in thin mortar, a substantial basement story; let into a hillside, for his manure and his root-cellar; let him build upon this a second story of like materials for the stalls of his cattle; and now he may add a third story and roof of wood for his bay and grain, if he sees fit. his son or grandson will, probably, take this off, and replace it with concrete walls and a slate roof; or this may be postponed until the original wooden structure has rotted off; but i feel sure that, ultimately, the dwellings as well as barns of thrifty farmers, in stony districts, will mainly be built of rough stone, thrown into a box and firmly cemented by a thin mortar composed of much sand and little lime; and that thus at least ten thousand tuns of stone to each farm will be disposed of. it may be somewhat later still before our barn-yards, fowl inclosures, gardens, pig-pens, etc., will be shut in by cemented walls; but the other sort affords such ample and perpetual lurking places for rats, minks, weasels, and all manner of destructive vermin, that they are certain to go out of fashion before the close of the next century. as to blasting out stone, too large or too firmly fixed to be otherwise handled, i would solve the problem by asking, "do you mean to keep this lot in cultivation?" if you do, clear it of stone from the surface upward, and for at least two feet downward, though they be as large as haycocks, and as fixed as the everlasting hills. clear your field of every stone bigger than a goose egg, that the plow or the mower may strike in doing its work, or give it up to timber, plant it thoroughly, and leave its stones unmolested until you or your descendants shall have a paying use for them. a friend deeply engaged in lumbering gives me a hint, which i think some owners of stony farms will find useful. he is obliged to run his logs down shallow, stony creeks, from the bottom of which large rocks often protrude, arresting the downward progress of his lumber. when the beds of these creeks are nearly dry in summer, he goes in, with two or three stout, strong assistants, armed with crowbars and levers, and rolls the stones to this side and that, so as to leave a clear passage for his logs. occasionally, he is confronted by a big fellow, which defies his utmost force; when, instead of drilling and blasting, he gathers dead tree-tops, and other dry wood of no value, from the banks, and builds a hot fire on the top of each giant bowlder. when the fire has burned out, and the rock has cooled, he finds it softened, and, as it were, rotten, on the top, often split, and every way so demoralized that he can deal with it as though it were chalk or cheese. he estimates his saving by this process, as compared with drilling and blasting as much more than fifty per cent. i trust farmers with whom wood is abundant, and big stones superabundant, will give this simple device a trial. powder and drilling cost money, part of which may be saved by this expedient. i have built some stone walls--at first, not very well; but for the last ten years my rule has been: very little fence on a farm, but that little of a kind that asks no forbearance of the wildest bull that ever wore a horn. the last wall i built cost me at least $ per rod; and it is worth the money. beginning by plowing its bed and turning the two furrows together, so as to raise the ground a foot, and make a shallow ditch on either side, i built a wall thereon which will outlast my younger child. an ordinary wall dividing a wood on the north from an open field of sunny, gravelly loam on the south, would have been partly thrown down and wholly twisted out of shape in a few years, by the thawing of the earth under its sunny side, while it remained firm as a rock on the north; but the ground is always dry under my entire wall; so nothing freezes there, and there is consequently nothing to thaw and let down my wall. i shall be sorely disappointed if that wall does not outlast my memory, and be known as a thorough barrier to roving cattle long after the name of its original owner shall have been forgotten. xxxvii. fences and fencing. though i have already indicated, incidentally, my decided objections to our prevalent system of fencing, i deem the subject of such importance that i choose to discuss it directly. excessive fencing is peculiarly an american abuse, which urgently cries for reform. solon robinson says the fence-tax is the heaviest of our farmer's taxes. i add, that it is the most needless and indefensible. highways we must have, and people must traverse them; but this gives them no right to trample down or otherwise injure the crops growing on either side. in france, and other parts of europe, you see grass and grain growing luxuriantly up to the very edge of the beaten tracks, with nothing like a fence between them. yet those crops are nowise injured or disturbed by wayfarers. whoever chooses to impel animals along these roads must take care to have them completely under subjection, and must see that they do no harm to whatever grows by the wayside. in this country, cattle-driving, except on a small scale, and for short distances, has nearly been superceded by railroads. the great droves formerly reaching the atlantic seaboard on foot, from ohio or further west, are now huddled into cars and hurried through in far less time, and with less waste of flesh; but they reach us fevered, bruised, and every way unwholesome. every animal should be turned out to grass, after a railroad journey of more than twelve hours, and left there a full month before he is taken to the slaughter-pen. we must have many more deaths per annum in this city than if the animals on which we subsist were killed in a condition which rendered them fit for human food. ultimately, our fresh beef, mutton and pork, will come to us from the prairies in refrigerating cars: each animal having been killed while in perfect health, unfevered and untortured by days of cramped, galled, and thirsty suffering, on the cars. this will leave their offal, including a large portion of their bones, to enrich the fields whence their sustenance was drawn and from which they should never be taken. the cost of transporting the meat, hides, and tallow, in such cars, would be less than that of bringing through the animals on their legs; while the danger of putrefaction might be utterly precluded. but to return to fencing: our growing plants must be preserved from animal ravage; but it is most unjust to impose the cost of this protection on the growers. whoever chooses to rear or buy animals must take care that they do not infest and despoil his neighbors. whoever sees fit to turn animals into the street, should send some one with them who will be sure to keep them out of mischief, which browsing young trees in a forest clearly is. if the inhabitants of a settlement or village surrounded by open prairie, see fit to pasture their cattle thereon, they should send them out each morning in the charge of a well-mounted herdsmen, whose duty should be summed up in keeping them from evildoing by day and bringing them safely back to their yard or yards at nightfall. fencing bears with special severity on the pioneer class, who are least able to afford the outlay. the "clearing" of the pioneer's first year in the wilderness, being enlarged by ax and fire, needs a new and far longer environment next year; and so through subsequent years until clearing is at an end. many a pioneer is thus impelled to devote a large share of his time to fencing; and yet his crops often come to grief through the depredations of his own or his neighbor's breachy cattle. fences produce nothing but unwelcome bushes, briers and weeds. so far as they may be necessary, they are a deplorable necessity. when constructed where they are not really needed, they evince costly folly. i think i could point out farms which would not sell to-day for the cost of rebuilding their present fences. we cannot make open drains or ditches serve for fences in this country, as they sometimes do in milder and more equable climates, because our severe frosts would heave and crumble their banks if nearly perpendicular, sloping them at length in places so that animals might cross them at leisure. nor have we, so far north as this city, had much success with hedges, for a like reason. there is scarcely a hedge-plant at once efficient in stopping animals and so hardy as to defy the severity, or rather the caprice, of our winters. i scarcely know a hedge which is not either inefficient or too costly for the average farmer; and then a hedge is a fixture; whereas we often need to move or demolish our fences. wire fences are least obnoxious to this objection; they are very easily removed; but a careless teamster, a stupid animal, or a clumsy friend, easily makes a breach in one, which is not so easily repaired. of the few wire fences within my knowledge, hardly one has remained entire and efficient after standing two or three years. stone walls, well built, on raised foundations of dry earth, are enduring and quite effective, but very costly. my best have cost me at least $ per rod, though the raw material was abundant and accessible. i doubt that any good wall is built, with labor at present prices, for less than $ per rod. perhaps i should account this costliness a merit, since it must impel farmers to study how to make few fences serve their turn. rail fences will be constructed only where timber is very abundant, of little value, and easily split. whenever the burning of timber to be rid of it has ceased, there the making of rail fences must be near its end. where fences must still be maintained, i apprehend that posts and boards are the cheapest material. though pine lumber grows dear, hemlock still abounds; and the rapid destruction of trees for their bark to be used in tanning must give us cheap hemlock boards throughout many ensuing years. spruce, tamarack, and other evergreens from our northern swamps, will come into play after hemlock shall have been exhausted. as for posts, red cedar is a general favorite; and this tree seems to be rapidly multiplying hereabout. i judge that farmers who have it not, might wisely order it from a nursery and give it an experimental trial. it is hardy; it is clean; it makes but little shade; and it seems to fear no insect whatever. it flourishes on rocky, thin soils; and a grove of it is pleasant to the sight--at least, to mine. locust is more widely known and esteemed; but the borer has proved destructive to it on very many farms, though not on mine. i like it well, and mean to multiply it extensively by drilling the seed in rich garden soil and transplanting to rocky woodland when two years old. sowing the seed among rocks and bushes i have tried rather extensively, with poor success. if it germinates at all, the young tree is so tiny and feeble that bushes, weeds, and grass, overtop and smother it. that a post set top-end down will last many years longer than if set as it grew, i do firmly believe, though i cannot attest it from personal observation. i understand the reason to be this: trees absorb or suck up moisture from the earth; and the particles which compose them are so combined and adjusted as to facilitate this operation. plant a post deeply and firmly in the ground, butt-end downward, and it will continue to absorb moisture from the earth as it did when alive; and the post, thus moistened to-day and dried by wind and sun to-morrow, is thereby subjected to more rapid disintegration and decay than when reversed. my general conclusion is, that the good farmer will have fewer and better fences than his thriftless neighbor, and that he will study and plan to make fewer and fewer rods of fence serve his needs, taking care that all he retains shall be perfect and conclusive. breachy cattle are a sad affliction alike to their owner and his neighbor; and shaky, rotting, tumble-down fences, are justly responsible for their perverse education. let us each resolve to take good care that his own cattle shall in no case afflict his neighbors, and we shall all need fewer fences henceforth and evermore. xxxviii. agricultural exhibitions. i must have attended not less than fifty state or county fairs for the exhibition (mainly) of agricultural machines and products. from all these, i _should_ have learned something, and presume i did; but i cannot now say what. hence, i conclude that these fairs are not what they might and should be. in other words, they should be improved. but how? as the people compose much the largest and best part of these shows, the reform must begin with them. two-thirds of them go to a fair with no desire to learn therefrom--no belief that they can there be taught anything. of course, not seeking, they do not find. if they could but realize that a farmer's fair might and should teach farmers somewhat that would serve them in their vocation, a great point would be gained. but they go in quest of entertainment, and find this mainly in horse-racing. of all human opportunities for instruction in humility and self-depreciation, the average public speaker's is the best. he hurries to a place where he has been told that his presence and utterance are earnestly and generally desired--perhaps to find that his invitation came from an insignificant and odious handful, who had some private ax to grind so repugnant to the great majority that they refuse to countenance the procedure, no matter how great the temptation. even where there is no such feud, many, having satiated their curiosity by a long stare at him, walk whistling off, without waiting or wishing to hear him. but the speaker at a fair must compete with a thousand counter-attractions, the least of them far more popular and winning than _he_ can hope to be. he is heard, so far as he is heard at all, in presence of and competition with all the bellowing bulls, braying, jacks, and squealing stallions, in the county; if he holds, nevertheless, a quarter of the crowd, he does well: but let two jockeys start a buggy-race around the convenient track, and the last auditor shuts his ears and runs off to enjoy the spectacle. decidedly, i insist that a fair-ground is poorly adapted to the diffusion of agricultural knowledge--that the people present acquire very little information there, even when they get all they want. what is needed to render our annual fairs useful and instructive far beyond precedent, i sum up as follows: i. each farmer in the county or township should hold himself bound to make _some_ contribution thereto. if only a good hill of corn, a peck of potatoes, a bunch of grapes, a squash, a melon, let him send that. if he can send all of these, so much the better. there is very rarely a thrifty farmer who could not add to the attractions and merits of a fair if he would try. if he could send a coop of superior fowls, a likely calf, or a first-rate cow, better yet; but nine-tenths of our farmers regard a fair as something wherewith they have nothing to do, except as spectators. when it is half over, they lounge into it with hands in their pockets, stare about for an hour, and go home protesting that they could beat nearly everything they saw there. then why did they not try? how can we have good fairs, if those who might make the best display of products save themselves the trouble by not making any? the average meagerness of our fairs, so generally and justly complained of, is not the fault of those who sent what they had, but of those who, having better, were too lazy to send anything. until this is radically changed, and the blame fastened on those who might have contributed, but did not, our fairs cannot help being generally meager and poor. ii. it seems to me that there is great need of an interesting and faithful running commentary on the various articles exhibited. a competent person should be employed to give an hour's off-hand talk on the cattle and horses on hand, explaining the diverse merits and faults of the several breeds there exhibited, and of the representatives of those breeds then present. if any are peculiarly adapted to the locality, let that fact be duly set forth, with the simple object of enabling farmers to breed more intelligently, and more profitably. then let the implements and machinery on exhibition be likewise explained and discussed, and let their superiority in whatever respect to those they have superseded or are designed to supersede be clearly pointed out. so, if there be any new grain, vegetable, or fruit, on the tables, let it be made the subject of capable and thoroughly impartial discussion, before such only as choose to listen, and without putting the mere sightseers to grave inconvenience. a lecture-room should always be attached to a fair-ground, yet so secluded as to shut out the noise inseparable from a crowded exhibition. here, meetings should be held each evening, for general discussion; every one being encouraged to state concisely the impressions made on him, and the improvements suggested to him, by what he had seen. do let us try to reflect and consider more at these gatherings, even though at the cost of seeing less. iii. the well supported agricultural society of a rich and populous county must be able, or should be able, to give two or three liberal premiums for general proficiency in farming. if $ could be proffered to the owner or manager of the best tilled farm in the county, $ to the owner of the best orchard, and $ to the boy under years of age who grew the best acre of corn or roots that year, i am confident that an impulse would thereby be given to agricultural progress. our premiums are too numerous and too petty, because so few, are willing to contribute with no expectation of personal benefit or distinction. if we had but the right spirit aroused, we might dispense with most of our petty premiums, or replace them by medals of no great cost, and devote the money thus saved to higher and nobler ends. iv. much of the speaking at fairs seems to me insulting to the intelligence of the farmers present, who are grossly flattered and eulogized, when they often need to be admonished and incited to mend their ways. what use or sense can there be in a lawyer, doctor, broker, or editor, talking to a crowd of farmers as if they were the most favored of mortals and their life the noblest and happiest known to mankind? whatever it might be, and may yet become, we all know that the average farmer's life is not what it is thus represented: for, if it were, thousands would be rushing into it where barely hundreds left it: whereas we all see that the fact is quite otherwise. no good can result from such insincere and extravagant praises of a calling which so few freely choose, and so many gladly shun. grant that the farmer's _ought_ to be the most enviable and envied vocation, we know that in fact it _is_ not and, agreeing that it should be, the business in hand is to make it so. there must be obstacles to surmount, mistakes to set right, impediments to overcome, before farming can be in all respects the idolized pursuit which poets are so ready to proclaim it and orators so delight to represent it. let us struggle to make it all that fancy has ever painted it; but, so long as it is not, let us respect undeniable facts, and characterize it exactly as it is. v. if our counties were thoroughly canvassed by township committees, and each tiller of the soil asked to pledge himself in writing to exhibit something at the next county fair, we should soon witness a decided improvement. many would be incited to attend who now stay away; while the very general complaint that there is nothing worth coming to see would be heard no more. as yet, a majority of farmers regard the fair much as they do a circus or traveling menagerie, taking no interest in it except as it may afford them entertainment for the passing hour. we must change this essentially; and the first step is to induce, by concerted solicitation, at least half the farmers in the county to pledge themselves each to exhibit something at the next annual fair, or pay $ toward increasing its premiums. vi. in short, we must all realize that the county or township fair is _our_ fair--not got up by others to invite our patronage or criticism, but something whereto it is incumbent on us to contribute, and which must be better or worse as we choose to make it. realizing this, let us stop carping and give a shoulder to the wheel. xxxix. science in agriculture. i am not a scientific farmer; it is not probable that i ever shall be. i have no such knowledge of chemistry and geology as any man needs to make him a thoroughly good farmer. i am quite aware that men have raised good crops--a good many of them--who knew nothing of science, and did not consider any acquaintance with it conducive to efficiency or success in their vocation. i have no doubt that men will continue to grow such crops, and to make money by agriculture, who hardly know what is meant by chemistry or geology; and yet i feel sure that, as the years roll by, science will more and more be recognized and accepted as the true, substantial base of efficient and profitable cultivation. let me here give briefly the grounds of this conviction: every plant is composed of elements whereof a very small portion is drawn from the soil, while the ampler residue, so long as the plant continues green and growing, is mainly water, though a variable and often considerable proportion is imbibed or absorbed from the atmosphere, which is understood to yield freely nearly all the elements required of it, provided the plants are otherwise in healthful and thrifty condition. water is supplied from the sky, or from springs and streams; and little more than the most ordinary capacity for observation is required to determine when it is present in sufficient quantity, when in baleful excess. but who, unaided by science, can decide whether the soil does or does not contain the elements requisite for the luxuriant growth and perfect development of wheat, or fruit, or grass, or beets, or apples? who knows, save as he blindly infers from results, what mineral ingredients of this or that crop are deficient in given field, and what are present in excess? and how shall any one be enlightened and assured on the point, unless by the aid of science? i have bought and applied to my farm some two thousand bushels of lime, and ten or a dozen tuns of plaster; and i infer, from what seemed to be results, that each of these minerals has been applied with profit; but i do not _know_ it. the increased product which i have attributed to one or both of these elements may have had a very different origin and impulse. i only grope my way in darkness when i should clearly and surely see. an agricultural essayist in maine has recently put forth a canon which, if well grounded, is of great value to farmers. he asserts that the growth of acid plants like sorrel, dock, etc., in a field, results from sourness in the soil, and that, where this exists, lime--that is, the ordinary carbonate of lime--is urgently required; whereas the application of plaster or gypsum (sulphate of lime) to that field must be useless and wasteful. if such be the truth, a knowledge of it would be worth millions of dollars to our farmers. but i lack the scientific attainment needed to qualify me for passing judgment thereon. there is great diversity of opinion among farmers with regard to the value of swamp muck. one has applied it to his land to good purpose; so he holds muck, if convenient, the cheapest and best fertilizer a farmer can add to his ordinary barn-yard manure; another has applied cords upon cords of muck, and says he has derived therefrom no benefit whatever. now, this contrariety of conclusion may result from imperfect judgment on one side or the other, or from the condition precedent of the diverse soils: one of them requiring what muck could supply, while the other required something very different from that; or it may be accounted for by the fact that the muck applied in one case was of superior quality, and in the other good for nothing. where muck is composed almost wholly of the leaves of forest-trees which, through thousands of years, have been blown into a bog, or shallow pond, and there been gradually transformed into a fine, black dust or earth, i do not see how it can possibly be applied to an upland, especially a sandy or gravelly soil, without conducing to the subsequent production of bounteous crops. true, it may be sour when first drawn from the stagnant pool or bog in which it has lain so long, and may need to be mixed with lime, or salt, or ashes, and subjected to the action of sun and frost, to ripen and sweeten it. but it seems to me impossible that such muck should be applied to almost any reasonably dry land, without improving its consistency and increasing its fertility. but all muck is not the product of decayed forest-leaves; and that which was formed of coarse, rank weeds and brakes, of rotten wood and flags, or skunk cabbage, may be of very inferior quality, so as hardly to repay the cost of digging and applying it. science will yet enable us to fix, at least approximately, the value of each deposit of muck, and so give a preference to the best. the analysis of soils, whereof much was heard and whence much was hoped a few years since, seems to have fallen into utter discredit, so that every would-be popular writer gives it a passing fling or kick. that any analysis yet made was and is worthless, i can readily concede, without shaking in the least my conviction that soils will yet be analyzed, under the guidance of a truer, profounder science, to the signal enlightenment and profit of their cultivators. here is a retired merchant, banker, doctor, or lawyer, who has bought a spacious and naturally fertile but worn-out, run-down farm, on which he proposes to spend the remainder of his days. of course, he must improve and enrich it; but with what? and how? all the manure he finds, or, for the present, can make on it, will hardly put the first acre in high condition, while he grows old and is unwilling to wait forever. he is able and ready to buy fertilizers, and does buy right and left, without knowing whether his land needs lime, or phosphate, or potash, or something very different from either. say he purchases $ , worth of one or more of these fertilizers: it is highly probable that $ , might have served him better if invested in due proportion in just what his land most urgently needs; and i unflinchingly believe that we shall yet have an analysis of soils that will tell him just what fertilizers he ought to apply, and what quantity of each of them. science has already taught us that every load of hay or grain drawn from a field abstracts therefrom a considerable quantity of certain minerals--say potash, lime, soda, magnesia, chlorine, silica, phosphorus--and that the soil is thereby impoverished until they be replaced, in some form or other. as no deposit in a bank was ever so large that continual drafts would not ultimately exhaust it, so no soil was ever so rich that taking crop after crop from it annually, yet giving nothing back, would not render it sterile or worthless. sun and rain and wind will do their part in the work of renovation; but all of them together cannot restore to the soil the mineral elements whereof each crop takes a portion, and which, being once completely exhausted, can only be replaced at a heavy cost. science teaches us to foresee and prevent such exhaustion--in part, by a rotation of crops, and in part by a constant replacement of the minerals annually borne away: the subtraction being greater in proportion as the crop is more exacting and luxuriant. what i know of science applicable to farming is little indeed; but i know that there _is_ such science, and that each succeeding year enlarges, improves, and perfects it. i know that i should thus far have farmed to far better purpose, if i had been master even of so much science as already exists. understand that i am not a teacher of this science--i stand very low in the class of learners. i began to learn too late in life, and have been too incessantly harassed by a multiplicity of cares, to make any satisfactory progress. any tolerably educated boy of fifteen may know far more of agricultural science by the time he has passed his eighteenth birthday than i do. what i know in this respect can help him very little; my faith that there is much to be known, and that he may master it if he will, is all that is of much importance. if i can convince a considerable number of our youth that they may surely acquire a competence by the time they shall have passed their fortieth year, without excessive labor or penurious frugality, by means of that knowledge of principles and laws subservient to agriculture which their fathers could not, but which they easily may attain, i shall have rendered a substantial service alike to them and to our country. xl. farm implements. a good workman, it is said, does not quarrel with his tools--which, if true, i judge is due to the fact that he generally manages to have good ones. to work hard throughout a long day under a burning sun, is sufficiently trying, without rendering the labor doubly repugnant by the use of ill-contrived, imperfect, inefficient implements. the half-century which nearly bounds my recollection has witnessed great improvements in this respect. the plow, mainly of wood, wherewith my father broke up his stony, hide-bound acres of new-hampshire pebbles and gravel, in my early boyhood, would now be spurned if offered as a gift to the poorest and most thriftless farmer among us; and the hoes which were allotted to us boys in those days, after the newer and better had been assigned to the men, would be rejected with disdain by the stupidest negro in virginia. though there is still room for improvement, we use far better implements than our grandfathers did, with a corresponding increase in the efficiency of our labor; but the cultivators of spain, portugal, and the greater part of europe, still linger in the dark ages in this respect. their plows are little better than the forked sticks which served their barbarian ancestors, and their implements generally are beneath contempt. with such implements, deep and thorough culture is simply impossible, unless by the use of the spade; and he must be a hard worker who produces a peck of wheat or half a bushel of indian corn per day by the exclusive use of this tool. the soil of france is so cut up and subdivided into little strips of two or three roods up to as many acres each--each strip forming the entire patrimony of a family--that agricultural advancement or efficiency is, with the great mass of french cultivators, out of the question. hence, i judge that, outside of great britain and australia, there is no country wherein an average year's work produces half so much grain as in our own, in spite of our slovenly tillage, our neglect and waste of fertilizers, and the frequent failures of our harvests. belgium, holland, and northern france, can teach us neatness and thoroughness of cultivation; the british isles may fairly boast of larger and surer crops of wheat, oats, potatoes, and grass, than we are accustomed to secure; but, in the selection of implements, and in the average efficiency of labor, our best farmers are ahead of then all. bear with me, then, while i interpose a timid plea for our inventors and patentees of implements, whose solicitations that a trial, or at least an inspection, be accorded to their several contrivances, are too often repelled with churlish rudeness. i realize that our thriving farmers are generally absorbed in their own plans and efforts, and that the agent or salesman who insists on an examination of his new harrow, or pitchfork, or potato-digger, is often extravagant in his assumptions, and sometimes a bore. still, when i recollect how tedious and how back-breaking were the methods of mowing grass and reaping grain with the scythe and sickle, which held unchallenged sway in my early boyhood, i entreat the farmer who is petitioned to accord ten or fifteen minutes to the setting forth, by some errant stranger, of the merits of his new horse-hoe or tedder, to give the time, if he can; and that without sour looks or a mien of stolid incredulity. the biblical monition that, in evincing a generous hospitality, we may sometimes entertain angels unawares, seems to me in point. a new implement may be defective and worthless, and yet contain the germ or suggest the form of a thoroughly good one. give the inventor or his representative a courteous hearing if you can, even though this should constrain you to make up the time so lost after the day's work would otherwise have ended. i suspect that the average farmer of our completely rural districts would be surprised, if not instructed, by a day's careful scrutiny of the contents of one of our great implement warehouses. so many and such various and ingenious devices for pulverizing the earth applying fertilizers to the soil, planting or sowing rapidly, eradicating weeds, economizing labor in harvesting, etc., will probably transcend not merely his experience, but his imagination; and every one of these myriad implements is useful in its place, though no single farmer can afford to buy all or half of them. it will yet, i think, be found necessary by the farmers of a school-district, if not of a township, to meet and agree among themselves that one will buy this implement, another that, and so on, until twenty or thirty such devices as a stump or rock-puller, a clod-crusher, thrashing-machine, fanning-mill, etc., shall be owned in the neighborhood--each by a separate farmer, willing to live and let live--with an understanding that each shall be used in turn by him who needs it; and so every one shall be nearly as well accommodated as though he owned them all. for the number and variety of useful implements increase so rapidly, while their usefulness is so palpable, that, though it is difficult to farm efficiently without many if not most of them, it is impossible that the young farmer of moderate means should buy and keep them all. true, he might hire when he needed, if what he wanted were always at hand; but this can only be assured by some such arrangement as i have suggested, wherein each undertakes to provide and keep that which he will most need; agreeing to lend it whenever it can be spared to any other member of the combination, who undertakes to minister in like manner to _his_ need in return. i think few will doubt that the inventions in aid of agriculture during the last forty years will be far surpassed by those of the forty years just before us. the magnificent fortunes which, it is currently understood, have rewarded the inventors of the more popular mowers, reapers, etc., of our day, are sure to stimulate alike the ingenuity and the avarice of clever men throughout the coming years, and to call into existence ten thousand patents, whereof a hundred will be valuable, and ten or twelve eminently useful. plowing land free from stumps and stones cannot long be the tedious, patience-trying process we have known it. the machinery which will at once pulverize the soil to a depth of two feet, fertilize and seed it, not requiring it to be trampled by the hoofs of animals employed in subsoiling and harrowing, will soon be in general use, especially on the spacious, deep, inviting prairies of the great west.--but i must defer what i have to say of steam and its uses in agriculture to another chapter. xli. steam in agriculture. as yet, the great body of our farmers have been slow in availing themselves of the natural forces in operation around them. vainly for them does the wind blow across their fields and over their hill-tops. it neither thrashes nor grinds their grain; it has ceased even to separate it from the chaff. the brook brawls and foams idly adown the precipice or hillside: the farmer grinds his grain, churns his cream, and turns his grindstone, just as though falling water did not embody power. he draws his logs to one mill, and his wheat, corn, or rye to another, and returns in due season with his boards or his meal; but the lesson which the mill so plainly teaches remains, by him unread. where running or leaping water is not, there brisk breezes and fiercer gales are apt to be. but the average farmer ignores the mechanical use of stream and breeze alike, taxing his own muscle to achieve that which the blind forces of nature stand ready to do at his command. it may not, and i think it will not, be always thus. steam, as a cheap source of practically limitless power, is hardly a century old; yet it has already revolutionized the mechanical and manufacturing industry of christendom. it weaves the far greater part of all the textile fabrics that clothe and shelter and beautify the human family. it fashions every bar and every rail of iron or of steel; it impels the machinery of nearly every manufactory of wares or of implements; and it is very rapidly supplanting wind in the propulsion of vessels on the high seas, as it has already done on rivers and on most inland waters. water is, however, still employed as a power in certain cases, but mainly because its adaptation to this end has cost many thousands of dollars which its disuse would render worthless. i am quite within bounds in estimating that nine-tenths of all the material force employed by man in manufactures, mechanics, and navigation, is supplied by steam, and that this disproportion will be increased to ninety-nine hundredths before the close of this century. for agriculture, steam has done very much, in the transportation of crops and of fertilizers, but very little in the preparation or cultivation of the soil. of steam-wagons for roads or fields, steam-plows for pulverizing and deepening the soil, and steam-cultivators for keeping weeds down and rendering tillage more efficient, we have had many heralded in sanguine bulletins throughout the last forty years, but i am not aware that one of them has fulfilled the sanguine hopes of its author. though a dozen steam-plows have been invented in this country, and several imported from europe, i doubt that a single square mile of our country's surface has been plowed wholly by steam down to this hour. if it has, louisiana--a state which one would not naturally expect to find in the van of industrial progress--has enjoyed the benefit and earned the credit of the achievement. of what steam has yet accomplished in direct aid of agriculture, i have little to say, though in great britain quite a number of steam-plows are actually at work in the fields, and (i am assured), with fair success. until something breaks or gives out, one of these plows does its appointed work better and cheaper than such work is or can be done by animal power; but all the steam-plows whereof i have any knowledge seem too bulky, too complicated, too costly, ever to win their way into general use. i value them only as hints and incitements toward something better suited to the purpose. what our farmers need is not a steam-plow as a specialty, but a locomotive that can travel with facility, not only on common wagon-roads, but across even freshly-plowed fields, without embarrassment, and prove as docile to its manager's touch as an average span of horses. such a locomotive should not cost more then $ , nor weigh more than a tun when laden with fuel and water for a half-hour's steady work. it should be so contrived that it may be hitched in a minute to a plow, a harrow, a wagon, or cart, a saw or grist-mill, a mower or reaper, a thresher or stalk-cutter, a stump or rock-puller, and made useful in pumping and draining operations, digging a cellar or laying up a wall, as also in ditching or trenching. we may have to wait some years yet for a servant so dexterous and docile, yet i feel confident that our children will enjoy and appreciate his handiwork. the farmer often needs far more power at one season than at another, and is compelled to retain and subsist working animals at high cost through months in which he has no use for them, because he must have them when those months have transpired. if he could replace those animals by a machine which, when its season of usefulness was over, could be cleaned, oiled, and put away under a tight roof until next seeding-time, the saving alike of cost and trouble would be very considerable. when our american reapers first challenged attention in great britain, the general skepticism as to their efficiency was counteracted by the suggestion that, even though reaping by machinery should prove more expensive than reaping by hand, the ability to cut and save the grain-crop more rapidly than hitherto would over-balance that enhancement of cost. in the british isles, day after day of chilling wind and rain is often encountered in harvest-time: the standing wheat or oats or barley becoming draggled, or lodged, or beaten out, while the owner impatiently awaits the recurrence of sunny days. when these at length arrive, he is anxious to harvest many acres at once, since his grain is wasting and he knows not how soon cloud and tempest may again be his portion. but all his neighbors are in like predicament with himself, and all equally intent on hurrying the harvest; so that little extra help is attainable. if now the aid of a machine may be commanded, which will cut or acres per day, he cares less how much that work will cost than how soon it can be effected. hence, even though cutting by horse-power had proved more costly than cutting by hand, it would still have been welcome. so it is with plowing, here and almost everywhere. our farmers have this year been unable to begin plowing for winter grain so early as they desired, by reason of the intense heat and drouth, whereby their fields were baked to the consistency of half-burned brick. much seed will in consequence have been sown too late, while much seeding will have been precluded altogether, by inability to prepare the ground in due season. if a machine had been at hand whereby or acres per day could have been plowed and harrowed, thousands would have invoked its aid to enable them to sow their grain in tolerable season, even though the cost had been essentially heavier than that of old-fashioned plowing. i traversed illinois on the th and th of may, , when its entire soil seemed soaked and sodden with incessant rains, which had not yet ceased pouring. inevitably, there had been little or no plowing yet for the vast corn-crop of that state; yet barely two weeks would intervene before the close of the proper season for corn-planting. even if these should be wholly favorable, the plowing could not be effected in season, and much ground must be planted too late or not planted at all. in every such case, a machine that would plow six or eight furrows as fast as a man ought to walk, would add immensely to the year's harvest, and be hailed as a general blessing. i recollect that a german observer of western cultivation--a man of decided perspicacity and wide observation--recommended that each farmer who had not the requisite time or team for getting in his corn-crop in due season should plow single furrows through his field at intervals of to - / feet, plant his corn on the earth thus turned, and proceed, so soon as his planting was finished, to plow out the spaces as yet undisturbed between the springing rows of corn. i do not know that this recommendation was ever widely followed; but i judge that, under certain circumstances, it might be, to decided advantage and profit. i have not attempted to indicate all the benefits which steam is to confer directly on agriculture, within the next half-century. that irrigation must become general, i confidently believe; and i anticipate a very extensive sinking of wells, at favorable points, in order that water shall be drawn therefrom by wind or steam to moisten and enrich the slopes and plains around them. such a locomotive as i have foreshadowed might be taken from well to well, pumping from each in an hour or two sufficient water to irrigate several of the adjacent acres; thus starting a second crop of hay on fields whence the first had been taken, and renewing verdure and growth where we now see vegetation suspended for weeks, if not months. i feel sure that the mass of our farmers have not yet realized the importance and beneficence of irrigation, nor the facility wherewith its advantages may be secured. xlii. co-operation in farming. the word of hope and cheer for labor in our days is coÃ�peration--that is, the combination by many of their means and efforts to achieve results beneficial to them all. it differs radically from communism, which proposes that each should receive from the aggregate product of human labor enough to satisfy his wants, or at least his needs, whether he shall have contributed to that aggregate much, or little, or nothing at all. coöperation insists that each shall receive from the joint product in proportion to his contributions thereto, whether in capital, skill, or labor. if one associate has ten children and another none, communism would apportion to each according to the size of his family alone; while coöperation would give to each what he had earned, regardless of the number dependent upon him. thus the two systems are radical antagonists, and only the grossly ignorant or willfully blind will confound them. a young farmer, whose total estate is less than $ , not counting a priceless wife and child, resolves to migrate from one of the old states to kansas, minnesota, or one of the territories: he has heard that he will there find public land whereon he may make a home of a quarter-section, paying therefor $ or less for the cost of survey and of the necessary papers. so he may: but, on reaching the land of promise, whether with or without his family, he finds a very large belt of still vacant land beyond the settlements already transformed into private property, and either not for sale at all or held on speculation, quite out of his reach. the public land which he may take under the homestead law lies a full day's journey beyond the border settlements, to which he must look for mills, stores, schools, and even highways. if he persists in squatting, with intent to earn his quarter-section by settlement and cultivation, he must take a long day's journey across unbridged streams and sloughs, over unmade roads, to find boards, or brick, or meal, or glass, or groceries; while he must postpone the education of his children to an indefinite future day. gradually, the region will be settled, and the conveniences of civilization will find their way to his door, but not till after he will have suffered through several years for want of them; often compelled to make a journey to get a plow or yoke mended, a grist of grain ground, or to minister to some other trivial but inexorable want. he who thus acquires his quarter-section must fairly earn it, and may be thankful if his children do not grow up rude, coarse, and illiterate. but suppose one thousand just such young farmers as he is, with no more means and no greater efficiency than his, were to set forth together, resolved to find a suitable location whereon they might all settle on adjoining quarter-sections, thus appropriating the soil of five or six embryo townships: who can fail to see that three-fourths of the obstacles and discouragements which confront the solitary pioneer would vanish at the outset? roads, bridges, mills,--nay, even schools and churches--would be theirs almost immediately; while mechanics, merchants, doctors, etc., would fairly overrun their settlement and solicit their patronage at every road-crossing. within a year after the location of their several claims, they would have achieved more progress and more comfort than in five years under the system of straggling and isolated settlement which has hitherto prevailed. the change i here indicate appeals to the common sense and daily experience of our whole people. it is not necessary, however desirable, that the pioneers should be giants in wisdom, in integrity, or in piety, to secure its benefits. a knave or a fool may be deemed an undesirable neighbor; but a dozen such in the township would not preclude, and could hardly diminish, the advantages naturally resulting from settlement by coöperation. nor are these confined to pioneers transcending the boundaries of civilization. i wish i could induce a thousand of our colored men now precariously subsisting by servile labor in the cities, to strike out boldly for homes of their own, and for liberty to direct their own labor, whether they should settle on the frontier in the manner just outlined, or should buy a tract of cheap land on long island, in new-jersey, maryland, or some state further south. i cannot doubt that the majority of them would work their way up to independence; and this very much sooner, and after undergoing far less privation, than almost every pioneer who has plunged alone into the primitive forest or struck out upon the broad prairie and there made himself a farm. the insatiable demand for fencing is one of the pioneer's many trials. though he has cleared off but three acres of forest during his first fall and winter, he must surround those acres with a stout fence, or all he grows will be devoured by hungry cattle--his own, if no others. whether he adds two or ten acres to his clearing during the next year, they must in turn be surrounded by a fence; and nothing short of a very stout one will answer: so he goes on clearing and fencing, usually burning up a part of his fence whenever he burns over his new clearing; then building a new one around this, which will have to be sacrificed in its turn. i believe that many pioneers have devoted as much time to fencing their fields as to tilling them throughout their first six or eight years. it is different with those who settle on broad prairies, but not essentially better. each pioneer must fence his patch of tillage with material which costs him more, and is procured with greater difficulty, than though he were cutting a hole in the forest. often, when he thinks he has fenced sufficiently, the hungry, breachy cattle, who roam the open prairies around him, judge his handiwork less favorably; and he wakes some august morning, when feed is poorest outside and most luxuriant within his inclosure, to find that twenty or thirty cattle have broken through his defenses and half destroyed his growing crop. if, instead of this wasteful lack of system, a thousand or even a hundred farmers would combine to fence several square miles into one grand inclosure for cultivation, erecting their several habitations within or without its limits, as to each should be convenient-- apportioning it for cultivation, or owning it in severalty, as they should see fit--an immense economy would be secured, just when, because of their poverty, saving is most important. their stock might range the open prairie unwatched; and they might all sleep at night in serene confidence that their corn and cabbages were not in danger of ruthless destruction. among the settlers in our great primitive forests, the system of coöperative farming would have to be modified in details, while it would be in essence the same. and, once adopted with regard to fencing, other adaptations as obvious and beneficent would from day to day suggest themselves. each pioneer would learn how to advance his own prosperity by combining his efforts with those of his neighbors. he would perceive that the common wants of a hundred may be supplied by a combined effort at less than half the cost of satisfying them when each is provided for alone. he would grow year by year into a clearer and firmer conviction that short-sighted selfishness is the germ of half the evils that afflict the human race, and that the true and sure way to a bounteous satisfaction of the wants of each is a generous and thoughtful consideration for the needs of all. * * * * * and here let me pay my earnest and thankful tribute to mr. e. v. de boissière, a philanthropic frenchman, who has purchased , acres of mainly rolling prairie-land in kansas, near princeton, franklin county, and is carefully, cautiously, laying thereon the foundations of a great coöperative farm, where, in addition to the usual crops, it is expected that silk and other exotics will in due time be extensively grown and transformed into fabrics, and that various manufactures will vie with agriculture in affording attractive and profitable employment to a considerable population. i have not been accustomed to look with favor on our new states and unpeopled territories as an arena for such experiments, since so many of their early settlers are intent on getting rich by land-speculation--at all events, through the exercise of some others' muscles than their own--while the opportunities for and incitements to migration and relocation are so multiform and powerful. doubtless, m. de boissière will be often tried by stampedes of his volunteer associates, who, after the novelty of coöperative effort has worn off, will find life on his domain too tame and humdrum for their excitable and high-strung natures. i trust, however, that he will persevere through every discouragement, and triumph over every obstacle; that the right men for associates will gradually gather about him; that his enterprise and devotion will at length be crowned by a signal and inspiring success; and that thousands will be awakened by it to a larger and nobler conception of the mission of industry, and the possibilities of achievement which stud the path of simple, honest, faithful, persistent work. xliii. farmers' clubs. farmers, like other men, divide naturally into two classes--those who do too much work, and those who do too little. i know men who are no farmers at all, only by virtue of the fact that each of them inherited, or somehow acquired, a farm, and have since lived upon and out of it, in good part upon that which it could not help producing--they not doing so much as one hundred fair days' work each per annum. one of this class never takes a periodical devoted to farming; evinces no interest in county fairs or township clubs, save as they may afford him an excuse for greater idleness; and insists that there is no profit in farming. as land steadily depreciates in quality under his management, he is apt to sell out whenever the increase of population or progress of improvement has given additional value to his farm, and move off in quest of that undiscovered country where idleness is compatible with thrift, profits are realized from light crops, and men grow rich by doing nothing. the opposite class of wanderers from the golden mean is hardly so numerous as the idlers, yet it is quite a large one. its leading embodiment, to my mind, is one whom i knew from childhood, who, born poor and nowise favored by fortune, was rated as a tireless worker from early boyhood, and who achieved an independence before he was forty years old in a rural new-england township, simply by rugged, persistent labor--in youth on the farms of other men; in manhood, on one of his own. this man was older at forty than his father, then seventy, and died at fifty, worn out with excessive and unintermitted labor, leaving a widow who greatly preferred him to all his ample wealth, and an only son who, so soon as he can get hold of it, will squander the property much faster, and even more unwisely, than his father acquired it. to the class of which this man was a fair representative, farmers' clubs must prove of signal value. though there should be nothing else than a farmers' club in his neighborhood, it can hardly fail in time to make such a one realize that life need not and should not be all drudgery; that there are other things worth living for beside accumulating wealth. let his wife and his neighbor succeed in drawing such a one into two or three successive meetings, and he can hardly fail to perceive that thrift is a product of brain as well as of muscle; that he may grow rich by learning and knowing as well as by delving, and that, even though he should not, there are many things desirable and laudable beside the accumulation of wealth. a true farmers' club should consist of all the families residing in a small township, so far as they can be induced to attend it, even though only half their members should be present at any one meeting. it should limit speeches to ten minutes, excepting only those addresses or essays which eminently qualified persons are requested to specially prepare and read. it should have a president, ready and able to repress all ill-natured personalities, all irrelevant talk, and especially all straying into the forbidden regions of political or theological disputation. at each meeting, the subject should be chosen for the next, and not less than four members pledged to make some observations thereon, with liberty to read them if unused to speaking in public. those having been heard, the topic should be open to discussion by all present: the humblest and youngest being specially encouraged to state any facts within their knowledge which they deem pertinent and cogent. let every person attending be thus incited to say something calculated to shed light on the subject, to say this in the fewest words possible, and with the utmost care not to annoy or offend others, and it is hardly possible that one evening per week devoted to these meetings should not be spent with equal pleasure and profit. the chief end to be achieved through such meetings is a development of the faculty of observation and the habit of reflection. too many of us pass through life essentially blind and deaf to the wonders and glories manifest to clearer eyes all around us. the magnificent phenomena of the seasons, even the awakening of nature from death to life in spring-time, make little impression on their senses, still less on their understandings. there are men who have passed forty times through a forest, and yet could not name, within half a dozen, the various species of trees which compose it; and so with everything else to which they are accustomed. they need even more than knowledge an intellectual awakening; and this they could hardly fail to receive from the discussions of an intelligent and earnest farmers' club. a genuine and lively interest in their vocation is needed by many farmers, and by most farmers' sons. too many of these regard their homesteads as a prison, in which they must remain until some avenue of escape into the great world shall open before them. the farm to such is but the hollow log into which a bear crawls to wear out the rigors of winter and await the advent of spring. too many of our boys fancy that they know too much for farmers, when in fact they know far too little. a good farmers' club, faithfully attended, would take this conceit out of them, imbuing them instead with a realizing sense of their ignorance and incompetency, and a hearty desire for practical wisdom. a recording secretary, able to state in the fewest words each important suggestion or fact elicited in the course of an evening's discussion, would be hardly less valuable or less honored than a capable president. a single page would often suffice for all that deserves such record out of an evening's discussion; and this, being transferred to a book and preserved, might be consulted with interest and profit throughout many succeeding years. no other duty should be required of the member who rendered this service, the correspondence of the club being devolved upon another secretary. the habit of bringing grafts, or plants, or seeds, to club meetings, for gratuitous distribution, has been found to increase the interest, and enlarge the attendance of those formerly indifferent. almost every good farmer or gardener will sometimes have choice seeds or grafts to spare, which he does not care or cannot expect to sell, and these being distributed to the club will not only increase its popularity, but give him a right to share when another's surplus is in like manner distributed. if one has choice fruits to give away, the club will afford him an excellent opportunity; but i would rather not attract persons to its meetings by a prospect of having their appetites thus gratified at others' expense. a flower-show once in each year, and an exhibition of fruits and other choice products at an evening meeting in september or october, should suffice for festivals. let each member consider himself pledged to bring to the exhibition the best material result of his year's efforts, and the aggregate will be satisfactory and instructive. the organization of a farmers' club is its chief difficulty. the larger number of those who ought to participate usually prefer to stand back, not committing themselves to the effort until after its success has been assured. to obviate this embarrassment, let a paper be circulated for signatures, pledging each signer to attend the introductory meeting and bring at least a part of his family. when forty have signed such a call, success will be well-nigh assured. xliv. western irrigation. i have already set forth my belief that irrigation is everywhere practicable, is destined to be generally adopted, and to prove signally beneficent. i do not mean that every acre of the states this side of the missouri will ever be thus supplied with water, but that _some_ acres of every township, and of nearly every farm, should and will be. i propose herein to speak with direct reference to that large portion of our country which cannot be cultivated to any purpose without irrigation. this region, which is practically rainless in summer, may be roughly indicated as extending from the forks of the platte westward, and as including all our present territories, a portion of western texas, the entire state of nevada, and at least nine-tenths of california. on this vast area, no rain of consequence falls between april and november, while its soil, parched by fervid, cloudless suns, and swept by intensely dry winds, is utterly divested of moisture to a depth of three or four feet; and i have seen the tree known as buckeye growing in it, at least six inches in diameter, whereon every leaf was withered and utterly dead before the end of august, though the tree still lived, and would renew its foliage next spring. most of this broad area is usually spoken of as desert, because treeless, except on the slopes of its mountains, where certain evergreens would seem to dispense with moisture, and on the brink of infrequent and scanty streams, where the all but worthless cotton-wood is often found growing luxuriantly. a very little low gamma grass on the plains, some straggling bunch-grass on the mountains, with an endless profusion of two poor shrubs, popularly known as sage-brush and grease-wood, compose the vegetation of nearly or quite a million square miles. i will confine myself in this essay to the readiest means of irrigating the plains, by which i mean the all but treeless plateau that stretches from the base of the rocky mountains, to miles eastward, sloping imperceptibly toward the missouri, and drained by the affluents of the platte, the kansas, and the arkansas rivers. the north platte has its sources in the western, as the south platte has in the eastern, slopes of the rocky mountains. each of them pursues a generally north-east course for some miles, and then turns sharply to the eastward, uniting some miles eastward of the mountains, where the plains melt into the prairies. between these two rivers and the eastern base of the mountains lies an irregular delta or triangle, which seems susceptible of irrigation at a smaller cost than the residue. the location of union colony may be taken as a fair illustration of the process, and the facilities therefor afforded by nature. among the streams which, taking rise in the eastern gorges of the rocky mountains, run into the south platte, the most considerable has somehow acquired the french name of cache la poudre. it heads in and about long's peak, and, after emerging from the mountains, runs some to miles nearly due east, with a descent in that distance of about feet. its waters are very low in autumn and winter, and highest in may, june and july, from the melting of snow and ice on the lofty mountains which feed it. like all the streams of this region, it is broad and shallow, with its bed but three to four feet below the plains on either side. greeley, the nucleus of union colony, is located at the crossing of the cache la poudre by the denver-pacific railroad, about midway of its course from the kansas pacific at denver northward to the union pacific at cheyenne. here a village of some to houses has suddenly grown up during the past summer. the first irrigating canal of union colony leaves the cache la poudre six or eight miles above greeley, on the south side, and is carried gradually further and further from the stream until it is fully a mile distant at the village, whence it is continued to the platte. branches or ditches lead thence northward, conveying rills through the streets of the village, the gardens or plats of its inhabitants, and the public square, or plaza, which is designed to be its chief ornament. other branches lead to the farms and five-acre allotments whereby the village is surrounded; as still others will do in time to all the land between the canal and the river. in due time, another canal will be taken out from a point further up the stream, and will irrigate the lands of the colony lying south of the present canal, and which are meantime devoted to pasturage in common. taking the water out of the river is here a very simple matter. at the head of an island, a rude dam of brush and stones and earth is thrown across the bed of the stream, so as to raise the surface two or three feet when the water is lowest, and very much less when it is highest. thus deflected, a portion of the water flows easily into the canal. a very much larger and longer canal, leaving the cache la poudre close to the mountains, and gradually increasing its distance from that stream to four or five miles, is now in progress by sections, and is to be completed this winter. its length will be thirty miles, and it will irrigate, when the necessary sub-canals shall have been constructed, not less than , acres. but it may be ten years before all this work is completed or even required. the lands most easily watered from the main canal will be first brought into cultivation; the sub-canals will be dug as they shall be wanted. at first, members of the colony arriving at its location, hesitated to take farm allotments and build upon them, from distrust of the capacities of the soil. they saw nothing of value growing upon it; the little grass found upon it was short, thin, and brown. it was not black, like the prairies and bottoms of illinois and kansas, but of a light yellow snuff-color, and deemed sterile by many. but a few took hold, and planted and sowed resolutely; and, though it was too late in the season for most grains, the results were most satisfactory. wheat sown in june produced bushels to the acre; oats did as well; while potatoes, beets, turnips, squashes, cabbages, etc., yielded bounteously; tomatoes did likewise, but the plants were obtained from denver. little was done with indian corn, but that little turned out well, though i judge that the summer nights are too cold here to justify sanguine expectations of a corn-crop--the altitude being , feet above the sea, with snow-covered mountains always visible in the west. for other grains, and for all vegetables and grasses, i believe there is no better soil in the world. to many, the cost of irrigation would seem so much added to the expense of cultivating without irrigation; but this is a mistake. here is land entirely free from stump, or stick, or stone, which may easily and surely be plowed or seeded in march or april, and which will produce great crops of nearly every grain, grass or vegetable, with a very moderate outlay of labor to subdue and till it. the farmer need not lose three days per annum by rains in the growing season, and need not fear storm or shower when he seeks to harvest his grass or grain. nothing like ague or any malarious disease exhausts his vitality or paralyzes his strength. i saw men breaking up for the first time tracts which had received no water, using but a single span of horses as team; whereas, breaking up in the prairie states involves a much larger outlay of power. the advantage of early sowing is very great; that of a long planting season hardly less so. i believe a farmer in this colony may keep his plow running through october, november, and a good portion of december; start it again by the st of march, and commence seeding with wheat, oats, and barley, and keep seeding, including planting and gardening, until the first of june, which is soon enough to plant potatoes for winter use. thenceforth, he may keep the weeds out of his corn, roots, and vegetables, for six weeks or two months; and, as every day is a bright working-day, he can get on much faster than he could if liable to frequent interruptions by rains. i estimate the cost of bringing water to each farm at $ per acre, and that of leading it about in sub-ditches, so that it shall be available and applicable on every acre of that farm, at somewhat less; but let us suppose that the first cost of having water everywhere and always at command is $ per acre, and that it will cost thereafter $ per acre to apply it, i maintain that it is richly worth having, and that nearly every farm product can be grown cheaper by its help than on lands where irrigation is presumed unnecessary. there are not many acres laid down to grass in new-england, whether for hay or pasture, that would not have justified an outlay of $ per acre to secure their thorough irrigation simply for this year alone. xlv. sewage. the great empires of antiquity were doomed to certain decay and dissolution by a radical vice inherent in their political and social constitution. power rapidly built up a great capital, whereto population was attracted from every quarter; and that capital became a focus of luxury and consumption. grain, meat, and vegetables--the fat of the land and the spoils of the sea--were constantly absorbed by it in enormous quantities; while nothing, or, at best, very little, was returned therefrom to the continually exhausted and impoverished soil. thus, a few ages, or at most a few centuries, sufficed to divest a vast surrounding district, first, of its fertility, ultimately of its capacity for production. and so nineveh, thebes, babylon, successively ceased to be capitals, and became ruins amid deserts. rome impoverished italy south of the apennines; then sicily; and, at last, egypt: her sceptre finally departing, because her millions could no longer be fed without dispersion. that some means must be devised whereby to return to the soil those elements which the removal of crop after crop inevitably exhausts, is a truth which has but recently begun to be clearly understood. unluckily, the difficulty of such restoration is seriously augmented by the fact that cities, and all considerable aggregations of human beings, tend strongly in our day to locations by the sea-side, in valleys, and by the margins of rivers. anciently, cities and villages were often built on hill-tops, or at considerable elevations, because foes could be excluded or repelled from such locations more surely, and with smaller force, than elsewhere. from such elevations, it need not have been difficult to diffuse, by means of water, all that could be gladly spared which would aid to fertilize the adjacent farms and gardens. a kindred distribution of the exuviæ of our modern cities is a far more difficult and costly undertaking, and involves bold and skillful engineering. yet the problem, though difficult, must be solved, or our great cities will be destroyed by their own physical impurities. the growth and expansion of cities, throughout the present century, have been wholly beyond precedent; and thus the difficulty of making a satisfactory disposition of their offal has been fearfully augmented. the sewerage of our streets and houses modifies the problem, but does not solve it. desolating epidemics, like the plague, yellow fever, and the cholera, will often visit our great cities, and decimate their people, unless means can be found to cleanse them wholly and incessantly of whatever tends to pollute and render noisome their atmosphere. sewage is the term used in england to designate water which, having been slightly impregnated with the feculence and ordure of a city or village, is diffused over a farm or farms adjacent, in order to impart at once fertility and moisture to its soil. to secure an equable and thorough dissemination of sewage, it is essential that the land to which it is applied, if not originally level or nearly so, shall be brought into such condition that the impregnated water may be applied to its entire surface, and shall thence settle into, moisten, and fertilize, each cubic inch of the soil. this involves a very considerable initial outlay; but the luxuriance of the crops unfailingly produced, under the influence of this vivifying irrigation, abundantly justifies and rewards that outlay. as yet, the application of sewage is in its infancy; since the perfect and total conversion of all that a great city excretes into the most available food for plants, requires not only immense mains and reservoirs, with a costly network of distributing dykes or ditches, but novel appliances in engineering, and a large investment of time as well as money. years must yet elapse before all the excretions of a great city like london or new-york can thus be transmuted into the means of fertilizing whole counties in their vicinity. but the work is already well begun, and another generation will see it all but completed. meantime, many smaller cities, more eligibly located for the purpose, are already enriching by their sewage the rural districts adjacent, which they had previously tended strongly to impoverish. edinburgh, the capital of scotland, is among them. the little village of romford, england, is one of those which have recently been made to contribute by sewage to this beneficent end; and a visit of inspection paid to it, on the th of october last, by the london board of works, elicited accounts of the process and its results, in the london journals, which afforded hints for and incitement to similar undertakings in this and other countries--undertakings which may be postponed, but the only question is one of time. _the daily news_ of oct. th, says: "breton's farm consists of acres of light and poor gravelly soil; and it now receives the whole available sewage of the town of romford--that is, of about , persons. this is conveyed to the land by an iron pipe of inches in diameter, which is laid under ground, and discharges its contents into an open tank. from this tank, the sewage is pumped to a height of feet, and is then distributed over the land by iron or concrete troughs, or 'carriers,' fitted with sluices and taps, so that the amount of sewage applied to any given portion of the field can be regulated with the greatest facility and nicety. to insure the regular and even flow of the sewage when discharged from the carriers, it was necessary to lay out the land with mathematical accuracy; and it has been leveled and formed by the theodolite into rectilinear beds of uniform width of thirty feet, slightly inclining from the centres, along which the sewage is applied. the carriers or open troughs, by which the sewage is conveyed, run along the top of each series of these beds or strikes; and at the bottom there is in every case a good road, by means of which free access is provided for a horse and cart, or for the steam plow--the use of which is in contemplation--to every bed and crop. these arrangements--the carrying out of which involved the removal of six hundred trees and a great length of heavy fences, the filling up of a number of ditches and no less than nine ponds, as well as the complete underdraining of the whole farm--were mainly effected last year; but it was not until the middle of april, , that mr. hope received any of this sewage from the town of romford, and not until the following month that he obtained both the day and night supply. satisfactory, therefore, as have been the results of the present season's operations, they have been obtained under disadvantageous circumstances, and cannot be regarded as affording complete evidence of the benefits which may be derived from the application of sewage to even a poor and thin soil, which had already ruined more than one of those who had attempted to cultivate it. to mention only one drawback which arose from the lateness of the period at which the sewage was first received, mr. hope had not the advantage of being able to apply it to his seed-beds: and thus many, if not all his plants were not ready for setting out so early as they would be in a future year, and some of the crops have suffered in consequence--that is to say, have suffered in a comparative sense. speaking positively, they have in all instances been much larger, not only than any that could have been grown upon the same land without the use of sewage, but than any which have been raised from much superior land in the immediate neighborhood. the crops which have been or are being raised on different parts of the firm, are of diverse character; but, with all, the method of cultivation adopted has been attended with almost equal success. italian rye-grass, beans, peas, mangolds, carrots, broccoli, cabbages, savoys, beet-root, batavia yams, jersey cabbages, and indian corn, have all grown with wonderful rapidity and yielded abundant harvests under the stimulating and nourishing influence of the romford sewage. the visitors of saturday last, as they tramped over the farm under the guidance of its energetic proprietor, had an opportunity of witnessing the abundance and excellence of many of these crops. even where the mangolds, from being planted late, had not attained any extraordinary size, it was noticeable that the plants were especially vigorous, and that there was not a vacant space in any of the rows. all the plants which had been placed in the ground had thriven, and would give a good return. where this crop had been specially treated with a view to forthcoming shows, the roots had attained an enormous size, and, like some of the cabbages, had assumed almost gigantic proportions. the carrots were very fine and well-grown, and the heads of the walcheren broccoli were as white, and firm, and crispy, as the finest cauliflowers; while the savoys, of unusual size and weight, were as round and hard as cannon balls; and some of the drumhead cabbages, although equally distinguished for closeness and firmness, were large enough in the heart to hold a good-sized child, and might, as was suggested upon the ground, very well be introduced into some pantomimic scene representing the kingdom of brobdingnag. the indian corn had reached the respectable height of some eight feet, and, with few exceptions, each stalk carried a good-sized and well-filled cob or ear. these, unless we should have another spell of exceptionally hot weather, will not ripen; but in their green state they are readily eaten by horses and cattle, and prove excellent fodder. in the course of their peregrinations, mr. hope's guests of course paid a visit to the tank in which the sewage is received before it is pumped on the land. we need hardly say that the appearance of this miniature lake of nastiness was anything but agreeable; but its odor was by no means overpowering, nor, indeed, very offensive. the rill of bright, clear water which flowed in at one corner, and some of which was handed about in tumblers, looking as pure as the limpid stream which flows from the most effective filters that are to be seen in the windows of london dealers, had only a short time before flowed out of this hideous reservoir in a very different state. we had met it in the "carriers" flowing along in a dark, inky stream, not smelling much, but covered with an ugly gray froth which reminded one of some of the most disagreeable details in the manufacture of sugar and rum, or suggested the idea that it had been used for a very foul wash indeed. with these reminiscences fresh in one's memory, it required some courage to comply with the pressing invitations to taste this 'effluent water.' there were, however, many of the party who braved the attempt; and, by all who tasted it, the water was pronounced to be destitute of any except a slightly mineral flavor. in dry weather, this effluent water, which has passed through the land and been collected by the drains, after mixing with the sewage, is again pumped over the fields; in wet weather, it can be turned into the brook which is dignified with the name of the river rom. * * * we have omitted to mention that the rent paid by mr. hope is £ per acre, and the cost of the sewage (at s. per head) £ more." --i think few thoughtful readers will doubt that here is the germ of a great movement in advance for the agriculture of all old and densely peopled communities, and that our youngest cities and manufacturing villages may wisely consider it deeply, with a view to its ultimate if not early imitation. that we are not prepared to incur the inevitable expense of a thorough system of sewerage with reference to the application to the soil of all the fertilizing elements that a city would gladly spare, by no means proves that we should not consider and plan with a view to the ultimate creation and utilization of sewage. xlvi. more of irrigation. i have thus far considered irrigation with special reference to those limited, yet very considerable districts, which are traversed or bordered by living streams, and, having a level or slightly rolling surface, present obvious facilities for and incitements to the operation. such are the valleys of the platte, and of nearly or quite all its affluents after they leave the rocky mountains; such is the valley of the upper arkansas; such the valleys of the smoky hill and the republican, so far down as irrigation may be considered necessary. irrigation on all these seems to me inevitable, and certain to be speedily, though capriciously, effected. i believe a dam across either fork of the platte, at any favorable point above their junction, raising the surface of the stream six feet, at a cost not exceeding $ , , would suffice to irrigate completely not less than fifty square miles of the valley below it, while serving at the same time to furnish power for mills and factories to a very considerable extent; for the need of irrigation is not incessant, but generally confined to two or three months per annum, and all of the volume of the stream not needed for irrigation could be utilized as power. thus the valleys of the few constant water-courses of the plains may come at an early day to employ and subsist a dense and energetic population, engaged in the successful prosecution alike of agriculture and manufactures, while belts, groves, and forests, of choice, luxuriant timber, will diversify and embellish regions now bare of trees, and but thinly covered with dead herbage from june until the following april. but, when we rise above the bluffs, and look off across the blank, bleak areas where no living water exists, the problem becomes more difficult, and its solution will doubtless be much longer postponed. to a stranger, these bleak uplands seem sterile; and, though such is not generally the fact, the presumption will repel experiments which involve a large initial outlay. the railroad companies, which now own large tracts of these lands, will be obliged either to demonstrate their value, or to incite individuals and colonists to do it by liberal concessions. as the case stands to-day, most of these lands, which would have been dear at five cents per acre before the roads were built, could not be sold at any price to actual settlers, even with the railroad in plain sight, because of the dearth of fuel and timber, and because also the means of rendering them fruitful and their cultivation profitable are out of reach of the ordinary pioneer. hence, so long as the valleys of the living streams proffer such obvious invitations to settlement and tillage, by the aid of irrigation, i judge that the higher and dryer plains will mainly be left to the half-savage herdsmen who rear cattle and sheep without feeding and sheltering them, by giving them the range of a quarter-section to each bullock, and submitting to the loss of a hundred head or so after each great and cold snow-storm, as an unavoidable dispensation of providence. but in process of time even the wild herdsmen will be softened into or replaced by regular farmers, plowing and seeding for vegetables and small grains, sheltering their habitations with trees, and sending their children to school. this change involves irrigation; and the following are among the ways in which it will be effected: the plains are nowhere absolutely flat (as i presume the "desert" of sahara is not), but diversified by slopes, and swells, and gentle ridges or divides, affording abundant facilities for the distribution of water. a well, sunk on the crest of one of these divides, will be filled with living water at a depth ranging from to feet. a windmill of modest dimensions placed over this well will be rarely stopped for want of impelling power: wind being, next to space, the thing most abundant on the plains. a reservoir or pond covering three or four acres may be made adjacent to the well at a small cost of labor, by excavating slightly and using the earth to form an embankment on the lower side. the windmill, left alone, will fill the reservoir during the windy winter and spring months with water soon warmed in the sun, and ready to be drawn off as wanted throughout the thirsty season of vegetable growth and maturity. carefully saved, the product of one well will serve to moisten and vivify a good many acres of grass or tillage. such is the retail plan applicable to the wants of solitary farmers; but i hope to see it supplemented and invigorated by the extensive introduction of artesian wells, whereof two, by way of experiment, are now in progress at denver and kit carson respectively. i need not here describe the artesian well, farther than to say that it is made by boring to a depth ranging from to more than a feet, tubing regularly from the top downward until a stream is reached which will rise to and above the surface, flowing over the top of the tube in a stream often as large as an average stove-pipe. such a well, after supplying a settlement or modest village with water, may be made to fill a reservoir that will sufficiently irrigate a thousand cultivated acres. its water will usually be warmer than though obtained from near the surface, and hence better adapted to irrigation. of course, the artesian well is costly, and will not soon be constructed for uses purely agricultural; but the railroads traversing the plains and the great basin will sometimes be compelled to resort to one without having use for a twentieth part of the water they thus entice from the bowels of the earth; and that which they cannot use they will be glad to sell for a moderate price, thus creating oases of verdure and bounteous production. the palpable interest of railroads in dotting their long lines of desolation with such cheering contrasts of field and meadow and waving trees, render nowise doubtful their hearty coöperation with any enterprising pioneer who shall bring the requisite capital, energy, knowledge, and faith, to the prosecution of the work. these are but hasty suggestions of methods which will doubtless be multiplied, varied, and improved upon, in the light of future experience and study. and when the very best and most effective methods of subduing the plains to the uses of civilized man shall have been discovered and adopted, there will still remain vast areas as free commons for the herdsmen and sporting-grounds for the hunter of the elk and the antelope, after the buffalo shall have utterly disappeared. i do not doubt the assertion of the plainsmen that rain increases as settlements are multiplied. crossing the plains in , i noted indications that timber had formerly abounded where none now grows; and i presume that, as young trees are multiplied in the wake of civilization, finally thickening into clumps of timber and beginning a forest, more rain will fall, and the extension of woodlands become comparatively easy. but, relatively to the country eastward of the missouri, the plains will always be arid and thirsty, with a pure, bracing atmosphere that will form a chief attraction to thousands suffering from or threatened with pulmonary afflictions. a million of square miles, whereon is found no single swamp or bog, and not one lake that withstands the drouth of summer, can never have a moist climate, and never fail to realize the need of irrigation. the plains will in time give lessons, which even the well-watered and verdurous east may read with profit. such level and thirsty clays as largely border lake champlain, for example, traversed by streams from mountain ranges on either hand, will not always be owned and cultivated by men insensible to the profit of irrigation. nor will such rich valleys as those of the connecticut, the kennebec, the susquehanna, be left to suffer year after year from drouth, while the water which should refresh them runs idly and uselessly by. agriculture repels innovation, and loves the beaten track; but such lessons as new-england has received in the great drouth of will not always be given and endured in vain. xlvii. undeveloped sources of power. the more i consider the present state of our agriculture, the more emphatic is my discontent with the farmer's present sources and command of power. the subjugation and tillage of a farm, like the running of a factory or furnace, involves a continual use of power; but the manufacturer obtains his from sources which supply it cheaply and in great abundance, while the farmer has been content with an inferior article, in limited supply, at a far heavier cost. yet the stream which turns the factory's wheels and sets all its machinery in motion traverses or skirts many farms as well, and, if properly harnessed, is just as ready to speed the plow as to impel the shuttles of a woolen-mill, or revolve the cylinders of a calico-printery. nature is impartially kind to all her children; but some of them know how to profit by her good-will far more than others. no doubt, we all have much yet to learn, and our grandchildren will marvel at the proofs of stupidity evinced in our highest achievements; but i am not mistaken in asserting that, as yet, the farmers' control of nature's free gifts of power is very far inferior to that of nearly every other class of producers. i have been having much plowing done this fall--in my orchards, for what i presume to be the good of the trees; on my drained swamp, because it is not yet fully subdued and sweetened, and i judge that the winter's freezing and thawing will aid to bring it into condition. and then my swamp lies so low and absolutely flat that the thaws and rains of spring render plowing it in season for oats, or any other crop that requires early seeding, a matter of doubt and difficulty. all the land i now cultivate, or seek to cultivate, has already been well plowed more than once; no stump or stone impedes progress in the tracts i have plowed this fall; yet a good plow, drawn by two strong yoke of oxen, rarely breaks up half an acre per day; and i estimate two acres per week about what has been averaged, at a cost of $ for the plowman and driver; offsetting the oxen's labor against the work done by the men at the barn and elsewhere apart from plowing. in other words: i am confident that my plowing has cost me, from first to last, at least, $ per acre, and would have cost still more if it had been done as thoroughly as it ought. i am quite aware that this is high--that sandy soils and dry loams are plowed much cheaper; and that farmers who plow wall (with whom i do not rank those who scratch the earth to a depth of four or five inches) do it at a much lower rate. still, i estimate the average cost in this country of plowing land twelve inches deep at $ per acre; and i am confident that it does not cost one cent less. nor is cost the only discouragement. there is not half so much nor so thorough plowing among us, especially in the fall; as there should be. the soil is, for a good part of the time, too dry or too wet; the weather is inclement, or the ground is frozen: so the plow must stand still. at length, the signs are auspicious; the ground is in just the right condition; and we would gladly plow ten, twenty, fifty acres during the brief period wherein it remains so; but this is impossible. others want to improve the opportunity as well as we; extra teams are rarely to be had at any price; and our own slow-moving oxen refuse to be hurried. standing half a mile off, you can see them move; if your eye-sight is keen, and you have some stationary object interposed whereby to take an observation; but it is as much as ever. if your soil is such that you can use horses, you get on, of course, much faster; but all that you gain in breadth you are apt to lose in depth. there may be spans that will take the plow right along though you sink it to the beam; but they are sure to be slow travelers. i never knew a span that would plow an acre per day as i think it should be plowed; though, if your only object be to get over as much ground as possible, you may afflict and titillate two acres, or as much more as you please. now, i have before me a letter to _the times_ (london) by mr. william smith, of woolston, bucks, who states that he has just harvested his fifteenth annual crop cultivated by steam-power, and has prepared his land for the sixteenth; and he gives details, showing that he breaks up and ridges heavy clay soils at the rate of six acres per day, and plows lands already in tillage at the rate of fully nine acres per day. he gives the total cost, (including wear and tear,) of breaking up a foot deep and ridging acres in september and october in this year, , at £ _ s. d._ or about $ in gold: call it $ in our greenbacks, and still it falls considerably below $ (greenbacks) per acre. say that labor and fuel are twice as dear in this country as in england, and this would make the cost of thoroughly pulverizing by steam-power a heavy clay soil to a depth of twelve inches less than $ per acre here. i do not believe this could be done by animal power at $ per acre, not considering the difficulty of getting it thoroughly done at all. mr. smith pertinently says: "horse-power could not give at any cost such valuable work as this steam-power ridging and subsoiling is." he tills acres in all, making the cost of steam-plowing his stubble-land _ s. - / d._ per acre (say $ . greenback). and he gives this interesting item: "no. , light land, acres, was ridge-plowed and subsoiled last year for beans: that operation left the land, after the bean-crop came off, in so nice a state, that cultivating once over with horses, at a cost of _ s._ per acre, was all that was needed this autumn for wheat next year. the wheat was drilled four days back." --now i am not commending steam as the best source of power in aid of agriculture. i hope we shall be able to do better ere long. i recognize the enormous waste involved in the movement of an engine, boiler, etc., weighing several tons, back and forth across our fields, and apprehend that it must be difficult to avoid a compression of the soil therefrom. a stationary engine and boiler at either end of the field, hauling a gang of plows this way and that by means of ropes and pulleys, must involve a very heavy outlay for machinery and a considerable cost in its removal from farm to farm, or even from field to field. either of these may be the best device yet perfected; but we are bound to do better in time. precisely how and when the winds which sweep over our fields shall be employed to pulverize and till the soil, are among the many things i do not know; but, that the end will yet be achieved, i undoubtingly trust. i know somewhat--not much--of what has been done and is doing, both in europe and america, to extend and diversify the utilization of wind as a source of power, and to compress and retain it so that the gale which sweeps over a farm to-night may afford a reserve or fund of power for its cultivation on the morrow or thereafter. i know a little of what has been devised and done toward converting and transmitting, through the medium of compressed air, the power generated by a waterfall--say niagara or minnehaha--so that it may be expended and utilized at a distance of miles from its source, impelling machinery of all kinds at half the cost of steam. i know vaguely of what is being done with electricity, with an eye to its employment in the production of power, by means of enginery not a tenth so weighty and cumbrous as that required for the generation and utilization of steam, and by means of a consumption (that is, transformation) of materials not a hundredth part so bulky and heavy as the water and steam which fill the boilers of our factories and locomotives. i am no mechanician, and will not even guess from what source, through what agencies, the new power will be vouch-safed us which is in time to pulverize our fields to any required depth with a rapidity, perfection, and economy, not now anticipated by the great body of our farmers. but my faith in its achievement is undoubting; and, though i may not live to see it, i predict that there are readers of this essay who will find the forces abundantly generated all around us by the spontaneous movement of wind, water, and electricity--one or more, and probably by all of them--so utilized and wielded as to lighten immensely the farmer's labor, while quadrupling its efficiency in producing all by which our earth ministers to the sustenance and comfort of man. xlviii. rural depopulation. complaint is widely made of a decrease in the relative population of our rural districts; and not without reason, or, at least, plausibility. i presume the census of will return no more farmers in the state of new york, and probably some fewer in new england, than were shown by the census of . the very considerable augmentation of the number of their people will be found living wholly in the cities and incorporated villages. i doubt whether there are more farmers in the state of new york to-day than there were in , though the total population has meantime doubled. many farms have been transformed into country-seats for city bankers, merchants, and lawyers; others have been consolidated, so that what were formerly two or three, now constitute but one; and, though every body says, "our farms are too large for our capital," "we run over too much land," etc., etc., yet, i can hear of few farms that have been, or are expected to be, divided, except into village or city lots; while the prevalent tendency is still the other way. an inefficient farmer dies heavily in debt, or is sold out by the sheriff: his farm is rarely divided between two purchasers, while it is quite often absorbed into the estate of some thrifty neighbor; and thus small farmers are selling out and moving westward much oftener than large ones. such are the obvious facts: now for some of the reasons: i. our state, like new england, was originally all but covered by a heavy growth of forest. the removal of this timber involved very much hard work, most of which has been done in this century, and much of it by the present generation. when i first traversed chautauqua county, forty-three years ago, from two-thirds to three-fourths of her acres must have been still covered with the primeval forest--a tall, heavy growth of beech, maple, hemlock, white pine, etc., which yielded very slowly to the efforts of the average chopper. many a pioneer gave half his working hours for twenty years to the clearing off of timber, fencing, cutting out roads, etc., and had not sixty acres in arable condition at the last. outside of the villages, the population of that county was probably as great in as it is to-day, though the annual production of her tillage was not half what it now is. her farms are now made; her remaining woodlands are worth about as much per acre as her tillage; there is now comparatively little timber-cutting, or land-clearing; and two-thirds of the pioneers, or their sons who inherited their farms, have sold out, or been sold out, and pushed further westward. meantime, grazing and dairying have extensively supplanted grain-growing; and farmers who found more work than they could do on or acres, now manage to acres with ease. i do not say that they ought not to farm better; i only state the facts that they thrive by this dairy-farming, and are not exhausting their lands. and what is true of chautauqua is measurably true of half the rural counties in our state. ii. formerly, wood was the only fuel known to our farmers, while immense quantities of it were burned in our cities, at the salt-works, etc. at present, wood is scarcely used for fuel, except as kindling, in any of our cities, villages, or manufactories, while the consumption of coal by our farmers is already very large, and rapidly extending. all this reduces the demand for labor on our farms and in our forests, while increasing the corresponding demand in the coal mines, and on the railroads. luzerne county, pennsylvania, has doubled her population within the last twelve or fourteen years; and this at the expense of our rural districts. iii. our agricultural implements and machinery grow annually more effective, and at the same time more costly. the outfit of a good farm costs five-fold what it did forty years ago. the farmer makes and secures his hay far more rapidly and effectively than his father did, but pays far more for reapers, mowers, rakers, etc.; in other words, he makes winter work abridge that of summer--makes a hundred days' work in some village or city save thrice as many days' work on his farm. this enhances his profits, but swells our urban, while it diminishes our rural population. iv. much has been said of the degeneracy and increasing sterility of the new england puritan stock. all this is shallow and absurd. there never before were so many people who proudly traced their origin to a new england ancestry as now. what is true in the premises is this: the new england stock is becoming very widely diffused, and is giving place, to a considerable extent, to other elements in its original home. forty years ago, at least seven-eighths of the inhabitants of boston were of new england birth and lineage; now, hardly half are so. the descendants of the pilgrims are scattered all over our wide country; while hundreds of thousands have flowed in from ireland, from germany, from canada, to fill the places thus relinquished; and, since most of the immigrants, whether into or out of new england, seek their future homes in the spring-time of life, their children are mainly born to them after rather than before their migration. the yankees have no fewer children than formerly; but they are now born in minnesota, in illinois, in kansas; while those born in new england are, for identical reasons, in large proportion of irish or of canadian parentage. there are new england townships, whereof most of the heads of families are long past the prime of life; their children having left them for more attractive localities, and the work on their farms being now done mainly by foreign-born employés. as a general rule, the boys first wandered off; leaving the girls only the alternative of following, or dying in maidenhood. marked diversities of race, of creed, and of education, have thus far prevented any considerable intermingling of the yankee with the foreign element by marriage. and what is true of new england is measurably true of our own state. i have not intended by these observations to combat the assumption that our people too generally prefer other employments to farming. the obstacles to effective modern agriculture--that is, to agriculture prosecuted by the help of efficient machinery--presented by that incessant alternation of rock and bog, which characterizes new england and some parts of new york, i have already noted; and they interpose a serious, discouraging impediment to agricultural progress. a farm intersected by two or three swamps and brooks, separated by steep, rocky, ridges, and dotted over with pebbly knolls, sometimes giving place to a strip of sterile sand, is far more repulsive to the capable, intelligent farmer of to-day than it was to his grandfather. so far as my observation extends, there are more new england farms on which you cannot, than on which you can, find ten acres in one unbroken area suitable for planting to corn, or sowing to winter grain. hence, agriculture in the east will always seem petty and irregular when brought into contrast with the prairie cultivation of the west. grain can never be grown here so cheaply nor so abundantly as there; while the tendency of our pastures to cover themselves over with moss and worthless shrubs, unless frequently broken up and reseeded, makes even dairying more difficult and costly in new england and along its western border than in almost any other part of our country. yet, these discouragements are balanced by compensations. timber springs luxuriantly and grows rapidly throughout this region; while our harsh, capricious climate gives to our hickory, white oak, white ash, and other varieties, qualities unknown to such grown elsewhere, while prized everywhere. apples, and most fruits of the temperate zone, do well with us; while our cities and manufacturing villages proffer most capacious markets. potatoes and other edible roots produce liberally, and generally command good prices. hay sells for $ to $ per ton, is easily grown, and is in eager and increasing demand. we ought to produce twice our present crop from the same area, and have need of every pound of it; for neither our cattle nor our sheep are nearly so numerous nor so well fed as they should be. in short, there is money to be made, by those who have means and know how, by buying new england farms, tilling them better, and growing much larger crops than their present occupants have done. there are many who can do better in the west; but the right men can still make money by farming this side of the susquehanna and the genesee; and i would gladly incite some thousands more of them to try. xlix. large and small farms. there is fascination for most minds in naked magnitude. the young colonel, who can hardly handle a brigade effectively in battle, would like of all things to command a great army; and the tiller of fifty rugged acres has his ravishing dreams of the delights inherent in a great western farm, with its square miles of corn-fields, and its thousands of cattle. each of them is partly right and partly wrong. there are generals capable of commanding , men, napoleon says there were two such in his day--himself and another: and these generally find the work they are fit for, without special effort or aspiration. so there are men, each of whom can really farm a township, not merely let a herd of cattle roam over it unfed and unsheltered, living and dying as may chance: the owners expecting to grow rich by their natural increase. this _ranching_ is not properly farming at all, but a very different and far ruder art. i judge that the farmers who can really till--or even graze--several thousand acres of land, so as to realize a fair interest on its value, are even scarcer than the farms so capacious. but there is such a thing as farming on a large scale; and it is a good business for those who understand it, and have all the means it requires. the farmer who annually grows a thousand acres of good grain, and takes reasonable care of a thousand head of cattle, is to be held in all honor. he will usually grow both his grain and his beef cheaper than a small farmer could do it, and will generally find a good balance on the right side when he makes up and squares his accounts of a year's operations. i could recommend no man to run into debt for a great farm, expecting that farm to work him out of it but he who inherited or has acquired a large farm, well stocked, and knows how to make it pay, may well cling to it, and count himself fortunate in its possession. but the great farmer is already regarded with sufficient envy. most boys would gladly be such as he is; the difficulty in the case is that they lack the energy, persistency, resolution, and self-denial, requisite for its achievement. we will leave large farms and farming to recommend themselves, while we consider more directly the opportunities and reasonable expectations of the small farmer. the impression widely current that money cannot be made on a small farm--that, in farming, the great fish eat up the little ones--is deduced from very imperfect data. i have admitted that grain and beef can usually be produced at less cost on great than on small farms, though the rule is not without exceptions. i only insist that there are room and hope for the small farmer also, and that large farming can never absorb nor enable us to dispense with small farms. i. and first with regard to fruit. some tree-fruits, as well as grapes, are grown on a large scale in california--it is said, with profit. but nearly all our pears, apples, cherries, plums, etc., are grown by small farmers or gardeners, and are not likely to be grown otherwise. all of them need at particular seasons a personal attention and a vigilance which can seldom or never be accorded by the owners or renters of large farms. should small farms be generally absorbed into larger, our fruit-culture would thenceforth steadily decline. ii. the same is even more true of the production of eggs and the rearing of fowls. i have had knowledge of several attempts at producing eggs and fowls on a large scale in this country, but i have no trustworthy account of a single decided success in such an enterprise. on the contrary, many attempts to multiply fowls by thousands have broken down, just when their success seemed secure. some contagious disease, some unforeseen disaster, blasted the sanguine expectations of the experimenter, and transmuted his gold into dross. yet, i judge that there is no industry more capable of indefinite extension, with fair returns, than fowl-breeding on a moderate scale. eggs and chickens are in universal demand. they are luxuries appreciated alike by rich and poor; and they might be doubled in quantity without materially depressing, the market. our thronged and fashionable watering-places are never adequately supplied with them; our cities habitually take all they can get and look around for more. i believe that twice the largest number of chickens ever yet produced in one year might be reared in , with profit to the breeders. even if others should fail, the home market found in each family would prove signally elastic. this industry should especially commend itself to poor widows, struggling to retain and rear their children in frugal independence. a widow who, in the neighborhood of a city or of a manufacturing village, can rent a cottage with half an acre of southward-sloping, sunny land, which she may fence so tightly as to confine her hens therein, whenever their roaming abroad would injure or annoy her neighbors, and who can incur the expense of constructing thereon a warm, commodious hen-house, may almost certainly make the production of eggs and fowls a source of continuous profit. if she can obtain cheaply the refuse of a slaughter-house for feed, giving with it meal or grain in moderate quantities, and according that constant, personal, intelligent supervision, without which fowl-breeding rarely prospers, she may reasonably expect it to pay, while affording her an occupation not subject to the caprices of an employer, and not requiring her to spend her days away from home. iii. though the ordinary market vegetables may be grown on large farms, the fact that they seldom are is significant. cabbages, peas, poled beans, tomatoes, and even potatoes, are mainly grown on small farms, as they always have been. there are sections wherein no cash market for vegetables exists or can be relied on; and here they will continue to be grown to the extent only of the growers' respective needs; but wherever the prevalence of manufactures or the neighborhood of a great city gives reasonable assurance of a market, they are grown at a profit per acre which is rarely realized from a grain-crop. no less than $ per acre is often, if not generally, achieved by the growers of cabbage around this city; and this not from rich, deep garden-mold, but from fair farming land, underdrained, subsoiled, and liberally manured. the careless, slipshod farmer may do better--that is, he will not fail so signally--in grain cultivation; but there are few more decided or brilliant successes than have been achieved within the last few years within sight of this city, and wholly in the tillage of small farms. i trust i have here said enough to show that there is a legitimate and promising field for agricultural enterprise and effort, other than that which contemplates the acquisition and rule of a township, and that, while farming on a large area is to many attractive and inspiring, there are scope and incitement also for tillage on a humbler scale--for tillage that permits no weed to ripen seed, and no nest of caterpillars to flourish a month undisturbed--for tillage that achieves large crops and profits from small areas, and rejoices in that neatness and perfection of culture attainable only in the management of small farms. l. exchange and distribution. the machinery whereby the farmer of our day converts into cash or other values that portion of his products which is not consumed in his house or on his farm, seems to me lamentably imperfect. let me illustrate my meaning: after three all but fruitless years, we have this year a bountiful apple-crop, in this state and (i believe) throughout the north. our old orchards being still, for the most part, preserved and in bearing condition, while a good many young ones, planted ten to twenty years ago, begin to fruit considerably, we had, throughout the three fall months, a superabundance of this homely, wholesome, palatable fruit. it should have been cheap for the great body of our mechanics and laborers to provide their families with all the ripe, good apples that they could consume without injuring themselves by gluttony. good apples should have been constantly displayed on every workingman's table, to be eaten raw as a dessert, or baked and eaten with bread and milk for breakfast or supper. each provident housewife should now have her tub of applesauce, her barrel of dried apples, or both, for winter use; while a dozen bushels of good keepers should be stored in every cellar, to be drawn upon from day to day during the next four or five months. in short, apples should have been and be, from last august to next may, as common as bread and potatoes, and should have been and be as freely eaten in every household and by every fireside. how nearly have we realized this? i will not guess how many millions of bushels have rotted under the trees that bore them, been eaten by animals to little or no profit, or turned into cider that did not sell for so much as it cost, counting the apples of no value. living immediately on a railroad that rims into this city, wherefrom my place is miles distant, i should be able to do better with apples than most growers; and yet i judge that half my apples were of no use to me. many of them sold in this city for $ per barrel, including the cask, which cost me cents; and, when you have added the cost of transportation, you can guess that i had no surplus, after paying men $ . per day for picking and barreling them. i sold all i could to vinegar-makers at fifty cents per bushel for cider-apples--the casks being returned. but they could not take all i wished to sell them, there being so many sellers pressing to get rid of their windfalls before they rotted on their hands that even this market was glutted. that it was much worse for the farmer a dozen miles from a railroad and a hundred from the nearest city, none can doubt. i have heard that, in parts of connecticut, cider was sold for fifty cents per barrel to whoever would furnish casks, and that their size was hardly considered. manifestly, this left nothing for the apples. if apples could have been daily supplied to our poorer citizens in such quantities as they could conveniently take, at from fifty to seventy-five cents per bushel, according to quality and comeliness, i am confident that this city and its suburbs would have taken two or three millions of bushels more than they have done; and the same is true of other cities. but the poor rarely buy a barrel of apples at once; and they have been required to pay as much for half a peck as i could get for a bushel just like them. in other words: the hucksters and middlemen set so high a price on their respective services in dividing up a barrel of apples and conveying them from the rural producer to the urban consumer that a large portion of the farmer's apples must rot on his hands or be sold by him for less than the cost of harvesting, while the poor of the cities find them too dear to be freely eaten. nor are apples singular in this respect. i would like to grow a thousand bushels of english (round) and french or swede turnips per annum if i could be sure of getting $ per barrel for them delivered at the railroad. if the poor of this city could buy such turnips throughout their season by the half peck at the rate of $ per barrel, i believe they would buy and eat many more than they do. but they are usually asked twenty-five cents per half peck, which is at the rate of $ per barrel; and at this rate they hold them too dear for every-day use. so the turnips are not grown, or the cattle are invited to clear them off before they rot and become worthless and nuisance. quite often, a green youth undertakes to get rich by farming near some great city. he has heard and believes that cabbages bring from $ to $ and even $ per hundred, squashes from $ to $ per hundred, watermelons from $ to $ , and so on. he has made his calculations on this basis, and sanguinely expects to make money rapidly. but his products, in the first place, fall short of his estimates; they are not ready for market so soon as he expected they would be; and, when at length they are ready, every one else seems to have rushed in ahead of him. the market is glutted; no one seems to want his "truck" at any figure; he sells it for a song, and quits farming disgusted and bankrupt. may be, his stuff would have sold much better next week or the week after; but he could not afford to bring it to market and take it back day after day, on the chance that the demand for it would improve by-and-by. i judge that more young men have on this account turned their backs on farming, after a brief trial, than on any other. they might have borne up against the shortness of their crops, hoping for better luck next time; but the necessity for selling them for a price that would not have reimbursed their cost, had they been ever so luxuriant, utterly disheartens and alienates them. i preach no crusade against hucksters and middlemen. i hold them, in the actual state of things, benefactors to both producers and consumers. in so far as they deal honestly and meet promptly their obligations, they deserve commendation rather than reproach. what i urge is, that more economical and efficient machinery of exchange and distribution ought to be devised and set at work--machinery that would do all that is required at a moderate, reasonable cost. i would like to see one of our solvent, well-managed railroads advertise that it would henceforth buy at any of its stations all the farmers' produce that might be offered, and pay the highest prices that the state of the markets would justify. let its agents purchase whatever came along--a basket of eggs, a coop of chickens, a barrel of apples, a sack of beans, a pail of currants--anything that could be sold in the city to which it runs, and which would conduce to human sustenance or comfort. its object should be freight--the rapid and vast increase of its transportations, not extra profit on the articles transported. but let its agents be ready to buy at fair prices whatever was offered, paying cash down, and pushing everything purchased directly into market, so as to have the money back to buy more with directly. the railroad company, thus owning nearly everything edible it brought into market, would buy and sell at uniform prices, and not bid against itself, as a crowd of hucksters and middlemen will often do. i am confident that a railroad that would inaugurate this system on a right basis, saying to every farmer living near it, "grow whatever your soil is best adapted to, and bring it to our station: there, you shall have cash down for it, at the highest price we can afford to give," would rapidly double and quadruple its freights, and would thus build up a business which has no parallel under the present system. it is urged, in opposition to this proposal, that a railroad so managed would monopolize markets, and deal on its own terms with the producer and consumer. if there were but one railroad entering a great city, and no other mode of reaching it, this objection would be plausible, but not in the actual case. whoever chose would be at liberty to start an opposition, and to use the railroad or dispense with it as he found advisable. li. winter work. the dearth of employment in winter for farm laborers is a great and growing evil. thousands, being dismissed from work on the farms in november, drift away to some city, under a vague, mistaken impression that there must be work at some rate where so much is being done and so many require service, and squander their means and damage their morals in fruitless quest of what is not there to be had. when spring at length arrives, they sneak back to the rural districts, ragged, penniless, debauched, often diseased, and every way deteriorated, by their winter plunge. for their sakes not only, but for the sakes also of those who will employ and those who must work with them hereafter, this drifting to the cities should be stopped. in its present magnitude, it is a very modern evil. far within my recollection, there was timber to cut and haul to the saw-mill, wood to cut, draw, and prepare for the year's fuel, with forest-land to be cleared and fitted for future cultivation, even in new-england. those who chose to work with ax or team were seldom idle in winter. now, there is little timber to cut, little land to clear, and coal is rapidly supplanting wood as fuel. so a larger and larger number of farm laborers is annually turned off when the ground freezes to live as they may for the next three or four months. i recognize the right of the farmer, who has given twelve or more hours per day to the tillage of his acres and the saving of his crops throughout the genial months, to take the world more easily in winter. he should now have leisure to return visits, to post and balance his books, and to improve his mind by study and reflection. having worked hard when he must, he ought to rest and recuperate when he can. but he gravely errs who supposes that, the ground being frozen, there is no longer work to be done on the farm until the ground is fit to plow again. on the contrary, he who realizes that the farmer is a manufacturer of food and fibrous substances from raw materials of far inferior value must see that, so soon as one harvest has been secured, the cultivator should devote his attention to the collection and utilization of the elements wherefrom a larger crop may be obtained from the same acres next season. and first as to muck. no one who has not valued and sought it is likely to know how generally abundant and accessible this material is. i have found it in inexhaustible supply on the land of a pretty good cultivator who, after working a fair farm ten years, sold it because (as he supposed) it was destitute of this basis of extensive fertilization. "seek, and ye shall find," implies that those who do not seek will rarely find; and such is the fact. where rock abounds, muck is rarely wanting. it covers many thousand acres of jersey sands, where rock is unknown; but show me a region ridged or ribbed with rock, and i shall confidently expect to find muck on it, though none has been known or supposed to exist there. and he who either has or can buy a bed of muck within half a mile of his barn, his sty, his hen-house, may dig and draw from it all winter with a moral certainty that it will generously reward his outlay. begin as soon after haying as you can spare the time, and cut an outlet so deep that you may thereafter work dryshod; thenceforth, dig and pile on the nearest accessible spot of dry ground, to be drawn away to the barn-yard and out-houses as opportunity presents itself. but, even though you have done nothing till the ground freezes, do not say it is now too late, but set to work. you can often team in winter where you could not at any other season; and, in digging muck from a swamp or bog well frozen over, you are not apt to be troubled with water. draw all you can; but dig much more; for no money at lawful interest pays so well as muck left to dry and cure for months before you draw it. i think i do not over-estimate the average value of a cubic yard of muck, well cured and mixed with warmer fertilizers before application to the soil, at one dollar; and i think there are few farmers in the old thirteen states who cannot obtain it for less than that. where muck is not to be had, i believe the tiller of a sandy or gravelly farm who can get access to a bed or bank of clay may profitably dig and draw this, to be used as he would use muck if he had it, and even for direct application to the soil. i do not think this method the most advisable; yet i feel sure that clay spread over a sandy or gravelly field that has been laid down to grass is worth fifty cents per cubic yard wherever hay is worth $ per tun; but i would wish to apply it not later than december. he who has fit places of deposit should draw all his lime, plaster, and other commercial fertilizers, in winter, so as to be ready for use when required. mix your lime while fresh from the kiln with muck, at the rate of a bushel of the former to a cubic yard of the latter, and the muck will be ready for use far sooner than it otherwise would be. be careful _not_ to mix lime with animal manures in any case, since it expels ammonia, whereas the sulphur of plaster combines with that volatile element and fixes it. there are some farmers who do, but twenty times as many who do not, use plaster enough about their stables and pig-pens. they ought to realize that a bad smell implies a waste of ammonia, which a farmer, unless very rich, can hardly afford. fences should all be scrutinized as winter goes off, and put into thorough condition for next season's service. fruit-trees should be relieved of all dead or dying branches, all suckers, and cut back where towering to high, or spreading too wide. it may be better for the trees to do all pruning in may or june; but the farmer who defers it to that season is very likely to be hurried into postponing it to another year--and another. there is scarcely a forest of second or later growth which would not pay for thinning and trimming, if well done. that which is out may be turned to good account as bean-poles, pea-brush, summer fuel, etc., while that which is left will grow faster, taller, and more shapely, to reward you doubly for your pains. --these are but suggestions. any farmer can add to or improve upon them if he will give an hour's thought to the subject. the best laborers can be hired for a full year at a price not very much exceeding that which will secure their services for eight or nine months. in the interest alike of good crops and good morals, i urge every one who can to resolve that he will henceforth hire by the year, or in some way manage to employ his laborers in winter as well as in summer. lii. summing up. in the foregoing essays, i have set forth, as clearly as i could, the facts within my knowledge which seem calculated to cast light upon the farmer's vocation, and the principles or rules of action which they have suggested to my mind. i have been careful not to throw any false, delusive halo over this indispensable calling, and by no means to induce the belief that the farmer's lot is necessarily and uniformly a happy one. i know that his is not the royal road to rapid acquisition, and that few men are likely to amass great wealth by quietly tilling the soil. i know, moreover, that what passes for farming among us is not so noble, so intellectual, so attractive, a pursuit as it might and should be--that most farmers might farm better and live to better purpose than they do. of all the false teaching, i most condemn that which flatters farmers as though they were demigods and their calling the grandest and the happiest ever followed by mortals, when the hearer, unless very green, must feel that the speaker doesn't believe one word of all be utters; for, if he did, he would be farming, instead of living by some profession, and talking as though his auditors did not know wheat from chaff. i regard the agriculture of this country as very far below the standard which, it should ere this have reached: i hold that the great mass of our cultivators might and should farm better than they do, and that better farming would render their sons better citizens and better men. if a single line of this little work should seem calculated to cajole its readers into self-complacency rather than instruct them, i beg them to believe that their impression wrongs my purpose. i am fully aware that others have treated my theme with fuller knowledge and far greater ability than i brought to its discussion. "then why not leave them the field?" simply because, when all have written who can elucidate my theme, at least three-fourths of those who ought to study and ponder it will not have read any treatise whatever upon agriculture--will hardly have yet regarded it as a theme whereon books should be written and read. and, since there may be some who will read this treatise for its writer's sake--will read it when they could not be persuaded to do like honor to a more elaborate and erudite work--i have written in the hope of arousing in some breasts a spirit of inquiry with regard to agriculture as an art based on science--a spirit which, having been awakened, will not fall again into torpor, but which will lead on to the perusal and study of profounder and better books. in the foregoing essays, i have sought to establish the following propositions: . that _good_ farming is and must ever be a paying business, subject, like all others, to mischances and pull-backs, and to the general law that the struggle up from nothing to something is ever an arduous and almost always a slow process. in the few instances where wealth and distinction have been swiftly won, they have rarely proved abiding. there are pursuits wherein success is more envied and dazzling than in agriculture; but there is none wherein efficiency and frugality are more certain to secure comfort and competence. . though the poor man must often go slowly, where wealth may attain perfection at a bound, and though he may sometimes seem compelled to till fields not half so amply fertilized as they should be, it is nevertheless inflexibly true that bounteous crops are grown at a profit, while half and quarter crops are produced at a loss. a rich man may afford to grow poor crops, because he can afford to lose by his year's farming, while the poor man cannot. he ought, therefore, to till no more acres than he can bring into good condition--to sow no seed, plow no field, where he is not justified in expecting a good crop. better five acres amply fertilized and thoroughly tilled than twenty acres which can at best make but a meager return, and which a dry or a wet season must doom to partial if not absolute failure. . in choosing a location, the farmer should resolve to choose once for all. roaming from state to state, from section to section, is a sad and far too common mistake. not merely is it true that "the rolling stone gathers no moss," but the farmer who wanders from place to place never acquires that intimate knowledge of soil and climate which is essential to excellence in his vocation. he cannot read the clouds and learn when to expect rain, when he may look for days of sunshine, as he could if he had lived twenty years on the same place. choose your home in the east, the south, the center, the west, if you will (and each section has its peculiar advantages); but choose once for all, and, having chosen, regard that choice as final. . our young men are apt to plunge into responsibilities too hastily. they buy farms while they lack at once experience and means, incur losses and debts by consequent miscalculations, and drag through life a weary load, which sours them against their pursuit, when the fault is entirely their own. no youth should undertake to manage a farm until after several years of training for that task under the eye of a capable master of the art of tilling the soil. if he has enjoyed the requisite advantages on his father's homestead, he may possibly be qualified to manage a farm at twenty-one; but there are few who might not profitably wait and learn, in the pay of some successful cultivator, for several years longer; while i cannot recall an instance of a youth rushing out of school or a city counting-house to show old farmers how their work ought to be done, that did not result in disaster. it is very well to know what science teaches with regard to farming; but no man was ever a thoroughly good farmer who had not spent some years in actual contact with the soil. . while every one says of his neighbor, "he farms too much land," the greed of acquisition does not seem at all chastened. men stagger under loads of debt to-day, who might relieve themselves by selling off so much of their land as they cannot profitably use; but every one seems intent on holding all he can, as if in expectation of a great advance in its market value. and yet you can buy farms in every old state in the union as cheaply per acre as they could have been bought in like condition sixty years ago; and i doubt their selling higher sixty years hence than they do now. no doubt, there _are_ lands, in the vicinage of growing cities or villages, that have greatly advanced in value; but these are exceptions: and i counsel every young farmer, every poor farmer, to buy no more land than he can cultivate thoroughly, save such as he needs for timber. never fear that there will not be more land for sale when you shall have the money wherewith to buy it; but shun debt as you would the plague, and prefer forty acres all your own to a square mile heavily mortgaged. i never lifted a mill-stone; but i have undertaken to carry debts, and they are fearfully heavy. . i know that most american farms east of the roanoke and the wabash have too many fields and fences, and that the too prevalent custom of allowing cattle to prowl over meadow, tillage and forest, from september to may, picking up a precarious and inadequate subsistence by browsing and foraging at large, is slovenly, unthrifty, and hardly consistent with the requirements of good neighborhood. it is at best a miseducation of your cattle into lawless habits. i do not know just where and when _all_ pasturing becomes wasteful and improvident; but i do know that pasturing fosters thistles, briers, and every noxious weed, and so is inconsistent with cleanly and thorough tillage. i know that the same acres will feed far more stock, and keep them in better condition, if their food be cut and fed to them, than if they are sent out to gather it for themselves. i know that the cost of cutting their grass and other fodder with modern machinery need not greatly exceed that of driving them to remote pastures in the morning and hunting them up at nightfall. i know that penning them ten hours of each twenty-four in a filthy yard, where they have neither food nor drink, is unwise; and i feel confident that it is already high time, wherever good grass-land is worth $ per acre, to limit pasturage to one small field, as near the center of the farm as may be, wherein shade and good water abound, into which green rye, clover, timothy, oats, sowed corn, stalks, etc., etc., may successively be thrown from every side, and where shelter from a cold, driving storm, is provided; and that, if cows could be milked here and left through night as well as day, it would be found good economy. . i know that most of us are slashing down our trees most improvidently, and thus compelling our children to buy timber at thrice the cost at which we might and should have grown it. i know that it is wasteful to let white birch, hemlock, scrub oak, pitch pine, dogwood, etc., start up and grow on lands which might be cheaply sown with the seeds of locust, white oak, hickory, sugar maple, chestnut, black walnut, and white pine. i know that no farm in a settled region is so large that its owner can really afford to surrender a considerable portion of it to growing indifferent cord-wood when it would as freely grow choice timber if seeded therefor; and i feel sure that there are few farms so small that a portion of each might not be profitably devoted to the growing of valuable trees. i know that the common presumption that land so devoted will yield no return for a life-time is wrong--know that, if thickly and properly seeded, it will begin to yield bean-poles, hoop-poles, etc., the fifth or sixth year from planting, and thenceforth will yield more and more abundantly forever. i know that _good_ timber, in any well-peopled region, should not be _cut off_, but _cut out_--thinned judiciously but moderately and trimmed up, so that it shall grow tall and run to trunk instead of branches; and i know that there are all about us millions of acres of rocky crests and acclivities, steep ravines and sterile sands, that ought to be seeded to timber forthwith, kept clear of cattle, and devoted to tree-growing evermore. . i do not know that all lands may be profitably underdrained. wooded uplands, i know, could not be. fields which slope considerably, and so regularly that water never stagnates upon or near their surface, do very well without. light, leachy sands, like those of long island, southern jersey, eastern maryland, and the carolinas, seem to do fairly without. yet my conviction is strong that _nearly all land which is to be persistently cultivated will in time be underdrained_. i would urge no farmer to plunge up to his neck into debt in order to underdrain his farm. but i _would_ press every one who has no experience on this head to select his wettest field, or the wettest part of such field, and, having carefully read and digested waring's, french's, or some other approved work on the subject, procure file and proceed next fall to drain that field or part of a field thoroughly, taking especial precautions against back-water, and watch the effect until satisfied that it will or will not pay to drain further. i think few, have drained one acre thoroughly, and at no unnecessary cost, without being impelled by the result to drain more and faster until they had tiled at least half their respective farms. . as to irrigation, i doubt that there is a farm in the united states where _something_ might not be profitably done forthwith to secure advantage from the artificial retention and application of water. wherever a brook or runnel crosses or skirts a farm, the question--"can the water here running uselessly by be retained, and in due season equably diffused over some portion of this land?"--at once presents itself. one who has never looked with this now will be astonished at the facility with which some acres of nearly every farm may be irrigated. often, a dam that need not cost $ will suffice to hold back ten thousand barrels of water, so that it may be led off along the upper edge of a slope or glade, falling off just enough to maintain a gentle, steady current, and so providing for the application of two or three inches of water to several acres of tillage or grass just when the exigencies of crop and season most urgently require such irrigation. any farmer east of the hudson can tell where such an application would have doubled the crop of , and precluded the hard necessity of selling or killing cattle not easily replaced. of course, this is but a rude beginning. in time, we shall dam very considerable streams mainly to this end, and irrigate hundreds and thousands of acres from a single pond or reservoir. wells will be sunk on plains and gentle swells now comparatively arid and sterile, and wind or steam employed to raise water into reservoirs whence wide areas of surrounding or subjacent land will be refreshed at the critical moment, and thus rendered bounteously productive. on the vast, bleak, treeless plains of the wild west, even artesian wells will be sunk for this purpose; and the water thus obtained will prove a source of fertility as well as refreshment, enriching the soil by the minerals which it holds in solution, and insuring bounteous crops from wide stretches of now barren and worthless desert. immigration will yet thickly dot the great sahara with oases of verdure and plenty; but it will, long ere that, have covered the valleys of our great basin and those which skirt the affluents of the savage and desolate colorado with a beauty and thrift surpassing the dreams of poets. and yet, its easiest and readiest triumphs are to be won right here--in the valleys of the connecticut, the hudson, the susquehanna, and the potomac. . as to commercial fertilizers, i think i have been well paid for the application of gypsum (plaster of paris) to my upland grass at the rate of one bushel per acre per annum, while my tillage has been supplied with it by dusting my stables with it after each cleaning, and so applying it mingled with barn-yard manures. lime (unslaked) from burned oyster-shells, costing me from to cents per bushel delivered, i have applied liberally, and i judge, with profit. bones, ground, (the finer the better) i have largely and i think advantageously used; but my land had been mainly pastured for nearly two centuries before i bought it, and thus continually drained of phosphates, yet never replenished: so my experience does not prove that the farmers of newer lands ought to buy bones, though i advise them to apply all they can save or pick up at small cost. pound them very fine with a beetle or ax-head on a flat stone, and give them to your fowls: if they refuse a part of them, your soil will prove less dainty. i am not sure that it pays to buy any manufactured phosphate when you can get raw bone; though i doubt not that, for instant effect, the phosphate is far superior. as to guano, it has not paid me; but that may be the fault of careless or unskillful application. i judge that any one who has to deal with sterile sands that will not bring clover, may wisely apply pounds of guano per acre, provided he has nothing else that will answer the purpose. after he has produced one good stand of clover, i doubt that he can afford to buy more guano, unless he can apply it to better purpose than i have yet done. i have a strong impression that most farmers can do better at making and saving fertilizers than by buying them. lime and sulphur (gypsum), if your soil lacks them, you must buy; but a good farmer who keeps even a span of horses, three or four cows, as many pigs, and a score of fowls, can make for $ fertilizers which i would rather have than two tuns of guano, costing him $ to $ . if he has a patch of bog or a miry pond on his farm--any place where frogs will live--he can dig thence, in the dryest time next fall, two or three hundred loads of muck, which, having been left to dry on the nearest high ground till november or later, and then drawn up and dumped into his barn-yard, pig-pen, and fowl-house, will be ready to come out next spring in season for corn-planting, and, being liberally applied, will do as much for his crop as two tons of guano would, and will strengthen his land far more. if he has no muck, and no neighbor who can spare it as well as not, let him at midsummer cut all the weeds growing on and around his farm, and in the fall gather all the leaves that can be impounded, using these as litter for his cattle and beds for his pigs, and he will be agreeably surprised at the bulk of his heap next spring. i am an intense believer in home production. we send ten thousand miles for guano, and suffer the equally valuable excretions of our cities to run to waste in rivers and bays, poisoning or driving away the fish, and filling the air with stench and pestilence. no farmer ever yet intelligently _tried_ to enrich his land and was defeated by lack of material. he may not be able to do all he would like to at first; but persistent effort cannot be baffled. . shallow culture is the most crying defect of our average farming. poverty may sometimes excuse it; but the excuse is stretched quite too far. if a farmer has but a poor span of horses, or a light yoke of thin steers, he cannot plow land as it should be plowed; but let him double teams with his neighbor, and plow alternate clays on either farm; or, if this may not be, let him buy or borrow a sub-soil plow, and go once around with his surface plow, then hitch on to the sub-soil, and run another furrow in the bottom of the former. there are a few intervales of rich, mellow soil, deposited by the inundations of countless ages, where shallow culture will answer, because the roots of the plants run freely through fertile earth never yet disturbed by the plow; but these marked and meagre exceptions do not invalidate the truth that nine-tenths of our tillage is neither so deep nor so thorough as it should be. as a rule, the feeding-roots of plants do not run below the bottom of the furrows, though in some instances they do; and he who fancies that five or six inches of soil will, under our fervid suns, with our summers often rainless for weeks, produce as bounteous and as sure a crop as twelve to eighteen inches, is impervious to fact or reason. he might as sensibly maintain that you could draw as long and as heavily against a deposit in bank of $ as against one of $ , . . finally, and as the sum of my convictions, we need more thought, more study, more intellect, infused into our agriculture, with less blind devotion to a routine which, if ever judicious, has long since ceased to be so. the tillage which a pioneer, fighting single-handed and all but empty-handed with a dense forest of giant trees, which he can do no better than to cut down and burn, found indispensable among their stumps and roots, is not adapted to the altered circumstances of his grandchildren. if our most energetic farmers would abstract ten hours each per week from their incessant drudgery, and devote them to reading and reflection with regard to their noble calling, they would live longer, live to better purpose, and bequeath a better example, with more property, to their children. * * * * * my self-imposed task is done. i undertook to tell what i know of farming through one brief essay for each week in ; and, in the face of multifarious and pressing duties, and in despite of a severe, protracted illness, the work has been prosecuted to completion. had i not kept ahead of it while in health, there were weeks when i must have left it unaccomplished, as i was too ill to write or even stand. i close with the avowal of my joyful trust that these essays, slight and imperfect as they are, will incite thousands of young farmers to feel a loftier pride in their calling and take a livelier interest in its improvement, and that many will be induced by them to read abler and better works on agriculture and the sciences which minister to its efficiency and impel its progress toward a perfection which few as yet have even faintly foreseen. index. accounts--accounts in farming, chap. xxxv, ; the causes of pecuniary failure, ; loss from waste of time, ; the author has found all successful farmers rigid economists of time, ; farmers urged to keep a rigid account of how they dispose of their time, ; keeping a diary recommended, ; what it should contain, ; accounts with neighbors, ; the farmer should keep an account of the expenses of his farm, and the receipts therefrom, ; importance of keeping an account with the several fields and crops, ; complication and uncertainty in account-keeping considered, - ; the advantage of keeping careful accounts, . agriculture. _see_ farming: books on practical, referred to, . alabama, . alder, . alkalis, as fertilizers. _see_ fertilizers, commercial. alleghany ridge, . alleghanies, the, , , , , . alps, . alps, austrian, . america, , . amherst. n. h., . ammonia, , . ammonoosuc, the river, . antelope, . apennines, . apple, the, , , . fruit-trees. the apple, chap. xxix, ; fruit-trees form a distinguishing feature of northern farms and holdings, ; unequaled in that respect elsewhere, ; our country north of the potomac excels, in its supply of tree-fruits, all other portions of the earth's surface of equal area, ; the northern states admirably adapted to the apple and kindred fruit-trees, ; effects of such adaptability, ; give an orchard the northern slope of a hill where possible, ; the one which blossoms latest, yields, on the average, most fruit, ; storing ice to place under trees, not recommended, ; importance of drainage, ; some reasons for choosing sloping ground for an apple-orchard, ; the soil for such, ; preparation of the soil, - ; treatment and care of the land devoted to an orchard, - ; more about apple trees, chap. xxv, ; apple trees are planted too far apart, and allowed to grow too tall, ; consequences, - ; trees should be set diamond fashion, ; pruning should be attended to annually, ; sprouts valueless, ; the demands which apple-trees make on the soil should be supplied, ; apple-trees in the township of newcastle, westchester, n. y., ; causes of their unproductiveness, - ; caterpillars and their ravages, ; duties of farmers and fruit growers, ; the abundant apple-crop of , ; establishes the capacity of our regions to bear apples, , , , , ; the apple-crop of , as an illustration of the imperfect means of exchanging farm products, - - ; loss to consumers and producers, - . arizona, . arkansas, state of, , ; the river, , ; the upper river, . artesian wells, , - , . ashes as fertilizers, - , , ; use in preparing for an orchard, , . _see_ also fertilizers, commercial. atlantic, the coast, , ; seaboard, ; slope, , , . austin, . australia, , , . autumn, , , , , , , , , , , , . babylon, . balsam fir, . baltimore, . barley, , . barn, the use of stone recommended in building a, batavia yams, . battenkill, . beans, , , . beech, , , , . beef, , , , . beets. _see_ roots, also , , , . belgium, , . berries, . birch, . birds--insects, birds, chap. xxii, ; birds our best allies against insects, ; the destruction of birds not the sole cause of insect ravages, ; birds should be protected and kindly treated, ; associations should be formed to do so, ; artificial nests, ; legal measures to protect birds, . black ash, . blackberries, , . black walnut, . blackwell's island, . blue ridge mountains, . board of works (london), . boissiÃ�re, e. v, de, - . bones. _see_ commercial fertilizers, also , , , . bone-dust, . bones, flour of, . bone flour, . bones, raw, . boston, farm near, , . botany, . buckeye, . buckwheat, , , , . buffalo, . buffalo grass, . burlington, n. j., . butter, , , . bridges, . british isles, , . broccoli, . cabbages, , , , . cache-la-poudre, the river, , , . california, , , , , , . canada, , , ; creek, . canals, . carolinas, the, , . carrots. _see_ roots, also , . carson, the river, , . cattle, ; pasturing, - ; soiling, ; treatment of herds of, in the mississippi and missouri valleys, ; rearing of, referred to, , , , , , , , . catskills, the, . census: the seventh, ; the eighth, ; the, of , . champlain, the, basin, ; lake, . chappaqua, . chautauqua co., n. y., , . cheese, , , . chemistry, , , , . cherries. _see_ fruits, also , , . chester co., penn., . chestnut, , , , , , , . _see also_, trees. cheyenne, . chicago, . chickens, . _see_ fowls. chlorine, , . chloride of lime, . cholera, . churches, . cincinnati, . climates, american, for the finer fruits, . clover, , , , . clubs. _see_ farmers' clubs. coal, , . colonies, advantage of settling in, ; the course to adopt in organizing one, ; union colony, ; its location, ; the city of greeley, its nucleus, ; irrigation canals of, - ; fertility of the soil at, . colonists, english, . colorado, , , ; river, . congress, . connecticut, , , ; river, , ; valley of the, . como, lake, . common schools, - . communism: differs radically from co-operation, . conclusions, general, summing up, chap. lli, ; the facts set forth in the essays, ; common misrepresentations, - ; object of the author in writing these essays, ; the propositions sought to be established therein, ; good farming must ever be a paying business, ; thorough tillage advocated, ; a location should be permanent, ; the too great haste in incurring responsibilities, ; the greed for land, ; common abuses in fencing and cattle-raising, - ; tree-cutting and tree-planting, - ; underdraining, ; irrigation, ; commercial fertilizers, - - ; shallow culture, - ; the need for study and inquiry, - ; concluding remarks, . co-operation, reference to, in regard to wild lands, ; co-operation in farming, chap. xlii, ; co-operation is the word of hope and cheer for labor, ; its meaning, ; differs radically from communism, ; the difficulties of a young farmer who migrates to kansas, minnesota or one of the territories, - ; the different circumstances consequent on settlement by co-operation, ; advantages of co-operation not limited to colonizing distant tracts, ; would benefit colored men, - ; fencing as an illustration of the loss consequent on want of co-operation, - ; how co-operation would remedy it, ; further application of the system, - ; mr. e. v. de boissière's co-operative farming, - . corn, , , growing of bread-corn eastward of the hudson, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . grain growing--east and west--chap. xxviii, ; hoeing is of no use to corn, ; the best and cheapest way to cultivate corn, ; the fields of the mississippi valley are the most productive in the world, ; the tillage, in some places, seemed susceptible of improvement, ; the west is the granary of the east, ; a change imminent, ; changes since twenty-three years ago when the author visited illinois, ; the course the west will ultimately adopt, ; exhaustion of the soil in new england and eastern new york, ; in the genesee valley, ; eastern pennsylvania profits by a provident system of husbandry, ; the states this side of the delaware will yet have to grow a large share of their breadstuffs, ; can it be done with profit now, considering, also, if the east has wisely, so largely abandoned grain-growing, - ; the places not taken into account, ; the "pine barrens" of new jersey selected to illustrate the profits of grain-growing in the east, ; their nature, ; estimate of expenses thereon, ; the product anticipated, ; the favorable conditions the cultivator would enjoy, ; the money value of his crop, ; great economy could be achieved in the cost of cultivating, ; conclusions, ; also , , , , , , , , - , , , - , . cotton, , . cotton-growers, southern, . cottonwood, . credit, buying a farm on, . crops, fall, . currants, . dairying, . dana's muck manual, . delaware, the state of, ; the river, , . denver, , ; pacific railroad, the, . depopulation, (rural)--rural depopulation, chap. xlviii, ; the alleged decrease in the relative population of rural districts, ; no increase since in the number of farmers in the state of new york, ; probable slight decrease in that of new england, ; consolidating farms, ; small farmers are selling out and migrating, ; reasons therefore, ; the changed character of the tillage, - ; the general use of coal has reduced the demand for labour, ; labour-saving implements, - ; the supposed degeneracy of the new england puritan stock, ; the migration from new england, - ; the assumption that americans prefer other pursuits to farming, ; the rock and bog of new england form a discouraging impediment to agricultural progress, ; compensation therefor, . diary, the keeping of one recommended, . dickinson, andrew b., , . distribution (of farm products). _see_ exchange. dock, . dogwood, . dogs; their depredations on sheep, - . draining-- draining--my own, chap. x, ; the author's farm, ; situation of the land thereon requiring drainage, - ; difficulties it presented, ; blunders, ; how repaired, ; condition of the marsh before draining it, ; how success was retarded, ; evidence of success, ; the crops of on the reclaimed land, ; draining generally, chap. xi, ; general conclusions from the author's experience, ; extent of land to be drained, ; _all_ swamp lands and nearly all of some other kinds must be drained to be well tilled, ; the many uses of underdrains, - ; no one should run into debt for draining, ; tile and stone drains, ; draining by a mole plow, ; general direction, - ; covered mains recommended, ; the question of labor, ; a case where the rudest surface drains would have changed bog into decent meadows, ; the stone drains on the author's farm, ; the author's summing up on, . drouth--habitually shortens our fall crops, ; a lesson of to-day ( ), chap. xxxii, ; the popular view of hot and cold seasons, ; the summer of , effects of the drouth, - ; general character of each summer, ; proof that drouth need not be feared by those who farm prudently, ; the author's observations during a trip through warren co., n. y., - ; results to be attained there by right cultivation, ; the inquiry: how are the people there to obtain fertilizers? ; answered, ; irrigation might be applied profitably, . earth closet, . eastern states, pasturing in, . eastern states, the, , - , , , , , , , . edinburgh, . eggs, - . egypt, , . electricity, . elk, . elm, . emerson, r. w., . england, , , ; (western) , , . erie co., pa., . europe, , , , , , , , , , . exchange: exchange and distribution, chap. l, ; the machinery for disposing of surplus farm products imperfect, ; the abundant apple crop of as an illustration thereof, - - ; apples should have been as common as bread or potatoes, ; the actual facts, ; cause of both the waste and dearness of apples, - ; consequent loss to producers and consumers, - ; turnips as a further illustration, ; disappointments of inexperienced farmers, - ; hucksters and middlemen, ; suggestion to have a railroad purchase and sell farm products, - ; results to be expected, ; an objection answered, . exhibitions (agricultural)--agricultural exhibitions, chap. xxxviii, ; author has attended at least fifty, ; concludes they were not what they might and should be, ; the reform must begin with the people, ; the lot of the public speaker, - ; what is needed to render our annual fairs useful and instructive detailed, ; each farmer should hold himself bound to make some contribution to his, ; an interesting and running commentary should given, - ; liberal premiums should be given for proficiency in farming, - ; need for improvement in the character of the public speaking, ; counties should be canvassed to enrol exhibitors, ; all in a locality should feel a common interest in their fair, . eye-smart, . fabrics, . fairs. _see_ exhibitions. fall, the, , , , , . farming-- will farming pay, chap. i, ; will it pay considered, ; the case of a man without capital, ; difficulties common to all pursuits, - ; astor referred to, ; earning the first thousand dollars, ; instance of remarkable success in farming, near boston, ; case of a farmer in northern vermont, - ; professor mapes's success, ; profitable return from a fruit farm on the hudson, - ; that shiftless farming don't pay admitted, ; good farming profitable, ; farming not recommended as a pursuit to every man, ; it can never be dispensed with, ; it is the first, and most essential of human pursuits, ; all are interested in having it honored and prosperous, ; if unprofitable, it is from mismanagement, ; the author's aim in these essays, . good and bad husbandry, chap. ii, ; good and bad farming considered, ; necessity master of us all, ; dictates the line to follow in farming, - ; application of the principle to pasturing, - ; illustration of good farming, - ; excuses for waste insufficient, ; truths on which good farming depend, ; good crops invariably practicable, - ; rarely fail to pay, ; increasing productiveness of the soil the fairest single test, ; where to farm considered, ; experience of the author's father regarding the east and west, ; circumstances qualifying it, ; the difficulties of the pioneer's life, - ; purchase of an "improvement" recommended in certain cases, ; civilized places are to be preferred for settlement, ; co-operation may change matters, ; good farming will pay everywhere, ; no one having a good farm advised to migrate, ; money is made by farming near new york as fast as in the west, ; where migration is advised, and its advantages, ; troubles attendant on buying on credit, ; the west will grow more rapidly than the east during the next twenty years, ; the south invites immigration, ; great inducements offered, ; combined effort recommended, ; good farming land cheapest in the united states, ; an incident in illinois farming, ; counsel to intending purchasers, ; land cheap in every state, ; advantages of settling in colonies, ; the first steps toward doing so, ; division of the lands, ; laying out the town, ; the progress it ought to make, ; economy of capital accomplished, ; preparing to farm, chap. iv, ; counsel intended for young men unaccustomed to farming, ; patience recommended, ; penalties of over haste, ; value of experience illustrated, ; an inexperienced young man advised to hire out, ; procure books, ; general counsel, ; how the course advised differs from running into debt, - ; experience and practice essential, ; circumstances where theoretical study is approved, ; qualifying remarks, - ; he who has mastered farming is competent to buy a farm, ; exceptions, ; a young man should not wait until he can buy a large farm, ; twenty acres ample for $ , capital, ; that extent is sufficient to test his aptitude, ; buying a farm, chap. v, ; it is better to buy good land than poor, ; poor land can be turned to account, ; the smallest farm should have its strip of forest, ; advantage of new england and countries of like surface over very fertile regions, ; cannot be divested of forest, ; "five acres" or "ten acres" not sufficient, ; exceptions, ; genuine farms, the general want, ; the remark "he has too much land," ; some men specially adapted for large farms, ; individual circumstances control, ; counsel to a young man intent on buying a farm, ; means of buying to be the main guide, ; capital the true limit, ; new england farms comparatively as cheap as western, ; migration urged only for those who cannot buy farms in the old states, ; success of the butter-makers of vermont, ; also of new york cheese dairymen, ; insuperable barriers in the east to effective cultivation, ; cultivation by steam must render large farms necessary, ; grain growing not likely to be extended in the east, ; the west to be the source of supply of bread-corn to the east, ; main considerations in buying land in the eastern states, ; in the west the case is different, ; social considerations, ; make a permanent investment, ; have confidence that industry will be rewarded, ; laying off a farm, chap. vi, ; the surface and soil of a farm should be carefully studied, ; misconception of the similarity of prairie farms, ; a northern farm selected for illustration, ; preparatory steps in laying off, ; care necessary, ; a pasture to be first selected, ; what it should be, ; the one great error in relation to this matter, ; weeds inseparable from pasture, ; treatment of a pasture, - ; it should have a rude shed, ; fodder to be brought to cattle, ; "too much" land and tree planting, ; farming in westchester county, n. y., ; management of grass lands a test of farming, ; the farmer's calling: chap. xxxi, ; merits of farmers as a class, ; the author would have advised one of his sons if spared to attain manhood to become a good farmer, ; difficulties attending the farmer's calling, ; author's reason for recommending farming as a vocation to his son, ; no other business in which success is so nearly certain as it, - ; farming conduces to a reverence for honesty and truth, - ; it is conducive to thorough manliness of character, - ; advantages the farmer enjoys in that respect over persons in other pursuits, ; incidents of the author's experience as a journalist in this regard, - ; independent position of the true farmer, ; difficulties a young farmer encounters as a pioneer, - ; considerably obviated be co-operation, ; co-operation admits of wider application, - ; fencing as an illustration of the want of co-operation, - ; wide adaptability of co-operation, - ; mr. e. v. de boissière's co-operative farm, - ; farming in colorado, ; mistaken calculations of inexperienced farmers, - ; summing up: the farmer's calling, ; american farming, ; good farming is and must ever be a paying business, ; thorough tillage, ; choosing a location, ; prudence enjoined, - ; the greed for land, - ; shallow culture, ; need for study and inquiry, . farms: large and small farms, chap. xlix, ; naked magnitude has fascination for most minds, ; some men can farm a township, ; large farmers, ; the opportunities and expectations of the small farmer, ; making money from small farms, - ; large farming can never enable us to dispense with small farms, ; evidence thereof, ; fruit culture, ; the production of eggs and the rearing of fowls, ; the inducements offered to fowl-breeders, ; this industry should comment itself to poor widows, ; the growing of market vegetables, ; the profits realized therein; ; general conclusions, - . farmers' clubs--farmers' clubs, chap. xliii, ; farmers divide into two classes, ; characteristics of those who do too little work, ; the farmers who work too much, ; illustration thereof, ; value of the club to them, ; who should form the club, ; its rules, - ; the chief end to be attained, ; habits of observation and reflection, ; evidence of the need thereof, ; a genuine interest in their vocation is needed by farmers, - ; false fancies to be removed, ; the officers of the club, ; grafts, plants or seeds for gratuitous distribution, ; an annual flower show, ; an exhibition of fruits, ; the organization of a farmers' club is the chief difficulty, ; how removed, . farm implements--farm implements, chap. xli, ; labor arduous enough without adding inefficient implements, ; improvements therein during fifty years, ; proofs thereof, ; the inferior implements used in the greater part of europe, - ; the claim of inventors or their agents to attention, - ; the stock of an implement warehouse, ; a co-operative plan will be found necessary to secure the needful implements, ; reasons therefor, ; greater inventions are certain to be made, ; inventions for plowing, . fences, - . fences and fencing, chap. xxxvii, ; excessive fencing general, ; fences are commonly dispensed with in france and other parts of europe, ; drivers must there keep their cattle from injuring the wayside crops, ; american railroads have largely superseded cattle-driving, ; fresh meat will ultimately come from the prairies, in refrigerating cars, ; owners of animals should be responsible for their care, - ; fencing bears with special severity on the pioneer, ; fences, where necessary, are a deplorable necessity, ; obstacles to introducing ditches and hedges, - ; wire fences, ; stone walls, ; rail fences, - ; posts and boards are the cheapest material for fences, ; red cedar posts, ; locust posts, ; posts set top-end down last longest, ; general conclusions, ; forms one of the pioneer's many trials, ; it is different, but not better, with settlers on broad prairies, ; co-operation would secure an immense economy in, , ; should be scrutinized in winter, ; most american farms east of the roanoke and wabash have too many fences, . fertilizers, commercial. commercial fertilizers--gypsum, chap. xvii, ; gypsum might be generally applied to cultivated land, with profit, ; the case where it costs $ , or over, per ton, considered, ; it should be used in all stables and yards, ; on meadows and pastures, ; _time_ and mode of application, ; _how_ gypsum impels and invigorates vegetable growth, referred to, ; its value practically demonstrated in and around paris, - ; the nature of gypsum, ; the chemists' theory of it, ; its actual effect assumed as the basis of these remarks, ; gypsum ought to be extensively applied to pastures and slopes, - ; a farmer's observations on its effects, ; it may be easily procured, ; its trial requested, - ; soils can be improved by means of calcined clay, ; a successful trial thereof, . alkalis ... salt--ashes--lime, chap. xvii, ; all our country's surface might be improved by the use of suitable fertilizers, ; not many acres but might be made more fertile by their use, ; comparative exhaustion of the soil soon renders them necessary, - ; the good farmer's inquiry on the subject, ; the state of each soil respectively, the true guide in using fertilizers, ; alkaline substances might be universally applied with profit, ; the use of ashes considered, - marls of new jersey, ; salt, ; potash, ; the author's trial of, - ; lime as a fertilizer, ; careful tests of the value of alkalis suggested, - . soil and fertilizers, chap. xix, ; the farmer a manufacturer, ; the opinion that some lands are naturally rich enough, ; the great wheat product at the salt lake city plain, ; the author's experience regarding the imperfect manuring of land, ; more manure and less seed should be applied by most farmers, ; the richest soils deteriorate after successive crops, ; nature's law of inflexible exaction, ; rich soil from the west exhibited at the n. y. farmers' club, ; chemical analysis made of same, ; professor mapes' remark thereon, ; the mistake of fertilizing poor lands only, ; better to produce the same quantity of corn from a small than a large area in certain cases, ; barn-yard manure, and its use, - ; no farmer ever impoverished by making and using manure of his own manufacture, ; lime has been used without advantage, ; reasons therefor, ; adulteration of lime, ; farmers advised to be discriminating, ; experiment recommended where there is doubt, ; bones--phosphates--guano, chap. xx, ; wasteful outlay for fertilizers, ; fertilizers needed and used in westchester co., n. y., ; where not needed, ; unprofitable use of guano, ; exceptions to the general rule, ; the other fertilizers, ; author's trial of guano, ; not of general application, ; experiments and careful observation recommended, ; results that may be expected, ; the earth closet, ; importance of it and kindred devices, ; oyster-shell lime is the best, ; the fertilizers to be used in preparing for an orchard, - ; treatment of swamp muck for potatoes, ; fertilizers for potatoes when muck cannot be had, - ; supposed inquiry of the people of warren co., n. y, "how shall we obtain fertilizers?" ; answered, ; a maine essayist on sourness of the soil and its remedy, - ; necessity for scientific knowledge on the effects of, ; importance of some standard to go by in using, - ; the digging and drawing of clay as winter work, ; value of clay for grass land, ; procuring commercial fertilizers, as winter work, . fruit: a profitable fruit farm on the hudson, ; culture of, , , ; ravages of insects on fruits, - . peaches--pears--cherries--grapes, chap. xxvii, ; adaptability of american climates as regards fruit-growing, ; why the climates of some sections are unfavorable for the most valued tree fruits, - ; author's personal observations, ; difficulties attending the growing of finer fruits, ; counsel thereon to farmers mainly engaged in the production of grain and cattle, - ; grape-growing, ; the mistake of neglecting vines, ; experiment recommended, ; necessary precautions, ; the course recommended to a farmer who proposes to grow pears, peaches, and quinces, - , , , , ; the descriptions of fruit grown by small farmers, ; fruit culture would decline should small farms be generally absorbed into larger, ; treatment of fruit-trees in winter, . gamma grass, . garda, lake, . genesee, valley of the, , , . geology, , , . germany, . grain, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . _see also_ corn. grapes, , , , , . _see also_ fruits. great basin, the, , , . great britain, , . grass, , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , . _see also_ pasturing and hay. greeley, horace--arrival in new york, - ; own experience of the difficulties of securing a good start in life, ; remark of his father to, on migration toward the west, ; own evidence of the value of experience, ; is descended from several generations of tree-cutters, ; engaged for three years in land clearing, ; reference to amherst, n. h., his birthplace, ; description of his farm, ; drainage thereof. - ; observations in italy, - ; experiments in irrigation, - ; observations in virginia, ; experience of the plowing of his plat in new york city, - ; tries deep plowing, ; plowing of the hill-sides on his farm, ; benefits thereof, ; judges that the gravelly hill-sides of his farm would repay applying tons per acre of pure clay, ; experience of guano, ; raising locust from seed, ; hay product of his farm, ; helps in hay-making from swamps, ; hoed corn in his boyhood, ; observations on the corn-fields of the mississippi valley, ; observations at chicago twenty-three years ago, ; finds potatoes less prolific on his farm than in new hampshire, ; speaks as a journalist's and farmer's calling, ; observations in warren county, n. y., ; the stone wall on his farm, ; experience of agricultural exhibitions, ; the plowing on his farm, ; mentions the sale of his apples as an illustration of the imperfect means of exchanging farm products, . greeley, the city of, . guano, , , , , . gulf stream, . gypsum, , , , , , , . _see also_ fertilizers, commercial. harlem railroad, . hawk, the, . hay, , , , , , , . hay and hay-making, chap. xxvi, ; importance of the grass crop, ; the portion made into hay, ; its quantity, ; the product and quality should be better, ; author's experience, ; the management of grass lands is a criterion of farming, ; hay-making in new england fifty years ago, ; too little grass-seed is now used, ; too little discrimination used in sowing grass seeds, ; the variety of good grasses will be increased, ; grass is cut in the average too late, ; consequences, - ; the plea that our farmers are short-handed in the summer harvest, ; treatment of grass when cut, ; the author's anticipation of how hay-making will yet be carried on, ; the need for improvement in hay-making insisted on, ; explanation thereof, . also , , , , , , , . _see also_ grass. hay-making, _see_ hay. hemlock, , , , , , , . hickory, , , , , , , , , . highways, . hoes, . hogs, . holland, . homestead law, . hops, . horses, ; carrots as food for, . hudson, the, ; a fruit farmer on the, ; the valley of the, ; banks of the upper, ; the valley of the upper, , , . humboldt, the river, . humboldt, the, or canada creek, . hungary, . illinois, state of, ; northern, , ; prairies of, , , , . indiana, , . insects--insects--birds, chap. xxii, ; the serious loss to farmers from insects, ; birds our best allies, ; what good they can do, ; ravages of insects not entirely due to the scarcity of birds, ; degeneracy of our plants largely causes their ravages, ; gov. packer of pennsylvania's observations thereon, - ; the case of wheat and other plants, ; a war against insects must continue for a generation, ; the destruction of birds, ; the measures to be adopted against insects, ; birds should be preserved, ; associations should be formed to do so, ; artificial posts, ; legal measures proposed, ; their ravages in newcastle township, westchester, n. y., - ; caterpillars, ; numerous from neglect, ; duties of farmers and fruit growers, . intellect (in agriculture)--intellect in agriculture, chap. xxxiii, ; years of rugged manual labor essential to success in hewing a farm out of the forest, ; value of education to the farmer, ; our average common schools defective in not teaching geology and chemistry, ; the leading principles and facts of these sciences ought to constitute the reader of the highest class in the common schools, ; counsel to the young farmer on agricultural books, ; their value demonstrated, ; a two-hundred acre farm will be found to give ample scope, ; instructions regarding particular books, ; men of the strongest minds and best abilities will be attracted to farming so fast and so far as it becomes intellectual, . interest, relatively high in this country, . iowa, , , , . ireland, , , . irrigation-- irrigation--means and ends, chap. xii. ; need of water for crops not often kept in view, ; the authors observations in lombardy (italy), - ; the atlantic slope and irrigation, ; author's experience in irrigation, - ; results, ; irrigation of new england farms, ; advantages that would result therefrom, . possibilities of irrigation, chap. xiii, ; natural facilities for irrigation general, ; artesian wells on the prairies, ; wells in california, ; water as a fertilizer, ; crops in virginia suffering from want of irrigation, - ; counsel to farmers on irrigation, - ; great profits to be realized by irrigation, - ; need of irrigation in the eastern and middle states considered, ; the prairie states after , ; common objections to irrigation, ; it must become general, ; wells will be sunk for the purpose, ; a steam locomotive for the purpose referred to, ; irrigation will become general, ; western irrigation, chap. xliv, ; irrigation is practicable everywhere, ; the portion of our country which cannot be cultivated without irrigation, ; its extent, ; its climate, ; it is spoken of as desert, ; the readiest means of irrigating the plains, ; their extent, ; the north and south platte rivers, ; union colony, ; its location, ; location of greeley, ; the first irrigating canal of union colony, ; branches and ditches therefrom, - ; how the water is deflected to it, ; the larger and longer canal, ; doubts at first entertained respecting the capacities of the soil, ; proved baseless, ; products of the soil, ; the cost of irrigation is not in excess of cultivating without it, ; demonstration thereof, ; it would pay to expend $ per acre for irrigating new england grass lands, ; more of irrigation, chap. xlvi, ; irrigation of places bordered by streams referred to, ; the facilities the platte offers for irrigation, - ; results that may be attained, ; the plains, ; obstacles to their cultivation, - ; the change that will be yet effected, ; how the plains will be irrigated, - ; artesian wells, - ; the co-operation of railroad companies anticipated, ; rain increases as settlements are multiplied, ; the permanent character of the plains, ; tracts needing irrigation in the east, ; summing up of the author's views on, - - . iron, . italy (northern), . kansas, , , , , , , . kansas pacific, the railroad, . kennebec, the valley of the, ; the river, . kentucky, . kit carson, the, . laborers, farm--dearth of employment for, in winter, a great and growing evil, . lakes, the northern, . lancaster county, penn., . lancashire (england), . land. _see_ farming. lands, public, . lard, . liebig's agricultural chemistry, . lime, ; as a fertilizer, _see_ fertilizers, commercial; _also_, , , , ; oyster shell, , , ; use in preparing for an orchard, , , , , , , , - , , , , . locust, the, tree, , , , , , , , . lombardy, , , . london, . londonderry (ireland), ; new hampshire, . long island, n. y., , , ; sound, . long's peak, . loring, dr. george b. (of mass.), . lumbering--how rocks in creeks are removed by a lumberman, . machines, agricultural, . maggiore, lake, . magnesia, . maidstone (england), . maine, , , . manganese, . mangolds, . manufactures, , . manure, . maple, . mapes, professor, , , , . marl, , , , , . _see also_ fertilizers, commercial. martineau, miss., . maryland, , ; eastern, . massachusetts, , . mccormick, c., . meats, , , , , ; meat will be ultimately conveyed in refrigerating cars, , . mechanics, . melon, . mexico, . michigan, state of, ; lake, . middle states, . milk, , , . mills, , . minnehaha, the, . minnesota, , , , , , , , , , . missouri, valley of the, ; state of, ; the river, , , . mississippi, valley of the upper, , ; valley of the, , , ; the river, . mole plow, the, . monmouth, n. j., . mormons, tree planting by, . mortgage, buying land on, . middle states, pasturing in, , , , , , , . muck, , , , ; use in preparing for an orchard, . muck--how to utilize it, chap. xxi, ; chemists will yet be able to determine the value of all kinds, ; use of muck profitable, ; the author's trial of it, ; how swamp muck forms, - ; its vast extent, ; little benefit derived from applying it _directly_, ; the true course to adopt to secure good returns, - ; practical evidence of its value, ; the course to be adopted by farmers having few animals, - ; mixing salt with lime, , , ; diversity of opinion about, ; as an illustration of the need for more scientific knowledge, - ; as an illustration of winter work, ; it is abundant and accessible, ; proof thereof, - ; value of muck, ; where to procure, . mutton. _see_ sheep; _also_, , . napoleon i, , . nevada, , , , . newburg, n. y., a fruit farm above, on the hudson, . newcastle (township), westchester co., n. y., , . new england, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . new hampshire, , , , . new jersey, , , , ; southern, , , , , , , , . new river, va., . new york (city), , , , , . new york state, , ; cheese dairymen of, , , , , , , , , ; western, ; eastern, , , , , . niagara, the falls of, . nineveh, . nitrates. _see_ fertilizers. nitrate of soda, . northern states, , , , , . oats, , , , , , , , , , , , , , . ohio, state of, , , ; valley of the river, ; the river, , . old states, the, , , . onions, . ontario, lake, . pacific states, . pacific, the coast, ; valley, a broad, . packer, gov. william f., of penn., . paris, . pastures--pasturing will soon disappear in the eastern and middle states, ; its pernicious effects, ; soiling is preferable to pasturing, ; a pasture should be the first field selected on a new farm, ; where it should be placed, ; misconceptions respecting indiscriminate pasturing, ; treatment of a pasture, - ; should have a shed, ; appearance of pastures where there is bad farming, ; summing up of the author's views on pasturing, - . _see also_ hay. peach-trees. _see_ fruits, _also_ , , . pears. _see_ fruits, _also_ , , , . peas, , , , . pennsylvania, ; eastern, , , . pemigewasset, the river, . philadelphia, , . phosphates. _see_ commercial fertilizers, _also_ , , , . phosphorus, , , . pippins, . pitch-pine, . pilgrims, the descendants of the, . pine, , . pine barrens, . plague, the, . plains, the, , , ; irrigation of, - , . plaster (gypsum). _see_ commercial fertilizers, _also_ , , , , . platte, the river, , , , ; valley of the, . plows, steel, . plowing: plowing, deep or shallow, chap. xiv, ; the deep plowing of _all_ lands, not advocated, ; reasons therefor, ; instances where deep plowing was unadvisable, - ; the primitive plow, ; plowing in new hampshire in the author's boyhood, ; will deep plowing pay? ; author's experience of the plowing of a plat in new york city, - ; plows deeply with profit, - ; an english farmer's trial of deep plowing, - ; the imperative reasons for deep plowing, . plowing--good and bad, chap. xv, ; misconceptions regarding deep plowing, ; the right conditions for deep plowing, ; case of a farmer of the old school cited, - ; how deep plowing will prove profitable to him, - ; how he should proceed, - ; subsoiling hill-sides, ; author's own experience, ; the revolution that steam-plowing will cause, ; plowing of grass land considered, ; treatment of grass land that has been plowed, ; plowing of a poor man's rugged sterile farm, - ; fall-plowing, - ; fences impede plowing, ; favored lot of the squatter on the prairie in regard to plowing, ; the plows of sixty years ago, ; the plows used in the greater part of europe, ; improvement in plowing inevitable, ; the improved system would be adopted in the west, ; steam plows and their inventors, ; at work in great britain, - ; the locomotive that is needed for steam-plowing, ; losses from want of such, - ; necessity for greater rapidity in plowing demonstrated, ; advice of a german observer on plowing for corn, - ; author's experience of the cost and delay of plowing, - ; not half so much or so thorough plowing done as there should be, ; the imperfect means of plowing, ; steam-plowing in england, - - ; application of the facts to this country, . _see also_ steam. plum-trees. _see_ fruits, _also_ , , . po, the river, - . pork, , , , , , , , . potash. _see_ fertilizers, commercial, also . potatoes, , . esculent roots--potatoes, chap. xxix, ; their productiveness, ; cultivated universally in europe, ; they alone form part of the every-day food of prince and peasant, ; the poor of new england depended on them when the grain crop was cut short, ; formed part of the regular supper in farmers' homes, ; the history of the potato, ; it is essentially a mountainous plant, ; it may have grown wild on the sides of the great chain traversing spanish america, ; everything there congenial to it, ; results attained by the author in growing potatoes, ; conditions which insure a good crop, - ; swamp muck treated as described, makes an excellent fertilizer for, ; how to act where such is not to be had, - ; instructions to a farmer having a poor, worn-out field of sandy loam, ; objections thereto considered, - ; the potato blights, - ; the kind of seed to plant, ; drills are preferable, in the author's judgment, - ; preparation of the soil, ; varieties considered, ; growing from tubers tends to degeneracy, ; the originator of a valuable new potato entitled to a recompense, ; also, , , . potomac river, the, , , , ; valley of the, . portugal, . power--undeveloped sources of power, chap. xlvii, ; the farmer's sources and command of power less than the manufacturer's, ; both have the same opportunities, ; author's experience of the delay and cost of plowing, - ; further illustrations of the imperfect means of plowing, ; steam plowing in england, - - ; steam not commended as a source of power to the farmer, ; reasons therefor, ; wind as a source of power, - ; the further anticipated sources, ; the triumphs of the future, . prairie, ; prairies, the, of the west, ; the, . prairie states, , . pruning, . public lands, , . pursley, . quinces. _see_ fruits. rag-weed, . railroads, their influence on the progress of the west, , ; suggestions to have one act as factor of farm products, - . raleigh, sir walter, . "ranching," . raspberries, . reapers, american, . red cedar, , , . red oak, , , . republican, valleys of the, . roads, . robinson, solon, on fencing, . rock. _see_ stone. rocky mountains, , , , . romford, england, - . roots, culture of, , ; all seek heat and moisture, , , , , , , ; fertilizers, commercial; also , , , , , , , . salt lake, . salt lake city, . savoys, . schools, , . science in agriculture, ; science in agriculture, chap. xxxix, ; author disclaims being a scientific farmer, ; men have raised good crops, who knew nothing of science, ; science is the true base of efficient cultivation, ; the elements of every plant, ; necessity for scientific knowledge, ; author's personal experience, ; the assertion of a maine essayist, as an illustration of the need of scientific information, ; the diversity of opinion as to the value of swamp muck as a further illustration, - ; analysis of soils considered, ; the necessity for some standard to go by in manuring land, ; illustration thereof, - ; science explains the impoverishment of soils, ; author's testimony on the value of science, from personal experience, ; a competence is reserved for young men fully conversant with agriculture, . scotch-irish, the, . scotland, , . scrub oak, . scythes, . seasons, dry. _see_ drouth. sewage--sewage, chap. xlv, ; causes which doomed ancient empires to decay, ; illustrations thereof, - ; the soil must receive back the elements taken from it, ; obstacles thereto, ; location of ancient and modern cities, ; imperative necessity for cleansing treat cities, - ; meaning given to sewage in england, ; conditions necessary for its equable diffusion over the soil, ; application of sewage, ; difficulties of utilizing it, - ; the progress made, ; the measures taken to utilize sewage at romford, england, ; farm whereon it was used, and the results attained, - - - - ; conclusion therefrom, - . sheep--sheep and wool growing, chap. xxxiv, ; production of wool in the united states insufficient, ; they might profitably grow as much as they consume, ; reasons therefore, ; the increased price of mutton will make up for the reduction on wool, ; sheep-growing in england as an illustration, ; sheep soon make a return for the outlay on them, ; they successfully contend with bushes and briars, ; more mutton should be consumed, - ; all farmers are not counseled to grow sheep, ; depredations of dogs, - ; precautions against them, ; the change in the relative values of mutton and wool, ; the relative prices and product the farmer must expect in the future, ; growing sheep for mutton near new york, ; profit thereof, ; sheep-growing is no experiment, ; encouragement thereto, - ; sheep growing in colorado and other territories, and its future, . sicily, . sickle, . silica, . smith, william (woolston, eng.), . society, agricultural, an, . _see_ farmers' clubs. soda, . soils, analysis of, . sorghum, stalks of, . sorrel, , . south, ; inviting immigration, ; the inducements she offers, - - , , . south america, , . spain, , . spanish america, . spring, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . spruce, . squash, , . stark county, ohio, . steam in agriculture, cultivation by, ; application of steam to plowing, . steam in agriculture, chap. xli, ; farmers have been slow in utilizing the natural forces around them, ; evidence thereof, ; steam as a source of power is hardly a century old, ; the revolution it has effected, ; it will effect still greater, ; steam has contributed very little to preparing the soil, ; disappointments of inventors of steam plows, ; steam plowing in louisiana, ; steam plows in great britain, - ; the locomotive that is needed for steam plowing, ; the saving it would effect, - ; american reapers in england, their value appreciated, ; need for a machine to plow rapidly demonstrated, ; recommendation of a german observer regarding plowing, ; irrigation will become general, ; the locomotive referred to above could be used for sinking wells, ; steam plowing in england, - - . steam plows. _see_ steam. steel, . steuben county, n. y., . stone--stone on a farm, chap. xxxvi, ; formation of the earth, ; diffusion of stones over the surface, ; these are sometimes a facility, but oftener an impediment to efficient agriculture, ; no rock on the surface of the great prairies of the west, and a portion of the valleys and plains of the atlantic slope, ; advantages and disadvantages thereof to the pioneer, ; less use for stone now than formerly, ; the stone on eastern farms to be yet utilized, - ; very stony land should be planted with trees, ; rough, unshapen stones will be more and more used for building, - ; instructions for building a barn partly with stone concrete, ; its advantages, ; blasting out stone considered, - ; the mode a lumberman employs to remove rocks in creeks, ; the author's experience regarding the fencing of his farm, ; his stone walls, . stones, . strawberries, , . sugar, production of, from the beet, ; maple, , . sulphur, . summer, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . super-phosphate, . susquehanna, the, , ; the valley of the, . swamp land: about , , acres of, in the old states (including maine), ; _see_ draining. swine, . switzerland, ; northern, . sycamore, . tamarack, . territories, the, , . texas, , , ; (western), . textile fabrics, . thebes, . thistles, . thread, . tillage: thorough tillage, chap. xvi, ; rocky character of the author's own fields, ; clearing off stones profitable, ; cultivating wet lands without draining unprofitable, ; the course a poor man with a rugged, sterile farm should adopt, ; should reclaim one field each year, ; should plow often, deeply and thoroughly, - ; reasons therefor, ; fall plowing, ; enriches the soil, - ; fences, ; the favored lot of the squatter on the prairie, . _see_ also, plowing--draining--farming. the times (london), timber. _see_ trees. timothy grass, , . tobacco, . tomatoes, , . tribune, the, new york, . turkey, . turnips. _see_ roots, also , , . trees: clearing off timber, ; new england must always be well wooded, , ; trees--woodlands--forests, chap. vii; the author not sentimental regarding the destruction of, ; utility the reason and end of vegetable growth, ; profit the main consideration, ; the beauty and grace of trees, ; new england a favored section in regard to tree-growing, ; disadvantage of prairie land in that respect, ; trees once grew on "the plains," ; tree-planting in utah, and its climatic influence, ; failure of congress to pass a bill encouraging tree planting, ; mistake of the new york dairy farmers in destroying trees, ; spain, italy, and portions of france suffering from the destruction of their forests, ; other illustrations of improvidence, . growing timber--tree-planting, chap. viii, ; proportion of a farm that should be devoted to trees, ; the question of "too much land" and tree-growing, - ; its general application, ; timber should be culled out rather than cut off, ; the care of apple trees applicable to all trees, ; some woodlands, the cheapest property in the united states, ; another profitable field of labor, ; plant thickly, ; a common objection answered, ; the far west and tree-planting, . planting and growing trees, chap. ix, ; timber general on most farms, ; suggestions for locating trees, ; trees once planted cost nothing for cultivation, ; the soil is richer even after repeated crops of wood, ; poor land improved by growing timber on it, ; springs and streams will be rendered more equable and enduring by tree-growing, ; trees should be set on all hill-sides and ravines, ; trees accumulate manure, ; they can be placed so as to modify agreeably the temperature of a farm, ; author's experience, ; trees on the crest of a hill improve the crops on the slope, ; trees may be placed with advantage on banks of rivers, &c., ; a good tree grows as thriftily as a poor one, ; evidence thereof, ; diversity profitable, ; wood-lot should be thinned out, not cleared, ; the future should be considered when cutting, ; evidence thereof, ; a plantation furnishes employment at all seasons, ; tree-growing will make springs appear, and cause rain, , . about tree-planting, chap. xxiii, ; author's experience in raising locust plants, ; general counsel on the raising of locust and most other trees, ; sowing seed and raising plants therefrom, ; the raising of chestnut, hickory, white oak, - ; how a farmer, having a rugged, stony hill should act, ; profits which can be realized, ; the utility of forests, - ; tree-planting as a field for adventurous young men, ; how they should proceed, ; the great profits to be realized, ; drouths may be expected as the country is more and more denuded of its forests, ; how stony land may be advantageously used for tree-planting, ; treatment of forests in winter, ; summing up of author's views on, . tree-fruits. _see_ apples and fruits. tree-planting. _see_ trees. union colony--its location, ; the city of greeley its nucleus, ; irrigating canals of union colony, - ; doubts of the fertility of the soil of its location, ; proved groundless, . united states, , ; the annual hay crop of, , , . utah, , , . vegetables, culture of, , , , , , , , , ; the growing of market, as a source of profit, . venice, . vermont--a grazing farm in northern vermont, , , , , , , . vines. _see_ fruit. virginia, , , , , , , . walnut, , , , . warren county, n. y., , . waring, on drainage, ; elements of agriculture by, ; on drainage, . water, - . _see also_ irrigation. water melons, weber, the river, . weeds, in pastures, . west, the, a farmer who migrated to, ; illustration of good farming drawn from, , , , , , , , ; regards tree growing, , , ; the granary of the east, , , , , ; the far, ; the great, , , . westchester county, n. y., , , , , , , . western irrigation. _see_ irrigation. wheat, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . _see_ also corn. white ash, . white birch, . white daisy, . white maple, . white mountains, n. h., . white oak, , , , , , . white pine, , , , , , , , . whitney, eli, . willow, . windmill, - . winds--utilizing the winds for power, . winter, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . winter. _see_ work, winter. wisconsin, , ; eastern, . wood ashes, , , . wool, . _see_ sheep. wool growing. _see_ sheep. work, winter--winter work, chap. li. ; dearth of winter work a great and growing evil. ; consequences thereof, ; it is quite a modern evil, - ; the hard-working farmer's claim to leisure, ; he errs in supposing that there is no winter work to be done, ; the drawing and preparing of muck as an illustration, - - ; the work to be substituted where muck is not to be had, ; procuring commercial fertilizers, ; fences, ; fruit trees, ; forests, ; general counsel, . wyoming, . zone, temperate, ; torrid, . the end. _horace greeley's autobiography._ recollections of a busy life: including reminiscences of american politics and politicians, from the opening of the missouri contest to the downfall of slavery. by horace greeley. in one elegant octavo volume. beautifully printed and handsomely bound. illustrated with a fine _steel portrait of mr. greeley_, also with wood engravings of "the cot where i was born," "my first school house," "portrait of margaret faller," "my evergreen hedge," "my house in the woods," "my present home," "my barn." dedicated to our american boys who, born in poverty, cradled in obscurity, and early called from school to rugged labor, are seeking to convert obstacle into opportunity, and wrest achievement from difficulty, these recollections are regardfully inscribed by their author. mr. greeley himself gives the best indication of their nature, when he says: "i shall never write anything else into which i shall put so much of _myself_, my experiences, notions, convictions, and modes of thought as these _recollections_. i give, with small reserve, my mental history." in his "apology," mr. greeley says: "* * * if my friends will accept the essays which conclude this volume as a part of my mental biography, i respectfully proffer this book as my account of all of myself that is worth their consideration; and i will cherish the hope that some portion, at least, of its contents embody lessons of persistence and patience, which will not have been set forth in vain." =prices=:--extra cloth, =$ . =. library style (sheep), =$ . =. half morocco, =$ . =. half calf, elegant, =$ . =. morocco antique, =$ . =. sent by mail, free, on receipt of price. address the tribune, new york. _the tribune almanac_, two vols. of important statistics for $ . (about , pages of closely printed matter). volume i. contains from to , both years inclusive. volume ii. contains from to , both years inclusive. in the fall of --years before the establishment of the tribune--the october elections having developed a popular uprising against the jackson-van buren dynasty, which had for ten years seemed invincible, i was moved to issue a political register for , intended mainly to embody the election returns of that year, and compare them with those of some preceding year. the reception of that little annual was such as to justify its reproduction for each succeeding year--that of only excepted--until the issue for completed a series of _thirty_ annual registers of election returns, with other useful political and statistical matter. this annual has been known successively as the politician's register, whig almanac, and tribune almanac, under which last name it has been issued for several years past. the stereotyped plates of the earlier issues having been consumed in the fire which destroyed the tribune building in , it has for some years past been impossible to procure full sets of the work at any rate, and the imperfect sets from time to time thrown upon the market have commanded fabulous prices. =horace greeley.= the complete sets of the register and almanac are comprised in two neatly-bound volumes, and are now ready. price, for the two volumes, =$ =. each order must be accompanied with the cash. address =the tribune, new york.= political economy, by horace greeley. the essays on protection to home industry, published in "the tribune" during the year , have been republished in a handsome volume of pages. contents. i. labor--production. ii. commerce--exchanges. iii. capital--skill--invention--intellectual property. iv. money--the balance of trade. v. paper money--interest--usury. vi. slavery--hired labor--proportion--co-operation. vii. monopoly--the law of prices--effect of duties on cost. viii. agriculture as affected by protection--views of the fathers. ix. the state--its legitimate sphere--powers and duties--free trade axioms considered. x. protection for agriculture. xi. manufacturers and their needs. xii. the laboring class--its rights, interests, duties, and needs. xiii. the interest of consumers--iron. xiv. protection illustrated--sugar. xv. the harmony of interests--the sugar industry of france invigorating other industries--beet sugar on its triumphal march. xvi. american ship-building, shipping, and foreign commerce. xvii. credit--its uses and abuses--foreign indebtedness--our national debt. xviii. what has been elucidating what shall be. xix. taxation, direct and indirect. xx. co-operation. xxi. wool and woolens. xxii. immigration. xxiii. specific--ad valorem--minimum. xxiv. conclusions. analytical appendix. for sale at the tribune office. price, =$ . =. sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price. address =the tribune, new york.= ewbank's hydraulics & mechanics _a descriptive and historical account of hydraulic and other machines for raising water. also, observations on mechanic arts and the steam engine._ illustrated by nearly three hundred engravings, th edition, with additional matter. by thomas ewbank, _late commissioner of patents_. during twenty years this work has been recognized as a standard authority, and nearly as many editions have been called for, several of the earlier having been issued from the _tribune office_. by frequent additions and changes it has been kept fairly abreast of the progress of invention and science. one large octavo vol., bound in cloth. price $ . sent by mail en receipt of price. address =the tribune, new york,= =pear culture for profit.= an illustrated work ( d edition), by p. t. quinn, a practical horticulturist, for many years a successful grower of pears for market. the subject is simply and thoroughly treated under the following heads: _varieties, aspect, preparation of the soil, distance apart, selecting trees, dwarfs and 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[illustration: hon. j. b. white kansas city, mo. chairman, executive committee, second national conservation congress and third national conservation congress] officers and committees for - _president_ b. n. baker, baltimore _executive secretary_ thomas r. shipp, washington, d. c. _secretary_ l. frank brown, seattle _vice-presidents_ john barrett, washington, d. c. james s. whipple, albany e. j. wickson, berkeley alfred c. ackerman, athens, ga. henry a. barker, providence _executive committee_ j. b. white, kansas city, mo., _chairman_ b. n. baker, baltimore j. n. teal, portland, ore. a. b. farquhar, york, pa. l. h. bailey, ithaca thomas burke, seattle henry e. hardtner, urania, la. w. a. fleming jones, las cruces mrs philip n. moore, saint louis mrs j. ellen foster, washington, d. c. _local board of managers for the saint paul congress_ hon. a. o. eberhart, _chairman_ frank b. kellogg, _vice-chairman_ j. s. bell, minneapolis h. a. tuttle, minneapolis george m. gillette, minneapolis b. f. nelson, minneapolis l. s. donaldson, minneapolis joseph h. beek, saint paul george h. prince, saint paul reuben warner, saint paul paul w. doty, saint paul theodore w. griggs, saint paul w. c. handy, _secretary_ officers and committees for - _president_ henry wallace, des moines _executive secretary_ thomas r. shipp, washington, d. c. _treasurer_ d. austin latchaw, kansas city, mo. _recording secretary_ james c. gipe, clarks, la. _executive committee_ j. b. white, kansas city, mo., _chairman_ b. n. baker, baltimore l. h. bailey, ithaca james r. garfield, cleveland frank c. goudy, denver w. a. fleming jones, las cruces mrs philip n. moore, saint louis walter h. page, new york george c. pardee, oakland, cal. gifford pinchot, washington, d. c. j. n. teal, portland, ore. e. l. worsham, atlanta _vice-presidents_ alabama, hon. albert p. bush, mobile; alaska, hon. james wickersham, fairbanks; arizona, b. a. fowler, phenix; arkansas, a. h. purdue, fayetteville; california, e. h. cox, san francisco; colorado, murdo mackenzie, trinidad; columbia (district of), w j mcgee, washington; connecticut, rollin s. woodruff, hartford; delaware, hon. george gray, wilmington; florida, cromwell gibbons, jacksonville; georgia, hon. jno. c. hart, union point; hawaii, mrs margaret r. knudsen, kanai; idaho, james a. maclean, university of idaho; illinois, julius rosenwald, chicago; indiana, f. j. breeze, lafayette; iowa, carl leopold, burlington; kansas, w. r. stubbs, topeka; kentucky, james k. patterson, lexington; louisiana, newton c. blanchard, shreveport; maine, bert m. fernald, augusta; maryland, william bullock clark, baltimore; massachusetts, frank w. rane, boston; michigan, j. l. snyder, lansing; minnesota, ambrose tighe, saint paul; mississippi, a. w. shands, sardis; missouri, hermann von schrenk, saint louis; montana, e. l. norris, helena; nebraska, dr f. a. long, madison; nevada, senator francis g. newlands, reno; new hampshire, george b. leighton, monadnock; new jersey, charles lathrop pack, lakewood; new mexico, w. a. fleming jones, las cruces; new york, r. a. pearson, albany; north carolina, t. gilbert pearson, greensboro; north dakota, u. g. larimore, larimore; ohio, james r. garfield, cleveland; oklahoma, benj. martin, jr., muskogee; oregon, j. n. teal, portland; pennsylvania, william s. harvey, philadelphia; philippine islands, maj. george p. ahern, manila; porto rico, hon. walter k. landis, san juan; rhode island, henry a. barker, providence; south carolina, e. j. watson, columbia; south dakota, ellwood c. perisho, vermillion; tennessee, herman suter, nashville; texas, w. goodrich jones, temple; utah, harden bennion, salt lake city; vermont, fletcher d. proctor, proctor; virginia, a. r. turnbull, norfolk; washington, m. e. hay, olympia; west virginia, a. b. fleming, fairmont; wisconsin, charles r. van hise, madison; wyoming, bryant b. brooks, cheyenne; national conservation association, gifford pinchot, washington. _standing committees_ forests--h. s. graves, u. s. forester, washington, d. c., _chairman_; e. m. griffith, madison, wis.; e. t. allen, portland, ore.; j. lewis thompson, houston. lands--governor w. r. stubbs, topeka, _chairman_; dwight b. heard, phenix; j. l. snyder, lansing; murdo mackenzie, trinidad; charles s. barrett, union city, ga. waters--w j mcgee, washington, d. c., _chairman_; e. a. smith, spokane; henry a. barker, providence; j. n. teal, portland, ore.; herbert knox smith, washington, d. c. minerals--charles r. van hise, madison, _chairman_; joseph a. holmes, washington, d. c.; d. w. brunton, denver; john mitchell, new york; i. c. white, morgantown, w. va. vital resources--dr william h. welch, baltimore, _chairman_; professor irving fisher, new haven; dr h. w. wiley, washington, d. c.; dr j. h. kellogg, battle creek, mich.; walter h. page, new york. [illustration: henry wallace des moines, iowa president, third national conservation congress] contents page constitution ix opening session invocation by archbishop ireland greeting from cardinal gibbons address by governor eberhart welcome by mayor keller address by president taft second session induction of governor stubbs as chairman address by senator nelson address by governor noel address by governor norris address by governor deneen address by governor hay announcement by professor condra address by governor brooks remarks by governor stubbs address by governor vessey third session appointment of credentials committee action on constitution of the national conservation congress remarks by director-general barrett remarks by governor stubbs invocation by reverend doctor montgomery address by ex-president roosevelt fourth session address by miss boardman address by commissioner herbert knox smith modification of credentials committee address by honorable james r. garfield address by ex-governor pardee remarks by delegate horr, of washington address by ex-governor blanchard address by william e. smythe address by walter l. fisher address by colonel james h. davidson fifth session invocation by bishop edsall address by president finley report of credentials committee address by senator beveridge response by gifford pinchot address by president mcvey discussion by chairman white address by mrs welch, of the general federation of women's clubs address by mrs hoyle tomkies, of the women's national rivers and harbors congress address by mrs sneath, of the general federation of women's clubs report by mrs howard, of the daughters of the american revolution sixth session induction of senator clapp as chairman address by president craighead postponement of call of states address by d. austin latchaw address by james j. hill discussion by henry wallace address by secretary wilson discussion by representative stevens address by professor bailey seventh session address by professor graves address by alfred l. baker address by frank h. short address by director-general barrett address by honorable esmond ovey action on time for election and report of resolutions committee eighth session appointment of nominating committee induction of governor eberhart as chairman address by dean wesbrook address by wallace d. simmons address by commissioner elmer e. brown address by mrs scott, president of the daughters of the american revolution action in memory of mrs j. ellen foster presentation by mrs howard to gifford pinchot response by mr pinchot address by francis j. heney address by gifford pinchot expression by governor eberhart statement by professor condra closing session commencement of call of states response by delegate harvey, of pennsylvania interlude by e. w. ross, of washington report of nominating committee nomination by chairman white second by gifford pinchot election of and response by henry wallace as president election of other officers resolution of thanks to retiring president baker response by mr baker report of resolutions committee adoption of resolutions interlude by e. w. ross, of washington remarks by delegate horr, of washington ratification of vice-presidents resolution in memory of professor green resumption of call of states response by delegate purdue, of arkansas response by delegate bannister, of indiana response by delegate miller, of iowa response by delegate young, of kansas response by delegate baker, of maryland response by delegate thorp, of minnesota response by state geologist lowe, of mississippi response by general noble, of missouri response by chairman white response by professor condra, of nebraska response by a delegate from new york response by delegate nestos, of north dakota response by delegate krueger, of south dakota remarks by delegate johns, of washington privileged statement by land commissioner ross, of washington response by delegate fowler, of arizona response by delegate hunt, of district of columbia response by delegate barker, of rhode island response by professor white, of west virginia response by delegate worsham, of georgia motion for adjournment by delegate martin, of oklahoma supplementary proceedings laws that should be passed, by senator francis g. newlands conservation of the nation's resources, by chairman j. b. white practical aspects of conservation, by a. b. farquhar report from arkansas, by sid b. redding report from colorado, by frank c. goudy report from florida, by cromwell gibbons report from idaho, by jerome j. day report from indiana, by a. e. metzger report from iowa, by a. c. miller report from louisiana, by henry e. hardtner report from maine, by cyrus c. babb report from massachusetts, by frank william rane and henry h. sprague report from missouri, by hermann von schrenk report from montana, by rudolph von tobel report from new mexico, by colonel w. a. fleming jones report from new york, by j. s. whipple special report from new york, by henry h. persons report from north dakota, by professor waldron report from ohio, by professor lazenby report from oklahoma, by benj. martin, jr. report from oregon, by e. t. allen report from rhode island, by henry a. barker report from south carolina, by e. j. watson report from south dakota, by doane robinson report from texas, by will l. sargent report from utah, by o. j. salisbury supplementary report from utah, by e. t. merritt report from vermont, by george aitkin report from washington, by e. g. griggs report from west virginia, by hu maxwell report from wisconsin, by e. m. griffith report of the american academy of political and social science report of the american automobile association report of the american civic association report of the american forestry association report of the american humane association report of the american institute of architects report of the american paper and pulp association report of the american medical association report of the american railway engineering and maintenance of way association report of the american railway master mechanics' association report of the american scenic and historic preservation society report of the association for the protection of the adirondacks report of the carriage builders' national association report of the delaware state federation of women's clubs report of the farmers' union of america report of the general federation of women's clubs report of the lakes-to-gulf deep waterway association report of the league of american sportsmen report of the national board of fire underwriters report of the national board of trade report of the national business league of america report of the missouri valley river improvement association report of the upper mississippi river improvement association report of the washington state federation of labor report of the western forestry and conservation association report of the united mine workers timber conservation, by george h. emerson forests and stream-flow, by william s. harvey the conservation of minerals and subterranean waters, by george f. kunz, ph.d. the question of land titles, by franklin mccray index [illustration: . gifford pinchot, vice-president ( ). . james r. garfield, vice-president ( ). . henry a. barker, vice-president ( - ). . a. b. farquhar, executive committee ( ). . w. a. fleming jones, vice-president ( ). . e. l. worsham, executive committee ( ). . george c. pardee, executive committee ( ). . j. n. teal, executive committee ( - ). . walter h. page, executive committee ( ). . l. h. bailey, executive committee ( - ).] _constitution_ article --name this organization shall be known as the national conservation congress. article --object the object of the national conservation congress shall be: ( ) to provide a forum for discussion of the resources of the united states as the foundation for the prosperity of the people, ( ) to furnish definite information concerning the resources and their utilization, and ( ) to afford an agency through which the people of the country may frame policies and principles affecting the wise and practical development, conservation, and utilization of the resources, to be put into effect by their representatives in state and federal governments. article --meetings _section ._ regular annual meetings shall be held at such time and place as may be determined by the executive committee. _section ._ special meetings of the congress, or its officers, committees, or boards, may be held subject to the call of the president of the congress or the chairman of the executive committee. article --officers _section ._ the officers of the congress shall consist of a president, to be elected by the congress; a vice-president from each state, to be chosen by the respective state delegations, and from the national conservation association; an executive secretary; a recording secretary; and a treasurer. _section ._ the duties of these officers may at any time be prescribed by formal action of the congress or executive committee. in the absence of such action their duties shall be those implied by their designations and established by custom. in addition, it shall be the duty of the vice-presidents to receive, from the state conservation commissions and other organizations concerned in conservation, suggestions and recommendations, and report them to the executive committee of the congress. _section ._ the officers shall serve for one year, or until their successors are elected and qualify. article --committees and boards _section ._ an executive committee of seven, in addition to which the president of the national conservation association and all ex-presidents of the congress shall be members ex-officio, shall be appointed by the president during each regular annual session to act for the ensuing year; its membership shall be drawn from different states, and not more than one of the appointed members shall be from any one state. the executive committee shall act for the congress and shall be empowered to initiate action and meet emergencies. it shall report to each regular annual session. _section ._ a board of managers shall be created in each city in which the next ensuing session of the congress is to be held, preferably by leading organizations of citizens. the board of managers shall have power to raise and expend funds, to incur obligations on its own responsibility, and to appoint subordinate boards and committees, all with the approval of the executive committee of the congress. it shall report to the executive committee at least two days before the opening of the ensuing session, and at such other times as the congress or the executive committee may direct. _section ._ a committee on credentials shall be appointed, consisting of five ( ) members, by the president of the congress not later than on the second day of each session of the congress. it shall determine all questions raised by delegates as to representation, and shall report to the congress from time to time as required by the president of the congress. _section ._ a committee on resolutions shall be created for each annual meeting of the congress. a chairman shall be appointed by the president. one member of the committee shall be selected by each state represented in the congress. the committee shall report to the congress not later than the morning of the last day of each annual meeting. _section ._ permanent committees, consisting of five ( ) members each, shall be appointed by the president of the congress on each of the following five divisions of conservation: forests, waters, lands, minerals, and vital resources. these committees shall, during the intervals between the annual meetings of the congress, inquire into these respective subjects and prepare reports to be submitted on the request of the executive committee, and render such other assistance to the congress as the executive committee may direct. _section ._ by direction of the congress, standing and special committees may be appointed by the president. _section ._ the president shall be a member, ex-officio, of every committee of the congress. article --arrangements for sessions _section ._ the program for the session of each annual meeting of the congress, including a list of speakers, shall be arranged by the executive committee. the entire program, including allotments of time to speakers and hours for daily sessions and all other arrangements concerning the program, shall be made by the executive committee. _section ._ unless otherwise ordered, the rules adopted for the guidance of the preceding congress shall continue in force. article --membership _section ._ the personnel of the national conservation congress shall be as follows: _officers and delegates_ officers of the national conservation congress. fifteen delegates appointed by the governor of each state and territory. five delegates appointed by the mayor of each city with a population of , , or more. two delegates appointed by the mayor of each city with a population of less than , . two delegates appointed by each board of county commissioners. five delegates appointed by each national organization concerned in the work of conservation. five delegates appointed by each state or interstate organization concerned in the work of conservation. three delegates appointed by each chamber of commerce, board of trade, commercial club, or other local organization concerned in the work of conservation. two delegates appointed by each state or other university or college, and by each agricultural college or experiment station. honorary members the president of the united states. the vice-president of the united states. the speaker of the house of representatives. the cabinet. the united states senate and house of representatives. the supreme court of the united states. the representatives of foreign governments. the governors of the states and territories. the lieutenant-governors of the states and territories. the speakers of state houses of representatives. the state officers. the mayors of cities. the county commissioners. the presidents of state and other universities and colleges. the officers and members of the national conservation association. the officers and members of the national conservation commission. the officers and members of the state conservation commissions and associations. article --delegations and state officers _section ._ the several delegates from each state in attendance at any congress shall assemble at the earliest practicable time and organize by choosing a chairman and a secretary. these delegates, when approved by the committee on credentials, shall constitute the delegation from that state. article --voting _section ._ each member of the congress shall be entitled to one vote on all actions taken viva voce. _section ._ a division or call of states may be demanded on any action by a state delegation. on division, each delegate shall be entitled to one vote; provided ( ) that no state shall have more than twenty votes; and provided ( ) that when a state is represented by less than ten delegates, said delegates may cast ten votes for such state. _section ._ the term "state" as used herein is to be construed to mean either state, territory, or insular possession. article --amendments this constitution may be amended by a two-thirds vote of the congress during any regular session, provided notice of the proposed amendment has been given from the chair not less than one day or more than two days preceding; or by unanimous vote without such notice. [illustration: . d. austin latchaw, treasurer ( ). . thomas r. shipp, executive secretary ( - ). . james c. gipe, recording secretary ( ). . john barrett, vice-president ( ). . mrs philip n. moore, executive committee ( - ). . frank c. goudy, executive committee ( ). . thomas burke, executive committee ( ). . e. j. wickson, vice-president ( ). . henry d. hardtner, vice-president ( ). . james s. whipple, vice-president ( ). . w j mcgee, vice-president (editor of proceedings).] second national conservation congress _opening session_ the congress convened in the auditorium, saint paul, minnesota, on the morning of september , , president baker in the chair, and was called to order on arrival of the president of the united states. president baker--mr president, your grace, ladies and gentlemen: the honor i have today in opening this great congress is one that will always be highly treasured, for i feel that what we are trying to do is to make our country great and strong by men who see the nation's wrongs and are giving their time to this great object. we are meeting today for the purpose of using our very best efforts to assist in protecting the interests of this great country in a way that will best protect every man and woman and child in his or her rights, with justice to all. that our great national resources are in danger of being wasted and not fully preserved for the future, i am satisfied is the thought of all the great minds assembled here today to take part in this congress. there is a great high power that rules and governs for the best in the world, and i now call upon his grace, archbishop ireland, to open our congress with an invocation to that great power for help, guidance, and direction. invocation _almighty and eternal god. we bow before thee in deep humility. accept from us, we beseech thee, from submissive minds and sincere hearts, adoration, praise, gratitude, love, and the promise of abiding recognition of thy sovereignty and of loyal obedience to thy laws._ _o god, all things are thine; all things were made by thee; no thing that was made was made without thee; "the heavens show forth thy glory and the firmament declareth thy power, day to day uttereth speech, night to night showeth knowledge," ever proclaiming that thou are the master, that things created are the scintillations of thy power and wisdom. we are thine, o god, thee our father and our master; earth and skies are ours through gift of thy munificence. "till the earth," was it said to us, "and subdue it and dominate over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and all living creatures that move upon the earth." earth is ours, not, o lord, that we use it at our will and caprice, but that under thy guidance we bid it turn to our best and truest welfare, to the best and truest welfare of our fellow-men, thy children all; over all of whom spread thy love and care._ _grant to us, o lord, this morning wisdom in our counselings and deliberations, that the intents of thy providence be our intents, and, thy will the inspiration of our counselings and our actions._ _we thank thee, o god, for the gift to us of america. as to few other lands, thou hast been prodigal to america of gifts rich and rare. in america skies are serene and health-giving above us; beneath us fields are verdant and fertile; nowhere else are forests more fruitful, hills and mountains richer in imbedded treasure; nowhere else are lakes and rivers endowed with higher grandeur or more ready to proffer to man useful and ennobling service. of america, through thy munificence, o god, we are the caretakers. may we be wise and prudent in our duty. we pray that under thy abiding watchfulness, through our intelligent industry, america grows ever in fairness and in wealth, and be the first and most beauteous of the stopping-places allowed to men in their pilgrimage toward their abiding home in heaven._ _bless, o lord, america, and bless its people, that they be ever faithful to thy laws; bless its citizenship, bless its government, that the spirit of its freedom-giving institutions never die, never lessen in sweetness and in power; that here liberty be ever encircled in order, and order ever wreathed in liberty; that righteousness dominate and permeate prosperity; that whatever the laws we form may be scintillations of thy own eternal laws--compliance with which is life and felicity, forgetfulness of which is misery and death to men and to nations._ _and we pray thee, o god, send down thy blessing upon the president of the republic, upon whose shoulders descends the chief responsibility of upholding the salvation and the dignity of america. we pray that thou bestow upon him thy precious blessing. the burthen is heavy, often the horizon is dark, often the polar star is hidden from which guidance might come; but in thee, o god, he confideth,--send upon him the wisdom and the strength of thy holy spirit, the wisdom that he may know, the power that he may do, ever thy will. in thee, o lord, in thy omnipotent hand--prompt to give aid in single-mindedness of purpose and in rectitude of intention--he puts his trust. be thou his teacher, be thou his guide._ _our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from all evil. amen._ * * * * * president baker--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: his eminence, cardinal gibbons, sends you greeting: allow me to say how earnestly i wish the congress every success in the much-needed work of national conservation. it is said that the french and germans could subsist on what we waste; and i fear that to a stranger visiting our country it must seem that in a hundred years we have wasted more of our natural resources than the nations of europe have done in all the centuries of their existence. but if we have been reckless in the past, wasting like vandals our rich inheritance, it is also most consoling and full of promise for the future that with the strong aid of our president, of colonel roosevelt, and of leading citizens in various parts of the country, we may look for a wiser use of our resources in the near future. and i am the more hopeful of a successful congress from the fact that there is no political issue involved in the great subject before it which might threaten to divide our counsels and breed discontent, but that the sole motive that actuates the congress is to conserve and increase our natural resources and thereby contribute to the material prosperity of our beloved country. it is also decidedly my opinion that we should regard our natural resources as the patrimony of the nation, a sacred trust committed to our keeping to be administered for the good of the whole people, and to be transmitted by us, as far as possible unimpaired, to our posterity. by husbanding and using economically the gifts of nature, we shall have an abundant supply for our own times, and also make suitable provisions for the future. mother earth is not only a fruitful mother; she is also a grateful mother, and repays her children for every kindness and tenderness we exercise toward her. and there are also instances on record to show that she is relentless when she chastises. did my many duties allow, i should gladly take a more active part in the greatly needed conservation labors. however, i trust you will feel assured of my entire sympathy and of the hope i confidently entertain of the very great benefits coming to us all as the fruitful result of these devoted laborers. james card. gibbons. * * * * * president baker--ladies and gentlemen: the opening of the congress today in saint paul is due largely to the kind assistance and friendly welcome of the governor of minnesota, his excellency a. o. eberhart, who will now extend you a welcome. (great applause and cheers) governor eberhart--mr president, members of the congress, ladies and gentlemen: when i was invited to appear before this congress and bid you welcome, it was suggested that i also outline what the people of minnesota felt when they sought to have this splendid gathering at saint paul. i am sure that no state or city could receive greater honor than to have the president of the united states come fifteen hundred miles to deliver the most important message on conservation that has ever been presented to the people of this great country. (applause) yet i am not going to take more than the twenty minutes allotted to assure you that the only interest this state has in the conservation movement is that which every true friend of the movement stands for. last night i cut out the meat of my remarks, this morning the bones, and now there is nothing left but the nerve, and i have scarcely enough "nerve" to deliver it. (laughter and applause) the conservation of natural resources does not consist merely in the preservation of these resources for the benefit of future generations, but rather such present use thereof as will result in the greatest general good and yet maintain that productive power which insures continued future enjoyment. (applause) while it is true that exhaustible resources like mineral wealth cannot be conserved for both future and present use, except by economic regulations and the prevention of wasteful methods, conservation deals with their distribution in such a way as to prevent their control by grasping corporations and individuals, who would monopolize them for their own exclusive benefit at the expense of the general public. (applause) it follows necessarily that any theory of conservation which does not provide for the present as well as the future does not cover the entire field and cannot possibly bring the best results. (applause) from every economic standpoint it is desirable that the present generation should be preferred, since future discoveries and inventions may render present resources of less value and importance to the coming generations. in its broadest sense the conservation movement is not limited merely to the consideration of natural resources. every great convention called to consider the problems involved has widened the scope of the movement so that today it includes the elimination of wasteful methods in almost every field of human activity and the conservation of all human endeavor so as to confer on all mankind the greatest blessings that a bounteous nature and twenty centuries of enlightenment can bestow. every consideration of natural resources for the purpose of eliminating wasteful methods, preserving and increasing productive power, as well as regulating operation and control, has for its ultimate object the conservation of human energy, health and life, the securing of equal opportunities for all, and such dissemination of knowledge as will guarantee the continual possession and enjoyment of these blessings. the subjects for consideration by this congress should, therefore, include not only the restoration and increase of soil fertility, the protection and development of forests, mines and water-powers, the reclamation of arid and swamp lands by irrigation and drainage, the forestation of areas unsuited to farming, the control of rivers by reservoirs so as to prevent flooding, as well as the elimination of waste in the use of these resources, but also the problems of public comfort, health and life that are so intimately connected with all material and intellectual development. (applause) many of these questions will concern home attractions and management, industrial education in the public schools, public highways, state advertising and settlement, pure food, public health, and sanitation. by far the most important of all natural resources is the soil, and the maintenance and increase of its fertility must, therefore, be given the greatest consideration. (applause) as long as food is necessary to human life, agriculture must continue to be the most vital industry of man, and the farm will be the most general and indispensable theater of his activity. we must have manufacture, art, schools, churches and government to round out our sphere of civilized existence, but the foundation of them all is the farm. (applause) from the earth come all the materials for manufactures, the commodities of commerce, and ultimately the support of all human institutions. during the half century just past our country has devoted its energies to the development of manufacturing and commercial industries to such an extent that the scientific methods of agriculture necessary to insure not only the permanency of our institutions but the very existence of human life itself have been comparatively neglected. the pendulum is now swinging back to the farm, and our great nation is becoming aroused to the fact that its most vital concern is the elimination of soil waste, the promotion of scientific methods of agriculture, and the conservation of that soil fertility which is the foundation of our entire social, political and commercial superstructure. (applause) this new birth of agricultural progress comes at a psychological moment. we have developed american manufactures until the $ , , , product of our mills and factories exceeds that of germany, france, and the united kingdom combined. (applause) we have built railroads by liberal public and private enterprise until the united states has about one-half of all the railway mileage and tonnage of the world. we have developed banking enterprise and home trade until we have the greatest banking power on earth, and an internal commerce which far exceeds the entire foreign commerce of the globe. we have become the model of the world in our free public schools and our republican form of government. but while we have demonstrated the possession of the greatest agricultural resources on the globe, and have heretofore supplied the world's markets with an unparalleled volume of farm products, we have wasted a wealth that would maintain our population for centuries. the loss in farm values in nearly all of the older states, as shown by the census records from to , varies from $ , , to $ , , in each state and aggregates the enormous total of more than $ , , , . is this not sufficient to arouse the entire nation and cause such a wave of reform as will put into activity every agency and instrumentality for scientific and progressive methods of agricultural reconstruction? the unprecedented agricultural growth of the united states, in spite of wasteful methods, has been caused by the extraordinary fertility of its virgin soil, the great inducement offered by states and nation to promote settlement and cultivation, the rapid growth of favorable transportation facilities, as well as the great demand for agricultural products resulting from the rapid increase of population, wealth and commercial enterprise. minnesota affords a splendid illustration of this development process, and i trust that i may be pardoned for using my own state for that purpose, since i am best acquainted with her conditions, development, and resources. of her , , acres of land area, about one-half is actually tilled, constituting the field area of about , farms whose aggregate area, including lands not tilled, approximates , , acres, or acres each. nearly , , acres of her area are covered by , lakes. this vast farm area possesses a soil unsurpassed by any state or any country in the world. the great glacier of several thousand years ago was generous to minnesota. its fine glacial drift almost wholly covers the old rock formations. coming from many regions and rock sources, it has given to the soil an excellent chemical composition. this, together with the vegetal mold, accumulated for ages, makes the very best of hospitable soils. the incomparable fertility of the minnesota soil and its ability to withstand fifty years of starvation methods in cultivation is accounted for by the almost uniform mixture of vegetal mold with all kinds of decomposed rock drift, thus making it possible for less than half of the state to produce farm products aggregating the enormous total for of more than $ , , . (applause) it accounts also for the fact that, while minnesota, like all other states, during this period of fifty years has been rather mining the fertility out of her soil than cultivating it, she has withstood the consequent impoverishment without appreciable shrinkage in farm value. there is perhaps not a single representative in this distinguished assemblage who cannot recall the day when the virgin soil in his locality did not produce from to percent larger crops than it does today, when dense forests covered large tracts now a barren waste, and when the bosom of the earth contained untold millions of mineral wealth now represented on the surface by huge spoil-banks and sunken surfaces. we remember only too well when our fertile fields yielded thirty-five to forty bushels of wheat to the acre, and that the same fields produced only about twelve bushels five years ago. in nearly every community there is found that pathetic omen of decay, the deserted farm--even in this young state. the economic importance of soil conservation is so great that it can scarcely be estimated. in making my estimates i have taken a very conservative view, and while no absolutely accurate figures can be obtained, the few that i shall give will be found sufficiently reliable to establish the paramount value of soil conservation. in minnesota the low tide of soil impoverishment occurred about five years ago. at that time, after several years of apparently unsuccessful effort, the agricultural college and schools, assisted by the state farmers' institutes and the press, succeeded in stemming the tide and arousing considerable interest in new methods of farming along more intelligent and intensive lines. only within the last year, however, has progress been marked and rapid. when the first state conservation congress was called to meet in saint paul, march, , nearly every township in the state was represented and all but two counties presented agricultural and industrial exhibits, attracting a total attendance of more than , people. the wonderful success of that congress and the enthusiasm it stirred up all over the state gave a great impetus to this new era of agricultural reform in the entire northwest and insured the complete success of this congress from a local standpoint. never before had , of the most progressive farmers of a state met for the purpose of discussing more intelligent methods of farming, as well as the suppression of wasteful methods in all fields of agricultural and industrial activity. during the past short period of five years the average cereal yield of this state has been increased more than five bushels per acre; the corn belt has been extended northward more than miles to the canadian boundary by the production of hardy and early maturing varieties of corn, yielding the state last year over , , bushels, and placing minnesota among the dozen leading corn states of the union. it is estimated that plant breeding and seed selection alone last year added about $ , , to our agricultural products. the cereal production has also affected clover, timothy and other tame grasses, thus largely contributing to the growth of the dairy industry, which has been increased ten-fold in twenty years until it now yields the state $ , , annually, several counties netting more than $ , , each. similar progress has been made in the live stock, fruit, and truck gardening industries, and it is safe to conclude that minnesota has entered in earnest upon a complete plan of agricultural reconstruction. but let us consider the opportunities for advancement that are still open, in order that we may determine the economy of soil conservation in terms of dollars and cents. the average yield of minnesota wheat last season was seventeen bushels per acre. at the agricultural experiment stations the same wheat with improved seed selection and better preparation of soil by crop rotation and tillage yielded twenty-eight bushels per acre, climatic and soil conditions, as well as expense of tillage being otherwise similar, a difference in favor of intelligent farming approximating from five to eight dollars per acre, depending on local conditions. assuming for the sake of argument that the average difference in the state would not be more than four dollars per acre, it would still increase the agricultural net earning of the state on the basis of the present acreage $ , , annually. these figures do not take into consideration the further increase of soil productivity by various methods of fertilization other than those resulting from planting crops which enrich the soil with nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potash and calcium, the essential elements of plant growth. besides, i have not attempted to estimate the value of raising almost maximum yields, where weather conditions are unfavorable, by such drainage, preparation of soil, planting and tillage as will best suit local and climatic conditions. no crop emphasizes the value of seed selection in such unmistakable terms as corn. the average stand of this crop does not exceed percent, which means that the farmer spends percent of his time in the cornfield without result. by selecting the seed in the field at the proper season, testing each ear before planting, and separating with reference to size, so that as nearly as possible the planter will put three kernels in each hill, the stand can be increased to at least percent. applying this increase to the , , acres of cornfield in minnesota, it would add approximately , , bushels with practically no additional cost of production. that the importance of this matter might be more firmly impressed upon the people of the state, i have issued a seed-corn proclamation designating the time when the seed-corn should be selected and calling the attention of the people to the feed value of the corn product as well as corn fodder, which is of utmost importance in a dry season like the one we are now experiencing. this proclamation has received extensive publicity, and it is safe to say that a large number of minnesota's , farmers will heed the note of warning. of still more vital importance, if possible, is the maintenance and increase of soil fertility as a source of support for future generations. the soil is the only permanent asset of the farmer, and its net returns in crops constitute his annual dividends. any impairment of this asset will not only reduce the dividends on which his support depends, but will destroy the productive power of the soil to such extent as to deprive future owners of the most essential means of livelihood. a loss of $ , , , in farm values, such as the older states have already suffered, does not mean merely that this vast sum of money has been wasted, but that its annual earning capacity on which thousands should depend for support has been entirely destroyed, and that these thousands have been forced to seek their sustenance from the fields of commerce and manufacture in the large cities. we enact stringent legislation to prevent the impairment of capital in our banking institutions to protect depositors from loss, but the working capital investment of millions in farm property on which all human institutions must necessarily depend for existence has not been safeguarded in any manner whatsoever. without any organized effort to interfere, we still permit millions of farmers to mine out the fertility of the soil, thus increasing the drudgery of farm life, reducing every source of farm income, converting the producers of the farm into consumers of the city, and thus contributing directly to the great increase in cost of living, the scarcity of farm labor, and the congested conditions that breed disease and crime in our large cities. apply the situation to the country at large and you will find a situation that is simply appalling. there are approximately , , acres under actual tillage in the united states. instead of figuring four dollars per acre waste, which probably would be a fair average, we will place the loss at the extremely low estimate of one dollar. this will still make the total loss through wasteful farming methods in the united states reach the enormous total of $ , , annually. in other words, if the loss were in fact not greater than one dollar per acre, which is unquestionably too low, and that rate could be maintained perpetually without an ultimate depletion of the soil, it would mean that a capital investment of $ , , , with an earning capacity of four percent per annum aggregating $ , , annually, had been completely destroyed. at the rate of two dollars per acre, which is a low average, we are every year wasting the income from $ , , , , a sum so great as to be entirely beyond human comprehension. in many of the older states, where farms were sold forty years ago at $ per acre, the same farms cannot be sold today for $ per acre, sometimes less than the actual cash value of the buildings and other improvements, because the soil has been robbed of its fertility, making it impossible for the owner to earn the most meager living without restoring the vitality of the soil through expensive methods of fertilization. it is not at all difficult to see how such wasteful methods of farming must affect the entire industrial situation. the younger generation, inspired with the hopes, aspirations, and energy of youth, stirred by the achievements, opportunities, and general prosperity of a truly great nation, and encouraged by the possibilities of a liberal education, cannot afford to stake its future on the eking out of a mere existence under the shadow of a rapidly increasing farm mortgage or the threatening omen of a deserted homestead. all honor and credit to that farmer's boy who early realizes the handicap placed upon him by the impairment, and oftentimes utter destruction, of the only safe capital investment of the farmer--fertile and productive soil. should we complain because he goes to the city to seek more inviting and attractive fields of existence after having been robbed of his only means of livelihood on the farm? this is the proper time for us to think it over. in the younger states, where soil mining has been of such short duration as to be incomplete, and the value of the land through settlement, city growth, and increased transportation facilities is constantly growing, the young man, who has learned intelligent and progressive methods of farming, should have no fear as to the future, for he has the making of a safe investment; but the young lad who, without experience or training, unexpectedly finds himself possessor of a farm where land values have ceased to rise and the soil has been starved until it no longer can yield in abundance, has a white elephant on his hands, and the sooner he can be brought to the realization thereof the better for himself and the entire community. where a certain amount of labor should produce thirty bushels of wheat to the acre, it yields but ten, or even less; and when the farmer cultivates his corn, working ten hours per day, four hours thereof is spent in vain, because percent of the field has no corn--not to speak of the poor quality of the corn grown on account of defective preparation of soil, poor tillage, and the lack of necessary nutritive elements within the soil itself. in addition, he has no knowledge as to diversified farming, the value of live stock, dairying, fruit-raising, truck-gardening, and many other means of livelihood which yield large incomes to the possessor of a well-managed farm, nor does he appreciate the enormous waste committed by unnecessary exposure to the elements of farm machinery and buildings. the young lady faces a similar situation. every field of employment bids her welcome at wages from $ or more per month, and she has already achieved such abundant success in every line of human enterprise, and at the same time enjoyed all the pleasures and delights which bring cheer to the heart of the young, that she cannot afford to even hesitate. should we complain if she refuses to stay on the farm and take her chances of marrying a $ man and a ruined farm plastered all over with mortgages, and be chained in matrimonial bonds of lifelong drudgery to a devastated farm homestead, robbed of everything that contributes to the beautiful and good and true in a woman's life? (great applause) there is only one answer, and its conclusions are just. though i have presented a sad picture, it is not pessimistic. the background is altogether cheerful. two words express the most simple and effective remedy: intelligent farming. this will not only make farming profitable, but it will surround the home life on the farm with so many attractions as to remove all desire for the deceptive allurements of a city. intelligent farming does not merely guarantee good dividends on a farm investment, but it builds good roads to save cost of transportation, consolidates rural schools where intelligent farming, industry and home economics can be taught by precept and example, beautifies the home and its surroundings and fills it with all the attractions that elevate manhood and womanhood, teaches the younger generation the dignity as well as reward of farm labor, and inspires the laborer with the hope of a bright future. drainage, farm settlement, good roads, forestry, transportation, industrial education, minerals, cheap heat and power resources, are all important factors in the conservation movement. minnesota has successfully drained about , , acres in the northern part of the state at an average cost of two dollars per acre, and converted into meadows, grain and clover fields, celery and cranberry gardens, what only a year or two since was a rough wilderness. every state should have some effective way of making these results known to prospective settlers through exhibits and judicious advertising. no state officer is in a position to bring greater returns to the state than the immigration commissioner, and it is to be regretted that his work is so often crippled by lack of sufficient appropriations. in marketing produce, distributing material, fertilizer and machinery, the farmers of minnesota haul annually approximately , , wagon loads. averaging the cost of each load over mostly unimproved roads at $ . , the cost of highway transportation in the state aggregates $ , , . most experts claim that uniformly good roads would reduce this cost one-half, but conceding for the sake of argument that the reduction would be only a third, the net saving to the farmers of the state in one year would be about $ , , . however, this is not the most important result. the building of good roads would build up farm intercommunication and promote the consolidation of rural school districts by making it possible to carry the pupils at all seasons of the year some distance over country roads to the school at a minimum cost. several of the north-central border states were the chief shippers of lumber only a few years ago. now our great forests are largely depleted, and scientific deforestation has become an absolute necessity. one of the most important duties the states as well as the nation have to perform is the transformation of this vast stumpage area into forests and farms. practical and scientific reforestation should convert the lands unsuited for farming into forests, so that every acre would produce revenue and furnish some necessity of life. the dry season of has particularly emphasized another important duty in this connection, and that is the protection of our forests and settlers from fires. it is a well known fact that enough timber has been destroyed by fire within the last four months to pay for the adequate protection of all our forests for a period of ten years or more, not to mention the great loss of human life, which in itself imposes upon states and nation the duty of protection. this congress should be instrumental in stirring public sentiment to such an extent that the various legislatures and the congress will take immediate steps to stop this needless and expensive waste. since mineral wealth is exhaustible, it follows that the interest of the people in this important resource should be guarded against the encroachments of greed with the utmost care. minnesota furnishes now one-half of all the iron-ore in the united states, and one-fourth of that of the world, exporting this year about , , tons. it is estimated that not less than , , , tons of ore has been definitely located, and that the volume of the undeveloped properties is enormous. the state is the owner of very large quantities of ore, and the income from this source alone will increase the state school fund by at least $ , , . no section of our country could profit more by water transportation than that tributary to this great mineral wealth. the canalization of the mississippi river system with its , miles of streams would by cheap transportation bring together the coal fields of the central interior with the iron ore of the north, and produce in the mississippi valley the greatest iron and steel industries of the world, besides opening up the greatest agricultural and industrial sections to the transportation facilities of the panama canal. no commercial nation can long retain supremacy unless it has unlimited supplies of cheap heat and power. in the north-central border states are located peat deposits that should furnish cheap heat and power for untold generations, minnesota alone possessing more than , , acres; and as the source of the three great watersheds of the country, with an elevation of about , feet over sea and gulf level, there is an abundance of water-power to turn the wheels of manufacture and commerce. time will not permit any consideration of the strictly human side of conservation. we have saved millions of dollars annually by guarding against plant and animal disease, and are just beginning to take note of the untold millions wasted every month through neglect of preventable and curable disease, impure foods, defective sanitation and health inspection in homes and schools, unsuitable playgrounds for children, and the lack of safeguards against railway, mine and factory accidents, all of which come properly within the conservation scope. the splendid progress made by minnesota and other states merely emphasizes the importance of the conservation movement. warned by the decay of older nations, we must act before the crisis of exhausted natural resources reaches our nation and commonwealths. indeed, warned by signs that are only too plain in our own midst, we must take decisive action without delay. fortunately, we have passed the pioneer stage of development. our nation and commonwealths have all experienced many of the disasters resulting from the skimming of natural resources. having discovered the vast mines of wealth which surround us everywhere, we must now and forever determine that ignorance, selfishness, and greed shall no longer control our governments and exhaust our resources. (great applause and cheers) the problems before us are not merely of tremendous importance, but they are also difficult as to solution. they frequently involve sharply conflicting claims and interests as between the nation and the various commonwealths. every state as well as the nation itself should have a distinct and separate department empowered to deal with all these problems. it matters but little how it should be designated, though it would serve all purposes best to be known as a conservation commission. but it is of vital importance that the agency should be given sufficient authority and funds, so as to enlist the strongest and best men in the conservation service. that such commissions would have sufficient work, and that from an economic standpoint they would constitute good investments, there is and can be no question. minnesota, as a distinctly progressive state and a recognized leader in the conservation movement, heartily welcomes this congress with its noted guests and speakers. we have the special honor of entertaining and hearing the three truly great men who have contributed so much to the actual achievements of the conservation movement, and they are the three most distinguished guests of this congress, president taft (applause and the chautauqua salute), colonel roosevelt (applause and cheers), and james j. hill. minnesota appreciates this honor and will prove herself worthy thereof. as her chief executive, i earnestly hope that the deliberations of this congress may bring results far beyond our hopes or expectations. i am intensely interested in the conservation of our resources, and will use all my efforts in securing and enforcing the best possible legislation, believing firmly that the conservation movement, as here outlined, will promote the general public welfare in a far greater degree than any other, and that it is destined to mark the twentieth century as an era of the greatest industrial achievement for the benefit of all mankind. the people of minnesota feel keenly their duties and responsibilities with reference to their great heritage of unsurpassed natural resources, and will continue as leaders in the only movement that can insure the perpetuation of our country as the greatest agricultural, industrial and commercial nation in the world. on their behalf, i welcome you to the state. i thank you. (applause) * * * * * president baker--it is now my pleasure to call upon his honor, mayor herbert e. keller, who will welcome you on behalf of the great city of saint paul. (great applause and cheers) mayor keller--mr president, delegates to the second national conservation congress, and guests: upon me, as chief executive of the city where this body will carry on its labors, the honor of welcoming you devolves. it is a great privilege and pleasure to discharge this duty, and yet my greeting can but inadequately convey to you the appreciation felt by all saint paul at being selected as the scene of this great congress, whose deliberations mark the commencement of a new epoch in the history of our country. (applause) the conservation to and by ourselves as trustees, and the dedication and perpetuation to our children and our children's children as beneficiaries, of the tremendous natural resources of our country is a duty and trust too sacred and too imperative to be disregarded or lightly considered, once the situation stands revealed in its true light. it is purely and simply a proposition of the greatest good for the greatest number, and the sound judgment of a great people, with the patriotism and unselfish devotion to duty of the founders of our country ever before them, must and shall consider the greatest number to be the countless millions of population to follow after us, and to whom must be handed down a heritage not diminished or impoverished by us, the temporary executors. we may be likened to children turned loose in some vast midas treasurehouse and told to go where we would and take what we pleased. a knock at the doors of congress, a state legislature, or a city council, gives the magical "open sesame!" and behold! the lavishing on some private interest or individual of a great national or state property or municipal right or franchise! the nation's bounty and generosity has been limitless, for the entire previous history of the whole world provides no precedent for a guide. but, fortunately, thoughtful minds began to work, awakened to what was being done, and the result is the present all-pervasive sentiment and determination to economize, to check improvidence and waste, and to establish a policy whereby future generations, as well as the present, may have equal opportunities to enjoy our natural benefits and advantages; and conservation is now more than a mere issue: it is an assured, established, sane and universal desire to preserve and perpetuate for ourselves and posterity the treasures of our country. and so i bid you welcome to the city of saint paul. may your labors be fruitful of great good. i know that your stay with us will be enjoyable. our city limits may be somewhat circumscribed for the immense crowds here this week, but our hospitality and good wishes are as limitless as the ocean. (applause) * * * * * president baker--fellow delegates, i am sure we all extend to his honor, mayor keller, a hearty vote of thanks for what he has done in preparing for this congress. and now comes a privilege of which i am very proud--as a southern man all my life--that of presenting to you the president of this great nation. (great applause and cheers, the audience rising) address by the president of the united states _ladies and gentlemen_: before beginning my formal address, i should like to extend to the president and the managers of this congress, to governor eberhart, and to the mayor of the city, my sincere and cordial thanks for the opportunity to come here and address this magnificent audience, and to reach the people of the united states on a subject of the utmost interest to them and to every patriot. (applause) conservation, as an economic and political term, has come to mean the preservation of our natural resources for economical use, so as to secure the greatest good to the greatest number. in the development of this country, in the hardships of the pioneer, in the energy of the settler, in the anxiety of the investor for quick returns, there was very little time, opportunity, or desire to prevent waste of those resources supplied by nature which could not be quickly transmuted into money; while the investment of capital was so great a desideratum that the people as a community exercised little or no care to prevent the transfer of absolute ownership of many of the valuable natural resources to private individuals, without retaining some kind of control of their use. the impulse of the whole new community was to encourage the coming of population, the increase of settlement, and the opening up of business; and he who demurred in the slightest degree to any step which promised additional development of the idle resources at hand was regarded as a traitor to his neighbors and an obstructor to public progress. but now that the communities have become old, now that the flush of enthusiastic expansion has died away, now that the would-be pioneers have come to realize that all the richest lands in the country have been taken up, we have perceived the necessity for a change of policy in the disposition of our natural resources so as to prevent the continuance of the waste which has characterized our phenomenal growth in the past. today we desire to restrict and retain under public control the acquisition and use by the capitalists of our natural resources. the danger to the state and to the people at large from the waste and dissipation of our national wealth is not one which quickly impresses itself on the people of the older communities, because its most obvious instances do not occur in their neighborhood, while in the newer part of the country the sympathy with expansion and development is so strong that the danger is scoffed at or ignored. among scientific men and thoughtful observers, however, the danger has always been present; but it needed some one to bring home the crying need for a remedy of this evil so as to impress itself on the public mind and lead to the formation of public opinion and action by the representatives of the people. theodore roosevelt (great and prolonged applause) took up the task in the last two years of his second administration, and well did he perform it. (great and prolonged applause) as president of the united states i have, as it were, inherited this policy, and i rejoice in my heritage (great applause). i prize my high opportunity to do all that an executive can do to help a great people to realize a great national ambition; for conservation _is_ national. it affects every man of us, every woman, every child. what i can do in the cause i shall do, not as president of a party, but as president of the whole people (enthusiastic applause and cheers). conservation is not a question of politics, or of factions, or of persons. it is a question that affects the vital welfare of all of us--of our children and our children's children. i urge that no good can come from meetings of this sort unless we ascribe to those who take part in them, and who are apparently striving worthily in the cause, all proper motives (applause), and unless we judiciously consider every measure or method proposed with a view to its effectiveness in achieving our common purpose, and wholly without regard to who proposes it or who will claim credit for its adoption (great applause). the problems are of very great difficulty, and call for the calmest consideration and clearest foresight. many of the questions presented have phases that are new in this country, and it is possible that in their solution we may have to attempt first one way and then another. what i wish to emphasize, however, is that a satisfactory conclusion can only be reached promptly if we avoid acrimony, imputations of bad faith and political controversy (cries of "hear, hear," and great applause). the public domain of the government of the united states, including all the cessions from those of the thirteen states that made cessions to the united states, and including alaska, amounts in all to about , , , acres. of this there is left as purely government property outside of alaska something like , , acres. of this the national forest reserves in the united states proper embrace , , acres. the rest is largely mountain or arid country, offering some opportunity for agriculture by dry farming and by reclamation, and containing metals as well as coal, phosphates, oils, and natural gas. then the government owns many tracts of land lying along the margins of streams that have water-power, the use of which is necessary in the conversion of the power into electricity and its transmission. i shall divide my discussion under the heads of ( ) agricultural lands; ( ) mineral lands--that is, lands containing metalliferous minerals; ( ) forest lands; ( ) coal lands; ( ) oil and gas lands; and ( ) phosphate lands. i feel that it will conduce to a better understanding of the problems presented if i take up each class and describe, even at the risk of tedium, _first_, what has been done by the last administration and the present one in respect to each kind of land; _second_, what laws at present govern its disposition; _third_, what was done by the present congress in the matter; and _fourth_, the statutory changes proposed in the interest of conservation. agricultural lands our land laws for the entry of agricultural lands are as follows: the original homestead law, with the requirements of residence and cultivation for five years, much more strictly enforced now than ever before. the enlarged homestead act, applying to non-irrigable lands only, requiring five years' residence and continuous cultivation of one-fourth of the area. the desert-land act, which requires on the part of the purchaser the ownership of a water-right and thorough reclamation of the land by irrigation, and the payment of $ . per acre. the donation or carey act, under which the state selects the land and provides for its reclamation, and the title vests in the settler who resides upon the land and cultivates it and pays the cost of the reclamation. the national reclamation homestead law, requiring five years' residence and cultivation by the settler on the land irrigated by the government, and payment by him to the government of the cost of the reclamation. there are other acts, but not of sufficient general importance to call for mention unless it is the stone and timber act, under which every individual, once in his lifetime, may acquire acres of land, if it has valuable timber on it or valuable stone, by paying the price of not less than $ . per acre, fixed after examination of the stone or timber by a government appraiser. in times past, a great deal of fraud has been perpetrated in the acquisition of lands under this act, but it is now being much more strictly enforced, and the entries made are so few in number that it seems to serve no useful purpose and ought to be repealed. (applause) the present congress passed a bill of great importance, severing the ownership of coal by the government in the ground from the surface and permitting homestead entries upon the surface of the land, which, when perfected, gives the settler the right to farm the surface, while the coal beneath the surface is retained in ownership by the government and may be disposed of by it under other laws. there is no crying need for radical reform in the methods of disposing of what are really agricultural lands. the present laws have worked well. the enlarged homestead law has encouraged the successful farming of lands in the semi-arid regions. of course the teachings of the agricultural department as to how these sub-arid lands may be treated and the soil preserved for useful culture are of the very essence of conservation. then the conservation of agricultural lands is shown in the reclamation of arid lands by irrigation, and i should devote a few words to what the government has done and is doing in this regard. by the reclamation act a fund has been created of the proceeds of the public lands of the united states with which to construct works for storing great bodies of water at proper altitudes from which, by a suitable system of canals and ditches, the water is to be distributed over the arid and sub-arid lands of the government to be sold to settlers at a price sufficient to pay for the improvements. primarily the projects are and must be for the improvement of public lands. incidentally, where private land is also within the reach of the water supply, the furnishing at cost of operation of this water to private owners by the government is held by the federal court of appeals not to be a usurpation of power; but certainly this ought not to be done except from surplus water not needed for government land. about thirty projects have been set on foot, distributed through the public-land states, in accordance with the statute, by which allotments from the reclamation fund are required to be, as nearly as practicable, in proportion to the proceeds from the sale of the public lands in the respective states. the total sum already accumulated in the reclamation fund is $ , , . , and of that all but $ , , . has been expended. it became very clear to congress at its last session, from the statements made by experts, that these thirty projects could not be promptly completed with the balance remaining on hand, or with the funds likely to accrue in the near future. it was found, moreover, that there are many settlers who have been led into taking up lands with the hope and understanding of having water furnished in a short time, who are left in a most distressing situation. i recommended to congress that authority be given to the secretary of the interior to issue bonds in anticipation of the assured earnings by the projects, so that the projects, worthy and feasible, might be promptly completed and the settlers might be relieved from their present inconvenience and hardship (applause). in authorizing the issue of these bonds, congress limited the application of their proceeds to those projects which a board of army engineers, to be appointed by the president, should examine and determine to be feasible and worthy of completion. the board has been appointed, and soon will make its report. suggestions have been made that the united states ought to aid in the drainage of swamp lands belonging to the states or private owners, because, if drained, they would be exceedingly valuable for agriculture and contribute to the general welfare by extending the area of cultivation. i deprecate the agitation in favor of such legislation. it is inviting the general government into contribution from its treasury toward enterprises that should be conducted either by private capital or at the instance of the state (applause). in these days there is a disposition to look too much to the federal government for everything (applause). i am liberal in the construction of the constitution with reference to federal power (applause); but i am firmly convinced that the only safe course for us to pursue is to hold fast to the limitations of the constitution, and to regard as sacred the powers of the states (great applause and cheers). we have made wonderful progress, and at the same time have preserved with judicious exactness the restrictions of the constitution. there is an easy way in which the constitution can be violated by congress without judicial inhibition, to-wit, by appropriations from the national treasury for unconstitutional purposes. it will be a sorry day for this country if the time ever comes when our fundamental compact shall be habitually disregarded in this manner. (applause) mineral lands by mineral lands, i mean those lands bearing metals, or what are called metalliferous minerals. the rules of ownership and disposition of these lands were first fixed by custom in the west, and then were embodied in the law, and they have worked, on the whole, so fairly and well that i do not think it is wise now to attempt to change or better them. the apex theory of tracing title to a lode has led to much litigation and dispute, and ought not to have become the law, but it is so fixed and understood now that the benefit to be gained by a change is altogether outweighed by the inconvenience that would attend the introduction of a new system. so too, the proposition for the government to lease such mineral lands and deposits and to impose royalties might have been, in the beginning, a good thing, but now that most of the mineral land has been otherwise disposed of--i do not refer here to coal land or gas land or oil land or phosphate land--it would hardly be worth while to assume the embarrassments of a radical change. forest lands nothing can be more important in the matter of conservation than the treatment of our forest lands. it was probably the ruthless destruction of forests in the older states that first called attention to the necessity for a halt in the waste of our resources. this was recognized by congress by an act authorizing the executive to reserve from entry and set aside public timber lands as national forests. speaking generally, there has been reserved of the existing forests about percent of all the timber lands of the government. within these forests (including , , acres in two forests in alaska) are , , acres, of which , , acres are in the united states proper and include within their boundaries something like , , acres that belong to the states or to private individuals. we have, then, excluding alaskan forests, a total of about , , acres of forests belonging to the government, which are being treated in accord with the principles of scientific forestry. the law now prohibits the reservation of any more forest lands in oregon, washington, idaho, montana, colorado and wyoming, except by act of congress. i am informed by the department of agriculture that the government owns other tracts of timber lands in these states which should be included in the forest reserves. i expect to recommend to congress that the limitation herein imposed shall be repealed (applause). in the present forest reserves there are lands which are not properly forest land, and which ought to be subject to homestead entry. this has caused some local irritation. we are carefully eliminating such lands from forest reserves or, where their elimination is not practicable, listing them for entry under the forest homestead act. congress ought to trust the executive to use the power of reservation only with respect to land covered by timber or which will be useful in the plan of reforestation (applause). i am in favor of each branch of the government trusting the good faith of the other (applause). during the present administration, , , acres of land, largely non-timbered, have been excluded from forest reserves, and , , acres of land, principally valuable for forest purposes, have been included in forest reserves, making a reduction in forest reserves of non-timbered land amounting to , , acres. but had we had the opportunity to include reserves in the forbidden states, the balance would have been otherwise. the bureau of forestry since its creation has initiated reforestation on , acres. a great deal of the forest land is available for grazing. during the past year the grazing lessees numbered , , and they pastured upon the forest reserves , , cattle, , horses, and , , sheep, for which the government received $ , --a decrease from the preceding year of $ , , due to the fact that no money was collected or received for grazing on the non-timbered land eliminated from the forest reserve. another source of profit in the forestry is the receipts for timber sold. this year they amounted to $ , , , an increase of $ , over the receipts of last year. this increase is due to improvement in transportation to market, and to the greater facility with which the timber can be reached. the government timber in this country amounts to only one-fourth of all the timber, the rest being in private ownership. only three percent of that which is in private ownership is looked after properly and treated according to modern rules of forestry (applause). the usual destructive waste and neglect continue in the remainder of the forests owned by private persons and corporations. it is estimated that fire alone destroys $ , , worth of timber a year. the management of forests not on public land is beyond the jurisdiction of the federal government. if anything can be done by law it must be done by the state legislatures. i believe that it is within their constitutional power to require the enforcement of regulations, in the general public interest, as to fire and other causes of waste in the management of forests owned by private individuals and corporations. (applause) exactly how far these regulations can go and remain consistent with the rights of private ownership, it is not necessary to discuss; but i call attention to the fact that a very important part of conservation must always fall upon the state legislatures, and that they would better be up and doing if they would save the waste and denudation and destruction through private greed or accidental fires that have made barren many square miles of the older states. (great applause) i have shown sufficiently the conditions as to federal forestry to indicate that no further legislation is needed at the moment except an increase in the fire protection to national forests and an act vesting the executive with full power to make forest reservations in every state where government land is timber-covered, or where the land is needed for forestry purposes. other land withdrawals when president roosevelt became fully advised of the necessity for the change in our disposition of public lands, especially those containing coal, oil, gas, phosphates, or water-power sites, he began the exercise of the power of withdrawal by executive order of lands subject by law to homestead and the other methods of entering for agricultural lands. the precedent he set in this matter was followed by the present administration. doubt had been expressed in some quarters as to the power in the executive to make such withdrawals. the confusion and injustice likely to arise if the courts were to deny the power led me to appeal to congress to give the president the express power (applause). congress has complied. the law, as passed, does not expressly validate or confirm previous withdrawals, and therefore, as soon as the new law was passed, i, myself, confirmed all the withdrawals which had theretofore been made by both administrations by making them over again (great applause). the power of withdrawal is a most useful one, and i do not think it is likely to be abused. coal lands the next subject, and one of the most important for our consideration, is the disposition of the coal lands in the united states and in alaska. first, as to those in the united states. at the beginning of this administration there were classified coal lands amounting to , , acres, and there were withdrawn from entry for purposes of classification , , acres. since that time there has been withdrawn by my order from entry for classification , , acres, making a total withdrawal of , , acres (applause). meantime, of the acres thus withdrawn, , , have been classified and found not to contain coal, and have been restored to agricultural entry, and , , acres have been classified as coal lands; while , , acres remain withdrawn from entry and await classification. in addition, , acres have been classified as coal lands without prior withdrawal, thus increasing the classified coal lands to , , acres. under the laws providing for the disposition of coal lands in the united states, the minimum price at which lands are permitted to be sold is $ an acre; but the secretary of the interior has the power to fix a maximum price and to sell at that price. by the first regulations governing appraisal, approved april , , the minimum was $ , as provided by law, and the maximum was $ , and the highest price actually placed upon any land sold was $ . under the new regulations, adopted april , , the maximum price was increased to $ except in regions where there are large mines, where no maximum limit is fixed and the price is determined by the estimated tons of coal to the acre. the highest price fixed for any land under this regulation has been $ per acre. the appraised value of the lands classified as coal lands and valued under the new and old regulations is shown to be as follows: , , acres valued under the old regulation at $ , , --an average of $ an acre--and , , acres classified and valued under the new regulation at $ , , , or a total of , , acres valued at $ , , . for the year ending march , , coal entries were made, embracing an area of , acres, which sold for $ , ; for the year ending march , , there were entries, embracing an area of , acres, which sold for $ , , and down to august, , there were but entries, with an area of , acres which sold for $ , ; making a disposition of coal lands in the last two years of about , acres for $ , , . the present congress, as already said, has separated the surface of coal lands either classified or withdrawn to be classified from the coal beneath, so as to permit at all times homestead entries upon the surface of lands useful for agriculture, and to reserve the ownership in the coal to the government. the question which remains to be considered is whether the existing law for the sale of the coal in the ground should continue in force or be repealed and a new method of disposition adopted. under the present law the absolute title in the coal beneath the surface passes to the grantee of the government. the price fixed is upon an estimated amount of the tons of coal per acre beneath the surface, and the prices are fixed so that the earnings will only be a reasonable profit upon the amount paid and the investment necessary. but, of course, this is more or less guesswork, and the government parts with the ownership of the coal in the ground absolutely. authorities in the geological survey estimate that in the united states today there is a supply of about three thousand billion tons of coal, and that of this one-third, or about one thousand billion, are in the public domain. of course, the other two thousand billion are within private ownership and under no more control as to the use or the prices at which the coal may be sold than any other private property. if the government leases the coal lands and acts as any landlord would, and imposes conditions in its leases like those which are now imposed by the owners in fee of coal mines in the various coal regions of the east, then it would retain over the disposition of the coal deposits a choice as to the assignee of the lease, a power of resuming possession at the end of the term of the lease, or of readjusting terms at fixed periods of the lease, which might easily be framed to enable it to exercise a limited but effective control in the disposition and sale of the coal to the public (applause). it has been urged that the leasing system has never been adopted in this country, and that its adoption would largely interfere with the investment of capital and the proper development and opening up of coal resources. i venture to differ entirely from this view (applause). my investigations show that many owners of mining property of this country do not mine it themselves, and do not invest their money in the plants necessary for the mining, but they lease their properties for a term of years varying from twenty to thirty and forty years, under conditions requiring the erection of a proper plant and the investment of a certain amount of money in the development of the mines, and fixing a rental and a royalty, sometimes an absolute figure and sometimes one proportioned to the market value of the coal. under this latter method the owner of a mine shares in the prosperity of his lessees when coal is high and the profits good, and also shares to the same extent in their disappointment when the price of coal falls. i have looked with some care into a report made at the instance of president roosevelt upon the disposition of coal lands in australia, tasmania, and new zealand. these are peculiarly mining countries, and their experience ought to be most valuable. in all these countries the method for the disposition and opening of coal mines originally owned by the government is by granting a leasehold, and not by granting an absolute title. the terms of the leases run all the way from twenty to fifty years while the amount of land which may be leased to any individual there is from acres to , acres. it appears that a full examination was made and the opinions of all the leading experts on the subject were solicited and given, and that with one accord they approved in all respects the leasing system (applause). its success is abundantly shown. it is possible that at first considerable latitude will have to be given to the executive in drafting these forms of lease, but as soon as experiment shall show which is the most workable and practicable, its use should be provided for specifically by statute. the question as to how great an area ought to be included in a lease to one individual or corporation is not free from difficulty; but in view of the fact that the government retains control as owner, i think there might be some liberality in the amount leased, and that , acres would not be too great a maximum. by the opportunity to register the terms upon which the coal shall be held by the tenant, either at the end of each lease or at periods during the term, the government may secure the benefit of sharing in the increased price of coal and the additional profit made by the tenant. by imposing conditions in respect to the character of work to be done in the mine, the government may control the character of the development of the mine and the treatment of employees with reference to safety (applause). by denying the right to transfer the lease except by written permission of government authorities, it may withhold the needed consent when it is proposed to transfer the leasehold to persons interested in establishing a monopoly of coal production in any state or neighborhood (applause). as one-third of all the coal supply is held by the government, it seems wise that it should retain such control over the mining and the sale as the relation of lessor to lessee furnishes. the change from the absolute grant to the leasing system will involve a good deal of trouble in the outset, and the training of experts in the matter of making proper leases; but the change will be a good one and can be made. the change is in the interest of conservation, and i am glad to approve it. (great applause) alaska coal lands the investigations of the geological survey show that the coal properties in alaska cover about , square miles, and that there are known to be available about fifteen billion tons. this is, however, an underestimate of the coal in alaska, because further developments will probably increase this amount many times; but we can say with considerable certainty that there are two fields on the pacific slope which can be reached by railways at a reasonable cost from deep water--in one case of about miles and in the other case of about --which will afford certainly six billion tons of coal, more than half of which is of a very high grade of bituminous and of anthracite. it is estimated to be worth, in the ground, one-half cent a ton, which makes its value per acre from $ to $ . the coking-coal lands of pennsylvania are worth from $ to $ , an acre, while other appalachian fields are worth from $ to $ an acre, and the fields in the central states from $ to $ , an acre, and in the rocky mountains from $ to $ an acre. the demand for coal on the pacific coast is for about , , tons a year. it would encounter the competition of cheap fuel oil, of which the equivalent of , , tons of coal a year is used there. it is estimated that the coal could be laid down at seattle or san francisco, a high-grade bituminous at $ a ton, and anthracite at $ or $ a ton. the price of coal on the pacific slope varies greatly from time to time in the year and from year to year--from $ to $ a ton. with a regular coal supply established, the expert of the geological survey, mr brooks, who has made a report on the subject, does not think there would be an excessive profit in the alaska coal mining because the price at which the coal could be sold would be considerably lowered by competition from these fields and by the presence of crude fuel oil. the history of the laws affecting the disposition of alaska coal lands shows them to need amendment badly. speaking of them, mr brooks says: the first act, passed june , , simply extended to alaska the provisions of the coal lands in the united states. the law was ineffective, for it provided that only subdivided lands could be taken up and there were no land surveys in alaska. i do not like to criticise a coordinate branch of the government. the executive makes mistakes, and so does congress, but i do not think it reflects greatly on the intense interest that congress had in alaska and her development that they should go to work and pass a law affecting the coal lands in alaska that didn't operate there at all [applause]. the matter was rectified by the act of april , , which permitted unsurveyed lands to be entered and the surveys to be made at the expense of the entrymen. unfortunately the law provided that only tracts of acres could be taken up, and no recognition was given to the fact that it was impracticable to develop an isolated coal field requiring the expenditure of a large amount of money by such small communities. many claims were staked, however, and surveys were made for patents. it was recognized by everyone familiar with the conditions that after patent was obtained these claims would be combined in tracts large enough to assure successful mining operation. no one experienced in mining would, of course, consider it feasible to open a coal field on a basis of a single -acre tract. the claims for the most part were handled in groups, for which one agent represented the several different owners. unfortunately a strict interpretation of the statute raised the question whether even a tacit understanding between claim-owners to combine after patents had been obtained was not illegal. remedial legislation was sought and enacted in the statute of may , . this law permitted the consolidation of claims staked previous to november , , in tracts of , acres. one clause of this law invalidated the title if any individual or corporation at any time in the future owned any interest whatsoever, directly or indirectly, in more than one tract. the purpose of this clause was to prevent the monopolization of coal fields. its immediate effect was to discourage capital. it was felt by many that this clause might lead to forfeiture of title through the accidents of inheritance, or might even be used by the unscrupulous in blackmail. it would appear that land taken up under this law might at any time be forfeited to the government through the action of any individual, who, innocently or otherwise, obtained interest in more than one coal company. such a title was felt to be too insecure to warrant the large investments needed for mining development. the net result of all this is that no titles to coal lands have been passed. on november , , president roosevelt issued an executive order withdrawing all coal lands from location and entry in alaska. on may , , he modified the order so as to permit valid locations made prior to the withdrawal on november , , to proceed to entry and patent. prior to that date some claims had been filed, most of them said to be illegal because either made fraudulently by dummy entrymen in the interest of one individual or corporation, or because of agreements made prior to location between the applicants to cooperate in developing the lands. there are thirty-three claims for acres each, known as the "cunningham claims," which are said to be valid on the ground that they were made by an attorney for thirty-three different and bona fide claimants who, as alleged, paid their money and took proper steps to locate their entries and protect them. the representatives of the government, on the other hand, in the hearings before the land office have attacked the validity of these cunningham claims on the ground that prior to their location there was an understanding between the claimants to pool their claims after they had been perfected and unite them in one company. the trend of decision seems to show that such an agreement would invalidate the claims, although under the subsequent law of may , , the consolidation of such claims was permitted, _after_ location and entry, in tracts of , acres. it would be, of course, improper for me to intimate what the result of the issue as to the cunningham and other alaska claims is likely to be, but it ought to be distinctly understood that no private claims for alaska coal lands have as yet been allowed or perfected, and also that whatever the result as to pending claims, the existing coal-land laws of alaska are most unsatisfactory and should be radically amended (applause). to begin with, the purchase price of the land is a flat rate of $ per acre, with no power to increase it beyond that, although, as we have seen, the estimate of the agent of the geological survey would carry up the maximum of value to $ an acre. in my judgment it is essential to the proper development of alaska that these coal lands should be opened, and that the pacific slope should be given the benefit of the comparatively cheap coal of fine quality which can be furnished at a reasonable price from these fields (great applause); but the public, through the government, ought certainly to retain a wise control and interest in these coal deposits (applause), and i think it may do so safely if congress will authorize the granting of leases, as already suggested for government coal lands in the united states, with provisions forbidding the transfer of the leases except with the consent of the government, thus preventing their acquisition by a combination or monopoly, and upon limitations as to the area to be included in any one lease to one individual, and at a certain moderate rental, with royalties upon the coal mined proportioned to the market value of the coal laid down either at seattle or at san francisco (applause). of course such leases should contain conditions requiring the erection of proper plants, the proper development by modern mining methods of the properties leased, and the use of every known and practical means and device for saving the life of the miners. the government of the united states has much to answer for in not having given proper attention to the government of alaska and the development of her resources for the benefit of all the people of the country. i would not force development at the expense of a present or future waste of resources; but the problem as to the disposition of the coal lands for present and future use can be wisely and safely settled in one session if congress gives it careful attention. (great applause) oil and gas lands in the last administration there were withdrawn from agricultural entry , , acres of supposed oil land in california, about , , acres in louisiana (of which only , acres were known to be vacant, unappropriated land), , acres in oregon, and , acres in wyoming, making a total of nearly , , acres. in september, , i directed that all public oil lands, whether then withdrawn or not, should be withheld from disposition pending congressional action, for the reason that the existing placer mining law, although made applicable to deposits of this character, is not suitable to such lands, and for the further reason that it seemed desirable to reserve certain fuel-oil deposits for the use of the american navy. accordingly the form of all existing withdrawals was changed, and new withdrawals, aggregating , , acres, were made, in arizona, california, colorado, new mexico, utah and wyoming. field examinations during the year showed that of the original withdrawals, , , acres were not valuable for oil, and they were restored for agricultural entry. meantime other withdrawals of public oil lands in these states were made, so that on july , , the outstanding withdrawals then amounted to , , acres. the needed oil and gas law is essentially a leasing law. in their natural occurrence oil and gas cannot be measured in terms of acres, like coal, and it follows that exclusive title to these products can normally be secured only after they reach the surface. oil should be disposed of as a commodity in terms of barrels of transportable product rather than in acres of real estate (applause). this is, of course, the reason for the practically universal adoption of the leasing system wherever oil land is in private ownership. the government thus would not be entering on an experiment, but simply putting into effect a plan successfully operated in private contracts. why should not the government as a land-owner deal directly with the oil producer rather than through the intervention of a middleman to whom the government gives title to the land? (applause) the principal underlying feature of such legislation should be the exercise of beneficial control rather than the collection of revenue. as not only the largest owner of oil lands, but as a prospective large consumer of oil by reason of the increasing use of fuel-oil by the navy, the federal government is directly concerned both in encouraging rational development and at the same time insuring the longest possible life to the oil supply. the royalty rates fixed by the government should neither exceed nor fall below the current rates. but much more important than revenue is the enforcement of regulations to conserve the public interest so that the inconvenience of the lessee shall specifically safeguard oil fields against the penalties from careless drilling and of production in excess of transportation facilities or of market requirement. one of the difficulties presented, especially in the california fields, is that the southern pacific railroad owns every other section of land in the oil fields, and in those fields the oil seems to be in a common reservoir, or series of reservoirs, communicating through the oil sands, so that the excessive draining of oil at one well, or on the railroad territory generally, would exhaust the oil in the government land. hence it is important that if the government is to have its share of the oil, it should begin the opening and development of wells on its own property. (laughter and applause) in view of the joint ownership which the government and the adjoining land-owners, like the southern pacific railroad, have in the oil reservoirs below the surface, it is a most interesting and intricate question, difficult of solution, but one which ought to address itself at once to the state law-makers, how far the state legislature might impose appropriate restrictions to secure an equitable enjoyment of the common reservoir, and to prevent waste and excessive drainage by the various owners having access to this reservoir (applause). it has been suggested, and i believe the suggestion to be a sound one, that permits be issued to a prospector for oil, giving him the right to prospect for two years over a certain tract of government land for the discovery of oil, the right to be evidenced by a license for which he pays a small sum. when the oil is discovered, then he acquires title to a certain tract, much in the same way as he would acquire title under a mining law. of course, if the system of leasing is adopted, then he would be given the benefit of a lease upon terms like that above suggested. what has been said in respect to oil applies also to government gas lands. under the proposed oil legislation, especially where the government oil lands embrace an entire oil field, as in many cases, prospectors, operators, consumers, and the public can be benefitted by the adoption of the leasing system. the prospector can be protected in the very expensive work that necessarily antedates discovery. the operator can be protected against impairment of productiveness of the wells which he has leased by reason of the control of drilling and pumping of other wells too closely adjacent or by the prevention of imperfect methods as employed by careless, ignorant or irresponsible operators in the same field, which result in the admission of water to the oil sand; while, of course, the consumer will profit by whatever benefits the prospector or operator receives in reducing the first cost of the oil. phosphate land phosphorus is one of the three essentials to plant growth, the other elements being nitrogen and potash. of these three, phosphorus is by all odds the greatest element in nature. it is easily extracted in useful form from the phosphate rock, and the united states contains the greatest known deposits of this rock in the world. they are found in wyoming, utah and florida, as well as in south carolina, georgia and tennessee. the government phosphate lands are confined to wyoming, utah and florida. prior to march , , there were four million acres withdrawn from agricultural entry on the ground that the land covered phosphate rock. since that time , , acres of the land thus withdrawn was found not to contain phosphate in profitable quantities, while , , acres was classified properly as phosphate land. during this administration there has been withdrawn and classified , acres, so that today there is classified as phosphate rock land , , acres. the rock is most important in the composition of fertilizers to improve the soil, and as the future is certain to create an enormous demand throughout this country for fertilization, the value to the public of such deposits as these can hardly be exaggerated. certainly with respect to these deposits a careful policy of conservation should be followed. half of the phosphate of the rock that is mined in private fields in the united states is now exported. as our farming methods grow better the demand for the phosphate will become greater, and it must be arranged so that the supply shall equal the needs of the country. it is uncertain whether the placer or lode law applies to the government phosphate rock. there is, therefore, a necessity for some definite and well-considered legislation on this subject, and in aid of such legislation all of the government lands known to contain valuable phosphate rock are now withdrawn from entry. a law that would provide a leasing system for the phosphate deposits, together with a provision for the separation of the surface and mineral rights as is already provided for in the case of coal, would seem to meet the need of promoting the development of these deposits and their utilization in the agricultural lands of the west. if it is thought desirable to discourage the exportation of phosphate rock and the saving of it for our own lands, this purpose could be accomplished by conditions in the lease granted by the government to its lessee. of course, under the constitution the government could not tax and could not prohibit the exportation of phosphate, but as proprietor and owner of the lands in which the phosphate is deposited it could impose conditions upon the kind of sales, whether foreign or domestic, which the lessee might make of the phosphate mined. (applause) the tonnage represented by the phosphate lands in government ownership is very great. but the lesson has been learned in the case of such lands as have passed into private ownership in south carolina, florida and tennessee, that the phosphate deposits there are in no sense inexhaustible. moreover, it is also well understood that in the process of mining phosphate, as it has been pursued, much of the lower grade of phosphate rock which will eventually all be needed has been wasted beyond recovery. such wasteful methods can easily be prevented, so far as the government land is concerned, by conditions inserted in the leases. water-power sites prior to march , , there had been, on the recommendation of the reclamation service, withdrawn from agricultural entry, because they were regarded as useful for power sites which ought not to be disposed of as agricultural lands, tracts amounting to about , , acres. the withdrawals were hastily made and included a great deal of land that was not useful for power sites. they were intended to include the power sites on twenty-nine rivers in nine states. since that time , , acres have been restored for settlement of the original , , , because they do not contain power sites; and meantime there have been newly withdrawn , , acres on vacant public land and , acres on entered public land, or a total of , , acres. these withdrawals made from time to time cover all the power sites included in the first withdrawals, and many more, on rivers and in states. the disposition of these power sites involves one of the most difficult questions presented in carrying out practical conservation. the forest service, under a power found in the statute, has leased a number of these power sites in forest reserves by revocable leases, but no such power exists with respect to power sites that are not located within forest reserves; and the revocable system of leasing is, of course, not a satisfactory one for the purpose of inviting the capital needed to put in proper plants for the transmission of power. the statute of , with its amendments, permits the secretary of the interior to grant perpetual easements or rights-of-way from water sources over public lands for the primary purpose of irrigation and such electrical current as may be incidentally developed, but no grant can be made under this statute to concerns whose primary purpose is generating and handling electricity. the statute of authorizes the secretary of the interior to issue revocable permits over the public lands to electrical power companies, but this statute is woefully inadequate because it does not authorize the collection of a charge or fix a term of years. capital is slow to invest in an enterprise founded upon a permit revocable at will. the subject is one that calls for new legislation. it has been thought that there was danger of combination to obtain possession of all the power sites and to unite them under one control. whatever the evidence of this, or lack of it, at present we have had enough experience to know that combination would be profitable, and the control of a great number of power sites would enable the holders or owners to raise the price of power at will within certain sections; and the temptation would promptly attract investors, and the danger of monopoly would not be a remote one. however this may be, it is the plain duty of the government to see to it that in the utilization and development of all this immense amount of water-power, conditions shall be imposed that will prevent monopoly, and will prevent extortionate charges which are the accompaniment of monopoly. the difficulty of adjusting the matter is accentuated by the relation of the power sites to the water, the fall and flow of which create the power. in the states where these sites are, the riparian owner does not control or own the power in the water which flows past his land. that power is under the control and within the grant of the state, and generally the rule is that the first user is entitled to the enjoyment. now, the possession of the bank or water-power site over which the water is to be conveyed in order to make the power useful, gives to its owner an advantage and a certain kind of control over the use of the water-power, and it is proposed that the government in dealing with its own lands should use this advantage and lease lands for power sites to those who would develop the power, and impose conditions on the leasehold with reference to the reasonableness of the rates at which the power, when transmuted, is to be furnished to the public, and forbidding the union of the particular power with a combination of others made for the purpose of monopoly by forbidding assignment of the lease save by consent of the government (applause). serious difficulties are anticipated by some in such an attempt on the part of the general government, because of the sovereign control of the state over the water-power in its natural condition, and the mere proprietorship of the government in the riparian lands. it is contended that through its mere proprietary right in the site the central government has no power to attempt to exercise police jurisdiction with reference to how the water-power in a river owned and controlled by the state shall be used, and that it is a violation of the state's rights. i question the validity of this objection. the government may impose any conditions that it chooses in its lease of its own property, even though it may have the same purpose and in effect accomplish just what the state would accomplish by the exercise of its sovereignty. that is shown frequently in leases of houses containing a covenant against the use of the house for that which under the law of the state is an unlawful use; and nevertheless, no one has ever contended that that condition, though it be for the stricter enforcement of the state law, is without the power of the lessor as a proprietor of the land which he is leasing. there are those (and the director of the geological survey, mr smith, who has given a great deal of attention to this matter, is one of them) who insist that this matter of transmuting water-power into electricity which can be conveyed all over the country and across state lines, is a matter that ought to be retained by the general government, and that it should avail itself of the ownership of these power sites for the very purpose of coordinating in one general plan the power generated from these government-owned sites. on the other hand, it is contended that it would relieve a complicated situation if the control of the water-power site and the control of the water were vested in the same sovereignty and ownership, viz: the state, and then were disposed of for development to private lessees under the restrictions needed to preserve the interests of the public from the extortions and abuses of monopoly. therefore, bills have been introduced in congress providing that whenever the state authorities deem a water-power useful they may apply to the government of the united states for a grant to the state of the adjacent land for a water-power site, and that this grant from the federal government to the state shall contain a condition that the state shall never part with the title to the water-power site or the water-power, but shall lease it only for a term of years not exceeding fifty, with provisions in the lease by which the rental and the rates for which the power is furnished to the public shall be readjusted at periods less than the term of the lease, say every ten years. the argument is urged against this disposition of power sites that legislators and state authorities are more subject to corporate influence and control than would be the central government. in reply it is claimed that a readjustment of the terms of leasehold every ten years would secure to the public and the state just and equitable terms. then it is said that the state authorities are better able to understand the local need and what is a fair adjustment in the particular locality than would be the authorities at washington. it has been argued that after the federal government parts with title to a power site it cannot control the action of the state in fulfilling the conditions of the deed, to which it is answered that in the grant from the government there may be easily inserted a condition specifying the terms upon which the state may part with the temporary control of the water-power sites, and, indeed, the water-power, and providing for a forfeiture of the title to the water-power sites in case the condition is not performed; and giving to the president, in case of such violation of conditions, the power to declare forfeiture and to direct proceedings to restore to the central government the ownership of the power sites with all the improvements thereon, and that these conditions may be promptly enforced and the land and plants forfeited to the general government by suit of the united states against the state, which is permissible under the constitution (applause). and that by such a provision, _in terrorem_, the edict of states and of the legislatures in respect to these lands might be enforced through the general government. i do not express an opinion upon the controversy thus made or a preference as to the two methods of treating water-power sites. i shall submit the matter to congress with all the arguments, and urge that one or the other of the two plans be promptly adopted. * * * * * at the risk of wearying my audience i have attempted to state as succinctly as may be the questions of conservation as they apply to the public domain of the government, the conditions to which they apply, and the proposed solution of them. in the outset i alluded to the fact that conservation had been made to include a great deal more than what i have discussed here. of course, as i have referred only to the public domain of the federal government, i have left untouched the wide field of conservation with respect to which a heavy responsibility rests upon the states and individuals as well. but i think it of the utmost importance that after the public attention has been roused to the necessity of a change in our general policy to prevent waste and a selfish appropriation to private and corporate purposes of what should be controlled for the public benefit, those who urge conservation shall feel the necessity of making clear how conservation can be practically carried out (applause), and shall propose specific methods and legal provisions and regulations to remedy actual adverse conditions (applause). i am bound to say that the time has come for a halt in general rhapsodies over conservation, making the word mean every known good in the world (applause), for, after the public attention has been roused, such appeals are of doubtful utility and do not direct the public to the specific course that the people should take, or have their legislators take, in order to promote the cause of conservation. the rousing of emotions on a subject like this, which has only dim outlines in the minds of the people affected, after a while ceases to be useful, and the whole movement will, if promoted on these lines, die for want of practical direction and of demonstration to the people that practical reforms are intended. (applause) i have referred to the course of the last administration and of the present one in making withdrawals of government lands from entry under homestead and other laws, and of congress in removing all doubt as to the validity of these withdrawals as a great step in the direction of practical conservation (applause). but this is only one of two necessary steps to effect what should be our purpose. it has produced a status quo and prevented waste and irrevocable disposition of the lands until the method for their proper disposition can be formulated, but it is of the utmost importance that such withdrawals should not be regarded as the final step in the course of conservation, and that the idea should not be allowed to spread that conservation is the tying up of the natural resources of the government for indefinite withholding from use, and the remission to remote generations to decide what ought to be done with these means of promoting present general human comfort and progress (great applause). for, if so, it is certain to arouse the greatest opposition to conservation as a cause, and if it were a correct expression of the purpose of conservationists it ought to arouse such opposition. (applause) real conservation involves wise, non-wasteful use in the present generation, with every possible means of preservation for succeeding generations; and though the problem to secure this end may be difficult, the burden is on the present generation promptly to solve it and not to run away from it as cowards, lest in the attempt to meet it we may make some mistakes (applause). as i have said elsewhere, the problem is how to save and how to utilize, how to conserve and still develop; for no sane person can contend that it is for the common good that nature's blessings should be stored only for unborn generations. (applause) i beg of you, therefore, in your deliberations and in your informal discussions, when men come forward to suggest evils that the promotion of conservation is to remedy, that you invite them to point out the specific evils and the specific remedies; that you invite them to come down to details in order that their discussions may flow into channels that shall be useful rather than into periods that shall be eloquent and entertaining without shedding real light on the subject (prolonged applause and cheers). the people should be shown exactly what is needed in order that they may make their representatives in congress and the state legislatures do their intelligent bidding. (great and prolonged applause) * * * * * president baker--the congress is now adjourned to reassemble at oclock this afternoon. _second session_ the congress was called to order by president baker at oclock p.m. president baker--it gives me a great deal of pleasure to announce that governor w. r. stubbs, of kansas, has kindly consented to preside at this session. ladies and gentlemen, governor stubbs. (applause) governor stubbs--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: i am very grateful for your liberal recognition. and i present to you a man who knows much about the laws pertaining to land in the united states, one better fitted to speak on this subject than any other, senator knute nelson, of minnesota. i take great pleasure in introducing him. (applause) senator nelson--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: i could not help thinking this forenoon as i looked at the magnificent audience how every delegate and visitor from abroad must conclude that in one respect conservation in minnesota has been a success--conservation of our prosperous and growing humanity. i am here to speak briefly of our public-land system, past and present, in the hope that we may derive some lessons from the mistakes of the past and have something to guide us in the future. i shall say little of conservation in general. my aim will be to draw attention to what i deem of importance for the legislative branch of the government to do in the future, and i shall do so only in general terms, seeking--on account of my position as chairman of the senate committee on public lands--to avoid all matters that will lead to controversy. as those know who have had experience in public affairs, particularly in legislation, all reforms are matters of compromise. legislation is largely experimental and those who are most progressive and advanced in seeking reforms for the future often find themselves handicapped by those who would make no change; and the result is oftentimes a compromise in which the reformers get only half a loaf. the natural resources of our country should be conserved by the individual, by the state, and by the federal government. for each there is an appropriate field. the farmer must conserve the resources of his farm; the state the resources of its lands, its forests and its waters; and the federal government the resources of its mines, its forests, and its lands with all their appurtenances. when the several forces act in harmony, beneficial results of a far-reaching and permanent value will be attained for the preservation and utilization of our resources. practical and beneficial conservation of natural resources on the part of the federal government and the state should include and provide for due and efficient utilization of the same for the benefit of the masses of the people. the mere conservation and retention of ownership, the mere securing of a larger price for the resource, may prove burdensome rather than a benefit to the public. the ultimate question is not so much how to hold and conserve as how to properly utilize our resources. the mere holding, or the mere securing of a higher price seems to me to be entirely futile (applause). the aim should not be so much to secure a higher price for the government as to secure lower price for the consumer and to prevent monopoly (applause). hence, in the disposal of a resource, care should be taken to prevent combination and monopoly in restraint of trade in respect to the same; and the right, as in the case of railway rates, to regulate the price to the consumer should be retained; in other words, care should be taken and provision should be made that the consumer can obtain the product of the resource at a fair and reasonable rate. to merely conserve and hold at a high price retards development and enables those who have already secured a large share of a resource to monopolize the market and to secure an exorbitant price for the product of the resource. (applause) the ultimate object of the conservation of a resource should be to utilize it for the best advantage of the consumer. true conservation means beneficial use--means utilization. * * * * * the close of the revolutionary war found our country with an empty treasury and a large public debt, but possessed of a large quantity of valuable public lands northwest of the ohio river and elsewhere, ceded by great britain, supplemented by a cession from virginia and some of the older states, from which were afterward carved great states, though the public domain was at that time regarded chiefly as an asset from which the government could obtain revenues for its wants and needs. the first general land law of a public nature for the disposal of our public lands was passed in . this law, after prescribing a system of surveying the public lands, substantially the same as has been since adhered to, provided for the sale of the lands at public auction to the highest bidder, partly for cash and partly on credit. by the act of the minimum price was fixed at $ an acre, and land not sold at public auction could be bought at private sale at that price. the act of abolished sales on credit and fixed the minimum price at $ . per acre, at which rate it has since remained. lands offered at public sale became known as "offered land," and if not sold at public sale could be obtained at private sale or entry at the minimum price. the result of this system was that, owing to the great scarcity of money in the country at that time among the masses of the people, large blocks of land were purchased by speculators and held by them indefinitely for an excessive profit, and the masses of the people--the settlers, the real home builders--had to purchase the land from these speculators instead of securing it from the government. the government got but scant return for its valuable public land. the chief profit was made by the middlemen, those speculators who bought it up in large blocks; they reaped a rich harvest. but in the midst of this system the settlers pressed on to the frontier. they were without money, but they settled on the public lands, squatted there without authority of law; and finally the government, to help these settlers, to relieve them and give them a little breathing time, in passed what was known as the general preemption law. under this law the head of a family, a widow, or a single person over twenty-one years of age who was a citizen or had declared his intention to become a citizen of the united states, could secure acres of public land by settling upon, improving and cultivating it, and by paying for and entering the same within from one to three years after settlement, the time of payment in each case depending on whether the land was offered, unoffered, or unsurveyed. this law (the preemption act of ) was clearly intended to help the pioneers and the settlers, and it proved of great advantage to them; but owing to the lax procedure that prevailed (under which a man could go on a preemption claim, make a few limited and pro forma improvements, and at the end of six months appear in the land office and prove up and have his final entry made and ultimately get a patent), the preemption law itself became a great instrument in the hands of speculators and land grabbers, and in consequence congress concluded to repeal the law. the law allowing lands to be secured at private entry was repealed in ; the law allowing public sales was repealed in , and the preemption law was also repealed the same year. these laws were repealed none too soon, because by that time they had got to be the instruments by which those who were seeking valuable coal lands, timber lands, and other lands would hire a lot of people to go and make preemption claims, and then, as soon as they obtained title, secure the title, whereby thousands and thousands of acres of the most valuable timber and mineral lands, coal lands, and other lands passed into the hands of speculators for little more than a dollar and a quarter an acre, and sometimes even less, for there were various kinds of scrip issued--agricultural college scrip and other scrip to which i will call attention later--put on the market and sold. that scrip would be used instead of money in paying for and entering land; and through it much valuable land passed into the hands of speculators at a cost of even less than one dollar an acre. you who have lived here have all observed that the low price at which the lumbermen secured timber in those early days under the preemption law, by cash entry, and under agricultural and other scrip, did not help much to get cheaper lumber. the result was to enable owners of large bodies of pine land to hold them indefinitely for the purpose of securing a higher price for their stumpage. in an act was passed "to encourage the growth of timber on the western prairies." the purpose of this act was laudable and had it resulted in supplying the prairies with timber the gift of the land would have been amply compensated for. but in its practical operations the law proved a failure. only a comparatively few of the many claims entered were ever successfully forested, or ever became real timber land. a large share of them were merely taken and held by speculators with no real purpose of complying with the law in respect to the planting, culture, and care of timber. claimants would secure these claims, enter them under the timber-culture law, make the first entry, and then hold them just as long as they could, waiting until some land-seeker came around, when they would tell him, "i have a timber claim here, and might relinquish it so you can take it as a homestead; how much will you give me for my relinquishment?" and for a time under this law there was a great speculation in the sale of what we call timber relinquishments. no timber was raised. speculators had held the land for four or five, maybe six, years as a timber claim. then when a real settler came along, why, for a consideration of one, two, three, four or five hundred dollars, or whatever the settler was able to pay, the holder would relinquish his timber claim to the government so that the real land-seeker could secure the same under the homestead law, or under the preemption law, while that was in force. in an act was passed giving to each state , acres of land for every senator and representative in congress for the purpose of establishing and maintaining agricultural and mechanical colleges. in states where there was a sufficient quantity of public lands the state was required to select the land from the public lands in the state, but in states where no such lands could be secured land scrip was issued in place of the land. this resulted in placing an enormous amount of land scrip on the market, which was sold by the state in many instances in bulk to speculators at a greatly reduced price, netting the states from fifty to one hundred cents per acre--perhaps the average did not exceed seventy-five cents per acre. the scrip could be used in entering land or in paying for land under the preemption and homestead laws at the rate of $ . an acre. so far as the states to which the scrip was issued were concerned the grant was a wasteful one. it would have been much wiser and better for the government to have appropriated $ . per acre in cash to the states instead of giving them the scrip, and reserving the lands which could be entered with the scrip for actual settlers under the homestead law. in addition to this college scrip, we have had from time to time various kinds of other scrip, chippewa half-breed scrip, sioux half-breed scrip, and supreme court scrip, and others that i cannot at this moment recall. most of this scrip, fortunately, is now about exhausted; very little of it is still afloat and at large. there was also what we called "soldiers' additional" scrip of which there was a great deal; a soldier could take a homestead of or or acres, and if he had no more in his homestead entry, he could take the residue and make up acres anywhere on the public lands of the united states, without residing on the land; and he could dispose of his interest by power of attorney, by which speculators succeeded in getting that. and the records of our soldiers' homes will show how land speculators have been searching among the veterans for this kind of scrip. why, i got a letter some years ago from a gentleman in missouri--i can't recall his name--reminding me of the fact that i had had a homestead; and he told me that i was entitled to forty acres more under my right, in addition to the acres, and that he was willing to buy the land of me. he had hunted up the records, and found a man by my name, but unfortunately the homestead and all the rest transpired and existed in wisconsin. in congress passed the so-called timber and stone act, originally limited to four western states, but by the act of extended to all the public-land states. under this law land unfit for cultivation and chiefly valuable for timber and stone could be secured in tracts of acres for each entry-man at a price of $ . per acre. under the law the purchaser is prohibited from buying the land on speculation or in the interest of any one but himself. on its face this law seems fair, harmless, and just, but in its practical operation it proved the means of a good deal of fraudulent land speculation. in the first instance, valuable agricultural land fit for agriculture was entered under the law on the theory that it was only good for the timber or stone on it. in the next place--and there was where the great iniquity occurred--speculators would hire men and women in different parts of the country to go and enter stone and timber claims, furnishing them money through outside friends, and then as soon as they had secured title get a transfer of the land to themselves by paying a bonus of one or two hundred and in some cases up to five hundred and a thousand dollars. why, i remember how, in a city not a thousand miles away from saint paul, one year some twenty-five or thirty school teachers entered stone and timber claims in the state of oregon! this law finally proved simply a source of speculation to the men who were trying to secure large bodies of timber; and under it a large share of the valuable timber lands now in private holdings were secured. the law should have been repealed immediately; but while the senate passed a bill repealing it some five or six years ago, the bill failed to pass in the house of representatives. since then the secretary of the interior has come to our relief to some extent. the stone and timber act said that this land could be sold at not less than $ . an acre; and up to the government had always treated that as the price, and never exacted any more. in the interior department adopted the rule of appraising the lands for the timber and stone on them and selling them at the appraised value, and the result of that policy has been to stop speculation in those kinds of lands. a very limited amount of timber and stone lands have been entered since for now it does not pay big lumber operators or land speculators to hire anybody to go and enter these lands because under this rule they have to pay pretty nearly what the land is worth. but while this administrative order has given us some relief, i am clearly of the opinion that the law should be entirely repealed to the end that we can make suitable provision for the disposal of our stone and timber land under more appropriate legislation and at a fairer rate, both to the purchaser and to the government. (applause) in congress passed the homestead law, with the general provisions of which most of you are familiar. this law makes a gift of acres to each settler and home-builder who will occupy, improve, and cultivate his claim for a period of five years. of all our public land laws this has, on the whole, been the most beneficent and productive of the best results. under its provisions hundreds of thousands of poor and industrious men and women have carved out happy homes for themselves and their children, relieved the pressure of labor in our large cities and great industrial centers, and rapidly laid the foundation for and built up great states in the middle and far west. judged by results, it is doubtful whether the government ever received a better return for any of its lands than it has received for these lands given as a free gift, under the homestead law, to our farmers and settlers. a happy, prosperous, and industrious rural population will ever prove to be the sheet-anchor of our industrial, social and political well-being, and will ever afford a solid foundation for the integrity and perpetuity of american institutions. the homestead law, with all its blessings, had one defect which has, to some extent, marred its usefulness. i refer to the privilege of commutation--the privilege of proving up and paying for the land at $ . per acre prior to the five-year period for final free entry. originally and for many years after the law was passed, the privilege of commutation could be exercised after the lapse of six months from date of entry. this period was extended to fourteen months some years ago and this fourteen months' period is still the law. the vice of allowing a homestead entry to be commuted as stated, consists in opening the door to the speculator, who, in the space of fourteen months can secure title to the land on scant and temporary improvements and then move away and hold the land for merely speculative purposes, leaving the surrounding settlers to enhance the value of his land by their continuing and permanent improvements. when they have erected dwellings, barns, school houses, and churches, and have laid out roads and organized school districts, the petty speculator and commutator, who has done nothing to build up the country, stands ready to sell his land at a greatly enhanced price to an actual home-builder and settler. the commutation privilege should not have been included in the law, and should be repealed, in my opinion, as soon as practicable. none but permanent and bona fide settlers should be permitted to secure land under the homestead law. in congress enacted a law for the location, purchase, and entry of land containing gold, silver, copper, and other precious metals, commonly called the mining law of the united states, which became a part of the revised statutes. mining claims are of two classes: ( ) lode or quartz claims, and ( ) placer claims. both are initiated by discovery, staking out on the ground, and filing notice of location. after these preliminary steps have been taken, claims can be held indefinitely without purchase as long as $ worth of work is done each year on each claim; and as a matter of fact, only a small proportion of mining claims, especially placer claims, are ever purchased from the government. placer claims are soon worked out and exhausted, while good lode claims are workable and profitable for many years. there is a difference in the size and in the price of lode and placer claims. placer claims are larger in area and can be purchased at $ . per acre, while lode claims cost $ an acre. in congress passed a law for the purchase and entry of coal lands, which also became a part of the revised statutes. under this law every person above the age of twenty-one years, who is a citizen or has declared his intention to become a citizen of the united states, may purchase and enter acres of coal land; and an association of such persons may purchase and enter acres, and an association of not less than four such persons, if they have first expended not less than $ , in working and improving a coal mine on the land, may purchase and enter not to exceed acres in one claim. the price in each case is not less than $ per acre where the land is situate more than fifteen miles from a completed railroad and not less than $ per acre if the land is within fifteen miles of a completed railroad. only one entry can be made by the same person or association of persons; and no association or any member of which shall have taken the benefit of the law either as an individual or as a member of any other association, shall enter or hold any other lands under the provisions of the law; and no member of any association which shall have taken the benefit of the law shall enter or hold any other land under the provisions of the law. a preference right of entry for the period of one year is given to any person or association that has opened and improved a coal mine on the public lands. the provisions of the law as to the acquisition and holding of more than one claim are clear and stringent, and have been applied and enforced in the courts in several instances where great corporations have sought, through dummies and otherwise, to acquire vast holdings of coal lands. it is conceded, too, that the minimum price fixed by statute is, in many instances, altogether too low and much below the real value. in the interior department cured this defect by adopting the policy of classifying and appraising the coal lands and selling them at the appraised value, a value in most instances far in excess of the minimum statutory price. this new policy is continued, and under it something over , acres of coal lands have been entered. further legislation is urgently needed in respect to the disposal of our coal lands. if the policy of selling the land is to be continued, not only should the system of appraisal now in vogue be adhered to, but provision should be made to protect the people--the consumers--against the monopolies and combinations in restraint of trade and against unreasonable and exorbitant prices. many good men, however, who have given the subject great consideration, favor a well-guarded system of leasing instead of sale for coal lands. their contention is that under a leasing system more careful and less wasteful methods of mining will be pursued and that better protection can be thereby secured for the miner, the consumer, and the government. i am not prepared to take issue with this contention. a leasing system is clearly preferable where the surface of the land is disposed of for agricultural purposes, for under such a system the conflicting interests of the miner and the farmer can be best adjusted, regulated, and controlled. perhaps it would be wise to adopt both sale and leasing systems, leaving it optional with the government to select the mode of disposal in any given case; for there may be cases where the one method would be preferable to the other. in congress passed an act extending the coal-land laws to alaska, but the act proved of no value as only surveyed lands could be purchased and entered under the general law, and there was no surveyed land in alaska, and no provision was made in the act for surveys. by the act of april , , the general coal-land laws were extended to alaska in a more effective and rational manner. under this act any person or association, qualified to make entry under the coal-land laws of the united states, who opens and improves a coal mine on the unsurveyed public lands in alaska can locate the land on which such mine is found by staking the same out on the ground, and by filing notice of location in the recording district and in the land office of the district in which the land is situate, within one year after staking out the claim. after these preliminary steps are taken, the locator must cause a survey and plat of the land to be made by a deputy united states surveyor, and thereafter, within three years from date of the location notice he must make application for a patent of the land, prove a compliance with the law, and pay the price of only $ per acre for the land. aside from these provisions all other provisions of the general coal-land law apply to coal lands in alaska. under this law between eight and nine hundred coal-land locations have been made, but of these only about thirty-three cases (perhaps a few more) have passed to final entry at the local land office. the time for making entry and securing patents on the other locations has, in most, if not in all instances, lapsed, and they cannot be relocated owing to the fact that by executive orders of november , and and december , , and by a recent executive order of president taft, all coal lands in alaska are withdrawn from location, sale, and entry. this withdrawal was no doubt made in pursuance of recent legislation by congress and for the purpose of giving congress an opportunity to enact better coal-land laws for alaska than those now in force; and such legislation, to my mind, is clearly and urgently needed, and i am in hopes that congress will take steps at its next session to enact suitable coal-land laws for alaska in order that the people there may have an opportunity to utilize the coal that is within their own boundaries. (applause) by the act of march , , amended in , provision was made for the entry and reclamation by irrigation of desert or arid land in the pacific coast and mountain states and territories. under the original act acres could be entered in one claim, but since the act of was passed only acres can be entered in one claim under this law. water for irrigating the land must be secured and the land must be reclaimed and cultivated by means of such water for the period of four years after the preliminary entry, and the price of $ . per acre must be paid before patent can be secured for the land. this law has not proved very effective or beneficial, especially on account of the difficulty, in many instances, of securing the necessary water supply by a single entryman. in many instances the conditions of the law have not been complied with, and as a whole the law may be said to have to some extent failed of its purpose. in view of the comprehensive character of the general reclamation act of , which makes due provision for securing a water supply and provides for limited homesteads under a qualified homestead law, the desert law referred to, could well be repealed. the federal reclamation system is more certain and effective than reclamation by individuals in isolated cases. under the so-called carey act of , desert and arid lands are granted to certain states, in limited quantities, for reclamation and cultivation by means of irrigation, this to be done under the auspices and direction of the states to which the grants are made. this law has in some respects proved more effective and of more value than the general desert law, but it cannot be regarded as equal in value and efficiency to the general reclamation act of , and therefore it seems to me it is not advisable to make any more grants of this nature to any of the states. no effective or systematic effort was made to preserve the forests on the public domain until march , , when an act was passed giving the president the power to set apart and reserve, from time to time, public lands for forestry purposes. this was supplemented by the act of june , , providing for the administration and care of the land so reserved and set apart, which lands are now termed national forests of the united states. under this law nearly two hundred million acres of public lands in various states and territories, including alaska, have been withdrawn and set apart for forestry purposes and are now embraced, most of them, in our national forests and their administration and care has been placed on a sound, workable, and safe basis through the initiation, prudence, and wisdom of our great forester, mr pinchot (great and prolonged applause), who has laid the foundation and is the father of our forestry system. this legislation and administrative action came none too soon. had there been more delay, our timber lands would, long before this, have passed into private ownership and there would have been nothing left for the government to conserve (applause). no land legislation in recent times has been productive of such beneficent and far-reaching blessings and results as our forestry legislation. while occasionally there has been a little grumbling and friction on the part of settlers and cattlemen as to the administration of the law in some of its details, yet it can be fairly said, when it is borne in mind that it is a new system, that there has been little, if any, valid ground for serious criticism or complaint. the conduct of a few over-zealous forest rangers and a few over-strenuous settlers and cattlemen ought not to militate against the value and usefulness of the forestry system as a whole and in its entirety. (applause) under the act of march , , as amended by the act of january , , and may , , the secretary of the interior is authorized, under general regulations to be fixed by him, to grant, without exacting compensation, permits for right-of-way on the public lands for canals and reservoirs which may be used for furnishing water for domestic, public, and other beneficial uses, and for the development of power. several valuable water-power sites have been secured under these laws as well as under the homestead and timber and stone laws. to put a stop to such practice the interior department, in the later part of and in the early part of , withdrew all power sites from every form of disposal under our land laws and these sites have remained thus withdrawn ever since, except during an interval of a few days or perhaps a few weeks in the spring of ; and during that interval no power sites were secured or disposed of. most of these power sites are of considerable value, and they ought not to be disposed of under any of the existing land laws. adequate provision should be made by law for the utilization of these water-power sites to the end that the government may receive fair compensation for the same, and to the end that the public may receive the beneficial use to be derived from the development of any water-power in connection with such sites, at fair and reasonable rates (applause). the problem under our dual system of government, state and federal, is not free from embarrassment, as it is the opinion of men versed in the law that while the general government may own the power site, with all the rights of a riparian owner, the water in the streams, except for purposes of navigation, belongs to the state, and that the state may allow its citizens to appropriate such water for their beneficial use and thereby render the power site of no value; for without a sufficient supply of water the power site will not be worthy of improvement or development. it seems to me (though perhaps i may err) that the problem of developing and utilizing water-power in such cases can be properly solved only by the cooperation of the state and the federal government (applause): the one owning the power site and the other the water in the stream, it strikes me that cooperation is essential and furnishes the only practical solution. and some plan should be devised by which the federal and state governments could act in harmony and in unison in such cases. of course, when the state owns both the water and the power site, the problem is of a less complex character, and is one exclusively for the state to solve except as to the question of navigation. and i may also add in this connection that congress, at its last session, passed a general law to regulate the construction of dams across navigable waters, by which ample provision is made for protecting the interest of the general government in all such cases. most of our remaining public lands, suitable for agricultural purposes, are within the arid or semi-arid parts of the country. these lands can be successfully farmed only by means of irrigation or by so-called dry farming methods. to aid in developing and successfully farming these lands, the reclamation act of was passed setting apart the proceeds of the sales of public lands within the arid and semi-arid states for the construction of dams, reservoirs, canals, and ditches for the impounding and distribution of water. a considerable number of irrigation projects have been entered upon under the act. a few of them have been completed, but the majority of them are still in an incomplete condition; and there being an insufficiency of funds available for their speedy completion, congress, at the last session, in order to expedite the work on the incomplete projects, provided for a loan of twenty million dollars, to be immediately available, and to be reimbursable out of the future income of the reclamation fund (applause). this will hasten the completion of the projects and will aid the homestead settlers of whom there are many, to secure a supply of water on their claims at an early day. for the purpose of promoting the farming of arid or semi-arid lands by dry-farming methods or otherwise, where no water supply for irrigation is or can be found available, congress, by the act of february , , provided for enlarged homesteads of acres of non-irrigable lands. the theory on which such legislation was based was this, that such lands to be farmed must be summer-fallowed, so that a crop could be raised only every other year, and therefore a larger quantity of land was needed, as only one-half of the cultivated land could be cropped each year. investigations by the geological survey have shown that considerable areas of public lands suitable for agricultural purposes are underlain with more or less valuable beds of coal. such lands, on account of their mineral character, are not technically subject to entry under any other than the coal-land laws of the united states. a considerable number of homestead settlers had settled upon such lands and had made the preliminary homestead entries of the same without any previous knowledge of their mineral character. for the relief of such settlers congress passed the act of march , , which provides that such settlers may enter and receive a patent for the surface of such land, reserving to the general government the coal underlying the same to be disposed of under the coal-land laws of the united states. this was supplemented by congress at its last session by the act of june , , which permits the entry of the surface of coal lands under the homestead law, the reclamation law, the desert law, and the so-called carey law, reserving to the government the coal beds underlying such lands, to be disposed of under the general coal-land laws in existence or to be passed in the future, and authorizing the exploration of the same. one of the most important of our late land laws and which will prove to be the key to future reforms in our land system is the act of june , , passed at the last session of congress. this act authorizes the president, in his discretion, to withdraw from settlement, location, sale, or entry any of the public lands of the united states and reserve the same for water-power sites, irrigation, classification, or other public purpose. there was some difference of opinion before the enactment of this law as to the power of the president to make such withdrawals in all cases. this act removes all doubt and controversy on the subject and enables the president to examine, classify, and appraise the lands and to reserve them for necessary and appropriate legislation by congress. many of our lands and their appurtenances are of such a character that they ought not to be disposed of under any of our existing land laws. good laws are needed for the disposal of our timber and stone, our water-power sites, and our coal, oil, asphalt, and phosphate lands. there was considerable opposition to the passage of this act in both houses of congress, and at one time it seemed as though it would not pass, and it would not have passed but for the active, continued, and persistent help of president taft (applause). he labored for its passage, in season and out of season, to my certain knowledge, and but for his help, i can say with all truthfulness that that important law would never have passed (applause). and since its passage the president has availed himself of it by making new withdrawals, and rewithdrawing many lands which had been withdrawn before but in respect to which some question was raised as to the validity of the withdrawal. i have not called attention to the various grants of land that have been made, first for wagon roads and canals, and afterward for railroads, nor to the large grants of land that have been made to the several states for educational and other purposes, for the reason that such grants are not likely to be repeated in the future. provision has already been made, with ample land grants for the admission into the union of our two remaining territories, arizona and new mexico; and it is not probable that any grants of public lands, except for right-of-way, will be made to any railroad in the future, especially the railroad grants, may seem to have been prodigal and too lavish; but to the legislators of those early days, who were anxious for the speedy settlement and development of our great west, they seemed justified and called for. and it is evident that, in consequence of these grants, the country was more speedily settled and the settlers afforded transportation facilities at a much earlier period than otherwise would have been done. the grants made to the states, especially for educational purposes, have from every point of view been fully justified, and have been, and will continue to be, of great help in maintaining ample and liberal educational facilities in the several states. in conclusion: i have given you this brief summary and outline of our public land laws, past and present, obsolete and subsisting, in order that from a consideration of the same we may avoid the mistakes of the past, and gather inspiration and instruction for our future guidance. in view of the diminishing supply and rapidly increasing demand it behooves us to husband, with discrimination and care, all our natural resources, beginning as promptly as possible, and this work must be done by legislation, by administration, and by individual effort. (applause) * * * * * chairman stubbs--if there are any pessimistic citizens in the united states they should hear the senior senator's story of the lavish management of public affairs in the past, and the splendid change made under that great leader--the greatest man on earth today--theodore roosevelt (applause and cheers) and gifford pinchot (renewed applause). i now take great pleasure in presenting to you a typical southern gentleman, governor noel, of mississippi (applause). * * * * * governor noel--mr chairman, brother governors, delegates, ladies and gentlemen: some months ago i received an invitation to attend this congress, which i promptly accepted; also an invitation to deliver an address, which i immediately declined. since entering the hall this afternoon i have been informed of my selection for the first address on my state--each governor speaking for his state in succession--and my state's views on questions pertaining to our natural resources. of course the greatest natural resource of every city and county, as of state and nation, is the productive energies of its people. their development, through proper training of mind and heart, should be the chief aim of all people and of the government. in those resources, however, our interests are the same as those of all other parts of the country, and they open too broad a field for me to enter. when we take up the question of the natural resources pertaining to our domain, mississippi occupies a widely different attitude from that of some states in the northwest whose governors are here to speak for them. we are an agricultural people. not a city in mississippi will much, if at all, exceed , inhabitants; more of its population and its wealth, proportionately, than of any other state in the union are engaged in agriculture. we have no mines, no minerals except some clays and stone, no oil, no gas, no coal. we acquired agricultural lands, and our natural resources are from those lands as agricultural soil and standing timber. before the question of conservation was understood, or at least before it had become of any force in state or nation, both mississippi and the federal government had parted with their lands and with their forests. much to our regret now, it is a question of the past, and has to be handled by individuals and by corporations, to whom our lands and timber chiefly, almost entirely, belong. we are interested; we try to regulate our resources in some measure, within the powers of the state government; but our interest is largely confined to our public lands. we have no coal or metals, our streams are sluggish, and there are few water-power sites. we have little beyond the surface values of the timber and the soil. we are interested in coal because it is necessary for our industries; we are interested in oil because we need it; we are interested in all the elements of the soil spoken of this morning, phosphorus and all the rest. we are greatly interested in all these things notwithstanding the land which contains them happens to be in other states. we have not lost interest in them on that account; and, speaking for our state--which has stood for state rights as it understood them, and stands for state rights still--our only way of securing these rights we believe to be through the federal government (applause); our only voice must be through congress and the president, and we do not care to surrender that to which the government is now properly entitled. if the choice goes to the state we know how it will go, for past experience has taught that lesson well--local interests will control, and the general good will be subordinated to personal pride and local considerations. we have learned much and suffered much in that line. the government gave to us, as to others, the sixteenth section of land in every township, one-thirty-sixth of the whole state. we put it in the power of a majority of the householders and patrons of schools in each township to vest the school lands by lease, thinking that local interests, being circumscribed and vitally concerned in education, would at least prevent spoliation of this magnificent donation to the school children; but we were mistaken. in a great many instances a few who were shrewd and sharp and designing used a law by which a lease could be made from one year to ninety-nine years, and until that law was repealed leased the lands for the largest possible term. we know that the smaller the area the greater the influence of personages, and of local and private considerations. therefore, as we look on this question of the conservation of our natural resources, it is a question of rights, and how those rights can best be maintained and perpetuated; the means, whether through state or federal government, is but a minor consideration; and believing that our rights can best be preserved and utilized, now and for all time to come, without waste and without destruction, both for the present and in the future, we think it can best be done under federal supervision (applause). the only rights we have in coal and oil and metals must be exercised through the federal government. we may not fully understand the water-power problem. it has been said to be only a local issue anyway. we do not understand it that way. the river which rolls by this city smiling, smooth, and clear, after it is joined to the missouri is muddy, deep, and uncertain; not only all of your waters but all of the waters east of the rocky mountains roll past our western boundary. while at some seasons the water is low, at others it is over fifty feet higher, and more than one-sixth in value of the land in our state is subject to overflow. your waters, which through proper forestation and proper handling by dams and other means would give us a more equable flow throughout the year, come down upon us at a time when we do not need them, and in a degree greatly in excess of any possible need at any time, and we have to bear the sins of deforestation and all of the other evils that come from the wholesale spoliation and destruction of your forest lands (applause). we are vitally interested in that question. we believe in forest reservations; we are sorry we cannot furnish the basis for it in our own state, but so far as the government lands we have can be availed of for that purpose, we would be more than glad to see the government take hold of the matter and set our people an example of how forests should be handled and preserved for the present and for the future. when it comes to water-power, to me, at least, and to many of us, the question of conflict between state and federal governments, about which so much has been said--especially with a view of eliminating the federal government--we hardly understand that view of it. we trace our title through the federal government (applause). as a lawyer of more than thirty years' practice, whenever i have been given a question for investigation pertaining to the title of land, the first thing i have done was to examine the tract-books to see whether the federal government had ever parted legally with its title. if it had not, the question was ended; if it had, then we could proceed to deraign to those properly entitled to it. so when the federal government owned the lands and was the source of title, we do not understand how, even though the lands may be within the state, its right as a land-owner is less on a river bank than it is in the interior, or when the federal government, as the owner of the lands, should not exercise riparian rights which any other owner tracing title through it might exercise. now, we would like cooperation of the states, but we would like the federal government to retain where it still possesses them those rights of which the people could not be robbed through control of state legislatures or local authorities (applause). you may say, what interest have we, who are not a manufacturing people, in the mines and the water-powers of other states? why, we are all in a common country. state lines may be changed; they are accidental; they are artificial; but the national boundary is fixed. when we look for coal or iron, or commercial or industrial products which we do not manufacture, we must look, primarily, within the bounds of the united states. it is within the power of the government and beyond ours practically, through tariff legislation, to exclude the minerals from outside. we have but one open field, we have but one certain route to any natural or manufactured product, and that is within the boundaries of the union itself; and we do not want, through monopolization of either coal or oil or water-powers, to be hampered in the protection of the country as a whole so that as consumers we shall have to bear the brunt of evils from which the national government, through the little influence we might have with it, might protect us, and of which our state government, in the past at least, has been very neglectful. hence we stand for state rights and federal control in cooperation (applause). but if it is within the power of the federal government, through leasing or otherwise, to retain control of its mineral and coal lands and its water-power sites, to put them beyond the possibility of handling by a state and its legislature, to regulate corporations' rights so as to prevent monopolization, and at the same time to prevent the nation as a whole from being deprived of any productive agency in our midst, we want the benefit of it. (applause) our patriotism on this score may be of that questionable type described by artemus ward, who said that during the civil war, when the stress was great, he listened to a magnificent speech from an orator on the subject of enlistment, and became so enthused that when the call for volunteers came he, with others, went up to sign the roll; but when he observed that the orator had not signed nor was likely to sign, because his province was simply that of speaking while other's would be fighting, his own ardor was somewhat cooled, and when he reflected that the orator's eloquence had carried his hearers where he would not go himself, it became cooler and cooler. still, his patriotism did not entirely vanish, for when his time came to sign the roll for enlistment, he signed it with the name of his mother-in-law and offered her as a sacrifice to his country (laughter). yet we are not exactly in that category, though we may seem to view the situation from a local standpoint. but knowing of our own condition, knowing of the rights which the federal government conferred upon the school children of our state--the sixteenth section and other lands of which you heard in senator nelson's address today,--and remembering how in a great many instances, through local influences, legislative or otherwise, the intended beneficiaries were largely deprived of the benefactions intended for them we really think, what has gone is gone, except as a lesson to us; and so far as we are concerned, we shall stand for the right of the people as a whole for the enjoyment of its great resources of coal, of oil, of water-power and other natural wealth, and we want to be protected in such a way that no state or local influence shall be able to take it from us forever (applause). that is our position on this question. in regard to the water-power question. a while ago i spoke of the mississippi rolling by; we have never been jealous of the federal government's dealings with that river, not a bit (laughter). we are not now. so far as we are concerned, we would be delighted if the federal government would acquire the riparian rights, with all the _liabilities_, from one end of the state to the other (laughter). the county in which i live, that part of it in the delta, as well as six or seven other counties, have had to keep up, without federal aid until this year--and then only incidentally for the protection of navigation against some caving banks--for five years more than miles of levee, and it has required an acreage tax of from three to five cents, an _ad valorem_ tariff of about ten mills, and a cotton tax besides; and while some of this is among the finest agricultural land in the world, it is almost wrecked by the taxes on it. missouri has fared better. her levees are not as extensive as ours; her people put them in good condition, and the general government afterward took charge of them in the interest of navigation; and if the government will relieve us of the whole burden from the waters which you send down upon us from the north and from east of the rocky mountains, and will take the riparian rights from end to end and preserve and use them for the benefit of the whole nation, all the people of our state will greatly rejoice (applause), and not a voice will be raised on the question of state rights as to any use for the people as a whole to which the government may put those lands. so, as we come to voice our wishes, our interests, our desires, they are for cooperation of state and federal government, but of absolutely no relinquishment on the part of the federal government either of its water-power sites, its coal lands, its phosphate lands, or of any of those other natural resources to which the people of the whole country are looking for future development and prosperity (applause). we are _in_ the country, we are a part of it; not merely a part of the government of the states but a part of the government of the whole union (applause), and all that concerns the union, or any part of it or any of its people, affects us to a greater or less degree. and speaking for our share and our part in the national destiny which invitingly presents itself before us, we say that we stand for conservation of natural resources by all governmental agencies, state and federal, which will not only develop now but protect in the future for the proper use and progressive benefit of the people of the whole country to whom they now belong and from whom they should never depart. (applause) * * * * * chairman stubbs--ladies and gentlemen: i am very glad indeed to introduce to you as the speaker to follow our distinguished friend from mississippi, the only other democratic governor in the congress, governor norris, of montana. (applause) you will see whether the views of the southern democrat and the northern democrat are the same after the two get through speaking. (laughter) * * * * * governor norris--mr chairman, and ladies and gentlemen: a feeling has prevailed in the west, or did a few days ago, to the effect that no enlarged opportunities were going to be given to express ideas here which were contrary to those held by the program committee of this congress (laughter). however, i am pleased to note that such is not to be the case, and whether the conference of the northwestern governors at salt lake city, recently held, has had anything to do with it or not i don't know. anyhow, we are thankful for small favors. if it had been the intention and had been carried out, it would have been a mistake, for the reason that the conservation movement is national in scope, and is a part of no section and no state alone. the conservation movement--in other words, the public conscience--received its awakening some two years ago, and theodore roosevelt did the awakening (applause); and i am pleased to note that the sentiment created by president roosevelt has ripened into practical action by president taft (renewed applause). i resent the insinuation that montana and the northwest, and in fact the entire west, is opposed to conservation; in fact, i insist that the northwest is the leader of the conservation movement (applause), and that the first practical act in conservation was taken by a western state, montana (applause). i am proud of the fact that the first conservation commission, either state or national, was appointed by me, in the state of montana (applause). i am further proud of the fact that the first conservation law, comprehensive in extent, was, under my recommendation, passed by the legislature of montana; and in that respect we have led the national government in the conservation movement (applause). therefore, just for a moment, and not desiring to be personal, permit me to state what we have done. and in every respect we have kept step with the national government and in the majority of cases we have led the national government, and you can come to us for a lesson as to how to properly conserve the natural resources of the country (applause). the legislature which assembled in montana in enacted a law conserving the resources possessed by us in our public lands, so generously given us by the government on our admission. that measure provided for the disposition of the land to actual cultivators of the soil, in -acre tracts where irrigated, in -acre tracts where it is suitable for dry farming, and in -acre tracts where it was only suitable for the raising of hay or for grazing purposes--that is, in the high altitudes, in the mountains. so in that respect we have gone hand in hand with the government in the passage of the -acre homestead act, applicable to entries where irrigation could not be had. in that same law, passed in , some eighteen months ago, montana forever reserved from sale, and in every patent on every acre of its lands that might thereafter be issued retained the coal rights, and provided for the leasing of those rights from time to time and for periods not exceeding five years (applause). so today, when president taft says he hopes congress will do the same with the government coal lands, we say, mr president, we are with you and hope congress will do this (applause), and if you wish an illustration proving that the title to coal lands can be retained and the coal rights leased from time to time, providing for the right to mine the coal at not less than - / cents per ton, come to montana and we will show you half a dozen coal leases with such provision which have been in force for the last sixteen months (applause). have we lagged behind the national government? oh, no! in fact, we have led the national government in the matter of conservation. (applause) and as to the metalliferous ores of the mines--the same laws are applicable to state lands that are applicable to government lands. as to the forests: in the making of those laws, i corresponded, and our commission corresponded, and we made those laws with the consent of, and they were afterward approved by, mr gifford pinchot (applause). there is but one provision which we made then differing from those of the government. we provided in that law, passed eighteen months ago, that lands more suitable for agriculture than for reforestation should be used for agricultural purposes and not for reforestation purposes. president taft described this morning how the government had in the last few months been doing the same thing, so it seems that, after awhile, the government will catch up to montana in that respect (laughter and applause). now, then, on the water-power question: that same commission is now operating, and it is going to prepare suggestions for submission to the next montana legislature with reference to adequate provisions for conserving the waters of the state of montana, and i have no doubt that the recommendations of the commission will, at the next session, be adopted. we would have done that two years ago except we cannot do all these things at once; our session only lasted sixty days, while congress is in session all the time (laughter and applause). if we had even six months instead of two years for it, we would have had those water resources conserved long ago (laughter). is montana entitled to take a place in the kindergarten class in the school of conservation? and are we who have conserved our resources to be distrusted as governor noel says you must distrust the legislature and the people of the state of mississippi? (applause) i thank my god that i can trust the people of montana to protect their own! (applause) and let me tell you one thing: the whole can never be greater than the sum total of its parts, and the federal government can never adequately preserve its resources until you get at least a majority of the people in a majority of the states to so agree, because it takes a majority for the federal congress or the federal government to act (applause). you start at the wrong end. you have got to start with the people of the state and build up. now, are we capable of passing legislation to preserve our water resources? i think we are; and let me tell you some of our plans. in the first place, the water and the land, during the territorial days of each state, belonged to the federal government. when the state was admitted, the lands were reserved by the federal government, but the waters flowing in the streams of the state passed into the control of the state. you heard senator nelson, an able lawyer, refer this afternoon to the fact that that was the law. now, they tell us that you cannot trust the states, you must trust the federal government; and yet i listened for nearly an hour to one of the ablest presentations i ever heard of how the federal government for a hundred years wasted its resources with all the prodigality of a drunken sailor (applause). trust the federal government! why, the federal government has been the greatest sinner in that respect. i am glad the federal government has awakened and is going to preserve its resources, but montana, at least, woke up a little before (applause). in this matter of the water-power: the most valuable use that water can be put to, or, in other words, the most valuable function that water can perform, is not the development of electrical power; in the semi-arid states it is the applying of that water to irrigation and the reclamation of the arid lands of the west (applause). so bear that in mind. in the state of montana--and what is true in that state is true largely in every other state in the west--not one-third of the arable lands that can be irrigated have as yet been reclaimed; less than , , acres have been reclaimed in montana, while there are , , , in fact there are , , acres that can be reclaimed. in other words, there are from six to ten million acres yet to be reclaimed by use of the water that flows in the streams of the state, and that is largely government land. so that when you talk about conserving the water for water-power purposes, we say conserve it for reclamation purposes (applause); for the reclamation of government land, too (applause), that may make homes for settlers who will come in and take it under the homestead act. there is the reason why we say that the federal government must not by its superior power step in and insist upon using the waters of the streams of the west for power purposes, unless when it so does it makes provision that the rights for irrigation purposes shall forever remain inviolate; otherwise, what does it amount to, the building of a dam across the stream? when the government conveys the right to build a dam across a stream, it means that the amount of water flowing over that dam will determine the amount of power that may be developed; hence, when that dam is built the government, if it conveys anything of value, must convey the right to the use of that water, and the right to the use of that water flowing over that dam must accrue as of that date, and forever thereafter the franchise-holder will have the right to demand as a concession from the federal government that the same amount of water, all the natural flow of that stream, must go over that dam forever. you thereby absolutely prevent the diversion of any water on that stream above that point for irrigation purposes. the use of water for irrigation purposes does decrease the amount flowing in the stream. that is the reason we object to the federal government coming in and taking charge of our water-power and giving it out--we do not care so much about the little income that may be received: that is the reason we are insisting upon the rights of the state. now, remember this: in the first instance, there is no contention but what the regulation of water for irrigating purposes is absolutely vested in the state, and that the federal government cannot acquire that right; hence a number of irrigators have already appropriated a part of the flow of the stream. the federal government grants the right of franchise for the building of a dam. suppose we assume, for the sake of argument, that it can grant the right to the remaining flow of a stream; it not only thereby forever thereafter prohibits the use of that stream above that point for further reclamation purposes, but the rights of every irrigator, either before or after appropriation is made, comes in conflict, or may come in conflict, with the federal franchise-holder? in other words, you transfer from the state courts and from the state forum the right of every irrigator to use the waters of a stream to the seat of power of the federal government at washington. in other words, you practically stop irrigation in the arid west when you insist upon having that power (applause). is that conservation? true conservation demands that every acre of land shall be used for its highest purpose and be made to serve its highest productive function (applause), whether in a forest reserve or out of it. therefore, in order to serve its highest productive function in the west, water must be applied to the land. now, take the , , acres of land that may be reclaimed in montana. if you do not insist upon the federal government taking charge of the water-power and preventing its further reclamation, it means , , acres of land reclaimed. it is fair to say that each year those reclaimed lands will produce a total of $ --yea, and if i did not want to be ultra-conservative, i would say $ --per acre; and at $ per acre, you have an annual income from those , , acres of land of $ , , . isn't that worth thinking about? isn't that a resource worth conserving? why, the , , horse-power that might be developed in montana is not worth one tithe of that. you say, give to the federal government the right to the water-powers of the state and forever prevent the further reclamation of our land? why, you are asking of us the most priceless gift that we have to convey--far more priceless than our mines yielding $ , , yearly, possibly the richest in the world--because you ask us to surrender not $ , , a year but the opportunity to make $ , , a year. has the federal government this right? we insist, as a matter of law, that the federal government has no authority to grant any right to the use of water on any power site that it may have. if the power site is situated along a stream, the title to the power site rests in the federal government and it can grant the right to erect a dam on that site, but the water that flows down the stream by that power site belongs to the state, and unless the state gives you the right to appropriate and take water you will develop no power by a dam-site! (applause) now, is the state ready to surrender any rights that it may have in the waters of the stream to the federal government? the state of montana is not ready to so do, for the reasons i have given. the state of montana will insist upon every right it has. let the federal government have that which of right or in law belongs to it, but let the state keep that which of right or in law belongs to it (applause). so sure am i that the state has the right to use of its water that i think the next legislature of montana will pass a law to regulate the use of water, making its use for power forever subordinate to its use for irrigation purposes, and then say to the federal government, you own your power site, but you do not own the water; we own the water, but we do not own the power site. your site is worth nothing to you because it is valuable only for power in connection with the use of water. we cannot develop power on that site, but we can go a little farther down the stream and divert that water for the irrigation of land, and it is valuable to us. now, that is what we mean by the rights of the state in and to the waters of the state. you cannot trust the state? why not? if you cannot trust the people of montana to conserve its resources, if you cannot trust the state of wyoming to conserve its resources, can we trust the state of maine, or the state of florida to conserve them for us? what reasons have we to assume that the people of the state of massachusetts or the state of louisiana are more patriotic in that respect than are our own people? the creation of the forest reserves was the greatest act ever performed in recent years. we would not have that act repealed. we have a double purpose in supporting the forest conservation policies. you think of it as valuable for the timber that it will grow. that timber is worth just as much, and will shelter just as many people, in montana as it will in the mississippi valley, but we desire it for a further purpose. the forests of these mountains are nature's reservoirs, builded there by an omnipotent creator, and can better conserve the waters that fall in the form of rain and snow than these artificial reservoirs that men may build (applause). we want those waters. the water that comes from our mountains and is conserved under those forests is the very life-blood of the state of montana. would you take the water away and stop the reclamation of the arid west? i know you would not; yet you would do so did you not at the same time that you were saving the timber make a provision that the rights to water for power purposes should forever be subject to the rights for irrigation purposes. bear this in mind, also. the doctrine of riparian rights does not prevail in the arid west; therefore the owning of the soil on each side of the stream does not convey the right to have the water flow down that stream undiminished in quantity or quality. in other words, the first appropriator is the first in right. i think there has been a misunderstanding as to the position of the west in this respect, as to why we are insisting upon the rights of the state. we insist upon the right of the state to control the waters of the state, not the water-power particularly. there is a decided difference between the waters and the water-power. the waters will irrigate land, the water-power will develop electricity. such is the position the west takes. will you not help us in that, and so help develop the land and make it productive? do you know it is your own salvation to do so? ye people of the populous east, where is the produce to come from to feed the ever-increasing millions, unless it be from the reclamation of the arid lands of the west? the time will soon be here, and it is not over four years removed, when we will cease to be a wheat-exporting nation, and in only a few years it must come that the children will cry for bread, and the land must be made to produce it. therefore we must husband our resources and conserve our water for use for the purpose which will permit the growing of something that will feed human beings; and pine trees do not do it (applause). you of the mississippi valley who for years have wept great crocodile tears that your lands have been cleared, suppose those lands had not been cleared, whence would come the produce to feed the millions of today? so bear these things in mind that when you come to conclusions you will take all these questions into consideration. and i want to say to you that in the future, as in the past, montana will not lag in the conservation movement, but will continue to lead the federal government (applause). * * * * * a delegate--mr chairman, are the propositions advanced by the governors to be discussed? i see no reference in the program to such discussion, and ask for information. chairman stubbs--the understanding of the chair is that this afternoon was turned over to the governors. the intention is to give them an opportunity to relieve their minds this afternoon (applause) and get the way clear for the greatest man you will hear talk in thirty years--theodore roosevelt (applause). we are clearing out the brush and getting ready for the real thing that you will have tomorrow. (laughter and applause) you can readily see that they have too much water in the south and not quite enough water in the northwest, judging by the views of the last two speakers. i now have the pleasure of introducing one of the greatest governors in the united states, and of one of the greatest states in the union, governor deneen, of illinois (applause). * * * * * governor deneen--fellow delegates, and ladies and gentlemen: the governors here have been somewhat confused regarding this program. i was invited by my good friend governor eberhart, of this state, to prepare a speech. i have it concealed about my person like a deadly weapon, and i have been wondering whether i dare read it; for if i do, those who follow me will, i fear, have no audience to address, while if i do not follow the text already given to the printer there will be the traditional print-shop "devil" to pay; but i have concluded to talk rather than read, and i hope that my good friends the reporters will publish what i should have said rather than what i shall say. i will follow the example of a very distinguished statesman in our state, who on a great occasion handed his speech to the reporters and said, "now, having given my speech to the reporters, i shall proceed to ramble;" and so he did. (laughter) it is a pleasure to follow the two distinguished gentlemen who have preceded me, the governor of mississippi and the governor of montana. it is a pleasure to note how the conditions have reversed the attitude of their states regarding state rights (laughter and applause). i am interested in both states. a year or more ago i purchased a farm in montana where the three rivers join to form the missouri river, and i discovered after the spring freshets that i now have a farm scattered all the way from montana to mississippi (laughter). i am interested in all the states because of that, because i now own property in all. but i cannot quite agree with my distinguished predecessor about the legislature--we, too, have a legislature (laughter), and whatever value it may have had at one time it is not considered at par at present. (laughter and applause) we have a water-power proposition, too, strange to say, even in the flat, level, horizontal state of illinois. some time ago when the government was considering the matter of the lakes-to-gulf waterway, our state supplemented the investigation of the government in considering the by-products of that great channel which was to be built (and i hope will be built), and we proceeded on the theory announced by the president this morning; instead of going from agitation to legislation, we considered it better to go on this theory: investigation, then agitation, and later legislation. so our state appointed a very distinguished commission to investigate some of the by-products that would accrue to illinois by reason of the lakes-to-gulf deep waterway. we soon found we had several questions. first, the matter of reclamation. we have the problem they have in mississippi, of too much water for too much time out of the year; an even , square miles of our state is under water too much of the time--an area larger than the state of connecticut or the island of porto rico. we worked out a plan by which, as an incident to the great waterway, we expect to reclaim land which has been estimated to be of the value of $ , , to the state. then we found that in part of that waterway (in - / miles of it from lockport to utica) there is a fall of feet, and that water-power can be created to the amount of about , horsepower, worth about $ , , or $ , , a year to begin with, and our engineers estimated that by availing ourselves of that power we would be able to contribute to the government the entire expense of the waterway between lockport and utica, and could afford to expend $ , , in doing so by reason of the by-product that would come to us; and that we would be able, if the legislature did as it should do, and the governor did as he should do, and the commission to be appointed would do as it should do--to repay that vast expense in fourteen years as a minimum period, and that in fact we could loan our credit and have the water-power pay for the bonds as they matured. the question was submitted to the people, and after an exhaustive discussion they approved the plan by the largest majority ever registered on any issue in illinois or in any state in the union, a majority of nearly , (i believe it was , to be exact). then we presented it to our legislature. now, this is the point. when we presented it to our legislature, what do you think has happened? why, nothing happened. (sensation) we have talked, and talked, and talked, but we haven't acted. we have had several sessions, regular and irregular (laughter), on this subject, general and special, but we have failed to act. after the failure of the regular session to act, on december last i called an extra session to determine the state's part in this water-power and waterway subject. it adjourned on march following (i want you to keep these dates in mind because they are significant); the legislature was in a deadlock--i am not blaming the republicans for this, although illinois is a republican state, and i am not blaming the democrats; the fact is that a band of republicans and a band of democrats joined to repudiate the pledges of both parties, and they did it, effectually did it. they adjourned on march ; on april following (this year) a little corporation with a huge name was formed in our state--the illinois valley gas, light & electric power company, i believe is the name--you are nearly compelled to take a vacation to pronounce the name all at once--with a capital stock of only $ ; a huge name for small capital. then, on may following--thirteen days later--the organizers of the corporation met, and decided they had made a mistake in capitalizing at $ ; so they made the capital accord with the dignity and length of the name and increased it from $ to $ , , . since that time they have acquired fifty-year franchises in the following cities: joliet, morris, seneca, ottawa, wilmington, streator, dwight, odell, gardner, pontiac, plainview, yorkville, coal city, and bridgewood. now that has been doing a good deal of work in a warm, humid atmosphere, such as we have in the summer time in illinois (laughter). they have not only done that, but they have also acquired the other corporations that have had to do with the developing of water-power in illinois; and not only that, but they have reached out and acquired certain riparian rights necessary to develop fully the power at marseilles. now, what will happen? our sanitary district of chicago has already expended $ , , on this channel, and will expend $ , , more in its full development, and our state will spend $ , , on its part. in other words, illinois will contribute $ , , to this lakes-to-gulf deep waterway, and a corporation which has not expended one dollar to create this power comes along and puts a toll-gate across it and collects the toll. bear in mind that none of this power is created by the surface or drainage water of the state; all of it is created by diverting the waters of lake michigan to the illinois and the mississippi. what would be thought, for instance, if our state should expend $ , , in building a road from chicago to saint louis and then some one who had not expended a dollar would throw a toll-gate across it and collect a toll of every person and vehicle that passed, and then when he tried to buy our own road back, charge us $ , , for it? that would be going some, even in these days of "frenzied finance," wouldn't it? yet that is exactly what they are doing with the water-power situation in our state. for several reasons (fancied or otherwise; it doesn't take much of a reason to occasion debate) there is a strong effort being made to prevent the state from acting, and our state is in the situation (and chicago will be in the same situation soon) where we will be compelled, in order to acquire the riparian rights, to condemn them at their market value, and you can see, from the array of towns i read you, that the market value is steadily increasing (i collected their names about two weeks ago, and had not time this morning to wire inquiring whether it was up to date, but give you the list as an indication). the point i want to make is that our state is a good deal like other states: we are neither abnormally good nor abnormally bad--just an average. sometimes we are attending to things in such a way that we would prefer to have no metropolitan newspapers to circulate and mislead us; at other times we do things in a grand style in that great state, and we are then very glad that we have such means of disseminating knowledge about what is being done. in regard to the conservation movement: i sympathize very strongly with my good friends here from the west. it has been a delightful pleasure to meet them on a number of occasions, on the waterway trip down the mississippi from saint louis to memphis, then at new orleans, and again at washington, where we were all together at the conservation conference in washington called by theodore roosevelt. i believe that the government should not interfere to prevent the full development of the states. a long time ago it was said that he was a benefactor who made two blades of grass grow where only one had grown before, and the man who can put two acres in cultivation where only one was cultivated before is certainly a friend of mankind. so i think we want all the acres put in cultivation by irrigation or dry farming. but the general government owns certain things: it owns coal lands, oil lands, gas lands, phosphate lands, and forest lands. we heard the president say this morning that the government owns about a third of the forests that we must have in the north in order to allow the mississippi to have enough water. the government owns about a third of the coal, and if i recall correctly, about a third of the phosphate lands, which will become more and more necessary as we develop our agricultural resources. now the federal government should not permit itself to be put in a position where these great natural resources could be wasted (great applause); it ought to be in a position to develop the states by irrigation, and in all possible ways, but it should not permit itself to be put in the position where a legislature of a state would take from it power to control some of the very necessities of advanced civilization (applause). they can have a crop of corn every year, they can turn on and off water-power every year, and the rains will come again; if by lack of attention the forests are burned or removed, they can be grown again; but the great creator provided there should be just one crop of coal for all time, and provided, so far as we know now, that there would be just a certain amount of phosphate lands, and they are for all time and all men. these crops are not growing in montana just now, they are not growing in other states; and because they were meant for us all, this great continental republic ought to be able to conserve them so they shall not be abused. we all have the right to use them now, and the government, in my judgment, should see that there is no possibility of abuse. it seems very likely that, so far as water is concerned, the state and the nation will have to cooperate and work together (applause). the state may own the water in montana because the streams are not navigable, and i assume this is so in wyoming and idaho and the other mountain states. the government at present owns much of the land. the federal government may not say to the state, "you cannot use the water because you cannot get in my backyard," and the state may not say, "water is valueless without the use of the land that is situated adjoining;" so they will have to work together, and they should work together. that is the way it ought to be, and that is the way it will be; and i believe that we here in the west, and in the east and in the south, who have had our states developed by a vast expenditure of these natural resources and vast waste, will have patience and consideration for the views of these men who are somewhat fearful lest we do not permit them to develop their own resources. i believe the nation will permit them not only to develop the resources, but will encourage them in that development (applause). now, just a word about illinois: i have told you so many bad things about our state that it is not proper to cease speaking without saying some good things. i was delighted with the statements made by governor norris about montana. it is a proud record. it has set a good example to the government. our state has done something, too (laughter). our state, a long time ago, before we heard of this conservation movement, had at least six or eight commissions out doing this very work. we have an agricultural experiment station that has explored every foot of our land, i may say, in a phenomenal way; the fact is we are laying off our state in ten-acre plats, and the university of illinois is surveying each ten acres and making a record indicating the kind of soil, later to give advice as to the development of each ten acres; and the gentleman under whose supervision that is done is a delegate to this congress and likely to address you. he is a specialist on soil. and we have had a geological commission that has taken stock of all of our minerals, and although we are a prairie state we are the third in the union in our mineral output. we are not only locating and taking stock of our coal but showing how to mine it, how to send it by freight, how to store it, and how to burn it--for nine-tenths of its energy is wasted before you get it to the place where you should apply it. we have made a survey of our rivers, studying the fishery question; illinois river is the second in its output of food products in the united states, being only exceeded by columbia river in the remote west; it has more than doubled in the last eight years. we have a commission on floriculture and horticulture; and we have an internal improvement commission that is studying every stream in our state and giving the information to our counties and districts for the purpose of forming drainage districts so that the land may be drained and more of it cultivated. in every department--water, soil, minerals--our state has made a most careful investigation, so that we feel we have a complete stock of our resources; we believe, too, in their development, and we are developing them. all the departments of our state work are going along as they should, and our resources are being well conserved. i have dwelt on a disagreeable feature only because i believe that the example of illinois should be beneficial elsewhere. we are having trouble in attending to our public utilities, as other states will. illinois will have expended a hundred million dollars in the making of a water-course that creates water-power, and you are all familiar with the disgraceful story as to how the state has tried to cope with that water-power monopoly through its legislature and conserve to us what we created ourselves. it is likely that we shall be compelled to see certain corporations or private individuals sowing where they didn't reap, and levying a toll upon a vast expenditure of money made by our commonwealth; and other states may profit by our experience. (applause) * * * * * chairman stubbs--i am very glad indeed to have the opportunity of introducing governor hay, of the great state of washington (applause). * * * * * governor hay--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: i desire to take this opportunity to thank the good citizens of saint paul for seeing to it that the western states were given representation at this congress (applause). it was not, and never was, the intention of the managers of this conservation congress to allow those who differed with them in opinion to be heard at this meeting, as i know by long correspondence myself with the management. in reading the numerous papers published here in the east relative to the "wild and woolly western men" and their ideas on conservation, i said to my wife, before leaving home, "it looks to me that i am going down to saint paul to get the most glorious spanking a white man ever got." my wife said, "go down and take it" (laughter). but since arriving here, i am pleased to say that i have found innumerable people who look upon this conservation question exactly the same way as do the majority of the people of the pacific coast. all that is needed to solve the problem of conserving our natural resources is common sense and the application of the square deal (applause). it is because of a departure from these two essential elements in the consideration of conservation, that an unsound, unjust, and impracticable policy has been advanced in this country. common sense has given place to humbug and fairness to intolerance. instead of calm, dispassionate, logical discussion of the subject, we hear and read on every hand exaggerated statements, misrepresentation, false accusation, dire prophecy, and passionate appeals to prejudice, avarice, and lawlessness. this has given rise to a wholly perverted notion of true conservation, and has brought about a condition hurtful to the west, and one that, if persisted in, is bound to prove injurious to the nation. the only sane and sensible kind of conservation is that which permits the fullest and freest development of our natural resources under provisions that will perpetuate those resources that can be renewed, and that will obtain the greatest economic good from those that cannot be replaced. but to many of us of the pacific coast and rocky mountain states, conservation, as practiced, means to tie up and not to utilize. it signifies to us the letting of our waters run unfettered to the sea for fear some one might develop their power and turn their energy to the benefit of mankind in this generation. to us it means the locking up of our vast forests that they may go to decay or become the prey of the fire king. it means that, to please some bureaucrat, the people of our section are held up to allow the timber trust to secure a profit of a few extra millions each year. it means that our vast coal areas must go undeveloped, and that we be compelled to spend our money with foreign mine owners for fuel, importing the coal at no small expense for the item of transportation alone. it means that the state of washington is robbed of the use of , acres of land that the federal government granted to it for educational purposes at the time it was admitted to the union. conservation as practiced in the past developed into a vast profit-making scheme for certain southern land grant railroads, which under it were given scrip in place of worthless desert land included in forest reservations, treeless since time began and bound to remain treeless to the end of time. and we have seen this scrip brought north and placed upon our timber lands that will cruise from , , to , , feet per section, and are worth from $ to $ per acre. this brand of conservation means to us that - / % of the total area of the state of washington paid a paltry $ , into the public coffers in . it means we are called upon to expend large sums each year for policing these federal reserves, which contribute practically nothing to the cost of state government, while at each session our state legislature is compelled to appropriate large sums to build roads through federal reserves. last year we appropriated $ , for this purpose. to us, conservation means that settlers within forest reserves who have taken up homesteads in good faith are harassed, browbeaten, and often forced to abandon their claims and lose the fruits of the labor of years. as an illustration of this, permit me to read a letter i received recently from a fellow citizen of mine who, by the way, is a prominent logger, and while a very wealthy man and a large timber owner, is one of that kind of men who came up from the bottom; he started in at day's wages in the state of washington a little over thirty years ago. this is what he says: speaking for myself and from a selfish standpoint, the present conservation by our national government suits me fine, but in the interests of the poor settlers who make our country, a change should be made. four-fifths of these settlers come out here from eastern states and endeavor to take up homesteads, but they are so harassed and driven from their homesteads through technicalities and forest rangers under orders that are absolutely foreign to the best interests of our country and the settler, that instead of making good citizens the conservation laws have made anarchists, and if the thing is kept up, everything that will burn i expect to see burned within the next ten years. you cannot drive a man from his home, with a wife and from one to six children, penniless and hungry and the children in rags, while the land that would support them lies idle and wild just to gratify the theory of some man who may be honest but who is ignorant of the conditions of the frontier. i will name a case of a man i met in aberdeen, who told me that he tramped forty miles three times to make proof on his claim. he had lived with his family on his homestead for seven years and endeavored to make proof, coming out with witnesses and spending money he needed for his family, only to be told the last time he came out that his hearing was indefinitely postponed. this man came out a good, loyal, american citizen; went back a fire-eater. i know another case on the head of nooksack river where a man endeavored to take up a homestead on meadow land, and after he made application it was set aside for forest rangers' quarters no. . he then tried to take a second homestead and it was set aside for forest ranger no. ; he then endeavored to take a third, and that was set aside for forest ranger no. . the land is fertile beyond description, but there is nothing living on it, and it is supporting no one. on the head waters of skagit river there are tracts of land that will support from three to four hundred homesteads. this is purely meadow land with brush and worthless scrub timber, like all our western washington meadows. any five acres of this land will sustain a family in comfort. this land is held in the forest reserve, absolutely worthless so far as sustaining people is concerned, or paying taxes to the state. if our state is to give up one-third of its taxable property and carry on its government with two-thirds, she has very little interest, if any, in that portion of the state reserved by conservation, and naturally will not aid in the preservation of the same as she would were the revenue from these resources to become the revenue of the state. up on quinault river, ten years ago, there was a flourishing settlement with every prospect for opening up the country. since this conservation law has been in force, many of these settlers have left their homesteads, others have been driven off and gone to british columbia. the united states government does not build a road into the settlement, and the people are too poor to build out. take it up in the northern peninsula (the greater portion covered by forest reserve), the land would sustain hundreds of thousands of comfortable and independent homes; but today it is a howling wilderness, and the meadow land is as wild as it was a hundred years ago. the people are too poor to build roads in and across the forest reserve, and the government does not. i sincerely hope and trust that the people of the east who are not acquainted with the conditions in the state of washington will permit this state to control and conduct her own conservation, both water, timber, coal and oil, if necessary, to the best interests of the state and nation. we have a state that has upwards of ten million horse-power in our waterfalls going to waste every minute. with proper state laws this could be utilized, and so protected that monopoly could not control it. we have millions of tons of cheap anthracite and bituminous coal on our coast. still, the people of alaska are buying british columbia coal and shipping it up to themselves two thousand miles, while the coal is sticking out of the mountain-sides of alaska and cannot be touched. we are shipping hundreds of thousands of tons of maryland coal to our navy on the pacific coast, in foreign ships, while we, of the state of washington, are prohibited from shipping our cheap lumber to our own people on the atlantic coast, and are compelled, if we ship at all, to ship it by rail to new york and the thickly settled portions of the east at a freight rate that is prohibitive. the only people receiving the benefit of our lower grades of lumber and cheap prices are the chinese and japanese. if we were permitted to ship our lumber in foreign vessels from washington to new york or other ports on the atlantic coast, we could give them lumber that they all need and that we would be glad to sell at a very reasonable figure. it is the fool laws that are oppressing the people, both of the east and the west, and many of them have been made in the interest of monopoly and many through ignorance. the west is not here to fight conservation, for, properly directed, it is one of the greatest movements inaugurated in this country since the abolishment of slavery. our former president instituted many reform movements that, properly directed, mean happiness and prosperity for our people; and of all the movements started by him, in my opinion none means more to the financial welfare of ourselves and our children than conservation, as vouched for by president roosevelt (applause). the complaint we have is not against the principle of conservation, but against the prostitution of that great movement to the impractical ends of certain men out of sympathy with our institutions. they would disregard the rights of the people of the western states to regulate affairs within their borders; they would retard development of the younger states; they would compel the citizens of the western states to contribute annually large sums of money to the timber, coal and power companies operating in those sections. while these bureaucrats claim to be working in the interest of the people, they could not better serve the special interests if they were employed by them. in the past they laid unusual burdens upon the western states, and have ruthlessly crushed and brushed aside the honest homesteader who did not have funds to fight or carry his case to the highest court. they are attempting to bottle up and make useless the natural resources of our western states, and have our local affairs administered through an irresponsible bureau located , miles away. all the people of the west ask is a chance with the older communities and an honest shuffle--a square deal above the table--and a show to develop our resources and build up prosperous communities made up of innumerable happy homes. i believe the people of the west are as good citizens, and are just as true and loyal to the interests of the nation as are the citizens of any other locality. as states we do not like to be looked upon as provinces or colonial possessions to be exploited for the benefit of the other sections of this nation. i have faith enough in the fairness of the citizens of the other sections of this nation to believe that they do not covet or desire to rob us of what rightfully belongs to us. we believe the profit arising from the development or exploitation of the natural resources of each state should be applied to the benefit of and to the cost of government of that state. let me get this fact set in your minds: - / % of the national reserves are located within the eleven pacific coast and rocky mountain states, and - / % of the total area of the state i have the honor to represent is taken up by forest reserves, an area in which could be placed the states of maryland, rhode island, delaware, connecticut, and the district of columbia, with room enough to spare to accommodate another rhode island. the extreme conservationist argues that the people of the western states are not competent or qualified to manage the natural resources within their borders and that a guardian in the shape of a federal bureau should be appointed to handle them for us. this is a gratuitous insult to the intelligence and integrity of the people of the west. almost the worst kind of government that can be placed upon a people is a bureaucracy. let me call your attention to the fact that practically all of the land, mineral, coal, timber, and power-site steals perpetrated upon the people were made when these titles were vested in the federal government. now, let us deal a little with common-sense conservation: the people of the state of washington started a practical system of conservation long before conservation became a national issue. the governor of montana has said that montana was the first state in the union to practice conservation. evidently the governor of montana is not up on the laws of the state of washington or he wouldn't have made that statement (laughter). one of the great natural assets of our state is our fisheries. because of over-fishing it became evident to our people some years ago that, unless proper steps were taken, our fishing industry would be ruined. laws were passed regulating the taking of fish, and numerous hatcheries were established throughout the state. we are now putting more salmon fry into salt water than is the federal government, and today the state of washington stands first in the union in the value of the products of its fisheries, all because our people a few years ago started a practical system of conservation. the expense of enforcing our laws regulating fisheries and the cost of maintaining and operating hatcheries is assessed against that industry. we cannot bring ourselves to consent to turn over the management of this industry to the federal government. in fact, so opposed are the fisher-folk of puget sound to federal control of the fishing industry, which is threatened because of the proposed treaty with great britain, that they are fighting the ratification of the treaty by the united states senate. let us now take up the question of the national forest reserves as administered in the western states. i doubt that there is a thinking man who does not love the trees, the deep woods and vast forests of our land; but a tree, like everything else that grows, has its youth, its maturity, its old age and death. a tree not used at maturity decays, falls, and becomes a fire-trap and is a serious menace to standing timber. i believe that when a tree reaches its maturity it should be used and not allowed to go to decay (applause). failure to make use of our natural resources which are going to waste is the antithesis of conservation. i believe that all non-forested lands adapted for agricultural purposes should be opened to settlement and homesteaders allowed to file upon them. within the national forest reserves are vast areas with not a stick of timber on them, and on which timber can never be made to grow profitably. these tracts should be thrown open to settlement. it is people we want in the west, not game preserves (applause); it is happy, prosperous communities, not idle wastes. i would not advise the acceptance of homestead filings upon timbered areas until after the timber is removed and it is found the land is suitable for agriculture. if it is valuable only for timber raising, then the land should be turned over to the state for reforestation. it is the duty of the state to all the states to start a system of reforestation. at the last session of our legislature, an appropriation was made to start a survey and have maps made showing the areas of our state better adapted for timber-growing than for any other purpose. this work is now well under way. a commission composed of twelve of our leading citizens, interested in forestry, have been appointed to draft a forestry bill to be submitted to the coming legislature, when, without doubt, the state will start in upon a plan of reforestation; something which every state of the union should take up. it is the duty of the states to attend to the growing of forests within their borders, and not the duty of the federal government. i am not in favor of abolishing the federal forestry department. this department should stand in the same relation to the state forests as the department of agriculture stands to the farming interests of the nation (applause). we would hardly expect secretary wilson to go around the country, preparing the ground, planting and harvesting our crops, and collecting the revenue therefrom, and we do not expect the federal government to go inside of the state and start a system of reforestation where it is absolutely the duty of the state itself to undertake that work (applause). the greatest infringement upon the rights of the state to handle their own internal affairs is the attempt on the part of the federal government to gain control by indirection of our water-power for the purpose of supervising and deriving the revenue from any possible development of the powers. this, by the way, is a policy particularly waged by the national conservation association, an organization which is making of this conservation question a cult, which has practically set up a dogma, and whose members are now quarreling over their claims to orthodoxy. so far about all it has done has been to play into the hands of the power monopoly, which the first apostles of conservation claim to fear so greatly. of all the lame arguments i have heard, the one that the people of the country have not the brains or authority to regulate the charges of any public service corporation, is the worst. we have two means of reaching them: by regulating the rates, and by taxation. no state in the union was probably ever more troubled than was the state of washington a few years ago with a railway lobby. in the year the legislature of the state of washington passed a railway commission law, and placed the regulation and control of railroads under this commission. three years this commission studied the conditions in the state. it was one of the first states in the union to make a physical valuation to determine the cost of these plants. in the railway commission of washington placed an order into effect that saved to the farmers of the state, in the hauling of wheat and other grains alone, $ , . at the same time they placed an order reducing the general distance tariffs of the railroads, which cost the railroads of the state $ , , and the railroads have never appealed from its decision and those rates are in effect today. in the railway commission traveled over every mile of road in our state, visited every station, held hearings, and as a result of that trip they made orders ordering new stations, enlargement of waiting-rooms and train facilities; all those things that the people complained about they remedied, and of the orders put into effect--which cost the railroads hundreds of thousands of dollars--they never have appealed from but , and have gone into effect; so the argument that the states cannot control affairs within their own borders, it seems to me, is very fallacious (applause). if we are not competent to handle affairs within our own borders, if we are not competent to regulate corporations, then let us surrender our constitution and go back to territorial days and let the federal government administer our affairs for us. (applause) now, with reference to the water-power bill: the bill before congress introduced by senator smoot, of utah, and a similar bill introduced by senator jones, of washington, are perfectly satisfactory to the people of the coast, so far as i know. governor norris has explained to you that the beds and banks of all streams, up to the limit of medium high tide and medium high water, belong to the states; they do not belong to the federal government. that property is just as much ours as is the jack-knife in our pockets. senator smoot's bill provides that all the interest the federal government has in this is that it owns the sites. we own the water, we own the power. there is no question about that. the supreme court has passed upon it time and time again. the government owns the sites. the smoot bill provides that the sites in the federal reserves shall be turned over to the state government, but that in no instance shall the state pass the fee-simple title to the land, and no lease shall be longer than fifty years. this is perfectly satisfactory, and the people of the state of washington have no objections to that form of relinquishment to the state. the high-handed manner in which a federal bureau attempted to hold up the development of the western states was the result of a false conception of the principles upon which the government is founded, and a dangerous assumption that honor and efficiency existed nowhere but in one self-appointed guide, philosopher, and so-called friend of the people. i believe it is the intention of those now in authority to administer the natural resources of the west according to law and with some respect for the welfare of the state in which the resources are located. but outside of governmental and administrative circles, an element composed of faddists, dreamers, and enthusiasts is striving to bend popular sentiment to certain impractical and unfair policies of applying conservation, and it is against this element that the west has taken arms. we want conservation that benefits all the people, not a conservation that plays into the hands of a few. conservation that does not make use of resources rapidly going to waste is conservation gone daffy. i have noticed that there are some states down here shouting loud for federal control of our natural resources. i want to say that those governors who are here shouting the loudest for federal control are from the states that have the least amount of natural resources. it is the desire of these people that the revenue received from these natural resources shall be surrendered to the federal treasury. that is what the western states certainly object to. some people and papers here are charging that "the interests," whatever you may call them, are favoring state control of the natural resources. i want to say to you that "the interests" are always against local control in any case, and always prefer that monopoly of all kinds shall be placed in the federal government and as far away from the people as it is possible to get it. the address made here by president taft this morning is in line with the western idea of conservation as i understand it, and i believe those of us from the west who look at this question as i do endorse the same safe statement that has been made by our great president (applause). let western men, using up-to-date western methods and familiar with western conditions, deal with and manage western matters. i thank you. (applause) * * * * * chairman stubbs--professor condra will make an announcement before i introduce the next speaker. * * * * * professor condra--mr chairman, and ladies and gentlemen: you know that we have state conservation commissions and associations representing various states. we have recently perfected an organization of these with a view to cooperation among states and with the federal departments. the federal representatives forming our national committees have thought it better not to issue any suggestions to the state delegations, preferring to leave this duty to the committee of the interstate organization, of which i have the honor to be chairman, as the more democratic method. we propose that the chairman of each state conservation commission or association call his state delegation together at some stated time and place (in the absence of the chairman the secretary or some other commissioner may act) to organize the delegation and select representatives to serve on the resolutions committee and any other committees, to the end that we may have fair discussion and full representation of all our states. * * * * * chairman stubbs--i now take pleasure in introducing governor brooks, of wyoming. (applause) * * * * * governor brooks--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: it has been my good fortune to visit nearly every state in this great union, and to spend considerable time in nearly all the larger cities, though, strange to say, this is the first time i have ever visited this particular spot; and yesterday, while enjoying a beautiful ride through the twin cities and around the great parks and other resorts, i felt that my education had been sadly neglected (applause). this is certainly one of the garden spots of the union, and i think the people here showed the proper spirit when their governor in his address this morning stated that a state convention on conservation had been held, at which the attendance numbered some , people, to consider the proper conservation of the soil and to bring about increased production of the farms. i know that the state of minnesota is on the right track--that is the important thing, after all. (applause) a few days ago the western governors held a meeting at salt lake city, and spent two days discussing this question of conservation. after full and complete discussion they adopted, unanimously, a brief set of resolutions, which i think express their views in this important matter. colorado, utah, california, washington, oregon, idaho, montana, and wyoming were represented; and since the resolutions, which have been published in all the western papers, have met with unqualified public endorsement, and as it will only take me about a minute, i am going to read them, as embodying the views of the western governors--and, i might add, of percent of the citizens of the great western states: _resolved_, that the governors of the rocky mountain and pacific coast states affirm as a platform of principles to be urged upon the national conservation congress to be held at saint paul, september - , _first_, that in legislatively solving the problem of conservation the national congress adhere to the doctrine of abraham lincoln that the public lands are an impermanent national possession, held in trust for the maturing states. right on that point, i wish to refer to the splendid paper read here at the opening of this afternoon's session by that brilliant, honest, and patriotic statesman, senator nelson (applause), outlining the public land laws. i call your attention to the fact that at the beginning of this great nation of ours the federal government acquired, by cession from the states, by treaties with the indians, and by purchase and conquest, all this vast public-land territory, the early idea being that this public domain was to be sold for the payment of the revolutionary war debt and for the running expenses of the government; though that early idea was quickly transformed and changed, owing to the insistent demand of the settlers, and the pre-emption laws (with which you are all familiar) followed as the second step. they were a sort of settlement and revenue measure combined; but still the insistent demand of the settlers would not stop, and gradually we reached that stage where the homestead law was passed, and signed by abraham lincoln in , giving the settlers acres of land as the result of settlement and cultivation, doing away entirely with the old revenue idea; and under that one law this great state of minnesota, and every other state in this central country, has developed to a degree unparalleled in the history of human progress (applause). now, all the west asks is an even break; all the west asks is an equal opportunity. how can we educate our children, how can we maintain good government and good law, how can we do all those necessary and essential things to maintain a high state of civilization and progress, if over one-half of the state is to be held permanently as a federal resource, giving no taxation or revenue whatever to the support of our state governments? (applause) it is utterly impossible. we of the west are just as bitterly opposed to monopoly, just as bitterly opposed to any misuse of the natural resources of this country as any of you gentlemen here assembled (applause); but we do believe that the states themselves can in a great measure work out the safest and best conservation. i might get started here and go on talking, and i do not want to do it; i want to read the other resolutions: _second_, that state government, no less beneficently than national government, is capable of devising and administering laws for the conservation of public property; and that the national and state governments should legislatively coordinate to the end that within a reasonable period of time the state governments be conceded full and complete administration of such conservation laws as may be found adaptable to the varying conditions of the several states. the idea being that conditions vary so tremendously--just as you have heard from the governor of mississippi and the governor of illinois, the latter of whom told you about a monopoly stepping in and stopping the state development of the water-power along one of their streams. such a condition is absolutely impossible in the west, because that old law of riparian rights does not apply; there is no law in the west whereby we are compelled to allow the water in the streams to flow by your property undiminished in quantity and undefiled in quality. in the west the law of appropriation applies, the law of use. under the constitution of wyoming, granting twenty years ago, we were given all the water of the state, everywhere and every place; we cannot part title with it, we hold it, and we will always hold it. talk about monopoly! how absolutely impossible, under the laws of wyoming! we have used this water wisely and well. i picked out of a paper this afternoon a certificate of appropriation for power granted in , ten years ago: "whereas, f. v. andrews has presented to the board of control of the state of wyoming proof of the appropriation of water from sand creek, tributary to the redwater territory, for enlargement of beulah flouring mill ditch, under permit (enlargement for power and milling purposes), now, know ye, that the board of control under the provisions of division , title , chapters and of the revised statutes of wyoming, , has, by an order duly made and entered on the th day of december, , in order record no. , page , determined and established the priority and amount of such appropriation as follows: name of the proprietor, f. v. andrews, postoffice, beulah, wyoming; amount of appropriation, cubic feet of water, date of appropriation, april , . said ditch so located, the right to use water herein defined, shall not at any time exceed the volume of cubic feet per second, and the right shall at all times be subject to any future regulation and restriction that may be placed on the same by the legislature of the state of wyoming." (applause) it is absolutely impossible to get a monopoly of water-power in the state of wyoming, and such an instance as referred to by the governor of illinois would be impossible. the state of wyoming could simply refuse to allow that company to use one drop of water; they have the power to do it, it is so provided for in the constitution, just as the state of wyoming, if it chose, could absolutely refuse to permit the general government itself to use one drop of water for power purposes. we have never had any power monopoly in the state of wyoming, and we do not intend to have. _third_, that experience of the conservation states demonstrates that dispositions of public property made under existing national conservation laws and regulations have tended to intrench monopolies and interests menacing the common welfare; and that modifications of such laws and regulations should be promoted by the conservation congress. our great president this morning stated a great truth, and it came right to the hearts of the western people. you can't understand it here, perhaps, but we realize the importance of conservation; but we have been talked to death on it. _what we want is action!_ we want the people to get busy; we do not want all these things bottled up in cold storage; we want them used for the generation of today. that is the important thing. as it is now in wyoming, every big coal company in the state is adding an increased price to its coal to the consumer, who is already burdened beyond the point of endurance, simply because there is no further development in these coal lands as they stand today under the withdrawals; every ranchman in the state of wyoming is paying ten dollars a thousand more for his lumber than he had to a few years ago--ten years ago, five years ago--owing to the fact that development has ceased. the only monopolies that we are troubled with out there are those that are unable to appraise their capital at present simply because competition cannot come up and meet them on the markets under present conditions. _fourth_, that the elimination from the forest reserves of all homestead and untimbered grazing lands is immediately expedient. _fifth_, the use and control of all water-power inheres of right in the states, within restrictions insuring perpetual freedom from monopoly. _sixth_, that the privilege of american citizens to seek and develop mineral wealth wherever it may be found should be fully amplified and secured by laws. _seventh_, that the idea of deriving federal revenue from the physical resources of the states is repugnant to that adjustment of constitutional powers which guarantee the perpetuity of the union. (applause) and with only one thought more i leave you: if the western states, never having had the opportunity so far to develop their great natural resources as you people of the east have, as minnesota and the atlantic states have, are now to be changed entirely from the time-honored policy that has made these states great and powerful; if now we are to be taxed, as we have been, $ , a year for the forest-reserve grazing privileges, when that same money is used in the great empire state for forest protection free of cost, then we of the west have a hard row to hoe. we simply ask the same fair treatment as accorded every central and eastern state of the union. it is not right to tax the west for anything which you would not apply in one of the great eastern states. we want our resources protected, we want them safeguarded for our children and our children's children, but we want the opportunity to make our young states grow and be prosperous, so that we of the west will have those things of which we can be as proud as you people of minnesota are when you take a gentleman to your magnificent state capitol, to your great agricultural college, and to your other great schools--we want the same for our children and our children's children, without federal interference. (applause) * * * * * chairman stubbs--i want to say a word here about a suggestion made by the montana governor. i would like to ask governor norris if it is not a fact that the federal government has led in irrigation in montana? governor norris--has led? chairman stubbs--yes sir. haven't they done a great deal of work to develop your irrigation projects? governor norris--for the last three or four years, yes. chairman stubbs--well, it is within the last three or four years that this conservation idea has been spreading out, taking root, and going out from washington; they didn't get started until theodore roosevelt got hold of it (applause). as to the federal government undertaking to dominate the west and discriminate against the west, i don't believe that it is in the heart or mind of gifford pinchot or theodore roosevelt or anybody else to do that (applause); but gifford pinchot has stood like a rock and fought like a tiger to keep the thieves out of the alaska coal fields (applause), and you ought to build a monument to his memory for keeping the cunningham claims off the statute books and from legalizing by congress, for it would have been an everlasting disgrace to the american nation to have millions and billions of tons of coal stolen there. what did president taft say this morning? he said, "we believe in leasing those lands out there in montana and in wyoming and all over this country." he does not believe in selling those things; he doesn't believe in turning them over to the state, either. he said as much here this morning (applause). he says, "lease them for the benefit of the people they belong to." i tell you this conservation idea, when it is put on the right sort of basis, is the biggest thing that we have struck in a financial way in a long while; and i tell you right now (i do not know how it happens, but it is a matter of fact) i do know that the great syndicates and the great corporations that want to gobble up all these coal lands and control these power sites, every bloody one of them, want state control. (applause, and cries of "right, right!") and the reason they want state control is because the meshes are too small in the national net; the federal government has given them genuine supervision and genuine control of national resources, and i thank god for it, too (applause). i want it to keep coming right along. i would not stand for one minute to see the west discriminated against; i do not believe in taxing montana or wyoming for anything that you would not tax new york or pennsylvania for; neither does theodore roosevelt, for he grew up out in that country and he is one of them and his whole heart is with them; he wouldn't see one iota of discrimination, and nobody else would; but i say to you that it is the great electric power organizations and combinations--it centers down to four or five or six fellows--that are trying to monopolize all the power sites in the united states! that's what's the matter now; and those fellows think if they could get the whole thing in the hands of state legislatures they could dicker and trade with them (applause and cheers). they know they cannot do it at washington. that is all there is to this whole problem; and i say to you today that the american people ought to build a monument to theodore roosevelt and gifford pinchot for the work they have done in this line (great applause), to say nothing about the other great work that has been done. i would like to see those alaska coal thieves sent to jail (laughter and applause), and for my part i do not take any stock in the ballinger idea of running things up there, either (tremendous applause). if i were president of the united states, i'd kick ballinger out of that cabinet in five minutes, that's what i'd do. (great and enthusiastic applause) we might as well tell the truth about it, too. i say to you that this work has started, and it has started along broad, decent, national lines; the states have plenty to do right now if they will attend to business; they have seventy-five percent of the forests now in private hands with only about twenty-five percent under federal control, and two-thirds of all the great coal interests of this country in private hands with only one-third vested in the federal government; i'd like to see the federal government look out for these power sites, and when the contract is made, let it be made in such a way as they can control it. taft made some good suggestions this morning, and i want to give him credit for it (laughter and applause). * * * * * i did not mean to make a speech; i meant to introduce governor vessey. (laughter and applause, and cries of "go on, go on") we have great men here that are ready to talk, and i must close in a few minutes. governor vessey, of south dakota. (applause) * * * * * governor vessey--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: you can readily see by the color of that man's hair (indicating governor stubbs) that he wears the kansas emblem on his head (laughter and applause) and is not afraid to say something. now, in regard to conservation, i am a good deal like john was the afternoon he was out riding with mary. for some reason or other he wanted to know whether mary thought enough of him to marry him, and yet he wasn't quite ready to make her his wife. but he put the question anyway, and she immediately accepted him. they rode along for some distance in silence. finally she asked, "john, why don't you say something?" he replied, "there's been too much said already!" (great laughter and applause) and there have been lots of good things said today. south dakota is in a peculiar position. it is not in the southern part of the united states, neither is it in the extreme northwestern part; it doesn't even join kansas (laughter), though it has _some_ of the same kind of spirit (applause). the eastern part of south dakota is a strip of country two hundred miles square, and there is no richer, no more uniform, no better farming land in the united states than that part of south dakota; the western part of the state goes into the foothills of the rocky mountains. in this western part is a great forest reserve; and i want to say i believe that in the state of south dakota the national government is doing the best work in preserving the natural forest done anywhere in the united states. still you find in the western part of our state a great deal of the same spirit that you find in wyoming, montana, and washington. why? because of local interests. you see this is largely a local question; and what suits kansas or mississippi, somehow or other does not suit wyoming. it is like the tariff question; and it will probably never be settled until it is settled by an expert commission which will deal with the matter as a whole. (applause) i believe largely--very largely, indeed--in state rights. i believe the state should control and own the water-power of streams that are not navigable and that it should be within its province to provide that the waters should first be used for the soil and secondarily be used for furnishing water power to turn the wheels of industry and thereby make the state richer. for we must admit--just as your great governor of minnesota has said--the first duty of the people of the united states is to preserve the soil (applause), because the crop that comes annually from the soil yields the greatest revenue that the united states will ever have; and we must have it, and must have it increased if we expect to support the increasing population of the united states at a reasonable cost so that they can work at reasonable wages and support homes--possibly not of luxury, but of all the comforts that citizens are entitled to. i appreciate the position that has been taken in the conservation of coal; i appreciate the conservation of timber, of phosphate lands, of oil, and of gas; but i want to say that the same conditions that have been referred to upon this platform with reference to the disposing of power from water-power plants at the lowest minimum cost should apply in the same way to these other natural resources--yet you will notice that in the report of the national forester it is shown that we have been selling stumpage at market prices. they propose to sell the coal and the gas and the oil, and possibly the phosphate, at market prices. if that is true, it is not real conservation in the interest of the consumer; because if we only own one-third of the coal and the private individuals who own two-thirds fix the prices, and if the government follows them in fixing the prices, where does the consumer derive any benefit (applause). the same rule should apply to timber. i can show you, in our own state, where there are parts of the national forests that are ripe and should be cut into lumber, and that lumber should be building homes on our broad prairies. but the price the government has fixed on the stumpage is too great for mill-men to buy it and manufacture it and sell it, even at the high price of lumber out in that country. now, who is suffering? the men that are endeavoring to build homes on that prairie. i think we ought to be intelligent on those things. i think we ought to use the timber, and we ought to use the coal, and we ought to use the phosphates, in the upbuilding of this country, and give it to the consumers, if possible, at a price at which they can use it, and not at a price that may be set by the large combinations or trusts that control these products. i thank you. (applause) * * * * * chairman stubbs--we were expected to get through here at oclock and it is now ten minutes after . i regret that there is not time to allow a dozen or fifteen mighty fine men to continue this discussion. the session is adjourned. _third session_ the congress convened in the auditorium, saint paul, on the morning of september , , and was called to order by president baker. president baker--ladies and gentlemen. we have a few minutes before our honored guest colonel roosevelt arrives. we shall occupy that time in routine business. at seattle, where this congress was formed, the organization was left to an executive committee and a board of directors. they are now prepared to submit a report; but the first and most important question relates to credentials, on which the congress at large may properly act. a delegate--mr chairman, i move that the chair be authorized to appoint a committee of five on credentials. president baker--gentlemen, you have heard the motion. is it seconded? (the motion was seconded) if there is no discussion, the motion will be put. all those in favor of the motion will signify their pleasure by saying aye. a voice--what is the question? president baker--the motion is that the chair be authorized to appoint a committee of five on credentials. all in favor will say aye. contrary nay. it is a unanimous vote. the chair will appoint on that committee edward hines, of chicago, chairman (and will ask him to call his committee together as soon as possible); george k. smith, of saint louis, r. w. douglas, of seattle, charles h. pack, of cleveland, lynn r. meekins, of baltimore. the next important business will be consideration of a constitution and by-laws, which professor condra will read. professor condra--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: i am asked to read the draft of a constitution that you may know that it comes from the state organizations. your various state committeemen met and adopted the draft submitted to us by the executive committee; therefore the proposed constitution has the approval of two bodies, one state and one national. (professor condra proceeded with the reading of the constitution as submitted; after reaching article vi--) a delegate--mr president, as the time is late, and as the executive committee have passed upon constitution and it has been approved by the representatives of the states in the form presented, i move that the further reading be suspended and that the constitution be adopted. (applause) president baker--is the motion seconded? (several voices seconded the motion) all in favor will say aye; contrary nay. carried without dissenting voice. (applause) some announcements will now be made by the gentleman from nebraska. professor condra--ladies and gentlemen: in order that there may be proper representation of the various delegations in the committee on resolutions, it is again urged that all members of each delegation meet and select their representatives. if chairmen of delegations will give us the place and time of meeting we will gladly announce it from this platform. thus far we have not heard of time and place for meeting of delegations from new hampshire, north carolina, tennessee, kentucky, ohio, minnesota, kansas, montana, wyoming, utah, or nevada. [several announcements of meetings of delegations were here made.] * * * * * president baker--we will now listen to an address from honorable john barrett, a man known around the world as the director of the bureau of american republics. (applause) * * * * * mr barrett--ladies and gentlemen: if i had the fascinating capacity of governor stubbs, of kansas (applause), i might be able to do justice to this occasion; but i have been sitting in yonder corner, behind three noble governors each ready to speak, beside the representative of the british government--which today is watching with great interest this gathering--not expecting for a moment that i would be called upon today; and it is only that i may be true to my new england birth and my western training that i rise in response to the suggestions of your chairman. (applause) if any reason renders it at all fitting that i should say a word, it is because perhaps i have the honor of representing here today some twenty nations as showing their interest in this great conservation movement which is sweeping over the wide world (applause). i want to tell you that as this movement grows, under the splendid leadership of the men who are blazing the way, it will become the policy of every american country from alaska and canada on the north to argentina and chile on the south (applause). we shall hear not only from the united states but from our sister nations of mexico, brazil, argentina, and chile in this effort to make the world realize that if we are to provide for ourselves and for all men who are to come, we must be minute-men--the minute-men of the present day. ladies and gentlemen, all the world is listening to what was said yesterday, on this platform, and all the world will listen, even more earnestly, to what is said today (applause and cheers); and these two great pronunciamentos on conservation will be read in every corner of the globe, and you and i will be proud that we have participated in this great movement. (applause) * * * * * [numerous calls were made for governor stubbs.] governor stubbs--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: it gives me great pleasure to be here this morning in anticipation of hearing a great speech from the greatest american and the greatest citizen of the world. (vociferous applause) i am proud of our country; i am proud of her achievements; i am proud of the great state of kansas, the greatest state in america (great applause), and i am proud to tell you that we won't meet in a bar-room today (laughter and applause), and that we do not have bar-rooms to meet in down in kansas (great applause and cheers); and i want to tell you that in kansas the idea of letting men spend their money for shoes and clothes and schools and homes has proved a blooming success (laughter and applause and cheers) as compared with the fellow who works by the week and makes ten or twenty or forty dollars and spends it in a saloon saturday night. (renewed applause) you have come here today to consider one of the great problems of the age and you will hear from a master mind, from the great leader of this movement, the policies and the plans and the propositions by which the work will be carried forward. i do not propose to take up your valuable time this morning in any discussion of a question of such splendid proportions that i would not have time to get started nor time in which to stop. (applause) * * * * * ex-president roosevelt here entered the hall amid cheers and rousing enthusiasm and mounted the platform. * * * * * president baker (when silence was restored)--reverend doctor j. s. montgomery, pastor of fowler methodist episcopal church, minneapolis, will now offer an invocation. invocation _almighty god, father of our lord and savior jesus christ, thou art the source of all mercy, love, and blessing. lift upon us all the light of thy holy countenance._ _from the beginning thou hast never been without a witness in the world, and thou hast never left us comfortless. give unto us, o god, the source of all wisdom, a great measure of thy wisdom, truth, and blessing. we recognize in thee the source of every good and perfect thing in all the world. thou hast opened up this new great world; and on this auspicious occasion, look thou upon us in mercy. bless our great land. grant that every source of material blessing may be conserved to serve all the people; grant that our citizenship may be blessed and directed from border to border. remember our country; remember the great southland, the great northland; bless the great east and the great west; and may all of our people everywhere have bread enough and to spare, and may we recognize that our supremest duty is not to build up institutions fit for man but to build up man fit for institutions._ _bless thou the governors of all the states. remember our great government, its legislative, its judicial and its executive branches._ _remember in mercy the president of these united states; and bless thou our most distinguished guest and most conspicuous citizen in all the world, who is with us this day. look upon him in mercy, guide him and direct him in wisdom, and grant that no peril may come nigh him._ _bless thou our flag; may it float on until all nations see the blessings of our great republic; may it float on until all selfishness dies out of the world's heart; may it float on until all ignorance shall be gone; may it float on until the nations of the earth shall be united in a brotherhood around and about which are wreathed the blessings and the wisdom of thy holy and undying self._ _be thou in the deliberations of this great body; grant that wisdom and truth may be uppermost in the minds of all who are here. accept thou our gratitude for thy abiding mercy, and at the last, o lord, gather us all into the haven of eternal rest. through jesus christ, our lord, we ask it. amen._ * * * * * president baker--ladies and gentlemen: it is now my pleasure to present that citizen of our country who in three continents has evoked the greatest enthusiasm, and who has done for this country no greater service than in forwarding and extending the work of conservation to protect the natural resources and in carrying out the principles of fair dealing between man and man; our most honored citizen, colonel theodore roosevelt. (great applause and cheers for many minutes) address by theodore roosevelt mr chairman, and governor; governors, and fellow-guests; men and women of minnesota: it is a very great pleasure to me to be here in minnesota again, and especially to come here to speak on this particular subject of "national efficiency." (applause) minnesota is one of the states that almost always takes the lead in any great work (applause), and minnesota has been one of the first to take hold of the conservation policy in practical fashion; and she has done a great work and set an admirable example to the rest of us (applause)--a work representing a policy well set forth in your governor's address yesterday--and i am glad that this congress is held in such a state, where we can listen to such an address made by a governor who had the right to make it. (prolonged applause) much that i have to say on the general policy of conservation will be but a repetition of what was so admirably said on this general policy by the president of the united states yesterday (great applause); and in particular all true friends of conservation should be in heartiest agreement with the policy which the president laid down in connection with the coal, oil, and phosphate lands (applause), and i am glad to be able to say that at its last session congress finally completed the work of separating the surface title to the land from the mineral beneath it. (applause) now, my friends, america's reputation for efficiency stands deservedly high throughout the world. we are efficient probably to the full limits that are permitted by the methods hitherto used. the average american is an efficient man; he can do his business. it is recognized throughout the world that that is his type. there is great reason to be proud of our achievements, and yet no reason to think that we cannot excel our past (applause). through a practically unrestrained individualism, we have reached a pitch of literally unexampled material prosperity. the sum of our prosperity in the aggregate leaves little to be desired, although the distribution of that prosperity, from the standpoint of justice and fair dealing, leaves a little more to be desired (laughter and applause). but we have not only allowed the individual a free hand, which was in the main right; we have also allowed great corporations to act as though they were individuals, and to exercise the rights of individuals, in addition to using the vast combined power of high organization and enormous wealth for their own advantage. this development of corporate action is doubtless in large part responsible for the gigantic development of our natural resources, but it is also true that it is in large part responsible for waste, destruction, and monopoly on an equally gigantic scale. (applause) the method of reckless and uncontrolled private use and waste has done for us all the good it can ever do, and it is time to put an end to it before it does the evil that it well may (applause). we have passed the time when heedless waste and destruction and arrogant monopoly are longer permissible (applause). henceforth we must seek national efficiency by a new and a better way, by the way of the orderly development and use, coupled with the preservation, of our natural resources; by making the most of what we have for the benefit of all of us, instead of leaving the sources of material prosperity open to indiscriminate exploitation (applause). these are some of the reasons why it is wise that we should abandon the old point of view, and why conservation has become a great moral issue, and become a patriotic duty. one of the greatest of our conservation problems is the wise and prompt development and use of the waterways of the nation (applause). there are classes of bulk freight which always go cheaper and better by water if there is an adequate waterway (applause), and the existence of such a type of waterway in itself helps to regulate railroad rates (applause). the twin cities, lying as they do at the headwaters of the mississippi, are not on the direct line of the proposed lakes-to-gulf deep waterway, and yet minnesota, with its vast iron resources and its need of abundant coal, is peculiarly interested in that problem (applause); and the twin cities, therefore, have their own real personal concern in the deepening and regulation of the mississippi to the mouth of the missouri and on to the gulf. (applause) friends, i have spoken on how progressive minnesota is and how progressive these twin cities are, but there are other progressive cities in the west, too (applause). i have just come from kansas city (applause)--it's a pretty live proposition (laughter), and there the merchants themselves have undertaken, by raising over a million dollars, to start the improvement of the waterway lying at their doors so that they shall be able to benefit by it. it is sometimes said that the waterway projects are only backed by people who are delighted to see the government spend its money but who are not willing to show their faith in the proposition by spending their own. kansas city is spending its own (applause). the project for a great trunk waterway, an arm of the sea extending from the gulf of mexico to the great lakes should be abandoned (applause). of course, before any project is entered upon, an absolutely competent and disinterested commission should report thereon in full to the government so that the government can act in the interest of the whole people and without regard to the pressure of special interests (applause), but subject to the action of such a body the lakes-to-gulf deep waterway, and the development of the rivers which flow into it, should be pushed to completion vigorously and without delay. (applause) in nearly every river city from saint paul to the gulf the waterfront is controlled by the railways. nearly every artificial waterway in the united states, either directly or indirectly, is under the same control. it goes without saying that (unless the people prevent it in advance) the railways will always attempt to take control of our waterways as fast as they are improved and completed; and i do not mention this to blame them in the least, but to blame us if we permit them to do it. (great applause and cheers) if uncle sam can't take care of himself, then there is no particular reason why any railroad man should act as his guardian. (great laughter and applause) if he attempted the feat he would merely find himself lonely among other railroads (laughter), and uncle sam wouldn't be materially benefitted. uncle sam's got to do the job himself if he wants to be protected (applause). we must see to it that adequate terminals are provided in every city and town on every improved waterway, terminals open under reasonable conditions to the use of every citizen, and rigidly protected against being monopolized (applause); and we must compel the railways to cooperate with the waterways continuously, effectively, and under reasonable conditions. unless we do this, the railway lines will refuse to deliver freight to the boat lines either openly or by imposing prohibitory conditions, and the waterways once improved will do comparatively little for the benefit of the people who pay for them. adequate terminals, properly controlled, and open through lines by rail and boat, are two absolutely essential conditions to the usefulness of internal waterway development. i believe, furthermore, that the railways should be prohibited from owning, controlling, or carrying any interest in the boat lines on our rivers (applause), unless under the strictest regulation and control of the interstate commerce commission, so that the shippers' interests may be fully protected. and now here another word in supplement: you are the people; now don't sit supine and let the railways gain control of the boat lines and then turn around and say that the men at the head of the railroads are very bad men (laughter and applause). if you leave it open to them to control the boat lines, some of them are sure to do so, and it's to our interest that the best and ablest among them should do so. but don't let any of them do it, excepting under the conditions you lay down (applause). in other words, my friends, when you of your own fault permit the rules of the game to be such that you are absolutely certain to get the worst of it at the hands of some one else, don't blame the other man; _change the rules of the game_. (laughter and applause and prolonged cheering) take the question of drainage, which is almost as important to the eastern states as irrigation is in the western states: where the drainage of swamp and overflow lands in a given area is wholly within the lines of a particular state, it may be well, at least at present, to leave the handling of it to the state or to private action; but where such a drainage area is included in two or more states, the only wise course is to have the federal government act (applause); the land should be deeded from the states back to the federal government, and it then should take whatever action is necessary (applause). much of this work must be done by the nation, in any case, as an integral part of inland waterway development, and it affords a most promising field for cooperation between the states and the nation (applause). the people of the united states believe in the complete and well-rounded development of inland waterways for all the useful purposes they can be made to subserve. they believe also in forest protection and forest extension. the fight for our national forests in the west has been won, and if after winning it we now go on and lose it, that is our own affair; but _we are not going to do it_! (applause) after a campaign in which her women did work which should secure to them the perpetual gratitude of their state, minnesota won her national forest, _and she will keep it_ (applause); but the fight to create the southern appalachian and white mountain forests in the east is not yet over. the bill has passed the house, and will come before the senate for a vote next february. the people of the united states, regardless of party or section, should stand solidly behind it and see that their representatives do so likewise (applause). because our ancestors didn't have sufficient foresight, the nation is now obliged to spend great sums of money to take responsibilities from the states. we, the people of the east, our state governors--i have been a governor of an eastern state myself (applause)--showed that the states in the east couldn't do the work as well as the national government and we are now getting the national government to take, at large cost to itself, these lands and do the work the public good requires (applause). when we are now doing that in the east, it seems to me the wildest folly to ask us to start in the west to repeat the same blunders that are now being remedied (applause and cheers). my language shall at least be free from ambiguity. if any proof were needed that forest protection is a national duty, the recent destruction of forests in the rocky mountains by fire would supply it. even with the aid of the army added to that of the forest service, the loss has been severe. without either it would have been vastly greater. but the forest service does more than protect the national forests against fire. it makes them practically and increasingly useful as well. during the last year for which i have figures the national forests were used by , cattlemen with their herds, , sheepmen with their flocks, , timbermen with their crews, and , miners. and yet people will tell you they have been shut up from popular use! (applause) more than , persons used them for other special industries. nearly , settlers had the free use of water. the total resident population of the national forests is about a quarter of a million, which is larger than the population of some of our states. more than , acres of agricultural land have been patented or listed for patent within the forests, and the reports of the forest officers show that more than , people a year use the forests for recreation, camping, hunting, fishing and similar purposes. all this is done, of course, without injury to the timber, which has a value of at least a thousand million dollars. moreover, the national forests protect the water supply of a thousand cities and towns, about irrigation projects, and more than power projects, not counting the use of water for these and other purposes by individual settlers. i think that hereafter we may safely disregard any statements that the national forests are withdrawn from settlement and usefulness (applause). conservation has to do not only with natural resources; it has to do with the lives of those who enable the rest of us to make use of those natural resources. the investigations of the country life commission have led the farmers of this country to realize that they have not been getting their fair share of progress and all that it brings. some of our farming communities in the mississippi valley and in the middle west have made marvelous progress, and yet even the best of them, like communities of every other kind, are not beyond improvement, and those that are not the best need improvement very much. as yet we know but little of the basic facts of the conditions of rural life compared to what we know about the conditions, for instance, of industrial life. the means for better farming we have studied with care, but to better living on the farm, and to better business on the farm--i mean by that, having the farmer use the middleman where it is to the farmer's advantage and not be used by the middleman chiefly to the middleman's advantage (applause)--scant attention has been paid. one of the most urgent needs of our civilization is that the farmers themselves should undertake to get for themselves a better knowledge along these lines. horace plunkett, an irishman, for many years a wyoming ranchman, has suggested in his recent book on "the country life problem in america" the creation of a country life institute as a center where the work and knowledge of the whole world concerning country life may be brought together for the use of the nation. i strongly sympathize with his ideas. last spring, while visiting the capital of hungary, buda-pesth, i was immensely impressed by the museum of country life, which contained an extraordinary series of studies in agriculture, in stock-raising, in forestry, in mining. it was one of the most interesting places i ever visited, and the exhibits were not merely interesting and instructive, they were of the utmost practical importance; and i felt rather ashamed that i, a citizen of what we suppose to be a very go-ahead country, should be in hungary and obliged to confess we had nothing at all like that in our own country. i wish we had such a museum in washington, and some of your farmer congressmen ought to get a detailed report of this buda-pesth museum to be printed for distribution as a public document (applause). i would like to see a study made of such museums, so that we may take what is good in them for our own use here in america. (applause) as a people we have not yet learned the virtue of thrift. it is a mere truism to say that luxury and extravagance are not good for a nation. so far as they affect character, the loss they cause may be beyond computation. but in a material sense there is a loss greater than is caused by both extravagance and luxury put together. i mean the needless, useless and excessive loss to our people from premature death and avoidable diseases. it has been calculated that the material loss to the federal government in such ways is nearly twice what it costs to run the federal government. one of the most important meetings in our recent history was that of the governors in the white house in may, , to consider the conservation question (applause). by the advice of the governors, the meeting was followed by the appointment of a national conservation commission. the meeting of the governors directed the attention of the country to conservation as nothing else could have done, while the work of the commission gave the movement definiteness, and supplied it with a practical program. now, my friends, so far, i have had nothing but praise to speak of minnesota; but i cannot continue to speak only words of praise. at the moment when this commission was ready to begin the campaign for putting its program into effect, an amendment to the sundry civil bill was introduced by a congressman from minnesota, with the purpose of putting a stop to the work so admirably begun. (sensation) congress passed the amendment. its object was to put an end to the work of a number of commissions which had been appointed by the president, and whose contributions to the public welfare had been simply incalculable. (voice: "now, what do you think of tawney?" and laughter) among these were the commission for reorganization of the business methods of the government, the public lands commission, the country life commission, and the national conservation commission itself. when i signed the sundry civil bill containing this amendment, i transmitted with it, as my last official act, a memorandum declaring that the amendment was void because it was an unconstitutional interference with the rights of the executive and that if i were to remain president i would pay to it no attention whatever (enthusiastic applause and cheers). the national conservation commission thereupon became dormant. the suspension of its work came at a most unfortunate time, and there was serious danger that the progress already made would be lost. at this critical moment the national conservation association was organized. it took up work which otherwise would not have been done; if it had not done it we wouldn't have had this meeting here (applause), and it exercised a most useful influence in preventing bad legislation, in securing the introduction of better conservation measures at the past session of congress, and in promoting the passage of wise laws. it deserves the confidence and support of every citizen interested in the wise development and preservation of our natural resources (applause) and in preventing them from passing into the hands of uncontrolled monopolies (applause). it joins with the national conservation congress in holding this meeting. i am here by the joint invitation of both. (applause) when the government of the united states awoke to the idea of conservation and saw that it was good, it lost no time in communicating the advantages of the new point of view to its immediate neighbors among the nations. a north american conservation conference was held in washington, and the cooperation of canada and mexico in the great problem of developing the resources of the continent for the benefit of the people was asked and promised. the nations upon our northern and southern boundaries wisely realized that their opportunity to conserve their natural resources was better than ours, because with them destruction and monopolization had not gone so far as they had with us. so it is with the republics of central and south america. obviously they are on the verge of a period of great material progress. the development of their natural resources--their forests, their mines, their waters, and their soils--will create enormous wealth. it is to the mutual interests of the united states and our sister american republics that this development should be wisely done. our manufacturing industries offer a market for more and more of their natural wealth and raw material, while they will wish our products in exchange. the more we buy from them, the more we shall sell to them. thank heaven, we of this hemisphere are now beginning to realize, what in the end the whole world will realize, that normally it is a good thing for a nation to have its neighbors prosper (great applause). we of the united states are genuinely and heartily pleased to see growth and prosperity in canada, in mexico, in south america (applause). i wish we could impress upon certain small republics to the south of us, whose history has not always been happy, that all we ask of them is to be prosperous and _peaceful_ (laughter and applause). we do not want to interfere, it is particularly the thing that we dislike doing; all we ask of any nation on this hemisphere is that it shall be prosperous and peaceful, able to do reasonable justice within its own boundaries and to the stranger within its gates; and any nation that is able to do that can count on our heartiest and most friendly support. (applause) it is clear that unless the governments of our southern neighbors take steps in the near future by wise legislation to control the development and use of their natural resources, they will probably fall into the hands of concessionaires and promoters, whose single purpose, without regard to the permanent welfare of the land in which they work, will be to make the most possible money in the shortest possible time. there will be shameful waste, destructive loss, and short-sighted disregard of the future, as we have learned by bitter experience here at home. unless the governments of all the american republics, including our own, enact in time such laws as will both protect their natural wealth and promote their legitimate and reasonable development, future generations will owe their misfortunes to us of today. a great patriotic duty calls upon us. we owe it to ourselves and to them to give the other american republics all the help we can. the cases in which we have failed should be no less instructive than the cases in which we have succeeded. with prompt action and good will the task of saving the resources for the people is full of hope for us all. but while we of the united states are anxious, as i believe we are able, to be of assistance to others, there are problems of our own which must not be overlooked. one of the most important conservation questions of the moment relates to the control of water-power monopoly in the public interest (applause). there is apparent to the judicious observer a distinct tendency on the part of our opponents to cloud the issue by raising the question of state as against federal jurisdiction (applause). we are ready to meet this issue if it is forced upon us (applause), but there is no hope for the plain people in such conflicts of jurisdiction. the essential question is not one of hair splitting legal technicalities (applause). it is not really a question of state against nation, it is really a question of the special corporate interests against the popular interests of the people. (tremendous applause and cheers) if it were not for those special corporate interests, you never would have heard the question of state against nation raised (great applause and cheers). the real question is simply this, who can best regulate the special interests for the country's good? (voices: "theodore roosevelt!" and prolonged applause and cheers) most of the great corporations, and almost all of those that can legitimately be called the great predatory corporations (laughter), have interstate affiliations: therefore they are out of reach of effective state control, and fall of necessity within the federal jurisdiction (applause). one of the prime objects of those among them that are grasping and greedy is to avoid any effective control either by state or nation; and they advocate at this time state control chiefly because they believe it to be the least effective (applause). if it grew effective, many of those now defending it would themselves turn around and declare against state control, and plead in the courts that such control was unconstitutional (applause). i had my own experience (applause and laughter); i'll give you an example of it. when i was governor of new york, there came up a bill to tax the franchises of certain big street railway corporations. as originally introduced, the bill provided that the taxation should be imposed by the several counties and localities in which those corporations did business. representatives of the corporations came to me and said that this would work a great hardship upon them, that the state authority would be more just, that the local authorities (especially where a railroad ran through two or three towns or counties) would each endeavor to get the whole benefit of the taxation for their own locality, and that, in the name of justice, i ought to agree to have the state and not the localities made the taxing power. i thought their plea just, and recommended and sanctioned the change. the bill was made a law; and those same corporations instantly entered suit against it on the ground that it was unconstitutional (laughter and applause) to take the power of taxation away from the localities and give it to the state (renewed laughter and applause); and they carried the suit up to the supreme court of the united states where, during my own term as president, it was decided against them. (applause) in the great fight of the people to drive the special interests from the domination of the government, the nation is stronger, and its jurisdiction is more effective than that of any state (applause). i want to say another thing, which the representatives of those corporations do not at the moment believe, but which i am sure that in the end they will find out; because of its strength, because of the fact that the federal government is better able to exact justice from them, i also believe it is less apt, in some sudden gust of popular passion, to do injustice to them (applause). now, i want you to understand my position--i do not think you can misunderstand it. i will do my utmost to secure the rights of every corporation. if a corporation is improperly attacked, i will stand up for it to the best of my ability; i'd stand up for it even though i was sure that the bulk of the people were misguided enough at the moment to take the wrong side and be against it (applause). i should fight to see that the people, through the national government, did full justice to the corporations; but i don't want the national government to depend only upon their good will to get justice for the people. (great applause) now, most of the great corporations are in large part financed and owned in the atlantic states, and it's a rather comical fact that many of the chief and most zealous upholders of states' rights in the present controversy are big business men who live in other states (applause). the most effective weapon is federal laws and the federal executive. that is why i so strongly oppose the demand to turn these matters over to the states. it is fundamentally a demand against the interest of the plain people, of the people of small means, against the interest of our children and our children's children; and it is primarily in the interest of the great corporations which wish to escape effective government control. (applause) and i ask you to consider two more things in this connection: waters run; they don't stay in one state (laughter and applause). that fact seems elementary, but it tends to be forgotten. i have just come from kansas. practically all the water in kansas runs into kansas from another state, and out of it into other states. you can't have effective control of a watershed unless the same power controls all the watersheds (applause and cries of "good"), as the water runs not merely out one state into another but out of one country into another. one of the great irrigation projects of montana has been delayed because the waters that make the milk river rise in montana, flow north into canada, and then come back into montana. you can't settle that matter excepting through the national government (applause); the state can't settle it. so much for what we see here. now, take the experience of other nations--of the little republic of switzerland. it actually tried what some of our people ask to try; it actually tried the experiment of letting each canton handle its own waters, and a conflict of jurisdiction arose, and the squabbling and the injustices became such that about nine years ago the national government of switzerland had to assume complete control of all the waters of switzerland, on the explicit ground that all of the waters belonged to all the citizens of the swiss nation (great applause). now, i am not asking that we go ahead recklessly; i am only asking that we do not go backward where other countries have gone ahead. (applause) as the president yesterday pointed out, one of the difficulties that we have to meet, in connection with the fight for conservation, is that our aim is continually misrepresented--that the effect is constantly made to show that we are anxious to retard development. it has been no slight task to bring ninety millions of people to understand what the movement is, and to convince them that it is right. much remains to be cleared up in the minds of the people, and there are many misunderstandings to be removed. for example, we find it constantly said by men who should know better that temporary withdrawals, such as the withdrawals of the coal lands, will permanently check development. yet the fact is that these withdrawals have no purpose whatever except to prevent the coal lands from passing into private ownership until congress passes laws to open them under conditions just alike to the public and to the men who will do the developing (applause). and, now understand me; if there is any doubt whether the conditions are liberal enough to the men who are to do the developing. i always solve the doubt in favor of liberality to those men; i want to give them every chance, i want to give them every opportunity to do well for themselves, but i want to see that in doing well for themselves they also do well for the rest of us. (applause) in spite of these difficulties, most of which are doubtless inevitable in any movement of this kind, the cause of conservation has made marvelous progress. we have a right to congratulate ourselves on it, but there is no reason for believing that the fight is won. in the beginning the special interests, who are our chief opponents now, paid little heed to the movement, because they neither understood it nor saw that if it won they must lose. but with the progress of conservation in the minds of the people, the fight is getting sharper. the nearer we approach to victory, the bitterer the opposition that we must meet and the greater the need for caution and watchfulness. open opposition we can overcome, but we must guard ourselves; and you of this congress must especially guard yourselves against the men who are really corporate agents but who pose as disinterested outsiders (applause). now i heartily approve the action of any corporation which comes here openly because it is interested in the deliberations of a meeting such as this, and by its openly accredited agents presents views which it believes the meeting should have in mind (applause); i approve of the corporation that does that, and i would despise any of our people who feared instantly to give the most ample and respectful hearing and real consideration to any such plea thus put forward. (applause and cries of "good!") the corporation through its agents not only has a right to be heard, but if it did not volunteer you ought to endeavor to see that its views were presented. my protest is not against the man who comes here openly as the corporation agent, but against the man who comes here openly as something else and really as the corporation agent. (laughter) it is our duty and our desire to make this land of ours a better home for the race, but our duty does not stop there. we must also work for a better nation to live in this better land (applause). the development and conservation of our national character and our free institutions must go hand in hand with the development and conservation of our natural resources, which the governors' conference so well called the foundations of our prosperity. whatever progress we may make as a nation, whatever wealth we may accumulate, however far we may push mechanical progress and production, we shall never reach a point where our welfare can depend in the last analysis on anything but the fundamental qualities of good citizenship--honesty, courage, and common sense (applause). the homely virtues are the lasting virtues, and the road which leads to them is the road to genuine and lasting success. what this country needs is what every free country must set before it, as the great goal toward which it works--an equal opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to all of its citizens, great and small, rich and poor, great and humble, alike. (tumultuous applause and continuous cheers) _fourth session_ the congress reassembled in the auditorium, saint paul, after luncheon, september , and was called to order by vice-president condra. * * * * * professor condra--delegates, ladies and gentlemen: president baker has asked me, as one of the vice-presidents, to preside pending his arrival. we are to be congratulated in that we are to hear from many distinguished speakers on many interesting topics this afternoon. we are especially happy in that the first speaker is one who has done much, not only in washington but throughout the world, for conserving human life through the work of the red cross. i have great pleasure in presenting to you miss mabel boardman, of washington. (applause) * * * * * miss boardman--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: of what value would conservation be without human life? for the benefit of man's life are given all these energies which are devoted to the conservation of our natural resources. so at the very foundation of conservation must lie the preservation of that for which conservation exists. it is in this principle of conservation of human life that the red cross has its being. though first inspired by florence nightingale in the crimea, it was born on the bloody battlefield of solferino, more than fifty years ago, when henri dunan witnessed the terrible waste of human life because of the lack of medical and nursing care. the red cross has become one of the great conserving forces of all the world. it acts under the only universal conservation treaty in existence. one after another all the nations of the world have signed this treaty of geneva, first drafted in , revised in , and its provisions extended to naval warfare by the treaty of the hague. the opening words of the geneva treaty read: "officers, soldiers, and other persons officially attached to armies, who are sick and wounded, shall be protected and cared for, without distinction of nationality, by the belligerent in whose hands they are. the belligerent in possession of a field of battle must search for and protect the wounded, and may grant immunity to those inhabitants who have taken into their homes the disabled men. the neutrality of hospitals and ambulances with their personnel, who cannot be made prisoners of war, must be respected, and, for humanity's sake, lists of the dead and wounded must be exchanged for transmission to the families of these men by the authorities of their own country." this wonderful treaty provides its own insignia, and wherever throughout the world the grating doors of the temple of janus open wide their terrible portals it flings to the winds of heaven its merciful banner of conservation of the sick and wounded, the flag of the red cross. the treaty provides, moreover, protection for the volunteer aid societies which have received official authority from their respective governments. these are the three great red cross societies. recognizing two facts, _first_, that no medical service of any nation can be adequate to the demands of war, and _second_, that at such times the humanity and patriotism of a people become deeply stirred into active life and that this activity should be utilized in such a systematic way as to be of real value in the saving of life for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the country, the members of the original geneva conference recommended to the signatory powers the formation of these volunteer aid societies. thus, the red cross had its origin in the purpose of conservation of human life in time of war. how efficiently it has carried out this duty where well organized is shown by a glance at the remarkable statistics of the work done by the red cross of russia and japan during the late war in the far east. i am tempted here to dwell for a moment on one or two facts connected with the japanese red cross. it has today more than , , members, and its annual revenue in amounted to more than $ , , . in spite of the late war which was such a serious drain upon the resources of the country, the japanese red cross never depleted by a single yen its permanent fund. the report for , just received, gives this permanent fund as more than $ , , , and it has besides in other funds more than $ , , on hand. by it plans to have increased its permanent fund to $ , , ; and knowing what japan has already done, we cannot doubt the carrying out of this expectation. but though since the beginning of history wars have been from time to time the misfortune of mankind, the great forces of nature bring a far more frequent need for such assistance as the red cross is able to render. because of this ever recurring need of organized aid the red cross reached out its strong and well-trained arms into this broader field to succor the victims of great disasters. the charter granted by congress to the american red cross, and which created it the officially authorized red cross of our government, provides that it shall not only "take charge of the volunteer relief in time of war" but that it shall "carry on a system of national and international relief in time of peace, and apply the same in mitigating the sufferings caused by pestilence, famine, fire, floods, and other great calamities, and to devise and carry on measures for preventing same." under this charter our own american red cross is not a private association of certain people, but an officially authorized agency of our government, responsible to the people, and whose existence congress may at any time cancel by annulling the charter. its accounts are audited by the war department. the chairman and five members of the central committee, representing the departments of state, treasury, war, justice, and navy are appointed by the president of the united states. the state department is represented because of participation in international relief. the treasury provides the national red cross treasurer, the department of justice, the counselor, and the army and navy have their reasons for representation not only because of war association but because, during national disaster relief as at san francisco, hattiesburg, and key west, the red cross has the heartiest and most invaluable aid of our army, while in international relief, as in italy after the earthquake and at bluefields, nicaragua, it receives the equally hearty and valuable aid of our navy. briefly, then, of what does the american red cross organization consist? since its reorganization in , william howard taft, now president of the united states, has been yearly elected as its president, and largely to his constant interest, wise counsel, and valuable assistance is its success due. it has, besides the other usual officers, a national director mr ernest p. bicknell, whose particular duty it is to proceed immediately to the scene of any serious disaster and take charge of or advise in regard to the red cross relief work. it has a central committee of eighteen, which elects an executive committee of seven. under this committee the work of the red cross is segregated into three departments for war and for national and international relief, each under a board of fifteen members. the chairman and vice-chairman of each board are members of the central committee. the war relief board, of which the surgeons representing the army and navy on the central committee are respectively chairman and vice-chairman, has prepared a complete list of every coastwise vessel suitable for a hospital ship, so that such a ship could be chartered at a moment's notice. it has moreover drawn up a complete and detailed list for the equipment of such a ship with estimates of the cost of this equipment and the necessary transformation for hospital purposes. it is studying the questions of civil hospital accommodations for war-time need, of hospital trains, of field hospitals, rest stations, the use of private automobiles for ambulances, and other kindred subjects. a sub-committee, six of whom are members of the board and nine of whom are representative women of the trained nursing profession, and whose chairman is miss jane delano, superintendent of the army nurse corps, has systematized the red cross nursing service, prepared uniform regulations, organized state and local committees, and is fast enrolling the best trained nurses in the country for active service in time of need. these splendid nurses at such times not only undertake the most difficult work under frequently severe hardships, but when on this active duty accept from the red cross only half of their usual salary. this red cross nursing committee will later take up the plan of providing courses for women in simple home nursing of the sick. another sub-committee of the war relief board is the first aid committee, the chairman of which, major charles lynch, of the army medical service, is detailed for this particular duty by the surgeon-general. the work of this committee is the organizing of courses in first-aid instructions throughout the country. on this committee such men as mr john hays hammond represent the mine companies; mr john mitchell, the miners; mr julius kruttschnitt, the railroad companies; mr w. g. lee, the trainmen; dr d. a. mansfield, the sailors' interests; dr j. a. holmes, the u. s. bureau of mines. the y. m. c. a. is also represented on the committee, as it now gives all its first-aid courses in collaboration with the red cross. dr m. j. shields is employed as the agent to organize these courses among miners. it is expected this autumn that a special car will be donated by the pullman company for the purpose of sending with dr shields a traveling first-aid equipment and safety-device exhibit. a number of railroads have already most kindly consented to transport this car free of expense to the red cross. i may say that in every case of a great calamity, the railroad companies, express companies, telegraph and telephone companies, have placed their services free at the disposition of the red cross in a most helpful and generous spirit. the first-aid courses will soon be extended to trainmen and employees of large industrial concerns, as has been done by the british and german red cross. major lynch has prepared for the red cross a most excellent general text-book on first-aid, also a special book for miners and trainmen, and another, at its request, for the bell telephone company. furthermore, valuable and inexpensive anatomical charts have been printed for these courses, and small metal boxes hermetically sealed containing first-aid bandages and a leaflet of directions have been made for the society, as well as a larger box for railroad stations, mines, factories, etc. competitions in first-aid have been held, and prizes and medals awarded. more than sixty thousand posters calling attention to precautions to be taken to prevent personal injury on railroads, and over thirty thousand of a like nature for trolley cars, have been issued by the red cross and are distributed on application from various companies. to spread abroad throughout the country the knowledge of first-aid among our industrial classes, in fact, among all classes of our people, is the aim of this department of red cross work. not only in time of war or disaster will such knowledge prove of great value, but in all of the frequent accidents of daily life will this training be of help. (applause) the second board, that of the national relief, has to do with the study, planning and overseeing of relief after national disaster. it is not possible, nor would it be wise, for the red cross to maintain a corps of trained workers for active duty after disaster, when such duty comes only from time to time; so to provide itself with an experienced personnel, it has created an institutional membership consisting of the best charity organization societies of the country. these associations in accepting membership consent to utilize their personnel under direction of this board and of mr bicknell, the national director, for active relief duty. for example, mr logan of the atlanta organization, went on red cross orders to key west last september, systematized relief work so as to avoid imposture, unfortunately prevalent at such times, advised with the mayor and commanding officer of the army post there, arranged that the contributions be mainly expended in rehabilitating the fishermen who had lost their little boats, their only means of earning their livelihood. as each boat was completed, the owner who had been provided with material for his boat and paid a daily wage while building it, was again on his feet, able to support himself, and his name was taken from the list of those being aided. at the time of the cherry mine disaster, mr kingsley of the united charities of chicago, went immediately to the scene of the disaster, remaining until mr bicknell could arrive. then for several months, at the request of the red cross, his assistant and two good women who could speak italian and polish to the poor distracted miners' widows, remained at cherry while mr bicknell's plan for permanent relief could be perfected and accepted. by this plan, which is now being carried out, the generous funds contributed by the people of illinois, by its state legislature, and by the miners' unions, amounting to about $ , , have been consolidated and are being administered by a joint commission so that a pension can be paid to each widow and minor child until the children are of an age to become wage-earners themselves and the fund is exhausted. (applause) the national relief board has also had charge of the little red cross christmas stamp--next year to be called a "_christmas seal_"--placed on the back of letters out of deference to the wishes of the post office department, which has suffered from a multiplicity of stamps issued by others because of the success of the red cross stamp. that stalking spectre of pestilence, tuberculosis, had laid its devastating hand on every nation; it invades the palace as well as the hovel, and the youth of the people are its surest prey. with a weapon tinier than the stone in david's sling, the red cross sends forth this little seal to do its part. in the last two years it has netted more than $ , with which to war against this grim destroyer. here again the red cross carries out its principle, the conservation of the _human life_. (applause) the third board is that of international relief with a representative of the state department as its chairman. two maps hang on the walls of the red cross office at washington, one of the world, the other of the united states with its insular possessions. starred over these large maps are little red crosses marking the fields of its noble labors for conservation. not alone within our own borders lies its merciful service. far away in russia, china, and japan, when famine claimed its thousands of tortured victims, went the red cross, aided by the _christian herald_ of new york, with food for the starving multitudes: when earthquakes in chili, jamaica, italy, portugal, and costa rica brought destruction and desolation, when floods in mexico, france, and servia devastated the land, when massacres in armenia brought suffering, misery, and even death to thousands, when internal war in nicaragua left regiments of wounded, naked, and starving boy prisoners, our american red cross stretched out her helping hand to these, her sister nations in distress (applause). if in conservation lies thought for men yet unborn, thought must also be given for the men who live today, and the red cross recognizes its duty toward the conservation of all human life. (applause) but a moment more on its organization: in over thirty states, boards of representative men, with the governor in each state as president of the board, have already been appointed, and before the end of the year the boards for all of the other states and for the insular possessions will probably be completed. the duty of such a board is to act as a financial committee for the receipt of contributions of the people of the state in case of war, local, national or international disaster. the governor being president of the board, may issue an appeal to the people of the state when in his judgment a disaster of sufficient magnitude within the state justifies such an appeal. on the occurrence of disasters without the state, appeals are issued only on advice from the national officers. the governor or state board may, in case of any disaster within the state of sufficient magnitude, request of headquarters the assistance of the national body. chapters of the red cross may exist in any town, city or county where there are five or more members who pay the annual dues of one dollar. it is the duty of these chapters to respond promptly and vigorously to any request for action on the part of the red cross in time of war or disaster at home or abroad. appeals issued by the president of the state board or from washington will state the needs for money or supplies, or both, which the chapter should at once begin collecting. in case of a serious local disaster, the chapter acts as the supply agency for the national director and institutional member, when such member is present. in case no institutional member is at hand, it is expected to take prompt relief measures pending the arrival or instructions of the national director. this, then, in brief, is the organization of the red cross for active service: national officers, a central committee, relief boards with their sub-committees; state hoards, chapters, and institutional members. it seems impossible in a non-military country like ours to obtain and retain a large supporting membership with small annual dues, as is done in other countries. when reports of great calamities fill the papers, our people give with wonderful generosity, but the minor disasters, whereby small communities suffer greatly, receive but little notice from our public. if japan plans to increase its red cross permanent fund to $ , , , could not the people of this country raise for our american red cross a permanent fund of $ , , ? i, for one, believe they will, for new york city alone has already promised nearly quarter of that amount, and this autumn endowment committees of prominent men, appointed by the president of the united states, will make an appeal to our people all over the country to raise this permanent fund for the american red cross. and, last, may i say a word or two for some of the by-products of conservation in red cross service? in the work of the red cross first-aid department lies the far-reaching results of conservation of the life of the wage-earner of the family as well as the labor-producer of the country, or in case of his death in disaster, as at cherry, the administration of the relief funds so that the unfortunate widows can keep their little children at home (applause),--a by-product, the conservation of the family. the preservation of life in time of war has not only its humane feature but its patriotic reason. in fact, the japanese red cross puts this principle first. the saving of one of the most important assets of any country, that of its young manhood, becomes a by-product of conservation for the sake of patriotism. another by-product is the conservation of communities. whether some little hamlet or some large city suffers from the overwhelming calamity of fire, flood, storm, earthquake or pestilence, or the still more pitiful disaster of widespread famine settles over a great province or empire, its people are brought down to desolation and despair. their neighbors suffer as well and there are none at hand to help. without aid they must die or drift away from their homes like unmoored boats after a storm, to be swamped at sea or wrecked upon the rocks of unknown shores. it is then to these communities as well as to the individual that the red cross comes. it calls to the disconsolate "comfort ye, my people, build again your homes. sow again your fields; the strong arms of the red cross are here to aid you, held up by your brothers of the nation, yea, by your brothers of the world, if there is need" (applause). on a beautiful silver tablet, presented by an italian relief committee to the american red cross, are engraved in latin the words of an old roman historian, "your bounty has repaired the catastrophe not merely of individual citizens but of entire cities." and there is one more by-product of conservation not having so much to do with things material but for the well-being of the world. is there not need of a conservation of higher things? above the passion of war, amidst the desolation of terrible disasters, in the dangers of the daily occupations so many of our fellowmen must undergo to earn their livelihood, does not the red cross conserve, protect, and extend the great bond of human brotherhood, and, touched by sorrow, make the whole world kin? strangely taking its inception on the field of battle, this great international organization of the red cross for the conservation of human life was born, has passed from infancy into a strong and noble maturity ever ready to protect and preserve human life, for which the conservation of all material things has its reason and its purpose. (applause) * * * * * chairman condra--we shall now have the privilege of hearing the commissioner of corporations, called to that responsible duty by president roosevelt, and continued in his responsibilities by president taft, honorable herbert knox smith, whom i have great pleasure in introducing (applause). * * * * * commissioner smith--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: my text is that superb word "power"; and it has no more appropriate place for enunciation than this center of gravity of imperial power, the mississippi valley. in our complex civilization there are many things that are necessaries of life. control over any of them represents a power that is essentially governmental. this is plainly true of basic necessaries like food, clothing, transportation, heat, and light; it is true also of the natural resources that are back of these. it is no less true of the mechanical power that produces and delivers them. private control of any one of these, unrestrained either by business competition or by governmental authority, means that irresponsible individuals hold a command over the daily life and welfare of the citizen which the men of our race have never willingly granted to any except their own representatives chosen by them. for us of our generation, mechanical power is a basic necessary. our daily existence is borne on its current, and our power demand steadily increases. our chief present sources of power supply--coal, petroleum, and natural gas--although at present ample, are absolutely fixed in quantity and cannot be replaced. water-power is the one important source of mechanical power now practically available which is self-renewing. its importance, therefore, to our present vision, must steadily increase. effective restraint, imposed by competition on its control, is becoming more and more improbable. there has been a marked concentration of water-power control in private hands, and this process is advancing rapidly. public regulation of water-power, the only other alternative, therefore, becomes a necessity. electric transmission has worked this change within the last decade. as now commercially practicable, such transmission allows a given water-power to reach a market area of at least , square miles. it has raised water-power from purely local work, and made it the vital energy for great communities and distant enterprises. it has brought our water-power resources suddenly within the sweep of great economic forces. within these market areas just described, there are strong practical reasons for consolidation of water-powers--what is known as "coupling up." a power plant must be constructed to meet the highest point of its expected demand--the "peak of the load." the nearer the "load" (the power demand) approaches that peak for all the time, the more fully will the entire fixed investment be earning a return. suppose there are two independent power plants in two neighboring communities where the demand in one community is mainly for power during the day time, and in the other at night. these plants can advantageously combine, throwing the surplus of their joint power by day to one place and by night to the other, thus bringing their normal load in each case up nearer to the peak. similarly, such coupling up is obviously advantageous in two neighboring watersheds where the excess water-power occurs at different times. in general such combining of varying conditions to produce a closer parallelism of supply and demand is in itself an entirely proper industrial development. we have no reason to oppose it if accomplished by fair methods; we must simply be prepared to regulate such monopolistic power as may result therefrom. the investigation of developed water-powers now being made by the bureau of corporations shows that up to date concerns or closely allied interests control over , , horsepower of the water-power developed or in process of construction, and, in addition, over , , horsepower of undeveloped water-power. as to undeveloped powers, this information was secured merely as an incident to our main work, and certainly much understates the case. as it stands, however, it makes a total water-power controlled by these groups of over , , horsepower. the total water-power in use in the united states in , as estimated by the census and geological survey, was only , , . and this total includes a very large number of small powers which the bureau did not include, as it dealt almost wholly with powers of over , horsepower. the total now commercially capable of development is variously estimated at from , , to , , horsepower, the smaller figure being the preferable one. the great bulk of both developed and undeveloped water-power lies on the pacific coast, in the northwest and northeast, and in the south atlantic states. our power demand as measured by the total unduplicated capacity of all prime movers--steam, water, and gas--is now at least million horsepower. it is obvious that a local monopoly of power covering simply one market area is nevertheless as complete in its effects on the inhabitants of that area as if it covered the entire country. conditions in separate sections are therefore important. in california, for example, four principal hydro-electric companies dominate the water-power industry. they have a total developed horsepower of , , with probably , additional undeveloped, and a very strong hold on the most important power markets. and between these four concerns there is also evidence of considerable harmony. this is not a unique case. conditions somewhat like this exist in the puget sound territory, in the southern peninsula of michigan, in colorado, in montana, and in the carolinas. in each of these sections, one, or at most two concerns are predominant in their control of water-powers, public-service companies, and power markets. the horsepower figures do not fully represent the extent of actual commercial control. the best powers have of course been developed first. these will always hold a disproportionately dominant position over later developed and less favored powers, because of their lower operating cost and prior hold on the important power markets. there is also going on a concentration of a wider sort--a process of deep significance, but as yet little recognized. there is a marked progress toward a mutuality of interests among public service companies generally, electric light, power, gas, and street railway concerns. the significant identity of officers and directors in a large number of such companies throughout the united states is very remarkable. this is due in part to specialization by financial houses in given lines of investment; in part to the common employment of certain eminent engineering firms; and in part to relations with certain leading equipment companies. electric equipment is usually supplied by one of a few great equipment concerns and frequently paid for, at least in part, in the securities of the proposed project. thus the equipment company acquires interests in widely separated power and light concerns. take a single example, the general electric company, the most powerful electric equipment concern in the world. men who are officers or directors of the general electric company, or of its three wholly controlled subsidiary companies, are also officers or directors in many other corporations. these other companies, with their subsidiaries, and the general electric with its subsidiaries, make thus a group interconnected by active personal and financial relationship. this one group includes corporations that operate hydro-electric plants, with at least , horsepower developed or under construction, and , undeveloped in different states, a total of , , horsepower (equal to more than percent of all the developed water-power in the united states in ). this group includes also over public-service corporations, not counting their minor subsidiaries; more than railroads; companies that use their power in the manufacture of cotton goods, with , hydraulic horsepower developed; and over banks and financial houses, many of them in the first rank of importance. this remarkable financial connection in itself is very significant. fifty-three general electric men, in all, constitute this chain of connection. nor are these men, as a rule, of the figurehead type; their presence on a directorate means something. of course these facts in no sense always mean identity of control. they certainly do mean a striking degree of non-conflicting interests and personal relationship which makes further concentration easily possible. this wider concentration is still in a formative stage, developed almost wholly within the last decade. the forces compelling thereto are still operative. it is like a physical solution of chemical elements which is still in suspension but which a single jar may precipitate into crystallization. water-power, being naturally allied with public-service business, will be included in any movement that affects that business generally. so wide is this interrelationship, and so comparatively few are the constantly recurring names in the directorates, that a few brief conferences, given the necessary impetus, might conceivably at any moment concentrate into definite legal form a sweeping control over the dominant water-powers of the country, as well as their related public service interests. here, then, is the present situation of the hydro-electric industry: ( ) it deals with a basic necessary, and its importance inevitably increases as the fixed supply of other sources of power decreases. ( ) substantial control of mechanical power means the exercise of a function that is essentially governmental in its effect on the public. ( ) driven by underlying economic and financial forces, concentration of control of water-powers in private hands has proceeded very rapidly. it is doubtful if anything can arrest this process, and a swift advance to a far higher degree of concentration is entirely possible. ( ) any chance, then, of restraint by competition is rapidly disappearing, certainly over given sections, and public regulation is therefore an imminent necessity. the extent of such regulation will depend mainly on constitutional limitations. a state, roughly speaking, can at any time exercise a high degree of control over power companies as quasi-public servants. the jurisdiction of the federal government covers a wider range geographically, but involves some difficult constitutional questions. over water-powers on the public lands it has full control. i concede no merit to doubts as to the government's unlimited jurisdiction there. as to powers on navigable streams not in the public domain, there is an undetermined constitutional question. it is well settled that no power dam can be maintained on a navigable stream without the consent of the federal government. nearly everyone admits that the government may impose upon such grants any desired time limitation, and may thus require readjustment of terms at any desired period. but some hold that the federal government, in exercising its arbitrary power as grantor, may also impose any further conditions it chooses upon such grant, as, for example, that the grantees shall pay a rental for the power acquired. others hold that the federal government can only impose such conditions as are directly connected with the federal power over interstate commerce, such as navigation. even this view would apparently at least permit a rental charge, if applied to navigation improvement. personally, i am strongly inclined to the former and broader view that any conditions whatsoever may be imposed (applause), both on general principles and on well-established legislative precedents. in numerous bridge and dam acts congress has used the broad power and imposed conditions in no way related to interstate commerce. in the california debris commission act, operative since , congress imposed a straight charge on placer miners for the privilege of emptying their refuse into the streams. the scope of the federal jurisdiction is of first importance, because the water-power problem is, in the main, a national one. much of the power is transmitted across state lines, or is used by interstate carriers. the bulk of the capital that is developing our most important powers comes from interests outside the states where the powers are located, and from the brief survey i have already given of the interrelationships existing between public-service companies it is obvious that state lines and state jurisdiction have no practical relation whatsoever to the sweep of these forces (applause). the hydro-electric industry has been largely nationalized by those who are foremost in it. the nation and the state will have to use their full powers to meet the water-power situation. the most effective time to use them is before, not after, private rights accrue. the one certain method is for the state or the federal government, to retain its interest, or impose its conditions, at the inception, as a part of the grant. then public control and private rights go together, as they must if we are to safeguard the public interest in water power. (applause) let there be no unnecessary hampering of hydro-electric development, but let the public be in on the ground floor at the start: for at the start the public must grant the power and for all time the public will be the party chiefly interested in its use. (applause) as president taft very justly said yesterday, when a man talks to you about conservation, you have the right to ask him to specify what steps he desires to take. i am going to specify. ( ) the _status quo_ of all water-power still controlled by the nation or state should be maintained until we know what we have, and can act intelligently thereon. ( ) no water-power grant should be made except for a fixed period, with at least the reserved right to readjust terms at the end thereof. that period, however, should be long enough to permit adequate financing and complete development. ( ) complete publicity of accounts and transactions should be required, as well as a record of cost, and the real relation of investment to stock and bond issues. ( ) power to revoke the grant for breach of conditions should be lodged in a specified public authority. otherwise there will always be the possibility of protracted litigation to determine the status. ( ) so far as is possible, direct provision should be made against excessive charges and monopolistic abuse. ( ) public authorities should reserve such constitutional compensation or rental as will establish the principle of underlying public interest. ( ) all public easements of navigation, fisheries, etc., should be safeguarded. ( ) in the case of new grants, all these provisions should be made conditions of the grant. finally, the purpose and probable effect on the public of any water-power grant should first be fully ascertained and carefully considered, in order to determine whether public interest justifies beyond a reasonable doubt the surrender by the public of even a part of its power over this great public resource. where reasonable doubt exists, the surrender should not be made. (applause) * * * * * [during the delivery of the address president baker arrived and resumed the chair.] * * * * * honorable john barrett--ladies and gentlemen: president baker has requested me to announce that professor george e. condra, of lincoln, nebraska, has been appointed chairman of the committee on credentials in lieu of mr edward hines, of chicago. (applause) governor pardee has an announcement to make in regard to the committee on resolutions. governor pardee--simply that the committee on resolutions will meet at the saint paul hotel this evening at oclock, in room . president baker--the program in your hands announces that an address entitled "safeguarding the property of the people" will be delivered by honorable francis t. heney, of california. he is prevented from being here this afternoon, but will arrive later. we have now the opportunity of hearing from one whose name has been so closely associated with the work of conservation that he is regarded as one of its greatest and ablest advocates; i have great pleasure in introducing, to speak on "the federal government's relation to conservation," honorable james r. garfield, of ohio. (applause) mr garfield--mr president and delegates, ladies and gentlemen (renewed applause): i appreciate your applause at this time very much, for i fear me at the end of what i have to say it may not be forthcoming. the subject i have chosen is one that affects very directly what may not merely be talked about but can actually be done by the people of this country in connection with conservation problems. it was often said a few months ago that conservation was an enthusiasm--that it was an idea, or perhaps an ideal, and that those who were urging conservation were not practical men and looking forward to practical work-a-day solutions of their own problems. so i chose to speak on the relation of the federal government to conservation--a very practical subject, one on which we have been working, as well as talking, for a number of years. there are two good reasons why the federal government is directly interested in conservation. in the first place, it is the largest land-owner in this country; and, in the second place, it has high duties to perform for the interests of all the people of this country. for these reasons, the federal government comes directly in touch with the practical questions of conservation in dealing with what is left of the natural resources of our public domain. the value of these resources cannot be measured in mere terms of acres. some , acres of our public lands remain; but that means nothing unless we know what is contained in or on the land represented by the mere statement in figures. now we are learning that this great area, both on the mainland and in alaska, is filled with priceless treasures in the resources needed for the lives of the people of our country; and it is in the handling of these resources--either disposing of them or providing for their use or development--that the federal government must deal practically with the problems of conservation. only as we know this tremendous area and its priceless treasures do we realize that we must, in the practical handling of these resources, make as few mistakes as possible, and constantly keep in view the interest of all the people as a guide in the solution of any given problem. now, we meet with serious difficulties in attempting to decide how best to use the property owned or held by the united states government as trustee for all the people. we have under our system of government a dual jurisdiction, or rather, two jurisdictions--that of the nation on the one hand, and that of the state on the other. yet between these two jurisdictions there is no real conflict; there ought to be no insuperable obstacle to such cooperation between states and nation as will make possible a wise solution of all questions in which both jurisdictions have duties to perform. we hear much about states' rights, as though the problems of conservation have brought to life again an old doctrine, as though in some way the conservationist is endeavoring to take something away from the states. the very opposite is true. there is no effort on the part of the conservationist to interfere with any duty that the state ought to and can perform. those duties devolving on the states should be performed by the states; and the people of each commonwealth should see to it that their state representatives not only do what is wise and necessary each year but exercise foresight in dealing with all resources subject to their jurisdiction (applause). that, however, does not mean that the federal government is debarred from proper use of the public domain within the areas of the several states; it likewise has great duties devolving on it in so administering its property as to safeguard the interests and the rights of all the citizens of the country. the state lines are merely accidental in many instances. the states of the old northwest and the states of the middle west today were carved out of public territory simply by drawing of lines; they were not political entities in the first instance, but a few people got together and agreed that so many square miles of territory would be made into a state, and whether that state line was drawn here or a hundred miles over there should not determine how we are to deal with the public resources contained within the area. in the early period of our development there was but little need of giving heed to the questions that are now uppermost in our minds in relation to the public domain. there was land enough and to spare; and the early purpose of the federal government was to provide easy methods for getting the public domain (which in those days was considered chiefly useful for agriculture, as it is in the middle west) into farms, and building up commonwealths that are now theatres of agricultural industry. but today the conditions are very different. the remaining agricultural land that can be used without irrigation or drainage is very little in comparison to the needs of our people; and in handling what is left of the public domain it becomes the duty of the federal government to see to it that not one acre of land that can be used for agricultural settlement and development is directed to any other purpose--and likewise to see to it that land capable of mineral development or of water development is not stolen from the public domain under the guise of homestead entries. (great applause) in order to understand exactly what the federal government can do in relation to the use of the public domain, let us keep clearly in mind the powers granted to it under the constitution, and the laws enacted in accordance with the constitution by congress. the constitution provides that-- the congress shall have power to dispose of, and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory and other property belonging to the united states. the executive power shall be vested in a president of the united states of america. * * * he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. now, in accordance with the provisions of the constitution, the congress has enacted the following laws affecting the public domain: the secretary of the interior is charged with the supervision of public business relating to * * * the public lands, including mines. the commissioner of the general land office shall perform, under the direction of the secretary of the interior, all executive duties appertaining to the surveys and sale of the public lands of the united states, or in anywise respecting such public lands. the commissioner of the general land office, under the direction of the secretary of the interior, is authorized to enforce and carry into execution by appropriate regulations, every part of the provisions of this title [the public land laws] not otherwise specifically provided for. congress, acting under these general provisions, has from time to time enacted laws affecting portions of the public domain. it has provided the homestead act, the timber and stone act, the mineral entry act; provided for the creation of the national forests; enacted laws relating to the use of the public domain for reservoir sites, for pipe-lines, and for transmission lines; and as the needs of each generation have been made known, congress, acting for the interests of all the people, has enacted direct legislation for the purpose of providing method for the disposition and use of the public domain. meantime, the executive on his part has performed the duties devolving on him under the constitution--duties few in number and easily expressed, though of great importance to the public welfare. they are, in brief, to see to it that the laws of the united states are faithfully executed; and he is granted all the executive power that could have been given by the use of the english language. there is no limitation. it is simply "executive power"; whatever that may be was granted to the president of the united states. one of the great objects for which this nation was created was to promote the "general welfare." that object was not only stated in the preamble of the constitution, but was likewise written into the body of the instrument; and the power was specifically granted to congress to provide for the general welfare of the united states. that was not an idle phrase. the founders of the republic recognized that it was impossible for them to foresee all the things that it might be necessary for the federal government to do; it was not possible for them to define in specific language all the powers that were to be exercised, nor was it possible for them to indicate to what extent these powers, once granted, might properly and wisely be used; and this welfare clause has made it possible to carry out by both the legislative and the executive branches of the federal government the beneficent purposes of the founders in ways which they never contemplated or could have contemplated in detail. fortunately, during the early days of our national existence we had at the head of the supreme court a master mind. marshall was as profound a statesman as he was a great jurist. he recognized with that great far-seeing insight that amounts almost to inspiration, that it would have been to sound the death-knell of the republic if he, as the chief law interpreter from the judicial seat, should so interpret the constitution as to tie the hands of the government and prevent the people from doing the things necessary to make themselves a great and permanent nation. in one of the earliest decisions involving interpretation of the constitution (mccullough vs. maryland. wheaton ) marshall used this language: let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited but consistent with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional. another sentence in the same opinion sets a standard for judging existing or proposed law; he says-- but where the law is not prohibited, and is really calculated to effect any of the objects entrusted to the government, to undertake here to inquire into the degree of its necessity would be to pass the line which circumscribes the judicial department and tread on legislative ground. this court disclaims all pretensions to such a power. clearly, marshall saw at that time that if the supreme court endeavored to prevent congress from exercising to the full a power granted under the constitution, it would at that very moment overstep its legitimate ground and interfere with the functions granted to the legislative body; and in dealing with the powers granted to the executive, exactly the same rule of interpretation applies. now, it is most interesting to notice how from generation to generation marshall's interpretation has made possible the doing of the things that have been done by our people. in those days it was impossible for men to conceive of the commercial development that has taken place during the hundred years. they could not have realized that within a hundred years we would be a great manufacturing nation, and that our commercial relations would not be confined to the thirteen colonies but would spread broadcast throughout the entire world. a striking example of the application of this wise interpretation arose in dealing with the questions of the philippine government. we there had an entirely novel proposition. the forefathers of the republic had never contemplated the acquisition by us of territory in the pacific, or islands elsewhere. yet when we faced that problem, we found that under marshall's interpretation, our constitution was broad enough and big enough, and the powers granted therein were great enough, to permit us to fulfill the nation's duty to the islands and islanders. president taft, discussing our work in the philippines, used this language three years ago: it is said that there is nothing in the constitution of the united states that authorizes national altruism of that sort. well, of course, there is not; but there is nothing in the constitution of the united states that forbids it. what there is in the constitution of the united states is a breathing spirit that we are a nation, with all the responsibilities that any nation ever had, and therefore when it becomes the christian duty of a nation to assist another nation, the constitution authorizes it because it is part of national well-being. that interpretation of the power of both the executive and the congress is exactly in line with the power that is exercised by both in dealing with this question of the public domain and the welfare of our people (applause). it would be a childish interpretation of the constitution to hold that we as a nation could act for the people in the philippine islands as was best necessary for their well-being, and yet within our own confines as a nation would be prohibited from doing that which is necessary for the well-being and the welfare of our children and their children. (applause) the interpretation by marshall gave vigor to the young nation. he was not afraid of great responsibilities. he recognized that great responsibilities likewise meant the possibility of great mistakes, but that did not deter him from so interpreting the constitution as to make possible the doing of the things that have been done. he was not of that class of timid folk who fear to exercise great power lest they may make a mistake. he was not that type, either as statesman or jurist, who because they do not see plainly written in the constitution specific authority for the doing of every act necessary, therefore hold back and maintain that no such authority exists. this is the type of mind that prevents all progress. the timid man is often side by side with the dishonest man, because the timid man refuses to act from fear while the dishonest man raises the cry, "there is no power," in order to gain for himself that to which he is not entitled, or to escape governmental jurisdiction or evade governmental regulation of any character. (applause) but we are not left simply to academic discussion as to whether the federal government has power to deal with the national domain. the supreme court has held, over and over again, that the federal government, acting through both the legislative and the executive branches, has the power to do what is best for the people's interests in handling the public domain. the court has wisely and properly held that the power granted under the constitution to dispose of the public domain carries with it every lesser power (applause)--that because congress has the right to provide for the sale or the gift of land, it can likewise provide for the lease of land under such conditions and regulations as it may prescribe or as it may permit the executive to prescribe. therefore, the way is clear for the federal government to do whatever may be wise and necessary to protect the interests of the people in the use of the public domain. let us take another view of executive authority. the chief executive, above all other officers, is recognized and properly held as the great steward, the immediate custodian of the public property and of the people's rights. he is single-headed. he is one upon whom responsibility may be fixed. he is constantly at his desk; he is ever vigilant; he is constantly in touch with the things that interest the people and their rights therein; and as the custodian and guardian of the people's interests, it is to him that we must look for the protection of the public domain. it is not enough that the executive shall simply carry into effect the specific language of a statute. he must go farther than that; he must be as aggressive in his vigilance as are those who would take the public property without conforming to the law (applause). the executive is required to see to it that the laws are enforced. now, in the enforcement of law he often finds that while the paper record presented to him or to his subordinates by those who seek to acquire the public domain is perfect (there is no difficulty about making a land title good on paper) his duty is only partially fulfilled unless he goes behind the paper record; and when the last administration took hold of the question of the land frauds, the executive decided that there was but one way to enforce the law, and that was to see to it that the paper record conformed to the facts in every case presented (great applause). the greatest land frauds that have been perpetrated against the people of the united states were perpetrated because the public officers in years past did not make that direct, careful investigation of the facts and of the condition of the lands which would have enabled them to save for the people hundreds of millions of dollars of valuable property that in the last generation has gotten illegally into the hands of the big interests. (applause) the founders of our republic recognized and understood the vital need of giving ample power to the executive. it is well to recall what hamilton wrote when defending the constitution: energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. it is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction and of anarchy. there can be no need, however, to multiply arguments or examples on this head. a feeble executive implies a feeble execution of government. a feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution, and a government ill-executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government. thus the executive must be held responsible for much that is done in connection with the administration of our laws. congress enacts the laws; they may be faulty; if so, they may be amended. if they are faulty, it is the duty of the executive to carry them into effect, but to recommend their amendment, alteration, or repeal; but under no circumstances is he fulfilling his duty if he sits supinely by and allows the public domain to be despoiled because the law is not as efficient as he thinks it should be. (applause) much has been said in recent years regarding executive usurpations. it has been held by those who objected to the new order of things--those who objected to that change in methods by which the public frauds were stopped--that the executive was usurping powers not granted to him under the constitution. now, if it be usurpation to so enforce the law as to prevent dishonesty, fraud, and theft, then there has been usurpation (applause). but i as yet have failed to have presented to me a single instance of actual usurpation. the executive is as much subject to the courts of the united states as is the ordinary citizen. if the executive has transcended his power, if he has in his execution of law gone beyond what someone thinks is his power, then the executive can be haled into court; and over and over again i have said to complainants who came to me when i was in office "all you have to do is to go into the courts of the united states, and if the executive power that is being exercised is improperly exercised, there in that jurisdiction you can bring us to account." but no one has yet seen fit to bring such an action; and the reason is that there has been no usurpation of executive authority. (applause) there is a wide difference between simply being within the law and executing the law. a man may be within the law and yet do absolutely nothing to further the spirit of the law; like an engineer, he is on the track whether he is standing still, going backward, or going forward; but i take it that what we want in executive office is an engineer who stays on the track yet is constantly driving forward the engine (applause). we may rest assured that those who are seeking to acquire the public domain will not be idle if the executive is standing still. (applause) that brings me again to a subject mentioned a moment ago, namely the relation of the nation to the states; and the executive here plays an important part. an example will show how the executives of both the nation and the states should cooperate in working out any given problem: a great water course is a natural entity; the water-shed must be considered as a unit--otherwise the people within that water-shed will not have equal justice done them in their right to the water. for example, the waters of the rio grande rise in colorado; they cross the line into new mexico; they then become the dividing line between mexico and texas. if we admit for a moment that the power to use and control all the water of the rio grande shall be left solely with colorado because it rises in the great mountains of that state, then we instantly jeopardize the rights of all the people who live south of the colorado line (applause). if the chief executive of the federal government had feared to exercise his power to prevent water-power sites and reservoir sites in colorado from being taken exclusively by colorado people; if he had been unwilling to exercise the power granted him by the constitution, then the people below would have had just cause for complaint that the executive instead of obeying the law was in effect a party to a violation of law in jeopardizing their rights. the only way in which that matter could properly be handled was for the executive of the federal government to withdraw certain lands from sale or entry; and by so doing he made it possible for the people of new mexico and texas, and of the republic of mexico in conformity with the treaty made by the federal government, to have their fair share and just proportion of the use of that water. the best way to deal with conflicting water rights between states is for the federal government to continue to hold every acre of public land capable of use in water development pending agreement with the various states as to how the lands shall be used, to the end that the rights of all the people of each water-shed, rather than the special interests of a few, shall be protected in the use and disposition of that great resource. (applause) what i have said in relation to water applies equally to the development of our coal, our phosphates, and our timber. the phosphates recently discovered in the west lie in four states. when the matter was first called to my attention by the report of the geological survey and the special report of dr van hise, i was astonished to learn the conditions then existing in our country. practically all of the mineral phosphates known in the united states were held by one great corporation, and over percent of the products of the southern mines were being shipped abroad to be used on the fields of europe; and the same men were already endeavoring to get hold of the phosphate deposits in the west. therefore i instantly made a recommendation to the president, and he instantly acted on it and withdrew the phosphate lands (applause). now that withdrawal was not an interference with the rights of the people of any of those four states, nor was it an act of usurpation, or an improper extension of executive authority. it simply meant this: that we would hold, prevent the acquisition of those lands under laws not adapted to them, report the matter to congress, and hold the lands until congress provided a method for wise disposition of them (applause). and my recommendation was that the phosphate deposits of the country should be disposed of only under lease and with such conditions as would prevent export to foreign lands (applause). we need every ton of our phosphates for our own use. (applause) so, if you trace the actions of the executive and of congress in dealing with the public domain, you will find that wherever there has been a vigorous execution of law coupled with recommendation of further legislation looking to the welfare of all of our people, there we have made advance along lines that will promote the development of our country in future years; and that wherever there has been laxity in the enforcement of law, wherever we have allowed the interference of big business interests to interrupt the enforcement of law as it should be enforced, land frauds there have crept in and in those conditions we have found the big interests getting control of more than their fair share of the resources of the public domain. sometimes we have been accused of being unfair to the big interests. we have been accused of assailing these interests simply because they were big; and we have been charged with raising ghosts to frighten the people, and naming those ghosts water-power trusts, timber trusts, land trusts, or coal trusts, when in reality there was no danger of trust development or of monopolistic holding of these resources. and yet, my friends, if you trace back the history of the acquisition of the public domain you will find that in every instance where there has been a failure to strictly enforce the laws the special interests have slipped in and have gained control of the resources of the public domain. they have never been idle. we ourselves have been indifferent, we have been negligent; and it is not for us now altogether to blame the beneficiaries of our neglect, but we must blame ourselves--and must blame our representatives in office now if by any chance they permit a return to the old conditions. (applause) the power of the executive and of congress is ample to do all that is necessary to protect the public welfare and the common good. there must be no backsliding in what has already been so splendidly started. we must see to it that our representatives, both in the senate and in the house, are men who will take a long look into the future--men with imagination. men with enthusiasm? yes! nothing great has ever been accomplished without enthusiasm and without imagination (applause). and we want practical men who will lead us, as i said in the beginning, step by step, to better things. thus and thus only will the federal government exercise to the full the powers granted under the constitution, and thus and thus only will the people of this country safeguard their property rights, their personal and their political rights as well, and hand down the great heritage that has come to us not only unimpaired but in better condition than we received it. (great and prolonged applause) * * * * * president baker--ladies and gentlemen: now that this subject has been so ably opened by mr garfield, we are going to call upon another man who has been militant in the work of conservation--an ex-governor who is even more active as an ex than he was as governor, a sort of characteristic, these days, of prominent men (laughter). i am sure you will have great pleasure in hearing from ex-governor george c. pardee, of california. (applause) ex-governor pardee--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: i hope the chair will forgive me if i differ from him very radically in one statement that he made, to the effect that _all_ of us who have been things (laughter) are now more active than we were when we were things. (laughter) i sat here today in this vast auditorium and saw thousands of men and women and children, gathering to do honor to the man whom we, in common with the rest of the world, consider to be the greatest american now alive (great applause). when i saw those thousands of people filling this great auditorium, row on row and tier on tier, until the heads of those standing in the topmost row touched the very roof, i thought to myself that the activities of him who _was_ in office are being only continued since he left the office which he filled to our entire satisfaction. (applause) i come here this afternoon to discuss the very able paper so well presented to you by him who was once secretary of the interior, in the cabinet of the president of the united states (applause); and i hope you will not consider it presumptuous that i should attempt to discuss that very able paper. mr garfield was good enough to furnish me with a copy of his address several days ago, and i am free to confess to you that i have given it prayerful consideration and that i can find nothing in it to discuss (applause), because it calls a spade a spade and a thief a thief (applause); and with both of those propositions i have no doubt the ladies and gentlemen here assembled will thoroughly and totally agree. (applause) every now and then we hear of some poor, miserable fool sent to the penitentiary for crimes and frauds against the land laws; but will any one be kind enough to mention to me the name of any principal in such crimes and frauds who, with shaved head and striped suit, is looking through the bars of the penitentiary today? i take it that you will agree with me that the time has come when the rights and duties of the plain american citizen should be again placed within his grasp, and that the rights and duties of the very meanest of us should be regarded as equal to those of the most powerful and the richest and most influential. our representatives have too often forgotten the fact that they represent the great mass of the people, and that they represent unborn generations of american citizens--that they are plowing legal furrows and building legal fences and making things ready for the coming generations of americans who will fill this great land of ours. so when i speak of my own state of california, and say that its people have been robbed and plundered and pillaged; when i say that its government has been debased and corrupted; when i say with shame and with blushes that my native city of san francisco has been humbled and shamed into the very dust by the corrupting influences of men and public-service corporations who, with us as their benefactors, have turned and stung the breast that warmed them into life; when i say these things i have but to call to your attention conditions which have existed in almost every large city, in almost every state of this union. (applause) like mr garfield, i do not find it in my heart to blame the men who have taken advantage of our laxness; i cannot find it in my heart to blame the two men who own each over a million acres of the best timber land in the state of california for having taken advantage of the laxness in administration of the law in times past--not of the law itself, for the law has been good, and if it had been administered as it should have been administered these two men could not have owned a million acres apiece of the best timbered land in the state of california (applause). but who of us has not heard--in times past more than since the time of theodore africanus (laughter)--who of us has not heard those who, perhaps with a selfish interest, have sneered and said, "well, we're all a little crooked, and why should we take exceptions to the man who is a little more crooked?" when the question of frauds against the land laws was in discussion? i take it that the officials who had those matters in charge should be, as mr garfield has so well said, ever vigilant within the law to do those things which the law does not prohibit and not wait for the prods and stings of outraged public opinion that compel them to do the things which they should, in common honesty to the people whom they represent, perform and do for the protection of you and me and your children and my children. (applause) i listened yesterday afternoon with mingled feelings to the statements of the gentlemen who four short years ago i would have hailed as brother governors. i heard some most violent utterances concerning the feeling of the people of the pacific-coast states in regard to state rights. one good brother governor said that percent of the people of the pacific coast were in favor of state rights. we had in california on the th day of august (less than a month ago) a direct-primary election. at that election there was nominated as the republican candidate for governor of the state of california hiram w. johnson. out of something over , votes cast he received over , votes. his next nearest opponent received , votes. mr johnson's campaign was made on a platform containing three principal planks--roosevelt, pinchot, and conservation. (great applause) if it be necessary, i can read a telegram from mr johnson in which he assures me that he has not yet recanted from his old rooseveltism, his pinchotism and his garfieldism, or his conservationism (applause); so i think i am safe in saying that instead of percent of the people of at least one pacific-coast state being in favor of state rights, i am entirely within the bounds of conservative statement if i say that percent of the people of california have not forgotten the civil war and remember that the ghost of state rights was laid so many fathoms deep at that time that no ingenious argument of any governor from the northwest, the southeast, or any other portion of this country can revive it and make it walk. (great applause) if necessary, i could read from this little packet that i have in my hand a portion of a letter from the grand master of the patrons of husbandry (that is the grange) of the state of washington (applause), whose governor addressed this congress yesterday afternoon and declared himself and his state as both being entirely in favor of state rights. in that letter the grand master of the patrons of husbandry of the state of washington, whose governor addressed this congress yesterday afternoon, says that he represents , of the people of washington, and that no man has the right to represent them upon the floor of this congress and say that they are in favor of state rights (great applause). and in this little packet i also have a telegram from the conservation association of the state of washington, signed by its president, which says that its membership in the state of washington is not in favor of state rights (applause). so, our good southern brethren having forgotten the bloody past (as my yankee blood has forgotten it), having come again into the union and declaring themselves loyal sons marching under the american flag and having forgotten the obsolete doctrine of state rights, i think i am safe in saying that the people of the north and northwest have not changed places with them, but that they believe that the federal government should keep and administer the things that belong _to all the people_ of the country. (applause) we have in california, my fellow-citizens of other states, a great deal of _your_ property. we have several millions of acres of national forests that belong to you. they cannot belong exclusively to the people of the state of california until the people of the united states, to whom they belong, give them to us. and i thank god that the national government, representing the people of other states, has not given those millions of acres of national forests in the state of california to the state of california. for if it had, just as sure as you are sitting here, those acres would have been given over into private ownership, just as thousands and hundreds of thousands of acres of the public lands which were given to the state of california have been squandered with a prodigal hand and given to men who have not obeyed either the letter or the spirit of the law conveying and granting to them those hundreds and hundreds of thousands and millions of acres of the public lands. (applause) let me instance one case. the oregon and california railroad begins at portland and runs south toward california. the california and oregon railroad begins at sacramento and runs north toward oregon. they meet somewhere north of the oregon line. they are both adjuncts of the southern pacific. when those roads were contemplated, the government, by an act of congress, donated to them , , acres of land, much of it covered with as fine timber as grows out of doors--i bar none. in the act of congress donating that land it was specified that the land should be sold in -acre tracts for $ . per acre to all actual settlers who might apply therefor. was any of it sold to actual settlers? a very few acres of it. half of the , , acres was sold, however, in large tracts to land speculators, to timber corporations, and to people of that kind and class, for $ . , $ . , $ . , $ . , $ . , $ . an acre. and when the southern pacific was brought to bar and asked why it hadn't lived up to the letter and spirit of the law, it said it had. and then we asked, "how do you make that out?" and it said, "why, only a few actual settlers have applied for the land." and we asked, "haven't people gone there and attempted to buy that land of you in order that they might settle upon it?" "oh, yes, but they are not actual settlers." "why not?" "because we construe the words 'actual settlers' to mean those persons who had actually settled in that country before the act of congress was passed." (laughter and applause.) and when, at the sacramento session of the national irrigation congress, mr e. h. harriman was asked why his company was holding , , acres of that land grant, he said, "for future generations." and everybody laughed. now, let that sink into you. the absolute arrogance, the indecent indecency of that kind of a proposition ought to make the blood boil in the veins of every american citizen who is face to face, or who was seven or eight years ago face to face with the proposition whether or not the american people were to rule themselves or whether they were to continue to be ruled by the "big interests," as jimmie garfield puts it. (applause) the sun rises every morning, three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, in california; it reddens the cheeks of our girls; it makes our boys strong and healthy; it brings the gold to the oranges that hang upon our trees. and for all these years we have been thanking god for the rising of the sun in california. "the gentle rain from heaven" has fallen alike upon the just and the unjust out there in california--upon those who deserve to be rained on and those who do not deserve to be rained on (laughter). and all these years we have been thanking god for the gentle rain that falls from heaven. but yesterday as i sat here in this great auditorium and listened to the governor of montana tell what montana had been doing for this nation, i began to think (i do not wish to be irreverent in saying it) that we were under no obligations in california to god for the rising of the sun or the falling of the rain; but that we were under great obligations to montana (laughter and applause) for all the good things that belong to california and californians. and as my good friend, governor norris (to put a name to him) was telling his lurid history of montana's great doings, i couldn't help but think that as an american citizen some of the things that lie in the state of montana belong to me, belong to you, belong even to those who live on the hook of cape cod or away up in the northeastern corner of maine or down on the tip of florida; that those things which belong to the people of the united states even in montana belong to us all, and that montana has no exclusive right to them until our representatives in congress give them to that state, and i am one of those who pray god that it will be a long time before the state of montana gets from us the exclusive right to, and ownership of, those things that are ours. (great applause) some time ago a good friend of mine, who has never denied when i have charged him with receiving $ , per annum (and by the way, he is a delegate from california to this congress) as the chief counsel of one of the power trusts of california, said to me, "oh, how the president is usurping the powers of the government! isn't it awful?" but i never could see anything very awful about it when roosevelt and garfield and pinchot and the rest of them were hustling around trying to keep my friend's corporation from stealing from us of california the few things we have left (laughter and applause); nor have i forgotten that, before the time of roosevelt, garfield and pinchot, the corporations represented by my friend did not believe in state rights. but since the time of roosevelt, pinchot and garfield they have begun to sing a different song. that song is state rights. nor have i forgotten that my friend used to be and still claims to be one of the most hide-bound republicans that mortal man ever looked upon (laughter and applause). _now_ he says that the rights of the people of the states are being pillaged and plundered and robbed away from them. i speak again for my state of california when i say that if there is anything in the state of california that the national government has not nailed down that has not been stolen, i would like to know what it is. (great laughter and applause) there are, as you heard mr herbert knox smith say here on this platform an hour ago, four great power corporations in the state of california. that is so; but there are practically only two power trusts in the state of california. when the government declared its intention to hold on to the few power sites that are left in the state of california in the national forests, all of a sudden these power trusts wanted all the water-power of california developed in the interests of the people; and they can't say it fast enough or often enough (laughter and applause). but, as you heard mr smith say, they have developed and are using only half of the power that they already have in their possession. so when they get gay around where i am, i generally say, "well, that's all right, but go on and develop all the power you have got _now_; and after you have got that developed, then we'll talk about giving you some more; because i know just as sure as you fellows get an opportunity to lay your hands on any of those power sites in the national forests you'll steal _them_ and put them in cold storage, and you'll make my children and their children, so long as there are any children in the state of california, dig up the last dollar that they have to pay you for the necessary electric current to do their business during the next century and the century after that until the end of time in california" (applause). and i, for one, as i say to them, while i am somewhat hardened and calloused by being robbed myself, don't want my children or their children to be robbed into the poor-house and the penitentiary by anybody's power corporation (applause). therefore i hope and pray that those gentlemen who are so apprehensive that the people of the country will not get, unless they get it through the states, the right to use the things that belong to all the people of the country, will pause until the state of montana, the state of california, the state of washington, and all the pacific-coast states, at least, if not the rest of the nation, are governed by the _people_ of those states and not by the public-service corporations. (great and prolonged applause) * * * * * christopher g. horr--mr chairman: the state of washington having been mentioned, i wish one minute to speak in behalf of that state. president baker--is the gentleman a delegate from the state of washington? mr horr--yes. it has been stated from the platform that the state of washington believed in state rights. i want to contradict that. as one of the delegates of the state of washington, i want to declare my belief that not only the granges of the state of washington, as brother pardee has stated, but the majority of the citizens of that state, will repudiate any such sentiment coming from anyone in this congress (great applause and cheers). i want to say that the state of washington is peopled in part by , former residents of the state of minnesota, and that they have full confidence in the national government--they have full confidence in president taft, they have full confidence in your senators nelson and clapp, and in congressman stevens and the other congressmen of the united states; and i consider it an insult to the congress and the president of the united states to say that they will not treat the people of the state of washington as they should be treated. i want to say to you, ladies and gentlemen, that the state of washington will keep step to the music of the union. (great applause) * * * * * president baker--after the next address on the program, any further discussion of the subjects presented will be welcome. it was gratifying to hear from california through the voice of ex-governor pardee. one of the fortunate features of this congress is the presence of men of prominence and influence from all sections of the country. not merely the north and the east and the west are represented, but the sunny south; and we will be pleased to hear from a representative of the great state of louisiana, who has always been deeply interested in conservation, and is no less competent to speak on the subject now than when he wielded the power of governor of that commonwealth. i have great pleasure in introducing ex-governor newton c. blanchard. (applause) ex-governor blanchard--mr president, ladies and gentlemen of the congress: i am not on the program for a formal address, but i am here to supplement and endorse and support the admirable address delivered you a little while ago by ex-secretary garfield. (applause) the times change, and men's opinions seem to change with them. on yesterday, in this auditorium, i listened to a number of western governors preaching the doctrine of state rights. for many years prior to the fateful year of , and for four memorable years following it, the question of state rights was forcefully discussed in the forum of the republic, and afterward practically settled on the battlefield (applause); and we of the south, who went down in that struggle to determine whether these rights of the states were paramount to the authority of the federal government, accepted the situation in good faith (great applause)--and we are now marching side by side with the north and the east and the west in that grand procession of progress that makes for the might and power of our great republic. (renewed applause) it seems strange to a southern democrat like myself (applause) that "a voice should come out of the west" (laughter) telling us that this movement for conservation must be abandoned by the federal government and relegated to the tender mercies of the western states (laughter and applause). gentlemen of the congress, was the question of state rights, the _real_, genuine doctrine of state rights, behind that demand? no; everyone of you know that it was not. it was a mere pretext; and the history of all nations is full of examples where strong men, having risen to ascendancy and ruling power and wanting to do something not exactly right (some usurpation of power or act of tyranny), first sought a pretext to justify it (applause). why, then, does this voice come out of the west--a country that in the time preceding and following was known as "the wild and woolly west," and out of which at that time came not a whisper in advocacy of state rights? why, now that the "wild and woolly west" has gone and magnificent commonwealths are there, now for the first time comes from the west, in former renegade garb or present robe of splendor, the cry that state rights must dominate the conservation of the natural resources of the country? gentlemen, some years ago a great citizen and soldier of our republic was the candidate of a political party for the high office of president of the united states at a time when the tariff was the dominant issue, and becoming involved in the intricacies and embarrassing problems of the tariff, he declared, "the tariff is a local issue." listening to the western governors last afternoon, i perceived the same idea arising again, only in a different form; for the western governors would make state rights a local issue. the natural resources of the united states belong to all the people (applause), not alone to those who happen to live in the states where what is left of the public domain is principally situated today; you and i have just as much concern and interest and proprietorship in the natural resources on and in and springing from the public domain in wyoming, in montana, in idaho, and in other western states, as have the people of those states themselves (applause). gentlemen, as has been well said already during this congress, the smaller the community the easier it is for special interests to control it; and that is the reason for this demand that the conservation of the natural resources in the western states should be turned over to the states themselves. if you want conservation to amount to anything--if you wish it to go forward in the fullness of development so that what is left of the public domain, of the coal lands, the phosphate lands, the oil and gas lands and the forests belonging to the united states may be preserved and conserved and utilized without present waste and handed down to our children and children's children without exhaustion, then i say the power that should lead in this movement is the mighty power of the federal government. (applause) when the distinguished and able gentleman who occupies the executive chair in the state of montana was speaking yesterday, he claimed for his state "the earth and the fullness thereof" in respect to the conservation of natural resources. he claimed that the movement there had antedated anything done by any other state or by the federal government, and to hear his eulogy of what montana had done in this respect and his absence of expression as to what the federal government had done there, one might think, to use the vernacular of the day, that montana was "the whole cheese" (laughter) in matters of conservation. and yet, when i met the gentleman today and asked him if the federal government had not been doing considerable work in montana and expending large sums of money to irrigate the arid regions of that state, he admitted that it had. i asked him if the federal government had not expended many times more money in doing just that kind of conservation work in his state than montana had, and he admitted that it had. i asked him if what the federal government had already done in the way of irrigating the arid regions of his state and the projects now under way would not when completed yield to the farmer and the husbandman many hundreds of thousands of acres of valuable land, and he admitted it would and that the aggregate would be more than , acres (applause). that is what the federal government has done and is doing in one western state; and yet that same governor, and others from the west, advocate that in the matter of conservation the federal government should take a back seat, and permit the states to take the lead in conservation. gentlemen, you heard today from the lips of theodore roosevelt a truth that struck me most forcibly, and that was this: it is not so much the question as to who shall take the lead in the matter of conservation, whether it be the power of the states or the authority of the federal government, but which of these powers is best equipped and most able to keep what remains of the public domain and the natural resources from falling into the hands of the special interests and the monopolists (applause). some of those western governors, when the imputation was made that if the natural resources were turned over to the states in the manner proposed by them the special interests might handle their legislators, grew virtuously indignant; and yet all of us remember that it has been charged time and time again--and i think no one will have the temerity to deny it--that powerful interests with unlimited money have put forward their own selections for the high office of senator of the united states and elected them (applause). that has been done repeatedly in the past; and is anyone here bold enough to say that even now there does not sit in the senate of the united states men from the western states who owe their election to that position through the instrumentality of money? (applause) no; that is true; and everyone of you knows it is true. if the legislatures--and i do not mean to imply or to charge that the legislatures of those particular western states are any more corrupt or more subject to the blandishments of corporations and men of means than the legislatures of other states, whether they be north or south or east or west--can be induced through those instrumentalities to elevate men to high position, then i say those legislatures can be controlled by the same means in other respects; and all of us know that special interests have always out a grabbing hand for what there is in the way of coal lands, in the way of water-power sites, in the way of phosphate lands and oil and gas lands. so i say, gentlemen of the congress, we had better leave this matter of conservation in the hands of the federal government to lead in this great work wherever the conservation relates to the natural resources springing from the public domain. i am here to advocate that first; and i am here to say that in other respects, where the state authority finds jurisdiction, there should be cooperation between the states and the federal government. (applause) we have heard much from these western governors in their speeches last afternoon relative to the waters in the rivers of their states, and the position was taken that the waters belong to the states. flowing through the public domain, the land and the water-power sites would belong to the federal government, and where that is the case there is good ground for cooperation; but i am far from admitting that those waters belong to the states. there are some decisions of the supreme court that so declare, but such decisions were made by the courts under peculiar circumstances and facts differing from the circumstances and facts set before us in the matter of conservation. take the great mississippi; to whom does the mississippi river belong? do its waters belong to the states through which those waters flow? why, don't you know that every drop of water precipitated from the clouds, except that which is taken up by evaporation, every drop of rainfall from the top of the alleghenies to the summit of the rocky mountains finds its way through the innumerable channels and smaller streams to the great main trunk that we call the mississippi river? don't you know that it is the receptacle for the drainage of half of this great republic of ours, that much of even the waters that fall in the western part of the great state of new york find their way into the channel of the mississippi? all of the water thus gathered into the main channel flows by the cities of all the states from minnesota down to louisiana, my own state; and all of that water flows through the state of louisiana to find lodgment at last in the mexican gulf. now, does all the water thus garnered from this immense watershed to flow through the state of louisiana belong to the state of louisiana? if so, _we don't want it_! (laughter and applause) it fell on these great western states, and too much of it comes down upon us, and we have had a great struggle, extending through many years, to keep that water off our land (laughter). i have known one great flood in louisiana to cause destruction to the extent of ten millions of dollars. the state of louisiana alone has expended, by state taxation and levee district taxation, more than thirty millions of dollars since the war in keeping the waters that fell upon your territory off our fertile lands (applause); and not being able to perform the herculean task ourselves, we have appealed, in season and out, to the federal government for aid, and a liberal hand has been extended to us. (applause) i was for years in congress from louisiana and for years a member and chairman of the committee on rivers and harbors of the house of representatives, and i had to deal with this question. when i went first to congress the idea prevailed there that the federal government had no constitutional authority to appropriate and expend money on mississippi river except in aid of navigation; it was admitted that could be done under the commerce clause of the constitution, but congress denied that it owed any other duty to the river. myself and others from the lower mississippi valley, the lands of whose constituents were flooded every now and then by the great river, contended that congress owed a two-fold duty to the river: to improve its navigation, and to prevent the waters from remaining a terror to those who lived in its lower valley (applause). congress admitted it owed the first duty, but asked where there was any constitutional authority for the appropriation of public money to redeem private property from the flood and ravages of the river; and it took the representatives and senators from the lower valley states many years--i know i worked at it myself for ten years, in season and out, as a member of congress--to demonstrate that the federal government owed it to the great river to prevent its floods as well as to improve its navigation. in answer to the demand for constitutional authority we cited a principle of law, recognized alike by the civil law system and by the common-law, which long antedated the constitution of the united states, a principle embodied in a latin maxim, "_sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas_"--so use your own that it shall not become an injury to others (applause). and we asked in that connection, "who owns the mississippi river? does the federal government own it? if so, it is its property as a great feature of our country; and if the proprietorship of the river is in the federal government, then should not the government so regulate and control its own that it will not injure or prove a detriment or damage to those who live in the lower valley?" (applause) and that argument won. prior to , large appropriations were made by congress for the mississippi river, all of them with a proviso that none of the money should be expended for the purpose of preventing the floods of the river; and not a dollar was available for the repair and construction of levees. that was the situation in and on down to , when the argument that the river belonged to the federal government and it must so regulate and use it that it should not be a damage and a hurt to us in the lower valley prevailed; and in the river and harbor bill of , at a time when i was chairman of the committee, the secretary of war was authorized to expend $ , , on the lower mississippi from cairo to the gulf, and the restrictions and provisos that had hampered the mississippi river commission theretofore in the expenditure of money for the two-fold purpose of improving navigation and preventing floods were removed (applause). we wrote these limitations all out; congress had been educated up to the point where it recognized the second duty it owed to the great river in preventing its floods. the bill passed, and the mississippi river commission allotted $ , , of the $ , , for levee construction and repairs (applause). we followed this two years later by another bill using the same phraseology and appropriating $ , , more, and these two great bills, carrying $ , , , with no restrictions on the expenditures for the prevention of floods in the river, have given us along the lower river the greatest and finest levee system ever known in any age or on any river in any country-- miles of levees that stay the floods of the mississippi so that a general flood in the river is a thing of the past; and on every mile of our miles of levees on the two banks of the river _is the stamp of the federal government_. (applause) and yet they tell you that these waters do not belong to the federal government? they admit that they belong to the federal government for purposes of navigation. congress is committed already to the principle that the waters of the river belong to the federal government, because congress has undertaken to help us to keep those waters off of our lands. but i go further than that; i agree with my distinguished friend mr garfield that the jurisdiction of the federal government extends, where the navigable waterways of the united states are concerned, far beyond the point to which they are navigable; it extends to the headwaters of those rivers, and for the very good reason that if the jurisdiction of the federal government did not so extend, then where these rivers take their rise some of these western states might undertake to divert from the great mississippi channel the water needed to supply that river with enough water for navigation purposes. every river, therefore, must be treated as a unit (applause). that is the view we take of it in the south; and in taking that view we hold to the national idea that water, being one of those natural resources which needs conservation in respect to its greater and wiser use, ought to be controlled by the federal government. water is one of those natural resources that man can do nothing to add to or diminish in quantity; the snows and the rains are the result of great cosmic action--and fortunate it is that such is the case, for past experience in this country shows that if man could diminish the supply he would long since have done so by his neglect and his wastefulness. (applause) i have spoken long enough. i wanted to supplement, from the standpoint of the south, the admirable remarks made by the distinguished governor of mississippi on last afternoon. we of the south are hand in hand with the federal government in this great question of the conservation of the natural resources; and we look to the federal government to lead in that movement (applause). at the same time i repeat that this great movement, so auspiciously inaugurated by theodore roosevelt and gifford pinchot (applause), needs for its full consummation and for the realizing of the greatest benefits possible the cooperation--with the federal government leading--of the federal government, the states, and all the people (applause). when we shall have brought these three great agencies into harmonious action looking to proper conservation, then will our country grow greater even than it is now in all that goes to make up the might and glory of a great nationality of the earth; our country will then continue to present the example of a great continental republic possessed of every variety of climate and production, whose people are as one again, loyally devoted to the perpetuity of the union, fearing no foreign foe, following the pursuits of peace, serving god according to the dictates of conscience and solving practically the great problems of self-government. (great and prolonged applause) * * * * * [in the course of the foregoing address, president baker surrendered the chair to professor condra.] chairman condra--ladies and gentlemen: before continuing the program, a few announcements will be made. ex-governor pardee: i again announce that the committee on resolutions will meet at the saint paul hotel this evening at oclock in room . those having resolutions will please write them out, sign them, and hand them in. several announcements were made on behalf of state delegations. chairman condra: in place of honorable b. a. fowler, of phoenix, arizona, who was to speak on "water as a natural resource," i call upon a man who has done much for the advance of irrigation, and who organized the first national irrigation congress, mr william e. smythe, of san diego, california. mr smythe--mr chairman, and ladies and gentlemen of the congress: i am called upon at very short notice to speak for our distinguished president of the national irrigation congress on water as a natural resource. i need not remind you how valuable this resource is. some years ago i went to the white house in company with a cabinet officer to confer with the then president of the united states concerning a mooted irrigation question. secretary moody presented me to president roosevelt, saying that i was a democrat interested in the subject of water; whereupon the president turned to me with a smile and said, "what! a democrat interested in _water_?" (laughter) "yes, mr president," i said, "for democrats have sense enough to know that in a country where it seldom rains water is too valuable to drink." (laughter) water is so valuable that we want to guard it carefully as a natural resource. i have but a moment at my disposal, and i am glad to take the advice of the president of the united states who yesterday told us to come out of the clouds, get down to brass tacks, and talk business. he asked us to say what we mean by conservation, to tell what are the evils that we want to remedy, and explain how we propose to remedy them (applause). in a word, the evil that we want to remedy in the arid states of america is the great evil of permitting men to make merchandise of the melting snow and the singing brook (applause). i stand here to say that no man can possibly be good enough to own the water which another man must use in order to live (applause). it may be that private enterprise can be employed in the form of a construction company to build the reservoir and the means of distribution; but in that case, after our people have paid for the work, and paid for it once and twice and three times, then the nation should answer our prayer, "let my people go." we should have joint ownership of land and water. today we have a magnificent construction company at work in the seventeen states and territories of arid america; the name of it is "the united states of america, unlimited." (applause) that construction company turns the work over to the people at actual cost, with ten annual payments, _and without one dollar of interest_ (applause). if the national government can do that with irrigation, it can do so just as wisely with power; and if it doesn't seem wise for the national government to do it as a matter of public enterprise, then give us a form of construction company; but in the end, in the day of our children and our children's children and our remote descendants, in the name of god and in the name of humanity, let the people own the water which is essential to their existence. (applause) just one word further. i stand here to endorse what has just been said by one of the few real men whom california ever had the good fortune to put into her governor's chair (great applause). california is not for state rights; _that_ doctrine was trampled to death fifty years ago under the feet of a million armed men. yesterday it raised its head and stretched out its weird arms seeking to grasp the remnant of the natural resources and turn them over to exploitation by private monopoly. but that will not be permitted. i am here, my friends, to say to you, as governor pardee has said, that in this great controversy--the most momentous which has arisen in this country since the close of the civil war--california and the pacific slope, and i believe all the splendid states of the rocky mountain region, stand with that fine young american statesman who during the past few months has thrilled this nation in his fight to save the resources of the people to all the people for the benefit of all the people; that young man who said at denver the other day that it is more important to help the small man make a living than to help the big man make a profit; that man, who has sounded the highest notes since lincoln, who has declared that he is in favor of government by men for human welfare and against government by money for profit--we stand first, last, and all the time with gifford pinchot. (great applause) * * * * * colonel t. h. davidson (delegate-at-large from minnesota)--mr chairman: i noticed scattered through the program of this great congress the words "general discussion." we have not limited the time to be occupied by speakers. i now move you, sir, that under the head of "general discussion" a delegate shall be entitled to occupy only five minutes, and shall not speak a second time on the same question. chairman condra--the rule adopted today fully covers the point, though it has not been put in effect this afternoon. we have two days, perhaps three, for full discussion, and the time will be limited under the rules which will govern tomorrow. the last speaker on the formal program is one who has been greatly interested in this movement and closely associated with mr pinchot. i have pleasure in introducing mr walter l. fisher, a vice-president of this congress and of the national conservation association and president of the conservation league of america. mr fisher--mr chairman, and ladies and gentlemen: i would not take any of your time this afternoon were it not that i, too, have felt the appeal of president taft for concrete and practical suggestions as to how to solve some of the more difficult of the problems of constructive statesmanship presented in the conservation movement. the particular point on which i wish to make a suggestion is the relation of the states and the federal government to the question of water-power grants. this question, it seems to me, has been allowed to assume a phase entirely unjustified by the facts. there is, in my judgment, not only no necessary conflict between the interests of the state and the nation, but there is every incentive for practical cooperation between state and nation on this matter (applause); and in my opinion the question can never be rightly settled until there is just that cooperation. (renewed applause) the federal government is the natural agency to which we must look for many of the things which are essential to a solution. there are two phases of the problem, one involving a question of law and the other a question of public policy. as to the strict legal right, it must be apparent that on any stream where the federal government owns the riparian property, or on any stream which is navigable in fact or in law, the consent of the federal government is absolutely necessary as a pre-requisite to the construction of any water-power works. for myself, i believe that the power conferred by the constitution upon the federal government with relation to interstate commerce absolutely carries the power to make such conditions in any permit to erect a structure in a navigable stream as the federal government may believe it wise policy to insert. the power to make or to withhold the permit, under all the decisions of the courts which have in any way touched that question, implies the power to impose conditions to the permit. there are, i know, those who disagree as to this proposition; but even they will agree on the broader question of public policy which underlies the whole subject. when the federal government undertakes the improvement of a navigable stream, it rarely if ever happens that it does not thereby either create water-power or increase potential water-power already existing. it is evident, therefore, that those riparian owners who own existing water-power grants are directly benefitted by the improvement in the navigable water. whenever the federal government protects the headwaters and the water-shed on which the stream depends, it is conferring a direct benefit upon the owners of water-power property along the line; and so with all the other improvements. you have heard the eloquent ex-governor of louisiana explain what the interest of that state is in the intervention of the federal government in the regulation of the mississippi river. there are few places throughout this country where the owners of water-power grants and those who are interested in all the other uses of flowing water have not appealed to the federal government for financial aid or for assistance not financial which that government alone can effectively render. it must be apparent that in rendering that assistance the federal government creates property of value, or enlarges the money value of property already existing. no hardship, then, is done if the owners of this property are required to contribute to the original cost. not only so, but there can be no justice in the proposition which requires the taxpayers of the united states as a body to pay the cost of the improvement or the protection of any stream when as a matter of fact the people who own the property immediately along the stream will get, in direct money value, a larger benefit than the cost of the improvement. there are many reasons besides these why the federal government _must_, in the very nature of things, be the effective agency to do many of the things which the states can never effectively do, no matter if the whole subject were turned over to them this afternoon. on the other hand, i wish to call attention to the fact, which i believe to be established by experience, that whenever a local community is once aroused to an intelligent appreciation of its interests and its rights, that local community will better and more effectively regulate local service and local rates than any more remote governmental agency whatever. herein lies the advantage of local home rule. now, i am not talking about railroad rates connected with interstate commerce, or about other things which affect more than the local community, but about those things which affect merely particular localities. if a water-power company starts in alongside of a great industrial community and that community is built up so that its industries depend on it, that community itself, once thoroughly aroused and intelligently educated upon the question, will far more effectively regulate those rates in the interests of the public, while at the same time dealing fairly with the corporate or private interests involved, than would the state or the federal government. that seems to me a broad, practical proposition which experience has justified. now, let us apply the principle to the water-power situation. and my whole purpose in speaking is merely to call the attention of this congress to a method of treating this question, which will, in my opinion, meet both situations. it is not a novel suggestion; in one of the very last of the water-power grants made by secretary garfield, the essential provisions of it were at least hinted at and a preliminary provision made. in my humble opinion, the federal government should control the water-power grants on streams that are navigable or where the government itself controls the riparian property. it should make grants for definite periods of time and should provide for compensation. that compensation as a broad, general rule should be applied to the improvement and protection of the stream and the watershed from which the water-power has been derived, or to other streams and watersheds of like character, for all uses of the water, whether for irrigation on the one hand or for water-power on the other. there should be periodical readjustments of the rate of compensation. in the beginning, and especially in an experimental enterprise, the rate of compensation should be exceedingly low. there should be, as president taft himself said here in his speech, a readjustment of the rate, say every ten years; and the person or the corporation invited to invest money should be given proper protection in that readjustment. capitalist and industrial pioneer should be treated not only fairly but liberally, that vigorous development may result. on the other hand, such a grant should contain this provision, or be subject to this fundamental legal limitation, that the grantee, by acceptance of the grant, acquiesces and will acquiesce in any reasonable regulation of the service and of the rates which may be charged the public that may be provided by the state or by any delegated agency of the state. in that way, the thing in which the local community (the state, its municipalities or minor communities) has the greatest interest will be amply protected and left free to act in its own interest. now, what will be the result practically? at the end of the first ten-year period the question of readjusting the compensation will arise. if the local government has not adequately protected private interests, if it has not regulated the rates so that the people are obtaining power upon fair terms and the corporation restrained from making extortionate profits, all the federal government will have to do will be simply to increase the compensation. if, on the other hand, the fundamental question is being taken care of and the community in which the water-power is generated and distributed is receiving it at fair terms, the compensation can be left where it is or only slightly increased, depending entirely on the situation. and this has another side? the federal government may possibly at times not be looking after some public interests in particular localities as well as it should, for these same federal officials who are elected by the method suggested by our friend from louisiana are the men who are going to control a large part of the regulation of the rates by the federal government; so anyone who believes that the delegation of this question to either federal or state authority is a final solution is equally mistaken in either case. but the method which i suggest will work automatically, because if either state or nation is alive to the people's interests they will be protected either by the imposition of proper compensation or by the appropriate reduction of the rates. (applause) * * * * * chairman condra--fellow-delegates, ladies and gentlemen: in taking note of the remarkable representation from all over the country in this congress, we should not forget that our president, mr bernard n. baker, is from baltimore, right on the atlantic coast and in a southern state; and i desire to say, with a great deal of satisfaction, that a large part of the success of this congress is due to his unflagging efforts. (applause) we shall close our formal program for the day with a brief address by colonel james h. davidson, whom i now have the pleasure of introducing. colonel davidson--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: i shall only detain you a few minutes to make some suggestions which seem to me pertinent. many delegates in this congress seem to have it fixed in their minds that federal control would settle the questions before us, and other delegates, from the far west, seem to claim that the states should control absolutely; and to my surprise and great pleasure, i find that the representatives of southern states, like louisiana and mississippi, are favoring federal control. i say to you, mr chairman and delegates to this congress, that this question is large enough and broad enough to enlist all the statesmanship in the federal government and in all the states composing the union (applause). reference has been made to that great struggle of nearly fifty years ago, in which i took part for nearly five years from private soldier to brigade commander as a full colonel (being one of but five who advanced in rank from private soldier to a full colonelcy); and i cannot stand up and ask as an american for state rights as against the federal government (applause). but it seems to me, gentlemen, that there is enough for each and all of us to do; and if we, as states, neglect the duties that devolve upon us under the police powers, which all the states have, of regulating internal affairs, including these manufacturing corporations and monopolies, we are weak and are not making full use of the great privileges conferred upon us. i was interested very much in the discussion by ex-governor pardee; and he pointed out a fact which indicates to my mind that federal control _alone_ is not sufficient. he says that , , acres of the most valuable timber lands that ever grew on this continent were conveyed to the southern pacific railway, in a certain sense in trust, to be conveyed to actual settlers at not less than $ . per acre, but that no actual settlers ever went upon that land. it is not charged that the state of california was in any way responsible. there was a case where the federal government, and the federal government alone, was involved; and yet that valuable property passed into the hands of that railroad which is the imperial controller of almost everything in california. in the course of the discussion yesterday in reference to the regulation of oil and gas lands it was stated that in california alternate sections had been conveyed to that great organization, and was out of the control of the federal government. that is another case where, if california, a sovereign state, had dealt with those things at the proper time and at the inception, it might have been saved some of the great burdens that now rest upon the people of that state. they speak of four great water-power companies in california, and two water-power trusts. i thoroughly investigated that subject, spending over six months on it three years ago, and i found that water was king in california, yet the water is owned by these four imperial companies. one-half of my life and of my most valuable treasure is my son and his family, now in the san joaquin valley; and every crevice and cañon, in the mountains, almost, has been pre-empted by these great water-power combinations, and it costs fifty dollars per horsepower per annum for the use of it for pumping or for any other purpose. if the state of california had been alert, and had had proper regulation, it would have seen to it that these monopolies could not take possession of all these cañons and control the water-power against the interests of the people. a board of most distinguished army engineers reported two or three years ago that the cost of generating one electrical horsepower at the falls of saint anthony--within ten miles of where i stand--was less than $ per annum, and that in the city of minneapolis to generate one horsepower by steam costs $ . is there any reason why these great monopolies that can generate horsepower by water at an expense of from five to six dollars--and i think in california at less--should put it to the people at fifty dollars per horsepower? i hope that one of the results of this congress will be earnest cooperation between the states and the federal government. let each one be alert. when the civil war broke out and president lincoln called for , men, the governors of the different states in the north did not hesitate, nor the governors in the different states in the south; they immediately began calling for volunteers, making all arrangements to take care of the soldiers, and not an hour was lost. governor alexander ramsey, of minnesota, tendered a regiment to president lincoln within an hour after the firing upon fort sumter (applause). it was a day for the earnest cooperation of all the states with the federal government. and we are confronting a condition of that kind, commercially and legally, today; and it needs cooperation, without bickering and without lack of confidence, in the most earnest manner, to pass such state laws as are proper and right, and to pass such laws of congress as will (so far as the general government has not parted with its rights) control the streams, the lakes, the waters, and the various natural resources in the west. (applause) * * * * * chairman condra--it is now long after six oclock; and the congress is adjourned, to reassemble tomorrow morning at . . _fifth session_ the congress was called to order in the auditorium, saint paul, on wednesday, september , , at . a.m. president baker--ladies and gentlemen: the state delegations are requested to hand the secretary, soon as possible, the names of their nominees for vice-presidents of the congress. the committee on resolutions are anxious to have all resolutions submitted to them at the earliest possible moment in order that they may receive full consideration. it has been arranged to renew the call of the states tomorrow afternoon. the first call of the states was made on governors' day (the second session), when preference was given to the governors. delegations are requested to have a speaker from their state prepared to respond to the call at the thursday afternoon session. * * * * * now that delegations are assembled, the right reverend samuel cook edsall, bishop of the protestant episcopal church for minnesota, will ask the blessing of our heavenly father. invocation _o, almighty and everlasting god, who art the giver of every good and perfect gift, we render unto thee our most humble and hearty thanks for all the blessings which thou hast vouchsafed unto our country, for our resources of soil, forest, mine, and stream, which thou hast given into our hands; and we humbly beseech thee that thou wilt give unto the president of the united states, the governors of our states, our legislators in national congress and in state legislatures, and unto all those who are in authority, as well as unto all the people whether in public or in private station, the graces of unselfishness and wisdom; that they may rightly use these bounties to thy honor and glory and for the good of all mankind; and that thou wilt so bless and guide the deliberations of this congress that by all that may be here said and done our minds may be illumined and our hearts stirred to righteousness and obedience to thy law--through jesus christ our lord. amen._ * * * * * president baker--ladies and gentlemen: we have with us today a truly representative man of our southland, mr w. w. finley, president of the southern railway company, who will address us on "the interest of the railways of the south in conservation." (applause) * * * * * mr finley--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: the interest of the railways of the south in conservation and the interest of the people of the south in conservation are identical. i will go farther, and state my unqualified conviction that any economic or governmental policy that is, in the last analysis, to the best interest of the people of any community is to the best interest of the railways by which that community is served. conversely, my conviction is equally strong that any economic or governmental policy that is harmful to the railways is harmful to the communities served by them. therefore, mr president, in all that i say on the topic assigned to me--"the interest of the railways of the south in conservation"--i must be understood as presenting what i believe to be the interest of the southern people. i am not sure that the expression "conservation of natural resources" is everywhere understood in its broadest sense. i think that to some minds it conveys only the narrow idea of the withdrawal from present use of some part of those resources. however important that kind of conservation may be in some localities and under some circumstances, i do not believe there is much occasion for its application in the part of the united states for which i am expected to speak--the states south of the ohio and potomac rivers and east of the mississippi. i would define the type of "conservation of natural resources" that should be applied in that section as being the wise use of those resources. in some cases it may involve a measure of present self-denial, as when, in the case of an owner of forest lands, it impels him to cut only the matured timber and leave standing immature trees that have a present market value; but, in that case, it leaves him with an asset which increases in value with each year's growth of the standing timber. in some cases conservation may mean the use of resources so as to obtain the maximum present profit, as in the case of soils; for i believe that i am supported by the best scientific and practical authority in saying that soils not only preserve, but increase, their productivity when so handled, in the application of fertilizers, the rotation of crops, and the growing of live stock, as to yield the maximum present profit. the south is interested in the application of conservation to the wise use to its soils, its minerals, its timber, and its streams. notwithstanding the wonderful industrial development of the south since , it is still pre-eminently an agricultural section. it is a section, therefore, in which the conservation of the soil is of the highest importance. there is a prevalent belief that the productivity of the soils in those parts of the united states that have been longest under cultivation has been seriously impaired. statistics do not confirm this belief. estimates of productions of staple crops per acre have been compiled in the united states only since , and, as there are often wide fluctuations between successive seasons--due to differences in rainfall and temperature--the period covered has not been long enough to afford a basis for definite conclusions. there is also the fact that all available figures are estimates, and consequently are not exact. on their face, however, they do not prove a decline in productivity. this may be illustrated by comparing the production of wheat per acre for ten-year periods since . in the decade from to the average for the united states was estimated at bushels; from to , . bushels; from to , . bushels; from to , . bushels, and for the three years since , . bushels. so far, then, as these figures can be relied upon, they tend to show an increase in productivity, especially as an analysis by groups of states shows the larger and more uniform increases to have been in some of the older sections of the country. similar figures for corn do not show an increase for the united states as a whole, but they show very little decrease. from to the average production of corn per acre was estimated at . bushels; from to , . bushels; from to , . bushels; from to , . bushels, and for the three years since , . bushels. it is proper to note, in connection with the apparent decline in the fourth decade as compared with the first, that the poorest yield in the entire period was in , when abnormal weather conditions brought the estimated average for the united states down to . bushels, thus pulling down the average for the entire decade. it is also proper to note that dr whitney, chief of the bureau of soils in the united states department of agriculture, in discussing these figures, expresses the opinion that, on account of a readjustment of the basis of the department's estimates in as a result of the reports of the census of , the figures before that year, both for wheat and corn, were relatively too high. estimates of cotton yield per acre have been made by the united states agricultural department since . ten-year averages for the full decades up to are as follows: to , . pounds of lint cotton per acre; to , . pounds; to , . pounds; to , . pounds, and for the four years since , . pounds. these figures are subject to the same question as to their accuracy that apply to the estimates of wheat and corn production, but, on their face, they do not indicate any impairment of the productivity of the cotton soils of the south. it is noteworthy that the larger and more uniform increases in yield per acre shown by the department's figures are in the older cotton states. while statistics of crop yields in the united states do not cover a sufficient period to be of great value in determining the effect of long use on soil productivity, some light is thrown on the subject by comparing yields per acre in the united states with those in other countries where lands have been under cultivation for centuries. thus, for the ten-year period from to , inclusive, the average yield of wheat per acre in the united states was . bushels, in france . bushels, in germany bushels, and in the united kingdom . bushels. in germany, statistics are available from to , inclusive, showing increases in the average yields of wheat from . to . bushels, of rye from . to . bushels, and of oats from . to . bushels. similar figures might be cited for other european countries, but perhaps the most conclusive statistics are those collected by kellerman, a german student of this question, who gives the yield per acre for a large number of german estates, covering long periods of time. i shall cite but one of these--a schmatzfeld estate with records extending back to . in the period between and the annual yields reduced to bushels per acre, were, wheat . , rye . , barley . , and oats . . in the period from to these yields were, wheat . , rye , barley . , and oats . . taking all these figures together, i believe the conclusion is inevitable that, while abuse of soils may impair their productivity, their wise use increases it, and the longer they are properly used the more productive they become. proper use, such as conserves and increases soil productivity, involves the most approved cultural methods, the application of such fertilizers as may be required for varying soil conditions, the raising of live stock, and, above all, the scientific rotation of crops. there can be little question that the most unwise use to which a soil can be subjected is the raising of the same crop for a long series of years. some very interesting experiments in continuous cropping and crop rotation, covering a period of sixty-five years, have been carried on at rothamsted, england. on one plot potatoes were grown for fifteen years. at the end of that period the soil was in such condition that it would not grow potatoes at all. it was then planted in barley, and produced an excellent yield. another crop followed the barley, and the soil was then in condition to grow potatoes again. on this same experimental farm wheat has been sown for fifty years on the same land without fertilizers, and the yield has gone down from bushels to bushels. on another tract wheat has been grown continuously for fifty years with the use of a complete fertilizer, and an average yield of about bushels has been maintained. on another tract wheat has been grown for fifty years in rotation with other crops and an average yield of bushels has been maintained, showing that, for growing wheat on that particular soil, rotation was equivalent to fertilization. as might be expected, the rothamsted experiments show the best results where fertilizers are used in connection with rotation, and justify the conclusion that under continuous use, with proper rotation and an intelligent use of fertilizers, soil productivity can be largely increased. this is a matter of particular interest to the south, because with our advantages of soils and climate we have an ideal region for soil conservation through crop rotation and intensive farming. there is a quite general impression throughout the north that, except for a few localities in which early fruits and vegetables, tobacco, and sugar cane are grown, the south is a one-crop region devoted exclusively to cotton. this is entirely erroneous. there are many localities in the southeastern states where cotton is not grown at all, and every acre of land in the cotton belt is suited for growing other crops as well. cotton will continue to be the great staple crop of the south, and with the ever-increasing demand for cotton goods of all kinds, its cultivation will become increasingly profitable, but the southern cotton planter is learning the value of crop rotation; diversified farming and live-stock raising are becoming more general, and the increased supply of cotton demanded by the world will be produced by increasing the average productiveness of each acre as well as by increasing the acreage. other things being equal, the conservative use of a raw material, whatever it may be, consists in its manufacture, in the locality of production, through all the stages of preparation for the final consumer. manufacturing in the south has reached its present growth and is being still further developed on the basis of this kind of conservation of raw material. industrial development in the south on a large scale may be said to date from about , prior to which time only relatively a small proportion of the raw materials available in that section were advanced through even the first stages of manufacture before being shipped to other localities. it is natural that, at first, only the coarser, and what may be termed the preliminary, processes should have been undertaken. this was the first step in the conservation of raw materials by their manufacture near the source of supply. the south has gone far in that direction, and has already started on the second step, which is the use of the products of primary manufacturing as the raw materials for secondary industries. but a large proportion of southern cotton mill products, lumber, pig-iron, and other commodities, advanced through the first stages of manufacture, are still shipped out of the south to serve as the raw materials of industries in other localities which convert them into articles ready for the final consumer; and southern coal is shipped to serve as the raw material for power and heat in other parts of the united states and, to some extent, in foreign countries. this is a waste of energy which, under ideal conditions of conservation would be avoided; and i am glad to be able to say that the present tendency of industrial development in our section is in the direction of its elimination. substantial progress has already been made in the building up of secondary manufacturing along some lines, and i believe that the most noteworthy progress of southern industrial development in the immediate future will be in this direction, carrying with it an increase in the volume of primary manufacturing through broadening the market for its products. one of the most valuable of the natural resources of the south is its timber. it is also a resource of which the intelligent conservation will benefit, directly and indirectly, the largest number of people. we have in the southeastern states large and growing industries which use wood alone, or wood in combination with iron, steel, and other materials, as their raw materials. some of these industries, such as the manufacture of furniture, have enjoyed a phenomenal growth in the past years. there is every reason to expect that this growth will continue and that the variety of wood-working industries will be increased, with the result that they will require an increasing supply of raw materials. as the timber consumption of the united states is now in excess of the annual growth, and as other sections are drawing on our southern forests, it is obvious that if these southern wood-working industries are to survive and are to be handed down to future generations, immediate and effective steps should be taken for the conservation of southern forests. this is the more important for the reason that the same steps taken to insure a perpetual supply of raw material for our wood-workers will tend to stream and soil conservation by increasing stream-flow in periods of drought and by lessening the destructiveness of floods which erode the soil of the upper watersheds and deposit gravel and silt on overflowed lands and in the beds of the navigable parts of the streams. if we were thinking only of the present time, there would be no occasion for us to concern ourselves with the conservation of our timber supplies. we have ample for the present generation. it is because timber is a crop of slow growth, requiring more than a lifetime to mature most of the species, that timber conservation, if it is to be effective and is to provide for the needs of those who come after us, must be handled along exceptional lines. it is not the duty of a private owner of forest lands to conserve them unless it is at least as profitable for him to do so as to clear all the timber off of them; but it _is_ the duty of the government to consider the welfare of future generations as well as of that now living. the conservation of southern timber supplies is a matter that concerns not only the people of our own section, but those of the entire united states as well. it is a matter of national concern, as, owing to the depletion of their forest resources, the people of other parts of the country must look to the south for an increasing proportion of their timber supplies. it is a recognition of this national interest in the southern forests that has strengthened the support of the proposition for the acquisition by the federal government of large tracts of lands in the appalachian region to be converted into national forests (applause) from which the timber shall be marketed under a system that will result in the perpetuation of the forests. it may be that our federal government has no power, under the constitution, to acquire lands for the purpose of forest conservation; but it is charged with the supervision, improvement, and conservation of our navigable streams (applause), and the evidence as to the effect of forests on stream flow was so conclusive as to lead the house of representatives, during the last session of congress, to pass a bill providing the establishment of national forests for the protection of the watersheds of navigable streams. this bill is to be voted on in the senate on the fifteenth of next february. whether this plan or some other may be adopted, i think it is of the utmost importance that the campaign of education as to the necessity for the speedy and general adoption of the most approved methods of scientific forestry, which is being so ably carried on by the national forest service, should be continued (applause). this is quite important, if the best results are to be attained, because, whatever may be done by the federal government, much will remain for the states and for private owners of forests and woodlots to do. if the states and private owners are to do their share, the owners of forest lands, the users of forest products, state legislators, and the people generally should be educated as to the dependence of our future supplies of timber on wise conservation. the private investor in forest lands buys them with the expectation of making a profit on his investment. he naturally wants to make the largest possible profit, and to do it as soon as possible. heretofore, partly as a result of prevailing systems of taxation and the lack of efficient fire protection, self-interest has impelled the investor in timber lands to clean up his holdings to the last dollar's worth of merchantable timber, and to get off the denuded land as quickly as possible, selling it for whatever it might bring. in the early years of our history, when, except in the prairie regions, lands for cultivation could be obtained only by clearing them of timber, this wholesale cutting was more justifiable, and, in some cases now, in locations where the value of the land for agricultural purposes is greater than its value for timber production, it may be the proper method. we have reached the point, however, when, especially with reference to our mountain forests, it may seriously be questioned whether, as a matter of dollars and cents, this method is the most profitable to the forest owner. in view of the present prices of lumber and the practical certainty of advancing prices in the future, i am disposed to believe that we have now reached the point where it will pay the private owner of any considerable body of timber on land having relatively a low agricultural value to adopt conservative methods of forestry (applause). a case in point is that of the university of the south, at sewanee, tennessee, which owns , acres of forest land. in it was proposed to sell all the marketable timber on this tract, and an offer of $ , . was obtained. this was rejected, and the university undertook to manage the forest conservatively and market the mature timber from time to time. the result is that, at the end of nine years, instead of having realized only $ , . from this tract, the university has received from it net profits amounting to over $ , . above all expenses (applause), including the cost of fire patrol; and instead of having , acres of cut-over land of relatively little value, it has a continuously productive forest. (applause) whatever may be the decision of our national legislature as to the proposition for the conversion of our appalachian woodlands into national forests, i believe it would be a wise and patriotic policy for our state lawmakers to encourage conservative forestry by private owners in every reasonable and proper way. one of the reasons assigned for the failure of private owners to adopt conservative forestry is that in some localities the rate of taxation on timber land is so high as practically to compel every owner to cut the timber as quickly as possible. another reason assigned is the general lack of an efficient fire patrol, and the danger that, even if an owner goes to the expense of preventing fire on his own property, his timber may be destroyed by a fire starting on the property of some neighbor who has taken no such precautions. these are matters that come within the province of our state legislators, and i would suggest their consideration of whether it might not be possible to devise a system of taxation that would differentiate between timber lands so managed as to insure the perpetuation of a great national resource and those so managed as to hasten its exhaustion (applause). i would also suggest consideration of the enactment of proper fire laws and the establishment of an efficient patrol, possibly with the expense apportioned among owners of timber lands, as i understand is done in some western localities at a very low annual cost per acre. i would further suggest consideration of the practicability of encouraging the planting of trees on lands of little or no agricultural value. even under the most encouraging conditions, however, planting of forests by private land owners must, almost necessarily, be on relatively a small scale. as a general rule, therefore, private planting will be limited to the establishment of woodlots on the waste lands of farms; and if reforestation is to be undertaken on a larger scale, it must be done by some governmental agency. (applause) the problem of stream conservation in the southeastern states is very closely connected with both timber conservation and soil conservation. the ends to be sought are a diminution of the volume of water carried by the streams in their flood stages, and an increase in their volume during their low stages. everything, therefore, which tends to retard the flow of the rainfall into the streams is a conservative agency. undoubtedly the most effective of these is the natural forest with its soil, composed of porous humus, covered by a blanket of decaying leaves, branches, and fallen trees, and often with a dense mat of underbrush growing among the trees. such a forest will absorb a large amount of water during a rain-storm, and allow it to seep down gradually into the streams instead of running off in torrents, overflowing the banks of the streams, destroying growing crops and other property, and scouring the soil from the watersheds to be deposited in the lower levels of the streams or at their mouths, shoaling channels or forming bars in harbors. generally speaking, therefore, every step taken in the conservation of forests is of value in stream conservation; but, if the best results in the regulation of stream flow are to be attained, other things may be done to advantage. the growth of underbrush having no marketable value is of no benefit to a forest, in fact it may choke out or retard the growth of young trees of valuable species. such a growth is of great value, however, in retarding water flow, and preventing soil erosion, and, unless cut-over mountain sides are to be reforested, i believe that the growth on them of such species as laurel and rhododendron should be encouraged. (applause) each farmer, especially along the headwaters of the streams, can contribute to a greater or less extent to stream conservation. he can do this by establishing permanent woodlots on those waste lands that are to be found on almost every farm in rolling or mountainous country, and especially on those lands that are liable to erosion. he should, of course, take every precaution to prevent the washing of gullies in his cultivated fields, and where such gullies have already been formed he should so manage as to prevent further erosion. the farmer on the headwaters of a stream cannot be expected to do these things in order to aid in the prevention of flood damages below him. he should be educated to an appreciation of their benefit to himself individually. he will not only be lessening, in some degree, the amount of silt carried down by flood waters, but will be conserving his own soil; and his woodlots will, in a few years, become increasingly valuable as stores of fire-wood and fence-posts, and, eventually, of larger timber. the effect of but a single farmer on an extensive watershed adopting these methods would, of course, be inappreciable, but if thousands of farmers could be led to do so as a matter of self-interest the good results would soon become apparent. another method of stream conservation that i believe may be practiced to advantage in some locations in the appalachian region is the impounding of flood waters in artificial ponds or lakes, to be let out gradually during periods of low water. this is not everywhere practicable, and, i believe, should only be practiced where the benefit will be greater than the damage that will result from overflowing the land included in the reservoir. it would manifestly be unwise to locate such a reservoir at a point where it would submerge a fertile agricultural valley, or where it would render inaccessible a valuable deposit of coal or ore. one of the great economic advantages of the south is the abundance of its opportunities for the development of hydro-electric power for the operation of its factories, the propulsion of its trolley cars, and the lighting of its cities and towns. if this cheap and efficient power is to be used most advantageously, it is important that the stream-flow by which it is generated should be, as nearly as possible, uniform at all seasons of the year. it is in this connection that reservoirs for impounding flood waters would be of great value. some of the sites where these reservoirs might be located are so situated that a great and powerful fall of water may be attained. the power plants would often have to be situated at points not suited for the location of industrial establishments, but the power can be carried by wire to factories many miles distant. where such reservoirs are established the primary purpose will be the generation of power, but they would also serve a highly useful purpose in diminishing the flood level of the streams which they feed. your invitation to address this congress was very gratifying to me, mr president, not simply because of the high honor which it conferred upon me, but chiefly because the invitation and the suggestion of my topic conveyed a recognition of the interest of the railways of the united states in the conservation of our natural resources and in all that concerns our national welfare. (applause) they are interested in soil conservation, because it means prosperity to the farmer and an increase in the volume of farm products to be carried, and also an increase in their tonnage of agricultural machinery and implements and of all kinds of merchandise which a prosperous farmer will buy. they are interested in the conservation of forests and mines, because it means the perpetuation of sources of supply of raw materials which, either in their crude or manufactured state, must be carried to market, and which, in their production and manufacture, bring prosperity to many thousands whose consumption of commodities produced in other localities calls for transportation. they are interested in the conservation of water powers and navigable streams, because cheap power means the development of industrial communities and, while economically efficient waterways mean a loss to the railways of some kinds of traffic, they also mean an increase in general prosperity in which the railways have a share. (applause) conversely, mr president, the people are interested in the conservation and development of their transportation systems. we have seen that one of the elements of conservation is the manufacture of finished products at or near the sources of supply of raw materials. it is this that enables the people of a community to devote their energies chiefly to those industries for which their locality is best suited and to exchange their surplus production for commodities that can be produced more advantageously in other localities. transportation makes this specialization of industries possible. without efficient transportation facilities each community would have to be, to a larger extent, self-supporting, and many of its people would have to engage in the production of commodities which, with our existing facilities for transportation, they can buy more profitably elsewhere. the scale of living would be much more restricted, and many things which are now looked upon as being almost necessaries of life would either be unattainable or would be luxuries which only the wealthy could enjoy. i am glad of the opportunity, mr president, to speak of the south and for the south before this representative national assembly (applause). our section is a region of unsurpassed economic strength. our climate and our soils invite to diversified agriculture, in which there can be produced profitably all the products of the temperate zone and many of those of the tropics. beneath our soil are stores of coal, iron and other ores, marble and stone for the builder, and clay for the potter and brickmaker. our forests are sources of great present profit and, under wise conservation, can be perpetuated as sources of wealth for future generations. our streams flowing from the wooded mountains of the appalachian region carry the force of millions of horsepower capable of being utilized along their banks or carried in the shape of electrical energy to wherever it can be used to best advantage. the intelligence, energy, and enterprise of our people are attested by the splendid social, agricultural, and industrial structure they have erected on the ruins left by the civil war. the progress that has been made is but the promise of what will be. the south is a land of present-day opportunity, and its people invite the man seeking an opportunity to work with hand or brain, or the man with money to invest to come to this favored land of busy factories and thriving towns--a land of fertile valleys, forest-clad mountains, and storehouses of mineral wealth. (applause) * * * * * president baker--ladies and gentlemen: you will no doubt gladly permit interruption of the formal program for a few moments now and then by reports of committees. professor condra, chairman of the credentials committee, is now ready to report. professor condra--mr president and delegates: we have examined the credentials of all delegates to the second national conservation congress, and find that the duly accredited delegates entitled to vote in accordance with the constitution of the congress number thirteen hundred fifty-one ( ), and that the number of duly accredited delegates from each state are as follows: alabama , arizona , arkansas , california , colorado , columbia (district of) , connecticut , delaware , florida , georgia , idaho , illinois , indiana , iowa , kansas , kentucky , louisiana , maine , maryland , massachusetts , michigan , minnesota , mississippi , missouri , montana , nebraska , new hampshire , new jersey , new mexico , new york , north carolina , north dakota , ohio , oklahoma , oregon , pennsylvania , rhode island , south carolina , south dakota , texas , utah , vermont , virginia , washington , west virginia , wisconsin , wyoming ; total, . foreign: canada , mexico . respectfully submitted to the congress: [signed] g. e. condra, _chairman_ lynn r. meekins geo. k. smith edward hines r. w. douglas a delegate--mr chairman: i move that the report be adopted and the committee be dismissed. the motion was put, and was carried without dissenting voice. president baker--professor condra will report an action by the committee on resolutions. professor condra (_reading_)--a motion was made and carried by the resolutions committee that resolutions presented to the congress or to the committee cannot be received after oclock p.m. wednesday. all resolutions should be headed with the subject of the resolution and should be signed by the person offering same. the resolutions committee has not yet received the names of the members from alabama, delaware, nevada, north carolina, south dakota and virginia; and the committee urge that the delegations from those states act at once. the next meeting of the committee will be held at p.m. today, room , saint paul hotel. * * * * * mr george b. logan (_secretary of the resolutions committee_)--mr chairman: the resolutions committee suggest that resolutions should be grouped under the heads of land, water, forests, minerals, and vital resources; and if those who submit resolutions will simply place the proper heading on each, it will greatly aid the committee. president baker--professor condra will make another announcement. professor condra--ladies and gentlemen: there is a strong demand for practical consideration of conservation problems in various states, and for the purpose of discussing these subjects a meeting will be held this evening at oclock in the saint paul hotel. all members of state conservation commissions and state conservation associations are invited to attend this meeting. president baker--here is another announcement just handed in: technical men in attendance are requested to meet in the lobby of the saint paul hotel on the adjournment of the morning session of this congress. the call includes civil, electrical, mining, mechanical and hydraulic engineers, architects, educators in these sciences, and also geologists and chemists. senator beveridge, of indiana, will now address us on a subject which ought to be very near the heart of every father and mother--"the young man's idea." i have the pleasure of introducing senator beveridge. [the band here played "the star-spangled banner," while the audience rose and greeted senator beveridge with tremendous applause.] * * * * * senator beveridge--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: the united states is. (applause) the american people are a nation (applause)--not forty-six nations. (applause) in war we fight under one flag (applause) for our common safety; in peace let us strive, under one flag, for our common welfare. (applause) our history is the story of the struggle of the national sentiment of all the people, which special interests for their selfish purposes sought to discourage, against the provincial sentiment of some of the people, which special interests for their selfish purposes sought to encourage. (applause) the parent of the provincial idea in american government was the british crown. the british kings believed that if they could keep the colonists separated by local pride, local prejudice, and local jealousy, the british policy would be easier. they knew that if the colonists were united by common interests, common sentiment, and a common purpose, the british policy would be harder; and that british policy _was_ to permit the special interests of the united kingdom to exploit the people of the divided colonies (applause). and so from king james to king george the british crown sought to keep the people of the colonies divided--separated by geography for the convenience of the english government; they sought to keep them separated in spirit for the interests of the british manufacturers. every british law which forced the revolution was a law to enable the special interests of the united kingdom to monopolize the markets of the people of the colonies. our revolution was nothing more than the war of the people, for the moment united, against the special interests of the colonies which had kept them divided. now, such is the origin of the provincial idea in america. washington and his continentals were the infant national idea in uniform, and manning the shotted guns of liberty (applause). the british and their hessian and tory allies were the full-grown provincial idea behind the bayonets of oppression. our first attempt at government was a failure because the british provincial idea still was powerful. the local pride, prejudice, and jealousy of the separate colonies reasserted itself, after their common danger was past. the result was the articles of confederation. washington said that the government thus formed was contemptible, and yet it was the provincial idea carried to its logical conclusion; and so it fell. the cruel necessities of the people forced the reassertion of the national idea, and the constitution of the united states was that idea's immortal child (applause). the articles of confederation said, we, the states, form a government: the constitution says, we, the _people_, form this government for our general welfare (applause). and yet into this great "ordinance of our nationality," as chief justice marshall calls our constitution, there crept defects which the statesmen of that day could not prevent, defects which have caused most of our trouble since, and nearly all of them are due to the provincial idea. for example, few men remember that when the constitution was adopted, "state rights" was not mentioned in that instrument. washington had been elected president. the congress of the united states was in session. the national government was under way. the tenth amendment was adopted to quiet those who were preaching the paradox that the general government of the people would oppress the people. noisiest of these was patrick henry, then governor of virginia, who refused to attend the constitutional convention, opposed the ratification of our fundamental law, and was against its adoption. upon the embers of provincialism he heaped the inflammable brush-wood of excited rhetoric. being in the constitution, the state rights provision is as valid as any other amendment. but such is its origin and spirit, and no misinterpretation of the provincial idea of state rights must be permitted to impair the american people's general welfare, waste their resources, plunge the nation into war, or impede our general progress as a people (applause). now, as always, the danger has been, and is, not so much that the nation will interfere with the rights of the states as that the states will interfere with the rights of the nation. (applause) after our present government was founded, its first conflict with the british provincial idea was in the whiskey rebellion of pennsylvania; the special interests that dealt in rum, under the guise of state sovereignty defied the nation's laws; but george washington put down that first state rights rebellion in the name of the government of all the people (applause). then came the special interests' defiance of the laws of the general government in andrew jackson's day, and andrew jackson's voice, like the voice of washington, was the voice of all the people against the voice of the special interests who tried to exploit the people. next came the special interests that thrived on human slavery, and, in the name of state rights tried to destroy the government they could not control. but again the national sentiment responded to abraham lincoln's call to arms (great applause), and a million bayonets wrote across our constitution these words of the american people's immortality: this is a nation! (applause) then came the special interests that robbed and poisoned the people by lotteries, that destroyed the morals of the people by obscene literature. they flourished under state protection. only the nation could stop them. those special interests denied that the nation had the power to stop them. but the nation _did_ stop them, and the supreme court of the nation upheld the nation's power (applause). then came the special interests that sold to the people diseased meats, poisoned foods, and adulterated drugs. again they flourished under state protection. again the nation only could protect the lives of the nation's people. and again those special interests denied that the nation had the power, but the nation _exercised_ the power, and today national laws protect the lives and rights of the american people from special interests that were plundering and poisoning and killing them. (applause) and it is the same conflict between the national and the provincial idea, for and against the great, necessary, and inevitable reform of the national control of corporate capitalization, on which so largely depend just prices and rates to the people. (applause) these are examples of the evils; but nearly every step of progress we have taken has been due to the success of the national idea. for example, president madison vetoed the first internal improvement bill. he said, in one of the ablest messages ever written--far abler than the diluted state rights doctrine we hear today--that the constitution gave the nation no power to build roads, bridge rivers, improve harbors; but the people needed these things in order to win that righteous prosperity which only they can have acting as one people, under one flag--and so congress passed the internal improvement bill over madison's veto, and today no one dares question the nation's power to make internal improvements; the only question today is how we can best do that work. (applause) again, for a hundred years, the provincial idea kept the quarantine of the nation's ports exclusively in the hands of the states; but if pestilence entered at a port of one state it attacked the people of other states. the germs of yellow fever did not know state lines when they saw them, any more than a forest fire knows the boundaries between states when it sees them. and so the open grave, the dead on the street, the people's past and future peril, asserted the national idea again for the nation's safety, and today we have substantially a national control of national quarantine to keep pests and death from our shores, and the states are cooperating. so you see that the history of the american people has been merely the narrative of the making of the nation, merely the record of the compounding of a people, merely the chronicle of the knitting together of one great brotherhood. it is an inevitable process, and it is a safe process--except for special interests that seek to exploit all the people. for the american people can be trusted (applause). the combined intelligence and composite conscience of the american people is the mightiest force for wisdom and righteousness in all the world, and no ancient and provincial interpretation of state rights in the name of development must impede our general welfare (applause), no plea for hasty local development must impair our healthy general development (applause), no temporary state politics compelled by the wealthy few must prevent permanent national statesmanship for the general good of all. (applause) affairs that concern exclusively the people living within a state are the business and the problem of that state. affairs affecting the general welfare of the whole people are the business and problem of the nation (applause). and even in solving its own problems, every state must remember that its people are an inseparable and indivisible part of the whole american people (applause). of states as of men it may be written, no state liveth unto itself alone. (applause) just as the idea of provincialism has caused most of our national evils in the past, so it has wrought the waste of our national resources. the provincial idea was that the national resources belonging to all the people should be handed over for nothing to special interests. this was done under the plea of encouraging individual enterprise and the hastening of local development. and so forests, which once belonged to all the people, have been ruthlessly slaughtered, and upon their ruins have risen the empires of our lumber kings (applause). priceless deposits of coal and iron and copper and phosphates have been freely surrendered to special interests, and those sources of the people's revenue, which should have flowed into the people's treasury to help pay the expenses of the people's government, have been diverted by the ditch dug by the provincial idea into the treasury of special interests until the multi-millionaire constitutes one of the gravest problems confronting american statesmanship. (applause) all this waste and robbery of the people's property must be stopped! (applause) the hand of waste or theft must not be strengthened by any legal technicality that plays into the hands of special interests and out of the hands of the american people! (great applause) had we kept all the property that belonged to all the people, and compelled special interests who exploited it to pay us a reasonable price for it, that income today would be paying most of our national expenses. our resources would have been developed and not exhausted, and our whole material evolution would have been rational and sound instead of unbalanced and defective. had this been our policy from the start, we would have enjoyed all the benefits from our natural resources, and our children today would inherit colossal national wealth and small national burdens instead of the special interests enjoying all the benefits of the people's property and _their_ children inheriting colossal fortunes and small private burdens. (applause) the nation must keep and administer for the benefit of all the people the property yet remaining to the people (applause). every state should help and not hinder the nation, in doing this great duty (applause). every state should administer the public property within it, and belonging to it, for the public good. every municipality should keep and administer the property belonging to it for the public good; and both state and municipality should aid the nation in keeping and administering for the people the property that belongs to _all_ of them. i want to give you an illustration, very concrete: many of new york's inconceivably vast fortunes have been expanded by corrupt councils selling watercourses and other property for a mere song to private owners. had new york kept the property which belonged to the city, instead of squandering it to already multi-millionaires, the city's debt today would not be so vast--and her great private fortunes would not be so vast either (applause). the people's taxes would have been less, and the gigantic unearned incomes of the heirs of great wealth would have been less (applause). and as between the two, the wiser policy have been for the city to keep the property that belonged to all the people of the city instead of selling it sometimes for an infamous price to private owners whose vast wealth, accumulating by the work of the city itself, has raised up in the midst of the american people one of the great questions of the age. cooperation of municipality, state, and nation, in keeping and administering for the general good the property of all the people--this is the policy of common sense and common honesty (applause). strife and dissension between municipality, state, and nation, that the reign of pillage may go on and that mighty accumulations of wealth may be upbuilded upon the ruins of the people's resources--_that_ is the policy of private avarice and private plunder (applause). coal, timber, asphalt, phosphates, water-powers--all the property of the people--must be kept and administered for the people by the government which lincoln said was "of the people by the people for the people" (applause). already this greatest of our present-day national policies is well under way. let any man beware how he retards or hinders it (applause). already we have saved much of the people's property still belonging to the people. we must save _all_ of the people's property still belonging to the people. (applause and cries of "good") "honor to whom honor is due." (applause) let us not forget, in this great hour, that the man who, by thought, word, and deed, has wrought for this great reform, until today he stands its national personification (applause), that splendid, courageous, pure, unselfish young american, the president of the national conservation association, gifford pinchot. (tumultuous applause and cheers, calls for "pinchot"; and the audience rose, gave the chautauqua salute, and continued cheering for many minutes) for years--and i speak from personal knowledge, because twelve years ago when i entered the senate i was made the chairman of the then despised forestry committee--for years gifford pinchot has ceaselessly worked and fearlessly fought to keep for the people the property of the people which special interests were trying to steal from the people (applause). and in that nation-wide battle he has been the field-officer of the man who _first_ succeeded in making conservation a permanent and practical policy of american statesmanship, theodore roosevelt. (great applause. a voice: let us vote to give him back his job!) the soul of our prosperity--even of our very life--is in the idea of our unity as a people. let municipality, state, and nation, each act and, within its own province, work to keep what belongs to the people for the people, instead of the municipality, state, and nation, each within its province, conniving at the waste of the people's property for the upbuilding of the wealth of special interests to the detriment of all the people. the wise, honest and economic administration of the people's welfare means the just advantage which individual enterprise and thrift as of right ought to have. the unwise, uneconomic and dishonest waste of the people's resources for the enrichment of the special few, this in the end, believe me, is the denial of that just advantage which individual thrift, enterprise, and integrity as of right ought to have. (applause) the young men of today in working for themselves individually must think and act for what the constitution calls "the general welfare" of the whole people (applause). after all, only as the nation is prosperous can any state be really prosperous. after all, only as the nation is powerful can any state be really safe from foes, foreign and domestic. the young men of the twentieth century in this republic are not the heirs of the provincial idea which we inherited from the british kings, and which has so hindered our real progress as a people, squandered so much of the people's resources, shed so much of the people's blood. no! the young men of today are the heirs of all the advancement that our struggling millions have made toward their common brotherhood. the young men of today are the heirs of all the victories which heroes and statesmen have won for the general welfare. the young men of today are the heirs of all the unifying influences by which the genius of man has knit this great people into one splendid family. and so the young american of today, when thinking of himself, must think in the terms of the nation; through his veins must pulse the blood of our general welfare; his every thought and act must be for the common good of all. and only so can his individual success be well builded; and when it is builded on such foundation, though "the rains descend and the floods come and the winds blow" and beat upon a house thus builded "it shall not fall, for it is founded upon a rock." (applause) why was the american nation founded? what is the purpose of this republic? it is to create a greater human happiness than the world has ever known (applause). it is to enable millions of men and women to cooperate in building clean, honorable, prosperous homes. and so let us americans move forward as brothers and as sisters until we shall give the whole world an example of one great brotherhood in heart and in deed as well as in words. (great applause) * * * * * there were repeated calls for "pinchot"; and mr pinchot, coming forward amidst great cheers and hearty applause, said-- ladies and gentlemen, members of this great meeting: there can be in a man's life but few moments like this, in seeing policies in which he believes and for which he has tried to work so splendidly acclaimed by such a meeting, when at first they were questioned. i haven't anything to say at this time except to thank you most profoundly, and to add that the policies for which this congress stands are sweeping the country as they are sweeping this body--and that, so far as the united states is concerned, conservation, i believe, has won out. (applause) i thank you! * * * * * president baker--ladies and gentlemen: we all know conservation has, with such a leader, won out. (applause) we now take up "a rational system of taxing national resources," by frank l. mcvey, president of the university of north dakota, whom i have the pleasure of introducing. (applause) * * * * * president mcvey--mr chairman and good friends: the invitation of the president of the congress to be present and to deliver an address on the subject of a rational system of taxing natural resources, asked that specific suggestions be made of a practical nature for the improvement of our present laws on this subject. this places upon me a heavy responsibility if the suggestions made are to be accepted in any serious way. the title of the address assigned emphasizes a _rational_ system; it implies that the one now in vogue cannot be so designated, and that any system of taxation has a close relation to the conservation of natural resources. this, if i may put it in so many words, is my thesis. it is unnecessary for me to go into the need of conservation, since that has been done in the previous congress and at various times in the public prints. the question then to which i must devote the time of the program assigned to me is this: how does taxation affect the conservation of natural resources, and what suggestions of a practical nature can be made for the betterment of the taxation of such resources? it may be said in the beginning that the difficulties involved in the taxing of natural resources exist to still greater degree in the case of other property. generally speaking, we have not attained to a rational system of taxation in any field, and we are now attempting to revamp the old system and extend it, by adding to or taking from it. economic conditions in america have changed from time to time, and these changes have forced upon us a reorganization of our methods, not only of manufacture and of transportation, but also of administration, government, and social organization. such a condition of affairs is seen today in nearly every state, and attempts are being made to meet it in the specific instance of the fiscal problem by adding to the old system of taxation through the special taxation of corporations, inheritances, royalties, and incomes. the consequence is that so far as natural resources are concerned we have no principle existent in the general scheme of taxation that can be used to meet the new conditions that have arisen in our efforts to conserve our resources. just as the problems of industrial organization have come upon the states, so now has come the problem of our natural resources. in hazy thinking, and sometimes in indefinite laws, we have attempted to regulate through legislation the great corporations of the present day; and in much the same manner we shall, by feeling our way, attempt to develop some plan of taxing natural resources. sometimes in discussing this question of the taxation of natural resources a great deal of emphasis is placed on the statement that it is the cause of the depletion of timber and mineral lands especially. i think it may be said at the outset that the taxation of natural resources is only one of many factors in the destruction of them. the extent to which this takes place is impossible to say, but the fact remains that the taxation of natural resources may or may not hasten the destruction of forest lands, the exploitation of minerals, and the cultivation of the soil. where lands bearing timber are owned, interest charges with each year of ownership are piled up, and the same is true of the taxes. where, on the other hand, lands are held through a royalty contract, the lessee is in a position to carry the lands without special cost to himself except that of the taxes. the consequence is that it is impossible to apply the same principle of taxation to agricultural lands, timber lands, minerals, and water-powers. there must be a differentiation between them, and a differentiation that will clearly meet the various uses to which they are put. without question, the general property tax, as it now stands upon the statute books of the different states, does not meet in any true sense of the term the general economic conditions, and the special needs of mining and lumbering in particular. the principle of taxing the product when it is placed upon the market applies particularly to mineral and timber lands, but the same principle in the case of agricultural lands would probably deter their use and fail to meet the needs of revenue as well as working to the discouragement of the agricultural industry. the single-taxers have insisted that the taxation of lands hastens its use, that it forces the owner to develop it; and this is just the thing that is needed in the special instances of agricultural lands and of town lots, but the same principle could not be applied to the other resources of the nation. it is possible for the owners of timber lands by following the principles of forestry to modify the product and to keep the land in producing condition indefinitely. taxation of such land, therefore, should have in view the maintenance of this condition. it must be clearly understood, however, that the fear of fire, interest charges on investment, and the cost of management will act quite as surely toward the rapid destruction of forests as will taxation. these conditions must also be recognized by the state in the establishment of a fire warden system, and the encouragement of forestation through some plan of bonuses. where forestation is not practiced, the taxation of timber products under present conditions, whether on stumpage or in transit to the saw-mills, is a serious problem--serious to the local governments because under existing laws logs in transit are taxable where they are owned, and serious to the owners of the timber lands because the fixed charges on their property increase each day without any income from them. as near as can be ascertained, the annual taxes on timber vary from one cent per thousand feet to fifty cents per thousand feet, with an average tax of somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen cents per thousand feet. interest charges are probably about twenty-three cents, making a total annual cost of something like thirty-eight cents per thousand feet. in ten years time the tax on each thousand feet of standing timber will amount to $ . , which compounded with interest makes a total of $ . . when added to the other charges it is probably true that the owner of timber under modern conditions must have at least $ . per thousand feet on his logs delivered at the mill if he is to come out even at the end of ten years with a profit of six percent. the suggestions which have been made from time to time regarding the taxation of timber have as their fundamental principle the separation of the value of the land from the value of the timber. this plan meets the criticism of the local assessing officers by providing a basis of taxing annually a part of the valuation, and of procuring some income for the local government. if it is understood then that the land may be taxed annually and the timber product when it is cut, we have under this plan a simple scheme of taxation which will unquestionably meet the difficulty that is now urged against the general property assessment of timber lands. under the old plan of valueing annually the property, it was difficult to secure an appraisement that was satisfactory to anybody; and, what was more, as the years went by the local governments found their assessed values decreasing and the burden of government materially increasing with the decline in amount of standing timber. the annual taxation of the land on which the timber stands meets this difficulty, while the taxation of the product at the time of harvesting provides a plan that is fair both to the local government and to the owner of timber. on the other hand, the taxation of mineral properties differs from the taxation of timber lands in that it is not possible for the owner to increase by any plan of conservation the amount of tonnage that he has in his possession. the conservation which he might practice is the simple conservation of saving for a future time. from the point of view of the state the problem is largely one of getting a share of the value of the minerals in the ground. the method that has been generally followed is that of making an appraisement of the mineral lands, which might be very far from or very near the truth. the same principle which is applied in the case of the timber lands, namely, the taxation of the product, should be applied to the taxation of mineral properties. there is no question that the easiest way, and the most satisfactory and acceptable way to all concerned, is a tonnage tax, varying possibly with the character of the ore and the cost of mining, but always depending for the rate and the amount on the ore that has been mined. it will probably be argued, as it has in other instances, that the local governments are compelled to rely largely for their support upon the taxes paid by the owners of mineral properties, and consequently a tonnage tax would deprive them of the regularity of their income. there is much to be considered in this point; but the taxation of the surface on some such basis as that seen in the case of the timber tax would provide a regular income, which would be supplemented by the amount of the tonnage taxes. the rate of the tonnage tax would not, as in the case of the appraisement of a general property tax, tend to hasten the utilization of the ore. that would be determined entirely by the demand for it in the fields of manufacture. the real essence of the tonnage tax lies in the fact that value found in the ground is distinctly a product of nature, which an _ad valorem_ tax cannot recognize, and in consequence the state's right to a share of the value of the earth's products, together with the diminishing value element involved, are overlooked. the protection of the local government, and often of the mineral owner, demands a combination of the tonnage tax and of the local land tax. when we come to the taxation of water-power we are face to face with a problem that involves even more difficulties than are found in the case of the timber and mineral lands. the thing here involved is so elusive, so difficult of measurement, and requires such expensive administration, that it is quite conceivable that many years must elapse before an adequate plan for such taxation can be developed. a water-power, however, is perpetual, and in this particular it differs from timber and mineral properties, and is more akin to farm lands. it differs from the latter, however, in this particular, that the work once done in harnessing it is done once for all, and the annual labor expended upon it is not exhausted, as in the case of the farm. nature, having been harnessed, is able to accomplish the work for which she is called upon. the first step in any adequate system of taxing water-powers must be their survey. this means listing, locating, and measuring. it means, too, that the legislature should assume at the beginning all water-powers belonging to the state, and that the acquirement of them must be through lease, as in the case of mineral lands in the state of minnesota, for example. several plans have been suggested for the taxation of water-power. one is the measurement of the water flowing over a dam, and another is the taxation of the actual horsepower developed. the latter plan is subject to many criticisms. the development of horsepower depends so largely on the skill of the engineer, on the capital invested, and on the way the water is handled, that it would be far better to measure the capacity of the dam under proper engineering authority and determine a fair rate for the amount of power produced by the water passing over the dam. of necessity many refinements of this plan would be required; such as the determination of the movement of the stream, the height of the water, the difficulties of harnessing the power; but it is possible, by taking into consideration the general expense of operating a water-power plant, to work out a rate which would be fair to the users as well as to the state. in no instance of conservation does a greater need of proper taxation appear than in the case of water-power. nature provides a perpetual force with but little expense after the necessary fundamentals have been arranged, and for the state to receive no compensation of any kind for the utilization of such a great wealth-producer is to bring into existence the greatest possible factor of injustice in the matter of taxation. it will therefore be seen that a rational taxation of natural resources does not depend on any very great and intricate principle, but that, on the other hand, the principles involved are comparatively simple. it must be clearly understood as well that the taxation of land for agricultural purposes, for minerals, for timber, or for water-power, must differ in many respects, and that a principle of taxation applied in one case may not work out in the other. but if we keep clearly in mind the purposes for which land can be utilized, and that the fundamental taxation of land as such can be made annually, and that of the product at the time of its harvesting, we have in the three instances of agricultural, mineral, and timber lands a principle that may prove satisfactory when put in the form of legislation. the same idea can be applied to the water-power site; taxation of the land at a nominal assessment and of the water-power on the basis of the amount of water passing over the dam gives us again a principle upon which can be based satisfactory legislation. it must be remembered, however, that all legislation is compromise in character, and that the recognition of these principles has usually been set aside when it came to the question of legislation. the states have reached a point in the raising of revenue where not only more revenue is needed for the purposes of general social advancement, but where better administration is as essential and necessary as the other. administration bureaus must be provided in all of the states to furnish the necessary data, if we are to reach some practical basis of conserving our resources through taxation. and tax commissions must be given ample authority, and in addition must have plenty of expert advice and assistance which will give it the necessary endorsement. to my mind, a rational system of taxing natural resources depends largely on administration based upon a few fundamental principles of legislation. it is comparatively not a difficult matter; it is largely a question of willingness to meet the problem; but if the experience of the past has any light to throw upon this subject, it is very clear indeed that legislation will be slow, and that the different interests involved, through fear of some possible advantage likely to be gained over them, will cling to the old system until it is almost too late to produce any results through adequate taxation. it is my hope that a congress like this may have some power and some influence in setting aside this attitude, but i fear that an adequate system of taxation will move very slowly when it comes to its formulation in legislation. this is not encouraging, but it is truth; and that after all is what we are really trying to get at without confusing the issue by arguments favoring present attitudes either of the state or of owners of natural resources. big views will help solve the problems, little and narrow ones never. (applause) * * * * * president baker--mr j. b. white, chairman of our executive committee, will discuss the question of taxation, especially in relation to woodlands. (applause) chairman white--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: we have listened to a great paper upon this subject of taxation. it is a subject difficult to analyze and very difficult to apply, because each section of the country requires a different form of taxation; each state has different views, and each should apply the remedy according to the local conditions. i speak as a representative lumberman, and as chairman of the conservation committee of the lumber manufacturers of the united states. now, the lumbermen have asked for nothing in regard to taxation excepting what they have incorporated in a resolution, part of the preamble to which i read: whereas, there is a great and growing need for uniform laws among the states in the interest of forest growth, conservation, and protection from forest fires, and for an equitable and helpful system of taxation which will make possible the conservative handling of standing timber. that is the declaration of the preamble. it asks simply a uniform system of taxation. i want to say a word for our fathers and grandfathers who have been called the ruthless destroyers of the forests, and i want to say in their behalf that they committed no sin which shall be visited upon their children or their children's children (applause). they cut the forests to make homes for the people; they cut the forests to build our cities and our towns; they sold all they could, they saved all they could, they committed no waste; and it should not be imputed to them that there is a penalty to be paid by their children or their children's children upon the forests that now stand. (applause) taxation is regarded everywhere as a part of the cost of a commodity. every person that buys a foot of lumber, every person that buys a yard of cloth, every person that buys a suit of clothes, or groceries, or anything that is manufactured, is the one who pays the taxes (applause). we are all consumers. we pay each other's taxes, and there is no way of avoiding taxation. it is said that death and taxation are sure. there is no way of avoiding either. the consumer must pay the tax because it is part of the cost. now, in regard to the system of taxation; every nation has its own form. when it is necessary to encourage the growth or manufacture of a product, the states of the world have some way of encouraging it by relief from taxation. germany has a law putting a duty on american wheat in order that every nook and corner of the waste land of germany may be made to grow wheat. now, that is a tax. the people of germany pay that tax, but it encourages the farmer to grow wheat. and in our own country, when it is necessary to encourage the farmer in the beet-sugar, or any related industry, the government gives a bounty, and people pay it, and the money is kept at home instead of going abroad for the product. so in timber taxation, it would seem to me that the reasonable way is to tax it as it is cut--let the tax follow the saw. of course every state will apply the remedy according to local conditions. louisiana has applied the remedy. she has passed some very good laws, and we are going to hear from the representatives of that state, before this congress adjourns. we want to consider these things. there are now so many substitutes for lumber that there will be inducements to let trees stand if they are not overtaxed. a tree must have a hundred years' growth before it can be utilized in the shape of clear lumber in the upper grades. if you tax the tree every year, you are putting one hundred years' taxes upon the timber. we must be reasonable about these things if we would encourage the growing of trees. any other commodity in the united states pays a tax annually upon the crop, but here, in growing timber, we are paying for a hundred years where we should only pay for one. (applause) some states will not grow trees. illinois will not grow trees. it would prefer to grow corn. its land is too rich to grow timber, and the people will grow corn and exchange it for the product of other states which are better adapted to tree-growing and not so well adapted to agriculture. the lands west of the cascade range are well adapted to tree-growing on account of the great rainfall, and not so well adapted for other uses. a tree will grow there in forty years to as great a size as it will in eighty years on this side of the cascade range. in short, trees will be grown where it pays to grow them, where they are encouraged to be grown, where the people want them grown. we cannot grow trees on sentiment; tree-growing will have to pay; it will have to stand upon a commercial basis. the government cannot grow trees without its costing something to grow them. conservation has been wrongly understood. the great leader of american forestry, gifford pinchot, is in favor of development (applause). he said in his speech at seattle a year ago that there could be greater waste by non-development and by non-use than there had been by the wastefulness of the past. that is true. by non-development and non-use we commit sometimes more waste than we did in the past, for we could not waste when things were not worth anything; a thing that isn't worth saving and whose by-product cannot be utilized is not wasted even if it goes to the burning ground or lies in the woods. (applause) * * * * * president baker--ladies and gentlemen: you will all be glad to hear from the greatest, grandest, noblest work of god, our good women. i have the pleasure of introducing mrs george o. welch, of fergus falls, representing the general federation of women's clubs. (applause). * * * * * mrs welch--mr president, delegates to the second national conservation congress, ladies and gentlemen: in the preparations for this great congress, there seems to have been no possible item omitted which could in any way contribute to the pleasure or edification of visitors, save in two particulars; and with these the management had nothing to do. the first is the unavoidable absence of the president of the general federation of women's clubs, mrs philip n. moore, resulting from the accident which befell her in cincinnati last may, from which she has not fully recovered. the second is due to those two elements which have for years uncounted interfered with man's proposals--time and tide. it is because time must be consumed in crossing the atlantic and tide reckoned with on the voyage that mrs emmons crocker, of boston, is not able to be present to speak on "woman's influence in national questions." her absence is indeed to be regretted, since influence is today women's best asset. because of these two regrettable occurrences a great honor and pleasure has fallen upon me. i am proud to be the bearer of greetings to the second national conservation congress from the general federation of women's clubs, an organization , strong, that may justly claim kinship with this body, since its watch words for years have been conservation and service, which are the impulse and purpose of this great congress. the inception of the general federation of women's clubs was due to the recognition of the necessity of conserving the energy and strength wastefully expended by scattered clubs remote from each other, which concentrated, might make a tremendous influence for the development of good fellowship and good citizenship. that the general federation has become of great force i think you will admit, since its president was invited to be one of that first notable conference called by the president of the united states in to consider the problems which this congress is hoping to solve. she was the only woman invited to that conference of governors, and it is not vain pride which prompts the mention of the great honor thus conferred upon the general federation--it is rather an humble sort of pride, since recognition of the work which women's clubs are doing carries with it an obligation to greater effort and greater achievement. the general federation of women's clubs has long been teaching the necessity of conservation, not only of the natural resources on which the material prosperity of this country depends, but of that vital force which means public health and all that goes with it; of that intellectual force which means education; and of that spiritual force which makes for higher ideals, wider sympathies, and fuller appreciation of our responsibility for the welfare of our fellow-beings. in the matter of the conservation of natural resources, the one which claimed our earliest attention was that of forestry. as far back as the forestry committee in the general federation served to bring into mutual recognition and helpfulness the efforts of all the clubs engaged in the work for the protection of forests; and i was proud of the praise given us yesterday by our most distinguished visitor for minnesota's successful efforts to preserve a large acreage of white pine timber as a national forest reserve. it was a fine and inspiring example to other states engaged in a warfare against the devastating hand of commercialism (applause). and it is another matter of pride that for four years the chairman of the forestry committee of the general federation was a minnesota woman, mrs lydia phillips williams (applause), whose life was devoted to the promulgation of forestry education, and to whose untiring efforts very much of the splendid work done for forestry by women's clubs is attributable. perhaps the most signal of the triumphs won by the women's clubs in the line of forestry was the saving of the big trees of california, after a fight lasting nine years (applause). those were years of great stress for the women, but we are willing to fight nine years more if need be for the right sort of protection to the forests in the white mountains and appalachian ranges (applause). today we are fighting not alone for the trees that are standing, but for the reforestation of devastated lands and for a stay of the wanton waste of forest products. at our recent biennial convention a whole session was devoted to this phase of the work, showing that our interest is practical as well as sentimental. since the conserving of forests and the conserving of water supplies are interdependent, the general federation of women's clubs through its committee on waterways is disseminating information, creating interest, and urging legislation for the further protection of these resources. but the conservation of natural resources, important as it is, is not the work which represents our heart interest, which appeals to our highest nature; it is not the thing for which we make our greatest effort. it is the problems of life, those affecting the home, society, our children, to which we give our most earnest endeavor. there never was a convention of women's clubs anywhere that did not in some way stress the conservation of the home, the family, the school, as our greatest need; and it is because we are aware of the grave dangers threatening them, dangers born of our times and fostered by our rapid material growth, that we are endeavoring through organization and concentration of forces to turn the tide into safer channels. the child has always been the central figure in our deliberations, the one for whom our hardest battles have been fought. the general federation, through its committees on health, education, and household economy, is carrying on a campaign of education which will give to all children greater opportunity for normal, helpful, happy development. to the child himself, through its department of civics, the federation is teaching his duty to society and his responsibility to the future. through its committee on industrial and social conditions it is trying to secure for him safety and efficiency in the great industrial struggle; to protect him against the forces that are pushing him, imperfectly prepared, into the great maelstrom of the workaday world, wasting his young life, minimizing his chances for happiness and usefulness. as long ago as the los angeles convention in , jane addams, our greatest american woman (applause), pleaded for the protection of the child against the awful economic waste of child labor (applause). she told of little lives by scores and hundreds yearly sacrificed to the god of greed: of conditions in some of the industrial pursuits where for want of a few dollars expended in safety devices, many children were yearly killed outright, or maimed for life. she so touched the hearts of her hearers that a committee on child labor was there created, whose province it was to discover if possible a remedy for these crying evils; at any rate to inform the public of their existence. women have worked long and earnestly to ameliorate these conditions, but they must depend on the mutual action of earnest, interested men, such as are sitting in this congress today, for the enactment and enforcement of the laws necessary to improve a state of things which women have only the power to point out. in the particular case of child labor there can be no accusation of exaggeration or hysteria, since from so unemotional a source as the federal government we learn that its recent investigation of child labor shows need of a strenuous and continued effort for the conservation of child life. in the cotton textile industry alone, and along the line of age-limit and illiteracy alone, its statistics show that in a group of states having no age limit for child laborers, there are over percent of female workers under fourteen years of age, and that in those same states over percent of the children of both sexes so employed are unable to read or write. what worth have forests or mines or any material wealth, gained at the sacrifice of so much vital force? for the welfare of women and girls, as well as for children, the general federation is working with all its energy and strength. for moral and social as well as industrial protection it begs cooperation. against the black plague as well as the white plague it is waging its warfare. for better housing in cities, for improved conditions in rural and remote communities, it is using all its power. what conservation and concentration of effort can do it is trying to accomplish, but it must as yet find its work constantly hampered and hindered by its inability to press to their ultimate accomplishment things which only legislation can effect. a club woman has wisely said that as conditions are today it is the women who suggest and initiate, the men who adopt and complete. this is true; for, after all, women can only point the way. the ex-president of the united states told us yesterday that it was a great wrong to allow any body of people to monopolize any good thing. there is, however, an exception to this rule, which i am sure our honored first citizen would concede to us: women have long had a monopoly on influence; it has been the one thing accounted their own particular weapon in social warfare (applause). and so i appeal to the men in this audience to yield themselves to that women's weapon when next the general federation of women's clubs or any individual members of the federation asks them for the enactment of laws which shall tend to the conservation of the vital forces represented in the mothers of the race and the children who are to be the country's future citizens. the general federation is, after all, just one more organization trying to make this land a better place to live in, and its people better fitted to live in this better land. (applause). * * * * * president baker--the next lady i wish to present represents an association that has done much; mrs hoyle tomkies, of shreveport, president of the women's national rivers and harbors congress. * * * * * mrs hoyle tomkies--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: greetings to this second national conservation congress from the women's national rivers and harbors congress, organized june, , and having officers in thirty-eight states and territorial possessions. this organization has for its object the development of the meritorious rivers and harbors, the preservation of the forests, and the conservation of all the natural resources of the nation. it stands for the establishment by the federal government of a definite waterway policy for the improvement of all approved rivers and harbors of the entire country, and also for the adoption of such a policy as will secure not only forest reserves but general forest development. the congress believes that the development of the waterways of the nation increases and conserves the people's wealth, _first_, directly, by securing the cheapest mode of transportation; _second_, indirectly, by lowering the cost of transportation by rail; and _third_, by encouraging production. the platform as adopted immediately after organization stated a belief in the need for the conservation of all the natural resources of the nation because of the interdependence which necessitated the development of each. the membership of our congress is composed of individuals and clubs, representing almost thirty thousand men and women, the latter largely predominating. the work of the congress, conducted through the departments of education and publicity, is directed by a board of directors representing thirty-nine states and territories. voluntarily these women are giving their time, finding in the joy of service for the cause ample recompense. in the educational campaign, the congress has culled from the best authorities the strongest arguments and convincing statistics, and has had these printed and circulated in many thousands of copies throughout the length and breadth of the land. in this congress secured the cooperation of the general federation of women's clubs for the promotion of waterway development. since organization the congress has worked incessantly for the passage of rivers and harbors bills, and individually for state projects for waterway development. it has worked for the week's bill, and for general national and state development. it urged upon congress the passage of the bill for the preservation of niagara falls in the spring of . in its educational campaign it has covered the entire question of conservation, and also urged the non-pollution and the beautification of the streams of our country. it has secured and arranged for large audiences in critical or indifferent centers, for experts to advocate the cause, and it has had speakers at all important public gatherings possible. it has organized conservation clubs, and secured the addition of conservation committees in various organizations. it has offered prizes, securing the writing of many thousands of essays by school children upon waterway and forest development. the various state vice-presidents have issued state circular letters, showing how their states were concerned in the cause we represent. the plan of the congress to supplement or substitute arbor day with conservation day met with the hearty approval of the united states department of agriculture and the cooperation of many educators, and has been successfully carried out in many states. the resolution of the congress asking that the principles of conservation of natural resources be taught in the school and summer normals, has been presented to every state represented in the congress, louisiana being the first to immediately pass the resolution unanimously at its state conference of high school superintendents, representing forty thousand pupils, and at its state teachers' association; kentucky being a close second, with every encouragement from other states. (applause) the same resolution was presented to the national educational association in convention at boston, july - , . of this resolution, honorable elmer ellsworth brown, united states commissioner of education, to whom we later had the pleasure of listening, wrote in reply to me a pleasant letter in which he enclosed the following copy of his letter to dr irwin shepard, secretary of the national educational association: department of interior bureau of education washington doctor irwin shepard, secretary national educational association, westminster hotel, boston, mass. my dear doctor shepard: the preamble and resolution enclosed herewith have been sent to me by the woman's national rivers and harbors congress, mrs hoyle tomkies, of shreveport, louisiana, as president national educational association at its boston meeting. following our ordinary course in such matters, may i ask you to lay this matter before the committee on resolutions. you are aware of the conservative position which i take as regards proposals for the incorporation of new studies in our school curriculum, and also as regards the turning aside of our school instructions from the aims of general education to the propaganda of any special cause. the organization presenting this resolution, however, disclaim any intention of introducing a separate new study in the course. the subject which they propose, however, is one so intimately bound up with the geographical conditions and the past history of this country, as well as with our prospect for the future, that it seems to me very desirable that the attention of teachers should be called to it, and that they should be led to see its relation to any proper and adequate treatment of a knowledge of our country. i should think it very desirable, accordingly, that something of this kind be introduced into the platform of the association of this year, with such adaptation of form and phraseology as the common practice of the association would suggest. i am, believe me, very truly yours, [signed] elmer ellsworth brown, _commissioner_. as to the action of the national educational association regarding the resolution, dr shepard wrote to me in part as follows: "i sincerely regret that you were not duly informed earlier of the action, or rather the non-action, of the committee on resolutions. i cannot explain their action in this matter. they had a large number of subjects to consider, and the omission of a declaration upon any subject is not to be considered as a judgment against such a declaration, but simply that the committee did not find it practicable, for reasons satisfactory to them, to include it in the declarations which they offered. incidentally i may suggest to you the present uncertainty regarding what is meant by conservation and the wisest policies to be adopted may have led them to defer action in this matter. let me assure you that we are all deeply interested in conservation, and believe that it can be profitably brought into the work of the public schools, but many are still uncertain as to the form of such work and the methods by which it can be most profitably introduced into the public school curriculum." members of this congress, there is in this non-action a suggestion potent to us. this indecision, this lack of harmony, should speedily as possible be changed into a definite, harmonious union of conservation policies (applause). this fall a printed catechism of questions on conservation adapted to the various grades will become a part of the curriculum of the public schools of kentucky, and will be tried in various other states. delegates have been sent by the women's national rivers and harbors congress to all important conventions of kindred interests. since organization it has had representative speakers on the platform of many of the most important conventions. the congress has furnished lecturers to schools and to various clubs of men and women, and also to the churches, in which latter the subject of "conservation of natural resources from the moral standpoint" has proved an appropriate and impressive theme. in december, , the congress endorsed the disinterested and patriotic policy of honorable gifford pinchot as chief forester of the united states. (applause) this report cannot satisfactorily be closed without mention of the loyal and very enthusiastic support of conservation being given us by our hawaiian members, who number several hundred, and who began immediately to put belief into practice. our state vice president there, mrs a. f. knudson, came all the way to washington to attend our last convention. these are the general activities of the organization. it would be impossible for me to go into the state activities at this time. sufficient to say that the message is being given at the fireside, from the platform, in the schools, through the press, all with the idea of perpetuating this nation--won by the blood of our forefathers--and handing it down in all the glory of its wealth and beauty to future generations. (applause) * * * * * president baker--it is a pleasure to present mrs g. b. sneath, of tiffin, ohio. * * * * * mrs sneath--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: after hearing the general purpose for which the women of the general federation of women's clubs have been working, it may seem needless for me to tell what one definite part of this great body is endeavoring to accomplish. i represent mrs j. d. wilkinson, chairman of the waterways committee of the general federation, which is a part of the great conservation committee of the federation, comprising almost , women in its organization. our work is entirely educational. we go into all the schools where we can possibly gain access, and strive to get the matter of preservation of inland waterways taught in the schools as among the great conservation problems. we have heard from experts all that is being done, all that they are trying to do, all that they are trying to remedy; and we feel that we, as women, have one chief and great duty to perform. you have heard how women strive to conserve the lives of children, to make them strong mentally, morally and physically. yet this is not all; the one great problem before the american people today is that of pure food and pure water (applause); and we, as women, must strive in the communities in which we live and the states of which we are a part--and the nation must come to our aid--to rescue and prevent from contamination the life-giving streams of this country, streams that were given for the benefit of mankind but which man has turned into drainage canals and cesspools. we must have help; we must have it through state legislatures, we must have it through the federal government, else we cannot conserve the lives of those that are dear to us. if a visitor from another land were to say to us, "your children are being poisoned by their own parents," we would hesitate to believe it; but our children _are_ being poisoned--not by criminal intent but by the carelessness of the municipalities in which we live (applause). so i leave with you this one thought: if we accomplish nothing else, if we leave to the men the questions of transportation and navigation and the great problems of irrigation and of water-power, let us work for the purity of our rivers and streams and lakes and inland waterways.[ ] (applause) * * * * * president baker--the proceedings of this congress are to be published through the kindness of a gentleman in saint paul who has guaranteed to have it printed, and all these addresses will go in. we will now hear from mrs jay cooke howard, of duluth. * * * * * mrs howard--mr president, ladies and gentleman: i will keep you only a minute, because you look hungry, and i'm hungry myself. i will simply file my report and tell you briefly what the daughters of the american revolution are doing for conservation. the d. a. r., being a patriotic society, believe that all their work is in the spirit of true conservation; but we have a special national committee, with a member or members from each state. i represent the chairman, mrs belle merrill draper, because i am the member for minnesota. mrs draper wrote last fall to all the governors, asking each what we could do to help the cause of conservation in his state. when the answers came we went to work, chiefly in three ways: first, in our own meetings, in which we worked up enthusiasm. second, in the press; the papers in the larger cities have much conservation matter, but in smaller cities and towns this is not always the case, and you from such places will never know how much about conservation that you have read--or skipped--was inspired by the d. a. r. our third branch of work, and the most important one, is with the children. i notice that most of the governors, whose interesting letters are contained in the report i am filing, preferred to have us turn our attention to the children rather than to the men (laughter). governor eberhart's courteous letter mentioned them, and the forests, especially. we have worked through the schools, and also in our own homes. may i tell my own experience? [voices: "go on, go on!"] i felt very proud when my little boy, who had saved eleven cents and did not know what to do with it all, finally said, "mother, i will give it to the baby; put it in his bank; it will teach him to save." but straws in the family show which way the wind blows in the nation. listen to what happened: i provided savings banks, the children conserved their resources, saved their wealth and then somebody came and stole the banks! (laughter and cries of "good!") * * * * * president baker--the congress stands adjourned until oclock. _sixth session_ the congress reconvened in the auditorium, saint paul, at p.m. september , president baker in the chair. president baker--ladies and gentlemen: i have the honor of asking senator moses e. clapp, of minnesota, to preside this afternoon, and to him i now yield the chair. (applause) senator clapp--ladies and gentlemen: during the course of this congress much has been said concerning the fact that conservation applies not only to the material resources of a nation, but to its productiveness and to its energies; and among those things to which it must under that classification apply is the conservation of time. now, i am going to give you a practical illustration of how a loyal adherent can carry out the conservation of time by omitting a speech, and proceeding at once to the business of the afternoon. (laughter) the first entry in the program for this afternoon is an address, "making our people count," by dr edwin boone craighead, president of tulane university, whom i take great pleasure in introducing. (applause) * * * * * president craighead--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: in this republic there is one thing supremely great and sacred, greater than the great republican party, the party of lincoln and grant, greater than the great democratic party, the party of jefferson and jackson, more precious than the conservation of our natural resources, more sacred than the supreme court, or even the constitution itself--i mean the great american people (applause). to make this people count, not only in the conservation of our natural resources but also in the enlargement and enrichment of their own lives, is the fundamental, the paramount, problem of this republic; for ours, it must not be forgotten, is not only a government of the people and by the people, but also preeminently a government _for_ the people. the founders of this republic were not only scholars and thinkers, but seers and prophets. with profound knowledge of the despotisms that for five thousand years had crushed and enslaved the greatest and sublimest thing on this earth, the individual man, the fathers of the republic laid broad and deep its foundations upon an everlasting rock--the inalienable, the ineradicable, the eternal right of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. they builded for all time and for all generation of men. (applause) the individual man, the individual woman, is by far the greatest and sublimest creation of god that we know of--far greater and grander than any or all the institutions of society. these institutions are the works of the hands of man, they exist for him, and their only reason for being is that they minister to him. yea, the earth was made for man, and the only reason for the conservation of its resources is that they may minister unto the needs of the individual man: seas roll to waft him, suns to light him rise; his footstool the earth, his canopy the skies. in the deliberations of this congress the words of ruskin should be uppermost in the minds of all: "there is no real wealth but life;" and by life he meant the perfection of the entire man, body, soul, and spirit. that church is best, that institution is noblest, that civilization is highest, that country is greatest, which furnishes the most abundant life to the largest number of human beings. the chinese empire, which embraces near four hundred million human beings, has existed for five thousand years; yet the countless millions of china, springing up like tropical weeds and sinking back to dreamless dust, have contributed far less to civilization than the twenty thousand athenians who in the brief periclean age followed the footsteps of plato and socrates. (applause) neither vastness of population or territory, nor richness of natural resources, nor accumulated wealth can alone make a great country. that country is great, no matter how barren its soil, whose children may truthfully repeat the words of the stern old spartan, who, when one pointing in derision to the bleak hills of lacedemonia asked, "what do you grow there?" replied, "we grow men there" (applause). to breed a race of strong men and noble women is the one and only thing that can make a country truly great. consider scotland--a poor and barren country, yet who would dare to call poor the land of scott and burns and carlyle? who shall estimate the wealth of scotland's contribution to the world and to america? the sons of her sturdy pioneers who poured down through virginia and kentucky and the carolinas have been worth to this republic their weight in gold. (applause) take ireland, that synonym of poverty; and yet how could our great metropolitan cities thrive for a single day without the helping hand of the sons of erin? somebody has advised that we buy ireland, not for her natural resources, not to grow corn and wheat and cotton, but to grow policemen. (applause) coming a little nearer home, take new england with her thousands of abandoned farms, rich only in the variety and ferocity of her climate and the blessed dispensations of our american protection; and yet far from mean have been new england's contributions to the wealth of american democracy. new england, rocky old new england, barren, storm-swept new england, "land of brown bread and beans," home of the liberty-loving puritans who, for the sake of the immaterial good, in quest of freedom, crossed the stormy sea, endured the hardships of an untamed wilderness battling with hunger and wild beasts and savages--grand, glorious new england (applause), home of adams and webster and emerson and hawthorne and williams and lowell and longfellow and edward everett and phillips brooks (applause)--grand, glorious, immortal new england, by her schools and colleges has almost dominated the intellectual life of this country; and in every part of this vast republic, yea, in every civilized land under the sun, may be found the sons and daughters of the pilgrims of the mayflower; scholars, preachers, teachers, missionaries, pioneers who have blazed out the pathway of civilization, established schools and colleges and universities, always and everywhere children of sweetness and light who even on the remotest frontier have kept trimmed and lighted the sacred lamps of learning (applause). harvard, yale, princeton, bowdoin, dartmouth, williams, have contributed more to the dignity of man, given more to the everlasting glory of the american commonwealth, than all the stock speculators of new york, or all the battleships ever built for the american navy. (applause) take only one other illustration: who of you from the waving cornfields of iowa and illinois, from the fertile lowlands of the mississippi, has not wondered, while passing through the old dominion and looking out upon her red clay hills, how on earth do these people make a living? why give me one acre of the best louisiana soil--and it is nearly all good--and put it down upon the barren rocks of new england, or upon the red hills of old virginia, and i would make a fortune selling it for fertilizer (laughter). and yet virginia has contributed more to the wealth of the american republic than any other single state of the union (applause). at the call of what other states did there ever arise a larger band of more gallant men than they who under the leadership of jackson and lee withstood for long weary months the combined forces of the union? and when the war was over, and virginia found herself in abjectest poverty, she showed to the world that her riches were inexhaustible; for during the next forty years she sent abroad into other states five hundred thousand of her most adventurous sons (applause), and, in so doing, contributed more to the wealth of this republic than all the gold that was ever dug from the mines of california (applause). i do not wonder that the poorest the humblest son of the old dominion, no matter where he finds himself, whether trudging through the snows of minnesota or loitering perchance beneath the fragrant magnolias of louisiana--even he, the poorest and humblest, must quicken his steps and lift aloft his head as he remembers, "mine is the land of george washington and thomas jefferson and james madison and james monroe and john marshall and john randolph and patrick henry and stonewall jackson and--towering above them all save washington only--that matchless military chieftain, great in battle but still greater in defeat as a private citizen, the stainless, the immortal robert e. lee." (applause) james russell lowell said--and said truthfully--that countries are great only in proportion to what they do for the moral and the intellectual energy, the spiritual faith, the hope, the comfort, the happiness of mankind. (applause) * * * * * chairman clapp--ladies and gentlemen: it is provided in the program that between the set speeches we will hear briefly from the accredited representatives of the various states, taken in alphabetical order. i now have the pleasure of calling upon the state of alabama. (pause) if no one cares to be heard from alabama, i now call upon arizona. (pause) if no one from arizona, then from the state of _arkansaw_; and that there may be no mistake on the part of the inhabitants of that state in the termination of the name, i repeat that call in the name of arkansas. (laughter) a delegate--mr chairman, i suggest that the call of the states be deferred until . in the morning, and that it then be taken up as a definite matter of business. chairman clapp--will the gentleman make a motion to that effect? [the motion was made, seconded, put and carried without dissenting voice.] president baker--mr chairman: i will be very glad to be here at . . we want everyone to be heard, and i would come here at oclock if desired, though i think . is early enough. i will be here promptly to open the congress and hear from the states until the regular speakers begin. then on thursday afternoon we have set aside a special time to hear from all the states and all the different organizations represented here. chairman clapp--ladies and gentlemen: during last summer it became my province to distribute nuggets of moral philosophy and political truth to the people of kansas, nebraska, and iowa; and while laboring in that moral vineyard i discovered that there was a newspaper in the southwest that had an immense influence throughout all that section. we have a representative of that paper with us this afternoon, who will now address us on "the press and the people"; mr d. austin latchaw, of the kansas city star. (applause) * * * * * mr latchaw--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: as a representative of the newspaper profession, before i say anything else, i wish, on behalf of my associates and myself, to thank the city of saint paul and its committee on arrangements for the very excellent facilities provided and the thoughtful courtesies extended to the men assigned to cover this congress. the subject assigned me is incidental rather than germane to the work of this congress. it is a big subject, and even if i felt that i could do justice to it i would doubt the appropriateness of using this occasion for the discourse. you are here to consider practical conservation; to discuss ways and means to develop and, so far as possible, to foster the natural resources of this country, and above all to check and prevent the wasting of them. and it is one striking commentary on the relations of the press to the people that you do not need to give a moment's concern about the publication of your deliberations and conclusions. (applause) yet it does seem fitting that at some stage of these proceedings a little time should be given to the consideration of that far-reaching agency without which the results of this congress would not reach the public at large; for what you do today will be made known to tens of millions of readers tomorrow. if it were not so, the value of such public-spirited meetings as this would be immeasurably discounted. however, as a member of the newspaper profession i cannot but feel that my subject would be more appropriately discussed by someone outside of that profession. it might be handled more frankly. it might be made more instructive to both the press and the people. most assuredly i have not come here to throw stones at my professional brethren, and as for handing them bouquets, that gentle function might be performed with a somewhat better grace by someone outside the family. still, i shall not be quite so reserved as was an old farmer back in pennsylvania, whose farm adjoined that of my father when i was a boy, and who always got the worst of it in a horse trade because he was too modest to brag about his end of the proposition. first of all the newspapers of this country could not have the splendid field they possess, the great opportunities they enjoy and the inspiring attention they command, if they did not appeal to the best read, the most intelligent, and the most responsive people on earth. in no other country is such a large percentage of the public a newspaper-reading public. nowhere else does the average man know so much about current affairs of all kinds as in this country of ours. on the other hand, i believe this popular intelligence is reciprocal--that the response the newspapers find for their endeavors is largely due to their efficiency in disseminating the news, in analyzing public questions, and in reiterating the truth. the man who is an habitual reader of a good newspaper owes much to that paper, just as the paper also owes much to him. it is true that newspapers differ in policies and methods and doctrines, and there are times when the public may be confused rather than enlightened by the different presentations of the same subject, especially if the subject be one of technical complexities, such, for example, as that of the protective tariff. but in the daily run of events and the discussion of them, and in the long run of complex problems, the lines between right and wrong are not difficult to follow. and i am glad to say that from the newspaper point of view, these lines seem to be more clearly discerned than ever before, not alone by the press, but by the people. there has been a national awakening in this country, and the newspapers have had their share of it (applause). there is a broader and franker handling of the subjects of the day. the number of wholly independent papers is constantly increasing, and the number of independent party papers is increasing still more rapidly. the uncompromising party organ will soon be a thing of the past (applause). this greater independence of the press is largely responsible for the increasing independence of the electorate. the time has come when no man's loyalty to his party can be questioned when he honestly disapproves of some legislative measure or official representative of that party. the chief function of the press is, of course, to present the news, and the news, collectively speaking, is non-partisan. a paper's advertising is non-partisan. if it is the right sort of paper, its circulation is largely non-partisan. and with equal freedom in its editorial policy, a newspaper, especially the big resourceful paper with an efficient and somewhat specialized staff, may make of itself a sort of popular university for its readers, furnishing them with authoritative information, whether obvious in the news or elucidated in the editorials, on the current life of the world. i am not one of those who believe that a newspaper should confine itself to the mere presentation of the news. that is a great and powerful function, but the paper with a vast audience, with a reputation for honesty and authority, can make of itself a constructive agency of tremendous power (applause). also, it can make itself a destructive agency, when the public welfare demands that something should be destroyed (applause). of course, we are a busy people, and newspapers must be prepared with reference to our limited leisure. a few papers are conducted on the theory that the public has no time to read anything but the headlines. i am not here to "knock" this class of newspaper. if they do not show a regrettable preference for the sensational or the scandalous, they serve a good purpose in the scheme of publicity. they have greatly enlarged the newspaper audience. do not forget that. and it is the experience of those who have published this class of papers that sooner or later their readers require more conservatism. as a result there has been a tendency for some time among these papers toward a more dignified style of publication. but, as i have said, we are busy people. we have need for intelligent digests, authoritative discussions of the subjects of the day as well as news developments of those subjects. an evidence of this need is the fact that, in some of our municipal, state, and national contests in which great issues are at stake, it is necessary, in spite of our boasted and undoubted intelligence, to reiterate salient facts day after day in order to drive them home and make them enter into the conviction of the masses (applause). sometimes this reiteration becomes tiresome to those of quick perception or ample leisure; but it is a necessary practice on the part of a newspaper that regards itself as an instructive and constructive agency as well as news furnisher. and when a paper thus regards itself it would seem that the ideal and final policy would be one of untrammeled freedom--freedom to support the man or the measure best calculated to serve the public welfare, or to oppose the man or the measure believed to be inimical to popular well-being. a paper thus established, not as an infallible judge but as an intelligent investigator, a patriotic champion, and an enterprising and faithful agency for progress in the community that supports it, can become a tremendous factor for good--a factor that will be taken into account by all friends of the people, and must be taken into account by all enemies of the people. (applause) i will not presume to encroach upon the direct business of this congress except so far as the newspaper hears a relation to it. every newspaper publisher has a personal as well as his public share of the general interest in conservation. the problem of procuring wood pulp at prices that will permit the continuation of the publication of newspapers at the present low rates will soon be serious unless a check is put upon the rapid decrease in the forest area. wood pulp is made almost entirely from the spruce tree. for years the manufacturers of pulp stripped the forests with little thought of the morrow. the visible supply of pulp timber is becoming limited. unless tree-growing comes to the rescue, it will not be long before print paper will have to be made from some other material, if a satisfactory substitute can be found, or the pulp will have to be bought from other countries. i do not know whether you understand how much good timber is handled by newspaper readers. let me give you some figures: the readers of the paper i represent handle sixty tons of it a day, taking into account the weekly edition. this is, in round numbers, , tons per year. we are already importing percent of the pulp used in our paper mill. think of it! in this great, big, new country, once almost covered with mighty forests, we find it advantageous today to import a common forest product from old germany, where the highest standards of forest preservation and use are to be found. and this pulp, with a protective duty paid, is laid down in kansas city for less than we have to pay for the domestic product of the same kind and quality. to make the paper for this one mill, the output of which is used exclusively by one paper, a daily average of more than one acre of spruce forest is used. it is a matter for congratulation that the press of the country has assumed a most friendly attitude toward the conservation movement (applause). newspapers still disagree about many things. they have their little differences on the tariff, on the currency system, on corporation regulation, on certain men and particular measures, and they do not agree as to why "jim" jeffries didn't come back (laughter); but i have yet to find in a single issue of any paper flat opposition to the conservation of natural resources (applause). gentlemen of the conservation congress, you have here a movement of national and irresistible sweep, a theme that will endure through successive generations--for if it does not endure the nation ultimately must perish. the people have grasped this subject spontaneously, and they are ready to study it zealously. few yet comprehend its scope, fewer still its diversified details; but collectively the people intuitively understand its vital significance. the country has at last awakened to its gross neglect and waste and prodigality. it has suddenly been reminded of its obligation to future generations along material lines. there is something even more appealing in this than the promptings of altruism: there is the moving sense of parental obligation, of sacred trusteeship. you are to be congratulated--you who are the fathers and prime movers of this great cause--that you have the united press of the country behind you. and not only is the press with you, but it is ready to do far more than it has been able to do thus far. this movement needs publicity--much publicity. it is new. it must be made familiar. the people must be informed in detail as to the location, the character, and the extent of their resources, and as to the means employed or proposed for the developing and fostering of those resources. the only effective means for the dissemination of this information is the press. every year the government spends millions of dollars on government reports. these reports are necessary as matters of record and reference, but they are worthless for general reading. many of the millions expended on these reports could be saved by limiting the number of copies to those that will be used and by leaving the mails unencumbered with the surplus (applause). if a part of the money thus saved were expended in the intelligent preparation of news matter pertaining to the various government departments, giving to the people the interesting facts as they develop instead of depending on voluminous and unpopular reports for the education of the people in these matters, the work of the government would be facilitated by popular enlightenment where it is now hampered by popular ignorance. it seems to me there is an opportunity here for the conservation of our national revenues and our natural resources at the same time. what is needed is an intelligent publicity bureau or agent in each department and the more important subdivisions, capable of preparing, in news form, as the facts develop, the interesting and instructive features of the department's daily work. this does not mean that all the papers will use all this matter, but some of it would be used by all to whom it is offered, and all of it would be used by some papers. on the whole there would be much wider publicity than could be procured in any other way. i am not suggesting an untried experiment. some of the bureaus at washington have publicity departments. those of the agricultural department and the geological survey have been measurably effective, and manufacturers and importers have found large use for the popularized consular reports. but with a single exception there has been no near approach to the possibilities of cheap and helpful publicity in any department at washington. the exception i have in mind is the forest service (applause). do you know why the country knows so much more about forest conditions and the employed and proposed measures for their improvement than it knows about irrigation, reclamation, the use of the rivers, the potentialities of water-power, or the conservation of coal or oil or minerals? it is because the forest service, under the direction of mr gifford pinchot, established a news service of such a character that the press of the country used its output freely and without the cost of one cent to the government other than the cost of putting the matter in form acceptable to the press. (applause) for some reason it was proposed, a couple of years ago, to prohibit, by congressional enactment, the continuance of this publicity. but the effort resulted only in a complete vindication of the service. it was shown that only legitimate news had been given out, and that this news had appeared in an average of , , copies of newspapers per month. these figures were based on clippings procured through the clipping bureaus, and did not include many publications that must have escaped the clippers. now, if it had been undertaken to place this same matter before the same number of readers through the medium of the formal and technical reports of the department, the cost would have been more than times as great--and nobody would have read them. as an illustration that newspapers want more conservation news than they are getting through regular channels: a number of publishers recently formed a special conservation service, which they maintained in washington, whose business it is to follow exclusively the developments of this movement. but this service cannot be made what it should be made if the government does not cooperate in this policy of needed publicity. considering the waste that is incurred in the publishing of government documents that have no popular educational value, it seems well nigh preposterous that there should not be ample provision, out of a saving that could be made by cutting off this waste, for the publication of matter that the people want and the newspapers stand ready to print free of cost. it would be no more absurd for this congress to go into executive session, bar these gentlemen of the press from its deliberations, and assume that the official report of your proceedings, which will be printed in the due course of time, would furnish sufficient publicity for the work of this convention. as it is, you have a circulation of tens of millions daily for your output. (applause) * * * * * chairman clapp--ladies and gentlemen: we often find a man who excels along some one line of work. the well-rounded man is the one who studies along every line; the truly great man _is_ the well-rounded man, the man who studies the forces which make for the conditions in which he lives. we have such a man in this city, of whom we are all justly proud; a man who long ago, in the forge of hope and courage, welded his own fate with the possibilities of the then undeveloped northwest, and who has lived to see the prophecies born of a study of conditions mature and develop in a splendid empire. it affords me great pleasure to present to you one who will speak on the subject of "soils and crops, food and clothing"--mr james j. hill, of saint paul. (great and prolonged applause) * * * * * mr hill--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: i do not intend to take much of your time this afternoon, but i hope to bring before you some thoughts that may suggest the practical side of the subject we have to consider at this congress. in order to make myself clearly understood and to be exact in my statements i will ask your indulgence in allowing me to read what i have to say: every movement that affects permanently a nation's life passes through three stages. first it is the abstract idea, understood by few. next it is the subject of agitation and earnest general discussion. third, after it has won its way to a sure place in the national life, comes the era of practical adaptation. mistakes and extravagances due to the enthusiasm of friends or the malice of enemies are corrected, details are fitted to actual needs, the divine idea is harnessed to the common needs of man. in this stage, which the conservation movement has now reached, the most difficult and important work must be done. in our own history and in that of other nations we have seen this process many times repeated. public education was an abstract idea in the time of plato, a controversy of the renaissance, and is still only partly realized. back of all written records lived the man who first saw a vision of government universal, equal, free and just. but the world has not yet achieved the final adaptation of this mighty conception to man as we find him. democracy is still in the fighting stage. only a few years have passed since it first dawned upon a people who had reveled in plenty for a century that the richest patrimony is not proof against constant and careless waste; that a nation of spenders must take thought for its morrow or come to poverty. the first actual conservation work of this government was done in forestry, following the example of european countries. it soon became evident that our mineral resources should receive equal though less urgent care. the supreme importance of conserving the most important resource of all, the wealth of the soil itself, was realized. in an address delivered four years ago this month before the agricultural society of this state, i first stated fully the problem that we have to meet and the method of its solution. with their great capacity for assimilating a new and valid thought, the people of this country were soon interested. belief in a comprehensive system of conservation of all resources has now taken possession of the public mind. what remains to be done is that most difficult of all the tasks of statesmanship--the application of an accepted principle and making it conform in all its general outlines to the common good. to pack the fact into a single statement, the need of the hour and the end to which this congress should devote itself is to conserve conservation. it has come into that peril which no great truth escapes--the danger that lurks in the house of its friends. it has been used to forward that serious error of policy, the extension of the powers and activities of the national government at the expense of those of the states. the time is ripe and this occasion is most fitting for distinguishing between real and fanciful conservation, and for establishing a sound relation of means to ends. (applause) we should first exclude certain activities that come only indirectly under the term, "conservation." the reclamation service is one. its work is not preservation, but utilization. the arid lands of this country have been where they now are, the streams have flowed past them uselessly ever since adam and eve were in the garden of eden. irrigation was practiced in prehistoric time. what we have to do is to bring modern methods to the aid of one of the oldest agricultural arts. it is mentioned here because its progress illustrates the dangers that beset conservation projects proper. they are dangers inseparable from national control and conduct of affairs. the machine is too big and too distant; its operation is slow, cumbrous, and costly. so slow is it that settlers are waiting in distress for water promised long ago. so faulty has been the adjustment of time and money that congress has had to authorize the issue of $ , , of national obligations to complete projects still hanging in the air. so expensive is it that estimates have been exceeded again and again. the settler has had either to pay more than the cost figure he relied on or seek cheaper land in canada. it costs the government from percent more to twice as much as it would private enterprise to put water on the land (applause). under the lower yellowstone project the charge is $ . per acre, and one dollar per acre annually for maintenance. the sunnyside project carries a charge of $ per acre, and cents maintenance. under the north platte project the charge is $ per acre, plus a maintenance charge not announced. these projects, in widely separated localities, entail a land charge prohibitive to the frontier settlers to provide homes for those for whom this work was believed to have been undertaken. the pioneer settler who can pay, even in ten annual installments, from $ , to $ , for eighty acres of land, in addition to the yearly fee per acre, must have some other resources to aid him. the work of irrigation would have been more cheaply done if turned over to private enterprise or committed to the several states within which lie the lands to be reclaimed (applause). this is not a criticism upon any individual. it is merely one more proof of the excessive cost of government work. (applause) toward the conservation of our mineral resources little can be done by federal action. the output is determined not by the mine owner, but by the consumer. the withdrawal of vast areas of supposed coal lands tends to increase price by restricting the area of possible supply. nor can such deposits be utilized eventually except under some such system as is now employed. it is foolish to talk of leasing coal lands in small quantities in order to prevent monopoly. mining must be carried on upon a large enough scale to be commercially possible. the lessee of a small area could not afford to install the necessary machinery and provide means of transportation without charging for the product a prohibitory price. the land should not be leased by the acre, but by the quantity of coal contained in the land (applause). a vein four feet thick contains about , tons to the acre; in many fields there are three, four, five, and six veins containing from fifteen to thirty feet of coal, or from fifteen to thirty thousand tons to the acre. what we want is intelligent understanding of the situation (applause). under too restrictive conditions the coal would remain in the ground indefinitely. the people of the west see little practical difference between a resource withheld entirely from use and a resource dissipated or exhausted. they understand by conservation the most economical development and best care of resources. it is the only definition consistent with the natural growth of communities in the history of the civilized world. the prairie states are more interested than any other in the question of cheap fuel. we do not depend on alaska for our future supply. there is abundant coal on the pacific coast nearer to our seaports and commercial centers. vancouver island is underlain with it; today, while the railroad companies with which i am connected bought coal lands on puget sound, which they still own, we are prepared to burn oil from california instead of coal. i speak of that as a practical reason why we should, before we leap, look to see what the actual conditions are. then, to say nothing of nova scotia on the eastern coast, there is coal in spitzbergen, within the arctic circle, actually nearer our eastern markets than the coal of alaska. while we lament the exhaustion of our coal supply, we maintain a tariff that compels us to draw upon it continuously. it would be well to cast out this beam before we worry too much over the conservation mote. (applause) the iron deposits of minnesota, the most wonderful in the world, are today not only furnishing industry in the nation with its raw material, but are piling up a school fund at home that is the envy of other states and adding more and more every year to the contents of the state treasury. minnesota is considering the reduction of her general tax levy by one-half. would it be better if these lands were today held idle and unproductive by the federal government, or worked only on leases whose proceeds went into the federal treasury and enabled congress to squander a few more millions in annual appropriations? (applause) against some forestry theories the west enters an even stronger plea. what the united states needs is neither reckless destruction nor an embargo upon our splendid western commonwealths by locking up a considerable portion of their available area. there were, by the last report of the forest service, over , , acres withdrawn from use in our forest reserves on june , . of this, nearly percent, over , , acres, or , square miles, lies in six western states. that is an area six-sevenths the size of germany or france. it is percent of the size of the unappropriated and unreserved land in those six states. how are the cities, towns, and villages in those states to grow if so large a portion of the land is closed to the husbandman? i received today an official statement of the entire amount of public land withdrawn from settlement, and it is astounding. in area it is greater than the thirteen original states; it is nearly as great as new england, new york, new jersey, pennsylvania, delaware, maryland, virginia, west virginia, kentucky, tennessee, ohio, indiana, and illinois (applause). and at the same time, we are driving this year not less than , american farmers to the canadian northwest to seek homes there (applause). now, i say to you that the area of this total withdrawal for various purposes of the public domain is greater than the cultivatable area of the entire canadian northwest. the forest reserves and the lands conveyed by congressional grants to private interests in oregon amount to some , square miles. more than half the area of this great state has been withdrawn by action of the government in one way or another from cultivation and the enjoyment and profit of the people of the state. over one-third of idaho and percent of washington are forest reserves. colorado is almost as badly off; and not more than percent of its forest reserves is covered with merchantable timber, while about percent has no timber at all. on the olympic peninsula are lands reported to be withdrawn to conserve our water supply where the annual rainfall amounts to something like seven to ten feet (laughter). according to the official report, the cost of administering the forest service in was a little short of three million dollars, and the receipts were $ , , . the deficit on current account alone was over $ , , . the total disbursements were over $ , , , and the actual deficit $ , , . now, we should be liberal in our grants for the care of our public forests. we should also closely scrutinize the manner of their care. the present season has seen an enormous destruction in the value of the timber in the forest reserves. our company, for over two months, has had from to , men at work doing nothing else but trying to put out the fires in the forest reserves. (applause) the forest service has over , employes. in they planted acres, and sowed , acres more. the west believes in forest preservation. but it believes practically and not theoretically. it realizes that a good thing may cost too much, and is not ignorant of the extravagant financial tendency of every federal department and bureau. it wants all good agricultural land open to the settler, wherever it may be situated. it wants timber resources conservatively utilized, and not wasted or destroyed. in connection with forestry interests there is just now much question of the conservation of water-power sites. the demand is that federal lands forming such sites should be withdrawn and leased for the profit and at the pleasure of the federal government. against this the whole west rightly protests. the water-power differs from the coal deposit in that it is not destroyed by use. it will do its undiminished work as long as the rains fall and the snows melt. not the resource but the use of it is a proper subject for conservation and regulation. to withdraw these sources of potential wealth from present utilization is to take just so much from the industrial capital of the states in which they are situated. the attempted federal control of water-powers is illegal, because the use of the waters within a state is the property of the state and cannot be taken from it (applause), and that the state may and actually does, in the case of idaho for example, perfectly safeguard its water-powers from monopoly and make them useful without extortion has been shown conclusively by senator borah in a speech in the united states senate in which this whole subject is admirably covered. back in our history beyond the memory of most men now living there was the same controversy over the public domain. ought it to be administered by the government and disposed of for its profit, or opened to the people and shared with the states? let experience determine which was the better guardian. the worst scandals of state land misappropriation, and there were many, are insignificant when compared with the record of the nation. the total cash receipts of the federal government from the disposal of public and indian lands from to were $ , , . the money is gone. it has been expended, wisely or unwisely, with other treasury receipts. it would be interesting to know how much the above sum exceeded the cost of administration. to go back years and dig up the cost of the administration of public lands would be more of a task than i have time for, but i took the last report of the general government, and in the disbursements of the interior department i found that the cost of administering the public lands was in $ , , , in $ , , , in $ , , . now if we take the entire proceeds of all the public lands sold, including the indian lands, it averages $ , , a year for the years during which it has been sold; and we find here that the cost of administering the greatly reduced estate is from three to five times as much as the total receipts would average (applause). but certain limited areas of lands were conveyed to the states for educational purposes. the permanent common school funds, state and local, conserved by the states, amount to $ , , . the estimated value of productive school lands today is $ , , , and of unproductive $ , , . add to these the land grant funds of colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts, and the total is merely half a billion dollars. to what magnitude these great funds, now jealously guarded for educational purposes by the states, may grow in time we cannot even guess. some may eventually provide amply for all educational needs of their states forever. this is one telling proof of the superior fidelity of the commonwealth as custodian of any trust for future generations. there remains an opportunity and a need of conservation transcending in value all others combined. the soil is the ultimate employer of all industry and the greatest source of all wealth (applause). it is the universal banker. upon the maintenance, unimpaired in quantity and quality, of the tillable area of the country its whole future is conditioned. four years ago, and on many occasions since, i presented the facts and statistics that make land conservation incomparably the paramount issue with all who have at heart the prosperity of our people and the permanence of our institutions. it is unnecessary to repeat in detail what has now become matter of common knowledge and is accessible to all. for the last ten years the average wheat yield in the united states was . bushels, while in germany it was . and in the united kingdom . . this is a measure of our general agriculture. the cattle other than milch cows on farms in the united states are over , , fewer than they were three years ago. the number of hogs declined , , in the last three years, and is less than it was twenty years ago. the increase in total value of food products is due to a great extent to higher prices. this failure to conserve soil fertility and maintain the agricultural interest is expressed in recent changes in our foreign trade. these are more than mere balance sheets; since, as you know, variations in international trade balances may produce wide-reaching effects upon all industry. while our total foreign trade last year was only a little less than the high record made in , the distribution of it was vastly different. for the last fiscal year our imports were nearly $ , , in excess of those for the same period in , and $ , , above those of . our exports were more by $ , , only than in , and were nearly $ , , less than in . in the excess of exports over imports was $ , , ; by it had fallen to $ , , . we are buying more lavishly and selling less because there is less that we can spare--yet, my friends, that $ , , of balance of trade due to this country is not enough to pay the extravagant traveling expenses of our "globe trotters" who are annually passing from one end of europe to the other. (applause) a glance at the following table of our exports for the last five years in three great schedules dependent directly on the soil tells the whole story: meat and dairy cattle, sheep breadstuffs products and hogs $ , , $ , , $ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , with the exception of the increase in breadstuffs in - , caused by our desperate need to send something abroad that would bring in money to stay a panic, the decline is constant and enormous. a continuance of similar conditions--and no change is in sight--must mean partial food famine and hardship prices in the home market; an annual indebtedness abroad which, having no foodstuffs to spare, we must pay in cash; and financial depression and industrial misfortune because we have drawn too unwisely upon the soil. this impending misfortune, only the conservation of a neglected soil and all the interests connected with it can avert. the saving feature of the situation is the interest already awakened in agricultural improvements; an interest which it should be the first object of this congress to deepen and preserve. much has been done, but it is only a beginning. the experiment station; the demonstration farm; agricultural instruction in public schools; emphasis upon right cultivation, seed selection, and fertilization through the keeping of live stock, all these are slowly increasing the agricultural product and raising the index of soil values. the work being done by the agricultural department under the care of our old iowa friend, secretary wilson--who is a farmer from choice (applause)--is scientifically selecting the good from the bad and the wise from unwise methods, and the information is within the reach of every farmer of this country who will only put out his hand and ask for it. (applause) but the work moves more slowly than our needs. the possibilities are great. one might make the comparison with current agriculture elsewhere almost at random, since european russia is the only first-class country more backward than our own. take the smallest and what might be supposed the least promising illustration: denmark's area is about twice that of massachusetts. it is occupied by more than two and a half million people. this jutland was originally land of inferior fertility. what has been done with it? denmark is now called "the model farm of europe." her exports of horses, cattle, bacon and lard, butter and eggs, amounted in to nearly $ , , . mr frederic c. howe in a recent article says: "the total export trade is approximately $ for every farm, of which , of the , are of less than - / acres in extent, the average of all the farms being but acres for the entire country. the export business alone amounts to nine dollars per acre, in addition to the domestic consumption, as well as the support of the farmer himself." one-half the population are depositors in the savings banks, with an average deposit of $ . how have these things been accomplished? first negatively, it has not been done by any artificial means or legislative hocus-pocus (applause). no bounty and no subsidy has any share in the national prosperity. the ruler of the country is the small farmer. he cultivates his acres as we cultivate a garden. he raises everything that belongs to the land. he fertilizes it by using every ounce of material from his live stock, and by purchasing more fertilizers when necessary. there are high schools and agricultural colleges in this little country with a population less than that of massachusetts in . whatever else they teach, agriculture is taught first, last, and all the time, to young and old alike. the dane is a farmer, and is proud of it. england and ireland and germany are studying his methods today. no people could imitate them with more profit than our own. (applause) recent good years have brought the average wheat yield per acre in the united states up to over fourteen bushels. twice that would be considered poor in great britain and an average crop in germany. therefore twenty-five bushels per acre is a reasonable possibility for us. suppose we raise it. the present wheat acreage of the united states is about , , acres on the average. if it gave bushels per acre, the crop would amount to , , , bushels. at our present rate of production and consumption we may cease to be a wheat exporting nation within the next ten or fifteen years, perhaps earlier. with the larger yield we could supply all our own wants and have a surplus of , , bushels for export. this is no fancy picture, but a statement of plain fact. is there any other field where conservation could produce results so immense and so important? is there any other where it bears so directly upon our economic future, the stability of our government, the well-being of our people? any survey of practical conservation would be imperfect if it omitted the almost desperate necessity at this time of conserving capital and credit. this subject deserves full and separate treatment. no more is possible here than to summarize some of the facts and conclusions presented by me to the conservation conference that assembled in this city a few months ago. conservation of cash and credit is important to the farmer as it saves or wastes results of his work, and his work furnishes the greater part of the nation's wealth. our states, including cities and minor civil subdivisions, have run in debt about three-quarters of a billion dollars in the last twelve years. public expenditure is increasing everywhere. public economy is a virtue either lost or despised. from to the aggregate expenditures of all the states increased percent. boston's tax levy, says brooks adams in a late article including this among the serious problems of modern civilization, was $ . per capita in , while now it is nearly $ . the per capita cost of maintaining the federal government was $ . in , $ . in , $ . in , and $ . in . the total appropriations voted by congress for the four years from to were $ , , , ; for the four years from to they were $ , , , . an increase of $ , , , in expense for two four-year periods with only eight years between them should give any people pause. spendthrift man and spendthrift nation must face at last the same law carrying the same penalty. if anyone believes that this growth of expenditure is a consequence of the general material growth of the country, let him study the following brief table of comparative statistics. it establishes the indictment of national extravagance: increases wealth to . % to . % foreign trade to . % to . % value manufactured product to . % to . % net ordinary exp. u. s. govt to . % to . % expenditures of states to . % this debauch of capital and credit has sent a poison circulating through the veins of the nation. everywhere the individual imitates the profligacy of his government. industry and saving are at a discount. any luxury, any extravagance is warranted if funds for it can be raised by wasting capital or creating debt. there is just so much less money for productive employment: for payrolls and the extension of commerce and industries, and the creation of those new facilities for want of which the commerce of the country is and always must be limited (applause). hence come also high prices, curtailment of business, distrust, and eventual distress. hence come waste and idleness, and the increased cost of production that makes both business and employment slow and insecure. any conservation movement worthy of the name must place high upon its program the saving of capital and credit from the rapacious hands of socialist as well as monopolist (applause). extravagance is undermining the industry of this country as surely as the barbarians broke down and looted that mighty empire with whose civilization and progress ferrero repeatedly insists that ours has so much in common. we must stand for conservation everywhere; in the tedious as well as in the interesting application; where it cuts into our pleasure and habits, and jostles our comfortable, easy-going ways of thought, just as firmly as where it is hand in glove with self-interest. this is, above all things, an economic question. it is neither personal nor political. in such petty and partial interests it has found its worst obstructions and encountered its most serious reverses. the tariff in some respects is a great enemy of conservation (applause). whatever we may think of it as a general industrial policy, everyone can see that, by excluding the raw products of other countries, it throws the entire burden of their consumption upon our own resources, and thus exhausts them unnecessarily (applause). this appears clearly when we consider such commodities as we might obtain from canada, a country that gained nearly , immigrants from the united states in the nine years up to april, , and has probably taken another hundred thousand since; a country where it is absurd to talk about any actual advantage in the wage scale as compared with our own. the tariff on forest products cuts down our own forests, a tariff on coal depletes our mines, a tariff on any raw material forbids the conservation of similar natural resources here. (applause). this congress announced from the first its purpose to deal with the subject of conservation in a practical spirit. the present condition of the movement, now in the third stage of its development, demands it. we have to apply the conservation principle, as we have eventually to apply every other, to our domestic economics; to work it out in the experience and practice of everyday life. how this may be done can be stated in the form of a few conclusions that raise the word conservation from the name of a more or less vague, diffuse, and disputable theory to that of a practical guide to legislation and administration. (applause) conservation is wholly an economic, not in any sense a political principle (applause). the nation has suffered and still suffers so much from transferring other economic questions to politics that the mistake should not be repeated (applause). whoever attempts to make conservation the bone of a personal controversy or the beast of burden to carry any faction into power or popularity is its worst enemy. (great applause) "conservative" is the adjective corresponding to the noun "conservation." any other attitude toward this movement, either radical or reactionary, is treason to its name and to its spirit. it should mean no more and no less than dealing with our resources in a spirit of intelligence, honesty, care for both the present and the future, and ordinary business common sense. (applause) conservation does not mean forbidding access to resources that could be made available for present use. it means the freest and largest development of them consistent with the public interest and without waste. a bag of gold buried in the earth is useless for any purpose. so is an acre untilled, a mine unopened, a forest that bars the way to homes and human happiness. the determination in each case as to what extent a given resource should be utilized and how far reserved for the future is an intensely practical, individual, and above all a local question. it should be carefully considered in all its aspects by both nation and state, and should finally rest within lines determined by proper legislation, as far as may be under the control of local authority. (applause) experience proves that resources are not only best administered but best protected from marauders by the home people who are most deeply interested and who are just as honest, just as patriotic and infinitely better informed on local conditions than the national government can possibly be. (applause) it is clear that every one of the many problems all over the country can be better understood where they are questions of the lives and happiness of those directly interested. behind this, as behind every great economic issue, stand moral issues. shall we, on the one side, deny to ourselves and our children access to the same store of natural wealth by which we have won our own prosperity, or, on the other, leave it unprotected as in the past against the spoiler and the thief? shall we abandon everything to centralized authority, going the way of every lost and ruined government in the history of the world, or meet our personal duty by personal labor through the organs of local self-government, not yet wholly atrophied by disuse? shall we permit our single dependence for the future, the land, to be defertilized below the point of profitable cultivation and gradually abandoned, or devote our whole energy to the creation of an agriculture which will furnish wealth renewed even more rapidly than it can be exhausted? shall we permit the continued increase of public expenditure and public debt until capital and credit have suffered in the same conflict that overthrew prosperous and happy nations in the past, or insist upon a return to honest and practicable economy? this is the battle of the ages, the old, familiar issue. is there in the country that intelligence, that self-denial, that moral courage, and that patriotic devotion which alone can bring us safely through? (applause) i ask these questions not because there is any doubt of the answer in the minds of the american people, but that it may be made plain what a complex fabric the fates are weaving from the apparently commonplace happenings of our peaceful years, and how each generation and each epoch must render an account for the work of its own days. the unprecedented dignity of this assemblage, its nationally representative character, the presence here of those upon whom great occasions wait, the interest felt by millions who look to it for information and guidance, prove how deep beneath the surface lie the sources of its existence and its influence. out of the conservation movement in its practical application to our common life may come wealth greater than could be won by the overthrow of kingdoms and the annexation of provinces; national prestige and individual well-being; the gift of broader mental horizons; and, best and most necessary of all, the quality of a national citizenship which has learned to rule its own spirit and to rise by the control of its own desires. (great applause) * * * * * chairman clapp--ladies and gentlemen: one among the recognized agencies for the spread of information in relation to our agricultural development is a paper published in iowa by mr henry wallace, who is known to us all. a discussion will now be led by mr wallace, and i take great pleasure in presenting him to this assemblage. (applause) * * * * * mr wallace--mr chairman, and ladies and gentlemen of the congress: i have been asked to discuss the subject opened up by my old friend--and your friend--mr james j. hill. with very much that he has said, i most heartily agree. he speaks on these and other subjects "as one having authority, and not as the scribes." while listening to him i have been trying to get in my own mind a clear conception of certain fundamental questions that have been discussed at this congress, and around which the discussion turns. i have been trying to put them in form, pointing out where he and i can agree and where we differ. i have come to the conclusion that a man has what he had, if he hasn't sold or contracted to sell it, or allowed somebody to steal it; that the united states has the resources that are now in the name of the united states and not under contract to be delivered, and not sold--or stolen--either in compliance with the letter of the law or in violation of both letter and spirit. in other words, there are certain assets or resources that we have and hold; and we all agree that the owner is entitled to the management and use of his assets (applause), and therefore that the people of the united states, as a people, are entitled to the use of whatever resources we may have remaining (applause). they are not for the benefit of any one man or any combination of men (applause), neither of any state (applause) or combination of states (applause), but for the whole people; therefore we can sell our coal lands or keep them. we will be wise if we keep them (applause). we can sell our forests, or say how they shall lie used, or we can let somebody steal them. we can hold on to our phosphate (and there is very little of these united states that won't be buying phosphates in fifty years) or we can let somebody control and ship it to europe, to enable the belgians and the germans to grow bushels of wheat to the acre while we grow (applause)--and by means of _our_ phosphates. using the language of the president the other day to outline the management of these resources (and he has done it better than any other man i ever knew), we can lease the lands, we can control them, we can prescribe how they shall be used. this much we all agree upon. and we will further agree that the congress of the united states, our representatives, must decide how it shall be done. we can do one of three things: we can deed these lands and these resources to the states, to be used as they think best. we can abdicate our sovereignty--perhaps modifying that to some extent, we can outline what the states shall do and what they shall not do, but that will involve abdicating our sovereignty and will lead to perpetual quarrels between the states (applause), such as now existing, for example, between colorado and kansas as to the use of water. or, as canada does, as germany does, as australia does, as tasmania does, we can hold to those resources and lease them for money for the benefit of the whole people. (applause) now, my good friend mr hill seems to have grave doubts as to the capacity of the united states to handle its business with anything like the same skill with which he handles his (laughter and applause). he tells us that this reclamation service is costly--thirty, forty, or fifty dollars an acre, to be paid in ten years without interest--for what? to be able to make it rain just when we want to, and stop it when we want to; that is what irrigation is (applause). and mr hill would give five dollars an acre for twenty years if for all time and eternity he, his descendants and his assigns, could make it rain when he wanted to and make it stop when he wanted to (applause). next to the owner of a quarter-section of land in iowa i think that the man who owns fifty acres of irrigated land at fifty dollars an acre is a prince of the blood royal (applause and cry of "good!"). it is the cheapest land in the united states, in the center of the highest civilization, the best education and the best schools. mr hill tells us also that the united states (i guess it was solomon he had in his mind: he was the brother of a great waster) has received $ , , or so for its indian lands--he didn't know how much it cost to acquire them (millions, however)--and that he doesn't know what has become of the money. well, i found since yesterday where some of it went--to this dam over here between minneapolis and saint paul (great laughter and applause). he tells us that states are more economical than nations. now, isn't it a matter of fact that both state and nation have been playing the part of the prodigal son, wasting our substance in riotous living--and that now we smell the husks? gentlemen, the agricultural colleges have wasted a good deal of money. the state of iowa had a great grant of land for improvement, and i give you my word you could run the whole thing through a barrel if you had enough headway. we have been absolutely throwing away our resources--just like some of our wealthy gentlemen down in new york throw their daughters in the face of titled nobodies asking them to take them "with the compliments of the author" (laughter). if this country continues to be governed, as it has been governed for the last twenty years, by great combinations of capital that get together in congress or out of congress to determine how much tariff they will levy and what else they may do in the way of getting hold of the public domain, it doesn't make a speck of difference whether our resources are governed by the government or by the states; they will all be stolen anyhow (laughter and cheers, and cries of "hit him again!")--just as they have been in the past. (renewed applause) a voice: conservation ought to have been started a hundred years ago. mr wallace: you're right. but if the people of the united states have made up their minds that they are going to be in the future a government "of the people by the people and for the people"; if we mean this in blood earnest (applause) and are willing to sacrifice our party affiliations (cries of "good, good, good!"); if we are willing to pay money to attend conventions, without going on passes (cries of "you bet!" and cheers); if we are willing to make the sacrifices which always belong to a free government (applause)--then predatory wealth will no longer sit in the seats of congress, and we shall have a democracy, a government of the people instead of a government of plutocracy. (applause and cheers) gentlemen, it is just a question whether we have the stuff in us to really be a great self-governing people, a nation that stands four-square to every wind that blows, that regards a law of the almighty as supreme law and right and the only manhood worth having as that which comes in obedience to those great laws that govern men in all nations of the world (applause and cheers); it is a question whether we will pay the price for the liberties that our fathers gave us. (applause) now, with about everything that my good friend mr hill has said on the conservation of soil fertility i most heartily agree. i get an idea about once a year (laughter), and am able to put it in a way that seems fairly good to me: and for some time past i have been brooding over the thought that the great problem before the american people--a problem involving all other problems that vex us, tariffs, conservation, trusts, everything--that the great problem we have before us is _how to keep enough skilled labor on the land to enable the farmer to sell his products to the city at a price the people can afford to pay_. now, just let that soak into you (applause). the problem is to keep enough skilled labor on the farm to enable the farmer to grow the food for this and other nations at a price that the people in the cities can afford to pay. it is the biggest problem before us. it involves all other problems, when you come to trace it down to its roots. the farmer is handicapped by the fact that he no longer tills virgin soil, as his father and his grandfather did, and by the fact that he no longer has timber at his door. we have wasted our magnificent forests of oak and walnut, and given away an empire (for example, in wisconsin) of the best pine lands that some fellows would put a road through, to get the lumber out under pretense of resisting a canadian invasion (laughter and applause). today we are buying fertilizers for all new england, new york, pennsylvania, ohio, southern indiana, all the south, and even for missouri; it is only a question of time when we shall have to buy them for all our land. notwithstanding all of the millions of acres that have been put into cultivation every year, our crop production lags behind our population. in the last ten or fifteen years, our production of wheat per acre gradually but slowly decreased until within the last three or four years, when with my friend secretary wilson's help we began to do a little better. the farmer is handicapped by the fact that he is tilling a partially infertile soil; he is handicapped worse in this way: he cannot possibly get, for love or money, the really skilled labor required to maintain the fertility of the soil while he is growing crops (applause). why, you know how difficult it is in the country to get a hired hand, and you know that a hired girl in the home is a thing out of the question. there isn't a man here ugly enough, if he is a widower, but what could get two second wives where he could get one hired girl (laughter and applause). now, we cannot use the labor of the city. let a man go to town and become a lawyer or a doctor for ten or fifteen years, and then return to the country, and what is he good for? he has to serve an apprenticeship for four or five years before he is worth his board. we cannot use the labor of southern europe except in the wheat fields or in the orchards; farm labor now is _skilled_ labor; and we haven't got it. one reason we haven't got it is because my friend mr hill has been giving excursion rates up to canada (laughter and applause)--for the benefit of his railroad, he says--and for the benefit of speculators who can paint a desert to look like the garden of eden, and make farmers believe that it is like the land of egypt "as thou goest unto zoar." if we could keep on the farm the boys and girls that grow up there we could give the people of the cities food at a price they could afford to pay; but there is the great problem. i will not solve it now, because i would have to discuss the tariff (laughter) and every other blooming thing that allures men to town--including high wages and easy times. today the townsman is in trouble. the fact is that he cannot get the farmer's products at anything like the price the farmer ought to have (voice: "now you're talking"). the farmer never gets more than two-thirds (voice: "if he gets that"); frequently he gets one-third. out in fresno, california, we found they made a first-class rate at four cents on what i was paying sixteen cents for; the railroad got four cents, the wholesaler four, the retailer four, and the farmer four--and i pay sixteen. and there is another trouble (i am one of the unfortunates so i look at both sides of the question): the farmer in town pays percent, so the merchants tell me, for the privilege of ordering goods by telephone instead of going to the market and getting them; and that is another reason he has to pay so much. but there is still another matter with the city man; it is not so much the high cost of living as the cost of high living and prosperous times (i borrowed that from mr hill); for the man in town now isn't satisfied to live as his father did, or his grandfather, or as he himself did ten or twenty years ago (applause). why, he wants strawberries from texas in february, and he wants green peas from florida, and he wants fresh eggs at the time when hens don't lay, and he wants spring chicken in the coldest weather--and he gets it, but it comes out of cold storage (laughter). that is one reason why the townsman cannot get farmer's products at the price he can afford to pay. let us look a little further--but i must not detain you (cries of "go on, go on, go on"). this problem has been growing on us for years; ever since the iron rail and steam and electricity enabled us to build cities far remote from the lake or the river or the ocean, ever since we learned to get gold out of quarries instead of out of river sand, ever since human power was multiplied by machinery, ever since railroads netted the country with their systems: there has been a tendency to the development of great cities and a constant decrease in the number of men that work on the farm. we don't _think_ now as we used to, because improved machinery (in most cases invented by farmers) has enabled the farm boy of fifteen years of age to do the work of eight or ten men--and at the same time has enabled him to rob the land more effectively than ever before. and this problem would have been met long ago if it had not been right here in this mississippi valley there is the finest slice of land that the lord ever made, to be given away by our benevolent uncle sam partly to the farmers and partly to the railroads--a country that needed neither spade nor axe to fit it for the plow; for the last twenty years we have been breaking it, mining it, robbing it, and selling its fertility to enable men in the great cities to live cheaply in the old world and in this country (applause). the people of kansas invited my good friend secretary wilson and me down there to talk about agriculture, and in going from our hotel to the place of meeting we actually fell over bags of bran that were put out there to send to denmark to make butter and cheese to come back and be eaten in kansas (laughter). this is the way we have actually been selling, piecemeal, our fertility. why, you men remember when corn was sold at and even cents a bushel, and oats at - / --i myself have sold wheat at --lower than the cost of production. the people in cities all over the world have an idea that it was foreordained from all eternity that they should have cheap foods, but they are now waking up to the fact that we have been postponing the day of judgment by selling foodstuffs for about what the fertilizers would cost, if we had to buy them, to provide bread and meat for the hungry nations. we have sold the buffalo grass on the prairies to the people of europe, in the shape of beef, dirt cheap; we have built up great cities and states; and the people have all the while thought that cheapness was normal, whereas we are now just getting to the normal basis. for twenty years i could buy bread made from american wheat, in the country on the farm, for three cents a pound, and now i pay five cents in town--and don't get as good bread at that. the real problem is, _how we are going to furnish bread to the people at a price that they can afford to pay_? i have no hand-me-down solution for that; it is the biggest problem that i know of, and i can venture only some suggestions. first, we can add a little to our production through irrigation. that is a slow process, and limited at best. we can add some more by drainage. we can add a good deal to the yield per acre by better methods of farming. but we are limited, as i have said, largely by the lack of skilled labor. the merchant, the city man, if he is to live on his income, must improve his system of distribution; he must in some way or other, get rid of the go-betweens. some things will have to be done by railroads and some by congress, and a number of things will have to be done that they will all say _can't_ be done--i'm tired of that story, that you _can't_ do anything. our railroad friends have told us that we can't pass interstate commerce laws, it's unconstitutional; that we _can't_ stop the giving of passes and rebates, that it's unconstitutional. now, we have done all those things. _the people of the united states can do anything that is right!_ (applause), though they can't permanently succeed in doing wrong (applause); and these things we have been told we _can't_ do we _have done_, and everybody says it is right. sometimes i take great comfort in watching some of our great "captains of industry," railroad magnates like mr hill. to see them you would imagine they had been reading the psalms of david and saying, "it was good for me that i was afflicted; before i was afflicted i went astray, but now i love"--the interstate commerce law (laughter). the trouble with them is that they turn round and oppose our railroad laws, and the measures brought up by the voice of the people, and insist that they _can't_ be enforced. if the farmers are to sell their products in sufficient quantities to cities at a price that they can afford to pay, the calm and considerate judgment and the earnest cooperation of every class of our people are needed. we have problems before us that cannot be settled today or tomorrow; they involve questions of deep statesmanship; and they never can be settled until they are settled right, on a basis that is just. and i have this faith in the american people, that notwithstanding all their mistakes and all their follies and all their extravagances and all their partisan differences, down at the bottom they are an honest people, they are an intelligent people, and they are a people that seem to have an instinct of danger and an instinctive perception of what is fundamentally and inherently right. (prolonged applause) * * * * * mr hill--i want to apologize to brother wallace because i did not make myself entirely understood when i indicated that $ or $ or $ an acre for government-irrigated land is too high. he says that i would give $ --and i would, if i had to; but if that land were left with private enterprises, or if the _people of the state_ alongside of this $ and $ and $ land were putting water on their land for $ , i wouldn't charge the settler $ or $ . (laughter and applause) * * * * * chairman clapp--ladies and gentlemen: there is a tradition in washington that the present very efficient secretary of agriculture established the department of agriculture, because of his long service in that position. i have to dispel that illusion. nevertheless his service has made that department what it is today; and i take great pleasure in presenting to you secretary wilson. (great applause) * * * * * secretary wilson--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: i have enjoyed the two last speeches more than anything else i have heard since i have been here, although i have never attended a meeting anywhere that i can remember where there were so many big men who do things in the world. the greatest regret i have is that there must be more than a hundred men here well worth hearing who will not have opportunity to speak on account of lack of time. mr hill and mr wallace have talked about things that i have not done. fourteen years ago i went down to washington with president mckinley to do something with the department of agriculture. i could see right well from tendencies that had originated some time previous a growing and a development that now at this present time have come to a head. i saw the necessity for conservation of the natural utilities of this country, the necessity for conservation of soils and forests and water-powers and all those things; and i went to work. i have never gone to congress to get help or money without getting it at once. if i have failed to do something for agriculture, the fault is mine and not that of congress, because they have never criticized me, except that i have not asked for enough money. i have found it necessary to educate men, or to have them educated, along new lines. search history as far back as you see fit to go, and you will find that there has been no education whatever for the farmer. the classical education, so beautifully spoken about by our friend from tulane university (president craighead), is a beautiful education; but there is no agriculture in it. it is a difficult thing to change the education of a people; even our religion is interwoven, like our literature, with the old-fashioned classical education. the country was regarded as valuable and the professions went to the country to get new men because the old wore out in the town, and so the farm has always reinforced the professions; and the practice has gone on until today the american navy is being reinforced even from the farms of minnesota and iowa. the average boy who lives in town knows too much about things he shouldn't know, and the boy on the farm or in the country knows little about the things that wouldn't do him any good if he did know them (laughter). my first problem was to organize a department of agriculture by training men to go safely where there were but few blazings through the woods. mr hill and mr wallace have both spoken wisely of the soil. that is the source of our wealth. when our good people travel abroad, the farmer pays the bill; when you beautiful ladies purchase diamonds--and sometimes bring them back in your hats--the farmer pays the bill (laughter). of course, since the civil war the farmer has been keeping the balance of trade in our favor--has paid all our foreign debts, has paid the cost of our wars, has paid all the expenses of shipments to foreign ports; but a new day has come. while the farm has been producing considerably more and its area has been increasing, certain things have occurred that have a momentous influence on the present and on the future. we have not been producing so fast as we have been increasing in population; it costs too much to get breakfast and dinner and supper, and we eat three times a day. the serious problem which presents itself to us now is that _it costs too much to live_. i never want to see the day come when the american workingman shall be reduced to the condition of the european who makes his dinner on bread alone and still lives. (applause) what are the prospects of getting cheaper food to eat? do we want to bring men from central america? they are diseased. do we want to bring them from mexico? they are not adapted to our climate. we do not care to bring them in much from canada, because they have no corn up there, and don't eat that kind of food. i see some rays of hope in our leaden sky. the south has in the past suffered from a pest known as the cattle-tick which prevents the development of domestic animals, and they have not given us as much meat as we have shipped to them; but congress gave my department money to try to get rid of this tick, and we have been at work for three years and have cleared the pest from the equivalent of an area of three great states, , square miles (applause), and it will not be many years until all the south is cleared of the cattle-tick. then the southern states will begin to contribute materially to our food production, because they have a mild winter, they have intelligent people, they have transportation systems; all they need is a little better system of agriculture. we have also been dealing with an invasion from guatemala for some time, the boll weevil. the question was whether the poor people in that section could sustain life under the burden of this pest, and they came to my department to go down and do something; and in checking the pest we are meeting the need for improved agriculture and increased production of foodstuffs. there are two prominent ways of increasing the producing capacity of a people: first, there is conservation demonstration (we shall be using this word "conservation" in our prayers if we don't look out). (laughter) last year we had , boys in four southern states, all under sixteen years of age, each of whom grew an acre of corn--the south never grew as much corn in its history as it did last year--and some of those boys grew over bushels to the acre (applause). they sold it at different prices. they were promised, as an encouragement, free tickets to washington to see the president and the capitol, and that the secretary would give them diplomas. well, i thought little about this until in marched the boys--looking very serious--each exactly like a man who is getting an ll.d. from a university. the first view of those boys was amusing, but the next one to me was very pathetic. a diploma, you know, is given to a man or a woman who does good work in a college course. didn't the boy who grew bushels of corn to the acre _do_ something? he did; he did the best there was in him; he put his will into the work. i signed the diplomas, and those boys went out as proud as any boys ever went away from a university. this year we have , boys in the southern states, each under sixteen years of age, each growing an acre of something, each getting lessons and hints in all directions from everybody that can give them, with regard to how to grow crops; we have agents in the south. now let me tell you something. you will find in every northern and eastern and western state a minority of good farmers and, i am compelled to confess, a majority of poor farmers. they don't know how to farm; they have yet to learn. where did bad farming begin, do you think? why, back in the eastern states where they do everything well--except farming. now where is there worse farming than there? i believe that the president of tulane university used to live there; perhaps he can tell us. when i was a boy i went to church on sunday and to prayer meeting in the middle of the week--i had to (laughter)--but they didn't educate the boys toward the farms; they educated them toward the professions, toward the mechanic arts, toward the factories. and when they were big enough and had an education they left the farm, they left the father and mother there, and by and by when the father and mother couldn't farm any more they rented out the farm--and today the same thing is beginning in iowa. i can't tell you what is happening in minnesota; you people who live here must be the judges whether the same robbery of the soil is beginning in minnesota. a soil robber is a man who grows grain and hay to sell from the farm and puts nothing back; that is what he is, and that is where he originated--back east. and we began manufacturing in our country at the time we began robbing our soil. the last half-century we have built up our manufactories at an astonishing rate. why have we built them up so fast; why have they risen to such tremendous figures? because our people were fed cheaper and better than the people who worked in factories in any other country. but what is the condition now? are our people still better fed and more cheaply that work in the factories, that work for the railroads, that work in the mines? no! there is where the trouble comes; that is what has arrested the attention of our people. every year, maybe oftener (mr hill could tell better than i can), the men that work for railroads notify the president that they want more wages because they can't live; and of course he has to raise their wages. while we were feeding europe, there was no difficulty in getting cheap food here in the united states for our workingmen; but, as mr hill told you, and gave you statistics for it--it is pretty hard to follow a man like him, who has all the statistics, and dr wallace, who has all the philosophy and wit, but i will do the best i can (laughter)--we are sending less and less food to foreign countries and paying more and more for what our workingmen eat at home. we are not paying off debts any more, though our people are still buying diamonds and pearls--you see the rows we are having in new york when our traveling americans come back, and want to get their jewels through the custom-house for nothing and hide them and all that; i have no sympathy with it--but we are not discussing the tariff here at all; i never talk politics and won't allow it; i have , men in my department and every man knows i'll discharge him in a minute if he talks politics (laughter and applause); we are considering the natural resources of the country and trying to conserve them. (applause and cries of "good!") as the department grew we organized a bureau for animals, another for plants, one for forests, one for chemistry, and one for soils; and all along the line we have those great bureaus at work. we are the practical fellows who conserve; we are doing it every day. i have just been out among the forests myself four or five weeks, helping to save the government's property out there. but the great question comes down to the soil. there is no classical college or university that teaches anything about the soil, not one single thing. from the time that samuel had the school of the prophets at bethel down to the present day, there never has been anything taught to the people with regard to the soil on which they walk and from which they get their living. i have organized a bureau for it. we are studying the soil all over the country. you might think, to go out on these beautiful prairies, that the soil is all alike. well, it isn't; any prairie has probably a hundred different soils, some of them best adapted to grow one plant and some another, some needing one kind of treatment and some another; and the great fundamental question that we must study now is the american soil and its power to produce. (applause) with regard to the literature of the farm: there was none when i was a young fellow; there was no college for farmers. i had to get what i did get from observation and from a store of recollection of older men. but now we have an agricultural college in each state. we have an experiment station in each state. we have , men making research in the department of agriculture at washington, all specialists, the foremost in their lines in the world. when one of those men makes inquiry into something and reports, we put his name to it and print it and send it out to the people without expense. we sent out , , pieces last year (applause). and any of you who want anything we have, no matter whether you are farmers or not, you are welcome to it. some of the best encouragement that we have comes from those who are not farmers at all. i have told you of the genesis of the soil-robber; is he here in the mississippi valley? the old-time farmer educated his children, but he educated them to do anything under the sun but farm. when the boy graduated, when he got through with his education, he went anywhere but to the farm. that was until within a few years the custom. the other day i wrote to the dean of the iowa agricultural college that several people had applied to me for men to superintend farms, and that a newspaper man wanted a farm expert to go into his office at a good salary, and asked--"how many young men do you graduate this year in a four-year agricultural course?" he replied, and i think he said "we graduated some seventy in a four-year course, but none of them left the state; they are all going back to the farm" (great applause and cry of "good!"). those men know something. now, are you doing that in minnesota? you have always had a fine agricultural school here connected with your state university, and you have an open door into the four-year academic course in the university; you are doing much for agriculture and education. yet we are where we are today with regard to scarce food and dear meat because we didn't begin educating the young farmer sooner. but he is going to catch on. there would be a universal introduction of agricultural education into the common and secondary schools of the country if teachers could be found. that is the great difficulty. fifty years ago, when congress endowed agricultural colleges, that was the trouble. they could start the college, they could erect a building, but there was no library, there was no professor who knew anything about agriculture, and the great trouble is a man can only teach what he knows himself. but now, after half a century of effort on the part of the farmers, on the part of friends of the farms, on the part of far-seeing men like james j. hill (applause), we are getting a creditable agricultural education in this country. do not be uneasy about the forests; at the last session, congress gave me $ , more than they had ever given me before to take care of the forests. do not be uneasy about the coal, the gas, the oil, and the phosphates; president taft has withdrawn all those until congress indicates what shall be done with them. but the soil, gentlemen, the soil; the big price for meat, the big price for bread; these are things to study. we _can_ improve our soil. one of our speakers this afternoon told us that you cannot grow soil. i believe that, once you wash it away. but you can reduce it, beyond the point of profitable production of crops; that you can do, and that is being done. the soil-robber works in iowa, and i fear he is at work in minnesota. the old folks have gone to town; and the lord knows nobody wants them there, because when you want to improve the town with gas and sewer and water and things of that kind, the farmer won't vote for them; he is regarded as a nuisance; everybody wishes he would stay on the farm, and i wish he would. and when the old farmer and his wife go to town, they sell off everything; they rent the farm to a man who has no means to stock it with cattle and sheep, hogs and poultry; he grows grain to sell, he grows hay to sell, and those farms grow worse and worse every year. that is the situation we are in. (applause) we are making some progress, some headway. the government gave to the emigrant from abroad, to everybody who wanted it as long as they lasted, a claim in the rainy belt; but there are no lands left for giving away in the rainy belt. something can be done in regard to our dry-land farming; something can be done in regard to irrigation. as mr hill intimated (in fact, he delivered a great deal of my speech), there is not much being done in the line of irrigation. take a trip out west and watch the rivers as you cross them, and you will see that we are wasting far more water than we are using--though in certain neighborhoods in colorado highly intelligent people are every year building more dams away up in the mountains and saving their winter and spring-flood waters. that is going on and on, and it should go on until all the waters in the mountains are saved for application to the land. do you remember the history of irrigation in the valley of the po, in italy? there are more people to the square mile there than are found in almost any other part of the world. they began at the headwaters of the tributaries and built great dams to hold up the water to an amount suitable for the growing of crops, something like twenty inches or more; and they built on down to the mouth of the po. now when there comes a drought like we had this year, they let water out on the fields, and thus get a maximum crop. without that extra water, at a time of drought their crop would wither and fail. i understand minnesota has more lakes, more natural reservoirs for holding water than any other state in the union. look to it, you minnesota people; you can, by using that water in a dry year, grow maximum crops. how do the people of the old world raise big crops? if you followed mr hill's statistics you learned they didn't know as much there once as they do now, for they have raised their crop production from to bushels an acre. he also alluded to the danes, who by good farming are enabled to sell enormous amounts of farm products. how do they keep that land up? i will tell you what a great many of them are doing. they buy mill-feeds from the united states; they buy bran and shorts, they buy the cottonseed of the south and the flaxseed of minnesota, and feed their dairy cows. that is a highly intellectual job, isn't it, for an american citizen, to grow food for a danish cow? but the dane has his eyes open; he _knows_. he sells $ , , worth of butter and cheese to england every year, but puts back all the fertility on the farm; and that is what has brought up his little fifteen-acre farm, or his forty-acre farm. he has brought it up by keeping and feeding his cows on our mill-feeds, mind you; and he is prosperous--and we are not so prosperous only because we rob ourselves. a voice--bran doesn't cost any more in denmark than in america. secretary wilson--it is american bran, though. and let me tell you something else. the meats you grow up here cost hardly any more in europe than they cost here, because the retailer over there hasn't got all the frills that the retail dealer has here, and is satisfied with a smaller profit. (applause) now, ladies and gentlemen, i am merely outlining some of the remarks that i prepared and gave to the newspaper people; and i have no doubt you have listened to me as long as you care to (cries of "go on, go on"). i have enjoyed my visit here. i am on record as saying that these northwestern states, beginning here and extending on west, are the healthiest we have; their waters are good; their climate is fine; they are going to grow vigorous men and handsome women. if we are going to have all their benefits you should conserve your soil, so that your great-grandchildren will have better soil than you have today. down in iowa, where i have lived for years, the soil grows bigger crops today than it did fifty years ago; and it is still improving. you have extended to me the greatest compliment a hospitable people can bestow on a stranger, and that is to give me your attention. i thank you. (great applause.) * * * * * chairman clapp--ladies and gentlemen: we will now listen to a discussion by honorable f. c. stevens, member of congress from this district. (applause) * * * * * representative stevens--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: you are fortunate this afternoon, so far as my discussion is concerned. i was assigned to discuss an address by senator dolliver, chairman of the senate committee on agriculture and forestry, on the subject of "cattle, food, and leather." we greatly regret the enforced absence of senator dolliver, because he is informed on that subject and could have given us a discussion of great benefit. i congratulate myself that i am not obliged to follow him, because i know too little about his subject. so i shall briefly discuss something i do know about. in the very able address of mr hill, and in the very bright discussion of mr wallace which followed, there was a general criticism of congress for undue expenditures of public money. i want to tell this audience that congress, instead of being extravagant, is often unduly economical of the people's money. the money we spend is what the people want us to spend, and we do not spend nearly as much as they want us to. the estimates that were sent in by the heads of the departments (of which secretary wilson is one) aggregated nearly two hundred millions of dollars more than the expenditures which congress authorized, and the estimates which came from the field officers to the heads of these great departments, for example, like that of secretary wilson; from the post-offices scattered throughout the country; from the officers of the war and navy departments, scattered all over the world; and from the officers of the state and other departments, were, i will venture to say, nearly two hundred million dollars more still: so that congress actually did not spend more than two-thirds as much as the people of the united states in their respective localities wanted spent. there is not a single large convention in the united states similar to this--which is one of the most magnificent in the history of this section of the country--that does not call upon congress for the expenditure of large sums of money, and i will venture to predict that the resolutions, which will be adopted by this congress will call for a large appropriation from the national treasury. we have in washington every year a rivers and harbors congress, composed of , of the brightest, broadest, most patriotic business men of the united states, who go there as delegates, spend their own money to go, and then ask large expenditures from the people's treasury. scattered all over this country, meeting probably in every state in the union, are various voluntary assemblages of our people demanding various improvements by the federal government, and every one asking for expenditures of the people's money. you never yet have heard of a convention which has met anywhere at anybody's expense asking for a cutting down of expenditures. if there is any one man who is popular in the united states it is the man who calls for the expenditure of the people's money; the men who are the most unpopular, and are condemned and criticised in public life, are those who try to cut down the expenses and be economical with the people's money (applause). i think there ought to be some reform (and i have had some experience); we _are_ extravagant; we do spend more money than we ought to, but it is spent honestly, it is spent with the best of intention, it is spent because the people want us to spend it, and we do not go nearly as far as they ask us to. just one suggestion more: it is easy to criticise and ridicule something that a man knows but little about, and i have noticed that in this discussion of conservation each man is almighty anxious to conserve that which interests _him_; and one of the latest examples of that was afforded by the statement of mr wallace in condemnation of the dam between saint paul and minneapolis. now, in advance i want to state that i am not responsible for that dam; it was there before i entered public life. but there is one thing we are trying to do; we are trying to enforce the principle of practical conservation, and i wish to call attention to that as a sample of ridicule sometimes seen in the discussion of a subject that really interests the people. the united states thirty years ago started, at the headwaters of the mississippi, six of the largest storage reservoirs for water in the world, with a capacity of many thousands of millions of gallons of water, designed to improve the navigation of the river and raise it in times of drought eighteen inches here at the levee of saint paul. that enormous storage of water in the river should be utilized for the practical benefit of the people of the united states. that is the practical basis for all theories of conservation. a board of engineers was ordered by congress to make an investigation of the use of the dam at the twin cities, and they have reported that a dam can be built and it has been ordered by congress and is under construction (it is the one ridiculed). it will be thirty feet high and will yield , horsepower of electrical energy, worth here $ per horsepower-year, making a total value of $ , per annum, at an expenditure in all not to exceed $ , , . it will pay the united states the money that it invests in that dam. it is expected that the united states will sell, for a reasonable price, that electrical energy to the cities of saint paul and minneapolis and the university of minnesota; these cities can be the best lighted in the world and save a hundred thousand dollars each annually (applause); and, more than that, we will have there the most beautiful lake in the world, extending from the historical falls of minnehaha below to the great and beautiful university of minnesota above. that is a practical example of conservation (applause). before any of these gentlemen come forward flippantly to ridicule the public works going on in any part of the country, they should realize that there _may be_ some things they don't know about. (applause) only one suggestion more (because we all want to hear from professor bailey): it is easy to criticise congress as a whole; it is fashionable to do it; congress hasn't any friends anywhere; but just remember this: it is a necessary evil; it is the concrete voice of ninety millions of free american citizens; it is the only agency whereby these ninety millions of american people can accomplish their will and desire. we can only run a free government by the rule of the majority; a majority of one is potent to control this whole great country; percent are in favor of what that majority does, and, percent claim the right to criticise and kick at what that majority does. as this is a free government they have that right. now, my friends, we must remember that what displeases us probably pleases percent, and if we had the right to pass the very laws we wanted to on any subject, the chances are that our next-door neighbors, on both sides, would criticise and complain of us, just as we are now doing of other people. the only thing i wish to emphasize is that congress tries to represent the whole american people, tries to make concrete the voice of the whole american people. it is human, the same as the people are; it makes the same kind of mistakes that the people make; and, after all, the people are responsible for congress. i thank you. (applause) * * * * * chairman clapp--ladies and gentlemen, we will now have an address on "conservation in country life," by dr liberty hyde bailey, dean of state agricultural college, cornell university, and chairman of the country life commission. it affords me great pleasure to introduce professor bailey. (applause) * * * * * professor bailey--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: because of the lateness of the hour, and because of the very great treat which you have had this afternoon in the presentation of the fundamental questions of country life, i shall only call your attention to three or four topics which, perhaps, have not been touched by others who have spoken from this platform. two great economic and social movements are now before the country--conservation, and country life. the conservation movement is the expression of the idea that the materials and agencies that are part of the furniture of the planet are to be utilized by each generation carefully, and with real regard to the welfare of those who are to follow us. the country life movement is the expression of the idea that the policies, efforts, and material well-being of the open country must be highly sustained, as a fundamental essential of a good civilization; and it recognizes the fact that rural society has made relatively less progress in the past century than has urban society. both movements are immediately economic, but in ultimate results they are social and moral. they rest on the assumption that the welfare of the individual man and woman is to be conserved and developed, and is the ultimate concern of governments; both, therefore, are phases of a process in social evolution. not only the welfare but the existence of the race depends on utilizing the products and forces of the planet wisely, and also on securing greater quantity and variety of new products. these are finally the most fundamental movements that government has yet attempted to attack; for when the resources of the earth shall largely disappear or the arm of the husbandman lose its skill, there is an end of the office of government. at the bottom, therefore, the conservation and country life movements rest on the same premise; but in their operation, and in the problems that are before them, they are so distinct that they should not be confounded or united. these complementary phases may best work themselves out by separate organization and machinery, although articulating at every point; and this would be true if for no other reason than that a different class of persons, and a different method of procedure, attached to each movement. the conservation movement finds it necessary, as a starting-point, to attack intrenched property interests, and it therefore finds itself in politics, inasmuch as these interests have become intrenched through legislation. the country life movement lacks these personal and political aspects. _these subjects have a history_ neither "conservation" nor "country life" is new except in name and as the subject of an organized movement. the end of our original resources has been foreseen from time out of mind, and prophetic books have been written on the subject. the need of a quickened country life has been recognized from the time that cities began to dominate civilization; and the outlook of the high-minded countryman has been depicted from the days of the classical writings until now. on this side of mineral and similar resources, the geologists and others among us have made definite efforts for conservation; and on the side of soil fertility, the agricultural chemists and the teachers of agriculture have for a hundred years maintained a perpetual campaign of conservation. so long and persistently have those of us in the agricultural and some other institutions heard these questions emphasized, that the startling assertions of the present day as to the failure of our resources and the coordinate importance of rural affairs have not struck me with any force of novelty. but there comes a time when the warnings begin to collect themselves, and to crystallize about definite points; and my purpose in suggesting this history is to emphasize the importance of the two movements now before us by showing that the roots run deep, back into human experience. it is no ephemeral or transitory subject that we are now met to discuss. all really fundamental movements are the results of long-continued discussion and investigation, but it requires a great generalizer and organizer, and one possessed of prevision, to concrete scattered facts into powerful national movements. the one who recognized the existence of these questions, who saw the significance of the problems, who aided to assemble them, and who projected them into definite lines of public action was theodore roosevelt; and he himself has expressed our obligation in this conservation movement to gifford pinchot. (great applause) the conservation movement is now approaching its full; the country life movement is a slower and quieter tide, but it will rise with great power. these are the twin economic and social questions that the roosevelt administration raised for our consideration. (applause) _they are not party-politics subjects_ i have said that these are economic and social problems and policies. i wish to enlarge this view. they are concerned with saving, utilizing, and augmenting, and only secondarily with administration. we must first ascertain the facts as to our resources, and from this groundwork impress the subject on the people. the subject must be approached by scientific methods. it would be unfortunate if such movement became the exclusive program of a political party, for then the question would become partisan and probably be removed from calm or judicial consideration, and the opposition would equally become the program of a party. every last citizen should be naturally interested in the careful utilization of our native materials and wealth, and it is due him that the details of the question be left open for unbiased discussion rather than be made the arbitrary program, either one way or another, of a political organization. the conservation principle is a plain economic and social problem rather than a political issue. (applause) the country life movement is equally a scientific problem, in the sense that it must be approached in the scientific spirit. it will be inexcusable in this day if we do not go at the subject with only the desire to discover the facts and to arrive at a rational solution by non-political methods. the first recommendation of the commission on country life is that the government begin taking stock of rural life in order that we may have definite facts on which to begin a reconstructive program. _the soil is the greatest of all resources_ the resources that sustain the race are of two kinds--those that lie beyond the power of man to reproduce or increase, and those that may be augmented by propagation and by care. the former are the water, the air, the sunshine, and the mines of minerals, metals, and coal; the latter are the living resources, in crop and live-stock. intermediate between the two classes stands the soil, on which all living resources depend. even after all minerals and metals and coal are depleted, the race may sustain itself in comfort and progress so long as the soil is productive, provided, of course, that water and air and sunshine are still left to us. beyond all the mines of coal and all the precious ores, the soil resource is the heritage that must be most carefully saved; and this, in particular, is the country-life phase of the conservation movement. to my mind, the conservation movement has not sufficiently emphasized this problem. it has laid stress, i know, on the enormous loss by soil erosion, and has said something of inadequate agricultural practice; but the main question is yet practically untouched by the movement--the plain problem of handling the soil by all the millions who, by skill or blundering or theft, produce crops and animals out of the earth. peoples have gone down before the lessening power of the land, and in all probability other peoples will yet go down. the course of empire has been toward the unplundered lands. thinner than the skin of an apple is the covering of the earth that man tills. beyond all calculation and all comprehension are the powers and the mysteries of the soft soil layer of the earth. we do not know that any vital forces pulsate from the great interior bulk of the earth. only on the surface does any nerve of life quicken it into a living sphere. and yet, from this attenuated layer have come numberless generations of giants of forests and of beasts, perhaps greater in their combined bulk than all the soil from which they have come; and back into this soil they go, until the great life-principle catches up their disorganized units and builds them again into beings as complex as themselves. the general evolution of this soil is toward greater powers; and yet, so nicely balanced are these powers that within his lifetime a man may ruin any part of it that society allows him to hold; and in despair he abandons it and throws it back to nature to reinvigorate and to heal. we are accustomed to marvel at the power of man in gaining dominion over the forces of nature--he bends to his use the expansive powers of steam and the energy of the electric currents, and he ranges through space in the light that he concentrates in his telescope; but while he is doing all this he sets at naught the powers in the soil beneath his feet, wastes them, and deprives himself of vast sources of energy. man will never gain dominion until he learns from nature how to maintain the augmenting powers of the disintegrating crust of the earth. we can do little to control or modify the atmosphere or the sunlight; but the epidermis of the earth is ours to do with it much as we will. it is the one great earth resource over which we have dominion. the soil may be made better as well as worse, more as well as less; and to save the producing powers of it is far and away the most important consideration in the conservation of natural resources. _no man has a right to plunder the soil_ the man who owns and tills the soil owes an obligation to his fellowmen for the use that he makes of his land; and his fellowmen owe an equal obligation to him to see that his lot in society is such that he will not be obliged to rob the earth in order to maintain his life. the natural resources of the earth are the heritage and the property of every one and all of us. a man has no moral right to skin the earth, unless he is forced to do it in sheer self-defense and to enable him to live in some epoch of an unequally developed society; and if there are or have been such epochs, then is society itself directly responsible for the waste of the common heritage. the man who plunders the soil is in very truth a robber, for he takes that which is not his own and he withholds food from the mouths of generations yet to be born. no man really owns his acres; society allows him the use of them for his life-time, but the fee comes back to society in the end. what, then, will society do with those persons who rob society? the pillaging or reckless land-worker must be brought to account and be controlled, even as we control other offenders. (i know that the soil-depletion idea is now challenged; but i am sure that the conservation ideal must be applied to soil maintenance even as it is applied to other maintenance. if it transpires that plants hold a different relation to the soil-content than we have supposed, we still know that poor farming makes the land unproductive and that the saving of wastes is a desirable human quality; and we shall probably need to change only our phraseology to make the old statement broadly correct.) i have no socialistic program to propose. the man who is to till the land must be educated: there is more need, on the side of the public welfare, to educate this man than any other man whatsoever (applause). when he knows, and when his obligations to society are quickened, he will be ready to become a real conservator; and he will act energetically as soon as the economic pressure for land-supplies begins to be acute. when society has done all it can to make every farmer a voluntary conservator of the fatness of the earth, it will probably be obliged to resort to other means to control the wholly incompetent and the recalcitrant; at least, it will compel the soil-robber to remove to other occupation, if economic stress does not itself compel it. we shall reach the time when we shall not allow a man to till the earth unless he is able to leave it at least as fertile as he found it. (applause) it is a pernicious notion that a man may do what he will with his own. the whole tendency of social development is away from this idea. a person may not even have the full control of his own children: society compels him to place them in school, and it protects them from over-work and hardship. a man may not breed diseased cattle. no more should he be allowed wantonly to waste forests or to make lands impotent, even though he "owns" them. (applause) _ownership vs. conservation_ this discussion leads me to make an application to the conservation movement in general. we are so accustomed to think of privileged interests and of corporation control of resources that we are likely to confuse conservation with company ownership. the essence of conservation is to utilize our resources with the least waste consistent with good progress, and with an honest care for the children of all generations. while we not infrequently state the problem to be the reservation of our resources for all the people, and then assume that if all the resources were in private ownership the problem would thereby be solved, yet, in fact, the conservation question is one thing and the ownership of property quite another. a corporation may be the best as well as the worst conservator of resources; and likewise, private or individual ownership may be the very worst as well as the best conservator. the individual owner, represented by the "independent farmer," may be the prince of monopolists (applause), even though his operations compass a very small scale. the very fact that he is independent, with the further fact that he is intrenched behind the most formidable of all barriers--private property rights--insures his monopoly. in the interest of pure conservation, it is necessary to control the single man as well as the organized men. in the end conservation must deal with the individual man--that is, with a person. it matters not whether this person is a part of a trust, or lives alone a hundred miles beyond the frontier, or is the owner of a prosperous farm--if he wastes the heritage of the race, he is an offender. we are properly devising ways whereby the corporation holds its property or privileges in trust, returning to government (or to society) a fair rental; that is, we are regulating the corporation and making it responsible to the people. what shall we do with the unattached man, to make him also responsible? shall we hold the corporate plunderer to strict account, and let the single separate plunderer go scot free? (applause) in the last analysis, as measured by the results to society, there is no essential difference between corporate ownership and individual ownership. _the philosophy of saving_ the conservation of natural resources, therefore, resolves itself into the philosophy of saving, while at the same time making the most and best advancement in our own day. we have not developed much consciousness of saving when dealing with things that come free to our hands, as the sunshine, the rain, the forests, the mines, the streams, the earth; and the american has found himself so much in the midst of plenty that saving has seemed to him to be parsimony, or at least beneath his attention. as a question of public action, however, conscientious saving represents a very high development. a high sense of saving ought to come out of the conservation movement. this will make directly for character-efficiency, since it will develop both responsibility and regard for others. civilization, thus far, is built on the process of waste. materials are brought from forest and sea and mine, certain small parts are used, and the remainder is discarded or destroyed; more labor is wasted than is usefully productive; but what is far worse, the substance of the land is taken in unimaginable quantities and dumped wholesale, through endless sewerage and drainage systems, into the sea. it would seem as if the human race were bent on finding a process by which it can most quickly ravish the earth and make it incapable of maintaining its teeming millions. we are rapidly threading the country with vast conduits by which the fertility of the land can flow away unhindered into the unreachable reservoirs of the ocean. (applause) the factories that fabricate agricultural products are likely to be midway stations in the progress of the fertility on its way to the sea. the refuse is dumped into streams; or if it is made into fertilizing materials, it seldom returns to the particular areas whence it came. a manufactory will expend any effort in improving its machinery and practice to enable it to get more material out of its products, but may do little or nothing to increase the production back on the farms. a sugar-beet or other factory may drain its country until the country can no longer raise the product; whereas, by developing a rational system of husbandry and returning the wastes, as in some european countries, it might maintain the land-balance. any good milk-products factory should develop sound milk-making on the farms of the region, as any good canning factory should raise the standard of production in the fruits and vegetables that it uses; and this should always be done with the object of preserving and even increasing the land-power. a factory owes an obligation to the open country that supports it. for these and for other reasons, the city always tends to destroy its province. the city takes everything to itself--materials, money, men--and gives back only what it cannot use or what it discards as useless: it does not constructively build up its contributory country. city dwelling and country dwelling are the two opposite developments of human affairs. the future state of society depends directly on the finding of some real economic and social balance between the two, some species of cooperation that will build and serve them both. this is the fundamental problem of the social structure. although city people and country people are rapidly affiliating in acquaintanceship, these poles of society are not yet effectively coming together cooperatively on economic lines. (applause) _the conservation of food_ the fundamental problem for the human race is to feed itself. it has been a relatively easy matter to provide food and clothing thus far, because the earth yet has a small population, and because there have always been new lands to be brought into requisition. we shall eliminate the plague and the devastations of war, and the population of the earth will tremendously increase. when the new lands have all been opened to cultivation, and when thousands of millions of human beings occupy the earth, the demand for food will constitute a problem that we scarcely apprehend today. one would think, from current discussions, that the single way to provide the food for the population is to raise more products by moving more people on the land; but this is not at all nub of the question. more products will be raised as rapidly as it pays persons to raise them, and there are now sufficient people on the land to double its productiveness; and the necessary increase of population will come automatically with increasing profits in the business. much is said about the necessity of intenser methods of farming, and we all recognize the need; but the chief reason why our people do not raise bushels of potatoes to the acre is that it does not yet pay in most cases to produce the extra yield. the comparative statistics of yields in different countries are useful as appealing to the imagination, but they may be wholly fallacious as guides. what we need is a thorough inquiry into the course of trade from potato-patch to consumer, to see where the profit goes. we need a greater number of competent farmers, to be sure, whether they hail from the country or the city; the city will still attract those laborers who cannot work alone and who watch the clock, and the city provides the organization or machinery to make them of use; but the real food question and cost-of-living question is the problem of maintaining the producing-power of the earth by means of better farming. we think we have developed intensive and perfected systems of agriculture; but as a matter of fact, and speaking broadly, a scientifically permanent agriculture on national lines is yet unknown in the world. in certain regions, as in great britain, the productivity of the land has been increased over a long series of years, but this has been accomplished to a great extent by the transportation of fertilizing materials from the ends of the earth. the fertility of england, according to authorities, has been drawn largely from the prairies and plains of america, from which it has secured its food supplies, from the guano deposits in islands of the seas, from the bones of animals and men, from the mummies of egypt (applause). the rotation of crops is not itself a complete means of maintaining fertility. we begin to understand how it is possible to maintain the producing-power of the surface of the earth, and there are certain regions in which our knowledge has been put effectively into operation; but we have developed no conscious plan or system in a large way for securing this result. it is the ultimate problem of the race to devise a permanent self-sustaining organized agriculture on a scientific basis. the problem is yet unsolved. we deplore the relative decrease in the exportation of agricultural produce, and seem to think that the more we export the richer we become; but, if our knowledge is correct, under present systems of farming, the more we send abroad the sooner do we deplete our soils. we properly remove phosphate lands from exploitation and monopoly, but we may remove our phosphates more rapidly by sending our produce in unhindered quantities to europe. of course, i am not arguing against exportation and trade, but i wish to point out a fallacy in our common economic speech. _the best husbandry is not in the new regions_ the best agriculture, considered in reference to the permanency of its results, develops in old regions, where the skinning process has passed, where the hide has been sold, and where people come back to utilize what is left. the skinning process is proceeding at this minute in the bountiful new lands of the united states; and in parts of the older states, and even also in parts of the newer ones, not only the skin but the tallow has been sold. there are "abandoned" farms from california even unto maine. it is persistently said that the old eastern states are worn out, and that the farming in them is wretched. there is reason enough to be ashamed of eastern agriculture, and i hope that our newer regions will not repeat the mistakes of the older states; but the eastern states have most excellent agriculture, more than we are aware. much of it is very profitable, fully as profitable as any i have seen in the great agricultural west. the acre-efficiency, as indicated by the twelfth census, is greatest in the old eastern states. considered with reference to maintaining high fertility and utilizing wastes, i have not seen better fanning in this country than in many examples east of buffalo. in the development of our agricultural wealth, the east as well as the west must be reckoned with. we cannot expect to develop widespread self-sustaining systems of farming in the east so long as it must compete with the soil-mining of the west. we are always seeking growing-room, and we have found it. but now, the western civilization has met the eastern, and the world is circumferenced. we shall develop the tropics and push far toward the poles; but we have now fairly discovered the island that we call the earth (within a year and a half we have reached one end of it and all but reached the other), and we must begin to make the most of it. _another philosophy of agriculture_ practically all our agriculture has been developed on a rainfall basis. there is ancient irrigation experience, to be sure, but the great agriculture has been growing away from these regions. agriculture is still moving on, seeking new regions; and it is rapidly invading regions of small rainfall. the greater part of the land surface of the globe must be farmed, if farmed at all, under some system of careful water-saving. some of it is redeemable by irrigation, and the remainder, representing about one-half the earth's surface, by some system of utilization of deficient rainfall, or by what is inappropriately known as "dry farming." the complementary practices of irrigation and dry-farming will develop a wholly new system of agriculture and a new philosophy of country life. even in heavy rainfall countries, there is often such vast waste of water from run-off that the lands suffer severely during droughts. the hilly lands of our best farming regions are greatly reduced in their crop-producing power because people do not prepare against drought as consciously as they provide against winter. it is often said that we shall water eastern lands by irrigation, and i think that we shall; but our first obligation is to save the rainfall water by some system of farm-management or dry-farming. the irrigation and dry-farming developments have a significance beyond their value in the raising of crops; they are making the people to be conservators of water, and to have a real care for posterity. agriculture rests on the saving of water. (applause) _the obligation of the farmer_ the farmer is rapidly beginning to realize his obligation to society. it is usual to say that the farmer feeds the world, but the larger fact is that he saves the world. the economic system depends on him. wall street watches the crops. as cities increase proportionately in population, the farmer assumes larger relative importance and becomes more and more a marked man. careful and scientific husbandry is rising in this new country. we have come to a realization of the fact that our resources are not unlimited. the mining of fertilizing materials for transportation to a few spots on the earth will some day cease. we must make the farm sustain itself, at the same time that it provides the supplies for mankind. we all recognize the necessity of the other great occupations to a well developed civilization; but in the nature of the case, the farmer is the final support. on him depends the existence of the race. no method of chemical synthesis can provide us with the materials of food and clothing and shelter, and with all the good luxuries that spring from the bosom of the earth. i know of no better present conservators than our best farmers. they feel their responsibility. quite the ideal of conservation is illustrated by a farmer of my acquaintance who saves every product of his land and has developed a system of self-maintaining live-stock husbandry, who has harnessed his small stream to light his premises and do much of his work, who turns his drainage waters into household use, and who is now troubled that he cannot make some use of the winds that are going to waste on his farm. _the obligation of the conservation movement_ what i have meant to emphasize is the fact that the farmer is the ultimate conservator of the resources of the earth. he is near the cradle of supplies, near the sources of the streams, next the margin of the forests, and on the hills and in the valleys and on the plains just where the resources lie. he is in contact with the original and raw materials, and with the fundamental necessities. any plan of conservation that overlooks this fact cannot meet the situation. the conservation movement must help the farmer to keep and save the race. the conservation and country life movements will pass through propagandic, economic, and political phases; but they will eventuate into a new alignment of human forces and a redirection of the processes of social development. these results are to be brought about by efforts proceeding along definite lines of action. the conservation movement is rapidly becoming crystallized into definite proposals. the country life movement should be solidified through a definite national organization or commission, that is continuously active. this body should work through all existing rural organizations, placing before them for consideration the specific questions of the day and serving as a clearing-house of discussions that arise in the societies and with the people; and it should make real investigation into the actual economic and social conditions of the open country, with a view to pointing out the specific practical steps to be taken by national, state, local, and individual enterprise. the commission on country life made sufficient specific recommendations and suggestions to start a fundamental redirection of effort as applied to rural development. the report of the commission will naturally be the diverging-point of future discussions of country-life problems. (applause) * * * * * chairman clapp--ladies and gentlemen: the hour grows late, and the congress will stand adjourned for the day. _seventh session_ the congress was called to order by president baker in the auditorium, saint paul, at . a.m. on thursday, september , few delegates being present, and none responding to an invitation to speak for their states. after waiting some time-- president baker--ladies and gentlemen: we will now go on with the regular program, leaving the call of the states for a later time when the delegations may be more fully represented. in the absence of the reverend dr j. a. krantz, president of the minnesota conference of the swedish lutheran church, we will dispense with the public invocation. professor henry s. graves, chief forester of the united states, will now address you on "the forest and the nation." * * * * * professor graves--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: the movement for the conservation of our natural resources has reached the second and most critical stage in its progress. the country has expressed in unmistakable terms its approval of the principles of conservation; there is now before it the problem of the practical application of those principles. in forestry there is a very general agreement that our woodlands must be protected from fire, that waste must be reduced, and that a future timber supply must in some way be provided. in carrying out these purposes, differences of opinion arise, and it soon develops that with many persons the interest in forestry is confined to the abstract idea and does not extend to its practice. when the requirements of forestry are considered, forest owners usually find that they must make some modification in their methods of cutting, that they must use more care in protection from fire and in saving young growth, and that if they are to secure a new growth of trees after cutting, some investment is necessary. the general public learns that in order to secure for the nation the permanent benefits of the forest, national and state expenditures are required. it is at this point that indifference and even opposition to conservation arise. indifference is shown by the public when it fails to make adequate appropriations for public forestry. direct opposition appears from those who fear that their interests in one way or another may be adversely affected. there is a great deal of misunderstanding in regard to the methods of conservation, and many have charged that those methods heretofore advocated are impractical. in order to be successfully applied, conservation must be practical; but at the same time the methods must be such as will actually accomplish its real purposes. to my mind the real significance and value of this congress is that an opportunity is afforded to make clear the methods of conservation, and the country will then decide whether it will really be put into practice or become a mere name. it is not my intention now to dwell at length on the fundamental importance to the country of forest conservation. to those who know the needs of the people for forest products, the available resources, and the manner in which they are now being used up or destroyed, it must be clear that we are facing a problem which must be met by prompt and vigorous action. a survey of the forest resources of the world shows clearly that in the long run this nation must be dependent chiefly on its own supplies. those who believe that we may destroy our own forests and then draw upon foreign resources of timber are misinformed as to the facts, for those supplies will not be long available. foreign countries will need for their own use what they can produce, and many of the exporting countries are exhausting their forests just as rapidly as america. the timber supply in this country is being rapidly depleted. we are extravagant in our use of forest products; there is waste in logging and manufacturing, and the loss by fire is a shame to the country. to offset this reduction of merchantable resources the annual production of timber by growth amounts to much less than one-third the average quantity used and destroyed. in other words, we are actually exhausting our forest supplies by use and waste. there is a sufficient amount of land in the country better suited to forest growth than other purposes to produce all the wood and timber needed by the nation, provided the forest is properly handled. this land includes mountain areas where the protection of the vegetation is necessary to conserve water and protect the slopes. the protective benefits of the forest can thus in most cases be secured at the same time as the production of wood and timber. there are, however, certain mountain regions of the west where large trees will not grow, and where the cover of brush and grass must be conserved to protect the slopes and to regulate the run-off of water. in these mountains special reservations must be maintained primarily for protective purposes. there is but little disagreement in regard to these simple propositions. the difficulty lies in the fact that the people do not appreciate the need of immediate action to put the principles of forestry into practice. the reason why prompt action is not appreciated is that, except locally, the effects of forest destruction have not yet been keenly felt. it is true that the prices of certain grades of lumber have tended to increase. this increase is in part due to the reduction of supplies, but it is due also to the same causes of increased cost of production as have raised the price of other manufactured commodities (applause). the development of railroad transportation and of methods of logging have constantly opened new forest resources and furnished a supply to the public. there are today over , saw-mills throughout the country cutting timber and competing for the market. although the prices of lumber may seem high to the consumer it is still true that in some sections the competition among the manufacturers is keeping the prices down to a point where it is hard to market low grades and to utilize in full any but the best trees in the forest. as long as the value of timber is below what it would cost to produce it by growth, the general public will not realize that our supplies are being depleted. it is after the virgin supplies are exhausted--and that will come in a comparatively short time--that the great increase in values will come and the public will suffer. we are urging action now in order that there may be new supplies produced to meet the needs of the nation at that time. (applause) the general public fails also to appreciate the effect of forest destruction on stream-flow and on soil erosion. some even go so far as to deny the connection between forests and stream-flow. there are many factors which determine the stability of water flow. climate, character of soil, topography, and vegetative cover, all have an influence on the run-off of water. there may be a change of conditions of one or more of these influencing factors sufficient to upset the equilibrium established by nature, and alter the manner of run-off of the water in a given watershed (applause). in humid regions, where the old timber is cut off or burned, a cover of young trees or brush often springs up quickly and protects the slopes before the character of the stream channels is changed. a single clearing of the forest may thus have only a small or temporary effect on water flow. the repeated destruction of the cover may, however, result in a permanent change, and finally produce torrent conditions. thus in the southern appalachian province it is not so much the present and past conditions--although those are serious--which demand forest conservation, as what will inevitably be the result of continued destruction of the cover. (applause) where the conditions for forest growth are critical, and the soil and topography are such that the balance of nature is easily disturbed, the effects of forest destruction are much more quickly felt. in certain parts of the west we find already examples of flood and torrent conditions equal to those in france and asia. for example, in utah there are watersheds where, on account of the burning of the forests and the over-grazing of slopes, torrent conditions are already definitely established. one of the most extreme and striking instances in the west is found on the watershed of kanab creek flowing through southern utah and northern arizona. as the result of over-grazing, the tributary streams have already become deep washes, and many new and deep gulches have been formed running into the main channel and into the side channels. the water which falls on the surface is quickly carried to some stream or wash which becomes a miniature torrent. the gathering of these together in the main channel makes a flood which is irresistible. the loss from the destruction of dams and bridges, the washing away of arable lands, and the deposit of rocks and gravel on cultivated fields, has been enormous. the restoration of vegetation alone will not cure the evil. it is now an engineering problem to check the torrential flow of water in the various streams and washes. in spite of the increasing evidences of the effects of forest destruction, the public still fails to appreciate the need of prompt action to prevent the scarcity of timber and to protect the flow of our streams. the time for action is _before_ a disaster and not afterward (applause). the small public investments necessary for forest protection are insignificant when contrasted with the losses and hardships to communities resulting from forest destruction. the forest problem is peculiarly difficult on account of the length of time required to produce timber of useful dimensions. we are using today trees which for the most part are from to years of age. the time required to produce trees suitable for lumber varies from about years with our most rapid-growing species to over years in many mountain regions. the production of timber requires a long investment. it requires the permanent use of land for forest growth, and a stable policy in handling the forest. at the present time in this country there is great risk from fire, which discourages investment by private capital in the growing of timber. by its very nature, therefore, the problem of forestry presents great difficulties to the average private owner of forest land who has bought the property to market the merchantable timber and not to grow trees. forestry nearly always involves an actual investment. private owners will not as a rule make this investment unless there is clearly in sight an adequate return. on account of the long investment, risk from fire, a burdensome system of taxation of growing timber, and the present uncertainties of market, most private owners today are not practicing a system of forestry which takes into consideration the production of new timber supplies. many say that if fires are kept out the question of forest production will take care of itself, no matter how the forest is handled, and that all there is to forestry is protection from fire. let me say, and with all the emphasis i am capable of using, that forest production will not take care of itself. there are cases, and remarkable ones, of natural reproduction of forests even under the worst of abuse. but where there is no systematic provision for reproduction, ordinary lumbering results in the long run in a steady reduction of growth of valuable material; and there are only too many cases of destructive lumbering which leave the land in an unproductive state even when fires do not occur. (applause) forestry is necessary to guarantee to the people the continuous benefits of the forest. the responsibility of working out the problem of national forestry cannot be left with private owners. it is primarily a public question, and the burden of its solution must be largely borne by the public. in the first place those forests owned by the public must be protected and administered under the methods of practical forestry. these public forests comprise about one-third of the forest area of the country. the remaining two-thirds of our forests are in private ownership, and this includes about four-fifths of the remaining standing merchantable timber. without doubt the area of the public forests will be considerably increased through the acquirement of areas needed for the protection of public interests, especially in the mountain regions of the east. but the federal and state forests alone will not be sufficient to produce the supplies of forest products needed by the country. the practice of forestry on private lands, or at least on those areas better suited for forest growth than for other purposes, is a public necessity. i regard the proper handling of these private forests as a public necessity (applause). the private owner cannot escape the responsibility of ownership of an important natural resource; at the same time he cannot be expected to make financial investments in order to provide for a general public benefit. the conditions which prevent him from practicing forestry should be changed. he should be given public aid in protection from fire. there should be a reasonable system of taxing growing timber, and there should be cooperation in meeting the peculiar difficulties of his business which tend to stand in the way of conservation. the practice of forestry by private owners may be brought about through assistance and cooperation by the federal government and the states. the government can do a great deal to promote private forestry. it is the policy of the forest service to aid in the introduction and practice of forestry on private lands, just as far as its authority permits. this assistance must, however, be largely confined to education, advice, and general cooperation. through research and experiment, the government is laying the foundation for the practice of forestry in all parts of the country. the results of the work in forest products will greatly help in the problem of saving waste. the experiments in silviculture are demonstrating the methods of handling woodlands. direct aid to private owners in the practice of forestry must come chiefly from the states. the proper adjustment of taxes is a state matter. assistance in fire patrol and fire fighting must come from the states. if on the other hand this aid is given by the states and the government, and the obstacles now standing in the way of private forestry are removed, private owners should assume their obligations in actually setting to work to practice forestry. the first necessity is prompt and effective action by the states. as yet most of our states have not assumed their full responsibilities in forestry. in a number of them good forests laws have been enacted; several states are buying lands as public reservations; and in about fifteen states a forest commission or a state forester has been appointed. but the problem of state forestry requires a great deal more than laws on the statute books, or the appointment of a state forester. there must be the machinery to carry out the laws, a thoroughly equipped organization to patrol the state and fight fires, and adequate appropriation of money to make this work really effective (applause). the real test of state forestry will be the development of a forest policy which will be stable, and the providing of the money necessary to carry on the work. the first duty of the federal government in forestry is the proper administration of the forest lands owned by the nation. a national forest policy has already been initiated. the greater portion of the federal forest lands have been set aside as national forests and they have been managed on the principles of practical conservation. the purpose of establishing these forests has been to guarantee the best possible use of their resources for the people. there is still an impression among some persons that the national forests are closed reservations, withdrawn from use and development. the keynote of the federal policy in handling these forests is the use of their resources; but it is the continued use in contrast with that use which exhausts the resources (applause). there are many who assert that the national forests are retarding development. it is the policy of the forest service to encourage the opening up and development of the resources of the forests, but we take the stand that this must be a development which will permanently build up the country. (applause) the federal policy stands squarely for permanent development and maintenance of stable industries, as opposed to mere exploitation which exhausts the resources, and which shortly results in the impoverishment of the region. (applause) in administering the national forests, the first task is to protect them from destruction by fire. in order adequately to protect forests from fire, the first necessity is a system of roads and trails to enable proper patrol and movement of fire fighters, and telephone lines for quick communication. the second necessity is a well organized force of rangers and guards to patrol the forest and fight fires. ever since the national forests were placed under the administration of the forest service, the construction of trails and telephone lines has been pushed as rapidly as funds could be secured for that purpose. although there have already been built , miles of trails, , miles of roads, and , miles of telephone lines, this represents but a beginning of the work when the vast area of inaccessible and undeveloped forests is considered. the forest service has a well organized protective service for patrol and fire fighting, though the number of men is still inadequate. nevertheless it has been possible in ordinary seasons to keep down the fires to a small loss. during the present season there has been in the northwest an unparalleled drouth and constant high winds that have made fire protection unusually difficult. innumerable fires were started in the forests from various causes. the woods were dry, and a small spark was sufficient to start a blaze. where there were roads and trails, the patrol-men were able to reach the fires quickly and either put them out in their incipiency or soon mobilize a force of men who brought them under control before they had done much damage. this was well demonstrated by the fact that in the montana and idaho districts the majority of railroad fires were put out by the patrol-men employed by the forest service and by the railroads in cooperation before they reached dangerous proportions. many fires were started, also, in the inaccessible portions of the forest where there are no roads and trails. it was often impossible to reach those fires until they had been burning several days, and in many cases had become dangerous conflagrations. the disastrous fires were those occurring under these conditions. i wish to take this occasion to express my appreciation of the work of those men who lost their lives in these fires, and also of those other men who ever since the opening of this dry season have been fighting these fires, working often day and night, without regard to hours of service--working with a courage, with a singleness of purpose and desire to protect the property of the public, which makes me proud of them. (applause) the great lesson of these fires is the absolute necessity for a complete system of roads and trails and of telephone lines in the national forests. i meet some men who say that forests cannot be protected from fire, and that sooner or later every extensive forest will be burned. the experience in the northwest this year only strengthens my conviction that forests can be protected from fire even under the most adverse climatic conditions. but this protection absolutely requires a proper development of the forest in the way of transportation and communication, and an adequate force of men for patrol. the national forests can be rendered safe from fire but they must be organized for it. this requires extensive construction work at the outset. it requires a large investment in permanent improvement work by the government. but that necessary expense is insignificant in comparison with the value of the property which will be protected, and the benefits to the communities and industries depending on these forests. * * * * * the national forests are for use, and are administered primarily for the benefit of those states and communities in which they are located. the various resources are opened to use under reasonable restrictions which will guarantee their best continuous service to the greatest possible number of people. the mature timber is cut when there is a demand for its use, but the cutting is conducted under the principles of forestry, so that new growth is established in openings made by lumbering and the continued supply of timber is provided for. (applause) the other resources of the national forests are also being put to use. the grass is utilized under a system of regulated grazing, land more valuable for agriculture than for forest purposes is opened to entry under the forest homestead act, prospecting is allowed without restriction, and legitimate mining is encouraged. it is the aim of the forest service to encourage the development of water-powers, and we are endeavoring to work out a practical plan which will facilitate this development by private capital, and at the same time protect the interests of the public (applause). i believe that the use of water-power sites on federal lands should be under government control, and i believe that this can be accomplished so as not to prevent the attraction of capital to their development. (applause) so far as the national forests are concerned, conservation has already carried into the practical stage, for it is being put into actual operation. the national forests will always stand as a monument to the work of the real founder and spirit of the conservation movement, gifford pinchot. (great applause) there are many opponents of the national forest policy and of the forest service, but i find in most sections of the country that those who are using the national forests, and who are therefore most vitally interested in them, are cooperating very heartily with the government in working out the details of their administration. it is through the kind of constructive cooperation which the forest service is receiving from lumbermen of the country that the practical management of the national forests can be made really effective. (applause) the burden of my plea today is the need of prompt and vigorous action. action is required of the general public in giving support for the protection of the national forests. action is required by the states in administering the state lands in the interests of the public. action is required by the states in initiating a system of taxation of growing timber which will not prevent conservation. action is required by the states in introducing a system of forest patrol and fighting fires which will permit prompt work in the prevention of the burning of our forests. and action, finally, is needed by private individuals to introduce the practical forestry on their lands just as far as economic conditions will permit. my suggestion is that the first step is required by the public through action of states and action of the government. i appreciate that this cannot be accomplished without explaining fully to the people exactly what is required. i appreciate that there is necessary an organized campaign of education which should be carried into every locality of the country. this campaign may and must be practical, and not only the general problem of forestry but also the specific means of solving it must be presented to the people. this educational work may be done in part by the government; a large amount of it must, however, be carried on through the state officials, through the state forest and conservation commissions, and through national and local associations. (prolonged applause) * * * * * president baker--the next subject is "the stake of the business man in conservation," by mr alfred l. baker, of chicago. mr baker--mr president, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen: here in this second conservation congress, where are assembled specialists who have given profound study to the different phases of the conservation of our resources, where are met together scientists in agriculture, forestry, mineralogy and waterways, it is not intended that the remarks of a business man should stumble into the fields of the experts. it is, however, appropriate that he should voice his approving earnestness and vigorous enthusiasm in behalf of the conservation movement (applause), and voice them to those national benefactors who are holding their shoulders to the wheel of progress. as a delegate to this congress, representing the business man and with the knowledge of his views, i wish to state with all the emphasis of which i am capable that the business men in this country are heart and soul in favor of conservation (applause). owing to the infirmities of human nature a few may faint by the wayside; but the great body and mass can always be depended on to faithfully and loyally support the movement. by so doing they are promoting the proper development of those resources which are not only the foundation of our national prosperity but also the foundation of their own individual success. the most conspicuous quality in the character of the successful business man is foresight--and he, more than any other member of the community, must realize the necessity of foresight in the management of our national affairs. he himself would never permit the waste or plunder of his own personal resources, and whilst enjoying their daily possession would always take thought for the morrow. the nation in its control of our resources should reflect the same character and intelligence which the individual shows in the management of his own private affairs. (applause) the great body of business men favor the well-known policies of conservation. they recognize that those resources which are of a public character should be held in trust by the nation for the benefit of the people (applause) and that those resources of a private nature should be so disposed of that they will be enjoyed by the greatest number for the longest time. (applause) they believe in the government control of water-power (applause) with the cooperation of the states, and in the application of a scientific forestry which will eliminate waste, also in a fire patrol which, _at whatever cost_ (applause), will prevent the destruction of our forests and of human life. they believe in better methods of farming and in the improvement of country life so that the bright boy on the farm shall no longer respond to the call of the great city, but find immediately about him equal opportunities for fame and fortune. (applause) they believe in the continued distribution of information on a large scale that will educate the people and advance their knowledge of conservation (applause); and finally they believe in the conservation of public integrity, which is the basal foundation of our national life on which all else depends. (great applause) i am not one of those who believe that the conservation movement should be confined solely to the technical treatment of the forest and soil and the prevention of material waste. the second article in the platform of the first conservation congress provides that "the objects of this congress shall be broad, to act as a clearing house for all allied social forces of our time, to seek to overcome waste in natural, human, or moral forces." i concur in that declaration. (applause) we are told that the constitution of the united states was the unexpected outcome of a conference convened for the sole purpose of investigating our waterways. the charge of irrelevancy might well have been brought to bear upon the discussions which ensued relating to a standing army and the powers of the federal government, but in all national movements the importance rests not with their origin but with the extent of their usefulness. (applause) however restricted at the outset, conservation has grown into a larger and more comprehensive movement, and its principles include the conservation of ideals that make for good citizenship (applause). it is in relation to this larger view that i wish to emphasize the importance of the american business man and his influence on our national progress. in the lifetime of many now living, the land in this great state of minnesota was divided between two indian tribes--the sioux and the chippewa. these tribes were uncivilized. intelligence had not arrived at the stage which produces diversified industry, commerce, and the merchant. the influence of these forces marks the difference between the land of the sioux and the state of minnesota today. the early pioneers who first settled on the atlantic coast and then continued their journey across the continent were all business men, but they were not capitalists. from the eastern states they sought in europe capital to build up the industries of their locations, and, by the use of this capital and labor rendered the east prosperous; and when these sturdy pioneers opened up the wealth of resources in the west they, in turn, drew upon the east for capital, and by paying for its use and uniting labor with it developed this great country. the descendants of these pioneer business men are the representative business men of today. they are not in an economic sense capitalists. whilst the capitalist may be a business man, the vast majority of business men are not capitalists. the business man is the one who obtains capital from one source and labor from another source and unites them in an anticipated prosperous undertaking. (applause) the material prosperity of the united states is due to our natural resources and the genius of the business man united with the capital of the few and the toil of the millions; but the _creative genius_, the organizing ability, the spirit which animates the partnership, is the contribution of the business man--by his brains, energy, force of character, and toil he has created here in the united states a commercial system of enterprise and a degree of business prosperity unparalleled in history. if we give the credit of this achievement to the business man, he should also bear the responsibility of the evils which have been engendered (applause). the gravest evils which have developed out of our commercial prosperity are the uncontrolled power of great wealth, the growth of monopolies, and their sinister influence on our political institutions. (applause) industrial efficiency may justify the union of many smaller corporations into one big one, but if it leads to industrial despotism this efficiency is obtained at the sacrifice of industrial freedom (applause). no one nowadays, on the ground of efficiency, believes in a _political_ despotism; surely it is equally difficult to believe that any degree of efficiency could justify _industrial_ despotism. (applause) as early as so conservative a man as grover cleveland expressed himself as follows: "communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which assiduously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of misrule." so far as communism of capital is concerned, did not cleveland's graphic statement adumbrate the conditions as they exist today? since that time how tremendous has been the growth in the combinations of capital and industry. but of more importance than the size of the corporations and the combinations of capital is the activity in our political arena of the agents and members of these corporations (applause); they are not there to advocate measures for the welfare of the community, but to obtain for themselves special privileges, to gain some advantage in disregard of the public welfare and merely for private gain. these conditions are precipitating an economic and political crisis, in which the issues are not to be between the two great political parties, but between ranks which are being formed to give battle on these new issues regardless of party lines. (applause) to my mind great encouragement lies in the fact that there is rapidly developing a segregation in the ranks of business men. already many of them, freed from a false sense of class loyalty, or a fear of injury to business, are unwilling to assist by their public support or private esteem that man, however successful or powerful he may be, who by himself or by his agents practices methods which are unfair and opposed to the common good (applause). they no longer respect the citizen who in any way indicates a reluctance to take part in the crusade against bribery and graft, or the one who, by silence, hopes to conceal his public attitude when public sentiment seeks to fasten responsibility where responsibility belongs (applause). this sort of man must come out into the open and declare himself--he must be either with us or against us. (applause and cries of "good!") even though the advocacy of the control of industrial combinations and the enactment of measures for their regulation temporarily affect business interests, they should not for this reason excite the opposition of the mercantile world. those business men who have become convinced of the wisdom of regulation should be willing to follow the example of the intelligent patient who goes through with a necessary operation that in the end he may obtain permanent health and strength. (applause) during the last five years there is apparent among business men a larger recognition of their obligations to the community, and there is noticeable among the directors of many of our corporations a stricter sense of trusteeship. an anti-toxin to corruption has entered the very veins of the business world (applause). the phagocytes of health are overcoming the macrophags of decay. this is not a sudden revival, a temporary wave of reform, but a gradual evolution of the moral sense, a permanent advance in the idea of social justice (applause). this moral awakening may show itself politically in an effort toward municipal reform, in legislative and municipal voters' leagues, in a determined resistance to monopoly, or for a larger control and a larger share in the profits of public franchise corporations. but in whatever form it seeks its expression, it is the manifestation of an actively constructive principle which will soon become so effective that the merchant and the man of affairs will overlook the near and personal view which appears on the stock ticker and take the larger view, the view that ultimately provides for the greatest good of the greatest number (applause). this awakened sense of social justice is the new and deeper significance of the conservation movement. (applause) two years ago the conference of governors adopted a declaration of principles which the president said should hang on the wall of every school-house for the education of every citizen who is to become a voter in the next generation. since then conservation has become the watchword of the hour. the widespread use of the word has given to it a meaning undreamed of in the beginning. in the form of an intelligent energy it has applied itself to all the concerns of life from the conservation of the soil and the forest to the conservation of birds, of child life and of health. it enters into our daily life, awakens into an active moral force a renaissance of the old-fashioned virtues--prudence, thrift, and foresight--and gives to them a larger and a national meaning. conservation is the intimate and individual message to our day and generation. it marks the advent of a new patriotism wherein love of humanity becomes an integral part of love of country, and where the conservation of our "rocks and rills," our "woods and templed hills," is not a more sacred trust than the conservation of those ideals and principles through which we hope to attain our ultimate national purpose--a government of enlightened people, enjoying equal opportunities, sharing equal burdens, and rejoicing in the freedom of an industrial and political democracy. (great applause) * * * * * [in the course of the foregoing, president baker invited professor condra to the chair.] professor condra--ladies and gentlemen: president baker desires me to say that his voice has failed. he also authorizes me to announce that the call of states will be made this afternoon. i am pleased now to introduce a speaker opposed to the leading objects of this congress. i ask you to hear kindly any criticism that he may offer. his subject is "the relation of capital to the development of resources." mr frank h. short, of california. * * * * * mr short--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: i am permitted to speak today for the first time for real money, and apparently in behalf of those who are sometimes denominated "malefactors of great wealth." i observe that one of the saint paul papers in announcing this address has referred to me as a lawyer and capitalist. the latter i modestly deny. it is unprofessional for a lawyer to become rich. good lawyers are scarce and valuable, and judging by the speeches i have heard in this congress rich men are very common and a great public nuisance. therefore i hold that it would be a great misfortune for a good lawyer, such as i admit that i am (laughter), to be spoiled by making out of him an ordinary capitalist. this audience, in listening to my address, will no doubt have in mind the numerous warnings which have been given to them in advance to forestall the evil influences of my humble remarks. i hope none of you will ever have to sustain the painful ordeal of appearing before an audience decorated with hoofs and horns by angels of light wearing crowns and playing harps, who have so kindly bestowed upon me the habiliments of the evil one. perhaps, since i have been so excessively featured, i had as well admit the whole horrible truth. first, and perhaps worst of all, i am a missourian, having committed the indiscretion of being born in the "show me" state--but not in kansas. all of my youth was spent in the middle west in the occupation of a rough rider; and i still enjoy a fight or a footrace as much as though i were a real colonel. further confessing, i have lived for many years in california and am a lawyer by profession, and have committed the offense of allowing myself to be retained and am now employed by a considerable number of large water companies and electric power companies and other corporations, diligently endeavoring to commit the crime of investing capital under the laws of the western states in the development of the industries and resources of those states. the difference between a real colonel and a second lieutenant is illustrated by the fact that this admission permits of my being heard under his authority, although industrious efforts by the lieutenant referred to have been devoted to the contrary purpose. i am, however, speaking under the general permission of this congress, and under no other frank than my unrevoked license as a real though obscure american citizen. the rights and interests of all american citizens and business institutions under the laws of our country are the same (applause). as a man accumulates property, and his interests and substantial connection with the country and its resources increase, he thereupon becomes just that much more interested in the honesty and integrity of the government under which he lives, in the perfectly equal and just operation of the law, and above all in the supremacy of the law and similarly in the inauguration, continuation, and perpetuation of good policies. no doubt we self-governing americans have all erred, both the poor man and the capitalist; and perhaps it would not be unfair to say that we all ought in humility to bear our equal share of the odium connected with whatever failures and offenses have been committed during our history, and i am not here to shift any of the burden from one class upon another. neither am i here to answer denunciations with denunciations. i am handicapped in such debate, for the reason that i acquired my education in the old-fashioned school that was taught to believe that an honest man was one who said little of his own honesty and less of the supposed dishonesty of others. a convention of this character can be carried on with but little capital, and may travel a good ways on sheer wind; but with all respect to free speech, it takes money to carry on government and conduct business, and if capital is as timid as it is supposed to be, and if some of our political friends were as dangerous as they sound, all of the money would have been scared out of america before i commenced these remarks on capital. allow me, however, respectfully to suggest that we of this country are engaged in many vast enterprises; we are responsible to many men and their families for the opportunity to work and to earn a living. we are committed to the completion of many national enterprises of great magnitude. our crops are none too large, our reserve capital is small and is growing smaller. the general industrial and financial conditions of the country from the point of view of thoughtful men who understand the situation, are not as satisfactory as i wish they were, and those who are gaining fame and ascending to office by wild denunciations of wealth are willing to assume hazards that i do not envy. (applause) honest capital is more secure when governments are made honest and special privileges are denied, when graft is prevented and crimes are punished: and there is never any danger in real reform, but infinite harm can be done by attractive orators of maximum lung power and minimum brains (applause). honesty is the best policy in large business and in small business, and the most that capital ought to expect or demand, and the most that will be profitable to it in the long run, is to seek and if it can obtain the passage and the enforcement of equal and just laws, the continuation of justice, and the right honestly to accumulate, hold and enjoy property (applause). the relations of capital to conservation are identical with its relations to all other business. as conservation tends to increase and continue the natural resources of the country, the fertility of the soil, the perpetuation of the forests, the flow of streams, and all of those conditions that insure the substantial welfare of the country, the capitalist has an equal interest with all other citizens in conservation, and the added interest that he can share in a greater degree in the resulting and continuing prosperity than his less fortunate neighbor. some excellent things have been done and said in this convention. if "conversational conservation" would cure the evils under which we live we would have no need of doctors for a long time. as against "conversational conservation" i wish now to say a few words about constitutional conservation. from now on i may wander a little from the rich subject that has been assigned to me, but i have been much interested in the suggestion that that branch of the government that can accomplish the most good for the people should take charge of their business and affairs connected with government. unless, however, we have some authoritative source other than the nebulous question of the general welfare to determine where this authority lies, i am apprehensive that most of the resources of government would be dissipated in fighting over the question of authority. what i now hold to be true for all time--and you will all agree with me some day--is that that branch of the government that under our constitutional system is designated as the one having the authority is the only branch of the government that can benefit capital, conserve or advance the rights of the people, or do justice in any way whatever. conservation as it was understood in its inception in this country, the preservation of our soils, our forests, and our resources presented a subject of little difficulty, and in connection with which we were all practically in accord and where apparently there would have been no occasion for any serious disagreement. no more new or difficult questions of government are legitimately involved in conservation and forestry than are involved in cultivation and farming. if the device of using the public lands to graft government onto conservation had not been invented by some civic genius, we would have had percent of conservation to percent of controversy. but when the landlord seeks to be the governor, especially in america, we get percent plus of controversy and percent minus of conservation. landlord law and governmental conservation was devised, we are told, to control wealth for the benefit of the plain, small man. inquire in the vicinity of any forest reserve, and you will find that there are more plain, small people than there used to be, and they are getting plainer and smaller every day; so apparently the good work will never end. as briefly as i may, and seriously as i can, i will state the situation that confronts the people of the west, the poor man and the capitalist alike, in connection with the forest reserve. forest reserves were authorized by congress for the purpose of protecting forests and conserving the source of supply of streams. probably one-third of the , , acres that have been set apart in forest reserves in the western one-third of the united states are reasonably necessary and suited to these purposes. as to the other two-thirds, they were largely included--and in some instances this is frankly admitted--for the purpose of authority for government control, to include pasture lands, power-sites, irrigation projects, and the like. if forest reserves had been created to meet the actual necessity which brought them into existence, and if they had been administered with due deference to the rights of the state within which they are situated, to improve and develop its resources without restraint, to construct or authorize to be constructed roads and highways, railroads, telephone and telegraph lines, canals and ditches for the beneficial use of water, and the functions of local self-government had not been assumed to the federal authorities and denied to the local authorities, i could conceive of no reason why the forestry policy could not have been carried out with great credit and some profit to the federal government and greatly to the advantage of the district in which the forests are situated. the pity of it all is that this has not been done. we are told that the sentiment in opposition to transferring from the states to the federal government important functions of regulation and control is not unanimous. this is true as to districts not directly affected by the forest reserves; but as to the people within and in the vicinity of the forest reserves, in other words, as to those who have come directly or indirectly in contact with bureaucratic government, the sentiment is about as unanimous as ever existed in america. that the forester and those under him honestly desire to benefit the people, especially "the poor, small man," we need not deny; that the actual results have been beneficial, however, we wholly deny. the imperial dominion withdrawn includes territory as large as or average-size eastern states, amounting frequently to one-fifth or one-fourth, and sometimes even exceeding the latter fraction of the territory within a state, and practically taking over and paralyzing local self-government in certain entire districts of a state. these lands are, and if the policy continues will remain forever, withdrawn from state taxation and revenue, and instead will become a source of expense and burden. first, considering the prime purpose to preserve and protect the forest, what has been the result? the forester and those under him have my profound sympathy in connection with the recent awful destructive forest fires and the heroic way in which the disaster was met, even though it was not overcome. for many years experienced and practical men in the west have protested against the policies pursued. previous to the establishment of the forest reserves the land was pastured by sheep and cattle, admittedly in some instances over-pastured. frequent fires ran through the country, but in most instances as the country had been closely pastured off and fires had usually recently occurred, these fires did only incidental harm, and in a general way the great forests of the west in many districts--although the result of mere natural processes--as valuable and magnificent as there are in the world, were retained in their primitive and perfect condition. for a good many years now exactly the reverse of this primitive condition has prevailed. sheep have been excluded and cattle have been limited; falling and decaying timber, the growth of vegetation from year to year, and the accumulation of underbrush and debris have continued; and we have gone on conserving our forests in such a way that we have been accumulating fuel and the elements of destruction, piling up wrath against the day of wrath, until the fires, in spite of precautions, have started, and the destruction that has resulted is inevitable. what is needed now in this particular is a surgeon who has the nerve to amputate the conditions that create fire, and until this is done the danger will go on increasing from year to year and more destruction than benefits will inevitably result. to those who suggest that a sufficient patrol will prevent fires, i respond that they ought to try the experiment of filling a building with powder, putting an ample guard around it, and touching a match to it. these great reserves have been practically closed to settlement and homesteading. the price of pasturage has been increased, the number of cattle and sheep pastured has been diminished, and the price of meat correspondingly advanced. the price of stumpage has been doubled and trebled, no small mills have been or can be successfully started, and the price of lumber to consumers has been increased. the policy has limited the construction of canals and other appliances for irrigation, and still more effectually limited the construction of like appliances for the diversion of water for the development of electric power. if this water could be diverted for irrigation and electric power under state laws without other restraint, the quantity available in the majority of the western states is so great that the supply would exceed the demand, the price would be lower, the consumption greater, and in every way the people would be benefited. the country would be settled, the people would be more prosperous, the supply of water and electricity would be more abundant and cheaper, and all of the people and all of the industries would be correspondingly more prosperous. it is gratifying that the line of cleavage and difference between the advocates of bureaucratic control over local industries and the advocates of local self-government have been better defined. upon the all-important question of the law applicable to this subject, i submit that there is little ground for honest difference. the supreme court of the united states has decided practically every phase of the matter over and over again, and the law is settled to the following effect: that the united states government owns the public lands in each of the states as private proprietor and not as sovereign; that it, the federal government, if it seeks to assert any authority in any state, must find its warrant in the constitution and not in the ownership of the public lands; that the authority of the united states government to adopt needful rules and regulations in connection with public lands is an authority to protect its proprietary interest and not exercise governmental functions within any state; that every state is upon an equal footing with all of the other states, and for the protection of its own people, its own industries, and the regulation of its own monopolies, each state has all of the powers of any other government; that the united states government exercises the same power, and each of the states exercises the same power, "no more and no less," regardless of the existence or non-existence of public land in any state. the whole pretense made by some that the united states government can exercise exceptional governmental authority in a state having public lands is a pretense and a pretense only. under the decision of the supreme court of the united states, such a claim has no shadow of foundation, and its assertion is merely injurious, detrimental to capital, destructive to industry, and can never serve any useful purpose of regulation or otherwise. these principles being fully decided and clearly in mind, it is hard to understand why the issue is raised, and how it is hoped that the policy can be imposed upon the western states or any other states under the constitution. it has been said with derision that the corporations are appealing to the constitution. i would to god that neither the corporations nor the american people might ever appeal to anything worse. however much evil may have been taught, no honest man need be apprehensive of injustice if his rights and the rights of his fellow citizens are always measured by a just construction of the constitution of the united states. (applause) we are told, and i think some of our adversaries honestly believe the tale, that all of the remaining resources of the country belong to all of the people. that "all of the resources belong to all of the people" is a slogan that sounds good. its chief defect is that it is not true, and the next objection is that to assert it now, after pursuing an exactly contrary policy as to four-fifths of the nation's resources, would be an intolerable injustice. the united states supreme court decided a long time ago that the united states government received and held the public lands as trustee for the benefit of the people and the states within which they were situated, to the end that they might be disposed of to actual settlers at nominal prices in order that the country might be settled, cultivated, populated, and developed; the lands come under the taxing power, and all of the unrestrained functions of state government. these decisions have been reaffirmed, and it has been held that the united states' title and trusteeship as to the public lands is identical in all the states. therefore it is not true as a matter of understanding or of law that the united states is the unrestrained proprietor of the public lands, but it holds in them a trust; and i submit that no justice can be done or good come from the violation or attempted violation of a trust. considering the equity of the situation, if the united states is now the owner of the remaining lands and resources for all of the people, it has been such from the beginning of the government; and having disposed of these resources to the beneficiaries entitled thereto, it is now seriously proposed to seize upon the remaining fraction and hold that fraction for the benefit of all the people, as much as for the benefit of the people and the sections of the country that have received their proportion as for those who have not received theirs. the situation might be illustrated by this simple statement: uncle sam may be assumed to be the father of four sons; we will name them east, north, south, and west. uncle samuel being liberal to a fault and mindful of a trust, has transferred to his three elder sons, east, north, and south, all of their share in his estate. but these elder sons, especially after their industrious younger brother has begun to show the real value of his portion of their father's estate, begin to look with covetous eyes upon the younger brother's inheritance. finally a deep sense of justice begins to pervade the minds of east, north, and south, and they appear before uncle samuel and say, "father, you have been very profligate in the management of your great estate. you have turned over to us and to our children without needful restriction the whole of the proportion that we can rightfully claim. in the doing of this you have shown great incompetency and have practiced many faults, and behold, you have sinned against heaven and in the sight of men. we can see no way of atoning for this awful offense except that you shall take and hold that portion of the estate that should descend to our younger brother for the benefit of all of your children. and as a further atonement, having shown in the distribution of your estate to us that you are dishonest and incompetent in the last degree, in consideration thereof we will nominate and appoint you the landlord and guardian, without bonds and forever, of that portion of the estate that, except for this atonement, would have belonged to our younger brother; requiring you, however, to see to it with scrupulous care that we, your elder sons, shall receive from the rents, leases, and profits of this estate our equal shares with our beloved younger brother." painful as it may seem, these elder brothers seem well nigh unanimous as to this scheme of atonement, and uncle samuel seems weak and subject to the influence of the majority. history, however, will record that the constitution broke the will and the elder brothers were charged with the costs and counsel fees. (laughter) if anyone present feels justified in challenging the accuracy or historical correctness of the foregoing statement or its logical application to the situation, he will now please rise and state his case or hereafter forever hold his peace. the overshadowing political reason why the united states government must invade the public land states and assert powers of government that it cannot assert in any other states we are told is to control monopolies. as a controller of monopolies not constitutionally subject to be controlled by the federal government, and under claims of title to the public lands, the united states government and its respective bureau chiefs would have st. george, the dragon destroyer, outclassed at the ratio of sixteen to one. it may do as a political issue for a long time, but if the people of the western states had no powers of government or sources of control within themselves, or except through the federal government, the public lands, and the heads of bureaus, these people would have little to expect or hope for. it is gratifying, however, to observe that instead of being helpless and impotent, the western states not only have all of the powers that are vested in any other government for the protection of their people from monopoly and wrong, but an understanding of their constitutions and laws clearly demonstrates that they are showing themselves far more alert, advanced, and capable in these functions of government than either the federal government or the older states in the east. it ought not to be necessary to say to an american audience that it is elementary that the people of a locality can give themselves more honest, efficient, and better government than can be given to them by any remote authority. the reason for this is so simple that the only excuse for attempting to deny it is the ignorance and incapacity of the people concerned to carry on or carry out self-government. the people of the western states alone will suffer if they do not efficiently and intelligently exercise their undoubted authority to supply themselves with good self-government, and efficiently control and direct their own industries and their own monopolies. about the only argument that is made in favor of federal control and against local self-government in the west is that the corporations appear to prefer the former. the question is not what the corporations prefer but what the constitution requires; and, in the next place, the corporations do not deny the authority of the states because they are advised that they cannot and therefore should not attempt to do so, and because they are advised that they must in any event submit to local self-government and that federal control would be an additional and not a lawful but a wholly unauthorized usurpation of authority. the american people, of all people in the world, have earned the reputation of being the most obedient to law and the least submissive to usurpation of any people in the world. if some of our wealthy men and some of corporations have offended against honesty and attempted to circumvent, misapply, and misuse the law, these are instances to be regretted, condemned, and punished. the practice should be abandoned, and if not abandoned rigorously prevented; having it, however, religiously in mind that ultimate justice can be done and the law vindicated only by adhering to due process of law. we are told that switzerland as a nation regulates and manages its own power business. since, however, switzerland has no more authority or powers of government than california, colorado, or new york, and since it is probably one-tenth the size of these states and its cantons are about the size of an ordinary western school district, this would not appear to indicate any reason why the western states of the union could not successfully carry out the same function of government. our former president has said to us that he would be as swift to prevent injustice and unwarranted uprising against property as anyone. this i do not doubt, and i am prepared to agree that probably no one living could perform the task more cheerfully or effectively; but in this connection it might not be improper to reflect that the people have been taught, and rightly so, that this is "a government of law and not of men," and we rely upon the equal and continued protection of the law for the protection of our persons and our property, not upon the life or disposition of any man. we have already referred to the assertion that the remaining resources of the federal government belong to all of the people and are to be administered and revenues obtained for their full benefit. we are not, however, deluded with the thought that we are to begin to draw individual dividends. the revenues thus obtained are to go into the federal treasury (and allow me parenthetically to suggest that the pay-roll will not be far behind the earnings), but if through some oversight a balance should be found in favor of all of the people it will go into the federal treasury to reduce taxation to the common benefit. allow me to suggest, and ask all thoughtful people to well consider, that if sufficient revenues were collected and paid into the federal treasury to prove of great benefit to a hundred millions of people, the collection and payment of these same revenues will of necessity amount to some slight imposition and burden upon the ten millions of people when they are paid out of their resources and revenues. while we are considering monopolies it might not be inappropriate to consider that they are of two classes: private monopolies and government monopolies. one of the highest functions of government is to control and regulate private monopolies. it is not always easy, but the undoubted power exists and if properly applied is effective. history records that four-fifths of the exactions and oppressions and human sufferings that have existed in the world have come about when the conduct of business and the sources of supply were confined and vested in the government and constituted a government monopoly. government monopolies are invariably created for the alleged benefit of the people, and throughout all history have almost invariably operated to the oppression and detriment of the people and ultimately to deprive them of their liberties. in the face of these undeniable records of history, the people of the western states are invited to surrender their control over their industries and their own private monopolies and have substituted therefor a federal government monopoly over which they could have no possible control. the western states are asked not only to surrender this control, but along with it to surrender the powers of taxation and revenue over all these great resources. my friends, some of you may congratulate yourselves that these so-called policies are popular, and no doubt to a certain extent they are; we think, however, because they are misunderstood. there need be no misunderstanding between us. you are welcome to your assumption of victory, and to the assumption of defeat for those who adhere to the right of local self-government. we are correctly told that the ancient doctrine of state rights ended at appomattox. the doctrine was there ended that the federal government did not have all of the power necessary to protect and continue the nation for the common defense and the general welfare. the undeniable doctrine and right of the american people within the several states to continue an unrestrained local self-government was at that time neither destroyed nor impaired. the right and doctrine of local self-government will endure and continue until, if ever, some common disaster shall terminate and end the national existence as well as the existence of the several states. no question is ever settled until it is settled right. frankly, today may be yours but tomorrow is ours. the constitution of this country is greater and more enduring than any man. let there be no misunderstanding between us. you should not, but if you would you cannot, deprive the people of this country in any number of states or in any one state of the equal guaranteed constitutional right of local self-government. in recent months, so numerous have been the complaints and utterances against the courts that it would almost appear that there was a common design to discredit the courts with the american people. for even a longer period there have been recurring attacks upon and denials of the capability and capacity of the representative branch of our government. even within its obvious jurisdiction the legislative department has not only been excessively criticized but its very powers denied. the executive of the country and each of the states, congress, and each legislature of each of the states, the supreme court and all of the subordinate courts, derive all of their authority from the american people through the constitution of the united states. he who acts without and in spite of the constitution acts without authority from the people. constitutions are adopted to safeguard the rights of all men and to protect minorities from majorities. the question is not, where the constitution declares the measure of right, what the majority wants, but the question is, what does the constitution declare; and that is the beginning and the end of the law. the government under which we have lived is the best vindicated government in the history of the world. if a democratic people, as we have been told, have destroyed more since the adoption of the constitution than has been wasted and destroyed in europe in all of its history, we may admit this and agree that it is wise always to prevent waste; but we can with equal truth assert that if our free people under our free institutions have destroyed more than the people of europe in their entire history, our people by scientific research and invention have added more to the potential and productive power of the earth and the elements for the benefit and subsistence of mankind than has been added by the people of europe, asia, and africa during the entire recorded history of the world--all since the adoption of the constitution of the united states. whether it be popular or unpopular, it is true that the tendency to belittle the legislative power, to disparage judicial power, and to correspondingly exalt the executive power, is the same evil tendency that has destroyed every free government that has ever existed. it is the same spirit that overthrew the mild judicial government of samuel and made saul of tarsus king over israel. it is the same spirit that subverted the free cities and provinces of greece, and made alexander, the macedonian, the sole arbiter of the destinies not only of the people of greece but of the whole eastern world. it is the same spirit that subverted the senate and the tribunals of rome, and made julius caesar and his successors the emperors and rulers of the entire known world for succeeding centuries. we may agree that no such events will recur in modern history. but it is the same spirit that brings about such a condition in mexico that nobody knows or cares when congress meets or adjourns, because they never pass or suggest the passage of any laws that have not already been approved by the president. they must have a supreme court in mexico, because their constitution is very similar to our own. for the same reason we assume that they have states, although nobody ever hears of them. neither do we hear of any one criticizing the decisions of the supreme court of that country; nobody has ever suggested that within the last quarter of a century that court has ever decided anything displeasing to the president. the united states of america today is the world's sole and single exception where the people under a constitution through a long period of years have been guaranteed and have received the equal protection of the law. no guards have been required to stand at our city gates, no bayonets have defended our towns; we have all lived and prospered under the equal protection of equal laws. (applause) these institutions are human, they are imperfect and under them errors have been committed, but undeniably under this government the people have received a larger measure of liberty together with a better distribution of the benefits of industry than was ever received or enjoyed hitherto by any people in the world. we favor that new efficiency that is neither national nor state, that under an equal respect for the nation and for the state and for each branch of the government strives for a higher condition of civic virtue, better enforcement and greater respect for the law in all of its branches. i hope and pray that none of us may ever be required to look beyond the years when the constitution and the law in letter and in spirit are no longer supreme in this country and when we shall have reverted to "that good old simple plan, that each may take whate'er he may and keep whate'er he can." (applause) * * * * * professor condra--ladies and gentlemen: a question has been sent to the chair: "will the congress close this evening?" we do not know; probably the congress itself will decide. there are several other features in the program, and there will be a report by the committee on resolutions. it may be that the congress can finish all of its work today if you choose to re-convene. you all know the next speaker, honorable john barrett, director-general of the pan-american union. (applause) * * * * * mr barrett--mr chairman, ladies and gentleman: when the captivating senior senator from indiana fascinated us yesterday, and after holding us enthralled by his eloquence ending with that magnificent climax in eulogy of gifford pinchot, he left this room remarking to the reporters that he couldn't stay longer because he must go down and look after his state and , , people. now, if some of the rest of us relied on the measure of states and population as a reason for not being here, we would not come at all. for example, i might have said, when invited to take part in the work of this congress, that i couldn't possibly come because i might neglect that which was best for independent republics and , , people. what i want to say is this--that i would like to multiply twenty times over all the enthusiasm with which senator beveridge fired us yesterday, and extend it to many millions of people, in order that the wave started here by him and other speakers might sweep over the whole western hemisphere and remove the slightest question that all these republics are awake to the practical value of conservation. possibly some of you do not know very much more about the practical work of the pan-american union than i knew about the country to which i was first appointed minister some sixteen or seventeen years ago--when i knew as little about foreign affairs as some of us did a few years ago about conservation. one day the president of the united states, with two united states senators from north carolina standing near by--if one of them had been from north carolina and the other from south carolina there wouldn't have been any doubt as to what the conversation was to be (laughter), but as both came from the same state i was in the dark--looked at me and said, "mr barrett, i am trying to find some young man who is not afraid of hard work and wants to make a reputation for himself to go off to a distant country, in another part of the world, to settle a case involving several millions of dollars and our treaty rights in the orient; i am looking for a minister to siam." well, i thought that he wanted me to recommend somebody, and was trying to think of somebody in my state that i would like to get rid of and never see again, when he added, "i am thinking of appointing you; what do you know about siam?" to save my life i couldn't even remember where it was, and i was conscious of the terrible impression i must be making upon the executive, when with a twinkle in his eye he intimated "i have him this time." then, a child-memory coming back, i braced myself and said, "why, mr president, _i know all about siam_." "you do? what do you know about that country?" "why, mr president, siam is the country that produced the siamese twins." whereupon he shook my hand and said he was delighted to get hold of a man of such abundant information. (laughter) now, before proceeding further, let me, as one of the officers of this congress--although one who has had very little to do with its hard work--join with you in expressing profound appreciation of the splendid hospitality that has been shown the delegates and all others who have come here to the city of saint paul in the state of minnesota (applause). moreover, i believe it is only fair and fitting that we should also express our gratitude for the hard work and the devotion to this congress shown by president baker and secretary shipp and professor condra and chairman white and other men belonging to the executive committee. (applause) i have been asked, as a resident of the district of columbia, whether, if this congress shall go to the east next year, it might not go to the city of washington, and there arouse the interest and the sympathy of the east. the west is awake; and if it be necessary to secure the cooperation of the eastern sections, and if the executive committee hesitates as to where it may go, i can assure them that by the city of washington, the capital of the nation, will be given a welcome akin to that which has been given by the city of saint paul. ladies and gentlemen, one feature of this congress has made a profound impression upon me, of which perhaps too little mention has been made: the cooperation and interest of the women. that was a splendid speech made the other day by mabel boardman; other women have spoken well, and others will. i assure you that there is no better omen of the success of this movement than this cooperation by women (applause). and i want to say right here, that whenever i am able to pay a tribute to the courage and the quality of women, i like to do it. it so happened that i was your first minister to panama, in the days which tried men's souls--where i, as minister, frequently had to preside where three or four splendid boys, graduates from our colleges and high schools, were laid under the wet clay in one grave, all victims of yellow fever. when i went down there with general davis, then governor of the canal zone, there were some sixteen girls, nurses, picked from all over this country--i think one or two came from saint paul or minneapolis--who had never seen yellow fever before, had never experienced the pestilential conditions faced in panama when we were "blazing the way" for the present sanitary condition. well, they came and took up their work; and in a short time the yellow fever spread until men were dying every day in increasing numbers, and both the boys and men came to us and begged that they might return to the united states--in the parlance of the canal work, they had "cold feet," and it was with the greatest difficulty that we were able to hold them there to perform the great task of making the zone sanitary as well as digging the canal that the oceans might be united; but when the yellow fever was conquered, general davis and i discovered that during all that time of peril and death and threatened desertion, not _one_ of those sixteen girls faltered or asked permission to leave her station of duty. (great applause) ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure today to be followed by a representative of the british government who is a credit to his government and to the great man whom he represents here, the right honorable james bryce, british ambassador (applause). there is nothing more splendid than the thought of the cooperation of this mighty country north of us, canada, with her , , square miles and her ambitious men and women with problems akin to ours; and it is both appropriate and flattering that the british empire should have responded to the invitation and sent here a special representative of their embassy (applause). we are to be congratulated on his attendance. it seems to me that during the past three or four days i have heard the word "insurgent" used. am i correct, mr president? president baker--"progressive." mr barrett--i think there have been some references to progressiveness and insurgency. now, as the head of an international bureau whose constituency is composed of twenty latin-american republics, i want to tell you that you don't know anything here about real insurgency (applause). why, we have men in central america and south america who could make murdock and madison look like picayune persons if they came in competition with them in the matter of insurgency. we have republics that can give kansas and wisconsin and nebraska and minnesota cards and spades and all the trumps in the pack, and then beat them out in insurgency. but i want to say this, that in all my experience in those countries as minister and my studies of their history, there has never been an insurgency or revolution, from mexico south to argentina which has succeeded without at the same time moving the country forward for its benefit (applause). i do not say this in any political spirit, because i am not in politics; being an international officer, i am neither republican nor democrat, but a citizen of america; yet i do say this, that the spirit of onward movement among men shown thus from time to time is a splendid sign of the progressive type which characterizes the american people, whether they be american of north america or american of south america. (applause) ladies and gentlemen, it would be a splendid thing today if the voice that has been sounded here on conservation could be heard by every pan-american--through that all america comprehending not only our own wonderful land but twenty other nations, covering an area of , , square miles, having a population of , , people, and conducting a foreign commerce valued at the magnificent total of $ , , , annually. only a few years ago latin-america seemed almost like an unknown land; but today these countries from mexico and cuba south to argentina and chile are making more progress commercially and materially than almost any other section of the world. we hear much of the orient, of japan and of china, whose inhabitants are alien people, alien in philosophy, alien in religion, raising the greatest racial question before the world; but here at the south of us are twenty sister nations whose peoples have the same ambitions as yours, the same religion, the same philosophy, the same hopes--and yet you and i have been sitting in cozy corners flirting with japan and china, and neglecting our own sisters in our own family (applause). last year argentina--a country half as large as our own splendid land, in a temperate zone, with nearly , , splendid white people, having sons whom you would allow your daughters to marry and daughters you would allow your sons to marry--conducted a greater foreign trade than the , , japanese or the , , chinese (applause); and yet we are neglecting them. now these countries gained independence at the hands of leaders who studied the life of george washington (applause), and they have continued their existence under the example of such men as abraham lincoln. whether you go upon the high andes or in the valley of the great amazon, the names of washington and lincoln are known almost as well as those of their own great heroes who helped them to win independence. ladies and gentlemen, it is time that through the cooperation of all these countries we should accomplish protection for them and for ourselves; and we should have in the near future a great pan-american conference of conservation, when all the countries from canada south will send their representatives to join us in working together to safeguard their prosperity, to safeguard our own, to promote our mutual and several interests until this whole hemisphere from alaska and the arctic on the north to chile and the straits of magellan on the south shall present a united force for the benefit not only of ourselves but of those who are to come after us. is there anything more magnificent than this thought that the twenty-one independent republics and an independent nation like canada should join hands in such a purpose? the details i shall not discuss, but i want it to be a thought that shall sink into your minds. now, i wish that i could take all the "hot air" that has arisen in this great auditorium and make a mighty balloon to take you for a trip over our sister countries (applause). i would like to show you brazil, into which you could place all of the united states and still have room left over for the german empire; i would like to take you up the amazon, out of which flows five times the volume of the mississippi; i would like to take you to buenos aires, the capital of argentina, which has a population of , , and is growing faster than any city in the united states with the exception of new york and chicago--i would like to show you its magnificent boulevards, its splendid public buildings, its schools, its cathedrals and churches; i would like to take you across the andes over that wonderful tunnel just completed and show you chile, which if placed at the southern end of california would reach up into the heart of alaska, in the very infancy of a splendid development; i would like to take you into bolivia, into which you could put texas three times and still have room left over; into peru, which would cover the whole atlantic coast from maine to georgia; into colombia, where you could place all of germany and france; into mexico, that would cover the whole southwestern section of this country; i would like to take you over all these countries and show you how they are moving forward, prove to you the remarkable fact that during the last fifteen years that part of the world has gone ahead with progress almost equal to ours. now, if we in this country are going to meet the great problems of manufacturing and the employment of labor and capital in the future, we must aid these countries to conserve their resources to supply our manufacturing plants with raw material. hundreds of millions of dollars today are keeping occupied by laboring men in this country factories that would have to be closed tomorrow if these countries were unable to supply us with their raw materials--think of that as we remember where we were only twenty-five years ago; and if some god-given influence can empower them to see our mistakes we will find, twenty-five years from now, brazil and argentina and mexico and canada providing us with those elements which shall make this country forever the greatest power in the world for civilization and for commerce. (applause) as i stand here before an audience of the west an inspiration comes for the work we have in washington that only those can feel whose residence is not entirely in the west. though born and brought up in new england and later taking my residence on the pacific coast, i have been much out of the country representing you abroad; and i rejoice in the ozone of patriotism that i am able to absorb in a state like minnesota. time and time again, after trips around the world i have arrived in new york or in washington hardly feeling that i was in the united states of america; but when i have crossed the alleghenies into the mississippi valley, into sections like this, then i have felt the pulsing of red blood, that impulse and influence which is making our country great; and i am proud today to be able to go back to washington feeling more capable than ever before for my humble task because of the contact with representative men of the west. (applause) there are two personal references that i make before i sit down: when on tuesday i sat on the platform and saw the personality of the foremost private citizen of the world exerting its influence, the prime thought that came into my mind was, not that he was speaking for the great cause of conservation, not that he was appealing to the moral sense of our people, but that there stood a splendid, a perfect example of what the young men of this country can do (applause). is there anything finer than to see a man of his physique, with the glow of health upon his face, the father of a family of which he can be proud, a man with a clear moral life and courageous career, one whose voice has been heard all over the world with respect--is there anything finer than that we should raise up in this country that class of men? and i tell you it would be disgraceful to our country with its , , people if we could not produce a man of that kind. it is the personal influence of theodore roosevelt, all over this country, not only among our young men, but among our young women, leading to world uplift and to sterling character, that we must have in order to fight the battles that are before us. (great applause) and there is this suggestion about his chief lieutenant who has perhaps been the father of this movement: i have known gifford pinchot personally, as a dear friend, for many years. it makes my heart well up with joy, it makes my pride as an american citizen more emphatic than ever before, when i think that a man born in affluence of a splendid family, born with every opportunity in the most exclusive circles of new york and washington, a man who could own his private yacht or spend his time in the gaieties of fashionable resorts, a man who could belong to every club and enjoy all its pleasures--that such a man has devoted his life unselfishly to the good of the american people and to the cause of conservation (great applause). it is a splendid example of true american manhood; and when he speaks here, as he has spoken in other places, the influence that he exerts is not merely for the cause of conservation but for the highest ideals which you and i have of american manhood. so i rest assured that the cause of conservation, with such an advocate as theodore roosevelt and such an apostle as gifford pinchot, will not be confined within the limits of the united states but will resound through canada and through mexico and on south even to the limits of the southern continent; and i foresee that you and i will be proud that we were able to participate in the effort to extend this movement. (great applause) * * * * * a delegate--mr chairman: as a member of the executive committee of the national conservation congress, i ask for the privilege of the floor for the purpose of introducing a resolution. professor condra--that will be in order immediately after the response by honorable esmond ovey, secretary of the british embassy, which is a part of the presentation now in progress. i take pleasure in introducing honorable esmond ovey. (applause) * * * * * mr ovey--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: when i arrived here on monday i noticed in the program laid before me a very disquieting item to the effect that a speech would be delivered on the subject of "conservation as a world-wide question" by a visiting representative of a foreign nation. i did not think that would mean me, and until yesterday evening was still hoping that some other representative would be found, more adequate than myself, to take the burden from my shoulders. however, no savior has appeared, and i think my best course will be, under the circumstances, to make an entirely clean breast in the matter and tell you that my knowledge on the subject of the technical details of the conservation of natural resources is very meager. the field of natural resources with which i personally am more occupied is one which is slightly different from that which forms the subject of your deliberations, a field that is perhaps as great and in many ways certainly as important; it is a field which requires neither phosphates nor potash, nor any of these ingredients of which i unfortunately am so ignorant--it is the field of international relation, and the crop or harvest is the harvest of peace and good will (applause). the duty of the diplomat is to watch this crop ripen. it is a crop which can go on forever ripening and getting greater, but there is, of course, the possibility of some spark dropping; and it is then the duty of the diplomat to attempt, so far as possible to arrest and extinguish that spark before it flames up like these wasteful and terrible conflagrations which occasionally sweep through the forests of this country. in this connection i will point out that in the immediate field of international relation between great britain and the united states there has been an exceedingly long period in which there has been no spark dropped (applause); the year after next will, gentlemen--i may call it to your attention--be the th birthday of peace between the two great english-speaking nations of the world. (applause) i have the very great pleasure of being here as the representative of my chief, the british ambassador, mr james bryce (applause). the british board of agriculture were unfortunately unable to send a delegate to attend this great conference. mr bryce himself was the recipient of a very cordial invitation from the president of this congress, mr baker. mr baker in his letter stated that should mr bryce be unable to accept, he would be glad if a member of his staff could come. mr bryce had long pre-arranged and planned a visit to panama and south america; i can only suppose with his great intelligence mr bryce (my own immediate chief) has gone there for the purpose of improving his mind in the contemplation of the achievements of my friend mr john barrett (applause). i have been commissioned by mr bryce to tell you how very glad he would have been to be able to accept this invitation. confidentially, i may tell you that, glad as mr bryce would have been to be here, i do not believe he would have been so glad as i am to be here myself. (applause) mr bryce is a man very difficult to represent (applause). his knowledge is encyclopedic. even if taken by surprise and asked to speak to an audience such as this, containing so many representatives of all the practical, scientific and technical phases of the great problem which is being discussed at this congress, he would, i am certain, have been able to draw on the great storehouse of his knowledge and give you the benefit of his accurate observation in a technically interesting form. i can, unfortunately, lay claim to no such talents. i will, however, refuse to yield to him in the enthusiasm--that sort of contagion to which mr barrett referred--which i feel here in this great country and in the state of minnesota on the subject of the noble ideals, the efforts and the aims of these congresses. it seems to me that the idea of careful deliberation and open discussion by persons from all parts of the world in an attempt to arrive at the conclusion and basis on which to build up a policy of conservation so you can hand down to posterity the great benefits that you enjoy, is a very noble conception. one of the great characteristic differences between occidental civilization and that of certain less civilized and advanced oriental nations is the great quality of foresight, of looking to the future; and this is a quality which you possess in a most extraordinary degree. i do not wish to deny that other people to whom i have referred also possess this quality; i will, if you permit me, give you an instance to prove that it is possessed by them, if in a less perfected form. there was upon a time a gentleman from some unspecified country in the far east who had an orchard. to protect this orchard from the prevailing cold northerly winds which destroyed his fruit in the early winter, he built a wall on that side of his property. when he had built his wall he called in a friend to admire it. the friend came and admired it. the wall was solidly built, six feet high, and twelve feet wide. the friend asked him, "why have you chosen these peculiar dimensions for your wall?" he said, "ah, i have foresight. i built this way for a reason: my neighbors' walls are frequently blown over by the wind. when mine is blown over, it will be twice as high as it was before." (laughter) now, that is not the sort of construction in this magnificent building of conservation that you are preparing. another quality, if i may be permitted to mention it, that i, as a foreigner, have observed, is a great quality which is invariably a concomitant of real progress; it is a certain kind of glorious dissatisfaction with your own achievements, however great they may be (applause). for instance, you have something which is very, very great--your country. you never were satisfied with that, you want to make it very, very good. you have something which is very, very good, the great american people; you want to make them, as far as i can understand, as numerous as possible (laughter and applause). you have your natural resources, which are very great and very good, perhaps the greatest and best on earth, and yet you are not satisfied. what do you do then? you say, "let's make them _everlasting_." (applause) now, ladies and gentlemen, that seems to me a very fine and high ambition on which you have set your minds. before concluding, i will venture to tell you about an impression that i received on my way out to saint paul, on this my first visit west of washington. as i looked out of the windows at the flying countryside, upon lake after lake, upon mountain, valley, plain, stream, forest, farm, garden, factory, city, town, i said to myself, "what manner of people then can these well be who have so kindly and courteously asked me to a congress which is apparently convening for the purpose of conserving the natural resources? what manner of people can these be that by digging, delving, plowing, mining, bridging, tunneling, felling, and building roads and railroads on all these countless millions of acres of rich and fertile land--many of which are protected from approach on the east by apparently uncrossable mountains and unfordable streams and what to lesser intelligence might seem unbridgable rivers--what manner of people may these be who, in spite of these obstacles, in this short period of time, have forced dame nature herself to cry out, gentlemen, please hold steady with me for a moment." (applause) such were my thoughts: and it seems to me that the necessity for convening these annual congresses for open discussion of the best means of avoiding unnecessary waste and of giving nature a chance of recuperation affords the highest compliment that it is possible to pay to the enterprise, courage, perseverance, and indomitable pluck of any nation. can you, therefore, ladies and gentlemen, ask if in view of these facts the government of great britain is interested in your efforts? as secretary of the british embassy i myself was instrumental in forwarding to my government in one year, through the kind intermediation of the state department, no less than copies of the report of the governors of on the conservation of your national resources, which, if i understand rightly, was one of the first expressions of this great movement-- departments of that government interested in this movement. (applause) it is my pleasurable duty to inform you that with her own magnificent dominions across the seas, with her great enterprises in forestry, irrigation, agriculture, and mining, in all scientific exploitation of land for the public good in canada, in australia, in india, in egypt, in south africa and british east africa, and in all the other places throughout the world in which great britain is now working, the government which i have the honor to serve is in the heartiest possible sympathy with the great object of your endeavors in conserving for posterity, for people not yet born, the same magnificent heritage which you and we enjoy. (applause) * * * * * professor condra--all those who wish to say that as delegates we stand for pan-american conservation of natural resources, and for good fellowship and world-wide conservation of all things best for mankind on all lines of industrial development, will please rise. [the audience rose en masse.] professor condra--there was a resolution to be offered at this time. a delegate--mr chairman: i move that the time for the election of officers of the national conservation congress for the ensuing year be fixed for the hour of p.m., thursday, september , and that the committee on resolutions submit their report immediately following the election of officers. the motion was seconded by delegates from iowa, south dakota, utah, indiana, north dakota, wisconsin, and the district of columbia; and the motion was put and carried without dissenting voice. professor condra--a recess will be taken until oclock p.m. _eighth session_ the congress reassembled in the auditorium, saint paul, at oclock p.m., thursday, september , president baker in the chair. president baker--fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen: it has been urged that a nominating committee should be appointed to name officers proposed to be elected by the congress as president, secretary, executive secretary, and treasurer. the vice-presidents have been chosen by the state delegations, and their names will be presented this afternoon. so, unless some other course be preferred, the chair will proceed to form a nominating committee. [after a pause.] the nominating committee will consist of professor george e. condra, of nebraska, as chairman; e. t. allen, of oregon; e. l. worsham, of georgia; lynn b. meekins, of maryland; and william holton dye, of indiana. delegates are invited to offer suggestions or nominations to the committee, which will hold a meeting during the afternoon. i have the honor now of presenting as presiding officer, his excellency a. o. eberhart, governor of minnesota. (applause) * * * * * governor eberhart--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: i am indeed sorry that i am to be engaged elsewhere a portion of this afternoon, so that i cannot take part in the entire program. we have this afternoon an unveiling of a statue in the capital, and i will necessarily have to take some part in the ceremony; but i shall hasten back just as soon as i can, so that i may hear the speakers who are on the program for this afternoon. i do not know whether the president of this congress has made a special effort to secure splendid speakers for this afternoon, but certainly no session of the congress, either forenoon, afternoon, or evening, has had better, more sincere, and more earnest and efficient workers along the lines of conservation interests than those for this afternoon; and for that reason i am indeed sorry that i shall not hear them all. i want to say to you that the state of minnesota and the twin cities are proud of the delegates and the guests and the speakers of this convention, realizing that perhaps never in the history of the conservation movement will there ever be another meeting so important as this, and one that will redound so much to the progressive and effectual work of the movement. i take great pleasure in introducing to you as the first speaker of this afternoon a man interested in the conservation movement from the standpoint of public health--dr f. f. wesbrook, dean of the medical department of our state university--who will speak on "life and health as national assets." i consider it one of the most important subjects of the conservation movement. i take great pleasure in introducing dean wesbrook. (applause) * * * * * dean wesbrook--mr president, your excellency, ladies and gentlemen: short-sighted humanity fails to appreciate nature's gifts until threatened with their loss. this is true of even the greatest of her gifts, life itself. although belated in our realization of the threatened overdraft on nature's storehouse, a compensatory and irresistible enthusiasm has developed within the last two years which augurs well for the retention by our country of that international leadership so manifestly foreordained by nature's bountiful equipment. it is significant of our failure to value health, which above all other considerations makes life worth the living, that the first meeting of the governors in the white house in failed to provide for the study of health problems. the omission was noted, and in the national conservation commission's report of january , , the general schedule gave special consideration to life and health. only four sections, however, were created in the appointment of the national conservation commission. health was not provided with a special section or with officers. in the north american conservation congress, in addition to the conservation of other national resources, the protection of game received attention; but among the commissioners representing the various countries, there was seemingly no one whose training and paramount interest lay in the field of public health. while it is apparent that the initial oversight has been in part repaired it remains to be seen what progress will result from the second national conservation congress, in relation to this, the people's most important natural asset. the inclusion in the program of a paper entitled "life and health as national assets" must not be taken as evidence that there is any doubt as to the real and assessable value of life and health. rather are we called upon at this time to realize that they constitute national or public resources furnished by nature and are not to be regarded as strictly personal or private possessions. the individual life has its economic and commercial value to the community and the nation by virtue of the contribution it may be expected to make to society. this view may perhaps be novel to some. our ideas concerning the conservation of other natural resources however, have undergone such rapid evolution in the recent past that we may easily orient ourselves to the viewpoint exhibited by the officers of this congress, that the individual in matters of health, as of other resources, must respect the rights of other individuals and of his municipality, state, and government. the health aspect of conservation, which is its most important aspect, cannot and will not be neglected, although it has not been the first to which the attention of the nation has been directed. nor can we dissociate health conservation from the other aspects of the movement, even if we would. the history of man's progress in the knowledge of the natural sciences bears out this statement. even though we ourselves have broken faith with nature, we are able today to make her fulfil her promises in forestry, agriculture, and other economic matters by the application of our knowledge of those very sciences which may be said to owe their birth to man's search for perpetual life and youth. one can easily imagine that the medieval conservation commission comprised two sections, one on health and the other on minerals. in the former, which undoubtedly was basic and dominated all other considerations, the papers presented dealt with "elixir vitæ" and the "touchstone" whilst in the latter the chief interest was displayed in the "transmutation of metals." at this stage the studies of health and of the control of man's so-called material assets were carried on hand in hand; and, if we are logical, they always will be. in any event, man's health depends on the success of his efforts to adapt his environment to his needs, more than it does on the adaptation of himself to his environment. health interests are fused with social and economic development, but should undoubtedly dominate rather than be dominated by them. our lack of interest in matters of health is more apparent than real. it is characteristic of many of us that where our most vital interests are involved, we betray the least public concern. in nothing is this better exemplified than in matters of personal and public health, except it be perhaps in matters of religious belief and practice. nor should we deem it strange that a similar attitude of mind obtains in matters of health and religion. in medieval times the priest and the physician were one. at the present day, aboriginal tribes combine religion and health, and to too great an extent, perhaps, do our civilized nations fail to discriminate between the two. particularly is this exhibited in man's cowardly attempt to shift his responsibility for disease and death upon providence. one of the greatest causes of lethargy in the conservation of personal and public health is the failure on the part of many to differentiate clearly and sharply between disease and death. the former is really a manifestation of life and vital force, and is capable of modification, prevention, or cure by human agency, since man has shown himself quite able to solve nature's other secrets for the benefit of his comfort or convenience. we conserve health by the application of the same sciences which enable us to conserve our other better recognized but less material natural resources. disease yields to man's mastery; death remains man's mystery. even death, however, may be postponed, and professor irving fisher has estimated that over , deaths occur each year in our country which could be postponed by the systematic application of the scientific knowledge already available. for those who think more easily in terms of dollars and cents, he has estimated this appalling annual national loss at over one billion dollars which can and should be prevented. we must not be lulled into any sense of well-being by such statistics. there is no royal road to such a goal. our very success in the eradication of one disease or unsanitary condition may lead to undue optimism in regard to other problems, which later may be found to be dependent on altogether different causes and to require very different methods of prevention or cure. failure to realize the complexities of modern social activity and economic development, in their relation to health, and, at the same time, to recognize the immense number of variable factors and agencies which are involved in health-protective measures, cannot but lead to disappointment. the individual whose enthusiasm is too easily aroused by the discovery of some hitherto unknown cause of disease, or some new method or theory of cure or prevention, is a source of danger to the commonwealth. the faddist, whether in the matter of such things as food, clothing, fresh air, baths, exercise or other therapeutic agents, as well as the individual who thinks that he has discovered the one cause of all diseases, is to be feared. our chief difficulty lies in coordinating the various forces and agencies which are essential to success in the eradication of sickness. there is no blanket method of preventing all diseases. quarantine and fumigation are now found to have but a limited application. vaccination, which is practically an absolute and the only reliable protection against smallpox, cannot be applied to such diseases as malaria, yellow fever, and diphtheria. the use of antitoxin, which prevents annually many thousands of deaths from diphtheria, does not help us in many other diseases. our knowledge of mosquito-borne disease, which has reorganized life in cuba, panama and the philippines, is not of much practical use in our northern states. as there is no single cause, so there can be no single method either of cure or prevention. these considerations should not discourage us. they show us, however, the need of further study, and the imperative demand for employing the services of trained physicians, biologists, chemists, engineers, statisticians, sociologists, educationists, and other experts and of coordinating all their efforts. we must steer a middle course, avoiding on the one hand the scylla upon which those run who become discouraged in the face of what they believe to be the unknowable, and, on the other hand, the charybdis of that fateful tendency to minimize the actual complexities of the present day health problem. fatalist and faddist are equally dangerous. it is fair to count upon the same progress in the adaptation of physical, chemical, biological, social and other sciences to the diagnosis, cure and prevention of disease as in their application to man's comfort, convenience and economic development. it is clear that the efforts of all the various workers in the different fields must be coordinated; yet the difficulties of coordination are at once apparent. the forces and agencies may be roughly divided into international, national, state, county, municipal and institutional, as well as individual. each one of these is capable of still further subdivision into two classes, one of which is official or governmental and the other is voluntary. improvement in public health requires cooperation and coordination of _all_ these. successful public health administration consists largely in making individuals do what they do not wish to do--or that of which they do not appreciate the necessity--for the good of themselves and others. this brings us naturally to the consideration of another national weakness. we encounter some of the same difficulties in public health work that we meet in the exercise of our other public functions. rampant individualism is of even greater danger in matters of health conservation than in other affairs of public concern, largely on account of the fact that health is too often regarded as a purely personal rather than a most important public asset. the individualist objects to authority in matters of health control. consequently he resents dictation as to his personal action, and fails to recognize the need for special training in health administration as in other branches of public service. public service of many kinds, and particularly that which relates to the conservation of health in our country, is all too often relegated to voluntary agencies, while in other countries it devolves upon official and governmental agencies. this volitional duty is nobly discharged. the main function of the volunteer should be, however, to afford to the general public object lessons of what is needed and of how progress can be made. in this he rarely fails, although he labors under tremendous difficulty imposed by lack of authority. funds which are furnished from private sources are frequently insufficient to permit of the employment of experts of the highest order. public apathy, on the one hand, and the development of an abnormal interest on the part of voluntary workers on the other, frequently lead to their continuance in service long after they have ceased to be useful, with the result either that the public delays the establishment of an official organization, or, if such an organization be established, there is a conflict between the official and voluntary forces. if municipal health departments, hospital services, police departments, water, school, poor and park boards, and other official servants and representatives of the people were supported by the people and were quick to see and to seize their opportunities, there would be less need of associated charities, of visiting nurses, pure water and milk commissions, tuberculosis camps, play-grounds associations, and other such voluntary organizations. is it not humiliating that public lethargy made it necessary for mr rockefeller to provide funds for the investigation and eradication of hookworm disease? in germany, the government, through its public health service and universities, provides for medical and other research so that nation has become a leader of the world in scientific health protection and scientific economic development. having seen some of the difficulties which stand in the way of satisfactory conservation of the public health, we might perhaps ask ourselves what proof of the possibility of conserving this asset is available. if, at this day and time, the american public is unconvinced of the need and possibility of conserving public health, it is undeserving of the respect of other nations, or even of self-respect. the daily and weekly press, our magazines, and governmental and other publications, have overflowed with information. our attention has been particularly called to the possibility of preserving the health of men in the field by japan's experience in the recent war with russia. our life insurance companies have been quick to see the practical possibilities of prolonging the lives of their insured and of thus increasing the earnings of their stockholders. as illustrating our progress, the report on "national vitality, its wastes and conservation," which was issued by the american association for the advancement of science, is a masterpiece; it was prepared and presented by professor irving fisher, of yale university. the publications of the various committees of the american medical association, and the speech of senator owen in the congressional record of march , , as well as federal, state, municipal and other health reports, afford examples of what can be done. those who may be skeptical in regard to the ability of our people to compete with older nations in the prevention of disease, should note what has actually been done by americans under the greatest of difficulties. in cuba, our nation overturned the existing order of affairs, and scientific discoveries, made and applied to sanitation by americans, afforded a lesson to the world. there has been no greater factor in winning the world-wide confidence of other nations than the production of the existing sanitary state of affairs in the canal zone by our own citizens. our work in cuba, panama, and the philippines has served to bring about hygienic conditions in supposedly pestilential regions which are vastly superior to those which obtain at home. what americans have done for others they have failed to do for themselves, owing largely to the lack of provision of adequate official and governmental agencies and to the failure to coordinate those which exist. two americans in porto rico showed the possibility of stamping out hookworm disease. the brains were furnished by the united states, and the money by the island. we have the brains at home, but we refuse to pay the bills. it is manifest that a full and complete discussion of life and health as national assets is impossible within the limits of a single paper. no attempt need be made to present a complete basis either of comparison or differentiation of health conservation from the other aspects of the national movement. it must be clear to all that in the conservation of lands, minerals, waters, and forests, effort is made to prevent the individual from taking that which belongs to the public. in the conservation of public health, our effort must be directed to preventing the individual from giving to the public something which neither he nor it desires. this is particularly true of infectious diseases. there are many other phases of public health than those which relate to infectious disease, but they cannot be discussed at this time. i have the honor to be a delegate to this congress from both the american medical association and the american public health association, which represent factors in the conservation of human life and health concerning which the public needs more information than it possesses; and with your permission, i shall briefly mention a few important matters: in the past, individual physicians and local medical associations and societies have brought a scattering fire to bear upon the inactivity and ignorance of the general public in matters which pertain to public health. the public fails to believe in the urgency of health needs, when presented by individuals or groups of physicians, because of its inability to appreciate the motive which leads the physician to urge the establishment of machinery and the special education of officials, as also the provision of funds to carry on work which to the casual observer would mean a diminution of the individual physician's work and income. physicians who have qualified by postgraduate training in bacteriology, pathology, epidemiology, and in public health, hospital, school and institutional administrative work must be drafted into the direct and official service of the people. this need is increasingly apparent. others are required who can present evidence of special scientific training in chemistry, engineering, statistical, sociological, charity and other work. at present, great as is the actual need, the demand on the part of the public and the remuneration offered are so small and the possibility of employment so uncertain that universities, technical schools, and other institutions which offer special courses fail to attract students. the public seems to prefer as yet to jeopardize its most valuable asset by employing untrained public health servants who develop efficiency after, instead of before, their appointment. this means a payment in life and health instead of dollars. the average individual seems willing to pay, and pay well, for a cure when he is sick. communities pay the cost of epidemics, and will even pay for engineering services in relation to public utilities, such as water supply and sewage disposal; but this is usually done only under the stimulus of some recent or threatened disaster. they, like the individual, want a _cure_, not a _protection_. clinical experts, life insurance examiners, and consulting and commercial engineers, are all sure of a good livelihood because they can help the individual or community out of difficulties. sanitarians and municipal engineers are usually left to semi-starvation, because their function is to prevent those same difficulties, without, however, having either available public sentiment or funds to enable them to do it. physicians are naturally skeptical of the scientific training and possession of proper ideals on the part of those who have not been especially trained in medicine, and who may have failed to develop the "disease point of view." that they are, however, of a receptive frame of mind can be shown in many ways. the american medical association has a number of standing committees, including a council on medical education. this council, in the endeavor to raise the standard of medical teaching throughout the united states, prepared a standard schedule of minimal requirements, through the agency of ten committees, each of which consisted of ten representative men. one of these ten committees (which had to deal with hygiene, medical jurisprudence, and medical economics) contained in its membership university and college professors of chemistry, physiological chemistry, political economy, pathology, bacteriology and hygiene. there were also executive officers of state and municipal boards of health, and representatives of the federal health service; whilst among the collaborators were engineers and many university professors. bear in mind that this was a committee of the so-called "medical trust"--the american medical association. through oversight for which no one is responsible, this second national conservation congress and the american public health association are meeting on exactly the same dates, september - , we in saint paul and the association in milwaukee--i was just able to get here from milwaukee. this association consists of some physicians who are in practice, but more particularly of federal, state, municipal and institutional administrative officers, as also of laboratory, statistical, engineering, and other technical workers. the membership includes representatives from all of the leading universities and medical and technical colleges. it has three sections, namely, laboratory, vital statistics, and municipal health officer sections. you are familiar with the work of many of its officers and members. colonel gorgas, who was responsible for the administrative health work in cuba, and who has made possible the building of the panama canal without undue loss of life, is a member of both associations. the late dr walter reed, who eliminated yellow fever from civilized communities, was vice-president. it is an international association in which canada, mexico, and cuba also participate, and much can be learned by attendance at these annual meetings. one of its chief benefits has been the formulation of standard methods of scientific procedure, applicable to the suppression of disease in various districts of the several countries. we in this country are compelled to admit that our neighbors upon the north and south have much in the way of advantage which is denied to our own workers in the united states. in our sister countries, the tenure of office depends on the fitness and training of the incumbent. as a rule the compensation for public service is relatively higher, and the official organizations are better provided with an authority which is commensurate with their responsibility than is the case in our own country. time will not permit extended discussion of these conditions, but the annual opportunity to compare notes; to tell each other of our successes, as also of our failures; and to help in the formulation of new methods and in an effort toward a higher standard of efficiency, is of untold value. this is, however, a purely voluntary organization maintained for over thirty years at the personal expense of its members in the face of public apathy. this will be realized if i ask, "how many of you knew that we have such an association," and "did you know that it is now in session"? there yet remain a few matters of which a general understanding would bring about yet greater cooperation between the doctor and the general public. the medical profession has realized for a number of years that its members must become teachers of personal hygiene to their patients and families, as also to schools and the general public. it is a new viewpoint, and involves the assumption of new responsibilities. the doctor has guarded himself against publicity except through his professional societies and journals and to his students, though ever eager to furnish details of his own discoveries and to recount his failures and his successes to those who could understand and sympathize. this kind of publicity has been regarded, however, by the lay public as a sort of soliloquy carried on in an unknown tongue, and intended for the mystification of that same poor public. why there should be any failure of the medical profession, as a whole, to be understood by the general public, it is difficult to see. the general public is composed of individuals, each of whom has a feeling of trust, affection, and possibly of veneration for one or more members of the medical profession. why then does the public, as an aggregation of individuals, allow itself to become suspicious of the medical profession, an aggregation of physicians? why does the public abhor and obstruct the physician in his study of anatomy, dissection, and autopsy on the human body? why is there so much suspicion of the motives and work, as well as denial of the benefits which accrue to humanity from animal experimentation, when it must be apparent to any right-thinking individual that the extension of a physician's knowledge is possible only by such means? why must doctors from time to time be themselves forced to urge the necessity of making every hospital a teaching and research institution? a moment's thought would convince anyone that if this be not done, and if medical knowledge be allowed to die out with this generation, there will be no skilled men available for the hospitals and patients of the future. it must also be patent to all that the patients themselves cannot possibly receive such effective care in a hospital in which medical research and teaching are not fostered. why should the burden of maintaining a high standard of entrance to the profession and of preventing incompetent and untrained persons from assuming the responsibility of physicians rest solely on the medical profession, when the object is the protection of private citizens and public health? the physicians of the united states are now thoroughly organized. the public should rejoice in this, since it is an attempt to neutralize the narrowing effect of isolation and to foster an exchange of information which physicians offer freely to each other and publish broadcast to the world (applause). county and state associations are affiliated with the american medical association, which numbers in its membership over seventy thousand doctors. just as the individual physician's concern is the care of his patient, so that of the organized medical profession is public health and welfare. the medical profession is, as a rule, underpaid, but members spend their hard-earned-money and a large portion of their time in efforts to benefit humanity, individually and _en masse_. it is the people's concern to demand a broad education and a thorough scientific training of all students and practitioners of medicine, public and private. it is to their interest to see that every possible facility is afforded for teaching and that a rigid standard of teaching, examination, degree conference, and licensure is maintained. nothing is more exasperating to the physician of high ideals, whose length and breadth of sacrifice is known to none, than to hear the sneer directed at his profession for its effort to protect the public. the time has come when the medical profession is in a position to demand that the people exercise discrimination and protect themselves. one of the first steps toward the betterment of our public health conditions is the coordination of the existing federal agencies in washington, of which we are all so proud. when no logical reason can be advanced in explanation of further delay, it is very discouraging to realize that this important matter has been postponed. at the st congress, various bills were introduced, including that of senator owen. in support of these bills appeared those who by special training and long experience are recognized at home and abroad as the highest authorities on public health. the whole country is waiting to see what action her representatives will take to protect her most precious asset. with your permission, i should like to cite some sixteen reasons why the people of the united states should have a department of health at washington, which were published by the committee of one hundred of the american association for the advancement of science: --to stop the spread of typhoid fever through drinking sewage-polluted water of interstate streams. --to enforce adequate quarantine regulations so as to keep out of the country plague and other similar pestilences. --to supervise interstate common carriers, in so far as without such supervision they prove a menace to the health of the traveling public. --to have a central organization of such dignity and importance that departments of health of states and cities will seek its cooperation and will pay heed to its advice. --to influence health authorities, state and municipal, to enact reform legislation in relation to health matters. --to act as a clearing-house of state and local health regulations, and to codify such regulations. --to draw up a model scheme of sanitary legislation for the assistance of state and municipal health officers. --to gather accurate data on all questions of sanitation throughout the united states. --to establish the chief causes of preventable disease and unnecessary ill-health. --to study conditions and causes of disease recurring in different parts of the united states. --to correlate and assist investigations carried on in many separate and unrelated biological and pathological federal, state and private laboratories. --to consolidate and coordinate the many separate government bureaus now engaged in independent health work. --to effect economies in the administration of these bureaus. --to publish and distribute, throughout the country, bulletins in relation to human health. --to apply our existing knowledge of hygiene to our living conditions. --to reduce the death-rate. in there will meet in washington, on the invitation of the president and congress of the united states, the international congress of hygiene and demography. this congress meets triennially in the capitals of the world, and brings together the leaders in health conservation who are officially delegated by the governments of all civilized countries. we have many things to show them of which we can be justly proud. our federal, state, municipal and other official health organizations, however, leave much to be desired: and it behooves us, in the few months still at our disposal, to prepare to show the visiting nations our methods and successes. we need many other things, but due recognition and coordination of our federal health mechanism is the first step which, if we have taken it before the meeting of this international congress, will best enable us to profit by the experience of the world's experts there assembled. nature has been prodigal in her gifts to our nation. in no respect has she been kinder than in opportunities for health and efficiency. her very prodigality has rendered us careless and extravagant. it is high time that americans do as well for themselves in health protection at home as they have done for themselves and others in cuba, the canal zone, porto rico, and the philippines (applause). this demands the creation and maintenance of official organizations to amplify, extend, and ultimately replace the work of our voluntary organizations whose lack of authority prevents their complete success, and whose continuance is an admission of popular inertia and official incompetence. (applause) * * * * * [during the foregoing, governor eberhart withdrew, and professor condra took the chair.] professor condra--ladies and gentlemen: in the temporary absence of governor eberhart i have the pleasure of introducing mr wallace d. simmons, of saint louis, who will address you on "our resources as the basis for business." (applause) * * * * * mr simmons--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: the president of the united states in opening this congress called upon the speakers to make definite practical suggestions. the ex-president of the united states the next day emphasized the need of further enlightenment of the people regarding conservation. it has frequently been my privilege to cooperate with both of them, and i will endeavor to do so now by suggesting a definite plan for spreading enlightenment in a practical manner. we of this generation have developed a distinctly new type in our american citizenship, one which has no counterpart in the history of any other people, one which has become a most potent and influential factor in our daily affairs: our modern high-class commercial traveler. in any campaign of education, such as i am going to suggest, you can have no more efficient allies than the , commercial travelers covering this country--not the old-time drummers of questionable methods, but the gentlemen of high character who have won the confidence, the respect and friendship of the merchants and the people generally in every part of this country; and i may add, as a requisite to their success that they are resourceful. to this development i attribute my having the honor of addressing you today regarding our resources as the basis of our business, because the organization of which i am president employs probably the largest corps of such representatives in the country, and has through them the best system of keeping accurately informed regarding all matters that affect business. from conclusions based largely upon the observations of the commercial travelers of this country, i will endeavor to outline to you what i believe to be the relationship between our business interests and the question of natural resources; and i believe this phase of the question is most vitally important to the people in whose interest you have gathered here from every state in the union. the primary reason for that belief--and the one on which all others hinge--is that we are a nation in trade; a whole people engaged in business. eighty-odd percent of our people are directly or indirectly dependent for their living on business conditions. the business interest therefore is the greatest interest, collectively, in the country. anything which directly affects the living of the majority of our people is not only worthy of our most earnest attention, but should be approached with due consideration. we should be especially cautious about experimenting with legislation that may interfere with the natural laws of trade. when this is more generally recognized, and the people begin to understand that their individual daily incomes are at stake, they will put a stop to using the business interests of the country as a football for politics. not only does there appear to me to be a direct relation between our natural resources and our business, but as i view it our resources are the foundation of our business, or as mr hill so aptly put it yesterday, they constitute the capital on which our business is done. in business we endeavor, by industrious and intelligent use of our capital, to produce as the fruit of our efforts an annual return without impairing the capital--without touching the principle or jeopardizing it in any manner. in private enterprises, the man who assumes the headship of a business organization in which the funds of others are invested as capital, and who then makes a show of prosperity by drawing on that capital to pay what he represents as dividends, is charged with running a "get-rich quick" scheme, and in most states is, by law, held personally liable. i commend to your consideration the consistency of applying that principle where there is involved the capital of all the people--the nation's resources. (applause) if we are a people in trade and mean to continue to be, and if our resources are our capital, can there be any doubt about the wisdom of handling that capital according to the rules of good business? can there be any doubt where we as a nation will land if we make annual inroads upon that capital; if we, in the management of the people's business, follow methods which in private affairs bring those responsible before the bar of justice? we as a nation take just pride in our business successes; we attribute them to the brains we put into our work, to the thoroughness with which we study what we do and what others have done that we may profit by experience. is it not well for us thoughtfully to inquire whether the histories of any other nations record the handling of their resources on the "get-rich quick" plan, that we may see what has been the outcome? history is full of such instances; many of them have been pointed out by eminent advocates of this movement. i will therefore not attempt anything but passing reference to some of them. volumes could be written from evidences found in the valley of the euphrates and of the tigris, where stood the great kingdom of babylonia, the wonder of the ancient world; in the ruins of palmyra and palestine; in the barbary states, once famed as the granary of rome but now a howling wilderness, because the mohammedans who conquered it neglected its natural resources; in the ruins of the cities of the sahara, whose crumbling courts bring to mind the words of omar khayyam-- they say the lion and the leopard keep the courts where jamshyd gloried and drank deep. if we look to history for the other side of the picture--for instances where business prosperity has gone on without interruption as long as natural resources have been conserved and intelligently maintained--we find them so well defined as to lead to but one conclusion. this is illustrated in germany where they have maintained the fertility of their soil for centuries. it produces more per acre today than it did many generations ago. their great forest estates have remained intact; they have cut a crop of timber from them regularly every year, producing an annual income, but the capital--the forest estate--is greater and more valuable today than it was before our country was discovered. fires have not destroyed their forests. they have long since learned the wisdom of applying, "an ounce of prevention," and fortunately have no "pork-barrel" to stand in the way. (applause) and we find in our own history many instances where great business enterprises have sprung promptly from efforts to intelligently develop the resources around us. the state of illinois was passed over by the first settlers as a land of no opportunities. it is today, in productiveness and volume of business, one of the greatest states in the union. in the states of utah and colorado vast areas formerly looked upon as barren and useless wastes, have been, by the intelligent handling of natural resources, made to produce annually wonderful crops of fruit and vegetables, the traffic in which has become a great commercial industry. the development of the southwest, dependent very largely on one resource--the fertility of its soil--has called into being such lusty young giants as wichita, oklahoma city, dallas, and other cities of that type. in the vicinity of birmingham, a section which before the war was occupied mainly by cotton plantations--wherein there was nothing that could be properly called business--where generations came and passed to the great beyond and never saw the smoke of a factory or heard the hum of a busy mart of trade, today, with but one generation intervening, we find a live and prosperous modern city, the heart of a great industrial region. the change has come from developing three great natural resources, which up to the close of the war had been allowed to lie idle and unproductive--the forests, the coal and the iron. here again we find an example of the business dependence of natural resources one upon the other. the timber from the forests was needed for the mining of the coal, and the coal was needed in the manufactures from the iron ore; and again the forests in the development of means of transportation to the markets of the world. so there is ample evidence that business activity follows promptly upon the intelligent development of natural resources, and decay with equal certainty follows the neglect or wasteful use of the capital which nature tenders us, and for the intelligent use of which she holds us strictly accountable. i have frequently been asked by those who know our system of getting reliable information, "how do people over the country feel in regard to conservation; are they in favor of it in all its aspects, or do they seem to be interested only in certain features?" as that is a question that has direct bearing on the business of the country, we naturally had made careful inquiry regarding it from maine to california, and we had learned that the majority of the people do not understand enough about it to hold any real opinion. they have no adequate idea what conservation means as applied, for instance, by this organization to our natural resources. in spite of exhaustive reports issued by the government, in spite of scholarly and illuminative articles on the subject, the people generally do not yet understand the real object of conservation. a busy people in trade do not have time to read government reports or long speeches on any subject, and of course no one can do justice to even one element of this great subject in a short article. the net result is therefore that there is no general understanding of even the a b c of conservation such as should be given to the people, such as they would be glad to have, and such as they must have before there is warrant for feeling that the foundation stones of conservation are so firmly grounded that no transitory wave of agitation on unimportant details can be successfully used to dislodge them. the majority have not yet grasped the idea that one of the prime objects of this conservation movement is to preserve the fertility and productiveness of the soil, on which we all depend for our food supply. they are not aware that already in many parts of this country, where formerly any man who rented farm lands was entirely free to use them with indifference to their future, he is now required by the owners to enter into a written contract which provides just how the land is to be cultivated--how the crops are to be rotated and fertilizers used. the owners of these lands today require their tenants to practice conservation. (applause) the people do not generally understand that when a territory which has been used as a range for cattle is by proclamation withdrawn, as we express it, that does not mean it is no longer to be used for pasturage. conservation does not aim to suspend use--its object is to perpetuate usefulness in full measure this year, and every year to come. (applause) a farmer who owns a pasture--large or small--and rents it for stock grazing, takes due care to cover in his agreement the number of head and the length of time they are to be kept on his land. he makes sure that his pasture is not to be so abused in any one season as to ruin it for the future. he cares for his own land as it is the province of the forest service to care for the public land entrusted to their supervision. he practices conservation because he cannot afford to do otherwise. it is not widely known that instead of wishing to keep settlers out of the national forests, inducements are given to get people to settle within their boundaries; homesteaders are free to pasture their domestic stock within the reservation and to cut from the forests the timber they require for building houses, barns and fences. it is not generally understood that making a forest reservation does not mean that no more timber is to be cut there for market; on the contrary, its prime object is to insure continued cutting and selling of it for all time. it is not widely known that the revenue from timber cutting on the public forest lands amounts already to a million dollars a year, and the annual revenue from the pastures puts another million into the public treasury--and that this is only a beginning; or that meanwhile this kind of revenue-making regulation also affects the regularity of water supply through our rivers and streams--a most vital question as has been shown by many able exponents of conservation. when this nation of business people understands that conservation is simply another term for business management of the people's capital, the pressure of public opinion will be so strong behind this movement as to brook no interference or delay in the passage and enforcement of the laws needed to begin at once a business administration. how to spread more widely a correct understanding of such facts is today a most important problem. how shall we reach the people who have not yet been reached, and who in all probability will not be reached by anything published in the usual way? i have a suggestion to make which i ask you delegates to take to the governors who appointed you to attend this congress; that is, that each governor summon to his capitol for consultation, say six of the leading business men of the state, selecting those who in their own business have, by successful use of modern advertising, demonstrated that they have learned from experience how to reach the individual and tell him something they want him to know. knowing how to do that is just as much a matter of education and experience as are the methods of the forester or of the politician who is a "past master" at the game. give the people of your state the benefit of this experience. it can be had for the asking. the business men can be depended on to help whenever called upon. they will be particularly ready in this matter which, in proportion as it is successful, will make for good trade and stable business conditions; and the conservation of our natural resources stands for more stable business conditions year after year, in that it tends to reduce the chances of losing our new wealth in crops just when it seems to be practically sure. ask such a group of successful advertisers to formulate a scheme of reaching the public generally with the kind of information they want and should have about conservation. enlist the cooperation of the army of commercial travelers within the state--there are no more loyal american citizens anywhere, none who can do more in such a campaign, none who will more gladly lend a hand when once they are advised along proper lines, and know how great a factor the conservation of our natural resources can be in the upbuilding of business and, through it, the general prosperity of our people. ask this business council to formulate ways of making known not only the facts about forests and water supply, and the importance of these facts to every individual man, woman and child in the nation, but why we in the united states average - / bushels of wheat per acre, instead of - / bushels, as they do in germany, and - / bushels in great britain; how this is making homestead lands scarce, and prices high, because we only get half the amount of crops we should get from the land we have under cultivation. when we find our production less to the acre each succeeding year and more mouths to feed, it is time everybody knew why. tell them in the simplest and most direct manner possible what is meant by the "pork barrel" in politics--how it is being used to retard the proper development of our natural resources, and why therefore it stands in the way of the nation's progress. let them know why we all have reason to thank god that we have in the white house a president who does not let politics silence his tongue on that subject or swerve him from his determination to stop this waste of the nation's funds. (applause) write up a short story of what reclamation has done and can do in relieving the situation by opening up to us millions of acres of land which can and will add greatly to our food and meat supply; tell them what has already been accomplished and the progress that is still being made by reclamation work, to the great benefit of the people. explain in a simple manner that hand in hand with the profitable development of our natural resources must go the development of our great waterways and railroads--that there can be no general prosperity without railroad prosperity; that our railroads and waterways are the connecting links which make our natural resources available, and that the practical value of our natural resources depends largely on the efficiency of our transportation service. (applause) point out to them the lessons which we should get from cases of individual effort along the lines of modern methods in farming; how, for instance, mr claude hollingsworth, near colfax, washington, raised this year bushels of wheat to the acre, averaging pounds to the bushel, and of barley - / bushels to the acre, when his neighbors, with the same conditions of soil, climate, and rainfall, averaged only half as much; or in south carolina, where mr e. mci. williamson has, by the proper application of fertilizers, modern methods, and little additional expense, increased his production of corn from bushels per acre to an average of nearly bushels, and of cotton from less than half a bale to an average of a bale per acre. such examples are most convincing, and will do much to arouse interest in the practical value of conservation. the conservation of the national health deserves to be emphasized even when we have under consideration this general subject from purely a business standpoint. when we consider that tuberculosis alone costs the people of the state of new york over $ , , per year, and that it is a preventable disease, and that that $ , , might be used as capital to give to millions of people profitable and wholesome occupation, the relation of the health movement to the business interests of the country is self-evident. of course, this suggestion is based upon entire confidence in the cooperation of the daily press--i have no doubt about that whatever. the newspapers and magazines are not only most potent factors in spreading enlightenment, but they can always be depended on to take enthusiastic hold of any movement that is honestly and disinterestedly for the general good. (applause) this whole subject of conservation is fundamentally a business proposition--a question of managing the people's business with the same care and foresight that we put into private business--a question of using the nation's capital in a way that will produce a regular, steady and proper income year after year, and at the same time so safeguard the principal that the people of these united states may go on in business indefinitely. history tells of many peoples who have spent their capital and disappeared from the face of the earth. let us so organize this nation's business that it may go on down the centuries as history's exception to the general rule of rise and fall (applause). as we point with pride, honor and gratitude to the signers of our declaration of independence and the makers of our constitution, so may the coming generations of americans, having in mind the fates of other peoples, look back with gratitude to us and have occasion to exclaim "see what would also have been our lot had it not been for the foresight and business judgment of our ancestors of the twentieth century--worthy successors of the great men who founded this government of the people by the people and for the people, not only for their own time, but for all time." (applause) * * * * * president baker--ladies and gentlemen: nothing is more important to conservation than education; and i have the honor now to introduce the commissioner of education, dr elmer ellsworth brown, who will address you on "education and conservation." * * * * * commissioner brown--mr president, ladies, and gentlemen: every uplift and reform comes back to education. it is uplift carried to the sticking point. it is reform continually going on. in speaking of the educational aspect of conservation, i am not concerned with anything merely incidental or subordinate, but have to do with a matter as large and vital as any upon which the success of the conservation movement depends. it must be admitted on the other hand that education has much to get from the conservation movement as well as much to give. the schools are learners as well as teachers. to support and further conservation they will need to learn conservation facts and doctrines. this congress and american education are aiming at the same thing in the end--the betterment of american life. what shall it profit to conserve everything else on earth if we fail to conserve the spirit and fiber of our citizens, young and old? that is a view in which conservationists and educators are fully agreed. now, what is our educational establishment, as it stands over against the body of our material resources? it is a group of state school systems, having in the aggregate a certain national character. we cannot insist too strongly that education is primarily a concern of the states. this group of state school systems represents a combination of public and private agencies, for our state institutions are supplemented by many institutions privately supported and controlled. it represents an extraordinary unity as between elementary education and the higher education, as between the democracy of the lower schools and the science of the universities. it represents, moreover, in all of its grades, an everlasting devotion to intellectual and moral values, as having to do with enlightened citizenship. this is the educational establishment that faces the needs and aspirations with which the conservation congress is concerned. there are three or four ways in which i should like to speak of the great work of that establishment as related to your own great work: . in the first place, there is the fact that our scholastic education is facing about and turning its attention toward industry and industrial life. this is a new movement in which all states and sections are taking part. it is a change which is attended with the gravest difficulty. no one who is not familiar with the actual administration of schools and colleges can guess how hard a thing it is to introduce a new practice of teaching and make it successful at the hands of many teachers in widely different communities. yet our educational leaders have addressed themselves to this task with courage and enthusiasm. in states provision is now made for teaching agriculture in public schools. such provision takes the form of agricultural high schools in alabama, massachusetts, minnesota and virginia, and in several other widely scattered states. in the best of these schools, there is arising a new interest in all that relates to the soil and the life on the farm. it is no uncommon thing to have class work interrupted by visits from neighboring farmers, who consult the expert teachers regarding drainage and fertilizers and the care of their horses and cows. the boys try out at school the seed corn they are to plant on the home farm, and the girls learn at school to raise poultry and vegetables and make from them appetizing dishes for home consumption. large provision has been made for consolidated rural schools, and in minnesota lands are added for instruction in the practice of farming. oklahoma requires the teaching of agriculture in all public schools, with the cooperation of the normal schools and the agricultural college. this new instruction is spreading in unexpected ways. columbia university, in the heart of new york city, has begun to offer courses in agriculture, taking up this work where it left it off early in the nineteenth century. and an agricultural conference has been held at bryn mawr college. after that what more is there to be said! (applause) but there is still a good deal more. much might be said about the new trade schools in the cities, and the new instruction in household arts for girls; but i pass these matters by and go back to the farm. what is especially interesting is the freedom with which new modes of teaching have been adopted. corn contests, potato trains, demonstration farms--our old manuals of teaching knew nothing of these things. then there is all manner of summer schools, short winter courses, farmers' institutes, and an assortment of other teaching devices. the university of idaho is employing three field men, a horticulturist, a dairyman, and an irrigation and potato specialist, and is sending regular schools of agriculture about the state on wheels. in virginia and three or four other states supervisors of rural schools have been appointed. they are making a close study of the resources, industries, and social needs of typical sections of their states, and are lending new life to the effort to make the schools more directly serviceable. one of the earlier developments of this movement, and one that comes into peculiarly close relations with the conservation campaign, is the setting apart of a day in each year for planting trees. nebraska is looked upon as the original center of this movement. a recent report shows the planting of , trees in a single year in minnesota, in connection with the arbor day celebration in this state (applause). the observance has received a fresh impetus in more than twenty of the states from the publication by the state education offices of attractive manuals offering suggestions regarding the celebration. the leaders of the new movement in our schools have called for a redirection of rural education. such a redirection is actually taking place. so much has been begun that it would be easy to believe that the work is done. there are many who suppose that this new education is already in the saddle and is moving triumphantly forward. but that is a mistake. great changes in education are not brought about so easily. there is a long campaign and a hard campaign before us if the desired ends are to be attained. state superintendents of public instruction, those who are training teachers in colleges and normal schools, and all who are engaged in this work in supervisory and teaching positions, will need for a long time to come the moral backing and the material support which this influential body can command. that is what they should have without reserve and without stint. (applause) the lack of well-prepared teachers of these subjects is one of the most serious difficulties the new movement has encountered. a recent report shows about seventy state normal schools offering regular instruction in agriculture. the nelson amendment to the agricultural appropriation act of provided federal funds for the training of teachers in the land-grant colleges. at least thirty of these colleges are now offering such instruction. but this work, too, is only begun. . and this suggests the second thing that i wish to say. the new movement is making a new demand for men in the business of teaching--strong men, technically trained for their work. if education is to help conservation, the teaching profession must be enabled to compete with the industries in attracting and holding such men. we are considering both ends of our educational system, the scientific end in the universities and the popular end in the schools. a man who has enough knowledge and skill to train others for an industrial occupation has enough to give him a place in the industry itself. and the industry pays a great deal better than the teaching. it is not necessary that the income of teachers and that of industrial leaders should be equalized. many men will continue to teach because they prefer to teach. but when the disparity becomes too great, many good teachers, in fairness to themselves and to their families, must give up the struggle and go over into the more lucrative employments. this is what has been going on in recent years. with a rapidly growing population and an increasing body of teachers, we have fewer men engaged in teaching than we had five years ago. we need opportunities in the teaching profession that will attract strong men to face the work before us (applause). i have the highest regard for the work of our women teachers; but both men and women are needed to give us a well balanced public education, and i welcome the alliance of the schools with the conservation movement, because of the new demand it makes for competent men in the schools. let me point out some of the places in our scholastic organization where strong men are needed, for conservation purposes as well as for educational purposes. it is generally understood that men of the largest caliber are in demand as presidents of technical colleges and universities. it should be equally obvious that such men are needed as state superintendents of public instruction. we have such men, and have had many such in the office of state superintendent--but in many of the states that office cannot attract men as do our college presidencies, because of the short term of service and other limitations with which it is hedged about. we need broad men and strong men as instructors in the technical departments of our higher institutions. those who deal with our national resources industriously can know but little of the personal strain and sacrifice with which other men have stuck to their task of dealing with these same resources educationally. in our secondary and elementary education there is not only need of specially trained men as teachers, but there is need in particular of specially trained supervisors. i was in vermont not many days ago, and there i saw one result of a new law, which provides for the employment of union district superintendents of schools, at a respectable minimum salary. the state superintendent had called together these local superintendents in their annual conference. there were nearly forty of them, where three years before there was not one. rather young men they were for the most part, though well-seasoned in the responsibilities of teaching. college graduates, alert and ambitious, they gave themselves over to the business which had brought them together, with a heartiness that was vastly encouraging. other states have made provisions for a similar staff of supervisory officers. new york is one of the latest to take such action. the great states of the west, in which the county is a common unit of school supervision, need in their counties traveling supervisors of special subjects, particularly those relating to the practical business of life on the farm. such supervisors can become veritable evangelists, bringers of good news concerning the things which make our national resources interesting and full of hope. . i have spoken of the new movement toward industrial education in our several states. i have tried to show that this movement is making only gradual headway against great difficulties, but that it can become a strong reinforcement of conservation and of other public interests _if given a fair chance_. now, in the third place it should be said that the federal government is concerned with giving it a fair chance. we have no national system of school administration. we do not want such a system. no one seriously proposes to relieve the states of their powers and responsibilities in this matter. but how can the nation be indifferent to the very stuff out of which it is made? while we have no national system of schools, we have and we are bound to have a national program of education. it is no new thing that i am proposing. i would simply propose that the program blocked out and entered upon many years ago should be carried out and made as useful as possible. this national program is a simple one. in the earlier days it consisted in the granting of lands for educational purposes. within the past half-century two additions to this earlier plan have been made. the first of these was the establishment of a central office of information, the federal bureau of education; the second was the annual appropriation of federal funds for institutions serving a special and urgent national need--the acts for the further support of the land-grant colleges. stated now in other words, our whole american scheme of public educational management consists of these four parts: first, the independent school and university systems of the several states, aided by grants of public lands and supplemented by privately managed institutions; second, the free cooperation of the states in educational matters of common interest; third, a federal education office, aiding the states by its information service and furthering their cooperation; and finally, the distribution of federal funds, under the supervision of the bureau of education. let me say a few words concerning that part of this plan with which i have personally the most to do. it is the business of the federal bureau to survey the whole field of american education, and make the best things contagious throughout that field. in such a subject as industrial education, it is to study our present needs in the large, and to set before our people the best examples of the successful meeting of such needs in this and in foreign lands. it is to promote unity of effort, by enabling every part of the country to profit at once by whatever has been well done in any other part of the world. as regards such a subject as the conservation of our national resources, it is to take the broad view which concerns education in all the states, and to further the common treatment of that subject as related to the geography, the history, and the industries of the american people. such work as this it is now doing in a preliminary and fragmentary way; but it needs more men--expert and informing men--to make of its educational contagion the really large and transforming thing that these times demand. give us the men, and we will give the help. when the nation has made its program, it cannot afford to carry it out on less than a national scale. (applause) i have said that our national program already involves a measure of direct federal aid to education in the states. there is every reason why such aid should be reserved as a last resort. but as a last resort, it has its place in our program. it is doubtful whether the industrial education which the nation now requires can be adequately carried out without an increase of such federal participation. but the point to be especially emphasized is this: any such extension of federal aid should be based on an accurate knowledge of the needs, and should be made in such ways as will strengthen and not weaken the educational systems of the states. for these reasons, a general investigation of the subject of industrial education in all sections of the country is one of the next things that should be undertaken by the education bureau. such an inquiry has already been recommended from the office of the secretary of the interior. it has been urgently requested by the national society for the promotion of industrial education. our neighbors of the dominion of canada already have a strong commission engaged in a similar inquiry. i earnestly hope that this congress will call upon the congress of the united states to institute such an inquiry at the earliest practicable date, and provide for carrying it on in a manner commensurate with the importance of the subject. when i speak of our national program in education, it is with warmth and conviction. no nation can come to its greatest, industrially and politically, save as it comes to its greatest in education. we have in our american form of governmental relations the basis for the noblest educational structure that any nation has ever erected. in full loyalty to the true relations of state and nation, we have only to go forward doing generously the things which may rightly be done, in order to have an infinitely varied yet gloriously united educational organization, in which our democracy, our science, and our nationality shall all of them come to their best. . fourthly and finally, what kind of education is it that the new needs call for? i cannot leave the subject without saying a few words on that theme. our american schools and colleges have stood in the past for liberal culture. they have taken pride in doing so and they have believed that by so doing they have been serving the ends of democratic citizenship. american education from the beginning has looked the almighty dollar squarely in the face and passed on in serene devotion to spiritual ends. is all of this to be changed with the new interest in industrial life? is the technical, in other words, to take place of the liberal? i do not believe it. in fact, no greater calamity could befall our industrial interests. but we are undoubtedly changing our conception of what is liberal and what is technical. we may describe a liberally educated man as one who has learned so thoroughly how the whole world hangs together that he constantly sees his own interests only as related to general and permanent human interests (applause). a technical education, on the other hand, enables a man to do that which most men cannot do, but which has some useful relation to those general human interests. if this is a fair statement, there is no field in which a liberal education is more to be desired than that of our material resources and our industries; for this is the field on which the whole game and drama of human life is to be played, though there is no other in which the temptation to illiberal, narrow, and selfish views is so great. to make the material basis of human society itself a subject of liberal education is one of the greatest things that scholastic enterprise can possibly accomplish. the next step is to join the training for technical pursuits directly to our liberal culture thus broadly conceived, so that every citizen shall add some valuable skill to his more general attainments, and every special skill shall grow directly out of his general knowledge. this, i believe, will be the great aim of american education everywhere. it is a high patriotic service to further such education. even in the elementary schools, let our pupils learn that their private interests are to be advanced only in accord with more general interests, and that they are to make their success in life by doing some one thing well for which the world at large has need. we have been, according to our critics, a nation whose resources were greater and more impressive than our civilization. with such an education as this, we shall be a nation whose civilization shall overtop all of the natural goods that may ever be discovered or conserved (applause). such an education, moreover, could do much to overcome some of the chief obstacles which the conservation movement now encounters; for it should give us a people who, from engineers and managers to farmers and miners, should not only be masters of their own trades but should pursue them with some positive regard for the public good (applause). our education is not big enough and virile enough until it can deal with such great national issues as this. i am confident that it will come up to that high measure of power and efficiency, and that already it has begun to carry those larger responsibilities. (applause) * * * * * president baker--ladies and gentlemen: can there be higher patriotism than in the efforts of this congress to protect the rights of all? conservation is true patriotism; and mrs matthew t. scott, president-general of the national society of daughters of the american revolution, will now address you on this subject. (applause, the entire audience rising) * * * * * mrs scott--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: in behalf of the national society of daughters of the american revolution, i wish to make my grateful acknowledgments to the executive committee (through its president, honorable bernard n. baker) for its courtesy in giving to mrs amos g. draper, the able chairman of our d. a. r. conservation committee who has so splendidly inaugurated and developed this work, and to myself, the privilege and honor of taking part in these splendid exercises. in its last analysis the generic term "conservation"--in its widest scope, and broadest sense--may be said to be the keynote and touchstone of our great d. a. r. organization. the finest brains and blood and nerve force of the land have been absorbed and found noble expression in various lines of work of the d. a. r. while the daughters have turned their sympathetic attention to various material branches of conservation work, we have not neglected the higher intellectual, ethical, and moral conservation interests; we aim to help preserve the glorious heritage that has fallen to us of self-government, and hand down the birthright undiminished to those who come after us that the priceless boon of "government of the people by the people and for the people" perish not from the earth. (applause) it has been borne in upon me of late that there are two conservation interests whose importance we have not fully recognized, and they are the conservation of true womanliness, and the conservation of the supremacy of the anglo-saxon race on this continent. as to the former, the president of the united states in a recent address at washington before the annual congress of the d. a. r., said that woman's place and sphere are on too high a plane to be even discussed. it is surely an inspiration to have the privilege before this splendid assemblage of representing the great patriotic movement, which under the banner of the d. a. r., marches steadily forward, with ever increasing numbers, enthusiasm, prestige, and practical power. the daughters of the american revolution in distinctive and especial ways have lent their organized strength to various good causes, which may all be practically considered as conservation interests: among other objects, to social uplift, to patriotic education in its widest scope, to placing bounds to the abuse of child labor, to playgrounds, to juvenile courts, to improvement of hygienic conditions in our great cities, to preservation of historic spots and records, to the safe and sane celebration of july fourth; and to cooperation with the s. a. r. in their noble work for immigrants landing upon our shores and subsequently for these foreigners and their children in the effort to americanize them and to inoculate them with ideals and principles known in this twentieth century as americanism. much has been done also among the mountain whites of the south. every mountaineer, child or adult, that in our work we help to educate toward intelligent citizenship--and many of these mountaineers are of revolutionary ancestry--is a barrier raised against the anarchistic tendencies and the unrest of our great cities; is a guarantee for the supremacy of the caucasian race in america. read, if you can secure it, mr thomas nelson page's plea for the education of the southern mountain whites in his magnificent address delivered at washington before the last continental congress! we are also preserving, all over this broad land, landmarks of history--sacred relics of a vanished age--which are object-lessons for our own youth and for the strangers who crowd our shores. every monument we rear, every tablet we place, every statue we erect, every old fort or bastian, every revolutionary relic or revolutionary soldier's grave we honor, is a tribute to those to whom we owe the imperishable gifts of liberty, of independence, of the right to worship god in our own way. every fountain or stone recording the trail of the pioneer, the priest, the trader, the soldier, or the devotion of the revolutionary heroine, is a breath of incense wafted back to the immortals, an inspiration for "tangible immortality" for ourselves, and those who come after us. (applause) the conservation of our natural resources is a subject of intensely practical importance to the d. a. r. representing as we do the motherhood of the nation, we feel that it is for us to see that the children of this and future generations are not robbed of their god-given privileges. it is our high privilege and mission to see to it that the future shall be the uncankered fruit of the past. the ideal democracy solemnly dedicated by the founders, we, as their daughters, declare shall not be forestalled. as women we cannot be silent and see the high ends at which they aimed made futile by the growth of a grovelling lust for material and commercial aggrandizement. this headlong haste for enormous gain, the total disregard of the future for the present moment, if not stopped will bring us to the condition of the old world where the fertility and habitability of past ages have been destroyed forever. we feel that it is for us, who are not wholly absorbed in business, to preserve ideals that are higher than business--the outlook for the future, the common interests, and the betterment of all classes. the wasteful scrambling and greedy clutching at our natural treasures has made the present generation rich; but the mothers of the future must be warned by us lest they find that our boasted prosperity has been bought at the price of the suffering, of the poverty, and class war of our descendants. there is no lack of patriotic devotion in the country; but the mere thoughtlessness and inability or unwillingness of the commercial class to drop the interests of the moment long enough to realize how they are compromising the future--this hot haste and heedlessness, it is for us with our larger outlook, to restrain. women have already preserved a large national forest in the pennsylvania mountains; the women of minnesota have to their credit the minnesota national forests; it was the women of california who saved the immemorial groves of the calaveras big trees. our own work in behalf of the preservation of the appalachian watersheds, in behalf of the preservation of historic sites, as well as the efforts being made by various women's organizations to preserve the natural beauty of the palisades, of niagara falls, and of other precious scenic treasures of the nation, are all steps in the right direction, are all preparation for the larger conservation interests which the d. a. r. have begun actively to champion. it should be a second nature to women, with the spirit of motherhood and protecting care innate in them, to take an effective stand in the spirit of true patriotism--against the spirit of rank selfishness--the anti-social spirit of the man who declines to take into account any other interests than his own. (applause) there is another great world interest that is peculiarly our own as daughters and descendants of the peace-loving patriots who took up arms a century and a half ago. they were not professional soldiers, but plain citizens hastily rallied together in often-wavering lines of defense of home and country. all the world wondered when at lexington and concord, on the village green and at the wooden bridge, the embattled farmers stood across the line of march of the british regular army, and fired "the shot heard round the world." it is the opening decade of the twentieth century of the christian era; it is time that brute force--the recourse of primitive, barbaric man--cease to be the last arbitrament between great nations calling themselves christian and civilized, and that the conservation of peace be established by international arbitration. (applause) again, it is one of the glories of our great organization that we are first, last, and all the time, considering the child. today in all civilized countries the child is leading the way. i am happy to be able to say that through the instrumentality of our chapters in different parts of the country, interest has been awakened in homeless and dependent children; organizations have been formed for children of foreign birth to teach them respect for the flag, and some things about our form of government. many chapters provide instructive lectures in their own language for foreigners, who listen eagerly. many chapters offer prize medals for the best essays on historical subjects--american history especially--and for memorizing our national songs. nothing is more important than our organized work for the "children of the american revolution"--children of american birth and descent--unless it be our work for the "children of the republic" in teaching to be american citizens boys of foreign parentage who come to us with little idea of the difference between liberty and license. for patriotism consists as much in making good citizens as in saving the nation from bad ones (applause). every boy of foreign birth or extraction that we can help to transform into a thorough american through this magnificent branch of our work, every lad of foreign birth or extraction that we can help train to become a useful citizen and grow up into honorable manhood as a credit to his adopted land is an added asset to the ethical wealth of the country. think for a moment what it means to help train these young foreigners in the plastic period of their life in the patriotic principles of their adopted country! a long stride has been taken in their patriotic and civic education, when through the exertions of noble women they have been given some idea of the great principles which are the basis of our form of government. another branch of our conservation work which is especially near my heart, and which i think must be near to the heart of every mother in this broad land, is that in connection with the splendid crusade now being carried on against the evil of child labor. we have attempted, in dealing with this as with every other problem, first to obtain a wide and sure knowledge of the facts, and secondly to avoid everything savoring of the spirit of fanaticism in concentrating our energies on some great constructive policy. the committee on child labor, under the leadership of its noble chairman--the late mrs j. ellen foster, whose life was dedicated to the needs of humanity--has made herculean efforts to bring this matter properly before the attention not only of the d. a. r. but of all the women of our land who are capable of responding to the pathetic appeal of suffering and stunted childhood, that we may wipe away this inexcusable stain on our national honor and this irreparable blight on that product which is more valuable than all the combined harvests of this fertile continent--the splendid american crop of human souls. (applause) if in a serener atmosphere than that of the politics of the hour, we as patriotic women can meet and help to solve these and other equally important problems in the eternally feminine way that has always given us power over men--if we would indeed, in the words of the old athenians, help to transmit our fatherland not only undiminished but better and greater than it was transmitted to us, and if we are indeed unwilling to transmit to posterity mere material possessions unillumined by divine ideals; if we can but rise to the height and might of a pure, disinterested, passionless consecration to the principles which time has proved to be the soul of the purpose of the fathers of the republic, and on that high level, above the distracting personalities and passing incidents and accidents of the hour, "live and move and have our being" as a national society, then we shall best establish and preserve the useful influence and leadership in the country to which we loyally aspire. our interest and work for these great conservation interests we cannot too often reiterate for our own encouragement and inspiration and for the enlightenment of the public. as i said before, in the light of recent incidents and experiences, it has been borne in upon me that there are two great conservation interests we have not yet sufficiently touched. with all the advance in learning, all the discoveries of science, all the enlightenment and uplifting of religion, all the refining of manners, all the acquisitions of men through invention and additions to the facilities for work and comfort of living, all the improvements of institutions providing for the farther and farther spread of well-being among the children of men, still, in the great underlying physical principles of existence, in the "main travelled roads" of humanity from birth to death, there is and can be no essential change. nevertheless, there are an infinite number of variations and gradations in the product of these eternal operations of nature. man's battle with nature--for human progress is a constant struggle against natural conditions, a continual re-making of the planet--has been ever accompanied, step by step, by the battle within himself against the contradictions in his inescapable heredity. it is the degree of success in this struggle for the triumph of the spiritual and the intellectual that marks the differences in racial types. here then are the grand elements of the problem, the condition as well as theory confronting every well-wisher to humanity, every lover of her kind and her country, especially among women. for it is woman who is the divinity of the spring whence flows the stream of humanity--nay, she is the source herself. to her keeping has been entrusted the sacred font. in her hands rests the precious cup, the golden bowl of life. holier than the holy grail itself is this chalice glowing ever, with its own share of the divine fire, its own vital spark from the altar of almighty power. never has this office of cup-bearer to creation placed greater responsibility upon woman than in this our own day, and this our own country. freely we have received, and generously must we respond; and deeply must we realize what a charge to keep we have--nothing less than the conservation of the greatest experiment in enlightened self-government the world ever saw. is that sacred trust to be jeopardized by untried, impracticable, uncalled for innovations upon the institutions of government sufficing for the fathers of the country, and providing for its splendid development thus far? shall we grasp at a shadow in the stream, like the dog in the fable, and drop the substance to sink away from us beyond recall? is any _real_ interest of the women of the land in danger? is any _real_ interest of women inseparable from the interests of the fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons of the women of the land? is there any interest of women to be compared in vital importance to themselves, with the conservation of true womanliness? i plead, as the representative of a great national organization of the women of the land, for the conservation of true womanliness, for the exalting, for the lifting up in special honor, of the holy grail of womanhood. but not merely the cup whence flows the stream of human life, must we guard and cherish; we must look to the ingredients which are being cast into the cup. we must protect the fountain from pollution. we must not so eagerly invite all the sons of shem, ham, and japhet, wherever they may have first seen the light, and under whatever traditions and influences and ideals foreign and antagonistic to ours they may have been reared, to trample the mud of millions of alien feet into our spring. we must conserve the sources of our race in the anglo-saxon line, mother of liberty and self-government in the modern world. i would rather our coming census showed a lesser population and a greater homogeneity. especially do i dread the clouding of the purity of the cup with color and character acquired under tropical suns, in the jungle, or in paradisian islands of the sea alternately basking in heavenlike beauty and serenity and devastated by earthquake and tornado and revolution. (applause) i come of the old virginia stock (applause) which first passed over the blue ridge and possessed the great middle west, just in time to prevent it from becoming spanish or french or british. some of the pioneers of washington's times have stayed on right there, in that eagle's nest of pure americans where kentucky, tennessee, and virginia meet in the mountains against which cornwallis' previously invincible raiding column--after devastating the carolinas--dashed itself to pieces, wiped out by volunteer mountaineers in that wonderful battle of kings mountain which no general planned or even heard of until it was over. personally, i would be willing to reduce our population-boast by many millions, had the remnant the unadulterated americanism conserved to this day in these mountaineers' descendants! we may be destined to see our cup of liberty, which we have so generously proffered to the whole world, grow to the proportion of a grand mixing-bowl of races; but if so, will it not at least be wise to see that our own race dominate? we, the mothers of this generation--ancestresses of future generations--have a right to insist upon the conserving not only of soil, forest, birds, minerals, fishes, waterways, in the interest of our future home-makers, but also upon the conserving of the supremacy of the caucasian race in our land. this conservation, second to none in pressing importance, may and should be insured in the best interests of all races concerned; and the sooner attention is turned upon it the better. (great applause) * * * * * [pending the foregoing, governor eberhart resumed the chair.] professor condra--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: at the instance of the president of the congress, and inspired by the splendid address of mrs matthew t. scott, president-general of the daughters of the american revolution and one of the most eminent of american women, i move that the secretary of the congress be empowered to prepare a suitable expression of the condolence of the congress to be sent to the family of the late mrs j. ellen foster, a member of the executive committee of the congress and one of the most militant women of the country in behalf of conservation. the motion was seconded by several delegates. governor eberhart--ladies and gentlemen: you have all heard the motion. as many as favor its adoption will please rise to their feet. [the entire congress arose.] the motion is carried unanimously, and the secretary will be instructed to forward the expression. while the formal addresses of the women of the nation to this conservation congress are now concluded, there is a little presentation which a lady of our state wishes to make; and in accordance with the instructions of the president of the congress, i am pleased to introduce mrs j. c. howard, of duluth. (applause) * * * * * mrs howard--your excellency, and ladies and gentlemen: mrs scott asks me to present this certificate which i hold in my hand, for her and for the d. a. r., to a man whom we all delight to honor. i used to live in washington before i grew up and came to minnesota, where i hope to spend the rest of my life; and there in my time i met many near-heroes and many heroes. i observed that modesty was always a sure sign of the real heroes; and if you had witnessed my efforts with mr gifford pinchot to persuade him to come on the stage and stay there until i could give him this card, you would have no more doubt than before in which category he belongs (laughter and applause). now, governor, please don't let him get away while my back is turned (laughter), because i feel he really ought to have this certificate. ladies and gentlemen, this certificate is a tribute by the d. a. r., in the form of a diploma, as you see; it says, in part, =he that planteth a tree is a servant of god. he provideth a kindness for many generations, and faces that he hath not seen shall bless him.= i have intense pride in presenting it to the man who is first in the conservation war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of all tree-lovers. [mrs howard here presented the certificate to mr pinchot amid great and prolonged applause, with cries of "pinchot!" "speech!"] mr gifford pinchot--mr chairman, mrs scott, and mrs howard: there are two reasons, ladies and gentlemen, why i am profoundly moved, and delighted to receive this certificate: one of them is--and it is not a bit modified by the fact that you have so kindly, yesterday and today, given me far more credit than i deserve--that i would rather have the good opinion of the women who are interested in conservation than that of the men--by far (applause and laughter). the other is, that of all the organizations that have been working for the conservation movement, for the preservation of the forests and for the extension of the same idea to all our natural resources, there has been none more devoted and more effective than the d. a. r. besides, of all the women in the d. a. r., no one has been more devoted or more effective than mrs howard's mother, mrs draper (applause). and in this certificate i have joined together in my mind the kindness of mrs scott and the organization which she represents, the good-will of mrs draper which i very deeply prize, and that of her daughter, mrs howard, who was kind enough to give it to me; and i want to thank them all most heartily. (great applause) * * * * * governor eberhart--when our friend mr pinchot comes here for the next conservation meeting, after having seen all the charming ladies who have attended this congress and worked in its interest, it is to be hoped that there may be still another certificate which he may have in his possession at that time (great applause). i am not saying this for the purpose of announcing any competition on the part of the ladies, but merely because mr pinchot himself suggested that he prizes this certificate so highly. but he would, i am sure, prize the other one still more if he got it (laughter). some time ago, when it became necessary to send a man of ability, honor, and integrity out west to prosecute land frauds, president roosevelt looked quite a while before he could find the right one. the instruction under which that man went was that he should prosecute every guilty person, no matter what position in life he held, whether of high or low standing; and the man he sent was eminently successful. after successfully prosecuting those land frauds, he went to san francisco and continued in the same work with equally great credit and distinction; so that in introducing him to you i am introducing the best-known, the ablest and strongest, apostle of clean citizenship in the united states, a man who stands for a square deal, and who believes in what is best and highest and truest and cleanest and purest in american citizenship. ladies and gentlemen, i have the honor and privilege of introducing to you that conserver of clean citizenship, who will address you on the subject of "safeguarding the property of the people," honorable francis j. heney, of california. [great and prolonged applause and cheers. voices: "what's the matter with heney?" "he's all right!"] * * * * * mr heney (after asking an attendant to remove the water pitcher)--mr chairman, ladies, and gentlemen: as i never take water, i have requested that it be moved over to another table before i commence. (laughter) the efficiency of a democracy must ultimately depend on the intelligence of its voters. it was the recognition of that idea which caused the fathers of this republic to advocate so strongly the establishment of a public school system in this country. any effort on the part of any public servant to prevent the voters of this country from having full knowledge of all its public affairs is, therefore, a species of treason, and any failure on the part of any citizen to acquaint himself as fully as possible with our national affairs is a failure to perform one of the duties and obligations which are imposed upon every member of a democracy. (applause) public opinion, it is said, rules the nation. it might better be said (because it would be more accurate) that public opinion in a democracy _should_ rule the nation; and it might further be said that if we had a real democracy, and a real representative government, public opinion _would_ rule the nation (applause). there are some evidences, however, that public opinion in this country does not have a free chance to operate. i need not mention many instances to convince you. ninety percent of the people of the united states were opposed to men being permitted to make a profit by poisoning a people; they wanted a pure-food law, and yet it was locked up on the high shelf in congress for sixteen years until theodore roosevelt, with the big stick, forced it out (great applause). what public opinion failed to do the big stick accomplished. (renewed applause) now, my friends, public opinion should be intelligent; and that requires accurate information. a friend of mine, riding on a street-car in the city of washington, at a time when the ballinger-pinchot investigation was going on, saw two young men, beyond the voting age, reading the morning newspaper. they had a paper apiece. he was standing close by hanging on to a strap. he heard one of them say to the other, "they are having a great fuss up there in congress over this ballinger-pinchot controversy, aren't they?" "yes," said the other; "i see that ballinger has been found three million dollars short in his accounts" (laughter). "yes, i see that," said the first, "and that they found pinchot has stolen a _million acres_ of public land" (laughter). whereupon both of them turned to the sporting column to see whether johnson or jeffries was predicted to win (laughter). they seemed to have a pretty accurate knowledge, also, of which club was ahead in the baseball game. now, my friends, that sort of misinformation is one of the diseases with which we are afflicted in this republic, and i again call your attention to the responsibility of citizenship; and in that connection i congratulate myself, and i congratulate the nation, that so many women are beginning to come to places like this, on occasions like this, to learn something about our national affairs (applause), because the future of this country is in the hands of the boys who are now growing up, and, perchance, the girls--who knows what may become of woman suffrage in the next generation? (applause) therefore, the more information the mothers have the better opportunity the nation has of getting intelligent action from the voters. the subject of my text today is "safeguarding the property of the people." well, my friends, there are just two ways in which the property of the people may be safeguarded: one is by the legislative arm of the government, to whom the constitution of the united states has entrusted the power of disposing of, regulating, and controlling public property; the other is the executive arm of the government, to which, under the constitution, the power is entrusted of enforcing the laws which have been provided by the legislative body. now, it must be apparent to any one that the most efficient executive must fail in safeguarding the property of the people if the laws provided for that purpose by the legislative body are loose, inaccurate, or unfitted to conditions. i want to make the charge plainly and unequivocally that, when we come (as we shall in a moment) to inquire into the safeguarding of the property of this nation, we will find that all the despoiling of the nation is directly chargeable upon the legislative branch of the government, the congress of the united states, to whom, under the constitution, we gave the power of trustees. in the first place, if unfortunately _our_ representatives in the united states senate--and i use the word "our" figuratively--if the representatives in the united states senate from each state, respectively, are there in the interest of specially privileged classes instead of in the interest of the average, common man, it will follow that the executive arm of the government will be inefficient; and i have discovered that it _is_ inefficient in the greater part of the west, where the greater part of the public property of the nation lies--the executive arm of the government _is_, and since the civil war has been the greater part of the time, utterly inefficient to safeguard the property of the people (applause). but i would be failing in my performance of duty if i failed to tell you why: it is because, while we have entrusted to the president of the united states the appointing of the united states attorneys for the different districts throughout the united states, a rule has grown up in the senate of the united states which has in effect robbed the executive of any real power in that respect, and has placed the appointing of such officials in the hands of the united states senators from the respective states in which those districts lie. (applause) what is the result? the result is that if the lumber interests in a particular district are strong, because of having already succeeded in despoiling the people of a large part of their timber interests, they are apt to dominate the election of a united states senator; and those lumber interests are also liable to dictate, through that united states senator, the appointment of the united states officials whose duty it will be to enforce the laws of the united states against their benefactors. (applause) i would not dare to make such serious charges if i did not speak from absolute experience (applause). when i reached oregon i found that situation existing in oregon--indeed, i found on investigation before a grand jury that the then united states attorney was protecting certain men, who belonged to the higher-up class, from indictment, and that he had entered into a corrupt conspiracy with both the united states senators from that state, by which they had agreed to have him reappointed united states attorney _upon condition_ that these men should not be prosecuted (applause). moreover, i found that when the first stealing of timber commenced in oregon and men were arrested for it, a man representing a big and influential timber company had taken to the railroad train about twenty-five men at portland and carried them up to salem and had them file openly on contiguous timber claims, each one swearing falsely that he was taking the timber for his own use; and when the matter was exposed immediately and the united states attorney took the matter before a grand jury and indicted the leaders who had instigated those men to go up and make the filings, influential state officials appealed to the united states senators from oregon to interfere, and appeals were sent to the commissioner of the general land office and the secretary of the interior, so that finally the indictments were dismissed. shortly thereafter about one hundred men filed on timber claims, under a contract to turn them over as soon as they were acquired, and again the influence of politicians and big business men brought about a failure of justice through an assistant united states attorney, who was the brother of the attorney representing the big interests who had hired these men to make the filings. case after case of that kind came to my knowledge in oregon; case after case of that kind has been brought to my attention in four or five other states. all of it can be traced back to the system under which we have been electing our united states senators. (applause) professor hadley has well said that the fundamental divisions of power in the constitution of the united states are between the voters on the one hand and the property owners on the other. that is the fight. that always has been the fight. that always will be the fight in this country. you heard, probably, all of you, that great address by the greatest citizen of the world, made in this hall the other day (applause), in which he outlined those conditions. now let us come back, for i want to show you wherein our trouble lies; and i want to show that great genius in railroad building (who is a citizen of your state, and who talked to you yesterday afternoon)--i want to show you and him who is responsible for the "extravagance and waste" of the great natural resources of this country. (applause) i have pointed out to you how big business controlled the execution of the laws in practically every place in the west--except, of course, wisconsin, michigan, and minnesota; in the early days when there was timber here none of these evils existed because these conditions didn't exist; your timber lands were not stolen in minnesota, wisconsin, and michigan; you didn't have united states attorneys suggested by united states senators who had been selected by owners of large timber tracts or railroads. some states in the union have suffered from that, but you never had any such thing come home to _you_ (laughter). i congratulate you (renewed laughter). the nation has had in its possession, owned in common by all of us and our forefathers, , , , acres of land. that is _some_ property (laughter); that is more than either you or i possess today (laughter). and that included all of the present rockefeller oil possessions, it included all of the northern pacific's land-grant possessions, it included all of the great anthracite companies' coal possessions, it comprised all of the millions of acres of timber land throughout the united states, including what there was in minnesota. it belonged to you and me and our fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers. we were pretty rich at that time. we _could_ have held on to it and developed it, because i can't believe that if we had offered to pay a patriotic citizen like james j. hill the sum of $ , a year to build a railroad for us from lake superior to puget sound and to furnish him the money with which to build it, that he would have refused the job (applause); even had he considered it inadequate compensation for his great ability, his patriotic love of the people of the united states would have led him to do it. (great applause and cheers) in talking with a banker the other night--one of the big four of new york--i asked him if in his opinion mr harriman, in the gigantic operations performed by him, was influenced by love of money and the desire to gain filthy lucre, or whether he was influenced by the great gratification of achievement, and he said undoubtedly by the latter; that mr harriman would have combined all these railroads for the people of the united states on a salary of $ a month, if we didn't want to give him any more, just for the pleasure of doing it. (laughter and applause) but we have received misinformation, and are receiving it yet, to the effect that there are no patriots in the united states; that no man is willing to develop our coal or our oil or our iron or our water-power or anything else that is left unless we give him everything in sight. (laughter and applause) my friends, the way the people of the united states have been treated in regard to this vast property which we owned reminds me of a story i heard about a man down south--a white man. he was going along the river in flood time in the back country, and the river was full of floating logs and refuse and all sorts of timber, and he saw a nigger sitting on the bank--and will you pardon me for using the word "nigger" instead of "colored man," because i have just been making a visit down in virginia and i suppose i fell into it (laughter); it is not meant as a term of reproach, nor is it used as such there or here--and seeing this negro sitting on the bank, he said to him, "sam, what are you doing?" "nothin', suh." "whose boat is that?" "that's mine, suh." "well, sam, let me tell you what i'll do; you take your boat and go and haul those logs out of the river there, and i'll give you half of all you get on shore." (laughter) it took a little while for that to sink in (laughter). it has taken you forty years to let this railroad proposition sink in. (laughter) right while i am on it, while it is fresh in my mind and in yours: mr hill says, "we have been extravagant." why, my friends, do you know what we gave to mr hill? i say we "gave" it; as a matter of fact, we weren't consulted (laughter); we didn't have a referendum on it (laughter and great applause). we gave the greatest land-grant ever given to an individual or a corporation in the history of the world--sixty millions of acres; when i say to mr hill, of course i mean the northern pacific. we gave outright a strip of land miles long, miles wide in the states and miles wide in the territories! worse than that: instead of giving it in a solid body, we gave every even section, so that in timber lands it carried an immense advantage over anybody else coming in from the outside. now, it is easy to demonstrate, and i hardly believe mr hill would care to deny it--and if he does, i'll get the figures and demonstrate it (applause)--that this land-grant was worth, at a fair figure, ten dollars an acre at the very least. that is six hundred million dollars (applause) of _our_ property that we "extravagantly and improvidently wasted," as mr hill would call it; and i agree with him. (laughter and applause) but what does that mean? why, the road is miles long; $ , a mile on an average for the entire road is a very fair figure as the cost of it, making, if i calculate correctly, $ , , , to build it. let's double that, and allow $ , a mile for the miles; that certainly would build and equip the road. that is two hundred million dollars. and we gave six hundred million dollars worth of land, and the railroad was built and now wants _forever_ to charge you rates--upon how much of a capitalization? well, i don't know. but four hundred million dollars profit! why, that would more than build the panama canal--and i wonder that some private corporation didn't do _that_ (laughter). it _would_, undoubtedly, if we had been willing to give to it all of the remaining , , acres of land that we have left--including alaska, with the coal mines that guggenheim wants (laughter and applause). we _have_ been "improvident"--or somebody has--with the property of the people. now, who was so improvident? why, congress; because the constitution places in the hands of congress the power to dispose of, regulate, and control the property of the united states; and congress did it--and _did_ us, too (laughter and applause). but not satisfied with that, congress gave to the southern pacific, the central pacific, and the union pacific , , acres more of our inheritance, which we purchased with both blood and money--because the war with mexico led to a part of the purchase, in which thousands of american citizens were killed, and thousands of american women widowed, and thousands of american children orphaned, while we put fifteen millions of _our_ money--our common pot--into the purchase on top of that human blood; and then we "extravagantly and improvidently" gave it away. (applause) not satisfied with that, when we commenced to realize that it was necessary to save the forests of this country--some of the forests which were left--congress again passed an act, in , called the new land act. in it had passed the law authorizing the president to create national forest reserves. at the same time it had passed a law authorizing the states to select new lands for the school sections which might be included in the national forest reserves. a gentleman in california by the name of frederick a. hyde, and another gentleman (who is since dead, and who served a year in jail, just before his death, for defrauding the united states), were actively operating in the state of california in school lands. now, don't get the idea in your heads from what i have been saying about the way congress has handled the lands and property of the united states that i am in favor of turning over to the states the power to handle any property in the hope that it will be better handled, because there, again, my experience teaches me that it will be worse--_if possible_ (laughter and applause). well, under that law of , hyde and his companion adopted this system: where they found that school lands were in reserve (they had a man in the surveyor-general's office who was looking out for them), they would go down and get bootblacks, and saloon barkeepers, and tom, dick, and harry to sign an application for school lands--under the law of california acres--the law requiring that in making his filing the applicant should swear that he was taking it for his own use and benefit and not for speculative purposes. and at the same time that mr bootblack signed the application, he would sign a transfer of his interest, a conveyance of the land, with the date left blank; and a very agreeable notary public would put his seal and acknowledgment upon the affidavit and the assignment, despite the blanks and the absence even of any description of the lands in the application. then, when mr hyde had one or two hundred of these, he would go and take up all those school lands, and have the agent of the state thereupon locate all of these school lands in a body in the finest forest he could find in california--some of the finest that ever grew on earth are there, trees two and three hundred feet high, sixteen to twenty feet in diameter, cutting so many millions of feet to the quarter-section that it would astound even a minnesota lumberman unless he had been out there and seen it; and those magnificent virgin forests would be separated from public ownership by our "extravagance"--and this, mark you, through congress passing the law for the benefit (?) of the schools of the state so loosely drawn that speculators could take advantage of it in this way. so the virgin forests went into private ownership; and mr hill will tell you, "what of it? doesn't that develop the country?" why, my friends, they didn't even put the patents on record, because the tax collector of the county would put them on the assessment roll if they did (laughter). and so they grabbed millions of acres, that they had no idea of using in the present; they were holding it for the profit which would come from scarcity of timber through the waste and use which is going on. why, people living in the very neighborhood of the timber grabbed don't know that it has passed out of government ownership! and yet those are some of the people who have been living "extravagantly." i believe that some of them wear shoes that cost the high price of a dollar, and eat bacon that is four-fifths fat. (laughter and applause) let me tell you that extravagance is largely a matter of trying to copy after the higher-ups. no nation was ever destroyed until it had a large leisure class to set a bad example (applause) in living to the common people; and this nation has a leisure class which is rapidly growing, and which is more wealthy than any leisure class ever known to the world, civilized or barbarian. why? my friends, _solely_ because congress has by bad laws permitted all this vast property of the people to get into the hands of the few (applause). there is not a fortune in this country today large enough to be a menace to the liberties of the common people which has not been acquired by despoiling the people through legislation that was either corrupt or the result of such ignorance that it ought to be punished as criminal negligence, or else through unfair discrimination made by common carriers giving one man an advantage over his competitors. (applause) now, i haven't time to finish--i am afraid i have overstepped my time already--(voices: "go on, go on," and applause) but i want to "go on" just a little longer (laughter and applause) because i have something on my mind that i want to put on yours. (laughter) we didn't lose our great inheritance until after the civil war. practically all of the rapes of this nation by congress have been committed since the civil war, and every land law which congress has placed upon the statute books since has been vicious--absolutely vicious--in its tendencies, and the commissioner of the general land office and the secretary of the interior have constantly, every year, told congress about it in printed reports and begged and urged congress to change the laws: _and it has refused to do it!_ (applause) of course all members of congress are not to blame for that; because this fight which hadley says is going on always, and always will go on, in the division of power fundamentally between the voters and the property owners, has resulted in the property owners having more representatives in congress than the people ever had. (applause) now, i am not here to abuse anybody. i heard a man tell a homely story last night that went directly to my heart; it's exactly in line with what i think about most of the men who are responsible for the present condition; i don't say these men are bad, but only that they have a wrong viewpoint--and that was illustrated in the story. this gentleman said that one day his boy brought home a fox-terrier. they had poultry at his home, some brown leghorns and some white chickens. this fox-terrier had been born and raised on a ranch where they had nothing but brown leghorns, and consequently when he went out in the chicken-yard and saw the feed thrown out he rushed out immediately--of course, without being told to do it--and weeded out the white chickens from the brown leghorns and drove them away from the feed and let the brown leghorns have it all (laughter). now, it wasn't the fault of the dog that the white chickens lost their feed (laughter); we mustn't blame him; that had become second nature, from what we would call, speaking in reference to human beings, _environment_ (laughter and applause); and it's a rare dog who can discover for himself that the white chickens ought to have an equal right with the brown leghorns to get _some_ of the feed. (laughter and applause) when, after the civil war, business commenced to swing with great strides in this country, owing to the great inventions in machinery, the discovery of the cotton-gin and so many other things that we can't stop to enumerate them, and the growth of the use of electricity in later days, a few men commenced to see business enlarge--and they were not the men who fought in the war, but the men who remained at home and reflected (laughter and applause). some of them were like the man pictured in one of the illustrated papers where there was a cartoon of thomas jefferson signing the declaration of independence, with one of the imaginary corporation men of the day--a tory--rushing in through the door and saying, "hold on, thomas, don't sign that document; it'll hurt _business_" (laughter); and these men said, "let's stop this war, it's hurting business." and there were others who thought the war _made_ business, though that was before they had commenced to can beef (laughter). then after the war, when the men who had made the fight for human liberty and the continuance of equal opportunities in this country came home and went to work, they went ahead satisfied to make a living for their little families in the best way they could, while these _business men_ who had remained at home had discovered that _if_ a man can get possession of those natural resources which can be turned into energy--the energy which drives modern machinery, which can do the work of human hands--he can sit back and fold his arms and say to the eighty million people in the united states, "go ahead; when you want energy to run your machinery, you'll have to come to me and buy it; when your money is gone the eighty millions of you will have to work for me; and when you get to be one hundred and sixty millions, you'll still have to work for me." now, it requires some imagination to see that, but it is just as fundamentally true as that the earth is spherical--flattened at the poles, as cook tells us (laughter); and peary corroborates it. (laughter) let me explain; because i want you to take home something, besides figures, that you will remember. when a man in the old days, when they had no machinery, employed four or five men, he commenced to be a business man; and when he began to put profit in his pocket--even at the rate of only ten cents a day for the labor of each man working for him, if he had five men he was making a clear profit of fifty cents a day, and if he had fifty men the profit was five dollars a day--he got on the road to "big business." if he could have five hundred men and could make fifty cents a day off the labor of each one, he would be making two hundred and fifty dollars a day; and if he could have factories spread out over the united states in which he had an aggregate of ten million men working for him--as in shoe factories when they made shoes entirely by hand--and could make fifty cents a day off each of the ten million men, he would make five million dollars a day. the figures stagger us. now, with machinery you can take coal, oil, timber, gas, or water-power--those are the energy-creating natural resources--and make machinery run with them; and if you own enough of those energy-creating natural resources to be equivalent to the labor of ten million men, and apply it to the right machinery, you can compete with the man who has ten million slaves to work for him and does not possess this other energy--and you can do better than merely compete, because your water-power doesn't wear out shoes at the toes nor coats at the elbows nor trousers at the knees; so, my friends, the man who owns the water-power is a greater slave-owner--has more energy that can be turned into wealth--than all the planters who owned the colored men of the south. now, at the time of the civil war we didn't understand this great power and the importance of preserving it in the ownership of the people--because it all belonged to us then. there is available--so the report of the national conservation commission says-- , , horsepower in the streams of this country. what does this mean? why, my friends, the energy expended by an average draft-horse working eight hours a day is equal to only four-fifths of the unit horsepower, as we use it in speaking of water-power, so that it would be equivalent, for an eight-hour day's work, to more than fifty-four million average draft horses. now, machinery used to be driven by man-power before the draft horse was made to work in place of the man; that was what they did in the old tread-mill before the discovery of steam, which has only been in effective use about a hundred years; and in man-power, what does the forty million horsepower available immediately for use mean? you don't conceive of it, i am sure. a horsepower is equal to the work of at least ten men, and forty million horsepower would be equal to the work of , , men! why, all the people in the united states today are only , , , including babies. four-hundred-million-of-men power! and just as sure as the sun will rise, if we permit that to go into perpetual ownership of individuals, the day will come when one corporation will own it all and one man will dictate and dominate that corporation (applause). if you want this country to have material progress at the cost of human liberty, let this source of energy slip out of your hands (applause); but if you want to hold on to any kind of a chance for your children and children's children to have equal opportunities like yours, then follow the policies laid down by theodore roosevelt the other day in regard to those energy-producing resources--coal, oil, gas, and water, as well as timber--and this country will be so great that all earlier history will never have told of such progress as the human race will make within these confines. (applause) it seems to me that we all ought to be able to realize that no human being in the short space of a lifetime can have earned a hundred million dollars--he cannot have given an equivalent to mankind for $ , , ; and when we see the example set by some of these great captains of industry who go over to monte carlo and risk a fortune on one bet and one turn of the wheel, and come back to this country and talk about their great benevolence, and then find that the pittsburg "survey" found conditions of human life at their workshops so low that it is bound to degrade and pull down the human race--surely it is time to stop and consider. (tremendous and prolonged applause) my friends, we must have more democracy in this country (applause). i know this is no place to talk politics, and i am not here for the purpose of talking politics in a partisan sense; but the conservation of the natural resources for the benefit of the human race--not only the people of the united states--is of such transcendent importance that it rises above all parties and all men (great applause). why is it that some of these men who have profited by our mistakes and our improvidence in the past are fighting against this conservation movement? is it because they fear that we will fail to develop the country rapidly enough? no! every true conservationist believes in developing the country rapidly as possible. but we realize the danger, the menace to human liberty, that lies in _parting with the fee title_ to all these great energy-producing natural resources; and if we can arouse the people of the united states to a realization and understanding of this question--which, after all, is simple when we get down to it--there will be such a wave of insurgency sweep over this country as will drive the representatives of the special interests out of every public office in the nation. (great and prolonged applause and cheers) now, in order to illustrate what i have said about what these people--or congress--have done and failed to do, i must draw your attention to the fact that under the timber and stone act, , , acres of the finest timber in the world have been extravagantly and improvidently disposed of and lost to the people through a vicious act of congress, and have gone largely into the hands of a few owners; for the repeated reports of the secretary of the interior--even the present secretary, mr ballinger--show that ten of the thirteen million acres are in the hands of a few individuals and corporations. ten million acres! why, that is equal to two of the smaller eastern states. in , the then secretary of the interior, immediately after the act was passed, said in his report for that year (report of secretary of interior, - , pp. xii-xv): while no legislation applicable to all parts of the country with regard to this subject was had, two bills of a local character were passed, one "authorizing the citizens of colorado, nevada, and the territories to fell and remove timber on the public domain for mining and domestic purposes," and one "for the sale of timber lands in the states of california and oregon and in washington territory." in the opinion of the commissioner of the general land office, which is on record in this department, these two acts are more calculated to _hasten the destruction_ of the forests in the states and territories named than to secure the preservation of them. of this act the commissioner of the general land office, in a letter addressed to the secretary of the interior, expresses the following opinion: "it is a fact well known that while almost all the timber-bearing land in those states and all the territories, except dakota and washington, is regarded as mineral, only a small portion is so in reality. the effect of this bill will, in my opinion, be to prevent the survey and sale of any of the timber lands, or the timber upon the lands, in the states and territories named, thus cutting off large prospective revenues that might and should be derived from the sale of such lands or the timber upon them. it is equivalent to a donation of all the timber lands _to the inhabitants of those states and territories_, which will be found to be the largest donation of the public domain hitherto made by congress. this bill authorizes the registers and receivers of the land offices in the several districts in which the lands are situated to make investigations without any specific directions from the secretary of the interior or the commissioner of the general land office, to settle and adjust their own accounts, and retain from the moneys coming into their hands arising from sales of lands such amounts as they may expend or cause to be expended. this method will be found exceedingly expensive and result in no good. experience has shown that the machinery of the land offices is wholly inadequate to prevent depredations." the "rules and regulations" issued in pursuance of the first section of this act are to be found in the report of the commissioner of the general land office, herewith presented. these rules, drawn up with a view to and the intention of preserving the young timber and undergrowth upon the mineral lands of the united states and to the end that the mountain sides may not be left denuded and barren of the timber and undergrowth necessary to prevent the precipitation of the rain-fall and melting snows in floods upon the fertile arable lands in the valleys below, thus destroying the agricultural and pasturage interests of the mineral and mountainous portions of the country, make it the duty of registers and receivers to see to it that trespassers upon timber lands, not mineral, be duly reported, that upon mineral lands only timber of a certain size be cut, and that young trees and undergrowth be protected, and that timber be cut only for the purposes mentioned in the act. these "rules and regulations" will be enforced with all the power left to this department to that end, in order to save what may be saved. but i deem it my duty to call attention to the fact that, as set forth by the commissioner in the letter above quoted, the machinery of the land offices is utterly inadequate to accomplish the object in view. after a careful consideration of the above-named act and its probable effects, i venture the prediction that the permission given the inhabitants of the states and territories named therein, to take timber from the public lands in any quantity and wherever they can find it, for all purposes except export and sale to railroads, will be taken advantage of, not only by settlers and miners to provide economically for their actual current wants, but by persons who will see in this donation a chance to make money quickly; that it will stimulate a wasteful consumption beyond actual need and lead to wanton destruction; that the machinery left to this department to prevent or repress such waste and destruction through the enforcement of the rules above mentioned will prove entirely inadequate; that as a final result in a few years the mountain sides of those states and territories will be stripped bare of the timber now growing upon them, with no possibility of its reproduction, the soil being once washed off from the slopes, and that the irreparable destruction of the forests will bring upon those states all the calamities experienced from the same causes in districts in europe and asia similarly situated. it appears to me, therefore, that the repeal of the above-named act, and the substitution therefor of a law embodying a more provident policy, similar to that of the above-mentioned senate bill no. , is in the highest degree desirable. if the destruction of the forests in those states be permitted, the agricultural and pasturage interests in the mountainous regions will inevitably be sacrificed, and the valleys in the course of time become unfit for the habitation of men. the act for the sale of timber lands in the states of california, oregon, and nevada, and in washington territory, passed by congress at its last session, is, in a letter addressed to this department, commented upon by the commissioner of the general land office, in the following language: "it is a bill of local and not general application to the timber lands of the united states, and adds one more to the already numerous special acts for the disposal of the public domain. the price fixed is too low, as much of the land is worth from five to fifty dollars per acre. "under the provisions of the bill the timber lands will, in my opinion, be speedily taken up and pass into the hands of speculators, notwithstanding the provisions to prevent such results. the soil should not be sold with the timber where the land is not fit for cultivation. only the timber of a certain size should be sold, and the soil and young timber retained with a view to the reproduction of the forests. the bill should have limited the sale of the lands to persons who have farms and homes within the state or territory, and it ought to have required the purchasers to show affirmatively that they had need of timber for domestic uses." no less emphatic were later recommendations for repeal or amendment of the timber and stone acts (report of secretary of interior, - , p. ): in my last annual report i discussed the inadequacy of the laws enacted by the last congress "authorizing the citizens of colorado, nevada, and the territories to fell and remove timber on the public domain for mining and domestic purposes," and providing "for the sale of timber lands in the states of california and oregon and in washington territory." the opinion i then ventured to express, that the first of these acts would be taken advantage of not only by settlers and miners to provide economically for their actual current wants, but by persons who see in this donation a chance to make money quickly; that it would stimulate a wasteful consumption beyond all actual need and lead to wanton destruction, and that the machinery left to this department to prevent or repress such waste and destruction through the enforcement of the rules to be made by the commissioner of the general land office would be found insufficient for that purpose, _has already_ in many places _been verified by experience_; also the predictions made by the commissioner of the general land office with regard to the effect of the second one of the above-named acts. referring to what was said about these laws in my last annual report, i repeat my _earnest_ recommendation that they be _repealed_, and that more adequate legislation be substituted therefor. it is by no means denied that the people of the above-named states and territories must have timber for their domestic use as well as the requirements of their local industries. neither is it insisted upon that the timber so required should be imported from a distance, so that the forests in those states and territories might remain intact. this would be unreasonable. but it is deemed necessary that a law be enacted providing that the people may lawfully acquire the timber required for their domestic use and their local industries from the public lands under such regulations as will prevent the indiscriminate and irreparable destruction of forests, with its train of disastrous consequences. it is thought that this end will be reached by authorizing the government _to sell timber from the public lands principally valuable for the timber thereon_, _without conveying the fee_, and to conduct such sales by government officers under such instructions from this department as will be calculated to _prevent the denudation of large tracts_, especially in those mountain regions _where forests once destroyed will not reproduce themselves_. i have no doubt that under such a law, well considered in its provisions, the people of those states and territories would be enabled to obtain all the timber they need for domestic as well as industrial purposes at reasonable rates, and that at the same time the cutting of timber can be so regulated as to afford sufficient protection to the existence and reproduction of the forests, which is so indispensable to the future prosperity of those regions. i venture to express the opinion that the enactment of such a law has become a pressing necessity, and cannot much longer be delayed without great and irreparable injury to one of the most vital interests of the people. i therefore again commend to the consideration of congress the bill introduced as senate bill no. in the _last_ congress: "the last clause of the second section will permit any person applying for a tract of timber land and securing a certificate from the register to sell his right and interest therein _immediately_, and the purchaser, although it may have been obtained by perjury, may be entitled to a patent for the land. "section provides that any person prosecuted under sec. of the revised statutes of the united states, may be relieved of the penalty by the payment of two dollars and fifty cents per acre for the land trespassed upon. this is objectionable, for the reason that the penalty fixed is altogether inadequate, and does not require the payment of costs of prosecution, which are often greater than the penalty to be collected. it should require that the trespasser should pay for the entire subdivision trespassed upon. "there can be no doubt that if this bill becomes a law it will be taken advantage of, by persons who want to make money quickly, to acquire the timber lands under its provisions at a very low price, and strip the mountain sides of their forest growth as rapidly as possible. how disastrous such a result will be to these states and territories need not be detailed here." my friends, every report from down to the last report this year, tells congress exactly the same thing, and begs and urges congress to repeal this timber and stone act. not only that; every report goes on and tells that large tracts are being stolen and taken fraudulently, and congress is urged for that reason to repeal it and make a different rule in regard to the sale of the timber, not to hold it but to sell the timber off the land letting buyers take the mature growth, and replanting and reforesting so that the timber will always be there; and congress failed to act until , fourteen years later. after the above reports went in, with a report of the same kind every year for fourteen years, then, in , with a report before them at the time to the same effect, congress _extended_ the timber and stone act to take in montana and some other states. _who got them to do it?_ the great amalgamated copper interests are in montana, and the great smelting interests there wanted _timber_--that belonged to us, and that they could well afford to pay for--and they wanted to get it under this vicious act, and they _did_ get it under this vicious act; and indictments followed only a short time ago, but there was failure of proof although everybody knew who was guilty (applause). and, my friends, the act of congress in extension of the vicious law, with all these reports before them, cannot be accounted for upon any other theory than that the people of the united states have a minority of representatives in both branches of congress (applause). now, after the extension, the adverse reports commenced to come in again; and they have been followed up every year down to the present year, yet that timber and stone act still remains on the statute books unamended and unrepealed! _how_ can you account for it? i'll tell you how. why, _there is still some timber to be stolen_! (applause) now, i have taken altogether too much of your time. i have not been able to present this matter as satisfactorily to myself as i would have liked on account of the limitation of time--i suppose most of you are glad of that. (voices: "no, no, no; go on!") i can't go on; it wouldn't be fair to other gentlemen who are here to speak, especially to mr gifford pinchot who is to talk to you immediately after i conclude, and i know you want to hear from him (applause). but i want to say to you that the fight to prevent our natural resources from getting into private ownership is a war that will have a greater influence upon the future of the human race than even the great civil war in this country had (applause); and i want to say to you, further, that i have enlisted in that war as a private soldier (applause, and a voice: "we'll make you the leader!") for the full term of my natural life. (great applause) * * * * * governor eberhart--the next subject for consideration is "the conservation program"; and i wish that time would permit me to say some of the fine things i would like to say about the speaker. i will say just one thing: a short time ago i was in the belasco theater in the city of washington and the question of conservation was up, and this man stood on the rostrum and said to that vast congregation that the time had come when we must forget personalities and men, and work for principles--that it was time for every man interested in the welfare of the nation to come forward in this conservation work, forgetting the past, and forget all personal prejudices and jealousies, and work for this one movement; and at the close of his address he was given such an ovation at the hands of that gathering as he has frequently received here. it is not necessary for me to formally introduce him; you know him as the best friend of our forests--gifford pinchot. (great applause and cheers) * * * * * mr gifford pinchot--governor, ladies and gentlemen: i am not tired of receiving your kindness, but i wonder if you are not tired of receiving my thanks! i _do_ want to thank you most earnestly for all your kindness; and i have wished all along that one person who has made the fight with me could be here, and that is my mother. (great applause) i shall have to read a good deal of my paper to you tonight, because there are some things i want to say more exactly than i otherwise could; but i will read just as little as possible. like nearly every great reform--and conservation _is_ a great reform--the conservation movement first passed through a period of generalities, general agitation and general approval, when all men were its friends; and it hadn't yet really begun. you have all noticed that when a minister in church makes a general arraignment of wickedness, no particular sinner seems to care very much--it passes over his head, or he applies it to the other fellow; but when he comes down to particular cases, and the special shortcomings, the special desires, the special impulses which control each one of us, begin to be the subject of his oration, then there is a very different situation. now, it was just so with the conservation movement. at first everyone approved it, because it touched no one nearly; then it passed into a period of practical application, out of the sweep of the generalities, and at once the men whose particular interests were threatened began to take an active interest in the question, and the opposition began; and with that opened the second period of the conservation movement. when this fight began, it was found that the people believed in conservation all over this nation, and that fact had to be taken into consideration by the people who were opposing the movement. when there is a general movement of which all men approve, the regular way in which the attack is made upon it is to join in the approval and then get after the men and the methods by which the general proposition is being carried out. so, now we find that the desire of the opponents of conservation--and there are not so very many of them in numbers--is not at all that we should abandon the principle of making the best use of our natural resources; they do not urge that we should abandon the ideas of doing the best thing for all of us for the longest time; but the soft-pedal conservationists _do_ demand that conservation shall be safe and sane. safety and sanity, in the meaning of the men who use that term most as applied to legislation, means legislation not unfriendly to the continued domination of the great interests as opposed to the welfare of the people (applause); and safe and sane conservation, as that expression is used by those same men, means conservation so carefully sterilized that it will do no harm to the special interests and very little good to the people. (prolonged applause) i take it, of course, that every friend of conservation is fully and heartily in sympathy with safety and sanity; that goes without saying, for if there ever was a prudent, safe and sane program, it is that of the conservation movement, expressing a prudent, safe and sane spirit, and intention as well. but we must never forget that safety and sanity from the point of view of the men who are advocating conservation--from the point of view of a great gathering like this--means that, first, last, and all the time, the interests of _all_ the people shall be set ahead of the interests of any part of the people. (applause) among the things that have been charged against the conservation movement is this, that conservation does not know what it wants--that the conservation movement is an indefinite striving after no one knows exactly what. i want to tell you, on the other hand, that the conservation program is now, and has for at least two years been a definite concrete attempt to get certain specific things; and that the impression which has been made, or has been sought to be made, that we didn't know what we were after, is wholly misleading. (applause) the conservation program may be found, most of it, in the following reports--the report of the public lands commission of ; the report of the inland waterways commission, march, ; the great declaration of principles adopted by the governors at the white house, in may, --one of the great documents of our history; the report of the commission on country life, january, ; and the declaration of the north american conservation conference, february, . by the close of the last administration, the conservation program had grown into a well-defined platform, and the only important addition of more recent date is a clearer understanding--and we have now a very clear understanding--that monopoly of natural resources is the great enemy of conservation, and that monopoly always must depend on the control of natural resources and natural advantages of a few as against the interests of the many. (applause) none of the men, so far as i know, who are engaged in the conservation movement, took hold of that side of the fight because they wanted to. i can say, for myself at least, that it was not until i was forced into it by experience that i could not doubt, by being defeated over and over again in trying to get things i knew were right--it was not until the covert opposition of the special interests in conservation was beaten into me, and beaten into the rest of us, that that end of it was taken up at all. there are troubles enough in this world without any of us hunting a fight; but this fight hunted us (applause), and we are in it yet, as mr heney declares. the principles of conservation are very few and very simple. that is one of the beauties of this whole movement--that there is nothing mysterious or complicated or hard to understand about it; it is the simplest possible application of common sense. the first of the principles is this: that the natural resources and the natural advantages both belong to all the people and should be developed, protected, and perpetuated directly for the benefit of all the people and not mainly for the profit of a few (applause). the second principle is that the natural resources still owned by the people which are necessaries of life, like coal and water-power, should remain in the public ownership and should be disposed of only under lease for limited periods and with fair compensation to the public for the rights granted (applause). i have never sympathized with the ideas we have heard so much of that the people must not try to protect themselves because they are not fit to handle their own affairs, and especially that they cannot handle their affairs in the matter of conservation. by all means let us have the resources cared for, held in ownership by the people of the states as well as of the nation, and handled for the benefit of the people first of all. (applause) now, i want to state a few propositions as to each of the four great categories of the natural resources, which seem to me to include not all but a very considerable proportion of the fundamental things that conservation people seek. it is very likely that some will not agree that these are the fundamental things; but i believe these propositions, taken together, represent fairly the opinion of most of the many millions of men and women who believe in conservation. first, as to our waterways: every stream should be made useful for every purpose in which it can be made to serve the public. we have been in the habit of sacrificing, for example, irrigation to power, or power to the city water supply. let us study our streams and use them for every purpose to which they can be put. the preparation of a broad plan is needed without delay for the development of our waterways for navigation, domestic supply, irrigation, drainage and power. (applause) second, every water-power site now in state or federal control should be held in that control (applause), and should be disposed of only under lease for a limited time and with fair compensation to the public. third, in the development of our waterways, the cooperation of the states with the nation is essential to the general welfare. (applause) now, as to our forests: first, all forests necessary for the public welfare should be in the public ownership and remain there (applause). among these are the national forests already in existence and the proposed appalachian and white mountain national forests (applause). i am glad to hear you applaud the proposition for the appalachian and white mountain forests--we need them (applause). we want also the state forests to be taken care of--the state forests of new york, pennsylvania, wisconsin, minnesota, and other states. second, the protection of forests against fire is the duty of state and nation alike (applause); and that lesson has been driven home this year in a way that i think will make our people understand and remember it for many years to come. i want to pay a tribute in a word, if you will allow me, to the wonderful work done by the boys of the national forest service, of the army, and of the great fire-fighting associations of the west, and by many private citizens, in making what seems to me to have been one of the best, one of the boldest, one of the most devoted fights for the public welfare of which i know anything in recent years (applause). the way to stop fires in a forest, as in a town, is to get men to them as soon as they begin. the maintenance and extension of forest fire patrol by the nation and states and by their subdivisions and by associations or private citizens who own timber lands is absolutely necessary. and we must have not only a patrol but a _sufficient_ patrol. third, the development of existing forests by wise use is the first step in forestry, and reforestation is the second. practical forestry in our existing forests comes first, tree planting follows; both are absolutely essential if we are to handle this problem right. (applause) fourth: land bearing forests should be taxed annually on the land value alone, and the timber crop should be taxed only when cut, so that private forestry may be encouraged (applause). next to fire, there is nothing that so stubbornly stands in the way of practical forestry in this country as bad methods of taxation. (applause) fifth--and i feel very strongly about this: the private ownership of forest lands is in reality a public trust, and the people have both the right and the duty to regulate the use of such private forest lands in the general interest. (applause) then as to the lands: every acre of land should be put to whatever use will make it most serviceable to all the people (applause). all agricultural land should be put to agricultural use. i have never been one to maintain that forest-bearing land which could be more useful under the plow should be kept for forest uses (applause); i have never been one to maintain, either, that land bearing heavy timber, acquired ostensibly for agricultural uses, should be cut over and afterward abandoned (applause). the fundamental object of our land policy should be the making and maintenance of permanent prosperous homes--that is the whole story (applause). land monopoly, and excessive holdings of lands in private ownership in great bodies, must not be tolerated (applause). one of the very great difficulties in several parts of our country arises in huge consolidated holdings of land, which make tenants out of men who ought to be freeholders--free men on their own land. (applause) settlement should be encouraged by every legitimate means on all the land that will support homes. that is a fundamental proposition. thus the tillable land in public ownership, within and without the national forest, should be disposed of in fee simple to actual settlers, but never to speculators. (applause) the first and most needed thing to do for our cultivated lands is to preserve their fertility by preventing erosion, the greatest tax the farmer pays. (applause) the non-irrigable and arid public grazing lands should be administered and controlled by the federal government in the interest of the small stockman and the homemaker until they can pass directly into the hands of actual settlers (applause). many millions of acres are now having their forage value destroyed because uncle sam exercises no control whatever over a territory vastly larger than any single state--even texas. finally, rights to the surface of the public land should be separated from rights to the forests upon it and the minerals beneath it, and each should be held subject to separate disposal; _and the timber and stone act should be repealed!_ (applause) as to our minerals: those which still remain in government ownership should not be sold--especially coal--but should be leased on terms favorable to development up to the full requirements of our people. i want to make it plain, if anyone should happen not to understand, that the withdrawals which have been made of coal lands and oil lands and phosphate lands are not intended to be permanent; they are intended simply to prevent those lands from passing into private ownership until congress can pass proper laws for retaining them in the public ownership and having them used there (applause). until legislation to this effect can be enacted, temporary withdrawals of land containing coal, oil, gas, and phosphate rock, are required in order to prevent speculation and monopoly. it is the clear duty of the federal government, as well as that of the states in their spheres, to provide, through investigation, legislation, and regulation, against loss of life and waste of mineral resources in mining. the recent creation of a national bureau of mines makes a real advance in the right direction. and i want here to pay my tribute to the man who has recently and most wisely been appointed director of that bureau of mines, joseph a. holmes, one of the best fighters for conservation that this country has produced. (applause) with regard to national efficiency: the maintenance of national and state conservation commissions is necessary to ascertain and make public the facts as to our natural resources. that seems to me to be fundamental. we must have the machinery for continuing this work. such commissions supply the fundamental basis for cooperation between the nation and the states for the development and protection of the foundations of our prosperity. a national health service is needed to act in cooperation with similar agencies within the states for the purpose of lengthening life, decreasing suffering, and promoting the vigor and efficiency of our people (applause). i think it is high time we began to take as much care of ourselves as we do of our natural resources. (applause) these are not all the things for which conservation stands, but they are some of the more important. i had meant to speak here of the conflict between state and federal jurisdictions, which we have seen illustrated in this congress, but i prefer to speak, not of the conflicts, but of the chances for cooperation (applause). i believe in the federal control of water-power in navigable and source streams and of water-power sites that are now in the federal hands. i believe equally that every state has a great duty to its own people in conservation, and that only by full and free and hearty cooperation between the nation and the states can we all of us get together to control or develop, as the case may be, those intrastate or interstate agencies which are attempting for private profit to harm all the people (applause). when a question is settled, as i think this congress has pretty well settled in its own mind certain of the questions relating to the division of the federal and state work, that is the time to go on and act upon it; and i believe we ought to emphasize here most vigorously the functions of the state as well as the functions of the national government, always remembering that the federal government alone is capable of handling questions which exceed the limits of any one state, and that, as colonel roosevelt said here the other day, nearly all of the great corporations have affiliations extending throughout the nation or at least across state boundaries. i am as vigorously for the recognition of the state power and the state duty as i am for the recognition of the federal power and the federal duty, each in its proper place (applause). but should i at any time see an attempt made to hide behind either one of these powers at the expense of the people, i would not be doing my duty if i didn't stand up and say so. just a word in closing: no body like this can get together without firing a man's imagination and heart. i have been at many great meetings, but never at one that seemed to me to contain within itself the possibility and power for good that this one does (applause). i have watched this conservation movement grow, as we all have; i see it now on the very verge of the most practical kind of results. the clouds have cleared away; we know where we stand; we are ready to go forward, and we know where we are going and how. there has been gathered here a body of men and women whose motive is clearly this, that they propose when they depart to leave this good old earth better for their children than when they found it (applause), and they are carrying that message to the people of the united states more powerfully than it has ever been carried before. if any man or any woman were disposed not to be hopeful about the conservation movement, i think this congress would lift them to a new plane; it gives us new hope for the future of our country. i thank you. (great applause) * * * * * governor eberhart--ladies and gentlemen: just a few words before we take a recess until this evening: i wish on this occasion, as it will be perhaps the only one afforded to me, to express my sincere thanks to the officers of this congress for the splendid manner in which they have done their work. i have never met a more congenial and kindly set of officers than those who are handling this convention (applause), and a great deal of the credit of the success of this convention is due to their personal, persistent, and strenuous efforts. i take it that this is the time at which, as chief executive of the state, i should present my acknowledgments. i regret that the president of the congress, who is always unselfish, has determined that, in order to give the other officers, delegates and guests a chance tonight to be heard, his own lecture--which we have all been waiting for--shall not be presented at this time. among the splendid sentiments which mr pinchot has uttered, one of the very best, i think, was that the states and the nation instead of struggling among themselves as to how authority should be divided, should cooperate (applause) in the conservation of the resources of the country for the benefit of all the people for all time. after two or three announcements have been made, we will take a recess until this evening at oclock. professor condra--the committee on nominations will meet, immediately after this meeting adjourns, in room , saint paul hotel. since the report of the committee on credentials was received and filed with the secretary yesterday, there has been an additional registration of or delegates. it was announced this morning that the call of the states would be made this afternoon, but it became impossible to do so. president baker asks me to say that tonight the order of business will be, _first_, the election of officers; _second_, the reception of the resolutions from the committee on resolutions; and _third_, special reports from the states--this to continue tomorrow if necessary. another suggestion: if any of you have anything to be read from the platform, please put it in such form that it can be read properly and understood clearly. we had an example of misunderstanding this morning, which i regret; and i want to advertise the papers of this city by asking you to read the report in one of them from which you will see the results of that misunderstanding. do not blame anybody; these things come. do not blame the ladies of this state for any misunderstanding. i have had too many thousands of womanly women in my classes at the university and elsewhere (and i married one of the most lovely women in the world), and i have too much faith in women to blame them. i blame myself for trying to read a statement which i had not had the time to look at. let a thing like that not come into this congress again. blame no one. thereupon governor eberhart, for president baker, declared a recess until oclock p.m. _closing session_ the congress was called to order by president baker in the auditorium, saint paul, at oclock p.m., september . president baker--ladies and gentlemen: the first business in order is action on the report of the nominating committee, to be followed by action on the report of the resolutions committee. while waiting for these reports we should be glad to hear from some of the states. washington made a special request to be heard. is the gentleman from the state of washington present? [there was no response.] w. s. harvey--mr president: in the absence of the representative of washington, may the delegation from the keystone state, pennsylvania, be heard at this time? president baker--colonel harvey has the floor, and will speak for his state. colonel harvey--mr president and delegates: on behalf of the commonwealth of pennsylvania, which it is our honor to represent, we desire to say first of all that no other state in the whole galaxy constituting our union of states possesses such great natural resources. in some, indeed, the resources may be more varied, but in none are they of such productive and wealth-creating capacity as in pennsylvania. pennsylvania leads all other states in the production of coal, the value of our annual output reaching approximately $ , , per annum. in the value of its petroleum, natural gas, clay products, and pig iron it has no close second. the annual value of our petroleum production is about $ , , , and of our natural gas about the same, while the value of our pig-iron production reaches about $ , , ; of our clays it might be said we have scarcely begun to develop them, yet the value of our clay product is more than $ , , yearly. we are among the leading states in the production of cement, roofing-slate, lime, and building stone. among our other mineral products are graphite, glass sand, mineral waters, metallic paints, mortar colors, and ochre. it will doubtless surprise many to learn that in the year the total value of all of the mineral products of all of the states west of the mississippi was more than $ , , less than the value of the mineral products of pennsylvania for the same year; and that the value of our mineral products in the same year was equal to almost one-third of the entire value of all of the mineral products of the united states, including alaska. this also includes gold and silver. we have thus far spoken only of our mineral resources, but when we add to this our magnificent resources in agriculture (one of our counties leading all others in the united states in the value of its agricultural products), of our timber and our water-power, and more important still, a population second only to that of the empire state and nearly equal to canada, it is apparent that we should be vitally interested in the subject of conservation; and we beg now to be permitted to mention what has been and now is being done along this line: our state has for many years had a forestry department with a commissioner and a forest reservation commission, who have purchased for the creation of state forest reserves and paid for up to september , , , acres of land at a cost of $ , , . or an average of $ . per acre, and have under contract for purchase about , acres more. the state also has established nurseries for seedlings, and has turned out thus far , , ; next spring the increased capacity of these nurseries will turn out about , , seedlings, and we hope and expect to be in a position within a few years to turn out , , each year. these seedlings are being used for reforestation on the state reservations and other lands that have been cut over or denuded, and in time will produce forests from which the state will derive a large revenue. the state has also established a forest academy, for which appropriations amounting to $ , have been made; students have been graduated, all of whom, with the exception of two, are now in the employ of the state; students are maintained in the academy; and the course is three years, students being admitted each year. the state has also made provision for protection against, and the extinguishing of, forest fires, and the sum of $ , has been appropriated for this purpose. the state has appropriated for maintenance and administration of forest reserves since they were first created the sum of $ , . in addition to the foresters employed, in number, the state employs rangers and a large labor force. one of the most important conservation movements entered into by our state has been the conserving of the health of its citizens by protecting from pollution, through a water commission and the state board of health, the waterways of the entire commonwealth. human life and its preservation from disease and impairment of usefulness and its loss of producing power is the most fundamental of all subjects of conservation. pennsylvania has also set an example that we sincerely trust may be followed by every other state wherein forest reserves can be created, by establishing camps for tuberculosis patients, where those who are unable to provide the necessary expense to be cared for in private institutions and in climatically suitable locations can be cared for by the state. since pennsylvania has appropriated to the state department of health for the construction of suitable buildings and camps for the treatment of tuberculosis on the reservations of the state, $ , , . the sanitarium established at mount alto has treated , patients, and dispensaries established throughout the state have treated , patients. the present enrollment at mount alto is nearly , and of dispensary patients , . this work is under the supervision of the distinguished and capable gentleman at the head of our health department, dr samuel g. dixon. the movement for the establishment of tuberculosis camps was inaugurated by dr j. t. rothrock about twenty years ago, and his name with that of others who have been influential in this work for the cause of humanity and the conservation of health and happiness will continue to be honored in our state. pennsylvania also makes much larger appropriations than any other state in the union for its general hospitals, furnishing free of cost the best surgical and medical skill to those who are unable to pay for the same, thus saving many lives as well as adding to the bread-winning capacity of every community. our department of mines is doing a good work in trying to make more secure the lives of the miners and their occupation less hazardous. our system of factory inspection is doing much to protect the lives of our workers in mills and factories, and the topographic and geologic survey commission of our state is also carrying on a most important work in the conservation and development of our natural resources. pennsylvania has a forestry association that has been in continued active existence for years. its membership extends to every county in the state, and it has taken the initiative and been the organizer and promoter of the measures that caused the creation by the state of forest reserves and a forestry commission; and its members have been largely instrumental, through the earnest, persistent, public-spirited devotion to measures and methods, in educating the people not only of pennsylvania but of other states to appreciate the value and merits of conserving all our natural resources; and what pennsylvania has done has helped in no small degree to develop conditions that have made possible the present nation-wide movement for conservation. (applause) the state of pennsylvania has in the above brief statement shown the practical interest it has had for years and will continue to have in the subject of conservation; and we earnestly assure this congress of the hearty support and cooperation of the keystone state in this great cause. respectfully submitted, on behalf of the state of pennsylvania, by wm. s. harvey, g. w. mcnees, and joseph c. righter. (applause) * * * * * president baker--ladies and gentlemen: we wish to give everybody a chance to speak, and i am willing to stay here all night and all day tomorrow. we shall have some very important business in a few minutes. it might be well under the call of the states, for speakers to be limited to five minutes (applause). is that your pleasure? all in favor of a five minute rule will please say "aye." [many voices: "aye."] president baker--are any opposed? (after a pause) it is carried unanimously. a delegate--mr president: i move you that the states be called in alphabetic order. it will save confusion, prevent delegates from rising in all parts of the house, and expedite business. the motion was seconded, put, and carried without dissent. mr e. w. ross (of olympia, washington)--mr chairman: nobody in this part of the house knows what is going on. what is the question before the house? president baker--the question before the house just now was on the motion that the states be called in alphabetic order, which was carried; and the call of the states is now in order. mr ross--we have expected, since : oclock this morning, to have the states called in alphabetic order. what is the use in talking to delegates now about calling the states in alphabetic order at oclock on next to the last day of this congress? this is the first time since i have attended this congress that i have heard the delegates vote on something which pertained to their own proceedings. (confusion on the floor) who brought this anyway? are we to sit here day after day like a flock of cattle and-- president baker--the gentleman is out of order. mr ross--i have traveled two thousand miles, and i had something to say on a proposition germane to what was going on at the time, and i was informed that there would be a time later and a motion was put here and voted on that at : this morning the states would be called-- president baker--the officers were here at : , but there were no delegates. mr ross--it is now oclock and you talk about-- president baker--we were ready at : this morning. mr ross--i was here and the representative of the state of washington-- president baker--washington was twice called. mr ross--and he has been-- president baker--you are out of order. mr ross--has been sitting on the rostrum there since oclock this morning, and he hasn't been heard yet! president baker (rapping on the table)--the gentleman is out of order. is the chair sustained? many voices: yes. a delegate--mr president: i make the point of order that the committee on nominations was to report immediately after oclock this evening. i therefore call for the previous question and ask that the election of officers proceed. president baker--the committee will be ready to report in a few minutes. mr ross--mr chairman-- president baker--you are out of order. mr ross--the gag rule is trying to be enforced, and i appeal to this congress. that is what we have had from the beginning to the end. put on your gag rule, and we will go home and never forget it--(calls from the floor: "order, order!") president baker--will the house be in order? mr ross--put the screws down, the harder you do it the greater the recoil and the rebound, and the boomerang will hit you in the end-- president baker--the chairman of the committee on nominations will now report: professor condra. mr ross--and i want to say now that when theodore roosevelt occupied the platform, myself and delegates walked to the front door and we knocked and we knocked and we knocked-- many voices: "you are out of order!" mr ross--and i am tired of the way things have been going on; the representative of the state of washington has been sitting on that rostrum since : this morning waiting for the states to be called and the states were-- a delegate--mr president: i call for the report. professor condra--mr president, and ladies and gentlemen: in this committee work we have tried to do our best for the interests of conservation throughout the whole country for next year and the ensuing years. no member of this committee has been unduly influenced or has any axe to grind whatever (applause)-- [mr ross interrupts, and momentary confusion ensues] professor condra--as to the delegates that tried to gain admission to our room this evening, that is a closed chapter and our report is without bias and we hope it will receive your approval (applause). we thought of nominating for the presidency of the congress, among others, two persons now on this platform. we consulted them, and they both said it would be better to place in nomination another. one of the two men whom we first thought of nominating is captain white, the other is gifford pinchot. the committee will ask the former to nominate the president, and the latter to second the nomination. (applause) captain white--mr president, ladies and gentlemen, and delegates to this congress: it is a pleasure that comes to man but seldom in life when he can do a great benefit to a people; even if it involves a sacrifice, it is often a pleasure to do it. i did not wish to have my name mentioned, as it has been (nor did i know that it would be), as a possible nominee for the presidency of this honorable body, nor did i know that my friend mr pinchot's name would be mentioned; but in thinking it over, after we were consulted, we both felt like influencing the nominating committee to do what was best for the country, this organization, and for all the state associations. the great back-bone of this country is the farming element. it is the farmers who make the country, and to them we must look for prosperity, and when they are prosperous and contented the country is prosperous and the people are happy. so, to that department of conservation we have looked for a man to act as president of this organization--one who would be satisfactory to the farmers. we found the right man. we are going to put in nomination to this congress a man in whom there is no guile, who is not only well known in this country but who has international fame; a man who has published for many years one of the largest, if not the largest, of farm journals in the country; one who was appointed by president roosevelt as a member of the country life commission, who has lived close to the farmer, who has done perhaps more than any man in his community, making greater sacrifices according to his ability; who has made speeches on many platforms, and during a long life has worked earnestly for the benefit of humanity. i take pleasure in nominating for the presidency that prince of men, mr henry wallace, of des moines. (great applause) mr gifford pinchot--ladies and gentlemen: i pray your indulgence for a moment while i try to say a little of what i think about "uncle henry" wallace. i call him "uncle henry" for the best of all reasons--that when a man has reached his age in a life of usefulness, he becomes, in a sense, the forebear of all the rest of us, and our affectionate esteem naturally expresses itself in calling him "uncle"; and i say "uncle henry" wallace because i love him. (applause) i want to add, too, an expression of my highest respect for his character, for his achievement, and, above all, for his breadth of view, which covers intelligently and fully every interest for which this conservation congress stands. mr wallace lives in the center of the country; his main attention has been given to our central industry. his advice and assistance have been poured forth freely for that class of citizens among us all who have the most to do with the fundamental occupation of conserving the earth and making it forever fruitful; and i deem it to be a most fitting nomination that the committee has laid before you in suggesting his name. before i sit down i want, with your permission, to say a word, also about captain white. captain white and mr wallace stand together in my mind as two of the finest types of ripened american citizens (applause). i am proud to say that i believe i enjoy the friendship of both. i have been associated with captain white for many years in conservation work. he was one of the first of the lumbermen--the very first of the lumbermen, i believe--to take an earnest and effective and active interest in conservation. it was to his lands that the first class from one of the great forest schools went to study lumbering and forestry on the ground; and at every point his helpful, wise, and effective assistance has been given to the movement for which this great congress stands. i know that mr wallace will not mind my interjecting remarks about another man in seconding his nomination, however irregular it may appear. i wanted to say (and this is the only chance i have) what i think of captain white; and i want to add that i shall make only one suggestion to mr wallace, if he is elected, and he will accept it or not as he pleases; but i shall certainly advise him to keep captain white as chairman of the executive committee. (applause) mr president, i take the greatest pleasure in seconding the nomination of mr wallace. (applause) a delegate--mr president: i move that the rules be suspended, and that mr wallace be elected by acclamation. the motion was seconded, put, and declared unanimously carried. mr baker--it gives me very great honor, mr president wallace, to present to you the gavel. no man will do more, to the extent of his ability, in supporting your administration and carrying it forward to success. (applause) president wallace--mr baker, and ladies and gentlemen: believe me, this is the greatest surprise of my life. no one had said a word to me about it until a few moments before i came into this room. i believe that if i had had time to think of it i would have declined, but in an unguarded moment, i said if the unanimous choice of this congress i would do my best to serve you. i know i am undertaking a very great work; i know i shall need all the help of your wisest counsels. i shall probably make mistakes. the man who makes no mistakes is the man who does nothing (applause). i have made mistakes in other undertakings. it is a rule of my life not to mourn over the irreparable past, but to make the best out of the available future (applause); to do one day's work well, and be ready if possible to embrace the opportunities that may come tomorrow. now, i feel conscious of my inability to act as president of your organization. i have studiously avoided such offices in the past; i have studiously avoided taking office of any kind or class; but this having been forced upon me, and the offer coming utterly without my knowledge--without a whisper of it, in fact--it gives me an opportunity of service which i will do my best to meet. i shall have to ask you to excuse me from serving tonight, for i am leaving on a train in a very short time. i shall ask you to wait, if i have the executive committee to appoint (as i am told i have), until i have time to study this conservation movement from the organization's side. i shall make the best selections i can; i will do the very best that lies in me, and that is all that any man can do. (applause) i want to say to you that if there have been any factions in this organization, i know nothing of them (applause). i have no part in them. i believe in the conservation of the resources of the country. i believe that if this is to be done wisely we must imagine ourselves in the position of the men who have differences of opinion here. i realize that the western people have peculiar difficulties; i realize that their position must be studied from their standpoint (applause)--that whatever help may be given them for the solution of their problems must be given; and if i am to be president of this organization, i will be president of a national organization (applause), and i will know no state (renewed applause), no faction, no party (renewed applause); and, so far as i am concerned, there will be no politics (great applause) in this association. i thank you for this unexpected and unsolicited honor, and i accept it as an opportunity to serve the american people in this generation and perform a service which will be beneficial to generations yet unborn (applause); for i believe that the mission of this nation is not to build great cities, not to be a world-power, not to amass wealth untold, but to develop character (applause) and manhood that can stand facing all the storms that blow, that can solve the problems as they come--a manhood that owes its highest obedience not to laws made by mortal man but to the laws made for human guidance by almighty god. (applause) professor condra--mr president, and ladies and gentlemen: your committee nominate for executive secretary thomas r. shipp (applause), for recording secretary james c. gipe, and for treasurer d. austin latchaw. i move the election of these nominees. president wallace--it is moved that thomas r. shipp be elected executive secretary. is that motion seconded? the motion was seconded from all parts of the house. president wallace--it is moved and seconded that thomas r. shipp be chosen executive secretary. are there any remarks? (calls of "question, question!") mr ross--mr chairman: i would like to have a little information on that subject. i would like to inquire whether mr shipp occupies any position of trust or profit in the way of emolument under the united states or any state government? (calls of "question!" "regular order!" "order!") president wallace--the chair is unable to give the gentleman any information on that subject. the question is called for. all in favor, signify by saying "aye." (hundreds of voices: "aye.") contrary "no." (pause.) the motion is carried. voices--"shipp, shipp!" mr ross--mr chairman-- president wallace--has the gentleman a motion to make? mr ross--i was recognized by the chair and the previous question has not yet been voted upon. president wallace--has the gentleman any motion to make the order of business? mr ross--i rise to a point of order. i have the floor. the chairman recognized me and the previous question has not yet been voted. i ask for a matter of information. president wallace--the chair has no information to give except that the gentleman is out of order. mr ross--i ask if mr shipp occupies a position or employment in any capacity for the united states government or any state or territory. president wallace--i don't know. the motion was duly put and was carried. voice--"he is out of order." president wallace--he is. the next nominee is james c. gipe for recording secretary. mr ross--does the chair rule that i am out of order? president wallace--i have, several times. mr ross--thank you, sir. that is the cap sheaf. president wallace--is there a second to the nomination of mr gipe for recording secretary? the nomination was seconded. president wallace--are there remarks on that question? many delegates--"question." the motion was put and carried, and mr gipe was declared unanimously elected recording secretary. president wallace--the committee also recommend the election of d. a. latchaw for treasurer. is there a second to the motion for his election? (the motion was seconded.) any remarks on the motion? voices--"question." the motion was put and carried, and mr latchaw was declared elected treasurer. delegate hunt--mr president: the district of columbia moves a vote of thanks to the nominating committee who have done their work so well and so pleasingly to this congress. the motion received a second, and was put and unanimously carried. mr ross--will the chairman please announce what the motion is? we didn't hear a word of it here. the delegate--that a vote of thanks be tendered to the nominating committee for the work which they have done so well and satisfactorily to this congress. mr ross--mr chairman, i second that motion. (laughter) colonel fleming jones (of new mexico)--mr president: i understand that governor pardee is about to submit the report of the committee on resolutions, and i have a resolution here which i should like to see embodied in the report. mr ross--the gentleman from new mexico is out of order. president wallace--the chair thinks the resolution out of order. delegate hardtner (of louisiana)--mr president: i move you that the rules be suspended for the purpose of permitting colonel fleming jones to submit his resolution. delegate dye (of indiana)--i second the motion. the motion being duly put and carried, colonel w. a. fleming jones submitted the following: _resolved_, that this congress express its grateful appreciation of the highly intelligent, unselfish, and successful services of its first president, mr bernard n. baker, of maryland. through his untiring effort and his purpose to bring into consultation all the interests of conservation, the congress has resulted in a meeting that will be historic in the records of american progress and achievement. being formally put, the resolution was adopted unanimously and enthusiastically. mr baker--mr president: i wish to express my appreciation, and to have it show in the proceedings. i have not taken one moment to present anything in which i was directly interested. i thank you very much. (applause) president wallace--we will now hear from the committee on resolutions. governor pardee--mr president, ladies and gentlemen: as chairman of the committee on resolutions i have been ordered and directed by a majority of the committee--some or out of about present at the last session of the committee--to present the following report, as the report of the majority in the proportions i have mentioned: resolutions of the second national conservation congress the second national conservation congress, made up of delegates from all sections and nearly every state and territory of the united states, met at the call of a great moral issue (applause), now in session assembled in the city of saint paul and state of minnesota, does hereby adopt and solemnly declare the following platform of opinion and conclusion concerning the inherent rights of the people of the united states: heartily accepting the spirit and intent of the constitution and adhering to the principles laid down by washington and lincoln, we declare our conviction that we live under a government of the people, by the people, for the people; and we repudiate any and all special or local interests or platforms or policies in conflict with the inherent rights and sovereign will of our people. (great applause) recognizing the natural resources of the country as the prime basis of property and opportunity, we hold the rights of the people in these resources to be natural and inherent, and justly inalienable and indefeasible (applause); and we insist that the resources should and shall be developed, used, and conserved in ways consistent both with current welfare and with the perpetuity of our people. (applause) recognizing the waters of the country as a great national resource, we approve and endorse the opinion that all the waters belong to all the people (applause), and hold that they should be administered in the interest of all the people. (great applause) realizing that all parts of each drainage basin are related and interdependent, we hold that each stream should be regarded and treated as a unit from its source to its mouth; and since the waters are essentially mobile and transitory and are generally interstate, we hold that in all cases of divided or doubtful jurisdiction the waters should be administered by cooperation between state and federal agencies. (prolonged applause) recognizing the interdependence of the various uses of the waters of the country, we hold that the primary uses are for domestic supply and for agriculture through irrigation or otherwise, and that the uses for navigation and for power, in which water is not consumed, are secondary; and we commend the modern view that each use of the waters should be made with reference to all other uses for the public welfare in accordance with the principle of the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time. (great applause) viewing purity of water supply as essential to the public health and general welfare, we urge upon all municipal, state, and federal authorities, and on individuals and corporations, requisite action toward purifying and preventing contamination of the waters. (applause) approving the successful efforts of the united states to provide homes on arid lands through irrigation, we indorse and commend the reclamation service (applause) and urge its continuance and the extension of the same policy to the drainage of swamp and overflow lands, to be carried forward so far as appropriate through cooperation between state and federal agencies. (great applause) viewing adequate and economical transportation facilities as among the means of conservation, and realizing that the growth of the country has exceeded the development of transportation facilities, we approve the prompt adoption of a comprehensive plan for developing navigation throughout the rivers and lakes of the united states, proceeding in the order of their magnitude and commercial importance. (loud applause) recognizing the vast economic benefit to the people of water-power derived largely from interstate and source streams no less than from navigable rivers, we favor federal control of water-power development (applause); we deny the right of state or federal governments to continue alienating or conveying water by granting franchises for the use thereof in perpetuity (applause); and we demand that the use of water rights be permitted only for limited periods, with just compensation in the interests of the people. (prolonged applause) we demand the maintenance of a federal commission empowered to deal with all uses of the waters and to coordinate these uses for the public welfare in cooperation with similar commissions or other agencies maintained by the states. (loud applause) approving the withdrawal of public lands pending classification, and the separation of surface rights from mineral, forest, and water rights, including water-power sites (applause), we recommend legislation for the classification and leasing for grazing purposes of all unreserved public lands suitable chiefly for this purpose, subject to the rights of homesteaders and settlers, or the acquisition thereof under the land laws of the united states; and we hold that arid and non-irrigable public grazing lands should be administered by the government in the interest of small stock-men and homeseekers until they have passed into the possession of actual settlers. (applause) we hold that the deposits of important minerals underlying public lands, particularly mineral fuels, iron ores, and phosphate deposits, should be leased for limited periods, not exceeding fifty years, but subject to renewal, the royalty to be adjusted at more frequent intervals; such leases to be in amounts and subject to such regulations as to prevent monopoly and unnecessary waste. (applause) we hold that phosphate deposits underlying the public lands should be safeguarded for the american people by appropriate legislation; and we recommend the early opening of the alaskan and other coal fields belonging to the people of the united states for commercial purposes on a system of leasing, national ownership to be retained. (applause) we urge immediate investigation by the federal government of the damage done by the smelting of copper ores, and the feasibility of so improving methods as to utilize the injurious by-products in connection with phosphatic fertilizers. we favor cooperative action on the part of states and the federal government looking to the preservation and better utilization of the soils by approved scientific methods. (applause) we approve the continuance of the control of the national forests by the federal government (applause), and approve the policy of restoring to settlement such public lands as are more valuable for agriculture. we earnestly recommend that the states and federal government acquire for reforestation lands not more valuable for other purposes, and that all existing forests publicly and privately owned be carefully protected by state and federal governments. we recognize the invaluable services of the forest service to the people (applause), and earnestly recommend that it be more generously supported by the federal government, and that state, federal, and private fire patrol be more generously provided for the preservation of forests and human life; and we appreciate and approve of the continuance of the services of the united states army in fire control in emergencies. we favor the repeal of the timber and stone law. (applause) we endorse the proposition for the preservation by the federal government of the southern appalachian and white mountain forests. we recommend that the federal government conserve migratory birds and wild game animals. we recommend that both public and private schools instruct the youth of the land in the fundamental doctrines of conservation. we realize that the fullest enjoyment of our natural resources depends on the life and development of the people physically, intellectually, and morally; and in order to promote this, we recommend that the training and protection of the people, and whatever pertains to the public health and general efficiency, be encouraged by methods and legislation suitable to this end. child labor should be prevented and child life protected and developed. realizing the waste of life in transportation and mining operations, we recommend legislation increasing the use of proper safeguards for the conservation of life; and we also recommend that in order to make better provision for securing the health of the nation a department of public health be established by the national government. we recommend the adequate maintenance of a national conservation commission to investigate the natural resources of the country and cooperate with the work of the state conservation commissions; and we urge the legal establishment and maintenance of conservation commissions or corresponding agencies on the part of all states of the union. nothing in these resolutions is to be construed as questioning the rights of the states or the people of the united states guaranteed under the federal constitution.[ ] (prolonged applause) * * * * * governor pardee--mr president: again reminding you that this is a majority report, and that the committee were told that a minority report would be presented (and i am looking directly at the member of the committee who gave this intimation), i move you that the report just read be adopted as the voice of this congress. mr g. m. hunt--mr president, the district of columbia seconds the motion of the chairman of the committee. mr frank h. short (of california)--mr president: in view of the remark that there was to be a minority report presented to this congress, i think, perhaps, i should say, on behalf of those who have been referred to as the minority (who may be "insurgents" some day) that in view of the provision in the resolutions that nothing shall be construed as contrary to the constitution of the united states, we do not offer any amendment. we think that no person in this country is entitled to anything that does not belong to him under the constitution and the law, and we don't think he should ever be offered anything else; and we suppose, if a conflict should arise, that the constitution will prevail. a delegate--pennsylvania rises to second the motion to adopt the resolutions as read. a delegate--mr president: as a delegate from the state of illinois, i rise to second the motion. president wallace--all in favor of the adoption of these resolutions as read will say "aye." (a chorus of "ayes.") contrary, "nay." (there were no negative votes.) the resolutions are declared adopted. mr ross--mr chairman-- president wallace--we will hear you. mr ross--that is all i want, that you should hear me. in view of the fact that this report is presented and heard by the delegates at this late hour for the first time, and in view of the fact that the report of the committee on resolutions and the action of the congress thereon is all-important and the final result of such a congress, and in view of the fact that we are to meet tomorrow morning at oclock or half-past, or whatever time it is, i move you, mr chairman, that action upon this report be deferred until the convening of this congress tomorrow morning, in order that the delegates may be able to read the report, section by section, as it may appear in the newspapers tomorrow morning-- president wallace--the gentleman is out of order. mr ross--so we can act intelligently. president wallace--the gentleman is out of order. the resolutions have already been adopted. mr ross--mr chairman, the motion is made. will somebody second my motion? i will see if i am out of order. mr johns (of washington)--mr president: i move to lay the motion on the table. i am from the state of washington and glory in it, but i do not glory in some of the men that the governor appointed. the motion to table was seconded, put, and carried with one dissenting voice. president wallace--what is the further business before the congress? are there any other committees to report? professor condra--mr president, and ladies and gentlemen: we have neglected one matter of business, and with your permission (at the request of those who have noticed it) i will read the names of the vice-presidents selected by state delegations. mr ross--mr chairman: that is what we expected at : oclock this morning. it is now twenty minutes past . i move you that leave to print be extended to the various vice-presidents and those designated by states, and if they can succeed in getting their written speeches printed in the record possibly we will have a chance to read them. delegate horr (of washington)--mr president, i have a request to make: that when you print the address read by lieutenant-governor (and acting governor) hay, of washington, you also print, right with it, the dispatch from c. b. kegley, representing , grangers, and also the dispatch from charles r. case, representing the organized labor of washington, both approving the federal policies of conservation. i make that as a request coming, as i believe, from the majority of the patriotic citizens of the state of washington. (applause) professor condra--mr president, just a moment. this list of vice-presidents selected by state delegations is not the call of states; we will come to that in a few minutes. the reports by state delegations might be turned over to the secretary who will ask that it be printed in the papers in the morning. a few states have not yet sent in the names of their vice-presidents, so that the list is not quite complete. a delegate--read the list. president wallace--let us hear the list read. a delegate--mr chairman, i rise to a point of order. the report of the nominating committee is the special order at this hour. having begun on nominations, they should continue until they are closed. the states should be called upon to name their vice-presidents. (applause) professor condra--mr president, if agreeable i will read the names which we have. reads list.[ ] president wallace--shall we vote on these vice-presidents selected by the delegates from the different states? all who favor the selections will please say "aye" (pause). any opposed will say "no" (pause). the selections are approved unanimously. mr pinchot wishes to offer a resolution that you will all agree to. mr pinchot--_whereas_, professor samuel b. green, dean of the school of forestry in the university of minnesota, and for twenty-two years a teacher in the state agricultural college, has recently been called to his reward; and _whereas_, professor green for years ranked as one of the most prominent and progressive instructors in forestry, and has been a great force in the cause of developing and conserving our national resources; therefore be it _resolved_, that in the death of professor green the state of minnesota and the nation have lost a distinguished citizen, and the cause of forestry one of its most valuable assets. president wallace--let us take a rising vote. all in favor of the resolution please rise. it is unanimously carried. we are now ready for the call of the states. the states were then called alphabetically, whereupon the following responded: mr a. h. purdue (of arkansas)--as regards arkansas and conservation, i will say that that subject with us is not a burning question. people are not yet clamoring for conservation. nevertheless, the movement set on foot by those who are promoting it is making itself felt among us, and the thoughtful people of the state are giving it their attention. mr o. b. bannister (of indiana)--i will not take five minutes. i first want to appeal to your spirit of fairness, and express the hope that at the next national conservation congress you will not ask delegates to wait until the eleventh hour of the last day of the convention. (applause) indiana is represented here by fourteen delegates. we have spent about $ to attend this congress (applause). we have sat here for four solid days and attended every single session, and heard the history of things from the birth of our saviour down to , when theodore roosevelt called the governors together for conservation, but up to this moment we have not been heard or given an opportunity to talk at all (applause). i just want to call your attention to that fact. i have only had three and a half minutes, and i am perfectly willing that the next speaker shall have my allotted minute and a half. (applause) president wallace--the president will say that if you live until the next congress, and i preside over it, you will all have a chance to make your speeches as early in the meeting as possible. (applause) mr bannister--mr president: it is not a question of speeches; it is a question of voting and being considered as the rank and file, if you please, of this organization. mr a. c. miller (of iowa)--the report of the iowa state delegation is in the hands of the secretary.[ ] mr young (of kansas)--our report has been filed with the secretary. president wallace--ladies and gentlemen: i am obliged to leave for my train, and i will ask captain white to act as presiding officer. (the audience rose as mr wallace withdrew.) mr bernard n. baker (of maryland)--i just want to say "thank you," for maryland, for the opportunity of being here. mr freeman thorp (of minnesota)--mr chairman, a way has been found (not theoretically but practically and demonstrably) whereby the time of the growth of forest trees is reduced to one-half. the secretary of agriculture, mr wilson, who merely hinted at this in the last paragraph of his speech the other day, will give you the exact information in detail in his bulletins this winter. it is not a theory or wild guess. it has been demonstrated, only miles from where you sit. there are thousands of trees there, some inches in diameter, grown from seed in fifteen years (applause). there are shown at the minnesota state fair today products of the soil grown upon the lightest sandy soils that we have in the state, during the greatest drought ever known, and the corn is as large as any in the state, and the clover superior (applause). this simply shows the new force and new instrumentality which will be at our hands in the great work of conservation. i will not take your time longer because the information will be given you this winter in bulletins from the department of agriculture at washington. (applause) dr e. n. lowe (of mississippi)--mr chairman and fellow delegates: we from mississippi have come here to be heard on conservation and to learn about conservation. we are interested in the subject. we have made some progress along the lines of conservation. i wish to say that the most enthusiastic conservationist in the state of mississippi is our chief executive, governor noel. practically all that has been done in conservation in mississippi has been instigated and encouraged by him. we are at the present time engaged in the study of our soil in cooperation with the bureau of soils at washington. the work has been in progress since december last, and will be prosecuted as rapidly as possible. we have four parties in the field at the present time. in addition to our soil resources we have, in the southern half of mississippi, a large pine forest; the virgin forest has been depleted very rapidly, and we are realizing the necessity of investigation along that line. general noble (of missouri)--mr chairman: i have been appointed to attend this congress as a delegate from the trans-mississippi commercial congress, and also as a delegate from missouri. i have been associated in the trans-mississippi commercial congress with mr larimore, of larimore, north dakota. we were instructed by the president of the trans-mississippi congress to present an invitation to this congress, which was put in the form of a resolution. i want to say that the trans-mississippi commercial congress has been in existence for more than twenty years. it has been my privilege and honor to attend many of its different sessions, and i speak whereof i know when i say that it has been one of the most influential bodies in the western country for the advancement of western interests, including among others, the great proposition of the conservation of our natural resources for the people. now, i wish to present this resolution: (reading) "_whereas_, the trans-mississippi commercial congress has for its purpose the inauguration and advocacy of great national policies, and has for many years been a friend of the beneficent and progressive conservation of our natural resources, and that congress is to meet at san antonio, texas, on the twenty-second to twenty-fifth days of november next; therefore-- "_resolved_, that the present congress at saint paul does hereby earnestly request the national conservation association, by its president, to select and send to the approaching session of the trans-mississippi congress a delegation of such members as he may deem best (say forty in number), to advocate the cooperation of that body in support of the measures here approved." i move you, mr president, that that resolution be adopted as a recommendation of this congress. you can get no better cooperator and successful worker for conservation in any portion of this country; so help us to carry into effect the great purposes of this congress, the conservation of our natural resources. (applause) the chairman--gentlemen, you have heard the resolution. a delegate--i move that the same be adopted. the chairman--it has been moved and seconded that the resolution be adopted. are there any remarks? a delegate--i move that it be referred to the executive committee for such action as they see fit, to be reported tomorrow morning. the chairman--the committee on resolutions has made its report. this resolution is in order, because it was offered by the gentleman from missouri as part of his remarks, and it has been moved and seconded that it be adopted. an amendment has been offered, which was also seconded, that it be referred to the executive committee. are you ready to vote on the amendment? a delegate--it was not put in the form of an amendment; it was put as a distinct motion. the chairman--two motions cannot be entertained at once. general noble--mr chairman: may i explain that this is merely a recommendation to the association. it is not a resolution passed by this congress to send a delegation; it is a recommendation by this congress to the body called the national conservation association, to act on it or not as they please. the chairman--gentlemen, we will vote on the original question. all those who are in favor of adopting the resolution as read by general noble will say "aye." (the resolution was adopted) professor condra--would it not be in order to hear from the executive committee relative to the work in missouri? i would ask that you grant to chairman white a minute or two to respond for that state. (applause) chairman white--gentlemen: i will not take much time, as it is getting late. i may say that missouri does not have to be "shown." on behalf of the executive committee, let me say this: we have had a pretty hard time in trying to satisfy everybody. i wish to apologize for any shortcomings on the part of president baker and myself. i was chairman of the executive committee, and had a great deal to do in trying to frame a program that would be satisfactory to every delegate and everybody else who attended the congress; but it was a hard thing to do. the president of the united states and the ex-president of the united states occupied two distinct days, and drew great crowds in opposition to the state fair; since then the fair has been doing business in opposition to this congress. then we had the governors here, and other great speakers; and the program had to be carried out. i wish to say that this organization will remain in session tomorrow if, at the close of this session, you so desire. i am going to stay here; i have authority to act as president protem tomorrow, and president baker will also stay with me, and we will gladly do all the good we can. delegate von tobel (of montana)--montana has filed a report. professor condra--for nebraska, i will speak briefly: i have had the very great privilege and honor of being connected with a nebraska state commission for eighteen or twenty years. we have a great variety of resources, mostly agricultural. he who says nebraska is a poor agricultural spot does not know; he who thinks nebraska is a sand-hill region does not know. in nebraska there are four great soil regions. some of them are very fertile; some , square miles are unusually fertile, the land values ranging from $ to $ per acre. we have , square miles of land worth from $ . to $ . per acre. i am not going to take the time to tell you just how good and how bad nebraska really is; there is enough of it that is especially good. we have a number of problems that should be taken up in the way of conservation, and we have undertaken to do it. we have irrigation, dry farming, forestation of sandhills and the like; also conservation of soil fertility, and the conservation of lands. our commission is non-political; and i believe all states taking up conservation problems should have non-political commissions. we have in nebraska, working with the commission, some ten or twelve committees, with to men at work, studying the problems of the state. we believe in cooperation and thorough investigation, and we believe, further, in contributing that which is suited to those who wish our contributions. we held a state congress not long ago in which it was the sentiment, and was declared by the president of the congress, "we want at this time that there may be made no reference to the controversy now waging in the nation." and no man on that floor spoke one word pertaining to the controversy. it was said further that, "we wish at this time that our work be non-political, that no man will stand here and talk that he may gain favor, or gain notice in the state, for political purposes;" and with but one exception no man undertook so to talk, and that man was stopped immediately (applause). it was also asked that no man take the floor unless he had a message and facts for the others, such facts as would be worth something to those attending and those at home. such is the spirit of nebraska. we are not the only state, we cooperate with others. we have good features and bad; but we want to learn to do practical things worth while to the farmers, worth while to those who are laboring, and worth while to all the people in the state. one of our committees is working on vital resources. we realize that while we grow wheat and corn for man and beast, we are working chiefly for the elevation of man; and in nebraska one thing we will see to is that the conditions are suitable for crops, for animals, and for man--and we propose to do our part in conserving the public health, and in looking to better living conveniences and better water supplies in the state. i have spoken three minutes, but i ask, since i happen to represent the association of congresses of the various states, that you join with those commissioners who were in the meeting last night in practical work in the states, and in the united states, so that when we reassemble we will have reports from men who are doing practical work. we ask for reliable cooperation to the end that our investigations will serve as a basis for action of use to the practical people of our country, especially the farmers. i thank you. (applause) a delegate (from new york)--in the absence of our chairman, the delegation from new york would say, in a word, that we are making progress; that we are with this movement first, last and all the time, and that we hope at the next congress there may be opportunity, as suggested by the gentleman from indiana, to draw out fuller information regarding resources from the delegations who have come from all over the country. many of the delegations have come here at great expense. perhaps no one has listened with greater interest to the able speeches that have been made here than have the delegates from new york, but we felt, in a representative organization like this, much in the position of the man who, in a legislative body, said that whenever they began to make speeches he went to the committee-room and went to work. we believed that with combined action (as the chairman has announced) at our next meeting we shall have the speeches and at the same time draw out the resources of the people, and so get down to work and make rapid progress right along. (applause) delegate r. a. nestos (of north dakota)--mr chairman: north dakota has the honor of sending the largest number of delegates to this congress with the single exception of minnesota, which shows that it is very much interested in the movement of conservation. north dakota has more coal conserved than any other state in the union. we have thousands of acres of coal, in seams varying in thickness from to feet of solid coal. all of our resources, with the exception of coal, are in private hands. our great coal fields, during the last administration, were put in the hands of the government, and hereafter no settler can get anything more than a surface right to those coal fields. the coal belongs to the government. of course we haven't very much use for coal up there, but we are keeping it. whenever you get chilly, just raise your hand and we will send down all kinds of coal for all of the hundreds and thousands of our people. our chief resource is our soil, which, when properly conserved and developed, can produce one-tenth of the food for this entire nation with the present population (applause). we have a larger area perhaps of fertile soil than any other state. this is all in the hands of private owners. there is simply one way to conserve our natural resources, and that is to educate the farmer (applause). there is nothing so cheap as education, and nothing so costly as ignorance. if our state will put half a million dollars into the agricultural college at the next session of the legislature, and extend its aid among the different educational institutions of the state, this money will come back in a hundredfold. it is in this direction that we must expect to conserve our resources. the interests of this nation that lie in private hands are enormously greater than those controlled either by the state or by the federal government, and it does not seem to me right that we should spend so much time talking about the rather meager resources of the state and nation and neglecting the manifestly greater resources that are in the hands of private citizens, because, in the last analysis, this matter of conservation will be carried out on each and every man's farm. you talk about establishing a national forest in north dakota, and already the government has planted a few acres in the bad lands; but forests in north dakota mean the planting of or acres of quick-growing timber on each man's farm (applause). in that way north dakota and similar states will carry out their part of the movement for conservation. mr george w. lattimore (of ohio)--ohio, with characteristic modesty, has nothing to say.[ ] (applause) mr benj. martin (of oklahoma)--mr chairman: i appeared for oklahoma and reported this morning to the chairman, and i ask that the report be printed in the record. mr a. w. krueger (of south dakota)--mr chairman: all of our members who are speakers have left, and there is no one here from south dakota except myself. i am not an orator, so i will not attempt to make a speech; but when i heard from other states i could not help feeling that i come from a state that has the richest resources in the world. our greatest resources lie in our inexhaustible soil and its fertility. we have people from most of the states in the union, and when i have asked our citizens from several of the eastern states, and other rich states like iowa, minnesota, ohio, wisconsin, and illinois, "why are you here?" they said, "because we have bettered our condition through the state of south dakota." so i have come to the conclusion that we must have about the best state in the union (laughter). they tell us that we have more money per capita for our schools than any other state in the union--but i do not want to make a speech, for i can't do it (laughter), only to say that i have had the pleasure and great honor to talk conservation in our state, and the longer i am here the more i am convinced that south dakota is in hearty accord with the doings of this congress (applause). i have not been instructed to say this, but from what our state is doing, i cannot see how any true and patriotic american citizen who loves his country, home, and fireside, and who wants to leave them to his descendants none the worse because he lived in the world, can help most heartily endorsing the conservation of our natural resources, such as forests, natural waterways, water-powers, minerals, coal, oil, and phosphates by the federal government. (applause) mr george h. emerson (of washington)--ladies and gentlemen: i come as the calm pacific instead of the cyclone that at times has swept over this audience. i came prepared with a paper that it was proposed to have placed before you, but it is not propitious at this late hour, neither is the temper of the audience such as to receive it, nor is the time that is allowed me sufficient. i ask, therefore, your permission to file the same. the chairman--permission will be given. washington was called this morning but the representative was not present, and ex-president baker tells me it was also called again this afternoon. two delegates--mr chairman-- chairman white--the gentleman who addressed the chair first is recognized. this gentleman from washington (indicating). mr william douglas johns (of washington)--mr chairman: i would ask of the delegates here three minutes. the chairman--there are just three minutes left, and you can have them. mr johns--mr chairman: i wish to tell the delegates here, for the purpose of showing the necessity of federal control, how the water-power sites of the state of washington--the greatest of them--have passed from the hands of the state within a few months, under the administration of land commissioner ross, who has made himself so prominent here this evening. two corporations have filed on the lower waters of the mighty columbia, a railroad and water corporation with steamboats plying miles above and carrying freight and passengers, and an irrigation corporation below, using half of the waters of columbia river, and all the state of washington got was filing fees; and governor hay wants us to give the balance to him in the same way--the other half of those great waters of the mighty columbia. the lands secured by the railroad corporation within a few months on the shore--lands worth millions of dollars--were sold by governor hay and land commissioner ross for $ , , and governor hay wants us to turn over more to him for the same purpose. the waters of chelan river in the cascades james j. hill secured ( , horsepower) by paying filing fees to the state. no wonder, in his speech, he favored state control! (applause) a few days before i left washington a dispatch came from port townsend to the seattle papers--making a glorious spread--saying that the water-power company, capitalized at a million or two, was going to put in a , horsepower plant to supply port townsend and the neighboring country--and then boasted of the country to show what a good thing it was to invest in. they said the company had secured every water-power site on the river, right up to its eternal glaciers, and that they had been twenty years in securing those sites. were they doing it for development? never! they were going to take one lower fall and develop it, and sell the power at a high price. they had secured all the other sites along that river--and for what purpose? to prevent competition until the country grew up by paying taxes simply, holding a water-power site that amounted to nothing until the people were prepared to pay an immense revenue to them. so much for their plea of governor hay that he wanted the state developed. the olympia national forest, reserved by president cleveland, was opened in response to a similar complaint as that made by governor hay, "you are driving settlers to british columbia." it contains some of the richest timber lands in the state of washington and on the pacific coast. what was done with it? part of it was covered by scrip, a few quarters were taken by war settlers, the balance by speculators. they sold at from $ to $ per quarter, a few holding on until within the last few years; and the result was that it has passed into the hands of the corporations. since the milwaukee built out there, they burned up much of it; and today you can go into great tracts of that land (i have been through it) and you would never know that a human foot had stepped there--it is as wild as it was before vancouver sailed along the coast on his voyage of discovery. if the national forests of the state of washington were turned over by the united states government to the state of washington and its officials, and the tender mercies of land commissioner ross, they probably would go just exactly as the olympia forest went--into the hands of speculators, not to be settled up, not to bring wealth and people and glory to the state, but to be held until timber is valuable, to be kept in primeval wilderness. gentlemen, i thank you. (great applause) a delegate--mr chairman: i wish to correct the chair in his remark that no one was here this morning to present the report from washington. i happen to be chairman of the delegation. i know all about the meeting behind closed doors in the saint paul hotel; i am sorry i couldn't tell about it here; but i filed my report this morning at oclock, and explained that mr emerson would speak for our state. mr ross--the state of washington has been exhausted-- the chairman--it has not been exhausted. we will give you a few minutes. mr ross--under the heading of personal privilege. i am not going to take your time to rehash any controversies referred to in the eloquence from the state of washington. i will take sufficient time, however, to tell you one or two things. the gentleman, so far as the delegation from the state of washington is concerned, speaks for himself and for no one else. mr johns--thank god, i do not speak for you! (applause) mr ross--the gentleman who has just spoken sounded the only discordant note in a meeting of citizens of seattle where, to a man, they endorsed richard ballinger! (hisses from the house) he is the only man in the city of seattle-- mr johns--the only thing done in seattle was what mr ross did. mr ross (turning toward mr johns)--i quit and allowed you your three minutes, although you were not entitled to appear here at all. now that you have aroused me to some extent, and since they have kindly consented that i may be heard for a few moments. i wish to tell this vast audience that the state of washington--and i speak solely in my official capacity, and i am not ashamed of any act i have ever performed--i wish to say that i served the state of washington as assistant attorney-general for four years, from to , all the time dealing with our state lands. the people of the state of washington, on my record there, elected me commissioner of public lands two years ago, and during the four years that i was commissioner of public lands, i made the same fight for the state of washington that i am making now. i made it in the navigation congress, in the forestry association--and god knows how many things there are going on that a busy man cannot keep track of--and the people of the state of washington, every man, woman and child, knew e. w. ross; they knew his record; they knew his fight; and in spite of all opposition from everybody in the state, like the gentleman who has just spoken, they nominated me by a popular vote two years ago, and i was--(commotion in the house, many delegates leaving). he says we have given away the water-powers. the state of washington commenced her conservation policy prior to november , , when we were admitted into the union. we have one provision in our constitution relative to water-power that i would rather have in the interests of the common people than all the discretionary powers you vested in all the presidents and all the public officers of the national and state governments. we have a provision in our constitution like this: the use of water for irrigation and the like shall forever be a public utility. you heard theodore roosevelt say that it was the intention of the national government, upon easy terms, to let the water-power out to private corporations so that the people of the states could have cheap electricity and cheap power furnished by these corporate institutions. and let me say to you, you heard the statements made by governor hay, of my state, as to the accomplishments of the railway commission in regard to the railway companies. in my state, the state railroad commission fixes the proper rate, and that ends it (applause). our objection to the movement is this: we are not fanatics; we have conserved beyond the possibility of any human agency, state and national governments; we have conserved the people's rights, so that when they need protection of the law it is vested in our constitution, and all the people have to do is to rise up and enforce it (renewed commotion). that is why we do not wish to surrender those powers to the national government, or to the discretion of any man. take the power proposition which has been mentioned by the gentleman: neither the state of washington, the board of state land commissioners (of which board i have the honor to be chairman), nor the members of the state tax commission had anything to do with the taking of a site by the hanford irrigation and power company--not a thing. let me tell you what it was. on columbia river, some to miles above kennewick, is what is known as priest rapids. the war department of the united states government is supposed to control columbia river. it is navigable for all sorts of crafts both below and above priest rapids. by virtue of an act of the legislature of , the state of washington conferred upon the reclamation service of the united states express authority to appropriate, for its own purposes and the purpose of irrigation, all the waters of columbia river and every other stream in the state. the reclamation service, in compliance with that act, filed upon the waters of columbia river at priest rapids, and, in one particular year, filed an express relinquishment and abandonment of that project. they stated, in cold type, that they would never undertake it. and what next? they consented, in writing, that the hanford irrigation company might have and enjoy it. the hanford company went to the war department of the united states, and obtained a permit to build a concrete dam in columbia river at priest rapids to assist irrigation, and the war department consented; and outside of that the hanford irrigation and power company has acquired nothing whatever from the state of washington. but supposing that the hanford irrigation and power company is using the waters of the state of washington for irrigation and power purposes--whenever the people of the state of washington are convinced that the hanford irrigation and power company is charging an unjust or unreasonable price for power, or for water for irrigation, or for the annual maintenance fee, thank god we have it vested in the constitution of the state of washington that the people can fix the price. that is our style of conservation, and that is why we object to federal control. i represent the people of the state of washington (laughter), and i don't care who says to the contrary, and i am proud to oppose the surrendering of absolute control by the people in favor of the discretion of any man. mr e. h. fourt (of wyoming)--mr chairman, it is now very late. i was not able to attend this morning and submit a report or an address. i will present this report, and move the congress that it be printed in the record as a report from wyoming. the chairman--the paper will be received, if there is no objection. (the paper was handed to the secretary.) mr b. a. fowler (of arizona)--in answer to the call for arizona, i want to say that at present arizona is a territory. one year from now, at the next conservation congress, we hope that arizona will be a state (applause), and that at that time we will make a state report of which you will not be ashamed. (applause) mr g. m. hunt (of the district of columbia)--mr chairman: i simply want to announce the fact that the district of columbia is on the map (applause). lots and lots of folks are under the impression that the district of columbia only exists from the second tuesday after the first monday in december until congress adjourns (laughter); but, on the contrary, the district of columbia is on the map days in the year. further than that, we have a chamber of commerce that is working hours a day during that days. still further, this chamber of commerce has authorized and directed me to present an invitation to this national conservation congress to hold its next annual session in the district of columbia. washington, d. c., is the capital of the nation; it is your home; it is _your_ capital; you have helped to make it what it is, and it is time that you should get there and see how we have spent your money. the far west has been converted to conservation, and with the setting of tomorrow's sun the middle west will have been converted; and we feel that we of the east need conversion, and we want you to come to washington in and convert us. i thank you. (applause) mr henry a. barker (of rhode island)--i think, at this late hour, it is not right to take very much time of the congress. i take pleasure in filing the report of the conservation commission of the state of rhode island. about three weeks ago the legislature of rhode island established the conservation commission on a new and more efficient basis than that which previously existed. of course i might spend a great deal of time in telling you that rhode island, like every other state that we have heard from so far, is by far the grandest and most splendid of all the states of the nation (laughter and applause); but i think, under the circumstances, i will confine myself to reading the last paragraph of the report, i will file in order to show you the position rhode island occupies in certain matters. "rhode island has awakened to vital things, but even if it had only an indirect interest in conservation it would still feel that it owed its moral influence to the country as a whole, and that it is not a selfish little -cent republic all by its lonesome, but a part of a great nation that prefers to be governed from washington"--i mean washington, d. c. (laughter)--"rather than from wall street. it prefers to belong to a nation whose prosperity and power and glory need the cooperation and loyalty of every one of its citizens." i thank you. (applause) the chairman: it has just been called to my attention that several delegates who have spoken for their states have not handed in their names; they will be privileged to hand their names and addresses, with the remarks that they have made, to the secretary. professor l. c. white (of west virginia)--west virginia has been overlooked; it is on the map. i will not take much of your time, gentlemen; only enough to say that west virginia has so far fought a losing game on the question of conservation with reference to our oil and gas resources. the great corporations have wasted natural gas in west virginia to the value of from $ , , to $ , , , and this is still going on at the rate of a quarter of million of cubic feet daily. our late governor dawson appointed a commission on conservation, and it made an able report; but the legislators, who are largely controlled by the corporations, have taken no notice of it whatever. the only thing actually done in the way of conservation was the establishment of a state game and fire warden, who has some power in the way of stopping the forest fires--thanks to one great conservationist, mr gifford pinchot (applause), through whose great influence we have made some advance in the preservation of our natural resources. and the state of west virginia also owes a debt of gratitude to dr joseph a. holmes, whom the president recently appointed director of the bureau of mines; at his instance an expert was sent from the great laboratory at pittsburg to the mines of west virginia to investigate the causes of mine explosions--through whom we learned that the dust of the mines would explode,--and that expert sacrificed his life in a west virginia mine. the former method of mining has now been entirely abolished, and during the fiscal year ending june , , out of the sixty or seventy thousand miners of west virginia not a single human life has been lost as the result of dust explosion (applause). and now that dr holmes is at the head of that great bureau (placed there against the wishes of some of the members of the cabinet of president taft), we are sure that other discoveries in certain lines will be made in west virginia for the conservation of human life. (applause) mr e. l. worsham (of georgia)--mr chairman, i want to report that georgia, too, is on the map. i am not going to take your time in an attempt to make a speech or even a report. there are a number of problems i wanted to discuss, but in view of the fact that i know all of you have had more conservation than you can digest in one evening, i forbear. i do want to say, however, that the west and the northwest are not the only sections of the country which are interested in conservation. coming from one of the oldest states of the union (one of the original thirteen) i can say that there is a greater demand for systematic conservation in our section of the country than there is in any other. we can appreciate the value of conservation. nature has been exceedingly kind to this section of the country in the distribution of natural resources. georgia was originally the chief gold-producing state of the union. she still has rich mineral resources. she has water-power enough to run all the mills in the southern states and then have some to spare. i can appreciate thoroughly what the water-power proposition means, because we are up against that same proposition now, wherein the large corporations are trying to gobble up the water-power sites: and that is one of the main problems of conservation which confronts the people of georgia today and will be fought before the state legislature; and i want to assure you, right now, that we are going to depend upon the national government for aid in propositions of this kind. (applause) we are interested in conservation, but our time is too valuable to be wasted in the discussion of states' rights, because our people fought out that question forty-five years ago (applause). my father spent four long years fighting on that problem, and we consider that it has been solved to the satisfaction of the great majority (applause). i want to endorse what mr pinchot said this morning in behalf of the work which the women have done for conservation. i don't know how it is in the north; but with us the women are the moulders of sentiment, and they have been fighting in this movement for a number of years (applause). we are going to hold a southern conservation congress in atlanta on october and (applause). that movement is backed by , women in the state of georgia, by the various women's clubs, by the press, and by all the leading citizens. if there are any factions, they have not made their appearance as yet. we are going to make that congress a success. we plead for your cooperation, because we need all the help we can get. (applause) a number of telegrams were read. the chairman--if there is nothing further before us-- mr benjamin martin, jr.--mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: the hour is growing late, and it is my pleasure to rise for the purpose of offering a motion to adjourn; but before making that motion, as a delegate from oklahoma, and speaking for the other delegates, i wish to thank the good people of minnesota, and more especially the people of the twin cities, for the delightful manner in which they have entertained us. as we return to our homes, we do so with the most pleasant memories of our visit to this great metropolis. one great inspiration to me, and to most of the delegates, has been the attendance of ladies at the various sessions. now, without further comment, i move that this congress adjourn _sine die_. chairman white--without objection, the congress will stand adjourned: it is adjourned. supplementary proceedings laws that should be passed francis g. newlands _senior senator from nevada_ regretting my inability to address the conservation congress personally on the subject assigned to me, i submit my views briefly by telegraph. conservation legislation necessarily involves harmonious action by forty-seven sovereigns, the nation and the states, each acting within its jurisdiction. as the legislative bodies cannot confer together, it is necessary that there should be some intermediate organization which will bring about team work. there should be a national commission and state commissions which can act together, as well as separately, in recommending needed legislation. a reactionary congress disregarded roosevelt's recommendations on this subject, but the progressive sentiment of the country will not brook further resistance; and the bill for the appointment by the president of a national conservation commission composed of publicists and experts in civil, hydraulic, and electric engineering, in arid and swamp land reclamation, in transportation, and in mining and lumbering, reported by the senate conservation committee at the last session, should surely pass. with roosevelt as chairman, and garfield, pinchot, newell, and the chief of engineers of the army as members of this commission, we would have the men who in practical administration have become more thoroughly informed regarding the natural resources of this country than any others. as to the land laws: it is evident that for years large portions of the public domain have been gradually drifting into private and monopolistic ownership under antiquated and misfit land laws utterly unadapted to existing economic conditions, and therefore stimulating fraud in their evasion and perversion. legislators outside of the public land states have taken little interest in the subject, relying mainly upon the states involved to suggest legislation. had the senators and representatives from the public land states counseled together continuously, patiently, and tolerantly regarding the land laws, as they did regarding the reclamation act, the confusion and scandal and the prosecutions of the past six years would have been lessened, and a wise solution of needed legislation would have been evolved and accepted by the country. at the next session of congress such a council of western senators and representatives should be held, and the present deadlock of conflicting views ended. in shaping laws regarding the public lands the central idea should be a rational development, without monopoly or waste; the establishment of individual homes upon the agricultural lands; the utilization of the forests and the coal, iron, and oil deposits under conditions that will enlist the aid of needed capital without monopolistic exaction or excessive prices; and the improvement of our waterways, regardless of state lines, so as to promote every use to which civilization can put them, and in that connection secure team work on the part of the various services, national and state, engaged upon them, as well as the cooperation of the nation and the states, each within its appropriate jurisdiction in the work to be done and the expenditures to be made. until comprehensive plans are developed, the nation should not part permanently with the title to any lands suited for the development of water-power, the promotion of navigation, or the establishment of transfer facilities and sites, but should hold the national properties in such shape that they may be utilized in the working out of comprehensive plans involving the union of national and state powers. in forming these plans it should be borne in mind that the nation holds the public domain, not for national profit, but in trust for the population, present and future, of the public land states which welcome immigration from other states whose surplus population there finds a resting place. the money realized either from sale or rentals should therefore be applied to the schools, roads, reclamation projects, and other public development of the states in which the lands are located. the ultimate purpose of the laws should be to gradually substitute state sovereignty for national sovereignty in the direction and control of this great public trust; but great care should be taken not to prematurely turn over the trust to states too weak to resist powerful combinations and monopolies, or until the organization of adequate public regulation and control is effected. conservation of the nation's resources j. b. white _chairman of the executive committee of the national conservation congress_ in the division of the program set apart for discussion there are many ideas and inquiries crowded upon our minds for expression; and while much will be made clearer to us, there will be many questions that will remain to us unanswered. perhaps we may first ask ourselves: why are we here? what came we here to do? what is conservation? to whom does it apply? who are conservationists? and who are enemies of conservation? are there any, and why? what special principles must we subscribe to in order to be known as sufficiently orthodox in creed that we will be received as worthy disciples in this cause? and who but ourselves (and each for one another) shall pass upon our credentials as to our honesty of purpose in this great work? to whom are we answerable but to ourselves, the people? and why should a great congress of thousands of american people meet here, as we are doing this week, on this occasion, when we have a legal congress in washington representing every district in this broad land, whose members we have elected to make such laws as are necessary for our present and future welfare? the answer seems to be that this assemblage represents a popular upheaval of public sentiment, animated and encouraged by those who have thought along advanced lines and are pioneers in this cause in the press and on the rostrum; some of whom have been right, and others of whom were almost wholly wrong. we are here to discuss these features, to winnow the chaff from the golden grain in this agitation of thought which we trust will be the beginning of wisdom, to be crystallized as far as practicable into proper national and state laws for the regulation of conservation of public resources, and that the people may become awakened to that greater saving principle of personal and private conservation. it is we, the people, instead of we, the politicians, who are and should be most in evidence at this congress. it has been said that knowledge is power. it is perhaps a better truism to say that action, with knowledge, is power. knowledge without action would avail little; and action without knowledge would be groping in the dark. but with knowledge and action we can accomplish noble results. all great reforms and improved conditions spring from the wants, needs, and consciences of a dissatisfied people. sometimes the needed relief comes through an armed and sometimes through a peaceful revolution. some man looms up above his fellows from the sea of unrest and his greatness is proven by his devotion to the cause, free from the selfish thought of personal aggrandizement; and by his wisdom and tact he creates confidence in his judgment, in his sagacity, in his fitness for leadership. so few there are who are willing to bear the cross from this high sense of duty and offer themselves a mark for calumny and vituperation, and often in many ways to become a sacrifice to a people's cause! and when one is found, it frequently happens that the public are slow in showing their gratitude and appreciation for what his discernment and discretion saved to a nation; the reward of proper recognition is often withheld until long after he is dead, because he lived in advance of his time. but there are fictitious and exaggerated issues which are created and developed to huge proportions for the dear people by the sleek politician (and his name is legion) who sets up his scarecrow of impending woe that he may rush valiantly in and save his constituents and the citizens of a nation from dire calamity, and generations unborn from distress and want. it is not my purpose to attempt to lull to sleep in fancied security those who have been influenced by those suspected of being unnecessarily active in fighting windmills. always there is need of sound, conservative consideration before taking hasty action, and the people are becoming better informed and more critical in their discriminations, and are learning to know the loud-mouthed pretender from the thoughtful, loyal, public-spirited citizen. people now are doing their own thinking. time was not long ago when the greatest newspapers of largest circulation manufactured public opinion so successfully that they were the great thinking machines for the country. it was so much easier for the people than doing the actual thinking and logical reasoning for themselves. people read the editorials of their respective journals in order to get ideas to use in their arguments with each other. i think that as an educator the newspapers then, as now, served a most valuable purpose, but it is infinitely of more help to the thinking man, who criticizes and analyzes what he reads before he accepts and assimilates it as his own. the pen has been mightier than the sword, and the "power of the press" has matured and developed conditions that had to be arbitrated by the sword. _the people deceived_ much harm has been done by wrong thinking in regard to conservation, and the people have been deceived and prejudiced; and like a strong man awakening from a sleep they have reached out in alarm to search for and punish, in advance of ascertaining what, if anything, was really the matter. innocent people and innocent industries were maligned and injured. the public are now finding that they have been deceived by the scheming politicians, and by highly colored newspaper comments, and that "conservation" has been used as a trick word and is not what they thought it was. they had been led to believe that it was something that someone else ought to do, or should be forced to do, and that they were being robbed because conservation was not practiced; and that if conservation laws should be passed as recommended by these ignorant agitators they would be greatly benefited; that everything would be cheaper than they had to pay, and that they could get more for what they had to sell. they never stopped to reason that conservation without use means holding back from development the natural resources of the country and producing stagnation in business, and that if each succeeding generation should follow the same policy there never would be any improvement. those whose education never has extended beyond the three rs can understand the principles of conservation in reforestation, reclamation, and restoration--reforestation where it will pay to reforest; reclamation where it will pay to reclaim; and restoration where it will pay to restore to the soil the elements needed, and where forestry will not pay better. the great american leader of conservation always has maintained, and especially in his speech at the first conservation congress a year ago, that the first principles of conservation is development of resources for the benefit of the people who live here now; he stated that there might be just as much waste in neglecting the development and use of natural resources as there is in their destruction by wasteful methods. in the second place, conservation stands for the prevention of waste; and in the third place, conservation stands for the preservation and perpetuation of our resources through wise economy and thrift. and its principles apply alike to individuals and to nations. if a policy in any department of conservation requires great outlay of money in order to develop and conserve for this and future generations, then the government, the whole people, and succeeding generations may be rightfully asked to bear part of the expense, which could be done by the selling of bonds, and by exemption from taxation some products of growth, like the forests, which are now taxed every year, making the owners pay taxes for a hundred years to get for the market only one crop. no other crop is taxed like this. the owners of any one resource should not bear all the burdens for growing it for future generations; and, if it does not pay, the soil will be used for other crops which will pay better. _true leaders misunderstood_ as a matter of fact, the true leaders in intelligent conservation have been misunderstood by press and people. the principle has been attacked as if it meant the non-use of our natural resources by the present generation. even in alaska the best known teachers of conservation urge the development of all the resources for the benefit of all the people. they wish to encourage pioneering on both a small and on a large scale. it is not the purpose of conservation to preserve from exploration and discovery unknown resources if there can be found for new fields men brave and fearless enough to take the risks of life and of capital. for instance, when in the prospecting of a country's possibilities, and in the risks of life and capital incident thereto, there is called into action every bit of physical or mental energy to meet conditions that seem insurmountable, it is not our purpose to hamper or retard, and say that this risk and cost shall be left entirely to future generations. we are willing to encourage the cutting out of the way, and doing all we can in this generation, believing that the next generation will find new duties suited to its advanced condition and change of needful requirements. wise conservation with use means the maximum of efficiency and profit with the minimum of waste and cost. we do not wish the few to have unfair advantage. we desire each and all to have opportunity according to their talents and their physical or financial abilities, that the known and unknown resources of a country shall not be gobbled up by a few without an equal opportunity to others who can furnish the same needed measure of requirements to insure success. we realize that corporations are necessary to develop a country; that aggregations of capital, made up from large and small stockholders of the people, can accomplish more with less waste than can individuals. they can put in expensive and saving devices and can operate at a far smaller percentage of profit. for example, in gold mining the individual works his placer claim with simple equipment; he will leave percent as waste. then the dredging companies will follow, and get half as much more. then come the big hydraulic companies, reaching benches and levels that men with small capital could not attain. these companies require millions of capital, and they save the waste and are satisfied with a net profit of a few cents per ton. just so with alaska's coal; alaska needs the coal, and all we ask is that some fair method shall be adopted which will best subserve the requirements and will encourage development. conservation and economy must enter into our very life, and every effort should be made to get the most out of little; to find a use for what now we are in various ways wasting. in european countries the hard struggles of the masses have produced the saving habit--a virtue we have got to learn and practice individually and as a people before conservation will become a national success. unless we halt in our mad extravagances, perhaps there will come to us in some degree those sad experiences of suffering that have put the saving principle into the very fiber of the old world peoples; and we will learn our lesson as they long ago learned theirs. we must each share the burdens of conservation, and we all likewise will share in its blessings. conservation is not any one man's opportunity, prerogative, or privilege. it is for the use and benefit of each and all, and can be practiced in any business or occupation as an important aid to success. it is for peasant and prince, rich and poor, and for the nation as well as for the individuals. we must discover some effectual means to prevent disastrous forest fires. we must restore the fertility of our soils. _the question of ownership_ whether conservation is best promoted by individual ownership of certain natural resources is a disputed question, depending on the nature of the public utilities, the location, and other conditions. government ownership does not mean that the government is going into business competition with private capital. it means reasonable royalty and fairness and protection to the lessee, to enable him to compete under prescribed conditions favorable and just alike to all parties. in most cases ownership causes a man to see the need of conservation and economy. the idea of protecting natural resources against waste is not so strong with some, if they do not have possession; while with others it is true that possession gives them the desire and opportunity to see the actual dollars, and they make haste, manufacturing more than the market demands so that only the prime and best qualities find a market, which causes a grievous waste. especially is this true in the lumber business, but it is not so true in the meat business. the packers of meat products have studied the science of saving and conservation, so that the entire carcass is utilized in some useful manner absolutely without waste. and on the farm the man who is financially able to study and practice conservation of the soil prevents its exhaustion, while his poorer neighbor, lacking the funds for the initial expenses, sells the life of the soil with the crop that he markets, and his farm is soon impoverished. we, or some of us, believe that there should be some way of extending state aid at a low rate of interest to the poor farmer to enable him properly to fertilize his soil; and that the chemistry of soils and scientific agriculture should be taught in the common schools. thus would the entire country be benefited, and national efficiency strengthened. _practical application_ the science of conservation, as a philosophy, is wholly independent of who owns the property; but its successful practical application often depends very much on ownership. combinations of capital have the advantage, and this needed capital gives greater possibilities for conservation. compare the country butcher and his -percent waste with the million-dollar packing house which has no waste. it is not the fault of conservation that there are extremes in combinations, resulting in trusts or monopolies. they are practicing conservation in the extreme, in saving of raw material by greater utilization, and by the discovery of new uses for by-products. the standard oil company is another example of the very fineness of division and subdivision of by-products, which finds a place in therapeutics and in the arts, and appear in vaseline, paints, dyes, and a hundred other valuable chemical products. this is conservation. but there are hundreds of ways where conservation can be practiced to a profit in every occupation of life, to the physical, intellectual, and moral betterment of mankind. as corporations are made up of many individuals to do certain things that are necessary to be done, which it would be impracticable or impossible for any individual to do alone, is it not best to recognize them as artificial individuals, subject to the control as well as to the protection of wise laws, which permit no individual to prosper at the expense, discomfort or injury of another individual? conservation, as a living, vital principle stands out beyond and above selfish partisan politics; and no man or combination of men will ever be able to make a political issue of it any more than you can make the gospel of spiritual salvation a political issue. but, like the gospel of spiritual and physical health, it demands the homage and acceptance of all. there will be many men of many minds, crystallizing by their combinations into different sentiments, and advocating different methods. it is so with churches. but their central doctrine of salvation will continue to be the basis of creed. and ours is conservation, that the country and its people may continue to prosper and progress, and that the principle and practice of love and charity, which make up the golden rule, shall not cease to influence the hearts of men. the great question to each one should be: where and how does conservation apply to me? we are here to build the temple, and to bring men up to the standard which we now unfurl to the world. the sower goeth forth to sow; some sow to discord and strife, and some to peace and harmony; some sow to love and some to hate; some sow to adversity, and some to prosperity; some sow to selfish greed, and some to philanthropy and public good; some sow to prudence and conservation, and some sow to extravagance and waste. "there is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that witholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty." "be ye not deceived. for whatsoever ye sow, that shall ye also reap." practical aspects of conservation a. b. farquhar _executive committeeman national conservation congress_ in the forum of argument the cause of conservation, as a general principle and in every detailed application, has already won. when taken on its own merits, hardly a voice is now raised in opposition. yet it has still its enemies, none the less pertinacious or dangerous that their antagonism is based not on public but on private interest--enemies who are carrying on a bitter contest by indirect methods, and clouding the issue by starting side questions. we have all heard of the medical practitioner who covered his general ignorance of pathology by the device of inducing fits, which were his specialty. so, when anybody finds the conservation policy an obstacle to his pecuniary interest, it is an easy expedient to cover his inability to overthrow or confute that policy on point of principle by a display of his skill in exposing real or fancied weaknesses on irrelevant points. instances of this effort to secure an advantage by an adroit befogging of the question will occur to everyone who has followed the discussion of our subject. some of these have been so often exposed that it would be only wearisome to allude again to them, were it not for the importance of being on guard at all times on all points against the crafty contrivings of the enemy. let us first consider the confusion of conservation with hostility to corporations; of encouragement to enterprise, with license to destruction of natural resources. it is true that we have heard and read some vigorous protests recently against grants of timber and water-rights to certain business corporations, whose profits would be sharply curtailed by preventing or limiting their free use of the country's forest and river wealth. perhaps those protests were stronger because a combination was to profit by the grants than they would have been had the beneficiaries been dissociated individuals; what is certain is that they were decidedly stronger because of a belief that the concessions were to be granted without exacting for them their full money value. yet, even allowing that objections founded on the principles of conservation may have been mixed in this case with objections on other grounds, it is contrary to common-sense to apply to the former the invalidity or the validity that may be discovered in the latter. arguments for conservation are no more or less sound because aggregations of capital in large industrial undertakings are dangerous or useful to the public. as conservationists, we are not concerned either to palliate the frequent dangers or to depreciate the frequent valuable services to the public from such aggregations. but we are concerned to see that the national resources are not squandered for private gain, if our best efforts can prevent it. another example of a confusion of the question, or raising a false question, is when a saving of natural resources is identified with locking them up; as though energy conserved were to be understood as energy neutralized. quite the contrary: conservation means so treating our resources as to get the most we can from them. in the case of our forest wealth, as of any other in which there is growth and decay, a judicious degree of consumption of the product is a necessity. after the period of most rapid development has been succeeded by a slower rate of increase, approaching that when losses by accident and by interior degeneration are barely made up by the growing season, there is obviously a gain in removing the tree and leaving its place to be filled by something that will continue to grow. in a properly conserved forest no tree is left standing until attacked by decay, but each is cut when its value is greatest, so that the best management is recognized not so much by the largest amount of standing timber as by the largest yearly gross increase in growth of timber. it is somewhat similar with water-power. "the mill never grind with water that is past," so the power has to be used when it is within our grasp, or be lost. conservation of water-power is maintenance of the amount of such power that so appears, and disappears. it is for use; conservation for disuse, in this case, becomes an absurdity. even as to mineral resources, which cannot be replaced when once withdrawn, conservation calls only for economical use, not for neglect or insufficient use. the argument is that we have quite as good a right to the enjoyment of the gifts of nature as our successors have, but not a right so much better than theirs as to render a wanton waste of our patrimony justifiable, or even pardonable. in connection with this same identification of forest conservation with neglect of the forests, we should consider the hasty tendency shown in some quarters to regard the terrible forest fires of the last few weeks as proof that we are safer without a woodland than with it, and that therefore our policy is at fault. but our policy is care, and not neglect. we would avoid such calamities by preventing them. the recent fires appear to have been due very largely to carelessness, from meal-preparation or from smoking in presence of dry combustible material; and in some instances to actual incendiarism, which was, where it occurred, a crime no less serious than wilful murder. these forests might have been safeguarded by an expenditure of one-tenth the loss by fire, and at no danger to life. fires from locomotive sparks--a far too frequent nuisance--should no longer be classed with unavoidable accidents; for the masses of dried grasses, etc., that make the sparks dangerous could and should be removed from the track vicinity; or the locomotives provided with efficient spark-arresters, or oil used instead of coal. from strictly non-preventable accidents such as lightning, general conflagrations must be exceedingly rare; and thus the cure for the entire evil is within the reach of capable caretakers. where an efficient forest guard is provided, as experience in european countries and some american states has demonstrated, these disastrous visitations are no longer dreaded. to look on a universal removal of our nation's tree-wealth as the only remedy, is like the old proposition to drive rats from the granary by burning the barn. one more illustration will be enough. it is a great advantage to any cause when the opposing advocate can be found in error on any point, no matter how trivial or how far aloof from the essential issue; for then the convenient presumption of "false in one thing, false in all," can be raised, and the weakness of the said cause most effectively disguised. this expedient is at least as good as the famous rule in pleading: "when you have no case, then abuse the plaintiff's attorney." it is readily possible, i dare say, to show that some of our conservationist champions may have in a few cases underestimated the life yet remaining to our national resources. estimate in these matters is necessarily uncertain, few or none of the elements of the calculation being well ascertained. this is particularly true of our mineral supply. the time when our coal, for example, may be expected to become practically exhausted cannot be set within a hundred years, for we cannot gauge the stock in veins out of sight, nor foresee the rate at which the use of coal will be accelerated. but it would seem sufficient to know that, at the present rate of extraction (the amount mined in , as the figures show, excelled all previous records, and yet the increase in over was more than the total annual supply years earlier), no finite quantity could indefinitely survive; hence more attention must be paid to avoiding the present lavish waste in mining, as well as applying water-power and wind-power wherever adapted to do the work now done by burning coal. these economies should be introduced now from choice, not left till the disappearance of our fuel-supply drives us to them by force. it is a wretched business to allow our boast that "the country's coal supply is good for many hundreds of years yet" to uphold us in the reckless waste we now make of it. but i attempted to cover the whole field of conservation in an address at our first congress, and will not repeat but, in conclusion, will touch upon that form of conservation which all will concede to be of supreme importance--the conservation of the most precious asset of the state: its men, women, and children. if the life and health of citizens is sacrificed, by vicious measures or by simple neglect, no saving of any other of our possessions will at all avail us. the importance of efforts, on a national scale, for the maintenance of public health has been proved by ample experience, and we should see to the continuance, and especially to the proper organization, of such efforts. an important step in that direction is the proposed formation of a department of health under the federal government, as contemplated in the bill so ably championed by senator owen at the last session of congress. our race is a prey to epidemics which extend far beyond state boundaries, arising from causes that often require long-continued and expensive investigations for their determination and their counteraction; and it is obvious that any effectual work against them must be under charge of the general government. the clear and cogent reasons for this view have again and again been given by sanitary experts, and it is needless to repeat them. the matter is of sufficient importance to call for action from our congress, and a resolution favoring a department of health, at the national capital ought surely to meet with no opposition. i would propose the following resolutions: _resolved_, that this congress declares its hearty approval of the opinion made public last week by our honored chief executive, president taft, that his party and his administration are pledged "to make better provisions for securing the health of the nation. the most tangible and useful form that this can take would be the establishment of a national bureau of health, to include all the health agencies of the government now distributed in different departments." _resolved_, that we accept, in principle, the "health department" bill of senator owen now pending, and strongly recommend that that measure, suitably amended where necessary, be enacted into law. _resolved_, that our secretary be directed to communicate a resolution advocating a department of health to the members of the national senate and house of representatives, and that our own membership be urged to use all their individual influence to aid the passage of the measure hereby recommended. report from arkansas sid b. redding _secretary arkansas conservation commission_ progress has been made in the conservation movement in arkansas through the recent organization of the arkansas conservation commission. up to this time we have had no legislation along conservation lines, and our conservation commission is one whose members serve without compensation. the commission was appointed by our present governor, and its officers are george w. donaghey, _chairman_, and sid b. redding, _secretary_. the commission has effected a permanent organization, and its membership includes some of the leading business and professional men of our state. the arkansas legislature will convene in january, , and at that time governor donaghey will perhaps recommend legislation covering a fixed conservation policy for our state. report from colorado frank c. goudy _president colorado conservation commission_ the colorado conservation commission is composed of thirty-six members appointed by the governor of the state february , , with mr frank c. goudy designated as chairman. the commission met on call to organize march , , at which time mr goudy, the chairman, was elected president of the commission for the ensuing year, and the following subjects were fixed upon as embracing the general scope of conservation in colorado, viz: lands, waters, minerals, forestry, and natural history. standing committees were appointed and put in charge of these five divisions of labor. the organization is composed of men holding all shades of opinion concerning conservation. some think the federal government should turn over to the state all the public domain within its borders, together with its natural resources of every kind; that the state should own and control the public land and all it contains. others hold that these transfers from the federal government to the state should be made, but that they should be subject to conditions to be named in the grant, providing adequate protection against monopoly and other objectionable control. still others believe there should be cooperation with the general government, at least until such laws are enacted as will assist in the work of conservation and until the state is better prepared, financially, to meet the expense necessarily attending such a work. there are many others who believe in the continued federal control of the public domain and its resources. including the first meeting, five sessions have been held, each occupying two days. in connection with the several sessions already held, considerable labor has been performed. many papers have been read, numerous addresses have been delivered, and the standing committees have made sundry carefully prepared reports. of the papers read, more than half have been given by persons not members of the commission, not for lack of readiness on the part of our own people, but to divide this feature of the work with the public at large. it has never been difficult to secure speakers either inside or outside of the commission. the commission itself is composed of a body of more than ordinary intelligence. the annual meeting was marked with a banquet to emphasize the passing of the year. the last meeting, april - , , was devoted entirely to the subject of the water-power resources of the state. numerous letters from men prominent at washington were received and read, and five papers were given by persons interested in the subject. all phases of the question were presented, and the most mature thought of the present time was elicited. one of the duties of the secretary of the commission is to take notice of any unlawful waste or destruction of natural resources and report the same to the proper authorities. this work has been sufficiently pursued to disclose a field calling for special attention--one that calls for legislative recognition, authority, and assistance. it may be of interest to the congress to know something of the resolutions that have been adopted by this commission. a brief abstract of the elements of a few will suffice to show how the body stands on the subject of conservation. --a hearty endorsement of the general policy of the government in control and conservation of the resources of the nation. --hearty cooperation between the state and nation in conservation. --that all plans of conservation should safeguard against monopoly. --that in disposing of water-power sites, all franchises should be limited to a reasonable period to prevent monopoly and regulate charges. --that in taxing forested lands, no account should be taken of the timber until it is cut and sold. --that all afforested lands over one acre and not over ten acres on a tract of acres should be exempt from taxation for a period of ten years. --that the state, by proper laws and reasonable appropriations, should cooperate with the general government in the protection of the forests within the state from fire and lawless depredations of every kind. among other things, a committee has been appointed to prepare and submit to the next meeting a brief and clear statement, for general circulation, as to what conservation is and what it is not; what it stands for, and what it seeks to do. the purpose is to clear away the haze of misunderstanding and misapprehension in the public mind concerning it. the commission is about to publish a full report of its proceedings, covering the five sessions already held. in closing this statement, it may not be out of place to say that nature has been lavish of resources in our state--they are many and abundant, but in a certain measure undeveloped, and, so far, we have had no leisure to take up matters not directly and specifically local to colorado, except in cases where they are necessarily general. report from florida cromwell gibbons _florida conservation commission_ the spirit of conservation prevaileth everywhere in these modern times, and for the reason that during the past several years vicious attacks have been made upon the national resources throughout the length and breadth of our land, and to such a marvelous extent that our whole people have awakened to the fact that something must be done and at once if we wish to preserve our general resources sufficiently to care for those we expect to come after us, and who are dependent on our country for an honest and successful living. we have been greedy and selfish in the past, and now is the time for us to curb this vicious appetite and think of those who are to come hereafter. modern times have come to stay, but the spirit of conservation will grow until we have accomplished the grand results of providing proper protection to our forests, mineral wealth, lands, water-power and waterways, and last but not the least our various climates that god almighty has given us to conserve the health of our people. much is said as to the methods to be adopted and what necessary legislation should take place to obtain actual results of conservation. the idea of giving absolute control over the forests, the inland waterways, and the public lands confined within the states to the national government is repugnant to me and i believe to all of the people of my state. it has too much the tinge of centralization of power in the federal government, and we have had enough of this already. the notion that giving the states power and control is in favor of the special interests is ridiculous when we look back and know what has already been done by the federal government giving away some of its most valuable resources to the trust-monopoly corporations of the country, and we view in comparison what the states have done where they have controlled many of these resources. i have but to call your attention to what we are doing in florida and have done the past several years in the way of conservation. we realized some years ago that our public lands were fast being absorbed by the railways operating in our state, and that the time would soon be at hand when our people would be unable to secure homesteads, and immigration to our great state would be unable to place that energy with the soil of our state and bring about the development of resources we were entitled to through the natural course of developments. we had within our borders a vast empire of land, over , , acres of fertile land known as the everglades, all of which was looked upon by the land grabbers as not worth cents an acre; but greatly to his credit, to governor napoleon b. broward, now our nominee for united states senator, is due the reclamation of this property and a saving to the state of lands now valued at over $ , , . against great political odds and vigorous contests, the policies of governor broward were endorsed; and after much litigation through the state and federal courts we have been able to conserve this vast area of land by drainage under state supervision and at the expense of the state. the policy was greatly doubted, but it has proven a grand success in that the state, securing title to these lands, successfully sold half of the same at a price sufficient to build the necessary dredges and pay for the work of the draining of the entire tract of property by carrying the surplus waters from lake okeechobee through the trunk canals to the waters of the gulf and to atlantic ocean. the work that is now going on has accomplished over miles of main canals with locks to preserve sufficient water for the purpose of irrigation in dry spells. when the work is completed, which will be inside of three years, the state will have provided over miles of canals with the lateral canals approaching the properties of the various owners, all of which will not only result in giving the necessary drainage and irrigation but will also furnish water transportation to the gulf and to the inland water route from key west to jacksonville (a distance of about miles), as well as deep-sea connections at the various ports along this route. by this state conservation we are giving to the people one of the richest bodies of fertile lands in the united states, a territory greater than the states of rhode island and connecticut combined, every inch of which will grow either sugar-cane or truck of all kinds through winter and summer. these lands will produce at least three crops a year, and to the industrious citizen who desires to live in a country that will give renewed youth and a climate unexcelled and a living independent of the world. i know of none that can be found better located to give the results than this vast empire known as the everglades, so promptly conserved by our state government and our people. we are also interested in another line of conservation, and that is the preservation of our pine forests and the prohibiting of the destruction of our sapling trees which have been attacked by those who are greedy for wealth and have no regard for the future. much will be accomplished in this direction, as our people are absolutely opposed to the complete destruction of the forests, as it will provide no future for our timber markets; and destruction of our pine forests would undoubtedly affect our climate, which by all means should be conserved as well as the timber for the building of our homes of the future. it may be as well for me to call your special attention to the fact that, in addition to this great work of conservation i have related in reference to the saving of public land and our efforts in the direction of saving the forests, our state has for several years aided in a public way in the building of the great inland waterway along the atlantic coast within the state of florida. these canals have been made during the past years, until now we have a thorough water route from saint john's river southward connecting streams and inlets until there has been dug over miles of canal, giving this great waterway and enabling the people along the eastern coast sections a cheap means of transportation to the railway center of the state at jacksonville. i think that we have done our part toward conservation, and all under the jurisdiction and authority of our state. there has been no effort at graft, but all have worked in harmony in the interests of the public welfare, thus demonstrating (so far as florida is concerned) that she is able to control her own affairs; and all she asks of the national government is its aid and assistance. report from idaho jerome j. day we believe that, in the interest of the united states and the state of idaho, the agricultural land within the forest reserves of idaho should be opened to settlement and made available for home building; and that the decision as to whether land is good agricultural land or not should be referred to those who are primarily agriculturists, rather than to those who are primarily arboriculturists, and to those who are familiar with farming in idaho rather than to those who are familiar only with farming in general. we believe that the protection of the forests of idaho and the safety of life and property in idaho require that good roads be built along the lines of streams leading into the heart of the forest reserves; and that the land along these roads, whether valuable for agriculture, timber, or mineral, should be open to entry, with such provisions in relation to habitation and improvement as will secure the presence, between the months of june and september, of a local fire-fighting force, consisting of men who know the country, have a financial interest in the locality, and are skilled in the use of the axe and in methods of fighting a forest fire. we believe in the separate classification of coal lands, oil lands, phosphate and mineral lands; and we believe in the administration of those lands in such a way as to prevent waste, promote safety in mining, and defeat monopoly. we do not believe in a policy for revenue in relation to these lands. the revenues to be derived should be incidental, and belong of right to the state of idaho. we believe in the cooperation of the state and the national government in the conservation and utilization of the water-power within the state of idaho. we will recommend that the governor of idaho call a convention or congress to consider questions relating to home conservation in idaho, and to recommend policies and legislation and a system of administration for all forms of public wealth that lie within the borders of the state. report from indiana a. e. metzger _indiana conservation commission_ the indiana conservation commission was appointed by former governor frank p. hawley shortly before he left the gubernatorial chair. the commission as appointed by governor thomas r. marshall, his successor, consists of nine members with mr henry riesenberg as chairman. the commission, through its chairman, made an effort to get a bill through the legislature, making an appropriation for the use of the commission, but it failed to pass. governor marshall was repeatedly urged to set aside a small sum out of the contingent fund so that an investigation could be made and published, but this the governor has repeatedly declined to do, and it is thought he is not very favorably disposed toward the cause of conservation. having no means the commission could do absolutely nothing, and hence may be said to be in a state of "innocuous desuetude." mr riesenberg, the chairman, has, however, lectured on the subject throughout the state, visiting many points, giving his time freely and defraying the expenses out of his own pocket. he has also written innumerable articles for the papers of indiana, and these, together with his lectures, have served to keep the subject alive; and indianians are probably as well informed and as fully alive to the subject as people in any other state. report from iowa a. c. miller _chairman iowa state drainage, waterways and conservation commission_ i have been asked to prepare for your consideration and information a history of the conservation movement in iowa, reviewing briefly the work done by the state drainage, waterways and conservation commission. the sentiment toward the conservation of our natural resources has been developing gradually for a number of years, keeping pace with the development that has been aroused throughout the country. so far as iowa is concerned, it was augmented greatly through the efforts of the commercial bodies throughout the state, and especially of those of the city of des moines, when during the year they inaugurated a movement which had for its object the securing of an appropriation by congress to be used in surveying three of our principal streams in order that we might determine whether or not they were subject to improvement for navigation, and for the further purpose of ascertaining the value of the water-power which might be developed if the rivers were improved for navigation. great interest was manifested by our people, and we were finally successful in securing an appropriation by congress for a survey of the larger of the three rivers, the des moines; and the united states government has at this time a corps of some engineers at work. they expect to finish their work early in . the thirty-third general assembly of iowa convened in december, , and remained in session until the following spring. the sentiment had been aroused to such an extent at this time that there seemed to be a general demand for the creation of some kind of a commission to take these matters up and work them out intelligently for the good of our people and report with recommendations to the next general assembly. it seemed hard, however, for all to unite on a general plan. portions of our state demanded a commission for dealing with the question of drainage only, leaving it to other commissions to handle the question of water transportations, forestry, and water-power. a compromise was finally made, and this commission was created. it is composed of seven members appointed by the governor: a. c. miller, _chairman_, l. w. anderson, e. a. burgess, a. f. frudden, t. w. keerl, thomas h. mcbride, and w. h. stevenson. _duties defined_ _first_--to investigate the present condition of public drainage in iowa and the benefits which can be derived from the best drainage engineering practice, the most economical administration of drainage projects, and a more economical best method of procedure to bring about the development of the water-power of those benefits may be secured. _second_--to investigate the present condition of all overflow of flood-plain lands of iowa, showing losses due to floods in the destruction of farm crops, the losses due to the destruction of property in the cities and towns and built-up districts, the losses due to the withdrawal from crop cultivation of such flooded lands, and recommending the proper methods of preventing such flood conditions. _third_--to investigate and survey at least one representative iowa river to ascertain the available dam sites and the potential water-power and report the best method of procedure to bring about the development of the water-powers of the state, at the same time retaining the ultimate control of the water supply as a property of the state. _fourth_--to cooperate with the united states survey provided by act of congress and investigate the possibilities of navigation upon the rivers or upon adjoining lands by canal, and to secure the aid of the government experts when practicable in the several matters investigated by this commission. _fifth_--to investigate the questions of forests and their preservation and culture in the state, especially with reference to the influence of forests on the flood conditions of the rivers and the erosion and waste of the soils. _sixth_--it is the clear intent and purpose of the act providing for the commission that the close interrelation of the several phases of river development shall be shown, and the necessity for a broad, comprehensive treatment of our rivers shall be studied and reported upon. _seventh_--the general question of the relation of the state to the preservation of the fertility of the iowa soils. _eighth_--the general question of the wise and conservative development and use of the mineral resources of the state, especially with reference to the mining of coal. _ninth_--the general question of the nature and condition of such lakes in iowa as now belong to the state, and the relation of lakes and streams to the preservation of such varieties of fish, birds, and native animals as are desirable which now belong to the state. _members serve without pay_ we have but $ , to carry on the expenses of our two years' work. out of this must be paid our secretary and office expenses, and the cost of printing our reports and whatever field work is done by the engineers. it would seem that the great state of iowa, producing annually more than $ , , of wealth could well afford to have been more liberal in appropriating for this work. the task assigned surely is no small one. _work of the commission_ we have begun to compile our report for the printers, and expect to present a report that will be valuable for future reference and we hope of much interest to our people. we have investigated the drainage conditions over the state quite extensively, and undertaken to ascertain the number of acres of land not available for agriculture through lack of drainage. we will have recommendations to make pertaining to this question, but have not yet worked out any plan for financing cost at reduced rates. this will be considered later, but the iowa farmer has money and is not so much interested in having the interest rates for carrying his debt reduced, as he is in getting the first cost reduced. _water-power_ we have investigated and surveyed a number of water-power sites and are more and more impressed with the importance of the state looking after them and seeing that the control does not slip away. no estimate has yet been made as to the value of the undeveloped water-power of the state, but i will venture that it will be shown to be several millions of dollars. if not looked after, it will be but a short time until it will be under the control of individuals or private corporations. almost invariably wherever our engineers have gone, they either find the engineer for some crowd of individuals--for some corporation--on the job, or find that he has preceded them. i will cite one example in our state: on cedar river, at moscow, individuals are planning the construction of a great dam which will store an immense body of water. they have , acres of land already acquired, adding greatly to the power developed by the natural flow of the river itself. when this dam is completed, it will turn from the channel into a canal practically the entire discharge of the river at low stage, carrying it around the country to the city of muscatine, with an average fall of about ninety feet, developing , horse-power, and finally discharging the water into the mississippi, never returning to the original channel from which it was taken. a syndicate plans to finance this proposition on a basis of $ , , , and if unmolested the probability is that it will be carried out successfully. the commission, however, is powerless, being a temporary creation with its duties defined. we, therefore, can only call attention in our report and urge upon our legislature that it take some action toward protecting our people in their rights in these matters. we are working in perfect harmony with the united states government engineers who are on the des moines river work at this time. we expect much from them in the way of information that we can use in our report. iowa is interested in some miles of navigable streams, either touched by her borders or within her territory, and we hope some day to again reap the benefit of being able to load and unload freight at docks within the corporate limits of our beautiful capital city, as we did for many years in its early history; and not only des moines but all the cities bordering on the great mississippi or the equally great missouri. iowa occupies a proud position among the states today, rich in fertile soil, rich in minerals, coals, and shales, blessed with a happy and contented people; if given the benefit of improved waterways like the mississippi, the ohio, and the missouri, making them great highways; and if at the same time permitted to improve our tributary rivers and the water-powers of this great central west, it will make a mighty empire of itself--and iowa, magnificent state that she is, will be in the center of it all. we are not yet so far advanced with our work that i am able to tell you what the commission will or will not recommend to the next legislature. i am firm in the belief that a permanent commission should be created, with a liberal appropriation for carrying forward the work. possibly the field now covered by our commission should be divided. it would seem that the drainage interests of the state would be of sufficient importance to justify the employment of a state engineer, and possibly the question of drainage would receive the entire attention of some state board. there is a great work that can be done by our commission in the future if the state should see fit to make it permanent and appropriate the money to carry forward the work. the beautifying of our meandered lakes is something that is attracting the attention of our people, and would prove a popular move if started. they are also becoming much interested in the treatment and handling of soils, and much good would ultimately result to our farmers if this phase of conservation was handled intelligently and carefully. professor stevenson, of the iowa state agricultural college, a member of this commission, is recognized as an expert in this line of conservation work, and i believe that his part of the report when published will be instructive and interesting. i can only hope that enough interest will be aroused throughout our state to influence the next legislature to put the commission on a permanent basis, furnishing the means to carry on the great work. report from louisiana henry e. hardtner _chairman louisiana conservation commission_ louisiana was the first state to create a commission for the conservation of natural resources by legislative enactment, and enjoys the proud distinction of being the first to enact sane and comprehensive laws tending to conserve, protect, and perpetuate the natural resources of the state. in the legislature created a conservation commission, whose duty it was to report to the legislature in as to the conditions of the various resources and to recommend necessary laws for their use and preservation. the commission went to work with a will, holding meetings all over the state for the purpose of arousing the people and educating them in the great work. the lumbermen were our friends from the beginning; so were the owners of timber lands, and operators in the production of oil, gas, sulphur, and salt; the farmers dependent on the streams for irrigation purposes soon saw the benefit to be derived from a policy that would protect and perpetuate our natural resources, and also gave us their hearty cooperation. this great work accomplished, the people as a whole soon realized that percent of the proceeds of the forests and rivers was expended for labor and supplies, and joined heartily in the movement; and thus we were prepared to ask the legislature that certain laws be enacted. honorable harry gamble, our efficient secretary (and a member of the commission) prepared the various acts, and with such care that they will stand the test of any court. it was my pleasure as a member of the legislature from the newly created parish of lasalle to introduce and handle a number of the conservation measures. governor sanders, one of the greatest men in the united states, who recently resigned a united states senatorship to which he had been unanimously elected because the people needed him at the helm of the state government, gave his hearty support to every measure bearing on conservation. but with all the serious obstacles removed, and the advantage of a friendly administration, our bills could not be made effective without a constitutional amendment; and so we faced a real crisis. in order to raise a sufficient fund to protect our forests from fires and for reforestation purposes, and to prevent the gas and oil fields from being recklessly exploited and wasted, it was necessary to levy a license-tax on timber and minerals severed from the soil. our resources being in the hands of individuals and corporations, it was just and proper that they contribute to the cost of the work for preserving their properties, and the people through the state would enact and carry such laws into effect as would benefit all. to pass a constitutional amendment is not any easy matter; and thus the real work began. the constitution of the state, which provided for a license-tax on nearly every profession or business, had left out lumber and minerals, probably because it has only been in recent years that there was any development along such lines. that part of the amendment referring to natural resources was as follows: "those engaged in severing natural resources, as timber or minerals, from the soil or water, whether they thereafter convert them by manufacturing or not, may also be rendered liable to a license-tax, but in this case the amount to be collected may either be graduated or fixed according to the quantity or value of the product at the place where it is severed." when the amendment came up for final passage i spoke in part as follows: "the whole conservation program as recommended by the conservation commission, of which i had the honor to be chairman, is dependent on this amendment of article of the constitution. in carrying out the idea of conservation, as in carrying out any other governmental policy, it is necessary to raise money. in order to introduce a forestry system and to protect your forests from fires, it is necessary to have money to employ persons informed along these lines whose special duty it will be to look after that kind of business. now in order to do this, it seems no more than fair that the persons who are profiting by the depletion of our natural resources should contribute to the payment of these bills; but before that can be done, it is necessary to change the constitution. "article , as originally made, exempts manufacturers. notwithstanding this fact, in a general license act was passed in which the legislature, in their wisdom, saw fit to levy a license-tax on the manufacture of lumber. when it was attempted to collect this tax, it was carried to the supreme court which held that a license-tax levied on the manufacture of lumber could not be collected for the reason that manufacturers were exempt under article , and the sawing of lumber was a manufacturing business. the court did not say that the attempt of the legislature to levy a license-tax on the manufacture of lumber was inequitable or unjust, but merely that it was unconstitutional according to article . this bill, from and including lines to , attempts to change the constitution so that the tax may be levied on the severing of trees from the soil. it is to be noticed that there is no attempt to levy a license-tax on the manufacture of lumber, but it is proposed to change the constitution so that the license-tax may be levied on the cutting down of trees in forests. "as stated before, the conservation commission, after having investigated this question for two years and examined the laws not only of the united states but of foreign countries, has reached the conclusion that those persons who are engaged in the exhaustion of the natural resources of the state, in justice to the state which permits them to do business under this law, in justice to the people, and in justice to future generations of the state, should bear a slight additional tax in order to restore and protect those resources. "this, gentlemen, is the reason why you are asked to change article of the constitution. you are already acquainted with the facts connected with the natural resource depletion of this state, and i will not now discuss that question. i am simply explaining to you, to the best of my ability, the necessity of changing the constitution as proposed in this bill in order that we may have the proper source to raise a revenue in order to carry out conservation policies." we succeeded in passing the amendment, and then passed the license-tax or revenue act which provides the following taxes: / cent per , feet log scale on fine and hardwoods severed from the soil; cent per stave bolts; / cent for each telegraph and telephone pole; cent each for piles; / cent per cup per year for extracting turpentine from growing trees; for production of oil, / cent per barrel; for natural gas, / cent per , cubic feet; for mining sulphur, cents per ton; for mining salt, / cent per ton. the license-tax on timber will yield about $ , annually, and the same amount will accrue from mines and mining. the conservation commission will use these funds for the protection and perpetuation of the state's natural resources. the forestry bill, which we consider a good one, was then passed. there are no restrictions as to size-limit in cutting timber. ample provisions are made for a complete fire patrol system and methods for preventing loss by fires. in louisiana and all southern states, denuded lands will reforest naturally if fires are prevented, and a good crop can be grown in from to years. for any one who will engage in the business of growing timber, especial inducements are held out. the assessment on the land is fixed at $ . per acre for or years, and the growing timber is not taxed during that period. the deputy forester must be a man practically and theoretically educated in silviculture, and under the state forester has supervision of forestry work. consent is also given to the united states to acquire by gift or purchase not exceeding , acres for a national forest reserve; the state may also acquire by gift or purchase lands for forest reserves. act provides for the establishment of a department of mining and minerals, including oil and gas production, authorizing the prohibition of unsafe and wasteful mining and the appointment of a supervisor of minerals on recommendation of the conservation commission. act to "establish a board of commissioners for the protection of birds, game, and fish," empowers them to employ wardens, officers, and assistants, and to provide means to carry the act into effect; gives them complete control and management of all the waters of the state, such as the gulf of mexico (within the jurisdiction of the state), all lakes, bays, sounds, rivers, streams, passes, bayous, creeks, lagoons, and ponds by granting management and control of all fish, shell-fish, oysters, diamond-back terrapin, turtles, shrimp, crabs, and alligators; and provides for oyster, game, and fish reserves by granting them control of birds, game, and fur-bearing animals, etc. birds, game, and fish are among the greatest natural resources of the state, yielding an enormous food supply and a large revenue. act declares that waters found in the bayous, lagoons, lakes, bays, and rivers to be the property of the state. the idea is that the state will not permit any one to create a monopoly of this resource, which belongs to the people. act provided for the creation of a commission for the conservation of natural resources. act provided for conservation of natural gas and oil by preventing waste. a number of other conservation measures were enacted into laws, in all, but i cannot touch upon them at this time. we are proud of our success in inaugurating safe and sane policies for conservation; we are proud of our governor, j. y. sanders, who urged the passage of the various bills; we are proud of our lumbermen, timber owners, gas and oil operators, and miners who recognized the need for conservation and the justness of our bills, and assisted in their passage. and above all we are proud of our people as a whole, who are so wide-awake on the question of conservation of natural resources. report from maine cyrus c. babb _district engineer maine state water-storage commission_ the two principal resources of the state of maine are its forests and its water-powers. of its total area of , square miles, , square miles, or percent are in forest lands. over lakes and ponds are located in the state, covering square miles of water surface, and not including the innumerable little ponds of an acre or two in area that are located in all directions. there are in the state one lake to each square miles of territory, and one square mile of lake surface to each . square miles of territorial area. although the state ranks in area, and in population, it ranks third in the union in water-power development, having, according to the u. s. census, a total of over , horsepower in use. it is surpassed only by new york and california in total horsepower. the state has always conserved its water-power. the supreme judicial court of the state has held as follows: it is a rule of law peculiar to this state and massachusetts under the colonial ordinance of - that all great ponds--that is ponds containing more than acres--are owned by the state. while private property cannot be taken for public use without compensation, the waters of great ponds and lakes are not private property. under the ordinance, the state owns the ponds as public property held in trust for public uses. it has not only the jus privatum, the ownership of the soil, but also the jus publicum, and the right to control and regulate the public uses to which the ponds shall be applied. the authority of the state to control waters of great ponds and determine the uses to which they may be applied is a governmental power, and the governmental powers of the state are never lost by mere non-use. _early investigation_ maine has always been in the forefront in the investigation and conservation of its resources. thirty years before the national government authorized its first geological investigations, and over forty years before the federal geological survey was established, the state of maine had made such a survey. by act of the state legislature, march , , a geological survey of the state was authorized under the direction of dr charles t. jackson, state geologist. the investigation was continued for three years. the results of this geological survey, considering the difficulties of transportation at that time and the non-existence of accurate maps, are interesting. a detail survey and report on the natural history and geology of the state was made in and by ezekiel holmes, naturalist, and c. h. hitchcock, geologist. reports were made on the zoology and botany of the state, but the most interesting and detailed reports treated of the geological resources. a hydrographic survey of the state was authorized by the legislature as early as . the resulting report of mr walter wells is considered as authority even to the present day. _present organizations_ at the present time there are two organizations in this state working along geological, topographic, and hydrographic lines. they are known as the maine state survey commission, and the maine state water-storage commission. the first organization was authorized by act of the state legislature march , . its powers were subsequently amended and enlarged by an act approved march , . it is authorized to cooperate with the u. s. geological survey, and its work includes the topographic and geological surveys of the state. the creation of the state water-storage commission was authorized by act of the legislature april , . his excellency, governor fernald, at the conference of governors in may, , was so impressed with the importance of the objects and recommendations there brought forth that, at the next meeting of the state legislature, he advocated and finally approved the act creating said commission. this commission is directed to collect information relating to the water-powers of the state, the flow of rivers and their drainage area, the location, nature, and size of the lakes and ponds in the state, and their respective value and capacity as storage reservoirs, with a view to conserving and increasing the capacity of the water-powers of the state. the act further provides that every person, firm, or corporation before commencing the erection of a dam for the purpose of developing any water-power in the state, or the creation or improvement of a storage reservoir, shall file with the commission certain prescribed engineering plans. the first report of the commission to the legislature is asked to show, in so far as time will allow, a comprehensive and practical plan for the creation of such water-storage reservoirs as will tend to develop and conserve the water-powers of the state, and to report the necessary steps that should be taken by the state to further conserve and increase them. the commission is further requested to ascertain what lands can be purchased by the state and the cost thereof, with information as to their value as forest reserves or for conserving the water-powers of the state, or for reforestation; and further to investigate the question of denuded, burnt-over, or barren lands in the state, and their extent and value, with a view to their purchase by the state for reforestation. by an agreement dated december , , between the director of the u. s. geological survey, the chairman of the state survey commission and the chairman of the state water-storage commission, the work of the three organizations in the state is brought under one direction. this agreement provides for a cooperative survey of the natural resources of the state; that said survey shall include the continuation of topographic mapping, a determination of the amount and availability of water resources, their present development and the best methods of their future utilization; also the further determination of geologic resources. the executive officer, under the terms of this agreement, is a duly appointed employee of the u. s. geological survey, with the title of district engineer. _state highway department_ this department was authorized by legislative act of . the appropriation for the work is based on a tax of / mill on the state valuation. provision is made in the law whereby the state will aid financially, on a sliding scale, the various towns if they raise money for highway construction purposes. on the average it may be said that for every dollar appropriated by a town, the state will pay an additional dollar. the law further provides for a limitation of the amount that the towns may raise for this purpose, based on the valuation of said town. the sliding scale of appropriation by the state is as follows: to towns having a valuation of $ , or less, the state will pay two dollars for each dollar appropriated by said towns; to each town having a valuation of over $ , and less than $ , , , one dollar for each dollar appropriated by said town; to towns having a valuation of over $ , , and less than $ , , , ninety-two cents; to towns having a valuation of over $ , , and not exceeding $ , , , eighty-five cents; to towns having a valuation of over $ , , and not exceeding $ , , , eighty cents; to towns having a valuation of $ , , and over, seventy-five cents for each dollar appropriated by the town; and to unincorporated townships, one dollar for each dollar appropriated. _state forestry department_ this department was created by legislative act of through the appointment of the state land agent as forest commissioner. this commissioner is directed to institute an inquiry and to report as to the extent to which the forests of the state are being destroyed by fires and by wasteful cuttings, and the effect of such action on the watersheds of the lakes and rivers and on the water-powers of the state. his principal duties, however, are the supervision and control of measures for the prevention and extinguishment of forest fires in all plantations and unorganized townships in the state. an efficient fire-fighting organization is now in operation in the state under this department, and during recent years valuable tracts of timber have been saved that would otherwise have been destroyed. _other organizations_ there are other departments and organizations that are doing very valuable work in the preservation of the natural resources of the state of maine. many pages could be written on their results but at present a number of them will only be mentioned by name. included in this list are the departments of inland fisheries and game, department of agriculture, bureau of industrial and labor statistics, state board of health, and department of harbor and tidal waters. report from massachusetts frank william rane _state forester_ henry h. sprague _chairman metropolitan water and sewerage board_ while we do not have an authorized conservation commission in massachusetts, we nevertheless have many wide-awake and active state officials and commissions in charge of work which in the total answers the same purpose to the commonwealth. massachusetts is noted for her excellent roads, and she is constantly enlarging the mileage. the fish and game commission is perfecting our laws and encouraging modern protection and management of both fish and game. the propagation and dissemination of each is a large part of their work. general agriculture is undoubtedly improving and various rural industries such as apple raising, cranberry growing, asparagus culture, and various specialties are receiving renewed attention. the state agricultural college is growing in influence and value to the state. the increasing population of the state has made it necessary to set apart and protect many of the ponds and streams throughout the commonwealth for the purpose of water supply. during the past fifteen years the commonwealth has expended more than $ , , for the acquisition and construction of metropolitan works in order to provide the city of boston and surrounding municipalities with water. one of the storage reservoirs constructed for the "metropolitan district" is the largest reservoir in the world built up to the present time for the purpose of providing domestic water supply. large sums have been spent not only for the direct protection of the reservoirs from pollution, but also in acquiring and improving large marginal areas of woodland, and in the planting with trees of many hundreds of acres of cleared lands which have been acquired. cities and towns outside of the metropolitan district have made and are making like provisions for obtaining and preserving their water supplies. under recent legislation the gradual metering of all water services in the metropolitan district is required, and more vigorous inspection has been introduced; so that in the past year or two a material reduction in the total consumption has been effected notwithstanding the increasing number of water takers. in the building of the great wachusett reservoir for the metropolitan water-works provision has been made for the utilization of the power which may be generated by the fall of the water over the dam to the level of the aqueduct through which the water is conveyed into the metropolitan district. machinery for a power plant is about to be installed in the power house already erected, by which it is estimated that from to horsepower may be generated and disposed of, not only at a profit to the district, but also to the advantage of the local industries. while the state has permitted the taking, for the benefit of the municipalities, of the necessary sources of water supply by the exercise of the power of eminent domain, it has adopted the policy of compelling the husbanding of the waters by the prevention of unnecessary and wasteful consumption, and of utilizing the power generated by water works for the benefit alike of the works of the mechanical industries of the commonwealth. for conserving forest, park, and shade trees, massachusetts has undertaken the great task of suppressing the ravages of the gypsy and browntail moths. this work has now extended over a period of years, and eminent entomologists concede that nothing equal to this undertaking has ever before been attempted. as many as men at one time have been employed by the state in this work. massachusetts has spent millions of dollars in the work, and it is not only a protection to our own people but equally prevents the dissemination of these pests to other states. parasites have been collected and introduced from foreign countries, and everything possible undertaken to assist in the work. our improved high-power spraying machines with new and improved devices for destroying these insects will undoubtedly prove of great value in future spraying undertakings throughout the nation. the forestry work meets with continued whole-hearted support at the hands of our people. the work of reforestation is becoming more popular each year, and great good is bound to result therefrom. our forest fire laws are proving to be workable and hence practical. the poorer towns are receiving state aid in the purchase of fire-fighting equipment, and the wealthier towns are equipping themselves. the past year, as heretofore, the legislature has been inclined to assist the state forester in his various endeavors. report from missouri hermann von schrenk _chairman missouri state forest commission_ the forest commission of the state of missouri was appointed a year ago for the purpose of making recommendations to the governor concerning a future forestry policy for the state. the commission, after a thorough study of the conditions prevailing in the state, prepared a report to the governor, the principal feature of which was the recommendation that a state forest board be established with a state forester. in submitting its report to the governor, the commission suggested a bill, modeled after what appeared to be the best laws already in force in other states. the commission called particular attention to the necessity for establishing fire guards and doing educational work among the people of the state. the report and the bill were sent to the legislature by the governor with a strong recommendation that the bill be passed. owing to the enormous amount of other business on hand and the lateness in the year, the legislature did not have time to fully consider the bill, and it will come up again at the next session. the commission has investigated the forest resources of the state in a general way, and feels that there is a large field for the work of perpetuating forests, especially in some parts of the state where the land is more or less unfit for agricultural purposes. the commission has furthermore planned the organization of a state conservation association, this to be organized sometime this fall along lines similar to those of associations already existing in many states. while the conservation work of this state is as yet in its infancy, the general interest awakened is very large, and the commission anticipates large practical results during the coming year. report from montana rudolph von tobel _chairman montana state conservation commission_ probably none of the governors of states who attended the conference of governors called by president roosevelt in may, , returned to their constituents more thoroughly imbued with the principles of conservation, or more fully determined to put those principles into practice in this state, than governor norris, of montana. almost immediately, acting on the suggestion of governor folk at the conference, he appointed a forestry commission, consisting of judge lew a. callaway, of virginia city, ex-governor robert b. smith, of kalispell, and ex-senator paris gibson, of great falls. it soon became apparent to governor norris, in view of the most unsatisfactory condition of the land laws of the state, that there was work along the lines of conservation of a broader scope than was comprehended in the plans laid down for the forestry commission, and he appointed what was known as the state lands commission, which was expected to draft a bill covering all state lands, except timber lands, to present to the legislature. this commission consisted of honorable david hilger, of lewistown, ex-governor b. f. white, of dillon, and honorable charles s. hartman, of bozeman. subsequently, mr e. m. brandagee, of helena, was appointed to fill the vacancy on the forestry commission caused by the death of ex-governor smith, and mr rudolf von tobel, of lewistown, was appointed on the land commission to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of mr hartman. after several meetings had been held by each of these commissions, it was found impracticable to separate the work of the two without duplicating much of it and causing some conflict; so the two were consolidated, and thereafter worked together in the preparation of a bill covering the entire land holdings of the state to present to the legislature. such a bill was prepared, submitted, and passed by the legislature, and approved by the governor, march , , and is now the law of the state. this act places all state lands under the control of the state board of land commissioners, consisting of the governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and superintendent of public instruction. it provides for the appointment of a register of the state land office, a state land agent, a state forester, and other minor officials. the duties of the register are to attend to the sale of lands, and he is the chief of the office. the state land agent's duties are, generally, to examine all lands in the field; and the state forester has general charge of the timber lands of the state. the act further provides that no timber land shall ever be sold, except only such as, after being cleared, would be more valuable as agricultural land, than it would be for the growing of timber; and that only the merchantable timber in the forests of the state shall be sold from time to time. it also provides for the reforestation of the lands as occasion may require. the state forester is made the general fire warden of the state, and the deputy forester, all peace officers, and the game wardens, are made deputy fire wardens, charged with the duty of protecting the forests of the state, all being liable to forfeiture of office for neglect. the act provides for prohibiting the sale of lands known to be coal lands, and provides that mines may be opened in the coal lands of the state and worked on the royalty basis, the minimum royalty being fixed at ten cents per ton; it provides that every patent issued for state lands shall reserve to the state the coal, oil, gas, and other minerals contained therein, with the right to enter upon the land and extract the same: thus reserving to the state all coal and other minerals in state lands, whether the same are known at the present time to exist or not. it also provides for the location of water-rights by the state for irrigation of state lands and provides for the location of mining claims on state lands in practically the same manner as it provided for the location of such claims under the federal statutes. this, in brief, is an outline of the work accomplished by the commission. owing to the facts that the timber lands of the state are not in one compact body and that large tracts of timber land lying adjacent to the state forests are owned by private parties and corporations, the experiences of the past summer in fighting forest fires, has demonstrated that all owners are not equally interested in preventing the destruction of the timber upon their lands; at any rate that they are not equally willing to pay the expense of preserving it. it was found that while some few corporations, owning large tracts of timber land, furnished their quota of men and money to protect their interests, by far the larger number either declined or neglected to furnish either, throwing upon the state the burden of protecting the timber of private owners in order to protect state property; and it is the intention of the commission to recommend and urge upon the legislature the passage of an act requiring private owners of timber land to protect their forests, and in case of their failure or neglect to do so, authorizing the state to do so and to charge the expense thereof to the land. inasmuch as the state has a large quantity of timber land within the national forests which is unsurveyed, and which if surveyed would be school sections, but which the secretary of the interior has decided belongs to the national government until surveyed, the state derives no benefit whatever from the land and will not derive any until the same has been officially surveyed. the commission proposes to recommend the passage of an act ceding to the federal government all of the lands within the national forests which would be school section, upon congress granting to the state a like area of equally good timber land, in one or more compact bodies so located that the state can obtain some benefit therefrom. this method of handling the matter, i understand, was favorably considered by mr pinchot while in office, and also by president taft. the commission also has in mind the preparation of a bill looking to the conservation of the waters of the state. while montana has many valuable water-powers, most of which are still undeveloped, the principal use of water in the state is, and always must be, for the irrigation of the land; nevertheless, much of the water of the state is available for power purposes which could not be made available for irrigation. under a long line of decisions of the supreme court of the united states, beginning with the case of martin vs. waddell ( peters, ) decided by chief justice taney in , down to the case of kansas vs. colorado ( , u. s.), the beds of all navigable streams below high-water mark, together with the waters flowing over them, belong absolutely to the state, subject only to the right of congress to regulate commerce, and are subject to state control. on the other hand, the land bordering upon such streams all belonged to the general government originally, and in many places available for power sites the lands bordering on the streams still belong to the general government. in order to develop these power sites the work must be undertaken by both state and nation, or by their joint consent; and it is hoped that some legislation may be secured in the state and in congress regulating this joint control. much has been said and written in regard to the compensation due the government, either state or nation, from the owners of developed power sites such as we have in montana; but the montana commission is more interested in the power to regulate rates than in the power to exact compensation for the use of the waters, for the reason that all compensation paid to the government must eventually come from the consumer, and in any event would be comparatively small, while the regulation of rates to the consumer is the only power necessary to complete control and the prevention of monopoly--although it is believed that some compensation should be exacted. such legislation would eventually conserve the undeveloped water-powers of the state, but other questions arise as to those sites which have already been developed. there are four dams across the missouri river in montana, either completed or in process of construction, each of which utilizes, or is intended to utilize, the entire flow of the river. all of these powers were developed under special acts of congress passed after montana became a state; but in no case was the consent of the state obtained, or even sought. the commission has not yet decided whether it will attempt to bring these developed powers under state control or not, and of course has not devised any method of doing so (in case it should be deemed advisable to attempt it), although individual members of the commission--including the writer--have expressed themselves as decidedly of the opinion that the owners of these developed powers, not having obtained any consent from the state for the construction of their dams or for the use of the water, may be brought under state control. the montana commission looks upon this water conservation as its main work for the immediate future. on the whole, the commission feels that it has already accomplished considerable in the way of practical conservation, but that there is much more to be done, some of which it hopes to be able to accomplish at the coming session of the legislature during the first of the coming year. report from new mexico colonel w. a. fleming jones i come from a territory that for sixty years has been knocking at the doors of congress, seeking admission to the sisterhood of states. the treaty of guadalupe hidalgo provided that our territory should be admitted to statehood "at the proper time" (which was to be judged by the congress of the united states), and to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the united states according to the principles of the constitution. the implied requisites for admission are population, taxable wealth, and the desire of statehood. all of these we have in abundance, including a population that exceeds by far that of any of the states at the time of their admission, with the single exception of oklahoma, and something that is by no means generally known is the fact that our territory has fewer foreign-born citizens per thousand than any state in the union. however, the present congress has enacted legislation under which we may be admitted, and our constitutional convention is now in session, framing a fundamental law that i am sure will meet with the approval of congress and the president. but for the fact that the best brains of our commonwealth are engaged in the work of framing this constitution, a much larger representation would have been present here. new mexico is proud of what she has done in the cause of conservation. the act of the thirty-eighth legislative assembly creating our conservation commission is broad in its scope and is a model for those states which have not enacted any such legislation. i hope to attend the third national conservation congress, not from a territory whose people are wards of the government and not considered capable of the management of their own affairs, but as the representative of the great state of new mexico, the forty-seventh star in our flag. report from new york j. s. whipple _chairman state forest, fish and game commission_ new york may well be called the empire state because of its great population, its railways, canals, navigable rivers, agricultural development, and diversified industries. it also has within its boundaries vast forests that give it an important place among the states of the union in regard to woodland products, fish, and game. no statement regarding the conservation question in new york would be complete without first referring to a few of its assets and their stupendous value. those to which i refer will readily indicate the importance of new york as a field for the protection, development, and use of natural resources. the state has an area of , square miles, or , , acres. of this great territory percent is occupied by forests, a proportion nearly the same as that of the forest area of germany. there is standing in new york about , , , board feet of timber; the output of our forests last year was , , , board feet. there are , saw-mills. the value of our forest product in at the mill was $ , , . in the manufacture of wood pulp new york leads all other states. last year , , board feet of domestic logs were used for pulp, and that was only about percent of the total amount used. new york also leads in the number of paper-mills. it has approximately establishments for the manufacture of paper. the paper and wood-pulp industry is represented by a capital investment of about $ , , . new york's vast wilderness contains much large game. over , deer and bear are killed each hunting season. the annual commercial value of fur and game animals and game birds approximates $ , . we rank third as a fish-producing state; the products of all species, including shell-fish, amounts to about $ , , annually, the annual shell-fish product being valued at about $ , , . the adirondack park contains , , acres, the catskill park , acres, and , , acres of land are owned by the state, of which one-third is virgin forest or that which is now equally good. twelve large rivers wholly within the state have their source in the adirondacks. the course of each is marked at frequent intervals by falls or rapids, and they, with others outside of the adirondacks (excluding the niagara and saint lawrence), have a natural horsepower already developed of , ; they are capable of furnishing at least , , horsepower. this estimate would indicate that there is still , horsepower running into the sea wasted. it has been estimated that new york state would derive a revenue of over $ , , annually from its fully developed water-power if controlled and sold by the state. besides the adirondack rivers there are the delaware, susquehanna, chemung, alleghany, esopus, genesee, and many other rivers of great value. new york has over miles of canals, or about percent of the total canal mileage of the united states, over which there are transported annually some , , tons of freight. mineral production is considerable. the mining of iron ore is a well developed industry. one of the largest known iron ore deposits in the world is located in the adirondack wilderness. gas, oil, garnet, graphite and many other mineral products are marketed annually to an amount over $ , , . only three other states yield a greater total value of agricultural products. new york ranks first in average value of production per acre. one-ninth of the hay and forage of this country are raised in new york, and the animal industries are of enormous value. our hay-producing acres are worth $ , , . new york has , farms with an aggregate area of , , acres, valued at $ , , , , furnishing employment for , persons. the annual product of these farms is worth $ , , . new york has acres of tree nurseries capable of producing , , trees annually, and will double that acreage during the next year. we have taken the lead in the establishment of tree nurseries, in planting, and general work of tree propagation. _work accomplished_ these are some of the factors which make conservation of natural resources in new york state very important. the work is being carried on by various state departments rather than by any single commission. governor charles e. hughes, and the departments under him, gave great impetus to the work during his term as governor. besides $ , , authorized for canal improvement and $ , , for good roads, over $ , , is expended each year by the state in conservation work as represented by the activities of the forest, fish, and game commission, the agricultural department, and the state water supply commission. all sections of the state have been awakened, and active steps are being taken in every direction. new york was first to achieve an onward movement in the preservation of its natural resources when in it led the way in the establishment of state forest preserves, and inaugurated the policy of protecting her forests for the health and recreation of the people and the protection of water sources. the same leadership has been continued in control of water by statute creating the state water supply commission in and vesting it with jurisdiction over the water supply of the state. _water_ water is now recognized as one of the most valuable economic resources of the earth, and the importance of measures for public control to secure full benefit of hydraulic resources to the people is being realized very rapidly as the great educational propaganda now carried on in new york progresses. the powers of the water supply commission extend to the progressive development of water-powers of the state for the public use under state ownership and control. it also has the power of improving, straightening, and dredging the channel of any water course of which the irregular flow is shown to be detrimental to public health and safety. four great reservoir projects have been located and surveyed; many other propositions have been tentatively examined, so that all water storage possibilities of the state are approximately known. i want to say just a word about the granting of franchises, especially in respect to water-power rights in perpetuity. we have become so accustomed to the idea of a non-controllable ownership of our natural resources that even our agents in the legislature have seemed at times not to fully appreciate the importance of state control and the rights of the people at large. no agent of the people has any moral right, nor have the people themselves, to bind by water rights in perpetuity future generations who will have their own problems to solve and their own lives to live. it is therefore of first importance to understand our relationship as trustees toward these public resources. are they ours to do with as we please, to use or waste as we see fit, or are they ours to use to the best advantage and with the least waste; and is it our duty to pass them on unimpaired, improved if possible, for those who are to follow us? it is self-evident that this world was not made for us alone. after us countless millions will come and go. could it have been intended that during our temporary occupancy we should have such a complete control of god's gifts to man that we, by our own act or legislative will, could determine for all time how these blessings might be used or enjoyed? we may give them away, we may deprive the people of their rights in them; but when on the one hand a road leads to safety and on the other a way to danger, there should be no hesitation about which we should take. new york has improved on its old policies, which can best be illustrated by an extract from an address by governor hughes: "water-power privileges have been granted in the past without any provision for a payment to the state in return for what the state gives. these grants have frequently been made without proper reservations or conditions and without anything constituting a suitable consideration. they have amounted simply to donations of public rights for private benefit. it does not fetter individual enterprise to insist upon protection of the common interest and due payment for what is obtained from the public. last year on the grant of a franchise to a development company which was to develop power from saint lawrence river it was insisted that provision should be made for compensation for the privilege upon a sliding scale according to the power developed. and thus it was established that hereafter in the state of new york public privileges, on terms of justice to the investors and the public alike, must be paid for." _proposed legislation_ last year a measure prepared for the purpose of relieving the tax burden on reforested land was presented to the legislature, but it failed of passage. this effort will be renewed until the much desired result is obtained. timber should be treated as a crop and taxed when cut. timber owners and tree planters should be encouraged to conserve and plant by making the carrying charges less, that better management may be had and more planting done. the leasing of camp-sites on state land, the building of good roads through the forest preserve, and the removal of dead and down timber were all submitted in the shape of constitutional amendments, but the legislature also failed to sanction these propositions. the public mind is not yet ready for complete and comprehensive conservation in new york, to have which requires a change in our constitution. the need is urgent, but, i regret to say, not fully appreciated. _agriculture_ the agricultural department is performing a splendid work in soil conservation. it assists in the preservation and protection of trees and in planting work, as well as the fostering of farm crops and the husbandry of meat products. the college of agriculture is devoted to the cultivation of intelligent and scientific methods in all branches of crop production. fertilization of the soil, destruction of injurious agents, and new methods of intensive farming, are all taken up in the various branches of the department. in the state college of agriculture there were enrolled last winter nearly students. we have two experiment stations with over fifty scientific men on their staffs. we have three lower-grade agricultural schools, and the state is conducting farmers' institutes, which have held more than a thousand sessions in the past season. _forests_ all the foregoing endeavors are closely related to the continued life of our forests, and in many respects are dependent on them. a producing soil we must always have, or life of all kinds will become extinct. without a fairly regular supply of water a producing soil is impossible; producing farm land is impossible. hence if our water sources do not perform their natural functions, we cannot get along very well. the absence of forests in a mountainous state like new york will prevent a regular flowing water supply, necessary to the demands of good soil productivity; therefore, forests very largely hold the key to the whole conservation situation as it bears on the life, health, and general welfare of the people of new york state. the question of timber supply, water-power, health resorts, and atmospherical conditions, as affected by the forests, are matters of secondary consideration in view of the indirect but vital influence forests have on our soil production. neither soil nor water can be totally destroyed. they may become impaired and unavailable on account of irregularity in rainfall, but to some degree they will always perform their natural services for mankind. the forests, however, might suffer total obliteration as they have in many sections of the orient and occident. wherever this calamity has occurred, we find soil and water have reached their minimum of usefulness. while we could not exist without water or soil, that does not mean that they are the most important subjects for conservation in my state. the question of having to exist without them is entirely eliminated; they will always be there in some degree of efficiency or inefficiency. they will always be with us in their efficient state if we exercise reasonable care in the use of our forests. on the other hand, it is within the scope of possibility that our forests might be destroyed to all practicable purposes, and history points out that soil and water supply would then be of slight utility in a mountainous country. the forest is the controlling resource, like the governor of an engine without which the engine would destroy itself. hence forests in new york state by their influence upon soil and water flow occupy the position of first importance among our natural resources to be conserved. the waste of our forests has been appalling, both by lumbering and conflagration. the great "burns" found through all our mountains furnish striking evidence of gross carelessness and indifference to the value of this great resource. it is time that these acts of colossal folly were stopped. supreme selfishness on the one hand and deadly indifference on the other are at the root of it all. some people do not understand the great danger of total forest destruction threatening certain of our watersheds. it takes to years to grow a mature tree. the average soil may increase about one inch in a century. it requires soil to grow trees, and fire, the great enemy of the forest, destroys not only the trees but the soil as well. on two or three occasions in the past seven years the adirondack park has come dangerously near being wiped out by fire. rain alone has saved it. in and again in several large fires burning at the same time threatened to unite and destroy the entire park. no human agency can combat successfully a great forest conflagration when once it is under way. in , , acres of land was burned over in new york state; the loss approximated $ , . in , , acres were burned, and the loss was more than $ , , . loss of soil and reproduction was not considered in the estimated loss and never is. it is logically evident from the history of forest fires that prevention is the right objective in seeking to remedy this great evil. methods of protection after fire starts will fail when certain commonly occurring weather conditions prevail. in new york we have devised an effective forest fire-fighting organization, based on the principles of prevention. the adirondack and catskill sections have been divided into four districts, three in the adirondacks and one in the catskills. a superintendent was appointed to take charge of each district. under him there were assigned regular patrolmen and special patrolmen, and to a certain extent the superintendent cooperates with supervisors of towns. the aggregate number of men engaged in this work this year is . in addition to this the supervisors in every town in the state of new york are responsible personally for damages caused by forest fires in their respective towns, if they are negligent in putting them out. i met the boards of supervisors of the various forest preserve counties and discussed with them ways and means of fighting fire, explaining the law and showing their responsibility. this action was followed by good results. the superintendents were in turn assembled at albany, and properly instructed as to their duties and the relationships to be carried on between their subordinates and themselves. twenty observation stations were erected on high points, and equipped with strong field glasses, range finders, maps, and telephones. the whole territory has been covered with telephone lines. these stations have proved an incalculable benefit in the apprehension of fires when they are in an incipient state. we have also added to the fire-fighting apparatus portable fire extinguishers. these are very useful in checking a fire at the beginning. old trails and tote roads are kept clear of obstructions to make the woods more accessible. the whole system is chiefly valuable in that it is based on the fundamental principles of early discovery, immediate alarm, and prompt action. over fires were discovered and extinguished last year so quickly that they attracted no public notice, and the damage done was unappreciable. another step was taken by the forest, fish, and game commission when the question of oil-burning locomotives running through the forest preserve was called to the attention of the public service commission. after an exhaustive investigation, oil as fuel was substituted for coal by order of the public service board. this order required that the railroads should install oil-burning engines for use between a.m. and p.m. from april to november each year, all engines to be inspected by representatives of the commission. coal-burning locomotives still run through the forest preserve at night which, on account of the heavy dew, it is thought in most seasons does not materially increase the fire risk; but it is doubtful whether in an extremely dry season coal-burning locomotives would not set fires at night as readily as they do during the day time. the partially restricted use of coal as fuel was the best change obtainable at the time the order was promulgated. the third factor contributing to reduce fire danger was the provision of the new law requiring the lopping of tops of all coniferous trees felled in the forest preserve. the value of this provision is realized when it is understood that the tops of trees felled a decade ago, when not lopped, are still ready to burn, while the debris of lopped trees disappears entirely as a fire menace in the same period of time because they lie flat on the ground, absorb moisture and rapidly decay. scenic assets have a tangible value. figures have been adduced showing that $ , was paid in fares to niagara falls to the new york central railroad in three months. the visitors to the adirondacks leave nearly $ , , behind them each season. these figures seem to suggest the culture of the esthetic, as that side of the problem is very remunerative. there ought to be as much attention paid to the acquirement and preservation of places of natural beauty, public usefulness, and historic interest, for the full enjoyment and use of all the people, as there is for the preservation of natural resources that have only a commercial value. to this end the people of the state of new york and new jersey have established an interstate park, and by statutory enactment preserved for all time the picturesque and historical palisades of the hudson, and many acres of woodland. to this end mrs harriman gave , acres of wild wooded land and $ , , to the state last winter, to which the state of new york added by bond issue $ , , for the enlargement of the interstate park. by statute also about square miles of the historic highlands of the hudson south of west point have been saved and set aside for park and forestry purposes. watkins glen, a beautiful part of schuyler county near seneca lake, has been purchased by the state, and its scenic beauty preserved. a reservation has been established in the thousand islands of saint lawrence river and one at niagara falls preserving these beautiful places to the people for all time. without such places pleasant to the eye and conducive to health, a numerous portion of the race thus deprived of opportunity for exercise, for recreation, and the quiet enjoyment of nature's great gifts of beauty that have existed for the full and untrammeled benefit of former generations, we must become a nation of human derelicts rather than a nation of healthy-bodied men and women. we must have these resources to keep up the physical standard of men and women, and more so in the future than in the present because conditions of living are changing rapidly in america. in only percent of the people dwelt in the cities or large towns; in more than percent lived amid urban conditions. president roosevelt never said a more striking thing than when he gave as the definition of civilization something to this effect: "the prime difference between a civilized and an uncivilized people is that civilized man looks beyond his own immediate needs, and even beyond those of his lifetime, and provides for generations yet unborn." in considering the principles of conservation, development comes first, using and improving the natural resources of our country for the benefit of the people. the second principle is the prevention of waste. conservation comprehends the substitution as far as possible of materials for those that are exhaustible. conservation reaches out into a wide field, and, as often said, it means the "greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time." conservation advocates the use of foresight, prudence, thrift, and intelligence in dealing with public matters. it means the application of common sense to our public affairs. conservation guarantees progress, efficiency, supremacy, perpetuity, the life of the nation. there is no interest of the public to which the principles of conservation do not apply. special report from new york--water resources of the state henry h. persons _president state water supply commission_ the people of the state of new york have a deep natural interest in the important economic problems now brought so forcibly to the attention of the american people through the conservation movement. that interest is properly manifested at this time because, in all probability, no other state in the union is invested with conditions so favorable and opportunities so promising for the early accomplishment of material progress in the practical conservation of one of its most valuable natural resources. in new york state the surface water supply as a natural resource is second in value only to the land itself, which indeed owes its value largely to the existence of an abundant natural water supply. it must be conceded that the value of water for potable and domestic purposes cannot be estimated in dollars and cents, constituting as it does a necessity of life for which no substitute exists. its money value is represented by whatever it costs to obtain the supply, be that much or little. aside from any such consideration as this, water is practically the only natural resource within the state of new york for the development of power, that great and fundamental requisite to the prosperity and comfort of a civilized community. the state does not have enough coal of its own to operate its existing iron mines, to say nothing of mining the whole of the valuable deposit, estimated at , , tons. this condition is compensated for in a large measure if not altogether by the fact that, in addition to the existence of an abundance of water, the profiles of the streams and the general topography of a large portion of the state are naturally favorable for the establishment of hydraulic power developments and the construction of storage reservoirs for the regulation of the flow of the streams. the state has taken a notable step forward by assuming certain regulative powers over the disposition of these resources, and by the institution of a systematic inventory of them to determine the extent not only of the supply but of existing developments and present uses, and the possibilities for additional uses and new developments. it has also made extensive studies to determine the possibilities for water storage, the necessary complement to extensive power developments within the state. _development of water conservation as a state policy_ a brief statement of the most important historical facts leading up to and determining the present status of water conservation within the state seems pertinent, and will doubtless be of assistance in furnishing a clear prospectus of the controlling conditions and the complicated problems involved in the formulation of a comprehensive and practicable plan for the regulation of these waters. in a special act of the legislature created the water storage commission. that commission was directed to make surveys and investigations to determine the causes of the overflow of the various rivers and water courses of the state, and to determine what, if anything, could be done to prevent such overflow. the serious nature and wide extent of the floods occurring at more or less frequent intervals in a large number of streams throughout the state had long been a source of anxiety to the residents of the flooded districts owing to the injuries and dangers occasioned by the sudden overflow. the failure to take proper measures of a corrective nature earlier was not due in any sense to a lack of interest, intelligence, or energy on the part of the citizens of the state. the interest was usually localized, owing to the fact that ordinarily the entire state does not suffer from floods at the same time, so that while small communities had made some attempts to secure relief there had been no state-wide movement or concerted action in that direction. several obstacles usually rendered individual and local remedies comparatively difficult and ineffective. the complexity of the hydrographic problems usually involved in a study of flood conditions, together with the expense incident to a technical investigation to determine the causes and means of relief, constitute one of these obstacles. small municipalities cannot usually see their way clear to employ a hydraulic engineer to investigate such problems, and conclusions arrived at, or remedies applied without such a study are likely to result in an unsatisfactory manner. furthermore, the proper remedies, when ascertained, usually require for their execution the acquisition of land and water rights which individuals or minor municipalities have no power to condemn. another obstacle arises from the fact that the distribution of the burden of expense for any particular improvement can scarcely be made equitably, or the payment of the amount enforced by any means other than the power of assessment. these were the conditions which led up to the demand for a state investigation and the creation of the state water storage commission. that commission, after about a year's investigation and research with a remarkably small appropriation at their disposal, submitted to the legislature an extremely valuable and comprehensive report on the flood conditions of the principal streams of the state. the report pointed out that storage reservoirs constituted the only practicable solution of the problem in the majority of instances, and recommended the construction of several such reservoirs at points where conditions were known to be favorable. having submitted its report, the water storage commission automatically ceased to exist. the next step in the development of the water-storage movement was the creation of the river improvement commission by act of the legislature in . the creation of that commission was the only practical outcome of the valuable report on the causes and remedies of floods in new york rivers made by the water storage commission in . the river improvement commission was invested with power to make preliminary investigations, plans, and surveys for the regulation of the course of any stream, of which the restricted or unrestricted or irregular flow should be shown by petition of local residents to be a menace to the public health and safety of the community. if the improvement appeared to be of sufficient importance and the legislature approved, the commission was then authorized to carry out the project and to assess the cost of the same according to the benefits received by the various individuals and the properties benefited. to provide for carrying on the work pending the collection of such assessments, authority was given the commission by the act to issue certificates of indebtedness, or to sell bonds, to be retired on the collection of the cost from the beneficiaries. that commission was composed principally of state officers as ex-officio members, and while its work was excellent its progress was unavoidably slow. while the river improvement commission was still in existence, the state water supply commission was created in ; the primary object of its creation being to insure an equitable apportionment of the sources for public water supplies among the various municipalities and civil divisions of the state. the legislature apparently had a very clear conception of the need for such a state agency and hence created the water supply commission with those specific powers. it soon became apparent that this commission was in better position than the river improvement commission to study flood conditions, involved as they were with the general subject of water supply; so that by act of the legislature in the river improvement commission was discontinued as a separate board, and all its powers and duties were transferred to the state water supply commission. the jurisdiction of the water supply commission was thus considerably broadened to include the study of water storage on a large scale. its powers and duties were subsequently extended to an investigation of water-powers within the state, and the preparation of a plan for their general development. the commission is therefore engaged in three distinct but closely related lines of work: ( ) the apportionment of municipal water supplies; ( ) the improvement of rivers in the interest of public health and safety; and ( ) the formulation of a plan for the general development of the water-power resources of the state. _municipal water supplies_ in practically working out a comprehensive plan for water conservation, the state has rightly begun with the matter of public water supplies. previous to the establishment of the water supply commission, the laws of the state permitted any city, village, or other municipal corporation to acquire or condemn lands for sources of water supply practically at will, and without regard to whether its plans were just and equitable to other municipalities and their inhabitants that might be affected thereby. thus, a large city armed with the power of eminent domain might take territory from a smaller community regardless of the present or prospective needs of the latter for the water sources thus appropriated. in fact, the people of the community invaded did not always have the foresight to realize that they would sooner or later require those sources for themselves. it can readily be seen that such a course might involve a serious menace to the future growth of the smaller community. fear of such procedure led to the passage of special prohibitory laws for many localities, particularly those adjoining new york city, against what was feared might be the ruthless exercise of the great power of the larger community. the effect of such legislation, involving as it did so much hostility between the different localities of the state, proved that the then current practice afforded but a partial, inadequate, and unfair method of administering the distribution of sources of water supply. provision for a pure and adequate supply of water for domestic purposes for all its inhabitants is one of the first duties of the sovereign state. through its important effect upon public health alone, the general use of pure water is a matter of the gravest importance to every man, woman, and child regardless of local divisions of government or grouping of citizens. it was with a realization of these principles that the legislature of wisely determined to delegate the power of control over the selection of sources of public water supply to a permanent commission which, by the aid of constant and special consideration of this subject, should become expert in controlling such selection so as to insure equity, among all the inhabitants and civil divisions of the state, and the resulting unimpeded prosperity, growth and comfort of each and every community. the law, therefore, provides that no municipality, or person, or water-works corporation engaged in supplying the inhabitants of any municipal corporation with water shall have power to acquire lands for any new or additional sources of water supply until its plans have been submitted to, and approved by, the water supply commission. in passing upon plans thus submitted to it, the commission is empowered to determine: ( ) whether the proposed plans are justified by the public necessities of the community; ( ) whether the plans are just and equitable to other communities, special consideration being given to future as well as present needs for water supplies; and ( ) whether the plans make fair and equitable provision for the determination and payment of any and all damages, both direct and indirect, which will result from their execution. under the operation of this law, which appears to have set a precedent among the states of the union in the general state administration of water-supply resources, there has resulted a smoothly adjusted progress in the development of public water supplies, without further need of appeal to the legislature for the drastic prohibitory special legislation formerly so much sought after. it is thus well established in the public law of new york state that the control of sources of water supply is a state function, and that all persons or municipalities must apply to the central state government and receive permission to take what may be determined to be a just share from the state's total supply of this indispensable resource. it must, therefore, be evident that the state should aim toward an ideal of administration of its water resources which would secure fully and impartially the rights of each and every one of its inhabitants and all of their local groupings to a just and equitable share of the public waters. this problem becomes especially complicated under our modern conditions of civilization which in promoting the growth of enormous cities, call for engineering works of the greatest scope and magnitude for the purpose of providing the requisite quantity of pure and wholesome water. one of the most recent and familiar illustrations of this fact is the present vast undertaking of new york city, which at a cost of about $ , , , is going miles to the catskill mountains to secure a water supply which its engineers estimate will be sufficient for its needs for only a comparatively few years. in this great project, as well as in the case of many others not so great, there is involved a large element of hardship and damage to the locality invaded, in the necessary taking of private property for the larger public water supply by constructing immense storage reservoirs which permanently occupy the lands thus acquired, and furnish no considerable means of support and prosperity to the region--as is the case when land is acquired for railroad purposes. this project of new york city constituted the first important case to come before the water supply commission for its official approval. after extended and careful consideration of all the manifold interests involved in this remarkable project, and after a protracted series of hearings, the suggestions of the commission with regard to the protection of the rights of all the other municipalities and people affected were incorporated into law, and the project received the sanction of the commission. under the authority thus given new york city has entered upon its work of constructing the most pretentious municipal water-supply system in the united states. subsequent to the new york city petition, many other applications from villages and cities, large and small, have been passed upon. by the accumulation of special knowledge resulting from comparing the problems of different localities, the commission has been able to bring to the aid of the smaller communities of the state a fund of experience and counsel which in not a few instances has proved of great benefit and assistance. the commission aims to make its practice simple, expeditious, and inexpensive; and the technical points involved in each application are carefully passed upon by a competent engineer. a complete census of all existing water supply plants and systems has been made and is revised from time to time, and the progress of each applicant whose plans are approved is carefully followed. construction work involving expenditures of $ , , has been passed upon by the commission and undertaken by the municipalities of the state. this has entailed the official consideration by the commission of separate applications, in connection with each of which public hearings are conducted. numerous complaints have been filed with the commission alleging unsatisfactory domestic or fire service both on the part of municipalities and water companies. the source of dissatisfaction seems to be the lack of foresight on the part of the municipal or water company officials, as a result of which they have obtained an inadequate supply or insufficient pressure. there are many instances of this condition in the state. there are also many consumers who object to excessive rates which they claim are imposed upon them by water companies. on the other hand, some of the companies themselves have attempted to secure legislation to provide that the state shall be the arbitrator in the adjustment of water rates. these conditions seem to point to the conclusion that in the comparatively near future the state will have to assume control over these matters. a certain degree of this sort of control is exercised in an indirect way at present in the case of applications which are before the commission for consideration, but no jurisdiction lies with the commission unless the acquisition of lands for a new or additional source of supply is involved. _river improvement for health and safety_ a number of river-improvement petitions presented to the river improvement commission and still pending at the time that commission's powers were transferred to the water supply commission involved the construction of storage reservoirs in the adirondack forests. the river improvement commission had considered the constitutional questions involved in the utilization of state forest lands for storage reservoir purposes, and had reached the conclusion that the force of a clause in the constitution prohibiting the removal of timber was paramount to all exercise of the police authority of the state to protect the public health and safety; and it had declined further to consider any petitions involving the utilization of state forest lands for reservoir purposes. the water supply commission on the other hand has held that the statutes relating to river improvements in the interest of the public health and safety are not sufficiently comprehensive to afford a proper basis on which to advance systematic water conservation involving water-powers. the existing river improvement law has the health and safety element as its basis, whereas the carrying out of a comprehensive conservation policy would be of greatest financial value to the existing and new power developments, owing to the regulating effect of storage reservoirs on the flow of the streams. for this reason the water supply commission has not urged the execution of river improvement projects involving water storage, under existing statutes, and has recommended to the legislature that the advancement of such projects should await the determination of a definite state policy and the formulation of a thoroughly comprehensive plan by means of which the storage reservoirs shall constitute a source of income to the state, even after the bonds are retired. several projected improvements therefore await the enactment of a more suitable statute. meantime, however, an important project calling for rather different treatment had arisen in the proposed improvement of the canaseraga creek, the most important tributary of genesee river. this project originated with the river improvement commission, and the water supply commission inherited and actively carried on the consideration of the problems involved. for the last miles of its course this creek flows through a broad, fertile valley. owing to the steep declivities of the upper water-shed and the resulting suddenness and severity of floods in the valley, a large portion of these flat lands were submerged two or three times a year, and the channel had gradually become filled with silt which raised the prism to such a height that the stream itself and its banks were actually higher in places than the adjacent land. in times of flood the stream overflowed and the water would stand for several days at a time over the low areas, in a large measure destroying such crops as were in a growing condition and effectually deterring the farmers from cultivating the lands thoroughly and systematically. the project of improvement which, after due course of public hearings and consideration by the water supply commission received the official approval of the legislature, contemplates the straightening, widening, and deepening of the channel of the stream, so as to afford a much more capacious flood prism and to shorten the length of the stream through the flooded district by about six miles. at the same time lateral ditches are proposed to be constructed to carry off the overflowing waters from the lower adjacent lands in order to protect them permanently from any serious or protracted inundation. this project did not involve the use of any state forest lands, nor did it affect any water-power developments. the fact was readily established that the proposed improvement was of great importance to the public health and safety of the community, and also of great importance, from a financial point of view, to the prosperity and general welfare of the community on account of the benefits that would accrue to agriculturists from the protection to be afforded by the proposed improvements against flood damages. the machinery involved in the working out of the project was put in operation and from time to time various obstacles were encountered which had to be surmounted by amending the law. gradually the statute has been so moulded that it is now thought to be in practical working order, and the proposed canaseraga creek improvement is actually provided for and financed; the bonds having been sold at a good premium. the actual work of the construction of the proposed improvement will probably be begun in the near future. the practicability of the method having thus been established the water supply commission believes that the state now has a method by which floods may be mitigated if there are no water-powers or state forest lands involved. on the other hand, the solution of the problem where these complications do exist, is much more difficult. in the cases of the genesee, hudson, and raquette rivers, petitions for the improvement of which have been filed under the public health and safety statute, very little real relief can be afforded by straightening or enlarging the channels of the streams. water storage appears to be the only practicable solution, and the water-powers which would be improved could afford to bear a larger share of the cost of improvement than those who would benefit from flood control. _water-power and water storage_ the most recent extension of the jurisdiction of the commission, under which it is investigating the water resources of the state, contemplates three principal lines of operation. these are: ( ) to collect information relating to the water-powers of the state; ( ) to make plans for such specific developments as the commission deems available; and ( ) to make such other investigations and studies as will enable it to devise a comprehensive and practicable plan for the general development of the water-powers of the state for the public use and benefit and the increase of the public revenue under state ownership and control. in accordance with this statute, the commission has proceeded to investigate in great detail the conditions governing rainfall and run-off of streams within the state, and has maintained a number of observation and gaging stations in cooperation with the united states weather bureau and the united states geological survey. a detailed investigation was also made by competent engineering employees to determine the number, capacity, equipment, and other material information relating to practically every water-power in the state. a general investigation of topographic conditions has also been made and practically all promising storage opportunities have been located and their approximate possibilities determined. a number of great reservoir projects have been surveyed and mapped in great detail. in many instances borings have been made to determine the character of foundations for dams, and complete detail plans of the dams and other structures have been prepared. the financial phases of a number of these great projects have been gone into in detail, and an exhaustive study of the constitutional and other legal aspects of the problems involved has been made by the commission, and the required comprehensive plan has been prepared. in spite of the great natural advantages which new york state possesses in its interior streams with their enormous possibilities for power, developed and undeveloped, the fullest utilization of these possibilities can never be realized under existing conditions. every river in the state exhibits such irregularity of flow that the water-power which may be economically developed from the present minimum flow is far below the average which can be attained by means of scientific regulation. the difference between maximum and minimum flow of most of our streams when stated in figures is startling to the layman. the hudson, which is more or less typical of the streams of the state, has a maximum recorded daily discharge of times its least daily flow. the genesee, which is much more flashy, has a maximum daily discharge about times the minimum daily flow. on the other hand the oswego, which is naturally more or less regulated by storage in the "finger lakes," has a maximum discharge about times the minimum. the yearly discharge of some of the rivers in a wet year is nearly double the yearly flow of a dry year. on a great many streams as much as three-fourths of the volume of yearly flow usually runs off in the spring and early summer months. these remarkable fluctuations of stream flow are principally attributed to the uneven distribution of precipitation through the year, which unfavorable conditions are undoubtedly aggravated by the varying conditions affecting evaporation, which is generally greatest in the months of least precipitation. over a large portion of the state, the greater part of the annual precipitation occurs in the winter and spring months. considerable water is temporarily stored in the snow banks, and is usually reduced to the equivalent of rain simultaneously with the customary heavy rainfall of the early spring months. it is quite common for millions of cubic feet of water to run over the falls and dams in the streams during these spring freshet periods which, if it could be stored until the drier summer and fall months, would be of wonderful utility in not only maintaining a higher rate of flow in those dry months, but also doing away largely with the damage and inconvenience incident to the sudden run-off of flood waters in their natural condition. these conditions point to the necessity for large water storage reservoirs as the only practical means of accomplishing any considerable degree of regulation. the investigations of the water supply commission have shown that there is an installation of water-wheels having a capacity of about , horsepower within new york state, of which amount about , horsepower is at niagara falls. the average daily output of the plants is about , horsepower, including , at niagara falls. there are in all more than , hydraulic power plants within the state, many of which are equipped with steam auxiliary power plants. the total capacity of these auxiliary plants is about , horsepower. the investigations have indicated a total development of about , , horsepower to be economically feasible within the state. this would be uninterrupted continuous power, exclusive of niagara river and the portion of saint lawrence river not under the jurisdiction of new york state. a considerable part of this amount is represented by that which would be added to the existing developments by the regulation of the flow of the streams. a number of individual opportunities exist for considerable new developments, some of the more important of which are a , horsepower on genesee river at portage falls, a , horsepower on sacandaga river at conklingville, a , horsepower on raquette river at colton falls, and many others ranging from , to , horsepower. the investigations of the commission have shown that the construction of large storage reservoirs for impounding flood waters may be beneficial in many ways. probably not all of the possible advantages would result from the construction of any particular reservoir. the extent and variety of benefits may be summarized somewhat as follows: ( ) the equalization of stream-flow by storing the water during wet seasons and using the same to increase the volume of the stream through dry seasons; ( ) a consequent large increase in the power value of the stream, due to augmenting the low-water flow, and thus doubling or trebling the dependable flow for power purposes; ( ) a consequent decrease in the height of freshets, thereby reducing the great pecuniary damages caused by the periodic recurrence of floods; ( ) by increasing the low-water flow of polluted rivers a dilution would result which would improve the sanitary conditions on the stream; ( ) navigation would be benefited by a higher stage of water on the lower reaches of the rivers; ( ) the extension of transportation facilities, often to an important and desirable extent, by navigation on the proposed reservoirs; ( ) the low lands of the river valleys could be made somewhat more tenable, and their agricultural products increased by reducing the contingency of floods; ( ) the perpetual submergence of extensive tracts of swamp lands, which are now unsightly and a menace to health, would be possible; ( ) the creation of extensive lakes with beautiful shores offering desirable locations for permanent homes and great attractions to summer visitors seeking recreation and health; and ( ) inestimable indirect benefit to the state due to the stimulation of industrial enterprises, the increase in number and prosperity of the people, and the creation of taxable wealth by the progressive development of water-powers. * * * * * among the more promising opportunities for the inauguration of a state policy in storage reservoir construction is that offered by genesee river. the commission's investigations have shown that it is practicable to build a reservoir with a dam near portage, which would be about fifteen miles long and over a mile wide, with a total capacity of about , , , cubic feet at a cost of about $ , , . the regulation of the stream by this reservoir would not only practically do away with disastrous floods in the genesee valley, but would add power worth at least $ , a year to the existing developments at rochester, and develop at least , horsepower in connection with the dam; the value of water-power at mount morris would also be greatly enhanced, and the nuisance created by the present polluted condition of the river below rochester would be abated. other opportunities are offered on sacandaga river and other tributaries to the hudson, on raquette river, and on black river, where a system of several reservoirs is proposed. many smaller projects are also under consideration. it is estimated that $ , , would be sufficient to build the reservoirs whose construction is justified under present conditions. _problems involved with water storage_ there are in general two acceptable methods of reducing or preventing floods. the storage of the water which constitutes the hood wave, or a considerable portion thereof, is doubtless preferable if there is a site for a reservoir of sufficient capacity and the construction is not too expensive. the other method consists of widening, deepening, and straightening the channel. in recent years, the public has been rather generally educated to believe that storage reservoirs constitute the universal and easily applied remedy. there are many rivers in new york state on which this method may be used effectively, but on many others the absence of basins of sufficient capacity or the excessive cost preclude the possibility of complete flood control in this manner. the problem of absolute flood control is, however, more complex than the foregoing simple statement would imply. one complication arises from the fact that the damage from floods in new york state is often increased by the formation of ice gorges. the formation of these gorges cannot be prevented by an ordinary system of storage reservoirs, although the temporary holding back of the ice in a reservoir would in a few cases undoubtedly be of some assistance. it seems that the most effective method of dealing with this condition consists of keeping the ice broken up on the reaches of the stream where gorges are most likely to form, and thus provide a clear passage for ice brought down by floods. this method would probably work hardships or inconvenience to the ice harvesters on some of the rivers; but the protection afforded to property would doubtless more than offset the disadvantages. the state has entered upon a policy of protecting property in this manner along the hudson below albany. another condition by which floods are greatly aggravated is the obstruction of the channel by insufficient bridge openings and other structures. the cause may be ignorance as to volume of flood run-off, or in the struggle to realize a large ultimate income from a small present investment the possibility of occasional damages may be carelessly disregarded. this encroachment on the channels of streams should be a matter for official regulation, and deserves more public attention than has yet been given it in this country. perhaps the complication which involves the most difficult problems of construction and operation of flood-control works is that of combining adequate flood protection with equalizing of stream-flow for the development of power and other purposes. to materially ameliorate flood conditions on large rivers usually requires the provision of an enormous amount of storage; logically, the larger the proportion and the greater the capacity, up to a certain limit, the better the control. on many streams it is doubtless feasible to build systems of reservoirs which would entirely do away with destructive floods, provided the reservoirs be intelligently operated solely for flood control. it must be frankly admitted, however, that the ideal use of storage for flood control is not entirely consistent with the best use of the same storage for equalizing the flow throughout the year. for the purpose of ideal flood control, the reservoirs should be emptied of accumulated flood waters immediately after the flood has subsided and as rapidly as possible without swelling the stream to dangerous proportions, in order to have the storage available for another flood. on the other hand, for the purpose of equalizing the flow as completely as possible throughout the year, the reservoirs should only be drawn upon when necessary to supplement the natural flow in the stream in order to maintain the desired average flow. theoretically, if the extremes both of the rate and volume of flow of the stream can be determined (which usually requires very long records of discharge), and if sufficient storage be provided for the absolute equalizing of the flow, the solution of both problems would go absolutely hand in hand, and flood control by storage would be synonymous with ideal equalization of stream flow. the most practical solution, where conditions will permit, seems to be to provide an excess of reservoir capacity so that the portion of the reservoir above a certain elevation may be reserved entirely for flood control while the portion below that elevation may be used for equalizing the flow of the stream. this plan has been proposed by the commission in the case of the projected portage reservoir on genesee river. undoubtedly the greatest economic problem involved in a study of flood control is that of the adjustment of the relative rights of the residents of the upper and lower sections of the river valley. from the point of view of each the matter calls for different modes of treatment. the up-river resident believes the solution of the problem will be found in facilitating the passage of the flood by his district. this may result in discharging a great volume of water on the communities down-stream at a time when it would swell the crest of the flood in that section. the down-stream resident naturally has to contend with a much larger volume of water, so that to restrict it to a channel of moderate dimensions is out of the question, and he therefore prefers an arrangement whereby the surface waters from the upper stream may be at least temporarily stored in the basins containing the lands of his up-stream neighbor. the water supply commission has held that the proper disposition is the improvement which will work the greatest good to the greatest number, provided there is a distinct economic advantage to the community in the river valley as a whole. the matter of municipal water supply is likely to be involved in some of the great storage projects, also the water supply for the canals of the state. several streams on which water storage is practicable are at present or will be in the future used as sources for canal water supply. the plans contemplated by the commission would result in insuring the sufficiency of these supplies, but the uninterrupted maintenance and protection of a constant water supply during the navigation season is undoubtedly essential to the proper operation of the canal system. in these times of extensive municipal water supply systems, it seems reasonable to assume that there may be instances in the practical working out of a comprehensive plan of water conservation where the project of water supply for a municipality or group of municipalities may be combined with a water-storage project to good advantage. at any rate the careful and prolonged study which has been made of municipal and domestic supplies by the water supply commission has given it a full appreciation of their prime importance, and the commission believes that in any water-shed the question of municipal water supplies should be given first consideration. it has been believed by many that the state, in the exercise of its police power, could construct storage reservoirs which involved the use of some of the state's forest lands in spite of the constitutional provision that "the lands of the state, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the forest preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands," and that "they shall not be leased, sold, or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or private, or the timber thereon be sold, removed or destroyed." the river improvement commission considered the constitutional question thus involved, and reached the conclusion that the force of this prohibitory clause in the constitution was paramount to all exercise of the police authority of the state to protect the public health and safety, and it declined further to consider any petitions involving the utilization of state forest lands for the construction of storage reservoirs. the water supply commission has held practically the same view of this question and has accordingly recommended to the legislature that the constitution of the state be so amended as to permit the flooding of state forest lands for the purpose of constructing storage reservoirs which are to be forever owned, maintained, and controlled by the state for the public use and benefit and for the purpose of providing a public revenue. the conservation of the water resources of the state on a broad and comprehensive basis, which shall give practical consideration to the most favorable natural opportunities and produce the most beneficial results necessarily involves the flooding of relatively small areas of state forest lands in the adirondacks. the surveys indicate that , acres of state land would be required for a complete system of water storage, including many reservoirs likely to be built only in the distant future, if ever. even this total of , acres is only . percent of the state's holdings within the boundaries of the adirondack park; of this amount about four-fifths is low swampy land or is under water, and only one-fifth, or eleven thousand acres, is of any considerable value for forest purposes. this question of the amendment of the constitution is under consideration by the state legislature. the drainage of swamp lands is another problem which tends to complicate rather than simplify the water-storage situation. there are within the state extensive areas of swamps whose owners would like to have them drained and reclaimed for agricultural purposes. some projects of this character have already been carried out, but the questionable constitutionality of most drainage laws has interposed to retard any very widespread reclamation movement of this character. here again the desires of the up-stream and down-stream residents do not harmonize. the down-stream riparian owner, especially if he operates a water-power, objects to the drainage of those marsh lands on the ground that they constitute a natural storage reservoir which operates to steady the flow of the stream. his solution of the problem would be to build dams across the outlets from these great swampy tracts and thus increase their capacity for storage. in some instances it appears to be entirely feasible to do so, while at the same time it seems equally practicable to secure the necessary storage by raising the surface of some existing lakes and subjecting them to some fluctuation. the question enters as to whether it is not better to flood a comparatively small additional area around the shores of existing lakes in order to secure the required storage and then drain and reclaim swamp lands for agricultural purposes. by special act of the legislature in the water supply commission was given jurisdiction over certain local improvements to streams which contemplated the betterment of both the sanitary and scenic conditions. certain lakes in the state are bordered with large areas of unattractive swamp and stump land which the local residents would prefer to have permanently submerged. it is claimed that the scope of improvement would include not only benefits to the conditions affecting the health of the community, but that such improvements would in a number of instances result in rendering the region more attractive, especially to summer visitors seeking recreation and health. it is also pointed out that in some instances the interior navigation on some of the lakes would be materially improved, and that the community would materially benefit from the improvement in this manner. the state has already carried out some improvements of this nature, and it seems quite probable that there are possibilities of a number of similar improvements. the problem does not appear to enter into the larger storage reservoir projects, and has not been given very extended consideration by the water supply commission. new york state and her citizens are justly proud of her scenic falls. of these the american falls of niagara are doubtless the most widely known. there are, however, other falls on streams within the state which constitute local attractions of great interest in their respective communities. the salmon falls on salmon river in oswego county, the series of falls in letchworth park on the genesee, and high falls on the ausable are prominent examples. the water supply commission entertains a deep appreciation of the esthetic value of these beautiful masterpieces of the hand of nature, and believes intrinsically in their preservation. this attitude of the commission is exemplified in the plans for the proposed portage falls power development, which provide for a flow greatly in excess of the minimum flow over the falls for a period of twelve daylight hours in each day. on the other hand, the commission sees also the wonderful amount of quiet comfort which would be afforded to modern civilization by electric light and the many other applications of power which can be generated by the waters running over some of the falls of the state. the major part of the surplus water is wasted in the spring months of the year, and does not contribute in any appreciable measure to the scenic beauty of the falls; on the other hand, the natural flow of the streams frequently is reduced to such a low rate that the falls lose something of their attractiveness. it will doubtless prove practicable in connection with power developments at some of the naturally attractive falls in the state to insure a larger minimum flow in the dry weather as well as to conserve the great amount of power at present running to waste over the falls in the wet season. in humid climates irrigation is admittedly more or less of an experiment. its financial feasibility seems to depend on its being considered a matter of insurance against the failure of crops in seasons of low rainfall. there have been a number of scattered experiments carried on at different places in the state, but the plants used, especially in the older experiments, were comparatively complicated and expensive. the equipment for one particular set of experiments cost about $ per acre. more recent experiments have been conducted in sections of the state where the precipitation is light during the growing months, and in fact throughout the year, and with a less expensive and a more generally practical equipment. in a few instances, which have been brought to public attention, the experimenters have been able to raise excellent orchards and garden products by means of a comparatively inexpensive irrigation plant, whereas other portions of the gardens and orchards of the same farms did not produce results nearly as satisfactory. one successful experimenter claims that he has made percent interest on his investment by the installation of a small irrigation plant. the precipitation records show that there are portions of new york state where the rainfall during the crop-growing months does not amount to more than one-fourth or one-fifth of the water which is applied to the same crops where irrigation is conducted on a broad scale. the subject has not been entered into in great detail by the water supply commission owing to the fact that its statutory jurisdiction does not seem to justify such a study, but it appears that the possibility of such use of at least a portion of the water supply of the state should be borne in mind and its development carefully watched in connection with the formulation of a general plan for the conservation of the water resources of the state by means of storage reservoirs. _need for comprehensive plan and definite policy_ the importance of a fixed policy establishing state leadership and control in the matters of water conservation cannot be overestimated. without it, there is no place for consecutive and correlated action, either executive or legislative. in the past the state has had no policy of power development, either under public ownership or by encouragement and regulation of private or corporate development. unlike many other states, new york has never, under general laws, granted the right of eminent domain to individuals or corporations for the purpose of flooding lands to create storage ponds and develop water-power. moreover, it must be conceded that in view of the doubtful constitutionality of the "mill acts" of other states, and particularly in view of the strength of the modern sentiment demanding universal sharing in the benefits of natural resources, this state is not likely in the future indiscriminately to grant its power of eminent domain for this purpose. unless the state shall define its policy and enter upon the work of carrying it out, this feature of its natural resources must largely remain in its present undeveloped condition, or be subject to the same haphazard and uncontrolled methods of utilization that have governed in the past. if we are to permit private interests to build storage reservoirs for power purposes on any broad and satisfactory plan, it can only be done by amending the constitution. as adequate reservoirs cannot be generally constructed for power purposes by private enterprise without constitutional amendment, and possibly not then, the better way to accomplish this object is for the state itself to announce its policy and undertake its performance in the interest of all classes and citizens. development by the state ensures the fullest possible utilization of the power possibilities of each stream, whereas development by uncontrolled private enterprise often involves waste of resources. private capital, seeking the greatest possible immediate return on the investment, naturally confines its attention to the most concentrated portion of a given fall. the less precipitous portions of the fall above and below, involving a large unit outlay in development, are consequently apt to be neglected, and in too many cases permanently wasted, because no other enterprise is likely to undertake their development afterward, even if the rights of the company already on the spot would permit this to be done. on the other hand, the state, with its greater power and scope, and with financial resources enabling it to defer the return on its investment, could undertake the construction of the more extensive works necessary to develop the full extent of the fall in the supposed case. without amplifying the point, it should be clear that the state is the only authority with sufficient power to ensure the complete development of each and every stream so that every foot-pound of energy represented by its falling waters may be given up when necessary to the service of man. the prime inclusive reason for the exercise of state authority over the control of stream-flow for power development is that under modern social and economic conditions this step is necessary to ensure the equal participation of all citizens in this form of natural wealth, which is peculiarly the heritage of the whole people. some of the more particular supplemental reasons for state control have been mentioned in the foregoing. it appears that from all points of view the state is the proper authority to undertake and carry out the conservation of its own water resources. the state water supply commission is engaged in studying the subject of conserving the falling waters in the rivers and streams of the state. in a country where all of the streams both great and small fill their banks in the springtime after heavy rains, and then decrease in volume all through the dry months so that they become in most instances worthless as power streams and of but little value in many other ways, it is clear that storage reservoirs of large capacity, the size depending, of course, on the water-shed in each case, must be built, if wasted water and worthless streams are to be turned into valuable assets. the building of storage reservoirs requires available areas to flood, favorable sites for dams, and scientific knowledge to supervise the construction of such damns and reservoirs. there must be, also, some general head to locate and plan such reservoirs on a broad and comprehensive scale, so as to store the largest possible amount of water in each given case; otherwise opportunities for economic development will be lost and money wasted. the plan should be so feasible and comprehensive as to include every profitable storage possibility, be it either great or small. the plan must permit of doing the work by reservoir units, and at such places as make promise of early and satisfactory return. with such a plan all who are interested in using to the best advantages that which is our own, and saving and conserving for the future that which justly belongs to our children, can work in harmony. such a plan will enlist the people of every locality in the possibilities of water storage in their own developments, and at the same time not interfere in the least with the developments of a similar character in other parts of the state. a plan that will enlist such an interest and make possible such a systematic development of a great and wasted natural resource, the water supply commission has been trying to devise. it makes no claim to perfection, but it does claim that it has devised a workable plan for saving and conserving this wasted energy for both public and private use and so as to provide a public revenue. the plan includes the building of storage reservoirs by the state which shall be owned and controlled by it. the scheme is to use the stored water to equalize the flow of each stream upon which it is built, and charge the users of the stored water for the additional power such stored water gives to mill owners further down the stream. this does not contemplate charging a mill owner anything for the power he now has, but only for the additional power he gets by reason of the equalized flow of the streams due to using the stored water when he needs it most. the water supply commission as a part of its last annual report to the governor and legislature submitted a bill providing for a systematic development of the water-power resources of the state under state control. this bill contemplated the return of a net revenue to the state and accordingly provided for the assessment of benefits upon individuals and properties benefited by reason of the construction and operation of storage reservoirs. many of the provisions of this bill were new in principle, and it was to be expected that a measure of such far-reaching effect would meet with some opposition. although the bill provided for contracts to be entered into with respect to payments for benefits to be conferred, and the power of assessment was only to be resorted to in order to forestall an unwilling beneficiary from blocking the progress of a great public enterprise, such a provision met with disapproval in the legislature and the bill was not advanced. the commission believes that as the legislature becomes more familiar with the problems involved, it will approve of this policy. for these reasons, the bill with amendments in other respects will again be submitted to the legislature in connection with the next annual report. report from north dakota c. b. waldron _state agricultural college of north dakota_ while conservation means the same to all people, namely, the perpetuation of those resources and conditions that make a prosperous existence possible, yet each commonwealth must develop its own best means for bringing this about. while it is wise for the federal and state governments to take what steps they may to prevent the wasteful destruction of certain natural resources like our minerals and forests, yet if all this be done and with the thoroughness that the most ardent of us could demand, still the great problem of conservation taken as a whole would scarcely be touched. the utmost that the government can do directly, though of considerable magnitude in itself, is relatively of small importance. even meetings like the present one have a significance and value only as they inaugurate and vitalize conservation movements more important and extensive than any government can ever hope to bring about by direct means. this principle applies to the greatest degree in instances in which control of the natural resources has already passed to the individual owners. it applies with even added force when such ownership lies in agricultural lands. the reason for this lies in the fact that of all natural resources the soil is by far the most important, and, further, that conservative principles and practices apply with greater directness and profit there than in any other field. the conservation of this season's plant food and soil moisture means next season's crop. through plant and animal breeding the more prolific and profitable strains are conserved, and through battle with plant and soil diseases and with pests of all kinds we conserve the purity of our soil and the crops that we grow. such active and constant exercise of conservation as this may be, in a field that directly affects our entire population in the most vital and direct manner possible, is a matter for our most earnest consideration. what is being done to train the great body of mankind to whom this important task of conservation is entrusted; and are the present measures adequate? aside from legislation pertaining to weeds, plant diseases, and insect pests, there is little that can be done directly to enforce conservation measures. the friction encountered in enforcing even this body of laws indicates the difficulties that arise when public restrictions come into conflict with private enterprises. true, it is a crime to waste the fertility of the soil on which the very existence of the race depends; but until all our traditions change, the only punishment that will be visited upon the offender is not from the legally constituted state but from nature herself. he whose will is to rob and skin the land may not be reached by legal process, but he must be taught that the penalties which an outraged nature exacts are as inexorable as the blind goddess ever pronounced. while there always will be fools that can learn only in the school of experience, yet the great majority are glad to find an easier and cheaper way. back of the conservation of the farm must lie the education of the farmer; and greater than all the other problems of conservation is this one. we are barely entering upon this field, for the reason that the fund of knowledge upon which this education is to be based has been but recently acquired. our knowledge of the soil in its relation to plant growth, the control of plant diseases, and the laws of plant improvement, have all come to us in recent years. still, much as there is yet to determine, there is already a vast fund of knowledge of untold worth; but means are not yet provided for making it useful and effective. speaking for north dakota, such natural resources as she possesses, aside from her soils, are being well protected and conserved through public measures already in force. her vast fields of lignite coal underlain with valuable clays have been withdrawn from homestead entry, and hereafter only surface rights in these lands will be granted. such forests as the state originally had have long since passed into private hands, and the land has mostly been cleared for farming. in north dakota, forestry, like agriculture, will be operated by the individual land owners for their direct if not immediate benefit. it may be found advisable to plant public forests in parts of the bad lands and other rough areas, but by far the greater part of tree planting will be done upon small areas on the individual farms. the state already encourages such planting by a bounty paid in the remission of taxes. this is not enough. the land owner in most cases does not know what trees will prove the most profitable, nor how they may best be grown. here again the one necessity is education. object lessons in tree planting should be established in each community, and all pupils in the public schools should be shown how to grow a grove of trees. such a system would produce immeasurably greater results in the way of timber production than would come from the public forests, important as these doubtless are. but agricultural education will conserve something more than the fertility of the soil and the vitality and purity of our crops. it means also the conservation of a prosperous, virile, self-dependent, and intelligent people. it means a prosperous people, for no cost of education of the right kind was ever known to impoverish a people, and no expenditure rightly made could ever equal the gain. conservation can never be expected of the ignorant. conservation is but the larger and more altruistic expression of the term known as thrift; and ignorance and poverty know it not. the means for extending and improving agricultural education will develop and expand in the same measure that we apply ourselves to the problem. agricultural colleges have not rendered the assistance that they should in extending agricultural education, because their field has been too restricted. excellent as their instruction may be, it reaches only a very small percentage of our people directly. their scope and activities must be enlarged till their influence is felt in every community. they should not be shut out from participating in the work of general education as they now are in many instances. in a measure we repudiate the findings of science, and discount the progress we have made, in not providing a wider application for our researches. there is at present no adequate means for the dissemination of the vast body of knowledge that alone will save to us our own great underlying industry of agriculture. the world has oftentimes tried the experiment of building a state upon other foundations than that of a conservative agriculture and an intelligent and prosperous agricultural class, and always with the same fatal outcome. the grandeur of cities, the glory and might of great armies, the highest culture in the arts, and the noblest of religions and philosophies, will not suffice to save the nation that knows not nature and defies her laws. that state but hastens the day of its own destruction that fails to train its citizens in the right use and management of their land holdings. no jealous interest of whatever worth in itself should be given consideration at the expense of that which maintains all of our interests. north dakota has been favored by nature with a soil so productive that, properly tilled and conserved, it will feed one-tenth of the present population of the entire nation. it is an asset such as few nations ever possessed, and it should be so safeguarded that its great contribution to the nation's existence may steadily increase. the one way to do this is to teach the land owners that conservation in agriculture means not only patriotism and good citizenship but prosperity as well, that useful education at any price is always cheap and ignorance costly, and that no values can be more stable and certain than those lying in productive farm lands. the patriotic sentiment that leads men to sacrifice time and money that our natural resources may be conserved is most commendable. of still more service is he who aids in developing a system of education that shall teach men to conserve the natural resources entrusted to their own hands. the task is a great one, but not beyond the range of possibility; and upon its successful accomplishment rests the welfare of the whole nation. report from ohio william r. lazenby _ohio state university_ _chairman executive committee of the society for horticultural science_ the welfare of our country, as well as that of the states composing it, depends on a wise conservation of its rich and varied natural resources. many of these resources have been so bountiful, and apparently so inexhaustible, that we have drawn upon them without a thought of their limitations of the dire effects of their exhaustion. speaking especially for ohio, i trust it will be understood that by "conservation" i mean an honest effort to make that state a good one to live in for all of us now there, and for all who may come after us. in addition to the three problems named below, other conservation questions will doubtless require attention; but for these, every instinct of justice and humanity insists that we accord them instant and earnest consideration. --_the forestry problem_ i place this first, because the influence of the forests is so far-reaching, and we have no clear-cut, well-defined policy in ohio designed to preserve, improve, and extend our forests. ohio has an area of , square miles, and has been tremendously rich in hardwood timber. we have cut down this timber most improvidently, with no effort to restore the supply, and so far as the state is concerned are now on the verge of a timber famine. in , according to the twelfth united states census, ohio ranked seventh as a lumber-producing state, being exceeded by michigan, wisconsin, pennsylvania, new york, minnesota, and maine. since then she has dropped to the nineteenth rank, and bids fair in the near future, unless prompt and vigorous action is taken, to have so little timber left as not to be rated at all. the effects of this wholesale removal of our forests may be briefly summarized as follows: ( ) we are compelling those who come after us to pay an almost prohibitive price for lumber, and are likely to see an end of some of the most important wood-consuming industries of the state. as a source of wood supply our forests touch the interests of all. we are a universally wood-consuming as well as food-consuming people. ( ) the recent floods in the river-valleys of ohio, which have caused losses of life and of property valued at millions, have followed and will continue to follow the denudation of our hills by excessive tree-cutting, followed by fire. ( ) in many places the erosion or wash caused by the rapid run-off of the rain and melting snow is reducing the deforested hills to barren wastes, and is covering much of the fertile soil of the valleys with sterile sand and gravel. the forest problem is the great conservation problem in ohio. it affects the state, because it concerns every citizen of the state, and it can only be solved by action of the state and the nation. --_the waterway problem_ in my opinion this question comes next in importance. by waterways i mean not only navigable streams and canals, but power sites on non-navigable as well as navigable streams. if the forests are properly managed, water will be an unfailing source of power. no few men, nor any special interest, should control these sources of power, for this means a control of all industry that depends on power. our waterways may not be so enormously valuable as those of some other states, and this is all the more reason why they should be conserved for the public good. we shall be needlessly mortgaging the future by allowing any special class or interest to use our waterways and water-power sites without making some direct payment for these valuable privileges. this is important not only for state revenue, but as a recognition of the principle that what belongs to the people should not be absolutely surrendered to private interests. there is great value in our undeveloped water-power. an engineer's inventory of all the waters of the state, with their possibilities of power, would cause ohio to sit up and take notice. if forests and waterways were properly conserved, we would hear less from railroads and power companies of the enormous bill of expense from floods at one time, and loss from low water at another. --_the mineral problem_ ohio is rich in coal, oil, gas, stone, clay, sand, and other mineral resources. these should be carefully catalogued, so that the people could know more about the material assets of the state. mineral lands should be sold only to those who are prepared to develop them, and under conditions that will prevent the improvident waste of reckless exploitation. for the present it is probable that the actual development or working of the mineral properties of the state can best be done by private interests acting under some public control, but the state has no moral right to permit such valuable privileges to pass from its control for nothing in return. it is only by some form of national and state conservation that we can secure an abundant and continuous supply of such primal necessities as wood, water-power, and coal. * * * * * the control of animal diseases and of insect and fungus pests that are spread by interstate transportation, and the preservation of migratory birds, which are our best allies in fighting injurious insects, are vital subjects for the consideration of a national conservation congress. the control and destruction of enemies and the protection and multiplication of friends by the concentrated and cooperative action of the states are subjects that clearly come within the scope and interest of national conservation. conservation can only be effective by good laws faithfully executed. by proper legislation we can encourage the reforestation of our denuded hillsides and stimulate the planting and care of valuable timber trees through relieving such land from undue taxation. timber should be taxed like other property, when cut; but to tax land and its timber crop every year is manifestly unjust. in order to rightly conserve our forests we should furnish good opportunities for young men to become well trained in forestry. for this our schools of forestry must be well equipped. i am pleased to state that ohio has made a splendid beginning in this direction; and there is no reason, if properly supported, why this centrally located state should not have one of the best forestry schools in the country. what is needed to properly investigate the conditions and formulate a conservation policy for the state is a good conservation commission. in addition to this, we need more thought, more study, more science, on the part of the public, concerning the natural resources of the state, with less blind devotion to the old ways and means of doing things, which if ever judicious, have long ceased to be so. report from oklahoma benj. martin i have the honor to represent as a delegate to this congress the muskogee commercial club of muskogee, one of the leading organizations of oklahoma, under the influence of which the city of muskogee grew from a town of , inhabitants in to its present population of , . a distinguished citizen of a neighboring state, on a recent visit to our city, constituted himself a grand jury and indicted each citizen of larceny. he charges that oklahoma for years had been stealing from the other states of the union some of their best brain and brawn, until now we have approximately two millions of the choicest sons and daughters of the american republic. to this indictment we now offer ourselves for arraignment before this congress, and plead guilty, and we are ready to receive our sentence without a plea that justice be tempered with mercy. as to other charges of wrongdoing on the part of some of oklahoma's distinguished sons, which have been much heralded in the press, i most emphatically enter a plea of "not guilty," either in law or morals; and time will completely vindicate them. the resources of oklahoma are vast, far beyond the conception or knowledge of those who have resided within her borders for many years. conservation is of particular importance to us, for yet our resources are practically in their virgin state. we heartily join hands with you of our sister states in this great movement, in my opinion due to the work and wisdom of gifford pinchot more than any other american citizen. however, his ideas and earnestness were very fully and heartily appreciated by that foremost american, theodore roosevelt, to whom for his great work in inaugurating and fostering federal conservation we give honor. chief among our resources are the vast variety of agricultural products which grow in great abundance. in the same field may be seen growing enormous yields of corn, cotton, oats, wheat, and alfalfa. no other state can excel oklahoma in the production of these products. we join the great corn-belt of illinois and iowa in singing the song of whittier-- heap high the farmer's wintry hoard, heap high the golden corn; no richer gift has autumn poured from out her lavish horn. let other lands exulting glean the apple from the pine, the orange from its glossy green, the cluster from the vine. we better love the hardy gift our rugged vales bestow, to cheer us when the storm shall drift our harvest fields with snow. the following extract is from the first biennial report of the oklahoma state board of agriculture: "oklahoma is the greatest country on earth, not only because we can grow everything here that can be grown anywhere else in the united states, but because many crops we can grow here are decidedly more profitable than are crops of like character in many other sections of the country." we join our sister states of pennsylvania, west virginia, tennessee, alabama, and others in the endeavor to conserve their vast deposits of coal, not solely from patriotic motives, but also because of our extensive coal, oil, and gas fields, only a small part of which have yet been developed. the supply of timber in the eastern and southeastern portions of our state is worthy of the consideration and protection of the conservation movement. particularly rich is our state in its streams of water and its water-power. the principal rivers are the arkansas, the grand, the verdegris, the canadian, the cimarron, the washita, and the red, the latter forming the boundary between oklahoma and texas. these streams within themselves contain great resources, yet in the virgin state, awaiting but to be developed and utilized by american genius. i know of no more appropriate way of closing my statement than in the words of colonel john a. joyce-- the rolling hills and mountains, without their forest dress will soon bring to the nation great hunger and distress; and if we do not listen to the scientific strain, the soil of grand columbia will be washed away by rain. brave nature in her glory works for animated things, and tells the old, old story of feeding serfs and kings; but man, obtuse and greedy, will not listen in his pain to the poor, and weak, and needy, who must live by sun and rain. we must save the soil and water, or a desert there will be for wife, and son, and daughter, in this land of liberty. and the congress of the nation, must now listen to the brain of our scientific sages who would husband soil and rain. report from oregon e. t. allen _assistant secretary oregon conservation commission_ oregon's chief conservation advances of late have been the passage of progressive water laws, by the effort of the state conservation commission, and the progress of private timber owners in the prevention of forest fires. the most urgent task now on hand is to secure more liberal state aid in forest protection. immediately following the conference of governors at the white house in , governor chamberlain appointed for oregon a conservation commission of members. this semi-official commission was reduced to members, and given statutory standing and a small appropriation, by act of legislature filed february , . its work is "to ascertain and make known the natural resources of the state of oregon, and to cooperate with the national conservation commission to the end that the natural resources of the state may be conserved and put to the highest use." no legislative session has been held since the statutory commission was appointed. in its earlier form, however, it recommended and secured the passage, by the same legislature which gave it official standing, of a workable law for the development of carey act projects, and one for complete state control of waters within the state. both have proved excellent, no defects of importance having developed. the oregon water law, in particular, is generally regarded as an example of good state action. it is based on the police power of the state to preserve the public peace and safety of its water users. under this law, rights to the use of water for power development are limited to a period of years. a simple and expeditious method is provided for determining early water rights, protecting existing rights, and acquiring new rights. prior rights are determined by a board of control consisting of the state engineer and the division superintendents of the two water divisions into which the state is divided. established rights are protected by a water master in each district of a division, acting under the direction of the division superintendent. he may make arrests and compel the installment of suitable devices for controlling the use of water. new rights are granted by certificate of the board of control, after proof, under a system based on priority of application and beneficial use. water for irrigation is made appurtenant to the land irrigated. oregon also has a law providing for a state tax, on a horsepower basis, upon water-power projects. oregon has a non-partisan state board of forestry, consisting of representatives of the industries and agencies chiefly concerned in forest management and protection; also an excellent forest code, so far as punitive and regulative provisions are concerned. it lacks appropriation or machinery to make this code effective. to secure such provision by the next legislature is the chief present work of the commission. the commission works under the plan of attacking one point at a time, instead of dissipating efforts among all the improvements needed. water and water-power were felt to be the most urgent, forestry is considered next, and when the forest laws are made satisfactory, other branches of conservation will receive concentrated effort. there is also an oregon conservation association which, under the same plan, is now chiefly devoted to carrying out the work of the state board of forestry for which no appropriation exists. its secretary is secretary of the state board, and the funds of the association help to pay postage and clerical help derived by the state. under an alliance called the oregon forest fire association, affiliated in turn with the western forestry and conservation association embracing five states from montana to california, a large number of the private forest owners of oregon cooperate to secure better protection from forest fires. these owners spend from $ , a year upward for patrol and fire-fighting, their employees having authority from the state as fire wardens. among the conservation problems to be taken up next in oregon are the protection of fisheries, good roads, improvement in technical methods in irrigation and dry-land farming, topographic surveys, and inventories of state resources. report from rhode island henry a. barker _chairman rhode island conservation commission_ this conservation congress has been so very generous with its invitations that it happens that about every organization in which i am interested has been asked to send delegates. as a result, quite a good lot of them have been so kind as to bestow this honor upon me--most of them prudently waiting until they found out that i was coming anyhow. for that reason my desk in providence is adorned with a nice little pile of beautifully engraved cards, each telling me that this city of saint paul takes pleasure in extending its hospitality, etc. along with each of them came other cards to warn me that if i wanted hotel accommodations i had better speak quick. so i spoke with reasonable speed--and eminently satisfactory results; but i am glad i did not have to find accommodations for all of the delegates that i seem to be. i want to say, also, that if it gives the cordial city of saint paul pleasure to extend this charming invitation, the pleasure is entirely mutual; i am delighted to accept the hospitality. i am glad that i need not report at this time for anything except the state of rhode island, and i am sure you will be. you may ask, "what has rhode island to conserve?" in reply i want to tell you that no state in the union in proportion to its population has so much that needs conserving. some of our friends from the far west tell us heartbreaking things about how the government has reserved or restricted so much of the western area that there isn't enough left to make farms and villages on. i think i heard day before yesterday that in the state where i attended the first conservation congress last year there were government reservations as big as massachusetts and rhode island combined--though i should say these wouldn't necessarily look so very big when painted on the map of washington, or seriously hamper the operations of its people. and we have this sad condition contrasted with that of the happy east where the government owns no reservations at all; but back in the east we do not realize that this is a good fortune. never having had any land in our part of new england owned either by the state or by the nation, we have been somewhat frantically endeavoring to have them secure some for the good of our people, even though it now has to be bought. everybody knows how earnestly we wish that the government might have done for us at the beginning of our settlement just what the government is able to do, and is doing, for the west today. there isn't any talk of "state rights" in the east. it is a question of the states' necessities. the eastern states are all working to their utmost to get the government to undertake certain enterprises like the appalachian white mountain reservations, that are of an interstate character; but each state expects to cooperate for as much of the remaining work as it can. you will be glad to know that little rhody is trying to do its share. it always does its share. it always matches the government, at least dollar for dollar, on any public improvement work. just now it is spending a million dollars on the harbor of providence to match another million that the government appropriated last year. that is the kind of "state rights" the government gives it. but not much compared with what the railroads are putting in. the formal establishment of a conservation commission was almost the very last act of the rhode island legislature at its special session, only about two weeks ago. we didn't expect, of course, to be quite so much up to date, or so early in any new field, as our brethren in montana for example, though we have had a conservation commission, rather informally appointed by the governor, ever since that notable gathering of the governors at washington, and work that such a commission would naturally do has been going on, under other names, longer than i can remember. the aim of the new commission is to secure the maximum of efficiency and the minimum of politics. i do not know what the political affiliations of its members are, or if they have any, and i do not believe the legislature knows. it is made up of ex officio members, to bring into efficient cooperation several well-established departments that have long dealt with some phase or other of conservation. the head of the bureau of industrial statistics, which is conducting a state survey of natural resources, including soil analysis; the secretary of the state board of agriculture; the director of the experiment station of the state college; the state forester; and the secretary of the metropolitan park commission--these departments will now contribute their efforts to a common purpose. the state forestry department, with advice from the national forest service, has been getting some very up to date forest laws passed, and the park commission has made a visible beginning to secure for public use and preservation some necessary recreation places for the over-crowding population of the providence "metropolitan district," which has about four-fifths of the population within about four-fifths of the area of the twin cities combined. the state college, assisted by the u. s. bureau of soils, has been showing such farmers as care to take notice that southern new england is a very different sort of place agriculturally than it has been the habit to suppose, and that at least three ears of corn may be made to grow, where, previously, one went to the dogs--or the hogs. the very fact that there are more ever-hungry mouths to feed and more manufactures to the square inch in southern new england than there are anywhere else makes this necessary. we must care for every drop of water that falls on our hillsides. the cities need it; the manufacturers need it (and can use it first); the great bleacheries--that furnish about all the textiles that all of you use and wear--need all they can have; and the people need the lakesides and the river banks for recreation as in the past. at present our markets get most of their "fine rhode island turkeys" from vermont and their "new-laid eggs" from beyond the mississippi. a large part of the rhode island greenings and massachusetts baldwin apples come from oregon and washington, though not because they refuse to grow in their native habitat. but much of the soil must have put back into it those elements which previous unscientific generations robbed it of. and here is an amusing paradox: with a population growing in density faster than in any other state of the union, and with more markets just around the corner, there are, nevertheless, more acres of forest-covered lands and more acres of unutilized lands in rhode island than there were years ago--and more in proportion than in almost any other state in the union. well, that's where rhode island comes in, in this conservation movement; and it has come in none too soon. if it had only had a wise and paternal government to help it administer and develop its natural resources a century ago, the cost of living would be less today for every one of its inhabitants. rhode island has awakened to vital things, but even if it had only an indirect interest in conservation it would still feel that it owed its moral influence to the country as a whole, and that it is not a separate selfish little two-cent republic all by its lonesome, but a part of a great nation that prefers to be governed from washington rather than from wall street: a nation whose prosperity and power and glory need the cooperation and loyalty of every one of its citizens. report from south carolina e. j. watson _commissioner of agriculture_ _chairman state conservation commission_ south carolina commission's full report delayed, so report briefly by wire. active work has been done. a preliminary forest survey has been made, and a complete measure for conservation of forests and protection against forest fires has been introduced in the general assembly and will be pushed during the coming session. active steps have been taken toward drainage and reclamation of coastal lands, and a measure to provide for a complete system under the direction of the state commission is now being prepared for introduction in the legislature in january next. conservation of human resources has been greatly advanced in the past two years, following the enactment of complete factory inspection laws. no state is giving more attention to conservation of all her resources at this time than is south carolina. i am heartily in sympathy with everything making for conservation, and greatly regret i cannot be with you at the congress. report from south dakota doane robinson _secretary conservation commission of south dakota_ the south dakota conservation commission, consisting of senator robert j. gamble (chairman), eben w. martin, samuel h. lea, o. c. dokken, and doane robinson (secretary), was appointed by governor coe i. crawford in august, , and has been continued by governor vessey. the commission made a preliminary report on the resources of the state in december, . it has been unprovided with funds, but the newspapers of the state and of the northwest have been open to its use, and from the beginning the policy was adopted of furnishing a weekly letter, educational in its nature, pertaining to the state's resources and their conservation. these articles have received very wide publicity, both within and without the state. the commission acted as executive committee of the south dakota conservation and development congress called by governor vessey and held at pierre june -july , . this was an exceptionally successful congress, in which nearly two thousand citizens participated. every county was represented, and the interest was very marked. the program consisted of addresses and papers educational in character, many speakers of national reputation participating. an annual congress is contemplated. report from texas will l. sargent _secretary conservation association of texas_ the interests of conservation in texas are promoted largely by a voluntary organization of citizens, the conservation association of texas. the association held a congress at fort worth in april last, at which much enthusiasm was manifested, and plans and policies were adopted, largely in the form of resolutions. the substance of these resolutions forms the body of this report. we lay especial stress on the dirt roads of our state. considering our great farming interests and their numerous and increasing yearly output, and the impassable condition of roads during certain seasons, we urge upon our county and state authorities the immediate betterment of our texas roads by drainage, split-log drag, top-gravel dressing, or other up-to-date methods. as the services of a large number of experts are necessary for the intelligent guidance and direction of all plans of conservation in all lines, and as intelligent workers are necessary for the effective carrying out of such plans, we urge upon our legislative authorities, as the necessary foundation for all conservation the better financial support of our great public school system, the introduction of agricultural and industrial studies into these schools, and the better equipment and maintenance of our higher educational institutions, and that more substantial financial support be accorded to the agricultural and mechanical college, and the department of agriculture, and that adequate appropriation be made for those institutions and for farmers' institutes to the end that the supply of experts and leaders may be made more nearly adequate to the needs of our rapidly growing state. we know from past experiences that the overflow of our rivers and streams have resulted in washing away not only a great deal of rich and fertile soil, thereby injuring the lands of our farmers, but that these floods have destroyed crops running into millions of dollars in value and brought destruction and ruin to hundreds of our most worthy citizens. we earnestly recommend that the legislature shall pass such laws as will constitutionally and in practical and adequate way prevent or curtail such losses in the future, the details of which can be worked out at the proper time and in an appropriate way by the legislative body itself. we deplore the wasteful methods of lumbering practiced in texas and look with dismay at the early day (say fifteen years) when all our best timber will be cut and unobtainable except at great cost, when the cut-over land, littered with dead branches and decayed treetops, will be annually burned over, the humus destroyed and the soil become unfit for cultivation and washed into the streams. we also apprehend with dismay the direful effects resultant upon our texas climate when the timber is gone and the forest area has become a grassy, burned-over waste. we urgently recommend to the people of texas that they call upon the legislature for the establishment of a forestry department, under charge of a trained forester, and under control of the state agricultural department; and it shall be the duty of said forester also to lecture in both the university and the agricultural and mechanical college, and take charge of all forestry work in the state, and his work shall be in connection with the forest service of the united states government, for the saving of the forest remnant in our state and the replanting of the cut-over area on lands not suitable for agricultural purposes. we believe in a strict conservation and preservation of the public domain of texas in a way that will best encourage homesteaders, and that all laws made for the protection of the state and the people against fraudulent entries or the illegal acquisition of the public domain on the part of private citizens or corporations should be strictly enforced, and we recommend to the next legislature the passage of a law making it a felony against all persons knowingly and fraudulently entering into conspiracy to acquire any portion of the public domain in violation of the laws of texas made for the benefit of actual settlers. recognizing the importance of fish as a food supply for our people, we indorse such laws as have already been enacted for the purifying of our rivers and lakes and such further legislation along that line as conditions demand, and recommend that hatcheries for the propagation and protection of fish be established and maintained by the state. we indorse the work of the texas audubon society in behalf of the wild birds of texas, and urge that the next legislature shall enact laws for the better protection of the birds, to the end that their extermination be prevented, so that they may be allowed to increase in numbers, delighting the world with their beauty and song, and also serving the economic purpose for which they were created, namely, the protection of crops by the extermination of insect enemies. we congratulate the farmers of texas for adopting modern methods in tilling the soil and in a diversification of crops. the great and beneficial results that have come to them through this system have clearly demonstrated its practicality. the legislature is asked to pass a law covering the features now partially covered by several independent laws and providing for a state department of engineering, which department shall be authorized to make surveys, maps, and estimates looking to the reclamation of overflow and wet lands anywhere within the state, and further being authorized to examine and approve all the plans and estimates of such improvements before said improvements can be accomplished, by this means being empowered to mutually protect all interests involved, whether these interests are at present active or in the future probable. in order to carry out most economically the conservation of the wealth latent in the soil and water supply of texas, we recommend the enactment of legislation which will provide means and instrumentalities for a soil and water survey of the state as a basis for the earliest possible development of such wealth for the common good. we recognize in the reclamation of our arid lands one of the greatest factors in the future development of the state, because of the million acres of fertile lands that can and should be reclaimed by irrigation. recognizing all vested rights, we encourage the conservation, storage, and equitable distribution of natural and flood waters of streams, artesian wells, springs, rainfall, and other sources of water supply. we favor a uniform system of irrigation laws that will give security for the investment of capital in the development of irrigation projects, and at the same time fully protect and safeguard the users of water and define the rights as well as the obligations of the enterprises delivering the water to them. we favor the state never parting with title to her water-power and the control of her streams to corporations or private individuals; we favor legislation that will secure the aid of the state in its conservation and reclamation work, such as the construction of reservoirs to be used for power, for irrigation, as well as for domestic and other purposes. the state is requested to enact a law creating an irrigation commission, acting under the direction of the commissioner of agriculture, whose duties shall be fully defined by statute. we heartily endorse the purposes and objects of the national conservation association, and urge all the friends of conservation in texas to cooperate by becoming members of the national conservation association. recognizing that the prosperity and the happiness of our people depend on the utmost protection of their health and the protection of their domestic animals from disease, we recommend that the legislature appropriate sufficient funds for the maintenance of the state board of health and the state sanitary board. recognizing the great value of the experiment stations and demonstration farms located in the various agricultural sections of our state, we indorse the work of the stations already established, and recommend that a law be passed authorizing the county commissioners of each county to provide, at their discretion, for such stations and demonstration farms, in order that the most approved methods of agriculture may be exemplified and new facts may be determined. we believe it would be advisable for the congress of the united states to pass a law repealing all laws authorizing the sale of any of the public domain in the united states and its territories, including the philippine islands and other possessions, and in the future only sell the surface for agriculture and stock raising purposes, and forever retain title in the people of the united states of the timber and of all minerals and all coal, oil, gases, phosphates, water and water-powers, to be worked under control of laws passed by congress by paying a reasonable royalty to the people for the same. report from utah o. j. salisbury _vice-president utah state conservation commission_ the utah state conservation commission was authorized by an act of the state legislature approved march , . the act prescribed the powers and duties of the commission, and appropriated a certain sum annually to be expended for the purposes thereof. pursuant to the said act the governor of the state duly appointed a commission, consisting of seven members, who organized and began active operations about the first day of october, . such legislation was called for and enacted on account of the pressing necessity of devising ways and means of preserving and protecting the abundant, varied, and valuable natural resources of our young and growing state; and it was a source of gratification to this commission to find that such resources had suffered comparatively little waste in the years past, and that the duties required of the commission were to ascertain the character and extent of the state's resources, and to work along lines of conservation and protection rather than those of restoration. the commission prepared and issued a preliminary report on the resources of the state late in the year , and copies were distributed to our state legislators, to government departments, conservation associations, public libraries, etc. owing to the short time in which the commission had to collect data and prepare the report, it was somewhat limited in its scope and general in its character. the commission has now in course of preparation a complete map of the state, showing the national forests, ownership of public lands (whether federal or state), character of the soils with analyses thereof, with other information to enable it to make an intelligent and accurate report to the governor and state legislature at the coming session in , suggesting and recommending such legislation as will best conserve and protect the state's natural resources to the benefit and advantage of our citizens of present and future generations. the amount of the annual appropriation for the purposes of the commission is $ , . . there was expended during the year the sum of $ . , and during the year the sum of $ , . . it is the intention and purpose of the commission to continue along the lines upon which it has started, to ascertain the extent and character and point out the location of the agricultural, mineral, power, and other natural resources of the state, and to place before the public such information concerning these resources as will enable the home-seeker, the investor, the manufacturer and all those seeking industrial pursuits adapted to our state, to secure for themselves some of the advantages which the development of such resources offers. supplementary report from utah e. t. merritt _delegate from utah_ the state of utah has not yet undertaken any great work in the matter of conservation of public resources, although a commission has been created with the governor as chairman. an office is maintained and the gentlemen of the commission are giving earnest thought and study to the issues involved, feeling that they want to be sure they are right before they go ahead. however, the general government has been very liberal in the attention it has given us, and we find our phosphate lands, the public coal lands, lands adjoining streams suitable for power sites, and practically every acre of our forest lands have been withdrawn from entry. and yet we feel that we have no quarrel with the government in these matters. we believe that just as soon as equitable and reasonable methods have been devised for the sale or lease of the first three named they will be placed in such a position to be of practical use and benefit to the people, as they should be; in other words, we do not believe they will be bottled up or pickled or preserved for future generations, but under wise and equitable laws and administration will be converted to the use of the people. the forest reserves are properly cared for in utah, and their use and administration is equitable and fair. mr pinchot told us when he began his administration that while no doubt mistakes would be made and some inconvenience suffered by the people, yet he wanted it understood that the forests belonged to the people, and that the purpose of the government was not to exploit them for revenue or for glory or for the fun there was in it, but rather to take care of them for the use and benefit of the people, especially for the people who had conquered and developed the adjoining country; to conserve the water supply, and to perpetuate and care for all the resources and homes of the people. he further told us that whenever we could suggest betterment of the service in the interest of the people, such suggestions would be gladly welcomed. such promises have been faithfully carried out, and we believe the government has been a kind parent to the state of utah. we see no reason for a quarrel as to the rights of the state and those of the government. we think there is plenty for both to do, and at least to us there is profit and benefit for us to go hand in hand in cooperation with the federal government in the development of our state. we believe that only by the general government can the problem of water-power sites, particularly on large or interstate streams, be handled. the history of utah shows that some years ago the adjudication of water-rights was in the courts of the several judicial districts of the state, and that in the course of their procedure it was a common thing for all the water of the stream to be decreed to the several owners residing within that judicial district, absolutely without regard to the rights of other citizens using water from the same stream, although residing in some other judicial district. we changed our laws, placing the acquirement and adjudication of water-rights in the state engineer. we found this a big improvement, but we still find ourselves in the matter of interstate streams entirely at the mercy of the fellow above us. of course the fellow below can take care of himself. the lesson is obvious. we maintain that only the general government can properly and rightly hand out justice and equity in the matter of power sites and water-rights as affecting interstate streams. we have found cooperation with the general government immensely valuable to us in the matter of experiments in the drainage of water-logged or alkali lands, measurement and recording of the flow of our streams, the eradication of disease among our livestock, and in fact in every department where cooperation has been tried. we are suffering today in utah, as in many other parts of the country, from mistakes and carelessness of the general government in the handling of the public resources, but this is also true of ourselves in our own administration; and we are very glad to see an awakening on this subject. the people of utah, in common with all of the people of the whole country, are deeply interested in the subject of conservation in all its phases, and believe that the great mistakes of the past, both national and in our own state, will not be repeated. report from vermont george aitkin _vermont conservation commission_ the commission on the conservation of the natural resources of vermont has no statutory existence, but was originally appointed by governor fletcher d. proctor in support of the general conservation movement instituted by the conference of governors at washington in may of . the commission has been continued by parole of governor george h. prouty. it has recognized and been in absolute sympathy with the principles fundamental to conservation work, namely, that conservative use and, where practicable, the intelligent maintenance and restoration of natural resources are indispensable to the continued prosperity of state and nation and of inter-nations; that state boundaries or national boundaries do not confine and limit natural resources; that it has become the sacred duty of state and nation to take measures for the preservation on the people's account of all the means of their life, welfare, and comfort, including soils, water, minerals, and forests; these to be safeguarded as public utilities to be used and treated in the interests of future as well as of existing generations, and to be stripped of every vestige of monopoly and trust. apart from the conservation of these necessary and material things, we have been interested in the advancement also of what is nearly as, if not more, important, the conservation of health, the retention and improvement of our self-governing opportunities, the equalizing and qualification of educational opportunity, and of every phase of civic, moral and social advance. vermont is mainly interested directly in the conservation and right use of public health, of its soil, of its forests and woodlots, of its water supplies, of its quarries of granite, marble, and slate, of its game and fish, and in its steadfast attention to educational opportunity and the administration of justice. for the greater part it possesses a very widespread individual ownership and control in all its natural resources and their development and use. it has for decades prior to the so-called conservation movement supervised and fostered all these economies through legislation; so that it may be said that the state has gradually but definitely applied the principles of conservation to its affairs and its resources for many years prior to the existing discussion of the subject. this is true in connection with quarrying, agriculture, forestry, and water supplies, though it should be added that conservation subjects have been much more prominently considered in recent years with increasing advantage to the farmers of the state and also with an increase in manufactures. our method of legislation and the machinery of our self-government represent an evolution and are the result of much and intimate public discussion, and they are working out good economic results. perhaps this may best be indicated by a reference to the legislation passed in . there was enacted a law which abolished the board of agriculture, and substituted in its place a board of agriculture and forestry, consisting of the governor, the director of the state agricultural experiment station, and two citizens known to be interested in the advancement of agriculture and forestry. the disbursement of the appropriation under this act was left discretionary between agriculture and forestry, and the results in the brief elapsing period since its passage have been very gratifying. in addition to this there were acts sustaining the work of the state agricultural college, providing for increased support of agricultural fairs, for the acquisition of forest reserves, for the appointment and maintenance of a state forester, for the more definite supervision of all agricultural interests, and for a more direct inspection of cattle and of dairies. the appropriations of included increased provision for the conservation of agricultural, forest, and dairy interests, for the care of game, for education and public health, and for the investigation of the water resources of the state. special attention was given to amendments of the law which aim to safeguard forests from fire and game from extinction, and to prevent the loss or misuse of water for domestic, power, and transportation purposes. this, however, was not an accident of recent agitation, but more particularly an evolution; and it operates, so far as vermont is concerned, in a true appreciation, use, and care-taking of its local resources. there has been special consideration given of late to public health, and laws were enacted governing the inspection of animals, supervising control of contagious and infectious diseases, suppressing adulterations of foods and drugs, advancing the working plans of the state laboratory of hygiene, more closely regulating the practice of medicine and surgery, forcing more specific duties on health officers everywhere, defining the practice of optometry--in short, all the means by which a state government may advance the well-being of its citizens through the application of what has been made known in science touching all these questions. the state also advanced the well-being of its people by conserving their natural resources, material or acquired, through the creation of a public utility commission, whose work has since demonstrated the need and value of its existence by its influence in behalf of the public of their use and service. we hold here that one of the most effective conservation measures is that which gives the people the best service at the lowest cost of all the applications of natural resources, as interpreted by science, which nature bestows in the way of power, water, light, and drainage. we wish to state positively, however, that these problems cannot be treated as accidents of public experience, but as subjects of legislation and public treatment which define themselves in their true relationship to property rights and individual rights and to public necessity by the process of evolution. this is illustrated by the way in which forestry conservation was instituted in vermont many years back, when a few men of foresight took an interest in the subject, formed a society, and kept bringing attention to the subject until it was made a part of the law and in equal standing with agriculture in this state, and is now apparently an assured state subject of continued standing as much as other subjects of legislation, like education, public health, the preservation of game, and the administration of justice. the expansion of the granite and marble industries of vermont has been so great as to give it rank among the foremost producing states of the union, and in the art and quality of its material and work it is foremost in all respects. in self-government, as affects all the things which make living conditions naturally satisfactory and profitable, there has been marked increase in the conservation of all the living opportunities afforded by the state; but it is again emphasized that this has been in due course of growth and not the incidental recognition of a possibility. our people have been conservative, rational, and human in the development of their chance, their natural resources, and their duty in regard to these, and have not required either through neglect or by any lapse of their rights the service of the national government in this regard, least of all through any material modification of the relationship defining state rights and state duties. there is a greater disposition here to accept direction as concerns the husbandry of our resources from science than from politics, and to insist that the care and supervision of such matters will best conserve our interests and our happiness if left to the judgment, regulation, and control of our own folks. there has been in the past few years a marked increase of income per acre from cultivated land in vermont, and a relatively greater income per acre than in the leading agricultural states, due, no doubt, to more intense farming, and there has also been an increase in the output of dairy products, while quarrying and stone-cutting manufactures have multiplied and taken a strong grasp on market opportunity. at the same time the great glory and strong defense of our state, its forests and its woodlots, have been conserved, and planting and scientific cutting have more and more become the rule. the reports from the stone industries indicate a growing demand for the manufactures of the state in granite, marble, and slate. the reports from agriculture indicate an increasing tillage and a larger financial return, an advance in the price of land, and vastly improved living conditions of the farm. the report from all the state commissions charged with the supervision of public health and the real life interests of the people supply increasing evidence of improved water supplies, of municipal lighting and power ownership, of increased transportation facilities, of reduction on accident hazards, and of steady advances in the art of and provision for public instruction. in forestry, which is one of the greatest natural resources of vermont apart from its vast contribution to the beauty of the state as a great natural park and game preserve, there has been the most marked advance. the office of state forester was established in april of , since which date its occupant, mr a. f. hawes, has made sixty-three addresses upon the subject in various parts of the state before numerous associations, agricultural societies, and forestry conventions. the state nursery under his direction has become one of the largest in the united states, today containing over , , trees, and there have been sold within the past year--a remarkable exhibit for a state of our size-- , trees, distributed through every county in our state. private timber holdings have been examined, detailed advices for handling many forests have been furnished, and in many instances trees have been marked for cutting by state advice on private lands. besides this, there have been established two state forests of acres which will be treated as subsidiary reservation nurseries to the one established at burlington. attention has been and is being given to all details relating to the promotion of agriculture, forestry, dairying, minerals, and water powers, so that it is possible to advise you that vermont is wholly alive to all natural, moral, educational, industrial, civic, and political propositions as they stand related to the conservation of everything that will best promote the well-being and happiness of its people. report from washington e. g. griggs _chairman washington delegation_ on behalf of the washington delegation, of which i have the honor of being chairman, i desire to congratulate this congress and every delegate on the opportunity afforded us in hearing that grand interpretation of conservation so ably presented by president taft. it will live as an epic, and should be translated throughout the land. since that opening day i have been thrilled and electrified by this theme of conservation, which is but another name for patriotism, the husbanding of the nation's resources. the country is stirred by that same feeling which i sometimes think aroused our fathers before the civil war. let us profit by the great forward steps they made in the determination of state and federal rights. to us it has fallen to solve these patriotic, philanthropic, and commercial questions of the day. i deplore the interjection of demagoguery and personal political advancement. i believe there is a sane, safe and sound conservation that we can all practice. above all things, let us eschew politics and throw a little more of that unselfish, self-sacrificing effort into this great fight for the nation that characterizes our friend and collaborator, gifford pinchot. we should leave this congress united in this one idea at least, that we will stop the nation's waste and encourage its development, so far as it lies within our power. eighteen years ago i left the state of minnesota and this delightful city which was my home, to do my share in the development of the pacific slope--"i love its rocks and rills, its woods and templed hills." wild horses could not drag me back to minnesota, where fifty years ago my father pioneered, and is yet interested--not that i love minnesota less, but only that i love washington more. you have grown and developed great cities. do not forget to let us do likewise. we no longer say, with greeley, "go west;" we say, come west. under the classic shades of our noble forests and within easy access of the snow-capped peak of mount tacoma--that mother of water-powers and protector of forests--we are solving _our_ pioneer problems, and we are not lagging behind in the race. our citizenship is of the highest type and from all of your states, for it is composed of that progressive element that first made your own cities famous--and did not back out of big problems. we are no longer savages devastating the frontier and uncle sam's patrimony. he is no longer "rich enough to give us all a farm;" but we are citizens alive to the big problems of the day--and we are the virgin state in which conservation and common sense can be practiced before it is too late. i predict for the state of washington--with wise federal and state legislation--a shining example of what horse-sense and conservation will bring about. if we sell our common lumber at the mills on puget sound for $ to $ a thousand, which is two to three dollars less than we got years ago, and have to pay $ to $ for a team of horses in minnesota today that years ago we could buy for $ to $ , is it any wonder that we lumbermen of the west are interested in conservation? rich beyond measure in timber, coal, fish, mines, and agricultural lands, the great state of washington is with you and your commissions that must finally work out and crystallize wise and patriotic legislation. let us nationally inventory our stocks and resources, unify and codify our laws affecting taxation and irrigation, liability and responsibility--develop our interstate commerce, and promote the general welfare. report from west virginia hu maxwell _chairman state conservation commission_ near the close of honorable w. m. o. dawson, then governor of west virginia, appointed a commission of three members, neil robinson, james h. stewart, and hu maxwell, to prepare a report for the guidance of the legislature in framing laws for the conservation of the state's resources. the report was ready for the legislature when it convened in january, . it recommended a number of changes in existing laws, and the enactment of several new ones. its principal recommendations were as follows: --a forest law providing for the prevention and suppression of fire, and for the care of woodlands and watercourses. a draft of the proposed law was included in the report. --a law to lessen the waste of natural gas, by requiring the plugging of wells when not in use, and saving the gas from others instead of permitting it to blow into the air. it was urged that effort be made to check the leak from gas mains. --for the purpose of checking the tremendous loss of by-products in coke making a law was recommended, to take effect five years from its passage, prohibiting the erection of any other than by-product ovens, but placing no restrictions on any ovens then in use, so long as they might last. --the state was urged to cooperate with the federal government in all reasonable ways for the improvement of navigable rivers in the state, and in the protection of mountain forests and the building of storage reservoirs to check the rush of floods and improve low-water conditions. --the establishment of an engineering school was recommended for the special purpose of educating men to develop and conserve the state's resources. it was pointed out that much of the practical work of conservation does not depend so much on the enactment of laws as on the training of men to do the work. in this connection it was shown that vast quantities of low grade coal, which is now unmarketable, is thrown away or left in the mines, though it would be sufficient, if manufactured into producer gas, to furnish power to drive much of the machinery in the state and in surrounding regions. if the state's water-power were fully developed it would be sufficient to turn every wheel in the state, but this development cannot be brought about by laws alone; it must depend largely on trained men. --better game and fish laws were recommended to take the place of the old laws which had failed to produce the desired results. --it was urged that prompt investigation be made of the question of municipal water supply in the state with the view to the prevention of pollution of the running streams. --it appearing probable that certain valleys in west virginia would respond in a satisfactory way to irrigation, it was recommended that experiments be carried out to test the matter. --the state's natural scenery is such that it might be made a valuable asset, in connection with the protection of forests and streams, and the commission recommended that the fact be borne in mind in laying out new roads, so that full advantage be taken of all scenic possibilities. --an immigration agency was recommended for the purpose of bringing into the state desirable immigrants who will cultivate the farms which suffer from neglect in many parts of the state. --changes in road laws were urged which would make possible the building of permanent, durable, desirable highways in place of the gullies and precipitous paths which in many parts have been tolerated as roads from the earliest settlement of the region down to the present. --the purchase of land by the state in each of the congressional districts was recommended for farms to serve as models and object lessons for the surrounding farmers; their management to be in the hands of trained agriculturists. * * * * * the legislature which convened in january, , considered one or two of the recommendations of the commission. a forest and game law was enacted, though it was not the measure which the commission recommended. the law, however, is a good one so far as it goes, and if its provisions shall be carried out, much good may be expected. no steps were taken by the legislature to lessen the waste of natural gas or to save the by-products in coke making. a new highway law was enacted, and a state commission was appointed to study the road problem. report from wisconsin e. m. griffith _state forester_ governor james o. davison appointed the wisconsin state conservation commission july , . the seven members appointed were men whose positions gave them a considerable knowledge as to the natural resources of the state, and the governor gave the commission full authority to call upon any state department for detailed information. during the summer of the commission held several meetings in the capitol, and reports were prepared on the three most important and pressing conservation problems in wisconsin, viz: water-powers, forests, and soils. a full report covering these three subjects was then made to the governor, and this the governor transmitted to the legislature in february, . the commission made the following recommendations: water-powers. --that franchises for water-powers be granted under a general statute. --that the issuing of such franchises be placed in the hands of the railroad rate commission, or similar board, under conditions to be provided by a general statute. --that such franchises be in the nature of leases for a long term of years. such leases should be renewable on equitable terms. rentals should be low, and should be applied to the extension of the state forest reserve. --that a reasonable conservation charge be levied on all developed water-powers on rivers of which the headwaters are protected by forest reserve lands, the income from such charge to be applied to the extension of the state forest reserve. --that the survey of the water-powers of the state be completed in cooperation with the united states geological survey. forests. --the state conservation commission regard it of the utmost importance that the state forest reserve, located about the headwaters of the more important streams of the state, be greatly extended. at the present time the opportunities to make such extensions are much more favorable than they will be in the future, and therefore the commission recommend that immediate action be taken to secure such extensions. --the state conservation commission recommend to the governor that, in view of the large increase in area of the forest reserves since the last session of the legislature and the probability that in the future such holdings will be materially added to, the annual appropriation of the state board of forestry for administrative purposes should be largely increased. --the state conservation commission also approved the following principles as adopted at the lake states forestry conference, held at madison, december , : "_resolved_, that forest fires being one of the greatest enemies of the state, and thus akin to riot and invasion, the executive power of the state should be employed to the utmost limit in emergencies in their suppression and control for the protection of the lives and property of the people. "_resolved_, that we advocate the patrol system as the only satisfactory method of preventing forest fires, and the commanding factor in fighting them. "_resolved_, that we recommend the retention of the fire warden system with the county, rather than the town, as the unit, as being essential in securing interest and responsibility among the people most affected. "_resolved_, that in all districts covered by state fire patrol a reasonable portion of the expense for such patrol should be placed upon the unoccupied, unimproved, or wild lands, whether forest or cut-over land, preferably in the form of an acreage tax. "_resolved_, that the expense of the local fire warden service, and the help called out for the suppression of fires, should be borne wholly or in part by the county or town, but the payment should first be made by the state to insure promptness. "_resolved_, that all officials, including public prosecutors, charged with the enforcement of fire-protective measures, should be subject to severe penalty or removal from office for non-performance of duty. "_resolved_, that the successful prosecution and a commensurate punishment in case of conviction often cannot be secured in the locality where the offense has been committed, and in order that the law shall be enforced, in the interest of justice, and under authority of the attorney general, a change of venue should be permitted. "_resolved_, that it is the sense of this meeting that lands containing forests should be taxed in the usual manner so far as the land is concerned, said land to be assessed as if it contained no timber; but the forest products should be assessed and taxed only when they are cut and removed, and then in an appropriate manner; that the harvest timber tax should be based on a stumpage value determined by the value of the forest product at the place where it is assessed, less the cost of placing it there." soils. the state conservation commission recommend to the governor that a soil survey of the state be undertaken and carried on at such a rate as will give a general view of the soils of the state in about five years. the commission call especial attention to the immediate need of such a survey in the central and northern parts of the state, the soils of which are now coming rapidly into agricultural use; and also to its necessity on lands which may be included in a forest reserve and which should be devoted to forestry or agriculture according to the nature of their soil. * * * * * let us see what were the results of these recommendations. a number of bills were introduced in the legislature of , seeking franchises to dam navigable streams and to create reservoirs and reservoir systems; but acting upon the recommendations of the conservation commission, all such bills were referred to a special committee of the legislature on "water-powers, forestry, and drainage" which has carefully investigated the development of the water-powers of the state and will report either to a special session of the legislature or to the regular session in . undoubtedly the issuing of such franchises will be placed in the hands of a competent board or commission. all forestry bills introduced in were referred to the same special committee of the legislature. two members of this committee have made their report, and include the following recommendations in regard to the forestry work of the state: --an act to provide a state tax of two-tenths of one mill for each dollar of the assessed valuation of the taxable property in the state, to be collected annually for a period of twenty years, the tax when levied and collected to constitute "a forestry investment fund" to be used for the purchase, improvement, and protection of the forest reserve lands. --an act to provide for the piling and burning of white norway and jack pine slash. --an act to provide for the employment of an efficient fire patrol by the state board of forestry. in accordance with the recommendations of the conservation commission, the legislature in passed an act providing for a soil survey of the state, and this work is being done by the geological survey and college of agriculture, for the purpose of ascertaining the character and fertility of the developed and undeveloped soils of the state, the extent and practicability of drainage of the swamp and wet lands of the state, and the means for properly conserving and increasing the fertility of the soil of the state. it will be seen from the above that the work of the state conservation commission has already shown important results, and it is believed that the legislature and people of wisconsin have now begun to realize clearly the urgent need and also the means which should be taken to conserve the great natural resources. report of the american academy of political and social science the conservation of natural resources is a subject in which an american academy of political and social science must necessarily have a keen interest. the primary purpose of the american academy being to assist in the right solution of the political and economic problems confronting the people of the united states, it has actively cooperated with those individuals and organizations that have done most to give impetus to the conservation movement. at the white house conference called by president roosevelt in may, , the american academy was one of the national organizations represented. the following november, the academy devoted one of its regular scientific sessions to conservation, the chief address of the session being delivered by mr gifford pinchot, the chairman of the national conservation commission. the academy was also represented at the conference which met in washington in december, , upon the invitation of the national conservation commission. the most valuable aid the american academy has given the conservation movement was rendered by the publication, in may, , of a comprehensive volume containing eighteen papers especially prepared by men prominent in the conservation movement. the scope and character of this volume are indicated by the following list of papers and contributors: _forestry on private lands_--honorable gifford pinchot, u. s. forester, and chairman national conservation commission. _public regulation of private forests_--professor henry solon graves, director forest school, yale university. _can the states regulate private forests?_--f. c. zacharie, esq., of the louisiana bar, new orleans. _water as a resource_--w j mcgee, ll.d., u. s. inland waterways commission; member national conservation commission. _water power in the united states_--m. o. leighton, chief hydrographer, u. s. geological survey. _the scope of state and federal legislation concerning the use of waters_--charles edward wright, assistant attorney to the secretary of the interior. _the necessity for state or federal regulation of water-power development_--charles whiting baker, c. e., editor-in-chief engineering news, new york. _federal control of water power in switzerland_--treadwell cleveland, jr., u. s. forest service. _classification of public lands_--george w. woodruff, assistant attorney-general for the department of the interior. _a summary of our most important land laws_--honorable knute nelson, u. s. senator from minnesota; chairman of the senate committee on public lands, and chairman of committee on lands, national conservation commission. _indian lands: their administration with reference to present and future use_--honorable francis e. leupp, commissioner of indian affairs. _the conservation and preservation of soil fertility_--cyril g. hopkins, chief in agronomy and chemistry, university of illinois agricultural experiment station, urbana. _farm tenure in the united states_--henry gannett, geographer u. s. geological survey. _what may be accomplished by reclamation_--honorable frederick h. newell, director u. s. reclamation service. _the legal problems of reclamation of lands by means of irrigation_--morris bien, supervising engineer, u. s. reclamation service. _our mineral resources_--honorable george otis smith, director u. s. geological survey. _the production and waste of mineral resources and their bearing on conservation_--j. a. holmes, chief, technologic branch u. s. geological survey; member national conservation commission. _preservation of the phosphates and the conservation of the soil_--charles richard van hise, president of the university of wisconsin. there were copies of this volume published, and its wide distribution at a most opportune time caused it to have an exceptionally effective influence. by the end of the edition was practically exhausted, and a new edition became necessary. the canadian members of the american academy, it is interesting to note, were particularly pleased to receive this publication. it is the belief of those most active in the work of the american academy that the question of the conservation of american resources outranks all other economic questions now before the people of the united states. it is especially important that national and local organizations should cooperate as fully as possible in educating the public as to the present condition of our resources, the manner in which they are being used, and the measures that should be taken to make these resources of permanent as well as of present value to the american people. respectfully submitted, [signed] emory r. johnson, _chairman_ frederick c. stevens wm. b. dean w. a. fleming jones wm. l. west charles w. ames _committee_ report of the american automobile association when the american automobile association was originally honored with an invitation to the national conservation congress it promptly accepted with two objects in view; _first_, to influence, if possible, the advocacy of a good highway construction and maintenance policy throughout the united states--national, state, and local--in its program in order to broaden and help the movement itself, and _second_, to enlist the friends of conservation in advancing highway construction; in other words, to make the theory of conservation cover not only the care and perpetuation of natural resources, but all broad economic activities, throughout the length and breadth of the country, concerning the care and betterment of property, whether natural or artificial. the resident in the east must feel that only by bringing within the scope of the conservation movement these somewhat narrower and more artificial economic measures can any wide and deeply interested following be secured in the more thickly settled eastern states, as most questions of bulk ownership and management of natural property in this section have long since been settled in law and in fact. if you adopt this theory and definition of conservation, and thereupon, among other efforts, give your help to advance the matter of good roads, then the advocates of good roads all over the country will have gained an ally, and you will have secured new friends. the american automobile association is devoting the major part of its time, means, and enthusiasm to advancing and coordinating the activity of good highway construction and maintenance, and to the preparation and enactment of good national, state, and local legislation regulating traffic on these highways all over the country. the association is organized in the large majority of all our states, with a large local following in every center, and with an effective central management cooperating with the most important like bodies abroad and with such associations at home as the u. s. office of good roads; national grange, patrons of husbandry; farmers' educational and cooperative union; and league of american wheelmen. it consists of state organizations in most of the states, comprising approximately local clubs and over , members. it is an active force engaged in useful educational and constructive work to better our national life by improving in an intelligent and public spirited manner a very important branch of transportation. it is and has been for some years the leading spirit in this work, as witness the organization of the national good roads convention with the above-mentioned cooperating associations to be held in saint louis toward the end of this month. transportation, broadly considered, has been the greatest ruling economic force in every civilization created by man. its absence or limitation ever makes for barbarism or the decadence of the people so confined. it is the pioneer and prime moving force in the creation of progress and enlightenment. each stage of the world's history that has witnessed some pronounced advance in transportation methods has been swiftly followed by a more than proportionate advance in progress, in wealth, and in happiness of the people affected. witness the march of wealth and education following the practical operation of the steam railway in the later half of the last century, and the further advance following the practical perfection of electrical transportation during the last quarter of the same century. steam has provided transportation for the great bulk of world life; electricity opened the way for relatively lighter and cheaper transport, thus opening sections otherwise not accessible for economic reasons. the motor-car and the public highway have crowned these achievements by providing a means for speedy, cheap, safe, and agreeable transport to any corner of the country, the qualities just described constituting the essence of what is best in transportation. the public highways in the country, however, which premise the reasonable use of motor transportation, have not advanced either in quality or quantity with the means of transport itself during the past fifteen years. the very existence of steam transport when this country was young and sparsely settled and poor and badly developed, and even of electrical transport at a later day, had in themselves limited the development of a reasonable highway system, when comparison is made with other older countries of like wealth, population, and civilization. in earlier days military necessity did not compel this government to build national highways for the movement of troops--the railroads did that. economy of transport did not compel the several states to build highways--the railway, the steamboat, the electric tram cared for that. it was not until the advent of the practical modern motor-car that the almost savage condition of this country with respect to highways became apparent. since then, say within the past ten years, the force moving all over the country toward reasonable highway development, maintenance, and regulation (which had its great inspiration in the army of motor-car tourists acquiring a knowledge of the geography and the beauties of this country by a new and independent method of travel, and which has more recently turned into a flood of growing purpose and organization for better highways because of the conviction of the farmer and the business man of the united states of their economic value in reducing the cost of ton-mile detail haulage to the lines of bulk transportation), as well as toward the moral uplift of the entire farming and country life, due to releasing the country resident from the unhealthy isolation of former times--this force must now be recognized and satisfied, and this conservation congress is a logical forum for exploiting and advancing these aspirations. a recent phase of this great new interest and industry has been the abuse heaped upon it by certain special interests that have been touched by the change the motor-car has wrought over the country. the reverend sam small once remarked that if you threw a brick in the dark and heard a dog howl you knew that you had hit him. the misrepresentation and denunciation and apparent lack of understanding of the true meaning of this new interest seems to come near those financial and bulk transportation interests--with their affected fear of largely mythological mortgages--from which the motor-car user in the aggregate has detached some profit either in transport or in investment. it needs no fine intelligence in these times to understand the weight and purpose of this opposition which has assumed an almost proscriptive right to the collection and handling of the loose money of the unorganized individual all over the country. what is this doctrine that the banker has become the censor of the individual's needs and actions with his own money? have the farmer and the business man of this country recently become so poor or reckless or so much in debt as to apologize to their fiscal agents for the purchase of a motor-car with their own money or lose credit? does this not logically lead to an equal apology and loss of credit for owning a decent home instead of a miserable one, or wearing good clothing, or eating good food, or getting a good education, or buying a carpet, a piano, or any of the other things which in the sum constitute the high environment of american life? the tens of thousands of users of motor-cars that are today deriving health and pleasure and, in a far greater number of cases than generally known, profit from the purchase and use of motor-cars, are deflecting interest and capital from channels which have long enjoyed them to their great benefit. that is the origin of the detraction of the motor-car industry and the individuals who created it and who are enjoying it today. fair and intelligent consideration is not generally given to the fact that speedier transportation wherever possible is inevitable in human history; that, when a farmer or a doctor or a real estate agent, or a business man of any sort, finds that, at the same cost, he can do, with the same personal effort per day, four times more work in a motor-car than with a pair of horses, provided decent roads exist--when this fundamental economic fact reaches the masses, then good roads teeming with motor-cars and trucks and reasonable universal legislation will be demanded and gotten. when added to this, the same investment provides the means of winging off where fancy leads on a healthful and charming tour or visit, who shall deny that the individual is wise to avail himself of this new facility? finally, sufficient weight is not given to the fact that every ton of freight in this broad country must be carried from its primal source, not once but several times, to a railroad or steamboat or tram, before it reaches the goal of the final user. the perfected motor-wagon and truck made in quantity at reasonable cost, provided the good highway exists everywhere, is the inevitable source of such reasonable transport: and, from the standpoint of utility, or effectiveness, or congestion of street areas, or speed--from any standpoint whatsoever--it is as distinct an advance over animal traction as was the electric tram thirty years ago over animal traction in that field of enterprise. the millions of dollars going into this industry spread out through the people, irrigating the total prosperity of the country through its appropriate channels, just as money spent on everything else the individual buys throughout the country, adds its appropriate quota to our national prosperity, and should be quite as immune from attack and misrepresentation. good highways and highway legislation are today a generally recognized national necessity. if this country were now through concerted action, nationally, in states, in counties, and in cities, to spend enough money to put its streets and highways in a comparable condition with those of england or france, and to replace the great percentage of animal traction and motor-cars as now made, to carry the bulk of detail tonnage on these highways, it could not in any other manner or with any better advantage to the coming generation, as concerns its wealth, happiness, and profit, invest this enormous sum or, in any other manner, not only add to the value of country property but influence so positively and so speedily an increase in the happiness and general content of country life in the united states. in conclusion, it is respectfully urged that the project of good highways and reasonable uniform state and national legislation governing their use should be incorporated in detail in the program of this national conservation congress and every kindred association throughout the length and breadth of the land. respectfully submitted, [signed] powell evans _chairman, a. a. a. conservation committee_ report of the american civic association i have already had the honor of presenting some statement of rhode island's interest in the conservation movement, and of the ways in which she proposes to demonstrate it. but i also bear messages from the american civic association and other organizations. perhaps one might think, on first consideration, that there was nothing very closely related, or perhaps related at all, in the purposes of the conservation commission of the state of rhode island and those of the american civic association, the providence board of trade, the metropolitan park commission of providence plantations, the atlantic deeper waterways association, and the rhode island chapter of the american institute of architects; yet i bring you greetings from all of these. i want to tell you that they are all working with all the enthusiasm there is in them for some phase or other of the mighty movement for conservation. some people have said--half contemptuously perhaps (i am afraid so)--that conservation is made to cover about every kind of a movement there is on this great footstool, but perhaps the statement is about true so far as these movements are concerned with the preservation and development of any of the great assets of nature or artificial achievements of man that are necessary or useful to the well-being of our own or future generations. whether we are considering the forests upon the mountain sides that control the floods and affect the farms and the water-powers and the navigable streams below, or are thinking how to plan and lay out and construct our towns and cities so that they shall most worthily and efficiently fulfill their two great purposes as places ( ) to live happily in and ( ) to work most successfully in, we find their principles overlapping and leading from one end of the line clear to the other. you cannot separate them, and it is not worth while to try. the interests of the american civic association, of course, are not restricted to any state or section. its activities are nation-wide. "for a better and more beautiful america" is its motto, and it believes that a more beautiful america is bound to be a better and more prosperous america. it believes also that the conservation of beauty means the conservation of patriotism; and its distinguished president has paraphrased a well-known utterance of ex-mayor mcclellan to the effect that "the country healthy, the country wealthy, and the country wise, may excite satisfaction, complaisance, and pride: but it is the country beautiful that compels and retains the love of its citizens." it is the love of country that lights and keeps glowing the holy fire of patriotism, and this love is excited primarily by the beauty of the country and the environments of the citizens. the american institute of architects believes that when a thing is most usefully done it is most beautifully done. it believes that conservation deals with two great departments closely related in human endeavor, and that you cannot divorce the necessity of city planning from the development of the resources of nations. a properly planned structure, whether it be of a single building or of a whole city, with all its homes and shops and streets, means the conservation of the people's efficiency through all the generations that shall ever come to dwell therein. similarly, the park movement, as we see it scientifically promoted, is almost wholly a measure of conservation. it is not, as the previous generation believed, primarily to tack on ornate luxuries to the urban fabric, but to preserve the necessary recreation places that would otherwise be obliterated, but without which the race of city-bred dwellers cannot survive. it is to safeguard human efficiency and happiness. the atlantic deeper waterways association, whose president, honorable j. hampton moore, has bidden me extend his greetings, calls for things that mean much conservation of effort. its project would remove much of the material burden of unnecessary cost. there is conservation of vast energy and the saving of huge national burdens in the present eastern ambition for the fuller improvement of harbors and development of connecting inland waterways. let me tell you how the improvement of the harbors related to the handling of at least percent of the $ , , , worth of all our imports, for this is the proportion that comes into the eastern harbors of the nation. it relates to the transportation of products of the eastern states worth over $ , , , a year--of percent of all the cotton that the nation raises, and percent of all our manufactures; to the , , tons of merchandise that has to be transported through these states in which more than percent of all our people dwell, and then transferred in various ways for the equal benefit of the other percent. no item in the cost of our existence is of more importance than that of transportation. well, of course, the board of trade is interested in all these things, though it looks upon them primarily as they bear upon the up-building of a city. it believes that it is working to assist the logical development of a city of glorious possibilities where certain services to the nation may best be performed. if there were not sound economic reasons for the up-building of a great city at any given place, it would be foolish and wicked to attempt by artificial means to talk it into being, or try to force it by the hothouse method of overheated air. but if you have the necessary natural assets and opportunities that but await intelligent handling, why here comes the need of conservation as a vital obligation. [signed] henry a. barker _delegate_ report of the american forestry association no organization can more appropriately than the american forestry association make its statement and its appeal to this congress; for it is the first of our conservation organizations. it has a past of nearly thirty years to which it can point with pride of real achievement; an active and efficient, though not a noisy, present; and a future of ever enlarging opportunity. in a very real sense we may say that the work of this association, through years of much misunderstood effort, under the able guidance of the great leaders of the american forestry movement, made this congress possible; for it was through the study of forestry and its relation to the country that the whole problem of our national resources came to be understood. the man who has given the conservation of natural resources its impetus, with the help of his distinguished chief, then president of the united states, was the recognized leader, the apostle and evangelist, of the forestry movement; and today no portion of our natural resources holds a more important place than the forests. they are inseparably linked with soils and waters, both of which depend on them in great measure; and as a product of the soil, nothing exceeds the forests in value and in necessity to human welfare. forests, like agricultural crops, belong to the renewable class of products, and their maintenance involves much more complicated and permanent problems than the non-renewable products like metals, coal, oil, and gas. therefore we conceive the field of our association to be vital and lasting, and so broad, many-sided, and far-reaching as to amply justify the existence of an organization dedicated to the advancement of scientific forestry for the best utilization of our forest lands for all time. our appeal is to the citizen who desires to promote the economic and moral welfare of the nation, for moral welfare comes only through good economics and such management of natural resources as makes for prosperity; to the lumbermen and to all manufacturers who use forest products, for to them this is a subject that touches the permanence of their industries; to the educator who looks beyond mere culture and believes that our education must more and more fit men and women to cope with the complex problems of modern life. in this last connection we shall soon announce plans, recently set on foot, for giving practical and definite assistance to those teachers who wish to bring the fundamental principles of forestry into their work, but who do not know how. we shall try to show them how in a systematic and practical way. our work is independent of that of the government, but is conducted in close touch with it. as an independent body of citizens we can do and say what government officials cannot do and say. our program embodies: ( ) an equitable system of taxation which shall not unduly burden the growing crop; ( ) adequate protection against fire, which will reduce this greatest of forest perils to a minimum; ( ) the practice of scientific management upon all existing forests; ( ) the planting of all unoccupied lands which can be utilized more profitably for forestry than for any other purpose; and, ( ) the whole to be brought about through harmonious adjustment of functions between the three classes of owners--national, state, and private. we do not believe that either one of these agencies is to be relied on alone. each has its place. i say this because our position in this regard is often misconceived. i may add (to correct another misapprehension) that we do not believe in putting under forest land more valuable for agriculture. forestry and agriculture are not rivals. they go hand in hand. one specific object to which we have given much effort for several years is the establishment of national forests on the great interstate water-sheds of the northern and southern appalachians. the conditions, which are acute for the thickly populated east, can only be handled by the united action of the national and state governments and private owners. the central cores of the white mountains and the southern appalachians clearly require national care and management. with this and cooperation of the states and private owners with the national government, we can save a rare country of beauty, health, and productiveness from being made a depopulated waste. we begin to see the light. in the house of the last two congresses we have passed a bill, after fighting to a finish the reactionary element which has controlled that body and throttled legislation framed in the public interest. in the senate we have a strong working majority which can only be beaten, as in the sixtieth and sixty-first congresses, by filibustering in the last hours of the session. if we are not cheated of our reward next winter we shall mark a new step in the progress of american forestry by making the national forest system really national. the association now has about members; it maintains an office in washington, where a close watch is kept upon national legislation, and through its correspondents, upon state legislation. it provides lectures, issues bulletins on important subjects, conducts a correspondence bureau, and publishes a monthly magazine, _american forestry_, which is contributed to by the best authorities in the country, and is the only popular magazine of its class of national scope. we enjoy the cordial cooperation of the u. s. forest service and of the various state forest bureaus. we look forward confidently to a future in which the practice of scientific forestry will become general throughout the united states, when our forest lands will be clearly defined and permanently maintained in productive growth, when waste lands will cease to play so large a part in our national statistics, when the production of the forests will cease to be so much less than the consumption of forest products, and when the national wealth will be contributed to largely each year from this source. but even with this hopeful outlook we cannot see that our work will ever be done, and we welcome the assistance which this conservation congress can give us. [signed] edwin a. start _executive secretary_ report of the american humane association the committee on conservation of national animal resources (the same being a sub-committee of the national conservation commission of the federal government) have the honor to report as follows: the animal resources of the united states constitute a large proportion of its natural productive energy. this country has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in horses, mules, cattle, hogs, sheep, and chickens. these constitute natural resources which are producing a larger percentage of wealth and a larger proportionate return for capital invested than almost any one other resource. furthermore, the actual means of sustaining life is more dependent on these resources than on all others combined, for aside from the food value of the cattle, hogs, sheep, and chickens, and also aside from the other products which are received from them, agricultural operations would be rendered largely inoperative if the assistance of the larger animals were withdrawn. in this way the products of the soil upon which man is so largely dependent for sustenance would be materially affected, and without the assistance of these animals the supply would diminish to the extent of actual starvation for vast numbers of the world's populace. even if mechanical contrivances should replace the labor of beasts, the cost would be enormously increased; and the natural fertilizing products being removed, the productive value of the soil would also be progressively decreased. from whatever point we look at this important question, the value of our animal resources is so great and so fundamental that the nation may well give its best energies and most discriminating intelligence to their protection and conservation. it has been estimated that through the humane treatment and care of horses the average life of these useful creatures can be easily increased from to percent. this likewise means a proportionate increase in the results derived from their labor, which in the aggregate would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. the same is also largely true of the increased value of other domestic animals as the result of humane and considerate treatment, which in all instances would greatly prolong their lives. the american humane association has been greatly interested in promoting the more merciful treatment of range stock, which in the past have been largely left to shift for themselves during the cold, bleak winters of the northwestern ranges. this has resulted in the death of vast numbers of livestock. a recent report of the department of agriculture indicates that over , , domestic animals die in the united states each year from hunger and exposure. another department in which the humanitarian societies of the united states have been largely interested which bears directly on the conservation of a great natural resource, has been the protection of the fur seals. these interesting and valuable animals, through piratical efforts employed in their destruction, have become partially exterminated, and a great source of national wealth has been almost annihilated. from vast herds, numbering a great many hundreds of thousands, the seals have been reduced until their rookeries in the islands of the northern pacific belonging to the united states have been almost depopulated. friends of the conservation policy have earnestly protested in congress against this inhumane and economically unwise course, and during the last session legislation was passed and signed by president taft, which would insure the ample protection of the seals. grave fears are expressed at the present time lest this result should be endangered by unwise administrative measures which are threatened. i earnestly hope that the second national conservation congress will speak in no uncertain terms in regard to this important question, so that the seals may be restored once more to their original numbers and productive value. this committee will not undertake to present all the activities in which we have been interested which bear upon this subject, but content ourselves with showing the great importance of this particular phase of conservation. we trust that this committee will continue for another year, and that the results of this congress will be felt in every portion of the united states. respectfully submitted, [signed] william o. stillman, _chairman_ m. richard muckle alfred wagstaff john partridge samuel weis john l. shortall guy richardson _committee_ report of the american institute of architects the committee of the american institute of architects on the conservation of natural resources has the honor to report as follows: a wide and increasingly active interest in the subject exists among the officers and members of the institute. the committee believes that few, if any, of the great national organizations touch the subject of conservation at so many points, or are more vitally interested in its wise and efficient progress, or can be more directly helpful in the application of the principles of conservation in a great series of important industries. the construction of modern buildings, either for residential or business purposes, involves the use in one form or another of practically the entire list of materials included under the general meaning of the term the "natural resources" of the country, excepting only agricultural land and foodstuffs; and in common with all other thinking citizens, the architects realize that the continued prosperity of the building interests is in the long run dependent on the wise use of these resources. exact statistics of the great building industry of the country are not obtainable; but a somewhat extended inquiry recently made led to an approximate estimate of the amount of money expended upon buildings in the united states per annum at an average of not less than $ , , , , practically all of which passes under the hands of the architects in the specifications of materials to be used and in certification as to quality and cost. among the materials used are metals, including iron and its various products in rolled steel, sheet metal, pipe, castings, and machinery, with copper, lead, graphite, zinc, nickel, silver, and even gold; lumber in enormous quantities and of all kinds; clay products, such as brick, terra cotta, roofing tiles, drain tiles, floor tiles, and porcelain; stone, including granite, marble, limestone, sandstone, and other quarry products; cement, lime, sand, glass, oils, gums, hemp, bitumen, asphalt, asbestos, barytes, and many other minerals; woven cotton, linen, wool, and other fibres. there are also used coal and water-power, and above all that greatest of all resources of the nation, the labor of man, both skilled and unskilled. this but briefly suggests the variety and extent of the interests represented in modern building. therefore the profession of architecture, represented by the american institute of architects, has a most real interest in this great topic, and can and does wield a very potent influence upon the use of the products of mine, quarry, factory, and field. it has been stated, with a large measure of truth, that if the architects will study the economic use of lumber and specify or permit the use of short lengths (such as -foot and -foot lengths as against -foot and -foot lengths) where such are structurally permissible, that a quarter of the lumber cut per annum could be saved without lessening the amount of lumber used in building. if the architects specify concrete to the exclusion of steel, the steel market is affected; if brick or clay products, the cement market is affected; if copper or sheet iron, or lead, or tile, or slate, or pitch, or even thatched straw, for roofing instead of shingles, the number of shingles used is correspondingly reduced. it is obvious that if the architects will substitute clay products or concrete or steel for lumber now used in building, no more effective method of conserving our lumber supply could be devised. materials used in buildings are not necessarily lost to the future, however. on the contrary, a certain class of materials, such as steel and other metals, are thus preserved, though temporarily withdrawn from use. who shall say that other needs and other customs of building of a future time will not be as different from ours as ours are from those of former times? indeed it is not wholly fantastic to prophesy that the skyscrapers of today may become the iron mines of tomorrow. the architects are only indirectly employers of labor, but as such they can, more fairly and with less self-interest than any other class, observe the conditions under which labor in the building trades is employed. your committee believes that the great annual losses by reason of accidents to men engaged in the building trades are largely preventable; that laws governing the construction of scaffolding, hoisting apparatus, derricks, and other machinery used in quarrying or manufacturing and building, should be passed where they do not already exist, and should be rigorously enforced everywhere; that mechanics and laborers should be taught not to take unnecessary risks but should suffer their fair share of blame if they do, and that they should be encouraged by the public authorities in all reasonable demands for the opportunity to pursue their avocations without unnecessary hazard of life and limb. the architects believe in the conservation of buildings once they are erected, and to this end that fire-proof construction should be adopted wherever possible. in all american cities today fire is a constant menace, and the annual loss from this cause both in life and property is appalling. the strict enforcement of wise building laws will largely prevent this loss; but some concession in taxation to those erecting fire-proof buildings might be found feasible, whereby a premium would be given to those owners of buildings who contribute to the greater safety of life and property by erecting fire-proof structures--or on the other hand an increase of taxation might be made on those erecting buildings which endanger the lives and property of their neighbors and whose flimsy structures make necessary the present large public expenditure for fire-department service in our cities. this committee, in common with those who have from the beginning promoted the cause of conservation, believes in the _use_ of our natural resources, not in their _abuse_--in their equitable distribution and development in the hands of the people or in the hands of the government, not in locking them up in the hands of a few; and that if corporate capital can develop them better than individual capital, then that it should be so done only under restrictions that will safeguard the interests of the people and be subject to governmental control and limitation, while at the same time giving the capital engaged absolute assurance of protection, security, and reasonable profit. this committee believes that _use_ does not mean _waste_ or loss, nor does it mean that reckless spendthrift policy which would squander in a generation, or less, the vast natural resources of this nation, or permit these resources to be monopolized. the american institute of architects is heartily in sympathy with the principles of the conservation of our natural resources--and will do its part to advance those principles. [signed] cass gilbert _chairman_ report of the american paper and pulp association as long ago as the officers of the american paper and pulp association, realizing the importance of maintaining a perpetual supply of pulpwood, devoted the annual meeting of that year principally to a discussion of the science and practice of forestry, then almost unknown in the united states. at that meeting addresses were delivered by doctor fernow, then chief of the government forestry bureau, by mr gifford pinchot, his successor, and by mr austin carey, now connected with the forestry department of the state of new york. mr hugh j. chisholm, then president of the association, in his annual message said: "those among us who have weighed the matter carefully are well aware that if we as a nation are to take and permanently hold the foremost place in paper making, we must begin at once to husband our resources. fortunately, the science of forestry, until recently but little known and heeded less, is ready to point out the way, and we shall learn from three of the best authorities of the country, not only why we should, but how we may, put in practice the principles of forestry. i hope that everyone will go away resolved directly or indirectly to do what he can to secure a rational use of this mainstay of our business." the attitude of the association, in the past twelve years, has been to exert its influence in every way possible in the encouragement of forest conservation. every year resolutions have been adopted urging timber land owners in the paper industry to practice conservative methods; and at the same time attention has been called to the vital importance of preventing forest fires, and in more recent years the subject of taxation of timber lands has also received attention. not only has a universal sentiment in favor of conservation been created in the industry, but practical results have been accomplished. it is not too much to say that our timber land owners, with possibly here and there an exception, have been for a number of years all conducting their operations so as not to impair the reproductive capacity of their lands. in the first place, they have carefully studied their holdings, in many instances being assisted by the forest service at washington; they have thus become enlightened as to how far cutting timber can go without jeopardizing the future. in the next place, they have voluntarily limited the size, or the diameter of trees, below which no cutting shall be done. they have very generally, although to just what extent cannot be definitely estimated, adopted the method of felling trees with the saw instead of the axe, and have in other ways sought to bring the waste down to a minimum. but perhaps in no way have they done better service than by encouraging legislation and the enforcement of it for the prevention of fires. it is roughly estimated that the paper makers own in the united states about , , acres, consisting mostly of spruce timber lands. while this is insufficient to afford a natural growth equal to the demands, the deficit is made up by purchases in the united states and by importations from canada, and the use of other kinds of wood. there is still much more spruce cut for lumber than for pulpwood, but the paper makers are continually adding to their holdings, and there appears to be a readjustment of prices going on which is leading to the substitution of pulpwood production for lumber production. the example set by paper makers is being followed by other timber land owners, so that we may confidently say that no timber lands of any moment are in any sense being denuded for the production of pulpwood. less than percent of the consumption of wood in this country is domestic pulpwood, and with a continuation of the conservative methods now in vogue, there need be no fear of diminution of our forests by the paper industry. in fact the perpetuation of the industry in the united states depends largely on the perpetuation of the forests of the united states, so that the paper manufacturers have every incentive to maintain them. the use of hemlock and other kinds of wood for pulp making has greatly increased, thus tending to relieve any drain there might be on the supply of spruce. as most of the paper mills are dependent on water-power, the manufacturers have still further incentive to protect the water-sheds. the forest commissioner of maine has stated-- "since the advent of the pulp and paper industry in maine, covering a period of less than twenty years, the system of handling our forest lands has been completely revolutionized. prior to ten years ago, in cutting logs in the woods, it has been demonstrated by actual tests and measurements that only from to percent of the volume of the lumber trees actually cut was saved and utilized for lumber purposes, while since that period on account of the paper industry it has been demonstrated by later measurements and experiments that from to percent of the volume of lumber trees is actually utilized, and what is of far greater importance is the fact that crooked, seamy and defective trees, as well as all of the undersized trees formerly cut and destroyed in swamping and in making yards and landings are now utilized. * * * fully one-half of the whole territory of maine has never as yet produced one single log for pulp and paper production. i refer to saint john river drainage, where the same wanton system of lumbering, although possibly in a somewhat lesser degree, is being followed as was followed through the long period from to . were this territory fully developed for lumbering by means of proper railroad connections or water facilities, it is safe to assert that conservatively managed, as the paper companies are endeavoring to do today with the best knowledge obtainable, it would supply the entire demand for all the mills now located in maine indefinitely." in the state of new york all the paper makers who own lands in the adirondacks have an association, including many other lumbermen, which has cooperated with the state authorities in securing legislation which would foster conservative cutting and the prevention of fires. the international paper company, owning nearly a million acres of forest lands in new england, new york state, and elsewhere in the united states, has always conducted its operations with a view to the future supply. in eleven years this company has cut less than two-tenths of a cord per year per acre, which is believed to be less than the natural growth. two years ago this company started a nursery in vermont, and each year it has been putting in transplants in increasing quantities in maine, new hampshire, vermont, and new york state, supplementing its own supply by purchases of seedlings and transplants at home and abroad. this replanting is being done on abandoned farms, pasture lands and burns. on their other holdings no replanting is necessary, as there is always sufficient growth left for reproduction. some other companies have done replanting, but in general conservative cutting and protection from fire render extensive planting unnecessary. the paper industry has acted on its own initiative, and while self-interest may have actuated it the result is none the less beneficial from the public point of view, and the policy is more apt to be followed permanently than if impractical law, attempting to make conservation compulsory, were passed. [signed] e. w. backus _delegate_ report of the american medical association the most important interest which this nation has to guard is human life and health. the conservation of national vitality is fundamental to all plans for the conservation of property and material welfare. as the life is more than meat and the body more than raiment, so is the preservation of health and the avoidance of unnecessary sickness and death of far greater importance than any other interests. realizing this, the american medical association, the national organization of the american medical profession, has been in hearty sympathy with the conservation movement from its inception. composed of state and territorial associations and local branches with over , members, this association has for years advocated the conservation of human life through the abolition of preventable diseases and the betterment of sanitary and hygienic conditions with a view to making the future work of the profession prevention rather than cure. for the accomplishment of these purposes it is today carrying out a number of important lines of work: --the american medical association has, since its organization in , labored constantly for the elevation of medical schools and of the standard of medical education. especially during the last five years it has, through its council on medical education, carried on a system of inspection of medical schools with the publication of reports thereon, which has materially raised the standard of medical education and has eliminated a considerable number of low-grade institutions. it is obvious that any increase in efficiency of the medical profession of the present or of the future cannot but result in increased economy of health. the association is glad to report that medical education in the united states is today upon a higher plane than ever before, and that the public is coming more and more to realize the value of a thorough scientific training for those who undertake the care of the sick. --through its publication, _the journal of the american medical association_, it is constantly laboring to improve the economic condition of the profession, recognizing as a general principle the fact that a poverty-stricken doctor is a dangerous doctor, both to the profession and to the community. the physician who is not able to procure proper instruments and drugs, or who through poverty cannot keep up with the progress of the profession or secure the necessary books and medical journals for his instruction, may and often does become an actual danger to his patients. proper efforts on the part of the profession for its own material well-being will result in a better class of physicians and consequently in better medical services to patients. --one of the most important activities of the association in the past five years has been the work of our chemical laboratory established for the investigation of pharmaceutical preparations offered to physicians for administration to patients, and for the analysis of so-called patent medicines sold directly to the public. this work has been carried on through the council on pharmacy and chemistry supported by the association, and has resulted in a much-needed reform in pharmaceutical products. many preparations which were carelessly, ignorantly, or fraudulently compounded, as well as many others which were sold under false representations, have been investigated and the results published to the medical profession. although much yet remains to be accomplished, the reform in pharmaceutical preparations has already resulted in an enormous amount of benefit to the people through the enlightenment and education of the profession on this important question. an investigation of "patent medicines" has also been carried on, and many of the preparations offered to the public have been shown, by chemical analysis, to be fraudulent; some are positively harmful, some are harmless but are not as represented; while extravagant, absurd, and impossible claims, false testimonials, and misleading advertisements, are common to many of these preparations. the association, by its work, has exposed many swindlers and fakirs, and as a result has earned their bitter antagonism. --in addition to investigating and exposing frauds in pharmaceutical preparations, the association has also established a bureau for the collection and preservation of material regarding medical frauds and fakes--including fraudulent "cures" for tuberculosis, cancer, paralysis, locomotor ataxia, and other diseases--which are advertised to the public through false representation, leading not only to an enormous loss to the people through money paid to the swindlers without any beneficial results, but also to great loss of life and economic loss through illness owing to the victims of these frauds being deprived of proper treatment. the association is cooperating with other organizations and with the proper authorities for the detection and punishment of these frauds and for the suppression of this most despicable kind of swindlers--those who prey upon the sick and, as a means of extorting a few dollars of blood money, take advantage of the natural desire of the sick or dying to recover health. it has been estimated by the national association for the prevention of tuberculosis that the money loss alone to the people of the united states through fake consumption cures amounts to $ , , annually. probably the loss to sufferers from cancer and other incurable diseases is as great. this robbery of the sick and helpless should no longer be tolerated in any civilized country. --the association has maintained a committee for the past four years on the prevention of ophthalmia neonatorum or blindness in infants due to gonorrheal infections, a preventable cause of a large percentage of existing blindness. the united states census for the blind and deaf taken in states that percent of the total number of blind lost their sight before the completion of the first year of life, and that in percent the cause of blindness was due to this form of infection. the committee of the association has been laboring for four years past, and is still at work, endeavoring to educate the public so as to secure proper legislation for the prevention of this form of blindness. --through its state and county branches, as well as through its official publications and its connection with state boards of health and other agencies, the association has been endeavoring to educate the public on the importance of better hygienic and sanitary conditions and laws, with special reference to pure food and water; proper ventilation of houses, stores, schools, factories, and work-shops; the prevention of avoidable accidents; the development of parks and playgrounds; and the avoidance of the evils of intemperance and excesses. realizing the importance of this work and the inadequacy of existing methods for bringing practical instruction on sanitary and hygienic questions before the public, the association at its last annual session established a council on health and public instruction, the special function of which shall be to place before the people, through the public press, magazines, pamphlets, public meetings, addresses, moving pictures, and every other available means, the best information obtainable as to the preservation of life and the avoidance of disease. the significance and importance of this action on the part of the organized medical profession of the country can hardly be overestimated. it means that physicians as a class have taken up seriously and systematically the prevention of disease and the education of the public as to how the elimination of avoidable diseases can be secured. with the cooperation of the newspapers and of the people many preventable diseases which have for centuries claimed a fixed toll of human life can be practically eliminated, and hundreds of thousands of lives saved each year. --while the association has labored for the enactment of any laws, either state or national, which were for the benefit of the public health, it stands particularly committed to legislation on three subjects. these are: (_a_) adequate state laws insuring purity of the food supply, (_b_) such state laws as will increase the efficiency of state boards of health and enable them to combat and suppress unnecessary and controllable diseases, and (_c_) such legislation as will provide an adequate plan for the collection and preservation of vital statistics, in order that proper data for the study and prevention of diseases may be available. it is not to the credit of this country that in half of our states human beings are born and die without any legal recognition of the fact, that not even as much attention is paid to the birth of a human infant as is given to the birth of a race-horse, a pedigreed bull, a blooded dog, or even an angora kitten. it is not to our credit as a civilized nation that human beings die and are buried without any legal recognition or record being made of the cause or manner of their death. it is in no sense to our credit that in many communities diphtheria, scarlet fever, and cerebro-spinal meningitis decimate the infant population yet no one knows, nor is it anyone's business to find out, how many deaths result from these epidemics, or how many persons die from various diseases in the course of a year. proper birth registration lies at the basis of social organization, and has been so recognized for years by european nations, yet it does not exist today in this country. vital statistics, showing the relative health, morbidity, and mortality of various sections, are of the utmost importance, since healthfulness is recognized as one of the best business assets which a town and county or a state can possess. yet through lack of proper laws we have today death registration alone in only half of the nation, and practically no registration of births whatever. this disgrace on our civilization, which is the wonder and amazement of european nations, should be at once removed by the passage and enforcement of uniform laws in all of the states. --the following resolutions were adopted by the house of delegates of the american medical association, june , : "_resolved_, that the principles of the owen bill, having for its object the creation of a national department of health, now pending in the senate, and similar bills introduced in the house by representatives simmons, creager, and hanna, be, and are hereby, heartily approved by this association, and the cordial thanks of the medical profession of the united states, officially represented, are hereby tendered to senator robert l. owen, irving fisher, and their co-workers for their able and unselfish efforts to conserve and promote the most important asset of the nation--the health and lives of its women, its children and its men--properly understood the greatest economic question now confronting our people. "the members of this association stand for pure food, pure drugs, better doctors, the promotion of cleaner and healthier homes, and cleaner living for individuals, for the state and for the nation. we believe this to be held as equally true by the reputable and informed physicians of all schools or systems of practice. "we welcome the opposition of the venal classes, long and profitably engaged in the manufacture of adulterated foods, habit-producing nostrums, and other impositions on the people, to the extent of hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and express our sympathy for the well-meaning men and women who have been misled and worked into hysterics by the monstrously wicked misrepresentations of a corrupt and noisy band of conspirators, who are being used as blind instruments to enable them to continue to defraud and debauch the american people. "medical science is advancing, especially on its life-saving side, with a rapidity unknown to any other branch of human knowledge. it is known of all men that our members in every community in the united states are unselfishly working day and night, instructing the people how to prevent tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and the other diseases from which physicians earn their livelihood. therefore, we welcome and will wear as a badge of honor the slanders of these unholy interests and their hirelings." * * * * * the american medical association, representing as it does the medical profession of the country, stands pledged and committed to any measure which will improve the public health and preserve the lives of our people. believing as it does that health and life is our greatest national asset, and that no nation is truly great whatever its material possessions that cannot boast of strong and healthy citizens, we ask the support and approval of the american public and of this congress in the efforts which are being made for the preservation of human life. [signed] j. t. priestly, des moines f. f. wesbrook, minneapolis a. r. mitchell, lincoln chas. s. sheldon, madison f. r. green, chicago _committee_ report of the american railway engineering and maintenance of way association in october, , the national conservation commission invited the american railway engineering and maintenance of way association, in connection with other technical bodies of this country, to be represented at the conference in washington, and to assist the national conservation commission with suggestions concerning advisable lines of inquiry, nature of report to be made, and possibilities of accomplishment on the part of the commission. acting upon this invitation, the board of directors of the association appointed a special committee to cooperate with the commission. this committee consisted of eight members of the association, selected from widely separated sections of the country. the association, through its committee, was represented at the joint conservation conference held in washington beginning december , ; and the committee has been keeping in touch with the conservation commission through mr pinchot and the secretary, mr thomas r. shipp. several meetings of the committee have been held, and in march, , the committee was addressed by dr joseph a. holmes, of the commission. in march, , the committee, through its chairman, requested mr pinchot to furnish, through cooperation with the forest service, suggestions as to the best methods to be pursued by the railroad companies for the prevention and control of forest fires, with statistics of the loss from such cause, and urged upon the commission the importance of endeavoring to effect reduction in the tariff on cross-ties and in lumber rates, in order to make it possible for the railroad companies to import ties and save thereby the home supply. the cooperation of the committee was offered with the forest-products laboratory at the university of wisconsin, or with any of the national or state organizations. on may , , an elaborate report was transmitted to the committee by the national conservation commission, through secretary shipp, containing valuable suggestions as to the possibilities of railroad companies assisting the work of conservation by thorough methods of prevention and control of forest fires and the cultivation of timber for railroad purposes, by the use of sawed instead of hewed ties, the use of treated timber and the extension of the supply of creosote, and other features, many relating to timber resources. this report was transmitted by the committee to the american railway engineering and maintenance of way association, published by the association, and distributed throughout the country in one of its bulletins. dealing directly, as it does, with those features of conservation that affect the railroad companies and their patrons, and having a circulation among railroad officers covering the united states, as well as large portions of canada and mexico, the results should be exceedingly beneficial to the cause of conservation. in march of this year the american railway engineering and maintenance of way association, recognizing the growing importance of the conservation movement, established the special committee as one of the standing committees of the association, at the same time largely increasing its personnel and bringing into membership a number of prominent railroad officers of this country and canada. the work of the committee has been divided into sub-committees for the purpose of specialization; these, with an outline for investigation are as follows: _no. --tree planting and general reforestation_ _a_--extent of existing forests considered in connection with increase of growth and consumption _b_--judicious selection of tree varieties for planting, and locality and soil conditions considered; possibility of value from growth on cut-over land _c_--methods of planting and cultivation, with cost of same, considering possibilities from cut-over lands _d_--anticipated results at maturity from trees so produced _e_--methods and costs of caring for and protecting existing forests _no. --coal and fuel-oil resources_ _a_--extent of existing supplies, considered in connection with consumption _b_--extent of waste in production _c_--economic consumption, giving consideration to practical use of by-products _no. --iron and steel resources_ _a_--supplies of raw material, considered in connection with consumption _b_--waste in production _c_--best methods of protecting finished products from destructive influences the committee will continue on the lines of investigation as shown, and holds itself in readiness to cooperate with the national conservation commission and its kindred and subsidiary organizations, as well as other national societies, for the furtherance of the great principles of conservation of the nation's resources. the committee: a. s. baldwin, chief engineer illinois central r. r. co. (_chairman_) moses burpee, chief engineer bangor and aroostook railroad w. a. bostwick, metallurgical engineer carnegie steel company e. f. busteed, general superintendent canadian pacific railway e. b. cushing, southern pacific company e. o. faulkner, manager tie and timber department, atchison, topeka and santa fe system w. f. h. finke, tie and timber agent southern railway j. w. kendrick, vice-president atchison, topeka and santa fe system a. l. kuehn, general superintendent american creosoting company g. a. mountain, chief engineer canadian railway commission wm. mcnab, principal asst. engineer grand trunk railway c. l. ransom, resident engineer chicago and northwestern railway [signed] a. s. baldwin _chairman_ report of the american railway master mechanics' association in behalf of the american railway master mechanics' association i wish to thank the officers of the national conservation congress for the courtesy shown our association by inviting our president, mr c. e. fuller, to attend this congress. mr fuller was unable to be present, and it was therefore my good fortune, as first vice-president, to take his place. as you no doubt are aware, the membership of the a. r. m. m. asso. is composed of the heads of the mechanical departments of practically every railroad in the united states and a large number from canada, and all of us are heartily in sympathy with the conservation movement that has had such wonderful growth during the five years it has been before the public. the enormous amount of lumber, coal, etc., that is used by the railways makes it imperative for them to use it as economically as possible, and great efforts are being made, by education, to use a pound or a ton of coal so that the greatest efficiency may be obtained therefrom. during the calendar year ending december , , the company i am connected with used , , tons of coal in its locomotives and power plants; we have a large force of instructors, including master mechanics, road foremen of engines, and traveling firemen who are continually riding the engines and giving the enginemen the benefit of their experience in the proper method of handling the locomotive so that steam will not be wasted, and that only the proper amount of coal will be shovelled into the firebox to produce the desired results. the use of feed-water heaters, superheaters, and compound locomotives has been hastened by the desire to get as much use out of the heat in the coal as possible; the feed-water heater and superheater promising the best field for economy in locomotive practice. the lignite fields of wyoming are being opened by using this kind of coal in locomotives that have been specially designed to burn it. heretofore it was necessary to haul coal from southern iowa to wyoming, a distance of about miles, which was a very wasteful operation; a good deal of this will be dispensed with by using lignite coal in the territory near which it is mined. so that a comparatively poor grade of coal can be made better, a washery, with a capacity of about tons per day has been erected and put in operation, which washes out a large percentage of the slate and other impurities in the coal; this means that a ton of washed coal has a greater heat value than the same amount of unwashed coal would have. the question of conserving the life of the ties used has had due consideration, and a treating plant has been in use for nearly six years which is expected to increase, by treatment, the life of ties about percent, besides enabling us to use an inferior kind of timber as ties, that before was considered impractical; the importance of thus prolonging the life of ties will be appreciated when i say that for the calendar year ending december , , we used , , ties. other wood was used in the same period as follows: piles, , ; posts, , ; lumber, , , board feet. it therefore makes it very necessary on account of the constantly increasing price of lumber to reduce the amount used and wasted. the use of concrete has enabled us to make things of that material, which a few years ago would have seemed impossible; floors in roundhouses and shops, which rapidly deteriorate (when made of wood), on account of moisture, are now made of concrete, which stands up admirably in that service. we are enormous consumers of oil, and the same care is exercised in its use as with coal and lumber--in fact, under present conditions, it is absolutely necessary that the greatest economy be instituted in the use of all kinds of material as a matter of self-preservation. during the time i have spent at your meetings, it has been quite a revelation to notice the intense interest that has been manifested by everybody on the subject of conservation; and as the representative of the american railway master mechanics' association i wish to assure you of our heartiest cooperation in the work. again i thank you for the opportunity of being present. [signed] h. t. bentley _first vice-president_ report of the american scenic and historic preservation society the suggestions of the committee of this society appointed to cooperate with the national conservation association must naturally be determined by the objects for which the society exists. it is the aim of the american scenic and historic preservation society to protect the interesting features of the natural landscape, to save from obliteration all historic places and objects, to erect suitable historical memorials where they are needed, to promote the beautification of cities and villages, and otherwise to develop in the people a regard for the beautiful in nature and for the historic in human institutions, cultivating this general field by means of free lectures, literature, prize competitions, correspondence, and other educational means as well as by using influence to have places and scenery preserved as parks and reservations. the interest of this society, therefore, lies not so much in the fields of economic production as in the less definite regions of historic appreciation and artistic sensitiveness to surroundings. the report of its committee on conservation will naturally not deal with the direct economic questions with which most other cooperating societies and organizations would naturally be concerned. the committee desires first to express its appreciation of the work of the national conservation association and to pledge itself to cooperate with that association in the furthering of its work. the committee holds itself in readiness to cooperate in the enterprises originating from the national conservation congress and the national conservation association so far as they are within the proper province of the american scenic and historic preservation society. the committee feels that the establishing of the national conservation commission, and its successor, the national conservation association, marks a distinct advance in utilizing for the good of all the people the resources which really belong to all the people, and which should be used for their welfare, rather than exploited for the interest and gain of a few persons or wasted and despoiled by the thoughtlessness of the people themselves. the committee holds that all natural resources should be protected and utilized in a scientific and unselfish way, and that the heritage of the earth should be passed over to our descendants with the least possible loss consistent with wise use in the present generation. its special interest in the question, however, lies in the belief that all this effort should harmonize with the preservation of the beauty of the natural landscape and with the conservation of all places and scenes of historic interest. it is too little appreciated that every natural object makes a two-fold appeal to the human mind: its appeal in the terms of its physical or material uses, and its appeal to our sense of beauty and of personal satisfaction. as the people progresses in civilization, the public mind becomes constantly more sensitive to the conditions in which we live, and the appeal to the spiritual satisfaction of life constantly becomes stronger. it is, therefore, of the very first importance that whatever is done by the national conservation association shall be executed in the feeling that not only shall the physical needs of life be met, but that the earth will constantly be made a more satisfactory place in which to live, and that the lessons of history must exercise an increasing influence. it is important that we not only save our forests in order that they may yield timber and conserve our water supplies, but also that they may adorn and dominate the landscape and contribute to the meaning of scenery. it is important that our coal supplies be not only conserved for their use in manufacture and the arts, but also that smoke does not vitiate the atmosphere and render it unhealthful, and discolor the objects in the landscape. it is of the greatest importance that water supplies be conserved by storage reservoirs and other means, but this conservation should be accomplished in such a way as not to menace health or offend the eye or destroy the beauty of contiguous landscape; the impounding of waters without regard to preserving natural water-falls, streams, and other scenery, is a mark of a commercial and selfish age, and is a procedure that cannot be tolerated in a highly developed society. it is important that regulations be enacted regarding the operation of steam roads through wooded districts not only that the timber may be saved, but also that the natural beauty of the landscape may be protected from fire and other forms of destruction. the fertility of the soil must be saved not only that products may be raised with which to feed and clothe the people, but also that the beauty of thrifty and productive farms may be saved to the landscape. the property-right in natural scenery is an asset to the people, and the best conservation of natural resources is impossible until this fact is recognized. on this point we call attention to the following paragraph in the report of the commission on country life: "in estimating our natural resources, we must not forget the value of scenery. this is a distinct asset, and it will be more recognized as time goes on. it will be impossible to develop a satisfactory country life without conserving all the beauty of landscape and developing the people to the point of appreciating it. in parts of the east a regular system of parking the open country of the entire state is already begun, constructing the roads, preserving the natural features, and developing the latent beauty in such a way that the whole country becomes part of one continuing landscape treatment. this in no way interferes with the agricultural utilization of the land, but rather increases it. the scenery is, in fact, capitalized, so that it adds to the property values and contributes to local patriotism and to the thrift of the commonwealth." it is especially important, in the opinion of this committee, that the national conservation congress and the national conservation association lend their influence to the establishment of reserves in all parts of the country for the preservation of natural features of great scenic interest, for the protection of birds, animals, and native plants, and also for the conservation of the lessons of history. the committee earnestly requests that in the program of the activities of the national association these questions may be given their due consideration. _what the american scenic and historic preservation society has accomplished_ having now stated its general position and its outlook on the subject of the conservation of our natural resources, the committee cites, by way of illustration, a few of the things that the society has accomplished. the american scenic and historic preservation society is the medium through which honorable wm. pryor letchworth, of portage, gave to the state of new york a superb tract of acres of land embracing the famous portage gorge of genesee river, including the three picturesque portage falls. this property, which cost the owner about half a million dollars, will pass into the official custody of the society, as trustees for the state of new york, on mr letchworth's decease. letchworth park, as it has been named by the legislature, possesses not only remarkable scenic beauty, but also high scientific and educational value. the geological strata here exposed have given the name to that extensive formation of rocks known as the portage group, and the vegetal and bird life of this reservation is remarkably varied and of the greatest interest to students of natural history. the society also secured the purchase by the state of new york, and is official custodian of, the famous watkins glen at the head of seneca lake. this property embraces about acres of land, and includes rock exposures that have received the attention of the united states geological survey and prominent geologists for many years. it presents one of the most remarkable examples of stream erosion in the eastern states. through the intercession of the society, the state of new york has purchased and committed to the care of the society acres of land on the promontory of stony point on the hudson river. here, in addition to an interesting exposure of primitive rocks and varied flora, are the historical associations of general anthony wayne's exploit during the revolutionary war, which evoked the admiration of the leading military men of america and europe. in like manner the state has purchased and committed to the society's care a small reservation on oneida lake embracing the remains of fort brewerton. ten years ago, governor roosevelt requested the society to represent the state of new york in concerted measures with the state of new jersey for the conservation of the palisades of the hudson. as the result of this initiative, the state of new york appropriated about $ , , the state of new jersey about $ , , and the honorary president of this society, mr j. p. morgan, gave $ , , and today the picturesque cliffs on the western side of the lower hudson for a distance of thirteen miles have been rescued from defacement and are in the care of the palisades interstate park commission. as a sequence to this work, and a result of the general sentiment developed in favor of scenic and historic preservation, mrs edward harriman recently gave to the state of new york , acres of land on the western side of the hudson for a state park, and she, together with mr morgan, mr john d. rockefeller, mrs sage, and others, have supplemented the gift with over $ , , of money. ten years ago, the society secured legislation by means of which a reservation of acres at the head of lake george was made by the state, for the purpose of preserving scenery and the ground made historic by events in the colonial and revolutionary wars. the long and difficult campaign for the preservation of niagara falls, in which the society had an honorable part, is familiar to all, and need not be repeated here. many other instances could be cited in different parts of the country, some connected directly with the society's work, and all the result of the general sentiment which has been developed during the past years in favor of conserving natural scenery and creating urban and extra-urban parks for the benefit of mankind. not the least important of these in their bearing on conditions of life are the city parks. in new york city, for example, the washington headquarters park and joseph rodman drake park were created at the direct instance of the society; and the famous central park, in the creation of which our late president andrew h. green, as controller of the park, was an important factor, has been protected against invasion by race tracks and many other artificial encroachments by the vigilance of the society. among the gifts of city parks by private individuals stimulated by the sentiment created by the society's work may be cited a series of parks embracing about acres and costing with their improvements a quarter of a million dollars or more presented in to the city of utica by mr thomas r. proctor, a trustee of the society. in , another member of the society, mr henry h. loomis, gave to the city of geneva (new york) about acres of woodland for a city park. in jamestown (new york) a park system has been developed largely under the influence of a trustee of this society. in colorado springs, within two years, there have been two remarkable expressions of this general sentiment which has now become so general that no one society can claim direct connection with its results. we refer to the series of completed parks, boulevards, and paths, embracing over acres of superb scenery, given to that city by general w. j. palmer; and the gift of the famous garden of the gods to the same city by the heirs of the late charles w. perkins, of iowa. these two gifts have placed colorado springs in possession of what is probably the most remarkable series of city parks of the kind in the united states. the sentiment created by this society has also expressed itself in the beautifying of many cities by the improvement of open spaces, public greens, and church yards, and by the erection of monuments and drinking fountains. of state parks as distinguished from city parks, those which have received the most attention from this society, outside of the five reservations under its immediate control and the palisades interstate park, have been the state park at niagara falls and the adirondack state park. the state reservation at niagara falls, comprising acres of land and acres of land under water, and including the american fall and half of the canadian fall, was created in ; and it was partly on account of the lessons taught by that reservation that the president of the niagara commission, the late honorable andrew h. green, ten years later founded the american scenic and historic preservation society. in the long campaign for the protection of niagara falls from the inordinate diversion of their waters and the disfigurement of their environment the society has taken a leading part. the adirondack park now comprises over , , acres. here, also, it has been necessary to maintain a constant campaign to protect the forests from destruction by fire, artificial flooding, and the illicit removal of timber. in the far southwest the efforts of the society have been directed chiefly to the extension of the grand canyon preserve, and the protection of the hetchhetchy valley--a part of yosemite national park--from what we believe to be an unnecessary project for flooding a part of the national park for the purpose of supplying water to san francisco. in conclusion, we may say of the movement at large for the preservation of remarkable works of nature for the instruction and enjoyment of the people, that it is older than the organized movement for the conservation of the material resources of the country; and if it cannot be said that one is the outgrowth of the other, it is true that both are necessarily closely inter-related and that each should proceed with full regard for the other's welfare. the conservation committee: l. h. bailey (_chairman_), ithaca charles m. dow, jamestown henry e. gregory, new york city edward hagaman hall, l.h.d., new york city samuel v. hoffman, new york city thomas p. kinsford, oswego geo. frederick kunz, ph.d., sc.d., new york city william p. letchworth, ll.d., portage thomas r. proctor, utica colonel henry w. sackett, new york city charles delamater vail, l.h.d., hobart college, geneva [signed] l. h. bailey, _chairman_ report of the association for the protection of the adirondacks the association for the protection of the adirondacks, with headquarters in new york city, was formed ten years ago before the word "conservation" as now used had acquired its present meaning. in the light of the present use of that word the object of this association might properly be expressed in the title "association for the conservation of the natural resources of the adirondacks." "the adirondacks," in a general way, is the term used to describe a region of about , square miles in northern new york, lying between lake champlain on the east, lake ontario on the west, saint lawrence river on the north, and the mohawk on the south. in the heart of this region the state has, by statute, delimited an area of about , , acres, or , square miles, under the title of the "adirondack park." within this more restricted area lie the principal mountains and the principal forests of the state. the state owns about one-half of the area of adirondack park, and its policy is progressively to acquire the remainder. the work of the association for the protection of the adirondacks for the past decade has been directed toward the preservation of the natural conditions and the material resources of adirondack park for the benefit of all the people of the state. during this period, what is now known as the movement for the conservation of natural resources has developed, although "conservation" in fact, if not under that name, was well begun in new york state a quarter-century ago when, in , the legislature established the forest preserve. in the state of new york, the natural resources, as that term is commonly understood, to the conserving of which public attention is now chiefly directed, are the forests and the waters. while the forests lie chiefly in the adirondacks, the streams and water-power sites lie chiefly outside of adirondack park; but in the protection of the adirondacks is involved the water question as well as the forest question, for three reasons: _first_, because many streams take their rise in the adirondacks; _second_, because of the intimate relation between the forest covering of water-sheds and stream-flow; and _third_, because there are a few possible reservoir sites situated on state lands in adirondack park which are coveted ardently by private interests strongly represented in the state legislature. the natural resources of the adirondacks, however, are not limited to the forests and streams. in a state embracing a tenth of the population of the united states, including a city embracing a twentieth of the population of the union--a state and a city in which the vocations of life are pursued under the highest nervous tension--the adirondacks possess natural resources for the conservation of human vitality (for the recuperation of health and the recreation of personal energy) which are no less important to the welfare and prosperity of our people than the cultivation of a timber supply or the development of hydraulic power. in addition to these considerations, two other elements enter into the question of conservation in the adirondacks: one is the preservation, for purposes of science and sportsmanship, of the natural wild species of animal life which have become extinct not only in other parts of new york, but also generally throughout the eastern states; the other is the preservation of the scenic beauty of this great mountain resort, which is seriously threatened in ways hereinafter to be mentioned. these latter considerations of health, recreation, and esthetic delight are not less entitled to recognition because they cannot be measured in terms of board feet or amperes convertible into dollars and cents. rest and recuperation are not the exclusive needs of men of large expenditure of brain and nerve force, nor is actual positive pleasure conceded to be the exclusive privilege of men of large means. the principle contained in the ancient command to do upon six days all that thou hast to do and to rest upon the seventh day is receiving a wider application in modern industrial conditions which constantly tend to shortened hours of labor on the six days and a larger recognition of every man's right to a measure of the possible joys as well as the inevitable labors of living. therefore, to conserve the adirondacks as a health and pleasure resort for the people at large as well as for a source of a timber supply and the fountain head of important water supplies is the object of our association. _forest conservation_ without entering into statistics of the relative area of forested and denuded lands in new york, or the relative rate of forest removal and forest growth which is so disproportionate as to threaten the complete denudation of the state within or years, we may mention something of what has been done in the way of practical forest conservation in the state, partly by the aid of this association. there are six principal ways in which the forests can be conserved: --by restriction of commercial lumbering --by prevention of timber stealing --by control of forest fires --by building good roads --by replanting --by prevention of flooding _ --commercial lumbering._ there appear to be three ways of reducing the danger of the denudation of private forest lands, namely, (_a_) to educate the owners as to the unwisdom of indiscriminate and wholesale cutting; (_b_) to convert private lands into state lands by purchase, and thus bring them under the protection of the constitution which forbids the cutting of trees on state land; and (_c_) the passage of laws offering inducements to, or imposing some restrictions on, private owners for the purpose of reducing their cut. of these three methods, good progress has been made with the first two; the third has been attempted only in a mild way and without effect. in the past dozen years, the private owners of forests in new york have awakened to a lively sense of the shortsightedness of the policy of cutting everything in sight. prior to about , roughly speaking, lumbermen as a usual thing took nothing less than two-log trees, leaving all that were under inches in diameter on the stump. but with the improvements in machinery and processes for the manufacture of wood pulp, not only was the range of cutting extended from poplar to spruce, hemlock, pine, and balsam, but the lumbermen also disregarded size limits and cut all the trees of certain species, large and small. this close cutting was disastrous in both its primary and secondary effects; it left no provision for future growth, and it thinned the forests so much in places that further damage was inflicted by wind and ice storms. in the closing years of the last century signs of an awakening to the dangers of this policy appeared. in the division of forestry of the united states department of agriculture issued circular entitled "practical assistance to farmers, lumbermen, and others in handling forest lands," conveying an offer to cooperate with owners in the preparation of working plans for forest lands which presented conditions favorable for systematic and conservative management. one of the first private owners to appreciate the wisdom of adopting the more conservative course recommended by the government was the late honorable william c. whitney, owner of a tract of , acres in hamilton county. prior to he had been cutting down to a diameter of inches three feet from the ground; but in , after securing expert advice, he raised the limit to inches, which was maintained until last spring, when lumbering on that preserve was finished. the result of this judicious policy has been that there is now a fine growth of young trees on the property, which in a few years will come to merchantable size. in the state of new york appropriated $ , to enable the forest, fish, and game commission to take advantage of the government offer to the extent of working out the theory of conservative forest management on a selected tract of land known as "township of the totten and crossfield purchase," embracing raquette lake in hamilton county. this could be only a theoretical demonstration as applied to state forest land, because (for very excellent reasons) the state adopted a constitutional amendment in which provides that--"the lands of the state now owned or hereafter acquired constituting the forest preserve as now fixed by law shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. they shall not be leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or private, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed or destroyed" (article vii, section ). but while only a demonstration on paper of a theory and not a demonstration in fact, the result of the practical study on the ground and the consequent publicity of the conclusions was of value, for it attracted the attention of lumbermen to the diameter limits below which it is wasteful in the long run to cut. township is a virgin forest, and taking into consideration all the conditions of that particular tract--character and density of growth, rate of reproduction, proximity to outlets, cost of logging roads, camps, and stream improvements--it was calculated that inches was the most advantageous minimum diameter to be used. in the following year a forest working plan for townships , , and was worked out with a similar result, namely, the recommendation of a -inch minimum limit. since that time conservative lumbering has been adopted on several private properties other than the whitney preserve. one of the most notable cases is that of the international paper company, the owner of very extensive woodlands, which for sometime past has not cut trees less than inches in diameter. it may be said with confidence, therefore, that the campaign of education in forest matters during the past ten years in this state, and the mathematical demonstration of the wisdom, from the practical business standpoint, of placing limitations on the cut, are bearing fruit. not only is the system of culling or selection tending to supersede wholesale tree-cutting of all sizes, but there is also reason to believe, from the latest available statistics, that in there was an actual change in favor of a reduced cut. in the past decade there has been material progress in forest conservation by the enlargement of the forest land holdings of the state. during this period, the state has purchased about half a million acres of forest land, and its forest preserve, on january , , embraced , , acres, of which , , were in the adirondack mountains and , were in the catskill mountains. much of the land acquired during the past decade has been lumbered land, and has contained little merchantable timber. the purchases have had the advantage, however, of increasing the area of wild land which, so long as the present forestry section of the state constitution shall stand, will at least have the chance to produce a new forest without risk of destruction. in pursuing the policy of building up its forest preserve, the state has shown in times past regrettable and costly procrastination, with the result that it has bought denuded land at twice the price at which it could have bought forested land. in this respect, the state still lags behind what many believe to be the rate at which the state's holdings should be increased. the signs of encouragement under this head are evident not only in the increased aggregate area of the state forest preserve, but also in the improved methods of administration. in times past, the forest administration has been so lax, not to characterize it more strongly, that while with one hand it was spending large sums in purchasing land, with the other it was parting with state property on flimsy pretexts, with the result that in some years, while purchases were being made, the state's holdings were actually decreasing instead of increasing. weak compromises, by which the state parted with its timber and retained the land, involved transactions in which the state apparently bought a second time land which it already owned; and the purchase of land at exorbitant prices from favored friends, were practices of the past, the abatement or abolition of which is not the least encouraging evidence of the conservation movement in this state. in legislation, little has been attempted in the way of offering inducements to lumbermen to restrict their cut, and nothing has been done in the way of compulsion. in and again in honorable roswell p. flower, then governor, in a message to the legislature recommended the enactment of a law which would provide for some reasonable compensation to such owners of private forests as should consent to cut no trees except under conditions imposed by the state; and a law was enacted embodying that idea, and it now forms section of the consolidated forest, fish and game law of . this section provides that the forest, fish and game commission may "contract that lands within the adirondack park not owned by the state shall, in consideration of exemption from taxation for state and county purposes, become public as part of the park in like manner as state lands. such a contract must provide against the removal of live timber except spruce, tamarack, or poplar, more than twelve inches in diameter three feet from the ground, and may reserve to the owner the right to clear not more than one acre within each hundred acres of land, and may contain such other reservations for occupancy as may be agreed upon. the approval of the commissioners of the land office must appear on any such contract by the certificate of their clerk. such contract shall be recorded in like manner as conveyances made by commissioners of the land office." this law has proved no inducement to forest owners, and has been ineffective in limiting their cuttings. our association has considered the subject of legislation providing for some discrimination in the taxation of forest lands which, by lowering the rate of taxation on immature forests, should offer an inducement to forest owners to allow their young timber to stand and grow; but as yet no satisfactory plan has been worked out. there is another phase of this question, however, which is attracting increasing attention in neighboring states, but which as yet has received little consideration in new york, namely, the compulsory restriction of timber cutting by legislation. two recent judicial decisions on the power of a state to regulate the use of the natural resources of private land bear with much force on this subject. the senate of maine requested the supreme court of that state to give, for its guidance, an opinion upon the following question: in order to promote the common welfare of the people of maine by preventing or diminishing injurious droughts and freshets, and by protecting, preserving, and maintaining the natural water supply of the springs, streams, ponds, and lakes of the land, and by preventing or diminishing injurious erosion of the land and the filling up of the rivers, ponds, and lakes, and as an efficient means necessary to this end, has the legislature power under the constitution, by public general law, to regulate or restrict the cutting or destruction of trees growing on wild or uncultivated land, by the owner thereof, without compensation therefor to such owner? with the exception of one justice, who declined to give an opinion for constitutional reasons, the opinion of the court was unanimously in the affirmative (opinion of the justices, me. ). the other decision referred to was in the case of hathorn vs. natural carbonic gas co., involving the use of the mineral waters at saratoga springs. the state of new york passed a law entitled "an act for the protection of the natural mineral springs of the state and to prevent waste and impairment of its natural mineral waters." the object of this law was to prevent the practice of artificially accelerating the natural flow of mineral waters for the purpose of extracting the carbonic acid gas for commercial uses. in the case in question, the court of appeals, with one dissenting voice, decided that the part of the statute in question was constitutional, and affirmed an order of the lower court restraining the defendant from doing what the law forbade. judge haight, the dissenting justice, differed from the majority, though not on the general proposition of the state's right to regulate the use of the springs; he based his objection on the ground that the statute in question did not attempt to regulate the production of the mineral waters in order that the public might enjoy the medicinal properties contained therein, but absolutely prohibited the pumping of carbonated waters throughout the state for the purpose of extracting carbonic acid gas. on the general question of the police powers and the conclusion that the legislature may by statute regulate the use of the waters, judge haight was in full accord with the majority. "surely," he said, "the state, under its police powers, may, in the interests of the people, protect such great gifts of nature to mankind." decisions like these would seem to be finger-boards pointing in the direction of compulsory conservation if an enlightened self-interest or public spirit on the part of private forest owners do not accomplish the same purpose. _ --timber stealing._ a very practical form of conservation in which this association has had a leading part has been the prevention of the unlawful removal of timber from state land. in reports reached us to the effect that in the face of the plain prohibition by the constitution private parties had made deliberate arrangements with contractors to lumber on state land, and that these operations were being carried on with the ample knowledge if not actual collusion of the then forest, fish and game commissioner and his subordinates. to verify these rumors, the association sent to the adirondacks in the dead of winter a representative, who, using snow-shoes when other modes of travel were impossible, penetrated into the depths of the forests, and found the lumber men in active operation on state lands. as the investigation progressed, it developed that between , , and , , board feet of timber had been removed unlawfully from state land during the preceding year, with the knowledge of the authorities whose duty it was to prevent it; and that it was done under a well-understood system of friendly cooperation by which the timber thieves, technically called "trespassers," were permitted to go through a form of confessing judgment and paying for the timber at a rate so low as to make the transactions profitable for the trespassers. not only was the mandatory legal penalty not exacted, but the so-called confessions of judgment were allowed to be made before country justices of the peace in amounts greatly exceeding their jurisdiction, and the timber was permitted to be removed from the state land in direct contravention of the constitution. from the perfection with which the system was then working it was apparent that the illicit practices were of long standing; but the exposure by this association resulted in the retirement from office of the forest, fish and game commissioner and the chief game protector, and the effectual stopping of this form of depredation. _ --forest fires._ substantial progress has also been made in the direction of conservation by fire prevention. the history of forest fires in this state may well prove of interest to other states having virgin forests. the most prolific source of forest fires in new york hitherto has been the steam locomotive. before the introduction of the steam railroad in the adirondacks, forest fires were infrequent and of small extent. with the construction of every new railroad using coal or wood for fuel, fires became more numerous. the danger from this direction was apparent years ago, but with an indifference for which a costly penalty has been paid, the state failed to find a remedy until within the past two years. in the tenth united states census, professor charles s. sargent, speaking of the forest fires in the united states during the year , said: "in the state of new york, the total area burned was, in acres, , ; and the value of the property destroyed, $ , , . of the causes to which these fires were attributed, cases were reported as originating from clearing land; cases as originating from sparks from locomotives; cases as originating from hunters." the "first annual report of the forest commission of the state of new york for the year " said: "the statistics show that in new york state at least, more forest fires are traced to railroads than to any other cause." three years later ( ) the state forest commission was so alarmed at the danger of fires from railroads that it formally declared the extension of railroads into the forests to be a calamity. it declared-- the extension of railways into the forest preserve proper cannot but be regarded as a calamity, and it is respectfully submitted that it would be most expedient to put a check upon their further encroachment by proper legislation. * * * a further extension of 'better means of transportation' by railway or steamboat threatens more danger to the forest than it promises benefit to the public. * * * complaints are loud against all railroads as being instrumental in scattering fire. these warnings are cited not so much as an argument against the introduction of railroads into forest lands--which can now be done with safety by the use of oil fuel or electric power--as to show how early was the realization of the danger of forest fires from railroads. about another railroad, the mohawk and malone, was built through the heart of the forests, and the testimony taken from old woodsmen in the fire investigation in showed that the building of the road was followed by the inevitable train of fire. the annual fire area in the adirondacks which had previously ranged from a few hundred acres up to square miles, increased to square miles in and to square miles in . in an area of square miles was burned over in the adirondacks alone. the maps of the large fires of and , showing the burned areas chiefly bordering the lines of railroads, were strong object lessons as to the principal source of the fires, however the railroad companies might attempt to disguise them. in public sentiment on this subject became aroused as never before. it was felt that whatever may have been the excuse for permitting the advent of coal-burning or wood-burning locomotives in the forests or more years ago, the further toleration of these fire-spreading agents was little short of criminal since electricity and oil fuel had been developed as practical agencies for developing power. in the year last mentioned, therefore, the forest, fish and game commissioner, backed up by the association for the protection of the adirondacks, applied to the public service commission for an order to compel the railroads running through the forest preserve to use oil-burning locomotives during the fire danger season. the railroads, as was to be expected, earnestly protested against the innovation; but the evidence was so convincingly against them that the public service commission ordered the use of oil fuel, and the installation of oil-burners has made an encouraging beginning. with the removal of this prolific cause of forest fires, the enforcement of salutary laws which had practically been a dead letter, the enactment of certain new laws providing for toplopping by lumbermen, etc, and the organization of an improved fire-fighting system by the forest, fish and game commission, it is believed that new york has taken a long step forward in the direction of conserving her forests from fire. _ --forest conservation by good roads._ the natural conditions in the adirondacks which for so many years made the mountain wilderness impregnable by civilization and to a great extent preserved that region from the denudation which has characterized the more thickly populated parts of the state have also retarded the development of road building. the road system of the adirondacks is therefore rudimentary. avenues of communication are comparatively few, and such as exist are not systematically connected and are generally of poor quality. until recently, this comparative impenetrability of the forests has doubtless tended toward their preservation; but conditions have changed to such a degree in recent years that the construction of good roads in the adirondacks seems to be desirable both for the greater enjoyment of the forest preserve as a health and pleasure resort and for the greater safety of the forests themselves. the increased appreciation of the forest preserve as a refuge in summer time, the great progress made in methods of highway travel, and the increased facility which good roads would afford for visiting the woods, are in themselves strong reasons for the extension of the present highway system in that region. when, to the foregoing considerations, are added the very practical value of roads as fire lanes and the advantage which they would afford in reaching forest fires, the argument for their construction becomes very strong. the attitude of this association with reference to the bearing of the constitution on the subject of roads in the forest preserve is that if good roads be necessary to keep the forest lands as "wild forest lands," in the words of the constitution, they should be allowed. an opinion of attorney general o'malley, given to the forest, fish and game commissioner on or about june , , however, has been interpreted to mean that no roads can be built on forest preserve land under the constitution. the question was raised by the superintendent of roads in franklin county, who asked permission to use stone from a ledge of rocks on neighboring state land for road purposes, promising not to cut away any timber or otherwise damage the land. in his opinion, the attorney general said in part, "it was clearly the intent of the framers of the constitution to preserve the lands constituting the forest preserve in their natural state, and therefore you have no authority to permit county officials to use the stone in the ledge referred to." in order, however, plainly to authorize the construction of highways in the adirondacks, our association caused two alternative propositions to be introduced in the legislature of . one was in the form of a bill providing that when validated by an amendment to the constitution it should be lawful to construct upon state lands in the forest preserve any of the state highways described in section of chapter of the laws of , and any of the county highways designated upon a map already prepared by the state engineer and surveyor, as provided by law and approved by the legislature by chapter of the laws of . the bill limited such highways to a width of rods, provided that they should be built and maintained under the supervision of the state highway commission, and imposed certain other conditions with reference to keeping the highways clean, removing inflammable material, the exclusion of railroads, the public inspection of maps of routes, etc. this bill, if enacted, was not to become effective until validated by an amendment to section of article vii of the constitution specifically referring to it by chapter number and year. after that bill was introduced it appeared that the same end might be attained, without becoming complicated with other questions relating to section of article vii, by amending section of the same article referring to highways. we therefore caused to be introduced a concurrent resolution to amend section of article vii of the constitution by inserting after the first sentence these words: "any county having part of the forest preserve therein shall receive its equitable apportionment of highways. highways within the forest preserve shall be opened or improved in the same manner as other highways in the state, except that they shall not be laid out to a greater width than feet or improved for a greater width than other highways in the state under similar conditions." but this proposition, so highly desired by the state highway commissioners, by the forest, fish and game commission, by the local communities in the adirondacks, and by the visitors to the adirondacks, was smothered in the ways and means committee through the opposition of the chairman, who was also the majority leader in the assembly, who is financially interested in water-storage, and who was evidently determined that no legislation beneficial to the adirondacks should be passed until the private interests which he represented had secured what they wanted in the way of permission to build storage reservoirs on state lands. for this reason, then, forest conservation by road building is at a standstill. _ --replanting of denuded areas._ constructive forest conservation, that is to say, the building up of new forests to take the place of those removed, has made some progress in new york, but not so rapid as could be wished. the fault has not been that of the forest, fish and game department, but of the legislature which has not furnished the means for the liberal prosecution of this work. the state has good nurseries and expert help, but lacks means to prosecute this branch of its work in the manner which its importance warrants. fortunately, private owners are taking up the subject of replanting effectively. the international paper company, for instance, has adopted the policy of tree-planting to renew its crops, and has a large nursery at randolph, vermont, from which it is distributing young plants to different sections of the country, including the adirondacks, where it owns and controls lands. within the limits of the adirondack park there are about , acres of state land which should be replanted, and in the catskill park about , acres. as to the cost of replanting: last year the forest, fish and game commission sold about , , trees to private parties for reforesting, and a careful analysis and average of their reports by the forest, fish and game commissioner indicate that reforesting cost these parties, including cost of stock, expressage, and labor, $ . an acre. we are informed that the state could reforest to advantage from , to , acres a year, and could supply material for planting at least , acres a year on private land. the importance of conservation by reforestation becomes apparent when one takes into consideration the relative rates of forest removal and forest reproduction. in the united states at large, we take from our forests each year, not counting the loss by fire, three times their yearly growth. we take cubic feet per acre for each cubic feet grown. we take cubic feet per capita, while germany uses cubic feet and france cubic feet. in the state of new york we are cutting away our trees five times as fast as they grow, and at the present rate of denudation, the state will be rendered practically barren of forest growth--except in the forest preserve--within years, unless there is a decided change in the proportion between tree-cutting and tree-planting. _ --tree destruction by flooding._ a source of tree destruction of no inconsiderable extent in the adirondacks in years gone by has been flooding by lumbermen's dams. the seriousness of this phase of the forest question has been greater than the area of destruction might indicate, for the reason that, in addition to the loss of the trees killed, unsightly and unhealthy conditions have been produced which have robbed certain regions of important elements of value. prior to the adoption of the constitutional amendment of , which prohibited the removal or destruction of timber upon the lands of the forest preserve, it had been the practice for nearly fifty years to build dams in the adirondack region either for the purpose of driving logs or in connection with canal feeders. those were days of prodigality, when the great north woods stood in almost their pristine condition, and when the lumbermen, in the presence of thousands of square miles of luxuriant forests, thought nothing of killing thousands of trees by drowning. almost every dam, therefore, that was built in the woods, set back the water upon forest land and killed trees. a dam built at forestport in and subsequently enlarged killed so many trees that the state had to appropriate thousands of dollars simply to remove the dead trunks. about the state built a dam at old forge on moose river, which is the outlet of the famous fulton chain of lakes, and subsequently built a dam at the outlet of the sixth lake of the chain. these dams raised the water in the various lakes from one to six feet, blighting the adjacent timber and producing a scene of desolation the vestiges of which are still evident after a lapse of thirty years. in and the state built a dam on beaver river at stillwater, raising the water feet. great areas of timber land for a distance of miles were flooded and the trees killed. the whole basin became filled with a tangle of drift-wood; great swamps were created beyond the flow line, springs were covered up and polluted, and the region rendered so unhealthy that land became unsalable. lovely lakes and ponds were submerged, and favorite camp-sites obliterated; feeding grounds for game were destroyed; and hunting in that vicinity was ruined. the magnitude of the damage may be judged from the fact that one of the adjacent property owners, mr wm. seward webb, sued the state for $ , damages. the claim was settled by the state buying from the claimant , acres, including the damaged area, for $ , . in the building of a dam was authorized on oswegatchie river at the mouth of cranberry lake; this dam created a reservoir of square miles flooding thousands of acres of land, destroying large quantities of timber, and creating unsightly and unsanitary conditions. about a dam was built on raquette river below the tupper lake outlet, with the result that soon the region between big tupper and little tupper lakes looked as if some terrible blight had fallen upon it. the scene in is thus described in the forest commission's report: the serious and extensive damage caused by the dam arrests the eye, presenting one of the saddest and most desolate pictures of destruction ever witnessed. no forest fire or devastating cyclone or ruthless axe of the charcoal burner ever wrought such ruin or left such a blasted scene as this. for ten miles the lands along the raquette river are covered with the white and ghastly skeletons of the noble trees which once made this spot a sylvan paradise. the bare trunks, bleached by the sun and storm, the gnarled roots and gray, scrawny limbs thrust sharply forth, recall to mind one of dore's pictures in the "inferno." the traveler gazes on it all with amazement, and then gives vent to the strongest words that a righteous indignation can supply. and this was once one of the most beautiful rivers in all the wilderness. illustrations of this sort could be multiplied to show the spirit of indifference to tree destruction in the past, and conditions which are now forbidden to be repeated upon state land. the constitutional amendment adopted in , prohibiting the destruction of trees in the forest preserve, was aimed at this evil among others, and has been one of the most valuable instruments in this state for forest conservation. _water conservation_ the subject of water conservation in the state of new york presents five different aspects: --the development of hydraulic or electric power, --the improvement of commercial waterways, --flood prevention, --sanitation, --domestic use. as might be expected in the largest manufacturing state in the union, there is in new york a very general appreciation of the importance of water storage for the development of power for industrial use; therefore, of the different phases of the water-storage question now pressed upon public notice, that one probably commands the most attention at the present time. _ --power development._ the association for the protection of the adirondacks is chiefly concerned with this question as it bears on the adirondacks; but owing to the fact that waters originating in part in the adirondacks flow in many cases to great distances beyond that region, it is impossible to treat the subject as one of purely localized interest. the question naturally arises, what proportion of importance is there between the question of water storage in the adirondacks and water storage in the state at large? on the face of things, the proportion seems small. the water-sheds of the whole state aggregate , , acres, while the state lands within the adirondack preserve with which we are chiefly concerned comprise only , , acres, or less than percent. a comparison of possible water-power developments shows a similar disproportion. the fourth annual report of the state water supply commission says that "with the complete utilization of all storage possibilities an eventual development amounting to not less than , , horsepower, exclusive of niagara and saint lawrence rivers, is possible for the entire state." if, to this estimate be added the existing , horsepower development at niagara falls, , horsepower as the resource of the lower niagara, and , horsepower for the saint lawrence, an eventual total of , , horsepower for the whole state does not seem to be beyond the range of possibility. from figures derived from the various sources it would appear that about - / percent of this development would require encroachment upon state land in the adirondack park, which is now forbidden by the constitution. when it is considered that attention has been concentrated for several years on the resources of the principal adirondack streams, while the possibilities of the rivers outside of the adirondacks have not yet been completely explored, there is much reason to believe that were the census of the hydraulic resources of the state complete it would be found that the ratio of the power possibilities of state forest lands to the power possibilities of the whole state is about the same as the ratio of the respective water-sheds, or about percent. there are two or three reasons, however, why the question of water storage in the adirondacks assumes an importance quite out of proportion to this ratio. one is the acknowledged fact that the majority leader of the larger house of the state legislature is personally interested in water-power developed from adirondack waters, and desires to have the constitution amended so that state lands may be flooded for the benefit of his own as well as other private corporations. this powerful member of the legislature has the sympathetic support of the speaker of the assembly, who stands sponsor for a power corporation on genesee river, on the banks of which the speaker lives. with the water-power interests thus strongly represented in the legislature, and with some of them casting covetous eyes on state land from which they are restrained only by the constitution, it is not surprising, perhaps, that in the public agitation of the water-storage question such statements should be made as that "the most important single obstacle to the carrying out by the state of this conservation policy" is "the necessity of amending the constitution" so as to permit the flooding of state land. now the attitude of this association--and this may be of interest to other states where the same question may arise--is as follows: at the outset, the association opposed amending the constitution for the purpose of permitting the flooding of state lands on two grounds; _first_, on account of the disastrous consequences to the forests which have invariably followed the construction of reservoirs in the past, and _second_, because it involved the principle of using public lands for private purposes without any guarantee of proportionate returns to the people whose domain was thus used. for several years the association, with the unquestionable support of public opinion, maintained that position for the reason that there appeared to be no safe way of compromise. during the past year, however, as the result of painstaking study of the problem by the new york board of trade and transportation and our association, a plan of legislation was evolved which it is believed may safely be adopted, and which, while conserving the public interests in the adirondacks, will permit a reasonable use of state land for the purpose desired by the water storage people. the first problem encountered in working out this plan was presented by the fact that if the constitution were amended generally so as to permit the flooding of state land, nobody could foretell to what extent or in what manner the lands might be flooded. it was therefore decided to prepare a law which should prescribe all the limitations and regulations in advance, and which should contain a provision that it should not become effective until validated by a constitutional amendment. then, after this law had been enacted, it was proposed to adopt an amendment to the constitution referring to the law specifically by chapter number and year, and permitting what was provided therein and nothing more. in pursuance of this plan, such a bill was drafted and introduced in the legislature at its session which closed in may, . it provided that storage reservoirs might be built upon state lands in certain specified water-sheds at certain specified points; that the flow-lines should be accurately surveyed and permanently monumented; that the total area of state land flooded should not exceed certain stated amounts--approximately percent of the total area of the forest preserve; that all trees, stumps, and other organic material should be removed from within the flow-line; and certain other conditions designed to protect the public interests in the construction, maintenance and use of the reservoirs and the water-power developed therefrom. the law was not to become effective until validated by an amendment to the constitution, and the constitutional amendment was to consist simply of an addition to the present section of article vii to the effect that "the provisions of this section may be modified as provided in chapter ---- of the laws of , but in no other respect whatever." by this plan it was believed that the safeguards would be erected in advance, and in voting for a constitutional amendment our citizens would know exactly what they were voting for. the bill, however, was defeated through the influence of the majority leader of the assembly, and instead a concurrent resolution to amend the constitution, proposed by him, passed the first of three requisite stages of adoption. the provisions of this amendment and the utterances of its author clearly reveal the attitude of the water-power interests represented by him, and present an issue of importance to every state in which the question of conservation under state auspices may arise. this issue, in brief, is whether, after the state has granted the use of land already belonging to the people and has acquired additional land in the exercise of its power of eminent domain; after it has furnished the capital for building storage reservoirs and for managing them when built, the profits shall accrue only to the private individuals or corporations benefited thereby, or whether the state itself shall derive a reasonable revenue from its lands and reservoirs for the relief of taxation, or for public improvements, to the consequent benefit of all the people? the constitutional amendment proposed by the water-power interests in the last legislature provides only that the actual cost of the water storage shall be paid by the private beneficiaries, leaving to them all of the profits and advantages; and the author of the amendment publicly declared himself as opposed to the periodical regulation of charges for the use of water thus conserved, or to paying anything more than the bare cost of construction and administration. on the other hand, the proposition of this association left the question of state revenue open for future legislation without any inflexible constitutional provision one way or the other. there the matter rests at the present moment. the issue remains to be fought out in the future, possibly in the legislature of , possibly at the polls the following november, and possibly later. at present the signs of the times are not encouraging to the belief that private interests will be given such valuable privileges without some reasonable return to the people from whom they are derived. _ --improvement of waterways._ water conservation for the improvement of commercial waterways has little connection with the adirondacks. the principal waterway improvement now in progress in new york state is the enlargement of erie canal at a cost of $ , , . very little of the water for the canal comes from the adirondacks, and the construction of reservoirs on state forest land is not required to augment the supply. _ --flood prevention._ the three principal streams within the borders of new york--the genesee, mohawk, and hudson--are subject at times to disastrous floods. these are in no small part the result of human folly. in the first place, the indiscriminate denudation of forests of the greater part of the state has removed one of the most valuable natural regulators; and it is the universal complaint that such denudation has resulted in the spasmodic flow of streams which are dry or low at one season and raging torrents at another. in other cases, as for instance at rochester, on the genesee, the river has been obstructed by bridge piers unscientifically placed, which obstruct the flow of water and cause great damage. the hudson, from the confluence of the mohawk to albany, is also subject to floods, and as the headwaters of the hudson rise in the adirondacks it has been argued by those who desire to have storage reservoirs for power purposes in adirondack park that the constitution should be amended so as to permit the building of reservoirs in the adirondacks to control the floods of the hudson. as a matter of fact, the statistics furnished by competent engineers show that percent of the floods at troy and albany are due to waters which do not originate in the adirondacks, but can be controlled along the mohawk; and that of the remaining percent over half (say percent) are due to water originating along the hudson and its tributaries outside of adirondack park. so far, then, as flood control is concerned, it has little bearing on conservation in the adirondacks. _ --sanitation._ except as a subterfuge, there is practically no connection between the subject of water conservation in the adirondacks and sanitation. the hudson is so polluted from troy southward with sewage that the fish have been almost exterminated, and the industry of fishing on the hudson which thrived within the memory of living men has almost disappeared. sanitation of the hudson from the head of navigation southward cannot be effected by storage reservoirs in the adirondacks. the only prominence which the question of sanitation ever had in connection with water conservation in the adirondacks was from five to ten years ago when persons who desired to build storage reservoirs on state lands, for the purpose of driving logs or developing power, used the plea of "public health and safety" in petitions presented to the river improvement commission to disguise their real purpose. _ --domestic use._ there are those who think that in time the adirondacks may be drawn upon for municipal water supplies for cities in the hudson valley. the extent to which new york city has reached out for her water supply during the past years would seem to lend color to such prophecies. in new york city introduced a water supply from the croton reservoir miles distant; at the present time it is building a great reservoir in the catskill mountains miles distant. many people believe that eventually new york will be forced to go to the adirondacks miles away for a pure water supply, and that the resources of the adirondacks should be preserved against that need and should not now be parted with for private use when there is the possibility that in the future they will be required for all the multifarious uses of human existence in the great metropolis. water conservation in the adirondacks for municipal use, therefore, is important chiefly with reference to the future. _scientific forestry on state lands_ as persons unfamiliar with the history of the forest preserve in new york may wonder why the state does not utilize commercially the timber growing on state lands, it may not be inappropriate to conclude this report with a brief explanation of the reasons for the iron-clad restriction placed by the constitution on the removal of state timber. the reason for this restriction is two-fold: first, it is not apparent that there are enough trained foresters yet available or that the problem of the conservative handling of state forest lands for commercial purposes is yet sufficiently understood to warrant the state in undertaking scientific forestry; and second, the citizens of the state are not confident that if the removal of timber were permitted, the people at large would derive any benefit from it. _ --lack of practical men._ at a public meeting held in the american museum of natural history in new york under the auspices of this association on april , , professor henry s. graves, then director of the school of forestry at yale university and now chief forester of the united states, speaking on the subject of scientific forestry on the state lands in new york, said: "it would be exceedingly difficult at the present time to secure trained men with adequate experience to carry out a plan of successful forestry." that situation with respect to the dearth of practical foresters still exists and promises to continue until relieved either by the more general teaching of forestry in colleges and schools or by a more general training in the field, or both. another drawback is the lack of systematic study and knowledge of our forest preserve. with the exception of township and adjacent territory, and possibly a few other tracts, little has been done in the direction of examining the land to determine its value, the amount and character of timber, the growth of trees, and the local conditions which are factors in the profitable management of the forests; nor has anything yet been done toward preparing a comprehensive plan for the whole preserve. a concrete illustration of the impracticability of scientific forestry under existing conditions is afforded by the experimental forest in franklin county established under an act of . the hopes entertained in regard to this experiment were well set forth in the message of governor black to the legislature on january , . the governor pictured in graphic terms the desirability of enlarging the forest preserve as a health resort and a conserver of the northern new york water-sheds, and referred to the rapid inroads made upon the forests by commercial lumbering, and to the protection which the constitution extended to state lands. he argued that, properly managed, the state forests might be made productive of a substantial revenue; but, he said, "the constitution should not be amended until the people have learned prudence instead of waste, and have equipped themselves with knowledge and experience adequate to the care of this great domain. our conditions here are not like those in germany and france, but in what respects they differ, few can tell." then, with a view to the acquisition of this necessary knowledge and experience, he recommended the following plan: there are students here who have made a careful study of the forests, their capacities and their needs. the number of these gentlemen i understand to be increasing, for through the labors of several of our citizens of great generosity and public spirit, the subject has been studied and discussed, and upon the general ignorance relating to this question there is beginning to be some light. the knowledge necessary to the proper treatment of the woods must come largely through experiment. it cannot be had unless the means of acquiring it are provided. i believe the means can be secured best through the purchase by the state of a tract of ground covered with those trees which are to be the subject of experiment. such a tract the state could set apart and gain from it the knowledge which will enable it by and by to deal with the millions of acres it has already and will in the meantime acquire. the time will come when the state will sell timber to the lumbermen, spruce to the pulp mills, reap a large revenue for itself and still retain the woods, open to the public, protecting the sources of water, growing and yielding under intelligent cultivation. the management of this experiment should not be subject to the vicissitudes of politics. it should be placed in charge of the regents, or of the trustees of cornell university, or of some similar body not subject to political change. the state should pay such reasonable sum as may be needed to administer the plan. reports should be made to the governor and the legislature annually of progress and results. the income from the tract so acquired should be paid to the state and the land itself should become the absolute property of the state, and a part of the forest preserve at the expiration of a period named. i believe such a plan would be soon, if not at once, self-sustaining, for the trees now ready to be cut would produce immediate revenue, and such revenue would be repeated at short intervals. the benefits could be hardly overstated, and in this direction, as in many others, the wisdom of new york entering upon a comparatively new and untried field would be finally approved. following governor black's recommendation, the legislature of enacted a law pursuant to which , acres of forest land in townships and in franklin county were purchased for $ , and conveyed to cornell university for the purposes of a "new york state college of forestry;" and in the years to sums aggregating $ , more were appropriated for salaries of the director and instructors in the college of forestry and for working capital for improving, maintaining, and administering the college forest. with a view to making the forest self-sustaining, the university on may , , made a fifteen-year contract with the brooklyn cooperage company by which it agreed to deliver to the company annually one-fifteenth of the wood and timber standing in the college forest. the details of this contract and the litigation which ensued are not essential to the present statement, but the results of the experiment were highly important; instead of yielding the state a revenue, all of the moneys appropriated were used up except about $ , of working capital, while about , acres of forest land were denuded and only about acres replanted. the results were so obviously disappointing that in governor odell vetoed the appropriation of $ , for that year, and since then no appropriation for the college of forestry has been made except one of $ , in , exclusively for the purpose of removing the underbrush and for replanting trees. soon thereafter (june, ) cornell university discontinued the college of forestry. in his message to the legislature in , governor odell, speaking of the school of forestry, said: "its operations had for their object the substitution of valuable growths for so-called worthless timber, but this has resulted in the practical destruction of all trees upon the lands where the experiment was in progress. no compensating benefits seem possible to the present generation. the preservation of the forests is primarily for the protection of the water supply, and this is not possible through the denudation of the lands. therefore this school failed of its object, as understood by its founders--a failure which was not due, however, to the work of the university, which followed out the letter and the spirit of the law." mr justice chester, of the supreme court of the state of new york, in his opinion rendered in june, , in the case of the people of the state of new york against the brooklyn cooperage company and cornell university,[ ] said that there could be no net revenues from the college forest, as the expenses exceeded the income. he also pointed out how, under the operation of the contract, practically the entire college forest would be denuded for the benefit of a private industry and not for the promotion of education in forestry. "there is proof in the case," he said, "that acres were sufficient for conducting experiments on the 'clear cutting' system of forestry as distinguished from the 'selection' system." notwithstanding the failure of the forest experiment, governor odell in hoped that the forest school would be continued: "because," he said in his message, "with the lapse of years, a proper understanding of scientific forestry will become more and more a necessity." what governor odell said remains true. but what is needed is not only scientific knowledge but also knowledge of local conditions. a high order of theoretical knowledge was brought to the management of the cornell tract, but the experiment failed for lack of knowledge of local conditions and business prudence. _ --lack of confidence that benefits will accrue._ the second obstacle to the introduction of scientific forestry upon state lands is the lack of confidence that if the forest products were utilized any benefit would accrue to the people generally. the feeling may be understood in the light of the history of the forest preserve. in its beginnings, this was not a deliberately planned institution, but grew up in haphazard fashion, without forethought or system. once the state owned nearly all the land within the adirondack wilderness, but prior to there were no laws which prevented the state from parting with its lands, and large areas were sold to private parties for almost a song--lands which the state has gradually been buying back ever since at constantly increasing prices.[ ] in a message to the legislature in , governor cornell called attention to the shortsightedness of this policy, in these words: by far the greater quantity of land within the adirondack wilderness proper belongs to the state. individual ownership is now confined to a few hundred thousand acres. heretofore it has been the practice of the state, with questionable policy, to sell its wild lands at nominal prices to private parties, who have gone on, in most cases, and cut off the marketable timber where accessible, and then abandoned to the state the clearings, worthless generally for agricultural purposes, thereby escaping the payment of taxes. forest fires have followed and raged with destructive fury, denuding the mountains and checking the flow of springs and streams that supply the navigable waters to the north and the hudson river to the southward. furthermore, many of the lakes, the natural reservoirs of the mountain courses, have been damaged by dams and overflow, so that the shores of those lying within the working timber limits present the effects of irreparable injury. in a law was enacted which prohibited the sale of any state lands in the counties of clinton, essex, franklin, fulton, hamilton, herkimer, lewis, saratoga, saint lawrence, and warren, and by subsequent acts the counties of oneida, washington, delaware, greene, sullivan, and ulster were added to the list. prior to that year the state had recovered about , acres of land which the owners had permitted to be sold for taxes--patches of land scattered here and there without any system or studied continuity. after the passage of the laws forbidding the sale of state lands the value of the lands began rapidly to appreciate, and private parties, desiring to acquire it endeavored to circumvent the law prohibiting the sale by attacking the state's tax titles. with the aid of pliant state officials, these efforts in many cases were successful, the state either parting entirely with its title or, retaining the title to the soil, parting with the title to the timber. in this manner the state lost about , acres of land. a report made to the comptroller in showed that these cancellations were made with disregard of the law and the rights of the state. as the result of all the tax-sale transactions of the state, it has acquired about one-half of its present forest-preserve holdings in the adirondacks. the other half was acquired by purchase. the first actual appropriation of money for the purchase of land for forest purposes was $ , appropriated in during grover cleveland's administration. in the forest preserve was established by law, and since then the building up of the forest preserve has proceeded with more intelligence and upon a more definite policy. up to the present time, the state has spent about $ , , on the purchase of lands for the adirondack and catskill forests. while the forest preserve was thus being evolved, other evils than the illegal cancellation of state titles developed. while the statutes--subject to change at any time at the wish of the legislature--forbade the sale of state lands, there was nothing, to prevent the sale of the timber on the land. in governor flower, whose friendship for the forests was unquestionable, recommended to the legislature that "the state could acquire considerable revenue by granting permission to fell trees above a certain diameter on state land." but the policy thus proposed with the best of intentions was a disastrous one, for the reason that with the reckless lumbering methods employed the lumbermen would destroy fifty trees while taking out one.[ ] by , with the juggling in titles to state lands, the destruction of trees in lumbering operations, the killing of trees by flooding, the creation of unsanitary conditions by dams, and the general misuse and mismanagement of the state forests, conditions became intolerable, and the constitutional convention of that year adopted the stringent section before quoted (page ). every word was carefully weighed, and designed to meet some phase of the situation. the necessity was so obvious that it was adopted without a dissenting vote by the convention, and subsequently was overwhelmingly ratified by the people. since then, persistent efforts have been made by the lumber and water-power interests to impair this safeguard, but without success. we do not believe that the time has yet come to relax this section of the constitution with respect to timber cutting; for while it is true that during the past few years conditions in the management of the adirondack forest preserve have greatly improved and the public confidence in the possibility of the proper utilization of our forests had begun to take root, it is an unfortunate fact that that confidence has received a severe set-back by the course of legislation in with reference to the use of adirondack waters. when the controlling powers in the legislature are hostile to the idea that the state shall derive a revenue from its waters, it cannot be said that the auspices are propitious for the state's deriving any revenue from its timber. we do not believe that the people of the state are prepared to part with their forests upon the terms upon which they are asked to build storage reservoirs and furnish water-power to private interests, that is to say, for the bare original cost of the timber. it therefore appears to be the part of wisdom for the people to defer scientific forestry on state lands while the present attitude of the legislative mind continues, and to preserve their forests intact until the prospect of deriving a revenue from them is better. [signed] warren higley, _first vice-president_ edward hagaman hall, _secretary_ report of the carriage builders' national association soon after the conference of governors called by president roosevelt in the white house, may - , , the carriage builders' national association appointed a committee on national conservation, which has submitted two reports adopted by the association. the last report, recently adopted, covers the items in which the carriage trade is most vitally interested. in addition to data taken from the report of the national conservation commission, it summarizes the work and opinion of our association on the important subject of conservation. a late census report showed in its lumber cut a total of , , board feet of hickory as compared with , , , feet for all hardwoods. this would indicate that the hardwood forest at present contains a little over percent of hickory; probably as much as percent for the entire hardwood area. the forest of the eastern half of kentucky has been estimated recently to contain about percent of hickory. the lumber cut does not show the large quantity of hickory which is cut and shipped in the form of round billets, rived or split spoke stock, etc. this form of material is frequently culled from the forest ahead of the lumberman, and tends to cause the low percentage of hickory in the lumber cut before noted. including this with the , , feet of hickory lumber would raise the total cut to at least , , feet per year. add to this hickory cut for fuel in localities with no transportation facilities, and the heart, pecky, and other portions wasted, and the total soon amounts to , , feet. if hickory forms percent of this forest (much of which is culled already for hickory--the lumber cut alone showing a little over percent) there would be a total stand of , , , feet of hickory. much of this is mature timber, with an annual growth of less than - / percent. hence there may be figured a growth of less than , , feet against a consumption of about , , feet. though this is to some extent speculation, when supported by increasing difficulty in getting hickory timber and with rising prices, it is nevertheless sufficient to indicate that a thorough study of the growth of hickory is one of the important steps in attempting to plan relief measures. the report made to president roosevelt was enthusiastically received, and an organization was formed to bring about a campaign of education among the people of the united states on national conservation of our resources. in turning over the office of president to william h. taft, theodore roosevelt recommended to him strongly the work of national conservation, and reports through the press have shown that he is very enthusiastic and is taking a live interest, notwithstanding some of the newspaper reports regarding the controversy between some of the members connected with the association, which, in our judgment, has been a splendid advertisement for the cause. we are also pleased to report that the national hickory association of the united states (whose membership is composed largely of the members of our association) have taken a great interest in this work of conservation, and have taken an active interest with the national conservation commission appointed by president roosevelt in making up their report. they also held an enthusiastic meeting in cincinnati last april, passing resolutions to work toward the end of having a permanent national conservation committee appointed by the government, and also in the various states. your committee recommended that all our members take an active interest and cooperate with the members of the national hickory association and the national conservation association, and offered the following resolutions which were adopted: "_resolved_, that we heartily endorse the work of the national hickory association and assure them of our hearty cooperation. "_resolved_, that we favor the maintenance of conservation commissions in every state, to the end that each commonwealth may be aided and guided in making the best use of those abundant resources with which it has been blessed. "_resolved_, that we also especially urge on the congress of the united states the high desirability of maintaining a national commission on the conservation of the resources of the country, empowered to cooperate with state commissions, to the end that every sovereign commonwealth and every section of the country may attain the high degree of prosperity and the sureness of perpetuity naturally arising in the abundant resources and the vigor and intelligence and patriotism of our people. "_resolved_, that a joint committee be appointed by our chairman, to consist of six members of our association, whose duty it shall be to work in harmony with the state and national commissions and the national hickory association." respectfully submitted, [signed] h. rattermann, cincinnati, ohio _chairman_ j. d. dort, flint, mich. daniel t. wilson, new york city e. w. m. bailey, amesbury, mass. george h. babcock, watertown, n. y. william a. snyder, piqua, ohio w. p. champney, cleveland, ohio d. m. parry, indianapolis, ind. maurice connolly, dubuque, iowa lucius gregory, chase city, va. _committee_ report of the delaware state federation of women's clubs as the one delegate from the state of delaware, i feel that i must speak a word for her. delaware has an enviable list of great names, from cæsar rodney, whose memorable ride turned the scale in the vote for liberty, with thomas f. bayard and john clayton, down to the present time, when we have a man like judge george gray to be proud of. the delaware state federation of women's clubs, which i represent, goes hand in hand with the women of sister states in this great movement. our legislature has appointed a state forester--and the granges and our agricultural college at newark are working to improve our soil and crops, while our women are supplementing their efforts wherever they can. we are cooperating with the red cross in the fight against the white plague, and have succeeded in having a child labor law enacted, and are now working for a juvenile court. we have offered prizes to the public school children for the best essay on waterways; and we are beautifying our waterfronts and securing pure water. we have no great forests, but we raise the best peaches in the world and are rapidly coming to the front in apple culture, and we are going to keep up a ceaseless educational campaign, so that our people will realize the importance of conserving our natural resources. i consider it a great honor and privilege to represent the women of delaware at this great congress, and thank you for your attention. [signed] cornelia r. holliday report of the farmers' union of america it is a matter of great regret to me that the national convention of the farmers' union occurs almost simultaneously with the gathering of the second national conservation congress. i regard the question of conservation as one of the very greatest now before this country. i regard gifford pinchot as the father of the conservation idea in america. i believe that future generations will credit his activity in awakening the american conscience to almost criminal extravagance in exploiting our resources as one of the most practical displays of patriotism in national history. i trust that the deliberations at saint paul will be attended by much progress and profit. let me beg also that while you concentrate on resources, you do not overlook the conserving of that greatest of our resources--the american farmer. i regard his uplift of first importance to the present welfare and destiny of america. i shall hope that such steps as you take during the current session will be of far-reaching influence in directing the vital thought of an aroused people. [signed] c. s. barrett _president_ report of the general federation of women's clubs it gives me great pleasure to report to this congress the work undertaken and accomplished by the waterway committee of the general federation of women's clubs during the sixteen months of its existence. every state federation in the union was asked to assist in this movement by adding to their standing committees one called waterways; and ready responses came from many states. the work as outlined for each state falls under three departments, civic, educational, and publicity. in this way the work can be systematized and developed along the lines to meet the needs of each locality. we have been told that our country stands foremost in waterway richness; with its many splendid rivers and great lakes, as it is well nigh girdled by oceans. plans are rapidly maturing for the celebration of the short route to the east through panama in . from the dawn of history to the present time, civilization has followed the water routes; all the great cities are on, or in close proximity to, waterways. the date of the rapid reaching of railroads in every direction throughout our land was the signal for the neglect and non-use of water highways, until in the majority of cases the river fronts have been absorbed for railroad ways. there are now scarcely any good terminal facilities to be found for water transportation. to meet the problems confronting us in regard to our waterways, women resolved that there must be instituted a campaign for education, such an education that the awakening resulting therefrom shall become a force of tremendous energy. man must know that in giving development to a stream it must be improved from its source to its mouth, and for its every use. storage dams should be built at every available point. the fish raised in the reservoirs thereby created will soon pay for the outlay in construction. it is estimated that by fully conserving the waters and utilizing the water-power developed in connection with storage and other works, three times as much land can be reclaimed in the western half of the united states. such dams will decrease largely the annual damage from flood waters, with which we are so familiar, as well as regulate a more even stream-flow. a larger and purer water supply will be assured; water for irrigation in the more accessible regions will be afforded. an improved stream provides cheaper power for manufacturing purposes, stimulates various industries, and thereby furnishes larger fields of employment. if the limitation of streams as self-clarifiers were better understood there would be such protection given to them and their water-sheds that there would be no more refuse, laden with typhoid, cholera and inflammatory intestinal germs given to them, especially if the great distances these germs travel and their tenacity of life were better known. the developed stream affords water for transportation when the stream is navigable, which affects both the producer and consumer from the remotest section to the heart of the nation. it costs no more to develop the average stream than to build a railroad of the same mileage, but the improved stream carries times as much freight per year as can be carried by rails, and at one-sixth the cost. some percent of the total freight commodities originating on the traffic lines in the united states consist of heavy raw materials, the staple productions of the farms, the forests, the mines, and the live stock ranges of the interior. these are commodities where economy of transportation is a prime essential to production. the even stream-flow which comes from improvement gives moisture to the agricultural lands along the banks; the trees at the head waters and outlining its meanderings testify to the interdependence of forests and streams. an improved river system as outlined in these suggestions also necessitates drainage of all lowlands, save those suffering from the encroachments of the sea. at a glance we readily see that the development of waterways affects the nation at large and man individually in a more vital way than any other of the natural resources. the idea is generally prevalent that the development of our nation's waterways is pre-eminently man's work, and that there is nothing for the women to do. yet there is not one phase of waterway development that does not directly or indirectly touch every home of this nation. who is there, then, to say that it is not the duty of every woman as mother and citizen to inform herself thoroughly on so vital a subject that she may be among the most active educators in this great campaign? in almost every great sociological and reform movement, women have been the originators; and today they are the dynamic forces which destroy the evils that are opposing civic righteousness. shall the homemaker refuse to protect her household from one of the greatest sources of physical infection which follows in the wake of modern indifference to pure water supply? purity in water means health, impurity means sickness and death. every year millions of dollars are spent by americans in travel in the older countries. we read beautiful descriptions of voyages down the rhine. along the thames the victorian embankment adds glory to london. the little river seine with its many canals, making paris, though inland, one of the greatest ports in france, remains beautiful throughout its length; flowing through the center of paris, it has been kept decorative, banked with foliage and flowers, skirted by long lines of graceful masonry, with pleasure promenades, bordered on either side with beautiful statuary and sparkling fountains. does it not fill your heart with a sense of mortification to compare these water fronts of european cities with the water fronts of our american cities? public beauty excites that love of country which is at the very foundation of true patriotism. let us resolve within ourselves to reverse these conditions, and bend our energies to improve and make of our waterways the most beautiful in the world. reports from the states now in active work along these lines have shown great returns from the efforts put forth. we have federated clubs showing definite results of their undertakings. in one state a splendid reference library on "waterways" has been established; in another a great warfare was waged for pure drinking-water, the women going to the polls and making a fight for the sand filtration plan. sixty-three clubs have reported making sanitary and parking water fronts as their especial work with splendid results. prizes have been offered in many states to school children for the best essay on "inland waterways": over children in one state alone entered this contest. placing conservation in the public schools has been accomplished in several states; in every state great work is being done along educational lines, with the hearty cooperation and support of the superintendents and teachers. this subject has been given place on programs of state, district, and local meetings of various organizations; and many speakers have addressed schools and club assemblies. the press has been most courteous in every state in its cooperation with this committee; different articles have been published in all the prominent newspapers throughout the states. the waterway committee of the general federation have sent delegates to waterway conventions in a number of states. there is scarcely a club in the federation that has not given at least one number on its program, if not the entire program, to the conservation of our natural resources. fifty thousand circulars and pamphlets have been sent from the chairman's office and distributed throughout the states by the different chairmen. the great demand for waterway literature from every quarter convinces us of the growing interest in this subject. thus we stand as strong allies in this great conservation movement. [signed] mrs j. d. wilkinson, _chairman waterways committee_ (reported through mrs g. b. sneath) report of the lakes to gulf deep waterway association i bring greetings from three different bodies allied in this work: the business men's league of saint louis; the missouri waterways commission, of which i have the honor to be chairman; and the lakes to the gulf deep waterway association, of which i have the honor to be president. on behalf of governor hadley and the state of missouri, i wish to extend to this congress the assurance that missouri is for the policy of conservation of natural resources in the way in which it is understood by most of you; that is to say, she is for the economical development of her resources in the highest degree, and at the same time for the preservation of the rights of the people in the control of those resources. some time ago, following out the policy advocated by mr gifford pinchot and by president roosevelt, governor hadley appointed the missouri waterways commission to examine and report upon the water resources of the state. in this department, missouri is richer than many other states in the union. located in the center of the most fertile valley in america, she possesses two great rivers; the mississippi, forming her entire eastern border, and the missouri, exactly bisecting the state, connecting her two great principal cities. in addition to these there come down out of the ozark mountain region a series of smaller navigable rivers, the osage, the gasconade, the big piney, the current, the black, the white, and many smaller streams flowing into the great rivers and enabling boats to reach almost every part of the interior. in the course of time all of these rivers will be very much improved, and many of them made navigable. the sources of these streams are in the ozarks, and they are fed by the most beautiful springs which are known to exist in america; one of these springs, named after our governor, discharges, it is estimated, , , gallons a day, even in the driest season--an amount equal to the entire consumption of a city of probably , inhabitants. there are many more which flow from , , to , , gallons a day. you cannot go a quarter of a mile along any valley road in the ozark region without coming upon a spring oozing out of the limestone or sandstone cliffs, and adding its limpid waters to some brook or river. the crest of the ozarks is , feet above the sea, more than , feet above saint louis, and all of these streams flow pell-mell down the hills to their navigable portions; so that the state has a very large amount of latent water-power. it is well to remember that the ozarks remain forested, and that it is in the shelter of these forests that the waters gather to form the abundant springs and streams. the missouri waterways commission has employed one of the best-known hydraulic engineers in america, mr m. l. holman, to make a preliminary survey of these and other resources; and on this he is now engaged. when this has been completed, a report will be made to governor hadley embodying a policy for the control and development of this power, and this policy, it is expected, will be recommended to the next state legislature by the governor with the view of securing legislation conserving at the same time the water resources and the people's rights in them. this is not, of course, the full extent of the waterway commission's work, for we have also to consider the use of the streams for navigation, a department in which the state is as much interested as the federal government, although we are not allowed to tamper with the navigable rivers themselves. we are also to consider the reclamation of swamp lands, the preservation of soil, and the general use of water, which is today the nation's greatest asset. in the last congress an appropriation of $ , , was made for missouri river, which means as much to missouri as a part of its conservation work as it does to the cities and the nation for its value to navigation. both the missouri and the mississippi are great devourers of soil. the missouri will tear out an entire farm and ruin a farmer in an incredibly short space of time when it is changing its bed. the application of revetment to the banks and the contraction system in the effort, certain of success, to obtain a -foot permanent channel between kansas city and saint louis, will return to the farmer, it is estimated, more than the entire outlay in additional capital wealth represented by the rich accretions of the missouri bottoms. the securing of this appropriation and the very large appropriations also for the mississippi fronting the state and leading from this beautiful city of saint paul all the way down to the gulf of mexico, has been largely stimulated by the work and activity of the lakes to the gulf deep water association; and many of you will remember how much that organization has had to do with the doctrines of conservation. this reference to the lakes to the gulf deep waterway association may be pardoned, when it is remembered that this association has always stood for the complete utilization of the waterways for all purposes for which they are available, and that it has thereby become one of the most effective conservation agencies in the world. it may interest you to know that we of the lakes to the gulf waterway association played an historic part in the early history of conservation in this country. in october, , the association chartered a fleet of steamers and carried president theodore roosevelt from saint louis to memphis to show a president of the united states for the first time the necessity of improving the inland waters. one of the steamboats which made that trip was the general mckenzie, and the passengers on the mckenzie were the inland waterways commission appointed by president roosevelt, upon the suggestion of our association, to examine the question in hand. one of the members of this commission was gifford pinchot; another was mr frederick h. newell, head of the reclamation service; another was dr w j mcgee, secretary of the commission; another was herbert knox smith, head of the bureau of corporations; and another was alexander mckenzie, always a friend of the waterways. on the steamer alton, escorting the president, were the governors of states; and still another vessel bore about members of the federal congress. the second night out from saint louis was a stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, and the vessels made their way with great difficulty through the intricate channel of point pleasant reached from new madrid southward. on that memorable night gifford pinchot and his associates in the inland waterways commission came aboard the steamer alton, and on the deck of that steamboat, protected from the storm by canvas awnings, held the historic meeting that gave birth to two great movements: conservation, and the house of governors. as a result of that meeting, where the policy of conservation was fully laid out, president roosevelt announced in his speech at the lakes to the gulf convention in memphis that he would call a meeting of the governors, and did call this memorable meeting of may - , , at which public sanction was given to the conservation movement, and the house of governors became an established organization. we have always felt that the place of the lakes to the gulf deep waterway association in bringing about this meeting is one of the proudest achievements that the association has on its records, and will live in history. the lakes to the gulf deep waterway association has always felt the necessity of allying itself with the upper mississippi river improvement association, the ohio river improvement association, and the general conservation movement for the best development of all river channels. the mississippi today has the largest storage reservoirs in the world, although they are almost equaled now by the storage in the salt river irrigation project in arizona. but because of the cutting and burning of the forests, and the failure of the government to complete the reservoirs, the mississippi this year has been unnavigable above saint louis through the whole summer season. nothing but conservation of the head-waters--and it must be remembered that adequate attention should be given to the forests about the head-waters--can prevent a recurrence of that circumstance in the next drought. the reservoirs which are now established should be supplemented by others on the wisconsin, the flambeau, the chippewa, the minnesota, and all the other streams flowing into the upper river, and some scheme for conserving the waters of the ohio, although it will come at great expense; and the tennessee also must be dammed and reservoired, both to withhold the floods and to conserve the water for dry-season navigation. costly as these reservoir systems may be, it will require but little figuring to show that, again in league with the conservation policy and a light charge by the government on the water-power in these navigable streams, they will return interest and sinking fund on the cost of the improvements. here in saint paul, and between here and minneapolis, we have an illustration of the great lack of proper development in the series of falls and rapids--not half of which is properly utilized--on which the government has spent much money and for which the people receive no return whatever. but the lakes to the gulf channel is a magnificent illustration of conservation. it requires, as in illinois, the cutting of miles of canal through rock and riverbed, and the building of dams which will develop , horsepower; and the use of the money from that power now going to waste will pay the entire cost of this expensive rock channel (this in itself is an ideal example of conservation). in the mississippi reach between grafton and cairo, which is to be deepened to feet or more by three large dams, will be developed more than , horsepower, and this in return will also pay for the cost of the work and a surplus besides. below cairo the improvement of the river contemplates--and the present appropriations are carrying this out--the revetment of the banks in every bend, which will save to the nation in soil an amount every year which it is impossible to calculate, but which is worth many millions of dollars; will allow the building of levees close to the waterfront without danger of their caving in, and so reclaim possibly square miles of additional land in the delta; and will make a permanent and safe drainage system for the great swamps along the river, from which a few years' crops will more than pay for the entire lakes to the gulf deep waterway. swamp drainage, storage to prevent floods, storage to provide water-power and better channels, the establishment of suitable banks and good levees--all of these are a part of the conservation policy that was launched on that memorable trip on which theodore roosevelt inspected the mississippi. [signed] w. k. kavanaugh, _president_ report of the league of american sportsmen the committee appointed by the league of american sportsmen to make recommendations to the national conservation congress beg leave to report briefly as follows: _federal laws_ the united states should enact laws so that in addition to those now in force, the following will be possible: the protection by the united states government of migratory birds and fishes. the setting apart and protection of game refuges, parks, and breeding grounds, and scientifically caring for same. some of these should be established in the forest reserves now existing that are suitable for this purpose, and competent caretakers put in charge. the wichita reserve is a good example to follow. marsh lands and water should not be forgotten, as all bird and forest life must be considered. trained government game-keepers or experts should be provided, that can be furnished upon applications received from state or private game parks--same to be paid by the applicant served. _the states_ the states should each and all set apart game refuges and parks and care for them practically. competent care-takers and trained game-keepers should be put in charge. these game refuges for wild life should be distributed as generally in each state and cover as wide an area as possible; for it must not be forgotten that the song and insectivorous birds are as important to save and find refuges for, as is what is usually denominated "game." the game laws of the states should be as nearly the same as geographical and local conditions will permit. the enforcement of the game, bird, and fish laws, together with the care of game preserves, should be divorced from politics. at present in most of the states the selection of a game warden is based not upon training or fitness for the position, but is the reward of party or personal political fealty. should by chance the appointee show adaptability and really study the subject of game protection, by the time his education is well under way and he has become valuable to the state, the political wheel turns again and some one else is to be rewarded. so-called game laws to be enforcible must be practical and have the sympathy of the people. therefore, the work of education must be continued and amplified by both the state and federal powers to show, _first_, the value of bird life to the farmer and all the people as insect and weed-seed destroyers; _second_, the value of game and fish as food products; _third_, their value as an incentive to a life out-of-doors and health; _fourth_, the value to the state because of the tourist and sportsmen's travel attracted thereby (statistics on this subject should be gathered by both federal and state authorities, and given constant and wide publicity); _fifth_, the non-resident hunting and fishing license should be made as nearly alike in the several states as possible, and a reasonable amount of fish or game allowed to be taken home by the terms of said license; _sixth_, resident licenses issued by the state should furnish funds for carrying on the work of game, bird, and fish protection and propagation, and we recommend a careful consideration of this subject by those states that have not already such laws in force; and _seventh_, the so-called spring shooting of water-fowl should be stopped. all of which is respectfully submitted: [signed] wm. b. mershon, saginaw, mich. _chairman_ jno. f. lacey, oskaloosa, iowa f. sharoir, stamford, conn. j. h. mcdermott, morgantown, w. va. j. adams brown, new york city r. d. evans, washington, d. c. _conservation committee_ report of the national board of fire underwriters since the commencement of the conservation movement, the national board of fire underwriters has been deeply interested in the governmental and associational activities aiming to foster and protect the natural resources with which our country has been so bountifully blessed. our representation at the washington conferences of indicated our sympathy with the propositions presented, and the continuance of our conservation committee is a manifestation that we have been and are ever ready to cooperate in a furtherance of those principles which you as an organization stand pledged to advance. we believe that unless there is an intelligent development and utilization of our natural resources, the comfort, prosperity, and happiness of future generations will be seriously impaired, and we are in hearty accord with all legislation having for its object the preservation from destruction of nature's gifts and man's handiwork. the address which this committee presented to the joint conservation conference sought to set forth some very important facts concerning the excessive fire waste which persists in the united states and suggested remedial measures, which we still firmly believe, if adopted, would materially diminish the grievous loss of life and the tremendous and unnecessary destruction of created values by fire. we therefore beg to reaffirm those suggestions at this time, as follows: the present fire waste in this country is an unnecessary national calamity, and to reduce it it is essential-- _first_--that the public should be brought to understand that property destroyed by fire is gone forever, and is not replaced by the distribution of insurance, which is a tax collected for the purpose. _second_--that the states severally adopt and enforce a building code which shall require a high type of safe construction, essentially following the code of the national board of fire underwriters. _third_--that municipalities adopt ordinances governing the use and keeping of explosives, especially inflammable commodities, and other special hazards, such as electric wiring, the storing of refuse, waste, packing materials, etc. in buildings, yards, or areaways, and see to the enforcement of such ordinances. _fourth_--that the states severally establish and support the office of fire marshal, and confer on the fire marshal by law the right to examine under oath and enter premises and to make arrests, making it the duty of such officer to examine into the cause and origin of all fires, and when crime has been committed requiring the facts to be submitted to the grand jury or proper indicting body. _fifth_--that in all cities there be a paid, well disciplined, non-political fire department adequately equipped with modern apparatus. _sixth_--that an adequate water system with proper distribution and pressure be installed and maintained. in the larger cities, a separate high pressure water system for fire extinguishment is an absolute necessity, to diminish the extreme imminence of general conflagrations. the publication by the u. s. geological survey of bulletin , known as "the fire tax and waste of structural materials in the united states," is worthy of high commendation, and we believe a wider distribution of this pamphlet and the preparation and dissemination annually of similar information, will materially serve to awaken the public to a realization of the enormous values in utilized resources which are destroyed by fire beyond recall, and cause action to be taken by states, municipalities and individuals to enact such laws and regulations as will make for the exercise of greater care and forethought in the preservation of materials produced from our natural resources. it must be evident that the conservation of our forests and mines will fail of its full results if the utilized products therefrom are to continue to be unnecessarily destroyed by fire to a degree that is a national disgrace. we share the pride of all our fellow citizens in the remarkable growth and prosperity of this country, in the extensive building operations, and in the increased commercial values; but, if we would conserve those natural resources which have been the principal foundations of our success, we submit that it is equally important to adopt and enforce such measures as will lessen the steadily and rapidly increasing fire waste of our utilized resources. the national board of fire underwriters has for years devoted its energies and activities principally to the reduction of the fire waste and the safeguarding of life and property. standard rules and lists of hazardous and protective devices and materials are distributed free of charge, the results of the tests conducted at the underwriters' laboratories are made known to anyone evincing an interest, a model building code, prepared under the advice of experts in construction and engineering, has been urged for adoption in every municipality of the country, and as a result our advice and cooperation are sought in the revision and adoption of the building laws of our cities. under the immediate direction of our committee on fire prevention, expert engineers investigate the fire-fighting facilities and structural conditions of our cities, submitting copies of the reports, with suggestions for improvements, to the officials of the city visited and to the press; the expense of the work of this committee alone, for the last six years, has amounted to $ , . we have persistently endeavored to influence the introduction of improved and safe methods of building construction, to encourage the adoption of better fire protective measures, to secure efficient organization and equipment of fire departments with adequate and improved water systems, and to have adopted rules regulating the storage and handling of explosives and inflammable products; and we contend that successful efforts along these lines will very largely lessen the fire waste of the utilized resources, the destruction of which at the rate of over $ , , annually ( - , inclusive) is one of the greatest drains upon our natural resources and one which can be corrected, if the nation, state, city, and citizen will cooperate along the lines indicated above. the destruction of our utilized resources by fire is increasing at such a rapid rate that the subject of its reduction should be very prominent in the minds of the people. losses recorded for the past thirty-five years, not including forests, mine or marine fires, total the enormous sum of $ , , , . unrecorded losses, if obtainable, would materially increase these figures. these annual fire losses run from $ , , in to $ , , in . in , a normal year, our recorded losses were $ , , , and our estimated fire defense cost $ , , , or a total amount equaling about percent of the value of the new buildings erected that year in the entire country. in , also a normal year, our ash-heap cost $ , , , and the relations of defense-cost and fire loss to new buildings remained about the same. our contributions to fire that year were over $ , , each day of the year, a sum equal to the operating expenses of our government, including those of our army and navy, for the same year; and in we gave to fire over $ , , , more than was spent in that year for the same governmental functions. no one organization can effect the needed reform. since the population has increased percent, while the fire loss for the same period increased percent. the national fire protection association and the national credit men's association are spreading the doctrine of reform in the recklessness with which our utilized resources are destroyed by fire. each organization should be encouraged. membership is open to all in the former, and in the latter to the business men and merchants of our cities. the work, however, is carried on without state or municipal cooperation and therein lies the chief reason of delayed success. if the office of state fire marshal were created by every commonwealth, and that official and his deputies were given power to enforce good fire-prevention laws, to investigate and if necessary prosecute cases of arson or criminal carelessness in the starting or spreading of fires, to ascertain the cause of every fire, and by the distribution of literature to educate the citizen to the need of care and forethought in the protection of his property, a distinct conserving of the utilized resources in that state would follow. if our municipalities will enact and enforce improved and safe methods of building construction and cause the removal or reconstruction of existing structures which constitute, because of their construction, a menace to adjoining properties, our cities will be freer from the imminent conflagration which now threatens them. eliminate defective chimney flues, unprotected external and internal openings, excessive areas, weak walls, and combustible roofs; prohibit the storage of rubbish, and demand the safe use and handling of dangerous inflammable liquids and oils; regulate the use of explosives; and the destruction of our values, created from the natural resources but enriched many-fold by human toil, industry, and skill, will be materially diminished. if the citizens of a community, as members of their local civic bodies and boards of trade, will create in such organizations a committee on fire prevention, whose duty it shall be to study the subject and awaken among their associates a realization of individual and communal responsibility, and if our boards of education will emulate the action of the state of ohio in prescribing primary education of the school children as to the chemistry of fire, the causes of fires in our homes and how to guard against them, and how to extinguish incipient fires or hold them in check while awaiting the response of the fire department, a preparation will be made in that community which will check the constantly increasing fire waste. and so while this congress discusses and formulates policies for the conservation of our natural resources, it should, at least, as representing the official, professional, commercial, and industrial life of the nation, distinctly and emphatically advocate such regulation as will preserve those resources which are the embodiment of the thrift and industry of our people--the utilized resources--from unnecessary and wasteful destruction by fire. respectfully submitted, [signed] a. w. damon, springfield _chairman_ geo. w. babb, new york c. g. smith, new york w. n. kremer, new york r. m. bissell, hartford r. dale benson, philadelphia r. emory warfield, new york _committee_ report of the national board of trade in response to the invitation of this congress, the national board of trade, which participated in the conference of governors at the white house in , is permitted to take part in its deliberations. the national board of trade, as its name implies, is national in character, and is composed of a large number of boards of trade, chambers of commerce, and other organized bodies representing many of the large commercial and industrial centers of the entire united states. it was organized years ago for the purpose indicated in the following declaration: "the national board of trade was formed for the purpose of promoting the efficiency and extending the usefulness of the various commercial and manufacturing organizations of the united states of america, securing unity and harmony of action with reference to business usages and laws, and especially the proper consideration of and concentration of opinion upon questions affecting the financial, commercial, and industrial interests of the country at large, and to provide a concerted action regarding national legislative measures and governmental department affairs." it will be seen from this declaration that the object of the national board of trade is to attempt to harmonize public opinion on national questions. about years ago it became impressed with the wanton wastefulness and public neglect of our national forests, and resolutions were adopted inviting public attention to and legislation for the preservation and conservation of the timber resources of the united states. in a very short time it became evident there were other important questions involved in the regulating of forests, primarily the grave necessity of creating forest reserves and protecting them from depreciation by government control and administration; and the establishment of a bureau of forestry was advocated. the national board of trade was also a pioneer in advocating the reclamation of arid lands and the drainage of swamp and overflow lands and practical reforestation, and adopted resolutions urging legislation to this end. the activity of the national board of trade in promoting the measures it has advocated consists of the printing and the distribution of many thousands of copies of reports of committees and resolutions, as well as large numbers of its annual report in permanent book form, which of itself constitutes a valuable commercial library of reference; these publications have been sent to members of congress and the officials of the national government, to state officials and members of state legislatures, and to mayors and other officials of many cities having more than ordinary interest in public-welfare questions. the dissemination of this information has required a great deal of time and the expenditure of no small sum of money, and the national board of trade and its constituent members, together with all others interested in its work, appreciate the patriotism and generosity of its president, who has done so much to carry on its work. the commercial interests of the entire country are thoroughly alive to the merits of, and are earnestly championing, the cause of conservation of all our natural resources. economic use that does not destroy, but protects and fosters reproduction where reproduction is possible, prolongs and perpetuates the industries dependent on natural products for their maintenance; and these compose the larger part of all our manufactures. the national board of trade in its years of existence has been the exponent of the principles upon which alone permanent trade and commerce can be maintained and extended--high standards of commercial honor and integrity, and doing unto others as we would that others should do unto us. there are in this congress, on the invitation of its officers, delegates from national organizations which have contributed greatly to various phases of conservation problems, which are now crystallizing into a national policy. so far as we are informed, it appears from the report of the committee on credentials and other committees that have been announced that no representation has been given these delegates to enable them to participate in the active work of the congress. we, as delegates from the national board of trade, representing the commercial interests of the entire country, recommend that in case invitations are extended to national organizations to be represented at future congresses that suitable provision be made for their representatives to participate in the practical work. the national board of trade rejoices with this congress in the advanced thought that the campaign of education has created in the minds of the american people, and it also feels great satisfaction in that it has for many years earnestly advocated and been instrumental in the adoption of the wise, beneficent, and economic measures that are in the interest of not only the present generation but of generations yet unborn. respectfully submitted on behalf of the national board of trade, [signed] a. t. anderson, cleveland william s. harvey, philadelphia (_chairman committee on forestry, irrigation, and conservation_) report of the national business league of america i deeply appreciate the privilege, and am not insensible of the honor, of briefly addressing this great congress of representative men in every field of human endeavor, who are met to plan for the conservation of our natural resources. first, i wish to emphasize the fact that the patriotic men who are planning conservation today are mostly not the men who will execute. the men who are to conserve our lands and waters and minerals, and perpetuate our forests, are now running around in knickerbockers, or being rocked in the cradles of the nation. they and their children and their children's children, down along the line of centuries, will carry out the vital precepts and principles of this great conservation movement--this timely warning cry against careless national extravagance, this imperative codicil to the declaration of independence. there are some resources we cannot restore, but may conserve or substitute. as one door closes another opens. coal, iron, copper, and other products of the mine, when once consumed cannot be reproduced; but for all time the tree may be perpetuated--the friendly, faithful, useful tree that conserves the rain-drop with its treasures of light, heat, power, and life-giving properties for vegetation, and fills the world with inspiring beauty. the restoration and preservation of our forests, then, and an adequate policy of accomplishment, become of the weightiest importance. in this connection i beg to suggest the american farmer boy. it is proposed to organize the farmer boys and young men of this country into a great national body, to be known as the tree planters of america. the plan involves instruction and actual practice in tree-planting and tree-culture, with suitable prizes for excellence and results. it aims to permanently check the wastefulness of go-as-you-please forestry now evident from every car-window in this country. in brief, without entering into details, the suggestion seeks to organize all farmer boys from twelve to twenty years of age as tree planters, in every commonwealth, county, and township of the united states; with the cooperation of the forest service at washington, governors of states, and the proper official heads of town and county governments. the plan in general unifies the individual, the state, and the nation, into one vast organized body for the practical reforestation of the country. the system once made operative will become an inseparable part of the life of the farmer of the future. it is kindred to the splendid educational and philanthropic work of mr bernard n. baker, the ideal and actual president of this congress; and i hope it may merit your approval as _one_ practical means to the end we all are aiming at. the time for talking has gone by. the time for action has come. therefore let us begin at the foundation and organize the coming men who are to do the actual work of reforestation. the mind of the american boy is plastic. the impressions he receives remain to the end. teach him, then, to practice those things that make for permanent universal betterment; for with his brain and brawn he determines the destiny of this great american republic. [signed] austin a. burnham _general secretary_ report of the missouri valley river improvement association when the missouri valley river improvement association was organized in august, , practically no one in the valley thought the missouri navigable in its then unimproved state, and only a few people believed it worth while to solicit government aid in trying to make it navigable. the general impression seemed to be that the missouri had outlived its usefulness. compare this feeling with the sentiment that exists today! the people of kansas city and the entire missouri valley have become awakened to the great possibilities of this river as a means of cheap transportation. through the efforts of our association and the people of the valley, the congress of the united states in made an appropriation of $ , for the improvement of the missouri; in congress made another appropriation of $ , , and in june, , still another of $ , , for improving the river from its mouth to fort benton. so great is the interest in the missouri river project that the people of kansas city recently raised a fund of over $ , , for the purpose of navigating the missouri with modern and up-to-date boats especially adapted to this river. experiments are now being made with different kinds of boats to determine which are the most practical. with the opening of navigation in the spring of , we hope to have a modern boat line in operation between kansas city and saint louis. in addition to raising $ , , for navigating the missouri, kansas city at her bond election in the spring of this year, voted $ , bonds for the improvement of her harbor. the sentiment in favor of improving and navigating the missouri was brought about to a great extent by some of the business men of kansas city who in organized a boat-line company to maintain regular steamboat service between kansas city and saint louis to demonstrate that the river was navigable even in its then unimproved state. this company, not waiting to build boats suited to the river, bought two old boats, and in and operated them with great success, carrying freight between kansas city and saint louis at two-thirds of the railroad rates. when the people of kansas city saw what could be done with the antiquated type of boat, they became interested in navigating the river with first-class steel-hull boats, built especially for the missouri--which resulted in the organization of the million dollar boat line. a movement is now under way to organize a company for the purpose of building a large dam across one of missouri's streams within miles of kansas city. it is proposed to put up a plant that will generate , horsepower; this to be transmitted to kansas city and sold to the consumers at the low price of one cent per kilowatt-hour. the largest consumers of electric power in kansas city are now paying - / cents and the smaller consumers from to cents per kilowatt-hour. the proposition has the appearance of being feasible, and if it can be carried through it means a great deal to the future growth of the missouri valley, as it will furnish cheap power to prospective manufactories. respectfully submitted, [signed] jerome twichell _chairman_ report of the upper mississippi river improvement association how to conserve the natural resources of every land has become an absorbing theme throughout the civilized world, and i think no one is more alert in reference thereto than the inhabitants of the former northwest territory and of the louisiana purchase. they are of the salt of the earth; yet notwithstanding their power they have permitted constant encroachments by predatory greed and covetousness, mostly by the corporate monopoly rampant world-wide in this twentieth century. it is thus fitting that this magnificent assembly of progressive public-spirited delegates from nearly every avocation and locality should here gather at the head of navigation of the great flowing stream that drains the most fertile valley on this mundane sphere. viewing these fertile lands, it would be most natural to expect that the rights of this people declared by the law of congress enacted in should be deemed wise, especially this provision: _article iv._ the navigable waters leading into the mississippi and saint lawrence, and the carrying places between the same, shall be common highways and forever free as well to the inhabitants of the said territory as to the citizens of the united states and those of any other states that may be admitted into the confederacy, without any tax impost or duty therefor. the association that i represent has labored during the past decade to so awaken public sentiment in this valley that a six-foot channel will be provided from here to the gulf; and i bring the message to you that we have aided much in arousing the people from lethargy to a forceful activity for cheaper transportation by inland waterway improvement, which has been assured to this upper river within the succeeding dozen years by congressional action at the last session. the problem to be grappled with now is how best to regain for the public the landings for boats, which we find have been obtained and are largely held by private interests antagonistic to thorough use of the stream. generally for a mere pittance the landing rights, to the thread of the stream, passed to private ownership needlessly and without any consideration to the original grantor, the government. each city and village along the river is now up and doing, as is this city of saint paul in providing a municipal wharf at enormous expense; they are now fully apprised of the importance of these holdings, which we ardently hope will be regained for free public use, so that improved machinery for loading and unloading cargoes of modern boats and barges by a single power lift may become effective, as may be seen along the rhine. when this is done, boats will again ply this great river and its tributaries, carrying the abundant products of every kind that this valley annually produces at a much cheaper rate than by rail. we, who people this central northwest, were pioneers in opposing rapacious transportation rates; it was the granger movement hereabouts, nearly forty years since, that aroused the law-making powers to the necessity of conferring on state and federal commissions the power to regulate rates; and further results are yet to be hoped for in the regulation of charges for freight, passenger, express, sleeping-car, and mail service, together with telegraph and telephone charges. this valley between the alleghany and rocky mountains was ordained by nature to supply foodstuffs for a goodly portion of the globe's people; and with the opening of the panama canal, along with the development of our inland waterway transportation, the problem of traffic rates must be solved. while the general government has been using the people's money to improve rivers and build canals, no sooner does the government undertake to develop power incidental to some praiseworthy project than it finds that the water-power was absorbed by private interests, which were at all times alert to obtain grants in perpetuity (now worth millions) without any regulation to redound to the people's good--as shown by the reports of our waterway conventions. the best sites are already taken away from the people; shall we bend every energy to save what remains? this should be all changed in future grants of power-rights in flowing water; a census of the nation's water-power resources should be taken, and all grants hereafter should be determined, with the respective values of the same, for use at equitable rates. when once the law-makers realize that the people are truly in earnest about conservation, a halt will be called upon reckless legislation in the interest of exploiters; then sincere citizens may be induced to stand as legislative candidates, without fear of being pilloried by a subsidized press and venal poll-workers at every turn in a canvass. our waterway improvement conventions in this valley have spoken plainly, and the rivers and harbors are faring better than ever before--in fact, our efforts along these lines have done wonders to bring to the people, by acts of congress, what is justly their own. will the conservationists array themselves against all law-makers who have proven recreant by their attitude toward clean-cut legislation in aid of conservation throughout the united states? smooth words, without conscientious acts in the interests of our lofty aims, should meet with a lasting rebuke! "fight it out on this line if it takes several summers," should be our slogan. [signed] m. j. mceniry _chairman conservation committee_ report of the washington state federation of labor the washington state federation of labor will not be represented by any of the washington state delegates at the second national conservation congress. we are, however, deeply interested in the question of conservation of natural resources for the people, and as president of this organization, with a membership of over , , i believe i am expressing the sentiment of the workingmen of this state when i say that i am in entire accord with the declaration of views and recommendations of the governors of states and territories of the united states, as adopted at the conference of governors, called by president roosevelt, in may, . our vast forests, our water supply (for irrigation and power projects), and our fisheries are of inestimable value to the people if properly developed under a control that will make the very best use of them with due regard to their future possibilities and greatness. forestry, irrigation, and water power are to a great extent dependent on one another in their successful development, and the magnitude of the undertaking requires the hearty cooperation of state and nation if it reaches the degree of success that we hope for. i trust that the congress will strengthen and perfect plans adequate for the protection of the people's interests and the development of these resources with an eye to their future greatness. respectfully submitted, [signed] chas. r. case _president_ report of the western forestry and conservation association let us concede that conservation means that we, as a people, should manage all our resources with the intelligence and prudence that an individual should devote to managing his own property. let us use them profitably, as he would; neither destroying or wasting them unnecessarily, nor giving them heedlessly to anyone who needs them less and will use them less to our advantage. but let us not, during excursions into constitutional problems, state rights, and other bewildering issues, forget that first of all comes protection from destruction and waste! the great danger now is that our resources will disappear while we are deciding to whom they shall belong. it is of this kind of conservation alone, the conservation that conserves, that i bring you a message from the pacific northwest. the western forestry and conservation association does not decry the necessity for wise action by state and nation in the safeguarding of water-power, minerals, and lands; but the settlement of such affairs is not our function. i come only to tell you of the work of the most perfectly organized and successful conservation movement ever undertaken by private individuals in this country--the forest-protective associations of the pacific slope. we talk little, but we work, spend money, and accomplish. in our five states from montana to california stands half the merchantable timber in the united states, the majority in private hands. the control of this stupendous community resource entails grave responsibilities. to preserve it for the fullest use, to replace it when used, if possible--this is the timber-owner's duty. his ownership is largely a public trust. nowhere else has he realized this so promptly and acted so adequately as in the pacific northwest. i have come to report his stewardship, and to show you that you need not wonder whether he will follow the conservation banner. the western forestry and conservation association has no individual membership. it is the central medium or clearing house for a dozen subsidiary associations of timber-land owners, representing millions of acres, who cooperate in order to apply to the best advantage the most modern and efficient systems of forest protection. through this means they employ a trained forester to assist them in solving problems of reforestation, forest legislation, education, and like matters demanding expert knowledge or central facilities. its meetings are attended not only by delegates from these timber-owners' organizations, but also by the leading state and forest service officials and representatives of the public conservation associations. all work in the closest harmony to devise and execute practical and effective policies. there are no dissensions at these meetings; no question as to who is most competent by right of law or geography. every man there, be he a humble officer of the forest service, state forester, or timber owner, is there because he wants to do his own part, with his own hands or money, in preserving the magnificent forests of the west. he knows what he is talking about, and the rest are mighty glad to hear him. but we do not stop with meetings, and herein is perhaps our chief difference from a great many advocates of conservation. you have all read of the recent fires in our northwestern country. they have been greatly exaggerated, the area injured really being very limited. nevertheless, while we talk here of generalities, bands of weary, half-blind men are still battling to prevent fresh outbreaks; the smoke still curls over the blackened forms of those who met a fearful death to save the lives of others; scores who fought till they could fight no more still lie bandaged and sightless in the extremity of mortal agony. no honor is too great to do these heroes. we of the west owe a sacred debt to them, one and all, and not least to the men of the forest service whose training made them as efficient as they were brave. we want more, not fewer, of them. but side by side with the bravest, equally efficient, equally trained and disciplined, worked the patrolmen of our fire associations. conservationists employed by private effort. we have had no time to prepare nice statistics, for our fire fighters have something else to do; but i venture to say that our associations' expenditures for forest protection this year will be over $ , . in the coeur d' alene fires alone, a single one of our associations put men in the field. and yet this is not much to boast of. there should have been no fires to fight. the way to prevent fire is to prevent it, not fight it when almost or quite beyond control. the only solution of the fire question is better enforcement of better laws, better public sentiment, and better patrol. there must be an organized force of trained and vigilant men, ample in numbers during the dry season to reach all fires in their incipiency. it is in this that our associations now lead all other agencies. they handle the fire situation in a much better and more comprehensive manner than even the government has ever done, because they spend three times as much money per acre for patrol. thoroughly excellent as are the methods in the national forests--they are identical with those of the most progressive practical timberman--congress does not sustain them adequately. our own system is by no means perfect yet. although in the territory covered by our association in idaho, washington, and oregon we have perhaps organized and equipped patrolmen, each authorized to hire help when needed, there is still much unorganized area, and not all timbermen within our territory contribute as they should. we need more men and more money from our own brethren, and heartier cooperation from public, state, and government. but we confidently expect to get all this, just as we have in greater measure each year in the past. and when, as already in washington last year, one association protects , , acres with a loss of but , acres; when this small loss was caused by less than fires out of , extinguished; when in this historic year of we have controlled our countless fires so that actual disasters can be counted on the fingers, and our loss as a whole is insignificant--we feel that no one has done more to prove his willingness and competence to practice conservation that counts than the northwestern forest owner. the northwestern timberman approves all measures that will give the greatest number of people the greatest permanent opportunity to profit by the fullest use and least waste of all our resources. thus they will be most prosperous and use most lumber. he is doing more than anyone else, government or state, to protect both old and growing forests from wasteful destruction, so there may be most lumber to use. i take it this is conservation. [signed] e. t. allen _forester_ report of the united mine workers i regret very much that serious complications in the mining industry of our country, together with an enormous amount of important matters requiring my immediate attention, makes it impossible for me to keep my engagement to address the conservation congress on the subject, "are we mining intelligently?" i am intensely interested in the subject of conserving our natural resources, but i am still more interested in protecting the lives and health of our people. we are not mining intelligently, as i will explain by letter. success to the work of the conservation congress! it means much for the future generations of this greatest industrial country on earth. [signed] t. l. lewis _president_ timber conservation george h. emerson _hoquiam, washington_ to save our nation's resources is the wish of all; to save our timber is the special wish of all timber owners--no one is so much interested as he who has his private gain or loss joined to his interest in the public good. the american people are a prodigal folk. they have looked upon their resources as inexhaustible, their lands as unlimited. they have called upon all nations to come, and to all comers they have given lands, mines, timber, water-power. has this course been right? up to a point in our development, yes; of late, no--most emphatically no! these resources are entrusted to us as a heritage for our children and generations yet to come. "america for americans" should have been sounded years ago; had it been, there would today be no cry of approaching timber shortage. what more absurd disposition of our timber land could have been made than the laws under which it has passed to private hands? the homestead and preemption acts, framed for prairies, requiring the settler to live on and cultivate the soil, have been extended to our forests, and to comply with their terms, thousands of men have withdrawn from vocations by which they were increasing the wealth of the nation, and with blankets and provisions strapped on their backs and axe and compass in hand have worked their weary way through the pathless forests to vacant government lands, on which they filed. then with axe and fire they spent months destroying the property they proposed to acquire title to--destroying the resources of the nation instead of increasing its wealth; and in doing so, fires reached beyond their control and destroyed still other timber. the law and the ruling of the land office have made this destruction one of the considerations of acquiring title. settlers must prove they "have cleared and planted and maintained a residence on the land;" that is, they must prove they have cut and burned a certain amount of the nation's timber, and have wasted or--worse--employed in destruction certain of the nation's time, and this to acquire title to land upon which they could no more live than in the middle of a desert! lands whose only value was in timber they were compelled, in part, to destroy; and this where they never intended to settle, other than to comply with the letter of the law, and never expected to return after acquiring title. the months or years wasted in complying with these foolish laws they might better by far have been spent in jail at the public expense. it would have cost the nation far less, and would have been less dangerous to life than the lonely existence remote from other human beings, where any accident to limb costs a life. sometimes there was an actual settler who wanted a farm or a pasture. he considered the timber only in the light of its cost to remove, and with axe, saw, and fire, he proceeded to its destruction. and why not? that which cost nothing looked to be of no value! timber appeared as free as air and sunshine. later the lumberman came, and up to our government offered him in washington hundreds of thousands of acres of the best-timbered land for $ . per acre. michigan and wisconsin had been so offered, and mostly sold. the lands of the northern pacific could then be had at $ . per acre and paid for in the bonds of the company, then worth half their face. the lumbermen looked upon the timber as inexhaustible. only that near water could be harvested by known methods; only the best of the trees could be sawed and sold at a profit; only western markets appeared possible. what wonder fires were set to burn the choppings and make pastures? no people save that which cost nothing, and for which they have no use and cannot sell. when things become of value they are conserved, and when of enough value they are manufactured or grown; and the ratio between cost and selling price regulates the supply of things manufactured or grown. up to within a few years there has been plenty of timber land that could be taken under the homestead, preemption, or timber and stone acts, or scripted or bought of the railroads. the blame, then, for the waste of our timber has been with the laws that made it valueless. the men we have sent to washington to make our laws have given this timber to all comers of all nations. they are the men our people should hold responsible for the waste of our resources. these same men now tell us, "we are on the verge of a timber famine," and that the lumbermen are wantonly wasting the nation's timber. is it not the old cry of "stop thief!" sounded by the culprit? by their acts they have made this timber valueless. had the government estimated the cost of growing a timber crop and sold its timber at about that price, timber would have been protected, conserved, and replanted, and its use would be as in europe, about feet per capita per annum, instead of feet as in america. since our timber has taken on a value, its destruction by fire has greatly decreased. timber owners now use precautions, and employ fire patrols. so, too, with harvesting; it is cut cleaner, sawed with thinner saws, manufactured with better appliances, and great saving has been effected in every branch of the industry--all because of greater values. now, if just tax laws were passed, taxing no crop until harvested, and taxing reforested land as stump land; if rates of interest were lower, and if stringent fire laws and careful patrol were enforced; if stumpage was a little higher or labor a little lower, or the railroads were to make a reduced rate on low-grade products, the law of supply and demand (or the ratio of cost to selling price) would reforest old choppings. toward these things we are rapidly advancing, and before our timber is exhausted we shall have reached this point. if our government would hold her reserved timber at cost of reproduction, and protect the timber of the nation by import duty, the question of timber shortage in america would soon be settled. instead, they threaten reduction of its present value and increase of its waste by the removal of duty on imports. there is no way to conserve any commodity but to give it value, and no way to make people manufacture goods or grow crops except to offer a price that covers cost and a profit. if the public would buy lumber of strength and durability suited to the purposes required, instead of ordering grades better than needed, they would help the conservation of our timber far more than by essays and speeches. the most unreasonable of all buyers are our government officials; with them there seems to be no purpose for which ordinary lumber is suited. so, too, if our state legislators would pass just tax laws, they would make a grand move toward timber conservation. instead, counties are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars--which the timber owners must pay--estimating the number of feet of standing timber, so as to be sure they find it all and tax it out of existence. this generation owes posterity laws that will save some of our present timber and leave to them growing timber crops instead of charred and desolate stump lands telling only of their fathers' greed and lack of foresight. wonderful tables have been prepared showing the upward tendency in prices of timber lands. far better prepare a table showing the cost of growing a timber crop, and causes that have deprived it of its legitimate value. water always rises to its level when the pressure is removed. timber-value level is costly to produce. the greatest pressure to hold timber values down in the past have been our land laws; first the federal laws for the sale of timber, second the state laws for taxes--and lack of all laws for protection and planting. our nation is still a prodigal. she taps the fuel supply of future generations and allows the gas to burn and the oil to run to waste. more of the timber of the nation has been burned for clearing and pasture than has been sawed by the mills; but when the lumbermen are accused of destroying their property, or not utilizing all that will return cost for their labor, they are accused of lack of good intelligence--and that we resent. new england and new york have a greater area in timber than they had years ago. nearly every town site has a saw mill that supplies local demand and makes shipments to nearby cities. the few days i spent in new hampshire last spring, and the auto trips i took through the places i knew in my youth, impressed these facts with force. rail trips through connecticut, rhode island, massachusetts, new hampshire, vermont, ohio, pennsylvania, and maryland revealed the fact that thousands of acres once under cultivation are now in timber, and that old forest lands are reproducing. pine groves, cut when i was a boy, are being harvested, and fields where i picked rocks every spring are growing beautiful pine forests; the present owner of the old homestead in new hampshire has put in a little saw and shingle mill to cut trees that were not sprouted when i left the old farm. the small saw-mills that are supplying the local demand are cutting the largest of the new growth, and the supply of that portion of the states where the timber was once exhausted will hereafter be adequate to local demands. as it is in new england and the middle states, so it is in the south, in the west, in california and oregon and washington; if we keep out the fires in the old choppings, the new growth will be ready before the old is gone--and the waste of today kept always damp by the young growth, brush, ferns, and vines, will rival in value the portion of the tree we are now able to market. again consumption in all things is in proportion to price. advance the price of lumber, and you reduce the consumption. stone, brick, concrete, and steel are ready substitutes, as the price of lumber advances. in europe, lumber is no longer a necessity, only a luxury, and not one much cared for at that; this has been forced home to me in countries i have visited during the past six months. six days from new york we touch the azores, a land where no lumber is used except for floor-joists and rafters in the cheaper buildings; next we touched madeira, and found a city of stone. so with gibraltar, southern spain, egypt, syria, greece, italy, france; not a lumber yard in all these countries that we could find. a cargo a year would supply the demand for all purposes. the wonder was not how these people get along without lumber, but how they use the feet per annum they are reported to require. i do not think there is one shingle roof in all those countries, and i expect a very good knowledge of arabic would be needed to explain to those people what a shingle is and its use. in constantinople we found a few miserable board shacks. lumber comes to that market at a low price from the black sea, and it appears to be a detriment rather than a good. in switzerland and southern germany, some houses are built of wood above the lower story; but i think there are no shingle roofs. these countries are well timbered, with trees in rows showing they are planted. the price of common lumber is only a little higher than with us, but labor is cheap, and growing timber exempt from taxes. trees there can find a profitable market, trunks, limbs, stump, and roots. it is then, little wonder mountain sides, impossible for agriculture, should be planted to timber. those timber areas do not use much of their lumber. in switzerland and germany we found saw mills, some of them of fair capacity, and shipping by rail, but their towns were built of stone. the mills select the largest trees, and replace with new plants. in time we shall reach some of these same conditions, and plant our timber instead of allowing it to grow at will. all this will come about when proper laws are enacted. american people will some time awaken to the fact, long since known in europe, that timber is no necessity; only a makeshift. bridges of rock, houses of brick and stone and steel, with roofs of tile, are for the centuries; buildings of wood are only for the years and the flames. lumber is cheap in the new countries, and convenient for quick shelter; and it is there forests are found. big timbers may become scarce, but their demand is also decreasing. already our cities have fire limits. bridges and spars are of steel; and if our farmers could obtain money at city rates, it is doubtful if it would not be cheaper for them to build fire-proof houses than to pay higher insurance on wooden buildings. already roofs of shingles are in balance with roofs of other and safer material, and the price of shingles is fixed by this competition. as it is with shingles it will be with lumber, and is for many purposes; in many countries for nearly all purposes. do not think i underestimate the value of our timber, or fail to advocate its protection and reproduction; but he who says we are approaching the time when timber values are to be much greater than now, and he who predicts a timber famine, have both overlooked facts that will come to the front with the years. the cry of "fire!" never stopped a conflagration. the cry of conservation will never stop the waste of valueless commodities. action is needed in both instances, if results are to be attained. to conserve our timber we must give it value. let the government refuse to sell from its reserves except for cost of reproduction; also protect us from foreign competition. educate our loggers to the enormity of the crime of burning choppings fit only for the timber crop. let states impose rigid fire laws and make liberal appropriation for forest protection. let our legislators see the folly and injustice of taxing the same crop year after year; a crop that can contribute nothing toward paying those taxes until marketed, a crop that is of far less value per acre than the yield of fruit gathered each year. do not be afraid the few remaining timber owners are going to be benefited at the expense of the many; rather the benefit will be for our children and our children's children. above all, remember the timber owner is not to blame, only fortunate that he bought timber that our government was willing to part with for a song; and hold our laws and their makers responsible for results for which they, only, are to blame. the forest fires of the west today are more often set by the railroads than by all others. their locomotives are torches of demons, tearing through our forests, streaming fire from their stacks and leaving all behind in flames. from the rear platforms of trains i have seen hundreds of little fires spring up as we passed--this, when the woods were dry and conditions right. the timber they burn is their resources for freight. the destruction they create is a loss of millions to their own business. it would seem prosecution for damage done should follow their wanton torches, and that laws should be made for the protection of their own interests they so recklessly ignore. it is no longer the logger or the settler that causes our forest fires. our laws and public opinion, and vast sums expended by timber owners prevent the setting of careless fires; but the railroad locomotives still scatter fire along their pathway through the woods. let the railroads learn a lesson from the recent montana fires that stretched along their lines on either side and crossed the rivers where they cross--fires that have destroyed millions of young pines that a few years hence would have yielded a freight of from $ to $ each tree for their transportation to market. let the loggers awaken to the fatal folly of allowing the first fire in their cuttings, and our legislators to the necessity of forest protection. stop the first fire where land is only adopted to the timber crop. out in the west where our mountains are the highest; where our streams spring from the eternal glaciers and are fullest when the weather is warmest; where water falls the farthest; where our soils are most productive when moistened; where our fruit is the finest; where trees grow the largest; where our hills contain coal, iron, silver, copper, and gold; where our ocean is the greatest and our fisheries are most prolific, our people are all conservationists. they are for conservation that is practical and adapted to their peculiar conditions; conservation that shall develop and utilize their resources, and that shall yield the greatest good to the greatest number, and to the future as well as the present. where all things are on so grand a scale, the people cannot be small and narrow. they are as are their woods, their mountains, and their torrents, grand and active; and they are to be trusted. they will solve the problem of conserving their timber. they will keep out fires. they will enact just tax laws. they will guard their holdings. they will encourage new growth. they will be first to awaken to the best methods of forest conservation adapted to their needs. they will solve the problem of conserving our western forests. forests and stream-flow william s. harvey _philadelphia_ professor willis l. moore, chief of the united states weather bureau, in his address before the atlantic deeper waterways convention in providence, september , , made the statement that the waterways were in no way affected by the forests; that he had records made for many years that clearly prove that the waterways have in no way been affected by the acts of man; that he was aware that he would destroy a popular impression by making this statement, and that he based his statement upon the facts as he knew them. the following eminent men in articles published in _american forestry magazine_ for april, , take exception to and refute the statements and claims made by professor moore (and which he had previously expressed): professor filibert roth, university of michigan, forester; professor l. c. glenn, vanderbilt university, geologist; and professor george f. swain, harvard university, engineer. these gentlemen represent geology, forestry, and engineering, and their training, knowledge, and experience qualify them to speak intelligently and with authority on this question of the influence and effect forests have upon streams. mill owners and operators on various rivers in new england have practical demonstration that denuding or partial denuding of the forests on the head-waters of the stream on which they are dependent for power has seriously impaired the uniformity of flow and lessened the amount of power which they are able to secure for the same number of days in a year: that denuding also allows the rainfall to run off rapidly, causing erosion, which erosion is filling and choking the streams and rivers and in seasons of flood depositing silt in valleys which have heretofore been of agricultural value, thus largely impairing or destroying their fertility. this condition equally applies to various streams and rivers in other sections of the united states. it is moreover denied and refuted by the greatest financial and manufacturing interests, who have spent and are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of electric power on the waterways of the united states. they have in their employ the most competent engineers known, who have investigated the entire situation, studied the maximum and minimum rainfall for a long period of years, and conditions influencing the territory embraced on the streams and rivers upon which they propose to make and are making and have made developments. these great interests, vital to commerce and trade, emphatically state that the flow of streams is affected by the forest cover, and that they are most anxious and are earnest in efforts to have the forest cover protected in all territory in which they operate, claiming that if the hillsides or mountains on the headwaters of water-sheds are denuded the volume of power will be so diminished, impaired, or destroyed that the value of the bonds issued for the development of these powers, and heretofore considered one of the safest and most desirable investments, will be seriously imperilled. in addition to the authorities above named, and to whose articles i have referred, there are others who have refuted and contradicted professor moore from his own premises and data. his excellency m j. j. jusserand, ambassador from france, publicly stated the absolute principle: "no forests, no waterways." without forests regulating the distribution of water, rainfalls are at once carried to the sea, hurried sometimes, alas! across the country. after having devastated the neighboring fields, the rivers find themselves again with little water and much sand; and with such rivers, how will you fill your canals? the question is as clear as can be; do you want to have navigable rivers, or do you prefer to have torrents that will destroy your crops and never bear a boat? if you prefer the first, then mind your forests. if the mississippi is the "father of waters," the forest is the father of the mississippi. the french ambassador, you will note, says, "we can tell you, for we know. france is now spending many millions of dollars to reforest the mountain-sides denuded many years ago, which have seriously affected her waterways." some of us feel it is unwise to take too seriously all the deductions and predictions that are made by academic, scientific, idealistic theorists, especially if the department of science with which they are most intimately identified relates almost exclusively to atmospheric conditions, which are still so imperfectly understood that they not infrequently elude prediction; though where the results of scientific deductions are proven correct and add to the fund of knowledge, they are deserving of our greatest respect and regard. we have much confidence, for example, in the conclusion of gifford pinchot and his staff of assistants, who have made a practical as well as scientific study of the effect of forest cover on the flow and supply of water in streams, which conclusions unqualifiedly refute the statements made by professor moore. the conservation of minerals and subterranean waters george frederick kunz, ph.d. _new york_ the necessity for conserving the forests has been fully recognized, and it may be said that as to what is in the ground a clear and satisfactory distinction has been established between what must be conserved for the good of the people as a whole, and what can safely be left to the exclusive control, management, and ownership of individuals or corporations. in regard, however, to the material wealth that lies beneath the ground, whether diamonds, gold, silver, copper, oil, or clay, or, indeed, anything that has a material value and can be included as such in the domain of mining statistics, there has been and still is a considerable difference of opinion touching what should be done. the existence of these materials beneath the ground is not usually evident, and the judgment of the best experts is frequently required to determine whether they exist in a given tract or not; on the other hand they may sometimes be casually found where their presence was not suspected. the government of the united states still owns great tracts of land, and it is most important that the whole people of the united states should receive the full benefit of all the mineral wealth that is below the ground--the invisible wealth of the nation, as it may be termed. in order to avoid any collusion on the part of officials engaged by the government to make investigations, or of those who, though no longer in the government service, might learn the results of these investigations and might in some manner try to obtain control of these lands before the government knew they had a distinct value, it would seem that a conservation act should be passed making it imperative that all minerals contained in any land beneath the surface should forever remain the property of the government. with lands containing minerals, there should further be an assurance that the deposits will be effectively worked, thus preventing an entire mineral supply from being locked up for many years, so as to maintain an artificial value for the material. again, little-understood minerals, or those that have been very little worked and yet may have a value in the future, such as bauxite, which is valuable in the manufacture of aluminum; monazite sand, which is used in the making of the welsbach incandescent light; and carnotite, whose value as a radium ore has been discovered within the past ten years--should all be made to yield royalties to the government. it is very evident that many minerals not considered to have any commercial value today may prove to be of the greatest industrial value in the future. furthermore, as we are likely to discover new elements, and new uses for old minerals, the conservation act might be made to provide for a payment of , , or even percent of the total value of the mineral as taken from the ground in royalty to the government of the united states, exactly as the south african government exacts as a royalty percent of the product of all the diamond mines within its territory. this would be a more generous treatment of private owners than was accorded them in some instances in the past. the french crown-deeds read in the seventeenth century that gold, silver, lapis-lazuli, etc, should belong exclusively to the crown. in reality, the government should only sell to private owners what is in sight on the land and the right to what could be grown on it, not what is below the ground. the franchises of subways and tunnels and all mineral rights should be retained, as well as the right to condemn at a fair valuation any property needed for the development of a mine or a water-power. the term "mineral" should apply to every substance found in the ground that is either a mineral or an associate of minerals, that is, rock, sand, clay, or even a swamp, that may have a value in the arts, sciences, agriculture, or any other monetary value. the word should be used in its broad sense and not in the more restricted scientific meaning of the word used by mineralogists, which is that a mineral must be a definite mineral compound. the subterranean waters of the united states are a great and valuable asset of the nation. nearly all of our water companies sell water either for power or for consumption. as each owner of a piece of property ought to be entitled to an interest in the water under it, some provision in conservation should be made for the actual ownership of the waters; not that they can be drained from under the property, for a series of springs could be threatened with ruin if this were done, just as were the famous springs in saratoga. in other words government lands should not be robbed of their subterranean waters to be in turn sold to those who have a joint right in them. the question of land titles franklin mccray _indianapolis_ all the territory west of mississippi river was acquired by the government by three means, purchase, conquest, and treaty. this territory, having been obtained by the diplomacy and blood and treasure of our common country, belonged to the people of the whole country, and was held in trust by the federal government for them. it was subject only to their call for settlement. the charge is made that practically all the looting of the public domain is in the louisiana purchase, the territory wrested from mexico, that acquired from great britain by the ashburton-webster treaty in the settlement of our northern boundary line, and that purchased from russia. this land, being held in trust by the federal government for the people and being subject only to their call for actual settlement, it is charged, has been plundered through fraud and corruption of the trustee, the government of the united states, in collusion with the grantees, who have obtained vast tracts and withdrawn the same from settlement by floating them into a different channel than that for which the government held them in trust. by this corrupt and fraudulent method, it is charged that these vast estates have been monopolized by corporate greed and accumulated wealth, and that no less than , , acres are now being held by two individuals alone within the state of california. if this be true, then, under a well-settled principle of law, the government has conferred no title upon such grantees, because fraud vitiates all contracts, and courts of equity have complete power under proper proceedings to follow this property, thus fraudulently obtained, in its labyrinthian processes and seize it by judicial decree, lay its stern hand upon it and restore it to its rightful owners, the people of the united states, and float it anew into the channel of settlement where it rested prior to its spoliation. i suggest that this congress petition the united states congress to investigate the titles of these grantees and, if found to be fraudulent, the department of justice should be instructed to institute proceedings calculated to restore the land to its rightful owners. footnotes: [ ] the full report by mrs wilkinson appears on later pages. [ ] the members of the resolution committee were chosen by their respective state delegations, and met at the call of a temporary chairman (and member-at-large), ex-governor george c. pardee, of california, who was afterward chosen by the committee as permanent chairman. the full personnel of the committee follows: alabama, john l. kaul, birmingham arizona, b. a. fowler, phenix arkansas, john a. fox, blytheville california, frank h. short, fresno colorado, p. t. coolidge, colorado spgs. columbia (district of), w j mcgee, washington connecticut, a. fletcher marsh, new haven florida, cromwell gibbons, jacksonville georgia, c. l. worsham, atlanta idaho, jerome j. day, moscow illinois, alfred l. baker, chicago indiana, william holton dye, indianapolis iowa, robert hunter, sioux city kansas, governor william r. stubbs, lawrence kentucky, c. c. grassham, paducah louisiana, robert roberts, jr., minden maine, cyrus c. babb, augusta maryland, lynn r. meekins, baltimore massachusetts, c. a. start, boston michigan, francis king, alma minnesota, e. w. robinson, minneapolis mississippi, h. l. whitfield, columbus missouri, george b. logan, saint louis montana, f. l. newman, havre rudolph van tolbel, lewistown nebraska, woodruff ball, valentine new hampshire, geo. b. leighton new jersey, frederick w. kelsey, orange new mexico, w. a. fleming jones, las cruces new york, j. s. whipple, salamanca north dakota, james e. boyle, grand forks ohio, charles lathrop pack, cleveland oklahoma, benjamin martin, jr., muskogee oregon, m. a. moody, the dalles pennsylvania, m. i. mccreight, dubois rhode island, h. a. barker, providence south carolina, e. w. durant, jr., charleston south dakota, p. h. o'neill, faulkton texas, s. h. cowan, fort worth utah, harden bennion, salt lake city vermont, george aitkin, woodstock washington, george h. emerson, hoquiam west virginia, i. c. white, morgantown wisconsin, william irvine, chippewa falls wyoming, e. h. fourt, lander [ ] the corrected list appears elsewhere (page iv). [ ] the reports submitted by states as mentioned in the responses to the call of states are printed in the supplementary proceedings, beginning on page , and are entered in the contents and index of the volume. [ ] the formal report for ohio appears in the supplementary proceedings. [ ] in the opinion he held that the plaintiff was entitled to judgment, declaring the brooklyn cooperage company and cornell university contract void, and directed the university to convey to the state of new york the , acres constituting the college forest. [ ] the relative prices of forest lands sixty years ago and now may be judged from the fact that in a law (chapter ) was passed providing that the state should not sell public land on raquette river for less than cents an acre. the state is now paying over $ . an acre for the same kind of land. [ ] declaration of colonel david mcclure in the constitutional convention of . index agriculture in schools, work of the department of, aitkin, george, report by, alaska coal lands, , allen, e. t., report by, , american academy of political and social science, report of, american automobile association, report of, american civic association, report of, american forestry association, report of, american humane association, report of, american institute of architects, report of, american medical association, report of, work of, american paper and pulp association, report of, american railway engineering and maintenance of way association, report of, american railway master mechanics' association, report of, american scenic and historic preservation society, report of, ames, charles w., report by, anderson, a. t., report by, arizona, report from, arkansas, report from, , association for the protection of the adirondacks, report of, atlantic deeper waterways association, report of, babb, cyrus c., report by, babb, george w., report by, babcock, george h., report by, backus, e. w., report by, bailey, e. w. m., report by, bailey, liberty hyde, address by, report by, baker, a. l., address by, baker, bernard n., introductory remarks by, report by, resolution of thanks to, baldwin, a. s., report by, ballinger, r. a., reference to work of, bannister, o. b., report by, barker, henry a., report by, , , barrett, john, address by, , barrett, c. s., report by, benson, r. dale, report by, bentley, h. t., report by, beveridge, senator albert j., address by, bissell, r. m., report by, blanchard, ex-governor newton c., address by, boardman, miss mabel, address by, brooks, governor bryant b., address by, brown, elmer ellsworth, address by, letter from, brown, j. adams, report by, bryce, james, tribute to, burnham, austin a., report by, business interest in conservation, , california, resources of, call of states, announcement of, , , , resumption of, , , capital, relation of, to resources, carriage builders' national association, report of, case, charles r., report by, champney, w. p., report by, cities, wastes of, clapp, senator moses e., presiding officer, cleveland, grover, quoted on monopoly, colorado, report from, columbia (district of), report from, condra, george e., announcement by, explanation by, report by, conference of governors, reference to work of, , , , , , , connolly, maurice, report by, conservation of minerals and subterranean waters, of the nation's resources, practical aspects of, problems, address on, program, the, constitution of the congress, ix adoption of, country life as related to conservation, craighead, edwin boone, address by, credentials committee, appointment of, modification of, report of, damon, a. w., report by, daughters of the american revolution, work of, davidson, james h., address by, day, jerome j., report by, dean, william b., report by delaware state federation of women's clubs, report of, deneen, governor charles e., address by, denmark, successful agriculture of, dixon, samuel g., reference to work of, dort, j. d., report by, draper, mrs belle merrill, reference to work of, eberhart, governor a. o., address by , presiding officer, edsall, right reverend samuel cook, invocation by, education and conservation, emerson, george h., report by, "timber conservation," evans, powell, report by, evans, r. d., report by, executive committee, report from, executive powers, definition of, exports, diminution of, farm, efficiency of the, production, , , , values, losses in, farmers' union of america, report of, farquhar, a. b., "practical aspects of conservation," fertility, conditions of, forests and stream flow, , , , , and the nation, address on, condition of, in washington, conservation of, , , , destruction of, national, utilization of, , forest service, reference to work of, foster, j. ellen, resolution in memory of, tribute to, fourt, e. h., report by, fowler, b. a., report by, finley, w. w., address by, fire losses, magnitude of, fisher, irving, reference to work of, fisher, walter l., address by, florida, report from, garfield, james r., address by, general federation of women's clubs, report of, georgia, report from, gibbons, cardinal, greetings from, gibbons, cromwell, report by, gilbert, cass, report by, gipe, james c., election of, as recording secretary, glenn, l. c., reference to work of, goudy, frank c., report by, government, cost of, governors, western, resolutions by, graves, henry s., address by, green, f. r., report by, green, samuel b., resolutions in memory of, gregory, lucius, report by, griffith, e. m., report by, griggs, e. g., report by, hall, edward hagaman, report by, hamilton, alexander, quoted on executive powers, hardtner, henry e., report by, harriman, e. h., reference to work of, harvey, william s., "forests and stream flow," report by, , hay, governor m. e., address by, health and life as national assets, , heney, francis j., address by, higley, warren, report by, hill, james j., address by, control of water-power by, explanation by, reference to work of, tribute to, holliday, cornelia r., report by, holmes, j. a., tribute to, , horr, christopher g., remarks by, , howard, mrs jay cooke, address by, presentation by, howe, frederic c., quoted on export trade, hunt, g. m., report by, resolution of thanks by, idaho, report from, illinois, resources of, indiana, report from, , invocation by archbishop ireland, bishop edsall, reverend j. s. montgomery, iowa, report from, ireland, archbishop, invocation by, iron ore of minnesota, irrigation, extension of, johns, william douglas, report by, johnson, emory r., report by, jones, w. a. fleming, report by, , resolution of thanks by, jusserand, j. j., quoted on forests and waterways, kavanaugh, w. k., report by, keller, mayor herbert e., address of welcome by, kremer, w. n., report by, krueger, a. w., report by, kunz, george frederick, "the conservation of minerals and subterranean waters," lacey, john f., report by, lakes-to-gulf deep waterways association, report of, land laws, , laws, needed reformation in, , , taxation, titles, the question of, lands, conservation and utilization of, lands, public, disposition of, latchaw, d. austin, address by, election of, as treasurer, lattimore, george w., report by, laws that should be passed, lazenby, william r., report by, league of american sportsmen, report of, legislative functions, failure in performing, lewis, t. l., report by, life and health, address on, louisiana, report from, resources of, lowe, e. n., report by, mackenzie, alexander, reference to work of, maine, report from, marshall, chief justice john, opinions by, martin, ben j., jr., report by, , resolution of thanks by, massachusetts, report from, maxwell, hu, report by mccray, franklin, "the question of land titles," mcdermott, j. h., report by, mceniry, m. j., report by, mcgee, w j, reference to work of, mcnees, g. w., report by, mcvey, frank l., address by, merritt, e. t., report by, mershon, william b., report by, metzger, a. e., report by, miller, a. c., report by, , minerals, conservation of, , minnesota, deforestation of, farm value in, iron ore in, report from, mississippi, report from, resources of, missouri, report from, , valley river improvement association, report of, waterways commission, work of, mitchell, a. r., report by, monopoly, growth of, of power, of resources in california, of transportation, moore, willis l., reference to work of, montana, report from, resources of, montgomery, reverend j. s., invocation by, muckle, m. richard, report by, national board of fire underwriters, report of, board of trade, report of, business league of america, report of, conservation association, endorsement of, conservation commission, reference to report of, efficiency, promotion of, nebraska, report from, nelson, senator knute, address by, nestos, r. a., report by, newell, f. h., reference to work of, newlands, senator francis g., "laws that should be passed," new mexico, report from, new york, report from, , , noble, john w., report and resolution by, noel, governor edmond n., address by, tribute to, nominating committee, creation of, report of, norris, governor edwin l., address by, north american conservation congress, work of, north dakota, report from, , ohio, report from, oklahoma, report from, oregon, report from, ovey, esmond, address by, page, thomas nelson, reference to work of, pan-american union, work of, pardee, ex-governor george c., address by, report of resolutions committee by, parry, d. m., report by, partridge, john, report by, pennsylvania, report from, persons, henry h., report by, phosphate lands, withdrawal of, pinchot, gifford, address by, memorial resolution by, nominating address by, presentation of certificate to, reference to work of, , , response by, , tribute to, , , , , , , , plunkett, sir horace, reference to work of, power, address on, press (the), address on, priestly, j. t., report by, property, safeguarding public, purdue, a. h., report by, railway control of waterways, subsidies, magnitude of, railways, control of, to prevent forest fires, , of the south and conservation, rane, frank william, report by, rattermann, h., report by, reclamation service, reference to work of, red cross, address on work of, redding, sid b., report by, republics, address on american, resolutions adopted by the congress, resolutions committee, announcement of, , composition of, report by, resources as the basis for business, address on, , rhode island, report from, , richardson, guy, report by, richter, joseph c., report by, rivers, federal control of, roads, value of good, robinson, doane, report by, roosevelt, theodore, address by, cited on civilization, reference to work of, tribute to, , , , , , ross, e. w., interlude by, , privileged statement by, roth, filibert, reference to work of, rothrock, j. t., reference to work of, salisbury, o. j., report by, sargent, will l., report by, scott, mrs matthew t., address by, senate, policies of the, sheldon, charles s., report by, shipp, thomas r., election of, as secretary, short, frank h., address by, shortall, john l., report by, simmons, wallace d., address by, smith, c. g., report by, smith, herbert knox, address by, smythe, william e., address by, sneath, mrs g. b., address by, report through, snyder, william a., report by, soil as a resource, , , impoverishment of, south carolina, report from, south dakota, report from, , resources of, sprague, henry h., report by, start, edwin a., report by, stevens, representative f. c., address by, stevens, frederick c., report by, stillman, william o., report by, stubbs, governor w. r., address by, , presiding officer, swain, george f., reference to work of, taft, president, address by, cited on national functions, tribute to, taxation of forests, of national resources, address on, texas, report from, thorp, freeman, report by, timber conservation, tomkies, mrs hoyle, address by, trans-mississippi congress, resolution concerning, tree planters of america, proposed organization of, twichell, jerome, report by, united mine workers, report of, upper mississippi river improvement association, report of, utah, report from, vermont, report from, vessey, governor, address by, vice-presidents, ratification of the, von tobel, rudolph, report by, , von schrenk, hermann, report by, wagstaff, alfred, report by, waldron, c. b., report by, wallace, henry, address by, , nomination and election of as president, warfield, r. emory, report by, washington, report from, , resources of, sentiment of, washington state federation of labor, report of, wastes of civilization, water conservation, , water-power, address on, control of, , , disposition of, , , , , , , , , , , value of, water resources of new york, water supply, conditions of, , waterways, development of, , utilization of, , , watson, e. j., report by, weis, samuel, report by, welch, mrs george o., address by, wesbrook, f. f., address by, report by, west, william l., report by, western forestry and conservation association, report of, west virginia, report from, , whipple, j. s., report by, white, l. c., report by, white, j. b., address by, "conservation of the nation's resources," nominating address by, report by, whitney, milton, reference to work of, women's clubs, work of, worsham, e. l., report by, wilkinson, mrs j. d., report by, williams, mrs lydia phillips, reference to work of, wilson, daniel t., report by, wilson, secretary james, address by, tribute to, , wisconsin, report from, wyoming, report from, resources of, young, p. c., report by, j. h. berkshire, president o. w. fisher, vice-pres. j. b. white, sec'y-treas. and gen'l mgr. =missouri lumber & land exchange company= missouri soft pine long leaf yellow pine short leaf yellow pine oak flooring louisiana mills: louisiana long leaf lumber co., fisher, la. pine and oak flooring mill louisiana long leaf lumber co., victoria, la. pine mill louisiana central lumber co., clarks, la. pine mills louisiana central lumber co., standard, la. pine mill missouri mills: missouri lumber & mining co., west eminence, mo. pine mill ozark land & lumber co., winona, mo. pine and oak mill annual capacity , , feet =high grades= =quick shipments= main office long building kansas city, missouri =missouri lumber & land exchange company= shipments we ship stock of our own manufacture exclusively. we carry large, well assorted stocks and quote only when we are sure of being able to comply with grade and time requirements. as our mills are located on four ( ) different railroads we can always ship orders without delay. finishing lumber we specialize on finishing lumber and every care is exercised to make it the best. by separating all widths and lengths, we are in a position to quote on any particular width or length desired. we carry in stock finish as wide as inches, in - , - , - and - thicknesses. our missouri finish, owing to its flexibility, lightness, softness and figure, is peculiarly adapted to all finishing work. we also carry all grades of finish in , and feet lengths. =if you want good grades and prompt service, write the "exchange"= =missouri lumber & land exchange company= pine yard and shed stock we carry a large stock of all yard and shed material, which is piled scientifically to avoid sap-staining and bluing and to insure dryness our upper grades are all steam kiln dried and a large percentage of our lower grades are either steam kiln dried or soda dipped either process precludes the possibility of sap-staining =if you want good grades and prompt service, write the "exchange"= =missouri lumber & land exchange company= oak flooring in the manufacture of our "diamond brand" oak flooring the greatest possible care is taken in every department. our oak flooring, owing to our method of drying and working, gives complete satisfaction in all climates. due to the fact that our mill is located at the same point where we operate a pine plant we can ship oak flooring and pine in the same car oak timbers, factory stock, etc. we manufacture oak timbers, ties, car framing, grain doors, factory stock, etc. we can ship oak, rough or dressed, in mixed cars with yellow pine =if you want good grades and prompt service, write the "exchange"= =missouri lumber & land exchange company= railroad material we manufacture large quantities of bridge timbers, cross ties (both oak and pine), braces, etc., with or without heart specifications, shipping same rough or surfaced as may be desired. car material by specializing on car material we are in a position to handle satisfactorily orders for sills, framing (both oak and pine), lining, roofing, siding, insulation, grain doors, etc. =if you want good grades and prompt service, write the "exchange"= =missouri lumber & land exchange company= shorts we carry in stock , and foot lengths, in all grades from no. common to "a," in both - and - stock. all widths and lengths are _stacked separately_. we will work these "shorts" to any pattern desired or ship rough, trimming to any length specified special material we manufacture any special items desired, in oak and pine, such as spreader slats, step-ladder material, pulley stiles, crating stock, etc. if you use anything in "shorts," regardless of grade, length, width or pattern, send us your inquiry. =if you want good grades and prompt service, write the "exchange"= transcriber's notes spelling irregularities where there was no obviously preferred version were left as is. variants include: derivatives of "allegheny" and "alleghany;" "antitoxin" and "anti-toxin;" "benefited" and "benefitted;" "cæsar" and "caesar;" "caretakers" and "care-takers;" "chile" and "chili;" derivatives of "criticise" and "criticize;" "drought" and "drouth;" "employes" and "employees;" "entry-man" and "entryman;" "endorse" and "indorse;" "fellowmen" and "fellow-men;" derivatives of "fiber" and "fibre;" "fulfil" and "fulfill;" "headwaters" and "head-waters;" derivatives of "homeseeker" and "home-seeker;" "horsepower" and "horse-power;" "inappreciable" and "unappreciable;" "lawmakers" and "law-makers;" "lifetime" and "life-time;" "livestock" and "live-stock;" "patrolmen" and "patrol-men;" derivatives of "payroll" and "pay-roll;" "phoenix" and "phenix;" "playgrounds" and "play-grounds;" derivatives of "postoffice" and "post-office;" "preeminently" and "pre-eminently;" derivatives of "preempt" and "pre-empt;" "prerequisite" and "pre-requisite;" "rainfall" and "rain-fall;" "savior" and "saviour;" derivatives of "short-sighted" and "shortsighted;" derivatives of "stockman" and "stock-man;" derivatives of "theater" and "theatre;" "rudolph von tobel," "rudolf von tobel" and "rudolph van tolbel;" "traveled" and "travelled;" "upbuilding" and "up-building;" "waterfalls" and "water-falls;" "watershed" and "water-shed," and their plurals; "workaday" and "work-a-day;" "workshops" and "work-shops." some of the index entries are not in strict alphabetical order, but they were left as is. changed "mrs." to "mrs" for consistency on page iii: "mrs j. ellen foster." changed "governer" to "governor" on page v: "ex-governor blanchard." changed "thorpe" to "thorp" on page vii. inserted missing " ." into caption of figure following page xii. changed "by" to "be" on page : "hallowed be thy name." inserted missing comma after "fruit-raising" on page . changed "wth" to "with" on page : "with so many attractions." changed "non-irrigible" to "non-irrigable" on page : "applying to non-irrigable lands." changed "mattter" to "matter" on page : "set in this matter." changed "phosphorous" to "phosphorus" and "phosphorous" to "phosphorus" on page . changed "nothwithstanding" to "notwithstanding" on page : "notwithstanding the land." changed "believeing" to "believing" on page : "believing that our rights." changed " acre-tracts" to " -acre tracts" on page . changed "reregarding" to "regarding" on page : "regarding this program." changed "lakes-to-the-gulf" to "lakes-to-gulf" on page : "the lakes-to-gulf deep waterway." changed "coöperate" to "cooperate" on page : "cooperate and work together." changed "attenton" to "attention" on page : "call your attention." changed "fadists" to "faddists" on page : "faddists, dreamers, and enthusiasts." changed "o'clock" to "oclock" on page , for consistency. changed "tumultous" to "tumultuous" on page : "tumultuous applause." changed "brifly" to "briefly" on page : "briefly, then." changed "subcommittee" to "sub-committee" on page : "a sub-committee, six of whom." changed "devasting" to "devastating" on page : "devastating hand." changed "prevent" to "prevents" on page : "that prevents all progress." changed "phase" to "phrase" to correct the quotation from alexander hamilton on page : "another phrase for a bad execution." changed "essenial" to "essential" on page : "not less essential." changed "differene" to "difference" on page : "a wide difference." changed "mr." to "mr" twice on page for consistency: "mr bernard n. baker" and "mr chairman." changed "re-forested" to "reforested" on page : "mountain sides are to be reforested." changed "multi-millionaries" to "multi-millionaires" on page . changed "queston" to "question" on page : "the question of taxation." changed "recources" to "resources" on page : "natural resources." changed "foresty" to "forestry" on page : "the line of forestry." changed "mrs." to "mrs" on page : "mrs hoyle tomkies." changed "extravagancies" to "extravagances" on page : "all their extravagances." changed "offences" to "offenses" on page : "failures and offenses." changed "fertilty" to "fertility" on page : "the fertility of the soil." changed "gaities" to "gaieties" on page : "the gaieties of fashionable resorts." removed mismatched double quotation character on page , before "gentlemen, please hold steady." changed "re-assembled" to "reassembled" on page : "the congress reassembled." changed "his" to "this" on page : "this kind of revenue-making regulation." changed "responsibilties" to "responsibilities" on page : "their powers and responsibilities." changed "innoculate" to "inoculate" on page : "to inoculate them." changed "devasted" to "devastated" on page : "devastated by earthquake." changed "lascruses" to "las cruces," "lewiston" to "lewistown" and "aitken" to "aitkin" in the footnote . changed "mississipppi" to "mississippi" on page : "we from mississippi." inserted "as" on page : "prosecuted as rapidly as possible." changed "washingon" to "washington" on page : "the state of washington and its officials." changed "sovereignity" to "sovereignty" on page : "national sovereignty." changed "dividuals" to "individuals" on page : "than can individuals." changed "extravagence" to "extravagance" on page : "extravagance and waste." changed "non-preventible" to "non-preventable" on page : "non-preventable accidents." changed "metzer" to "metzger" on page . changed "necesssary" to "necessary" on page : "the necessary steps." changed "perserved" to "preserved" on page : "preserved for all time." changed "runoff" to "run-off" on page : "run-off of streams." changed "henry a. baker" to "henry a. barker" on page . changed "greely" to "greeley" on page . changed "agronomony" to "agronomy" on page : "chief in agronomy and chemistry." changed "viligance" to "vigilance" on page : "the vigilance of the society." changed "his" to "this" on page : "the provisions of this section." changed "mrs." to "mrs" and "s. b." to "g. b." on page : "mrs g. b. sneath." changed "centre" to "center" on page : "center of the most fertile valley." changed "acretions" to "accretions" on page : "the rich accretions." changed "sportsmens'" to "sportsmen's" on page : "sportsmen's travel." changed "kilowat" to "kilowatt" twice on page . the index entry for "blanchard" incorrectly references page , rather than page . page should be the reference for miss boardman, which is missing. these errors were corrected. changed "emeprson" to "emerson" in the index entry for "emerson, george h." changed "commitee" to "committee" in the index entry for "executive committee, report from." changed "mathew" to "matthew" in the index entry for "scott, mrs matthew t." changed "philips" to "phillips" in the index entry for "williams, mrs lydia phillips." transcriber's note italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=. makers of modern agriculture [illustration] macmillan and co., limited london · bombay · calcutta · melbourne the macmillan company new york · boston · chicago · dallas · san francisco the macmillan co. of canada, ltd. toronto [illustration: jethro tull founder of the principles of dry-farming. - .] makers of modern agriculture by william macdonald, d.sc. _editor, "agricultural journal," union department of agriculture, south africa; and corresponding secretary for the international dry-farming congress_ macmillan and co., limited st. martin's street, london _copyright_ richard clay and sons, limited, brunswick st., stamford st., s.e., and bungay, suffolk. preface when it is remembered what a prominent part agriculture plays in the history of all nations, it does seem strange that so little is known of the lives of those pioneers who have been foremost in the discovery of fundamental principles, improved methods, and labour-saving machines. perhaps it is that farmers as a whole are not specially fond of reading. this, however, is not to be wondered at, because after a long day's work in the open air it is hard to rivet one's mind on anything more serious than the headlines of a daily newspaper, or the rose-tinted pictures of a rural magazine. still, it is safe to prophesy that the successful farmer of the future will not only be a hard worker, but also a hard reader. and biography brings before us, in a vivid manner, the onward march of modern agriculture. it is also of interest to note how much agriculture owes to men who could scarcely be called practical farmers. indeed, the author has been impressed, contrary to common opinion, with the success of the townsman who takes to farming. but this is really no more surprising than that the simple-hearted farm lad should forsake the old homestead for the fascinations of the city, and by reason of his character, courage, and industry, become in a few years the captain of some great commercial enterprise. there will always be the ceaseless ebb and flow of the human tide between country lane and crowded street. but it is surely our plain duty to do something to make the life of the worker in the field less dull and lonely, and more attractive by the erection of pleasant cottages and the establishment of rural industries: while, at the same time, we try to brighten the life of the toiler in the town by freehold garden lots and sunlit, open spaces. i desire to thank the editors of the several papers in which these sketches have appeared for kind permission to republish them in book form: the _graphic_ (chapter i), the _star_, johannesburg (chapter ii), the _rand daily mail_ (chapters iii and iv), and the _sunday post_ (chapter v). to the _journal_ of the royal agricultural society of england, i am indebted for the frontispiece (jethro tull), as well as for much valuable information. royal agricultural society of england, , bedford square, london, _september st, ._ contents page portrait of jethro tull _frontispiece_ i. jethro tull ii. coke of norfolk iii. arthur young iv. john sinclair v. cyrus h. mccormick "one comfort is, that great men, taken up in any way, are profitable company."--carlyle. makers of modern agriculture chapter i jethro tull : founder of the principles of dry-farming _"for the finer land is made by tillage the richer will it become and the more plants will it maintain."_--jethro tull. eight miles to the north-west of reading, on a lovely reach of the river thames, lies the parish town of basildon, in the county of berkshire. here, in the year , was born the man who revolutionized british agriculture and laid the foundations for the "conquest of the desert." yet, strange as it may seem, until the other day tull's grave was unknown, and even now no monument marks the resting-place of this illustrious husbandman. his family was of ancient and honourable lineage, and he was heir to a competent estate. at seventeen he entered his name on the register of st. john's college, oxford; but he did not proceed to a degree. two years later he was admitted as a student of gray's inn, and was, in due course, called to the bar. it is probable that tull studied law not so much with the thought of taking it up seriously as a profession, but simply in order to better fit himself for a political career. ill-health, however, made him turn his attention to farming. at the age of twenty-five he married a lady of good family, miss susanna smith, of the county of warwick, and then settled down to farm in oxfordshire. his first farm was howberry, in the parish of crowmarsh. the land of this farm was fertile and renowned for heavy crops of both wheat and barley. here tull lived and toiled for nine years, till at last his health broke down and he was ordered south to the milder climate of france and italy. so he decided to sell a portion of his oxfordshire estate and send his family to another farm in berkshire named "prosperous," situated in the parish of shalbourne. after an absence of three years tull returned to "prosperous farm"--a place for ever famous in the annals of agriculture. here he lived for twenty-six years to the close of his strenuous, chequered career. of this farm, tull writes: "situated on a little chalk on one side and heath on the other, the soil is poor and shallow--generally too light and too shallow to produce a tolerable crop of beans. this farm was made out of the skirts of others; a great part was a sheep down with a full reputation of poverty." while in europe tull took special note of the deep and careful cultivation of the vineyards, where the tillage of the soil between the rows of the grape vines was made to take the place of manuring the land. on his return to england he tried this method at "prosperous farm," first with turnips and potatoes, and then with wheat. and by adopting this simple system with some few modifications of his own, he was enabled to grow wheat on the same fields for thirteen years continuously without the use of manure. * * * * * it was on his farm of howberry that tull invented and perfected his drill in the year . he has told the story of this invention in the pages of his great work. finding his plans for growing sainfoin[ ] hindered by the distaste of his labourers for his new methods, he resolved to try to "contrive an engine to plant st. foin more faithfully than such hands would do. for that purpose i examined and compared all the mechanical ideas that ever had entered my imagination, and at last pitched upon a groove, tongue, and spring in the sound-board of the organ. with these, a little altered, and some parts of two other instruments, as foreign to the field as the organ is, added to them, i composed my machine. it was named a drill, because, when farmers used to sow their beans and peas in channels or furrows by hand, they called that action drilling." and thus tull's drill, taken from the rotary mechanism of his favourite organ, is the pioneer of all modern planters. his first invention was what he termed a _drill-plough_ to sow wheat and turnip seed three rows at a time. [ ] a leguminous plant cultivated for fodder. it was this invention that led tull to enunciate his first principle of tillage, namely, _drilling_. and it is the more amazing to reflect that even after this long lapse of time many farmers still persist in broadcasting their seed; for, as a recent authority working on the semi-arid lands of montana writes: "sowing broadcast is bad at any time, but in dry-farming it is suicidal." that the use of the drill has everywhere effected an enormous saving of seed is common knowledge; but let us hear what tull has to say under this head: "seed (sainfoin) was scarce, dear, and bad, and enough could scarce be got to sow, as was usual, seven bushels[ ] to an acre. i examined and thought the matter out, and found the greater part of the seed miscarried, being bad, or too much covered. i observed, and counted, and found when much seed had miscarried the crop was best." here was his second principle, _reduction of seed_, or, as we now say, "thin-seeding," a practice which has been adopted by the dry-farmers of utah with remarkable success. [ ] at the present time it is customary to sow from - lb. of sainfoin seed per acre. moreover, tull was an ardent advocate of the weedless field, and he saw, clearly enough, that dung was a serious menace to clean tillage, as the seeds of troublesome weeds were apt to be scattered far and wide over the farm. this led him to lay down as his third principle--the _absence of weed_. but he certainly never, as is sometimes said, condemned the use of manure. his experiments, however, proved beyond the shadow of doubt that good crops might be grown simply and solely by means of deep and constant tillage. so he says, angrily: "the vulgar in general believe that i carried my farmyard dung and threw it in a river. i have no river near; besides, my neighbours buy dung at a good price; but it is known i neither sell nor waste any dung. against such lying tongues there is no defence." nevertheless, many years after his part was taken by none other than the great scientist of rothamsted, the late sir john lawes, who wrote as follows:-- "tull was quite an original genius and a century in advance of his time. i consider he has been most unjustly accused of not placing sufficient value upon farmyard manure; he advocated cleanliness, and saw that dung was a great carrier of weeds. to give some clear idea of the value of tull's advocacy of drill-husbandry and the freedom from weed which can alone be obtained by the use of the drill, i may mention that so far as statistics will allow, i have ascertained the average yield of the wheat crop of the world, and i am able to say that the average yield is less than it is at the present time upon my permanent wheat land, after more than sixty years absolutely without manure. here we have the result of tull's three great principles--_drilling, reduction of seed, and absence of weed_. if he were alive now and were writing for the agriculture of the world, he would, i think, be quite justified in saying everything he said in regard to cleanliness and manure." as a result of his studies, travels, and experiments, tull published "the new horse-hoeing husbandry: or an essay on the principles of tillage and vegetation" in the year . the great value of this work is that it is founded not upon mere theory, but upon actual experiments in the field. the fourth edition, which i have beside me, consists of pages, with several plates, and chapters which treat of the following subjects: of roots and leaves; of food of plants; of pastures of plants; of dung; of tillage; of weeds; of turnips; of wheat; of smuttiness; of lucerne; of change of species; of change of individuals; of ridges; old and new husbandry; of ploughs; the four-coulter'd plough; of the drill-boxes; of the wheat-drill: of the turnip-drill; of the hoe-plough; with an appendix concerning the making of the drill and the hoe-plough. tull's idea--which was that by tillage soils might be constantly and for ever reinvigorated or renewed--is summed up in his famous epigram, "tillage is manure." he believed that the earth was the true and the sole food of the plant, and, further, that the plant feeds and grows by taking in minute particles of soil. and since these particles are thrown off from the surface of the soil grains, it followed, therefore, that the more finely the soil was divided the more numerous the particles and the more readily the plant would grow. although tull's theories were wrong, his practice has been followed by all progressive farmers down to the present time. we now know that plants do not absorb particles of earth, but take in food in solution. consequently, the more the particles of soil are broken up and refined, the more plant food the roots can absorb. in this volume, which must be counted an agricultural classic, tull at once takes rank as the foremost preacher of his time of the gospel of deep and perfect tillage. and it is a work which, in the words of his great compeer, arthur young, will "unquestionably carry his name to the latest posterity." the botanical world has recently been illumined by the splendid discovery of the principles of heredity set forth by gregor mendel, and the foremost exponent of the new science, professor bateson, writes as follows: "we have at last a brilliant method and a solid basis from which to attack these problems, offering an opportunity to the pioneer such as occurs but seldom even in the history of modern science." cannot we, as agriculturists, say the same with equal truth? for, to our thinking, jethro tull bears the same relation to dry-farming that mendel does to plant-breeding. for if, on the one hand, his drill-ploughs are the models from which have been derived the marvellous agricultural machines of modern times, then, on the other, his clean husbandry, his seed selection, his deep and constant tillage are the fundamental principles in the great new science of dry-farming. nor should we forget that both mendel and tull enunciated their principles only after long and patient experiment. the principles which we have adopted in our experiments on the government dry-land station at lichtenburg, in the transvaal and which we propose to follow on all stations hereafter to be established in the union of south africa, are seven in number, namely: ( ) deep ploughing; ( ) drilling; ( ) thin seeding; ( ) frequent harrowing; ( ) weedless lands; ( ) few varieties; and ( ) moisture-saving fallows. and we know full well that the more faithfully we adhere to this scheme the richer shall be our harvests. but, after all, these principles are merely the amplification, nothing more, of those fundamental methods of tillage so plainly set forth, one hundred and eighty-two years ago, by the genius of jethro tull. tull died in the month of march, in the year , at the age of sixty-six. in speaking of agricultural education we have frequently urged the benefits to be derived from a liberal education, and we like to recall tull's own words: "i owe my principles and practice originally to my travels, as i owe my drill to my organ." here indeed, was a man of many parts--a famous agriculturist, an able mechanic, a good musician, and a keen classical scholar. his life, strange to say, was one dauntless struggle with disease. for six years he scarce ever left his room, and seldom in that period was he gladdened by so much as a glimpse of his "hundred acres of drilled wheat." so they laid the tired body of the simple-minded english squire under the yew-trees of basildon in the mellow soil he loved so well. but the bells of the old church of saint bartholomew now ring out with a new, glad message, for they tell the toiling husbandmen of all lands to be of good cheer, for the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose; while the winds and the waters carry the echo of tull's name down through the corridors of time. chapter ii coke of norfolk: fattier of experimental farms _"seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men."_ at the beginning of this article we have quoted a text taken from the proverbs of solomon, which we believe can be applied more truthfully to the subject of our paper than to any other name conspicuous in the annuals of agriculture. for he was a man diligent in his business and he stood before kings. thomas william coke, of holkham (holy home), earl of leicester, was the eldest son of robert wenman. he was born in the year , and educated at eton, after which he travelled abroad. on the death of his father, coke was elected in his place as member of parliament for the county of norfolk. he was then in his twenty-second year. he entered the youngest member; his political career extended over a period of fifty-seven years, and he finished up as "father of the house of commons." his domestic life was singularly happy--very different from the sad state of his great contemporary arthur young. in he married his cousin, jane dutton, by whom he had three daughters. after her death in he remained a widower for twenty-one years and then at the age of sixty-eight wedded a girl of eighteen, lady anne keppel, by whom he had five sons and one daughter. coke had the unique experience of being offered a peerage seven times under six different prime ministers, and he was the first commoner raised to the peerage by queen victoria on her accession to the throne. in this connection an amusing story is told. in the year coke was called on to present, at a levee, a very forcible address to the prince of wales, who was then acting as regent, praying him "to dismiss from his presence and council those advisers, who, by their conduct, had proved themselves alike enemies to the throne and the people." the regent was warned of the proposal. knowing that coke valued his position as a commoner above everything else, he declared with an oath that: "if coke of norfolk enters my presence, by god, i'll knight him." this speech was repeated to coke. "if he dares," was the rejoinder, "by god i'll break his sword." part of the estate or holkham was formerly a series of salt marshes on the coast of the north sea. and when coke came into his property in --a fateful year in the history of the british empire the surrounding district was little better than a rabbit-warren, with long stretches of shingle and sand. soon after coke's marriage, when his wife remarked that she was going down to norfolk, the witty old lady townshend said, "then, my dear, all you will see will be one blade of grass and two rabbits fighting for that." the story of how coke came to be a practical farmer is told in the third volume of the journal of the royal agricultural society of england, published in the year . the article containing it was written by earl spencer, and is of special interest as he had it direct from the lips of mr. coke (then lord leicester) a short time before his death. when coke entered into his heritage, he found that five leases were about to expire. these farms were held at a rental of s. d. an acre; and in the previous leases they had been valued at s. d. an acre. at that time the agriculture of norfolk was of the poorest character; and we may judge of the quality of the holkham land by comparing it with the average rent of s. an acre which arthur young says prevailed at this time. coke sent for the two tenants, mr. brett and mr. tann, and offered to renew their leases at a slightly higher figure, namely s. an acre. both refused; and mr. brett jeered at the suggestion, saying that the land was not worth even the s. d. an acre which had originally been paid for it. this curt refusal was enough for a man of coke's temperament. he forthwith decided to farm the land himself. it was thus that a young man of twenty-two, possessor of a princely fortune, fresh from the salons of europe, suddenly turned his back on a gay and fashionable world; and stung into action by the laughter of a lazy tenant, took up the management of a sterile farm, raised a parish from poverty to affluence, transformed a desolate county into a cornfield, and left a name renowned in the annals of english agriculture. * * * * * in the history of agriculture, the name of coke is chiefly remembered by those famous gatherings locally known as "coke's clippings." these wonderful meetings began in a simple way with the clipping or shearing of sheep, but soon came to embrace the whole realm of the rural industry. as might be imagined, when coke took over the management of his farms, he had not the slightest knowledge of the science and practice of agriculture. so he called together his neighbours and frankly asked their advice. they in turn were doubtless glad to meet a young man so keen and so eager to learn. soon they brought their friends and their relatives, and two years later these little country gatherings had assumed a more definite character, and were thereupon called "coke's clippings." soon agriculturists from all parts of great britain wrote to ask if they might attend. swiftly and steadily the fame of the "clippings" grew, till presently scientific and other celebrated men from the united states and the continent travelled to england to take part in these meetings. year by year they increased in numbers till at last they embraced every nationality, every profession, and every rank in life, from royalty to the poorest peasant. holkham had, in fact, become a great experimental farm--a private estate turned by the enterprise of its owner into a public institution. nowadays, we are familiar with state experimental farms, which are visited by thousands of farmers once or twice a year. but a century ago such a thing was unheard of, and coke may justly be termed the "father of the experimental farm." at these shearings coke presented many cups and prizes for the invention of any new agricultural implement, for suggestions with regard to improved systems of cropping, of irrigation, of enriching the soil, and for articles on agricultural subjects--in a word, to every one who contributed to advance any branch whatsoever of the agricultural industry. moreover, we are told that at a meeting of sweepstakes were offered for guessing the correct weight of a wether. the winner was a certain mr. money hill, who guessed the exact weight-- lbs.; while a butcher named rett was a good second, and he guessed the weights of four other sheep within one pound. it is said that, one year, there died on the holkham estate a tenant who had won no less than £ in prizes at the "clippings." party politics were carefully excluded from these meetings, and any attempt to introduce a party spirit into the speeches at the annual dinners was at once silenced by coke. as a politician he was a prominent whig, but as an agriculturist he sank his politics and opened his doors to men of merit irrespective of their views. thus he gave sir john sinclair a magnificent goblet as a token of his appreciation of sinclair's "code of agriculture," in spite of the fact that sir john was a strong supporter of the "vile tories and their viler head, mr. pitt." sir john was pleased beyond measure and remarked, with a true highland courtesy, that hitherto the most priceless heirloom in his castle had been the drinking cup of mary queen of scots, but henceforth he would look on the goblet of his whig friend as his greatest treasure. the last of "coke's clippings" took place in the year . it was attended by seven thousand people, and lasted three whole days. there is something very pleasing in the account of this pastoral scene. a stately mansion in a splendid park, with a group of village maidens spinning flax, on a velvet lawn, in the midst of a vast concourse of people drawn from all parts of the earth. punctually at ten o'clock in the morning, so we read, miss coke came on to the lawn, accompanied by her father, and the duke of sussex. then after greetings taken and greetings given, the vast crowd proceeded, some riding, some driving, some walking, to inspect the different farms on the estate. the first day was given up to the study of the inoculated pasture, prize cattle, new implements, sheep-shearing amid farm crops. the second day was devoted to fresh fields, farm schools and cottage gardens. the third day was absorbed in the inspection of the carcases of animals that had been slaughtered, speech-making, and the distribution of prizes. on that day at p.m., seven hundred guests sat down to dinner, a mid-day meal, which, with the speeches and prizes lasted for seven hours! the historian of this period has left us an account of the most popular toasts at these annual banquets, such as "a fine fleece and a fat carcase," "the plough and a good use of it," while the tribute to coke's efforts to enclose all waste lands always brought down the house, for it wittily ran: "the enclosing of all waists," and coke's own toast "live and let live," was invariably greeted with tumultuous applause. the two annalists who have left us unimpeachable accounts of those memorable meetings are both agreed that coke himself was the central figure. dr. rigby, in "holkham and its agriculture" ( ) writes: "he is everywhere and with everyone. he solicits enquiry from everyone." at each halt in the ride little knots of people collected round him and listened with absorbed interest to all he said, while for hours he thus sustained the character of leader, lecturer, and host. and the american ambassador of that day, his excellency mr. richard rush, writes in "a residence at the court of london," "no matter what the subsequent advance of english agriculture or its results, mr. coke will ever take honourable rank among the pioneers of the great work. come what will in the future, the holkham sheep-shearings' will live in english rural annals. long will tradition speak of them as uniting improvements in agriculture to an abundant, cordial, and joyous hospitality." when coke started to farm in norfolk the value of rotation was unknown. then, it was customary to grow three white straw crops in succession followed by broadcast turnips. it was not to be wondered at that soil which consisted mainly of drifting sand and sharp, flinty gravel should soon become worn out. coke changed this practice and grew only two white crops in succession and then let the land lie in pasture for the next two years. he began to manure heavily; and used rape-cake as a top dressing with marked success. moreover, he found that the soil of almost the whole district was composed of very light sand and underlaid with a stratum of rich marl. pits were opened, the marl dug out, and scattered over the surface of the land. this not only promoted fertility, but gave to the soil that solidity which is so essential to the growth of wheat, it was coke's proud boast that he turned west norfolk from a rye-growing into a wheat-growing district. but it took him eleven years before he could get wheat to grow on the poor, sandy soil of his own estate. nevertheless, before he died, these so-called "rabbit and rye" lands were yielding as much as thirty-two bushels to the acre. his main idea was to stock heavily; more for the sake of manure than for the sake of meat. he pinned his faith on the motto: "muck is the mother of money." and we are told that he was accustomed to say to his tenants, "if you will keep an extra yard of bullocks, i will build you a yard and sheds free of expense." he was a patient man but he was once heard to remark: "it is difficult to teach anything to adult ignorance. i had to contend with prejudice, an ignorant impatience of change, and a rooted attachment to old methods." he referred to the fact that the farmers still persisted in the old system of sowing cereals broadcast, or else laboriously made holes with a dibbing-iron into which the grain was dropped, while another man followed with a rake and covered up the holes. thus he used the drill for sixteen years before any of his neighbours could be induced to adopt it; and even when the farmers began at last to see the benefit of this rapid manner of sowing, he estimated that its spread was only a mile each year. by-and-by, however, he noticed that a quaint term for a good crop of barley had come into use at holkham. his farmers spoke of "hat-barley" for the reason that if a man throws his hat into a crop of barley, the hat rests on the surface if the crop is good, but falls to the ground if the crop is bad. "all sir," said his tenants at length, "is 'hat-barley' since the drill came." * * * * * coke was never tired of experimenting with every kind of crop. cocksfoot (orchard grass) was cultivated with great success and numbers of sheep were fattened on it. on land, once considered worthless, he cut four hundred tons of sainfoin from one hundred and four acres. he early recognised the merits of swedes, and was the first to grow them on a large scale. he made a special study of birds in relation to the eradication of grubs. finding a field of turnips infested with a larva which caused black canker he turned four hundred ducks into the field which they cleared of this pest in five days. early in his career coke discarded the native sheep of norfolk, with backs as narrow as rabbits, in favour of the southdowns, and gradually became one of the largest sheep-breeders in england. encouraged by the duke of bedford, another eminent agriculturist, he started a herd of north devons, and thereafter bred them with much success. he also improved the suffolk breed of pigs by crossing them with the neapolitan, thereby obtaining a superior quality of pork. afforestation was one of his special hobbies. he fully realised the truth of the old saying that a tree is growing while its planter is sleeping. every year he planted fifty acres of timber, mostly oak, spanish chestnut, and beech, till he had three thousand acres of bleak, wind-swept country well covered. he permitted the poor of the neighbourhood to plant potatoes among his young trees for two or three years; a practice which kept his land clean and saved the expense of hoeing. and in the year he embarked in a ship built of oak from the acorns which he himself had planted. he always maintained that the interests of landlord and tenant were identical. in order, therefore, to encourage his tenants to exert themselves to the utmost, he let out his farms on long leases of twenty-one years at a moderate rental and burdened with but few restrictions. he soon saw, however, that in the case of an indolent tenant a long lease would mean the rapid deterioration of the property. it happened at this time that a certain farmer named mr. overman, who had been foremost in furthering the new agricultural schemes, applied for a farm on the holkham estate. coke allowed him, as an experiment, to draw up the covenants of his own lease. overman straightway inserted a clause making the improved course of cropping compulsory. coke was so pleased that he at once made this lease the model for all his other tenants with a few slight modifications. and so the land was fully protected from any possible injury through a long period of bad farming. by such improved methods coke is said to have raised the annual rental of his estate from £ , to £ , ; while the yearly fall of timber and underwood averaged £ , --a sum which exceeded the whole of his old rent roll. during his sixty-six years at holkham he spent over half a million pounds sterling on improvements alone, without taking into account the large sums spent on his house, domain, and home-farm buildings. yet it is averred that this vast outlay was all regained in due course. at that period the holkham estate consisted of , acres in a ring fence, with a park of , acres surrounded by a ten-mile wall close to the sea. in a volume entitled "agricultural writers" ( - ) by donald mcdonald, the name of coke does not appear. and it would seem that all he ever wrote were some papers for the "annals of agriculture" (arthur young), and a pamphlet on "an address to the freeholders of norfolk." the biography of this remarkable man has recently been written in two brightly bound and lavishly illustrated volumes by mrs. a. m. w. stirling, under the title of "coke and his friends."[ ] his memory well deserved the laborious and loving tribute of his enthusiastic great grand-child. but to be of any practical value to the agriculturist, the book must be greatly condensed. out of thirty-five chapters we can find only five which tell of his services to the agricultural industry. out of a thousand odd pages we can find only one hundred and sixteen which bear on the science and practice of farming. out of sixty-four carefully executed illustrations we can only find four which have anything whatsoever to do with rural affairs. it may be affirmed that coke was much more than a mere agriculturist. that is very true; but surely his fame rests far more on his services to rural progress than on his reputation as a politician, a society leader, or a landlord. we therefore hope that at no distant date the same flowing pen which has produced the bulkier volumes will compile a handier life dealing altogether with coke's agricultural doings. coke died in at the age of eighty-eight, and was buried in the family mausoleum attached to the tittleshall church, norfolk. [ ] published by mr. john lane, london. in a life drama so vivid and forceful there are yet two vivid scenes we cannot fail to recall. it was coke who brought forward the motion in the house of commons to recognise the independence of the american colonies. all night long the house sat. at . a.m., the end came. amid breathless silence the result was announced noes, ayes. it was coke who announced to the obstinate, discomfited king the result of that great debate, whereby the disastrous fratricidal war was forever ended and the independence of the united states acknowledged by the parliament of the mother country, after nine bitter years, by a majority of one vote. the parish of burnham lies next to the parish of holkham. and the son of the rector of the former village, a fragile, delicate lad, used sometimes to join mr. coke's hounds when they were out coursing. but he was never asked to shoot, as only once had he been known to hit a partridge. one day this poor young man, returning from a two years' cruise paid a visit to his wealthy neighbour and stayed overnight. the great-uncle of his host built the mansion house of holkham, and thomas william coke spent all his life and a large fortune in developing the family estate. but the british people placed nelson, the frail and nervous guest, who slept that night in the humble turret-room, on the top of the column in the centre of trafalgar square. chapter iii arthur young: author of the agricultural tour _"the magic of property turns sands into gold. give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert."_--arthur young. arthur young, the greatest of english agriculturists and the poorest of practical farmers, was born at whitehall, london, in the year . he was the youngest son of the reverend dr. arthur young, prebendary of canterbury cathedral, rector of bradfield, and of anne lucretia, daughter of john de cousmaker, a dutchman who accompanied william of orange to england. from his father arthur inherited good looks and literary talent; and from his mother the love of learning and brilliant and pleasing speech. mrs. young brought her clerical husband a large dowry, much of which was swallowed up in the vortex of his debts, and later, on his death, in promoting the agricultural schemes of her gifted but unbusinesslike son. his home from the first, and for the most part of his life, was bradfield hall in the county of suffolk--a property which had been in the hands of the young family since the year . after a visit to bradfield, reached from marks tey on the great eastern railway, you do not wonder at young's early love of rural life. a broad, winding, elm-bordered road, meadows knee-deep in wild flowers and waving grasses, tangled hedges of eglantine and honeysuckle, rustling cornfields and silent woods--these, all these, were the sweet pathways to his home. at the age of seven the lad was sent to the grammar school at lavenham in order to learn the greek and latin languages, together with writing and arithmetic. owing to the indulgence of a fond mother, his attendance at his classes was irregular, and neither the centurions of cæsar nor the wooers of penelope were able to beguile him from his pony, his pointer and his gun. but the cheapness of his board and schooling would delight the hearts of many parents in the transvaal and elsewhere in the year of grace . here is the bill:-- "the rev. dr. young to john coulter (master of lavenham school), xmas, to xmas, . a year's board, etc., £ . sundries, £ _s._ _d._ total, £ _s._ _d._" on leaving lavenham, he was apprenticed, at the wish of his mother, to a wine-merchant at lynn. he deserted his new work. he was fond of music and the drama. he excelled in dancing, but was always a diligent scholar. his income, in those days, was not excessive, being thirty pounds per annum: but his foppery in dress deprived him of the means wherewith to purchase his beloved books. accordingly, he wrote a pamphlet entitled "the theatre of the present war in north america," for which he received ten pounds' worth of books from the publisher. more balls compelled him to compile more political pamphlets in order to procure more books. in the year , at the age of eighteen, he left the counting house at lynn, as he tells us in his own words, "without education, pursuits, profession or employment." that same year his father died much in debt. he next went to london and started at his own expense a monthly magazine called "the universal museum." it failed, and he returned home. all his wealth was now summed up in a freehold farm of twenty acres. his mother owned eighty acres at bradfield. she persuaded him to reside with her and to manage the farm. he had no knowledge of agriculture, but he accepted, and tells the story in his own words: "young, eager, and totally ignorant of every necessary detail, it is not surprising that i squandered large sums under golden dreams of improvement." at the age of twenty-four he married miss martha allen of lynn. one of his biographers says: "the marriage brought him an enviable connection--troops of friends, a passport into brilliant circles, but no fireside happiness. the lady was evidently of a captious disposition, shrewish temper and narrow sympathies." another biographer writes: "a loving son, a devoted father, young was an indifferent husband." having failed to make a success of his first farm, young, nothing daunted, undertook the cultivation of sampford hall in essex. this farm consisted of acres of good arable land. but want of practical knowledge, and want of capital, drove him from it, and after a five years' tenancy he paid a farmer £ to take it off his hands. his successor made a fortune on it. but during these five years young had made a large number of experiments, the results of which he afterwards published in two large volumes under the title of "a course of experimental agriculture." still unshaken in his love of the soil, he sought another farm, and the quest furnished materials for his "six weeks' tour through the southern counties," a very popular work which ran through several editions. it was at this time that on the advice of his suffolk bailiff he took a farm of one hundred acres at north mimms in hertfordshire. this property had a good house, but that seems to have been all. he was deceived by seeing it in a specially good season. this speculation proved worse than the last; but his picturesque pen never failed: "i know what epithet to give this soil. sterility falls short of the idea--a hungry, vitriolic gravel. i occupied for nine years the jaws of a wolf." the simple fact was that whenever he put pen to paper he was successful; whenever he turned to practical farming he was a ruined man. he continued to write. his publisher called for more tours. his receipts were considerable, yet we find him recording: "no carthorse ever laboured as i did at this period, spending like an idiot, always in debt, in spite of what i earned with the sweat of my brow, and almost my heart's blood--the year's receipts £ , ." about this time he wrote "observations on the present state of the waste lands of great britain," and was elected a fellow of the royal society. finding that he could not make enough to live on at farming, he accepted an appointment as parliamentary reporter for the "morning post" at five guineas a week--a most incongruous job for a farmer since it compelled him to be absent from his home during six days of the week. yet he retained it for several years--walking seventeen miles down to his farm every saturday evening and returning to london every monday morning. in the year young began the publication of the "annals of agriculture"--a monthly publication which ran through forty-five volumes. these annals covered the whole field of agriculture in the form of letters and essays from the most eminent ruralists of the age. but more than a fourth part of the whole series came from the editor's ceaseless pen. even the king was persuaded to contribute two letters under the _nom de plume_ of "ralph robinson," his windsor shepherd. young related with much pride that his majesty said to him one day on the terrace of windsor: "mr. young, i consider myself as more obliged to you than to any other man in my dominions"; while the queen observed that they never travelled without a copy of the "annals" in the royal carriage. these volumes created quite a stir in european circles, and from all parts of the continent there flocked scholars to study at the feet of the abelard of english agriculture. a year later young's mother died and bradfield hall and farm became his property. if tull was the founder of dry-farming, and coke the father of the experimental farm, young was unquestionably the author of the agricultural tour. from his fertile pen flowed "the southern," "the northern," and "the eastern tours," together with "the tour in ireland." the first three tours were translated into russian by the express command of the empress catherine, who at the same time sent several young russians to reside at bradfield for instruction in british agriculture. it was his own opinion that the most useful feature of the tours was the practical information which they gave on the important subject of the correct courses of crops, on which all preceding writers had been silent. his most famous and most popular work was his "travels in france during the years , and ." yet these remarkable journeys were fore-shadowed twenty years before in a little book he wrote entitled "the farmer's letters to the people of england," in which he says: "the nobility and men of large fortune travel, but no farmers; unfortunately, those who have this peculiar and distinguishing advantage, the noble opportunity of benefiting themselves and their country, seldom enquire or even think about agriculture." then comes a sketch of a farmer's tour with the routes laid down for the imaginary traveller, being precisely those roads he himself was to follow two decades later. in the year he received a pressing invitation from a polish friend in paris to join the count de la rochefoucauld in a tour of the pyrenees. "this was touching a string tremulous to vibrate," he writes: "i had long wished for an opportunity to examine france." his travels in france were the sensation of the hour. no one had done quite the same thing before. he was an eye-witness of the moving scenes which ushered in the french revolution. his name was in everybody's mouth. he received invitations to courts and salons. all the learned societies enrolled him as a member. his work was translated into a score of languages. princes, statesmen, scientists, men of letters, simple farmers and plain peasants paid a visit to bradfield. among his correspondents we note the names of washington, pitt. burke, wilberforce, lafayette, priestly and jeremy bentham. so it happened that when the affluent coke of norfolk was holding a continental sheep-shearing salon at holkham, his indigent neighbour, fifty miles to the south, was holding a european levee to discuss the fundamental principles of rural economy. four years later young's heart was broken by the death of his favourite daughter, "bobbin" at the early age of fourteen. he developed religious melancholia, shunned society, left his journal blank and brooded over sermons. his sight began to fail. he was operated on for cataract. wilberforce, warned to be careful, went, a week later, to see him in the darkened room. in his sweet and elegant voice the great emancipator spoke feelingly of the death of a mutual friend. young burst into tears and became for ever blind. the remainder of his life was spent in preaching the gospel to the peasantry and in works of charity. he died in the eightieth year of his age in sackville street, london, and was buried at bradfield, april, . it is impossible in this brief article to do more than mention the writings of young. these we must reserve for a subsequent paper. our library is far from complete, yet we possess sixty-six volumes of his sparkling prose, which, placed one upon another, attain to a height of nine feet--a monument of amazing industry. true, he was not exempt from those petty jealousies which so often mar the character of eminent men. he tried to snatch some credit for the board of agriculture from sir john sinclair, and he scoffed at the idea that jethro tull had invented the corn-drill. he met and conversed with the greatest savants of the age, yet his mind never burst the old wine bottles which he served out in the suffolk store. and so he arrogantly says that canada and nova scotia are not worth colonising. "if they continue poor, they will be no markets. if rich they will revolt; and that perhaps is the best thing they can do for our interest." ... "the loss of india must come. it ought to come." yet with all his foolish fancies what a splendid life! for he was the prophet of the new agriculture in the valley of dry bones. and england may well write the epitaph of her illustrious son in the words of ezekiel: "this land that was desolate is become like the garden of eden." chapter iv john sinclair: founder of the board of agriculture one of the earliest recollections of the writer's childhood as he fished for trout in the swiney burn in the far north of scotland, was the tale of a certain wonderful man that was wont to tie little shoes on the feet of his sheep in order to keep them warm while walking through the snow. but many a trout had to be caught, and many a ripple of the shining river had to pass beneath the thurso bridge ere he learned the name of the strange person who struck his childish fancy as he looked up from his quivering line into the wistful eyes of a cheviot ewe on the lonely, wine-red, moor. sir john sinclair, the founder of the british board of agriculture, was born in thurso castle in the county of caithness, on may th, . his father, george sinclair, the laird of ulbster, was a descendant of the earls of caithness and orkney; while his mother, lady janet sutherland of dunrobin, was the sister of the sixteenth earl of that name. as a child he was carefully and wisely trained by his parents. from his father, a man of literary tastes and deeply religious character, he inherited a love of books; and from his gentle mother, he learned the lesson that life is not an empty dream; and her lad was soon to be known as "the most indefatigable man in europe." john was educated at the royal school of edinburgh, and at the university of the same city which he entered at the early age of thirteen. he also studied at glasgow, and at trinity college, oxford. he was called to the bar in . his father died suddenly when john was sixteen, and he found himself heir to estates comprising some , acres, mainly bleak and barren moor. he at once began to improve his property. scottish agriculture was then in a most backward state. the fields were unenclosed, the lands were undrained. the small farmers of caithness were so poor that they could hardly afford to keep a horse, or even a shetland pony. the burdens were chiefly borne by women. indeed, according to smiles, if a cottar lost a horse, it was not unusual for him to marry a wife as the cheapest substitute. the country was without roads or bridges. drovers taking their cattle to the south had to swim rivers alongside their beasts. the chief track leading into the country lay along the high shelf of a mountain called ben cheilt; the path being several hundred feet above the storm-tossed sea, which thundered on the rocks below. imagine the loud laughter of the elders of this community when they heard a rumour that young sinclair proposed to build in a single day a road over this hitherto impassable hill. but john surveyed the road himself, and ordered up the statute labour. at that time the law decreed that all capable inhabitants of the agricultural class should work on the roads for six days in every year. and so, early one summer morning, he assembled the neighbouring farmers and their servants--a total of , . each party, on arrival, was assigned a certain piece of the path where they found tools and provisions awaiting them. at sunset of the same evening the youth drove his carriage and pair over six miles of mountain road which the night before had been a dangerous sheep-track. tidings of this exploit by a stripling of eighteen spread far and wide, and spurred the sleeping spirit of the north. at the age of twenty-six, john sinclair was elected member of parliament for the county of caithness, and remained in the house of commons for upwards of thirty years. * * * * * the great monument to sinclair's indefatigable industry is his "statistical account of scotland" in twenty-one volumes, one of the most valuable works on agriculture ever published in any country. it took seven years and seven months of incessant labour to complete. it was then that the word "statistics" and "statistical" were first introduced into the english language by sinclair. he made use of the clergy to obtain the information he desired. he sent a circular letter to each parish minister in scotland with questions under four heads: ( ) geography and natural history. ( ) population. ( ) production. ( ) miscellaneous subjects. in the collection of data many difficulties occurred. some of the clergy scorned the idea that one man could collect and collate all this information: others were lazy both in mind and body: and some were old and infirm. several parishes were vacant, some too huge to fully cover, many were without roads, and not a few separated by tempestuous arms of the sea. to overcome these obstacles he enlisted the aid of the leaders of the church of scotland, of which he was a member, and the great landowners, and as a last resort he employed statistical missionaries to supply the missing information. he generously assigned all the profits of this publication to the scottish fund for the benefit of the sons of the clergy, and obtained for that society a royal grant of £ , . among the direct results of this work was the raising of the stipends of ministers and schoolmasters--surely a convincing reply to his critics in the manses--the abolition of what was then called thirlage or the compulsory grinding of corn at a particular mill. charles abbot, afterwards lord colchester, the originator of the census of england, wrote to sinclair: "your success suggested to me the idea," and the various bureaux of statistics in the united states and other countries can be directly traced to the influence of his treatise. in the year sinclair founded the wool society. for some time he had been wondering why shetland wool was so extremely fine. meeting at the general assembly in edinburgh a shetland minister, he put the question to him and obtained much valuable information which he at once laid before the highland society. this led him to form the british wool society. it was inaugurated by a grand sheep-shearing festival at newhall's inn, queensferry, near edinburgh, in the year . to sinclair, therefore, belongs the credit of initiating the sheep-shearing contests which a few years later developed into coke's famous "clippings," and which were the precursors of our present agricultural shows. the first agricultural show was held by the highland and agricultural society at edinburgh in . it was the long hill sheep of the east border that sinclair re-christened by the now famous name of cheviot. these sheep soon became naturalised all over the north of scotland, and in a short time the rent of sheep firms rose to fabulous prices. pastures of little value under coarse-woolled sheep yielded large returns. as an illustration of the practical value of his improvements it may be mentioned that sinclair's estate of langwell, which he had bought for £ , , he afterwards sold for £ , : while the estate of reay in sutherlandshire was purchased at £ , . the name cheviot comes from the range of rounded or cone-shaped hills growing a superior pasture on the scottish and english border. in the opening lines of this article i spoke of a childish tale about sheep-shearing. that this legend is not mere fiction may be seen in the following letter of arthur young (see autobiography of arthur young, page ): "from sir j. sinclair on clothing for sheep which he sent and desired me to buy. i did so, and the rest of the flock took them, i suppose, for beasts of prey, and fled in all directions, till the clothed sheep, jumping hedges and ditches, soon derobed themselves." * * * * * in his third lecture in the "crown of wild olives," ruskin points out that all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war. it is worth while, therefore, to note that the british board of agriculture was established when britain was engaged in the supreme struggle with france, which terminated on the field of waterloo, that the national department of agriculture in the united states was inaugurated in the midst of the civil war, and that the transvaal department of agriculture was commenced ere peace was signed at vereeniging. in the year sinclair's services in restoring commercial confidence during the crisis which occurred at the outbreak of the french war were recognised by pitt, who sent for him to come to downing street, thanked him on behalf of the government, and asked him if there was anything that he desired. sinclair replied that he sought no favours for himself, but the most gratifying of all would be the establishment by parliament of a great national corporation to be called "the board of agriculture." in due course the board was successfully established with the king as patron, sinclair as president, and arthur young as secretary. the annual parliamentary grant was £ , . in this brief review we have no space to follow the fortune of the board to the date of the retirement of its inspiring founder, down to the time when it returned £ , to the treasury--not knowing how to spend it--till it finally faded away in the year . yet the board accomplished much imperishable work. it carried out agricultural surveys, published several volumes of "communications," promoted prize essays on rural topics, encouraged elkington, the father of drainage, macadam the road-maker, and meikle, the inventor of the threshing machine, and arranged lectures by sir humphry davy on agricultural chemistry, and by young on tillage. the north of scotland at that period owed much to sinclair. in he saved the inhabitants from a serious famine by obtaining a parliamentary grant of £ , . in the same year, along with some other patriots, he secured the repeal of the law which for thirty-seven years--since the rebellion of --had forbidden the use of the kilt. sinclair was an enthusiastic tree-planter in a country which was once wittily described by an american visitor as a "great clearing." he rebuilt thurso, and founded the herring fisheries at wick. to ensure the success of this industry he imported dutch fishermen to teach the caithnessmen the art of catching and curing herrings. he introduced improved methods of tillage, a regular rotation of crops, and the cultivation of turnips, clover, and rye-grass. one of his many schemes was a general enclosure bill, his toast at agricultural gatherings being: "may a common become an uncommon spectacle in caithness." in his attachment to william pitt was rewarded with a baronetcy. sir john's domestic life was singularly happy. on referring to the old book already mentioned, we read: "he has been twice married to two of the most beautiful women in the island. his first lady, a miss maitland, died prematurely in the bloom of youth. his present lady is the daughter of the late lord macdonald, and by her he has a son, george, and other children." it cannot be doubted that sir john loved the limelight, possessed an unbounded self-conceit, lacked the saving sense of humour, and over-estimated his own achievements. but these vanities were but the fitful smoke in the blue flame of a burning energy. what a lesson in industry for the youth of south africa. fifty years of ceaseless toil, author of thirty-nine volumes and pamphlets. this scottish agriculturist died in at the ripe age of eighty-one, and is buried according to an ancient family rite, in holyrood chapel at edinburgh--the friend and confidant of three english kings. chapter v cyrus h. mccormick: inventor of the reaper _"i expect to die in harness, because this is not the world for rest. this is the world for work. in the next world we will have the rest."_--cyrus h. mccormick. it is hardly to be expected that those people who devoutly chant in a million churches the fourth sentence of the lord's prayer should think with gratitude of any other person than the divine giver of all good. yet it is strange to reflect that although every schoolboy knows something of the life of our least poet laureate, not one in ten thousand could tell you the career of the man who responded in a truly miraculous manner to the heartfelt, world-voiced matin of both rich and poor, "give us this day our daily bread." cyrus h. mccormick, the inventor of the reaping machine, was born in the eventful year . it was the birth year of darwin and tennyson, of mendelssohn, gladstone, and lincoln. he was born on walnut grove farm, amidst the mountains of virginia, one hundred miles from the sea. he came of that virile stock that has proved to be the main strength of the republic, that gave washington thirty-nine of his generals, three out of four members of his cabinet, and three out of the five judges of the supreme court--the scots who migrated to ulster, and thence to the united states. robert mccormick, the father of cyrus, was a fairly large farmer, and an inventor of no mean ability. the little log workshop is still shown to the enquiring tourist where father and son moulded and mended machinery on many a rainy day. indeed, we are told that the mccormick homestead was more like a small factory than a farmer's home, so full was it of rural industries--spinning and weaving, soap and shoes, butter-making and bacon-curing. and it is more than likely that the ceaseless activity of his wise and celtic mother taught cyrus the value of each moment of time. ever since he was a child of seven it was his father's ambition to invent a reaper. he made one, and tried it in the harvest of , but it proved a failure. it was a fantastic machine, pushed from behind by two horses. it was highly ingenious, but it would not cut the corn, and was hauled off the field to become one of the jokes of the countryside. hurt by the jests of his neighbours, he locked the door of his workshop and toiled away at night. early in the summer of he had so improved his reaper that he gave it another trial. again it failed. true, the machine cut the corn fairly well, but it flung it on the ground in a tangled heap. satisfied that there was something radically wrong, robert mccormick gave up the reaper after having worked at it for over fifteen years. at this point cyrus took up the task which his father had reluctantly abandoned. he showed his genius from the very start by adopting a new principle of operation. first of all, he invented the divider to separate the corn to be cut from the corn left standing. next came the reciprocating blade, and the fingers, the revolving reel, platform, and side draught, and, lastly, the big driving wheel. one day late in the month of july, in the summer of , cyrus put a horse between the shafts of his reaper. with no spectators save his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, he drove down to a patch of yellow grain. to that little family circle it must have been a moment of intense excitement. click, click, click--the white blade shot to and fro. what a shout of joy! the wheat is cut and falls upon the platform in a golden, shimmering swathe! thus at the early age of twenty-two cyrus had invented the first practical reaper that the world had seen. and now began his nine years' struggle with adversity, from which he emerged in triumph to become the greatest manufacturer of harvesting machines that america has produced. in order to obtain funds with which to manufacture reapers he started to farm. but he soon found that it was impossible to raise sufficient capital by this means. near by was a large deposit of iron ore, and he forthwith resolved to build a furnace and make iron. he persuaded his father and the school teacher to become his partners. for several years the furnace did fairly well, when, suddenly, the price of iron fell. the mccormicks were bankrupt. cyrus gave up the farm, and stuck grimly to his reaper. one day the village constable rode up to the farm door with a summons for a debt of nine-teen dollars, but he was so impressed with the industry of the mccormicks that he had not the heart to serve the notice. it was the darkest hour before the dawn. * * * * * the same year ( ) a stranger rode in from the north and drew rein in front of the little log workshop. he was a rough looking man with the homely name of abraham smith, but to cyrus he came as an angel of light. he had come with fifty dollars in his pocket to buy a reaper--the first that was ever sold. a short time later two other farmers came on the same errand, and that summer three reaping machines were working in the wheat-fields of america. in mccormick sold seven machines, and in fifty. the home farm had now become a busy factory. three years later a friend said to him "cyrus, why don't you go west with your reaper, where the land is level and labour cheap?" it was the call of the west. he travelled over the boundless prairies, and was quick to see that this great land-ocean was the natural home of the reaper. straightway he transferred his factory to chicago--then, in , a forlorn little town of less than , souls. his business flourished. in the great fire of his factory, which was then turning out , harvesters a year, was totally destroyed. at the word of his wife he rebuilt it anew with amazing rapidity. and so we find that the tiny workshop in the backwoods of virginia has become the mccormick city in the heart of chicago. in the sixty-five years of its life this manufactory has produced over , , harvesting machines, and is now pouring them out at the rate of over , per week. the mccormick company is now known as the international harvester company, and his eldest son, cyrus h. mccormick, is the president. the annual output is , , dollars. it was the reaper that enabled the united states, during the four years of the civil war, not only to feed the armies in the field, but at the same time to export to foreign countries , , bushels of wheat. and well might the savants of the french academy of science say, when electing cyrus mccormick a member, that "he had done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man." and now we must trace the evolution of the reaper from its origin on the walnut grove farm to the marvellous machine of to-day. for about thirty years it remained practically unaltered in design, save that seats had been added for the raker and the driver. it did no more than cut the grain and leave it in loose bundles on the ground. it had abolished the sickler and cradler, but there still remained the raker and binder. might it not be possible to do away with them also, and leave only the driver? such was the fascinating problem which now confronted the inventor. in the year a bedridden cripple called jearum atkins bought a mccormick reaper, and had it placed outside his window. to while away the weary hours he actually devised an attachment with two revolving iron arms, which automatically raked off the cut grain from the platform to the ground. it was a grotesque contrivance, and was nicknamed by the farmers the "iron man." nevertheless, this invention stimulated the manufacture of self-rake reapers, and soon the american farmer would buy no other kind. thus part of the problem had been solved. the raker was abolished. but there still remained the harder task of supplanting the binder--the man or the woman who gathered up the bundles of cut corn and bound them tightly together with a wisp of straw into the sheaf. and now another figure appears upon this ever-moving stage, a young man by the name of charles b. withington. born at akron, ohio, a year before mccormick invented his reaper, this delicate youth was trained by his father to be a watchmaker. at the age of fifteen, in order to earn pocket-money, he went into the harvest field to bind corn. he was not robust, and the hard, stooping labour under a hot sun would sometimes bring the blood to his head in a hemorrhage. there were times after the day's work was done when he was too weary to walk home, and he would throw himself on the stubble to rest. at eighteen he journeyed to the goldfields of california, drifted to australia, and in the year arrived back in wisconsin with , dollars in his belt. all this money he began to fritter away in trying to invent a self-rake reaper. suddenly, inspired by the articles of a rural editor, who maintained that the binding of corn should be done by a machine, withington dropped his self-rake and went straight to work to make a self-binder. he completed his first machine in , but met with much discouragement until, two years later, he came across mccormick. their dramatic meeting is best told by mr. herbert m. casson in his interesting volume, entitled "cyrus hall mccormick: his life and work." "one evening in a tall man; with a box under his arm, walked diffidently up the steps of the mccormick home in chicago, and rang the bell. he asked to see mr. mccormick, and was shown into the parlour, where he found mr. mccormick, sitting, as usual, in a large and comfortable chair. "'my name is withington,' said the stranger; i live in janesville, wisconsin. i have here a model of a machine that will automatically bind grain.' "now, it so happened that mccormick had been kept awake nearly the whole of the previous night by a stubborn business problem. he could scarcely hold his eyelids apart. and when withington was in the midst of his explanation, with the intentness of a born inventor, mr. mccormick fell fast asleep. at such a reception to his cherished machine withington lost heart. he was a gentle, sensitive man easily rebuffed, and so, when mccormick aroused from his nap, withington had departed, and was on his way back to wisconsin. for a few seconds mccormick was uncertain as to whether his visitor had been a reality or a dream. then he awoke with a start into instant action. a great opportunity had come to him, and he had let it slip. he was at this time making self-rake reapers and marsh harvesters; but what he wanted--what every reaper manufacturer wanted in --was a self-binder. he at once called one of his trusted workmen. "'i want you to go to janesville,' he said. find a man named withington and bring him to me by the first train that comes back to chicago.' "the next day withington was brought back, and treated with the utmost courtesy. mccormick studied his invention, and found it to be a most remarkable mechanism. two steel arms caught each bundle of grain, whirled a wire tightly around it, fastened the two ends together with a twist, cut it loose, and tossed it to the ground. this self-binder was perfect in all its details--as neat and effective a machine as could be imagined. mccormick was delighted. at last, here was a machine that would abolish the binding of grain by hand." for six years all went well with the mccormick and withington self-binder. this wonderful wire-twisting machine was working everywhere with clockwork precision, and was believed to be the best that human ingenuity could devise. all at once the manufacturing world was startled with the news that william deering had made and sold three thousand twine self-binders. deering, by this dramatic move became in a flash mccormick's most powerful competitor. he was not a farmer's son, like the latter, being bred in the city and trained in a factory. he had been a successful merchant at maine, then left it to enter the harvester trade. he staked his whole fortune on making twine binders. he won, and mccormick was forced to follow in his wake. the evolution of the reaper into the twine self-binder was an epoch-making event in the agricultural world. it enormously increased the sales. in , , reapers were sold; five years later the figures had risen to , . since then, with the exception of the new knot-tying device, there has been no real change in the reaper. it remains the grandest of all agricultural machines, and one of the most astonishing mechanisms ever devised by the brain of man. mccormick died in . in the span of his own life the reaper was born and brought to perfection. he created it in a remote virginian village, and he lived to see his catalogue printed in twenty languages, and to know that so long as the human race continues to eat bread the sun will never set on the empire of his reaper, for somewhere, in every month in all the year, you will find the corn white unto the harvest. * * * * * r. clay and sons, ltd., brunswick st., s.e., and bungay, suffolk. * * * * * =the rural science series= edited by professor l. h. bailey =the soil.= by f. h. king. _s._ _d._ net. =the fertility of the land.= by i. p. roberts. _s._ _d._ net. =the spraying of plants.= by e. g. lodeman. _s._ _d._ net, =milk and its products.= by h. h. wing. _s._ _d._ net. =principles of fruit growing.= by l. h. bailey. _s._ _d._ net. =fertilizers.= by e. b. voorhees. _s._ _d._ net. =irrigation and drainage.= by f. h. king. _s._ _d._ net. =rural wealth and welfare.= by g. t. fairchild. _s._ _d._ net. =the farmstead.= by i. p. roberts. _s._ _d._ net. =the principles of agriculture.= edited by l. h. bailey. _s._ _d._ net. =the principles of vegetable gardening.= by l. h. bailey. _s._ _d._ net. =garden-making.= by l. h. bailey. _s._ _d._ net. =the nursery book.= by l. h. bailey. _s._ _d._ net. =the pruning-book.= by l. h. bailey. _s._ _d._ net. =the forcing-book.= by l. h. bailey. _s._ _d._ net. =plant breeding.= by l. h. bailey. _s._ _d._ net. london: macmillan and co., ltd. * * * * * =the rural science series= edited by professor l. h. bailey =farm poultry.= by g. c. watson. _s._ _d._ net. =the feeding of animals.= by w. h. jordan. _s._ _d._ net. =the farmer's business handbook.= by i. p. roberts. _s._ _d._ net. =the diseases of animals.= by nelson s. mayo. _s._ _d._ net. =how to choose a farm.= by prof. t. f. hunt. _s._ _d._ net. =bush fruits.= by f. w. card. _s._ _d._ net. =forage crops.= by e. b. voorhees. _s._ _d._ =bacteria in relation to country life.= by prof. jacob g. lipman. _s._ _d._ net. =fruit-growing in arid regions.= by w. paddock and o. b. whipple. _s._ _d._ net. =rural hygiene.= by prof. henry n. ogden, c.e. _s._ _d._ net. =dry-farming.= by john a. widtsoe. _s._ _d._ net. =law for the american farmer.= by john b. green. _s._ _d._ net. =the training and breaking of horses.= by merritt w. harper. _s._ _d._ net. =farm boys and girls.= by william a. mckeever. _s._ _d._ net. =sheep-farming in north america.= by john a. craig. _s._ _d._ net. =co-operation in agriculture.= by g. harold powell. _s._ _d._ net. london: macmillan and co., ltd. * * * * * transcriber's notes all small caps formatted text has not been converted to all caps to distinguish them from titles which were printed as all caps. the birth year for thomas william coke is reported on page as ; page states "coke died in at the age of eighty-eight"; and wikipedia reports coke was born on may and died june (aged ). so, the year of coke's birth on page should probably be . wikipedia shows that a gravestone has been placed on mr. tull's resting place. the holy earth by l. h. bailey new york charles scribner's sons copyright, , by charles scribner's sons published september, contents page first, the statement: pages - in the beginning the earth is good it is kindly the earth is holy second, the consequences: pages - the habit of destruction the new hold the brotherhood relation the farmer's relation the underlying training of a people the neighbor's access to the earth the subdividing of the land a new map the public program the honest day's work the group reaction the spiritual contact with nature the struggle for existence: war the daily fare the admiration of good materials the keeping of the beautiful earth the tones of industry the threatened literature the separate soul the element of separateness in society the democratic basis in agriculture the background spaces.--the forest a forest background for a reformatory the background spaces.--the open fields the background spaces.--the ancestral sea the holy earth the holy earth first, the statement so bountiful hath been the earth and so securely have we drawn from it our substance, that we have taken it all for granted as if it were only a gift, and with little care or conscious thought of the consequences of our use of it; nor have we very much considered the essential relation that we bear to it as living parts in the vast creation. it is good to think of ourselves--of this teeming, tense, and aspiring human race--as a helpful and contributing part in the plan of a cosmos, and as participators in some far-reaching destiny. the idea of responsibility is much asserted of late, but we relate it mostly to the attitude of persons in the realm of conventional conduct, which we have come to regard as very exclusively the realm of morals; and we have established certain formalities that satisfy the conscience. but there is some deeper relation than all this, which we must recognize and the consequences of which we must practise. there is a directer and more personal obligation than that which expends itself in loyalty to the manifold organizations and social requirements of the present day. there is a more fundamental co-operation in the scheme of things than that which deals with the proprieties or which centres about the selfishness too often expressed in the salvation of one's soul. we can be only onlookers on that part of the cosmos that we call the far heavens, but it is possible to co-operate in the processes on the surface of the sphere. this co-operation may be conscious and definite, and also useful to the earth; that is, it may be real. what means this contact with our natural situation, this relationship to the earth to which we are born, and what signify this new exploration and conquest of the planet and these accumulating prophecies of science? does the mothership of the earth have any real meaning to us? all this does not imply a relation only with material and physical things, nor any effort to substitute a nature religion. our relation with the planet must be raised into the realm of spirit; we cannot be fully useful otherwise. we must find a way to maintain the emotions in the abounding commercial civilization. there are two kinds of materials,--those of the native earth and the idols of one's hands. the latter are much in evidence in modern life, with the conquests of engineering, mechanics, architecture, and all the rest. we visualize them everywhere, and particularly in the great centres of population. the tendency is to be removed farther and farther from the everlasting backgrounds. our religion is detached. we come out of the earth and we have a right to the use of the materials; and there is no danger of crass materialism if we recognize the original materials as divine and if we understand our proper relation to the creation, for then will gross selfishness in the use of them be removed. this will necessarily mean a better conception of property and of one's obligation in the use of it. we shall conceive of the earth, which is the common habitation, as inviolable. one does not act rightly toward one's fellows if one does not know how to act rightly toward the earth. nor does this close regard for the mother earth imply any loss of mysticism or of exaltation: quite the contrary. science but increases the mystery of the unknown and enlarges the boundaries of the spiritual vision. to feel that one is a useful and co-operating part in nature is to give one kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. here arise the fundamental common relations. here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires,--when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their terms; and here also the responsible practices of life take root. so much are we now involved in problems of human groups, so persistent are the portrayals of our social afflictions, and so well do we magnify our woes by insisting on them, so much in sheer weariness do we provide antidotes to soothe our feelings and to cause us to forget by means of many empty diversions, that we may neglect to express ourselves in simple free personal joy and to separate the obligation of the individual from the irresponsibilities of the mass. _in the beginning_ it suits my purpose to quote the first sentence in the hebrew scripture: in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth. this is a statement of tremendous reach, introducing the cosmos; for it sets forth in the fewest words the elemental fact that the formation of the created earth lies above and before man, and that therefore it is not man's but god's. man finds himself upon it, with many other creatures, all parts in some system which, since it is beyond man and superior to him, is divine. yet the planet was not at once complete when life had appeared upon it. the whirling earth goes through many vicissitudes; the conditions on its fruitful surface are ever-changing; and the forms of life must meet the new conditions: so does the creation continue, and every day sees the genesis in process. all life contends, sometimes ferociously but more often bloodlessly and benignly, and the contention results in momentary equilibrium, one set of contestants balancing another; but every change in the outward conditions destroys the equation and a new status results. of all the disturbing living factors, man is the greatest. he sets mighty changes going, destroying forests, upturning the sleeping prairies, flooding the deserts, deflecting the courses of the rivers, building great cities. he operates consciously and increasingly with plan aforethought; and therefore he carries heavy responsibility. this responsibility is recognized in the hebrew scripture, from which i have quoted; and i quote it again because i know of no other scripture that states it so well. man is given the image of the creator, even when formed from the dust of the earth, so complete is his power and so real his dominion: and god blessed them: and god said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. one cannot receive all these privileges without bearing the obligation to react and to partake, to keep, to cherish, and to co-operate. we have assumed that there is no obligation to an inanimate thing, as we consider the earth to be: but man should respect the conditions in which he is placed; the earth yields the living creature; man is a living creature; science constantly narrows the gulf between the animate and the inanimate, between the organized and the inorganized; evolution derives the creatures from the earth; the creation is one creation. i must accept all or reject all. _the earth is good_ it is good to live. we talk of death and of lifelessness, but we know only of life. even our prophecies of death are prophecies of more life. we know no better world: whatever else there may be is of things hoped for, not of things seen. the objects are here, not hidden nor far to seek: and god saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. these good things are the present things and the living things. the account is silent on the things that were not created, the chaos, the darkness, the abyss. plato, in the "republic," reasoned that the works of the creator must be good because the creator is good. this goodness is in the essence of things; and we sadly need to make it a part in our philosophy of life. the earth is the scene of our life, and probably the very source of it. the heaven, so far as human beings know, is the source only of death; in fact, we have peopled it with the dead. we have built our philosophy on the dead. we seem to have overlooked the goodness of the earth in the establishing of our affairs, and even in our philosophies. it is reserved as a theme for preachers and for poets. and yet, the goodness of the planet is the basic fact in our existence. i am not speaking of good in an abstract way, in the sense in which some of us suppose the creator to have expressed himself as pleased or satisfied with his work. the earth is good in itself, and its products are good in themselves. the earth sustains all things. it satisfies. it matters not whether this satisfaction is the result of adaptation in the process of evolution; the fact remains that the creation is good. to the common man the earth propounds no system of philosophy or of theology. the man makes his own personal contact, deals with the facts as they are or as he conceives them to be, and is not swept into any system. he has no right to assume a bad or evil earth, although it is difficult to cast off the hindrance of centuries of teaching. when he is properly educated he will get a new resource from his relationships. it may be difficult to demonstrate this goodness. in the nature of things we must assume it, although we know that we could not subsist on a sphere of the opposite qualities. the important consideration is that we appreciate it, and this not in any sentimental and impersonal way. to every bird the air is good; and a man knows it is good if he is worth being a man. to every fish the water is good. to every beast its food is good, and its time of sleep is good. the creatures experience that life is good. every man in his heart knows that there is goodness and wholeness in the rain, in the wind, the soil, the sea, the glory of sunrise, in the trees, and in the sustenance that we derive from the planet. when we grasp the significance of this situation, we shall forever supplant the religion of fear with a religion of consent. we are so accustomed to these essentials--to the rain, the wind, the soil, the sea, the sunrise, the trees, the sustenance--that we may not include them in the categories of the good things, and we endeavor to satisfy ourselves with many small and trivial and exotic gratifications; and when these gratifications fail or pall, we find ourselves helpless and resourceless. the joy of sound sleep, the relish of a sufficient meal of plain and wholesome food, the desire to do a good day's work and the recompense when at night we are tired from the doing of it, the exhilaration of fresh air, the exercise of the natural powers, the mastery of a situation or a problem,--these and many others like them are fundamental satisfactions, beyond all pampering and all toys, and they are of the essence of goodness. i think we should teach all children how good are the common necessities, and how very good are the things that are made in the beginning. _it is kindly_ we hear much about man being at the mercy of nature, and the literalist will contend that there can be no holy relation under such conditions. but so is man at the mercy of god. it is a blasphemous practice that speaks of the hostility of the earth, as if the earth were full of menaces and cataclysms. the old fear of nature, that peopled the earth and sky with imps and demons, and that gave a future state to satan, yet possesses the minds of men, only that we may have ceased to personify and to demonize our fears, although we still persistently contrast what we call the evil and the good. still do we attempt to propitiate and appease the adversaries. still do we carry the ban of the early philosophy that assumed materials and "the flesh" to be evil, and that found a way of escape only in renunciation and asceticism. nature cannot be antagonistic to man, seeing that man is a product of nature. we should find vast joy in the fellowship, something like the joy of pan. we should feel the relief when we no longer apologize for the creator because of the things that are made. it is true that there are devastations of flood and fire and frost, scourge of disease, and appalling convulsions of earthquake and eruption. but man prospers; and we know that the catastrophes are greatly fewer than the accepted bounties. we have no choice but to abide. no growth comes from hostility. it would undoubtedly be a poor human race if all the pathway had been plain and easy. the contest with nature is wholesome, particularly when pursued in sympathy and for mastery. it is worthy a being created in god's image. the earth is perhaps a stern earth, but it is a kindly earth. most of our difficulty with the earth lies in the effort to do what perhaps ought not to be done. not even all the land is fit to be farmed. a good part of agriculture is to learn how to adapt one's work to nature, to fit the crop-scheme to the climate and to the soil and the facilities. to live in right relation with his natural conditions is one of the first lessons that a wise farmer or any other wise man learns. we are at pains to stress the importance of conduct; very well: conduct toward the earth is an essential part of it. nor need we be afraid of any fact that makes one fact more or less in the sum of contacts between the earth and the earth-born children. all "higher criticism" adds to the faith rather than subtracts from it, and strengthens the bond between. the earth and its products are very real. our outlook has been drawn very largely from the abstract. not being yet prepared to understand the conditions of nature, man considered the earth to be inhospitable, and he looked to the supernatural for relief; and relief was heaven. our pictures of heaven are of the opposites of daily experience,--of release, of peace, of joy uninterrupted. the hunting-grounds are happy and the satisfaction has no end. the habit of thought has been set by this conception, and it colors our dealings with the human questions and to much extent it controls our practice. but we begin to understand that the best dealing with problems on earth is to found it on the facts of earth. this is the contribution of natural science, however abstract, to human welfare. heaven is to be a real consequence of life on earth; and we do not lessen the hope of heaven by increasing our affection for the earth, but rather do we strengthen it. men now forget the old images of heaven, that they are mere sojourners and wanderers lingering for deliverance, pilgrims in a strange land. waiting for this rescue, with posture and formula and phrase, we have overlooked the essential goodness and quickness of the earth and the immanence of god. this feeling that we are pilgrims in a vale of tears has been enhanced by the wide-spread belief in the sudden ending of the world, by collision or some other impending disaster, and in the common apprehension of doom; and lately by speculations as to the aridation and death of the planet, to which all of us have given more or less credence. but most of these notions are now considered to be fantastic, and we are increasingly confident that the earth is not growing old in a human sense, that its atmosphere and its water are held by the attraction of its mass, and that the sphere is at all events so permanent as to make little difference in our philosophy and no difference in our good behavior. i am again impressed with the first record in genesis in which some mighty prophet-poet began his account with the creation of the physical universe. so do we forget the old-time importance given to mere personal salvation, which was permission to live in heaven, and we think more of our present situation, which is the situation of obligation and of service; and he who loses his life shall save it. we begin to foresee the vast religion of a better social order. _the earth is holy_ verily, then, the earth is divine, because man did not make it. we are here, part in the creation. we cannot escape. we are under obligation to take part and to do our best, living with each other and with all the creatures. we may not know the full plan, but that does not alter the relation. when once we set ourselves to the pleasure of our dominion, reverently and hopefully, and assume all its responsibilities, we shall have a new hold on life. we shall put our dominion into the realm of morals. it is now in the realm of trade. this will be very personal morals, but it will also be national and racial morals. more iniquity follows the improper and greedy division of the resources and privileges of the earth than any other form of sinfulness. if god created the earth, so is the earth hallowed; and if it is hallowed, so must we deal with it devotedly and with care that we do not despoil it, and mindful of our relations to all beings that live on it. we are to consider it religiously: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. the sacredness to us of the earth is intrinsic and inherent. it lies in our necessary relationship and in the duty imposed upon us to have dominion, and to exercise ourselves even against our own interests. we may not waste that which is not ours. to live in sincere relations with the company of created things and with conscious regard for the support of all men now and yet to come, must be of the essence of righteousness. this is a larger and more original relation than the modern attitude of appreciation and admiration of nature. in the days of the patriarchs and prophets, nature and man shared in the condemnation and likewise in the redemption. the ground was cursed for adam's sin. paul wrote that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, and that it waiteth for the revealing. isaiah proclaimed the redemption of the wilderness and the solitary place with the redemption of man, when they shall rejoice and blossom as the rose, and when the glowing sand shall become a pool and the thirsty ground springs of water. the usual objects have their moral significance. an oak-tree is to us a moral object because it lives its life regularly and fulfils its destiny. in the wind and in the stars, in forest and by the shore, there is spiritual refreshment: and the spirit of god moved upon the face of the waters. i do not mean all this, for our modern world, in any vague or abstract way. if the earth is holy, then the things that grow out of the earth are also holy. they do not belong to man to do with them as he will. dominion does not carry personal ownership. there are many generations of folk yet to come after us, who will have equal right with us to the products of the globe. it would seem that a divine obligation rests on every soul. are we to make righteous use of the vast accumulation of knowledge of the planet? if so, we must have a new formulation. the partition of the earth among the millions who live on it is necessarily a question of morals; and a society that is founded on an unmoral partition and use cannot itself be righteous and whole. second, the consequences i have now stated my purpose; and the remainder of the little book will make some simple applications of it and draw some inferences therefrom. there is nothing here that need alarm the timid, albeit we enter a disputed field, a field of opinion rather than of demonstration; and if the reader goes with me, i trust that we may have a pleasant journey. it is to be a journey of recognition, not of protest. it is needful that we do not forget. we are not to enter into a course of reasoning with those whom we meet on the way, or to pause to debate the definitions and analyses made in books, or to deny any of the satisfactions of tradition. we shall be ready for impressions; and possibly we shall be able to find some of the old truths in unfrequented places. _the habit of destruction_ the first observation that must be apparent to all men is that our dominion has been mostly destructive. we have been greatly engaged in digging up the stored resources, and in destroying vast products of the earth for some small kernel that we can apply to our necessities or add to our enjoyments. we excavate the best of the coal and cast away the remainder; blast the minerals and metals from underneath the crust, and leave the earth raw and sore; we box the pines for turpentine and abandon the growths of limitless years to fire and devastation; sweep the forests with the besom of destruction; pull the fish from the rivers and ponds without making any adequate provision for renewal; exterminate whole races of animals; choke the streams with refuse and dross; rob the land of its available stores, denuding the surface, exposing great areas to erosion. nor do we exercise the care and thrift of good housekeepers. we do not clean up our work or leave the earth in order. the remnants and accumulation of mining-camps are left to ruin and decay; the deserted phosphate excavations are ragged, barren, and unfilled; vast areas of forested lands are left in brush and waste, unthoughtful of the future, unmindful of the years that must be consumed to reduce the refuse to mould and to cover the surface respectably, uncharitable to those who must clear away the wastes and put the place in order; and so thoughtless are we with these natural resources that even the establishments that manufacture them--the mills, the factories of many kinds--are likely to be offensive objects in the landscape, unclean, unkempt, displaying the unconcern of the owners to the obligation that the use of the materials imposes and to the sensibilities of the community for the way in which they handle them. the burden of proof seems always to have been rested on those who partake little in the benefits, although we know that these non-partakers have been real owners of the resources; and yet so undeveloped has been the public conscience in these matters that the blame--if blame there be--cannot be laid on one group more than on the other. strange it is, however, that we should not have insisted at least that those who appropriate the accumulations of the earth should complete their work, cleaning up the remainders, leaving the areas wholesome, inoffensive, and safe. how many and many are the years required to grow a forest and to fill the pockets of the rocks, and how satisfying are the landscapes, and yet how desperately soon may men reduce it all to ruin and to emptiness, and how slatternly may they violate the scenery! all this habit of destructiveness is uneconomic in the best sense, unsocial, unmoral. society now begins to demand a constructive process. with care and with regard for other men, we must produce the food and the other supplies in regularity and sufficiency; and we must clean up after our work, that the earth may not be depleted, scarred, or repulsive. yet there is even a more defenseless devastation than all this. it is the organized destructiveness of those who would make military domination the major premise in the constitution of society, accompanying desolation with viciousness and violence, ravaging the holy earth, disrespecting the works of the creator, looking toward extirpation, confessing thereby that they do not know how to live in co-operation with their fellows; in such situations, every new implement of destruction adds to the guilt. in times past we were moved by religious fanaticism, even to the point of waging wars. to-day we are moved by impulses of trade, and we find ourselves plunged into a war of commercial frenzy; and as it has behind it vaster resources and more command of natural forces, so is it the most ferocious and wasteful that the race has experienced, exceeding in its havoc the cataclysms of earthquake and volcano. certainly we have not yet learned how to withstand the prosperity and the privileges that we have gained by the discoveries of science; and certainly the morals of commerce has not given us freedom or mastery. rivalry that leads to arms is a natural fruit of unrestrained rivalry in trade. man has dominion, but he has no commission to devastate: and the lord god took the man, and put him into the garden of eden to dress it and to keep it. verily, so bountiful hath been the earth and so securely have we drawn from it our substance, that we have taken it all for granted as if it were only a gift, and with little care or conscious thought of the consequences of our use of it. _the new hold_ we may distinguish three stages in our relation to the planet, the collecting stage, the mining stage, and the producing stage. these overlap and perhaps are nowhere distinct, and yet it serves a purpose to contrast them. at first man sweeps the earth to see what he may gather,--game, wood, fruits, fish, fur, feathers, shells on the shore. a certain social and moral life arises out of this relation, seen well in the woodsmen and the fishers--in whom it best persists to the present day--strong, dogmatic, superstitious folk. then man begins to go beneath the surface to see what he can find,--iron and precious stones, the gold of ophir, coal, and many curious treasures. this develops the exploiting faculties, and leads men into the uttermost parts. in both these stages the elements of waste and disregard have been heavy. finally, we begin to enter the productive stage, whereby we secure supplies by controlling the conditions under which they grow, wasting little, harming not. farming has been very much a mining process, the utilizing of fertility easily at hand and the moving-on to lands unspoiled of quick potash and nitrogen. now it begins to be really productive and constructive, with a range of responsible and permanent morals. we rear the domestic animals with precision. we raise crops, when we will, almost to a nicety. we plant fish in lakes and streams to some extent but chiefly to provide more game rather than more human food, for in this range we are yet mostly in the collecting or hunter stage. if the older stages were strongly expressed in the character of the people, so will this new stage be expressed; and so is it that we are escaping the primitive and should be coming into a new character. we shall find our rootage in the soil. this new character, this clearer sense of relationship with the earth, should express itself in all the people and not exclusively in farming people and their like. it should be a popular character--or a national character if we would limit the discussion to one people--and not a class character. now, here lies a difficulty and here is a reason for writing this book: the population of the earth is increasing, the relative population of farmers is decreasing, people are herding in cities, we have a city mind, and relatively fewer people are brought into touch with the earth in any real way. so is it incumbent on us to take special pains--now that we see the new time--that all the people, or as many of them as possible, shall have contact with the earth and that the earth righteousness shall be abundantly taught. i hasten to say that i am not thinking of any back-to-the-farm movement to bring about the results we seek. necessarily, the proportion of farmers will decrease. not so many are needed, relatively, to produce the requisite supplies from the earth. agriculture makes a great contribution to human progress by releasing men for the manufactures and the trades. in proportion as the ratio of farmers decreases is it important that we provide them the best of opportunities and encouragement: they must be better and better men. and if we are to secure our moral connection with the planet to a large extent through them, we can see that they bear a relation to society in general that we have overlooked. even the farming itself is changing radically in character. it ceases to be an occupation to gain sustenance and becomes a business. we apply to it the general attitudes of commerce. we must be alert to see that it does not lose its capacity for spiritual contact. how we may achieve a more wide-spread contact with the earth on the part of all the people without making them farmers, i shall endeavor to suggest as i proceed; in fact, this is my theme. dominion means mastery; we may make the surface of the earth much what we will; we can govern the way in which we shall contemplate it. we are probably near something like a stable occupancy. it is not to be expected that there will be vast shifting of cities as the contest for the mastery of the earth proceeds,--probably nothing like the loss of tyre and carthage, and of the commercial glory of venice. in fact, we shall have a progressive occupancy. the greater the population, the greater will be the demands on the planet; and, moreover, every new man will make more demands than his father made, for he will want more to satisfy him. we are to take from the earth much more than we have ever taken before, but it will be taken in a new way and with better intentions. it will be seen, therefore, that we are not here dealing narrowly with an occupation but with something very fundamental to our life on the planet. we are not to look for our permanent civilization to rest on any species of robber-economy. no flurry of coal-mining, or gold-fever, or rubber-collecting in the tropics, or excitement of prospecting for new finds or even locating new lands, no ravishing of the earth or monopolistic control of its bounties, will build a stable society. so is much of our economic and social fabric transitory. it is not by accident that a very distinct form of society is developing in the great farming regions of the mississippi valley and in other comparable places; the exploiting and promoting occupancy of those lands is passing and a stable progressive development appears. we have been obsessed of the passion to cover everything at once, to skin the earth, to pass on, even when there was no necessity for so doing. it is a vast pity that this should ever have been the policy of government in giving away great tracts of land by lottery, as if our fingers would burn if we held the lands inviolate until needed by the natural process of settlement. the people should be kept on their lands long enough to learn how to use them. but very well: we have run with the wind, we have staked the lands; now we shall be real farmers and real conquerors. not all lands are equally good for farming, and some lands will never be good for farming; but whether in iowa, or new england, or old asia, farming land may develop character in the people. my reader must not infer that we have arrived at a permanent agriculture, although we begin now to see the importance of a permanent land occupancy. probably we have not yet evolved a satisfying husbandry that will maintain itself century by century, without loss and without the ransacking of the ends of the earth for fertilizer materials to make good our deficiencies. all the more is it important that the problem be elevated into the realm of statesmanship and of morals. neither must he infer that the resources of the earth are to be locked up beyond contact and use (for the contact and use will be morally regulated). but no system of brilliant exploitation, and no accidental scratching of the surface of the earth, and no easy appropriation of stored materials can suffice us in the good days to come. city, country, this class and that class, all fall and merge before the common necessity. it is often said that the farmer is our financial mainstay; so in the good process of time will he be a moral mainstay, for ultimately finance and social morals must coincide. the gifts are to be used for service and for satisfaction, and not for wealth. very great wealth introduces too many intermediaries, too great indirectness, too much that is extrinsic, too frequent hindrances and superficialities. it builds a wall about the man, and too often does he receive his impressions of the needs of the world from satellites and sycophants. it is significant that great wealth, if it contributes much to social service, usually accomplishes the result by endowing others to work. the gift of the products of the earth was "for meat": nothing was said about riches. yet the very appropriation or use of natural resources may be the means of directing the mind of the people back to the native situations. we have the opportunity to make the forthcoming development of water-power, for example, such an agency for wholesome training. whenever we can appropriate without despoliation or loss, or without a damaging monopoly, we tie the people to the backgrounds. in the background is the countryman; and how is the countryman to make use of the rain and the abounding soil, and the varied wonder of plant and animal amidst which he lives, that he may arrive at kinship? we are teaching him how to bring some of these things under the dominion of his hands, how to measure and to weigh and to judge. this will give him the essential physical mastery. but beyond this, how shall he take them into himself, how shall he make them to be of his spirit, how shall he complete his dominion? how shall he become the man that his natural position requires of him? this will come slowly, ah, yes!--slowly. the people--the great striving self-absorbed throng of the people--they do not know what we mean when we talk like this, they hear only so many fine words. the naturist knows that the time will come slowly,--not yet are we ready for fulfilment; he knows that we cannot regulate the cosmos, or even the natural history of the people, by enactments. slowly: by removing handicaps here and there; by selection of the folk in a natural process, to eliminate the unresponsive; by teaching, by suggestion; by a public recognition of the problem, even though not one of us sees the end of it. i hope my reader now sees where i am leading him. he sees that i am not thinking merely of instructing the young in the names and habits of birds and flowers and other pleasant knowledge, although this works strongly toward the desired end; nor of any movement merely to have gardens, or to own farms, although this is desirable provided one is qualified to own a farm; nor of rhapsodies on the beauties of nature. nor am i thinking of any new plan or any novel kind of institution or any new agency; rather shall we do better to escape some of the excessive institutionalism and organization. we are so accustomed to think in terms of organized politics and education and religion and philanthropies that when we detach ourselves we are said to lack definiteness. it is the personal satisfaction in the earth to which we are born, and the quickened responsibility, the whole relation, broadly developed, of the man and of all men,--it is this attitude that we are to discuss. the years pass and they grow into centuries. we see more clearly. we are to take a new hold. _the brotherhood relation_ a constructive and careful handling of the resources of the earth is impossible except on a basis of large co-operation and of association for mutual welfare. the great inventions and discoveries of recent time have extensive social significance. yet we have other relations than with the physical and static materials. we are parts in a living sensitive creation. the theme of evolution has overturned our attitude toward this creation. the living creation is not exclusively man-centred: it is bio-centric. we perceive the essential continuity in nature, arising from within rather than from without, the forms of life proceeding upwardly and onwardly in something very like a mighty plan of sequence, man being one part in the process. we have genetic relation with all living things, and our aristocracy is the aristocracy of nature. we can claim no gross superiority and no isolated self-importance. the creation, and not man, is the norm. even now do we begin to guide our practises and our speech by our studies of what we still call the lower creation. we gain a good perspective on ourselves. if we are parts in the evolution, and if the universe, or even the earth, is not made merely as a footstool, or as a theatre for man, so do we lose our cosmic selfishness and we find our place in the plan of things. we are emancipated from ignorance and superstition and small philosophies. the present wide-spread growth of the feeling of brotherhood would have been impossible in a self-centred creation: the way has been prepared by the discussion of evolution, which is the major biological contribution to human welfare and progress. this is the philosophy of the oneness in nature and the unity in living things. _the farmer's relation_ the surface of the earth is particularly within the care of the farmer. he keeps it for his own sustenance and gain, but his gain is also the gain of all the rest of us. at the best, he accumulates little to himself. the successful farmer is the one who produces more than he needs for his support; and the overplus he does not keep; and, moreover, his own needs are easily satisfied. it is of the utmost consequence that the man next the earth shall lead a fair and simple life; for in riotous living he might halt many good supplies that now go to his fellows. it is a public duty so to train the farmer that he shall appreciate his guardianship. he is engaged in a quasi-public business. he really does not even own his land. he does not take his land with him, but only the personal development that he gains from it. he cannot annihilate his land, as another might destroy all his belongings. he is the agent or the representative of society to guard and to subdue the surface of the earth; and he is the agent of the divinity that made it. he must exercise his dominion with due regard to all these obligations. he is a trustee. the productiveness of the earth must increase from generation to generation: this also is his obligation. he must handle all his materials, remembering man and remembering god. a man cannot be a good farmer unless he is a religious man. if the farmer is engaged in a quasi-public business, shall we undertake to regulate him? this relationship carries a vast significance to the social order, and it must color our attitude toward the man on the land. we are now in that epoch of social development when we desire to regulate by law everything that is regulatable and the other things besides. it is recently proposed that the congress shall pass a law regulating the cropping scheme of the farmer for the protection of soil fertility. this follows the precedent of the regulation, by enactment, of trusts and public utilities. it is fortunate that such a law cannot be passed, and could not be enforced if it were passed; but this and related proposals are crude expressions of the growing feeling that the farmer owes an obligation to society, and that this obligation must be enforced and the tiller of the soil be held to account. we shall produce a much better and safer man when we make him self-controlling by developing his sense of responsibility than when we regulate him by exterior enactments. in the realm of control of the farming occupation we shall invoke other than legal means, and perhaps these means will be suggestive for other situations. these means may be somewhat indefinite in the law-book sense, but they may attain to a better human result. we shall reach the question by surer ways than the crudities of legislation. we shall reach the man, in this field, rather than his business. we have begun it by accepting it as one part of our duty to the race to provide liberally at public expense for the special education of the man on the land. this is the reason, even if we have not formulated it to ourselves, why society is willing to go farther in the education of the farming people than in the popular education of other ranges of the people. this, of course, is the fundamental way; and if there are any governments that attempt to safeguard this range directly by laws rather than by education, then they have not arrived at a long view of the situation. we invoke regulatory law for the control of the corporate activities; but we must not forget the other kinds of activities contributing to the making of society, nor attempt to apply to them the same methods of correction. into this secular and more or less technical education we are now to introduce the element of moral obligation, that the man may understand his peculiar contribution and responsibility to society; but this result cannot be attained until the farmer and every one of us recognize the holiness of the earth. the farmer and every one of us: every citizen should be put right toward the planet, should be quicked to his relationship to his natural background. the whole body of public sentiment should be sympathetic with the man who works and administers the land for us; and this requires understanding. we have heard much about the "marginal man," but the first concern of society should be for the bottom man. if this philosophy should really be translated into action, the farmer would nowhere be a peasant, forming merely a caste, and that a low one, among his fellows. he would be an independent co-operating citizen partaking fully of the fruits of his labor, enjoying the social rewards of his essential position, being sustained and protected by a body of responsive public opinion. the farmer cannot keep the earth for us without an enlightened and very active support from every other person, and without adequate safeguards from exploitation and from unessential commercial pressure. this social support requires a ready response on the part of the farmer; and he must also be developed into his position by a kind of training that will make him quickly and naturally responsive to it. the social fascination of the town will always be greater than that of the open country. the movements are more rapid, more picturesque, have more color and more vivacity. it is not to be expected that we can overcome this fascination and safeguard the country boy and girl merely by introducing more showy or active enterprises into the open country. we must develop a new background for the country youth, establish new standards, and arouse a new point of view. the farmer will not need all the things that the city man thinks the farmer needs. we must stimulate his moral response, his appreciation of the worthiness of the things in which he lives, and increase his knowledge of all the objects and affairs amongst which he moves. the backbone of the rural question is at the bottom a moral problem. we do not yet know whether the race can permanently endure urban life, or whether it must be constantly renewed from the vitalities in the rear. we know that the farms and the back spaces have been the mother of the race. we know that the exigencies and frugalities of life in these backgrounds beget men and women to be serious and steady and to know the value of every hour and of every coin that they earn; and whenever they are properly trained, these folk recognize the holiness of the earth. for some years i have had the satisfaction to speak to rural folk in many places on the holy earth and to make some of the necessary applications. everywhere i have met the heartiest assent from these people. specially do they respond to the suggestion that if the earth is hallowed, so are the native products of the earth hallowed; and they like to have the mystery--which is the essential sentiment--of these things brought home to them with frequency. i will here let my reader have a letter that one of these persons wrote me, and i print it without change. on inquiry, the writer of it told me that he is a farmer, has never followed any other occupation, was brought up "in the woods," and has had practically no education. i did not ask him, but i judge from the narrative style that he has been a reader or a hearer of the old testament; and here is the letter: as you say, too many people confound farming, with that sordid, selfish, money-getting game, called "business," whereas, the farmer's position is administrative, being in a way a dispenser of the "mysteries of god," for they are mysteries. every apple is a mystery, and every potato is a mystery, and every ear of corn is a mystery, and every pound of butter is a mystery, and when a "farmer" is not able to understand these things he is out of place. the farmer uses the soil and the rains and the snows and the frosts and the winds and the sun; these are also the implements of the almighty, the only tools he uses, and while you were talking that day, it brought to mind the recollection of an account i once read of an occurrence which took place in the vicinity of carlsruhe, in germany, about thirty years ago, and i want to tell you about it. an old man and his two sons, who were laborers on a large farm there, went out one morning to mow peas, with scythes, as was the method in use at that time, and soon after they began work, they noticed a large active man coming along a pathway which bordered the field on one side, and when he came to where they were, he spoke to them, very pleasantly, and asked them some questions about their work and taking the scythe from the hands of the older man he mowed some with it and finally returned it and went his way. after a time when the owner of the farm came out to oversee the work they told him of the occurrence, and asked him if he could tell who the stranger might be, and he told them that he was prince bismarck, the chancellor of the empire, who was staying at his country home at carlsruhe, and was out for his morning walk, and they were astonished, and the old man was filled with a great pride, and he felt himself elevated above all his fellows, and he wouldn't have sold his scythe for half the money in germany, and his descendants to this day boast of the fact that their father and bismarck mowed with the same scythe. now if it was sufficient to stimulate the pride of this old laborer, if it was sufficient to create for him a private aristocracy, if it was sufficient to convert that old rusty scythe into a priceless heirloom to be treasured up and transmitted from father to son, if it was sufficient for all these things that he had once held a momentarily unimportant association with the man of "blood and iron," how much more inconceivably and immeasurably high and exalted is the station of the farmer who is, in a measure, a fellow craftsman of the god of nature, of the great first cause of all things, and people don't know it. no wonder the boys leave the farm! _the underlying training of a people_ this, then, is the landsman's obligation, and his joyful privilege. but it must not be supposed that he alone bears the responsibility to maintain the holiness of the divine earth. it is the obligation also of all of us, since every one is born to the earth and lives upon it, and since every one must react to it to the extent of his place and capabilities. this being so, then it is a primary need that we shall place at the use of the people a kind of education that shall quicken these attachments. certainly all means of education are useful, and every means should be developed to its best; and it is not to be expected that all the people shall pursue a single means: but to the nation and to the race a fundamental training must be provided. we are now in the time of developing a technical education in agriculture, to the end that we may produce our land supplies. already this education is assuming broad aspects, and we begin to see that it has very important bearing on public policies. it is a new form of exercise in natural science,--the old education in this great realm having become so specialized and departmentalized as to lose much of its value as a means of popular training. it is a happy augury that in north america so many public men and administrators have taken the large view of education by means of agriculture, desiring, while training farmers or those who would be farmers, to make it a means of bringing the understanding of the people back to the land. the americans are making a very remarkable contribution here, in a spirit of real statesmanship. in the long run, this procedure will produce a spirit in the people that will have far-reaching importance in the development of national character, and in a relation to the backgrounds of which very few of us yet have vision. it will be fortunate if we can escape the formalizing and professionalizing of this education, that has cast such a blight on most of the older means of training the young, and if we can keep it democratic and free in spirit. we shall need to do the same in all the subjects that lie at the foundations,--in all the other crafts; all these crafts are of the earth. they support the physical man and the social fabric, and make the conditions out of which all the highest achievements may come. every person in a democracy has a right to be educated by these means; and a people living in a democracy must of necessity understand the significance of such education. this education should result or function politically. it is not sufficient to train technically in the trades and crafts and arts to the end of securing greater economic efficiency,--this may be accomplished in a despotism and result in no self-action on the part of the people. every democracy must reach far beyond what is commonly known as economic efficiency, and do everything it can to enable those in the backgrounds to maintain their standing and their pride and to partake in the making of political affairs. _the neighbor's access to the earth_ when one really feels the response to the native earth, one feels also the obligation and the impulse to share it with the neighbor. the earth is not selfish. it is open and free to all. it invites everywhere. the naturist is not selfish,--he shares all his joys and discoveries, even to the extent of publishing them. the farmer is not selfish with his occupation,--he freely aids every one or any one to engage in his occupation, even if that one becomes his competitor. but occupations that are some degrees removed from the earth may display selfishness; trade and, to a large extent, manufacture are selfish, and they lock themselves in. even the exploiting of the resources of the earth may be selfish, in the taking of the timber and the coal, the water-powers and the minerals, for all this is likely to develop to a species of plunder. the naturist desires to protect the plants and the animals and the situations for those less fortunate and for those who come after. there are lumbermen and miners with the finest sense of obligation. there are other men who would take the last nugget and destroy the last bole. we are to recognize the essential integrity of the farming occupation, when developed constructively, as contrasted with the vast system of improbity and dishonor that arises from depredation and from the taking of booty. the best kind of community interest attaches to the proper use and partitioning of the earth, a communism that is dissociated from propaganda and programs. the freedom of the earth is not the freedom of license: there is always the thought of the others that are dependent on it. it is the freedom of utilization for needs and natural desires, without regard to one's place among one's fellows, or even to one's condition of degradation or state of sinfulness. all men are the same when they come back to the meadows, to the hills, and to the deep woods: he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. the lesson of the growing abounding earth is of liberality for all, and never exploitation or very exclusive opportunities for the few. even if the weaker anywhere perish in the contest for food, they are nevertheless given the opportunity to contest on terms equal to their abilities; and at all events, we come, in the human sphere, to the domination of sweet reason rather than to competition in sheer force. when, by means of reasonable education, this simple relation is understood by mankind and begins to express itself spontaneously, we shall find our voluminous complex of laws to regulate selfishness gradually disappearing and passing into the limbo. it is now easy to understand the sinfulness of vast private estates that shut up expanses of the surface of the earth from the reach and enjoyment of others that are born similarly to the privileges of the planet. there is no warrant in nature for guarantee deeds to such estates. it is true, of course, that land-estates should not be equal, for capacities for use are not equal, and abilities and deserts are not equal. it is legitimate to reward those who otherwise render great service, and this reward may lie in unusual privileges. the present emoluments in the way of incomes bear little relation to service or even to merit. we have not yet escaped the idea that vested rights--and particularly personal realty--are inviolable. certainly these rights must be protected by law, otherwise there can be no stability and regularity in affairs; but there is no inalienable right in the ownership of the surface of the earth. readjustments must come, and even now they are coming slowly, and here and there in the interest of the neighbor; and in the end there will be no private monopoly of public or natural resources. the cure for these ills does not lie, however, in the ownership of all the land by "the government," at least not in our time and perhaps never. it is well for a person to have his own plot for his lifetime, with the right to use it as he will so long as he does not offend, or does not despoil it for those who follow: it steadies him, and it identifies him with a definite program in life. we usually speak as if all good results in the distribution of the natural bounty will ensue if "the government" or "the state" owns the resources; but government ownership of resources and direction of industries may not mean freedom or escape for the people. it depends entirely on the kind of government,--not on its name or description, but on the extent to which the people have been trained to partake on their own initiative. the government may be an autocracy or only another form of monopoly. the aristocracy of land has much to its credit. great gains in human accomplishment have come out of it; but this does not justify it for the future. the aristocracy of land is a very dangerous power in human affairs. it is all the more dangerous when associated with aristocracy of birth and of factitious social position, which usually accompany it. a people may be ever so free in its advantages and in its theoretical political organization, and yet suffer overwhelming bondage if its land is tied up in an aristocratic system, and particularly if that system is connected into a social aristocracy. and whenever rigid aristocracy in land connects itself with the close control of politics, the subjection becomes final and complete. what lies within a nation or a people may lie in enlarged form between the nations or the peoples. neighborliness is international. contest for land and sea is at the basis of wars. recognizing the right of any people to its own life, we must equally recognize its right to a sufficient part of the surface of the earth. we must learn how to subdivide it on the basis of neighborliness, friendship, and conference; if we cannot learn this, then we cannot be neighbors but only enemies. the proposal now before congress to cede to canada the alaskan panhandle, or a part of it, is an evidence of this growth of international morals, extended to the very basis on which nations have been the least ready to co-operate. if we may fraternalize territory, so shall we fraternalize commerce. no people may rightly be denied the privilege to trade with all other peoples. all kinds of useful interchange are civilizers and peacemakers; and if we carry ourselves to others when we carry our produce and our wares, so do any of us need that others shall bring their produce and their wares to us. it would be a sorry people that purchased no supplies from without. every people, small or large, has right of access to the sea, for the sea belongs to mankind. it follows that no people has a right to deprive any other people of the shore, if that people desires the contact. we now begin to understand the awful sin of partitioning the earth by force. _the subdividing of the land_ the question then arises whether lands and other natural resources shall now be divided and redistributed in order that the share-and-share of the earth's patrimony shall be morally just. undoubtedly the logic of the situation makes for many personal points of very close contact with the mother earth, and contact is usually most definite and best when it results from what we understand as ownership. this, in practice, suggests many small parcels of land--for those who would have their contact by means of land, which is the directest means--under personal fee. but due provision must always be made, as i have already indicated, for the man who makes unusual contribution to the welfare of his fellows, that he may be allowed to extend his service and attain his own full development; and moreover, an established order may not be overturned suddenly and completely without much damage, not only to personal interests but to society. every person should have the right and the privilege to a personal use of some part of the earth; and naturally the extent of his privilege must be determined by his use of it. it is urged that lands can be most economically administered in very large units and under corporate management; but the economic results are not the most important results to be secured, although at present they are the most stressed. the ultimate good in the use of land is the development of the people; it may be better that more persons have contact with it than that it shall be executively more effectively administered. the morals of land management is more important than the economics of land management; and of course my reader is aware that by morals i mean the results that arise from a right use of the earth rather than the formal attitudes toward standardized or conventional codes of conduct. if the moral and the economic ends can be secured simultaneously, as eventually they will be secured, the perfect results will come to pass; but any line of development founded on accountant economics alone will fail. here i must pause for an explanation in self-defense, for my reader may think i advise the "little farm well tilled" that has so much captured the public mind. so far from giving such advice, i am not thinking exclusively of farming when i speak of the partitioning of the land. one may have land merely to live on. another may have a wood to wander in. one may have a spot on which to make a garden. another may have a shore, and another a retreat in the mountains or in some far space. much of the earth can never be farmed or mined or used for timber, and yet these supposed waste places may be very real assets to the race: we shall learn this in time. i am glad to see these outlying places set aside as public reserves; and yet we must not so organize and tie up the far spaces as to prevent persons of little means from securing small parcels. these persons should have land that they can handle and manipulate, in which they may dig, on which they may plant trees and build cabins, and which they may feel is theirs to keep and to master, and which they are not obliged to "improve." in the parks and reserves the land may be available only to look at, or as a retreat in which one may secure permission to camp. the regulations are necessary for these places, but these places are not sufficient. if it were possible for every person to own a tree and to care for it, the good results would be beyond estimation. now, farming is a means of support; and in this case, the economic possibilities of a particular piece of land are of primary consequence. of course, the most complete permanent contact with the earth is by means of farming, when one makes a living from the land; this should produce better results than hunting or sport; but one must learn how to make this connection. it is possible to hoe potatoes and to hear the birds sing at the same time, although our teaching has not much developed this completeness in the minds of the people. i hope, therefore, that the farmer's piece of land will be economically good (that it may make him a living and produce a surplus for some of the rest of us), and that the farmer may be responsive to his situation. the size of the farm that is to support a family, and the kinds of crops that shall be grown and even the yields that shall be secured to the acre, are technical problems of agriculture. in this new world, with expensive labor and still with cheap land, we cannot yet afford to produce the high yields of some of the old world places,--it may be better to till more land with less yield to the acre. but all this is aside from my present purpose; and this purpose is to suggest the very real importance of making it possible for an increasing proportion of the people to have close touch with the earth in their own rights and in their own names. we recognize different grades or kinds of land occupancy, some of it being proprietorship and some of it tenancy and some of it mere shareholding. thus far have we spoken of the partitioning of the land mostly in its large social and political relations; but to society also belongs the fertility of the land, and all efforts to conserve this fertility are public questions in the best sense. in america we think of tenant occupancy of land as dangerous because it does not safeguard fertility; in fact, it may waste fertility. this is because the practice in tenancy does not recognize the public interest in fertility, and the contract or agreement is made merely between the landowner and the tenant, and is largely an arrangement for skinning the land. it is only when the land itself is a party in the contract (when posterity is considered) that tenancy is safe. then the tenant is obliged to fertilize the land, to practise certain rotations, and otherwise to conserve fertility, returning to the land the manurial value of products that are sold. when such contracts are made and enforced, tenancy farming does not deplete the land more than other farming, as the experience in some countries demonstrates. it is hardly to be expected, however, that tenant occupancy will give the man as close moral contact with the earth and its materials as will ownership; yet a well-developed tenancy is better than absentee farming by persons who live in town and run the farm by temporary hired help. the tenancy in the united states is partly a preliminary stage to ownership: if we can fulfil the moral obligation to society in the conserving of fertility and other natural resources, tenancy may be considered as a means to an end. persons who work the land should have the privilege of owning it. it may be urged by those who contend that land should be held by society, that this regulation of tenancy provides a means of administering all farm lands by government in the interest of maintenance of fertility. leaving aside the primary desirability, as i see it, of reserving individual initiative, it is to be said that this kind of regulation of the tenant is possible only with a live-stock husbandry; nor do we yet have sufficient knowledge to enable us to project a legal system for all kinds of agriculture; nor again is it applicable to widely differing conditions and regions. a keener sense of responsibility will enable owner and tenant to work out better methods in all cases, but it is now impossible to incorporate complete control methods into successful legislative regulations. the increasing competition will make it ever more difficult for the careless man to make a good living by farming, and he will be driven from the business; or if he is not driven out, society will take away his privilege. yet we are not to think of society as founded wholly on small separate tracts, or "family farms," occupied by persons who live merely in contentment; this would mean that all landsmen would be essentially laborers. we need to hold on the land many persons who possess large powers of organization, who are managers, who can handle affairs in a bold way: it would be fatal to the best social and spiritual results if such persons could find no adequate opportunities on the land and were forced into other occupations. undoubtedly we shall find ourselves with very unlike land units, encouraged and determined by the differing conditions and opportunities in different regions; and thereby shall we also avoid the great danger of making our fundamental occupation to produce a uniform and narrow class spirit. we need the great example of persons who live separately on their lands, who desire to abide, who are serious in the business, and who have sufficient proprietary rights to enable them to handle the natural resources responsibly. there is a type of well-intentioned writers that would have the farmers live in centres in order that they may have what are called "social" advantages, betaking themselves every morning to the fields when the dew is on the grass and the birds sing, hastening back every evening (probably when the clock points to five) to engage in the delightful delirium of card-parties and moving-picture shows (of course gathering the golden harvest in the meantime). other writers are to have the farms so small that the residences will be as close as on a village street, and a trolley-car will run through, and i suppose the band will play! _a new map_ if, then, we are to give the people access to the holy earth, it means not only a new assent on the part of society but a new way of partitioning the surface. this is true whether we consider the subject wholly from the view-point of making natural resources utilizable or from the added desire to let the people out to those resources. the organization of any affair or enterprise determines to a great extent the character of the result; and the organization rests directly on the subdivision into parts. the dividing of a business into separate responsibilities of different departments and sub-departments makes for easy access and for what we now know as efficiency; the dividing of a nation into states or provinces and counties and many lesser units makes political life possible; the setting off of a man's farm into fields, with lanes and roads connecting, makes a working enterprise. the more accurately these subdivisions follow natural and living necessities, the greater will be the values and the satisfactions that result from the undertaking. here is the open country, behind the great cities and the highly specialized industries. there are hills in it, great and small. there are forests here, none there; sands that nobody wants; fertile lands that everybody wants; shores inviting trade; mineral wealth; healing waters; power in streams; fish in ponds and lakes; building stone; swamps abounding in life; wild corners that stimulate desire; sceneries that take the soul into the far places. these are the fundamental reserves and the backgrounds. the first responsibility of any society is to protect them, husband them, bring them into use, and at the same time to teach the people what they mean. to bring them into use, and, at the same time, to protect them from rapacious citizens who have small social conscience, it is necessary to have good access. it is necessary to have roads. these roads should be laid where the resources exist, direct, purposeful. in a flat and uniform country, road systems may well be rectangular, following section-lines and intermediate lines; but the rectangularity is not the essential merit,--it is only a serviceable way of subdividing the resources. to find one's direction, north or south, is convenient, but it may clearly be subordinated to the utilization and protection of the supplies. the section-line division may accomplish this or it may not, and it is likely to place roads in wrong locations and to render the country monotonous and uninteresting. but in the broken country, in the country of tumbled hills and crooked falling streams, of slopes that would better be left in the wild, and of lands that are good and fruitful for the plow, the roads may go the easy grades; but they ought also to go in such a plan as to open up the country to the best development, to divide its resources in the surest way for the greatest number of persons, and to reduce profitless human toil to the minimum,--and this is just what they may not do. they may go up over bare and barren hills merely to pass a few homesteads where no homesteads ought to be, roads that are always expensive and never good, that accomplish practically nothing for society. they leave good little valleys at one side, or enter them over almost impossible slopes. there are resources of physical wealth and of wonderful scenery that they do not touch, that would be of much value if they were accessible. the farming country is often not divided in such a way as to render it either most readily accessible or to make it the most useful as an asset for the people. to connect villages and cities by stone roads is good. but what are we to do with all the back country, to make it contribute its needful part to feed the people in the days that are to come, and to open it to the persons who ought to go? we cannot accomplish this to the greatest purpose by the present road systems, even if the roads themselves are all made good. when the traveler goes to a strange country, he is interested in the public buildings, the cities, and some of the visible externals; but if he wants to understand the country, he must have a detailed map of its roads. the automobile maps are of no value for this purpose, for they show how one may pass over the country, not how the country is developed. as the last nerve-fibre and the last capillary are essential to the end of the finger and to the entire body, so the ultimate roads are essential to the myriad farms and to the national life. it is difficult in any country to get these maps, accurately and in detail; but they are the essential guidebooks. we undertake great conquests of engineering, over mountains and across rivers and through the morasses; but at the last we shall call on the engineer for the greatest conquest of all,--how to divide the surface of the earth so that it shall yield us its best and mean to us the most, on the easiest grades, in the most practicable way, that we may utilize every piece of land to fullest advantage. this means a new division and perhaps a redistribution of lands in such a way that the farmer will have his due proportion of hill and of valley, rather than that one shall have all valley and another all hard-scrabble on the hill or all waste land in some remote place. it means that there will be on each holding the proper relation of tilled land and pasture land and forest land, and that the outlets for the farmer and his products will be the readiest and the simplest that it is possible to make. it means that some roads will be abandoned entirely, as not worth the cost, and society will make a way for farmers living on impossible farms to move to other lands; and that there will be no "back roads," for they will be the marks of an undeveloped society. it means that we shall cease the pretense to bring all lands into farming, whether they are useful for farming or not; and that in the back country beyond the last farms there shall be trails that lead far away. in the farm region itself, much of the old division will pass away, being uneconomical and non-social. the abandonment of farms is in some cases a beginning of the process, but it is blind and undirected. our educational effort is at present directed toward making the farmer prosperous on his existing farm, rather than to help him to secure a farm of proper resources and with proper access. as time goes on, we must reassemble many of the land divisions, if each man is to have adequate opportunity to make the most effective application of his knowledge, the best use of himself, and the greatest possible contribution to society. it would be well if some of the farms could be dispossessed of their owners, so that areas might be recombined on a better basis. this is no utopian or socialistic scheme, nor does it imply a forcible interference with vested rights. it is a plain statement of the necessities of the situation. of course it cannot come about quickly or as a result of direct legislation; but there are various movements that may start it,--it is, in fact, already started. all the burning rural problems relate themselves in the end to the division of the land. in america, we do not suffer from the holding of the land in a few families or in an aristocratic class; that great danger we have escaped, but we have not yet learned how to give the land meaning to the greatest number of people. this is a question for the best political program, for we look for the day when statesmanship shall be expressed in the details of common politics. we now hear much about the good-roads question, as if it were a problem only of highway construction: it is really a question of a new map. _the public program_ it would be a great gain if many persons could look forward to the ownership of a bit of the earth, to share in the partition, to partake in the brotherhood. some day we shall make it easy rather than difficult for this to be brought about. society, in its collective interest, also has necessities in the land. there is necessity of land to be owned by cities and other assemblages for water reservoirs, and all the rights thereto; for school grounds, playgrounds, reformatory institutions, hospitals, drill grounds, sewage-disposal areas, irrigation developments, drainage reclamations; for the public control of banks and borders of streams and ponds, for the shores of all vast bodies of water, for pleasure parks, recreation, breathing spaces in the great congestions, highways and other lines of communication; for the sites of public buildings, colleges and experiment stations, bird and beast refuges, fish and game reservations, cemeteries. there are also the rights of many semi-public agencies that need land,--of churches, of fraternal organizations, of incorporated seminaries and schools, of water-power and oil and coal developments, of manufacturing establishments, of extensive quarries, and of commercial enterprises of very many kinds. there is also the obligation of the general government that it shall have reserves against future needs, and that it shall protect the latent resources from exploitation and from waste. great areas must be reserved for forests, as well as for other crops, and, in the nature of the case, these forest spaces in the future must be mostly in public ownership. great remainders should be held by the people to be sold in small parcels to those who desire to get out to the backgrounds but who do not want to be farmers, where they may spend a vacation or renew themselves in the soil or under the trees, or by the green pastures or along the everlasting streams. it is a false assumption which supposes that if land cannot be turned into products of sale it is therefore valueless. the present active back-to-the-land movement has meaning to us here. it expresses the yearning of the people for contact with the earth and for escape from complexity and unessentials. as there is no regular way for attaining these satisfactions, it has largely taken the form of farming, which occupation has also been re-established in popular estimation in the same epoch. it should not be primarily a back-to-the-farm movement, however, and it is not to be derided. we are to recognize its meaning and to find some way of enabling more of the people to stand on the ground. aside from all this, land is needed for human habitation, where persons may have space and may have the privilege of gathering about them the goods that add value to life. much land will be needed in future for this habitation, not only because there will be more people, but also because every person will be given an outlet. we know it is not right that any family should be doomed to the occupancy of a very few dreary rooms and deathly closets in the depths of great cities, seeing that all children are born to the natural sky and to the wind and to the earth. we do not yet see the way to allow them to have what is naturally theirs, but we shall learn how. in that day we shall take down the wonderful towers and cliffs in the cities, in which people work and live, shelf on shelf, but in which they have no home. the great city expansion in the end will be horizontal rather than perpendicular. we shall have many knots, clustered about factories and other enterprises, and we shall learn how to distribute the satisfactions in life rather than merely to assemble them. before this time comes, we shall have passed the present insistence on so-called commercial efficiency, as if it were the sole measure of a civilization, and higher ends shall come to have control. all this will rest largely on the dividing of the land. it is the common assumption that the solution of these problems lies in facilities of transportation, and, to an extent, this is true; but this assumption usually rests on the other assumption, that the method of the present city vortex is the method of all time, with its violent rush into the vortex and out of it, consuming vastly of time and energy, preventing home leisure and destroying locality feeling, herding the people like cattle. the question of transportation is indeed a major problem, but it must be met in part by a different philosophy of human effort, settling the people in many small or moderate assemblages rather than in a few mighty congestions. it will be better to move the materials than to move the people. the great cities will grow larger; that is, they will cover more land. the smaller cities, the villages, the country towns will take on greatly increased importance. we shall learn how to secure the best satisfactions when we live in villages as well as when we live in cities. we begin to plan our cities and to a small extent our villages. we now begin to plan the layout of the farms, that they may accomplish the best results. but the cities and the towns depend on the country that lies beyond; and the country beyond depends on the city and the town. the problem is broadly one problem,--the problem of so dividing and subdividing the surface of the earth that there shall be the least conflict between all these interests, that public reservations shall not be placed where it is better to have farms, that farming developments may not interfere with public utilities, that institutions may be so placed and with such area as to develop their highest usefulness, that the people desiring outlet and contact with the earth in their own right may be accorded that essential privilege. we have not yet begun to approach the subject in a fundamental way, and yet it is the primary problem of the occupancy of the planet. to the growing movement for city planning should be added an equal movement for country planning; and these should not proceed separately, but both together. no other public program is now more needed. _the honest day's work_ there is still another application of this problem of the land background. it is the influence that productive ownership exerts on the day's work. yesterday for some time i observed eight working men engaged in removing parts of a structure and loading the pieces on a freight-car. at no time were more than two of the men making any pretension of working at once, most of the time they were all visiting or watching passers-by, and in the whole period the eight men did not accomplish what one good honest man should have performed. i wondered whether they had sufficient exercise to keep them in good health. they apparently were concerned about their "rights"; if the employer had rights they were undiscoverable. we know the integrity and effectiveness of the body of workmen; yet any reader who has formed a habit of observing men on day work and public work will recognize my account. day men usually work in gangs, frequently too many of them to allow any one to labor effectively, and the whole process is likely to be mechanical, impersonal, often shiftless and pervaded with the highly developed skill of putting in the time and reducing the time to the minimum and of beginning to quit well in advance of the quitting time. the process of securing labor has become involved, tied up, and the labor is not rendered in a sufficient spirit of service. about the only free labor yet remaining to us is the month labor on the farm, even though it may be difficult to secure and be comprised largely of ineffective remainders. over against all this is the importance of setting men at work singly and for themselves; this can be accomplished only when they own their property or have some real personal share in the production. the gang-spirit of labor runs into the politics of the group and constitutes the norm. if we are to have self-acting men they must be removed from close control, in labor as well as elsewhere. if it is necessary that any great proportion of the laboring men shall be controlled, then is it equally important that other men in sufficient numbers shall constitute the requisite counterbalance and corrective. it is doubtful whether any kind of profit-sharing in closely controlled industries can ever be as effective in training responsible men for a democracy, other things being equal, as an occupation or series of occupations in which the worker is responsible for his own results rather than to an overseer, although the profit-sharing may for the time being develop the greater technical efficiency. the influence of ownership on the performance of the man is often well illustrated when the farm laborer or tenant becomes the proprietor. some of my readers will have had experience in the difficult and doubtful process of trying to "run a farm" at long range by means of ordinary hired help: the residence is uninhabitable; the tools are old and out of date, and some of them cannot be found; the well water is not good; the poultry is of the wrong breed, and the hens will not sit; the horses are not adapted to the work; the wagons must be painted and the harnesses replaced; the absolutely essential supplies are interminable; there must be more day labor. now let this hired man come into the ownership of the farm: presto! the house can be repaired at almost no cost; the tools are good for some years yet; the harnesses can easily be mended; the absolutely essential supplies dwindle exceedingly; and the outside labor reduces itself to minor terms. work with machinery, in factories, may proceed more rapidly because the operator must keep up with the machine; and there are also definite standards or measures of performance. yet even here it is not to be expected that the work will be much more than time-service. in fact, the very movement among labor is greatly to emphasize time-service, and often quite independently of justice. there must necessarily be a reaction from this attitude if we are to hope for the best human product. the best human product results from the bearing of responsibility; in a controlled labor body the responsibility is shifted to the organization or to the boss. assuredly the consolidating of labor is much to be desired if it is for the common benefit and for protection, and if it leaves the laborer free with his own product. every person has the inalienable right to express himself, so long as it does not violate similar rights of his fellows, and to put forth his best production; if a man can best express himself in manual labor, no organization should suppress him or deny him that privilege. it is a sad case, and a denial of fundamental liberties, if a man is not allowed to work or to produce as much as he desires. good development does not come from repression. society recognizes its obligation to the laboring man of whatever kind and the necessity of safeguarding him both in his own interest and because he stands at the very foundations; the laboring man bears an obligation to respond liberally with service and good-will. is it desirable to have an important part of the labor of a people founded on ownership? is it worth while to have an example in a large class of the population of manual work that is free-spirited, and not dominated by class interest and time-service? is it essential to social progress that a day's work shall be full measure? _the group reaction_ one of the interesting phenomena of human association is the arising of a certain standard or norm of moral action within the various groups that compose it. these standards may not be inherently righteous, but they become so thoroughly established as to be enacted into law or even to be more powerful than law. so is it, as we have seen, with the idea of inalienable rights in natural property that may be held even out of all proportion to any proper use that the owners may be able to make of it; and so is it with the idea of inviolable natural privileges to those who control facilities that depend on public patronage for their commercial success. the man himself may hold one kind of personal morals, but the group of which he is a part may hold a very different kind. it is our problem, in dealing with the resources of the earth, to develop in the group the highest expression of duty that is to be found in individuals. the restraint of the group, or the correction of the group action, is applied from the outside in the form of public opinion and in attack by other groups. the correction does not often arise from within. the establishing of many kinds of public-service bodies illustrates this fact. it is the check of society on group-selfishness. these remarks apply to the man who stands at the foundation of society, next the earth, as well as to others, although he has not organized to propagate the action of his class. the spoliation of land, the insufficient regard for it, the trifling with it, is much more than an economic deficiency. society will demand either through the pressure of public opinion, or by regularized action, that the producing power of the land shall be safeguarded and increased, as i have indicated in an earlier part of the discussion. it will be better if it comes as the result of education, and thereby develops the voluntary feeling of obligation and responsibility. at the same time, it is equally the responsibility of every other person to make it possible for the farmer to prosecute his business under the expression of the highest standards. there is just now abroad amongst us a teaching to the effect that the farmer cannot afford to put much additional effort into his crop production, inasmuch as the profit in an acre may not depend on the increase in yield, and therefore he does not carry an obligation to augment his acre-yields. this is a weakening philosophy. undoubtedly there is a point beyond which he may not go with profit in the effort to secure a heavy yield, for it may cost him too much to produce the maximum; so it may not be profitable for a transportation company to maintain the highest possible speed. with this economic question i have nothing to do; but it is the farmer's moral responsibility to society to increase his production, and the stimulation reacts powerfully upon himself. it is a man's natural responsibility to do his best: it is specially important that the man at the bottom put forth his best efforts. to increase his yields is one of the ways in which he expresses himself as a man and applies his knowledge. this incentive taken away, agriculture loses one of its best endeavors, the occupation remains stationary or even deteriorates, and society loses a moral support at the very point where it is most needed. if the economic conditions are such that the farmer cannot afford to increase his production, then the remedy is to be found without rather than by the repression of the producer. we are expending vast effort to educate the farmer in the ways of better production, but we do not make it possible for him to apply this education to the best advantage. the real farmer, the one whom we so much delight to honor, has a strong moral regard for his land, for his animals, and his crops. these are established men, with highly developed obligations, feeling their responsibility to the farm on which they live. no nation can long persist that does not have this kind of citizenry in the background. i have spoken of one phase of the group reaction, as suggested in the attitude of the farmer. it may be interesting to recall, again, the fact that the purpose of farming is changing. the farmer is now adopting the outlook and the moral conduct of commerce. his business is no longer to produce the supplies for his family and to share the small overplus with society. he grows or makes a certain line of produce that he sells for cash, and then he purchases his other supplies in the general market. the days of homespun are gone. the farmer is as much a buyer as a seller. commercial methods and standards are invading the remotest communities. this will have far-reaching results. perhaps a fundamental shift in the moral basis of the agricultural occupations is slowly under way. the measuring of farming in terms of yields and incomes introduces a dangerous standard. it is commonly assumed that state moneys for agriculture-education may be used only for "practical"--that is, for dollars-and-cents--results, and the emphasis is widely placed very exclusively on more alfalfa, more corn, more hogs, more fruit, on the two-blades-of-grass morals; and yet the highest good that can accrue to a state for the expenditure of its money is the raising up of a population less responsive to cash than to some other stimuli. the good physical support is indeed essential, but it is only the beginning of a process. i am conscious of a peculiar hardness in some of the agriculture-enterprise, with little real uplook; i hope that we may soon pass this cruder phase. undoubtedly we are in the beginning of an epoch in rural affairs. we are at a formative period. we begin to consider the rural problem increasingly in terms of social groups. the attitudes that these groups assume, the way in which they react to their problems, will be determined in the broader aspects for some time to come by the character of the young leadership that is now taking the field. _the spiritual contact with nature_ a useful contact with the earth places man not as superior to nature but as a superior intelligence working in nature as a conscious and therefore as a responsible part in a plan of evolution, which is a continuing creation. it distinguishes the elemental virtues as against the acquired, factitious, and pampered virtues. these strong and simple traits may be brought out easily and naturally if we incorporate into our schemes of education the solid experiences of tramping, camping, scouting, farming, handcraft, and other activities that are not mere refinements of subjective processes. lack of training in the realities drives us to find satisfaction in all sorts of make-believes and in play-lives. the "movies" and many other developments of our time make an appeal wholly beyond their merits, and they challenge the methods and intentions of education. there are more fundamental satisfactions than "thrills." there is more heart-ease in frugality than in surfeit. there is no real relish except when the appetite is keen. we are now provided with all sorts of things that nobody ever should want. the good spiritual reaction to nature is not a form of dogmatism or impressionism. it results normally from objective experience, when the person is ready for it and has good digestion. it should be the natural emotion of the man who knows his objects and does not merely dream about them. there is no hallucination in it. the remedy for some of the erratic "futurism" and other forms of illusion is to put the man hard against the facts: he might be set to studying bugs or soils or placed between the handles of a plow until such time as objects begin to take their natural shape and meaning in his mind. it is not within my purview here to consider the abstract righteous relation of man to the creation, nor to examine the major emotions that result from a contemplation of nature. it is only a very few of the simpler and more practical considerations that i may suggest. the training in solid experience naturally emphasizes the righteousness of plain and simple eating and drinking, and of frugality and control in pleasures. many of the adventitious pleasures are in the highest degree pernicious and are indications of weakness. considering the almost universal opinion that nature exhibits the merciless and relentless struggle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, it is significant that one of the most productive ways of training a youth in sensitiveness and in regard for other creatures is by means of the nature contact. even if the person is taught that the strong and ferocious survive and conquer, he nevertheless soon comes to have the tenderest regard for every living thing if he has the naturist in him. he discards the idea that we lose virility when we cease to kill, and relegates the notion to the limbo of deceits. this only means that unconsciously he has experienced the truth in nature, and in practice has discarded the erroneous philosophy contained in books even though he may still give these philosophies his mental assent. it is exactly among the naturists that the old instinct to kill begins to lose its force and that an instinct of helpfulness and real brotherhood soon takes its place. from another source, the instinct to kill dies out among the moralists and other people. and yet it is passing strange how this old survival--or is it a reversion?--holds its place amongst us, even in the higher levels. the punishment of a life for a life is itself a survival. entertainment even yet plays upon this old memory of killing, as in books of adventure, in fiction, in playgames of children, and worst of all on the stage where this strange anachronism, even in plays that are not historic, is still portrayed in pernicious features and in a way that would rouse any community and violate law if it were enacted in real life. it is difficult to explain these survivals when we pretend to be so much shocked by the struggle for existence. we must accept the struggle, but we ought to try to understand it. the actual suffering among the creatures as the result of this struggle is probably small, and the bloody and ferocious contest that we like to picture to ourselves is relatively insignificant. there is a righteous element in the struggle; or, more truthfully, the struggle itself is right. every living and sentient thing persists by its merit and by its right. it persists within its sphere, and usually not in the sphere of some other creature. the weeding-out process is probably related in some way with adaptability, but only remotely with physical strength. it is a process of applying the test. the test is applied continuously, and not in some violent upheaval. if one looks for a moral significance in the struggle for existence, one finds it in the fact that it is a process of adjustment rather than a contest in ambition. the elimination of the unessentials and of the survivals of a lower order of creation that have no proper place in human society, is the daily necessity of the race. the human struggle should not be on the plane of the struggle in the lower creation, by the simple fact that the human plane is unlike; and those who contend that we should draw our methods of contest from wild nature would therefore put us back on the plane of the creatures we are supposed to have passed. if there is one struggle of the creeping things, if there is one struggle of the fish of the sea and another of the beasts of the field, and still another of the fowls of the air, then surely there must be still another order for those who have dominion. _the struggle for existence: war_ we may consider even further, although briefly, the nature of the struggle for existence in its spiritual relation. it would be violence to assume a holy earth and a holy production from the earth, if the contest between the creatures seems to violate all that we know as rightness. the notion of the contentious and sanguinary struggle for existence finds its most pronounced popular expression in the existence of human war. it is a wide-spread opinion that war is necessary in the nature of things, and, in fact, it has been not only justified but glorified on this basis. we may here examine this contention briefly, and we may ask whether, in the case of human beings, there are other sufficient means of personal and social development than by mortal combat with one's fellows. we may ask whether the principle of enmity or the principle of fellow feeling is the more important and controlling. we are not to deny or even to overlook the great results that have come from war. virile races have forced themselves to the front and have impressed their stamp on society; the peoples have been mixed and also assorted; lethargic folk have been galvanized into activity; iron has been put into men's sinews; heroic deeds have arisen; old combinations and intrigues have been broken up (although new ones take their place). a kind of national purification may result from a great war. the state of human affairs has been brought to its present condition largely as the issue of wars. on the other hand, we are not to overlook the damaging results, the destruction, the anguish, the check to all productive enterprise, the hatred and revenge, the hypocrisy and deceit, the despicable foreign spy system, the loss of standards, the demoralization, the lessening respect and regard for the rights of the other, the breeding of human parasites that fatten at the fringes of disaster, the levying of tribute, the setting up of unnatural boundaries, the thwarting of national and racial developments which, so far as we can see, gave every promise of great results. we naturally extol the nations that have survived; we do not know how many superior stocks may have been sacrificed to military conquest, or how many racial possibilities may have been suppressed in their beginnings. vast changes in mental attitudes may result from a great war, and the course of civilization may be deflected; and while we adjust ourselves to these changes, no one may say at the time that they are just or even that they are temporarily best. we are never able at the moment to measure the effects of the unholy conquest of peoples who should not have been conquered; these results work themselves out in tribulation and perhaps in loss of effort and of racial standards through many weary centuries. force, or even "success," cannot justify theft. but even assuming the great changes that have arisen from war, this is not a justification of war; it only states a fact, it only provides a measure of the condition of society at any epoch. it is probable that war will still exert a mighty even if a lessening influence; it may still be necessary to resort to arms to win for a people its natural opportunity and to free a race from bondage; and if any people has a right to its own existence, it has an equal right and indeed a duty to defend itself. but this again only indicates the wretched state of development in which we live. undoubtedly, also, a certain amount of military training is very useful, but there should be other ways, in a democracy, to secure something of this needful training. the struggle for existence, as expressed in human combat, does not necessarily result in the survival of the most desirable, so far as we are able to define desirability. we are confusing very unlike situations in our easy application of the struggle for existence to war. the struggle is not now between individuals to decide the fitter; it is between vast bodies hurling death by wholesale. we pick the physically fit and send them to the battle-line; and these fit are slain. this is not the situation in nature from which we draw our illustrations. moreover, the final test of fitness in nature is adaptation, not power. adaptation and adjustment mean peace, not war. physical force has been immensely magnified in the human sphere; we even speak of the great nations as "powers," a terminology that some day we shall regret. the military method of civilization finds no justification in the biological struggle for existence. the final conquest of a man is of himself, and he shall then be greater than when he takes a city. the final conquest of a society is of itself, and it shall then be greater than when it conquers its neighboring society. man now begins to measure himself against nature also, and he begins to see that herein shall lie his greatest conquests beyond himself; in fact, by this means shall he conquer himself,--by great feats of engineering, by completer utilization of the possibilities of the planet, by vast discoveries in the unknown, and by the final enlargement of the soul; and in these fields shall be the heroes. the most virile and upstanding qualities can find expression in the conquest of the earth. in the contest with the planet every man may feel himself grow. what we have done in times past shows the way by which we have come; it does not provide a program of procedure for days that are coming; or if it does, then we deny the effective evolution of the race. we have passed witchcraft, religious persecution, the inquisition, subjugation of women, the enslavement of our fellows except alone enslavement in war. here i come particularly to a consideration of the struggle for existence. before i enter on this subject, i must pause to say that i would not of myself found an argument either for war or against it on the analogies of the struggle for existence. man has responsibilities quite apart from the conditions that obtain in the lower creation. man is a moral agent; animals and plants are not moral agents. but the argument for war is so often founded on this struggle in nature, that the question must be considered. it has been persistently repeated for years that in nature the weakest perish and that the victory is with the strong, meaning by that the physically powerful. this is a false analogy and a false biology. it leads men far astray. it is the result of a misconception of the teaching of evolution. our minds dwell on the capture and the carnage in nature,--the hawk swooping on its prey, the cat stealthily watching for the mouse, wolves hunting in packs, ferocious beasts lying in wait, sharks that follow ships, serpents with venomous fangs, the vast range of parasitism; and with the poet we say that nature is "red in tooth and claw." of course, we are not to deny the struggle of might against might, which is mostly between individuals, and of which we are all aware; but the weak and the fragile and the small are the organisms that have persisted. there are thousands of little and soft things still abundant in the world that have outlived the fearsome ravenous monsters of ages past; there were goliaths in those days, but the davids have outlived them, and gath is not peopled by giants. the big and strong have not triumphed. the struggle in nature is not a combat, as we commonly understand that word, and it is not warfare. the earth is not strewn with corpses. i was impressed in reading roosevelt's "african game trails" with the great extent of small and defenseless and fragile animal life that abounds in the midst of the terrible beasts,--little uncourageous things that hide in the crevices, myriads that fly in the air, those that ride on the rhinos, that swim and hide in the pools, and bats that hang in the acacia-trees. he travelled in the region of the lion, in the region that "holds the mightiest creatures that tread the earth or swim in its rivers; it also holds distant kinsfolk of these same creatures, no bigger than woodchucks, which dwell in crannies of the rocks, and in the tree tops. there are antelope smaller than hares and antelope larger than oxen. there are creatures which are the embodiment of grace; and others whose huge ungainliness is like that of a shape in a nightmare. the plains are alive with droves of strange and beautiful animals whose like is not known elsewhere." the lion is mighty; he is the king of beasts; but he keeps his place and he has no kingdom. he has not mastered the earth. no beast has ever overcome the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force. nature is not in a state of perpetual enmity, one part with another. my friend went to a far country. he told me that he was most impressed with the ferocity, chiefly of wild men. it came my time to go to that country. i saw that men had been savage,--men are the most ferocious of animals, and the ferocity has never reached its high point of refined fury until to-day. (of course, savages fight and slay; this is because they are savages.) but i saw also that these savage men are passing away. i saw animals that had never tasted blood, that had no means of defense against a rapacious captor, and yet they were multiplying. every stone that i upturned disclosed some tender organism; every bush that i disturbed revealed some timid atom of animal life; every spot where i walked bore some delicate plant, and i recalled the remark of sir j. william dawson "that frail and delicate plants may be more ancient than the mountains or plains on which they live"; and if i went on the sea, i saw the medusæ, as frail as a poet's dream, with the very sunshine streaming through them, yet holding their own in the mighty upheaval of the oceans; and i reflected on the myriads of microscopic things that for untold ages had cast the very rock on which much of the ocean rests. the minor things and the weak things are the most numerous, and they have played the greatest part in the polity of nature. so i came away from that far country impressed with the power of the little feeble things. i had a new understanding of the worth of creatures so unobtrusive and so silent that the multitude does not know them. i saw protective colorings; i saw fleet wings and swift feet; i saw the ability to hide and to conceal; i saw habits of adaptation; i saw marvellous powers of reproduction. you have seen them in every field; you have met them on your casual walks, until you accept them as the natural order of things. and you know that the beasts of prey have not prevailed. the whole contrivance of nature is to protect the weak. we have wrongly visualized the "struggle." we have given it an intensely human application. we need to go back to darwin who gave significance to the phrase "struggle for existence." "i use this term," he said, "in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny." the dependence of one being on another, success in leaving progeny,--how accurate and how far-seeing was darwin! i hope that i speak to naturists and to farmers. they know how diverse are the forms of life; and they know that somehow these forms live together and that only rarely do whole races perish by subjugation. they know that the beasts do not set forth to conquer, but only to gain subsistence and to protect themselves. the beasts and birds do not pursue indiscriminately. a hen-hawk does not attack crows or butterflies. even a vicious bull does not attack fowls or rabbits or sheep. the great issues are the issues of live and let-live. there are whole nations of plants, more unlike than nations of humankind, living together in mutual interdependence. there are nations of quiet and mightless animals that live in the very regions of the mighty and the stout. and we are glad it is so. consider the mockery of invoking the struggle for existence as justification for a battle on a june morning, when all nature is vibrant with life and competition is severe, and when, if ever, we are to look for strife. but the very earth breathes peace. the fulness of every field and wood is in complete adjustment. the teeming multitudes of animal and plant have found a way to live together, and we look abroad on a vast harmony, verdurous, prolific, abounding. into this concord, project your holocaust! _the daily fare_ some pages back, i said something about the essential simplicity in habit of life that results from the nature contact, and i illustrated the remark by calling attention to the righteousness of simple eating and drinking. of course, the eating must be substantial, but the adventitious appetites accomplish nothing and they may be not only intemperate and damaging to health but even unmoral. yet it is not alone the simplicity of the daily fare that interests me here, but the necessity that it shall be as direct as possible from the ground or the sea, and that it shall be undisguised and shall have meaning beyond the satisfying of the appetite. i was interested in tusser's "christmas husbandly fare," notwithstanding some suggestion of gluttony in it and of oversupply. there is a certain vigor and good relish about it, and lack of ostentation, that seem to suggest a lesson. it was more than three centuries ago that native thomas tusser, musician, chorister, and farmer, gave to the world his incomparable "five hundred points of good husbandry." he covered the farm year and the farm work as completely as vergil had covered it more than fifteen centuries before; and he left us sketches of the countryside of his day, and the ways of the good plain folk, and quaint bits of philosophy and counsel. he celebrated the christmas festival with much conviction, and in the homely way of the home folks, deriving his satisfactions from the things that the land produces. his sketches are wholesome reading in these days of foods transported from the ends of the earth, and compounded by impersonal devices and condensed into packages that go into every house alike. thomas tusser would celebrate with "things handsome to have, as they ought to be had." his board would not be scant of provisions, for he seems not to have advised the simple life in the way of things good to eat; but he chose good raw materials, and we can imagine that the "good husband and huswife" gave these materials their best compliments and prepared them with diligence and skill. not once does he suggest that these materials be secured from the market, or that any imported labor be employed in the preparation of them. "good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall, brawn, pudding, and souse, and good mustard withal." here is the whole philosophy of the contented festival,--the fruit of one's labor, the common genuine materials, and the cheer of the family fireside. the day is to be given over to the spirit of the celebration; every common object will glow with a new consecration, and everything will be good,--even the mustard will be good withal. what a contempt old tusser would have had for all the imported and fabricated condiments and trivialities that now come to our tables in packages suggestive of medicines and drugs! and how ridiculously would they have stood themselves beside the brawn, pudding, and souse! a few plain accessories, every one stout and genuine, and in good quantity, must accompany the substantialities that one takes with a free hand directly from the land that one manages. it surprises us that he had such a bountiful list from which to draw, and yet the kinds are not more than might be secured from any good land property, if one set about securing them: "beef, mutton, and pork, shred pies of the best, pig, veal, goose, and capon, and turkey well drest, cheese, apples, and nuts, joly carols to hear, as then in the country, is counted good cheer." in these days we should draw less heavily on the meats, for in the three centuries we have gained greatly in the vegetable foods. tusser did not have the potato. but nevertheless, these materials are of the very bone of the land. they grow up with the year and out of the conditions, and they have all the days in them, the sunshine, the rain, the dew of morning, the wind, the cold foggy nights, and the work of laborious hands. every one of them means something to the person who raises them, and there is no impersonality in them. john's father drained the land when yet he was a boy; the hedges were set; long ago the place was laid out in its rotations; the old trees in the fields are a part of it; every stall in the stables and every window-seat in the old house hold memories; and john has grown up with these memories, and with these fields, and with the footpaths that lead out over brooks and amongst the herds of cattle. it is a part of his religion to keep the land well; and these supplies at christmas time are taken with a deep reverence for the goodness that is in them, and with a pride in having produced them. and thomas tusser, good husbandman, rejoiced that these bounties cost no cash: "what cost to good husband, is any of this? good household provision only it is. of other the like, i do leave out a many that costeth a husbandman never a penny." to farm well; to provide well; to produce it oneself; to be independent of trade, so far as this is possible in the furnishing of the table,--these are good elements in living. and in this day we are rapidly losing all this; many persons already have lost it; many have never known the satisfaction of it. most of us must live from the box and the bottle and the tin-can; we are even feeding our cattle from the factory and the bag. the farmer now raises a few prime products to sell, and then he buys his foods in the markets under label and tag; and he knows not who produced the materials, and he soon comes not to care. no thought of the seasons, and of the men and women who labored, of the place, of the kind of soil, of the special contribution of the native earth, come with the trademark or the brand. and so we all live mechanically, from shop to table, without contact, and irreverently. may we not once in the year remember the earth in the food that we eat? may we not in some way, even though we live in town, so organize our christmas festival that the thought of the goodness of the land and its bounty shall be a conscious part of our celebration? may we not for once reduce to the very minimum the supply of manufactured and sophisticated things, and come somewhere near, at least in spirit, to a "christmas husbandly fare?" yet, thomas tusser would not confine his husbandly fare to the christmas time. in another poem, he gives us "the farmer's daily diet," in which the sturdy products are still much the same, secured and prepared by those who partake. all this may be little applicable literally in our present living, and yet i think it is easily possible, as certainly it is very desirable, to develop a new attitude toward the table fare, avoiding much unnecessary and insignificant household labor and lending an attitude of good morality to the daily sustenance. much of our eating and feasting is a vicious waste of time, and also of human energy that might be put to good uses. one can scarcely conceive how such indirect and uncomfortable and expensive methods could have come into use. perhaps they originated with persons of quality in an aristocratic society, when an abundance of servants must be trained to serve and when distinctions in eating were a part of the distinction in rank. but to have introduced these laborious and unintelligent methods into hotels, where persons tarry for comfort and into homes that do not need to maintain an extrinsic appearance, is a vain and ludicrous imitation. the numbers of courses, with more service than food, that one often meets at the table d'hôte of the frequented hotels abroad, are most exasperating to one who values time and has a serious purpose in travel and a rightful care for the bodily apparatus. here is the performance--it was nothing more than a performance, consisting in repeated changing of all the dishes, the removing of every fragment of edibles, and in passing very small separate parcels of food--that it was my lot to endure on an otherwise happy day in a hotel that had little else to distinguish it: course . dry bread (no butter). removal. course . soup (nothing else). removal. course . fish (very economical), with a potato on the side. removal. course . veal, macaroni. removal. course . spoonful of green beans (nothing else). removal. course . beef and salad (fragmentary). removal. course . charlotte russe, bit of cake. removal. course . fruit (slight). removal. course . morsel of cheese, one cracker. removal. course . coffee. relief. the traveler knows that this species of time-wasting is not unusual; certainly the food is not unusual and does not merit such considerate attention, although it may profit by the magnification. all this contributes nothing to human efficiency--quite the reverse--and certainly nothing to the rightful gusto in the enjoyment of one's subsistence. it is a ceremony. such laborious uselessness is quite immoral. i am afraid that our food habits very well represent how far we have moved away from the essentials and how much we have misled ourselves as to the standards of excellence. i looked in a cookbook to learn how to serve potatoes: i found twenty-three recipes, every one of which was apparently designed to disguise the fact that they were potatoes; and yet there is really nothing in a potato to be ashamed of. of course, this kind of deception is not peculiar to cookery. it is of the same piece as the stamping of the metal building coverings in forms to represent brick and stone, although everybody knows that they are not brick and stone, rather than to make a design that shall express metal and thereby frankly tell the truth; of the same kind also as the casting of cement blocks to represent undressed rock, although every one is aware of the deception, rather than to develop a form that will express cement blocks as brick expresses brick; of the same order as the inflating of good wholesome water by carbonic gas; and all the other deceits in materials on which our common affairs are built. it is, of course, legitimate to present our foods in many forms that we may secure variety even with scant and common materials; but danger may lie in any untruthfulness with which we use the raw materials of life. so cookery has come to be a process of concealment. not only does it conceal the materials, but it also conceals the names of them in a ridiculous nomenclature. apparently, the higher the art of cookery, the greater is the merit of complete concealment. i think that one reason why persons enjoy the simple cooking of farmers and sailors and other elemental folk, is because of its comparative lack of disguise, although they may not be aware of this merit of it. we have so successfully disguised our viands through so many years that it is not "good form" to make inquiries: we may not smell the food, although the odor should be one of the best and most rightful satisfactions, as it is in fruits and flowers. we may smell a parsnip or a potato when it grows in the field, but not when it is cooked. we add the extrinsic and meaningless odors of spices and flavorings, forgetting that odor no less than music hath occasions; each of the materials has its own odor that the discriminating cook will try to bring out in its best expression. were we to be deprived of all these exotic seasonings, undoubtedly cookery would be the gainer in the end; nor could we so readily disguise materials that in themselves are not fit to eat. there is a reason why "all foods taste alike," as we often hear it said of the cooking in public places. moreover, we want everything that is out of season, necessitating great attention to the arts of preserving and requiring still further fabrication; and by this desire we also lessen the meaning of the seasons when they come in their natural sequence, bringing their treasure of materials that are adapted to the time and to the place. we can understand, then, why it so happens that we neglect the cookery of the common foods, as seeming to be not quite worth the while, and expend ourselves with so much effort on the accessories and the frills. i have been interested to observe some of the instruction in cooking,--how it often begins with little desserts, and fudge, and a variety of dib-dabs. this is much like the instruction in manual training that begins with formal and meaningless model work or trivialities and neglects the issues of life. it is much like some of the teaching in agriculture not so many years ago, before we attacked very effectively the serious problems of wheat and alfalfa and forests and markets. mastery does not lie in these pieces of play work, nor does the best intellectual interest on the part of the student reside in them. result is that one finds the greatest difficulty in securing a really good baked potato, a well-cooked steak, or a wholesome dish of apple-sauce that is not strained and flavored beyond recognition. it is nearly impossible for one to secure an egg fried hard and yet very tender and that has not been "turned" or scorched on the edges,--this is quite the test of the skill of the good cook. the notion that a hard fried egg is dangerously indigestible is probably a fable of poor cookery. one can secure many sophisticated and disguised egg dishes, but i think skill in plainly cooking eggs is almost an unknown art, perhaps a little-practised art. now, it is on these simple and essential things that i would start my instruction in cookery; and this not only for the gain to good eating but also for the advantage of vigor and good morals. i am afraid that our cooking does not set a good example before the young three times every day in the year; and how eager are the young and how amenable to suggestion at these three blessed epochs every day in the year! some unsympathetic reader will say that i am drawing a long bow; yet undoubtedly our cookery has prepared the public mind for the adulteration. knowing the elaboration of many of the foods and fancy dishes, the use of flavoring and spice and other additions to disguise unwholesome materials, the addition of coloring matter to make things attractive, the mixtures, the elaborate designs and trimmings and concoctions, and various deceptions, one wonders how far is the step from some of the cookery to some of the adulteration and whether these processes are really all of one piece. i will leave with my reader a paragraph assembled from a statement made by a food chemist but a few years ago, to let him compare adulteration with what is regarded as legitimate food preparation and note the essential similarity of many of the processes. i do not mean to enter the discussion of food adulteration, and i do not know whether these sophistications are true at the present day; but the statement describes a situation in which we found ourselves and indicates what had become a staggering infidelity in the use of the good raw materials. hamburg steak often contains sodium sulphite; bologna sausage and similar meats until recently usually contained a large percentage of added cereal. "pancake flour" often contains little if any buckwheat; wheat flour is bleached with nitric oxide to improve its appearance. fancy french peas are colored with sulphate of copper. bottled ketchup usually contains benzoate of soda as a preservative. japanese tea is colored with cyanide of potassium and iron. prepared mustard usually contains a large quantity of added starch and is colored with tumeric. ground coffee has recently been adulterated with roasted peas. so-called non-alcoholic bottled beverages often contain alcohol or a habit-forming drug and are usually colored with aniline. candy is commonly colored with aniline dye and often coated with paraffine to prevent evaporation. cheap candies contain such substances as glue and soapstone. the higher-priced kinds of molasses usually contain sulphites. flavoring extracts seldom are made from pure products and usually are artificially colored. jams are made of apple jelly with the addition of coloring matter and also of seeds to imitate berries from which they are supposed to be made; the cheap apple jelly is itself often imitated by a mixture of glucose, starch, aniline dye, and flavoring. lard nearly always contains added tallow. bakeries in large cities have used decomposed products, as decayed eggs. cheap ice-cream is often made of gelatin, glue, and starch. cottonseed-oil is sold for olive-oil. the poison saccharine is often used in place of sugar in prepared sweetened products. the attentive reader of the public prints in the recent years can greatly extend this humiliating recital if he choose. it is our habit to attach all the blame to the adulterators, and it is difficult to excuse them; but we usually find that there are contributory causes and certainly there must be reasons. has our daily fare been honest? _the admiration of good materials_ not even yet am i done with this plain problem of the daily fare. the very fact that it is daily--thrice daily--and that it enters so much into the thought and effort of every one of us, makes it a subject of the deepest concern from every point of view. the aspect of the case that i am now to reassert is the effect of much of our food preparation in removing us from a knowledge of the good raw materials that come out of the abounding earth. let us stop to admire an apple. i see a committee of the old worthies in some fruit-show going slowly and discriminatingly among the plates of fruits, discussing the shapes and colors and sizes, catching the fragrance, debating the origins and the histories, and testing them with the utmost precaution and deliberation; and i follow to hear their judgment. this kind of apple is very perfect in spherical form, deeply cut at the stem, well ridged at the shallow crater, beautifully splashed and streaked with carmine-red on a yellowish green under-color, finely flecked with dots, slightly russet on the shaded side, apparently a good keeper; its texture is fine-grained and uniform, flavor mildly subacid, the quality good to very good; if the tree is hardy and productive, this variety is to be recommended to the amateur for further trial! the next sample is somewhat elongated in form, rather below the average in color, the stem very long and well set and indicating a fruit that does not readily drop in windstorms, the texture exceedingly melting but the flavor slightly lacking in character and therefore rendering it of doubtful value for further test. another sample lacks decidedly in quality, as judged by the specimens on the table, and the exhibitor is respectfully recommended to withdraw it from future exhibitions; another kind has a very pronounced aromatic odor, which will commend it to persons desiring to grow a choice collection of interesting fruits; still another is of good size, very firm and solid, of uniform red color, slightly oblate and therefore lending itself to easy packing, quality fair to good, and if the tree bears such uniform samples as those shown on the table it apparently gives promise of some usefulness as a market sort. my older friends, if they have something of the feeling of the pomologist, can construct the remainder of the picture. in physical perfectness of form and texture and color, there is nothing in all the world that exceeds a well-grown fruit. let it lie in the palm of your hand. close your fingers slowly about it. feel its firm or soft and modelled surface. put it against your cheek, and inhale its fragrance. trace its neutral under-colors, and follow its stripes and mark its dots. if an apple, trace the eye that lies in a moulded basin. note its stem, how it stands firmly in its cavity, and let your imagination run back to the tree from which, when finally mature, it parted freely. this apple is not only the product of your labor, but it holds the essence of the year and it is in itself a thing of exquisite beauty. there is no other rondure and no other fragrance like this. i am convinced that we need much to cultivate this appreciation of the physical perfectness of the fruits that we grow. we cannot afford to lose this note from our lives, for this may contribute a good part of our satisfaction of being in the world. the discriminating appreciation that one applies to a picture or a piece of sculpture may be equally applied to any fruit that grows on the commonest tree or bush in our field or to any animal that stands on a green pasture. it is no doubt a mark of a well-tempered mind that it can understand the significance of the forms in fruits and plants and animals and apply it in the work of the day. i sometimes think that the rise of the culinary arts is banishing this fine old appreciation of fruits in their natural forms. there are so many ways of canning and preserving and evaporating and extracting the juices, so many disguises and so much fabrication, that the fruit is lost in the process. the tin-can and the bottle seem to have put an insuperable barrier between us and nature, and it is difficult for us to get back to a good munch of real apples under a tree or by the fireside. the difficulty is all the greater in our congested city life where orchards and trees are only a vacant memory or stories told to the young, and where the space in the larder is so small that apples must be purchased by the quart. the eating of good apples out of hand seems to be almost a lost art. only the most indestructible kinds, along with leather-skinned oranges and withered bananas, seem to be purchasable in the market. the discriminating apple-eater in the old world sends to a grower for samples of the kinds that he grows; and after the inquirer has tested them in the family, and discussed them, he orders his winter supply. the american leaves the matter to the cook and she orders plain apples; and she gets them. i wonder whether in time the perfection of fabrication will not reach such a point that some fruits will be known to the great public only by the picture on the package or on the bottle. every process that removes us one step farther from the earth is a distinct loss to the people, and yet we are rapidly coming into the habit of taking all things at second hand. my objection to the wine of the grape is not so much a question of abstinence as of the fact that i find no particular satisfaction in the shape and texture of a bottle. if one has a sensitive appreciation of the beauty in form and color and modelling of the common fruits, he will find his interest gradually extending to other products. some time ago i visited hood river valley in company with a rugged potato-grower from the rocky mountains. we were amazed at the wonderful scenery, and captivated by the beauty of the fruits. in one orchard the owner showed us with much satisfaction a brace of apples of perfect form and glowing colors. when the grower had properly expounded the marvels of hood river apples, which he said were the finest in the world, my friend thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out a potato, and said to the man: "why is not that just as handsome as a hood river apple?" and sure enough it was. for twenty-five years this grower had been raising and selecting the old peachblow potato, until he had a form much more perfect than the old peachblow ever was, with a uniform delicate pink skin, smooth surface, comely shape, and medium size, and with eyes very small and scarcely sunken; and my hood river friend admitted that a potato as well as an apple may be handsome and satisfying to the hand and to the eye, and well worth carrying in one's pocket. but this was a high-bred potato, and not one of the common lot. this episode of the potato allows me another opportunity to enforce my contention that we lose the fruit or the vegetable in the processes of cookery. the customary practice of "mashing" potatoes takes all the individuality out of the product, and the result is mostly so much starch. there is an important dietary side to this. cut a thin slice across a potato and hold it to the light. note the interior undifferentiated mass, and then the thick band of rind surrounding it. the potato flavor and a large part of the nutriment lie in this exterior. we slice this part away and fry, boil, or otherwise fuss up the remainder. when we mash it, we go still farther and break down the potato texture; and in the modern method we squeeze and strain it till we eliminate every part of the potato, leaving only a pasty mass, which, in my estimation, is not fit to eat. the potato should be cooked with the rind on, if it is a good potato, and if it is necessary to remove the outer skin the process should be performed after the cooking. the most toothsome part of the potato is in these outer portions, if the tuber is well grown and handled. we have so sophisticated the potato in the modern disguised cookery that we often practically ruin it as an article of food, and we have bred a race of people that sees nothing to admire in a good and well-grown potato tuber. i now wish to take an excursion from the potato to the pumpkin. in all the range of vegetable products, i doubt whether there is a more perfect example of pleasing form, fine modelling, attractive texture and color, and more bracing odor, than in a well-grown and ripe field pumpkin. place a pumpkin on your table; run your fingers down its smooth grooves; trace the furrows to the poles; take note of its form; absorb its rich color; get the tang of its fragrance. the roughness and ruggedness of its leaves, the sharp-angled stem strongly set, make a foil that a sculptor cannot improve. then wonder how this marvellous thing was born out of your garden soil through the medium of one small strand of a succulent stem. we all recognize the appeal of a bouquet of flowers, but we are unaware that we may have a bouquet of fruits. we have given little attention to arranging them, or any study of the kinds that consort well together, nor have we receptacles in which effectively to display them. yet, apples and oranges and plums and grapes and nuts, and good melons and cucumbers and peppers and carrots and onions, may be arranged into the most artistic and satisfying combinations. i would fall short of my obligation if i were to stop with the fruit of the tree and say nothing about the tree or the plant itself. in our haste for lawn trees of new kinds and from the uttermost parts, we forget that a fruit-tree is ornamental and that it provides acceptable shade. a full-grown apple-tree or pear-tree is one of the most individual and picturesque of trees. the foliage is good, the blossoms as handsome as those of fancy imported things, the fruits always interesting, and the tree is reliable. nothing is more interesting than an orange tree, in the regions where it grows, with its shining and evergreen leaves and its continuing flowers and fruits. the practice of planting apples and pears and sweet cherries, and other fruit and nut trees, for shade and adornment is much to be commended in certain places. but the point i wish specially to urge in this connection is the value of many kinds of fruit-trees in real landscape work. we think of these trees as single or separate specimens, but they may be used with good result in mass planting, when it is desired to produce a given effect in a large area or in one division of a property. i do not know that any one has worked out full plans for the combining of fruit-trees, nuts, and berry-bearing plants into good treatments, but it is much to be desired that this shall be done. any of you can picture a sweep of countryside planted to these things that would be not only novel and striking, but at the same time conformable to the best traditions of artistic rendering. i think it should be a fundamental purpose in our educational plans to acquaint the people with the common resources of the region, and particularly with those materials on which we subsist. if this is accepted, then we cannot deprive our parks, highways, and school grounds of the trees that bear the staple fruits. it is worth while to have an intellectual interest in a fruit-tree. i know a fruit-grower who secures many prizes for his apples and his pears; when he secures a blue ribbon, he ties it on the tree that bore the fruit. the admiration of a good domestic animal is much to be desired. it develops a most responsible attitude in the man or the woman. i have observed a peculiar charm in the breeders of these wonderful animals, a certain poise and masterfulness and breadth of sympathy. to admire a good horse and to know just why he admires him is a great resource to any man, as also to feel the responsibility for the care and health of any flock or herd. fowls, pigs, sheep on their pastures, cows, mules, all perfect of their kind, all sensitive, all of them marvellous in their forms and powers,--verily these are good to know. if the raw materials grow out of the holy earth, then a man should have pride in producing them, and also in handling them. as a man thinketh of his materials, so doth he profit in the use of them. he builds them into himself. there is a wide-spread feeling that in some way these materials reflect themselves in a man's bearing. one type of man grows out of the handling of rocks, another out of the handling of fishes, another out of the growing of the products from the good earth. all irreverence in the handling of these materials that come out of the earth's bounty, and all waste and poor workmanship, make for a low spiritual expression. the farmer specially should be proud of his materials, he is so close to the sources and so hard against the backgrounds. moreover, he cannot conceal his materials. he cannot lock up his farm or disguise his crops. he lives on his farm, and visibly with his products. the architect does not live in the houses and temples he builds. the engineer does not live on his bridge. the miner does not live in his mine. even the sailor has his home away from his ship. but the farmer cannot separate himself from his works. every bushel of buckwheat and every barrel of apples and every bale of cotton bears his name; the beef that he takes to market, the sheep that he herds on his pastures, the horse that he drives,--these are his products and they carry his name. he should have the same pride in these--his productions--as another who builds a machine, or another who writes a book about them. the admiration of a field of hay, of a cow producing milk, of a shapely and fragrant head of cabbage, is a great force for good. it would mean much if we could celebrate the raw materials and the products. particularly is it good to celebrate the yearly bounty. the puritans recognized their immediate dependence on the products of the ground, and their celebration was connected with religion. i should be sorry if our celebrations were to be wholly secular. we have been much given to the display of fabricated materials,--of the products of looms, lathes, foundries, and many factories of skill. we also exhibit the agricultural produce, but largely in a crass and rude way to display bulk and to win prizes. we now begin to arrange our exhibitions for color effect, comparison, and educational influence. but we do not justly understand the natural products when we confine them to formal exhibitions. they must be incorporated into many celebrations, expressing therein the earth's bounty and our appreciation of it. the usual and common products, domesticated and wild, should be gathered in these occasions, and not for competition or for prize awards or even for display, but for their intrinsic qualities. an apple day or an apple sabbath would teach the people to express their gratitude for apples. the moral obligation to grow good apples, to handle them honestly, to treat the soil and the trees fairly and reverently, could be developed as a living practical philosophy into the working-days of an apple-growing people. the technical knowledge we now possess requires the moral support of a stimulated public appreciation to make it a thoroughly effective force. many of the products and crops lend themselves well to this kind of admiration, and all of them should awaken gratitude and reverence. sermons and teaching may issue from them. nor is it necessary that this gratitude be expressed only in collected materials, or that all preaching and all teaching shall be indoors. the best understanding of our relations to the earth will be possible when we learn how to apply our devotions in the open places. _the keeping of the beautiful earth_ the proper care-taking of the earth lies not alone in maintaining its fertility or in safeguarding its products. the lines of beauty that appeal to the eye and the charm that satisfies the five senses are in our keeping. the natural landscape is always interesting and it is satisfying. the physical universe is the source of art. we know no other form and color than that which we see in nature or derive from it. if art is true to its theme, it is one expression of morals. if it is a moral obligation to express the art-sense in painting and sculpture and literature and music, so is it an equal obligation to express it in good landscape. of the first importance is it that the race keep its artistic backgrounds, and not alone for the few who may travel far and near and who may pause deliberately, but also for those more numerous folk who must remain with the daily toil and catch the far look only as they labor. to put the best expression of any landscape into the consciousness of one's day's work is more to be desired than much riches. when we complete our conquest, there will be no unseemly landscapes. the abundance of violated landscapes is proof that we have not yet mastered. the farmer does not have full command of his situation until the landscape is a part of his farming. farms may be units in well-developed and pleasing landscapes, beautiful in their combinations with other farms and appropriate to their setting as well as attractive in themselves. no one has a moral right to contribute unsightly factory premises or a forbidding commercial establishment to any community. the lines of utility and efficiency ought also to be the lines of beauty; and it is due every worker to have a good landscape to look upon, even though its area be very constricted. to produce bushels of wheat and marvels of machinery, to maintain devastating military establishments, do not comprise the sum of conquest. the backgrounds must be kept. if moral strength comes from good and sufficient scenery, so does the preservation of it become a social duty. it is much more than a civic obligation. but the resources of the earth must be available to man for his use and this necessarily means a modification of the original scenery. some pieces and kinds of scenery are above all economic use and should be kept wholly in the natural state. much of it may yield to modification if he takes good care to preserve its essential features. unfortunately, the engineer seems not often to be trained in the values of scenery and he is likely to despoil a landscape or at least to leave it raw and unfinished. on the other hand, there is unfortunately a feeling abroad that any modification of a striking landscape is violation and despoliation; and unwarranted opposition, in some cases amounting almost to prudery, follows any needful work of utilization. undoubtedly the farmer and builder and promoter have been too unmindful of the effect of their interference on scenery, and particularly in taking little care in the disposition of wastes and in the healing of wounds; but a work either of farming or of construction may add interest and even lines of beauty to a landscape and endow it with the suggestion of human interest. if care were taken in the construction of public and semi-public work to reshape the banks into pleasing lines, to clean up, to care for, to plant, to erect structures of good proportions whether they cost much or little, and to give proper regard to the sensibilities of the communities, most of the present agitation against interference with natural scenery would disappear. one has only to visit the factory districts, the vacation resorts, the tenement areas, the banks of streams and gorges, to look at the faces of cliffs and at many engineering enterprises and at numberless farmyards, to find examples of the disregard of men for the materials that they handle. it is as much our obligation to hold the scenery reverently as to handle the products reverently. man found the earth looking well. humanity began in a garden. the keeping of the good earth depends on preservation rather than on destruction. the office of the farmer and the planter is to produce rather than to destroy; whatever they destroy is to the end that they may produce more abundantly; these persons are therefore natural care-takers. if to this office we add the habit of good housekeeping, we shall have more than one-third of our population at once directly partaking in keeping the earth. it is one of the bitter ironies that farmers should ever have been taken out of their place to wreak vengeance on the earth by means of military devastation. in the past, this ravage has been small in amount because the engines of destruction were weak, but with the perfecting of the modern enginery the havoc is awful and brutal. while we have to our credit the improvement of agriculture and other agencies of conservation, it is yet a fact that man has never been so destructive as now. he is able to turn the skill of his discovery to destructive ends (a subject that we have already approached from another point of view). the keeping of the earth is therefore involved in the organization of society. military power heads toward destructiveness. civil power heads toward conservation. the military power may be constructive in times of peace, but its end, if it uses the tools it invents, is devastation and the inflicting of injury. when the civil power is subjugated to the military power, society is headed toward calamity. to keep and to waste are opposite processes. not only are we able to despoil the earth by sheer lust of ravage and by blighting the fields with caverns of human slaughter, but we shoot away incredible supplies of copper and petroleum and other unrenewable materials that by every right and equity belong to our successors; and, moreover, we are to make these successors pay for the destruction of their heritage. day by day we are mortgaging the future, depriving it of supplies that it may need, burdening the shoulders of generations yet unborn. merely to make the earth productive and to keep it clean and to bear a reverent regard for its products, is the special prerogative of a good agriculture and a good citizenry founded thereon; this may seem at the moment to be small and ineffective as against mad impersonal and limitless havoc, but it carries the final healing; and while the land worker will bear much of the burden on his back he will also redeem the earth. _the tones of industry_ one of the clearest notes of our time is the recognition of the holiness of industry and the attempt to formulate the morals of it. we accept this fact indirectly by the modern endeavor to give the laboring man his due. the handworker is more or less elemental, dealing directly with the materials. we begin to recognize these industries in literature, in sculpture, and in painting; but we do not yet very consciously or effectively translate them into music. it is to be recognized, of course, that melody is emotional and dynamic not imitative, that its power lies in suggestion rather than in direct representation, and that its language is general; with all this i have nothing to do. meunier has done much with his chisel to interpret the spirit of constructive labor and to develop its higher significance. his art is indeed concrete and static, and sculpture and music are not to be compared; yet it raises the question whether there may be other bold extensions of art. the primitive industries must have been mostly silent, when there were no iron tools, when fire felled the forest tree and hollowed the canoe, when the parts in construction were secured by thongs, and when the game was caught in silent traps or by the swift noiseless arrow and spear. even at the stone age the rude implements and the materials must have been mostly devoid of resonance. but now industry has become universal and complex, and it has also become noisy,--so noisy that we organize to protect ourselves from becoming distraught. and yet a workshop, particularly if it works in metal, is replete with tones that are essentially musical. workmen respond readily to unison. there are melodies that arise from certain kinds of labor. much of our labor is rhythmic. in any factory driven by power, there is a fundamental rhythm and motion, tying all things together. i have often thought, standing at the threshold of a mill, that it might be possible somewhere by careful forethought to eliminate the clatter and so to organize the work as to develop a better expression in labor. very much do we need to make industry vocal. it is worth considering, also, whether it is possible to take over into music any of these sounds of industry in a new way, that they may be given meanings they do not now possess. at all events, the poetic element in industry is capable of great development and of progressive interpretation; and poetry is scarcely to be dissociated from sound. all good work well done is essentially poetic to the sensitive mind; and when the work is the rhythm of many men acting in unison, the poetry has voice. the striking of the rivet the purr of a drill the crash of a steam-shovel the plunge of a dredge the buzz of a saw the roll of belts and chains the whirl of spindles the hiss of steam the tip-tap of valves the undertone rumble of a mill the silence intent of men at work the talk of men going to their homes,-- these are all the notes of great symphonies. nor should i stop with the industries of commerce and manufacture. there are many possibilities in the sounds and voices that are known of fisherfolk and campers and foresters and farmers. somehow we should be able to individualize these voices and to give them an artistic expression in some kind of human composition. there are rich suggestions in the voices of the farmyard, the calls of wild creatures, the tones of farm implements and machinery, the sounds of the elements, and particularly in the relations of all these to the pauses, the silences, and the distances beyond. whether it is possible to utilize any of these tones and voices artistically is not for a layman to say; but the layman may express the need that he feels. _the threatened literature_ a fear seems to be abroad that the inquisitiveness and exactness of science will deprive literature of imagination and sympathy and will destroy artistic expression; and it is said that we are in danger of losing the devotional element in literature. if these apprehensions are well founded, then do we have cause for alarm, seeing that literature is an immeasurable resource. great literature may be relatively independent of time and place, and this is beyond discussion here; but if the standards of interpretative literature are lowering it must be because the standards of life are lowering, for the attainment and the outlook of a people are bound to be displayed in its letters. perhaps our difficulty lies in a change in methods and standards rather than in essential qualities. we constantly acquire new material for literary use. the riches of life are vaster and deeper than ever before. it would be strange indeed if the new experience of the planet did not express itself in new literary form. we are led astray by the fatal habit of making comparisons, contrasting one epoch with another. there may be inflexible souls among the investigators who see little or nothing beyond the set of facts in a little field, but surely the greater number of scientific men are persons of keen imagination and of broad interest in all conquests. indeed, a lively imagination is indispensable in persons of the best attainments in science; it is necessary only that the imagination be regulated and trained. never has it been so true that fact is stranger than fiction. never have the flights of the poets been so evenly matched by the flights of science. all great engineers, chemists, physiologists, physicists work in the realm of imagination, of imagination that projects the unknown from the known. almost do we think that the roentgen ray, the wireless telegraphy, the analysis of the light of the stars, the serum control of disease are the product of what we might call pure fancy. the very utilities and conquests of modern society are the results of better imagination than the world has yet known. if it is true that the desire to measure and to analyze is now an established trait, equally is it true that it directs the mind into far and untried reaches; and if we have not yet found this range of inspiration in what is called artistic literature, it must be because literary criticism has not accepted the imagery of the modern world and is still looking for its art to the models of the past. the models of the past are properly the standards for the performances of their time, but this does not constitute them the standards of all time or of the present time. perhaps the writing of language for the sake of writing it is losing its hold; but a new, clear, and forceful literature appears. this new literature has its own criteria. it would be violence to judge it only by standards of criticism founded on elizabethan writings. we do not descend into crude materialism because we describe the materials of the cosmos; we do not eliminate imagination because we desire that it shall have meaning; we do not strip literature of artistic quality because it is true to the facts and the outlook of our own time. it may be admitted that present literature is inadequate, and that we are still obliged to go to the former compositions for our highest artistic expressions. very good. let us hope that we shall never cease to want these older literatures. let us hope that we shall never be severed from our past. but perhaps the good judge in a coming generation, when the slow process of elimination has perfected its criticism, will discover something very noble and even very artistic in the abundant writing of our day. certainly he will note the recovery from the first excess of reaction against the older orders, and he will be aware that at this epoch man began anew to express his social sense in a large way, as a result of all his painstaking studies in science. even if he should not discover the highest forms of literary expression, he might find that here was the large promise of a new order. possibly he would discover major compositions of the excellence of which we ourselves are not aware. it is less than forty years since darwin and less than fifty years since agassiz. it is only twenty years since pasteur. it is only a century and a quarter since franklin, fifty years since faraday, less than twenty-five since tyndall. it is sixty years since humboldt glorified the earth with the range of his imagination. it is not so very far even if we go back to newton and to kepler. within the span of a century we count name after name of prophets who have set us on a new course. so complete has been the revolution that we lost our old bearings before we had found the new. we have not yet worked out the new relationships, nor put into practice their moral obligations, nor have we grasped the fulness of our privileges. we have not yet made the new knowledge consciously into a philosophy of life or incorporated it completely into working attitudes of social equity. therefore, not even now are we ripe for the new literature. we have gone far enough, however, to know that science is not unsympathetic and that it is not contemptuous of the unknown. by lens and prism and balance and line we measure minutely whatever we can sense; then with bared heads we look out to the great unknown and we cast our lines beyond the stars. there are no realms beyond which the prophecy of science would not go. it resolves the atom and it weighs the planets. among the science men i have found as many poetic souls as among the literary men, although they may not know so much poetry, and they are not equally trained in literary expression; being free of the restraint of conventional criticism, they are likely to have a peculiarly keen and sympathetic projection. close dissection long continued may not lead to free artistic literary expression; this is as true of literary anatomy as of biological anatomy: but this does not destroy the freedom of other souls, and it may afford good material for the artist. two kinds of popular writing are confused in the public mind, for there are two classes that express the findings of scientific inquiry. the prevailing product is that which issues from establishments and institutions. this is supervised, edited, and made to conform; it is the product of our perfected organizations and has all the hardness of its origin. the other literature is of a different breed. it is the expression of personality. the one is a useful and necessary public literature of record and advice; the other is a literature of outlook and inspiration. the latter is not to be expected from the institutions, for it is naturally the literature of freedom. my reader now knows my line of approach to the charge that literature is in danger of losing its element of devotion, and hereby lies the main reason for introducing this discussion into my little book. we may be losing the old literary piety and the technical theology, because we are losing the old theocratic outlook on creation. we also know that the final control of human welfare will not be governmental or military, and we shall some day learn that it will not be economic as we now prevailingly use the word. we have long since forgotten that once it was patriarchal. we shall know the creator in the creation. we shall derive more of our solaces from the creation and in the consciousness of our right relations to it. we shall be more fully aware that righteousness inheres in honest occupation. we shall find some bold and free way in which the human spirit may express itself. _the separate soul_ many times in this journey have we come against the importance of the individual. we are to develop the man's social feeling at the same time that we allow him to remain separate. we are to accomplish certain social results otherwise than by the process of thronging, which is so much a part of the philosophy of this anxious epoch; and therefore we may pursue the subject still a little further. any close and worth-while contact with the earth tends to make one original or at least detached in one's judgments and independent of group control. in proportion as society becomes organized and involved, do we need the separate spirit and persons who are responsible beings on their own account. the independent judgment should be much furthered by studies in the sciences that are founded on observation of native forms and conditions. and yet the gains of scientific study become so rigidly organized into great enterprises that the individual is likely to be lost in them. as an example of what i mean, i mention john muir, who has recently passed away, and who stood for a definite contribution to his generation. he could hardly have made this contribution if he had been attached to any of the great institutions or organizations or to big business. he has left a personal impression and a remarkable literature that has been very little influenced by group psychology. he is the interpreter of mountains, forests, and glaciers. there is one method of aggregation and social intercourse. there is another method of isolation and separateness. never in the open country do i see a young man or woman at nightfall going down the highways and the long fields but i think of the character that develops out of the loneliness, in the silence of vast surroundings, projected against the backgrounds, and of the suggestions that must come from these situations as contrasted with those that arise from the babble of the crowds. there is hardiness in such training; there is independence, the taking of one's own risk and no need of the protection of compensation-acts. there is no over-imposed director to fall back on. physical recuperation is in the situation. as against these fields, much of the habitual golf and tennis and other adventitious means of killing time and of making up deficiencies is almost ludicrous. many of our reformers fail because they express only a group psychology and do not have a living personal interpretation. undoubtedly many persons who might have had a message of their own have lost it and have also lost the opportunity to express it by belonging to too many clubs and by too continuous association with so-called kindred spirits, or by taking too much post-graduate study. it is a great temptation to join many clubs, but if one feels any stir of originality in himself, he should be cautious how he joins. i may also recall the great example of agassiz at penikese. in his last year, broken in health, feeling the message he still had for the people, he opened the school on the little island off the coast of massachusetts. it was a short school in one summer only, yet it has made an indelible impression on american education. it stimulates one to know that the person who met the incoming students on the wharf was agassiz himself, not an assistant or an instructor. out of the great number of applicants, he chose fifty whom he would teach. he wanted to send forth these chosen persons with his message, apostles to carry the methods and the way of approach. (when are we to have the penikese for the rural backgrounds?) sometime there will be many great unattached teachers, who will choose their own pupils because they want them and not merely because the applicants have satisfied certain arbitrary tests. the students may be graduates of colleges or they may be others. they will pursue their work not for credit or for any other reward. we shall yet come back to the masters, and there will be teaching in the market-places. we are now in the epoch of great organization not only in industrial developments but also in educational and social enterprises, in religious work, and in governmental activities. so completely is the organization proceeding in every direction, and so good is it, that one habitually and properly desires to identify oneself with some form of associated work. almost in spite of oneself, one is caught up into the plan of things, and becomes part of a social, economic, or educational mechanism. no longer do we seek our educational institutions so much for the purpose of attaching ourselves to a master as to pursue a course of study. no more do we sit at the feet of gamaliel. in government, the organization has recently taken the form of mechanism for efficiency. we want government and all kinds of organization to be efficient and effective, but administrative efficiency may easily proceed at the expense of personality. much of our public organization for efficiency is essentially monarchic in its tendency. it is likely to eliminate the most precious resource in human society, which is the freedom of expression of the competent individual. we are piling organization on organization, one supervising and watching and "investigating" the other. the greater the number of the commissions, investigating committees, and the interlocking groups, the more complex does the whole process become and the more difficult is it for the person to find himself. we can never successfully substitute bookkeeping for men and women. we are more in need of personality than of administrative regularity. this is not a doctrine of laisser-faire or let-alone. the very conditions of modern society demand strong control and regulation and vigorous organization; but the danger is that we apply the controls uniformly and everywhere and eliminate the free action of the individual, as if control were in itself a merit. in some way we must protect the person from being submerged in the system. we need always to get back of the group to the individual. the person is the reason for the group, although he is responsible to the group. it is probably a great advantage to our democracy that our educational institutions are so completely organized, for by that means we are able to educate many more persons and to prepare them for the world with a clear and direct purpose in life. but this is not the whole of the public educational process. some of the most useful persons cannot express themselves in institutions. this is not the fault of the institutions. in the nature of their character, these persons are separate. for the most part, they do not now have adequate means of self-expression or of contributing themselves to the public welfare. when we shall have completed the present necessity of consolidation, centralization, and organization, society will begin to be conscious of the separate souls, who in the nature of the case must stand by themselves, and it will make use of them for the public good. society will endow persons, not on a basis of salary, and enable them thereby to teach in their own way and their own time. this will represent one of the highest types of endowment by government and society. we begin to approach this time by the support, through semi-public agencies, of persons to accomplish certain results or to undertake special pieces of work, particularly of research; but we have not yet attained the higher aim of endowing individuals to express themselves personally. there are liberated personalities, rare and prophetic, who are consumed only in making a living but who should be given unreservedly to the people: the people are much in need. never have we needed the separate soul so much as now. _the element of separateness in society_ if it is so important that we have these separate souls, then must we inquire where they may be found and particularly how we may insure the requisite supply. isolated separates appear here and there, in all the ranges of human experiences; these cannot be provided or foretold; but we shall need, in days to come, a group or a large class of persons, who in the nature of their occupation, situation, and training are relatively independent and free. we need more than a limited number of strong outstanding figures who rise to personal leadership. we must have a body of unattached laborers and producers who are in sufficient numbers to influence unexpressed public opinion and who will form a natural corrective as against organization-men, habitual reformers, and extremists. it is apparent that such a class must own productive property, be able to secure support by working for themselves, and produce supplies that are indispensable to society. their individual interests must be greater and more insistent than their associative interests. they should be in direct contact with native resources. this characterization describes the farmer, and no other large or important group. we have considered, on a former page, that we are not to look for the self-acting individuals among the workingmen as a class. they are rapidly partaking in an opposite development. they are controlled by associative interests. even under a profit-sharing system they are parts in a close concert. how to strike the balance between the needful individualism and social crystallization is probably the most difficult question before society. of the great underlying classes of occupations, farming is the only one that presents the individualistic side very strongly. if individualism is to be preserved anywhere, it must be preserved here. the tendency of our present-day discussion is to organize the farmers as other groups or masses are organized. we are in danger here. assuredly, the farmer needs better resources in association, but it is a nice question how far we should go and how completely we should try to redirect him. fortunately, the holding of title to land and the separateness of farm habitations prevent solidification. if, on this individualism and without destroying it, we can develop a co-acting and co-operating activity, we shall undoubtedly be on the line of safety as well as on the line of promise. it would be a pity to organize the farming people merely to secure them their "rights." we ought soon to pass this epoch in civilization. there are no "rights" exclusive to any class. "rights" are not possessions. i do not know where the element of separateness in society is to be derived unless it comes out of the earth. given sufficient organization to enable the farmer to express himself fully in his occupation and to secure protection, then we may well let the matter rest until his place in society develops by the operation of natural forces. we cannot allow the fundamental supplies from the common earth to be controlled by arbitrary class regulation. it would be a misfortune if the farmer were to isolate himself by making "demands" on society. i hope that the farmer's obligation may be so sensitively developed in him as to produce a better kind of mass-cohesion than we have yet known. _the democratic basis in agriculture_ all these positions are capable of direct application in the incorporation of agriculture into a scheme of democracy. a brief treatment of this subject i had developed for the present book; and this treatment, with applications to particular situations now confronting us, i used recently in the vice-presidential address before the new section m of the american association for the advancement of science (published in _science_, february , , where the remainder of it may be found). some of the general points of view, modified from that address, may be brought together here. the desirability of keeping a free and unattached attitude in the people on the land may be expounded in many directions, but for my purpose i will confine the illustrations to organization in the field of education. the agricultural situation is now much in the public mind. it is widely discussed in the press, which shows that it has news value. much of this value is merely of superficial and temporary interest. much of it represents a desire to try new remedies for old ills. many of these remedies will not work. we must be prepared for some loss of public interest in them as time goes on. we are now in a publicity stage of our rural development. it would seem that the news-gathering and some other agencies discover these movements after the work of many constructive spirits has set them going and has laid real foundations; and not these foundations, but only detached items of passing interest, may be known of any large part of the public. i hope that we shall not be disturbed by this circumstance nor let it interfere with good work or with fundamental considerations, however much we may deplore the false expectations that may result. we are at the parting of the ways. for years without number--for years that run into the centuries when men have slaughtered each other on many fields, thinking that they were on the fields of honor, when many awful despotisms have ground men into the dust, the despotisms thinking themselves divine--for all these years there have been men on the land wishing to see the light, trying to make mankind hear, hoping but never realizing. they have been the pawns on the great battlefields, men taken out of the peasantries to be hurled against other men they did not know and for no rewards except further enslavement. they may even have been developed to a high degree of manual or technical skill that they might the better support governments to make conquests. they have been on the bottom, upholding the whole superstructure and pressed into the earth by the weight of it. when the final history is written, the lot of the man on the land will be the saddest chapter. but in the nineteenth century, the man at the bottom began really to be recognized politically. this recognition is of two kinds,--the use that a government can make in its own interest of a highly efficient husbandry, and the desire to give the husbandman full opportunity and full justice. i hope that in these times the latter motive always prevails. it is the only course of safety. great public-service institutions have now been founded in the rural movement. the united states department of agriculture has grown to be one of the notable governmental establishments of the world, extending itself to a multitude of interests and operating with remarkable effectiveness. the chain of colleges of agriculture and experiment stations, generously co-operative between nation and state, is unlike any other development anywhere, meaning more, i think, for the future welfare and peace of the people than any one of us yet foresees. there is the finest fraternalism, and yet without clannishness, between these great agencies, setting a good example in public service. and to these agencies we are to add the state departments of agriculture, the work of private endowments although yet in its infancy, the growing and very desirable contact with the rural field of many institutions of learning. all these agencies comprise a distinctly modern phase of public activity. a new agency has been created in the agricultural extension act which was signed by president wilson on the th of may in . the farmer is to find help at his own door. a new instrumentality in the world has now received the sanction of a whole people and we are just beginning to organize it. the organization must be extensive, and it ought also to be liberal. no such national plan on such a scale has ever been attempted; and it almost staggers one when one even partly comprehends the tremendous consequences that in all likelihood will come of it. the significance of it is not yet grasped by the great body of the people. now, the problem is to relate all this public work to the development of a democracy. i am not thinking so much of the development of a form of government as of a real democratic expression on the part of the people. agriculture is our basic industry. as we organize its affairs, so to a great degree shall we secure the results in society in general. it is very important in our great experiment in democracy that we do not lose sight of the first principle in democracy, which is to let the control of policies and affairs rest directly back on the people. we have developed the institutions on public funds to train the farmer and to give him voice. these institutions are of vast importance in the founding of a people. the folk are to be developed in themselves rather than by class legislation, or by favor of government, or by any attitude of benevolence from without. whether there is any danger in the organization of our new nationalized extension work, and the other public rural agencies, i suppose not one of us knows. but for myself, i have apprehension of the tendency to make some of the agricultural work into "projects" at washington and elsewhere. if we are not careful, we shall not only too much centralize the work, but we shall tie it up in perplexing red-tape, official obstacles, and bookkeeping. the merit of the projects themselves and the intentions of the officers concerned in them are not involved in what i say; i speak only of the tendency of all government to formality and to crystallization, to machine work and to armchair regulations; and even at the risk of a somewhat lower so-called "efficiency," i should prefer for such work as investigating and teaching in agriculture, a dispersion of the initiative and responsibility, letting the co-ordination and standardizing arise very much from conference and very little from arbitrary regulation. the best project anywhere is a good man or woman working in a program, but unhampered. if it is important that the administration of agricultural work be not overmuch centralized at washington, it is equally true that it should not be too much centralized in the states. i hear that persons who object strongly to federal concentration may nevertheless decline to give the counties and the communities in their own states the benefit of any useful starting-power and autonomy. in fact, i am inclined to think that here at present lies one of our greatest dangers. a strong centralization within the state may be the most hurtful kind of concentration, for it may more vitally affect the people at home. here the question, remember, is not the most efficient formal administration, but the best results for the people. the farm-bureau work, for example, can never produce the background results of which it is capable if it is a strongly intrenched movement pushed out from one centre, as from the college of agriculture or other institution. the college may be the guiding force, but it should not remove responsibility from the people of the localities, or offer them a kind of co-operation that is only the privilege of partaking in the college enterprises. i fear that some of our so-called co-operation in public work of many kinds is little more than to allow the co-operator to approve what the official administration has done. in the course of our experience in democracy, we have developed many checks against too great centralization. i hope that we may develop the checks effectively in this new welfare work in agriculture, a desire that i am aware is also strong with many of those who are concerned in the planning of it. some enterprises may be much centralized, whether in a democracy or elsewhere; an example is the postal service: this is on the business side of government. some enterprises should be decentralized; an example is a good part of the agricultural service: this is on the educational side of government. it is the tendency to reduce all public work to uniformity; yet there is no virtue in uniformity. its only value is as a means to an end. thus far, the rural movement has been wholesomely democratic. it has been my privilege for one-third of a century to have known rather closely many of the men and women who have been instrumental in bringing the rural problem to its present stage of advancement. they have been public-minded, able, far-seeing men and women, and they have rendered an unmeasurable service. the rural movement has been brought to its present state without any demand for special privilege, without bolstering by factitious legislation, and to a remarkable degree without self-seeking. it is based on a real regard for the welfare of all the people, rather than for rural people exclusively. thrice or more in this book i have spoken as if not convinced that the present insistence on "efficiency" in government is altogether sound. that is exactly the impression i desire to convey. as the term is now commonly applied, it is not a measure of good government. certain phrases and certain sets of ideas gain dominance at certain times. just now the idea of administrative efficiency is uppermost. it seems necessarily to be the controlling factor in the progress of any business or any people. certainly, a people should be efficient; but an efficient government may not mean an efficient people,--it may mean quite otherwise or even the reverse. the primary purpose of government in these days, and particularly in this country, is to educate and to develop all the people and to lead them to express themselves freely and to the full, and to partake politically. and this is what governments may not do, and this is where they may fail even when their efficiency in administration is exact. a monarchic form may be executively more efficient than a democratic form; a despotic form may be more efficient than either. the justification of a democratic form of government lies in the fact that it is a means of education. the final test of government is not executive efficiency. every movement, every circumstance that takes starting-power and incentive away from the people, even though it makes for exacter administration, is to be challenged. it is specially to be deplored if this loss of starting-power affects the persons who deal first-hand with the surface of the planet and with the products that come directly out of it. there is a broad political significance to all this. sooner or later the people rebel against intrenched or bureaucratic groups. many of you know how they resist even strongly centralized departments of public instruction, and how the effectiveness of such departments may be jeopardized and much lessened by the very perfectness of their organization; and if they were to engage in a custom of extraneous forms of news-giving in the public press, the resentment would be the greater. in our rural work we are in danger of developing a piece of machinery founded on our fundamental industry; and if this ever comes about, we shall find the people organizing to resist it. the reader will understand that in this discussion i assume the agricultural work to be systematically organized, both in nation and state; this is essential to good effort and to the accomplishing of results: but we must take care that the formal organization does not get in the way of the good workers, hindering and repressing them and wasting their time. we want governments to be economical and efficient with funds and in the control of affairs; this also is assumed: but we must not overlook the larger issues. in all this new rural effort, we should maintain the spirit of team-work and of co-action, and not make the mistake of depending too much on the routine of centralized control. in this country we are much criticised for the cost of government and for the supposed control of affairs by monopoly. the cost is undoubtedly too great, but it is the price we pay for the satisfaction of using democratic forms. as to the other disability, let us consider that society lies between two dangers,--the danger of monopoly and the danger of bureaucracy. on the one side is the control of the necessities of life by commercial organization. on the other side is the control of the necessities of life, and even of life itself, by intrenched groups that ostensibly represent the people and which it may be impossible to dislodge. here are the scylla and the charybdis between which human society must pick its devious way. both are evil. of the two, monopoly may be the lesser: it may be more easily brought under control; it tends to be more progressive; it extends less far; it may be the less hateful. they are only two expressions of one thing, one possibly worse than the other. probably there are peoples who pride themselves on more or less complete escape from monopoly who are nevertheless suffering from the most deadening bureaucracy. agriculture is in the foundation of the political, economic, and social structure. if we cannot develop starting-power in the background people, we cannot maintain it elsewhere. the greatness of all this rural work is to lie in the results and not in the methods that absorb so much of our energy. if agriculture cannot be democratic, then there is no democracy. _the background spaces.--the forest_ "this is the forest primeval." these are the significant words of the poet in evangeline. perhaps more than any single utterance they have set the american youth against the background of the forest. the backgrounds are important. the life of every one of us is relative. we miss our destiny when we miss or forget our backgrounds. we lose ourselves. men go off in vague heresies when they forget the conditions against which they live. judgments become too refined and men tend to become merely disputatious and subtle. the backgrounds are the great unoccupied spaces. they are the large environments in which we live but which we do not make. the backgrounds are the sky with its limitless reaches; the silences of the sea; the tundra in pallid arctic nights; the deserts with their prismatic colors; the shores that gird the planet; the vast mountains that are beyond reach; the winds, which are the universal voice in nature; the sacredness of the night; the elemental simplicity of the open fields; and the solitude of the forest. these are the facts and situations that stand at our backs, to which we adjust our civilization, and by which we measure ourselves. the great conquest of mankind is the conquest of his natural conditions. we admire the man who overcomes: the sailor or navigator in hostile and unknown seas; the engineer who projects himself hard against the obstacles; the miner and the explorer; the builder; the farmer who ameliorates the earth to man's use. but even though we conquer or modify the physical conditions against which we are set, nevertheless the backgrounds will remain. i hope that we may always say "the forest primeval." i hope that some reaches of the sea may never be sailed, that some swamps may never be drained, that some mountain peaks may never be scaled, that some forests may never be harvested. i hope that some knowledge may never be revealed. look at your map of the globe. note how few are the areas of great congestion of population and of much human activity as compared with the vast and apparently empty spaces. how small are the spots that represent the cities and what a little part of the earth are the political divisions that are most in the minds of men! we are likely to think that all these outlying and thinly peopled places are the wastes. i suspect that they contribute more to the race than we think. i am glad that there are still some places of mystery, some reaches of hope, some things far beyond us, some spaces to conjure up dreams. i am glad that the earth is not all iowa or belgium or the channel islands. i am glad that some of it is the hard hills of new england, some the heathered heights of scotland, some the cold distances of quebec, some of it the islands far off in little-traversed seas, and some of it also the unexplored domains that lie within eyesight of our own homes. it is well to know that these spaces exist, that there are places of escape. they add much to the ambition of the race; they make for strength, for courage, and for renewal. in the cities i am always interested in the variety of the contents of the store windows. variously fabricated and disguised, these materials come from the ends of the earth. they come from the shores of the seas, from the mines, from the land, from the forests, from the arctic, and from the tropic. they are from the backgrounds. the cities are great, but how much greater are the forests and the sea! no people should be forbidden the influence of the forest. no child should grow up without a knowledge of the forest; and i mean a real forest and not a grove or village trees or a park. there are no forests in cities, however many trees there may be. as a city is much more than a collection of houses, so is a forest much more than a collection of trees. the forest has its own round of life, its characteristic attributes, its climate, and its inhabitants. when you enter a real forest you enter the solitudes, you are in the unexpressed distances. you walk on the mould of years and perhaps of ages. there is no other wind like the wind of the forest; there is no odor like the odor of the forest; there is no solitude more complete; there is no song of a brook like the song of a forest brook; there is no call of a bird like that of a forest bird; there are no mysteries so deep and which seem yet to be within one's realization. while a forest is more than trees, yet the trees are the essential part of the forest; and no one ever really knows or understands a forest until he first understands a tree. there is no thing in nature finer and stronger than the bark of a tree; it is a thing in place, adapted to its ends, perfect in its conformation, beautiful in its color and its form and the sweep of its contour; and every bark is peculiar to its species. i think that one never really likes a tree until he is impelled to embrace it with his arms and to run his fingers through the grooves of its bark. man listens in the forest. he pauses in the forest. he finds himself. he loses himself in the town and even perhaps in the university. he may lose himself in business and in great affairs; but in the forest he is one with a tree, he stands by himself and yet has consolation, and he comes back to his own place in the scheme of things. we have almost forgotten to listen; so great and ceaseless is the racket that the little voices pass over our ears and we hear them not. i have asked person after person if he knew the song of the chipping-sparrow, and most of them are unaware that it has any song. we do not hear it in the blare of the city street, in railway travel, or when we are in a thunderous crowd. we hear it in the still places and when our ears are ready to catch the smaller sounds. there is no music like the music of the forest, and the better part of it is faint and far away or high in the tops of trees. the forest may be an asylum. "the groves were god's first temples." we need all our altars and more, but we need also the sanctuary of the forest. it is a poor people that has no forests. i prize the farms because they have forests. it is a poor political philosophy that has no forests. it is a poor nation that has no forests and no workers in wood. in many places there are the forests. i think that we do not get the most out of them. certainly they have two uses: one for the products, and one for the human relief and the inspiration. i should like to see a movement looking toward the better utilization of the forests humanly, as we use school buildings and church buildings and public halls. i wish that we might take our friends to the forests as we also take them to see the works of the masters. for this purpose, we should not go in large companies. we need sympathetic guidance. parties of two and four may go separately to the forests to walk and to sit and to be silent. i would not forget the forest in the night, in the silence and the simplicity of the darkness. strangely few are the people who know a real forest at dark. few are those who know the forest when the rain is falling or when the snow covers the earth. yet the forest is as real in all these moments as when the sun is at full and the weather is fair. i wish that we might know the forest intimately and sensitively as a part of our background. i think it would do much to keep us close to the verities and the essentials. _a forest background for a reformatory_ some years ago i presented to a board that was charged with establishing and maintaining a new state reformatory for wayward and delinquent boys an outline of a possible setting for the enterprise; and as this statement really constitutes a practical application of some of the foregoing discussions, i present the larger part of it here. with delinquents it is specially important to develop the sense of obligation and responsibility, and i fear that we are endeavoring to stimulate this sense too exclusively by means of direct governing and disciplinary methods. the statement follows. i think that the activities in the proposed reformatory should be largely agricultural and industrial. so far as possible the young men should be put into direct contact with realities and with useful and practical work. an effort should be made to have all this work mean something to them and not to be merely make-believe. it is fairly possible to develop such a property and organization as will put them in touch with real work rather than to force the necessity of setting tasks in order to keep them busy. aside from the manual labor part of it, the background of the reformatory should be such as will develop the feeling of responsibility in the workers. this means that they must come actually in contact with the raw materials and with things as they grow. when a young man has a piece of wood or metal given to him in a shop, his whole responsibility is merely to make something out of this material; he has no responsibility for the material itself, as he would have if he had been obliged to mine it or to grow it. one of the greatest advantages of a farm training is that it develops a man's responsibility toward the materials with which he works. he is always brought face to face with the problem of saving the fertility of the land, saving the crops, saving the forests, and saving the live-stock. the idea of saving and safeguarding these materials is only incidental to those who do not help to produce them. it is important that the farm of this reformatory should be large enough so that all the young men may do some real pieces of work on it. such a farm is not to be commercial in the ordinary farming sense. its primary purpose is to aid in a reformative or educational process. you should, therefore, undertake such types of farming as will best serve those needs and best meet the abilities of the inmates. a very highly specialized farming, as the growing of truck-crops, would be quite impracticable as a commercial enterprise because this kind of farming demands the greatest skill and also because it requires a property very easily accessible to our great markets and, therefore, very expensive to procure and difficult to find in large enough acreage for an institution of this size; and it is doubtful whether this type of farming would have the best effect on the inmates. of course, i should expect that the institution would try to grow its own vegetables, but it would probably be unwise to make truck-gardening the backbone of the farming enterprise. i also feel that it would not be best to make it primarily a dairy farm or a fruit farm or a poultry farm, although all these things should be well represented on the place and in sufficient extent to supply the institution in whole or in part. there should be such a farming enterprise as would give a very large and open background, part of it practically wild, and which would allow for considerable freedom of action on the part of the inmates. you should have operations perhaps somewhat in the rough and which would appeal to the manly qualities of the young men. it seems to me that a forestry enterprise would possibly be the best as the main part of the farming scheme. if the reformatory could have one thousand acres of forest, the area would provide a great variety of conditions that the inmates would have to meet, it would give work in the building of roads and culverts and trails, it would provide winter activity at a time when the other farming enterprises are slack, it would bring the inmates directly in touch with wild and native life, and it would also place them against the natural resources in such a way as to make them feel their responsibility for the objects and the supplies. perhaps it will be impossible to secure one thousand acres of good timber in a more or less continuous area. however, it might be possible to assemble a good number of contiguous farms in some of the hill regions so that one thousand acres of timber in various grades of maturity might be secured. there would be open spaces which ought to be planted, and this of itself would provide good work and supervision. the trimming, felling, and other care of this forest would be continuous. the forest should not be stripped, but merely the merchantable or ready timber removed from year to year, and the domain kept in a growing and recuperating condition. one thousand acres of forest, in which timber is fit to be cut, should produce an annual increase of two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand board feet, and this increase should not lessen as the years go on. this timber should be manufactured. i have not looked into the question as to whether a market could be found for the materials that would be made from this timber, but i should suppose that a market could be as readily secured for this kind of manufacture as for any other. the educational and moral effect of seeing the material grow, then caring for it, then harvesting it, and then manufacturing it would be very great. one could follow the process from beginning to end and feel a responsibility for it in every stage. i should suppose that the manufacture would be of small work and not merely the sawing of lumber. it might be well to determine whether there would be market for chairs, cabinets, and other furniture, whip-stocks, or small material that could be used in the manufacture of novelties and other like articles. possibly the reformatory could supply some of the stock to the prisons that are manufacturing furniture, although the educational and moral effects would be better if the inmates could see the process from beginning to end. of course, you would not limit the manufacturing activities of the reformatory to wood-working. you probably would be obliged to have other kinds of factories, but the wood-working shops ought to be part of the plan and i should hope a very important part. i have not made any careful study of this question, and do not know how feasible these suggestions may be; but they appeal to me very strongly on the educational and reformational end. these suggestions are made only that they may be considered along with other suggestions, and if they seem to be worth while, to have the question investigated. if something like one thousand acres of land were secured for a forest, it would mean that the farm itself would be rather large. there ought to be probably not less than two or three hundred acres of land that might be used for grazing, gardens, and the ordinary farm operations that would contribute to the support of the inmates of the institution. of course, this arable land ought to be valley land or at least fairly level and accessible along good public highways. the forest land could be more remote, running back on the hills. if the property could be so located that the forest would control the sources of important streams and springs, the results would be all the better. the young men should feel their responsibility for creeks and ponds, and for the protection of wild life as well as for the crops that they raise. where the reformatory should be located is a matter that should receive very careful attention. it is not alone the problem of finding a site that is proper for a reformatory, but also the question of so placing it that it will have some relation to state development and some connection with the people's interests and desires. state institutions should be so separated that the greatest number of people may see them or come into contact with them. i dislike the tendency to group the state institutions about certain populous centres. in these days of easy transportation, the carrying problem is really of less importance than certain less definite but none the less real relations to all the people. there are certain great areas in the state of considerable population in which there are no state institutions, and in which the people know nothing about such affairs beyond the local school and church. perhaps at first blush the people of a locality might not relish the idea of having a reformatory in their midst, but this feeling ought soon to pass away; and, moreover, the people should be made to feel their responsibility for reformatories, asylums, and penitentiaries as well as their responsibility for any other state institutions, and the feeling should not be encouraged that such institutions should be put somewhere else merely because one locality does not desire them. the character of the property that is purchased will determine to a very large extent the character of the institution, and, therefore, the nature of the reformatory processes. this is more important than transportation facilities. it is a more important question even than that of the proper buildings, for buildings for these purposes have been studied by many experts and our ideas concerning them have been more or less standardized and, moreover, buildings can be extended and modified more easily than can the landed area. it seems to me that before you think actually of purchasing the land, you should arrive at a fairly definite conclusion as to what kind of a farming enterprise it is desired to develop as a background for the institution; you could then determine as far as possible on principle in what general region the institution ought to be located; and then set out on a direct exploration to determine whether the proper kind and quantity of land can be secured. _the background spaces.--the open fields_ here not long ago was the forest primeval. here the trees sprouted, and grew their centuries, and returned to the earth. here the midsummer brook ran all day long from the far-away places. here the night-winds slept. here havened the beasts and fowls when storms pursued them. here the leaves fell in the glory of the autumn, here other leaves burst forth in the miracle of spring, and here the pewee called in the summer. here the indian tracked his game. it was not so very long ago. that old man's father remembers it. then it was a new and holy land, seemingly fresh from the hand of the creator. the old man speaks of it as of a golden time, now far away and hallowed; he speaks of it with an attitude of reverence. "ah yes," my father told me; and calmly with bared head he relates it, every incident so sacred that not one hairbreadth must he deviate. the church and the master's school and the forest,--these three are strong in his memory. yet these are not all. he remembers the homes cut in the dim wall of the forest. he recalls the farms full of stumps and heaps of logs and the ox-teams on them, for these were in his boyhood. the ox-team was a natural part of the slow-moving conquest in those rugged days. roads betook themselves into the forest, like great serpents devouring as they went. and one day, behold! the forest was gone. farm joined farm, the village grew, the old folk fell away, new people came whose names had to be asked. and i thought me why these fields are not as hallowed as were the old forests. here are the same knolls and hills. in this turf there may be still the fibres of ancient trees. here are the paths of the midsummer brooks, but vocal now only in the freshets. here are the winds. the autumn goes and the spring comes. the pewee calls in the groves. the farmer and not the indian tracks the plow. here i look down on a little city. there is a great school in it. there are spires piercing the trees. in the distance are mills, and i see the smoke of good accomplishment roll out over the hillside. it is a self-centred city, full of pride. every mile-post praises it. toward it all the roads lead. it tells itself to all the surrounding country. and yet i cannot but feel that these quiet fields and others like them have made this city; but i am glad that the fields are not proud. one day a boy and one day a girl will go down from these fields, and out into the thoroughways of life. they will go far, but these hills they will still call home. from these uplands the waters flow down into the streams that move the mills and that float the ships. loads of timber still go hence for the construction down below. here go building-stones and sand and gravel,--gravel from the glaciers. here goes the hay for ten thousand horses. here go the wheat, and here the apples, and the animals. here are the votes that hold the people steady. somewhere there is the background. here is the background. here things move slowly. trees grow slowly. the streams change little from year to year, and yet they shape the surface of the earth in this hill country. in yonder fence-row the catbird has built since i was a boy, and yet i have wandered far and i have seen great changes in yonder city. the well-sweep has gone but the well is still there: the wells are gone from the city. the cows have changed in color, but still they are cows and yield their milk in season. the fields do not perish, but time eats away the city. i think all these things must be good and very good or they could not have persisted in all this change. in the beginning! yes, i know, it was holy then. the forces of eons shaped it: still was it holy. the forest came: still holy. then came the open fields. _the background spaces.--the ancestral sea_ the planet is not all land, and the sea is as holy as the soil. we speak of the "waste of waters," and we still offer prayers for those who go down to the sea in ships. superstition yet clings about the sea. the landsman thinks of the sea as barren, and he regrets that it is not solid land on which he may grow grass and cattle. and as one looks over the surface of the waters, with no visible object on the vast expanse and even the clouds lying apparently dead and sterile, and when one considers that three-fourths of the earth's surface is similarly covered, one has the impression of utter waste and desolation, with no good thing abiding there for the comfort and cheer of man. the real inhabitants of the sea are beneath the surface and every part is tenanted, so completely tenanted that the ocean produces greater bulk of life, area for area, than does the solid land; and every atom of this life is as keen to live and follows as completely the law of its existence as does the life of the interiors of the continents. the vast meadows of plankton and nekton, albeit largely of organisms microscopic, form a layer for hundreds of feet beneath the surface and on which the great herbivora feed; and on these animals the legions of the carnivora subsist. every vertical region has its life, peculiar to it, extending even to the bottoms of the depths in the world-slimes and the darkness; and in these deeps the falling remains of the upper realms, like gentle primeval rains, afford a never-failing, never-ending source of food and maintain the slow life in the bottoms. we think of the huge animals of the sea when we think of mass, and it is true that the great whales are the bulkiest creatures we know to have lived; yet it is the bacteria, the desmids, the minute crustaceans, and many other diminutive forms that everywhere populate the sea from the equator to the poles and provide the vast background of the ocean life. in these gulfs of moving unseen forms nitrification proceeds, and the rounds of life go on unceasingly. the leviathan whale strains out these minute organisms from the volumes of waters, and so full of them may be his maw that his captors remove the accumulation with spades. the rivers bring down their freight of mud and organic matter, and supply food for the denizens of the sea. the last remains of all these multitudes are laid down on the ocean floors as organic oozes; and nobody knows what part the abysmal soil may play in the economy of the plant in some future epoch. the rains of the land come from the sea; the clouds come ultimately from the sea; the trade-winds flow regularly from the sea; the temperatures of the land surface are controlled largely from the sea; the high lands are washed into the sea as into a basin; if all the continents were levelled into the sea still would the sea envelop the planet about two miles deep. impurities find their way into the sea and are there digested into the universal beneficence. we must reckon with the sea. it is supposed that the first life on the earth came forth where the land and the waters join, from that eternal interplay of cosmic forces where the solid and the fluid, the mobile and the immobile, meet and marry. verily, the ancestral sea is the background of the planet. its very vastness makes it significant. it shows no age. its deeps have no doubt existed from the solidification of the earth and they will probably remain when all works of man perish utterly. the sea is the bosom of the earth's mysteries. because man cannot set foot on it, the sea remains beyond his power to modify, to handle, and to control. no breach that man may make but will immediately fill; no fleets of mighty ships go down but that the sea covers them in silence and knows them not; man may not hold converse with the monsters in the deeps. the sea is beyond him, surpassing, elemental, and yet blessing him with abundant benedictions. so vast is the sea and so self-recuperating that man cannot sterilize it. he despoils none of its surface when he sails his ships. he does not annihilate the realms of plankton, lying layer on layer in its deluging, consuming soil. it controls him mightily. the seas and the shores have provided the trading ways of the peoples. the ocean connects all lands, surrounds all lands. until recent times the great marts have been mostly on coasts or within easy water access of them. the polity of early settlements was largely the polity of the sea and the strand. the daring of the navigator was one of the first of the heroic human qualities. probably all dry land was once under the sea, and therefrom has it drawn much of its power. from earliest times the sea has yielded property common to all and free to whomever would take it,--the fish, the wrack, the drift, the salvage of ships. pirates have roamed the sea for spoil and booty. when government appropriates the wreckage of ships and the stranded derelict of the sea, the people may think it justifiable protection of their rights to secrete it. smuggling is an old sea license. laws and customs and old restraints lose their force and vanish on the sea; and freedom rises out of the sea. and so the ocean has contributed to the making of the outlook of the human family. the race would be a very different race had there been no sea stretching to the unknown, conjuring vague fears and stimulating hopes, bringing its freight, bearing tidings of far lands, sundering traditions, rolling the waves of its elemental music, driving its rank smells into the nostrils, putting its salt into the soul. +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | transcriber's notes | | | | words printed in italics in the original work are represented here | | between underscores, as in _text_. words originally printed in bold| | face are represented as =text=, words in small capitals as all | | capitals. | | | | further transcriber's notes may be found at the end of this text. | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ farm mechanics machinery and its use to save hand labor on the farm including tools, shop work, driving and driven machines, farm waterworks, care and repair of farm implements by herbert a. shearer agriculturist author of "farm buildings with plans and descriptions" _illustrated with three hundred original drawings_ chicago frederick j. drake & co. publishers copyright by frederick j. drake & co. chicago preface more mechanical knowledge is required on the farm than in any other line of business. if a farmer is not mechanically inclined, he is under the necessity of employing someone who is. some farms are supplied with a great many handy contrivances to save labor. farmers differ a great deal in this respect. some are natural mechanics, some learn how to buy and how to operate the best farm machinery, while others are still living in the past. some farmers who make the least pretensions have the best machinery and implements. they may not be good mechanics, but they have an eye to the value of labor saving tools. the object of this book is to emphasize the importance of mechanics in modern farming; to fit scores of quick-acting machines into the daily routine of farm work and thereby lift heavy loads from the shoulders of men and women; to increase the output at less cost of hand labor and to improve the soil while producing more abundantly than ever before; to suggest the use of suitable machines to manufacture high-priced nutritious human foods from cheap farm by-products. illustrations are used to explain principles rather than to recommend any particular type or pattern of machine. the old is contrasted with the new and the merits of both are expressed. the author. contents page chapter i the farm shop with tools for working wood and iron chapter ii farm shop work chapter iii generating mechanical power to drive modern farm machinery chapter iv driven machines chapter v working the soil chapter vi handling the hay crop chapter vii farm conveyances chapter viii miscellaneous farm conveniences index farm mechanics chapter i the farm shop with tools for working wood and iron farm shop and implement house the workshop and shed to hold farm implements should look as neat and attractive as the larger buildings. farm implements are expensive. farm machinery is even more so. when such machinery is all properly housed and kept in repair the depreciation is estimated at ten per cent a year. when the machines are left to rust and weather in the rain and wind the loss is simply ruinous. more machinery is required on farms than formerly and it costs more. still it is not a question whether a farmer can afford a machine. if he has sufficient work for it he knows he cannot afford to get along without it and he must have a shed to protect it from the weather when not in use. in the first place the implement shed should be large enough to accommodate all of the farm implements and machinery without crowding and it should be well built and tight enough to keep out the wind and small animals, including chickens and sparrows. the perspective and plan shown herewith is twenty-four feet in width and sixty feet in length. [illustration: figure .--perspective view of the farm shop, garage and implement shed. the doors to the right are nearly feet high to let in a grain separator over night, or during the winter, or a load of hay in case of a sudden storm.] [illustration: figure .--floor plan of shop, garage and storage. the building is feet wide and feet from front to back. the doors of the garage and tool shed are made to open full width, but feet is wide enough for the shop door. all doors open out against posts and are fastened to prevent blowing shut. the work shop is well lighted and the stationary tools are carefully placed for convenience in doing repair work of all kinds. the pipe vise is at the doorway between the shop and garage so the handles of the pipe tools may swing through the doorway and the pipe may lie full length along the narrow pipe bench.] the doorways provide headroom sufficient for the highest machines, and the width when the double doors are opened and the center post removed is nearly twenty feet, which is sufficient for a binder in field condition or a two-horse spring-tooth rake. one end of the building looking toward the house is intended for a machine shop to be partitioned off by enclosing the first bent. this gives a room twenty feet wide by twenty-four feet deep for a blacksmith shop and general repair work. the next twenty feet is the garage. the machine shop part of the building will be arranged according to the mechanical inclination of the farmer. [illustration: figure .--perspective view of farm implement shed and workshop.] a real farm repair shop is a rather elaborate mechanical proposition. there is a good brick chimney with a hood to carry off the smoke and gases from the blacksmith fire and the chimney should have a separate flue for a heating stove. farm repair work is done mostly during the winter months when a fire in the shop is necessary for comfort and efficiency. a person cannot work to advantage with cold fingers. paint requires moderate heat to work to advantage. painting farm implements is a very important part of repair work. a good shop arrangement is to have an iron workbench across the shop window in the front or entrance end of the building. in the far corner against the back wall is a good place for a woodworking bench. it is too mussy to have the blacksmith work and the carpenter work mixed up. [illustration: figure .--floor plan of farm implement shed, showing the workshop in one end of the building, handy to the implement storage room.] sometimes it is necessary to bring in a pair of horses for shoeing, or to pull the shoes off. for this reason, a tie rail bolted to the studding on the side of the shop near the entrance is an extra convenience. in a hot climate a sliding door is preferable because the wind will not slam it shut. in cold climates, hinge doors are better with a good sill and threshold to shut against to keep out the cold. sometimes the large door contains a small door big enough to step through, but not large enough to admit much cold, when it is being opened and shut. likewise a ceiling is needed in a cold country, while in warmer sections, a roof is sufficient. farm shops, like other farm buildings, should conform to the climate, as well as convenience in doing the work. a solid concrete floor is a great comfort. and it is easily kept clean. the perspective and floor plan show the arrangement of the doors, windows and chimney and the placing of the work benches, forge, anvil, toolbench and drill press. figures and show the perspective and floor plan of a farm shop and implement house x feet in size, which is large enough for some farms. shop tools good tools are more important on a farm than in a city workshop for the reason that a greater variety of work is required. _measuring mechanical work._--in using tools on the farm the first rule should be accuracy. it is just as easy to work to one-sixteenth of an inch as to carelessly lay off a piece of work so that the pieces won't go together right. [illustration: figure .--caliper rule. a handy slide caliper shop rule is made with a slide marked in fractions of inches as shown in the drawing. the diameter of a rivet, bolt or other round object may be taken instantly. it is not so accurate as calipers for close measurements, but it is a practical tool for farm use.] the handiest measuring tool ever invented is the old-fashioned two-foot rule that folds up to six inches in length to be carried in the pocket. such rules to be serviceable should be brass bound. the interior marking should be notched to sixteenths. the outside marking may be laid out in eighths. the finer marking on the inside is protected by keeping the rule folded together when not in use. the coarser marking outside does not suffer so much from wear. figure shows a -inch rule with a slide caliper jaw. [illustration: figure .--small pocket oilstone. shop oilstone in a box. -foot measuring tapeline marked in inches, feet and rods.] in using a two-foot rule to lay off work the forward end should contain the small figures so that the workman is counting back on the rule but forward on the work, and he has the end of the rule to scribe from. in laying off a -foot pole the stick is first marked with a knife point, or sharp scratchawl, and try square to square one end. the work is then laid off from left to right, starting from the left hand edge of the square mark or first mark. the two-foot rule is laid flat on top of the piece of wood. at the front end of the rule the wood is marked with a sharp scratchawl or the point of a knife blade by pressing the point against the end of the rule at the time of marking. in moving the rule forward the left end is placed exactly over the left edge of the mark, so the new measurement begins at the exact point where the other left off, and so on the whole length of the stick. the final mark is then made exactly sixteen feet from the first mark. in sawing the ends the saw kerf is cut from the waste ends of the stick. the saw cuts to the mark but does not cut it out. in using a rule carelessly a workman may gain one-sixteenth of an inch every time he moves the rule, which would mean half of an inch in laying off a -foot pole, which would ruin it for carpenter work. if the pole is afterwards used for staking fence posts, he would gain one-half inch at each post, or a foot for every twenty-four posts, a distance to bother considerably in estimating acres. it is just as easy to measure exactly as it is to measure a little more or a little less, and it marks the difference between right and wrong. woodworking bench in a farm workshop it is better to separate the woodworking department as far as possible from the blacksmith shop. working wood accumulates a great deal of litter, shavings, blocks, and kindling wood, which are in the way in the blacksmith shop, and a spark from the anvil might set the shavings afire. a woodworking bench, figure , carpenter's bench, it is usually called, needs a short leg vise with wide jaws. the top of the vise should be flush with the top of the bench, so the boards may be worked when lying flat on the top of the bench. for the same reason the bench dog should lower down flush when not needed to hold the end of the board. it is customary to make carpenter's benches separate from the shop, and large enough to stand alone, so they may be moved out doors or into other buildings. [illustration: figure .--carpenter's bench. a woodworking bench is ' long, ' " wide and " high. the height, to be particular, should be the length of the leg of the man who uses it. lincoln, when joking with stanton, gave it as his opinion that "a man's legs should be just long enough to reach the ground." but that rule is not sufficiently definite to satisfy carpenters, so they adopted the inside leg measurement. they claim that the average carpenter is ' " tall and he wears a " leg.] [illustration: figure .--carpenter's trestle, or saw-bench. the top piece is x and the legs are x . there is sufficient spread of leg to prevent it from toppling over, but the legs are not greatly in the way. it is heavy enough to stand still while you slide a board along. it is feet high.] [illustration: figure .--shave horse. for shaping pieces of hardwood for repair work. a good shave horse is about ' long and the seat end is the height of a chair. the head is carved on a hardwood stick with three projections to grip different sized pieces to be worked.] [illustration: figure .--compasses, wooden clamp and cutting pliers.] carpenter benches may be well made, or they may be constructed in a hurry. so long as the top is true it makes but little difference how the legs are attached, so long as they are strong and enough of them. a carpenter bench that is used for all kinds of work must be solid enough to permit hammering, driving nails, etc. usually the top of the bench is straight, true and level and it should be kept free from litter and extra tools. good carpenters prefer a tool rack separate from the bench. it may stand on the floor or be attached to the wall. carpenter tools on a farm are not numerous, but they should have a regular place, and laborers on the farms should be encouraged to keep the tools where they belong. [illustration: figure .--monkey-wrenches are the handiest of all farm wrenches, but they were never intended to hammer with. two sizes are needed--an eight-inch for small nuts and a much larger wrench, to open two inches or more, to use when taking the disks off the shafts of a disk harrow. a large pipe-wrench to hold the round shaft makes a good companion tool for this work.] woodworking tools every farmer has an axe or two, some sort of a handsaw and a nail hammer. it is astonishing what jobs of repair work a handy farmer will do with such a dearth of tools. but it is not necessary to worry along without a good repair kit. tools are cheap enough. such woodworking tools as coarse and fine toothed hand saws, a good square, a splendid assortment of hammers and the different kinds of wrenches, screw clamps, boring tools--in fact a complete assortment of handy woodworking tools is an absolute necessity on a well-managed farm. the farm kit should contain two sizes of nail hammers, see figure , one suitable to drive small nails, say up to eight penny, and the other for large nails and spikes; a long thin-bladed handsaw, having nine teeth to the inch, for sawing boards and planks; a shorter handsaw, having ten teeth to the inch, for small work and for pruning trees. a pruning saw should cut a fine, smooth kerf, so the wound will not collect and hold moisture. [illustration: figure .--hand saw. this pattern, both for cross cut and rip saw, has been adopted by all makers of fine saws. nine teeth to the inch is fine enough for most jobs on the farm.] [illustration: figure .--keyhole saw with point slim enough to start the cut from a half-inch auger hole.] [illustration: figure .--bramble hook for trimming berry bushes and cleaning out fence corners. it has a knife-edge with hooked sawteeth.] farmers' handsaws are required to do a great many different kinds of work. for this reason, it is difficult to keep them in good working condition, but if both saws are jointed, set and filed by a good mechanic once or twice a year, they may be kept in usable condition the rest of the time by a handy farm workman, unless extra building or special work is required. [illustration: figure .--nail hammers. two styles. the upper hammer is made with a ball peen and a round face. it is tempered to drive small nails without slipping and shaped to avoid dinging the wood. this hammer should weigh or ounces, including the handle. the lower hammer is heavier, has a flat face and is intended for heavy work such as driving spikes and fence staples.] a long-bladed ripsaw is also very useful, and what is commonly termed a keyhole saw finds more use on the farm than in a carpenter's shop in town. it is necessary frequently to cut holes through partitions, floors, etc., and at such times a keyhole saw works in just right. handaxes are necessary for roughing certain pieces of wood for repair jobs. two sizes of handaxes for different kinds of work are very useful, also a wide blade draw shave, figure , and shave horse, figure . a steel square having one -inch blade and one -inch is the best size. such squares usually are heavy enough to remain square after falling off the bench forty or fifty times. a good deal depends upon the quality of the steel. [illustration: figure .--drawing-knife with wide blade for finishing straight surfaces.] [illustration: figure .--try-square with six-inch blade. wood, brass and steel are the proper materials for a try-square. a double marking gauge for scribing mortises is also shown.] steel squares differ in the measuring marks, but the kind to buy has one side spaced to sixteenths and the other side to tenths or twelfths. the sixteenth interest farmers generally, so that special attention should be given this side of the square. the lumber rule on some squares is useful, but the brace rules and mitre calculations are not likely to interest farmers. screw-drivers should be mostly strong and heavy for farm work. three sizes of handled screw-drivers of different lengths and sizes, also two or three brace bit screw-drivers are needed. one or two bits may be broken or twisted so the assortment is sometimes exhausted before the screw is started. [illustration: figure .--heavy hand axe for use on the shop chopping block. a beet topping knife is shown also.] [illustration: figure .--heavy screwdriver. the strongest and cheapest screw-driver is made from a single bar of steel. the wooden handle is made in two parts and riveted as shown.] pinch bars and claw bars are very useful in a farm tool kit. farm mechanical work consists principally in repairing implements, machinery, fences and buildings. always a worn or broken part must be removed before the repair can be made. a pinch bar twenty-four inches long, figure , with a cold chisel end, and another bar eighteen inches long with a crooked claw end, figure , for pulling nails and spikes comes in very handy. these two bars should be made of the best octagon steel, seven-eighths of an inch in diameter. [illustration: figure .--( ) ratchet screwdriver. it does rapid work and will last a generation if carefully used. ( ) auger-bit of the side cutter type. a full set is needed. they are not for boring into old wood. running once against a nail ruins one of these bits.] [illustration: figure .--handspike. a wooden handspike or pry is about seven feet long by inches thick at the prying end. in the north it is usually made from a hickory or an ironwood or a dogwood sapling. the bark is removed and the handle is worked round and smooth on the shave horse. it is better to cut the poles in the winter when the sap is in the roots. after the handspikes are finished they should be covered deep with straw so they will season slowly to prevent checking.] [illustration: figure .--wrecking bar for pulling nails and to pry broken parts from other wreckage.] [illustration: figure .--carpenter's level. for practical farm work the level should be " or " long. wood is the most satisfactory material. the best levels are made up of different layers of wood glued together to prevent warping or twisting. for this reason a good level should be carefully laid away in a dry place immediately after using.] [illustration: figure .--( ) snips for cutting sheet metal. ( ) carpenter's level, iron stock.] [illustration: figure .--wood-boring twist drill bit. twist drills for wood have longer points than drills for boring iron.] [illustration: figure .--pod-bit. the fastest boring gimlet bits are of this pattern. they are made in sizes from to / " to / " and are intended for boring softwood.] [illustration: figure .--auger-bits. for smooth boring the lip bits are best. the side cutters project beyond the cutting lips to cut the circle ahead of the chips. for boring green wood the single-worm clears better than the double-worm bit.] [illustration: figure .--extension boring bits. the cutting lips may be set to bore holes from / " to " in diameter. they are used mostly in softwood.] [illustration: figure .--ship auger. this shape auger is made with or without a screw point. it will bore straighter in cross-grained wood without a point.] [illustration: figure .--long ship auger.] [illustration: figure .--bridge auger. the long handle permits the workman to stand erect while boring. the home made handle is welded onto the shank of a ship auger.] a wooden carpenter's level, figure , two feet long, with a plumb glass near one end, is the most satisfactory farm level, an instrument that is needed a great many times during the year. good brace bits are scarce on farms. they are not expensive, but farmers are careless about bits and braces. two sizes of braces are needed, a small brace for small pod bits and twist drills, and a large ratchet brace with a -inch crank radius for turning larger bits. [illustration: figure .--carpenter's jointer.] [illustration: figure .--fore-plane. this style plane is preferred to a regular jointer for most farm work.] twist drill bits will bore both wood and iron, and they are not expensive up to three-eighths inch or one-half inch. but for larger sizes from one-half inch to one inch the finest lip wood boring bits will give the best satisfaction. extension bits are used for boring holes larger than one inch. two extension bits are better than one bit with two lip cutters. they will bore holes in soft wood in sizes from one inch to three inches. other cutting tools such as jack plane jointer and smoothing plane, also an assortment of chisels, belong to the farm equipment. [illustration: figure .--tool box of socket chisels and gouges. the chisels are sized from / " to " in width. the two chisels to the right show different patterns.] all cutting tools should be of the best design and the best steel. if they are properly used and taken care of, the different jobs of repair work can be handled quickly and to great advantage. farm grindstone a grindstone may be gritty without being coarse so it will bite the steel easily and cut it away quickly. a good stone is a very satisfactory farm implement, but a greasy stone is a perpetual nuisance. there are grindstones with frames too light. the competition to manufacture and sell a grindstone for farm use at the cheapest possible price has resulted in turning out thousands of grindstone frames that possess very little stability. [illustration: figure .--grindstone. the speed of a grindstone varies with the diameter of the stone. it should turn just fast enough to keep a flow of water on the upper face surface. if the stone turns too slow the water will run down; if too fast, it will fly off.] grindstones should be kept under cover; the best stone will be injured by leaving it in the hot sun. the sun draws the moisture out of the upper side and leaves the lower side damp and soft so that in use the stone soon becomes flat sided. the wet side freezes in winter, which is a disintegrating process. the best stones, with good care, will become uneven in time. the remedy is to true them with a quarter-inch soft iron round rod used like a lathe tool over an iron rest placed close to the stone on a level with the center of the stone. the rod is held against the stone in such a way as to cut away the high bumps and make the stone truly round. the stone cuts away best when it is dry. a small rod is better than a large rod. it digs into the stone better and takes out a deeper bite. large power stones in machine shops are trued up in this way frequently. farm stones often are neglected until they wabble so badly that it is difficult to grind any tool to an edge. if the grindstone is turned by a belt from an engine the work of truing may be done in a few minutes. if the stone is turned by hand the work of making it round takes longer and requires some muscle, but it pays. the face of a grindstone should be rounded slightly, and it should be kept so by grinding the tools first on one side of edge of the stone, then on the other, with the cutting edge of the tool crosswise to the face of the stone. for safety and to prevent a sloppy waste of water the stone should turn away from the operator. the best way to keep a stone moist is by a trickle of water from an overhead supply. troughs of water suspended under the stone are unsatisfactory, because the water soon gets thick and unfit for use. such troughs are forgotten when the job is done, so that one side of the stone hangs in the water. an overhead supply of water leaks away and no damage is done. grindstone frames are best made of wood " x " thoroughly mortised together and well braced with wooden braces and tied across with plenty of iron rods. a good grindstone frame could be made of angle iron, but manufacturers generally fail in the attempt. there are good ball-bearing grindstone hangers on the market, both for hand crank stones and for belt use. the belt is less in the way if it is brought up from below. this is not difficult to do. a grindstone turns slower than any other farm machine so a speed reducing jack may be bolted to the floor at the back of the grindstone a little to one side to escape the drip. this arrangement requires a short belt but it may have the full face width of the pulley as the tight and loose pulleys are on the jack shaft. _emery grinders._--there are small emery wheels made for grinding disks that work quickly and cut an even bevel all around. they are made in pairs and are attached to the ends of a mandrel supported by a metal stand which is bolted to a bench. the same rig is used for sickle grinding and other farm jobs. [illustration: figure .--emery grinder. the illustrations show two kinds of grinding that double emery wheels are especially adapted to. to grind a mowing-machine knife it is necessary to reverse. by placing the rest opposite the center between the two wheels the bevel will be the same on both sides, or edges, of the section.] blacksmith shop the furniture in a blacksmith shop consists of forge, anvil, half barrel, vise bench, drill press and tool rack. a farm shop also has a heating stove, shave horse, a woodworking bench, a good power driven grindstone and a double emery grinder. _forge._--the old-fashioned forge laid up with brick in connection with an old-fashioned chimney is just as popular as ever. the same old tuyer iron receives the air blast from the same old style leather bellows, and there is nothing more satisfactory. but there are modern portable forges, figure , made of iron, that are less artistic, cheaper, take up less room and answer the purpose just about as well. the portable iron forge has a small blower attached to the frame which feeds oxygen into the fire. there are a good many different sizes of portable forges. most of them work well up to their advertised capacity. [illustration: figure .--portable forges. the smaller forge is for light work such as heating rivets for iron bridge construction. the larger forge to the right is meant for blacksmith work.] generally, farm forges are not required to develop a great amount of heat. farmers do but little welding, most of the forge work on the farm being confined to repair work such as heating brace irons, so they may be easily bent into the proper shape, or to soften metal so that holes may be punched through it easily. sharpening harrow teeth, drawing out plow points and horseshoeing are about the heaviest forge jobs required in a farm blacksmith shop, so that a medium size forge will answer the purpose. [illustration: figure .--anvil. the only satisfactory anvil is forged out of ingot steel with a power trip-hammer. it should weigh pounds.] _anvil._--an anvil should weigh at least pounds; is better. it should be set six feet from the center of the fire to the center of the anvil. it should be placed on a timber the size of the base of the anvil set three feet in the ground. the top of the anvil should be about thirty inches high. holmstrom's rule is: "close the fist, stand erect with the arm hanging down. the knuckles should just clear the face of the anvil." _bench and vise._--the vise bench should be made solid and it should face a good light. the bench window should look to the east or north if possible. it should be about four feet high and eight feet long, with the window sill about six inches above the bench. [illustration: figure .--( ) shoeing tool box. the four small compartments are for horseshoe nails of different sizes. there may be a leather loop for the paring knife. the low box end is for the shoeing hammer, rasp, nippers and hoof knife. ( ) blacksmith tool rack. tongs, handled punches and cutters are hung on the iron rails. hammers are thrown on top. the lower platform is the shop catch-all.] [illustration: figure .--shoeing knife. good temper is the main qualification. all shoeing knives are practically the same shape, although they may vary in size.] two and one-half feet is the usual height for a workbench above the floor. the best workbench tops are made by bolting together x s with the edges up. hardwood makes the best bench, but good pine will last for years. the top surface should be planed true and smooth after the nuts are drawn tight. [illustration: figure .--horseshoeing rasp and wood rasp. these are necessary tools in the farm shop.] [illustration: figure .--iron work bench. solid is the first specification for an iron shop bench. it should be three feet wide, not less than eight feet long and about inches high. the top is made of x s placed on edge and bolted together. the supports are x bolted to the shop studding and braced back to the studding at the sill. the front part of the bench is supported by iron legs made of gas-pipe with threaded flanges at top and bottom. heavy right angle wrought iron lugs are used to fasten the top of the bench to the studding. the foot of the vise leg is let into the floor of the shop or into a solid wooden block sunk in the ground.] [illustration: figure .--assortment of files and rasps needed in a farm shop. ( ) slim three-cornered handsaw-file. ( ) common three-cornered file suitable for filing a buck-saw. ( ) double-cut, or bastard, -inch flat file. ( ) single-cut, or mill file, either or inches. ( ) half-round -inch wood rasp. ( ) horseshoer's rasp.] [illustration: figure .--file handle. basswood makes the most satisfactory file handles. they are fitted by carefully turning them onto the file shank to take the right taper. there should be a handle for each file. the handle should be the right size and fitted straight with the file so the file will take the same angle to the work when turned over.] [illustration: figure .--nail set. on all wooden surfaces to be painted nails should be carefully driven with a round peen nail hammer and the heads sunk about one-eighth of an inch deep with a nail set. the holes may then be filled with putty and covered smoothly with paint.] [illustration: figure .--cold-chisel. there are more flat cold-chisels than all other shapes. they are easily made in the farm shop and it is good practice. they are usually made from octagon steel. different sizes are needed according to the work in hand. a piece of / " steel " long makes a handy cold-chisel for repair work.] [illustration: figure .--cape cold-chisel. it may be tapered both ways or one way to a cutting edge, or one edge may be rounded.] [illustration: figure .--( ) tinner's punch. made of octagon steel in sizes to fit the rivets. the cutting end is flat and has sharp edges made by roll filing. it should be about " long and from / " to / " in diameter, according to the size of rivet and thickness of sheet metal to be punched. ( ) prick punch. usually made rather short and stocky. it may be / " or / " diameter and - / " to " long. ( ) hot-iron punch. made in many sizes and lengths. the taper should be the same as the drawing.] [illustration: figure .--( ) blacksmith vise. the old-fashioned leg vise is the most satisfactory for the blacksmith shop. it should have " jaws. ( ) power post drill. belt power is practical for the post drill in a farm shop. the hand crank may be easily attached when needed.] the bench vise should be heavy. a vise is used for bending iron hot from the forge. unless the jaws are large, the hot iron is likely to heat the vise sufficiently to draw the temper. heavy jaws are solid enough to support the iron when it is being hammered. often heavy hammers are used for this purpose. a heavy vise holds the work solid, because it may be screwed so much tighter than a light vise. a heavy vise will hold light work, but a light vise will not hold heavy work. heavy vises cost more, but they are cheaper in the end and more satisfactory at all times. a leg vise with five-inch jaws weighs about sixty pounds; five and one-half-inch jaws, eighty pounds. a machinist's vise is made to bolt on top of the bench. it will answer for blacksmith work on the farm, but is not as good as the old-fashioned leg vise. a machinist's vise is very useful in the garage, but it would hardly be necessary to have two heavy vises. the pipe vise belongs on a separate bench, which may be a plank bracketed against the side of the room. _drill-press._--the most satisfactory drill-press for use on a farm is the upright drill that bolts to a post. there is usually a self feed which may be regulated according to the work. the heavy flywheel keeps the motion steady, and because there is no bench in the way, wagon tires may be suspended from the drill block, so they will hang free and true for drilling. often long pieces of straight iron are drilled with holes spaced certain distances apart. it is easier to pass them along when they lie flat side down on the drill block. to use a drill properly and safely, the chuck must run true. it is easy to break a drill when it wabbles. most drills are made on the twist pattern, and it is something of a trick to grind a twist drill, but anyone can do it if he tackles the job with a determination to do it right. in grinding a twist drill, use a new drill for pattern. grind the angles the same as the new drill, and be careful to have the point in the center. a little practice will make perfect. mechanics will say that no one except an expert should attempt to grind a twist drill, but farmers who are mechanically inclined are the best experts within reach. it is up to a farmer to grind his own drills or use them dull. in drilling wrought iron either water or oil is required to cool the drill, but cast iron and brass are drilled dry. light work such as hoop-iron may be drilled dry, but the cutting edge of the drill will last longer even in light work if the drill is fed with oil or water. [illustration: figure .--( ) electric drill-press. a small electric motor is attached to the drill spindle. ( ) tram points. two steel points are fitted with thumbscrew clamps to fasten them to a long wooden bar. they are used to scribe circles too large for the compasses. ( ) ratchet-brace. two braces, or bitstocks, are needed. a large brace with a " radius for large bits and a small brace with a " or - / " radius for small bits.] in using drill-presses, some extra attachments come in very handy, such as a screw clamp to hold short pieces of metal. before starting the drill, a center punch is used to mark the center of the hole to be bored and to start the drill in the right spot. [illustration: figure .--twist-drills. round shank for the post drill and square taper shank for brace work. brace drills are small, / " or less.] [illustration: figure .--taper reamer. used to enlarge, or true, or taper a hole that has been drilled or punched.] [illustration: figure .--another style of reamer.] [illustration: figure .--countersink. this is the old style, blacksmith-made, flat countersink. it will do quick work but not so smooth as the fluted kind.] in doing particular work, the drill may be re-centered when it starts wrong. this is done with a small round-nosed cold chisel. if the work is not very particular, the drill may be turned a little to one side by slanting the piece to be drilled. this plan is only a makeshift, however, the proper way being to block the work level, so that the drill will meet it perpendicularly. however, by starting carefully, the hole may be bored exactly as required. _iron working tools._--forge tools for a farm shop need not be numerous. several pairs of tongs, one blacksmith hammer, one sledge, one hardy, one wooden-handled cold chisel, one pair pincers, one paring knife, one shoeing rasp, and one shoeing hammer will do to begin with. [illustration: figure .--machinist's hammers. a medium weight should be selected for farm repair work. it should be hung so the end of the handle clears half an inch when the face rests flat on the bench.] monkey-wrenches come first in the wrench department. the farmer needs three sizes, one may be quite small, say six inches in length, one ten inches, and the other large enough to span a two-inch nut. and there should be an ironclad rule, never use a monkey-wrench for a hammer. for work around plows, cultivators, harvesters, and other farm machines, a case of s wrenches will be greatly appreciated. manufacturers include wrenches with almost all farm machines, but such wrenches are too cheap to be of much use. [illustration: figure .--( ) hardy. the anvil hardy is used more than any other anvil tool except the blacksmith's hammer and tongs. ( ) a cold-shut link that may be welded, riveted or simply pounded shut.] [illustration: figure .--calipers: ( ) a pair of tight-joint inside calipers. ( ) its mate for taking outside dimensions. ( ) a pair of spring-jointed, screw-adjustment inside calipers for machinists' use.] [illustration: figure .--blacksmith tongs. straight tongs made to hold / " iron is the handiest size. two or three pairs for larger sizes of iron and one pair smaller come in handy.] [illustration: figure .--( ) wire splicer. the oval openings in the tool are of different sizes. they are made to hold two wires, close together, with ends projecting in opposite directions. each end is wound around the other wire. the ends are then notched with a three-cornered file and broken off short and filed smooth. the splicing tool should be thin, about / " or / ", to bring the two twists close together. this is especially necessary in making hoops for wooden pails. ( ) blacksmith shoeing pincers, used to pull horseshoes. they should close together to catch a nail by the head.] for heavier work pipe-wrenches are absolutely necessary. the reason for having so many wrenches is to save time when in the field. it often happens that men and horses stand idle waiting for what should be a quick repair job. [illustration: figure .--( ) cotter pin tool. handy for inserting or removing all sorts of cotter keys. ( ) nest of s wrenches of different sizes. farmers have never appreciated the value of light, handy wrenches to fit all sorts of nuts and bolt heads closely.] for bench work a riveting hammer and a ball peen machinist's hammer are needed. a nest of s wrenches, two rivet sets, cold chisels, round punches and several files also are required. the same twist drills up to three-eighths-inch will do for iron as well as wood. however, if much drilling is done, then round shank twist drills to fit the drill chuck will work better. farmers seldom drill holes in iron larger than one-half inch. for particular work, to get the exact size, reamers are used to finish the holes after drilling. screw holes in iron are countersunk in the drill-press. [illustration: figure .--hack saw. one handle and a dozen blades. the frame should be stiff enough either to push or pull the saw without binding. the teeth may point either way to suit the work in hand.] [illustration: figure .--powerful bolt cutter. it is intended for factory use.] for small work, twist drills with square shanks for brace use should range in sizes from one thirty-second of an inch up to one-quarter inch, then every one-sixteenth inch up to one-half inch. for boring screw holes in wood the quickest work is done with pod bits. not many sizes are needed, but they are cheap, so that a half dozen, ranging from one-sixteenth to one-quarter inch or thereabouts, will be found very useful. pod bits belong to the wood department, but on account of being used principally for screw sinking, they are just as useful in the iron working department as in the carpenter shop. sheet metal snips for cutting sheet metal properly belong with the iron working tools. snips are from ten to fourteen inches in length. a medium size is best for miscellaneous work. if kept in good working order twelve-inch snips will cut -gauge galvanized or black iron. but a man would not care to do a great deal of such heavy cutting. [illustration: figure .--cutting nippers. for cutting the points from horseshoe nails after they are driven through the hoof to hold the shoe in place. these nippers are hard tempered and should not be used for any other purpose.] [illustration: figure .--two shapes of steel crowbars.] _pipe-fitting tools._--recent farm improvements require a few tools that rightfully belong to plumbers. every farm has some kind of water supply for domestic use and for live-stock. a great many farm machines require pipe tools for repair work. every year more plumbing reaches the farm. plumbing work is no more difficult than other mechanical work, if the tools are at hand to meet the different requirements. one job of plumbing that used to stand out as an impossibility was the soldering together of lead pipes, technically termed "wiping a joint." this operation has been discontinued. every possible connection required in farm plumbing is now provided for in standardized fittings. every pipe-fitting or connection that conducts supply water or waste water nowadays screws together. sizes are all made to certain standards and the couplings are almost perfect, so that work formerly shrouded in mystery or hidden under trade secrets is now open to every schoolboy who has learned to read. [illustration: figure .--( ) pipe vise. hinged to open for long pipes. ( ) machinist's vise. made with a turntable to take any horizontal angle. the pipe jaws are removable.] the necessary outfit to handle all the piping and plumbing on the farm is not very expensive, probably $ . will include every tool and all other appliances necessary to put in all the piping needed to carry water to the watering troughs and to supply hot and cold water to the kitchen and the bathroom, together with the waste pipes, ventilators and the sewer to the septic tank. the same outfit of tools will answer for repair work for a lifetime. farm water pipes usually are small. there may be a two-inch suction pipe to the force pump, and the discharge may be one and a half inch. but these pipes are not likely to make trouble. [illustration: figure .--pipe cutter. the most satisfactory pipe cutter has three knife-edge roller cutters which follow each other around the pipe. some of these cutters have two flat face rollers and one cutter roller to prevent raising a burr on the end of the pipe. the flat face rollers iron out the burr and leave the freshly cut pipe the same size clear to the end.] [illustration: figure .--pipe-wrench. this type of wrench is valuable for working with the heavier farm implements. it is intended more for holding than for turning. it is rather rough on nuts. damaged nuts show signs of careless work.] there should be a good pipe vise that will hold any size pipe up to three inches. at least two pipe wrenches are needed and they should be adjustable from one-quarter-inch up to two-inch pipe. we must remember that water pipe sizes mean inside measurements. one-inch pipe is about one and one-quarter inches outside diameter. three-quarter-inch pipe is about one inch outside. two-inch pipe will carry four times as much water as one-inch pipe, under the rule "doubling the diameter increases the capacity four times." [illustration: figure .--a smaller sized wrench with wooden handle.] the three-wheel pipe cutter works quickly and is satisfactory for most jobs. sometimes two of the knife wheels are removed and rollers substituted to prevent raising a burr on the end of the pipe. threading dies are made in standard sizes. a good farm set consists of stock and dies to thread all the different sizes of pipe from one-quarter inch to one inch, inclusive. not many pipes larger than inch are threaded on the farm. they are cut to the proper lengths in the farm shop and the threads are cut in town. chapter ii farm shop work profitable home repair work each farmer must be the judge in regard to the kind of mechanical repair work that should be done at home and the kind and amount of repair work that should go to the shop in town. a great deal depends on the mechanical ability of the farmer or his helpers. however, the poorest farm mechanic can do "first aid" service to farm implements and machinery in the nick of time, if he is so disposed. a great many farmers are helpless in this respect because they want to be helpless. it is so much easier to let it go than to go right at it with a determination to fix it, and fix it right. [illustration: figure .--logging chain. one of the cleverest farm inventions of any age is the logging chain. it is universally used in all lumber camps and on every farm. it usually is from to feet in length, with a round hook on one end for the slip hitch and a grab hook on the other end that makes fast between any two links.] [illustration: figure .--neckyoke and whiffletree irons. farmers can make better neckyokes and whiffletrees than they can buy ready-made. the irons may be bought separately and the wood selected piece by piece.] [illustration: figure .--measuring a worn skein for a new boxing. the pasteboard calipers are cut to fit the old skein sideways because it is probably flattened on the bottom from wear.] on general principles, however, farm repair work should not occupy a farmer's time to the detriment of growing crops or the proper care of live-stock. farming is the business; mechanical work is a side issue. at the same time, a farmer so inclined can find time during the year to look over every farm machine, every implement and every hand tool on the farm. the stupidest farm helper can clean the rust off of a spade and rub the surface with an oily cloth, in which some fine emery has been dusted. the emery will remove the rust and the oil will prevent it from further rusting. every laborer knows better than to use a spade or shovel after a rivet head has given way so the handle is not properly supported by the plate extensions. there really is no excuse for using tools or machinery that are out of repair, but the extent to which a farmer can profitably do his own repairing depends on many contingencies. in every case he must decide according to circumstances, always, however, with a desire and determination to run his farm on business principles. [illustration: figure .--wooden wagon axles. axle timber may be bought in the rough or partly fitted to the skeins.] [illustration: figure .--showing how to fit the irons on the forward end of a wagon reach.] [illustration: figure .--wire splice. with a little practice wire may be wound close enough to prevent slipping.] _home-made bolts._--the easiest way to make a bolt is to cut a rod of round iron the proper length and run a thread on each end. on one end the thread may be just long enough to rivet the head, while the thread on the other end is made longer to accommodate the nut and to take up slack. a farmer needs round iron in sizes from one-fourth inch to five-eighths inch. he will use more three-eighths and one-half inch than any other sizes. blank nuts are made in standard sizes to fit any size of round iron. have an assortment, in different sizes, of both the square and the hexagon nuts. [illustration: figure .--emergency bolts. a bolt may be made quickly without a forge fire by cutting a short thread on one end for the head and a longer thread on the other end for the nut.] [illustration: figure .--rivets. a stock of soft iron rivets of different sizes and lengths should be always kept on hand ready for immediate use.] to make a bolt in the ordinary way requires welding, but for repair work in a hurry it is better to select the proper iron and cut it to the required length either with a cold chisel in the vise, or with a hardy and a handled cold chisel over an anvil. the quickest way of cutting that mashes the rod the least is to be preferred. the size of the rod will determine the manner of cutting in most instances. [illustration: figure .--rivets.] [illustration: figure .--rivet set. this style of set is used for small rivets. the size should be selected to fit the rivets closely. larger rivets are made to hug the work by means of a flat piece of steel with a hole through it.] [illustration: figure .--rivet set.] [illustration: figure .--( ) coulter clamp. plow-beam clamps should be made in the farm shop to fit each plow. ( ) garden weeder. the quickest hand killer of young weeds in the garden is a flat steel blade that works horizontally half an inch below the surface of the ground.] [illustration: figure .--stock and dies. taps and dies and stocks are best kept in compartments in a case made for the purpose.] [illustration: figure .--stock for round dies. the opening is turned true and sized accurately to fit. the screw applies pressure to hold the die by friction.] [illustration: figure .--taps and dies. standard threads are tapped into blank nuts and corresponding threads are cut onto bolts with accuracy and rapidity by using this style taps and dies. they may be had in all sizes. the range for farm work should cut from / " to / ", inclusive.] [illustration: figure .--taper tap for blacksmith's use.] [illustration: figure .--machine bolt and carriage bolt. the first is used against iron and the second against wood, but this rule is not arbitrary. the rounded side of the nuts are turned in against wood; the flat side against washers or heavier iron. use square head bolts if you expect to take them out after the nuts have rusted on.] [illustration: figure .--plow bolts and sickle bar bolts should be kept in stock. standard sizes and shapes are made for several different makes of plows and machines.] taps and dies are made to fit each size of rod. if the thread on the bolt is cut with a solid, or round, plate die, the corresponding tap is run clear through the nut. in that case the nut will screw on the bolt easily, possibly a little loose for some purposes. it is so intended by the manufacturers to give the workman a little leeway. if it is desirable to have the nut screw on the bolt very tight, then the tap is stopped before the last thread enters the nut. a little practice soon qualifies a workman to fit a nut according to the place the bolt is to occupy. [illustration: figure .--lag screw. to set a lag screw in hardwood, bore a hole the size of the screw shank as calipered between the threads.] [illustration: figure .--( ) wagon-box irons, showing how to attach the box and the rave to the cross-piece and to brace the side of the box to hold it upright. there may be several of these braces on each side of the wagon box. ( ) u bolt in cement. a solid staple to be embedded in concrete for a horse ring, door hinge, cow stanchion, etc.] generally it is desirable to have nuts fit very snug on parts of machines that shake a good deal, and this applies to almost all farm machinery and implements. [illustration: figure .--wagon-box brace. it is offset to hold the rave and to brace the sideboard at the rear and the front ends and sometimes in the middle of light wagon beds.] [illustration: figure .--two plow clevises and a plow link.] ordinarily a horse rake is supposed to travel steadily along like a cart, but the ground is rough and in practical use the nuts loosen almost as soon as haying commences. some farmers make a practice of riveting bolt ends to prevent nuts from working loose. when the bolts have square heads, this practice is not objectionable, because with two wrenches a nut can be twisted off over the riveting, but a great many bolts have round heads and very short, square shanks. theoretically, the shanks are driven into the wood firm enough to prevent the bolts from turning. practically this theory is a delusion and a snare, as every farm boy can testify. bolts are not manufactured in quantities in the farm blacksmith shop. they can be made by machinery cheaper, but so many times a bolt is needed on short notice that the farm shop should have the necessary tools and materials to supply the need quickly. _forging iron and steel._--iron and steel are composed of the same properties, but differ chemically. steel also is finer grained than iron and it requires different treatment. iron should be forged at a light-red or white heat. if forged at a dark-red heat the iron generally will granulate or crack open and weaken the metal. for a smooth finish the last forging may be done at a dark-red heat, but the hammer must be used lightly. the weight of the hammer as well as the blows also must differ with the different size of iron under heat. small sizes should be treated with hammer blows that are rather light, while for large sizes the blows should be correspondingly heavy. if light blows be given with a light hammer in forging heavy iron the outside alone will be affected, thus causing uneven tension and contrarywise strain in the iron. steel should never be heated above a yellow heat. if heated to a white heat the steel will be burned. steel should never be forged at a dark-red heat. if this is done it will cause considerable strain between the inner and outer portions, which may cause it to crack while forging. the weight of the hammer and the hammer blows in forging of steel is vastly of more importance than in forging iron. if the blow or the hammer is not heavy enough to exert its force throughout the thickness of the steel it will probably crack in the process of hardening or tempering. if steel be properly forged it will harden easily and naturally, but if improperly forged the tempering will be very difficult--probably a failure. the quality of a finished tool depends greatly upon the correct heat and proper method used in forging and hardening it. _making steel tools._--steel for tools should first be annealed to even the density and prevent warping. this is done by heating it to a dull cherry red in a slow fire. a charcoal fire for this purpose is best because it contains no sulphur or other injurious impurities. after heating the piece of new steel all over as evenly as possible it should be buried several inches deep in powdered charcoal and left to cool. this completes the annealing process. while working steel into proper shape for tools, great care is required to prevent burning. it should be worked quickly and the process repeated as often as necessary. practice is the only recipe for speed. when the tool is shaped as well as possible on the anvil it is then finished with a file by clamping the new tool in the vise, using single cut files. bastard files are too rough for tool steel. after the tool is shaped by cross-filing and draw-filing to make it smooth it is sometimes polished by wrapping fine emery cloth around the file. oil is used with emery cloth to give the steel a luster finish. tempering is the last process in the making of such tools as cold chisels, drills, dies, punches, scratchawls, etc. _tempering steel tools._--good judgment is required to get the right temper. good eyesight is needed to catch the color at the exact instant, and quick action to plunge it into the water before it cools too much. dies are made very hard. the color of the steel at dipping time should be a bright straw color. cold chisels will break when being used if tempered too hard. if cold chisels are to be used for cutting iron, the color should be violet; if the chisels are for cutting stone, purple is the color. drills for boring iron are tempered a dark straw color at the cutting edge merging back into blue. the water in the dipping tub should be warm, as steel is likely to check or crack when it is tempered in cold water. [illustration: figure .--blacksmith hammers. some smiths use a heavy machinist's hammer. but the flat peen is more useful when working around the anvil and the leg vise.] tool steel should be held in a perpendicular position when it enters the water to cool all sides alike. otherwise the new tool might warp. it is better to dip slowly, sometimes holding the point, or cutting edge, in the water while permitting the shank to cool slowly enough to remain soft. some sizes of steel may be tempered too hard at first and the temper immediately drawn by permitting the heat of the shank to follow down almost to the edge, then dip. this is done quickly while watching the colors as they move towards the point or edge. _draw-filing._--making six-sided and eight-sided punches and scratchawls out of hexagon and octagon tool steel is interesting work. the steel is cut to length by filing a crease all around with a three-cornered file. when it is sufficiently notched, the steel will break straight across. to shape the tool and to draw out the point the steel is heated in the forge to a dull cherry red and hammered carefully to preserve the shape along the taper. special attention must be given to the numerous corners. a scratchawl or small punch, must be heated many times and hammered quickly before cooling. an old english shop adage reads: "only one blacksmith ever went to the devil and that was for pounding cold iron." after the punch or scratchawl is roughed out on the anvil, it is fastened in the vise and finished by cross-filing and draw-filing. copper caps on the vise jaws will prevent indentations. [illustration: figure .--vise jaw guards. soft auxiliary vise jaws are made of sheet copper or galvanized iron.] [illustration: figure .--roll filing. to file a piece of steel round it is rolled by one hand while the file is used by the other hand.] draw-filing means grasping each end of the file and moving it back and forth sidewise along the work. for this purpose single-cut files are used. the smoothing is done with a very fine single-cut file, or if very particular, a float file is used. then the polish is rubbed on with fine emery cloth and oil. the emery cloth is wrapped around the file and the same motion is continued. with some little practice a very creditable piece of work may be turned out. such work is valuable because of the instruction. a good test of skill at blacksmithing is making an octagon punch that tapers true to the eye when finished. _set-screws._--it is customary to fasten a good many gear wheels, cranks and pulleys to machinery shafts by set-screws. there are two kinds of set-screws; one has a cone point, the other a cup end. both screws are hardened to sink into the shaft. a cup is supposed to cut a ring and the point is supposed to sink into the shaft to make a small hole sufficient to keep the wheel from slipping. however, unless the cone-pointed screw is countersunk into the shaft, it will not hold much of a strain. the point is so small it will slip and cut a groove around the shaft. to prevent this, the set-screw may be countersunk by first marking the shaft with an indentation of the point of the screw. then the wheel or crank or collar may be removed and a hole drilled into the shaft with a twist-drill the same size, or a sixty-fourth smaller, than the set-screw. then by forcing the end of the set-screw into the drill hole, the wheel is held solid. [illustration: figure .--machine-bolt and set-screw. the bolt to the left is used to clamp cylinder heads in place. the set-screw to the right is the cup variety. the end is countersunk to form a cup with a sharp rim.] the principal objection to set-screws is that they are dangerous. the heads always project and are ready to catch a coat sleeve when the shaft is revolving. in all cases, set-screws should be as large as the hub will allow, and it is better to have them protected so it is impossible to catch anything to wind around the shaft. cup set-screws are not satisfactory except for very light work. if necessary to use them, the ends may be firmly fixed by cutting a ring with a sharp, diamond-point cold chisel. _setting the handsaw._--nine teeth to the inch is the most satisfactory handsaw for all kinds of lumber. setting the teeth of this kind of saw is best done with a hand lever set. the plunger pin should be carefully adjusted to bend the teeth just far enough to give the necessary set. for general work a saw needs more set than is needed for kiln-dried stuff. the teeth should cut a kerf just wide enough to clear the blade. anything more is a waste of time and muscle. it is better to work from both sides of the saw by first setting one side the whole length of the blade. then reverse the saw in the clamp and set the alternate teeth in the same manner. there should be a good solid stop between the handles of the set to insure equal pressure against each sawtooth. the pin should be carefully placed against each tooth at exactly the same spot every time and the pressure should be the same for each tooth. the best saw-sets for fine tooth saws are automatic so far as it is possible to make them so, but the skill of the operator determines the quality of the work. the reason for setting a saw before jointing is to leave the flattened ends of the teeth square with the blade after the jointing and filing is completed. _jointing a handsaw._--after the saw has been set it must be jointed to square the teeth and to even them to equal length, and to keep the saw straight on the cutting edge. some woodworkers give their saws a slight camber, or belly, to correspond with the sway-back. the camber facilitates cutting to the bottom in mitre-box work without sawing into the bed piece of the box. it also throws the greatest weight of the thrust upon the middle teeth. a saw with even teeth cuts smoother, runs truer and works faster than a saw filed by guess. it is easy to file a saw when all of the teeth are the same length and all have the same set. anyone can do a good job of filing if the saw is made right to begin with, but no one can put a saw in good working order with a three-cornered file as his only tool. [illustration: figure .--saw jointer. the wooden block is about two inches square by " or " in length. the block is made true and scribed carefully to have the ripsaw slot square, straight and true. the file is set into a mortise square with the block.] _filing the handsaw._--first comes the three-cornered file. it should be just large enough to do the work. there is no economy in buying larger files thinking that each of the three corners will answer the same purpose as a whole file of smaller size. in the first place the small file is better controlled and will do better work. in the second place the three corners are needed to gum the bottoms of the divisions between the teeth. there is much more wear on the corners than on the sides of a saw-file. also the corners of a small file are more acute, which means a good deal in the shape of the finished teeth. after the saw is carefully set and jointed, clamp it in the saw vise and file one side of the saw from heel to point. then reverse the saw in the saw clamp and file the other side, being careful to keep the bevel of each tooth the same. it is better to stop filing just before the tooth comes to a point. a triangular or diamond shaped point will cut faster and leave a smoother saw kerf and last longer than a needle point. as the tooth of a crosscut saw is filed away from both edges, it is necessary to make allowances when filing the first side, otherwise some of the teeth will come to a sharp point before the gumming is deep enough. _using a handsaw._--anyone can saw a board square both up and down and crossways by following a few simple rules. have the board supported on the level by two well made saw-benches " high. stand up straight as possible and look down on both sides of the saw blade. use long even strokes and let the saw play lightly and evenly through the saw cut. do not cut the mark out; cut to it on the waste end, or further end, if there are more pieces to be cut from the board. the saw kerf is about / " wide for a nine-tooth saw set for unkilned lumber or dimension stuff. if both saw kerfs are taken from one piece and none from the next then one length will be / " shorter than the other. for practice it is a good plan to make two marks / " apart and cut between them. use a sharp-pointed scratchawl to make the marks. a penknife blade is next best, but it must be held flat against the blade of the square, otherwise it will crowd in or run off at a tangent. _setting a circular saw._--a good saw-set for a circular saw may be made out of an old worn-out flat file. heat the file in the forge fire to draw the temper and anneal it by covering it with ashes. smooth it on the grindstone. put it in the vise and file a notch in one edge. the notch should be just wide enough to fit loosely over the point of a sawtooth. the notch should be just deep enough to reach down one-quarter of the length of the tooth. make a saw-set gauge out of a piece of flat iron or steel one inch wide and about four inches long. file a notch into and parallel to one edge at one corner, about one-sixteenth of an inch deep from the edge and about half an inch long measuring from the end. with the home-made saw-set bend the saw teeth outward until the points just miss the iron gauge in the corner notch. the edges of the gauge should be straight and parallel and the notch should be parallel with the edge. in use the edge of the gauge is laid against the side of the saw so the projecting tooth reaches into the notch. one-sixteenth of an inch may be too much set for a small saw but it won't be too much for a -inch wood saw working in green cord wood. _jointing a circular saw._--run the saw at full speed. lay a -inch file flat on the top of the saw table at right angles to the saw. move the file slowly and carefully towards the saw until it ticks against the teeth. hold the file firmly by both ends until each sawtooth ticks lightly against the file. a saw in good working order needs very little jointing, but it should have attention every time the saw is set and it should be done after setting and before filing. _filing a circular saw._--the teeth of a crosscut circular saw point a little ahead. sometimes they point so nearly straight out from the center that you have to look twice to determine which way the saw should run. there are plenty of rules for the pitch of sawteeth, but they are subject to many qualifications. what interests a farmer is a saw that will cut green poles and crooked limbs into stove lengths with the least possible delay. a saw inches in diameter will cut a stick eight inches through without turning it to finish the cut. the front or cutting edges of the teeth of a -inch crosscut circular saw for wood sawing should line to a point a little back from the center. this may not sound definite enough for best results, so the more particular farmers may use a straight edge. select a straight stick about half an inch square. rest it on top of or against the back of the saw mandrel and shape the forward edges of the teeth on a line with the upper side or rear side of the straight edge. the teeth will stand at the proper pitch when the saw is new, if it was designed for sawing green wood. if it works right before being filed, then the width of the straight edge may be made to conform to the original pitch and kept for future use. the gumming is done with the edge of the file while filing the front edges of the teeth. it is finished with the flat side of the file while filing the rear edges of the teeth. the depth, or length, of the teeth should be kept the same as the manufacturer designed them. a wood saw works best when the front edges of the teeth have but little bevel. the back edges should have more slant. the teeth should have three-cornered or diamond-shaped points. needle points break off when they come against knots or cross-grained hardwood. short teeth do no cutting. single cut flat files are used for circular saws. the file should fit the saw. it should be about / " wider than the length of the front side of the teeth. the back edges require that the file shall have some play to show part of the tooth while the file is in motion. large files are clumsy. the file should be carefully selected. [illustration: figure .--how to sharpen a hoe. grinding a hoe is difficult, but filing it sharp and straight at the cutting edge is easy. if the hoe chatters when held in the vise, spring a wooden block under the blade. use false vise jaws to prevent dinging the shank.] _how to sharpen a hoe._--it is quicker and more satisfactory to file a hoe sharp than to grind it on the grindstone. the shank of the hoe must be held firmly in the vise and there should be a solid block of wood under the blade of the hoe, a little back from the edge; to keep the file from chattering. a single cut flat file is the best to use. it should be long enough to be easily held in one position to make a smooth, even bevel at the same angle to the face of the blade all the way across. to make sure not to file a feather edge it is better to joint the hoe to begin with, then to stop filing just before reaching the edge. if the edge be left / " thick it will wear longer and work more easily after having been used an hour or two than it will if the edge be filed thin. this is especially noticeable when the ground contains small stones. hoes are sharpened from the under side only. the inside of a hoe blade should be straight clear to the edge. hoes should always have sharp corners. when working around valuable plants you want to know exactly where the corner of the hoe is when the blade is buried out of sight in the ground. _shoeing farm horses._--farmers have no time or inclination to make a business of shoeing horses, but there are occasions when it is necessary to pull a shoe or set a shoe and to do it quickly. shoeing tools are not numerous or expensive. they consist first of a tool box, with a stiff iron handle made in the shape of a bale. the box contains a shoeing hammer, hoof rasp, hoof knife, or paring-knife, as it is usually called, and two sizes of horseshoe-nails. sometimes a foot pedestal is used to set the horse's front foot on when the horse wants to bear down too hard, but this pedestal is not necessary in the farm shop. there are flat-footed horses that cannot work even in summer without shoes. common sense and shoeing tools are the only requirements necessary to tack on a plate without calks. shoes to fit any foot may be purchased at so much a pound. a paring-knife is used to level the bottom of the hoof so that it will have an even bearing on the shoe all the way round. it is not desirable to pare the frog or the braces in the bottom of a horse's foot. if the foot is well cupped, a little of the horny rim may be taken off near the edges. generally it is necessary to shorten the toe. this is done partly with the hoof chisel and rasp after the shoe is nailed fast. sometimes one-fourth of an inch is sufficient; at other times a horse's hoof is very much improved by taking off one-half inch or more of the toe growth either from the bottom or the front or both. like all other mechanical work the shoeing of a horse's foot should be studied and planned before starting. a long toe is a bad leverage to overcome when pulling a heavy load. at the same time, nature intended that a horse should have considerable toe length as a protection to the more tender parts of the foot. and the pastern bone should play at the proper angle. [illustration: figure .--tool box for field use. the long open side is for tools. on the other side of the center partition bolts, keys, screws, nails, bits of wire, leather, tin, etc., are kept in the different divisions.] _handy tool box._--a tool box with a high lengthwise partition in the middle and a handle in the middle of the top of the partition is the handiest tool box ever used on a farm. at haying and harvest time it should be fitted with the common tools required about haying and harvest machinery. one side is partitioned into square boxes to hold split wire keys, washers, bolts, rivets, and a collection of wire nails, bits of copper wire, a leather punch, etc. on the other side of the box is an assortment of wrenches, cold chisels, punches, pliers and hammers. this tool box belongs in the wagon that accompanies the outfit to the field. [illustration: figure .--melting ladle. babbitting shaft boxing requires a melting ladle. it should be about five inches across the bowl and about three inches deep. that is a good size to heat in a forge fire.] _babbitting boxings._--babbitting boxings is one of the repair jobs on the farm. some men are careless about oiling; sometimes sand cuts them out. every year some boxings need rebabbitting. the melting ladle should be large enough to pour the largest box. usually a -inch bowl is about right. a large ladle will pour a small box but a small ladle won't pour a large one. in cold weather the shaft and box should be warmed to insure an even flow of metal. pasteboard is fitted against the shaft when pouring the cap or top half of the box. pasteboard is fitted around the shaft at the ends of the box to keep the melted metal from running out. never use clay or putty, it is too mussy and the babbitt is made rough and uneven at the edges. some skill is required to fit either wood or metal close enough to prevent leaks and to do a neat job. if the boxing is small, both top and bottom may be poured at once by making holes through the dividing pasteboard. the holes must be large enough to let the melted metal through and small enough to break apart easily when cold. chapter iii generating mechanical power to drive modern farm machinery at one time ninety-seven per cent of the population of the united states got their living directly from tilling the soil, and the power used was oxen and manual labor. at the present time probably not more than thirty-five per cent of our people are actively engaged in agricultural pursuits. and the power problem has been transferred to horses, steam, gasoline, kerosene and water power, with electricity as a power conveyor. fifty years ago a farmer was lucky if he owned a single moldboard cast-iron plow that he could follow all day on foot and turn over one, or at most, two acres. the new traction engines are so powerful that it is possible to plow sixty feet in width, and other machines have been invented to follow the tractor throughout the planting and growing seasons to the end of the harvest. the tractor is supplemented by numerous smaller powers. all of which combine to make it possible for one-third of the people to grow enough to feed the whole american family and to export a surplus to europe. at the same time, the standard of living is very much higher than it was when practically everyone worked in the fields to grow and to harvest the food necessary to live. farm machinery is expensive, but it is more expensive to do without. farmers who make the most money are the ones who use the greatest power and the best machinery. farmers who have a hard time of it are the ones who use the old wheezy hand pump, the eight-foot harrow and the walking plow. the few horses they keep are small and the work worries them. the owner sympathizes with his team and that worries him. worry is the commonest form of insanity. [illustration: figure .--flail, the oldest threshing machine, still used for threshing pedigreed seeds to prevent mixing. the staff is seven or eight feet long and the swiple is about three feet long by two and one-half inches thick in the middle, tapering to one and one-half inches at the ends. the staff and swiple are fastened together by rawhide thongs.] [illustration: figure .--bucket yoke. it fits around the neck and over the shoulders. such human yokes have been used for ages to carry two buckets of water, milk or other liquids. the buckets or pails should nearly balance each other. they are steadied by hand to prevent slopping.] at a famous plowing match held at wheatland, illinois, two interesting facts were brought out. boys are not competing for furrow prizes and the walking plow has gone out of fashion. the plowing at the wheatland plowing match was done by men with riding plows. only one boy under eighteen years was ready to measure his ability against competition. the attendance of farmers and visitors numbered about three thousand, which shows that general interest in the old-fashioned plowing match is as keen as ever. a jumbo tractor on the grounds proved its ability to draw a big crowd and eighteen plows at the same time. it did its work well and without vulgar ostentation. lack of sufficient land to keep it busy was the tractor's only disappointment, but it reached out a strong right arm and harrowed the furrows down fine, just to show that it "wasn't mad at nobody." [illustration: figure .--well sweep. the length of the sweep is sufficient to lower the bucket into the water and to raise it to the coping at the top of the brickwork. the rock on the short end of the sweep is just heavy enough to balance the bucket full of water.] modern farm methods are continually demanding more power. larger implements are being used and heavier horses are required to pull them. a great deal of farm work is done by engine power. farm power is profitable when it is employed to its full capacity in manufacturing high-priced products. it may be profitable also in preventing waste by working up cheap materials into valuable by-products. the modern, well-managed farm is a factory and it should be managed along progressive factory methods. in a good dairy stable hay, straw, grains and other feeds are manufactured into high-priced cream and butter. [illustration: figure .--wire stretcher. a small block and tackle will stretch a single barb-wire tight enough for a fence. by using two wire snatches the ends of two wires may be strained together for splicing.] [illustration: figure .--block and tackle. the rope is threaded into two double blocks. there is a safety stop that holds the load at any height.] farming pays in proportion to the amount of work intelligently applied to this manner of increasing values. it is difficult to make a profit growing and selling grain. grain may sell for more than the labor and seed, but it takes so much vitality from the land that depreciation of capital often is greater than the margin of apparent profit. when grains are grown and fed to live-stock on the farm, business methods demand better buildings and more power, which means that the farmer is employing auxiliary machinery and other modern methods to enhance values. in other manufacturing establishments raw material is worked over into commercial products which bring several times the amount of money paid for the raw material. [illustration: figure .--farm hoists. two styles of farm elevating hoists are shown in this illustration. two very different lifting jobs are also shown.] the principle is the same on the farm except that when a farmer raises the raw material he sells it to himself at a profit. when he feeds it to live-stock and sells the live-stock he makes another profit. when the manure is properly handled and returned to the soil he is making another profit on a by-product. farming carried on in this way is a complicated business which requires superior knowledge of business methods and principles. in order to conduct the business of farming profitably the labor problem has to be met. good farm help is expensive. poor farm help is more expensive. while farm machinery also is expensive, it is cheaper than hand labor when the farmer has sufficient work to justify the outlay. it is tiresome to have agricultural writers ding at us about the superior acre returns of german farms. german hand-made returns may be greater per acre, but one american farmhand, by the use of proper machinery, will produce more food than a whole german family. [illustration: figure .--two powerful winches. the one to the left is used for pulling small stumps or roots in the process of clearing land. the rope runs on and off the drum to maintain three or four laps or turns. the winch to the right is used for hoisting well drilling tools or to hang a beef animal. the rope winds on the drum in two layers if necessary.] dog churn even the dog works on some farms. a dog is a nuisance among dairy cattle, but he can be made to earn his salt at churning time. all mechanism in connection with dog power must be light. it also is necessary to eliminate the friction as much as possible. [illustration: figure .--dog churn power. a wheel keyed to an iron shaft is placed at an angle as shown. the weight of the dog turns the wheel and power is conveyed to the churn by a light rope belt. it is necessary to confine the dog between stationary partitions built like a stall over the wheel.] the best way to make a dog power is to use a light wooden sulky wheel for the revolving turn table. next best to the sulky wheel is a light buggy wheel. the wheel is made fast to an upright iron shaft that is stepped into an iron oil well at the bottom and inclined at an angle of about fifteen degrees to give the necessary power. to steady the top of the shaft a light boxing is used, preferably a ball-bearing bicycle race to reduce friction. power is conveyed to the churn by means of a grooved pulley on the top of the shaft. a small, soft rope or heavy string belt runs from this pulley to a similar pulley connected with the churn. dogs learn to like the work when fed immediately after the churning is finished. dogs have been known to get on to the power wheel to call attention to their hungry condition. this calls to mind the necessity of arranging a brake to stop the wheel to let the dog off. when the wheel is running light, the dog cannot let go. a spring brake to wear against the iron tire of the wheel is the most satisfactory. the brake may be tripped and set against the tire automatically by a small lever and weight attached to the underside of the wheel. when the speed is too fast the weight swings out and sets the brake. when the speed slackens the weight drops back towards the center and releases the brake. when the speed is about right the weight swings between the two spring catches. bull treadmill on dairy farms it is common to see a valuable pure bred bull working a treadmill for exercise and to pump water. sometimes he turns the cream-separator, but the motion is too unsteady for good results. treadmills for this purpose are very simple. the mechanism turns a grooved pulley which propels a rope power conveyor. the rope belt may be carried across the yards in any direction and to almost any distance. bull treadmills consist of a framework of wood which carries an endless apron supported on rollers. the apron link chains pass around and turn two drumhead sprocket-wheels at the upper end and an idler drum at the lower end. the sprocket-wheel drum shaft is geared to an auxiliary shaft which carries a grooved pulley. a rope belt power conveyor runs in this groove and carries power from the bull pen to the pump. bull tread powers usually have smooth inclined lags, because a bull's steps on the tread power are naturally uneven and irregular. this construction gives an even straight tread to the travel surface. to prevent slipping, soft wooden strips are nailed onto the lags at the lower edges. even incline tread blocks or lags are also recommended for horses that are not shod and for all animals with split hoofs. the traveling apron of the power is placed on an incline and the treads are carried around the two drums at the upper and lower ends of the frame by means of endless chains. there is a governor attachment which regulates the speed and prevents the machinery from "running away." [illustration: figure .--bull tread power. treadmills have gone out of fashion. too much friction was the cause, but a mill like this is valuable to exercise a pure bred bull. some dairymen make him pump water.] the simplest governor is made on the two-ball governor principle with weights on opposite levers. the governor is attached to two opposite spokes in the flywheel. as the speed increases the weights move outward because of their centrifugal force. this motion operates a brake lever to retard or stop the flywheel. when the machine stops an opposite weight rests against the flywheel until it starts in motion again, so the apron cannot be moved until the brake is released. this is necessary to get the animal on or off of the platform while it is at rest to avoid accidents. the usual incline is a rise of two feet in eight when power is wanted. this pitch compels the bull to lift one-quarter of his own weight and it may be too severe for a heavy animal. the endless apron is an endless hill climb to the bull. treadmills are not economical of power because there are so many bearings to generate friction. windmills wind power is the cheapest power we have. a windmill properly proportioned to its work is a great help, especially when it is attached to a good pump for the purpose of lifting water into an elevated tank from which it is piped under pressure for domestic purposes and for watering live-stock. you can have considerable patience with a windmill if you only depend upon it for pumping water, provided you have a tank that will hold a week's supply to be drawn during a dry, hot time when every animal on the farm demands a double allowance of water. that is the time when a farmer hates to attach himself to the pump handle for the purpose of working up a hickory breeze. that also is the time when the wind neglects a fellow. a good windmill is useful up to about one-third of its rated capacity, which is the strongest argument for buying a mill larger than at first seems necessary. some men have suffered at some time in their lives with the delusion that they could tinker with a poorly constructed windmill and make it earn its oil. they have never waked up to a full realization of their early delusion. it is a positive fact that all windmills are not lazy, deceitful nor wholly unreliable. when properly constructed, rightly mounted and kept in good repair, they are not prone to work in a crazy fashion when the tank is full and loaf when it is empty. there are thousands of windmills that have faithfully staid on the job continuously twenty-four hours per day for five or ten years at a stretch, all the time working for nothing year after year without grumbling, except when compelled to run without oil. at such times the protest is loud and nerve racking. a good windmill with suitable derrick, pump and piping may cost $ . the yearly expense figures something like this: interest on investment at % per annum $ . depreciation % . oil . repairs . making a total of $ , which is less than $ . per month for the work of elevating a constant supply of water for the house, stable and barnyard. one-mule pump a home-made device that is much used on live-stock ranches in california is shown in the illustration. this simple mechanism is a practical means for converting circular mule motion into vertical reciprocating pump action. a solid post is set rather deep in the ground about twelve feet from the well. this post is the fulcrum support of the walking-beam. one end of the walking-beam reaches to the center line of the well, where it connects with the pump shaft. the other end of the walking-beam is operated by a pitman shaft connecting with a crank wrist pin near the ground. a round iron shaft similar to a horsepower tumbling rod about ten or twelve feet in length and one and a half inches in diameter is used to convey power and motion to the pitman shaft. [illustration: figure .--mule pump. a practical home-made power to pump water for live-stock. it is used where the water-table is within feet of the surface of the ground. the drawing shows a post in the center which supports the walking-beam and acts as a fulcrum. a mowing-machine wheel is keyed to one end of a round iron shaft. the other end of this shaft turns in a boxing which is swiveled to a short post as shown at _b_. see also detail "_b_.". the two plunger shafts are shown at _a_ _a_. the mule is hitched to the round iron shaft near the traveling wheel by means of a round hook. as the mule walks around in a circle the shaft revolves and operates the crank _b_. there are side guys not shown in the drawing to keep the walking-beam in position.] a mowing-machine wheel is keyed to the outer end of the tumbling rod. at the crank end is a babbitted boxing with a bolt attachment reaching down into the top of a short post set solidly into the ground, directly under the inner end of the walking-beam. this bolt permits the boxing to revolve with a swivel motion. another swivel connects the upper end of the pitman shaft with the walking-beam. the whiffletree is attached to the tumbling rod by an iron hook. this hook is held in place by two iron collars fastened to the tumbling rod by means of keys or set-screws. the mowing-machine drive wheel travels around in a circle behind the mule turning the shaft which works the walking-beam and operates the pump. it would be difficult to design another horse or mule power so cheap and simple and effective. the mule grows wise after a while, so it is necessary to use a blindfold, or he will soldier on the job. with a little encouragement from a whip occasionally a mule will walk around and around for hours pulling the mowing-machine wheel after him. horsepower one horsepower is a force sufficient to lift , pounds one foot high in one minute. the term "horsepower" in popular use years ago meant a collection of gear-wheels and long levers with eight or ten horses solemnly marching around in a circle with a man perched on a platform in the center in the capacity of umpire. this was the old threshing-machine horsepower. it was the first real success in pooling many different farm power units to concentrate the combined effort upon one important operation. not many horses are capable of raising , pounds one foot in one minute every minute for an hour or a day. some horses are natural-born slackers with sufficient acumen to beat the umpire at his own game. some horses walk faster than others, also horses vary in size and capacity for work. but during a busy time each horse was counted as one horsepower, and they were only eight or ten in number. and it so developed that the threshing horsepower had limitations which the separator outgrew. the old threshing horsepower has been superseded by steam engines and gasoline and kerosene power, but horses are more important than ever. [illustration: figure .--horse power, showing the manner of attaching the braced lever to the bull wheel.] farm horses are larger and more powerful; they are better kept, better trained, and hitched to better machinery, because it pays. one man drives three , -pound draft horses as fast as he used to drive two , -pound general-purpose horses. the three drafters make play of a heavy load, while the two light horses worry themselves poor and accomplish little. modern farm machinery is heavier, it cuts wider and digs deeper and does more thorough work. modern farm requirements go scientifically into the proper cultivation and preparation of soil to increase fertility. old methods used up fertility until the land refused to produce profitably. although the old familiar horsepower has been greatly outclassed, it has not been discarded. there are many small horsepowers in use for elevating grain, baling hay, cutting straw for feed and bedding, grinding feed and other light work where engine power is not available. water-power water-power is the most satisfactory of all kinds of stationary farm power, when a steady stream of water may be harnessed to a good water-wheel. it is not a difficult engineering feat to throw a dam across a small stream and take the water out into a penstock to supply water to a turbine water-wheel. in the first place it is necessary to measure the flow of water to determine the size of water-wheel which may be used to advantage. in connection with the flow of water it is also important to know the fall. water is measured by what is termed a "weir." it is easily made by cutting an oblong notch in a plank placed across the stream, as a temporary dam which raises the water a few inches to get a steady, even flow of water through the notch so that calculations may be made in miner's inches. the term "miner's inch" is not accurate, but it comes near enough for practical purposes. measuring the volume of water should be done during a dry time in summer. the fall of the stream is easily measured by means of a carpenter's level and a stake. the stake is driven into the ground at a point downstream where water may be delivered to the wheel and a tailrace established to the best advantage. sighting over the level to a mark on the stake will show the amount of fall. when a manufacturer of water-wheels has the amount of water and the fall, he can estimate the size and character of wheel to supply. the penstock may be vertical or placed on a slant. a galvanized pipe sufficient to carry the necessary amount of water may be laid along the bank, but it should be thoroughly well supported because a pipe full of water is heavy, and settling is likely to break a joint. galvanized piping for a farm penstock is not necessarily expensive. it may be made at any tin shop and put together on the ground in sections. the only difficult part about it is soldering the under side of the joints, but generally it may be rolled a little to one side until the bottom of the seam is reached. the most satisfactory way to carry power from the water-wheel to the farm buildings is by means of electricity. the dynamo may be coupled to the water-wheel and wires carried any required distance. the work of installing electric power machinery is more a question of detail than mechanics or electrical engineering. the different appliances are bought from the manufacturer and placed where they are needed. it is principally a question of expense and quantity of electricity needed or developed. if the current is used for power, then a motor is connected with the dynamo and current from the dynamo drives the motor. a dynamo may be connected with the water-wheel shaft at the source of power and the motor may be placed in the power-house or any of the other buildings. the cost of farm waterworks depends principally on the amount of power developed. small machinery may be had for a few hundred dollars, but large, powerful machinery is expensive. if the stream is large and considerable power is going to waste it might pay to put in a larger plant and sell current to the neighbors for electric lighting and for power purposes. standard machinery is manufactured for just such plants. the question of harnessing a stream on your own land when you control both banks is a simple business proposition. if anyone else can set up a plausible plea of riparian rights, flood damage, interstate complications or interference with navigation, it then becomes a question of litigation to be decided by some succeeding generation. steam boiler and engine farm engines usually are of two different types, steam engines and gasoline or oil engines. steam stationary engines are used on dairy farms because steam is the best known means of keeping a dairy clean and sanitary. the boiler that furnishes power to run the engine also supplies steam to heat water and steam for sterilizing bottles, cans and other utensils. for some unaccountable reason steam engines are more reliable than gasoline engines. at the same time they require more attention, that is, the boilers do. steam engines have been known to perform their tasks year after year without balking and without repairs or attention of any kind except to feed steam and oil into the necessary parts, and occasionally repack the stuffing boxes. on the other hand, boilers require superintendence to feed them with both fuel and water. the amount of time varies greatly. if the boiler is very much larger than the engine, that is, if the boiler is big enough to furnish steam for two such engines, it will furnish steam for one engine and only half try. this means that the fireman can raise or pounds of steam and attend to his other work around the dairy or barn. where steam boilers are required for heating water and furnishing steam to scald cans and wash bottles, the boiler should be several horsepower larger than the engine requirements. there is no objection to this except that a large boiler costs more than a smaller one, and that more steam is generated than is actually required to run the engine. the kind of work required of a boiler and engine must determine the size and general character of the installation. portable boilers and engines are not quite so satisfactory as stationary, but there are a great many portable outfits that give good satisfaction, and there is the advantage of moving them to the different parts of the farm when power is required for certain purposes. small gasoline engines a gasoline engine of - / horsepower is the most useful size for a general purpose farm engine. it is convenient to run the pump, washing-machine, fanning-mill, cream-separator, grindstone, and other similar farm chores that have heretofore always been done by human muscle. a small engine may be placed on a low-down truck and moved from one building to another by hand. one drive belt or feet long, making a double belt reach of or feet, will answer for each setting. the engine once lined up to hitch onto the pulley of any stationary machine is all that is necessary. when the truck is once placed in proper position the wheels may be blocked by a casting of concrete molded into a depression in the ground in front and behind each wheel. these blocks are permanent so that the truck may be pulled to the same spot each time. [illustration: figure .--kerosene farm engine. this is a very compact type of engine with heavy flywheels. a longer base might sit steadier on a wagon, but for stationary use on a solid concrete pier it gives good service.] a gasoline engine for farm use is expected to run by the hour without attention. for this reason it should have a good, reliable hit and miss governor to regulate the speed, as this type is the most economical in fuel. it should have a magneto in addition to a six-cell dry battery. it should be equipped with an impulse starter, a device that eliminates all starting troubles. the engine should be perfectly balanced so as to insure smooth running, which adds materially to the life of the engine. with a good, solid pump jack, a - / horsepower engine will pump water until the tank is full, whether it requires one hour or half a day. it is easily moved to the dairy house to run the separator. as the cream-separator chore comes along regularly every night and every morning, the engine and truck would naturally remain inside of the dairy house more than any other place. if the dairy house is too small to let the engine in, then an addition is necessary, for the engine must be kept under cover. the engine house should have some artistic pretensions and a coat of paint. kerosene portable engines the kerosene engine is necessarily of the throttle governor type in order to maintain approximately uniform high temperature at all times, so essential to the proper combustion of kerosene fuel. therefore, a kerosene engine of the hit-and-miss type should be avoided. however, there are certain classes of work where a throttle governor engine is at a decided disadvantage, such as sawing wood, because a throttle governor engine will not go from light load to full load as quickly as will a hit-and-miss type, and consequently chokes down much easier, causing considerable loss of time. a general purpose portable kerosene engine is admirably suited to all work requiring considerable horsepower and long hours of service with a fairly steady load, such as tractor work, threshing, custom feed grinding, irrigating and silo filling. there will be a considerable saving in fuel bill over a gasoline engine if the engine will really run with kerosene, or other low-priced fuel, without being mixed with gasoline. in choosing a kerosene engine, particular attention should be paid to whether or not the engine can be run on all loads without smoking. unless this can be done, liquid fuel is entering the cylinder which will cause excessive wear on the piston and rings. a good kerosene engine should show as clean an exhaust as when operating on gasoline and should develop approximately as much horsepower. another feature is harmonizing the fuel oil and the lubricating oil so that one will not counteract the effects of the other. portable farm engine and truck [illustration: figure .--portable farm engine. this engine is permanently mounted on a low wheel truck wagon. the saw frame is detachable and the same truck is used for spraying and other work.] a convenient arrangement for truck and portable power for spraying, sawing wood and irrigation pumping, is shown in the accompanying illustration. the truck is low down, which keeps the machinery within reach. the wheels are well braced, which tends to hold the outfit steady when the engine is running. the saw table is detachable. when removed, the spraying tank bolts on to the same truck frame; also the elevated table with the railing around it, where the men stand to spray large apple trees, is bolted onto the wagon bed. spraying never was properly done until the powerful engine and high pressure tanks were invented. spraying to be effective, should be fine as mist, which requires a pressure of pounds. there may be a number of attachments to a spraying outfit of this kind. a pipe suspended under the frame with a nozzle for each row is used to spray potatoes, strawberry vines and other low down crops that are grown in rows. when not in use as a portable engine it is blocked firmly into place to run the regular stationary farm machinery. hydraulic ram the hydraulic ram is a machine that gets its power from the momentum of running water. a ram consists of a pipe of large diameter, an air chamber and another pipe of small diameter, all connected by means of valves to encourage the flow of water in two different directions. a supply of running water with a fall of at least two feet is run through a pipe several inches in diameter reaching from above the dam to the hydraulic ram, where part of the flow enters the air chamber of the ram. near the foot of the large pipe, or at what might be called the tailrace, is a peculiarly constructed valve that closes when running water starts to pass through it. when the large valve closes the water stops suddenly, which causes a back-pressure sufficient to lift a check-valve to admit a certain amount of water from the large supply pipe into the air-chamber of the ram. after the flow of water is checked, the foot-valve drops of its own weight, which again starts the flow of water through the large pipe, and the process is repeated a thousand or a million times, each time forcing a little water through the check-valve into the air chamber of the ram. the water is continually being forced out into the small delivery pipe in a constant stream because of the steady pressure of the imprisoned air in the air-chamber which acts as a cushion. this imprisoned air compresses after each kick and expands between kicks in a manner intended to force a more or less steady flow of water through the small pipe. the air pressure is maintained by means of a small valve that permits a little air to suck in with the supply of water. [illustration: figure .--hydraulic ram. the upper drawing shows how to install the ram. the lower drawing is a detail section through the center of the ram. water flows downhill through the supply pipe. the intermittent action of the valve forces a portion of the water through another valve into the air-chamber. air pressure forces this water out through delivery pipe. another valve spills the waste water over into the tailrace. an automatic air-valve intermittently admits air into the air-chamber.] water may be conveyed uphill to the house by this means, sometimes to considerable distance. the size of the ram and its power to lift water depends upon the amount of water at the spring and the number of feet of fall. in laying the small pipe, it should be placed well down under ground to keep it cool in summer and to bury it beyond the reach of winter frost. at the upper end where the water is delivered a storage tank with an overflow is necessary, so the water can run away when not being drawn for use. a constant supply through a ram demands a constant delivery. it is necessary to guard the water intake at the dam. a fence protection around the supply pool to keep live-stock or wild animals out is the first measure of precaution. a fine screen surrounding the upper end of the pipe that supplies water to the ram is necessary to keep small trash from interfering with the valves. the farm tractor farm tractors are becoming practical. most theories have had a try out, the junk pile has received many failures and the fittest are about to survive. now, if the manufacturers will standardize the rating and the important parts and improve their selling organizations the whole nation will profit. the successful tractors usually have vertical engines with four cylinders. they are likely to have straight spur transmission gears, and a straight spur or chain drive, all carefully protected from dust. and they will have considerable surface bearing to avoid packing the soil. some tractors carry their weight mostly upon the drive wheels--a principle that utilizes weight to increase traction. other tractors exert a great deal of energy in forcing a small, narrow front steering-wheel through the soft ground. any farmer who has pushed a loaded wheelbarrow knows what that means. some kerosene tractors require a large percentage of gasoline. the driver may be as much to blame as the engine. but it should be corrected. [illustration: figure .--tractor transmission gear. spur gears are the most satisfactory for heavy work.] manufacturers should do more educational work and talk less about the wonderfully marvelous and marvelously wonderful. salesmen should study mechanics instead of oratory. tractor efficiency should be rated practically instead of theoretically. the few actual reports of performance have emanated from tests with new machines in the hands of trained demonstrators. manufacturers include belt power work among the virtues of farm tractors, and they enumerate many light jobs, such as running a cream-separator, sawing wood, pumping water and turning the fanning-mill. well, a farm tractor can do such work--yes. so can an elephant push a baby carriage. if manufacturers would devise a practical means of using electricity as an intermediary, and explain to farmers how a day's energy may be stored in practical working batteries to be paid out in a week, then we could understand why we should run a horsepower engine to operate a cream-separator one hour at night and another hour in the morning. [illustration: figure .--straight transmission gear, forward and chain drive reverse, for traction engine.] chapter iv driven machines farm waterworks every farm has its own water supply. some are very simple, others are quite elaborate. it is both possible and practical for a farmer to have his own tap water under pressure on the same plan as the city. when good water is abundant within feet of the surface of the ground the farm supply may be had cheaper and better than the city. even deep well pumping is practical with good machinery rightly installed. farm waterworks should serve the house and the watering troughs under a pressure of at least pounds at the ground level. the system should also include water for sprinkling the lawn and for irrigating the garden. if strawberries or other intensive money crops are grown for market there should be sufficient water in the pipes to save the crop in time of drouth. these different uses should all be credited to the farm waterworks system pro rata, according to the amounts used by the different departments of the farm. the books would then prove that the luxury of hot and cold running water in the farmhouse costs less than the average city family pays. _three systems of water storage._--the first plan adopted for supplying water under pressure on farms was the overhead tank. the water was lifted up into the tank by a windmill and force pump. because wind power proved rather uncertain farmers adopted the gasoline engine, usually a two horsepower engine. the second water storage plan was the air-tight steel water-tank to be placed in the cellar or in a pit underground. the same pump and power supplies the water for this system, but it also requires an air-pump to supply pressure to force the water out of the tank. the third plan forces the water out of the well by air pressure, as it is needed for use. no water pump is required in this system; the air-compressor takes its place. [illustration: figure .--the farm pump. it superseded the iron-bound bucket, the slimy old bucket, the malaria-lined bucket that hung in the well, but it wore out the women. oil was never wasted on its creaking joints. later it was fitted with a stuffing-box and an air-chamber, and the plunger was hitched to the windmill. to the right are shown two kinds of post-hole diggers. the upper digger is sometimes used to clear the fine earth out of the bottom of a hole dug by the lower digger.] _suction-pumps._--the word suction, when applied to pumps, is a misnomer. the principle upon which such pumps work is this: the pump piston drives the air out of the pump cylinder which produces a vacuum. the pressure of the atmosphere is about fifteen pounds per square inch of surface. this pressure forces sufficient water up through the so-called suction pipe to fill the vacuum in the cylinder. the water is held in the cylinder by foot-valves or clack-valves. as the piston again descends into the cylinder it plunges into water instead of air. a foot-valve in the bottom end of the hollow piston opens while going down and closes to hold and lift the water as the piston rises. water from the well is forced by atmospheric pressure to follow the piston and the pump continues to lift water so long as the joints remain air-tight. the size of piston and length of stroke depend on the volume of water required, the height to which it must be lifted and the power available. a small power and a small cylinder will lift a small quantity of water to a considerable height. but increasing the volume of water requires a larger pump and a great increase in the power to operate it. the size of the delivery pipe has a good deal to do with the flow of water. when water is forced through a small pipe at considerable velocity, there is a good deal of friction. often the amount of water delivered is reduced because the discharge pipe is too small. doubling the diameter of a pipe increases its capacity four times. square turns in the discharge pipe are obstructions; either the pipe must be larger or there will be a diminished flow of water. some pump makers are particular to furnish easy round bends instead of the ordinary right-angled elbows. a great many pumps are working under unnecessary handicaps, simply because either the supply pipe or discharge pipe is not in proportion to the capacity of the pump, or the arrangement of the pipes is faulty. [illustration: figure .--hand force-pump. showing two ways of attaching wooden handles to hand force-pumps.] [illustration: figure .--rotary pump. twin water-chamber rotary pumps take water through the bottom and divide the supply, carrying half of the stream around to the left and the other half to the right. the two streams meet and are discharged at the top.] [illustration: figure .--section of rotary pump.] _rotary pumps._--a twin-chamber rotary pump admits water at the bottom of the chamber and forces it out through the top. intermeshing cogs and rotary cams revolve outward from the center at the bottom, as shown by the arrows in figure . the stream of water is divided by the cams, as it enters the supply pipe at the bottom, and half of the water is carried each way around the outsides of the double chamber. these streams of water meet at the top of the chamber, where they unite to fill the discharge pipe. these pumps operate without air-chambers and supply water in a continuous stream. they may be speeded up to throw water under high pressure for fire fighting, but for economy in ordinary use the speed is kept down to revolutions, or thereabout. rotary pumps are also made with one single water chamber cylinder. the pump head, or shaft, is placed a little off center. a double end cam moves the water. both ends of the cam fit against the bore of the cylinder. it works loosely back and forth through a slotted opening in the pump head. as the shaft revolves the eccentric motion of the double cam changes the sizes of the water-pockets. the pockets are largest at the intake and smallest at the discharge. rotary pumps are comparatively cheap, as regards first cost, but they are not economical of power. in places where the water-table is near the surface of the ground they will throw water in a very satisfactory manner. but they are more used in refineries and factories for special work, such as pumping oil and other heavy liquids. _centrifugal pumps._--the invention and improvement of modern centrifugal pumps has made the lifting of water in large quantities possible. these pumps are constructed on the turbine principle. water is lifted in a continuous stream by a turbine wheel revolving under high speed. water is admitted at the center and discharged at the outside of the casing. centrifugal pumps work best at depths ranging from twenty to sixty feet. manufacturers claim that farmers can afford to lift irrigation water sixty feet with a centrifugal pump driven by a kerosene engine. the illustrations show the principle upon which the pump works and the most approved way of setting pumps and engines. centrifugal pumps usually are set in dry wells a few feet above the water-table. while these pumps have a certain amount of suction, it is found that short supply pipes are much more efficient. where water is found in abundance within from to feet of the surface, and the wells may be so constructed that the pull-down, or the lowering of the water while pumping is not excessive, then it is possible to lift water profitably to irrigate crops in the humid sections. irrigation in such cases, in the east, is more in the nature of insurance against drouth. valuable crops, such as potatoes and strawberries, may be made to yield double, or better, by supplying plenty of moisture at the critical time in crop development. it is a new proposition in eastern farming that is likely to develop in the near future. [illustration: figure .--centrifugal pump. this style of pump is used in many places for irrigation. it runs at high speed, which varies according to the size of the pump. it takes water at the center and discharges it at the outside of the casing.] [illustration: figure .--air pressure pump. pumping water by air pressure requires a large air container capable of resisting a pressure of pounds per square inch. this illustration shows the pressure tank, engine, air-compressor, well and submerged pump.] _air pressure pump._--instead of pumping water out of the well some farmers pump air into the well to force the water out. a double compartment cylindrical tank is placed in the water in the well. these tanks are connected with the farm water distributing system to be carried in pipes to the house and to the stock stables. air under a pressure of from to pounds per square inch is stored in a steel tank above ground. small gas-pipes connect this air pressure tank with the air-chamber of the air-water tank in the well. a peculiar automatic valve regulates the air so that it enters the compartment that is filled, or partly filled, with water, and escapes from the empty one so the two compartments work together alternately. that is, the second chamber fills with water, while the first chamber is being drawn upon. then the first chamber fills while the second is being emptied. this system will work in a well as small as eight inches in diameter, and to a depth of feet. it might be made to work at a greater depth, but it seems hardly practical to do so for the reason that, after allowing for friction in the pipes, pounds of air pressure is necessary to lift water feet. an air tank of considerable size is needed to provide storage for sufficient air to operate the system without attention for several days. careful engineering figures are necessary to account for the different depths of farm wells, and the various amounts of water and power required. for instance: the air tank already contains , gallons of air at atmospheric pressure--then: forcing , gallons of atmospheric air into a , -gallon tank will give a working pressure of pounds per square inch; , gallons, pounds; , gallons, pounds, and so on. therefore, a pressure of pounds in a , -gallon tank ( inches by feet) would require , gallons of free atmosphere, in addition to the original , gallons, and the tank would then contain , gallons of compressed air under a working pressure of pounds per square inch. a one cylinder compressor inches by inches, operating at a speed of r.p.m. would fill this tank to a working pressure of pounds in about minutes. one gallon of air will deliver one gallon of water at the faucet. but the air must have the same pressure as the water, and there must be no friction. thus, one gallon of air under a working pressure of forty-five pounds, will, theoretically, deliver one gallon of water to a height of feet. but it takes three gallons of free air to make one gallon of compressed air at forty-five pounds pressure. if the lift is feet, then , gallons of air under a pressure of forty-five pounds will theoretically deliver , gallons of water. practically, the air tank would have to be loaded to a very much greater pressure to secure the , gallons of water before losing the elasticity of the compressed air. if one thousand gallons of water is needed on the farm every day, then the air pump would have to work about one hour each morning. this may not be less expensive than pumping the water directly, but it offers the advantage of water fresh from the well. pure air pumped into the well tends to keep the water from becoming stale. [illustration: figure .--( ) single-gear pump jack. this type of jack is used for wells from to feet deep. ( ) double-gear, or multiple-gear pump jack. this is a rather powerful jack designed for deep wells or for elevating water into a high water-tank.] [illustration: figure .--post pump jack. this arrangement is used in factories when floor space is valuable. the wide-face driving-pulley is shown to the left.] [illustration: figure .--three jacks for different purposes. at the left is a reverse motion jack having the same speed turning either right or left. the little jack in the center is for light work at high belt speed. to the right is a powerful jack intended for slow speeds such as hoisting or elevating grain.] [illustration: figure .--speed jack, for reducing speed between engine and tumbling rod or to increase speed between tumbling rod and the driven machine.] [illustration: figure .--the speed jack on the left is used either to reduce or increase tumbling rod speed and to reverse the motion. the speed jack on the right transfers power either from belt to tumbling rod or reverse. it transforms high belt speed to low tumbling rod speed, or vice versa.] _pump jacks and speed jacks._--farm pumps and speed-reducing jacks are partners in farm pumping. force-pumps should not run faster than forty strokes per minute. considerable power is required to move the piston when the water is drawn from a deep well and forced into an overhead tank. jacks are manufactured which bolt directly to the pump, and there are pumps and jacks built together. a pump jack should have good, solid gearing to reduce the speed. spur-gearing is the most satisfactory. bevel-gears are wasteful of power when worked under heavy loads. power to drive a pump jack is applied to a pulley at least twelve inches in diameter with a four-inch face when belting is used. if a rope power conveyor is used, then pulleys of larger diameters are required to convey the same amount of power. only general terms may be used in describing the farm pump, because the conditions differ in each case. generally speaking, farmers fail to appreciate the amount of power used, and they are more than likely to buy a jack that is too light. light machinery may do the work, but it goes to pieces quicker, while a heavy jack with solid connections will operate the pump year in and year out without making trouble. for increasing or reducing either speed or power some kind of jack is needed. all farm machines have their best speed. a certain number of revolutions per minute will accomplish more and do better work than any other speed. to apply power to advantage speed jacks have been invented to adjust the inaccuracies between driver and driven. irrigation by pumping the annual rainfall in the united states varies in different parts of the country from a few inches to a few feet. under natural conditions some soils get too much moisture and some too little. irrigation is employed to supply the deficiency and drainage, either natural or artificial, carries off the excess. irrigation and drainage belong together. irrigation fills the soil with moisture and drainage empties it. thus, a condition is established that supplies valuable farm plants with both air and moisture. in the drier portions of the united states, nothing of value will grow without irrigation. in the so-called humid districts deficiency of moisture at the critical time reduces the yield and destroys the profit. the value of irrigation has been demonstrated in the west, and the practice is working eastward. [illustration: figure .--centrifugal pump setting. when used for irrigation, centrifugal pumps are set as close to the ground water as practical.] irrigation is the new handmaiden of prosperity. a rainy season is a bountiful one. irrigation supplies the bounty without encouraging destructive fungus diseases. where water is abundant within easy reach, pumping irrigation water is thoroughly practical. improvements in pumps in recent years have increased their capacity and insured much greater reliability. a centrifugal pump is recommended for depths down to feet; beyond this depth the necessity of installing more expensive machinery places the business of pumping for irrigation on a different plane. a centrifugal pump will throw more water with less machinery than any other device, but like all other mechanical inventions, it has its limitations. in figuring economical pumping, the minimum quantity should be at least gallons per minute, because time is an object, and irrigation, if done at all, should cover an area sufficient to bring substantial returns. centrifugal pumps should be placed near the surface of the water in the well. for this reason, a large, dry well is dug down to the level of the water-table and the pump is solidly bolted to a concrete foundation built on the bottom of this well. a supply pipe may be extended any depth below the pump, but the standing water surface in the well should reach within a few feet of the pump. the pump and supply must be so well balanced against each other that the pull-down from pumping will not lower the water-level in the well more than twenty feet below the pump. the nearer the ground water is to the pump the better. the water well below the pump may be bored, or a perforated well pipe may be driven; or several well points may be connected. the kind of well must depend upon the condition of the earth and the nature of the water supply. driven wells are more successful when water is found in a stratum of coarse gravel. before buying irrigation machinery, it is a good plan to test the water supply by temporary means. any good farm pump may be hitched to a gasoline engine to determine if the water supply is lasting or not. permanent pumping machinery should deliver the water on high ground. a main irrigation ditch may be run across the upper end of the field. this ditch should hold the water high enough so it may be tapped at convenient places to run through the corrugations to reach the roots of the plants to be benefited. there are different systems of irrigation designed to fit different soils. corrugations are the cheapest and the most satisfactory when soils are loose enough to permit the water to soak into the soil sideways, as well as to sink down. the water should penetrate the soil on both sides of the corrugations for distances of several inches. corrugations should be straight and true and just far enough apart so the irrigation water will soak across and meet between. some soils will wash or gully out if the fall is too rapid. in such cases it may be necessary to terrace the land by following the natural contour around the ridges so the water may flow gently. where the fall is very slight, that is, where the ground is so nearly level that it slopes away less than six inches in a hundred feet, it becomes necessary to prepare the land by building checks and borders to confine the water for a certain length of time. then it is let out into the next check. in the check and border system the check bank on the lower side has an opening which is closed during the soaking period with a canvas dam. when the canvas is lifted the water flows through and fills the next check. this system is more expensive, and it requires more knowledge of irrigation to get it started, and it is not likely to prove satisfactory in the east. for fruits and vegetables, what is known as the furrow system of irrigation is the most practical. an orchard is irrigated by plowing furrows on each side of each row of trees. the water is turned into these furrows and it runs across the orchard like so many little rivulets. potatoes are irrigated on the same plan by running water through between the rows after the potatoes have been ridged by a double shovel-plow. this plan also works well with strawberries. after the land is prepared for irrigation, the expense of supplying water to a fruit orchard, strawberry patch or potato field is very little compared with the increase in yield. in fact, there are seasons when one irrigation will save the crop and produce an abundant yield, when otherwise it would have been almost a total loss. _overhead spray irrigation._--the most satisfactory garden irrigation is the overhead spray system. posts are set ten feet apart in rows feet apart. water pipes are laid on the tops of the posts and held loosely in position by large staples. these water pipes are perforated by drilling a line of small holes about three feet apart in a straight line along one side of the pipe. the holes are tapped and small brass nozzles are screwed in. the overhead pipes are connected with standpipes at the highest place, generally at the ends of the rows. the pipe-lines are loosely coupled to the standpipes to permit them to roll partly around to direct the hundreds of spray nozzles as needed. [illustration: figure .--overhead irrigation. diagram showing the arrangement of pipes for irrigating one acre of land. the pipes are supported on posts six feet high.] six feet high is sufficient to throw a fine mist or spray twenty-five feet, which is far enough to meet the spray from the next row, so the ground will be completely covered. to do this the pipes are rolled from one side to the other, through a degree arc to throw the spray on both sides. the pipes usually are laid with a grade which follows down the slope of the land. a fall of one foot in fifty is sufficient. water is always admitted at the upper end of each pipe-line to flow down by gravity, assisted by tank pressure. a pressure of about forty pounds is needed to produce a fine spray, and to send it across to meet the opposite jets. the little brass nozzles are drilled with about a one-eighth inch hollow. but the jet opening is small, about no. w. g. this gives a wire-drawn stream that quickly vaporizes when it meets the resistance of the atmosphere. when properly installed a fine misty rain is created, which quickly takes the same temperature as the air, and settles so gently that the most delicate plants are not injured. _quantity of water to use._--good judgment is necessary in applying water to crops in regard to quantity, as well as the time of making application. generally speaking, it is better to wait until the crop really needs moisture. when the pump is started give the crop plenty with the expectation that one irrigation will be sufficient. much depends upon the amount of moisture in the soil; also the kind of crop and weather conditions enter into the problem. on sandy land that is very dry where drainage is good, water may be permitted to run in the corrugations for several days until the ground is thoroughly soaked. when potatoes are forming, or clover is putting down its big root system, a great deal of water is needed. irrigation sufficient to make two inches of rainfall may be used to advantage for such crops under ordinary farming conditions. it is necessary after each irrigation to break the soil crust by cultivation to prevent evaporation. this is just as important after irrigation as it is after a rain shower. also any little pockets that hold water must be carefully drained out, otherwise the crop will be injured by standing water. we are not supposed to have such pockets on land that has been prepared for irrigation. _kind of crops to irrigate._--wheat, oats, barley, etc., may be helped with one irrigation from imminent failure to a wealth of production. but these rainfall grain crops do not come under the general classification that interests the regular irrigation farmer beyond his diversity plans for producing considerable variety. fruits, roots, clover, alfalfa, vegetables and indian corn are money crops under irrigation. certain seed crops yield splendidly when watered. an apple orchard properly cared for and irrigated just at the right time will pay from five hundred to a thousand dollars per acre. small fruits are just as valuable. these successes account for the high prices of irrigated land. in the east and in the great middle west, valuable crops are cut short or ruined by drouth when the fruit or corn is forming. it makes no difference how much rain comes along at other times in the year, if the roots cannot find moisture at the critical time, the yield is reduced often below the profit of raising and harvesting the crop. strawberry blossoms shrivel and die in the blooming when rain fails. irrigation is better than rain for strawberries. strawberries under irrigation may be made to yield more bushels than potatoes under humid conditions. one hundred bushels of strawberries per acre sounds like a fairy tale, but it is possible on rich land under irrigation. the cost of pumping for irrigation, where the well and machinery is used for no other purpose, must be charged up to the crop. the items of expense are interest on the first cost of the pumping machinery, depreciation, upkeep and running expenses. on eastern farms, however, where diversified farming is the business, this expense may be divided among the different lines of work. where live-stock is kept, it is necessary to have a good, reliable water supply for the animals. a reservoir on high ground so water may be piped to the watering troughs and to the house is a great convenience. also the same engine that does the pumping may be used for other work in connection with the farm, so that the irrigation pump engine, instead of lying idle ten or eleven months in the year, may be utilized to advantage and made to earn its keep. well-water contains many impurities. for this reason, it is likely to be valuable for crop growing purposes in a wider sense than merely to supply moisture. well-water contains lime, and lime is beneficial to most soils. it has been noticed that crops grow especially well when irrigated from wells. [illustration: figure .--power transmission. circular motion is converted into reciprocating motion by the different lengths of the two pitman cranks which cause the upper wheel to oscillate. power is carried to a distance by wires. to reduce friction the wires are supported by swinging hangers. sometimes wooden rods are used instead of wires to lessen expansion and contraction.] _house and barns supplied from a reservoir._--a farm reservoir may sometimes be built very cheaply by throwing a dam across a narrow hollow between two hills, or ridges. on other farms, it is necessary to scrape out a hole on the highest ground within reach. for easy irrigation a reservoir is necessary, and it is economical because the pump may work overtime and supply enough water so the irrigation may be done quickly and with sufficient water to make it effective. when the cost of the reservoir can be charged up to the different departments of the business, such as irrigation, live-stock and house use, the cost is divided and the profits are multiplied. _power conveyor._--circular motion is converted into reciprocal motion to operate a pump at a distance from the engine. the short jack crank oscillates the driving pulley to move the conveyor wires back and forth. the distance to which power may be carried is limited by the expansion and contraction of the conveying wires. wooden rods are better under extremes of temperature. where an engine is used night and morning in the dairy house to run a cream separator, this kind of power transmission may be worked to operate the pump at the house. light wire hangers will support the line wires or rods. they should be about three feet in length, made fast at top and bottom to prevent wear. the spring of a no. wire three feet long is sufficient to swing the length of a pump stroke and the friction is practically nothing. electricity on the farm electric current in some sections may be purchased from electric railways or city lighting plants. but the great majority of farms are beyond the reach of high tension transmission cables. in some places three or four farmers may club together and buy a small lighting plant to supply their own premises with both light and power. unless an engineer is employed to run it trouble is sure to follow, because one family does all of the work and others share equally in the benefits. the solution is for each farmer to install a small plant of his own. the proposition is not so difficult as it sounds. two-horsepower plants are manufactured for this very purpose. but there is more to it than buying a dynamo and a few lamp bulbs. a farm electric system should supply power to run all of the light stationary machinery about the farm, and that means storage batteries, and the use of one or more small electric motors. there are several ways to arrange the plant, but to save confusion it is better to study first the storage battery plan and to start with an engine large enough to pump water and run the dynamo at the same time. it is a good way to do two jobs at once--you store water enough in the supply tank to last twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and at the same time you store up sufficient electricity to run the cream-separator for a week. electric power is the only power that is steady enough to get all of the cream. [illustration: figure .--electric power plant. a practical farm generator and storage battery, making a complete farm electric plant that will develop and store electricity for instant use in any or all of the farm buildings.] refrigeration is a profitable way to use electric power. there are small automatic refrigerator machines that maintain low temperatures to preserve food products. this branch of the work may be made profitable. laundry work on the farm was principally hand labor until the small power washers and wringers were invented. now a small electric motor takes the blue out of monday, and the women wear smiles. electric flatirons afford the greatest comfort on tuesday. the proper heat is maintained continually until the last piece is ironed. cooking by electricity is another great success. some women buy separate cooking utensils, such as toasters, chafing dishes and coffee percolators. others invest in a regular electric cooking range at a cost of fifty dollars and feel that the money was well spent. it takes about k.w.h. per month in hot weather to cook by electricity for a family of four. in winter, when heat is more of a luxury, the coal or wood range will save half of the electric current. dishwashing by electricity is another labor-saver three times a day. vacuum cleaners run by electricity take the dust and microbes out of floor rugs with less hand labor than pushing a carpet sweeper. incubators are better heated by electricity than any other way. brooders come under the same class. sewing-machines were operated by electricity in sweatshops years ago--because it paid. farm women are now enjoying the same privilege. electric lighting on the farm is the most spectacular, if not the most interesting result of electric generation in the country. this feature of the subject was somewhat overtaxed by talkative salesmen representing some of the pioneer manufacturers of electric lighting plants, but the business has steadied down. real electric generating machinery is being manufactured and sold on its merits in small units. not many miles from chicago there is an electric lighting plant on a dairy farm that is giving satisfaction. the stables are large and they are managed on the plan of milking early in the morning and again in the middle of the afternoon. the morning work requires a great deal of light in the different stables, more light than ordinary, because the milking is done by machinery. the milking machine air-pump is driven by electricity generated on the farm, the power being supplied by a kerosene engine. electricity on this farm is used in units, separate lines extending to the different buildings. the lighting plant is operated on what is known as the -volt system; the rating costs less to install than some others and the maintenance is less than when a higher voltage is used. i noticed also that there are fewer parts in connection with the plant than in other electric light works that i have examined. technical knowledge of electricity and its behavior under different circumstances is hardly necessary to a farmer, because the manufacturers have simplified the mechanics of electric power and lighting to such an extent that it is only necessary to use ordinary precaution to run the plant to its capacity. at the same time it is just as well to know something about generators, switchboards and the meanings of such terms and names as volt, ampere, battery poles, voltmeter, ammeter, rheostat, discharge switch, underload circuit breaker, false fuse blocks, etc., because familiarity with these names, and the parts they represent gives the person confidence in charging the batteries. such knowledge also supplies a reason for the one principal battery precaution, which is not to use out all of the electricity the batteries contain. those who have electric lighting plants on the farm do not seem to feel the cost of running the plants, because they use the engine for other purposes. generally manufacturers figure about h.p. extra to run a dynamo to supply from to lights. my experience with farm engines is that for ordinary farm work such as driving the cream separator, working the pump and grinding feed, a two-horse power engine is more useful than any other size. farmers who conduct business in the usual way will need a three-horsepower engine if they contemplate adding an electric lighting system to the farm equipment. among the advantages of an electric lighting system is the freedom from care on the part of the women. there are no lamps to clean or broken chimneys to cut a finger, so that when the system is properly installed the only work the women have to do is to turn the switches to throw the lights on or off as needed. the expense in starting a farm electric light plant may be a little more than some other installations, but it seems to be more economical in service when figured from a farmer's standpoint, taking into consideration the fact that he is using power for generating electricity that under ordinary farm management goes to waste. a three-horsepower engine will do the same amount of work with the same amount of gasoline that a two-horsepower engine will do. this statement may not hold good when figured in fractions, but it will in farm practice. also when running a pump or cream separator the engine is capable of doing a little extra work so that the storage batteries may be charged with very little extra expense. on one dairy farm a five-horsepower kerosene engine is used to furnish power for various farm purposes. the engine is belted to a direct-current generator of the shunt-wound type. the generator is wired to an electric storage battery of ampere hour capacity. the battery is composed of a number of separate cells. the cells are grouped together in jars. these jars contain the working parts of the batteries. as each jar of the battery is complete in itself, any one jar may be cut out or another added without affecting the other units. the switchboard receives current either from the battery or from the engine and generator direct. there are a number of switches attached to the switchboard, which may be manipulated to turn the current in any direction desired. some provision should be made for the renewal of electric lamps. old lamps give less light than new ones, and the manufacturers should meet customers on some kind of a fair exchange basis. tungsten lamps are giving good satisfaction for farm use. these lamps are economical of current, which means a reduction of power to supply the same amount of light. the mazda lamp is another valuable addition to the list of electric lamps. the wisconsin _agriculturist_ publishes a list of different uses for electricity on farms. many of the electrical machines are used for special detail work in dairies where cheese or butter is made in quantity. sugar plantations also require small units of power that would not apply to ordinary farming. some of the work mentioned is extra heavy, such as threshing and cutting ensilage. other jobs sound trivial, but they are all possible labor-savers. here is the list: "oat crushers, alfalfa mills, horse groomers, horse clippers, hay cutters, clover cutters, corn shellers, ensilage cutters, corn crackers, branding irons, currying machines, feed grinders, flailing machines, live stock food warmers, sheep shears, threshers, grain graders, root cutters, bone grinders, hay hoists, clover hullers, rice threshers, pea and bean hullers, gas-electric harvesters, hay balers, portable motors for running threshers, fanning-mills, grain elevators, huskers and shredders, grain drying machines, binder motors, wheat and corn grinders, milking machines, sterilizing milk, refrigeration, churns, cream-separators, butter workers, butter cutting-printing, milk cooling and circulating pumps, milk clarifiers, cream ripeners, milk mixers, butter tampers, milk shakers, curd grinders, pasteurizers, bottle cleaners, bottle fillers, concrete mixers, cider mills, cider presses, spraying machines, wood splitters, auto trucks, incubators, hovers, telephones, electric bells, ice cutters, fire alarms, electric vehicles, electro cultures, water supply, pumping, water sterilizers, fruit presses, blasting magnetos, lighting, interior telephones, vulcanizers, pocket flash lights, ice breakers, grindstones, emery wheels, wood saws, drop hammers, soldering irons, glue pots, cord wood saws, egg testers, burglar alarms, bell ringing transformers, devices for killing insects and pests, machine tools, molasses heaters, vacuum cleaners, portable lamps to attract insects, toasters, hot plates, grills, percolators, flatirons, ranges, toilette articles, water heaters, fans, egg boilers, heating pads, dishwashers, washing machines, curling irons, forge blowers." gasoline house lighting gasoline gas for house lighting is manufactured in a small generator by evaporating gasoline into gas and mixing it with air, about per cent gas and per cent air. we are all familiar with the little brass gasoline torch heater that tinners and plumbers use to heat their soldering irons. the principle is the same. there are three systems of using gasoline gas for farmhouse lighting purposes, the hollow wire, tube system, and single lamp system. the hollow wire system carries the liquid gasoline through the circuit in a small pipe called a hollow wire. each lamp on the circuit takes a few drops of gasoline as needed, converts it into gas, mixes the gas with the proper amount of air and produces a fine brilliant light. each lamp has its own little generator and is independent of all other lamps on the line. the tube system of gasoline gas lighting is similar in appearance, but the tubes are larger and look more like regular gas pipes. in the tube system the gas is generated and mixed with air before it gets into the distribution tube, so that lamps do not require separate generators. in the separate lamp system each lamp is separate and independent. each lamp has a small supply of gasoline in the base of the lamp and has a gas generator attached to the burner, which converts the gasoline into gas, mixes it with the proper amount of air and feeds it into the burner as required. farm lanterns are manufactured that work on this principle. they produce a brilliant light. by investigating the different systems of gasoline gas lighting in use in village stores and country homes any farmer can select the system that fits into his home conditions to the best advantage. in one farmhouse the owner wanted gasoline gas street lamps on top of his big concrete gateposts, and this was one reason why he decided to adopt gasoline gas lighting and to use the separate lamp system. acetylene gas acetylene lighting plants are intended for country use beyond the reach of city gas mains or electric cables. carbide comes in lump form in steel drums. it is converted into gas by a generator that is fitted with clock work to drop one or more lumps into water as gas is needed to keep up the pressure. acetylene gas is said to be the purest of all illuminating gases. experiments in growing delicate plants in greenhouses lighted with acetylene seem to prove this claim to be correct. the light also is bright, clear and powerful. the gas is explosive when mixed with air and confined, so that precautions are necessary in regard to using lanterns or matches near the generators. the expense of installing an acetylene plant in a farm home has prevented its general use. wood-saw frames there are a number of makes of saw frames for use on farms, some of which are very simple, while others are quite elaborate. provision usually is made for dropping the end of the stick as it is cut. sometimes carriers are provided to elevate the blocks onto a pile. extension frames to hold both ends of the stick give more or less trouble, because when the stick to be sawed is crooked, it is almost impossible to prevent binding. if a saw binds in the kerf, very often the uniform set is pinched out of alignment, and there is some danger of buckling the saw, so that for ordinary wood sawing it is better to have the end of the stick project beyond the jig. if the saw is sharp and has the right set and the right motion, it will cut the stick off quickly and run free while the end is dropping to the ground. the quickest saw frames oscillate, being supported on legs that are hinged to the bottom of the frame. oscillating frames work easier than sliding frames. sliding frames are sometimes provided with rollers, but roller frames are not steady enough. for cross sawing lumber v-shaped grooves are best. no matter what the feeding device is, it should always be protected by a hood over the saw. the frame should fall back of its own weight, bringing the hood with it, so that the saw is always covered except when actually engaged with the stick. saw-mandrels vary in diameter and length, but in construction they are much alike. for wood sawing the shaft should be - / " or - / " in diameter. the shaft runs in two babbitted boxes firmly bolted to the saw frame. the frame itself should be well made and well braced. root pulper there are root pulpers with concave knives which slice roots in such a way as to bend the slices and break them into thousands of leafy shreds. the principle is similar to bending a number of sheets of paper so that each sheet will slide past the next one. animals do not chew roots when fed in large solid pieces. cattle choke trying to swallow them whole, but they will munch shredded roots with apparent patience and evident satisfaction. american farmers are shy on roots. they do not raise roots in quantities because it requires a good deal of hand labor, but roots make a juicy laxative and they are valuable as an appetizer and they carry mineral. pulped roots are safe to feed and they offer the best mixing medium for crushed grains and other concentrated foods. feed crusher instead of grinding grain for feeding, we have what is known as a crusher which operates on the roller-mill principle. it breaks the grains into flour by crushing instead of grinding. it has the advantage of doing good work quickly. our feed grinding is done in the two-story corncrib and granary. it is one of the odd jobs on the farm that every man likes. the grain is fed automatically into the machine by means of the grain spouts which lead the different kinds of grain down from the overhead bins. the elevator buckets carry the crushed feed back to one of the bins or into the bagger. in either case it is not necessary to do any lifting for the sacks are carried away on a bag truck. we have no use for a scoop shovel except as a sort of big dustpan to use with the barn broom. stump puller pulling stumps by machinery is a quick operation compared with the old time methods of grubbing, chopping, prying and burning that our forefathers had on their hands. modern stump pulling machines are small affairs compared with the heavy, clumsy things that were used a few years ago. some of the new stump pullers are guaranteed to clear an acre a day of ordinary stumpage. this, of course, must be a rough estimate, because stumps, like other things, vary in numbers, size and condition of soundness. some old stumps may be removed easily while others hang to the ground with wonderful tenacity. there are two profits to follow the removal of stumps from a partially cleared field. the work already put on the land has in every case cost considerable labor to get the trees and brush out of the way. the land is partially unproductive so long as stumps remain. for this reason, it is impossible to figure on the first cost until the stumps are removed to complete the work and to put the land in condition to raise machine made crops. when the stumps are removed, the value of the land either for selling or for farming purposes is increased at once. whether sold or farmed, the increasing value is maintained by cropping the land and securing additional revenue. there are different ways of removing stumps, some of which are easy while others are difficult and expensive. one of the easiest ways is to bore a two-inch auger hole diagonally down into the stump; then fill the auger hole with coal-oil and let it remain for some weeks to soak into the wood. large stumps may be bored in different directions so the coal-oil will find its way not only through the main part of the stumps but down into the roots. this treatment requires that the stumps should be somewhat dry. a stump that is full of sap has no room for coal-oil, but after the sap partially dries out, then coal oil will fill the pores of the wood. after the stump is thoroughly saturated with coal-oil, it will burn down to the ground, so that the different large roots will be separated. sometimes the roots will burn below plow depth, but a good heavy pair of horses with a grappling hook will remove the separated roots. [illustration: figure .--the oldest farm hoist. the first invention for elevating a heavy object was a tripod made of three poles tied together at the top with thongs of bark or rawhide. when hunters were lucky enough to kill a bear, the tripod elevator was erected over the carcass with the lower ends of the poles spread well apart to lower the apex. the gambrel was inserted under the hamstrings and attached to the top of the tripod. as the skinning of the animal proceeded the feet of the tripod were moved closer together. by the time the head was cut off the carcass would swing clear.] dynamite often is used to blow stumps to pieces, and the work is not considered dangerous since the invention of safety devices. in some sections of the country where firewood is valuable, dynamite has the advantage of saving the wood. an expert with dynamite will blow a stump to pieces so thoroughly that the different parts are easily worked into stove lengths. pitch-pine stumps have a chemical value that was not suspected until some fellows got rich by operating a retort. farm elevating machinery many handy and a few heavy elevators are being manufactured to replace human muscle. the simple tripod beef gin was familiar to the early settlers and it is still in use. when a heavy animal was killed for butchering, the small ends of three poles were tied together to form a tripod over the carcass. the feet of the tripod were placed wide apart to raise the apex only a few feet above the animal. after the gambrel was inserted and attached the feet of the tripod were moved gradually closer together as the skinning proceeded, thus elevating the carcass to swing clear of the ground. _grain elevators._--as a farm labor-saver, machinery to elevate corn into the two-story corncrib and grain into the upper bins is one of the newer and more important farming inventions. with a modern two-story corncrib having a driveway through the center, a concrete floor and a pit, it is easy to dump a load of grain or ear corn by raising the front end of the wagon box without using a shovel or corn fork. after the load is dumped into the pit a boy can drive a horse around in a circle while the buckets carry the corn or small grain and deliver it by spout into the different corncribs or grain bins. there are several makes of powerful grain elevating machines that will do the work easily and quickly. the first requisite is a building with storage overhead, and a convenient place to work the machinery. some of the elevating machines are made portable and some are stationary. some of the portable machines will work both ways. usually stationary elevators are placed in vertical position. some portable elevators may be operated either vertically or on an incline. such machines are adaptable to different situations, so the corn may be carried up into the top story of a farm grain warehouse or the apparatus may be hauled to the railway station for chuting the grain or ear corn into a car. it depends upon the use to be made of the machinery whether the strictly stationary or portable elevator is required. to unload usually some kind of pit or incline is needed with any kind of an elevator, so the load may be dumped automatically quickly from the wagon box to be distributed by carrying buckets at leisure. [illustration: figure .--portable grain elevator filling a corncrib. the same rig is taken to the railway to load box cars. the wagon is unloaded by a lifting jack. it costs from c to - / c per bushel to shovel corn by hand, but the greatest saving is in time.] some elevators are arranged to take grain slowly from under the tailboard of a wagon box. the tailrod is removed and the tailboard raised half an inch or an inch, according to the capacity of the machinery. the load pays out through the opening as the front of the wagon is gradually raised, so the last grain will discharge into the pit or elevator hopper of its own weight. technical building knowledge and skill is required to properly connect the building and elevating machinery so that the two will work smoothly together. there are certain features about the building that must conform to the requirements and peculiarities of the elevating machinery. the grain and ear corn are both carried up to a point from which they will travel by gravity to any part of the building. the building requires great structural strength in some places, but the material may be very light in others. hence, the necessity of understanding both building and machinery in order to meet all of the necessary technical requirements. chapter v working the soil importance of plowing [illustration: figure .--heavy disk plow. a strong four-horse disk implement for breaking stumpy ground or to tear tough sod into bits before turning under with a moldboard.] plowing is a mechanical operation that deals with physics, chemistry, bacteriology and entomology. the soil is the farmer's laboratory; his soil working implements are his mechanical laboratory appliances. a high order of intelligence is required to merge one operation into the next to take full advantage of the assistance offered by nature. the object of plowing and cultivation is to improve the mechanical condition of the soil, to retain moisture, to kill insects and to provide a suitable home for the different kinds of soil bacteria. there are aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, also nitrogen-gathering bacteria and nitrifying bacteria which are often loosely referred to as azotobacter species. few of us are on intimate terms with any of them, but some of us have had formal introductions through experiments and observation. [illustration: figure .--sulky plow. this is a popular type of riding plow. it is fitted with a rolling coulter.] the mechanics of plowing _walking plow._--the draft of a walking plow may be increased or diminished by the manner of hitch. it is necessary to find the direct line of draft between the work performed and the propelling force. the clevis in the two-horse doubletree, or the three-horse evener and the adjusting clevis in the end of the plow-beam with the connecting link will permit a limited adjustment. the exact direction that this line takes will prove out in question. the walking plow should not have a tendency to run either in or out, neither too deep nor too shallow. for the proper adjustment as to width and depth of furrow, the plow should follow the line of draft in strict obedience to the pull so that it will keep to the furrow on level ground a distance of several feet without guidance from the handles. in making the adjustment it is first necessary to see that the plow itself is in good working order. all cutting edges such as share, coulter or jointer must be reasonably sharp and the land slip in condition as the makers intended. [illustration: figure .--disk plow. less power is required to plow with a disk, but it is a sort of cut and cover process. the disk digs trenches narrow at the bottom. there are ridges between the little trenches that are not worked.] [illustration: figure .--three-horse and four-horse eveners. this kind of evener hitches the horses closer to the load than some others and they are easier to handle than the spread out kinds. the four-horse rig requires the best horses in the middle.] all plows should have a leather pocket on the side of the beam to carry a file. a -inch bastard file with a good handle is the most satisfactory implement for sharpening the cutting edges of a plow in the fields. a good deal depends on the character of the soil and its condition of dryness, but generally speaking, it pays to do a little filing after plowing a half mile of furrow. if the horses are doing their duty, a little rest at the end of the half mile is well earned. the plowman can put in the time to advantage with the file and the next half mile will go along merrily in consequence. no farmer would continue to chop wood all day without whetting his axe, but, unfortunately, plowmen often work from morning till night without any attempt to keep the cutting edges of their plows in good working order. _riding plow._--the riding plow in lifting and turning the furrow slice depends a good deal on the wheels. the action of the plow is that of a wedge with the power pushing the point, the share and the moldboard between the furrow slices and the land side and the furrow bottom. there is the same friction between the moldboard and the furrow slice as in the case of the walking plow, but the wheels are intended to materially reduce the pressure on the furrow bottom and against the land side. plow wheels are intended to relieve the draft in this respect because wheels roll much easier than the plow bottom can slide with the weight of the work on top. the track made in the bottom of the furrow with the walking plow shows plainly the heavy pressure of the furrow slice on the moldboard by the mark of the slip. to appreciate the weight the slip carries, an interesting experiment may be performed by loading the walking plow with weights sufficient to make the same kind of a mark when the plow is not turning a furrow. one advantage in riding plows in addition to the relief of such a load is less packing of the furrow bottom. on certain soils when the moisture is just sufficient to make the subsoil sticky, a certain portion of the furrow bottom is cemented by plow pressure so that it becomes impervious to the passage of moisture either up or down. the track of a plow wheel is less injurious. [illustration: figure .--three-section, spike-tooth harrow. the harrow is made straight, but the hitch is placed over to one side to give each tooth a separate line of travel.] [illustration: figure .--harrow sled long enough to hold a four-section harrow.] plow wheels should stand at the proper angle to the pressure with especial reference to the work performed. wheels should be adjusted with an eye single to the conditions existing in the furrow. some wheel plows apparently are especially built to run light like a wagon above ground regardless of the underground work required of them. [illustration: figure .--corn cultivator. a one-row, riding-disk cultivator. the ridges are smoothed by the spring scrapers to leave an even surface to prevent evaporation.] axles should hang at right angles to the line of lift so accurately as to cause the wheels to wear but lightly on the ends of the hubs. mistakes in adjustment show in the necessity of keeping a supply of washers on hand to replace the ones that quickly wear thin. in this respect a good deal depends on the sand-bands at the ends of the hubs. plow wheels are constantly lifting gritty earth and dropping it on the hubs. there is only one successful way to keep sand out of the journals and that is by having the hubs, or hub ferrules, extend well beyond the bearings. plow wheel hub extensions should reach two inches beyond the journal both at the large end of the hub and at the nut or linchpin end. some plow wheels cut so badly that farmers consider oil a damage and they are permitted to run dry. this is not only very wasteful of expensive iron but the wheels soon wabble to such an extent that they no longer guide the plow, in which case the draft may be increased enormously. [illustration: figure .--a combination riding and walking cultivator, showing fenders attached to protect young plants the first time through. the two bull tongues shown are for use in heavy soils or when deeper digging is necessary.] _scotch plows._--when the long, narrow scotch sod plows are exhibited at american agricultural fairs they attract a good deal of attention and no small amount of ridicule from american farmers because of the six or seven inch furrows they are intended to turn. in this country we are in too much of a hurry to spend all day plowing three-fourths of an acre of ground. intensive farming is not so much of an object with us as the quantity of land put under cultivation. those old-fashioned scotch plows turn a furrow about two-thirds of the way over, laying the sod surface at an angle of about ° to the bottom of the furrow. the sharp comb cut by the coulter and share stands upright so that a sod field when plowed is marked in sharp ridges six or seven inches apart, according to the width of the furrow. edges of sod show in the bottoms of the corrugations between these little furrow ridges. when the rains come the water is held in these grooves and it finds its way down the whole depth of the furrow slice carrying air with it and moistening every particle of trash clear to the bottom of the furrow. such conditions are ideal for the work of the different forms of bacteria to break down plant fibre contained in the roots and trash and work it into humus, which is in turn manipulated by other forms of soil bacteria to produce soil water which is the only food of growing plants. _jointer plows._--american plow makers also have recognized the necessity of mixing humus with soil in the act of plowing. to facilitate the process and at the same time turn a wide furrow, the jointer does fairly good work when soil conditions are suitable. the jointer is a little plow which takes the place of the coulter and is attached to the plow-beam in the same manner. the jointer turns a little furrow one inch or two inches deep and the large plow following after turns a twelve-inch or fourteen-inch furrow slice flat over, throwing the little jointer furrow in the middle of the furrow bottom in such a way that the big furrow breaks over the smaller furrow. if the work is well done, cracks as wide as a man's hand and from three to five inches deep are left all over the field. these cracks lead air and moisture to rot the trash below. this is a much quicker way of doing a fairly good job of plowing. such plows loosen the soil and furnish the conditions required by nature; and they may be operated with much less skill than the old-fashioned narrow-furrowed scotch plows. good plowing requires first that the soil be in proper condition to plow, neither too dry nor too wet, but no man can do good plowing without the proper kind of plow to fit the soil he is working with. plowing by tractor under present conditions farm tractors are not intended to replace horse power entirely but to precede horses to smooth the rough places that horses may follow with the lighter machines to add the finishing touches. light tractors are being made, and they are growing in popularity, but the real business of the farm tractor is to do the heavy lugging--the work that kills horses and delays seeding until the growing season has passed. the actual power best suited to the individual farm can only be determined by the nature of the land and the kind of farming. in the middle west where diversified farming is practiced, the - and the - sizes seem to be the most satisfactory, and this is without regard to the size of the farm. the preponderance of heavy work will naturally dictate the buying of a tractor heavier than a - . the amount of stationary work is a factor. in certain communities heavy farm tractors are made to earn dividends by running threshing machines after harvest, silo fillers in the fall and limestone crushers in the winter. here is a classified list of jobs the medium size farm tractor is good for: clearing the land--pulling up bushes by the roots, tearing out hedges, pulling stumps, grubbing, pulling stones. preparing seed bed and seeding--plowing, disking, crushing clods, pulling a land plane, rolling, packing, drilling, harrowing. harvesting--mowing, pulling grain binders, pulling potato digger. belt work--hay baling, corn shelling, heavy pumping for irrigation, grinding feed, threshing, clover hulling, husking and shredding, silo filling, stone crushing. road work--grading, dragging, leveling, ditching, hauling crops. miscellaneous--running portable sawmill, stretching wire fencing, ditch digging, manure spreading. generally speaking, however, the most important farm tractor work is preparing the seed-bed thoroughly and quickly while the soil and weather conditions are the best. and the tractor's ability to work all day and all night at such times is one of its best qualifications. to plow one square mile, or acres, with a walking plow turning a twelve-inch furrow, a man and team must walk , miles. the gang-plow has always been considered a horse killer, and, when farmers discovered that they could use oil power to save their horses, many were quick to make the change. it requires approximately horsepower hours to turn an acre of land with horses. at a speed of two miles, a team with one plow in ten hours will turn two acres. to deliver the two horsepower required to do this work, they must travel feet per minute and exert a continuous pull of pounds or . pounds per horse. one horsepower equals a pull of , pounds, moved one foot per minute. two-mile speed equals two times , or , feet per hour, or feet per minute. sixty-six thousand divided by equals foot pounds pull per minute. one horsepower is absorbed in feet of furrow. horse labor costs, according to government figures, - / cents per hour per horse. on this basis ten hours' work will be $ . , which is the average daily cost of each horse. an average illinois diversified farm of acres would be approximately as follows: fifty acres of corn, acres of oats and wheat, acres of hay, acres of rough land, pasture, orchard, building and feed lots. this average farm supports six work horses or mules and one colt. according to figures taken from farm work reports submitted by many different corn belt farmers, the amount of horse-work necessary to do this cropping would figure out as follows: fifty acres of corn land for plowing, disking, harrowing, planting, cultivating and harvesting would amount to a total of , horsepower hours. thirty acres of wheat would require a total of horsepower hours. twenty acres of hay would require horsepower hours. in round figures, , horsepower hours at - / cents would amount to $ . . elaborate figures have been worked out theoretically to show that this work can be done by an - farm tractor in - / days at a cost for kerosene fuel and lubricating oil of $ . per day. adding interest, repairs and depreciation, brings this figure up to about $ . per day, or a total of $ . for the job. no account is kept of man power in caring for either the horses or the tractor. the actual man labor on the job, however, figures - / days less for the tractor than for horses. we should remember that actual farm figures are used for the cost of horse work. such figures are not available for tractor work. the cost of plowing with a traction engine depends upon so many factors that it is difficult to make any definite statement. it depends upon the condition of the ground, size of the tractor, the number of plows pulled, and the amount of fuel used. an - horsepower tractor, for instance, burning from to gallons of low grade kerosene per ten hour day and using one gallon of lubricating oil, costs about $ . per ten hours work. pulling two -inch plows and traveling miles per day, the tractor will plow . acres at a fuel and an oil cost of about cents per acre. pulling three -inch plows, it will turn . acres at a cost for fuel and oil of about cents an acre. the kind and condition of soil is an important factor in determining the tractor cost of plowing. comparison between the average horse cost and the average tractor cost suggests very interesting possibilities in favor of tractor plowing under good management. aside from the actual cost in dollars we should also remember that no horse gang can possibly do the quality of work that can be accomplished by an engine gang. anxiety to spare the team has cut a big slice off the profits of many a farmer. he has often plowed late on account of hard ground, and he has many times allowed a field to remain unplowed on account of worn-out teams. under normal conditions, late plowing never produces as good results as early plowing. many a farmer has fed and harnessed by the light of the lantern, gone to the field and worked his team hard to take advantage of the cool of the morning. with the approach of the hot hours of midday, the vicious flies sapping the vitality from his faithful team, he has eased up on the work or quit the job. in using the tractor for plowing, there are none of these distressing conditions to be taken into consideration, nothing to think of but the quality of work done. it is possible to plow deep without thought of the added burden. deep plowing may or may not be advisable. but where the soil will stand it, deep plowing at the proper time of year, and when done with judgment, holds moisture better and provides more plant food. the pull power required to plow different soils varies from about three pounds per square inch of furrow for light sand up to twenty pounds per square inch of furrow for gumbo. the draft of a plow is generally figured from clover sod, which averages about seven pounds per square inch. suppose a plow rig has two -inch bottoms, and the depth to be plowed is six inches. a cross section of each plow is therefore by inches, or square inches. twice this for two bottoms is square inches. since, in sandy soil, the pressure per square inch is three pounds, therefore times pounds equals pounds, the draft in sandy soil. times pounds equals , pounds, the draft in clover sod. times pounds equals , pounds, the draft in clay sod. the success of crop growing depends upon the way the seed-bed is prepared. the final preparation of the seed-bed can never be thoroughly well done unless the ground is properly plowed to begin with. it is not sufficient to root the ground over or to crowd it to one side but the plow must really turn the furrow slice in a uniform, systematic manner and lay it bottom side uppermost to receive the beneficial action of the air, rain and sunshine. the moldboard of a plow must be smooth in order to properly shed the earth freely to make an easy turn-over. the shape of the shear and the forward part of the moldboard is primarily that of a wedge, but the roll or upper curve of the moldboard changes according to soil texture and the width and depth of furrow to be turned. moldboards also differ in size and shape, according to the kind of furrow to be turned. sometimes in certain soils a narrow solid furrow with a comb on the upper edge is preferable. in other soils a cracked or broken furrow slice works the best. when working our lighter soils a wide furrow turned flat over on top of a jointer furrow breaks the ground into fragments with wide cracks or openings reaching several inches down. between these extremes there are many modifications made for the particular type or texture of the soil to be plowed. we can observe the effect that a rough, or badly scratched, or poorly shaped moldboard has on any kind of soil, especially when passing from gravelly soils to clay. in soil that contains the right amount of moisture, when a plow scours all the time, the top of the furrow slice always has a glazed or shiny appearance. this shows that the soil is slipping off the moldboard easily. in places where the plow does not scour the ground is pushed to one side and packed or puddled on the underside instead of being lifted and turned as it should be. a field plowed with a defective moldboard will be full of these places. such ground cannot have the life to bring about a satisfactory bacteria condition necessary to promote the rapid plant growth that proper plowing gives it. cultivated sandy soils are becoming more acid year after year. we are using lime to correct the acidity, but the use of lime requires better plowing and better after cultivation to thoroughly mix the trash with the earth to make soil conditions favorable to the different kinds of soil bacteria. unless we pay special attention to the humus content of the soil we are likely to use lime to dissolve out plant foods that are not needed by the present crop, and, therefore, cannot be utilized. this is what the old adage means which reads: "lime enricheth the father but impoverisheth the son." when that was written the world had no proper tillage tools and the importance of humus was not even dreamed of. not so many years ago farm plows were made of cast iron. then came the steel moldboard, which was supposed to be the acme of perfection in plow making. steel would scour and turn the furrow in fluffy soils where cast iron would just root along without turning the ground at all. later the art of molding steel was studied and perfected until many grades and degrees of hardness were produced and the shape of the moldboard passed through a thousand changes. the idea all the time was to make plows that would not only scour but polish in all kinds of soil. at the same time they must turn under all of the vegetable growth to make humus, to kill weeds and to destroy troublesome insects. besides these requirements the soil must be pulverized and laid loose to admit both air and moisture. these experiments gradually led up to our present high grade plows of hardened steel and what is known as chilled steel. besides the hardness there are different shapes designed for different soils so that a plow to work well on one farm may need to be quite different from a plow to do the best work in another neighborhood. the furrow slice sliding over a perfect moldboard leaves the surface of the upturned ground as even as the bottom of the furrow. by using a modern plow carefully selected to fit the soil, gravel, sandy, stony or muck soils, or silt loams that contain silica, lime, iron and aluminum oxide can be worked with the right plow to do the best work possible if we use the necessary care and judgment in making the selection. one object of good plowing is to retain moisture in the soil until the growing crop can make good use of it. the ease with which soils absorb, retain or lose moisture, depends mostly on their texture, humus content, physical condition, and surface slope or artificial drainage. it is to the extent that cultivation can modify these factors that more soil water can be made available to the growing crop. there are loose, open soils through which water percolates as through a sieve, and there are tight, gumbo soils which swell when the surface is moistened and become practically waterproof. sandy soils take in water more readily than heavier soils, hence less precaution is necessary to prevent run-off. among the thousands of plows of many different makes there are plenty of good ones. the first consideration in making a selection is a reliable home dealer who has a good business reputation and a thorough knowledge of local soil from a mechanical standpoint. the next consideration is the service the plow will give in proportion to the price. disk harrow for preparing land to receive the seed no other implement will equal a double disk. these implements are made in various sizes and weights of frame. for heavy land, where it is necessary to weight the disk down, an extra heavy frame is necessary. it would probably be advisable to get the extra strong frame for any kind of land, because even in light sand there are times when a disk may be used to advantage to kill quackgrass or to chew up sod before plowing. in such cases it is customary to load on a couple of sacks of sand in addition to the weight of the driver. when a disk is carrying or pounds besides its own weight the racking strains which pull from different directions have a tendency to warp or twist a light frame out of shape. to keep a disk cultivator in good working order it is necessary to go over it thoroughly before doing heavy work. bolts must be kept tight, all braces examined occasionally, and the heavy nuts at the ends of the disk shafts watched. they sometimes loosen and give trouble. the greatest difficulty in running a disk harrow or cultivator is to keep the boxings in good trim. wooden boxes are provided with the implement. it is a good plan to insist on having a full set of eight extra boxes. these wooden boxes may be made on the farm, but it sometimes is difficult to get the right kind of wood. they should be made of hard maple, bored according to size of shaft, and boiled in a good quality of linseed oil. iron boxings have never been satisfactory on a disk implement. wooden ones make enough trouble, but wood has proved better than iron. on most disk cultivators there are oil channels leading to the boxings. these channels are large enough to carry heavy oil. the lighter grades of cylinder oil work the best. it is difficult to cork these oil channels tight enough to keep the sand out. oil and sand do not work well together in a bearing. the manufacturers of these implements could improve the oiling device by shortening the channel and building a better housing for the oil entrance. it is quite a job to take a disk apart to put in new boxings, but, like all other repair work, the disk should be taken into the shop, thoroughly cleaned, repaired, painted and oiled in the winter time. some double disk cultivators have tongues and some are made without. whether the farmer wants a tongue or not depends a good deal on the land. the only advantage is that a tongue will hold the disk from crowding onto the horses when it is running light along the farm lanes or the sides of the fields with the disks set straight. horses have been ruined by having the sharp disks run against them when going down hill. such accidents always are avoidable if a man realizes the danger. unfortunately, farm implements are often used by men who do very little thinking. a spring disk scraper got twisted on a root and was thrown over the top of one of the disks so it scraped against the back of the disk and continued to make a harsh, scraping noise until the proprietor went to see what was wrong. the man driving the disk said he thought something must be the matter with the cultivator, but he couldn't tell for the life of him what it was. when farmers are up against such difficulties it is safer to buy a disk with a tongue. _harrow cart._--a small two-wheel cart with a spring seat overshadowed with a big umbrella is sometimes called a "dude sulky." many sensitive farmers trudge along in the soft ground and dust behind their harrows afraid of such old fogy ridicule. the hardest and most tiresome and disagreeable job at seeding time is following a harrow on foot. riding a harrow cart in the field is conserving energy that may be applied to better purposes after the day's work in the field is finished. knife-edge pulverizers a knife-edge weeder makes the best dust mulch pulverizer for orchard work or when preparing a seed-bed for grain. these implements are sold under different names. it requires a stretch of imagination to attach the word "harrow" to these knife-edge weeders. there is a central bar which is usually a hardwood plank. the knives are bolted to the underside of the plank and sloped backward and outward from the center to the right and left, so that the knife-edges stand at an angle of about ° to the line of draught. this angle is just about sufficient to let tough weeds slip off the edges instead of dragging along. if the knives are sharp, they will cut tender weeds, but the tough ones must be disposed of to prevent choking. the proper use of the knife-edge weeder prevents weeds from growing, but in farm practice, sometimes rainy weather prevents the use of such a tool until the weeds are well established. as a moisture retainer, these knife-edge weeders are superior to almost any other implement. they are made in widths of from eight to twenty feet. the wide ones are jointed in the middle to fit uneven ground. clod crusher the farm land drag, float, or clod crusher is useful under certain conditions on low spots that do not drain properly. such land must be plowed when the main portion of the field is in proper condition, and the result often is that the low spots are so wet that the ground packs into lumps that an ordinary harrow will not break to pieces. such lumps roll out between the harrow teeth and remain on top of the ground to interfere with cultivation. the clod crusher then rides over the lumps and grinds them into powder. unfortunately, clod crushers often are depended on to remedy faulty work on ordinary land that should receive better treatment. many times the clod crusher is a poor remedy for poor tillage on naturally good land that lacks humus. [illustration: figure .--land float. clod crushers and land floats belong to the same tribe. theoretically they are all outlaws, but some practical farmers harbor one or more of them. wet land, containing considerable clay, sometimes forms into lumps which should be crushed.] as ordinarily made, the land float or clod crusher consists of from five to eight planks, two inches thick and ten or twelve inches wide, spiked together in sawtooth position, the edges of the planks being lapped over each other like clapboards in house siding. the planks are held in place with spikes driven through into the crosspieces. farm roller farm rollers are used to firm the soil. sometimes a seed-bed is worked up so thoroughly that the ground is made too loose so the soil is too open and porous. seeds to germinate require that the soil grains shall fit up closely against them. good soil is impregnated with soil moisture, or film moisture as it is often called, because the moisture forms in a film around each little soil grain. in properly prepared soil this film moisture comes in contact with the freshly sown seed. if the temperature is right the seed swells and germination starts. the swelling of the seed brings it in contact with more film moisture attached to other grains of soil so the rootlet grows and pushes out into the soil in search of moisture on its own account. a roller is valuable to press the particles of soil together to bring the freshly sown seeds in direct contact with as many particles of soil as possible. rolling land is a peculiar operation, the value of which is not always understood. the original idea was to benefit the soil by breaking the lumps. it may be of some benefit on certain soils for this purpose, but the land should always be harrowed after rolling to form a dust mulch to prevent the evaporation of moisture. land that has been rolled and left overnight shows damp the next morning, which is sufficient proof that moisture is coming to the surface and is being dissipated into the atmosphere. in the so-called humid sections of the country the great problem is to retain moisture. any farm implement that has a tendency to dissipate soil moisture is a damage to the farmer. probably nine times out of ten a farm roller is a damage to the crop it is intended to benefit because of the manner in which it is used. it is the abuse, not the proper use of a roller, that injures the crop. [illustration: figure .--iron land roller made of boiler plate.] [illustration: figure .--wooden land roller.] corn-planter corn-planters are designed to plant two rows at once. the width of rows may be adjusted from about to inches apart. when seed-corn is carefully graded to size the dropping mechanism will feed out the grains of corn regularly with very few skips. this is one reason why most farmers plant corn in drills. there are other cultural reasons which do not properly belong to this mechanical article. hill dropping is considerably more complicated and difficult. after the feeding mechanism has been adjusted to the size of seed kernels to be planted so it will drop four kernels in a hill then the trip chain is tried out to see if it is right at every joint. dropping in hills is a very careful mechanical proposition. an inch or two out of line either way means a loss of corn in cultivating. in setting the stakes to go and come by, a careful measurement of the field is necessary in order to get the stake lines on both sides of the field parallel. if the ring stakes are driven accurately on the line, then the first hill of corn must come at the same distance from the line in each row. likewise in starting back from the far side of the field the first hill should measure exactly the same distance from the stake line as the first hills on the opposite side of the field. this is easily managed by counting the number of trips between the stake line and the first row of corn hills. if the two lines of stakes on the opposite sides of the field are exactly parallel it is not necessary to move either line in order to get the proper distance to start dropping, but it must be adjusted by measurement, otherwise the corn hills will be dodged. if the corn hills are to space three feet apart then the first row of hills should come nine or twelve feet from the stake line. stakes may be measured and set a certain number of inches from the line to make the distance come right. this careful adjustment brings the hills in line in the rows. when the field is level or gently sloping there is no difficulty in making straight rows so far as check rowing is concerned. when the field is hilly another problem crops up. it is almost impossible to run corn rows along the side of a hill and keep them straight. the planter has a tendency to slide downhill. also the distance across a field is greater where the rows pass over a hill. to keep the rows straight under such conditions allowance must be made for the stretch over the hill as well as for the side thrust of the planter. where a chain marker is used it hangs downhill and a further allowance must be made for that. a good driver will skip an inch or so above the mark so that the rows will be planted fairly straight. this means a good deal more in check rowing than when the corn is planted in drills. the greatest objection to hill planting is the crowding of four corn plants into a space that should be occupied by one plant. a great many experiments have been tried to scatter the seeds in the hill, so far without definite results, except when considerable additional expense is incurred. however, a cone suspended below the end of the dropping tube usually will scatter the seeds so that no two seeds will touch each other. they may not drop and scatter four or five inches apart, but these little cones will help a good deal. they must be accurately adjusted so the point of the cone will center in the middle of the vertical delivery tube, and there must be plenty of room all around the cone so the corn seed kernels won't stick. the braces that hold the cones in place for the same reason must be turned edge up and supported in such a way as to leave plenty of clearance. the idea is that four kernels of corn drop together. they strike the cone and are scattered in different directions. they naturally fly to the outsides of the drill mark which scatters them as wide apart as the width of the shoe that opens the drill. the advantage of scattering seed grains in the hill has been shown by accurate experiments conducted at different times by agricultural colleges. grain drill to know exactly how much seed the grain drill is using it is necessary to know how many acres are contained in the field. most drills have an attachment that is supposed to measure how many acres and fractions of acres the drill covers. farmers know how much grain each sack contains, so they can estimate as they go along, provided the drill register is correct. it is better to provide a check on the drill indicator. have the field measured, then drive stakes along one side, indicating one acre, five acres and ten acres. when the one-acre stake is reached the operator can estimate very closely whether the drill is using more or less seed than the indicator registers. when the five-acre stake is reached another proof is available, and so on across the field. next in importance to the proper working of the drill is straight rows. the only way to avoid gaps is to drive straight. the only way to drive straight is to sight over the wheel that follows the last drill mark. farmers sometimes like to ride on the grain drill, which places the wheel sighting proposition out of the question. a harrow cart may be hitched behind the wheel of the grain drill, but it gives a side draft. the only way to have straight rows and thorough work is to walk behind the end of the drill. this is the proper way to use a drill, anyway, because a tooth may clog up any minute. unless the operator is walking behind the drill he is not in position to see quickly whether every tooth is working properly or not. it is hard work to follow a drill all day long, but it pays at harvest time. it costs just as much to raise a crop of grain that only covers part of the ground, and it seems too bad to miss the highest possible percentage to save a little hard work at planting time. special crop machinery special crops require special implements. after they are provided, the equipment must be kept busy in order to make it pay. if a farmer produces five acres of potatoes he needs a potato cutter, a planter, a riding cultivator, a sprayer that works under high pressure, a digger and a sorter. the same outfit will answer for forty acres, which would reduce the per acre cost considerably. no farmer can afford to grow five acres of potatoes without the necessary machinery, because hand labor is out of the question for work of that kind. on the right kind of soil, and within reach of the right market, potatoes are money-makers. but they must be grown every year because the price of potatoes fluctuates more than any other farm crop. under the right conditions potatoes grown for five years with proper care and good management are sure to make money. one year out of five will break even, two years will make a little money and the other two years will make big money. at the end of five years, with good business management, the potato machinery will be all paid for, and there will be a substantial profit. wheel hoe in growing onions and other truck crops, where the rows are too close together for horse cultivation, the wheel hoe is valuable. in fact, it is almost indispensable when such crops are grown extensively. the best wheel hoes have a number of attachments. when the seed-bed has been carefully prepared, and the soil is fine and loose, the wheel hoe may be used as soon as the young plants show above ground. men who are accustomed to operating a wheel hoe become expert. they can work almost as close to the growing plants with an implement of this kind as they can with an ordinary hand hoe. the wheel hoe, or hand cultivator, works the ground on both sides of the row at once, and it does it quickly, so that very little hand weeding is necessary. chapter vi handling the hay crop revolving hayrake about the first contrivance for raking hay by horse power consisted of a stick eight or ten feet long with double-end teeth running through it, and pointing in two directions. these rakes were improved from time to time, until they reached perfection for this kind of tool. they have since been superseded by spring-tooth horse rakes, except for certain purposes. for pulling field peas, and some kinds of beans, the old style revolving horse rake is still in use. [illustration: figure .--grass hook, for working around borders where the lawn-mower is too clumsy.] [illustration: figure .--revolving hayrake. the center piece is " x " x ' long. the teeth are double enders - / " square and ' " long, which allows " of rake tooth clear of the center timber. every stick in the rake is carefully selected. it is drawn by one horse. if the center teeth stick into the ground either the horse must stop instantly, or the rake must flop over, or there will be a repair job. this invention has never been improved upon for pulling canada peas.] improved revolving horse rakes have a center timber of hardwood about x inches in diameter. the corners are rounded to facilitate sliding over the ground. a rake twelve feet long will have about eighteen double-end teeth. the teeth project about two and one-half feet each way from the center timber. each tooth is rounded up, sled-runner fashion, at each end so it will point forward and slide along over and close to the ground without catching fast. there is an iron pull rod, or long hook, attached to each end of the center bar by means of a bolt that screws into the center of the end of the wooden center shaft, thus forming a gudgeon pin so the shaft can revolve. two handles are fastened by band iron straps to rounded recesses or girdles cut around the center bar. these girdles are just far enough apart for a man to walk between and to operate the handles. wooden, or iron lugs, reach down from the handles with pins projecting from their sides to engage the rake teeth. two pins project from the left lug and three from the right. sometimes notches are made in the lugs instead of pins. notches are better; they may be rounded up to prevent catching when the rake revolves. as the rake slides along, the driver holds the rake teeth in the proper position by means of the handles. when sufficient load has been gathered he engages the upper notch in the right hand lug, releases the left and raises the other sufficient to point the teeth into the ground. the pull of the horse turns the rake over and the man grasps the teeth again with the handle lugs as before. unless the driver is careful the teeth may stick in the ground and turn over before he is ready for it. it requires a little experience to use such a rake to advantage. no better or cheaper way has ever been invented for harvesting canada peas. the only objections are that it shells some of the riper pods and it gathers up a certain amount of earth with the vines which makes dusty threshing. [illustration: figure .--buck rake. when hay is stacked in the field a four-horse buck rake is the quickest way to bring the hay to the stack. the buck rake shown is feet wide and the x teeth are feet long. two horses are hitched to each end and two drivers stand on the ends of the buck rake to operate it. the load is pushed under the horse fork, the horses are swung outward and the buck rake is dragged backward.] hay-tedder the hay-tedder is an english invention, which has been adopted by farmers in rainy sections of the united states. it is an energetic kicker that scatters the hay swaths and drops the hay loosely to dry between showers. hay may be made quickly by starting the tedder an hour behind the mowing machine. it is quite possible to cut timothy hay in the morning and put it in the mow in the afternoon, by shaking it up thoroughly once or twice with the hay-tedder. when clover is mixed with the timothy, it is necessary to leave it in the field until the next day, but the time between cutting and mowing is shortened materially by the use of the tedder. grass cut for hay may be kicked apart in the field early during the wilting process without shattering the leaves. if left too long, then the hay-tedder is a damage because it kicks the leaves loose from the stems and the most valuable feeding material is wasted. but it is a good implement if rightly used. in catchy weather it often means the difference between bright, valuable hay and black, musty stuff, that is hardly fit to feed. hay-tedders are expensive. where two farmers neighbor together the expense may be shared, because the tedder does its work in two or three hours' time. careful farmers do not cut down much grass at one time. the tedder scatters two mowing swaths at once. in fact the mowing machine, hay-tedder and horserake should all fit together for team work so they will follow each other without skips or unnecessary laps. the dividing board of the mowing-machine marks a path for one of the horses to follow and it is difficult to keep him out of it. but two horses pulling a hay-tedder will straddle the open strip between the swaths when the tedder is twice the width of the cut. hay skids [illustration: figure .--hay skid. this hay skid is feet wide and feet long. it is made of / " lumber put together with " carriage bolts--plenty of them. the round boltheads are countersunk into the bottom of the skid and the nuts are drawn down tight on the cleats. it makes a low-down, easy-pitching, hay-hauling device.] [illustration: figure .--hay sling. it takes no longer to hoist pounds of hay than pounds if the rig is large and strong enough. four feet wide by ten feet in length is about right for handling hay quickly. but the toggle must reach to the ends of the rack if used on a wagon.] [illustration: figure .--( ) four-tined derrick fork. ( ) pea guard. an extension guard to lift pea-vines high enough for the sickle is the cleanest way to harvest canada peas. the old-fashioned way of pulling peas with a dull scythe has gone into oblivion. but the heavy bearing varieties still persist in crawling on the ground. if the vines are lifted and cut clean they can be raked into windrows with a spring tooth hayrake. ( ) haystack knife. this style of hay-cutting knife is used almost universally on stacks and in hay-mows. there is less use for hay-knives since farmers adopted power hayforks to lift hay out of a mow as well as to put it in.] hay slips, or hay skids, are used on the old smooth fields in the eastern states. they are usually made of seven-eighths-inch boards dressed preferably on one side only. they are used smooth side to the ground to slip along easily. rough side is up to better hold the hay from slipping. the long runner boards are held together by cross pieces made of inch boards twelve inches wide and well nailed at each intersection with nails well clinched. small carriage bolts are better than nails but the heads should be countersunk into the bottom with the points up. they should be used without washers and the ends of the bolts cut close to the sunken nuts. the front end of the skid is rounded up slightly, sled runner fashion, as much as the boards will bear, to avoid digging into the sod to destroy either the grass roots or crowns of the plants. hay usually is forked by hand from the windrows on to the skids. sometimes hay slings are placed on the skids and the hay is forked on to the slings carefully in layers lapped over each other in such a way as to hoist on to the stack without spilling out at the sides. four hundred to eight hundred pounds makes a good load for one of these skids, according to horse power and unevenness of the ground. they save labor, as compared to wagons, because there is no pitching up. all hoisting is supposed to be done by horse power with the aid of a hay derrick. [illustration: figure .--double harpoon hayfork. this is a large size fork with extra long legs. for handling long hay that hangs together well this fork is a great success. it may be handled as quickly as a smaller fork and it carries a heavy load.] [illustration: figure .--six-tined grapple hayfork. it is balanced to hang as shown in the drawing when empty. it sinks into the hay easily and dumps quickly when the clutch is released.] western hay derricks two derricks for stacking hay, that are used extensively in the alfalfa districts of idaho, are shown in the illustration, figure . the derrick to the left is made with a square base of timbers which supports an upright mast and a horizontal boom. the timber base is sixteen feet square, made of five sticks of timber, each piece being x inches square by feet in length. two of the timbers rest flat on the ground and are rounded up at the ends to facilitate moving the derrick across the stubble ground or along the road to the next hayfield. these sleigh runner timbers are notched on the upper side near each end and at the middle to receive the three cross timbers. the cross timbers also are notched or recessed about a half inch deep to make a sort of double mortise. the timbers are bound together at the intersections by iron u-clamps that pass around both timbers and fasten through a flat iron plate on top of the upper timbers. these flat plates or bars have holes near the ends and the threaded ends of the u-irons pass through these holes and the nuts are screwed down tight. the sleigh runner timbers are recessed diagonally across the bottom to fit the round u-irons which are let into the bottoms of the timbers just enough to prevent scraping the earth when the derrick is being moved. these iron u-clamp fasteners are much stronger and better than bolts through the timbers. [illustration: figure .--idaho hay derricks. two styles of hay derricks are used to stack alfalfa hay in idaho. the drawing to the left shows the one most in use because it is easier made and easier to move. the derrick to the right usually is made larger and more powerful. wire cable is generally used with both derricks because rope wears out quickly. they are similar in operation but different in construction. the base of each is feet square and the high ends of the booms reach up nearly feet. a single hayfork rope, or wire cable, is used; it is about feet long. the reach is sufficient to drop the hay in the center of a stack feet wide.] [illustration: figure .--hay carrier carriage. powerful carriers are part of the new barn. the track is double and the wheels run on both tracks to stand a side pull and to start quickly and run steadily when the clutch is released.] [illustration: figure .--( ) hayfork hitch. a whiffletree pulley doubles the speed of the fork. the knot in the rope gives double power to start the load. ( ) rafter grapple, for attaching an extra pulley to any part of the barn roof.] there are timber braces fitted across the corners which are bolted through the outside timbers to brace the frame against a diamond tendency when moving the derrick. there is considerable strain when passing over uneven ground. it is better to make the frame so solid that it cannot get out of square. the mast is a stick of timber inches square and or feet long. this mast is securely fastened solid to the center of the frame by having the bottom end mortised into the center cross timber at the middle and it is braced solid and held perpendicular to the framework by " x " wooden braces at the corners. these braces are notched at the top ends to fit the corners of the mast and are beveled at the bottom ends to fit flat on top of the timbers. they are held in place by bolts and by strap iron or band iron bands. these bands are drilled with holes and are spiked through into the timbers with four-inch or five-inch wire nails. holes are drilled through the band iron the right size and at the proper places for the nails. the mast is made round at the top and is fitted with a heavy welded iron ring or band to prevent splitting. the boom is usually about feet long. farmers prefer a round pole when they can get it. it is attached to the top of the mast by an iron stirrup made by a blacksmith. this stirrup is made to fit loosely half way around the boom one-third of the way up from the big end, which makes the small end of the boom project feet out from the upper end of the mast. the iron stirrup is made heavy and strong. it has a round iron gudgeon - / " in diameter that reaches down into the top of the mast about inches. the shoulder of the stirrup is supported by a square, flat iron plate which rests on and covers the top of the mast and has the corners turned down. it is made large to shed water and protect the top of the mast. this plate has a hole one and a half inches in diameter in the center through which the stirrup gudgeon passes as it enters the top of the mast. a farm chain, or logging chain, is fastened to the large end of the boom by passing the chain around the boom and engaging the round hook. the grab hook end of the chain is passed around the timber below and is hooked back to give it the right length, which doubles the part of the chain within reach of the man in charge. this double end of the chain is lengthened or shortened to elevate the outer end of the boom to fit the stack. the small outer end of the boom is thus raised as the stack goes up. [illustration: figure .--hay rope pulleys. the housing of the pulley to the left prevents the rope from running off the sheaves.] an ordinary horse fork and tackle is used to hoist the hay. three single pulleys are attached, one to the outer end of the boom, one near the top of the mast, and the other at the bottom of the mast so that the rope passes easily and freely through the three pulleys and at the same time permits the boom to swing around as the fork goes up from the wagon rack over the stack. this swinging movement is regulated by tilting the derrick towards the stack so that the boom swings over the stack by its own weight or by the weight of the hay on the horse fork. usually a wire truss is rigged over the boom to stiffen it. the wire is attached to the boom at both ends and the middle of the wire is sprung up to rest on a bridge placed over the stirrup. [illustration: figure .--gambrel whiffletree, for use in hoisting hay to prevent entanglements. it is also handy when cultivating around fruit-trees.] farmers like this simple form of hay derrick because it is cheaply made and it may be easily moved because it is not heavy. it is automatic and it is about as cheap as any good derrick and it is the most satisfactory for ordinary use. the base is large enough to make it solid and steady when in use. before moving the point of the boom is lowered to a level position so that the derrick is not top-heavy. there is little danger of upsetting upon ordinary farm lands. also the width of feet will pass along country roads without meeting serious obstacles. hay slings usually are made too narrow and too short. the ordinary little hay sling is prone to tip sideways and spill the hay. it is responsible for a great deal of profanity. the hay derrick shown to the right is somewhat different in construction, but is quite similar in action. the base is the same but the mast turns on a gudgeon stepped into an iron socket mortised into the center timber. [illustration: figure .--cable hay stacker. the wire cable is supported by the two bipods and is secured at each end by snubbing stakes. two single-cable collars are clamped to the cable to prevent the bipods from slipping in at the top. two double-cable clamps hold the ends of the cables to form stake loops.] the wire hoisting cable is threaded differently, as shown in the drawing. this style of derrick is made larger, sometimes the peak reaches up ' above the base. the extra large ones are awkward to move but they build fine big stacks. [illustration: figure .--california hay ricker, for putting either wild hay or alfalfa quickly in ricks. it is used in connection with home-made buck rakes. this ricker works against the end of the rick and is backed away each time to start a new bench. the upright is made of light poles or x s braced as shown. it should be or feet high. iron stakes hold the bottom, while guy wires steady the top.] california hay ricker in the west hay is often put up in long ricks instead of stacks. one of my jobs in california was to put up , acres of wild hay in the sacramento valley. i made four rickers and eight buck rakes similar to the ones shown in the illustrations. each ricker was operated by a crew of eight men. four men drove two buck rakes. there were two on the rick, one at the fork and one to drive the hoisting rig. ten mowing machines did most of the cutting but i hired eight more machines towards the last, as the latest grass was getting too ripe. the crop measured more than , tons and it was all put in ricks, stacks and barns without a drop of rain on it. i should add that rain seldom falls in the lower sacramento valley during the haying season in the months of may and june. this refers to wild hay, which is made up of burr clover, wild oats and volunteer wheat and barley. alfalfa is cut from five to seven times in the hot interior valleys, so that if a farmer is rash enough to plant alfalfa under irrigation his haying thereafter will reach from one rainy season to the next. chapter vii farm conveyances stone-boat one of the most useful and one of the least ornamental conveyances on a farm is the stone-boat. it is a low-down handy rig for moving heavy commodities in summer as well as in winter. no other sleigh or wagon will equal a stone-boat for carrying plows or harrows from one field to another. it is handy to tote bags of seed to supply the grain drill, to haul a barrel of water, feed for the hogs, and a great many other chores. [illustration: figure .--stone-boat. stump logs are selected for the planks. the bend of the planks is the natural curve of the large roots. the sawing is done by band saw cutting from two directions.] when the country was new, sawmills made a business of sawing stone-boat plank. trees for stone-boat staves were cut close to the ground and the natural crooks of the roots were used for the noses of sleigh runners and for stone-boats. but cast-iron noses are now manufactured with recesses to receive the ends of straight ordinary hardwood planks. these cast-iron ends are rounded up in front to make the necessary nose crook. the front plank cross piece is bolted well towards the front ends of the runner planks. usually there are two other hardwood plank cross pieces, one near the rear end and the other about one-third of the way back from the front. placing the cross pieces in this way gives room between to stand a barrel. [illustration: figure .--wheelbarrow. this factory-made wheelbarrow is the only pattern worth bothering with. it is cheap and answers the purpose better than the heavier ones with removable side wings.] the cross pieces are bolted through from the bottom up. round-headed bolts are used and they are countersunk, to come flush with the bottom of the sliding planks. the nuts are countersunk into the cross pieces by boring holes about one-quarter inch deep. the holes are a little larger than the cornerwise diameter of the nuts. no washers are used, and the nuts are screwed down tight into the plank. the ends of the bolts are cut off even and filed smooth. the nuts are placed sharp corner side down and are left nearly flush on top or even with the surface of the cross pieces. in using a stone-boat, nobody wants a projection to catch any part of the load. regular doubletree clevises are attached to the corners of the old-fashioned stone-boat and the side chains are brought together to a ring and are just about long enough to form an equilateral triangle with the front end of the stone-boat. cast-iron fronts usually have a projection in the center for the clevis hitch. oxen on a new england farm one of the most interesting experiences on a new england farm is to get acquainted with the manner in which oxen are pressed into farm service. one reason why oxen have never gone out of fashion in new england is the fact that they are patient enough to plow stony ground without smashing the plow. a great deal of new england farm land has been reclaimed by removing a portion of the surface stone. in the processes of freezing and thawing and cultivation, stones from underneath keep working up to the surface so that it requires considerable skill to do the necessary plowing and cultivating. oxen ease the plowpoint over or around a rock so it can immediately dip in again to the full depth of the furrow. a good yoke of cattle well trained are gentle as well as strong and powerful. oxen are cheaper than horses to begin with and they are valuable for beef when they are not needed any longer as work animals. the holstein breed seems to have the preference for oxen with new england farmers. the necessary harness for a pair of cattle consists of an ox yoke with a ringbolt through the center of the yoke, midway between the two oxen. a heavy iron ring about five inches in diameter, made of round iron, hangs from the ringbolt. there are two oxbows to hold the yoke in place on the necks of the cattle. a logging chain with a round hook on one end and a grab hook on the other end completes the yoking outfit. the round hook of the chain is hitched into the ring in the plow clevis. the chain is passed through the large iron ring in the oxbow and is doubled back to get the right length. the grab hook is so constructed that it fits over one link of the chain flatwise so that the next link standing crosswise prevents it from slipping. the mechanism of a logging chain is extremely simple, positive in action and especially well adapted to the use for which it is intended. the best mechanical inventions often pass without notice because of their simplicity. farmers have used logging chains for generations with hooks made on this plan without realizing that they were profiting by a high grade invention that embodies superior merit. in yoking oxen to a wagon the hitch is equally simple. the end of the wagon tongue is placed in the ring in the ox yoke, the round hook engages with a drawbolt under the hammer strap bar. the small grab hook is passed through the large yoke ring and is brought back and engaged with a chain link at the proper distance to stretch the chain taut. the process of yoking oxen and hitching them to a wagon is one of the most interesting performances on a farm. the off ox works on the off side, or far side from the driver. he usually is the larger of the two and the more intelligent. the near (pronounced n-i-g-h) ox is nearest to the driver who walks to the left. old plows turned the furrow to the right so the driver could walk on hard ground. in this way the awkwardness and ignorance of the near ox is played against the docility and superior intelligence of the off ox. in yoking the two together the yoke is first placed on the neck of the off ox and the near ox is invited to come under. this expression is so apt that a great many years ago it became a classic in the hands of able writers to suggest submission or slavery termed "coming under the yoke." coming under the yoke, however, for the new england ox, in these days of abundant feeding, is no hardship. the oxen are large and powerful and the work they have to do is just about sufficient to give them the needed exercise to enjoy their alfalfa hay and feed of oats or corn. travoy one of the first implements used by farm settlers in the timbered sections of the united states and canada, was a three-cornered sled made from the fork of a tree. this rough sled, in the french speaking settlements, was called a "travoy." whether it was of indian or french invention is not known; probably both indians and french settlers used travoys for moving logs in the woods before american history was much written. the legs or runners of a travoy are about five feet long. there is a bunk which extends crossways from one runner to the other, about half or two-thirds of the way back from the turned-up nose. this bunk is fastened to the runners by means of wooden pins and u-shaped bows fitted into grooves cut around the upper half of the bunk near the ends. just back of the turned up nose is another cross piece in the shape of a stout wooden pin or iron bolt that is passed through an auger hole extending through both legs from side to side of the travoy. the underside of the crotch is hollowed out in front of the bolt to make room to pass the logging chain through so it comes out in front under the turned up nose. [illustration: figure .--travoy. a log-hauling sled made from the fork of a tree.] the front of the travoy is turned up, sled runner fashion, by hewing the wood with an axe to give it the proper shape. travoys are used to haul logs from a thick woods to the skidways. the manner of using a travoy is interesting. it is hauled by a yoke of cattle or a team of horses to the place where the log lies in the woods. the round hook end of the logging chain is thrown over the butt end of the log and pulled back under the log then around the bunk just inside of the runner and hooked fast upon itself. the travoy is then leaned over against the log, the grab hook end of the chain is brought over the log and over the travoy and straightened out at right angles to the log. the cattle are hitched to the end of the logging chain and started. this kind of a hitch rolls the log over on top of the bunk on the travoy. the cattle are then unhitched. the grab hook end of the chain thus released is passed down and around under the other end of the bunk from behind. the chain is then passed over the bolt near the nose of the travoy and pulled down through the opening and out in front from under the nose. the small grab hook of the logging chain is then passed through the clevis, in the doubletree, if horses are used, or the ring in the yoke if cattle are used, and hitched back to the proper length. a little experience is necessary to regulate the length of the chain to give the proper pull. the chain should be short enough so the pull lifts a little. it is generally conceded by woodsmen that a short hitch moves a log easier than a long hitch. however, there is a medium. there are limitations which experience only can determine. a travoy is useful in dense woods where there is a good deal of undergrowth or where there are places so rough that bobsleighs cannot be used to advantage. linchpin farm wagons [illustration: figure .--cross reach wagon. this wagon is coupled for a trailer, but it works just as well when used with a tongue and horses as a handy farm wagon. the bunks are made rigid and parallel by means of a double reach. there are two king bolts to permit both axles to turn. either end is front.] [illustration: figure .--wagon brake. the hounds are tilted up to show the brake beam and the manner of attaching it. the brake lever is fastened to the forward side of the rear bolster and turns up alongside of the bolster stake. the brake rod reaches from the upper end of the lever elbow to the foot ratchet at the front end of the wagon box.] [illustration: figure .--bolster spring.] in some parts of the country the wheels of handy wagons about the farm are held on axle journals by means of linchpins in the old-fashioned manner. there are iron hub-bands on both ends of the hubs which project several inches beyond the wood. this is the best protection against sand to prevent it from working into the wheel boxing that has ever been invented. sand from the felloes scatters down onto these iron bands and rolls off to the ground. there is a hole through each band on the outer ends of the hubs to pass the linchpin through so that before taking off a wheel to oil the journal it must first be turned so the hole comes directly over the linchpin. to pry out the linchpin the drawbolt is used. old-fashioned drawbolts were made with a chisel shaped end tapered from both sides to a thickness of about an eighth of an inch. this thin wedge end of the drawbolt is placed under the end of the linchpin. the lower side of the hub-band forms a fulcrum to pry the pin up through the hole in the upper side of the sand-band projection. the linchpin has a hook on the outer side of the upper end so the lever is transferred to the top of the sand-band when another pry lifts the pin clear out of the hole in the end of the axle so the wheel may be removed and grease applied to the axle. the drawbolt on a linchpin wagon usually has a head made in the form of the jaws of a wrench. the wrench is the right size to fit the nuts on the wagon brace irons so that the drawbolt answers three purposes. [illustration: figure .--wagon seat spring. the metal block fits over the top of the bolster stake.] [illustration: figure .--hollow malleable iron bolster stake to hold a higher wooden stake when necessary.] sand-bands many parts of farm machinery require projecting sand-bands to protect the journals from sand and dust. most farms have some sandy fields or ridges. some farms are all sand or sandy loam. even dust from clay is injurious to machinery. there is more or less grit in the finest clay. the most important parts of farm machinery are supposed to be protected by oil-cups containing cotton waste to strain the oil, together with covers in the shape of metal caps. these are necessary protections and they help, but they are not adequate for all conditions. it is not easy to keep sand out of bearings on machinery that shakes a good deal. wooden plugs gather sand and dust. when a plug is pulled the sand drops into the oil hole. farm machinery that is properly designed protects itself from sand and dust. in buying a machine this particular feature should appeal to the farmers more than it does. leather caps are a nuisance. they are a sort of patchwork to finish the job that the manufacturer commences. a man who is provident enough to supply himself with good working tools and is sufficiently careful to take care of them, usually is particular about the appearance as well as the usefulness of his tools, machinery and implements. [illustration: figure .--sand caps. not one manufacturer in a hundred knows how to keep sand out of an axle bearing. still it is one of the simplest tricks in mechanics. the only protection an axle needs is long ferrules that reach out three or four inches beyond the hub at both ends. old-fashioned linchpin farm wagons were built on this principle. the hubs held narrow rings instead of skeins, but they wore for years.] bobsleighs on northern farms bobsleighs are as important in the winter time as a farm wagon in summer. there are different ways of putting bobsleighs together according to the use required of them. when using heavy bobsleighs for road work, farmers favor the bolster reach to connect the front and rear sleighs. with this attachment the horses may be turned around against the rear sled. the front bolster fits into a recessed plate bolted to the bench plank of the front sleigh. this plate is a combination of wearing plate and circle and must be kept oiled to turn easily under a heavy load. it not only facilitates turning, but it prevents the bolster from catching on the raves or on the upturned nose of the front bob when turning short. the heavy hardwood plank reach that connects the two bolsters is put through a mortise through the front bolster and is fastened rigidly by an extra large king-bolt. the reach plays back and forth rather loosely through a similar mortise in the other bolster on the rear sleigh. the rear hounds connect with the reach by means of a link and pin. this link pushes up through mortise holes in the reach and is fastened with a wooden pin or key on top of the reach. sometimes the hounds are taken away and the reach is fastened with pins before and behind the rear bolster. this reach hitch is not recommended except for light road work. these two ways of attaching the rear sled necessitate different ways of fastening the rear bolster to the sled. when the rear bolster is required to do the pulling, it is attached to the sled by double eyebolts which permit the necessary rocking motion and allows the nose of the rear sled to bob up and down freely. this is an advantage when a long box bed is used, because the bolster is made to fit the box closely and is not continually oscillating and wearing. eye-bolts provide for this natural movement of the sled. light pleasure bobs are attached to the box with eyebolts without bolster stakes. the light passenger riding seat box is bound together with iron braces and side irons so it does not need bolsters to hold the sides together. [illustration: figure .--bobsleighs, showing three kinds of coupling. the upper sleighs are coupled on the old-fashioned short reach plan except that the reach is not mortised into the roller. it is gained in a quarter of an inch and fastened by an iron strap with a plate and nuts on the under side. the bobs in the center show the bolster reach, principally used for road work. the bottom pair are coupled by cross chains for short turning around trees and stumps in the woods.] bobsleighs for use in the woods are hitched together quite differently. the old-fashioned reach with a staple in the rear bench of the first sled and a clevis in the end of the reach is the old-fashioned rig for rough roads in the woods. such sleighs are fitted with bunks instead of bolsters. bunks are usually cut from good hardwood trees, hewed out with an axe and bored for round stakes. log bunks for easy loading do not project beyond the raves. with this kind of a rig, a farmer can fasten two logging chains to the reach, carry the grab hook ends out and under and around the log and back again over the sleighs, and then hitch the horses to the two chains and roll the log up over a couple of skids and on to the bunks without doing any damage to the bobsleighs. bobsleighs hitched together with an old-fashioned reach and provided with wide heavy raves will climb over logs, pitch down into root holes, and weave their way in and out among trees better than any other sled contrivance, and they turn short enough for such roads. the shortest turning rig, however, is the cross chain reach shown in figure . making a farm cart a two-wheeled cart large enough to carry a barrel of cider is a great convenience on a farm. the front wheels of a buggy are about the right size and usually are strong enough for cart purposes. a one-inch iron axle will be stiff enough if it is reinforced at the square bends. the axle is bent down near the hubs at right angles and carried across to support the floor of the cart box about one foot from the ground. the distance from the ground should be just sufficient so that when the cart is tipped back the hind end will rest on the ground with the bottom boards at an easy slant to roll a barrel or milk can into the bottom of the box. under the back end of the cart platform is a good stout bar of hardwood framed into the sidepieces. all of the woodwork about the cart is well braced with iron. the floor of the cart is better when made of narrow matched hardwood flooring about seven-eighths of an inch thick fastened with bolts. it should be well supported by cross pieces underneath. in fact the principal part of the box is the underneath part of the frame. sidepieces of the box are wide and are bolted to the vertical parts of the axle and braced in different directions to keep the frame solid, square and firm. the sides of the box are permanently fastened but both tailboard and front board are held in place by cleats and rods and are removable so that long scantling or lumber may be carried on the cart bottom. the ends of the box may be quickly put in place again when it is necessary to use them. to hold a cart box together, four rods are necessary, two across the front and two behind. they are made like tailboard rods in wagon boxes. there is always some kind of tongue or handle bar in front of the farm cart conveniently arranged for either pulling or pushing. if a breast bar is used it handles better when supported by two curved projecting shafts or pieces of bent wood, preferably the bent up extended ends of the bedpieces. the handle bar should be about three feet from the ground. [illustration: figure .--farm cart. the axle need not be heavier than / ". the hind axle of a light buggy works the best. it is bent down and spliced and welded under the box. the cart should be made narrow to prevent overloading. the box should be low enough to rest the back end on the ground at an angle of about ° for easy loading.] colt-breaking sulky a pair of shafts that look a good deal too long, an axle, two wheels and a whiffletree are the principal parts of a colt-breaking sulky. the shafts are so long that a colt can kick his best without reaching anything behind. the principal danger is that he may come down with one hind leg over the shaft. it is a question with horsemen whether it is better to first start a colt alongside of an old, steady horse. but it is generally conceded that in no case should a colt be made fast in such a way that he could kick himself loose. different farmers have different ideas in regard to training colts, but these breaking carts with extra long shafts are very much used in some parts of the country. the shafts are heavy enough so that the colts may be tied down to make kicking impossible. a rope or heavy strap reaching from one shaft to the other over the colt's hips will keep its hind feet pretty close to the ground. any rig used in connection with a colt should be strong enough to withstand any strain that the colt may decide to put upon it. if the colt breaks something or breaks loose, it takes him a long time to forget the scare. farm boys make these breaking carts by using wheels and hind axles of a worn-out buggy. this is well enough if the wheels are strong and shafts thoroughly bolted and braced. it is easy to make a mistake with a colt. to prevent accidents it is much better to have the harness and wagon amply strong. [illustration: figure .--colt-breaking sulky. the axle and hind wheels of a light wagon, two strong straight-grained shafts about feet too long, a whiffletree and a spring seat are the principal parts of a colt-breaking sulky. the shafts and seat are thoroughly well bolted and clipped to the axle and braced against all possible maneuvers of the colt. the traces are made so long that the colt cannot reach anything to kick, and he is prevented from kicking by a strap reaching from one shaft up over his hips and down to the other shaft. in this rig the colt is compelled to go ahead because he cannot turn around. the axle should be longer than standard to prevent upsetting when the colt turns a corner at high speed.] chapter viii miscellaneous farm conveniences farm office [illustration: figure .--perspective view of two-story corn crib. the side of the building is cut away to show the elevating machinery.] business farming requires an office. business callers feel sensitive about talking farm or live-stock affairs before several members of the family. but they are quite at ease when alone with the farmer in his office. a farm office may be small but it should contain a desk or table, two or three chairs, book shelves for books, drawers for government bulletins and a cabinet to hold glassware and chemicals for making soil tests and a good magnifying glass for examining seeds before planting. a good glass is also valuable in tracing the destructive work of many kinds of insect pests. [illustration: figure .--floor plans of two-story corn crib. the first floor shows the driveway with corn cribs at the sides and the second floor plan shows the grain bins over the center driveway, with location of the downspouts, stairway, etc.] the office is the proper place for making germination tests of various farm seeds. seventy degrees of heat is necessary for the best results in seed testing. for this reason, as well as for comfort while working, the heating problem should receive its share of attention. many times it so happens that a farmer has a few minutes just before mealtime that he could devote to office work if the room be warm enough. [illustration: figure .--economy of round barn. the diagrams show that the popular ' x ' cow stable and the commonest size of round barn have about the same capacity. each barn will stable forty cows, but the round barn has room for a silo in the center. both barns have feed overhead in the shape of hay and straw, but the round feed room saves steps.] [illustration: figure .--concrete farm scale base and pit.] neatly printed letter-heads and envelopes are important. the sheets of paper should be eight and a half by eleven inches in size, pure white and of good quality. the printing should be plain black and of round medium-sized letters that may be easily read. fancy lettering and flourishes are out of place on business stationery. [illustration: figure .--top view of the hay-track roof extension, showing the ridgeboard and supporting jack-rafters.] [illustration: figure .--side view showing plan for building a hayfork hood to project from peak of a storage barn. the jack-rafters form a brace to support the end of the hay-track beam.] [illustration: figure .--slaughter house. the house should be twelve feet wide. it may be any length to provide storage, but x makes a good beef skinning floor. the windlass shaft should be ten feet above the floor, which requires twelve-foot studding. the wheel is eight feet in diameter and the winding drum is about ten inches. the animal is killed on the incline outside of the building and it lies limp against the revolving door. the door catch is sprung back and the carcass rolls down onto the concrete skinning floor.] halftone illustration of farm animals or buildings are better used on separate advertising sheets that may be folded in with the letters when wanted. [illustration: figure .--rule of six, eight and ten. diagram showing how to stake the foundation of a farm building so the excavation can be made clear out to the corners without undermining the stakes.] [illustration: figure .--roof truss built strong enough to support the roof of a farm garage without center posts.] [illustration: figure .--design of roof truss intended to span a farm garage.] [illustration: figure .--roof pitches. mow capacity of the different roof pitches is given above the plates in figures.] typewriters are so common that a hand-written letter is seldom seen among business correspondence. a busy farmer is not likely to acquire much speed with a typewriter, but his son or daughter may. one great advantage is the making of carbon copies. every letter received is then filed in a letter case in alphabetical order and a carbon copy of each answer is pinned to it for future reference. [illustration: figure .--double corn crib. two cribs may be roofed this way as cheaply as to roof the two cribs separately. a storeroom is provided overhead and the bracing prevents the cribs from sagging.] the cost of furnishing a farm office will depend upon the inclinations of the man. a cheap kitchen table may be used instead of an expensive mahogany desk. a new typewriter costs from fifty to ninety dollars, but a rebuilt machine that will do good work may be obtained for twenty. a useful magnifying glass with legs may be bought for a dollar or two. or considerable money may be invested in a high-powered microscope. speed indicator the speed requirements of machines are given by the manufacturers. it is up to the farmer to determine the size of pulleys and the speed of intermediate shafts between his engine and the machine to be driven. a speed indicator is held against the end of a shaft at the center. the indicator pin then revolves with the shaft and the number of revolutions per minute are counted by timing the pointer on the dial with the second hand of a watch. [illustration: figure .--speed timers. two styles. the point is held against the center of the shaft to be tested. the number of revolutions per minute is shown in figures on the face of the dial. the indicator is timed to the second hand of a watch.] [illustration: figure .--building bracket. made of x pieces put together at right angles with diagonal braces. the supporting leg fits between the four diagonal braces.] soil tools soil moisture often is the limiting factor in crop raising. soil moisture may be measured by analysis. the first step is to obtain samples at different depths. this is done accurately and quickly with a good soil auger. other paraphernalia is required to make a careful analysis of the sample, but a farmer of experience will make a mud ball and form a very good estimate of the amount of water in it. [illustration: figure .--diagram showing how to cut a plank on a band-saw to form a curved rafter. the two pieces of the plank are spiked together as shown in the lower drawing. this makes a curved rafter without waste of material.] [illustration: figure .--breeding crate for hogs. the illustration shows the manner of construction.] [illustration: figure .--soil auger. scientific farming demands that soils shall be tested for moisture. a long handled auger is used to bring samples of soil to the surface. the samples are weighed, the water evaporated and the soil reweighed to determine the amount of moisture.] [illustration: figure .--post hole diggers. two patterns of the same kind of digger are shown. the first has iron handles, the lower has wooden handles.] [illustration: figure .--hoes and weeders. the hang of a hoe affects its working. the upper hoe shows about the easiest working angle between the blade and the handle. the difference between a hoe and a weeder is that the hoe is intended to strike into the ground to loosen the soil, while the blade of the weeder is intended to work parallel with the surface of the soil to cut young weeds.] [illustration: figure .--manure hook and potato diggers.] [illustration: figure .--spud. certain vegetables are grown for crop and for seed. the green plants are thinned with a spud for sale, leaving the best to ripen for seed. it is also used to dig tough weeds, especially those having tap roots.] [illustration: figure .--( ) corn cutting knife. ( ) asparagus knife.] fence-making tools _sliding field gate._--each farm field should have a gate, not necessarily expensive, but it should be reasonably convenient. farm field gates should be made sixteen feet long, which will allow for a clear opening about fourteen feet wide. the cheapest way to make a good farm gate is to use a -inch board for the bottom, -inch for the board next to the bottom and three -inch boards above that. the space between the bottom board and next board is two inches. this narrow space prevents hogs from lifting the gate with their noses. the spaces widen toward the top, so that the gate when finished is five feet high. if colts run the fields then a bar is needed along the top of the gate. six cross pieces inch by inches are used to hold the gate together. these cross pieces are bolted through at each intersection. also a slanting brace is used on the front half of the gate to keep it from racking and this brace is put on with bolts. two posts are set at each end of the gate. the front posts hold the front end of the gate between them, and the rear posts the same. there is a cross piece which reaches from one of the rear posts to the other to slide the gate and hold it off the ground. a similar cross piece holds the front end of the gate up from the ground. sometimes a swivel roller is attached to the rear cross piece to roll the gate if it is to be used a good deal. a plain, simple sliding gate is all that is necessary for fields some distance from the barn. [illustration: figure .--( ) plumb-bob and plumb-line. the line is paid out about feet from the spool and given a half hitch. it may then be hung over the wire and the spool will balance the bob. ( ) bipod. the legs of a fence bipod are cut feet long. the bolt is put through inches from the top ends. by the aid of the plummet the upper wire is strung plumb over the barb-wire in the furrow and ' " above grade. the lower parts of the posts are set against the barb-wire and the upper faces of the posts at the top are set even with the upper wire. this plan not only places the posts in line, both at the top and bottom, but it regulates the height.] [illustration: figure .--fence tools. the upper tool is a round steel pin to twist heavy brace wires. the scoop is for working stones out of post-holes. the steel crowbar is for working around the stones to loosen them.] [illustration: figure .--fence pliers. this is a heavy fence tool made to pull fence staples and to stretch, cut and splice wire.] corn shock horse [illustration: figure .--corn horse. when corn is cut by hand there is no better shocking device than the old-style corn horse. it is almost as handy when setting up the corn sheaves from the corn binder.] a convenient corn shocking horse is made with a pole cut from a straight tree. the pole is about six inches through at the butt and tapers to a small end. about twenty feet is a good length. there are two legs which hold the large end of the pole up about " from the ground. these legs are well spread apart at the bottom. two feet back from the legs is a horizontal hole about one and one-quarter inches in diameter to hold the crossbar. this crossbar may be an old broom handle. the pole and the crossbar mark the four divisions of a corn shock. corn is cut and stood up in each corner, usually nine hills in a corner, giving thirty-six hills to a shock. corn planted in rows is counted up to make about the same amount of corn to the shock. of course a heavy or light crop must determine the number of rows or hills. when enough corn is cut for a shock it is tied with two bands, the crossbar is pulled out and the corn horse is dragged along to the next stand. husking-pin hand huskers for dividing the cornhusks at the tips of the ears are made of wood, bone or steel. wooden husking-pins are made of ironwood, eucalyptus, second growth hickory, or some other tough hardwood. the pin is about four inches long, five-eighths of an inch thick and it is shaped like a lead-pencil with a rather long point. a recessed girdle is cut around the barrel of the pin and a leather finger ring fits into and around this girdle. generally the leather ring fits the larger finger to hold the pin in the right position while permitting it to turn to wear the point all around alike. bone husking-pins are generally flat with a hole through the center to hold the leather finger ring. steel husking-pins are shaped differently and have teeth to catch and tear the husks apart. [illustration: figure .--brick trowel.] [illustration: figure .--plastering trowel.] [illustration: figure .--concrete hog wallow, showing drain pipe.] [illustration: figure .--concrete center alley for hog house. the upper illustration represents the wooden template used to form the center of the hog house floor.] [illustration: figure .--sanitary pig-pen. one of the most satisfactory farrowing houses is constructed of concrete posts " square and " square mesh hog fencing and straw. the posts are set to make farrowing pens ' wide and ' deep from front to back. woven wire is stretched and fastened to both sides of the posts at the sides and back of each pen. straw is stuffed in between the two wire nets, thus making partitions of straw " thick and " high. fence wire is stretched over the top and straw piled on deep enough to shed rain. the front of the pens face the south and are closed by wooden gates. in the spring the pigs are turned out on pasture, the straw roof is hauled to the fields for manure and the straw partitions burned out. the sun shines into the skeleton pens all summer so that all mischievous bacteria are killed and the hog-lice are burned or starved. the next fall concrete floors may be laid in the pens, the partitions restuffed with straw and covered with another straw roof. in a colder climate i would cover the whole top with a straw roof. sufficient ventilation would work through the straw partitions and the front gate. in very cold weather add a thin layer of straw to the gate.] [illustration: figure .--concrete wall mold. wooden molds for shaping a concrete wall may be made as shown. if the wall is to be low-- ' or less--the mold will stay in place without bolting or wiring the sides together. the form is made level by first leveling the " x " stringers that support the form.] [illustration: figure .--husking-pin. the leather finger ring is looped into the recess in the wooden pin.] [illustration: figure .--harness punch. the hollow punch points are of different sizes.] [illustration: figure .--belt punch. two or three sizes should be kept in the tool box. belt holes should be small to hold the lace tight. the smooth running of belts depends a good deal on the lacing. holes punch better against the end of a hickory block or other fine grained hardwood.] paint brushes paint brushes may be left in the paint for a year without apparent injury. the paint should be deep enough to nearly bury the bristles. pour a little boiled linseed oil over the top to form a skin to keep the air out. it is cheaper to buy a new brush than to clean the paint out of one that has been used. [illustration: figure .--knots. the simple principles of knot tying as practiced on farms are here represented.] [illustration: figure .--sheepshank, two half hitches in a rope to take up slack. the rope may be folded upon itself as many times as necessary.] [illustration: figure .--marline spike. used for splicing ropes, tying rose knots, etc.] fruit picking [illustration: figure .--fruit-picking tray. it is used for picking grapes and other fruits. the california lug box has vertical sides and is the same size top and bottom. otherwise the construction is similar.] apples are handled as carefully as eggs by men who understand the business of getting high prices. picking boxes for apples have bothered orchard men more than any other part of the business. it is so difficult to get help to handle apples without bruising that many inventions have been tried to lessen the damage. in western new york a tray with vertical ends and slanting sides has been adopted by grape growers as the most convenient tray for grapes. apple growers are adopting the same tray. it is made of three-eighths-inch lumber cut inches long for the sides, using two strips for each side. the bottom is inches long and three-eighths of an inch thick, made in one piece. the ends are seven-eighths of an inch thick cut to a bevel so the top edge of the end piece is fourteen inches long and the bottom edge is ten inches long. the depth of the end piece is eight inches. hand cleats are nailed on the outsides of the end pieces so as to project one-half inch above the top. these cleats not only serve to lift and carry the trays, but when they are loaded on a wagon the bottoms fit in between the cleats to hold them from slipping endways. in piling these picking boxes empty, one end is slipped outward over the cleat until the other end drops down. this permits half nesting when the boxes are piled up for storage or when loaded on wagons to move to the orchard. [illustration: figure .--fruit thinning nippers. three styles of apple-stem cutters are shown. they are also used for picking grapes and other fruits.] apples are picked into the trays from the trees. the trays are loaded on to wagons or stone-boats and hauled to the packing shed, where the apples are rolled out gently over the sloping sides of the crates on to the cushioned bottom of the sorting table. orchard men should have crates enough to keep the pickers busy without emptying until they are hauled to the packing shed. the use of such trays or crates save handling the apples over several times. the less apples are handled the fewer bruises are made. [illustration: figure .--apple picking ladder. when apples are picked and placed in bushel trays a ladder on wheels with shelves is convenient for holding the trays.] in california similar trays are used, but they have straight sides and are called lug boxes. eastern fruit men prefer the sloping sides because they may be emptied easily, quickly and gently. fruit picking ladders commercial orchards are pruned to keep the bearing fruit spurs as near the ground as possible, so that ladders used at picking time are not so long as they used to be. [illustration: figure .--stepladder and apple-picking bag. this ladder has only three feet, but the bottom of the ladder is made wide to prevent upsetting. this bag is useful when picking scattering apples on the outer or upper branches. picking bags carelessly used are the cause of many bruised apples.] [illustration: figure .--tree pruners. the best made pruners are the cheapest. this long handled pruner is made of fine tool steel from the cutting parts clear to the outer ends of the wooden handles. a positive stop prevents the handles from coming together. small one-hand pruning nippers are made for clean cutting. the blades of both pruners should work towards the tree trunk so the hook will mash the bark on the discarded portion of the limb.] the illustration shows one of the most convenient picking ladders. it is a double ladder with shelves to hold picking trays supported by two wheels and two legs. the wheels which are used to support one side of the frame are usually old buggy wheels. a hind axle together with the wheels works about right. the ladder frame is about eight feet high with ladder steps going up from each side. these steps also form the support for the shelves. picking trays or boxes are placed on the shelves, so the latter will hold eight or ten bushels of apples, and may be wheeled directly to the packing shed if the distance is not too great. [illustration: figure .--shears. the first pair is used for sheep shearing. the second is intended for cutting grass around the edges of walks and flower beds.] step-ladders from six to ten feet long are more convenient to get up into the middle of the tree than almost any other kind of ladder. commercial apple trees have open tops to admit sunshine. for this reason, straight ladders are not much used. it is necessary to have ladders built so they will support themselves. sometimes only one leg is used in front of a step-ladder and sometimes ladders are wide at the bottom and taper to a point at the top. the kind of ladder to use depends upon the size of the trees and the manner in which they have been pruned. usually it is better to have several kinds of ladders of different sizes and lengths. pickers then have no occasion to wait for each other. feeding racks special racks for the feeding of alfalfa hay to hogs are built with slatted sides hinged at the top so they will swing in when the hogs crowd their noses through to get the hay. this movement drops the hay down within reach. alfalfa hay is especially valuable as a winter feed for breeding stock. sows may be wintered on alfalfa with one ear of corn a day and come out in the spring in fit condition to suckle a fine litter of pigs. alfalfa is a strong protein feed. it furnishes the muscle-forming substances necessary for the young litter by causing a copious flow of milk. one ear of corn a day is sufficient to keep the sow in good condition without laying on too much fat. when shoats are fed in the winter for fattening, alfalfa hay helps them to grow. in connection with grain it increases the weight rapidly without adding a great deal of expense to the ration. alfalfa in every instance is intended as a roughage, as an appetizer and as a protein feed. fat must be added by the use of corn, kaffir corn, canada peas, barley or other grains. alfalfa hay is intended to take the place of summer pasture in winter more than as a fattening ration. [illustration: figure .--horse feeding rack. this is a barnyard hay feeder for horses and colts. the diagonal boarding braces each corner post and leaves large openings at the sides. horses shy at small hay holes. the top boards and the top rail are x s for strength. the bottom is floored to save the chaff.] [illustration: figure .--corner post detail of horse feeding rack. a x is spiked into the edge of a x , making a corner post " across. the side boarding is cut even with the corner of the post and the open corner is filled with a two-inch quarter-round as shown.] [illustration: figure .--automatic hog feeder. the little building is ' x ' on the ground and it is ' high to the plates. the crushed grain is shoveled in from behind and it feeds down hopper fashion as fast as the hogs eat it. the floor is made of matched lumber. it should stand on a dry concrete floor.] [illustration: figure .--sheep feeding rack. the hay bottom and grain trough sides slope together at ° angles. the boarding is made tight to hold chaff and grain from wasting.] [illustration: figure .--rack base and sides. the x s are halved at the ends and put together at right angles. these frames are placed ' apart and covered with matched flooring. light braces should be nailed across these frames a few inches up from the ground. the x pickets are placed " apart in the clear, so the sheep can get their heads through to feed. these picketed frames are bolted to the base and framed around the top. if the rack is more than ' long there should be a center tie or partition. twelve feet is a good length to make the racks.] split-log road drag the only low cost road grader of value is the split-log road drag. it should be exactly what the name implies. it should be made from a light log about eight inches in diameter split through the middle with a saw. plenty of road drags are made of timbers instead of split logs, but the real principle is lost because such drags are too heavy and clumsy. they cannot be quickly adjusted to the varying road conditions met with while in use. [illustration: figure .--hog trough. in a winter hog house the feed trough is placed next to the alley or passageway. a cement trough is best. a drop gate is hinged over the trough so it can be swung in while putting feed in the trough. the same gate is opened up level to admit hogs to the pen.] [illustration: figure .--reinforced hog trough. the section of hog trough to the left is reinforced with chicken wire, one-inch mesh. the trough to the right is reinforced with seven / " rods--three in the bottom and two in each side.] [illustration: figure .--double poultry feeding trough with partition in the center.] [illustration: figure .--poultry feeder with metal or crockery receptacle.] the illustration shows the right way of making a road drag, and the manner in which it is drawn along at an angle to the roadway so as to move the earth from the sides towards the center, but illustrations are useless for showing how to operate them to do good work. the eccentricities of a split-log road drag may be learned in one lesson by riding it over a mile or two of country road shortly after the frost has left the ground in the spring of the year. it will be noticed that the front half of the road drag presents the flat side of the split log to the work of shaving off the lumps while the other half log levels and smooths and puddles the loosened moist earth by means of the rounded side. puddling makes earth waterproof. the front, or cutting edge, is faced with steel. the ridges and humps are cut and shoved straight ahead or to one side to fill holes and ruts. this is done by the driver, who shifts his weight from one end to the other, and from front to back of his standing platform to distribute the earth to the best advantage. the rounded side of the rear half log presses the soft earth into place and leaves the surface smooth. [illustration: figure .--split-log road drag. the front edge is shod with a steel plate to do the cutting and the round side of the rear log grinds the loosened earth fine and presses it into the wagon tracks and water holes.] [illustration: figure .--heavy breaking plow, used for road work and other tough jobs.] unfortunately, the habit of using narrow tired wagons on country roads has become almost universal in the united states. to add to their destructive propensities, all wagons in some parts of the country have the same width of tread so that each wheel follows in paths made by other wheels, until they cut ruts of considerable depth. these little narrow ditches hold water so that it cannot run off into the drains at the sides of the roadway. when a rut gets started, each passing wheel squeezes out the muddy water, or if the wheel be revolving at a speed faster than a walk it throws the water, and the water carries part of the roadway with it so that small ruts are made large and deep ruts are made deeper. in some limited sections road rules demand that wagons shall have wide tires and have shorter front axles, so that with the wide tires and the uneven treads the wheels act as rollers instead of rut makers. it is difficult to introduce such requirements into every farm section. in the meantime the evils of narrow tires may be overcome to a certain extent by the persistent and proper use of the split-log road drag. these drags are most effectual in the springtime when the frost is coming out of the ground. during the muddy season the roads get worked up into ruts and mire holes, which, if taken in time, may be filled by running lengthwise of the road with the drag when the earth is still soft. when the ground shows dry on top and is still soft and wet underneath is the time the drags do the best work by scraping the drier hummocks into the low places where the earth settles hard as it dries. a well rounded, smooth road does not get muddy in the summer time. summer rains usually come with a dash. considerable water falls in a short time, and the very act of falling with force first lays the dust, then packs the surface. the smooth packed surface acts like a roof, and almost before the rain stops falling all surface water is drained off to the sides so that an inch down under the surface the roadbed is as hard as it was before the rain. that is the reason why split log road drags used persistently in the spring and occasionally later in the season will preserve good roads all summer. it is very much better to follow each summer rain with the road drag, but it is not so necessary as immediate attention at the proper time in spring. besides, farmers are so busy during the summer months that they find it difficult to spend the time. in some sections of the middle west one man is hired to do the dragging at so much per trip over the road. he makes his calculations accordingly and is prepared to do the dragging at all seasons when needed. this plan usually works out the best because one man then makes it his business and he gets paid for the amount of work performed. this man should live at the far end of the road division so that he can smooth his own pathway leading to town. steel road drag manufacturers are making road drags of steel with tempered blades adjustable to any angle by simply moving the lever until the dog engages in the proper notch. some of these machines are made with blades reversible, so that the other side can be used for cutting when the first edge is worn. for summer use the steel drag works very well, but it lacks the smoothing action of a well balanced log drag. seed house and barn trucks [illustration: figure .--barn trucks. the platform truck is made to move boxed apples and other fruit. the bag truck is well proportioned and strong, but is not full ironed.] bag trucks for handling bags of grain and seeds should be heavy. bag truck wheels should be eight inches in diameter with a three-inch face. the steel bar or shoe that lifts and carries the bag should be twenty-two inches in length. that means that the bottom of the truck in front is twenty-two inches wide. the wheels run behind this bar so the hubs do not project to catch against standing bags or door frames. the length of truck handles from the steel lift bar to the top end of the hand crook is four feet, six inches. in buying bag trucks it is better to get the heavy solid kind that will not upset. the light ones are a great nuisance when running them over uneven floors. the wheels are too narrow and too close together and the trucks tip over under slight provocation. platform trucks for use in moving boxes of apples or crates of potatoes or bags of seed in the seed house or warehouse also should be heavy. the most approved platform truck, the kind that market men use, is made with a frame four feet in length by two feet in width. the frame is made of good solid hardwood put together with mortise and tenon. the cross pieces or stiles are three-quarters of an inch lower than the side pieces or rails, which space is filled with hardwood flooring boards firmly bolted to the cross pieces so they come up flush with the side timbers. the top of the platform should be sixteen inches up from the floor. there are two standards in front which carry a wooden crossbar over the front end of the truck. this crossbar is used for a handle to push or pull the truck. the height of the handle-bar from the floor is three feet. rear wheels are five inches in diameter and work on a swivel so they turn in any direction like a castor. the two front wheels carry the main weight. they are twelve inches in diameter with a three-inch face. the wheels are bored to fit a one-inch steel axle and have wide boxings bolted to the main timbers of the truck frame. like the two-wheel bag truck, the wheels of the platform truck are under the frame so they do not project out in the way, which is a great advantage when the truck is being used in a crowded place. [illustration: figure .--farm gate post with copper mail box.] [illustration: figure .--concrete post supporting a waterproof clothes line reel box.] [illustration: figure .--dumb waiter. the cage is poised by a counterweight. it is guided by a rope belt which runs on grooved pulleys at the top and bottom.] home canning outfit there are small canning outfits manufactured and sold for farm use that work on the factory principle. for canning vegetables, the heating is done under pressure because a great deal of heat is necessary to destroy the bacteria that spoil vegetables in the cans. steam under pressure is a good deal hotter than boiling water. there is considerable work in using a canning outfit, but it gets the canning out of the way quickly. extra help may be employed for a few days to do the canning on the same principle that farmers employ extra help at threshing time and do it all up at once. of course, fruits and vegetables keep coming along at different times in the summer, but the fall fruit canning may be done at two or three sittings arranged a week or two apart and enough fruit packed away in the cellar to last a big family a whole year. canning machinery is simple and inexpensive. these outfits may be bought from $ up. probably a $ or $ canner would be large enough for a large family, or a dozen different families if it could be run on a co-operative plan. [illustration: figure .--clothes line tightener. this device is made of no. wire bent as shown in the illustration.] [illustration: figure .--goat stall. milch goats are milked on a raised platform. feed is placed in the manger. the opening in the side of the manger is a stanchion to hold them steady.] [illustration: figure .--horse clippers. hand clippers are shown to the left. the flexible shaft clipper to the right may be turned by hand for clipping a few horses or shearing a few sheep, but for real business it should be driven by an electric motor.] electric towel the "air towel" is sanitary, as well as an economical method of drying the hands. a foot pedal closes a quick-acting switch, thereby putting into operation a blower that forces air through an electric heating device so arranged as to distribute the warmed air to all parts of the hands at the same time. the supply of hot air continues as long as the foot pedal is depressed. the hands are thoroughly dried in thirty seconds. stalls for milch goats milch goats are not fastened with stanchions like cows. the front of the manger is boarded tight with the exception of a round hole about two feet high and a slit in the boards reaching from the round opening to within a few inches of the floor. the round hole is made large enough so that the goat puts her head through to reach the feed, and the slit is narrow enough so she cannot back up to pull the feed out into the stall. this is a device to save fodder. [illustration: figure .--hog catching hook. the wooden handle fits loosely into the iron socket. as soon as the hog's hind leg is engaged the wooden handle is removed and the rope held taut.] stable helps [illustration: figure .--bull nose-chain. cross bulls may be turned out to pasture with some degree of safety by snapping a chain like this into the nose-ring. the chain should be just long enough to swing and wrap around the bull's front legs when he is running. also the length is intended to drag the ring where he will step on it with his front feet. there is some danger of pulling the nose ring out.] [illustration: figure .--manure carriers. there are two kinds of manure carriers in general use. the principal difference is the elevator attachment for hoisting when the spreader stands too high for the usual level dump.] overhead tracks have made feed carriers possible. litter or feed carriers and manure carriers run on the same kind of a track, the only difference is in size and shape of the car and the manner in which the contents are unloaded. manure carriers and litter carriers have a continuous track that runs along over the manure gutters and overhead lengthwise of the feed alleys. there are a number of different kinds of carriers manufactured, all of which seem to do good service. the object is to save labor in doing the necessary work about dairy stables. to get the greatest possible profit from cows, it is absolutely necessary that the stable should be kept clean and sanitary, also that the cows shall be properly fed several times a day. different kinds of feed are given at the different feeding periods. it is impossible to have all the different kinds of food stored in sufficient quantities within easy reach of the cows. hence, the necessity of installing some mechanical arrangement to fetch and carry. the only floor carrier in use in dairy stables is a truck for silage. not in every stable is this the case. sometimes a feed carrier is run directly to the silo. it depends a good deal on the floor what kind of a carrier is best for silage. the advantage of an overhead track is, that it is always free from litter. where floor trucks are used, it is necessary to keep the floor bare of obstruction. this is not considered a disadvantage because the floor should be kept clean anyway. [illustration: figure .--cow stanchion. wooden cow stanchions may be made as comfortable for the cows as the iron ones.] house plumbing when water is pumped by an engine and stored for use in a tank to be delivered under pressure in the house, then the additional cost of hot and cold water and the necessary sink and bath room fixtures is comparatively small. modern plumbing fixtures fit so perfectly and go together so easily that the cost of installing house plumbing in the country has been materially reduced, while the dangers from noxious gases have been entirely eliminated. open ventilator pipes carry the poisonous gases up through the roof of the house to float harmlessly away in the atmosphere. septic tanks take care of the sewerage better than the sewer systems in some towns. plumbing fixtures may be cheap or expensive, according to the wishes and pocketbook of the owner. the cheaper grades are just as useful, but there are expensive outfits that are very much more ornamental. farm septic tank [illustration: figure .--frame for holding record sheets in a dairy stable.] [illustration: figure .--loading shute for hogs. this loading shute is made portable and may be moved like a wheelbarrow.] supplying water under pressure in the farmhouse demands a septic tank to get rid of the waste. a septic tank is a scientific receptacle to take the poison out of sewerage. it is a simple affair consisting of two underground compartments, made water-tight, with a sewer pipe to lead the waste water from the house into the first compartment and a drain to carry the denatured sewerage away from the second compartment. the first compartment is open to the atmosphere, through a ventilator, but the second compartment is made as nearly air-tight as possible. the scientific working of a septic tank depends upon the destructive work of two kinds of microscopic life known as aerobic and anaerobic forms of bacteria. sewerage in the first tank is worked over by aerobic bacteria, the kind that require a small amount of oxygen in order to live and carry on their work. the second compartment is inhabited by anaerobic bacteria, or forms of microscopic life that work practically without air. the principles of construction require that a septic tank shall be large enough to contain two days' supply of sewerage in each compartment; thus, requiring four days for the sewerage to enter and leave the tank. [illustration: figure .--brass valves. two kinds of globe valves are used in farm waterworks. the straight valve shown to the left and the right angle valve to the right. either one may be fitted with a long shank to reach above ground when pipes are laid deep to prevent freezing.] estimating gallons daily of sewerage for each inhabitant of the house and four persons to a family, the septic tank should be large enough to hold gallons, three hundred gallons in each compartment, which would require a tank about four feet in width and six feet in length and four feet in depth. these figures embrace more cubic feet of tank than necessary to meet the foregoing requirements. it is a good plan to leave a margin of safety. [illustration: figure .--septic tank, a double antiseptic process for purifying sewerage.] it is usual to lay a vitrified sewer, four inches in diameter, from below the bottom of the cellar to the septic tank, giving it a fall of one-eighth inch in ten feet. the sewer enters the tank at the top of the standing liquid and delivers the fresh sewerage from the house through an elbow and a leg of pipe that reaches to within about six inches of the bottom of the tank. the reason for this is to admit fresh sewerage without disturbing the scum on the surface of the liquid in the tank. the scum is a protection for the bacteria. it helps them to carry on their work of destruction. the same principle applies to the second compartment. the liquid from the first compartment is carried over into the second compartment by means of a bent pipe in the form of a siphon which fills up gradually and empties automatically when the liquid in the first compartment rises to a certain level. the discharging siphon leg should be the shortest. the liquid from the second compartment is discharged into the drain in the same manner. there are special valves made for the final discharge, but they are not necessary. the bottom of the tank is dug deep enough to hold sewerage from two to four feet in depth. the top surface of the liquid in the tank is held down to a level of at least six inches below the bottom of the cellar. so there is no possible chance of the house sewer filling and backing up towards the house. usually the vitrified sewer pipe is four inches in diameter, the septic tank siphons for a small tank are three inches in diameter and the final discharge pipe is three inches in diameter, with a rapid fall for the first ten feet after leaving the tank. septic tanks should be made of concrete, waterproofed on the inside to prevent the possibility of seepage. septic tank tops are made of reinforced concrete with manhole openings. also the manhole covers are made of reinforced concrete, either beveled to fit the openings or made considerably larger than the opening, so that they sit down flat on the top surface of the tank. these covers are always deep enough down in the ground so that when covered over the earth holds them in place. in laying vitrified sewer it is absolutely necessary to calk each joint with okum or lead, or okum reinforced with cement. it is almost impossible to make a joint tight with cement alone, although it can be done by an expert. each length of the sewer-pipe should be given a uniform grade. the vitrified sewer is trapped outside of the building with an ordinary s-trap ventilated, which leaves the sewer open to the atmosphere and prevents the possibility of back-pressure that might drive the poisonous gases from the decomposing sewerage through the sewer back into the house. in this way, the septic tank is made entirely separate from the house plumbing, except that the two systems are connected at this outside trap. it is sometimes recommended that the waste water from the second compartment shall be distributed through a series of drains made with three-inch or four-inch drain tile and that the outlet of this set of drains shall empty into or connect with a regularly organized field drainage system. generally speaking, the final discharge of liquid from a septic tank that is properly constructed is inoffensive and harmless. however, it is better to use every possible precaution to preserve the health of the family, and it is better to dispose of the final waste in such a way as to prevent any farm animal from drinking it. while manholes are built into septic tanks for the purpose of examination, in practice they are seldom required. if the tanks are properly built and rightly proportioned to the sewerage requirements they will take care of the waste water from the house year after year without attention. should any accidents occur, they are more likely to be caused by a leakage in the vitrified sewer than from any other cause. manufacturers of plumbing supplies furnish the siphons together with instructions for placing them properly in the concrete walls. some firms supply advertising matter from which to work out the actual size and proportions of the different compartments and all connections. the making of a septic tank is simple when the principle is once understood. index page acetylene gas air pressure pump anvil apple-picking bag ladder asparagus knife auger, ship auger-bit , automatic hog feeder axles, wagon babbitting boxings barn trucks belt punch work bench and vise bench for iron work for woodworking bipod bits, extension boring bit, twist-drill, for wood-boring blacksmith hammers shop block and tackle bobsleighs boiler, steam bolster spring stake bolt cutter bolts, carriage and machine emergency home-made plow and sickle bar boxings, babbitting brace, wagon-box bramble hook brass valves breeding crate for hogs brick trowel bridge auger bucket yoke buck rake building bracket bull nose-chain treadmill cable hay stacker california hay ricker calipers caliper rule canning outfit carpenter's bench trestle cart, two-wheel centrifugal pumps chain, logging chisels and gouges circular saw, filing jointing setting clearing land by tractor clevises, plow clod crusher clothes line reel box, concrete clothes line tightener cold-chisel colt-breaking sulkey compasses concrete center alley for hog house farm scale base and pit hog wallow wall mold conveniences, miscellaneous farm conveyances, farm corn crib, double two-story corn cultivator planter shock horse cotter pin tool coulter clamp countersink cow stanchion crop machinery, special crops, kind of, to irrigate crowbars cultivator, combination corn cutting nippers derrick fork dies and taps diggers, potato disk harrow plow dog churn power draw-filing drawing-knife drill, grain power post drill-press electric driven machines dumbwaiter economy of plowing by tractor electricity on the farm , electric lighting electric power plant towel elevating machinery elevator, grain emery grinders engine and truck, portable engine, gasoline kerosene steam eveners for three- and four-horse teams extension boring bits farm conveniences conveyances office shop and implement house shop work tractor waterworks , feed crusher feeding racks fence-making tools , fence pliers file handle files and rasps filing hand saw roll flail fore-plane forge forges, portable forging iron and steel fruit picking ladders tray fruit-thinning nippers gambrel whiffletree garage garden weeder gas, acetylene gasoline engine house lightning gate, sliding field gatepost with copper mailbox gauge, double-marking generating mechanical power goat stall grain drill elevator elevator, portable grass hook grindstone hacksaw hammers, blacksmith machinist's hand axe hand saw , filing jointing setting using handspike hardy harness punch harrow cart disk sled spike-tooth harvesting by tractor hay carrier carriage hay crop, handling hay derricks, idaho western hayford, double harpoon grapple hitch hood hayrake, revolving hay ricker, california hay rope pulleys hay skids hay sling hay stacker, cable haystack knife hay-tedder hay-track roof extension hoe, how to sharpen wheel hoes and weeders hog catching hook hog feeder, automatic trough trough, reinforced wallow, concrete hoist, oldest farm hoists home repair work, profitable horse clippers horse feeding rack horsepower house plumbing husking-pin hydraulic ram idaho hay derricks implement shed shed and work shop iron, forging irons for neckyoke and whiffletree iron roller iron working tools irrigation by pumping overhead spray jointer, carpenter's jointer plows jointing hand saw kerosene engine keyhole saw knife, asparagus corn cutting haystack knots lag screw land float level, carpenter's iron stock lighting, gasoline linchpin farm wagons link, cold-shut plow loading chute for hogs logging chain machines, driven machinist's hammers vise manure carriers marline spike measuring mechanical work mechanical power, generating mechanics of plowing melting ladle monkey-wrench mule pump nail hammers nail set office, farm oilstone overhead spray irrigation oxen paint brushes pea guard picking fruit pig-pen, sanitary pincers pipe cutter pipe-fitting tools pipe vise wrench plastering trowel pliers plow, heavy-breaking riding walking plowing by tractor importance of mechanics of plows, jointer scotch plumb-bob and plumb-line plumbing, house pod-bit portable farm engine post-hole diggers poultry feeding trough power conveyor power, generating mechanical power post drill power transmission pulverizers pump, air pressure centrifugal mule jack jacks and speed jacks rotary suction punches quantity of water to use in irrigation racks, feeding sheep feeding rafter grapple rasp rasps and files ratchet-brace refrigeration reservoir for supplying water to farm buildings revolving hayrake riding plow ripsaw rivets rivet set road drag, split-log steel road work roller roll filing roof pitches truss root pulper rotary pumps round barn, economy of rule of six, eight and ten sand bands caps sanitary pig-pen saw, hack scotch plows screwdriver ratchet seed house trucks septic tank set-screws shave horse shears sheep feeding rack sheepshank ship auger shoeing horses knife tool box shop, garage and implement shed shop tools slaughter house sliding field gate snips, sheet metal soil auger tools soil, working the speed indicator jacks split-log road drag spud stable helps stall for milch goats steam boiler and engine steel, forging road drag square tools, making stepladder stock for dies stone-boat stump puller suction pumps sulkey, colt-breaking s wrenches tapeline taper reamer tap taps and dies tempering steel tools tongs tool box for field use handy tool rack, blacksmith tools for fence-making for woodworking for working iron pipe-fitting soil tractor economy farm transmission gear used in plowing uses for, on farm tram points travoy treadmill, bull tree pruners trowel, brick plastering trucks, barn try-square twist-drills , u bolt in cement uses of electricity on farm valves, brass vise wagon-box irons wagon brakes seat spring walking plow water-power water storage waterworks, farm well sweep wheelbarrow wheel hoe winches windmills wire splice splicer stretcher wooden clamp roller wood-saw frames woodworking bench tools working the soil wrecking bar _drake's mechanical books_ ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- *title | style | price ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- =electrical books= electrical tables and engineering data *lea. $ . electrical tables and engineering data *cloth . motion picture operation *lea. . motion picture operation *cloth . alternating current lea. . alternating current cloth . wiring diagrams and descriptions *lea. . wiring diagrams and descriptions *cloth . armature and magnet winding *lea. . armature and magnet winding *cloth . modern electric illumination *lea. . modern electric illumination *cloth . modern electrical construction *lea. . modern electrical construction *cloth . electricians' operating and testing manual *lea. . electricians' operating and testing manual *cloth . drake's electrical dictionary lea. . drake's electrical dictionary cloth . electric motors, direct and alternating *lea. . electric motors, direct and alternating *cloth . electrical measurements and meter testing lea. . electrical measurements and meter testing cloth . drake's telephone handbook lea. . drake's telephone handbook cloth . elementary electricity, up-to-date *cloth . electricity made simple *cloth . easy electrical experiments *cloth . wireless telegraph and telephone handbook cloth . telegraphy, self-taught cloth . dynamo-electric machines cloth . electro-plating handbook lea. . electro-plating handbook cloth . modern american telephony lea. . handy vest-pocket electrical dictionary lea. . handy vest-pocket electrical dictionary cloth . storage batteries cloth . elevators--hydraulic and electric cloth . how to become a successful motorman lea. . motorman's practical air brake instructor lea. . electric railway troubles cloth . electric power stations cloth . electrical railroading lea. . note.--new books and revised editions are marked* ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- *title | style | price ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- =automobile books= brookes' automobile handbook. *lea. $ . automobile starting and lighting *lea. . automobile starting and lighting *cloth . ford motor car and truck and tractor attachments *lea. . ford motor car and truck and tractor attachments *cloth . automobile catechism and repair manual *lea. . practical gas and oil engine handbook *lea. . practical gas and oil engine handbook *cloth . note.--new books and revised editions are marked* ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- *title | style | price ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- =farm books= farm buildings, with plans and descriptions *cloth $ . farm mechanics *cloth . traction farming and traction engineering *cloth . farm engines and how to run them cloth . note.--new books and revised editions are marked* ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- *title | style | price ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- =shop practice books= twentieth century machine shop practice cloth $ . practical mechanical drawing cloth . sheet metal workers' manual *lea. . oxy-acetylene welding and cutting *lea. . oxy-acetylene welding and cutting *cloth . th century toolsmith and steelworker cloth . pattern making and foundry practice lea. . modern blacksmithing, horseshoeing and wagon making cloth . note.--new books and revised editions are marked* ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- *title | style | price ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- =steam engineering books= swingle's handbook for steam engineers and electricians *lea. $ . steam boilers, construction, care and operation *lea. . complete examination questions and answers for marine and stationary engineers *lea. . swingle's catechism of steam, gas and electrical engineering *lea. . the steam turbine, its care and operation cloth . calculation of horse power made easy cloth . note.--new books and revised editions are marked* ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- *title | style | price ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- =railroad books= modern locomotive engineering *lea. $ . locomotive fireman's boiler instructor *lea. . locomotive engine breakdowns and how to repair them *lea. . operation of trains and station work *lea. . construction and maintenance of railway roadbed and track lea. . first, second and third year standard examination questions and answers for locomotive firemen *lea. . complete air brake examination questions and answers *lea. . westinghouse air brake system cloth . new york air brake system cloth . walschaert valve gear breakdowns cloth . note.--new books and revised editions are marked* ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- *title | style | price ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- =carpentry and building books= modern carpentry. two volumes cloth $ . modern carpentry. vol. i cloth . modern carpentry. vol. ii cloth . the steel square. two volumes cloth . the steel square. vol. i cloth . the steel square. vol. ii cloth . a. b. c. of the steel square cloth . common sense stair building and handrailing cloth . modern estimator and contractor's guide *cloth . light and heavy timber framing made easy cloth . builders' architectural drawing self-taught cloth . easy steps to architecture cloth . five orders of architecture cloth . builders' and contractors' guide cloth . practical bungalows and cottages *cloth . low cost american homes *cloth . practical cabinet maker and furniture designer cloth . practical wood carving cloth . home furniture making cloth . concretes, cements, mortars, plasters and stuccos cloth . practical steel construction cloth . th century bricklayer and mason's assistant cloth . practical bricklaying self-taught cloth . practical stonemasonry cloth . practical up-to-date plumbing cloth . hot water heating, steam and gas fitting cloth . practical handbook for millwrights cloth . boat building for amateurs cloth . note.--new books and revised editions are marked* ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- *title | style | price ---------------------------------------------------+-------+-------- =painting books= art of sign painting *cloth $ . scene painting and bulletin art *cloth . "a show at" sho'cards cloth . strong's book of designs *lea. . signist's modern book of alphabets cloth . amateur artist cloth . modern painter's cyclopedia cloth . red book series of trade school manuals . exterior painting, wood, iron and brick cloth . . interior painting, water and oil colors cloth . . colors cloth . . graining and marbling cloth . . carriage painting cloth . . the wood finisher cloth . new hardwood finishing cloth . automobile painting *cloth . estimates, costs and profits--house painting and interior decorating *cloth . note.--new books and revised editions are marked* +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | transcriber's notes | | | | the text of the original work has been maintained, except as | | mentioned below. | | | | changed for consistency: screwdriver to screw-driver, pene to peen,| | homemade to home-made, ballbearing to ball-bearing, horse-power to | | horsepower, double-tree to doubletree, and eye-bolt to eyebolt. in | | the index, the following words have been changed to conform to the | | text: sulkey to sulky, and re-inforced to reinforced. all | | dimensions have been standardised to a x b (with a and b | | representing two numbers). | | | | typographical errors corrected: azotabacter to azotobacter (p. | | ), devise to device (p. ), anarobic to anaerobic (p. ), | | and hayford to hayfork (index). some minor typographical errors | | have been corrected silently. | | | | page : "the so-called humid sections" should possibly be "the | | so-called arid sections". | | | | the advertisements have been re-arranged to a single list per | | subject. | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ the internet archive transcribers note text emphasis denoted as _italics_ and =bold=. computers on the farm farm uses for computers, how to select software and hardware, and online information sources in agriculture [illustration] [illustration] united states department of agriculture farmers' bulletin number cover photo: fran and brian schnarre, a farm couple from columbia, missouri, working at their computer. _photo by duane dailey, university of missouri_. prepared by office of information, office of governmental and public affairs =issued march = contents purpose of this bulletin what a computer can do for you recordkeeping farm management analysis process controllers telecommunications other uses computers on the farm how to choose a microcomputer system strategies for getting into computers alternatives to buying a microcomputer information available from your county extension agent how to select software checklist for evaluating software where to look for good software compatibility counts how to select hardware checklist for evaluating hardware where to look for good hardware types of hardware components of a microcomputer try it out computers need an investment of time and money information available online from usda, state, and private sources other computer development at usda learning more about computers on the farm glossary of computer terms =computers on the farm= =by deborah takiff smith= =purpose of this bulletin= how can a computer help you operate your farm better? how do you select useful computer programs (software) and equipment (hardware)? if you have a computer or plan to get one, what information can you obtain with your computer that will be useful for your farm operation? this publication will help you answer such questions. it will help you evaluate and select a new system, or get more out of the one you already have. the key components of computer systems you may want to know about are: hardware--the physical equipment itself. software--the computer programs on tape or disk, and online sources of information--such as current market and weather information and technical reports. this publication offers guidelines to help farmers select hardware, software, and online information. (see the glossary at the end of this publication for definitions of specialized computer terms.) =what a computer can do for you= you can use a microcomputer to help you-- determine the most economical feed ration for dairy cows and other farm animals. schedule irrigation, get quick access to records, keep machinery inventories and depreciation schedules, help with tax records and making out income tax returns, keep livestock breeding and production records, keep a record of loans and cash flow to meet interest and principal payments, determine levels of earnings by working through a profit and loss statement and by calculating a percentage return to capital and a percentage return to equity, decide the optimum production choice for a particular farm in a given year, and the optimum combination of inputs to grow the crops or livestock chosen, store large amounts of data, and get current market and weather information if the microprocessor is connected via the telephone to data bases (see section on online services). software programs are also available in such areas as financial management, crop and field records, mailing lists for customers of certified seed and breeding stock, machinery purchase versus custom hiring, investment feasibility of building and livestock facilities, commodity price charts and tables, income taxation, marketing, soil conservation, and integrated pest management. the computer and its associated software packages can help you do four kinds of work: ( ) store and manipulate records, ( ) provide analyses for management decisions, ( ) control machines or monitor production, and ( ) communicate faster with other people through their computers and data bases. =recordkeeping= many experts recommend that you start on a small scale, computerize one thing at a time, and learn as you go along--rather than trying to put information on your entire farm operation into the computer all at once. a good place to start is with farm records. you can use microcomputers to keep track of financial records--such as cash flow, bank balances, accounts payable, accounts receivable, net worth statements, costs, and returns--as well as other records--such as livestock breeding and production reports, crop and field records, and mailing lists. =farm management analysis= after computerizing the farm records, the next step would be to do simple analyses on the microprocessor. a good place to start is by analyzing data already stored in the computer or available in the files. for example, you could use the recordkeeping capabilities of the computer to record and depreciate equipment, and to decide whether it is cheaper to lease or buy farm equipment. general software is available to help you with accounting and bookkeeping, basic business functions. =process controllers= besides analyzing farm management problems and storing data, computers have another key use--as process controllers. they can control such devices as pumps and gates, record milk output per cow, and control grain drying. to save water and energy, some farmers have switched to sophisticated irrigation scheduling by programing their computers to read the moisture in the soil, the weather, and the humidity, and to provide information on a plant's age and irrigation needs. the computer then tells the farmer when to water a crop and for how long--and can even turn the water on and off. =telecommunications= you can also use a computer as an up-to-date source for communication, linking you to banks of information that are available almost instantaneously from public and private online information sources. with the computer hooked up to the telephone, you can get information quickly, receive it visually, and record it in detail if you wish. some key information sources are listed on page of this bulletin. =other uses= farm families can use microcomputers the same way other families do--to plan the family budget, keep an inventory of household furnishings, keep track of recipes, keep mailing lists, turn lights and heat on and off, type homework and other documents, learn new skills, and play games. =computers on the farm= most of the computers farmers are getting are microcomputers, also called home computers or personal computers. they are the basis of the "computer revolution" that has been occurring since the late 's and they are the focus of this publication. many farmers, especially the owners of the larger farms, already have computers. but you don't have to be a large farmer to afford a microcomputer. computers can be useful in almost all areas of a farming operation--helping you decide what, when, and how to plant; how to sell; and how to arrange the farm business to be more efficient and more profitable. the computer can supplement the calculator, typewriter, and file cabinet. and it can send and receive written or graphic messages by telephone (in most areas of the country) that might be too long or complex to do verbally. a computer can be very useful when repetitive analyses are needed or when data storage is important, as with financial records or daily milk output per cow. more and more, farming requires sophisticated management decisions and management of basic resources, including land, water, labor, production inputs, and capital. these are the kinds of decisions the computer can help you make faster and more cost-effectively. although a computer program for your farm operation could make recordkeeping and analysis easier and improve your ability to manage, it might be hard to measure these improvements in dollars. but the dollars you save by having better information on when to sell a crop, how to monitor the business, and how to diagnose a problem before it gets out of control might pay for the computer. farmers and ranchers with large feedlot or other livestock operations might find that a feed formulation program could cut costs enough to pay for the computer system within a few months. =how to choose a microcomputer system= should you buy a microcomputer? how do you decide on a system that's best for you? here are some factors to consider in making these decisions. the first step is to think about your needs. what would you do with your computer system? how would you actually use it to help you run your operation better? list your primary needs, the important things you want to do right away with your computer. then, think of secondary needs--things you might do in the future once you have a computer. once you've identified your needs, the next step is to shop around--to find some software that fulfills your needs and to see some systems in operation. go to computer stores or get in touch with the salespeople in your area. you could decide to have custom programs written for your operation, but they will be significantly more expensive than programs that have already been developed. talk to other farmers, ranchers, extension and university specialists, and business people who are using microcomputers. find out what software they are using. do some research (by reading books or magazines, taking a course or seminar, or visiting a trade show) so you'll be an informed customer when you shop seriously. many computer experts strongly recommend against buying a computer first and then shopping for the software packages. so identify your needs and select the software packages or materials that will help you do what you want to with your computer. then find the hardware to run the programs. =the computer revolution= "the advent of computers to farm management ... is already underway and seems likely to have a powerful influence," said usda historian wayne rasmussen in . "the computer should lead to more efficient management of machines and energy and should help in other farming operations such as cost accounting, mixing feed rations and applying fertilizers and other resources efficiently. some farmers now have computers of their own, and many others have access to computer systems through their county agricultural agents," rasmussen pointed out. the computer can be seen as the "third revolution" in american farming. the first revolution was the use of the horse, which added animal power to human power. the second was the switch from the horse to the tractor, which again expanded the power an individual could wield. but the computer is a different kind of technological advance because it adds to the farmer's power to manage. by , the computer will probably be as important a part of a commercial farmer's operation as the pickup truck. farmers may flip on their computers first thing in the morning--instead of their radios--to get the latest market prices. they can get a rundown on weather and growing conditions for major worldwide production areas; pertinent data on prices, market conditions, credit terms, transportation and storage rates, and related forecasts; and finally a list of priorities each day to take advantage of these conditions. getting the right system--the combination of hardware (the physical equipment) and software (the computer programs)--is the problem farmers must solve before they can make the most of the computer revolution. =strategies for getting into computers= if you're interested in getting your farm's operations computerized, and you're just starting, you could choose various strategies for doing so. one way is to first buy the basic hardware and components you think you need, and then add memory and other components later. if you do that, be sure you can add additional disk drives, memory, and a printer to your computer, all at a reasonable cost. what can you do with a small computer once you outgrow it, and you want to get a bigger one? you might want to use your older computer in a small, specialized farm operation, or keep it to retrieve and analyze records that you stored on the old equipment. other alternatives would be to trade it in on a larger computer, advertise to sell it through the local want-ads, trade or sell it to a friend or neighbor, keep the small computer for someone else in the family (perhaps a game-playing youngster), or donate it to a local school or religious or charitable group and take a tax write-off. the farm of the future may have many computers, some for specific functions such as irrigation scheduling or dairy operations, and one for financial records. having several computers would help farmers deal with the problem of malfunctioning computers, so that the whole farm would not be shut down if one computer goes down. =alternatives to buying a microcomputer= you might consider alternatives to buying a computer. you may be able to lease one to see what it will do for you, and use it until your needs make it worthwhile to buy one. prices keep coming down. the best time to buy is when you find you can profitably make use of a computer. even though it becomes technically obsolete, it will still do for you what you purchased it for. a programmable calculator may be an appropriate tool that is much less costly then a microcomputer. if you like what a computer can do for your operation but aren't ready to buy one or to use it yourself, you might hire a consultant to help you select an appropriate system. or you might retain an accountant or computer consultant to run the financial analysis programs you need. this kind of service gives quick results, and relieves you of having to do it yourself. =information available from your county extension agent= state cooperative extension services are helping states provide computers for county offices. many state extension services already have computers in nearly every county extension office. if you are considering buying or leasing a computer system, or want software or timesharing services to make the most of the system you have, a good place to go is to your state or county extension office. in many states, county extension offices have terminals connecting them to mainframe computers; some have microcomputers which give them access to information on crop management, animal production, and marketing. the county extension staff can tell you what is available online in your area that is tailored to your kind of farming and your region. the extension staff will also be able to tell you the software programs applicable in your state. many state extension offices have publications on computers, and others have or are developing online information networks linking farmers and other users to the state university mainframe computer and its data base. state extension specialists are a logical place to start when looking for software that is appropriate to your needs. many state extension computer and agricultural experts have produced software materials that are available, and the county agent will know about them. in some cases the county extension office can lend you software. if you don't have a computer, the extension office may be able to run programs for you, choosing the appropriate software available and plugging in the precise conditions and problems on your farming or ranching operation. or they may be able to use the computer to search for information you need, perhaps communicating with a large state, regional, or national data base. as lower cost computers with improved software have become available, an increasing number of people are turning to their state cooperative extension services for training in computer fundamentals, equipment selection, and software evaluation. county agents can help people find what is available, but they probably will not be preparing software programs themselves. =how to select software= the key criteria for selecting good software are the following: does it meet your needs? does it do what it says it will do? and does it have good support documentation? =checklist for evaluating software= here are some factors to consider when evaluating and comparing software: =documentation.= look at the "documentation" or the written (paper) materials that come with your program. these should explain clearly what the program does and what you have to do to use it. =ease of use.= is the program fairly easy to use? does it guide you through the program? =instructions.= another factor you should consider in evaluating software is the instructions. are there instructions in the program or in the written documentation? are they readable? you should be sure you understand how to operate the program. =help.= what help can you get if you run into problems? does the program have a "help" function? when you don't know how to answer a question or need help, can you turn to a separate part of the computer program or to a part of the accompanying documentation to answer your question? is there a company phone-in service you can call if you need help? some software programs may come to you with bugs (errors) in them. find out what backup services are available. is there a hotline you can call for help if the program has a problem you can't solve? does the company provide updated versions periodically? are they free or at nominal cost? =compatibility with hardware.= is the software compatible with hardware you already have, or does it run on an operating system you can use with your hardware? some computers use tape cassettes, like audio tape you use on a tape recorder. the most standard storage medium for programs and data is the floppy diskette, which looks like a soft phonograph record. the diskette comes in several sizes--the most common are inches and ¼ inches. a newer possibility is the -inch hard disk. the hard disk may be used for storage, but you buy the software on a floppy disk and transfer it. =memory.= does your computer have enough memory to run the program? =recommendation.= does the program come from a reputable source, or does it come with a recommendation from someone you trust? =effectiveness.= does the program do what you want it to do correctly and consistently? =where to look for good software= where do you find good software? some farmers and ranchers write their own programs or pay a programmer to write a custom program. but most get existing programs either from state extension sources or from commercial outlets. many operations farmers need to perform on a computer can be done by using generalized software packages readily available through commercial sources. check with your county extension agent. he or she may know of the programs that have been tailored for your operation. the extension service has published a directory of agricultural software programs produced by state extension services, entitled "updated inventory of agricultural computer programs."[a] [footnote a: to order a copy, send $ . , payable to the university of florida, to administrative services institute of food and agricultural sciences (ifas) bldg. university of florida gainesville, fl ] there are also various private directories of software that is compatible for particular equipment. you can get these programs at computer stores or through mail-order sources. many trade journals carry ads of agricultural software vendors. the land-grant university in your state may have computer programs available for farmers at nominal cost. many states have produced extensive computer software. there are also many commercial software houses that produce computer programs in the field of agriculture. the best programs are written by people who combine strong expertise in the agricultural subject matter with the ability to write good computer programs that are relatively "friendly" or easy to use. the 's have seen a big jump in the number, quality, and friendliness of agricultural software. but you still need to evaluate carefully the programs you are considering. remember that software selection and evaluation are important factors to consider when planning a computer system for your farm. =compatibility counts= computers and marriages should share one thing in common: compatibility. if it's not there, the system won't work. not all hardware and software are compatible. in fact, hundreds of producers of computer equipment and computer programs are in the market, and there are few across-the-board standards. so it's important to get hardware and software that are compatible. software, or the computer programs themselves, are not like records that can be played on any record player. they have to be compatible with the hardware in terms of the programing language used, operating system, size, format, and other factors. try to find a store in your area where you will get the expertise you need to obtain the right combination of software and hardware to meet your needs. when you buy a computer, find out whether it comes with a standard operating language that will allow you to use a wide variety of programs written in different languages on your computer. even then, you may find that a disk that supposedly works with that operating language will not work on your machine. =how to select hardware= =checklist for evaluating hardware= here are some factors to consider when evaluating and comparing hardware: =software.= the first questions to ask are, "what software do you plan to use?" and "which computer will run that program?" does the computer come with a standard operating system so that it will be compatible with a range of software programs? =memory.= how much memory, or information storage capacity, do you need? the computer's memory is measured in kilobytes (abbreviated k), and most computers come in sizes ranging from k up to k. (a kilobyte is equal to roughly , characters.) you need to know the software program you will use and your recordkeeping requirements to accurately estimate the capacity of the equipment you need. some agricultural programs use k or k of memory. user friendly programs, which require little training to use and which guide you through the program, may be easier; but they may require more memory for the program itself, leaving you less storage space or memory for the data. =computation.= what kind of computational ability do you want your computer to have? will it serve the computing needs you have identified for now and later? =input and output devices.= what kind of output do you need? what additional pieces of equipment or peripherals (such as separate screen, disk drive, modem, printer) will you need to buy to make this system do what you want it to? most agricultural programs require a printer. a dot matrix printer (which produces characters made of small dots) may be sufficient. another option is a letter quality printer, which is more expensive. how big a screen do you need? (screens are measured in characters and in inches.) do you need an -column or -column monitor? do you need color and strong graphics capability? what quality screen image do you need? can you add memory and other components later if you need to? =external storage.= what kind of external storage does the system use, floppy disk, hard disk, or tape? cassette tape storage costs less, but compared to disk storage, it has several disadvantages. if the hardware uses floppy disks, is the disk drive included as part of the computer package or does it come separately? is a second disk drive included in the package or does it come separately? what kind of a disk drive(s) do you need, single or double density? hard or floppy? =training.= what training is available in the use of the new equipment? =backup and maintenance services.= what backup and maintenance services are available from the vendor or other sources, once you've bought this computer? what happens when the computer is down (not working)? does the company or store from which you plan to buy offer a service contract, and how much does it cost? will you have to carry your computer to their site for servicing, and how long are you likely to be without it? how far away is your dealer and where will the computer actually be serviced? it's important to buy something that you can have fixed fairly quickly and cheaply, since elements of your system, especially the mechanical parts, may well need repair at some time. =value.= what equipment and software programs come with the basic package, and are these items included in the base price? compare prices carefully, considering the components and software you are getting for a particular price. do not buy on the basis of price alone, but consider also the reliability of the equipment and the vendor, and the service you will be getting to set up, maintain, and support your system. =where to look for good hardware= many buyers get their computers at specialty stores that handle computers and other electronics. some handle only one brand of computer. it's worthwhile to shop around and see various systems. the big national department store chains sell computers, too. talk to your neighbors about what they're using, and be sure to get hands-on practice with systems you are considering. try to find a reputable dealer who can offer backup support. consider the pros and cons of getting all equipment from a single vendor versus shopping around for peripherals from different manufacturers. a reliable dealer who handles several brands can help you make this decision. check with your extension office. it may have a state publication on computers or a checklist for buying one. =types of hardware= farmers are using several different types of computers. besides the microcomputer, which is the most widely used, other kinds of farm computers include interactive terminals, videotex terminals, handheld processors, and minicomputers. a microcomputer can be used as a stand-alone unit, working on its own with a software disk or tape. or it can be connected to outside information sources if it is equipped with a device known as a modem, which allows the computer to communicate with other computers over the telephone. the modem turns the computer from an information processor and storage machine into a piece of communications equipment. an interactive terminal has no data storage capability but is linked to a central computer through the telephone. this is called a "dumb" terminal because it can receive, display, and send information, but it cannot process that information. programs and data are stored in the central computer and the user pays a fee to access the system. a videotex keyboard terminal can be connected to a telephone jack and any television set. the user can request and receive any kind of information stored in the central computer. some of the online services use this type of equipment (see section about online information systems on page ). many farmers are also using handheld programmable calculators. these are convenient to use in the field, and can record often repeated data, such as daily milk production. they have little memory (usually k) and their output can be printed on -inch paper tape. they are much cheaper than the microcomputer. farmers use them to record daily milk production, formulate dairy and beef rations, estimate value of dairy forages, estimate cost of operating farm machinery, and calculate depreciation and investment tax credit. some very large farm operations use minicomputers, which are larger, have more memory, can do more functions than the microcomputers, and can support multiple users. however, the newer microcomputers have more memory and more functions, and the difference between minicomputers and microcomputers has narrowed. =computer system components= [illustration: printer; display screen; telephone/modem; disk drive; floppy disk; and central processor with keyboard] =components of a microcomputer= one way to understand how a microcomputer works is to see its key components. the =central processing unit= (cpu) is the silicon chip that is the "brain" of the computer. it does all the computation and controls all the other processing. the cpu stores =memory= of several kinds. part of the memory is wired into the computer permanently by the manufacturer. this is called read only memory (rom). it contains such things as the operating system and program language. random access memory (ram) is the memory bank that includes the computer program or instructions, as well as the data. your storage devices--tape cassettes, floppy disks, or hard disks--that store computer programs and data, are sometimes called external memory. the computer system also needs =input devices= and =output devices=. your keyboard is an input device; disk drives and tape drives are also input devices. the output will probably be a cathode ray tube (crt), which looks like a video monitor. the printer is the other output device you may choose to include in your computer system. make sure the microcomputer has an adequate number of input and output ports for future needs. if you use your computer for communications, you'll need a telephone =modem=. here is a possible shopping list of hardware for a farmer's starting microcomputer system: cpu (computer) with k or k of memory. crt or monitor with adequate character width for the programs you plan to use. one or two disk drives, either ¼ or inches in diameter. dot matrix printer (optional). modem for communication with large computer (optional). =try it out= be sure you try the system you plan to buy. test run on a sample problem the hardware and software combination you are considering using. see if you think the solutions the computer puts out are what you need. if you insist on a thorough demonstration of the material you are considering buying, you can evaluate it in terms of its ease of use and the usefulness of its analysis. if you're thinking of buying a new software package for a computer you already have, ask to try it out first. some software distributors in the public sector will give you a trial period to make sure the program is satisfactory and runs on your equipment. or you may be able to obtain a demonstration disk. at least, try out new programs with the same microprocessor, printer, and screen you use to make sure they will work on your equipment. it's useful to have software evaluated by a reputable source--for example your local county extension agent, state extension specialist, or a neighbor who has had experience. "let the buyer beware" is a good motto to remember as you shop around for a computer system. =getting comfortable with computers= if you can use a typewriter, you can use a computer. most agricultural program's do not require particular math or technical skills, just a knowledge of your farming operation and the ability to think in a logical, orderly way. most new programs are user friendly; they ask you questions in plain english, and you type the answer on the keyboard. a good way to feel comfortable with computers is to try one out at your local computer store, or at fairs, conferences, or workshops at universities. =computers need an investment in time and money= in addition to considering the cost of a computer system, consider the time and effort it takes to learn the equipment and the programs, and to keep records. who will be operating the microcomputer? does he or she have the patience and skills to learn to operate the computer, and to enter the large amounts of data that will be required initially? the computer may save time and money. many farmers find that they don't save time but they accomplish more in the time they do spend. don't underestimate the amount of time and effort it will require to collect data, make sure it's accurate, enter the data, and run the analyses. it's important to consider how user-friendly the computer is, and how much the computer's software will do to guide you through the analysis. a computer will do calculations very quickly, perhaps saving hours of laborious figuring. a computer will store information from one time period to the next, and recalculate alternatives quickly. by making the information available, it will help you identify strong and weak points in your operation. however, these functions will depend on your data. if the records you use in making a computation are incomplete, for example, the computer cannot fill in the gaps for you nor overcome inaccuracies in the data. =information available online from usda, state, and private sources= you can transform your own microprocessor or other computer into a powerful communications device by adding a modem to it and communicating over the telephone. this will help you gather information on news, weather forecasts, emergencies or disasters, crop and livestock production, and marketing (including current and future prices). online computer services also include buying and selling farm products; purchasing farm and home supplies, including teleshopping; banking services; business management advice; ordering theater tickets; information concerning farm and public policy; and personal education and entertainment. many farmers who are computerizing their operations, as well as others in agriculture, can use some form of online information. there are more than , public and private information sources available on computer. new ones seem to come out every week. the following selected list of information you can receive on computer includes some of the major private online information services with agricultural applications, as well as the main ones available from usda and the state land-grant institutions. most of these information networks are paid for by the user based on the amount of use. many charge an initial fee, and then most charge the user by the amount of time he or she spends on the system. no one computer system or online system may be adequate for everyone. there are many good systems, and different systems are good for different tasks. = . agnet= agnet is a major online information and problem-solving service for farmers, ranchers, agribusinesses, and homes. it is sponsored jointly by five state cooperative extension services--nebraska, montana, north dakota, south dakota, and washington--and operated by the university of nebraska. county extension offices in several states participate, and farmers in nearly all the states and canada subscribe to agnet. it helps people make marketing and production decisions and solve agricultural management problems, and it provides current information on market conditions and news items. it offers cash and futures market reports, international market reports from the u.s. department of agriculture (usda) foreign agricultural service (fas), reports and report abstracts from the usda's economic research service and statistical reporting service, and market comments by extension service economists. also available are electronic mail service and electronic conferencing, which allows groups of users with similar interests to share ideas and information. farmers and ranchers who have computer terminals with communication capability can access agnet. others can tap into agnet through their county extension services. agnet subscribers are typically agricultural lenders and bankers. extension specialists, farm managers, home economists, agricultural consulting firms, farmers and ranchers, and exporters of agricultural commodities. address: agnet university of nebraska miller hall university of nebraska lincoln, ne = . agricoia= agricoia is an online information service produced by the national agricultural library (nad of usda), and is available commercially from a number of sources (including dialog and bibliographic retrieval services). it provides comprehensive access to information on published literature pertaining to agriculture. agricoia is the catalog and index for nal and covers materials published since . it includes about . million citations. agricoia contains citations to worldwide published books, serial titles, and journal articles on agriculture and related subjects. in addition to bibliographic citations of published literature, the system offers information through several specialized subfiles; these subfiles include brucellosis (bru), environmental impact statements covering and (env), and the food and nutrition information center, which emphasizes human nutrition research and education and food technology (fnc). librarians are the main users of this system. address: to find out more about agricoia, contact: educational resources staff national agricultural library room beltsville, md = . agridata network= agridata is a private information and computing network specializing in agriculture. it offers immediate access to more than , pages of continuously updated business, financial, marketing, weather, and price information, as well as analyses and recommendations from its own and other reporters, analysts, economists, meteorologists, and researchers. it offers several different services, including an online computing service that allows users to access a library of microcomputer software programs that can be transferred to the user's microcomputer; an agricultural production technology service offering data bases from land-grant universities and from agricultural, chemical, fertilizer, equipment, seed, and feed companies; an "electronic yellow pages," or product service directory for farmers; and electronic mail. address: agridata resources, inc. west highland ave. milwaukee, wi = . agri-markets data service (amds)= agri-markets data service is an agricultural data base service offered by capital publications in arlington, va. the service provides market information, such as prices and shipments, as well as commentary and other information. it gives daily and weekly market commentary on local and national market activity in livestock, grain, fruits and vegetables, and poultry and dairy products. address: agri-markets data service north th st., suite arlington, va = . ams market news network= the usda agricultural marketing service (ams) has a market news telecommunications system that reports up-to-the-minute information on commodity prices, demand, and movement. the system transmits between and different reports each day on more than farm commodities. each report is re-transmitted an average of times. the initial use of this market news system is to transmit reports to the news media and among market news offices; firms and individuals may also subscribe at their own cost. in addition, ams and the public broadcasting service deliver market information directly to farmers via a television captioning system called farm market infodata, available in several cities around the country. by selecting a special channel on a closed captioning decoder, anyone within the broadcast coverage area of the participating public television station may receive the market information. additional stations in a number of states have instituted this service on their own. for more information, contact: ams communications and operations branch administrative services division, room u.s. department of agriculture washington, d.c. = . autex systems= autex systems designs and operates computer-based communications systems which link buyers and sellers in specific industries. two agricultural services are its produce network and its floral marketing network. subscribers to the networks use autex supplied terminals to access a nationwide communications network that includes buyer and seller offers. this online data communications system offers pretrading information. the terminal prints information needed to compare buying and selling opportunities in fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as floral products. the company is owned by xerox. address: autex systems william st. wellesley, ma = . chase econometrics= chase econometrics, a subsidiary of chase manhattan bank, offers economic and financial information and analyses in the areas of industrial economics, energy, fertilizer, minerals, international economics, u.s. economics, and agriculture through its information system. data and forecasting services on agribusiness cover international, national, regional, and statewide levels. subscribers receive regular reports and analyses, and also have access to a number of historical and forecast data bases acquired through internal data collection activities or from other organizations. many of its customers are large food and agribusiness firms. address: chase econometrics monument rd. bala cynwyd, pa = . cmn (computerized management network)= developed by virginia polytechnic institute and state university as a national information system for use by state extension services, cmn helps extension workers in solving problems, retrieving information, and evaluating programs. to date, many cmn programs have provided the foundation for several highly successful extension programs. two of the most popular are the simplified dairy cattle feeding program, which has had a substantial impact on the economics of feeding dairy herds, and coin, which provides low-cost user access to usda reports on marketing, futures, and summary information on all major crops and livestock enterprises. the cmn system is designed to be used by people who have no special training with computers, and is available nationwide and in canada. address: cmn virginia cooperative extension service plaza i, bldg. d blacksburg, va = . coin (computerized outlook and information network)= coin is a nationwide source of information from the extension service, which can be accessed by state and county extension staff, as well as by researchers, farmers, and agribusiness. it contains usda outlook, market, and other information on a national computer network. information from the usda which is available through coin includes statistical reporting service (srs) crop reporting board reports. economic research service (ers) economic situation summaries. world agricultural outlook board reports on world agriculture supply and demand. foreign agricultural service (fas) weekly roundup of world production and trade reports. agricultural marketing service (ams) summary of daily grain market prices, and usda news releases. some states use a multi-state computer network, or an in-state computer system, or both, to transfer agricultural outlook and production information to county offices and disseminate it to the general public. state extension outlook specialists load their outlook analyses directly onto coin (with a remote terminal) many times throughout the year. coin is available on the computerized management network (cmn) and through usda online (see those entries on this list). = . compuserve= compuserve information service offers access to more than data bases. some of the subjects of particular interest to farmers include agribusiness, agricultural news, finance and investment, news, weather, specific commodities including cotton futures prices and cattle prices, and the commodity news service data. it also offers electronic shopping and banking, electronic mail, hobby and special interest newsletters, and games. address: compuserve incorporated arlington centre blvd. post office box columbus, oh = . cris--current research information system= cris--current research information system--is a computer based information storage and retrieval system. it covers most of the nation's publicly supported agricultural and forestry research, and contains about , summaries of research projects. the data base is updated monthly. cris summaries provide information about ongoing research projects conducted or sponsored by usda research agencies, state agricultural experiment stations, state forestry schools, schools of veterinary medicine, land-grant colleges of , tuskegee institute, and other cooperating state institutions. it went online in . through this retrieval system, an individual can obtain a brief description of the research, along with the investigators' names, performing organization and location, current progress, and a list of the latest publications resulting from the research. cris inhouse search services are provided primarily to research scientists and research managers in usda and state participating institutions. the public can directly access the cris data base through the dialog online retrieval system. researchers in public and private institutions are the main users of cris. address: customer service dialog information retrieval services, inc. hillview avenue palo alto, ca = . dri (data resources, inc.)= dri is a private forecasting service with regional models that forecast acreage planted and harvested, and yield for all commodities. this service does independent forecasts of production, prices, and demand for livestock, and has a separate program for fertilizer. dri has software programs for potato producers. some of its main clients are big agricultural supply companies and food processing firms. address: data resources, inc. hartwell ave. lexington, ma = . estel (extension service telecommunication system)= estel is a pilot project from the university of maryland's cooperative extension service. it provides farmers with information via a microprocessor or videotex equipment, which receives the information and displays it on a video screen. the videotex equipment may be cheaper to purchase than a microcomputer. estel provides current information on market news, local weather conditions, pesticides, production information, and energy conservation tips, as well as home economics and -h programs. address: estel (extension service telecommunication system) maryland cooperative extension service university of maryland college park, md = . farm bureau acres= the american farm bureau federation has a program to provide marketing information and advice for its members. known as farm bureau acres, this marketing information project involves several state farm bureaus. afbf members can retrieve information from the host computers via telephone hookup and, at the same time, send messages to state computers, thereby providing a two-way daily contact between state coordinators and farmer-members. for more information, contact your county or state farm bureau. = . firsthand= based on french videotex technology known as "teletel," firsthand is a transactional videotex system originally started by the first bank system of minneapolis and now available in other areas too. with this system, participants can access agribusiness bookkeeping systems; weather, commodity, and financial reports; and domestic and international news through a local telephone number. clients can also do their shopping electronically from a catalog, and obtain commodity reports and other agribusiness information offered by other information providers. they can see their bank statements and balances, make transfers between accounts, and pay bills electronically. address: videotex soo line bldg. minneapolis, mn = . grassroots= grassroots is a canadian videotex system that provides agribusiness with comprehensive, up-to-date information. it helps farmers make effective purchasing, operating, financing, and marketing decisions. it offers market information on current and future prices of all major agricultural commodities, and carries farm management programs as well. it also offers information from companies offering products and services of interest to agriculture, including material on chemicals, fertilizers, equipment, real estate, seed, feed, grain, and livestock. material on financial services, banking, and insurance is updated daily. address: infomart merton st. toronto, ontario, canada m s a = . instant update= instant update is a timesharing information delivery system designed for the professional farmers of america. the system offers its users a variety of services and information, including electronic mail, agribusiness news and analyses, weather reports, and technical information. address: instant update professional farmers of america parkade cedar falls, ia = . market data systems, inc.= market data systems carries information from commodity exchanges for the benefit of customers. it leases terminals on which to receive the information. address: market data systems, inc. lamar ave. memphis, tn = . nema (national electronic marketing association, inc.)= nema offers marketing firms computerized marketing systems for many agricultural products. it is a way of linking buyers and sellers without having to first transport the products to market. electronic marketing enables buyers and sellers to negotiate transactions in a public market while remaining in their own offices. nema is developing several marketing systems for agricultural markets. nema was developed by virginia tech extension and research staff in cooperation with the virginia department of agriculture and commerce and ams. through a telephone hookup to computer terminals in any location, buyers and sellers are brought together at a specific time to determine the price, on a competitive basis, for the products being offered for sale. prospective buyers can obtain written descriptions of the products before sale time. one pricing technique is a computerized auction process, where the computer acts as the auctioneer. during the auction, the computer drops the asking price until a bid is received, then raises the price from that point until there is only one bidder left. at the end of a sale, the highest bidders receive summaries of their purchases. the products are shipped efficiently from seller to buyer. state cooperative extension services, producers' organizations. state departments of agriculture, and other agencies have developed and implemented nema, as well as some other electronic marketing systems in the united states. today computerized systems sell slaughter and feeder livestock, cotton, and shell eggs. this system is for market agents and buyers. address: national electronic marketing assn., inc. p.o. box christiansburg, va = . npirs (national pesticide information retrieval system)= npirs is a nationally accessible online data base containing information about all pesticides registered with the environmental protection agency, and indicating which are registered for use against specific pests on specific crops or sites. states can also insert information about state pesticide registrations. purdue university is developing the system under a cooperative agreement with usda and is managing the data base, which uses facilities provided by martin-marietta, inc. address: national pesticide information retrieval system entomology hall purdue university west lafayette, in = . rural ventures= rural ventures offers courses and data, recommends solutions to problems of small farmers, and promotes economic efficiency in small-scale agriculture and food processing enterprises. it is a joint venture by control data corporation and other groups, which started with a project in princeton, minnesota. a rural venture project gives farmers the capability to determine the optimum selection of crops, livestock, and equipment, and offers a full range of computer-based education and training programs. address: rural ventures, inc. south lagrande ave. princeton, mn = . the source= the source, a subsidiary of reader's digest, provides access to more than , programs and services in a variety of subject areas, including agriculture. it carries the commodity news service general news reports and daily price activities for major commodities. the system also supplies news and commentary on current business trends along with updated listings of stocks, bonds, commodities, and futures. address: the source source telecomputing anderson road mclean, va = . telplan= telplan is a timesharing computer service with several interactive problem-solving packages. its agricultural programs are in the areas of farm finance and animal nutrition, and it offers family finance and human nutrition programs as well. it is operated by michigan state university and is available nationwide. address: telplan--michigan state university room agriculture hall department of agricultural economics michigan state university east lansing, ml - = . usda online= usda online delivers news and other current information from usda's office of information. services include the following reports as they are released: ( ) usda national news releases about policy and program announcements, ( ) usda regional and state news releases about program announcements, ( ) outlook and situation report summaries, ( ) crop reporting board reports, report highlights, and summaries, ( ) foreign agricultural service reports and announcements on foreign crops, world production, and trade, ( ) economic research service report abstracts, ( ) a daily agricultural news summary called "ag a.m.," and ( ) a weekly "farm paper letter" for farm magazine and newspaper editors and others interested in the summary and highlights of usda reports for the week. through usda online, users can also access coin (see p. - ) and several other data bases. another communications network available to users of usda online is an electronic mail service linking various offices at usda and the state extension services, land-grant universities, state departments of agriculture, other federal and state agencies, and other organizations interested in agriculture. address: news division, room -a office of information u.s. department of agriculture washington, d.c. =rural telephone lines= one question to consider when you are selecting a computer system to be used in a rural area is whether your telephone line is adequate for potential users in your area. you must have a private line. line quality is also important; excessive line noise or dips and surges in power may cause the communications system to disconnect you. in the future, farmers will be able to get information by satellite rather than through the phone, which could eventually be a cost saver for those who are far from the information source. =other computer developments at usda= besides online information services, there are several other computer developments available through usda that are of use to farmers and ranchers. many usda agencies are using computers to disseminate information. here is a partial list: since , the foreign agricultural service (fas) has been releasing information electronically that previously had been distributed as publications through the mail. the fas electronic information system includes agricultural trade leads received from agricultural attaches relating to potential purchases of commodities by foreign buyers. the federal crop insurance corporation (fcic), in cooperation with the extension service, has developed two software packages to help farmers make decisions about the kind and amount of crop insurance they will need. arcie (all risk crop insurance evaluation) comes in "mini" and "complete" versions. mini-arcie takes individual farm data and calculates a projected cash flow under various yield conditions with and without crop insurance. it takes about minutes to run. complete-arcie, which takes about an hour, analyzes risk and loss probabilities over an extended period. it prompts farmers to enter expected prices and yields, and to include historical data. both programs examine the insurance options available--both public and private--and show how these options compare and how they complement each other. federal crop insurance is currently available on about major crops nationwide. these programs are designed to run on most microcomputer models. your state extension service, state vocational education office, or your local crop insurance agent may already have the programs. for further information, including how to obtain a copy of the program, write to: the arcie project department of agricultural economics agricultural building texas a&m university college station, tx the =agricultural stabilization and conservation service= (ascs) is planning to put small computers into all its county offices starting in . they will keep lists of farmers and their acreage allotments and bases, record set-aside histories, and record and maintain the other myriad facts necessary to make the usda farm programs work. the system will keep farm records, addresses for mailings, election registers, and records of payments. even checks to pay farmers will be produced by the decentralized county computer systems. the computers will also be tied into state systems and a central computer for some recordkeeping functions, and can be used for electronic mail and other communications. one function of the new system will be to mesh fas trade opportunity leads into the ascs data base. this will permit a farmer or local agribusiness person to go into the ascs office and immediately learn about trade leads reported by agricultural attaches. this program will go into operation during the mid- 's. the =economic research service= (ers) releases its outlook and situation reports through agnet. summaries of these are available through usda online. =learning more about computers on the farm= the computer field is changing so fast that it is difficult to keep up with the changes. one way to keep current is to join a users group for your particular brand of computer, or an agricultural users group. another way to get up-to-date information about new computer hardware and software products is to read a private newsletter. some of these are: agricomp east walnut, suite columbia, mo agricultural computing doane-western, inc. manchester road st. louis, mo agricultural microcomputing ridgetown college of agricultural technology ridgetown, ontario canada nop co compu-farm alberta agricultural box olds, alberta canada tom po computer farming newsletter lloyd dinkins p.o. box memphis, tn farm computer news successful farming locust street des moines, ia friendly farm computer newsletter fbs systems, inc. p.o. box aledo, il =glossary of computer terms= listed below are some of the shorthand or jargon terms in the computer field. understanding these terms will help you discuss hardware and software systems and their operation. =address:= a number specifying a particular location in the computer's memory. =basic (beginner's all-purpose symbolic instruction code):= a relatively easy-to-use computer language that comes with most small and personal computer systems. =baud rate:= the speed at which information is exchanged over communications lines, generally expressed in characters per second. baud is the most common rate. it is equivalent to characters per second. =binary:= a two-digit numbering system based on the digits and . it is the basis for calculations on all computers, and the basis for storing and retrieving information, including alphabet characters. =bit:= the smallest unit of information the computer recognizes. a bit is represented by the presence or absence of an electronic pulse, or . =bug:= a fault or error in a computer program. =byte:= a byte is composed of several bits, and is used to represent one character--such as a letter, number, or punctuation mark. the older microcomputer systems used bits per byte, but the newer ones are based on or bits per byte. =chip:= a thin silicon wafer on which electronic components are deposited lithographically in the form of integrated circuits. =cobol (common business-oriented language):= a high-level programing language widely used in business applications. =computer network:= two or more computers that are connected so they can exchange information. =computer program:= a collection of instructions that together direct the computer to perform a particular function. =cp/m (control program for microprocessors):= a popular operating system for small computers. =cpu (central processing unit):= the part of the computer that controls and organizes the operations of the other parts of the computer and does the calculations. =crt (cathode ray tube):= a video screen that can be used for viewing output. =data:= the information, such as numbers or letters, that are put into the computer system. =debug:= to remove the errors in a computer program. =diagnostic:= a program for detecting and isolating a problem or mistake in the computer system; features that allow systems or equipment to self-test for flaws. =disk:= a revolving plate on which data and programs are stored. also called diskette. =disk drive:= a part of the computer system that reads and writes material on the disk. it can be part of the main hardware or a peripheral attached to the system. =documentation:= . the instruction manual for a program (software) or piece of hardware. . the process of describing a computer program so others using the program can see how it works. =downtime:= any time a computer is not available or not working because of a machine fault or failure. downtime includes repair delay time, repair time, and machine-spoiled work time. =edit:= to change or add data to an existing document or program. =floppy disk:= a small, flexible storage device made of magnetic material. it looks like a soft phonograph record and is usually ¼ inches or inches in diameter. =fortran (formula translation):= a computer language widely used to solve scientific and engineering problems, mainly for large commercial systems. =garbage:= meaningless information. =hard copy:= a printout on paper of information from the computer. =hardware:= all the physical parts of the computer system, including the computer itself, the input and output equipment and peripherals, and the physical disk or tape equipment. (the computer programs are software.) =input:= the data that are put into the computer, or the process of putting it in. =instruction:= a group of bits that designates a specific computer operation. =integrated circuit:= an electronic circuit or combination of circuits contained on semiconductor material, or chip. =interactive:= a computer system that allows two-way communication between the user and the computer. =interface:= a piece of equipment used to connect two parts of a computer system that cannot interact directly with each other. =k (kilobyte):= a measure of computer memory capacity. each k of information is , bytes. =load:= to put data or programs into a computer. =magnetic tape:= a recording device used to store programs and data. it resembles audio tape used in tape recorders. =memory:= that part of the computer that stores information. also, the external material, such as floppy disks, hard disks, or cassette tapes that store information. =microcomputer:= a small computer in which the cpu is an integrated circuit deposited on a silicon chip. =microprocessor:= a silicon chip that is the central, controlling part of the computer. =minicomputer:= a computer that is usually larger, more powerful, and more expensive than a microcomputer, but is smaller than a mainframe in memory and functions. =modem (modulator/ demodulator):= a device used to attach a computer or one of its devices to a communication line, often a telephone. =operating system:= a special group of programs which controls the overall operation of a computer system. it mediates between the hardware and the particular software program. =output:= the information generated by a computer. =peripheral:= a device, such as a crt, disk drive, or printer, used for entering or storing data into, or retrieving it from, the computer system. =printer:= an output device to print the information from a computer. =program:= a set of coded instructions directing a computer to perform a particular function. =programing language:= a special language of words and rules that is used to write programs so the computer can understand them. =ram (random access memory):= the portion of the computer's memory in which data, instructions, and other information are stored temporarily. also called read-write memory. =rom (read only memory):= the portion of the computer's memory that contains information and instructions that are stored permanently. this memory cannot be altered or added to. =semiconductor:= a material such as silicon with a conductivity between that of a metal and an insulator. it is used in the manufacture of solid-state devices such as diodes, transistors, and the complex integrated circuits that comprise computer logic circuits. =software:= a general term for computer programs, procedural rules, and sometimes the documentation involved in the operation of a computer. =system:= the computer and all its related components, including hardware and software, that work together. =terminal:= a peripheral device through which information is entered into or extracted from the computer, usually with a keyboard and an output device such as a crt or printer. =timesharing:= a method by which more than one person can use a computer at the same time at separate terminals. =turnkey system:= a computer system that has all hardware and software installed. supposedly, all you have to do is turn it on. =word processing:= typing, editing, storing, and printing text with a computer. * * * * * the mention of commercial products, services, or companies does not constitute endorsement by the u.s. department of agriculture. if additional computer services of interest to the agricultural community are available, we would be glad to consider them for inclusion in possible revisions of this bulletin. * * * * * transcribers note the title "computor system components" (p. ) was changed to "computer ...". under coin (p. ) the reference to "computer management network" was corrected to "computerized ...". by the internet archive. transcriber note text emphasis denoted as _italic_. u. s. department of agriculture. farmers' bulletin no. . home manufacture and use of unfermented grape juice. by george c. husmann, expert in charge of viticultural investigations, bureau of plant industry, u. s. department of agriculture. washington: government printing . letter of transmittal. u. s. department of agriculture, bureau of plant industry, _washington, d. c., may , ._ sir: i have the honor to transmit herewith a paper on home manufacture and use of unfermented grape juice, by mr. george c. husmann, expert in charge of viticultural investigations in this bureau, and to recommend it for publication as a farmers' bulletin. part of the matter contained in this paper has already been published in bulletin no. of this bureau on the manufacture and preservation of unfermented grape must, but the widespread interest in the subject and the demand for information regarding appliances and methods of manufacture adapted to the ordinary farm and kitchen makes desirable its wider circulation through the farmers' bulletin series. respectfully, b. t. galloway, _chief of bureau_. hon. james wilson, _secretary_. contents. page. introduction historical notes composition of the grape causes of fermentation methods of preventing fermentation home manufacture manufacture of larger quantities useful appliances composition of unfermented grape juice flavor and quality in grape juice uses of unfermented grape juice food value of unfermented grape juice a few good recipes illustrations. page. fig. . cloth hand press . cloth or felt filter . pasteurizer for juice in bottles . drip bag . barrel and skid . sulphur hook . corking machine . home-made lever press b. p. i.-- . pom. i.-- . home manufacture and use of unfermented grape juice. introduction. unfermented grape juice has no doubt been used ever since wine has been made from the grape. the following practical suggestions will enable housewives to put up unfermented juice at the time of the fruit harvest, and thus to utilize much fruit that is now annually lost through inability to preserve it in the fresh state. in this form it is a pleasant, wholesome drink and food well adapted to home use. on some farms enough such preventable wastes occur almost every year to largely reduce the possible profits, or even to cause failure to meet the running expenses of the farm. by preventing these wastes an unprofitable farm may often be made profitable. historical notes. galenius, the greek physician and writer says (a. d. ): "a good many asiatic wines were stored in bottles which were hung in the corner of fireplaces, where, by evaporation, they became dry." this process was called "fumarium." the greeks had two kinds of wine, "protoplon," or first juice of the grape before pressing, and "denterion," or pressed juice. the romans called them "vinum primarium" and "vinum secondarium." some of them drank the juice before fermentation had started, and called it "mustum." after the must or juice had been through a heating process (called "reduction" nowadays), they called it "frutum," and when, after long heating, it had been reduced to one-half or one-third its original volume, they called it "sapa." this was used by the romans on their bread and was equivalent to what we now call grape syrup. in europe physicians often send their patients to the wine-growing districts during vintage time to take daily rations of the fresh juice as it comes from the crusher. this, however, restricts its use to a brief season of the year and to the immediate vicinity of the vineyards, or to individuals who are yet strong enough to undertake the journey. of late years repeated efforts have been made to prevent the juice from fermenting and to preserve it in vessels of such size and shape as can be easily transported, thus rendering its use possible at all times of the year. until recently its use has been almost exclusively restricted to juice for medicinal or sacramental purposes. unrestricted and general use has been retarded through lack of knowledge of the principles underlying the process of manufacture. this lack of knowledge and of the necessary skill in applying it has resulted in many failures, thus rendering the production of a good article uncertain and expensive. composition of the grape. the grape contains to per cent of sugar, about to per cent of nitrogenous substances, and some tartaric and malic acids. the skins contain tannin, cream of tartar, and coloring matter. the seeds contain tannin, starchy matters, and fat. the stems contain tannin, diverse acids, and mucilaginous matter. the value of the juice made from any grape is determined by the relative proportion and composition of these various parts. causes of fermentation. it is well known that grapes and other fruits when ripe have the invisible spores of various fungi, yeasts (ferments), and bacteria adhering to their skins and stems. when dry these spores are inert, but after the grapes are crushed and the spores are immersed in the juice they become active and begin to multiply. if the juice is warm, the changes take place rapidly; if, on the other hand, it is cool, the change is slower. but in either case, if left alone, the organisms increase until the juice ferments. the most favorable temperature for fermentation is between ° f. and ° f. cold checks, but does not kill, the ferment. this fermentation, now commonly called the elliptic yeast, changes the sugar in the grape to alcohol and carbonic-acid gas, and is the leading factor in converting must[a] into wine. hence it will be readily seen that to keep grape juice sweet fermentation must be prevented, and to be salable the product must be clear, bright, and attractive. [a] the word "must" as used in wine making invariably refers to the unfermented juice of the grape and is so used in this publication. methods of preventing fermentation. fermentation may be prevented in either of two ways: ( ) by chemical methods, which consist in the addition of germ poisons or antiseptics, which either kill the germs or prevent their growth. of these the principal ones used are salicylic, sulphurous, boracic, and benzoic acids, formalin, fluorides, and saccharin. as these substances are generally regarded as adulterants and injurious, their use is not recommended. ( ) mechanical means are sometimes employed. the germs are either removed by some mechanical means, such as filtering or a centrifugal apparatus, or they are destroyed by heat, electricity, etc. of these, heat has so far been found the most practical. when a liquid is heated to a sufficiently high temperature all organisms in it are killed. the degree of heat required, however, differs not only with the particular kind of organism, but also with the liquid in which they are held. time is also a factor. an organism may not be killed if heated to a high temperature and quickly cooled. if, however, the temperature is kept at the same high degree for some time, it will be killed. it must also be borne in mind that fungi, including yeasts, exist in the growing and the resting states, the latter being much more resistant than the former. a characteristic of the fungi and their spores is their great resistance to heat when dry. in this state they can be heated to ° f. without being killed. the spores of the common mold are even more resistant. this should be well considered in sterilizing bottles and corks, which should be steamed to ° f. for at least fifteen minutes. practical tests so far made indicate that grape juice can be safely sterilized at from ° f. to ° f. at this temperature the flavor is hardly changed, while at a temperature much above ° f. it is. this is an important point, as the flavor and quality of the product depend on it. this bulletin being intended for the farmer or the housewife only, the writer refers such readers as desire to go into the manufacture of grape juice in a systematic manner for commercial purposes to bulletin , bureau of plant industry, department of agriculture, on the same subject, this publication treating only of methods that can be applied in every home. home manufacture. use only clean, sound, well-ripened but not over-ripe grapes. if an ordinary cider mill is at hand, it may be used for crushing and pressing, or the grapes may be crushed and pressed with the hands. if a light-colored juice is desired, put the crushed grapes in a cleanly washed cloth sack and tie up. then either hang up securely and twist it or let two persons take hold, one on each end of the sack (fig. , p. ), and twist until the greater part of the juice is expressed. then gradually heat the juice in a double boiler or a large stone jar in a pan of hot water, so that the juice does not come in direct contact with the fire, at a temperature of ° f. to ° f.; never above ° f. it is best to use a thermometer, but if there be none at hand heat the juice until it steams, but do not allow it to boil. put it in a glass or enameled vessel to settle for twenty-four hours; carefully drain the juice from the sediment, and run it through several thicknesses of clean flannel, or a conic filter made from woolen cloth or felt may be used. this filter is fixed to a hoop of iron, which can be suspended wherever necessary (fig. ). after this fill into clean bottles. do not fill entirely, but leave room for the liquid to expand when again heated. fit a thin board over the bottom of an ordinary wash boiler (fig. ), set the filled bottles (ordinary glass fruit jars are just as good) in it, fill in with water around the bottles to within about an inch of the tops, and gradually heat until it is about to simmer. then take the bottles out and cork or seal immediately. it is a good idea to take the further precaution of sealing the corks over with sealing wax or paraffin to prevent mold germs from entering through the corks. should it be desired to make a red juice, heat the crushed grapes to not above ° f., strain through a clean cloth or drip bag, as shown in fig. (no pressure should be used), set away to cool and settle, and proceed the same as with light-colored juice. many people do not even go to the trouble of letting the juice settle after straining it, but reheat and seal it up immediately, simply setting the vessels away in a cool place in an upright position where they will be undisturbed. the juice is thus allowed to settle, and when wanted for use the clear juice is simply taken off the sediment. any person familiar with the process of canning fruit can also preserve grape juice, for the principles involved are identical. [illustration: fig. .--cloth and press.] [illustration: fig. .--cloth or felt filter.] [illustration: fig. .--pasteurizer for juice in bottles: _db_, double bottom. _st_, steam pipe. _w_, water bath. _t_, thermometer. (bottle shows method of adjusting a cork holder of sheet metal.)] [illustration: fig. .--drip bag.] one of the leading defects so far found in unfermented juice is that much of it is not clear, a condition which very much detracts from its otherwise attractive appearance and due to two causes already alluded to. either the final sterilization in bottles has been at a higher temperature than the preceding one, or the juice has not been properly filtered or has not been filtered at all. in other cases the juice has been sterilized at such a high temperature that it has a disagreeable scorched taste. it should be remembered that attempts to sterilize at a temperature above ° f. are dangerous, so far as the flavor of the finished product is concerned. another serious mistake is sometimes made by putting the juice into bottles so large that much of it becomes spoiled before it is used after the bottles are opened. unfermented grape juice properly made and bottled will keep indefinitely, if it is not exposed to the atmosphere or mold germs; but when a bottle is once opened it should, like canned goods, be used as soon as possible, to keep it from spoiling. manufacture of larger quantities. another method of making unfermented grape juice, which is often resorted to where a sufficiently large quantity is made atone time, consists in this: take a clean keg or barrel (one that has previously been made sweet). lay this upon a skid consisting of two scantlings or pieces of timber of perhaps feet long, in such a manner as to make a runway (fig. ). then take a sulphur match, made by dipping strips of clean muslin about inch wide and inches long into melted brimstone, cool it and attach it to a piece of wire fastened in the lower end of a bung and bent over at the end, so as to form a hook (fig. ). light the match and by means of the wire suspend it in the barrel, bung the barrel up tight, and allow it to burn as long as it will. repeat this until fresh sulphur matches will no longer burn in the barrel. [illustration: fig. .--barrel and skid.] [illustration: fig. .--sulphur hook.] then take enough fresh grape juice to fill the barrel one-third full, bung up tight, and roll and agitate violently on the skid for a few minutes. then burn more sulphur matches in it until no more will burn, fill in more juice until the barrel is about two-thirds full; agitate and roll again. repeat the burning process as before, after which fill the barrel completely with grape juice and roll. the barrel should then be bunged tightly and stored in a cool place with the bung up, and so secured that the package can not be shaken. in the course of a few weeks the juice will have become clear and can then be racked of' and filled into bottles or jars direct, sterilized, and corked or sealed up ready for use. by this method, however, unless skillfully handled, the juice is apt to have a slight taste of the sulphur. a few useful appliances. fig. shows a very practical and inexpensive corking machine. the illustration shows the cork in place, ready to be driven through the tapering hole in the machine into the neck of the bottle underneath. the corks should be put in hot water and allowed to stand for a few minutes before using in order to soften and make them pliable. this enables one to use a cork large enough to seal securely. [illustration: fig. .--corking machine.] care should be taken to set the bottles on a flat piece of rubber or on a piece of cloth folded several times, as shown in the figure, so as to take the jar of the blow when the cork is driven. it is even a wise precaution to have a pan underneath, as it frequently occurs that bottles thought to be entirely good have blemishes and break. [illustration: fig. .--home-made lever press. a, press basket. b, press bottom. c, tub. d, skids. e, lever. p, upright posts. g, block and tackle. t, lever bolt. i, press block.] an ordinary cider press is not expensive; nevertheless the majority of farms do not have one, and it frequently occurs that a farm is located so far away from any establishment dealing in such implements that the fruit might spoil or not be sufficiently valuable to justify the purchase price and time lost and expense incurred in getting it. fig. gives an illustration of a lever press, very efficient for this and similar uses, which any farmer handy with tools can make, the material for which can be found on almost any farm at any time. the press consists of the following parts: two upright posts (f) set deep and firmly in the ground side by side and about inches apart. (it is a good idea to attach some deadmen to them in the ground to prevent them pulling out too easily.) between these posts the lever (e) is hung by means of a bolt (t), or the lever may be hung to the side of a building, or a hole notched into a tree large enough to admit the end of the lever and a bolt run through that. at the other end of the lever are two posts, so set that the lever can be raised up between them by means of block and tackle. the press itself consists of two timbers (d), on which the press bottom (b) rests, and on this bottom is the press basket, consisting of the two sides and two ends, and so constructed that it can be easily taken apart and set up again, being held together at the ends by means of rods (l). the sides and ends should be bored full of small holes from three-eighths to one-half inch in diameter to allow exit for the juice. after the press is filled, the top (which is made to fit in the inside of the basket) and cross blocks ( ) are put on and the lever is then allowed to press down on it. a press like this has the advantage that it can be filled in the evening and left to press until morning while the farmer sleeps. the precaution, of course, must be taken to set a tub (c) large enough to hold the juice under the press. it is perhaps well to state that the longer and heavier the lever the greater the pressure it exerts. where it is not convenient to make the lever very long, weights are placed or hung on the outer extremity of the lever to increase the pressure. it will thus be seen that with a little ingenuity a person can adapt the press to suit his individual requirements. for ordinary purposes a press basket feet square and feet high will be found a very convenient size. this will accommodate a ton of crushed grapes. composition of unfermented grape juice. herewith are given the component parts of a california and a concord unfermented grape juice, the former being analyzed by the california experiment station, the latter by the bureau of chemistry, united states department of agriculture: concord. california. _per cent._ _per cent._ solid contents . . total acids (as tartaric) . . volatile acids . . grape sugar . . free tartaric acids . . ash . . phosphoric acids . . cream of tartar . . this table is interesting in so far that california unfermented grape juices are made from viniferas or foreign varieties, whereas the concord is a labruska or one of our american sorts. the difference in taste and smell is even more pronounced than the analysis would indicate. flavor and quality in grape juice. in the making of unfermented grape juice a great deal of judgment can be displayed and many variations produced so as to suit almost any taste by the careful selection of the varieties of grapes from which it is made. from the mission grape, for instance, when fully ripe, a juice would be obtained that would be delicate and simply sweet, without any other taste; from the muscat we would get that rich musky flavor found in our leading raisins; in the concord that sprightly foxy taste so well known; in the catawba or isabella that fragrance so peculiarly their own, and in the iona a pleasing, mild, yet just pronounced enough aroma and taste to strike the right spot. thus we might continue along the list. equally as pronounced variations in color can be had, as, for instance, almost colorless, yellow, orange, light red, red, and a deep purple. the writer has often been asked what kind of grapes should be used in making unfermented grape juice, when, as a matter of fact, it can be made from any grape; not only this, but unfermented juice is made from other fruits as well, for instance, apples, pears, cherries--and berries of different kinds yield excellent juices. it is really good judgment in selecting the right varieties when planting for fruit production. that also determines the quality of our unfermented juice. for instance, the richer, sweeter, and better in quality the fruit we use, the richer, sweeter, and better will be our unfermented juice. if, on the other hand, the fruit is sour, green, and insipid, the juice will be likewise. as stated before, the intention of this bulletin is to show how to avoid some wastes, and to increase income by utilizing those products of which there is a surplus, and instead of, as is usually done, letting them rot, convert them into something that can be kept, used, and disposed of at any time when desired, or when fresh fruit is not available. uses of unfermented grape juice. the uses are indeed many. it is used in sickness, convalescence, and good health; as a preventive, restorative, and cure; by the young, by persons in the prime of life, and by those in old age. it is used in churches for sacramental purposes; at soda fountains as a cool and refreshing drink; in homes, at hotels, and at restaurants as a food, as a beverage, as a dessert, and in many other ways. when people become accustomed to it they rarely give it up. when properly prepared, unfermented grape juice can be made to please the eye by its color and attractive appearance, the sense of smell by its aroma or fragrance, the palate by its pleasant flavor. it is food and drink, refreshment and nourishment, all in one. not a by product, but made from fruit going to waste--one of the blessings given us, that some are too careless, others too ignorant, to make use of. food value of unfermented grape juice. the effects of unfermented grape juice on the human system have been studied for a number of years, especially at the so-called grape cures so long in vogue in europe. a smaller number of investigations have been made in laboratories. it is quite generally claimed that using a reasonably large amount of unfermented grape juice with an otherwise suitable mixed diet is beneficial and that digestion is improved, intestinal fermentation diminished, and that gains in body weight result. it should not be forgotten that the abundant diet and hygienic methods of living practiced at the grape cures play an important part, but even taking all this into account it seems fair to conclude that some of the good results can be directly attributed to the unfermented grape juice. grape juice contains the same kinds of nutrients as other foods. the percentage of water is high, and thus it resembles liquid foods more closely than solid foods. it is sometimes compared with milk, the most common liquid food. it contains less water than milk, more carbohydrates, and less protein, fat, and ash. carbohydrates, largely present in the form of sugar, are the principal nutritive ingredients. it is evident, therefore, that grape juice is essentially an energy yielding food, and may help the body to become fatter, though it can not materially assist in building nitrogenous tissue. sugars in moderate amounts are wholesome foods, and grape juice offers such material in a reasonably dilute as well as palatable form. undoubtedly the agreeable flavor increases the appetite, a by no means unimportant consideration. a few good recipes. grape nectar. take the juice of lemons and orange, pint of grape juice, small cup of sugar, and a pint of water. serve ice cold. if served from punch bowl, sliced lemon and orange add to the appearance. an invalid drink. put in the bottom of a wineglass tablespoonfuls of grape juice; add to this the beaten white of egg and a little chopped ice; sprinkle sugar over the top and serve. this is often served in sanitariums. grape punch. boil together pound of sugar and half a pint of water until it spins a thread; take from the fire and when cool add the juice of lemons and a quart of grape juice. stand aside overnight. serve with plain water, apollinaris, or soda water. grape sherbet. for persons mix pint of grape juice (unfermented), juice of lemon and heaping tablespoonful of gelatine, dissolved in boiling water; freeze quickly; add beaten white of egg just before finish. grape ice cream. one quart of unfermented grape juice, quart of cream, pound of sugar, and the juice of lemon. syllabub. one quart of fresh cream, whites of eggs, glass of grape juice, small cups of powdered sugar; whip half the sugar with the cream, the balance with the eggs; mix well; add grape juice and pour over sweetened strawberries and pineapples, or oranges and bananas. serve cold. bohemian cream. one pint thick cream, pint grape-juice jelly; stir together; put in cups and set on ice. serve with lady fingers. besides the recipes just given many more are enumerated, such as grape ice, grape lemonade, grape water ice, grape juice and egg, baked bananas, snow pudding, grape gelatine, junket and grape jelly, tutti-frutti jelly, grape float, grape jelly, grape juice plain, grape soda water, and scores of others. farmers' bulletins. the following is a list of the farmers' bulletins available for distribution, showing the number, title, and size in pages of each. copies will be sent to any address on application to any senator, representative, or delegate in congress, or to the secretary of agriculture, washington, d. c. the missing numbers have been discontinued, being superseded by later bulletins. . leguminous plants. pp. . . barnyard manure. pp. . . the feeding of farm animals. pp. . . hog cholera and swine plague. pp. . . peanuts: culture and uses. pp. . . flax for seed and fiber. pp. . . weeds: and how to kill them. pp. . . souring and other changes in milk. pp. . . grape diseases on the pacific coast. pp. . . alfalfa, or lucern. pp. . . silos and silage. pp. . . peach growing for market. pp. . . meats: composition and cooking. pp. . . potato culture. pp. . . cotton seed and its products. pp. . . kafir corn: culture and uses. pp. . . spraying for fruit diseases. pp. . . onion culture. pp. . . farm drainage. pp. . . facts about milk. pp. . . sewage disposal on the farm. pp. . . commercial fertilizers. pp. . . insects injurious to stored grain. pp. . . irrigation in humid climates. pp. . . insects affecting the cotton plant. pp. . . the manuring of cotton. pp. . . sheep feeding. pp. . . sorghum as a forage crop. pp. . . standard varieties of chickens. pp. . . the sugar beet. pp. . . how to grow mushrooms. pp. . . some common birds. pp. . . the dairy herd. pp. . . experiment station work--i. pp. . . butter making on the farm. pp. . . the soy bean as a forage crop. pp. . . bee keeping. pp. . . methods of curing tobacco. pp. . . asparagus culture. pp. . . marketing farm produce. pp. . . care of milk on the farm. pp. . . ducks and geese. pp. . . experiment station work--ii. pp. . . meadows and pastures. pp. . . the black rot of the cabbage. pp. . . experiment station work--iii. pp. . . insect enemies of the grape. pp. . . essentials in beef production. pp. . . cattle ranges of the southwest. pp. . . experiment station work--iv. pp. . . milk as food. pp. . . the grain smuts. pp. . . tomato growing. pp. . . the liming of soils. pp. . . experiment station work--v. pp. . . experiment station work--vi. pp. . . the peach twig-borer. pp. . . corn culture in the south. pp. . . the culture of tobacco. pp. . . tobacco soils. pp. . . experiment station work--vii. pp. . . fish as food. pp. . . thirty poisonous plants. pp. . . experiment station work--viii. pp. . . alkali lands. pp. . . cowpeas. pp. . . potato diseases and treatment. pp. . . experiment station work--ix. pp. . . sugar as food. pp. . . the vegetable garden. pp. . . good roads for farmers. pp . . raising sheep for mutton. pp. . . experiment station work--x. pp. . . suggestions to southern farmers. pp. . . insect enemies of shade trees. pp. . . hog raising in the south. pp. . . millets. pp, . . southern forage plants. pp. . . experiment station work--xi. pp. . . notes on frost. pp, . . experiment station work--xii. pp. . . breeds of dairy cattle. pp. . . experiment station work--xiii. pp. . . saltbushes. pp. . . farmers' reading courses. pp. . . rice culture in the united states. pp. . . farmers' interest in good seed. pp. . . bread and bread making. pp. . . the apple and how to grow it. pp. . . experiment station work--xiv. pp. . . hop culture in california. pp. . . irrigation in fruit growing. pp. . . sheep, hogs, and horses in the northwest. pp. . . grape growing in the south. pp. . . experiment station work--xv. pp. . . insects affecting tobacco. pp. . . beans, peas, and other legumes as food. pp. . . experiment station work--xvi. pp. . . red clover seed: information for purchasers. pp. . . experiment station work--xvii. pp. . . protection of food products from injurious temperatures. pp. . . practical suggestions for farm buildings. pp. . . important insecticides. pp. . . eggs and their uses as food. pp. . . sweet potatoes. pp. . . the mexican cotton-boll weevil. pp. . . household tests for detection of oleomargarine and renovated butter. pp. . . insect enemies of growing wheat. pp. . . experiment station work--xviii. pp. . . tree planting in rural school grounds. pp. . . sorghum sirup manufacture. pp. . . earth roads. pp. . . the angora goat. pp. . . irrigation in field and garden. pp. . . emmer: a grain for the semiarid regions. pp. . . pineapple growing. pp. . . poultry raising on the farm. pp. . . the nutritive and economic value of food. pp. . . the conformation of beef and dairy cattle. pp. . . experiment station work--xix. pp. . . carbon bisulphid as an insecticide. pp: . . insecticides and fungicides. pp. . . winter forage crops for the south. pp. . . celery culture. pp. . . experiment station work--xx. pp. . . clearing new land. pp. . . dairying in the south. pp. . . scabies in cattle. pp. . . orchard enemies in the pacific northwest. pp. . . the fruit garden: preparation and care. pp. . . how insects affect health in rural districts. pp. . . the home vineyard. pp. . . the propagation of plants. pp. . . how to build small irrigation ditches. pp. . . scab in sheep. (in press.) . game laws for . pp. . . practical suggestions for fruit growers. pp. . experiment station work--xxi. pp. . . methods of controlling the boll-weevil. pp. . . rape as a forage crop. pp. . . culture of the silkworm. pp. . . cheese making on the farm. pp. . . cassava. pp. . . pearl millet. pp. . . experiment station work--xxii. . principles of horse feeding. . the control of the codling moth. . scale insects and mites on citrus trees. . a primer of forestry. . broom corn. * * * * * transcriber note all illustrations have been move so as to not split paragraphs. the american country girl [illustration: the american country girl. an abundance of sunshine, fresh air, good water, and healthful exercise in the open permit wonderful young life to reach its highest development.] the american country girl by martha foote crow author of "elizabeth barrett browning," "harriet beecher stowe," etc. _with fifteen illustrations from photographs_ new york frederick a. stokes company publishers _copyright, , by_ frederick a. stokes company to the seven million country life girls of america with the hope that they may see their great privilege and do their honorable part in the new country life era contents chapter page i the country girl--where is she? ii the heart of the problem iii is the country girl happy on the farm? iv a calendar of days v what one country girl did vi stories of other country girls vii the other side viii the inheritance ix the daughter's share of the work x the homesteader xi the new era xii the household laboratory xiii efficient administration xiv an old-fashioned virtue xv health and a day xvi the country girl's wage xvii the dress budget xviii founding a home xix the farm partner xx the country girl's training xxi a great opportunity xxii the ills of isolation xxiii the solace of reading xxiv the service of music to the countryside xxv the play in the home xxvi pageantry as a community resource xxvii associations, especially the young women's christian association xxviii the camp fire xxix the country girl's duty to the country xxx the country girl's score card index bibliography illustrations the american country girl. an abundance of sunshine, fresh air, good water, and healthful exercise in the open permit wonderful young life to reach its highest development _frontispiece_ the country girl is the life of the home. she is a companion for the parents and a playmate for the little brothers and sisters the country girl and her pets. "the quietness of the country permits a greater spiritual and mental growth, with its abundance of life, plant and animal, which challenges the mind to discover its secrets" the country girl takes a pride in her chickens that makes their care a pleasure to her the inheritance. the country girl, working cheerfully beside her mother, will learn much that will be of value to her in her effort to make the housework of to-day a joy and not a burden a happy homesteader in front of her "soddy." the vastness of the country does not daunt her. she learns to love the quiet, broken only by the roar of a river at the bottom of a canyon or the howl of a coyote on the great sandy flats a knitting class at an agricultural school. note the splendid poise of the country girl in the background--how naturally and yet perfectly she is holding herself this tennessee girl is a member of a gardening and canning club. she won the cow and calves as premiums for having the best exhibit at the state fair springtime in the country. city children may well envy their little country cousins the free life in the open and the companionship with animals a lesson in household economics, at cornell university children in a country school scoring corn. everywhere the country is responding to the call of progress, and these members of a new generation are striving to reach the best the swiftly awakening artistic energies of the country girl are finding an outlet in the new national interest in pageantry. the farm, meadow or field makes an ideal stage one of the many eight weeks clubs organized throughout the country by the y. w. c. a. this photograph of a camp fire girl shows the opportunity country life affords for good sport a school garden where the children are taught to love and understand the growing things as well as to cultivate them note the author acknowledges with gratitude the kindness of her friends among the members of her fraternity, and among the graduates of wellesley college, of northwestern, syracuse, and chicago universities, and of grinnell college, who carefully found country girl correspondents for her in all parts of the country; and especially of professor martha van rensselaer of cornell university who generously shared with her some of the results of a questionnaire on _the young woman on the farm_, which was sent out by the home economics department of that university. it would be impossible to name here all the helpers that this book has the honor to claim; the many specialists who have been good enough to advise the author; the enthusiasts whose fire has sustained her courage; and above all the many friends who have entertained her in their country homes and talked over with her their problems. the author would, however, acknowledge her special indebtedness to the honorable john t. roberts, the well known lover and sympathetic critic of country life, who gave valuable time to reading her manuscript and made some vital suggestions; and to miss mary l. read, head of the school of mothercraft, who gave some of the chapters a studious criticism. while acknowledging many sources of inspiration the author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in the book, opinions sometimes maintained against valued authority. all quotations from country girl experiences are made with direct personal permission of the writers; the kindness of the girls, who for the sake of other girls have given these permissions, is here mentioned with special appreciation. for illustrations the author is indebted to the home economics and other departments of the agricultural college at cornell university and to the home economics department of the school of agriculture at alfred, n. y.; also to mr. s. h. dadisman of the agricultural college at ames, iowa; to mr. o. h. benson of the united states department of agriculture; to mr. a. a. allen of the cayuga bird club, and to mr. james m. pierce of the _iowa homestead_ of des moines, iowa. the list should also include mr. r. m. rosbrugh of syracuse, n. y., and mrs. mabel stuart lewis, efficient homesteader, of fladmoe, south dakota. other names are mentioned in the text and need not be repeated here. to these and other helpers, great thanks are due. this book has been written about the country girl and for the country girl; for her mother and father, and for everybody else as well; but especially for the country girl herself. it will reach its aim if some father says, "why, here now, somebody has written a book about my little gal there. i should not have thought it was worth while to make a book about her. well, now, perhaps she is of some account. guess i'll give her a little more schooling; guess i'll let her go to that institute she was asking to go to; guess i'll let her have some music lessons, or buy her a piano, or send her to college." or if some mother says wistfully, "my daughter is going to have a better chance than i had!" or if the country girl herself should say, "i see my opportunity and i will arise and fulfil my mission." the book will reach its aim, too, if another thing should happen. this is the first book about the country girl. there have been tons of paper devoted to the farmer; reams filled on the farm woman; not a line for the girl. may this first book be followed by many, correcting its misconceptions, rectifying its mistakes, directing its enthusiasms into the best channels for the welfare of the six and three-quarters millions of country girls of this land! by that time there will be seven millions--unless in fact these six millions shall have run away to build their homes and rear their children in the hot, stuffy, unsocialized atmosphere of the town, leaving the happy gardens without the joyous voices of children, the fields without sturdy boys to work them, the farm homes without capable young women to--shall i say, to _man_ them? no, let us say to _woman_ them, to _lady_ them, to _mother_ them, and so to make them centers of wholesome interesting life that, if the girls do their part, shall be the very heart and fiber of the nation. the author is sorry that she cannot write to all the country girls who have written her either through the questionnaire or through other means of communication in the groups with which she has been so happily associated; but she wishes that every country girl who reads this book would write to her (using the address below) and tell her where she thinks the book has spoken truly and where mistakenly. she trusts the judgment of the country girls of america absolutely, if they can but be induced to speak in unison and after careful thought. martha foote crow. tuckahoe, new york city august, . chapter i the country girl--where is she? woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, and she will enter every place on this round earth. _frances e. willard._ _o woman, what is the thing you do, and what is the thing you cry?_ _is your house not warm and enclosed from harm, that you thrust the curtain by?_ _and have we not toiled to build for you a peace from the winds outside,_ _that you seek to know how the battles go and ride where the fighters ride?_ you have taken my spindle away from me, you have taken away my loom; you bid me sit in the dust of it, at peace without cloth or broom; you have shut me still with a sleepy will, with nor evil nor good to do, while our house the world that we keep for god should be garnished and swept anew. the evil things that have waxed and grown while i sat with my white hands still, they have meshed our world till they twined and curled through my very window sill; shall i sit and smile at my ease the while that my house is wrongly kept? it is mine to see that the house of me is straightened and cleansed and swept! _margaret widdemer._ chapter i the country girl--where is she? the clarion of the country life movement has by this time been blown with such loudness and insistence that no hearing ear in our land can have escaped its announcement. the distant echoes of brutal warfare have not drowned it: above all possible rude and cruel sounds this peaceful piping still makes itself heard. it has reached the ears of the farmer and has stirred his mind and heart to look his problems in the face, to realize their gigantic implications, and to shoulder the responsibility of their solution. it has penetrated to the thoughts of teachers and educators everywhere and awakened them to the necessities of the minute, so that they have declared that the countryside must have educational schemes adapted to the needs of the countryside people, and that they must have teachers whose heads are not in the clouds. it has aroused easy-going preachers in the midst of their comfortable dreams and has caused here and there one among them to bestir himself and to make hitherto unheard-of claims as to what the church might do--if it would--for the betterment of country life. and all of these have given hints to philanthropists and reformers, and these to organizations and societies; these again have suggested theories and projects to legislators, senators, and presidents; the snowball has been rolled larger and larger; commissions have sat, investigations have been made, documents have been attested, reports handed in, bills drafted and, what is better, passed by courageous legislation; so that now great schemes are being not only dreamed of but put into actual fulfilment. moreover, lecturers have talked and writers have issued bulletins and books, until there has accumulated a library of vast proportions on the many phases of duty, activity, and outlook that may be included under the title, "a country life movement." in all this stirring field of new interest, the farmer and his business hold the center of attention. beside him, however, stands a dim little figure hitherto kept much in the background, the farmer's wife, who at last seems to be on the point of finding a voice also; for a chapter is now assigned to her in every book on rural conditions and a little corner under a scroll work design is given to her tatting and her chickens in the weekly farm paper. cuddled about her are the children, and they, the little farm boys and girls, have now a book that has been written just about them alone--their psychology and their needs. also, the tall strong youth, her grown-up son, has his own paper as an acknowledged citizen of the rural commonwealth. but where is the tall young daughter, and where are the papers for her and the books about her needs? it seems that she has not as yet found a voice. she has failed to impress the makers of books as a subject for description and investigation. in the nation-wide effort to find a solution to the great rural problems, the farmer is working heroically; the son is putting his shoulder to the wheel; the wife and mother is in sympathy with their efforts. is the daughter not doing her share? where is the country girl and what is happening in her department? it is easier on the whole to discover the rural young man than to find the typical country girl. since the days of mother eve the woman young and old has been adapting herself and readapting herself, until, after all these centuries of constant practise, she has become a past master in the art of adaptation. like the cat in the story of alice, she disappears in the intricacy of the wilderness about her and nothing remains of her but a smile. there are some perfectly sound reasons why american country girls as a class cannot be distinguished from other girls. chief among these is the fact that no group of people in this country is to be distinguished as a class from any other group. it is one of the charms of life in this country that you never can place anybody. no one can distinguish between a shop girl and a lady of fashion; nor is any school teacher known by her poise, primness, or imperative gesture. the fashion paper, penetrating to the remotest dug-out, and the railway engine indulging us in our national passion for travel see to these things. moreover, the pioneering period is still with us and the western nephews must visit the cousins in the old home in new hampshire, while the aunts and uncles left behind must go out to see the new nebraska or wyoming lands on which the young folks have settled. we do not stay still long enough anywhere in the republic for a class of any sort to harden into recognizable form. new inhabitants may come here already hardened into the mold of some class; but they or their children usually soften soon into the quicksilver-like consistency of their surroundings. there is also no subdividing of notions on the basis of residence, whether as townsman or as rural citizen. the wind bloweth where it listeth in this land. it whispers its free secrets into the ears of the city dweller in the flat and of the rural worker of the cornfield or the vine-screened kitchen. the rain also falls on the just and the unjust whether suburbanated or countrified. there is no rural mind in america. there has indeed been a great deal of pother of late over the virtue and temper of "rural-minded people." this debate has been conscientiously made in the effort to discern reasons why commissions should sit on a rural problem. reasons enough are discernible why commissions should sit, but they lie rather in the unrural mind of the rural people, as the words are generally understood, than in some supposed qualities imposed or produced in the life of sun and rain, in that vocation that is nearest to the creative activities of the divine. and if there is no rural mind, there is no distinctive rural personality. if the man that ought to exemplify it is found walking up fifth avenue or on halstead street or along el camino real, he cannot be discovered as a farmer. he may be discovered as an ignorant person, or he may be found to be a college-bred man; but in neither case would the fact be logically inclusive or uninclusive of his function as farmer. the same is almost as exactly true for his wife and his daughter. if one should ask in any group of average people whether the farmer's daughter as they have known her is a poor little undeveloped child, silent and shy, or a hearty buxom lass, healthy and strong and up to date, some in the group would say the latter and some the former. both varieties exist and can by searching be found along the countryside. but it is nothing essentially rural that has developed either the one set of characteristics or the other. to be convinced of this, one who knows this country well has but to read a book like "folk of the furrow," by christopher holdenby, a picture of rural life in england. in such a book as that one realizes the full meaning of the phrase, "the rural mind," and one sees how far the men and women that live on the farms in the united states have yet to go, how much they will have to coagulate, how many centuries they will have to sit still in their places with wax in their ears and weights on their eyelids, before they will have acquired psychological features such as mr. holdenby gives to the folk of the english furrow. a traveler in the old world frequently sees illustrations of this. for instance, in passing through some european picture gallery, he may meet a woman of extraordinary strength and beauty, dressed in a style representing the rural life in that vicinity. she will wear the peasant skirt and bodice, and will be without gloves or hat. a second look will reveal that the skirt is made of satin so stiff that it could stand alone; the velvet bodice will be covered with rich embroidery; and heavy chains of silver of quaint workmanship will be suspended around the neck. on inquiry one may learn that this stately woman was of what would be called in this country a farmer family, that had now become very wealthy; that she did not consider herself above her "class"--so they would describe it--no, that she gloried in it instead. it was from preference only that she dressed in the fashion of that "class." now, whether desirable or not, such a thing as this would never be seen in america. no woman (unless it were a deaconess or a salvation army lassie or a nun) would pass through the general crowd showing her rank or profession in life by her style of dress. and that is how it happens that neither by hat nor by hatlessness would the country woman here make known her pride in the possession of acres or in her relation to that profession that forms the real basis of national prosperity. hence no country girl counts such a pride among her inheritances. therefore if it is not easy to find and understand the country girl as a type, it is not because she is consciously or unconsciously hiding herself away from us; she is not even sufficiently conscious of herself as a member of a social group to pose in the attitude of an interesting mystery. she is just a human being happening to live in the country (not always finding it the best place for her proper welfare), just a single one in the great shifting mass. although it may be difficult to find what we may think are typical examples of the country girl as a social group, yet certain it is that she exists. of young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, there are in the united states six and a half million ( , , , to be exact) who reside in the open country or in small villages. this we are assured is so by the latest census report. by starting a little further down in the scale of girlhood and advancing a trifle further into maturity this number could be doubled. it would be quite justifiable to do this, because some farmers' daughters become responsible for a considerable amount of labor value well before the age of fifteen; and on the other hand the energy of these young rural women is abundantly extended beyond the gateway of womanhood, far indeed into the period that used to be called old-maidism, but which is to be so designated no more; the breezy, executive, free-handed period when the country girl is of greatest use as a labor unit and gives herself without stint (and often without pay) to the welfare of the whole farmstead. the american country girl is not by any means behind her city sister in her ability to make the bounds of her youth elastic, though the girl on the farm may go at it in a somewhat different way. then, perhaps, too, the word "youth" may, alas! have another connotation in the mind of one from what it has in the dreams of the other. if we should, however, thus enlarge the scope of our inquiry, we should increase but not clarify our problems. moreover it is the country girl that interests us, the promise and hope of her dawn, the delicate swiftly changing years of her growth, the miracle of her blossoming. there is something about the kaleidoscope of her moods and the inconsistencies of her biography that fascinates us. the moment when she awakes, when the sparkle begins to show in her eyes, when we know that a conception of her mission and of her supreme value to life is beginning to glow before her imagination--that is the crisis to work for and to be happy over when it comes. as for us, we ask no greater happiness than once or twice to catch a glimpse of that. that great host of six million country girls is scattered far and wide; they are everywhere present. a certain number of millions of them are working industriously in myriads of unabandoned farms all over the appalachian plateau, and on the wide prairies to the rockies, and beyond. in thousands of farmsteads they are helping their mothers wash dishes three times a day three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, not counting the steps as they go back and forth between dining-room and kitchen. they are carrying heavy pails of spring water into the house and throwing out big dishpanfuls of waste water, regardless of the strain in the small of the back. they are picking berries and canning them for the home table in the winter; they are raising tomatoes and canning them for the market; they are managing the younger children; they are baking and sewing and reading and singing; they are caring for chickens and for bees and for orphan lambs; they ride the rake and the disc-plow and sometimes join the round-up on the range. moreover they go to church and they go to town and they look forward to an ideal future just as other girls do. the country girl is a human being also. it has been intimated that young women living on remote secluded farms have not, with all their singing, been always able to dispel the monotony of a thousand inevitable dishwashings a year; they are said nowadays to have opened their ear to the lure of the town and to have started out, keeping step with their brothers, to join what some one has called, "the funeral procession of the nation" cityward. if we could, in fact, get them to confide in us, we should find that they have longings and aspirations, many of which are unsatisfied; and that is the reason why it seems to be high time for their voice to be heard. some of the younger farm women are showing themselves equal to the larger burdens in the business of agriculture. they are running their own farms in michigan and their own automobiles in kansas. they are taking up claims. they are developing them and proving up in the dakotas and through montana and wyoming. from four to six in the morning they till an acre; then they ride twenty miles to the school and teach from nine to four; after that they ride back and work in their cornfields till the stars twinkle out. they stay alone in their shack and are happy and fearless and safe. moreover some thousands of the girls are laboriously teaching schools in thousands of one-room schoolhouses, where they provide almost one hundred per cent. of the common instruction for fifty per cent. of the population. besides this, there is no one of all the gainful occupations in which young women of this country engage which has not drawn upon the reservoir of country strength for supplies. among those women blacksmiths and engineers, those clerks, secretaries, librarians and administrators, those lawyers, doctors, professors, writers, those nurses, settlement workers, investigators and other servants of the people in widely diverse fields, there are many whose clearness of eye and reserve of force have been developed in the wholesome conditions of the open country. the country girl has no reason to be ashamed of the part she has borne in the non-rural world. it has been said that about eighty per cent. of the names found in "who's who in america" represent an upbringing in the rural atmosphere. the proportion of women in this number or the special proportion of grown-up farm girls to be found among those women cannot be stated; but the number must be large enough to justify a belief that to spend a childhood in the open country or in the rural village will not, in the case of women any more than in the case of men, form an impassable barrier to eminence. from this great rural reserve of initiating force, sane judgment, and spiritual drive have come, in fact, some of the most valued names in philanthropy and literature. among them we find the leader of a great reform, frances willard; the inaugurator of a world-wide work of mercy, clara barton; the president of a great college, alice e. freeman; the wise helper of all who suffer under unjust conditions in city life, jane addams; and the writer of a book that has had a national and world-wide influence, harriet beecher stowe. it heartens us up a bit to name over examples like these. they give us a vista and a hope. but now and then there is a country girl who would rather have, say, a better pair of stilts over the morass or a stronger rope thrown to her across the quicksand, than a volume of "who's who" tossed carelessly to her in her difficulties. for all the country girls on their farms do not sing at their work. they are not idle, heaven knows!--but their work does not invariably inspire the appreciation it deserves. chapter ii the heart of the problem new times demand new measures and new men; the world advances and in time outgrows the laws that in our fathers' day were best; and, doubtless, after us some purer scheme will be shaped out by wiser men than we, made wiser by the steady growth of truth. _lowell._ chapter ii the heart of the problem the reason why the american people care so much for the ideals that are presented to us in the country life movement is that there is something very deep-seated and permanent within us to which these motives can appeal. we are a country-life people. the bogy of the overshadowing city, threatening to spread and spread until, like a great octopus, it should suck all the sweet fields into its tentacles and cover the green areas with a compact blackness, has given us a definite fright. the result of our terror is the "country life movement." it is not that we were actually approaching an imagined danger-point; it was only that a vision of life constantly fed and inspired by the pure unadulterated influences of the country was before the eyes of a country-bred people, and was of so great preciousness that we must guard it at the first hint of peril. there are indeed grave dangers threatening some fundamental interests in the agricultural realm; to these the nation is now well awake. the republic has many problems but on the whole it is prospering, and perhaps one reason why this is so lies in the fact that the profession of agriculture is still the backbone of our national life. the so-called country life movement, then, is not a sudden onslaught upon our consciousness by an alien influence, as if we were fish suddenly commanded to go and live on the land. it is more as if a band of mountaineers with lungs adjusted to a height of several thousand feet, had been trying to breathe the air in a close and stuffy valley far below their proper levels, but who had now returned to their native height and were feeling the glow and triumph of their original energy; or who perhaps, being frightened lest they should be imprisoned in that low valley, were making frantic efforts to escape this doom and to reach their mountain homes where they could breathe freely and grow normally again. the country life movement is not the despairing gasp of expiring effeteness; it is an exclamation of robust joy in the possession of a life healthily adapted to our needs. at present there are well-nigh six million farmsteads in this country. they form what we may untechnically call the agricultural group, and represent roughly, but of course vitally, the great business of farming. in our consideration we have to include also the small rural villages, because the united states census reports include under the word "rural" both people living in the open country and those living in villages up to twenty-five hundred inhabitants in size. in the agricultural group the unit is the farmstead. by that term is meant the whole complex organization of the farm, including the land and its products, the stock, the barns and the sheds, the whole family together with whatever houses it, the corps of workers, farmer, farmer's wife, sons, daughters, maiden aunts, working people unhired and hired--in fact, everything "animal, vegetable or mineral," as the children say when they play "forty questions," that ministers in any way to the success of the farm as a business and to its ultimate object, the happiness of the family living thereon. so when we say "farmstead" we mean not only fodder for beasts but also food for the human beings; but inasmuch as the human being is soul-endowed and has imperative appetites in the æsthetic and spiritual realm as well as in the physical, the farmstead covers the matter of the piano as well as of the hoe. a wealthy farmstead is indeed one that has cattle upon many hills, or that sends many carloads of milk to the city; but it can scarcely be called a wholly prosperous farmstead unless it has an unrestricted view of the scenery from its living-room windows, a public reading room within reach of its buggy's wheels--that means, say, within twelve or fifteen miles at most--or of its automobile--which may mean within forty or one hundred miles according to the roads and the car; and, we may add, unless it takes advantage of this and other cultural privileges. it may be said that the ultimate end of the whole farm business is the happiness of the family; yet the minds of many do not travel to the ultimate--they pause at some one of the possible stopping places along the way and fashion that subsidiary idea into the fiction of an ultimate end. for instance, one may make the fattening of stock or the purchase of a certain additional strip of land into an ultimate end, and work for that, sacrificing much that is of immediate happiness value, or perhaps even of supreme happiness value, to gain that minor object. meantime the real end, the one that if we should penetrate to the heart of our ideals, we should find seated in the most sacred place: namely, the welfare and happiness of the family group for which we live and labor, has been neglected, and nearer, more direct means to attain it have been overlooked. this, then, is the heart of the matter. the farmstead is an intricate organism with many parts working wonderfully together. the object, the reason for the existence of every item and strain of it and for the thing as a whole, is that there should be at the center of it a radiant core of joy in which every human member of the little cosmos may have a share and so reflect back to the others a still greater brightness. in this farmstead world, each individual member must therefore be made happy. a tricky word--that word "happiness!" perhaps it cannot be defined, but americans are entitled to pursue it, whatever it may mean! the wise ones, however, say that the one condition that can and will set alight a vigorous flame of happiness at the heart of any human farmstead is that there should be found there the opportunity for growth for every individual in the circle, for the development of his or her latent powers, so that each life may find that whatever it was intended to be, it has been fully able to become; that none of its god-given abilities have gone to waste for want of notice, furtherance, food, or inspiration. it would be a pity to find that there was one social structure among the devices of our high civilization that was stubbornly inhospitable to the entrance of that messenger, "growth," who precedes and announces the heavenly visitant, "happiness." the farmstead must not be accused of being such a structure as that unless it is absolutely necessary. to what extent, then, does the farmstead offer opportunity for such growth? is it too much to ask that the ultimate joy of living, the joy of growth, should be brought very near to the eyes of the people living on the farmsteads, that their imaginations should be touched even more keenly than they now are to a consciousness of the real possibilities in their environment? what can we do to create an atmosphere that will give its own enthusiasm to the people, that will bind each member of the farmstead indissolubly to the place; one in which there shall be so swift a certainty that it will seem like magic; that must so charm the mind and the heart of each one that the tie will hold against any kind of onslaught? but the claim is being made in some quarters that the countryside home does not live up to its possibilities in this respect, and if not in this respect then the country life movement has a real pang behind it as well as an uprising of renewed life. if the father in the home, who is the farmer and head of the homestead, does not find happiness according to his needs, it may from all the signs be concluded that the government and the universities and the newspapers and the legislators are busying themselves to the greatest possible extent to relieve his disabilities; he may be left in their care for the present. of the farmer's wife, who is the head of the home and the partner with her husband in the farm business, the government has lately in a group of letters addressed to fifty-five thousand farm-woman correspondents, asked the question, what do you wish to have done that your life may be more filled with content and that your disabilities may be relieved? it is safe to presume that the longings of their hearts will be by some means satisfied in longer or shorter meter. the sons are sharing the fortunes of the fathers, but if they are not, numbers of them may go out from the home valley and easily seek what they believe will be a better fortune along the outer avenues of a man's activities. and the daughter? while that ship comes slowly in that is to bring something comforting to her mother, while her father is giving the farm the benefit of his fast accumulating scientific information and lessening the daily labor by up-to-date machinery, what is happening to her? is she having her share of content? has she the chance to grow and fill full the possible round of her own personal development? is the country girl happy on the farm? or is she in her heart dissatisfied and glowering? is she suppressed and sodden in mood? is her face expressionless and too old for her years? is she round-shouldered and heavy of step? is she listless and suspicious and sensitive? [illustration: the country girl is the life of the home. she is a companion for the parents and a playmate for the little brothers and sisters.] or is she full of spirit and enthusiasm, a perfect dynamo of energy? is she the life of the home, with a word and a joke for everybody and is she a perfect mischief among the other children? is her face full of expression, with smiles and dimples all the time? is she full of love and affection toward each member of the family, and endless in her devices for their comfort and entertainment? is she a veritable steam engine to get the work done and equally a master hand at all kinds of games and plays, able to get up something in no time and carry out any kind of a scheme with nothing to do with? does she sleep the very sleep of the dead the whole night long, and is she all day the widest awake being that can be found for miles around? has she an appetite to startle one fully three times a day and even more often, if something good to eat is being made? in fine, is she receiving her share of possible growth? is she having her chance to show all that she is able to become? and thus is she being happy? and also thus is she making the rest of the circle in the home that is at the center of the farmstead, happier than it could ever have been if she had not been there and had not been the fully developed girl that she is? this is the question that seems most important at just this time. this is the problem on which light must be thrown. it seems to be an important question for several reasons. it is said that the young men are showing their dissatisfaction with farm life by going away in large numbers to find occupation in the city; that the best and most energetic of the young men, those who would have been leaders for betterment in the general countryside, are found among those who desert the countryside, and that thus the farm community is depleted and deprived of good elements that it cannot well spare. the wind of destiny for woman that has swept through the country and the world during the last two decades or so, has penetrated the valleys where in seclusion the country girls have grown up, and has now whispered inspiration and courage into their ears, so that if they are dissatisfied with the conditions of their lives they will have the daring to go forth also, following their brothers, and to take up some industrial fortune in the city whither the bright star of independence beckons them. they are doing this already; and the news of it should make thoughtful people bestir themselves. there seems to be a great problem here, and the country girl seems to be at the heart of it. for if the rural question is the central question of the world, and if the social problem is the heart of the rural problem, and if the failure of the daughter's joy and usefulness threatens the farmstead,--then once more in the history of the world has the hour struck for woman; then does the welfare of the world depend upon her as much as did the life of the bleak new england shore depend on the health and survival of the pilgrim mothers? of course no one would wish to claim that the young woman in the farmstead is of more importance than other members of the home; but as a chain will break if one link fails, so the farmstead will be ruined if it lacks the cooperation of the daughter. she has, at least, a function all her own; and the happiness that comes through normal growth must be hers in order that she may fulfil her mission. the farmstead girl must take her place in the farmstead or the farmstead unit will lack one of its component parts and fall to pieces. it is her patriotic duty; it is her home and family duty; and it is her greatest happiness. the young woman on the farm must grow up with the idea that she is essential to the progress of country life and therefore of the national life, and that a career is before her just as much as if she were aiming to be an artist or a writer or a missionary. this purpose makes her life worth while. she must conserve her health for this; she must develop her powers for this; she must train herself heroically for this. we are, then, face to face with the question, so important to us at the present moment, whether the daughter in the farmstead family is having her own full meed of happiness in her farm home or not. has she the opportunity that is her right to grow and develop all her latent powers and to become the person that by all the gifts of nature she is capable of becoming? chapter iii is the country girl happy on the farm? let the mighty and great roll in splendor and state! i envy them not, i declare it. i eat my own lamb, my own chicken and ham, i shear my own sheep and i wear it. i have lawns, i have bowers, i have fruits, i have flowers. my lark is my morning's charmer; so you jolly dogs now here's god bless the plow-- long life and content to the farmer. _inscription on an old english pitcher._ chapter iii is the country girl happy on the farm? the young women who read this book will surely believe that no mere curiosity inspires the question at the head of this chapter, but a fully fixed idea that much depends on the answer. if it is not to be possible for the young women to be made happy in the rural environment, they surely are going to turn in great numbers and follow the beckoning finger of industries and engagements townward. and if multitudes of them do this, it will be increasingly difficult to keep that composite thing, the farmstead, in perfect balance; and in that balance the daughters have every year a more important part. their share, in fact, is constantly growing more vital, more indispensable to the welfare of the whole. there is also an even more important consideration. it is this. the daughters in the homes of to-day are the home-makers of to-morrow; if they are estranged irrecoverably from the countryside, what is to become of the countryside in the days that are to come? can we entertain the hope that the city cousins will come to the rescue? can we reply upon the inrush of new families from across the seas to enter our widespread fields and valleys and support for us the burden of scientific housekeeping, and high-minded home making, and modern education in the spirit of american institutions? these are some of the thoughts and some of the fears that students of the situation entertain. the result is that a strong interest is felt to know if possible exactly how the country girl herself does feel about her life on the farm, whether she is dissatisfied with the conditions that surround her, whether she suffers from a deep-seated sense of neglect and suppression, and whether she is attentive to some distant call of the metropolitan lure. many conversations and a wide and representative correspondence leave the impression upon the author that the country girls of america, however far apart in geography and condition, are alike in one characteristic--the sincerity and soberness of their testimony. the young woman on the american farm is thoughtful, well balanced, dignified. she takes herself seriously, and she is developing powers that promise well for the future of american life. the first unthinking impulse of many country girls is their love for their country homes. some are optimistic enough to claim that the farmer's family can enjoy all the advantages of village or city life without any of the disadvantages, and with the added enjoyment of the country itself. now that books, pictures, and music are so easily accessible to the farm, now that the telephone puts one into communication with friends in city or country, and modern traveling conveniences make it possible to secure such urban benefits as lectures, church, lodge, post office, etc., they feel that they have all grievances done away with. girls in thickly-populated new york and in wide-awake, modern idaho give the same testimony. there is a large group who will even exclaim as one missouri girl did that she never had had a single reason for wishing to leave the farm; that she knew of no other place which offered so much help in physical, mental, and spiritual growth and development. a young woman with an ear to economic values suggests that on the farm a great part of the food can be produced at home and can thus be kept free from adulteration. this is not by any means a minor consideration. another who perhaps has at some time known stringency in the city and can look at the problem from another angle, thinks that in the country it is rather a relief not to have to count the cost of each separate meal. the opportunities on the farm sometimes appeal to the fun loving propensities of the young girl. one has, or nearly always can have, they say, space for games, such as tennis, basket ball, etc. many think that there is more real fun in the distinctive exercises of the farm than in those of the town; for there they have nutting, riding down hill, going berrying, riding on loads of hay;--all these are thoroughly appreciated. in the varied business of the farmstead the daughter may see her love of animals gratified. on the big iowa farm where one country girl lives the farm stock is to her the chief attraction. they make pets of nearly all their creatures, and she herself assigns the fanciful and literary pet names. some times the more mature country girl has reached the height where she finds the good of country life to consist in its liberty, its leisure, its varied interests, its fresh air and nearness to nature, and its distance from the pettiness of the towns people and their limited outlook. on the farm time may be devoted to the really big things of life without petty distractions. one gains there a wholesome, sane view of life. there may be plenty to do on the farm but what you do is of consequence. [illustration: the country girl and her pets. "the quietness of the country permits a greater spiritual and mental growth, with its abundance of life, plant and animal, which challenges the mind to discover its secrets."] some of the more spiritual aspects are gathered together in this transcript of a country girl's thoughts and dreams. in trying to describe the charm that the country has for her, she mentions "the quietness and peace which permit of one's greater spiritual and mental growth, the abundance of life, plant and animal, which challenges the mind to discover its secrets; the rocks and streams which call out to one for study and discovery, the beauties of the sunrise, the clouds, the sunset, the moonlight, and the far off stars,--these call to our spirits to penetrate their mystery and lift up our souls to those levels above the commonplace where we commune with the maker; the hills and the wide expanses make us reverent and teach us to walk humbly and patiently; the clean sweet air gives us health and strength of body and soul; and the freedom from restraint by formalities and conventionalities permits the development of the person in a sane and natural way." another thoughtful mind writes this: "farming is creative; being experimental, it is interesting. on the farm both body and mind are exercised, therefore both are kept nearer a normal level. we have fresher, purer food and air; freedom from foolish forms and ceremony. we are nearer to god." an aspect that many country girls have keenly felt is shown in this passage from the letter of a loyal girl of the countryside: "i fail to find the hardships of farm life, and it always makes me indignant to hear about them. save as all life has its hardships, these special hardships are a bugaboo that does not exist. a few weeks ago i was hostess to fourteen of the girls from a large drygoods store in the city. i was grieved to see what undersized, ill-nourished little people they were. they ranged in age from sixteen to twenty, and every one was prepared to despise the country and to look upon it with contempt and the people with pity because they do not live in the city. their prevailing idea seemed to be that they had come to another race of people whom they regarded with a tolerant pity and contempt. i heard them telling my cousins, honest manly fellows, how very different they were from boys in the city. ah me! the simplest things about nature which they did not know would fill many a book." this delightfully peppery communication may be followed by one that gives that feeling of joyousness that we believe should always be found in real country life, and at the end strikes clearly the most important note of all: "the attractiveness of farm life lies in as many, diverse, and wonderful things as the breadth of the individual girl's mind can comprehend and enjoy. to some the sense of freedom in country life is a large means of happiness. the feeling of exultation in the far sweep of vision, the glorious sunsets, and the movements of the clouds in the wind and the coming storm. then there is the pleasure in seeing and helping things grow, in the frolic of the lambs in the spring, of the colts at play, and in the young plants sprouting and growing in the summer showers and sunshine; especially if you have pulled the weeds and hoed about them yourself. frequent outings to the lake or river for an afternoon or evening holiday with bathing and canoeing in the afternoon and a bonfire in the evening with a group of friends to toast marshmallows or roast corn, and later with stories and songs, add much to the pleasure of farm life. then there is the quiet and peace of the country where one may be alone at times and think. in the country there is a more compact home life than anywhere else, for each member of the family is working together for the home." this most important point might receive further emphasis. the young women in our farm homes, are, with true american spirit, appreciating the possible play in rural life of freedom and independence. young women of the rural communities seem to be at one with the time spirit of the whole country. nothing has set them askew, not even a world-wide women's movement! it delights them that country life fosters individuality; but they absolutely identify themselves with the welfare of the farmstead as a whole. the idea that their good could be separated from the good of the family and business group in which their life is embedded, does not seem to influence the minds of our country girls, north, south, east, or west. and they have their far thoughts; they look ahead and see that life on the farm furthers the unity of the family; that it is the best place to rear children; that family life and affection are more successfully fostered in a country town than in a city flat, hotel or mansion. they find that simplicity of living is easier to attain in the farm home and they believe that this is favorable to the welfare of the family. moreover, the coordinating spirit of the age has touched the minds of some. they see now that the farmstead is closely knit up with the larger unit of the farm community. they find along the countryside greater friendliness among neighbors than is found in the crowded city; they realize that the farmer's family can set its own standards without losing social recognition; and they prize the informality of social intercourse which is found in the rural world. these are some of the things that the young woman in the rural realm will set down in her brief for country life. her voice is an even-tempered voice; there is self-control in it and there is a dynamic element behind it that will compel a hearing. talking with many country girls and reading long letters from them, one gains an impression that, like the composite photograph, reveals a country girl personality whose sanity and thoughtfulness win our respect, and whose serious facing of the facts bodes ill for such country life leaders as may in the future neglect the resources to be found in the sagacity, alertness, and powers of execution stored up in the young womanhood of our rural life. chapter iv a calendar of days a country life is sweet! in moderate cold and heat, to walk in the air how pleasant and fair! in every field of wheat, the fairest of flowers adorning the bowers and every meadow's brow; so that i say, no courtier may compare with them who clothe in gray, and follow the useful plow. they rise with the morning lark, and labor till almost dark; then, folding their sheep, they hasten to sleep, while every pleasant park next morning is ringing with birds that are singing on each green, tender bough. with what content and merriment their days are spent, whose minds are bent to follow the useful plow. _anon._ chapter iv a calendar of days the wisest find life a difficult thing to classify; therefore young girls must not be blamed if they do not critically analyze the causes and the effects that appear in their personal environment. when asked, however, to give pictures of their daily experiences they do not fail us. such glimpses of the real life of some country girls in their farm homes will be afforded by the partial recitals given in this chapter. to other country girls or to those to whom the welfare of the country girl is dear, or even to those urbanized city residents who consider the dwellers in the open country as a sort of alien race whose ways must be made a matter of study before they can be comprehended--these and perhaps others will surely be interested in these fresh and vivid accounts of the everyday doings in the farm homes of our country. a fortunate country girl when asked to write a description of a representative working day of her life, sends the following joyous account. she is fifteen years old. her life is under the protection of highly educated parents and the safeguards of right home training, taste and refinement. they come from magnificent stock and work a farm of medium size in the northwest. she said: "i get up at about half-past six in the morning, and have breakfast at seven. then i help mother what i can before i start for school. mamma puts up my luncheon while i get ready. about a quarter past eight i start on my two mile walk to school. for about three quarters of a mile i follow the road, then i turn off into woods. by following a half-beaten trail for a ways, i come to a bridge made of wire. the sides and bottom are of wire; on the bottom are laid rows of planks with cross pieces to keep them where they belong. the bridge sways when you walk on it and sometimes it sags quite a little. across the river i go through more woods. the schoolhouse is set on the top of a little hill. there are about twenty pupils in the school. at recess and noon we often play baseball. we have a fine teeter and swing. at noons all of the girls and sometimes the boys take their dinners and go out and find some pretty spot in the woods to eat. in the spring-time we often go flower hunting. i never get home in the afternoon until about half past four. after school i play, sew, or help in the garden till supper time. after supper i do the supper dishes, then we all have a nice time sewing, reading, or playing games around the fireplace." a rest-breathing idyl like this shows that it is possible for bits of heaven to appear here upon earth now and then! the picture is made still more vivid by this little note: "several times we took lunch to an unworked mine near by and enjoyed the beautiful view and amused ourselves by picking gold out of the crevices in the rocks." the final touch of romantic beauty! a roseate story like this should be followed, for contrast's sake, by one picturing the harder side. the following, written by a girl of sixteen, a description of a day in haying time, shows how a blithesome spirit can make work light and joyous: "haying time is a very busy season for all on the farm. at . o'clock mother comes to our room, saying, 'it is going to be a good hay day, girlies. you must get up now; the men are nearly through milking.' she is forced to call several times, but finally we are up and dressed; we help finish getting breakfast, feed the chickens, and drive the cows to pasture. after breakfast my sister and i take the milk to the milkman who carries it to the milk station. father hitches our horse and loads the milk for us, and then hurries away to begin his mowing so that the hay will have time to be well cured in the afternoon. we drive a half mile to the milk stand where our milk is unloaded by the milkman; exchange good-mornings with him and perhaps with a neighbor or two, and drive back home. we take care of our horse and wagon and then help with the morning housework. about half-past eight my sister and i start out after huckleberries in a near-by field. it is a beautiful morning and we enjoy the walk. we pick enough berries for a pie and for supper that evening and a few more. but we hurry back in order to have a little rest before half-past ten, when i must start raking. at half-past ten, then, i hitch my horse to the rake and ride off to the lot to work. i rake until dinner time and have perhaps a third of the raking done. i unharness my horse, water him, and put him in the barn. i go to dinner with an enormous appetite and a feeling of anticipation, both of which are soon appeased. "soon after dinner i begin raking again and rake until six o'clock. father and the hired man draw in six large loads of hay. the haying for the day is done and it is pleasant to lie in the hammock and read a paper or book while the men finish unloading their last load. but before i enjoy this i must take care of my horse and carry him a drink of water from the well. after supper my sister and i help with the dishes and then run off to play in the swing while the men finish milking. when the milking is done we take the cows and the horse to pasture. then we feed the calf, claire by name, who is a very dear little creature and always greets us with great joy when she sees us coming. we shut up the chickens also. then there is about a half-hour or more left for play, and we have a good time, forgetting that we ever worked. "all our days are not so busy as this one; and when the haying and summer sewing are done, we have a chance for good times. our haying was done this summer in eight days or perhaps less. at quarter of nine we go to bed. i read a chapter or two in some book i am reading, but by ten o'clock we are both asleep with the starlight and the moonlight shining in on us through the open screen." if our sixteen-year-old girls can be completely satisfied to have but half an hour a day for recreation and to spend all the rest in unintermittent and heavy toil, and then can come out of it not only with unbroken courage but also with buoyancy and a poetic mood, then our respect for the country girl's character and nerve ought to be enhanced. this one ends her story thus: "indeed my sister and i love the farm very much and have no desire to leave it. we often declare that we would not live in the city for anything." perhaps the above letter will be recognized in some mysterious way as belonging to one of the middle states; the following delightfully individual letter can come only from a big ranch in the northwest. one feels the personality of the writer, like a dynamo, through all she writes. a rocky mountain breeze blows through her words; and her day, we know, is only one among many equally dramatic and interesting. "this morning i was wakened by the sun as it first shone in at my window. as it was only a quarter of five i covered my eyes for one more nap. we have cool nights, but yesterday it was in the shade. soon i heard papa get up, so i did likewise. i built a fire in the kitchen range and cooked my own breakfast. 'cookie sis' was not up and papa does not eat breakfast. "i thought the rest had slept long enough, so i turned on the water near the house and began to carry wash water. that got them up. while my water was heating, i gathered the clothes, swept four rooms, irrigated a little on the garden, and picked up chips. then i washed--they call me the 'family laundry.' i must be somewhat irish, too, for i must have everything in the house and on me washed clean. "at noon i was still washing. while waiting for dinner, one of the hired men struck a bargain with me. he is to bring down his spring and summer collection of seventeen dirty shirts; i am to show him how to wash them and then i may iron them. i promised because i believe in helping my neighbor, because this fellow sometimes takes my sister riding in his new buggy, and because he and i have red hair. "dinner was good even though served on our decrepit ranch dishes. we are running three kitchens. we have good meals always. we eat well and work hard for what we get here in the west. "in the afternoon i finished the washing, helped clean the house, and mended. after three o'clock i sat here in a cool room by an open window watching papa mow alfalfa and the men stack grain. the children were in swimming. by and by one of my chums drove by on her way home from town. we visit thus mostly. "supper at six. i ironed before and after, as long as the irons were hot. now at sunset my work is done. but papa is irrigating--that takes twenty-four hours a day. "this was a typical working day; but it would have been as natural for me to have described one of the six days last week when i spent ten hours a day hoeing corn. to-morrow we girls will put on overalls and shock hay. don't let it shock you--we live in the west! "the trouble with farming is that the days are not long enough for work or the nights long enough for sleep." the writer of the following "typical day" has become early the possessor of husband and child; but we shall not omit her story on that account. she lives sixty miles from the railroad station and has wonderful mountains about her horizon. her account of one of her marvelous days may be commended to all country people wherever they may be found. the joy of work and the joy of living, here reach a climax together: "it is dusk. the children and i have just come in from the corral, where i milked seven cows. i am so in love with life that i find a day very short to hold its allotted joys. "first, i awoke a little earlier than usual this morning and lay thinking over the 'had-to-be-dones.' it was baking day; but that is a glad-to-be as well as the other, because i love to experiment outside of the cookbooks. at half-past five i arose and by half-past six had breakfast on the table and my bread set. by eight o'clock we had breakfasted and i had the seven cows milked. how i love my gentle cows! what an inspiration their calm patience is! and i love to get out at that hour. at this altitude the mornings are always chilly but by eight it is pleasant. at half-past eight i had the three larger children dressed and at breakfast, while i ran the milk through the separator. while the children finished, i went again to the barnyard, where i fed my little chicks and turkeys and looked after the rest. i have two rows of flowers between the barnyard and the house, so i stopped a few minutes to smell the sweet-peas, to admire the gorgeous colors of the poppies, and to pull a few weeds. by ten i had baby robert bathed and all his little wants attended to, the breakfast dishes and the milk things washed, my bread in the oven and my dinner started. so i sat down to churn and to read while i churned. i use an old-fashioned dash churn, therefore i have an excuse for sitting down. i am glad of it, for i can read then. by twelve i have my sweet golden butter printed, have heard jerrine's lessons and have dinner ready. by half-past one we have had dinner and i have the kitchen in order and we all lie down for a rest. at two i begin making the beds, by three the whole house is straightened, so i have two hours for myself. i read a little story for the kiddies and then send them all to play while i read a little. i write a couple of letters and then go out to hoe and pull weeds a while. i cook most of my supper while i cook dinner so i can prepare supper in a few minutes. so i feed my biddies, and the children gather the eggs, until we hear the men coming in from the field. by seven o'clock we have had supper, and baby is put to bed. jerrine helps me put the kitchen to rights. then comes the goodest part of the day. we go to milk. jerrine and calvin sit in the wagon out of harm's way and i milk. jerrine lets the cows in for me and empties the milk. we all enjoy the beauties of the sunset, the beautiful colors, the crisp little mountain breeze. by nine the kiddies have had their bath and are in bed. daddy-man is playing the phonograph so they can go to sleep lulled by _annie laurie_, _bonnie doon_ and _the sword of bunker hill_. now that i have that line written i see it is rather an odd thing to be lulled by a sword, but i reckon you can figure out the meaning. at ten o'clock my day will be finished. i shall finish this paper and read a little with daddy-man and then it will be my bed-time. as i finish i see i have left out many little joys. i have kissed little hands to make hurts well perhaps a dozen times. i matched some colors and cut some blocks for jerrine's patch work; i made a finger-stall for the hired man. i have answered the 'phone a few times and-- now if some university can help me to make my days more elastic so that they can encompass all my joys comfortably, i shall be glad. there's so much i want to do but-- good-night." the writer of the following story goes beyond the one typical day and for the sake of a more accurate treatment of her program includes a whole week. thus is recorded the general plan of the american housework system as it is carried on to-day. she says: "a representative week of my life at home in the summer is easier to describe than one day, for each day is individual to itself. to begin with the most interesting occupation of the morning, i get up at about five-thirty in time to toast the bread for breakfast. after breakfast i take care of the milk and then mother and i wash the dishes. sweeping, dusting and putting in order the kitchen, dining-room and living-room comes next. the hard-wood floor in the kitchen is mopped twice a week. next the bedrooms are put in order. this regular morning work takes from an hour to an hour and a half. on monday we always do the family washing, which generally takes me about three hours and a half when mother hangs up the clothes. mother bakes the bread, prepares the vegetables for dinner and plans the desserts. if she needs me i sometimes help with these. she lets me bake the cake and what extra bread is needed for variety, such as brown bread, graham, cornbread, etc. monday afternoon we generally iron for an hour and a half to start on tuesday's work. after the ironing is finished i sweep and dust the bedrooms, unless something extra comes up, such as indoor painting, varnishing hard-wood floors, cleaning of cupboards, etc. tuesday afternoon is open for sewing. on wednesday and thursday after the morning work is completed mother and i sometimes go visiting, but generally i spend these days sewing. on friday there is the weekly sweeping of the living-room, the lamp chimneys to be washed, the windows to be polished and the porch to be cleaned. sometimes there is company expected saturday or sunday, so that i do part of this work thursday. saturday morning there is a cake to be iced and in the afternoon we often have callers or else we go somewhere. "sunday is a day looked forward to all the week. we sleep a little later sunday morning and after the morning work is done all the family, consisting at present of mother, father, my two brothers and i, get ready for church. in the afternoon we sometimes either go away or have company, but the kind we like best is the good old fashioned kind that we enjoyed when we were children, just to read a favorite book or story for the two or three short but precious hours before chore time. in the afternoon after their naps mother and father always enjoy a walk back on the farm. the evening we either enjoy quietly at home or if it is fair weather we attend the evening meeting at the church. "this is the frame-work of the program of the summer days on the farm. i have said little of the heat because our kitchen is cool, nothing of the work because nothing is worth while which isn't hard work, made emphatic with backache and punctuated with drops of sweat. gathering the berries, early apples, etc., was omitted because they come in just any time and are fun. driving on the horse fork, canning fruit, etc., all come in their time, making every day full of busy little tasks." the following gives the experience of three sisters in an opulent home on the western slope of the catskills. it seems likely that the writer depreciates her own share in the work and in the success of the systematic household. she says: "it is difficult to select any one day for a representative farm day program. the work changes with each day in the week and also changes very much with the seasons. in the spring there is the gardening, house cleaning and the raising of chickens, besides the shipping of many crates of eggs to new york. all this is done in the house and, although it is done all the year, in the spring when there are more eggs the work is heavier. "the chickens are hatched out by incubators in a small house built for that purpose and when hatched they are moved to the brooder house. here they are cared for until strong enough to be put out doors in brooders. later they are sorted and put into larger colony houses out in the field. the entire responsibility and work of this is taken by my sister isabell, so it is needless to say that her program through the spring months would show days that were more than busy. "in the creamery, from which butter in pound prints is shipped twice a week to private families, the work of wrapping, packing and marking is also done by isabell. there is more of this work to be done during the winter months than in the summer because so many of the people who take the butter go abroad for the summer months. "the management of the house, the cooking, and to a large extent the management of the business fall to my oldest sister, elizabeth. we have two dining-rooms, one for the men, of whom there are sometimes as many as eight--and the other where we eat. for the housework we have no outside help except a woman who comes in once a week to bake for us and who also does the washing for the men. our own washing is done by elizabeth, with the aid of a power machine and steam which is piped from the creamery to the laundry. "during the summer elizabeth cans berries, fruits, beans, corn and tomatoes in as large amounts as our garden may produce for winter use. ham, bacon and sausage are also made on the place. even soap is made in the big iron kettles in just the same way that our grandmothers used to make it. many people marvel at the amount of work which is done here without any apparent confusion, and the reason for this is to a large extent due to my sisters' management. we have electric lights and steam heat and the kitchen is arranged in every way to save unnecessary labor. "as for social life, we are not able to have as many guests here or to go to as many things in town as when we had sufficient girls in the kitchen. most of our friends live in town six miles distant. this is due probably to the fact that we all went to high school there. we have a driving horse and go to most of the social things in town which occur in the afternoon. we rarely go down at night unless there is some exceptional event. my sister belongs to several clubs in town and recently has organized a study and social club among the farm women of this immediate vicinity. i think if one asked my busy sister what kind of recreation she enjoyed most, she would answer horseback riding and shooting. most of the time we are too busy and interested in things here to complain about being far away from things in town. sometimes, however, when the roads are bad, it becomes monotonous to be shut away from the outside world, and i can easily see how this phase of farming is often the reason for great discontent. "my part in the community is rather small. i just help, and when the other members of the family go away, i fill their places. the year isabell was at cornell i had charge of the chickens. now the bees occupy a great deal of my time. "i don't know as it is necessary after writing all this to add a program of a day, but i will simply put down the things i do in a day which isn't especially rushed. "i get up at about : or am supposed to. my sisters get up earlier. after i have eaten my breakfast i prepare the potatoes for dinner. by that time all the men have had their breakfast and i wash the dishes and clean up things in general. then there are beds to be made and perhaps rooms to be cleaned. after that some mornings i go to the creamery and wrap butter, but recently i have worked for an hour or so fixing bee equipment. about : on some mornings, i put on my bee togs and work with them until nearly dinner time, when i set the table and help get dinner. after dinner i wash the dishes and, unless there is garden picking or preparing of something for canning to do, as there often is, i am free until about four-thirty. if i go to town i leave directly after dinner and get back about six. we don't go down a great deal however. during the afternoon the mail comes bringing the daily paper and at the end of the month the magazines. the entire family take turns reading the paper, and the magazines are read at the first opportunity. we sew, do little odd things, and are never at loss as to how to spend the time. supper is at five, so the men can milk after it. i wash dishes or gather eggs after supper and unless something turns up to do am free. we often pick garden things for the next day because it is cool then." the itinerary of the american country girl might thus be followed from the energizing cool of the morning when the impact of the day's work is so buoyantly met to the quieting cool of the evening when rest is so joyously welcomed. so far in our investigation there has always been some source of hope and enthusiasm to be discovered. if the margin of unbearable drudgery seems to be reached, there is the solace of music at evening when the whole family join in an orchestra of violin, cornet and piano. if the days seem to grow unendurably monotonous, a pageant looms on the horizon to capture the interest and to make life fascinating at once. a fourteen-hour day of hard labor is broken by a recess in the midst to write a letter and send it out to some girl friend in the great big world that shall keep the secluded spirit in some touch with the outside currents of life. at the stroke of eleven the daily paper comes; at the twentieth of the month the magazine. a french or an organ lesson is possible; and life, though burdened is kept enlivened on every side. in such homes, work is not drudgery and the word "monotonous" has no fatal meaning. perhaps it may be said that there is always something that can be found, if it is looked for searchingly enough, to make a life of hard work bearable. work is good; all of us write that down on paper and believe that we believe it. but when the principle is illustrated in a practical form many things are required to sustain our conviction. there must be a meaning, a hope, a definition, a goal. each life is a system set in with other systems. to make one of them a success, all must move on right lines toward the chosen end. other letters from these sensible young women in the rural realm will perhaps make us feel this more keenly than the foregoing. chapter v what one country girl did thorn apples and sweet acorns i love the taste of thorn apples and sweet acorns and sumac and choke-cherries and all the wild things we used to find on the road to school. and i love the feel of pussy willows and the inside of chestnut burrs. i love to walk on a country road where only a few double teams have left a strip of turf in the middle of the track. and i love the creaking of the sleigh runners and the snapping of nail-heads in the clapboards on a bitter cold january night. in the first cool nights i love the sound of the first hard rainfall on the roof of the gable room. and i love the smell of the dead leaves in the woods in the fall. i love the odor of those red apples that grew on the trees that died before i went back to grandpa's again. i love the fragrance of the first pink and blue hepaticas which have hardly any scent at all. i love the smell of the big summer raindrops on the dusty dry steps of the school house. i love the breath of the great corn fields when you ride past them on an august evening in the dark. and i love to see the wind blowing over tall grass. i love the yellow afternoon light that turns all the trees and shrubs to gold. i love to see the shadow of a cloud moving over the valley, especially where the different fields have different colors like a great checkerboard. i love the little ford over turtle creek where they didn't build the bridge after the freshet. i love the sunset on the hill in winnebago county, where i used to sit and pray about my mental arithmetic lesson the spring i taught school! _elisabeth wilson._ chapter v what one country girl did it may be interesting to some of the country girls who read this book to see not only some pictures here and there from the life history of girls but also to look over several more detailed accounts, so that they may realize more fully what the new era in country life means to a young woman on the farm who takes hold of her problem with vigor and enthusiasm. to gratify this desire there will be given in this and the following chapters, with the kind permission of the writers, a number of sketches in some detail of the experiences of several girls, who though they represent widely separated regions of the country, still seem to be moved by a like impulse toward an advance in efficiency and power of service. the first of these accounts expresses the great awakening of southern womanhood in the new activity of the "beloved southland." this story is especially interesting because it shows what one girl has done just with what she had, and how she found that she had a great deal more to work with than she had dreamed. the writer of the many letters from which the account is framed, is a little over twenty years old, and lives on a farm of two hundred acres, twenty-five of which are cleared. the nearest village, which consists of just a score of houses, is three miles from her farm. the land is not productive without fertilizer, but at the best produces a fair crop of corn and sweet potatoes. this is the way the farm looked when she first saw it: "around the house was an old-fashioned flower garden planted years before. the woods and creek were beautiful. the day we arrived, after we had crossed the creek and were inside the clearing, what we saw made us forget the long drive through black stumps and fallen trees. the oaks were just coming into leaf. the dogwoods formed a semi-circle around the place and were white with bloom against the green of the pines, while the wisteria hung in great clusters and the bridal wreath was one heap of white flowers." this was the first entrancing glimpse. but any one who knows about farm work, realizes that this view of a run-down, neglected old place means a long struggle. nature has reached out hands to pull the whole cultivation back into the wilderness. in that tangled fragrant clearing was waiting a severe test for a trained farmer, not to say, for a beginner. but this girl was determined to live on the farm, and she stood ready to face all difficulties in the attainment of her desire. that neglected garden was typical. she soon had it cleaned and the bulbs reset, and it was not long before there were flowers for every month in the year. all difficulties seem to have been met with a spirit of determination and of cheer. "we were crazy," she declares, "to live on a farm and determined not to fail; but as soon as one problem was solved, another would bob up. there was never a day without some unexpected happening, and adventures were plentiful." she would have amply proved that she appreciated the attractiveness of farm life if she had not classified her thoughts and set them down so neatly. to her the charm of life on the farm consists, first, in the fresh air and wholesome food, with plenty of fruit and vegetables, together with the pleasure of helping to produce and prepare the food. in her opinion having to depend upon one's self to decide courses of action as much as you do in farm life, gives one backbone and trains one to rely upon self and to be an effective leader. she has, as most true country people have, an ineradicable and fundamental passion for independence. in town one may have the advice of the minister, the doctor and the lawyer; but in the country, she says, it is the lord and i. again, it takes much less time and less expense to keep up appearances in dress in the country; one is freer from interruptions than in town, and ties of kinship are stronger among people of the country. no, the farm is not monotonous; one acquires a liberal education just by being alive; nature study, the work in the flower garden, affords constant variety; and there are new interests and adventures every day. this girl has also thought on the other side of the question, and she can see that there may be reasons why one may prefer to leave the farm. one may feel the lack of companionship near one's own age and the lack of recreation. too much importance may be placed on field work to the neglect of the garden; unkind criticism by neighbors may be the only recreation available; and not paying the women of the family for their aid in the household service, may be in her mind sufficient reasons for desertion. these, in short, are some of the things she emphasized. an average day of her life on the farm is a busy one. she says: "the sun wakes me up in the morning, or maybe it is the mocking-birds singing. i work in the garden gathering the vegetables, picking the flowers, or cultivating, until breakfast time. after breakfast i make the beds and straighten the bedrooms; then i work in the garden again until about : or : o'clock. then i come in and help with the dinner or sew or study or write, and if it is bread-baking day i always knead the bread and prepare it for the oven. as we have breakfast about five-thirty o'clock we get so hungry we have dinner about : . after dinner we rest a half hour either by reading or by lying down. in the afternoon after a bath i study or sew until it is cool enough to work in the garden. for supper we only make coffee and warm over something left from dinner. we have supper at five o'clock, but usually have a bowl of clabber or a glass of milk before going to bed. i work in the garden until dark; then we talk a while and go to bed about nine o'clock. in the winter we talk or read after supper until bed-time. however, in canning time the study, the sewing, and a good part of the reading are put aside." it is evident that her share in the housework is not a small one. she does the sewing and much of the gardening, taking entire care of the flower-garden. she does marvels of canning; she keeps the accounts; she straightens out the rooms, and helps with the cooking. she runs the errands, waiting on the father, who is permanently disabled. to facilitate her work she has a sewing machine, an oil stove, a pump near the door, and a wheel-hoe. what she desires in the way of equipment in order to make her housekeeping easier are these only--her thoughts for herself have not flown very high!--a kitchen cabinet and a clothes wringer. since they eat a great deal of cream cheese and lots of fruit and vegetables raw, she does not feel that they need a fireless cooker; but she does greatly need a canner. since the canner is so frequently offered as a prize, this need will no doubt be soon supplied. the recreations of this hard-working girl consist of reading, going visiting, walking, studying nature, making a flower garden, and writing letters. she also naïvely includes going to sunday school among her recreations. she takes an excursion to the shore once in a great while; but only seldom has she the time for that. she can have the use of a conveyance at convenience, and on saturday she and her mother drive to town and occasionally on sunday to church. has she no games? no, she is an only child and has never had any playmate in the home. besides the flower garden and nature study form her recreation. but she thoughtfully encloses in one letter a list of games that she thinks girls may like to know about and gives a bibliography of articles on games for young folks in the woman's paper they are accustomed to take in her home. in her community there are perhaps twenty-five young people. they have a dance once or twice a month and a picnic twice a year; and there is a school social every two months. the social life of the village centers about the school as much as anywhere. perhaps they could attract more interest to the church if the members of the church choir only had tact and facility enough. they have no resident minister and therefore the church lacks a centralizing element. but the village has a hall with a platform, a two-roomed school house, and a tennis court, as facilities for a social center. there is also a rest room at the ice cream parlor and back of the church there is another hall. one would say that there was no excuse for this town if it did not have a thriving social life and a good time for everybody on the highest lines. and ought they not to overcome all separating difficulties, if there be any such, and establish a regular pastor and begin to have a real community life? for how can a town with all those advantages hold up its head among the towns of america if it has a church building and no church therein? certainly though one girl can do much, she cannot do all. one may judge any girl by the books she sets down as her favorite reading matter: this farm girl mentions the bible, shakespeare, _silas marner_, _days off_, _the calling of dan matthews_, _alice in wonderland_, _little women_, _john halifax gentleman_, _lorna doone_, _david harum_, _the little minister_, _distractions of marietta_, _the chimes_, _treasure island_, _josephus_, _lady of the lake_, _rose and ring_, _prince otto_, _red badge of courage_, _poems of all great poets_, idylls of the king, department of agriculture bulletins, botanies and school books. to this list she adds the name of the woman's paper she and her mother had taken, the file of which she has preserved for some years. those she underscores as the ones she reads with most delight are these: _little women_, _little minister_, _alice in wonderland_, and all the stories in her woman's paper. the serial story appeals to her most, because she has to wonder how it is going to come out. she does not let anything interfere with reading an hour or so every day. she and her mother read together a great deal. she reads to her mother articles in the woman's paper, and the poetry of lewis in the houston _post_. they take several weekly papers, three monthly magazines, and a daily city paper. she herself took two of these, the woman's paper and one of the most vital of the national weekly journals. she likes these two best--one because it gives the home view and the other because it gives the world view. they supplement each other, she thinks, and help one to develop a well balanced mind and character. her other cultural interests, however, are centered in the household tasks and in helping in the sunday school, and she finds these so interesting that the days are all too short. the sunday school must mean a great deal to her for she mentions it as a cultural as well as a recreational resource. it was about four years ago that the sunday school was started. they had good music for about two years, one family playing all the instruments. through the librarian she loaned her books, bringing them as they were called for. the librarian saved her the trouble of asking for the return of the books and in five years only one was lost. they also had a plan for passing their magazines about. every sunday when she went to church she would take armloads of flowers to give away; and if any one wanted plants or bulbs she brought them on request. this seems so delightfully practical. why should not the church door be a place for the exchange of free will offerings of all kinds? there seems on first view very little opportunity for a girl in some secluded farm to learn much about the great fields of classic art. this girl is one to whom art subjects have a great appeal though she feels the lack of opportunity to develop this interest. she draws enough to have some appreciation of form and tone and she studies reproductions of famous paintings; she enjoys especially watching the sunrise and the sunset, and the stars on a clear night. nothing in nature is alien to her. trees, birds, ferns, wild flowers and garden flowers, all are beloved. she has the scientific spirit as well as the artistic. she has made collections of pressed wild flowers, and the expert consulting botanist of the united states department of agriculture bureau of plant industry names them for her. she made two sets of specimens, numbering them, keeping one and sending the other to washington. with delightful frankness this efficient country girl recounts her financial endeavors. her chief way of earning money is by raising vegetables for the table and by cutting down expenses by careful planning of the diet. during one year the family had only to pay out $ for bought groceries, and the eggs helped to pay for that, so that the bought groceries were only $ . apiece per month for the four members of the household. circumstances have thrown a load of responsibility upon this young girl, but unconsciously she was being trained for the work. she was already a unit in the complex structure of the farmstead before she was so acutely needed. in her earlier girlhood her father paid her a salary of ten dollars a month for her household assistance. in doing this he was enlisting her interest in an enterprise to the success of which she was led to feel that she was essential. she responded to this educational method by being ready when the need came to plan wisely and efficiently and to carry out these plans successfully. that first money she earned she was permitted to save. she let it accumulate for a time and when she had a good opportunity she bought a lot with it. after a while she moved a house upon the lot and fixed it up. the family lived there for about a year and then she sold it, making a good profit. during that time they owned a garden and a cow. the garden was held to be her own special property; but her enthusiasm for the whole farm project was no doubt to a good extent the result of the training in responsibility she had received at the hands of her wise parents. when she found that she could obtain government publications on farming problems, she promptly availed herself of this means of help. almost as soon as she moved to the farm, her congressman at her request sent her the publications of the department on agricultural education. there she read about the correspondence work at the pennsylvania state college; and by the time she had been on the farm four months, she had begun correspondence courses in domestic science and agriculture under that patronage. she completed thirteen subjects: principles of cooking, heating and ventilation, canning and preserving, house furnishing, butter-making, dairy, breeds of cattle, vegetable gardening, dressing and curing meat, stock feeding, principles of breeding, farm manures, commercial fertilizers, and farm bookkeeping. for this work she received two certificates. the tuition was free and no books had to be specially purchased for these subjects. for her home library and text-book facilities for these studies this energetic and persevering girl had at command, besides the bulletins of the united states department of agriculture, only the file of that household journal that she had taken since . added to this was the constant advice of her mother, who had had opportunity to observe the work in a large hotel where her husband had once occupied some position that gave her the entrée to the kitchen laboratory. this aid came in well on the household side of the problem. as one would certainly expect, it is found that this correspondent takes part in all meetings and movements to promote better housekeeping that are at hand. she has the girls' canning club and the united farm women. for information in regard to clubs and societies she sent to the colleges receiving federal aid as listed in circular , office of experiment stations. by this means she has begun a thriving intercommunication by letters with many other girls, with whom she exchanges items of information as to what they find out in their canning and gardening experiences. after a little the bureau of plant industry asked her to report the blossoming and ripening of fruit for the region where she lives; in return for this they sent her a whole mail sack of bulletins. these bulletins and others from the department, together with the household journal which she and her mother had taken for several years, she used in studying the lessons in her correspondence course, making a list of references for each lesson. the girls' canning club meets at her house, and she prepares the questions for them. she has copied over two hundred recipes on canning for the department of agriculture. she hopes to get the national plant, flower and fruit guild started in her vicinity so that she can send things to the orphans' home in the nearest city. for two years she has sent an exhibit of canned products to the fair--twenty-one varieties in . she read in the papers about the girls' tomato club in an adjoining state and she wrote at once to the professor in charge of the extension department of a polytechnic institute in her own state, asking him to help start some clubs for girls. this professor soon journeyed to her county to look the situation over and to see what could be done. he became enthusiastic about it and won the interest of the county superintendent; thus the clubs were soon started under the patronage of the school teachers. at present there are girls in the canning clubs of that one county alone. in the club in the one little village there are seventeen members, nine girls and eight women. they have four meetings and a canning party annually. at the last meeting the founder read a paper on _the uses of tomatoes_; she also asked forty questions on tomatoes, five on berries, five on beans and cabbage, and five on jelly. the club is now working on a tomato history; they will send their exhibits to the fair where they stand a good chance to win one of the five prizes offered. the canning club also belongs to the united farm women. by this organization programs for suggested meetings are sent and at the time for the meeting various bulletins and booklets on the subjects chosen also come. the girls consider those in the _better babies_ group a valuable collection. the club asked the storekeeper in the village to hand out the bulletins on the _care of the baby_ to the country customers wherever he hears of the arrival of new babies. he says the people are very thankful for the bulletins. among other resources of various kinds that this girl and her friends can call upon is the daughters of the american revolution, who through their conservation committee offer seven canners as prizes to the canning clubs of that state. the members of the club also receive magazines from the church periodical club, and they pursue extension courses in agricultural subjects. certain colleges that have correspondence courses on subjects connected with the farm home have been called upon for aid by some of the young women who belong in the realm of this girlhood endeavor. when the girls began to feel the need of beautification about the church surroundings, they asked the landscape gardener of the bureau of plant industry for aid and he drew a blue print plan for setting out the trees and shrubs; now they are asking the same favor for the country school houses in their vicinity. community spirit has reached such a height now that effective meetings in the interest of good roads are being held. many people think that this is the final stage in community success, for all things become possible if the roads are good. says this young enthusiast: "when we have as good roads as they have across the line in the next state, we shall have to move to a pioneer country to find some new problems." this concludes the report of a wonderful young life--a life full of promise, one that seems to be developing through service, making economical gain and keeping economical balance as she goes along. nothing greater could be asked, as far as ultimate good is concerned. chapter vi stories of other country girls well then, i now do plainly see this busy world and i shall ne'er agree; the very honey of all earthly joy does, of all meats, the soonest cloy; and they, methinks, deserve my pity who for it can endure the stings, the crowd, and buzz, and murmurings of that great hive, the city! _cowley._ chapter vi stories of other country girls the first of the three stories in this chapter represents the work of a young woman who spends more than half of her time with her mother and an aunt upon an ancestral home in a mountain region of new england. again we discover what a girl can do who looks about her to see what the needs are and then stands ready to help in any way she can. the ways that are opening before her are many and her life seems likely to be marked by the most joyous of fulfilment in helpfulness and radiating energy. the farm where she lives has about nine hundred acres and is situated in the edge of a village of some four hundred inhabitants. the place is full of historic interest, and has wonderful views over the mountains in every direction. such a home as this naturally makes a great claim on the attachment of the open-eyed young woman who writes about it; but she possesses also a pure straightforward love for the simple country wherever found. watching the growth of plant and animal life has a charm for her. the fresh air, the good water, the abundance of fresh vegetables, and the freedom from the noise and hurry of the city, make a strong appeal. yet she sees that there might be reason in some complaints against the country system as it is. an absence of cash results for work done by members of the family in the home or in the field; a lack of interesting recreation; a longing for freedom; the narrowness and spirit of criticism in village life: any of these may justify a young woman in going away. as for herself she has no grievance. her share in the work on the farm and in the home consists of a good part of the cooking, cleaning, canning and gardening, but it is not too much for her. they have many household conveniences: running water in a barrel, a blue flame oil stove, a bread-mixer, and a carpet-sweeper. she would like a kitchen cabinet, electric lights, a furnace, a vacuum cleaner run by electricity, and a system of plumbing. but these, in that thickly populated region, will doubtless come in the near future. in the summer her regular work is the care of the garden, and bringing in the vegetables. when they have no hired girl, she washes all the dishes, fills the lamps and the wood-box, and does most of the sweeping and cleaning. she does a great deal of sewing and is occupied with everything from upholstering chairs to making posters for lectures and plays. during the canning season she cans string beans, corn, swiss chard, spinach, beets, carrots, pears, plums, cherries, berries, etc., and makes astrachan jelly enough to supply the church suppers for the whole year. she seldom has a chance to sit down unless it be to prepare the vegetables for dinner. her afternoons are taken up with club work, or with other outside activities, with time for an occasional walk with her mother, or an informal call. evenings there is either choir practise, christian endeavor meetings, grange, church suppers, club work, or plays, with business letters and sewing to fill up whatever time remains. yet room is made for a little music. there is a piano in the home and they sometimes have hymns and old standard songs in the evening. when sewing is to be done, some one always reads aloud. the house is well supplied with books. there are most of the standard books though few novels and little light reading. the newspapers and magazines are read aloud evenings. the table is well supplied with periodicals: they take the _outlook_, the _independent_, the _geographic magazine_, the _atlantic_, the _new york times_, the _hampshire gazette_. for herself alone she takes _wohelo_, the camp fire magazine, and if she should add another it would be the _survey_. that would help her most, as her reading at present is along the lines of sociology. to be sure, her reading is somewhat interfered with by housework, sewing, and occupation with outside interests. besides she has too much physical vitality to sit still long. but if she does need more books than her own house supplies, there is a public library a quarter of a mile away. she is a trustee of this library and goes there twice a week. she helps the librarian catalog the new books, obtains loan agricultural library books, exchanges books with other towns, and obtains agricultural bulletins,--thus making herself an invaluable helper to the whole region. she sees to it that the library gives help to those that are interested in nature study. she herself has an interest in birds and wild flowers. in her home they have a stuffed collection of fifty or more species of birds. she modestly says that she "knows ferns somewhat." thanks to her ministrations the town library has books on all those subjects. the chief sources of culture in the village, she says, are the library, the grange, the stereopticon lectures, and a good pastor. in order that she may do her full share in helping to promote the general welfare, she has become guardian of a camp fire club and in that group does all she can to encourage efficiency among the girls. she takes a vital interest in all the organizations for young people. there cannot be a girl in that region who does not know that if she wants any good thing this older girl stands ready to help her. she is herself a unitarian but she has no sectarian prejudice against working in the christian endeavor society and she shows this by taking part in the meetings every sunday evening. she owns the only stereopticon in town and generously sees to getting the slides for the monthly lectures. she sings in the church choir. she keeps more or less in touch with the school superintendent who is very responsive to suggestions and she tries to help him and the five district school teachers in every way she can. she is medical temperance superintendent in the women's christian temperance union. in this connection she puts up posters and prepares charts for the school children. she is guardian not only for the camp fire girls but also for the bluebirds, which is organized for the girls under twelve. as to earning money, she is so happy as not to have to work for that at present. however, "on the place," she says, "i think i could earn by making jelly, if i could find a market. in the past, when we were living elsewhere, i was given seventy-five dollars a month to pay my share of the housekeeping accounts (which i ran) and to lay aside. now on the farm, i do not have any set sum, but i own a share in the farm." asked if this sharing in the ownership made her more enthusiastic for the success of the farm, she answered that she thought it did. she would like to know of more ways of earning money that she might recommend them to her camp fire girls. she has had no special education for farming as a business or for home-making; but she follows the suggestions of an agricultural teacher in a high school in the next town, and she reads up on various lines of home work in connection with the judging of the work of the girls in the camp fire, and she has taken two courses at a college in household chemistry. a life of such incessant activity must have a great deal of joy in it. there are, however, some special forms of recreation accessible to her. there is a fourth of july celebration with floats and a parade; there are athletic contests; there is baseball, and there is an entertainment consisting of a play, and other exercises. there are occasional school picnics, and plays are given by the grange or by the camp fire girls. sunday evening stereopticon lectures are run by the christian endeavor society. she attends the baseball games, the w. c. t. u. parties; the cradle roll parties, the camp fire parties, and the bluebird parties for the little club girls. social life centers about church and grange. there are enough girls to have societies of their own and though they live widely apart, it seems that this girl with the spirit of a leader is able to draw them together. though she is very modest about her part of the attraction, she could doubtless say, if she would, "a great part of it i was!" there are about a dozen young people in about a dozen houses in her village and there is something going on once a week or oftener which is specially for the girls. there is a great deal more that might be said about this faithful and enthusiastic worker. her loyal following in the path that first opened before her has led her into a special field of moral education where her efficiency and fine spirit are making her useful not only to her own region but to a much wider circle. she has been trained for a service which it is a joy to render. the second record in this group represents the great bounding life of the northwest, and is as full of the new elixir of country life as the other accounts given. the writer says: "i could tell you volumes about our western rural life," and if there were room, those "volumes" should be included. she is twenty-one years old, and is one in a family of ten children. the farm she refers to is one owned by her grandfather and there she spends a great deal of her time and lavishes a great deal of work. there are eighty acres; forty of them are hilly, unirrigated lands, while five acres are still in sage-brush. the rest is irrigated by electric pumped water. the nearest town is six miles away and has twenty-two hundred people. many charming glimpses are given of the home this girl represents. she is an enthusiast for the possibilities of farm life. she prizes it because she finds that freedom of action is possible there in matters of dress and in the choice of companions. all desired urban benefits--such as lectures, church, organizations and social events, seem to have become accessible to her. she thinks, too, that the farm realizes outdoor life at its best. there is plenty to do--this she rates as one of the great advantages--and she adds this pregnant sentence, "what one does is of consequence." she acknowledges that parents might desire to go away from the farm in order to put children in a town school. but she adds: "i'd rather take them to a good centralized country school. i have taught in town and country both, and am now teaching a country school under town supervision with ten pupils and every advantage. as i keep house for my grandfather on a dry homestead two miles from school, i have the fun of walking to and from the schoolhouse." again she says that people may go to the town in order to spend their money; town, she says, is a good place to go for that purpose. she adds this caustic note: "but my father made money in town and spent it in the country--as long as he kept tenants on his farm!" her share in the housework is ample and joyous. she says: "myself and two grown sisters, both younger than i, take turns about doing the entire housework. the rest work in the garden and the field, irrigating, hoeing, etc. i prefer outside work too, but i always wash and iron, even when i am working outside." her home conveniences are a washing-machine, a pump in the house, running water at the door, a telephone, the daily weather reports, a typewriter, a sewing-machine, screened windows and doors, and homemade soap. who but a girl of the great untrammelled northwest would call the weather reports a home convenience, or think of including homemade soap? of course she is not satisfied: she would like electrically pumped water, electric lights, ice, and a gasolene stove. some of these she hopes to have next year, and the electric stove will doubtless come too and other new and important things. opportunity for recreation is not wanting. there are fishing on the place, swimming in the large irrigation canal, and buggy riding. in winter there is dancing at farm homes; visits are made over the 'phone. sewing and sewing bees are recreation; so are reading and writing letters. caring for small brothers and sisters seems to come under the same head; water-color painting, hunting jack-rabbits and grouse, taking kodak pictures, going to picnics and celebrations, camping in the mountains, lectures, lodge, and socials in town, horseback riding and day dreaming do not seem so difficult to include. she harnesses and drives, hitching up to the buggy, the democrat, or even the jockey cart; she rides the bicycle and expects to drive an auto--"some day." all the games they play in that large and varied family are "to work, and to tease one another." evidently here is a place on the planet where work and play run into each other and become one and the same thing! she says: "there seems to be no necessity for games." she adds: "we older ones often amuse and watch the three children play." as to the number of young people in the vicinity she says that there are about twenty "within this natural district." during the school year they have about six social gatherings; in summer there are informal picnics and sunday visits with refreshments. social life centers about the school and the doings in the adjacent town. among some of the neighbors there is a german club. as facilities for a social center, they have the schoolhouse (but with stationary seats), a playground, any number of natural groves and of fishing holes, and the big ditch for swimming. for the girls alone they have swimming parties and visiting parties; and they help one another during haying and threshing. this she puts down among the social gatherings for girls in her neighborhood! in the house there is a library of about two hundred and fifty volumes. lack of time is the only thing that prevents reading. there is a public library in the nearest town and she goes there every week in winter. in summer however she is too busy with farm work to go so often. in the family evenings either she or her mother reads aloud: also on sunday afternoon. the books that they have thus read together of late are _lorna doone_ and one by wason called _friar tuck_ which she marks an underscored "good." they have a piano and the favorite songs are such old favorites as _annie laurie_ and _juanita_. also they sing church songs, and popular tunes, such as _the trail of the lonesome pine_. they adapt the music to the different tastes in the ten-children family. besides the daily evening paper and the local weekly paper, they take _successful farming_, _better fruit_, _scientific american_, _american magazine_, _cosmopolitan_, _epworth herald_, some law papers, the government bulletins and reports, _current opinion_, etc. for her own interests she is going to take _epworth herald_, _primary education_, _youth's companion_, _american geographical magazine_, _current opinion_, _stock reports_, _successful farming_. her other cultural interests are these: music; school, especially high school entertainments, correspondence with normal school friends; teachers' institute, each fall, one week; water-coloring; making beautiful clothes and fancy work; rebecca lodge; church in town; amateur photography; and reading, underscored again. it is fascinating to see what a girl like this will include under the head of "cultural interest." on the question of earning and using money, she says: "from the time we were very small we earned all our spending money by being paid for extra work. i have been absolutely independent, even to buying my clothes, since i was seventeen years old. i figure that my work more than pays my board." first among the ways of earning money, she names hoeing corn; next she mentions teaching school. "i teach school nine months of the year. before i began that and ever since, i have earned money. i put myself through the normal school. i packed prunes (at four cents an hour), sold garden truck (twenty-five cents a day, average--did no peddling), and sewed for others at usual rates." no special sum is set apart for her use but she has all she earns. in teaching she receives sixty dollars a month. she has taught for this salary for two years and with this she has paid two hundred dollars she had borrowed for her school expenses. she has four hundred dollars remaining. most of this is now in interest-bearing notes on farm securities. she adds: "i buy my clothes, go one-half on board with grandfather on the homestead, and am beginning a 'hope-box.'" she is to have a share in the corn crop. "when i am married," she says, "i expect to invest some in cattle for beef." the vital question as to whether her sharing in this ownership makes her have more enthusiasm for the success of the farm, receives this answer: "certainly; you should have seen me top the corn when it got frosted june . it's doing fine now; i think we saved it, for it was frozen to the ground." she has read all on the subject of farming that she could find. she took some work in the normal school--enough, she says, to make her realize that she knew very little; she believes she could do much through correspondence. her interest is now about equally divided between farming and home economics: but, she is good enough to confide, "i expect to make home-making predominate some day." ah, then this is the true meaning of that "hope-box"! this efficient girl is to be a farmer's wife and she wishes to know how to do her part in helping run a grain-haystock ranch of a thousand acres successfully. so she has taken one year at the normal school in home economics and some studies in agriculture also; she studied family sociology in a forty weeks' course; and she has given some study to the laws governing women's property. may her hope-box overflow! may she in time run her own car, and may all her schemes work out perfectly! is there room to put down just one more story? this one has been sent by a friend who for years has been teaching in the idaho industrial institute, a school where they train boys and girls for farm life. the writer of the paper, a girl of nineteen, interested her especially and she asked her to write a brief record. the farm where this girl lives is in a hilly region and is productive; they have from it oats, wheat, clover, timothy, and potatoes. there are acres, and they are six miles from town. "farm life to me is attractive," she says, "because on the farm one has the freedom that cannot be gained anywhere else in the world. one learns the habits of birds and animals and one comes in touch with nature and hence with the creator himself. children raised on the farm grow strong in body and spirit, and they store their minds with more venturous thoughts. by living on the farm one gets all the fresh vegetables, fruits, butter, milk, eggs and meat that one desires. but of course there may be reasons why one might desire to leave the farm. one may get the idea that one has to work harder for less pay than elsewhere. one may think that the pleasures are few and that farm life is not respectable enough, and that if one could only leave and go to the city, one would be contented. but any one leaving the farm will never be happy while away and will soon learn that there is no place in life like the farm." this young woman shows the usual picture of work and of small opportunity for social enjoyments. these are her books: the bible, _stephen_, _soldier of the cross_, _jesus of nazareth_, _the coming king_, _tempest and sunshine_, _the broken wedding ring_, _sweet girl graduate_, _daddie's girl_, _wild kitty_, _girls of the forest_, _ruby or a heart of gold_, _taking her father's place_, _now or never_. she was very much delighted, she says, with all in this list. she has the long winter's evenings to read in but the additional work in summer interferes somewhat with her reading. they have no musical instrument in the home but they have many of the best hymn-books and country songs, and they sing hymns together. she is very much interested in ways of making better homes. she herself takes the _mother's magazine_ and _the christian endeavor world_, and is pursuing a course in home economics at the present time. a single working day of her life is thus described: "one bright morning in early july i was awakened by my mother who told me that it was half-past four. i arose immediately for i had had a good night's rest and did not feel sleepy. i dressed in my riding habit and went to the barn and waked my brother who was sleeping in the hay-loft and asked him to come and saddle my pony, 'daisy.' he saddled her and i mounted and went to the timber for the cows. the air was fresh and cool. it filled me with joy and seemed to affect daisy the same, for she threw her ears forward, listened a second for the cows, and hearing the tinkle of the bell she started out on a gallop. after about a half hour's ride i found the cows and drove them home. when i had taken the saddle from daisy and given her her breakfast and a few loving caresses i left her and went to the house, arriving just in time for breakfast. after breakfast i told my two sisters i would do the housework myself while they washed. i had an early start, was in high spirits and ready for the day's work before me. it did not take me long to plan my dinner, which i decided should consist of baked potatoes, creamed carrots, greens, and radishes, all fresh from the garden. for dessert i made blanc mange with cocoa sauce. i had plenty of fresh butter, cream, and light-bread at my disposal. the first thing i did on entering my kitchen was to mix up my light-bread. it did not take me long to clear off the breakfast table and put the dining-room in order. when i came to the kitchen i did not find it so easy; but my greatest delight being to set a kitchen in order i did not mind the task before me; but before starting it i did up the milk work which only took me half an hour, there being no churning that morning. i had my kitchen in order and the bread molded by ten o'clock. i then cleaned myself up and read a short story in the sunday school paper before starting my dinner which i did at ten-thirty. my dinner was a success or at least my father pronounced it so when he had finished eating a not small portion of it. after i had the dinner work cleared away, everything in order and my bread baked, i made my small brother a suit and had it done by the time that my mother had supper ready. after supper again i saddled daisy and went for the cows while my sisters washed the supper dishes. that evening as we gathered around the kitchen table and my father read a chapter from the bible, i think i was one of the happiest girls in the world even if i was tired. as i went to bed that evening i thanked the dear father that i had a father, mother, brothers and sisters to love and help care for. this is only one day out of many that i have spent in this way." when one reads this account, one pictures the strong vivid life of this sound generous-hearted girl. it seems glorious to be so able and so willing. what, then, will be the surprise when on looking down the page a little farther one sees in the handwriting of the friend who had asked her to write an account of one of her working days, a paragraph like this: "the writer of the above is a cripple, getting about with the aid of a crutch. she entered the institute this fall and pays half her expenses by working more efficiently than most pupils." after reading this, what words of praise would not sound futile! chapter vii the other side i cannot bear to think what life would be with high hope shrunk to endurance; stunted aims like broken lances ground to eating knives; and low achievement doomed from day to day to distaste of its consciousness. _george eliot._ chapter vii the other side the experiences related in the last chapters have been purposely laid before the reader with little comment. they make their own impression. they may help to dispel an apprehension lest the girls on the farms should be having too hard a time, or lest when the work in which they are asked to join is closing somewhat too strongly upon their young strength they should be weighed down with the sort of dullness that comes from continued pressure on one nerve. they seem to give an assurance that the country girl's day in many, perhaps the majority, of cases, affords some time for reading and for music; there is a concert in the evening or a spare afternoon hour for the village guest. they encourage us to believe that when the point of joylessness approaches there will be ready a new supply of energy for rejuvenation and refreshment. as long as this state of things exists the case is not so bad. into this serene atmosphere a bomb must be thrown; for both sides have a right to be heard. the testimony of the country girl when she is speaking in favor of country life has been accepted; the same courtesy must be given her when she tells us more or less frankly--frankly when she can be brought to speak at all--what objections some may have to a life which it seems to many ought to be good for any one, and which, if it is not, surely can very easily be made so. it is no more than right that a system should be judged not only by the most fortunate example of its working, where factors that have little to do with its essential principles may have crept in to modify the outward appearance, but also by the less known cases, by flagrant examples of what is possible under the existing plan. what wrongs can be found? what sufferings to certain individuals? what must be rectified in order that the machinery may be wholly approved? is the system, which was evidently designed to foster justice and happiness, accomplishing this end for a reasonable majority? these are very natural questions to those who listen to the testimony of the girl of the rural districts when she discloses her problems almost without knowing that she is doing so. what about exceptional cases? what about a vital minority? the following description of a country girl's working day is taken from the life of a fourteen-year-old girl, who lives on a farm of medium size, so fortunately or so unfortunately placed as to be not very far away from a summer colony. there is no mother in this farmstead. "description of my average working day? here it is. i rise shortly before five o'clock and dress hurriedly. father is calling me to come and strain the milk and get his breakfast. go down cellar and strain the milk into pans, set them on a large stone table, and skim the milk for cream for the campers along the lake. measure out ten to twenty quarts of milk and put them into separate pails to be sent out to customers encamped on the lake. take cream up stairs and put it in a warm place to ripen for churning. get breakfast, call the children, and after the others have eaten and the boy has started on his morning delivery, i eat breakfast and clear away the dishes. while sister washes them, i mix bread and set it away to rise. stir the cream, and then sweep three floors and make five beds. by this time it is nine o'clock. then there are berries to pick, and vegetables to be got ready for market and i go out to help till about half-past ten, when i come in and make three or four pies and a cake or a pudding. while these are baking i clean the vegetables for dinner and put them on to cook, set the table and put the dinner on, meanwhile watching the baking pies, the rising bread, and the ripening cream. in the course of the morning ten or a dozen persons have come in for milk, eggs, butter, or something else, and i have to wait on them and keep their accounts up in my book. after dinner the bread is ready to make into loaves and is then set to rise again before baking. while the bread is rising i scald out the churn and rinse with cold water and then put in the cream and churn it by hand. after the butter has come and gathered, i remove it from the churn, rinse the buttermilk out and work the butter; salt and work again and set it in the cellar till the next day, when it must be worked again and put into pails or jars. then i pour the buttermilk from the churn into a jar and set it away for future use, clean and scald the churn, setting it out in the sunshine to dry. by this time the bread is ready to bake and must be watched rather closely and the wood fire also. i begin to get things ready for supper, going out into the garden to pick berries, gather vegetables, dig potatoes, etc. meantime i wait on more people. after straining milk and skimming other milk, i eat supper and then measure out milk for evening delivery, get vegetables and bread ready to be delivered also and start the boy on delivery. wash dishes and meanwhile wait on milk customers who are transients. when boy returns from delivery, i wash milk cans and put them out in the air, write up books of accounts, plan out next day's work, make list of groceries, etc., that must be bought to replenish our slender stock. by this time it is ten o'clock; i am weary and my hair is a sight. after taking off a little of the dirt with a sponge in the wash basin i tumble wearily into bed until the next morning." an account like this arouses a perfect hornets' nest of question-marks. it cannot be well for the nation, and especially for those that are to bear the burden of the day in decades to come that the girls of the present time should in any large numbers be required to endure such strain as this sixteen-hour-day of unremitting, heavy and exacting work imposed upon a young girl between the age of thirteen and seventeen, in one of the largest and most prosperous farming states of this country. fortunately she has had phenomenal strength and physical persistence, and the baneful conditions have not caused her absolute break-down. but--she has run away! otherwise she probably would never have gained the development that gave her a voice to speak out for herself as she has spoken in this letter. more laconic, and yet expressive of a more deadly blight, was the letter from a girl of fifteen in another state. this girl lives on a prosperous seventy-five acre farm, three miles from a good-sized town. there is a public library in that town but she never uses it: and there is no home library to give her any aid. there are no contests, no prizes that are accessible to her to awaken her ambition; and there is no association or society of any kind for girls in her vicinity. there is no music in her family, no games are played, and no magazines are taken; she has no share in any part of the farm business except to work tirelessly as directed; nothing on the farm can she call her own; and no sum of money is set apart for her use. she has no enjoyments, no encouragement; she is hard at work all the time. she neither knows why any one should find the farm attractive nor why one should desire to leave it. time and interest for her have ceased. it is news from such a girl as this that most startles us. but such a country girl exists, hushed, unexpressive, unresponsive, undeveloped. she is the blind gentian in the country garden. are there many of these? who can tell? if diligent search is made for them they are found upon the most remote farms where no newspapers ever penetrate, where the roads are bad and the neighbors are far away or are beyond forbidding hills, where the deadly round of dishwashing or the weight of work too heavy for the years of the girl are exhausting her strength, stifling her exuberance, and deadening all the power of expression she may have been capable of having. the least fortunate girl is the one that has her power to express developed to the least extent; she does not now know her own wants; but yet when told she too will begin to live and to do her lovely part in the rooms of life. one of the group who has thus begun at last to live voices a part at least of the inwardness of the reason why the young women and young men of to-day will not be satisfied with the ways of their farming ancestors. she says: "there exist on many farms conditions which make life there almost unbearable, to young people particularly. one of them is lack of congenial companionship; which may be due to lack of material, or to the thoughtlessness of the parents, which makes it impossible for the young people to have their friends come to their homes. then in many farm houses there is a woful lack of books, magazines and papers of the best sort; again due to the lack of education or of interest on the part of the parents. so also with pictures, music and recreation. but perhaps greater than any other, excepting perhaps the first named, is the dull weary succession of duties following each other day in and day out without rest or respite, and without any or with few of the modern conveniences to lighten the work. so many farmers, of the old school at least, understand little of the reasons for the why and wherefore of the things they do. they were taught of their fathers who were taught of their fathers and who did things in such a way because they proved expedient. by trial, or accident, one may have discovered something to be more expedient some other way, but the wonderful process and reason back of it, they understood little or not at all. this also is true of the farmer's wife. this blind way of doing things suits the young folks not, for the unrest, that spirit of the times which is forever questioning things, is within them, filling them with nameless longings even though they know it not. in their ignorance they believe they will find something better in the city, something more beautiful, more interesting, more thrilling. were these young people taught the reason for things and the possibilities of experimentation to find a better way, were they given conveniences with which to work, so that there might be some leisure for books, music and friends, there would be, i believe, little discontent." again we find our country girl closing with a hopeful note. the gentle critical comments of those that in spite of their love for country life reject its claims as a mode of living favorable to human development and content, are based upon motives that are sometimes vocational and sometimes social in character. when they deny to the country their allegiance it is because they fail to find in rural life as they know it, those boasted possibilities and opportunities. farming seems to them drudgery, which means labor without inspiration or acknowledgment. they have no interest for the work. they may have taste and fitness for some other occupation; but there is the fact--they do not take to farming. they feel intensely the monotony of farm life, the stagnation of the rural community. the sameness, the humdrum tediousness of the everyday life drives them to the city. in the work of the farmstead, the country girl of this disheartened group plainly sees that the subsidiary, detail work, which has no intellectual and very little social stimulus will be assigned to her. she knows that the monotony of this heterogeneous drudgery will daily leave her too tired to go out, even if she has somewhere to go; and too destitute of initiative to seize upon any form of pleasure unless she has already a mind trained to find delight in books; and she sees no prospect of being able to gain the training that will open fields of intellectual enjoyment to her. she keenly feels the lack of recreation. she comes to believe that if she were in the city she would not have such late hours of labor. she does not see the twelve and fourteen hour days of work in that rosy dream of good wages and leisured evenings in town. on the farm it is from five in the morning till nine at night; the work is not only too heavy for her, but it is closely confining. she has not the strength for it; and the enforced toil exhausts her energy prematurely. she now sees that the methods used in her household workshop are laborious and out of date; her task is unnecessarily difficult; and who can blame her if under such circumstances her enthusiasm for her work fades away? there is resentment in the remark of the young girl who said: "if we always have to work in an awkward kitchen with rusty old pans, if we do not go anywhere and never have any company, we do certainly want to leave the farm." when the blind gentian speaks out like that the emphasis must be multiplied a hundred fold. from the work of girls like these, incentive has been removed, or else it was never there. this sort of country girl may not reason it out to the point of clearness, but the lack of acknowledgment of her labor in the farmstead as an industry, as an essential part of the business, makes her toil seem hopeless; it renders her feeling toward whatever charm the country may have for her permanently callous; and it takes all the vibrancy out of her spirit. all this makes her alert to find deep-seated defects in rural life in conditions that, but for her disaffection would seem but difficulties easily overcome. the look cityward is not always caused by the incitement of an uneasy, a commercial, or an ignoble impulse. it is sometimes the call of the best and noblest part of the soul. to such as recognize this higher purpose the passion for education, for free access to libraries, for association with intellectual people, form a part of the city's lure. they desire to see more of life, to have more and closer contact with one's fellows, to gain valuable companionship, to get more and broader pleasures, to have greater opportunities to make something of one's self. the young women who are thinking such thoughts as these are full of the energy of youth; they are at the moment of opening ambitions and developing personality; they are making plans for the future. they are not the women who in long years have grown accustomed to their burdens and have either learned how to bear them or have become sodden with the despair of ever finding any relief from their load. the brightness of young hope has not faded out, and the buoyant spirit still stands up underneath whatever is to be done or borne. youth feels equal to anything. therefore the slightest deflection of their courage from the norm should have the closest attention. chapter viii the inheritance we men of earth have here the stuff of paradise--we have enough! we need no other thing to build the stairs into the unfulfilled-- no other ivory for the doors-- no other marble for the floors-- no other cedar for the beam and dome for man's immortal dream. here on the path of every day-- here on the common human way-- is all the busy gods would take to build a heaven, to mold and make new edens. ours the stuff sublime to build eternity in time! _edwin markham._ chapter viii the inheritance this, then, is the indictment of country life as it now is, by the country girl who is now living in the midst of it. it is depressing, it is terrible, that a concourse of country girls will stand up before the fathers and declare that while they love the country, and prefer to remain there all their days, yet they cannot, because life there is intolerable to them. they say this in all sobriety; no one can accuse them of speaking in haste; their mood is most judicial. the young woman in the farm life of to-day has a deep-seated love for country life; many things about it command her affection and give her delight; but there are also some things that she does not feel called upon to endure. if it were not for them, for these, and these, and lo! all of these, objections to it, she would be perfectly content and satisfied to live on the farm all her days; but as it is, well, she can only join that funeral procession of the nation cityward. it is true that the country girl does not enjoy a house with no music under its roof-tree, a house where no games are played, where no stories are told or read about the lamp in the long winter evenings: a house, in short, with nothing she calls happiness in it; but this is a small part of her indictment. she does not enjoy trudging back and forth a million times a year over the same square yards of floor-space; but that, too, is immaterial to her. in fine, she does not object to the work itself, but she cannot endure that heterogeneous, unsystematized, objectless drudgery, the enforced character of the toil, the out-of-date methods, the absence of acknowledgment of any economic value in her contribution to the business--this is what grinds her soul. she is not wanting in appreciation of the possibilities in farm life and the farming business; but, to quote with variations, she says to herself: if they be not fair for me, what care i how fair they be? she sees the beauty of the changing seasons, and she enjoys the companionship of animals, naming them one by one after all her favorite heroes and heroines of fairyland; but the fact that she has nor chick nor lambkin for her own is as the little rift within the lute that by and by will make the music mute. [illustration: the country girl takes a pride in her chickens that makes their care a pleasure to her.] if the struggle to pay the mortgage is long and the work heavy, she does not especially enjoy spending days and nights of toil with the rest of the family to accomplish the desired end; but more than all this does she dislike having the father keep all the trouble to himself; she wants a share in the responsibility. she wants some acres of her own, some stock of her own. she wants her personality as a factor in the business, which it really is, to be justly acknowledged. for without that, she reasons, what is there to look forward to? hope is the anchor of the soul; and without something to hope for, how can one hope? she finds that she has none of these joyous anticipations of the future that every young woman loves and has the right to entertain. she cannot look forward to the natural and normal life of the home for her future lot, for the existing scheme of country life does not provide her with a husband. therefore if the home cannot be made happy and the work in the farmhouse cannot be made interesting, if her fair share of incentive as a human being in the common round of life cannot be assigned to her, if her part in the complex structure of the farmstead cannot be put upon an equitable basis, if the universal happy fortune of woman cannot be seen to shine as a goal in the long service of the farmstead, why, she will have none of it! if this is the irrevocable decision of the farmers' daughters of the present day, it is a very serious matter. it means that the farmstead will have to be broken up, that the farm home must go out of existence, and the whole system of farm life must be revolutionized. what will happen then, it passes wisdom to prophesy! the country girl may well say, "after me, the deluge!" for if at any one point in the procession of the generations, the women will stand together and say "thus far and no farther!" the procession must stand as still as the pillar of salt that commemorates the wife of the unfortunate lot. can it be that the country girl has in some measure reached this point by doing what lot's wife did--by simply looking behind her? casting her eye along back over the generations, did she see anything that appalled her? may it have been something in the experience of her own mother that lent decision to her mind as she considered what she herself would choose for a life-path? or rather, as she looked over the career that lay nearest to her, the life-struggle that was visible to her in her own homestead, did she see something that held up before her a warning hand? there still lives many a farm woman who has to walk down a hill and carry up from a spring all the drinking and cooking water for her household and who gets it fresh for every meal. her round of work may include all the house work with the washing and ironing, the scrubbing and cleaning. she sweeps all the rooms up stairs and down every week, covering all the furniture with sheets to keep off the dust that she flings into space with her besoms and brooms. she picks the berries for the table and they may have them three times a day. she gathers all the vegetables. if she has no cow, she goes for the milk and brings it home. she is an expert cook, serving the meals in courses, carrying in and out the dishes, and providing ample quantities of everything. she may can the fruit and make the pickles, jellies and preserves. she will certainly take care of the chickens. in spite of all this she will never seem tired. she will go to the woods and bring ferns and put them into pots to set about the house. she will bring wild flowers and carry them with all sorts of dainties to neighboring houses where there is illness. her dress is invariably changed in the afternoon; and she always goes to prayer meeting. she is a great reader and stays up after the family have gone to bed to read the church paper and the farmers' magazine. she is full of life and fun and can talk intelligently on any subject. every evening after her work is done she may walk to a neighbor's to visit, or if the village is near enough she will go every night to bring the mail. this woman of the rural realm is a super-woman in the farm environment; her discouraging example cannot be taken as a rule to be followed by others, since few can equal her in strength of body or mind. she is one who has in some way become possessed of a mental training above the average; her intellectual outlook has been brought to such a point that she can take pleasure in many of the resources of culture. she has learned to read,--really read--a thing accomplished by but few of the many who can glibly reel off the words from the printed page. this woman of the farm gathers the ideas and enjoys the fancies that lie behind the mere alphabetical letters. she is one who can gain solace from her hour of reading whenever it is possible to have one; and this keeps her young and buoyant. then she has also a real interest in everything around her, the garden, the making of the jelly, the missionary cause, all the great wonderful world--everything has attraction for her. moreover as a result of her mental and inner poise, she has the power to systematize the work of her home and so to get the best results in the shortest time. does her husband appreciate what a wonderful woman fate has assigned to him? if not, if he never acknowledges the economic value of this woman's courage and gay spirit, as well as of her mere hand-work and its efficient system, then there may be a sore spot underneath that will never be cured in all her life. many a farmer husband has said affectionately to his wife that he could never have made a financial success of his farm without her help. but it will take more than assurances like that to satisfy the mind and the heart of the country girl in the new era. going but half a generation farther back into the past one may find the woman who had not only all that has been described to do but the milking and the butter making beside. she worked up the wool and spun, wove, and made full cloth for men's wear, for flannel sheets and for all the flannel dresses, and she knit all the socks and stockings for the big family. she would rise at four, summer and winter. she would build her own fires, milk four to eight cows, and have breakfast at six. there would be a sugar orchard that made many hundred pounds of sugar, and she would make the syrup and care for it. the floors of her rooms would be covered with carpets of her weaving. the table linen and toweling would be both spun and woven by her hands. all the time she had for intellectual employments would be while some labor was going on. it is a tradition from the past in this country that if a woman can work with her hands or her feet and at one and the same time employ the eyes in some studious pursuit, she has a fair right to whatever intellectual attainment she may be able to gain thereby. roxana beecher in guilford, connecticut, a hundred years ago, had a volume of philosophy fastened to her wheel and read the book while she treadled and spun; and no woman was really accomplished in the old days unless she could knit and read at the same time. sometimes--but rarely--the women of past time in this country took some part in the outside farm labor. the author knows of a woman who husked six hundred bushels of corn in one summer. the following season she piled up one hundred cords of wood and did all the housework beside. it would not be possible to speak of some pathetic cases of enforced toil lest some good men should be led thereby to fall from grace and wish they were noncombatants. the truth is that it has never been the custom in this country that the women should enter into the heavier farm work; from the beginning women were held so sacred that nothing must be risked that could injure their permanent strength. the men rolled in the logs of wood for the big fireplaces and did all the heavier work of the place, answering without a moment's demur the request of the women for help. such a spirit in the men of america has crystallized in many laws more favorable to women than to men, and in many others designed to give special protection to women and to ward off the possibility of a failure in the persistence of their physical soundness. but clever bad men may break laws that clever good men may make; or good men may be confidingly inattentive while valuable laws and customs become obsolete. yet the fact does stand out that the spirit of the republic does not favor anything that will dull the physical vigor of the women; and those who feel this spirit and are representative of its urgency--and they are, we must believe, the great majority--are the men in most danger of falling from grace in the manner referred to above. moreover they are also the people, voters and what not, who will make an effective bar against the inroads of a certain disposition on the part of the foreigners who are, in the main beneficently, coming across the wide seas to find homes in our farming regions, namely, to place the women of their tribes in rows along the fields who bend their backs like the picture of "the gleaners" by millet, and to produce such descendants as markham's "man with the hoe." a sight like this with promise such as this is abhorrent to the institutions of our country; the men of the republic, not to say the women, will not tolerate it. but progress is made little by little. there are cases of arrested development and examples of retardation. there are places where backward-drawing influences have kept some groups from making the advance that other groups have made. if we could penetrate still farther into the past, we should find more reason for the drawbacks that we run across here and there in our own time. we have no histories of selected working days that the great mothers of times past wrote--they certainly had no time to count up calories and set down scientific records of their cookery and their collections of simples. there is a journal extant which was written by one abigail foote in . it goes something like this: september . i spun. " . i spun. " . i spun. " . i spun. " . i spun. " . i spun. and so on, excepting, of course, sundays. about november the record is stated in this wise: november . i wove. " . i wove. " . i wove. " . i wove. " . i wove. and so on, again. certainly monotony could no farther go. if such workers had not fastened a book to the distaff, insanity would surely have set in. the weaving never could be quite so monotonous as the spinning, for there was necessary a constant watching of the web that effectually prevented any wandering from the business in hand, or any flashing of looks toward the window-sill where lay the volume of romance. if however, a leaf from the daily life of one of our grandmothers were accessible, it would contain the story not only of the bread-making, but of the soap-making too. that good grandmother in her brisk and energetic days would kindle the big fire in the back yard, bring the large kettles up from the cellar, pack the barrel full of good hard-wood ashes and set it on its supports, and then pour the water through it to make the lye. she would then melt up the bones and grease saved from the winter's supply of pork, and when the grease was tried out she would mix the lye and the melted grease with as nice an art and with an expertness as much the product of long experience as is the skill of the artist when he combines his paints for a masterpiece. "with what do you mix your paints?" inquired a young sprig of a great artist. "with brains, sir," was the answer. so might the housewife of a hundred years ago have said if she had been asked how she attained her ends in the soap, the candles, the dyes, the cakes, the baking of the beans--as critical a piece of business as ever a parisian chef could attempt--the turning of the heel in stocking-making, the weaving of the colors in the carpet, the bleaching to snowy whiteness of the linen and the woolen blankets. "i mix all these processes with brains--with the results of experience bought through many decades of experiment by many costly mistakes and especially by a vivid and unfailing memory of what happened when it was done in one special way and what happened when it was done in some other way. by these means i gained the power to do these things and to gain these successes. it was not so easy as it may seem." thus might the ghostly grandmother speak if she could come back and let her voice be heard and then she would point to the long rows of soap-bars, put away side by side, white or brown or yellow according to the purity of the grease that had been used, to become dry and fit for household use for the next half-year. meantime the tallow would have been saved out to be used for dipping the candles or for molding them out in the tin candle-forms. the cotton cord would be strung through the long tin tubes and pulled out at the lower end for the wick end; or the strings of wicking would be hung along a pole, to be dipped into the melted fat again and again as fast as the grease would cool on the strings and thus increase with every dipping the size of the slender tapering candle. between the intervals of dipping, the little mother would hurry back to her chair and there sit and cut long strips of cloth and sew them together into carpet rags. when the piles on the floor at her side would be high enough, she would run them off around her elbow into a hank ready to be colored. the little girls in the family would have peeled bark from the butternut trees and gathered golden rod and other herbs and these would have been steeped thoroughly for the magical liquors which would be standing ready in crocks full of dyes to give the brown and yellow and green and blue tint to these hanks of rag-cord. then the weaving loom would be got ready in the attic and the shuttle would fly back and forth and the rags would soon be transformed into a smooth, well-striped carpet, which would come off in pieces several yards long. later on these would be sewed together into a beautiful floor covering to be used for the parlor first, afterward, when the freshness was somewhat worn off, for the living-room; later for some hallway, and last of all, what remained from many footsteps would be made into little rugs to be put down extra in such places as needed special protection. the craftswoman who did all this was equally gifted in making the cross-stitch initials for the corner of the bolster and the knitted lace for its edge. she was master of all tricks with the needle as well as with the shuttle and the wooden spoon. moreover, that grandmother was the mother of fifteen children, and there was nobody but herself to make mittens and stockings for all of them for both winter and summer. so her knitting-needles simply had to fly in all the interstices between tasks of weaving and spinning and dyeing and soap-making and candle-making and other work. all this was to be done besides what the average women of to-day have to do and think pretty hard for them. edith abbott in her book, _woman in industry_, mentions forty-nine different processes in the factory of to-day that now take the place of the work of one woman as she stitched a pair of shoes in her home, as women often did in the middle new england pioneering era, to accomplish the detail of all the industries that passed through the hands of that capable little grandmother of ours in, say, or thereabouts. in still earlier days the women performed prodigies of heavy labor and bore a child a year while they did it. history, however, grimly adds the illuminating note that most of these had a short career. and it is just possible that the women of that earlier time went beyond their strength, exhausting their resources of vigor, so that the women of to-day have not their full share of energy for the tasks before them and therefore do not add to the sum of life in the same numbers that their foremothers did. such grandmothers, such mothers as those, were "the kind of mothers that men must worship," says sarah comstock in _the soddy_ as she describes the trials of women in present-day pioneering; and she adds, "worshiping mothers makes men great!" is it not clear where the true greatness of america lies? if there are old men living who are the sons of such mothers, though they may be worshipers of the memory of their heroism, if those sons have any spark of chivalry remaining in their bosoms, they will wish that their mothers had lived to-day instead of then, that their labor might be lessened by modern work-saving methods and their lives brightened by modern amplitude of resource. the practical executive ability of those great women of one, two, and three generations ago should be the inheritance of the country girls of to-day, and their faithful examples should be an inspiration to them. but the loyal descendants of those self-sacrificing and sacrificed women should say that they will do all in their power to make the time come swiftly when there shall be a new day in the kitchen, a day when the housework may be a joy and not a burden to press the strength and buoyancy out of the young spirits of those who prefer--if they can get themselves to be brave enough--to enter upon the long service of life in the environment of the open country. chapter ix the daughter's share of the work the kitchen o little room, wherein my days go by each like to each, yet each one set apart for special duties ... nearest to my heart art thou of all the house ... in thee i try new issues when the old ones go awry, and with new victories allay the smart of dismal failures; and afresh i start with courage new to conquer or to die. o simple walls, no pictures break thy calm! o simple floor uncarpeted below! the inward eye has visions for its balm, and duty done is solace for each woe, and every modest tool that hangs in view is fitted for the work it has to do. _helen coale crew._ chapter ix the daughter's share of the work there is a doctrine held by some theorists that a people really needs now and then to be plunged into the struggle and stress of actual war in order to become inured to hardship, toughened and strengthened in nerve and fiber. in a memorable essay professor william james proposed a "moral equivalent" for this discipline that he thought would afford a like toughening training. his suggestion was that there should be a military conscription of the whole youthful population; that they should for a certain number of years form part of an army enlisted in the fight for the conquest of nature, a campaign for compelling the forces of the material world to become subject to the needs of mankind. definitely, professor james' suggestion was that "our gilded youths" should be made to go to work in coal mines, on freight-trains, in fishing fleets in december, at dishwashing, clothes-washing, road-building and tunnel-making, in foundries and stoke-holes, and on the frames of skyscrapers, in order that they may get the "childishness knocked out of them" and come back into society with "healthier sympathies and soberer ideas." when the word "youths" was used in the last sentence it probably was not held to include, as it sometimes does, the young women as well as the young men. but the work of girls and women must have been in the mind of the writer when he said "dishwashing and window-washing," for these have been feminine specialties from time immemorial or at least ever since the days of the amerinds when women were the bricklayers, builders and architects, and men were the weavers. therefore by admitting these occupations it is avowed that the women may come in for some of the benefits of discipline that the struggle for the conquest of nature is to bring to those that take part in it. does it not make the down-trodden woman feel more grand, does she not hold her head higher and stiffen her neck proudly, when she thinks that her melancholy and sickening work of dishwashing will stand for her in the place of that grandeur of the army going out to battle, that her humble employment may be invested with some of the heroism of the flag-bearer for his country's sake, that she may take to herself a little of the glory of the battle-scarred? if this may be so, there will be some comfort for the housekeeper in the farmstead on a rainy day when the wood from the pile outdoors is so wet that it will not burn, and the water is cold, and everybody in the house is cross! it is not a matter to be treated lightly. whatever burden there is to be borne falls more heavily upon the wife than upon the husband in the farmstead. if the farm is isolated, she is the loneliest person there. if there is poverty, she has the least to use or to spend. if there is lack of labor-saving devices, she has far fewer than the farmer has. if life there is monotonous, hers is the victim of the greatest sameness, the unending changelessness of three meals a day through planting and harvesting, through week days and sundays, year in and year out. professor fiske, author of _the challenge of the country_, takes a large view when he touches this phase of the subject. "the annual conquest of farm difficulties," he says, "makes splendid fighting. there are plenty of natural enemies which must be fought to keep a man's fighting-edge keen and to keep him physically and mentally alert. what with the weeds and the weather, the cut-worms, the gypsy, and the coddling moths, the lice, the maggots, the caterpillars, the san jose scale, and the scurvy, the blight and the gouger, the peach yellows and the deadly curculio, the man behind the bug gun and the sprayer finds plenty of exercise for ingenuity and a royal chance to fight the good fight. effeminacy is not a farm trait. country life is great for making men; men of robust health and mental resources well tested by difficulty, men of the open air and the skyward outlook. country dwellers may well be thankful for the challenge of the difficult. it tends to keep rural life strong." this was written from the standpoint of the farmer himself and his business. a like account and with quite as much zoology in it could be made for the women that share his problems. life under farming conditions is as likely to provide opportunity to develop character in the women folks as in the men; and the daughter in the house may receive some of the benefits of this developing discipline. to have a joyous share in a useful work is one of the most satisfying things in the world. in such a joy as this, the daughter in the farmstead is, within the bounds of her working capacity, invited to partake. she may have the inspiration of work, the exhilaration of struggle, and the keen delight of victory in the solution of farm problems. there is much that she can do without injury, even if she is not very strong, and almost nothing that she cannot do, if she is robust and vigorous. if the housework seems a hardship, the matter must be attacked as a problem and studied into to see what can be devised to lessen the drudgery or re-adapt the burden. invariably the parents should consider what is good for the girl, not what is good for the farm. sacrifice the farm, if need be, but save the daughter. [illustration: the inheritance. the country girl working cheerfully beside her mother, will learn much that will be of value to her in her effort to make the housework of to-day a joy and not a burden.] the american country girl is doing her full share and often-times more than her share. in the majority of cases "shares" should not be mentioned at all, for each does all that is in her power more for love's sake than because the division has been allotted out by some technical rules of supposed right or law. the country girl of to-day can have nothing to blame herself for in the part she takes as first assistant to her mother in the home part of the farmstead. she is the vice-regent in a kingdom where the mother is queen. and if the mother falls behind in the race for the finish the daughter comes in and takes her place. she does this ungrudgingly. the daughter in an american farm home bestows liberally of her strength to make the housekeeping as nearly a success as under the circumstances it can be. either she shares the work with the mother, or she works under the mother's direction, doing the heaviest parts; or she does all the work while the mother takes care of the chickens or carries on some of the business of the farmstead that presupposes experience. for instance, a twenty-two year old girl who is a good helper in a house where the work is not overwhelmingly heavy may have for her "share" to do all the chamber-work, wash the dishes, do the sweeping, the dusting, and all the ironing; to rinse, starch, and hang out all the clothes; to bake all the cakes, the pies, the cookies; to help also with the mopping and scrubbing, and to have the loathsome duty of taking care of the kerosene lamps. and she may add the churning and much outdoor work beside. such a girl as this does not consider her work a stint; she does not say that she will do so much and no more: she helps till all is done. she is the crack-filler. the country girl and her mother make some attempt to organize their work and to introduce some little system into the program of the day. sometimes they will arrange for the daughter to be housekeeper one week and assistant cook the next. sometimes they divide the work equally between mother and daughter; or two sisters take turns about doing the entire housework. an arrangement like this affords to both mothers and daughters a rich opportunity. but a strange little paradox comes in here. if the daughters wish to give the greatest degree of reverence and protection to their mothers they should not pay too much attention to what the mothers tell them to do. in other words if they will follow the beckoning hand of progress and take up with the suggestions of modern invention in their further housekeeping, they must depart from their parents' advice and from the ways of the old folks. the oft repeated saying, "what was good enough for my father is good enough for me," should never again be heard without protest by any member of the younger generation--at least an inward protest that will rob it of its depressing influence. it is not a want of reverence toward the memory of our forefathers that makes us wish other and different conditions from what they had. it is not a disloyalty to the living mother for the daughter to say that she will not follow in her footsteps if she now sees better ways of doing things. shall not the large-hearted mother wish that her child may have better and improved ways, greater conveniences, lighter burdens, machinery for making work less burdensome, more leisure for the higher life? she should--but does she? she often does not see the use for the new-fangled appliances. she is too stiff to change her ways, even when she sees that the new methods are an economy of time, labor and nervous force. as to such a farm woman as that, one who is so fixed in her ways that she will not listen even for her children's sake, to the voice of progress: why, there remains nothing for her to do but to pass on. peace be to her! she has stood there for a life-time and drudged and submitted and has done nothing for household or community advancement. some among the older women may awake to a new life; here and there one will step over the abyss that separates her from her daughter, will pass down and stand side by side with the younger woman. but as a general thing the abyss is too fearful and she lacks the energy for the leap. there remains for her only a martyr's crown and a harp. the most isolated farm woman in the country of half a century old must have been touched by the edges at least of the wave of progress in social and home-making conditions that has swept through our life in late decades. most of the dwellers on farms as well as townspeople have been profoundly moved thereby. some strange new kind of utensil drifting to the remotest mountain valley and appearing in some neglected despairing kitchen, like a bit of flotsam floating across seas from richer lands, was a symbol of a reorganization as undreamed of as heaven will be found to our awakening eyes. that utensil was the call of a new era. the isolated farm wife may not have had her ears opened to know the sound, but that was what it was, for all that. it represented a new life, the making over of a whole generation. naturally the younger people are a part of this new life; naturally the difference between the wants of the older people and the wants of the younger makes a cleavage between them. the more swift the change, the greater the difference between the people of the two ranges of family relationship. this is the all-sufficient reason for the frequency of differences between the young men and young women of this period and their parents. in the country these differences have appeared with less frequency because the progress in those parts has been less spasmodic, more normal, more natural. this has been at least one good effect of the slowness of the countryside to take up with the new ideas. but the progress there has been fully swift enough to make a distinct division between old and young, and this division, the result of perfectly natural influences that do not by any means belong to the country alone, has been one of the causes why the young men and the young women have drifted away to the city. a better way would be to stay and work out the problem. it would be wiser for the older and younger to attack it together as one. as for the country girl, we are far from suggesting a separation between the motherly and the daughterly ideals. we would wish rather to pour greater tenderness into the relationship, already one of the dearest of human ties. said one noble-hearted man, after giving a full description of the work of his mother under the old régime with soap-making, dyeing, spinning, and candle-making, "do we want to return to those good old times? not by any means! my greatest regret is that my mother could not have lived to have some of the luxuries of the present era." this is the right spirit. and the young woman who brings her thoughts to her mother with the brand of the later era upon them, must remember that she is carrying out the spirit, if not the letter, of her mother's life and character, her cleverness and her patience, her adaptation to circumstances and her tact and perseverance, when she takes the result of her mother's work and carries it a step farther, adapting her hands to the use of the tools that her time provides, even as her mother did in using the tools of her own time and station a half-century ago, when she exchanged her tallow dip for the kerosene lamp, her fireplace and crane for the cast-iron stove. chapter x the homesteader what man would live coffined with brick and stone, imprisoned from the influences of air and cramped with selfish landmarks everywhere, when all before him stretches, furrowless and lone, the unmapped prairie none can fence or own? what man would read and read the selfsame faces, and, like the marbles which the wind-mill grinds, rub smooth forever with the same smooth minds, this year retracing last year's, every year's, dull traces, when there are woods and un-man-stifled places? _lowell._ chapter x the homesteader in the famous ladies of litchfield molded delicately the leaden statue of king george into bullets that their husbands might have the wherewithal to fight king george's men. to this day there stands along the edges of the west many a shack with chunks of lead imbedded in its walls where women still live who defended themselves there using bullets they also molded, not a century, but just a few decades ago. the pioneering era is with us still. "over vast expanses of america," says dr. albert shaw, "the log-cabin period still continues." and if the log-cabin is found--or the tar-paper shack, or the sod-wall house, or the dug-out, or whatever device stands as an apology for a dwelling place while the claim is being "proved up"--then also the dolorous conditions of isolation and struggle, of overwork and wearing out and all that follows as a reprisal by fate for the inroad into a new world, are matters of present day experience. there are unirrigated deserts where women wear out their lives in despairing labor. the unwatered soil laughs at the puny human beings, and human need and human desire do not easily learn the lesson that only by united effort, by community union on a grand scale, can conquest be made against that array of nature's inexorable forces. across prairie uplands on the slopes of the rockies are vast stretches of level yellow soil where not a green speck is in sight in any direction. the gray-hued buffalo grass spreads everywhere and not a tree, rock or stone can be seen. in the widely separated farmsteads most of the houses are of sod. the men are sheep herders: they start out with a collie and supplies for a three months' trip. when they come back they are startled at the sound of a human voice. often on their return they are disturbed in their mental balance. the solitude has not been good for them. many go insane. the women remain in the sod house and work. in illness they have only the midwife to rely upon. as a result they suffer from the effects of unskilful treatment. they are all eastern women, all homesteading; but they never can save money enough to go back east. hopeless of that, they lose impetus and all life descends to a lower key. in this dark picture, from which some of the deepest shadows have been intentionally omitted, a definite region has been kept in view; but there are other places out on the edge of things that are like or similar to this. such conditions require the heroism of martyrs. noble martyrdoms pay well but reckless waste of life does not. it cannot be said that any daughters born under these conditions have one-tenth of their rightful chance in life. in other portions of the vast and but partially subdued west, conditions may be trying but they are not hopeless. here, as we have seen in former chapters, life to the country girl may be buoyant and inspiring even though the eight hour day of hard labor may stretch out to ten or twelve or even fourteen hours. the rest is sweet, conscience is crystal-clear, and "what one does is of consequence." it is that ultimate possibility that lends zest to effort, the "consequence" that inheres in the task. while the registry of cattle brands in the local western newspaper always includes among its symbols some three-ply hook or decimal fraction or swastika design that stands for the ranch of an enterprising and successful woman, there is always a suggested possibility to the mind of the young girl that lends fervor to her efforts. it is not forbidden that she should excel and even have a ranch of her own. the author knows of an efficient woman who owned and ran for twenty-five years a ranch of fifty thousand acres in the midst of the southern rockies. the place produced annually twenty thousand tons of hay; they had about ten thousand head of cattle, three thousand head of horses, two hundred angora goats, selling the wool for sixty cents a pound; there were two thousand chickens, three hundred head of hogs, and two thousand doves. a stream ran near the house from which a five-pound trout could be taken at any minute. in summer some fifty men were employed. the owner had a son and a foreman with whom she advised, but she managed things herself. there was also a daughter, she sometimes put on a sombrero and drove one of the two-furrow disk plows when ten in a line worked over a field one mile wide by four miles long, following the big irrigation ditch that ran along the side of the field. of course the woman's opportunity and will to own a farm are not confined to the western country. many a girl in new hampshire, michigan or alabama has saved the old home for her disabled parents by putting her shoulder to the wheel, bearing the disaster of the near-cyclone and the barn-burning, the desertion of renegade "help," and the distrust of old fogy neighbors. a girl graduate of wellesley has hastened to acquire a farm in a lovely river bend in central new york before the price goes higher still, and one has doubts of her success until one hears her at the telephone arguing with a man who thinks he can go back on his bargain about her wind-fall apples. stories like these would take us trailing across the country from maine to california and would leave us bewildered before the upspringing of new life everywhere in the energies of the young women of america. to many of these younger women, the fact that in america a woman does not have to be head of a family in order to take up a claim seems a golden opportunity; the struggle and privation inevitable in the years of proving up, are not sufficiently appalling to prevent their attempt. the number is swelled by recruits from among the straight college girls, the agricultural graduates, those who have had business training, some of the writing clan, some artists, and some who are moved by a clear spirit of adventure. nothing daunts them. to this energetic girl the business part is a mere detail. she writes to the department of the interior at washington, asking for full information about the method of taking up land, about the unappropriated lands and instructions for homesteaders. these pamphlets are promptly received. or she applies to the chamber of commerce of the biggest city in the state to which she wishes to go. she carefully regards the warnings set up along the path of the would-be homesteader, which are these: see the land itself before deciding; decide that the home you are seeking is to be a permanent one; be sure that you are adapted for silence and solitariness; and finally, this all-important rule--have enough capital for buildings, for cattle and horses, for machinery, wells, cisterns and seed, and enough more to carry you over a bad year or two, before you undertake the great task. having met these requirements, she gaily packs her carefully selected goods on a gigantic prairie barge and convoyed by an efficient freighter (a freighter is a human being), she rides the fifty miles from the last station out to her claim, paying the freighter twenty dollars for his service. she is very busy, that instinct for the practical that has been developed in the ingenious american through centuries of pioneering comes to her rescue now. she resorts to all manner of tasteful makeshifts; she works miracles with hammer and saw; she makes easy chairs out of barrels and dressing tables out of packing boxes. as soon as possible a piano is installed in the soddy. the tiny shack becomes an orderly little combination of laboratory, boudoir, and study. the little house acquires a charm of its own. wherever the american girl is, it is a home. she sits at the door of her soddy with her faithful tabby in her lap and is content. she loves it all. the wild surroundings have a charm for her. said one: "i certainly fell in love with life on the ranch. i still have my place and have bought more land adjoining it. i guess i am a sort of indian myself. i love the big outdoors and i love every rock in our mountains. there is something in the somber green of the pines that creeps into one's heart and i am lonesome away from them." a young woman in wyoming writes: "this country is so different, so big, that the horizon alone seems to set the limit. i visited on one ranch that is fourteen miles from one end to the other. there are no green wooded hills here, but great rocky slopes and rushing water and great sandy flats with wonderful changing colors.... i do not think we miss the outside world as there is something about this country that, after a time, fills one's whole thoughts and it is hard to remember that there is any other world than this." but do they not mind the deep changeless silence in those distant solitary places? "but there is no silence here," she answers, "except on the high places of the mountain tops. here there is always the roar of the river at the bottom of the canyon and the wind in the cedars all about me." but the indians? do you not fear that war-whoop? "it used to alarm me to meet an indian out on the big flats, but i soon discovered that they will not even look at you as they pass." but how about rattlesnakes? in answer came this: "i never had any rattlesnakes in my bed, though i fancied i had one night. i got up, carefully lifted off the sheets, and found--the comfortable under me wrinkled up! there are not many rattlesnakes now--you see, we kill them." another girl who taught in a sod schoolhouse told how one day she discovered a large snake coiled around the rafters of the little room. she and the larger pupils got sticks and drove it out. she then modestly added, "we certainly would have killed it had it not been a bull snake, but bull snakes kill the deadly rattlers, you know, so we let it live." but are you not afraid to stay in your cabin alone on your lofty butte? "no, i do not believe that i am afraid. when i first came here the bigness of the hills frightened me, but now some of the best times i have are when i am walking over the hills and through the trees at night. i have a bull terrier and a collie that are always with me so i am not so much alone as it might seem. i have also a beautiful big morgan saddle horse; i ride over the country alone and i have never been frightened." another homesteader girl has learned how to overcome fear. she says: "it takes some courage to stay alone on one's claim night after night. but perhaps that is a foolish fear, for there is really nothing to be afraid of. i positively love to hear the coyotes howling and barking among the hills as i lie on my little bed in my little house. one night last winter i heard the creaking and groaning of heavy wagons laboring through the snow. i had been in bed for some time and the noise of the wagons mingled with the voices of the men awakened me. i rose, threw on a cloak, and opening the door a few inches, i looked out. the foremost wagon had stopped just in front of the door. 'what is it?' i called. 'which way do you go to get to grassville?' i told him, he thanked me, and i shut the door. the wagons creaked and moved away. _i had not been afraid._ perhaps it is faith in god which keeps us out here. if that is so, then this life _is_ favorable to moral development, is it not?" "homesteading," says one college girl and successful homesteader, "is not simply one means for leisure, outdoor life and freedom from conventionality--it is an opportunity to test one's caliber in withstanding privations, in braving blizzards, in conquering the fear of rattlers and that greater fear of being alone on a seemingly limitless prairie. it is also a chance to recognize in those sturdy men and women of the west their big heartedness and clean mindedness. a girl too timid to stay alone over night in a city apartment may feel a sense of safety alone in her shack in the west that the civilized east would not understand. it does not take long to realize that the old cow-boy courtesy of protecting women holds good still. as a result of it all we might say that besides gaining a new view point on life, besides the moral strength attained in conquering that desire to return to the ease of civilization, comes that mental and physical vigor which seems to be inherent in the girl who has held down a claim for fourteen months and who has successfully proved it up." to take a place like this in the community such as homesteading involves, requires the assumption of responsibility, and responsibility always develops. cases are mentioned where a young woman has been strengthened morally by the evident necessity for rectitude. young women who have not before been interested in church work have been drawn into it, for they saw that somebody must do this between the times when the circuit preacher could come around. a well-balanced judgment comes from elinore rupert stewart, whose homesteading experience has been detailed in a delightful book and whose record of a working day has been shared with us in an earlier chapter. to her homesteading offers one solution of poverty's problem; but she adds, if the would-be homesteader is afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness, she had better let ranching alone. nevertheless, any woman who can endure her own company, who can see the beauty in a sunset, who loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at hard outdoor labor as she has done over the washtub, will certainly succeed. her reward will be in independence, enough to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end. this homesteader with her power of literary expression has given us vivid pictures of the possibilities in the cabin life of the new country. her claim lies sixty miles from a railroad. there is no rural delivery of mails, no doctor, no preacher. to the west the rocky mountains lift great gorge-scarred masses of rock and to the east stretch bad lands and desert and interminable uninhabited space. her "community" includes all the ranches for fifty miles around. and how interesting are those neighbors! so good, so queer, so like folks! she has brought christmas cheer into every camp of sheep-herders within reach. she is nurse and doctor to every sick woman. she has been guardian angel to the lone rancher, zebulun, finding his friends for him "back home," and to a pair of abused young lovers, for whom she gave a wedding dinner, providing the elegance of drawn-work paper napkins and inviting the guests to wash dishes--a compliment that they did not in the least consider a breach of decorum. she is community companion to her neighbors in hours of joy and in hours of sorrow. a missionary could scarcely ask for a more needy, a more vital or a more responsive "field." in the circle of her ministrations was found a young girl whom she calls cora belle. this little person, half child, half grown woman, so unconsciously brave, so pathetically buoyant, asking little of fate and receiving so little from the hand of that close-fisted autocrat--forms an appealing figure and may be thought of as the typical young country girl in the realm of the ranch and the cabin. cora belle lived with her grandparents, two useless old people who drank up each other's medicines just to save them, and frightfully neglected the poor little granddaughter. the description of the child brings her vividly before us. "she was a stout, square-built little figure with long flaxen braids, a pair of beautiful brown eyes, and the longest and whitest lashes you ever saw, a straight nose, a short upper lip, a broad full forehead,--the whole face, neither pretty nor ugly, plentifully sown with the brownest freckles." the child did all the housework for her rheumatic and ignorant grandparents and took care of the stock. from the big sheep men that passed their way, she begged the "dogie" lambs which they were glad to give away, and by tender care she preserved their lives. soon she had a flock of forty in good condition and preserved from attacks by the wolves. the next step in her progress was that she began to help cook for the sheep-shearer's men in order that her sheep might be sheared along with theirs. the one to whom she appealed was kindly disposed and he hauled her wool to town, bringing back to her the magnificent sum of sixty dollars, all of which she soon had the hard luck to see paid out for more quack medicines. and cora belle went on wearing the poor gingham skirt that was so unskilfully cut that it sagged in the back almost to the ground. no wonder that this unselfish, hapless little girl touched the heart of the capable young woman homesteader so that she made a party all for her, giving her a few simple presents, some underclothes made of flour bags that she had carefully preserved, a skirt of outing flannel and a white sun-bonnet built from a precious bit of lawn and trimmed with an embroidered edging. cora belle came to the party driving her lanky old mare, sheba, hitched up with the strong little donkey, balaam, who balked every three miles and had to be waited for. the grandparents were in behind all wrapped in quilts, and they were as astonished as modest cora belle herself to find that it could enter anybody's head to appreciate and honor that small child. now--good luck to all the cora belles! and may every one of them find such a friend as this girl has found! [illustration: a happy homesteader in front of her "soddy." the vastness of the country does not daunt her. she learns to love the quiet, broken only by the roar of a river at the bottom of a canyon or the howl of a coyote on the great sandy flats.] while the brave people that have adventured into a new country will invariably be interesting to the seeing eye, it is the experience of many homesteaders to find in their expansive communities many who will surprise them by their ability and attainments. this is not strange for a new country always beckons to the strong, the intelligent, the highly individual. in one region the forest ranger had been a newspaper editor in dublin; one of the hired men had been a photographer artist in detroit; another had been a wireless operator in alaska; another was educated in a german university, and an oxford man drove the stage. "our neighborhood," says a college girl homesteader, who herself wears a phi beta kappa key, "is as cosmopolitan as ellis island itself. one family of three from illinois are good neighbors and law-abiding citizens. another neighbor is a mexican freighter. another is a norwegian whose sole delight is to poison other people's stock and dogs and to read the _appeal to reason_, which he calls 'the apple.' another lawless one hails from denmark. would that he and his tribe had never left the fatherland, if they will not become americanized! another is a half-witted bosco. another is a woman who has trodden the historic appian way and journeyed to world capitols. another is a sweet-faced teacher who is much in demand in higher circles of learning than we have here. so there are italians, scotch, french, germans, swedes, and many finlanders,--making up the good and the bad, the strong and helpful as well as the opposite." sociability and a community spirit of a kind adapted to the conditions are possible under such circumstances. and there is probably no better field for the weekly paper, the woman's magazine and all the monthlies than in the dug-out and the soddy. "any pleasures? heaps of them!" cried one of the homesteader girls. "visiting, horseback riding, parties, socials, dancing, camping, hunting,--all kinds for all tastes." to be sure, when the ranches are ten to twenty miles apart, it is difficult for the people to get together very often. but when they do have a dance they come from fifty miles around. they come for supper, dance all night, and have breakfast together the next morning. [illustration: a knitting class at the agricultural school. note the splendid poise of the country girl in the background, how naturally and yet perfectly she is holding herself.] to a lonely girl on her claim it is an event if another girl becomes her next door neighbor fifteen miles away. hence the newcomer no sooner arrives than an eager neighbor comes to call, and the call lasts the whole afternoon. they talk about the cabin and its fixtures, cooking and recipes, dress and styles, the family and the crops--and the neighbors. if the circle includes foreigners then the question of being neighborly is more difficult. it is also a problem when one finds one's self near a group who spend the whole time in playing bridge, for there is nothing more certain to asphyxiate intellectual intercourse or human exchanges of any kind. if the leader of the four hundred in a one-hundred-mile-square community cannot read or write but plays cards like a gambler, it is impossible to entertain a hope that true community spirit will flourish there and good works will be furthered. but the country girl who finds herself in such a place as that may reflect that perhaps her very reason for being is to provide from her abundant resources some offset of joy and entertainment and good will that will plant good community spirit and unharmful pleasure where evil things had sway. both the gay bravura and the sound judgment of the american college girl are shown in this picturing bit from mabel stewart lewis, a successful homesteader of south dakota. "it is such fun to go visiting the other girls, to taste their goodies, to sleep four in a bed, toast marshmallows, and make fudge. but these things are mere trivialities. the great and glorious fact of _being_ it and _doing_ it is the pleasure! what could be more delightful than owning one's own land, having one's own house, digging in one's own soil, and being one's own and only boss? "looking down deeper than the surface and out beyond my quarter section, i see that our life here is another part of the great feminist movement of the world, a real and very vital part for the young women who are fortunate enough to be classed among the homesteaders. and fortunate not only are they, but the country, a part of which they are building." pioneering life is a passing phase; the girl homesteader is exceptional. but transitory periods may teach great lessons as they glide along before the glass of history. and if the girls that brave the danger, endure the solitude, become angels of mercy in their communities, survive the bad years, and master the situation commercially, show that they can do this when the incentive that is rightfully theirs is given to them, they have performed a service worthy of their strenuous labor, their suffering, and even perhaps of their martyrdoms. this chapter has spoken of an exceptional group; the following chapters return to the average country girl and her general problems. chapter xi the new era it is especially important that whatever will prepare country children for life on the farm, and whatever will brighten home life in the country and make it richer and more attractive for the mothers, wives and daughters of farmers should be done promptly, thoroughly and gladly. there is no more important person, measured in influence upon the life of the nation, than the farmer's wife, no more important home than the country home, and it is of national importance to do the best we can for both. _theodore roosevelt._ chapter xi the new era the mother of to-day is a bridge between two eras. her mother had a wooden spoon and a skillet; her daughter has a dynamo. as for herself, she hardly knows which way to turn--whether to be loyal to the wooden spoon or to enlist her sympathies with the dynamo. this is, by the way, the reason for many of her troubles, though she may not assign them to this cause. for the utensil is the symbol of a psychology, of a rationale of living, of an esthetic ideal, of a spiritual recognition. when the soap-kettle was carried for the last time into the backyard to rust away forever in the weeds behind the barn, the new era believed itself safe in the dining-room and made up its mind to stay there. science riding on a gang-plow and scattering bulletins along the way, was making happy inroads on the farm; and the electric motor in the kitchen became inevitable. all that remained for us was to adapt ourselves to it, and that is what we have been doing ever since. it was a revolution--this introduction of machinery; and it was none the less so because it came so gradually and with so little show of intention. no one noticed when hannah found it no longer possible to sit by her window binding shoes. she then, however, ceased to look through the pane for her unreturning lover, but sorrowfully rose from her chair and walking out of the low door, she passed over to the factory across the street and there went on as before, binding shoes--but in another way. she simply became one of a hundred who gave their whole attention to one single element among the forty-nine different elements now made possible in the process of making a pair of shoes, and left the other forty-eight elements to be done by other industrious women working in groups of one hundred. the women were not driven out of their work; they did not crowd into the places of men in the manufacturing field. they simply took their long-accustomed work in hand and went into the factory to do it. so with weaving and many other kinds of industry. so is it now with canning. women are the prehistoric caretakers of our foodstuffs. they still are this when in the factory they are canning pickles and green corn and tomatoes. strangely enough the same influence that took the industrial woman out of the home is to conduct her back again. it was power embodied in the steam engine that wooed her away from the home; it will be power expressed in the marvelous dynamo that will set her again by the hearthside. it will be a regenerated home, one in which the regenerated woman will be able to live, the woman that can think in terms of calories, who will act as quickly as the new mechanical force will demand, and who after a little will find the far more exact methods no strain upon her powers of adaptation and execution. in the present era of transition loyalty leads her to make the best of her surroundings and to do all that she can to-day to ameliorate the difficulties for herself and her family; sometimes she does not know that a better lot should be hers; sometimes she is dulled by the care and the burden she bears. but the great upward pressing tide will reach every one in time--soon, yes, very soon!--and she will see that the new way is going to set her free for a better and a higher service to those she loves. the wonderful element of mechanical power embodied in the dynamo or in some kindred form, is to contract her working hours, as it has the stint of men, from ten hours to one, and will leave her with lightened hands to do other and more valuable things for family and community. of course the old era and the new era are now seen standing side by side and will be for a long time yet. there are ardent unenlightened women who stand for old ways as if the new must have a sort of wickedness about them because they are expected to lessen the work. there are by this time also many who have experimented with the use of mechanical power in the household and have found this newly adopted servant of the lord in that great laboratory of the lord, the human house and home, to be a comfortable and loving companion; as at the beginning, this application of divine force to human happiness has been pronounced good. as the old and the new stand side by side, they will be sure to clash to some extent. every detail must be studied out and applied to various needs as they come up. progress is being very swiftly made just now and every one must get in step as soon as possible. the awakening that is proceeding along all the great channels of thought meets, however, at certain points a very definite obstacle. for instance, if one of those famous self-sacrificing housewives who survive from past times, should be asked why she did not have a certain convenience that would lessen her labor, she would say: "well, i thought that over and decided that i could possibly get along without it." the answer would be typical. whatever she could possibly get along without she ought not to have. unconsciously the woman makes all things a matter of conscience. but the conscience is a creature capable of education as well as of ethical impulse and determination. the conscience should be more highly educated. the question should not be, can i possibly get along without that?--but, can i bring myself and my family to a higher degree of efficiency, to a state of more robust vigor, of more intense and joyous activity, by having the conserving appliances, by cooking more sustaining meals, by inducing them to wear shoes with thicker soles and coats of rubber, or to stop work sooner? can i get a little more efficiency out of myself and of my family and out of the workers in barn and kitchen by adopting these new-fangled ideas or devices? the new era woman will always give the new-fangled idea a chance. a noble joke was played upon a woman of this kind by her modern young niece when she took an old barrel from the woodshed and with the aid of two old kettles and an armful of hay turned it into a fireless cooker--or rather into a "hay-box" cooker, for it hardly deserved the better name though it was built on the same principle. the girl had been bragging that she could cook potatoes for dinner in an old box out in the woodshed. the aunt, of course, thought her niece was joking. but she assured her aunt that she was in earnest and would show her. so she peeled the potatoes and bringing them to a boil on the stove at eight o'clock in the morning and whisking them, piping hot into the hay-box, she left them there till exactly twelve, the dinner hour, and then brought them triumphantly forth, still piping hot, perfectly cooked, perfectly mealy and delicious. the happiness point was reached for her when her aunt sank down in a chair absolutely nonplussed with this miracle that she had seen with her own eyes!-- or, better still, when the potatoes the aunt had surreptitiously prepared by her accustomed methods were refused by everybody, while the family partook of those that were cooked by the miracle. triumph could no further go! it cannot be said that old is old and new is new and never the twain shall meet, for old and new met here at that moment and old was demolished! the next thing would be for that identical very capable housewife to buy a good, first-class, durable and sanitary fireless cooker and use it habitually. but, alas! the prejudices of her husband prevented that desirable consummation. progress was therefore stalled in that particular spot. but the valley where she lived had had one ray of light let into it; the thought of a possible relief had come. let us hope that this may soon happen to every vale and corner, and kindle a hope in the heart of all farm women everywhere! the light of this hope may not shine very brightly in the hearts of many women of the earlier training and habits. but for the young women, for the six million between the age of fifteen and twenty-nine, it is radiant and alluring. the present-day mother may still say that her mother's ways are good enough for her; but the daughter--as between the wooden spoon and the motor, what will she be likely to choose? can any one ask the question? she will ask that when her new house is built she shall have ample accommodation of cisterns full of soft water together with pipes to carry it to every part of the house where water is needed and an adequate accompaniment of drain pipes and plumbing. she will ask for an electric motor or a power-engine to run the washing-machine, to pump the water into the attic cistern, and to be the avenue of force to every activity, including the dishwashing. she will plan to give thirty minutes every other day to that dreaded work that now takes an hour three times a day. she will make no provisions for carrying in coal and carrying out ashes, for her electric stove will not use that kind of fuel and will not produce that kind of waste. there will never be a fly in her kitchen; the household laboratory will be as clean and glowing as the parlor. the floor will be as artistic as the tessellated pavement of a palace. the aluminum utensils will be always shining, for the material of which they are made will not tarnish. they will be light as feathers and never be a trouble to lift. her hands will be neat and exquisite; her dress for the laboratory of the house will be tasteful and tidy and becoming, for there will be no reason why it should not be. she will be a joy to look at because she will be happy and because she will be adapted to her work. if the country girl of the new era is asked to go and begin her own home-making in the old homestead, she will ask to have the walls perforated and a large-sized vacuum cleaner installed in the cellar with hose connections on all the floors. there must be slides and pulleys to let heavy things down to the lower floors, and to draw them up to bedrooms or storerooms above. room must be made for dust chutes from all floors above the cellar and heating pipes to every room. one may think that the house in the new era is to be all pipes, but this is the laboratory installation idea; this is simply applying the same principle to the house that men are applying to the office. the telephone, the private wire, the repeating phonograph, the card system, the calculating machine and all the different kinds of recording and stamping machines--these are what the mechanical age provides for the workshop of the man. well may we repeat what has been said: "the workshop of the woman is the worst workshop in the world." but it is not to be so very much longer. the scheme above described is not by any means a dream of the far distant future. no: here and there it is now being realized. in many a kitchen in small villages and along the countryside where the distance is not too great to make electric connections from central plants, we may find installed the electric stove which with fireless cooker and scientific manipulation is found to be no more costly after the initial expense of installation than other forms of heating, and the dishwashing machine which reduces that part of the labor from three separate hours each day to forty solid minutes of one single morning. we may find also the inlet of power by which many other household processes as well as such branches of the farming business as are carried on in the house, are turned from unbearable drudgery almost into play. in such a kitchen the fittings will be exquisite; to work there a delight. the housewife who has devoted so much money to mere machinery may have resigned the addition of a wing or a porch and devoted the two thousand dollars the enlargement of the house would have cost to the installation of these expensive fittings. but it has richly paid her. the whole field of family welfare has been lifted to a higher plane and the happiness and health of all indefinitely increased. and the same fine experience will be within the reach of all farm and village women soon. those that live in villages and closely inhabited country districts will get their electric power from streams and waterfalls, utilized for community service; those that live on remote farms on the prairies and mountain-sides will have their individual resources for power. for the most part these are financially able to gain this, for if they were not they could not remain in the regions where they dwell. a comparatively small proportion of the population could not, if they would, make use of some source of mechanical power. if they would! what prevents them? it is this--only this: the lack of community spirit! and since this desirable spirit is constantly increasing, since recruits are coming to this new army almost daily, since students, teachers, ministers, philosophers, one after another are putting shoulder to this wheel, and farm men, farm women, and farm sons and daughters are coming forward with the new light in their eyes to ask and expect the aid of machinery to make their work more effective, it is not unwise to hope that the people of the countryside are not going to be made to wait many years more for the fulfilment of their dream. the country girl of the new era will ask to have a new house, built to the highest ideals of sanitary living, and of release from unnecessary, uncalled-for toil, or else she will require that the old house be made over to the new mechanism. which will be the most economical? sometimes that old place has advantages in the lines of its roof, the store of its traditions, the love laid up in its cubby-holes; but then--it will have to be torn out somewhere for the entrance of labor-saving devices. science will insist on some surgery for cleanliness and deftness and the wisdom of the future to enter in. whatever plan is made for the house of the future that its household laboratory may have the attention it deserves, the life of the country girl therein is to be set to a new rhythm, or she will be hopelessly left behind. can any one doubt that she will ask for such things as she believes are necessary to her highest efficiency, and insist upon having them? various lists of essential labor-saving devices have been suggested. the one that follows was taken for the most part from an agricultural paper and includes most of the things now recommended by specialists in household economics. but it must be noted that the progress in the application of forces to needs is now very swift, and any day these devices may be superseded by more expediting appliances. it is the duty of every young woman to keep track of these additions to her repertory of activities. the various journals of mechanics constantly report them, and the wild frenzy of the advertisers may be turned into righteousness by watching what they have that will be of use to us. a list of labor-saving devices water system, including bathtub, and all fixtures connected therewith. heating system. lighting system. vacuum cleaner. refrigerator, or a concrete cooler built near the well to take advantage of the coolness of the well water. sewing-machine with electric power to run it. washing-machine, do. wringer, do. dishwashing machine, do. cold mangle. alcohol iron or electric iron. carpet-sweeper. bread-mixer. cake-mixer. meat and vegetable mill. fireless cooker. coal-oil stove, three burner. dinner wagon or wheeled tray. ash chutes, to the kitchen for the range and to each room that has a fireplace; not needed if electric stove is used. cement walks--through the yard and garden to prevent wear and tear on floors of the house. a scheme for the equipment of a modern kitchen follows, with, again, the proviso that the young woman must adapt it to her own needs by careful study of her conditions: equipment for a farm kitchen furniture stove with water-back and boiler. kitchen table with drawer. kitchen cabinet. ice-box. fireless cooker. scrap basket. clock. a revolving high-stool. a magnifying glass. a dissecting microscope. a linoleum floor covering. a double sink. double wheeled trays. a perfectly fitted wire screen for each window. a wire screen door. utensils _granite or aluminum_ tea-kettle, qt. and cover. saucepans, qt., qt. and qt. double-boilers, qt., qt. and qt. pudding dish. colander. coffee-pot. nest of mixing bowls. a set of covers, various sizes. stock pot, qts. salt dredger. flour dredger. garbage pail, with tight-fitting cover. _wire-ware_ toast broiler. meat broiler. strainers. tea strainer. flour sifter. potato masher. egg beaters. soap dish. dish drainer. cake coolers. soap shaker. _tinware_ jelly cake tins. bread pans. cake tins. potato ricer. pint measure. biscuit cutter. doughnut cutter. flour scoop. funnel. dishpans. muffin pans. biscuit pan. wash boiler. quart measure. apple corer. graters, small and large. steamer. ladle. sink scraper. _ironware_ roasting pan. omelet pan. griddle. frying kettle. coal scuttle. shovel. stove lifter. poker. waffle iron. irons lbs. irons lbs. iron lbs. iron stand. food chopper. pancake turner. _japannedware_ bread box. cake box. flour box. sugar box. tea cannister. spice box. dust pan. _woodenware_ mop. broom. vegetable brush. sink brush. stove brush. floor brush. scrub brush. stepladder and chair combined. sugar bucket. chopping bowls, large and small. ice-cream freezer. meat board. rolling-pin. small wooden spoons. large wooden spoons. work board. boiler stick. wringer. ironing-board. clothes horse. pail. ice-cream freezer. _hardware_ bread knife. cleaver. butcher knife. vegetable knives. heavy mixing spoon. ice pick. meat fork. forks. cristy knife. palette knife. corkscrew. can opener. scale. coffee mill. teaspoons. tablespoons. chopping knife. pair heavy scissors. set skewers. knife sharpener. _earthenware and glass_ bowl, qts. bowls, qts. bowls, qt. cups (custard). breakfast plates. fruit jars, pt. jelly tumblers with covers. fruit jars, qt. baking dish, qt. baking dish, qts. teapot. casserole, qts. bean pot with cover. butter jar. measuring cup, / pt. pitcher, qts. pitcher, qt. pitcher, pt. linen fine linen dish towels for glass. coarser dish towels. knit dishcloths. hand towels. coarse floor cloths. dustless dusters. holders, washable. cheesecloth squares for wrapping lettuce. miscellaneous letter file for bills. hook for business notes. memorandum pad and pencil. account book. fountain pen. pencil. indelible pencil. supply of blocks, impression papers, pencils, erasers, blotting paper, ink, pens, pins, clips, etc. supply of cards for a card catalog for all household records. it is not claimed that this list is imperative for each and every girl. she must adapt it to her special needs. it is merely a typical list. and if the young woman who reads and ponders it does not know how to adapt it to her own needs, she certainly is not fitted to undertake her own housekeeping. she should go to some school where young women are trained in household science and there study the science of utensils and the chemistry of cooking and cleaning, and the whole science and art of home-making. the list may seem a long one; but when the appliances and utensils are placed before the adequately prepared young woman, she will have a sensation not of discouragement but of delight. to make every young woman realize that if she has adequate preparation she can feel perfectly at home in a house with an industrious little motor at its heart from which will go forth the miracle of an invisible force that will bring every part of the work to magical completion without any effort of ours and that thus what once was drudgery may be turned into a delight,--this is the problem that stands with expectant, perhaps ominous, eyes at our doorway; ominous if we show an unwelcoming look, expectant if we give it greeting and stand ready to take this friend to our heart. everything in this world is good. the great god power led the woman out of her house and into the factory. it was necessary in order that she should have a chance to learn the rules of the game. now, her lesson learned, the same great god power is quietly but firmly taking her again by the hand and leading her back to her house. there she will dwell; and there she will again attempt to create that divine reflection of heaven which we call home. now that she is once more allowed to undertake this task, let us hope that she will be successful in building up an institution worthy of the scientific age in which she lives, illuminated with electric beams that shall beat into every rat hole and every germ-protecting dark corner, and with every conceivable energy-producing and conserving device that can be planned by the human mind. chapter xii the household laboratory voices in the household upon the shelf the clock ticks merrily; the kettle sings his song in drowsy mood; within the stove crackles the fragrant wood; the coffee-mill grinds out a cheerful lay. surely within the oven one can see a roast ... what else on earth would smell so good?... and little globes of fat, all amber-hued, dance in the pan and sing with noisy glee. sweet sounds! inviting yet another song; and i will sing in unison with them. work brings the joy that helps the work along, and so, harmonious, sounds the kitchen hymn. while all about the ready dinner-table the children's voices raise a merry babel. _helen coale crew._ chapter xii the household laboratory the kitchen should be a combination of laboratory, machine shop and studio. the work done there is just as complex as that! there are an almost infinite number of different things needed to accomplish the different processes that have to be carried on in this workshop. there must be a variety of mechanical devices to negotiate and subtly maneuver all the effects that are to be brought out to artistic and wholesome conclusions. this is true to a great extent nowadays in all households whether in city or country. but the farm is yet, as it always was, a place where there is greater complexity to master because many more things are done there. the spirit of machinery has entered into the life of the city kitchen and eased the burden; it must now enter the country household and work the same magic there. if the kitchen is to be a combination laboratory and machine shop it must look like one. it must be filled with appliances for every part of the intricate work of making ten thousand things that are needed for the family through the various seasons and changes of the year. imagine an exquisite room long and narrow. the walls are painted white or light gray--a warm golden gray for the relief and pleasing of the eye. the floor is comfortable to the feet, sanitary, easily cleansed and durable. there is an iron ring in the floor where the cover to the chute is lifted down which the dust is to be thrown. there is another for the ash chute, lined with metal for protection from fire by means of the hot coals that may sometimes be left in the ashes. one beauty of the electric stove is that it produces no ashes; one advantage of the vacuum cleaner is that it does away with dust. the sink has two compartments--all enameled white--one for the washing of the dishes and one for the draining. in the second is the wire drainer. the sink is placed at the right height for this particular housewife, be she a little treasure done up in a small parcel or a tall stately woman when standing very straight--as every one ought to, whether city or country bred. at the right of the sink there is a table or shelf for the dishes as they are taken from the wheeled tray that has brought them from the dining table, and at the left is the draining sink or draining board or a shelf on which the dishes may be laid when they have been dried with the linen drying cloth. there is a window before the worker and from it she can look out over the garden off to the fields, and beyond toward the village, following her thoughts now and then to the great big world outside. when an ideal like this is held up before their eyes, the younger women see the futility and bad policy of the old methods. for it is the worst policy to lay heavier burdens upon man or beast than he can carry. it is better policy to conserve the strength of the beast of burden whether horse or daughter. the farmer has found that labor-saving utensils and appliances are his best investment in the barn. why not in the house? running water is needed for the dairy stalls; but it is more necessary in the pantry. the live stock in the kitchen is of a fiber incomparably delicate and fine. it will be good for the big brother to scrub that floor; and everything the father and the brother can do to sustain the struggle of the mother and the sister will come back to them with rich interest in the value of the product, viz., the health, happiness and vibrancy of the women in the home and the power to give out energy in their home life and to their children. the young woman of to-day takes it into account that she will probably have to deal with a scheme of life that does not include service in the household laboratory other than that of her own hands. she realizes that there will never be a peasant class in this country; and she sees that housewives must take the consequences of this happy lack: namely, they must do their own work. every woman will be always as good as every other woman and therefore there can be no servant in our kitchen; there cannot even be "help." what then shall be done? there must be fit machinery. the drudgery point must be reduced till labor becomes a joy. the kitchen is not to be a place to which the housewife is condemned; it is a place she is going to love because it is a laboratory where science has sway, where aseptical cleanness reduces every process to a fragrant dream, and the laws of processes appear as miracles of nature controlled at last by the art of man. seeing all this clearly, it is not strange that the young woman decides to relegate the bad kitchen to the limbo of broken and disused furniture. this, to her, is the impossible kitchen: one that has no shelves, drawers, or cupboards, and no place where things can be put away; or if there are any shelves, they are made so wide that things have to be stored in behind each other so that the first row must be taken out in order to get at something behind. in this impossible kitchen the pantry is on the wrong side for the worker. by the arrangement of doors and windows light and air are shut out. the rotten old wooden sink is bad smelling, too low, and too narrow, and it is so far from the pantry that the worker will have to go back and forth ten times as many times to do a piece of work as she would if the articles were conveniently placed. the room is too large; there is many times as much walking as is necessary; it is as far removed as it possibly can be from the compact convenience of the ideal kitchen. the floor is uneven and there are broken splinters where the wood has worn. they catch the dust, and little bits of string drag along from them to catch more dust and dirt. it is impossible that this floor should ever be clean; the very thought of it is discouraging. the water must be brought from an outside well, and the wood from an outdoors wood-pile. if it is a rainy day, the wood is wet and takes a long time to get to burning in the range. it is not a range--it is only a stove and a poor one at that. there are many other things that might be said about the impossible kitchen, but perhaps it is not necessary to go any further, for has not everybody seen one? the great majority of kitchens are now impossible. the great majority should be torn out before any more machinery is bought for the farm business, and a full kitchen equipment should be installed in the place of the worn-out floors, the ill-adapted furniture, the cracked and rusted hardware, the soaked and disease-laden woodwork, and the leaky pipes and shingles. when the daughter in the country home sees that the father and mother are working together for one end, that they have for the good of all undertaken a task that is too great for them, and that they are oppressed and almost despairing in their fight against untoward circumstances, she is ready to join in the struggle and to give her sometimes slender strength to help in the lifting; but when it becomes evident that the old unsanitary kitchen of the average farm home could be renovated and made the workshop of joyous efficiency instead of the treadmill of despairing burden-bearing; and when at the same time she sees additions constantly made to the greater efficiency of the farming side of the farmstead business, the daughter feels with the mother that their work does not have the appreciation that it deserves. and this is what puts the one little drop of bitterness into the cup she has to drink. there is nothing like this to take the tuck out of one. to know that there exist means to reduce the time limit for a certain piece of work from four hours to twenty minutes and that these means are stubbornly and constantly denied to the worker, takes the poetry and the hope out of her heart and the buoyancy out of her joints more than anything else could. especially is this the effect when the chains are being hung in the new barn to swing the feed along the passageway to every stall, all to save the strength of the men's arms, and no chains and pulleys are being strung in the kitchen to lift pails and swing loads for the mother and sister. to know that the time spent in dishwashing for a family of five could be reduced from six hours distributed through two days to forty-two minutes at one time in one morning--and then to have to go on interminably giving three separate hours daily to this loathsome, lukewarm, greasy, unsanitary, ill-assorted, deadening task--no, the next group of household administrators will not do that! it is not that the younger women are lazy and inclined to shirk the heavy tasks. that is not their spirit. but they cannot keep up their fine buoyancy of mind and heart when better methods are constantly going into the barn and none into the house; when appliances are bought for cattle and none for the women. and they know that life will not be held up to its high level if they cannot command buoyancy of spirit. life is framed on a larger pattern nowadays; there is a greater demand for standard; there is a higher degree of intelligence required. all this the new young woman sees that she has to do and be. she springs to meet the situation--but hanging at her heels is a chain, the chain of old-fashioned methods. she must be free of this chain, or she will not sustain the burden of country life in the time to come. she thinks she sees a way out in the industrial opportunity of the town. it is a mirage--but she follows it. she follows it and follows it--and what is the end to be? would it not pay us to give her the opportunity to put the housekeeping for the next generation of home-makers on a better foundation and thus keep these finest of the girls of the nation in the environment they love but now find unendurable because they cannot under present conditions have the help they need? the papers and periodicals for women nowadays devote long columns to telling us how to make some kind of contraption that will take the place of a fireless cooker or of a movable tray or of some other new housekeeping device. it is true that woman may use her ingenuity to make something that will "do." but we have been too long getting on with half-measures, makeshifts, contraptions of all sorts. the star we should now hitch our wagon to is an electric motor. the young woman who wishes to live on the farm would better enter some industrial field, make something commercially and with efficiency, sell it, and find in her hands the fifteen dollars for the fireless, the eleven for the double-decker wheeled-tray, and pretty soon the larger sum that will be needed to install a perfect kitchen, that will not only be a joy to herself but will be a lesson to her whole community, that will lift the whole region into a new realization of life, that will show how the time necessary to be spent on the drudgery of the household may be reduced from eighteen hours a day to two, and so release her energies as to give to the higher needs of the family and to the equally great needs of the community the services that she alone is fitted to give, and that are absolutely necessary to the well-being and the safeguarding of the life of the rural realm and therefore also of the whole people. how can we get a kitchen like that? well, that is the gordian knot that the farm daughters will be able to cut. they can do it--they must do it. every instinct of patriotism, every breathing of passion for the welfare of the future homes, every thought of affection for the home circle that will be theirs, calls for the most valiant struggle to gain the goal--a perfectly hygienic, perfectly fitted household plant, with all in it that can by scientific mechanism be placed there, to be the perfect working basis for that highest product, human happiness in a human home. chapter xiii efficient administration scientific management is the application of the conservation principle to production. the time, health and vitality of our people are as well worth conserving, at least, as our forests, minerals, and lands. when we get efficiency in all our industries and commercial ventures, national efficiency will be a fact. _theodore roosevelt._ chapter xiii efficient administration if the country girl of the future takes her life in her hands and asks for a household laboratory such as has been described, she must make sure also that she will be able to work in that place in such a way as to get the most good out of it and to prove its value to those that have installed it for her. this presupposes a high degree of efficiency in herself as well as in the tools she handles. never has young womanhood been so fortunate in opportunities for preparation as is the girl of this day. the very minutes seem to bristle with the word "efficiency." on every side she may receive suggestion and instruction as to how to make herself consonant with her era. scientific management is being carried out in every sort of factory, workshop, studio, regiment,--everywhere,--with the one exception, perhaps, of her own, the household workshop. therefore it is for her to see what scientific management means to all these other institutions and to apply the lesson to her own realm, and make that factory of hers, that workshop, regiment, and studio, into the most efficient place upon earth! the great movement in the interest of efficiency has its origin in the desire to get just as much result as possible out of the labor of the workers. their strength must be conserved, not because of any philanthropic feeling for the man, but because that strength is needed for further use, in order that a greater output of the product may be gained. the method employed is to consider studiously the movements made in carrying on any one part of the work. they separate this operation into its elements, and then they determine upon the best motions to make to accomplish the end, and upon the exact order of those motions, shaving off a part of a second here and there by the careful choosing of motions and the surest order of them. the motions the workman makes, whether with eyes, fingers or arms, are thus economized. the bricks for the building up of the wall are conveniently placed, and all the details in following any pattern are fitted together so as to make as few motions as possible, to use as little energy as possible, and to reach the end as quickly as possible. this is, says one, "the application of the conservation principle to production." "the art of management," says another of these experts, "is knowing exactly what you want the men to do, and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way." in order to accomplish all this in, say, the business and work of a factory, there must be an efficiency engineer, who shall spend days and weeks and months in finding out what the right order of motions is, what the best arrangement of the tools and materials shall be, what elimination of unnecessary acts and things can be made in order that every possible waste of energy may be pared off and the path to the end may be absolutely, sternly direct. then there is the route clerk, who sees that this order is followed by each man until he is able to do it involuntarily and as if by instinct. to make definite record of the success of this work, the time-and-cost clerk will keep track of time and per cent. items, and make known exactly what are the results of doing things in one particular way. if not satisfactory, another way must be chosen. it is the belief of the advocates of scientific management that if we thus make the individual efficient, his productive capacity will be raised twenty-five or fifty per cent., or even sometimes doubled. scientific management calls for a careful study of the surroundings. the appliances must be adequate, comfortable, handy, and such as require the least percentage of rest. the scaffold or bench must be the exact height to make as little strain as possible on the worker. the table must be made at the right height so that the worker will not have to stoop over for his tools. if he works on his feet, there must be something for him to stand against so that he may have no fear of falling. to get the full output, the right appliances must be devised, standardized, used, and maintained. the worker's clothing must not be ill-fitting, or it may restrict the movement of his arms and hands. it must be of such material that he will not be in constant fear of ruining it. everything about him must be such as to increase speed and not restrict motion. nothing that will affect the eyesight unpleasantly is to be tolerated. there shall be no reflecting surfaces from which the light may shine into the eyes. the colors that will help the eyes are to be selected for the room, those that are pleasant, that will induce a happy mood and will therefore decrease irritation and help the spirit of energy. he must take up the nearest tools first; the pockets and containers to hold tools must be placed so that the least and shortest motions may be made in handling them. and so on. there are several reasons why the work of the kitchen has not been more promptly attacked by the believer in scientific management. in the first place, the business of the home laboratory is of so complex a nature that no factory can compare with it in difficulty of analysis. efficient housekeeping is a combination of many factories. the scientific expert can far more easily separate the making of a single pair of shoes into its forty-three acts than he can analyze any one of the processes of the home laboratory: say, for instance, the making of a frosted layer-cake, the assembling and concocting of a mince-pie, or the infinitely complex business of washing dishes. in the second place, men have been fairly busy putting this matter through in their factories. they have naturally studied out the processes nearest to their own hands. they are not to be specially blamed for inattention to the woman's realm. that will come next. now that their attention is being called to the need for expert management in the other department of life, they are recommending in many books and lectures what should and must be done to put housekeeping on a basis for efficiency. so if women do not standardize their work, men will do it for them, and that will not be so well for them as if they did it themselves. the woman who is administrator in the farm home must be equal to several women. she must be master in the difficult art of cookery, adapting her menu to the welfare of a group of people of all ages and with all kinds of needs. she must be washwoman and laundry woman, cleaning and scrub woman. she must know all the proper chemicals to be applied to the cleansing of different kinds of metal, cloth, wood, and every sort of surface painted and unpainted. she must be food expert, and textile expert, medicine and poison expert. besides all this, she must be teacher, instructor, and entertainer, the encyclopedia and gazetteer, a theological and philosophical professor. and all these separate functions must do their work together within the one personality, the administrator, the little mother of the home, the companion of the kitchen, the parlor and the bedside. translated into technical engineering language this women in the heart of the farmstead is her own route-clerk, and order-of-work clerk; she is her own instruction-card clerk, time-and-cost clerk, gang boss, speed boss, repair boss, and inspector. all these and much more must she be in order to gain the effects of scientific management in that factory which is her home realm. theodore roosevelt said, "when we get efficiency in all our industries and commercial ventures, national efficiency will be a fact." does he include the farm laboratory among the "industries"? the farm home is producing (or ought to produce) the most valuable product that can be found in the country--the man and woman of the future. if these men and women are to be efficient, the home from which they are to come must certainly be a model of efficiency. we have to pierce through the crust of our national conceit and find there the truth that our people are painfully in need of more efficiency and that therefore it is a matter of the most vital concern that we should put the home in all its phases into a condition more adapted for producing the perfectly efficient human product. the gospel of efficiency has reached the farmer; he finds that with three men he can do the work that fifteen men did forty years ago. he realizes that the efficient farmer progresses, the inefficient falls behind. will not the same thing be true of woman in the farmstead? to see how the principle of efficiency may be applied in the work of the farmstead, we have but to look, for instance, at that task of dish washing. suppose that the worker were piling the dishes at the right of the dishpan and also trying to drain them at the same side. the efficiency expert would promptly decide that this arrangement would cause a waste of time and energy, for while the right hand was ready to lift the dishes to be washed into the pan, the left would have to move back and forth in many unnecessary motions to put the dishes back into the draining rack which was also on the right. the efficiency clerk would demand that the dishes be drained at the left. if there were some article of furniture at the right, so that the dishes could not be placed there, say a pump or a door or a cupboard, that would have to be removed. if the time and strength and nervous energy of those workers were to be conserved and the product to be put forth with the least expenditure of mind and nerve, such changes would have to be made as would make labor-saving motions possible. not to make the changes would be bad policy, because these conditions would be constantly causing waste of time and strength; and that time and that strength would be of pecuniary worth to the business. what business? the important business of administering the affairs of the home! every country girl should experiment to see how she can economize motions and save time. she should make a study of every part of her work and see where she can by forethought cut down useless movements and intensify energy. if at first she finds difficulty, she should persevere; she will master the task in time. there is a knack about it that she must master before she can become adept. if, for instance the hair is being done up in a new way, it takes a longer time than usual the first day, less time the next, and after a few more days the new way takes no longer than the old. some natural motions have been found out that economize the time and effort, that introduce convenient moves, that shake off awkwardnesses, and set the whole into a rhythm of motion. josephine preston peabody has written a lovely poem about a child watching her mother as she braids her hair. the child is delighted with the deftness of her mother's hands, and with the perfect rightness of the braids as every loop comes into its place and all of them are so quickly and so beautifully fitted about the head. that mother had by long practise found the exactly right way to manage that complicated piece of human industry, the "doing up" of a mass of long and wavy hair. she did it almost without thought. her "motions" were perfectly smooth, exquisitely graceful, and adapted absolutely to the end desired through a series of separate acts composing all together a whole scientific process. and she was so accustomed to it as a whole and to all the separate details, that she could do it with a rhythm that was like music. when it was done she could give one little final pat and say, "there!" with a slight thrill of delight. just so should it be with any of the intricate operations of the household laboratory. just such a thrill of delight should be possible when the complicated piece of hand-work and machine-work called washing the dishes is finished. at the end one should be able to express a delighted "there!"--not because a dreaded and abhorrent quarter-of-an-hour was over, but because a piece of work necessary to human welfare has been turned off with firm conclusiveness and dispatch. the inefficient way of doing things is a too frequent experience. a farm housekeeper will bring a dish of cold potatoes from the kitchen, carry it all the way through the dining-room, set it down on a chair while she opens the door to the cellar, carry it haltingly down the stairs, and then set it down on a box because it is too dark to place it in the cupboard where it belongs. she does not want to take the pains to get a lamp, but she has to. she carefully lights the lamp, carries it down the cellar stairs, places it in a safe place, and then takes care of the potatoes. then she comes back and carries a little plate of bacon that has been left and deposits it in the same careful way. then follow the bread, the milk and the cream in pitchers; follow the cake, the jam, and many other things in little precious bits too good to be thrown away, all requiring a careful passage, each one at a time. it is good that she has so many beautiful and promising things to put away; but how different it would have been if she had been able to load all these things on the dummy and with one stroke of the arm to move it all downstairs. then, o joy! if she had had the electric light to turn on in the cellar-way and down in the cellar cupboard, she could have gone downstairs with perfect safety and without fear, and she could have returned with a light heart, swung the wheeled tray into its place, and all would have been over in three minutes at the most, instead of taking twenty-five and being accomplished only by a vast expenditure of effort and nervous fear. the money that woman wasted in reduced energy and nervousness causing doctor's bills, would have bought her a wheeled tray, put in a dummy with pulley, rope, and weights, and paid the family doctor's bill besides! nothing can be done hygienically that is done in the dark. the country girl may practise for efficiency while she is waiting for her perfect kitchen to materialize, by doing all in her power to make herself save steps. to learn to make no useless passages across the floor is to begin a conquest of one's own mind, to establish self-control, and to utilize forethought. "think twice and step once," was a good motto. there is a one best way to do all things. why not search for it? chapter xiv an old-fashioned virtue ill housewifery pricketh herself up with pride; good housewifery tricketh her house as a bride. ill housewifery lieth till ten of the clock; good housewifery trieth to rise with the cock. _penny magazine_, . chapter xiv an old-fashioned virtue this may be considered a brief for the "old maid" of olden time; or rather for the quality that she stands for in our dream and story life. we have not given this so-called "old-maidishness" its rightful place among the virtues. the quality deserves to be classified among the highest expressions of the intellect. in the olden time, when the mother was busy with her family of from two to twenty children, the mother's unmarried sister was the "efficiency-clerk" of the big household. she was the motor, the balance-wheel; she knew where everything was, to the last sheaf of catnip; she put everything in its place and could go and get whatever was wanted. behind all this was her classifying mind. that "old-maidishness" was composed of three elements: a fine discrimination of values, an appreciation of little things as pivots for greater things, and a love of orderliness. to her the first law of heaven was her first law. heaven never had a law till it had order; and when the stars found that there was to be something more than a fortuitous concourse of atoms in the universe, we know what they did: they sang. in any house there will be more singing when orderliness reigns there. but the household is a concourse of myriads of parts. we cannot always sing that the house "is so full of a number of things" that we think we "should all be as happy as kings." it is only when we can keep good track of these things that we can be "as happy as kings." this was a large part of the mission of the invaluable old maid in our early centuries. there was a great deal of system in the housekeeping of our ancestors. bags, basket and bundles were trained into the service of good order. they cross-stitched numbers on the pillow-slips and on the sheets and on the rare napery they had spun and woven with their own capable hands and had bleached on their own soft grass-plots. they kept their "simples" in carefully protected and distinctly labeled sheaves. their piece-bags were innumerable. they could go in the dark into the storeroom, put their hand in behind things, feel unerringly for what they needed, and find it there. the burden upon the memory that this elaborate system of old must have entailed is now transferred to the card catalog. this invaluable modern device is a system for recording upon cards of a certain uniform size the items and lists and notes to be remembered and preserved, and of classifying them carefully for ready reference. these cards are stood up in a closely packed row, in a box or drawer, or in a compartment made especially for the purpose, where they are arranged alphabetically or by subjects, in such a way as to be easily run over by the finger till the desired card is found. the cards must be made of stiff paper or card-board; they must be accurately cut to a required measure, usually five inches wide by three inches tall, and they must be fitted exactly into the box, with "guides" to aid in finding the main subjects. the "guide" is a card of a different color from the others, usually yellow, and has a little top extension, so that when the guide is put in its place in the row of white cards, this top extension will stand up above the others so as to catch the eye readily. on this little bit of the guide that stands up above the rest, a main heading is written very clearly in fine lettering,--or, better, printed neatly--and on all the cards that are selected to be slipped in behind that guide are written the notes or references on subjects that belong under that heading. for instance, suppose the main heading, written on a certain guide, should be this: "recipes." then each card that follows that guide would have written on its face the details of some recipe--one recipe to one card. and all the cards on which the housekeeper had written the recipes she wished to preserve would be placed behind that guide. then whenever she wished to use any one recipe, she would open her drawer, look along the tops of the cards until she found the guide extension--the little projecting piece that had the word "recipes" on it. behind that guide she would find all her recipes; then it would be but the work of an instant to pick out the one she wanted. on each separate card would be written in the upper right-hand corner, the name of the recipe on that card. if the housekeeper had a great many recipes, she might make more guides: one for cake recipes, one for bread, and so forth. then there would be still other main heads. one might be marked "inventory." one might be called "clothing." records of music, of engagements, of books, and so forth might be set down. any subject that needed to be kept track of could be thus securely noted in the card catalog. under the heading "inventory" a most useful record might be made. subordinate headings on cards of some other color should be used. the first of these would be "parlor." behind that would be placed the cards that told all the articles of furniture or decoration that that important room contained. "dining-room," "kitchen," "pantry," etc., would come along in order and all items considered worthy of note would be put on their proper cards. then there would be other cards entitled "linen-closet," "side-board," "old bureau," "old chest," "black trunk," "brown trunk," "old-fashioned deep basket," or other containers of clothing, silver, bedding, linen, utensils, or treasures of any kind. in case of fire, the card catalog, along with the locked document box or safe, would be one of the things to be sought for first and rescued from harm. in fact there should by rights be two copies of any household inventory made, so that in case the inventory in the house should chance to be burned with the house, there might still be a careful record preserved in some safe place for future reference, for purposes of insurance or for historic archives. every one of us should think of the family as an institution of dignity, one whose smallest doings have importance, because we belong to a great human family, and because we are bearing on the touch of life to future generations. we are now making history. and we should see to it that our link of the unending chain should not break for want of a sensible and accurate recorder. this description of the card catalog is given with so much particularity because it has been proved by long experience that it is a very great saving of trouble to have it exactly right. the making of the cards is a matter of the nicest care. this exactitude is essential to the quick movement of the fingers and is therefore a saving of time in hunting for the one card desired. the jelly may be almost ready to "jell," and one may run to the catalog of recipes to find what is the matter; one must not be impeded an instant at that critical point. time is always precious, too, to the housekeeper, and the orderliness that makes it possible to find things quickly is one of the most important elements in the success of the new housekeeping. whatever part the daughter in the farm home may have in the business of the farm, she will find the card catalog of the utmost value to her in making herself useful and in placing her results on the basis of authority. in such a system of records she can always find what she wants on demand; the various accounts can be added to and taken from and corrected to date at any moment without recopying the whole. so the records of the daily egg-harvest can be kept, the in-come and out-go of any of the products of the farm, the weighing and testing of the milk, the mending and making of fences, the apple harvest, the dates for putting in crops, the dates of payments to the men and the number of their days' labor, and many other items that belong to the business of the farm. of course when the farm business becomes very large and intricate, an elaborate system of bookkeeping is necessary. but for the myriads of little things that belong to the home side of the farmstead, this ingenious system is especially adapted. here we may advantageously keep our records of such memoranda as specially concerns the family, the household accounts and receipts; inventions we may hear about and new devices in which we may be interested and that we may sometime want to find out about or make our own; contents of the tool chest, dates of repairs and memoranda of things that need to be repaired about the house; cans of fruit and other things stored away on the shelves and in the cupboards of the cellar and in the cold room and elsewhere--a valuable record to check up against another year's yield of these treasures; doctor's visits and prescriptions, notes of symptoms, together with dates and any circumstances that may need to be accurately remembered; music, victrola records; christmas and birthday gifts given or received; dates of events, the coming and going of guests at the home; personal items such as the size of shoes, gloves, collars, hats, etc., for the different members of the family; books we should like to have; newspapers and magazines taken or desired; records of the magazine club or of the book loan club; correspondence, letters received and sent; patterns, clippings, quotations. for remembering all these things the card catalog will prove the unfailing helper; and all and many more will be the care of the country girl when she becomes administrator of a household in the new time. a simple bookkeeping may also be recorded in the card catalog. the monthly or seasonal or annual statements of expenses may be recorded here, however, and may be kept for comparison with other seasons and years. these records may be placed under the following heads: _food_ (including meat, groceries, milk and eggs, green vegetables, and fruit, ice, and fuel for cooking). _shelter_ (including rent or purchase money, taxes, insurance, interest, repairs, fuel for heating, furnishing). _clothing_. _education_ (including papers, books, school, lectures, concerts, art). _benevolence_ (including church and charity). _recreation_. _transportation_ (including expenses of travel). _health_ (including doctor's bills, and medicine). _savings_. _labor_. _sundries_. this scheme is designed to be used for the budget of a family; but it is most important that every young girl, whether in city or country, and whether her purse be a long one or a short one, should know each year whether the demands upon her cash account are exceeding those of the year before, and that she should make up her mind whether there shall be any change in that regard during the year to come. this is a training that every girl should insist upon giving to herself constantly. if she finds herself called "oldmaidish" therefor, she will know that she cannot have earned the name, since there are no old maids any more! the same sort of person must now be called "efficiency administrator." in suggesting this form of self-discipline to the country girl, we know very well that the girl that determines to keep accurate records of her expenses has a good fight before her. women seem at present to have a preternatural disinclination toward keeping their own accounts, and nearly every girl inherits this bent. in canning clubs for women it is found that the members will do all the delicate measuring accurately; their sense of taste is unerring; their judgment of results is perfect; but they just will not render an account of their work! that women are not by right of their sex incapable of mathematical processes is shown by the fact that so large a number of women attain distinction in the higher fields of that study, becoming astronomers, computing eclipses and ranging the outer realms of the sky with great telescopes. the rather general dislike of women for the simpler forms of computing probably has grown up in the financially irresponsible state that has become a part of woman's very bone and marrow during late centuries. but it must not be so any longer. too much depends upon orderliness in finances, for the country girl to neglect this means of becoming efficient in her life-work. all of these card-catalog and other "devices" are a part of a great movement to put efficiency into every human industry. and this movement, again, is a part of the upward striving of mankind. the "industry" that is to be the life-work of the country girl must not be behind. it is claimed that the average farmer puts more thought into his work than the average woman in a farm home puts into hers. this is partly because the seasons make less change in her work than they do in his. but they do make a very great change in her work; and the difference between her work and his in this respect ought not to make the great difference that exists between the amount of foresight he shows in his planning and the dim irresolute bungling that is so often the characteristic of hers. we cannot say that we have an ideal unless we contrive a plan to express that ideal. something luminous and startling may glow before our eyes and flatter our self-conceit with a hope that seems like a resolution. but without a definite plan, the glow soon vanishes and we are no better for having had it. in fact we are worse. it is a real injury to our soul development to entertain an unfounded ideal and then allow it to fade away before we concentrate it into purpose; for we have deceived ourselves and we have weakened our will. now and then we read of some woman of olden time who thought out her plan for the next day after she went to bed at night. she was a prophecy of the present; or rather, of the time to come. too much cannot be said to the young women of to-day about the necessity of foresight. foresight is the great bulwark of efficiency. hurry, they say, is only poor planning; and we know what depredations hurry is making upon our fields of life. the country girl, if she wishes to help in the upbuilding of national character, must drive hurry from her field, and this she can do by efficient planning. she must now adopt the systematic spirit in order that when she has a farm home upon her hands she will be ready for the simplification that alone will make her work under the new complications endurable and easy. it will be necessary for her to reduce all to a definite scheme. she must then plan her work by seasons; she must plan it by days, and by hours in the day. she must make records of the time it takes for each part of the work, and she must think out a way to do it in less time. it will be well if she can arrange it so that different kinds of work will overlap, in order that one thing may be preparing while she is doing something else. and if she finds it a weight upon the mind to keep track of so many things at once, she must yield herself to this discipline, knowing that she is thus training her mind for better service and that she will be more fitted to use to good advantage the extra hours that she will thus gain. she will come to the new cultural duty of the hour she has thus wrung from the working period with increased joy and with new powers gained by the strenuousness of the hour's work that went before. the administration of a house is to call for a higher training in mechanics. education is giving much more of this now than formerly and will answer the demand for still more. the girls of the country, where this education is needed far more even than in the city, must be prepared to answer this need. we cannot be expert in the new housekeeping unless we have some comprehension of the chemical processes that constantly go on under our hands. one young woman took for her master's degree a study of the bacterial flora found in spoiled canned peas and string beans. she found that there are some organisms that only grow all the better after they have been boiled one hour. she found that the strongest acids do not inhibit the growth of some other kinds. she has been a good year working on that theme. if she should include one or two other kinds of spoiled foods her work would extend over another year. how many kinds of bacterial life are there? how many fruits, vegetables, foods of all sorts, are made the home of these various kinds? what processes will protect each kind from becoming harmful to human life? how many hours will it take to show that certain processes will render each variety a safe food? how many young students must give years to the business of finding out what we may use and what we may not? how long will it take us to realize that the detail of preparing the food for the table is a great scientific study, one deserving our highest expertness, meriting our highest honors, to those who work in the laboratory of the university and to those who labor in the laboratory of the house? every young woman should consider herself a licensed observer; she should watch every process to see what she may learn of nature's secrets, that she may compare it with what she has read and thus make additions to the sum of knowledge that may be beneficial to all. it is not alone because foods have as close a connection with our well-being that we should study them. they have in themselves an extraordinary fascination. the daily and hourly companion of the worker in the household should be the magnifying-glass. the dissecting microscope is a form of magnifier that is especially adapted for household use and should be within the reach of every one. to get into the habit of putting all foods to the test of this infallible little instrument gives one a great feeling of safety and comfort. every bag of oatmeal should be examined, all cereals, especially cornmeal, all products that have been kept in any storehouse, should be thus tested. if all the women of the country would use the magnifying-glass on everything that comes into the house, and promptly reject what is not perfectly clean, the level of good health and long life would rise suddenly by perceptible degrees among our people. if the prospective household administrator cries out that she cannot be bothered with such little things as these, she will be one of those that will be left behind. those that can be bothered are the people that are to win. the value of the little thing, when it is the pivot for greater things, is one of the discoveries of modern science; and, strangely enough, there is no little thing that is not a pivot for greater things. our part is to train ourselves to realize this. in the household of the future there will be nothing that the microscope can reveal or the card catalog record that will not be of importance to the success of the whole. it would be amusing--if it were not so tragic!--to see the utter serenity with which some of the older women will say, "but i have no scientific turn of mind, i do not care for the microscope!" it is as if they said: "but i prefer to murder the members of my family; i do not care to give them the key that will let them out of imprisonment where they have been carelessly but dolorously confined; i have no predilection for dashing away the poison from their lips when unwillingly they are about to drink it!" to such a woman either the word "duty" has no meaning or else she is lacking in instruction as to what duty is. but the coming country girl will avoid the mistakes of the past; she will do everything in her power to gain the training that is necessary for her to meet successfully and inspiringly the duties and privileges of the new era. chapter xv health and a day no one can be the highest type of philosopher unless in exuberant health. _epictetus._ chapter xv health and a day "give me health and a day and i will make ridiculous the pomp of emperors!" cried emerson. the ultimate use of health is to make us happy, and the deepest hurt of sickness is that it destroys our power of enjoyment. moreover, since our happiness when we are at our human best, consists in adding to the welfare and happiness of others, our highest in life is sadly crippled when we allow disease to get the better of us. if we desire to be happy, we should, as the camp fire girls' law says, "hold on to health" and with a tight grip. it used to be thought that health was a gift of heaven bestowed on certain of its favorites. you had it or you did not have it: that was all there was about it. by pious behavior and prayer perhaps we might gain this benefit from the partial hand of heaven--perhaps not! and if you did anything to help yourself directly to a larger portion of vigor, ate heartily, or took an invigorating walk, you were in danger of indulging a selfish spirit that should be curbed. we have now changed all that belief. we do know that we may inherit certain disproportions, certain maladies, that interfere with our soundness; these we have to fight against. knowing them, we can fight intelligently. our duty lies in taking the resources of strength that we possess, and making the most of them. we are to give ourselves the largest opportunity to make ourselves useful to our friends and to our world in general as much as we may with the portion of vigor that we receive by inheritance, and we are to develop that portion as much as we possibly can. doing something for ourselves will sometimes be the greatest unselfishness. this teaching the country girl should take to heart. it is her duty to recognize the great value of her physical vigor to the life of her realm, and to do all in her power to conserve it and to increase it. she should think of this not only because she is of tremendous importance in the home of to-day and because its happiness depends in large measure upon her buoyancy and cheer and hopefulness, which may so easily be increased or diminished by her physical state, but also because she has so great a part in bearing the torch of life to another generation. let me repeat the words--it is her duty; and again, and yet again let me say it--it is a duty! it is a duty to exercise every part of the body, the hands, the wrist, the fingers, each finger! every part of the body has a function and should be prepared for its uses. the lifting muscles, the straightening muscles, the apparatus that pulls and that pushes, that bends and that twists; the machinery for stepping with vibrancy, for going uphill, for going downhill, for walking on the grass, on irregular stony paths, on cement walks; every kind of movement has its special apparatus in this wondrously varied human body and all should be developed and rounded into perfection. housework affords a training for more of the body's needs than perhaps any other occupation. the household administrator has an advantage there, and the physical vigor of women in this country ought to increase as they more and more have the opportunity to take up this work in their homes. probably when every house in the country has mechanical appliances so that there will be enough work in the household and not too much, the health of the nation will increase by leaps and bounds. at present housework, especially in the country, affords wearying labor which is not so well adapted to the development of physical strength as it might be because it is not systematic. certain parts of the body are overexercised and certain parts are neglected. the result is frequently a body with a semblance of strength but with, as you might say, strands of weakness, rendering it liable to fall at the least onslaught of infection or unusual strain. these lacks should be made up for by consistently arranged exercises, by carefully studied diet, and by proper sleeping plans, so that there may be rightly developed muscular force--not too much and yet enough; so that there may be perfect circulation; fat enough and not too much; and that there may be a full supply of energy. if the young woman is vain enough to wish not to be portly when she is forty, she must not wait till she is forty-five to go to work at it; she should begin at twenty to train for that special form of beauty; if she does this she will soon express it in trimness, in an energetic and graceful step, in the exact curve of the spinal column at the small of the back, the right lift of the chest beneath the neck, and the perfect position of chin, elbows, shoulder blades, hips, feet, and all the parts of the body, for walking, sitting, standing, running, sleeping, and for every possible activity. beauty is a thing to be valued and worked for; but a greater motive for the attention necessary to the full development of our physical powers is that we should be able to give to our children the greatest allotment of beauty and vigor that we can possibly command. miss goldmark in her valuable study, _fatigue and efficiency_, says that the results of overstrain in the labor of women are manifest in a heightened infant mortality, in a lowered birth rate, and in an impaired second generation. we should take this to heart. not to make a struggle to increase our store of vigor for the sake of the children that are to be is to do them a great wrong. for girls under twenty the responsibility of the mother is greater because so much depends upon the establishment of the daughter's health during these earlier years. but girls themselves should take it upon their own responsibility to a large extent also. in the appendix to this volume will be found a bibliography where among the works published by the young women's christian association, the girl may find some that will answer many questions that perhaps have puzzled her in the period of swift growth between fifteen and twenty. every mother should be in her daughter's confidence in regard to all questions of health and physical well-being. and now and then the father should stand his daughters up in a row before him, look them over, and see for himself whether they are sound, blooming, well developed and rosy. do their chests stand up good and strong? is the chin well down and back? are the shoulders well back? can they take full, deep, long breaths? if they were set back against the wall, would the hips be close to the wall, the shoulder blades nearly flat against the wall and would the girls be perfectly comfortable in that position? and can they then walk off, holding the frame in this way, and keep the position firmly and gracefully? how hard can they hit, how fast can they run, how high can they jump, how much can they lift, how free are they from pain, and how happy are they? if the answers to these questions are not satisfactory, that farmer's crop of humanity does not take a prize! and he should try to know the reason why. it is not a lightning streak of divine disfavor that has destroyed this crop. it is just as impossible that a woman should have a beautiful child if she has been the victim of overstrain for ten years before that child is born, as it would be to get a good crop from absolutely untilled ground. the home is the field for the harvest of children. that ground must be cultivated as carefully and assiduously as any other, or the harvest will bring no honor to the family. if the young girls in the farmstead do not measure up to the standard, will they try to do what is in their power to make themselves more strong, fit, and beautiful? it will take six weeks of hard, unremitting work, by night and day and every hour in the day, to turn a round-shouldered girl into a well-shaped, straight-shouldered, elastic figure. is it worth while? the result will be a girl with better breathing capacity, more vigor, more beautiful carriage, and in every way better prepared for a happy life. there are some wrongs that are done to the young people by neglect of the laws of health that never can be made up to them. but there is much that can be done, and perhaps it is not too late to correct some errors and to make up for some losses. health conditions on many farms are not up to the mark and among the causes of this the report of the commission on country life mentions the too long hours of work. there are of course other causes. three meals a day of pork and bread, seven days in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year, year in and year out the same, will never produce blooming youngsters, especially if we are speaking of the delicate constitutions of girls. nor will bedrooms hermetically sealed from air during half of the breathing time, favor development of lung-capacity. theoretically, the farm should be the most healthful place for the growth of human beings; and wherever sanitary conveniences are installed, health conditions need no betterment. the point is not that the rural people have declined from a former better condition, but that they have not gone forward so fast as they might. while the residents of cities have at the command of new science been making swift progress in sanitation, working vigorously on the problems of pure food, good water, the suppression of tuberculosis, pellagra and other diseases, the country people have not so swiftly answered the call. such movements as, for instance, the one to provide pure milk for babies, lower the death rate in the cities, while the health rate in the country has not shown a corresponding rise. this is simply because the country towns have not waked to the importance of these endeavors toward betterment. the country may be the home of abounding physical vigor; but many an unsanitary farmstead and many an unregenerated village is still in a decidedly unmoral state of ill-health. in this matter a recent investigation in new york state has aroused serious apprehension. statistics were made public showing that the death rate in so-called rural districts was increasing as compared with that of the large city, new york, the conclusion being that the country would have to give up its world-old claim to being a supremely healthful place to live. if, however, we look into the matter more closely, we may find a ray of hope. the investigation included under the word "rural" towns of over eight thousand inhabitants, the division being no doubt made because of the fact that the united states reports were, up to , made on a like basis, and other statistics could be more conveniently compared if these were included. but the census of makes the word "rural" cover towns and villages of and under, and what we understand by rural conditions pertains to this smaller grouping. the larger grouping includes a number of towns that are manufacturing in character, that sometimes contain a large foreign element, that have the beginnings of congestion without the open air to offset them, and that have notoriously not followed in the steps of the larger cities in sanitation. thus these very unrural towns bring down the average. we feel, then, that we have a right to take heart of grace and tell ourselves that the open country is as good for health as it ever was. moreover, farm houses are rapidly acquiring the principal appliances for sanitation. the wells are being looked out for and the pure condition of the water supply being insured from contagion; and the level of education in regard to sanitation is being rapidly lifted. at present, the small towns and the larger villages are about on a par in regard to indifference to the laws of health, and to the necessity for framing new ones to meet new demands. but in the smaller villages and in the open country the necessity is not so pressing because the congestion has not been so immediate as to cause depression of the death rate there. therefore we may say that the girl who is born in the open country or in the small village is more likely, all other things being equal, to keep her hold upon life than any other girl in the land. it is said that sixty per cent. of the school children in the country suffer from removable physical defects. the countryside has its share of these. fortunately for girls, life force is more persistent with them than with boys, and women are longer-lived than men. sometimes fate deprives the home of the mother, and then heavy burdens fall to the daughter, too heavy for her young and undeveloped body. it is then that the young girl feels the necessity for a better understanding of her physical needs. wanting this, life-long suffering may be the result of undertaking severe labor ere yet her health is thoroughly established or her maximum growth has been gained. there is much, then, for every young woman on the farm both to study and to practise. the following code of rules is suggested as an aid and as a reminder: code of rules for maintaining health _bodily carriage_ hold the head erect. keep the chest high. hold the abdomen in. rest the weight of the body on the balls of the feet. keep this position constantly, by day and by night. when lying down, stretch out; do not curl up. _exercise_ make a special study of the proper times for exercise and take a normal amount of it at those times. let nothing induce you to undertake severe bodily work or strain when the body is not in a condition to sustain the strain. when all conditions are right for it, take a good deal of joyous exercise. (no one can regulate this for any girl but the girl herself.) learn some systematic exercises and practise them every day. systematize the exercise in housework as far as possible and supplement it when needed by long walks and hill-climbing. _correct breathing_ take long breaths of fresh air on rising and frequently through the day. breathe always through the nose and from the diaphragm. keep the air in the room fresh by day and by night. breathe deeply to keep the mind clear, the blood pure, and the spirits buoyant. _clothing_ let the weight of clothing hang from the shoulders. have the clothing loose enough to allow free play of the diaphragm in breathing and of the limbs in exercise. protect the feet and ankles from exposure to wet and cold. keep the chest well protected but do not over-wrap the neck. _food and eating_ have meals absolutely regularly and at proper intervals. choose foods adapted to present needs. study adaptation of foods so as to know how to choose. drink at least six glasses of pure water daily, between meals. always think and speak of something pleasant while eating. _elimination of waste_ free the body from poisonous waste by keeping the bowels active. by keeping the pores of the skin open. by using a great deal of well-planned, vigorous exercise. by general cleanliness. _cleanliness_ take a cold tonic sponge or shower bath every day when in good health. take a warm cleansing bath once or twice a week. keep the mouth and skin free from dirt and germs. give perfect care to the hair and the finger nails. wash the hands before eating or serving food. brush the teeth at least twice every day--on rising and on retiring; after every meal is better still. avoid gathering or spreading disease germs through any form of contact. _amount of sleep_ ten and one-half hours ( : to : ) for those to years old. ten hours ( : to : ) for those to years old. nine and one-half hours ( : to : ) for those to years old. eight hours ( : to : ) for those to years old. lost sleep must invariably be made up. try to go to sleep happy. _rest_ when you work, work efficiently; when you rest, rest efficiently; whatever you do, do it with all your might. when resting, relax perfectly; let go. stop worrying; think of something else; think of something cheerful. do not yield to impatience or to anger; they shorten life. think pure and beautiful thoughts; learn the beautiful thoughts of others and say them over till they become your own. cultivate a well balanced mind; preserve courage and cheer. _prevention of illness or of a depressed state of health_ study the laws of hygiene and of sanitation. avoid patent medicines of all kinds. when ill, consult a reliable physician. prevent illness by following the laws of health and by regular health examinations. chapter xvi the country girl's wage "to preserve as things above all price the old domestic morals of the land, her simple manners and her stable worth that dignified and cheered a low estate, ... the character of peace, sobriety, and order, and chaste love, and honest dealing, and untainted speech, and pure good-will, and hospitable cheer; that made the very thought of country life a thought of refuge, for a mind detained reluctantly amid the bustling crowd." _wordsworth._ chapter xvi the country girl's wage a vision had certainly visited the soul of a certain fifteen-year-old country girl of new york state who claimed that the girls of the present day have a progressive spirit, and that if this spirit of progress is not found on the farm, they will seek it in the city. the bearing of this spirit on the question of the country girl's wage has made her think more deeply and feel more keenly than words can express. she cannot resist the conclusion that unless the young people are paid definite wages for the work they do on the farm, it will not seem to them that they are getting on so well as they might in a city office. this is a delicate diagnosis of a very painful trouble. many of the girls realize that the tenure of industry in the city is light for the person that comes unprepared for it; many realize that the dangers are thickly set about her path; many know well that the lure of the city is to be valiantly resisted; but the majority, being but little accustomed to the handling of money, and having sadly little instruction as to real values, cannot see why eight dollars a week gained in some city industry does not represent a fortune. in making her budget at home the cost of rental and food have not been taken into account, and she has never been made to realize what these items mean in the new environment. parents and teachers and ministers and all sober people in the farming community are cruelly to blame for the ineptitude of their neglect in leaving these things unimpressed upon the mind of the young women in the community and for not watching out for the strangers who may fill their minds with glowing descriptions not founded on fact about the abundant opportunity and the free and enjoyable life to be found in the walks of city work and play. "let the child earn money, have money, spend money, save money," advised a country mother; and if this were done, wisely and all the time, from earliest years up, the boys and girls would not come to the age of question and desire with so little preparation for its responsibilities. from a wide correspondence with country girls in many parts of america, the conclusion is forced upon us that very few of them, even when mature and hard-working young women, are receiving definite pay for their service to the household. they are doing a wage-worthy work but they are not paid for it. instead the fathers think their duty is done when they give to the daughters as a benevolence what they, the fathers, think the daughters should have for their needs and pleasures. meantime there is a new thing under the sun, namely, an awakening of the desire for economic independence in the soul of woman, and the younger women on the farms are partaking of this spirit. result, the cityward procession! some medieval daughters have not heard of this new spirit, but they will hear of it and they also will be stirred with a divine discontent. many girls gain time and permission to enter into some earning work outside of the home. the money that they thus gain they generally feel that they may lay claim to and use it as they think best. at any rate, the fear that it will not be understood that they do have what they earn leads them sometimes to emphasize the fact that they do positively consider what they earn outside of the home as their very own. public opinion is ahead of law in this respect. a father who took legal means to take the earnings of a son under age, was quietly told that the village would be too small for him hereafter. perhaps we have not come to the point where this would invariably happen in the case of a daughter. the daughter as she grows up should have a reasonable sum of money to spend as she likes; this is essential as a matter of education, to prepare her for the responsibilities that are to be hers as one of the great body of spenders. she should grow up with a fully trained power to spend money wisely. and when she becomes mature, if she is strong enough to do a full-grown woman's work, she should have her self-respect educated and cultivated by receiving the sum of money that would be her fair wage if she were not a member of the family. moreover, a father may attach his children to himself in a very real and spontaneous service, if he will allow each child, including the daughters, to be responsible for some part of the farm business, to own a piece of land or some of the livestock, and to control the produce thereof. this will be the best way to train them not only to understand the problems of the farm but to feel that interest that comes only through possession and responsibility. the daughter will be as keenly responsive under this method as the son. dr. anna howard shaw in a recent address made a good point. it was in effect something like this: she said that if the farmer gave his son a colt, not a scrub colt but one of the very best on the farm to be all his own and to do with as he chose, that colt would tie the boy to the farm as nothing else could unless it was a share of the farm itself. the same, she said, was true in regard to the girl who went out to milk the cows because that was part of her duty, without having any heart or interest in the result of the milking; but if she were given a cow, one of the best of the herd as her own, she would not only be interested in the milking of that one, but all the cows she milked would give more milk--she would do all her work better because of the interest she took in the work. this is not saying that either the girls or the boys are unconscientious in their work and will not do well unless they have a selfish motive; it is only to say that they are human beings and all the more like grown-up people. dr. shaw added as her opinion that the ownership of the boy and girl should not end merely with the colt and the cow. each year they should feel that a certain percentage of the net profits of the work should belong to them, and that they were having a chance to accumulate, even though it was only a very small part of the income a year. "if i had a farm and had sons and daughters on it," said dr. shaw, "i would sit down and discuss the whole matter of the work of the farm with them, and agree upon a certain share of the net and then let each one have his or her share, and encourage them to invest it, but leave them free to use their own judgment as to the investment. until something of this sort is done, i am afraid that the boys and girls more and more will turn from the farm to the city; and who can well blame them, even though it costs them more to live in the city than they can make? sometimes one feels happier in spending every dollar he has merely to live, if he is free to spend it as he wishes, than he would to save if he were not free." this wisdom may sound a little utopian, at any rate as far as country girls are concerned. very few girls are assigned any pecuniary share in the farm. now and then one remembers that she once had several calves that were "called" her own; but she does not remember ever receiving any money from that stock. a mother will share the precious egg-money with the daughter. one girl confessed to owning a tree, and one a canary. another mentioned as her pecuniary share in the farm the fact that she helped milk! nearly all would agree with dr. shaw that having a share in the ownership would make them more enthusiastic for the success of the farm. if the young woman in the farmstead would be more systematic in the use of what money she can command, perhaps she would the sooner be trusted with greater financial responsibility. it certainly is a motive in many parental minds that the children--they still seem to be children in the thoughts of some parents even when they have reached years of discretion--are not wise enough to use money discretely. often they are not, but whose fault is it? if children were trained in the use of money from childhood up, they would not be so foolish when the time comes for putting this discipline into practise. parents should remember that they are sure to wish some time to have a wise, careful son to lean upon. then they will wish they had trained the child properly. the same is true of the daughter. there is nothing more certain than that the daughters in the wide countryside are being brought up in the main with very little inkling of business. now any girl that has gone as far in her education as to spell and to compute fractions is quite far enough to be taught the meaning of a deed. and not long after that she should know the force of the little word "warranty" or "full covenant" or "quitclaim" written before the word "deed." she should understand something of the meaning of the fell term "mortgage"--something besides the fact that when it is mentioned everybody is expected to weep. if young women grew up with a more common-sense attitude toward this vital subject, the word would be robbed of some, at least, of its terrors. in just a few years those young women will be the distributors of the income for a whole family; they are to be the conservators of the saving for the fatal day of interest-paying. if they understood more of the practical working of the matter, the saving would be approached with less dismay. does it not seem reasonable to suppose that if a girl is made to see the relation of "overhead charges" to the "cost of living," if she has been taken into family confidence with regard to the business of the farm, and has been made to understand the difference between the basis for a girl's wages in town and that in the farm home, she will not run away under a fatal misunderstanding of conditions there? moreover the girl of to-day is to be the home-conserver of to-morrow. since the woman is the fore-ordained overseer of the whole business of spending, we may say that her failure to save and to plan and to adapt, has been the cause of all our trouble. it makes no difference to the women of the countryside that the women of the cities are more culpable in these things than are they; their affair is their own, and their duty is to attain not some one else's ideal, but their own. the model home-conserver will have the budget for the year put into shape; she will know all the items of rent, interest on mortgages (if the family are so unfortunate as to have these troublesome things to look after), the dates when the fatal inroad has to be made into the cherished store of savings, the days when the various taxes are due--the inheritance, county, village, water and other special taxes--and all other payments that belong in the system of support that the farm or village home requires. she must know that the thing to be aspired to and looked forward to is that at the end of the year the financial income and outgo should accurately balance. the young woman who neglects her own small account will not be preparing herself for these larger responsibilities; and she must be able to make this small one balance if she expects to do the same with the greater one. the comfort of having it come out right once will be an incentive ever after; and the effect upon character of compelling one's self to keep steadily to the task of mental accuracy, of remembering each item and of putting it down quickly before it has escaped, will be incalculable. it is not a matter of mere idiosyncrasy that a young girl may say, "oh, i cannot keep my accounts and make them come out right--it's too much trouble for just me!" to have to confess this should be considered a disgrace. one should conceal the disinclination to this duty, as one should conceal a disinclination to give one's hair the thorough weekly washing which that passion for cleanness that is the mark of the true lady calls for. it is impossible for a young girl of right instincts to say, "oh, i would just as lief be an unclean person!" so it should be impossible for the young girl of right feeling to say, "oh, i would willingly be a lazy, ineffective and partly dishonest person in my understanding of business!"--for slackness and inaccuracy in business are the next door to dishonesty. in all finances, to the remotest penny, the rightly constituted girl will be accurate. if necessity compels her to borrow a small sum, she will repay it at the earliest possible moment. it is not the mark of a fine woman to be careless in spending; quite the contrary. the young woman who has intellectuality and training and taste to compute her expenses carefully, to use the money to good advantage and to the best purpose, is the young woman of higher grade, not the one who wastes, who scatters carelessly and purposelessly, and who indulges in things costing much and affording no permanent good. our ideal in these respects needs some right-about-face orders from our conscience. "saving," says professor martha van rensselaer at cornell university, "cultivates self-control, imagination, resourcefulness, character." she continues: "it is quite right to economize on some standbys and then spend more for some esthetic object, if the esthetic better satisfies a real craving connected with the higher life.... it is not meanness to study economy; it is not 'near' to avoid waste. to work out new uses that may be made of every particle of food, to get the full food-value out of every bit of it, is scientific exactness instead." it is possible that all the skill of the woman in the farm home will be needed as time goes on to keep the financial foundations of the farmstead firm. a long look forward seems to discern on the horizon a rising necessity for greater care, and perhaps for all the skill that the farm women and other women of the next generation can master. why should nature go on interminably caring for a people who indulge themselves so heedlessly, so criminally in waste, cutting away their forests, throwing away good food, refusing to use the supplies of electric power in their rivers? of course she will not. disciplines are before us. it is the part of wisdom to use greater stringency and more scientific exactness in our household systems, that disaster may not come upon us unprepared. some prevision of this may be in the minds of women when they endeavor to give themselves a bit of training for direct money-earning business. for them, and especially the younger women, openings are being made in almost every direction. a woman is no longer to be accused of a tastelessly commercial spirit if she desires to know through actual experiment the value of her labor in the commercial rating of the community. it is only by trying that she can thus standardize her labor. if she offers cabbage plants from her growing patch, honey from her bee-colonies, wild fruit that she has gathered from god's free gardens, if she takes boarders, weaves hair, embroiders, or mends, if she takes advantage of postal service and builds up a business in fine lace-laundering, or silk and lingerie waist cleansing, whatever she takes in hand, she is not only earning a little money, but she has gained skill in manipulation, developed taste, compelled herself to seek excellence, and strengthened her character by putting her work--and that means herself--to the test of comparison with the work of others to stand or fall by the decision. if she has failed in this test, she has the chance to try harder and gain more character in further struggle. all this should be looked upon as a part of the girl's training for life. when parents have presented to the human family a highly developed and trained young woman as their contribution, they should expect her to desire to be a worker and to take up some form of activity as the beginning, in turn, of her personal contribution. professor nearing says that every girl should occupy the years between the latest school days and her marriage in some wage-earning pursuit. there should be two or three years there that she could spend in this part of her education. she should thus learn business law, the stringency of markets, the balance of purchase and sale, the interchange of commercial motive, and the art of salesmanship. here will be a great field of training for her, and every part of it will be useful to her when she enters upon the duties of her own house and home. the best way for any girl to start upon this means of discipline, is to think over what she can already do well. what have you been praised for doing? take that and try to do it still better. what you best like to do will be the easiest to start with. do this so well that people will desire the product. people buy what they think is most excellent: therefore make something so excellent that people will want to buy it. and remember this principle: the _appearance_ of anything offered for sale has a great deal to do with whether people will take a liking to it or not. do up all things nicely; make all packages neat and shipshape; use color if possible; have the box and the cord match in tint; humor the fancy of the buyer. at a certain country fair the girls in one particular booth had great success. why? their voices were sweet and they themselves were neatly dressed. but above all, the packages were done up so deftly and looked so beautiful when they were handed out that it was not difficult to understand the success of this booth. buyers want a good product, but they do like it in a fine package. [illustration: this tennessee girl is a member of a gardening and canning club. she won the cow and calves as premiums for having the best exhibit at the state fair.] a beautiful enthusiasm for canning club work comes from the south. joined with many other good things that come inevitably with the organization of young life, it has enriched and blest the girls incalculably. writing to me of this, one woman said: "it has done more to stir the southern girls from the lethargy into which so many of them had fallen than anything else i can think of." in reply to an inquiry, mr. o. h. benson, in charge of canning club work for the u. s. department of agriculture, i wrote: "during the present year there are about , boys and girls enrolled in club projects in the united states who are receiving special follow-up instruction and who are organized on the federated basis, making them members not only of their own local community but of the state and national movement. about half of these are girls who are doing work with poultry, home gardening or the canning club project work." mr. benson was kind enough to lend me the photograph of the young lady with the two jersey calves. she is miss myrtle hardin, of camden, tennessee, a girl fifteen years of age, who has been a member of the gardening and canning club of the state for four years. the two jersey calves were won as premiums for having the best records for club work in the state fair for and . mr. benson gives a list of the prizes she won, and of the educational trips she has taken, and adds: "besides this, she has earned from her work several hundred dollars which she deposited in the bank and will use to pay her expenses to attend college and take a domestic science course." this efficient girl so interested me that i wrote her and asked her to tell me herself something about her achievements that i might hand it on as an inspiration to other girls. she wrote me this delightful account: the tomato club has meant more to me than i am able to tell. my two years' experience has taught me how to prepare nice things for the table, how to beautify the home, and how to make life in the country attractive and happier. nothing has done more to train my mind than our club work. i have read bulletins, cookbooks, books on home-making and domestic science, and dozens of different papers and magazines in the two years' work. i have written histories of my crops, and compiled "tomato recipe" booklets, and "the life history of the tomato"; and have drawn the plan, complete, of my home and grounds. on all of the above i won first prizes in my state and county. [illustration: springtime in the country. city children may well envy their little country cousins the free life in the open and the companionship with animals.] i have as a result of my two years' work two jersey calves, indian runner ducks, raised from a pair i won last year, a pen of thoroughbred chickens, a tireless cooker, a cut glass bowl, and a great many small prizes, as well as some cash which i won at different places. i love best of all my calves, ducks and chickens and hope to tell you some ups and downs with them some time. i have always been a "benton county country girl," and love the farm and its life. i had been out of my county but twice when i became a club member. in the last two years i have traveled in ten different states--but still like tennessee best of all. i have also visited a great many large cities, our national capital being one. last year, miss moore said i could go, as first prize winner, with four other girls to the national corn show at columbia, s. c. we spent a delightful day in atlanta, a week in columbia, and two days in charleston on this trip, besides stopping at several other cities for a few hours. o how grand the atlantic looked and how majestic its ships! i thought then that a tomato club girl could be no more highly favored than i. but this year when miss moore wrote me that i had been selected to go to washington it seemed too good to believe. what a delightful time we had, girls and boys from michigan to florida and from south carolina to oregon. the greatest people in the land showed us that they thought we too had some degree of greatness because we were "good farmers and had a purpose in life." we were not ashamed of our work, either, for i presented "the highest lady in the land" some of my canned goods, and she very graciously accepted them and told us she was proud of "her girls." as a final treat miss moore carried me to new york where we met some lovely people and spent two days full of interest and sight-seeing. then home in time for christmas. some have asked me how i won. i don't know, but my county agent says, "it's because you try to do everything you are told to do in the work, and do it like you are told." that may be true. i advise every club girl to do no less than this anyway. full information about the work of canning cubs for girls may be obtained by any one who will write to the department at washington or directly to mr. benson, and ask for circulars on the subject. many of the state agricultural colleges, also, have bulletins on the subject. in all these wage-earning endeavors there is but one caution to be thought of beforehand. we should remember that when a young woman is working in the kitchen of the farm home, she is doing a wage-worthy work fully as much as when she is offering to some outside market. now if she undertakes to make use of some by-product of the farm, if she cans the waste vegetables, reclaims them to common use, and standardizes the product, will not this new industry march into the factory as the others have, and will not the woman in the home be left without her wage as before? unless the right principle underlies the business of canning, this will surely come to pass. there is no reason why the housework should not be standardized and brought under the law of economic production; there is no reason why a new sort of canning should be left in the unregulated realm for the benefit of the woman's whim for a work of her own. it shall surely not escape commercialization. the rag carpet, now a cheapened factory product, should be a warning to women. what we should work for is not the enclosing of a certain piece of work with bars that we may get our hands upon it, but the establishment of economic laws that shall make women free to work wherever their taste and abilities incline them. for the country girl in her plans for a future life of healthful, satisfying labor, the pathway to this better order lies over the rocky pavement of household systemization and scientific budget-making. chapter xvii the dress budget there is that scattereth and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet and it tendeth to poverty. _proverbs._ except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. _st paul._ even the son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister. _jesus._ chapter xvii the dress budget the country girl has this advantage--the business of the farm and the home are so closely connected that the work she has to do can be carried on without separating her from her home. this would not be so in any work she could undertake in the city. she would not have a great big house to return to from her store or factory, but some little upstairs room, the "hall-bedroom" of that tragic book _the long day_, which so painfully portrays the conditions of work for girls in a great city. the country girl in her home with her housework about her is in a paradise compared with conditions such as these. the "home" means rent, board, general living expenses--all these are looked out for in the scheme of life for the country girl. why, then, does she feel so great a need for sheer money? the reason is partly this: she has the dress problem on her hands. she is scantily supplied with a bit now and then when she asks for a cloak or some other garment; she is not assigned a certain sum a month, as her self-respecting spirit demands, and left free to use it as her judgment directs. she has not been trained to do this and the fear that she will not do it wisely keeps the father from inaugurating such a system. in the long run, after the daughter has gained wisdom from a few mistakes with the suffering resulting therefrom, the outgo from the parental pocket would not be much increased by adopting the educative method of letting her have the personal management of her little budget. few fathers can bear to see a daughter really suffer; most fathers will not let her even foolishly think that she is suffering, and a plea from her will generally bring an indulgence in some unnecessary purchase. the problem is intricate and has many sides; but we believe the best way for the father to take would be to place a set sum at her command with the injunction that she is to plan and use it carefully--and make it do! if the parent is able to go so far in the process of education as to start her on a cash account and oversee her as she tries to carry it on, especially if he will initiate her in the mysteries of a small bank account, he will in the majority of cases be richly repaid in the development of an ability to manage and to save that he did not suspect the daughter to possess. the father himself, in the happy-go-lucky method of most fathers in their financial relations with the women of the family, does not know what the daughter's dress budget for a year ought to be. the following lists of items for a country girl's dress budget are presented here as much for the father's sake as for that of the girls. the lists have been drawn from various sources and they represent the thought of many students of country life conditions and of some country girls themselves. the first list was made by a wide-awake country girl in the state of idaho: list of clothing for a year, for a girl in high school suit for best for year, coat for best years $ . winter coat . winter hat for best . winter hat for school, a felt knock-about . spring coat or party wrap . summer hat . pair gloves, seldom worn here except on sundays . pair golf gloves . pairs shoes . pairs of stockings . pairs rubbers . suits underclothing, winter . suits underclothing, summer . underskirts, white . underskirt, knitted . silk underskirt . pairs corsets . corset covers . waists (not worn much) . worsted skirt . linen skirt . gingham wash dresses . princess slip . miscellaneous, per year of nine months . ------ $ . she adds this note: "some figures are guessed at, for i make and remake my clothes always. note that the suit is not necessary. needless to mention these figures are doubled and even trebled by some thoughtless girls of poor but long-suffering parents. i earn my own money." the following meager list represents, i am sure, the thought of a girl who has been accustomed to the least that could possibly be got along with: dress for a village girl going to school woolen combination suits $ . corset waist . flannelette petticoats . black petticoat . waist . dress skirt . woolen dress . winter hat . pair gloves . pairs of stockings . pairs of rubbers . pairs of shoes . winter coat . spring coat . handkerchiefs . ------ $ . the following is quoted with permission from a valuable little leaflet prepared by miss caroline d. pratt, of hampton institute, hampton, virginia, and shows what the prices would be for a girl in the southern realm: suggestions for clothing for school girls undervests (summer) $. undervests (winter) . pair drawers, homemade . white petticoats, homemade . nightgowns, homemade . underwaists, homemade . gingham petticoat, homemade . short flannel petticoats, homemade . plain shirt waists, homemade . white percale dress skirt, homemade . gingham dress, homemade . muslin dress, homemade . gingham aprons, homemade . white aprons, homemade . pairs stockings . pair low shoes . pair high shoes . pair corsets . hat . wool skirt . suit . raincoat . pair rubbers . umbrella . collars . handkerchiefs . pair gloves, lisle . pair gloves, wool . belts, neckties . ------ $ . this list has been very carefully thought out, it is evident; but while the sum is small, we believe that it would be difficult to get clothing of good material at these figures. for instance, the corset. a fifty-cent corset cannot easily be made to last a year; and it would probably be of such a shape that it would be injurious rather than helpful to the wearer. perhaps something else could be substituted for that, however; that should be studied out by the country girls. to this budget miss pratt adds a page of suggestions that are so useful that we are glad to have more girls read them. here they are: what a well-dressed girl wears to school neat, plain, shirt waists. plain, well-made, cotton or wool dresses. plain, short, wool skirt. good material will last longer and prove more economical in the end. clean, plain, well-mended, durable underwear. if trimmed, use cambric ruffles, lace, or embroidery of good quality. torchon lace wears well and is cheap. clean collars and neckties. neckties and belts should either match or harmonize with skirt or waist. hair neatly and becomingly dressed, not extreme. clean hands and finger nails. plainly trimmed hat. plain, serviceable coat. neat, comfortable shoes. neat gloves. old gloves and shoes are neat when clean and carefully mended. what a well-dressed girl does not wear to school elaborate shirt waists or dresses. jewelry. low shoes and thin stockings in winter. bright, gay colors. petticoats longer than dress skirt. dusty, spotted clothes. fussy neckwear. soiled shirt waist and collar. dresses or underwaists cut too low. short sleeves in winter. coats, dresses, skirts, or waists whose buttons or hooks and eyes are lacking. holes in stockings. safety-pin showing beneath the belt. from a report by miss caroline gleason, director of social survey for the consumers' league of oregon, is copied, with permission, a carefully made list representing conditions in the northwest: winter coat $ . suit . extra skirt . dark waists . white waists . dark underskirts . suits summer underwear . suits winter underwear . dozen pair stockings . pair corsets . corset covers . - / dozen cotton handkerchiefs . pair gloves . pair shoes . pair rubbers . umbrella . hats . party dress . white underskirts . summer dresses . ------- $ . miss gleason adds: "in making out a budget for the cost of the country girl's clothes, i would feel it necessary to consider whether they were procured in the city at city prices (through mail order houses) or in the country store. my reason for saying this is that, judging from my slight experience, country prices are higher than city prices even with postage attached." these western and southern reports may be supplemented by two that come from new england. the first of these is made by miss l. g. chase, social worker in providence, rhode island, and represents a great deal of thought and experience. it may be called final for that part of the country. it is as follows: _underwear_-- winter-- union suits at c. (cotton and wool) $ . summer-- shirts at c. . pair drawers (made at home) at c. . two outing-flannel petticoats, yds. at c. . two outside petticoats, yds. at c. . one ferris-waist . one pair garters . four nightdresses (estimated) . _coats, hats, gloves_-- summer coat . winter school hat . winter hat (best) . summer hat (every day) . two pair gloves . _rubbers, shoes, stockings_-- one pair rubbers . one pair high shoes . one pair low shoes . repairs to shoes . eight pair stockings (estimated) . _dresses_-- summer-- yds. gingham at c.--trimming c. (best dress) . gingham dress, yds. at c.--trimmings c. . white middy blouse and skirt-- yds. material at - / c. . fall and winter blue ratinée-- - / yds. at c., trimming and girdle c. . brown corduroy-- yds. at c., trimming $ . . three shirt-waists-- - / yds. each at - / c. . one pongee waist (made from dress of mother, estimated value of waist to take its place) . handkerchiefs, collars, ties, etc. (estimated) . ------ $ . left over for use for another year-- winter coat, sweater, white panama hat, white dress, princess slip, corset cover, blue serge dress, black and white check dress, gingham dress, house dress. the second new england budget was prepared by a group of girls at the agricultural college of connecticut, most of whom came from the country. the scheme is made for three years' wear and is given with the caption that the girls themselves chose. a three-year budget suitable for a sixteen to eighteen year old girl living in the country and attending a neighboring high school, with the advantage of shopping in the city. to be attractive is not to attract attention. in choosing her clothes, a young girl at school must consider style, suitability, durability, neatness, and cost. cheap materials should not be chosen merely because they are cheap, for in the end a high-priced material is often cheaper than a low-priced one. light-weight unionsuits at c. $ . heavy-weight knit unionsuits at $ . . corset covers (plain) at c. . corset covers (fancy) at c. . princess slip . white petticoats at $ . . dark petticoats at $ . . summer nightgowns (of long cloth or nainsook) at c. . winter nightgowns (of outing-flannel) at c. . pairs corsets at $ . . waists (made at home of material easily laundered) at c. . waists at $ . . heavy skirt . cotton dresses at $ . . dress (silk) . dresses, woolen material at $ . . suit (coat and skirt) . heavy skirt . sweater . heavy coat . light coat . raincoat . winter hats . summer hats . pairs silk gloves . pairs heavy gloves . ties at c. . handkerchiefs . pairs stockings at c. . pairs stockings at c. . pairs shoes at $ . . pairs overshoes at c. . extras: hairpins, tooth-brushes, shoe-polish, various toilet articles . extras: ribbons, velvet, collars, etc. . ------- dress budget for three years $ . dress budget for one year $ . these various budgets are given that we may be sure to have some approach to a standard for each part of the country. but it is of course possible that none of them will meet the case of a great many of the girls. however, the hope is that they may at least give the suggestion that it is a useful thing to make such a list in order that a girl may thus be able to see at a glance what she is doing with her money; and when she is looking forward into the year ahead she may feel an inspiration to plan beforehand and thus forestall the disaster that so surely follows poor investment. the first principle of efficiency is to put in a pin, as it were, at a certain point, so that one may see what point has been reached and so be helped to decide whether it can be surpassed another time. let this chapter be a help to put in such a pin, to set something like an ideal of what is possible in the matter of reasonable dress. it may also aid the daughter to know what she may fairly expect her father to supply for her needs. it may help the well-meaning father to realize what he must do if his children are able to hold up their heads in the community. the rank of the head of the family is often reckoned by the appearance of the wife and child. some of these lists are evidently made for a girl whose father may be marked by the daughter's dress as a man of less position and generosity and fairness than he imagines himself to be. that state of things can easily be corrected. on the other hand, the girl that has time for sewing, and the cleverness and training to do it, should take delight in making her clothing for herself. given those antecedent conditions, the country girl's dress will thus be not only less expensive, but also better adapted to herself, and more charming because more individual. chapter xviii founding a home the woman that can in the midst of her rigid daily duties fall on her knees and thank god for the dim, black forests which are the eternal fans of nature, for the rain that appeases the thirst of the birds of the air, and the newly sown seed in the fields, that can feel amid these natural objects awe, admiration, a sense of infinite force, of boundless life, of duration that is eternal in its broad and human sweep, leaving her stunned with the realization of her pigmied self in the presence of these veritable facts, and at the same time filling her with a deep, maternal pride that she, too, is a living, necessary factor in god's world of rural life is the one that possesses the power to rise above the common drudgeries of daily existence. she knows that the secret of the beautiful and simple life is to make oneself a symbol of heavenly life. --_sigismund von eberstadt._ chapter xviii founding a home there is one thing that may not be mentioned by any country girls even in their dearest confidences, but that we may for a surety know: it is that every one of them looks forward to the making of her own home. yes; every one has her dream of a "hope chest"; and as she wanders about her home community she is looking here and there to see what hillside or what sightly place on the plain will be the destined location for her home. like the wise woman in proverbs, she, in imagination, buildeth her house beforehand, and thinks it all out according to the scope of her ideals. these ideals that are cherished in the thoughts of the young woman are her most valuable possessions. they are the blossoming of the best that she has received from her education, her surroundings in the home, the advice of her elders, the influence of the books she has read, the music she has heard and has made, the plays she has seen and the poetry she has learned. they are the inherited result of long years of experience on the part of the race; and perhaps in no place is the best that past centuries have garnered to be found more assimilated and concentrated than in the country home in america. in the history of the evolution of society we recall that woman was assigned no small place. in those early eons of the long slow growth of society, she was the creator of the home; she was the master of the mysteries of fire and of household devices; she was the carrier, the lapidary, the builder, the inventor, the harvester, the tiller of the soil; she was the weaver, the skin dresser, the maker and mender of clothing, the hewer of wood and the drawer of water; she was the linguist and instructor of girls; she was a prophetess and a founder of religion; she went into battle with the fighting men and she deliberated in the council of the tribe. she had her full share in the creation of a social order. to dwell upon the history of domestic evolution will perhaps encourage the young woman of to-day to step forward and shoulder the responsibilities that belong to her. but the young woman in the rural field has at present a special difficulty. if the better and more adventurous among the rural young men withdraw to the city, the choice of the young women that remain is restricted. indeed many may continue unmarried because of the lack of companionship of their own caliber. this situation should work several ways; to the young men who are tempted to run away to city life, it should be an incitement to stay where their true home is; it should also be an inspiration to the youths remaining in the home village when the less loyal or the more enterprising young men have departed, to build up efficiency in every possible way, so that they may make themselves more acceptable and successful in the social field of the community. but as to the girls themselves--ay, there's the rub! difficult as the problem always is for any young woman, it is doubly so for her in the country to-day. under these circumstances, what the dignified position for her to take is hazardous to say. there is no use in trying to minimize the great importance of the problem. the advance or the deterioration of the community depends on the mental and physical health of the race. in order that a home may be successfully founded; that it may carry on the best traditions and improve upon them, it should be made by the best possible choice of each other on the part of those that form it. back of these best possible choices must lie the highest ideals and the courage to demand the fulfilment of these ideals. for the characteristics of the children in any home will be formed by the characteristics of both the parents. therefore, the quality and character of both parents will determine whether the race shall ascend in the scale of being or shall decline and deteriorate. the young may not choose for their own pleasure alone; they should choose also for the sake of the whole race and its hopes and aspirations. they must develop themselves; they must make themselves and keep themselves sound and well-trained and in good trim not for their own joy in living, not even solely for the benefit of those about them, but for the strength and success of those who are to live after them. it is for this reason that the choice is so momentous. and it is not to be wondered at that many young men and young women find the years of youthful decisions fraught with an almost tragic significance. in the present state of social evolution, the burden of choice seems to rest chiefly upon the young man. but is it really so? professor scott nearing asks the question and then makes the suggestion that though the conventionally modest young woman of to-day may shrink from the thought that she should take the lead in this matter of selection, still she may unconsciously and instinctively do so after all. the same suggestion is strongly urged by another educational authority. one of the wise men of illinois, a man of culture, an educationalist and a close observer of life, writes as follows: "what the country girl most needs and wants is a larger opportunity for social development. her life is isolated, her friends limited. she has little choice when she selects a husband from the home community. i almost wish custom would permit her to make the proposal, for i feel sure that she could do so more intelligently, and better results would obtain." we have indeed a mighty precedent in the earliest days of our national story for the initiative of the woman. "why don't you speak for yourself, john?" has been said once, and it can be said again. but then again, would the state of things be bettered if this important initiative were placed equally in the hands of women and men? would the young men suffer themselves to be ensnared by the unbelated suggestion, remain in the rural environment and found their homes there? would they allow themselves to be tied down in a place where they do not desire to be? and who would want to tie them down, anyway? the wings of lord love are tremendously energetic, especially when bound by artificial cords. in questions like these we must wait until we have seen what the young folks have done before we make up our minds what is right to do; and especially to-day when the boys and girls are suffering from the neglects of the last generation. the people who have just passed off the stage allowed education, science, recreation, good times, hospitality, and spiritual life to drag behind; now the younger farm people of to-day are feeling the results. we must look to the new life, the new methods, the new community spirit of to-morrow to make things over so that there shall spring up perfectly balanced homes all along the countryside with such attraction in home and community that no one can possibly be lured away. in this reorganization of community life, as we have seen, the country girl has a great share and duty. and one of the greatest services she can perform will be to cherish in her own heart the highest ideals as to the right and necessary construction of a home in the character of the parents, and to hold everybody on whom she has any influence in the community to those ideals as strictly as she possibly can. for it would be indeed far better for her and for her part in the onflowing life stream of racial progress if she should dwell unmarried, run her own farm, and fill her house with the laughter of some unmothered and unfathered children who would no doubt repay her with love and service and honor as devotedly as if they had been children of her very own, as if she should unite in a family plan that by carrying on impure or diseased influences would contribute to the degradation of the race, and increase the misery of the world. though hampered with some disabilities, the country girl of to-day has one great advantage. she was born after the time when it was settled conclusively that there was nothing in her sex alone that ought to hinder her mental growth and her opportunity for activity. in her time woman has come to realize that when she believes in her own inferiority, in the possibility that her sex may be a handicap, her nature will be restricted, and she will not be able to develop the powers she does possess. she sees that the obsession of this thought has tied down the woman in the past and has impeded her development. she is now wakened from this daze. what barrier can there be to a woman's progress? truly life presents many. for instance, her idea of what would for her be progress, may not be the right idea. there are many stern duties that sometimes seem to impede progress; duties to parents, to family, or to the social order; duties to religious forms that have become woven into society and could not be drawn out without too much sacrifice of what is good and necessary; duties to common legal form that has dominance and is the result of centuries of experience, and that could not be taken exception to without too great risk--these and many other things may form barriers to the desire of the mere individual. but, these being granted, the woman can have a free chance for growth and development only when she believes that nothing coming out of the mere fact of sex has a right to hamper her growth or restrict her activity, and that no one shall have the right to say what is best for her or what she ought to wish for herself, in matters where she alone can have the means for understanding the situation. these principles intimately concern the question of marriage. george meredith said that to a woman marriage should be a platform from which her soul may take a new flight. how wonderful! a platform from which the soul may take flight!--not a black cage in which the soul of woman must crouch, to which her soul must fit itself, moving cramped, and slowly, and at war with itself; not a cage in which a caught and imprisoned canary bird must sing for the amusement of its owner. no! a platform from which to take flight, with sunlighted realms to investigate and new skies to discover, with wings growing ever stronger for more daring ascensions into still clearer light. let every girl make sure that that is the kind of platform that is being built for her in the character and in the attitude of mind of the destined lover. and let her make certain that she also is building and developing in herself a character that shall be worthy of her high mission, that shall be sufficient for all its needs, and that shall merit the deep reverence that all hearts give to the mother and homemaker. in order that the founding of a successful home may be the country girl's happy lot, is it too much to ask that she should cherish for herself the ideal of a nature clean and pure, with so high a reverence for purity that she shall demand it in her lover as in herself? and that she shall recognize no difference in her standard for the morality of both the young man and the young woman? should not her ideal include the fact of established health, both physical and mental, with a physician's certificate for both young man and young woman as to this, and include also a good inheritance of health in both families together with absolute freedom from alcoholism or other death-dealing diseases? moreover, no marriage can be quite happy and successful that is not based upon the principle that each shall respect the personal rights of the other; and this should include, not only matters of income and property, but of tastes and opinions, and of all personal relationships. both should have a good common school education and as much more as circumstances will permit. if he is a college graduate, she should be one also; and she should never be asked to leave her college course in order to marry. a wise girl will frown upon the young man who makes plans for marriage before he has gained a thorough training in some good bread-winning occupation and also developed a fair money-earning capacity. the country girl may be reminded again that she herself should have the thorough training in the science, art, and business of the household that will make her a perfect house administrator and homemaker and leave it possible to adapt some part of this varied work to money earning should occasion require. the ideal for two who are to found a home together should certainly include a genuine love of home life, together with love of children and a capacity to become a wise, efficient father and mother. a home will be more interesting and therefore more successful, as years move along, if the founders are people of growing nature, if they have a disposition to keep in touch with affairs, if they indulge themselves with an avocation, something they especially like to do, something that will carry on their education to farther heights. there must be courage,--home-founding calls for heroism--there must be fortitude, reserve force, patience. ordeals will come, and trials: a buoyant faith in the spiritual realities alone will bear us through these. then it must be remembered that we live in the community. it is well to select a socialized nature, one having ability to live among people and to meet them successfully, one that knows the give-and-take of social life. both the young man and the young woman must be good citizens in the community. now what has been forgotten? the great thing that perhaps with most young people is thought of first, namely, the question as to whether these two young people like each other or not. but the phase being presented here concerns not so much the choice of a particular one who shall be companion in the founding of a certain home, as the qualities of the group of people from among which that choice shall be made. certainly it is of the greatest importance to decide whether the two young people do really like each other or not. it would be blasphemy to enter into the relationship without that satisfaction in each other's society that alone gives promise of happiness. there should be a strong, deep affection and love for each other; they should have a mutuality of interest, tastes and ideals; they should enjoy each other's society; and these points should be put to the test of time and absence--but not too much of either! homes founded by members of groups who hold ideals like these and live up to them, will be certain to carry on into the future the best the race has attained and to add to the stores of happiness and well-being of all people. into such homes it will be the best possible fortune to be born; and if these homes are set against an unspoiled country background, they will be the places where children will have the best chance to develop to perfect human height. it should indeed be a part of the ideal cherished in the depths of every country girl's heart, that she will, if possible, make to the world a contribution of children, the most perfect that she can compass, the most complete in all their powers, the most invincible in their strength, mental, physical and moral; and that these shall go forth into the world trained for the most distinguished service among the world's great needs. this should be her ambition; and i believe that it is the desire and the ideal of the great majority of the girls of the present generation. to present a completed, full-grown, thoroughly efficient man or woman to the world, is a contribution to the world's storehouse of power. but how much more that means than simply to bear the child! the right direction of the babyhood and youth, the full apprehension of the value of education, and the entire dynamic encouragement to both the sons and the daughters, the example of industry, the inspiration to work, the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice to help in reaching high ideals, the wisdom to guide these endeavors--these are the things that belong to the contribution of the woman. whether or not a woman has made her due contribution is bound up in the matter of what her sons and daughters actually do for the community and the world, how wide their influence is, how serviceable they are to the general good. the mother of edison, for instance, made a great contribution. let every young woman take this point of view and consider what she is now doing, even while yet only a girl, to make it possible for her children that are to be, to have large lives, useful to the whole community. in olden time the family numbered fifteen to twenty children. then, indeed, there were things happening in the farm home! then was there companionship under the roof tree! the evenings were merry about the fireside--and, by the way, there was a literal as well as a spiritual fireside for the children to be merry about! then, too, there was hospitality, the thanksgiving dinner, the christmas home-coming for all the cousins! in those days life was worth living and there was no country life problem. we must look forward to larger families. the next row of fathers and mothers must live for this, plan for it, trust for it, and educate themselves for it; for only thus will the farmstead be at once a place where rafters shall ring with jollity, and the complex life offer dramas enough to be interesting. in this way we shall save the country. the story of the home life of the beecher family, a typical large family of old new england days, touches a high-water mark of vivid home life. there was a perfect furor of intellectual excitement going through the house all the time. every topic of public interest was brought to the home circle. books were read aloud continually. excitement of all kinds was going on in the evenings, discussions of all sorts at the table. the children were not invited, they were required, to argue. if they did not do it cleverly the father would confound them with ridicule, or he would say: "now present this argument and you will be able to down me." and then he would tell them just how to manage the point in order to show up the fallacy and gain the right conclusion. so the wise father trained their minds in a sort of play. people have talked a great deal about the value to a child of a noble mother; let a word or two be said for the value of the father in the training of the home. it should be thought of both after the home is established and before. young women should think of this in making the choice of a partner and the young men should know that they are doing so. in fact, this may be actually happening already. two little boys were talking in the playground not long ago, and one said to the other: "you mustn't do that, for if you do, you are not training for parentage." the new era has certainly begun! but there is a still larger view. the country girl should also consider what she is now doing for the community to make it one in which her sons and daughters shall, twenty years hence, have a chance for clean, wholesome and inspiring lives. if she now forms a society for the girls in her village so that the strength of each individual girl will be multiplied by the braiding together of their efforts, to the end that better social enjoyments and more intellectual and more ethical ideals may become habitual, it may be that the years filled with these high activities will result in a state of things in that community that will make higher things the rule and lower things impossible. then her village will be a safer place for her children when they come than it could have been without her own girlish endeavors. the country child starts out with a better physical development than the city child. our countryside from the atlantic to the pacific is full of children who are especially endowed for the highest attainments. may not the country girl of the next generation be expected to do something adequate and wonderful with these good gifts of heaven? chapter xix the farm partner efficient housekeeping is the beginning of good citizenship. --_professor martha van rensselaer._ chapter xix the farm partner the country girl of to-day may look forward to a life in which she shall serve in a double capacity. she is to be a farm-woman and she is to be also a wife-mother. the farm woman may do what she can in the work of the farmstead, but her occupations there must be in abeyance before the vastly greater importance of the work which is specially hers--the conserving of the best and highest interests of the family. she is, first, the head and link of the family. if after she has finished her contribution to the work of discipline, education, inspiration, reading and story-telling, spiritual and esthetic guidance, mending and making, and placing food thrice on the table daily; after she has supplied her own needs in self-education and self-inspiration, in recreation and social satisfaction, so that she may come to the tasks mentioned above with spiritual and mental energy and alertness; and if then she still has time, strength, patience, will, energy and taste, left for still greater demands upon her resources; then she may help in the things that concern the farm business. she may do whatever will be a joy to her to do, whatever she can do buoyantly and with enthusiasm. no doubt in the new era this will be possible. but the woman of the next generation is going to insist upon being happy, and her happiness is to consist in maintaining efficient working power and in having her work appreciated. her work in the home must be thought of as having the same value as any other earning work. it must be acknowledged in the home of the future that woman's skill and woman's power to save are both business assets. it should be acknowledged in the home of to-day both for the wife and for the daughter. one may say that all business is carried on by men in order that the home--which means the wife and the children--may be sustained and that its happiness and its outlook to the future may be made to prosper. all men work for this end. the love of a man for his wife and for their children is the inspiration of his daily toil. but with all other occupations save the farmer's, the business is one thing and the home is another. the woman and her share of world's work, namely the making and the keeping of the home, are a thing apart. they are placed in a little coop by themselves and there treasured as a shrine. sometimes, to be sure, the little coop where the woman plies her work is in the mind of the man quite other than a shrine. but in the majority of cases it is this, and we are speaking of the law and not of the exception. but with the wife of the farmer, the woman's laboratory-machine-shop-studio is not a little room by itself. the home is a business center; it is a dynamo from which goes out the power for the whole machinery; it is itself a piece of elaborate machinery without which the rest of the cogs and bands and phlanges would all go awry and break into pieces, doing damage to the whole farm-factory. it is because of this that the woman in the farm home is so essential a part of the farm business; it is for this reason that she is to be thought of as a partner. it is for this reason that the farm woman may have the satisfaction of knowing that she contributes more of constructive value than do the women of any other group. from these conditions farm women gain a training that no other women have. it is claimed that suffrage was carried in the northwestern states by the weight of the women of the agricultural regions; they had been trained to the new point of view by their position in the farmstead. students of the conditions of living in the homes of both city and country have proposed various schemes for the practical finances in the home. an excellent scheme for a household budget appeared in the _journal of home economics_ for june, . it provided for three separate accounts, one called "the man's personal account," one "the woman's personal account," and the third, "the family account." into the first went the man's clothes, traveling expenses (carfare, etc.), charities, amusements, society dues, dentist and doctor's bills--all personal expenses. into the second went similar items for the woman, except that the bills connected with the birth of children were not recorded there. these went into the third account, together with the running expenses of living, and all expenses connected with the children, their clothing, amusements, instruction, etc. a weekly sum came from this account for the use of the wife for the household; what remained there after these depredations, composed the mutual savings, and this sum belonged equally to both husband and wife and could be used for any purpose only by consent of both. this scheme in its general features is adapted to any family, but might of course, after discussion and consent, be altered to suit circumstances. every difficult question in the apportionment of these separate accounts should be talked over thoroughly. each member should endeavor to see the question in the abstract, pure from every selfish impulse. each should try to see it from the other's standpoint, freed from prejudice, and in the dry light of reason. by working out these problems for several years, it may be possible to bring the sums set apart for certain purposes down to fixed amounts. but it must not be forgotten that the general cost of living varies--who does not know that, alas!--from year to year. we have green years and slack years; therefore we are not to be blamed if we do not always live up to an ideal standard. besides, we need a new cloak one year and do not need one the next. new-cloak-year cannot be always last year or always next year; it sometimes must be _this_ year! the comfort of a family budget can hardly be imagined by those who have a family to plan for and have not tried this system. you know what you have to do with; you can plan and thus reduce expenses where they can most conveniently be shaved off and not feel it so much. the husband will have the comfortable assurance that he is obeying that great principle of efficiency that calls for a "square deal" in the human group with which he has most to do. the wife knows that when she is taking a sum of money to use for herself or for her family she is not asking a favor; she knows that she will never hear the dire question, "where is the dollar i gave you last month?" immense quantities of self-respect are carefully preserved by a methodical arrangement of the home budget, and happiness is laid up for use both here and hereafter. we may then ask how this general scheme may be adapted to homes in the countryside. the financial plan for the farm home ought not to present any difficulty, but it seems to, and for two reasons. in the first place the money generally arrives in bulk in connection with harvests, not scattered along through the year as in most other forms of business. but one would think that this peculiarity would aid system; to know all in a month what is to be available for twelve should be the most effective basis for a wise plan. second, a large part of the supplies for the farm home come directly from the farm without intervention of butcher, baker or candlestick maker. this, again, ought not to prove a difficulty. why not record the farm-supplies on the day book at market prices, as if they did come from butcher and grocer? this is the normal, systematic and efficient thing to do. it is only the close interweaving of farm and house functions, that makes it seem difficult; but in spite of this a carefully worked out and closely followed system of bookkeeping will give aid at nearly every point. may we, however, ask a further question? in trying to make just and equitable plans in the unique structure of the farmstead, how shall we place a value upon the labor of the house administrator? the farm home is an absolutely essential part of the farmstead, its heart and focus. the business of the home is a part of the business of the farm. whatever the woman does to fulfil her duty in the home, to make the output of the home a real productive contribution, is of actual economic value to the farm business, and should be appreciated as such. if by specially good management, by industry and thrift, she can make an unusually good showing in her administration, lessen expenses by saving, increase energy by a studied dietary, make children more efficient and the family happier and healthier, she should be the more appreciated as a business partner whose service is invaluable and who is well worthy of her share of the profits. if, then, besides these duties that are the normal work of the homemaker, she is able to add such work in the farmstead as belongs to the farming business, such as the care of the cream and butter, providing meals for the farm hands, care of stock, chickens, bees, lambs, or the garden, she takes the part of a farm hand or a farmworker, she is a unit in the farm business as well as a partner, and should have the value of the service she performs paid to her in wages. of course we hate the word. we want at least the mother in the home to be the final unmerchantable thing there. but there are families in the country scattered here and there who painfully need some such planning of home affairs as this. if the happier women would move on lines of economic system, even though they do not themselves feel tragic need for it, but just in the interest of scientific accuracy and efficiency, the other wives would be happier and all life in the home realm would have a better adjustment. as long as the farmstead is a combination of home and farm business, the presiding genius in this combination may work for love many hours in the day; but where work is done by the woman administrator that a house servant, if one were employed, would be doing and would be paid for doing, the woman administrator, the mother in her function of housekeeper, should be paid in money at commercial rates for those services; and this should be accurately recorded day by day and week by week and taken full account of in the budget. the spirit that will uphold the mind and heart during the instalment of such plans is the desire to know with scientific accuracy what the annual budget of the house is and likewise what the budget for the farm business is, and what each contributes toward the success of the other. that each institution will be more efficiently run under such a system, and that the elastic interplay of the two will move more harmoniously, with less friction, and with a larger output of happiness for all, admits of no possible doubt. also that the country girl of to-day will be anything less than fitted, disciplined and willing to act well her vigilant part in this plan is equally inconceivable. in order to meet this situation the average country girl no doubt needs training in system and in bookkeeping. she needs to adopt a point of view. she must take into account two things: first, every item, however small, is important; second, every item, however small, must be recorded. the apron-pocket should have pencil and tiny pad in it all the time, except that every few minutes it must come out to receive a record. one of the most important principles of efficiency is that we should record our daily or momently efforts. we must know exactly what we have been able to do before we can take a long breath and try to do more. all this the country girl of to-day may do for her present home; and in her future home, if she does not do it, she will be completely out of tune with her time. in a thoughtful and courteous book on rural conditions in the united states, by a distinguished english observer, the suggestion was made that the woman in the farm home is the fitting person to keep the accounts. the author decides this by her leisure (save the mark!) and by her well trained faculty for detail. this statement of opinion aroused a storm of comments in other books, chiefly by american gentlemen, claiming that the farm woman lacks the training for keeping accounts and the large comprehension needed for that part of the business. but this training is now accessible to the country girl, and we believe the "large comprehension" will come with experience. at any rate this will come to her as easily as to the unwilling agriculturalist himself, and the leisure (in a new era) and the faculty for detail will remain her valued assets. it is idle to say in this day and age of the world that the woman has no mind for the keeping of accounts when women are bankers and millionaires and managers of large business enterprises by myriads. it is a simple matter for the girl to take charge of the butter and egg accounts, and also of the bookkeeping for the whole farmstead: she will be all the better mentally and morally for attending to this duty. mentally she will improve under the discipline of exactness and promptness; morally she will improve under the discipline of the strictness and definiteness required by the responsibility. the reason why so many women have been so irresponsible in money matters is because they have been treated as children and therefore have adopted the habits of children in their buying and selling. there is a telephone girl who can tell the 'phone number of nearly all the houses in three large cities where she has worked in the hotel 'phone booths. there are a good many things she cannot do but she can do that. the person at the head of the department for receiving payments at one of the largest department stores in new york city is a woman. she takes in all the bills and makes change on the charge slips and the checks, and estimates all the details of the accounts. she puts her mind completely upon the papers in hand, so that while a set of these are before her she is so absorbed in them that no question put to her by any one standing at the door of the cage would any more reach her mind than if she were dead. in a moment she hands the papers to the proper person with the correct statement; then that is over and she is ready for the next. she has done this work every day for sixteen years, and she looks young and blooming. this woman is working for herself; but she is doing her work so excellently that it becomes a universal benefit, inspiring us to imitate her efficiency. as the home is the reason for being of the farmstead, the woman therein is making good her partnership if she is taking care of her housekeeping and family duties. her contribution is being made. but the farm and the home are so closely interwoven that she is of far greater importance than this shows. she is a true partner and is worthy of all the rights and duties that this indicates. if the woman is not the keeper of books for the farm business, it is at least her right as a partner to have the books of the business always open to her. to see the books would be the first request of any partner. one of the best farmers, who was also one of the best of men, affirmed that he was not in the habit of confiding his business matters to his wife. she on her part was one of the most loyal and most refined of women, the mother of wonderful children, and the very effective though unencouraged worker by his side for many years. his thought was that he would take the whole responsibility for the support of the family; he did not want to bother the rest of the household about details of business. one summer he lost a thousand dollars through the bad outcome of a bargain, but he did not tell his wife of this. then after a while he made five thousand dollars more than usual--but neither did he share this news with her. do you not think that if that wife had known that summer that there were four thousand extra dollars that might be depended upon for the use of the home, she would not have used two of them in the development of an efficient kitchen, placing a set of machines there that would have given her hot and cold water at hand, some form of power for the washing-machine, dummies, dust-chutes, ice chests, fireless cookers, lighting, wheeled trays, and all the necessary paraphernalia to put her household on an efficient basis--by this means not only lifting her own work up to the place of a scientific laboratory but raising the productive level of the whole valley where she lived and helping to lighten the burdens of a hundred farm women who were having not even so comfortable a time in their life plans as she was? now if this woman had had a little more business sense she would have realized that she had begun wrong years ago. it may also be that, if she had understood the whole situation, she would have approved of leaving the money in the bank for a time: it may be that she would have devoted it to sending a daughter to college. but, other things being equal, and if to her marriage had been a platform from which the soul of woman takes a new flight, we may believe that she would have devoted some of the money to better equipment for her own workshop. but all these things are aside from the point, which is that she had earned the money as much as he had, and that she should have had as much to say as her husband had about the disposal of their joint savings. the country girls of to-morrow must profit by experiences like these in the families of the generation now passing, and make certain that the efficiency principle of the square deal and the basic principle of a true partnership shall be established in the home-plans they are making. if they cannot assure themselves that conditions satisfying to their self-respect will prevail for them in the farmsteads of the future, they are justified in rejecting the countryside for their home and in leaving it to wither away in its lack of their dynamic and rejuvenating presence. chapter xx the country girl's training here in america, for every man touched with nobility, for every man touched with the spirit of our institutions, social service is the high law of duty, and every american university must square its standards by that law or lack its national title. --_president wilson._ the object of all education is to fit men for service. --_edmund janes james._ chapter xx the country girl's training it would indeed be fortunate if every young woman who has been raised in rural surroundings could go to some educational institution where there is a department of home economics, and there prepare herself by a thorough four years' course for a life of service in her home and community. one could hardly ask for a more ideal life than a country girl prepared in that way would see before her, a life that would be joy-giving not only because it would be efficient, but because it would be inspired throughout by the noblest motives. there is, in fact, not an hour of the day that may not be full of joyously productive labor, if the country girl can take advantage of her present opportunities; and there will soon be no excuse for her, since it is now becoming the fashion in many states for most of the family to leave their farm for a time in the depths of the leisurely winter and to hie away to the university where the men listen to conferences on problems of business and produce, and the mothers and daughters hear lectures on the industrial and other features of the home. of this and other methods of special training for special work, some thousands among the millions of country girls must avail themselves if they will do their duty by their generation. at the basis of success in any field lies the drudgery of preparation; excellence and reward are beyond. the task of the household administrator is no exception to this law of efficiency. the work is no haphazard matter, no question of luck; housekeeping is emerging from the realm of medieval magic now. other things being equal, the one that has been trained for a work invariably commands the higher salary. an investigation made by the department of agriculture in the states of indiana, illinois, and iowa, showed that the men with no schooling had an average annual income of $ , those with a common school education earned $ , while those that were college-bred received $ . these figures tell the story and impress the lesson that these sweet fruits grow high and that the ladder to reach them is a superior education. if the country girl really is in earnest in asking for further appreciation in the farm budget she must train for the responsibility. but where shall she begin? the work of caring for and building up a home is so complex, there is so much to it, that it is difficult to pin it down into a curriculum. it really fits into every department of education. it is science--chemistry, physics, mechanics; it is art--pictures, sculptures, architecture, costume, color, form, proportion; it is pageantry, drama, music; it is history--the family, law, records, relationships, eugenics; it is literature--poetry, story, myth, folk lore, epic, expression, drama; it is philosophy--conduct, the ends of effort, the individual; it is religion--the mission of love, the ultimate things in life, the use of training, the ministry of discipline; it is mathematics--accounts, percentages, adding up, and also (save the mark!) dividing and subtracting; it is economics--averages, outgo and income, the wage, the unearned increment, the community; what, in fact, is it not? such a calling of the roll gives us some hint of the scope and range of the work that makes the dignity of the woman's duty and privilege--of her "sphere." it is truly a "sphere," for it rounds out in every direction. there is not a single part of education that may not be useful to the homemaker. there is no least strand that will come amiss in her day's work when she is mother and overseer of the destinies of the family in her household. a review like this makes it clear how little the education attained so far by the world reflects the whole of life when the needs of the woman in her so important role as nearest helper to the next generation of human beings finds in none of these mentioned subjects the aid she needs for her part--her half, shall it be said?--in the work of bringing forward those who are to lift the race into a larger life in the ever receding, ever growing future. in the schools of to-day the education is modeled upon the needs of the man. in this country especially, when schools of the higher kind began to be built, the need was for emphasis on professional education. to prepare men for that need was the aim. this was what women found when they began to enter institutions of higher education: they found a system adapted for men's needs, and especially to prepare them for the professions. at first it seemed strange to many men that women should desire to gain this kind of education. but there were other men who saw that the path toward their own needs was through the well-paved avenues of education as it then existed. so women went on; they felt that their first duty was to take the training that men were taking, if for no other reason than to show that they could. they did this. they showed it abundantly. then they began to philosophize on the situation. they saw that they must have a system of education more adapted to their own needs. hence the rise of courses of study adapted to the immediate needs of women in their work as home-makers and household administrators. so far these courses of study are usually found in the agricultural colleges or in institutions formed for the special purpose of training women for home-making. this is because the agricultural college has been founded in the main since the new vision of the relation of education and the work of women has touched the eyes of educators. the old-line colleges preserve the ideals of decades ago. they are hopelessly masculinized and professionalized. there women will perhaps never find a natural normal education. at all events they will not find this until it is understood that psychology must as thoroughly prepare the young women to understand the development of the child's mind as it does the business man to understand the principles of advertising, and that chemistry should fit the housekeeper to gain aseptical cleanness in her household laboratory as efficiently as it does the manufacturer's expert to find a use for the by-product and turn it into money value. that the woman has a right to expect her college education in all its branches to prepare her for the duties that are hers, has not yet seemed to enter the minds of educators. she should no longer be required to go to a special institution for this. she has shown that she can undertake the severest strains of educational training; she no longer needs to keep that purpose in view. what she now needs is adaptation for her own work. the highest institutions that exist should give her what she needs. until this comes along in the natural course of educational development--as it surely will--she must gain the training she needs in such ways as she can. nearly all the agricultural colleges now have courses of study in home science and art. for the benefit of any girls who may not be in the habit of studying the catalogs of institutions and who would like to know what subjects the university considers to be of educational value in household economics, i give here some outlines of courses of study pursued at certain typical institutions. home economics department, cornell university, ithaca, new york. [illustration: a lesson in household economics, at cornell university.] _a course in household sanitation._ a consideration of the sanitary conditions of the house and site; the relations of bacteriology to the household in cleaning, in the preservation of foods, in diseases, and in disinfection; personal hygiene, including the care of the body in health; heat, light, ventilation, and the disposal of refuse; general lectures by specialists, giving a survey of the field of sanitation. teachers' college, columbia university, new york city. _a course in household management._ application of scientific and economic principles to the problems of the modern housewife--with discussion of them from both the ideal and the practical point of view, taking up such problems as: income as determining the type of household, the budget and its apportionment; the choice of a dwelling, moving, and settling; house furniture, utensils, appliances, decoration, supplies, the menu, clothing, maintenance, cleaning, repairs, household service, apportionment of time, household accounts, home life. home economics department, connecticut college of agriculture, storrs, connecticut. _a course in laundry work._ the principles and processes of laundry work; equipment and materials required to do good work in the home laundry, and the use and economy of labor-saving appliances; practical work in the processes of laundering, sorting, soaking, removal of stains, etc.; special methods of washing different fabrics; starching, ironing, and folding; experiments with hard and soft water, soap making, and composition of bluing. simmons college, boston, massachusetts. _a course in house-planning._ the designing and construction of the modern house; study of the plans and specifications in order to train the student to be able to read drawings, and understand the items of foundation, walls, plastering, heating, plumbing, roofing, and finishing; the history of furniture, color, and interior decoration; a consideration of fabrics, and wall coverings. a four years' course of study may be arranged as follows: _first year:_ hygiene, biology, chemistry, household administration, cookery, physical training, and some electives. _second year:_ english, french or german, biology, nutrition, cookery, chemistry, physical training and electives. _third year:_ history, economics, household administration, clothing, textiles, nursing, and electives. _fourth year:_ english, administration, hygiene, social science. [illustration: children in a country school scoring corn. everywhere the country is responding to the call of progress, and these members of a new generation are striving to reach the best.] the elective studies in this general course may be taken from among such titles as these: dietetics, household sanitation, eugenics, sewing and embroidery, textiles (woolens, silks, cottons), clothing, laundering, landscape art, plant breeding, poultry husbandry, bee culture, pomology, vegetable gardening, meteorology, rural economy, marketing, cooperation, organization, rural education, citizenship. such courses as these are given at cornell university, at simmons college, boston, at connecticut agricultural college, at the university of chicago, and elsewhere. correspondence courses are offered in many colleges. the names of many such courses have already been given in the report of one of the girls who took such a course under the direction of the pennsylvania state college, center county, pennsylvania. the young woman in planning to go to the university for a course in domestic science must take into account the benefits that she herself will gain from the association with the other students in the classes and in the various college exercises. the educational influence the student-body as a whole will have upon the development of the individual has been already mentioned. there are two things that no young person can gain without going away from home to some educational institution. they are these: contact with the great teacher, and contact with the great fellow-student. the first she can make up for to some slight extent in the reading of books; for the loss of the second, if absolutely deprived of it by the lack of companions in her own community, she cannot be reimbursed in any way. and there is nothing quite so inspiring as the personal contact with the revered instructor, nothing so entirely vivifying as the group of fellow-students. deprived of all this, however, the girl in a lonely life must make up for it as best she may, by books, by personal experiments, by keeping a buoyant and cheerful spirit, by seeking excellence by all means that are attainable. in this endeavor she may approach heroism, and in doing this she may well attain the supreme ends of life without the help of schools, or of machinery, or of any human aids whatever. chapter xxi a great opportunity the mission of the ideal woman is to make the whole world home-like. --_frances e. willard._ chapter xxi a great opportunity it is possible that a good share of training for her profession will be brought right to the door of the country girl's future household laboratory. this she may look forward to as an assured hope. it is to come about through the fulfilment of a plan which was the outgrowth of the commission on country life, and which has been worked for by many students of rural conditions and lovers of the countryside. the whole scheme sets before the country girl of to-day an open door and gives to her more hope of relief from the unfortunate results of the unscientific farming and unbalanced conditions in the country homes of the past than any other one thing that has been devised. but what is this open door? to explain this, we must start in by a sort of detour, with the boll weevil. his imperial highness was a fiend incarnate; yet his coming was not all a misfortune. for to rid the land of this depredating buccaneer among the southern domains, demonstration farms were established, and these led to a more adapted form of conveying help to the distressed and threatened farmers in the cotton belt by means of instruction carried to the individual farms themselves. a wonderful degree of success attended this work, and the western farmers, seeing this, called to the government for aid of the same sort against their own special difficulties, an assistance which was generously given. funds were distributed through the states by the federal government, and by means of demonstrations, the government sought to give to all the states the benefits that had been proved so helpful in the south. meanwhile the states themselves were carrying on many projects of their own for the advancement of the farming interests within their bounds. there was likelihood that there might be duplication of effort, that there might even be waste of means and of energies. to make sure, then, that this should not happen, the government has now devised a new measure, a bill for the inauguration of cooperative agricultural extension work, known at present as the smith-lever bill. the passing of this bill was an item of the national budget. before the eventful thing happened many processions of women protesting their desire for more formal acknowledgment before the law and in the privileges of the vote had walked the length of fifth avenue, and in these processions many men of the highest stamp had taken their chivalrous place. by the time the bill was being framed the woman side of things for city and for country had begun to hold a far different position in the public mind than it did in the days of thoreau or horace mann. it was not just as a slip of the tongue that the words "and home economics" were placed by the words "subjects relating to agriculture." no: the concurrence of the phrases came about as a natural outcome of well-considered belief, as indeed a testimonial to the fact that in the mind of the framer of the bill the two matters were of equal importance and were to be logically united in the minds of the people. at any rate, the fact that the phrase "home economics" stands at the head of this bill represents an incalculable leap forward of public opinion in the direction of betterment for the home and all that it contains of influence on our well-being. let it be deeply impressed, then, that the two words, "agriculture" and "home economics" stand together at the head of a bill that is to provide for instruction on a vast scale for all the rural districts of this land. in a letter to the author, the honorable asbury f. lever, the framer of the smith-lever bill in its present form, shows a full appreciation of the claim of the countryside to a fair share in this distribution. the letter by kind permission may be quoted here and is as follows: committee on agriculture, _house of representatives, u. s._ washington, d. c., august , . mrs. martha foote crow, tuckahoe, new york city. _my dear mrs. crow:_ responding to your letter, permit me to enclose you herewith a marked copy of my report which accompanied the bill from the committee on agriculture. i say unhesitatingly that the problem of the farm wife is one of the most vital of all of our rural problems and when this bill was drawn, i had in mind the use of a reasonable portion of the funds for the amelioration of her condition. i think the exact division of the funds should depend upon conditions in each individual state and may be increased or decreased as seems wise to those charged with the handling of the funds. i believe that the home economics feature of this bill is one of its most important features. in my own state one-fourth of the funds are to be used for the teaching of home economics by means of the itinerant teacher. this may be found to be insufficient and if it is the ratio can be changed. i would feel greatly disappointed if those who use these funds should in any manner get it into their minds that the home economics feature of the law is not regarded by the author as important. trusting this will be of service to you, very truly, a. f. lever. when uncle sam starts out on some great endeavor, he does so with a wide scope and plans on a magnificent scale. and wise he is, too. the universities, through their agricultural colleges, where, as secretary of agriculture houston says, information has been "reservoiring" for the last half century, will be made the effective means for the distributing of the wealth of the scientific knowledge and research they have garnered. through men and women trained in these special schools where all details of farm business and home economics are now accessible to everybody, the demonstration of these forms of scientific knowledge will be carried out to the farms and to the homes on the farms directly. and uncle sam will pay for it. ten thousand dollars is directly appropriated to each state annually, beginning in . the next year after this another sum of approximately the same amount will come to each state according to the percentage of the rural population in that state, counting by the census of . in each year following, the same sum is added to that of the year before, until is reached, when the sum becomes a fixed annual appropriation of three million, paid according to the percentage of the rural population at the time. to show that the individual states appreciate all this, they must add to these appropriations in a certain ratio. will any states fail to show their appreciation, and to meet the offer of the beneficent uncle sam? if they do, they will be standing in their own light in the most darkness-loving way. now this wonderful bill says distinctly nothing as to how the vast hoard of money shall be divided between the two departments, "agriculture" and "home economics." perhaps it may be half and half; then again perhaps it may be in a ratio of ninety-nine per cent. to the first one named and one per cent. to the second! here then is the crux of the matter. would the young woman on the farms of this country like to have a good half of this sum devoted to her needs that she may carry out her ideals for rural betterment? then let her think and talk about what she wants. let her discuss it in her house and among her friends. who knows but one young woman may devise some new thing that will not be thought of anywhere else in all the world! every new idea has to start somewhere; it must be born in the midst of the needs of some one person or family. it may be merely two crossed sticks rubbed together, yet this may light the fires for a whole world. and suppose that the one person who thinks of the one best thing should be too timid about the value of any idea of hers, should have so humble a mind about her own mental product that she will name it to no one and so let the thought fall to the ground and go to nothing! do not let this happen: let every happy idea be talked out in a letter to the secretary of agriculture, stating the need and making the suggestion. the young women all over the country are showing a keen interest in the outcome of this project. the universities that receive federal aid, who are to have charge of using these moneys, are setting apart the share that is to go to the home economics work; sometimes it is one-half, sometimes only a fifth; but every state must make some generous assignment or it cannot live with itself in the future. women have but to make their interest known and--talk about it! to gain attention to their wish. bret harte has somewhere made a character say something about "poor lovely helpless woman." another speaker answers, "no, she is armed to the teeth--she has her tongue." this primordial weapon of woman's--a far better sword than the man's--can be used to good effect now; and if she does this she may see some of her dreams fulfilled. for instance, suppose the household adminstrator should look out over the piles of work to be done before nightfall and should say to herself, "oh, deary me! i wish some one would just come along and tell me how to do this so that i could get it done in shorter time!" she not at all realizes that she has struck a very great idea. this is the thought that came into the heads of agricultural committees in several states and countries. in our land only it remains till now to hear it imperatively voiced. perhaps we may understand this better if we recall that american women, because of the chivalry of our men, the freedom of our institutions, and the high standard of our domestic morality, have been more advanced in personal liberty and efficiency than the women of other countries, have been far more ready and able to cope with the difficulties of life on the farm, and therefore have not had the depression and the weakness that have taken the light out of the eyes of women in the rural parts of other lands. moreover, in our country, the pioneering period is not so very far back of us. we are still near to the effects of that discipline, which developed in us the hardiness that makes it easier for us to bear the burden of work and the strain of the struggle than women not thus developed could sustain. for all this we should be properly grateful and forget as soon as may be the losses that we have been obliged to sustain while we were gaining this hardihood. to return to the need for a wise helper and adviser. that efficient person coming along the road to tell the woman on the farm how to arrange her work so that its burden may be lessened, would in one or two european countries be a well-known figure in the farming community. she would be welcomed and would take her place in the family for a time till she had filled the minds of the members of that family circle with much wisdom from her well-filled stores and had shown them by practical demonstration the "why" and the "how" of many a new method of making ends meet, of making long hours short, and of turning off work. after supper she would be with the children for a time and let some light in upon their puzzles; then when they had gone to bed she would talk every difficulty over with the farm wife and the husband too; at least we may be sure that she would do this if she were in this country, though perhaps she would not in the land of the hausfrau; and being thoroughly trained in gardening and in the treatment of all the animals that may come under the care of the woman on the farm, whether pigs, lambs, bees, or chickens, as well as in house sanitation, the care of the sick, laundry-work, needle-work, embroidery and crochet, she can come very near to the heart and the hands of her attentive hostess in the farm home. in this country the woman who is trained to perform this service will be called a farm bureau agent. according to a late letter from the secretary of agriculture to his crop correspondents, it is the intention of the government to have in time such agents as these in every county in the united states. it is such a service as this that the so-called smith-lever bill now projected by the federal government would provide for--that is, if the young women of the country will show that in their future homes they would like to have a distinct advance upon the homes of the past. to establish a faculty of trained women to go from home to home all over this land, making periodical visits and putting the results of their training at the command of the women everywhere, is the ideal dwelling in the minds of the workers for this form of instruction. hundreds and perhaps thousands of women will be needed. they are now preparing for their work, not in sufficient numbers as yet, but soon there will be many who are prepared and willing and glad to lay their ability and their expert skill at the feet of this service. let another possibility be suggested. suppose that a distracted young housewife on some prosperous farm will sit down among a great pile of women's papers that she takes out of the abundance of her means and the activity of her imaginative idealism, and cry out as she reads the many articles and the innumerable columns of suggestions, "o i should like to have a perfect house and a wonderful system of housekeeping! but all these things confuse me--there is really too much to do. i wish i could see just one perfect house, right down in the village there, where i could go and see for myself how it all ought to be done." she again, has little idea that she has hit upon a great discovery, a very great idea. she does not realize that the house for demonstration of home economics is entirely within possibility and is a thing that ought to be within the reach of every woman in the land. such a house should be in every village and town and within "team-haul" distance of every farm. it should be a social center where every week in the year the women of the region may come and meet one another and talk over their problems. it should be in charge of a scientifically trained woman whose sole business should be to stand there and be a help to every woman within reach who has a single question in home economics to ask. she should know the best ways to do everything about the farm home, the best ways to do them with the machinery at hand, and also the best household machinery to get and the most advantageous changes to be made for the sanitary and artistic and health conditions in each individual home. it is a large order, but the young women who offer themselves to be prepared for such work must and we believe will measure up to the need. here is indeed a mission for the trained country girl. although the words "home economics" have not heretofore appeared in papers set before our legislatures, our government has been for years giving aid to the farmer's wife through many pamphlets on subjects related to her work. from the bureau of animal industry we have advice concerning the health of the farm animals, concerning meat, butter, eggs, wool, leather, diseases, meat inspection,--all of which are matters of vital importance to the home; in the bureau of chemistry studies are made on the composition of many things used in homes: sugar, bread stuffs, preservation of fruits, pure food laws, storage, and other subjects of value to the household administrator; the bureau of plant industry gives us information regarding crops for food for animals and humans, protection of plants from injurious diseases, how to domesticate plants and how to secure variety in foods; the department of entomology aids us in our warfare against flies, mosquitoes, ants, moths, etc.; the agricultural library sends us bibliographies; the experiment stations investigate in every direction; the office of public roads tries to bring markets and farms closer together; and so the work goes merrily on, full of beneficent endeavor. does the country girl sufficiently appreciate our uncle sam? does she make the most of his efforts in her behalf? any girl that has learned to take pen in hand and can command the value of a postage stamp can send a respectful request to the department of agriculture, washington, d. c., asking for the list of bulletins on the farm home and on problems connected therewith. when she has received this and has read it carefully, she will be full of thoughts no doubt on subjects about which she would like help. she can then write again to the department at washington asking for the bulletins on the particular subject that interests her. for instance suppose she is interested in the subject of bee-culture. she should write and ask for a bulletin on that subject. one girl on a western ranch is very much interested in the subject of--what do you suppose? it takes a keen, unprejudiced mind to show this interest;--it is nothing more than weeds! studying into this, she finds that all the books she can get hold of give her very little help because they do not refer to the conditions in that part of the world where she lives. so she is going to study the divergencies she sees between books and facts. she has sent everywhere for bulletins and books, and has now a considerable library on the subject; and she has gone vigorously to work to mark out all the differences between her own experiences and those that are recorded in the books. in time her records will be added to those, and she will have been of great service to the world by giving new knowledge that may be used for the benefit of her whole region. in this way the country girl, however lonely the farm where she lives, may feel that she is in touch with great movements, and can believe that her life is of especial use to the world. chapter xxii the ills of isolation the fruits of modern inventive skill and enterprise have enriched country life and have banished forever the extreme isolation which used to vex the farm household of the past. the farm now is conveniently near to the market. the town, churches, and schools are near enough to the farms. the world's daily messages are brought to the farmer's fireside. and the voice of the nearest neighbor may be heard in the room though she may live a mile away. --_professor g. w. fiske._ chapter xxii the ills of isolation "isolation" is a word that the country girl does not very much use, but still she feels the meaning of the word. this note sounds in the unusually frank answer of one who did not speak for herself but said that she really thought some of the other girls went away to the city because there was no one in the village for them to marry, and in the naïve words of the girl who stated that she always said a club was a very good thing. where the community does not afford the social life they crave as a part of their development, as the natural normal state for their self-expression, and as a part of their plans for life, it is no wonder they seek it elsewhere. this is one of the chief causes of the cityward tendency. for this reason the girls are willing to exchange the pure air of the country for the close atmosphere of the town; the safe and kindly surroundings of the rural home for the dangerous conditions of the city, its unregulated contacts, its promiscuity and its perils, and its loneliness in the midst of the indifference of strangers. there is a forbidding solitariness in the city that is to that of the country as a desert to a garden. this misery attacks one even more virulently on the noisy boulevard than along the whispering country lane. but this the country girl does not know, and she seeks relief from a woe that she does understand. perhaps the young woman on a lonely farm in some remote region does not realize this. she may be too dulled and discouraged by the effects of isolation to know either what is the trouble with her or even that there is any definite thing the matter. the lack of companionship is indeed a very real hardship; for companionship is necessary to our growth as well as to our happiness. the solitary girl on the remote farm or in the obsolescent village has small share in this form of education and remains with her resources undeveloped. for her natural and normal education she needs a great deal of association with other young growing human beings; something therefore must be devised to supply this need or the country girl will not have the happy and well-rounded life on the farm that is her right. one woman in giving reasons why she preferred the city said she would "rather have folks than stumps!" truly. very few farms, however, consist solely of what is represented by the expressive word "stumps"; and as for "folks," it is possible to have in city life a plethora of social contact so that leisure for thought, reading and study, or for any form of self-development, is unknown. besides there are "folks" and "folks"; and a neighborhood full of cousins and friends is an unsurpassed shelter for the favorable growth of the young human being. but ah! there is the very point. a neighborhood! if every country girl had a neighborhood to grow up in, a group of homes about her to afford her companionship, she could ask nothing better. but there are many girls living on remote and lonely farms far away from any neighborly environment; to such as these the isolation is a very real sorrow. it falls as heavily upon the farmer's daughter as it does upon the farmer's wife--even more heavily if possible, for she is generally led to realize her need at a time when her social instincts are most insistent. to make for the young woman in the farm home a life so interesting, so fascinating, so full of purpose and of the possibilities of self-expression, that the loss of "folks" will to some extent be made up to her, and to give to her as much companionship as possible and the effects of companionship through all known means that can be devised, should be the object of an earnest and widespread effort. a visit made to a country girl who lived at a farm that was on a steep hillside in a lonely part of the world far from any town or village, left a very deep impression. i was riding through that region with a cousin on my way to the railroad twenty miles off. "in that house," she said, pointing to a dilapidated farmhouse nearly smothered in greenery and totally unkempt in appearance, "lives a relative of ours, a second cousin. we must stop and see her." "oh, no," i cried out, for i was then young and selfish; "don't let me have to see any more relatives to-day." "yes, we must stop," said my firm cousin. "she is a good girl and will remember it always if you stop, and will be bitterly disappointed if you do not." we drew up; a figure promptly appeared on the rickety porch and came down between the tall grasses that almost obliterated the path to the torn gate. "how old is she?" i whispered. "about twenty-eight; yes, twenty-nine next december." "she looks forty," i said. "you must remember she has had a hard time on this farm--it's no good, the farm, and she and her father live here alone now." cousin artemisia--for that was her ironical apportionment as to name--came down to the buggy and stood between the wheels and reached over a long slim hand in greeting to my companion. i thought she would never let go. then i was introduced. cousin artemisia stood back and looked at me as if she would read every thought in my whole soul. the most devouring curiosity, the most rapt wonder, the still, thunderstruck, hypnotized look of absorbed contemplation, were in her eyes. all my features went, i am sure, into her memory's irremediable printing, to stay there forever. all this--more shame to me!--was only a bother to me, for i did not at all understand what it could mean to a poor lonely soul to have a vision of a young relative from the great big outside world. i will not accuse myself of cruelty--only of ignorance and carelessness; but that, of course, is bad enough. to pay me for this, and as a perpetual punishment, i have the memory of her last look. after some suave and polite nothings from my lips i nudged my driver cousin and we went on over the hill, leaving artemisia alone with her solitariness, stunned, it may be, for the moment by our swift passing, as a prisoner might be into whose dark cell a ray of light had penetrated and then been quickly withdrawn, making the darkness blacker than before. that last long look! i cannot describe it, but i shall remember it always. at that moment there was in cousin artemisia's face the suppressed longing of the imprisoned soul, the appeal for help to one that was believed to have had opportunity, the cry of the hopelessly restricted longings, the desire for companionship, suppressed for years and accumulated unbearably. the memory of that quarter of an hour with cousin artemisia has driven it home to me that the young woman in the solitary farm house wants and needs the means of self-expression as much as little helen keller needed the means to reveal herself that would take the place of the hearing and speaking and seeing that had been denied her. what would have happened to her if she had not had gateways opened to her mind and soul so that she could give out and receive, is what happens to all of us unless we have our powers developed by contact with others and by giving and taking intellectual and spiritual goods. dumbness is a hindrance to growth. excessive shyness and secrecy, bashfulness, a spirit of seclusion, sensitiveness, and other faults that attack young people in the growing years, are a result of the lack of the liberalizing and purifying ministry of companionship and they are an inhibition of development. an account by a rural school-teacher presents a picture that is gruesome, and any one that wishes may omit it from the reading; but it suggests a possibility and drives home a lesson. circumstances required her for a time, she said, to take care of an old lady, who lived with her husband and daughter on a lonely farm. all that they had in the house were the old things the mother had kept house with forty years ago. the chairs had been scrubbed till not a particle of paint was left; and their meals were alike three times a day--pork, potatoes and bread. not a book was there to read except a few old school books and the bible. the young woman who tells the story stayed a week, and it was the longest week she ever spent. the farmer's daughter was about eighteen years old. she seemed a bright young girl; but two years after that, while the father was gone to the factory, she hung herself in the barn. the school-teacher did not wonder; she said that if she had had to live in such a house, life would have been a burden. of course that is an extreme case. the suicide rate is higher for the city than it is for the country; it is higher for men than it is for women; the proportion of suicides over sixty-five years of age is greater for rural districts in our country than it is for cities. this may not especially interest the young woman on the farm; but it concerns us to see that all the younger people should have the natural normal life that will satisfy their physical, mental and moral needs; and that they should realize early that they are to be supplied with the career that their natures demand, in order that they may not despair before they have really begun to live. a conviction dwells in the minds of many country girls that the quietness and freedom from interruptions on the farm form one of the chief reasons for desiring the rural life. there certainly is truth in this. the jaded city worker flees to the calm of the country for relief from people and things. but it is also true that isolation is not a good in itself and too much of it is directly harmful. we develop not by it but in spite of it. no man can be a true man, no woman a true woman, who has not been molded by human companionship. we should "live in the house by the side of the road" and unite our interests with those of humanity at large. we do not know ourselves except as we know others. whether we are above the level of average human capacity, or below it, or simply different from others, or, what is more usually the case, different in some things and like in others, we do not know except by comparison with others. companionship with others brings us knowledge of our defects, our omissions, our weaknesses, sometimes of our strength and power to give and to help. therefore, the normal development of the daughter on the farm depends largely upon having the heavy weight of rural solitariness lifted. she may not know this herself; but the quickness with which her spirit responds to the touch of companionship between herself and a friend of her own age, when fortunate occasion brings her this pleasure, shows what her need is. it is now said that the young men and the young women in college give to each other almost as much education as is given to them by the teachers themselves. in other words the social contact possible where many young people are brought together has such power to quicken energy and to incite noble rivalries that it alone becomes one of the most effective means of education. this education and opportunity should be within reach of every country girl, and she may herself do a great deal to bring this about. in endeavoring to do her share in thus developing the social resources of the country, the country girl must, however, work for a time against a disadvantage. at present the young girl from the country makes the impression of being less developed than the young boy. as a general thing he has had a great deal more outlook, more responsibility, more contact with outside influences. he goes with his father to town; the father and the brother look upon this excursion as a task, and they think this is work that can be done by them and save the women-folk all that trouble. but the fact is that this going to town is a means of getting at least some outlook into the great world beyond that the farm circle did not give, an enlargement that would be just as good for the sister as for the brother. the sons come back joyous and electrified and able to work better afterward. meantime the daughters have stayed at home in the treadmill, unexcited and dull; and because they have lacked the stimulus of the excursion into the outer world they get the discredit of being gloomy and stupid. if they had driven to the village also, or to call upon a girl friend, they would have returned joyous and eager, full of talk and energy, and with new ideas to add to the family discussion. the efficient country girl of to-day is often as equal to the management of the intractable horse as a man: she rides the disc-plough and she runs the automobile. it would only be in some backward section of the country or in some tradition-bound family, where the daughter could not drive the horses and have the use of a conveyance to go to town whenever it seemed to her to be necessary. it has been suggested by an eminent authority that the farm woman should go to town once a week and should also go to a neighbor's every week for an afternoon's visit. what then should be the excursions of the daughter during the years when she is growing up and becoming a young lady, entering upon her duties as hostess and social leader? there should not a day pass when she does not have some contact with the social world of the rural community. she should have a large letter-writing correspondence and make it yield her all the culture possible. she should take part in every commendable social organization that is accessible and with her mother's cooperation make her home a center of gracious social welcome to friends and neighbors. with the new machinery there will be much greater simplification possible in the household, and in the wake of this may enter our old-time friend, hospitality, so long and sadly missed from our ferny lanes. perhaps it is not necessary to suggest that the greatest care should be taken to place under the safest conditions the social life in which the daughter bears a part. in order that this may be so there is no better safeguard than that the mother should be in closest confidence with the daughter, should be present at all the parties, should be in all the fun. this is the scheme now most approved under the best social auspices and is adopted in the country wherever they live up to the most refined models. it means that the mother must never lose the thread of her daughter's confidence; and if she has done so by the mistake of some past day, she must leave no stone unturned, by tact and love and prayer, to regain the lost ground. it means joining in all the games; it means taking an interest in all the youthful plans. it means adapting her mind to the youthful mind. it means--but why should i tell mothers what that means? they know. and the daughters must do their part too in keeping the confidence-thread between themselves and their mother always perfect and golden. when a community is really dead, we may know the fact by the absence of sociability. the whole country problem hinges chiefly upon this social matter; and as the woman is the essential upholder of the community the world over in social affairs, it behooves the young woman in rural life to prepare for these responsibilities if she will ward off from the farm and village community a deadly and intolerable inaction. after all cousin artemisia was not in such a parlous state. if those eager eyes had had no expression in them at all, if the curiosity in them had long since faded into indifference and a dull unresponsive look had taken its place, then a just observer might well have had cause for compassion for that young woman into whose soul the iron of isolation had gone so deeply that it had hardened and deadened the best part of her. if a life has been lived through with all its experiences and has been one long record of unsatisfied longing for the impossible, and if the end came without ever one break in the cloud that hid away an imagined world of fulfilment and success, and if during it all there had been never an instant's let-up from the momently waiting for the sun to break through, such a life as that has been a success. not to attain is not failure. the only failure is to cease trying, to stop aspiring, and to let the dream and the vision fade away from the face of the unresponding clouds. some one may say, why then touch her in this obliviousness of her unfilled possibilities? the same fallacy lies beneath all missionary work, all philanthropy, all striving upward. we wish every country girl in the remotest stronghold of conservatism to be touched with that divine discontent that will stir her to an upward struggle. among the six million country girls for whom this book is written, there are many who are tremendously and honorably efficient; there are also many who are by no means awake to their duty and opportunity; but the vision will soon touch the eyes of all, and will reveal to them the part they may play in the new country life era. not for her own sake alone does any girl strive. all she does lifts everywhere as well as in her own valley. and these beneficent influences will reach out and include other and still other circles of girls who repose under the protection of the republic. among these one may see the puzzled eyes of porto ricans, and of aleutian and of philippine girls. and there are found two larger companies: the dark-skinned girls with the tragic remembrance of slavery in their eyes, and the aquiline faces of the appalachian mountain girls, dignified and quietly expectant and our close racial kin. among these adoptive and neglected fields there will be hollows of stagnation and delays of progress. for the reclamation of these we are not by any means doing what we might as a people; they some way escape the great abundantly filled currents of philanthropy; and if they soon become discontented and ominous, we shall have ourselves to blame. it would be better to be beforehand with nature's demands and arouse noble aspirations that may forestall wrong tendencies. chapter xxiii the solace of reading the evening hour the day is done; the clock is striking eight; the children now are snug and safe abed; still on the pillow lies each little head, tired out, altho' they begged to sit up late. i cover the fire within the kitchen grate, mix up a light sponge for the morrow's bread, wind up the faithful clock; with quiet tread depart, and leave my kitchen to its fate. the study calls me to my favorite nook beside the table, underneath the light. here shall i joy me with a gracious book until at last i bid my world good-night. o peaceful dreams beneath the homestead roof! ye straighten out life's tangled warp and woof! --_helen coale crew._ chapter xxiii the solace of reading the countryside does not sufficiently appreciate the value of its asset in the changing seasons. the alternation of winter and summer gives the admirable opportunity for the harvest for support, and for the fireside evenings for culture; the two combined make the possibility of an ideal life. even in the busy time of summer, the farmer who scientifically organizes his scheme of farm work, will be able to give one day a week at least for reading and the study of the literature of farming. perhaps the number who compose this orderly scheme of work may at present be small, nor has any such boon of system including leisure for reading reached the farm woman. how that older woman on the farm has felt about this, is one of the great complaints lying back of the country life movement. will the country girl be obliged to inherit this deprivation? from the country girl of to-day, the report is far more cheering than from the older women. she has many books at hand. she feels no poverty in this regard. sometimes they say: "we have a very large library in our house--as many as a hundred books," or they say, "my father left us a large law library," and they seem to love to gaze at the brown backs of these volumes. certainly this pride in the inheritance is noble. if you ask country girls what books they have for their very own, they will in many cases give long representative lists. encyclopedias will be included and sometimes books of reference. their library lists give an insight into the taste in reading of the american country girl that is most gratifying. the first impression is that her taste is well founded in classics; the second, that she keeps up with the times. she shows on the whole great catholicity. we cannot give room to the long lists: but we may mention some of the books that, in response to our request, some country girls mentioned as favorites. in a long list of books that are her own an iowa girl stars the following as her favorites: life of ellen h. richards shakespeare's works whittier's poems _ben-hur_ _uncle tom's cabin_ _kidnapped_ _quentin durward_ _the woman who spends_ the stories she enjoys reading when she is tired; the others she takes to study. another mentions these: all of mrs. porter's several of stewart edward white's several of ralph connor's three of fox's two of churchill's _shepherd of the hills_ _johnson's natural history_ _personal memoirs of u. s. grant_ life of livingstone robert e. speer's works she adds dickens, poe, alcott, whittier as starred favorites. in a list of twenty books, a colorado girl stars a large number. the list is headed by "the library of the world's greatest books." then she mentions: _laddie_ _freckles_ _girl of the limberlost_ _barriers burned away_ _lady of the lake_ _as a man thinketh_ _the choir invisible_ _little women_ her list includes also the life of john bunyan, the life of christ, the works of george eliot and of burns, and many more standard and popular books. she has had a course at college and reads the u. s. bureau of agriculture bulletins. books starred by an idaho girl are: _at the foot of the rainbow_ _promised land_ _friar tuck_ _treasure island_ _king of the golden river_ _water babies_ _the crisis_ _the varmint_ set of kipling set of w. irving she includes also riley, e. b. browning, wordsworth, burns. one writer who lives sixty miles from any kind of library is so fortunate as to have all of dickens, scott, shakespeare, and a copy of longfellow, tennyson and browning. "i have," she says, "a great many miscellaneous books, _the promised land_, _laddie_, _a girl of the limberlost_, _the friendly road_, and books of that kind. the first three authors are my favorites; but the bible and longfellow are the most comfort and enjoyment." on the whole there are comparatively few to complain, as one did, that the bible and a paper now and then compose their entire means of outlook into the world of literature; or as this one said: "when i was at home my only book that was my own property was the bible." fortunately this young girl had thus a compendium of all literature, and she is coming out all right. it also should be a surprise that there should be so few to include a list like this: "_prue and i_, some books on the economic status of woman, and a few books on domestic science." but perhaps country girls would not think to classify their interest in such studies as these under the heading "reading." the mothers and daughters, if requested together, would no doubt mention some of the same interferences with the pleasure of reading; but the daughters give some that the mothers would never have thought to state. work is the great interference for both. the daughters are deterred by housework, sewing, picking blue-berries, darning stockings. weariness, the tired-out feeling, come in. there is so much work to be done in doors and out, and the barn work lasts so late; the evenings are short and when the work is finished, it is time to retire. it is rather pathetic to see how many country girls will mention the moment of getting to bed and to sleep as the happiest point in the day. but then--no one has yet said that she was too tired to sleep--and that, we are sure, has happened many and many times to the mothers of yore! and when the daughter speaks of having been kept from reading by her demonstration work duties, we certainly hear a note of the new era being struck. but what farm woman of the old days ever gave "so many other pleasures," or "too many places to go," as reasons for not reading? piano practise, too, and "friends running in" prevent the reading. there cannot be much isolation in such a farmstead as that! many country girls insist emphatically that in spite of difficulties they do read a good deal. such a girl says that when she has a book the hour of night draws nigh too soon. another always reserves a few hours each week for reading, though sometimes she can not make it every day. a determined girl declares that she lets nothing interfere with a certain amount of reading. this sort of testimony reaches a height in one who says that she reads or studies five hours every day. yet the girl who wrote that does most of the housework for a small family and takes care of a large garden. a few lament the scarcity of books. they have no opportunity to get books aside from the few belonging to one's friends; but these are soon read and re-read. lack of material is the chief interference with reading with an uncomplaining but very important minority. if there does really remain any girl in the country who does not know that she can get books from the traveling libraries that are maintained now by almost every state, the glad message should be taken to her at once. and any girl with a fair share of energy could start a small library in her village or her community, even as the peripatetic librarian did in mr. bouck white's book, _the mixing_, who carried the books about to every house and pressed them upon the family at its very threshold. in that case the house was the castle of the woman as well as the man, but the little librarian battered an entrance with her winning ways. after a while everybody blessed her, and her old mare and wagon were welcomed along the roads. or the country girl might begin with a book exchange club in which each member buys a book a year and these are handed from member to member by the month or as shall be agreed upon. meetings may be called to talk the books over and fine discussions of ethical points involved in the stories read may be held. at the end of the year the books may be lodged in some convenient place to be used by others not members of the club. in this way a nucleus is made for a regular library. the same can be done with magazines. at the end of the year a "banquet" may be held; each member may be dressed up to represent some book, speeches may be made while good things are eaten, and literary conversation may to some extent drive out less worthy and less interesting themes. almost anything can be done if there are young people enough to get together and talk over plans. the whole tone of the community may be lifted and many a young person may be saved from the evil things that creep in where the mental spaces have not been forestalled by better ideals. many a country girl has laid the foundations for a regular public library by using the country store and the schoolhouse for book stations. in one very successful attempt of this kind, one hundred books of fiction and travel, children's books, religious books, history, and biography were chosen. voluntary assistance was given by friends, and records were carefully kept. the following were the appliances necessary. besides the one hundred books, there were five hundred book labels, one hundred borrowers' cards, four record books for the librarian, three small memorandum books for the stations, three typewritten book lists or catalogs, and one hundred hand bills. on the borrowers' cards were printed the directions, which were these: "any responsible person wishing books may borrow them one at a time; no book may be kept out longer than two weeks; no charge is made for the use of books; please take care of them and return them promptly." the librarian visited the stations at regular intervals and took up the books that were returned. there can hardly be a more definite way in which a girl may serve her community than by starting some such scheme as this. if her own home were conveniently situated, she could use it as book station. it is to be feared that the country girl does not make the most of one great privilege: namely, to lead the family to indulge the luxury and joy of reading aloud together on winter evenings from some interesting author. even in a family that is fond of reading, each member of the circle will be seen when lamps are lighted to settle down to read from the book or paper that interests himself or herself alone, and all the good of unified thought, that might be theirs if they had read aloud, of vital interruption and comment, of living together in mind and growing together as the story develops, of enjoying the humor and romance together, are entirely lost. to read great pieces of literature together in the family is to put a personal consecration about the genius-crowned work of the master spirit. never can a great epic or drama mean so much to any one of us by closet perusal as it would if we had shared it with our next of kin. this is another place where losing our life is gaining our life. our treasure is doubled by giving it to others. winter evenings and sunday afternoons all the year round, may be made memorable by association with the greatest minds through their preserved works. the complaint has been made that there is no literature of farm life--that our literature is now completely urbanized and industrialized. there certainly is a tendency in this direction, especially in the realm of fiction. but it is possible to find some that are giving the country its due, and the writings of mrs. porter, so dear to country girls, are a proof of the fact.[ ] but if the genius of fiction has become absorbed with the problem of the city, that of poetry has remained true to its first love among the fields and streams. it is a joy to know that the poets will always be found among the books chosen for the happy winter evening in the country home. there, if not in fiction and tale, countryside people find a reflection of their thoughts. perhaps this is because poetry is the one art that can conveniently penetrate to the distant homes in remote rural places. since time immemorial country life seems to have been not only an inspiration to poets, but also to the development of our powers of expression in that highest of the arts. what is there about life in the open that gives to genius its incentive? the beauty of the surroundings ought to be a sufficient answer. but perhaps that very individuality that we blame country life for overdeveloping may be the favorable ground for the upspringing of this noble human blossom. at any rate it seems that if a soul is born with the endowment of genius, the psychical offices of country life will carry those native qualities to their highest power. many a city child has been born with the light of genius in its eyes and has had this fire smothered out in the close air and wild rush of the metropolis. but the woods still face the window where bryant looked out into their mysterious depths, and the brook still sings its way down from the mountains and past the farm where he spent his early years. to him the berkshire groves were god's chosen temples, first and last. it is because of this that the poetic writers of the present day and hour should find a sympathetic hearing in the country realm even when the turmoil and drive of the metropolis are deaf to their music. if our living poets may have the people of the countryside for their great and widespread audience they need ask no greater joy. mr. vachel lindsay, a wandering poet who has traveled almost all over this country preaching his gospel of beauty and democracy, says that in almost every ranch-house "is born one flower-girl or boy, a stranger among the brothers and sisters," a "fairy changeling." the land, he says, is being "jeweled with talented children," from maine to california. these children of to-day, though they may not be adapted to the strain of heavy labor, yet they will be infinitely patient with the violin, or chisel, or brush, or pen. country people should be on the watch for those rare wonder children who will be the poets of the future. one of these may seem at the beginning like a simply unusual child. afterward it may be seen that what was thought queer or different, may have been higher or supreme. we may not have been ourselves sufficiently attuned to the supreme in human accomplishment to recognize the elements in their beginning. great genius is not "to madness near allied," but is the sanest and most normal thing in the whole realm of creation. the extension of human powers in the field of what we call "genius" is what makes the benefactor of the race in any field most successful and the reformer most influential. moreover, every child has the right to find forces in his world that will make his powers, however great or however small, grow to the full measure of which he is capable. if one has a little ability in the field of any one among the arts, he has a right to experience the joy and the benefit that as much training as he is capable of taking shall give to him. therefore artistic training should be given to every child. and since poetry is the art that is most widely disseminated, the one most practical in its service and cheapest to get hold of in places far distant from picture galleries and concert halls, therefore there should be in all the homes in the open, a great deal of poetry, in order to satisfy the demand that is deeply imbedded in every human being for the satisfaction of the love of beauty. here is indeed a great service for the daughter in the family to supply. she is the poetic individual in the home circle. it will be readily acknowledged as fitting that she should know poetry by heart. that she should sing poetry feelingly and speak it effectively will be forgiven by a business-hardened parent and a rough, deriding brother, more readily than if any other member of the family circle should make the attempt. and the persevering and enthusiastic girl will be repaid by finding that the tight outer case of the father will after a time be loosened and that he will be surprised to find himself enjoying what he did not know he liked. she will be gratified again when the heroic ballad, told to appeal to the brother who is in the chivalrous and fighting era of boyhood, fulfils its mission not only by amusing him, but by leading him up to the chivalric motives and to the conquest of selfishness by the higher ideal of honor and devoir. if, too, she will select for her evening reading volumes of the poets who are writing to-day in her own country, writing out of today's life and mood and hope and pain, she will be far more likely to find a sympathetic response in her living audience, than if she chooses from the pages of any souls of poets dead and gone, however classic. footnotes: [ ] in the appendix to this book will be found a reference to a special bibliography made as a guide to certain works of fiction that do illustrate country and village life in various states. chapter xxiv the service of music to the countryside harmonies the scrubbing's done; my kitchen stands arrayed in shining tins, and order reigns supreme. and on the table, like a fairy dream, a row of pies and cakes, all freshly made and full of spicy odors, stands displayed; while from the oven, like a rising stream of incense, comes a fragrance, warm, supreme ... the bread, its final browning still delayed. now while i sit beside the oven door i take up my guitar upon my knee, and singing the old songs i knew of yore, my happy youth comes back again to me-- music and incense rising on the air! courage is mine, and all the world is fair! --_helen coale crew._ chapter xxiv the service of music to the countryside mrs. gene stratton porter in her book, _at the foot of the rainbow_, makes a certain scotch character say that he does not care for better talking than the "tongues in the trees"; for sounder preaching than the "sermons in the stones"; finer reading than the "books in the river"; no, nor better music than the "choirs of the birds." this music he calls the music of god; he would rather have this, every time, than "notes fra book." this philosophy of dannie macnoun's is excellent; but we must not forget that god made the "notes fra book" also, and gave us our power to design and to enjoy them. it is true also that there is little man has done in copying after the ideas of god that comes so near to the divine as do his attempts in the realm of music. this field nearly all, if they have ears to hear and a voice to sing, can approach in some, at least, of its aspects. the service of music to the human soul is so excellent that it seems as if it must be one of the necessities. why does the shepherd invariably possess a flute? the answer is this: some kind of music he _must_ have in his solitary life, and the flute is the instrument that can be carried in the pocket. the ills of isolation may be measurably alleviated by this harmonious companionship and this fact seems to meet a fairly widespread appreciation along our countryside. the emphasis is however placed almost entirely upon instrumental music. the piano of course predominates; but the organ frequently takes its place, the violin, 'cello, cornet, flageolet, guitar and trombone are also found. then there comes in the phonograph, the graphophone, the victrola, and the angelus music-box; the instrument that stands for "all that ever went with evening dress" appears among country customers also, and there seems to be room for mouth-organ and jew's-harp when nothing else offers. now a jew's-harp is better than no harp, a mouth-organ is better than no organ; and an accordeon can happify a lowering twilight. the banjo is an all-round-the-world delight and a guitar may be almost heaven to a music-hungry boy or girl. a twenty-dollar organ worked by foot-pedals may be a household blessing, and a flageolet has kept many a sheep herder from insanity on a lonely mountain. but any report on music makes on the whole a sad impression when the human voice is not mentioned; and a hundred will tell of having a musical instrument and some song book or other, where one will speak of singing in the family. almost every conceivable collection of songs will be mentioned but the general impression gained will be that the american countryside is not filled with singing; that the people do not sing at their work, and that not one hundredth part is there of the joy due them in community music. in the art and joy of singing together our people seem to have retrograded. perhaps the dominant influences at the beginning were not favorable to this art. whatever love we had for music was cherished, however, in the church of new england, but the advent of the soloist in the choir loft has put a quietus upon the musical expression in the pew. harriet beecher stowe tells us how those old billowy fuguing tunes used to be sung, with what gusto the men and women, bass, counter, soprano, and tenor, trained in that national institution, the singing school, would chase the melody around, racing after one another, each singing a different set of words, until at length by some inexplicable magic they would all come together again and sail smoothly out into a rolling sea of song. to her those tunes, as she remembered them from her childhood, were like the ocean aroused by stormy winds, when deep calleth to deep in tempestuous confusion, out of which at last is evolved union and harmony. it is a pity that such musical impulse as this should be allowed to go to waste. and it is not as if the primitive musical quality were extinguished in us, but the impulse remains submerged unless something brings it out. professor peter lutkin of northwestern university, head of a school of music that constantly draws students from the western states, says that you cannot give musical culture to an acre of the western land without having music talent spring there. we should follow the example of little wales, that sturdy sister in the confederation of the british isles. how wonderful is the singing of the welsh when they come together in their great national eisteddfod! there they have a national contest in which many singing societies join, and a prize is given to the victorious one. how do we account for this great interest in singing? why, there is a choral society in every village of wales. between village and village, between city and city, there are competitive tests, and this annual event is the outcome of all the smaller ones, the crowning engagement for the highest honors. how much must this mean to the people of the villages! what a comfort to the isolated ones! for twelve miles about any village or town center the people come walking in every sunday evening, to attend rehearsals for practise in sacred music, hymns and chorals being their mainstay. in northern england we find the same musical feeling, and in italy. why these special parts of the world should move in this direction, who can tell? it is enough to know that those rougher, more hilly, and more secluded regions do this service for the people. they make them feel the impulse and the necessity for song. that the case with us is not by any means hopeless is shown by the story of norfolk, connecticut. here a great musical movement has been led by the litchfield county choral union, a musical society that was founded and led by an inspired man, the keynote of whose life may be found in his own words when he said: "had i my life to live over again, with such slight knowledge as i may have gained, i would become an humble laborer in a primitive and ignorant farming community where by word and example i might perhaps help to raise its members to a higher standard of life in material and spiritual matters; and could i but implant one better thought into a single soul, life would not have been lived in vain." such was the quiet but radiant ideal of robbins battell, the man that tuned all the life of the lower berkshires to lofty music. the choral union as it now stands is a federation of the musical societies of the larger towns of the county, and includes seven hundred members. each of these societies has many concerts and festivals for the expression of its own skill and joy in the compositions of the masters; and besides this there is an annual three-day meeting and concert at the great "music shed" in norfolk. in the festival of they gave the _elijah_ with a chorus of four hundred and fifteen voices, all chosen from the members of these county unions. the year before, the same chorus gave excerpts from gluck's _orpheus and eurydice_ and the _hora novissima_ of horatio parker; the year before that they gave _verdi's requiem_ and _the song of hiawatha_ by s. coleridge-taylor. other concerts accompanied these in which noted soloists took part and great composers were present and conducted their own compositions as given by trained orchestras. so, in about thirty-six thousand people of the region were able to hear pieces from wagner, beethoven, haydn, vieuxtemps, liszt, rossini, schumann, strauss, and mendelssohn--these were the names represented in the program of , while selections from goldwork, beethoven, tschaikowsky, saint-saens, grieg, mozart, and wagner, in were heard by eight thousand persons. it is quite impossible to estimate the effect of such musical opportunity or the meaning of these rehearsals from january to june to those villages. the people become consecrated to their art, like the oberammergauers. personal ambition is swept away in the success of the song or the oratorio. as there is no entrance to the concerts except by invitation, all mercenary and selfish desire is removed. there is one aim--to express the music perfectly and in the most lofty spirit; therefore the festival is both a vital element in the community and a welder of the people into a social unity. the chorus is also an influence for democracy. there is a weekly rehearsal. women sometimes walk several miles to attend this and members rarely miss a meeting. one couple came twelve miles every week for eight years. there is no expense except for music and sometimes the sum does not go over sixty cents a year. the possession of a voice is the one condition for entrance, and the land does not assign tuneful voices according to man-made aristocracies; maid and mistress, bank president and store clerk, sing side by side. into many lives, otherwise inert, the music brings a motive and an inspiration. they sing with wonderful enunciation and with a fervor that can come only from spontaneous rapture. when in _elijah_ the prophets of baal cried out their prayer for "fire!" outsiders ran, it is said, and notified the fire department! to have a large part of the community thus trained, to have all the community thus interested and inspired, to have every least member of the community honored by citizenship in a village where these nobly cultural influences are found, is certainly a great thing. and when we remember that this could happen or rather, could be developed, in any town or village in the land, we can but mourn our silent roadsides, our unsinging lips, our wicked waste of the good gifts of god. another rare expression of musical enthusiasm comes from the central west. the little town of lindsborg, on the broad high prairies of kansas, holds each spring during holy week a musical celebration called, naturally, the "messiah festival." in this case a college is the leader--bethany college, where there are a thousand students with regular standard courses of study besides varied and excellent choruses, orchestras, societies, and classes for musical development. in the spring of there was a chorus of six hundred voices; another of children alone contained four hundred and fifty; distinguished singers gave the solos; a week was filled with concerts of classic and modern renderings; brahms, dvorak, macdowell, sibelius, were found together with beethoven and handel, and the whole reached a wonderfully high level of attainment. what interests us most, however, is to see what this work does for the people of the region. men and women come from fifteen miles away to attend the rehearsal, and this in winter; three generations of one family sang in the chorus at the last festival; they play and sing for the pure love and enjoyment of the music. it is altogether impossible to state in words what all this must mean to the moral and spiritual development of the region, to the binding of the hearts of the people in the community, and to the forging of those ties that will hold the young people true in their loyalty to their homes. it is not claimed that every country community can have such a concourse as this for concert work during the winters; but something like the old singing school might be installed, and home music might be made far more of a joy and comfort than it now is. that this can be the mission of music in community service is being discerned by many. in the always forward-looking university of wisconsin, a plan has been made for the development of musical feeling among the people. the desire is to make the people realize the immense social power of music and to give a chance for this welding and delighting influence to have its way in the home, the schools, the churches, in musical organizations of all kinds, in all places of amusement, and in entertainments of all kinds. no doubt other universities in other states will follow this admirable example. but we do not need colleges and universities to tell us that we should do more with singing than we at present do. here are six million girls of the countryside--what can they do to redeem the country from this dull silence and unmelodious tedium? what, in fact, might they not do? let every one of them resolve that she will wake up every morning singing; that she will sing at her work all day long; that she will call for songs in the evenings, with the whole family around--not one, of any age, allowed to be absent from the circle; that she will require that music of some sort shall be part of the ceremony of every society and club she belongs to; that she will get the young people together to sing once at least every week; that she will suggest that the older people should sing together--it is unnecessary and absurd to let the singing days disappear along with youth into the background; and that she will persevere in this till the whole countryside shall ring with song from east to west, and until the stigma that we are a people that do not care for music shall be forever removed. we have some magnificent old folk songs; we have glorious national songs; we have some religious songs with a marching rhythm and a fervor that make them good for every day in the week, for threshing times and for all times; we have a song for every mood and every experience; why not use our songs and enjoy them? the larger breadths of musical repertory are not so far away from the remote country places as formerly, now that the victrola and other instruments of like kind bring a knowledge of the great orchestral and operatic passages to our very sitting-room. every village should have this help in order to understand the great music that without it might be shut off from us. there should be one in every social center for general use in the community. a good way is for some member of the music-study committee to give a description of the opera or the oratorio, with comments on the particular passage that the instrument can render; then the listeners are better able to understand what is being played and by the imagination to place the solos in their right background as they are being heard; an impression of the work as a whole will be thus gained that will to some extent approach the composite scene as it is shown on the stage. "ah! can you imagine what the victrola means to us out here on this prairie!" wrote a friend from western nebraska. this may be the experience of every rural circle the country over if it will only have community spirit enough to work together and acquire the music-reproducing apparatus. another thing that can be done is to get together all the people in the community that can play on any kind of instrument, and make them play together. do not despise the day of small things. there must be a beginning. it will not be long before we can do more in any village, and at last we can have music of a higher order to drive the ills of isolation out of our atmosphere and introduce a healthful harmony in their place. if a boy belonged to an orchestra that met on monday and friday evenings for practise, to a class in voice on tuesday evening, and had engagements with groups of young men and young women to train for concerts all the other evenings of the week and was to sing in the church choir on sunday, is it possible that he would feel that he could be spared to go away to the city to live? the case of the country girl will be exactly parallel. her voice is the leading voice in the quartette; she is necessary to the musical atmosphere of the village; she is the hostess everywhere; she cannot be spared from any village and country life that is full of musical and other social engagements. and among the influences that beneficently endow human beings, the one that is at once most welding, most unifying, and most delighting is music. chapter xxv the play in the home o little bulb, uncouth rugged, and rusty brown, have you some dew of youth? have you a crimson crown? plant me and see what i shall be-- god's fine surprise before your eyes! --_m. d. babcock._ chapter xxv the play in the home the development of musical taste and the power to enjoy the works of the great composers is closely akin to the ability to appreciate the sister art of the drama. the art that has grown out of that imitative impulse, which is so deeply implanted in human nature and has reached such heights in the hands of genius, has modest stages of growth that may be seen in the daily programs of the home, the school, the playground, in all the walks of children and of grown people. to be able to tell a story, and show it up with a little dramatic imitation, is to add to the success of the social queen, the drummer, the one who influences and manages men or women in any field. there are people who think it well worth while to spend much time in the study of the art of expression, just to add to their powers of entertainment when they wish to use this form of culture in the home circle only. it is not at all a bad thing to do. thus to train the voice for sweet and fine or for powerful and striking modulations, to give the face new power of showing emotion, to win also the help of gesture, is to add to one's resources and to make them a greater source of enjoyment in the daily walks of life. it is hardly possible to think of society in any age of the world since we became human beings when the intercourse of people was not lighted up with electric bits of humor, joking and ridicule, based on the dramatic principle of imitation. but when the day came for our solemn ancestors in new england to appear on the scene, they concocted a theory of duty that was not favorable to these pleasurable forms of activity. yet, as we have seen, these subdued people loved music and they loved beauty in all forms. and when beauty could be had along with what they considered a pure and dignified aspect of expression, they winked at the keen pleasure that they felt and said nothing against it. an interesting story of catherine beecher, daughter of the great new england theologian, dr. lyman beecher, illustrates this. it is related in the autobiography of her father that she once devised a play and prepared, unknown to her parents, to give it in the kitchen of their home in litchfield, connecticut. the unsuspicious parents, it seems, did not notice that the neighbors were dropping in with a very unusual simultaneousness and that after supper an unwonted fire was being built in the parlor. soon the door into the kitchen was opened with a flourish, a curtain was seen to have been strung across the room, roman senators began to stalk across the stage--the kitchen floor--and a good rousing dip was taken by all into the fountain of antique romance. after it was over the stern father, who had been too greatly overwhelmed by the events of the evening to make any objection, whispered to that favorite daughter of his that it had all been very interesting but--better not do that again! catherine got off easily, considering the repute in which dramatic representations were held by our forefathers. temptations to evil, at least, they were considered to be, if not the very path itself. yet catherine beecher made many plays, devised in large part from the plots of approved and semi-pious story-books, and these were enacted at school and at the picnics of her large circle of brothers and sisters. moreover her sister harriet (afterward harriet beecher stowe) being at about this period of her youth filled with the aspiration to become a great tragic poet, wrote reams and reams of blank verse on a classic theme developed in dramatic form. by this time, however, the elder dominant sister catherine must have seen the error of her ways, for finding harriet one day in the act of composition, she took her precious play away from her, bidding her to cease this waste of time and go to work on her butler's _analogy of nature and religion_. and harriet obeyed. this story is told to afford one illustration of the fact that the divine endowments of human genius cannot be so easily crushed out. a theory will not accomplish it. catherine and harriet beecher were not the only possessors of glowing dramatic inspirations in the early days. we had not been fully settled here very many lustrums before the submerged river of artistic feeling came to the surface in the form of vivid oratory and elaborate dialogue; and when there began to be sunday schools there were sunday school concerts with tableaux of an unworldly sort, with dialogues and with companies of young people who, in a small and innocuous way, engaged in exercises that might be called acting. this was found more or less all over new england and went with the new england migration into new york, and ohio, and then farther west. many thousands of angels with tinsel crowns and tissue-paper wings have filled the spaces between pulpit and organ in the little white churches that have sprung up beside every hill along what we may call the new england belt--the course of the travels westward across the continent as the generations of descendants have passed on and built and subdued the soil and planted schools and churches along the northern latitudinal lines. the story of catherine beecher illustrates too the fact that the prejudice in the dwellers in country districts against the use of dramatic forms of entertainment is based after all not so much upon the dramatic representation itself as upon certain conditions and associations often found connected with theatrical displays as carried on in larger towns and cities and believed to be necessary to the existence of theatrical life. there is a village in illinois with a population of nine hundred where the majority of the church-going people--and most of the inhabitants of the town belong to that class--have been of the opinion that it is a wicked thing to go to see a play if it is enacted by some company of play-actors such as might come along on their theatrical route; yet in that town for years the townspeople have been giving plays of their own, in which nearly the whole population of the place would join, old and young, rich and poor, wise and unwise. the whole family from grandmother to grandchild will sometimes appear in one play, and all the cousins and relatives of the whole "team-haul community" will come to see. they give many standard melodramas, and they have also tried their hand at shakespearean drama, to the great enjoyment and uplift of themselves, both those that thoroughly capture the meaning of the play by training for the parts, and those that closely if charitably attend and listen. why should not this be done in every small town? why should not the unused building, an old barn, a store-loft, be transformed into a country theater, where the whole village may assemble twice a week or oftener, and run through a play together, getting joy and culture at once? if once the ingrained, inherited prejudice, handed down from those misinterpreting honorable ancestors of ours, could be overcome, the plunge might be taken and the drama could become the education and inspiring agent that it has the capacity to be in our homes, our schools, and our towns and villages. especially to the remote village and to the lonely farm would this form of entertainment be a benefit. do we not need this also to help lift the ban of loneliness and to supply that elasticity of spirit that means life to us? companionship is our lack, the impact of various lives upon ours, the stirring of resentment against wrong or of enthusiastic approval of the good and noble that comes from the clash of motives, right and wrong, wise and unwise. if we are denied the opportunity to see and feel all this in the scenes from actual life in which we ourselves in our own persons participate, we may receive some portion at least of the education to be derived from such impact by living for a time in the imagined world of the dramatist's creation and by watching the constant intricate play of emotion in the dialogue. and this we can in no other way do so well as by taking a part in the drama and appropriating it for our own; by living in that part, adopting the imagined circumstances for our own and following out the problem in the character represented and pursuing his fate to the bitter end. to do that is to gain to some extent the effect of companionship and its enlightening, enlarging and satisfying influence. to the extent that we are able to do this shall we combat and overcome the stagnation and the pain of loneliness. as a by-product of the same exercise, we shall gain a new knowledge of our own capacity. we shall take a long step in the direction of obeying the old dictum to "know thyself." if, for instance, we are reading the part of hamlet, and are trying to adopt his life and problem for the time being for our own, we learn how much we could suffer, how strongly we could determine, how fiercely we could doubt and yet struggle on, how tenderly we could love and yet resign, how all these things we could feel if we were really the hamlet of the great play of shakespeare. in this way we gain an enlargement of our own nature and receive inspirations to heroism on our own part. this is not wasted time, for there is no life that does not afford opportunity for heroism or that does not need inspirations to courage and fortitude. there are people who do not enjoy reading a play. they miss the constant running description of movement and gesture, of scenery and color and background, of meaning and prophecy and scope that are found in a story or in narrative of any kind. they are not accustomed to supplying the pictures of the story from the resources of their own imagination. however valuable a discipline it may be for them to learn how to make up imaginary backgrounds instead of depending upon the writer's aid, to that form of discipline they will not give the trouble. but if such readers will take the play into the family circle, and using several copies of the text, assign parts to each of the family, and thus read the text aloud, letting the words spoken by each of the characters give the suggestion for action, and encouraging each one to give the proper expression and gesture as he reads his part, the meaning will come clear as the scene goes on, and the proper enjoyment of the play as a play will enter into each one that shares the cast. if this does not happen with the first reading, it will come with the second or third. it is a pretty poor play that will not bear several readings; while as for the greatest of dramatists, shakespeare, his plays will stand many and many a reading. it would be a good winter's enjoyment on a far away farm, for the family to set apart one or two evenings a week to be given to reading of the plays by the greatest poet and dramatist. several plays would do for one winter and the whole thirty-six of them would last for several years, and then one could begin again at the beginning and read them over with renewed interest and understanding. thus the farm home could have a theater of its own in the warm sitting-room while the soft snow covered the acres all about, hushing every disturbing sound. perhaps that lofty master of the dramatic art should not be the first one mentioned. it is quite easy to understand that some country girl will think this poet to be hard reading for one who has not had the chance to go through high school. for those who are timid about taking a bold leap into the field of more advanced literature there are many plays made from our present-day lives that are easy to read and to enact, plays adapted to any number of people, plays that may include father, mother, and the children down to the smallest; and there are many kinds of tableaux and smaller plays that can be represented on the lawn of the farmhouse or in the kitchen after the work is done. of course the greatest thing of all would be to make one's own plays out of one's own circumstances or out of the things that one is thinking about every day. in making a play one must first choose a hero or a heroine; then imagine something that this hero wishes to do. after that some great difficulty is to be planned that he must meet, some opposition he must overcome. in constructing a drama you tell the story of a struggle or endeavor of this kind, putting it all into the words the people speak and nothing at all into any account of the action, the gesture, or the dress. all those things must be seen to by the people who take the parts. and the background may be selected that will come nearest to being the right and fit one for the people and action suggested by the words of the play. there is an infinite possibility before those who will make the attempt to let the playing of plays have part in the amusements in the farm home. all ages can be suited with plays, the simple ones for the smallest children, the more complex and finished for the older ones, the great ones for the oldest and most educated among the members of the family. as drama is one expression of the play spirit (using the word here in its meaning of "recreation"), and the satisfaction that comes with the feeding of this hunger in people of all ages, has but to be once known for us to seek earnestly for its food another and yet another time. to show how this instinct has been made effective in one home i quote, with kind permission, a play made by one little girl of eleven years old. in reading it over the reader will see what the child has been reading and where she got the material of the thoughts she has embodied in the action and atmosphere of this naïve and delightful little play. true lovers a play in seven scenes by julia carolyn horne the cast king eric betsy horne princess elaine, his daughter harriet benger sir constantine, knight, in love with princess elaine julia horne omar, a page billie horne three ladies in waiting to jessielyn lucas, helen ecker, the princess helene timmerman. scene i.--court of king eric. king _seated on throne._ princess elaine _beside him, attended by her three maids of honor. a loud knocking is heard. omar goes to the door and returns._ omar [_bowing low before throne_]--your majesty, a visitor has come. king--bring him in. [omar _ushers in a knight._] sir constantine [_bowing low before the throne_]--most noble king, i beg of you your daughter's hand in marriage. king [_stamps impatiently_]--no! out of my royal presence at once! knight--farewell! farewell! [_bows low and withdraws._] princess elaine [_rising_]--alas! alas! it is so sad! father, if ever thou carest for my happiness, grant him my hand. [_withdraws._] king--come back, daughter, be not so foolish. scene ii.--under the window. knight [_kneeling, sings_]--"oh, ma charmante. dost thou love me, fair one?" etc. princess--yea, sir knight; cupid's arrow hath in truth pierced my heart. knight--and wilt thou elope with me? fear not. princess--i fear lest thou should think i bear no love for my father, or that i am too easily won. but yea, i will. knight [_bends low and kisses her hand_]--i will come even on wednesday next. will it be long, sweetheart? princess [_waves hand and tosses a kiss_]--yea, it will be long. scene iii.--the elopement. knight--see, dearest, i am come, and we shall flit away to my castle. step forth from thy lattice. quick! spring into my arms. princess--it is even so. scene iv.--king eric's court. king [_rushes in excitedly_]--where is my daughter? my daughter! [omar _appears in response to bell._] omar, scour the kingdom for that wretched sir constantine. he no doubt knows something about my daughter. [omar _retires, while_ king _walks up and down stage in anger until_ omar _returns._] omar [_returns and bows low_]--your majesty, i have searched everywhere except in the forest. king--what! not found my daughter? now methinks the forest is the very place to which she and her scoundrel knight would take themselves. now will i creep all through the forest, and mayhap i will find these madcapped lovers. their ill-gained happiness will soon be brought to an end. scene v.--the forest. [_knight and lady enter arm in arm._] knight [_radiantly_]--we are now safe. thy father would never hunt us here. we shall spend our day in the forest. princess--it is even so. knight [_looking around joyously_]--the birds shall sing at our wedding. fragrant wild flowers shall be thy wedding bouquet. oh! let us scorn not nature, for she and love are great friends. princess--yea, 'tis so. [_the king's voice is heard without._] knight [_suddenly in alarm_]--ah, woe! woe! here comes thy father. i must not flee, but fight. princess [_clinging to knight_]--oh! go not forth, my knight! knight--that angry voice! i hoped never to hear more. i am young, i thought experienced. he is old, yet mighty. king [_enters_]--fight with me, sir knight, and defend your lady with your body. do your best, for i am come to test your fame. [_duel with swords,_ knight _falls._] knight--alas! i am weak and my courage fails. spare me, o king. king--so, thou pleadest for mercy. yea, mercy thou shalt have. but go thou away, far away. be banished, nevermore to return. [knight _departs mournfully._] king [_embracing daughter tenderly_]--weep not, daughter. i shall banish thy lover till thou shalt be more careful how thou dost elope. have done with thy weeping. thou shalt have no tears left for thy other lovers if they dare to come. princess [_in tears_]--ah, cruel father! dost thou have no pity for me? king--why did'st thou not tell me before, oh, daughter! i knew not how true was thy love. would i could call the brave sir constantine back. but that is against the law. scene vi.--the knight's death. knight [_calls_]--oh, omar! [_enter_ page.] faithful bearer of my letters, take this to my lady and tell her that i have died of grief. [_sighs, falls and expires._] scene vii.--court of king eric. [lady elaine, _with_ maids.] princess [_as_ omar _enters_]--ah! see! here comes a messenger. now will i see what my dear sir knight will say to me. [omar _gives her a letter._] [_reads:_] "dear lady--i have died of grief, and shall never see thee more. "constantine." princess--alas, alas! my knight, i will join thee. [_screams, falls, dies._] king [_enters sorrowfully_]--oh! 'tis but to-day that my daughter had a letter saying that her lover had died of grief. she, too, has died of sorrow, and i shall have the same fate. woe, that i had no time to repent! [_falls, dies._] the end the utter childlikeness of this playlet is one of its chief charms. any one may play it--it is not copyrighted. and if it may seem forbiddingly dark in tone, perhaps in spite of the empurpled tragedies of its ending, the pang will be turned to joy when the king and the princess arise promptly from the ground and assume their proper character as father and little daughter amid the wild plaudits of the audience, consisting probably of mother only. nothing can be better for the children than to engage them in the making of little plays such as this. there are now many books of plays for children and young people. of course there are not enough. there should be one hundred where there is now but one. if all the young people would go to work devising plays we would soon have more; and plays made by themselves for themselves would be better for their use than any others could ever be. where the life of the sixteen-year-old daughter in the home may become most useful may perhaps consist in getting the parents and the children to join her in carrying through the great endeavor of presenting a play, some winter afternoon in the kitchen, for their own delectation and education. it is easy to imagine the whole family, including the father, whatever his age may be, taking part in a play; and if the father finds it hard work to fall down dead at the proper minute, it is good enough for him for allowing himself to grow so stiff! and if he finds it difficult to feel at home in a helmet of pasteboard trimmed with gilt paper and decorated with dust-brush plumes, he may remember that he is ridiculous in his own eyes only, not in those of the enraptured boy and girl who are fellow actors with him. an unfailing source of good plots is always at hand in the bible; and no better way to impress these stories upon the memory could be found than by turning the incidents into little plays and tableaux for the family to show. the sabbath school lesson could be metamorphosed into a joy and the symbolisms of christmas and easter could be made a reality by the legitimate use of the dramatic instinct that is innate in all of us. a form of art akin to the play is the moving picture. this source of amusement and of education is within the reach of every country community that has learned the secret of joining hands. the men and especially the women of the community should be invariably present and should instantly and firmly object to any film that seems to them harmful. this being provided, the young people are safe and may have the pleasure and instruction that come from seeing displayed the clean, adventurous story, the doings of other lands and of historic events long past. chapter xxvi pageantry as a community resource truth is eternal, but her effluence, with endless change, is fitted to the hour; her mirror is turned forward, to reflect the promise of the future, not the past. --_lowell._ chapter xxvi pageantry as a community resource [illustration: the swiftly awakening artistic energies of the country girl are finding an outlet in the new national interest in pageantry. the farm, meadow or field makes an ideal stage.] the swiftly awakening artistic energies of the country girl are finding still another outlet in the new national interest in pageantry. now that we realize our puritanic mistake about the god-given powers for artistic enjoyment, we are taking to our heart the ravishing delight that the quick and vivid sense of beauty can yield. the pageant is one expression of this; along with old home week, and other celebrations of local history, it is also a blossoming of our quickening historic sense. we see that there is a great deal of education to be found in the pageant itself, and a great deal of community spirit in the making and in the representing of this form of dramatic art. the pageant is a form of drama in which the greatest freedom is allowed as to the dimensions of the stage, the number of the actors, and all the provisions of properties and scenery. instead of a constricted box-like compartment such as the audience faces in the usual theater, the hillside or the village green may be the stage. in the place of a few accurately balanced characters, whole congregations of worshipers, audiences of citizens, or armies of soldiers, may assemble, flocks of faeries may fly by, unreal spirits of the winds and very real spinsters or bachelors may hold conversation with each other, and throughout the whole structure of the work the fancy may have its way with the actual and disport itself freely with the romantic. it is not many years since the pageant began to be taken up in this country as a form of artistic expression. when we began to realize how strangely romantic our course of history as an american people had been, when we viewed our past struggle to subdue the soil and overcome the difficulties of pioneering as a most tragic story, as a heart-moving tale fitted for the great epic and for the great tragic drama, then we felt the impulse to place these tales of old-time heroism in fitting artistic form before the eyes of the people. it was not without meaning that the desire to express in dramatic form the pictures of our historic past had its earliest origins not in the metropolitan square but on the village green, with a background not of skyscrapers but of sequoia groves. again we see rural conditions more favorable to the budding powers of human genius. there our newly awakened enthusiasm for community betterment promptly seized the pageant as a fitting means of expressing its urgent emotion. looking forward into the future we desired to express our hopes for enlargement as we had expressed our vision of the meaning of past struggles. there are plain reasons why this loose and easy dramatic form is especially adapted for the use of a town or village when it wishes to portray dramatically its own historic and community experiences. in fact, american pageantry has had from the earliest attempts a distinct reference to the welfare of the community and to the development of the rich resources of fellowship to be found in concerted action. this was amply shown at thetford, vermont, where one of the earliest and most successful pageants was given. that was as late as . the author of the text frankly stated that the pageant seemed to him the expression of a movement for the general development of the resources of the town, agricultural, educational and social. the work should become, then, a study of the rural problem, and a contribution toward the effort to make the country town fulfil its ideal as a place to live. in this effort the pageant has been a success; it has proved a molding, unifying and inspiring influence; it has quickened into life the slumbering energies of the people. by awakening pride in the characteristics of the town and the region, interest in the history of their past, and hopes for the better things of the future, it has created a shoulder to shoulder feeling and a vivification of energy that have brought new ideas to life and given courage to try them. in the pageant reality may be mingled with symbolism--the latter for passages not susceptible of representation on so large a stage as the village green, or for certain elements of village life that could not be put into direct dramatic form. for instance, after some scenes from the early history of a town have been shown, the conditions of modern times may be symbolized by embodying the new life in a character to be called the spirit of pageantry or the spirit of putting joy into work. she will be radiant with hope and joy, and her motions will be stately and ritualistic. prone upon the ground before her may lie a character representing the village of time past, clothed in a dingy dress and expressing melancholy in her whole appearance. the spirit of pageantry may lift her up and give her encouraging words. following this a figure on a white horse who represents america may enter and the pageant may close with the orchestra and chorus singing "o say can you see by the dawn's early light?" something a little like this was done at thetford, vermont. the pageant at st. johnsbury had an advantage in that its name suggested knightliness and gave opportunity for armor, processions of knights, and chivalric poems. they had also the fairbanks' scales as a motive suggesting an interesting symbol for their historic treatment. in meriden, vermont, education for the new country life was taken as a theme and the founding of their academy was the central feature. the individuality of every town may be expressed in its pageant. no two would ever be alike. how a pageant idea may be used to illuminate a sacred or ecclesiastical subject may be seen in a masque that was written for the dedication of a chapel. the plan is very simple. one character represents the church as a whole, and another, a younger woman, stands for the spirit of the chapel. this character presents a model of the chapel to the church, who in stately measures of verse, receives the gift, and asks to know what the services of the people are to be. a series of scenes are the answer. women and children come with their burdens of sickness and poverty and are helped. a battalion of boys show their drill and receive prizes. various clubs offer entertainment. strangers of different nationalities are welcomed one after another, and before the evening is over one has seen an exhibition of model devices for making a church touch every side of the life in a community. of course a church that has no benevolent activities in working order could not hope to provide a pageant that would have dramatic interest. a dead church could only betray its poverty. and yet--perhaps it would be salutary for some churches if they could be stung into such betrayal: it might awaken them to a sense of their own losses of the joy of giving and of doing. a story that has been passed down from generation to generation can be used in a pageant. this is delightfully illustrated in a scene from _the mohawk trail_, a pageant given in the summer of at north adams, massachusetts, in honor of the re-opening after many centuries of disuse of an old path over the hoosac mountain that used to be the connecting link between the iroquois indians of new york and the tribes of new england. eleven hundred persons took part in this great play. there were indians, early settlers, quakers, revolutionary soldiers, spirits of the pines and spirits of the waters, the little creatures of the swamp, and so on. the inhabitants of several towns took part and the muse of cooperation (a newcomer in that select greek group!) must have waved happy wings over the whole mountain region. the scene referred to was based on the following story: there were many quakers among the early settlers in that region and among them was a pretty young quaker sister that an english officer fell in love with, thereupon asking her father to give him her hand in marriage. the old gentleman said: "if thee will give up thy fighting, thy sword and thy sinful coat of scarlet, and become a good quaker gentleman, thee may have my daughter, sir, for she loves thee." the officer, it is said, did give up his commission, marry the pretty quaker and adopt the quaker garb and the quaker principles. in the pageant this quaint incident appears in this wise: the british officer alights on the pageant green near the meeting-house and stands waiting. the young quakeress comes demurely along, picking flowers as she approaches. while they are conversing, the people begin to enter the church. as they pass they look with curiosity upon the two young people, who when the father and mother come near, show the very picture of woe. the british officer however steps toward the parents, leading the maiden by the hand and says: "friend bowerman, may i have thy daughter for my wife? i love her, sir, and will guard her with my life. do not, i pray thee, say me nay. my happiness and hers depend upon the decision." here the soldier and the maiden kneel before the stern parents. says friend bowerman: "rise from thy knees, friend, kneel only to thy god. thee may have my daughter, sir, upon one condition. thee must give up thy fighting, thy sword, and thy sinful coat of scarlet and become a good quaker gentleman. think well on this, good friend, before making thy decision." then friend bowerman and the mother go toward the meeting-house, leading the daughter sorrowfully with them. the english officer now seats himself to think and decide. immediately thereupon things begin to happen. enter cupid with his little bow and dances about him. next the spirit of war rides across the green; the soldier sees the war-horse and runs eagerly toward it. he leads it forward as if about to mount, when presto! cupid runs forward, and draws his bow. the officer returns to his seat, drops his face and thinks some more. now the people come out of the church and gather in groups shaking hands with each other. friend bowerman comes along with wife and daughter. cupid hides in the bushes. the british officer rises from his meditation, steps forward and says: "friend bowerman, i have made my decision. i lay my sword, my scarlet coat and my commission at the feet of thy daughter whom i ask to be my beloved wife." friend bowerman says to rachel his wife, "what sayest thou, rachel?" and she nods acquiescence. then he says to the officer, "thee may have her, friend, for she loves thee." then the people gather around the couple, the wedding ceremony is performed, the officer and the pretty bride mount and ride away, the quakers disperse, and cupid dances gleefully about the green. there were ninety quakers in this scene and nearly all of them were direct descendants of the true quakers of the earlier time. this adds, of course, immensely to the interest of the scenes. to think that one is enacting a story that our great grandparents lived, making history as they lived, is a wonderful experience. but we are living too; we are making history. and perhaps the things we do shall be thought worthy of remembrance. the pageant in this country has an opportunity that almost no other land on the globe can afford. this is illustrated in one of the scenes of the st. johnsbury play, a town whose business of scale-making has called to the town many people of many different nationalities. in one of the interludes of their pageant companies of people entered in the costumes of the countries from which they had come and danced the folk dances of their various nations. so for instance the french canadians came in and danced the old vintage-dance to the proper folk-music accompaniment. following them the germans danced the german hopping-dance; then the scandinavians gave their kulldansen, the scotch the scotch reel, the irish the st. patrick's jig, the italians the tarantella. after these separate dances were finished, all the different companies came in together across the greensward and marched in and out in interlocking wheels, until they formed themselves into one large glorious united wheel together. the beautiful lesson is very plain. in such scenes as these full opportunity is specially given for the young people to take part. they can be choruses; they can be pioneers or fairies; they can be flowers and birds and butterflies; they can be spirits of waves, of breezes, of leaves and brooklets, all in appropriate costumes of tissue-paper wings or khaki indian suits, or blue denim cloth with patterns cut out and sewed on. this gives every one a feeling of being a part of the day's great celebration and awakens the spirit of home and community in the heart. to represent a pageant with broad historic effects one must have many characters and a great deal of perspective. but the beauty of it is that this great piece of work is one that can engage the interest of every last man, woman or child in the whole town. there are so many parts to the completed whole, there are so many kinds of ability that can be brought into play that every member of the community can be given a portion of the structure for his or her responsibility; and the final joy of achievement is gained, the sense of being a part of a great whole, the joy of the community working together. there must be committees. all the noted and leading people of the town and county may be made into a committee of patrons and patronesses. to these may be added the names of any people of note whose interest can be gained. the honor of heading the committee will perhaps not be declined by the governor of the state, and any literary people who may live in the vicinity will be proud to give their names. the author or authors of the text, the composer of the music and the master of the pageant who has main charge of the dramatic presentation, will be in a distinctive group by themselves. there should be a suitable person to see that the historical matters are correctly used, a historical censor or critic. there must be a committee to take charge of funds incoming and outgoing, one for advertising, one for costume, one for properties. other committees will have charge of buildings and grounds, of seating and lighting, and any other matters that are likely to come up, such as care of horses or oxen; and if there are to be any eagles, ostriches, rattlesnakes or giraffes--why, safety and agreeableness would seem to require that there should be a committee for each of these! it is evident that the pageant will find use for all the tastes and abilities of the whole village, not to say the entire township. many and many a meeting will be held and many a discussion about the olden time and what the grandparents now have to carry on their various industries and household and town activities. and every boy and girl who takes part in those discussions will have a deepened realization of the hardships that our ancestors went through to prepare the way for the blessings that we now enjoy. the pageant not only cultivates the historic sense; it also makes us better understand ourselves in the present; and it quickens our sense of living for the things that are to be and that are to be a growth from the things that are, as what we are now has come up from the past. the picture of the heroism of our ancestors gives us the enlargement that always comes from the view of great ideals of courage and nobility. so our culture and our spiritual height are enlarged, our sense of the dignity of the human race is heightened, and our determination to live highly is intensified. it is a good thing to present any dramatic piece that has been created by the great minds and poets of earth. this should also be a part of our endeavor. to do this brings us into a closer touch with the mind of the great artistic creator than we can come in any other way. we have then held up before our mind the ideal of great artistic form and the influence of this model will be incalculable upon our education and development. but there is a certain spontaneity of self-expression, a certain arousing of the intellectual powers and of the artistic feeling, that comes with the making of our own play, that can hardly be otherwise gained. both experiences are within the opportunity of any village or community. both joyful means of self-expression can be mastered and experienced. the play and the pageant form the greatest means for the expression of the artistic energy of a community that can be devised. the pageant may be the happy means of bringing the whole town together. it breaks over all dividing lines because every individual in the community can have at least some part in it. the pride in the success of the whole can be shared by every least child, by each most important person, by the rich and the poor, by the wise and by the unlearned; for there has been a place for each one, according to his ability. the pageant is democratic; all individuals work for the success of the whole, not for the glorification of any single one, never for the glorification of self. it develops a personality of the community itself. above all things it gives the person and the community a chance to gain the joy that comes from the expression of that creative sense that lies at the base of all artistic ability, that power in which the human being is most near to the god-like. here the poets and dramatic writers of earth, the great souls of the greek and of the elizabethan ages have been partakers of the fervor that was with god under the symbol of "wisdom" as that wonderful poem in the eighth chapter of the book of proverbs, relates, when with joy he created the earth. among all the good things that may come in the new upspringing of this artistic interest, the young women in the rural realm have a distinct function. in the planning of the play or pageant the young people will be brought together in social ways that are full of opportunity for high-toned acquaintanceship and culture under the best auspices. ladies and gentlemen, young men and young ladies, will be working together for an artistic purpose; the result will be not only an enlarged community spirit among all, but a great number of personal ties that will be of enduring value. may not this be still another interest that will bind the younger members of the village life more closely to the home place so that they cannot be lured away? there are pageants that may be enacted by young girls alone when fairies and sylphs and angels hold the stage and delight the eye with their many-hued robes and their beautiful movements. the young women's christian association has given some altogether delightful masques and pageants; the camp fire girls have done the same. in their societies, whatever the kind, country girls may undertake some of the plays of smaller scope but quite as beautiful in their way as those in which the whole community join, and in this way find their hands filled with pleasing and recompensing labor. chapter xxvii organizations, especially the young women's christian association raise the stone: thou shalt find me there; cleave the wood, and there am i. --_logia of jesus._ chapter xxvii organizations, especially the young women's christian association in a memoir that belongs to the classic traditions of our country, that of david brainerd the missionary, we read that he besought the lord that he might not be too much pleased and amused with dear friends and acquaintances one place and another. we have now a new and different ideal of community feeling; we pray that we may be "pleased and amused with dear friends and acquaintances," for we realize that only by having ideas together and working together may we reach the highest ideals not only for the community but for the individual. where isolation becomes really intolerable, the country girl cannot be blamed for taking the first means to relieve herself of its dangers. but where there is a possibility of making a stagnant place become healthily busy and interesting, she must be blamed for not making an attempt in that direction. an association of the girls alone is always possible if there is even one more than one to start with. perhaps others will soon join. the most unpromising material, if it is human material, can be brought into line and made something of. but there must be a start. now and then we know there is a girl found among the good people of a village who has thoroughly bad inclinations. such a one, after the case is made clear, must be put into the hands of some person of trained experience and mature judgment. this is not to be managed by the girls themselves. because of this possibility it is thought best that every club for girls, especially for the younger girls, should have a guardian or a secretary of older years. whatever rules are made, say, for instance, by the young women's christian association, in the fundamental plans for societies of girls, we may be sure they have been devised by people who are good, and who desire the best for the girls, and who understand the whole situation and speak and act from this knowledge. it may be that the girl who will entertain the bold idea of forming a club or society is not by any means the one who most needs the club. she thinks of it because some happy circumstance has developed in her a power of initiative, the courage or instinct for beginning something new. it takes courage sometimes to undertake an absolutely new work; and the girl who has been always helped, never told to go ahead and do things for herself, will not have developed that power. the ability to start things can be hypnotized out of anybody; the faculty for it, if once possessed, can be deadened or suppressed beyond the last degree of vitality. to take the first step is a matter of life or death with such a long suppressed nature; but that one step over, the crushed vitality springs strangely to life and then every step is easier. then the beautiful experience lies before you of constantly growing life; faculties that you hardly knew you possessed spring into being. this is growth, and growth is the only life. there will sometimes be in the village one girl who cherishes a higher ideal of conduct than she sees embodied in the life about her. where did she get it? perhaps from a mother who, immersed in her home cares and burdens, has taken little part in the affairs in the town. she in turn received from her mother delicate thoughts that have vanished from the village when a lower standard of manners came in with certain new and less cultivated people. in this new atmosphere the daughter has tried to live and has been mostly alone. lack of companionship has made her unsocial and somewhat unbending. her mind lacks swift response because she has had no chance to practise swiftness of response in conversation and repartee. moreover, she has not the influence among the girls that she ought to have because they take her search for better forms of conduct for self-conceit; they consider her proud and stiff and priggish; those touches of ceremoniousness which she chooses because of her passion for beauty and grace, they consider affectation. there is no place like the country to put affectation in its place; but it is as possible there as elsewhere to misjudge the real sources of inspiration in matters of conduct. in the hearts of these very girls who look askance at the solitary one as she passes along the village path and talk among themselves about her primness and her pride, there may be a great admiration for her after all, a desire to copy all her little touches of elegance, a swift noting of her graces and of everything new she adds to her repertoire of manners. if she keeps her body very straight and holds her chin correctly, they will be looking in the glass to find out whether their spinal column can be stiffened to give the same effect. they may laugh at her but they try to imitate her. after all, you see, the fundamental standards are the same; the difference being that one girl comes almost to the point of living up to them, the other girls have tried and because of ignorance or lack of opportunity have failed, and have looked upon their failure until they have despaired of ever succeeding. fundamentally there is the same desire at the heart of both the refined recluse girl who longs to have company among the other girls, and the less agreeable, less refined and less cultivated girls who secretly envy while they ridicule, and are waiting only for the open door to enable them to walk in and leave their coarseness and bungling outside. the first step for such a girl to take in working out her desire to be of help to the other girls, is to show them in some way that she really cares for them and that, as far as her heart goes she is one with them. if she can only get out of her seeming stiffness for a little while and get down to the real heart beneath, the other girls will respond, and pretty soon the happy influence of the spirit of unity will assert itself and the true basis in desire for better things--whatever they may turn out to be--will be a bond between the elements. then some kind of play or some kind of work may be proposed. it does not matter so much what is done as it matters that something shall be done and done together. _do something together_--that is the main thing. anything, anything at all--only that it be _together_! then after the doing of something together has begun, the next steps are possible. the young woman in the rural community may see things that need to be done and be unable to think of any way to accomplish the reform. here comes in the good of an association. for instance, something may be going wrong in the village. there is a dangerous manure heap by a wall. on the other side of the wall lives a family with children. the big black flies are creeping on the heap and then they fly over and light upon the baby's lips, dropping death-dealing poison as they move along over the pure skin of the child. what is there that any one girl can do about such a thing? she may feel that she is not the one to approach the old gentleman who owns the uncared-for barnyard; he would never listen to what some chit of a girl would say to him; no, evidently that would do no good. but if the young girl has some social position and some popularity among the other girls in the village, she can organize them into a club or society; she can make out programs for meetings into which some useful modern subjects are sprinkled; she can in a little time get the whole village agog about the care of their spotless town, and at last, the thought will rise to the surface that said neighbor must do something about the abuse of neighborliness he has committed in leaving his barnyard untended for so long a time. the club of girls could take for its motto, "no fly in our village"; and no worthier one could be found, at least for a time. other forms of aspiration might follow. meantime, perhaps, the baby has died; and this thought may bring it home to us that the keeping of the village clean is a sort of king's business requiring haste. it is always a good plan to save red tape by taking advantage of any existing associations that may be made to answer our need. the country girl is happy in having several such societies that she may join. among these may be mentioned the young women's christian association, the young women's hebrew association, the educational alliance, the girls' friendly society, the king's daughters, the sodality of the children of mary, the girls' athletic league, the girls' protective league, the camp fire girls, the good templars, and the grange, a society in which the women have the same privileges as the men and where young and older members meet and work together. the international congress for farm women has a section for young women. among all these the one that has the most to give to the young women of the countryside is the young women's christian association--an association that now includes a glorious company of two hundred and eighty thousand young women. the fundamental thought in their work is "character-contagion"; first the contagion of the character of christ as an influence in the world; second, the contagion of the character of a christ-like human being among others. this thought is expressed in their handbook in these words: "with the contagion of christian character as a definite object the very first ideal of the association is that every person placed in a position of responsibility for any part of the work shall embody the spirit of christ." flaming with enthusiasm for this ideal, over a hundred national secretaries are carrying on the work among nine hundred local societies in this country, and over thirty are sent to turkey, japan, india, china, and south america, that the girls of other lands also may learn to know the good that girls can do for girls. for this association follows the theory that "every girl needs help, and every girl can give help." the declaration strikes to the bottom of things psychological in girl-life. girls need each other. no one can help a girl like a girl. if there is any trouble with any girl or with any pair or group of girls, get a girl--the right kind of girl--to come and redirect the group. if new thoughts, new ideals, new enthusiasms embodied in a new girl can be brought in, the old thoughts will disappear themselves. there are trees on which the old leaves hang withered and dead all winter long: the rains cannot rot them away, the winds cannot whip them off. but when in the spring the new life begins to come coursing up the trunk, runs out through the branches, and presses a new end against the root of the dead stem, it yields at last and makes way for the leaf and flower and fruit that imperatively insist upon having more room. those who wish to redirect young human life may find a practise lesson in this example of nature. to make faulty habits or low ideals or dangerous inclinations disappear, bring in new life. and experience teaches that new life can be imparted in no way more effectively in the field of girl-life than through good noble girl associates. to associate girls under some noble banner that will assure their enthusiasm and loyalty, will therefore be one of the most direct means of lifting their standard of living. this association more than any other has taken to heart the problem of the country girl. two of the hand bills of the association show how they feel about the country girl and what she needs and what she may have if she will take the right means. the girl in the country "_where the wide earth yields_ _her beauties of fruit and grain._" if the country is to continue to produce not only the food but the hardiest young men and women, and much of the idealism and best leadership of the nation, life must be made _less solitary_ _more comfortable_ _more attractive_ _freer from drudgery_ _happier and_ _fuller of opportunity_ for the , , girls and women on the farms and in the villages! solving the rural problem through the country young women's christian association. it brings to the girls in the country and small towns the opportunity of self-development and self-expression the chance to work and play with other girls higher social standards spiritual growth and christian ideals contact with a world-wide organization a community consciousness. these girls give back to their community trained leadership joyful, rich, vivid lives improved economic conditions for women consecrated homes christian spirit in work and play cooperation. the young women's christian association feels that it is its "privilege to reach the country girls in terms of their own environment, helping them to help themselves and to become active social forces in their own communities." pursuing this thought, the wonderful idea was hit upon of using the available energy of the country girl that goes away to college as she returns to her home full of inspiration for a "career." the career of being a good angel to her home community is offered to her. [illustration: one of the many eight weeks' clubs organized throughout the country by the y. w. c. a.] carrying out this purpose with energy and great enthusiasm, as they do everything they take up, the y. w. c. a. instituted a special section of their work which they called the "eight weeks club." under this scheme, in the late winter or early spring, trained secretaries who are able to give time and strength to the work and who are touched with the flame of that character-contagion, are sent out to the colleges. preparation classes are formed among these girls, schemes are marked out for the summer, and a suggested plan of study printed for them in the association monthly is gone over. in the summer of about nine hundred names of country girls in college who were willing to embark for the summer's work were received. they came from one hundred and fifty-eight different colleges. not all of these were eventually able to lead clubs; some were prevented by sickness, by family reasons, etc., after they got home. but there were one hundred and seventy-two who reported promptly that they did actually lead eight weeks clubs, and about girls were enrolled in these clubs. the clubs represented thirty-one states, pennsylvania leading with twenty-two, iowa having nineteen, south dakota ten, wisconsin twelve.[ ] if you think that there is not much that you, a lone, single girl without any help can do, listen to this story which one of the christian association secretaries tells of the experience of one college girl who went to teach in a small town. "the first sunday i was in town," she said, "i went to sunday school. there were eight people there and they were all old. on the next sunday there were five and one of them was blind; and what do you think? they asked me to take the superintendency." did she take it? the secretary says she held her breath for the answer, for on just such a turning-point as this hangs the solution of the whole country problem. "i did; and when i went away in the spring, there were ninety-three in that sunday school and none of them was blind." if one lone country girl can do so much as that, what might not be accomplished if all the girls in the community were as one heart and mind to work together for the sunday school, for the church, for the christian endeavor and the epworth league, and for all the causes that seek higher things in the community? a young woman may never know what emergency she may be training for when she begins to teach a sunday school class. it is the hope of the y. w. c. a. that the eight weeks club for the summer may ultimately be developed into an all-round-the-year y. w. c. a., to go on indefinitely. the desire of the secretaries is to organize the young women of country and village life on the basis of the county. a county secretary, trained for the work, should be placed in charge and should seek to reach every girl within "team-haul" or street-car riding distance with the invitation to meetings, where music, books, and pictures are found, together with wholesome social guidance and direct religious inspiration, and above all the companionship that forms a channel for the effectiveness of those good and uplifting influences. "the county secretary," says one of their leaflets, "must not only know country life but student life and city life and industrial life. she must be an expert in educational, physical, religious and civic questions and she must be able to lead and to organize so that clubs and groups may be produced which shall meet needs extending all the way from athletics and recreation through social and general community life up to distinctly religious and devotional service. she must be able to use volunteer leaders and to mold them into a sympathetic cooperation for the bearing of one another's burdens which ultimately will lead them to share one another's successes. the county young women's christian association ... is bound to come into its heritage of success and to transform the girlhood of the country and village life of our land." if there is no college girl to come "back home" to take the lead in forming an eight weeks club, and no other means at hand to carry out a plan for organization in the mind of any young woman in some rural region, the best thing to do is to write--and get as many other girls as you can to write also--to the y. w. c. a., lexington avenue, new york city, and tell them of the desire, and then see what happens. they will be likely to send in good time a state or county secretary to come and look over the field and give advice. she will probably hold a conference with the leading people of the county, calling together the pastors and their wives, teachers, bankers, alumnæ, and others interested. there will be parlor conferences, speeches and addresses, and personal interviews. giving of the necessary funds will surely follow all this education of the mind of the community, and a place will be chosen or built for the home of the new association. whatever institutions already exist in the community, either social or religious, the y. w. c. a. will not retard them but will give them aid and new inspiration. by the elastic articulation of its secretaries and departments, the young women's christian association cooperates with many organizations: with the church in training leaders for bible study courses and teachers for sunday schools, in directing social life, and in encouraging federation and unity among denominations; with the school, by athletic leagues, field days, play festivals, contests in public speaking and choral singing; with teachers and farmers' institutes, chautauquas, and the grange, giving programs for girls and women; with agricultural extension courses, adapting them to the needs of girls; with state and county fairs, providing exhibits, contests, camps, rest rooms; with library commissions, making out reading lists and using traveling libraries. there is not an organization for betterment beside which the young women's christian association will not stand, taking from it whatever it can use for the welfare of young women and girls, and putting its own spiritual meaning into the endeavor. footnotes: [ ] if any country girl should write to miss elizabeth wilson, executive secretary of the y. w. c. a., lexington avenue, new york city, full information would be given her about the eight weeks clubs and also as to any other part of the work of this wonderful, dynamic and constantly growing association. chapter xxviii the camp fire ruth the toiler there is that quiet in her face that comes to all who toil. she moves through all the sheaves with grace a daughter of the soil. there is that beauty in her hands, that glory in her hair, that adds a warmth to sun-brown lands when autumn cools the air. there is that gladness in her eyes, as one who finds the dust a lovely path to paradise, and common things august there is that reverence in her mood, that patience sweet and broad, as one who in the solitude yet walks the fields with god! --_edward wilbur mason._ chapter xxviii the camp fire the young women's christian association will frequently be found working in harmony with a sister organization called "the camp fire girls," which is also a national association with many local groups called "camp fires." the purpose of this organization, to quote from one of their booklets, "is to show that the common things of daily life are the chief means of beauty, romance and adventure; to aid in the forming of habits making for health and vigor, the out-of-door habit and the out-of-door spirit; to devise ways of measuring and creating standards of women's work; to give girls the opportunity to learn how to 'keep step,' to learn team work through doing it; to help girls and women to serve the community, the larger home, in the same ways that they have always served the individual home; to give status and social recognition to the knowledge of the mothers and thus restore the intimate relationship of mothers and daughters to each other." the field of endeavor in this organization is seen to be a wide one. it is interesting to learn how they have worked this fine ideal out into practical form. in planning and building up this association the picturesque field of american indian life has been drawn upon for an elaborate and fascinating system of ceremonial, that masks some very definite psychological principles and ideals for future development in character and customs. what seemed attractive in indian life to the founders of this society has evidently been the out-of-doors aspect that our amerindian predecessors' way of living always suggests. then the primitive industries were taken into account, and perhaps the fact that the mother was among the indians the center of the community, the chief laborer, the owner of all the property and the giver of the family name, may have had influence in the choice of their thoughts and ways of symbolism. the picture writing, the delicate craft of bead embroidery and bead weaving had a strong appeal. there was much about indian lore and indian craft that could beckon modern girls along a path of adventure, poetry and romance into the realms of industry, service and patriotism. indian symbolisms are used in the prettiest manner. there is a camp fire costume cut and fringed so as to look like that of an indian maiden. there are many attractive signs filled with mystic meanings. the watchword is "wohelo," a word that sounds like an indian name, but really is made out of the first letters of three good american words: work, health, and love. each member is expected to choose a name for herself; it must be something that shall express her own wish and desire. for instance, the girl whose aspiration was to sing and to grow, chose for herself the name "songrow." then the member is expected to weave this name into the bead band she is allowed to wear about her forehead in the supposed fashion of indian women. around her throat she wears a necklace, and on this sacred ornament each bead represents some achievement she has made, the color of the bead indicating the class of service that has been performed by her. all this is most fascinating to the story-book quality in the mind of every young girl. in order to become a camp fire girl the applicant must repeat "the wood gatherer's desire." in this she testifies to her desire to obey "the law of the camp fire," which is to "seek beauty give service pursue knowledge be trustworthy hold on to health glorify work be happy." these seven laws of the camp fire she promises that she will strive to follow. later on she may receive a higher title, that of fire maker. to do this she must learn by heart and repeat "the fire maker's desire." "as fuel is brought to the fire, so i purpose to bring my strength, my ambition, my heart's desire, my joy, and my sorrow, to the fire of humankind for i will tend as my fathers have tended and my fathers' fathers since time began, the fire that is called the love of man for man, the love of man for god." but in order to win the honor of becoming a fire maker, she must do much more than merely to recite a short poem. she must also perform a service of a housewifely sort, such as the purchase and preparation of a meal; must be able to darn stockings, keep her own cash account, tie a square knot, sleep with open windows, take a half hour's outing daily, refrain from chewing gum, from candy, sundaes, sodas and commercially manufactured beverages for at least a month, report on a study of infant mortality, on the rudiments of first aid, and of personal hygiene, including the right use of baths, a nice care of the hands and of the feet, exquisite cleanliness of hair, shiny whiteness of teeth, perfect sweetness of breath, care in regard to eyesight, sleeping, and exercise; she must know by heart some one poem twenty-five lines long and the whole of "my country, 'tis of thee," and the career of some woman who has done much for the country or state. besides all this the candidates must present twenty elective honors; but to learn what these may be a prospective fire maker will have to consult the long and elaborate lists in the camp fire girls' book of specifications, where she will find them covering eight pages of fine print, arranged under various heads. here is where the brightly colored beads come in. it is no meaningless honor--that necklace of many-colored beads! let us briefly run over this list of possible honors. [illustration: this photograph of a camp fire girl shows the opportunity country life affords for good sport.] the red beads are for honors in health craft; and this represents attainment in a special knowledge of first aid to the injured, in personal conquest over colds for a certain length of time, regularity in attendance at school, proper diet, sleeping outdoors or with windows open wide, a certain time spent in playing games, attainments in swimming, rowing, canoeing, sailing, skating, coasting, snow-shoeing, riding, mountain climbing, tramping, bicycling, automobiling or folk dancing. it is plain to see that the ideal of the camp fire girls in regard to health and vigor is to be sought with determination and to be gained specially through the good out-of-doors. the flame-colored bead represents home craft. here a large variety of activities are grouped under the heads of cooking, marketing, laundering, housekeeping, a term used here to include all departments of scientific house-cleaning, making beds for baby and for grown folks, care of baby and making toys for the little ones, care of waste and garbage, washing dishes, storing clothes for the winter, and care of domestic animals. to this formidable array is added the devising of some invention that shall be useful in the household. then comes some non-professional instruction in the care of the sick; and the wide field of entertainment follows, such as song, playing some musical instrument, reciting poetry, getting up a dialogue or play, writing a story or working out a program of some sort, giving a pantomime, telling stories, or adapting them to dramatic representation, and giving these forms of entertainment at some home, hospital, or settlement where there are sick people to be helped to forget their suffering. [illustration: a school garden where the children are taught to love and understand the growing things as well as to cultivate them.] next come the blue honors. the bead of this color is given for attainments in nature lore--knowledge of trees, flowers, ferns, grasses, mosses, birds, bees, butterflies, moths, stars. if the girl knows the planets and seven constellations and their stories, she may wear the blue bead. also if she does a certain amount of work in a flower or vegetable garden of her own, raises a crop of something and cans, pickles or preserves her product, or if she carries on an experimental garden, planting, for instance, one plot with pedigreed and one with unpedigreed seeds and recording the results, she wins the blue bead. this is but a faint sketch, of course, of the interests in this department. a wood-brown bead is given for camp craft. here there are tent craft, wood craft, fire lore, camp cookery, weather lore, camp packing, and all kinds of knot tying. added to this is an attractive group called indian craft. under this head the member may win a wood-brown bead if she knows six indian legends or twenty-five signs of the indian sign language, or six blazes. is there any one who does not know what the word "blaze" means? it is the mark you cut on the tree with your hatchet by which when you are on the trail you may tell your way back home again. the applicant for this brown bead honor may know three indian ways of testing the eyesight, or how to make a totem, an indian bed, an indian tepee, or a bead band eight inches long. any one of these achievements wins the wood-brown bead. then come the green honors. here the artist in the young member of the society has a chance for development. if the girl chooses she may win this bead by work in clay modeling, or in brass or silver work; in basketry, wood carving, carpentry, dyeing, leather work, stenciling, sewing, photography, hat trimming, original designs in embroidering, and many other kinds of beautiful expression through the arts. yellow honors are given for any sort of business positions, earning certain sums for an accomplishment worthy of the yellow bead, keeping accurate accounts, saving a definite amount, making budgets for the family, and so forth. then come the red-white-and-blue honors, which includes helping in the celebration of some historical day, the national birthdays, or some day connected with the history of the town in which the member lives, like a pageant or an historical tableau. knowledge of the customs and laws of our country come under this head, and service to the community in any way, helping about keeping the town clean and about making it a better and more healthful place for all. this bead may be won by a knowledge of what the great ones of the past have done for the public good, such as religious leaders, missionaries, educators, great women, statesmen, scientists. a sketch of the life of that great woman, harriet beecher stowe, or of that other wonderful woman, frances e. willard, would take this honor; and the ability to repeat from memory a certain number of verses from the bible or a number of the world's greatest hymns, would be equally valued among these achievements. it would certainly seem as if a girl who could win honor beads enough to string a necklace for herself might be forgiven for some slight tinge of vanity. but there is not much excuse for any girl in the land to fail to be worthy of acceptance in this honorable company, for the requirements cover so wide a range and the girls of america are so ingenious in taking hold of new ideas and moreover are already so filled with activities in all the realms touched by these inspiring suggestions, that the camp fire spirit ought to become a household interest in every state of the union. when a member has gained the precious testimonials of her attainments in these artistic and household and community services, she procures the leather cord that is essential in the proper indian method for stringing beads, and in some shape that her original fancy shall dictate she arranges a necklace to suit her own taste. the beads are of good size; they are colored in delicate, unstaring tints, and the hole in the bead is large enough for the leather to pass easily through. more and more honors may be worked for and won as time goes on, and the bead string may be made more and more beautiful; the wearer may thus become more of an inspiration to her friends and associates. there is a still higher rank than fire maker; it is that of torch bearer. the one who reaches this rank by special study and work, is an assistant to the guardian, who is the leader of the society and is a person of maturity and of training for the work of guide to the younger ones. the camp fire girls as an association is especially adapted to charm and interest the girls of from twelve years old to sixteen, while it is good also for older girls. it is evident that the useful activities that lie back of the attainment of these varied beads in the camp fire girls' necklace will influence every girl that undertakes them in the direction of the aims and purposes of the society. the camp craft and wood craft will awaken the outdoor spirit, and the health craft will help to establish habits making for health and vigor. the same red bead brings games and exercises that will teach girls how to do team work, how to work together to gain the power of quick decision, to take defeat casually, to acknowledge the rights of others, to perceive justice when its laws are thrust upon one in fair play. when the red-white-and-blue bead is gained, a service to the community has been emphasized; and throughout all the list the emerging standardization of women's work is seen. in this respect the camp fire girls as an organization joins with many other movements in working toward placing home economics on a more respected and honorable platform. just how the system of activities is to make a closer and more intimate relation between daughter and mother is yet to be revealed. the daughter's appreciation, developed through actual experimentation, of what the mother has perhaps been doing all alone in carrying household burdens, will no doubt tend to make a more cordial relation and intimacy between the house leader that has been and the house leader that is to be in the home that goes on forever. at all events there is a crying need just to-day for a closer understanding and sympathy between mothers and daughters: and if this organization of young women and girls will help in that phase of our life, it will be performing a great national service. a great deal of poetry has been written for and by the camp fire girls and much fine music has been composed for them to sing in their ceremonies. what could be more beautiful than this, by katherine lee bates: "burn, fire, burn! flicker, flicker, flame! whose hand above this flame is lifted shall be with magic touch engifted, to warm the hearts of lonely mortals who stand without their open portals. the torch shall draw them to the fire, higher, higher, by desire. whoso shall stand by this hearthstone, flame-fanned, shall never, never stand alone; whose house is dark and bare and cold, whose house is cold, this is his own. flicker, flicker, flicker, flame; burn, fire, burn!" the whole ritual is so poetic that it seems to have touched the young life into creative energy. the ceremony of receiving a girl into the various honors is altogether beautiful; but we must leave something for a surprise to the young girl who is hoping to become some day a member. it must be remembered, however, that the honors are to be earned. the friend of a member is not begged to join the camp fire girls; she is allowed to join if she will enter into the spirit of the society and make herself worthy. to do that she may have to alter her point of view. if she has been in the habit of thinking of the humble duties of life as a drudgery, she certainly will have to change her mind in that respect. to throw romance and beauty and the spirit of adventure about the common things of life is the avowed object of the association. and these are the common things of life--dish washing, house cleaning, first aid to the injured, darning stockings and keeping accurate accounts. to view these as adventures, as bits of romance, is what the camp fires are aiming toward. and they are succeeding; for there are hundreds of groups of girls all over the country who are struggling to win the beads by study and service, that shall make these prized necklaces represent their endeavors. the mothers are welcoming this spirit that turns a disliked piece of household work into an adventure of high emprise. they find themselves rushed away from a task they were about to begin lest the daughter should fail by chance to gain a bead she was striving for, and prevented from various branches of work by the rules the daughter was following. but it is not the spirit of vanity and self aggrandizement that forms the basis of the girls' endeavor; it is the love of achievement; it is the game! if one looks over the books of directions for camp fire girls, one is delighted and fascinated by the pictures that show the many ways the girls have to carry out the intention of the society. here are girls in the ceremonial costumes, the hair braided indian fashion, the decorated band drawn around the forehead and fastened behind at the back of the head. in one picture the girls are sitting by the tent at camp, sewing and carving and carpentering for honors. here they are in a big canoe with paddles lifted all together; again they are starting out for a hay-rack ride, or building a gigantic bonfire for independence day, setting up the logs in tepee-shape, while eight girls are bearing the next log to the pyramid. we see them wading, swimming, and making fire in antique fashion with bow and drill; they are cooking in house and in camp; they are washing, they are ironing, they are mending; here they are serving the community by teaching some little girls to sew, or by helping to fight a real forest fire; they are holding ceremonial meetings and conferring honors on those that by hard work have won them. one can only say: o happy, happy girls in this happiest of countries, that have so much done for them, that have so great opportunities, that are so diligently and joyously making the most of their chance in life! chapter xxix the country girl's duty to the country are you sheltered, curled up and content by the world's warm fire, then i say that your soul is in danger! the sons of the light, they are down with god in the mire, god in the manger. the old-time heroes you honor, whose banners you bear, the whole world no longer prohibits; but if you peer into the past you will find them there, swinging on gibbets. so rouse from your perilous ease: to your sword and your shield! your ease is the ease of the cattle! hark, hark, the bugles are calling! out, out to some field-- out to some battle! --_edwin markham._ chapter xxix the country girl's duty to the country various societies are now trying to supply one of the greatest needs of the girls in country life: namely, good times. the young life is doing the most natural thing possible when it demands recreation, and grave losses must be sustained if satisfaction is not given to this pure and normal desire. the countryside itself seems to be painfully, culpably wanting in the first efforts for the supply of the need for normal, healthful play times. if public health is valued, if pure morals are desired, if home comfort is coveted, not to say if there is a wish that the girls and boys should remain and sustain the rural commonwealth of the future, the first thing to do to gain these ends would be to answer their unconscious outcry for more development of the play instinct. a wonderful woman of our time has written a book about the spirit of youth in the city street; some one should write one about the spirit of youth along the country road. we should awake that spirit and set it to singing on every road and lane, up hill and down dale, all over the prairies and all along the canyons. that this is a very vital matter is shown in a letter from a country girl. she wrote: "there was one thing i did want to ask you about and that was the need for social recreation, girlish recreation, wholesome, whole-hearted recreation. judging by the girls i have taught both in country and village schools, it has seemed to me that they need to be taught to be girls, real girls, more than anything else, and to cherish that girlhood. there exists such a false relation between the girls and the boys. they are little stagy grown-ups playing at life, when they should be natural, wholesome children. i have wondered whether, if their social entertainments were different, and, if the true way could be shown them, they wouldn't leave the false and the sham, and be natural. often the play ends in real disaster and young lives full of possibilities go down into the deeps. it is hard to express this in just these few words on paper but if you know country life as it still exists i am sure you will understand." this wise young woman has here linked the need for recreation and the dire necessity for moral restraint in a way to appeal to every student of country life and to every one that desires the well-being of the boys and girls there. when the factors in this problem are thus reduced to simple terms, it seems so easy to manage. the little things to do, the appalling disaster to be prevented! more recreation in the village--more girls saved from direst sorrow and downfall! who would not spring to help? is not the duty of the girls who are a little older or who have been away to school or college perfectly, translucently clear? can you fail to see and feel it? there was a story of lost opportunity unconsciously revealed in the letter of a college girl, who lives in a long valley between mountains where the young people come in great numbers to do the hop-picking. the plan for living included tents and an eating-table in common. there were dances at night and much drunkenness. the writer added a tragic description of what happens under these circumstances and of the terrible results that follow the orgy. what is that country girl thinking of, that she should waste this opportunity? why does she not do something for those girls? what can she do? organize something! form some kind of an association. get the girls together--but not at just the last moment before the great wave rises above their heads. we must build up beforehand; we must start in at foundations; little by little we must undermine wrong likings and insert slowly in their places better likings. we cannot force the growth of the better things; they must grow naturally. working thus for days and months and years, we may at last cause a better feeling, a better taste; we may develop greater self-control that will be permanent because based on higher ideals and nobler desires. the young woman who wrote that letter was educated in an eastern college and went from there to a farm in the west, finding a home at last in this beautiful valley. who knows but that her whole life and career was ordained in this wandering way in order that she might come to that special valley and seeing the need there, should put her shoulder to the wheel to make a moral uplift for the whole region! the young woman that will accept this high education and then neglect such opportunities for social service has not gained the chief thing--the socialized spirit, the spirit of social responsibility for the world; no, nor even for the very town for which she ought to be first to feel it. surely she could ask for no better or larger career than to be able to make in her home town a radiant life for all the young people, full of charm, a counter-charm against which the lure of the city would have no power, and thus keep girl life safe and pure, and prevent the sorrowful fate that would befall her young townswomen if they should yield to the temptation that knocks at their door. the seriousness of the situation for those unprotected from such dangers can scarcely be exaggerated. while the number of native-born american country girls that deliberately choose a low or vicious life is, in the opinion of experts, comparatively small, still it is not to be tolerated that any country or village girls should lack safeguarding. happily this is the story of an exceptional incident; but how may it be prevented from becoming common? by making the life about the country home interesting in the work and in the play; by building up a complex social structure in every village with music and pageantry, with clubs and societies, with vigorous religious influence and activity, with traveling library and magazine exchange. not one of the possible means for intellectual and social interchange, however joyous, but is justified in its philanthropic aim. the farm home, the country village _must_ be made a happy place for the young folks. it must never for one instant be dull. to preach this ideal no one can be so useful as the girls themselves. natural hostesses and social leaders, they are adapted to create wholesome good times in the community. but may we not expect even more? if among the girls of the village there is one who has been away to college and has seen anything of the outside world, ought she not to use her influence among the girls of the village to show them what the real danger is likely to be to one who goes unprepared by industrial and social training to cope with the situation in the city? ought she not to consider herself to a great degree responsible if any girl from her village or her country community does go away unequipped into the struggle and becomes lost in the oubliette of vice? ought not the girls with superior knowledge and better outlook not only to do all in their power to keep the home girl amused and interested in the life of the village, but to see that in each individual case the better wisdom is at hand for her as warning and as deterrent? "i should have known better" is small comfort afterward. when the wrong is done, and the girl is lost, does the college girl in her home town take it to her own heart as in part her responsibility? should she not do so? in case an inexperienced girl should have occasion to go to the city alone, she should learn beforehand what are the proper and fit things to do at railroad stations and in other public places, and what resources she has at hand there in case of difficulty. the young women's christian association announce the following rules for a young girl entering a strange city: do not start to a strange city or town without information about a safe place to stop. do not leave home without money for an emergency and sufficient for a return ticket. do not ask for or take information or direction except from officials. do not accept offers of work either by person or advertisement without investigation. the y. w. c. a. has employment bureaus and boarding-house directories, and cafeteria lunch-rooms. travelers' aid secretaries meet all incoming trains. these appointed systems of relief for girls in difficulty the girls should understand about, and feel free to take refuge in them if occasion requires. assuredly there are many young women in the country who are fully as well prepared for the work of revitalizing the life in country and village community as the college-trained girls are. a number of these are far more so than some who have had the opportunity for higher education. it is said that a man can go through college and be a fool still. the same is no doubt true of a woman. but from those to whom much has been given, much will be required; and this requirement comes from all about us as well as from above. the thing to be done is to cut off this thread of inevitable sequence at the beginning; to give the girl in the small town the movies and the other varied amusements that will make it impossible for her to think of going away; to give her the knowledge of the poisonous results of vicious contacts and companionships that will make her abhor them with her very soul and be terrified of them; and to provide her with the opportunity for earning that will satisfy her self-respect as a unit in the home industrial community. these things cannot be done by one person alone; the parents must work at it, the better class of girls in the community must work for it, using constantly varied tactics to meet the enemy; and the minister, the teacher, the people all together must combine to prevent this bitter inroad from entering rural life. for the country girls who by nature, ability, predilection and training, are endowed for special service, there are attractive fields open. the work of visiting nurse, of physician, of home economics agent and demonstrator, of social secretary, of teacher, of minister and pastor, are available fields for womanly endeavor. no country girl need feel called to go to the other side of the world to fulfil her mission. in her own valley she can have a life work that will be full of the rich returns for her well-directed, self-sacrificing service. chapter xxx the country girl's score card i am aware as i go commonly sweeping the stair, doing my part of the everyday care-- human and simple my lot and my share-- i am aware of a marvelous thing: voices that murmur and ethers that ring in the far stellar spaces where cherubim sing. i am aware of the passion that pours down the channels of fire through infinity's doors; forces terrific, with melody shod, music that mates with pulses of god. i am aware of the glory that runs from the core of myself to the core of the suns. bound to the stars by invisible chains, blaze of eternity now in my veins, seeing the rush of etherial rains, here in the midst of the everyday air-- i am aware. --_angela morgan._ chapter xxx the country girl's score card "efficiency" is now the watchword in all endeavors, and every man worker and every woman worker is being put under training to secure the greatest amount of it. the factory is stretched to the strain. in every department store there is an efficiency school for the clerks, and every one has to take this discipline. all large public schools have a score card for the instructors and every teacher must stand or fall by the results of the criticisms therein set down. in the home economics department of various colleges a section of a course of study is sometimes given to the close examination of the score card for the housekeeper. the points discussed include not only the technique of the kitchen, but the character that lies behind all efficiency and the training for making the most of native endowments. why, then, if the country girl wishes to become efficient, should she not have a "score card" of her own? at any rate it may be an incitement to her conscience, and perhaps it may give some suggestions for her life-plan. the country girl's score card given here is not to be taken as in any way final. let it be thought of as suggestive only. the country girl's score card _character_ notable excellencies in character, temperament, or disposition: integrity, truthfulness, trustworthiness, courage, fortitude, self-reliance, steadiness, fearlessness, generosity, magnanimity notable deficiencies in character, temperament or disposition as shown by such actions or incidents as these: inconsiderateness in causing unnecessary trouble to others carelessness, causing waste or extra work disorderliness, causing waste or worry or extra work frequent tardiness at meals disregarding the rules of the home, thus causing worry forgetting (which usually means not caring) losing things (which generally means culpable inattention) showing a depressed will power (which means not caring enough) tampering in the least with accurate statement, not rigorously preserving a habit of accuracy tampering in the least with exact business relations, borrowing carelessly; borrowing money when it is not absolutely necessary; not making payment at the first possible moment deflecting in the least from generous treatment in speech or act of companions especially of a rival or foe _expression of herself in manners_ self-control repose of manner, dignity, gentleness, quietness tact quick perception of people's whims or foibles avoidance of things that may give offense ready adaptation to circumstances atmosphere friendliness or cordiality; expressing enough but not too much; having a manner perfectly adapted to circumstances cheer; a hopeful, buoyant spirit voice quality, management of voice, sweetness, clearness carrying power without harshness speech use of english, good grammar, avoidance of crude language precision in the use of the mother tongue, choice of words, use of idiom a clear-cut enunciation _philosophy of life_ the will to live, a plucky spirit, a determination to win through, to succeed, to take the hazard and go ahead a passion for perfection, for excellence in the result; not to give up until the end is gained and the product is as good as it can possibly be made artistic passion, the love of seeing things look well, of seeing harmony and proportion; love of music and pictures and all things beautiful; love for finding beauty in common things; interest in making oneself look always as beautiful as possible power and habit of reflection, philosophy, reasoning things out; the power to put two and two together, to see through a matter and find out why a thing is made in such a way and no other passion for truth for its own sake, for finding out what the underneath processes of nature are, for scientific investigation in the natural world about us power of growth a teachable spirit, ability to take suggestions, and to act generously upon them; employment of means to maintain efficiency and perseverance in these efforts; ability to rise after failures and to strike in again with better knowledge _health_ enthusiastic and persistent obedience to all the code given in chapter xiv, particularly as to bodily carriage, exercise, breathing, clothing, food and eating, elimination of waste, cleanliness, amount of sleep, rest, and prevention of illness willingness to make sacrifices in order to gain and to maintain a high state of bodily strength and efficiency _perfect relations with the various members of the family_ attentive and affectionate relations with the father loving and helpful relations with the mother amiable and companionable relations with brothers (if nearly her own age) fair, responsive and tender relations with sisters (if nearly her own age) patient and inspirational relations with the younger children _community spirit_ dependable and active relations with the church inquiring, critical, responsive relations with the school helpful working relations with the community societies and societies for young people cordial furtherance of any public work for betterment a pure, self-sacrificing and noble influence among the village young people _definite preparation for her home that is to be_ the "hope-box" and what it should contain a scheme for her house-plan and all its ideal details; the site, the appliances, the fittings and furniture, the decorations training in the business of the home training in the business of the farmstead training in the knowledge of child-life and child-psychology training in the laws governing the property of women _qualities for an efficient administrator of a household:_ knowledge of the business and training for it either at home or in some school power to systematize work, to apportion out labor, and to keep accounts and make budgets; power to purchase and to save wisely ability to carry things through in a business-like way; courage to undertake things; ability to make both ends meet resourcefulness; ability to act promptly when things go wrong, to adapt oneself to changes, to show reserve in emergencies power to save time and avoid dawdling; to avoid unnecessary motions and waste of energy; to avoid unnecessary waste of materials passion for cleanliness in rooms, furniture, utensils, linen; passion for personal cleanliness a real love of the work itself, a love to create good things; a love to see things done and to do them if you, dear country girl, will take a score card similar to this, go away by yourself and think it all over, then conscientiously take the examination, mark yourself on all the points honestly and fairly, desiring strongly to be just with yourself and to see yourself as you really are, there will perhaps come to you an illuminated hour when you will dare to set yourself down in the group called "meritorious" or in the next group called "not-quite-meritorious-but-almost." perhaps, however, you may feel that you ought to descend into the group named "inferior" or even into the "deficient" class. but this attempt at self-examination will spur you to greater effort, whatever your decision. for if you must say "inferior" or "deficient," there is no doubt some reason for the lacks, and the examination will help you to find these and to strive earnestly to make up for them. and if you feel that you can honestly say "meritorious," you must remember that all good qualities are but the stepping-stones to higher struggle and that life affords us many more advanced degrees to which we may aspire. the country girl's score card may afford an appreciation of how much the young woman in rural life means to her environment. that appreciation will only make you see the more clearly the claims that country life has upon you. for you must realize that there is one link in the chain of american life that the country girl alone can forge. if you fail, the chain must break; but if you do your allotted part, the chain will be one of those that milton loves to sing about, that bind the whole round earth about the throne of god. index a abbott, e., . addams, jane, . agricultural department. see _u. s. agr. dep't._ agricultural college of conn., , , . amusement, recreation, , , , , , , , , , - . b barton, clara, . bates, k. l., . beecher family, . beecher, catherine, . benson, o. h., - . bible, , , , ; source of plots, . book exchange. see _clubs_. books. see _reading_. brainerd, david, . breathing, correct, . bureau of animal industry, . bureau of chemistry, . bureau of plant industry, , . budget, f, , - , . c canning in the home, . camp fire girls, , , , , - . card catalog, . chase, l. g., . chemistry in household, . chicago, university of, . children in farm home, , , , , - . christian endeavor society, , , . church, , . church periodical club, . city: precautions, , ; occupations in, ; exodus to, , , , , . clothing. see _dress_. clubs: canning, , , - ; book exchange, . see also _organisations_. college girls, work of, for country girl, . columbia university, . commission on country life, , . community spirit, , , , , , , , , , , , . comstock, sarah, author "the soddy," . congress of farm women, . conservation, . cooperative agricultural extension, bill for, . cornell university, , , . correspondence basis of the work, . correspondence courses, . country girl: as a class, ; number of, in u. s., ; wide extent, ; in gainful occupations, ; happiness in rural life, , , ; experiences quoted, - , - , , , - ; as farmer, , ; distinguished women, , ; as homemaker of future, ; character, , , ; passion for independence, , ; love for country, , ; needs, ; inheritance, ; share in housework, , ; relations with mother, - ; social life on farm, , f; magnitude of her task, ; wage, - ; opportunity, ; barriers to her progress, ; place in evolution, , ; duty to country, , - ; going to the city, precautions, , ; attitude of family toward, ; importance of her status, , , , , . see also _earning_, _finance_, _spiritual aspects_. country life movement, , , , . country life in: new england, , ; new hampshire, ; new york, , , ; south, f, , , ; south dakota, ; porto rico, , ; philippines, , ; alaska, , ; western, , , ; northwest, , , . country life, favorable view, , , ; influence on health, ; misunderstood by urban people, ; nearness to nature, ; influence on poetic genius, ; opportunities, - ; love of animals, ; spiritual aspects, , ; influence on home life, ; an optimistic report, . country life, unfavorable view, , , , - , , , , , . see also _city, exodus to_. crew, h. c., , , , . d dishwashing, , . see _equipment_. dress, , . dress budget, - . drama. see _play_. e earning, , , , , , , - , ; spending, , , ; bookkeeping, ; parents' right to child's earnings, ; wage of daughter, - ; daughter's share in farm, . see _occupations_, _budgets_, _finances_. eberstadt, s., . economic position of farm woman. see _finances_, _earning_. education, training, , , , , , , , , , - , ; instruction at farm home, ; a four years' course, ; courses of study, - . educational alliance, . efficiency, , f, - , , - , f, , , , , - . see _equipment_. eight weeks clubs, . see _y. w. c. a._ epworth league, . equipment, , , , - , - . exercise, . experiment stations, , . f family. see _children_, _farm home_, _family life_. family council, . see also _farm home_. family life on farm, , , , . farm bureau agent, . farm home: wife, , , - , ; mother, , - , ; children, f; council, ; family records, - ; social life in home, ; sunday in, . see also _efficiency_, _equipment_, _children_, _farm home work_. farm home work: service in farm, ; housework a wage-earning work, ; housework as exercise, ; daughter's share in work, , ; system in work, ; optimistic view of, ; overwork, , , , , ; laundry work on farm, . see also _efficiency_, _earning_, _finances_. farm housework, routine of, - , - . farmsteads in u. s., number of, . finances of farm home, , , , , ; training for right use of money, , ; daughter's share in profits, ; business of farm, ; as farm partner, ; woman's part essential to farm, ; house accounts, - ; adaptation for accounting, ; cost of living, . fireless cooker, . fiske, professor g. w., , . foods, , . foote, roxana beecher, . foote, abigail, . freeman, alice e., . g girls' athletic league, . girls' friendly society, . girls' protective league, . girls' tomato club, . gleason, miss caroline, . goldmark, miss j., . good templars, . grange, , , . h harden, miss myrtle, . health, - , , ; of city child, , , ; code of health rules, f. n national plant, flower and fruit guild, . nearing, professor scott, . newspapers. see _periodicals_. o occupations on farm: old time industries, - ; wage-earning pursuits, , ; standardizing woman's labor, ; chickens, , ; household industries, - ; teaching, , ; nursing and other occupations, . office of public roads, . orderliness, f. organizations, - . p pageantry, - ; at thetford, vt., ; at st johnsbury, vt., ; at north adams, mass., . see also _community spirit_. parentage. see _children_. pennsylvania state college, , . penny magazine, . periodicals, , , . pioneering period, , , . play, drama, - . poetry in country life, . porter, mrs. g. s., . pratt, miss caroline, , . r reading, , , , , - , , , , , , , , - ; reading aloud, . records, household, - . see also _card catalog_. rest and health, . roosevelt, theodore, , , . rural group, . rural mind, , . rural village defined, . s schools, . scientific management. see _efficiency_. score card for country girl, - . shaw, dr. albert, . shaw, rev. anna h., , . simmons college, , . smith-lever bill, f. sodality of the children of mary, . spending and saving. see _earning_. spiritual aspects, . stewart, elinore rupert, - . stowe, harriet beecher, , , . suicide, . t temperance, medical, superintendent, . tomato clubs, , . "true lovers," play by j. c. horne, - . u united farm women, . u. s. department of agriculture, , , , , - . u. s. commission on country life, . v van rensselaer, professor martha, , . w war, moral equivalent for, . widdemer, margaret, . willard, f. e., , , , . wilson, elizabeth, , . wilson, president, . w. c. t. u., . wisconsin, university of, . y y. w. c. a., , - , . y. w. hebrew asso., . bibliography the problem of country life anderson, w. l.: the country town butterfield, k. l.: chapters in rural progress earp, e. l.: the rural church movement fiske, g. w.: the challenge of the country (_y. w. c. asso. press_) gillette, j. w.: constructive rural sociology hart, j. k., editor: educational resources of village and rural communities roosevelt, t.: report of commission on country life, introduction by theodore roosevelt strong, j.: our world the problem of urban life devine, e. t.: misery and its causes laughlin, clara: the work-a-day girl richardson, d.: the long day the world of all outdoors bailey, l. h.: the outlook to nature brearley, h. c.: animal secrets told comstock, anna b.: handbook of nature study dixon, royal: the human side of plants grinnell, m.: neighbors of field, wood and stream knight, c. r.: animals of the world for young people; birds of the world for young people lounsberry, a.: the wild flower book for young people; the garden book for young people; frank and bessie's forester delightful books about the country albee, h. r.: mountain playmates burroughs, j.: wake robin robertson, c. d.: down the year rogers, e. w.: journal of a country woman stewart, elinore rupert: letters of a woman homesteader thoreau, h. d.: walden whiting, c. g.: walks in new england efficiency in the household child, g. b.: the efficient kitchen curtis, i. g.: the making of a housewife dodd, h.: the healthful farmhouse frederick, c.: the new housekeeping goldmark, j.: fatigue and efficiency gulick, l. h.: the efficient life lancaster, m.: electric cooking marchant, e.: serving and waiting terrell, b. m.: handbook of housekeeping woman among the world's workers abbott, e.: woman in industry dorr, r. c.: what eight million women want nearing, s.: woman and social progress spencer, a. g.: woman's share in social culture the woman citizen's library, volumes wilbur, m. a.: everyday business for women crafts for girls bailey, c. s.: girls' make-at-home things beard, p.: the jolly book of boxcraft candee, h. c.: how women may earn a living kelley, l. e.: three hundred things a bright girl can do klickman, f.: the modern crochet book; the craft of the crochet hook; the home art book of fancy stitchery; home art crochet book; the cult of the needle laselle, m. a. and wiley, k. e.: vocations for girls mcewen, d.: stenography in two weeks, a text-book for self-use. paret, a. p.: harpers' handy book for girls sanford, l. g.: art crafts for beginners weaver, e. w.: vocations for girls boys' books that girls can use adams, m.: boys' own book of pets and hobbies bailey, c. s. and m. e.: boys' make-at-home things barnard, j.: every man his own mechanic fraser, c. c.: every boy's book of handicraft kelland, c. b.: the american boy's workshop games and recreation baker, e. m.: indoor games for children and young people bancroft, j. h.: games for the playground, home, school and gymnasium barse, m. e. s.: games for all occasions beard, l. and a. b.: how to amuse yourself and others campbell, h. s.: the american girl's home book of work and play canfield, d.: what shall we do now? curtis, h. s.: play and recreation for the open country jenks, t.: photography for young people kinney, t. and m. w.: social dancing of to-day parsons, b. r.: plays and games for indoors and outdoors stern, r. b.: neighborhood entertainments some problems of girlhood burks, f. w. and j. d.: health and the school cabot, r.: what men live by coe, g. a.: the spiritual life daniels, h. mcd.: the girl and her chance learned, e. c.: ideals for girls slack, e. j.: a little essay in friendship (_y. w. c. asso. press_) slattery, m.: the girl in her teens a group of biographies of country girls who became great and useful women mary lyon, by b. b. gilchrist alice freeman palmer, by g. l. palmer ellen h. richards, by caroline l. hunt harriet beecher stowe, by martha foote crow frances e. willard, by anna a. gordon some other inspiring stories jane addams' twenty years at hull house louise may alcott, by belle moses helen keller's story of my life lucy larcom's a new england girlhood margaret e. sangster's from my youth up n. hudson moore's deeds of daring done by girls books of poetry country girls enjoy noyes, alfred: sherwood--robin hood and the three kings; drake, an english epic; tales of the mermaid tavern the golden treasury, series i and ii the little book of modern american verse a group of poems to know and recite in the home bates, katherine lee: america the beautiful branch, anna hempstead: songs for my mother davis, fannie stearns: souls garrison, theodosia: the daughter guiney, louise imogen: the kings kilmer, joyce: trees lindsay, vachell: kansas mackaye, percy: hymn for equal suffrage markham, edwin: to young america morgan, angela: battle cry of the mothers issued may , . u. s. department of agriculture. farmers' bulletin . methods of destroying rats. by david e. lantz, _assistant, bureau of biological survey_. [illustration] washington: government printing office. . [transcriber's note: words surrounded by tildes, like ~this~ signifies words in bold. words surrounded by underscores, like _this_, signifies words in italics.] letter of transmittal. u. s. department of agriculture, bureau of biological survey, _washington, d. c., may , _. sir: i have the honor to transmit herewith for publication farmers' bulletin no. , containing concise directions for the destruction of rats, prepared by david e. lantz, an assistant in this bureau. the damage done by these rodents, both in cities and in the country, is enormous, and the calls for practical methods of destroying them are correspondingly numerous and urgent. it is believed that by following the directions here given the numbers of this pest can be greatly reduced and the losses from them proportionally diminished. respectfully, c. hart merriam, _chief, biological survey_. hon. james wilson, _secretary of agriculture_. contents. page. introduction methods of destroying rats poisoning trapping use of ferrets and dogs fumigation rat-proof construction natural enemies of rats conclusions illustration. page. fig. .--method of baiting guillotine trap methods of destroying rats. introduction. the brown or norway rat (_mus norvegicus_) is the worst mammal pest in the united states, the losses from its depredations amounting to many millions of dollars yearly--to more, indeed, than the losses from all other injurious mammals combined.[a] in addition to its destructive habits, this rat is now known to be an active agent in disseminating infectious diseases, a fact which renders measures for its destruction doubly important. [footnote a: several species of rats are known as "house rats," including the black rat (_mus rattus_), the roof rat (_mus alexandrinus_), and the brown rat (_mus norvegicus_). of these, the last is the commonest and most widespread in this country. not one of these species is a native, but all were imported from the old world. as their habits in general are similar, the instructions given in the bulletin apply alike to all.] introduced into america about the year , the brown rat has supplanted and nearly exterminated its less robust relative, the black rat, and despite the incessant warfare of man has extended its range and steadily increased in numbers. its dominance is due to its great fecundity and its ability to adapt itself to all sorts of conditions. it breeds three or four times a year and produces from to , and even more, young at a litter. young females breed when only or months old. the species is practically omnivorous, feeding upon all kinds of animal and vegetable matter. it makes its home in the open field, the hedge row, and the river bank, as well as in stone walls, piers, and all kinds of buildings. it destroys grains when newly planted, while growing, and in the shock, stack, mow, crib, granary, mill, elevator, or ship's hold, and also in the bin and feed trough. it invades store and warehouse and destroys fur, laces, silks, carpets, leather goods, and groceries. it attacks fruits, vegetables, and meats in the markets, and destroys by pollution ten times as much as it actually eats. it carries disease germs from house to house and bubonic plague from city to city. it causes disastrous conflagrations; floods houses by gnawing lead water pipes; ruins artificial ponds and embankments by burrowing; destroys the farmers' pigs, eggs, and young poultry; eats the eggs and young of song and game birds; and damages foundations, floors, doors, and furnishings of dwellings. methods of destroying rats. a compilation of all the methods of destroying rats practiced in historic times would fill a volume. unfortunately, the greater number of them are worthless or impracticable. few have more than temporary effect upon their numbers, and even the best of them fail unless persistently applied. conditions vary so much that no one method of dealing with this pest is applicable in all cases. among the more important measures to be recommended for actively combating the brown rat are: ( ) poisons; ( ) traps; ( ) ferrets; ( ) fumigation, and ( ) rat-proof construction of buildings. poisoning. ~barium carbonate.~--one of the cheapest and most effective poisons for rats and mice is barium carbonate, or barytes. this mineral has the advantage of being without taste or smell; and, in the small quantities used in poisoning rats and mice, is harmless to larger animals. its action on rodents is slow, but reasonably sure, and has the further advantage that the animals before dying, if exit be possible, usually leave the premises in search of water. its employment in houses, therefore, is rarely followed by the annoying odor which attends the use of the more virulent poisons. the poison may be fed in the form of a dough made of one-fifth barytes and four-fifths meal, but a more convenient bait is ordinary oatmeal, with about one-eighth of its bulk of barytes, mixed with water into a stiff dough; or the barytes may be spread upon bread and butter or moistened toast. the prepared bait should be placed in rat runs, a small quantity at a place. if a single application of the poison fails to drive all rats from the premises, it should be repeated with a change of bait. ~strychnine.~--strychnine is a more virulent poison, but its action is so rapid that the animals often die upon the premises, a circumstance which prohibits its use in occupied dwellings. elsewhere strychnine may be employed with great success. dry strychnine crystals may be inserted in small pieces of raw meat, vienna sausage, or toasted cheese, and these placed in the rat runs; or oatmeal may be wet with a strychnine sirup, and small quantities laid out in the same way. strychnine sirup is prepared as follows: dissolve a half ounce of strychnia sulphate in a pint of boiling water; add a pint of thick sugar sirup and stir thoroughly. a smaller quantity of the poison may be prepared with a proportional quantity of water. in preparing the bait it is necessary that all the oatmeal should be moistened with sirup. wheat is the most convenient alternative bait. it should be soaked over night in the strychnine sirup. ~other poisons.~--the two poisons most commonly used for rats and mice are arsenic and phosphorus, nearly all commercial preparations containing one or the other as a basis. while experiments prove that rats have great powers of resistance to arsenic, it may sometimes be used advantageously as an alternative poison. preparations of phosphorus sold by druggists are often too weak to be effective; and home-made mixtures, when of sufficient strength, are dangerous, as rats may carry the baits into walls or crannies and thus cause fires. for these and other reasons the biological survey does not recommend preparations containing phosphorus. ~poison in the poultry house.~--for poisoning rats in buildings and yards occupied by poultry, the following method is recommended: two wooden boxes should be used, one considerably larger than the other, and each having two or more holes in the sides large enough to admit rats. the poisoned bait should be placed on the bottom and near the middle of the larger box, and the smaller box should then be inverted over it. rats thus have free access to the bait, but fowls are excluded. trapping. trapping, if persistently followed, is one of the most effective methods of destroying rats. the improved modern traps with a wire fall released by a baited trigger and driven by a coiled spring have marked advantages over the old forms, and many of them may be used at the same time. these traps, sometimes called guillotine traps, are of many designs, but the more simply constructed are to be preferred. probably those made entirely of metal are the best, as they are less likely to absorb and retain odors. in illustration of the effectiveness of traps, it may be related that a year or two ago a large department store in washington experienced heavy losses of gloves, lace curtains, and other merchandise from rat depredations. for several months the damages amounted to from $ to $ nightly. after many unsuccessful attempts to abate the nuisance the managers were advised to try the improved traps. as a result rats were killed during the first twenty nights, when the losses practically ceased, and the method has been continued in the store ever since with satisfactory results. guillotine traps should be baited with small pieces of vienna sausage (wienerwurst) or bacon. the trigger wire should be bent inward to bring the bait into proper position to permit the fall to strike the rat in the neck, as shown in the illustration (fig. ). other excellent baits for rats are oatmeal, toasted cheese, toasted bread (buttered), and sunflower or pumpkin seeds. when seed, grain, or meal is used with a guillotine trap, it may be placed on the trigger plate, or the trigger wire may be bent outward and the bait sprinkled under it. [illustration: fig. .--method of baiting guillotine trap.] wire cage traps (french) also are useful for catching rats, but in the long run the kinds recommended above are much more effective. while trapping, all other food should be removed and the trap bait should be changed often. rats are very suspicious, and baits and traps should be handled as little as possible. increased success may be secured both in trapping and poisoning if the rats are fed for a night or two with the kinds of food to be used for bait. use of ferrets and dogs. a ferret is useful for the purpose of driving rats out of burrows and other hiding places so that dogs can capture them. an experienced person with dogs and ferrets trained to work together can kill many rats when they are numerous. but the amateur ferreter is likely to be greatly disappointed. in the rice fields of the far east the natives build numerous piles of brush and rice straw and leave them for several days until many rats have taken shelter in them. a portable bamboo inclosure several feet in height is then set up around each pile in succession and the straw and brush are thrown out over the top while dogs and men kill the trapped rodents. large numbers are killed in this way, and the plan with modifications may be utilized in america with satisfactory results. a wire netting of fine mesh may be used for the inclosure. the scheme is applicable at the removal of grain, straw, or hay stacks, as well as brush piles. fumigation. rats may be destroyed in their burrows in the fields, and, still more important, in levees and rice-field dikes, by the use of carbon bisulphid. a wad of cotton or other absorbent material is saturated with the liquid and pushed into the burrow, the opening being packed with soil to prevent escape of the gas. all animals in the burrow are asphyxiated. fumigation about buildings is not so effective, as the gas can not readily be confined. rat-proof construction. the best way of excluding rats from buildings, whether in the city or country, is by the use of cement in construction. as the advantages of this material are coming to be generally understood, its use is rapidly extending to all kinds of building. dwellings, dairies, barns, stables, chicken houses, ice houses, bridges, dams, silos, tanks, cisterns, root-cellars, hotbeds, sidewalks, and curbs are now often made wholly of concrete. in constructing dwelling houses the additional cost of making the foundations rat-proof is slight as compared with the advantages. the cellar walls should have concrete footings and the walls themselves be laid in cement mortar. the cellar floor should be of "medium" rather than "lean" concrete, and all water and drain pipes should be surrounded with concrete. even an old cellar may be made rat-proof at comparatively small expense. rat holes may be permanently closed by a mixture of cement, sand, and broken glass or sharp bits of stone. rat-proof granaries, corncribs, and poultry houses may be constructed by a liberal use of concrete in the foundations and floors. rats, mice, and sparrows may be excluded from corncribs by the use of either an inner or an outer covering of fine-mesh wire netting sufficiently heavy to resist the teeth of rats. the common custom of setting corncribs upon posts with inverted pans at the top often fails because the posts are not long enough to insure that the lower cracks of the structure are beyond jumping reach of rats. the posts should project at least feet above the surface of the ground. natural enemies of rats. the value of carnivorous mammals and the larger birds of prey in destroying rats should be more fully recognized, especially by the farmer and the game preserver. chief among the animals that are useful in destroying these rodents are the fox, skunk, and weasel, and the larger species of owls and hawks. rats destroy more poultry and game, both eggs and young chicks, than all the birds and wild mammals named combined, yet some of our most useful birds of prey and carnivorous mammals are persecuted almost to the point of extinction. an enlightened public sentiment should cause the repeal of all bounties on these animals and afford protection to the majority of them. conclusions. by the persistent use of traps, occasional resort to poison, and the exercise of forethought in the construction of farm buildings so as to minimize the opportunities for harborage, farmers and others may prevent the greater part of the loss and annoyance they now experience from rat depredations. the same statement applies in great measure to city and village conditions. hence cooperation in the warfare on rats is particularly important and can not be too strongly urged. the children's library of work and play carpentry and woodwork by edwin w. foster electricity and its everyday uses by john f. woodhull, ph.d. gardening and farming by ellen eddy shaw home decoration by charles franklin warner, sc.d. housekeeping by elizabeth hale gilman mechanics, indoors and out by fred t. hodgson. needlecraft by effie archer archer outdoor sports, and games by claude h. miller, ph.b. outdoor work by mary rogers miller working in metals by charles conrad sleffel. [illustration: photograph by helen w. cooke. harvesting nature's crops] _the library of work and play_ outdoor work by mary rogers miller [illustration] garden city new york doubleday, page & company all rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the scandinavian copyright, , by doubleday, page & company this book is affectionately dedicated to eight brothers and sisters who sent one another to college acknowledgments acknowledgment is due to the expert writers of united states government and state experiment station bulletins from which much practical information has been gained by the author; to the boys and girls who wrote for this book the stories of their success in several kinds of outdoor industry; to dr. burton n. gates, state inspector of apiaries in massachusetts, and prof. james e. rice of the department of poultry husbandry at cornell university for reading the chapters on their specialties and for numerous suggestions which make those chapters valuable; and to many others from whom helpful ideas have come in letters. a word to parents there are two sovereign cures for the ills of modern life: work and outdoors. it is the purpose of this book on "outdoor work for young people" to teach the gospel of these two remedies, not in lessons nor sermons, but in the form of confidential talks, which are intended to be both practical and inspiring. the guiding principles in the preparation of this book are three: , to help young people to earn money; , to help them build character; , to help them make better citizens. . the most obvious reason why children wish to work is that they "want to earn money," to spend as they like. here is a great opportunity and a considerable danger. the opportunities are to help support the family, to learn self-reliance, to gain in efficiency, to appreciate the sacrifices made by parents, to purchase innocent pleasures, and to save toward a college education. the dangers are that children may become too commercially minded, grasping, even dishonest, make dull playmates, and become stunted in character for lack of play and wholesome stimulus to the imagination. if you will analyze these dangers you will find that they are all the results of overdoing good things. the old rule of the greeks, "nothing too much" is the golden rule to measure perfect commercial relations between parents and children. . but far more important than money making is character making. and therefore one of the principles of this book is to suggest in a thousand ways that money making may go too far. for example, i would encourage boys to gather and sell nuts, but not to take nuts from a neighbour's trees without permission nor destroy young trees whose future crops belong to a future generation of boys. i encourage trapping but urge the use of humane traps to avoid cruelty. i encourage the gathering and selling certain wild flowers, if abundant, but warn against the danger of exterminating species, or of robbing the public of pleasure. i have gone over all of the things that children do out of doors and have tried to select the best occupations. i have studied the worst things they do and have suggested their opposites--constructive work that earns money, develops character, or preserves public property. for example, instead of collecting birds' eggs i suggest methods of attracting birds, building houses for them, and providing food and protection from enemies. . the book is addressed to the citizens of nineteen hundred and twenty. will not busy boys and girls make better citizens than idle ones? practical patriotism becomes second nature to children who learn early to regard the rights of others, to respect the laws, and to protect public property. the boy who raises wild fowl and liberates them or refrains from mutilating for purely selfish ends a fine tree is doing his share in the great work of conservation. but the young workers cannot do it all. you will be disappointed if you give this book to a child for a birthday or christmas present and expect him to "do the rest," without further help. there is no substitute for affectionate parental interest. this book will surely fail you if you do not thoroughly believe in the dignity of manual labour and experience the uplift that rewards work with your own hands. although in theory we may all believe in the dignity of labour (for other people), many of us make mental reservations to suit our own cases and persist in regarding certain forms of labour as distinctly beneath our dignity. children see through that attitude every time. when i used to be acquainted with the citizens of the george junior republic, they had a saying that even the president and the judge could not maintain standing with the others unless they took their turn now and then working in the ditch. and so i say, work with your children, with common tools, out in the dirt. the scratches will heal and the dirt will wash off, but the sense of kinship with workers will stay. have a "you and i" club, with you and the children for members. meet once a week to discuss schemes for earning money to buy what the children want. it is easier to go out and earn the money and give it to them to spend, but where do they come in? read parts of this book aloud when outside information or suggestion is needed. make a list of your children's occupations; consider whether they are the best ones. if you know any better ones than i have put into this book please tell me, for i, too, have children and i wish them to have the very best works and plays that children in this world can have. contents chapter page i. the best ways of earning money ii. harvesting nature's crops wild berries--wild fruits--nuts--tree seeds--christmas greens--medicinal plants--walking sticks--wild flowers for city children--corn husks--fragrant herbs and grasses--balsam leaves--birch bark--porcupine quills--maple sugar--wild rice--spruce gum--mushrooms. iii. raising domestic animals colts--sheep--goats--calves--pigs--chickens--guinea fowls--turkeys--peacocks--ducks--squabs for market--pheasants. iv. raising animals for pets shetland ponies--rabbits, guinea pigs, and cavies--fancy pigeons--bantams--fancy fowls--dogs--goldfish. v. work and play with trained animals dairy cows--training pet animals--training young horses--treadmills and cranks--making animals happy--taming wild animals. vi. making brooks and springs useful reclaiming a trout stream--reclaiming a spring--making a swimming pool. vii. keeping bees viii. raising silkworms ix. making collections plants--shells--insects. x. odd jobs kindling-wood--cleaning a carriage--work in the orchard--making rustic furniture--selecting seed corn--making cider vinegar--making grape juice--making leaf mould--making lavender sticks--drying corn--making a tennis court--shovelling snow--mowing lawns--utilizing wood ashes--planting crocuses in the lawn--making ice--cutting seed potatoes--pruning--cleaning rugs. xi. making the country a better place to live in improving home grounds--outdoor clubs--attracting birds--domesticating wild game--protecting wild flowers--preventing forest fires--killing weeds--getting rid of poison ivy--lessening the plague of mosquitoes--fighting flies--trapping--curing and tanning skins. appendix free printed matter: how to get it list of books and bulletins by experts on outdoor work illustrations harvesting nature's crops _frontispiece_ facing page gathering wild flowers for city children "big boy blue" looks after the sheep feeding the goats the shetland pony is the ideal pet holding a conversation gyp has an ax to grind a group of happy farm animals the skunk is an amiable and well-mannered pet the crow may be tamed when young a "bottle baby" plenty of trout in this stream when grandfather was a boy an odd job that is never out of date is this work or play? outdoor work i the best ways of earning money couldn't you use more money if you had it? there are several million american boys and girls just like you. they want a lot of things, a lot of good things. wouldn't you like a half dollar once a year for a circus ticket, a quarter now and then for a box of candy, or ten dollars for a new dress or some music lessons? you'd be glad to buy your own clothes, and select them too, if you had the cash. that would be a big help in thousands of families. parents sometimes wish that their children could "leave out" in new clothes in spring, like the trees. if you could begin to earn money at twelve you could save toward a college education, too. lots of boys and girls are earning their way. you can. you can earn money between twelve and twenty years of age without interfering with your schooling. what kind of stories do you like best? isn't it inspiring to read about the boyhood of our great men. do you remember young abe lincoln splitting rails? garfield drove mules on a tow path. the men and women who are doing great things now started as boys and girls with work to do. they washed dishes and split kindlings and fed chickens and milked cows and dug potatoes. now they are tunnelling mountains, building bridges, helping make the world better in all sorts of courageous ways. don't you like to hear engineers, miners, sailors, inventors, animal trainers, cowboys, foresters, and other workers talk about their work? the only really happy people are the ones who have found the work they love best. i have put some stories in this book. these are told by real boys and girls who were successful in earning money. can you beat them at their own game? will you try? there are thousands of ways for young people in their teens to earn money. i believe the best are the outdoor ways. i have suggested a list of occupations, the best i can think of. of course, no one person could try them all. circumstances must decide. you will succeed best with the work which you like best. you must not let outside work interfere with your studies. you must not undertake work that is too hard for your strength or unsuited to your disposition. maybe this list will help you choose. occupations suited to the four seasons and some that go through the year _summer._--gathering berries, tree seeds, bulbs and roots, wild flowers and ferns, balsam leaves, medicinal plants, pine cones, making collections, mowing lawns, marking tennis courts, sawing wood, cleaning rugs, drying herbs, corn and fruits, raising queen bees, collecting bait, rearing butterflies for museum specimens, gathering clam shells for button factories, shocking grain, "toting" water. _fall._--gathering fruit, nuts, making corn husk mats and baskets, shelling corn, making leaf mould, clearing a field of stones, making stone fence, making grape juice and cider vinegar, collecting bayberries, painting barns and outbuildings, packing fruit, cleaning farm implements, gathering faggots, collecting cocoons, collecting insect homes for nature study. _winter._--gathering spruce gum, collecting christmas greens, shovelling snow, pruning shrubs, vines and trees, trapping, tanning skins, making candles, selecting seed corn, pruning and tying grapevines, transplanting trees and shrubs, feeding birds. _spring._--cutting seed potatoes, budding, grafting, cutting dandelions from lawns, killing weeds, oiling ponds and ditches to kill mosquitoes, shelling corn, starting silkworms, trout, frog and toad culture, attracting birds, fighting flies. _year-round occupations._--keeping bees, raising goldfish, training animals, raising colts, sheep, pigs, goats, dogs, chickens and other poultry, rabbits and other pets, collecting wood for kindling, turning grindstone, milking, taming wild creatures, raising prize corn, potatoes, or cotton. things worth thinking about don't think only of the money you can earn. there's no use talking, the work you do and the way you do it is going to have an influence on your character. do a good job! if you slight your work you cheat your employer. you know it, if he doesn't. you cheat yourself, too. and when you are working for yourself, you are the one who is doubly cheated by slack methods. that's plain. don't choose an occupation you are doubtful about. most occupations are perfectly honourable. dishonesty comes in methods. the grown-up grafters, ten to one, were cheaters at games, and sneaks about work. when in doubt, ask advice. don't you like to be asked for your opinion? everybody does. ask your parents' advice about the work you think of undertaking, and the methods of carrying on the business side. what will please them more than to know that you have a keen sense of honour? this is my word of encouragement and inspiration to the boys and girls who read this book. there are a hundred perfectly good reasons why you should have more money of your own. and there are a thousand ways to earn it. every one of you can earn a college education. choose the best work _for you_, and do it with enthusiasm. if you want my advice about your work or any information i can get for you, nothing would please me more than to hear from you. ii harvesting nature's crops picking berries the berry picking season begins "'long about knee-deep in june" with the first wild strawberries. it does not end till the last cranberry is harvested on the eve of thanksgiving day at the end of the drowsy indian summer. there is money to be earned at this occupation wherever there is ambition to overcome difficulties and force of character enough to step aside from the beaten paths. fortunately berries are ripe in vacation time. for some people berry picking has almost if not quite the fascination of fishing. it lacks the objectionable features of hunting, fishing and trapping. guns, tackle, and traps are unnecessary in this gentler sport. no costly tools are required. a light pail, flaring somewhat at the top, is a good receptacle. a wire bent into an s-shaped hook is handy to swing the pail over the forearm while the ambidextrous picker almost doubles the day's harvest if the fruit is extra plentiful. there is hardly a state in the union which has not plenty of wild fruits. the young citizens of each state should know these fruits and make the most of them. some states or regions have fruits peculiar to themselves. wouldn't it be worth while for the domestic science or cookery teacher in a country school to show her pupils how to utilize these home products? we hear talk about the cost of materials for use in classes in cookery. to let our wild fruits go to waste is poor economy whichever way we look at it. wouldn't you, if you live in northern michigan, like to exchange a pot of thimbleberry jam for one made in north carolina from persimmons? or if you live in montana would you exchange buffalo berry marmalade with a florida friend for guava jelly or preserved cumquats? wild raspberries just the other day a girl from the shore of lake superior told me of a camping trip on a part of the lake shore inaccessible except by water. a storm on the lake kept them from going home when they had expected so they gathered raspberries and canned and jammed them till their sugar gave out, then until every available cooking utensil, even the coffee pot, was full and the supply of berries was as unlimited as ever. these great, luscious fruits, she said, were as big as the end of her thumb, and fairly falling off the bushes with the weight of juice. doesn't it make your mouth water? the pickers who live near the woods up there bring berries to town in milk pails. the fruit box may be more elegant, but there is a bountiful sound about the milk pail that takes my fancy. of course, one gets scratched while berry-picking; but in what a good cause. is there something wrong about boys and girls who prefer boxed berries and smooth hands to wild fruits and scratches? there are thousands of dollars wasted every year that might be working on some boy's or girl's schooling, just because nature's crop of raspberries isn't half harvested. wild raspberries should be canned, jellied, or jammed by the regulation methods. with a good oil stove all the work can be done in the open air. thimbleberry do you know the thimbleberry? some call it the flowering raspberry. you will know by its shape and general look that it is a cousin to the black raspberry although it is flatter, seedier, and more sharply acid. it grows on a bush or shrub somewhat like a raspberry, but its leaves are broad, like grape leaves. instead of thorns its twigs are clothed with sticky hairs. the colour of the fruit is pinkish purple. thimbleberries grow often along woods margins, just back of the fringe of wild red raspberries. you are lucky if you get two cupfuls of the thimbleberries while your companion is picking two quarts of the raspberries. yours pack more closely and the fruit is not so abundant. the number of people who have tasted thimbleberry jam is small. i am told by one who has made it that you can get any price you ask for tiny glasses of it, even a dollar a glass, from people who "must have it." made just as one does other jams, equal parts of fruit and sugar, there is nothing tastes quite like it. blueberries blueberry pie was a staple and justly popular dessert in a certain college dining-room, where i first made its acquaintance. it was, of course, made of canned blueberries, and we used to wonder where they all came from. we certainly never saw them growing in the mississippi valley. the blueberry belt is a wide one and includes all the eastern and central states. i first saw them growing on cape ann, and later on the new hampshire hills. the women and children used to bring them in small pails to sell at the doors of their less enterprising neighbours. but the price was always high and the berries not first class, unless we gathered them ourselves. it takes a lot of picking to get two quarts. one gets an entirely wrong impression of the blueberry business from these experiences. the great canning factories do not depend on a haphazard crop. in new england and the eastern states there are thousands of acres of waste land, shorn of its forest, where blueberries grow in greatest abundance. it is not possible to estimate with any accuracy the value of this wild crop. pickers get from one and one-half to three cents a quart, and the boxes sell in retail market at from twelve and one-half cents to eighteen cents a box. northern michigan shipped five thousand bushels one year. they ship better than softer fruits, but the price is always high and the supply small because the canning factories are near the fields, and shipping is expensive. one large factory uses seven hundred bushels a day. the total product of the maine canneries ten years ago was worth over one hundred thousand dollars. that must be where our college cook got her supply. huckleberry and blueberry are the names used most commonly and you will meet people who know one from the other. but as both are blue and there are high bush and low bush huckleberries, as well as high and low bush blueberries, it is useless to discuss the names. both are right and a huckleberry in ohio may be a blueberry in maine. a sort of rake to gather blueberries is used for the low bushes. but hand picking is best. the rake tears the bushes so, and the berries have to be put through a fanning mill twice to free them from leaves and rubbish. this process fits them for the canners who are not as particular as we wish they were. the blueberry bush is a kind of indian. it does not take kindly to gardens and other civilized places. it thrives and yields abundantly if given a chance on its native hillsides, and comes up by the million wherever the cutting of the timber lets in the light. by burning over the blueberry land in very early spring while the ground is wet, those in charge can keep down the alder, poplars, birches, and other non-money-making growths, and this is taken by the blueberries as their chance. they come right up, and deliver a tremendous crop the first year after the burning. wild grapes we used to gather wild grapes along the river bottoms in the middle west when we went nutting. sometimes our nutting excursion turned out to be a grape harvest. these grapes were small, almost black under their thin coat of bloom, in clusters like miniature garden grapes. oh, but they were puckery when green, but the frost sweetened them. the vines grew tremendously, way to the tops of the trees, their stems like great ropes, which we used for swings. the grapes were really mostly seed and skin, but there was juice enough to stain our aprons, and give the teeth and tongue an unmistakable telltale hue. there was juice enough for a kind of jelly which i believe had the peculiarity of never "jelling" properly. it is good, though, and they were well worth the sugar to make them edible. i was surprised at their size when i first saw the big summer grapes of the eastern hedge-rows and banks. but their flavour is no great improvement over that of the frost grape. there is more pulp, though. my barberry gathering friend, who admits that she is "fond of all sorts of woodland flavours," gathers these grapes in august before they begin to change colour. she makes the only really green grape jelly i have seen. this is her receipt: wash the stemmed grapes very carefully to rid them of dust and possible taint from poison ivy, with which they often associate. put them into a preserving kettle with a very little boiling water, cover and let them steam till tender. (no boiling here.) strain to get rid of seeds and skins. (work fast at this point, because delay may cause the change of colour we wish to avoid.) weigh the juice and an equal amount of white sugar. heat sugar and juice separately, without scorching. stir the hot sugar into the boiling juice, let boil up, skim, and put into dry, hot glasses. if it boils a long time it loses the green colour, and its flavour of the wild out-of-doors. green grape jelly that is really green is a triumph. it would bring a price. elderberries elderberries have almost gone out of fashion in these days of refrigerator cars and cold storage, when fruits from all parts of the world are brought to our doors. but i am antiquated enough to like the rather flat, seedy things, and the "runny" jelly is of a wonderful colour and flavour. best of all is the fun of gathering the broad, flat clusters, always seeing a finer one just a few steps farther on or just over the fence. the golden-rod is brilliant in the september sunshine, the asters like star stuff sifted in every fence corner, while the fox grapes clambering over stray trees along the line fence fill the air with fragrance. perhaps i could get on without the elderberries, but the new england conscience requires some practical excuse for traipsing off over the fields when there is useful work to be done indoors. elderberries canned in a thin syrup, one cup of water, two of sugar, and all the berries the jar will hold, are excellent for steamed pudding. drain off the juice, and stir the berries into the batter just as you would blueberries, mulberries, or any other fruit. the colour of the pudding will be awe-inspiring but with the juice for sauce it is good, really. barberries our westchester county hostess always took a basket on her arm when she went for a walk. she had an unusual taste for wild flavours of all sorts and her guests were always sure of some delightful surprise at her table. in september there is a choice of wild fruits, and everybody recognized the necessity for a basket. i wondered, though, when we passed, unnoticed, bushels of elderberries, and rods of browning grapes, and headed for a group of dogwood trees. but although the berries were thicker than i ever saw on the dogwood, they were only admired and left for the sun to burnish. high on a bare hilltop we sat where the view was panoramic. the lady with the basket betook herself to a fringe of tall, ruddy bushes on the brow of the hill, and i found her busily filling her basket with barberries. she did not wait to pick them singly but snipped off the laden twigs with scissors, avoiding thus the angry thorns. "what are they good for?" i asked, as i tasted again the sharp, astringent flavour and felt that indescribable pucker on tongue and lips that goes with it. the barberry had long been a favourite with me; the bush for its wayward grace and its cunning flowers, the berries for their exquisite bloom and for tasting so unlike any cultivated thing. but i had never dreamed of making jelly of them. "jelly," said our hostess. "it's particularly good with game." of course it would be good with game, but can you imagine eating barberry jelly with corn-fed pork or with fat mutton? the berries should be gathered before they are fully ripe and treated like currants, although the yield of juice is meagre. add a little water and heat slowly. strain and add "pound for pound" of sugar. put in tiny glasses. any one in search for a unique christmas gift for an epicurean uncle would find barberry jelly fills the bill. in salem, mass., i saw barberries for sale in the market. they looked mightily out of place along with pineapples, watermelons, grapes, peaches, japanese plums, and other conventional market fruits. bayberries two friends of mine, summering on cape ann, discovered there to their delight, a low shrub, growing in great profusion on the rocky hills. the foliage was of a rich green colour, of a leathery texture, and was possessed of an aromatic odour at once delightful and wholesome to their senses. they were seized with a great desire to take home with them a quantity of this plentiful foliage to make into pillows or to feed the fire on the hearth that they might inhale its fragrance, and be reminded of cape ann and the summer sea. so they procured huge gunny sacks which they were at some pains to stuff to their utmost capacity. they have a snapshot of themselves, bent double under the weight of the great sacks. with the help of a friendly native they succeeded in transporting the burdens to the express office, and addressed them home. we cheerfully paid the expressman's charges at the home end, having been advised that the bags were coming, and carried them to the attic floor where they were to be spread to cure. but when the contents came tumbling out, its pent-up fragrance was familiar. then was it possible those blessed geese had been spending their precious vacation days gathering bay berry leaves? it was even so, and we had paid nearly two dollars express on the bags--and our woods were full of it! what a laugh we had at their expense when they came to reimburse us. the bayberry shrub is also called wax myrtle and it is easy to see why, when you find the berries in october. they are gray, almost white, and you see that each one is covered with tiny drops of wax that has oozed out of the berry and dried on its surface. bayberry is called candleberry, too, because of the use our great-grandmothers made of the wax. bayberry dips have come into fashion again and people who make them skilfully find a ready sale for their product. making bayberry dips to make bayberry candles you must first gather the wax-covered berries. get them early, for, as cold weather comes on, the pellets of wax drop off. two quarts make only a little ball of wax, so you must gather an enormous quantity of the berries. put them into water and bring it to a boil, stirring well to be sure that all the wax is melting. being lighter than water the wax will rise to the surface. when you think all the berries are bare, take them from the fire. as the water cools, the wax hardens on top. if the berries do not all go to the bottom you will have to melt the wax again over a slow fire or in a double boiler until the wax rises clean at the top; all dirt and refuse on its lower surface can be scraped off. do not let the wax burn. smoke is a sure sign that it is too hot. in a double boiler there is no danger. to make the dips, take regular candle wicking, a soft, white, loosely twisted cord, cut it twice the desired length for the candle. double it and twist enough to hold it together. the loop at one end is convenient to hold it by. dip into the hot wax and then as it cools draw the wick down with finger and thumb so that it hangs straight and kinkless. a second dip adds a little to the diameter of the candle, the third another layer and so on till your first bayberry dip is finished. if the first effort is not a good shape and has to go back into the pot you needn't be discouraged. didn't the first chocolate cream you ever made look like a chestnut gone wrong? but with patience it is possible for even a beginner to produce very shapely candles. they do not need to be absolutely regular. paraffin or tallow candles, moulded just alike by the hundred thousand dozen, may be as round and perfect as machinery can make them. part of the charm of the bayberry dips is in these slight irregularities of shape and size. wild crab apples thickets of small trees, bearing little solid green apples are a feature of almost every farm in the prairie states. they are common also on the hilly pastures of ohio, western pennsylvania, and new york. the south, too, has its native crab apple. school children the country over loved in my day to fill their pockets with the hard, sour, little fruits and nibble at them surreptitiously under cover of a broad geography. but perhaps children's tastes have changed since that far time. modern geography must be different, anyhow. i saw one the other day shaped just like a fifth reader or history or any other. it just looked like any book, not one bit like a g'ography. the little crabs were made into sauce or "butter," by pioneers of the prairie states. we washed, quartered, and cut out the wormy places, stewed them till soft with a little water, then put them through a coarse sieve to take out seeds, cores, and skin. the pulp was then sweetened with sorghum molasses and boiled; stirring is necessary to prevent burning. the appetites of those days did not demand dainty fare. well do i remember a small visitor to whom our cookery was new whose demand for crab-apple-sauce-if-you-please was hard to satisfy. i believe crab apple jelly would be regarded a great delicacy by people of good taste, if once they had a try at it. persimmons the children of the persimmon belt, which includes a much larger part of the eastern half of the united states than many suppose, all know that the fruit of some trees is better than that of others. the 'possum knows, too, and lucky is he who finds both "fruits" on the same tree. there is a market for persimmons if they are gathered after frost, and a greater demand may be created. seeing an unfamiliar fruit in the market is very likely to awaken the interest. whether the buyer will want a second basket or not depends entirely upon the cleverness of the person that supplies the demand. the thoroughly ripe fruit is, according to an experienced traveller, "entirely without bitterness or astringency, sweet, rich, and juicy." what more can you say about watermelon or strawberries? but if you who gather the fruits persist in hurrying them green into market you may expect that the prejudice against persimmons will grow stronger. haws is there any good reason why some of the people who used to be boys should never have a chance to taste any thorn apples now that they are older? perhaps these grown-up boys deserve to be punished for deserting the old haunts, but give them a taste of what the open road has to offer and maybe they will be tempted back to a simpler life. the fruit of the may haw or apple haw of the far south is sold in the markets of some cities and is made into preserves and jelly. the washington thorn which grows wild in virginia and the other states not far from the capital city is also cultivated in many gardens farther north. it has run wild from these gardens and ranges over new york, pennsylvania and neighbouring states. though usually small, its berries are a beautifully shining scarlet and very numerous. it is worth risking a pound or so of sugar just to see what jelly they would make. the pear haw has a thick, juicy flesh, and some of the yellow ones are equally good. wild plums the wild plums of the east did not strike the early settlers as very much worth while. they were almost all seed and skin and the rest was "pucker." quite naturally the plums of the mother country were preferred and sprouts were brought over and set in the gardens of our forefathers. these plum emigrants did so well in the new country that they escaped from the gardens into the pastures and roadsides, coming up wherever seeds were dropped. in such places they still flourish and are thought of as wild plums. they are gathered for market, but compare unfavourably, except with very old-fashioned people, with the garden-grown fruits of the same or similar varieties. the pioneers of the middle west, however, found very fine plums growing wild in plentiful thickets. we used to gather these native plums in the mississippi valley, in great tubfuls. we not only appreciated the crop nature provided for us every year, but were far-sighted enough to realize that the time would come when the march of civilization would tramp out the plum thickets. so we planted them in orchards and gardens, taking those trees that had given us the best crops of the biggest, finest fruit. in fact, the pioneers did just what we ought to be doing all over our country with other wild fruits and with nuts. the wild goose plum is a native which has founded a race of which there are many named varieties, much bigger and finer than the little, old, wild grandmother of the plum thicket, but they all have still that same tart tang, just under the skin, that gave to our wild plum "jell" its incomparable flavour. are the wild plums all forgotten? must all fruit come out of boxes and have that stale taste of the town? must it lose its characteristic aroma and give off only that general "markety" smell? is "goin' plummin'" entirely out of fashion, even in the prairie states? i don't believe it is as bad as that. do you believe that moving pictures or shoot the shoots or merry-go-rounds can begin to compare with such simple pleasures as plumming, graping, berrying, and nutting? i have tried both, and give me the old, homely pleasures every time. the following extract from "the tree book" so well describes an annual outing of pioneer children that it is quoted in full: "'do you calculate to go a-plummin' this fall?' the question was quietly put in father's judicial tones, but it sent an electric thrill from head to toes of every youngster. mother's reply sent an answering current, and the enthusiasm of the moment burst all bounds. 'well, you better go this afternoon. i can spare the team and wagon, and i guess john is big enough to drive. there's no use goin' at all if you don't go right off.' "so mother and the children rode out of the yard, she sitting with her young driver on the spring seat, the rest on boards laid across the wagon box behind. what a jouncing they got when the wheels struck a stone in a rut! but who cared for a trifle like that? john's reckless driving but brought nearer the goal of their heart's desire. "a lurid colour lightened the plum thicket as it came in sight. the yellow leaves were falling and the fruit glowed on the bending twigs. close up the wagon is drawn; then all hands pile out, and the fun really begins. how large and sweet they are this year! mother knows how to avoid the puckery, thick skin in eating plums. the youngsters try to chew two or three at once and their faces are drawn into knots. but they soon get used to that. "now the small folks with pails are sent to pick up ripe plums under the trees, and warned against eating too many. 'remember last year,' says mother, and they do remember. the larger boys spread strips of burlap and rag carpet under the fullest trees, in turn, and give their branches a good beating that showers the plums down. with difficulty the boys and girls make their way into the thicket; but torn jackets and aprons and scratched hands can be mended--such accidents are overlooked in the excitement of filling the grain sacks with ripe fruit. how fine 'plum butter' will taste on the bread and butter of the noon lunch when winter comes and school begins. (the pennsylvanian's love for 'spreads' on his bread leavened the west completely.) "other neighbours have come, and started in with a vim. it seems unreasonable to take any more. the bags are full, and there are some poured loose into the wagon box. besides, everybody is tired, and john shouts that the hazel-nuts are ripe on the other side of the log road. "a great grape vine, loaded with purple clusters, claims mother's attention. there will probably be no better chance for grapes this fall, and the sun is still an hour high. john chops down the little tree that supports it and the girls eagerly help to fill the pails with the fruit of the prostrate vine, while john goes back to command the hazel-nut brigade and sees that no eager youngster strays too far. "mother's voice gives the final summons, and the children gather at the wagon, tired but regretful for the filled husks that they must leave behind on the hazel bushes. a loaded branch of the grape vine is cut off bodily, and lifted into the wagon. the team is hitched on, and the happy passengers in the wagon turn their faces homeward." such was the poetry of pioneer life. pleasures were simple, primitive, hearty--like the work--closely interlinked with the fight against starvation. there was nothing dull or uninteresting about either. the plums and grapes were sweetened with molasses made from sorghum cane. each farmer grew a little strip, and one of them had a mill to which every one hauled his cane to be ground "on the shares." who will say that this "long sweetenin'" was poor stuff, that the quality of the spiced grapes suffered for lack of sugar, or that any modern preserves have a more excellent flavour than those of the old days made out of the wild plums gathered in the woods? and this is also true: there is no more exhilarating holiday conceivable than those half days when mother took the children and "went a-plummin'." nuts the wild nuts gathered in this country for sale or home use in the north are chestnuts, hickory nuts, black walnuts, butternut, hazel-nut, beechnut; in the south, the pecan and the chinquapin; in the far west, the pine nut. the least known of these in eastern markets are the pine nuts, which form a very staple article of food for many tribes of indians in the great basin. john muir says that there are tens of thousands of acres covered with nut pines. an industrious indian family can gather fifty or sixty bushels in a month if the snow does not catch them. the little cones are beaten off with poles as the trees are not high, and are heated till they open and the nuts fall out from under the scales. i have eaten pine nuts in turkish restaurants. they came as a surprise in a dish of eggplant stuffed with chopped meat, raisins, nuts, bread crumbs, and i know not what all else. the native chestnut, though smaller, is far sweeter than the popular spanish one. but it looks as if some foreigner must take the place of our native chestnuts in the woods as well as in the market. the chestnut disease which has driven the trees out of the parks and wood lots near new york city is baffling the scientists. every year the deadline moves westward and southward and northward from its center. perhaps a cure will be found before all the chestnuts are gone. if any region has a few trees which seem to withstand the disease while all the rest die, those trees should be preserved and used to propagate a race of chestnuts which would be immune. it may be that the spanish and japanese chestnuts will prove hardier than our own. these are being grown quite extensively in some eastern states. they bear when remarkably young. japanese chestnuts begin to bear, according to the nurserymen, "at three years of age, bear from three to seven nuts in a bur, each nut measuring from four to five inches in circumference." trees five years old bear two or three quarts each and the yield increases rapidly from year to year. these bring fancy prices in city markets and are eaten either raw or cooked. in growing chestnuts it is the practice first to cut down the old native trees. as in all likelihood these would be dead in a few years anyhow, this is economical. dead lumber is not as valuable as live lumber. the first year after a chestnut is cut, a crop of young suckers come up around the stump. these shoots are grafted with scions of a desired variety. there is a good story of a lad of twelve years of age who asked his father to graft a chestnut tree. although the man was grafting apple trees at the time he laughed at the boy's idea. the lad did not forget and years after he put his idea into practice and now owns a chestnut grove which brings him an income of thousands of dollars. his chestnut groves are on waste land unfit for ordinary farm purposes. if one farm boy in every county would take an interest in growing the nuts that belong to his region, think how the value of the nut crop would increase. every boy knows that the hickory nuts on one particular shell-bark are bigger and sweeter than on every other one he knows of. he and his friends try to get there first, before the "other gang" do, and make sure of their share. but does he ever plant any big sweet nuts along a fence row and take care of the young trees till they are big enough to take care of themselves? in the seventeenth century there was a law in certain european countries that every young man should plant a certain number of walnut trees. unless he could prove that he had complied with the law, he couldn't marry. what a good idea! with such a law we might have more fine trees and fewer hasty marriages. chinquapins a coloured girl brought me a pint of chinquapins from her home in ca'line county, virginia; i sampled them eagerly, taking great pleasure in their diminutive prettiness, tidy shape, and rich, dark colouring. i kept a handful securely tied in the little salt bag in which they had made the journey and took them to my native state to show to the children, who had never seen a chestnut tree of any kind. when i took the bag from the trunk, there was a dustiness about the feel of it that aroused my suspicions. i emptied the contents into a flat dish. there were my nuts, their glossy brown shells as smooth as ever, but empty. rolling about amongst them were a lot of the plumpest little white grubs, fairly bent double with corpulency. there must have been one for each nut, for not a sound kernel was left. i learn from chestnut-wise people that these weevils are another great enemy of chestnut culture, no remedy having been found. the chinquapin is the southern child's chestnut. it is sometimes a tree, but more often a low shrub. the bur is round and has only one nut in it. a good many are marketed, especially in southern cities, and bring a good price when fresh. the weevils enter the nuts before they are mature and it is difficult to find the bad nuts till too late to prevent a disagreeable impression. this interferes with the popularity of the chinquapin as a dessert nut. hazel-nuts the american hazel-nut flourishes over the eastern half of the united states. it is a sweet little nut, much more to my taste than the bigger filbert, which is so popular in our markets. we used to gather hazel-nuts in the edge of woods which fringe the little rivers of the mississippi valley. the bushes grew in thickets and while the big brothers and sisters gathered the nuts from among the closely interlaced branches that grew scarcely higher than their heads, the smaller fry crept in underneath and getting about on the floor of the woods searched for nuts that had ripened early and dropped from the browning husk. there is no progress in simply going out in the fall and taking what nature furnishes. unaided, the good mother goes on producing the same small nuts, caring just as patiently for the inferior ones and even encouraging the nut weevils to prey upon them. but i wonder if some boy or girl who thinks there isn't any interesting work to be done on the farm, could not make some experiments in hazel-nut culture. the bushes grow readily from seed, but seedlings do not always produce as fine nuts as those that were planted. for this reason one can save time by selecting the bushes that bear the largest crop of fine nuts and propagating those. they grow in any well drained, fairly rich soil and i know of hundreds of miles of fence rows answering these requirements, which now produce poison ivy, cat brier and other harmful crops. hazel bushes make a beautiful fence row, and yield a salable crop. hazel bushes propagate naturally by suckers and layers. by manuring well in summer long shoots for layering will be forced. "these should be staked down in winter or spring and covered with earth. they may be removed to nursery rows or orchard at the end of the first season." so says w. a. taylor in the "cyclopædia of american horticulture." the same writer gives directions for pruning as follows: strong shoots should be headed back to promote spur formation (the nuts are borne on short side shoots) and old wood that has borne fruit should be removed annually. suckers should be kept down unless wanted for propagation. march or april is the best time to prune as they blossom very early and one must avoid cutting off either the young nuts or the pollen-bearing flowers. the nuts should be gathered when the husk begins to brown at the edges. if left longer, as is most often done, in the case of wild nuts, a large proportion of the crop falls to the ground and is lost. beside, the dried hulled nuts do not bring as high a price as the fresh unhusked ones. if kept long in the husk they will mould, unless dried thoroughly. the nuts, however, will keep through the season in a cool place. walnuts the fruit of the black walnut is enclosed in a globe-shaped husk. all country boys and girls know how that husk smells and how it stains the fingers. the nuts are very oily and must be treated carefully. they should be dried, preferably on the garret floor, hulled and stored in a cool, dry place. if for market, they should be sold immediately. they are very likely to grow rancid if kept. billy, in the "limberlost" story, had a piece of heavy plank with a hole in it, just big enough to let the husked nut through. he put an unhulled nut over the hole, then with a wooden mallet, he drove it through the hole. it came through clean. the butternut or oilnut is from a tree closely related to the black walnut. it is called also white walnut. the husk is not so thick as that of the black walnut and adheres stubbornly to the nut if left to dry. the nuts get rancid if kept warm and should be marketed as soon as dry or kept stored in the cold and eaten before spring. pickled walnuts are a highly prized delicacy in households where "culturine" has not taken the place of old-fashioned household arts. the nuts are gathered when green, before the shell has hardened. if a knitting needle can be pushed clear through the nut, it is not too old for pickling. you will be fortunate if you can get a receipt from some housewife who has time for real culture as well as for making pickles. _receipt for pickled walnuts._--(from my great aunt's cook-book.) ingredients: one hundred walnuts, salt and water, one gallon of vinegar, two ounces of whole black pepper, half an ounce of cloves, one ounce of allspice, one ounce of root ginger sliced, one ounce of mace. gather the nuts in july when they are full grown. they should be soft enough to be pierced all through with a needle. prick them all well through. let them remain nine days in brine (four pounds of salt to each gallon of water), changing the brine every third day. drain them, and let them remain in the sun two or three days until they become black. put them into jars, not quite filling them. boil the vinegar and spices together ten minutes, and pour the liquid over the walnuts. they will be fit for use in a month, and will keep for years. beechnuts the boys of your neighbourhood may not know that the smooth, gray-barked trees with very long, slender, pointed buds are beeches. they may never have noticed the wonderful gray-green colour nor delicate texture of the newly opened leaves, nor the soft, silky flower head that bears the pollen. too many boys think these preliminaries are of no importance. the chances are strong that when october ripens the nuts, nobody has any difficulty in locating beech trees, if there are any in the vicinity. usually, in the wild woods, they grow in large groups of various sizes; the big trees sheltering the little ones until they are strong enough to live in the full sunlight. do boys and girls find the beeches by instinct just as the mice, the blue jays, the squirrels, and the foraging hogs do? do you know why it takes so much longer to gather a pint of beechnuts than the same amount of hazel-nuts? they are pretty small; yes, but there's another reason. if you were to count your beechnuts, you would find it takes many more of them by count to make a pint than of the round nuts, because of their triangular shape. they fit so snugly that your pint measure of beechnuts is almost solid nuts. they are about the sweetest of the wild nuts. they are very rich in fat too, and in olden times an oil for table use was made from beechnuts. olive oil takes its place now and costs less. there is a market for all the beechnuts you can gather. dealers in tree seeds often have difficulty in filling orders. as the nuts do not germinate till april they may be gathered at any time during the winter, unless the wild folks have gathered them all. the chances are that to get any you would have to go early and search sharply. once or so in a lifetime the burrow of a white-footed mouse is discovered near beech woods. are you hard hearted enough not only to break and enter, but also to burgle his hoard? rather admire the little creature's industry and resolve to go and do likewise. hickory nuts america is the only country that has native hickory nuts. of these the best nut producers are the shagbarks and the pecans. these two nuts are increasingly popular. people are planting these nuts and experimenting with new varieties, with grafting and cultivation, as never before. pecan orchards are being planted in many regions and hickory nuts are being studied with a view to improving the kernel and reducing the hardness of the shell. the value of hickory wood in the making of tools and for fuel has made the lumber more profitable than the nuts. but with improved varieties this may not be true. the poor quality of the wood of the pecan has saved these native trees from destruction. hickory nuts have a husk as every country child knows; but the husk has a good-natured habit of splitting neatly into four equal parts which fall away from the nut when dry. there are several kinds of hickory which produce sweet, edible nuts, but the nuts of the true shagbark are the best. they grow on low hills near streams or swamps in good soil in the eastern and middle states as far south as florida, and as far west as kansas. the king nuts of the mississippi are bigger, but not so good, although the price you get for them is good and the baskets fill faster than with the little shagbarks. pecans this nut tree grows in the south, and as the wood is too brittle to be very valuable nobody has cut it for lumber. tremendous interest has been aroused during the past ten years in pecan growing. pecan orchards are being planted in all sorts of soil, good, bad, and indifferent. the wisest planters have gone to nature to learn what kind of conditions the pecan requires. by cultivation and fertilizing and otherwise improving good natural conditions, many growers are succeeding. by planting nuts from trees that produce fine ones abundantly every year, and by budding these trees with scions from still finer specimen trees great improvement has been made. i have a picture of a pecan tree in georgia, sixteen years old, which is nearly fifty feet high. it has borne already three hundred and fifty pounds of nuts and this year's crop will be over a hundred pounds. this tree has never had to fight weeds, has always had plenty to eat and drink, was protected in winter while young, and now it is ready to foot all its own bills and give a fine profit. how many of us are ready to do that at sixteen years? the cultivation of pecans is only just begun. very little of the annual crop of these nuts is harvested in orchards. in "the tree book" the author says that ninety-five per cent. of the crop is still gathered in the woods. the annual crop is tremendous, and the pickers get only three to ten cents a pound for the ungraded nuts. for the very best nuts, mainly sold for seed, the retail price is from fifty cents to a dollar a pound, which is from one to two cents per nut. who picks all these nuts in the woods? surely, the boys and girls of the pecan belt do their share. do they do it in a primitive way or are their methods worthy of the up-to-date american youngster? professor hume of the florida agriculture experiment station (bulletin no. , ) gives suggestions for gathering the pecan crop in the orchard which ought to be useful to the "wild picker." the nuts ought to be gathered as soon as the most of the burs have opened. in orchards, the pickers use ladders for young trees and climb the big ones and gather the nuts by hand into sacks. beating and shaking the trees is only resorted to for the nuts that are entirely out of reach. if allowed to fall on the ground so many of the nuts are lost that the profits are materially lessened. if practicable a large sheet should be placed under the tree to save this loss. the nuts should be spread under some sort of roof to cure, which requires ten days or two weeks. have you ever tried the experiment of sorting and grading the nuts you gather? the fruits of wild trees vary greatly in their size and general appearance. the wholesale dealer who buys nuts undoubtedly grades them and gets a fancy price for the big ones. why should you not benefit by this? pecans are graded by sifting them through screens, the mesh of which lets only those of small size through. you might build up a private trade in wild nuts by packing your best nuts in attractive pasteboard boxes and charging a good retail rate for them. the inferior nuts you could well afford to sell at the lowest wholesale price as your average would be higher than the wholesaler would pay for unsorted nuts. your fancy nuts would have to be polished in order to compete with the nuts sold in city markets. the polishing does not make the meat any sweeter, but it does make a more attractive dessert nut, especially now that folks are used to seeing them polished. this is done by putting some dry sand into a barrel with the nuts and rolling the barrel about till the nuts are polished. if you have a worn out barrel or box churn, as we once had, that would be just the thing. fancy packages of five to ten pounds would be very much in demand at christmas. the big cities are well supplied with this sort of thing, but in the smaller cities and larger towns there are always some people who know a good thing when they see it and to whom the local markets often fail to supply these little luxuries. nut growing in bulletin no. of the maryland agricultural experiment station published in you may read: "the young and middle-aged should not only plant nut trees themselves, but should encourage the children to do likewise. every farm boy ought to have a small nut nursery and be taught to plant and care for nut trees. nothing more creditable could be done in the schools than to interest the boys and girls in the possibilities of nut production and to celebrate arbor day with the planting of nut trees." doesn't that read like sound advice? think of the land on your father's farm to-day that is not working. or if there isn't any idle land can you not persuade him to lend you an acre or so for experimental purposes? the chances are that he will encourage and help you because he wants you to be interested in the farm. but you may say to yourself: "not much! i don't mean to stay on the farm. i'm going to work hard and get an education. i want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a banker." nevertheless, you take the maryland man's advice and set out some nut trees. let us say you start your nut orchard at age fourteen when you have three years yet in the high school. your trees will be set so far apart that some other crops will be grown between them; corn, potatoes, melons, or anything that requires good cultivation and fertilization. when you finish the high school your nut trees will not look very big, but promising. you go on to college and in four years you will see a big change. no crop is in sight yet but you are only twenty-one and ready to go to work. you may forget all about those nut trees for a few years but they are not forgetting their business. they will bear a few nuts some year, as if to try their hand at a new enterprise. some day when you are needing a sum of money to start in business for yourself, and you are wondering who will lend you that much, you will get word from the folks at home that they have harvested your first crop of pecans or english walnuts or spanish chestnuts and have deposited a thousand dollars in the bank in your name as the net profits. will you try it? before planting nut trees it is important to learn all you can by reading and by correspondence with your experiment station experts about the kinds that will do best in your region and on your soil. if more boys used a little forethought we should have fewer young college men struggling along on small salaries in work they dislike, just for lack of a tidy sum of ready money to set them on their feet at the critical time. there are good reasons for this greater interest in nut growing in the united states. the use of nuts is more common than formerly but they are still a luxury. wild nuts are scarcer, owing to the destruction of the trees for lumber. the food value of nuts is better understood than formerly, and many articles of food are manufactured now from nuts. nuts as meat substitutes have come into prominence within a few years. this creates a demand which will increase. there is no danger of over-production. now is the time to get into the nut business. tree seeds in his book on "forestry" professor gifford says: "collection of tree seeds should yield good returns if properly conducted." that is good news, for if ever a crop was allowed to go to waste it is this crop of tree seeds. any one who has seen a forest of young maples cut down by lawn mowers in the helplessness of their seed-leaf stage realizes that with any sort of forethought those seeds might have been made a source of income. professor gifford says a little farther on that many of the seeds of our native trees can be more easily obtained in europe than in america. we may learn many lessons in economy from our neighbours over there. but who is going to harvest the tree seeds? a mechanic who earns a good wage cannot afford to gather tree seeds; neither can a bank clerk unless he does the work in his vacation. but our boys and girls are often at a loss to find ways of earning money. here is a crop they can gather without danger of trespassing. there is a market for this harvest. some tree seeds are difficult to get and expensive; red pine for instance. spruce trees produce seed only once in seven years. this keeps the supply short. in a spruce seed year every seed should be gathered. pecks of hard maple seeds are swept up by street cleaners every year on our home street. they are worth a lot of money, yet the boys on the street never have all the cash they want to buy baseball gloves and circus tickets and bicycles. no enterprising reader of this book need ever lack for pocket money. remember, professor gifford said, "collection of tree seeds should yield good returns _if properly conducted_." every business to be successful must be conducted properly. there are some simple principles. you need not be an expert forester but the more you know about trees the better. if a dealer buys six quarts of _red_ maple seeds of you he will be disappointed if you send him _silver_ maple, discouraged if you send him _sugar_ maple, and disgruntled if you send him _ash_. furthermore, he will not send you the money nor any orders for more. if there is a maple tree with a peck of seed on it in your yard, in five minutes or less time you can find out what kind it is with "the tree book." before the seeds are ripe write to a several seed men and tell them what you have; ask if they want any, at what price, and on what date. some trees ripen their seeds in the spring, shake them off, and let the wind scatter them. in the case of some kinds, the seeds sprout within a few days after they reach the ground. these should be gathered as soon as ripe, spread out to dry for a few days, and planted within a few weeks at latest. seeds of other kinds do not grow till the following spring. none of these should be allowed to dry too thoroughly. nuts and acorns for seed should not be allowed to get dry over winter. these should be packed in moist sand and kept cool but not frozen. cherry, plum and peach pits are better for being frozen. the supply of white pine seed is never equal to the demand. the market price is said to vary from two dollars fifty cents to four dollars fifty cents per pound. you get a little over a pound of seeds from a bushel of unopened cones. white pine trees require two years to mature their cones and they set seed only once in every four or five years. but every year there will be some trees bearing seed. nineteen hundred and four was a big "on" year in the new york white pine forests. you can tell when the tiny cones first appear that a crop is coming. the cones should be watched as august wanes and gathered before they open. september is the month as a general thing. boys can earn thirty cents or so a bushel gathering the full cones. but i should not be satisfied to let the other fellow get all the profits just because he knows how to cure and market the seed. that is easy. spread the cones out in the barn to dry. slat trays are best to get free circulation of air. you can make these at odd times before the crop is ready. a fanning mill comes in handy to thrash and free them from rubbish and imperfect seed. market them immediately to avoid loss. if you are to keep the seed for home consumption, mix with dry sand and store in a cool but not too dry place. if allowed to dry or freeze and thaw they lose their vitality. tree seeds need pretty careful handling. any one interested in gathering tree seeds should get information from books and bulletins on forestry. he should write to firms who make a specialty of selling tree seeds and they will help him by giving directions about the treatment of seeds. did you ever wonder where the nursery men get the thousands of apple trees they sell every year? go a step back of the budding or grafting that is done in the nursery. where did the little tree come from whose top was cut off after the first bud was set? it came from a seed; just any apple seed. and where do apple seeds come from? from apples? yes, just any apples. did you ever make cider on your farm? you put in whole apples, skin, core, stem, seeds, and all; shovelled them into the hopper. the pulp was squeezed dry and thrown away, wasn't it, at your cider mill? that is proof of the wastefulness of some good farmers. if the pulp were washed in tubs, the seeds would find the bottom (or the top) and they would bring a good price per pound. collecting christmas greens once upon a time everybody who wanted christmas greens had the fun of gathering his own. that was in the generation when all the grandmothers lived in the country and only the plain fathers and mothers and children lived in the cities. but now we children have grown up and our children want to go to grandmother's house for christmas just as we did. can't you imagine how surprised and disappointed they are to find their grandmothers living in city houses, even in flats? didn't we tell them about going out to gather holly and mistletoe and ground pine and hemlock and even how we used to cut the christmas tree itself in grandpa's woods? in the middle west where christmas trees do not grow in the woods we used to choose a shapely young oak. to make it look like an evergreen we used to get grandpa to go out with his big jack-knife and cut off the largest branches he could spare from the evergreens in the door yard. with good, strong twine we tied these to the branches of the oak. when all the decorations were on and the oranges and the apples and the popcorn strings and the candles _and_ the presents, we children who had never seen a real live christmas tree couldn't have told the difference. we didn't even mind the fact that some of the oak's outer branches were pine, some were spruce, some were cedar. it was all evergreen to us and all christmassy. we were easy to please. but now--alas! the gathering of christmas greens has been commercialized. it has ceased to be fun, and has become a business. the boys and girls may share in the profits and perhaps get some fun out of it if they go about it right. holly, which of all the christmas greens is the most popular, is a hardy and beautiful tree, which grows wild in great numbers in the southern states and in the chesapeake region. many country boys and girls make easy christmas money from the holly trees in their own woods. to these boys and girls i want to say "don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg." a tree with fine berries on it this year will, if treated right, produce a good crop again in a few years. pruning is good for a tree, but brutally hacking its head out destroys the tree's future, and the boy who does it is not a good citizen. holly wood is close grained, light, and tough and is valuable in some forms of cabinet work. here is an industry that might be developed as a side issue in the holly trade. the best market calls for holly wreaths. i have a picture of a girl of fourteen who can make sixty wreaths in a day and she gets six and a half cents for each. that is good wages for a girl of her age, but she must get pretty tired making wreaths every minute all day long. if she could help her brothers gather the holly for part of the time, it would be easier on her back. the wreaths are made on frames of twigs, twisted into circles, and tied. young twigs of any flexible shrub are used. somebody has to gather these. it is a wonder that more holly trees are not planted in door yards. and wouldn't it be a good idea for some boys to begin a plantation of holly now so they can reap the harvest later? holly will not go out of fashion in a great many years. but at the present rate the supply cannot last. the amount used every year is past belief. from one small railway station , wreaths! one year, several carloads were burned because the market was overstocked. the time has come already when raising christmas trees is necessary. they still come up like weeds in the woods where enough mature ones are left to seed the bared hillsides. the harvest begins in november and the trees are cut and sorted, roped to preserve their branches, in bundles of eight or less or singly, and stacked along the roads to await shipment. hundreds of thousands are harvested every year. "no-christmas-tree" clubs are being formed now to try to stop this wastefulness. we go too much to extremes. one christmas tree used to be enough for all the grandchildren; but nowadays every one must have his own. if our children's children are to have real christmas trees the boys of to-day must plant the seeds of the beloved balsam fir. the man who discovers and makes popular a new kind of christmas greens does everybody a good turn. one of the most remarkable "ten-strikes" ever made along this line was a sort of accident. a man who calls himself "caldwell, the woodsman," describes his experience as follows: "it was several weeks before i found the evergreen that was to make the town of evergreen, ala., famous throughout the decorative world. wandering through the woods one day, my attention was attracted to a beautiful green vine hanging from the topmost limb of a small dead oak. i caught hold of the vine and pulled it down, and was much astonished at the ease with which it came out of the tree, and the fact that it seemed in no way injured by my rough treatment. on carrying it to my new home, i arranged it around the mirror in my room, and, after leaving it there for about a week or ten days, found that it was as fresh and green as ever." mr. caldwell saw that in wild southern smilax he had found a plant that possessed all the good points required for wholesale decorations. it is used everywhere now. city florists cannot get enough of it. the plant is a perennial, renewing itself every year, and grows in greatest profusion in its wild habitat. he had an uphill job, though, convincing the fashionable florists of the value of this plant. but he persevered and now he ships five thousand cases of it a year at an average profit of one dollar per case. young long-leaf pines grow in the south and are now used extensively for christmas decoration in the north. it seems a pity to kill a pine tree every time one of these is cut, but in places where the seedlings come up too thick for good forest growth cutting out some is a benefit. if only the gatherers would be conservers as well! the collecting of ferns in the woods is a business suited to the country boys and girls. this has grown to a really great enterprise since the rage for country things has struck city people. there is some sham about every fad of this kind, but the fern gatherers are not shamming. they do the real work. to succeed in this, one must not work haphazard. he must know just what his customer wants, and the buyer must know just what the collector can supply. _ferns_ is a big group of plants, and some of them you couldn't sell. if christmas ferns grow plentifully in your woods, you can gather them by the thousand fronds. but will the florist buy those leaves which have the brown spots (or spores) on the under side? find out before you waste your time. those spores are more valuable in the woods than on the garbage heap. the boys who pull the plants up by the roots are killing their own goose. the fern can spare all the perfect leaves you find on it in the fall without much if any damage. a new crop will be forthcoming next year if the roots are undisturbed. scissors and care used in gathering only good leaves will pay now, as well as in the future. there are a number of wild things that deserve more popularity. bitter-sweet is lovely and lasts forever, nearly. you seldom see it in the market, though. sumach too, has great decorative value, yet whoever saw it in a florist's window? cattails, pussy willows, spice bush, dogwood flowers and berries, solomon's seal, and a score of other wild flowers are already in use. but there are others you may be able to introduce to city people. it is surprising what they will buy and admire if it comes from the country. i rode on a suburban car one day behind an armful of poison ivy. it was brilliantly beautiful and i suspect the gatherer wished i had kept still when i told her what it was. if she hadn't had a child with her, i should have let her risk it. maybe she was immune. most people are. the funniest thing i ever saw for sale was a basket of skunk-cabbage flowers on broadway. the shrewd old farmer who had them for sale got a quarter for two. he called them japanese lilies. i wonder that the winter berry has not found more favour for decoration. two kinds of shrubs with this name are common in our northern woods. they are both hollies, but, unlike the southern holly, lose their leaves. one has bright orange-coloured berries, the other is covered with a great profusion of bright scarlet fruits. nothing could be more effective in a large vase in a dark corner. they light up handsomely at night or in the sunlight. medicinal plants there are a good many kinds of aromatic roots and medicinal plants which are kept in stock at drug stores. some of them are rare and bring a good price; like golden seal at a dollar or over per pound. digitalis in the drug store is foxglove in the garden; but who ever thinks of gathering its leaves and finding a market for them? somebody must or the supply would run out. the leaves of the second year's growth are dried for medicinal uses. wild ginger root is used in preserves and for confectionery. i have seen it in market and wondered who gathered it. preserved calamus root, too; who buys that unless it is br'er rabbit? there is a bulletin of the department of agriculture on "weeds used in medicine" that you ought to have. the list of weeds used in medicine will certainly surprise the unenlightened. how do you know that your doctor isn't dosing you with burdock, dandelion, dock, pokeweed, foxglove, mullein, tansy, boneset, catnip, horehound, fleabane, yarrow, or jimson weed? all these and many more common weeds are collected by somebody, dried, and used in medicine. pokeweed pokeweed roots are poisonous. the berries are not. they are used to make a syrup with which to colour frosting for cakes and the like. receipts for this are to be found in many cook books. but the best part of pokeweed is not the fruit. in early spring, when asparagus is expensive and scarce, the pokeweed shoots grow rank and as thick as your thumb in fence corners. they will take entire possession of a large garden in two years if given the least encouragement. i cut the stems when about a foot in height. they are covered with short leaves which are best removed except at the end of the shoot. cook exactly like asparagus, and dress with butter or cream. they resemble asparagus somewhat, but are more delicate in flavour and less woody in texture. walking sticks i once knew a stubborn man who was convinced that an unproductive orchard full of old gnarled trees on his place was good for nothing but firewood. he had the trunks cut into stove lengths and then burned the brush in ten huge piles. as the last pile was about to be fired, a manufacturer of umbrella handles offered him ten dollars for what was left. imagine his feelings! thousands of handsome walking sticks and umbrella handles are made of apple, cherry, and such woods. the makers cannot get enough of it and yet every year how much salable wood must be burned in the form of prunings. there is a true story of a young man in florida who paid his way through college by collecting orange wood suitable for walking sticks. this wood is still popular for the same purpose, and the idea is worth passing along. roots of quaint or grotesque shape are often found in the woods and may be used as handles of umbrellas or walking sticks. i have a stick made of a small sapling upon which a branch of bitter-sweet had entwined. as the sapling grew in circumference, the coils of the climber had not been loosened but had become imbedded in the wood of the little tree. the long vine was not cut off, but trimmed and wound round and round at the head of the stick to make it large enough to grasp comfortably. such a stick is an interesting gift for a friend. [illustration: walking sticks decorated by nature] another pretty bit of nature's handiwork is a walking stick engraved by the engraver beetle. these little insects make their burrows just under the bark and they often work on small branches of a great variety of forest trees. remove a bit of loose bark and ten to one you will find it carved with a more or less intricate design by the engraver beetle. could you do as neat a piece of work? a thorough brushing and oiling are all that such a stick needs to make it an ornament to the hat-rack. sticks intended for handles or canes cannot be bent when dry. they should be steamed until flexible or buried in hot, wet sand till you can shape them. boiling for a half-hour will sometimes make a piece supple. fasten in the desired shape with stout cords and dry thoroughly before releasing. sticks that are slightly crooked may be straightened by putting them into a bundle with perfectly straight pieces and winding with strong rope; let them dry in this bundle. sticks which are to be peeled should be partially dried first but not by artificial heat. rapid drying is likely to split the stick. wild flowers for city children children who live in the country part or all of the year do not know how much pleasure they might give if they would gather wild flowers and send them to city children. there is a society which distributes flowers thus collected in new york but maybe there is none in the city near you. the commonest flowers, even the weeds like daisies and dandelions and black-eyed susans, are eagerly taken home by children who are so poor that they never even saw a park, much less a meadow. in one city school over two hundred children had never seen a dandelion. a lady once started with a bunch of daisies to give to a city friend. she was met at the ferry with, "please give me a flower." she went on up the street. "won't chu gimme one o'yer flowers?" children seemed to appear from every direction; maybe they were always there and she had not noticed them before. the grown-up friend did not get any flowers but she got a good story instead. mr. jacob riis founded a flower mission on a similar experience. it is fun to gather flowers anyhow, and if you can make some other child happy even for a few minutes it would be even more fun. this is only a hint. shelf fungi have you seen those outgrowths on dying and dead trees which stand out like a shelf? they are called bracket or shelf fungi. if you have an artist friend who can make beautiful things on these by carving them with little engraving tools, gather all you see for her. [illustration: photograph by verne morton. gathering wild flowers for city children] dandelion greens do your folks cook dandelion greens? mine never did but since seeing them for sale at so much per half-peck i have come to think that they must be eatable and have wished we had gathered and sold the bushels that grew in our lawn. corn husks corn husks is a crop that used to be more eagerly harvested than now. in the corn belt, where the husking is done in the field, the husk is left on the stalk and would therefore be hard to get. but where corn is snapped, husk and all, and left to be husked at leisure in field or barn, the husks can be saved with profit. for summer beds they are cheaper and softer than hay. for porch cushions they are far superior to excelsior. for braiding into mats they are really valuable, and well-made ones bring a good price. cornstalks yield another crop that is little known. collectors of insects use thin sheets of cornstalk pith to line their insect boxes. it is peculiarly adapted to this purpose. they cannot get a large supply of it, yet what boy in any great corn state could not get a ton of it if he had the gumption. ask the entomology man in your state experiment station, if he needs cornstalk pith. if you live in a cactus country, ask him if he could use thin slices of the pith from the flower stalk of the giant cacti. fragrant herbs and grasses of the fragrant herbs, grasses, and shrubs which nature provides, nothing is more in demand than sweet grass. in the parts of the country where it is abundant, people still gather and cure it and make useful baskets and mats of it. sometimes it is combined with birch bark or porcupine quills or both by skilful indian women who learned how from their grandmothers. the good market for such things will keep the art of basket making from becoming a lost one. indian maidens are not the only ones who have learned basket weaving. indeed this has almost taken the place of patchwork, for girls, except in very old-fashioned families. clever girls will not be content to use only such conventional materials as raffia and reeds. often the colours of those you buy are so crude that you cannot make really artistic things of them. some of the native grasses, flower stalks, strips of palmetto, rushes, soft inner corn husks, cat-tail leaves, and sedges are used. one basket maker has used the shiny brown stems of maidenhair ferns and the effect is very pretty. another uses long pine needles in her weaving. most of these materials are unfit for use when dry and brittle, but books on basketry tell just how they can be made pliable. grasses are usually at their best just after flowering. the dried leaves of sweet fern, sweet clover in blossom, balsam fir, and bayberry make sweet smelling cushions and bags for bureau drawers and couches. balsam leaves in gathering what you hear called "pine needles" for pillows be sure you have the right kind of trees before you begin to gather the leaves. pine needles are long and stiff and sharp. a pillow made of dried ones would not be a very fragrant nor a very comfortable thing. what you want is the short, soft leaves of balsam fir. these retain their wholesome odour after being dried. in five minutes you can learn to tell the balsam from spruce, hemlock, and cedar, the other common short-leaved native evergreens. birch bark camping parties often leave a trail of devastation behind them which would shock the most hardened and wasteful one of the lot. this is largely if not entirely because they are ignorant, not because they are intentionally breakers of the laws of the woods. indeed they are probably very ardent believers in the theory of conservation. has it never occurred to them to practise it? in the matter of collecting birch bark much damage has been done. some people in whom you have confidence say: "oh, no. it doesn't hurt the tree." so you strip off layer after layer; such a fascinating occupation, i do not wonder you hardly know when to stop. but read what miss rogers says in "the tree book:" "the feminine tourist in northern woods loses no time in supplying herself with birch bark note-paper. the bark is usually removed in thick plates, from which the thin sheets may be stripped at leisure. these sheets are orange-coloured, with a faint purplish bloom upon them and darker purplish lines. alas! for the zeal of these tourists. they usually cut too deep, and the strip that tears off so evenly girdles and kills the tree, because nothing is left to protect the living cambium. a black band (of mourning) soon marks the doomed tree, and it eventually snaps off in the wind." i know a girl who killed thirty-seven beautiful birch trees before any one showed her how she could get plenty of bark and leave some for the tree beside. she was perfectly horrified when she realized what she had done. so few people know that the live part of the tree is not at the heart--that is quite dead--but just under the skin. cut off the bark in any large quantities and your tree falls an easy prey to disease. hiawatha was not the first indian to use the canoe birch for practical purposes. his ancestors used this bark for all sorts of utensils, dishes, baskets, buckets, and for their canoes. they sewed the pieces together with fibrous roots and filled the cracks with wild gum or pitch. the indians of nowadays have degenerated and the things they make have become less artistic. i lately saw a buckskin pouch, decorated with exquisitely woven bead work, in simple but charming design. it was a piece of real indian handiwork, but the whole effect was spoiled by a lining of coarse red and blue and green gingham and the pouch flap was secured by a thong looped over a large white agate shirt button! in trying to imitate the indians at their game of making things out of birch bark, quills, sweet grass, and other natural materials, let us keep clear of the shops and use only what combines naturally and artistically. porcupine quills "give me of your quills, o hedgehog!" hiawatha was talking to a porcupine, for the chances are that he never saw a hedgehog. poets ought to know better than to confuse their "critters." a real indian boy in the woods knows that porcupines give up their quills all too willingly. it is strange that the wild beasts of prey and the domestic dogs cannot learn this and let the porcupine alone. they have no quarrel with him. he eats the bark of trees, and goes about his own affairs. there isn't a word of truth in the story of his shooting his quills. no doubt he would if he could, if sore pressed, but he can't. he bristles them up when attacked and then woe be to the tender nose that touches the sharp points! the quills let go of their original owner very easily, but being barbed on their outer end they bury themselves in the soft parts of the attacking animal. with no thought of revenge in his rather witless head, the porcupine may pronounce the death sentence on his captor. porcupines are hunted for their quills and easily captured by men as they are slow and awkward. the quills take a pretty polish and their cream white and shaded brown colours blend softly with the tints of birch bark and wild grasses with which they are combined by basket and mat weavers. maple sugar making most of the fifty million or so pounds of maple sugar made in this country is made in six states, vermont, new york, ohio, michigan, pennsylvania, and new hampshire. the boys and girls of these states have exceptional opportunities of studying the mysteries of tree life and of sharing the bounty the maples provide. i was not brought up in any one of the above-named states, yet i remember the maple sugar making in the woods along the river. one of my early recollections is of a party of indian women, on piebald ponies, bringing fascinating heart-shaped cakes of maple sugar to exchange at the farm for fresh meat. theirs were no pale, anæmic, delicate squares of creamy texture, but ruddy and hard. less discriminating than now, we children ate with relish the coarse sugar almost black from the bits of bark, chips of leaves, and twigs which had undoubtedly been boiled with it. nor did we innocents turn from it with loathing when told by a teasing uncle that its colour was due to the sirup having been strained by the indians through their blankets. we didn't believe it then and i don't yet. how very bad for the blankets! the indians discovered the maple sugar industry long before they themselves were discovered by white people. they taught our new england ancestors how to tap the trees and boil down the sirup and how to "sugar off." they had little or no sugar except what the maples supplied. the indians had very primitive ways of tapping the trees, collecting the sap, boiling, and sugaring. these ways have been improved in the last three hundred years. although wooden buckets and home-made spiles made of sumach branches may still be used where only a few trees are tapped, the up-to-date sugar maker has modern, patent, covered buckets, spouts, and evaporators. he uses a thermometer and knows "for sure" when to shut off his fire if he wants to make sirup, and how high the temperature may go to make the best sugar. he knows, too, whether he can afford to make sugar which tests eighty per cent. or ninety per cent. pure and get the bounty, if his state pays one, or if it costs him less labour and expense to sell his entire product in the form of sirup. but scientific methods can never take away the charm of maple sugar making. there is so much yet to be learned from the trees about the whys and wherefores of their behaviour during the harvest, that our interest in maple products increases as our interest in mere "sweets" decreases. if you have a "sugar bush" planted by your great-grandfather, the chances are that you have had annual opportunities to help in making sugar, ever since you could drive a horse on frosty mornings to collect the sap. but i am going to suppose that during the winter you have been reading "trees every child should know" and have been identifying the trees about your home. the maples are about the easiest trees to identify when leafless. suppose you have found several maple trees, good big ones, right in your own door yard. the hard or sugar maple is the one most frequently used for sugar making, but experiments show that soft maples make good sugar too. it isn't worth while to tap trees in winter. the sugar is in them all right because the leaves were storing up the starch all summer. this starch has been changed to sugar in the living cells of the wood. but you couldn't get any of it until the sap begins to run. it does this with the first warm, sunny days of february. after locating all the trees you expect to tap, you must make some preparations so that you will not lose any time at the critical moment. i knew one boy who got his bit and brace out the first thing, bored a hole in the tree trunk, and lost about a gallon of sap before he could get a spile and a pail ready to catch it. you want a spile or spout for every pail and a pail for every tree. the patent spouts have a hook upon which the bucket hangs. if you use sumach spiles you may have to set the bucket on the ground where it is likely to get dirt in it, tip over, and it is so far from the spile that the wind blows the sap away from the pail entirely. the pails should be generous in size unless you expect to collect the sap more than once a day. an average yield per day is five quarts per hole. the pails and spiles should be in readiness before "sugar weather" begins. beside the pails and spouts you need a wooden mallet, and a bit and brace or small auger for the outdoor work; a kettle for boiling down, a large jar to put the fresh sap in, and a dipper to dip it out, a strainer and a skimmer for the indoor work. if you boil your sap outdoors using cheap fuel you will make more out of your enterprise than if you use coal or gas. a good sap-running day is a warm, sunny day after a frosty night. while the days and nights are about the same temperature the sap does not run much. the best place to tap a tree is about four feet from the ground, and fortunately that is the easiest place to work with the auger or bit. the bit should be bright and sharp; a dull, rusty bit makes a shabby hole in the wood with a lot of woody shreds which clog the flow of sap. clean out the hole, as any chips left in stop the flow in the same way. the bit or auger used should be about one half inch in diameter. a bigger hole might give more sap but would injure the tree more. the tree fills up the smaller hole in a few years with new tissue. the hole should not be deeper than three inches. it is a mistake to think that the centre of the tree holds the sap. as a matter of fact there is less there than anywhere else and more as you near the surface. the living, active part of the tree is just under the bark. it is necessary to say this over and over again so that people will get it into their minds. the indians used to tap the trees on the south side because they said more sap came from that side. experiments show that on warm, sunny days, this is the case. on cloudy days, however, sap comes about equally from holes on all sides. if the trees have been tapped before, it is best to tap at some distance from the old places. the size of the auger and spile should be the same and the latter should be forced in tightly, and not fall out when the pail is full. pure sap makes the clearest sirup and the lightest-coloured sugar. every bit of dust, leaves, twigs, or bark that gets into the pail leaves its mark on the sugar even though strained out. so covers on the pails are preferred if one can afford them. most of the sap runs between nine o'clock in the morning and noon. it has been found by tests that this morning sap has more sugar in it than that which runs later in the day. it is the custom in some places to throw away the ice if the sap freezes. this is very wasteful, for this ice contains about thirty per cent. of the sugar. of course, melting ice is expensive business so one must try not to let his sap freeze. the sap in the storage jar or tank must not be allowed to get warm, though, as it may sour. it should be boiled as soon after gathering as possible to ensure best results. maple sap contains other ingredients beside water and sugar. in boiling, the water passes off in steam and the sugar and other solids remain. the changes in colour from clear sap to dark brown sugar is caused by the action of the heat upon the sugar and other substances. all sugar makers know that the lightest coloured sirup and sugar can be made from the earliest run of sap. that is because, as the season advances, more of the lime, potash, magnesia, and other substances are present in the sap. you see the tree does not stop work just because you tap it; and the sap is changing every day until, by the time the buds begin to open, the sap is so changed that it does not make good sugar at all. water boils when it reaches two hundred and twelve degrees, fahrenheit, as any thermometer will tell you. in fact, you cannot heat water hotter than two hundred and twelve degrees, for at that temperature the water becomes steam. a mixture of sugar and water will not boil at two hundred and twelve degrees but requires a higher temperature. therefore, as the water passes off the sap in boiling, and as the amount of sugar per gallon increases, it gets hotter and hotter. it is necessary to watch boiling sap carefully to avoid burning. in making sirup it is important to have it just thick enough to taste right and not so thick that it will granulate. sirup that weighs eleven pounds to the gallon has long been considered as "just right," and it has been found by testing that if you take the sirup off the fire just as soon as the thermometer registers two hundred and nineteen degrees it will weigh eleven pounds to the gallon and will not granulate. if you take it off when the thermometer says two hundred and sixteen degrees your sirup will be a pretty fair article, but you cannot expect to get as good a price for it, because it has more water in it than there should be in a prime article. when the sirup has boiled down to nearly two hundred and nineteen degrees, it is necessary to pour it off or strain it through thick cloths to take out the dark-coloured impurities. after this the sirup is heated again to boiling point and sealed in jars or cans. a gallon of sirup will make between eight and ten pounds of sugar. can you afford to make your sirup into sugar at this rate? it will depend upon the relative price of sugar and sirup, the cost of your fuel and the value of your time and whether your market wants sugar or sirup. there is a good and increasing demand for pure maple products, especially in the form of confectionery. if you can work up a market for fancy maple sugar in the form of bonbons it will bring a fancy price. this is not so hard as it sounds but it takes enterprise and gumption and perseverance and knack. here is a job where brothers and sisters can work together to very great advantage and add to their store of college money by discovering and harvesting a crop right at home which in many cases has been neglected for decades. if you have city cousins they will help you sell your products among their mates. it will pay you to prepare small sample parcels, enough to whet the appetite but not enough to satisfy. i remember receiving a number of packages of maple cream from a vermont friend. the price per pound was equal to that of the finest candy and i wanted to share with all my friends. but i couldn't afford to give away pound packages to everybody. i might have created a large demand for this delicious confectionery, had i been able to get sample packages to give to friends. this year i am to have them. it adds wonderfully to the attractiveness of maple sugar to have each cake or bonbon wrapped in its own piece of waxed paper. this is a kind of guarantee of dainty handling that is appreciated by the purchaser. a shoe box is hardly a dainty parcel, yet i know of one unimaginative maple sugar man who packs his cakes in just such boxes. there is a chance for some one to "make a hit" in this line. wild rice wild rice sells for two or three times the price of ordinary rice and the supply never meets the demand. "but who wants it and what for?" wild rice is not likely to become a popular breakfast food except among the ojibways, yet a lot of time and effort have been spent on trying to find out how to grow crops of it. the reason for this is that nothing fattens wild ducks, geese, and other game birds quite so satisfactorily. where the wild rice flourishes there is the hunter's paradise in september. this is reason enough for wanting to grow wild rice. when our true american sportsmen awoke to the fact that game was scarce and realized why, they set about protecting the wild fowl and studying their habits so as to better supply ideal conditions for the remnant to increase. this is conservation and boys that help in such enterprises are truly patriotic citizens. wild rice grows in swamps, shallow lakes, and sluggish rivers covering immense areas in the mississippi valley and the middle north-western states. mud is a necessity to its growth. it grows taller than a man's height above the water and its seed comes in a loose spray at the very top of each stalk. the plants die every year and new ones come up from seed. the grain begins to ripen early in september and keeps on until heavy frosts. this is all right for ducks but it makes harvesting a very difficult task. the indian women of the wild rice regions go out and shake the heads over their boats. they have to go again and again. if they left it till all the grain had ripened they would get very little seed, because the wild rice falls as soon as it is ripe and lies in the mud till spring. the long-hid secret of the many failures to get wild rice to grow from seed was discovered by some scientist to be this habit of lying in the mud over winter. thoroughly dried seed does not germinate. wild rice is queer looking stuff. the grains are black and very long and slender. some of them are an inch long. it is said by some to be very good eating, especially as prepared by the indians. they parch it usually, but sometimes it is made into a sort of porridge and eaten with maple sugar. practically, the best market for wild rice will always be amongst the wild fowl and it is a sportsman-like act to gather the seed and propagate it for their sake. gathering spruce gum if spruce gum were used only in the manufacture of "chewing-gum" we had much better let the crop go unharvested. it serves a useful purpose in the tree which produces it. when you have a cut or bruise you like to put something on it that excludes the air. the tree acts on the same principle. the live part of the tree is just underneath the bark. trees are liable to many kinds of injuries. the winter winds strain them sometimes to the point of splitting, a heedless woodsman blazes the bark in passing, wild creatures gnaw or scratch the trunks, a woodpecker digs a hole through the bark. any injury of the living layer is like a "hurry call" to the cells where the resin is stored. these cells are the health department. they send out to the injured part a covering of balm, a salve which seals the wound effectually from contact with the air. we cannot say that the tree knows that the air is full of the germs of decay and that to let them get a foothold means decay and sure death; but the tree has something that serves the same purpose as knowledge. physicians make use of the resinous gums in preparing medicines, and druggists always try to keep a stock of spruce gum on hand. collectors find their best market for it in the drug trade. the best quality brings as high as one dollar and fifty cents a pound, while one dollar a pound is not too much to expect for the average collection. all the spruces yield gum, but the best quality is said to come from the white spruce. the first thing to do then is to learn to recognize this tree on sight. it will take you and a tree book together about five minutes to distinguish between the three short-leaved evergreens which look so much alike to a novice, the firs, the hemlocks, and the spruces. when once you know the spruces by the looks or the feel, you will begin to know the white from the red and black spruce by the colour. everything about the white spruce is paler than the others. the foliage is light, almost pea-green, and the bark is not ruddy but grayish-brown. there are thousands of acres of spruce woods in our northern central and new england states. boys and girls on camping trips can sometimes collect spruce gum enough to pay expenses and have fun doing it. the only equipment necessary is a heavy pocket knife, a gum spud, a canvas sack, a strong hand, and a pair of sharp eyes. the eyes will get sharper as the knife gets dull and the tree you found nothing on in the morning of your first day may yield a good harvest on the return trip. you will not be able to buy a gum spud, but a tinsmith can make one for you at small cost, according to these directions: solder a piece of galvanized iron into a funnel six inches deep, three inches across the top, and one inch in diameter at the bottom. a ferrule two or three inches deep and an inch in diameter is fitted into the bottom of the funnel and soldered in tight. fit a long handle into this affair and your spud is ready. you may count on a good majority of the gum you find being out of reach of the knife but the spud gets it down very successfully. the best place to find spruce gum is undoubtedly in woods where no one has been "gummin'" before, at least not for five years or so. the most plentiful supply is said to be on slopes where the trees have a southern exposure, and the smaller trees yield more gum than the big ones. your work is not done with collecting, for in order to get the best price you must present a fancy grade to the market. if your gum is all thrown in together, good, bad, and indifferent, your average price is pretty sure to be less than for a carefully cleaned and sorted lot. spruce gum can be collected in summer or winter. which time is better for you depends on circumstances. there is a peculiar charm about gum hunting on snow-shoes. a young man suffering from too little fresh air and attendant ills might find his health among the spruce trees while the gum paid the bills. mushrooms "are you sure these are good mushrooms?" i asked my seven-year-old daughter. "yes. i'm sure. don't you know aunt j---- says that all the _coprinæ_ are edible?" this is a true story and it only goes to show that even a small child can learn that there are a small number of unmistakable mushrooms, which are edible and there is never any danger of being wrong about them. the puff-balls, for example, are all good to eat. when we found the neighbour's children kicking great white spongy puff-balls in the pasture we begged them to let us have them instead. "pap says they're p'ison" was their reply, but we heeded them not for their "pap" was no oracle of ours. we were quite willing the children should go on thinking puff-balls were poison, if only they would not use them for foot-balls. nobody in his senses would try to eat puff-balls after they have begun to turn black or brown. but when they are white and tender they are very good. skin the ball, slice thin, add water and a little salt, and stew for twenty minutes or so. drain and dress with cream sauce. no doubt puff-ball slices broiled over a camp fire with bacon would be good. i wish i had tried it, but i never have. we will agree that no puff-ball can compare with the pink-gilled meadow mushroom, but we make no such claims for it. the best place to look for puff-balls is in old pastures in late summer and early fall. the giants are sometimes as big as a milk pail. the pear-shaped ones grow on tree stumps and are as big as your fist or smaller. there is an endless variety of tiny ones of all sorts which are either too tough or too small to bother with. but no puff-ball is "p'ison," not one. boys and girls who like to harvest nature's crops are missing a lot of fun besides many pecks of delicious food by neglecting the common edible mushrooms. if you know a few good ones you are perfectly safe. when you have seen them a few times and gathered them a few times and compared them with photographs you are ready to eat them. i should advise always to go mushroom hunting first with some experienced person. personally i take no risks. for instance if my book tells me that "dangerous fungi resembling this species and sometimes found in company with it--etc.," that's enough. say no more. i let that one alone. i do not like the company it keeps, and it may be a sheep in wolf's clothing. in my list of edible fungi, common in new york and new jersey, there are less than a dozen kinds. no one of these looks enough like any other fungus to be mistaken for it. a few good looks at them will fix them in the memory. these are morels, meadow mushrooms, shaggy-manes, inky-caps, oyster mushroom, puff-balls, coral fungi, and chanterelles. the open season for morels is in early spring, when arbutus is blossoming, and later. coral fungi and chanterelles are at their finest in midsummer, puff-balls in september, inky-caps and shaggy-manes in october, and we ate oyster mushrooms on january first one year, though they appear earlier. the meadow mushroom with white flesh and pink gills is grown indoors and is seen in the market from fall till spring, but nature's crop must be harvested in fall before frost. _morels._--morels look like nothing else. when full sized they are six inches high. the hollow stalk is as large as your finger and about half the length of the whole. the top or cap is brownish and so covered with ridges and wrinkles that it would never be mistaken for anything else in the world. you ought to see a picture of it because it is difficult to describe so irregular an object. look it up in some mushroom book or bulletin in your library. [illustration] you never know just where morels may appear. we found them in our garden once. they come up right among the weeds or dead leaves. i have often found them along forest by-paths, especially in wet weather in spring. they are delectable. perhaps you have eaten delicately broiled slices of tenderloin of young pig. morels do not taste like this--they look a little like it--they taste very much better. you taste them. _coral fungi._--the coral fungi that i eat look like chunks of pinkish or cream white organ pipe coral. they are fleshy, soft, yet firm enough to keep their shape, and the whole mass is made up of tiny thread-or rod-like parts of many branches. there is a fine one which looks like a cauliflower though more yellow. i have found the pink and creamy ones on fallen and decayed tree trunks in deep, cool woods in midsummer. others equally good grow in thin woods or open places. they vary in size from chunks as big as a walnut to those as big or bigger than your fist. they need careful cleansing under a faucet. some cooks soak them first in cold water into which they put a little vinegar or lemon juice. they then fry in butter. another way is to stew till tender in water with lemon juice in it. then drain and dress with cream sauce. _puff-balls._--what country child has not puffed the "smoke" from the hole in the top of the tough-skinned little brown balls they find in the fields in autumn? children generally believe them to be deadly poison and call them "devil's snuff-boxes." their life history is very like that of other fungi. the most of the year these flowerless and leafless plants spend underground. they spread in a tangle of fine threads all through the soil wherever they find decaying vegetable matter upon which to feed. when their time comes, little white balls push out and up from the threads. these come to the surface and we know them by their shapes and sizes as our different kinds of puff-balls, mushrooms, or other fungi. the puff-balls are white and look like fine cream cheese when they first appear. their business is to ripen their spores, scatter them, and disappear. the brown smoke or dust of the ripe puff-ball is blown about by the wind and finds its way into the earth in time; each tiny spore or grain of dust can start a new mat of threads down underground. when you puff the devil's snuff-box you are doing the plant just the kindness it was waiting for. when a cow steps on a ripe giant puff-ball a great smoke goes up, and the breeze catches the dust. some of the spores may be carried on the wind or on the cow's foot to far distant pastures, there to settle down and start a new puff-ball colony. it is just so with all the fungi. all the puff-balls are edible but one of the most eatable is _the giant_, which is found in august or september in pastures or other grassy places. when right to eat it is grayish on the outside and pure white clear through. in size this giant varies from six or eight inches through to two feet. specimens of ten pounds' weight are not rare, and there is record of some twice that size. when yellow or brown inside, the giant is past eating. the _pear-shaped_ puff-ball is the commonest one. this is a sort of dirty brown colour outside, pure white inside. it is found on old wood or on the ground as early as july and as late as october. in size the balls vary from thimble size to that of a big pear. they grow in companies, sometimes scores together. the _brain_ puff-ball is larger than the pear-shaped. the top is wrinkled or corrugated, and grayish or reddish in colour. _chanterelles._--chanterelles are found in late summer in the woods amongst moss where it is damp and cool. they are red or yellow and look as if you had put your thumb in the middle of the top and pushed it down so that the network of gills appear on the outside. the name means a little goblet, and the perfect ones are goblet-shaped. if you go camping in the woods in summer you are almost sure to find chanterelles. _meadow mushrooms._--the wild meadow mushroom usually appears in large numbers after the autumn rains have renewed the pastures. they frequently come up alongside of an old dried patch of cow manure. to make myself familiar with this pink-gilled variety i visited a large market where they had them for sale in all stages, from the little round buttons to the big flat broilers which are turning brown. they are just right when the cap has spread so as to burst the delicate white veil which covers the gills. the flesh is white and the gills a delicate pink. the skin peels off easily like that of a ripe peach. look them over with great care when preparing for the table. the early worm which is on hand to get a first bite of everything sometimes honeycombs the whole plant. the stems of young ones are tender at the top. _inky caps._--you never expect to gather your dinner from an ash heap? neither did i; but in the edge of the woods nearest us the public used to be allowed to dump ashes. it is now overgrown with golden-rod, iron weed and various other coarse plants. a path leads through it. last fall we discovered that the place was fairly swarming with _coprinus comatus_, the shaggy mane mushroom. this does not look like anything else on land or sea and is delicious. its relative, the inky cap is just as good to eat, but not so handsome. both melt away into black ink as they grow old. they should be cooked as soon as possible after gathering. we kept some over night once. such a sight! they looked like black corn smut. the _coprinæ_ push up in such tight clumps sometimes that their heads are all out of shape. they rise literally over night. sometimes one comes up singly and grows tall and perfect, a truly lovely object, pure white, six inches tall, its shaggy head held high, its silver-white gills delicate as tissue paper. a few hours later you will see a ragged bit of pulp rapidly dissolving in a pool of black ink. _oyster mushrooms._--the oyster mushroom comes out like the shelf fungi on decaying tree stumps or logs. they are ashy colour or dull white, solid and rather tough, and vary in breadth from two to five inches. as to why they are called oyster mushrooms, opinions differ. the flavour is not oyster-like, though the flesh is about as tough as a boiled oyster. the shape does suggest an oyster shell; perhaps that is the best reason for the name. one edible relative of the oyster mushroom grows usually on decaying elm stumps as late in the year as november. the first thing to do if you get interested in mushrooms is to get some good illustrated book on them. the chances are that your state experiment station has issued a bulletin on the subject. if not you can get those published by the united states department of agriculture or perhaps those issued by some neighbouring state. what you want is information on wild fungi, especially the edible ones, not directions about growing the market varieties. when you write for bulletins state just what you are looking for. pictures, especially photographs, are of the greatest use in identifying specimens. compare the descriptions and pictures with your mushrooms and do not use them if there is any question in your mind as to what they are. the books mentioned in the appendix of this book have been of help to me. conserving nature's crops the harvesting of nature's crops is a most fascinating occupation. as boys and girls we do not ask why; we only know what fun it is. if the time ever comes when you wish to forget that you are grown up, nothing will help you like going into the woods, the fields, or the hedge-rows to help the birds and the little fur-coated animals harvest the crops of nuts or berries or other fruit that grow in nature's orchards. with your sack of nuts or plums on your arm, or your pail full of berries, you can easily forget that you live in a flat or work in an office or a factory. some people think when they see how much over-ripe fruit is falling to the ground, and how much more there is than can ever be gathered by human hands, that nature is wasteful. perhaps this is why these same people and others who did not think at all, have been so very wasteful of our country's natural resources, and brought about such a really alarming state of things in our forests. those who do stop to think will see that although she is lavish, nature is never wasteful. the berries must decay in order that the seeds may germinate, and in moulding they nourish the fungi which are just as important in nature's eyes, so to speak, as the berries are. nothing is _wasted_ in nature. on the contrary, everything is _saved_ and is made over into some other form. nothing stands still; transformation goes on continuously. what was soil yesterday is fruit to-day and is built into our muscles and nerves and brains to-morrow. every boy or girl that helps to harvest nature's crops can do a little to assist in our great national work of preserving the country's natural resources. would you ruin a fine young tree just beginning a life of usefulness? by mutilating it past recognition, you may add a few nuts to your this year's store. but what an injustice you are doing to the next generation of boys and girls. you are robbing them. i have heard men say: "when i was a boy we used to bring home arbutus by the wagon load from coy glen. but it's hard to find any there now. it must have winter-killed or blighted." my tongue burned to tell them that they themselves were the blight that winter-killed the arbutus and robbed me of my right to gather a few sprays. they had torn it up by the roots in their greed to fill their wagons, and then they cut out all the trees, and the sunlight destroyed all the shade-loving things. boys and girls of a more enlightened generation know better ways and will not leave behind them a record of selfishness. the story of the creation of a new industry i am glad to tell the methods by which i have developed a good business in collecting and growing california bulbs, as i believe my success can be duplicated in other parts of the country--in fact, one man already makes a good living by exploiting the wild flowers of the rocky mountains, several people are exporting the cacti of our desert, and there are several nurseries in the southern appalachians for the interesting plants of north carolina. in , when i was nine years old, my family moved to ukiah valley in north-western california, and there i have lived ever since. my early home was a farm, and my first work to raise hops and a mortgage. my education was such as the district school and an abundance of good reading could give me. at eighteen i began to teach school. i was always a lover of nature and fond of wandering about the hills. in mendocino county in the country was just emerging from the cowboy era, and little attention was paid to vegetable gardening, while flower gardens were all but unknown. how the life work was determined there was one notable exception to the indifference to flowers. alexander macnab, a scotchman who had been forced by declining health to leave glasgow, had found new vigour in california's mountains. the property which he had purchased for a stock range is one of the most picturesque in northern california, and there he built a modest but ideal home. he sent everywhere for flowers, and i know of no place in these later days where more flowers are well grown. he gave to his flowers not only money, but love and himself, and few gardeners were more successful. i often visited there in my boyhood days and the inspiration that i received from this place and from another source determined my life work. i had a sister a few years older than myself who had been in the east for some years and whose failing health forced her to return to california. she was a flower-lover and soon called upon me to begin a garden on the bare hill where our very plain home stood. it was a work of love, for all of the new soil was carried in buckets, and the water which our hot climate made necessary was carried from a well, but it was a great success. my scotch friend was most liberal with both plants and instruction, and between the two my bent was well fixed. the beginning of the industry it was through mr. macnab that i got started in the collection of native plants. woolson and company, then of passaic, n. j., were the first american firm to take up the culture of our native american plants as a specialty. they wrote to mr. macnab, asking him to secure the native plants and offering to pay for them in eastern grown plants. my love for flowers had interested me in botany, and it was quite natural that the letter should be turned over to me. in my first letter to woolson i sent a pressed flower of _colochortus pulchellus_ and received in return an order for one hundred bulbs, which they said they would pay for in cash. this order was filled and it was the beginning of my bulb business. my first idea was to earn money to buy plants with, but before long i saw that a small business might be built up. my progress as a collector went hand in hand with my education in botany. my method was this: first to find something of sufficient beauty to make it probable that it would be wanted; next, to find its name, and then to offer it to some one of the very few firms then interested in such things. such was the first stage in the development of a new industry, but the latter was no less important, for it involved knowing the plant at every stage of its growth, finding when it could best be handled, and how best packed for shipment. almost from the beginning i tried to grow the native plants, and botanical study, collection, and cultivation have gone hand in hand since. methods of collecting every year i took longer trips. i went alone, with the lightest of camping outfits, slept on the ground, and penetrated the wildest regions, learning where the desirable flowers grew, and collecting those in demand, at the same time studying the general flora. when i had learned the flora of a region, i tried to train some resident as a permanent collector, for not all of these long trips could be made every year. my horizon fast widened, and through friends, by letters to others, and often by the migration of men whom i had trained, new fields were opened, and later i had men who had been trained under me to send to distant points. before i began to collect, others had been in the field, but they were principally wandering botanists who seldom collected over the same ground for two years in sequence. their collections were of stuff of all grades, often made at the wrong season, and there was no demand except from a few special lists. at first i shared their faults, but after a few years i saw the necessity of making a reputation for reliability, for thoroughly learning the art of packing, and for such grading as would insure uniform quality. establishing a nursery business as time went on, collection became less important and culture the central feature of my work. my first garden was at the farm home; later i spent much time and money in experiments in a reclaimed lake bed near ukiah, still later at my ukiah home, and since in the mountains about eight miles east of ukiah. each experiment had its value. no one had grown californian bulbs in california, and everything had to be learned experimentally. i now have two nurseries. one of them is at lyons valley, a lovely spot in the highest part of that branch of the coast range which i found six years ago was specially adapted to lily culture. about three quarters of a mile away, at "the terraces," nature has provided endless variations of soil, climate, moisture, sun, and shade. here i grow a great variety of bulbs. in i sold about seven thousand plants of all sorts; in , two hundred and fifty thousand, and the difference was on business principles. carl purdy iii raising domestic animals raising colts every farm boy i ever knew was ambitious to own horses. before my eldest brother was twelve he had traded pigs with our father for calves, then heifers for a horse, and his favourite air castles were great luxurious barns inhabited by blooded horses of his own raising. if your colt's mother is dutiful, and they mostly are, the youngster will have plenty to eat for the first few weeks. petting is a good thing for little colts; never a cuff nor a harsh word. their confidence won, their education is begun. while still dependent on the mother for milk the young colt begins to nibble hay from the manger, and gets a taste of the oats in the feed box, too, and finds them good. oats and clover hay, a little bran and shorts, a run in the pasture every fine day all winter, will usually keep the colt growing and healthy. a warm stable with plenty of dry bedding, preferably in a stall with another colt, is necessary at night. colts need a plentiful supply of cool, clean water in summer, but in winter, water should be heated just enough to take off the chill. it is bad for a colt to drink at meal-time. (that sounds like a rule for boys and girls.) a chunk of rock salt handy for colts to lick at helps keep the appetite normal. an ordinary farm colt at three or four months old is worth only thirty or forty dollars. two years later, with the right kind of care and teaching, the same colt will bring four times that price. what other farm crop will do as much? the mother of a baby colt once died on our farm. my father felt very badly over it; losing the old mare was misfortune enough, but the colt was a noble-looking little fellow, highly bred. we girls had been foster-mothers to almost everything; cats, pups, and pigs were easy, and calves. but what of a colt? "let's try if we can't raise him on the bottle," said our mother. the experiments we tried with that colt were many. we gave him "half and half" at first--a cup full of milk to one of water. our small cousin had once been fed on mare's milk, much to our disgust, but it gave us ideas for our colt. mother read somewhere that cow's milk was not so sweet, but was richer than mare's milk. so we patched our bits of hearsay together and made up our colt's ration about like this: first week: half sweet milk, half water, a teaspoonful of sugar to each pint, ten times a day--always warm--last feeding at ten p. m.--not very much at a time. second and third weeks less water, six feedings a day, warm and sweet as before. fourth to tenth week: increase quantity gradually, give warm--not very rich--milk three times a day. we gave him a bottle at first with a nipple made of a goose-quill wrapped each time with clean, soft rags. everything about his food had to be kept sweet. we scalded the bottle and the quill and washed them in water and baking soda, just as mother said. then we taught him to drink from a pail. he followed us about like a dog and was very playful and frisky. we fed him a little hay and oats and grass when he was old enough. my little sister wanted us to give him less milk so that he would grow up into a pony, but when he begged for food, she was the first to go for his bottle. he grew up and developed just like any horse and father said he was the easiest two-year-old he ever had to teach to work. he paid us seventy-five dollars for the colt when he was eight months old and ready to shift for himself with the other colts. raising sheep every boy on the farm ought to have his own particular hobby in the line of stock. it is far easier to keep account of your own if they are entirely different from the animals raised by the other members of the family. an account should be kept with the animals, to learn whether they pay or not. it is only by this business-like method that the young farmer, or the older one for that matter, can know whether his animals are visitors or boarders. if the mother keeps poultry, the boys pigs, and the father raises horses and cows, then why should not the girls raise sheep? there is room on every fair-sized farm for a flock. there is nothing about the care of sheep that a strong, healthy girl may not do if she is not needed to help with housework. her father will teach and advise her. tending sheep is far more healthful occupation and more remunerative than embroidering sofa pillows or knitting "fancy work." whoever undertakes the sheep raising must know first some of the needs of his favourites. they are grazers. they will glean a good living in stubble fields and crop grass in pastures where cows would starve; they will bite the weeds in the fence corners down to the quick nor leave one stalk to blossom or set seed. they are among the best and cheapest of lawn-mowers, enriching the ground they feed over. they are easy to care for, as they can take care of themselves most of the year. what a joy it is to take a quiet walk over the hills of a sunday morning to salt the sheep! they are trustful, playful, docile creatures, and their presence undeniably adds to the picture of content and comfort that every homestead should present. while it is true that sheep will keep fat on good pasture with plenty of water and a semi-weekly supply of salt, it is not to be supposed that they can pick up a living the whole year round in a cold climate. they do not need stuffing in cold weather, but they do need plenty of good hay in early winter and nourishing food like bran, oats, barley, and clover hay toward spring. alfalfa is ideal, but many people succeed with sheep who fail on alfalfa. sheep will over-feed if not restrained. they should have exercise and fresh air in plenty all winter. they should go out every day to pasture, except during storms, until snow covers the ground. ewes fed but not over-fed over winter and sheltered under some kind of rain-proof roof will be strong and healthy mothers. a new-born lamb is about as weak and wobbly and inefficient as a human baby. the weakest ones seem bent on dying, but a little coddling and care will put them on their feet. they should be taught how to take nourishment and whoever takes this in hand should use patience and insist that the lesson be learned. i have known of many a good shepherd who sat up late and got up early and visited the sheep at midnight in lambing time and so saved all his lambs. there is something so appealing about a lamb that no owner would like to remember that he slept comfortably through a stormy night while a new-born lamb starved in the presence of plenty or was chilled past help while its mother could only bleat helplessly for the slothful shepherd. lambs should not follow their mothers to pasture until the grass is grown enough to be really long and nourishing. they should be out in the barnyard on warm, sunny days, and not weaned until near six months old. after august they will fatten on clover pasture and be ready for market before christmas. sheep are sheared in spring, about april first, but this depends on the climate. most farm crops are fall or winter affairs. like maple sirup, wool is a spring cash crop, which is a great convenience. an eight-pound fleece is worth nearly half as much as the sheep it grew on, and the lambs will soon be worth as much as their mothers. so we have a double chance to make good in sheep raising. sheep are so hardy, so harmless, and so easily managed that the only wonder is that any farm is without a flock. men who know say that the farm dog is to blame for this. how about the farm dog, boys and girls? honestly, now, is your dog worth his keep? no matter how much better he is than the neighbours' dog. how about your dog? you like him, of course, but is he a loafing, worthless, sneaking, sheep-killing dog? look between his teeth before you deny that he is a sheep-killer. are you a good citizen if you let such a dog run at large? if you raise sheep you will need a dog, and remember that a good collie will protect your sheep from all the roving, bloodthirsty dogs in the neighbourhood. [illustration: photograph by julian a. dimock. "big boy blue" looks after the sheep] raising goats boys, are you really serious about making some money? do you live on a farm where the hills are too steep to plow and the only crop that amounts to anything is the crop of stones? are those steep hills covered with brush and good-for-nothing trees that look too hopeless? don't grind your teeth and say "there's no chance here. i'm going to buy a ticket for the city." glance at the heading on this page and don't smile derisively nor turn on to some new chapter. "goats! humph!" if you never heard of anybody making anything out of goats, here's your chance to hear something new. people can and do make money out of goats and so can you. why, it is too easy! here, read these facts about goats: goats _prefer_ rough, rocky, wild, and hilly land. goats _always thrive_ if allowed considerable range. hilly, _bushy_ land is _best_ for goats. the feed of _one_ cow will keep _twelve_ goats. _temperature_ need not be considered. goats thrive where temperatures are _extreme_. the angora goat _fleece_ is cut annually and is _very valuable_. we import over one million pounds a year. skins of common goats are in _great demand_ for leather. we imported sixteen million dollars' worth in and more every year since. _goat manure_ is as valuable as that of sheep. angora _venison_ cannot be told from lamb. goats _scorn_ to eat fresh grass if _coarse weeds_ like wild carrot, mullein, dock, etc., are in sight. _every part_ of a goat is _salable_. fleece, milk, cheese, skin, flesh, tallow, bones, hoofs, horns, and manure. goats _improve land_. they are "lifelong scavengers," and can put land covered with useless underbrush into shape for pasture more cheaply and more quickly than dynamite. a herd of _common goats_ can be built up in _a few years_. they breed at one year and usually have twins. goats are _hardy_; less subject to disease than sheep. a good goat is a _money-maker_. these statements are quoted directly from the writings of men and women of experience. they have no goats to sell, so you can take their word. the requirements for successful goat raising are few and easy to provide. they are these: ( ) _space._--goats do not take kindly to herding nor to small fields. if they have only a small enclosure they are likely spend more time trying to get at what is outside than in browsing. to meet a wire fence every few steps makes a goat restive. ( ) _housing._--goats must be kept dry overhead and under foot. the shelter for goats should be high and dry. they will not thrive in wet, marshy land, nor keep well if their shed is muddy. they dislike filth and will not stand in it nor touch soiled food. they prefer to sleep on the roof of the barn, you know, but if a clean, dry bed in an airy place is provided they will not roost so high. ( ) _water._--plenty of clean fresh water should always be available. if you can supply these three essentials, you are ready to raise goats. there are two well-marked lines of business in goat raising. which shall you follow? angoras are raised for their fleece; common goats either for leather or for milk. angoras are not much good for milk and their skins are not so fine nor durable as those of common goats. the angora is free from the offensive odour of common male goats. the greatest demand for goat products in our markets to-day is for angora fleece and for common goat skins. the other products, like flesh, hoof, bones and horns, tallow, cheese, milk, and manure, can easily be marketed and should pay most of the expenses. the main products should be clear profit. building up a herd there is a slow way and a quick way to build up a herd of goats. as usual the slow way requires less capital. if you have but a few dollars you will have to begin with cheap goats, but to keep a poor goat is poor business. you can buy good, common goats for one dollar and a half or two dollars each and with time and patience build up from them a herd of angoras by crossing. if capital is easier to command than years of time, you will begin with good angora does which cost from eight dollars upward. if you begin with common ones, choose white, short-haired individuals. keep only the best does in your herd for breeders; you will soon learn how to judge them by the quality of their fleece and the price it brings you per pound. in five or six years it is possible to build up a herd of fine mohair producers from common goats. the hair grows coarser as the goat passes six years of age, so it does not pay to keep one too long. buy young does. a goat's teeth tell its age up to the fourth year. if all the eight teeth are full-sized the goat is certainly four to five years old, it may be more. care of kids a young kid is not a very sturdy youngster. good care should be given both doe and kid at this time. a warm shelter should be provided. may is the best month for kids to come, in the north. extra feeding should be given the doe and plenty of water. if possible each doe with her kid should have a separate stall or pen so that the doe will know her own young one. if you can arrange that each pen in the kid stable can have an outdoor entrance the mother can come and go at will. a board a foot to eighteen inches high across this entrance will keep the kid from following his mother. when about six weeks old the kid will jump this board. by this token you will know that he is strong enough to jump about over the stones wherever his mother leads him. food of goats the comic papers may be right about some things, but they are wrong about goats. a diet of newspapers and tin cans will not keep a goat healthy nor produce a salable fleece of fine mohair. angoras like common goats are browsers, not grazers like sheep. they eat coarse vegetation such as weedy growths and the twigs and leaves of underbrush, rather than grass. besides this, particularly in winter, they should have other food. leaves, table scraps like potato and fruit parings, turnips and other roots, and cabbage are all acceptable if clean. parings and roots should be washed; if you expect goats to eat swill you deserve to be disappointed. dirty carrots, rotten apples, sour or mouldy refuse do not tempt a self-respecting pig; much less an angora. oats in the sheaf are very good fodder for them. grain is not required if clover hay, alfalfa, or cowpea stubble is plentiful. too much grain makes a lazy goat and a lazy goat will not produce a handsome fleece. bran may be fed for a change, and a little cotton seed or corn may be given, but sparingly. leaves or other coarse food should be given plentifully at night, as angoras relish a midnight lunch beside their three square meals a day. a supply of rock salt should be kept where goats can get it whenever they want it. if it is given only at long intervals they may over-indulge. water should be warmed slightly in winter if practicable. shelter and enclosure hardy as they are, goats cannot stand exposure to storms. they abhor wet. cold rain or sleet storms are really dangerous to their health. goats will go the long way round every time rather than get into mud. mud is very bad for the fleece, too. buyers refuse to pay for dirt. goat shelters should be dry, but they need not be tight except overhead. in fact many goats die of suffocation when huddled in close quarters. if the roof is just high enough from the floor for goats to go under, it can be open all round except perhaps on the side where the prevailing wind and storms would beat in. no other animals should be quartered with goats. experience shows this. goats prefer hard beds. chaff or straw enough to absorb the liquid manure is all that should be put on the floor. trees are the best shade from the hot sun, but if none are growing in the goats' pasture other shelter should be provided. it is true that goats thrive best when unconfined. but this does not mean that your goats should be allowed to range on other people's domains. they are a very real nuisance in orchards and gardens, and if your place is small it is no place for goats. a fence need not be very high to restrain a flock of goats. they are climbers and once in a while there is one who would take a prize for the "high jump." ordinarily a fence three and a half feet high is all that is necessary. boards, rails, or wire will make a good goat fence. it should go close to the ground to prevent crawling under. if wire is used, take care that the mesh is too small for a goat's head. you must take your market's demands into consideration when deciding whether to breed angoras or common goats. an angora fleece weighs from four to eight pounds. this can be cut every year for ten or twelve years. the common goat's skin is valuable, but he has only one! this makes the angora look like the best business proposition, although requiring more capital to start, as the care required is about the same and the value of by-products practically equal. the common goat two arguments may be brought forward in favour of the common goat. in the first place, the herd increases much faster as the angora doe usually has only one kid, while twins are the rule with common goats. there is a decidedly growing demand for goats' milk near large cities, especially for hospitals. we all know how commonly goats' milk is used in foreign countries. we americans have a rather silly prejudice against it, but we will get over this when we realize how often goats' milk saves the lives of babies and invalids. the following statements are vouched for by physicians and others of experience: [illustration: photograph by helen w. cooke. feeding the goats] goats' milk is more easily digested than cows' milk. analysis shows goats' milk has a marked similarity to human mothers' milk and is more readily assimilated by infants. goats' milk is generally claimed to be free at all times from germs of tuberculosis. cannot be told from cow's milk by taste. excellent for coffee and in cooking. the goat is claimed by its friends to be greatly the superior of the cow for milk, for the following reasons: the goat is naturally cleanly. the goat is easy to keep clean because of her small size. goats can be and are put into tubs and scrubbed and sterilized when being used as foster-mothers in baby hospitals. but no such treatment is possible with a cow. a goat can easily be taken from place to place with a family. a cow could not be transported without great expense. goats eat far less than cows. eight milch goats can be kept on the food of one milch cow. the same quality of food should be furnished. i believe there is a great future in america for the milch goat. twenty acres redeemed: the story of a satisfactory experiment with goats in new england in january, , i bought seventy-five angoras, as i had about twenty acres of brush land that i wanted to reclaim. i kept the goats in sheds until may. i had to put up a wire fence to keep them from visiting my neighbours, and in early may turned them into the first section, about one half of the piece. i built a shed for them to stay in nights and during rains. the work they did was marvellous. in less than a month this section had the appearance of having been struck by a cyclone, and it was evident that the goats would soon require more territory. consequently i wired the other section of this twenty-acre piece, and when finished allowed them the range of the other piece, to which they marched in military precision daily, returning to the shed at night or during the approach of rain, which they seemed to foretell as accurately as a barometer. it was not long before it developed that they would require fresher fields or i must reduce my flock, as this ground was all that i had of that kind. consequently i sold all but twenty-five, retaining twelve registered does, twelve kids, and one buck. for the does i paid ten dollars each, and my buck, which was a kid, cost twenty-five dollars. i had some grades that i sold at eight dollars and eight dollars and twenty-five cents each, and also some wether kids that i sold at five dollars each. i have this same flock now, with the addition of ten kids born this spring from these twelve does, which had twelve kids, two having died, leaving thirty-five now in the field. during the past winter i have handled more than six hundred that were sent here from the west. the test that i was anxiously watching for at the advent of spring was to see the effect of their work done last season, and i must say i am very agreeably surprised. in the first lot fenced there is scarcely a brush left, no briers, and not even canada thistles. the entire field between the rocks came out this spring with beautiful, thick, green, grassy foliage, mostly white clover. on the other lot, part of the brush tried hard to show its tenacity of life by coming out with green leaves, but at this writing the shrubs have fallen prey to the devouring angora, and green grass is coming out in about all the ground that they have trod. this alone to me is a satisfactory commercial experience. w. o. corning raising calves feeding the calves is always the boy's job or the girl's. usually the milk is prepared by their mother, but the responsibility for the calves' welfare is left to the youngsters. if you look upon calf feeding as nothing but a chore to get over with as soon as possible, you get very little fun out of it. but if you see in those calves the beginning of your own fortune or the foundation of your college fund they look different. whether the calves are yours or your father's, they are living creatures, capable of appreciating proper care and repaying it. they are just as capable of showing neglect. if you are going to feed the calves, make a study of calf nature, know what kind of animals you want to make of them, find out how to accomplish your purpose, and then keep a straight course. find out first the parentage of the calf. then inquire if it is to be a beef animal or a dairy cow. knowing its past and its future you can provide wisely for the present. a new-born calf should stay with the mother from twelve to twenty-four hours. the fluid she gives first is not milk, but is just what the calf needs to prepare its digestive organs for milk. if left longer with the mother it will be more bother to train. the calf should be fed sweet, whole milk for two weeks. if put immediately onto a diet of skim-milk, indigestion is likely to result, and the calf gets a setback from which it may never recover. when a young calf is taken from its mother, it knows nothing about drinking. the best practice is to let it fast for from twelve to twenty-four hours till it gets good and hungry. it is then in a state of mind to learn anything rather than go without any longer. [they treat human babies the same way if need be.] if started right, a young calf learns to drink in a day or two. holding the pail with one to two quarts of warm, fresh, whole milk in your left hand, stand beside the calf and put your right hand over its nose. insert two fingers into its mouth. did you ever feel anything so funny? the calf will suck your fingers hungrily. gently push its nose down into the warm milk with your fingers still in its mouth. after a while gently pull out one finger. if he misses it put it back and later try again. in a few lessons the calf will drink readily. patience and kindness must be exercised if one little scamp proves dull. a calf that gets a slap for not drinking will come to think that the two disagreeable things always come together and his education and his growth will be delayed. for the first ten to twelve days the calf should have about five quarts of milk a day, divided into three feedings. this should be warmed to blood heat, ninety-five to a hundred degrees fahr. at two weeks you can begin to substitute skim-milk. a half-pint a day at first is about right. watch the effect on the calf. increase the quantity gradually, until at a month or six weeks old the calf is getting seven to eight quarts per day of skim-milk, always warm and perfectly sweet. the worst disease of calf-hood is scours, and this disease is caused by feeding cold, unclean, or sour milk. i'd be ashamed to have a calf of mine sick with the scours! to cure it, add lime-water to the milk or mix a teaspoonful of dried blood in a small amount of water, then stir into the milk. or an ounce of wheat bran or kaffir corn meal stirred into the milk will be helpful. some recommend oat or corn meal fed dry, or a little linseed meal mixed in a little water and then stirred into the milk. if your calves are all heifers to be added to the dairy herd, you do not want them to lay on great amounts of fat, but to grow strong and be able to digest great amounts of hay. if they are to be beef, they need more fat. grain is fattening, especially corn. begin to feed hay as soon as the calf will take it. clean, dry clover is best, but any good hay will help prepare their stomachs for the work which is expected of them later. milk and hay are best for growing calves. grain, oil-meal, and pasture furnish variety. have you seen a wild-eyed cow being literally dragged behind a wagon, scared past endurance and behaving like a savage creature? there is not the slightest excuse for that sort of thing. what fun it is to slip a halter on a calf to-day and let him get accustomed to it; to-morrow lead him about a little with coaxing. in a few days he will lead like an old horse. he will learn to expect only kindness from his feeder and trainer. it would be well to accustom the calves to the presence of your dog, too. there are men who think a frightened animal is a humourous sight. but such a man is "no gentleman" and i certainly would never think of trusting him to drive my horses, or milk my cows, or even feed my pigs. our calves were kept in an old orchard, convenient to the house, with good pasture, plenty of sun and shade, and a suitable fence. a shed for wet weather is essential, for a clean, dry bed must be provided. calves have no way of cleaning themselves, therefore they must not be allowed to get dirty. milk should be fed until the calves are four months old, and may be continued longer. after the first few weeks, when they have begun to take some hay and grass, the milk may be given in two feedings. water should be given freely especially in hot weather. if your pasture has a clear running brook, your calves are in luck and so are you, for carrying water for a bunch of calves is no joke. a garden hose or a series of v-shaped troughs from pump to pen saves a lot of time and backache. a calf whose mother has a record for milk rich in butter fat and a sire of good family has in it the possibilities of a prize-winner. whether she will earn seventy-seven cents a year over and above her keep, like those one thousand and twenty poor cows that illinois boys and girls know about, or thirty dollars a year, like the twenty-five good cows, depends very much on the care she gets. no amount of care given to a cow will make up for neglect to the calf. there's a big responsibility on the boys and girls of the farms, for calf feeding is their job. the story of two boys and a cow the suggestion that the suburban home might be a money-making investment would strike the average suburbanite as ridiculous. but a few moments of careful calculation may put preconceived notions to flight and show how considerable money may be made--or saved, which is quite as important. some years ago a family, which included two boys of eleven and thirteen years, took a house in the outskirts of a good-sized town, about thirty minutes' ride from the city. the father was a buyer for an importing house, and absent from home for several months of each year. his salary was large, as such salaries go, but there were seven children to be raised and educated, several of them with marked abilities that needed the very best possible instruction to bring them to their highest development. the boys spent one summer vacation at the country house of an old friend of the family and got ideas. they talked them over, went back to their friend for counsel, then turned their batteries on their parents to gain their consent to an important new enterprise. attached to the house was about an acre of ground, three fourths of which was old pasture grown to weeds and a tangle of brier bushes. by promising to work for a farmer during the coming vacation the boys arranged to have the field, which they cleared and made ready, ploughed, harrowed, and marked in the most thorough fashion. they planted it with the best variety of mid-season sweet corn. the farmer cultivated it, and the boys hoed it and kept it in almost perfect condition. the season was very dry, but they laid a hose so as to start a stream of water into the lines between the rows of corn; then with a good pump they filled the trenches they had dug and completely irrigated the entire field. the crop was a great success. the boys picked and sold at retail prices to private customers twelve hundred dozen ears of the finest corn raised in that section. as it averaged twenty cents a dozen, it footed up the very comfortable sum of two hundred and forty dollars with small ears and left-overs quite sufficient for the use of the family. two weeks from the first picking the stalks were cut and set up to cure for the cow that was really the object of their endeavour. the friend of the family selected the cow. she was a fine, fresh, young jersey and alderney cross--a high-grade animal, good for quality as well as quantity of milk and cream. there was small, well-built barn on the place, and here the cow was stabled. cleanliness was the first, last, and intermediate law in and about the place. the boys had clothes expressly for barn wear and white aprons with long sleeves to put on when milking. such unusual attention to details attracted customers until the demand went far ahead of the supply. for the first six months the cow gave, on an average, sixteen quarts a day, fourteen of which were sold to persons who came for it, thereby saving all trouble and cost of delivery. two quarts were kept for the family. for the next four months the sales were twelve quarts a day. feed for the cow cost one dollar a week, besides hay and corn-stalks. the cow was bought late in july, and by the first of august the milk trade was well established. after ten months' experience the boys made up a statement to show to their father when he returned from a trip to europe. credit , doz. corn at cts. a doz. $ . stalks . milk, days, qts. at cts. a qt. . " " " " " " " . -------- $ . debit cow, $ . ; ton hay, $ . ; feed, $ . $ . -------- profit, cash on hand $ . value of cow . -------- total assets $ . nelson s. stone raising pigs when i was nine years old i laid the foundation of my college fund. my grandmother had a flock of twenty or thirty geese which were kept for the pillows and feather beds they filled. great was my delight when grandma told me that she would give me a pig if i would help her pick the geese. helping her would have been reward enough, for i was a great grandma girl, but the ambition of my childhood was to own a pig. did not my elder brother now own a beautiful mare and colt, and had he not started with a pig? wednesday was the day set for plucking the geese and all my leisure on monday and tuesday was spent in building a pen. plenty of material from which to construct this edifice was found about the place. i wisely located it at the back of the henhouse which left me only three sides to build. one corner was roofed with the best boards i could find, for i didn't wish my precious pig to suffer from sunstroke or have his bed transformed into a mud-hole when it rained. when the geese were picked to the last feather they could spare, i went with grandmother to select my pig from the litter of sucklings now ready to begin taking their food from the trough. she generously allowed me my choice, and if i did not get the pick of the bunch it was not her fault. i wonder how a girl of nine succeeded in transporting a lusty pig the three quarters of a mile between grandmother's house and ours. i should not like to undertake it now, but my confidence in my ability to do what i wanted done in those days was unlimited. a piece of rope, a stout cudgel, a pair of strong, young arms, and a high disregard of appearances sustained me. i got my treasure home and into his pen--no mean triumph even as viewed by my elder brother who had passed by the pig stage and even the calf stage and entered into the exalted realm of horse ownership. my father was not the "your shoat, my hog" kind of a father. there came a time when he used to say that the girls owned all the cattle and the boys all the horses on the farm. when my pig grew up, i traded it to my father for a fine calf. this calf was the nucleus of my "herd," for i never owned a horse. all through my college course when i needed money, i used to write to father to sell "rowena" or "corinne" or "natty bumpo." (we named our calves after the people we read about.) there was always a buyer ready at hand and the price paid was strictly in accord with the market quotations. the cow which bought my graduation cap and gown was the last of her race, "betsy bobbett," one of the great-great-granddaughters of the calf for which i traded that original pig. no one can deny or doubt that there is profit in pig raising. pork "on the hoof" is ten cents a pound even as i write these words, with prospects good for going higher. a profit of one hundred per cent. is recorded by growers when the price is only six cents a pound. with the one exception of poultry, hogs bring the quickest returns for investment of any live stock. it is poor economy to keep any animal which cannot pay its board, except for sentiment, and few people keep pigs on that account. if i were beginning again i should not trade my pig for a calf but should raise pigs. in selecting a mother for my family of hogs i should care more about her individual character than about her breed. a good brood sow ought to have a good disposition, which means a good digestion, and respond quickly to kindness. nervous, irritable sows often develop vicious habits. a short, broad face, a wide space between the eyes, a deep chest, broad back, and large hams with rather short legs are all considered good points. a good-natured, healthy pig has a bright, friendly manner when accosted and a look of shrewd though guileless interest in his master. "dirty as a pig" is a slander on the pig and a censure on its owner. pigs and goats are more particular about their beds than either horses or cows. success with porkers is spelt _c-l-e-a-n-l-i-n-e-s-s_. they like to wallow in the edge of a sluggish stream on a warm day. well, so do you. mud is not dirty unless mixed with foul manure and decaying vegetable matter. all feeding troughs, floors, and beds should be thoroughly scraped, swept, and dried if the pigs are to be healthy, happy, and comfortable. under no other conditions does keeping pigs pay. you will be very fortunate if your young sow's first litter numbers ten or a dozen lively youngsters. six or eight will not be bad if she raises them all, and with care she ought to. improper care and feeding before the pigs come are usually responsible for any cannibalistic habits developed by the sow. corn alone is not a good ration except for fattening. used with wheat, middlings, bran, and ground oats, with plenty of clover or alfalfa hay, corn is all right. the sow should be put into a pen by herself before farrowing time. the best bedding is clean wheat or rye straw, which should not be left until it is wet and filthy. sprinkle air-slaked lime in the sleeping pen under the fresh bedding. a sick pig means a neglectful owner. pigs ought to grow fast and without any check. at six months old they should weigh two hundred pounds, an average gain you see, of over a pound a day. with a good, healthy mother little pigs need no extra feeding the first month. the sow should be given nourishing food, bran and ground oats and rye, lots of skim-milk and an abundance of clean, fresh water. if the pigs seem hungry when only a couple of weeks old a little, new trough should be made for them. a small quantity of boiled corn and skim-milk should be put into this trough where the little fellows can get to it but the sow cannot. they may not take much at first, but several hours later the trough should be rinsed and a fresh supply given. sour, dirty milk may produce serious sickness in young pigs and check growth. the sow will wean them when she gets ready, and they will not know the difference if they get used to their trough early. it is possible to raise and fatten pigs in pens, but it is not economical. pasture is essential to their best growth. it gives them exercise, and the green food not only nourishes them, but aids in the digestion of the more concentrated foods. the expression, "pigs in clover," is based on fact. a happy, healthy, money-maker is the pasture-fed pig. he will put on his ten cents' worth a day of bone, muscle and fat at less expense in a clover patch than elsewhere. alfalfa or cow peas will serve him about as well. fruit windfalls are good for him, too. if you live on a place where grain or fruit are the main crops and a few cows are kept, you are losing a great opportunity if you are not raising a few pigs. they dispose of the surplus on such farms, as well as the unsalable garden crops and weeds, and pay their board day by day. the owner should keep a close account with his pigs. if they eat what would otherwise be wasted you are so much to the good. what you sell them for, less what you have paid out for food, equals what you get for your time. raising chickens success with chickens does not depend upon the breed, nor upon any patent devices for hatching and brooding, nor on any special mixture of feed. you can find frenzied advertisers trying to disprove these statements, but do not your own observations bear me out? however, i venture to say that with common-sense and gumption, and a real liking for chickens, success in this line is nearly certain. there are dozens of good stories of boys who have begun chicken raising at twelve to fourteen years of age and have made money at it, beside training themselves at the same time in business methods and efficiency. there are no good reasons why girls also should not succeed. there are certain principles of poultry culture upon which most people agree. these are based on a knowledge of hen nature and are the result of study and experience. we will discuss them under the following heads: , housing and care; , food and feeding; , raising young stock; , business methods. housing [illustration: frame for eleven-dollar chicken house] this first department properly includes not only the house proper with all its interior fixtures and its care, but the runs, the scratching shed, and all that has to do with the supply of air, warmth and sunshine and the protection of the flock from disease and vermin. no matter how plain and ordinary your chicken house is, the test of your fitness for the business comes with its care, not once a month, but day by day. [illustration: chicken house a boy can build] many people have an idea that the only way to keep hens healthy and productive is to let them range. of course it is true that chickens on the farm seem to pick up a free living, but it is equally true that, as a general thing, the farmer does not keep any account with his chickens, and if they get into the corn crib or granary he does not know how much grain they eat and how much they waste. if they hide their nests and the eggs spoil, or if they sit and the chicks do not live to get to the barnyard, the owner is unaware of his loss. if, having no house and nest boxes, the hens lay in the weeds, in the wood pile, in the straw stack, in the haymow, it's no loss, for the women and children hunt the eggs and their time isn't worth anything! but do you believe there are any farm hens whose portraits will appear in the big magazines? did you see that one last year in _collier's weekly_? do you suppose there are many -eggers on farms with all their supposed advantages? i don't. but we shall never know, because no accurate records can be kept of chickens that run at large. i shall take it for granted that you expect to begin in a small way with very little to invest. remember that a few hens pay better per hen than a large number, but on the other hand it takes about as much time to care for a dozen as it does for one hundred. you will therefore look forward with satisfaction to increasing your flock as your capital grows and your time becomes more valuable. have you a suitable place for chickens? it should be dry, sunny, though with some shade, protected from severe winds and storms. the sun is the greatest purifier and disinfector in the universe, and you must have your house face the south or east if possible. whether your first house is made of store boxes or of expensive matched lumber the principles are the same. to make the house _dry_ it should be built on well-drained soil and should sit up six inches from the surface of the ground so that air can circulate freely beneath. the only heat in the hen house comes from the hens and the sunshine. therefore, to make the house _warm_ you should have it small enough so that your hens can generate heat enough to keep warm in winter. the exposure should be such that the sun can get into it. if possible it should be shaded by trees or other buildings against storms and summer sun. every hen needs from four to five square feet of floor space and only eight to ten cubic feet of air space. square houses are more economical to build. figure out with diagrams and drawings to scale just how large a building is needed to house your flock when you get it. how low at the back can you make it without bumping your head when you go inside? how high in front must it be to provide space for your door and window? what shaped roof will be easiest to build, most economical of lumber, and most satisfactory as a rain shed? [illustration: self-feed grit box] consider many things in the selection of material. rough boards are a little cheaper, but how they do ruin good paint and whitewash brushes! matched boards are cheaper and tighter than unmatched boards with strips nailed over the cracks. for the roof some kind of waterproof roofing material will keep the house warm and dry. if you have ever seen a chicken house with a cement floor you will be determined to have that kind. at first the expense may be greater than for boards, but if you live in your own home you can afford to put a cement floor in the chicken house sooner or later, especially if you do the work yourself. if you are a renter you will not feel like putting in expensive, permanent improvements. it will be warm and dry, saving many losses from wet feet and diseases brought on by dampness and cold. it is easy to clean. it will do away with the rat problem, and last forever. you can put it in after the house is built. figure out the cost of a layer of cement one and one half inches thick laid on a bed of gravel and small stones. the cement is mixed as follows: one part portland cement, three parts clean sand, five parts gravel. mix the cement pretty thick, tamp it down conscientiously until perfectly level, then with a trowel smooth it and smooth it, over and over, until the surface is free from anything like a stone or large pebble. the door to the chicken house should be well hung, easy to open, shut, and lock. the window is to admit light and sunshine, especially the latter. very small panes may be cheap but they shut out the sun; twelve eight by ten panes in a single sash make a window of convenient size. the window should be placed so that the sun can get way back to the very farthest corner of the house. a high window is better for this than a low one. the diagram shows why. [illustration: the windows should be placed high enough to let the sun in to the back of the house] sunshine and exercise are necessary for healthy fowls. they can stand cold weather well, if they are kept dry and active. scratching sheds or open-front pens provide sunshine and exercise. scratching for food in the litter keeps hens moving and they get to be very athletic, jumping up to cabbages and fresh meat or grain self-feeders hung just out of reach. scratching sheds in the north need adjustable curtains of coarse muslin to keep out driving rain, snow, and sleet. the state agricultural experiment station at orono, maine, has made valuable studies of curtained sheds, and the use of this form of poultry house has found favour all over the country. [illustration: grain self-feeder for fowls] the furniture of the hen house consists of roosts, dropping board, nests, dust box, and utensils to hold ground feed, grit, shell, and water. in making and erecting each piece ask yourself, "will this be easy to clean?" the roosts should be in the corner farthest from door and window, out of all draughts. there should be enough of them to provide each fowl with six to eight inches of room and they should be set at least a foot apart. do not have the roosts at different levels. it is hen nature to want the highest place, and they will fight and crowd and worry each other if there is a higher roost. pieces of two by two, with the upper edge rounded, make good perches. as the floor of the chicken house is also the dining table for the occupants it is extremely important that there should be a well-built platform under the roosts for droppings, in order to keep the floor clean. there should be space enough between this board and the perches to allow you to clean it frequently without difficulty. [illustration: corner in chicken house, showing up-to-date furniture] if you ever tried to clean a range of wall nests you know why the up-to-date poultry men are discarding them as unsanitary. many are now placing their nests under the dropping board. they are out of the way here, not too high for the hens, nor too low for you. square nests, fourteen inches each way and at least a foot from the droppings platform, are satisfactory. a long door hinged at the top and hooked at the bottom should form the back of a row of nests. you open this to gather eggs and to clean the nests. the front, where the hens enter, should be in behind under the platform. as it is rather dark in there, the hens are pleased, because they like to preserve the old-time fiction that they are hiding their nests away. the nest should be five or six inches deep. straw is the best nesting material. short hay is next best. a hen cannot be happy with excelsior twisted round her toes and an unhappy hen is an unproductive hen. the dust bath must be provided. most baths are wet but hens are dry cleaners. the dust bath must be dry to be of any use; the lighter, finer, and dryer the better. a sunny corner of the house or shed is the best place. sifted coal ashes and street dust is a good mixture. allow just as much space for the runs as you can afford to fence. if possible divide the enclosure in two and keep one part seeded to clover while the chickens are in the other. the heavier fowls usually make very little trouble flying over a fence of five foot wire netting even though it have no top strip. clipping one wing may be necessary to restrain some individuals. small trees in the runs are most desirable. plant there such small fruit trees as plum or cherry and the hens will help to keep insects in check. [illustration: covered dust bath in sunny corner] one of the biggest items of work in the chicken business is keeping the house clean. the health, comfort, happiness, and the very life of the hens, as well as the business, depend on this. many a boy with a sort of natural knack at carpentry can build a chicken house out of second-hand lumber or out of a couple of piano boxes. but it takes a long distance form of gumption to keep any chicken house sanitary. the droppings should be cleaned up often and right here a word to the wise. hen manure is a valuable garden fertilizer _if_ it is sprinkled with land plaster while fresh. otherwise it may become very nearly worthless. so if you have a garden or can dispose of your fertilizer every day or two you can make something extra on this by-product by a semi-weekly cleaning of roosts and droppings board. litter is not dirt in the chicken house but it ought to be dry, fresh litter. it is not enough that the house should look clean. the obvious dirt, bad as it is, does less harm than the almost invisible vermin that lurk in the crevices of roosts, nests, and walls. whitewash is a very wholesome finish for the interior and should be put on at least twice a year. this is not enough however. every square inch of surface should be wet thoroughly with some liquid which is sure death to vermin. spray or brush may be used. i wonder if this could be done too often in hot weather. once a month is probably often enough if good insect powder is used on the hens and in the nests. in winter the vermin are less active, but it is not safe to neglect them even then. food and feeding hens are known to be omnivorous. they must have animal and mineral as well as vegetable food. they need these things in variable quantities depending on their occupation. the hen's main duties are growing, laying, brooding, moulting, fattening. she needs a great variety of these three classes of foods throughout her life. study your flock, read of the experiences of others in magazines, bulletins, and books, follow their advice, and work out mixtures and methods to suit your conditions after you gain experience. the hens will give you many a hint. let them out of the pen now and then just before feeding time and see how they make for the grass. in the evening the earthworms are near the surface. the hens devour them greedily. you can get the flock back easily if you have a call, whistle, or other signal which they associate with grain-scattering, but they will go in at twilight anyhow. sitting hens need less food because of their sedentary occupation. the main thing is to keep food and fresh water where they can get it when they want it, or see that they go to it regularly. broody hens are a trial. the common practices of starving them, ducking them, and otherwise subjecting them to indignities, are little short of cruel and often fail to cure their natural desire to sit. stop and reason not with, but about, the hen. having laid all the eggs nature has provided during the spring, the hen's instinct is to brood and rear a nestful. she has worked hard and maybe is run down physically. feel her bones. what you want from her is more eggs. instead of wasting time "getting even" with her for being a nuisance, try some rational way of breaking up her desire to sit. remove her immediately from the nest to a coop. instead of starving her give her a plentiful supply of the diet you have found best for layers. she will probably soon begin to lay again if treated sensibly. [illustration: racks over feed pans prevent waste and soiling food] moulting is a perfectly natural process but it occurs at the end of the season and the chickens are often in a low state of vitality. for this reason it is a critical time. study the hens. find out what their physical condition is at moulting season. the best condition is half-way between fat and thin. if they are thin, provide a wholesome diet rich in fatty foods, as corn, oats, sunflower, and some flaxseed, with bran, meat scraps, and clover. if heavy with fat from too rich a diet in the summer, less of the fat-producing foods makes a better moulting diet. the quality and flavour of the eggs and meat depend pretty much on the kind of food given. if filth is taken into the hen's system it affects her general health and efficiency. there is an opinion that hens and pigs are by nature dirty. we will not stop to argue that, but your hens will eat nothing but clean food if nothing else is provided. that's certain! look to your feeding racks and watering pans. use water freely and a stiff brush or cloth. clean water is positively necessary. all sorts of diseases lurk in dirty houses, filthy runs, and stale, unclean feeding and drinking pans. regularity in feeding is important. do not go into this business if you expect frequently to be otherwise employed at feeding time. the main feedings are two, morning and late afternoon, for whole or cracked grain scattered in the litter. ground grain should be there, in a hopper, at all hours in summer and all the afternoon the rest of the year. the exercise they must take to get the grain keeps the hens from getting fat and lazy. a busy hen is a happy hen and a productive hen. hang a half cabbage up just out of reach in the house on a stormy day and see them train for the standing broad jump! if you can get what is known as "the haslet," really the lungs, heart, and liver of a porker or lamb, you can suspend this in the same way and they will work all the better for it. raising young chickens [illustration: model chicken coop--open on pleasant days] it is poor practice to set your hens in the chicken house. prepare as many fresh nests as you expect to need. put them in the cellar, unused shed, under the porch, or any convenient and protected place. doors of wire netting or slats are a great convenience. when a hen is broody, take her off the nest the first night and put her into the new place with an artificial egg or two. ten to one she will stay all right. if not, do not waste time with her. when assured that her mind is unalterably made up, give her thirteen eggs and close the door on her again. set two or three the same day and later combine the flocks under one hen. select the eggs with reference to their shape, size, and quality of shell. misshapen, very large, or very small eggs or those with thin shells are worthless for setting. set the eggs of the best layers. every morning take sitters off nests, leave food and water for them, and return in half an hour. usually they are all back in their places in less time than that. if not, you can replace and shut them in again. in eighteen to twenty-one days the eggs will hatch. probably more little chicks die from lice than from any other cause. preventive measures must begin early. get fresh, dry insect powder and treat the nest and hen about the third, the ninth, and the fifteenth day of incubation. rub the powder all through the feathers. fine dust obstructs the breathing pores of the lice and kills them. when you take the chicks from the nest examine the head, neck, and vent regions of every one. if lice are present a drop of melted lard will put an end to them. constant vigilance and nothing short of it, will prevent death from lice. [illustration: prop the door open, thus, in rain, wind, or too hot sun] a good home-made lice powder, costing only about four cents a pound, may be made as follows: mix together one quarter pint crude carbolic acid ( per cent. pure), and three quarters of a pint of gasolene. stir into this enough plaster of paris to take up the liquid, (about two and one half pounds). mix thoroughly and rub through a wire mosquito screen to break the lumps. this can be used to dust through the feathers, the day after it is made. keep in a tight jar or box. this powder is the invention of an expert in poultry husbandry. the coops for hen and chicks need not be ponderous, but they should be rain proof. a coop two and one half feet square with removable roof and floor is not too heavy to handle and answers every purpose. a wire netting run three or four feet long attached to each coop is necessary and this combination will house a hen and from fifteen to twenty chickens. [illustration: closed for the night. vermin-proof, weather-proof. screen-covered ventilator on one side] [illustration: bottom of model coop can be cleaned by lifting up the coop] all the food a young chick needs the first twenty-four hours is provided by nature. after that it is "up to you." their first meal may be hard-boiled eggs minced finely, shells and all, and mixed with oatmeal or custard made of milk and eggs baked hard, or it may be baked and crumbled corn bread. by the third day they will be ready for raw broken grain. there are many good commercial kinds: less trouble than making your own mixtures. the chicks will learn to scratch for this in a week or two. the hen is their teacher. fine grit, charcoal, and clean water must be kept where they can get what they want. soft food should not be fed in unlimited quantities; give what they will eat in five or ten minutes, then take it away. they are likely to over-eat of wet mashes, but what they have to work for is not likely to give them indigestion. when chickens are two months old they no longer need wet mash. they should now have access to food whenever they want it. a mixture of cracked corn, wheat, beef scrap, bone, grit, shell, and other grains, with dry middlings and bran, may be put into a slatted self-feeder, like the illustration, easily constructed by yourself. it is not much trouble to see that this is never empty. if fed only at intervals they rush at you, bolt the biggest grains, stuff their crops, crowd away weak or modest ones; result, some are under-fed, others are over-fed. if food is kept where they can get it whenever they happen to think of it they take a reasonable amount, then visit the growing clover or grass, pick up a casual pebble, take a drink of water, scratch out a worm, and return to the feed tray, all in natural course of the day's work. you will want to get rid of most of your young cockerels as soon as they are marketable. broilers bring highest prices. to put them in tip-top condition they should be fattened for about two to three weeks when they are four months old. there is nothing better for fattening than a mash made of equal parts finely ground corn meal and wheat middlings with one fourth the quantity of meat meal. this should be wet with sour skim-milk or buttermilk and fed in a semi-liquid condition, about the consistency of pancake batter. ground oats may be added. the product is known in the highest priced city hotels as "milk fed" or even "cream fed" chicken. if you can get skim-milk cheap why not buy a bunch of young cockerels and stuff them for market? they have been known to put on a pound for every five pounds of this mixture eaten. business methods the day you drive your first nail into what is to be your chicken house you should start an account. every item should go down, cost of materials, cost of stock, cost of feed. economize where you can by utilizing vacant space for growing clover for summer feed and some root crop like mangolds for winter supply. apples are fine in winter for hens. you can often get bushels of windfalls for the picking. sunflowers are easy to grow and their heads hold a tremendous lot of chicken feed. table scraps ground with a hand mill vary the hen's diet, but do avoid sloppy messes. there are two sides to every account. if you charge the chickens with what they cost you, it is only fair to yourself and to them to credit them with the eggs and meat they furnish, as well as with increase of stock, etc. [illustration: trap-nest open. the hen's weight shuts the door behind her] in every flock there are some idlers. they lay only a hundred or so eggs, they leave their eggs too long when sitting, or they never put on any weight. you want to be rid of all such. you can mark the bad sitters, and send them to the pot, as well as those whose habits are such as to make them a nuisance. but you need to know which fowls lay the biggest and best eggs and which lay the largest number. for market in our country where eggs are sold by the dozen it is numbers that count, but for breeding you want eggs of good size and shape. you also want to set the eggs of the good layers. these eggs taste no better in cake or omelet, but by careful selection you can breed a strain of extra good layers, right in your hen house. the device known as a trap-nest is the thing you will need if you go at it scientifically. you want it in winter, too, to prevent killing your best hens for potpie, while the idlers cheerfully eat your grain without recompense. the simpler the mechanism of the trap-nest the better. it must stand open until the hen enters, then close without frightening her. most of them keep the hen a prisoner until you go and examine the nest, credit the hen by her leg-band number, and release her. by following the drawings in the bulletins of the new york and maine experiment stations referred to in the list of bulletins on chickens you can construct your own trap-nests. [illustration: trap-nest closed after hen has gone in] there are people who claim that "common chickens" or mixed breeds are hardier than pure bred fowls and better all around producers. how many can show records to make good that claim? american boys and girls who go into chicken raising will want to breed from good pure stock. nothing is too good for them. did you ever hear any one show any enthusiasm when passing a flock of mongrels? contrast this with the delight you and all your friends take in the sight of a hundred fowls all white, all red, all spangled, all black, all piebald, all blue, or all speckled, as alike as peas in a pod! i vote for the pure stock every time. you can keep it pure and strong by exchanging cockerels with other breeders of the same variety and with similar ideals and practices. keeping chickens isn't mere child's play. there's lots to be done. you must be carpenter, gardener, breeder, merchant, and even doctor, all rolled into one. but there is fun in it and profit in it. better than all, there is a satisfaction in doing a good job and doing it well, and it keeps a boy out of doors where he belongs if he's a healthy boy. egg records house no. matched bird no. pen no. variety +======+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+=====+====+ | date |nov.|dec.|jan.|feb.|mar.|apr.|may |june|july|aug.|sept.|oct.| +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |totals+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +======+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+=====+====+ the egg record is the up-to-date way of keeping tab on idlers. it goes with the trap-nest. [illustration: a useful hen gate] as with many other products of home industry the first and best market is the home market. credit the hens with every pound of meat you furnish for the table and every egg consumed by the family. but you will soon need to extend your market. across the street, up and down on both sides, you can find people who like "personally conducted" eggs and prefer that the fowls served on their tables should be acquaintances rather than the embalmed kind. you must be business man enough to work up a trade for fresh, clean eggs in attractive packages, and for wholesome meat. it would be a good stroke of business to date your eggs if you know what demand you can depend on. that would help impress the idea of real freshness on the consumer's mind. if you pluck fowls for market it will interest you to know that feathers have a market value. they should be plucked dry and the wing and tail feathers kept separate. any large city dealer in chickens will probably take your feathers. by-products often make the difference between plus and minus in a year's business. the winner of the first prize of one hundred dollars in the junior poultry contest of the oregon agricultural college tells this story: raising chickens boys and girls should raise chickens in the city as well as on the farm because it pays and is a fine occupation. it is a work that never grows tiresome and new experiences are always awaiting you. various theories are advocated as to the proper manner of feeding and housing to get the best results but simple rules are the best to begin with. plenty of clean water, clean houses and yards and good feed are needed to get the best results. spade up a little in the chicken yard every day that is pleasant, but if it is cold and in wet weather provide a scratching shed. keep the hens busy. read the bulletins furnished free by the government and the various experiment stations. also subscribe to a good poultry paper. the ideas you will get from these together with your own experience will make you a successful poultry raiser. by doing all that was stated above i was able to win first prize in the poultry contest just closed. clarence a. hogan success with chickens the contest of the portland junior poultry association has closed. it lasted a whole year, and it seemed as if it would never come to an end. but if it had not been for the contest i would never have known many of the interesting things i now know about chickens. i had twelve white leghorn hens and a cock entered. they were all little beauties and i enjoyed working with them very much. they laid one thousand six hundred twenty-two eggs during the year. the eggs were worth from twenty-five to sixty cents a dozen. we fed them wheat, corn, barley, oats, and bran in which table scraps were mixed, oyster shells, grit, prepared beef scraps, charcoal, and green foods such as grass from the lawn, cabbage, kale, and lettuce and other green things from the garden. each hen made us a profit of two dollars and seventy-two cents for the year. chickens need lots of care. their house must be cleaned out, there should be some fresh ground dug up in the yard, and they need some green food every day. papa took care of the house, and i mowed the lawn and gave them the clippings and gathered cabbage leaves, kale leaves, and lettuce leaves out of the garden and gave them each day. in the spring time we let them out a few minutes every morning to get bugs and worms. they soon had all the bugs and worms scratched out of the garden and then they ran out in the yard and scratched up the flower beds, which did not please mamma very well. after that they wanted to go to the neighbour's yard but we had to keep them up. this was before we made the garden. chickens make nice pets. they are much nicer than dogs or cats, and if you take good care of them they will pay well beside. i had a nice little white leghorn hen i called "petty." when she was a little chicken i would catch her every day and play with her. she would go in the nest and wait for some one to take her out and pet her. she got so tame that i could catch her any place in the yard. i would go in the yard and get her and take her out in the garden and dig for her and let her find the bugs and worms. i had another little chicken that i called "jim." he was a cute little rooster. when he was just a little chicken i would put him to bed every night and when he grew a little older he would not go to bed alone. one night we weren't at home at his bedtime and when we came home that night we heard a funny little noise in the back yard. it was raining and jim had gone under the sweet pea vines to sleep instead of going into his box. the first little chicks we hatched we took away from the hen and raised them by hand. for about a week after they were hatched we put them in a basket and covered them over with warm, woollen cloths and set them by the stove to keep warm over night. i had a peach box with a wire covering to keep them in, in the daytime. on sunshiny days we set them out in the sunshine but after about a week they were not satisfied with that. i decided that what they wanted was to get out and run for bugs. so one afternoon when i came home from school it was nice and sunshiny and i let them out of their box. when they first stepped into the grass they were surprised. that was the first time they had ever stepped on the lawn. they ran right to a rose bush and stayed right there all the time picking off bugs. each evening i let them out they would go a little farther away from home. at last they had caught all the bugs around the place and if we did not watch, they would run over to the neighbour's yard. i am anxious for the time to come when we will have more little chicks. ruth hayes the girl who tells this story is thirteen years old. she won second prize, fifty dollars. another prize winner's story during the time that i have been taking care of poultry i have been successful. i only had six chickens in the oregon junior poultry contest, five hens and a rooster, but i have about fifty other chickens to take care of. the chickens that i had in the contest were black minorcas, but i also raise white wyandottes. i seem to have better success with my white wyandottes than with my black minorcas. the house i have for the contest chickens is twelve feet wide and six feet long. the place they roost in is four feet by six and the rest is a scratching shed, which is eight feet by six. the house is open front and has a ground floor, which is dry and the chickens can dust in it. i feed them three times a day, grain morning and noon, which i feed in litter, and a warm mash at night so they can go to roost warm. i also keep bran, charcoal, and grit before them all the time. i have a bone cutter, and feed cut bone to my chickens once a week. i clean off the drop board every morning, and once a week i coal-oil the roost and where the roost rests. during this cold weather i do not let the chickens out very early and when it is raining i do not let them out at all. every night after the chickens have gone to roost i go out and throw a little grain in their litter and that gives them something to do the first thing in the morning. i am sorry that i did not have a photograph of myself to send you. frank mitchell a boy feeds six thousand hens in half an hour what do you know about that? i saw this feat done last winter by a fourteen-year old california boy, and i took his photograph as he was doing it. what can a boy not do if he has the opportunity? there are other boys who find it a harder task and a more disagreeable one to feed half a dozen hens. a boy can feed six thousand hens and gather two or three thousand eggs a day and go to school. this california boy had a gray pony to help him, but what enabled him to perform this feat day after day was system. his uncle, the owner of the farm, had planned the work to make it easy. the farm contains one hundred and twenty acres, and the six thousand hens are scattered over the whole farm in colony houses. the system of feeding was a liberal feed of soft mash in the morning. three colony houses were placed together. the middle one was a laying house; the other two, roosting houses. in one end of the laying house there was a wheat bin holding several sacks of wheat. the bin was a self-feeding hopper. after dinner the fourteen-year old boy jumped on his gray horse and made the rounds of the houses, opening a door to the hopper of wheat, so that the hens could eat at will during the afternoon. it took just a moment to jump off of his horse, open the door, and jump on again, the horse going on the lope between the houses. he made the rounds in less than half an hour. about three or four o'clock he hitched his pony to a low wagon and visited all the houses, gathering the eggs. this was a bigger job than feeding the hens; he could not go as fast with the eggs. in the morning, about seven o'clock, he makes the rounds of the houses, and without getting off his horse opens the doors to the laying houses, and does it all in fifteen minutes. what do you know about that? james dryden an amateur's experience in april, nineteen hundred and one, i purchased four broody hens, two settings of white wyandotte eggs, and two of plymouth rock. i live in a suburban district where dogs and cats abound and poultry cannot have free range. i therefore made two wire-covered board runs, six feet by eight, eighteen inches high, and against a six-inch hole sawed in one end of each i placed a box turned on its side for a coop. of twenty-eight wyandotte eggs, twenty-six hatched, and three chicks died. of twenty-six plymouth rocks only three hatched, and these i put with the wyandottes in care of the two most motherly hens. every morning i fed a mash of meal, shorts, and beef scraps, in equal parts, mixed dry with boiling water; at noon and night oatmeal, cracked wheat, or occasionally cracked corn, and clean table scraps at any time. oyster shells and fresh water were always before them. mothers and children ate together, each taking what she liked best. as often as they soiled the grass i shifted the runs, and on fine days i let the families out for an hour before dark into an adjoining field, keeping an eye on their wanderings. october first i sold the four hens, which had laid meanwhile fifteen and a half dozen eggs. twelve chicks were cockerels, which were killed as needed. november first i reduced the daily feed to two meals--a warm mash at half past eight a.m. so that they would scratch awhile before being fed, and for supper grain, generally oats, scattered about the yard, with a few handfuls inside the house to induce more scratching. they had all they would eat, but if they left any food i skipped the next meal and let them get hungry. the water was renewed often, dishes kept clean, and field excursions continued occasionally. november sixth i sold the first dozen eggs, and for eleven months the supply never failed. the eggs were large, and the hens were active, healthy, and happy. any success i attribute to moderate feeding, exercise, and cleanliness. _may , , to august , _ expenses eggs, white wyandotte $ . express . eggs, plymouth rock . hens . boards, net, and boxes . grain, ½ months . ------ $ . receipts eggs, pullets, dozen $ . eggs, hens, ½ dozen . cockerels, ¼ pounds . hens . hens (sold by reason of my illness) . barrels dressing . runs, etc., on hand . ------ $ . . ------ profit $ . belle s. cragin how i started with hens i am a boy, thirteen years old, and have always been very fond of farm animals, especially chickens. i like the white wyandottes best for all-around, general-purpose fowls. they lay well, and when they are dressed for market there are no dark pin-feathers to spoil their looks. in april, nineteen hundred and five, i purchased two settings of white wyandotte eggs at the rhode island college, and borrowed two broody hens. i bought one of these hens later, but she soon died. i fixed up an old pig house that was on the place, and set the hens in this house. while they were sitting, papa helped me make two coops and pens for them. for the coop i took a dry-goods box, about four feet by one and one half feet by fifteen inches, and made a door in one corner large enough to admit a hen. in one end i bored some holes and covered them with wire netting, for ventilation. for the pen i took four pieces of scantling and a good supply of laths. i used the pieces of scantling for the corner-posts and nailed the laths on the sides, top, and one end. i did not put anything on the other end except the top and bottom strips. the pen is just the length of a lath, but the width is a little less. the open end is placed against the front of the coop; the hen can then come out into the pen, and the chicks can go anywhere. after awhile the chicks hatched and there were sixteen of them. at first i fed them a mash of corn meal and bran and later a little cracked corn and wheat. they grew finely, but i raised only thirteen of them, eight of which were pullets. i fed them in the back yard for a while, but they dug the grass up so that i had to stop it. then i built a scratching-pen by the wood shed, to feed them in. in the summer the chickens were roosting in the trees, and when cold weather came and i wanted them to roost in the hen house they would not do it. i tried feeding them there, and driving them in; but that did not work very well, because i could not drive them all in at once, and when i drove some in and tried to get the rest, the first ones would come out again. so i had my brother help me, and every night we would carry them down to the hen house. after a time they learned to roost there. the pullets began to lay early in november and laid well all winter. i am proud of one of my hens. she laid two hundred and thirty-eight eggs from the eighth of november, nineteen hundred and five, to the fifth of august, nineteen hundred and six. i think this is a very good record, considering that during the most of that time she was fed nothing but cracked corn. during the first part of the winter of nineteen hundred and six to nineteen hundred and seven the hens did not lay very well, and i asked one of the poultry men at the rhode island college what to feed them to make them lay. he told me what he had fed with good success, and as it made my hens lay, it may make somebody else's hens lay. grain { whole corn equal parts, by weight, of { wheat { oats mash { bran equal parts, by weight, of { middlings { corn meal { beef scraps this means that they will get more wheat and oats than corn, and more bran and middlings than corn meal. i feed the grain morning and night, and the mash at noon. the mash may be fed either wet or dry. i have tried it both ways but i like to feed it dry fully as well for two reasons: first the hens cannot gobble it up so fast and all get an equal share; second, the hens lay just as well and it saves labour. feed is expensive here and it cost me three dollars and thirty-nine cents for one hundred pounds of both kinds. i think i shall continue to feed it till i find something better, and i would recommend it to any one who desires a good, satisfactory feed. my poultry record for one year is as follows: poultry account dr. cr. jan., feed $ . jan., eggs $ . march, feed . jan., roaster . april, shells . feb., eggs . may, feed . march, eggs . june, feed . april, eggs . july, feed . may, eggs . aug., feed . june, eggs . oct., feed . july, eggs . nov., feed . aug., eggs . ------ sept., eggs . total $ . sept., roaster . oct., eggs . oct., premium . nov., eggs . ------ $ . ------ profit $ . two of my hens died during the first year, leaving six, hence these six paid a profit of one dollar and one and one half cent each, above cost of feed. leslie e. card how one young woman made a start with poultry we had long dreamed of a country home, my mother and i--of a place where living expenses would be lessened and which would be pleasant during the summer for my sisters, who teach eight months of the year--a place where we could add materially to our income by keeping chickens. after discarding the idea of buying near new york city, because of the higher value of land and greater cost of living, we chose a place of twelve acres on the edge of an aristocratic old town in western new york. being within the corporation limits we have water and sewer connections, hardware and lumber delivered (which is quite an item when one is building poultry houses); and, best of all, the expressman comes for all eggs and poultry. a woman intending to go into the poultry business will certainly find such a location a great advantage over being farther from town. the increase in taxes is slight. the cost of expressage is, of course, greater than if we had located near new york city, but grain is cheaper. we purchased the place in the fall to have possession the following march. during the winter, i took the three months' poultry course at cornell university. the course is comprehensive and very practical. beside learning the principles of poultry husbandry, i gained confidence and courage. we paid two thousand six hundred dollars for the property and spent four hundred dollars more in plumbing and repairs on the house. the place consists of about twelve acres of very good land, especially suited for poultry, being somewhat sandy and sloping enough for drainage. the house is small but well built. the view is magnificent, and the place is easily adaptable to some charming bits of landscape gardening which good taste and personal supervision can accomplish without expensive gardener's fees. we first built some brooder houses, gasolene heated, as used at cornell, and purchased day-old chicks of a good laying strain. late in the summer we built a five-pen laying house, the pens being twenty by twenty feet, using one pen for a feed room. the entire first year we took care of the poultry ourselves, with the assistance of a schoolboy who worked for his board. most of the land was in hay, which we hired cut and sold, and we raised some corn. i knew nothing about farming, and was so interested in chickens that i had little time to study; however, i got the cornell bulletins on alfalfa and started an acre according to their suggestions. this has been successful and is fine feed for poultry. the second spring we hired a man by the month. one man can take care of twelve hundred hens and the horse, carry coal, and drive for us some of the time. the regular farm work we hire done by the day. a woman needs to pay special attention to keeping down the labour expenses. the laying hens have about three acres for yards. this is divided into three different yards, one for the four hundred best pullets which i take the time to trap-nest, and the third one to be alternated with the other two so that they can all be ploughed and seeded, in order to keep the ground from becoming contaminated. i have planted cherry trees in one yard and will in the others later, to furnish shade for the fowls. i chose cherries for various reasons. they can stand the enrichment and the treatment of the land necessary for poultry; also, if they are well cared for, sprayed, etc., i can get a fancy market for them at home. the place had been noted in former years for its fine cherry orchard, so i believed the soil and location to be well adapted to them. we felt we could not afford to build an incubator cellar, so we moved the furniture from a north-east bedroom where we placed three four-hundred-egg incubators. we closed the east shutters so that the morning sun would not interfere with the temperature and used the north window for ventilation. it was successful and convenient. the brooder houses are located near the house as long as the little chicks need heat. i have started a hedge for a windbreak in front of them, which will also screen the poultry part of the plantation from the house. when the chicks no longer need heat the hovers of the brooder houses are removed and roosts put in. the houses, which are on runners, are drawn to a cornfield as soon as the corn has grown enough not to be injured by the chicks. here they have free range all summer. by moving the first hatches to some shack houses, which are cheaply built, when the chicks no longer need heat the brooder houses can be used once again. there are two cornfields for growing the pullets, to be used in alternate years so the ground will be fresh. the corn gives shade and a sense of security, besides furnishing a considerable part of the winter feed. i hope to be able to grow corn for several successive years on the same ground by sowing either clover or rape at the last cultivation to furnish humus for the land. the following were our initial expenses: -egg incubators $ . brooder houses . shack houses . laying pen for , hens , . fences . tools and equipment for poultry . --------- total $ , . last year i cleared two dollars over the cost of feed from each of my layers, from the sale of eggs alone. the pleasure and freedom of country life are worth much. a garden with high quality vegetables, fruit of all kinds and varieties, fresh eggs and poultry, goes a long way in making the cost of living less. (we save cracked, small, or misshapen eggs for our own use.) with a saddle horse and a tennis court, life in the country is far from dull. ava hooker preserving eggs for winter use when eggs are cheap and plenty is the time when it will pay to preserve some for winter use. remember, though, that no amount of preserving, or cold storing will make a fresh egg out of an old egg. as infertile eggs keep better than fertile ones, it is well to separate the laying hens from the roosters when the hatching season is over. cold storage is undoubtedly the best method for keeping eggs in wholesale quantities, but for home consumption there is nothing more satisfactory than a preservative called water glass which is _sodium silicate_ and can be bought in crystal or liquid form at drug stores. prof. j. e. rice of cornell university says that "the liquid form is very much to be preferred owing to the fact that it is very difficult to dissolve the crystal. one part of water glass to nine parts of water makes a liquid having a consistency not quite heavy enough to cause the eggs to come to the surface, but still sufficiently strong to furnish the coating which prevents the air from entering the shells." stone jars are recommended as inexpensive and not likely to leak. eggs taken out after nearly a year in the water glass and washed look like fresh eggs. as to taste, a very fastidious person might find the flavour not quite right when served as boiled eggs. in all other ways they are entirely satisfactory. with water glass, eggs can be preserved for less than two cents a dozen. in communities where the price of eggs varies from a cent apiece to four cents apiece it would be very profitable to preserve all the surplus. raising guinea fowl what would you expect if you ordered "american pheasant" from a bill of fare in a london restaurant? no matter what you expected, when the bird came onto the table it would be guinea hen! this is a dish you probably never ate at home unless you live in the south, "where they know what's good," or make a practice of dining at fashionable hotels where they serve fancy game and poultry. most of the guinea fowls marketed in this country are put into cold storage and sent to england. they also bring a good price in city markets in this country. farm boys and girls all over the country are familiar with the strident squawk and the furtive, hunching trot of the speckled guinea fowl. i doubt if any farmer could tell why he harbours one on the premises, unless it is to warn his chickens of the presence of danger. i know of very few people in the north who eat either eggs or birds (if they know it), and the young are very seldom seen. here is a really valuable game bird which silly prejudice is depriving of its fair share of attention. if farm boys realized that there is a good and growing market for guinea fowls, eggs, and birds, they would read this: a fashionable new york hotel served three thousand of these birds between january first and april thirteenth, nineteen hundred and five. listen to the prices: from one dollar to one dollar and a half per pair for young broilers in midwinter in the large northern cities. eggs twice the price of hens' eggs. taking into consideration the fact that they are hardier even as chicks than ordinary poultry and that the market is strictly fancy and not oversupplied, the chances for success in guinea raising are good. in beginning this branch of business it is not best to buy old fowls. they are swift of wing, and they are extremely likely to take "french leave" unless closely confined for a week or more to their new quarters. this confinement is not very good for them. my advice is to begin with a setting of fifteen eggs under a common hen in may or june. the eggs are smaller than hens' eggs and have good, strong shells. they take from twenty-six to thirty days to hatch. the treatment and care of young guinea fowls varies from that given to young chickens in a few particulars only, _e. g._, the chicks should be fed very _soon_ after hatching and need a large percentage of animal food when first hatched. dry bread crumbs and hard-boiled eggs minced finely or pieces of cooked meat cut very fine are a good first meal. bread and milk and finely chopped lettuce, cress, or other vegetation should be given a day or two later. they will pick up innumerable insects if allowed the privileges of the garden or fruit plantation. little guineas should have access to feed all the time as a few hours without food is very likely to prove fatal. like little pheasants they require a greater percentage of animal food than chickens because if in the wild they would eat little else. soft grains should follow the earlier rations, and the mixtures given to ordinary poultry should gradually take the place of these. old guinea fowls have the reputation for making very tough meat. for this reason it is better to market them while the breast bone is still tender, the claws still short and sharp, and before the crest or helmet has reached its full size or changed colour. in young birds the helmet is nearly black, growing lighter with age. ordinarily it is more economical when raising a few guinea fowls not to confine them to runs, in which they are less hardy. partial confinement, such as coming to the barn yard to roost and appearing regularly to be fed, is more practical. if kept in runs it is necessary to cover the pens. high roosts should be provided. during the laying season the hens are almost certain to hide their nests and need close watching. they may lay in nest boxes if these are in dim, secluded corners. guinea hens are very wary and may resent having their nests visited, by quitting. also, the hens seem to be able to count and will usually desert their own nests if all but one or two eggs are taken away. they are rather impatient sitters, often leaving the nest when the eggs are half incubated or when the first chick is ready to go, even though they have a dozen pipped eggs. the little ones are, like little turkeys, susceptible to dampness and cold. very early and very late hatchings are undesirable. raising turkeys among the pictures which my memory calls up is that of an old bushel basket by the kitchen stove on a damp spring morning. from the comforting folds of an old flannel petticoat in the depths of the basket came the feeble "peep-peawp" of a dozen or more miserable little turkey chicks rescued from the shower. what a chase they had given us through the wet tangles of grass, weeds, and bushes, scooting to cover like partridges, hidden by their colouring almost as effectually as their wild cousins. we shall never be quite sure that we got them all, for we weren't certain how many there were originally. if the chill had not penetrated to their vitals, and these important organs lie disastrously near the pin-feathers, we had been in time to save them. experiences like these impress upon the minds of farm children much that is characteristic of the turkey. as grown-ups we read of the precautions necessary in raising turkeys and realize that we knew all that years ago. a turkey hen will stay close around the barn yard eating and drinking with the other fowls all winter, roosting in convenient tree tops, and giving no hint of wildness or firmness of purpose. but in april you miss her. she may return about meal time, take a dust bath perhaps, then she is off again. now you must test your wits against her instincts and see if you can find her nest. she may have secreted her eggs in a perfectly safe barrel, provided with straw and cunningly secluded in the shrubbery. she is likely, though, to go far afield and give you a merry chase. it is wise to take away the eggs each day until she has finished and wishes to sit. then you may give her a nestful, fifteen to eighteen, or you can set the eggs under hens and when the turkey's broody spell is over she will lay again. four weeks is the time required to hatch turkey eggs. newly hatched turkeys are far from spry. they have no interest in food nor in the world about them. it is forty-eight hours or even longer before they begin to take notice. hard-boiled eggs chopped fine is a good first meal for them. some growers take a pint of sweet milk in a saucepan, let it come to a boil, and stir into it two eggs well beaten. this makes a sort of custard and this quantity is said to be enough for fifty new turkey chicks. cottage cheese without salt is recommended. a dusting of black pepper in the food is good for week-old turkeys, especially in cool weather. two deadly enemies of little turkeys are lice and wet. these are responsible for the high rate of mortality in flocks of all breeds. keep them free from these by all known methods and with ordinary care in other details your profits are safe. if you tide over the first two months you will see the delicate chicks transformed into hardy little poults, holding their own with any kind of fowls. i don't know of any one who ever made a success of turkeys on a small lot. their habit of ranging can be restrained to the extent of keeping them off the neighbours, but close cooping opposes their natural instincts. they are great insect eaters and will pick up a fair living away from the feed trough. it is best to train them by a regular evening feeding to roost at home. you will want to count them frequently, especially as november draws near and the price begins to soar. there are a number of breeds in cultivation. the biggest and perhaps the hardiest is the bronze turkey. some consider their flesh less delicate than that of the smaller kinds. there is always a good market for any size. if all your neighbours have bronze turkeys and the flocks are always getting mixed, why not try the buff or black or the white holland? the latter are almost as beautiful an ornament to the country home as peacocks, and can be seen at a great distance because of their brilliant white plumage. if one wants to get enthusiastic over turkeys let him drive through a thrifty farming community in the fall and catch glimpses of the sunshine reflected from the burnished backs of the great flocks which ornament every farm yard. or, if inclined to a meal of turkey, just inquire the price on the farm or in the market, and you will decide to raise some for your own use next year, and a few to sell. raising peacocks we have it on the authority of the curator of birds of the new york zoölogical garden, mr. c. william beebe, that peafowls are not difficult to raise if the owner is watchful. wouldn't it be a triumph to raise a family of these wonderful birds? mr. beebe says also that "peacocks are so common that we sometimes fail to appreciate their really wonderful colours." i wonder if that can be true. they were so uncommon in the mississippi valley when i was a child that i never saw one; it was less than ten years ago that i saw for the first time this regal bird spread his wonderful tail in the full sunlight. it was one of mr. beebe's own pets and i shall never forget nor fail to appreciate the sight. a peahen lays fewer eggs than most birds of her size. she will lay three times a year if you succeed in "changing her current of thought" when she is broody. she usually wishes to sit on the first six eggs and as she has pretty good judgment in placing her nest and is a patient and courageous mother, you had better trust her to bring up her family, unless you wish to raise the first lot under hens or turkey mothers. like young turkeys, the little peachicks are very tender and susceptible to dampness. woe unto them if the chill of an early may rain gets into their bones! this is the time when watchfulness on the owner's part is necessary. for newly hatched peachicks a few meals of finely chopped, hard-boiled eggs and minced lettuce are right. as they develop appetites, feed some of the mixtures prepared for game, pheasants, etc. by all means let them have space to run in; a little coop is bad for their health. make it twelve feet long at least. they will eat quantities of insects and will need feed only morning and evening after the first month or two. corn, wheat, barley, and millet make a good mixture. no regular house is required for peafowls, though shelter must be provided against rain. they prefer to roost high, where the air is fresh and cool. wind and cold weather they like. indian peacocks cost twenty dollars to thirty dollars a pair. you can grow them for far less from eggs and sell the birds. they live to be twenty or thirty years old. if you are convinced that you want to try your hand at any of these kinds of fancy poultry, collect all the information you can first. visit some successful poultry plant, ask questions, take notes. get all the government and state experiment station bulletins available. breeders often publish information about rearing birds. they are glad to help any one who is interested. it increases their business. write to your agricultural college for information. they may not have a bulletin on the subject, but the men in their poultry department are glad to answer questions. giving advice is part of their business and you can count on it being good advice. raising geese march is a good month to set goose eggs. as it takes them a little over a month to hatch, they will come out in april and the early birds catch the best prices. it is really surprising that more farmer's boys and girls do not raise geese. they will "board themselves" if given a chance at pasture, but need fattening with ground grain if held for christmas trade. goslings can be raised under hens, six eggs in a nest, but the goose is an admirable mother. unlike most of his feathered kindred the gander is a true helpmate, often "spelling" his mate during the sitting period and caring for the young afterward with great solicitude. watchful care is needed to prevent the damp, cold april from getting the best of little goslings. they should begin their careers with a meal of bread crumbs, scalded meal, and hard-boiled eggs, chopped vegetable tops and grass included in the mash. they eat small quantities at a time, but need it frequently to stay their stomachs. water for drinking should be accessible, clean, and fresh always. many a sick gosling can trace his disorder directly to the bad water. a large tub of water for bathing, too, is advisable for geese after they are feathered. toulouse and embden geese are tremendous creatures, even reaching the enormous weight of twenty-five pounds. their meat is highly prized in european countries and is becoming popular in america so that a good market is assured. the business of fattening geese for market is quite specialized now. men engaged in this business visit the farms where a few geese are kept and buy the eight-weeks old goslings for seventy-five cents to one dollar and a half apiece. if you can get this price your profit is fair and certain and your work ended. you can put your cash into some other business. raising geese is a good summer vacation job. on a goose fattening farm near a good eastern city market as many as fifteen or twenty thousand geese are fattening at one time. geese on farms when i was a girl were kept principally for their feathers which found their way into the pillows and feather beds then used. the best pillows in my house are filled with the feathers plucked from geese with which i was personally acquainted. these feathers have a high market value, higher when you buy than when you sell to be sure, but you may be able to supply a local market and thus get a better price. geese, like all the other feathered tribes, moult naturally in late summer. if the live geese are to be plucked, it should be done very carefully, three or four feathers at a time. the geese do not show evidence of minding much when they find that your designs are peaceable. only the breast feathers and the smallest ones from the back are ordinarily taken for home use. avoid the feathers with coarse stiff shafts. no down should be removed. goose quills make good toothpicks, cleaned and scalded and trimmed into shape. or they may be sold separately as feathers. geese are plucked before sending to market. most of the feathers and some of the down now extensively used by manufacturers of bed clothing comes from the marketed geese. raising ducks probably in many neighbourhoods you would be laughed at if you tried to raise ducks without a pond or stream of water. it is not customary. true, if you have them for ornament principally, they look best disporting themselves in what seems to be their natural element. but if you believe there is money in raising ducks for market, nothing is easier than to prove that the people who laughed were not up to date. you have heard the old saying on a very wet day, "good weather for ducks." don't you believe it. if you go into duck raising you must be just as careful about ducks getting wet as you are about your chicks. the duck must have plenty of water inside, all he will drink, but keep him dry outside. little ducks are hardy if kept dry and warm. even cold drinking water will give them cramps and should be avoided. the drinking vessels should be so covered that the duckling can get only the bill wet. the advantage of ducks over chicks is this: they do not bring quite so big a price per pound, but they grow so much faster during the first two months of their lives. ducks should be marketed at eight to ten weeks old. at ten weeks old a good broiler will weigh about two pounds and will sell for seventy-five cents, but a duckling will weigh four to five pounds, which at twenty-five cents a pound will give you from one dollar to one dollar and twenty-five cents. the cost of feeding the two will be about the same. ducks have other advantages over chickens. they are not nearly so subject to vermin, though lice sometimes attack their heads. they seem to thrive in confinement and cost less to house than chickens. their feathers will bring a good price, and eggs of pure breeds for hatching are in demand. they are excellent layers, even better than some hens, as experience will show. if a duck lays nine dozen eggs at four dollars a dozen, and raises a family, she does a pretty good year's work, and is more profitable to keep than some cows. she eats grubs and insects, too, and grass and surplus from the vegetable garden. the commonest practice for beginners is to set duck eggs under hens in april and may. the biggest varieties are the best to raise as all are hardy, fast growers, and good layers. the eggs take about twenty-eight days to incubate. treat the hen and nest for lice just as when sitting on hens' eggs. when ducklings are twenty-four hours old, they are ready for their first meal. mashed potatoes mixed with meal of corn or oats and middlings are good for them. milk, too, is excellent as for all fowls. begin to stuff them immediately; you will find them quite agreeable. green food of all kinds--grass, lettuce, cabbage, vegetable tops--all chopped small, fills them up and is good for them. such things as turnips and potatoes should be cooked. ground meat should be fed three times a week. have the feeding troughs so arranged that they can get their shovels into it but cannot walk over the food and foul it; same thing with the water. feed four times a day. they must not get empty. growth will not be rapid unless continuous. grit should be supplied. on duck farms one hundred ducklings are kept in brooders five by seven feet, with yards five by sixteen feet. they are kept absolutely clean and dry. those you keep over winter for next year's egg supply should have access to a pond and grass. old ducks do not bring high prices for table use and do not put on weight very fast. it was perhaps a young boston housekeeper who asked when her market man offered her pekin ducks for her table, "how are they esteemed?" he replied, "oh, my wife, she don't never steam ducks. she just stuffs 'em like you would a chicken and bakes 'em." raising squabs for market a few years' experience in raising fancy pigeons for pets is the best kind of training for a young man who wants to raise squabs for market. this business on a small scale ought not to take all one's time and can easily be combined with some other business or profession or with attending college. but your experience, varied though it may be, has not acquainted you with all that is worth knowing on the subject. the time has gone by when a man can afford to ignore books and bulletins even on a subject upon which he may himself be an authority. a library of pigeon literature will increase your wisdom. a practical man writing of his experience in your business may save you hundreds of dollars if you heed his advice. don't scoff at college bulletins as your grandfather probably did. he had reason, but the bulletin is not what it was. great strides forward have been made. visit some big squab raiser's plant and take mental and written notes of significant facts observed. the colour of his pigeon loft does not affect the price he gets for his squabs, but the quality of the grain he feeds has a direct influence on the fullness of his wallet. full-blooded homers are declared by many to be the best, all things considered, for table use. good, mated birds of this variety can be bought for about two dollars a pair. they are hardy, bright, active on their feet, and the squabs have a larger breast than some of the other sorts. homers are not all the same colour; some are white, others black, reddish, and mixed colours. good stock will rear six or eight pairs of squabs in a year, while some exceptionally good ones will raise ten pairs. if you make a clear profit of one dollar and twenty-five cents per year on an average from each pair you should do well. it is not profitable to keep birds which produce less than five pairs a year. a record must be kept in order to weed out worthless birds. you do not wish to spend your leisure running a free boarding house for pigeons. you must know which are the big producers and keep only their young as breeders. nests should be numbered and every bird have a leg label with a number corresponding to a numbered description in your book of records. this is good economics. squabs of homers should be ready for selling at four weeks old; they should be fully feathered but still in the nest. the heaviest grade weigh eight pounds per dozen and these bring highest market prices. lighter birds are considered poor quality and bring a correspondingly low price. prices vary from four dollars and fifty cents to one dollar and seventy-five cents per dozen. dispose of pairs which habitually produce light-weight squabs as indicated by your records. minute directions for killing and dressing squabs for market are given in farmers' bulletin no. , which every squab raiser should have in his library. there is, as yet, no indication of over-production in squab raising; although many more are grown every year, the demand is still on the increase. it is a good business for two people to go into together, a brother and sister, two brothers, or adjoining neighbours. descriptions of house and furnishings, fly, foods and feeding, and details of care are given in chapter iv under "raising fancy pigeons." raising pheasants the young people on a big ranch or estate with its up-to-date poultry plant, raising not only plain and fancy chickens, but pigeons, ducks, geese, turkeys, and guinea fowl, all attended by men hired for the purpose, may look about in vain for a chance to try their hands at raising anything with feathers. to such boys and girls i say, "did you ever see any pheasants?" "at the zoölogical gardens, yes." aren't they beauties? how would you like to grow pheasants? there is a line that has not been overworked. profit in it, too. look at prices you must pay for birds and get an idea of how yours will sell later. numerous experiments in pheasant growing have been tried in this country. it is well to know of these and to profit by them. some men raise many varieties, importing them from every quarter of the globe. their ideal is to have a complete collection. a visit to a large aviary will give you some idea of what a gorgeous family of birds the pheasants make. they are highly prized as game birds. in germany they are served in a most surprising way. the edible parts are cooked and arranged on a platter on a bed of parsley. at one end of the platter the cook puts the head with its beautiful neck ruff and at the other end the tail feathers. imagine the waiter's triumphant entrance into the dining-room, platter held aloft, and the pheasant's brilliant tail feathers streaming far behind like pennants from a mast top! the pheasant most easily grown in the united states is the ringneck or mongolian pheasant imported from its home in china. there is hardly a state in the union where no attempt has been made to raise pheasants. it is an industry that appeals to sportsmen everywhere. massachusetts, ohio, new york, indiana, illinois, california, new jersey, and some other states have made pheasant rearing a part of the work of their fish and game commissions. the state of oregon is the only one where a remarkable success has been won. evidently the climate and conditions there were ideal. about three dozen pheasants were set free in the willamette valley in eighteen hundred and eighty-one. so rapid was the increase that when the first open season of two and one half months was declared eleven years later it was estimated that fifty thousand birds were shot the first day! they have continued to increase in that state and towards the north, and many other states get their supply for propagation from oregon. the first thing to do after becoming interested in pheasants is to learn something about their nature and needs and to consider whether your conditions are such as would make the business possible or profitable. they are not domestic fowls but more like the jungle fowl from which, in all likelihood, our barn yard fowls are descended. but they can be raised in captivity if due regard is taken of their habits and characteristics. books and bulletins are mentioned in the appendix of this book. in some respects pheasants are very like chickens, being especially susceptible to the diseases of the poultry yard. in england, pheasant rearing is quite common. one sees in open meadow land on great estates the tidy coops where anxious biddies cluck after their wayward foster children. it is a pretty sight to see the fifteen or twenty brown-striped birds scuttling wildly to her protecting wing at the approach of danger. pheasants' eggs for shipping should be most carefully packed in cotton, hay, or excelsior to insure safety from jar. you do not have to begin with grown birds which cost five dollars a pair for ring-necks, as the eggs are best set under hens. the eggs should be set in late april or early may for best results. bantams are often preferred, but any good mother will do if she is cleanly and not too clumsy. great precautions should be taken that the nest be clean, and that the hen should have all the comforts of home, _e. g._, a dust bath, clean water, and regular feeding. can you afford to run the risk of young chickens getting lice as soon as they are hatched? well, you simply can't take any chances with baby pheasants. hens should be dusted three times during incubation with insect powder. visit an aviary or a pheasantry if you can and ask questions and take observations on how to make nests, coops, and pens. study your books, too, and be guided by the experience of others. while you wait for your young pheasants to hatch there is plenty to do in preparing coops and learning what to feed them when they arrive. much of our lack of success in rearing all sorts of wild game is because we know so little about what they eat. we probably make lots of mistakes with the animals we have domesticated but the more adaptable of them have grown accustomed to civilized food, and thrive. there could be no better place for a rearing ground for young pheasants than an orchard where clover abounds. coops, like chicken coops, should be rain proof, well ventilated, bottomless, and so built that they can be closed to keep out vermin and to shut the chicks in when the grass is wet. pheasants are omnivorous but they need more fresh animal food than is supplied by ordinary "chick mixtures," to balance their ration. probably they share with other young birds a relish for insects and while their mothers do not actually bring this food to the open bills of their young, they take the flock to the feeding ground and show them how to find worms, bugs, caterpillars, etc., by scratching. there are ways employed by experienced pheasant growers of raising a supply of meal worms, maggots, and ant pupæ for their flocks, but cheap, fresh meat ground very fine furnishes suitable animal food. during the first three or four days after feeding is begun a custard made of ten eggs to a quart of milk, baked well, is their best food. hard-boiled eggs finely minced (put through a potato ricer), fine bread crumbs, and fresh vegetables cut into small bits can be given during the first week. later, small grains of a great variety of kinds. a sprinkle of red pepper in their food during cold, damp days is good for half-grown chicks. the young pheasants must have access to fine grit and gravel and they must have fresh, cool water all the time. in building pens for pheasants we should take into consideration their habits, their safety, and their lack of hardiness in domestication. select the site for the pens after due thought. there must be both shade and sunshine. the soil should be well drained and rich enough to grow grass and clover. each run should be at least ten feet by ten with netting of medium mesh for sides, eight feet high, cover of the same. a house is an unnecessary expense, as it is pheasant nature to stay in the open or seek a covert of brush. a rain proof shed, where they can retire when it rains, and where a dust bath will always be in readiness, is a necessity. wild birds of prey evidently consider it perfectly legitimate to visit pheasant runs. raccoons, foxes, rats, and mink, too, may work ruin there. the cover of netting protects from above and it may be necessary, where burrowing animals abound, to dig a trench a foot deep and set the netting down in the ground that far. a few steel traps set unbaited along the outside of the runs may prevent a serious loss and provide you with a handsome mink or raccoon fur skating or motoring cap. severe cold, even storms, are not fatal to pheasants. provide perches in the pen as well as in the shed and they will usually choose those in the open air. because of their great timidity the birds should be disturbed as little as possible. unfamiliar sights and sounds alarm and distress them. what a triumph it would be to induce your pheasants to eat from your hand! it can be done by exercising great patience, gentleness, and perseverance. all you know about chicken raising will be useful now. make up your mind that everything that is bad for chicks is simply fatal to young pheasants; for instance, wet feet, lice, dirty, or sun-warmed water, over-feeding, wrong feeding. if you play this game you must expect a constant succession of hazards, of narrow escapes, and losses. but it is a noble game. iv raising animals for pets shetland ponies the perfect pet is the shetland pony. this diminutive horse is a model of gentleness, patience, good-nature, and horse sense. one writer says of him: "if more than eight children get on his back he will shake himself like a wet newfoundland dog and then stand motionless, while they pick themselves up and out from among his four hoofs." so many generations of ponies have lived right in the family circles of their cold little island that children do not make them nervous. is there a prettier sight than a well-groomed shetland pony, a carriage made in lilliput, and a small driver, and a reasonable number of little passengers of assorted sizes? a goat team is a joke, a dog team is impracticable, a team of young oxen is too plodding and lacks style. the pony outfit is charming and always delights everybody. but who likes to see a grown man in a pony carriage? a small grown person may be necessary, especially if the baby is to be taken for a drive, but a full-sized adult makes a pony carriage look top heavy. the shetland pony is a sort of "boy horse" so far as work is concerned. (some say, too, that he gets out of as much work as possible.) there is no better helper at light jobs than the pony. like the yak: "he will carry and fetch you may ride on his back or lead him about with a string." indeed he will follow his master about without a string and can carry a good load. with a light cart or wagon suited to his build and a boy to do the rest, one of these hardy little fellows will be of greatest help in doing the endless odd jobs that always fall to the boy's lot. the pony will more than earn his board if the boy earns his. [illustration: photograph by helen w. cooke. the shetland pony is the ideal pet] a thoroughbred shetland pony should be less than forty-five inches high and weigh less than three hundred pounds. many are raised in this country. a boy is lucky who has a chance to train a pony colt. training should be begun early. one successful breeder says that his children do all the training of his ponies. his boy, seven years old, broke the first one they raised to drive to a little wagon. little boys and girls under ten take entire care of the ponies in another man's herd. no doubt their father or mother oversees the work, but it is fun for the children to groom and feed and pet these wee horses. breeding shetland ponies is a very practical way to make a few hundred dollars a year. they eat less than full-sized horses and will keep fat on grass from frost till frost. the price of ponies is per cent. higher than it was five years ago. this makes the cost of going into this business higher, but the sales begin the second year and selling prices are higher, too. shetlands are hardy and require shelter only in bitter cold weather. ponies of various sorts are becoming far commoner here than formerly, so the demand is increasing. i wish every boy and every girl whose heart is set on having a pony could have one. let us all raise ponies until there are enough for every one. rabbits, guinea pigs, and cavies rabbits, guinea pigs, and cavies are not poultry, yet there is always a department devoted to them in the great poultry show at madison square garden in new york. it was there that i first made the acquaintance of these three kinds of popular pets. many a boy has made a neat little addition in two figures, at least, to his college fund, by raising hares, rabbits, guinea pigs, white rats, fancy mice, or cavies. common white rabbits can be bought for one dollar a pair, but these days it is not uncommon for a breeder to pay from fifteen dollars to twenty-five dollars for wearers of blue ribbons. if you had guinea pigs for sale you would be glad that the best ones cannot be bought for less than ten dollars apiece. rabbits are the most popular of these pets, while cavies come next. there is just now a great demand for cavies. they are odd little creatures, neither intelligent nor affectionate. neither are they very hardy; in the north they have to be kept indoors in cold weather. cavies are easy enough to feed, for they eat everything that is set before them, and keep at it all the time. all sorts of vegetables, bread and milk, and corn are the "chief of their diet." before going into the business of raising any of these creatures it is well to consult some other boy who has had some experience and find out if there are any peculiar difficulties he can help you provide for. maybe your locality and conditions are better fitted for one than the other. a dealer will often be able to give you valuable information about the different sorts of pets, and may be able to recommend the best book on the subject. fancy pigeons if i were a boy or a girl to-day there is nothing i should so much like to do as to raise pigeons. not that i think it an easy job. (wouldn't you almost as soon work as to look for an easy job, anyhow?) there are lots of disappointments, discouragements, and hard labour about pigeon rearing. but young folks with hobbies like this are getting more fun out of life than the idle ones. pigeons are hardy, easily tamed, prolific, and can be made to pay their own way. it would be impossible to associate with them, care for them, learn their nature and habits, without becoming thoroughly interested in them. no pets could be more gentle, more beautiful, more docile than pigeons. success in rearing them will not be immediate, but will come with experience. the business of raising fancy pigeons for pets is quite distinct from squab raising, treated in the chapter on poultry, and is far more likely to interest boys and girls. if you were to go to a big poultry show you would be bewildered at the number of breeds of fancy pigeons. the pouters, the tumblers, the barbs, the dragoons, nuns, helmets, the fantails, and carriers are all there in endless variety. what you like will be different from what i like, probably, so it is not easy to recommend. beginners would do well to choose some one variety and try their hand at that before investing very extensively. the flying tumbler is recommended by many good authorities. these are not difficult to breed, are small eaters, do not need to be caged continually, and although they are to be had in nearly all the colours of the rainbow they are not very expensive. it is not good economy to buy cheap stock, in anything. though by getting good ones you must start with a single pair, it is the best economy. your increase will be very much more valuable. you should ask the breeder for a written guarantee that the pigeons are as represented, healthy, young, mated stock. if he does not care to give the guarantee, i should not consider him reliable. pigeons are not much influenced by elaborate dovecotes. they are quite as happy living the simple life in a dry-goods box, provided it contains the conveniences they require, and is placed where the light will be plentiful, the air pure, and the roof rain proof. city boys and girls need not sigh and give up the idea because they have no place for pigeons. the attic or the roof serves them just as well as the barn yard, perhaps better, as mice and rats are less likely to disturb them on housetops. every precaution should be taken however against these vermin. cracks, doors and ventilators should be covered with fine wire netting. even the entrances, holes six inches high by four in width, should be protected by tin guards which rats and mice cannot creep over. [illustration: net for capturing pigeons] [illustration: pigeon roost] each pair of pigeons will need two nesting compartments. a good kind is described in farmers' bulletin no. , and is constructed as follows: inch boards, twelve inches wide, with parallel cross cleats nailed on nine inches apart, are set upright full twelve inches apart against one wall, and securely fastened at top and bottom. cut twelve-inch squares of inch boards for the bottoms of the nest boxes. it is easy to see how convenient these sliding bottoms will be to clean. provide small earthenware dishes as nests, with a foundation of tobacco stems, to discourage lice. the birds will build nests of straw above the tobacco stems, the male bringing the material which the female arranges to suit her ideas of house furnishing. some growers use sawdust in the nest. if your pigeons are allowed their liberty with no shelter save the pigeon loft, perches will be needed inside. as the pigeon's feet are formed for perching on flat surfaces instead of on rounded branches like many of their feathered relatives, you should provide what suits their needs. a good form of perch is made as follows. cut half-inch, dressed material four or five inches wide into five or six-inch lengths. nail together two of these pieces in v-shape. this can be nailed to a square foundation piece and hung angle up on the wall of the loft. the slanting sides afford no lodging for droppings and as only one bird at a time can perch on so small a place, quarrelling is avoided. iron brackets with perches attached are also used. two nest dishes are provided for each pair, as very often the hen will lay a second pair of eggs before the earliest young ones are ready to leave the nest. the male pigeon is untiring in his devotion to the young and their mother, taking his turn on the nest regularly during the seventeen days of incubation, doing his share of the work, and even beating his wife if she shows any disposition to slight her duties. if the pigeons are confined in a wire fly, perches should be provided there, and board walks for them to alight upon and walk about on should be placed at a distance of four or five feet from the ground. nothing in the shape of roosts or cross pieces should be put in the fly, as the pigeons need all the space in which to exercise their wings. [illustration: a fly for pigeons. put no roosts across the fly. flying against these would injure the birds] for one hundred birds the fly should be thirty-two feet long, eight feet high, and the entire width of the house. it will be a fine problem in practical arithmetic to figure how much netting will be required to cover the frame of this fly, how many posts, and how much one by four-inch stuff will be needed to complete the frame. the advice of some one who has built a pigeon fly would be most valuable to the inexperienced person, and the pictures in books, bulletins, and magazine articles will be helpful in making your plans. holes, at least two, rounded at the top and six inches each way, provide for the going and coming of the birds between house and fly. for yourself, an outside door into the fly is a necessity, of course. before installing your pigeons in their house, use the whitewash brush there freely. into each gallon of your mixture of lime and water put a half-teaspoonful of crude carbolic acid. clean sand is recommended for the floor of both fly and house. it is very bad practice to scatter food for pigeons on the floor or ground. you will see, if you try it, how much is wasted; any that they leave becomes soiled, moulds, or sours, and if eaten in that condition is nearly sure to injure the birds. a shallow feeding trough should be placed near the centre of the house. fine charcoal, table salt, and cracked oyster shells should be kept permanently before the birds, the boxes cleaned out at least weekly. clean water in stone or galvanized iron fountains should always be there, too. daily or semi-daily is none too frequent to clean these vessels. pigeons are not gluttonous feeders but "they want what they want, when they want it." in other words, regularity is important to their well-being. an early morning feed, six-thirty in summer, seven in winter, of equal parts cracked corn, wheat, and peas, and an afternoon feed, at four in summer, three in winter, of equal parts cracked corn (with no fine meal in it), kaffir corn, millet seed, and peas, is a fair ration. pigeons like a variety but not as a steady diet. hemp may be substituted for millet once or twice a week; a little broken rice, green vegetable food, like lettuce and onions, will be taken sparingly, and tiny bits of fat bacon seem to be acceptable. nothing but first-class grain should ever be set before pigeons. the quantity needed should be determined by watching. if food is left in trough, feed less next time. water for bathing is as necessary for pigeons as the dust bath is for hens. a broad galvanized iron pan three inches deep makes a first-rate bathtub. although fancy plumbing is out of place in a pigeon house, it is the greatest convenience to have running water passing through a trough constantly; this solves completely the problem of sanitary drinking water. the best fanciers clean their houses weekly. with a few birds this may not be necessary. but when your nose gives unmistakable evidence that it is time, do not put it off. a spade to scrape the floor, an old knife for the nest boxes, and a broom are necessary utensils. mated birds will choose a nesting box after becoming accustomed to their new quarters. the nest pans, with their foundation of tobacco stems cut in six-inch lengths, should be in place, and a supply of short hay or straw where it can be found. two eggs are usually laid, with a day between and sitting begins as soon as the second egg is laid. if the sight of a young squab does not make you sick of your choice of a hobby, you are a hopeless case, and i predict great success for you. young robins are not beautiful to behold, but squabs are such ghastly looking little beasts, with nothing to recommend them except their entire helplessness. evidently the parents are well satisfied with the appearance of their offspring which look just as they expected, no doubt, and begin almost immediately to feed them. "pigeon milk" is injected into their open throats by the parent birds, in whose stomachs it has been manufactured. the squabs gain rapidly after a few days of this "milk" diet; pin-feathers replace the scanty yellow down in about a week. at three weeks they are able to walk, but are still fed by their parents, although grain is brought to them instead of the predigested food. although they are hardy, do not suppose that pigeons have no diseases. however, the author of a government bulletin on squab raising says that with "wholesome food, proper housing, and proper care, very little disease is usually encountered." to prevent disease, and avoid dampness in house and fly, keep the food and water untainted, and the house clean. it is very desirable, whether raising squabs for market or for pets, to keep a record of the performance of each pair. this is usually done by the use of numbered tags on the birds' legs. the record makes it possible to prevent inbreeding, gives you knowledge of whether certain pairs are profitable, and keeps up your own interest far more than haphazard methods do. bantams almost every family that keeps chickens has two or three "banties" for the children. what an amusing sight it is to see a tiny fuss-budget clucking and bristling to protect a half-dozen lubberly plymouth rock "broilers" that she has been inveigled into rearing. but the raising of pigmy fowls is not confined to the child's play of the chicken yard. at the big poultry shows almost every breed of fowl from brahma to silkie has a diminutive mimic, and the requirements for the dwarfs are just as rigid as for the big fellows. to be just right a bantam ought not to weigh much over a pound, the cock should be impetuous, pugnacious, and haughty; the hen should be smaller than her lord, and meek in demeanour except when her flock is in danger. bantams are very popular with amateurs who regard them as a sort of joke, but the poultry fanciers take them quite seriously. it is not unusual for the prize-winning bantams to bring as high prices as the heavy weights. game bantams are great favourites with fanciers. they are easily recognized by their game-fowl characteristics: tall, upright carriage, oval body tapering from shoulder to tail, very long legs and neck, small head, and almost no show of comb. there are eight standard varieties in america, and the game bantam club is interested in improving the breeds and increasing the popularity of the birds. as the varieties of bantams are pretty thoroughly mixed, it is no simple matter to breed birds fit for exhibition. but after all there is so much fun for boys and girls in growing any sort of pigmy chickens and such a good market for both eggs and pairs for pets that i wonder that more young people do not go into the business. bantams take less room than ordinary chickens which is an advantage on a small place. care should be taken to save for setting eggs of none but the smallest and most perfect members of the flock, and to dispose of any which are larger than the standard or poor in shape or colour or in any characteristics peculiar to bantams. if you start with eggs of some fine breed, try to keep your stock pure, and improve it by selecting the best individuals for breeding. in matters of housing, feeding, cleanliness, and care, bantams should be treated just like other chickens. the young of some varieties are exceedingly delicate and cannot stand the least neglect. these are more like little wild things, partridges or quail, than like domestic fowls. other varieties are as hardy as plymouth rocks, but any one who has tried it knows that raising plymouth rocks is no mere joke, especially in a cold, damp spring. if your father objects to your going into the bantam business instead of raising standard size fowls bring these arguments to bear upon him: bantams occupy one fourth the space. their food costs one fifth as much. their eggs are two thirds as big. pairs can easily be sold without expensive advertising. fancy fowls if you want to make the neighbour boys open their eyes, and the passers-by stand still to admire, try the experiment of raising fancy fowls. growing them for exhibition purposes is such a separate and distinct department of the poultry business and demands familiarity with many "show standards," "tricks of the trade," and special practices in breeding and grooming to bring a fowl up to a high score, that it may be best not to undertake to compete with more experienced breeders. a visit to a fancy poultry exhibition is like a trip to wonderland. just looking at the pictures of the prize winners, and studying the alluring advertisements arouses enthusiasm. but to read the accounts of the fanciers, or to hear them talk about the merits of their favourites makes a chicken lover fairly thrill with ardour. how to decide upon which variety to try is a hard problem. take a lot of things into consideration. discount what the enthusiasts say about the one they have for sale; they mean every word of it, but they are prejudiced. don't be influenced to select one breed when you really prefer another. here is a department where personal preference should cast the deciding vote; the one you like best is the best one for you. it is not well known except by specialists that there are so many distinct varieties in breeds of fowls. for example take the polish. there are blue polish, plain white, golden, white-crested, black, buff-laced, and silver; of the hamburgs there are black, silver-and gold-spangled, silver-and golden-penciled white, and so on through the list. the polish and the houdans are remarkable for their tremendous top knots, the hamburgs, lakenvelders, and many others for their wonderful plumage and colour combinations, while the most astonishing creatures in the whole chicken tribe are the yokahamas whose snow-white tail feathers trail gracefully behind them like a bride's gown and veil at a fashionable wedding. these must be the originals of the extraordinary fowls represented on japanese and filipino pottery and embroidery. it is not much wonder that fancy breeds are growing more popular in our country. although as a rule they are non-sitters, they are all described by their advocates as prize layers, some hens even reaching the remarkable record of two hundred eggs a year. the hamburgs, for example, are called "dutch everlasting layers." their eggs are smooth and "satiny white"; polish eggs are very large and snow-white, but they are not winter layers; houdans lay white eggs of great size and almost certain fertility, and are, besides, excellent table fowls; the lakenvelders rank with leghorns as layers and their eggs are also "of a porcelain whiteness" which insures a fancy market in new york where the preference is for white eggs. do not think that you can just as well house your fancy breeds in with your ordinary chickens. it is a mistake. they should be kept apart from the beginning. light hens of commoner breeds are successfully employed as foster-mothers for the fancy fowls, but it is important to provide separate pens even for the young. if young chicks are kept in the same run with those somewhat older, they are crowded away from the feeding dishes; chicks with top knots should never be raised with other sorts. the crest interferes with their sight, and they are not fighters and will allow themselves to be driven away from the food. crested chicks should be treated with a grease lice-destroyer at least once a fortnight. a little of the lard or sweet oil is enough but it should be worked into the feathers to be effectual. use powder on the hens, but not while the chicks are oily. making the neighbours gape in open-eyed astonishment is not all there is to raising fancy chickens. with a few years' experience in chicken raising back of you, it would not be risky to raise them for commercial purposes. the popularity of fancy chickens is just beginning in this country. there is a fine market for eggs for hatching, but as it is extremely important to keep the breeds pure your fancy birds should be kept by themselves practically the year round. most of the breeds mentioned are quite hardy, and the same care required for ordinary poultry as to housing, food, prevention of disease, cleanliness, and records will insure a good measure of success with fancy fowls. dogs raising dogs may prove a profitable business for any one who likes dogs, understands them, and is willing to doctor them when they are sick, and train them to good habits. an untrained dog is a nuisance, however well bred he may be. to start a small kennel does not require any more room than to start in the chicken business in a small way. just now the prices are so absurdly high on high-bred dogs of popular varieties that few but fanciers can afford to own the best stock. why is it not better to raise some first-rate but not fashionable breed, and not enter into competition with men whose living depends on the number of blue ribbons they can win at dog shows? buy a young female dog, teach her, and train her. get experience with one dog and her young ones before you put in much capital. find out by going to a good dog show what are the points of a good dog of your chosen breed, make out a score card, and mark your own dogs. sell for pets those which do not come up to the mark. i have before me a balance sheet made out by a young man who began raising white english bull terriers in nineteen hundred and three. in spite of a lot of bad luck, which, with better arrangements, need not have happened, he netted nearly a hundred dollars the first year and over two hundred the second year. this young man kept chickens, too, beside his regular business which kept him at an office seven hours a day; and he found dogs better money makers than chickens. in raising puppies there are three important essentials: the right sort of food, fresh, clean water to drink, and exercise. i believe more dogs get sick from water or lack of it than from any other one cause. if a dog's dish is not clean enough for you to drink out of yourself, then it is not fit for your pups. keep that in mind. fresh air and sunshine are as necessary for puppies as for children. kennels should be airy, face the south, and have shavings or straw bedding. authorities differ about a dog's food. it is safe to feed him about as you would a growing boy. like the boy he may overeat of his favourite dish. for breakfast, oatmeal or other cereal with milk and no sugar; for lunch, some dry dog biscuit or stale bread; for afternoon tea, soup or gravy thickened with boiled rice or corn mush. but a puppy's supper ought to be a good square meal because he is an outdoor sleeper, and it is easy for dogs to take cold on an empty stomach. for supper, then, give the puppies some bits of cooked meat, stale bread, and gravy or cooked vegetables. "never feed a puppy hot bread or any rich, greasy, or highly seasoned foods. avoid all sweets." doesn't that sound like a book on what children should eat? but it is quoted right out of a dog book. if your dogs get sick, eczema, distemper, or fits, consult a veterinary surgeon. a good book on dogs and their care will be of greatest value to you for such minor troubles as dogs are heir to. full-grown dogs do not need more than two meals a day. most dogs are over-fed, under exercised, and are therefore unhealthy beings. dogs eat slowly and should not be hurried. they should be fed regularly but not fussed over. a word to boys and girls who own pets: if you live cooped up on a small lot you have no right to keep a dog, much less dogs. if you have a dog and let him run at large, you will probably lose him, and you deserve to. nobody has any right, law or no law, to allow his live stock, let them be chickens, dogs, cats, or children, to annoy the neighbours. a dog or a cat, a rabbit, or a family of chickens can do more damage in a garden than anybody would believe,--except the gardener. your dog may be worth ten dollars; he may do ten dollars' worth of damage in ten different bulb beds in ten days. a thirty-cent cat can frighten away more birds in five days than an owner can attract to his garden in a whole season. be fair to yourself, your neighbour, and your animals, and keep them on your own place. if you are out with your dogs, that is a different matter; if you have them trained "to heel," people will welcome you. goldfish i have already said that the shetland pony is the ideal pet. that is true still, but i should have said "for out of doors." of all the candidates for the office of ideal indoor pet, i believe goldfish would get the most votes. they are peaceful and innocent, their needs are few, and their manners engaging. they are attractive in colour, shape, and movements and never get under foot. above all they have no bad habits. they neither squawk nor whistle, bark, sing, nor howl. they never stay out late nights, nor make trouble with the neighbours. they require a minimum of attention and a minimum of expense both for quarters and for food. for developing a sense of responsibility in children they serve a good purpose, and they can even be taught. it is very evident that they have memory as well as sight, hearing, sense of smell, touch, and taste. they easily learn, if patiently taught, to know their master's voice and to come when he signals. they will learn their feeding time and place and seem to enjoy attention. just as with horses, dogs, or elephants, the first essential in teaching goldfish is to gain their confidence. this can only be done by patience and gentleness. a restless, nervous goldfish rushing from one side of the tank to another when any one approaches tells its own story. teased, frightened, neglected, and unhappy they are indeed in a sorry plight, for they are, even more than some other pets, utterly at the mercy of their owners. the sooner they die and pass into oblivion, the better! but what a pretty sight it is to see a well-balanced aquarium, water plants spreading their delicate fronds, a clean, pebbly bottom, and bright-coloured, healthy, happy, care-free goldfish glancing in and out in the sunshine. china is the greatest place for goldfish. rearing them there has been reduced to a science. we find them running wild in our waters, but they are not native to america. under ideal natural conditions they are said to live to be a hundred years old. many are known to have lived to the age of ten years in one aquarium. goldfish are hardy, live in sluggish streams or ponds, and eat all sorts of vegetable matter. they also eat soft-bodied insects, worms, and small fish, even their own spawn and young. for directions for keeping goldfish happy and healthy in an aquarium in the living room of your home, i must refer you to various books and articles on aquaria and on how to make and maintain them. raising goldfish for profit is "a horse of quite another colour." goldfish are sold by the thousand in department stores as well as in shops which deal wholly in pets. some fish are imported, but the bulk of them are grown in this country. one of the most scientific growers in this country is mr. hugo mulertt, whose book on the subject is quite enough to make its readers enthusiastic fish culturists. the best markets are in cities, and transportation is difficult and expensive. fancy varieties would not be in demand except in large cities. one can begin goldfish growing in a small way at very small expense. four tanks or reservoirs are required. any boy who can make a hotbed frame can make these. they should be in a series: no. , spawning pond; no. , rearing pond; no. , storage pond; no. , winter pond. whether one makes artificial tanks or utilizes a natural valley, separated by little dams, it is essential that the four ponds should be so fitted that they can be emptied at will. they should be sheltered from cold winds and from direct summer sun. the spawning pond should be built first, and furnished with water plants as much like nature as possible. female fish ready to spawn can be bought from growers. these men are reliable and know how to advise you. it is to their advantage to increase the interest in goldfish. while building tank no. , keep watch for eggs in the spawning tank. laying begins late in april or early in may outdoors. the egg is no bigger than a pinhead, yellow, or cream-coloured. look for them on the plants. snip the twigs off with great care and transfer the eggs, twigs and all, into large candy jars in clean water; one hundred eggs is enough for a gallon jar. be careful that the water is of the same temperature in the jar as in the tank. eggs should be kept not lower than sixty degrees fahr., and not higher than ninety degrees fahr. they hatch in two or three days or at most in less than a week. do not disturb the water. sudden changes of temperature will kill the young fish. when the fish are three days old, they are pretty lively and will soon begin to need other food than that supplied by the egg. to transfer them from the "incubator" to the rearing tank is a delicate operation. mr. mulertt advises putting the tiny fish into a small, shallow, "nursery" tank first to make the change more gradual. the jar can be emptied very gently, fish and all, into this tank. prepare the rearing tank, taking every precaution against enemies. it should be covered with a screen to keep the dragon flies from laying their eggs in the tank. dragon fly nymphs are death on new-hatched goldfish. if the fish get a good start they will hold their own. let me warn you again to take great precaution against chilling the fish. a few degrees difference may be fatal. when the fish are a week to ten days old, they should be about a half-inch long, darting swiftly about in the nursery tank. be sure the temperature of the water is right, then set a wide-mouthed pail or jar full of water down in the tank with the fish, and dip the biggest one at a time with a little hand net of soft material. do not crowd the fish in the transfer pail, but rather make more frequent trips. extremely delicate handling is absolutely necessary. do not dip the fish out of the jar, but put it down in the water deep enough so they can swim out of their own accord. they are to stay a long time in the rearing pond so must not be crowded. in a tank covering an area of one hundred and sixty square feet, two hundred to three hundred fish can be reared. when they are only one half an inch long, the tank looks thinly settled, but they soon grow. the young are silver-gray at first. they usually get their permanent colour before reaching the age of two months. in warm ponds, in sunny weather, goldfish may grow to be six inches long in the first summer, but between two and three inches is more normal. goldfish in outdoor rearing ponds do not require artificial feeding. nature supplies them with their natural food. the storage tank is simply to keep the fish in while awaiting purchasers. it should be divided by partitions into small compartments. it is convenient to sort the fish taken from the rearing tank, so that those of one size or colour or variety can be separated and buyers can readily see the stock. it is easier to catch them in the small tank also. in the storage tank some feeding is usually needed. fresh, dry bread crumbs are recommended by most fish growers; feed small amounts until they get used to it and until you know just how much they require. the winter pond costs the most to build. it should be three feet or more deep, lined with boards or cement, and located so that water will be moving through it, in and out slowly all winter, to prevent freezing. it should be covered during storms. growers plan to get rid of their stock except breeders before winter sets in. one can dispense entirely with a winter tank if he can establish a house aquarium successfully for wintering the fish from which he expects to obtain spawn the following spring. as might be expected of animals which have for so many centuries been associated with man, goldfish have a good many diseases. their ill-health can almost invariably be traced to neglect or ignorance on the part of the person upon whom they are dependent. the signs of ill-health are usually quite noticeable. they are: faded colours, bloody streaks, coated or inflamed fins, and swollen gill covers. most of the troubles have to do with air supply. when a fish loses colour and appetite, has a slimy coating, and acts weak and dejected, it should be put into a "hospital" aquarium where plenty of plants are flourishing, at a temperature of seventy to eighty degrees fahr. one teaspoonful of salt to each gallon of water will be good for the fish, but no food should be offered for several days. this remedy will usually restore the fish if its trouble is asphyxia or itch and has not gone too far. in the open water conditions right themselves more readily, but fish acting queerly should be taken out from among the others. the greatest harm may result from hail storms and heavy rains on unprotected tanks. the natural enemies of goldfish inhabit the same ponds and to succeed one must daily wage war against crayfish, tadpoles, salamanders, snakes, fish-eating birds, muskrats, and aquatic insects. toad and frog spawn found in goldfish ponds should be removed to some other pond to mature. these creatures are useful as destroyers of insects but you can dispense with them in goldfish tanks. the story of a boy's animal cage two years ago, when i was ten years old, my father built me a house for my animals. it is twenty feet square and ten feet high. the framework is of wood. the walls are covered with wire netting. in winter they are boarded in. last winter we had a fire in a stove in the passageway, but we decided that the animals were better off without it. the pen cost about one hundred and fifty dollars. i keep in it three 'coons, ten to thirty rabbits, and about twenty pigeons. two 'coons, tom and jerry, i have had three years; the other one, pauline, i have had two years. my oldest rabbits, harry and lily, i have had six years. the 'coon pens and the passageway have wooden floors. the walls of the 'coon pen have double wire to prevent the 'coons from grabbing the other animals. their pens go up to the roof of the house. the rabbit pens are separated by movable wire panels six feet high. on this side of the house there is a second story for the rabbits and pigeons. this is reached by a step-ladder, and is divided by movable panels. the pigeons' house is over the passageway. there are shelves with nappies in them for nests. it is open at both ends in summer. i have kept crows and white rats; they were not a success. the crows killed the rabbits, and the rats smelled bad. i feed the rabbits morning and night and water them once. their feed is oats in the morning and hay at night. they have from two to eight little ones in a litter. when they multiply too fast we eat them. their meat is like chicken. the only way to distinguish it is by the bones. i feed and water the 'coons twice a day. they have a sort of cake made of corn meal. they grow very fat in the fall, but in the spring and summer they get very thin. they are not of any use except to look at. i did play with them until they bit my sister. since then i have been timid about playing with them. i feed wheat to the pigeons once a day. i have tumblers and magpie pigeons. both kinds are great fighters. i have four ducks, also, two mallards and two pekins. their pen is outside of the rabbit pen. in summer i keep them shut up here. in coldest winter weather i keep them in the barn. the rest of the year they wander about as they please. they have a tub, which i keep filled with water, where they can bathe. i feed them corn. they are much more interesting pets than hens. a story of success with dogs some years ago two young women, one a bookkeeper, the other a stenographer, decided to exchange city for country life. born and reared on farms, they secured seven acres of farm land, with cottage, but sixteen miles from chicago, and started a chicken business. this did not prove entirely successful, mainly, as the now prosperous farmers admit, because of ignorance and inexperience. meantime the fine collie dog, kept as guard and companion, was bringing many requests for good puppies, and it was determined to raise collies instead of chickens. so daisy rightaway, an english champion, was purchased, later being joined by imported master clinker, son of the famous wishaw clinker, which was brought from england about three years ago by j. pierpont morgan at a fabulous price. warned by the trying chicken experience, miss porter, who conducts the farm while miss benson retains her business position and looks after the "city end" of affairs, resolved to "make haste slowly" in the new direction. few, but good, animals were chosen, only the best of the young stock was placed on the market, and if the farm books at first showed but small profits, the upward trend, both in cash and reputation, was gratifyingly steady. with less than four years of professional dog rearing behind them, and with all buildings, runs, etc., originally lacking, the pleased proprietors of "sylvan farm" rejoice in promising financial statistics for the last half of that time. about two years ago came, apparently by chance, that branch of the business which has, perhaps, proved most lucrative, and which is especially worthy of note by other women with country homes, love for and some knowledge of dogs, and a desire to make money. a friend who owned fine collies envied the splendid environment under which the "sylvan" canines flourished, and asked permission to board some of his young puppies with "porter and benson," to give the young women their official title. the dogs sent thrived remarkably, and he mentioned the matter to other dog fanciers, and they to still others. almost without knowing how it happened, the delighted farmers soon found themselves caring regularly for from forty to seventy-five well bred dogs. only collies were at first accepted, but business and accommodations alike gradually widened until practically all kinds of dogs are now handled, in a most progressive and hygienic manner. an isolation house for dogs when first received or suspected of illness; heated homes for young mothers, puppies, and lapdogs; winter houses, with shelters for open-air exercise in bad weather; commodious separate runs--these are among the conveniences now enjoyed by the happy "visitors" whose owners are off for the summer or winter or are otherwise unable to care for their cherished pets. the desplaines river runs by the farm and a picturesque "river run" is much appreciated by water dogs and those enjoying an occasional frolic in cool water. two fine cows provide fresh milk in abundance for the nursing mothers and young puppies. every dog, whether boarder or family resident, is personally and intimately known to miss porter, who takes sole care of them with the aid of an intelligent boy to perform the rougher tasks. five dollars monthly is charged for the board of healthy dogs, with special rates for those needing special care. the standard dietary, varied to suit individual and class needs and varying occasions, is composed of soup made of meat and vegetables, meat jelly, rice, plenty of bones, and dog biscuit, with warm milk every two hours for the young mothers and puppies. the other dogs are fed twice daily--to the minute. in this incessant, indispensable care is found the chief drawback of the business for those fond of personal freedom, since the important duties of feeding, inspection, etc., seldom can be delegated to those not personally interested in the dogs. the little farm provides all the vegetables needed and some corn, but all other food supplies must be purchased. with more ground the recurring feed bills might be made smaller, but the labour outlay would be correspondingly augmented. eliminating unnecessary details, the financial situation for the two years in which the dog experiment has been successfully running stands thus: expended stock, buildings, and fences $ miscellaneous expenses, labour, etc. feed cash on hand ------ total $ , received original investment $ sale of puppies board of dogs , ------ total $ , the balance of seven hundred and sixteen dollars does not represent a bad profit in less than three years made from an investment of four hundred dollars, and while the young farmers feel that perhaps in other lines of work such increase might have been more quickly and easily acquired, they feel that perhaps in no other field could they have received such high dividends of health, happiness, and independence. the work is hard but enjoyable, while its widening scope and success bring true satisfaction. sylvan farm now receives dogs from, and sends dogs to, all parts of the united states, and the "farm family" of high-bred animals from time to time receives judicious addition. some famous canines have been raised, welcomed, and boarded, and one young puppy, born on the place, recently sold for one thousand dollars. v work and play with trained animals dairy cows if the boys and girls of the farms are looking about for a big thing to do, the very best place for them to look is at their father's herd of cows. even if it isn't a strictly dairy herd it is kept partly for dairy purposes. every cow demands stabling, pasture, feed, and attention. she is supposed to give value received for all this. but how many cow owners know which cows pay their board with a bonus, which barely keep even, and which are eating their heads off? the margin of profit when feed is high is too small to risk feeding an unproductive animal. if your father has not been in the habit of keeping accounts with his cows, you can make him open his eyes. you do not need ledgers and daybooks for your simple statement of facts. bring every animal face to face with her record. on one side of the account put the cost of what you give each cow. on the other side what she gives in return. you will have a page like this: _roberta grade holstein years_ debit to feed (at prices you would have to pay if you bought it) $ to stabling, estimate $ to care (so much an hour) $ credit to milk, so many qts. at so much $ to calf $ to compost $ you will have to reduce the item "feed" to many items, and remember that hay produced at home is not free hay. it is worth to feed to roberta just what you would have to pay wholesale for it if you had to go to the feed store, minus the cost of cartage. to work this out is good arithmetic, better than covering acres of blackboard space with examples in "partial payments." now roberta may give a good quantity of milk but of poor quality. at first you might think that didn't matter; it brings just as much a quart. but does it, when your mother and sisters make it into butter, for example? or, if you sell cream, wouldn't you want a cow whose milk tested high in butter fat? your customers would, whether they bought milk or cream, i know. [illustration: photograph by julian a. dimock. holding a conversation] the boys and girls in many of the great dairying states, notably illinois and wisconsin and new york, are learning in school how to test milk for the butter fat it contains and the chances are that every agricultural college in the united states is ready to instruct boys and girls by letter in this important part of dairying. many of them send out printed lessons giving careful directions about using the babcock testing apparatus, and i have seen a class of boys and girls in a country school testing milk from their fathers' cows. it is astonishing how many cows are kept on farms purely for ornament--or maybe to give the boys plenty of chores. these cows consume as much food as good ones, but they are idlers. it isn't their fault but the farmer's. can your father or you afford to keep money invested in any cow that returns him less than a dollar a year over and above the expense of feed? a good cow may cost twice as much to buy, but a good cow will make thirty or forty dollars a year clear gain. these figures are not guess-work but facts. so i say again to the farm boy and girl--if you want to do a big thing for your home place and for the neighbourhood, reform the dairy herd. keep a record for every cow. weigh the milk of each one separately every day for a week, then again two months later, and so on through her milking days. take an average of all these weights as the weekly weight of milk and multiply by the number of weeks the cow gave milk. this will give the total number of pounds produced. learn how to test for butter fat. your neighbourhood creamery tests the milk with a babcock test and you can learn how. persuade your father to sell all the cows which fall below a fair standard and buy good ones. test the milk of the cows he thinks of buying. a poor cow often looks as well as a good one. the illinois experiment station shows by tests that twenty-five of the best cows in the state produce as much butter fat as ten hundred and twenty-one of the poorest cows, while eating only one fortieth as much food, to say nothing of the stable room, the time spent in milking, etc. and a quarter of the million cows in the state of illinois are making their owners only seventy-seven cents a year apiece. can your father afford to keep that kind of a cow? clean home milk i know what milking is on the farm. take it on a frosty october morning about sun-up, when you make the cow get up from her bed so that you can stand in the "warm spot" to warm your feet. it gets no better from that time on, even if you do milk in the cow stable. but the boys that do the milking do not realize how perfectly filthy the milk often is when it gets to the house. take a milk pail from the shelf, go down to the cow barn. there is the cow. throw her down an armful of hay to chew on while you milk, brush off the stool, rub off the cow's bag with a wisp of hay if she is especially dirty, never mind your hands or the open pail, throw a stream of milk onto each palm and begin. is there a little hay and dust in the pail? never mind; it will strain out. when you get through, set the pail down while you drive the cows out to pasture. to be sure, they will raise a lot of cow-stable dust and the smell is pretty bad in there, but if you set it outside the pigs would get into it. it is nearly school time and you have other chores to do. take it to the house and strain it. mother always doubles the strainer cloth, but it takes an awful time for it to run through that way. there, you said the dirt would strain out, and look at it there in the cloth! this is a cold-hearted picture of one of the chores the farm boy particularly hates. compare each item with your own methods and improve on each. home milk is not always clean milk. [illustration: sanitary milk pail] the boy that milks ought to do a better job than this. he ought to bring clean milk into the house. how shall he do it? a clean place to milk, a clean cow, a clean boy, and a sanitary milk pail; these four things are within the reach of every farm that can afford a cow. i have seen a good many patent milk pails, mostly in stores, seldom on farms. the sanitary milk pails _keep the dirt out_, they don't strain it out. here is one described by the man who invented it for his own use. this pail is tin, holds ten quarts or so. on one side is a spout two and a half inches in diameter and three inches long. the spout has a tin cover like a baking powder can cover. to keep the dirt out of the top of the pail the man bought a tin pan, just the size to fit tight into the top of the pail. just above the bottom of the pan on one side he had a tinner cut eight or ten small holes, like a collander. scald the pail, double the strainer cloth and lay it across the top of the pail. press the pan down on the cloth till it goes down into the pail tight, taking care that the edge of the cloth comes up all round. do all this at the house. with this pail, a clean milker can milk a clean cow in a sweet smelling place, and get clean milk. this may look like a pound of prevention, but think of the tons of cure it will save. marketing milk there are lots of boys delivering milk in towns and cities. most of them do their part well. but i believe they would like to do it better. driving from one house to another is pretty dull business for a live boy and unless he has something to think about his mind wanders. why not put some thought on the very business he is engaged in? does he know what milk is? that children's lives depend upon the care he gives it? does he know that dirt in ice and dust from streets may be deadly if they get into milk? if dust gets into that little puddle that ought not to be on top of the bottles does he wipe it off with a dirty rag, ignorant of the danger? if he thought of these things and studied out ingenious ways of keeping his bottles free from dust, life would no longer be dull but interesting. he would be well started toward good citizenship. training pet animals trained pets have a greater market value than those which have no education. parrots, for example, with nothing but their native harsh squawk, can be bought for very little. but every word added to polly's vocabulary can be expressed in dimes added to her price. there are very few domesticated or tamed animals so lacking in wit that they cannot be taught. but it takes a particular kind of patience and persistence. some animals learn very quickly; mice for instance. one trainer has taught them to walk the tight rope, climb ladders, swing in a trapeze, pull tiny wagons, and do other little tricks. we have all seen trained animals in shows and have marvelled at them. it is hard to believe that they are real. it takes genius to train fleas, for example, or geese, yet these animals are tamed. every boy has a little spark of such genius and with use the spark would grow. dogs are about the easiest animals to train. teach a dog first to obey. he must learn to understand just as a baby does. how long does it take a baby to learn what "no, no" means? a bright dog will learn to "charge" about as quickly. when he knows what you mean and that you really do mean it and are not fooling, he will suit the action to the word or signal. a little training every day will do the business. rewards in the form of food or caresses appeal to the dog's understanding. never forget to give the reward. you may sometimes have to punish a dog, but you should be careful to make certain that he associates the punishment with the crime. whipping a dog to "get even" with him is not the way to make him a good dog. he may take his chance to "get even" some day. do you blame him? most children expect a dog to learn too fast. for instance, a boy wants his dog to draw a wagon or sled. the dog is big and strong and there are leaves to be gathered or kindling to be brought in. don't make a harness, force it onto the dog, hitch him up regardless of his protests, and expect him to trot off like a pony. ponies are trained to the feel of the harness from their youth up. your dog will rebel, not angrily, but none the less emphatically. he will lie down or slip the harness or otherwise rid himself of the burden. or he will balk. train him gradually, just as you would a colt or calf. he will learn faster than either. dogs are sometimes trained to carry baskets or bundles and can even be trusted to go on errands alone, if, by going over the same route daily, their minds are impressed sufficiently. training a dog should begin in puppyhood. make commands in single words and accompany the word with a sign. use always the same easily interpreted sign with the command word. teach him his name first, then to come when called. after these commands are thoroughly learned, teach him to come "to heel," "charge," and similar commands. a poor teacher will make a poor dog, so teach yourself patience. your voice should be firm but never loud or high-pitched. a young dog will learn to herd cattle, sheep, or goats more easily from an old dog than from you. he will follow his leader at first, then later he can go on ahead driving the herd on his own responsibility or in obedience to a command. [illustration: photograph by george g. mclean. gyp has an ax to grind] did you try to teach your dog to retrieve by ducking him? how silly! how soon would you learn to swim by that method? begin by letting him think he is bringing you his play-ball, although really you are pulling it by an attached string. insist on his giving up the ball every time. do it again and again till he is out of the primer class. throw the ball a few feet at first, then farther and farther away till he has that trick "down fine." when the water is well warmed by the spring sunshine, take him to the shore and repeat the same lessons patiently, a little each day. if you have an old retriever with you the youngster will be ambitious to "go him one better" and will learn more quickly. it is necessary in training dogs to consider the inborn instincts of the breed. a terrier is a "nat'ral ratter" and needs little training for that, but you would have to train a long time to get a spaniel to catch rats. a dog on the farm can be trained to save the boys a lot of steps. we had a shepherd dog once which was a famous runner. when my father suspected that the cattle were breaking into the cornfield, he would go first to the top of the knoll by the house, hold nimp up in his arms, point in the direction of the cows. nimp would whimper and squirm and when let down was off like a streak of brown lightning. he would not go in a bee-line, but followed first the road, then the line fence to where the marauding cattle were at work. by the time my father or one of the boys on horseback reached the break in the fence the fleet-footed dog would be hustling those cows. if he didn't actually get them back into pasture he kept them moving so that they got no more green corn than was good for them. "good old dog" was all nimp expected for little deeds of kindness like this. he wagged his head, hung out his long pink tongue, and almost smiled with satisfaction. there was no doubt that he was pleased with having outwitted the cows, for which he had small respect. teaching a collie to herd sheep or goats is a special sort of business; experienced shepherds can teach you how it is done. training hunting dogs is also a work for experts. anybody knows that a poorly trained dog makes the difference between real sport and disgusting failure. a young man with a real aptitude for training dogs for various forms of hunting can find opportunities to turn this genius into cash. training young horses "breaking colts" is a phrase handed down to us, i think, from the days way back when our pioneer ancestors used to go out and catch a wild horse and break it to saddle and harness. on ranches where colts range over vast areas and never get acquainted with human beings except at branding time, it is little wonder that they must be broken. they do a little breaking on their own account, too. but on the small farm where three or four colts a year or fewer are raised, no colt should need to be "broken." all should be trained, which is one way of saying taught or educated. everything depends upon the colt's learning each thing right first. if you put an old, worn strap on him, or a fraying rope which he can break, he will just as likely as not become a halter and bridle breaker. a little colt starts out without any habits. all the bad ones as well as all the good ones are learned. every bad habit harks right back to some mistake. you can manufacture balky horses by overloading a wagon for your team of colts. i have seen boys tease a colt "just to see him kick." that strikes me as lacking in "horse sense." every time you go out with your father to visit the two-year-olds and the yearlings, be sure that you pet and caress them. don't attempt to mount one till you have accustomed him to the feel of a burden on his back, a very small weight first, then the saddle of an old harness, then a very light saddle. don't act as if you were in desperate need of a saddle horse. his training cannot all be done in one visit. a yearling must be taught to lead, then to be driven. after a two-year old has been accustomed to the feel of a harness, one part at a time, he can safely be hitched with some old stager to a light wagon, and taught what pulling means. he should already know that a pull on the right rein means "gee" and on the left means "haw"; never give the command "whoa" to a colt, unless you have the muscle to make your command good. a runaway may not break any harness, nor any vehicle, nor any bones, _this_ time, but a runaway horse is an ill-trained horse. it is almost an impossible thing to train an old, high-spirited horse to regard an automobile or a trolley car with anything but disfavour. a young horse can learn easily. soon after a colt is well "halter-broke" he should be led around where the farm machinery is at work. he must be held with a strong hand and not be allowed to bolt when the mowing machine starts. break the automobile to him gently. lead him up to a quiet one. have a bit of his favourite dainty to offer him from the seat and see to it that he is convinced that the automobile is harmless. (would that it were true!) speak reassuringly to him. if he jerks back, don't get mad and whack him, just to vent your impatience. he will associate your whack with the automobile, and you will have your work to do over again. i have known of a colt being made "trolley-wise" in an hour and he never has forgotten; he would no more shy when one whirls by than he would at his own mother hitched to a load of hay. treadmills and cranks how a boy does hate the sight of a crank. turning the grindstone, running the washing machine and churning are part of a country boy's daily life. he may do these things cheerfully, because he knows they are boys' jobs or because he hates to see his mother doing them even worse than he hates doing them himself. but that doesn't prove that the boy's tastes run to crank turning. why not train a dog or a sheep to turn the crank? that's a scheme. it's fun to train an animal and then it will be more fun to see him do the work while you read a book and watch him. here is a picture of a big wheel from which a belt runs to a grindstone out under a tree. in the wheel stands a good dog; by his bright eyes, his erect carriage, and the "near-smile" on his face, you can see that he is no brow-beaten labourer. a man at the grindstone holds the axe and the wheel is ready to turn. this fine dog knows that a certain signal means work. he does not skulk off and hide, nor yawn and look limp. he steps up into the wheel, waits for the signal, then begins a steady tread. on mondays he does the washing, on tuesdays and fridays he churns, on other days he helps grind the axe, the sickle, the scythe, or the butcher knife. when the job is done, at a well-known signal, the dog stops, steps off the wheel, and waits for the kindly pat of his mistress or the "good old fellow" of his master. making animals happy in training any domestic animal you will find their greatest weakness is fear, just as with wild animals. you do not want to develop this but to win their confidence. with horses taken right from the range or wild, the men who are most successful are those who train by kindness. a horse whose spirit is broken and who does his task because he is afraid not to is not a safe horse. i wouldn't trust him in an emergency. a horse who lives in a state of fear has very little sense. [illustration: photograph by julian a. dimock. a group of happy farm animals] one blow, yell, jerk, or even a threatening motion will often obliterate all the work you have done. so the animal trainer must not lose his temper, especially with dogs and horses. the more intelligent the animal, the more kindness and gentleness are required. on one farm, you will see the calves trembling when coming for their food, trying to keep one eye out for sudden blows while drinking; the horses jerking timidly up as if expecting their tender mouths to be yanked; the cows kicking the milkers; the colts hard to toll in from pastures; the dog with tail between his legs; the cat on her way up a tree. do you know the owners of such animals? how are the boys of the family liked in the neighbourhood? are the girls popular and good-natured? has the mother the sweet and patient look that the best mothers have? every domestic animal ought to be kept happy. a happy hen will lay eggs, a happy cat will purr and rub your leg in passing, not because she wants anything out of you, but because she thinks you are a good fellow and that's her way of expressing herself; she will catch mice for you, too. a happy cow will give down her milk; a happy pig will lay on fat faster than a miserable one, a happy horse will almost trot at the plough. so really it pays to keep animals happy. having creature comforts alone is not enough for most animals. they like attention, caresses, and even seem to enjoy and understand conversation. boys that train animals will find that the animals train them. if you have a hot temper and can keep it in enough to train a dog to draw a wagon, you will find it isn't so hard to hold in when you are playing ball. self-control is one of the biggest things in life. the training of a calf or colt should begin early, just as with other animals. if the animal has never been frightened the task is easy. begin gradually. petting for a day or two will get him used to being handled. a rope may be knotted round his neck and worn for a day or two, or a rope halter put over the head; something that slips on easily so that you don't have to hold the youngster's head. when he is accustomed to the feel of the halter, you can lead him to his food without his realizing it. unconsciously he gets used to the pull on the rope. a pair of well-matched oxen, trained by kindness, taught to "gee" and "haw" at the word without reins or goad, with no bad habits like kicking or turning in the yoke, are worth between two and three hundred dollars. they started out worth four or five dollars a head for veal. training and grass have done most of the rest. if trained in kindness, they are docile, gentle, industrious, and though less spirited than horses, they are also steadier and far better suited to many heavy farm tasks than horses. the harness for oxen is very simple, costs little, and seldom needs mending. every county fair ought to offer prizes for animals trained by boys and girls. i believe boys train animals more often than girls do. i wonder how that comes. practise on the hens, girls, and on the cat. i know of a cat which picks up nuts and puts them in a basket quite as a child might. this cat treads a wheel, too, to turn the churn. if all the animals were happy and earned their living, helping do the work, as well as reproducing their kind, farm life would be less dreary and hardships would seem less hard and the country would be a better place to live in. taming wild animals all little children are interested in animals. it does not take much argument to convince a boy that he needs a dog or the girl that she needs a canary bird. if, as they grow older, they seem to lose their pleasure in the companionship of animals, it means that something is wrong. probably home conditions are such that an intimate acquaintance with any animal is inconvenient or else some unnatural lessons in natural history have been forced upon the children at school and their interest in the real things has been deadened. i have heard many boys and girls say that they dislike zoölogy. take these same boys and girls out on an excursion, with an opera glass or with an insect net, or show them a rabbit's tracks in the new snow, and who will say they are not awake and interested? the first thing you want to know about an animal is its name. the same is true of a new neighbour or a new schoolmate. the name does not tell you much about the animal or the boy. when you know them better you will give them names that fit. the new boy's name may be reginald. when the boys get to know him they may call him "piggy," or "chief," depending on what kind of a boy he is. but a name is a great convenience. next after the name you want to know where he lives, how he lives, and above all what he can do. after all "what he can do" is the boy, and the same is true of other animals. how are boys and girls going to find out what animals can do, how they live, how they make a living? the good old natural way to find out what an animal can do and will do is to catch him and watch him. some small neighbours of mine did not catch grasshoppers and throw them into the water because they were cruel, although their mother berated them for cruelty. they wanted to find out whether grasshoppers could swim or not. the boys who catch squirrels and rabbits and birds and put them in cages want to take care of them and teach them tricks. but, seeing the wild ones unhappy and drooping, most boys will voluntarily let them go. there is no good word to be said for the practice of caging wild creatures merely for the entertainment their misery will afford an irresponsible and curious crowd. i am glad to know that those horrid whirling cages in which squirrels used to be shut have become less common. in these days of hunting without guns, there is also a good deal of taming without cages. this is the real thing, and has everything in its favour. there are two sides to it. from the animal's side the tamed one has nothing to lose. he, and for his sake, all his fellows, receive protection, consideration, care. if he tells any secrets, his confidence is not betrayed to the enemy. he comes and goes at will and pays his debts by keeping true that balance which existed in nature before mankind upset it. from the human side taming wild things is a delightful though not an easy way to learn to be patient, persevering, and gentle. you simply have to practise these virtues or you will fail. furthermore, the domestication of wild animals useful to man results in very great practical value. from the naturalist's point of view, this is a most fruitful method of discovering the true habits of the wild creatures, about which so much is yet to be learned. most efforts to tame full-grown animals result in complete failure. taken when young, almost any of them can be tamed. no one ought ever to have a pet of any kind unless he sees one thing clearly: forcing his pet to become dependent upon his protection and care involves a real responsibility. when i consider the number of cases of neglected pets i am inclined to discourage children from keeping them. it is a very good method of developing responsibility, but, if the method fails, the innocent pet suffers. the uncaged pet has an advantage over the caged one in that he can, if neglected, return to the wild and shift for himself. birds a great many famous people have made friends with our native birds. john burroughs could depend on an audience of robins to perch on his knee. they would listen politely while he remonstrated with them for stealing his grapes, well assured that the next forkful of earth he turned would yield worms enough to repay them for waiting. it is not uncommon to see photographs of birds perching on the hands of children or grown people. one noted naturalist is pictured with a piece of bread in his mouth, out of which a bird is taking a bite. to really tame a full-grown bird is practically impossible. to gain its confidence is difficult. it means that the person has never in its presence made a motion sufficiently sudden to startle the timid creature nor lost his patience or self-control once during many trials. a bird is not tamed in an hour nor a day. a quick wave of the arm or a sharp noise is enough to undo all that has been accomplished in long, patient hours spent in establishing friendly relations. the photographs are records of triumphs. professor hodge encourages the taming of young birds in the interest of increasing our valuable bird life. he says: "it is a rare lesson in gentleness to capture a young bird without frightening it, but, if successfully done, your bird is practically tame. if even a young bird is caught after a severe chase, it is likely to be days, weeks, and even months, before the effects of its fright can be obliterated. if they can be picked up without frightening them, they will often immediately perch on the finger and feed from the hand. i have tested this with young vireos, chipping sparrows, orioles, grackles, and repeatedly with young robins, which some even put down in their books as untamable. think what a monster the open hand must seem to a bird!" those of you who have read mrs. stratton-porter's story of freckles will remember how he tamed the wild birds. they were residents of the great primeval woodland and had not learned yet from sad experience to hide from men. they swarmed about the gentle irish lad because he had made himself a part of the forest. to them he was like some new kind of beneficent tree, yielding nuts for the nut-eaters, grain for the grain-eaters, and bits of suet or scraps of meat for all who came for it. he called them all, "me chickens." was there anything wonderful in this? yes; so thought the scotch woodsman with whom freckles lived. and no, because anybody can do the same who will follow the same tactics. if you read on in the story, you will readily believe that his relations with the birds and the forest helped make freckles the lovable boy and the fine, sweet-natured man he grew up to be. how to do something toward domesticating wild birds in order to make the country a better place to live in is treated more fully in a later chapter. humming-birds are said to be entirely without fear if tamed when nestlings. they sometimes fall from the nest and are, of course, helpless so far as feeding themselves is concerned. they will take sweetened water from a spoon, but should not be expected to thrive on this diet alone. their natural food while growing, and probably afterward, too, is largely insects. a supply of these should be given the young birds. they become very tame and perch on the hand and on the flowers in vases. they will visit your best hat, too, if it has flowers on it, and will even try to collect nectar from the flowers on wall-paper or curtains. toads and their kin one is really surprised at the long list of wild animals that have been successfully tamed. that is, they are sufficiently tame to come to the tamer, eat from his hand, nestle in his pocket, follow him about--in short, to show perfect confidence and little or no fear. the toad for example, "ugly and venomous," (we have shakespeare's word for that, but he was mistaken)--, a very useful animal and absolutely without disagreeable traits. it has been carefully estimated that every toad is worth twenty dollars to the garden he lives in. yet how seldom one hears of a tame toad. at best they are tolerated, but not often encouraged by protection or by a little attention. to tame a toad, one only needs to feed him. frogs, salamanders, newts, snakes, turtles, and fish have all been tamed in the same fashion. as nearly all are insect eaters, we are benefiting mankind when we encourage them. [illustration: photograph by charles w. miller. the crow may be tamed when young] [illustration: photograph by chester k. reed. the skunk is an amiable and well-mannered pet] squirrels tame squirrels are amusing. it takes very little encouragement to make them tame enough to eat from the hand and even to rummage the pockets for nuts. i remember a case when the red squirrels made so free with the books in a great man's study that he became positively annoyed, although he had himself encouraged them and had enjoyed their friendliness and tameness. the case got so bad that he was forced either to vacate or to get rid of the squirrels. he finally had a trap set. the first squirrel that came in ran straight into the trap. the great man had really not counted on any such circumstance. he was nonplussed. in all his diplomatic career no such a situation had arisen. he gave the matter earnest thought. he considered all the _pros_ and _cons_. he weighed all the evidence. the squirrel was guilty! when asked by a friend what penalty he pronounced, the great man replied: "i read him such a lecture as he will never forget--and turned him loose!" the relations of the red squirrel with the birds are such that we are pretty sure they should be discouraged. they are, alas! egg-suckers and nest-robbers. the gray squirrel has not been caught in this nefarious occupation. if plenty of nuts, fruit, and water were supplied for red squirrels, maybe they could be cured of their bad habits. the flying squirrel is to me the most beautiful member of his family. he is said to tame easily, but i remember the only pair we ever caught were shut in a convenient closet "till morning." when morning came there were only a little pile of gnawings and a hole under the door to tell the story. they had flown, nor could i blame them. raccoons, woodchucks, and skunks a raccoon is a most satisfactory pet and will afford about as much amusement in the back yard as a cage of monkeys. raccoons are more numerous, especially in new england, than formerly. they are extremely fond of green corn, but corn in any form is eaten greedily. also, i regret to say, they are nest-robbers. in fact, they will eat fish, flesh, and fowl, as well as vegetables and insects. this makes the food problem for a pet 'coon a very simple one. but we can not afford to encourage them, because of their bird-eating habits. sometimes a hunter finds a suckling 'coon in the woods. he cannot let the helpless thing starve, as it certainly would if left. when he gets it home, he will realize that its natural food is 'coon's milk. some bright member of the family will suggest that a bottle of cow's milk with rubber nipple will do the trick. having no such convenience as a rubber nipple, we once successfully brought up a baby pig on a bottle. we took a goose quill and wrapped it with a strip of clean old cotton cloth till we made a stopper for the bottle. this was fine, and i can recommend it for suckling lambs, pigs, fawns, 'coons, and other young mammals. there are well-authenticated stories of baby 'coons being adopted by cats whose young have been "disposed of." [illustration: photograph by e. s. kane. a bottle baby] a 'coon is a most mischievous creature, and if you tame one you should really not expect your mother to feel all the enthusiasm you do about him, for his mischief is sometimes exasperating. an animal enclosure in the back yard may be necessary, but that means more work for you to keep the 'coon and his mates happy. tame woodchucks are said by experienced boys to be a great success. young ones are easy to capture, for they are not allowed to "hang around" the home nest after the parents decide that they are big enough to earn their own way. in "american animals" there is a good story of a tame 'chuck for which the author traded an old fish line with a broken hook and thirteen cents "to boot." this little chap was brought up by hand and developed most interesting traits. he made life miserable for the family tabbies by nipping their heels, and he tunnelled under the door step till he made the earth cave in. a wild woodchuck will show fight when in danger of capture, but the tamed ones are not vicious. the last creature i should ever think of becoming familiar with is the skunk. yet i have a photograph of a lady feeding a full-sized one from her hand. the account that went with the picture said that this skunk was in "perfectly good working order," too. several naturalists have tamed these little animals, and there is no doubt that they make amusing and well-behaved pets. prairie dogs, chipmunks, badgers, fawns, 'possums, crows, and many other native wild animals have been successfully tamed. you may have read of "red" saunders's pets, the bob-cat, the snake, and judge, the hawk. whether you would call them tame or not depends. they certainly had "wild, wild ways," though they frequented the kitchen and slept under the stove, one at a time. the same methods must be employed, no matter what the creature is. gentleness, patience, and common sense will succeed almost every time with young animals. vi making brooks and springs useful reclaiming a trout stream "i used to ketch trout that 'ud weigh two pound in that little crick back of my pasture when i 'uz a boy." who has not heard old men say that? they seem to have just accepted the lack of trout as one other piece of bad luck, like wormy apples, blighted wheat, and other dispensations of providence. the younger generation are not satisfied with this view. if good wheat can be grown by modern methods, and wormy apples prevented by spraying, why shouldn't trout be caught in grandpa's old brook? no reason in the world. in between you and grandpa there was a generation of neglect. your father and his brothers probably went to town to seek their fortunes. anyhow, everybody was too busy to fish, and something went wrong with the brook that needs to be righted. any stream that has been a trout stream once can be so again, provided that the water is not fed with poisoned drainage from some mill or factory. if the forest has been removed and natural conditions so changed that the brook that used to be perennial is now only semi-annual, going dry in time of drought, it will be necessary to build a series of dams to make sure that the water will always be deep enough for trout. a spring-fed brook is best; it is cool and constant. lower the channel by digging where refuse has choked the natural course of the stream, but don't tidy it up enough to make it artificial. the ideal brook, and the country is full of them, has gravelly or sandy stretches which serve as spawning beds, swift rapids where exercise is necessary, and deep pools for rest and quiet, shallow places where insects lurk in the overhanging vegetation, and once in a great while a real little waterfall where the water gets well churned and mixed with air. the brook ought to supply enough food for all, but i have seen fish so plentiful in well-cared-for streams that it was necessary to feed them. we would take great pans of specially prepared food to the water's edge; as we threw it broadcast on the surface the trout would leap entirely out of the water in their eagerness to get the morsels. we did not feed them liver because the epicure does not like his trout to have a liver flavour. the natural food of the trout should be encouraged to breed in the trout stream. you can restock your stream with the little crustaceans, insect nymphs, and similar fish food from other streams if you think it necessary. a few pails full of mud carried across will start them. [illustration: photograph by helen w. cooke. plenty of trout in this stream when grandfather was a boy] the greatest necessity is to protect your fish from their natural enemies. big fish will eat little fish, trout will eat trout, so will bass, pickerel, and suckers. you can keep the big fish out by screening the spillway at the upper dam. there is good fun to be had in raising trout from the egg. this work has been regarded by most people as too complicated and too difficult for any but an expert. as a matter of fact, it is no more difficult than many of the occupations boys engage in, chicken raising, bee-keeping, and photography, for instance. visit a fish hatchery if you have one near, get all the government bulletins on the subject, and, if you have available running water, you can try your hand at trout growing. it would not appeal to many, but it is really fascinating work. springs for trout culture if there are constant, cold springs on your place, you are neglecting a golden opportunity for earning money in an easy and delightful way. a spring is capable of furnishing living room for a large family of trout. you can sell live trout at sixty-five cents to a dollar a pound to a first-class hotel. the big fish bring the smaller prices per pound, those weighing from half a pound to a pound being most popular. clean out your spring first and make a basin ten to twenty feet square, the bigger the better. put a fine, galvanized iron netting over the overflow of your reservoir. young fish can be bought from a fish hatchery in the form of eggs, fry, fingerlings, yearlings, or even larger. the government will stock your streams for you free, but it imposes certain conditions, which is quite just and proper. get all the information you can from state fish hatcheries or the united states bureau of fisheries, before you decide finally. reclaiming a spring there is often a neighbourhood tradition concerning a wonderful spring somewhere near, a spring that never ceases to flow, no matter how complete the drought. the water is pure, cold, and clear; maybe the oldest inhabitant had it from his grandfather how the indians used always to camp near it on their cross-country marches from the catskills to the blue ridge. they call it "the old indian spring." sometimes they tell hair-raising tales of midnight adventures and hair-breadth escapes, till you wonder that the spring itself never turned red with the spilt blood. from stories of early pioneer days one gets a good idea of the very great importance of the ever faithful spring. with the certainty of a pure water supply for family and beasts, a man might safely carve a home in a primeval forest. without it, he must push on yet another lap toward the wilderness. i remember such a spring. generations of red men, trekking from one hunting-ground to another or maybe waging their own peculiar war in the enemy's country, have depended on this spring for their success. later generations of pioneers have passed that way and refreshed themselves with its sweet water. as years went by, the spring fell into disuse and gushed on forgotten. but forty years ago it was re-discovered by a searching party, identified as an historic spot, reclaimed, and made permanently useful and beautiful by public spirit. nobody knows just how to appreciate a spring except the person who discovers it, reclaims it, and makes it do his bidding. no bit of his own ingenuity pleases the householder quite as much as his spring, his piping, his reservoir, and his little hydraulic ram, yet one of the last springs i visited was in a new england pasture. its only protection was a sort of fence of poles to keep the cattle out. to approach it you had to leap from hillock to hillock, in constant danger of losing your balance and sinking in a deep mud hole. the spring bubbled up clear as crystal in a most unromantic hole in the ground; its overflow simply spread out on the ground between the hummocks. it didn't look thrifty to me. two days' work would have laid a basin rim of small stones about that spring with a piece of tile for an overflow pipe, and a shallow channel might have been dug to carry the surplus to the edge of the slope where another basin for the cattle might have been made, or to a trough. the water of a spring ought to be analyzed by a chemist before it is used for drinking. nobody knows what contamination is possible to a spring whose sources are mystery. campers ought to be particularly careful in this, especially if their camp is near settlements. the first step in reclaiming a spring is to dig out a basin. the chances are that the one made by the water is too shallow for practical purposes. compute the number of gallons you want in reserve and take out enough cubic feet of soil to make a basin of that capacity. decide next what to do with the surplus. your basin is not designed to hold the spring's daily output. if the spring is in a ravine, nothing is simpler than to lay a tile drain from the basin down to the stream bed. by damming the stream you can make a pond for waterfowl, for trout raising, or for a swimming hole: but that is another story. the basin should have a protecting rim. for a number of reasons this should be solid and permanent. you are sure to want to sit on it and watch the water, for one thing. then, too, you want a protection against surface water. all sorts of decaying animal and vegetable matter must be kept out of the spring, so cover it tightly. making a swimming pool in a country where wooded brooks are plentiful there is absolutely no good reason why boys shouldn't have a swimming pool. it needn't cost a thousand dollars, either. every outdoor club ought to have one as a special feature. the same dam that holds back the water for the skating pond may serve in summer to make the swimming hole. it is really fun to build a dam. your father or the other boy's father will know how. you can dig out the stream at low water, and make the pool deep enough for diving. high banks make the place more private; trees and underbrush serve the same purpose. but if the banks are not high naturally, and the trees have been cut away you have no idea how quickly you can make a natural screen. willows love the margin of streams and they grow tremendously. a frame of poles covered with wild cucumber or morning glory will make a good screen the first season while the permanent trees and shrubs are growing. you don't need to swim all your spare time, so you can give some time to making the pool more secluded. move a few big bushes from the woods in winter. they will never know the difference if you transplant them while their roots are frozen in a big ball of earth. let me make a suggestion to you. you believe everybody ought to know how to swim, don't you? that includes your father, of course, who taught you. does it include your sisters and the other boys' sisters? "everybody" is a big word, now you think of it. why it includes even your mother! do mothers know anything about swimming? some of them do, already, only they never get a chance to keep in practice; but they like it. it is precisely as natural for girls and mothers to enjoy the water as it is for boys and fathers. just be generous and let it be understood that a certain day in the week is ladies' day, and turn the pool over to them. their bathing suits may not be in the latest fashion, but you won't be there to criticize nor to see how well they really swim. a home-made skating pond the family who own a tennis court and enjoy no skating in the winter have their own want of ingenuity to blame, if they live in the jack frost belt. any level piece of ground, even the grass plot in the back yard, can be skated on. you need first to set a six-inch board on edge all round the level plot. this board should be three inches in the ground and three inches out. as winter approaches, rig a trough from the pump to the pond-to-be or have the hose where it can be attached to the spigot at a moment's notice. wait for a hard freeze. when it comes, and the ground is like rock, give the word "all hands to the pumps." let on enough water to cover the surface, then let it freeze. if you get a smooth surface the first go you are luckier than most boys. cover the first coat with a second and that with a third layer until you have smooth ice. then skate. on cold nights spray the worn places if you use a hose, or run on another half-inch of water. a good skating pond can be made by boys with a little ingenuity, which in this case means engineering ability, by damming a brook until it floods a naturally flat area above its own level. or by damming the outlet of a pond before dry weather comes on and holding the water at a higher level than it would naturally have. it is perfectly astonishing what a small dam will do, if cleverly placed. study the work of beavers if you know of any. you can get pointers from mill-dams built by your great-grandsires, if there are any in your vicinity. in one of the books for boys, mentioned in the book list, are practical suggestions about building dams. sometimes boys think nature has not done as much for them as for boys who have a natural swimming pool, a skating pond, or a trout brook. maybe if you helped her out a little, nature would do her part in your case, too. the story of reclaiming a spring when i was fourteen years old my father bought his property in ithaca, n. y., on which we live. that part of it on which there is now a fine spring was considered worthless. through this property ran a well-wooded glen, the upper end of which was very wet and swampy. this condition was due to several small springs emerging from the ground at the head of the glen. all of these springs joined and flowed down through the glen, forming a fairly large stream. this stream flowed continually throughout summer and winter, without change of volume. the first step in the reclaiming of this spring was to collect all the water through tile drains into a large, concrete reservoir. this reservoir, which was four feet wide, four feet high, and twelve feet long, was constructed about two feet under ground. an open spring basin was connected with this reservoir by a two and one-half inch iron pipe. this basin was made of rough stones laid in cement, and the back side of it arched over a foot or more, forming a partial roof. on the open side is a concrete seat where one can conveniently sit and get a drink. my father and i did all the work except part of the ditch digging. from this basin was laid a one and a quarter-inch iron pipe which carried the water down the glen a distance of about sixty feet to a hydraulic ram. this ram is always running, and is made to go by the constant pressure of the water from the spring basin. the water is forced through a half-inch iron pipe to a large tank in the attic of the house situated on the hill above. the tank, which holds about five hundred gallons, supplies the house with pure, cold water for all purposes. as the water is always flowing into the tank it is provided with an inch and a half overflow pipe, which carries the surplus water back into the glen. thus, through a series of pipes and a ram, the water is conveyed from the reservoir throughout the house. by building a small dam farther down, we made a fair-sized pond on which to domesticate some wild fowl. the ground drained by concentrating the springs was well adapted because of its fertility for the growing of shrubbery and flowers of many sorts. in the wetter places, ferns and pink and yellow lady slippers were planted, and in the dryer area shrubbery, such as the red bud and azalea. thus, what was once a mud hole was transformed into a useful piece of ground. john needham a back yard swimming pool somewhere and somehow our boys came into possession of the idea that they could make a swimming pool. i think the original suggestion came from _country life in america_, wherein was described, with beautiful pictures, a swimming pool that cost five thousand dollars or six thousand dollars. the boys had land a-plenty, water, too, and a will to work if they were shown what to do. with the decision made that a swimming pool must be had, a council was held to decide on ways and means. the oldest boy, aged thirteen, stoutly maintained that he could do the entire work himself, while the youngest, aged four, was equally confident that the job was entirely within his capacity. it was finally agreed that i should stake out the ground and furnish the material, and the boys would do the work. with some slight modifications this plan was followed throughout. it was decided to make the pool twenty-five feet long, ten feet wide, and four feet deep. the ground was thereupon staked off and the boys fell to with a will removing the earth. it was hard digging, but the youngsters stuck to the work and finished within a week. earth to the depth of three feet was removed, and by piling this around the entire margin of the excavation the level was raised about one and one half feet for a distance of eight feet on all sides. this plan avoided the necessity of hauling away the earth, gave the desired depth, and provided a flat surface eight feet wide all around the pool. the rough digging being finished, the sides of the excavation were trimmed with a spade to an angle of about forty-five degrees. rough two by four-inch studding was then cut into lengths of four and one half feet and placed four feet apart all around the banks. where each piece of studding was set, the earth was removed, so that the timber was made flush with the soil. the end of each piece of timber was also sunk in the earth at the bottom of the pit for about three inches, in order that it might be held firmly against the bank. rough pine boards, free from cracks and knot holes, were then nailed to the timbers at the top only. these boards were twelve inches wide, and thus formed a border or rim all around the upper portion of the pit, one foot in width. at right angles to the twelve-inch rough boards others of the same size were nailed, the last projecting out on the level ground, thus forming a boardwalk around the excavation. the main object of these boards was to keep the waves from washing the banks and to give a clean place upon which to stand or sit while not actually in the water. the boards being up, there was still left about three feet of the sides, and the entire bottom of the excavation, without covering of any kind. it was decided to cover the sides and bottom with cement, plastering this material directly upon the earth. the cement was mixed with sand, one part cement and two parts of sand, and was spread on with a mason's trowel. two and a half barrels of cement and about four barrels of sand were used. toward the last, pure cement was applied as a thin wash to the entire surface. the cementing was a pretty tough job, but with the help of an old coloured man the work was finally done in a thorough manner, and the pit was then as tight as a jug. it was allowed to dry for two days; then the water was turned in. the water was supplied from the service pipe of our home near by, and as it is furnished by meter, we had no qualms as to the quantity used. the pool holds about eight thousand gallons and requires from twelve to fifteen hours to fill it through a three-quarter inch pipe. the entire cost of the work, not counting the boys' time, was as follows: boards, Ã� Ã� $ . pieces rough pine, Ã� Ã� . ½ barrels cement at $ . per barrel . ------ total $ . the pool was located in the shade of some willows on ground slightly higher than the adjacent territory. every few days some of the water was siphoned off through a piece of hose and fresh water run in. once a week, however, about a handful of copper sulphate was tied up in a piece of cheese cloth and thrown into the pool, where it was whipped up and down in the general fun until all the copper was dissolved. the copper kept the water absolutely pure and sweet throughout the entire season, and not a sign of algæ appeared. the pool was a source of constant delight, not only to our youngsters, but to those of our neighbours. all but the four-year-old learned to swim, and by the end of the season even he could make some preliminary moves in that direction. the moral of the story is that if you have some youngsters, a back yard and a city water pipe you do not need to go to the seashore for fun. give the boys a chance to make a swimming pool and they will enjoy it all the more if it is the result of their handiwork. beverly t. galloway vii keeping bees i picked up a number of the _bee-keeper's review_ one day and my eye caught this surprising headline: "a boy's business worth $ " i opened my eyes and read on in astonishment about a boy who started with no more capital than any boy could get together, and, without sacrificing his school or college plans, built up a bee business which he sold for one thousand dollars. in the meantime his bees had not only paid their own board but his as well. if one boy can make a success like that, other boys can. so can girls, for bee-keeping is a form of outdoor work which seems admirably suited to sensible, nature-loving girls. how to begin there are a good many ways to begin this like any other business, but there is probably a _best_ way for each person. fortunately one does not have to begin on a large scale. in my opinion the only way to learn how to keep bees right is to keep them. experienced bee-keepers advise young people to visit a practical apiary and watch the owner among his bees, taking note of what he does and says. offer your services if he needs help, asking him to explain what he is doing and what for. stay a few days or a week if he will keep you and learn all you can. one young woman spent a summer vacation on a farm where twenty or thirty colonies of bees were kept, and helped whenever anything was to be done with the bees. when she went home she took a colony of bees with her, and now she is manager of her own apiary with a larger income than the average teacher and ten times the leisure. for beginners the cheaper bees are satisfactory. later, nothing will be too good. a stand of bees can be bought for two dollars or three dollars, but a colony of choice italians in a modern hive with tested queen may come as high as fifteen dollars. better have them to sell than to buy at that price. there are cheaper ways of getting them than buying them. if a runaway swarm which no owner claims, alights in your yard the bees may be yours by right of discovery and if you hive them successfully, by right of possession. this method though practised by some has not the sanction of the golden rule, and is not here recommended. what fun it would be, though, to secure a runaway swarm and make the visitors comfortable in a temporary hive. you would probably find they belonged in the apiary nearest you and ten to one the owner would just as soon you kept them unless they were a very choice kind. he will be so pleased that you were able to hive them that he will offer you something substantial for your work. he may give you the bees, and your bee-keeping will begin "by accident" as did the life-work of the famous veteran apiarist, mr. a. i. root. make a small beginning. many successful bee-keepers had less than twenty dollars to begin with. one colony is a start. it is astonishing how quickly bees begin to "pay their way" and this test ought to be applied in all your ventures. keep a strict account of all your expenditures in supplies, and credit the bees with all the honey you take off and with the new swarms. if i say this often, it is because it must be repeated to fix its importance in the mind. if you make good interest on your money you know it is safely invested. if, however, you charge up your time against the bees you must credit them with the fun you have, the outdoor exercise you get in caring for them and the consequent freedom from doctor bills. the best place for bees you will read of keeping bees on a city roof, in a suburban attic, and on boats; but the most natural place for them is in the village or country, where fields of clover, groves of basswood, and patches of buckwheat abound. an orchard or large garden is incomplete without a few hives. the young bee-keeper with these advantages is to be congratulated; the conditions are ideal. all he needs is a liking for bees and spunk. before you get the first colony decide where your apiary is to be located. even one hive must have a place and you must plan for increase. an orchard is a fine place, and the hives should be at least fifty feet from the street or road, because bees do not recognize the laws of the open road and turn neither to the right nor to the left. if necessary to put them next the street or close to a neighbour's garden, there should be tall bushes, a hedge, or a high fence to protect the passers-by. otherwise your venture into bee culture may make you "bad friends" with the neighbours and even carry you before the justice of the peace. in very hot weather some shade is necessary for beehives, but too much shade may result in failure. the morning sun and the late afternoon sun are good for bees, but the heat of the mid-day sun may cause the comb to melt and bring disaster to bees young and old. as moving the active colonies is not always safe, it pays to make a plan in the beginning for the whole number you expect to have. this is a case where it is justifiable to "count your chickens before they are hatched." it will not take much imagination to draw a plan on paper locating the principal objects in and near the apiary-to-be, and to sketch in the location of the ten, fifteen, or twenty hives you are likely to have five years from now. if you have no large, deciduous trees to offer ideal shade you needn't give up the idea of keeping bees. with the modern ventilated covers, bees are successfully kept out in the sun, if protected from wind and storms. a grape arbour affords good protection. it should run from east to west. any trellis with quick growing vines like hops, virginia creeper, or grapes, will serve well. grapes give best return as they bear fruit and their blossoms supply honey in season. where no natural shade is possible a shade board or air-spaced cover supplies the lack. a shade board can be made of any old box material. lay a couple of sticks across the top of the hive to rest the shade board on and to let the air circulate. wind is worse for bees than too much sun. bless the pioneers of the windy country if, by reason of their forethought, you have a real evergreen windbreak on your place. if you have not this ideal windbreak, a building will serve, or your hedge or high board fence should be on the windy side. if you start, as many have, with one or two colonies let them face the south or east and leave space enough between the hives to run a lawn mower. as your number increases, your original plan may be changed, but it always pays to make the plan. try to consider, in the arrangement of the hives, not only convenience but beauty. if a board fence is necessary, train vines to cover its bare ugliness; a fringe of low shrubs will help make it beautiful. as your apiary grows, experience will teach you how to group the hives to get the best results. twenty hives grouped in fives under the north side of four big, spreading apple trees would be the ideal i would set for myself if the orchard was ready for occupancy. if i began at the age of fourteen years, i could easily reach this ideal in six years and keep my other duties up, too. by that time i should know whether i wanted to be a bee-keeper or not. a great many people find that the chicken business combines well with some other business or profession. it is surprising that more people do not consider bee-keeping in the same way. barring accidents, bees are far easier to handle, cleaner, and they board themselves. you can leave them over sunday without any qualms of conscience and without arranging with somebody to feed and water them. the bees will not get out and scratch up your garden or your neighbour's, but they will do work in the garden that is too fine for your hands to tackle, and your crops will be bigger because of their visits. chicken owners always sleep with one ear open, expecting night prowlers to appear and carry off their best stock. but who ever heard of a burglar alarm on a beehive? there are honey thieves, but they are not common. beehives look best on a carpet of grass, but if you have to be away during much of the summer wide rough boards should be placed in front of the entrance to the hives to keep the grass down. a bee is likely to come home heavily laden and pretty well fagged out with a long flight. if she should settle in a tangle of grass she would be likely to give up the struggle and fail to answer to roll call the next morning. keep the grass short in front of the hives, then, if you have to cut it with shears, which is not as dangerous as it sounds, once you get used to it. this is best done on cold or wet days when few bees are going in and out. salt, ashes, or gravel may be sprinkled close up to the hives to kill the grass. buying bees even the people with bees to sell advise beginners to buy from some one in their neighbourhood. it is not safe, though, to move bees less than a mile and a half as they are likely to return to their old location. buy from an up-to-date apiary if you can, and get standard hives; the old box hives are not worth anything; neither are fancy hives of complicated structure. the entrance to the hive should be closed with wire cloth after the bees all get home in the early evening. if closed in the middle of the day you are cheated. in warm weather the cover should be taken off; in its place should be put the super over which wire-cloth has been tacked. strips of wood can be nailed on top of this to which the cover can be fastened. by this arrangement ventilation is secured. we once lost a colony shipped by express without any provision for the circulation of air. night is the best time to move the bees, though it can be done in the daytime; a cold day is best. remove the wire cloth the first night after placing in permanent location. spring is the best season to buy your first colony. the price may be higher but the risk is less. get a strong colony that has wintered well, which contains, on the average, twenty-five thousand to thirty-five thousand worker bees. it would be well just here for the beginner to get acquainted with the opinions of the best bee-keepers about the kinds of bees. there are varieties among bees as well as among hens, pigeons, dogs, and horses. americans like to be "hail, fellow, well met" with all their live stock, and although even the best tempered bee might resent a cordial slap on the flank, there are bee-lovers who tell of stroking their little winged friends with a grass stem. it requires real sympathy to succeed with bees just as it does with chickens or cows. no one can work long with them without becoming intensely interested. most people learn to love them and find absorbing occupation in studying their ways. two races of hive bees are common here, though none are native: german, or black, and italian. all the books and magazines as well as bee-lovers unhesitatingly recommend the latter as the more good-tempered, being at the same time hardy, prolific, and industrious. good hybrids, that is, a mixture of black and italian blood, may do almost as well as pure stock, but pure-bred queens are a necessity to keep the grade up. when you hear of people who gather bees by handfuls into aprons or baskets you may be sure that those concerned are all thoroughbreds. if there are no bees for sale near by, the best plan is to order from a dealer in the spring what is known as a nucleus. this is a very small colony, about a quart of bees (three thousand two hundred), should be accompanied by a tested queen, and housed in a modern hive with three frames of comb. the queen sets to work laying eggs in the cells, new frames should be added as needed, and if pollen and nectar are plentiful the hive will soon be full of busy young workers. by fall the frames should be stored with the honey needed for the winter. your first expense after securing a colony will not be for "mixed grain" or "middlings," but for a smoker, a bee veil and gloves, extra hives for your swarms, honey sections, and other supplies. don't buy everything that looks useful or is highly recommended by the salesman. maybe he never saw a bee. sometimes an old spoon or other cheap utensil can be made into a more useful tool than the one he wants fifty cents for. the following list includes the supplies you are pretty sure to need the first year: one colony of bees, in an up-to-date though simply constructed hive. on the whole, the ten-frame hive seems to me to have advantages over a smaller one. a deep telescope cover gives room for two supers on top at once. the only advantage in the chaff hives seems to be that winter protection is not needed for bees housed in them. the obvious disadvantage is their greater cost, size, and weight. single walled hives are so easily made weatherproof, (see wintering) that the expense of the chaff hive is not necessary. three extra hives. two supers; four super covers. two to five hundred section boxes for comb honey. you will not need very many of these the first year, but they come cheaper in larger lots. one smoker. of the several kinds offered, you may safely choose the one that you have seen used successfully. one pair bee gloves; one bee veil. one pound brood foundation, for the new swarms to begin on. two pounds thin super-foundation for starters in the honey sections. one foundation fastener. one experienced bee-keeper tells me that he likes the "dewey" best. others prefer the "daisy." one porter bee escape. one bee brush. one queen and drone trap. the new alley trap is made with bars instead of perforated zinc, and works better. a bee-keeper's guide. (see list of books in the appendix.) complete directions for putting together the hives, etc., should accompany the filled order, and the novice should work with one eye on the printed page. a good book on bee-keeping should be included in the beginner's order. those recommended in the book list in the appendix are all good books for beginners. bees as wage earners average american boys and girls are a pretty sensible crowd and they don't expect to get much for nothing. if they make money they like to see "for value received" written on it. they may get enthusiastic over the work they undertake, but there is a difference between enthusiasm and gush. enthusiasm helps you do the hard part of your job. gush only makes you ridiculous. is there anything worth doing that doesn't take time and work? the honey-producing business is no exception. but the people who keep bees like their job. "yes," they say, "it takes thought and energy and some hard work, but it is _such fun_." the "little people" are so interesting that you forget that it is work. compared to "butter money," "egg money," and "fruit money," the women of the household regard "honey money" as "easy." how much can you count on your bees earning? general statements will give you some idea. you may do better or not so well as the average. a good colony ought to turn out thirty or forty pounds of comb honey a year beside what they need for winter, which is fifteen or twenty-five pounds if wintered in a cellar, twenty-five or thirty-five pounds if wintered outdoors. the best market for honey is the home market, and the price is the best. you get the commission man's profit and the retailer's profit as well as the grower's. the last honey i bought was twenty-five cents a pound. if i bought your thirty pounds at that price you can see for yourself what you would get per hive. the new swarms add to your assets and you are out nothing except for supplies. compare this with the expense of going into chicken or squab raising. the following is quoted from a good authority: "two dollars a year clear profit per hive is the very lowest estimate and twenty to thirty hives infringe very little on one's time. this many colonies may easily be managed by a woman or by the younger members of the family." the united states has to import two and a half million pounds of honey annually, and a half million pounds of beeswax. will not our bees work just as cheaply as those in foreign countries? let us have more bee-keepers. hives little flat-topped white houses varying in height, standing under the trees in back yards are not an unfamiliar sight to most of us. we say as we pass on the road, "those people keep bees," and our mouths begin to water. but what do the hives look like inside? they are not mere hollow boxes. wild bees are content with a hollow tree, but modern domesticated bees require a special kind of furniture. the first eaters of honey were simply robbers of the wild bees. when man began to domesticate bees, and that was so long ago that we cannot stop to count the centuries, there came to be two sides to the bargain. in return for a share in their stores he kept them in clean quarters, provided abundant pasture, protected them from their enemies and from the weather. the old-fashioned hives were very picturesque affairs; you see them in pictures, and when you travel in europe you may see them still in use. those skeps do not encourage doing much with the bees or knowing what is going on in the dark hive. i wonder how the folks ever got any honey to eat. the modern bee-keeper wants to open his hive for a good many reasons. he not only wants honey when the bees have an over-supply, but he wants to know what is doing. he wants to know if his expensive queen is doing her duty; he wants to know if too many young queens are being developed; he wants to know if any diseases or other enemies are present. he therefore must have a hive that permits frequent and minute inspection of its interior. "but," said one boy, "i don't intend to open my hives and get stung all over." now who expects to get stung all over? there's no denying that bees sometimes sting, cats often scratch, dogs sometimes bite, goats butt, cows hook, horses kick, and so on. some method of self-defence is their right, and i doubt if we should find bees so interesting if they did not carry concealed weapons. we certainly respect their rights as we might not if they were defenceless. a bee sting is uncomfortable while it lasts, but people afraid of bees get very little sympathy from me. rest assured that you will open your hives often and the less said about being stung the better. [illustration: modern hive, showing parts in their correct order] if possible examine at a dealer's or at some apiary an empty hive. learn the uses and names of the parts. the bottom board represents the foundation, the brood chamber is the living room, and the supers are the attic store rooms. the flat cover is the rain-proof roof. the hive must be a good home for the bees and easily handled by the operator. the bottom board should not rest directly on the ground because of dampness, which rots the wood and is not good for the bees. some use hive stands, others set the hives on a platform, supported by wooden blocks or on tiles as illustrated here. beehives, like cottages nowadays, must have all the modern conveniences, and up-to-date furniture. in the brood chamber there are movable frames into which the bees build the combs where the young are reared. with the introduction of these movable frames by langstroth, fifty years ago, a new era in bee culture began. the furniture of the second-story rooms consists of rows of little section boxes, empty at first, but ready to be stored with comb honey. when nectar is plentiful and the brood-chambers are full to overflowing with honey, the workers are quick to take the hint and begin to store their surplus in the section boxes. you will notice that there is just one entrance to the hive. this front door is sacred to the occupants. when going among his hives, the bee-keeper who knows his place keeps to the rear. if you respect their privacy to this extent, the bees will come out in front, rise, and sail off above your head without taking the slightest notice of you. what goes on in the brood chamber? bees are the most public-spirited of creatures. they devote their time to the service of their colony. their industries are all directed towards one end: the increase of the number of bees in the world. when the hive gets too full of bees, the colony divides and a "swarm" is the result. thus two colonies are established where there was but one, and the number of individuals goes on increasing twice as fast. the honey bee, like its wild cousin the bumble bee, passes through four changes of form during its development. these are the _egg_, the _larva_, the _pupa_, and the _adult_. the queen is no ruler, but she is the mother-bee, and upon her depends the future of the bee colony. dealers in bees rear some of her young before selling each queen, in order to be sure that she has mated with a pure-blooded drone. these are called tested queens. their progeny can be depended upon to possess the good qualities of both parents. if the eggs of fine italian queens develop into nervous, lazy, black-coated, and black-tempered workers, you may safely say, "they take after their father's family." the egg-laying begins in the spring and at the height of honey harvest the queen bee may lay as many as three thousand eggs every day. she hurries over the open comb inserting her body into the empty cells, and leaves an egg stuck fast at the bottom of each. the worker bees grow from egg to maturity in small, hexagonal, or worker cells. three or four days in the egg, six days as a footless grub or larva floating serenely in a tiny well of liquid food supplied her by the nurse bees, twelve days wrapped in a silk coverlet of her own spinning, the young worker bee passes through her four stages of growth. at the end of her three weeks some inner impulse tells her to be up and doing, and she obeys the stern call. she cuts a hole in the cap of her cell, sheds her skin for the last time (she did this five or six times during the larval or growing stage), and comes forth. it takes her about one day to dry her "feathers," adjust herself to her environment, and "get busy." she finds many little open wells of unsealed honey, and as nobody pays any attention to her she drinks her fill. a round of duties await her, and she goes at them without being told how. she must do nursing, comb-building, cell-capping, and general housework, and all without the least training. after about a week of this, the young worker goes out to play, and then to work. she is young, inexperienced, and self-conceited, and tries to call attention to herself like any vain young miss. when she brings in her first load of pollen she fairly swaggers with importance. mr. root says, "her first load of pollen is just what the first pair of pants is to a boy baby." when a bee is a month old, she is in the prime of life. three or four months of hard work in summer means old age for the workers, but in the bee colony there is no such thing as an old ladies' home. with their wings worn to stumps, their once velvety backs rubbed shiny, they may be seen creeping away from the hive to die, having given their very lives in willing and faithful service of the commonwealth. of the unexplained wonders of the development of queens and drones, the mystery of the laying workers, and the other many and varied activities of the hive, we cannot tell much in detail here. your own book on bee-keeping and larger books of reference will be mines of information. but there are undiscovered north poles in the bee world, and the young bee-keepers of to-day may be the greeleys and the pearys and the shackletons of this new-old science. swarming did you ever wonder why bees swarm? they have no regular dates for doing things. although they have been known to swarm in may, and even in april, you are not likely to get a swarm before june. early swarms are the most valuable, therefore you should be ready, for bees are like time and tide. have the hive fitted with frames and keep it in a cool place. bees swarm to increase the number of colonies. the date of swarming depends on local conditions and nobody can tell but the bees themselves, and they won't, what these conditions are exactly. if there are too many bees, too much honey stored, thousands of workers hatching daily, many young queens ready to emerge, the bees are likely to swarm. the bee-keeper is on the lookout after he knows the signs and can guess pretty shrewdly whether the swarm will be out in a few days or later. he gets his apparatus together and his hives ready. bees often "hang out" on the outside of the hive, and we used to think that was a "sure sign," but it often fails. it is the old queen that leaves the hive, but the bees that go out with her are a mixture of young and old ones. no one knows how the decision is made as to who shall go and who shall stay behind, but there is never any indecision in the community that we can reckon with. some hot sunday you will be roused from your book by the excited cry: "the bees! look, there they go! the air's full of them. they're swarming. i'll bet they get away. no, they're settling." meantime, if you are the boy who owns the bees, you are getting ready to hive your first swarm. it's no joke, for thrills will be chasing up your spine, and if you didn't have so much to do you would be as excited as the rest. but success may depend on your keeping cool. you have probably already instructed the family in modern methods so that no one will be raising a din by beating an old wash boiler, etc. if you have a garden hose handy, let some one play a fine spray on the whirling bees. nothing brings them to time more quickly. when the bees have settled, place the hive conveniently near them, with a sheet or hive cover in front. cut the branch on which the bees are clustered and shake them off into or in front of the hive. if well disposed they will go in promptly. if high trees and no shrubbery is the rule in the vicinity of your hives, you will probably need your long-handled swarm-catcher. or you will very soon begin the practice of clipping the wings of your queens. when the clipped queen brings out a swarm she hops about near the hive. she may climb into a shrub if one is near by. why not provide her with a still more convenient forked stick as some bee-keepers do? she climbs up this, calls her family together, and you do the rest. you may prefer to capture the queen in your little queen trap, and place her at the entrance to a new hive which you should place on the stand where the old hive was. the bees will return to their old location when they discover that the queen is not with them. the new hive will receive them and the queen when released will go in with her family. if the bees refuse to stay in the new hive, it may be because the hive is too hot. prop up both hive and cover to allow extra ventilation. making apparatus while i do not advise any amateur bee-keeper to try to construct his own hives and frames, i do think it is a fine idea to begin right away to study how to improve the appliances now in use. you will have to discard many of your own ideas as useless when you come to try to apply them to practical use. there are lots of patented appliances for sale that make an experienced bee-keeper smile. he undoubtedly knows a clever boy at home who can rig up a home-made contraption that will cost nothing at all, and do the work better than the expensive tool. a boy that keeps bees will find a knowledge of tools and wood-working of great advantage to him, and a girl's deft fingers will know how to put materials together that a professional would never think of. in this connection i will here describe a swarm-catcher, devised by a practical bee-keeper many years ago and recommended by an expert in apiculture of the united states department of agriculture. the construction is so simple that i believe i could make one myself! though home-made, it is interesting to see how thoroughly scientific are the essential features of this device, all based on a knowledge of bee instincts. this description is adapted from an article by dr. b. n. gates in one of the annual reports of the maryland bee-keepers' association. the accompanying drawing was made from a picture of the swarm-catcher in the same report. the apparatus consists of a box with one end open and supported on a pole. the materials required are nails, a large wire hook, some thin boards, and two or three poles of different lengths. a saw, a bit and brace, and a hammer are the only tools required for making it. [illustration: swarm-catcher that works like magic. any handy boy can make it] it is bee nature to try to get into some small hole. to take advantage of this instinct the five sides of the swarm-catcher are perforated with holes about one half an inch in diameter. while the framework of the box should be light, it should also be strong and the materials good so that the swarm-catcher will last for years. a convenient size has been found to be eight by eight by sixteen. a hole to fit the size of the poles should be bored in the centre of the top and one at the bottom. the big wire hook should be screwed into the top far enough from the centre so that it will not be interfered with by the projecting end of the pole. a slot should be cut lengthwise of the top, sufficiently large to allow a frame of honey-comb to be put in so that it hangs down inside to attract the bees. this honey bait is essential to the successful working of the swarm-catcher. you can devise other ways of suspending it to the top inside of the box. it is thought that a coat of green paint on the outside and one of black on the inside induces the bees to enter the box more readily. a swarm-catcher like this cuts out all the loss of time and danger of losing a valuable swarm of bees while preparations to hive them are going on. and you can practically catch a swarm anywhere with this device. if they light on a stone wall, a tree trunk, or on the ground, you simply brush a pint or so of them into the box, stick the sharp lower end of the pole into the ground near by, and go off and leave them to go in at their leisure. a whiff or so of smoke is needed when you first go up before beginning to wield the brush. for swarms hanging in the ordinary way from limbs of trees or vines, while the bees are clustering, take a frame from one of the hives and hang it in the swarm-catcher. it is best to take a comb containing developing brood and some honey. this forms a well-nigh irresistible lure for the swarming bees. one look at the pendant mass of bees will tell you what length of pole you need in the box. put on your veil and gloves and hoist the box up into the tree. put the open end of the box up against the mass of bees and get as many of them into it or onto it as possible. catch the branch with the hook on the box and give it a vigorous shaking. this unsettles the rest of the bees and they will be attracted instinctively to follow the rest into the box where the brood cells are. once the bees are safely clustered in and on the box there is no rush about hiving them. they are safe to be left hanging by the hook within ten feet or so of their original clustering place or with the pole stuck in the ground near by. they are secure there for hours, even for days, but one usually has time to hive them the same day. the swarm should not be left in the hot sun. hiving is done in the usual way. after the hive is prepared with combs or foundation, shake the bees from the swarm-catcher either into or in front of the hive. with large swarms it is advisable to prop the hive body up slightly from the bottom board to enlarge the entrance. the "marching in" is a wonderful sight. an established colony of bees cannot be moved five feet without causing them confusion. before the newly hived bees have had time to locate themselves and set to work at honey gathering, the hive should be moved to its permanent location. it is not safe to delay longer than twilight of the day they are hived. when once they get a location fixed they return to it and are lost. if they refuse to be reconciled in a new hive, put in a frame of young brood from some other hive and try them again. they seldom desert an obvious duty like the caring for young. opening the hive the modern art of bee-keeping was made possible by the invention of the hive with movable frames. some of the many reasons for opening the hive are: . to take off honey. . to see if enough honey has been stored for winter. . to find the queen. . to introduce a new queen. . to examine the brood. before opening the hive know just what you are going to look for. get the smoker well going; shavings, punk, excelsior, or chips crowded in make a good smudge; you want much smoke and little fire. put on your bee veil. for a greeting, blow a little smoke in at the entrance of the hive you are going to open. loosen the cover which you will find to be glued tight with propolis by the bees. a dull putty knife or screw-driver is a good tool for this job. as fast as you unseal the cracks, blow smoke into them. at this juncture it is well to close the hive for a few minutes to give the bees time to "think it over." the better the grade of bees the less smoke is required. take your time. keep your nerve steady and the smoker handy. loosen the frames and take them out one by one. in order to see what is going on in the frames you must clear off the bees. do this in such a way that you will not endanger the queen if she should be on the frame. poke the bees off so that they fall bewildered back into the hive. set the frame down against the outside of the hive and take out another. there are cells of three sizes in the brood combs. queen cells are large, standing out from the surface of the comb quite prominently. the drone and worker closely resemble one another, but the drone cells are the larger. honey is stored in both drone and worker cells. if you wish to destroy the queen cells to prevent swarming you will find it a ticklish job, even with a sharp, slender knife, not to ruin a lot of comb. [illustration: drone and queen trap at hive entrance] it is often important to locate the queen. if you wish to clip her wings, find her you must. she is usually near the middle of the hive, surrounded by her court, a rosette of workers. she is quite different in shape from the workers. it is well to study her picture before going to look for her. a queen's wings are not much to cut, but you will need a steady nerve if you do it free hand. many devices are to be had to make the operation less difficult and to insure safety to the rest of the queen. the danger is all to her, for although she is armed she will not sting you. she reserves her sting for some rival in her own class. harvesting any crop has interesting features, but nothing has the peculiar charm of taking off honey. loosen the cover, puff in a little smoke, lift the cover, then the whole super off. put on a new super and replace the cover. have your bee brush ready and as you lift the fitted sections out of the super, brush the bees that cling to them down to the entrance to the hive. this is the old way and is fraught with dangers. moreover, the bees may regard one robbery as sufficient excuse for another. robbery is a serious matter in the apiary. the modern way is to use the porter bee-escape. this device obviates all the difficulties and once you have "got the hang of it," you will have no further trouble getting honey from your hives. stings: prevention and cure the bee mittens, the veil, and the smoker are all preventive measures. a good deal depends on the way you behave when working with bees. if you are nervous and anxious you probably will act that way and the bees have a way of understanding and are likely to find you. remove the sting by a scraping motion with a knife blade or some hive tool you happen to have handy. if you use the thumb and finger you squeeze the tiny bulb at the outer end of the sting, and inject the poison into your blood. experts have little or no faith in cures which are rubbed on. they underestimate the comfort one gets "doing something" for a spot that hurts so mighty bad. so go ahead and put on alcohol or baking soda or ammonia; you can't do a bit of harm that way. in the meantime nature is busy neutralizing the acid the bee punished you with. mrs. comstock, in "how to keep bees," gives these maxims for opening the hive: have the smoker ready to give forth a good volume of smoke. use the smoker to scare the bees rather than to punish them. do not stand in front of the hive lest the bees passing out and in take umbrage. be careful not to drop any implements with which you are working; take hold of all things firmly. move steadily and not nervously. do not run if frightened, for the bees understand what running away means as well as you do. if the bees attack you, move slowly away, smoking them off as you go. if a bee annoys you by her threatening attitude for some time, kill her ruthlessly. wintering before buying your hives you must decide where your bees are to winter. if you have a suitable shelter you can use the ordinary hives; but if your bees are to winter outside, you may decide that you want the great chaff-packed, double hives. as the summer wanes every hive must be examined to make sure that the colony is strong and that the supply of honey is not short. if the season has been a bad one for flowers, or if the region provides few blossoming fields it may be necessary to feed the bees. special directions are needed and any bee book will supply them. a strong swarm, supplied with twenty-five pounds to thirty-five pounds of honey, will winter without serious loss in a chaff hive. other protection than that afforded by a good windbreak is unnecessary. in our furnace-heated houses no part of the cellar is cool enough all the time for the bees. the temperature should not go above forty-eight degrees fahr., nor below forty degrees; forty-three degrees is considered just right. sudden changes are bad for bees. [illustration: beehive covered with newspapers and waterproof paper for wintering outdoors] many experienced bee-keepers winter their colonies successfully outdoors with home-made protection. the ordinary hives, with the covers on but with the supers off, of course, are put into winter quarters in this way: fold seven or eight thicknesses of newspaper over the top of the cover and sides. make a neat job of this as if you intended to send the box by mail. use a few tacks if needed. over this fold a large piece of tar or other waterproof paper. there is a right way to fold the ends of this outer wrapper, and a wrong way. the illustration shows the right way. if the paper is brought down from the top first and round the ends from the sides over that (the wrong way), pockets will be formed which hold snow and water. nail thin pieces of wood on to hold the folds securely. the entrance to the hive should not be closed as bees come out more or less on warm days in winter. be sure that the entrance is always free from dead bees. another way to protect hives from the cold when wintering outside is to construct a packing case three and a half inches bigger in all dimensions than the hive. set one of these down over each hive and pack the space between hive and case with any kind of dry packing material, such as shavings, sawdust, cork chips, dry leaves. any of these materials used wet would do more harm than good. some sort of shelf or projection should be so placed over the entrance as to keep it open as with other forms of winter protection. feeding in the spring, bees need water. if the tree blossoms are late in coming out, sirup is often fed to the bees to give them a start. patented feeding devices are not necessary. a flat tin pan works admirably. the best sirup for all purposes is plain granulated sugar and water, made cold. stir in all the sugar that the water will hold. fill the feeding pan with excelsior first, then sirup, and place it in the super. little ladders leading up to the top of the pan will help the bees get at the sirup. feeding is also practised in the fall if the amount of stored honey is short. the feeding of honey is likely to start the bees to robbing. under no circumstances should "market" honey be fed to bees. diseases are transmitted by this practice. plants that furnish honey or pollen or both gill-over-the-ground } shadbush } tulip tree } willow } grape } sorrel } spring. elm } maple } dandelion } hawthorn } red bud } fruit trees } clovers (cultivated) } alfalfa } wild sweet clover } raspberry } bee-balm } blueberry } chestnut } corn } summer. fig-wort } locust } basswood } catnip } horse mint } mustard } sage } sumach } buckwheat } spider flower } sunflowers } fireweed } smartweed } fall. milk-weed } golden-rod } aster } rape } the products of the hive besides honey, bees make use of wax to construct combs, bee-bread for larvæ food, and propolis for glue. if you think the bees gather honey from the flowers you are greatly mistaken. nobody knows yet quite how honey is made. chemists say that it has in it water, grape sugar, a little formic acid, some mineral matter, albuminoids, and essential oils. but this list leaves us little the wiser. no chemist has been able to combine these materials into honey. the nectar gathered by bees passes directly into a receptacle, the honey-sack or honey-stomach, which is used for that purpose only. it does not go the same road as the bee's food. the notion that bees swallow the nectar and then unswallow it is as erroneous as it is unappetizing. the flavour, body, and colour of honey depend on the source of the nectar, the age, the amount of chemical change wrought by the bees, and the completeness of the ripening process which goes on in the hive before the cells are capped. honey is a very wholesome sweet, far more easily digested than cane or grape sugar. if the making of honey is mysterious, what can we say of wax production? in the height of the honey season we can watch the bees making wax through a glass-sided hive. mrs. comstock says: "a certain number of self-elected citizens gorge themselves with honey and hang up in chains or curtains, each bee clinging by her front feet to the hind feet of the one above her, like japanese acrobats; and there they remain sometimes for two days until the wax scales appear pushed out from every pocket." sometimes a honey-and pollen-laden bee will come home from pasture with flakes of wax exuding from the wax plates on her abdomen. but this happens only when wax is needed for comb making. at other times no amount of honey gorging will produce a scrap of wax. does this not hint at mystery and something higher than mere intelligence? you would think in such a perfectly organized community there would be something like specialization. such appears not to be the case. all the workers seem to do all the different kinds of things. let us say a bee goes out and gets a load of honey the first thing in the morning. when she comes in she goes to the comb to deposit her honey, then to the brood cells where she combs the pollen off her legs into a cell where it is stored to feed the young bees later. perhaps she sees in passing some cells which need capping, does that, then away to gorge herself with honey and make wax, then builds her own or her neighbour's wax onto the comb. if the day is hot it may occur to her and a thousand others to construct a living fan and keep the air stirring inside the hive by waving their wings. in a system like this there is no resting, no play, no shirking, no specializing. there is always work to do and always somebody doing it with a will in the perfect socialism. many boys and girls of these days are fortunate in having had at school an observation hive. no bee-keeper will be long without one if he has any curiosity about what is going on in the dark hive, or if he is ambitious to solve some of the mysteries. an ordinary hive can be made into a good observation hive by putting a pane of glass in the sides and top. there should be hinged doors to fit tightly over the glass. a two-frame hive devised by prof. v. l. kellogg has both sides of glass so that the whole domestic economy of the bee family can readily be observed. diseases and enemies you will not be in the bee business long before you learn that bees have diseases and enemies. in fact, it is better to face that fact at the beginning and learn how to recognize and combat the troubles. carelessness along this line is inexcusable and will surely cause failure. several states have official inspectors whose business it is to know bee diseases and methods of controlling them. he is required to inspect apiaries where diseases are suspected, and the best thing to do is to interest him in your work and get all the help from him you can. an ounce of prevention will save a pound of cure, every time. if there is a bee-keepers' association in your county, by all means join it and help make it a live, active organization. the united states department of agriculture can give you much needed information as to who the men are in your locality who are officers in the associations and official inspectors. marketing honey the best honey market is the home market as i have said. you may have to work up a demand in your neighbourhood and there are many ways to do this which ingenious boys and girls will devise. most of us, if we can afford to use honey at all, know it only as a "spread" for hot biscuits or griddle cakes. but not every one knows that honey is a very much more wholesome sweet than cane sugar. many people cannot eat sugar at all, but find honey does not cause indigestion. if you could persuade your neighbours to buy your honey for their children instead of candy, "all-day-suckers" coloured with cheap dyes, and sirups made of nobody knows what, you would be doing something worth while. honey is used in cooking too, in many ways. get your mother or sister interested in trying some receipts in which honey takes the place of sugar. if you make a success of this you can get other people to making honey cakes, thus creating a demand for your product. one enterprising chap made a great success by first going from house to house and giving away samples of his honey. he also left a self-addressed postal card with prices and order blank printed on one side, and nine out of ten of the people he called on sent orders. it seemed a pity to waste a good postal card and everybody likes to help a bright boy along; and beside they wanted the honey! it might be well to have a little pamphlet telling about your honey and of the many uses it may be put to, with a receipt for honey cake, perhaps. you will get a reputation, if you try, for pure products, neat packages and courteous dealings. as your output increases from year to year your market will grow, until you, like the boy we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, have a business worth at least a thousand dollars. my experience with honey bees it was just by chance that i ever got started in keeping bees. there were several boys about my size in the neighbourhood at my home and we used to go swimming and play ball together. one fine spring day a few of us were walking down the road toward the swimming pool when we found a swarm of bees on a fence post. one of the fellows knew how to hive the swarm, so we got a box from the store and watched while he got the bees into it. it was the first time that i had seen a swarm hived and the performance proved very interesting to me. i bought that swarm in the old box for seventy-five cents, very well satisfied with the bargain, for of course the box would be full of honey in a short time! the colony was placed upon a bench in the front yard. one night the old bull got out and upset the bench. the bees were ready to sting anything next day. i bundled up until i was sting proof and then got them straightened up. the combs were broken which gave the bees a setback from which they did not recover. i did not get any honey from them and they died out in the winter. an old bee-keeper who lived near us gave me two swarms the next spring. one of them left the hive and flew to the woods and the other was weak and died. it began to seem as though bees were hard to keep. i got a book called "a b c of bee culture," and read it. i soon learned that bees should be kept in movable frame hives so they could be easily handled. i had no bees now, but, although we were laughed at, my father and i entered into a partnership. he furnished the hives and implements and i furnished the bees and labour. we were to divide profits equally. we bought two hives, a smoker, and a bee veil. i caught one swarm in the woods and bought another. they were both late swarms and died in the winter. success was still far off and things did not look very bright, but i had learned how not to do lots of things. the two hives we had were not the best, so we sold them and bought five of a different kind for the next spring. the outlay was large and no profits, but i was determined to succeed. in the spring i caught a swarm early in the season and it made a few pounds of surplus honey which we used at home. during the latter part of august my chum and i were out squirrel hunting and he found a swarm that had built combs on the limb of a large tree. we got it into a hive and i bought his share of the swarm. this colony needed feeding, so i fed it on sugar and water. both colonies lived through the winter and made a strong start in the spring. each gave a swarm and i caught both. the book and the old bee-keeper taught me that italian bees were better than the wild bees, so i invested in two italian queens which i got by mail from a queen breeder. i killed the old queens in two of the colonies and introduced the new ones. they did some good work that summer and lived through the winter. the next spring i had two colonies of black or wild bees and two of italians. the blacks together made about twenty pounds of surplus honey, while the two italians made nearly two hundred pounds. this showed me that there was a great difference in bees. each colony swarmed once, making eight in all. we had now made a success and the business was on a good footing even after four years of failure. that last honey crop was worth about thirty dollars, and the bees and hives were worth about forty-five dollars. we were encouraged. that fall i was sixteen years old and had decided to go to college. the president of the agricultural college in this state offered me a chance to work my way through college by taking charge of the bees on the college farm. i gladly accepted it and sold my bees at home. life at college was very different from home life, but the bees always furnished a source of pleasure and recreation during my spare moments on week days and on saturdays. in the summer months i either worked with the government bee-men or for the college. the bees have not only given me lots of pleasure, but they have made it possible for me to pay my entire tuition and expenses for five years at college. besides studying and attending to my bees, i have had time for much other fun, and this year i made the 'varsity football team and played in every game. some people think that the honey is not worth the stings, but my advice is to get a colony and try your hand. sydney s. stabbler how i earned two hundred dollars i had helped with the bees more or less all my life, so that i already knew how to handle them when my high school course was broken into by illness and i had an enforced vacation of one year and a half. i was able at this time to devote to the bees one full season, that is, from april through july. my father allowed me the use of bees, hives, combs, etc., for queen rearing. the queens i sold for seventy-five cents and one dollar each, according to the grade. to my father i furnished one hundred queens at the reduced price of fifty cents each as rent for the bees, hives, etc. i had about ninety nuclei of two frames each. during the swarming season i used a good many natural cells from the better colonies. later i used artificial, dipped cells which i made myself. in the latter case i took larvæ from the very best queens in the apiary and placed the cells in queenless colonies to be developed, or sometimes in colonies which were superseding their queens. when the cells were nearly ready to hatch they were placed in the nuclei where the young queens remained until they commenced laying, when they were ready for sale. altogether i made a little over one hundred dollars that season. i was then eighteen years old and determined to go to college. two years later i began my studies at the university of california, working for my board in a private family and drawing from the one hundred dollars for incidentals. clothing i had received at home and had made myself for the most part. the san francisco earthquake occurred on the eighteenth of april, in the spring of my freshman year, and college was closed immediately, so that i was able to enter again into the queen rearing business. that season i sent out advertising cards to the members of the california bee-keepers' association and sold nearly all my queens to them. the financial result was nearly the same as for the former season. so in all i made about two hundred dollars, which paid for the incidentals during three years of my college career which is as far as i have gone. by "incidentals" i mean books, paper, and such necessities, also subscriptions to the college daily paper, class and association dues, tickets to college jinks, theatricals, games, etc. i also spent a good deal for tickets to concerts, plays, etc., as that was my first opportunity to hear the great musicians and actors and i considered that a part of my education. flora mcintyre profits of bee-keeping i have been asked to tell something of my early experiences as a bee-keeper, for boys and girls who may become interested in this very fascinating, and, i may say at the same time, profitable, pursuit. i think it may be said of bee-keeping as sailors say of seafaring--once a bee-keeper always a bee-keeper. i should like to tell you in a few words what can be expected from a dozen and a half hives of bees with an average of one and one half days a week spent in the apiary. i believe really, though, that when i began keeping bees it was not because i expected to make much money. the whole story of the bee life, as read from different books which i secured after becoming interested, was so wonderful and fascinating that i could hardly wait until spring so that i might study the two hives acquired through the winter. that first spring and summer there were only those old box hives, which could not be opened for inside study, and all observations had to be confined to watching the bees from the outside. the next summer some modern hives that could be taken apart and every nook and corner laid open to observation were bought. in the fall i was very fortunate in securing eighteen colonies of bees at an auction sale, paying therefor only fifty cents a colony, much to my satisfaction and my neighbours' amusement. most of the hives were frame, but of an undesirable sort of frame. the next summer these colonies were transferred to up-to-date hives. that summer, and for the next succeeding six summers, these colonies did not fail to yield on an average about seventy dollars' worth of honey and wax. counting out winter losses the number of colonies per year would average twelve, the number of pounds of honey about three hundred and seventy-five, worth twenty cents a pound. the bees received only a small part of my time each day. later, when a student at the ohio state university, as manager of the apiary there, about the same results were obtained, so that an average of about five dollars a hive is a conservative estimate. if one begins in a small way, in a few years he should be able to manage one hundred colonies. but it should be remembered that the yield per hive may decrease somewhat as the number of colonies increases, because of the danger of launching in the business on a large scale. the best insurance against loss is a thorough study and understanding of all the details by the practice of bee-keeping on a small scale for a term of years first. i may say that the income from the bees aided not a little in helping me through college, and i may say, also, without exaggeration that this interest in bees by one enthusiastic student helped in no small degree toward the inauguration of a course in bee-keeping at our own ohio state university. to make the story complete i think i should add that the writer of this article is at present engaged as assistant in apiculture, doing experimental work in apiculture in the government apiaries at washington, d. c. there is opportunity for those who wish to take up some problem relating to apiculture as a subject of investigation, and the agricultural colleges and experiment stations will no doubt in the future give more and more attention to the investigation of problems related to this interesting and profitable pursuit. arthur h. mccray viii raising silkworms although silkworms are not actually reared in the open air, there is so much outdoor work and moderate exercise connected with their care that the subject may properly be included in a book on outdoor work. the best food for silkworms is the leaf of the white mulberry. if you have already a hedge of this or several trees you can begin at once. if not, several years must elapse while you raise your preliminary crop of mulberry trees from seeds or cuttings. it is useless to buy silkworm eggs if you have not the wherewithal to feed your infant caterpillars. you may not think of going into silkworm rearing in a commercial way but only as an interesting bit of nature study. why not make up some neat attractive cases, each containing a little collection illustrating the four stages of the growth of this insect? heat a few eggs to destroy life, then glue them to a card; preserve a caterpillar in a vial of alcohol; glue a cocoon to a card; pin and spread two of the moths, a male and a female, and pin them into the box. from such a box school children will get a far more definite idea of insect metamorphosis than they will ever get from a book on zoölogy. such little collections ought to sell well in schools where nature study, zoölogy, or agriculture is taught. the mulberry silkworm makes the best silk, although it is by no means the only silk-spinning insect. every now and then we read of some one who is experimenting with the silk of our american or giant silkworms, the _promethea_ or the _cecropia_, or with the silk spun by spiders. but none as yet compares with _bombyx mori_ in either quantity or quality of its product or in ease of rearing or in reeling of the silk. the adult moth lays between three and seven hundred eggs during the first three days after she emerges from her cocoon. in a week or ten days she dies, her work finished. moths in the wild state are at some pains to deposit their eggs on the favourite food plant of their young, but in the case of _bombyx mori_ this instinct has been lost in the countless years of domestication. the eggs, when laid, are moist with a sort of glue which secures them to the surface upon which they are deposited. the winter is passed in the egg stage. a cool, dry place is safest for them, where no sudden changes of temperature are possible. a steady temperature of thirty-five degrees is ideal, and they must be enclosed in something that is mouse proof, though not air-tight. a perforated tin box is right for this purpose. silkworm eggs for study may be obtained from dealers in miscellaneous insects, birds, animals, etc. as spring approaches you must watch the mulberry leaves and make your preparations. any room in which temperature and ventilation can be regulated will serve for rearing silkworms. you should have some racks made of lattice work, and shelves, open to the air, on which to place them. i have seen a clothes-horse, with racks resting upon the rungs, used for this. a supply of cheap wrapping paper or newspapers should be on hand to put on the shelves, and some coarse netting, the use of which will be described later. do not make the mistake of getting too many eggs. an ounce does not seem like very much, but the well-grown worms from an ounce of eggs ought to have at least seventy-five square yards of shelf space. they will require during the first six days only eleven pounds of leaves, six meals a day, but during the eight days just before spinning they will require over half a ton of food. imagine lugging in two hundred weight of fresh mulberry leaves five times a day to feed these ravenous things so dependent upon you! [illustration: movable frame and light shelves for feeding silkworms] warmth and moisture are required for hatching the eggs. as the spring advances and the mulberry shows signs of putting forth its leaves, the silkworm eggs should be spread thinly on sheets of paper on the shelves in a temperature of about fifty-five degrees fahr. the temperature should be increased after three or four days and gradually raised to seventy-three degrees fahr. sprinkle the floor to make the air moist, but do not wet the eggs. at this temperature hatching will take place after about ten days' time. watch the eggs. when they begin to whiten you must get to work, as the first worms will soon be out. take two thicknesses of coarse tulle or bobinet cut the size of the racks. chop some young, tender mulberry leaves very fine. scatter a thin layer of these bits over the cloth and lightly lay it over the hatching eggs. no sooner do the young silkworms become aware of the presence of their favourite vegetable than they make their way to it, coming up through the holes of the bobinet as easily as "rolling off a log." they are tiny creatures. eight of them laid end to end would hardly measure an inch. as hatching usually takes place in the morning, by ten o'clock the worms will all have crawled through the netting to the leaves on the upper layer of the net. this can now be transferred to the rearing shelf. the netting should be kept well stretched, as the worms may be injured if buried down amongst the leaf bits. all through life silkworms must be handled with extreme care. if necessary to lift any individual from one shelf to another it should be done with tenderest touch. rough treatment is fatal. [illustration: a clothes-horse fitted with racks for feeding silkworms] for young worms the newly opened leaves are the best. as they grow older their tastes change and the more mature leaves may be given. a quantity of leaves may be gathered at one time and kept fresh. the leaves themselves should never be put into water. prepare the food by removing the foliage you intend to feed from the stems. then chop or cut it into fine shreds. six times a day a small quantity of the prepared leaf should be sprinkled lightly over the netting. like other caterpillars, silkworms shed their skins at certain intervals. the six-day period between hatching and the first moult is called "the first age." on the fourth day it is best to change the beds, as the droppings from the worms and the litter of uneaten leaves are not healthy for the moulting caterpillars. spread fresh leaves on nets and place over the worms in the evening. by morning all will be ready for the clean shelf and doubled space. as the sixth day approaches, the worms lose appetite and cease to move about. finally the skin whitens, the head seems to grow larger, and each little creature pulls himself out of his old skin and finds himself clad in a new suit. i imagine he must feel very much as a boy does when on the first really warm day in april his mother allows him to shed his winter underwear, get his hair cut short, and wear his summer blouse and knickers. the young worm, however, does not feel very lively at first. no food should be given for several hours. when signs of waking are evident, food should be given and the worms transferred to clean shelves by means of the nets. on the third day they should be changed to fresh papers. four meals a day are needed by the caterpillars at this time. the second age is shorter than the first, being only four or five days. the skin now changes in colour from gray to yellowish white. after the second moult their food need not be cut much, but they require a lot of it, as they should double their size during the third age, which lasts six or seven days. if the weather is pretty warm their development is faster. they should never be crowded nor allowed to go hungry. always change to clean shelves when the dead leaves and excrement become the least offensive. this odour, which you can escape by leaving the room, may be deadly to your pets. they are helpless to escape it, and are entirely at your mercy. during the fourth age, _i. e._, after the third moult, give more space and feed small branches with leaves on. always remove every berry from the mulberry branches or the worms will eat them and be made sick. their appetites are enormous, their growth rapid. change the beds four times during this period of nine days. [illustration: a rack or ladder for silkworms to spin on] after the fourth moult the worms pass into the last age. five or six days of voracious feeding brings them near that most dramatic event in their lives--the cocoon spinning. for three days, now, instead of eating steadily they wander aimlessly about, as if seeking they know not what; they wag their heads; they behave in an altogether restless and uncertain way. is it some mortal ailment or mere "weakness of intellect?" you are expecting this and have prepared for it beforehand. they will not need to search long for a place to mount and spin in safety and security their cocoon of shining silvery silk. farmers' bulletin, no. , recommends the use of small, clean, leafless brush tied together into bundles and fastened between the shelves in rows a foot or so apart. some use a sort of rack or ladder of narrow strips of wood which should be placed upright on the shelf where the worms can easily find it. they spin between the slats. any worms which seem not to be ready to spin with the others should be fed until they, too, feel the impulse to travel. as the process of spinning takes some hours, there will be no difficulty in observing it from start to finish. you are entitled to this exhibition, for, without your constant care and feeding, these creatures would not have been able to develop. the dull, inactive silkworm has acquired wonderful agility, and without practice is able to weave himself into his sleeping bag with astonishing celerity, reeling out his twelve hundred or sixteen hundred yards of silk in one continuous thread. there are no knots or kinks in it. it is inaccurate as well as rather silly to refer to the cocoon as a shroud or burial casket, as some do. the creature inside is just as much alive as ever it was. the cocoons with the live pupæ inside are called green cocoons. to prepare them for market they are usually subjected to heat either in the oven or by steaming. no water should touch the cocoons, neither should the oven be hot enough to brown them. after heating they should be dried in the sun or other heat. open one when you think they may be dry; if they are, the pupæ inside can be rubbed into powder with the fingers. a good price per pound is paid for dried cocoons, but it takes five hundred or more to weigh a pound. if you have never seen a moth emerge from its cocoon you should keep several of your cocoons. in eighteen or twenty days the moth comes out, usually in early morning. invite your friends to have a look, too. must the moth break the threads in getting out, or is the cocoon woven in a manner to provide a gateway when it shall be needed? how does the creature get out anyway, and what is it like when it first arrives in the open? wonderful happenings must have been going on inside to make a winged moth out of that naked caterpillar. something left in the cocoon rattles when you shake it. examine the dried ball and you will recognize in it the cast-off clothes, hat, coat, socks, and boots that he had on when he shut himself in. there, too, is the brown shell he wore as a pupa. you may think you know these things by reading about them, but you do not, really. hearsay is not the real thing in any realm of life, least of all in the realm of nature. ix making collections plants collecting plants has always been an important feature of practical scientific work. great sums of money and many years of time have been spent in searching through little-explored countries for new plants. agents of many governments, representatives of great nursery companies of this and other countries are all the time looking, looking, often at the cost of the greatest hardship, for new plants. why is this? not as you will readily conclude, merely to add new specimens to museum collections, nor merely to find and name a new species, though some collectors are in the field for these purely scientific reasons. but our department of agriculture is on the lookout for new plants from foreign parts which will be commercially valuable to us. our enterprising nurserymen are after the same game. at the present time very great interest is being taken in plants from western china, a vast and little-explored region. strangely enough, the plants from that far away country seem to be peculiarly fitted to thrive here, and while the government and the nurserymen are telling the people about these new plants, the botanists are trying to discover the reasons why asiatic plants fit our conditions better than the plants of europe seem to. the making of collections of plants, then, is a big, important work, and well worth the while of any boy or girl. if you would read stories of exciting adventures, narrow escapes, thrilling encounters amid romantic surroundings, read some of the accounts of scientific explorations. the collectors of plants and insects in the philippines, central asia, little-known islands of the far east, and such "wild nations," must needs be men of valour, and to know any one of them is a liberal education. making a collection of plants is probably not the best way to arouse an interest in outdoor life. indeed it was made such a deadly dull business for me that my early interest was entirely "nipped in the bud" and lay dormant many, many years. collecting is one of the recognized and useful ways of introducing ourselves to our neighbours of the vegetable kingdom. living in a plant-infested world as we are elected to do, eating plants, wearing their products, utilizing them in all our arts, buying and selling them daily, unable to get through an hour of the day without being constantly reminded of our entire dependence upon the members of the vegetable kingdom, what is more natural than that we should wish to know them? to know their names is not the end and aim of plant study. the name is a convenient handle for a plant. it enables you to talk about the plant to others without the necessity of a lengthy description. it enables you to read understandingly what other students have said about the plant in books. it is only the beginning, like the introduction to a stranger. to make of a stranger a friend, you must know something of his family, of his relation to the rest of the world, how he lives, gets a living, how he makes use of his faculties, what are his peculiarities, his habits, his environment, in fact all about him. in discovering the name of a plant by use of a botanical key you learn a few but not all of these things. as with some people so with some plants, the more you know of them the less you think of them; the less you wish to have to do with them. take poison ivy for an example. knowing its characteristics you pass it by without touching it. you observe it from afar off, so as to be able to warn others of its whereabouts. on the other hand, if you had only known well the giant puff-ball you so wantonly crushed under your heel, you might have enjoyed a delicious supper of creamed mushrooms. making a collection of plants is an extremely simple job. the materials needed are not expensive nor hard to get. here is a list of what is required for a beginner's collection: ( ) a dozen or so newspapers. ( ) driers, two or three dozen, Ã� inches. ( ) two boards, Ã� inches. ( ) a stone of twenty to thirty pounds weight. ( ) mounting paper. ( ) genus covers. cut the newspapers into half sheets. each specimen is to be placed in a folded piece of this. the driers may be cheap blotting paper or pieces of carpet felt, cut to the desired size. arrange a specimen just as it was taken from the ground, inside of one of the half pages of newspaper. while it is not desirable to put too much time on the arrangement of each specimen, it is as well to place it in a natural position and in such a way that the leaves will not lie all over each other and the flowers be crowded so that the appearance will be awkward. but do not overdo this: if a flower droops naturally, do not make it stick upright. with one of the boards as a foundation build your pile of pressing plants up as follows: lay on two or more driers, then a folded newspaper holding a specimen, then a drier or two. (if the specimen is a juicy thing, several blotters are needed between it and the next one.) now another specimen, a drier, a specimen, etc., until you are through with the day's collecting, or until the pile begins to topple. finish with a drier, then put on the other board, and weight it with your big stone. the driers must be changed every day. do not disturb the specimens, but lift each folded newspaper from the old to the new pile, building up with fresh driers as before. in a week or ten days most plants will be thoroughly dry. if at all moist they are likely to mould after being mounted and your work will be spoiled. a dried specimen is brittle and needs careful handling. mounting paper, to be standard and uniform, should be white, plain paper of a very heavy quality. it costs a cent a sheet, size eleven and one half by sixteen and one fourth inches. no other size would be acceptable if you wish at some later time to donate your collection to the local museum or to sell it to some school. there are several ways of fastening specimens to the sheet. some like to use little strips of gummed paper or court-plaster, but old-fashioned glue is about the most satisfactory stuff. it is mussy to work with till you get your hand in, but it holds the plants fast to the sheet, and "that's the intintion." it is best to keep the specimens in the newspaper wrappers until you have a lot ready to mount. then with a pot of glue, a dry cloth, a damp one, and a small brush you are ready for business. lift the specimen from the newspaper and lay it first on the mounting sheet to get some idea beforehand of how you will place it. you may have to prune it some to get it all on, but this is not likely as your drying sheets are the same size as your mounting paper. having decided at what angle to place it, lay the specimen back on the newspaper upside down. with your brush wet, but not dripping, with glue, brush the stems, buds, leaves, and flowers lightly over the back. lift it again, turning it over as you transfer it to the white sheet. with a light pressure make the parts fast and lay the sheet aside for the glue to dry. small specimens should occupy a place just a little below the centre of the sheet, and if more than one specimen is required to show all parts they may be arranged on the sheet as their various shapes and sizes look best. [illustration: plants should be mounted on paper ¼ Ã� ½ inches] a few facts should accompany each plant to refresh your memory of that specimen when you come to study it later. these facts should have been recorded by you in whatever way you like and referred to the specimen by a number while in the press. finally each mounted specimen should have its label, bearing the name of the plant, the collector's name, the date collected, locality, and any useful information regarding it. glue the label into the lower right-hand corner, which should always be reserved for that purpose. these loose sheets, covered with mounted specimens, must not be allowed to lie in a shelf or drawer unprotected. each group of them should be put into a folded sheet of manilla paper. such a holder is called a "genus cover." its size, folded, is eleven and three fourths by sixteen and one half inches. this word "genus" suggests that in time the collector is going to be able so to classify his specimens that each genus cover may contain only plants so closely related one to another that they are of the same botanical genus. the beginner need not be seriously disturbed if there are many plants in his collection that he does not know the names of yet. the collection is for study or it is worth nothing. knowing plants is more important than knowing names. you cannot handle plants much and observe them in their places without noticing how different they are. then you begin to see that some are more like than others. this is the beginning of classification. you need not know even the common names of the plants to do this, although you will know some, of course. professor bailey says: "learn first to classify plants; names will follow. look for resemblances, and group plants round some well-known kind. look for sunflower-like plants, lily-like, rose-like, mint-like, mustard-like, pea-like, carrot-like plants. these great groups are families." after you have handled your common plants a good deal you will be surprised to find how easily you can guess at one's family, and guess right. when you have reached this stage in your collecting you will feel that you need some book to guide you and act as a check on your studies. all the books mentioned in the lists in this book are useful for beginners. if you find a book which pretends to take the place of the plants themselves, you would better throw your money away than buy it. instead of helping it will hinder your progress. you will find in beginners' botanies what is known as a "key." now, a key is obviously to unlock something with. if you had a door key which turned with difficulty, or fitted the lock imperfectly you would be sure to have it repaired or get a more modern one. some of the old botanical keys seem to be rusty and it is difficult to use them. choose the key that works most easily. in making a key for classifying plants one begins by dividing the whole vegetable kingdom into two big departments, thus: a. plants which never have flowers. aa. plants which do have flowers. as your specimens are all of the flowering kind we shall for the present forget all about the others and begin to divide our big group aa into smaller groups. this is how it is done: aa. flowering plants. b. flowers not showy, seeds in cones (usually), leaves needle--or scale-like, evergreen (usually). bb. flowers showy, seeds not in cones, leaves of various shapes, deciduous (usually). you will see that in dividing a group it is important that a is just the opposite of aa, and b is just the opposite of bb, and that the place to look for bb is just the same distance over from the margin of the page as b although it may not be on the same page, if there are a great many divisions under b. these little things make the key easier to use than the old-fashioned ones were. some people still use botanical keys as mental gymnastics but i do not believe in that. after all you are studying plants not keys. you will want to go back to the group we called a, for to the non-flowering plants belong the lovely ferns which must certainly grace your collection. this is a delightful group to study and it is possible with a reasonable amount of persistence and by exchanging with fern collectors in other parts of the country to get a very nearly if not quite, complete collection of native forms. only one hundred and sixty-five of the four thousand species of ferns are native to the united states. such a collection should be very valuable. some boys and girls lose interest in collecting plants after the first season, especially if they have done well the first year and secured most of the species in their locality. if the opportunity to collect elsewhere does not come the next spring there can be nothing more interesting than to try to get the same things you already have, but in some other stage of their growth. for example: most collections will have several kinds of violets, blue, white and yellow, in all the beauty of their flowering. but whoever thought of getting one that showed the seed pods? what is a violet's seed pod like anyhow? is the seed pod of the white one like that of the yellow? are the seed pods of one plant all alike? when do the pods open and how? how do the seeds germinate and when? these and other questions are waiting to be answered by every plant in your collection. would it not be fine to know the pure white trillium in midsummer when it has grown a leaf nearly a foot across and has a red fleshy seed case thrust up where it will be conspicuous? some plants are far more showy in fruit than in flower and you will begin to see why these and other things are true as you carry on your studies throughout the year. many a teacher of botany is forced to depend upon pictures when she wishes to teach children to discriminate between two kinds of leaves, kinds of roots, kinds of stems, kinds of inflorescence. what a boon to those teachers would be a collection put up to illustrate the lessons as they came along! i wonder if there is not a market for such collections in schools where no herbariums are made or kept. for little children, making blue prints is delightful occupation. i knew a child of four who learned to recognize the leaves of most of the common trees one spring by means of this work, and she did every bit of it alone. a small printing frame, blue print paper of the required size, and plenty of water is all that is required. a child soon learns to use good judgment in printing, exposing the frame just long enough to get a fine blue. the outline of the leaf comes out distinctly in white against a blue background. the prints should be thoroughly washed and may be dried on panes of glass. the blue prints of leaves and of flowers do not show anything but the outlines, of course. leaf prints of other kinds are made which bring out the veining as well. the outfit for this work is simple. two print rollers, a pane of glass, and a tube of printers' ink, sheets of paper to print upon, and leaves. put a small quantity of the ink on the clean glass, and work it into a thin film over the surface. lay a leaf upon this film of ink and go over it with the inky roller. transfer the leaf to a sheet of paper and cover with a second sheet. one whirl of the clean roller ought to give you the desired print. it is surprising how delicate and true these are and how perfectly they show the characteristic margin, indentations, venation, and even something of the texture of each leaf. a little practice makes one able to make impressions which are like leaf shadows, so delicate and lace-like can these prints be made. it is an excellent way of fixing the leaf forms in the memory, as well as in the note-book. in making a collection of plants the same "rules of the game" should hold good as in collecting insects and other natural objects. take only what you need. do not uproot and leave to die the near neighbours of the specimens you select. the taking of rare specimens is discouraged. i shall never forget the look of indignation our dear old professor gave an ambitious youth who had uprooted for his paltry collection every plant of a species of rare fern which the professor had been trying for years to re-establish in its old location. after all is said and done, a live plant is better than a dead one. this is all a part of the great spirit of conservation that has so taken possession of our people of late years. out of these little acts of preserving our resources will grow a more beautiful america and a better appreciation of all things beautiful. collecting sea-weeds every child ought to be familiar with that musical poem of percival's beginning: "deep in the sea is a coral grove, where the purple mullet and goldfish rove." and then when the child grows bigger he should have an opportunity to go out in a glass-bottomed boat, at santa catalina island or elsewhere, and see for himself that those "yellow and scarlet tufts of ocean," "bending like corn on the upland lea," are not pictures from a poet's dream, but beautiful realities. sea-weeds are exquisite things and few people can resist the temptation to collect them when spending a vacation at the beach. when going on a collecting trip for these it is well to take a net and two pails, one small enough to hold the smaller things and carried inside the larger. a heavy knife may be useful, too. the best time is after the spring-tides, because at the lowest ebb of the water one may find forms of great beauty and brighter colours than elsewhere. the rocks, the rubbish left by the tide, the pools, the piles, the sea-wall, the surface of the waves themselves, are all good places to look for sea-weeds. they are fewer on sandy beaches than elsewhere. they vary in size from great, coarse, leathery rock-weeds to those so delicate as hardly to be seen at all. sea-weeds are real plants, belonging to that great group of non-flowering plants mentioned before. they are called algæ. they do not have true stems and leaves, neither do they feed by means of roots. many of them are so shaped that they appear to have stems, roots, and leaves, but as these parts do not do the work of true stems, roots, and leaves they are not classed as such. the root-like parts of a sea weed are usually simply hold-fasts, which anchor the plant to the rocks. algæ which live in sea-water get their nourishment from the water which washes their entire surface. when collecting algæ, every specimen which is intended for immediate mounting should be kept continuously in sea-water. this is what the pails are for. every part of the plant should be taken, as the attachment to the rocks is as valuable as the rest. the knife is useful here, or a staff with a metal point, for scraping the weeds off the rocks. the natural element of the sea plant is sea-water. do not put your specimens into fresh water even to wash or rinse them, as they will lose some of their beauty. unless dried soon after gathering they will decay and fade. in collecting, try and get plants of various sizes even though they look alike. the larger ones may be in the fruiting stage. do your mounting out of doors if possible, where you can have all the basins of sea-water you want and need not be careful about spilling. if your collection of sea weeds is for a regular herbarium you should by all means have mounting paper of the standard size and quality; heavy white, unruled paper, of a quality which will stand wetting without being spoiled, eleven and one half by sixteen and one fourth inches. if you are merely making a few souvenirs of your summer at the shore, your own taste is the only thing to be considered. you will require genus covers, labels, etc., just as for flowering plants. for the work of mounting you will want plenty of driers, some pieces of muslin the same size, sheets of standard size mounting paper as described above, a heavy needle fitted into a wooden handle, a pair of forceps, scissors, two smooth boards, and weights. for complete enjoyment of the work you will surely have a little magnifying glass, for your pressed specimens will never be as beautiful as the fresh ones. [illustration: sea weed mounted on paper of standard size] with several shallow dishes of sea-water within easy reach of your hands, and your pails of specimens floating in sea-water, you are ready to begin. select your first specimen and lift it with care from the water. dip it up and down gently in clean water. every bit of matter that does not belong strictly to that plant must come off, and all the sand or other dirt. let it spread out naturally in the water and with your scissors prune it to suit your purpose. some grow in such a bunch that they will not show well on the paper, others may have to be trimmed to get them onto the page. do not, of course, trim them down to look alike but preserve their peculiarities and characteristics. the great charm in a collection of this kind is in its variety. when the plant is absolutely clean, float it in a dish of clean water. this last dish should be a broad one for now you are to slip your sheet of mounting paper right into the water and get the plant onto it, floating it out in a natural attitude. this takes a knack, you may be sure, but the knack can be acquired with practice. if you can provide yourself with a pane of glass to lay the sheet upon when you take it from the water you will have the best conditions. some people get along very well with a shallow plate. some of the delicate parts will be certain to cling together as you lift them out of the water, but you can remedy that by dipping a few drops of water onto them and with your needle you can arrange them as you wish. take your time. this is not a job for a person in a hurried mood. examine and admire each piece as you work at it. make it yours for all time, although you may sell it the following day and never see it again. lay one of your driers on the lower board, put a mounted specimen all wet as it is, on this, then spread over the sheet a piece of muslin, lay on another drier, mount another sea-weed, cover it with cloth and so on you may build up your pile. top it with a drier, put on the second board, and your weight, of ten pounds or so. coarse, thick algæ should not be pressed in the same pile with the fine ones as they would make the pressure uneven. blotters and cloths must be changed every day at first, dried in the sun to be ready for the next day. after two or three days the cloths may be taken off, and the plants left in press at least a week longer, changing driers every day. if you can set aside a regular time each day for this job, it is not so likely to be forgotten. moulding specimens are very disappointing. after one has made a little collection of sea-weeds all the stories about the wonders of the deep will take on a reality. you will want to read all you can find about the sargasso sea, which sounds like a fairy story. maybe you have a specimen of this sea-weed in your collection, maybe you have been fortunate enough to sail through that "vast acreage of vegetation as large as the continent of europe, lying southwest of the azores!" do you wonder that the first navigators, sailing uncharted seas, were alarmed by this vast expanse and thought of course there were concealed shallows beneath the feathery fronds of this gulf weed? you must read, too, of some of the giants of the sea-weed tribe; the "devil's apron," the "sea-otter's cabbage," with its air-vessel as big as a hogshead, and its stalk a slender cord hundreds of feet in length. these are all algæ, and so are the microscopic plants which produce that wonderful phosphorescence on the surface of the ocean. there are still unsolved mysteries about these plants and there is always a chance that the boys and girls who collect sea-weeds to-day on the beach may in the years to come read some of the secrets now hidden from all eyes. it is well worth while to keep such a big thought in mind even while doing the simple and easy work of mounting specimens. collecting shells of all the kinds of collections of natural objects that i have seen, there is none that has quite so much beauty, in itself, as a collection of shells. how easily they can be displayed in a cabinet for our friends to enjoy, too, and they are never attacked, so far as i know, by what we call museum pests, those destructive little creatures which make life a burden to the owners of collections of insects, plants, stuffed birds, and the like. perhaps the products of the sea possess an especial charm to the "landlubber," but most people admire shells and love to handle them and to wonder where they came from and what kind of creatures built them. did any one ever visit the shore and come home without a pocket bulging with shells? or a big handful tied up in a grimy handkerchief? probably that is the way most of the great collections in the country were begun. you can begin one this summer or any time that you visit a beach, and add to it daily if you are spending the summer on the shore. as your collection and your interest grow, you can exchange specimens common on your coast with collectors who live on the other oceans and the gulf. remember that every shell is rare until you get it in your cabinet and what is common as the sand on your coast may be a rarity in other parts of the world. you will probably begin your collection by picking up empty shells of various sizes, colours and shapes. sometimes you will find a pair still held together by the tough tendon that worked the hinge when the bivalve that built the shell was alive and going about his affairs. many of these will be worn by their daily encounter with the tide, and some will be pierced with small round holes too neatly ground to have been made by accident. these holes give you a hint as to why this shell is empty for they are the work of a band of little pirates which live by boring into their neighbours and sucking their life-blood. many of the dead shells are those of animals which live far out at sea or in the deep water and have been washed ashore when the tide was high. search along the shore where the water has drifted a line of sea-wrack. it looks like rubbish at first glance but it is almost sure to hold many small shells you will want, some even from far-off coasts. the collector will not long be satisfied to gather only such shells as he finds on the beach. his eyes are opened. what seemed to him at first a flat, smooth surface of sand strewn with bits of rubbish and a few shells, most of them not worth picking up, has awakened into life. every pool has become as a village, its inhabitants engaged in a variety of occupations. the smooth sand is inhabited. the centre of population is down at the low-water line. the rocks, the bridge piers, the wharf piles, and the sea-walls are seen to be covered with living things. now collecting begins in good earnest. on the sandy beach one needs a net, a sieve, and a shovel. the best costume for such work is the same as that worn when bathing. you will need to be in the water part of the time and will not wish to be hampered by anxiety as to clothing. the best time to go is the time you can go, of course, but you are more likely to find a great variety of things at the very lowest tide. you have heard of planting "by the moon" and you are right in supposing that the moon has little influence on potatoes and cabbages. but to go collecting on the sea-shore "by the moon" is quite reasonable. when the moon is full and when it is new they have what are called spring tides at which times the ebb is lower than ordinarily. after a storm is a fine time to look for things which have been dragged by the force of the water from their anchorage in the depths, and tossed ashore. when you arrive on the sand all will appear to be quiet. your best plan is to sit still and wait for some signs of life. in a moment some clam may send a jet of water into the air near you. if you are quick enough with your shovel you may catch the joker, but he has had more practice in the game than you and will probably elude you. watch for bubbles and jets of water and dig frantically. you will be able to work up speed after a few trials and land your "fish." after some practice you will be able to unearth many living things you little suspected of being there. crabs of various kinds are common and sea-worms of rainbow colours and curious forms. creatures in snail-like shells, little and big, are common in the sand of our coast. as you shovel away try to have presence of mind enough to throw the sand into your sieve. take this to the water's edge and wash it. you will in this way get many small things which you otherwise would not see. do not discard anything about which you have an unanswered question. many of the mollusks leave egg cases on the sand or these are washed in by the tides. they are no less wonderful than the shells, for they are chapters in the same story. the egg-cases of the whelk are common. those of the skate are called "devil's pocket-books" by natives. muddy shores have their own special forms, while rocky coasts differ from all the rest. some creatures, like the hermit crab, are abundant everywhere. you can read the story of this fellow in any book on shells. take some of the stories about him with a grain of salt. he may not be as bad as he is painted for much of the gossip about him has never been proven. his affairs need investigation. the creatures which build the shells are for the most part soft bodied and can not be preserved except in some liquid like alcohol or formalin. these would be difficult to transport but will be of greatest value if you are studying the structure of the mollusks. if you wish to preserve the shells only, you should take great care to free every part from any animal matter that adheres to them. boiling the shell will usually accomplish this. labels should be used and record made of the locality, date, collector's name, and other interesting data. every naturalist of any experience has the note-book habit. many a collector who trusts to his memory finds himself sadly at a loss when he comes to work with his specimens and especially when he wants to write about them. if his note-book tells him the story he will be able to make his account accurate as well as interesting. collecting insects the two principal reasons for making insect collections are first, to study, second, to sell. the beginner's outfit will be the same whichever reason is his. time was when any one carrying an insect net was looked on with a sort of pitying suspicion. he or she was thought to be the victim of a mild form of lunacy, which might or might not take violent shape. all that is past now that insect study has grown so important and popular. it is quite safe to conclude that the hundreds of trained scientists employed by the government to investigate the problems involving insect life all started their studies by making a collection. probably the easiest kind of collection to make is one of plants. once you see them, their fate is sealed. escape is impossible. but collecting wild plants about your own door yard and in the woods is tame work compared to insect capturing. your eye marks a butterfly or a dragon fly for your own, but you have him yet to reckon with and his wings may carry him far beyond your reach. the outfit necessary to an insect collector is simple and inexpensive. for general collecting, and that is the best for a beginner, you need: . a net. . a killing bottle. . insect pins. . insect boxes. while you can add to your collection almost every day in the year when once "you have the fever," the best time to begin is summer. more insects are in evidence then, and their active flight, their beautiful colours, and wonderful variety of form all help arouse the interest. as the collection grows you will find that many insects can be captured without a net, but as you will want every new butterfly, moth, dragon fly, and grasshopper that comes into your line of vision you must certainly have a net the first thing. the materials needed for a net are these: . a smooth, light, but strong handle about three feet in length. (an old broom handle will answer.) . a strip of tin, four inches wide, and long enough to fit around the handle. (why not use a piece of a tin can if you have strong shears?) . three and a half feet of heavy wire. (no. galvanized is the thing.) . a piece of cheese cloth, three fourths of a yard. (get a good grade to stand a season's wear.) almost every boy knows a tinsmith and when it comes to putting these materials together, the services of a skilled workman are very valuable. if pocket money is scarce, there are any number of jobs a boy can do for the tinsmith in exchange for his help in making the net. that piece of wire is to form the ring which holds the cheese cloth bag; the ring must be fastened securely into the end of the handle. bend the wire into a circle a foot in diameter, then bend back three inches of both ends and force them into the end of the handle, a hole for the purpose first having been made by burning or boring. bend the tin round the handle at the net end to keep it from splitting when in use, and tack it on tight. [illustration: insect net] if you know how to sew you are more fortunate than most of the boys i know, although why should not a boy learn to use a sewing machine? the bag ought to be sewed on the machine. you must first lay the finished edge or selvedge around the wire to make sure that it goes around and has a little extra for the seam. pin the cloth together where it meets around the wire, then lay it on a table, double. cut the bag, rounding the bottom neatly. cheese cloth is the worst stuff to ravel, and if you sew the bag with a single seam you will soon be sorry. pin the cloth so that the two edges are exactly together and sew a seam about a quarter of an inch wide all the way round. now turn the bag inside out and fold it so that the seam you just made will be right on the edge. sew another seam, three eighths of an inch deep this time. the ragged edge of the goods will now be inside of this second seam and can not fray out and make a nuisance of itself. if all this is worse than dutch to you, take the bag to your sister. she is not so much cleverer than you but the chances are that if you ask her to sew you a french seam, she will make it just as i have described. sew the finished bag onto the wire with heavy double thread and your net is ready for use. materials to make a killing bottle: . a wide-mouthed bottle. (i advise every collector to have two bottles, one to carry in the pocket all the time, the other for special trips for large things. for the first a small olive oil bottle, a test tube, or any convenient sized bottle with a mouth nearly or quite as large as the body of the bottle. a fruit jar, pint size, does well for the very large things.) . a cork which fits the bottle tightly, and is an inch long. a cork any shorter than this is an aggravation as it is so unhandy. . a lump of cyanide of potassium as big as a hickory nut for the small bottle, two or a little more for the big bottle. yes, cyanide is a deadly poison, and the druggist will not sell it to you and your father will not let you buy it. but if you convince your mother that she can trust you to use a cyanide bottle as it is intended to be used, her objections will melt away. just as likely as not she and your father, too, and your teacher, and maybe the druggist all made insect collections when they were your age and one or the other will make your cyanide bottles for you following these directions: [illustration: killing bottle] . a teacup full of plaster of paris. handle the cyanide with a couple of sticks or drop the lumps from the paper into the bottles so as not to touch them with your fingers, mix a little of the plaster of paris and water till it is like a thin paste and pour enough in on the lumps of cyanide to entirely cover them. put in on top of this all the dry plaster of paris the water will take up. let the bottle stand open for an hour or so, then wipe it out with a rag, which may be burned afterward. put in the cork and your killing bottle is ready to do its share toward making a collection for you. don't forget to label your bottles "poison," and always be careful not to inhale the fumes. the smell of the breath of the bottle will be enough to remind you. it was a japanese student, who, when he found one of his pinned moths had come to life and beaten its wings to pieces in the box, said: "it ought-a be dead. he in cy'ni' bot'l' a' night." i should not wish to be quite so stoical. his bot'l' was probably an old one, which did its work too slowly. mounting insects the first insects i ever saw in a collection were a sorry sight. beautiful as the specimens had been, they were all spoiled by the collector. the moths were all out of shape, wings half folded, the pins used were short common pins, and every specimen was disfigured with masses of verdigris, they were pinned into rough boxes in higgledy-piggledy fashion, and showed every sign of neglect and careless handling. my interest in insect collecting did not date from that hour but from a look i had at a friend's cabinet years later. the first mistake a beginner makes is to use common pins. really, before you begin to collect, you ought to send away for a supply of german insect pins. these can be bought from dealers in entomological supplies and a hundred each of nos. and will cost thirty cents. with them your collection may be salable, and you may exchange your duplicates with other collectors, while if you use common pins your specimens will have no commercial value, and will soon be spoiled, by the corroding of the pins. [illustration: cross-section of spreading-board, showing construction] the first insect you get will probably be a butterfly, or a moth, for these showy ones are all you are able to see. later the smaller ones will attract your attention. therefore you will not be able to mount your first specimen properly without a spreading-board. the drawing of one which appears on this page will tell you more about how to make as well as how to use it than any amount of description. if you can earn seventy-five cents more easily than by making a set of three of these in assorted sizes, you can buy for that amount an adjustable one which will serve you for all winged insects of all sizes. [illustration: spreading-board, in use] i will suppose that you have captured your first butterfly. do get a good sized one first as it will be easier to learn on that than on a small one. an hour in a freshly made cyanide jar is long enough to insure a painless death. if any one calls you a cruel boy at this time, assure the person that butterflies are very short-lived and that this one would have been eaten by a bird within an hour or two anyhow. the cyanide is the least painful form of dying for the butterfly. its work is probably done, already. you can prove that you do not kill insects for the fun of seeing them die, by putting the bottle back in your pocket where they can die in private, and by never killing any unless you need them for your collection. a few duplicates for exchange is also legitimate. it does not injure a specimen to leave it in the jar over night. if you cannot spread it immediately, do not take it from the jar, as when dried they cannot be spread, as they are very brittle. if you never looked at a butterfly before, you will look at this one. you will note that it has four broad wings attached to a rounded body. the portion of the body to which the wings are fastened is called the thorax. for a medium-sized insect, a no. pin should be taken. the butterfly should be pinned through the thorax, half way between the front wings. direct the pin so that it will come out in the middle on the under side of the thorax. one fourth of the pin's length should remain above the insect. this may seem a small matter but insects unevenly pinned look badly, and it spoils their salability. you will want some black-headed pins for use on the spreading-board. common pins hurt the fingers, insect pins are too flexible and expensive. pin strips of paper on to hold the wings in place. with the picture of butterflies on a spreading-board as a model, you will, after some experience, get so that you can do this well. it is no job for an impatient person, though. leave the butterfly on the board until it is thoroughly dry, which takes three days. put the board where the air can have free circulation around it, but not the mice. [illustration: showing how to pin common insects] the only insects that are not pinned through the middle of the thorax are the beetles, those hard-shelled creatures like june bugs (which ought to be called may beetles), and potato bugs (which are also beetles). if you put a pin through the centre of a beetle's thorax, it spreads the wings out in an unnatural way. so collectors agree to pin them through the right wing-cover. [illustration: pin butterflies through the thorax, between the front pair of wings] your next requirement will be boxes to put the specimens in. many a fine collection has been begun in ordinary cigar boxes. at first you will probably try to pin the insects right into the bottom of the box. after you have spoiled two or three of your rarest ones, bent a dozen or so expensive pins, you will conclude that the wood is too hard and does not hold the pins well. be warned in time to save yourself this bother. the boxes should be lined with a thin layer of some material which, though soft enough to push a pin into easily, must at the same time be elastic and firm enough to hold the pins. cork, linoleum, and slices of pith are all used. you may have noticed, though, if you have been to a large, up-to-date museum, that the specimens of insects are all pinned into solid blocks of wood. many an hour i have spent pinning specimens into blocks in their permanent places in a great museum collection. it is hard work and has to be done with a tool. when once fastened on a block the insect is supposed to be a fixture; when it moves the block goes along. but the material you use in your boxes ought to be soft enough to make shifting of specimens easy. for example, at first you will get a great assortment. a butterfly to-day, a beetle or two to-morrow, a pair of moths the next day, some crickets, a dragon fly, a cicada, a waterbug, and so on. take everything unless you already have it. that is the only way to collect. if you say, "oh, i'll get a better one to-morrow," the chances are that the season will go by and you will not get that variety at all. [illustration: glass-topped insect case] classification your first box full will be a varied assortment. when you have all you can conveniently pin into three boxes without crowding, you will want to arrange them. if you have begun to study science you will know what "classify" means. every school is made up of classes. so with insects. you will know by the looks of the insects that certain ones belong together. a good way to start is to put all the butterflies and moths into one box. you may not know what you have done, but you have simply separated the members of the order _lepidoptera_ from all the others. look over those that are left and you will see that some, like the blundering june bug, have their wings so placed that a straight line appears down the middle of the back. these belong together, regardless of their colour, size, shape, habits, or other considerations. they belong to the order _coleoptera_. grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets belong to another group and can be pinned together. all the flies have two wings, and belong in a group apart from all the four-winged ones. the dragon flies go together. you will have representatives of other orders, less easy to distinguish, but by the time your collection has grown to this extent you will be ready for some beginner's book on entomology, which will make further classification simple enough. as you shift your specimens from one box to another observe a certain regularity of arrangement. the heads should all point in one direction. when pinning a group all of which are about one size, set the pins all in line, in military fashion. how much better they look! this neat, formal arrangement of the specimens adds greatly to your satisfaction and enjoyment of your collection. avoid crowding and breakage. a dried specimen is almost everlasting, but at the same time it is the most fragile thing you can imagine. as your collection grows in size, value, and interest, you will certainly want wooden cases. perhaps your manual training teacher will be willing to let you build a box under his direction. a cabinet-maker can make them at one dollar or less, apiece, of well-seasoned basswood. before you have been collecting long, you will have learned by observation quite a lot about insects and their ways. you will know that some localities are very poor collecting ground, that other places yield an abundant variety; that the best time for butterflies is in a sunny forenoon; while moths are abroad in the early twilight and later. you will see that dragon flies are fond of flying about over streams or ponds and you may wonder why as you try in vain to net a fine one without getting your feet wet. other insects are frankly aquatic and you can get them only by dipping your net in. it is well to have a second net if you expect to do much water collecting as the cloth is hard to smooth out after a wetting. as a majority of insects are vegetarian you will naturally seek among plants for specimens. if the winged forms are not eating the foliage you may discover that they are laying eggs on the leaves of the food plant on which their young must develop. if you live in town you will find it worth while to carry your bottle with you when you go out in the evening. nocturnal insects of all kinds are attracted to electric lights, many of them to their death, as you will see. a candle in your open window will attract some valuable additions to your collection and also some you will sleep better without. some collectors care nothing for a specimen unless it is rare. a better way is to regard them all as rare until you secure a specimen for your box, and of equal value towards building up a complete collection. a life history collection you can not collect insects very long before you begin to see a lot of things you never noticed before. you see leaves cut or eaten in strange forms, or you find a cluster of tiny eggs on a leaf, or several leaves sewed or stuck together with strands of silk. perhaps you find strange abnormal growths on certain plants, swellings on their stems, leaves transformed into balls, or pod-like or cone-like affairs which do not look natural. these things are sure to arouse your curiosity. sometimes the answer to your question is right there. cut open a swollen golden-rod stalk and you will find the culprit which caused the plant to grow that way. but how did the footless, helpless grub get there and when? you break down the mud-dauber wasp's nest from among the rafters of some building. what is that yellowish object that rolls from among the ruined adobe walls? look! it is a spider. what business has a spider in the wasp's nest, if it is her nest? spiders have none too good a reputation, but this spider does not act very spry. seems to be alive, yet not alive. the secret of the relation between the spiders and the wasps you can read in many a book. you might even guess at it, but there was no guess work about the observer who first studied out this secret. he did not get his knowledge from books. he patiently watched the mud-dauber going about her house building. he knew that her painstaking labour could have but one meaning. she was building not a home for herself, but for her children. the wasp's children are not little wasps, yet they are none the less young wasps for being footless, colourless, wingless, stingless grubs. they are eggs at first of course, just as all insects are. when the mother wasp has one cell of her apartment house finished she concerns herself immediately with stocking the larder. knowing the tastes of her yet unborn young, she leaves for a time the mud hole, and visits the haunts of certain spiders. finding one to her liking, she captures it. not appreciating the fact that the law forbids the use of preservatives in meats, she injects a drop of some wonder-working fluid into the spider and preserves the creature, not only fresh but alive, though paralyzed. upon the inert body she places an egg, then seals the cell, well assured in her mind that when the grub hatches it will find the food just as she left it and just enough to nourish the young one to maturity. before your first season of collecting is past you will find yourself bringing home as specimens many insects which you will see are not fully grown. little grasshoppers, scarcely bigger than a fly yet possessed of such strength of leg that they can hurl themselves into the air for a distance equal to twenty times their own length. how do you know that they are young grasshoppers and not fully grown ones of some tiny race? look at one closely and you will see a look of youth about him that is unmistakable. he is fuzzy, his head is too big for him, his legs out of all proportion to the rest of him. then, too, he has no wings, just little buds where the wings will be some day. by these tokens you will know him for a baby. you can find them in all sizes and can have a series to show the stages of growth. this is one of the first steps in the making of a "life history collection," far more valuable to the naturalist than a collection containing only mature insects. generally speaking, all adult insects have wings, and all winged insects are adults. there are exceptions to this, but they will take their places when the time comes. the young of the insects belonging to certain orders resemble their parents enough so as to be placed where they belong at a glance. this is true of the grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets, of the true bugs which include the squash-bugs, the chinch-bug, the stink-bug and others. of most of the other orders this is not true. the young do not look at all like the adults. in many cases as, for example, the dragon fly and the mosquito, they are fitted in the immature stages to a life in the water. they must, on this account, have organs for swimming, for aquatic breathing, and for getting a living in the water. the forms of these young insects are just as varied as those of the adults, but they do not resemble the winged ones in the least. the life history collection must contain specimens of the immature forms of insect life as well as adults if it is to be most useful and complete. some orders of insects, as for example the moths, butterflies, beetles, flies, bees, wasps, ants, and others pass through four distinct changes of form. they always follow the same order. every generation, beginning with the egg, passes next to the larva (called caterpillar or incorrectly worm, or grub, or maggot), on to the pupa, then to the adult. the egg of an insect is often a most beautiful object. with a hand lens, which every collector will surely need, one can see its delicate colouring, its pearl-like shell, its curiously carved or sculptured surface. to get some idea of the great variety in form, colour, shape, and markings of insects' eggs, ask at your library for a book on butterflies, with coloured plates, and the chances are that you will be surprised. the second or larval stage of the insect's life is the eating, growing stage. during this stage the young bee, butterfly, ant, or moth moults several times. in this process the entire old skin is shed, an operation well worth seeing. under the old coat a new one has formed, which being larger, accommodates itself to the insect's increased size. the larval stage is in the case of many insects the active time when, if they are vegetable feeders, they injure crops. when the larva has completed its growth it changes into a pupa. some insects pass this third stage inside of silken cases they spin about themselves, others, after shedding the larval skin, find themselves each clad in a sort of horny coat of mail. we call these chrysalides. some larvæ creep away into the ground, there to shed their old coats and rest inside of the pupa cases which nature provides. each one follows the fashion of his own family and is in no danger of being mistaken for any one else. out of the pupa, whether it be cocoon, chrysalis, or just plain pupa case, comes the adult. the main business of adult insects is to reproduce their kind. after the eggs are laid there is little excuse for their living. in the case of a great many kinds of insects death follows soon after. there are some noted exceptions to this rule as for instance the wasps which build with so much skill and patience the homes in which to rear their young, the ants and the bees, both social and solitary, which carry on such a complicated home life. of these highly "civilized" insects only a word can be spoken here. from the chapter on "bee-keeping" and from other books you may learn of the wonders they perform. we must return now to our life history collection. how the subject opens as we add specimens of cocoons and pupa cases to the collection! to get a complete series illustrating the life, let us say, of one of our common butterflies, the monarch or milk-weed butterfly, you should visit the clusters of milk-weed along the roadside or anywhere, in the forenoon of a sunny july or august day. a few butterflies are probably flitting about in rather casual fashion. watch them light on the leaves, mark the leaf with your eye and hurry to the spot. search well. the tiny speck of pale yellow may be a drop of milk but if it stands up on the leaf it is likely to be a butterfly's egg. your lens will tell you. having made sure of one you will find others. you may find a young caterpillar lunching on the leaf. if just out of the egg it is a dull lead colour, but when half grown a young monarch is striped with rings of greenish yellow and black. though handsome as to colour scheme, this caterpillar has manners unbecoming a plain citizen, let alone a monarch. touch its back with a grass stem and see what happens. if time permits you should visit your clump of milk-weed daily or better still take home the eggs and the young caterpillars. keep the food plant fresh in a jar of water and get more when needed. as you want a specimen of the egg-shell for your collection, you must be on the spot when the young caterpillars come out. they sometimes eat the shell the first thing. it is a delicate operation to glue a thing as frail as this shell onto a dried milk-weed leaf, and you may have to content yourself with making a sketch of it on a small square of drawing paper. pin the leaf or the drawing in the box. it is not easy to keep specimens of caterpillars. there is a method of preparing the inflated skins, but as the process is a difficult as well as a ghastly one, you can wait till you go to college to learn it. for the milk-weed caterpillar i suggest instead, a coloured drawing. when your caterpillars are full-sized they will transform into chrysalides. it is worth sitting up all night to see a sight like this. when a caterpillar spins a little mat of silk and suspends itself by a tail-hook, you will know that the performance is about to begin. the chrysalis is a lovely light green with spots of gold upon it. all this beauty was hidden under the skin of the caterpillar. with an egg, a caterpillar, a chrysalis, and an adult you have all four stages of the monarch's life represented. insect homes nothing in the insect world interests me more than their homes. the collector sees many of these in his rounds, and begins to consider how he can complete his series by adding samples of them as specimens to his collection. i was lucky enough to find, when on a collecting trip one day, a curious structure made of mud on a weed stem. it was declared by the professor to be an ants' "cow-shed." knowing that the museum specimen was in a bad state of repair i readily offered my find to replace it. the professor refused the gift, but offered me what he thought it was worth. i accepted and bought a pair of shoes with the money, which shows that these things have a market value. it is well to press a specimen of the favourite food plant of a species of insect and make it a part of the collection. but dried butterflies, fastened in utterly unnatural attitudes upon dried plants they would scorn to eat in life, framed or put under glass globes on the parlour table do not appeal to the naturalist. they are "fakes" pure and simple. there will be a few among the many who begin to make collections of various kinds who will keep at it. i know one young man who sold his stamp collection for enough to take him on his first trip abroad. six hundred dollars was the sum realized, i believe. those of you who have read mrs. gene stratton-porter's story "the girl of the limberlost" remember that "the girl" sold indian relics and insects enough to send herself to high school and start a college fund. she made up little life history collections to illustrate the talks she gave as special teacher of nature study in the grades in a city school system. the limberlost girl had an offer of three hundred dollars for a complete collection of the butterflies and moths of the united states. she had a wonderful collecting ground in and about the big swamp, and she had enough duplicates to exchange with other collectors for things she could not get at home. in order to have perfect specimens, both male and female, she made breeding cages and reared the moths and butterflies. she dug in the earth about the tree roots and other "likely" places for pupæ, she searched the shrubs and vines and trees for hanging cocoons, she brought in innumerable eggs, caterpillars, and chrysalides and the story of her successes and failures fills many delightful pages. it all rings so true that you can't help hoping that you may see her insect collection some day, and hear her tell how she brought this butterfly up "by hand," how she had to wait a year to get a male to complete one series, how narrowly she escaped the quicksands in a wild chase she had for another, and other details of her occupation. rearing insects [illustration: bandbox breeding-cage for insects] breeding insects is easy. look at the home-made breeding-cage illustrated on this page. materials needed: one round or oval hat box, a strip of wire screen, two and a half feet wide or so and long enough to fit around the inside of the box and lap three inches. either sew the screen together in the form of a cylinder or fasten it every six inches with paper fasteners. (any way to keep it together good and tight.) push the screen down inside the box till it touches the bottom, put the lid on and you are ready for business. if the screen is too wide you will have trouble in reaching to the bottom of the box which you will have to do sometimes, for one reason or another. into breeding-cages made on this general plan you can put all sorts of material while waiting developments, and get many additions to your collection that you would otherwise miss entirely. some surprising facts are often discovered by accident. a breeding-cage containing a female _cecropia_, one of our largest and most beautiful moths, was accidentally left near an open window over night. the next morning between twenty and thirty moths of that species were found fluttering about the cage. they had evidently been attracted from some distance, but found their way to their imprisoned sister unerringly. collectors have many ways of capturing night flying moths. one way is known as "sugaring." this consists of daubing a sticky, sweet preparation on the trunks of trees and visiting the baits later in the evening with cyanide jars and capturing the specimens which are attracted by the odour to the feast set for them. it is unsportsmanlike and entirely unnecessary to put any poisonous substance in the bait and this practice should be darkly frowned upon. the best places for sugaring are these: a strip of woodland edging a stream, the rim of the woods adjoining an open field or pasture, old roadways through woods of beech, oak, chestnut, or any mixed growth, wooded slopes in city parks where there is some protecting undergrowth, anywhere about the old groves surrounding country homes. windy or wet nights are not the best for sugaring, neither are moonlight nights. the ideal night for this is the evening after a hot, sticky day in late summer, the sky overcast and dark but not foggy. you will need a lantern to work by. keep calm. quick, nervous movements frighten away more moths than the light. the following is the unspeakable concoction recommended by one collector as "the best ever" for baiting moths: four pounds darkest sugar. one quart new orleans molasses. one pint stale beer or ale. (this should have been allowed to stand uncorked in a warm place for a week, before using it.) mix all together and heat gradually. boil till about as thick as varnish, which takes about five minutes. when cool add four ounces of jamaica rum. cork loosely and keep in a cool place. the strong odour of this mixture pervades the air for a long distance, and proves attractive to the olfactories of moths though none of us would care to have it about. a good evening's work at sugaring ought to furnish moths enough to keep you busy spreading all the next forenoon. a night in the cyanide jar will do them no injury. it is well to have a pair of light pincers to take specimens out with. if all are emptied out at once some will dry too much before you are ready to spread them. every time they are handled they lose part of the scales and become slightly defective. if practical, put the very large specimens into the jar hinder end first. this will make it easier to get them out head first. it is almost inevitable that the inveterate collector of insects shall become a naturalist. by constant watching, he discovers how insects live, and how they affect plants. he will witness many a tragedy. he will find that there are among them thieves and robbers, pirates, cannibals, assassins, scavengers, and disease carriers. he will witness many acts of heroic self-denial, some feats of strength, endurance tests, and acrobatic turns. he will admire the ingenious architecture and wonder at the never ending variety of forms, colours, and markings they exhibit. many questions will come up in the course of his studies. he may seek the books in vain for information on some of the commonest insects of the garden. entomology is a new science. boys and girls who begin the study by collecting their first insect to-day may, before they stop, discover some important fact to add to the sum of human knowledge and make the world a better place to live in. x odd jobs kindling wood cutting kindling wood was ever a boy's job. most set tasks have little to them but drudgery. but cutting kindling used to be interesting. what is there about it? the struggle to master a stubborn stick, the danger that a slip may bring the axe down elsewhere than on the stick, or that a careless blow may cause the stick to rebound, leap into the air, and give the chopper a whack on the head? scarcely a boy but can show a hatchet's scar on the foot and i know a girl who will always carry one in the place where most people carry a corn. the problem of a source of kindling supply on the farm is never one to be reckoned with. there are always old fences going to pieces, old buildings being torn down, and the problem is rather how to store the supply where it can be had when needed. in town things are different. the fences, if any, are iron, the buildings are few and kept in repair because they cost so much to build. there are practically no loose boards lying around and kindling has to be bought outright. the ex-farmer always resents this as an uncalled-for expense. but kindling is a necessity wherever fires are to be made. no patent article quite fills the bill. [illustration: photograph by helen w. cooke. an odd job that is never out of date] why should grown men monopolize the kindling business? because there is good money in it? but any boy can go into this business, if he has any spunk. the capital required is very small. if your credit is good you can borrow a hatchet. the chances are that spunk will supply the wood. it may be rotting in somebody's wood lot waiting till the right boy comes along. boys in the south are lucky. they can get fat pine which is in great demand both north and south. some say the supply has given out, but who believes such tales? the demand for this will never be less than now and there is no substitute for fat pine. collecting driftwood is another occupation for boys, sea-coast boys, this time. a kind of substitute for this is being sold. it is a mixture of chemicals and does very well for toy fireplaces in city apartments. but the real thing will always bring a fancy price. it is the common practice of american lumbermen to regard no part of the tree as valuable, but the trunk. all the rest is rubbish and the expense of trimming off the branches reduces the amount of profit on every log. some day when our young foresters get enough experience to see all round the great subject they are working at, they will think out ways of disposing economically of the tops and branches of the cut trees. this is one of the big problems of forestry for these reasons: ( ) the huge amount of this refuse wood chokes out the young growth and the forest cannot renew itself as it would naturally. ( ) the brush dries quickly and whenever a small fire gets started there is fresh food for it everywhere. ( ) the brush prevents the fighters from making their way to the threatened district. they have to fight the brush piles before they get to the fire. this refuse wood might be put to a number of uses, e. g., for pulp wood, thus saving the trunks for lumber; for fuel, nothing makes better fires than the smaller limbs; for kindling, the branches which are too small to use for stove wood make splendid kindling, particularly for fireplaces. some of us think gathering faggots too slow and laborious. but we needn't make work of it. when i see men, women and children poking over the masses of evil-smelling rubbish on the mammoth dump-heaps that deface the landscape near some of our great cities, or going from house to house collecting old iron or rubber or newspapers, or picking over the slag along the railways for chance lumps of coal, i wish that there were some way of getting them away into the woods where firewood is rotting and doing harm besides, a waste that works both ways, you see. there is no excuse for the poor people of a village near woods suffering for fuel. they needn't steal. let them get permission from the owner to clean up his wood lot. it will be good for the wood lot and the owner knows it if he is an intelligent man. the boys and girls are much safer gathering faggots in the woods than coal along the tracks. faggots for kindlings bring a fair price, too, and i recommend it as a way of earning money out of your father's wood lot if he has one. in some villages in germany the people have the right to break off in the forest all the branches that they can reach when standing on the ground. in those forests there is never any loss of life, nor lumber, by fires, no choking out of young growth by brush piles. you could walk through the forest there and see in every direction miles and miles of clean trunked trees of varying ages, but no underbrush, no rubbish, no decaying logs, no diseased wood. maybe those thrifty german people made mistakes when their country was as young as ours. but they found out the way to take care of their forests hundreds of years ago and we can learn how from them. cleaning a carriage if you get home late at night after a drive in the mud the chances are that you will not clean the carriage till the next day. but if thin mud is allowed to dry on a varnished surface it will be sure to leave spots. water is the "first aid to the injured" in cleaning highly polished vehicles. plenty of it should be flushed onto the varnish, the mud washed off by the force of the water rather than being rubbed off or scraped off. keep your buggy out of the bright sunlight when not in use, especially when it is wet. slow drying is better for the varnish. a coarse sponge is a good thing to wash a carriage with; this should be thoroughly rinsed after each rub to free it from grit. never use soap on varnish. it may be used on the metal parts of the carriage. prepared chalk is the best for polishing the ornamental parts. for glass, clean water and a cloth or chamois skin are all you need. work in the orchard [illustration: shield-budding] many are the light jobs in the orchard or fruit plantation, which fall to the boys. i know a boy who at thirteen was his father's expert budder. there are high school boys in localities where nurseries and orchards are plentiful who follow this as a trade, making good wages at it. it is a wonderful thing to do, a very neat job in handicraft, and while a book might tell how it is done, nobody could learn how to bud or graft without seeing it done and then trying, till the trick is learned. boys also follow the grafter and tie in the bud or wax the graft. boys are often employed in vineyards to follow the pruners and tie the vines to the trellis or wire with rags or raffia. they become very expert and tie an incredible number in a day. in fact many of the light jobs grow pretty heavy after eight or nine hours. making rustic furniture collecting material for making rustic furniture is a pastime that is suggested by walks in the woods. sometimes a bit of twisted branch may look like the arm of a settee or the leg of a tea-table. procuring the first part suggests the quest for the other pieces and the fitting them together to make a natural looking, balanced, artistic piece. rustic furniture to be good, should appear to have grown that way. there is too much of the kind that looks as if it were made to sell. the truth is that the more truly artistic it is the better price it will bring in the right market. laurel wood is particularly adapted for rustic furniture. selecting seed corn by a careful study of what experts have to say about the best corn for seed, and of the photographs of ears of prize corn, any young man of intelligence may learn to select from his father's field the best corn for seed. it may be that your father buys his seed corn from a seedsman. my experience is that seed corn bought in bulk contains a large number of poor grains. they probably shell the whole ear. the best farmers never plant grains from tips or butts of ears, since it costs just as much to plant and cultivate and harvest a runty corn stalk bearing a nubbin as it does a lusty, towering stalk with two good ears of corn on it. [illustration: prize seed corn] find out what a good ear of corn looks like. make note of all the points to be encouraged. the habit of producing two good ears of corn is a good one to establish. go through the field when the corn is ripe, before the huskers, and select the best ears, with all the points you have learned in mind. take off the outer husks and draw the rest back, exposing the entire ear. when you have ten or a dozen ears braid the husks together, starting with three ears, adding one after another to the braid till all are secure. fasten with strong twine and make a loop to hang the bunch by. seed corn should hang for a few weeks in the open to cure, but should be taken inside before snow. you will have to use a good deal of ingenuity to keep chickens, rats, squirrels, and other thieves away from your seed corn. when spring comes the corn should be shelled, and every imperfect grain should be discarded. by selecting the seed in this way, demanding of each ear that it shall be perfect, you find the crop will improve, if cultivation is good, the soil well enriched, and the season normal. every time a farmer boy uses his mind first in connection with any kind of work, the quality of work improves and his interest in his work increases. selecting seed not only gives better corn but it helps make a better farmer. making cider vinegar every good apple year there are thousands of bushels of apples that go to waste. it doesn't pay to pick and put them into barrels when the price of barrels is more than you can get for the apples. the farmer is the last man to learn how to make use of what ordinarily goes to waste. nature is lavish always, but wastes nothing. the farmer has learned to be lavish and wasteful too. they say that every part of the pig is utilized in the packing house except the squeal. that is the principle which the farmer will have to live by if he would succeed. what can be done with those wasting apples? let the boys have them to make into pure cider vinegar. every one knows how vinegar has been adulterated, and now the law-makers have put their veto on the practice and a penalty to match the crime. there is nothing very difficult about the physical part of vinegar making. nature does the hard work but we can aid nature by providing the ideal conditions for making the product we want. the best apples for making pure cider vinegar are clean, ripe apples. if you use green, dirty, decayed, or over-ripe apples, your vinegar will probably not meet the lawful tests and your time and work will be wasted. green apples have not enough sugar in them. the same is true of over-ripe apples. "but there isn't much sugar in cider vinegar," you say. no, that is true, but without sugar in the cider you wouldn't get any vinegar. if you were a chemist you could find out just how much sugar was contained in the juice of your apples. unless the cider has per cent. of sugar it will not make vinegar good enough to satisfy the requirements of the law. however, plenty is found in cider made from sound, ripe apples, and he who makes cider out of anything else deserves to fail. expose any fruit juice to the air and it will change. we say, "oh, that is fermented," and throw it away. but what is this ferment? set a glass of fresh apple juice in the sun and watch it. in a few days you can actually see that some change is taking place. it is "working," as they say. the sugar is changing to alcohol; so the chemists tell us. what makes it do this? the chemists must answer again. they say that there are yeast plants in the apple juice. how did they get there? we did not put yeast in the apple juice. no, but the air is full of the spores of wild yeast plants so the juice does not have to wait till we put in domesticated yeast from a little "silver" wrapper. as these yeast plants grow they cause the sugar in the juice to change to alcohol. there are lots of other wild spores in the air and in the dirt which collects on the apples if they are left out very long. some of these spores may be of a kind that would delay the fermentation. for this, if for no better reason, we should wash our cider apples. in a glass of cider set out in the sun it does not take long for the yeast plants to convert all the sugar to alcohol, because warmth hastens the work. in the barrel set in a cool cellar it takes longer, about six months. but you have no vinegar yet. you have nothing but "hard" cider which isn't fit for anything. but in the barrel along with the yeast plants are lots of other bacteria, to be seen under the microscope. among them is a kind that causes alcohol to change to acetic acid. did you ever pour off the vinegar from a jug and find a mass of jelly-like substance stopping the mouth of the jug? they called it "mother" didn't they? this mother contains great numbers of acetic acid makers and if placed in your barrels will hasten the changes that fit the hard cider for use on the table. the making of cider vinegar is almost all profit for there is very little outlay for materials and very little work is required. it does take some knowledge of what to do and when. a little study and experience makes success almost certain. a bulletin of the new york state experiment station at geneva gives the following directions, somewhat abbreviated here, for making good cider vinegar at home: "use sound ripe apples, picked before they have become dirty or crushed. observe ordinary precautions to secure cleanliness in grinding and pressing, and use no water. let the juice stand a few days to settle, then draw off the clear liquid into barrels that have been cleansed and treated with steam or boiling water. do not fill more than three fourths full. put a loose plug of cotton into the bung hole. if kept at a temperature of fifty to forty-five degrees fahr. the alcoholic fermentation will be complete in about six months. this time can be shortened to three months by keeping a temperature of sixty-five to seventy degrees in the storage room and by adding one cake of fleischmann's compressed yeast dissolved in a little water, to every five gallons of juice. when the cider stops 'working' you will know that the sugar has all been changed to alcohol. the clear liquid should now be drawn off, the barrels rinsed and filled again. to each barrel should now be added from two to four quarts of good vinegar containing some 'mother.' if kept at a temperature of sixty-five to seventy degrees fahr. the vinegar may be ready for use in six months. if kept very cool it may be two years. when sour enough to be 'just right' the barrels should be filled as full as possible and tightly corked or the sourness may disappear." making grape juice any girl with a little experience in canning fruit can make for home use and for sale a harmless and delectable beverage out of the surplus grapes. every good grape year on the farm there comes the question of what to do with the grapes. a little jelly is made when the grapes are green but most people prefer currant jelly or blackberry or crab apple. canned grapes are pronounced "no good" by all the family, and grape marmalade is full of "splinters of glass," though how they got there who can say? the housekeeping magazines give receipts for preserving grapes but cold storage alone gives good results and few farms have cold storage plants. those grapes hang there by the bushel and try as you may you do not get them all eaten fresh. grape juice is not wine. if you should try to make wine you would probably fail. but unfermented grape juice is easier to make than jelly and as it needs no sugar your investment is small. grape juice has food value, as it contains more solid matter than milk, and is recommended as a drink for children and for invalids. in many european countries "grape cures" have long been popular. in the pure, unadulterated, unfermented juice of the grape we have a palatable, nourishing food and a refreshing drink in one. it is highly recommended as a preventive of some diseases, a cure for others, and as a restorative of general health. so much for the product. now how is it made? it is possible to make grape juice from start to finish in the open air. if the grapes grow on an arbour what more delightful occupation can you imagine than spending a day or two converting the perfect fruit into nectar? idling in a hammock may appeal to some, but a row of shining fruit jars worth seventy-five cents apiece looks better to an enterprising girl than a finished novel. you will need a table, a rocking chair, a large basket and scissors, granite pans and double boiler, an oil or gasolene stove, clean jelly bag and flannel filter, jars or bottles, corks, rubbers, etc. when the grapes are just right to eat out of hand they are right for grape juice. green or over-ripe grapes are not worth working over. discard all unsound fruit, wash, and crush. put into a freshly washed bag of coarse, strong muslin, tie securely and twist and squeeze it until the juice is all out. two people can work to advantage at this job. the juice should now be put into a stone jar set in a pan of water or heated in a double boiler. it is just at this point that most people make a mistake and destroy the fine flavour of the grape by boiling the juice. _it should never boil._ if you have a thermometer use it now. the object of heating this juice is to destroy the yeast spores and other organisms which have alighted on the grapes as they hung in the arbour and which are so small that they came right through the mesh of the muslin bag. a temperature of one hundred and eighty degrees to two hundred degrees fahr. is high enough. take the juice from the fire when the two hundred fahr. is reached. a thermometer is not absolutely necessary. when the juice begins to steam it is getting close up to two hundred and twelve degrees fahr., the boiling point, which you must avoid. making prime quality unfermented grape juice requires two forenoons. if you want your jars to be clear from top to bottom instead of muddy with sediment you will set the juice away in an enamelled or glass vessel until morning, when you will see why this precaution is necessary. with greatest care dip the clear liquid off and filter it. a flannel bag made in the shape of a cone with a stiff wire or wooden ring at the top to hold it open, is the best filter. several thicknesses of flannel or felt are better than one. all the tiny particles of sediment will be caught in the woollen meshes and the juice will be pure. the last traces of settlings, will be removed and the liquid will be clear. the colour and flavour will depend on the kind of grape used. put the filtered juice into bottles or fruit jars that have been sterilized by boiling in water. do not fill them quite full. wiping is unnecessary. fit a false bottom made of a thin board or slats into the bottom of the washboiler and set the jars of grape juice with rubbers and covers on but not screwed down in on this. put water into the boiler till it comes up to the shoulders of the jars. heat now until the water is on the point of boiling, but do not let it boil. remove jars from the water and screw down the covers. if bottles are used, clean, sterilized corks must be put in, while the juice is still in the hot water. if the corks are very tight further sealing is not required, but wax or paraffine is put over them by cautious persons to make assurance doubly sure. quart jars are probably most economical and will find a ready sale. grape juice will ferment very soon after unsealing and should be used immediately. even a small family will have no difficulty in consuming a quart if given the opportunity. many delicious desserts can be made with this juice combined with sugar, eggs, gelatine, cream, lemons, and other fruits. making leaf mould every year i see boys and girls raking leaves from the lawns and either piling them in the street or in the back yard and then burning them. nobody likes an outdoor fire more than i do, whether it is a real camp fire, a little back yard faggot fire just enough to roast a few potatoes and onions and play gypsy, or a big blazing bonfire, almost dangerous and wholly splendid. what i don't like is a sickly, smouldering pile of leaves sending out a suffocating smudge, bursting with sudden flame at night and having to be put out after you had your slippers on and had begun a new book. such a fire is a nuisance to you and to the neighbourhood and no satisfaction. burning leaves is like burning money. that is quite another way of looking at it. "why, most people have to pay out money to get their leaves taken away," you say. true, but that is because we are such a lot of wasters. we are just beginning to learn to be economical, because we must. to make a long story short, turn your leaves into money by composting them. for greenhouse work pure leaf mould is a necessity and the supply of the real article is never equal to the demand. ask the florist in your town where he gets leaf mould and how much it costs him. making leaf mould is simple. all you have to do is to rake the leaves into a pile where they can lie still and rot. to make a really neat job and lose none of your work or leaves make a frame of boards a foot high or so and as large as you think your leaves will require. set this frame in some part of the yard where it will not look unsightly but as near the source of leaf supply as is permissible. if you have to carry the leaves by wheelbarrow you will see the force of this. use a pony and cart for the job if you have them. a big box or barrel on a wheelbarrow is better than the wheelbarrow alone. get a layer of leaves a foot deep, then tramp it. if water is handy, wetting them with a few pailfuls would make them pack well. put on layer after layer of leaves if pure leaf mould is to be made. lay boards over the top to hold the leaves down or the autumn winds will scatter them for you. forking over a few times will hasten the process of decay. a very small quantity of leaf mould for home use can be made in a store box or barrel. this should not be water tight. let the leaves be exposed to all the elements; the rain, the air, freezing and thawing, help on the process of decay. leaves are a very valuable ingredient in the making of compost for the garden. i have from an expert gardener this receipt for his favourite "garden fruit cake" three parts selected leaves. three parts cow manure. two parts garden soil. one part kitchen refuse and weeds. one part pasture sod. compost these in alternating layers for one, two, or three years under cover. the result is a rich, brown, moist compound which, added to common garden soil at suitable times, is warranted to raise flowers and vegetables fit for the queen's table. now then, instead of burning your leaves, go out and gather all you can from the neighbour's yard as well as your own and make leaf mould. combine the boys on the street into a "leaf mould syndicate" and get the local florists interested in a home-made product. making lavender sticks the weaving of lavender sticks has been described to me as "the harmless occupation of old-fashioned fingers." in these days when the revival of old-time industries is so often undertaken, it is well to learn from our aunts or our great-aunts some of the fancy work that employed their elegant leisure when they were girls. the lavender stick is such a sweet and dainty object that i hope for it a renewed popularity. it is one of the always acceptable gifts the pacific coast can send to the atlantic where it is so hard to make lavender grow. i might say here that there is good reason to advise the growing of lavender in the light limestone soil of some of our southern states. immense quantities are used in the manufacture of lavender water and perfumery, and although the dried flowers are retailed as a preventive for clothes moths, i have grave doubts about that. the best way to learn how to make lavender sticks is to have some dear old lady show you. failing this you may try to follow these directions and the picture that goes with them. late june is the best time, september the next best. the lavender must be in full flower. if too young the stems will cure limp. the finest odour passes with the going to seed. cut the flower stalks in clear weather and before the heat of the day. [illustration: a lavender stick] as some lavender sticks should be shorter and some longer to suit their various purposes, you should next sort the stalks into groups according to length. for a handkerchief box nine short ones would be right. to make a large "stick" for a linen closet shelf choose twenty-five of the longest, heaviest heads. always have an odd number. strip off the leaves, draw the stems down till the heads are all on a level, then tie them "gently but firmly, under their chins" with soft cotton yarn that will hold but not cut. use plenty of string and leave very long ends. build the thistle-like head into a shapely oval--but not with cotton, after the way of the philistines. plump it out with a little sheaf made of the heads that are too small to use, and add a few leaves to round it out. with those long string ends wind the head, now, and tie securely. the next step is one where skill and care are necessary. each stem is to be bent directly backward at a sharp angle and it will be a wonder if you do not break every other one. crease each stem over your thumb-nail before turning it back over the head. when all are safely reversed, double one end of a bolt of lavender ribbon over one stalk, close to the top and begin to weave. the simplest weaving is the most artistic, under one stalk and over the next, passing round and round till the head is covered. at this point it is best to fasten the end of the ribbon, wind the stems with common string and begin on another till you have brought all to the same stage. lay them all away for a month to cure. you will find that the weaving will then have to be tightened about the head. now wind the ribbon tightly round the handle and fasten it there. a tuft of loops at the end is a simple and old-timey finish. the less attempt at decoration the better. a lavender stick is a very acceptable gift for one who is fond of its perfume and can detect the aroma of homely sentiment that mingles with its sweetness. drying corn in my girlhood the surplus sweet corn was not left to dry on the stalks. it does not make very good fodder. the best ears were marked and left to ripen for seed, but the surplus green corn was dried. the boys would bring in a bushel or so of ears in the husk. we prepared these as carefully as if for immediate use on the table. every silk was removed. the ears were then put into boiling water a few at a time and left only five or six minutes, just long enough to "set" the milk. as soon as the corn had cooled sufficiently we began to cut it off, with thin, sharp knives. with the butt of the ear resting on the flattest big platter, one sliced from top to bottom. we had orders not to cut deep the first time--just to take off the tops of the grains. the next cut was thin, too, and came off in a slice which fell apart. we cut three slices, at least, before we came to the cob. by this means we obtained a final product far superior to that of the neighbours who made one cut suffice. when a platter was full, the corn was spread evenly and put out in the sun, on a long table and covered with netting to keep off flies. when partially dry we transferred it to a large cloth and continued the drying until every vestige of moisture was gone from it. it was then put into a loose muslin bag and hung up near the ceiling where mice and dampness could not get at it. i have eaten evaporated corn, and find it a poor substitute for the sun-dried article. to prepare dried corn for the table wash well, soak over night, and then steam slowly on the back of the kitchen stove from morning till late afternoon, with salt to taste. by this time most of the water will have been absorbed or evaporated. the corn will be soft and all its native sweetness will be right there. add a generous libation of cream, a lump of butter, a whisk of pepper, and you have a delectable dish. making a tennis court the largest item in all the estimates for making a tennis court is for labour. if a boys' club can supply this they can have a court without expense except for the wire netting and the necessary posts. a standard double court is seventy-eight feet by thirty-six. choose a well-drained piece of ground; the more nearly level the better. locate the courts with reference to the time of day when they will be most used and the direction of the sun's beams at that hour. the first job is to get rid of the grass and weeds, root and branch. if a plough is used do not begin the levelling until every root is gone. turning grass under is bad practice. some kinds of grass can grow no matter which end is up. next with rakes make the surface fairly level. _level_ is one of those adjectives that can not be compared. if a court is level it can't be any leveller, and to be right it must be done with a straight edge and a spirit level. if there is one boy in whom you all have confidence, it is a good plan to elect him boss of the job and follow his instructions. "team work" is the right thing in this kind of a job, just as in games. when the court is level it must be rolled and rolled and rolled again, with the heaviest roller you can get. a surface of ordinary dirt does not wear well. some people prefer to spread on a layer of ashes, next three inches of sand, soil, and clay mixed. roll each layer thoroughly. for a top finish a very fine gravel is used on some courts, sand is used on others. you will probably use that which is most available. clay is hard to work with, but when overlaid with fine sand makes a hard court on which the swiftest experts can play with enjoyment. the care of the court should be taken week about, two boys working together. the roller should be used often, especially after a rain, and worn spots mended immediately before they get bigger. most clubs count in an expensive marker when estimating the cost of tennis. an ingenious boy can make one for nothing. a square varnish tin or olive oil can holding a gallon or more can easily be held by a framework upon a wheelbarrow or wheel hoe in such a way that the drip from two nail holes will fall upon the broad rim of the wheel. fold a piece of paper into funnel shape, fill the can with thin whitewash and paint mixed and you are as well equipped as if you had spent five dollars for a marker. if conditions favour a grass court the sod should be taken off and the ground beneath spaded, raked, and made level. then the sod should be matched and laid accurately, then rolled, sprinkled, and rolled again; for three days at least the rolling and sprinkling should be repeated. shovelling snow the boys of our neighbourhood made an abundance of pocket-money in the winter time by combining into a "snow shovellers union." most of the men on our street take early trains and have very little time, and even less inclination to shovel snow. the boys are out early before the snow gets packed on the sidewalks. they work by the job or by the hour, whichever the employer prefers. at first the boys expected the employers to furnish the tools. but that didn't work very well. to make work a pleasure one must have his tools right and an expert snow shoveller does not want to use a dilapidated spade on one job, a short-handled shovel here, and a long-handled one there. he wants snow shovelling tools and after a little experience he knows what he wants. the tools can be made by the boys. our boys made a most efficient plough for walks, out of cheap store boxes, and a scraper for steps that fit every corner accurately so that one scrape did the trick and no false motions to waste time and strength. for informal paths to chicken house, garden, etc., a shovel made of light barrel staves sawed in halves was found to be better than an expensive iron-bound shovel from the department store. if there is a lame boy on your street take him into the union too; although he can't keep up with you at the shovel, he can have a book, keep track of the time each boy can work, call at patrons' doors to arrange about their work, and these things are just as important as the actual shovelling. mowing lawns in summer the snow shovellers union can reform into the "lawn mowers and irrigators, limited." every year i used to send my lawn mower to a "tinker" who charged me one dollar and twenty-five cents for _sharpening_ it. i learned one day and it made me sad, that a lawn mower properly cared for keeps itself sharp. any boy who is strong enough to run a lawn mower ought to be smart enough to take care of one. he needs to know how the machine is put together, what parts do the work and where the wear comes on the parts. the directions which come with a good machine are worth reading. the man who sells the mower may not be able to explain any part you don't understand. his business may be to sell, only. if you go into the hardware store and find the man who knows all about lawn mowers, he will be only too glad to show you how to run the machine so that it will do its work and last. it is to his interest to have you recommend his machine. make yourself familiar with a machine in perfect working order. your ears and your eyes ought to tell you when it is going wrong. it is, above all, of greatest importance to know how to adjust a lawn mower. a wrench, a screw-driver, and an oil can should be your constant companions. go over the machine before you begin and put it in shape. it is ten minutes well spent. tighten screws, oil the parts that rub, adjust the knife to the kind and condition of the grass. when the job is done, look the mower over. if a screw is lost be sure to supply a new one before the next using; clean the machine and put it away in a dry place. utilizing wood ashes boys who have as part of their daily work the cleaning out of ashes would do well to stop and consider before they dump their pails. coal ashes are as nearly worthless as anything i know of although they can be used in making a tennis court, and are even advised by some for a very stiff garden soil. a garden must be pretty bad off to be improved by coal ashes. but there are thousands of cords of wood burned every year and wood ashes are very valuable. there is no fertilizer equal to them for certain purposes. not only are they valuable at home, but they are an article of commerce, and have a market value. who has a better right to the ashes than the boy who manages the ash pan? barrels are the most convenient receptacles to store ashes in. cheap boxes come next. they should be tight and kept under cover. leaching takes the value out of wood ashes. planting crocuses on the lawn did you ever see crocuses, yellow, lavender, and white, scattered informally in the lawn, coming into blossom with the earliest springing grass. one fall we tried the experiment of poking a crocus bulb down in the hole where we took out a dandelion and the result was charming. there are philosophers who profess to a liking for dandelions in the lawn. perhaps it is hobson's choice with them, as with many, but although the dandelion flower is bright as gold the leaves are a real nuisance. they are coarse and rank and they resist the lawn-mower, and discourage the fine grasses. except when in blossom they are a disfiguring feature. crocuses are certainly more delicate in flower than dandelions and their leaves are more like grass. moreover they die down early and are out of the way of the lawn mower. so instead of just digging out a dandelion or a thistle and leaving a bare hole, i recommend that you poke in a crocus bulb next fall. your reward will come in gold and purple. making ice lots of us get along without ice in winter because we cannot afford to buy it all the year round. we put things outside and they freeze, we keep them in the kitchen and they spoil. the butter is either too hard or too soft all the time. boys and girls like ice-cream the year round and yet many of us do without it in the winter time because the iceman does not come around. sometimes you may have thought when you broke the ice in the watering trough that there was nearly enough to make a freezer of ice-cream. did it not occur to you that you could make home-made ice, supply the refrigerator in coldest weather, and make ice-cream whenever you want it? all you need is the cold weather and a heavy tin pail. fill the pail with clean water some clear, cold night and stand it where it will get the greatest exposure. if the mercury is a little below zero it will freeze a coat of ice two or more inches thick on top and sides of the pail. turn the pail upside down on a bench and turn enough hot water over it to loosen the pail; then take it off. the ice on the bottom will be thin. break this and dip out all of the water, but about two inches. this will freeze very quickly in cold weather and you can put in more. keep filling it up until your ice pail is solid. it is then ready for the refrigerator. from making one block of ice in a heavy tin pail it is an easy step to making a winter supply to store in sawdust where the sun cannot melt it during a thaw and where you can get at it when needed. from this the logical conclusion is that a man and his boys could make a supply of ice for both summer and winter by following the same tactics. how well i remember the hardships of the ice harvesters of my home neighbourhood. the ice had to be cut in the river three miles away, and hauled up a bad hill. if the roads were good the ice was bad as a rule. good sleighing meant ice covered with snow. there was always anxiety for fear we should not get a supply, and often the houses were filled with thin cakes, for fear the cold weather was over for the year. then the hauling and the cutting in the bitter weather was bad for men and teams. the ice was river ice and we knew it was unsafe. a writer in _country life_ describes how he made his supply of home-made ice. he first had a tinner make heavy tin boxes of a size convenient to handle. he had them made an inch smaller at the bottom than at the top and the top was bound over a heavy wire. when the cold weather came the clean pans were filled from the well. the cakes were turned out of the pans next day and dipped and filled just as described above, as solid cakes formed. these were packed in the ice house for the summer's supply as fast as made. the cost was less in time and cash, than putting up "wild ice," even including the cost of pans, which can, of course, be used over and over, year after year. cutting seed potatoes [illustration: for cutting seed potatoes] cutting seed potatoes is a job that most boys and girls dislike and no wonder. it takes so long, is so dirty, your thumb gets so scored and even cut seriously. but most fathers want the potatoes cut before planting and who is to do it but the boys and girls? two ingenious boys invented a contraption which decreased the time and labour to a minimum and almost made the job a pleasure. this description of their potato cutter is adapted from _farming_ for april, nineteen hundred and seven. a dry goods box holding several bushels was fitted with four strong legs, just long enough to lift the box to a height convenient to sit by. at the bottom of one side of the box a board was removed to let the potatoes roll out on a shelf attached beneath the opening. the shelf should have a rim two or three inches high and there should be a crack where shelf and box come together to let the dust sift down. the knife is driven into the end of a short piece of plank and held with fence staples. the boy sits on the plank. the potato is pushed forward against the sharp blade and the pieces drop into the basket. a man can cut forty bushels of potatoes in a day with this outfit. the work ought to be done out under a tree, and if the boys want to wear gloves to keep their hands clean and smooth for more delicate work, i should encourage them to do so. pruning [illustration: rosebush before pruning] when i see a lot of ignorant labourers put onto the job of pruning trees, my blood fairly boils. their work, unless overseen by an expert, is pure butchery. many a noble tree has been so mangled by saw and axe that it has become an easy prey to all sorts of diseases. [illustration: rosebush after pruning] pruning is work that requires intelligence. in orchard and door yard any one with the strength to wield a saw or shears can do the annual pruning. a woman can do it as i can testify, except occasionally where large limbs are to be handled. such occasions seldom arise on a well-cared-for place. it is impossible to treat the whole subject of pruning in one short chapter, but there is nothing difficult to understand about the principles or practice. in ten minutes an expert grape pruner could show a pupil how to prune a grape-vine so as to produce the best and largest crop. each kind of shrub whether for fruit or flowers requires its special treatment. it takes experience to acquire judgment but the principles are easy to learn and to practise. you should go to a book on pruning to learn just how to prune the various kinds of shrubs, vines, and trees. [illustration: the right way. the wound is healing] [illustration: the wrong way. the stub prevents healing] but if there is a limb to be cut off a tree in the door yard who is likely to be delegated to the job? every boy ought to know how to do this right. you may be acquainted with the boy who sat on the limb and sawed between the tree and himself, but you will certainly not share his fate. when you use the pruning shears on the branches and twigs of a tree or shrub you are, so to speak, cutting its fingernails or hair: but when you go up with a saw you are performing a far more serious operation. do not forget that the life processes of the tree, the circulation of the blood, the assimilation of the food, the respiration, all go on right under the bark. the "heart" of the tree is a misnomer. that fresh moist layer which is uncovered by the skinning of a tree is the only part of the tree which is really actively alive and at work. this layer, called the cambium, extends like a tight-fitting garment over the entire tree. every tiny twig and spur is overlaid with it. if you ever had an "infected" finger from a scratch or pin prick or cut you have some idea of the danger the tree is exposed to when the cambium layer is laid bare and the wound neglected. compare the two drawings on this page. look at the trees in your yard. are there some like no. and others like no. ? in no. the pruner cut a branch off close up to the main trunk. the wound was dressed with thick paint to close the pores. all around the edge of the wound was the cut edge of the cambium layer. a roll of new tissue formed there, covering a part of the wound the first year. in a year or two more the roll became broad enough to close over the smooth base where the severed limb was. the wound is healed. but look at the long stubs of no. . that was the work of a "tree butcher." already the stub has begun to rot and the injury has gone far into the tree, past cure. you have seen a fine board ruined by a knot hole? that knot hole was made by careless pruning. have you seen beautiful "curly" places in fine woodwork? those curls or "eyes" are made by the healing over of places where limbs came off. as the cambium adds layer after layer over it, the base of the old limb becomes more and more deeply buried in the wood. learn the principles of pruning: cut off the branch, no matter how small, close to the trunk or larger branch from which it grew; cover the wound with a dressing to prevent decay. trees, shrubs, vines, and bushes should be pruned every year. cut out all dead wood, and then prune to shape the tree or shrub as you want it or to produce the greatest quantity of fruit, blossoms or branches. cleaning rugs the sanitary home has never a carpet these days, but rugs on bare floors. these rugs, if small enough to handle every week, make the semi-annual old bugbear of house-cleaning a thing of the past. what could be more dreary than to come home from school some afternoon and find the floors littered with flattened old straw, so gray with dust as to be scarcely recognizable? getting that straw out was the boys' work, the girls did the sweeping and mother washed the floor. how cheerless the days that followed! how damp the floors, how extra careful we had to be not to carry in dirt on our way to bed! the whole house wore a dejected expression reflected by the family. all because of those miserable carpets. they had to be beaten, too, and the clouds of dust that had to be breathed before we heard the welcome call, "that's enough now. don't whip that carpet all to pieces. fold it up and bring it in." as we folded it we realized how far from clean it really was and how we longed to _turn the hose on it_. but no one had the courage to suggest such an unorthodox proceeding. probably the colour would all run and the carpet would shrink and everything. but anyhow we wished it was really clean, now that so much discomfort had been endured to clean it. rugs on bare floors are preferable. they can be swept and beaten every week and they can be washed. no rug should be hung on a line to be beaten. it is bad for the rug and a waste of energy. a rug-beating rack can be made which will save the wear on the rugs and get them more nearly clean than any other dry method i know of. it is described, by mr. w. c. egan, who devised it, as follows: [illustration: rug-beating frame up against the barn] make a frame of four by four pine timbers, braced across the corners. it should be somewhat bigger than the biggest rug you expect to beat. stretch galvanized iron fencing over this frame and staple it securely all round. the best place for this frame is at the side of the barn. strong strap hinges should be used to attach it to a piece of four by four spiked to the barn at a height convenient for your beating. when the frame is not in use it is pushed up and rests against the side of the barn, held in place by hooks. a rope and two pulleys enable one to raise and lower the frame easily. when down, the frame rests on swinging legs made of inch iron pipe and attached to the frame at the outer corners. the rug should be laid on the netting pile downward. rug-beating is hard work no matter what kind of tools one has. but who does not love to ply the hose? i made up my mind once that a rug that had to have an expensive compressed air bath or stay dirty was not living up to its function as a sanitary floor covering. i experimented with an all-wool rug, some good white soap, warm rain water, and a scrubbing brush. a good lather was laid first on the back, then i threw discretion to the winds and lathered the face of the thing. i scrubbed it as if my life depended upon making the colours run, if they would. then i let the children turn the hose on it. we turned it over and over and over again, till it was very, very wet. it was also clean. we left it on the grass in the shade the first day. then we laid it still damp, face down, on the clean, dry floor of the porch where the sun could get at it and the breeze. it was dry by the night of the second day and so clean that it was a real joy to handle it. one by one we put every rug in the house through the same course of treatment. a couple of wiltons, a few of brussels carpeting, some that were woven out of old ingrain carpets, the rag ones, and finally the precious orientals went through the water cure. before i dared do this last act, i got advice from a rug man, who said that really good rugs would suffer no harm from such treatment. but one never believes until he tries it, and now we all believe, and our rugs are more beautiful than before. we treated the best rugs very gently, of course, but none the less thoroughly, and we dried them face up on the hard floor right in the sun part of the time. it takes about three days and nights to get the dampness all out. [illustration: rug-beating frame, down in use] good rugs ought never to be treated roughly. they should be swept gently _with the nap_, and never beaten with a whip, hung on the line, or shaken. lay on a soft carpet of grass or on a rug-beating frame and beat gently with a flat rattan beater. when rolled, roll with the nap; never fold them. xi making the country a better place to live in i once asked professor bailey, "what is the most important farm crop raised in the united states?" without a moment's hesitation he answered, "boys and girls." of course they are. the best farmers, the real bone and sinew of the country, are the kind that raise the crops themselves, without much help from the outside. they grow nearly every thing they eat, and exchange their surplus for the food and clothing that they can't raise. there is a type of farm life where the family is brought up on the principle that what is too poor to sell is good enough to eat. the boys and girls of such a family are too good for such a life. they do not stay in the country. like the big apples, the prize potatoes, and the gilt-edge butter, though raised on the farm, they are consumed in the city. the country is the best place in the world for boys and girls to grow up in, just because it is the country. but there are ways in which country life can be improved and if the grown folks are too busy raising crops, the young folks must head the campaign which is to make the country a better place to live in. since this is a book on outdoor work we cannot consider ways of making the life indoors more attractive, more comfortable, more convenient, and more sanitary, but concern ourselves with outdoor problems only. boys and girls, stop and think. what can you do to make your own particular corner of the country a better place for you and your companions to live in? when a crowd of boys meet together, what do they talk about? are they interested in local affairs or do they tell each other of the great things they expect to do when they get away? a wise old man once said, "in a republic you ought to begin to train a child for good citizenship on the day of its birth." are you going to be a good citizen? are you patriotic? do you salute the flag at school, and then go out and break the game laws? train now for citizenship. there is more patriotism in obeying the laws of your home, your school, your town, and your state than there is in parading with flags and band in the national guards. good citizenship begins at home. how can you make your own home a more desirable place for your brothers and sisters to live in? take a look at the house. is it plain and unadorned and uncomfortable? are the surroundings bare and ugly? have you had experience in building, painting, and planting? if you can help build a corn crib, you can make a porch over the front door or a sidewalk connecting the back door with the pump or the milk house. if you can help paint the barn, why not the house? if you can plant trees in the orchard, why not shrubs in the door yard, and vines over the porch? don't think you must have expensive pillars and fancy railings. they will not look as well as rustic work or pillars of home-made cement. the vines will soon cover the porch with their greenery if given half a chance. outdoor clubs have you a boys' club in your neighbourhood? or a girls' club? you used to have a literary society in school, and it failed? why was that? the boys didn't take any interest in it. why not have a club that the boys will take an interest in and a club that the girls will take an interest in? what kinds of clubs do boys like? athletic clubs where they wrestle, box, turn handsprings, have jumping, skating, walking, and running matches, and play such games of skill and endurance as hare and hounds, pitching horseshoes, and baseball. they like all sorts of clubs that get real things done, like raising prize corn or cotton or pigs or training colts or steers or dogs. boys and girls like to compete for prizes. how boys or girls will work to do something so much better than any other boy or girl in the crowd that the judges will award the prize to them. it is hard in contests like these to be able to walk up like a true sportsman and congratulate the winner. but a boy can learn to do it; so can a girl. all over the united states boys are banding together to raise better corn, better cotton, better chickens, better fruit. north, west, east, and south, thousands of boys are raising corn. they test their seed, prepare the soil, plant, cultivate, and harvest the crop, weigh it, take it to the exhibition where they compare it with other boys' crops, and see for themselves who has the best yield. one boy, a member of the winnebago county farmer boys' experiment club took first prize of fifteen dollars in gold for the best ten ears of corn. this club has about eleven hundred members. there is a winnebago county girls' home culture club with an equally large membership. these boys and girls are growing up to be good citizens right there in the country, where they were born. they don't have to go to the city to find education or good manners or a good time. the fathers and mothers, the school teachers, the ministers, and the county superintendent of schools all work together in winnebago county, ill., and they can everywhere. [illustration: photograph by helen w. cooke. is this work or play?] the boys in your home school can form a boys' agricultural club now. the first thing you need is information about other clubs. your club will not be just like the others. it ought not to be. but if you know how the others are managed it will help you to manage yours. send to the secretary of agriculture, washington, d. c., and ask for farmers' bulletin no. on boys' and girls' agricultural clubs. on page fifteen of this bulletin are suggestions as to an invitation to be sent out for the first meeting. if your teacher is willing you can hold the first meeting some friday afternoon in the early spring at the school-house. if the teacher is not yet interested hold the meeting at some home in the neighbourhood. if you are acquainted with the county superintendent or the school commissioner, tell him about the club you want to start, and maybe he will arrange for the first meeting and get all the boys and girls in the county organized. you could have a local chapter of the club, with local exhibits and local prizes; then you could have a space at the county fair, and members of different clubs all over the county could compete for first prize. the bulletin gives suggestions for a constitution, enrollment of members, and a scheme for cards on which to keep a record of the crop you are going to grow. there are rules, too, that each person who competes for prizes must observe. a good many boys' clubs start in with growing a crop of corn, and girls' clubs with bread-making. they need not do these same things every year, although one can learn something new about growing corn, raising chickens, or making bread every year. the country would be a better place to live in, if there were more boys' and girls' clubs. attracting birds the country would be a better place to live in if there were more song birds there. i know of a shrewd firm of real estate men, who wished to attract a certain class of residents to their suburban section, knowing that others would follow and property become more valuable. they laid out the woodsy tract with as little change from the natural conditions as they could, and still have a sanitary, convenient, and comfortable suburb. they did not chop down the trees in order to run straight roads through, nor did they fill in the small gully that wanted to be a brook. they encouraged the brook and ran their roadways so as to avoid the big trees and give each building site a character of its own and privacy. then they put a man in charge with strict orders to make the place attractive to song birds; to protect and feed them; to destroy their enemies. he was also to foster and encourage such wild flowers and ferns as grew naturally in the woods, and to propagate and increase them so as to make the place a paradise. the man entered into the spirit of their idea and succeeded wonderfully. the real estate men advertised and the right people came and were convinced and bought homes there and "lived happy ever after." bringing back the song birds how can boys and girls bring back our song birds? i will not say much about why we want them, for in enlightened america we take it for granted. some people still want to be convinced that birds are of practical value. i will say only that the damage to crops by insects in nineteen hundred and four, is estimated at nine hundred and seventy-five million dollars. investigations by scientists in state and nation all go to prove that a vast percentage of this loss could have been saved by birds. i wish every child would be ambitious to increase the bird life on every farm, on every village block. here are some facts that ought to be convincing. i take them at random from my notes: kingbirds kill bot-flies. brown thrashers feed mostly on insects, especially white grubs and curculios. cat-birds, cuckoos and orioles are very important enemies of gypsy moth. the red-eyed vireos are "premium caterpillar hunters." bluebirds board themselves. eat cut-worms, furry caterpillars, and grasshoppers. wrens' food is ninety-eight per cent. animal matter. warblers, titmice, creepers, and nut hatches eat lice. a pair of robins fed their nestlings this menu in three hours, bringing food every three minutes: sixty-one earth-worms, sixteen yellow grubs, thirty-eight other insects. also four grasshoppers, several dragon flies, and a few moths. robins rank first as enemies of white grub. kingbirds protect poultry by driving away hawks; ninety-eight per cent. of their food is insects, mostly injurious sorts. woodpeckers destroy grubs in living trees. phoebes catch flies, lighting on backs of cattle so as to be handy; also elm-leaf beetle, adults of canker-worms, cut-worms and gypsy. baltimore orioles are worth their weight in gold as destroyers of gypsy and brown-tail moths. rose-breasted grosbeaks cleaned out potato beetles. scarlet tanagers ate gypsy moths at the rate of thirty-eight per minute for eighteen consecutive minutes. thirty cedar waxwings will destroy ninety thousand canker-worms in a month. so we can pile up the evidence in favour of the birds. how to attract birds two words tell us what to do to increase bird life: provide and protect. we must provide food, water, and nesting places. we must protect from disturbance, from natural enemies, from destruction by hunters who sell the feathers. [illustration: a birds' table hung with wires] all over the country, laws to protect birds are being introduced into legislatures. boys and girls may think that they cannot do much to help make laws. they can if their fathers are in the legislature as lots of fathers are, take the country over. maybe your father does not know how much birds are worth. get him to read the bulletins issued by the government. the boys who protect the birds around home will be the law makers some fine day themselves. they'll "see to it," then. but now what can you do to-day? is it winter? feed the birds. there are many winter bird residents. where are the insects in winter? have they gone south? not a bit of it. they lurk under the bark on your apple trees. they hide on the fence rails and under the leaves. trust the birds to find them unless snow prevents. the extra feeding you give them will not toll them away from the insect food they love, but will keep them "on the job" and will keep them from starving in stormy weather. water, too, they often suffer for in winter. supply it in shallow basins and slightly warmed. tie suet to the trees; sacks made of loose netting will hold nut meats for them. scatter grain for the grain eaters on a platform. in spring furnish nesting places and material, protection from cats and distressing disturbances; mud for robins, string for orioles, floss, feathers, and straw for others. do something every day for your birds. drinking fountains are a necessity, especially in towns where there is no running water. shallow basins are best. they will often come right to the door and drink or bathe, unless frightened by some real or fancied danger. to make the birds tame you must make them feel safe, and supply their wants. the traffic in bird skins not many girls wear birds' feathers in their hats. but many women do, and girls get to be women very soon. no one knows how many birds are slaughtered in america each year for hat trimmings. a few facts are available such as: seventy thousand skins were sent in four months from a small district on long island; one new york house contracts to furnish to paris forty thousand skins in one season; four hundred thousand bird skins from america sold in one london auction room in three months. these numbers fairly stagger the reader. i don't know one american girl who would kill a bird. if every one of them would refuse ever to wear any bird feathers there would be a great falling off in this traffic. collecting birds' eggs and nests is still quite common, and should be discouraged. the present state of the bird population does not warrant the destruction of any except for the big museums. their collectors are trained experts who collect only such birds as are needed for scientific purposes. they go at the right season to do the least damage, and they do not slaughter by wholesale. besides cats, which can be regulated to a certain extent in our homes, birds have other enemies. crows, though valuable insect eaters, are bad nest robbers and have been caught in the act of killing nestlings and even small adult birds. snakes eat both eggs and young. guards for cats will keep out squirrels which molest the birds' nests. ground nesting birds may be protected with wire netting. where this has been tried, in no case did it cause birds to desert the nests. birds need thickets, hedge-rows and shrubbery for nesting places, hiding places, and shelter from storms. every farmer who kills the birds on his place justifies the destruction by the evidence that they eat fruit. true, some of them do. but if water is provided many of them prefer it to fruit juice. to preserve our strawberries and cherries, we should plant june berry and russian mulberry, which the birds like better. chokeberry, buckthorn, elder berry, and mulberry will attract birds away from blackberry and raspberry patches. wild cherry will protect the grapes, as both ripen late. domesticating wild game the country would be a more attractive place to live in if there were more wild game. thirty years ago, when i was a little girl in the middle west, my brothers used to shoot "prairie chickens" (grouse), quail (bob-white), wild geese, brant, wild ducks, and even bigger birds. but now the guns are all rusty, and the powder flask is empty. i came across the old wad-cutter in the attic and hardly recognized it. efforts are being made in several states to rear wild fowl in the barn yard. bob-white, grouse, mallard, wood ducks, and canada geese are being experimented upon. a measure of success has already been achieved, but more experience is necessary especially with regard to the feeding of the young birds. [illustration: a wood duck will nest in a box like this] probably the wild fowl for young hunters to experiment with is wood duck or mallard. a man whose ten years' experience with raising wild fowl has earned him the title of expert, writes as follows: "i think it would be a most useful work to educate our young people up to the fact that with a little patience and a small outlay they can help to increase our supply of wild birds. for raising wood ducks, all one needs is a small pond or even an artificial tank surrounded by a few bushes enclosed by a wire fence. in one corner, place a box on a post three feet high with a cleated boardwalk leading up to a platform from which they can reach the entrance, which should be a round hole. turn a pair of wood ducks into the enclosure the first of march, and with luck your duck will build her nest, and lay from eight to twelve eggs. in about four weeks the eggs will hatch and the troubles commence." he goes on to say that some kinds of wild geese are comparatively easy to raise and that they do not require much of a pond, but ample grazing facilities, like their domestic relatives. mallards, also, are very easy to raise. as wild fowl bred in captivity bring a very good price and the demand is increasing with the spreading interest in the subject, raising wild fowl might be a source of income to an enterprising young man or woman. all spring shooting of wild fowls ought to stop. don't say, "if i don't shoot them, somebody else will." that is not the attitude of a good sportsman. public opinion among boys can only be established by boys. if you don't believe in hunting in spring, when the ducks are laying or brooding the young, you can not only stop doing it, but you can influence others. will you do this? to kill one mother duck this year means eight or ten less next year. it is a plain example in arithmetic to see what a big blunder you make if you shoot in spring. a game preserve if you live on a big farm or ranch well wooded and watered, your conditions are ideal for creating a private game preserve. if a few wild birds are known to be already at home on your place, encourage them. let them breed in security and plant their favourite food crops. small areas of land in various out of the way places can be ploughed and planted in spring to buckwheat and millet, wheat, rye, and barley. the bob-white has become so rare that you will probably have to plant some seed birds, as they say. they can be bought for five to ten dollars a dozen. care should be taken that the birds are not frightened when liberated. to spend ten dollars for birds, only to lose them by carelessness, is poor business. these suggestions are given by an experienced game warden: "take the boxed birds out near some good, thick shelter where they can hide and gain confidence. attach a long rope to a soap box, scatter grain about near the end of the box nearest the cover, and scatter sheaf grain along toward the cover. take only three cocks and three hens from the shipping box and put them in the liberating box. go some distance off and be deliberate. let the quail get rested and quiet. pull the long rope, lifting the box gently and steadily. the birds will see the grain and hop out. watch them from your safe distance following the wheat toward the cover. keep up the supply of wheat until they are accustomed to their new home, and can find their way back after roaming. birds should not be planted later than may first." protecting the wild flowers the country would be a better place to live in the whole or part of the year or to visit for a day or a week or a month if there were more wild flowers there. even the man who doesn't know one flower from another will acknowledge, if asked, that wild flowers make the woods and the roadsides and the meadows prettier to look at. the country over, our loveliest wild flowers have met the same fate as the bright-feathered birds. they have been hunted for their blossoms and the gatherers have not cared whether they pulled the plants up by the roots or not. the case of trailing arbutus is a particularly sad one. in localities where it used to flourish, selfish and wanton hands have literally rooted it out until none remains. only lately has any effort been made to protect the wild flowers and multiply them. now, in the general awakening of the public to the fact that we are blundering and wasteful, a widespread interest has grown up in saving the wild flowers. in your own locality you can help this good work. refrain from destroying the plants yourself. when you gather flowers in woods or meadow do so in moderation. a few loose, graceful sprays will give you as much pleasure as a huge bunch inartistically crowded into a vase. have you not often seen children returning from a walk in the woods bearing handfuls of columbine? these frail blooms wilt in the hot sun, and the roadway is often strewn with forlorn bunches of them, dropped by tired children. how much better that each child should gather a few and put them all in a botanical case or wet paper to be distributed when they reach home. those hundreds on the dusty road will never be visited by the ruby-throated humming-bird, nor set any seed for next year's flowers. older boys and girls can do much to influence the younger ones to gather sparingly. another way to increase the wild flowers in your locality is to propagate them. gather their seeds and plant them in your garden where you can protect the young seedlings from harm. where they are big enough, set them out where they will have natural conditions. or undertake a bit of wild gardening right in the woods or the roadside where the plants grow naturally. clear out less desirable sorts, lessening the struggle for your favourites. cultivate them a little. see that they do not suffer from too much sun or rain or drought. if you know of a plot of woodland soon to be denuded or a piece of wild land to be improved, get permission to gather bulbs, roots, and plants there. if you know the flowers the year 'round, you will be able to recognize the lilies, the orchids, the blood roots, the wild ginger, hepatica, violets, and can transplant them to your own woods or garden. preventing forest fires it is october now, and this morning's paper had accounts of terrible forest fires raging in minnesota. hundreds dead, thousands homeless, and millions of dollars' worth of property wiped out. nobody knows, who has not fought fire, what a fiend the foresters have to deal with. i have looked up many forest fire statistics and i find always noted among the "sources of fires," this item: _forest fires set by children_. there may not be much that boys and girls can _do_ to put in practice the big things we hear talked about under the name of conservation, but one thing you can certainly refrain from doing, and that is, setting a forest fire. a person who makes a fire in the woods is responsible to the community for that fire and its consequences. to boil a coffee pail, to broil bacon, to bake biscuits, to fry fish, to give comfort to the hunter, trapper, camper, or picnicker, many are the legitimate uses of a fire in the woods. no real sportsman forgets his fire. his last act before leaving a camp is to see that no vestige of it remains. he makes sure every spark is dead, then throws on another pail of water, and goes on with a light heart and a clear conscience. if you have ever left a fire in the woods, anywhere, your conscience ought to give you a good jab when you read of forest fires, though distant, a jab that will prevent your repeating the offence. killing weeds weeding is the boy's job, isn't it? if only one could get some kind of inspiration into weeding, so as to rob the work of its drudgery! if we must serve our time at weeding, let us at least weed intelligently. what is a weed anyhow? in germany, i am told, the peasants call weeds "_unkraut_". since "_kraut_" is cabbage, "_unkraut_" must be weeds. a weed is really a plant growing where we don't want it. the worst weed in a hill of four corn stalks is the fourth stalk of corn that crowds the others. the worst weeds in a row of beets are the little beet plants that crowd each other. what a plague they are! some of the plants we usually include among our "coarse native weeds" are grown in gardens in europe. mullein, for example, over there is called "the american velvet plant" and a well-grown specimen is really handsome. if weeds are plants out of place there is much to be done by boys and girls in the way of ridding gardens, lawns, school grounds, and village streets of their overgrowth of weeds. if you clear out one thing put in something better or nature may put in some plant that will not please you. save seeds from your own garden and drop them along the roadside. the school grounds are the particular province of the school boys and girls. join together to make the grounds more beautiful and there is no end to the improvements that will follow. a lecturer once visited the school in a small village in the state of new york. on his way from the village to the school-house he was impressed with two things: first, the wonderful size and vigour of the burdocks that seemed to have possession of even the front yards on the business streets; and, second, the quantity of rubbish accumulated on the margin of the pretty little stream which wandered under the bridges of the town. do boys and girls know what public spirit is? do you know how your little village strikes a stranger? the lecturer was so struck by the sad state of the town that he made up his mind to talk to the school about it. he did. he found that public spirit was not dead there; it was only dormant. the boys and girls had passed by the burdocks so often during their growth that they had taken them for granted. they had so often thrown papers, broken dishes, worn-out baskets, barrels, and rubbish over the bridges that they forgot to notice how it looked. what else is an old creek like that good for anyhow? can't go swimmin' in it. before the man finished his sociable little talk with the boys and girls he had organized the younger ones into brigades of twenty to make war on the burdocks. with the help of teachers and boys he mapped out the town and assigned given localities to certain groups. each group had a captain with orders. the lecturer had a burdock plant brought in, a tremendous one, root and all, from the school yard. he showed the boys and girls how well adapted this weed is to make a living, how by means of burs it steals rides, travelling from place to place, dropping a few seeds here and a few there. he showed them the tough, long root and told them the plant's life history. has the burdock any vulnerable spot they wondered? the only time when burdock is weak is when it comes up as a seedling. one scrape of the hoe would kill hundreds then. hearing what was up at school, an enterprising business man offered to give ten dollars to the squad of pupils who brought in the largest number of burdock plants. this added zest to the work and a generous emulation. before the week was up, the town was rid of burdocks, and there were wagon loads of them withering on the vacant lot near the school. the squad that won the prize brought in upwards of seven hundred plants, root and branch. they donated the money to the school library. the boys and girls in that village didn't need to be waked up but once. they went to work on the little stream. they had bonfires at the water's edge. they planted willows and other water loving trees on the banks, they asked the selectmen to pass a law to forbid the throwing of rubbish and sewage into the stream. they enforced the law themselves. then they built two little dams, and made a skating pond right near the school house. getting rid of poison ivy if there is any one thing that would make the country a better place to live in for some people, it would be to eradicate poison ivy. when it once gets possession of a fence row, it is an awful job to get it out. cutting off the tops is about as effectual as cutting your hair. it grows again thicker than ever. the roots and the creeping stems run under ground and every cubic inch of soil has to be gone over. a great many beautiful plants will have to be destroyed in our fence rows in getting out the poison ivy. but we can replace these, and by constant watchfulness keep the ivy out. in some localities the village selectmen have seriously undertaken the eradication. any one who has ever suffered will agree that the work ought to be taken hold of in a public way. many people are immune. those who know themselves to be so should undertake the work. a bounty is offered by some towns for uprooted plants. the hands should be washed frequently with hot water and plenty of soap when working on poison ivy. washable overalls and shirt should be worn, as the oil of the ivy gets on the garments and may poison any one who handles them. lessening the plague of mosquitoes every boy and girl in the "mosquito belt" realizes keenly that the towns as well as the country would be better places to live in if there were no mosquitoes. some people do not believe that it is possible to lessen this plague, much less end it. but such a belief is pure ignorance. i know of an army post where in one season the mosquitoes were eradicated. it was easy there, because the post was isolated and because, when the commandant issued a general order that all rain barrels were to be covered or emptied, the people went right out and obeyed. you see, army people get a fixed habit of obedience. then the health officer, who really had the matter most at heart, though backed by his superior, had squads of prisoners at work gathering up and carting off tin cans or other rubbish capable of holding water. pools were drained. sewer openings and ponds were oiled. before the mosquitoes had fairly got out of winter quarters all the stagnant water was coated with an oil film. there was no use trying to lay eggs under those conditions, so they left for parts unknown. as mosquitoes cannot fly far unless carried by the wind, they undoubtedly perished just outside the gates, and the people came out and sat on their porches safe and happy. they were ashamed that they had grumbled when the orders came to cover the rain water barrels. mosquitoes breed in water. the wigglers of the watering trough or rain barrel are young mosquitoes. you can raise your own mosquitoes as well as your own chickens and pigs. a little precaution would save much annoyance. neighbourhoods should unite to rid themselves of the pest. boys can do the work required. the school children in worcester, mass., wage very effective war against mosquitoes every year under the guidance of their teachers. the saving in cost of netting and wire screens would almost pay the expense of a campaign against mosquitoes and flies. after emptying or covering all the water receptacles on the place, it is well to place a few decoy pails in promising situations. when the mosquitoes have deposited their eggs, tip over the pails and that is the end of that lot. one female can produce four hundred eggs, so you see what a calamity it is for her young to come to maturity, which they may do in eight to ten days. mosquitoes have their natural enemies. where areas of water are too large to oil, we should see to it that fish are plentiful, especially goldfish, sunfish, roaches, killies, and minnows. toads, frogs, and lizards also prey on mosquitoes as do the nymphs of dragon flies and other water insects. swallows and purple martins catch mosquitoes on the wing. fighting flies the house fly is no longer a mere nuisance, but is a menace to health. he is well named the typhoid fly and the filth fly. the boys and girls who help rid their neighbourhood of these disease-carrying pests are real patriots. flies are not a heaven-sent plague in this day and generation. flies in the milk, flies in the pantry, flies on the kitchen door, flies buzzing about the table, are the obvious result of carelessness and mismanagement. what is more, the remedies are not hard to apply. the typhoid fly (house fly) breeds in horse manure. the adult fly feeds upon every known variety of filth as well as upon good food, but the undeveloped fly is a footless maggot and it breeds in your own and your neighbour's stable yard. people will go on buying fly paper, fly poison, fly traps, screen doors, and window netting to keep flies out, but the very fly that has visited a typhoid patient to-day may to-morrow leave the imprint of his foul feet on the baby's face, or drown himself, but not his germs, in your gravy. what does your father have a manure pile for? if he is a frugal farmer he expects to put it on his fields when the other work is out of the way, and plough it in. he knows the value of manure on fields. but does he realize that the best time to carry the manure out is while it is new? every expert will tell him so and why. in the pile by the barn it lies and burns. have you seen it smoke? burnt manure is wasted fertilizer. when it rains, the valuable elements needed by the soil leach out and nourish the crop of "jimson weeds" and burdocks that will crowd round the barn yard next year. meantime the flies buzz round the manure pile. the worse it smells the better they like it. they are there for business. eggs, thousands upon thousands of tiny flies' eggs, are deposited by industrious and prolific flies. a fly's egg! the hired man will laugh at you for bothering over a thing so insignificant. but when his wife comes down with typhoid and the flies come in and worry her, he will complain of his luck and drive out the flies, which go merrily forth to start little private epidemics all over the neighbourhood. destroy their breeding places. that is one remedy for flies. trap them, poison them, discourage them. is it worth while for you to do this when the rest of the people do not? yes, indeed. if you have very near neighbours, their flies may get to you to some extent, but with nothing to furnish breeding places, and no foul-smelling swill or decaying animal or vegetable stuff around, they will not be attracted to your place. awaken the neighbour's interest in your "fly-destroying crusade." if you can reach results best by forming a club, organize and pass resolutions and wake people up to their responsibilities. this is practical work for a boys' good citizenship club. trapping i know a city boy who is fortunate enough to have a farm home to go to as soon as school closes in the summer. with his parents and brothers and sisters he lives the life of the farm boy, with enough of gardening, a little of chicken raising, one cow to milk, and a chance to measure his cunning against that of many "varmints" which would otherwise destroy his garden and steal his chickens. he knows how to use a gun, and when, and where. he can make a good trap, a scientific and humane trap, and he knows the ways of the two-or four-or six-footed enemies he is at war with. between them and him there is a fair field and no favours, just as between one wild creature and another. if to-day he outwits a crow, to-morrow a skunk pays the crow's score with heavy interest by making a meal of a nestful of young chickens. this boy has learned enough of the art of preparing skins to make those he gets salable, and he exhibits with just pride a handsome fur skating cap made by his mother out of skins of mink he has taken. his traps add something every year to his growing college fund. [illustration: simple box-trap] there are a great many things about the business of trapping that seem very horrible and brutal to a sensitive person. because many cruel men have gone into that life, which is a life of the greatest hardship and has little in it to encourage gentleness, we have rather taken it for granted that all trapping is unjustifiable and that a boy who wants to set traps is an inhuman monster and not to be tolerated in a civilized home. if fathers and mothers were all like my young friend's parents, they would see that trapping ought to be a part of a boy's training, just like using an axe, or a saw, or a gun. trapping everything would be bad business. you would not catch squirrels in a trap any more than you would shoot bluebirds or brown thrashers. one could easily damage his neighbourhood and himself by trapping the wrong things or trapping in the wrong way. a trapper who is a sportsman will see to it that his traps are of the right kind. i would not have a mouse-trap in the house that made a practice of catching mice by the foot or tail. there are traps of many kinds for a variety of purposes and the trapper must either catch his prey alive and provide a way of despatching it humanely or use a trap which is instantaneous in its deadly work. [illustration: box-trap and figure ] boys who have learned to trap in the natural, legitimate way do not become "fish butchers" or "game hogs" when they grow up. i once saw a picture of a game warden standing triumphantly beside a mound of dead crows, two thousand and twelve was the number, i believe. he had cunningly learned to imitate their call so successfully that they could not resist coming within range of his deadly weapon. crows may be harmful to wild fowl but no boy with right instincts would be guilty of an act so base as this, so unbecoming a sportsman and a gentleman. getting rid of the animals which prey upon orchard, garden, and chicken roost is, without question, one of the ways of making the country a better place to live in. trapping may be regarded as clean sport when done for this purpose, or for food when needed. catching animals alive for the sake of taming and training them as pets is treated in another chapter and has its own rules. there are a number of fur-bearing animals which, though too shy to venture inside the barn yard, prey so successfully upon the less fortunate ones, that it has become our duty to take up warfare against them. this duty is all the more heavily laid upon us because, in the act of civilizing the woods and converting the hills and valleys into cultivated fields and pastures, we have destroyed the natural hiding places of the wild things and "upset the balance." if we were suddenly to abandon this country, it would not be many generations before the buffalo, the wild pigeon, and the wild turkey would return to their haunts, the forests would recover the hills, the potato beetle would go back to its colorado weed, and some natural enemy would control the san josé scale and the english sparrow and reduce them to their natural places. in some localities trapping of fur-bearing animals is still a money-making small industry and if properly carried on will lead to no evil results. the more a boy knows about the habits of the animals he seeks to outwit, the greater will be his chances of a capture, and when he knows a little he will want to know more. he will learn that there are rules in this game as well as in games with his human fellows, and that there are things "that no man would do," and pretend to self-respect. a knowledge of woodcraft is indispensable to the trapper and helps him to take care of himself and act with good judgment in cases of emergency. a boy that sets a trap takes a certain responsibility. if he fails to visit his traps he breaks a rule of the game. a live animal in a cage trap begins to suffer very soon for water and for food. an animal in a steel trap, if not dead, will often pull or even gnaw off his injured leg, and escape. his tragic story may often be read in his footprints in the snow. if trapping for skins you must take them off while fresh, as they taint very quickly and may be ruined by delay. trapping mink the boy that catches a mink is a pretty lucky boy in these days when those wily little robbers have grown so scarce. the price of mink fur made into muffs and collars is so high as to make a mink skin worth trying for. i can imagine the surprise and well-earned triumph of my young trapping friend when, after trying for a year or two to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his thoroughbred chickens, he finally succeeded in capturing a fine mink. a friend of his to whom he had taught all he could of the art of trapping caught another. and this happened within the city limits of the nation's capital! who says now that the mink has disappeared? the mink is a flesh-eater, and lives on what he can catch, varying his bill of fare with frogs, snakes, birds, mice, muskrats, and fish. it is always open season for trout in the mink's code of laws and though he is not a water animal his home is more than likely to be near a trout stream, on the bank, in a well-concealed place. it is not fair to trap mink in the breeding season, which is april or may. the young are at the mercy of all sorts of flesh-eaters, including their own fathers, who are a most undiscriminating sort. there ought to be some form of guarantee to a mink mother that while she is foraging for food for her young she will not be enticed into a trap. later, when she goes a-hunting on her own account and the chances are even, she is legitimate prey for the trapper. steel traps are best, say the experts, and they should be cunningly concealed. gouge out a sort of hole in the bank, conceal the trap at the front, and put the bait farther in so that the trap must be passed to reach the bait. muskrat flesh, fish, or other meat is the bait used. a common practice is to scorch the bait, to make the odour more pervasive and attractive. the price of fresh mink skins varies according to size and condition from two dollars and a half to four dollars. trapping skunks the last thing you would expect of a skunk is that he should be popular among the girls. but under the seductive title of alaska sable, the fur of the plain jersey or york state skunk is worn with satisfaction by ladies of good sense and good taste. a skunk's pelt is worth two dollars and a half or more and although he is of undoubted value to the farmer as a destroyer of insect pests, i shall not undertake his defence. a cloud of witnesses would rise up to recount their losses from the marauding skunk. his fondness for poultry would be mere circumstantial evidence that he is an enemy of the wild birds as well, but we have direct evidence enough to convict and condemn him. because of his unusual weapon, used only when hard-pressed in an unequal battle, a good deal of special precaution has to be taken when trapping _mephitis_ for his fur. the least taint of the unmistakable odour ruins the skin, as no cleansing compound has been invented strong enough to remove it or drown it. it is said on good authority that the skunk seldom besprinkles itself when discharging its "rear battery." skunks are not very clever nor very swift. they go about at night for the most part, or early evening. the young are born, six to nine in a litter, in april or may. the nests are hidden in holes in hollow trees, among rocks, or in the ground. the young ones frequently follow the old ones all summer or even longer, little realizing that this is a dangerous habit. by tracking them from the scene of their nocturnal visit to or from the stream they run to daily for water, one may find the hiding place. a clever trapper succeeds in capturing a whole family ofttimes by simply making the path the skunks follow more distinct, treading down the grass, and even setting up sticks to guide them along toward the place they wish to go. traps with bits of meat for bait are set at intervals along the path. a snare and spring pole are said to insure no bad consequences. one author advises the hunter that striking a sudden blow near the tail paralyzes the ejecting muscles. no doubt! but in the meantime what is the skunk doing? [illustration: deadfall trap] the white stripe on the skunk's back, while a valuable warning to all of what is approaching, is a disadvantage from the trapper's viewpoint. this stripe varies in length and some varieties are without it entirely. there is a story of the days when the indians in western new york used to bring in many skunk skins to the local fur-buyer. one red man, a notorious cheat, came in one day with a single skin to sell. "long stripe or short stripe," said the buyer, whose prices varied with the length of the white stripe on the skunk's back. "ver' short stripe. how much pay?" said the indian. "let's see the skin," said the buyer. the indian showed the skin, which was that of a young animal, and very small, the stripe extending the entire length of the skin. "you said short stripe," said the indignant buyer, pointing the finger of scorn at the runty little skin. "short skunk, short stripe," said the indian with a shrug. "what you pay?" i cut out an item from the daily paper last week which had this headline: "skunks sent him to college." can you draw your own inferences? the fur of skunks is very valuable now and in many fashionable paris shops it is advertised with large placards printed distinctly for their english-speaking customers, "_veritable skong_." trapping woodchucks judging by the tales they tell, new england boys of the passing generation spent most of their time trying to outwit the woodchucks which infested their farms. if all their tales were true, the barn doors of their respective states must have needed stretching to hold all the skins of all those woodchucks, and no boy could possibly have been long without that valuable possession, a whiplash made of woodchuck hide. this little cousin of the squirrels is neither very fleet nor very cunning. he has, though, very quick ears and quicker eyes, and knows that his hole is the safest place for him when boys are around. the only excuse for hunting woodchucks is that they sometimes get so numerous as to do real damage in the garden, either by their holes and the mounds of earth they throw out, or by eating more vegetables than can reasonably be spared. a better game than hunting them would be to discover how they build their underground galleries. are these mere holes deep enough to crawl into for safety? is there more than one tunnel? has the owner an exit as well as an entrance to his home? has he a nest, and where and what is it? does he hoard for winter, or hibernate? trapping moles it is hard to get a new point of view. having been brought up in the belief that the mole is a nuisance, pure and simple, i find myself unable on short notice to believe that this little blind miner is actually useful. if only he would confine his sphere of usefulness to some other neighbourhood than our lawn! we all think that his underground passages disfigure the lawn. but does the grass die where the tunnels run? i think not. you see patches of dead grass on many lawns, but do you find moles at work in these same lawns? in fact, the brown, dead patches of grass are probably killed by the white grub, arch enemy of grass roots. the mole is arch enemy to the white grub and others of his ilk. according to people who know about moles, we ought to decorate them with medals instead of trapping them and decorating the barn door with their tiny skins. the first mole i ever saw was one brought in by our old cat. she laid it down with a sort of shamefaced air as much as to say, "things have come to a pretty pass when a self-respecting cat is obliged to bring in the likes of that. it fair turns my stomach!" it was not an attractive object, but we children turned it over and over with a stick. what an odd shape, so unlike the animals familiar to us. its nose like a gimlet, its fore feet like little shovels; no wonder it could tunnel. no eyes, no ears; but what use has a mole for either? do you know what oliver herford said of the mole? "see, children, the misguided mole, he lives down in a deep, dark hole; sweetness and light and good fresh air are things for which he does not care. but say not that he has no soul, lest haply we misjudge the mole." no one can say that the mole has not a redeeming feature. surely there is no creature clad in a coat of more surpassing softness and fineness than the mole. are the exquisite "moleskin" garments sometimes seen in furriers' windows really made of tiny skins of this despised little quadruped? it is not likely that any of us will ever catch many moles. if they are troublesome in your lawn, you and the neighbour boys can do some trapping with mole traps. they are of a kind specially fitted to outwit the mole in his tunnel, and directions accompany each trap. every boy knows what "knuckle down" means and how sore your knuckles get in marble time. there is usually one boy in the crowd who is lucky enough to have a knuckle dabster, made of moleskin. "there, use that. soft as velvet, eh? nope, don't want to sell it. caught a mole last summer, tanned the skin myself and my mother made this for me, like the one in 'the boy's own book.' wouldn't take a dollar for it." trapping muskrats the first fur collar i ever had was sold to me as "electric seal." there was no deception practised on me, for i knew that the fur was neither electric nor seal. but i didn't know then that it was muskrat fur. they call it hudson seal nowadays, i believe. these small relatives of the beaver have so few natural enemies, and are so prolific that they are in no danger of disappearing from our ponds and sluggish streams. the beaver, on the other hand, is supposed to be protected by law. until it is against the law to sell and to wear beaver skins, trappers will evade the law and escape the fines. muskrat fur is not so fine nor thick as that of the beaver and not nearly so expensive. a fresh skin is worth twenty-five to forty cents. they are more in demand now than ever, owing to the fashionable demand for furs and the scarcity of other fur-bearing animals. there are many ways of trapping them. as they are aquatic and active in the winter they are often taken through the ice. muskrat trappers are always good skaters. a hard blow on the ice will stun the rat, which is pulled out through a hole. they are sometimes speared through holes in the ice. a boy might develop enough patience and perseverance, as well as skill and alertness, in a job like this to make it pay better in some other field than the sale of the skins. muskrats are often caught in traps, too. to be successful at this it is necessary to learn a great deal about the little fellow's habits of life, his house, his food and his ways of escaping enemies. it is well to know his enemies, too. these are the fox, the mink, and the otter. you would be a lucky boy, indeed, if instead of common little musquash you bagged an otter whose pelt is worth fifteen or twenty dollars. my father has an otter skin cap about which he and my uncle tell a truly exciting story. they caught an otter, but that was sixty odd years ago. muskrats are the greatest nuisance in ornamental grounds where there are large water features. they have an unfortunate fondness for lily bulbs. the boy who can outwit them will win favour with the gardener and the garden's owner, with the muskrat skins thrown in. trapping gophers our old dog nimp was convinced that the way to get a gopher was to dig him out. doctor hornaday tells an amusing story about his having that same conviction when a boy. many a night nimp would come home from the pasture, panting, his coat all rough with the reddish soil that we knew had come out of a gopher hole. weary, yes, but discouraged, never. the old dog would go back to his job morning after morning. sometimes we would try to help by carrying buckets full of water and "drowning him out." never did nimp scent a gopher near the cattle well but once, and then the boys drowned him out with a vengeance. the hunted little creature leaped out of a hole so unexpectedly near where the boys sat that one turned a complete somersault and landed in the last pailful of water. nimp was quicker than his masters and soon laid the bedraggled little miner at our feet. we felt pretty small. very little can be said in defence of the gopher. he is an undeniable nuisance and helps to bring the farmer's crop down to a lower figure than it ought to be. traps and poisoned vegetables are swifter methods of dealing with the case than digging, for the gopher is himself past master in the art of digging. trapping the weasel one of the natural enemies of the pocket gopher is the weasel. if only we could set the weasel on the gopher and then had something like a mongoose to keep down the weasels! i never yet heard a good word for the weasel. he seems to be the embodiment of all that is mean and sly and hateful. it is undeniable that he does not obey the laws of the woods, that he kills for the mere joy of killing, and that is a high crime. men with weasel-like ways get to have the same blood-thirsty look. the weasel is a savage, hunting every wild creature in the woods, rabbits, mice, chipmunks, moles, rats, grouse, chickens, and ducks, and even insects. he robs the nests of birds, eats eggs and young, and even the old birds are not safe from him. i just read in a book that "weasels are so small that their fur has little value, but the time will come when it will be eagerly sought and used." well, that time has come, but, who ever went to a shop and asked for a weasel tippet? but ask for ermine and they will show any quantity of it. the price! well, wouldn't the weasel be surprised to find himself so popular. it all comes about because of that interesting habit of his, changing colour in the winter. the weasel is a sort of peculiar shade of brown as you can testify if you have caught one; the ermine is pure white all but the tippest tip of the tail which is dead black; yet they are one and the same. weasel in summer and ermine in winter. the weasel, the mink, and the marten are all enemies of the native wild game, and efforts to exterminate them are always applauded by sportsmen. much is yet to be learned of their habits. trappers have succeeded in keeping the mink and marten in check, but the weasel goes his murderous way, feared and hated by everybody. trapping rats there is no pest around the farm yard or barn yard anywhere so hard to cope with when once they get a foothold, as rats. finding them numerous in the barn once, we put chicken feed in the uncemented cellar of the house. before the end of the first winter of that arrangement we were praying for a visit from the pied piper. the rats took possession. they broke dishes, seemingly for the fun of it; they gnawed the softened woodwork around the kitchen sink and held high carnival at midnight throughout the spaces between the walls; they all but bit the babies in their cradles and defied all our efforts to outwit them. traps, cats, poison, we tried everything, but they outstayed us. if ever we get into a like case again i shall be tempted to try ferrets or cyanide. some people are successful trappers of rats, and these suggestions come from them. set a trap in a pan of meal or bran, cover with same and put it in a runway. make the runway easy to pass through by placing boards or boxes along near the walls. cover a trap with thin brown paper or cloth and set it in the runway. smoke the trap over the fire and heat it hot (not hot enough to draw the temper of the steel), after each setting. change the place of the trap very often. wear gloves to keep the odour of your hands from the trap. the rat is the very wisest of all his family, his behaviour seems to be the result of impish intelligence rather than mere instinct for self-preservation. no true sportsman will allow his antipathy to rats or weasels to lead him to commit acts of cruelty. fighting them with their own methods makes you into a human rat or weasel. trapping rabbits there are times when rabbits get too numerous, and times when they are needed to eat, and times when you want to try your hand at taming a wild one. under these circumstances it is legitimate sport to hunt or trap them. if damage is being done to crops in the spring we shall be forced to wage war against them in self-defence during their breeding season. otherwise no sportsman would do it. if there is so little legitimate rabbit food in winter that they are driven to destroy fruit trees to get a little bark, then the inference is that there are too many rabbits. study the rabbit's ways of living, and learn his weak points. find out if he has a "tendon of achilles" or vulnerable spot. look one over. what are his conspicuous characteristics? is it not evident that his life is one long series of narrow escapes? he has few, if any, wits; how low his forehead. timid eyes. but ears! can he not hear you coming a mile off? and legs! did you ever see a greater development in that direction? yes, in a grasshopper, but nowhere else. the rabbit is a perfect mammalian grasshopper. when you stop to think of it you will see a certain pathetic side to its life. the rabbit has its wild enemies, ever watchful, ever close on its trail. the hawk, the mink, the weasel, the fox, the lynx, and others are rabbit hunters. besides his quick hearing, and his swiftness, br'er rabbit has a wonderful power of becoming invisible. his nondescript colour, combined with his ability to "freeze," serve him as well as a cloak of darkness. the cotton-tail rabbit is commonest in the middle and southern states, while his bigger cousin, the varying hare, overlaps the rabbit's territory in the colder parts, and takes his place in the most northern states. the varying hare is called also the snow-shoe rabbit and the white hare, but in summer he is dull russet brown. you may have heard of the wonderful change of colour of this and other animals. interesting stories are told of the sudden blanching of the fur, of its turning white, "in a single night," like the locks of the prisoner of chillon. not a word of truth in that story. why do people, whose only fitness for telling stories lies in their having an imagination, make up such yarns about real things? they could invent an animal and then tell as many wonderful tales as they liked and nobody would be deceived. the truth about animals is wonderful enough. if writers would only take pains to find out the truth instead of repeating fancies! suppose the early ancestor of the white hare had a grayish-brownish coat, just the thing to protect him from his enemies in a world all full of grayish-brownish things. but one day there came a snow storm, and all the gray-brown things were covered with whiteness, except the poor hare. suddenly he became the most noticeable object in the woods. then all his neighbours saw him and wanted him, and mostly they got him. it was about then that the hare began to be the "varying hare." a law of nature came to his rescue. some hares there were which were not so dark coloured as others. they may have been longer winded and swifter footed, too, but anyhow they escaped and lived to bring families into the world. as like breeds like, these young hares took after their parents, and because they were lighter coloured in the winter they in turn escaped and carried this peculiarity into the next generation. it took endless years, and innumerable generations of hares, varying this way and that to fulfill this natural law, and fix the habit. but now that it is fixed we may well view it with wonder, and call it an example of the law of the "survival of the fittest." how is the change brought about? just as the chickens and the birds moult, and the horse sheds, so do the rabbits. their summer coats are thinner and brown. one by one the brown hairs fall out in the fall till finally the new coat is there, which is white. it is not like the human hair changing from brown to white. in the fall and then again in the spring there is a time when the varying hare is a variegated hare, his coat being mottled with white and brown. rabbits are hunted with dogs and their trails in the new snow are easily followed by the hunter alone. they are caught in traps and snares of various kinds. in one of his lessons in woodcraft, mr. seton describes a rabbit snare as follows: "string, a shoe-lace, a buckskin thong, or even a strip of clothing may be used as a snare. there are many ways of making a rabbit snare, but the simplest is the best. the essentials are, first, the snare--an ordinary running noose; second, a twitch-up--that is a branch bent down or a pole set in the crotch of a sapling. the snare is fast to the end of the pole, and spread open in a well worn runway. the loop is about four inches across and placed four inches from the ground. the pole twitch-up is held down by placing the cross-piece of the snare under some projecting snag. the rabbit bounding along, puts his head in the noose, the slight jerk frees the cross-piece from its holder, and in a moment the rabbit is dangling in air." rabbit fur is not very durable but is much used for the manufacture of less expensive fur garments. under the name of "french seal" it finds a ready market and is really soft and pretty. traps that boys can make there are a number of traps and snares that boys can make. descriptions of these are to be found in books on amateur carpentry, manual training, and books for boys of various kinds. the illustrations in this chapter are intended to give a few suggestions. money and recreation in trapping i shall not attempt to go at this subject from a professional side, as i think no boys care to trap for a living. whatever may be said about the boy having a gun in a thickly settled suburb, nothing can be offered against his trapping if he goes at it in an amateur way and with no intent to exterminate the animals (which only a shrewd trapper could do). i will presume the boy to be attending a neighbouring school either on the edge of a city or in a town. under these circumstances he must attend to his traps early in the morning or after school. at first there may be no more than enough money in it to cover the cost of traps, but nevertheless the recreation which it offers will appeal to the average boy. as his knowledge of animals becomes greater with time, he will get more and more pocket money. when he starts in, the other boys may laugh at him and say that there is nothing to trap. in most cases they would make a big mistake, because there often are, on the edge of a city, more fur-bearing animals than in the surrounding country. this for the reason that the professional trapper is not present and most of the city boys do not know how to trap. there are, say, muskrats and an occasional mink along the rivers and streams. the swamps usually abound in muskrats. in the woods and fields are squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, opossums, and (in the north) woodchucks. it is legitimate to catch the water animals in ordinary steel traps because, if set right, the captive is instantly drowned. for dry land the steel jaw-trap is not suitable, because it will rarely kill the animal, but cause him much suffering as it usually breaks his leg. often in such case the trapper will only find a foot in his trap, the animal having gnawed or twisted his body free. nevertheless any trap is humane which kills the animal instantly. there are many new traps on the market which will do this, but on account of their being patented and high-priced they are not extensively used. the traps which are most commonly used for this purpose are the deadfalls and snares. the muskrat lives wherever there is a body of water. he feeds chiefly on vegetable matter which he obtains in the swamps or digs on the banks, although he frequently visits a cornfield or vegetable garden. only in cases of extreme hunger, as happens when they are frozen in, have they been known to eat their own kin. in swamps they have houses made of rushes and twigs, standing in a rounded shape about two feet above the water. to trap in the swamps one must have high rubber boots and if the water is deep a small boat is necessary. a home-made flat-bottomed canoe, made of canvas, will be found to answer the purpose admirably. where it is shallow enough to use the boots, a long, heavy staff should be carried, as the mud is very often treacherous and interwoven with muskrat runways. i might as well say in the beginning that the intending trapper should take a friend into his confidence and the two set out to trap together, for in this way they can help each other out of difficulties. (my friend had to do some pretty stiff pulling once to get me out of a mud hole into which i had recklessly plunged, having only in my mind to get to my traps quickly.) along the rivers the muskrats live in holes in the banks. in trapping in such places one may walk along the bank or use a boat, setting the traps in the entrances of houses or in the runs. before the trapping season begins it is very wise to go over the territory and locate the different houses, runways, and feeding places. this will save time when trapping begins, which should not be before december, because up to this time the pelts are not in their prime. the trapping season lasts for about three months or until the ice breaks up in the spring. if the water is not yet iced over, the muskrats can be caught with the steel jaw-traps. they should be set in the runs or at the entrances of houses so that they are just under the surface of the water. the chain should be staked in the water as far out as possible. the muskrat will in every instance try to swim out into deep water and the weight of the trap on his foot will pull him down and drown him. traps may be baited with apples, carrots, turnips, and nearly any vegetable or fruit. the bait should be stuck on a slanting stick so that it will hang about a foot above the pan of the trap. [illustration: "stop thief" trap] when the water is frozen over, other methods must be followed. many trappers cut the houses open and set the traps on the inside, but those who wish to keep the muskrats in the vicinity will not do this, because it destroys their homes and causes them to seek new shelter. for my own use i have "stop thief" traps which kill instantly and are not very expensive. a hole is cut in the ice and the trap set before the house entrance or in a swimway. in going through, the muskrat puts his foot on lever _a_, which releases _b_, and this in turn lets down lever _c_, which strikes him over the neck or back, breaking it instantly. as shown, the trap is fastened with staples to a wooden prong, one end of which is stuck in the mud at the bottom and the other fits just under the ice. mink are rarely caught, because they are very crafty and keen to the scent of a human being. once in a while they are caught in a trap set in the water or in the entrance to a muskrat house. this is accounted for by the fact that the mink preys largely upon these weaker animals in the winter when food is scarce. sometimes they can be lured with a muskrat carcass or a dead bird. if the trap is not set under water there is little probability of getting the mink. the trapping of mink should be encouraged, because they kill not only muskrats, but chickens and other domestic fowl as well. one must use his own judgment and set his trap in a place frequented by the mink. prime mink skins usually bring three or four dollars from any local fur dealer. on the other hand muskrats are more plentiful and bring only about thirty cents. thus it is that some boys prefer to keep the muskrat skins and tan them at home. from these skins they make comfortable caps and gloves. [illustration: stretchers for skins. the narrow one for mink, the other for muskrat] to skin the muskrat and mink, commence on the hind legs. the skin is slit down one leg and up the other. with muskrats the tail is cut away from the rest of the skin. the mink's tail adds greatly to the value of the skin, so the bone is carefully extracted with a pair of pincers and the tail left on the skin. the skin is then gradually peeled down over the body and head. it is then stretched with the fur side inward on a board as shown in the figure on this page. after this it is hung in a dry, airy place to dry, away from the sun. for home tanning a fresh pelt needs only salt, but the following solution gives somewhat better results and makes the skin more pliable: salt, two pounds. sulphuric acid (com.) two ounces. rain water, one gallon. the pelt should remain immersed in the solution for about two days. when taken out it must be first nearly dried and then the flesh side scraped and rubbed until soft with some dull steel instrument, such as an old blunt chisel. care should be taken not to break the skin as it is very fragile in some places, especially on the belly. [illustration: snare with carrot bait] the land animals can be caught in snares or deadfalls. very likely most boys know of these, but i have illustrated them here in the forms which i think have served me best. usually only the smaller animals are caught in the snare, such as rabbits and squirrels. to bait for either of these corn or apple is commonly used, although onion makes a good scent bait to draw rabbits from afar. besides these named nearly any green vegetable or fruit will answer very well. these animals being maybe the least wary of them all are therefore very easy to catch. for an opossum green corn and a little raw meat is all that is necessary, while for a raccoon a crawfish may be added. this latter is considered the best, and hardly ever fails to lure the raccoon. the skins of the raccoon and opossum bring about a dollar and a half, and half a dollar, respectively. [illustration: deadfall] rabbits and squirrels are caught as game, while raccoons together with opossum are considered eatable by most trappers. the up-to-date people who order "marsh rabbits" at the most fashionable restaurants are eating no other than muskrat. these they eat with a great relish under the new name. i will add that it makes a great difference in eating a muskrat whether you let your imagination get the best of you. many times i have eaten muskrat with quite as much comfort as though i were eating rabbit. naturally the meat has a very strong taste which must be removed before cooking, by soaking over night in salt water. young fat woodchucks are also frequently eaten. it is hard to set down on paper just how and where to set the traps and it can only be learned from another trapper or by experience. the most important thing is to observe closely and learn the habits of the animals. stanley coville curing and tanning skins the boy trapper must know how to take the skins from the animals he traps, and how to treat them to preserve their beauty and value. the skin should be taken off before it becomes tainted, and with greatest care not to injure it. some skins are exceedingly tender. be careful to remove bits of fat or flesh; left to dry on the skin, these detract from its value. no artificial dressing is needed to cure or dry a skin. the fresh skin should be tacked to a smooth board or drawn over a stretcher, fur side in, so that the air can get at it freely. it should not be put in the sun, or rain, or artificial heat. when thoroughly dry, the skin is ready for market or it may be tanned at home. a boy fortunate enough to obtain a valuable pelt like that of marten, mink, or otter, will certainly want to try his hand at tanning. you want first to be sure to use a mixture which will not injure the fur but will fix it more firmly in its place. never put any dressing on the fur itself. you also want the skin to be soft and pliable so that it can be made up into some form of garment. the following directions are adapted from "the tricks of trapping" by w. hamilton gibson, a reliable source of all trapping lore for american boys: "after every particle of loose flesh and fat is removed from the skin, it should be soaked for a couple of hours in warm water. while waiting, prepare this mixture: take equal parts of saltpetre, borax, and sulphate of soda. mix with enough water to make a thin batter. paint the wet skin over thickly on the flesh side. fold the skin flesh side in and lay in an airy place, for twenty-four hours. "on the following day prepare a second mixture consisting of two parts sal-soda, three parts borax, four parts castile soap. melt these together over a slow fire. apply this mixture in the same manner as the first, twenty-four hours later. fold skin as before and leave another twenty-four hours. make a third mixture of equal parts of common salt and alum, dissolved in warm water and thickened with coarse flour to the consistency of thin paste. allow this to dry on, then stretch the skin lightly and scrape off the hardened paste with the bowl of a spoon. sometimes a second or even a third treatment with the last mixture is required to make the skin absolutely pliable, after which it should be finished with sand-paper and pumice stone. a skin thus dressed should be soft as velvet. the alum and salt set the hair securely." appendix free printed matter. how to get it there are three principal sources of free printed matter on outdoor work subjects. these are ( ) the united states department of agriculture. ( ) state agricultural experiment stations. ( ) commercial houses who sell supplies for outdoor occupations. ( ) the farmers' bulletins are the ones which will be most useful to outdoor workers. they are written in plain language and treat every subject in a practical way. to get them, you should address a postal card thus: secretary of agriculture, washington, d. c. on the other side of the card write as follows: please send me the list of publications for free distribution sent out by your department, and oblige, sign your name and address distinctly. in a few days you will get a printed circular giving the numbers and titles of all the farmers' bulletins and other free literature they have. choose the ones you want and address another postal card to the secretary of agriculture. ask for the bulletins wanted by number and title both, to avoid mistakes. some of the bulletins of the united states department of agriculture are not for free distribution. they are too valuable. a charge is made to cover cost of printing. to get any bulletin mentioned in this list _with its price_, address a letter to superintendent of documents, washington, d. c., and enclose the amount in money order or coin. do not send stamps. ( ) to get the bulletins of your own state experiment station you have only to address another postal card; this time to the director of state experiment station, with the name of the post-office and state. if not sure of the title and number of the bulletin you want, tell the director what phase of the subject you are interested in. for instance, one experiment station issues several poultry bulletins. do you want the one on "house construction" or the one on "feeding pullets?" the more definite you are in your requests the more likely you are to get exactly what you need most. to get the bulletins of another station than your own is not quite so simple. they have no fund for distributing bulletins in other states. but i have never failed to get them by asking for just the thing i need. it is well to offer to pay for these; the price is always small. some of them are republished by the united states department of agriculture and appear in their free list as experiment station work, i, ii, iii, etc. ( ) the booklets and catalogues sent out free by seedsmen and other commercial houses are mines of information, condensed and well arranged. you may be sure that the advice they give is good, too, as it is to their interest to have their patrons succeed. you can tell the difference very quickly between the "hot air" of advertising matter and the practical advice to beginners given in catalogues. i most earnestly advise every one of you who is engaged in a money making enterprise to subscribe for some good periodical. there are good magazines devoted to many of the occupations, and some of the general magazines have special departments which are full of up-to-date suggestions which have not yet been put into books. the latest and best word on your subject is none too good and may make a difference of dollars in or out of pocket. if you devise any new apparatus or discover any time or money saving methods, don't keep these things to yourself. help the world along by writing to some magazine about it. they are on the lookout for valuable novelties. the stories told by boys and girls in this volume have almost all appeared in a magazine first. the outdoor worker's library the following is a list of useful books, magazines, and bulletins on all sorts of outdoor occupations, written by experts. they are here arranged by subjects under eleven of the chapters of this book. n. b. some of these books are expensive. get them from your library if you can. the librarian will usually order a good book which is in demand. chapter ii. united states department of agriculture: farmers' bulletin no. . nuts and their uses as food. " " no. . weeds used in medicine. " " no. . maple sugar and sirup. plant industry bulletin no. . root drugs. price c. vermont agricultural experiment station bulletin no. . maple sap flow. vermont experiment station bulletin no. . maple sugar. practical forestry. gifford. d. appleton & co. mushrooms, edible and otherwise. hard. mushroom publishing co., columbus, o. chapter iii. farmers' bulletin no. . the feeding of farm animals. " " no. . pig management. " " no. . sheep feeding. " " no. . the angora goat. " " no. . ducks and geese. " " no. . guinea fowl. " " no. . methods of poultry management at the maine experiment station. " " no. . squab raising. price c. " " no. . pheasant rearing in the united states. bureau of animal industry bulletin no. . milch goats. price c. cornell university rural school leaflet. vol. . no. . horses. ithaca, n. y. poultry bulletins nos. , , , . cornell university. the poultry book. doubleday, page & co. chapter iv. the poultry book. doubleday, page & co. our home pets. o. t. miller. harper & bros. the self-supporting home. st. maur. the macmillan co. goldfish culture. mulertt. h. mulertt, publisher, fennimore st., brooklyn, n. y. chapter v. illinois agricultural college extension course. dairy lessons for use in public schools. farmers' bulletin no. . care of milk in the home. " " no. . usefulness of the american toad. " " no. . silver fox farming. " " no. . deer farming in the united states. chapter vi. american boys' handy book. beard. harper & bros. bound volumes of_ country life in america_. articles on swimming pools, springs, etc. farmers' bulletin no. . irrigation in field and garden. chapter vii. farmers' bulletin no. . bees. a b c of bee culture. root. a. i. root co., medina, o. how to keep bees. comstock. doubleday, page & co. chapter viii. farmers' bulletin no. . silk-worm culture. chapter ix. botany. bailey. the macmillan co. the sea beach at ebb-tide. arnold. the century co. cornell nature study leaflets. how to make a collection of insects. comstock. j. b. lyon, albany, n. y. united states national museum bulletin . collecting fossils, plants, insects, shells, arrowheads, etc. chapter x. farmers' bulletin no. . seed corn. " " no. . unfermented grape juice. new york experiment station at geneva. bulletin no. . (popular edition.) making cider vinegar at home. chapter xi. farmers' bulletin no. . beautifying the home grounds. " " no. . tree planting on rural school grounds. " " no. . how insects affect health in rural districts. " " no. . boys' and girls' agricultural clubs. " " no. . the eradication of bind weed or wild morning glory. " " no. . how to destroy rats. " " no. . how to destroy english sparrows. " " no. . the muskrat. " " no. . insect enemies of shade trees. " " no. . weeds: how to kill them. " " no. . common birds in their relation to agriculture. price c. biological bulletin no. . grouse and wild turkeys in the united states. price c. bureau of entomology bulletin no. . mosquitoes. price c. bureau of entomology circular no. . house flies. year book of department of agriculture. plants useful to attract birds and protect fruit trees. new jersey experiment station bulletin no. . the house mosquito. circulars issued by the audubon society. new york. how to attract the birds. blanchan. doubleday, page & co. camp life in the woods and the tricks of trapping. gibson. harper & bros. trappers' guide. newhouse. (try to get this book from a library.) transcriber's notes: spelling appears to be evolving between us/uk e.g. both color and colour are seen. some page numbers in contents list are incorrect, these have been left as given. ch ii is p. . (toc has ) ch ii is ( ) ch viii is ( ) ch ix is ( ) ch x is ( ) ch xi is ( ) appendix is ( ) book list is ( ) corrected obvious typos and inconsistencies, otherwise spelling has been left as printed: p. gasoline -> gasolene. "skim milk" -> "skim-milk". p. "wynadottes" -> "wyandottes". p. "precentage" -> "percentage". p. "vak" -> "yak". p. "belive" -> "believe". p. "at" -> "as". p. "noctural" -> "nocturnal". the internet archive. transcriber note text emphasis is denoted as _italic_. sweet clover: utilization h. s. coe assistant agronomist, forage-crop investigations [illustration] farmers' bulletin united states department of agriculture contribution from the bureau of plant industry wm. a. taylor, chief washington, d. c. may washington : government printing office : sweet clover may be utilized for feeding purposes, as pasturage, hay, or ensilage. with the possible exception of alfalfa on fertile soil, sweet clover, when properly handled, will furnish as much nutritious pasturage from early spring until late fall as any other legume. it seldom causes bloat. stock may refuse to eat sweet clover at first, but this distaste can be overcome by keeping them on a field of young plants for a few days. as cattle crave dry roughage when pasturing on sweet clover, they should have access to it. straw answers this purpose very well. an acre of sweet clover ordinarily will support to sholes. on account of the succulent growth, it is often difficult, in humid climates, to cure the first crop of the second season into a good quality of hay. when seeded without a nurse crop, one cutting of hay may be obtained the first year in the north and two or three cullings in the south. two cuttings are often obtained in the south after grain harvest. the second year a cutting of hay and a seed crop usually are harvested. sweet clover should never be permitted to show flower buds before it is cut for hay. it is very important that the first crop of the second season be cut so high that a new growth will develop. when the plants have made a growth of to inches it may be necessary to leave the stubble to inches high. in cutting the first crop of the second season it is a good plan to have extension shoe soles made for the mower, so that a high stubble may be left. in some sections of the country sweet clover as a silage plant is gaining in favor rapidly. this crop has given excellent results as a feed for cattle and sheep. experiments show that it compares favorably with alfalfa. sweet clover has proved to be a profitable soil-improving crop. the large, deep roots add much humus to the soil and improve the aeration and drainage. as a rule, the yield of crops following sweet clover is increased materially. being a biennial, this crop lends itself readily to short rotations. sweet clover is a valuable honey plant, in that in all sections of the country it secretes an abundance of nectar. this bulletin discusses only, the utilization of sweet clover. a discussion of the growing of the crop may be found in farmers' bulletin . sweet clover: utilization.[ ] [ ] the growing of this crop has been discussed in a previous publication, farmers' bulletin , entitled "sweet clover; growing the crop." contents. page. general statement of the uses of sweet clover sweet clover as a pasture crop sweet clover hay sweet clover as a silage crop sweet clover as a soiling crop sweet clover as a feed sweet clover as a soil-improving crop sweet clover in rotations sweet clover as a honey plant general statement of the uses of sweet clover. the utilization of sweet clover as a feed for all classes of live stock has increased rapidly in many parts of the country, owing primarily to the excellent results obtained by many farmers who have used this plant for pasturage or hay, and also to the fact that feeding and digestion experiments conducted by agricultural experiment stations show that it is practically equal to alfalfa and red clover as a feed. as a pasture plant, sweet clover is superior to red clover, and possibly alfalfa, as it seldom causes bloat, will grow on poor soils, and is drought resistant. the favorable results obtained from the utilization of this crop for pasturage have done much to promote its culture in many parts of the united states. on account of the succulent, somewhat stemmy growth of the first crop the second year, difficulty is often experienced in curing the hay in humid sections, as it is necessary to cut it at a time when weather conditions are likely to be unfavorable. when properly cured the hay is relished by stock. at the present time sweet clover is used to only a limited extent for silage, but its use for this purpose should increase rapidly, as the results thus far obtained have been very satisfactory. in addition to the value of sweet clover as a feed, it is one of the best soil-improving crops adapted to short rotations which can be grown. when cut for hay, the stubble and roots remain in the soil, and when pastured, the uneaten parts of the plants, as well as the manure made while animals are on pasture, are added to the soil and benefit the succeeding crops. in addition to humus, sweet clover, in common with all legumes, adds nitrogen to the soil. this crop is grown in many sections of the country primarily to improve soils, and the benefits derived from it when handled in this manner have justified its use, as the yields of succeeding crops usually are increased materially. the different species of sweet clover are excellent honey plants, as they produce nectar over a long period in all sections of the united states. [illustration: fig. .--cattle pasturing on sweet clover.] sweet clover as a pasture crop. with the possible exception of alfalfa on fertile soils, no other leguminous crop will furnish as much nutritious pasturage from early spring until late fall as sweet clover when it is properly handled. live stock which have never been fed sweet clover may refuse to eat it at first, but this distaste is easily overcome by turning them on the pasture in the spring, as soon as the plants start growth (fig. ). many cases are on record where stock have preferred sweet clover to other forage plants. the fact that it may be pastured earlier in the spring than many forage plants and that it thrives throughout the hot summer months makes it a valuable addition to the pastures on many farms. sweet clover is an especially valuable forage plant for poor soils where other crops make but little growth, and it is upon such soils that thousands of acres of this crop are furnishing annually abundant pasturage for all kinds of live stock. in many portions of the middle west, where the conditions are similar to those of southeastern kansas, it bids fair to solve the serious pasturage problems. native pastures which will no longer provide more than a scant living for a mature steer on or acres, when properly seeded to sweet clover will produce sufficient forage to carry at least one animal to the acre throughout the season. in addition to this, a crop of hay or a seed crop may be harvested from a portion of the land when it is so fenced that the stock may be confined to certain parts of the field at specific times. land which is too rough or too depleted for cultivation, or permanent pastures which have become thin and weedy, may be improved greatly by drilling in, after disking, a few pounds of sweet-clover seed per acre. not only will the sweet clover add considerably to the quality and quantity of the pasturage but the growth of the grasses will be improved by the addition of large quantities of humus and nitrogen to the soil. sweet clover has proved to be an excellent pasture crop on many of the best farms in the north-central states. in this part of the country it may be seeded alone and pastured from the middle or latter part of june until frost, or it may be sown with grain and pastured after harvest. when sweet clover has been seeded two years in succession on separate fields, the field sown the first year may be pastured until the middle of june, when the stock should be turned on the spring seeding. when handled in this manner excellent pasturage is provided throughout the summer, and a hay or seed crop may be harvested from the field seeded the previous season. some of the best pastures in iowa consist of a mixture of kentucky bluegrass, timothy, and sweet clover. on a farm observed near delmar, iowa, stock is pastured on meadows containing this mixture from the first part of april to the middle of june. from this time until the first part of september the stock is kept on one-half to two-thirds the total pasture acreage. the remainder of the pasture land is permitted to mature a seed crop. after the seed crop is harvested the stock again is turned on this acreage, where they feed on the grasses and first-year sweet-clover plants until cold weather. the seed which shatters when the crop is cut is usually sufficient to reseed the pastures. by handling his pasture land in this manner, the owner of the farm has always had an abundance of pasture and at the same time has obtained each year a crop of to bushels of recleaned seed to the acre from one-third to one-half of his pasture land. this system has been in operation on one field for years and not until the last two year's has bluegrass showed a tendency to crowd out the sweet clover. it is essential that sufficient stock be kept on the pastures to keep the plants eaten rather closely, so that at all times there will be an abundance of fresh shoots. whenever the first crop of the second year is not needed for hay or silage it can be used for no better purpose than pasturage. in fact, it is better to pasture the fields until the middle of june, as this affords one of the most economical and profitable ways of handling the first crop. in addition to its value for pasture, grazing induces the plants to send out many young shoots close to the ground, so that when the plants are permitted to mature seed a much larger number of stalks are formed than would be the case if the first crop were cut for hay. the hay crop is likely to be cut so close to the ground that the plants will be killed, whereas but little danger of killing the plants arises from close pasturing early in the season. excellent stands of sweet clover will produce an abundance of pasturage for two to three mature steers per acre from early spring to the middle of june. cattle which are pasturing on sweet clover alone crave dry feed. straw has been found to satisfy this desire and straw or hay should be present in the meadow at all times, after stock are removed from the field it is an excellent plan to go over it with a mower, setting the cutter bar so as to leave the stubble to inches high. this will even up the stand, so that the plants will ripen seed at approximately the same date. experiments by many farmers in the middle west show that sweet clover is an excellent pasture for dairy cattle. when cows are turned on sweet clover from grass pastures the flow of milk is increased and its quality improved. other conditions being normal, this increase in milk production will continue throughout the summer, as the plants produce an abundance of green forage during the hot, dry months when grass pastures are unproductive. if pastures are handled properly they will carry at least one milk cow to the acre during the summer months. in many parts of the country sweet clover has proved to be an excellent pasturage crop for hogs. when it is utilized for this purpose it usually is seeded alone and pastured for two seasons. the hogs may be turned on the field the first year as soon as the plants have made a -inch growth. from this time until late fall an abundance of forage is produced, as pasturing induces the plants to send out many tender, succulent branches. pasturing the second season may begin as soon as growth starts in the spring. if the field is not closely grazed the second season it is advisable to clip it occasionally, leaving an -inch stubble, so as to produce a more succulent growth. an acre of sweet-clover pasture ordinarily will support to shotes in addition to furnishing a tight cutting of hay (fig. ). for the best growth of the hogs, they should be fed each day pounds of grain per hundredweight of the stock. hogs are very fond of sweet clover roots and should be ringed before being turned on the pasture. the tendency to root may generally be overcome by adding some protein to the grain ration. meat meal serves this purpose very well. the iowa agricultural experiment station conducted an interesting pasturing experiment with spring pigs in , in this experiment, pigs weighing approximately pounds each were pastured for a period of days on two plats of red clover, a plat of dwarf essex rape, and a plat of yellow biennial sweet clover. the pigs pasturing on each plat received a ration of ear corn. the ration given to the pigs on one plat of red clover and on that of rape was supplemented with meat meal to the extent of one-tenth of the ear corn ration. the feed given to the pigs pasturing on sweet clover was supplemented with meat meal at the same rate during only the last days of the test. the red clover was seeded in and reseeded in , so that the plat contained a very good stand of plants at least one year old. the sweet clover was seeded in the spring of , while the rape was sown on april , , in -inch rows. the pigs were turned on the forage plats on june . [illustration: fig. .--hogs pasturing on sweet clover.] the results of this experiment, as presented in table i, show that sweet clover carried more pigs to the acre and produced cheaper gains and a greater net profit per acre than either red clover or rape. to judge from the date of seeding of the plants tested, it was to be expected that the pigs pasturing on the sweet clover would not gain as rapidly at first as those pasturing on the other forage plants, as the growth of the sweet clover at this time was undoubtedly much less than that of the other crops. this assumption is borne out by the results given for the first days of the test. during this period the pigs on the rape made a net gain of $ . per acre and those on the red clover $ . per acre more than those on the sweet clover. in these computations corn was valued at cents per bushel and hogs at $ per hundredweight. during the latter part of the experiment there was but a scant growth of red clover on the plats, while the sweet clover produced an abundance of forage, and during this period of the experiment the pigs pasturing on sweet clover made a net gain of $ . per acre more than those pasturing on red clover and $ . per acre more than those pasturing on rape. (table i.) the difference in net profits probably would have been greater had white sweet clover been used instead of yellow sweet clover, as it makes a larger growth and contains approximately the same ratio of food elements. table i.--relative merits of dwarf essex rape, red clover, and yellow sweet clover when pastured by spring pigs for days, june to november , . ---------------------------+------+-------+-------+--------+---------------+--------+------- | | | | |supplementary | | | | | | |feed required | total | net | | | | | for | cost |profit | |initial| total |average |pounds of gain.| of | per |number| weight| gain, | daily +-------+-------+ pounds |acre.[ ] forage tested, plat area, | of | per | all | gain |shelled| meat | of | and ration. | hogs.| hog. | hogs. |per hog.| corn. | meal. |gain.[ ]| ---------------------------+------+-------+-------+--------+-------+-------+--------+-------- | |pounds.|pounds.| pounds.|pounds.|pounds.| | rape (dwarf essex, . | | | | | | | | acre), and ear corn[ ] | | | | | | | | plus one-tenth meat meal.| | . | , . | . | . | . | $ . | ...... reduced to acre basis. | | .... | , . | .... | ..... | ..... | ..... | $ . | | | | | | | | clover (medium red, . | | | | | | | | acre) and ear corn | | | | | | | | alone[ ]. | | . | , . | . | . | none. | . | ...... reduced to acre basis. | . | .... | , . | .... | ..... | ..... | ..... | . | | | | | | | | clover (medium red, . | | | | | | | | acre) and ear corn[ ] | | | | | | | | plus one-tenth meat meal.| | . | , . | . | . | . | . | ...... reduced to acre basis. | . | .... | , . | .... | ..... | ..... | ..... | . | | | | | | | | sweet clover[ ] (yellow | | | | | | | | biennial, . acre) and | | | | | | | | ear corn[ ] plus | | | | | | | | one-tenth meat meal. | | . | , . | . | . | . | . | ...... reduced to acre basis. | . | .... | , . | .... | ..... | ..... | ..... | . ---------------------------+------+-------+-------+--------+-------+-------+--------+--------- [ ] corn valued at cents per bushel, meat meal at $ . per hundredweight. [ ] hogs valued at $ per hundredweight. [ ] during the first days of the test, practically two-thirds of the time, a limited ration of corn was given, while during the last days the pigs received a full feed. [ ] the pigs pasturing on sweet clover received meat meal only during the last days of the experiment. an experiment reported by the new jersey agricultural experiment station shows that a mixture of rape and sweet clover makes an exceptionally fine pasture for hogs. in this experiment the mixture of rape and sweet clover produced more pasturage than alfalfa and was preferred to alfalfa by the hogs. it was seeded at the rate of pounds of dwarf essex rape and pounds of sweet clover to the acre. sheep relish sweet clover and make rapid gains when pastured on it. care must be taken to see that pastures are not overstocked with sheep, as they are likely to eat the plants so close to the ground as to kill them. this is especially true the first year, before the plants have formed crown buds. yellow biennial sweet clover probably would not suffer from this cause as much as the white species, because the plants make a more prostrate growth and are not likely to be eaten so closely to the ground. horses and mules do well on sweet-clover pastures. on account of the high protein content sweet clover provides excellent pasturage for young stock. no cases of slobbering have been noted with horses. tainting milk and butter. milk may be tainted occasionally when cows are pasturing on sweet clover. however, the large majority of farmers who pasture sweet clover on an extensive scale report very little or no trouble. the flavor imparted to milk at times is not disliked by all people, as some state that it is agreeable and does not harm the market value of dairy products in the least. this trouble is experienced for the most part in the early spring. the tainting of milk may be avoided by taking the cows off the pasture two hours before milking and keeping them off until after milking the following morning. bloating. unlike the true clovers and alfalfa, sweet clover seldom causes bloat; in fact, with the exception of the summer of , only a few authentic cases of bloat have thus far been recorded in sections where large acreages are pastured with cattle and sheep. a number of cases of bloat wore reported in iowa during the abnormally wet season of . no satisfactory explanation for this comparative freedom from bloating has been offered. it is held by some that the coumarin in the plants prevents bloating, but this has not been established experimentally. treatment for bloat. _cattle._--if the case of bloat is not extreme, it may be sufficient to drive the animals at a walk for a quarter or half an hour. in urgent cases the gas must be allowed to escape without delay, and this is best accomplished by the use of the trocar. in selecting the place for using the trocar, the highest point of the distended flank equally distant from the last rib and the point of the hip must be chosen. here an incision about three-fourths of an inch long should be made with a knife through the skin, and then the sharp point of the trocar, being directed downward, inward, and slightly forward, is thrust into the paunch. the sheath of the trocar should be left in the paunch as long as any gas continues to issue from it. in the absence of a trocar an incision may be made with a small-bladed knife and a quill used to permit the gas to escape. care must be taken to see that the quill does not work down out of sight into the incision. another remedy consists in tying a large bit, the diameter of a pitchfork handle, in the mouth, so that a piece of rubber tubing may be passed through the mouth to the first stomach to allow the gas to escape. when the animal is not distressed and the swelling of the flank is not great, or when the most distressing condition has been removed by the use of the trocar, it is best to administer internal medicine. two ounces of aromatic spirits of ammonia should be given every half hour in a quart of cold water, or half an ounce of chlorid of lime may be dissolved in a pint of tepid water and the dose repeated every half hour until the bloating has subsided.[ ] [ ] see "diseases of cattle," a special report of the bureau of animal industry. for acute bloating the kentucky agricultural experiment station recommends quart of a - / per cent solution of formalin, followed by placing a wooden block in the animal's mouth and by gentle exercise if the animal can be gotten up. _sheep._--gas may be removed quickly from bloated sheep by using a small trocar. the seat of the operation is on the most prominent portion of the left flank. sweet-clover hay. when sweet-clover hay is cut at the right time and cured properly it is eaten readily by all classes of live stock. as the hay is rich in protein, growing stock make gains on it comparable to the gains of those fed on alfalfa. the quantity and quality of the milk produced when the hay is fed to cows are approximately the same as when other legumes are used. hay which is cut the first year is fine stemmed and leafy and resembles alfalfa in general appearance. unless it is cut at the proper time the second year, it will be stemmy and unpalatable. feeding experiments show that it contains practically as much digestible protein as alfalfa and more than red clover, but the hay is not as palatable as red clover or alfalfa when the plants are permitted to become coarse and woody. when sweet clover is seeded in the spring without a nurse crop in the northern and western sections of the united states, a cutting of hay may be obtained the same autumn. when it is seeded with a nurse crop in these regions, the rainfall during the late summer and early fall will largely determine whether the plants will make sufficient growth to be cut for hay. on fertile, well-limed soils in the east, in the eastern north-central states, in iowa, and in eastern kansas a cutting of hay is commonly obtained after grain harvest when the rainfall is normal or above normal. in many sections of the country two, and at times three, cuttings of hay may be obtained the second year (fig. ). in the south two, and sometimes three, cuttings may be obtained the first year if the seeding is done without a nurse crop. when the seed is sown in the spring with oats, two cuttings may be secured after oat harvest. three cuttings may be obtained the second year, although it is the common practice to cut the first crop for hay and the second crop for seed. yields of sweet-clover hay. the total yields of sweet clover per acre for the season are usually less than those of alfalfa except in the semiarid unirrigated portions of the country. sweet clover ordinarily yields more to the acre than any of the true clovers. [illustration: fig. .--cutting sweet clover for hay in western kansas.] when the seed is sown in the spring in the north without a nurse crop, yields of to tons of hay of good quality may be expected the following autumn, the massachusetts agricultural experiment station obtained , pounds of hay per acre in the fall from spring seeding, while the united states department of agriculture obtained , pounds of hay per acre in august from may seeding in maryland. yields of to tons, and occasionally tons, have been obtained in michigan, illinois, iowa, kansas, the dakotas, and other states. in illinois, iowa, and kansas yields of to - / tons are often obtained after grain harvest when weather conditions are favorable. the first crop the second season yields - / to tons of hay to the acre in the northern and western sections of the united states. the second crop of the second season will yield from three-fourths to - / tons to the acre, although this crop usually is cut for seed. when sweet clover is seeded in the south without a nurse crop on fairly fertile soil that is not acid, three cuttings of hay, averaging at least a ton to the cutting, may be secured the year of seeding. when the seed is sown in the early spring on winter grain, two cuttings, yielding at least ton to the cutting, may be obtained. the first crop the second season yields on an average - / to tons of hay to the acre. in the alabama canebrake station obtained - / tons of hay after oat harvest and a total yield of tons per acre from the same field in . time to cut sweet clover for hay. the first season's growth of sweet clover does not usually get coarse and woody and therefore may be cut when it shows its maximum growth in the fall, in regions where more than one crop may be obtained the first season, the first crop should be cut when the plants have made about a -inch growth. the proper time to cut the first crop the second season will vary considerably in different localities, depending very much upon the rainfall, the temperature, and the fertility of the soil. in no event should the plants be permitted to show flower buds or to become woody. in the semiarid sections of the country sweet clover does not grow as rapidly as in more humid regions. neither do the plants grow as rapidly on poor soils as upon fertile soils. in the drier sections the best results usually are obtained by cutting the first crop when the plants have made a growth of to inches. on fertile, well-limed soils in many sections of the country a very rapid growth is made in the spring, and often the plants will not show flower buds until they are about feet high. on such soils it is very essential that the first crop be cut when the plants have made no more growth than to inches if hay is desired which is not stemmy and if a second growth is to be expected. height of stubble to be left when cutting for hay. it is not necessary to leave more than an ordinary stubble when cutting the sweet-clover hay crop in the fall of the year of seeding. a stubble or inches in height, however, will serve to hold drifting snow and undoubtedly will be of some help in protecting the plants from winter injury. while sweet clover without question is more hardy than red clover, usually more or less winterkilling occurs, and any protection which may be afforded during cold weather will be of considerable benefit. while the first crop in the second year comes from the crown buds, the new branches which produce the second crop of the second year come from the buds formed in the axils of the leaves on the lower portions of the stalks which constitute the first crop, as shown in figure . these branches usually commence growth when the plants are about inches high. in fields where the stand is heavy and where the lower portions of the plants are densely shaded, these shoots are soon killed from lack of necessary light. (figs. and .) the branches which are first to appear and which are first to be killed are those closest to the ground. it is therefore very important when cutting this crop to cut the plants high enough from the ground to leave on the stubble a sufficient number of buds and young branches to produce a second crop. [illustration: fig. .--sweet-clover plants, showing the direct relation that exists between the thickness of stand, the time of cutting, and the height at which the stubble must be cut if a second crop is to be expected. the plant at the left was cut day later than the plant at the right. note the height at which it was necessary to cut this plant so that a second crop would develop and also the scars on the stubble where young shoots had started earlier and were killed from lack of sunlight. when the stand is thin the young shoots will survive, as they did on the plant at the right, even though the field is cut at a later date.] examination of hundreds of acres of sweet clover in different sections of the united states during the summers of and showed that the stand on at least per cent of the fields was partly or entirely killed by cutting the first crop the second season too close to the ground. a direct relation exists between the thickness of the stand, the height of the plants, and the height at which the stubble should be cut if a second crop is to be harvested. it is very essential to examine the fields carefully before mowing, so as to determine the height at which the plants should be cut in order to leave at least one healthy bud or young branch on each stub. in fact, the stand should be cut several inches above the young shoots or buds, the stubble may die back from to inches if the plants are cut during damp or rainy weather. [illustration: fig. .--stubble of sweet clover collected in fields where per cent of the plants had been killed by cutting too closely to the ground. the heavy stands in these fields were not cut until the plants had made a growth of to inches. note the scars on the stubble where young shoots started, but died from lack of light.] when fields of sweet clover contain only a medium-heavy stand and when the plants have made no more than a -inch growth, a to inch stubble usually will be sufficient to insure a second crop, but where fields contain heavy stands-- to plants to the square foot--it may be necessary to leave an -inch stubble. in many fields examined in northern illinois in june, , heavy stands had been permitted to make a growth of to inches before cutting. in a number of these fields a very large percentage of the plants were killed when an to inch stubble was left. (see fig. .) a careful examination of such fields showed that the young branches had started on the lower portions of the stalks and had died from lack of light before cutting. in semiarid regions, where the plants do not make as rapid growth as in humid sections, they may, as a rule, be clipped somewhat closer to the ground without injury. on account of the difference in the growth that sweet clover makes on different types of soil and on account of the difference in the thickness of the stand obtained in different fields, it is impossible to give any definite rule as to the proper height to cut the first crop. [illustration: fig. .--shoe sole to be placed on the inner shoe of the mower, so that a high stubble may be left when mowing sweet clover: _a_, end view of the back part of the sole; _b_, side view of the sole, showing general shape; _c_, shape of the front end of the pole when it is to be used on mowers having shoes of the type used on deering machines; _d_, forward end of the sole represented in _b_. the toward end of the sole shown in _b_ and _d_ should be made for machines having shoes of the type used on mccormick mowers.] mower changes for cutting sweet clover. it is good practice to replace the shoe soles of the mower with higher adjustable soles, so that a stubble up to inches in height may be left when cutting sweet clover, shoe soles such as are shown in figures and may be made on any farm provided with a blacksmith's forge, or they can be made at any blacksmith shop at a cost which should not exceed $ . . preferably they should be of strap iron, about one-fourth of an inch thick and inches wide; however, old pieces of iron or steel which may be found on the farm will serve the purpose. [illustration: fig. .--shoe sole to be used on the outer shoe of the mower, so that a high stubble may be left when cutting sweet clover; _a_, end view of the back part of the sole; _b_, side view of the sole, showing general shape; _c_, forward end of the sole to be used on certain deering machines; _d_, end view of the front part of sole shown in _b_.] then these soles are to be placed on machines that have shoes of the type used on the deering mower, the forward inches of the sole for the inner shoe should be tapered gradually to a blunt point and bent in such a manner that it will hook into the slot in the shoe. (fig. , _c_.) when the soles are to be placed on mowers having shoes of the type used on mccormick machines, the forward inches of the sole for the inner shoe should be tapered gradually to about inch in width, bent forward so that it will fit against that portion of the shoe where it is to be bolted, and have a hole of the proper size bored for the bolt three-fourths of an inch from the end. (fig. , _b_ and _d_.) the bottom of the sole should be rounded, so as to run smoothly on the ground when the cutter bar is raised to cut at different heights. the back portion of the sole should be upright and should have holes bored in it, so that it may be set for the cutter bar to rest at different heights from the ground. preferably the lower hole of the upright should be located so that when the bolt in the shoe is run through it the cutter bar will be inches from the ground. it should be long enough to permit four or five holes, inch apart, to be bored above the lower one. (fig. , _a_.) with some makes of machines it is not advisable to raise the cutter bar higher than inches from the ground, but when this is true the cutter bar may be tipped upward, so that a -inch stubble is left. the forward end of the shoe sole to be used on the outer shoe should be tapered gradually to inch from the end. the forward inch should be one-fourth of an inch in width and bent slightly upward and inward, so that a hook will be formed to fit into the slot in the front end of the shoe. (fig. , _b_.) the rest of the sole should curved, so that it will run smoothly on the ground when the cutter bar is set to cut at different heights. the upright which is bolted to the sole should preferably be made of three-eighths by inch material and should have six holes, inch apart, bored in it, so that the outer end of the cutter bar may be raised to the same height as the inner end. on practically all standard makes of mowers the outer shoe sole hooks into the shoe instead of bolting to it, as is the case with the inner sole on some machines. a wheel is used in place of a shoe sole on the outer end of the cutter bar on some machines. when this is the case, the upright to which this wheel is attached should be lengthened. on other machines the forward end of the sole hooks into a slot in the shoe in the same manner as the inner sole. in this event the front end of the sole should be bent slightly upward and outward. (fig. , _c_.) before shoe soles are made for any mower a careful examination should be made of the shoes to determine the exact size required and the manner in which they should be attached to the forward ends of the shoes. curing and handling sweet-clover hay. one of the greatest difficulties in curing sweet clover is the fact that the plants usually are ready to be cut for hay at a time of the year when weather conditions are likely to be unfavorable for haymaking. little trouble is experienced in curing this crop in the drier sections of the country where the methods used for alfalfa are employed. the curing of sweet clover is more difficult than the curing of either red clover or alfalfa, as the leaves are very apt to shatter before the stems are cured. every possible means should be employed to save the leaves, as these constitute the best part of the hay. (see table ii.) table ii.--average analyses of the leaves of four samples of well-cured white sweet-clover hay. [analyses made by the bureau of chemistry.] --------+------------------------------------------------------------- | constituents (per cent). +----------+-------+---------+---------+-------+-------------- samples.| moisture.| ash. | ether | protein.| crude | nitrogen-free | | | extract.| | fiber.| extract. --------+----------+-------+---------+---------+-------+-------------- | | | | | | leaves. | . | . | . | . | . | . stems. | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | | | | --------+----------+-------+---------+---------+-------+-------------- the hay collected for the above analyses represented the first cutting the second season. the plants had made a to inch growth at the time of cutting. it will be seen that the protein content of the leaves is almost three times as great as that of the stems. in the drier sections of the country or when the first crop of the year of seeding is cut for hay in the north-central states the mower may be started in the morning as soon as the dew is off. the hay should remain in the swath until the following day, or until it is well wilted, when it should be raked into small windrows. after remaining in the windrows for a day it may be placed in small cocks to cure. cocks made from hay which has dried to this stage will not shed water well and therefore should be covered if it is likely to rain. it is important that the cocks be made small enough to be thrown on the rack entire, as many leaves will be lost if it is necessary to tear them apart. [illustration: fig. .--sweat clover curing in the cock.] when sweet clover is permitted to dry in the swath, a large percentage of the leaves will be lost in windrowing and loading unless handled with the utmost care. hay in this condition should never be raked while perfectly dry and brittle, but should be raked into the windrow in the early morning or in the evening, when it is slightly damp from dew. it may then be hauled to the barn or stack after remaining in the windrow for a day. one of the most successful methods for handling sweet-clover hay, especially in regions where rains are likely to occur at haying time, is to permit the plants to remain in the swath until they are well wilted or just before the leaves begin to cure. the hay should then be raked into windrows and cocked at once (fig. ). the cocks should be made as high and as narrow as possible, as this will permit better ventilation. in curing, the cocks will shrink from one-third to one-half of their original size. it may take from days to weeks to cure sweet clover by this method, but when well cured all the leaves will be intact and the hay will have an excellent color and aroma. when sweet clover is cocked at this time the leaves will cure flat and in such a manner that the cocks will readily shed water during heavy rains (fig. ). [illustration: fig. .--a cock of sweet-clover hay which has cured in excellent condition and retained all of its leaves.] when sweet-clover hay is to be stacked it is highly desirable that some sort of foundation be made for the stack, so as to prevent the loss of the hay which otherwise would be on the ground. several feet of straw or grass are often used for this purpose, but still better is a foundation of rails, posts, or boards placed in such a manner that air may circulate under the stack. a cover should be provided for the stacks, either in the form of a roof, a canvas, or long green grass. if none of these means is practicable a topping of perfectly green sweet clover will cure with the leaves flat and will turn water nicely. it is well known that hay made from either red clover or alfalfa will often undergo spontaneous combustion if put into the barn with too much external moisture upon it. no instances of spontaneous combustion in sweet-clover hay have been noted, but this may be due to the fact that comparatively little sweet-clover hay is stored in barns. the same precautions, therefore, should be taken with sweet-clover hay as with red clover or alfalfa. sweet clover as a silage crop. in some sections of the country sweet clover is gaining in favor as a silage crop, either alone or in mixtures with other plants. the silage made from this plant will keep better than that made from most legumes, as it does not become slimy, as is so often the case with red clover or alfalfa silage. it produces a palatable feed, which should contain more protein than well-matured corn silage. [illustration: fig. .--filling the silo with sweet clover.] when sweet clover makes sufficient growth after grain harvest, or when seeded alone, it is not necessary to cut it for silage until fall. at this time it may be run into the silo alone or in mixture with corn. excellent results have been obtained by placing alternate loads of corn and sweet clover in the silo. (fig. .) when the first crop the second season is not needed for pasturage, ensiling may prove to be the most economical and profitable way of handling it, as it is necessary to cut this crop for hay at a time of the year when the weather conditions in humid regions are very likely to be unfavorable for haymaking. the large percentage of leaves which usually are lost from shattering when harvesting the hay will be saved when the crop is run into the silo. the first crop the second season will produce approximately two-thirds as much silage to the acre as corn when it is cut at the time it should be cut for hay. the second crop may then be harvested for seed. when sweet clover is handled in this manner, approximately two-thirds of the total corn acreage which would be cut for silage may be permitted to mature, as the first crop of sweet clover will replace the corn silage, while the seed crop ordinarily will bring as much per acre as the corn. in addition to this, the roots and stubble will add large quantities of vegetable matter to the soil. some farmers do not cut sweet clover for silage until it is in full bloom. when this is done, to tons of silage will be obtained per acre, but the plants will be killed by the mowing. [illustration: fig. .--cutting sweet clover with a grain binder for silage.] when the green plants are ensiled, the crop preferably should be cut with a grain binder. (see illustration on title-page and fig. .) this will solve the difficulty of cutting a high stubble and will at the same time bind the plants so that they may be run through the silage cutter without difficulty. green plants, and especially the first crop of the second season, contain too much moisture to be run into the silo immediately after cutting. in some cases quantities of juice have been pressed out of the bottom of the silo, and as a result the silage settled considerably. analyses of the juice from one silo showed that it contained . per cent protein and per cent carbohydrates. this loss of juice may be overcome by permitting the bundles to remain in the field just as they come from the binder until the plants are wilted thoroughly. straw or corn stover may be placed in the bottom of the silo to absorb some of the juice. if the plants contain too much moisture it may be a good plan to mix some corn stover with the sweet clover as it is run into the silo. several silos in illinois have been filled with sweet-clover straw. when this is done it is necessary to add sufficient water to moisten the dry stems. these stems become soft in a short time and ensile in good condition. when the seed crop is thrashed with either a grain separator or a clover huller the stems are broken and crushed sufficiently to render it unnecessary to run them through a silage cutter. care must be taken when ensiling the straw to add sufficient water, if molding is to be avoided. it will probably be necessary to add water at the blower and also at the top of the silo. it is essential to tramp the straw thoroughly, so as to exclude as much air as possible. after the silo is filled it should be covered with a layer of green plants and thoroughly soaked with water. table iii gives analyses of several sample of sweet-clover silage as compared to corn silage. table iii.--_composition of sweet-clover silage and well-matured corn silage._ ---------------+---------+--------------------------------------------- | | constituents (per cent). | +------+------+--------+----------------+----- kind of | | | | | carbohydrates. | | number |water.| ash. | crude +------+---------+ silage. | of | | |protein.| |nitrogen-| fat. |analyses.| | | |fiber.| free | | | | | | | extract.| ---------------+---------+------+------+--------+------+---------+----- | | | | | | | white sweet | | | | | | | clover; | | | | | | | first year's | | | | | | | growth[ ] | | . | . | . | . | . first crop, | | | | | | | second | | | | | | | season[ ] | | . | . | . | . | . | . straw[ ] | | . | . | . | . | . | . corn, well | | | | | | | matured[ ] | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | | | | | ---------------+---------+------+------+--------+------+---------+----- [ ] analysed by the illinois agricultural experiment station. [ ] analysed by the bureau of chemistry. [ ] analyses compiled by henry and morrison. as shown in table iii the analyses of the first and second years' growth of sweet clover compare favorably in food elements with corn silage. it is to be expected that the silage made from the sweet clover straw would contain less protein and carbohydrates than that made from the entire plants, as most of the leaves shatter from sweet clover before the seed crop is cut. considerable protein and carbohydrates were lost from the silage made from the first crop the second season, as the plants were run into the silo as soon as they were cut. much juice was pressed from the bottom of this silo. an analysis of this juice is given on page . sweet clover as a soiling crop. as a soiling crop sweet clover has been used to only a very limited extent. the amperage yields of green matter vary from to tons per acre, the season for soiling may commence when the plants are to inches high and continue until flower buds appear. an area of such a size that the plants may be cut every four or five weeks should be selected. the plants should not be cut closer to the ground than inches during the first part of the season and to inches during the latter part of the season. on account of the high protein content and the large amount of forage produced on a relatively small area, sweet clover may profitably be fed in this manner when more desirable soiling crops are not to be had. sweet clover as a feed. palatability of sweet clover. the woody growth of sweet clover as it reaches maturity and the bitter taste due to coumarin have been the principal causes for live stock refusing to eat it at first. on this account many farmers have assumed it to be worthless as a feed. it is a fact that stock seldom eat the hard, woody stems of mature plants, but it is true also that stock eat sparingly of the coarse, fibrous growth of such legumes as red or mammoth clover when they have been permitted to mature and have lost much of their palatability. all kinds of stock will eat green sweet clover before it becomes woody, or hay which has been cut at the proper time and well cured, after they have become accustomed to it. many cases are on record in which cattle have refused alfalfa or red clover when sweet clover was accessible. milch cows have been known to refuse a ration of alfalfa hay when given to them for the first time. western range cattle which have never been fed corn very often refuse to eat corn fodder, or even corn, for a short time, and instances have come under observation in which they ate the dried husks and left the corn uneaten. when these cattle were turned on green grass the following spring they browsed on the dead grass of the preceding season's growth, which, presumably more closely resembled the grass to which they were accustomed. such preliminary observations should never be taken as final, even when they represent the results of careful investigators. when cowpeas were first introduced into certain sections of this country much trouble was experienced in getting stock to eat the vines, either when cured into hay or made into ensilage. this difficulty, however, was soon overcome. it is very true that stock which have never been pastured on sweet clover or fed on the hay must become accustomed to it before they will eat it, but the fact that sweet clover is now being fed to stock in nearly every state indicates that the distaste for it can be overcome easily and successfully. as sweet clover usually starts growth earlier in the spring than other forage plants and as the early growth presumably contains less coumarin than older plants, stock seldom refuse to eat it at this time. properly cured hay is seldom refused by stock, especially if it is sprinkled with salt water when the animals are salt hungry. composition of sweet clover. sweet clover, like most legumes, contains a relatively high percentage of protein, thus making it a source of that valuable constituent of feeds needed for growing stock and for the production of milk. table iv shows the relative composition and digestibility of sweet clover as compared to some other feeds. table iv.--composition and digestibility of sweet clover compared with that of other forage crops. average percentage composition of sweet clover and other forage crops. -----------------+---------+-------------------------------------------- | | constituents (per cent). | +------+-----+--------+----------------+----- | | | | |carbohydrates. | | number | | | +------+---------+ kinds of forage. | of |water.| ash.| crude | |nitrogen-| fat. |analyses.| | |protein.|fiber.| free | | | | | | extract.| -----------------+---------+------+-----+--------+------+---------+----- | | | | | | | green crop: | | | | | | | sweet clover[ ]| | . | . | . | . | . | . alfalfa[ ] | | . | . | . | . | . | . red clover[ ] | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | | | | | hay (moisture- | | | | | | | free basis): | | | | | | | white sweet | | | | | | | clover[ ] | | .... | . | . | . | . | . yellow sweet | | | | | | | clover[ ] | | .... | . | . | . | . | . alfalfa[ ] | | .... | . | . | . | . | . red clover[ ] | | .... | . | . | . | . | . timothy[ ] | | .... | . | . | . | . | . -----------------+---------+------+-----+--------+------+---------+----- digestible nutrients of sweet clover and other forage crops when fed to sheep.[ ] ----------------+----------+---------------------------------+--------- | | digestible nutrients in | | | pounds of air-dried hay. |nutritive |dry matter+--------+--------+-------+-------+ratio.[ ] kinds of forage.| in |protein.|carbohy-| fat. | dry | | pounds. | | drates.| |matter.| ----------------+----------+--------+--------+-------+-------+--------- | | | | | | white sweet- | | | | | | clover hay | . | . | . | . | . | : . pea hay | . | . | . | . | . | : . alfalfa hay | . | . | . | . | . | : . (second cutting)| | | | | | ----------------+----------+--------+--------+-------+-------+--------- [ ] analyses taken from henry and morrison's "foods and feeding." [ ] analyses compiled by the bureau of chemistry. [ ] experiments conducted by the wyoming agricultural experiment station. [ ] the nutritive ratio is the ratio which exists between the digestible crude protein and the combined digestible carbohydrates and fat. table iv shows that the percentage composition of both green and cured sweet clover compares favorably with that of alfalfa and red clover. perhaps the most interesting point shown in this table is that the fiber content of white sweet clover, whether green or cured into hay, is no greater than that of alfalfa. it is understood, however, that the plants collected for these analyses were taken when they were at the proper stage for curing into hay. table iv also shows that the digestible nutrients of sweet clover when fed to sheep compare favorably with alfalfa. it was stated that the sweet-clover hay used for this experiment was stemmy and that it had not been cut until it had become woody. the pea hay had passed the best stage for cutting when it was harvested, while the alfalfa hay was in excellent condition. in a feeding experiment with sheep conducted by two students at the iowa state college it was found that the protein digested in sweet-clover feed alone was per cent and that the addition of corn to the hay ration increased the digestibility of sweet clover to per cent. alfalfa and red clover showed similar increases of the digestibility of the protein content when corn was added to the ration. the percentage of digestibility figured for the protein in the corn was the average of a number of digestion experiments. the probability is that the digestibility of the corn was also increased by the presence of the hay in the ration, so that not all the increase in the digestibility should be credited to the hay constituents of the different rations. feeding experiments with sweet clover. few agricultural experiment stations have carried on definite feeding experiments to determine the value of sweet clover compared with other feeds. the south dakota agricultural experiment station reported an experiment in which lambs were fed on sweet-clover hay in comparison with alfalfa, pea-vine, and prairie hay. in this experiment the lambs made a better gain at a less cost when fed sweet-clover hay than when fed pea-vine hay, but not as large a gain as when fed alfalfa hay. the results of this experiment are shown in table v. table v.--feeding experiment with lambs in south dakota, showing the comparative value of different kinds of hay as roughage. [grain ration consists of oats and corn in all cases; roughage varies.] --------------+-------+--------+----------------+---------------+------- | | | average weight.|required for | | | | |pound of gain. |average | | +--------+-------+-------+-------+ daily | number|duration| | | | | gain roughage fed.| of |of test.|at be- |at end.|grain. | hay. | per | lambs.| |ginning.| | | | head. --------------+-------+--------+--------+-------+-------+-------+------- | | | | | | | | | days. |pounds. |pounds.|pounds.|pounds.|pounds. prairie hay | | | . | . | . | . | . pea-vine hay | | | . | . | . | . | . alfalfa hay | | | . | . | . | . | . sweet-clover | | | . | . | . | . | . hay | | | | | | | --------------+-------+--------+--------+-------+-------+-------+------- the wyoming agricultural experiment station also performed an, interesting experiment with lambs. a number of pens of to lambs each were fed different mixtures of feeds for weeks. those receiving sweet-clover hay, corn, and a small amount of oil meal made an average gain of . pounds per head, as compared with . pounds for those receiving native-grass hay, oats, and oil meal. those receiving alfalfa hay and corn made a gain of more than pounds per head. the results obtained with four pens of lambs in this experiment are given in table vi. table vi.--results of feeding tests of lambs in wyoming covering weeks. -------------+------+-------+----------------------------------------------- | | | required for pounds of gain. | | +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------- | |average|sweet- | | | | | |number| gain |clover |native |alfalfa| corn. | oats. | oil ration. | of | per | hay. | hay. | hay. | | | meal. |lambs.| head. | | | | | | -------------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------- sweet-clover | |pounds.|pounds.|pounds.|pounds.|pounds.|pounds.|pounds. hay, corn, | | | | | | | | and oil meal| | | | | | | | (old process)| | . | . | ..... | ..... | . | ..... | . | | | | | | | | native-grass | | | | | | | | hay, oats, | | | | | | | | and oil meal| | | | | | | | (old process)| | . | ..... | . | ..... | ..... | . | . | | | | | | | | alfalfa hay | | | | | | | | and corn | | . | ..... | ..... | . | . | ..... | ..... | | | | | | | | do | | . | ..... | ..... | . | . | ..... | ..... | | | | | | | | -------------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------- the sweet-clover hay used in this experiment was described as stemmy and more than a year old; yet it was eaten up clean by the lambs. the south dakota agricultural experiment station conducted an experiment in which steers were fed corn silage and various kinds of hay, including sweet clover. the steers which were fed corn silage and sweet-clover hay made an average daily gain of . pounds, at a cost of $ . per hundred pounds of gain, whereas the steers which were fed corn silage and red-clover hay made an average daily gain of . pounds, at a cost of $ . per hundred. the steers that were fed corn silage and alfalfa hay made an average daily gain of . pounds, at a cost of $ . per hundred. in computing the cost of the gains, corn silage was valued at $ per ton, alfalfa, red-clover, and sweet-clover hay at $ per ton, and prairie hay at $ per ton. the results of this experiment, as given in table vii, show that sweet-clover hay is practically equal to red-clover and alfalfa and greatly superior to prairie hay for roughage for steers. table vii.--feeding experiments with steers in south dakota, showing the value of sweet-clover hay as compared with some other kinds of hay. [corn silage fed in all cases; kind of hay varies.] ------------+-------+--------+----------------+-------+---------------+------ | | |average weight. | |feed per pound | cost | | +--------+-------+ | of gain. | per |number | | at | |average+-------+-------+ | of |duration| begin- | at | daily | | |pounds roughage. |steers.|of test.| ning. | end. | gain. |silage.| hay. | of | | | | | | | | gain. ------------+-------+--------+--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------ | | days. | pounds.|pounds.|pounds.|pounds.|pounds.| red-clover | | | | | | | | hay | | | | | . | | . | $ . | | | | | | | | sweet- | | | | | | | | clover hay| | | | | . | | . | . | | | | | | | | alfalfa | | | | , | . | | . | . | | | | | | | | prairie | | | | | . | | . | . hay | | | | | | | | ------------+-------+--------+--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------ the results of these various experiments are being duplicated every year by many feeders. each year in the middle west and northwest many cattle that bring high prices are being fed with no other roughage than sweet-clover hay. steers which have been pastured entirely on sweet clover have brought in the chicago market $ per hundredweight more than ordinary grass-pastured stock marketed from the same locality and at the same time. excellent results were obtained in lee county, ill., from feeding steers sweet-clover silage made from plants which had matured a seed crop. for this experiment head of steers and years old, averaging , pounds per head, were purchased at the kansas city stock yards on november , , at a cost of $ . per hundred. these steers were shipped to a farm at steward and immediately turned on acres of cornstalks. they were fed nothing in addition to the cornstalks until january , , when they were put into the feed lot. while they were not weighed when turned into the feed lot, the owner of the steers stated that in his estimation they had gained but little, if any. during the days these steers were in the feed lot they were fed bushels of snapped corn twice a day and as much sweet-clover silage as they would eat. these animals had access to sweet-clover straw during the first part of the feeding period, but after this was consumed they had only oat straw as roughage. at the end of the feeding period they were sold on the chicago market at the average price of $ . per hundred, netting approximately $ per head. the average weight of these steers in the chicago yards was , pounds, pounds more than when purchased in kansas city. a most remarkable feature of this experiment is the fact that the steers were fed almost entirely material which would have been considered of little value by the average farmer. the corn which was fed tested per cent moisture at the rochelle, ill., elevator, and cents per bushel was the best price offered for it. presumably on account of wet weather during the fall of , the sweet-clover seed crop was a failure in that section; in fact, the crop had been cut for seed and part had been thrashed before it was decided that the seed yield was not sufficient to pay for the thrashing. the remainder of the crop was then run into the silo and fed to the steers. the leaves fall and the stems of this plant become hard and woody as the seed matures. the crop therefore would have been worthless for feed had it not been placed in the silo. as a rule, stock readily eat sweet-clover straw when the stems are broken and crushed by the hulling machines. the sweet-clover straw which was used as roughage during the first part of the feeding period was from that part of the seed crop which had been thrashed. an interesting feeding experiment was conducted on a farm at rochelle, ill. on september , , head of -year-old steers, averaging pounds, were turned on acres of sweet clover which had been seeded that spring with barley. these animals were pastured on the sweet clover until november without additional feed. during this time they made exceptionally large gains. from november to december , head of these steers had access to an -acre field of cornstalks. on december they were put into the feed lot. during the time these steers were on the cornstalks they barely held their gain, but during the first days they were in the feed lot they made an average daily gain of almost pounds. in this period they received bushels of corn-and-cob meal and - / tons of silage made from the first-year growth of sweet clover. during the next days they received bushels of corn-and-cob meal and much less sweet-clover, silage. during this time they made an average daily gain of pounds. when the corn-and-cob meal ration was increased the steers ate less silage. these cattle dressed - / per cent at a chicago packing house. sweet clover as a soil-improving crop. unlike many legumes, sweet clover will make a good growth on soils too depleted in humus for profitable crop production. in addition to its ability to grow and to produce a considerable quantity of forage on such soils, it will add much humus to them. the extensive root systems do much toward breaking up the subsoil, thereby providing better aeration and drainage. the effect of the large, deep roots in opening up the subsoil and providing better drainage is often very noticeable in the spring, as the land upon which sweet clover has grown for several years will be in a condition to plow earlier than the adjacent fields where it has not been grown. the roots are often one-eighth of an inch in diameter at a depth of feet, and they decay in five to eight weeks after the plants die. (figs. and .) the holes made by the roots are left partly filled with a fibrous substance which permits rapid drainage. sandy soils are benefited materially by the addition of humus and nitrogen, while hardpan often is broken up so completely that alfalfa or other crops will readily grow on the land. the roots add much organic matter to the layers of soil below the usual depth of plowing, while those in the surface soil, together with the stubble and stems, when the crop is plowed under, add more humus than possibly any other legume which may be grown in short rotations. not only does this crop add organic matter to the soil, but in common with other legumes it has the power of fixing atmospheric nitrogen by means of the nitrogen-gathering bacteria in the nodules on the roots. [illustration: fig. .--a portion of a root of sweet clover, collected days after the seed crop had been cut. the cortex was so decayed that it remained in the ground when the root was removed. note that the pith has largely disappeared and that the half-rotten central cylinder is all that remains.] [illustration: fig. .--the same root shown in figure after being crushed between the thumb and forefinger. illustrating how rapidly sweet-clover roots decay after the plants die. the holes left in the ground by the rapid decay of the roots facilitate drainage.] the ability of sweet clover to reclaim abandoned, run-down land has been demonstrated in northern kentucky and in alabama. in these regions many farms were so depleted in nitrogen and humus by continuous cropping with nonleguminous crops that profitable yields could be obtained no longer, through the use of this crop many of these farms have been brought back to a fair state of fertility. tests at the alabama agricultural experiment station show that the increased yield of corn following sweet clover which had occupied the land for two years was - / bushels per acre. the cotton grown on the land the second year showed an increase of pounds per acre. the combined value of the increased yields of corn and cotton for the two years was estimated at $ . . the total yield of hay for the two preceding years was . tons per acre. in another experiment at this station cotton was planted on land that had grown sweet clover the two previous years and on land that had received an application of tons of stable manure per acre. the sweet-clover plat produced pounds of seed cotton the first year and pounds of seed cotton the second year more than the plat which received the heavy application of manure. land on which sweet clover had been grown for four years at the ohio agricultural experiment station yielded . bushels of wheat per acre as compared with . bushels on the check plat. sweet clover was seeded at the tennessee agricultural experiment station in the spring of . one cutting of hay was removed that year and the following spring the field was plowed and planted to corn. the corn yielded . bushels per acre as compared with . bushels per acre for an adjoining plat where rye was turned under. a number of tests have been conducted in southeastern kansas which show clearly the value of sweet clover as a soil-improving crop for that section. the yield of wheat has been increased as much as bushels per acre and that of corn as much as bushels per acre by plowing under the second-year growth of clover. annual yellow sweet clover is rapidly gaining in favor as a green-manure crop for orchards in the southwest. in arizona two plats seeded in october and plowed under in april yielded, respectively, and tons of green matter to the acre. at the arizona agricultural experiment station annual yellow sweet clover, lupines, and alfalfa were tested as green-manure crops for orchards. in this experiment the sweet clover clearly showed its superiority to lupines or alfalfa for this purpose, as it yielded from to tons of green matter per acre, whereas the highest yield for the lupines was tons and for the alfalfa tons per acre. the use of annual sweet clover as a green-manure crop in southern california has increased very rapidly in recent years, and this increased use apparently has been justified by the results obtained with it. one of the most interesting green-manure tests thus far noted was conducted at the california citrus experiment station. in this experiment nine legume plats and eight nonlegume plats alternated with each other. the -year average weight of green matter produced on the sweet-clover plat was - / tons per acre, whereas the -year average weight of green matter produced by common vetch and canada field peas was tons and tons, respectively, per acre. on one series of these plats corn was planted in rotation with the clover. the average yield of shelled corn for four years was bushels to the acre on the sweet-clover plat, as compared with bushels to the acre on the common-vetch plat and bushels per acre on the field-pea plat. one barley plat receiving each year an application of , pounds of nitrate of soda gave an average yield of bushels per acre. the -year average yield of potatoes following sweet clover was bushels per acre, as compared with bushels following common vetch and bushels following field peas. sweet clover has proved to be an excellent plant to grow in rotation with sugar beets, as the -year average for the beets following it was . tons per acre, as compared with . tons following common vetch, and . tons following field peas. annual yellow sweet clover makes a profitable growth only in the south and southwest and therefore should not be planted in any other section of the country. in those sections of the united states where the soils are low in humus it is to be strongly recommended that sweet clover be grown for green manure. this method is being practiced in some sections of the country with excellent results. it should be remembered that sweet clover will not make a satisfactory growth on acid soils and that it is very essential to provide inoculation if the soil is not inoculated already. sweet clover in rotations. as sweet clover is a biennial plant, it lends itself readily to short rotations. it may be seeded in the spring on winter grain or with spring grain, the same as red clover. it will produce at least as much pasturage the following fall as red clover, and in some parts of the country a cutting of hay may be obtained after the grain harvest. the following year the plants will produce two cuttings of hay or one cutting of hay and a seed crop. in some sections of the united states this plant is replacing red clover in rotations, as it will succeed on poorer soils than red clover and will add much more humus to the soil. it will withstand drought better than either red clover or alfalfa, and on this account its use in rotations may be extended into drier sections. as a rule the beneficial effect of sweet clover on the subsequent crops is more marked than that of other legumes. this is especially true with corn, and whenever possible corn should follow sweet clover in rotations. root crops also are benefited by its use in rotations, as the large deep roots of sweet clover open up the soil. sweet clover as a honey plant. a number of the leading honey plants fail to secrete nectar in part of the territory in which they are found, but white sweet clover ranks as a valuable source of nectar wherever found in sufficient quantity in the united states. the period of nectar secretion usually follows that of white and alsike clovers in the northern states, and consequently comes at a time when the colonies are strong enough to get the full benefit of the secretion. the honey from white sweet clover is light in color, with a slight green tint, the flavor being mild and suggestive of vanilla. the characteristic flavor and color of the honey seem to be less marked during a rapid secretion of nectar, in the irrigated portions of the west honey from white sweet clover is often mixed with that from alfalfa. beekeepers have long recognized the value of sweet clover as a source of nectar, and for years tons of seed have been sold annually by dealers in beekeepers' supplies. it has never been found profitable to cultivate any plant solely for nectar, and those beekeepers who were primarily interested in the plant for bee forage have scattered the seed chiefly in waste places and along railroad embankments and roadsides. a number of beekeepers who were also engaged in general farming have for years utilized the plant for forage, and they were among the earliest to grow the plant for seed, so as to be able to supply their fellow beekeepers. sweet clover to-day is almost the only plant which beekeepers seek to increase in waste lands in their localities. the yield of nectar from sweet clover is heavy, and a number of beekeepers now market this honey in carload lots. sweet clover is utilized for honey especially in kentucky, in iowa, and in colorado and adjacent states. in alabama and mississippi a number of beekeepers are harvesting large crops chiefly from this source. the color and flavor make this plant suitable for either comb or extracted honey. yellow sweet clover is perhaps as valuable for nectar as white sweet clover, but beekeepers have paid less attention to it. this is probably due to the fact that the blooming period of the yellow species often coincides with that of white and alsike clover, making it less valuable to the beekeeper. in sections where the quantity of white and alsike clover is limited and it is desired to plant sweet clover for bee pasturage, a mixture of the white and yellow species is recommended, as the yellow species will bloom from to days earlier than the white. wherever any of the species of sweet clover are cultivated, either for forage or for seed, beekeeping is to be recommended as a valuable source of additional income, and such locations are especially suitable for extensive commercial beekeeping. * * * * * transcriber note minor typos may have been corrected. illustrations may have been moved to avoid splitting paragraphs. many of the tables have labels which are displayed as italics; but due to space limitations in the text-only version, the italicization was ignored. by the internet archive. transcriber note text emphasis is denoted as _italics_ and =bold=. whole and fractional parts of numbers a s - / . +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | hemp | | | | | | | | | | farmers' bulletin no. | | | | u. s. department of agriculture | | | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ contents page _caution_ _hemp_ _what it is_ _it grows well in corn belts_ _how to grow it_ _soils and fertilizers_ _seed_ _when to plant_ _seeding_ _culture_ _varieties to grow_ _enemies_ _harvesting_ _time to harvest_ _machinery_ _retting_ _underretting and overretting_ _sunburning_ _turning soils_ _testing the end point of the ret_ _picking up the retted stalks_ _extra care insures extra profits_ _yeilds_ _caution_ the hemp plant contains the drug marihuana. any farmer planning to grow hemp must comply with certain regulations of the marihuana tax act of . this involves registration with the farmer's nearest internal revenue collector and the payment of a fee of $ . although the fee is small, the registration is mandatory and should not be neglected, as the penalty provisions for not complying with the regulations are very severe. the registration must be renewed each year beginning july . this so-called "license" permits a farmer to obtain viable hempseed from a registered firm dealing in hemp, to plant and grow the crop, and to deliver mature, retted hemp stalks to a hemp mill. washington, d. c. issued january slightly revised april _hemp_ by b. b. robinson, _senior agrononmist_ _division of cotton and other fiber crops and diseases bureau of plant industry, soils, and agricultural engineering agricultural research administration_ hemp is a fiber used in making twines and light cordage. it is also used as an extender for imported cordage fibers, particularly abaca, sisal, and henequen, when supplies of these are not adequate to meet domestic demands. the size of the hemp industry, therefore, is greatly influenced by the availability of imported cordage fibers. hemp is not a hard crop to grow. it should be planted on the most productive land on the farm--land that would make to bushels of corn per acre. the crop is planted with a grain drill and harvested with special machinery rented from hemp mills. it is allowed to lie on the ground until the outer part of the stalks has rotted, freeing the fibers. this process is called dew retting. the most important step in hemp farming is to stop the retting process at the proper time. (see pp. and .) this bulletin tells how to grow and harvest hemp. for more information write to the bureau of plant industry, soils, and agricultural engineering, united states department of agriculture, or to your state experiment station, or consult your county agent. _what it is_ hemp is an annual plant that grows from seed each year, and therefore it can be brought readily into production. it produces twice as much fiber per acre as flax, the only other fiber that is its equal in strength and durability and that is known to be suitable for culture and preparation on machinery in this country. when hempseed is sown thickly for fiber production, the plants usually grow from to feet tall. however, when the plants are thinly spaced in rows for seed production, they may, under favorable conditions, reach a height of to feet. if the plants are not crowded, they become much branched and are bushy. uniform stems approximately / inch in diameter and to feet long are especially desired for fiber production, because they can be handled well by the harvesting and processing machinery available in this country. [illustration] hemp is a dioecious plant, that is, the staminate (male) and pistillate (female) flowers are borne on separate plants, rather than both on one plant. the flowers of the two types of plants are different, but the male plant is easily distinguished from the female, as the anthers are about the size of a wheat kernel. the male plants die soon after discharging their pollen; this is usually about to weeks before the female plants mature seed and die. the fiber of commerce ranges from to feet in length and has the appearance of a flat, fine ribbon. it lies very close to the epidermis or skin of the plant. spinners desire the fiber ribbon / inch or less in width. the long strands of fiber are called "line" fiber to distinguish them from "tow" fiber, which consists of shorter, broken, tangled pieces. _it grows well in the corn belt_ hemp is recommended as a good crop for the corn belt states, because of their favorable climatic and soil conditions. most fiber-producing varieties of hemp require a frost-free growing season of months or longer to produce seed and approximately months for fiber production. hemp will endure light frosts in the spring and survive frosts in the fall better than corn. it grows best when well supplied with moisture throughout its growling season and especially in its early stages of growth. drought conditions, if accompanied by high temperatures, appear to hasten maturity before the plants are fully grown. the vegetative growth of hemp should be uniform. this growth is noticeably affected if the soil is flooded or saturated with moisture for too long a period. the leaves turn yellow, and the plants die. rainfall, well distributed during the growing season, is, therefore, desirable for uniform vegetative growth. hemp should be planted only on well-drained soils and not on flat, heavy, impervious soils. climate is important not only in the growth of the plant but also in the preparation of the crop after harvest. it influences the method used in handling the crop and the labor requirements, which determine the cost of production. in the united states the common practice (known as dew retting) is to cut the crop and let it lie on the ground. exposure to the weather causes the fiber in the outer part of the stem to separate. light snows and alternate freezing and thawing seem to improve or make the retting more uniform. _how to grow it_ =soils and fertilizers= hemp should not be grown on poor soils. to obtain good yields and fiber of high-quality, it is necessary to have a growth of uniform stalks to feet long. short stalks, from poor nonfertile soils, seldom produce a high-quality fiber. fiber hemp grows successfully on soils of the clarion, tama, carrington, maury, hagerstown, and miami series, which, in general, are deep, medium-heavy loams, well-drained, and high in organic matter. artificially drained areas of the webster, brookston, and maumee series also give satisfactory yields. these soils are among the most productive soils of the corn belt. they produce average yields of to bushels or more of corn per acre. if land will not produce from to bushels of corn per acre, it should not be planted to hemp for fiber production. muck or peat soils are not recommended for the production of high-quality hemp fiber. the quantity of fiber produced per acre on these soils may be very high, but experience has demonstrated that the fiber lacks strength, which is the first requirement of hemp fiber for good cordage. the inexperienced farmer usually gets advice from an experienced hemp-mill superintendent in the selection of the right soil. in fact, the farmer's contract to grow hemp usually specifies the exact field that it has been mutually agreed should be used for the hemp crop. this type of supervision by the company contracting for hemp has helped to prevent many crop failures. hemp should not be grown continuously on the same soil, for the same reasons that many other crops are not adapted to such practices. in wisconsin, fields previously used for a cultivated crop are selected for hemp planting in preference to ones upon which small grains have been grown. in kentucky, bluegrass sod, if obtainable, is selected. old pastures plowed up are well suited for hemp culture. fields previously cropped to soybeans, alfalfa, and clover are excellent for hemp. a good rotation is to follow corn with hemp, and in kentucky a fall cereal may follow the hemp. although hemp requires a rich soil, it does not remove from the farm an excess of plant-food material. nearly all the leaves on the hemp plants, containing much of the plant nutrients removed from the soil, fall off during the growth and maturing of the plant. the remaining leaves may drop off in the field during the process of retting. further, the plant stems lose about percent in weight of soluble and decomposed materials, which leach out upon the fields, and the stubble may be plowed under. the plant in this manner returns to the land a large part of the plant nutrients that it removes during its growth. commercial fertilizers may be used to advantage on soils that are not well supplied with organic matter. ordinarily, the best fertilizer for hemp is barnyard manure, but commercial fertilizer can be used to advantage to supplement manure. lime applications may be supplied on acid soils to advantage. consult your county agent for recommendations as to amounts of fertilizer and lime to apply. =seed= the period of flowering of the hemp plant may extend over several weeks, and as a result the seed does not all mature at one time. hemp seed for sowing frequently contains some immature green to yellowish-green seeds that may not germinate well. good hempseed for sowing should be relatively free of such seeds and should germinate percent or better. as the oil content of hempseed usually ranges between and percent, the seed should be kept cool and dry, as it spoils rapidly under warm and damp conditions. hemp seed seldom retains its germinating power well enough to be used for seed after -years' storage. =when to plant= hemp should be planted in the spring just before corn. in a program calling for small spring grains and corn, the farmer should plan to plant his hemp between the time he plants his small grains and the corn. =seeding= hemp grown for seed production should be sown in rows or hills. the hills are commonly spaced by feet, with to seeds to the hill, planted not more than / inch deep. the plants are thinned to to to a hill. if care is taken to save seed, about - / pounds wall sow an acre. most farmers use more seed, and frequently the crop is replanted because of late floods or failure to obtain good stands. hemp grown for fiber should be sown with a broadcast seeder or with a grain drill. a drill with inches between drill tubes is preferred to one with inches or more. the seed should not be planted deeper than inch, and a depth of / inch is preferred. if the seed is planted deep, the hemp seedling is not capable of pushing its way to the surface of the ground. a slight crust on the ground frequently results in a poor stand. if the seedbed is loose, disks on a seed drill may cut too deep into the soil and the seed will be sown more than inch deep. in such cases, to make certain that the disks do not cut too deep into the seedbed, they should be tied to the seed box. a standard bushel of hempseed weighs pounds. the rate of seeding hemp for fiber production ranges between and pecks of seed per acre. in kentucky, where hemp is hand-broken, it has been the practice to sow pecks ( pounds) per acre. however, when the hemp is to go to the mill, bushel per acre gives a product that is better suited to milling. wisconsin and other corn belt farmers have commonly sown pecks per acre. the lighter rate of seeding in kentucky produces larger stalks. these stalks are easily broken, and the fiber is easily prepared by the hand-breaking methods that have been used there since colonial days. machine methods of breaking and scutching to prepare the fiber are used in wisconsin, and recently to some extent in kentucky. the machines will handle finer stems, and the sowing of pecks is advisable where hemp is to be prepared by machine. [illustration] a good practice in planting hemp for fiber production is to sow around the edge of the field next to the fence a - to -foot width of small grains, which may be harvested before the hemp. space is thus provided for the harvester to enter the field and begin cutting without injuring the hemp. it also prevents hemp plants at the edge from growing too rank. uniform plants are necessary for uniform fiber quality. =culture= fall plowing in wisconsin gives better results with hemp than spring plowing. hemp for fiber production requires little or no cultivation or care after planting until the harvest; but if, after seeding and before the seedlings emerge, the ground crusts badly it may be advisable to roll the field to break the crust. hemp for seed production should be cultivated the same as corn; that is, sufficiently to keep back the weeds. spudding out canada thistles where they appear in dense stands in hemp fields should be done when the hemp is only a few inches high. in most cases hemp will compete well with weeds, if the hemp gets off to a good start. _varieties to grow_ the fiber hemp grown in the united states by the early colonists was of european origin; but our present hemp, commonly known as kentucky or domestic hemp, is of chinese origin. few importations of hempseed have been made in recent years for commercial plantings, as imported seed has not proved as productive under domestic conditions as kentucky hemp. _enemies_ in the united states there are no hemp diseases of economic importance, and hemp has not been seriously attacked by insects. the european corn borer and similar stem-boring insects occasionally kill a hemp stem. however, they have not proved important, perhaps because hemp has not been grown to any extent in the sections of the united states where the european corn borer is a serious pest. seedling plants are frequently attacked by cutworms and white grubs after spring plowing of sod land. broom rape is a small weed to inches high that is parasitic on the roots of hemp, tobacco, and tomatoes, it usually grows in clumps and has purple flowers, which produce many very small seeds. these adhere to the waxy flower parts surrounding the hempseed and are distributed in this manner. broom rape can be very serious on hemp if proper control measures are not followed. only well-cleaned hempseed and seed from fields containing no broom rape should be sown. hemp has been recommended as a weed-control crop. its dense, tall growth helps to kill out many common weeds. the noxious bindweed, a member of the morning-glory family, is checked to some extent by hemp. unfortunately, bindweed and several other species of morning-glory have seeds so near the same size and weight of hempseed that mixtures obtained in producing hempseed are carried to the field planted for fiber production. in growing hemp for seed all vine weeds of this type found on the hemp stalks should be removed before the hemp plants begin to produce seed. [illustration] _harvesting_ =time to harvest= hemp is harvested for seed production when the plant on being shaken sheds most of its seed. this occurs when the seeds are fully mature on the middle branches. the seeds will mature on the lower branches first and on the top of the plant last. the common method of harvesting hemp for seed production is to cut it by hand and shock it to permit more seed to mature and cure before threshing. the harvesting should be in the early morning or on damp days when the seeds do not shatter so much as they do in the warmer and drier part of the day. threshing of the seed hemp should be done on dry afternoons. in threshing, the seed shocks should be placed on large canvas cloths by feet and then be beaten with long sticks to remove the seed. hemp is harvested for fiber production when the male plants are in full flower and are shedding pollen. by harvesting before the male plants die, the retting of both male and female plants is more uniform, as both types of plants are still green and growing. the harvesting period may extend for weeks or longer. very early harvested hemp may produce a finer and softer fiber than that harvested later, but it is usually weaker. the fiber from hemp that has been harvested so late that many seeds have matured does not possess so good cordage and textile characteristics as fiber from hemp harvested earlier. hemp stalks should be relatively free of leaves except a few at the very top before harvesting. this is important when hemp is shocked after harvest, as it makes the top of the shock smaller so that less rain can enter the shock. [illustration] =machinery= harvesting methods vary with locality and climate. in kentucky, hemp may grow to a height of feet or more. these long stalks are difficult to handle with machinery. self-rake reapers (see below) have been used in harvesting hemp for many years, and they probably do better work with very tall hemp than any other machine now available. a modified rice binder, which cuts and binds the hemp into bundles, is also available, although difficulty in handling the very tall hemp may be experienced. this latter type of machine can be used for short hemp in areas, such as kentucky, where hemp must be shocked within a few days after harvest to avoid sunburn. [illustration] in the northern part of the corn belt the hemp usually does not grow so tall and therefore can be handled more easily with machines. during the first world war hemp-harvesting machinery was developed. these harvesters (see above) in one operation cut an - or -foot swath and elevate the stalks to a quarter-circle platform where they are turned automatically and dropped or spread on the ground for retting. the butts of the stems all lie in the same direction and are relatively even. the thickness of the layer of stalks in the swath influences the speed and uniformity of the dew retting. machines of this type, because of their labor economy, are recommended for use in the northern states, where hemp can be safely spread for retting when harvested. hemp harvesters are usually owned by the hemp mills. they are rented to the individual farmers, who usually furnish the motive power and the labor to run the harvesters. _retting_ retting is the partial rotting of the hemp stalk. it permits the fiber in the stalk to separate easily in long strands from the woody core. the fiber strands break if unretted stems are bent or broken. in this country the usual practice is to ret hemp by allowing it to lie on the ground, where it is exposed to rain and dew. this method is called dew retting. dew retting is dependent upon dews and rains to furnish the moist conditions necessary for the growth of the molds that cause the retting. in warm, moist weather the retting may require to weeks, but usually to weeks is required for retting in kentucky and wisconsin. hemp has remained spread under snow in wisconsin until spring without serious injury, but more often hemp left under snow all winter is overretted and ruined. =underretting and overretting= if hemp stalks are lifted from the ground before they are sufficiently retted, the fiber will not separate easily from the woody hurds (small pieces of the woody core of the plant) in milling. however, if the retting is permitted to go too far, the fiber separates very readily from the core, but the adhesive substance between the individual fiber cells in the long strand breaks down and the fiber is weak. hemp further overretted produces mostly short broken strands of fiber called tow fiber, which is less valuable than the long parallel strands of fiber called line fiber. nowhere in the growing or processing of hemp is good judgment more needed than in determining the time to end the ret. experience and good judgment are necessary to determine just when the hemp stalks should be lifted from the field and bundled. the lifting and shocking stops the retting action. the value of the fiber can be cut in half or entirely lost by several days' overretting in warm weather. =sunburning= in kentucky, hemp spread immediately to ret after harvest is apt to sunburn, or sunscald. it is common belief that the hot, bright days in august and september in some way cause deterioration of the fiber if spread for retting. sunburned fiber is uneven in color, usually has less strength, and possibly is drier and more harsh than fiber not sunburned. in order to avoid sunscalding, the hemp is shocked after being harvested and not spread for retting until the cooler days of november. in locations having climatic conditions similar to those prevailing in wisconsin, sunscald of hemp is rare. [illustration] =turning stalks= in dew retting the spread stalks should be turned once or more during the retting period. this aids in bleaching the stalks and results in fiber of more uniform color and quality. the turning is done by workmen using bent poles approximately to feet in length. the poles are pushed under the head ends of stalks in the swath, and the stalks are turned over without moving the butt ends. [illustration] in turning the straw the workmen start in the middle of the field, turning the first swath into vacant center space. the second swath will be turned to lie where the first swath had been, and so on. care should be exercised in turning to prevent the stalks from tangling. the more hemp is handled, the more tangled the stalks may become. tangled hemp is more difficult to process and produces a high proportion of tangled, short, tow fiber. =testing the end point of the ret= a few days too long in the field may make the difference between retting and rotting. therefore, it is most important that inexperienced farmers obtain the assistance of the hemp-mill superintendent or an experienced grower in determining when to stop the retting. dry hemp stalks should be tested when possible to determine the degree of retting. three to six stalks are taken in both hands and bent back and forth to perform the break test. if properly retted, the fiber should not break when the woody core breaks. the hurds should fall free of the fiber in the breaking and shaking between one's hands. if the hemp is only partly retted, some hurds will adhere to the loosened fiber. unretted hemp fiber is usually green or light yellow. dew-retted hemp is usually slate gray or black. after the fiber is broken free, its strength should be tested by breaking a small strand between the fingers. a small strand of fiber not twisted and about / inch wide should break with great difficulty and with a decided snap. if it is very weak and breaks with little or no snap the hemp is probably badly overretted or may have been grown under unfavorable cultural conditions. (see p. .) [illustration] all indication that the retting end point is near is that the hemp makes "bowstrings." in a small percentage of the stems, less than to percent under certain conditions, the middle of the stalks appears to ret first. the fiber comes free from the middle and forms a string fastened at the top and bottom of the stem, not unlike a bowstring. if bowstring stems are found, a sample of the hemp should be taken to the hemp-mill superintendent as soon as possible for verification of the retting end point. the bowstring condition is only a supplementary aid in determining when to stop the retting, and it may or may not occur in properly dew-retted hemp. some experienced hemp producers use the peeling test for determining the degree of retting. this is accomplished by peeling the fiber away from the butt ends of the stems. if properly retted, the fiber should peel freely from the woody core of the stem. if the hemp is not sufficiently retted, the fiber will break after a few inches have been peeled. this free-peeling stage is desirable for breaking hemp on hand breaks. where hemp is to be processed by machinery the retting need not progress quite so far as is necessary for hand breaking. [illustration] _picking up the retted stalks_ hemp stalks may be picked up by hand. this method has been used from early times and is satisfactory where labor is plentiful. however, in this country it is being replaced by machine pick-up binders. in picking up the straw by hand, small sticks about feet long with a single steel or wooden hook on the end are used. the hemp is raked into bunches with these implements, and usually tied. hemp-fiber bands are used in tying the bundles. an inexpensive "buck" (see above) may be used to bunch the hemp, or it may be bunched with a pitchfork. [illustration] the most efficient method is to use the pick-up binder. these machines, drawn by tractors, cover about an acre an hour. they pick up the retted hemp stalks and tie them into bundles in one operation. the machines are part of the modern hemp-mill equipment and are rented to farmers. dew-retted hemp is usually shocked after being picked up. the hemp remains in the shock until it is transported to the mill. [illustration] _extra care insures extra profits_ the farmer's job is done when he delivers the hemp to the mill. all further processing to prepare the fiber is part of the milling operation. however, it is of interest to both farmers and mill operators to attempt to keep the hemp stalks and fiber well butted. this means keeping the butt ends of the stalks or fiber in a bundle all even. every time the hemp stalks are handled, care should be taken to see that this is done. if the hemp stalks are well butted in the bundle when processed, the milling operations can be carried out more economically. tangled, uneven bundles are more difficult and require more time to handle. the yield of high-value long-life fiber is much greater if the stalks are well butted. hemp stalks are considered most desirable if they are less than half an inch in diameter. the thickness of a pencil is frequently used to illustrate the size of desirable stalks. the larger diameter stalks have a lower percentage of fiber than finer stems, are harder to break, and produce more tow fiber. hemp stalks grown on unproductive soil usually contain a lower percentage of fiber, and this fiber may be coarse, harsh, and of low strength, so that it breaks into tow in milling. stalks underretted frequently must be run through the mill breaker a second or third time to remove the remaining hurds. this increases the milling labor costs, and the resultant fiber may be reduced to a low grade. on the other hand, overretted hemp must be milled as little as possible, with less pressure exerted on the rollers and a slower speed of the scutcher wheel to keep from making an excess amount of tow fiber. _yields_ hemp yields have been extremely variable when this crop has been planted in new areas by inexperienced farmers. in wisconsin and kentucky, where only experienced farmers have grown the crop in recent years, the yields have not varied a great deal. the crop has been reasonably dependable and has not often been injured by storms or droughts. the average yields per acre for experienced farmers are approximately - / to - / tons of air-dry retted hemp stalks; pounds total fiber. under the wisconsin machine-milling system the yields may average pounds line fiber and pounds tow fiber; under the kentucky hand-breaking system they may average pounds kentucky rough and pounds tow. if hemp is planted for seed production, the average yields per acre are approximately bushels or pounds, on bottom land, and bushels on uplands. u. s. government printing office: for sale by the superintendent of documents, u. s. government printing office washington , d. c. -- price cents * * * * * transcriber note illustrations were moved so as to not split paragraphs. minor errors were corrected. the contents was added for ease of locating sections of interest. this file was produced from images generously made available by the internet archive. by usda through the internet archive. all resultant materials are placed in the public domain. transcriber note emphasis is denoted as _italics_ and =bold=. =crimson clover= leaflet no. u.s.department of agriculture issued june . =crimson clover= by e. a. hollowell, _senior agronomist, division of forage crops and diseases, bureau of plant industry_ =growth and distribution= crimson clover (_trifolium incarnatum_) is the most important winter annual legume of the central section of the eastern states (fig. ). besides being an excellent hay plant and furnishing an abundance of early spring pasture, it affords protection to the soil during the fall, winter, and spring, prevents soil washing, and provides green manure for soil improvement. this legume has the distinct advantage of being a heavy producer of seed, which can be easily harvested and sown without the use of expensive machinery. [illustration: figure .--principal crimson clover region of the united states.] crimson clover is a native of europe and is widely grown in france, hungary, and other central and southern european countries. seed was introduced into this country as early as , but it was not until that the plant became of agricultural importance. during the last years the annual commercial consumption of seed in the united states has ranged from to million pounds. in addition, large quantities of home-grown seed are used and handled from farm to farm. the common name of this clover is derived from the distinctive bright crimson color of the blossoms. other common names, such as german clover and scarlet clover, are frequently heard in different localities. in general the leaves and stems of crimson clover resemble red clover, but are distinguished by the rounding of the tips of the leaves and a greater covering of hair on both leaves and steins. when it is planted in the fall the leaves develop from the crown and form a rosette, which enlarges whenever weather conditions are favorable. in late spring flower stems develop rapidly and terminate their growth with elongated flower heads. seed forms and the plant dies with the advent of hot summer weather. the seed is yellow, slightly larger, and more rounding than red clover seed. =adaptation= crimson clover is adapted to cool, humid weather and is tolerant of winter conditions where the temperature does not become severe or too variable. in this region (fig. ) it should be planted in late summer or early fall, since early establishment and growth are favorable to its winter survival. it will thrive on both sandy and clay soils and is tolerant of ordinary soil acidity. on extremely poor soils, stands are difficult to obtain and the growth is stunted. the use of manure and phosphate fertilizers on such soils will improve the chances of obtaining good stands. crimson clover may also be successfully grown as a summer annual in maine, northern michigan, and minnesota. the winter culture of this clover may be extended into kentucky, southern missouri, and southern indiana provided the seed is sown in fertile soil early in august. production may be successfully extended southward with an increase of soil fertility and with seeding delayed until soil-moisture conditions are favorable. =seedbed preparation= the most important and difficult phase of successful production of crimson clover is getting a stand. sufficient soil moisture to germinate the seed and to establish the seedlings is the greatest factor in obtaining a stand, which when established usually produces a good crop. seedings are usually made in late august or early september between the rows of cultivated crops. under such conditions an ideal seedbed is difficult to prepare, therefore careful preparation is necessary. furthermore, the crop plants in the row shade the clover seedlings and seriously compete with them for the available moisture. increasing the distance between the rows and planting the row crop more thinly will afford better opportunity for the establishment of the clover. when planted between the rows of other crops, the seed is usually broadcast on the surface and covered by cultivating or harrowing (fig. ). drilling the seed after the soil surface has been stirred will usually give more complete stands than broadcasting, and it may be done with a small one-horse drill. the seed should not be planted more than one-half to three-fourths of an inch deep, respectively, in clay and sandy soils. [illustration: figure .--seeding crimson clover in corn.] crimson clover is often seeded following a grain crop, and this is a surer method of establishing a stand than planting between the rows of cultivated crops, providing the seedbed is well prepared. after the grain crop is removed the soil is plowed or disked and allowed to settle. this is followed by light harrowing or disking when necessary to kill weed seedlings. before the clover is seeded the soil should be firmly packed, because a loose cloddy seedbed is the forerunner of failure. the seed may be either drilled or broadcast, but drilling will give more uniform stands. =fertilizers= when the crop is planted on extremely poor soils, good stands and growth cannot be expected. such soil conditions may be improved by the application of manure and phosphate fertilizers or by turning under such crops as cowpeas, soybeans, or lespedeza. in many soils of low fertility the use of to pounds per acre of a nitrogen fertilizer will encourage early seedling growth and establishment. on the fertile soils of this region crimson clover may be successfully grown without fertilizer, but on most soils applications of pounds of phosphate fertilizer per acre are profitable in obtaining stands and vigorous growth (fig. ). the use of potash is recommended when a deficiency is known to exist. [illustration: figure .--effect of phosphate application on good soil: treated (left); untreated (right).] =seed sources= of the total amount of seed normally used approximately percent is of foreign origin, coming principally from hungary and france. most of the domestic crimson clover seed offered on the market is produced in south-central tennessee. while white-flowered strains and others differing in maturity have been isolated, they are little used. claims have been made that locally grown seed is superior to seed from other sources including that of foreign origin. further experiments are needed to determine whether such differences actually exist. =rate and time of seeding= under ordinary conditions to pounds of hulled seed will give good stands unless there is a deficiency of soil moisture. depending upon the amount of foreign material to pounds of unhulled seed is comparable to a -pound seeding rate of hulled seed. crimson clover may be sown from the middle of august until october with the expectation of securing a good stand. the later it is seeded the less growth can be expected and the more readily winterkilling occurs. the early establishment of the plants becomes more important as plantings are extended northward. seeding crimson clover, if possible, either immediately before or following heavy rains will increase its chances of making a stand. the spring planting of crimson clover in or south of the corn belt usually results in a short, stunted growth followed by meager blossoming and an unprofitable yield. =inoculation= in many parts of the crimson clover region it is not necessary to inoculate the seed; but if clover has not been successfully grown on a soil, inoculation of the seed is good insurance. if the plants are not inoculated they will develop slowly, become yellow, and die. inoculated plants are able to obtain about two-thirds of their nitrogen from the air through their root nodules. the plants may be artificially inoculated by applying pure cultures of the bacteria to the seed or by scattering soil from a field where inoculated crimson clover has been grown. two hundred to three hundred pounds per acre of such soil evenly distributed at seeding time is sufficient. =unhulled seed= the use of unhulled seed offers the distinct advantage of increasing the chance of obtaining thick stands. with the prevalence of dry soil conditions, light rainfall does not cause the unhulled seed to germinate, but hulled seed germinates readily and the seedlings may die from lack of moisture before they can become established. its bulky nature makes unhulled seed more difficult to distribute uniformly than hulled seed. it must be broadcast and may be harrowed in. it is also difficult to market and is not generally handled by the seed trade. but farmers can harvest seed for their own use and save the expense of having it hulled. =companion crops= rye, vetch, italian ryegrass, and fall-sown grain crops are often seeded with crimson clover. besides making a valuable addition to the clover (fig. ), these companion crops help bolster up a thin stand. such crops are seeded from one-half to one-third the normal crop rate and the crimson clover is seeded at the normal rate. planting is done at the same time, but, as a greater depth is required for most of the seed of the companion crops, two seeding operations are necessary. in tennessee, farmers often use a mixture of pounds of red clover and pounds of crimson clover per acre with excellent results. the first growth of the mixture may be grazed or harvested for hay or for crimson clover seed, while the second crop is wholly red clover. [illustration: figure .--crimson clover and rye, an excellent green-manure combination.] =diseases and insects= the only serious disease that affects crimson clover is stem rot. the effect of this disease is seen in the early spring and is characterized by the plants dying in patches. the stems rot at the surface of the soil or where they join the crown. the occurrence of continued damp cool weather during early spring favors the development of the disease. exclusion of clover and other legumes from the rotation for a period of to years is the best control method. sandy soils in the southern part of the crimson clover belt are often infested with nematodes. nematode injury results in a stunting and yellowing of the plants and is most prevalent in the southern part of the region. while the clover-seed chalcid, the pea aphid, and other insects sometimes become numerous in crimson clover, insects do not ordinarily cause appreciable damage. =utilization= crimson clover grows rapidly in early spring and furnishes an abundance of early grazing (fig. ). if planted early and an abundant fall growth is made, the clover may also be grazed during the fall and winter months. such a practice has been successfully followed in tennessee, where crimson clover has provided the winter pasturage. the grazing, however, should be restricted to periods when the soil is relatively dry, otherwise damage may result from trampling. animals grazing on crimson clover seldom bloat; however, it is advisable not to turn them into clover fields for the first time when they are hungry. bloat is less likely to occur when a mixture of clover and grass or grain is grazed than when the clover alone is grazed. as crimson clover reaches maturity the hairs of the heads and stems become hard and tough. when grazed continuously or when fed as hay at this stage of maturity large masses of the hairs are liable to form into hair balls in stomachs of horses and mules. occasionally the hair balls are responsible for the death of animals. if small amounts of other feeds, particularly roughages, are fed along with the clover, the formation of these balls will be reduced. cattle, sheep, and swine do not seem to be affected. [illustration: figure .--crimson clover provides an abundance of early spring grazing.] crimson clover makes excellent hay when cut at the early bloom stage although the yield may be slightly reduced. for maximum yields it should be harvested in full bloom. the hay is easily cured either in the swath or in the windrow. fewer leaves are lost and less bleaching occurs in windrowed hay. although yields as high as ½ tons per acre are not uncommon on fertile soil, ½ to tons is an ordinary production. crimson clover is an ideal green-manure crop. for the best result it should be plowed under to weeks before planting the succeeding crop. this gives sufficient time for decomposition, which is rapid unless the crop is mature when plowed under. occasionally, strips are plowed in which row crops are planted, allowing the clover between the plowed strips to mature. seed may be harvested by hand from the clover between the row crop, and the remaining clover straw allowed to mat and serve as a mulch, or the entire plant may be permitted to form a mulch. a volunteer seeding may be secured in this way, especially in the northern part of this region, but attempts to follow such a practice should be tried on a small scale until experience is gained. when used in orchards, crimson clover is often allowed to mature, after which it is disked into the soil. occasionally a volunteer seeding may be obtained in the fall. =seed production= crimson clover is a prolific seed-producing plant and yields of to bushels per acre are common, depending upon the thickness of the stand, the amount of growth that is produced, and the care exercised in harvesting the seed. the florets are self-fertile, but bees are effective in tripping and transferring the pollen, with a consequent increase in the number of seed per head. the placing of colonies of honeybees adjacent to blooming fields will effectively increase pollination. more seed is usually produced on soils of medium fertility than on rich soils, since fertile soils seem to stimulate the growth of stems and leaves at the expense of flower-head development. large yields and ease of harvesting crimson clover seed are the principal reasons why crimson clover is such an ideal legume crop. farmers may save seed with very little expense other than their own labor. when the seed heads are mature they readily shatter and are easily harvested either by hand stripping or by using horse-drawn homemade strippers. one bushel of unhulled seed contains about pounds of hulled seed, and although bulky in nature, it can be easily stored on the farm until fall. [illustration: figure .--cutting a crimson clover seed crop with a mower equipped with a bunching attachment.] when the seed is mature the crop is cut with a mower, which may be equipped with a bunching or windrowing attachment (fig. ) or it may be harvested with a combine. during wet seasons difficulties in combining the seed from standing plants may be experienced. under such conditions the plants may be cut and windrowed and then threshed by the combine from the windrow. as crimson clover shatters easily when ripe, cutting with the mower when the heads are damp with dew or rain is recommended. if allowed to stand too long after it is ripe a beating rain will shatter much of the seed. after a few days of curing, the seed is hulled with an ordinary clover huller or a grain separator equipped with hulling attachments. the less the clover is handled, the less seed will be lost by shattering. troublesome weeds are encountered in growing crimson clover seed; field peppergrass (_lepidium campestre_) and wintercress (_barbarea praecox_) are probably the worst, as their separation from the clover seed is difficult. little barley (_hordeum pusillum_) is objectionable in unhulled seed, and the use of unhulled seed will naturally increase the prevalence of this weed. u. s. government printing office: for sale by the superintendent of documents, washington, d. c. -- price cents * * * * * =transcriber note= illustrations moved to avoid splitting paragraphs and closer to references in the text. minor typos may have been corrected. the american agriculturist. [illustration] agriculture is the most healthful, the most useful, and the most noble employment of man.--_washington._ vol. ii. new york, december, . no. xi. a. b. allen, editor. saxton & miles, publishers, broadway. fattening poultry. as thanksgiving, christmas, and new years, are fast approaching, when the demand for poultry is at its greatest height, and the quality of it is more curiously considered than at other seasons of the year, in order to obtain something choice for the festive days, we have thought a few words upon the fattening and preparation of it for market might now very appropriately be given, and perhaps interest our readers more than at another time. the fowls being in good condition a fortnight to one month previous to the time they are wanted for killing, shut them up in a roomy, dry, well-ventilated, and warm building, with either a ground, stone, or plank floor, as is most convenient. this should be cleaned every day, and straw several inches thick spread over a part of it, especially where geese and ducks are shut up, for the purpose of giving them good beds to sit in. as often as the litter gets soiled, remove it, and put clean straw in its place. a constant supply of food and water should now be kept before them, allowing the fowls to eat and drink as often and as much as they please. gravel is indispensable for their health, and charcoal, together with a little lime or ground bones, is beneficial. fowls fat better when they can get at their food as often as they please, and are not so apt to gorge themselves and become surfeited. for feed we prefer corn mostly; a little wheat, rye, or barley, is also very well as a change; oats have rather too much husk about them. in addition to these, boiled potatoes, sweet apples, pumpkins, and sugar beet, are excellent food, especially when mixed with a due proportion of mush or hasty pudding. where sweet potatoes abound, they are an excellent substitute for the last. to the above, add daily a little lean meat, that which is cooked is preferred; and the last week of their fattening, for a finishing process, rice boiled in milk and sweetened with molasses, is very excellent. this may be called an expensive method; but our readers may be assured that the fowls will be enough better to pay for it. meat derives much of its taste from the kind and quality of food that the animals consume; hence gross, fatty substances, fish, or anything that is disagreeable to the taste should be avoided in the food given to fowls during the fattening process, as these invariably impart more or less of their disagreeable flavor to the flesh of the poultry fed upon them. it is well known that the celebrated canvass-back duck derives its delicacy of taste from feeding on the bulbous roots of a peculiar grass growing in the chesapeake bay, and that other kinds of ducks are scarcely eatable, in consequence of their living almost entirely upon fish. these remarks will hold good to most kinds of birds, both of the water and land, and, indeed, of all animals; accordingly as their food is good or bad, so will be the quality of the milk, meat, or eggs. we recollect when a boy, of having occasionally seen geese and ducks nailed through the webs of their feet to planks and floors, and hens and turkeys tied up and so closely confined to stakes, that they could not exercise. this was done so that they might fat the faster! how shockingly barbarous, and any one guilty of such a practice in these days, ought to be indicted, and severely punished for their cruelty and cupidity. we are totally opposed to the close confinement of beast or bird. without exercise, the system can not be in a healthy state; and the meat of close confined animals is never as good, to say the least of it, as when they have plenty of fresh air, and are allowed to move moderately about. the best method of killing fowls, is to cut their heads off at a single blow with a sharp axe, and then hang them up and allow them to bleed freely. by this process they never know what hurts them, or endure pain for a second. wringing the necks of poultry is almost as shocking as nailing their feet to planks for the purpose of fattening them, and follows in the same barbarous category. scalding the fowl previous to picking, injures the feathers, and makes it troublesome to dry them, and we think the quality of flesh is somewhat injured by this process, especially if the weather be not pretty cold at the time. they should be picked as soon as possible after being killed, and their offal taken from them; be clean rinsed then in cold water, and hung up to dry, and kept as separate as possible till sold; packing them together in heaps injures the flesh. to be hung up and frozen for a few days, or even weeks before eating, makes the flesh more tender. to keep them the same length of time after roasting, especially if well stuffed, also adds to their delicacy of taste and tenderness. when the bird is brought on to the table, it is perfectly shocking to see its head, legs, and feet, left upon it, though we know in many places this is fashionable, and considered highly genteel; but for our own part we detest such offal, and the sight of them frequently destroys our appetite for the time being. the process of carving also at the table is a dead bore. we like the french fashion of cutting up the bird in the kitchen or at a side table, and having it passed round on the dish, every one then helping himself to such pieces as he likes best. fertility of sea-mud. sea-mud varies greatly in its composition, dependant something upon the soil of the neighboring uplands. it is considered a valuable manure in europe, and is sought for with avidity, and transported not unfrequently considerable distances into the interior. we have seen it used with good effect in the united states, from massachusetts to pennsylvania; and are told that in delaware and maryland, and even farther south, it is highly prized by those who have tried it. on long island, the past summer, we were occasionally shown the fertilising results, not only of sea-mud, but of the marsh soil also, applied to the uplands a little removed from the borders of the marshes and the seashore. our intelligent correspondent, mr. partridge, informs us he has used beach-mud in various ways with good effect; and that the past summer, two gentlemen whose country seats border his mill, were allowed to make use of the sediment from the tide mill-pond, and they found it added greatly to the productiveness of their gardens. sea-mud may be applied in different ways, according to its constituents. if it abounds with clay, it should be taken in the fall of the year, and spread broad-cast upon the land, and thus lie exposed to the action of the frost all winter. this pulverises it well, and in the spring of the year the roller should be passed over it in dry weather, followed by the harrow, and if any lumps remain after this operation, let them be beaten fine with the dung-beater. this is considered one of the best top dressings for grass land which can be given; it also answers well to be plowed in for either grain or root crops. where the mud abounds more with sand, it is an excellent thing to put into barn yards and pig-styes, to be incorporated with the litter and manure; it may likewise be thrown into a heap until it becomes completely pulverised, and then spread upon the land. as air-slacked lime or small broken lime can be obtained in this city for about half the price of quick lime, mr. partridge suggests that it would be an excellent ingredient to mix with the sea-mud, for the purpose of forming a compost. a bushel or two of the lime, to a cart-load of the mud, he thinks a good mixture. when it abounds with considerable vegetable matter, we would recommend a greater proportion of lime, say from one to ten or twenty parts. ashes and charcoal dust are excellent ingredients to mix with sea-mud, and when either of these or lime is used to form a compost, they make it much more lasting. it is less labor to transport the sea-mud directly to the place where it is to be used, and spread it broad-cast at once upon the land; and as the saving of labor is quite an object in our country, we have found that this method of applying it is the most generally practised. with the exception of a few of our more intelligent farmers, sea-mud and marsh-mud as fertilizers, are not valued as highly as they ought to be in the united states. they exist in immense quantities all along our seaboard, and may be had in an unlimited extent for the mere labor of transportation. we hope that some experiments may hereafter be made with them by some of our readers on the different kinds of crops, and that they will give us the results. the time, we think, is approaching, when sea-mud and marsh-soil will be as highly prized here as they now are in europe. sketches of the west.--no. ii. plantation of mr. grey.--one of the best plantations, especially for its farm-buildings, which we visited in kentucky, was that of mr. benjamin grey of versailles. the house, as is usual in the more southern states, stands near the centre of the domain on rising ground, and commands a fine view of the country around. it is in cottage style, large and roomy, and flanked by thick, strong chimneys, built up outside of the gable ends. a pretty yard of smooth green-sward, decked with shrubbery and evergreens, is enclosed around with pointed white palings, and adjoining this is a noble park, formed by merely underbrushing and thinning out a few of the trees of the original forest. these are usually termed wood-land pastures in kentucky; yet in most instances, they better deserve the name of park, than many of those on noblemen's estates in europe. crops.--mr. grey's farm being principally devoted to stock, and what is rather unusual here, dairy products, the crops are but a secondary consideration. hemp is the main one to which he gives his attention; and in addition to this, he raises a sufficiency of corn and the smaller grains for his own consumption. the rotation is much like that described in our first volume, under head of tours in kentucky. stock.--this is very fine indeed, mr. grey having been highly spirited in this matter. his short-horns are choice, and quite numerous. we particularly admired the cow mary ann, with the calf at her foot. she has a fashionable and airy form; an up-head, and deer-like action; handles well, and in addition to all these, we were informed that she is an excellent milker. three heifers of her produce we also admired; the two youngest were strikingly like their dam. after the short-horns, we were shown a few good cotswold, and south-down sheep, imported direct from england by messrs. bagg & wait of orange co., in this state. the stock-hogs are a cross of the berkshire upon the thin-rinds, (a grade chinese), and they make excellent porkers. farm buildings.--these are among the most complete we have seen in any place, and we speak of them with the more pleasure, because they are blameably deficient in farm buildings throughout the whole southwest. the climate here, it is true, is warmer and much more open than at the north; but it is in this _very openness_, that consists the principal suffering of the stock. the ground during this time is muddy, cold, and damp; and worse, consequently, for animals to repose upon, than when frozen dry, or covered with snow. sudden changes are continually taking place. mild weather prevails for a few days, relaxing the system; this is then followed not unfrequently by intense cold; the thermometer sinking in hours from ° or ° above, to zero, and sometimes ° to ° below it. these sudden changes are very injurious to man and beast, and far more to be dreaded than the steady cold of northern latitudes; and for this reason, more attention should be paid to the warmth of their dress on the part of the people here, and to the housing of stock, than is generally done. it would lessen disease, add to their longevity, and give a handsomer, fuller, and more healthful physical appearance. but to return more immediately to our subject. with the exception of the usually reserved gangway on the barn-floor, the lower story is devoted to stables. these are planked, and each animal is accommodated with a separate stall. behind them is a shallow gutter, running the whole length of the stable, which conducts the liquid falling from the animals into a cess-pool in the yard, and is there absorbed by muck. the solid manure is also equally carefully saved and applied to the land, and notwithstanding the proverbial fertility of the soil of kentucky, mr. grey assured us that he considered himself well paid in the increase of his crops, for the labor employed in thus saving and applying his manure. over-head in the barn are lofts for hay and straw; a straw-cutter to prepare them for feeding; cribs and bins for grain; and a large square box with heavy wooden pounders, for the hands to pound up corn and cob into meal on rainy days, when they can do nothing else. this cob-meal is usually mixed up with water, and allowed to stand till it ferments, and is then fed to the stock. the dairy.--this is a sufficiently roomy building, of one story, situated in a little dell a short distance from the mansion. one of the gable ends abuts against a nearly perpendicular cliff, out of which bursts a clear gurgling spring, that takes its course through the centre of the rocky floor of the dairy, and then finds its way into the valley below. here is every convenience for making butter and cheese, in which mr. grey excels. we have dwelt thus minutely on the plantation, stock, and buildings of mr. grey, because we consider them an excellent example to follow in kentucky; and also for the purpose of giving our northern readers a general idea of the husbandry at the west, of which the great majority entertain the most indefinite notions imaginable. mr. hart's plantation.--after taking an early dinner, mr. grey ordered up his buggy, and we started for mr. nathaniel hart's. this was some few miles off, yet in order to get there we paid no attention to the public roads, but took our way over gentle hill and dale, through woodland-pastures, and among fields containing a hundred acres or more in each, under a single fence. for the purpose of opening and shutting the field-gates as we passed, we were accompanied by an ebony urchin, as out-rider, mounted on the bare back of a high-spirited gray nag, which he rode with no little address. this seemed quite a gala business for him; and bare-headed, with his thick woolly locks fluttering in the wind, and his shirt-collar wide open, he went grinning along, now advancing at a hard gallop, and anon closing up at a fast trot, swinging open and shutting to the gates, shaking his pate, and hallooing to every animal that he thought did not move with sufficient alacrity from our destined path. "yo! ho! so you no move, misser cow--then pompey make you," and at her he charged, brandishing a long stick, like a cossack of the don with his spear, the gray nag at the same time laying back his ears, and opening his mouth, and showing his teeth, as if grinning in fiery sympathy with his redoubtable rider, and ready to devour the animal that so sluggishly obstructed the path. but one look from the cow, or whatever beast it might be, at the horse and boy, seemed quite enough; and without waiting further hints, they would shake their tails, then give them a slight curl, and set off at a round scamper, the triumphant pompey following up their career a short distance, singing with high satisfaction:-- i tell you so, now misser cow; yo, ho, you go, bow wow, bow wow. mr. hart's plantation is a very fine one, and he is one of the largest hemp-growers in kentucky. he has done much to introduce a system of water-rotting hemp in ponds, which we think is the best and most simple of the kind yet tried. he has promised us a description of this, with his late improvements, and we trust that we shall be favored with it soon, for the benefit of those desirous of preparing their hemp for market by the pond-water-rotting process. there is so much in common with kentucky plantations, that it is unnecessary to dwell further upon particulars. mr. hart's stock of cattle is principally derived from the first importation of the short-horns into kentucky, in . he keeps a flock of about merino sheep, which, low as wool is, he thinks make him as good, if not a better return, than anything else which his plantation produces. sheep-husbandry is attracting much attention at present in kentucky. it is a very superior region indeed, for sheep, and if the planters would go judiciously into the fine-woolled breeds, wool would soon become an article of large export with them, and a source of considerable profit. let it be remembered, that the cheaper and better wool can be produced, the more there will be consumed of it; and the cheaper and better, woollen cloths will be furnished in return. we need not fear overstocking the country in our generation. mr. hart keeps quite a herd of deer in his park, and several head of elk. these last, with their large branching horns, and lofty, erect heads, have a noble appearance. he formerly had a few buffaloes, but they became so troublesome in breaking down fences, and sallying out whenever they pleased, to the great terror of the country round, that he was at last obliged to kill them. buffalo bulls get somewhat ferocious as they grow old, and are rather dangerous animals on the plantation. while in kentucky, we picked up some comic anecdotes of their doings as they turned out; but a feather's weight in the other scale might have made them equally tragical; and upon the whole, unless enclosed within a fence that they could not break down, we should advise our friends to eschew keeping buffaloes. breeds of fowls. in perusing the american poultry book, which we noticed in our october no., we find the following recommendation for selecting a stock for the poultry-yard:-- the better practice would seem to be, in order to make the poultry-yard most profitable, to select _no particular breed_. commence with pullets and cocks of the first year, of all the breeds mentioned above, except bantams, and without any regard to color excepting those of a pure white. it would be well, if possible, to select the cocks from the same yard. every year exchange a nest-full of eggs with your neighbors, or such as have good fowls. by pursuing steadily this practice of exchanging eggs, you will yearly infuse new blood into your stock, and avoid the inconvenience of breeding in and in. without being aware of this fact, many farmers find their stock _running out_, &c. now the above plan for forming a stock for the poultry-yard we hold to be perfectly absurd, and one might with just the same propriety, advise mingling all the different breeds of horses or cattle together, for the purpose of forming a good stock, as the different varieties of fowls; and we need only consider for one moment, the incongruity of the materials which form them, to be convinced of this. there is the pugnacious gamecock; the pheasant-shaped top-knot; the coarse malay; the thick-skinned negro-fowl; the tender chinese or merino; the tailless rumpless; the friesland, with reversed feathers; the short-legged creeper; the five-toed dorking; &c., &c.; all thrown into one helter-skelter mass, the progeny of which would prove as contemptible a race of mongrels as ever graced a dung-hill, and beyond the precincts of a dung-hill they would scarcely be worth removing. those who have most eminently succeeded in breeding fowls, have adopted the same course in doing so, which is followed by judicious breeders of animals; and that is, by sticking to the breed, when it is a good one, in its utmost purity; choosing the best of the flock from which to propagate, and thus continuing. in-and-in breeding, to a certain extent, when pursued by those who thoroughly understand their business, has been productive of the best results. the finest, the largest, and the most _indomitable_ game-cocks have thus been bred; and if we possessed a good breed of poultry of any kind, we should be very careful how we exchanged eggs with our neighbors for the purpose of improving them. if they had a superior stock to our own, of the same breed, we would select from among them grown birds only; we should then know what we got, and be able to make improvements upon those we already possessed. it is by mingling all sorts of breeds together, without any definite notion as to the results, that "many farmers find their stock _running out_"; and if every one were to follow this course, we should soon be without a single good fowl in our poultry-yards. we really regret to see a book like this on american poultry, which in the main is a good little work, recommend such a course of breeding; for in our humble judgment it is the very worst which could be pursued. we can not say that we much like the author's advice either, as to the choice of a cock. why he should be "restless, not very large, with a thick and stout bill, long spurs," &c., we can not divine. the best cocks we ever kept, and those of the most indomitable courage, when fighting was necessary, were the most quiet, attentive, and polite in their seraglio: they were also of rather large size for their breed; with fine heads, bills, feet, and legs. new york farmers' club. the farmers' club resumed their meetings, on tuesday, nov. th, at the repository of the american institute. the meeting commenced by reading a communication from the president of the manhattan gas light company, david c. colden, esq., inviting the attention of farmers, and all interested in agriculture, to the value of the refuse of gas-works as manure. extracts from the works of liebig, and johnston were then read, setting forth the powerful fertilizing properties of ammoniacal liquor, with which the refuse of gas-works is found to be strongly impregnated. after some conversation on the subject, in which mr. stevens, commodore de kay, mr. meigs, and mr. wakeman, took part, as to the best method of disposing of this communication, it was resolved that it be referred to a committee consisting of gen. tallmadge, mr. prince, gen. johnson, col. clarke, and mr. townsend, to report at the next meeting of the club. mr. william r. prince, of flushing, presented to the meeting, specimens of nineteen different varieties of apples, among which were several of very large size and superior quality. mr. meigs presented seeds of a new variety of squash, the _cucurbitur bicolor_. mr. ward, cuttings from a vine which produced ripe isabella grapes on the th september. a desultory conversation then ensued as to the future proceedings of the club. much diversity of opinion appeared to exist as to the propriety of holding the meetings weekly, fortnightly, or monthly, when a committee was appointed to report upon the subject. dr. field next called the attention of the club to a subject which he considered deserving their serious attention, viz: the present condition of the children now in the alms-house on long island. he thought they might be employed advantageously to themselves and the public, either in the cultivation of the mulberry, and general management of silk, or in horticultural occupations. he then proceeded to describe with feeling eloquence, their present deplorable condition, both morally and physically, arising from the system of idleness they are now allowed to pursue. he was followed by mr. stevens, and mr. carter, who both agreed that it was high time some steps should be taken to ameliorate the condition of the poor children, and it was finally resolved: that a committee consisting of dr. field, mr. stevens, and mr. carter, be appointed to investigate the subject, and petition the corporation that the pauper children of this city, now on the long island farm, be employed in horticultural pursuits generally, and also in the raising and manufacture of silk. mr. stevens then made some remarks on the subject of wax-flowers and fruits, a specimen of which was exhibited by mr. lane. mr. stevens thought that a model of every new variety of fruit ought to be taken in wax, and preserved at the repository of the institute. a motion was made and carried that the executive committee be instructed to consider the subject. gen. tallmadge suggested that a list of donors of fruits, &c., be kept by the secretary, and placed on the records of the club at every meeting, which was unanimously agreed to. the meeting then adjourned to tuesday, the th november. the following are the extracts on refuse gas, sent to the club by the president of the manhattan gas-light company:-- "if the properties of manure, and its agency upon the growth of the vegetable world, can be explained by chemistry, we shall find the ammoniacal liquor produced in gas-works, to be a valuable substitute for those manures, by the application of which it is intended to supply the soil with nitrogen. "one of the most valuable manures is urine, and its excellence depends almost entirely upon the ammoniacal salts which it holds in solution. the relative value of urine as manure, depends upon the quantity of nitrogen the different kinds yield. thus human urine is the most esteemed, and that of horned animals the least."--_clegg's treatise on gas-making._ according to liebig, pounds of human excrement contain . pounds of nitrogen; a quantity sufficient to yield the nitrogen of pounds of wheat, rye, oats, or of pounds of barley. how much more, then, will be supplied from an equal weight of ammoniacal liquor! mr. j. watson, the manager of the gas-works at kirriemuir, has favored me with the following facts:-- "the ammoniacal liquor on the surface of the tar-well has been found a very great improvement as a manure for raising crops of grass in this quarter, by being sprinkled on the field in the same way as water is put on public streets in large towns, to keep down dust in dry weather. i have myself seen an experiment of this tried, and can say that part of a field of grass sprinkled in this way, after the first cutting, was far superior to any other part of the field receiving manure of any other kind, and that the part so sprinkled, or showered over, was ready to be cut down a second time in the course of between fourteen days and three weeks; whereas, the other part of the field cut at the same time, was only beginning to spring or rise from the roots in that time. it must be mixed up before use with four parts of common water. in particular, the said experiment of the gas-water has been used by david nairn, esq., doumkilba, near meigle, in this neighborhood, with success; and i am informed that he has purchased and taken a lease of the ammoniacal liquor from different gas-companies in this country. "i am convinced much good might be derived from different qualities of the refuse products of gas-works as manure. an inquiry into this subject would remunerate the engineer or agriculturist to the full, and would besides confer a considerable benefit upon his fellows, and give that practical proof of the correctness of a theory so welcome to the man of science." "the fertilizing power of gypsum has been explained by its supposed action on the ammonia which is presumed to exist in the atmosphere. if this be the true explanation, a substance containing ammonia should act _at least_ as energetically. at all events, the action of foldyard manure and of putrid urine, is supposed to depend chiefly on the ammonia they contain or give off. "now among the substances containing ammonia in large quantity, the ammoniacal liquor of the gas-works is one which can easily be obtained, and can be applied in a liquid state at very little cost. it must be previously diluted with water till its taste and smell become scarcely perceptible. "i would propose therefore, as a further experiment, that along with one or more of the substances above mentioned, the ammoniacal liquor of the gas-works should be tried, on a measured portion of ground, and, if possible, in the same field. "soot as a manure is supposed to act partly, if not chiefly in consequence of the ammonia it contains. in gloucestershire, it is applied to potatoes and to wheat, chiefly to the latter, and with great success. in the wolds of yorkshire it is also applied largely to the wheat-crop. in this country it is frequently used on grass land. i am not aware that it is extensively used on clover. i am inclined to anticipate that the sulphur it contains, in addition to ammonia, would render it useful to this plant. at all events comparative experiments in the same field with the gypsum and the ammoniacal liquor, are likely to lead to interesting results. * * * "of ammoniacal liquor or gallons per acre, according to its strength, for this is constantly varying. it must also be diluted with so large a quantity of water as will render it perfectly tasteless, and is likely to prove most beneficial if laid on at several successive periods."--_johnston's agricultural chemistry_, part . "sal ammoniac is probably too expensive an article to be employed; but sulphate of ammonia may be had of the wholesale chemist at a price considerably more reasonable, and the ammoniacal liquor of the gas-manufactories, through the distillation of coal, is a still cheaper commodity."--_liebig's agricultural chemistry._ "its efficacy as a manure is vouched for by many who have made trial of it upon their land. see a communication by mr. paynter on gas-water as a manure."--_journal royal ag. soc._, no. . the next annual show of the state agricultural society. as the annual show of the new york state agricultural society is now sure to bring fifteen to twenty thousand strangers into the place where it may be held, to pass three or four days there, and spend their money pretty freely, it has become quite an object with the different towns situated on the great thoroughfares, to have the exhibitions within their boundaries as often as possible. strong movements will be made for these hereafter; but we trust that the society will weigh well the different claims preferred for its favor, and that no other consideration than the public good, and the spread of its influence, will have weight in its decisions. albany, syracuse, and rochester, each having had the advantage of one of these meetings, other towns now are soliciting the like favor; and among those which are preferring their claims for the show of , we understand that buffalo, utica, and poughkeepsie, are the most prominent. perhaps as the northern and western parts of the state have now had the benefit of three of the exhibitions of the society, it is no more than fair that some attention be paid to the southern and eastern portions. we have heard this city named as a very suitable place for the show of next year, and the only objection we can anticipate to it is, that it is an extreme end of the state. granted; and is not buffalo the same? yet, notwithstanding this, we contend that new york or buffalo is just as fairly entitled in their turn to one of the exhibitions of the society, as albany, syracuse, or rochester. however, as our own interests might be somewhat served by a meeting of the state society in this city, we shall waive advocating its claims to one for the present, and content ourselves with stating those of poughkeepsie. . this town is miles by the usual travelled route, northwest from montauk point, the southeast end of the state. this is as great a distance as from poughkeepsie to syracuse, and miles further than the railroad route, though a circuitous one, from syracuse to buffalo; so that it may fairly be said to be the hither-end of a third-part of the limits of the state. . the population, from dutchess county, south and east, includes about one fourth of that of the whole state. . poughkeepsie is easy of access by land or water, and being situated on the hudson, hundreds of strangers from the neighboring states, especially the southern ones, would visit a show here, when they could hardly be induced to go farther north or west, and as these visiters are always purchasers to a greater or less extent, it is quite an object to get them to attend. . this town is the capital of one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most populous counties of the state, and the one whose general system of agriculture is probably more highly advanced than any other. dutchess, and the neighboring counties, have also considerable improved stock--much more than we had any idea of till our recent excursions in these parts. durham, devon, and ayrshire cattle abound; superior road and blood horses; cotswold, leicester, south down, and numerous flocks of merino sheep; the products of the dairy; agricultural implements, and roots, seeds, fruits, flowers, and domestic fabrics. . poughkeepsie is ready at her own expense, to build pens for the stock, and furnish all other needful accommodation for the society, which will be a saving of expense to it of at least $ , . lastly, there is more accumulated wealth in the southern, than other parts of the state, and the society, by holding a fair proportion of its shows in this quarter, will make itself many staunch friends, and be introduced to thousands, who would otherwise be ignorant of its great public merits. the agricultural society of the state of new york is looked up to as an example throughout the country, and it should be careful to avoid even the appearance of being partial or local in its proceedings. the national societies of great britain and ireland, adopt the course of holding their shows in, not only the central, but the extreme parts of the kingdom; and this is one great reason of their popularity among all classes. tour in england. no. . thinking that our readers had become somewhat satiated with so much upon foreign matters as have hitherto found place in this journal, we had desisted for several months past, giving sketches of the agriculture of england; but having recently received so many solicitations to continue them, we again take up the subject, and shall pursue it pretty regularly through the whole of our third volume, if such seems to be the pleasure of a majority of our subscribers. perhaps, to these, we may also add sketches of some things we saw in russia, the recollections of which are very pleasant, at least to us, yet whether we shall make them equally so in relating them to others, remains to be seen. chatsworth, seat of the duke of devonshire.--in returning from yorkshire to london on the north midland railroad, we stopped at the chesterfield station, for the purpose of making an excursion to chatsworth, to view the celebrated gardens and immense conservatory of this superb place. it was a raw morning in august, and as we jumped from a confined seat in the rail-coach, we were glad to be on our feet once more, and have an opportunity of rousing our blood by a smart walk from the station into the town. we stopped at the angel inn, took a hearty breakfast, and while waiting a gig being made ready to convey us to chatsworth, stepped out for a stroll over the place. chesterfield is a dingy old town, of about , inhabitants, and has little to recommend it to the notice of strangers, save the spire of all saints' church. this rises to the height of feet, is curiously channeled, and covered with lead, and is so much out of perpendicular, as to attract marked attention in passing it, even when at a considerable distance. it being market-day, the town was thronged with farmers from the country, exposing stock and agricultural products in the square for sale. there was little in these, however, deserving particular attention, and after giving them a hasty look, we returned to the inn. as we came up, a dapper waiter announced the "oss and gig as _h_all ready;" when in we jumped, and set out for chatsworth at a round pace, distant, if we recollect right, about miles. derbyshire possesses the wildest and most broken scenery of any county in england, and after passing over the flat surface of yorkshire, it was quite a relief to find ourselves trotting up and down along a road winding picturesquely around high hills, and over deep narrow dales. an hour's drive or so, brought us to the pretty little village of edensor, close by the inn of which, is the entrance to chatsworth. the village is situated within the park, and is the property of the duke, and certainly it is the most charming one we ever saw. every cottage is of stone, and no two alike in their architecture. one is a mimic gothic castle; another a cottage ornèe; a third in the elizabethan, a fourth in the swiss, and perhaps a fifth in the tudor style. everything then was so complete about them--the pretty gardens full of flowers--the hedges so neatly trimmed--the yards, laid down with the greenest and softest of turf, and the shrubbery so tastefully planted! these were the residences of the laborers on the estate, the possession of which any one might envy them, and desire to be able to call his home. attached to the village is a fine old church, and around it an ample yard, handsomely walled in with strong mason-work. altogether, this village is quite a gem in its way, and we were going to add, an epitome of its owner's heart; for on all his estates, whether in england or ireland, the duke of devonshire has made it a point to protect and bountifully provide for his people. there is no want, or suffering, or seeking the poor-house, by the tenantry, allowed by this kind-hearted, benevolent man. turning from edensor, and ascending a mound-like hill to the left of the carriage-road, the palace and the grounds of chatsworth appear to the greatest advantage. immediately below is the river derwent, tracing its sparkling course through a rich vale, where were perhaps , deer browsing or taking their gambols. a handsome stone bridge spans the river, and just beyond, the ground rises in terraces to a narrow plain, where stand the noble palace, with its out-buildings, and the immense conservatory, in magnificent grandeur. back of these rises a lofty hill, the steep sides of which are thickly planted with forest-trees, and the summit is crowned with a high tower of octagonal shape, built of stone. we were received at the palace-gate by a servant in handsome livery, and passing into the gallery of the court, a fine hearty girl made her appearance to conduct us over the building. the front of the palace is feet, and one of the side wings about feet long, and this whole area contains a series of apartments called the drawing-room suite. an entire number of this paper would hardly suffice to give the reader a complete description of these magnificent rooms, and the treasures of art they contain, we therefore pass them over in silence. from these we strolled into the orangery, which is about feet wide, and feet long. it is full of beautiful exotics, and among them were several specimens of the rhododendron arboreum, which bore, the preceding summer, over , flowers. we now walked out to the lawn in front of the palace, where one of the under-gardeners appeared to conduct us over the grounds. these are extremely beautiful, with walled terraces in the italian style, and fountains. one jet d'eau throws up a column feet high. but the great show here in the way of water-works, is the cascade. it is entirely artificial, and must have been made at a great expense. the water rushes out from a series of lakes on top of the hill, and comes pouring down its side, taking a leap of about feet from one of the arches, and then falls for a length of yards over a series of ledges, and disappears amidst masses of rock, on the edge of the lawn. here it finds a subterranean passage to the river derwent. these water-works are looked upon by some critics with affected contempt; not so with us, however, we greatly admired them in their way; and yet we have seen niagara a thousand times, and had a peep at most of the other water-falls worth looking at in the united states. we have no sympathy with such hypercritics as profess a distaste to the cascade at chatsworth: as a work of art, it is a magnificent thing, and to our eye, in keeping with the palace and grounds; and we viewed it with interest. a bronze tree a little farther on, excited still greater curiosity with us than the cascade, for it was made to act the part of a fountain, by throwing water from a thousand sprigs and leaves all around in a shower of spray. but leaving this and the exquisite scenery of the lawn, we passed on by a winding carriage-road to a short distance to the conservatory. this was feet long, feet wide, and nearly feet high; and when fully completed, is to have an additional length of feet. the roof is an arch, and is covered with plate glass of the best kind, and so thick as to resist the heaviest hail. it is heated by iron tubes of hot water, and to these are added others for cold water, and the whole, if stretched out to a single length, we were informed would extend nearly six miles. the plants and trees here are distributed in open borders, each class being placed in the soil most proper for it, and the temperature so regulated as to suit their natural state as nearly as possible. not far from the centre is an immense rockery rising about feet high, and from the fissures of the thick slabs of stone that compose it, the cactus and other plants grow out as in their natural state. half way up this huge precipice is a little lake with islets, and in this, water-lilies and other aquatic plants of the rarest and most beautiful kinds. a wild goat path leads to the top of the rockery, and beneath it is a wide, deep cave. the variety of shrubs and plants in this immense conservatory is very great; some of the trees already reach nearly to the top of the roof, and others presented dimensions gigantic in the extreme for those within a green-house. there are wide folding-doors at each end of the conservatory, and any time he pleases, the duke can have a drive with his coach and four horses through it. taking it altogether, it is by far the most magnificent thing of the kind we have ever seen. the whole cost of it is not less than half a million of dollars, which is but a little over the present annual income of its wealthy possessor. after leaving the conservatory, we took a zig-zag road, and ascended through the forest to the crown of the hill by the octagonal tower. a peasant family was residing here, who permitted us to ascend it to the top. the view from this is no less extensive than beautiful, of chatsworth and the wild broken country around. descending from this high perch we had quite a chat with the peasant's wife. she informed us that the tower was built by a predecessor of the present duke, for the purpose of giving the ladies at the palace an opportunity of seeing the fox-hunting which formerly took place at chatsworth. upon taking leave, the good woman directed a little rosy-faced daughter to show us the lakes on the hill, the sources of the cascade and fountains below. after something of a stroll through the woods, we found two large expanses of water belted in by thick rows of the larch and fir, and apparently as isolated as if in a wild forest of our own country. the white swan and the black are kept here, and most other kinds of curious water-fowl. our pretty guide answered all our inquiries with intelligence, and at parting we gave her a small guerdon, for which she returned a grateful "thank'e zur" and a low courtesy, and then, with the lightness of a young fawn, skipped into the woods, and immediately disappeared. descending the hill toward the palace we came to the stables. these are very extensive, of quadrangular shape, and large courtyards within. at a distance, with their imposing architecture, they might almost pass for the palace itself. we now bent our steps to the house of the celebrated mr. paxton, the head gardener of the duke of devonshire, editor of the magazine of botany which bears his name, and one of the first botanists of england. his residence is within the park, about a quarter of a mile from the palace, and is a roomy, beautiful cottage, completely enveloped in flowers and flowering shrubbery, with a handsome little conservatory at the end. much to our regret, he was not at home; but a sub-gardener, quite an intelligent man, volunteered to show us the gardens. they occupy acres, and are enclosed by a thick, brick wall, about twelve feet high. here are the experimental and kitchen gardens, and hundreds of fruit-bearing espaliers, trained up the walls. in addition to these there are forcing pits in abundance, and upward of hot-houses, about feet long each, devoted to different purposes, one of the most extensive of which is the growing of pine apples. all these things may be considered very extravagant, but in supporting them, the duke of devonshire has done much for the cause of science, and has conferred a lasting benefit on his country. we left chatsworth with regret; the day we spent there we would have gladly prolonged to a week, and then we should have gained but an imperfect knowledge of the treasures of nature and art which are stored up here for the admiration of thousands of visiters. mary queen of scots was some time a prisoner here; so also was marshal tallard, who was captured at the battle of blenheim. what were the thoughts of the beautiful queen upon taking leave of it, history does not record; but the marshal, no less gracefully than happily, said: "when i return to france and reckon up the days of my captivity in england, i shall leave out all those i have spent at chatsworth." and so thought we, pausing on the mound-like hill again, as we retraced our steps to edensor, and cast a last lingering look upon the park, and palace, and forest hills in the background, lit up by the clear, glorious sun just sinking beneath the horizon. agricultural shows. the philadelphia society held its annual show at the lamb tavern, october , , and . the germantown telegraph states, in the _report of the committee of arrangements_, that the display of horses was unusually attractive, exhibiting the various breeds for the turf, road, and farm, in considerable numbers. the durham cattle seem at last to be getting the better of prejudice in that quarter, and in their superior forms and deep milking qualities, have shamed nearly everything else from the ground, save a few fine devons and capital grade durham milkers. of sheep and swine, there were very few present, which is the more to be regretted, as these animals exist in considerable numbers and of superior breeds throughout the neighboring counties of montgomery, delaware, chester, and lancaster. of agricultural implements and products there was a good show, and the plowing-match proved an interesting affair. peter a. browne, esq., delivered the address, which we find at length in the farmers' cabinet. among other things, he contends no less strenuously than justly for the establishment of agricultural schools and professorships. from another part of the address we subjoin a few suggestions. first, then, it is feared that our agricultural friends have not yet paid _all_ the attention that the subject demands, to a judicious rotation of crops, adapted to our climate; particularly in regard to _roots_. second. much has been done, that is beyond all praise, in insuring the best breeds of cattle. while we hear pronounced with gratitude, the names of mease, powell, brantz, clay, gowen, and kelley, let us not forget that the task is not finished. third. soiling, it is apprehended, has been too much neglected by most american husbandmen. fourth. irrigation has also been too little attended to in the united states. fifth. proper care and precaution have not been sufficiently bestowed upon the selection of seeds. this is a subject of the greatest importance. sixth. much is yet to be learned in regard to the preservation and economical use of manure. seventh. the introduction, more generally, of labor-saving machinery, and particularly of the itinerant thrashing-machine, deserves to be mentioned. eighth. gardening and raising fruit are much neglected by our farmers. it is respectfully suggested that special committees might, with advantage, be raised upon these and other useful topics, to report at the next annual meeting. pennsylvania contains nearly thirty millions of acres. according to the census of , she had a population of one million seven hundred and odd thousands, which is nineteen acres and a fraction for each inhabitant. in , she raised, of grains of all kinds, upward of sixty millions of bushels; of potatoes, nearly thirteen millions of bushels; of hay, upward of two millions and a quarter of tons; of flax and hemp, upward of three thousand three hundred tons; of tobacco, four hundred and eighty thousand tons; of silk, upward of twenty-one thousand pounds; of sugar, nearly three millions and a half of pounds; and of wines, nearly eighteen thousand gallons. the henrico society held its third annual show at richmond, virginia, november st. the proceedings are published in the richmond enquirer. the executive committee reports, that although there is a falling off in its receipts, there is an increased interest and attention to its proceedings by the planters. mr. c. t. botts, editor of the southern planter, made the address, from which we subjoin an extract. this society was organized and has been chiefly supported by a few public-spirited gentlemen in the neighborhood. its beneficial effects are felt and seen by all of you. to form a proper appreciation of them, you have only to ride in any direction about the suburbs of the city. rude grounds have been converted into productive gardens, and barren wastes into smiling fields. i recollect a lady's saying to me last summer, that she meant to make her husband become a member of this society, because it had done so much to beautify the rides and walks about the city. she declared the time had been when it gave her a fit of the horrors, (she was a nervous lady,) to order her carriage for an evening drive; but that now, there was nothing that she and her children enjoyed so much. but this is not all. let him who has been familiar with your market for the last eight or ten years, compare its present abundant supplies of the finest fruits and vegetables, with the meager exhibition of former days; and, after all, let us be as sentimental as we will, a good market plays a very important part in the comedy of human happiness. our merchants and mechanics too should remember, that these exhibitions are annually becoming more and more attractive, and that they are by no means inefficient in increasing the trade of the city. but, over and above all considerations of dollars and cents, let us, one and all, come forward and enrol our names as members of this association, which represents the great agricultural interest of the state, and which should be the pride and ornament of its metropolis. lake county society.--the show of this society took place at medina, ohio, and a complete account of its proceedings may be found in the painsville telegraph. in addition to the usual show of stock, &c., an extensive procession was got up of wagons and carriages, preceded by bands of music. one of these held no less than ladies, engaged in the laudable occupations of knitting, sewing, spinning, and various other domestic employments. we wish we could chronicle more such industrial displays, for we consider them an excellent feature in agricultural shows. bourbon county society of kentucky.--we learn from the paris citizen, that the eighth annual show of this society took place near paris, and continued three days, and is said to be the largest and most varied ever held in kentucky. the first two days were devoted to the exhibition of domestic animals, agricultural products, and farming implements; the third day, to that of domestic manufactures. the show of horses present was considered very superior; they were of all varieties, from the mettlesome thorough-bred, to the enormous cart-horse. the durhams and other horned stock were well represented, and gave evidence in their splendid proportions of the superiority of kentucky pastures. the descendants are said to be an improvement over the original importations from england. mr. clay was present, and had a superb pair of blankets presented him by mrs. james hutchcraft. these were made from the wool of leicester sheep, and were of uncommon size and thickness, weighing lbs. the pair. on the presentation of these blankets, mr. clay was addressed by the hon. garrett davis, m. c., and he replied in his usual elegant and happy manner. hampshire, hampden, and franklin society, massachusetts.--the united show for the three wealthy and populous counties above, came off at the beautiful town of northampton, on the th and th october, and we much regret on more accounts than one, that we could not, be present. the boston cultivator furnishes a full report. a large number of working-oxen of course were present, and to these were added some superb fat oxen, exhibited by mr. sumner chapin. the committee who reported upon this subject, attributes the superiority of the cattle to the large infusion of short-horn blood in their veins, and hence their fine symmetry, light offal, and increased weight of flesh on the more valuable parts, as compared with native stock when fattened for the shambles. mr. paoli lathrop exhibited some choice short-horns. of native cows the committee thus speak:-- of the ten cows entered for the premium as _native_ animals, nearly or all have an intermixture of short-horn or other foreign blood. we awarded to mr. minor hitchcock the first premium in this class. in his written statement to us it appears that her average product in milk for the six months, ending st october, was lbs. per day, and in the months of june and july, lbs. per day. in butter, her average product in the same time was more than lbs. per week, and in the month of july alone, nearly lbs. per week; yet in the same time he used the necessary milk and cream for his family of four persons. your committee have entire confidence in the statement of mr. hitchcock; yet it is proper here to remark, that from his account of her, and though awarded, a premium as a native animal, she partakes highly of the blood of the short-horns. in the two classes of animals entered as of _native and foreign origin_ it is obvious that a proper discrimination was not made; for in some of the former there is evidently more of the blood of distinct imported races than the latter. yet your committee deemed it their duty to award the premiums of the society to the two classes as they found them. now here it is, most everywhere that our native cows are found excelling as milkers, we can trace a portion of their blood, (usually the greatest share,) to the durhams, and yet there are those who are constantly decrying the short-horns for not being _milkers_. verily a few particular people are very hard to be convinced. it is our intention hereafter to make up a table of the milking qualities of the short-horns and their grades, and any one possessing information upon this subject, we shall be glad by their communicating the same to us. mr. paoli lathrop of south hadley took the first premiums on durham bulls and heifers. mr. ira fenton of belchertown on durham cows. mr. sumner chapin of springfield, the first premiums on fat cattle and working-oxen. sale of rambouillet merinos. --mr. nathaniel hart, jr., of kentucky, has just passed through this city on his way home, having in company with him three rambouillet merino bucks, purchased of mr. d. c. collins of hartford, connecticut. mr. hart has kept a large flock of the old-fashioned merinos for some time, on his plantation at versailles, woodford county, and has purchased these fine bucks, as the best animals which could be found, for the purpose of making improvements upon them. kentucky will have in these rambouillets a valuable addition to her sheep stock, and we recommend their produce in advance, to the breeders of the western country. we understand mr. collins has recently met with a great demand for his sheep, and that he has now disposed of all he has to spare this year. we congratulate him upon it, and take some credit to ourselves, for calling public attention to his very valuable imported flock. sheep-dogs. --the price of a well-broke sheep-dog is $ to $ . they ought always to be accompanied by their shepherds, as they are taught to manage sheep in a peculiar way, which none but regularly-bred shepherds understand. annual meeting of the n. y. state agricultural society. --the annual meeting of the new york state agricultural society, will be held at the society's room in the old state hall, albany, on the d wednesday, (the th,) of january, , at o'clock, a. m. persons intending to compete for the society's premiums on field-crops, essays, &c., are reminded that their statements and essays must be sent to the recording secretary, albany, before the first of january. presidents of county agricultural societies are also requested to transmit the reports required by the statute, to the recording secretary, previous to the annual meeting. luther tucker, rec. sec'y. list of premiums _of the american institute._--_continued_. flowers. william kent, brooklyn, l. i., for superior dahlias, including some extra-fine american seedlings--gold medal. george c. thorburn, john street, n. y., for a rich display of dahlias--gold medal. daniel boll, bloomingdale, n. y., for a fine assortment of dahlias, including some fine american seedlings--silver medal. thomas hogg & sons, th street, n. y., for a good assortment of dahlias--mrs. loudon's flower garden. william r. prince, flushing, l. i., for numerous varieties of dahlias--downing's rural architecture. thomas addis emmet, mount vernon, n. y.--t. cremmins, gardener--for a superior display of dahlias--downing's cottage architecture. william phelan & sons, th street, n. y., for a fine display of dahlias--hovey's magazine. william reid, th street and th avenue, n. y., for an excellent assortment of dahlias--bridgeman's gardeners' assistant. william laird, th street, n. y., for an ornamental frame, decorated with flowers--hovey's magazine. james l. l. f. warren, brighton, mass., for a beautiful bouquet of flowers--silver medal. mrs. jeremiah brown, brooklyn, l. i., for a beautiful vase of flowers--mrs. loudon's flower garden. j. b. mantel, th street, n. y., for an ornamental frame, decorated with flowers--american flower-garden directory. daniel boll, bloomingdale, n. y., for numerous varieties of the rose, and other rare flowers--mrs. loudon's flower garden. samuel m. cox, bloomingdale road, n. y., for a beautiful stand of flowers--american flower-garden directory. william beekman, ninth street, n. y., for a fine supply of dahlias--hovey's magazine. isaac buchanan, th street, n. y., for two vases of rare flowers-- vol. of american agriculturist. to alfred bridgeman, j. boyce, a. p. cummings, william davison, j. ettringham, william v. legget, mrs. mcfarlane, george maine, william ross, samuel ruth, grant thorburn, jr., l. van wyck, edward white, and john w. wood, for supplies of flowers for ornamenting the horticultural room, to each a copy of the report of the american institute, on the subject of agriculture. vegetables. robert l. pell, pelham, ulster co., n. y., for the choicest assortment of culinary vegetables--silver medal. john beekman, st street, n. y., for the best and greatest variety of vegetable roots for cattle--silver medal. joseph clowes, harsimus, n. j., for twelve superior blood beets--united states farmer. robert l. pell, pelham, ulster co., n. y., for twelve superior sugar beets-- vol. american agriculturist. john beekman, st street, n. y., for twelve superior mangel-wurtzel beets-- vol. of the cultivator. christopher allen, staten island, n. y., for six fine heads of cauliflower--buel's farmers' companion. peter hulst, gardener to lambert wyckoff, bushwick, l. i., for the best field of cabbage--silver medal. l. wyckoff, bushwick, for twelve large heads of the drum-head cabbage--transactions of the state agricultural society. thomas bridgeman, jr., dutch kills, l. i., for twelve fine heads of savoy cabbage--faulkner's farmers' manual. thomas prosser, paterson, n. j., for twelve superior carrots for the table--united states farmer. j. clowes, harsimus, n. j. for twelve fine roots of white celery--transactions of state agricultural society. frederick bonnicamp, harsimus, n. j., for twelve fine roots of red celery--dana's muck manual. robert l. pell, pelham, ulster co., n. y., for six large egg-plants--bridgeman's gardeners' assistant. john brill, jersey city, n. j., for a peck of superior yellow onions--faulkner's farmers' manual. william ross, ravenswood, queens co., n. y., for a peck of superior red onions--smith's productive farming. joseph clowes, harsimus, n. j., for twelve fine parsneps for the table--american agriculturist. j. beekman, st street, n. y., for twelve large parsneps for cattle--united states farmer. alexander walsh, lansingburgh, for superior seedling potatoes--bridgeman's gardeners' assistant. t. b. wakeman, bergen, n. j., for superior mercer potatoes--silver medal. william j. townsend, newtown, queens co., for a superior lot of table potatoes--bridgeman's gardeners' assistant. s. b. townsend, newtown, l. i., for three large cattle pumpkins--buel's farmers' companion. r. l. colt, paterson, n. j., for a peck of superior potatoes for cattle-- vol. of cultivator. john p. haff, yorkville, n. y., for a peck of superior white flat turneps-- vol. of cultivator. peter wyckoff, bushwick, kings co., for twelve superior roots of long white turneps--bridgeman's gardener's assistant. s. pabor, harlem, n. y., for superior cream pumpkins--smith's productive farming. f. o. wakeman, bergen, n. j., for twelve superior roots of salsify--american agriculturist. john brill, harsimus, n. j., for three fine winter squashes--faulkner's farmers' manual. john a. miller, little falls, n. j., for a fine large valparaiso squash--dana's muck manual. h. w. tibbets, yonkers, n. y., for half a peck of large tomatoes--united states farmer. robert l. pell, pelham, ulster co., for a fine sample of hops--american agriculturist. robert l. pell, pelham, n. y., for superior specimens of sweet potatoes--diploma. p. hegone, greenwich street, for superior specimens of pickles and catsup--diploma. fruits. r. l. pell, pelham, ulster co., n. y., for the best fruit farm--gold medal. r. t. underhill, croton point, n. y., for successful vineyard-culture of the native grape--silver medal. j. l. l. f. warren, brighton, mass., for twelve superior table apples--bridgeman's gardeners' assistant. r. l. pell, pelham, ulster co., n. y., for twelve superior winter apples--kenrick's american orchardist. t. h. perkins, brookline, mass., for twelve superior varieties of house-grapes--gold medal. r. s. field, princeton, n. j., for three superior varieties of house-grapes--silver medal. j. f. allen, salem, mass., for six varieties of superior house-grapes--downing's cottage architecture. rev. dr. wm. patton, sullivan street, n. y., for fifty-two superior bunches of isabella grapes--downing's rural architecture. r. t. underhill, croton point, n. y., for superior specimens of catawba grapes--kenrick's american orchardist. j. l. l. f. warren, brighton, mass., for twelve superior peaches (freestone)--kenrick's american orchardist. john j. van wyck, twenty-first street, n. y., for twelve superior peaches (clingstones)--bridgeman's gardeners' assistant. m. p. wilder, dorchester, mass., for sixty-five choice varieties of pears--silver medal. george c. dekay, th street, seventh avenue, n. y., for a superior lot of table pears--kenrick's american orchardist. d. henderson, jersey city, n. j., for twelve fine magnum-bonum plums--buel's farmers' companion. c. m. graham, jr., content, harlem lane, n. y., for fifty-five quinces gathered from one tree--kenrick's american orchardist. jacob hendrer, glenham, dutchess co., n. y., for fine specimens of grapes--bridgeman's gardeners' assistant. j. w. hayes, newark, n. j., for a lot of grapes and fine pears--farmers' companion. john couzens, dobb's ferry, westchester co., n. y., for superior specimen of grapes--united states farmer. wm. r. prince, flushing, l. i., for two bunches of native grapes, and fine specimen of apples--hovey's magazine. william reid, th street, th avenue, for a fine collection of pears and apples--american agriculturist. charles m. graham, jr., content, harlem lane, for a fine lot of isabella grapes--transactions of state agricultural society. j. j. morris, batavia, n. y., for fine specimen of pears--farmers' manual. nicholas wyckoff, jr., bushwick, for fine specimens isabella grapes--the planters' guide. j. b. mantel, th street, n. y., for varieties of pears and other fruit--two vols. of the transactions of the state agricultural society. joseph l. franklin, flushing, l. i., for twelve extra large apples--dana's muck manual. h. & l. hotchkiss, new haven, conn., for one pear weighing oz.-- vol. of the cultivator. samuel walker, roxbury, mass., for superior varieties of pears--silver medal. henry steel, jersey city, n. j., for a lot of extra-fine early grapes--bridgeman's gardeners' assistant. miss louisa bennett, l. i., for a basket of native strawberries--bridgeman's florist's guide. making capons. the following article on making capons, is the best within our recollection. it is taken from the directions accompanying the sets of instruments for caponising, made by mr. john mendenhall, philadelphia:-- fowls intended to be cut, must be kept at least twenty-four hours without food, otherwise the entrails will fill the cavity of the belly and render it almost impossible to complete the operation; besides, when they have been starved the proper length of time, they are less liable to bleed. the chicken is taken at any age, from five days old until it begins to crow, or even after. lay the fowl on its left side on the floor, draw the wings back, and keep it firm by resting the right foot on its legs, and the other foot or knee on its wings. (the table with the apparatus does away with the necessity of this stooping position.) be careful that the head of the fowl is not held down, or even touched during the operation, as it would be sure to cause it to bleed. pluck the feathers off from its right side near the hip joint, in a line between that and the shoulder joint; the space uncovered should be a little more than an inch square. make an incision between the two last ribs, having first drawn the skin of the part backward, so that when left to itself it will cover the wound in the flesh. in some fowls the thigh is so far forward that it covers the two last ribs; in which case, care must be taken to draw the flesh of the thigh well back, so as not to cut through it, or else it would lame the fowl, and perhaps cause its death in a few days after the operation, by inflaming. the ribs are to be kept open by the hooks--the opening must be enlarged each way by the knife, if necessary, until the testicles, which are attached to the back bone, are entirely exposed to view, together with the intestines in contact with them. the testicles are enclosed in a thin skin, connecting them with the back and sides--this must be laid hold of with the pliers, and then torn away with the pointed instrument; doing it first on the upper testicle, then on the lower. (the lower testicle will generally be found a little behind the other--that is, a little nearer the rump.) next introduce the loop; (which is made of a horse-hair or a fibre of cocoa-nut;) it must be put round the testicle which is uppermost, in doing which the spoon is serviceable to raise up the testicle and push the loop under it, so that it shall be brought to act upon the part which holds the testicle to the back; then tear it off by pushing the tube toward the rump of the fowl, at the same time drawing the loop. then scoop it and the blood out with the spoon, and perform the same operation on the other testicle. take away the hooks, draw the skin over and close the wound; stick the feathers that you pulled off before on the wound, and let the bird go. remarks.--if the operation be performed without sufficient skill, many of the fowls will prove not to be capons; these may be killed for use as soon as the head begins to grow large and get red, and they begin to chase the hens. the real capon will make itself known by the head remaining small, and the comb small and withered; the feathers of the neck or mane will also get longer, and the tail will be handsomer and longer: they should be kept to the age of fifteen or eighteen months, which will bring them in the spring and summer, when poultry is scarce and brings a high price. take care, however, not to kill them near moulting time, as all poultry then is very inferior. the operation fails, principally, by bursting the testicle, so that the skin which encloses the soft matter, remains in the bird, and the testicle grows again. birds of five or six months are less liable to have the testicles burst in the operation than younger fowls, but they are also more apt to bleed to death than those of from two to four months old. a skilful operator will always choose fowls of from two to three months;--he will prefer also, to take off the lower testicle first, as then the blood will not prevent him from proceeding with the other; whereas, when the upper one is taken off the first, if there should be any bleeding, he has to wait before he can take off the lower testicle. the large vein that supplies the entrails with blood passes in the neighborhood of the testicles; there is danger that a young beginner may pierce it with the pointed instrument in taking off the skin of the lower testicle, in which case the chicken would die instantly, for all the blood in its body would issue out. there are one or two smaller veins which must be avoided, which is very easy, as they are not difficult to see. if properly managed, no blood ever appears until a testicle is taken off: so that should any appear before that, the operator will know that he has done something wrong. if a chicken die, it is during the operation by bleeding; (of course it is as proper for use as if bled to death by having its throat cut;) they very seldom die after, unless they have received some internal injury, or the flesh of the thigh has been cut through, from not being drawn back from off the last two ribs, where the incision is made; all of which are apt to be the case with young practitioners. if the testicles be found to be large, the bamboo tube should be used, and it should have a strong cocoa-nut string in it,--for small ones the silver tube with a horse-hair in it, is best. when a chicken has been cut, it is necessary before letting it run, to put a permanent mark upon it; otherwise it would be impossible to distinguish it from others not cut. i have been accustomed to cut off the outside or the inside toe of the left foot,--by this means i can distinguish them at a distance. another mode is to cut off the comb, then shave off the spurs close to the leg, and stick them upon the bleeding head, where they will grow and become ornamental in the shape of a pair of horns. this last mode is perhaps the best, but it is not so simple and ready as the first. which ever mode is adopted, the fowl should be marked before performing the operation, because the loss of blood occasioned by cutting off the comb or a toe, makes the fowl less likely to bleed internally during the operation. it is very common, soon after the operation, for the chicken to get wind in the side, when the wound is healing, between the flesh and the skin; it must be relieved by making a small incision in the skin, which will let the wind escape. those fowls make the finest capons which are hatched early in the spring; they can be cut before the hot weather comes, which is a great advantage. never attempt to cut a full-grown cock; it is a useless and cruel piece of curiosity. i have never known one to live. be not discouraged with the first difficulties; with practice they will disappear; every season you will find yourself more expert, until the cutting of a dozen fowls before breakfast will be a small matter. it may be well to give a warning against becoming dissatisfied with the tools. a raw hand, when he meets with difficulties, is apt to think the tools are in fault, and sets about to improve them and invent others; but it is only himself that lacks skill, which practice alone can give. i have spent money, besides wasting my time in this foolish notion, but have always found that the old, original tools, which came from china, and where this mode of operating was invented, are the best. take care that the tools are not abused by ignorant persons attempting to use them; they will last a person's life-time if properly used; but if put out of order, none but a surgical instrument maker can repair them properly. the object in giving publicity to this, is to have the markets of philadelphia well supplied with capons: they have ever been esteemed one of the greatest delicacies, preserving the flavor and tenderness of the chicken, with the juicy maturity of age. in the paris and london markets, double the price of common poultry is obtained for capons. considering the abundance and excellence of poultry in the united states, it seems surprising that the art of making capons should be almost entirely unknown--it is hoped that this deficiency will now be supplied. grafting and budding. for what follows on grafting and budding, we are indebted to that excellent family paper, the new world. the article was prepared for it by j. s. skinner, esq., of the post office department, washington, from an english work, which, he adds, "is not published or much known in this country." grafting.--the process of grafting consists in taking off a shoot from one tree, and inserting it into another, in such a manner as that both may unite closely, and become one tree; the shoot or cutting thus employed is called a _scion_, and the tree on which it is inserted or grafted, a stock. the process of budding has precisely the same object in view as that of grafting, differing from the latter process only in the insertion of a bud, instead of a shoot or cutting, into the bark of another tree. to execute either process with adroitness and success, considerable practice is required. to excel in either, instructions should be received from some competent person, who is both willing and able to impart the necessary information. more knowledge can be acquired in a short time in this manner than can possibly be attained by the most attentive perusal of any treatise expressly written upon the subject. impressed with the difficulty of the task, many writers have indeed asserted, that description alone must ever fail to convey an adequate knowledge of the process; but the intelligent author of the english gardener has, with his usual ability, treated the subject in so clear and comprehensive a manner that we are induced to give the details of the process in the author's own language. before entering upon the subject of grafting and budding, there is one thing which is equally applicable to both processes, and that is, that the _stock_ ought to stand the whole summer upon the spot where it is grafted, before that operation is performed upon it. if stocks be planted out in the fall, the sap does not rise vigorously enough in the spring to afford a fair chance to the growing of the graft; another remark of equal importance is, that fruit-trees stand only _one summer_ on the spot whence they are to be removed to their final destination; because, if they stand longer than this, they will have large and long roots, great amputation must take place, and the trees suffer exceedingly. _the time of grafting_ is generally from the beginning of february to the end of march,[ ] beginning with the earliest sorts of trees, as plums, cherries, and pears; and ending with the latest, as apples. but seasons are different, and in a backward season, the season for grafting will be backward; and in such case, the fulness and bursting appearance of the buds of the stocks, and the mildness of the weather must be our guides. however, it is certain that the mild weather, with occasional showers, is the best time for grafting. [ ] in this climate, april and may are the best months.--ed. am. ag. _the mode of preparing the scion_ comes next. take from the tree from which you mean to propagate, as many branches of last year's wood as will cut into the quantity of scions that you want; but in choosing what branches to take, let the vigor of the tree guide you, in some measure. if it be a healthy, flourishing, and young tree, take your branches from the outside shoots, for the upright ones at the top, or those near the middle, are more likely to produce wood than fruit. yet do not take branches from the very lowest part of the tree, if you can avoid it, as these are sure to be more puling in their nature. in case the tree be old or weakly, then choose the most vigorous of its last year's shoots, no matter where they grow. keep these branches uncut until you arrive at the season for grafting, keeping them, in the meanwhile, buried in dry mould; and when that season arrives, take them up and cut them into the proper lengths for grafting. the middle part of each branch will generally be found to be the best; but your branches may be scarce and few in number, and then make use of every part. each scion should have from three to six eyes on it, but six will, in all cases, be quite enough, as there is no use in an extraordinary length of scion; but, on the contrary, it may be productive of much mischief, by overloading the head with young shoots and leaves as summer advances, and thereby making it more subject to accident from high winds or heavy rains. _the operation of grafting_ is performed many ways, though none of them differs from any of the others in the _main principle_, which is that of bringing the under or inner bark of the scion to bear upon the same bark of the stock. the sap of the stock flows upward toward the scion, and it will flow on into the scion, provided it find no interruption. here, therefore, is the nicety--to fit those two barks so closely, the one upon the other, that the sap shall proceed onward into the scion, just as it would have done into the amputated branch, causing the scion to supplant the branch. i shall only mention and illustrate two modes of grafting, viz., _tongue-grafting_ and _cleft-grafting_. these two it is necessary for me to speak of separately, and thoroughly to describe, for they are not both of them applicable in all cases; the former being used in grafting on small-sized stocks and small branches of trees, and the latter on large stocks and large branches. [illustration: tongue-grafting.--(fig. .)] _tongue-grafting._--suppose you have your stock of the proper age for grafting, you cut it off at three or four inches from the ground, and with a very _sharp, straight, and narrow-bladed grafting-knife_, cut a thin strip of bark and wood upward, from about two inches below your already shortened stock. make this cut at one pull of the knife, inserting the edge rather horizontally, and when it has gone through the bark and into the wood a little short of the middle, pull straight upward, ( , _a, b_;) then at rather less than half way down this cut, and with the blade of your knife across the cut, and downward, cut a very _thin tongue_ of not more than three eighths of an inch long, ( , _c_.) proceed nearly in the same way with the bottom part of the scion; cut first a narrow strip of wood and bark out, but not putting the knife in horizontally, as you have done with regard to the stock, (at , _a_,) nor bringing it out straight to the end, to make a shoulder or angle, as you have done at ( , _a b_;) but make a sloping cut ( , _a b_,) of about the same length as the cut in the stock, or rather a little less if anything; then make a tongue ( , _c_) to correspond with that of the stock, but recollect that this must be cut _upward_ instead of _downward_; then place the scion upon the stock, inserting the tongue of the scion into the tongue of the stock. bring the four edges of bark, that is, the two edges of the cut in the top of the stock, and the two corresponding edges of the cut in the bottom of the scion, to meet precisely; or, if the scion be, in diameter, a smaller piece of wood than the stock, so that its two edges of bark can not both meet those of the stock, then let only one meet, but be sure that one meets precisely. but observe, that this can never be unless the first cut in the stock and that in the scion ( , _a b_,) and ( , _a b_,) be as even as a die, and performed with a knife scarcely less sharp than a razor. take a common pruning-knife, and attempt to make a cut of this kind, and you will find when you come to fit the scion on, that, squeeze them together as you may, you will, in most cases, see light between the parts of the stock and the scion that you are trying to join, so effectually, as that the sap shall flow out of the one into the other, unconscious of any division at all! but i will not suppose anybody so ungain (as it is called in hampshire) as to go about so nice an operation as this without being prepared with the proper instruments for performing it; and therefore, i now suppose the scion put on properly, and presenting the appearance as in ( , _a_.) but this is not all; the operation is not yet complete. the two parts thus joined must be bound closely to one another with matting, or bass, as the gardeners call it, ( .) a single piece tied on to the stock, will, if well done, almost insure the junction; but lest parching winds should come and rip up all vegetation, it is usual to put on besides the bandage of matting, a ball of well-beaten clay sprinkled over with a little wood-ashes or the fine siftings of cinders, to cover completely the parts grafted, that is, from an inch below them to an inch or so above them, ( ;) and, even to prevent this ball of clay from being washed off by heavy rains, it is well to tie around it a covering of coarse canvass, or else to earth up the whole plant as you do beans or peas, drawing a little mound around it so as to reach nearly the top of the clay. mr. harrison prepares his grafting clay in the following manner: take two parts of clay and one of horse-dung, free from straw, mix them together, and beat the mass until the whole is thoroughly incorporated, then temper it with a little water till it is reduced to the consistence of stiff paste. this composition _never cracks_ on drying! _future treatment._--something now remains to be said on the future treatment of the grafted plant. in a month's time at least, you will see whether the scion has taken; it will then be either bursting forth into leaf or be irrecoverably dead. in this latter case, take off immediately the canvass, clay, bandage, and dead scion, and let the stock push forth what shoots it pleases, and recover itself. in the former case, however, you must, as soon as the scion is putting forth shoots, cut off, or rub off, all shoots proceeding from the stock between the ground and the clay, as these, if suffered to push on, would divert the sap away from the scion, and probably starve it; then carefully stake the plant, that is, put a small stick into the ground at within three inches, or thereabouts, of the root, and long enough to reach a few inches above the scion, which you will tie to it slightly with a piece of wetted matting. this is really necessary, for when the shoots proceeding from the scion become half a foot long, they, with the aid of their leaves, become so heavy as, when blown to and fro by the wind, to break off immediately above the clay, or become loosened down at the part joined to the stock. the staking being done, you need do nothing more till near the end of june, when you should take off the whole mass of canvass, clay, and bandage, but be careful in taking off the clay not to break off the plant at the junction. it should be done by a careful hand, and after a day or two of rainy weather, as then the clay is moist and comes off without so much danger to the plant as when it is not. on taking off the clay, there is found a little sharp angle, left at the top of the stock; this should now be cut smooth off. the bark of the stock and that of the scion will heal over this, and the union is then complete. lastly, it is frequently found that mould, and sometimes small vermin, have collected around the heretofore covered parts of the plant, according as the clay has been cracked by the sun. rub off all mould with your fingers, (no instrument does it so well,) and kill all vermin in the same way; and it is not amiss to finish this work by washing the joined parts with a little soap and water, using a small paint-brush for the operation. all these things done, you have only to guard against high winds, which, if the plant be not staked, as is above described, will very likely be broken off by them; and, in this work of destruction, you will have the mortification of seeing the finest of your plants go first. [illustration: cleft-grafting.--(fig. .)] _cleft-grafting._--this is a species of grafting adopted in cases where the stock is large, or where it consists of a branch or branches of a tree headed down. in either of these cases, saw off horizontally, the part you wish to graft, and smooth the wound over with a carpenter's plane, or a sharp, long-blade knife, ( .) prepare your scion in this manner: at about, an inch and a half from the bottom, cut it in the form of the blade of a razor; that is, make it sharp on one side, and let it be blunt at the back, where you will also take care to leave the bark whole, ( , _a_.) having thus prepared the scion, make a split ( ) in the crown of the saw-cut downward for about two inches, taking care that the two sides of this be perfectly even. hold it then open, by means of a chisel or a wedge, (or when the stock is but a small one, your knife,) and insert the scion, the sharp edge going inward, and the bark side or razor-back remaining outward, so that, on taking out the wedge or chisel, the cleft closes firmly on the scion, ( ,) the two edges of bark formed by the cleft, squeezing exactly upon the two edges of bark formed by the blunt razor-back. to make the two barks meet precisely is the only nicety in this operation; but this is so essential, that the slightest deviation will defeat the purpose. in this sort of grafting, the stock on which you graft is generally strong enough to hold the scion close enough within its cleft, without the aid of binding, and then it is better not to bind; but as it is also necessary to prevent air circulating within the wounded parts both of the stock and the scion, use grafting-clay to cover them over so as to effectually exclude the air; and cover the clay with a piece of coarse canvass, wetting it first, and then binding it on securely. in this way, the stock being strong, you may insert several scions on the same head, by making several different clefts, and putting one scion in each; but this can only be to insure your having two to succeed, for if all the scions that you put on one head take, you must choose the two most eligible, and sacrifice the rest, as more than two leading limbs from such head ought not to be encouraged. the season for performing this sort of grafting, and the mode of preparing the scion, and the future treatment of the tree, are precisely the same as in _tongue-grafting_. _crown, or bark-grafting_ is a very ready method of grafting upon large, uneven, old stocks and branches. it is practised somewhat later than the methods above described, that is, from the end of march to the third week in april, because, in that period, the separation of the bark from the wood is more easily affected; a circumstance of primary importance in this case. the tree is to be headed down, the cut being made horizontally, and the section bored quite even and smooth; then make a slit in the bark two inches in length, next with the handle of a budding-knife, carefully open the bark for about a quarter of an inch; then cut the scion about two inches in a sloping direction, in the form of a tongue, leaving the bark entire on the outside. the scion thus prepared, is pressed downward between the bark and the wood as far as the incision in the stock extends; the bark of the stock readily yields to the pressure employed, and the scion is supported in its situation by a few coils of bass-matting, the whole being surrounded by clay. _dove-tail grafting._--this is a very neat and successful mode of grafting, originating with mr. malone, who gives the following directions for its performance. the scion is to be selected so as to have two or three buds above where the knife is to be inserted to prepare it for the operation; a slip is cut off the end of the scion, sloping it to the bottom as long as it may be decided to insert it into the stock. on each side of the cut, as far as it extends, a part of the bark is to be taken off, leaving the under part broader than the upper, on which upper or back part always contrive to leave a bud. the stock or branch to be worked is thus prepared: being first cut off smooth and straight, two parallel slits, distant from each other nearly the width of the scion and the length of its cut part, are then made in the bark of the branch, observing particularly to slope the knife, so that the under edge of the cut next the wood may be wider than the outer edge. the piece of bark between the slits must then be taken out, separating at the bottom by a horizontal cut. the scion will then slide into the dove-tail groove thus formed, and, if the work is well performed, will fit neatly and tightly. a small quantity of the grafting-clay must then be carefully applied, securing it on with list, or any other convenient bandage, fastening it at the end with two small nails. the top of the stock should be entirely covered with clay, sloping it well up to the grafts, and should be examined often to see if any cracks or openings appear, which should be immediately filled up with some very soft clay. the proper time for performing the operation is from the beginning of april till the middle of may, or earlier if the sap is in motion. (gardener's magazine, vol. vii.) [illustration: budding.--(fig. .)] budding.--budding is performed for precisely the same purpose as grafting, and, like grafting, it is performed in many different ways; and as long experience has ascertained the best method, namely, that of t budding, ( ,) so called from the form of the two cuts that are made in the bark of the stock to receive the bud, or _shield-budding_, as it is sometimes called from the form of the piece of bark ( ) on which the bud is seated, assuming the shape of a shield when it is prepared to be inserted within the t cut in the stock. the only solid difference between budding and grafting is this, that whereas in grafting you insert on the stock a _branch_ already produced, in budding, you insert only the _bud_. i shall proceed, in treating of this matter, in the same way that i did in the preceding article, namely, _as to the season proper for budding, the choosing and preparing of the bud, the operation of budding, and the future treatment of the plant budded_. _the season for budding_ is generally from the latter end of july to the latter end of august, the criterions being a plump appearance of the buds formed on the spring shoot of the same year, seated in the angle of a leaf, and a readiness in the bark of the stock to separate from the wood. _in choosing and preparing the bud_, fix on one seated at about the middle of a healthy shoot of the mid-summer growth--these are, generally speaking, the most inclined to fruitfulness. choose a cloudy day, if you have a choice of days at this season, and if not, perform your work early in the morning, or in the evening. the time being proper, you sever the branch on which you find the buds to your liking. take this with you to the stock that you are going to bud, holding the branch in your left hand, the largest end downward; make a sloping cut from about an inch and a half below the bud to about an inch above it, suffering your knife to go through the bark, and about half way into the wood, cutting out wood and all. this keeping of the wood prevents the bud and its bark from drying while you are preparing the incision in the stock, and if you wish to carry buds of scarce sorts to any distance, you may do so safely by putting their ends in water, or in damp moss, but it is always safer, as well in grafting as in budding, to perform the operation with as much expedition as possible, but particularly it is so in budding. _operation of budding._--cut off the leaf under which the bud is situated, but leave its foot-stalk, ( , _a_,) and by this hold it between your lips, while with your budding-knife you cut two straight lines in the stock at the place where you wish to insert the bud, and this should be where the bark is smooth, free from any bruises or knots, and on the side rather from the mid-day suns. of these lines let the first be horizontal, ( ,) and let the next be longitudinal, beginning at the middle of the first cut and coming downward. let them, in short, describe the two principal bars of the roman letter t. you have now to take out from the bark on which the bud is, the piece of wood on which the bark is, and which has served you, up to this time, to preserve the bud and bark from drying and shrinking. but this is a nice matter. in doing it you must be careful not to endanger the root of the bud, as it is called, because in that is its existence. the bark, (if the season be proper for budding,) will easily detach itself from this piece of wood, but still it requires a very careful handling to get it out without endangering the root of the bud. hold the bud on your fore-finger, and keep your thumb on the wood opposite; then with the fore-finger and thumb of the other hand, bend backward and forward the lower end of the shield, and thus coax the wood to disengage itself from the bark; and when you find it decidedly doing so, remove your thumb from it, and the whole piece of wood will come out, leaving you nothing but a piece of bark of about two and a half inches long, with a bud and foot-stalk of a leaf on it. if the root of the bud be carried away with the piece of wood, you will perceive a small cavity where it ought to be. in this case, throw away the bud and try another. having succeeded in the second attempt, now open the two sides of the longitudinal bar of the t with the ivory haft of your budding-knife, but in doing this, raise the bark clearly down to the wood, for the inside of the piece of bark belonging to the bud must be placed directly against this. having opened these sides wide enough to receive the longest end of the bark, insert it nicely, taking especial care that its inner side be flatly against the wood of the stock. then cut the upper end of the bark off, so that its edge shall meet precisely the edge of the horizontal bar of the t ( , _a_.). with your finger and thumb bring the two sides of the longitudinal bar over the bark of the bud, or rather the shield, and with a piece of well-soaked matting, begin an inch below this bar and bind firmly all the way up to an inch above the horizontal bar, taking good care to leave the bud peeping out. bind in such a way as to exclude the air, for that is the intent of binding in this case. tie your piece of matting on first, and wind it round and round the stock as you would a riband, taking care not to twist the matting; wind it slowly, and every time you have gone completely round, give a gentle pull to make it firm. _future treatment._--in a fortnight's time from the operation, you will discover whether the bud has taken, by its roundness and healthy look; and, in a fortnight after that, loosen the bandage to allow the plant to swell, and in about five weeks from the time of budding, take away the bandage altogether. in this state, the plant passes the winter, and just as the sap begins to be in motion in the following spring, you head down the stock at about an inch above the bud, beginning behind it, and making a sloping cut upward to end above its point. some gardeners leave a piece of the stock about six inches long for the first year, in order to tie the first summer's shoot to it to prevent its being broken off by the wind. this may be well when the plant is exposed to high winds, but even then, if you see danger, you may tie a short stick on the top part of the stock, and to this tie the young shoot, and then the sap all goes into the shoot from the bud, instead of being divided between it and six inches of stock left in the other way. there are some advantages which budding has over grafting, and these i think it right to mention. in the first place, universal experience has proved that certain trees succeed much better when budded, than the same trees do when grafted, such are the peach, nectarine, apricot, plum, and cherry; indeed, the rule is, that all stone-fruits do better budded than grafted, that they are, when budded, less given to gum, a disease peculiar to stone-fruits, and often very pernicious to them. you may also, by budding, put two more branches upon a stock that would be too weak to take so many grafts, and you may bud in july when grafting has failed in march and april. the disadvantage of budding is that the trees are rendered one year later in coming into bearing than when you graft. mr. knight has recommended a mode of budding, (hort. trans., vol. i.). he thus describes the process: in the month of june, as the luxuriant shoots of my peach-trees were grown sufficiently firm to permit the operation, i inserted buds of other varieties into them, employing two distinct ligatures to bind the buds in their places. one ligature was first placed above the bud inserted, and upon the transverse section through the bark; the other which had no further office than that of securing the bud, was applied in the usual way. as soon as the buds had attached themselves, the ligatures last applied were taken off, but the others were suffered to remain. the passage of the sap upward, was in consequence much obstructed, and the inserted bud began to vegetate strongly in july, and when these had afforded shoots about four inches long, the remaining ligatures were taken off to admit the excess of sap to pass on, and the young shoots were nailed to the wall, being there properly exposed to light, their wood ripened well, and afforded blossoms in the succeeding spring. * * * * * we should be pleased if any of our readers could give us further information about the shrub described below. _from the yankee blade._ high cranberry. a gentleman of this place having occasion some twenty years ago, to make an excursion into the northern part of the state, near lake umbagog, where the magalloway empties into the androscoggin, passed through a large piece of low land, comprising many acres, which was covered with the high cranberry as far as the eye could see, exhibiting the most beautiful and splendid appearance, perhaps, ever displayed from any of the spontaneous productions of the forests of new england. he says that some shrubs which had acquired the magnitude of trees of several inches diameter, were literally bent to the ground, under the weight of their luxuriant fruit; and such was their abundance, that a single individual might have gathered more than thirty bushels in a day. the high cranberry in dense forests, sometimes acquires the respectable altitude of or feet; but in more open places, its height is generally from to or feet. its stem and leaf very much resemble those of the snow-ball; and the flower, while it lasts, is but little inferior in elegance and beauty to the flower of that highly ornamented and much esteemed shrub. the fruit is smaller than that of the running cranberry, of a bright red color when ripe, and grows in large, flat clusters on the ends of the branches. its taste is very acid, and rather austere. it contains a large, hard, flat seed, which is an objection to the use of it without sifting or straining; but being sifted or strained after stewing, it is excellent for sauce, pies, and tarts. prepared with sugar, in the usual way, it makes a most delicious jelly. original correspondence. _for the american agriculturist._ fine wool sheep. _buskirk's bridge, october, ._ i have read the article headed "sheep, paular merinos," over the signature of examiner, in the may number, page of your paper, purporting to give us plain farmers an insight into sheep breeding, &c.; and what fine flocks used to be, when the "old fashioned merino sheep" were in their "glory." what they were a quarter of a century ago, i cannot say, that was before i had any thing to do with sheep in this country; but i presume that _fine_ flocks were then not so numerous as they are now. i can not agree with the writer, "that the fine flocks of the united states are sadly deteriorated, indeed, nearly run out." since , i have been acquainted with fine sheep in this country, and i venture to say, that there are three, four, or five, and in this section, _ten_, fine flocks, where there was but one years ago. if examiner will honor me with a visit, an invitation i herewith cordially tender to him, i will show him _fine_ flocks, consisting of more than a few individuals--a dozen or two, or may be a few scores, of picked sheep together, and kept in the very highest possible condition; no, but flocks from to , --even more--which might alter his judgment, if that is not swayed by prejudice. many of these large flocks shear on an average lbs. and over, of wool, well washed on the sheep's back, the quality of which is superior to the "paular," and "old-fashioned merinos;" and i doubt not, should examiner make a comparison between the two kinds himself, he would pronounce it _superfine_; and besides the quality, he would also discover a great difference in the condition and cleanliness of the wool. these flocks are high-grade saxons, and show a result not quite so "unfortunate" as examiner would make us believe. my own flock of ewes and lambs and a few bucks, pure, unmixed saxons, whose pedigree can be traced back to the importations of the elector of saxony, from the royal flocks of spain, sheared this year lbs. oz. per head; last year lbs. oz. clean wool. if i had had a proportionate number of weathers among them, the average would have been at _least_ lbs. i repeat then, that the wool of the "paular," or "old fashioned merinos," does not compare with the saxons and their crosses in quality and condition. if the fleeces from the former are heavier than from the latter, let it be borne in mind that they contain more _gum_, and _yolk_, dirt, &c.,; are not so fine, and that the sheep _consume a greater quantity of feed_. these are facts well known to every good judge of wool, and to every experienced, practical shepherd. i would ask whether examiner had his eyes closed against them when he was examining the fine-wooled flocks of the united states, and declared them "sadly deteriorated, indeed, nearly run out." i do not pretend, mr. editor, that i am acquainted with all "the fine flocks of the united states, but allow me to say, that my acquaintance among the wool-growers is pretty extensive. i am a purchaser, as well as a grower of wool, and handle no inconsiderable quantities yearly. my purchases this year amount to over , lbs., and i have examined at least , lbs., and a great variety of flocks of different grades and character, have come under my observation--sheep kept in the very lowest up to the very highest condition. i have always found, that where the blood of the "old fashioned merinos, paulars," or whatever their possessors are pleased to call them, predominated, there also i found _gum_, yolk, dirt, and other substances adhering to the wool, in great abundance, _unfit to make cloth_ of, which goes far to make up the greater weight of fleece over the saxony. indeed, sir, when gentlemen talk of fine fleeces weighing , , or lbs. they forget to mention "_including gum, yolk, dirt, and other substances adhering to the fleece_." some years since, i saw a lot of "old fashioned merino" wool at a factory in massachusetts, which the manufacturer assured me would lose per cent. in cleansing. "indeed," said he, "we can never estimate the dirt in such wool correctly; it always exceeds our estimate, and we invariably suffer loss." and recently, a gentleman, a dealer in wool, told me that he sent this season, a large quantity to boston to be sold, and that on making sale of some , lbs., the manufacturer who bought it, rejected all gummy, dirty fleeces, declaring that he would not have them, as such wool would lose more than per cent. in cleansing. and to use the gentleman's own words, "there it lies, in a corner of the wool room, and i do not know what to do with it;" observing at the same time, that the manufacturers were "getting more cunning." there was a time when the supply fell short of the demand, and almost any wool, however gummy and dirty, found ready purchasers; for manufacturers were often compelled to buy it, in order to keep their machinery in operation; but that time has gone by, and they are now more choice in their selections, and when they come across a lot of such wool they pass it by, with observations like these: "i do not want it, it is too dirty, let him keep it for some body else"! in your july number, page and , mr. editor, you have made a calculation of the number of sheep, and the quantity of wool obtained therefrom. the census of shows, say , , in the united states. of this number you estimate only , , shorn sheep, yielding , , lbs. of wool, and the lambs at , , .--with due deference to your superior opportunities for information, i beg leave to say that you are over estimating the number of lambs, for every practical wool-grower knows, that that proportion is too large--if you had said one third, you would have come nearer the truth. i think you are mistaken also that the census of included lambs, it was exclusive of lambs.(_a_) you are, however, perfectly safe in estimating the average weight of fleece in the united states at ¼ lbs. this is certainly too low by one fourth of a pound.(_b_) in this region it exceeds ¾ lbs. then you say, that by producing a superior quality of wool, its value would be increased nine cents per pound; this certainly is attainable; but the way in which you propose to bring it about, namely, by crossing with the "paular, or old-fashioned merinos," you would not obtain that end, thousands of fine flocks would be reduced in quality.(_c_) in this section it would reduce the quality as much as you wish to improve it. coarse sheep would be improved by the cross; but to apply it to all the sheep in the united states, as i understand you to say, you would find yourself very much mistaken in the result. i venture to say, that on the same quantity of feed, you can not increase the heft of fleece of a fine flock shearing from ¾ to lbs., by your cross up to ¾ to lbs. per head, and have the wool in equally good condition.(_d_) an increase of feed will do much toward increasing the heft of fleece. a few words more and i have done. examiner, page , says: "as to paular bucks, it strikes me that you might, for any practical purpose, just as well have advised a cross of the fabulous unicorn, for it would be just as easy to find the one as the other at the present time in the united states; for depend upon it, there is no such thing now existing, as _a paular buck_, nor _any thing deserving the name_ in the whole country." and you say that "there are still large and valuable flocks scattered over the country."(_e_) h. d. grove. (_a_) immediately upon the receipt of this letter of mr. grove's we wrote on to washington to ascertain the facts in the case, but were answered that the census bureau was abolished, and they could not tell. we know that when the person for taking the census in the district in which we were then residing, called upon us, he required the number of colts, calves, lambs, and pigs, although some of them were only three days old at the time; and to our objection of rendering an account of such young stock, he remarked, "never mind, they will be grown when the census appears, and it is the law." most of those to whom we have put the question about rendering an account of the lambs in their flocks, say they did so; others do not recollect. if there has been irregularity with sheep-owners in giving an account of their lambs, of course we are incorrect; and we think, upon reflection, we may have estimated the number of lambs too high; though, on the other hand, we are quite certain mr. grove has set them down as entirely too few; for we know flocks that produce within a fraction as many lambs annually as there are breeding ewes. (_b_) perhaps when mr. grove has travelled south and west more extensively, and seen in the months of march and april, as many half-bare sheep as we have, which shed their wool from disease, want of care, &c., he may come to a different conclusion. we have often seen flocks in the same condition at the north too, leaving many of our farmers little to boast of in this respect. (_c_) we have turned to the article to which mr. grove alludes, but really, we do not find that we used the expressions attributed to us. we said "spanish merino," also, "unadulterated merino;" meaning thereby, the rambouillets more particularly. we also spoke in general terms, in recommending the use of these. such a flock of saxons as mr. grove's we would _especially except_; and if the accounts which we hear of them be correct, and we have no doubt they are, we would not cross them with anything less fine than themselves. they are unquestionably superior animals, as is proved by their superior weights of fleece, and the high price the wool commands; and we wish, since the name of saxon has been so basely misused in this country by miserable counterfeits, that mr. grove would give his flock the name of electoral; for they and their descendants are probably the only ones entitled to it in the united states. with this name, they would then fairly stand aloof from the common herd, as they deserve, and not be associated in idea hereafter, with the miserable riff-raff of the country, passing under the general name of saxons. it is our intention next season to call and see mr. grove's flock. (_d_) we meant to be understood as alluding to a cross on the coarser and more restiff sheep of the country, when we spoke of obtaining an increase of weight of wool on the same food, and we know that this can be done. (_e_) true enough, but we did not say these valuable flocks were paulars; nor did we go so far as to assert that they were pure merinos of any distinct name. we wish it understood, that we do not endorse all the opinions of examiner any more than we do other correspondents--he speaks for himself, and we for ourselves. * * * * * _for the american agriculturist._ sea-mud as a fertilizer. _flushing, l. i., november th, ._ can you inform me whether the sea-mud which is found on the shore, below high-water mark, is of any value to the farmer; and if it is, in what way would you advise that it should be applied? do you think that it would answer in a compost heap, or would it be preferable to put it into the cattle-yard or hog-pen? i have thought that the only objection to using it would be on account of the great quantity of salt, which it contains; although leibig and other celebrated writers, speak in very favorable terms upon the application of salt. and here arises another question. are not those farms which are situated upon the sea-shore sufficiently supplied with salt by the winds which are constantly sweeping over them? johnson remarks that this is the case, and if this is so, would not the application of this sea-mud be too strong? although i am inclined to believe that by drying the mud, much of the virtue of the salt would necessarily be destroyed, and as sea-water contains, as leibig states, many very fertilizing qualities, this mud which perhaps has been accumulating for ages, must have imbibed a large quantity of all those properties, of which sea-water is composed. by answering these questions you will greatly oblige one of your subscribers. r. b. c. for an answer to the above see page . * * * * * the following communication was read before the new york farmers' club by the hon. henry meigs at its meeting august , and is obligingly furnished us for publication. _for the american agriculturist._ farm of hugh maxwell, esq. good effects of marl.--in a conversation with hugh maxwell, esq., some short time since, he stated some facts in relation to the fertilising power of a red marl abundantly existing at nyack, which induced me to visit the spot. i found mr. maxwell's farm of acres bounded by the hudson, well worth a visit. the whole was in excellent fence, made of the loose stones found on the land, neatly piled about ½ feet high, forming fields of from to acres. the formation of these fences has used nearly all the stones which were on the surface of the lands. and in this it would seem as if divine providence had caused the rocks to be distributed of the proper size for fencing. had the pieces been much larger or smaller they would not have answered the purpose so well as they now do. if they had been planted two feet under ground, or had been piled in larger masses, the labor of fencing would have been very greatly increased. this farm, as well as all those about nyack, lies on the singular mass of sandstone included by a front of about five miles on the river. all the surrounding rocks are of other materials. this sandstone, when quarried, exhibits strata of a kind of red marl of many feet in thickness, lying between strata of the sandstone. the quarry-men throw it out of their way, and millions of loads are lying near the water's edge, so that in many places vessels can lie alongside a bed of it, and slide it on board. on mr. maxwell's farm, the former proprietor, desirous of making extensive hard walks through his garden, caused this marl to be put upon them about one foot deep. soon after this was finished, the walks began to produce clover; the white in such profusion and persevering succession, that all prospect of using the paths in that condition was abandoned: they could not be kept in order by the hoe. mr. maxwell being strongly impressed by this occurrence, determined on applying it to the surface of his farm. i saw a field of corn of several acres which had been top-dressed this year with the red marl, now bearing not less than bushels of shelled corn to the acre--as great a product as is obtained from the best city manure, costing at nyack nearly cents per load. i saw an upland field of wheat, on which, as an experiment, mr. maxwell had top-dressed with this marl a space of three rods by two, from which i pulled an average bunch of straw-stubble, that is more than double the size and weight of any like parcel of stubble, to be found in the whole field of several acres. unfortunately the husbandman had cradled all the wheat indiscriminately, which prevented mr. maxwell from examining the separate product of the wheat. i should not hesitate to pronounce it a double product. mr. m. top-dressed a field of oats with this marl, and the yield was bushels per acre. he top-dressed a field of clover with it the third year from the seeding, and the product is heavier than the crop of the _second year_. this field was dressed with ten loads of marl per acre. the corn is large -row yellow, and the stalks are about feet high. the corn-blades never curled during the late drought, while other fields all curled. the corn was worked with the hand-harrow once, with the cultivator twice, and was hoed twice. no plowing between the hills. mr. m. thinks that in dry weather it is very injurious to run the plow through, for it cuts the smaller roots of the corn. he has tried bushels of hickory ashes, against of anthracite coal ashes, and found no perceptible difference in the result. the general effect of this red marl is perceptible in almost every plant and tree in that vicinity. fruit-trees are especially vigorous and free from disease. flowering shrubs, roses particularly, seem not to have been touched by any insect. i pulled up a mullein stalk growing on a naked mound of this marl, which measures nine feet in height, and the flower stem, which is covered with buds, is four feet in extent. the trees, excepting peach alone, are more thriving than those i have anywhere seen. the peach-trees have the yellows. moss roses growing in rich grass are remarkably strong; mr. m. finds that they do better closely surrounded by grass than in clear ground. he has ten kinds of healthy cherry-trees, including the red and white ox-heart, and the bull's eye. he has freely given, and wishes to distribute buds and grafts to all those who ask for them. mr. m. has very healthy apricots, which have yielded fine fruit. _he smoked the blossoms with sulphur and pitch_, and all the fruit was perfect. _this smoking was done in the evening._ some of the fields had never been but partially cultivated, on account of being so swamped that cattle mired in them. he made in one four-acre field a drain ten rods long, and three feet deep, filled in with coarse stone. this drain formed a _perpetual spring for his cattle_, and this barren field has now buckwheat of at least _thirty bushels per acre_. _one and a half bushels_ of seed was sowed per acre. no manure needed. this drain cost $ . . twelve acres were drained in the same style at a cost of $ ; this field is now fine, and asks for no manure from new york, or nyack marl. he prefers the same amount of marl to best new york city manure for all grains and grapes. mr. m. has the old english yew thriving in open air in winter. the european mountain ash, white and red linden, red maple, weeping ash, weeping beech, weeping elm, madeira nut, (one five years old bearing fruit,) spanish chestnut now in fruit, (this tree has also some blossoms on it at this time.) apricots grafted on plum stock are very thrifty. a remarkable horse.--in passing through mr. maxwell's barn-yard, i noticed a couple of horses, one of which was hoppled with a strong iron chain. what mischievous young horse have you there? he replied, it is my old family mare kate, who has carried me, and my wife and children, safely for the last one and twenty years! i bought her when she was about four years old, but she will break fences now (wooden ones) with her irons on, she is so active and cunning. locust eggs.--i remarked at nyack the work of the locust, and mr. m. and thomas addis emmet, esq., examined with a good microscope, a twig worked by the little insect. the twig being split in the line of the work, exhibited the whole process of the egg deposite. the twig is pierced nearly to its centre at every three quarters of an inch, or nearly so; the wood is rendered fibrous, it is then lifted up, and the eggs, which are of a long, oval form, are deposited side by side at an angle of about degrees to the grain of the twig, and the fibrous tuft of wood placed over them, with its end sticking out; these incisions being repeated every inch on a line for some few inches in each twig. with the microscope, we saw the eyes of the young locusts always heads to the centre. the general outline of the young animal was perceptible through its delicate membranous cover. they moved slightly on being disturbed. almost every twig so operated on by the locust was entirely dead. the magnifying power of the microscope was perhaps or . value of an orchard.--i visited an apple orchard at nyack, which arrested my attention by its regular and healthy appearance. i found young van houton at home, who, with perfect good feeling and true politeness, gave me the account of the orchard which i desired. when his father was about fifty years of age, he undertook to plant winter pippin-trees on that spot. his neighbors thought him an old fool to plant twigs of apple at his time of day. young van houton, then about years of age, held the little nurslings in the holes while his father filled in the soil. the old gentleman continued to prune them, so that they are widely branched and open for air and sun within the mass of branches. for twenty or twenty-two years past, the old gentleman has often received $ , a year for his apples. sometimes $ per barrel; sometimes sold in the orchard for $ per barrel. that old gentleman and his wife are now, between them, years old. let no man be afraid to plant winter pippins because he is fifty or sixty years of age. i have been highly pleased with my excursion. when gentlemen of high rank in learned professions are found turning that intellectual force which has influenced the most wealthy and intelligent portion of mankind, from law, politics, &c., to that greatest, best of all arts--agriculture, i look for good results and i find them. the old world is hard at work in this direction, and i hope that we shall watch her operations with the eye of our own bird, and see to it, that we be not excelled in any good thing. * * * * * _for the american agriculturist._ mediterranean wheat. _wheatland, va., november , ._ i have noticed your remarks in the october no. of your paper, on the mediterranean wheat. your views coincided with mine when i first sowed this variety of wheat; but i have sown it now for two seasons, and the change has been so great in the color, as to convince me that by cultivating it here, it will lose its dark color, and become as good in that respect, and yield as much flour as any wheat we have. the two seasons i have raised it, it has been the best wheat i had. i have doubts whether it will tiller as much as some other varieties, and therefore sow it much thicker. robert l. wright. * * * * * _for the american agriculturist._ topping cotton--marl. _sumpter district, s. c., nov. th, ._ in those excellent matter-of-fact articles on the cultivation of cotton, which have appeared in the late numbers of your paper, by dr. philips of miss., and which, by the way, are the best i have ever seen on the subject, i do not recollect that he has touched upon the subject of topping cotton. i have made one experiment in this, and was pleased with the result. some planters north of us, i understand, have also tried this method, and find the cotton is not so apt to shed, as when it is not topped, especially in wet seasons. ordinarily we reckon the first week in august the best time for topping; but this, of course, will depend upon the season, and the forwardness of the crop--for sometimes it must be earlier, and sometimes later. i tried the effects of what i suppose to be marl, on a small spot in one of my fields, say about one acre. the marl i judge to be of poor quality, yet can not say, positively, as i have no analysis of it. i dug it out in january last, and spread it broad-cast, at the rate of loads to the acre, as large as an ordinary pair of mules would carry. it seemed to pulverize well, exposed to the severe frost of last winter, and i plowed it in deeper than i usually plow, and harrowed the land well. the result is, i shall get full one third if not one half more cotton off of this piece than any other part of the field, which more than pays me for the trouble. i need not say that we read the articles on manures in the agriculturist with much interest; for many of us are beginning to learn that it is not only easier and better, but even _cheaper_ to renovate our old lands, than emigrate to a new country and bring new lands into cultivation. c. mcd. * * * * * _for the american agriculturist._ hints on the cultivation of wheat. _buffalo, october th, ._ there are four conditions that modify the value of a wheat crop. one may not only be larger in measure than another, but heavier for the same measure; yielding more flour from a given weight; and lastly, affording a greater proportion of gluten from the same quantity of flour. it is necessary for the farmer to have each of these considerations in view, if he would attain the utmost success in the cultivation of this invaluable grain. my object, in this brief article, will be, to afford some helps to the agriculturist in increasing the ultimate value of his crop. as a starting point, it will, perhaps, be most instructive to inquire, what are the constituent elements of wheat? sprengel has analyzed both grain and straw, and the following is the result:-- lbs. of wheat afford · lbs. and of wheat straw, · lbs. of ash, consisting of grain of wheat. straw of wheat. potash · lbs. · lbs. soda · · lime · · magnesia · · alumina with a trace of iron · · silica · · sulphuric acid · · phosphoric acid · · chlorine · · ----- ----- · · this analysis shows an amount of ash far below the average. davy found · lbs. of ash in lbs. of ripe wheat straw; and johnstone, in one variety, grown on a soil abounding in limestone, · per cent. of ash. thus it will be seen, according to the above analysis of sprengel, that of the total of grain, less than ½ per cent., and of straw, rather more than ½ per cent. is earthy or inorganic matter; while all the remainder is composed of the organic materials, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, of which carbon alone constitutes about one half. all these constituents are absolutely essential to the perfection of the crop. in the natural condition of a fertile soil when first reclaimed, these materials are usually found in sufficient abundance to produce wheat. such was the condition of nearly all the land in new england, and the eastern portion of our own state; but a few years of careless, unscientific cropping, has exhausted one or more of those constituents which may have existed in an available form; and much of it, after a very few of the first years of its cultivation, has been of little or no value for wheat, under the system of tillage there adopted. it has been asserted by dr. dana, that in a soil purely granitic (and much of the land in that region partakes of this character), there is potash enough for successive crops of wheat for , years, and lime enough to last more than twice that period. but the result is the same for the growing vegetation, whether the materials do not exist at all, or are locked up beyond the reach of it. it is absolutely certain, if wheat will not grow with care and industry, and all the usual appliances of good husbandry, where it once nourished successfully, there is one or more ingredients wanted, in such a condition, that the plants can appropriate them to their own nourishment. and first of the inorganic matters. the proportion of straw will vary from to ½ times the weight of the grain. suppose the quantity taken off the land be estimated at ½ times the weight of the grain. in a series of crops averaging bushels of wheat per acre, for years, we shall have as the result , lbs. of grain, and , lbs. of straw carried off the soil, charged with all the materials above enumerated, and probably sufficient to reduce the land to a very small capacity for production. some limited portions of the earth, as the plains of babylon, when under skilful cultivation, the valleys of the indus and the nile, and the fields of sicily, almost since the days of the flood, have produced luxuriantly, without the aid of manure to any extent; but it must be remembered the former have their fertility annually renewed by the rich overflowings of the rivers, which are charged with all the materials necessary to restore exhausted nature; while the soil of the last, being wholly of basaltic origin, is rich in the alkalies, which a year or two of rest, is sufficient to replenish in a soluble state, to be again taken up by the luxuriant crop. hence, we have witnessed a drainage of nearly all the products from these fertile regions, for thousands of years, with impunity. but they are exceptions which only go to prove the general rule. the farmer must look to it, that all the ingredients that enter into his crops, are supplied by the materials in his soil, or a deficiency, or entire failure, will be the inevitable result. although all the constituents entering into the straw and grain, are absolutely essential to their perfection, they are not all equally essential to be contained in the soil. it is indispensable, however, that the earthy or inorganic portion of them be there, for these can not be obtained elsewhere. how shall they be best supplied? ashes, it is believed, afford the cheapest, as well as one of the most effectual applications that can be made for grain. of the ten fixed ingredients enumerated as entering into wheat, ashes yield potash, soda, lime, magnesia, sulphuric and phosphoric acids, in large proportions, and silica and iron in smaller. the chemical operation of the potash, and carbonate and sulphate of lime, however, when added to the soil, is to supply the silica, in a soluble state, from its natural condition, (it being found in abundance for this object in every soil, except in such as are formed almost exclusively of peat,) for the demands of the crop. an increased supply of lime and gypsum, beyond what is found in the ashes, is frequently advantageous; and when the latter is beneficial, as it generally is, it should never be withheld to an extent in the highest degree useful. of the operation of this last material, beyond yielding a portion of its sulphur to the gluten, we have as yet no satisfactory explanation. in respect to the theory of its concentrating ammonia in the soil from the atmosphere, we have very contradictory authority. liebig asserts it, johnstone questions it, and dana denies it; yet the increasing fertility its application produces, would seem to give the weight of experience in favor of liebig's views. the chlorine and soda, if not furnished by the ashes in proportions sufficiently large, may be procured by the application of common salt, which yields both. the phosphoric acid may be obtained in any required quantity, by the addition of bones, which, dry or calcined, yield both that acid and lime, phosphate of lime constituting per cent. of bones. most soils contain alumina in abundance to furnish the food requisite for wheat; yet as it is one of the most valuable soils for this grain, both as seizing upon and retaining ammonia, and furnishing a firm foothold for the roots of the plants, it is important that lands intended for this purpose, should be adequately supplied with alumina as a top-dressing, if naturally deficient in it. we have, then, above, all the inorganic materials for the purpose required. but there is about per cent. of the crop yet to be made up of the organic constituents, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. how shall they be provided for? first, by the selection of a calcareous or clay soil, which will furnish a proper bed for the roots of the plant, and by their peculiar mechanical texture and chemical composition, will not only hold the manures incorporated with them, but also draw some of the requisite constituents largely from the air; the former absorbing carbonic acid, and the latter ammonia. second, by the liberal application of common farm-yard manure, to a crop preceding that of wheat, which will leave a rich mould highly conducive to an abundant yield of perfect grain. an instance has been recently given, of a maryland farmer raising large successive crops of wheat, by the application of putrescent manure directly upon the grain, and all injurious effects were obviated by the use of a moderate quantity of lime. this is a practice, however, which has not been found generally to be successful, causing either blight, or such rapid and luxuriant growth, as to crinkle and lodge. this effect is also produced in peaty and rich alluvial soils, where the silicate of potash, so essential to the formation of a strong, upright stalk, is not furnished in a quantity large enough for the object. third, the liberal use of charcoal scattered through the soil. it is claimed from its use, that the wheat crop of france has been largely augmented within the few past years. several instances of its greatly beneficial effects, have been noticed in this country; though its influence has not hitherto been felt on wheat, by an extensive virginia planter, in two or three recent experiments. the great power of condensing gases peculiar to charcoal, was noticed by some of the early chemists. murray mentions it, and saussure gives a table of results, in which he shows that perfectly dry charcoal from boxwood, will absorb volumes of ammonia; of muriatic acid; of sulphurous acid; of sulphuretted hydrogen; of carbonic acid, &c. this condensation takes place in its pores, and does not produce any alteration, or new chemical compounds of the gases thus stored up; but their use in an agricultural point of view, is invaluable; for while the coal yields no fertilizing matter from its own substance, being nearly indestructible, it takes from the atmosphere in great abundance, and hoards up for the future use of the plants, one of the most evanescent, as well as most useful materials for their perfection, viz., the nitrogen contained in the ammonia. a fourth means for procuring a good yield of wheat, is by alternating with clover, and turning in a liberal share of it as a preparation for the wheat. this is practised extensively throughout the wheat districts of the united states, and has resulted in great benefit; for besides yielding a portion of food to the grain, it keeps the ground in the best possible mechanical condition. a fifth means, is to return all the straw and chaff to the soil, as they contain a large quantity of the identical materials required for a succeeding crop. with the foregoing causes in full action, and an adequate supply of moisture, whether from rains, dews, or artificial irrigation, the crop will draw largely from the atmosphere for the supply of its required organic constituents. carbon will be furnished from its carbonic acid; nitrogen from its ammonia; hydrogen from its vapor, dews, and ammonia; and oxygen from air, water, and soil. the use of all these materials, _together with the selection of the best varieties of seed_, will give the first three requisites of a wheat crop; large measure, heavy weight, and much flour. manures peculiarly adapted to the object, will tend in the highest degree to produce the greatest quantity of _gluten_, the most valuable portion of the flour. it is true, that climate has much to do in condensing, and of course, improving the value of wheat. it is a general principle, that the warmer and drier the climate where it is grown, the more valuable the grain. wheat from the south of europe, is worth more than when grown in the north; and that from any portion of the united states, owing to our superior dryness of climate, is more nutritive than what is produced in great britain. this difference is increased from to per cent. in favor of the american. gluten varies in wheat from to per cent.; in rye, to ; barley, to ; and oats to . the _quality_ of wheat with regard to the quantity of gluten it contains, is nicely estimated and fully regarded by accomplished bakers. the nitrates of potash, or soda, are frequently used in england to increase not only the quantity, but especially the quality of their flour, a practice the high prices of land and produce may render profitable there, though it is hardly to be expected they could generally be used in this country to a profit. in an experiment lately tried in england, one acre of wheat dressed with one cwt. of nitrate of soda, gave ½ bushels, weighing ¾ lbs. per bushel; another acre dressed with two cwt. yielded - / bushels, weighing ½ lbs.; while an undressed acre, in every other respect similar to the others, yielded only - / bushels, weighing lbs. numerous other instances could be given equally conclusive. although we may not be justified in using these somewhat expensive salts, so highly charged with nitrogen, there are sources of supply within our reach, especially rich in this material, and abounding in many of the other ingredients of fertility. these are animal manures of all kinds, but more particularly urine, human excrements, and the offal of animals, such as uncalcined bones, horns, hair, hides, flesh, blood, &c. all of these contain large proportions of nitrogen, and if carefully incorporated into the soil, would tend largely to the increased production and value of the wheat crops throughout the country. an experiment was made in manuring wheat with cow dung, which contains the smallest proportion of nitrogen, and this yielded · per cent. of gluten. another parcel, grown on land manured with human urine, gave · per cent. thus it will be seen, that the maximum of value in wheat, may be reached, by the application of an article, almost everywhere wasted in the united states. it is by skilfully feeding the wheat plant with all the nourishment that it can take up, that the crops may be indefinitely increased. lord hardwicke stated, in a speech before the royal ag. soc. of england, that the fine suffolk wheat had produced bushels per acre; and another and more improved variety had yielded the astonishing quantity, of bushels per acre. there is no comparison between the capacity of an animal and seeds, to produce results; for while the former is limited to a definite growth, which no effort of science or skill can augment, a seed may multiply beyond almost any assignable limit. we have been shown a stool of wheat, originating from a single seed, the growth of the present season, with stalks, averaging from to grains on each head. over , perfect grains, is thus the product of a single parent in one season. it requires, then, but the proper pabulum to produce good wheat, within the wheat latitudes, in every portion of the union. some of our worn-out eastern lands may be so totally unsuited to its growth, as not to justify the efforts of reclaiming or fitting them for this object, especially, while we have a region in the west, every way adapted by nature, to its most successful cultivation. but we can not for a moment doubt, that when those western fields become comparatively full, industry and science will combine to clothe again those hills and valleys (now but partially robed with a scanty herbage), with teeming crops of wheat, such as gave to them, in their pristine days, a fame for fertility seldom exceeded. r. l. allen. * * * * * _for the american agriculturist._ a pennsylvania dairy. _philadelphia, nov. th, ._ noticing in your october number an account of a dairy on long island, i am induced to give you a description of one in this vicinity. mr. henry charley has a dairy farm near laurel hill, where he keeps from to cows, consisting of ayrshire, holderness, alderny, durham, and a few natives; but mostly crossed with a fine, thorough-bred short-horn bull, and is raising full bloods, and high grades of this breed as fast as possible. he makes veal of his bull-calves, and raises all his best heifer-calves from his best cows for his own use. i found the cows luxuriating in a rich clover pasture when i visited them last summer between and o'clock, the hour for afternoon milking, from which they were taken by the herdsman, and driven half a mile to the barn. this is a stone building feet long, feet wide, with a wing of feet, the same width as the barn, high walls, and steep roof, which make it capable of holding a great quantity of fodder, consisting last year mostly of cornstalks, (some of which he bought very cheap of his neighbors, while others let theirs stand in the field and this spring raked them up and burned them,) rye straw, and oats unthrashed, all of which he cuts and steams--sometimes with a little hay cut also and mixed with the above articles. these are all steamed together, or each separately, (as best suits the appetites of the cows) in a large vat, connected with a pipe through which the steam passes from the boiler, which stands in a room adjoining with stone or ground floor. the chimney is of sheet-iron running up through the roof, and coal used for fuel, renders the risk for insurance at a very low rate. the water is supplied from a spring running into the yard, and thence through a pipe into the boiler. the cows are also watered from the same when the weather is stormy in winter, and they are not allowed to go out. but to return from this digression. after the fodder is sufficiently cooked, which takes but a short time, it is taken out into other larger vats or troughs, with scoop shovels, and there left to cool; then a suitable portion of indian meal or ground rye, buck-wheat, or oats, or any two or all four mixed and ground together, (which in my opinion would be better,) adding a portion of ship-stuffs, shorts, or even bran. this is the food for the cows at all seasons, except when there is a full supply of grass. they are driven to a woods pasture for exercise and air when there is little or no grass. air and exercise are indispensably necessary for the health of cows, and without these, the milk will always be more or less unhealthy, according to the nature of their confinement. when the cows were brought into the yard, i was puzzled to know how they were to be handled; but the stable doors being thrown open, each cow entered the door nearest her stall, and went to it with as much regularity as a young miss goes to her seat in a boarding-school. there is a drop in the floor immediately behind the cows, inches wide and inches deep; into this all the excrements fall, the water running off immediately to a reservoir prepared for the purpose of receiving it; this, together with all the manure, was taken away daily, and put upon the land or crops or in a heap to make compost; so that the premises were kept perfectly clean and sweet. the floor was covered with a thin bed of cut straw, which was passed off with the manure as it became soiled, and by being cut, worked immediately into and incorporated itself with the manure, without vexing the husbandman or gardener as long green manure so frequently does. the floor behind the cows, between the trough to catch the liquid and the wall, is six feet wide, with strong plank platforms or tables on which to set the vessels containing the milk. there is an open space directly over the vat for steaming, where all the feed is cut and passed down through a hopper into the vat; also, hoppers or spouts leading from the meal room over head directly into the vats, which contain the steamed feed for cooking. the mangers in which the cows are fed are broad, so that the food may be thrown into them with scoop shovels without waste, of which i found nothing of the kind about the whole premises. if a little too much feed is given to one animal, and consequently left, it is carefully scraped out and fed to one having a better appetite; thus the mangers were kept clean and sweet. mr. charley feeds roots, but to what extent i did not learn. i hope he may be induced to write you a letter, giving a description of his cutting machine, which does its work better than any one i have ever seen; having two blades coming together like shears, cutting corn-stalks through their joints with as much apparent ease as a pair of tailor's shears would cut a thread. there is a stable for dried cows which were feeding for the butcher. box stalls are provided for cows about to calve; the young cattle are kept by themselves, as are also the calves. mr. charley was not at home when i visited his dairy; but this disappointment to me was made up by the kind mrs. c., who, with justifiable pride, showed me her spring house with its large copper caldron for scalding her milk tubs, pans, pails, churns, &c. &c., in the best of order, all of which she personally superintends and looks after; and whenever there is an overstock of milk for city customers, it is here converted into butter of the choicest quality, and each market-day finds her at her stand with her butter and lots of garden vegetables, the raising of which she also superintends and takes into the city at the dawn of day. that some families are sick and others miserably poor, is not strange, to one who looks behind the curtain and sees what can never otherwise be described. s. a. * * * * * _for the american agriculturist._ reply to the gardener's chronicle. _new-york, th november, ._ the gardeners' chronicle, published in england, has the following criticism on my essay of dock-mud, inserted in your april number of this year, page :-- "we trust the editor is more correct in his other statements than in this, concerning the percentage of sea-salt in guano, which contains little more than a trace of it." i have never analysed the guano, but depended on one or two analyses given by professor johnston, reader of chemistry in the university of durham, england, in the appendix to his lectures on agricultural chemistry. he gives tables of contents of two parcels, the first containing . per cent., the second rather more than per cent. of sea-salt. i took the larger quantity, to prove that if dock-mud contained sea-salt, it could be no objection to it as a fertilizer. it is highly important that the tables of analysis of celebrated manures should be correctly given, and if the editor of the chronicle can furnish correct tables, he will be conferring an important boon on the agricultural community of the whole world. wm. partridge. * * * * * _from the american agriculturist almanac._ southern calendar for december. the closing month of the year is one in which every agriculturist should take an interest, and for many useful hints we will refer the reader to the northern calendar for this month. cotton-picking will probably occupy this month until christmas, when this business will have been completed, if the culture has been well managed, and the season favorable. it would be well to start your plows and break up ground for corn; let nothing but cotton prevent--not even cleaning; for plowing is only one job; yet, if done soon, it is generally advantageous, and if bad weather should set in when it must be done, time will be lost, and a drawback ensue, whereas by plowing in time, cleaning can be done later. in weather not employed about other labor more important, manure and trim all kinds of vines and fruit-trees, except the orange tribe. transplant evergreens and other trees, sweet briers, honeysuckles, jasmines, &c.; sow late peas and beans, and set out onions for seed; set all hands at work in cleaning up for other crops, picking up limbs, grubbing, cleaning up hollows, sides of bayous, cutting down corn-stalks with hoes, gathering materials for making manure, &c., &c. if you do not live in the immediate vicinity, say five or six miles, from a sugar-plantation, by all means keep bees. this can be rendered one of the most productive branches of business of the day. procure a few swarms at first, and they will soon multiply to any extent required. use sections of hollow logs, four or five feet long, for hives, if you have no other more convenient materials to make them of, and allow the bees to work over the honey a second time, that you may avoid the injurious effects in eating honey which may have been gathered from poisonous flowers. if the above-named class of hives be used, there will be no necessity for killing the bees; for when the hives are filled with honey, they can be removed without harm from the end opposite to that in which the bees are at work, and they will immediately go to work and fill the vacancy. in most parts of the southern states bees maybe kept at work during the winter. if there are not flowers for them, they can be made to work over the bad honey collected the season before. this is also a busy month for the sugar-planter. he will be active in cutting and carting his cane with all possible despatch; and he should employ one or more practical and intelligent men to conduct the operations of the mill. in the manufacture of sugar, we know of no better method than that given by professor mapes in a letter to hon. h. l. ellsworth, from which we make the following extract:-- . to cut the cane as ripe as possible, but before any acetic acid is formed; litmus paper, touched to the fresh-cut cane, will turn red if acid. . express the juice without loss of time, as every moment after cutting will deteriorate its quality. . a small quantity of clear lime-water, say one quart to a hundred gallons of juice, should be added the moment it is expressed, unless the juice shows acidity with litmus paper; in that case, no lime should be used, but a solution of sal-soda or soda ash should be added, until it is precisely neutral. . when the juice is neutral, free from excess of acid or alkali, it should be evaporated in such an apparatus as would finish its charge in minutes; if the boiling power is too small, good crystallization can not possibly be obtained. the whole time occupied, from the cutting of the cane to finishing its boiling, should not exceed one hour. . to know when the boiling is finished, place a thermometer in the kettle, and continue to evaporate until it stands at ° fahrenheit. if, when placed to run off after cooling, it should be found too freely boiled, the next time boil to °, or, if too light to run off, to °, and so on. . the kettle or boiler should be so arranged, that the moment it is done its charge should be thrown into a cooler, capable of holding a number of charges. the first charge should be left in the cooler with stirring, until the second charge is thrown in; then with an oar scrape the crystals found on the side and bottom of the cooler loose, and gently stir the whole mass together: the less stirred the better; so continue at the letting in of each charge, to stir gently; and when all is in the cooler, let the whole stand until it cools down to °; then fill out into sugar-moulds of a capacity not less than gallons. when cooled in the mould sufficiently, say fourteen hours, pull the plug out of the bottom of the mould, and insert a sharp point, nearly as large as the hole, some six inches; withdraw the point, and stand the mould on a pot to drip. . if the sugar is intended to be brown, leaving it standing on the pot for a sufficient length of time, in a temperature of °, will run off its molasses, and leave it in a merchantable shape; it will probably require twenty days. it can then be thrown out of the moulds, and will be fit for use. when moulds can not be obtained, conical vessels of wood or metal, with a hole at the apex, will answer equally well. d. * * * * * _from the american agriculturist almanac._ northern calendar for december. settle all your accounts, collect what is due you, and pay what you owe. "short settlements make long friends." examine your farm statistics, and see what have been the results of your experiments with the different kinds of manures, seeds, modes of tillage, &c., &c.; and note them well for future use. no farmer ought to be without such a book, in which all experiments should be carefully recorded at the time, and the results carried into a separate book for his own use hereafter; and if new and valuable discoveries are obtained, communicate them to some agricultural periodical for the benefit of the world. recollect, you have the experience of thousands to guide your operations, and, by contributing to the general stock whatever may be useful, you are but returning to mankind a part of the benefits you have derived from them. but avoid twaddle and humbuggery, and oft-published statements, and prolix or tedious narration, and give all the circumstances material to the subjects in the briefest, plainest, simplest language possible. above all things, send in your subscription to one or more valuable agricultural papers, and get as many of your neighbors to subscribe as possible; and consider, in so doing, you are benefiting yourself by it ten times as much as you are the publishers. summer is peculiarly the time for making observations and experiments, and winter the time for communicating them. _remember the poor_, not only in this month, but every month through the year, and especially during the inclemency of winter. you need not give so much to them outright, but endeavor to put them in a way of making themselves comfortable, by affording them employment, by which, you may be benefited, while doing them good. you thus confer on them a triple benefit, by furnishing them the means of comfortable subsistence, teaching them to help themselves, and avoiding the habit of receiving _charity_, which insensibly weakens their sense of self-dependance. stock now requires increased attention: they must be well housed, or at least protected against wind, with a shelter to which they can resort in storms, well supplied with salt, and abundance of water, if possible, in the yard, where they can get it when they want, and without wearying themselves in looking for it, and wasting their manure by dropping it in the road, or by a running stream or pond, where it will all be lost. their feed should be regular, and given to them as near stated times as possible. they look for their food then at certain hours, and are not uneasy and fretful till the customary period arrives, when they again fill themselves, and rest quietly, digesting their food till it is time to look for another supply. if brought up in regular habits, brutes are much better time-keepers than many are disposed to consider them who have not observed closely their intelligence. now is a good time to break steers and colts, while the roads are smooth and hard. they ought to be early accustomed to handling and the halter, and be gently treated, by which they are more disposed to yield to the wishes of their master. if they have been always used to good treatment, they will acquire a confidence in their keepers, and the more readily submit to their guidance. 'tis always better to train them with strong, well-broken animals. sympathy has more to do with the brute creation than they have credit for generally; and the good habits and orderly behavior of the older animals, they have been accustomed to treat with deference, will not be without their wholesome effect on them. this is the best month for spreading out hemp for dew-rotting, in the latitudes below °, as it gets a whiter and better rot than if spread earlier. kitchen-garden.--every fine day uncover the frames in which are lettuce and cauliflower plants; otherwise they will become spindling, from want of air. hot-beds can now be made, for forcing asparagus for the table in january. if the ground is open, continue trenching for spring crops. when the ground is frozen, cart manure, repair fences, clean seeds, prepare tools for spring. provide pea-sticks, bean-poles, &c., and finish all that will be required in the spring, and which can be done when the ground is frozen. fruit-garden and orchard.--finish those things which may have been omitted the previous month. if the weather continues open, digging and plowing may be done advantageously. perform any work that may tend to forward your business in the spring. flower-garden and pleasure-grounds.--continue to protect your beds of bulbs, and also flower-beds and shrubs as directed in last month. should the weather continue open in the early part of this month, bulbs may still be planted. they should not be left as late as this, but if such has been the case, they had better be planted now than left until spring. now carefully protect seedling bulbs. the more tender kinds of trees can have their roots protected from frost by laying manure or long litter about them. foreign agricultural news. by the steamship caledonia, we are favored by the receipt of our european journals up to the th november. markets.--_ashes_, both pots and pearls, have advanced, and were brisk of sale. _cotton_ had declined / d. per lb. the recent advices from bombay and calcutta of the east india crop, were not quite so favorable. the stock of cotton on hand at liverpool on the st november, was , bales, against , at same period last season. _flour_ was flat, and little doing in it. _naval stores_, declining. _provisions_ were about the same as by our last advices, with the exception of cheese, the finer qualities of which were of quick sale. _tobacco_, steady and firm. _money_ still plenty, and the low rates of interest prevail. _american stocks_ continue nearly the same as at our last. very few recent transactions. _agricultural school._--we see by the berwick warder, that an agricultural school is established in aberdeenshire, by the practical farmers of that county, which promises to be a very useful institution. it is superintended by mr. r. o. young, and we like its arrangements better than anything of the kind we have yet seen. to explain these, we make a few quotations from the prospectus. the young gentlemen who may be intrusted to mr. young's charge for the purpose of being instructed in the principles and practice of scottish agriculture, will have daily opportunities of witnessing the regular routine of farming operations going on at the farm, and of taking an active part in these operations. they will be required to keep, in a farm-book, a daily record of what has been done on the farm. explanations will be given of the principles upon which the different operations are conducted, and upon which they will be examined at stated times. regular minutes will be kept by the pupils of all such explanations, as well as of any facts that may come to their knowledge through their occasional intercourse with the farmers of the country. there will be stated times set apart for reading, as text-books, the most approved agricultural works of the day; and on the subjects of their reading mr. y. will minutely examine the young gentlemen, and will also require them to write exercises upon given agricultural topics--particularly those that bear on practice. while it will be mr. y.'s care to direct the attention of the pupils to chemistry and geology in their application to practical agriculture, a branch of study until lately very little attended to, he will make arrangements for procuring the services of the professor of agriculture in the university of aberdeen, for a few weeks every summer, to give lectures and conduct experiments on the analysis of soils, manures, &c.--thus securing to the pupils more than a mere theoretical knowledge of this important branch of agricultural education. as nothing is so much calculated to impress any subject upon the youthful mind, as to invest it with a _personal interest_, mr. y. proposes to devote to the exclusive use of his pupils, a small farm, of about acres in extent, adjoining to his other farm. this small farm contains a variety of soils, upon which experiments of different kinds may be conducted, on a small scale. it will be possessed and managed by the pupils, under mr. y.'s direction, and upon certain equitable rules as to each pupil's share of the concern. each pupil will be required to keep regular books, exhibiting all disbursements and receipts, and the results of all experiments tried, with every particular connected with such experiments. each pupil will be required to take his share of management, &c., and the profits of the concern, after paying a certain moderate rent, will, at each term, be divided among the young gentlemen, in proportion to their respective interests. it is conceived that such a plan will have a strong tendency to promote exactness, regularity, and business habits; but, without the consent of their parents or guardians, pupils will not be asked to join in this scheme. farmers' magazine.--_meat-salting instrument._--the instrument resembles a common syringe of more than ordinary dimensions, and, although not quite so simple in its construction, it is intended to be used in the same way as the syringe, provided the point or tube be not exposed to the air. the advantages to be derived from the use of the instrument are explained by the fact that a joint of meat may, in the simplest manner, be properly salted in less than ten minutes. the brine is made of the usual ingredients, and after the salt and other substances are completely dissolved, the liquid is poured into the machine, and the nipple or tube (the circumference of which is perforated with three small holes) is inserted into the most solid part of a joint of meat, and the contents are, by a very strong pressure, forced through the fibres until the brine is seen to escape on the surface. for this purpose a smaller quantity of pickle is used than is employed in the ordinary method of curing meat, and the bone (if there be any,) in the centre becomes thoroughly impregnated with the fluid. by the present mode of salting meat, it is a matter of some difficulty to inject the brine into the innermost part of a large joint, whereas by the process which is adopted in the use of mr. carson's instrument, the size or substance of the meat presents no additional trouble to the operator. _prince albert's annual sale of live stock._--since prince albert has turned farmer, he has an annual sale of his fat stock, and is said to realize from to per cent. profit on it. the last took place in october, at which time sheep, oxen, and cows and heifers, were disposed of, realising him £ , , (about $ , ;) a clever sum for fat sheep and cattle. _produce of ewes._--count de gourcey states in that part of his agricultural tour in europe, just received, that mr. walker, manager of the late duke of gordon's estates, in scotland, informed him that from leicester ewes, and as many southdowns, they _bring up on an average_, lambs. we wish we had possessed this information when writing our notes to mr. grove's letter in this paper, as it would have been something of an argument in our favor, regarding the difference of opinion existing between us about the number of lambs bred in the united states. new farmers' journal.--_exportation of cattle to prussia._--one bull and eight heifers have been recently purchased in england, for the royal agricultural society of prussia. netting for sheep-folds.--the fibre of the cocoa-nut is said to make the most durable netting for sheep-folds; it out-wearing several sets of tarred-hemp netting, and is so light, that a herdsman can with ease carry yards of it. _soiling._--feeding animals in the summer-season with green food, cut daily, and given them in stalls or yards, is far preferable to grazing--first, because the food is consumed with less waste; secondly, because rest is an equivalent for food. the bodies of animals do not remain stationary, but are constantly wasting in proportion to the amount of exercise they undergo--hence, while they rove at large, they must receive from time to time new supplies in the shape of food, to make up for this waste, which are not needed when they are at rest, and consequently, by the system of soiling, less food will be required to fatten them. thirdly, because by soiling there is an increase of valuable manure, which, by the old method of grazing, was nearly altogether lost. _american provisions._--within the last few days, boxes of american cheese have been received in liverpool. every year the quality of the american cheese improves. another article, which is arriving in very large quantities, is american lard, which is coming into use for many purposes for which salt and even fresh butter has been employed. very excellent salted beef has come from the united states in considerable quantities. _epidemic among cattle._--this has broken out again in a most virulent shape in the north of england. journal of agriculture.--_miller's safety reins._--these consist of gut covered with leather, and are, therefore, proof against fracture; and being round, and of neat light appearance, form a rather ornamental and sporting-like appendage to harness or saddle. they are mounted in this way:--they pass through a hook placed on the head of the harness-bridle, and through a leather loop on the head of the riding-bridle, and come down on each side of the neck. about middle-way down the neck is a coupling with two swivels, which receive the reins from the head, and they then pass through the dees of the harness, and through the turrets of the harness-saddle, and along to the front of the splashboard to a rein-holder, by which they are held always ready for use. the head of the horse and the turrets of the saddle being both higher than the throat, and the coupling being short, and having leave to traverse the reins on each side of the neck, it settles on that part of the throat at which the reins, on being pulled, exert the greatest force, when, the windpipe being forcibly compressed, the horse becomes affected in his respiration, and, therefore, stands still, or slackens his pace for breath, which he immediately obtains on the reins being slackened. thus, feeling he is mastered, the horse shows no farther inclination to run off again; but in case he should renew symptoms of starting off, a few firm grips of the coupling on the throat will let him feel the futility of his attempts. in explanation of the origin of the invention, mr. miller stated that he was a farmer's son, and that, in his youth, he used to be employed at times to assist in catching horses at grass, by means of surrounding them with a rope, borne by a person at each end of it. he remarked that, in this service, although no restraint was laid upon the horses when the rope rested on their chests, yet, whenever it could be got upon their throats, they instantly stood still and allowed themselves to be taken. the idea which this recollection suggested, of the probable effect of pressure on the throat in stopping a runaway horse, led mr. miller to the contrivance of his safety-reins. in his first experiment, the band which connects the reins under the neck was attached to the headstall by hooks and straps; but it has been considered an improvement to allow it to move freely upon the reins, on which it settles in contact with the throat, in a proper position for use when required. our communications with mr. miller impressed us favorably in regard to his contrivance; but, wishing to see it in practice we availed ourselves of an offer by him to afford us an opportunity of judging of it in operation. we, accordingly, on a day appointed, accompanied him in a carriage drawn by one horse, for the purpose of trial; and we witnessed as spectators, as well as made ourselves, repeated tests of the reins, with the horse going at a smart canter, both on a level road and on a descent, and we invariably observed that the tightening of the reins caused the horse immediately to stop. no injurious effect seemed to be produced on the horse by the interruption of his respiration. he always appeared to breathe freely, and to be ready to resume his work, as soon as the tension of the reins was relaxed. upon the whole, therefore, we consider mr. miller's invention to be a neat and simple, as well as, to appearance, an effective contrivance for the accomplishment of its important object, in the prevention of the disastrous accidents which not unfrequently occur from horses running away; and we think it reflects much credit on the ingenuity of its inventor. gardeners' chronicle.--_rhododendron._--there is a variety of the rhododendron ponticum growing here, which appears to be different from any of the others. it comes into flower about the same time as the others, but instead of unfolding its blossoms at the same rate as its neighbors, it only opens a few at a time, and continues long in flower. it did not cease flowering this season the whole month of august; consequently was nearly a month longer in bloom than the others. it has a southern exposure, and is sheltered from the north and east. _blight on grain from the barberry._--in the chronicle of august , under the head of "vulgar errors," we read as follows: "people still maintain that the barberry blights their grain." this is, nevertheless, a matter deserving attention; for in this, as in many other instances, a popular prejudice has been founded on truth, although the real cause has been often overlooked. some writers have treated this subject with respect, and among them is dr. thornton. the latter says that the "leaves are very subject to the _rubigo_, which will infect the grain in the neighborhood." here the secret is at once explained, and the aversion of farmers to the barberry-bush at once justified. the vulgar notion is, that the barberry exercises some evil agency upon grain within a certain distance, and accordingly farmers will never suffer it to grow near their fields. they are right as to the effect, but they attribute it to a wrong cause. i have seen some remarkable instances of grain perishing in a semicircle, in front of a barberry-bush, and extending a good way into a field. any one who has but superficially noticed the barberry, must have observed that the leaves and young shoots of the shrub were covered with a peculiar kind of blight or mildew. now it is by no means extraordinary that this should be carried by the wind into grain-fields, and infect the grain so as to cause its destruction. this is the true explanation of the mischief caused by the barberry to grain in its neighborhood. [this is the common explanation, but if any one will take the trouble to examine the parasitical plant which attacks the barberry, and that of grain, he will find that they are totally different things. one is the Æcidium berberidis, and the other some species of uredo or puccinia, for it is sometimes one and sometimes the other. we should as soon believe that a hen's egg would be hatched into toads, as that the seed of an Æcidium would produce an uredo or puccinia. we are aware of the facts mentioned by mr. wighton, for we have seen them ourselves, and they form a curious problem yet to solve.] review of the market. prices current in new york, november , . ashes, pots, per lbs. $ to $ pearls, do. " bacon sides, smoked, per lb. ½ " ½ in pickle do. " bale rope do. " bark, quercitron per ton " barley per bush. " beans, white do. ½ " beef, mess per bbl. " prime do. " smoked per lb. " ½ rounds, in pickle do. " ½ beeswax, am. yellow do. " bolt rope do. " bristles, american do. " butter, table do. " shipping do. " candles, mould, tallow do. " sperm do. " stearic do. " cheese do. " cider brandy, eastern per gal. " western do. " clover seed per lb. ½ " ½ coal, anthracite lbs. " sidney and pictou per chal. " cordage, american per lb. " corn, northern per bush. " southern do. " cotton per lb. " cotton bagging, amer. hemp per yard. " american flax do. " feathers per lb. " flax, american do. " ½ flax seed, rough per bush. " clean do. -- -- " -- -- flour, northern and western per bbl. " fancy do. " ½ southern per bbl. " richmond city mills do. " rye do. " hams, smoked per lb. " ½ pickled do. " hay per lbs. " hides, dry southern per lb. " hemp, russia, clean per ton. " american, water-rotted do. " do dew-rotted do. " hops per lb. " horns per " lard per lb. ½ " lead do. ½ " sheet and bar do. " ½ meal, corn per bbl. " corn per hhd. " molasses, new orleans per gal. " mustard, american per lb. " oats, northern per bush. " southern do. " oil, linseed, american per gal. " castor do. " lard do. " oil cake per lbs. " -- -- peas, field per bush. " -- -- pitch per bbl. ½ " plaster of paris per ton. " ground, in bbls. per cwt. " -- -- pork, mess per bbl. " prime do. " rice per lbs. " rosin per bbl. " rye per bush. " salt per sack " shoulders, smoked per lb. " ½ pickled do. " spirits turpentine, southern per gal. " sugar, new orleans per lb. " ½ sumac, american per ton " tallow per lb. " ½ tar per bbl. " timothy seed per bush. " tobacco per lb. " ½ turpentine per bbl. " wheat, western per bush. " southern do. " whiskey, american per gal. " wool, saxony per lb. " merino do. " half-blood do. " common do. " advertisements new york cattle market--november . at market, , beef cattle, ( from the south), cows and calves, and , sheep and lambs. prices.--_beef cattle_ have slightly improved, and we quote $ . a $ to $ . a $ . for the best. , unsold. _cows and calves._--all taken at $ a $ . _sheep and lambs._--sales of lambs at $ a $ , and of sheep at . ½ a $ . . unsold. _hay_.--sales at ½ a cents per cwt. * * * * * remarks.--_ashes_, since the late news from europe, have been in good request. _candles_, especially those made of stearic, are brisk. _cotton_. the day after the arrival of the caledonia with advices of a fall in england, this article receded nearly ¼ of a cent per lb.; but a brisk demand springing up for export, it has recovered, and is about the same now as before the reception of the late news. we hear nothing particularly new from the south regarding the picking, the weather upon the whole supposed to be more favorable. export from the united states since st september last, , bales; same time last year, , ; same time year before, , . _flour_. the continued navigation on the canals, has brought us an unprecedented supply, and a large quantity has gone into store; a good business, however, continues to be done in it. the total arrivals this season have been , , brls. _rye-flour_ is dull. _buckwheat_, very scarce and advancing. _cornmeal_, dull. _wheat_ is in good demand, and prices stiff. _rye_, declining. _barley_, _oats_, and _corn_, in fair demand. _hemp_, dull. _hops_, improving. _molasses_, not much inquired for. _beef_ and _pork_, quiet, and little doing at present in them. _lard_, much wanted. _hogs_. extreme rates now in cincinnati are from $ . to $ . ; we are free to repeat, however, that we believe the first quality of hogs will be worth $ by christmas. _rice_, of the better qualities, scarce. _seeds_, especially timothy, in good request. _sugar_, quite inactive. _tobacco_, fine kentucky, scarce and wanted; stems, none in market. _wool_ seems to have taken a fresh start again, and prices have an upward tendency. _stocks_. a large business continues to be done in these, and they are still gradually advancing. _money_ plenty, and seeking investment at the usual low rates. _real estate_ seems at last to have come into demand, and considerable sales in this species of property have recently taken place at good prices. it must henceforth advance. our population and wealth have increased in an unprecedented ratio within the past four years, and there is no reason why real estate should remain at its late low prices, and transactions in it any longer stagnant. _business generally_, the past season, has been extremely good; and we do not hesitate to say, few years can show a greater amount of substantial profits. we consider the days of darkness as passed, and we may now look forward to the future with the brightest anticipations. _packing pork._--on this subject we quote from the cincinnati chronicle of d november. for the benefit of our distant readers, who may be disposed to send their orders here for pork, we give below the pork-merchant's prices for _packing_ this season, based upon cents per bushel for turk-island salt, ½ cents for bbls., cents per bushel for kenhawa fine salt, and cents to $ . per day, for laborers. for receiving, weighing, and cutting the hogs, a block-fee of cents each. for packing per bbl., including all charges, $ . _a_ $ . . for salting lbs. in bulk, including saltpetre for the joints, $ . _a_ $ . . smoking per . lbs., including washing, $ . . rendering lard, _a_ cents per lbs., which does not include the price of the keg or barrel-- to cents is also charged on each keg or barrel, for nailing the hoops, boring, weighing, and marking. the cooperage is charged at cost. to correspondents. --a. b. your package of essays is sent to t. c. r. of p., as directed, and we have written you in full in it. the sheep-articles shall be condensed as you suggest, if we can possibly find room, and papers in any event sent to the gentlemen whose names are given. good south-downs, or merinos, can be had from $ to $ each. it is not worth while to transport lower-priced animals such a distance. for rambouillets, $ to $ each. see mr. collins' letter, sept. no., page . henry a. field, j. w. stuart, s. b. parsons, james bates, and d. k. minor, in our next. acknowledgment. --from some unknown friend, we have received a tin case containing two fine paintings of cattle, sheep, &c. we should be pleased to know to whom we are indebted for these, for no note accompanied them, and we can hardly guess. * * * * * black galloway cattle. a pure-bred imported cow, and a bull of the galloway or kyloe breed of scotch highland cattle, are for sale in this vicinity. these animals are very fine of their kind, and were chosen from one of the most celebrated breeders of this stock in scotland. the cow took several prizes at the agricultural shows before being shipped to this country, and gives a superior quality of milk. the bull is quite equal to the cow, and they will be sold at a reasonable price. apply, post paid, to the editor of this paper. * * * * * farming lands for sale. for sale, about acres of choice farming lands, lying on the erie canal and niagara river, miles from buffalo, and one mile below the hydraulic works in black rock. there is a due proportion of cleared and timber land, and the soil is equally adapted for grain, grass, and roots. its proximity to an extensive and growing market, as well as the convenience, beauty, and healthfulness of the location, render this one of the most desirable situations in western new york. the most liberal credit will be given to purchasers. address, post paid, r. l. allen, main st., buffalo. * * * * * linnÆan botanic garden and nursery--late prince's. flushing, l. i., near new york. the new descriptive catalogue, not only of fruit, but also of ornamental trees, shrubs, and plants, cultivated and for sale at this ancient and celebrated nursery (known as prince's, and by the above title for nearly fifty years), with directions for their culture, may be had _gratis_ on application to the new proprietors by mail, post paid. the collection at this establishment is unrivalled, and prices generally very much reduced; and the proprietors flatter themselves that the catalogue will be found to surpass in extent of information and usefulness, anything of the kind ever before presented to the public, and to be worthy of a permanent place in the library of the horticulturist. orders will be promptly executed. winter & co., proprietors. flushing, oct. th, . * * * * * a stock man wanted to go south. a planter, in the state of georgia, wishes to engage a faithful competent man to take charge of his stock. if he be married, and his wife be a good dairywoman, she will also find employment. the situation is in the interior of the country, and quite healthy. none need apply if above middle age, or who have not had some experience in their business in this country, and can bring the best of references. address the editor of this paper. * * * * * business agency. the subscriber will attend promptly to the execution of all orders for the purchase of stock, agricultural implements, or merchandise of any kind; also the negotiation of loans, sales of lands, payment of taxes, &c. he has been more or less engaged in mercantile pursuits in this city for ten years, and has an extensive acquaintance with moneyed men, and a thorough knowledge of business in general. cash or produce must invariably be in hand, before orders for purchases can be executed. a. b. allen. broadway, new york. * * * * * cheap cash bookstore, broadway, new york. saxton & miles, publishers, and dealers in books in every department of literature, at very reduced prices for _cash_. s. & m. publish the following book, which should be in every family in the united states: gunn's domestic medicine, or the poor man's friend. among the many publications of more than doubtful utility, with which our presses groan, it is pleasant to offer to the public one which, while it can not injure the mental and moral powers, is capable of improving our health and prolonging our days. it is now about ten years since this work was first published, since which time it has passed through many large editions, and the astonishing number of _one hundred thousand_ copies has been sold in the southern and western states, and the demand is increasing. it has just been revised and corrected, containing pages, and executed in superior style. people may be disposed to smile when we tell them that they can save money by purchasing this book, but we think we can satisfy them that such is the fact, in every family more or less is paid yearly for doctor's bills. a child is taken with a fever, or some other complaint, and from ignorance nothing is or can be done effectually to check it. the physician is called, and a large bill is contracted; whereas, had gunn's domestic medicine been on hand, a remedy could easily have been found which would have checked the disease in its first stage, and not only have saved the purse, but perhaps the life. * * * * * american agriculturist almanac for . this work comprises pages, double columns octavo, with numerous wood cuts, price $ per hundred, ½ cents each. in the contents will be found--agricultural statistics of the united states--aspects and nodes--astronomical calendars for montreal, boston, new york, philadelphia, charleston, and new orleans--characters and names of the planets, &c.--farmers' northern calendars, with particular directions for the management of the farm, cattle, fruit and flower garden, &c.--southern calendars for the planter and farmer, with explicit directions for the culture and harvesting of cotton, rice, tobacco, &c., &c. the american agriculturist. published monthly, each number containing pages, royal octavo. terms--one dollar per year in advance; single numbers, ten cents; three copies for two dollars; eight copies for five dollars. each number of the agriculturist contains but one sheet, subject to newspaper postage only, which is _one cent_ in the state, or within miles of its publication, and _one and a half cents_, if over miles, without the state. advertisements will be inserted at one dollar, if not exceeding twelve lines, and in the same proportion, if exceeding that number. [symbol] _remit through postmasters, as the law allows._ editors of newspapers noticing the numbers of this work monthly, or advertising it, will be furnished a copy gratis, upon sending such notice to this office. volume i of the american agriculturist, with table of contents complete, for sale at $ ; handsomely bound in cloth, $ . it is a neat and tasteful book, and makes a handsome premium for distribution with agricultural societies; to which, when several copies are ordered, a liberal discount will be made. [symbol] to prevent confusion, all letters merely ordering this work, or enclosing money for subscriptions, should be addressed to saxton & miles, broadway, post-paid or franked by the postmaster. communications for publication, to be directed to the editor; and all _private_ letters, or those on business disconnected with the paper, should be addressed, simply, a. b. allen, broadway. new york. * * * * * stock for sale. r. h. hendrickson & co., of middletown, butler county, ohio, will promptly attend to orders for short-horn cattle, bakewell, merino, south-down, and saxon sheep; also for berkshire pigs from windsor castle, imported from england, and twenty choice berkshire sows, a part of which were also imported. windsor castle stands feet high, and is estimated by competent judges to weigh lbs. pigs of crosses with the imported kenilworth, the large miami, byfield, and grazier stocks, will likewise be furnished. none but choice specimens of any of the above stock will be supplied, and at prices corresponding with the times. address, post paid, as above. oct. th, . r. h. hendrickson & co. agents for the american agriculturist. john halsall, bookseller, st. louis, mo. g. s. taintor, bookseller, natchez, miss. s. f. gale & co., chicago, ill. john j. herrick, detroit, mich. j. b. steele, new orleans. c. m. hovey, boston, mass. saxton, peirce, & co., boston. arthur d. phelps, boston. r. h. hendrickson, middletown, ohio andrew campbell. e. cornell, ithaca, n. y. h. kirkland, northampton, mass. john bonner, white plains, georgia. * * * * * contents of december number. editorial. page. fattening poultry, fertility of sea-mud, sketches of the west, no. , breeds of fowls, } new york farmers' club, } next annual show of the state ag. society, tour in england, no. , agricultural shows, sale of rambouillet merinos, } price of sheep dogs, } annual meeting of the new york state ag. society, } list of premiums of the american institute (continued), } foreign agricultural news, review of the market, } to correspondents, } acknowledgment, } terms and list of agents, extracts. making capons, grafting and budding, high cranberry, original correspondence. h. d. grove, fine-wool sheep, r. b. c, sea-mud as a fertilizer, henry meigs, farm of hugh maxwell, esq., robert l. wright, mediterranean wheat, } c. mcd., topping cotton-marl, } r. l. allen, hints on the cultivation of wheat, s. a., a pennsylvania dairy, wm. partridge, reply to the gardeners' chronicle, } amer. ag. almanac, southern calendar for december, } do. do. northern do. do. transcribers notes: a mixture of archaic and modern spelling is used. for example; visiters and visitors. this is retained. inconsistent hyphenation is retained. italics are shown thus: _sloping_. small capitals have been capitalised. this ebook was produced by david schwan <davidsch@earthlink.net>. one thousand questions in california agriculture answered by e. j. wickson professor of horticulture, university of california; editor of pacific rural press; author of "california fruits and how to grow them" and "california vegetables in garden and field," etc. foreword this brochure is not a systematic treatise in catechetical form intended to cover what the writer holds to be most important to know about california agricultural practices. it is simply a classified arrangement of a thousand or more questions which have been actually asked, and to which answers have been undertaken through the columns of the pacific rural press, a weekly journal of agriculture published in san francisco. whatever value is claimed for the work is based upon the assumption that information, which about seven hundred people have actually asked for, would be also interesting and helpful to thousands of other people. if you do not find in this compilation what you desire to know, submit your question to the pacific rural press, san francisco, in the columns of which answers to agricultural questions are weekly set forth at the rate of five hundred or more each year. this publication is therefore intended to answer a thousand questions for you and to encourage you to ask a thousand more. e. j. wickson. contents part i. fruit growing part ii. vegetable growing part iii. grain and forage crops part iv. soils, irrigation, and fertilizers part v. live stock and dairy part vi. feeding animals part vii. diseases of animals part viii. poultry keeping part ix. pests and diseases of plants part x. index part i. fruit growing depth of soil for fruit. would four feet of good loose soil be enough for lemons? four feet of good soil, providing the underlying strata are not charged with alkali, would give you a good growth of lemon trees if moisture was regularly present in about the right quantity, neither too much nor too little, and the temperature conditions were favorable to the success of this tree, which will not stand as much frost as the orange. temperatures for citrus fruits. what is the lowest temperature at which grapefruit and lemons will succeed? the grapefruit tree is about as hardy as the orange; the lemon is much more tender. the fruit of citrus trees will be injured by temperature at the ordinary freezing point if continued for some little time, and the tree itself is likely to be injured by a temperature of or ° if continued for a few hours. the matter of duration of a low temperature is perhaps quite as important as the degree which is actually reached by the thermometer. the condition of the tree as to being dormant or active also affects injury by freezing temperatures. under certain conditions an orange tree may survive a temperature of ° fahrenheit. roots for fruit trees. i wish to bud from certain trees that nurseries probably do not carry, as they came from a seedling. is there more than one variety of myrobalan used, and if so, is one as good as another? if i take sprouts that come up where the roots have been cut, will they make good trees? i have tried a few, now three years old, and the trees are doing nicely so far, but the roots sprout up where cut. i am informed that if i can raise them from slips they will not sprout up from the root. will apricots and peaches grafted or budded on myrobalan produce fruit as large as they will if grafted on their own stock? experience seems to be clear that from sprouts you will get sprouts. we prefer rooted cuttings to sprouts, but even these are abandoned for seedling roots of the common deciduous fruits and of citrus fruits also. the apricot does well enough on the myrobalan if the soil needs that root; they are usually larger on the peach root or on apricot seedlings. the peach is no longer worked on the myrobalan in this state. one seedling of the cherry plum is about as good a myrobalan as another. what will the sucker be? i have a japanese plum tree which bears choice plums. three years ago a strong young shoot came up from the root of it, which i dug out and planted. will it make a bearing tree in time and be of like quality with the parent? it will certainly bear something when it gets ready. whether it will be like the parent tree depends upon the wood from which the sucker broke out. if the young tree was budded very low, or if it was planted low, or if the ground has been shifted so as to bring the wood above the bud in a place to root a sucker, the fruit will be that of the parent tree. if the shoot came from the root below the bud, you will get a duplication of whatever stock the plum was budded on in the nursery. it might be a peach or an almond or a cherry plum. of course you can study the foliage and wood growth of the sucker, and thus get an idea of what you may expect. tree planting on coast sands. i wish to plant fruit trees on a sandy mesa well protected from winds about a mile from the coast. the soil is a light sandy loam. i intend to dig the holes for the trees this fall, each hole the shape of an inverted cone, about feet deep and feet across, and put a half-load of rotten stable manure in each hole this fall. the winter's rains would wash a large amount of plant food from this manure into the ground. in march i propose to plant the trees, shoveling the surrounding soil on top of the manure and giving a copious watering to ensure the compact settling of the soil about and below the roots. the roots would be about a foot above the manure. on such a light sandy soil you can use stable manure more safely than you could elsewhere, providing you have water handy to use if you should happen to get too much coarse matter under the tree, which would cause drying out of the soil. if you do get plenty of water to guard against this danger, you are likely to use too much and cause the trees to grow too fast. be very sure the manure is well rotted and use one load to ten holes instead of two. whether you kill the trees or cause them to grow aright depends upon how you use water after planting. a wrong idea of inter-planting. what forage plant can i grow in a newly planted orchard? the soil is on a gently inclined hillside - red, decomposed rock, very deep, mellow, fluffy, and light, and deep down is clayish in character. it cannot be irrigated, therefore i wish to put out a drought-resisting plant which could be harvested, say, in june or july, or even later. i find the following plants, but i cannot decide which one is the best: yellow soja bean, speltz, egyptian corn, jerusalem corn, yellow milo maize, or one of the millets. what do you think? do not think for a moment about planting any such plant between orchard trees which are to subsist on rainfall without irrigation. your trees will have difficulty enough in making satisfactory growth on rainfall, and would be prevented from doing so if they had to divide the soil moisture with crops planted between them. the light, deep soils which you mention, resulting from decomposed rock, are not retentive enough, and, even with the large rainfall of your region, may require irrigation to carry trees through the latter summer and early fall growth. what slopes for fruit? i want to plant some apples and berries. one man says plant them on the east or south slope of the hill and they will be ripe early. another man says not to do that, for when the sun hits the trees or vines in the morning before the frost is off, it will kill all the blossoms, and as they would be on the warm side of the hill they would blossom earlier and there will be more frosts to injure them. i am told to plant them on the north or west side of the hill, where it is cold, and they will blossom later and will therefore have less frosts to bother them, and the frost will be almost off before the sun hits them in the morning. fruit is grown on all slopes in our foothills, depending on local conditions. on the whole, we should choose the east and north slopes rather than the east and south, because there is less danger of injury from too great heat. in some cases what is said to you about the less danger of injury from frosts on the north and west slopes would be true. all these things depend upon local conditions, because there is so much difference in heat and frost and similar slopes at different elevations and exposures. there can never be a general rule for it in a state so endowed with varying conditions as california is. trees over underflow. i have planted fruit trees near the creek, where they do not have to be irrigated as the ground there holds sufficient moisture for them, but a neighbor tells me that on account of the moisture being so near the surface the trees will not bear fruit well, although they will grow and have all the appearances of health. shallow soil above standing water is not good for fruit trees. a shallow soil over moving water or underflow, such as you might expect from a creek bank, is better. the effect of water near the surface depends also upon the character of the soil, being far more dangerous in the case of a heavy clay soil than in the case of a light loam, through which water moves more readily and does not rise so far or so rapidly by capillary action. if the trees are thrifty they will bear when they attain a sufficient age and stop the riotous growth which is characteristic of young trees with abundant moisture. if trees have too much water for their health, it will be manifested by the rotting of their roots, the dying of their branches, the cropping out of mushroom fungi at the base and other manifestations of distress. so long as the tree is growing well, maintains good foliage to the tip of the branches and is otherwise apparently strong, it may be expected to bear fruit in due time. the "june drop." i am sending four peaches which are falling off the trees. can you tell me how to prevent falling of the fruit next year and what causes it? it is impossible to tell from the peaches which you send what caused their falling. where fruit passes the pollination stage successfully, as these fruits have, the dropping is generally attributed to some conditions affecting the growth of the tree, which never have been fully determined. it is of such frequent occurrence that it is called the june drop, and it usually takes place in may in california. as the cause is not understood no rational preventive has been reached. a general treatment which consists in keeping the trees in good growing condition late enough during the previous season, that is, by seeing to it that they do not suffer from lack of moisture which causes them to close their growing season too soon before preparation for the following year's crop is made, is probably the best way to strengthen the tree for its burden. trees over a gravel streak. i have an apricot orchard seven years old. most of the land is a fairly heavy clay with a strip of gravel in the middle running nearly north and south. the trees on the clay bear good crops, but those on the gravel are usually much lighter in bearing and this year had a very light crop. can you tell me of anything i can do to make them bear? the trees are large and healthy looking, and grow big crops of brush. we should try some water in july on the gravel streak, hoping to continue activity in the tree later to induce formation of strong fruit for the following year. on the clay loam the soil does this by its superior retentiveness. fruit and overflow. i have acres of rich bottom-land that overflows and is under water from to hours. i would like to set the ground to fruit trees, either prunes, pears, apricots, or peaches. would it be safe to set them on such land? fruit trees will endure overflowing, providing the water does not exclude the air too long and providing the soil is free enough so that the soil does not remain full of water after the surface flow disappears. if the soil does not naturally drain itself and the water is forced to escape by surface evaporation, probably the situation is not satisfactory for any kind of fruit trees. overflow is more likely to be dangerous to fruit trees during the growing season than during the dormant season, and yet on well-drained soil even a small overflow may not be injurious on a free soil, if not continued too long. prunes on plum root, and pears will endure wet soil better than apricots or peaches. fruit trees and sunburn. how long is it wise to leave protection around young fruit trees set out in march in this hot valley? the trees are doing well, but we could not tell when to take away protection. it is necessary to maintain the protection from sunburn all through the autumn, for the autumn sun is often very hot, and as the sap flow lessens, the danger of burning is apparently greater. the bark also must be protected against the spring sunshine, even before the leaves appear. so long as the sun has a chance at the bark, you must protect it from sunburn. replanting in orchard. is it considered a good plan to set the tree at once in the place where one has died, or is it better to wait a year before replacing? it is not necessary to wait a year in making a replanting. get out all the old roots you can by digging a large hole, fill in with fresh soil, and your tree will accept the situation. whole roots or piece roots. for commercial apple orchards which is preferable, trees grafted on piece roots or on whole roots? on behalf of the piece-root trees it is claimed they sprout up less around the tree. on the other hand, it is claimed they never make a vigorous tree. what is the truth? value depends rather upon what sort of a growth the tree makes afterward than upon what it starts upon. theoretically perhaps a whole-root tree may be demonstrated to be better; practically, we cannot see that it becomes so necessarily, because we have trees planted at a time when the root graft on a piece was the general rule in propagation. after all, is it not more important to have soil conditions and culture of such character that a great root can grow in the orchard than to have a whole nursery concentrated in the root of the yearling tree? as for the claim that a root graft on a piece-root never makes a vigorous tree, we know that is nonsense. planting deciduous fruit trees. in order to gain time, i have thought of planting apples and pears this fall, in the belief i would be just that much nearer a crop, than though i waited until next spring. the land is sandy loam; no irrigation. would you advise fall or spring planting? if fall, would it be best to plow the land now, turning in the stubble from hay crop, or wait until time to plant before plowing? you will not be any nearer a crop, for next summer's growth will be the first in either case. on land not liable to be too wet in winter, it is, however, best to plant early, say during the month of december, if the ground is in good condition and sufficiently moist. if the year's rainfall has been scant, wait until the land is well wet down, for it is never desirable to plant when the soil is not in the right condition, no matter what the calendar may say. on a sandy loam early planting is nearly always safe and desirable. on lands which are too wet and liable to be rendered very cold by the heavy january rains, planting had better be deferred until february, or as soon as the ground gets in good condition after these heavy rains. whenever you plant, it will be desirable to plow the land either in advance of the rains, if it is workable, or as soon as rain enough comes to make it break up well. it is very seldom desirable to postpone plowing until the actual time of planting comes. budding fruit trees. is it better to bud in old bark of an old tree or in younger wood bark? how do you separate old bark without breaking it in lifting the bark? buds may be placed in old bark of fruit trees to a certain extent. the orange and the olive work better that way than do the deciduous trees, although buds in old bark of the peach have done well. they should, however, be inserted early in the season while the sap flow is active and the old bark capable of lifting; if the bark sticks, do not try budding. in spite of these facts, nearly all budding of deciduous trees is done in bark of the current year's growth. starting fruit trees from seed. how shall i start, and when, the following seeds: peach, plums, apricots, walnuts, olives and cherries? in the east we used to plant them in the fall, so as to have them freeze; as it does not freeze enough here, what do i have to do? do just the same. in california, heat and moisture cause the parting of the seed-cover, more slowly perhaps, but just as surely as the frost at the east. early planting of all fruit pits and nuts is desirable for two reasons. first, it prevents too great drying and hardening and other changes in the seed, because the soil moisture prevents it; second, it gives plenty of time for the opening and germination first mentioned. but early planting must be in ground which is loamy and light rather than heavy, because if the soil is so heavy as to become water-logged the kernel is more apt to decay than to grow. where there is danger of this, the seed can be kept in boxes of sand, continually moist, but not wet, by use of water, and planted out, as sprouting seeds, after the coldest rains are over, say in february. cherry and plum seeds should be kept moist after taking from the fruit; very little is usually had from dry seeds. the other fruits will stand considerable drying. very few olives are from the seed, because of reversion to wild types - also because it is so much easier to get just the variety you want by growing trees from cuttings. mailing scions. which is the best way to send scions by mail? wax the ends of mature cuttings, remove the leaves and enclose in a tight tin canister with no wet packing material. nursery stock in young orchard. how will it do to raise, for two or three years, a lot of orange seedlings between the rows of young three-year-old orange trees? i see that a nurseryman near me has done this, and his trees are more flourishing than mine. it can be done all right, as your own observation affirms. the superior appearance of the trees may be due to the additional water, and fertilizer probably, used to push the seedlings; possibly also to extra cultivation given them. it all depends upon what policy is observed in growing the seedlings; if something more than usual is done for their sakes, the trees may get their share and manifest it. if not, the trees will be robbed by the seedlings, and there is likely to be loss by both. there is no advantage in the mere fact that both are grown; there may be in the way they are grown. whether there is money value in the operation or not depends upon how many undertake it. square or triangular planting. what is your opinion on triangular planting as compared with square planting? planting in squares is the prevailing method. the triangular plan is not a good one when one contemplates removing trees planted as fillers. the orchard should either be planned in the square or quincunx form. in the latter case individual trees can be easily removed; in the other case rows can be removed - leaving the rows which you wish to keep equidistant from each other. killing stumps by medication. will boring into green stumps and inserting a handful of saltpeter kill the roots and cause the stump to readily burn up a few months later? we have tried all kinds of prescriptions and have never killed a stump which had a mind to live. many trees can be killed by cutting to stumps when in full growth, whether they are bored or not. others will sprout in spite of all medicinal insertions we know of when these are placed in the inner wood of the stump. we believe a stump can be killed by sufficient contact with the inner bark layer of arsenic, bluestone, gasoline, and many other things, but it is not easy to arrange for such sufficient contact, and it would probably cost more than it would to blow or pull out the stump. one reader, however, assures us that he has killed large eucalyptus stumps by boring three holes in the stump with an inch auger, near the outer rim of the stump, placing therein a tablespoonful of potassium cyanide and saltpeter mixture (half and half), and plugging tightly. another says: give the stumps a liberal application of salt, say a half-inch all over the top, and let the fog and rain dissolve and soak down, and you will not have much trouble with suckers. planting fruit trees on clearings. we wish to plant orchard trees on land cleared this winter: manzanita and chaparral, but also some oaks and large pines and groves of small pines. we have been told that trees planted under such conditions, the ground containing the many small roots that we cannot get out, would not do well. are the bad effects of the small roots liable to be serious; also, would lime or any other common fertilizer counteract the bad effects? proceed with the planting, as you are ready for it, and take the chances of root injury. it may be slight; possibly even absent. carefully throw out all root pieces, as you dig the hole, and exclude them from the earth which you use in filling around the roots, and in the places where large trees stood, fill the holes with soil from a distance. much depends upon how clean the clearing was. no considerable antiseptic effect could be expected from lime and the soil ought to be strong enough to grow good young trees without enrichment. the pear, fig and california black walnut are some of the most resistant among fruit-bearing trees, and these may usually be planted with safety. the cherry is the most resistant of the stone fruits. the "toadstool" disease occasionally affects young apple trees recently set out, but it is not usually serious on established trees. dipping roots of fruit trees. in planting an almond orchard would it be of any benefit to dip the young trees in a solution of bluestone and lime dissolved? we doubt if it would serve any good purpose. if done at all the dip should be carefully prepared in accordance with the formula for bordeaux mixture, for excess of bluestone will kill roots. healthy trees do not need such treatment, and we doubt if unhealthy ones can be rendered safe or desirable by it. preparing for fruit planting. what effect will a crop of wheat have on new cleared land, to be planted in fruit trees later on? one crop of wheat or barley will make no particular difference with the cleared land which you expect to plant to fruit later. it would be better to grow a cultivated crop like corn, potatoes, beets, squashes, etc., because this crop would require summer cultivation which would kill out many weeds or sprouts and leave your land in better shape for planting. depth in planting fruit trees. i have been advised to plant the bud scar above ground in a wet country. is that right? on ordinary good loam, plant the tree so that it will stand about the same as it did in the nursery: a little lower, perhaps, but not much. the bud scar should be a little above the surface. it is somewhat less likely to give trouble by decay in the upset tissue. if the soil is heavy and wet, plant higher, perhaps, than the nursery soil-mark, but not much. in light, sandy soil, plant lower - even from four to six inches lower - than in the nursery sometimes. in this case the budscar is below the surface, but that does not matter in a light, dry soil which does not retain moisture near the surface. fruit trees in a wet place. one part of my orchard is low and wet, much scale and old trees loose. will much spraying be a cure and can i use posts to hold the old trees firm, or would you take out and put in bartlett pears! spraying would kill the scale but no spraying will make a tree satisfactory in inhospitable soil. as pears will endure wet places better than apples, it would seem to be wise to make the substitution, providing the situation is not too bad for any fruit tree. in that case you can use it for a summer vegetable patch. cutting back at planting. i have planted a lot of one-year-old cherry trees and would like to know if i should cut them down the same as the apple tree? i have also planted a lot of walnut trees. shall i cut them off? yes for the cherries and no for the walnuts - although we have to admit that some planters hold for cutting back the walnuts also. if you do cut back the walnuts, let them have about twice the height of stem you give the cherries and cover the exposed pith with wax or paint. branching young fruit trees. it is the practice in this locality to wrap all young trees to a point inches above the bud, for the purpose of protection against rabbits, to protect the bark from the sun and to prevent growth of sprouts. these wrappings are kept on indefinitely, the rule being that no sprouting is to be permitted below the -inch murk. is there any virtue in this, and why is it done? the wrapping is desirable both to protect them from rabbits and from sunburn, and either this or whitewash or some other form of protection should certainly be employed against the latter trouble. it is not desirable to have all the branches emerge at the same point, either from the ground or at some lower level, as is preferable in interior situations, but branches should be distributed up and down and around the trunk so as to give a strong, well-balanced, low-headed tree. so far as wrapping interferes with the growth of shoots in this manner it is undesirable. coal tar and asphaltum on trees. what is the effect of coal tar or asphaltum applied to the bark of trees? the application of coal tar to prevent the root borers of the prune which operate near the surface of the ground was found to be not injurious to the trees, although there was great apprehension that there would be. the application of asphaltum, what is known as "grade d," has been also used to some extent in the santa clara valley without injury. of course, in the use of any black material, you increase the danger of sunburn, if applied to bark which is reached by the sun's rays. whitewashing fruit trees. when is the proper time to whitewash walnut trees to prevent sun scald? how high up is it advisable to apply the wash? whitewash after heavy rains are over and before the sun gets very hot; near the coast see that it is on early in april; in the interior it should be in place in march. do not wait until all the rains are over, because there is a great chance of bark-burning between rains in the spring. whitewash the trunk and the larger limbs - wherever the sun can reach the bark; being careful to keep the surface white where the o'clock sun hits it. be particular to whitewash, or otherwise protect by "protectors" or burlap wrappings, all young trees; the young tree is more apt to be hurt than an old one, but bark seems never to get too old to burn if the sun is hot enough. shaping a young tree. in shortening back long, slim limbs the side shoots come out, and one soon has a lot of ugly, crooked limbs to look at. there are a number of orchards here being spoiled in that way. how is this avoided? you cannot secure a low-heading, well-shaped tree without cutting back the branches. afterward you can improve the form by selecting shoots which are going in directions which you prefer, or you can cut back the shoots afterward to a bud which will start in the direction which you desire. in this way the progressive shaping of the tree must be pursued. if you only have a few trees and can afford the time, you can, of course, bend and tie the branches as they grow, so that they will take directions which seem to you better, but this is not practicable in orcharding on a commercial scale. there is no disadvantage in crooked branches in a fruit tree, but they should crook in desirable directions, and that is where the art in pruning comes in. pruning times. what is the best time to prune the french prune and most other trees? in santa clara volley they prune as soon as leaves are off; in the mountains they prune later, say in february and march, and finish after bloom is started and of course when sap is up. which is right? you can prune french prunes and other deciduous trees at any time during the winter that is most convenient to you. it does not make any particular difference to the tree, nor does it injure the tree at all if you should continue pruning after the bloom has started. in fact, it is better to make large cuts late in the winter, because they heal over more readily at the beginning of the growing period than at the beginning of the resting season. it is believed that early pruning may cause the tree or vine to start growth somewhat sooner and this may be undesirable in very frosty places. grafting wax. how shall i make grafting wax for grafting fruit trees? there are many "favorite prescriptions" for grafting wax. one which is now being largely used in fruit tree grafting is as follows: resin, lbs.; beeswax, lb.; linseed oil, pint; flour, pint. the flour is added slowly and stirred in after the other ingredients have been boiled together and the liquid becomes somewhat cooler. some substitute lampblack for flour. this wax is warmed and applied as a liquid. plowing in young orchard. how near can i plow to two-year-old orange trees safely? you can plow young orange orchards as close to the trees as you can approach without injuring the bark, regulating depth so as not to destroy main roots. destruction of root fibers which have approached too near the surface is not material. it is very desirable that the soil around and near the tree be as carefully worked as possible without injury to the bark of the tree. how far that can be done by horse work and how much must be done by hand must be decided by the individual judgment of the grower. crops between fruit trees. what would be best to grow between fruit trees, while the trees are growing, and what to alternate each season, so as not to use up the soil without putting back into it? where one is bringing along a young orchard, without irrigation, it is doubtful whether it is not better policy to give the trees all the advantage of clean cultivation and ample moisture than to undertake intercropping. if you live on the place and wish to grow vegetables between the rows, the thorough cultivation to bring the vegetables along satisfactorily would help to preserve moisture enough both for the vegetables and for the trees, but this is very different from growing a field crop by ordinary methods of cultivation. select a crop which will require summer cultivation, like corn, potatoes, squashes, and beans, and never a hay or grain crop which takes up moisture without working the soil for the greater moisture conversation which hoed crops require. in choice of hoed crops be governed by what you can use to advantage, either for house or the feeding of animals, or what you can grow that is salable with least loss of moisture in the soil. the choice is governed entirely by local conditions, except that leguminous plants - peas, beans, vetches, clovers, etc. - do take nitrogen from the atmosphere and can thus be grown with least injury and sometimes with a positive benefit to the fertility of the soil. regular bearing of fruit trees. how can trees be induced to bear regularly instead of bearing excessively on alternate years? the most rational view is that in order to bear regularly the tree must be prevented from overbearing by thinning of the fruit; also that the moisture and plant-food supply must be regularly maintained, so that the tree may work along regularly and not stop bearing one year in order to accumulate vigor for a following year's crop. there is some reason to believe that some trees which seem to overbear every year can be prolonged in their profitable life and made to produce a moderate amount of fruit of large size and higher value by sharp thinning to prevent overbearing at any time. this is found clearly practicable in the cases of the apricot, peach, pear, apple, table grape, shipping plum, etc., because the added value of larger fruits is greater than the cost of removing the surplus. scions from young trees. i have bought some one-year-old apple trees that are certified pedigree trees. would it be practical to take the tops of these trees and graft on one-year seedlings and get the same results as from the trees i bought? will they bear just as good, or is it necessary to take the scions from old bearing trees? they will bear exactly the same fruit as the young trees will, but you cannot tell how good that will be until you get the fruit. the advantage of scions from bearing trees is that you know exactly what you will get, for, presumably, you have seen and approved it. late pruning. will i do injury to my peach trees if i delay pruning until the last of february, or until the sap begins to run and the buds to swell? it will not do any particular harm to let your peach pruning go until the buds swell or even after the leaves appear. late pruning is not injurious, but rather more inconvenient. avoiding crotches in fruit trees. how can i avoid bad crotches in fruit trees? crotches, which means branches of equal or nearly equal size, emerging from a point at a very acute angle, should be prevented by cutting out one or both of them. the branching of a lateral at a larger angle does not form a crotch and it usually buttresses itself well on the larger branch. that is a desirable form of branching. short distances between such branchings is desirable, because it makes a stronger and more permanently upright limb, capable of sustaining much weight of foliage and fruit. build up the young tree by shortening in as it grows, so as to get such a strong framework. crotch-splitting of fruit trees. i have a young fig tree that is splitting at the crotches. i fear that when the foliage appears, with the force of the winds the limbs will split down entirely. perhaps you have been forcing the trees too much with water and thus secured too much foliage and weak wood. whenever a tree is doing that, the limbs ought to be supported with bale rope tied to opposite limbs through the head, or otherwise held up, to prevent splitting. if splitting has actually occurred, the weaker limb should be cut away and the other staked if necessary until it gets strength and stiffens. if the limbs are rather large they can be drawn up and a / inch carriage bolt put through to hold both in place; but this is a poor way to make a strong tree. we should cut out all splits and do the best we could to make a tree out of what is left. then do not make them grow so fast. strengthening fruit trees. i have read that some trees are propped by natural braces; that is, by inter-twining two opposite branches while the tree is young, so that in time they grow together. what is your idea regarding the practicability of such an idea in a large commercial orchard? twining branches for the purpose indicated is frequently commended, but it seems best for the use of ingenious people with plenty of time and not many trees. to prune trees to carry their fruit so far as one can foresee, and to use props or other supports when a tree manifests need of a particular help which was not foreseen is the most rational way to handle the proposition on a large commercial scale. time for pruning. what is the proper time for pruning pear and apricot trees? ordinary deciduous fruit trees can be successfully pruned from the time the leaves begin to turn yellow and fall, until the new foliage is appearing in the late winter or spring. grape planting. what is the proper time for planting grape vines? grape vines are most successfully planted after the heavy rains and low temperatures are over and before the growth starts: this will usually be whenever the soil is in good condition, during the months of february and march. covering tree wounds. what is the best stuff to use on wounds and large cuts on my fruit trees? i have used grafting wax, but it is expensive and not altogether satisfactory. amputation wounds on trees can be more successfully treated with lead and oil paint than with grafting wax. mixed paint containing benzine would not be so good as pure lead and oil mixed for the purpose and then carefully applied as to amount so as not to run. "asphaltum grade d" may also be used in the same way. covering sunburned bark. would asphaltum do to use an sunburned bark? owing to the attraction of the heat by the black color, asphaltum would increase the injury by absorption of more heat. some white coating is altogether best for sunburn injuries, because it will reflect and not absorb heat, and a durable whitewash applied as may be needed to keep the white covering intact is undoubtedly the best treatment. where the bark has been actually removed, white paint would be superior to whitewash to keep the wood from checking while the wound was being covered laterally by the growth of new bark. too much pruning. same peach trees entering the third year were pruned early in the winter very severely. the pruner merely left the trunk and the three or four main laterals, the latter about one foot in length. a large proportion of these trees have not sprouted as yet, though alder and better pruned trees are all sprouted in the same vicinity. the bark is green and has considerable sap. will the trees commence to grow? the trees will sprout later, after they have developed latent buds into active form. the pruning probably removed all the buds of recent growth. after starting they will make irregular growth, starting too many shoots in the wrong places, etc., and considerable effort will be necessary to get well-shaped trees by selection of shoots in the right places and thinning out those which are not desirable. for broken roots. when the root of an orange or other fruit tree is exposed or brakes by the cultivator, what is the best way to treat that root? where a root is actually broken it is best to cut it off cleanly above the break. this will induce quick healing over and the sending out of other roots. where there is only a bruise on one side, all the frayed edges of the wound should be cleanly cut back to sound bark, which will have a tendency to promote healing and prevent decay. pruning in frosty places. this appears to be a frosty section. pruners are at work continuously from the time the apricots are harvested until spring arrives. from what is said in "california fruits?" i judge late winter pruning would be best far apricots and peaches. am i correct? in frosty places it is often desirable to prune rather late, because the late-pruned tree usually starts later than the early pruned, and thus may not bloom until after frost is over. low growth on fruit trees. should the little twigs an the lower parts of young fruit trees be removed or shortened? an important function which these small shoots and the foliage which they will carry perform is in the thickening of the larger branches to which they are attached and overcoming the tendency of the tree to become too tall and spindling. this can be done at any time, even to the pinching of young, soft shoots as they appear. it must be said, however, that in ordinary commercial fruit growing little attention is paid to these fine points, which are the great enjoyment of the european fruit-gardeners and are of questionable value in our standard orcharding. it is, however, a great mistake to clear away all low twigs, for such twigs bring the first fruit on young trees. are tap-roots essential? is it better to plant a nut or seed or to plant a grafted root; also is it better to allow the tap-root to remain or not in event of planting a grafted root? it does not matter at all whether the tree has its original tap-root or not. all tap-roots are more or less destroyed in transplanting and the fact that not one per cent of the walnut trees now bearing crops in california consist of trees grown from the nut itself planted in place, is sufficient demonstration to us that it is perfectly practicable to proceed with transplanting the trees. it is more important that the tree should have the right sort of soil and the right degree of moisture to grow in than that it should retain the root from which the seedling started. the removal of the tap-root does not prevent the tree from sending out one or several deep running roots which will penetrate as deeply as the soil and moisture conditions favor. this is true not only of the walnut but of other fruit trees. transplanting old trees. can i transplant fruit trees to inches through the butt, about one foot from the ground? varieties are oranges, lemons, pears, apples and english walnuts nearly inches through the butt. i wish to move them nearly a mile. what is the best way and what the best month to do the work, or are trees too large to do well if moved? the orange and lemon will do better in transplanting than the others. take up the trees when the soil becomes warmed by the sun after the coldest weather is over. this may be in february. cut back the branches severely and take up the trees with a good ball of earth, using suitable lifting tackle to handle it without breaking. settle the earth around the ball in the new place with water, and keep the soil amply moist but not wet. whitewash all bark exposed to the sun by cutting back. you can handle the walnut the same way, but it would, however, probably get such a setback that it might be better to buy a new tree two or three years old and plant that. the apples and pears we would not try to transplant, but would rather have good new yearlings than try to coax them along. transplanting deciduous trees should be done earlier in the winter than evergreens. dwarfing a fruit tree. i am told that by pruning the roots of a young tree after the root system is well started (say three years old) that as a result this will produce a tree that is semi-dwarfed or practically a dwarfed fruit tree. yes; cutting back the roots in the winter and cutting back the new growth in the summer will have a dwarfing effect. the best way to get a dwarfed garden tree is to use a dwarfing root. you can get trees on such roots at the nurseries. seedling fruits. i have been growing seedlings from the pits of some extra fine peaches and plums with a view to planting them. a man near san jose advised me that i would get good results, but since then i have met others who say that the fruit trees that spring from planted seeds yield only poor fruit. it is the tendency of nearly all improved fruit to revert to wild types, more or less, when grown from the seed. the chances are, then, that nine-tenths or more of the seedlings which you grew for fruiting might be worthless. a few might be as good as the fruit from which you took the pits; possibly one might he better. for these reasons the growing of fruit trees from pits and seeds is only used for the purpose of getting a root from which a chosen variety may be gotten by budding and grafting. grafting. i did a little grafting last spring, and as it was my first attempt, about ten per cent of the scions failed to grow. now shall i saw the stub off lower down and try again, or bud into one of the sprouts that have grown around the cut end? the trees are pear and cherry. you did very well as a beginner not to lose more than one-tenth. saw off below and graft again. you might have budded into one of those shoots last july, and if you fail again, bud into the new shoots next summer. filling holes in trees. i have a number of trees that, on account of poor pruning and improper care, are decaying in the center. many of them are hollow for a foot or more down the trunk. excavate all the decayed wood with a chisel or gouge or whatever cutting tool may work well and fill the cavity with portland cement in such a way as to exclude moisture. this will prolong the life and productiveness of the trees for many years if other conditions are favorable. deferring bloom of fruit trees. have any experiments ever been carried on definitely to decide what causes early blossoming of fruit trees? for instance, have adjacent trees of the same variety been treated definitely by putting a heavy mulch around one to hold the cold temperature late in the spring, leaving the other tree unmulched so the roots could warm up? it has been definitely determined by the experiments of professor whidden of the missouri experiment station that the swelling of the buds and starting of the foliage of fruit trees is due to the action of heat upon the aerial parts of the trees; that is, growth is not caused by increasing the temperature of the ground and cannot be retarded by cooling the ground. experiments with the use of snow and ice under trees by which the ground has been kept at a low temperature have not prevented the activity of the tree. the only way known to retard activity is to spray the tree with whitewash so that the white color may reflect the heat and prevent the absorption of it by the bark, which is usually of a dark color and therefore suited to heat absorption. retarding of growth is possible in this way for a period of six to ten days, which, of course, in some cases might be of value, but the lengthened dormancy is probably too small to constitute it of general value. in whitewashing, to determine what advantage there is in it in retarding growth, the tree should be thoroughly sprayed with whitewash so as to cover all the wood some time before the buds swell. in fact, it is to prevent the early swelling of the buds that the whitewashing is resorted to. it is better to make the application, therefore, a little too early than too late. a specific date cannot be given for it that would be right in all localities. repairing rabbit injuries. your book says in pruning young trees for the first time, about four main branches should be left and these cut back to or inches. now, where the rabbits have pruned back to or inches the very ones i wanted, what should be done? some say, cut these back to the stem, allowing new shoots to start from the base of branches so removed. cut back to a bud near the stem, or if you do not see any, cut back near to the stem, but not near enough to remove the bark at the base of the shoot, for there are the latent buds which should give you the growth. this should be watched, and the best shoot selected from each point to make a strong branch, pinching back or removing the others. for a bark wound. what is best to do with an apricot or prune tree when it has been hit with an implement and the bark knocked off? cut around the bark wound with a sharp knife so as to remove all frayed edges. cover the exposed wood with oil and lead paint to prevent cracking, and the wound will soon be covered with new bark from the sides. bridging gopher girdles. how shall i make the bridge-graft or root-graft over the trunks of trees girdled by gophers? has this method proved successful in saving trees three or four inches in diameter, and how is it done? the bridging over of injury by mice by grafting has been known to be successful for decades in countries where this trouble is encountered. undoubtedly the same plan would work in the case of all bark injuries which can be bridged. the plan is to take good well-matured shoots which are a little longer than the injury which has to be spanned, making a sloping cut on both ends, also a cut into the healthy bark above and below the injury, and slip the cut ends of the cutting into the cuts in the bark so that the ends go under the bark above and below, and the cut ends are closely connected with the growing layer of the stock. if the cutting is made a little longer than the distance to be spanned, the tendency of the cutting by straightening is to hold itself in place. when in place, the connections should he covered with wax to prevent drying out. soil-binding plant for winter. what would be the best to plant in an orchard on ground of a light sandy sediment which, after plowing, will move with the strong winds? i would like to plant something that will benefit the ground. the winds are the strongest from december to april. this is in the irrigated district and i need something that will make a sod during that period. we would, in all the valleys, advise a fall irrigation (if the rains are late) and the sowing of burr clover, which when started in september will have the ground well covered by december, if you keep the moisture right to push it. disking or plowing this under in march (or april, according to locality) will hold the sand and afterward enrich it. you can do this every year, but probably you will not need to seed it more than once. bananas in california. is there any reason why bananas would not grow and bear in the vicinity of merced if they had plenty of water? or would the cool nights at certain seasons keep them from bearing? would they do better in the imperial valley? bananas would suffer too severely from frost to be profitable at any point in the interior valleys of california. a plant would be killed to the ground at least every year unless under glass or other protection. there are a few places practically frostless where bananas can be grown in this state, but there is no promise in commercial production because they can be so cheaply imported from the tropics. carobs in california. will the carob tree (st. john's bread) do well in the sacramento valley, and is it a desirable tree for lining a driveway? carobs have been grown in california for thirty years or more and they will make a handsome driveway and give a lot of pods for the kids and the pigs - for they are "the husks which the swine did eat," and both like them. they ought to be much more widely planted in california because they grow well and are good to look upon. spineless cactus fruit. i have about two acres of high land in fresno county that can't be irrigated. it is red adobe soil and there is hardpan in it. which kind of fruit trees will grow and pay best? how near may the hardpan be to the surface before i have to blast it? it is a hard fruit proposition. try spineless cactus, the fruits of which are delicious. blasting would help if there is a moist substratum below the hardpan and might enable you to grow many fruits. if your land is hard and dry all the way down, blasting would not help you unless you can get irrigation. presumably your rainfall is too small for fruit unless you strike underflow below the hardpan. cleaning fruit trays. what do you advise for killing and removing the whitish mold that forms on trays used for drying prunes? would sunning the trays be effective, or washing in hot water, or is there some suitable fungicide? good hot sun and dry wind will kill the mold. the spores of such a common mold are waiting everywhere, so that your fruit would mold anyway if conditions were right. still, scalding the trays for cleanliness and a short trip through the sulphur box for fungus-killing is commended. killing moss on old trees. i have some bartlett pear trees that are covered with moss and mold, and the bark is rough and checked. i have used potash ( %), pound to gallons spray. it kills the long moss, but the green mold it does not seem to affect. the trees have been sprayed about one week. some trees have been sprayed with a pound to gallons solution by mistake. shall i spray these again with full strength, and when? you have done enough for the moss at present. even the weaker solution ought to be strong enough to clean the bark. wait and see how the bark looks when the potash gets through biting; it will keep at it for some time, taking a fresh hold probably with each new moisture supply from shower or damp air. the spray should have been shot onto the bark with considerable force - not simply sprinkled on. shy-bearing apples. i have some apple trees and years old that do not bear satisfactorily, but persist in making to feet of new wood each year. if not cut back this winter, will they be more likely to make fruit buds? yes, probably. certainly you should try it. you should also cultivate less and slow down the growth. if they then take to bearing, you can resume moderate pruning and better cultivation. this is on the assumption that your trees are in too rich or too moist a place. but you should satisfy yourself by inquiry and observation as to whether the same varieties do bear well in your vicinity when conditions are such that slower growth is made. if the variety is naturally shy in bearing, or if it requires cross-pollination, the proposed repressive treatment might not avail anything. in that case you can graft over the tree to some variety which does bear well or graft part of the trees to another variety for cross-pollination. no apples on quince. how large a tree will the yellow bellefleur apple make if grafted or budded on quince root at the age of years? i have been trying to get some information about dwarf fruit trees, but it is difficult to get. no wonder the information is hard to get. the yellow bellefleur will not grow upon the quince at all, or at least not for long. in growing dwarf apples the paradise stock is used, while the quince is used for dwarfing the pear, and many varieties of pears will accept the quince root which the apple rejects. stock for apples. do you recommend french seedling stock as greatly to be preferred to that grown in this country? french seedling stock is generally used because it is graded and furnished in uniform sizes; also, because it can usually be purchased for less than seedlings can be grown under our labor conditions. locally grown apple seedlings are apt to be irregular in size and, as already stated, cost more than the properly graded imported stock. apples and alfalfa. i have recently come across a proposition to sow apple orchards in the interior of southern california with alfalfa. the apples are said to be superior and the crop heavier, to say nothing of a half or two-thirds of an alfalfa crop in addition to the crop of apples. what do you know about it? is alfalfa being used by others in this way? it is perfectly rational to grow alfalfa in fruit orchards if the water supply is ample for both the trees and the intercrop and the owner will not yield to the temptation to waterlog his trees for the sake of getting more alfalfa. it is even more desirable in the interior than near the coast, probably. in arizona some growers have for a number of years practiced growing alfalfa in orchards, cutting the alfalfa without removing it, counting that clippings are worth more to them through their decay and the increase of the humus content of the soil. even where this is not done, the alfalfa will add to the humus of the soil by its own wastes both from root and stem. the presence of an alfalfa cover reduces the danger of leaf and bark burning either by reflected or radiated heat from a smooth ground surface, and some trees are very much benefited by this protection in regions of high temperature. this might be expected to be the case with the apple, which is somewhat subject to leaf burning in our interior valleys. top grafting. in grafting over apple and pear trees to some other variety, is it advisable to cut off and graft the entire tree the first year where the trees are from to years old, or would it be better to cut off only a part of the top the first year and the rest the following year? in the coast region it is a good practice to graft over the whole tree at one time, cutting, however, above the forks and not into the main stem below the forking. this gives many scions which seem able to take care of the sap successfully. in the interior valleys, it is rather better practice to leave a branch or two, cutting them out at the following winter's pruning, for probably the first year's grafts will give you branches enough. this has the effect of preventing the drowning out of the scions from too strong sap-flow. cutting back and regrafting of old trees should be done rather early, before the most active sap-flow begins. the later in the season the grafting is done, and the warmer the locality, the more desirable it seems to be to leave a branch or two when grafting. apple budding. what is the best time to bud apples? apples are budded in july and august and remain dormant until the following spring. mildew on apple seedlings. why do young apple plants in the seed bed became mildewed? they are in a lath house. because too much moisture was associated with too much shade. more sunshine would have prevented mildew, and if they had enjoyed it the seedlings could have made better use of the water probably. pruning apples. young apple trees set two years ago were cut back to to inches and cared for as to low branching, proper spacing, etc., but the desired branches were allowed to make full growth to the present time. they have mode great growth and if allowed to continue will make too tall trees. we understand that your trees have made two summers' growth since pruning. we should cut back to a good lateral wherever you can find one running at the right direction at about three to four feet from the last cut, and shorten the lateral more or less according to the best judgment we could form on sight of the tree. in this way you can take out the branches which are running too high and make the framework for a lower growth. do not remove the small twigs and spurs unless you have too many such shoots. cutting back apples and pears. "california fruits" says the "apple does not relish cutting back, nor is it desirable to shorten in the branches." but when a three-year-old tree gets above feet high, as many of mine are doing, what are you going to do? i cut these back same last year, but up they go again with more branches than ever. the pears are getting too tall, also. should not both apple and pear trees be kept down to about ten feet? the quotation you make refers to old bearing trees, and indicates that their pruning is not like that of the peach, which is continually shortened in to keep plenty of new wood low down. of course, in securing low and satisfactory branching on young apples, pears, etc., there must be cutting back, and this must be continued while you are forming the tree. if you mean that these trees are to be permanently kept at ten feet high, you should have planted trees worked on dwarfing stocks. such a height does not allow a standard tree freedom enough for thrift; as they become older they will require from twice to thrice the altitude you assign to them, probably. pears can be more successfully kept down than apples, but not to ten feet except as dwarfs. pruning old apple trees. how would you prune apple trees eight or nine years old that have not been cut back? there are a great many that have run up feet high with twelve or fifteen main limbs and very few being more than two or three inches in diameter. remove cross branches which are interfering with others and thin out branches which seem to be crowding each other at their attachments to the trunk, by removing some of them at the starting point. having removed these carefully so as not to knock off spurs from other branches, study the tree as it is thus somewhat opened up and see where remaining branches can be shortened to overcome the tendency to run too high. do not shear off branches leaving a lot of stubs in the upper part of the tree, but always cut back a main branch to a lateral and shorten the lateral higher up if desirable. this will keep away from having a lot of brush in the top of the tree. study each tree by itself for symmetry and balance of branches and proceed by judgment rather than by rules anyone can give you. top-grafting apples. can i graft over a few ben davis apple trees years old or thereabouts, but thrifty and vigorous? it is certainly possible, by the old top-grafting method which has been used everywhere with apples for centuries. graft during the winter. work on the limbs above the head so as to preserve the advantage of the old forking, using a cleft graft and waxing well. it is usually best to graft over a part of the limbs and the balance a year later. will the apples be the same kind? i have a mixed orchard, mostly gravensteins, and i want to graft all the other trees into a gravenstein top if i can do so and at the same time get the early gravenstein bloom and the fruit would be as satisfactory as though on other roots. the new tree grown from the grafts will behave just like the tree from which the scions were taken if similarly thrifty. places for apples. what quality is it in the soil in the vicinity of watsonville that makes that country peculiarly adapted to the culture of apples? are there not other portions of the state where apples could be produced on a commercial basis? it is not alone quality in the soil, but character of the climate that underlie success in the watsonville district. apples can be and are grown on a commercial scale through the coast district of sonoma, mendocino, and humboldt counties; also in suitable situations in the coast counties south of santa cruz county. along the coast, as far as deep retentive soil and the cool air of the ocean extend, one may expect to get apples similar to those produced in the watsonville district. in the interior valleys, on suitable soils with adequate moisture, early apples are profitably grown, while in the higher foothill and mountain valleys in all parts of the state, where moisture is sufficient, late keeping apples of high quality are produced. summer-pruning apples. will summer pruning cause apple trees to bear fruit instead of growing so much new wood? over-growth can be repressed by summer pruning, and if done just at the right time bearing is increased and late new growth is avoided, but it is not easy to determine exactly the right time, and it has to be fixed according to local conditions of length of growing season and growth condition of the tree itself also. it is better for some varieties than others, and, in fact, has to be done wisely. a summer slashing of apple trees, simply because some one says so, is not only expensive, but may do more harm than good. therefore, those inclined to it, should try a few trees at first and note results. grafting apple seedlings in place. i want to plant apple trees for home use. i have an idea to plant apple seeds instead of trees: planting three or four seeds for each hill, right in the place where i would grow the trees, and select the best one to graft on. i will take seed of bellefleurs, which are vigorous growers. what do you think? will the seed germinate readily and when is the right time to plant? select plump, well ripened seed, keep them in damp sand until the ground begins to get warm in january or february, according to location. but such an undertaking will cost you vastly more in time, in labor, and waste of land than it would to buy well-grown nursery trees budded with the variety which you desire. such trees would give you practically a uniform lot of trees in your orchard while planting seedlings and grafting afterward would give you very irregular and for the most part unsatisfactory results - providing you get any seeds to grow at all in the open ground, which is doubtful. resistant apple roots. a few apple trees which are almost dead from ravages of the woolly aphis. i am going to dig them out and plant in their places other apple trees on woolly aphis-proof root. will it be necessary to use measures to exterminate the woolly aphis in the old roots or their places in the ground before planting new trees in the places of the removed trees? it is not necessary to undertake to kill aphis in the ground when you are planting apple trees on resistant roots. it will give your trees a better start to dig large holes, throw out the old soil, and fill in with some new soil from another part of the land to be planted, but it has been demonstrated that these roots are resistant, no matter if planted in the midst of infestation. apples and cherries for a hot place. what kind of apple do you think would do best in a dry, hot climate? what do you think of the early richmond cherry in such a place? apples most likely to succeed in a dry situation are those which ripen their fruit very early. the red astrachan is on the whole the most satisfactory, but there are many places which are altogether too dry and hot for any kind of apple. whether cherries would succeed or not you can only tell by trying. possibly the trees would not live through the summer if your soil becomes very dry. the most hardy cherries are the sour or pie cherries and the early richmond is one of this group. die-back of apple trees. what causes the death of the top shoots in apple trees? new wood is sometimes diseased by mildew, but die-back is usually due to two different causes: one, the accumulation of water in the soil during the excessive rains of mid-winter; second, the occurrence of low temperatures, including frosts, after the sap has risen. which of these causes operate in a certain case depends, of course, upon whether the soil was heavy and inclined to retain standing water too long, or whether there were such frosts at about the time when the leaves should start. sometimes, of course, both of these conditions worked in the same place; sometimes one and sometimes the other, but certainly both of them are capable of causing the trouble. there seems to be no specific disease; it is rather a matter of unfavorable conditions for growth. storage of apples. we desire to store two or three thousand boxes of apples for three or four months and propose to do it in this way: make an excavation in dry earth, putting at the bottom of the excavation straw. upon this straw place the apples, then dry straw over the apples, and upon the top of this two or three feet of dry earth. will it be a good plan to pour on water from time to time over the top of this to keep the apples and all wet, or should the apples be kept dry? putting down loose apples in a straw-lined pit would be very expensive. it would invite decay by bruising the fruit, and the result would probably be a worthless mixture of rotten fruit and straw. the fruit should be stored in boxes or shallow trays to reduce pressure and promote ventilation, and not in bins or large piles. apples will keep for a long time in good condition if the boxes are put in piles in the shade, covered with straw, which should be slightly moistened from time to time; but in that case there would not be such an accumulation of moisture and there would be ventilation at all times. apples should be kept dry, but they will shrivel and become unmarketable unless the air in which they are stored is kept reasonably moist. this is generally accomplished by making apple houses with double walls and roof to exclude heat and with an earth or concrete floor which can be sprinkled from time to time with a hose. apple root-grafts. i have an old apple orchard and would like to have two or three of the best varieties positively identified, so that i can order these kinds from the nursery for next year's planting. old california apple orchards have many varieties no longer propagated largely. if you greatly desire to have a few trees of exactly the varieties which you are now growing, you run some risk of mistake in ordering by name, but if you make some root-grafts by taking a piece of the smaller roots of the tree, which you can dig out, say about the size of a pencil, and graft scions upon them, you can secure root-grafts for planting in nursery this year and in that way be sure to have trees of exactly the same kind. root-grafts can be made in the winter, placed in sand which is kept moist and not wet, planted out as soon as the ground warms up, and you will get immediate and very satisfactory growth in that way. pruning old apple trees. i have an old orchard containing some apple trees about years old - trees well shaped but with plenty of main branches and limbs all very long. the trees bear profusely in alternate years but the fruit is small. in pruning would you advise cutting out some main limbs where there are over three or four and thus making a big wood reduction (where sunburn protection can still be guarded) or would you only shorten in the branches and thin the fruit severely? do not remove main branches unless they are clearly too numerous or have been allowed to grow to interference with each other or have become weakened or feeble in some way. in such cases the space is worth more than the branch. if the tree has a fair framework do not disturb it in order to get down to an arbitrary limit of three or four main branches; sometimes the tree can carry more. if the tree is too thick, thin it out by removing side branches of more or less size - saving the best, judging by both vigor and position. work through the whole top in this way until you reach the best judgment you can form of enough space and light for good interior foliage and fruit. apple branches should seldom be shortened, and when this seems desirable, cut to a side branch and not to a stub which will make a lot of weak shoots or brush in the top of the tree. pruning apple trees. there is a great difference of opinion here regarding the pruning of three-year or older apple trees. many people cut back three, four and five-year-old trees half the season's growth; others only cut back six inches. apple trees are cut back during their early life to cause branching and to secure short distances between the larger laterals on the main branches. this secures a lower, stronger tree. cutting back twice or three times should secure a good framework of this kind, and then the apple should not be regularly and systematically cut back as the peach and apricot are. it is not possible to prescribe definite inches, because cutting back is a matter of judgment and depends upon how thick the growth is, what its position and relation to other shoots, etc. the chief point in cutting back is to know where you wish the next laterals to come on the shortened shoot, and if you do not wish more laterals at once; do not cut back at all. treatment, of laterals which come of themselves is another matter. do not clip the ends of shoots unless laterals are desired. if you keep clipping the ends of apple twigs, you will get no fruit from some varieties. grafting almond on peach. i had good success with the peach trees which i grafted to almond last spring, getting about per cent of a stand, and many of the grafts now are one and one-half inches diameter. in each of the trees i left about a quarter of the branches, to keep up the growing process of the tree. the universal practice around here in grafting is to cut the whole top off the tree at the time of grafting, but the increased growth and vigor of the grafts i have has proved to me and other growers around, that much better results are obtained by leaving part of the top on the tree at the time of grafting. you did exceedingly well with your grafting. it seems a more rational way to proceed than by a total amputation, and yet ample success is often attained by grafting for a whole new top at once. pruning almonds. should the main branches be shortened in a three-year-old almond tree? of course, i intend to thin out the branches. some growers here advise me to shorten the main branches; others say do not shorten them, as it tends to give the trees a brushy top. although some growers are contending for regular shortening - in of the almond as is practiced on the peach, it is not usual to cut back almond trees after they have reached three years of age and have assumed good form. of course, if cutting back is done, the shoots coming from near the amputation must be thinned out to prevent the brushiness your adviser properly objected to. budding and grafting almonds. is it better to bud or graft bitter almond seedlings of one year's growth, and, as they must be transplanted, would it be proper to do the work this season or defer it for another year's growth? your almond seedlings should have been budded in july or august after starting from the nut, which would have fitted them for planting in orchard the following winter as dormant buds, as they cannot stay where they are another season. now you can transplant to nursery rows in another place: cut back and graft as the buds are swelling, allowing a good single shoot to grow from below on those which do not start the grafts into which you can bud in june, and cut back the stock to force growth as soon as the buds have taken. in this way you will get the whole stock into trees for planting out next winter. some will be large and some small, but all will come through if planted in good soil and cared for properly. of course, you can plant out the seedlings and graft and bud in the orchard, but it will be a lot of trouble and you will get very irregular results. cutting back almonds. i have some nice thrifty two-year-old almond trees which i did not "top" this spring. the limbs are from about four to seven or eight feet long. would it not be best to "top" them yet? cut them back to a shoot of this year's growth, removing about a third of last year's growth, perhaps. this will give you lower and better branching. almond planting. i am contemplating the planting of about five to eight acres of almonds: what variety is best to plant? before planting so many almonds, you should determine how satisfactory the almond is in bearing in your location. unless you can find satisfactory demonstration of this fact, it is hazardous to plant such an acreage. on the other hand, if you find that almonds are bearing satisfactorily, the kinds which are perhaps most satisfactory to plant are nonpareil, texas prolific, ne plus ultra and drake's seedling. the texas prolific and drake's seedling are abundant bearers and profitable because of the size of the crop, although the price is lower than the soft-shelled varieties, nonpareil and ne plus ultra. these two varieties are such energetic pollinizers that they not only bear well themselves, but force the bearing of the larger varieties mentioned. every third row in your plantation should be either texas prolific or drakes' seedlings, which would give you two-thirds of the larger varieties and one-third of the smaller. there are, of course, other soft-shelled almonds which are worth planting and are being considerably planted in localities where they do well. this you can ascertain by inquiry among local growers and nurserymen. the planting of a good proportion of active pollinizers is the most important point. almond pollination. my almond trees look healthy but the fruit seems to be diseased. is it necessary to have male and female trees, and how can one distinguish them? the almond is monoecious and has perfect blossoms, therefore, there is no such thing as male and female trees in the case of the almond, but most of the best soft-shelled almonds are self-sterile and need cross-pollination from another variety. this is discussed elsewhere in answer to another question. roots for the almond. which is the best root to have the almond grafted on, peach or bitter almond? the soil is sandy. the bitter almond and the hard-shelled sweet almond are both used and we are not aware that any particular advantage has been demonstrated for either of them. the almond does well on peach roots also, but the almond is a better root where the soil conditions suit it. longevity of almond and peach. what is difference in life of peach and almond in california? the almond is the longer-lived, but we have seen both assuming the aspect of forest trees in abandoned pioneer places. both are apt to live longer than their planters, if soil and moisture conditions favor. almond seedlings. i have been told that almond trees raised from seed, no matter what kind of seed planted, will produce bitter almonds. is this a fact? it is not a fact. the majority will probably be hard-shell, sweet and bitter, but others will be soft-shell, medium-shell, paper-shell, and everything else you ever heard of in the almond line. the almond has the sportiest kind of seedlings. do not plant almonds in place. i have acres which i intend to plant to almonds and peaches, and i thought of planting the sprouted nuts and pits where i wanted my trees, and budding the same there in orchard form. as one or two years' use of the land is not considered, what is your advice? my idea is to plant in orchard at start so as not to disturb roots, as when grown in nursery and transplanted in orchard. would it not progress as rapidly? would you advise budding peaches on almond roots; if not, why? my idea is that it would give a longer-lived tree. we would do nothing of the kind. if we decided it better to grow trees than to buy them, we would grow and bud the seedlings in nursery and not in the field. field budding is open to all kinds of injuries and growth from it, when saved from cultivation and all kinds of intruders, is irregular and uncertain. as for starting the roots from the nut in plate, it is largely a fanciful consideration. we count it no gain for the walnut which makes a tap root, and still less gainful for the almond and peach, which, usually make spreading roots. to cut off a tap root does not prevent the tree from rooting deeply if the soil is favorable. as to use of the land, you lose time by growing the seedlings in place. the peach does well on the almond root if soil conditions favor the almond. perhaps it gives longer life to the peach, but the profitable life of the peach tree in a proper soil does not depend on the root; it depends upon the treatment of the top in pruning for renewal of branches. almond and peach. with water-table at feet, which root is best for almond trees? the experience around here is that the peach root starts best. which root is most durable? what is the life of the peach root and of the almond? it is not merely a question of depth to water, but of character of the soil above the water. neither of the roots will stand heavy soil which holds water too long, and both enjoy a free loam which drains readily down to the water-table or bottom water. if the soil is rather sandy, letting the water down very quickly, the almond is better in getting to it than the peach. if it is finer and still well drained the peach will do well, and the almond enjoys that also. the almond probably can be counted on to stand coarser soil and greater drouth than the peach and under such conditions will outlive the peach, probably, but both of them will live twenty to thirty years or more if pruned in the head to get enough new wood and the trunk is kept from sunburn. aside from this choose the almond root for the almond. pollination of almonds. i have drake's seedling almonds. some people have told me that i must plant some hardshell variety between them, otherwise they will not bear. it is not necessary to plant hardshell almonds near drake's seedling trees in order to have them bear. some varieties of almonds will set few nuts unless they are cross-pollinated, but these are the paper-shell varieties, as a rule - the nonpareil, ixl and ne plus ultra - and for these the drake's seedling or texas prolific is planted as a pollenizer. the highest-priced nut of all is the nonpareil, and it is also a good bearer when in a good location and planted with drake's or texas prolific. stick-tight almonds. i have leased seven acres of bearing almond trees which have the appearance of being reasonably well cared for. i notice a few trees that still have almonds on ("stick-tights"). what is the cause and remedy? the occurrence of stick-tights is generally due to lack of moisture and thrifty growth, although some trees may be weak from some other cause and therefore deficient in sap-flow, which manifests itself in that way. single nuts may also fall into that condition of malnutrition. we know no remedy except to keep the trees in good thrift by cultivation or by the use of irrigation if necessary. shy-bearing apricots. why do my apricot trees not bring fruit? they seem healthy and are vigorous-looking trees. five large trees have not borne pounds of fruit in three years. the trees are not over six years old. you may have a shy-bearing kind of apricot, of which there are many, or the trees may have grown too fast to hold the fruit, or the frost or north wind may have blasted the bloom. stop winter pruning, and summer prune to prevent excessive growth; reduce irrigation; try to convince the apricot that it is not a "green bay tree" and see what will happen. pruning apricots. in pruning apricots, if there should be a hollow center of a big branch in center of a seven-year-old tree, should it be cut out with summer pruning? should heavy growing apricots be summer pruned? would it be all right to thin out a dense growth of wood in the prune trees in september? it is always desirable to cut below a hollow in a limb if possible. where, however, this would necessitate cutting below the desirable laterals, the cavity may be filled with cement and thus rendered serviceable for some years. summer pruning of the apricot is desirable if the growth is heavy and the tree has reached a bearing age. thinning out of prune trees can be undertaken in the autumn, providing the tree has practically finished its growth, as indicated by the change in the color and pose of the leaves. apricot propagation. can royal apricots be grafted into seedling apricots? do the scions do well? what is the best time to graft them? the apricot is grafted readily by the ordinary cleft grafting, amputating above the forks if the tree is low-headed enough to allow you to work into the limbs instead of the trunk. grafts will take all right in the trunk by bark grafting, but working in smaller limbs makes a stronger tree. this is for old trees and the grafting is done during the winter. younger seedlings can be cleft or whip grafted in the stems, but it is better to bud into the young seedlings with plump buds of the current year's growth, in june, and by shortening in the seedling above the buds as soon as they have taken, get a growth on the bud in the latter half of the same growing season. in nursery practice, trees are usually made by budding in july or august into seedlings which are then growing from the seed planted the previous winter. little seedlings from under old trees may be carefully transplanted to nursery rows in the spring and budded the same summer. cultivated well and irrigated if necessary, they will not suffer from this transplanting. renewing old apricots. shall i prune back heavily a to -year-old apricot tree which did not mature its fruit this season, i think on account of neglect? it was very poorly cultivated and not irrigated, consequently looks very sick. cut back all the main branches to six or eight feet from the ground, leaving on whatever small growth there may be below that height. paint the stubs and thin out the shoots next summer to get the right number of new branches properly distributed. whether you will get a good renewal of the head depends upon whether the sickness is in the root or not. cut back just before the buds swell toward the end of the dormant season. summer pruning of apricots. is it feasible to prune five-year-old apricot trees in august? they seem in good growth and have been irrigated three times this season, though they have never been pruned very closely. summer pruning would be perfectly proper and advisable. summer pruning immediately after the fruit is picked, has become much more general, and winter pruning has proportionately decreased. young trees are winter pruned to promote low branching and short, stout limbs; bearing trees are summer pruned to promote fruit bearing and check wood growth - the excess of bearing shoots being removed by thinning during the winter. wild cherries. where do the mahaleb and mazzard cherries grow naturally? how large are the trees, and what kind of fruit do they bear? the mazzards, of which there are many, and some of them wild in the eastern states, are counted inferior seedlings of the species avium, and are tall, large trees, the fruit being small and rather acrid and colors various. the mahaleb is a european type with a smaller tree, fruit inferior to the mazzards, and used as a root under soil and climatic conditions under which the mazzard is not hardy and vigorous. neither of the kinds are worth considering for their fruit. pruning cherries. i have some cherry trees that have not been pruned. they are beautiful trees, but it a requires a -foot ladder to get near the top limbs. the side limbs reach from tree to tree. they had a splendid crop this year. people here tell me never to prune cherry trees. one man who claims considerable experience with fruit says prune them as soon as the crop is off. your cherry trees should have been pruned for the first two or three years quite severely, in order to secure better branching and strength in the main branches. if this is done, and the trees come into full bearing, very little pruning has to be done afterward, except removing diseased, interfering or surplus branches, if there are too many. it is perfectly safe to cut back the trees which you now have as you have been advised to do, after the leaves have fallen or after they have begun to turn yellow. the trees can be safely topped and thinned, for the cherry accepts pruning very readily. even considerable amounts of the tops have been cut off at fruit-picking time from trees which have been running too high, so that the fruit could be secured, and this has not injured the trees, according to our own experience and observation. cherries can be summer-pruned to check excessive growth and to promote fruit-bearing, but as your trees have already begun to bear well, this treatment does not seem to be necessary. you should do fall and winter pruning for the shape of the trees. training cherry grafts. i have grafted a lot of seedling cherries, leaving two or three buds on each piece of grafted wood. in planting these out, shall i put the union under ground (they are grafted at the crown of the root) and shall i loosen the cloth a little later when they start to grow? how can i get the head for the tree? should i let only one shoot form, and when it is as high as i want it, cut it off as i would a tree gotten from a nursery? if you have used waxed cloth in your grafting, it will be necessary to loosen it after the tree gets a good start. common unwaxed cloth could be trusted to decay soon enough, probably, but it should be looked at to see that it is not binding. the union should not be placed much below the ground surface, although it can be safely covered, and the future stem may look the better for it. one shoot could be allowed to grow from each graft, choosing the best ones and pinching the others so that they will stop extension and hold leaves during the first season. these can be cleanly removed at the first winter pruning at the time you head back the main shoot to the proper height. restoring cherry trees. i have about two acres of cherry trees in sonoma county said to be about years old. they are in a very neglected condition and i am desirous of putting them in good shape for next year's crop. they are in a very light sandy loam sail which is easily worked. cherry trees under good growing conditions and proper care are very long lived in california and bear abundant crops when thirty and more years of age. in the san jose district and elsewhere there are orchards considerably older than the limit stated and are still very profitable. if your trees have been so neglected that the branches have died back, the trees should be pruned, of course, cutting out all dead wood and shortening weak or dying branches to a point where a good strong shoot can be found. then a good application of farmyard manure plowed in during the rainy season, followed by summer cultivation for moisture retention. although the cherry is very hardy, it is quite likely to suffer on light soils which become too dry. on such soils as yours there is little if any danger of too much water in the winter, unless the land lies low, but the injury to the tree comes from the lack of moisture during the summer time, and this, with your abundant rainfall, you can probably assure by thorough summer cultivation. renewing cherry trees. we have cherry trees set out diamond shape about feet apart. we cannot take out every other tree and have any order, so we ask you if it would be possible to cut the trees back and keep them pruned down to a smaller size. the trees are about years old and are dying back quite badly. if the trees are dying for lack of summer moisture it is idle to do much for them until you can give them irrigation right after the fruit ripens. the cherry tree takes kindly to cutting back and will give good new fruit-bearing shoots if the roots are in good condition. it is desirable to remove surplus branches entirely rather than to cut back everything to a definite height, the branches to be removed being those which show disposition to die back and those which are running out too far so as to reduce the space between the trees or to interfere with branches from other trees. branches which are failing above can in some cases be cut back to a strong thrifty lateral branch below. shortening-in branches high up is less desirable because it forces out too much new growth in the top of the tree and carries the fruit so high that picking would be expensive. all cuts of any size should be painted to prevent the wood from checking. pruning cherries. i have cherry trees in their third season which have been given the usual winter pruning. the trees are putting forth a great many more branches than are required, and naturally many of the branches are growing across the tree. in cutting these extra branches, i am informed that there is a way to trim them so that they will eventually form fruit spurs. i had an idea that in order to do this it would be well to cut about one inch from the main branch. some one has told me that this would merely cause the little branch to sprout again. cherry shoots which are not required or desired for branch-forming can be transferred into fruit spurs, if the tree is of bearing age, by shortening them in. do not, however, cut at an arbitrary distance of one inch from the starting point, but rather save one or two buds at whatever distance from the starting point these may be growing. if the tree is too young to bear, only growth shoots may appear from these buds, but they are likely to be short and will support fruit spurs later. this practice should not be carried to excess or you will have too many small shoots which will not get light enough to bear good fruit, even if fruit spurs should appear. pollination of black tartarian. there are many old tartarian cherry trees around our district that have only borne a few cherries in years. there are bing, royal ann and early purple guignes here with these, but they seldom, if ever, bloom with the tartarian at the proper time to pollinate. what varieties would cause the trees to bear? sterility of the black tartarian is rather unusual. in the coast regions, bing, black tartarian and early purple guigne are all considered pollinizers for the royal ann. inversely all these should be pollinizers for the black tartarian, if that variety requires such assistance, which we have all along supposed that it did not. treatment of fig suckers. a few young fig trees are not growing from the tops, but are sending out suckers, in some cases above and others below the point of grafting. had i better let these suckers grow and see what comes from them or plant new trees? graft near the ground all those which are sending suckers from below the graft. suckers from above grafting point can be trained into trees by selecting the best, tying to stakes to straighten up and removing all other suckers but the one selected. no gopher-proof fig roots. is it necessary that figs should be grafted in some other roots to keep the gophers from destroying the trees? what root should i order? figs are not grown on any other than fig roots and are generally propagated by rooted cuttings for the purpose of avoiding the expense of grafting. the fruit must then be protected by killing the gophers rather than by an effort to get the tree upon a gopher-proof root. pollination of bartletts. would clapp's favorite be a good pollinizer for the bartlett as well as the white doyenne? the white doyenne and the clapp's favorite usually begin to bloom three or four days later than the bartlett, but the bartlett period extends about ten days into the blooming period of the others. therefore, your question is to be answered in the affirmative; that is, if the bartlett needs pollination, it will be likley to get it from either of these varieties. comice pears. would you plant comice pears instead of bartletts, and why? what is their behavior as to bearing? do they require any different treatment than bartletts? what roots? do they need other varieties for pollinizing? do not plant cornice instead of bartletts except for those who have tested out the cornice to their production and selling. though satisfactory in some places, it makes no such wide record of success as the bartlett and should be planted only on the basis of experience with it. its propagation and culture are the same as other pears. it takes to the quince all right if you want dwarf trees. we have no record of its pollination needs, but as the bartlett in california defies its eastern reputation for self-sterility, it is likely that cornice may also take care of itself, for it is not handicapped by such eastern condemnation. no pears on peach. i saw, the other day, some bartlett pear grafts in salway peach trees, and the party informed me that he had seen three-year-old grafts that had pears last season. i would like your opinion, as i always thought that such a union was not possible. our opinion is like yours, and seeing some pear grafts set in peach branches would not convince us that they would grow or bear fruit. pigs in the orchard. i have an orchard of bartlett pears about fifteen years old, located on sediment land. i desire to set this to alfalfa, and to feed the alfalfa by letting hogs eat it off, thereby leaving the droppings on the land. what i wish to know is this: will this crop be beneficial or injurious to the trees? alfalfa can be successfully grown in an orchard, providing you have irrigation water so that the alfalfa shall not rob the trees of moisture; otherwise it is a very dangerous practice. the practice of running animals of any kind in an orchard is to be condemned. pigs are particularly liable to injure trees by gnawing the bark, and we have seen fig trees barked clean as high as a pig could reach by standing on his hind legs. of course, if you try an experiment for your own satisfaction, you will have to watch the pigs very carefully. it is true that growing pasture crops in an orchard and grazing, it off is injurious to trees, because the land lacks proper aeration, and good orchard cultivation is even more necessary in this state than in humid climates. therefore, unless you are sure of a good water supply for irrigation, it would be altogether safer to give the whole land to the trees and keep them cultivated well, or else dig out the trees and use the land for other purposes. dwarf pears not commercially grown. will you kindly give the experience of pear growers in california who have grown the dwarfs? if you can give me the data or refer me to persons who can give data showing that the growing of dwarf pears can be made a commercial success the information will be of great value. there is no commercial growing of dwarf pears in this state, except some trees owned by the a. block company, santa clara. the late mr. block had an old orchard of dwarf trees, planted perhaps forty or fifty years ago, which he converted into an approach to a standard orchard by removing alternate rows, and the trees being otherwise treated like standards have been satisfactorily producing pears for many years. how far these trees are still on the dwarf roots and how far they have supplied themselves with roots from the variety growth above, we do not know. there is no disposition whatever to plant dwarf trees in this state except among a few amateurs who are making home fruit gardens. in view of the successful growth of standard trees in this state, there seem to be no adequate reasons for recourse to dwarf trees. yield in drying pears. what is the loss of weight in drying bartlett pears? they run from to lbs. of fresh pears to lb. hard dried. there is quite wide variation according to condition of the fruit. probably about / to would be as near a realizable ratio as you could get by arbitrary estimate. pear problems. kindly let me know the advisability of grafting bartlett pears onto apple trees. in replanting pears in young orchard, how would it do to take rooted pear suckers, graft the bartlett on them, and save the cost of nursery stock? last year my five-year-old bartlett orchard was full of blossoms, but, though many pears became as large as white beans, the majority of them dropped. the pear and apple do not make a good union. the grafts may grow for a while, but finally fail. do not use suckers as stocks. you can dig up some year roots and use them as starters by making root-grafts with bartlett scions and do better than with suckers, but a good pear seedling is the proper thing either for budding or root grafting. unless you have some experience in such work, it will be cheaper in the end to buy good nursery trees. the nonbearing of your young trees is probably due to their youth and vigor. bees and pear blight. a few years ago, i planted alfalfa between my pear trees and the trees bore a very heavy crop that year. then blight made its appearance, and it was claimed that the bees carried the blight. i therefore plowed under the alfalfa and destroyed what few beehives i had. if the theory that the bees carry the blight from tree to tree is not correct, i will experiment with alfalfa again this year. it is true that bees carry pear blight. it is also true that you are not likely to get many pears without bees to pollinate the blossoms. you cannot escape the carriage of the pear blight by removing tame bees, because wild bees are abundant in all parts of the state. the way to overcome the blight is to pursue it by amputation of diseased branches continually, so that there may be no contamination for the bees to carry. you are certainly warranted in continuing your alfalfa growing without regard to this question, using water enough to keep the alfalfa growing well without saturating the soil to the injury of the trees or inducing too much summer growth on them. forage under sprayed trees. is it safe to use arsenical sprays in a pear orchard in which alfalfa is raised between the trees and afterward cut and fed to cattle? it was fully demonstrated by experiment about years ago that herbage under trees sprayed with paris green at the rate of pound to gallons of water was not injurious to animals pasturing upon it. we are not aware that such an experiment has been made with the more recently used arsenates - which can be used with a much higher amount of arsenic to the gallon because they do not injure the foliage - to determine whether the herbage below would be poisonous or not. presumably not, because modern spraying does not admit as much loss from run-off as was the case with old spraying methods. pears on quince. i saw some time ago a report of some french experiments in grafting the pear onto quince root. the report said the fruit produced was much larger than on any other root. most of our common pears will take readily when grafted on the quince, but the quince transforms them into dwarfed trees. such trees do produce, with proper care, very fine fruit. the remark about their being better than on standard trees refers, however, to other climates than ours, for california grows just as large pears on standard trees as can possibly be grown, while where conditions are harder the higher culture of the dwarf tree and the protection which it requires from climatic hardships, gives the dwarf tree the advantage. you can get pears on quince roots from most of our california nurseries. pollination of pears. is it necessary in growing the comice pear successfully, to put some other pear near for the purpose of pollination in order to make it successful? will the ordinary bartlett pear do for pollination? the comice pear blooms with the bartlett, and would therefore presumably be of pollinizing benefit to the bartlett if the latter should require such treatment. common experience in california, however, is that the bartlett is self-fertile and not self-sterile as it is commonly reported in eastern publications. california practice is, then, to plant bartletts solidly without reference to preparation for pollination. taking the matter the other way around, the bartlett will do for pollination of the comice probably, if that should be necessary. lye-peeling peaches. please give the formula for peeling peaches by dipping them in caustic soda or lye. lye for peeling peaches is used at the rate of half to one pound to the gallon of water, according to the strength of the lye, which you can determine by the quickness with which it acts. the lye water is kept boiling, and the fruit is dipped in wire baskets, only being allowed to remain in the lye a few seconds, and is then plunged at once into fresh water. you must be careful to keep the lye boiling hot, also either to use running water for rinsing or change it very frequently, for you have to rely on fresh water to remove the lye, or the fruit is likely to be stained. aged peach trees. what should be done with peach trees years old which are becoming unthrifty, bearing only at the ends of the limbs, etc.? old peach trees become bark-bound and need to be cut back to just above the crotch for the forcing out of new branches, this being facilitated, of course, by application of manure, good cultivation of the soil, use of water during the dry season, etc. the peach is, under most conditions, not a long-lived tree, and if your trees are years of age, it is probable that best results could be obtained by grubbing them out and replanting with young trees on new soil if possible. the profitable life of the eastern peach tree is put down at five or six years. in california the profitable life of the peach sometimes reaches twenty or more years, if growing under exceptionally good conditions; but years would seem to be at least on the borders of decrepitude. growing at the tips shows that you have not pruned annually to induce the growth of new wood lower down. renewing peach orchard. which is the best way to renew an old peach orchard? the trees are about years old, muirs and fosters, and are yielding good crops, but some of the trees show decline. is it best to replace the old ones with new trees or to plant a new orchard in between the old trees and cut out old ones when new trees are three or four years old? if the trees have sound bodies and are not badly injured by sunburn borers, do none of the things you mention, but would cut back for a new head. cutting back should be done during the latter half of the dormant period and thinning of shoots to proper balance a new head should be carefully done the following winter. it is a hard job to get young trees to start among old trees and you are apt to get a mixed lot of trees which you will not be proud of. cut back as suggested or rip out, plow deeply and start anew, placing the rows midway between the old rows. will he have peaches? i have a young orchard between five and six years old, mostly of the lovell variety. i didn't have much of a crop this year. should i have a good crop next year? you ought to be able to tell now how full a set of fruit buds you have. if you do not know what the fruit buds are, ask some neighbor who knows peaches to point them out. if you have a good show of fruit buds, the question in california is not whether they will winter-kill or not, but whether the leaves held late enough the preceding summer and therefore the tree had strength enough to make good strong fruit buds. the late action of the leaves shows that the trees had enough autumn moisture. you will soon learn to recognize the condition also from the plumpness of the wood which carries the fruit buds. if all has gone well so far, the next point is to spray with the bordeaux mixture in november or december so that the new wood shall not be attacked by the peach blight or shothole fungus. this disease comes on early in the winter, sets the the new bark to gumming and endangers the crop. then if you have san jose scale, or if your trees showed much curl-leaf last spring, you ought to spray before the blossom buds show color with the lime-sulphur wash. supposing that you have good buds now and are willing to protect them as suggested, your trees may be expected to come through with a good crop if seasonal moisture conditions are right. peach fillers in apple orchard. i have heard some talk against planting peach fillers in an apple orchard. what is your opinion on the subject? there is no objection providing the peach is profitable in the locality; and that point you must look into. the peach trees will not injure the apples unless they are allowed to stand too long. in that case they would interfere with the development of the apple. grafting peach on almond. may i expect to get good results by grafting some kind of peach to -year-old almond tree? if so, what kind of peach will be best? when shall i do grafting? peaches take to the almond all right. cut off and graft in the branches above the main forking of the tree; leaving at least one large branch to be grafted later or to be cut out entirely if you have peach growth enough to fill the top sufficiently. graft in any kind of peach you find to be worth growing. graft toward the latter part of the dormant season, say when the buds are swelling for a new start. peaches on apricot. i have a three-year-old peach orchard grafted or budded on apricot roots, and interspersed through the orchard are young apricot trees, from half-inch to inch and a half in diameter, which sprang from the root, the peach bud or graft having died. i budded these over to peaches in summer, but the buds all died for some cause. what is now the best course to transform them into peach trees? if a graft, what form of graft, and approximately when should it be made? you can graft peach scions into the apricot sprouts by taking the peach scions of the varieties you desire while the tree is perfectly dormant, keeping them in a cool place and putting in the grafts just as the buds are beginning to swell on the apricot stock. the scions can be buried in the earth in the shade of a fence or building, selecting a place, however, which is moist enough and yet where the water does not gather. the ordinary form of top grafting in stems an inch or more in diameter will work well. the half-inch stems can be whip-grafted successfully. you will have to wax well and see that the wax coating is kept sound until the growth starts. replanting after root-knots. in digging out some old peach trees, i find now and then a tree affected with root knot. i am burning the root, of course, but as these trees are scattered in the orchard, i wish to plant young trees in same locations, thus preserving the rows. can new stock be safely put in the earth from which the old tree is removed? if treatment of the soil is essential, what is recommended? dig a good large hole, removing the earth, and fill with new earth from between the rows, and in this way healthy growth ought to be obtained, although there is always a disposition in some trees to put on knots. they should be looked at from time to time and all those affecting the larger stem should be removed and the wound painted with bordeaux mixture. buds in bearing trees. in budding over some old peach trees, should i cut away the branch above the bud when the latter seems to have taken? the sap flow to the upper part of the branch should be checked by part girdling or by part breaking or bending the top above the bud, after the bud is seen to have set or taken. do not remove the whole top until the growth on the bud has started out well or else you will "drown it" with excessive sap flow. pollen must be of the same kind. do peaches, nectarines and apricots set fruit with the pollen of one another, and are the various peaches, nectarines and apricots self-sterile, or will most kinds set fruit with their own pollen? we do not count upon pollination between different kinds of fruit. most fruits are self-fertile, else we could not attain the practical results we do, because it is only in the planting of almonds, cherries, pears and apples that any regard is paid to the association of varieties for that cross-fertilization. some fruits are more apt to be self-fertile in this state than in other states where the growing conditions are not so favorable. peach budding. which is easier with the peach, grafting or budding? the peach is rather a difficult tree to graft, and budding, on the other hand, is quite easy. you can bud into new shoots of this season's growth in july, and, if necessary, you can improve the slipping of the bark by irrigation a few days before budding. buds can also be successfully placed in june in the old bark of the peach, providing it is not too old. for this select well-matured buds from the larger shoots and use rather a larger shield than in working into new shoots. when the buds are seen to have taken, the top growth beyond it can be reduced gradually and some new growth forced on the buds the same season, if the sap flow continues as it might be expected to do on young trees well cared for. grafting on the peach. will pears do to graft on the peach, or will plums do well on the peach? how soon ought they to bear when grafted on the peach which is past three years old? pears cannot be grafted on peaches. plums generally do well on the peach, and if the grafts are taken from bearing trees, should come into fruit the second season. the peach is more difficult to graft than other fruit trees, because of the drying back of the bark. be extra careful in the waxing and be sure that the waxing remains good until the growth starts out well the following summer. young trees failing to start. some peach and almond trees set out last spring lived, but made no growth. should they be replaced with new stock? if not, what may be expected of them? if your inactive trees have good plump dormant buds (though they may not be large buds), they may make good growth the coming summer, if the land is good and the moisture right for free growth. peach planting in alfalfa sod. is it advisable to plant canning peaches in april, and will i gain time in growth and development? i want to set out eight acres in tuscans or phillips on deep rich soil near yuba city. i have a pumping plant and can irrigate. the land has been in alfalfa for several years. i have in mind setting out trees without disturbing the alfalfa - until next plowing season. do you think it advisable to use commercial fertilizer on ten-year-old muirs? planting the best canning peaches on good peach soil near yuba city seems to be about the safest line of fruit investment which can be undertaken. we doubt that you can get much growth from trees planted in an old stand of alfalfa without some effort to kill out the plant which now occupies the ground. still, by deep digging, throwing out all the alfalfa roots and thorough hoeing during the growing season and keeping the alfalfa mowers from sawing off the tops of them, the trees may make a good start. as the alfalfa will have to be irrigated, april may not be too late to start the trees, providing you can find nursery stock which is still quite dormant. probably ten-year-old peach trees will be very much improved by commercial fertilizers. prune on almond. what root is considered best for prune trees? the ranch lies above the creek. a friend is very partial to the almond root instead of the myrobalan, but i understand that the prune tree sometimes outgrows the almond root. if you have a deep rather light soil which drains well and which there is, therefore, no danger of water standing during the rainy season, the almond root is perfectly satisfactory for the prune. it is a strong-growing root and keeps pace with the top growth well. the prune, in fact, is more apt to overgrow the myrobalan than the almond, and the myrobalan will not do well on light soils likely to dry out as the almond will. re-grafting silver prunes. i have five acres of silver prunes which produce very little fruit. the trees are strong and healthy. french prune trees adjoining bear regularly and heavily. can i graft french prunes on the silver trees? will silver prune trees take other grafts, such as apricots or apples? the silver prune is often unsatisfactory for reason of shy bearing. it is perfectly feasible to graft over the tree to the french prune and this has been done for years by different growers. apricots will usually take on the plum stock, but are apt to over-grow it or else be dwarfed themselves, but the apricot is often worked upon a plum stock. apples have no grafting affinity whatever for the plum. french or italian. in the prune-growing district around salem, oregon, italian prunes are grown exclusively for drying purposes. french prunes were considered worthless. here in sutter county, california, a great many french prunes are grown and we are advised to plant them, but would rather plant the italian prune. which would you advise us to set out in this part of the state? the italian or fellenberg prune was grown to some extent in california years and abandoned; it was not so sure in bearing as the french, and it was not the type of prune which we had ambition to excel with. the prune which we grow as the french is the true prune or plum of agen. we should plant it and let the oregon people have the italian. myrobalan seedlings. i am sending two small plums which i am told are myrobalan plum. i desire to grow seedlings on which later to bud and graft french prunes. if these are myrobalan plums, will trees from them be as good as trees from pits that were imported? the fruits are myrobalan plums, and their seedlings would be suitable for the french prune, providing the trees which bear them are strong, thrifty growing trees. there is great variation in the colors of the myrobalan seedlings, from light yellow to dark red, and it is the satisfactory growth of the tree rather than the character of the fruit which one has to bear in mind when growing seedlings from selected trees instead of depending so largely on imported seedlings. drying plums and prunes. i have plum trees of various kinds that are loaded with fruit. i do not know if any are of the variety used for drying as prunes: i know nothing of the process of making or drying prunes. one man suggests that i dip them for four or live minutes in a or per cent solution of lye and then place them in the sun. dipping your plums is right providing they are very sweet, as they will dry like prunes without removing the pit. if they are plums that are commercially used for shipping, without enough sugar to dry as prunes, the pit must be removed. drying in this way, you do not need to use lye, which is simply for the purpose of cracking the skin so that the moisture can be more readily evaporated. there is no danger in using the necessary amount of lye. less is used than in making hominy. the sugar prune. what is the commercial value of the sugar prune? is there any other early ripening variety better than the sugar? it is selling very well as a cured prune, and growers in the northern bay counties especially have done so well that they are extending their plantings. it is coarser in flesh than the french and generally flatter in flavor when cooked and thus falls below the ideal of a cured prune, but it has compensating characters, such as early ripening, with which no other prune compares. the sugar is also valuable as a shipping plum to eastern markets. glossing dried prunes. will you give the method for giving the gloss to dried french prunes? there are various methods. one pound of glycerine to gallons of water; a quick dip in the mixture very hot gives a good finish. where a clear bloom rather than a shine, is desired, five pounds of common salt to gallons of water, also dipped hot, gives a good effect. some use a thin syrup made by boiling small prunes in water (by stove or steam) and thinning with water to produce the result desired. steam cooking avoids bad flavor by burning. the salt dip is probably the most widely used. price of prunes on a size basis. explain the grading in price of prunes. for instance, if the base price is, say, five and three-fourths cents, what size does this refer to, and how is the price for other sizes calculated? also, what is the meaning of the phrase "four-size basis"? prunes, after being sold to the packer, are graded into different sizes, according to the number required to make a pound, and paid for on that basis. the four regular sizes are - s, - s, - s, and - s, which means that from to prunes are required to make a pound, and so on. the basis price is for prunes that weigh to the pound. when the basis price is / cents, - s are worth / cent less than this amount, or / cents. the next smaller size, - s, are worth / cent less, or cents, while prunes under this size are little but skin and pit and bring much less to the grower. for each next larger size there is a difference of / cent in favor of the grower, so that on the / -cent basis - s are worth cents, and - s / cents. this advance continues for the larger sizes, - s, - s, etc., but these quite often command a premium besides, which is fixed according to the supplies available and the demand for the various sizes. the sizes for which no premium or penalty is generally fixed are those from to , four sizes, so that this basis of making contracts and sales is called the "four-size basis." the advantage that results in having this method of selling prunes can be seen by the fact that on a / -cent basis the smallest of the four sizes will bring but cents a pound, while - s would bring, without any premium, / cents, and with cent premium, / cents. this size has this season brought as high as and cents a pound. it may be noted here that no prunes are actually sold at just the basis price, as they are worth either less or more than this as they are smaller or larger than to the pound. no matter what the basis price is, there is a difference of one-half cent between each size and the sizes nearest to it. pollinizing plums. how many rows of robe de sergeant prune trees should be alternated with the french prune (the common dried prune of commerce) to insure perfect fertilization of the blossoms? the french prune is self-fertile; that is, it does not require the presence of other plum species for pollination of the blossoms. it is the robe de sergeant prune which is defective in pollination and which is presumably assisted by proximity to the french prune. if you wish to grow robe de sergeant prunes your question of interplanting would be pertinent, but if you desire only to grow french prunes you need not plant the robe de sergeant at all. cultivating olives. how deep should an olive orchard be plowed? i was told that by plowing deep i would injure my trees, in cutting up small rootlets and fibres which the olive extends through the surface soil. is this so or not? plowing olives is like plowing other trees, the purpose being to get a workable soil deep enough to stand five or six inches of summer cultivation, usually. if you have old trees which have never been deeply plowed, you would destroy a lot of roots by deep plowing, and you should not start in and rip up all the land at once. you can gradually deepen the plowing, sacrificing fewer roots at a time, without injuring the trees if they are otherwise well circumstanced. small rootlets and fibres in the surface soil do not count; they are quickly replaced, and if you do not destroy them, the whole surface soil, if moist enough, will be filled with a network of roots which will subsequently make decent working of the soil impossible. moving old olive trees. would there be anything gained by transplanting old olive trees to inches in diameter over nursery stock? they would have to be shipped from santa clara to butte county and grafted. would they come into bearing any sooner and be as good trees? could the large limbs be used to advantage? would the fact that they are covered with smut cause any trouble? old olive trees can be successfully moved a long distance by cutting back, taking up a ball of earth, and possibly a short distance with bare roots if everything is favorable. but do not for a moment think them worth such an outlay for labor, freight and hauling which such a movement as you mention involves. the trees on arrival would probably only be firewood, and if they lived, the time required in getting a good growth and grafting, etc., would perhaps be as great as in bringing a young tree of the right kind to bearing, and the latter would be a better tree in every way. large limbs can be split and used as cuttings, but the tree would be growth on one side and decay on the other. use the smaller limbs for hard-wood cuttings and the balance for firewood. the smut shows that the trees are covered with scale insects and might indicate that it is better to burn up the whole outfit unless you learn to fight them. darkening pickled olives. is there anything that will make olives keep their black color when put into lye? when i put my first picking of ripe olives in lye, a large part of them turn green, the black leaving the fruit. my formula is one pound of lye to five gallons of water. have you any better formula? by exposing the olives to the light and air, either during the salting or immediately after, ripe olives may be given a uniformly black color. also, fruit which is less ripe and which shows red and green patches after processing with lye, becomes an almost uniform dark brown color. to do this, the olives are removed from the brine and exposed to light and air freely for one or two days. your lye was stronger than necessary. with ripe olives it is desirable to use salt and lye together to prevent softening, and the common prescription is two ounces of potash lye and four ounces of salt to the gallon of water after the bitterness is largely removed by using one or two treatments with two ounces of lye to the gallon without the salt. it is necessary to draw off the solution, rinse well, and put on fresh solution several times during the process to get the best results. seedling olives must be grafted. will olive trees grown from the olive seed be the right thing to plant? will they be true to the parent tree or will they have to be grafted? olives which a seedling olive tree will bear will be, as a rule, very inferior and generally of the type of the wild olive. all such trees must be grafted in order to produce any particular variety which you desire. olives, oranges and peppers. we have been told that olive trees easily become infested with a fungus disease which they then impart to the orange tree. the same objection is raised to the planting of pepper trees. may this be true in some parts of the state and not in others? the fungus of which you have heard is the "black smut." it is a result, not a cause. it grows on the honey dew exuded from scale insects and if your trees have no scale they have no fungus. the olive trees and pepper trees may communicate this trouble to citrus trees, or vice versa - whichever gets it first gives it away to the other. if you will work hard enough to kill the scale wherever it appears you can have all these trees, but, of course, it costs a lot to fight scale on big pepper trees, and it is, therefore, wisest usually to choose an ornamental tree not likely to accept the scale. budding olive seedlings. i have planted olive seeds which are just sprouting now. can these be budded next june or july in the nursery row, or can they be bench-grafted the following winter? your seedlings may make growth enough to spur-bud this summer. the ordinary plate-bud does not take freely with the olive. some of them may do this; other seedlings may be slow and have to be budded in the second summer. watch the size and the sap flow so that the bark will lift well - which may not be at just the time that deciduous trees are budded. it may be both earlier or later in the season. graft evergreens like the olive in the nursery row; not by bench grafting. budding old olives. i have seedling olive trees, set out in , which i wish to change over to the ascolano variety. which is the best way to do it, by budding or grafting, and what is the proper time? twig-budding brings the sap of the stock to bear upon a young lateral or tip bud, which is much easier to start than dormant buds used either as buds or grafts. a short twig about an inch and a half in length is taken with some of the bark of the small branch from which it starts, and both twig and bark at its base are put in a bark slit like an ordinary shield bud and tied closely with a waxed band, although if the sap is moving freely it would probably do with a string or raffia tie. put in such buds as growth is starting in the spring. olives from small cuttings. in the rooting of small soft-wood olive cuttings is it necessary to cover same with glass - say perhaps prepare a cold-frame and put stable manure in the bottom with about eight inches of sand on top? it ceases to be a cold-frame when you cover in manure for bottom heat; it becomes a hotbed. varieties of olives differ greatly in the readiness with which they start from small cuttings. some start freely and grow well in boxes of sand under partial shade - like a lath house or cover. some need bottom heat in such a hotbed as you describe with a cloth over; some start well in a cold-frame with a lath cover. to get the best results with all kinds, it is safer to use some more heat than comes from exposure to ordinary temperatures - either by concentration, as in a covered frame, or by a mild bottom heat. if you have glass frames or greenhouse, they are, of course, desirable, but much can be done without that expense. olives from large cuttings. i am about to take olive cuttings from one-half to one inch thick and to inches long, and wish to root them in nursery rows. please advise me if it is necessary to plant under half shade? also, can same be planted out right away, or should they be buried in trenches for a while before setting out? would it be best to strip all leaves or branches off, or leave one on? how many buds should be left above ground? plant in open ground in the coast district generally; in the interior a lath (or litter shade not too dense) is desirable in places where high dry heat is expected and where sprinkling under the cover may be desirable. plant out when the soil is right as to warmth and moisture, which is usually a little later than this in the central and northern parts of the state. remove all leaves and twigs and plant about three-quarters of the length in the soil, which should be a well-drained sandy loam. the cuttings can be taken directly from the trees and need not be bedded. if the cuttings come some distance and get end-dried, make a fresh cut at planting. if shriveled at all, soak a few hours in water before planting out. trimming up olives. limbs are shooting out too low on my olive trees. would it be right to trim them up while dormant this winter, or should i let them grow another year before doing so? i think i want the first limbs to start at to inches above the ground. take off the lower shoots whenever your knife is sharp. do not let them grow another year. theoretically, the best time to remove them is toward the end of the dormant season, but if they are not large as compared with the whole growth of the tree, go to it any time. canning olives. what is the recipe for preserving olives by heat, and how long do they have to remain in the heated state? canning olives is a process, not a recipe, and it has to be operated with judgment. it resembles, of course, the common process of canning other fruits and vegetables. it has been demonstrated that heating up to ° fahrenheit is effective to keep olives in sealed containers for over two years. the heating was done in the jars in the usual canning way for several minutes after ° was reached, to be sure the contents were heated through. renewing olive trees. i have olive trees on first-class land; no pest of any kind is apparent. the trees look healthy in every way, and average about inches at the butt and feet high. they have borne fruit, but for the last three years have not borne. i am advised to cut back to stumps, or feet high, and start new tops. unsatisfactory olive trees may be cut back, but not to such an extent as you mention. thin out the branches if too thick and cut back or remove those which interfere, but to cut back to a stump would force out a very thick mass of brush which you would have to afterward go into and thin out desperately. the branches which you decide to retain may be cut back to twelve or fifteen feet from the ground. this would have the effect of giving you plenty of new thrifty wood, which is desirable for the fruiting of the olive, but we cannot guarantee that this treatment will make the trees satisfactory bearers. are you sure they are receiving water enough? if not, give them more next summer. also give the land a good coat of stable manure and plow under when the land is right for the plow. growing olives from seed. how are seedlings grown from olive seeds? growing olives from seeds is promoted by assisting nature to break the hard shell. this can be done by pinching carefully with ordinary wire pliers until the shell cracks without injury to the kernel, or the shell may be cut into with a file, making a very small aperture to admit moisture. the french have specially contrived pliers with a stop which admits cracking and prevents crushing. olive seeds in their natural condition germinate slowly and irregularly. they must be kept moist and planted about an inch deep in sandy loam, covering with chaff or litter to prevent drying of the surface. before experimenting with olive pits, crack a few to see if they have good plump kernels. seedling olives must be grafted, of course, to be sure of getting the variety you want. for this reason growth from cuttings is almost universal. neglected olive trees. i have a lot of olive trees which have grown up around the old stumps. they are large trees and some of them have six or eight trunks. should i cut away all but one trunk or let them alone? there are some of the trees with small olives; others none. if the olive trees which were originally planted were trained at first and still have a good trunk and tree form, the suckers which have intruded from below should be removed. if, however, the trees have been allowed to grow many branches from below, so that there is really no single tree remaining, make a selection of four or five of the best shoots and grow the trees in large bush form, shortening in the higher growth so as to bring the fruit within easier reach and reduce the cost of picking. you can also develop a single shoot into a tree as you suggest. of course, you must determine whether the trees as they now stand are of a variety which is worth growing. if they are all bearing very small fruit, it would be a question whether they were worth keeping at all, because grafting on the kind of growth which you describe would be unlikely to yield satisfactory tree forms, though you might get a good deal of fruit from them. olives from cuttings. i have two choice olive trees on my place. i am anxious to get trees from these old ones and do not know how to go about it. can i grow the young trees by using cuttings or slips from these old trees ? if so, when is the proper time to select the cuttings, and how should they be planted? take cuttings of old wood, one-half or three-quarters of an inch in diameter, about ten inches long, and plant them about three-quarters of their length in a sandy loam soil in a row so water can be run alongside as may be necessary to keep the soil moist but not too wet. such dormant cuttings can be put in when the soil begins to warm up with the spring sunshine. they can be put in the places where you desire them to grow in one or two years. olives, like other evergreen trees, should be transplanted in the spring when there is heat enough to induce them to take hold at once in their new places, and not during the winter when dormant deciduous trees are best transplanted. water and frost. i have in mind two pieces of land well adapted to citrus culture. both have the same elevation, soil, climate and water conditions, except that one piece is a mile of the kaweah river, while the other is four or five miles distant. in case of a frost, all conditions being about the same, which piece would you consider to be liable to suffer the more? in the heavy frost of last december, while neither sustained any great damage, that portion of the ground nearer the river seemed to sustain the less. is this correct in theory? the kaweah river at this point is a good-sized stream of rapidly flowing water. the land near the river, conditions of elevation being similar, would be less liable to frost. there are a good many instances where the presence of a considerable body of water prevents the lowering of the temperature of the air immediately adjacent. it is so at various points along the sacramento river, and it is recognized as a general principle that bodies of water exert a warming influence upon their immediate environment even in regions with a hard winter. how much it may count for must be determined by taking other conditions into the account also. thinning oranges. is it advisable to thin fruit on young citrus trees? our trees have been bearing about three years, but they are still small trees. the oranges and grape fruit ripen well and are large and of excellent quality, but the trees seem overloaded. the size of oranges on over-burdened trees can be increased by thinning, just as other fruits are enlarged, but it is not systematically undertaken as with peaches and apricots, because it is not so necessary and because it is easy to get oranges on young trees too large and to be discounted for over-sized coarse fruit. removing part of the fruit from young trees is often done - for the good of the tree, not for the good of the fruit. it should be done after the natural drop takes place, during the summer. wind-blown orange trees. what would you do for citrus trees five years old that have been badly blown out of shape? such trees must be trued up by pruning into the wind; that is, cutting to outside buds on the windward side and to inside buds on the lee side; also reducing the weight by pruning away branches which have been blown too far to the leeward. sometimes trees can be straightened by moving part of the soil and pulling into the wind and bracing there by a good prop on the leeward side, but that, of course, is not practicable if the trees have attained too much size. handling balled citrus trees. i have some orange and lemon trees which were sent me with their roots balled up with dirt and sacks. as we are still having frosts i have not wanted to set them out. would it not be better to let them stay as they are and keep the sacks wet (they have a sack box over them) than to put them out while the frosts last? your citrus trees will not be injured for a time unless mold should set in from the wet sacks. get them into the ground as soon as the soil comes into good condition, and cover the top for a time after they are planted to protect them against frosts. this would be better than to hold them too long in the balls, but do not plant in cold, wet soil; hold them longer as they are. the navel not thornless. i have lately purchased some washington navel orange trees, and upon arrival i find they have thorns upon them. i thought the washington navels were thornless. the navel orange tree is not thornless. it is described as a medium thorny variety, so that the finding of thorns upon the trees would not be in itself sufficient indication that they were not of the right variety. over-size oranges. i have some orange trees in a disintegrated granite with a good many small pieces of rock still remaining in the soil. what i wish to know is whether it is probably something in the soil that makes them grow too large, or is it probably the method of treatment? what treatment should be adopted to guard against this excessive growth? young trees have a natural disposition to produce outside sizes of fruit, and this is sometimes aggravated by excessive use of fertilizers, sometimes by over-irrigation. we would cease to fertilize for a time and to regulate irrigation so that the trees will have enough to be thrifty without undertaking excessive growth. such soil as you describe is sometimes very rich at the beginning in available plant food, and fertilization should be delayed until this excess has been appropriated by the tree. budding or grafting in orange orchard. i have land now ready to be planted to oranges, but it is impossible for me to buy the necessary budded stock now or even later this year. would you advise me to plant the "sour stock" as it comes from the nursery and have it budded or crown-budded later? are there any real objections to this method, and, if so, what are they? it is perfectly feasible to plant sour-stock seedlings and to graft them afterward to whatever variety of oranges you desire to grow, but it is undoubtedly better to pay a pretty good price for budded trees of the kind you desire rather than incur the delay and the irregular growth of young trees budded or grafted in the field. there is also danger of an irregular stand from accidental injuries to new growth started in the field without the protection which it finds in the nursery row. budding oranges. how late in the fall can budding of orange trees be done - plants that are two years old - and what advantage, if any, is late budding? what shall i do with some old trees that were budded about two months ago and are still green but not sprouted yet? the budding was done on young shoots. late budding of the orange can be done as late as the bark will slip well; usually, however, not quite so late as this. such buds are preferred because in the experience of most people they make stronger growth than those put in in the spring. such buds are not expected to grow until the lowest temperatures of the winter are over. the buds which you speak of as green but still dormant are doing just what they ought to do. they will start when they get ready. under-pruning of orange trees. my washington navels have a very heavy crop on the lower limbs, as is usual. these branches are so low down that many of the oranges lie on the ground, and it takes a good deal of time to prop them up so that they will not touch the ground. what would be the result of pruning off these low branches, after the fruit is off? will the same amount of fruit be produced by the fruit growing on the limbs higher up? certainly, raise the branches of the orange trees by removing the lowest branches or parts of branches which reach to the ground. a little later others will sag down and this under-pruning will have to be continuous. it would be better to do this than to undertake any radical removal of the lower branches. the progressive removal as becomes necessary will not appreciably reduce the fruiting and will be in many ways desirable. keeping citrus trees low. my tangerines last fall shot up like lemon trees - a dozen to twenty shoots two or three feet high. the trees are eight years old and are loaded with bloom and some of the shoots have buds and bloom clear to the top. some shoots have no bloom. what should i do with these shoots? cut them back like lemons or let them remain? you must shorten the shoots if you desire to have a low tree. this will cause their branching and it will be necessary, therefore, to remove some of the shoots entirely, either now or later, in order that the tree will not become too compact. dying back of fruit trees. i have a few orange and lemon trees that are starting to die. one tree has died on the top. what kind of spray shall i use? the dying back of a tree at the top indicates that the trouble is in the roots, and it is usually due to standing water in the soil, resulting either from excessive application of water or because the soil is too retentive to distribute an amount of water which might not be excessive on a lighter soil which would allow of its freer movement. dig down near the tree and see if you have not a muddy subsoil. the same trouble would result if the subsoil is too dry, and that also you can ascertain by digging. if you find moisture ample, and yet not excessive, the injury to the root might be due to the presence of alkali, or to excessive use of fertilizers. the cause of the trouble has to be determined by local examination and cannot be prescribed on the basis of a description of the plant. it cannot be cured by spraying unless specific parasite is found which can be killed by it. young trees dropping fruit. i have a few citrus fruit trees about three years old. they have made a good growth and are between seven and eight feet high with a good shaped top or head. i did not expect any fruit last year and did not have any. this spring they blossomed irregularly at blooming time, but quite an amount of fruit set and grew as large as marbles, some of it the size of a walnut, but lately it has about all fallen off the trees. there is always more or less dropping from fruit trees. some years large numbers of oranges drop. there may be many causes, and the trouble has thus far not been found preventable. when the foliage is good and the growth satisfactory, the young tree is certainly not in need of anything. it is rather more likely that fruit is dropped by the young trees owing to their excessive vegetative vigor, for it is a general fact that fruit trees which are growing very fast are less certain in fruit-setting. it is, of course, possible that you have been forcing such action by too free use of water. you will do well to let your trees go along so long as they appear thrifty and satisfactory, and expect better fruiting when they become older. orange training. is not a single leader in an orange tree more desirable than the much-forked tree so commonly seen! can a single-leader tree be made from the nursery trees which have already formed their heads, by cutting off the heads below so that only a straight stick without any branches is left? an orange tree with a central leader would not be at all satisfactory if it were carried very high. of course, a central stem can be to advantage taken higher than it is often done, but we would not think of growing an orange tree with a central stem to the apex. the laterals would droop, crowd down upon each other badly, open the center to sunburn, and encourage also a growth of central suckers and occasion an amount of pruning altogether beyond what is necessary with a properly branched tree without a central stem. curing citron. i wish to know a way to cure citrons at home. i have a fine tree that has borne very fine-looking fruit for the past two years. an outline for the preparation of candied citron is as follows: the fruit, before assuming a yellow color, and also when bright yellow, is picked and placed in barrels filled with brine, and left for at least a month. the brine is renewed several times, and the fruit allowed to remain in it until required for use, often for a period of four or five months. when the citrons are to be candied they are taken from the barrels and boiled in fresh water to soften them. they are then cut into halves, the seed and pulp are removed, and the fruit is again immersed in cold water, soon becoming of a greenish color. after this it is placed in large earthen jars, covered with hot syrup, and allowed to stand about three weeks. during this time the strength of the syrup is gradually increased. the fruit is then put into boilers with crystallized sugar dissolved in a small quantity of water, and cooked; then allowed to cool, and boiled again until it will take up no more sugar. it is then dried and packed in wooden boxes. crops between orange trees. what crop can i plant between rows of young orange trees to utilize the ground as well as pay a little something? it depends not alone upon what will grow, but upon what can be profitably sold or used on the place, and unless sure of that, it is usually better not to undertake planting between young trees but rather to cultivate well, irrigate intelligently, and trust for the reward in a better growth and later productiveness of the trees. it is clear, california experience that planting between trees except to things which are demonstrated to be profitable should not be undertaken, and where one does not need immediate returns is, as a rule, undesirable. the growth of a strip of alfalfa, if one is careful not to submerge the trees by over-irrigation, would be the best thing one could undertake for the purpose of improving the soil by increasing the humus content, reducing the amount of reflected heat from a clean surface, and is otherwise desirable wherever moisture is available for it. you could also grow cow peas for the good of the land if not for other profit. you can, of course, grow small fruits and vegetables for home use if you will cultivate well. common field crops, with scant cultivation, will generally cause you to lose more from the bad condition in which they leave the soil than you can gain from the use or sale of the crop. navels and valencias. navel trees are being budded to valencias in southern california, because of the higher price received for the late-ripening valencias. are the orchards in central and northern california being planted in navels, and is there any difference in soil or climate requirements of navels and valencias? there is no particular difference in the soil requirements of valencia and navel oranges. they are both budded on the same root. the desirability of navel oranges in the upper citrus districts arises from the fact that the policy of those districts at the present time is to produce an early orange. this they could not accomplish by growing the valencia. the great advantage of the valencia in southern california, on the other hand, lies in the very fact that it is late and that it can be marketed in midsummer and early autumn when there are no navels available from anywhere. orange seedlings. what about planting the seed from st. michael's oranges or of grapefruit for a seed-bed to be budded to valencias? good plump st. michael's seeds would be all right if you desire to use sweet seedling stock. grapefruit seedlings are good and quite widely used, though the general preference is for sour-stock seedlings. acres of oranges to a man. in your opinion, is it possible for one man, of average strength, to take perfect care of a twenty-acre citrus orchard? are the services of a man who takes the entire responsibility of an orchard (citrus) worth more than those of a common ranch hand? it depends upon the man, upon the age of the trees, upon the kind of soil he has to handle, upon the irrigation arrangements and upon what you mean by "perfect care." if you contract the picking and hauling of fruit, the fumigation and allow extra help when conditions require that something must be done quickly, whatever it may be, a man with good legs and arms, and a good head full of special knowledge to make them go, can handle twenty acres and if he does it right you ought to pay him twice as much as an ordinary ranch hand. roots for orange trees. what are the conditions most favorable to orange trees budded upon sour stock; also upon sweet stock and trifoliata? the sour stock is believed to be more hardy against trying conditions of soil moisture - both excess and deficiency, and diseases incident thereto. the sweet stock is a free growing and satisfactory stock and most of the older orchards are upon this root, but it is held to be less resistant of soil troubles than the sour stock, and therefore propagators are now largely using the latter. the trifoliata has been promoted as more likely to induce dormancy of the top growth during cold weather, because of its own deciduous habit. it has also been advocated as likely to induce earlier maturity in the fruit and thus minister to early marketing. the objection urged against it has been a claimed dwarfing of the tree worked upon it. citrus budding. i wish to bud some maltese blood orange trees to pomelos and lemons. will they make good stock for them, and, if so, is it necessary to cut below the original bud? it is possible to bud as you propose, and it is not necessary to go back to the old stock. work in above the forks. no citrus fruits on lemon roots. would it be any advantage to bud the washington navel on grapefruit and lemon roots? the grapefruit or pomelo is a good root for the orange, and some propagators prefer it. the lemon root is not used at present, because of its effect in causing a coarse growth of tree and fruit and because it is more subject to disease than the orange root. in fact, we grow nearly all lemons on orange roots. budding oranges. my first attempt at budding, i cut buds and immediately inserted in stock of mexican sour orange "amataca." i left bands on them for ten days at which time about half seemed to have "stuck," but after a few days the bark curled away and the buds dried up and died. i then tried again, but left the bands on for thirteen days and lightly tied strings around below the bud to prevent the bark from curling, and also put grafting wax in the cut and over the bud. these appeared fresh and green at time of taking off the bands, but three weeks later i found them rotted. the grafting wax used was made of beeswax, resin, olive oil and a small amount of lard to soften it. do you think that the action of the lard on the buds would cause them to rot? consider first whether the buds which you use are sufficiently developed; that is, a sufficient amount of hardness and maturity attained by the twig from which you took these buds. second, use a waxed band, drawing it quite tightly around the bark, above and below the bud, covering the bud itself without too much pressure for several days, then loosening the band somewhat, but carefully replacing over all but the bud point. it is necessary to exclude the air sufficiently, but not wholly. the use of a soft fat like olive oil or lard is not desirable. if you use oil at all for the purpose of softening, linseed oil, as used by painters, is safer because of its disposition to dry without so much penetration. having used olive oil and lard together you had too much soft fatty material. budding orange seedlings in the orchard. what are the objections or advantages of planting sour stock seedlings where one wishes the trees and one or two years later bud into the branches instead of budding the young stock low on the trunk? planting the seedling and at some future time cutting back the branches and grafting in the head above the forks is an expensive operation and loses time in getting fruit. you will get very irregular trees and be disappointed in the amount of re-working you will have to do. suckers must be always watched for; that has to be done anyway, but a sucker from a wild stock is worse in effects if you happen to overlook it. avoid all such trouble by planting good clean trees budded in nursery rows. you may have to do rebudding later, if you want to change varieties, and that is trouble enough. do not rush at the beginning into all the difficulties there are. grapefruit and nuts. peaches, pears and plums predominate in this section, but would not grapefruit, almonds and english walnuts be just as profitable? what is your idea about english walnuts on black walnut root? you can expect grapefruit to succeed under conditions which favor the orange. therefore, if oranges are doing well in your district, grapefruit might also be expected to succeed on the same soils and with the same treatment. planting of almonds should proceed upon a demonstration that the immediate location is suited to almonds, because they are very early to start and very subject to spring frost and should not be planted unless you can find bearing trees which have demonstrated their acceptance of the situation by regular and profitable crops. english walnuts are less subject to frosts because they start much later in the season. they need, however, deep, rich land which will be sure not to dry out during the summer. english walnuts are a perfect success upon the california black walnut root. soil and situation for oranges. is it absolutely essential that orange trees be planted on a southern slope, or will they thrive as well on any slope? what is the minimum depth of soil required for orange trees? how can i tell whether the soil is good for oranges? orange trees are grown successfully on all slopes, although in particular localities certain exposures may be decidedly best, as must be learned by local observation. how shallow a soil will suit orange trees depends upon how water and fertilizer are applied; on a shallow soil more fertilizer and more frequent use of water in smaller quantities. any soil which has grown good grain crops may be used for orange growing if the moisture supply is never too scant and any excess is currently disposed of by good drainage. there can be no arbitrary rule either for exposure, depth or texture of soils, because oranges are being successfully grown on medium loam to heavy clay loam, providing the moisture supply is kept right. transplanting orange trees. can you transplant trees two years old with safety to another location in same grove, same soil; etc.? yes; and you can move them a greater distance, if you like. take up the trees with a good ball of earth, transplanting in the spring when the ground has become well warmed, just about at the time when new growth begins to appear on the tree. the top of the tree should he cut back somewhat and the leaves should be removed if they show a disposition to wilt. you should also whitewash or otherwise protect the bark from sunburn if the foliage should be removed. protecting young citrus trees. is it necessary to have young orange trees covered or leave them uncovered during the winter months? it is desirable to cover with burlaps or bale with cornstalks, straw or some other coarse litter, all young trees which are being planted in untried places; and even where old trees are safe, young trees which go into the frost period with new growth of immature wood should be thus protected. do not use too much stuff nor bundle too tightly. not orange on the osage. can the navel orange be grafted on the osage orange? i understand it is done in florida, and would like to know if it has been tried in california. it cannot. it has not been done in florida nor anywhere else. the osage orange is not an orange at all. the tree is not a member of the citrus family. no pollenizer for navels. i read that the flowers of the navel orange are entirely lacking in pollen, or only poorly supplied. if this is true, what variety of orange would you plant in a navel grove - to supply pollen at the proper time? we would not plant any other orange near the navel for the sake of supplying it with pollen. pollen is only needed to make seeds, and by the same process to make the fruit set, and navels do not make seeds, except rarely, nor do they seem to need pollen to make the fruit set. water and frost. from how many acres could i keep off a freeze of oranges with gallons per minute? the water is at degrees. the amount of water will prevent frost over as large an area as you can cover with the water, so as to thoroughly wet the surface, but the presence of water will only be effective through about four degrees of temperature and only for a short time. if, then, the temperature should fall below degrees and should remain at that point for an hour or two, it is doubtful if the water would save your fruit. water is only of limited value in the prevention of frost, and of no value at all when the temperature falls too low. what to do with frosted oranges. what is the best plan of treatment for frosted orange trees? the crop will be a total loss. it does not show any tendency to fall off the trees, however. should it be picked off, thrown on the ground and plowed under? should this be done right away or later? unsound fruit should be removed as soon as its injury can be conveniently detected and worked into the soil by cultivation; never, however, being allowed to collect in masses, which is productive of decay and which may be injurious to roots. if trees are injured sufficiently to lose most of their leaves, the fruit should also be removed if it shows a disposition to hang on. this will be a contribution to the strength of the tree and its ability to clothe itself with new foliage. pruning frosted citrus trees. how shall i prune two-year-old orange orchard, also nursery stock buds that are badly injured by frost; how much to prune and at what time? as soon as you can see how far injury has gone down the branch or stem, cut below it, so that a new shoot may push out from sound wood, and heal the cut as soon as possible. this applies to growths of all ages. in the case of buds, if you can only save a single node you may get a bud started there and make a tree of that. in the case of trees, large or small, it is always desirable to cut above the forkings of the main branches, if possible, and when this much of the tree remains sound, a new tree can be formed very quickly. if the main stem is injured, bark cracked, etc., cut below the ground and put scions in the bark without splitting the root crown; wax well or otherwise cover exposed wood to prevent checking. if this is successfully done, root-rot may be prevented and the wound covered with new bark while the strong new stems are developing above. pruning oranges. is it best to prune out orange trees by removing occasional branches so as to permit free air passage through the trees? some are advocating doing so; but as i remember, the trees in southern california are allowed to grow quite dense, so that we could see into the foliage but very little. it is a matter of judgment, with a present tendency toward a more open tree than was formerly prescribed. trees should be more thrifty and should bear more fruit deeper in the foliage-wall if more air and light are admitted. but this can be had without opening the tree so that free sight of its interior is possible. we believe thinning of the growth to admit more light and air is good, but we should not intentionally cut enough to make holes in the tree. pecan growing. would you advise planting of pecans in commercial orchards here? walnuts in their proper location constitute some of california's best improvements. after visiting some bearing paper-shell pecans here in fresno county, i believe a pecan orchard of choice variety would be more desirable than a walnut orchard. pecans do well on moist rich land in the interior valleys where there are sharper temperature changes than in the coast valleys, except perhaps near the upper coast. such planting as you propose seems promising on lands having moisture enough to carry the nuts to full ripening. growing filberts. please give information about growing filberts. filberts have been largely a disappointment in california and no product of any amount has ever been made. good nuts have been produced in the foothills of the sierra nevada and the coast range. theoretically, the places where the wild hazel grows would best suit the filbert, and so far this seems to be justified by the little that has actually been done, but there is very little to say about it beyond that. it requires much more experience to lift the nut out of the experimental state. early bearing of walnuts. please inform me if young walnut trees grafted on black walnut stock will produce fruit within months after being planted. it is true that the french varieties of english walnuts have produced fruit the second summer of their growth. this does not mean, however, that you can count upon a crop the second year. these are usually grafts in nursery rows, and one would have to wait longer, as a rule, for trees planted out in orchards with a chance to make a freer wood growth. this is rather fortunate, because it is better to have a larger tree than to have the growth diverted into bearing a small amount of fruit while the tree is very young. we do not know any advantage in getting nuts the second year except it be to see if you really have secured the variety you desire to produce later. handling walnut seedlings. what is the best time to transplant seedlings of the black walnut? transplant during the dormant season (as shown by absence of leaves) when the soil is in good condition. handle them just as you would an apple tree, for instance. how to start english walnuts. in starting english walnuts, shall we get nursery stock grafted on california black, or shall we start our black walnut seedlings in nursery plats, or plant the nuts where the tree is wanted, and graft them at two or three years? what is the advantage, if any, of the long stock from grafting high, over the grafted root? if we had the money to invest and were sure of the soil conditions, etc., we should buy grafted trees of the variety we desired, just as we would of any other kind of fruit. if we were shy of money and long on time, we would start seedlings in nursery, plant out seedlings, and graft later, because it is easier to graft when the seedling is two or three years in place. we count the planting of nuts in place troublesome and of no compensating advantage. the chief advantage known to us of grafting high and getting a black walnut trunk is the hardier bark of the black walnut. walnut planting. i am planning to plant walnuts on rather heavy soil. i have been told to put the nut six inches below the surface, but think that too deep, as soil is rather heavy. in a heavy soil we should not plant these nuts more than three inches below the surface, but should cover the surface with a mulch of rotten straw to prevent drying out. pruning grafted walnuts. should english walnut trees be pruned? i have along the roadside english walnuts grafted on the california black, and they have grown to very large size and the fruit seems to be mostly on the outside of the trees. english walnuts are not usually pruned much, though it is often desirable, and of course trees can be improved by removing undesirable branches and especially where too many branches have started from grafts, it is desirable that some be removed. they should be cleanly sawed off and the wound covered with wax or thick paint to prevent the wood from decaying. pruning walnuts. when is the best time to remove large limbs from walnut trees? this work with walnuts or other deciduous fruit trees should be done late in the winter, about the time the buds are swelling; never mind the bleeding, it does no harm, and the healing-growth over the wound is more rapid while the sap is pushing. grafting walnuts. in cleft grafting walnuts is it necessary to use scions with only a leaf bud, or with staminate or pistillate buds? is cutting the pith of the scion or stock fatal to the tree? in grafting walnuts it is usual to take shoots bearing wood buds, and not the spurs which carry the fruit blossoms, although a part of the graft containing also a wood bud can be used, retaining the latter. cutting into the pith of the scion or of the stock is not fatal, but it is avoided because it makes a split or wound which is very hard to heal. for this reason it is better to cut at one side of the pith in the stock, and to cut the scion so that the slope is chiefly in the wood at one side of the pith and not cutting a double wedge in a way to bring the pith in the center. grafting nuts on oaks. i have to acres of black oak trees which i wish to graft over to chestnuts. can grafting be done successfully? some success has been secured in grafting the chestnut on the chestnut oak, but not, so far as we have heard, on the black oak. but grafts on the chestnut oak are not permanently thrifty and productive, though they have been reported as growing for some time. the same is true of english walnut grafts on some of the native oaks. grafting walnut seedlings. would it be proper to graft one-year california black walnut seedlings that must also be transplanted? as the seedlings must be moved, plant in orchard and graft as two or three-year-olds, according to the size which they attain. pruning the walnut. what is the proper time for pruning the walnut? is it bad for the tree to prune during the active season? i have recently acquired a long-neglected grove in which many large limbs will have to be removed in order to allow proper methods of cultivation to be practiced, and i am in doubt as to the wisdom of doing this during the rise of sap. the best time to remove large limbs to secure rapid growth of bark from the sides of the cut, is just at the time the sap is rising. there will be some outflow of sap, but of no particular loss to the tree. as soon as the large wounds have dried sufficiently, the exposed surface should be painted to prevent cracking of the wood. eastern or california black walnuts? i am told that the eastern black walnut is a more suitable root for the low lands in california than the california black. is this true? there has been no demonstration that the eastern black walnut is more suitable to low moist lands than the california black walnut. our grandest california black walnut trees are situated on low moist lands. walnut grove is on the edge of the sacramento river with immense trees growing almost on the water's edge. walnut creek in contra costa county is also named from large walnut trees on the creek bank land. we have very few eastern black walnut trees in california and although they do show appreciation of moist land, they are not in any respect better than the californian. ripening of walnuts. i send you two walnuts. i am in doubt if they will mature. the nuts are well grown, the kernel fully formed in every respect. whether they will attain perfect maturity must be determined by an observation of the fact and cannot be theoretically predicated. where trees are in such an ever-growing climate as you seem to have, they must apparently take a suggestion that the time has arrived for maturity from the drying of the soil. the roots should know that it is time for them to stop working so that the foliage may yellow and the nuts mature. it is possible that stopping cultivation a little earlier in the season may be necessary to accomplish this purpose. cutting below dead wood. i have some seedling english walnut trees which are two years old, but they are not coming out in bud this year. they are about three feet high, and from the top down to about inches of the ground the limbs are dark brown, and below that they are a nice green. i cut the top off of one of them to see what is the matter that they do not leaf out, and i found that there is a round hole right down through the center of the tree down to the green part. the hole is about three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter. the pith of the limbs has been eaten away by some kind of a worm from the inside. would it be better to cut the tree down to the green part, or let them alone? it is the work of a borer. cut down to live wood and paint over the wound or wax it. protect the pith until the bark grows over it or you will have decay inside. if buds do not start on the trunk, take a sucker from below to make a tree of. you could put a bud in the trunk, but it is not very easy to do it. walnuts in alfalfa. will the walnut trees be injured in any way by irrigating them at the same time and manner as the alfalfa - that is, by flooding the land between the checks? will the walnuts make as good a growth when planted in the alfalfa, and the ground cultivated two or three feet around the tree, as though the alfalfa was entirely removed? is it advisable to plant the trees on the checks rather than between the checks? walnut trees will do well, providing you do not irrigate the alfalfa sufficiently to waterlog the trees; providing also that you do use water enough so that the trees will not be robbed of moisture by the alfalfa. this method of growing trees will be, of course, safer and probably more satisfactory if your soil is deep and loamy, as it should be to get the best results with both alfalfa and walnuts. it would be better to have the trees stand so that the water does not come into direct contact with the bark, although walnut trees are irrigated by surrounding them with check levees. planting walnut trees in an old stand of alfalfa is harder on the tree than to start alfalfa after the trees have taken hold, because the alfalfa roots like to hang on to their advantage. in planting in an old field, we should plow strips, say, five feet wide and keep it cultivated rather than to try to start the trees in pot-holes, although with extra care they might go that way. walnuts in the hills. will walnuts grow well in the foothill country; elevation about feet, soil rich, does not crack in summer and seems to have small stones in it? walnuts will do well providing the soil or subsoil is retentive enough. if you have water available for irrigation in case the trees should need it, they would do well, but if the soil is gravelly way down and likely to dry out deeply and you have no water available an opposite result might be expected. it is a fact that on some of the uplands of the coast mountains there is a lack of moisture late in the season which interferes with the success of some fruit trees. to increase bearing of walnuts. we have a walnut orchard which does not bear enough nuts. the trees are all fine, even trees, and years old, and we are told that the crop was light this year because the trees were growing so vigorously and put most of their energy into the new wood. is there any special fertilizer which will make the trees bear more and not prompt such heavy growth? if your adviser is right that the trees are not bearing because of excessive growth, it would be better not to apply any fertilizer during the coming year, but allow the trees to assume more steady habit and possibly even to encourage them to do so by using less cultivation and water. if you wish to experiment with some of the trees, give them an application of five pounds of superphosphate and two pounds of potash to each tree, properly distributed over the land which it occupies. you certainly should not use any form of nitrogen. temperature and moisture for the english walnut. what amount of freezing and drouth can english walnuts stand? under what conditions is irrigation necessary? the walnut tree will endure hard freezing, providing it comes when the tree is dormant, because they are successfully grown in some parts of the eastern states, though not to a large extent; but the walnut tree is subject to injury from lighter frosts, providing they follow temperatures which have induced activity in the tree. on the pacific coast the walnut is successfully grown as far north as the state of washington, but even in california there are elevations where frosts are likely to occur when the tree is active, and these may be destructive to its profit, although they may not injure the tree. you are not safe in planting walnuts to any extent except in places where you can find trees bearing satisfactorily. planting elsewhere is, of course, an enterprising experimental thing to do, but very risky as a line of investment. irrigation is required if the annual rainfall, coupled with the retentiveness of the soil and good cultivation, do not give moisture enough to carry the tree well into the autumn, maintaining activity in the leaves some little time after the fruit is gathered. walnuts from seed. there is a reliable nursery company selling seedling franquette walnut trees on a positive guarantee that they will come true to type. are orchards of this kind satisfactory? walnuts do come truer to the seed than almonds and other fruits and the franquette has a good reputation for remembering its ancestry. until recently practically all the commercial walnut product of california was grown on seedling trees. but these facts hardly justify one in trusting to seedlings in plantings now made. the way to get a walnut of the highest type is to take a bud or graft from a tree which is bearing that type. high-grafted walnuts. what is the advantage of a high-grafted walnut? i am about ready to plant acres to nuts and do not know whether to purchase franquette grafted high on california black or not. the advantage of grafting english walnut high on california black walnut consists in securing a main trunk for the tree, which is less liable to sunburn and probably hardier otherwise than is the stem of the english walnut, and the present disposition toward higher grafting or budding seems therefore justified and desirable. grafting and budding the mulberry. what is the most approved manner of grafting mulberry trees? am told that they are very difficult to successfully graft. most propagators find the mulberry difficult by ordinary top and cleft grafting methods. a flute or ring graft or bud does well on small seedlings - that is, removing a ring or cylinder of the bark from the stock and putting in its place a cylinder from the variety desired, cut to fit accurately. for large trees this would have to be done on young shoots forced out by cutting back the main branches, but when this is done ordinary shield budding in these new shoots would give good results. cut back the trees now and bud in the new shoots in july or august. hardiness of hybrid berries. how much cold will phenomenal, himalaya and mammoth blackberries stand in winter? is it safe to plant where the temperature goes below degrees? these berries are hardy to zero at least, for they are grown in northern parts of this coast where they get such a touch once in a while. they have also endured low temperatures in the central continental plateau states and eastward. whether they can endure the lowest temperatures of the winter-killing regions of the northern border cannot be determined in california, for we do not have the conditions for such tests. the berries are very hardy while dormant, and probably their value in colder regions would depend rather more upon their disposition to remain dormant than upon what they can endure when in that condition. pruning himalayas. shall the old wood be cut away in pruning himalayas? all the old wood which has borne fruit should be cut out in the fall and new shoots reduced to three or four from each root, and these three or four shoots should be shortened to a length of ten or twelve feet and be trained to a trellis or fence, or some other suitable support. vines which are allowed to grow riotously as they will, are apt to be deficient in fruit bearing. strawberries with perfect flowers. has longworth prolific an imperfect bloom? i have longworths in bearing which apparently are perfect. is there another strain of longworth that are not self-fertilizing? the longworth prolific strawberry has both staminate and pistillate elements. possibly some other variety, because of its resemblance to longworth and the popularity of it, may have been wrongly given its name. most of the varieties which are largely grown in california are perfect in blossom, though some of the newer varieties need association with pollinizers. pruning loganberries. should the new shoots of loganberry vines, which come out in the spring, be left or cut away? if cut, will more shoots put out in the fall and be sufficient for the next year's crop? the loganberry shoots which are growing should be carefully trained and preserved for next year's fruiting. the old canes should be cut away at the base after the fruit is gathered. the plant bears each year upon the wood which grew the previous summer. strawberry planting. should i plant strawberries in the spring or fall? whether it is wise to plant strawberry plants in the fall depends on several things, such as getting the ground in the very best of condition, abundance of water at all times, splendidly rooted plants, and cool weather (which is very rare at the time plants are to be planted, august and september). plants may be taken with balls of earth around the roots, and water poured in the hole that receives the plant. after planting, each plant should be shaded from the sun; after this the ditches must be kept full of water so the moisture will rise to the surface; this must be done till the plant starts growth. this method can only be used in small plantings, as it is too expensive for large plantings, as is also the potted plant method where each plant is grown in a small pot and transplanted by dumping out the earth as a ball with the plant and putting directly in the ground. from potted plants, set out in the fall, one may count on a fine crop of berries the following spring. strawberry plants are never dormant till midwinter, and there is no plant more difficult to transplant when roots are disturbed in the hot season, which usually prevails in the interior valleys of california. to have a long-lived strawberry field and to get best results, planting must be done in the spring, as soon as the soil can be put in best condition to receive plants. from this a fall crop can be expected - answer by tribble bros., elk grove. blackberries for drying only. what variety of blackberries or raspberries are the best for drying purposes? are berries successfully dried in evaporators? this is a natural berry country. wild blackberries are a wonder here. transportation facilities do not allow raising for the city market. in your opinion, would the planting of ten acres in berries for drying be a success? the blackberries chiefly grown in california are the lawton, crandall and the mammoth. the raspberry chiefly grown is the cuthbert. there are very few of these berries dried. it would be better to dry them in an evaporator than in the sun, but little of it is done in this state. it is doubtful whether it would pay to plant blackberries for drying only, because there is such a large product flow in various places where the berries are either sold fresh or sold to the cannery, and drying is only done for the purpose of saving the crop if the prices for the other uses are not satisfactory. to grow especially for drying would give you only one chance of selling to advantage, and that the poorest. planting bush fruits. what is the best time to set out blackberries and loganberries? any time after the soil is thoroughly wet down and you can get good, mature and dormant plants for transplanting. this may be as early as november and may continue until february or later in some places. growing strawberry plants. in a patch of strawberries planted this spring, is it advisable to cut off runners or root some of them? in planting strawberries in matted rows, it is usual to allow a few runners to take root and thus fill the row. it is the judgment of plant growers that plants for sale should not be produced in this way, but should be grown from plants specially kept for that purpose. strawberries in succession. is there any reason, in strawberry culture, when the vines are removed at the end of the fourth year, why the ground may not be thoroughly plowed and again planted to strawberries? it is theoretically possible to grow strawberries continuously on the same land by proper fertilization and irrigation. practically, the objection is that certain diseases and injurious insects may multiply in the land, and this is the chief reason why new plantations are put on new land and the old land used for a time for beans or some root crop, so that the soil may be cleaned and refreshed by rotation and by the possibility of deeper tillage. limitations on gooseberries. why is it that gooseberries are not grown more in california? is there any reason, climatic or other, why the gooseberry should not be as successfully grown in california as elsewhere? there are two reasons. first, the gooseberry does not like interior valleys, although with proper protection from mildew or by growing resistant varieties, good fruit can be had in coast or mountain valleys. second, practically no one cares for a ripe gooseberry in a country where so many other fruits are grown, and the demand is for green gooseberries for pies and sauce, and that is very easily oversupplied. dry farming with grapes. i have heard that they are planting muscat grapes on the dry farming plan. will it be successful? grapes have been grown in california on the dry farming plan ever since americans came years ago. grapes can be successfully grown by thorough cultivation for moisture retention, providing the rainfall is sufficient to carry the plant when it is conserved by the most thorough and frequent cultivation. unless this rainfall is adequate, no amount of cultivation will make grape vines succeed, because even the best cultivation produces no moisture, but only conserves a part of that which falls from the clouds. whether grapes will do depends, first, upon what the rainfall is; second, upon whether the soil is retentive; third, upon whether you cultivate in such a way as to enable the soil to exercise its maximum retentiveness. these are matters which cannot be determined theoretically - they require actual test. cutting back frosted vine canes. vines have been badly injured by the late frosts, especially the young vines which were out the most. is there anything to be done with the injured shoots now on the vines so as to help the prospects of a crop? if shoots are only lightly frosted they should be cut off at once as low as you can detect injury. this may save the lower parts of the shoot, from which a later growth can be made. frosted parts ferment and carry destruction downward, and therefore should be disposed of as soon as possible. where vines have run out considerably and badly frosted, the best practice usually is to strip off the frozen shoots so as to get rid of the dormant buds at the base, which often give sterile shoots. a new break of canes from other buds is generally more productive. dipping thompson seedless. what is the process of dipping and bleaching thompson seedless grapes? one recipe for dipped raisins is as follows: one quart olive oil; / -pound greenbank soda and quarts water are made into an emulsion, and then reduced with gallons water in the dipping tank, adding more soda to get lye-strength enough to cut the skins, and more soda has to be added from time to time to keep up the strength. the grapes are dipped in this solution and sulphured to the proper color. this is the general outline of the process. the ability to use it well can only be attained by experience and close observation. the zante currant. is the currant that grows in the united states in any way related to the currant that grows in greece? if so, could it be cured like the currant that comes from greece? the dried currants of commerce are made in greece and in california (to a slight extent) from the grape known as the grape of corinth. they are not made from the bush currant which is generally grown in the united states, and the two plants are not in any way related. grape vines for an arbor. how shall i prune grape vines, viz: tokay, black cornichon, muscat, thompson seedless, rose of peru, planted for a grape arbor? you can grow all the vines you mention with high stumps reaching part way or to the top of the arbor as you desire side or top shade or both. you can also grow them with permanent side branches on the side slats of the arbor if you desire. each winter pruning would consist in cutting back all the previous summer's growth to a few buds from which new canes will grow for shade or fruiting, or you can work on the renewal system, keeping some of these canes long for quick foliage and more fruit perhaps and cutting some of them short to grow new wood for the following year's service, as they often do in growing eastern grapes. pruning old vines. i have some muscat grape vines years old. can i chop off most of the old wood with a hatchet and thereby bring them back to proper bearing? not with a hatchet. if the vines are worth keeping at all, they are worth careful cutting with a saw and a painting of all cuts in large old wood. if the vines have been neglected, you can saw away surplus prongs or spurs, reserving four or five of the best placed and most vigorous, and cut back the canes of last summer's growth to one, two or three buds, according to the strength of the canes - the thicker the canes, the more buds to be kept. it is not desirable to cut away an old vine to get a new start from the ground, unless you wish to graft. shape the top of the vine as well as you can by saving the best of the old growth. topping grape vines. is topping grape vines desirable? topping of vines is in all cases more or less weakening. the more foliage that is removed, the more weakening it is. vines, therefore, which are making a weak growth from any cause whatever can only be injured by topping. if the vines are exceptionally vigorous, the weakening due to topping may be an advantage by making them more fruitful. the topping, however, must be done with discretion. early topping in may is much more effective and less weakening than later topping in june. very early topping before blossoming helps the setting of the blossoms. topping in general increases the size of the berries. bleeding vines. will pruning grape vines when they bleed injure them? it has been demonstrated not to be of any measurable injury. vines and scant moisture. would it be well to sucker vines and take also some bearing canes off, or in a dry year will they mature properly as in other years if the ground is in good condition? vines usually bear drouth-stress better than bearing fruit trees. on soils of good depth and retentiveness, they are likely to give good crops in a dry year with thorough cultivation; still, lightening the burden of the vines is rational. suckering and cutting away second-crop efforts should be done. whether you need to reduce the first crop can be told better by the looks of the vines later in the season. sulphuring for mildew. for two years i have not sulphured my vineyard and had no mildew. my vines seem as healthy and thrifty as any of the neighbors' that were duly sulphured. have i lost anything by not sulphuring? certainly not. in sections where mildew is practically sure to come, sulphur should be used regularly as a preventive without waiting for the appearance of the disease. there are, however, many locations, especially in the interior valley, where the occurrence of mildew is rare in sufficient volume to do appreciable harm, and then sulphuring should depend upon the weather, which favors mildew or otherwise. but be always on the watch and have everything ready to sulphur immediately; also learn to recognize the conditions under which appearances of mildew become a menace. grape sugar in canned grapes. how can i prevent the formation of grape sugar in canned grapes? take care that the syrup is of the same density as the juice of the grape when the fruit and the juice are placed together in the can. the density of the syrup and the juice are, of course, to be obtained by the use of the spindle, the same arrangement employed for determining when the percentage of sugar in the grape juice is right for raisin-making or for wine-making. whatever the density of the juice, make the syrup the same by the use of the right amount of sugar. part ii. vegetable growing california grown seed. which are the best garden seeds to use, those raised in ohio and the east or those raised in washington and oregon or those raised in this state? it has been definitely shown by experience and experiment that is does not matter much where the seed comes from, providing it is well grown and good of its kind. there is no such advantage in changing seed from one locality to another as is commonly supposed. besides, it is now very difficult to tell positively where seed is grown, because california wholesale seeds are retailed in all the states you mention, and the contents of many small packets of seeds distributed in california went first of all from california to the eastern retailers, who advertise and sell them everywhere. cloth for hotbeds. would cloth do to cover a hotbox to raise lettuce, radishes, etc., for winter use where we get a very heavy rainfall? yes, if you make the cloth waterproof for its own preservation from mildew and other agencies of decay. the following recipe for waterproofing cloth is taken from our book on "california vegetables": soften / ounces of glue in / pints of water, cold at first; then dissolve in, say, a washboiler full ( gallons) of warm water, with / ounces of hard soap; put in the cloth and boil for an hour, wring and dry; then prepare a bath of a pound of alum and a pound of salt, soak the prepared cloth in it for a couple of hours, rinse with clear water and dry. one gallon of the glue solution will soak about ten yards of cloth. this cloth has been used in southern california for several years without mildewing, and it will hold water by the pailful. where the rain is heavy and frequent, the cloth should be well supported by slats and given slope to shed water quickly. of course, this is only a makeshift. glass would be more satisfactory and durable in a region of much cloudiness and scant sunshine; the greater illumination through glass will make for the greater health and growth of the plants. soil for vegetables. some of my soil bakes and hardens quickly after irrigation, but i have an acre or so of sandy soil. would this be best for garden truck and berries? sandy, loamy soil is better than the heavy soil for vegetables and berries, if moisture is kept right, because it can be more easily cultivated and takes water without losing the friable condition which is so desirable. a heavier soil can, however, be improved by the free use of stable manure or by the addition of sand, or by the use of one or more applications of lime at the rate of pounds to the acre, as may be required - all these operations making the soil more loamy and more easily handled. vegetables in a cold, dark draft. what vegetables will thrive in localities where the sun shines only part of the day? i have a space in my garden that gets the sun only between the hours of and , thereabouts; i would like to utilise those places for vegetables if any particular kind will grow under such conditions. the soil apparently is good, of a sandy nature, with some loam. the place is high and subject to much wind. you can only definitely determine by actual trial what vegetables will be satisfactory under the shade conditions which you describe. you may get good results from lettuces, radishes, beets, peas, top onions, and many other things which do well at rather a low temperature, while tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, etc., would probably be worthless. your soil is probably satisfactory and you can easily keep the moisture right by being careful not to use as much water as you would in open sunshine. the behavior of the plants will be directly dependent upon the temperature and the sunshine which they receive under the conditions described. jesusalem artichokes. what is the best time for planting jerusalem artichokes? jerusalem artichoke tubers are planted in the spring after the ground has become warm and the heavy frosts are over. the planting may be done in rows far enough apart for cultivation, the tubers being set about a foot apart in the row. this tuber grows like a potato, but is more delicate than the potato. it is inclined to decay when out of the ground, but will not start growth as early as the potato, and therefore it is not desirable to start it early in the winter if the winters are cold and the ground apt to be very wet. do not cut the tubers for seed as you would potatoes. globe artichokes. i have land that will grow magnificent artichokes. two plants last year (variety unknown) produced heavy crops of buds, but the scales opened too wide and allowed the center to become fibrous and were unsalable. is this due to climate, lack of sufficient water, or to not having the right variety? many artichokes which are planted should really be put in the ornamental class - they are either a reversion from a wilder type in plants grown from the seed or they never have been good. in order to determine which varieties you had better grow on a large scale, it is desirable to get a few plants of the different varieties as offered by seedmen. in this way you would find out just what are considered best in different parts of the state, and propagate largely the ones which are best worth to you. by subdivision of the roots you get exactly the same type in any quantity you desire - ruling out undesirable variations likely to appear in seedlings. artichoke growing. is the globe artichoke a profitable crop to raise commercially? near pescadero a company has been formed to raise it for eastern shipment. is it a very profitable crop to raise? are certain varieties worthless? considerable quantities of globe artichokes are grown in southern and central california for eastern shipment. there is a limit to the amount which can be profitably shipped, because people generally, at the east, do not know the globe artichoke and how to eat it, but more of them are learning the desirability of it every year. there are species which are only ornamental, as a bad weed. asparagus growing. what is the average commercial yield of asparagus to the acre in california? also, how long it takes asparagus to come into full bearing, and what yield could be expected after two years' growth? is asparagus resistant to moderate quantities of alkali in the soil? the yield of asparagus is from one to four tons of marketable shoots per acre, according to age and thrift of plants, etc., the largest yields being on the peat lands of the river islands. on suitable lands one ought to get at least two tons per acre. roots may yield a few days' cuttings during their second year in permanent place; the third year they will stand much more cutting, and for several years after that will be in full yielding. asparagus enjoys a little salt in the land, but one would not select what is ordinarily called "alkali land" for growing it - not only because of the alkali but because of the soil character which it induces. bean growing. we have a small field of beans, and would like to know which is the best and most profitable way to crop them. cultivate the beans so that the plants may have plenty of moisture to fill the pods, then let them dry and die. gather the dry plants before the pods open much, and let them dry on a clean, smooth piece of ground or on the barn floor. when they are well dried, thresh with a flail, rake off the straw, sweep up the beans and clean by winnowing in the wind or with a fanning mill with suitable screens. hoeing beans. should beans be hoed while the dew is on the vine? beans had better be hoed with the dew on them than not hoed at all. the only objection to hoeing with the dew on is that the hoer will get his feet wet, the vines will become untidy from adhering dust, with a possible chance of the leaves becoming less effective and the pollination of the blossom rendered less liable to occur. beans as nitrogen gatherers. i grow string beans in my rotation to restore nitrogen, but i see it stated that not all beans are valuable for this purpose. are the common bush varieties nitrogen gatherers? probably they are all doing it in various degrees. pull up or dig up a few plants when growing actively, not too early nor too late in the season, and look for nodules on the roots. number and size considered together will measure their activity in this line in your soil. bean growing. i want to plant beans of different varieties. the land is rich, black loam with a little sand. when is the best time to plant? if planted early, what shall we do to keep the weevils out of them? it is desirable to plant beans as early as you can without encountering danger of frost killing. no particular date can be mentioned for planting because the dates will vary in different locations according to the beginning of the frost-free period. the best way to escape weevil is to sell most of the beans as soon as harvested, treating those which you retain for seed, or for your own use, with bisulphide of carbon vapor or by gently heating to a temperature not above degrees, which, of course, must be done carefully with an accurate thermometer so as not to injure germinating power. unless you know that beans do well in your locality, it would be wise to plant a small area at first, because beans are somewhat particular in their choice of location in california, and one should have practical demonstration of bearing before risking much upon the crop. the yard-long bean. i wish to ask about the very long bean which i think was introduced from china into california. i remember seeing one vine when i was living in california which i think must have been or feet long and had hundreds of pods and each of these pods were from to feet long. are these beans generally considered eatable? would they be at all suitable to get as a field bean which the hogs eat? you probably refer to the "yard-long" pole bean. it is a world variety and may have come to california from china as you suggest, but it has also been well known for generations in europe and was brought thence to the eastern states at some early date. it is generally accounted as an unimportant species and certainly has not risen to commercial account in california. the beans are edible and the whole plant available for stock feeding, but there is no doubt but that the growth of some of the cowpeas would be preferable as a summer field crop for hog pasture. why the beans are waiting. can you tell me why pink beans which were planted early in merced county, irrigated four times, hoed four times and cultivated, have no beans on them? the vines look finely. probably because you had too much hot, dry wind at the blooming. this is one of the most frequent troubles with beans in the hot valley, but the pink bean resists it better than other varieties. as the heat moderates you are likely to get blossoms which will come through and form pods, and then the crop will depend upon how long frost is postponed. you have also treated the plants a little too well with water and cultivation. you had better let them feel the pinch of poverty a little now; they will be more likely to go to work. blackeye beans. what is the best way to prepare land for black-eye beans? how much seed is required per acre, and what is the estimated cost of growing them? the soil is a well-drained clay loam. the cost of growing is not particularly different from other beans, and will vary, of course, according to the capacity and efficiency of the plows, harrows, teams, tractors, men, etc. every man has to figure that according to his conditions and methods of turning and fining the land. sow pounds per acre in drills feet apart, and cultivate as long as you can without injuring the vines too much. sowing must of course be done late, after the ground is warm and danger of frost is past, though the plowing and harrowing should be done earlier than that. blackeye beans are cow peas. i sent for some blackeye cow peas; they look like blackeye beans. am sending you a sample of what i got. what are they? yes, they are in the cow pea group, but there are other cow peas which would not be recognized as having any relation to them. all cow peas are, however, beans, and they have not much use for frost. they are not hardy like the true pea group. growing horse beans. does the soil need to be inoculated for horse beans? i intend to plant five acres about january , on the valley border in placer county and they get heavy frost in the morning. does frost hurt them? how shall i plant them? california experience is that horse beans grow readily without inoculation of the seed. quite a good growth of the plant is being secured in many parts of the state, particularly in the coast region where the plant seems to thrive best. it is one of the hardiest of the bean family and will endure light frost. how hardy it will prove in your place could be told only by a local experiment. whether it can be planted after frost danger is over, as corn is, and make satisfactory growth and product in the dry heat of the interior summer must also be determined by experience. the horse bean is a tall growing, upright plant which is successfully grown in rows far enough apart for cultivation, say about / feet, the seed dropped thinly so that the plants will stand from inches to foot apart in the row. growing castor beans. give information on the castor oil bean; the kind of bean best to plant, when to plant and harvest, the best soil, and where one can market them. castor bean growing has been undertaken from time to time since in various parts of california. there is no difficulty about getting a satisfactory growth of the plant in parts of the state where moisture enough can be depended upon. although the growing of beans is easy enough, the harvesting is a difficult proposition, because in california the clusters ripen from time to time, have to be gathered by hand, to be put in the sun to dry, and finally threshed when they are popping properly. the low price, in connection with the amount of hand work which has to be done upon the crop, has removed all the attractions for california growers. there is also, some years, an excess of production in the central west, which causes prices to fall and makes it still more impracticable to make money from the crop with the ordinary rates of labor. the oil cannot be economically extracted except by the aid of the most effective machinery and a well equipped establishment. oil-making in the rude way in which it is conducted in india would certainly not be profitable here. legume seed inoculation. is there any virtue in inoculating plants with the bacteria that some seed firms offer? i refer to such plants as peas and beans. if the land is yielding good crops of these plants and the roots are noduled, it does not need addition of germs. if the growth is scant even when there is enough moisture present and the roots are free from nodules, the presumption is that germs should be added. speaking generally, added germs are not needed in california because our great legume crops are made without inoculation. presumably, burr clover and our host of native legumes have already charged the soil with them. if, however, such plants do not do well, try inoculation by all means, to see if absence of germs is the reason for such failure or whether you must look for some other reason. if the results are satisfactory, you may have made a great gain by introduction of desirable soil organisms which you can extend as you like by the distribution of the germ-laden soil from the areas which have been given that character by inoculation of the seed. beans on irrigated mesas. would white and pink beans do well on the red orange land at palermo with plenty of water? i have in mind hill land, the hills being very red and running into a dark soil in the lower part. how many beans could i get per acre? probably nothing would be better for the land or for the future needs of the trees than to grow beans. an average crop of beans, for the whole state and all kinds of beans, is about one ton to the acre. what you will get by irrigation on hot uplands we do not know. beans do not like dry heat, even if the soil moisture is adequate. they do not fructify well even when they grow well. the pink bean does best under such conditions. all beans, except horse beans, must be brought up after frost dangers are all over, and this brings them into high heat almost from the start in such a place as you mention. you should find out locally how beans perform under such conditions as you have, before undertaking much investment. leases for sugar beets. i have land in yolo county that has made an average yield yearly of from to sacks of wheat and barley. a beet sugar company proposes renting this land and plant it to sugar beets and i would prefer not to consider any agreement of less than five years' duration. the particular point that i would like to have you advise me on is the effect sugar beet has upon the soil. you certainly have good soil, and it is not strange that a sugar company should desire to rent it for its purposes. there is, however, a great question as to whether it would be desirable to run to beets continually for five years. beets make a strong draft on some components of the soil, and it is a common experience that they should not be grown year after year for a long period, but should take their place in a rotation, in the course of which one or two crops of beets should be followed by a crop of grain, and that if possible by a leguminous plant like alfalfa or an annual legume like burr clover used for pasturage, and then to beets again. beets improve soil for grain, because of the deep running of the root, and because beet culture is not profitable without deep plowing and continuous summer cultivation. this deepens and cleans the land to the manifest advantage of the grain crop, but still the beet reduces the plant food in the soil and some change of crop should be made with reference to its restoration. we would much prefer to lease it for two years than for five years of beet growing. topping mangel wurzels. does it harm the mangel wurzels if their tops ore cut off once a month? removing leaves will decrease the size and harden the tissues of the beet root. if you wish to grow the plant for the top, the root will continue to put out leaves for you for a time; if you grow it for the size and quality of the root, you need all the leaf-action you can get, therefore do not reduce the foliage. blooming brussels sprouts. are brussels sprouts male and female? some of my plants are flowering and show no signs of sprouts, while those that are not, show some small eyes at stem that look like young sprouts. brussels sprouts ought to form the sprouts without flowering, just as a cabbage heads without flowering. those plants which show flowers have been stopped by drought or otherwise, and have taken on prematurely the second stage of growth which is productive of seed and is undesirable from the point of view of growing heads. blanching celery. i desire to know the different methods by which the celery is bleached, and particularly whether boards or other material other than earth is used for this purpose. there is some blanching of celery with boards, cloth wrappings, boot-legs, old tiles, sewer pipes, etc., in market gardens in different parts of the state, but the great commercial product of celery for export is blanched wholly by piling the light, dry earth against the growing plant. as we do not have rains during the growing season and as the soil on which celery is chiefly grown is particularly coarse in its texture, there is no rusting or staining from this method of blanching. it shakes out clean and bright. conditions which make earth-blanching undesirable in the humid region do not exist here. corn in the sacramento valley. is it practical to raise corn in the sacramento volley? are the soil and climatic conditions suitable? the success of corn on plains and uplands in the sacramento valley has not yet been fully demonstrated, although good corn is grown on river bottom lands, and it is possible that much more may be done with this grain in the future than in the past. corn does not enjoy the dry heat of the plains, and even when irrigated seems to be dissatisfied with it. how far we shall succeed in getting varieties which will endure dry heat and still be large and productive will ere long be determined by the experiments which are in progress. the old sacramento valley farmer has been justified to some degree in his conclusion that his is not a corn country. still it may appear so later. plant corn in warm ground. i also put in a lot of corn and none of it came up. the ground was damp and rather cold, as well as being alkali. corn should never be planted in cold, wet ground - in fact, very few seeds should be. besides, corn has no use for alkali. sweet corn in california. i have been informed that sweet corn cannot be raised in this part of the country, an account of worms eating the kernels before the ear has matured. is there any method of overcoming this difficulty? you have been correctly informed concerning the difficulty in growing sweet corn. although many experiments have been made, no method of overcoming this pest has yet been demonstrated. for this reason canning of corn is not undertaken in this state, and for the same reason most of the green corn ears sold in our markets have the tops of the ears amputated. it is sometimes possible to escape the worm by planting rather late, so that the ears shall develop after the moth, which is parent of the worm, has deposited its eggs. forcing cucumbers. give information on growing hot-house cucumbers, and also if you think it would pay me to go into the business in southern california. forcing of cucumbers has been undertaken for a number of years in california and formerly was considered unprofitable because cucumbers grown in the open air in frostless places came in before the forced product could be sold out at sufficiently high prices to make the venture profitable. recently, however, owing to our increased population in cities and larger demand of products out of season, forcing becomes more promising and is worthy of attention. forcing of cucumbers in california can be done at very much less expense, of course, than elsewhere, because of the abundance of winter sunshine and the fact that sufficiently high temperatures can be secured in glass houses with exceedingly little if any artificial heat: the chances of growing cucumbers out of season for shipment eastward and northward can be discussed with the officers of the california vegetable growers' union, which has offices and warehouse in los angeles. cucumber growing. i have a piece of red so-called orange land which has produced excellent wheat. will you give information about its adaptability to cucumbers? are there pickle factories in the state which would demand them in quantities, and is there much other demand for them? about when should they be planted, and how much water would they need? the cucumber needs a retentive soil which does not crack and bake, and such a soil is made by abundance of organic matter. your orange soil, unless heavily treated with stable manure and given plenty of time for disintegration, would probably give you distressful cucumber plants, if it has come right out of wheat-growing. besides, cucumbers do not like dry heat, even if the soil be kept moist by irrigation. oranges will do well under conditions not favorable to cucumbers. cucumber plants must come up after danger of frost is over. the amount of water they require depends upon how moist the soil is naturally, and as the crop is chiefly grown on moist river lands and around the bay, it is chiefly made without irrigation. such lands have a cucumber capacity equal to the consumption of the united states, probably, and the pickle factories can usually get all they can use at a minimum transportation cost. large-scale plantings should only be made by men who know the crop and have definite information or contract for what they can get for it. ginger in california. we have ginger roots in a growing condition with sprouts and bulbs growing an them, but we do not understand how to raise the plants. growing ginger in california in a commercial way has not been worked out, although roots have been introduced from time to time. plant your roots in the garden, just as you would callas, where you can give them good cultivation and water, as seems to be necessary, and note their behavior under these favorable conditions before you undertake any large investment in a crop. licorice growing in california. i have for some time been seeking far some information as to the method of preparation for market and sale of licorice roots. i have a lot of them and have never been able to find a market, and do not know how they are prepared for market. licorice was first planted in california about by the late isaac lea, of florin, sacramento county. mr. lea grew a considerable amount of licorice roots and gave much effort to finding a market for it. he found that the local consumption of licorice root was too small to warrant growing it as a crop; that the high price of labor in digging the roots, and the high cost of transportation of the roots to eastern markets would make it impossible for him to undertake competition in the eastern markets with the sicilian producers, unless, perhaps, he could build an extracting factory and market licorice extract, the black solid which is sold by the druggist, and which the sicilians produce in large quantities. the preparation of licorice root is simply digging and drying, but the preparation of the extract requires steam extractors and condensers. california could produce licorice, for we have a good climate for it. if it is grown on light, sandy loams, it could be pulled from the ground by the yard at rather small expense, and yet, one should not undertake the production unless he wished to put in much time and money in working up economical production and marketing in competition with the foreign product, produced by cheap labor and with the advantage of processes well known and established by long usage. experiments should be circumspectly undertaken, for licorice is one of the worst weeds in the world, and extremely difficult of eradication probably. growing lentils. give information regarding the planting and raising of lentils. can they be grown in the sacramento valley in the vicinity of colusa, and at a profit? lentils are as easily grown in california as common peas, and will do well as a field crop if started during the rainy season, as they are hardy enough to survive our ordinary valley frosts. with respect to lentils, it may be said that excellent as these legumes are for many purposes, they do not seem to be well known to american consumers, and therefore the amount to be grown is limited, until you know who will buy larger quantities of them at a good price. canada peas for seed. i want to raise canada peas for the seed. in what month of the year is the best time to plant them; also how many pounds to the acre to be sowed broadcast on rolling land in napa? broadcast from to pounds of seed per acre as soon as you can get the ground into good condition. what you get will depend much upon how late spring rains hold this year. we should only try a small area this year to see what happens, for you probably should have started earlier in the season. on uplands it will always be a question whether your soil will hold moisture enough to mature a good seed crop. growing niles peas. how shall i plant and handle a crop of niles peas? niles peas are hardy and will make a good crop on any good soil, if planted early in the season so as to make the main part of their growth before the heat of the summer comes on. under garden conditions they can, of course, be grown all summer. transplanting lettuce. i have lettuce plants that have been transplanted to head. occasionally i find a head that has withered away and upon examining it find it rotted away at the stem. can you suggest a remedy for it? your lettuce plants are destroyed by the "damping, off" fungus. it would be preventable by reducing the amount of moisture until the transplanted plant had opportunity to re-establish itself in the soil and thus come into condition to take water. the chance of it could also be reduced by using a certain amount of sand in connection with the soil, unless it is already very sandy, and by a shallow covering of sand on the surface around the plants after they are reset, in order to prevent too great accumulation of moisture. handling winter melons. give particulars regarding harvesting, storaging, and shipment of winter melons. how do you harvest and pack them for distant market? there is no particular system in the handling of winter melons. they are gathered into piles on ground where water will not gather and covered with the trash of the vines on which they grow. they will keep for months in this way, as our autumn temperatures do not freeze them. other growers collect them in open sheds shaded from sun and rain, and still others put them into barns or shallow cellars under buildings, etc. the melons are very durable and seem disposed to keep in any old way. the melons are shipped in large packing cases with slat sides, or in the smaller slat crates that are used for summer cantaloupes. no packing is used, generally. if it seemed necessary, a little clean straw would be sufficient. ripe melons. how can i tell when a watermelon is fully ripe? what is the method used by growers in picking for commercial shipping? gently press the sides of a melon and if it crackles a little bit, all right; if it makes no sound then go to another. commercial pickers look at the little spiral between the melon and the nearest leaf. if it is withered they pick the melon, if fresh, pass it until next picking. growing onion seed and sets. will you give localities of the leading production of onion seed or dry sets in your state? onion seed is grown in several parts of the state, largely in the santa clara valley adjacent to the city of san jose. onion sets are largely produced in orange county, near los angeles, for eastern shipment, for which purpose they are grown under contract. ripening onions. i am raising some onions from bottom sets and as they are growing nicely and are beginning to swell at the bulb some advise me to cut the tops off and some advise me to bend them over or tramp them down. do not cut off the tops of the onions. if they seem to be overgrowing and not disposed to ripen the bulb, the top can be broken down, thus partly arresting the vegetative energy of the plant and causing maturity. onions from sets. will onion sets planted in july grow and mature in the fall months? good onion sets grown during the winter and spring should be mature by july and if planted after drying would proceed to make a full growth of large onions if growing conditions should be right for them; that is, the soil moist and the temperature not too high. how many crops of onion seed? does the growing of onion seed exhaust adobe land, and if so, how many years' cropping before it requires rest or fertilizing? the growth of any seed crop, including cereal grains, of course, makes a supreme draft upon soil fertility. how long a certain soil can stand it, depends upon the amount of fertility it has when the draft begins. the best rough way to tell how it is going, is to watch the growth and crop, when moisture conditions are known to be favorable. if you get a good growth of the plant it is still good to make the seed. onions from seed. will onions from seed mature the same season if they are irrigated? some tell us they will not, so we would be very much pleased to hear from you. onions grown from the seed do fully develop during the growing season following the planting of the seed. in fact, nearly all california onions are grown in that way. our growing season is so long that we do not need to use onion sets to any extent, as they do in short-summer climates. dry farming with chili peppers. if i set chili pepper plants down six or eight inches lower than the surface of the ground and fill in as the plants grow larger, will this help in case i could not get water enough? my soil is a deep sandy loam. we have had between five and six inches of rain. do you think water every fifteen days would be enough? on such light soil as you mention, the plants can be planted deeply and a certain amount of soil brought up to the plants by cultivation without injury. as this plant has a long growing season and matures its crop rather late, you will undoubtedly need irrigation. probably irrigation twice a month will be sufficient in connection with good cultivation, but you will have to watch the plants and apply the water as it seems to be needed, rather than by a specific scheme of days. harvesting peanuts. i would like information regarding the curing of peanuts. should they be bleached, and, if so, how is it done? does bleaching affect the keeping qualities? it is not usual to bleach peanuts. they should be grown in such light soil that they will not be stained, and the common method of curing is to dig or plow up, throw the vines, with nuts attached, into windrows and allow them to lie a week or ten days for drying. then the nuts are picked into sacks and cleaned before shipment in revolving drums, followed by a grain fan which throws out the light nuts and other rubbish. bleaching would not destroy the keeping quality probably, but it would destroy the flavor and the germinating power. the latter would not matter, except with such nuts as you wish to keep for seed, because the roasting destroys the germinating power also, but sulphuring, which would reduce the flavor, would give the product a bad name. possibly some growers do bleaching, but, if so, they have to be pretty careful about it. the cost of the operation would also be a bar to profit, for peanuts are grown on a narrow margin owing to competition with importations grown with cheap labor. adobe and peanuts. is adobe land good for the peanut? is it harder to start than in other soils or not? it is not good at all. peanuts require the finest, mellowest loam with sand enough to prevent crust, and moisture even and continuous. the surface must be kept loose so that the plant can bury its own bloom stem and the under soil light and clean so that it will readily shake from the nuts and not stain them. adobe is the worst soil you could find for peanuts. cutting potatoes. what would be the most profitable potato to plant in the salinas valley, and how small can a potato be cut up for planting? how many eyes should each piece contain in order to make a good growth and be profitable? probably the best potato for your district would be the burbank, which is largely grown near salinas and brings the highest price. it is customary to cut a medium-sized potato in two pieces and a large one in four pieces. one can be very economical of seed by smaller cutting, but it would require the most favorable conditions to bring a vigorous growth. probably pieces weighing not less than two ounces would be best under ordinary conditions. potatoes which are rather small may be used for seed if well matured and have good eyes. it is dangerous, however, to use the small stuff - too small for sale. unless the soil and moisture conditions are extra favorable, the growth will be weak and unsatisfactory. potato planting. how many sacks of potatoes are to be planted to an acre, and how many eyes are to be left in a seed? if, for instance, we plant seed with three eyes, how many potatoes should we get from that vine? potatoes are planted all the way from five to fifteen sacks to the acre, probably about ten sacks being the average. there is no particular number of eyes specified in preparing the seed, according to common practice. good medium-sized potatoes are generally cut in two pieces crosswise, and large potatoes in four pieces, cutting both ways. there is no definite relation between the number of eyes planted and the number of potatoes coming from them. this has been the subject of innumerable experiments, and the conclusion is that the crop is more dependent upon good soil and favorable growing conditions than upon any way of preparing the seed. northern potatoes for seed. do you regard northern-grown seed potatoes sufficiently better to make it worth while paying freight on them from the state of washington? experience seems to indicate the superiority of northern-grown seed potatoes, not only in this state, but on the atlantic coast, and they are largely depended upon. systematic demonstration by comparative tests has been made by the vermont station and preference for northern-grown seed seems, to be justified. potato planting. i have ten acres of land in placer county which i propose to put into potatoes next spring. it has been recommended to me to put potatoes in as early as january. it seems to me that january is rather early; however, it is said that this land is in the orange belt and practically free from frost. whether you can plant potatoes to advantage in january or not depends upon the temperatures which you are likely to meet after that date, also whether the ground is warm enough in january, because there is no advantage in planting in cold ground nor in soil that is too wet at the time. the earliest potatoes, of course, come from planting much earlier than january; usually as soon as the ground is moistened enough in the autumn. the potato will stand some frost, but autumn planting is not feasible in places which are under hard freezing or receive too much cold rain water. potatoes should be planted early. i have early rose potatoes planted about may first. the tops look fine, but there are few potatoes and small, and, though not developed, have commenced growing a second time, sprouts starting from the new potatoes. when should i plant and what care should they have? your potatoes act peculiarly because of intermittent moisture - the plant being arrested by drought and then starting again, which is very undesirable. to avoid this, potatoes should be planted earlier so as to get a large part of their growth during the rainy season. if planted late the ground should be well wet down by irrigation, and then plowed and cultivated, and irrigation should be used while the plant is growing well. if this is done, potatoes can be successfully grown by irrigation, but if the land is allowed to become dry the plant is arrested in its growth for a time and a second and undesirable growth is started. potato balls. i find in potato writings of forty years ago that the seed from the potato balls which form on the tops of the plants is recommended for growing the best potatoes. in later books i find no mention of them and all are advised how to cut the tubers to get seed potatoes. the seed of the potato plant which is found in the "balls" which develop on the tops of the plant is only valuable for the origination of new varieties, with the chance, of course, that most of them will be inferior to the tubers produced by the plant which bears the seed. therefore, these seeds are of no commercial importance. there has also sometimes developed upon the top of the plant what is called an aerial tuber, which is even of less value than the seed ball, because it does not contain seed nor is it good as a tuber. forty years ago there was a great demand for newer and better kinds of potatoes which has, since that time, been largely supplied, and commercial potato-growing consists in multiplying the standard varieties which best suit the soil and the market. this is done by planting the tuber itself, which is really a root-cutting and therefore reproduces its own kind. those who are originating new kinds of potatoes still use seed from the balls, either taking their chances by natural variation or, by hybridizing the blossoms, increasing the chances for variation from which desirable varieties are taken by selection, to be afterward multiplied by growth from the tubers. seed-ends of potatoes. is it bad practice to plant the seed-ends of potatoes? the seed-end of the potato is the least valuable part of it, but it is better probably to plant than to reject it. the moon and potato planting. is there any foundation to the oft-repeated story about potatoes in the light of the moon running to tops and the dark of the moon to spuds? if we paid any attention to the moon in planting, we should plant in the dark of the moon so as to give the plant opportunity to make use of whatever additional light the full moon afforded. planting whole potatoes. one man states the only way to cut seed is to take a potato and cut the ends off and not divide the potato any more; or, in other words, a whole potato for each seed. good results are obtained by planting whole potatoes, but in that case there is no advantage in removing the ends. how to cut seed potatoes. would it pay in returns to use large potatoes for seed in preference to culls? large potatoes are better than culls, but medium-sized potatoes are better than either. many experiments have been made to determine this. at the arkansas station whole tubers two to three inches in diameter yielded per cent more than small whole tubers three-quarters to one and one-quarter inches in diameter, and large cut tubers yielded . per cent more than small cut tubers. cutting potatoes to single eyes. some say only one eye to a piece; others say several eyes - which is better? in one experiment potatoes cut to single eyes with each piece weighing one-sixteenth of an ounce yielded bushels to the acre, while single eyes on two-ounce pieces yielded bushels to the acre. experiments in indiana showed that the yield usually increased with the weight of the set and that the exact number of eyes per cutting is relatively unimportant. potato scab. can potatoes be treated in any way before planting to prevent the new ones from being what is called "scabby"? there are two successful treatments for scab in potatoes. one is dipping in a solution of corrosive sublimate. dissolve one ounce in eight gallons of water and soak the seed potatoes in this solution for one and one-half hours before cutting. this treatment kills the scab spores which may be upon the exterior of the potatoes. more recently, however, to avoid danger in handling such a rank poison as corrosive sublimate, formaldehyde has been used, and one pint of commercial formaldehyde, as it is bought in the stores, is diluted with thirty gallons of water, and potatoes are soaked in this for two hours. thirty gallons of this dip ought to treat about fifty bushels of potatoes. double-cropping with potatoes. i am told that here two crops of potatoes can be raised by planting the second crop in august. i have five acres which will be ready to dig in july. can i dig these potatoes and use them for seed at once for another crop, or won't they grow? i have a crop of barley, and as it is heading out now, i want to put potatoes on the ground after i take the barley off. i have plenty of water to irrigate. if your potatoes ripen in july and you allow those which you desire for seed to lie upon the ground and become somewhat greenish, they are likely to sprout well for a second crop. they should not, however, be planted immediately. whether you get a second crop successfully or not depends upon how early the frosts come in your district. whether you get potatoes after barley or not depends also upon how much moisture there remains in the soil. by irrigating thoroughly after harvesting the grain and then plowing deeply for potatoes, you would do vastly better than to plant in dry ground and irrigate afterward. when to plant potatoes. i have been puzzled to understand potato growing in california. do you have more than one cropping season, and if so, about what dates are they due? every month in the year potatoes are being put into the ground and being taken out of the ground somewhere in california. we have, then, practically a continuous planting and harvesting season. there is, however, a division possible to make in this way: plantings undertaken in september and october are for winter supplies of new potatoes, which begin about the holidays and continue during the winter. there is also in southern california a planting beginning in january, which might be called the earliest planting for the main crop, and other plantings for the main crop in the central and northern parts of the state begin in february and continue until may, according to the character of the land; that is, whether it is upland, on which the planting is earlier, or whether it is lowland along the rivers where excessive moisture may render the land unsuitable until april or may. the harvesting of the main crop then begins in may and continues during the whole of the summer, according to the character of the land cropped over, lapping the planting time for early potatoes first mentioned. it is also true by use of properly matured seed one can secure, in some places, two crops a year, if there is sufficient inducement therefor. thus it comes about that we are continually planting and digging potatoes according to local conditions and the possibility of selling advantages. keeping potatoes. advise me how to keep my potatoes. what is the best way? would a dark room be suitable? some people are digging holes in the ground to put them in. potatoes, if properly matured and free from disease, will keep for a considerable time in dark rooms kept as cool as possible. they must be kept away from the reach of the moth, which is parent to the worm producing long black strings inside of the potato. if they are thoroughly covered with boards or sacking or straw, so as to keep the moth from reaching the potato, they may be held for a long time in the open air, and covering with earth, as your neighbors are doing, will be all right until the rains come and cause decay by making the soil too wet. the main point is to keep the tubers as cool as possible and out of reach of the potato moth. potato yield. what is the yield per acre of potatoes on the best land around stockton, cal., where work is done properly; also what is the yield for potatoes along the coast? the average yield of potatoes in california, taking the whole acreage and product as reported by the last united states census, is bushels to the acre. in stockton district, on good new reclaimed land the yield has been reported all the way from to bushels per acre - the crop declining rapidly when continued on the same land. one year's crop in the stockton district was estimated at , acres averaging sacks per acre. the coast yield would be more like the general average for the state as first given. new potatoes for seed. can i plant american wonder potatoes for the first crop, and let enough of them mature to use for seed for the second crop, to be planted the first or middle of july? it is possible to use potatoes grown the same year as seed for the later crop, providing you let the potatoes mature first by the complete dying down of the vines, and second by digging the potatoes allow them to lie in the open air, with some protection against sun-burning, until the potatoes become somewhat greenish. if this is the case the eyes will develop and seed will grow, while without such treatment you might be disappointed in their behavior. of course, the question still remains whether it would be desirable to do this or to plant some later variety earlier in the season when the growing conditions would be better. potato growing. in what locality are the best early potatoes grown in california? can they be raised on wheat lands without irrigation as an early crop? early potatoes are grown in regions of light frosts in all parts of the state - around the bay of san francisco, on the mesas in southern california, and to some extent at slight elevations in the central part of the state. the potato endures some frost, but one has, for an early crop, to guard against the locations subject to hard freezing. most of our potatoes are grown without irrigation because, on uplands, winter temperatures favor their growing during the rainy season. the middle-season and late potatoes are grown on moist lowlands where irrigation is not necessary. in proper situations, much of the land which is used for potatoes has at some time produced wheat or barley, corn or sorghum, and other field crops. potatoes after alfalfa. i have been a successful potato grower in ohio. i have the best alfalfa soil and it is now in its fourth year of productiveness in that crop. i would like to grow potatoes in a small way. proceed just as you would at the east in getting potatoes upon a red clover sod. turn under the alfalfa deeply now if the soil will work well, and roll your sandy soil. you must use a sharp plow to cut and cover well. if there is moisture enough the alfalfa, plowed under in the fall, ought to be decayed by february, when you could plant potatoes safely, probably, unless your situation is very frosty. if you plant early you ought to get the crop through without irrigation if you cultivate well and keep the land flat. flat or hill culture for potatoes. is it better to hill potatoes or not? during the dry time of the year potatoes should be grown with flat cultivation, except as it may be necessary to furrow out between the rows for the application of irrigation water. potatoes grown during the rainy season in places where there is liable to be too much water, can often be hilled to advantage, but dry-season cultivation of practically everything should be as flat as possible to retain moisture near the surface for the development of shallow-rooting plants. bad conditions for potatoes. our potatoes were planted early and were frosted several times while young. as we come to harvest them we find them with very large green tops but the potatoes are about the size of a hen's egg and from that they run down to the size of a pea. the larger ones are beginning to send out roots, four or five to a potato. the potatoes have not been irrigated lately and the ground they are in is dry. the ugly behavior of your potatoes is doubtless due to irregularities in temperature and moisture which have forced the plants into abnormal or undesirable activity. potatoes should have regular conditions of moisture so that they shall proceed from start to finish and not stop and start again, for this will usually make the crop unsatisfactory and worthless. excessive moisture is not desirable, but the requisite amount in continuous supply is indispensable. potatoes on heavy land. will potatoes grow well in adobe land, or partly adobe, that has not been used for seven years except for pasturing? although potatoes enjoy best of all a light loam in which they can readily expand, it is possible to get very good results on heavy land which has been used for pasturage for some years, providing the land is broken up early and deeply and harrowed well in advance of planting and thorough cultivation maintained while the crop is growing. the content of grass roots and manure which the land has received during its period of grazing tends to make the soil lighter and will also feed the plant well. for this reason better potatoes are had on heavy land after pasturage than could be had on the same land if continually used for grain or for some other crop which tended to reduce the amount of humus and to make the land more rebellious in cultivation. storage of seed potatoes. we need potatoes for late planting and have found a good lot which is being held in cold storage at temperatures from to degrees f. they have not been there long, however. would that hurt them for seed, and also how long could they be safely left there now before planting? seed potatoes would not be injured in storage, providing the temperature is not allowed to go below the freezing point. they should not, however, be allowed to remain longer in storage, but should be exposed to the sun for the development of the eyes, even to the sprouting point being desirable before planting. the greening of the potato by the sun is no disadvantage. we would not think of planting potatoes directly from storage, because, owing to the lack of development in the eyes, decay might get the start of germination. potatoes and frosts. can i keep frost off of potato tops by building smudge fires! i would like to plant about february , but we usually have a few light frosts here during march. if i were to turn water in the field when too cold, would that keep the frost off, and if so, would i have to turn water down each row, or would one furrow full of water to about every fourth or sixth row be enough? you can prevent frost by smudging for potatoes just as you can for other vegetables. the potato, however, needs little protection of this kind and will endure a light frost which would be destructive to tomatoes, melons, and other more tender growths. unless you have a very frosty situation, you can certainly grow potatoes without frost protection, and they should be planted earlier than february first if the ground is in good condition. the great secret of success in growing potatoes in southern california is to get a good early start before the heat and drought come on. water will protect from frost if the temperature only goes to about degrees and does not stay there too long. the more water there is exposed the longer may be the protection, but probably not against a lower temperature. growing sweet potato plants. how shall i make a hot-bed to raise sweet potato plants? i don't mean to put glass over bed, but want full description of an up-to-date outfit for raising them. manure hot-beds have been largely abandoned for growing sweet potato slips, though, of course, you can grow them that way on a small scale or for experiment. in the large sweet potato districts, elaborate arrangements for bottom heat by circulation of hot water or steam are in use. in a smaller way hot air works well. the arizona experiment station tells how a very good sweet potato hot-bed at little cost is constructed as follows: a frame of rough boards seven feet wide, twenty feet long and fourteen inches deep is laid down over two flues made by digging two trenches one foot deep and about two feet wide, lengthwise of the bed. these trenches are covered with plank or iron roofing, and are equipped with a fire pit at one end and short smokestack at the other. four inches of soil is filled into this bed and sweet potatoes placed upon it in a layer which is then covered with two or three inches more of soil. large potatoes may be split and laid flat side down. the whole bed is then covered with muslin, operating on a roller by which to cover and uncover the bed. thus prepared, the bed may easily be kept at a temperature of to degrees f. by smouldering wood fires in the fire boxes. the potatoes, kept moist at this temperature, sprout promptly and will be ready to transplant in about six weeks. a bed of the size mentioned will receive five to seven bushels of seed roots, which will make slips enough to plant an acre or more of potatoes. growing sweet potatoes. please inform me how to keep sweet potatoes for seed; also how many pounds it takes for one acre, and what distance apart to plant, and the time to plant. sweet potatoes may be kept from sprouting by storage in a cool, dry place. sweet potatoes are not grown by direct cutting of the tuber as the ordinary potato is, but the tubers are put in january or later in a hot bed and the sprouts are taken off for planting when the ground becomes warm and all danger of frost is over in the locality. the number of sprouts required for an acre is from five to ten thousand, and a bushel of small sweet potatoes will produce about two thousand sprouts if properly handled in the hot bed, which consists in removing the sprouts when they have attained a height of five or six inches, and in this way the potatoes will be yielding sprouts in succession for some time. the sprouts are planted in rows far enough apart for horse cultivation. they are usually hilled up pretty well after starting to grow well. they cannot be planted until the danger of frost is over, for they are much more tender than irish potatoes. sweet potato growing. in planting sweet potatoes, do we have to make hotbeds just like those for tomatoes, or if just a plain seed-bed will do? is it necessary to irrigate them or not? you can bed your sweet potatoes in a warm place on the sunny side of a building or board fence, and get sprouts all right. you will, however, get them sooner and in greater numbers by using a slow hotbed in which the manure supply is not too large. the fact that sweet potato growers do use some artificial heat, either from manure or by piping bottom-heat in their propagating houses, is a demonstration that such recourse is desirable to get best results. the necessity of irrigation depends upon the soil and its natural moisture supply. on a fine retentive loam, the crop is chiefly made without irrigation, if the plants are all ready to put out in the field as soon as it is safe. if you are late in the planting, or if the soil is dry or likely to dry before the tubers are grown to good size, irrigation, some time ahead of the need of the plant, is essential. sweet potatoes. what kind of soil and climate does it take to grow sweet potatoes, and can i grow them in any part of contra costa county, and about what time is the best to plant them? sweet potatoes do best in a light warm loam which drains well and does not bake or crust by rain or irrigation. sprout the tubers in a hot-bed or cold-frame in february and break off the shoots and plant as soon as you are out of danger by frost. sweet potatoes are more tender than common potatoes. there are places in contra costa county where they do well, though some parts of the county do not have enough summer heat. sweet potatoes between fruit trees. i am expecting to grow a fall crop of about twenty acres of sweet potatoes. the land is a heavy, sandy loam in the interior, which has been set out this spring to almonds, apricots and prunes. i wish to grow sweet potatoes between trees. would an irrigation every forty days be often enough? also, if either sweet or irish potatoes grown between rows are harmful to either of the varieties of fruit mentioned? we see no reason why you should not get your crop, providing you do not have to run the plants into the frosty period, and sweet potatoes will not, of course, stand frost as well as the common potato. the moisture which you propose to give ought to be enough for a retentive soil in connection with good cultivation until the vines cover the ground. growing any crop between orchard trees is apt to be an injury to the trees, because of the spaces which are not and cannot be adequately cultivated, so that the ground around the trees is apt to become compacted either by the run of water or the lack of cultivation, or both. our observation has been that irish potatoes are no more injurious than other crops. any crop will injure young trees if it takes moisture they ought to have or interferes with good cultivation of the land. giant japanese radish. in discussing sakurajima (giant japanese radish) eastern publications advise planting late, about august , and not earlier than july . what can you tell me about the plant here? the asiatic winter radishes can be successfully planted in california in july or august if the soil is thoroughly saturated by irrigation before digging and planting. it is, however, not so necessary to begin early in california as at the east, because our winter temperatures favor the growth of the plant, while at the east they have to make an early start in order to get something well grown before the ground freezes. for the growth of winter radishes, then, in california you can wait until the ground is wet thoroughly by the rain, which may be expected during september, and afterward you can make later plantings for succession at any time you desire during the rainy season. this applies to all kinds of radishes. rhubarb rotting. i have planted rhubarb roots in the san joaquin valley and find the root crowns rot below the surface. the old-fashioned summer rhubarb usually goes off that way in very hot localities. if there is too much alkali or hardpan, or if planted too late, the same results will be had with any sort of rhubarb. where it is very hot, plants, irrigated in the morning near the plants, scald at the crown and die in a few days. if irrigated in the afternoon and the ground worked before it gets hot the next day fine results are obtained. the winter rhubarb varieties do well in hot districts if the roots are planted from september to may , while in cooler sections, april, may, june and july are the best months and will insure a crop the following winter. squashes dislike hardship. what caused these squashes, of which i send you samples, to be so hard and woody? they were grown without irrigation. your squashes were grown without irrigation under conditions which were too dry for them and became inferior in quality. possibly the variety itself is not of good quality or the specimen from which the seed was taken may have been inferior. a squash, in order to be tender and acceptable, needs rich feeding and plenty of drink. otherwise, it is apt to resent ill treatment by very undesirable growth. harvesting sunflowers. what is the method used in saving or threshing the seed from the giant russian sunflower? cut off the seed heads of your sunflowers when the seed seems to be well matured but before any of it falls away from the head. throw these heads on a smooth piece of ground or a tight floor and when they become thoroughly dry thresh out the seed with a flail, removing the coarse stuff with a rake and afterwards cleaning the seed by shoveling it into the wind so that the light stuff may be blown away. a more perfect cleaning afterwards could be secured with a grain fanning mill or a simple sieve of the right mesh. irrigating tomatoes. how much water does it take (in gallons or cubic feet) to properly irrigate an acre of land for tomatoes? the soil is adobe, and the customary way of planting tomatoes is feet apart each way, plowing a trench of one furrow with the slope of the land for irrigating, that is, a trench between every row and a cross trench as a feeder. the land is low and in the driest part of the year the surface water is from to feet beneath the top of the ground. it is not possible to state a specific quantity of water for any crop, because the amount depends to such a large extent upon the retentiveness of the soil, the rate of evaporation and the kind of cultivation. the best source of information is the behavior of the plant itself, bearing in mind that tomato plants require constant but not excessive moisture supply, and that if moisture is applied in excess it will promote an excessive growth of the plant, which will cause it to drop its blossoms and therefore be unsatisfactory and unproductive. in such land as you describe no irrigation whatever would be desirable except in years of short rainfall, and such land, if properly cultivated, would always furnish moisture enough by capillary action to support the growth of the plant. less water and more heat. what chemicals should i put into the soil to insure a good crop of vegetables, such as tomatoes, string beans, or other over-ground producers? last year my tomatoes and string beans grew plentifully, but never produced any tomatoes or beans, yet turnips and parsnips were all right. vegetables which behave like your tomatoes and string beans, making too much growth and not enough fruit, do not need fertilization. the land is perhaps too rich already, or you may have used too much water. use less water so that the plants will make a more moderate growth, and they will be fruitful if the season is warm enough in the later part of summer. this, of course, would be one of the drawbacks to growing tomatoes and beans in san francisco. turnips and parsnips do well with less heat. you may have to modify the san francisco summer climate by wind screens or glass covers. continuous cropping with the same plant. what would happen on the crops of cucumbers, tomatoes and eggplants, etc., planted on the same place continuously? there would be in time a decadence of crop from soil exhaustion, but that you could prevent by fertilization. the greatest danger from continuously growing these vegetables on the same land is the multiplication of bacteria which injuriously affect them, in the soil. the plants which you mention are all subject to "wilt" diseases from this cause, therefore, they should have new ground. if you have to use the same garden ground continuously, the plants which you mention should be rotated with root crops or with other kinds of vegetables, so as to frequently change plants and soil within the general area which has to be used for them. big worms on tomatoes. i have a nice patch of tomatoes in my garden, and only recently i notice large green worms on them with one large brown horn on their head. they strip the leaves off. they look to me like a tobacco worm. they are tobacco worms; that is, they are the larvae of hawk moths, some of which take tobacco, tomatoes, grapevines and many other plants, including some of the native weeds of your valley. pick them off and crush them, or give them a little snip with the scissors if you do not like to handle them. they are so large and easily found that such treatment is easily applied, as in "worming tobacco." loss of tomato bloom. i have tomato plants which are very strong and healthy and full of blossoms, but there is something cutting the blossoms off and just about to ruin my plants. the trouble with your tomato plants is that life is too easy for them, that they have so much moisture and plant food that they can grow comfortably and rapidly without thought of the future. so, because they do not have to think of making fruit, the blossoms drop off. this is a very common occurrence with tomatoes, especially in home gardens where the owners have not the experience or the information on the subject that they might have, and give the tomatoes too much water. many other plants act the same way and will not set fruit while they can grow easily, and only begin to produce when they have made a great growth or when moisture begins to get a little short. if you irrigate the tomatoes, stop, and put no more water on until the plant begins to set fruit as if it meant business, or gives some sign that water would be appreciated. if the ground is naturally moist you will have to wait until the plants make more growth and the weather gets drier and hotter, and the plants will then set fruit. some growers have found that by trimming up the vine and staking it, the fruit sets much more readily. part iii. grains and forage crops wants us to do the whole thing. can you help, me to determine a good product to plant somewhere in california; also what particular section would be most suitable for the raising of that which you would advise? i wish a crop of permanent nature (as orchard trees). i also desire advice on some product which would give a quick return while i am waiting on the more permanent one to mature and bear. i have not procured land yet, and am thinking seriously of trying to get government land, therefore, you are free to give me the best location for the raising of that which you would, suggest. i want a money-making product and one which is not already overdone. the choice of crops depends quite as much upon the market demand and opportunity as it does upon the suitability of the soil and local climate. choice of crops indeed involves almost the whole business of farming, and although we can sometimes give a man useful suggestions as to the growth of plants and the protection of plants from enemies, we cannot undertake to plan his farming business for him. he must form his own opinions as to what will be most marketable, and therefore profitable, if he succeeds in getting a good article for sale. a wise man at the east once said: "you can advise a man to do almost anything. you can even select a wife for him, but never commit the indiscretion of advising him what to grow to make money. that is a matter he has to determine for himself." pasturing young grain. would it be advisable to herd milch cows for a few hours each day on a field of black oats which is to be grown for hay? the oats are now about four inches high and rank, as the land was pastured last year. the land is sandy, rolling soil and will soon be dry enough so that the cows would not injure the plants. the idea is that the leaves which are green now will all dry up and are really not the growth which is cut for hay; therefore, i should think it would do no harm to feed it down a bit. over-rank grain with abundant moisture will make a more stocky growth and stand against lodging if pastured or mowed. the leaves which you speak of as being lost in the later growth of the plant serve an important purpose in making that growth, and removing them is a repressive process which is not desirable when rain is short. we should allow the plants to push along into as good a growth of hay as a dry year's moisture will give. dry plowing for grain. we have land that we could very easily plow now with our traction engine and improved plows, but the people here claim that it does not pay to dry-plow, that is, before the land has had a good rain on it and the vegetation has started. i believe in dry plowing. two of our oldest farmers in merced county dry-plowed, that is, they commenced plowing as soon as harvesting was over. if the rainfall is small and likely to come in light showers, dry plowing, if it turns up the land in large clods, might yield poorer results than land which is plowed after rain, because there would be so much moisture lost by drying out from the coarse surface when it came in amounts not adequate for deep penetration. plowing after the rain for the purpose of killing out the foul stuff which starts is, however, quite another consideration. it is a fact that dry plowing and sowing is not now desirable in some places where it was formerly accepted, because the land has become so foul as to give a rank growth of weeds which choke out the grain at its beginning. such land can be cleaned by one or two shallow plowings and cultivations after there is moisture enough to start the weeds to growing. these are local questions which you will have to settle by observation. in a general way, it is true that opening the surface of the ground before the rains, reduces the run-off and loss of moisture, but whether there would be any loss of moisture by run-off or not depends upon the slope of the land and also upon the way in which the rain comes, and the total amount of moisture which is available for the season. sub-varieties of california barley. can you tell where i can buy seed of varieties of california six-rowed barley, described as "pallidum" and "coerulescens," and what the seed will cost? no one knows where the six-rowed barley, known as "common" barley in this state, came from, nor when it came. it has been here since the early days and it has naturally shown a disposition to vary, so that it is quite possible to select a number of types from any large field, of it. these variations have been studied to some extent by eastern students who are endeavoring to develop american types of barley for brewing purposes as likely to be better than the brewing varieties which are famous in europe. in europe brewing barleys are chiefly two-rowed. under california conditions the plant is able to develop just as good brewing grains on a six-rowed basis, and this seems to be a commendable trait in the way of multiplying the product. the names "pallidum" and "coerulescens" indicate two of these varieties recognized by eastern students. it is not possible at this time to get even a pound of selected grain true to this type, and no one knows when it will be worked out to available quantities. chevalier barley. has chevalier barley more value to feed hens for egg production than common feed barley or wheat? chevalier barley is no better for chicken feed than any other barley which is equally large and plump. brewers like chevalier because of its fullness of starch to support the malting process; also, because it is bright, that is, white, and not stained or tinged with bluish or reddish colors. color points do not count for chicken feed, but good plump kernels do. besides this, however, darker kernel (not chaff) usually indicates more protein, and therefore a darker kernel of either wheat or barley might be more valuable for feeding. a hard, horny kernel is richer than a softer, more starchy one, either in wheat or barley. barley on moist land. what would you do with land subject to overflow by the sacramento when that river rises feet, and which you wanted to plant to barley this season? would you take a chance on the river rising that high this year, or wait until after that danger was over, and take a chance on not getting enough rain to make the grain come up; also, if the river did come up for hours after the grain was in, but did not wash, would the grain be lost? should the grain be planted deeper than on ordinary land, and, if so, should a drill be used? how much seed should be sown per acre on good river-bottom soil? get the barley in and watch for the overflow rather than to fear it. an overflow for hours would give you the greatest crop you ever saw, unless it should be in a settling basin and the water forced to escape by evaporation. from your description we judge that this is not so and that the land clears itself quickly from an overflow. depth of sowing depends upon the character and condition of the soil - the lighter and drier the deeper. by all means use a drill if the soil is dry on the surface. short rainfall makes the advantage of drill seeding most conspicuous. on the university farm trials gave an average gain of over per cent in yield. the difference would be much greater in a dry year; it might be per cent greater, possibly, and save high-priced seed at the same time, as about pounds of seed per acre will do, instead of pounds broadcast, in accordance with the approved heavy seeding practice on the river lands. barley and alfalfa. i have some alfalfa which is a poor stand. can i disc it up heavily and seed in some barley for winter pasture? you can get barley into your alfalfa as you propose, but you should not seed until fall. the more barley you get into your alfalfa, however, the less alfalfa you will have afterward. if you want to improve your afalfa, keep everything else out of the field and help the plants by regular irrigations during the balance of the growing season. beets and potatoes. which is the best for dairy cows, plain red mangels or a cross between these and sugar beets? can you suggest a more profitable variety of potato than the oregon burbank? if you can get a cross which gives you more tonnage than a mangel and a higher nutritive content you would have something better to grow. the first point you have to determine by growing the two side by side and weighing the product; the nutritive value of each will have to be determined by chemical analysis. until these determinations are actually made a comparison of desirability is nothing but conjecture. there are several other potatoes which are sometimes more profitable here and there for early crop when grown in an early locality. if you are not in an early locality you are obliged to produce for the main crop, and nothing, to our knowledge, sells as well as the burbank, if you get a good one. beets for stock. will sugar beets grow on black alkali land? how many pounds of seed per acre should be used and when is it time for sowing in the san joaquin valley? which kind would be best for cows? beets will do more on alkali than some other plants, but too much alkali will knock them out. you must try and see whether you have too much alkali or not. you can sow at various times during the rainy season, for the beets will stand some frost. sow pounds per acre in drills / to feet apart, so as to use a horse cultivator. for stock you had better grow large stock beets like marigolds or tankards - not sugar beets. it costs too much to get sugar beets out of the ground, because it is their habit to grow small and bury themselves for the sake of the sugar maker, while stock beets grow largely above ground. summer start of stock beets. how can i make mangel wurzels grow in hot weather? the land is level and can be irrigated by flooding or ditching between the rows. how often should the water be applied, and which method used? the land is in fine shape; a sandy loam bordering on to heavier land. wet the land thoroughly; plow and harrow and drill in the seed in rows about / feet apart. this ought to give moisture enough to start the seed. cultivate as soon as you can see the rows well. irrigate in a furrow between the rows about once a month; cultivate after each irrigation. corn growing for silage. with fair cultivation, will an acre produce about tons of ensilage without fertilization - it being bottom land? how should it be planted? - the rows closer together than feet, or should it be planted the usual width between rows, and thick in the rows? if fertilizers were to be used, what kind would you recommend? would you recommend deep plowing followed by a packer and harrow so as to preserve the moisture? you ought to be able to get tons of silage per acre from corn grown on good corn land. it can be best grown in rows sufficiently distant for cultivation, closer in the row than would be desirable for corn, and yet not too crowded, because corn for silage should develop good ears and should be cut for silage about the time when the glazing begins to appear. if your land needs fertilization, stable manure or a "complete fertilizer" of the dealers would be the proper thing to use. it would be very desirable to plow corn land deeply the preceding fall, followed by a packer or harrow to settle down the land below, but do not work down fine. keep the surface stirred from time to time during the winter and put in the crop with the usual cultivation in the spring as soon as the frost danger is over. irrigation for corn. what amount of water is necessary per acre for the best possible yield of corn under acreage conditions and proper cultivation in the san joaquin or sacramento valleys? no one can answer such a question with anything more than a guess. it depends upon how much rain has fallen the previous winter, how retentive the soil is naturally, and what has been done to help the soil to hold it. nearly all the corn that is grown is carried without any irrigation at all on moist lowlands, which may be too wet for winter crops. if you demand a guess, make it six acre-inches, with a good surface pulverizing after each run of water in furrows between the rows. this water would be best used in two or three applications. eastern seed corn for california. the question has been raised as to eastern-grown seed corn, comparing it with california-grown seed. some claim that the former does not yield well the first season. we cannot give a complete refutation of the impression that eastern seed corn does not yield well the first season in california. it is a somewhat prevalent impression. all that we can announce now is that we have grown collections of eastern seed corn and have found the product quite as good as could have been expected, and did not encounter, apparently, the trouble of which you write. need of corn suckering. to insure the best crop of corn possible, does it pay to sucker it or not? the removal of suckers is a matter of local conditions largely in california, and growers are getting out of the habit of suckering. in some places suckering is needed, and in others it apparently does not pay to do so, although with very rare exceptions a larger yield can be secured by suckering than without. cow peas not preparatory for corn. what time of the year can cow peas be planted, and can the entire crop be plowed under in time for planting field corn? cowpeas are very subject to frost. they are really beans, and therefore can be grown in the winter time only in a few practically frostless places. wherever frosts are likely to occur they must be planted, like beans and corn, when the frost danger is over. field peas, canadian peas and vetches are hardy against frost and therefore safer for winter growth, and treated as you propose they may be preparatory for corn-growing providing you plow them under soon enough to get a month or more for decay before planting the corn. oats and rust is there any variety of oats that is rust-proof, or any method of treating oats that will render them rust resistant? we are situated on a mountain, only about miles from the coast, and have considerable foggy weather, which most of the farmers here say is the cause of the rust. there is no way of treating oats which will prevent smut, if the variety is liable to it. there is a great difference in the resistance of different varieties. a few dark-colored oats are practically rust-proof, and you can get seed of them from the seedsmen in san francisco and los angeles. such varieties are chiefly grown on the southern coast. foggy weather has much to do with the rust, because it causes atmospheric moisture which is favorable to the growth of the fungus, which is usually checked by dry heat, and yet there are atmospheric conditions occasionally which favor the rust even in the driest parts of the state. the fog favors rust, but does not cause it. the cause is a fungus, long ago thoroughly understood and named puccinia graminis. midsummer hay sowing. can i sow oats or barley in july upon irrigated mesa land, with the object of making hay in the fall? which of the two would do the better in summer time? i have plenty of water. we have never seen this done to advantage. if you desire to try it, irrigate thoroughly and plow and sow afterward. use barley rather than oats and irrigate when the plant shades the land well, if you get growth enough to warrant it. it will be easier to get the crop than to figure a profit in it. loose hay by measure. how many cubic feet should be allowed for a ton of alfalfa hay loaded on a wagon from the shock? i must sell more or less in that way, as no scales are near enough to be used. it is a proposition, as to the weight of loose hay, which could of course keep changing the higher you built the load on the wagon. it is easier to give figures on weight from a stack in which there has been something like uniform pressure for a time. in the case from a -day stack it is common to allow an eight-foot cube to a ton, etc. perhaps you can guess from that. when to cut oat hay. to make the best red oat hay should it be cut when in the "milk," "dough" or nearly ripe! it should be cut in the "soft dough" or, as some express it, "between the milk and the dough." this is probably as near an approach in words as can be made to that condition which loses neither by immaturity or by over-maturity from the point of view of hay which is to get as much as can be in the head without losing nutritiveness in the straw. of course there are other conditions intruding sometimes, like the outbreak of rust or the premature ripening through drought. in such cases care must be taken not to let the plant stand too long for the sake of reaching an ideal condition in the head - which for lack of favorable growing conditions the plant may not be able to reach. rye for hay. when is the best time to cut rye for hay, and how should it best be handled? would it be well to cut it up and blow it into the barn, and would it do all right for silage? rye makes poor hay on account of its woody stems and must be cut earlier than other grains. after that it is handled as is other hay. cutting it up would probably be more of a help than to other grain hay. it could be put into the silo, but would of course have to be cut pretty green and would have to run through a cutter and blower. putting it in whole would be out of the question. in the silo, the fermentation would largely overcome the woodiness of the stems. it would also as a silage balance up nicely with alfalfa, and the best way to do would be to mix it with alfalfa when putting it in. rye in california. which kind of rye is the hardiest, the best yielding, and the best hay varieties in your state? rye is the least grown of all the cereals in california, and no attention has been paid to selection of varieties. that which is produced is "just rye," of some common variety which came to the state years ago and still remains. no rye is grown for hay, as the toughness of the stem renders it undesirable for that purpose. there is a certain amount of rye grown for winter feeding. this is grown in the foothills principally and it serves an excellent purpose, but it is fed off before approaching maturity. that old seven-headed wheat. we are sending you some heads of grain which was grown in this county. the land was planted with an imported australian wheat, which we believe the smaller heads to be, but the wheat is about evenly mired with grain like the large heads, which we think to be a species of barley. the grain is an old, coarse, bearded wheat which is continually appearing in fields of ordinary grain and naturally excites interest among all to whom the variety is a novelty. it is the old seven-headed egyptian wheat, which has never proved of any cultural value, because its manifolding of the head is of no advantage. it is better to have a straight well-filled head than to have a branching head of this kind. this matter has been fully demonstrated by experience during the last thirty or forty years, not only in this state, but in other states, for the variety has a way of getting around the world, and seed has sometimes been sold at exorbitant prices to people who have been persuaded that it is of particular value. speltz. i have heard of a russian grain called "speltz" or "emmer." can i raise it successfully and, if so, what is the very best time of year to sow some for the best crop obtainable? can it be sown in the fall, say november? would springtime be a better time to sow it on soil that is very soft in winter? if your land yields good crops of wheat or barley or oats, you have little to expect from speltz or emmer. this is a grain generally considered inferior to those just mentioned and advocated for conditions under which the better known grains do not do well. it is hardy against drought and frost, particularly the latter, and is, therefore, chiefly grown in the extreme north of europe. it may be sown in the fall or in the spring in places where rains are late and carry the plant to maturity. italian rye grass. what kind of grass is enclosed? also the best method to eradicate it? the grass is the italian rye grass, or as it is sometimes called, the italian variety of the perennial rye grass. it is proving a very satisfactory grass in california for moderate drought resistance and for winter growing, and a great deal of it is being sown for these purposes. you can readily kill it out by cultivation, but most people are more occupied with its propagation than with its destruction. fall feed. can i irrigate and plant a forage crop n july to feed dairy cows this fall and winter? would you recommend cow peas or some kind of sugar corn? if cow peas, how many pounds to the acre? if you wet down the land thoroughly and then plow and harrow and plant either cow peas or indian corn, you ought to get a good green crop before frost. drill in or drop the seed in rows about three feet apart and keep cultivating and irrigating as long as you can get through without injuring the crop too much. use about pounds of cow peas to the acre. hurry-up pasture. what can i plant this fall which would produce pasturage for a small amount of stock this winter, and until i can get the land under irrigation and seeded to alfalfa? for quick fall and winter growth nothing is better probably than oats and vetches sown together as soon as you get rain enough to plow, but it would be a question whether it is worth while to work for that, because you ought to get your land ready for february sowing of alfalfa and that will keep the land busy after the rain gets it into working condition. johnson grass. i am informed that johnson grass makes fine hay. i have not sown the seed yet, but would like to know if the hay is good and if it will grow on dry land. i have the seed on hand, but do not want to sow it if it is not good. johnson grass is poor, coarse stuff. the plant is most valuable for grazing when young. johnson grass will not grow on really dry land, but it will take the best moist land it can find and hold on to it. it is sensitive to frost and is not a winter grower except in the absence of frost. improving heavy land for alfalfa. my land is very heavy, red loam, and crusts over very hard in dry seasons. i would like to know if it would be best to use barnyard compost over the surface as a mulch, or would it be best to use plain straw for that purpose? a very heavy soil can be brought into better surface condition for alfalfa by plowing in stable manure as soon as possible after the fall rains, in order that the manure may have opportunity to become disintegrated and mixed with the soil by the time for alfalfa sowing, which is from february to april - whenever the heavy frosts of the locality are over. for a small piece, you might get a better stand by using a light mulch of disintegrated coarse manure or even straw, scattering it after the sowing, but for a large acreage this would involve too much labor. it is not desirable to work in much manure or other coarse stuff at the time of sowing the seed, but you can make a light surface application after the plant has made a start. cultivating alfalfa. when is the best time to cultivate alfalfa, and how often during the season is it advantageous to do so? which is the best implement to use? cultivated alfalfa is a term applied to alfalfa sown in rows and allowed to grow in narrow bands with cultivated land between, and the irrigation is then done in a furrow in the narrow cultivated strip. this will give thriftier growth and perhaps more hay to the acre than flooded, broad-casted alfalfa, but it will cost so much more that the acre profit would probably be less. this is an intensive culture of alfalfa, which is still to be tested out in california, if any one should be inclined to do it. some one-cow suburbanite would be in condition to try the scheme first. probably you refer to disking, and for that an ordinary disk is used with the disks set pretty straight to reduce the side cutting, and this is done at different times of the year by different growers. by doing it when the ground gets dry in the early spring much of the foul stuff is cut out before the alfalfa starts strongly. but disking seems to be good whenever in the year the soil is dry enough to take it well. suburban alfalfa patch. how can we rid the alfalfa of weeds? as we are obliged to hire help, and do not succeed in getting the hay cared for until we have mostly stalks without leaves, i have put the cow on it to pasture it off. the cow knows how to handle it, but you will not get as much alfalfa as if you cut and carried it to her. if you cut sooner you will get rid of many plants which are propagated by the seeds which they produce, and you will also get better hay, more leaves and fewer stalks. cut it about the time it begins to bloom, not waiting for the full bloom to appear. alfalfa and bermuda. i have land which was seeded to alfalfa some years ago and has been pastured continuously until it was almost all bermuda. i had it thoroughly plowed, disk harrowed and sowed to oats; disk harrowed in, and drag harrowed. after cutting for hay this year i intend putting it in egyptian corn in rows, so it can be cultivated to get rid of bermuda. i have also been advised to plow the land immediately after harvesting corn and let it lie until next january and then plow and sow to barley and alfalfa as i wish to grow alfalfa. kindly let me know if method is right. the land is sandy loam and under irrigation. whether you will fully succeed against bermuda grass or not is doubtful. it is probable, however, that you can reduce the bermuda so that other cultivated crops can be continuously grown. common experience is that bermuda will hold on unless you have hard freezing of the ground to a considerable depth, as they have in the northern states. the best use that you can make of land infested with bermuda is to get as good a stand as you can of alfalfa and let the alfalfa fight for itself. the combination of alfalfa and bermuda grass makes very good hay or pasturage. we should, however, sow the alfalfa alone and not handicap it by sowing with barley. the bermuda will smile at that advice. egyptian corn can be planted in rows, / to feet between the rows to admit of easy cultivation bermuda grass. what is the value of bermuda grass as a forage crop for cattle, more particularly dairy cows? bermuda grass is generally condemned because of getting in places where it is not desirable and of being almost impossible of eradication therefrom. still, bermuda grass will make good pasturage on land which is too alkaline to make other crops, and therefore is highly esteemed by some owners of waste lands in the san joaquin valley. it is good pasturage and is most easily propagated by cutting the roots up into short pieces by use of the hay-cutter, nearly all the pieces retaining an eye which will make a new plant. it is easy to get in and hard to get out. salt grass and alfalfa. i have some land in sutter county and it has some of this salt grass in spots. i am about to take a twenty-acre piece and put in alfalfa, but some old-timers tell me that the salt grass on it is bad stuff to handle. your trouble will probably be not so much the salt grass, but the alkali in the soil which the salt grass can tolerate and which other plants cannot stand. you cannot then substitute alfalfa for salt grass without getting the alkali out of the soil, and you cannot do this without having sufficient drainage so that the rainfall may wash the alkali out from the soil and carry it away in the drainage water. you probably cannot get a satisfactory growth of alfalfa on the spots where the salt grass has established itself, although the land round about may be very satisfactory to alfalfa. giant spurry. i would like information about spurry. how much frost will it stand? what is time for sowing? its value as crop to plow under? from a california point of view, spurry is a winter-growing weed which has been approved by orchardists in sonoma county because it yields a considerable amount of vegetation for turning under with the spring plowing of the orchard. for this purpose it should be sown at the beginning of the rainy season. its value as a crop to turn under depends upon the amount of growth you can get. it is not a legume and, therefore, does not have the value of the nitrogen-gathering plant. still, it yields humus and, therefore, is valuable for winter growing as ordinary weeds, grasses, grains, etc., are. light soil and scant moisture. advise me as to plowing under a crop of last year's weeds where i intend to plant beans, corn, etc. the soil is "slickens," on the yuba river, and the weeds grew up last year in a crop of volunteer barley, which was hogged off. i expect to plow five inches deep, and calculate that the barley straw and weeds will contribute to the supply of humus, which is always deficient in most of our soils. i expect to try to grow beans without irrigation, and wonder if the trash would hold the soil too open so as to dry them out. considering the character of the soil which you describe and the shallow plowing you intend we should certainly burn off all the trash upon the land. with deep plowing early in the season this coarse stuff could be covered in to advantage, but it would be dangerous to do it in the spring. clean land and thorough cultivation to save moisture enough for summer's growth is the only rational spring treatment. clovers and drought. i have sandy loam with some alkali. in wet years it is regarded as too damp in some places. can you give me any information on the following points? i have practically no water for irrigation and i feel sure that alfalfa would not grow without it. do you think that clover would make one or more cuttings without water? red and white clover are less tolerant of drought than alfalfa, which, being a deep-rooting plant, is especially commended in dry-farming undertakings. red clover will grow better on low wet lands than will alfalfa, but the land must not dry out or the red clover will die during the dry season. none of the plants will stand much alkali. clover for wet lands. what kind of alfalfa will do best on sub-irrigated land which is very wet? i have sown it in alfalfa and it grows finely for two or three years, but then the roots rot and die. it is impossible to make any kind of alfalfa grow well on very wet land, that is, where the water comes too near the surface. alfalfa has a deep-running tap root which is very subject to standing water. you can get very good results from the eastern red clover on such land, because the red clover has a fibrous root which is content to live in a shallow layer of soil above water. but red clover will not stand drought as well as alfalfa, because it is shallower rooting. it is necessary, therefore, that water should be permanently near the surface or surface irrigation be frequently applied, in order to secure satisfactory growth of red clover in the drier sections of california. it is also necessary that neither land nor water carry alkali. frosted grain for hay. the freeze struck us pretty severely. i had acres of summer-fallowed wheat which i had estimated to make sacks to the acre of grain. it was breast high in places already, and was just heading out. the frost pinched the stalks of this grain in several places and the heads are now turning white. it is ruined for grain. there is lots of fodder in it, and it should be made into hay. if so, should it not be cut and cured at once? what is the relative worth of such hay as compared with more matured hay? would the fact that it is frozen make it injurious to feed? if the whole plant seems to be getting white, the sooner it is cut the better. if the head is affected and the leaf growth continued, cutting might be deferred for the purpose of getting more of it. hay made from such material will not be in any way dangerous, although it would be inferior as containing less nutritive and more non-nutritive matter. such hay would seem to be most serviceable as roughage for cows or steers in connection with alfalfa hay or some other feed which would supply this deficiency. forage plants in the foothills. we have , acres of foothill land and hope to be able to irrigate some land this spring and wish to know the best forage crops, for sheep and hogs, especially. kafir corn, stock peas, rape, sugar-beets and artichokes are the varieties about which we desire information. where you have irrigation water available in the foothills you can get a very satisfactory growth of red clover. we have seen it doing very well on sloping land in your county where water was allowed to spill over from a ditch on the ridge to moisten the slope below. winter rye and other hardy stock feeds could also be grown in the winter time on the protected slopes with the rainfall. some such plants are not good summer growers, owing to the drought. rape is a good winter grower by rainfall, but not so satisfactory as vetches and kale. sugar beets are not so good for stock purposes as stock beets, which give you much more growth for the same labor and are more easily gathered because they grow a good part out of the ground. they will stand considerable freezing and may be sown at different times throughout the year, whenever the land is moist, either by irrigation or rainfall. artichokes are of doubtful value. we have never found anyone who continued to grow them long. of course, on good, deep land, with irrigation, nothing can be better than alfalfa as supplementary to hill range during the summer season. winter forage. at what time of the year should i plant kale, swiss chard, etc., so as to have them ready for use during the months from february to june? you should plant swiss chard, kale, etc., as soon as the ground is sufficiently moist from the rain in the fall. in fact, it would be desirable for you to plant the seed earlier in boxes and thus secure plants for planting out when the ground is sufficiently moist. these plants are quite hardy against frost, and in order to have them available by february, a start in the autumn is essential. a summer hay crop. what can i put on the land after the oat crop is taken off to furnish hay for horses during the coming winter? i had thought millet would be good. i have water for irrigation. you could get most out of the land you mention during the hot season by growing kafir corn or milo, cutting for hay before the plant gets too far advanced. if your land can be flooded and takes water well, so that you can wet it deeply before plowing, the sorghum seed can be broadcast and the crop cut with the mower while the stalks are not more than half an inch in diameter. this makes a good coarse hay. if you have not water enough or the land does not lie right for flooding, you can grow the sorghum in drills and irrigate by the furrow method, being careful, however, not to let the crop go too far if you desire to feed it as hay. teosinte. what about "teosinte," its food value, method of culture, and adaptability to our climate, character of soil required? teosinte is a corn-like plant of much lower growth than indian corn. it may be of value as a forage plant on low, moist, interior lands in the summer season. it is very sensitive to frost and is, therefore, not a winter grower. it abhors drought and, therefore, is not a plant for plains or hillsides. it was grown to some extent in california years ago and abandoned as worthless so far as tried. bermuda objectionable. bermuda grass as pasture for summer to supplement burr clover and alfilaria in winter on the cheap hill pasture lands along the coast or the foothill ranges of the sierras. stock like it and do well on it, and i have noticed it growing in places where it had no water but the little rains of winter in southern california. so the question occurred to me, why should it not be a profitable pasture for the dry summers on the coast or foothill ranges of the state? bermuda grass will not make summer growth enough on dry pasture land to make it worth having. it will not make much growth in the rainy season because of frost, and if it has possession of the ground it will not allow either burr clover or alfilaria to make such winter growth as they will on clean land. besides, this grass is generally counted a nuisance, because it will get into all the good cultivated land and it is almost impossible of eradication. bermuda grass is of some account on alkali land where it finds moisture enough for free growth. we would not plant it in any other situation. rye grasses better than brome. i see in an eastern seed catalogue "bromus inermis" very highly spoken of as pasturage. do you know anything of it, and do you think it would be suitable for reclaimed tule land in the bay section? both english and italian rye grasses have proved better than bromus inermis on such land as you mention. the latter is commonly known as hungarian brome grass or awniess brome grass and it was introduced to this state from europe about years ago and the seed distributed by the university experiment station. hungarian brome may be better on rather dry lands, although it will not live through the summer on very dry lands in this state, but we would rather trust the rye grasses or reclaimed lands, providing, of course, that they are sufficiently free from salt to carry tame grass at all. on the upper coast hungarian brome has been favorably reported as an early-winter growing grass with comparatively low nutritive value, but is especially valuable because it will grow in poor soil. it is especially suited to sandy pasture and meadow lands and is quite resistant to drought. it is a perennial grass, reproducing by a stout rootstock, which makes it somewhat difficult to eradicate when it is not desired. it is desirable to keep stock off the fields during the first year to get a good stand. black medic. will you kindly name the enclosed; also explain its value as forage! the plant is black medic. it has been very widely distributed over the state during the last few years. it is sometimes called a new burr clover, which it somewhat resembles. it is not very freely eaten by stock and is apparently inferior to burr clover for forage purposes. it is a good plant to plow under for green manure. crimson clover. about crimson clover in california. has it proved satisfactory? if so, can you give me data how to plant, etc.! crimson clover must be sown after frost, for it is tender. it will give a great show in june and july on low moist land. it is not good against either frost or drought. it has been amply tried in california and proved on the whole of little account. california winter pastures. we have a great deal of pasture land on which the native grasses yield less feed each year. a great part of this land can be cleared of brush and stone, ready for the plow, but what can we sow to take the place of the native pasture? the ground in many places is not level enough for alfalfa and in some places water is not available. can we break up the land and sow pasture grasses as the farmers are exhorted to do at the east? the annual rainfall is from to inches. the perennial grasses which they rely upon for pasturage in the east and which will maintain themselves from year to year, will not live at all on the dry lands of california, nor has investigation of the last twenty-five or thirty years found anything better for these california uplands than the winter growth of plants which are native to them. such lands should be better treated, first by not being overstocked; second, by taking off cattle at the time the native plant needs to make seed, because, as they are not perennial, they are dependent upon each year's seed. after the plants have seeded, the land can be pastured for dry feed without losing the seed. of course, if one has land capable of irrigation he can grow forage plants, even the grasses which grow in moist climates, like the rye grasses, the brome grasses and the oat grasses, etc., which will do well if given a little moisture, but it will be a loss of money to break up the dryer lands with the idea of establishing perennial grasses upon them without irrigation. california pastures are naturally good. in early days they were wonderful, but they are restricted to growth during the rainy season, or for a little time after that, and are therefore suited for winter and spring pasturage, while the summer feeding of stock, aside from dry feed, should be provided from other lands where water can be used. the improvement of these wild pastures consists in a more intelligent policy for their production and preservation rather than an effort to improve them by the introduction of new plants. pastures may, however, be often improved by clearing off the brush and harrowing in seed of burr clover, alfilaria, etc., at the beginning of the rainy season. alfilaria and winter pasturage. will alfilaria (erodium cicutarium) grow well on the hills of sonoma county partially covered with shrubs? i want something that will be food for stock another year. i have heard of alfilaria and that it grows well without being irrigated. alfilaria is a good winter-growing forage plant in places where it accepts the situation. it is an annual and therefore does not make permanent pasturage except where it may re-seed itself. on the coming of the dry season it will speedily form seed and disappear. it is therefore of no summer use under the conditions which you describe, nor is it possible to secure any perennial grass which will be satisfactory on dry hillsides without irrigation. improved winter pasturage can be secured by scattering seed of common rye at the beginning of the rainy season, or of burr clover, both of which are winter-growing plants. pasturage is also capable of improvement by being careful not to overstock the land, so that the native annuals may be able to produce seed and provide for their own succession. the secret of successful pasturage on dry uplands is to improve the winter growth. it is too much to expect much of them for summer growth without irrigation. grasses for bank-holding. we desire a grass to be used on levees, to keep from washing. bermuda or johnson gross are dangerous to farming lands. what we desire is a grass that will grow in good dirt with no water to support it during most of the year, except the annual rainfall of fresno county. of course, this grass will also have to endure a great deal of water during the flooded season of the year. we have heard that the italian rye grass would be suitable. the rye grasses do not have running roots; therefore are not calculated to bind soil particles together as bermuda grass does. if you want a binding grass, you must take the chances of its spreading to adjacent lands. of course, if you could get a sod of rye grass it would prevent surface washing from overflow, etc., to a certain extent. we are not sure how far it would prevent bank cutting by the flowing water, for it makes a bunchy and not a sod-like growth. it would not live through the summer unless the levee soil keeps somewhat moist. the only way to determine whether you can get a permanent growth of it, will be by making a trial. seed should be sown as soon as the ground becomes moistened by rain. it is a very safe proposition, because if it is willing to live through the summer, it is one of the best pasturage grasses for places in california where it will consent to grow, and it is not liable to become an annoyance by taking possession of adjacent land, because it would be readily killed by cultivation. alfalfa and alkali. i sowed several acres of alfalfa seed with a disc this season and none of it has come up. i think the reason for it not coming up is that the disc put it into the ground too deep. we sowed some by hand and it came up very well. is there any probability that later in the season this seed will germinate, or has it rotted in the ground? water stands within three feet of the surface and has considerable alkali. what can i plant on this land and get a crop? it is our intention to sow it to alfalfa next fall. the land adjoining, although higher, has a good stand of alfalfa now. you are right about covering the alfalfa seed too deeply. it is not likely to appear. your chance of getting a durable stand of alfalfa on such shallow soil over alkali water is not good, but you can hardly determine that without trying. sometimes conditions are better than you think; sometimes worse. the plant itself is the best judge. on your lower land you could probably get a better stand of rye grass than anything else - sowing at the beginning of the rainy season. of course, however, even that will depend upon how much alkali you have to deal with. alfalfa on adobe. is adobe land good for alfalfa? is it harder to start than in other soils or not? how much seed is required to sow an acre? also state what time alfalfa should be sowed. alfalfa will thrive on an adobe soil if the moisture is kept right - especially guarding against too much water at a time. it is necessary to irrigate more frequently and apply only as much as can be absorbed by the soil before the hot sun comes on the field, for that scalds the plant badly. it is harder to get a good stand because of the cracking and hardening of the surface. sow about pounds to the acre just as soon as the soil comes into good condition - that is, moist and warm. february and march are usually the best months, according to the season in the interior valleys. alfalfa and soil depth. do you consider soil which is from to feet deep to hardpan of sufficient depth for alfalfa? is there hardpan in the region of lathrop in san joaquin county, and can it be dissolved by irrigation, or can any good be accomplished by blowing holes at different places to allow the water to pass to lower levels? are other crops affected by hardpan being so close to the surface? you can grow alfalfa successfully on land which is from four to six feet deep if you irrigate rather more frequently and use less amounts of water each time, so that the plant shall be adequately supplied and yet not forced to carry its roots in standing water. the eastern alfalfa grower is fortunate when he gets half the depth you mention, although it does seem rather shallow in california. shallow lands are distributed over the valley quite widely. a deepening of the available soil is usually accomplished by dynamiting, especially so if the hardpan is underlaid by permanent strata. alfalfa will penetrate some kinds and thicknesses of hardpan when it is kept moist, but not too wet, to encourage root growth. winter-growing green crops are less affected by shallow soil because they generally make their growth while the moisture is ample, if the season is good. curing alfalfa with artificial heat. it is current rumor that "out in california they are hauling alfalfa green and curing it by artificial heat," thus reducing loss through bad weather and producing a superior hay for feeding or milling purposes. it is true that alfalfa is being cut green and dried by artificial heat, but this is only being done in preparation for grinding. no one thinks of doing it for the making of hay for storage or for feeding. this method is undertaken, not because the alfalfa hay does not dry quickly enough in the field, but because after drying in the field so many leaves are lost in hauling to the mill. we have no trouble sun-drying alfalfa for ordinary hay purposes; in fact, we have to be very careful that it does not get too dry. cheap preparation of land for alfalfa. i am about to put a piece of land into alfalfa, and want to use the most economical system of preparing the land for irrigation. my neighbors tell me that it will be necessary for me to have the land leveled; at a cost of $ to $ per acre. now i am informed that in alberta, and some places in california, they do not go to the expense of leveling land, but use a system of preparing land for irrigation at a cost of about cents per acre. nothing except a highly educated gale of wind, with discriminating cutting and filling ability of a very high order, could do it for that price. the cheapest way to prepare land for irrigation is the contour check method, which is largely used, or the flooding in strips between levees at right angles to the supply ditch; but neither of these could be put in properly for that money, even if the land was naturally in such shape that a minimum amount of soil-shifting is necessary. where alfalfa is grown. in what counties is alfalfa most successfully grown? by this i mean where three crops of hay may be had each growing season. also, will corn grow good paying crops in same sections? alfalfa is grown all through the valleys and foothills of interior california; also to a certain extent in coast valleys. on suitable lands, three crops can sometimes be secured without irrigation, while twice or three times as many cuttings are secured on irrigated lands where the frost-free season is particularly long. according to the last census, we are growing alfalfa on , farms with a total acreage of , . the total value of the product is over $ , , . corn is widely grown, but is small as compared with alfalfa. it is grown in alfalfa districts and in coast valleys where there is not much done with alfalfa. sowing alfalfa. what is the proper time to sow alfalfa? some advocate fall and others spring sowing. what seasons are given for each sowing? we shall undoubtedly soon get to sowing alfalfa all the year round except in the short season of sharp frosts and cold wet ground in november, december and january. if you can get a good start in september and october, all right; if not, wait until february and march, according to the season. where it is never very cold or wet, sow whenever moisture is right. there never can be any rule about it, for localities will differ. foxtail and alfalfa. will foxtail choke out and exterminate alfalfa? some fields look as though the foxtail had crowded the alfalfa out, but i hold that the alfalfa died from some other cause and the foxtail merely took its place. foxtail will not choke out alfalfa, providing, soil and moisture conditions are right for the latter, and a good stand of plant has been secured. if anything is wrong with the alfalfa, the foxtail will be on the alert to take advantage of it. you will always have foxtail with you, and considerable quantities of it, perhaps, in the first cutting, because foxtail will grow at a lower temperature than alfalfa, and, therefore, will keep very busy during the rainy season, while the alfalfa is more or less dormant, but as the heat increases, if the soil is good and moisture ample, the alfalfa will put the foxtail out of sight until the following winter invites it to make another aggressive growth. therefore, we answer that alfalfa does not die from foxtail, but from some condition unfavorable to the alfalfa, which must be sought in the soil, or in the moisture supply, or traced back to bad seed, and a poor stand at the beginning. which alfalfa is best? i have in stanislaus county ten acres of arabian alfalfa, which was sown the first week in april this year. it was clipped in july and irrigated. it is now about inches high, but looks sickly, turns white at the tips, and some dies down. there are several places here with the arabian alfalfa on them and with the same trouble, while the ordinary variety is looking fine by the side of it. arabian alfalfa usually makes a good show at first and begins to run out afterward. it does not seem to be so long-lived and satisfactory as the common variety. with this prospect ahead of you, according to present experience, it would seem to be desirable to plow the crop in and seed again with the common variety, or with the turkestan, which is proving the most satisfactory of the recently introduced varieties. fall sowing of alfalfa. we have summer-fallowed land which we know will grow good alfalfa, and as we have just had four inches of rainfall upon it, we were wondering if we could not plow the twenty acres and get a stand upon it in time to stand the cold weather this winter. do you think this is practicable? if four inches of rain on summer fallow connects well with the lower moisture which a good summer fallow ought to conserve in the soil, such sowing is rational; but if the summer fallowing was not done well, that is, if it was rough plowing without enough harrowing, as is too often the case, the four inches of rain might not be safe because of the dry ground beneath waiting to seize the moisture and so dry the surface that sprouting alfalfa plants would perish between dry soil below and dry wind above. fall sowing will give enough growth to resist frost killing in many places in the valley if the moisture in the soil is enough to carry the plant as well as start it, or if showers come frequently - otherwise it is dangerous, not from frost but from drouth. alfalfa hay and soil fertility. we are feeding all our hay to dairy cows, returning the manure to the soil. at present prices of hay, my neighbors who sell theirs, seem to be as well off, with considerable less work; but how about the future? can this soil be cropped indefinitely and the crops sold, without returning anything to the land? it is a mistake to think that you can sell alfalfa hay indefinitely without reducing the soil. it may gain in nitrogen by the wastes of the plant, but it will lose in other constituents unless reinforced by fertilization. no single act can make for the maintenance of the soil as the growing and feeding of crops and return of manure does. dry-land alfalfa. i am in a country of strictly dry farming. i have a wash or gulch on my place and would like to know if i could, with success, plant it to alfalfa without irrigation; soil is sandy loam, no evidences of springy moisture at all. what kind should i try? alfalfa will endure much drouth. what it will do in a particular place can only be told by trying. sow turkestan alfalfa. if the rains come early so as to wet the land down in september and october, sow the seed then. the endurance of the plant will depend much upon its having a chance to root deeply before the drouth comes on. inoculating alfalfa. is it profitable to inoculate alfalfa seed before planting to increase its yield? can it be done by leaching soil from old alfalfa ground, providing it has been plowed up and allowed to stand for a year? are commercial inoculants a safe thing to inoculate with? apparently alfalfa does not need inoculation in this state. probably not one acre in ten thousand now profitably growing alfalfa has ever had artificial introduction of germs. you can make germ-tea, if you wish, of the soil you describe; one year's exposure would not destroy the germs. it is safe enough to use commercial cultures. you will have to decide for yourself whether it is worth while. irrigating alfalfa. i am making parallel ridges for alfalfa, sending a full head of water down to the end of the field between each ridge. should i calculate the lands to be mowed one at a time in even swaths? the mower being -foot cut, would you count on cutting a / or -foot swath? this soil is sandy, water percolating rapidly. the fall is feet to the mile. how wide, then, would you advise making the ridges to suit the mower, and to flood economically, using from to cubic feet per second? the length of the lands is across acres. growing alfalfa in long parallel checks, to be flooded between the levees, is the way in which much alfalfa is being put in at the present time where the land has such a slope as you indicate. it is calculated, however, to seed the levees as well as the check bottoms, and to run the mowers across the levees, thus leaving no waste land and mowing across the whole field and not between the levees as you propose. for that purpose these levees are made low, not over a foot in height, calculating that they will settle to about six or eight inches, which is sufficient to hold the water and direct its flow gently down the slope. there is, however, a limit to the distance over which water can be evenly distributed in this way, the difference being dependent upon the character of the soil, slope, etc. a length of nine hundred feet is sometimes found too great for an even distribution, and, for this reason, supply ditches at shorter intervals are introduced. unirrigated alfalfa. in what part of the state does alfalfa grow best without irrigation? obviously the parts which have the greatest rainfall in connection with retentive soil and plenty of summer heat. alfalfa grows best without irrigation on "sub-irrigated" land where the ground water is sufficiently deep to allow a deep rooting of the plant in free soil and yet not too far down to be readily reached by the deep-running roots. good results can be obtained with anywhere from four to ten or twelve feet of soil above water. on shallower soils the plant is apt to be short-lived through root troubles. unirrigated alfalfa is also reduced by the incursions of gophers which flooding at least once a year will destroy. alfalfa and overflow. how long can alfalfa stand water without being drowned out? i have a piece of alfalfa on which the water will stand for considerable time in the winter time. alfalfa while dormant will endure submergence for several weeks. we do not know exactly how long, but evidently for a considerable period, providing temperatures are too low to invite growth. on the other hand, growing alfalfa is quickly and seriously injured by overflow. no nurse-crop for alfalfa. is it advisable to use oats with alfalfa seeds in seeding for alfalfa? some growers of alfalfa here advise it strongly, others advise against it. the general experience in california is decidedly against using oats, barley, or any other nursecrop with alfalfa. get the land in the best possible condition and let the alfalfa have the full benefit of it. the ripening of the grain crop will do the young alfalfa plants more harm by robbing them of moisture than any protection which the taller plant can afford. reseeding alfalfa. this spring i planted alfalfa and only got about half a stand on some of the land. i want to reseed this fall and i thought of putting more seed on the ground and then disc it in. or would you advise replanting the land? what do you think of putting manure on young alfalfa? do you think there is any danger of burning it out? stir it up with a spring tooth harrow or disc it lightly to make a nice seed bed and then sow your seed as if you were planting alfalfa for the first time. this will give you a good seed bed and will not hurt the alfalfa already growing. prepare the surface first and then sow, rather than disking in the seed. the manure in moderate application would not burn out the young alfalfa if properly applied after the rains begin. taking the bloat out of alfalfa. will italian rye grass and red top clover be a success under irrigation as cow pasture in this county, either separately or mixed with alfalfa? to sow in bare spots in the alfalfa, would the rye grass prevent bloat? italian rye grass and red clover will make good pasturage under irrigation and will make a fight with the alfalfa to the best of their ability. the admixture of rye grass will reduce the danger from bloating. red clover will not have that effect, because red clover is a pretty good bloater on its own account. this seems to be the function of all the clovers according to the rankness of their growth at the time that they are grazed. the time to cut alfalfa. what is the best period to cut alfalfa hay for cow feed and the best method for curing? the best time to cut alfalfa is just when new shoots are starting out at the crown. this will give the greatest yield of hay during a season, and the hay will be much more palatable than if the alfalfa is permitted to get well into the blossoming period. the leaves, which are the best part of the hay, also remain on better than if the stems are older. if a person does not care to take the trouble to find out whether the new shoots are coming out or not, he can approximate the time to cut fairly well by waiting until a blossom here and there appears, cutting immediately. it would be difficult to tell on paper exactly when alfalfa was properly cured, as that is a matter of individual judgment. it is usual to cut in the morning and rake into windrows in the afternoon. with the usual weather in interior california that stage of the curing is completed by that time. the next day it can be gathered into cocks and gotten ready to move. that is about all the curing that is done. the size of the windrows depends upon the amount of hay, as thick hay should be put up in small windrows to give plenty of circulation of air. it is considered better also to build the cocks on raked land, otherwise the hay lying flat at the bottom will not cure properly and cannot be gathered up clean. which crop of alfalfa for seed? which cutting of alfalfa should be left for seed bearing? which cutting is best for seed depends, of course, on the way the plant grows in your locality. where it starts early and gives many cuttings in a season with irrigation a later growth should be chosen for seed than with a short season where fewer cuttings can be had. the second cutting is best in many places, but o. e. lambert of modesto after threshing about lots in one year tells us that some growers had left second, some third and some fourth cuttings for seed. he found the second cutting very poor both in yield and grade, much of it not being well filled and the seed blighted, as the growth of hay was too heavy. the seed on third cutting was good both in grade and yield. much of the seed on fourth cutting was not matured. for good results the stand should be thin. our drier, heavier lands give the best results, sub-irrigated lands not seeding. all irrigation should stop with the previous cutting for hay. siloing first crop alfalfa. how about putting first cutting of alfalfa and foxtail into the silo? do you think there is any danger of fire in a wooden silo, and do you add salt and water when filling, and how long after it is cut would you advise putting it into the silo? put it through the silo cutter as soon as you can get it from the field. do not let it cure at all, and be sure to cut and pack well. if at all dry, use water at the time of filling, and some salt then also, if you desire. there is no danger of firing if you put it in with good moisture, and by short cutting and hard packing you exclude the air. if you do not do this you will get a silo full of manure, and possibly have a fire while it is rotting. soil for alfalfa. what kind of soil is best for alfalfa on a dairy ranch? an ideal soil for alfalfa is a deep well drained soil into which the roots can run deeply without danger of encountering standing water or alkali. still we are finding that alfalfa is very successful on soils which are not strictly ideal, providing the moisture is supplied in such a way that the soil shall not be waterlogged nor the water be allowed to remain upon the surface during the hot weather, because this kills the plant. handling young alfalfa. i have alfalfa that is doing very well for the first year. my soil is sandy loam with light traces of white alkali, although it does not seem to be detrimental to the growth thus far. i am in the dairy business and will have by winter enough manure to top-dress the field. would it be good policy to use the manure, or would it be more satisfactory to top-dress with gypsum? would it injure alfalfa to pasture lightly after the last cutting? presumably your soil contains enough lime, and therefore the application of gypsum at this time of the year would not be necessary. it may be desirable to top-dress with gypsum near the end of the rainy season to stimulate the growth of the plant. gypsum, however, has no effect upon white alkali. so far as alkali goes, gypsum merely changes black alkali into white, thus making it less corrosive. there would be no objection to pasturing lightly this fall. be careful, however, to keep off the stock while the land is wet and not to overstock so as to injure root crowns by tramping. the manure can be used as a top dressing during the rainy season, unless you think it better to save it for the growth of other crops. alfalfa is so deep rooting where conditions are favorable that it does not require fertilization usually on land which has been used for a long time for grain or other shallow-rooting plants. alfalfa sowing with gypsum. i intend sowing alfalfa this fall on land that has some very compact hard spots. i aim to doctor these spots with gypsum at the rate of about pounds per acre and cultivate the gypsum in thoroughly two or three weeks before sowing the alfalfa seed. would this be all right? is there danger of injury to seed by coming in contact with gypsum? gypsum will not hurt the alfalfa seed. it is not corrosive like an alkali. whether it will have time enough to ameliorate the soil in the spots in the period you mention depends upon there being moisture enough present at the time. red clover for shallow land. what can you say of red clover on shallow soils in the sacramento valley under irrigation? how many crops, etc.? red clover is fine under the conditions you describe. we could never understand why people do not grow more of it on shallow land over hardpan which is free from alkali and not irrigated too much at a time. it is good on shallow land over water, where alfalfa roots decay, etc. though we have no exact figures, we should expect to get about two-thirds as much weight from it as from an equally good stand of alfalfa. clovers for high ground-water. where, in california, is alfalfa being raised successfully above a water-table of, say, feet or less, and are any unusual means used to accomplish this? over a high water-table, the alfalfa plant will be shorter lived according to the shallowness of soil above water. one could get very good results at from to feet, whereas at or feet the stand of alfalfa would soon become scant through decay of its fleshy root. where the water comes very near the surface, a more shallow and fibrous rooting plant, like the eastern red clover, should be substituted for alfalfa in california. it is a very vigorous grower and will yield a number of crops in succession although the water might be very near the surface, as in the case of the reclaimed islands in the stockton and sacramento regions and in shallow irrigated soils over bedrock in the foothills or over hardpan on the valley plains. in this statement, freedom from alkali is presumed. vetches in san joaquin. in michigan i was familiar with the use of the sand vetch as a forage plant, for hay, for green manure, and as a nitrogen producer. in western michigan, on the loose sandy soil, i sowed in september or october pounds per acre for a seed crop and pounds per acre for pasture, hay, or green manure. can i expect good results in fresno and tulare counties without irrigation? will fall seeding the same as wheat produce a seed crop? will sand vetch grow on soil having one-half of one per cent alkali? most of the vetches grow well in the california valleys during the rainy season; the common vetch, vicia sativa, and the hairy vetch, vicia hirsuta, are giving best results. the proper time to plant is at the beginning of the rainy season. they will stand some alkali, especially during the rainy season, when it is likely to be distributed by the downward movement of water, but it is very easy to find land which has too much alkali for them. these plants seed well in some parts of the valley, but a local trial must be made to give you definite information. growing vetch for hay. how many pounds of vetch seed should be sown to the acre? how many tons per acre in the crop? as i desire to change my crop, having to some extent exhausted the soil with oats, how advisable will it be to sow wheat with the vetch to give it something to climb on? if so, and wheat is not desirable under the circumstances, what? in using vetch for horse fodder, how much barley should be fed with it per day for a driving horse? for a draught horse? is vetch sown and harvested at about the same time as other crops? except in very frosty places, vetch can be sown after the rain begins at about to pounds of seed to the acre. the yield will depend upon the land and on the moisture supply, and cannot be prophesied. one grower reports three tons of hay per acre near napa. if the land usually yields a good hay crop, it should yield a greater weight of vetch. in mowing for hay purposes it is desirable to raise the vetch off the ground to facilitate the action of the mower. oats would be better than wheat, because rather quicker in winter growth. if the vetch is to be fed green, rye is a good grain, but not good for hay purposes because of the hardness of the stem. there is no particular difference in the plant-food requirements of the different grains, so that there is nothing gained in that way in the choice of wheat. in feeding a combined vetch and barley hay, the ration is balanced; the feeding of grain would not be necessary, except in case of hard work under the same conditions grain is usually fed to horses and in about the same amounts. vetch requires a longer season than ordinary oat or barley hay crop to make a larger growth, consequently an early sowing is desirable. cover crop in hop yard. will you please give information concerning cow peas or the most suitable crop to sow in a hop field for winter growth, to be plowed under as a fertilizer in the spring? also, would it injure the vines to be cut down before they die, so as to sow the mulch crop soon as possible after the hops are gathered? cow peas would not do for the use which you propose, because they would be speedily killed by frost on low lands, usually chosen for hops, and would give you no growth during the frosty season. probably there is nothing better than burr clover for such a winter growth. hop vines should be allowed to grow as long as they maintain the thrifty green color, because the growth of the leaves strengthens the root. but when they begin to become weakened and yellow they can be removed without injury. it is not necessary to wait for them to become fully dead. growing cowpeas. what is the best variety of cow peas for a forage crap? i want a variety which with irrigation will come up after it has been cut, so as to keep growing and not be like some which i tried last year. they grew up like ordinary garden peas and were just a waste of ground. possibly you did not get cowpeas; they do not look like garden peas at all: they look more like running beans, which they are. the crop is not counted satisfactory except on low, moist land, for on uplands, even with irrigation, it does not seem to behave right. we do not know that a second growth can be expected, for in the southern states it is grown as a single crop, and resowing is done if a succession is desired, the point being made at the south that the plant is adapted to this method of culture because it grows so rapidly that it can be twice sown and harvested during the frost-free period. cowpeas in the san joaquin. how late in the season will it be profitable to plant cowpeas? what is the best manner of planting? are there several varieties? if so, which one is best adapted to plant after oats? the land can be irrigated until about august . will it be advisable to plow up a poor stand of alfalfa about july and plant to cow peas? you can plant cowpeas all summer on land which is moist enough by natural moisture or irrigation to promote growth. what you will get by late planting depends upon moisture and absence of an early fall frost. if your alfalfa stand is bad enough to need re-sowing anyway, you may get a good catch crop of cowpeas by doing as you propose. if, however, you plow under much coarse stuff in putting in the peas the growth may be irregular. it can, of course, be improved by free irrigation. on clear land moderately retentive much more is being done in summer growth of cowpeas without irrigation than expected. there are several good varieties. one of these is the whippoorwill. cowpeas can be sown in furrows three feet apart and cultivated, using about pounds of seed to the acre, or they may be broadcasted, which takes about twice as much seed. cowpeas and canadian peas. would canadian field peas and cow peas be valuable as a forage crop for cows and hogs; also as fertilizer? please tell us also when to plant, how to plant, etc. these plants are of high forage value as cow feed; also as a soil restorative when the whole crop is plowed under green or when the roots and manure from feeding add to the soil. but for either purpose the result depends upon how much growth you can get, and that should be told by local trial before any great outlay is undertaken. canadian peas are hardy against frost and can be broadcasted and covered with shallow plowing as soon as the land is moist enough from fall rains - except in very frosty parts of the state. they can also be sown in drills to advantage. cow peas are beans, and cannot be planted until frost danger is over in the spring. they are only available for summer feeding, and whether they will be worth while or not depends upon how much moisture can be held in the soil for summer growth. they should be sown in drills and cultivation continued for moisture conservation until the plants cover the ground too much to get the cultivator through. canadian or niles peas. i send a sample of peas which i bought for canada field peas, and they were so labeled. i would like to know what they are. the peas are, apparently, one kind of canada peas. there is some variation in canada peas, but these are peas of that class. some of the canada pea are hardly distinguishable from the so-called niles pea of california growth, and it does not matter much, anyway, for one is about as good as the other. sunflowers and soy beans. i would like information concerning cultivation, method of feeding and food value of soy beans. also sunflowers. soy beans are grown like other beans, in rows which, for convenience in field culture, should be about / feet apart and cultivated up to blooming time at least. they should be sown after frost danger is over and the weather is settled warm, for they enjoy heat. for feeding they can be made into hay before maturity, or the beans can be matured and prepared for feeding by grinding. as with other beans, small amounts should be used in connection with other feeds. they are a rich food and somewhat heavy on the digestion. the same is true of sunflowers, except that the seed is richer in oil than in protein, as beans are. sunflowers in field culture are planted and cultivated like beans. the seed is flailed out of the heads after they lie for a time to dry. jersey kale. please inform me how to plant jersey or cow kale. jersey kale can be planted by thin scattering of seeds in rows / feet apart so as to admit of cultivation, or the plants can be grown just as cabbage plants are and set out / or feet apart, the squares to admit of cultivation both ways. the plant needs a good deal more space than an ordinary cabbage, for it makes a tall free growth, and space must be had for the growth of the plant and for going into the patch for stripping off leaves and cultivation. the plant can be started in the rainy season whenever the land comes into good condition. it is a winter grower in california valleys. rape and milo. would rape be a good pasture crop sown broadcast? if so, at what time should it be planted? will milo maize grow profitable in sonoma county? rape can be sown as soon as the land gets moist enough from early rains to start the seed and hold the growth. it is a wintergrowing plant in this state. we believe, however, you will get better results with common vetch, which is also a winter grower and more nutritious. if you desire one of the cabbage family, kale will probably serve you better than rape. milo is one of the sorghums and will only grow during the frostless period, like kafir, egyptian corn and other sorghums. it will do well with you, but probably make less growth than in the interior valleys. sweet clover not an alfalfa. i send you a sample of alfalfa which grows very vigorous here on my place spontaneously and would like you to give me all the information about it you will, as a feed for cows and hogs. the stock seem to eat it well. the plant is not alfalfa at all. it is white sweet clover (melilotus alba), and it is usually considered a great pest in alfalfa fields, because although it grows vigorously as you describe, it is not generally accepted by stock, unless once in awhile some one considers it a good thing, perhaps because he keeps stock hungry enough to enjoy it in spite of its rank taste and smell, but, usually when they can get alfalfa they will not pay much attention to this plant. it is good for bee pasturage, however, and is grown to some extent for that purpose. you probably had the seed of it in your alfalfa seed. it is a biennial and not a perennial like alfalfa. it will disappear if you can keep it from going to seed. sweet clover as a cover crop. how about melilotus as a cover crop? last year in certain sections it proved very successful, while in others it did not give satisfaction. melilotus, by virtue of its hardiness in growing at low temperatures, its depth of root penetration, the availability of the seed, the smallness of the seed so that the weight required for the acre is not large, is to be favored for a cover crop. the objections are two: the fact that it does not seem to grow well under some conditions; second, that when a growth is made it is coarse and rangey, and the amount of green stuff to the acre is much less than its appearance would indicate. we know of cases where what seemed to be a good stand of melilotus yielded only about ten tons of green stuff to the acre, and what appeared to be a less growth of vetches or peas yielded from fifteen to twenty tons to the acre. and yet we believe that in some places it will be found extremely desirable for a cover crop in harmony with what was reported some time ago as the result of experiments by the arizona experiment station. spineless cactus. there seems to be two distinct kinds of cactus: one for forage, the other for fruit. it is claimed by some people that the spineless cactus is more valuable as a forage plant than alfalfa. what is your opinion? there are many varieties of smooth cacti. some of them bear higher quality fruit than others, and some are freer growers and bear a greater amount of leaf substance for forage purposes; therefore, varieties are being developed which are superior for fruit or for forage, as the case may be. spineless cactus is in no way comparable with alfalfa, either in nutritive content or in value of crop, providing you have land and water which will produce a good product of alfalfa. cactus is for lands which are in an entirely different class and which are not capable of alfalfa production. probably not broom-corn. i have a side-hill ranch on which i would very much like to raise broom corn. the soil produces good grapes, fruit, corn, oats, peas, etc., and i wish to know if there are possibilities of broom-straw. all the broom-corn which has been successfully produced in california has been produced on moist, riverside land. the plant is a sorghum - consequently subject to frost injury, and can only be grown during the frostless season as indian corn is. this makes it impossible to get the advantage of rainfall on winter upland and necessitates the use of lowlands, which carry moisture enough to secure a free growth of the brush, for poor broom-corn is worthless practically, being too low priced to be profitable for brooms and too fibrous to be of value for feeding purposes. even in a place where the plant grows well its product is worthless unless properly treated, and that requires full knowledge and a good deal of work. the outlook for broom corn. broom corn is way up in price, but that is an indication that everyone who has ever grown broom corn is likely to plant it this year. what is the outlook in california? nothing but a local experiment will determine whether you can get a satisfactory brush under the conditions prevailing in your vicinity. undoubtedly, the high price of broom corn will stimulate production, but under quite sharp limitations in california, because a good, satisfactory brush cannot be grown on dry plains, although a good product is made in the river bottoms not far away. but there are so few people in california who understand how to handle broom corn to produce a good commercial article, and there are such rigid requirements in the size, quality, etc., that those who break into the business without proper knowledge cannot command even profitable prices. therefore, if your enterprise is conducted with a full knowledge and with proper local conditions it would not encounter such a local disadvantage in the great increase of the product as one might think at first. smutty sorghum. the various plantings of egyptian corn on the ranch have turned smutty, very much after the manner of wheat and barley. is there any unusual reason for this, or could irrigation have caused it, and what is the best method of preventing it? sorghum is affected by a smut similar to that of other grains. it is due to the introduction of the germ of the disease which comes with the use of smutty seed. possibly the growth of the smut may have been promoted by moisture arising from soil rendered very wet by irrigation, and for this plant free irrigation should not be used, because it will do more with less water than any other plant we are growing, and is likely to be more thrifty in a drier atmosphere. get seed for next year from an absolutely clean field; get as much growth as you can without irrigation, and then use water in moderate quantities as may be necessary, followed by a cultivation for the drying of the surface. late-sown sorghum. how late can egyptian corn be planted on good sediment soil capable of growing to socks of barley per acre in good years with ordinary rain? the field was cut this year for hay on account of rank growth of wild oats, after irrigating; land is still moist. can i put in egyptian corn with on assurance of crop, or is it too late? how much seed should be planted to the acre, also should seed be drilled in or broad-casted? there is no difficulty in getting a start of egyptian corn during the dry season providing the soil contains moisture enough to germinate the seed. afterward the growth will be more or less according to the moisture present and will be available for forage purposes. whether a seed crop can be had by late sowing depends upon the frost occurrence in the particular locality, for it only takes a light frost to destroy the plant. to get the best results, particularly with late sowing, the seeds should be drilled in rows far enough apart for horse cultivation; about forty pounds of seed to the acre. what you get in this way will depend upon the amount of moisture in the soil and the duration of the frost-freedom. kaffir and egyptian corn. does kaffir corn yield as well here as egyptian corn? the fodder is good feed and the heads stand erect and at a more even height from the ground, which makes three advantages over egyptian. irrigation in either case is the some. the reasons you mention have no doubt had much to do with the present popularity of an upright plant like kafir over a gooseneck like the old dhoura or egyptian, which was the type first introduced in california. for years there has been more gooseneck sorghum in the sacramento valley than in any other part of the state. it may have superior local adaptions or the people may be more conservative. the way to determine which is better is to try it out, and, unless the egyptian does better in grain and forage than the upright growers, take to the grain which holds its head up. sorghums for seed. which sorghum is the most profitable to plant for the seed only white egyptian, brawn egyptian or yellow mila? which sorghum is best is apparently a local question and governed by local conditions to a certain extent. egyptian corn (with the goose-neck stem) has held more popularity in your part of the sacramento than elsewhere, while kaffir corn (holding its head upright, as do many other sorghums) has been for years very popular in the san joaquin. in the imperial valley dwarf milo is chiefly grown for a seed crop shattering and bird invasion are very important. g. w. dairs of the san joaquin valley, says there is a very great difference in the different varieties regarding waste from the blackbird. the ordinary white egyptian corn is very easily shelled, and the birds waste many times more of the grain than they eat, after it has become thoroughly ripe. the milo maize, or red egyptian corn, does not shell nearly so easily as the white corn, and the grain is considerably harder and less attractive to the blackbirds. in fact, blackbirds will not work in a field of this variety of corn if there is any white corn in the vicinity to be had. the dwarf milo maize yields much more crop than the white egyptian corn, or any other variety. blackbirds do not damage the white kaffir corn to the extent they do the ordinary white egyptian corn. sorghum planting. what is the best time to sow egyptian corn; also how much per acre to sow? all the sorghums, of which egyptian corn is one, must be sown after frost danger is over - the time widely known as suitable for indian corn, squashes and other tender plants. sow thinly in shallow furrows or "marks," / or feet apart and cultivate as long as you can easily get through the rows with a horse. about pounds of seed is used per acre. if grown for green fodder, sow more thickly and make the rows closer, say / feet apart. buckwheat growing. two or three farmers in this locality desire to plant buckwheat. not having done so heretofore they are in doubt as to the soil and other conditions that go to make a successful crop. the growing of buckwheat in california is an exceedingly small affair. the local market is very limited, as most california hot cakes are made of wheat flour. there is no chance for outward shipment, and the crop itself, being capable of growing only during the frostless season, has to be planted on moist lands where there is not only abundant summer moisture but an air somewhat humid. irrigated uplands, even in the frostless season, are hardly suitable for the common buckwheat, although they may give the growth of japanese buckwheat for beekeepers who use dark honey for bee feeding. the japanese buckwheat is well suited for this because it keeps blooming and produces a scattered crop of seed, but this characteristic makes it less suitable for a grain crop, and it has therefore never become very popular in this state. we consider buckwheat as not worthy of much consideration by california farmers. variation in russian sunflowers. in an acre of mammoth russian sunflowers there seems to be three varieties, some of the plants bear but one large flower; others bear a flower at the top with many other smaller ones circling it, while others have long stalks just above the leaf stems from the ground level all the way up to the largest flower, which appears at the very top. are all these varieties true mammoth russian sunflowers? what explanation is there for these variations? will the seed from the variety carrying but one natural head produce seed that will reproduce true to the parent? your sunflowers are probably only playing the pranks their grandfathers enjoyed. if seed is gathered indiscriminately from all the heads which appear in the crop, succeeding generations will keep reverting until they return to the wild type, or something near it. if there is a clear idea of what is the best type (one great head or several heads, placed in a certain way) and seed is continually taken from such plants only for planting, more and more plants will be of this kind until the type becomes fixed and reversions will only rarely appear. no seed should be kept for planting without selecting it from what you consider the best type of plant; no field should be grown for commercial seed without rogue-ing out the plants which show reversions or bad variations. if you find sunflowers profitable as a crop in your locality, rigid selection of seed should be practiced by all growers, after careful comparison of views and a decision as to the best characters to select for. sacaline. my attention has been brought to a plant called sacaline by an eastern plant dealer. he states that this plant will grow in any kind of soil and needs practically no water. the plant sacaline (polygonum saghalience) was introduced to california as a dry-land forage plant about , and has never demonstrated any particular forage value. it is a browsing shrub, making woody stem, and cattle will eat it readily when not provided with better food. it has possible value on waste land, but probably is in no sense superior to the native shrubs of california which serve that purpose. it is a handsome ornamental plant for gardens or parks. mossy lawns. what will destroy patches of moss which are spreading over our lawns and apparently destroying the grass? more sunlight would have a tendency to discourage the growth of moss on a lawn. if this is not feasible, irrigation less frequently but a more thorough soaking each time will give the surface a better chance to dry off, and moss will not grow on a dry surface. the frequent spraying of a lawn with just enough water to keep the surface moist and not enough water to penetrate deeply will tend to the growing of moss and to less vigor in the growth of the grass, a good soaking of the soil once a week is better than daily sprinkling, but, of course, very much more water must be used when you only sprinkle at long intervals. the drying of the surface may be assisted by sprinkling with air-slaked lime and this will discourage the growth of moss, but of course lime must not be used in excess or it will also injure the grass. scattering grass seeds. we live on the west side of sonoma valley, and want to seed some of our fields with a good wild grass. we want to carry bags of it in our pockets to scatter when we ride. timothy we should like, but this is not its habitat, is it? can you suggest a grass or grasses that would do well here? there are really wild grasses worthy of multiplication, but no one makes a business of collecting the seed for sale, so that such seeds are not available for such purpose as you describe. of the introduced grasses, those which are most likely to catch from early scattered seed are australian and italian rye grasses, orchard grass, wild oat grass and red top. you can get seed of all these from dealers in any quantity which you desire at from to cents a pound, according to the variety, and make a mixture of equal parts of each grass, which you can carry and scatter as you propose. some of them will catch somewhere, particularly in spots where the shade modifies the summer heat and where seepage moisture reduces soil drought. you are right about timothy; it is good farther up the coast and in the mountain valleys, but not in your district. poultry forage. i have light sandy loam on which i desire to grow forage for chickens. it lies too high for irrigation. you could probably grow alfalfa to advantage if the soil still deep and loose, getting less, of course, than by irrigation, but still an amount that would be very helpful in your chicken business. otherwise, as the land lies higher and perhaps out of sharp frosts, you could grow winter crops of vetches and peas and thus improve the land while furnishing you additional poultry pasture. the latter purpose could also be served by growing beets, cabbage or other hardy vegetables during the rainy season. this is prescribed because of the apprehension that the soil may not contain moisture enough for summer cropping without irrigation. no grain elevators in california. is california wheat shipped in bulk or in bags at the present time? there are no elevators in this state, owing to the fact that hitherto grain cargoes have been acceptable to ship only as sacked grain, because of claimed danger of shifting cargo and disaster during the long voyage around the horn. a novel by frank norris, entitled the "octopus," describes a man being killed by smothering in a grain elevator at port costa, but there never was an elevator at that point, and consequently there never was a man killed by getting under the spout thereof. answering specifically your question, california grain is shipped in bags and not in bulk. it is handled in sacks from the separator to roadside or riverside storage, to the loading point into the ships and out of the ships on the other side - still in bags. new zealand flax. give information about phormiun tenax (new zealand flax), which i see is imported to san francisco in large quantities yearly for making cordage and binder twine, and is said also to be the best of bee pasture. can i get the plants on the coast, and is california soil and climate adapted to the culture? new zealand flax grows admirably in the coast region of california. you will find it in nearly all the public parks and in private gardens, for it is a very ornamental perennial. plants can be had in any quantity from the california nurserymen and florists. it produces plenty of leaves, but we should doubt whether it is floriferous enough for bee pasturage except where it occurs wild over a large acreage. you could get vastly more honey from other plants grown for that purpose. no home-made beet sugar. is there any simple process of making sugar from beets so that i could make my own sugar at home from my own beets while sugar is so very expensive to buy? there is no simple way of making beet sugar. it can only be economically done in factories costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. don't get crazy about special crops. i want information about flax as a crop. i have been having some land graded for alfalfa and i have had to wait so long i am now doubting the advisability of seeding it all under these conditions until fall, as hot weather will soon come. i want some good crop to plant in the checks and give two good irrigations. what would you think about rye for straw for horse collars? i do not wish to consider corn, as the stalks would be troublesome. potatoes would necessitate disarranging the land too much and would require more attention than i am in shape to give just flow. everybody grows wheat, barley and oats. i want something that i can get a special market for. to succeed with flax, the seed ought to be sown in the fall, or early winter, in california, and the plant will make satisfactory growth under about the same conditions that suit barley or wheat. spring sowing would not give you anything worth while except on moist bottom land. rye is also a winter-growing grain. to grow rye straw for horse collars would be unprofitable unless you could find some local saddler who could use a little, and it is probable you could not get a summer growth of rye which would give good straw, even if you had a market for it. you could get a growth of stock beets, field squashes, or pumpkins for stock feeding. in fact, the latter would give you most satisfaction if you have stock to which they can be fed to advantage. sorghum is our chief dry-season crop, but that makes stalks like corn and would, therefore, be open to the same objections. has it never occurred to you that people grow the common crops, not because they are stupid, but because those are the things for which there is a constant demand and the best chance for profitable sale? efforts to supply special markets are worth thinking of, but seldom worth making unless you know just who is going to buy the product and at what price. california insect powder. what part of the plant is used in making insect powder and how is it prepared? is the plant a perennial? what soil suits it best? the plant is pyrethrum cinerariaefolium and has a white blossom resembling the common marguerite. the powder is made of the petals and the seed capsules or heads are thoroughly dried in the sun and ground with a run of stone such as was formerly used for making flour. the powder must be finely ground, and only good powder can be made in a mill suitably equipped for that purpose. the plant is a perennial, beginning to bloom the second year from seed. it will grow in any good soil with ordinary cultivation. twenty-five years ago it was thought that a great california industry might be established on that basis, but there is at the present time but one establishment, which grows about all the material it can use on its own ranch in merced county, on a fine, deep loam which the plant seems to enjoy. rotations for california. i wish to work out a practical system of crop rotation suitable to the climate and conditions obtaining in southern california. would you recommend different systems for grain lands and irrigated lands? general schemes of rotation are hard to work out in california. they must be locally revised according to the local temperature conditions and the local market also. we should endeavor to find out what has been successfully grown on similar lands to those which you have in mind and arrange the rotation on that basis, from what we knew of the relation of the different plants to soil fertility, etc. you cannot make out a satisfactory local scheme for the seven counties in southern california, because of the widely different behavior of the separate plants in the different parts of the district. you can hardly work on the basis of soil character: moisture supply and temperatures are more determinative. surely you should make a scheme for irrigated land different from that for dry land, and it could not only be a longer rotation, but many more plants would be available for its service. berseem? berseem has been introduced into this country from egypt, and would like to know if it has been used in california, and if it has came up to expectations. berseem is an annual clover supposed to grow only during the summer time. it has been tried widely in california, but practically abandoned because it will not grow during the rainy season. it is in no way comparable to alfalfa, which is a deep rooted perennial plant, nor would it be comparable with burr clover as a winter grower on lands which have a moderate amount of water. heating and fermentation. please explain why dampness will cause anything like hay, egyptian corn or other like products to heat. heating is due to fermentation, which means the action upon the vegetable substance of germs which begin to grow and multiply after their kind whenever conditions favor them. the earlier stages of this action is called "sweating," and it is beneficial as in the case of hay, tobacco, dried fruits, etc., as is commonly recognized - resulting in what is known as curing - and it is the art of the handler of such products not to allow the action to go beyond what may be called the normal "sweating." if not checked by proper handling, which involves drying, cooling, etc., fermentation will continue, and other germs will find conditions suitable for them to take up their work of destruction, and this new action produces higher temperature still, and if not checked by cooling or drying or otherwise making the substance inhospitable to them, "heating" will result, and thence onward rapidly to decay, if they have everything their own way. moonshine farming. what influence, if any, has the moon on plant growth? are there any reliable data of experiments available? very prolonged investigation by the weather bureau determined that no difference was found in planting in different phases of the moon. if we paid any attention to it, we should plant in the dark of the moon, so as to get the plants up so that they could use the little more light which the moon gives. it is, however, more important to have the soil right than the moon. part iv. soils, fertilizers and irrigation what is intensive cultivation? from whom can i receive instruction or information regarding intensive cultivation? intensive cultivation has, so far as we know, not been made the subject of any treatise or publication. intensive cultivation means the use of a maximum amount of labor, fertilizers and water for products of high market value. there is no better example of intensive cultivation in the world than is afforded by the practice of the best market gardeners and producers of small fruit. next to them, on larger areas, would be the policies and methods of the fruit growers of california. intensive culture, then, is not a particular method or system, but consists in doing the best thing for maximum production of any product which is valuable enough to spend the large outlay which is required. just how this cultivation should be done depends upon the nature of the product and the conditions of soil and climate in whatever locality intensive cultivation may be undertaken. can a man farm? is it possible for a man with a few acres well cared for and carefully tilled to make a living and pay out on a purchase of land at $ per acre? could a good carpenter make wages and take care of a small tract for a year or so until well under way? we consider $ per acre for good land with a good water right a fair price. financing a farming operation depends more upon the man than upon the good land. there are men who would, by intensive cultivation of salable stuff and right use of water, pay off the full value of the land from its produce in a couple of years. others will never pay off. of course, the nearer you can come to paying for the land at the beginning, and the more money you have for improvements, the more satisfactory your situation should be in every respect. there is a good chance for carpenter work in colony development, and considerable self-help could be secured in that way. you do not say whether you know anything about farming. farming is a very complicated business and a basic knowledge derived from experience is a proper foundation to build upon in the light of the fuller application of scientific principles. soil depth for citrus trees. i have a top soil of rich loam containing small rocks and pebbles. underneath it is washed gravel, rocks, boulders, yellow sand, etc. what is the limit as to thinness before trees will not grow, or thrive? orange trees are growing quite successfully on shallow soil overlying clay where the use of water and fertilizers was carefully adjusted so as to keep the trees supplied with just the right amount. under such conditions a good growth may be expected so long as this treatment is maintained. there should be, however, not less than three feet of good soil to make the large expenditure necessary to establish an orange orchard permanently productive, and all the depth you can get beyond three feet is desirable. we question the desirability of planting orange trees even on a good soil overlying gravel, rocks or sand. roots will penetrate such material only a short distance usually. it is almost impossible with such a leachy foundation to keep the surface soil properly moistened and enriched; you are apt to lose both water and fertilizer into the too rapid drainage. soils and oranges. i find this entire district underlaid with hardpan at various depths, from to feet down, and of various thicknesses. this hardpan is more or less porous and seeps up water to some extent, but is too hard for roots to penetrate. it is represented to me that if this hard pan is down from to feet it does not interfere with the growth of the orange tree or its producing. is or feet of the loam enough? four or five feet of good soil over a hardpan, which was somewhat porous, is likely to be satisfactory for orange planting. there has been trouble from hardpan too near the surface and from the occurrence of a hardpan too rich in lime, which has resulted in yellow leaf and other manifestations of unthrift in the tree. discussion of this subject is given on page of the fifth edition of our book on "california fruits," where we especially commend a good depth of "strong, free loam." this does not mean necessarily deep. the orange likes rather a heavier soil, while a deep sandy loam is preferred by some other fruits. if you keep the moisture supply regular and right and feed the plant with fertilizers, as may be required, the soil you mention is of sufficient depth - if it is otherwise satisfactory. oranges over high ground water. does california experience show that citrus trees can be grown upon land successfully where the water-level is feet from the surface; that is, where water is found at that level at all seasons and does not appear to rise higher during the rainy season? we do not know of citrus trees in california with ground-water permanently at six feet below the surface. if the soil should be a free loam and the capillarity therefore somewhat reduced, orange trees would probably be permanently productive. if the soil were very heavy, capillary rise might be too energetic and saturate the soil for some distance above the water-level. in a free soil without this danger the roots could approach the water as they find it desirable and be permanently supplied. orange trees are largely dependent upon a shallow root system, the chief roots generally occupying the first four feet below the surface. from this fact we conclude that deep rooting is not necessary to the orange, although unquestionably deep rooting and deep penetration for water are desirable as allowing the tree to draw upon a much greater soil mass and therefore be less dependent upon frequent irrigations and fertilizations. depth of ground-water. is there probable harm from water standing feet from the surface in an orchard? also probable age of trees before any effect of said water would be felt by them? the soil is almost entirely chocolate dry bog. - w. e. wahtoke. water at twelve feet from the surface is desirable, and water at that point will be indefinitely desirable for the growing of fruit trees. of course, conditions would change rapidly as standing water might approach more nearly to the surface, a condition which has to be carefully guarded against in irrigation. but it can come nearer than twelve feet without danger. summer fallow and summer cropping. i own some hill land which has been run down by continuous hay cropping. i am told that a portion must be summer-fallowed each year, but i wish to grow some summer crop on this fallow ground that will both enrich the soil and at the same time furnish good milk-producing feed for cows - thoroughly cultivating it between the rows. what crop would be best? i am told the common kaffir or egyptian corn are both soil enriching and milk producing. if you grow a summer crop on the summer-fallowed upland, you lose the chief advantage of summer fallowing, which is the storing of moisture for the following year's crop. a cultivated crop would waste less moisture than a broadcast crop, surely, but on uplands without irrigation it would take out all the moisture available and not act in the line of a summer fallow. kaffir corn is not soil enriching. it has no such character. it probably depletes the soil just as much as an ordinary corn or hay crop. it is a good food to continue a milking period into the dry season, but you must be careful not to allow your cattle to get too much green sorghum, for it sometimes produces fatal results. we do not know anything which you can grow during the summer without irrigation which would contribute to the fertility of your land. if you had water and could grow clover or some legume during the summer season, the desired effect on the soil would be secured. soils and crop changes. peas and sweet peas do not grow well continuously in the same ground. i know this practically in my experience, but in no book have i ever found why they do not grow. there are two very good reasons why some classes of plants cannot be well grown continuously in the same piece of ground. one is the depletion of available plant food, the other the formation of injurious compounds by the plants, or the gradual increase of fungoid, bacterial or animate pests in the soil, which finally become abundant enough to seriously hinder growth. different plants take the plant foods, as nitrogen, lime, potash, phosphates, etc., in different proportion. more important, perhaps, is the fact that the root acids that extract these foods are of different types and strength. thus before many seasons it may happen that most of the plant food of one or more kinds may be nearly exhausted as far as that kind of plant is concerned that has grown there continually, while there would be plenty of easily available food for plants with a different kind of root system and different root acids, etc. this is one reason why rotation of crops is so good; it gives a combination of root acids and root systems to the soil during a term of years, and it also frees the soil from one certain kind of organism because it cannot survive the absence of the particular plants on which it thrives. summer-fallow before fruit planting. i recently bought a ranch at sheridan, placer county, and was intending to put acres to peaches and acres to wheat or barley, but the residents tell me that the land must be summer-fallowed before i can do anything. the soil is a red loam and has not been plowed for six years. your local advisers are probably right as to the necessity for summer-fallowing in order to conserve moisture from a previous year's rainfall and to get the land otherwise into good condition. there might be such a generous rainfall that an excellent crop might come without summer-fallowing, and the results will depend upon the rainfall. if it should be small in amount, you might not recover your seed. by the same sign you might not get much growth on your fruit trees, but you could help them by constant cultivation and by using the water-wagon if the season should be very dry. therefore, you are likely to do better with trees than with grain without summer-fallowing, although even for trees it is a decided advantage to have more moisture stored in the subsoil and the surface soil pulverized by more tillage. defects in soil moisture. i have apricot trees that appear to be almost dead; all but a very few small green leaves are gone, and they look bad, still i think they might be saved if i only knew what to do. presumably your apricot tree is suffering from too much standing water during the dormant season, or from a lack of water during the dry season. the remedy would be to correct moisture conditions, either by underdrainage for winter excess or by irrigation for summer deficiency. when a tree gets into a position such as you describe, it should be cut back freely and irrigation supplied, if the soil is dry, in the house that the roots may be able to restore themselves and promote a new growth in the top. dry plowing for soil and weed growth. is there any scientific reason to support the belief that it is injurious to the soil to dry-plow it for seeding to grain this fall and winter? will dry-plowing now cause a worse growth of filth after the rains than the customary fallowing in the spring? should the stubble be burned, or plowed under! the points against dry-plowing to which you allude may arise from two claims or beliefs: first, that turning up land to the sun has a tendency to "burn out the humus"; second, that dry-plowing may leave the land so rough and cloddy that a small rainfall is currently lost by evaporation and leaves less moisture available for a crop than if it is plowed in the usual way after the rains. the first claim is probably largely fanciful, so far as an upturning in the reduced sunshine of the autumn goes. whatever there may be in it would occur in vastly increased degree in a properly worked summer-fallow, and even that is negligible, because of the greater advantage which the summer-fallow yields. there may be cases in which one will get less growth on dry-plowing than on winter plowing, if the land is rough and the rain scant, and yet dry-plowing before the rains is a foundation for moisture reception and retention - if the land is not only plowed, but is also harrowed or otherwise worked down out of its large cloddy condition. when that is done, dry-plowing may be a great help toward early sowing and large growth afterward. as for weeds, dry-plowing may help their starting, but that is an advantage and not otherwise, because they can be destroyed by cultivation before sowing. if the land is full of weed seed, the best thing to do is to start it and kill it. the trouble with dry-plowing probably arises, not from the plowing, but from lack of work enough between the plowing and the sowing. stubble should often be burned: it depends upon the soil and the rainfall. on a heavy soil with a good rainfall, plowing-in stubble is an addition to the humus of the soil, because conditions favor its reduction to that form, and there is moisture enough to accomplish that and promote also a satisfactory growth of the new crop. treatment of dry-plowed land. we are plowing a piece of light sandy mesa land, dry, which has considerable tarweed and other weeds growing before plowing. which would be best, to leave the land as it is until the rains come and then harrow, or harrow now? would the land left without harrowing gather any elements from the air before rain comes! the above land is for oat hay and beans next season. roll down the 'tar-weed, if it is tall and likely to be troublesome, and plow in at once so that decay may begin as soon as the land gets moisture from the rain. it would be well to allow the land to lie in that shape, and disc in the seed without disturbing the weeds which have been plowed under. if all this is done early, with plenty of rain coming there is likely to be water enough to settle the soil, decay the weeds, and grow the hay crop. of course, such practice could not be commenced much later in the season. the land gains practically nothing from the atmosphere by lying in its present condition. if there is any appreciable gain, it would be larger after breaking up as proposed. in dry farming, harrowing or disking should be done immediately after plowing, not to produce a fine surface as for a seed bed, but to settle the soil enough to prevent too free movement of dry air. if your rainfall is ample, the land may be left looser for water-settling. for a refractory soil. what can i do to soil that dries out and crusts over so hard that it won't permit vegetable growth? a liberal amount of stable manure has been applied, and the land deeply plowed, harrowed and cultivated, but as soon as water gets on it, it forms a deep crust on evaporation. will guano help, or is sodium nitrate or potash the thing? none of the things you mention are of any particular use for the specific purpose you describe. keep on working in stable manure or rotten straw, or any other coarse vegetable matter, when the soil is moist enough for its decay. plow under all the weeds you can grow, or green barley or rye, and later grow a crop of peas or vetches to plow in green. keep at this till the pesky stuff gets mellow. if you think the soil is alkaline, use gypsum freely; if not, dose it with lime to the limit of your purse and patience, and put in all the tillage you can whenever the soil breaks well. more manure, water and cultivation required. i have a small place on a hillside, with brown soil about one to two feet deep to hardpan and i am getting rather discouraged, as so many things fail to come up and others grow so very slowly after they are up. a neighbor planted some dahlia roots the same time i did. only one of mine came up and it is not in bloom yet, while several of his have been blooming for some weeks and are ten times as large in mass of foliage as mine with its lone stalk and one little bud on the top. peas came up and kept dying at the bottom with blossoms at the top tilt they were four or five feet high, but i never could get enough peas for a mess. can you help me get this thing right? use of stable manure and water freely. your trouble probably lies either in the lack of plant food or of moisture in the soil. this, of course, is supposing that you cultivate well so that the moisture you use shall not be evaporated and the ground hardened by the process. during the summer a good surface application of stable manure to which water can be applied would be better than to work manure into the soil, which should be done at the beginning of the rainy season. as your soil is so shallow it will be well for you to stand along the side of the plant much of the time with a bucket of water in one hand and a shovel of manure in the other. planting trees in alkali soil. my land contains a considerable quantity of both the black and white alkalies, the upper two feet being a rather heavy, sticky clay, the next three feet below being fine sand, containing more or less alkali, while immediately underneath this sand is a dense black muck in which, summer and winter, is found the ground-water. do you think the following method of setting trees would be advantageous. excavate for each tree a hole three feet in diameter and three feet deep. fill in a layer of three or four inches of coarse hay, forming a lining for the excavation. then fill the hole with sandy loam in which the tree is to be set. the sandy loam would give the young tree a good start, while the lining of hay would break up the capillary attraction between the filled-in sand and the ground-water in the surrounding alkali-charged soil. the fresh soil which you put in would before long be impregnated through the surface evaporation of the rising moisture, which your straw lining would not long exclude. the trees would not be permanently satisfactory under such conditions as you describe, though they might grow well at first. it would be interesting, of course, to make a small-scale experiment to demonstrate what would actually occur and it would, perhaps, give you a chance to sell out to a tenderfoot. planting in mud. why does ground lose its vitality or its growing qualities when it is plowed or stirred when wet, and does this act in all kinds of soil in the same way? we are planting a fig and olive orchard at the present time, but some were planted when the ground was extremely wet. the holes were dug before the rain and after a heavy rain they started to plant. after placing the trees in the holes they filled them half full with wet dirt, in fact so wet that it was actually slush. what would you advise under the circumstances and what can be done to counteract this? we have not finished filling in the holes since the planting was done, which was about a week ago. the soil loses its vitality after working when too wet, because it is thrown into bad mechanical (or physical) condition and therefore becomes difficult of root extension and of movement of moisture and air. how easily soil may be thrown into bad mechanical condition depends upon its character. a light sandy loam could be plowed and trees planted as you describe without serious injury perhaps, while such a treatment of a clay would bring a plant into the midst of a soil brick which would cause it to spindle and perhaps to fail outright. the best treatment would consist in keeping the soil around the roots continually moist, yet not too wet. the upper part of the holes should be filled loosely and the ground kept from surface compacting. the maintenance of such a condition during the coming summer will probably allow the trees to overcome the mistake made at their planting, unless the soil should be a tough adobe or other soil which has a disposition to act like cement. electro-agriculture. kindly tell me of any one who is working upon the application of electricity to stimulating agricultural growth-especially here on the coast. a friend who has done some work in this line seeks to interest me. i have seen notices of this work, and have read of professor arrhenius stimulating the mental activity of children, etc., but i desire more definite information, if possible. does the idea seem to you to be feasible? so far as we know, there has been no local trial of the effect of electric light in stimulating plant growth. much has been done with it in europe and in this country. there is much about it in european scientific literature. it is perfectly rational that increased growth should be attained by continuous light in the same way, though in less degree than occurs in the extreme north during the period of the midnight sun. it is known that moonlight, to the extent of its illumination, increases plant growth, and it has been amply demonstrated that light is light, just as heat is heat, irrespective of the source thereof. of course, the commercial advantage must be sought in the relative amount of increased growth and the selling value of whatever is gained in point of time. high hardpan and low water. what detriment is hardpan if inches below the surface and in some places inches? i have been plowing so i could set peach trees, but i have been told that they will not grow. i would like your opinion about it. i intended to blast holes for the trees, and the water is feet from surface. the top soil is red sandy and clay mixed, but it works very easily. you cannot expect much from trees on such a shallow soil over hardpan without breaking it up, because the soil mass available to the trees is small; also because the shallow surface layer over hardpan will soon dry out in spite of the best cultivation, because there is no moisture supply from below. if such a soil should be selected for fruit trees at all, the breaking through the hardpan by dynamite or otherwise is desirable, and irrigation will be, probably, indispensable. depth of cultivation. i would be glad to know whether in cultivating an orchard a light-draft harrow could profitably be used, which cultivates three and a half inches deep? i have used another cultivator, and try to have it go at least seven inches. a depth of - inches is not satisfactory in orchard cultivation, although there may be some condition under which greater depth would be difficult to obtain because of root injury to trees, which have been encouraged to root near the surface. both experience and actual determinations of moisture in this state show that cultivation to a depth of inches conserves twice as much moisture in the lower soil as can be saved by a -inch depth of cultivation under similar soil conditions and water supply. it is all the better to go inches if young trees have been treated that way from the beginning. alfalfa over hardpan. i have land graded for alfalfa and some of the checks are low and water will stand on the low checks in the winter. there is on an average from two to three feet of soil on top of hardpan and hardpan is about two feet thick. will water drain off the low checks if the hardpan is dynamited, and will this land grow alfalfa with profit? yes; much of the hardpan in your district is thin enough and underlaid by permeable strata so that drainage is readily secured by breaking up the hardpan. standing water on dormant alfalfa is not injurious. trees over high-water. which are the best fruit trees to plant on black adobe soil with water table between and feet from surface? the soil is very rich and productive. the land is leveled for alfalfa also; will the alfalfa disturb the growth of trees? we would not plant such land to fruit at all, except a family orchard. the fruits most likely to succeed are pears and pecans. on such land alfalfa should not hurt trees unless it is allowed to actually strangle them. the alfalfa may help the trees by pumping out some of the surplus water. soil suitable for fruits. i am sending samples of soil in which there are apricots and prunes growing, and ask you to examine it with reference to its suitability for other fruits. will lemons thrive in this soil? it is not necessary to have analysis of the soil. if you find by experience that apricot and prune trees are doing well, it is a demonstration of its suitability for the orange, so far as soil is concerned. the same would also be a demonstration for soil suitability for the lemon because the lemon is always grown on orange root. the thing to be determined is whether the temperature conditions suit the lemon and whether you have an irrigation supply available, because citrus fruits, being evergreen, require about fifty per cent more moisture than deciduous fruits, and they are not grown successfully anywhere in this state without irrigation, except, possibly, on land with underflow. the matter to determine then is the surety of suitable temperatures and water supply. for blowing soils. i am going to dry-sow rye late this fall. i want some leguminous plant to seed with the rye for a wind-break crop, not to plow under. the land varies from heavy loam to blow-sand. i have under consideration sweet clover, burr clover, vetches. i see occasional stray plants of sweet clover (the white-blossomed) growing in the alfalfa on both hard and sandy soil. i read in an eastern bee journal that sweet clover can be sowed on hard uncultivated land with success. could i grow it on the hard vacant spots that occur in the alfalfa fields? you can sow these leguminous plants all along during the earlier part of the rainy season (september to december) except that they will not make a good start in cold ground which does not seem to bother rye much. but on sand you are not likely to get cold, waterlogged soil, so you can put in there whenever you like - the earlier the better, however, if you have moisture enough in the soil to sustain the growth as well as start it. we should sow rye and common vetch. sweet clover will grow anywhere, from a river sandbar to an uncovered upland hardpan, but it will not do much if your vacant spots are caused by alkali. more than dynamite needed. i have some peculiar land. people here call it cement. it does not take irrigation water readily, and water will pass over it for a long time and not wet down more than an inch or so. when really wet it can be dipped up with a spoon. hardpan is down about to inches. i have tried blowing up between the vines with dynamite, and see little difference. can you suggest anything to loosen up the soil? you could not reasonably expect dynamite to transform the character of the surface soil except as its rebelliousness might in some cases be wholly due to lack of drainage - in that case blasting the hardpan might work wonders. but you have another problem, viz: to change the physical condition of the surface soil to prevent the particles from running together and cementing. this is to be accomplished by the introduction of coarse particles, preferably of a fibrous character. to do this the free use of rotten straw or stable manure, deeply worked into the soil, and the growth of green crops for plowing under, is a practical suggestion. such treatment would render your soil mellow, and, in connection with blasting of the hardpan to prevent accumulation of surplus water over it, would accomplish the transformation which you desire. the cost and profit of such a course you can figure out for yourself. is dynamite needed? i have an old prune orchard on river bottom lands; soil about or feet deep. quite a number of trees have died, i presume from old age. i desire to remove them and to replace them with prune trees. i have been advised to use dynamite in preparing the soil for the planting of the new trees. whether you need dynamite or not depends upon the condition of the sub-soil. if you are on river flats with an alluvial soil, rather loose to a considerable depth, dynamiting is not necessary. if, by digging, you encounter hardpan, or clay, dynamiting may be very profitable. this matter must be looked into, because the failure of trees on river lands is more often due to their planting over gravel streaks, which too rapidly draw off water and cause the tree to fail for lack of moisture. in such cases dynamite would only aggravate the trouble. dynamiting should be done in the fall and not in the spring. the land should have a chance to settle and readjust itself by the action of the winter rains; otherwise, your trees may dry out too much next summer. improving heavy soils. what is adobe? what kind of plants will grow best in adobe? in this redwood city i find clay-like soil which looks very dark and heavy. what kind of plants will grow best in this soil? the term adobe does not mean any particular kind of soil. it is applied locally to clay and clay-loam soils indiscriminately. it generally signifies the heaviest, stickiest, crackingest soil in the vicinity. most plants will grow well on heavy soils if they are kept from getting too dry and too full of water. this is done by using plenty of stable manure and other coarse stuff to make the soil more friable, which favors aeration, drainage, root extension and plant thrift. friability is also promoted by the use of lime and by good tillage. the particular soil to which you refer is a black clay loam which can be improved in all the ways stated. it is a good soil for most flowers and vegetables if handled as suggested. you can get hints of what does best by studying your neighbors' earlier plantings. for a reclaimed swamp. i have land, formerly a pond which dried up in the summer months. it has been thoroughly drained now for several years. the land surrounding it is good fertile soil and produces good crops. on this piece, however, crops come up and look fairly well until about two inches high when they turn yellow and die. mesquite grass and strawberries seem to be the only crops that will live, and they do not do at all well. sorrel grows abundantly in the natural state. apparently the reclaimed land which you speak of needs liming to overcome the acidity in the soil. common builders' lime applied at the rate of pounds to the acre at the beginning of the rainy season ought to make the land much more productive and the soil, at the same time, more friable. deep plowing with aeration will also help the land, and this treatment can begin at once if the soil is workable. other additions of lime can be made later as they may be required to make the improvement permanent. improving uncovered subsoil. what is the best treatment for spots that have been scraped in leveling for irrigation? the land can be improved by plowing deeply and turning in stable manure or green alfalfa or any other vegetable matter which may decay, rendering the soil rich in humus and more friable. of course, it will take some time to accomplish this improvement, and it is necessary that there be moisture enough present to cause the material to decay in order that the improvement may be secured. sand for clay soils. will beach sand do adobe or clay soil any good? it gets hard at times and i thought that if i was to put beach sand in the ground the salt in the sand would do the ground harm. it is certainly desirable to mix sand with heavy soil for the purpose of making it lighter - that is, better drained and more friable and therefore improving it for the growth of plants. sometimes beach sand contains a good deal of salt, which, however, is readily removed by fresh water, and sand hauled and exposed to the rains rapidly loses any excess of salt it may contain. probably with such an amount of sand as you are likely to use to mix with your adobe, there is no danger at all from salt. even if such sand should contain considerable salt, if applied at the beginning of the rainy season it would be so quickly distributed as to not constitute a menace to the growth of plants. the worst adobe can be transformed into a most beautiful garden soil by the application of sand and stable manure. plowing from or towards. which is the proper way to plow an orchard? first to plow to the trees and then to plow from them, or to plow from the trees and then to them, and your reasons? i have had many arguments with my neighbor farmers. there is difference of opinion everywhere as to whether the first plowing should be toward or away from the trees. in places where the soil is pretty heavy and the rainfall is apt to be quite large, plowing toward the trees and opening a dead furrow near the center seems to promote rapid distribution of surplus water. if the rainfall is less and arrangements for deep penetration are more necessary, the plowing can well be away from the trees, so as to direct the water toward the row. it is, of course, exceedingly important in this case, that the land should be worked back before it has a chance to dry out by exposure and this is one of the chief objections to the practice, because one is apt to let the land lie away from the trees, hoping for a late rain which may not come. whatever theoretical advantages there may be in either of these methods, they can only be secured by the greatest care to avoid the dangers which attend them. this uncertainty is the reason why people so generally disagree as to which is the best practice, and they are right in disagreeing. dry plowing and sowing. i dry-plowed my grain field to a depth averaging seven inches; it turned up very rough. i then disked and harrowed it, but it is still very rough. i intended to drill the seed, wait for sufficient rain, and harrow to a satisfactory condition, but have been advised to put no implement on after the drill, as a harrow would spoil the work done by the drill, and a slab or roller would cause the ground to bake. if i wait for rain to work the soil before drilling, it will bring the seeding too late. you have probably done a pretty good job of dry work. if the land is still too rough for the drill, we should broadcast and harrow again. it is not desirable to harrow after the drill, and to roll or rub is likely to smooth too much, because the land would bake or crust after the heavy rains. this would cause loss of moisture and it is therefore better to leave the surface a little rough. you can roll lightly after the grain is up, if the surface seems to need closing a little. artesian water. i have a large tract of adobe soil, a black clay top soil. for about five months in the year there is not sufficient water on the place. i have sunk wells in different parts, but with very poor results, the further we went down the drier and harder the soil got. what little water we did obtain was unfit for domestic use. can you give me an idea as to what might be the result of an artesian well in such soil? artesian water has nothing to do with the soils. it is a deeper proposition than that. artesian water comes from gravel strata overlaid with impervious layers of rock or clay in such a way that water in the gravel is under pressure because the gravel leads up and away to some point where water is poured into it by rain falling or snow melting on mountain or high plateau. as the water cannot get out of this gravel until you punch a hole in its lid, its effort will be to shoot up to something less than the elevation at which it gained entrance to this gravel - as soon as your puncture gives it a chance. geologists who know the locality may be able to tell you that you have little or no chance, but no one can tell you whether you have a good chance or not until he has tested the matter by boring. the quality of the artesian water is determined by its distant source and the bad water you have found is therefore no indication of the quality of what may be below it. no one should enter an artesian undertaking, except to tap a stratum of known depth, without a long purse. probably one in a thousand of the bores made into the crust of the earth yields as many gallons of artesian water as gallons of various liquids used in boring it - and yet some of them are good wells to pump from because they pierce other strata carrying water, but not under pressure causing it to rise. treatment of alkali. i am advised that in some cases alkali may be drained and that in others it is treated with gypsum. gypsum is not a cure for alkali, but simply a means of transforming black alkali into white, which is less corrosive and therefore less destructive to plants, but there may be easily too much white alkali present - so much that the land would be made sterile by it. you cannot remove alkali by flooding unless two conditions can be assured: first, that the water itself is free from alkali before application to the land; second, that you underdrain the land at a depth of from three to four feet with tile, so that the fresh water on the surface can flow through the soil into the drains, carrying away from the land the alkali, which it dissolves in its course. to flood land even with fresh water without making arrangements for carrying off the alkali water below, is to increase the alkali on the surface as the water evaporates, and such treatment does land injury rather than benefit. we cannot give you any estimate as to the cost of washing out. it depends altogether upon local conditions: whether you use hand work or machinery for the ditching, and what your water will cost. alkali, gypsum and shade trees. kindly advise how to apply gypsum, and how much, to heavy, sticky soil, the worst sort of adobe and heavily saturated with alkali. we want to plant shade trees. eucalyptus and peppers succeed fairly well after once started. gypsum seems to help, but i don't know how much to use. the amount of gypsum required to neutralize black alkali depends upon how much black alkali there is to be neutralized, and no definite amount, therefore, can be prescribed beforehand as sufficient without a determination of the amount of alkali. in some experiments gypsum to the amount of thirty tons to the acre or more has been used just for the purpose of seeing how much the land would take, and a fine growth of grain has been secured after using that much gypsum, but that, of course, would be out of the question because the outlay would be more than the land or the crop would be worth. in the planting of trees at some distance apart, the tree can be protected from destruction and enabled to make a stand in the soil by using gypsum on the spot rather than the treatment of the whole surface. in this way five or ten pounds of gypsum could be used by mixing with the soil to fill a good-sized hole. distribution of alkali. i am told by all the ranchers on the east and south sides of the valley that their wells are excellent. but they all say that on the west side - they are bringing up alkali. one also said that the water level was rising throughout all the valley. is it safe to depend on this in part, or will the alkali spread over all the valley and the foothills? it is not unusual to find people who predict the rise of alkali almost anywhere except on their own premises. no one can exactly tell where alkali will go, because no one has complete knowledge of the water movement in underlying strata. wherever the ground water rises on lower levels because of irrigation on higher levels there is danger of the rising of the alkali, for which the only cure is underdrainage with tile so that this rising water is carried to an outflow and not allowed to approach within three or four feet of the surface. if you have such an outflow and desire to undertake the expense of tiling, you can insure yourself against a serious rise of alkali indefinitely. we do not see, however, how alkali can rise to the higher lands of the valley. its first effect would be to make lakes or ponds in the lowest parts of the valley, and even then the surrounding mesa lands would not be injured. plants will tell about alkali. please give information as to the application of gypsum to my soil which is somewhat alkaline. i do not care to have an analysis made of my soil, and believe that you can advise me without it. if your soil is too alkaline for the growth of plants you can demonstrate that fact by experiment, or if it is capable of being used by the application of gypsum, that also can be determined by experiment and noting the behavior of the same plants afterwards. it is rather a slow process but it is sure enough. litmus and alkali. is there any simple soil test for alkali that can be made without a chemical analysis? you can ascertain the presence of alkali by using red litmus paper, which will be turned blue by the alkali in the soil, if the soil is moist enough. this does not determine the amount of alkali, but the quickness of the turning to the blue color and the depth of the color are both attained when the alkali is very strong. when there is less alkali, the reaction is slower and weaker. this test, however, gives you only a rough idea whether the soil is suitable for growing plants. you can tell that better by the appearance of the plants which you find. any druggist can furnish the litmus paper, and give you a demonstration of how it acts on contact with alkali. using gypsum for alkali. is it better, to kill the black alkali in the soil with gypsum, just to scatter it over an alkalied spot or to plow the soil first and then use the gypsum? i am going to sow alfalfa. use the gypsum after plowing, for it will wet down more quickly, and the gypsum has to be dissolved to act freely. the best way to cure your spot is to run an underdrain into it, if possible, so the rain-water can run through the soil freely and take the alkali with it. blasting or tiling. in planting trees where hardpan is four feet from the surface is it necessary to blast the hardpan, or is there no benefit derived by the blasting? if there should be a good available soil under a shallow layer of hardpan, which you say is four feet from the surface, it might be of considerable advantage to bore into the hardpan and explode a dynamite cartridge in it. but if your good soil is really only four feet deep and hardpan continuous below, the blast might cause fissures which would prevent standing water in the upper stratum. if you are sure of four feet of good soil above the hardpan you will have no difficulty in growing good trees, if you get the moisture just right and the hardpan slopes in such a way that surplus moisture will move away. if, however, you have hardpan at different depths on the tract, so that it may really make basins which will hold water, you are likely to have trouble from accumulations of water which will not only prevent the roots extending to the full depths of the soil, but will also cause some trees to die. such a danger could be removed by draining the soil to a depth of three and a half or four feet with tile, in order to prevent accumulations at any point. this would be expensive perhaps, but you would be sure that you had rendered your four feet of soil safe and available. if you trust to blasting you will have to wait several years for the trees to tell you whether you helped them or not. effects of blasting. i have land which is underlaid with hardpan two or three feet deep and this in turn is underlaid with sand or sandpan. what i would like to know is whether blasting the holes before setting trees would allow more moisture coming from this sandpan, or, rather, what effect it would have as to moisture. we do not know. it might make the soil better for the trees by allowing escape for surplus water through previous layers. it might allow the tree to root more deeply for moisture in those strata. it might allow water to rise from such strata if they have water under pressure. it might do other things good or bad, according to conditions prevailing under the hardpan. if you are to irrigate the land the effects would probably be good. the sub-soil plow. i am contemplating using a sub-soil plow for the purpose of breaking plow-sole on grain land. this is about / inches below the surface and is about inches thick. this soil is comparatively loose and seems to be of good quality. do you think that the sub-soil plow run low enough to break this plow-sole will benefit the land? there can be no question about the benefit of breaking up this tight stratum, provided you use a long-tooth harrow or a subsoil packer afterward to reduce the land so that it will not be too open to loss of moisture by too free circulation of air. the best way to treat such a soil would be to use a tractor and plow to a full foot of depth, for this, followed by good harrowing, would disintegrate the hard stuff and commingle it with the loose surface soil and make it somewhat more retentive - doing this when the moisture is just right for disintegration and mixing. if you are not ready to go to this expense, a subsoiler, following the plow with another team, would put your land in better shape for dry farming or for irrigation than it is now. starting late, however, might give you less crop the first year on such deep working than by shallow plowing if the year's rainfall should be scant. it would, however, be a good start for summer-fallowing and a big crop the next year. sour soil. what is "sour" soil? is that the name by which it is commonly known, and what is the treatment for it? sour soil is soil in which an acid is developed by plant decay and exclusion of air. the proper treatment is the application of lime, and aeration by open tillage and underdrainage. old plaster for sour land. can house plaster be used in reclaiming sour ground and how much per acre? the ground produces some sour grass - not a great deal. the plaster is from an old building that is being torn down. house plaster is desirable as an application to land which is sour. it also adds to the mellowness of land which is hard, because of the sand contained in it. it has always been considered a good dressing for garden land. so far as the correction of sourness goes, it is much less active than fresh lime, but it acts in the same way to a limited extent. it is certainly worth using, providing it does not cost too much for delivery, and can be freely used if the land is heavy and needs friability. application of manure ashes. having recently got a lot of manure plentifully supplied with redwood shavings that had been used with the bedding, and being afraid to use the same in that shape, as it takes such a long time for the wood to rot, i reduced the pile to a heap of ashes. how can it be best applied to ornamental trees and shrubbery in a light gravelly soil? you have done unwisely in burning the manure. we would have taken the risk of a single use of shavings for the sake of the manurial matter associated with them, and this risk of too much lightening of a gravelly soil would be especially small in connection with deep rooting plants like ornamental trees and shrubbery. you have left merely the skeleton of the manure, and much of that of doubtful solubility, if the temperature ran very high by burning in a mass. you need not be fearful about using these ashes. scatter or spread them over the ground just as you would have spread the manure, let the rains dissolve and carry down what they can and go on with your usual methods of cultivation. the best fertilizer for sand. how can i best fertilize soil that is pure sand? the best fertilizer for pure sand is well-rotted stable manure, because it not only supplies all kinds of plant food, but increases the humus in the soil, which is exceedingly important in making the sand more retentive of moisture as well as more productive. fertilizers in tree holes. would it be harmful to add or pounds of steamed bone meal to the hole of a young tree just before planting? there would be no injury, providing you mix it with a considerable amount of soil by digging over the bottom of the hole, but our conviction is that on lands which are good enough for the commercial planting of fruit trees, it is not necessary to stimulate a young tree in this way, but that it is better to postpone the use of fertilizers until the trees come into bearing and show the desirability of more liberal feeding. of course, if young trees do not make satisfactory growth, they may be stimulated either with some kind of a fertilizer or with a freer use of water, and it is generally the latter that they are chiefly in need of. wood ashes and tomatoes. is there any harm to vegetable growing to dig sufficient of wood ashes in for mellowing heavy soil? my tomato plants grew splendidly this year, but the fruits were all rough and wrinkled. i gave them plenty of horse and poultry manure at planting and plenty of wood ashes and falling leaves of cypress later. wood ashes do not mellow a heavy soil. the effect of the potash is to overcome the granular structure and increase compactness. coal ashes, because they are coarser in particles and devoid of potash, do promote mellowness, and are valuable mechanically on a heavy soil although they do not contain appreciable amounts of plant food. you are overfeeding your tomato plants, probably. the chances are that you had poor seed. there is no best tomato, because you ought to grow early and late kinds: there is also some difference in the behavior of varieties in different places. was it the potash or the water? last year the lye from the prune dipper was turned on the ground near two almond trees which seemed to be dying, and to my surprise they have taken a new lease of life. hence my conclusion that potash was good for our soil. your experience seems to justify the application of potash, surely, but the question still remains, how much good the potash did the trees, and how much they needed the extra water which the waste dips supplied. it would be desirable for you to make another experiment with other trees, applying wood ashes, if you have them, or about four pounds per tree of the potash which you use for dipping, scattering well and working it into the soil after it is moistened by the rains, and not using any more water than the trees ordinarily received from rainfall. after this trial you will be in a position to know whether your trees need potash or irrigation - by comparing with other trees adjacent. besides are you sure that your lye dip was caustic potash and not caustic soda? the latter has no fertilizing value. prunings as fertilizer. is orchard and vineyard brush worth enough as a fertilizer to pay for cutting or breaking and putting back on the land? we should say not. it takes too much labor to put it in any form to promote decay, and is even then too indestructible. it is also possible that its decay may induce root rot of trees. we should burn the stuff and spread the ashes. vineyard prunings are more promising because more easily and quickly reduced by decay. vinecane-hashers have been proposed from time to time, but we do not know anyone who long used them. gypsum on grain land. is there any profit in sowing gypsum on grain land, say on wheat or oat crop? at what stage should it be applied and in what quantity? it would have a tendency to make the surface more friable and therefore better for moisture retention, and it could be used at the rate of pounds to the acre, broadcasted before plowing for grain. as our soils are, however, usually well supplied with lime, there is a question whether there would be any profit in the use of gypsum, for, aside from lime, it contains no plant food, although it does act rather energetically upon other coil contents. gypsum is a tonic and not a fertilizer from that point of view. the best way to satisfy yourself of its effect would be to try a small area, marked so as you could note its behavior as compared with the rest of the field. gypsum and alfalfa. what is gypsum composed of? is it detrimental to land in future years? have the lands of california any black alkali in them? i notice my neighbors who sow gypsum on their alfalfa get a very much better yield of hay than those who do not. gypsum is sulphate of lime. it is not detrimental to the land in after years except that its action is to render immediately available other plant foods and this may render the land poorer - not by the addition of anything that is injurious but by the quicker using up of plant food which it already contains. black alkali is very common in california in alkali lands. in lands which show their quality by good cropping, there is no reason to apprehend black alkali nor to use gypsum to prevent its occurrence. the use of gypsum does stimulate the growth of alfalfa and makes its product greater just as you observe in the experience of your neighbors, but the more they use up the land now the less they will have later, unless they resort to regular fertilization to restore what has been exhausted. but even that may be a good business proposition. what gypsum does. i intend to fertilize alfalfa and should like to know about gypsum. i have heard it stimulates the growth temporarily but in three or four years hurts the land. i have heavy land. the functions of gypsum are: (a) to supply lime when the soil lacks it; (b) to make a heavy soil more mellow, and (c) to act upon other soil substances to render them more available for plant food. these are some of the soil aspects of gypsum; it may have plant aspects also. it is too much to say that gypsum hurts the land; it does, however, help the plant to more quickly exhaust its fertility, and in this respect is not like the direct plant foods which comprise the true fertilizers - one of which gypsum is not. it might be best for your pocketbook and for the mechanical condition of the soil to use it, but do not think that it is maintaining the fertility of the land (a service which we expect from the true fertilizers) except as it may supply a possible deficiency of lime. how much gypsum? how much per acre, how frequently and what seasons of the year are the best time to apply gypsum? of gypsum on alkali, we should begin at the rate of one ton to the acre and repeat the application as frequently as necessary to achieve the desired result. if the alkali was quite strong we would use twice as much. without reference to an alkaline condition in the soil, and to give heavy soil a more friable character, which promotes cultivation, aeration, etc., and, therefore, ministers to more successful production, half a ton to the acre can be used, applications to be repeated as conditions seem to warrant it. wood ashes in the garden. there is available in my neighborhood a free supply of wood ashes. can you tell me how best to distribute the same in a garden (flowers and garden truck), and what, if any, treatment is to be given the ashes for the best results. wood ashes long exposed to rain lose most of their valuable contents, and leached ashes are only of small value. if they are fresh ashes or ashes which have been kept dry, they are chiefly valuable for potash, which is good in its way, but not all that a plant needs. if, however, your soil is shy of potash, the use of ashes will notably improve growth if not applied in excess in the caustic form in which it occurs in the ashes. they require no treatment. spread, say, a quarter of an inch thickness all over the ground and dig in deeply. it may also help you by destruction of wire worms and other ground pests. coal ashes in the garden. what is the effect of coal ashes on the red clay soil of redlands or wood and coal ashes combined? coal ashes are exceedingly desirable upon clay land because their mechanical mixture with the fine particles of the clay renders the soil more friable, permeable and better adapted to the growth of most plants. coal ashes, however, possess no fertilizing value - their action is merely mechanical. the wood ashes which may be combined with them are desirable as a source of potash which most plants require. liming a chicken yard. i have a small family orchard of half an acre, fenced in as a chicken yard, the soil of which has become very foul. when would be the best time to apply lime and how much? put on pounds of lime and plow under as soon as you can - that is, spread the lime just before the plowing, with a shower or two on the lime before plowing, if the weather runs that way. poultry manure. give directions for using chicken manure. for use of young trees, is there any difference in treatment of deciduous and citrus trees? for use in the vegetable garden and the flower garden, what should be mixed with it and in what proportions? so many people say poultry manure is so strong, i am afraid to use it. it is a fact that poultry manure, free from earth, contains even as high as four times as much plant food as ordinary stable manure. it is, therefore, to be used with proportional care, so that the plants shall not receive too much, and particularly so that there may not be too much collected in one place. probably the best way to guard against this is to thoroughly mix the manure with three or four times its bulk of ordinary garden soil and then use this mixture at about the same rate you would stable manure. if you do not desire to go to all this trouble, make an even scattering of the manure and work it into the soil. there is no reason to fear the material; simply guard against the unwise use of it. it is good for all the plants which you mention; in fact, for any plant grown, provided it is sparingly and evenly distributed. it should be pulverized so that there shall not be lumps and masses in the same place for fear of root injury. of course, the strength depends upon how much earth is gathered up with the manure. sometimes there is so much waste material that it can be handled just as ordinary farm manure is. we should not use over pounds of clean droppings to a young tree and should mix it with the soil for a considerable distance around the tree. old bearing trees might stand two or three tons to the acre if distributed all over the ground. the material contains everything that is necessary for the growth of the tree and formation of the fruit. ashes and poultry manure. it is said that ashes mixed with chicken manure is not good. i use ashes altogether on the drop boards because i can keep the boards cleaner. the refuse is then scattered around the fruit trees. wood ashes and lime should never be used as you propose, because they set free the nitrogen compounds which are the most valuable content of poultry manures. this action is conditioned largely upon the presence of moisture, and if the droppings are kept dry and hurried into the soil the loss is lessened. coal ashes, on the other hand, are a thoroughly good absorbent when the coal burns to a fine ash or is sifted. they do not act as wood ashes do, because they do not contain soluble alkali. they also have a good mellowing effect on heavy soil. caustic lime not a good absorbent. would air-slackened lime be suitable to sprinkle over the dropping boards in hen houses? gypsum is greatly superior to air-slacked lime for the hen houses, as it has every beneficial effect of the latter, while the air-slacked lime will set free much of the fertilizing value of the manure, which the gypsum will not do. too much chicken manure for young trees. i have peach trees and apple trees, to years old, that are very thrifty but grow only wood. the soil was poor when planting, and i have put on plenty of sweepings from the chicken-yards. i suppose that is the cause of the trouble. undoubtedly you have overmanured your soil with chicken manure, which is a very strong fertilizer and should only be used in limited quantities. in order to counteract any acidity or ill effects which have been produced by its excessive application, it would be desirable for you to apply about to pounds per acre of common builders' lime at the beginning of the rainy season, working it into the soil with the fall or early winter plowing. do not cut back the tree during the dormant season, although, of course, you may have to remove surplus or interfering branches for the sake of shaping the tree. winter pruning induces a greater wood growth during the following summer; therefore, it should be avoided under such conditions as you describe. having adopted such a policy, there is nothing for you to do but to wait for the trees to slow down and assume a normal bearing habit proper for their ages. summer pruning is an offset for excessive wood growth. suburban wastes. we keep a cow and poultry and have a dry-earth toilet. we have been burying the manure in the little garden spot or along by the fences or spreading it out on the alfalfa before it is rotted, but do not get good results. how shall we apply it to get the best results ? we have a town ordinance against leaving it in piles to rot. you can compost it in a tight bin made of planks, and using enough water to prevent too rapid fermentation and loss of valuable ingredients. during the dry season you can probably use enough dry earth or road dust to render the material inoffensive, and you can also distribute it then without undesirable results. composting garden wastes. you recommend making a compost of all scrapings, garbage, weeds, etc. is there any danger in having this in a pit near the house? if you desire to put garden wastes, including manure, into a pit, the only objection would be the heavy work of digging it out again. if you allow waste water from the house to run into the pit, there would probably be not enough dry material to absorb it, and the pit would be not only objectionable on account of odors, but possibly dangerous to health. the water would also prevent decomposition, because of exclusion of air. at the same time, enough moisture to promote slow decomposition is essential. it is usually more convenient to compost garden wastes on the surface of the ground, enclosing them with a plank retainer, because moisture can easily be applied with a hose, as desirable, the material can be occasionally forked over to promote decay, and the heavy work of digging material out of a pit is avoided. such a collection is neither offensive nor dangerous if handled right. composting manure. will the dry barnyard manure, when heaped up and dampened with water, make a valuable fertilizer? for garden use, dry manure in heaps should be dampened with water from time to time so as to prevent too active fermentation. of course, water should not be supplied so freely as to cause a leaching of the pile. it is also desirable that the material should be forked over from time to time to distribute moisture and promote decay. when this is done a thoroughly first-class fertilizer is produced. barnyard manure and alkali. in spots my land is hard and has some black alkali. will barnyard manure help the hard land if cultivated in? use stable manure because that would not only furnish nitrogen, if your plants need any more, but it would add coarse material and ultimately humus which would overcome the tendency of your soil to become compact and thus concentrate alkali near the surface by evaporation. mellow the soil, increase the humus, make water movement freer and good cultivation easier and alkali will become weaker by distribution through a greater mass of the soil and may be too weak at any point to be troublesome, unless you have too much to start with. put on manure at the beginning of the rainy season and plow it under, with all the green stuff which grows upon it, during the winter or early spring. stable manure and bean straw. what are the approximate contents of common stable manure; also, how much of the above is contained in bean straw? the composition of mixed stable manure is given as containing in one ton: nitrogen, pounds; phosphoric acid, pounds; potash, pounds. the constituents of bean straw in one ton, are given as: nitrogen, pounds; phosphoric acid, pounds; potash, pounds; of course, a large part of the difference in composition is due to the excessive amount of moisture which ordinary stable manure contains. air dried stable manure, such as is found in a california corral, would have much higher fertilizing value than such moist manure as an eastern chemist would be likely to handle. roofing a manure pit. is it necessary to roof a manure pit, if the pit is tight so that all rain on manure is caught in the liquid manure and nothing is lost? to secure satisfactory composting of stable manures in a pit it is necessary to be able to regulate the moisture of the mass. if it becomes too dry, too rapid fermentation takes place and the material is destroyed by what is called fire-fanging. if too much liquid enters the pit, so that the material is submerged, the air is excluded and fermentation stops. for these reasons it is necessary that a pit in the region of large rainfall be covered, and water be used from a hose or other source of supply in just sufficient quantity to keep the material right for slow fermentation. how much water should be added to bring the moisture to a right condition depends upon how much liquid waste runs into the pit, and where water is used for cleaning a stable care has to be taken that the pit is not submerged. success with a pit is, therefore, conditioned on the amount of moisture admitted, and this cannot be controlled unless the pit has a cover fit to shed rainfall. of course, it may be adjustable so that some rainfall may be admitted as may be desirable. value of animals in manure. in the operation of our fruit and dairy ranch we have the manure from some forty head of horses and cattle, which is distributed over the place. we cut our alfalfa and feed it and do very little pasturing. in order to give our dairy the proper credit, we would kindly ask what you consider a fair price for the manure of a cow for one year. also what would the manure from a horse for one year be worth? a compilation of a considerable number of weighings, analyses and valuations in europe, cited by prof. roberts in his book on the "fertility of the land," gives an average value of the voidings of a cow for a year as $ . and of a horse at $ . . this is based, of course, upon the collection and saving of all excrements which is never secured except in careful experimentation. the value of manure depends upon the quality of the feed. in two experiments, considered a safe substitute for the straw, apart from the fact that the gave a value in manure of $ per ton of hay fed; cows fed on clover and bran gave value in manure of . per ton of mixed feed. your alfalfa feeding would approach the higher value. you will have to make an estimate from the above data to serve your purpose and you can figure it either by the number of animals or by the tonnage of the feed. value of fresh and dry manure. what is the relative value of the weekly or semi-weekly corral scrapings which are tramped fine and air-dried; and of the fresh, wet manure from the stable? i do not understand that the latter has appreciable water added, and the amount of sand in the corral scrapings would be small. fresh, mixed animal manure is usually calculated to contain about per cent of water. manure which has been quickly dried, without fermentation and without leaching by rains, may be worth four or five times as much per ton. nothing, however, short of analysis would determine the value of any particular lot, for that depends somewhat upon the way the animals are fed, as well as upon the moisture content. shavings in stable manure. is barnyard fertilizer containing shavings instead of straw, desirable? barnyard manure containing shavings is chiefly objectionable because of the amount of inert material. the shavings are exceedingly slow to decompose, and in light soil in considerable quantities would cause a serious loss of moisture. if applied, on the other hand, to a heavy soil and accompanied by sufficient irrigation water, the effect of making the soil more friable might be very desirable. it depends then upon circumstances whether shavings can be concited by prof. snyder in his "soils and fertilizers," cows fed on hay straw is more valuable not only because more easily decomposed, but because its content of plant food is greater. handling grape pomace. in the case of grape pomace, would not the large value shown by analysis be chiefly in the seeds? my observation is that these are exceedingly slow to became available in the soil. would composting break down the shell of the seed? grape pomace is slowly available because of the slow disintegration you mention. it could be hastened by drying and grinding, but we doubt if this or other treatment would return its cost. decay by moisture promoted by composting with manure, kept at a low temperature by continuous moisture would render it sooner available, but this would involve labor which, at our wage rates, would probably make the material cost more than it is worth. this is probably a cost in which time is cheaper than money. sheep and goat manure. i can buy goat manure from an inclosure where this is deposited to an amount of about five carloads. will goat manure be of great value in fertilizing an orchard? if so, how much of it should be spread an an acre? accumulations of sheep and goat manure in a dry situation, that is, where not leached out by heavy rainfall, have been found to run as high as $ per ton in fertilizing constituents. the average would, however, be not above $ . , and would depend not only upon the unleached condition of the material but upon the amount of sand mixed with it. if it is in a situation where sand blows very freely, it might not be worth over $ or $ per ton, possibly not that much. you have, therefore, to deal with a condition largely unknown. so far as its fertilizing quality goes, however, it is freely available and directly calculated to stimulate the growth of plants, and probably four or five tons could be used to the acre without injury if well distributed over the surface of the land. application can be made at any time of the year, for the drying will not injure it. it will not, however, become available until the soil is sufficiently moist to carry its contents to the roots of the plants. under ordinary conditions in california, application should be made just before the beginning of the rainy season. hog manure and potatoes. what is the fertilizing value of hog manure, and also what is the best fertilizer to use for potatoes? our potatoes are planted early in january. hog manure is rather a rank and strong fertilizer, usually very rich, although the quality of it depends upon how well the hogs have been fed - that from grain-fed hogs being notably better. the valuation of hog manure ranges from $ . to $ . per ton, according to the feeding as noted, while ordinary stable manure may be worth from $ to $ . per ton. it is not a good idea to apply these organic manures directly for the growth of potatoes. it is better to apply them to the land for the growth of a grain or forage crop, plowing in the stubble and using the land for potatoes the following year. if you wish to fertilize directly for potatoes, the use of a commercial fertilizer containing a good amount of potash would be a better proposition. fertilizer for sweet potatoes and melons. i have sandy soil that has been used for sweet potatoes until it is worn out for that crop, and would like your advice as to the best fertilizer to use. also, what fertilizer would be best for melons on land that has been planted to melons for the past three years? there is not much difference in the plant food required by the two crops you mention, but both evidently need a freshened soil and an increase of humus. we should apply a half ton to the acre of a complete fertilizer, of which any dealer can give you descriptions and prices. if you wish to do a good job, start a growth of peas or vetches or burr clover, and sow the fertilizer evenly with the seed. plow the growth under in february and roll (as the soil is sandy) to close down and promote the decay of the green stuff, which ought to be so well accomplished by the date that it is safe to plant sweet potatoes or melons that it will give no trouble in summer cultivation. an abuse of grape pomace. i got in an argument with a neighbor of mine who stated that grape pomace is not a fertilizer. is it so? my neighbor says that two years ago he had two apricot trees in his yard, and they were fine bearing and healthy trees. after making his wine he put the pomace on the ground and they died. could that be the cause? yes, probably. he used too much fresh pomace and the resulting fermentation of its products may have killed the trees. but grape pomace, after going through fermentation and in the process of decay, makes humus in addition to giving potash and other desirable substances to the soil. manuring vineyard. does barnyard manure have any injurious effect on the vines if applied on my vineyard? one of my neighbors claims barnyard manure burned his vines so he got no crop wherever he spread the manure, and nothing would now induce him to use it again. barnyard manure can be safely used in a vineyard at the beginning of the rainy season, working it in with the plowing, but not using too much. wine grapes are sometimes injuriously affected in flavor by the use of such fertilizer, but the growth of the vine itself can be stimulated by the rational use of it. your neighbor apparently either used too much or made the application at the beginning of the dry season or made some other mistake. bones for grape vines. i am going to plant out some grape vines, and would like to know if it is a good plan to put old bones, broken up fine, into the holes when planting. yes, if you do not use too much and it is mixed with earth, a little beyond the touch of the roots at planting. you do not need to finely break the bones. the roots will take care of that. but do not put in too much coarse stuff, for fear of causing too rapid drainage. reviving blighted trees. i have a couple of apple trees here that were hurt by the pear blight three years ago and were cut back since then; they come out each year, but the leaves curl up, and they do not do anything. i would like to know if putting any fertilizer around them would help them to put out their leaves, and if so what i should use? put some stable manure on the top of the soil around your trees now so that the rains may reach the contents of the soil, then later in the season dig the manure into the soil. apply water during the summer time and this will encourage the trees to grow, if there is any vigor remaining in them. this treatment, however, will not protect them from the blight. fertilizing pear orchard. i have pear trees years old which have fruited heavily for years and have never been fertilized. what is the best fertilizer for the soil which is heavy, and when is the best time to apply it? i intend planting rye to plow under in the spring, but thought possibly the fertilizer should be applied first. if you have stable manure available, nothing could be better for the feeding of the trees and for its mellowing effect upon your heavy soil. application can be made at once, to be worked into the land when the rye is sown. it will help the trees and give you more rye which in the end will help the trees. if you have no stable manure available, what is called by the dealers a "complete fertilizer" for orchard purposes is what you should use and apply it when you work the land for rye. fertilizing olives. what is the best means of fertilizing an olive orchard? my orchard gives me a perfect quality of oil, but a poor quantity. my soil is dry calcareous, red and gray, and is very thin in places, therefore, it lacks moisture. an olive orchard can be fertilized with stable manure or with a "complete fertilizer," or with the special brands of different manufacturers of special fruit fertilizers. but you must be sure that your trees do not need moisture more than they need fertilizers, for without adequate moisture fertilizers cannot do their best work. the increase of the humus content of the soil, either secured by stable manure or by the plowing under of winter-grown cover crops, is desirable, as they not only give the trees more plant food, but make the soil also more retentive of moisture. you will have to experiment along this line to see just what is best for your trees. consult the trees. can i send you a little soil out of my one-year-old pear orchard so that you can advise me what i can do to improve its fertility. the trees are fairly thrifty, but as fruit growing is my pleasure i wish to make it a model orchard and add whatever it requires of nitrogen, humus, etc., immediately so as to increase the growth for this summer. next winter i intend to put manure around them and cultivate about every other month. careful experimenting with fertilizers will teach you more than analysis would do, because the behavior of the tree under various conditions tells you more than a chemist possibly could. besides, we are of the conviction that on good soils young fruit trees should not be pushed beyond the growth which they would naturally make with a regular and adequate moisture supply. be careful about using fertilizers on young trees, either in the summer or in the winter. when they come to bearing age and yield large crops of fruit, that is another question. any california soil which will not grow young fruit trees thriftily should not be used for orchard purposes unless an amateur desires to grow trees on a picturesque lot of rocks or sand. results of fertilizing olives. we have acres in olives about six miles northeast of rialto in san bernardino county. in we got about five tons from the acres. we began fertilizing and cultivating in , and have put on the acres about the same amount of fertilizer each year. in we got tons; in , tons, and is estimated at to tons. it is important that your olive trees are responding to good treatment and fertilization. unfortunately, that does not seem to be always the case and a good many olive trees have been made into firewood because nothing seemed to bring them into satisfactory bearing. good bearing olive trees are now among the very best of our horticultural properties, while non-bearing olive trees are worth about $ a cord for fire wood. nursery fertilizers. i have light sandy loam, well drained. it has been in blackberries, and i now have it planted to nursery fruit tree stock. i have given it this spring two applications of nitrate of soda, but no other fertilizer. will the nitrate act alone, or must i apply also the phosphate and potash to get results? nitrate of soda will act alone and will stimulate growth, and there are cases in which there is enough phosphate and potash already in the soil to act with it. usually, however, it is customary to use a complete fertilizer containing phosphate and potash as well as nitrogen, in order that the plant may be more roundly supplied and promoted, and one would be a little safer in using that sort of fertilizer than in relying upon the nitrate of soda alone. you will, of course, be careful not to use these fertilizers in too large amounts, for nitrate of soda is especially dangerous if used in excess. almond hulls and sawdust. is there any fertilizing value in the hulls of almonds? would pine sawdust from the lumber mills be a good substance to mix in and plow under in a three-acre adobe patch in order to loosen and lighten the soil for truck gardening? almond hulls have considerable fertilizing value, but they are slow to decompose, and, therefore, may be a long time unused by the plant. they also have a good feeding value for stock, and if you can expose them in the corral so the stock can eat as they like, this is the best way to get them into fertilizing form. if they can be cheaply ground their availability as a fertilizer would, of course, be quickened. redwood sawdust is better than pine sawdust, but any kind of sawdust can be made to serve a good purpose in mellowing heavy soils if not used to excess and if there is plenty of moisture to promote decay. fertilizing fruit trees. i have an orchard of prunes, apricots and cherries, which has been bearing since some years ago, without fertilization, except possibly muddy sediment from occasional irrigations of mountain streams. various people are advocating the use of nitrates and other fertilizers. should i have samples of this earth analyzed in order to ascertain what the soil most needs? to find out whether your trees need fertilization, study the tree and the product and do not depend upon chemical analysis of the soil. if your trees are growing thriftily and have sufficiently goodsized leaves of good color, and if fruit of good size and quality is obtained, it is not necesssary to think of fertilization. if the trees are not satisfactory in all these respects, the first thing to do is to determine whether they have moisture enough during the later part of the summer. this should be determined by digging or boring to a depth or three or four feet in july or august. the subsoil should be reasonably moist in order to sustain the tree during the late summer and early fall when strong fruit buds for the coming year will be finished. if you are sure the moisture supply is ample, then fertilization either with stable manure or with commercial fertilizers containing especially nitrates and phosphates should be undertaken experimentally, in accordance with suggestions for application made to you by dealers in these articles, who are usually well informed by observation. when you have the tree to advise you of the condition of the soil, you do not need a chemist, although if the tree manifests serious distress and is unable to make satisfactory growth the suggestions of a chemist may be very helpful. fertilizing oranges. what is the general and what do you consider the ideal, manuring, and when applied for orange trees from to years old under irrigation? i use about cwt. each of superphosphate, nitrate of soda and sulphate of potash per acre, but am dissatisfied with my yields as compared with yours in california. there is not only no standard for fertilizing orange trees, but there is no "ideal" which might be considered as a basis for a standard. all growers who are awake to the necessity of doing something for bearing trees, try all things and hold fast to what (they think) is good. practically none of them has any enduring conviction or demonstration as to what is good, but they keep on trying. there is, however, one clear and enduring conviction, and that is, that continuous fertilizing must be done for profit, and our best growers are using the same materials you mention in considerably larger amounts than you apply, and use also other forms of nitrogenous fertilizers. the amounts of superphosphate and nitrate which you use would be considered homeopathic treatment by our growers. cow stable drainage for fruit. i have been told that the drainings from a cow barn make an excellent fertilizer for orange and lemon trees, in fact, anywhere on plants where manure is considered beneficial. the drainage from a cow barn is excellent for fertilizing almost any crop unless it is used in too large quantity. if it should be combined with a considerable amount of water used for cleaning out the stable, it would be excellent for the irrigation of all kinds of fruit trees. care should be taken, however, not to oversaturate the ground, which would be the case if the washing of the stable was allowed to run continuously alongside a single row of trees. the water should be changed from row to row in succession, cultivating the ground meantime to promote aeration and to prevent too great compacting of the soil. seed farm refuse as a fertilizer. would cleanings from sweet peas or all kinds of seeds grown on a seed farm be of any value as a fertilizer on sandy loam soil for an orchard? this has been in a pile for three years or more, and i can get it for the hauling. there are a hundred loads or more of it and not very far to haul. it would be worth more on a heavy soil, because the danger of drying out would be less and the surety of reduction to humus greater. to get the highest value from such stuff it should be composted with water and turning in heaps, but that would occasion expense beyond value probably, unless it could be composted with manure for market garden purposes. the hauling might be good work for idle teams. spread the stuff rather thinly to be covered in with fall plowing, so that its decay could be promoted during the rainy season. slow stuff as a fertilizer. how can we use sawdust and shavings from our high school shop so as to combine it with street sweepings, lawn cuttings, etc., and insure ready decay without objectionable features? do not mix sawdust and shavings with lawn clippings and street sweepings, because of the great difference in susceptibility to decay. the lawn clippings and street sweepings, which would contain considerable horse manure, would be readily transformed into a good fertilizer by composting. such treatment, however, would have no appreciable effect upon sawdust or shavings for a considerable period of time, and they would still be too coarse in their character to be of any value unless you have to deal with heavy clay soil, and in that case the sawdust and fine shavings might be dug in at once and trusted to decay slowly in the soil, at the same time improving its friability by their coarser particles. if, however, you are dealing with light sandy loam, such coarse material would cause too rapid drying out and injure the plant, which might be benefited by lawn clippings and street sweepings. the best way to get rid of the sawdust and shavings is to set up an altar, such as we have in our own backyard - a piece of an old boiler about two feet in diameter and two and a half feet high, in which we currently burn all rubbish which is not available for quick composting into a fertilizer. lime on sandy soil. do you think pounds of lime per acre would help a sandy soil which has not been enriched by pasturing or legumes? of course, we would not apply the lime until next fall before plowing. lime is not usually called for in a sandy soil, which probably requires direct fertilizing with stable or commercial fertilizers. lime on alfalfa. what effect does putting lime on land have in holding moisture? also, will it pay to put it on a large field of alfalfa? the land is adobe. i can get slaked lime for the hauling, distance being about five miles. the lime will make the land more friable and, therefore, less disposed to bake and lose moisture by evaporation. alfalfa is hungry for lime and is generally advanced by the application of it. fertilizing alfalfa. can new cow manure be put on alfalfa? is not the best way to use the above as a fertilizer in form of liquid being run from barn via pipes to a settling-tank and from there via irrigation ditches to the land to be irrigated? what is the best way to get rid of cow manure so as to keep a barn sanitary and the place free from stench? cow manure can be used to advantage on alfalfa. corrals can be cleaned up and the manure spread at the beginning of the rainy season. during the winter the manure can be spread as it is produced and very good results will be noticed in the growth during the following summer. it is perfectly rational for you to use the liquid fertilizer as you propose in connection with irrigation water, but this is not generally done because of the cost of the outfit and the labor of handling the material in that way. the best way to keep a barn sanitary is to keep it clean, removing all the waste matter to a considerable distance daily, allowing nothing to accumulate, and have the stable drainage arranged so that the stable can be frequently flushed out into good drainage outlets, carrying the water to grass or alfalfa land if possible. fertilizing corn. we are going to plant about acres to corn on a sidehill and intend to put some fertilizer on, but want to give it to the corn only. would it be a good plan, after we have marked out our rows, to scatter some fertilizer in these marks and put the corn right on top of it? we take it you ask about the use of a readily soluble commercial fertilizer. if so, you can do as you propose, being careful not to use too much. the operation of planting will distribute the fertilizer through enough soil if the application is not too heavy. the effect will depend something upon what showers you get after planting. scrap iron as a fertilizer. is cast or other iron in small pieces plowed into the land of any benefit to trees as a fertilizer? if so, what would be the value as such per pounds? junk dealers sometimes offer cents per pounds. if it has any value as a fertilizer, i am satisfied it must be worth four times that price. we pay three cents a pound for sulphate of iron as a fertilizer. of course, it is a salt and dissolves quickly, therefore, i believe cast iron, even if it works slowly, has some value, and at the same time farmers can clean up and get rid of a lot of rubbish. in most cases the california soils are sufficiently supplied with iron by nature. iron scraps have a little and remote value because they are so slowly available by the process of rust disintegration. it might, therefore, be worth while for farmers to bury such scrap iron as accumulates on the place below the reach of the cultivating tools. but it would not be profitable to buy iron scraps at junk dealers' price, nor would it be profitable to haul this material any long distance, even if it could be had for nothing. kelp as a fertilizer. are there ill effects from using sea kelp as a fertilizer for orange trees? there is no ill effect. sea kelp has been dragged from the beaches at low tide, partly dried and used, for centuries perhaps, as field fertilizer for all sorts of crops in europe, and for decades, to some extent, on the new england coast. the dangerous substance in it would seem to indicate that that is not present in sufficient quantity to cause trouble. the great difficulty lies in securing and transporting the substance, for less than its fertilizing equivalent can be obtained by purchase of other more concentrated manures. applying thomas phosphate. when is the best time to apply thomas phosphate slag on orchard land? as thomas phosphate is slowly soluble, it can be applied at any time during the rainy season without danger of loss, and for the same fact, it should be applied early during the rainy season in order to be available to trees during the following summer's growth. it ought, perhaps, to be added that other forms of phosphate have largely displaced slag during the last few years in the united states, other forms being more available. sugar factory lime for fertilizing. is the lime from a sugar factory a good fertilizer for either oranges or walnuts; if so, about what amount to the acre would you recommend? if your land needs lime or if it is heavy and needs to be more friable, or if you have reason to think that it may be soured by exclusion of air or by excessive use of fermenting manures, the refuse lime you speak of will do as a corrective just as other lime does, though, perhaps, not so actively. beyond that there is nothing of great value in it. you can use two or three applications of pounds to the acre without overdoing it - if your land needs it at all. nitrate with stable manure. i am going to plant about plants of rhubarb. i intend to put some cow and horse manure under the plants as a fertilizer, but i do not think i will have enough for all the plants, so i bought some nitrate of lime, with the intention of mixing the cow and horse manure with the lime nitrate, which i thought would allow me to spread the manure much thinner and i could cover more surface. now i am not sure but the nitrate of lime will burn the manure if mixed with it. you can mix either nitrate of lime or nitrate of soda with the stable manure as you propose; in fact, it is frequently done. these nitrates are neutral salts and do not act on manure as caustic lime or wood ashes would do. they are quite content to keep along without kicking their neighbors. but, of course, the more nitrate you add the more careful you must be about using too much of the mixture, and as for putting manure under any plant, at spring planting particular, it is dangerous business. nitrate of soda. how shall i apply nitrate of soda as fertilizer for roses and other flowers and lawns during the summer months? one has to be very careful in the use of nitrate of soda not to use too much and not to apply it unevenly, so that too much is brought in contact with the roots of particular plants. from one to two hundred pounds an acre evenly distributed is the usual prescription for nitrate of soda, although in the case of bearing orange trees considerably larger amounts have been successfully used. this would be at the rate of about one ounce to one square yard of surface. it would be a safe application to begin with and could be increased a little on the basis of observation of results. of course, the application should be accompanied by copious irrigation in order to dissolve and distribute the substance. fertilizing strawberries. i have half an acre of strawberries which will fruit their second season this spring, and half an acre set last month. i had intended to use nitrate of soda on them, but was talking to a friend who told me it would kill my soil. that the first year it would produce an enormous crop and the next year i couldn't raise anything. which would be better to use here, stable manure or commercial fertilizer? it is true that nitrate of soda is a stimulant of plants, and by rendering soil fertility immediately available may seem to reduce the supply later, and yet it is a most available forcing fertilizer if used with great caution, not over pounds to the acre evenly scattered over the whole surface or a less amount, of course, if confined to particular areas. if used in excess it may actually kill the plants. still nitrate of soda is being used actively and intelligently by nearly all growers of plants and must be counted on the whole a valuable agency. if you can get stable manure, nothing is better as a complete plant food. application to strawberries must be made at the close of the season, rubbish scraped away and manure applied and allowed to stand on the surface during the early rains, being worked into the soil during the rainy season. if the soil is light, sandy loam, too much coarse material must be avoided. therefore, well-rotted manure is important on such soils while on a heavy soil coarser material may be used to advantage if applied early in the rainy season. if you have no well-rotted manure, a complete commercial fertilizer will give best results. late applications of nitrate. i have some prune trees which blossomed some time ago and the prunes are already set, and of small size. would you recommend me to use an application of, say pounds per acre of nitrate of soda, applied immediately, or is it a little too late in the season to get the desired result? it would be perfectly safe to use pounds of nitrate of soda to the acre well distributed now; in fact, you could safely use twice as much, but we doubt if you would get any benefit from it unless you should irrigate, for there is no reason to expect showers that would have penetrating powers enough to carry the nitrate any appreciable distance into the soil. of course, the nitrate could be plowed or cultivated in to a considerable depth, but that would probably result in losing moisture by deep opening or turning, which would do more harm than any gain which the nitrate produces, if it were to become available. our judgment would be, then, that it is too late for any benefit to accrue unless the land can be irrigated. charcoal is a medicine, not a food. recently a lumberyard burned, leaving quite a quantity of charcoal. i have a lot x feet in rhubarb. would the charcoal be of any service on that lot as a fertilizer? i now have it well fertilized with horse manure, but would like to use the charcoal if it would be of any material assistance to the plants. charcoal is of no value as a fertilizer. it is practically indestructible in the soil. in fact, they are digging up now charcoal in the graves of ancient egyptians, who departed this life five thousand years ago. charcoal has corrective influence in absorbing some substances which might make the soil sour or otherwise inhospitable to plants. it has been found desirable sometimes to mix a certain amount of charcoal with soil used in potting plants for the purpose of preventing such trouble. the only way to make your charcoal of any value as a fertilizer would be to set it on fire again and maintain the burning until it was reduced to ashes, which are a source of potash and, therefore, desirable, but it will probably cost more than the product of potash will be worth. humus burning out. i would like to know whether or not dry-plowing land, in preparation for sowing oats for hay, injures the soil? i have heard that dry plowing tends to wear out the soil, as the soil is exposed to the sun a long time before harrowing. i have been dry-plowing my land to kill the, weeds, but had a light crop of hay this year. there is believed to be what is called "a burning out of humus," by long exposure of the soil to the intense heat of our interior districts. it is probable that the reduction of humus is due more to the lack of effort to maintain the supply than to the actual destruction of it by culture methods. such a little time as might intervene between dry plowing and sowing could not be charged with any appreciable destruction of soil fertility. it is altogether more probable that your hay crop was less from loss of moisture than from loss of other plant food; and it is desirable to harrow a dry plowing, not so much to save the soil from the action of the atmosphere, as to conserve the moisture, which, as you know, will rise from below and will rapidly be evaporated from the undisturbed bases of your furrows. therefore, we should harrow a dry plowing as soon as practicable, but with particular reference to the moisture supply rather than to other forms of fertility. straw for humus. do you consider straw good to plow under for humus, and which kind, wheat, oat, or barley straw, is best? straw, by its decay in the soil, produces humus and, therefore acts in the same way just as does the decay of other forms of vegetation. as, however, straw is less easily decomposed than fresh vegetation, it is less valuable and may be troublesome by acquiring a greater amount of moisture by interfering with cultivation or by tending to dry out the soil to the injury of other plants. if the soil is heavy and moisture abundant, straw may be desirable, while in the case of a light soil and scant moisture, may be injurious. there is no particular difference in the straw of the different grains from this point of view. the best legume for cover crop. what would you advise to sow as a crop to plow under? when should it be sowed, and when plowed under? the best crop for green-manuring in any locality is the one which will make the best growth when surplus moisture is available for it, and when its growth can be undertaken with least interference with irrigation, cultivation and other orchard operation. generally in california, such a crop can be most conveniently grown during the rainy season, but in some parts of the state where irrigation water is available, a summer growth can be procured with very satisfactory results; so that we are now growing in california both wintergrowing legumes, like field peas, vetches, burr clover, etc., which are hardy enough to grow in spite of the light frosts which may prevail, and are also growing summer legumes which thrive under high temperature, like cowpeas and other members of the bean family, and for which water can be spared without injury to the fruit trees which share the application of the land with them. the plants which are worth trying are burr clover, common or oregon vetch, canadian field pea, and the common california or niles pea. whichever one of these makes the best winter growth so that it can be plowed under early in the spring, say in february or march, while there is still plenty of moisture in the soil for its decay, without robbing the trees or rendering the soil difficult of summer cultivation, is the plant for you to use largely. all these plants should be sown in california valleys and foothills, as soon as there is moisture enough from rainfall to warrant you in believing they will catch and continue to grow. if the land is light they can be put in with a cultivator and plowed under deeply in the spring, as stated. if the land is heavy, probably a shallow plowing would be better to begin with. cowpeas for cover crop. i planted cowpeas between peach trees which i have kept irrigated; when should they be plowed under? cowpeas will be killed by frost in most places and should, therefore, be plowed in this fall whenever you have a large growth of green stuff and the ground gets moist enough so that the trees will not be endangered by drying out of the soil, which is likely to occur after plowing in coarse material, unless the soil is kept moist by rain or otherwise. garden peas for green manure. would it be possible to plant the yorkshire hero pea in on orange grove as late as december and get a crop from the peas? would this pea add much to the fertility of the soil? you can sow any garden peas as late as december , if the ground is in good condition and the temperature not too low. they are grown as a winter crop except when the ground freezes. you would not get as much good for the grove by growing these peas for the market as you would by plowing the whole growth under green, but you certainly will get advantage from the decomposition of the pea straw and of the root growth of the plant. grass for green manuring. i wish to sow this fall some green grass to be plowed in next spring to improve the soil of part of my land. i read for that purpose a bulletin i had from the government, but the conditions are so different here in california that i am very much puzzled which kind to select. there is no grass which grows quickly enough to be worth seeding in the fall for spring plowing. it is a good deal better to use a grain, either barley or rye, for the seed is cheap, the growth quick and you can get a good deal of green stuff to plow under. legumes are, of course, better because of their ability to absorb atmospheric nitrogen, but any plant which makes a large green growth is good, and it is better to have a heavy weight of wild vegetation than to have a light growth of an introduced legume. manure with a clover crop. i have an old apple orchard in which i intend to sow burr clover. in order to get the clover to grow i know that i shall have to use fertilizer of some kind and this is what i want your advice about. if you can get it, use stable manure at the time of sowing the clover seed. stable manure alone will restore the humus and overcome the rebellious behavior of the soil. possibly you cannot secure sufficient quantities of it. in that case a little with the burr clover seed will give the plant a good start, or use a complete fertilizer to secure the growth of a legume in the freest and quickest way. fenugreek as a cover crop. fenugreek has been recommended to be as a nitrogen-gathering plant, but i cannot find information as to the amount of nitrogen it gathers in its roots and tops, nor the amount of crop per acre. fenugreek is a good nitrogen gatherer and is desirable for green manuring wherever you can get a good growth of the plant. you can count it worth as much as peas, vetches, etc., if you can get as much growth of the plant. it is most largely used in the lemon district near santa paula. the best way to proceed would be to try a small area of all the nitrogen gathering plants of which you can get the seed easily, and determine by your own observation which makes the best growth under your conditions. improvement of cementing soils. i would like some advice in handling the "cementy" gravel soil. manure is beneficial in loosening up the soil, but there is not enough available. would the canadian field pea make a satisfactory growth here if sown as soon as the rains begin? i would try to grow either peas or vetch and plow under in february or march and then set trees or vines on the land. the way to mellow your soil is certainly to use stable manure or to plow under green stuff, as you propose. this increases the humus which the soil needs and imparts all the desirable characters and qualities which humus carries. you ought to get a good growth of canadian field peas or common california field peas or the common oregon vetch by sowing in the fall, as soon as the ground can be moistened by rain or irrigation, and, if the season is favorable, secure enough growth for plowing under in february to make it worth while. be careful, however, not to defer planting trees and vines too late in order to let the green stuff grow, because this would hazard the success of your planting by the reduction of the moisture supply during the following summer by the amount which might be required to keep the covered-in stuff decaying, plus loss of moisture from the fact that the covered stuff prevented you from getting thorough surface cultivation during the dry season. for these reasons one is to be careful about planting on covered-in stuff which has not had a chance to decay. this consideration, of course, becomes negligible if you have water for summer irrigation, but if you expect to get the growth of your trees and vines with the rainfall of the previous winter, be careful not to waste it in either of the ways which have been indicated, and above all, do not plant trees and vines too late. theoretically, your position is perfect. the application of it, however, requires some care and judgment. rather than plant too late, you had better grow the green stuff the winter after the trees have been planted. needs organic matter. i have what i believe to be decomposed sandstone. many rocks are still projecting out of land which i blast and break up. the soil works freely when moist or wet, but when dry it takes a pick-axe to dig it up; a plow won't touch it. among my young fruit trees i tried to grow peas, beans, carrots and beets, and although i freely irrigated them during the summer and fall, and although i planted at different times, my peas and beans have been a total failure, and the beets, carrots and onions nearly so. for years the land has grown nothing but weeds. your soil needs organic matter which would make it more easy of cultivation, more retentive of moisture, and in every way better suited to the growth of plants. liberal applications of stable manure would produce best effects. no commercial fertilizer would begin to be so desirable. if you can dig into the soil large amounts of weeds or other vegetable waste material, you would be proceeding along the same line, but stable manure is better on account of its greater fertilizing content. you ought to be thankful that the soil has spunk enough to grow weeds. the immanent creator is still doing the best he can to help you out; take a hand yourself on the same line. two legumes in a year. i have land on which i wish to plant to fruits, and i wish to build up the soil all i can, by planting cover crops and plowing under. what would be the best to plant this fall, to be plowed under next spring, and to plant again next spring to plow under in the fall? i will not be able to plant any trees before next fall or the following spring. get in vetches as soon as the ground is in shape in the fall. plow them under early in the spring and close the covering and compact the green stuff by running a straight disk over the ground after plowing. this will help decay and save moisture. follow with cow peas as soon as you are out of the frost, disking in the seed so as not to disturb the stuff previously covered in. do not wait to put under the winter growth until it is safe to put on the cowpeas, for, if you do, you will lose so much moisture that the cowpeas will not amount to much. handling orchard soil. we average about inches of rainfall. with this heavy rainfall, is there any advantage to be gained by early plowing and clean cultivation right through the winter? would such plowing and cultivation result in any serious loss of plant food? would you advise an early or late application of nitrogen, such as nitrate or guano? if there is any loss from an early application, can it be determined by any means? the old policy of clean winter cultivation has been largely abandoned. nearly everyone is trying to grow something green during the rainy season to plow under toward the end of it. even those who do not sow legumes for this purpose are plowing under as good a weed cover as they can get. this improves the soil both in plant food and in friability, which promotes summer pulverization and saves moisture from summer evaporation. much less early plowing is done than formerly unless it be shallow to get in the seed for the cover crop; the deeper plowing being done to put it under. guano can be applied earlier in the winter than nitrate, which can be turned in with the cover crop, while the former may be sown with the seed to promote the winter growth. whether you are losing your nitrate or not the chemist might determine for you by before-and-after analyses. if you are a good observer you may detect loss by absence of the effects you desire to secure. soaking seeds. do you think it a good practice to soak seeds before planting? it is more desirable with some seeds than others and when the ground is rather dry or the sowing time rather late, than when sowing in moister ground or earlier in the rainy season, when heavy rains are to be expected. soaking is simply a way to be sure that the seed covering has ample moisture for softening and the kernel has what it requires for awakening it germ and meeting its needs. the soil may not always have enough to spare for these purposes and germination may be delayed or started and arrested. ordinarily seeds can be helped by soaking a few hours in water at ordinary temperatures. some very hard seeds like those of acacia trees, etc., are helped by hot water - even near the boiling point. irrigating palms. my palms are quite small, but they do not seem to grow; they seem to be drying up. the growth of palms is proportional to the amount of soil moisture available, providing it is not in excess and not too alkaline. some palms are quite drouth-resisting, but it is a mistake to think of a palm as a desert plant and try to make a desert for it. a young palm, especially, needs regular and ample water supply until it gets well established. your plants may be drying up, or they may have had too much frost or too much alkali. if they are not too far gone, they will come out later if you give them regular moisture and cultivation. water from wells or streams. one of our neighbors insists that water from a well is, in the long run, very hard on the land, and that irrigation water is much to be preferred. there is no characteristic and permanent difference between waters from wells and waters from streams so far as irrigation is concerned. the character depends upon the sources from which both are derived. some wells may carry too much mineral matter in the form of salt, alkali, etc., and some stream waters sometimes carry considerable alkali. for this reason some wells may be better than streams and some streams better than wells. there is no general rule in the matter. your neighbor may be right as applied to your location, and may know from his experience that the well water carries too much undesirable material. that could only be determined by analysis, and the analysis must be made when the water is rather low, because during the rainy season, or soon after it, the water may have less mineral impurity than later in the season when it may be more concentrated. shall he irrigate or cultivate? our soil is of an excellent quality, and i feel if the moisture were properly conserved by suitable methods it could be made to produce fruits or some other very much more profitable than from hay and grain crops. whether you can grow deciduous fruits successfully without irrigation depends not only upon how well you conserve the moisture by cultivation, but also whether the total rainfall conveys water enough, even if as much as possible of it is conserved. again, you might find that thorough cultivation will give you satisfactory young trees, but would not conserve moisture enough for the same trees when they come into bearing. this proposition should be studied locally. if you can find trees in the vicinity which do give satisfactory fruit under the rainfall, you would have a practical demonstration which would be more trustworthy than any forecast which could be prepared upon theoretical grounds. condensation for irrigation. if a circular funnel of waterproofed building paper, or some better cheap device, were fastened about the base of the tree in such a manner as to catch and concentrate most of the drippings from the leaves, and that water made to run down through a tube leading a suitable depth into the earth, it seems to me that the number of foggy nights that occur in many localities during the season might thus supply ample water for a tree's needs. the probability is that water would not be secured in sufficient quantities to serve any notable irrigation purposes, or if the fogs were so thick as to yield water enough, the sunshine would be too scant for the success of the plant. put your idea to the test and see how much water you could get from a tree of definite leaf area, which could be readily estimated. winter irrigation. last may i irrigated my prune trees for the first time, again during the first two weeks of last december. if no rain should come within the next two weeks, would you advise me to irrigate then? should i plow before irrigating, or should irrigation be done before the buds swell? unless your ground is deeply wet down by the rains which are now coming, irrigate it once, and do not plow before irrigating. the point is to get as much water into the ground and as much grass growth on top as you can before the spring plowing. never mind about the swelling of the buds. the trees will not be affected injuriously by getting a good supply of winter water into the soil. there might be some danger with trees which bloom late in the spring, like citrus trees or olives, because by that time the ground has become warm and the roots very active. at the blooming time of deciduous trees less danger would threaten, because there is less difference between the temperature of the ground and the water which you were then applying from a running stream. if you irrigated in furrows and, therefore, did not collect the water in mass, its temperature would rise by contact with air, which would be another reason for not apprehending trouble from it. how much water for oranges? how much water would you consider absolutely necessary to carry to full-bearing citrus trees an clay loam-that is, how many acres to a miner's inch, figuring nine gallons per minute to the inch? it would, of course, depend upon the age of the trees, as old bearing trees may require twice as much as young trees. we would estimate for bearing trees, on such retentive soil, -acre inches per year applied in the way best for the soil. damping-off. my orange seed-bed stack has "damp-off." same say "too much water;" "not enough water;" "put on lime;" etc. i use a medium amount of water and more of my stack is affected than that of any other grower. one man has kept his well soaked since planting, and only about six plants were affected. another has used but little water, keeping them very dry; he has lost none. damping-off is due to a fungus which attacks the tender growth when there is too much surface moisture. it may be produced by rather a small amount of water, providing the soil is heavy and the water is not rapidly absorbed and distributed. on the other hand, a lighter soil taking water more easily may grow plants without damping-off, even though a great deal more water has been used than on the heavier soil. too much shade, which prevents the sun from drying the surface soil, is also likely to produce damping-off, therefore, one has to provide just the right amount of shade and the right amount of ventilation through circulation of the air, etc. the use of sand on the surface of a heavier soil may save plants from damping-off, because the sand passes the water quickly and dries, while a heavier surface soil would remain soggy. lime may be of advantage if not used in too great quantities because it disintegrates the surface of the soil and helps to produce a dryness which is desirable. keeping the surface dry enough and yet providing the seedlings with moisture for a free and satisfactory growth is a matter which must be determined by experience and good judgment. irrigated or non-irrigated trees. is there any difference between the same kind of fruit trees grown without irrigation and with it? it does not make a particle of difference, if the trees are grown well and matured well. overirrigated trees or trees growing on land naturally moist may be equally bad. excessively large trees and stunted trees are both bad; with irrigation you may be more likely to get the first kind; without it you are more likely to get the latter. there is, however, a difference between a stunted tree and a wellgrown small tree, and as a rule medium-sized trees are most desirable than overgrown trees. the mere fact of irrigation does not make either good trees or bad trees: it is the man at the ditch. too little rather than too much water. looking through an orchard of -year-old prune trees on riverbottom land, i found a number of the trees had died. a well bored in the orchard strikes water at about feet. i find no apparent reason far the death of these trees unless it is that the tap roots reach this body of water and are injuriously affected thereby. we do not believe that water at feet depth could possibly kill a prune tree. it is more likely that owing to spotted condition of the soil, gravel should occur in different places, and with gravel three or four feet below the surface a tree might actually die although there was plenty of water at a depth of feet. there is more danger that the trees died from lack of water than from an oversupply of it, and it is quite likely also that you could pump and irrigate to advantage large trees which did not seem to be up to the standard of the whole place, as manifested by lack of bearing, smallness of leaves, which would be apt to turn yellow too early in the season. possibly too much water. my trees are four years old and are as follows: peach, fig, loquat, apple, apricot and plum. last year they had plenty of blossoms, but i got no fruit. i always watered them twice a week in summer. you are watering your trees too much; stimulating their growth too much, and this, while a tree is young, is apt to postpone its fruit bearing. give the soil a good soaking about once a mouth, unless you are situated in a sandy or gravelly soil, in which more frequent applications may be necessary. too little water after dynamiting. in planting almonds on a dry hard soil i dynamited the holes and ran about gallons of water into each hole before planting. about per cent of the trees started growth, but seem now to be in a somewhat dormant state, the leaves of some being slightly wilted. all the trees were watered since planting. i have been told i made a mistake by throwing water in the dynamited holes. when the holes were watered the ground was very dry and the water disappeared in a few minutes. you have used too little water rather than too much. dry soil of fine texture can suck up an awful lot of moisture, which can be drawn off so far, or so widely distributed, that there will not be enough for the immediate vicinity of the roots. the dynamiting tended to deep drying and necessitated much more irrigation. irrigating young trees. we have just put out acres to walnuts. the party who put them out wants me to have some boxes or troughs made inches long with a -inch opening, and put in on the slant so as to have the water hit the roots. many such arrangements of boxes, perforated cans, pieces of tile, etc., have been proposed during the last fifty years in california for accomplishing the purposes which are mentioned in your letter, and all such devices have been abandoned as undesirable. they may bring the water to bear upon a lower level as intended, but the free access of air and the fact that, with their use, proper stirring of the soil is neglected renders them undesirable. the best way to water young trees singly is to make a trench around tree, but not allowing the water to touch the bark, applying the water and then thoroughly hoe when the surface soil comes into proper condition. young trees treated in this way, with the surface always in good condition, do not require much water. the amount depends, of course, upon whether the soil is naturally porous or retentive. underground irrigation. how extensively used and with what results is the underground tile system for irrigation used, and what especial character of soil is it best suited for? not extensively at all; in fact, if there is an acre of it which has been for three years in continuous and successful operation, it has escaped us. after forty years of trial of different systems, none has demonstrated value enough to warrant its use. theoretically, they are excellent; in practice they are defective. surface application in different ways, according to the nature of the soil, accompanied with thorough cultivation, is the only thing that at the present time promises satisfactory results, except that where the land suits it, irrigation by underflow from ditches on higher elevations is being successfully used on small areas in the foothills. for gardens the most promising arrangement seems to be a laying of drain tiles rather near the surface, which shall be taken up each year, cleaned of silt and plant roots, and relaid along the rows before planting; but this calls for too much labor, except perhaps for amateur gardeners. the kind of soil best suited to such a system is a medium loam which will distribute water sufficiently to avoid saturation and air-exclusion. both a heavy soil which does this, and a coarse sandy loam which takes water down out of reach of shallow-rooting plants too rapidly and lacks capillarity to draw it up again, are ill adapted to underground distribution. irrigation of potatoes. will you kindly tell me when is the proper time to irrigate potatoes, before they bloom or after they bloom, and do they require much water? it should seldom be necessary to irrigate potatoes after the bloom appears. potatoes do not need much water, and there is danger of giving them too much. it is absolutely essential to see that there is no check in the growth of the plant, for once the growth is at all checked by drought, and irrigation is done, a new lot of potatoes start and new and old growth of tubers are worthless. give what irrigation is needed and make cultivation do the rest. the secret of success is keeping the soil continually at the right moisture, so that the first growth of the plant may continue regularly until the tubers are brought to maturity. irrigated or non-irrigated apples. where soil and climatic conditions are favorable to the raising of apples, what effect has irrigation an them? the commercial product of california apples is chiefly made upon deep soils in districts of ample rainfall so that the fruit can be perfected and the trees maintained in thrift by thorough cultivation and without irrigation. in the foothill and mountain regions, however, apple trees are irrigated and first-class fruit produced by the process. there is no particular virtue in the absence of irrigation nor in the presence of it. all that the tree requires is that the moisture supply should be adequate and timely. there are undoubtedly many apple orchards grown without irrigation where a little water during the latter part of the summer would be a great advantage for the perfection of winter varieties. irrigating walnuts-checks or furrows. which is the best method to irrigate a tract of acres of sandy sediment sail, nearly level, preparatory to planting walnuts? by all means use the furrow system of irrigation unless your land should be so light that the water would sink in the furrows and distribution would be very unequal without covering the whole surface as is done by filling checks. when the land cannot be covered well by the furrow system, checking is resorted to, but not otherwise. summer and fall irrigation. is it desirable to irrigate peach trees in the fall after the crop is gathered? the popularity of autumn irrigation for peaches in the san joaquin valley is based upon the experience of the last few years where trees that have been allowed to become dormant too early in the season and have been weakened by a long period of soil-drought during the autumn, have cast their blossoms or manifested other indications of weakness during the following year. it is thoroughly rational to apply irrigation to hold the leaves and secure their service in the strengthening of bloom buds for the following year by irrigation. such irrigation should be applied immediately after the fruit is gathered or even before that, if the yellowing of the leaves indicates lack of strength in the tree and the frequency and amount of irrigation during the autumn depends upon whether the soil will hold moisture enough to carry the tree to its proper period of dormancy. this may be determined by the aspect of the trees and by digging down two or three feet to see whether the soil carries moisture which is likely to be sufficient until the coming of the rains. whether late irrigation will be necessary is also determinable by the character of the soil; on close retentive soil it may not be necessary, while on loose, sandy or gravelly soil it may be essential to the life of the tree. one has to settle all these matters by judgment and not by recipe. fertilizers in irrigation water. do you recommend putting fertilizers in irrigating water? i am about to water the orchard and am thinking of putting some nitrate in the water. you can distribute any soluble fertilizer by dissolving it in irrigation water, but few have ever done it because of the difficulties of getting equal strength in running water. it is much easier to distribute on land before irrigation. irrigating alfalfa on heavy soils. how does alfalfa succeed on adobe and soils slightly modified from it? does irrigation work well an adobe planted to alfalfa? if you get the irrigation adjusted so that the soil shall not be water-logged and so that the water does not stand on the surface when the sun is hot, you can get plenty of good alfalfa on a heavy soil. irrigation on adobe soils must be done more frequently and a less amount at each application to guard against the dangers named above. how much water for crops? same of my land is heavy but the most of it is light soil. i want alfalfa mostly, same potatoes and grain, and later oranges, olives and other fruit. how much water in inches or acre feet is required per acre per year far the irrigation of it? the amount of water required to grow different crops depends upon the crop itself, upon the time of the year in which it grows, the character of the soil, etc. there is no such thing as stating how much water would be used for all crops on all soils, and at all times of the year. the range would be from, say, ten acre inches for irrigation of deciduous fruits, which need moisture supplementary to rainfall; twice or thrice as much for citrus fruit trees; four or five times as much for alfalfa where a full number of cuttings are required. these are, of course, only rough estimates which would have to be modified according to local rainfall and soil character. water should be applied frequently enough to keep the lower soil amply moist. a color of moisture is not enough and a muddy condition results from too much water. one has to learn to judge when there is moisture enough, and a good test of this to take up a handful of soil, squeeze it and open the hand. if the ball retains its shape it is probably moist enough. if it has a tendency to crack upon opening the hand, it is too dry. this test, of course, is somewhat affected by the character of the soil, but one has to form the best judgment possible how far allowance has to be made for that. sewage irrigation. what is the usefulness or harmfulness of the outflow from septic tanks for use an fruits and vegetables? there is no question as to the suitability of the affluent from a septic tank for irrigation purposes. waste waters are sometimes injurious when they are loaded with antiseptics, but the septic tank will not work unless it has a chance for free fermentation in the absence of antiseptics, therefore, this objection against waste water does not hold with the out-flow from septic tanks. it has the advantage over straight sewage irrigation because fermentation in the septic tank is believed to free the water from many dangerous germs, though not all of them. creamery wastes for irrigation. will the waste water from a creamery, pumped into a ditch and used for irrigating sandy loam orchard land, or nursery stack, in any way be injurious to the land or the trees? it will depend upon the amounts of salt and alkaline washing materials which it carries. this would be governed, of course, by the amount of fresh water used for dilution in the irrigation ditch. there are two ways to determine the question. one would be to make an analysis of a sample of the water taken when it contains the largest amount of these materials after the dilution with ditch water. another way would be to plant some corn, squashes, barley and other plants, so that they would be freely irrigated by the water during one growing season. this would be rather better than an analysis, because everybody could see whether the plants grew well or not, and would be apt to be better convinced by what they see than by an opinion which a chemist might give on the basis of an analysis. the use of this water on a sandy loam would obviously be less injurious than upon a heavy retentive soil. house waste water. is it feasible to use wash water, etc., for watering fruit trees and vegetables? kitchen sink water is not desirable because of its great content of grease, but wash-tub and bathtub water are good. strong soapsuds should be mixed with considerable rinsing water to escape excessive content of alkali. run the water in hoe-ditches, along the rows of vegetables, hoeing thoroughly as soon as the land hoes well, changing the runs of water so that the soil does not become compacted but is kept friable and lively. draining a wet spot. i have a spot of about an acre that in a wet winter becomes very miry and as a rule is wet up to july. can i put in a ditch two and one-half feet deep and fill in with small stones for a foot or a foot and a half, until i can afford to buy tiles? drains made of small stones are often quickly filled with soil and stop running. however, it will work for a time, and such drains were formerly largely employed in eastern situations when cash was scant and stones abundant. dig the ditch bottom to a depth of not less than or / feet, then put in the stones deep enough not to be interfered with by plowing. if you have flat stones you can make quite a water-way with them and fill in with small stones above it. part v. live stock and dairy legal milk house. what is a legal milk house in california? the state dairy law says little concerning the construction or equipment of the milk house. it says that the house, or room, shall be properly screened to exclude flies and insects, and is to be used for the purpose of cooling, mixing, canning and keeping the milk. the milk room shall not be used for any other purpose than milk handling and storing, and must be feet or more distant from hogpen, horse stable, cesspool or similar accumulation of filth, and must be over feet from cow stalls or places where milking is done. in regard to the size of the milk room and equipment, nothing is said provided it is large enough for the milk to be handled conveniently. concrete milk houses, however, had best have smooth-finished floors and walls. the interior of the milk house is also to be whitewashed once in two years or oftener. if milk from the dairy is to go to a city, the requirements will be more severe than provided in the state law, and must conform to the ordinances of the city to which the milk is to be sent. cure for a self-milker. what shall i do for a young cow that milks herself? fit a harness consisting of two light side slats and a girth and neck strap in such a way that the cow cannot reach her udder. unless she is particularly valuable for milk, it will save you a lot of worry to fix her up for beef. strong milk. how can i overcome strong milk in a three-quarter jersey cow? i had been feeding alfalfa hay with two quarts alfalfa meal and one quart middlings twice a day. thinking the strong milk came from the feed i changed to oat hay and alfalfa with a soft feed of bran and middlings. there is nothing in either ration that could cause strong milk, nor will a change of feed likely benefit the trouble. if the cow is in good physical condition the trouble probably comes from the entrance of bacteria during or after milking. thoroughly clean up around the milking stable, followed by a disinfection of the premises. have the flanks, udder and teats of the cow thoroughly cleaned before milking and scald all utensils used for the milk. harmful bacteria may have gotten well established on the premises and the entrance of a few is enough to seriously affect the flavor of the milk. once the trouble is checked it can be kept down with the usual sanitary methods. separator as milk purifier. i have a neighbor who contends that a cream separator purifies the milk that passes through it. i say that it does not purify the milk. i agree that it does take out some of the heavy particles of dirt and filth, but that it cannot take out what is already in solution with the milk. the purification naturally cannot be very great, and if milk is produced in unsanitary fashion, running through the separator will do little, if any, good. nevertheless, the separator does remove more than just the solid particles of dirt. the purifying comes by leaving behind the separator slime, so called, the slimy material left behind after a good deal of milk has been run through. in fact, some creameries separate milk, only to mix milk and cream again, largely for the purpose of removing the impurities found in the slime. in this slime are not only the impurities that fall into the milk, but also some of the fibrous matter that is part of the milk, and this gathers, being pulled out by gravity as are the fat particles, it seems to gather with it a few more bacteria than remain in the milk itself. material in real solution, as sugar is in solution in water, naturally is practically unaffected by separation. you are, therefore, right to the extent that you cannot produce unsanitary milk and clean it with the separator, but your neighbor is right to the extent that the separator does remove some impurities and is used just for that purpose. there is also in the dairy trade a centrifugal milk clarifier which is constructed in somewhat similar manner to a cream separator, but acts differently on the milk in not interfering with cream rising by gravity when separated cream and milk are mixed after cleaning. butter going white. i bought some butter and during the warm weather it melted. about or per cent was white, while the balance was yellow and went to the top. when the butter remelted, the yellow portion melted, leaving the white portion retaining its shape. the white portion did not taste like ordinary butter. the butter made from our cows' cream melted at a higher temperature, but did not have a white portion. why did our butter not act like the creamery butter? samples of butter have occasionally been sent to this office that have turned white on the outside, and since the white part has a very disagreeable, tallowy flavor, people think that tallow or oleomargarine has been mixed with it, but we have never been able to find any foreign substance in any of the samples. we have found that some of the best brands of butter will turn white first on the outside and the white color will gradually go deeper if the butter is exposed to a current of air or if left in the sun a short time - f. w. andreason, state dairy bureau. what is "butter-fat?" i would like to know what "butter-fat" means. i have asked farmers this question and no one seems to know. i suppose all parties dealing with creameries understand what the standard of measure or weight of butter-fat is, but it is my guess that there are thousands of farmers whom, if they were asked this question, would not know. we, of course, know that butter is sold by the pound and cream by the pint, quart or gallon, but what is butter-fat sold by? butter-fat is the yellow substance which forms the larger part of butter. besides, this fat butter is composed of per cent or less of water and small amounts of salt, and other substances of which milk is composed. from to per cent or so of ordinary butter is the fat itself. it is sold by weight. the cream from which butter is made is taken to the creamery and weighed, not measured. a small sample is tested by the so-called babcock test to determine the exact percentage of fat, and payment mode on this basis. for instance, if , pounds of cream is one-third butter-fat, the dairyman receives pay for / pounds of this substance. if it is only one-quarter fat, he receives pay for pounds. ordinary cream varies within these limits, but may be much richer or thinner. cream after the butterfat is removed is much like skimmed milk, although it has less water in it. why would not butter come? what is the trouble with cream that you churn on from monday until saturday, then have to give up in despair and turn it out to the hogs? we warmed it, and we cooled it, and used a dairy thermometer, but nothing would do. if the cream was in churnable condition otherwise, the probability is that it was too cool when you started churning. it should be about ° fahrenheit. drying a persistent milker. my cow is to come fresh about the middle of next mouth, and in the last two weeks her milk has changed in some way so that the cream makes very yellow butter and comes to butter nearly as quick as when the cow was fresh. would it best for her to go entirely dry before coming fresh, or will it be all right if she does not entirely dry up? if your cow has been able to pick up any special amount of grass since the rains came it might add to the color of the butter. a cow's milk also gets richer toward the end of her lactation period, which may make a richer cream and make the butter come quickly there does not seem to be anything to worry about. the cow would probably do better if she could become entirely dry before calving, but unless you can easily dry her up it would be dangerous to try to force her to do so. butter-fat in sweet and sour cream. the creamery wagon takes our cream every other day. without ice it is almost impossible to keep the cream sweet during the hot weather. by the time the wagon gets here, several hours after the fourth milking, the cream is quite sour. does sour cream test lower than sweet cream! is any butter-fat lost due to evaporation in dry weather? the test of sour cream will be as accurate as of sweet cream, if properly made, but it is rather more difficult to make; or rather, to get the material into condition to work well. there is no fat lost by evaporation. cream that won't whip. when i sell my cream from the separator they say they cannot whip it. can you tell me if there is any way that i can make the cream whip? there appears to be no good reason for blaming the separator for your difficulty with the cream. possibly the cream may be too thin, as thin cream is sometimes difficult to whip. there is also the possibility that the fat globules in the cream may be rather small, but that will be the fault of the cows, not of the separator. another reason why the cream may not whip well may be that it is used too quickly. if the milk is all right, the cream not too thin and it is permitted to stand for hours or so there should be no trouble with it. occasionally when cream is pasteurized it will not whip well. in these cases, or any other that may develop, the application of lime water to the cream at the rate of gallon to will remove the difficulty. what is certified milk? what process has milk to go through to be called "certified," and what demand is there for it? certified milk is simply milk that is produced and marketed under prescribed sanitary conditions. the dairies are inspected periodically by representatives of some medical society or other organization to see that all regulations are observed, who certify that this is done; hence the name. milk from other dairies is prohibited by law from being sold under the name "certified milk." among the requirements in its production are that the cows must be free from tuberculosis and otherwise perfectly healthy, the stable to have a concrete floor which is washed out after each milking, the milkers to have special clothes for milking, etc. the milk is cooled and bottled immediately after milking, and kept at a low temperature until it reaches the consumer, to prevent the entrance of dirt of any kind or the development of the few bacteria that must gain entrance before it is bottled. to produce such milk requires much expensive apparatus and much more labor than to produce ordinary milk, and as a result it sells for a much higher price, both to distributor and consumer, so that the market for it is rather limited. jersey shorthorn cross. if i cross registered shorthorns with a jersey bull, what dairying value will the progeny have? this makes an excellent cross. even beef-strain shorthorns have lots of milking power if it is developed and the jersey cross will bring it out in the progeny. the cows have excellent milking qualities and give very rich milk. they also have a big frame and fine constitution. about the finest cows in humboldt county were of this cross although jersey bulls have been used so long that the shorthorn blood is almost eliminated. the first "improved" cattle in california and the first cross made for dairy purposes was jersey bulls upon grade shorthorn cows. later the holstein friesians became popular and they and their grades are now most abundant. a free martin. i have a jersey cow who has just had twin calves, a heifer and a bull. the heifer was born about five minutes before the bull and seems to be the stronger. my neighbors tell me to fatten both for the butcher, for they say the heifer will be barren. the mother is a young cow, as this is her second calf. kindly inform if this is one of nature's laws or if there is a possibility of the heifer turning out all right? the probability is that it will be better to veal the heifer than to raise her, as most heifer calves twinned with a bull are free martins, or animals of mixed sex and no good for breeding purposes or for profitable milk production. if the bull is a good animal, he probably will be all right, as this twinning does not seem to affect a bull calf, though it does the heifer. it does not always happen that the heifer is worthless for breeding, but the probability is so great that you had better have her killed and be done with it. what is a "grade"? does the term "grade" mean an animal whose sire is a thoroughbred and whose dam is a scrub, or just one who is selected from others because of her good points or those of her mother? roughly speaking, a grade animal is one having more or less pure-bred blood, but not enough, or otherwise too irregular, for registry under the rules of the association of the breed to which it has affiliation. it does not refer to selection without use of a pure-blood sire at some point in the ancestry, but this is not a distinction of much moment, for it is hard to find animals which have not borrowed something from some cross with pure blood, though remote. the terms high and low grade are sometimes used to signify amount of pure blood recognizable by form and other characters or remembered by owners or their neighbors. generally speaking, a grade is anything not entitled to registry, though ordinarily it refers to the offspring of a pure-bred sire and a cow of another or of no breed. the offspring of a pure-bred cow and a scrub bull would also be a grade. breeding a young mare. i have a beautiful colt months old that will weigh or pounds; very compactly built, and has extra health, life and vigor. i want this colt for a broodmare. would you advise breeding at two or three years old? authorities agree at placing the age from two to three years, according to the development of the animal and other circumstances. "to breed in the purple." what is meant by breeding a sow in the purple? i have seen this statement used many times by breeders who advertised "sows safe in pig bred in the purple." to be "bred in the purple" means to be of royal or princely parentage. it originally was used in reference to the nobility of europe, as purple was the insignia of royal blood, due to the fact that purple was the rarest and most costly color and only the rich and noble could buy it. when used in referring to live stock, it signifies that the animal in question has a long line of blooded ancestry. cows for hill country. what breed of dairy cows do you think would be preferable to keep for butter, at an altitude of about feet, in nevada county - jerseys, guernseys or ayrshires? i do not mean to have them to rustle for their own living, but to feed them well, house and care for them in all weather, particularly in stormy weather. the best breed for a man is the one he likes best, providing it has been bred for the purposes he desires to attain. all the breeds you mention are suited to the scheme you outline. foothill dairying. is there any risk to run in taking cows to an altitude of from a much lower one? there is no quarrel between a cow and a mountain. ever since the settlement of the state cows have been driven directly from the valley up to the mountain meadow pastures, both for butter and for beef-making, in the summer time. the foothill elevation you mention is only a starting to elevations of feet and more to which cattle are driven every season. bad-tempered jerseys. jersey bulls are apt to become vicious after a time; is it so to the same extent with bulls of the other named breeds? the jersey bull is conceded to be crosser and more dangerous than other bulls, but no bull should ever be allowed to have a chance at a man. never consider a bull gentle and you will be safe with him. breeding in line. is it right and proper to breed a pedigreed registered bull to his daughter, who is the offspring of a grade cow? if it is not right, explain why. if it can be done, will the offspring be physically perfect and an improvement, or will it have poorer qualities than its sire and mother? if this inbreeding can be done successfully, how long can it be carried on, or, in other words, how long could one bull be bred back into his own offspring? can a herd be perfected in this way? it is right and proper to breed a registered sire to his daughter, who is the offspring of a grade cow. the first cross is all right and the offspring ought to be physically perfect. this is a first step in what we call line breeding, but in line breeding proper, both animals must be pure bloods and registered, having ancestors on both sides which have a long line of good individuals with strong constitutions and true to type. to do this, one must have a perfect ideal in mind. this line breeding is what has developed the breeds today up to the high standard of perfection. breeding sire to daughter, if followed along these lines, will be all right; at least, it was so in the case of amos cruickshank, the great shorthorn breeder. you cannot successfully breed back on the daughter's offspring, but if you use a straight out-cross on the daughter's offspring you can again use this sire on her produce with marked success. in the case of a grade cow and registered sire, there are two things which will make you either lose or win with one cross, and that is regarding the breeding of your sire. if he is just an ordinary-bred fellow it will be a hit-and-miss game, but if he is from a long line of good ancestors on his dam's side, you can very materially improve the, herd, because always keep in mind the female produce from the sire's dam will grow with age toward the sire's dam. so if your first cross from your first sire is all right, use a straight out-cross bull, but be sure he is what he ought to be, and then you can use your old bull back on his heifers. of course, a man practicing this breeding ought to be a thorough stockman and a first-class judge of live stock. - w. m. carruthers. whitewashes for stock buildings. i desire whitewash recipes which have given durable results on outbuildings. it is so desirable to make outbuildings neat and clean, and so important to keep trees from sunburning, etc., that a durable whitewash as cheaply and easily made as possible is very important. the following are commended: no. - to half a bucketful of unslaked lime add handfuls of common salt, and soft soap at the rate of pound to gallons of the wash. slake slowly, stirring all the time. this quantity makes bucketfuls of very adhesive wash, which is not affected by rain. no. - whitewash requires some kind of grease in it to make it most durable. any kind of grease, even though it be old and partly spoiled, will answer all right, though tallow is best. the grease imparts to the whitewash an oil property the same as in good paint. tallow will stay right on the job for years, and the cheapest of it will do. in order to prepare this grease and get it properly incorporated into the white wash, it is necessary to put the grease in a vessel on the stove, and boil it into a part of the whitewash so as to emulsify it and get it into such condition that it can be properly incorporated with the whitewash mixture. no. - for every barrel of fresh lime, add pounds of tallow, pounds of salt and pounds of glue, dissolved. mix all together and slack; keep covered, and let stand a few days before using. add water to bring the right consistency to spread readily. for nice inside work strain it. when less than a barrel of lime is used, the quality of the wash does not seem so good. it is better to apply hot, but it does well cold. government whitewash. what is the government recipe for whitewash? "take a half bushel of well-burned, unslaked lime, slake it with boiling water, cover during the process to keep in steam, strain the liquid through a fine sieve or strainer, and add to it pounds of salt, previously dissolved in warm water; pounds of ground rice boiled to a thin paste and stirred in while hot; half a pound of spanish whiting and pound of glue, previously dissolved by soaking in cold water, and then hanging over in a small pot hung in a larger one filled with water. add gallons of hot water to the mixture, stir well and let it stand for a few days, covered from dirt. it should be applied hot, for which purpose it can be kept in a portable furnace. a pint of this mixture, if properly applied, will cover a square yard." whitewash for spray pump. can you give a recipe for a durable whitewash which can be prepared simply and in large quantities? the whitewash will be applied with a spray pump. to pounds of lime, whole, slacking with gallons of water, add pounds of common salt and / pounds of brown sugar. stir and mix well and allow to cool. when cool stir in ounce of ultramarine blue. then add gallons of water, and sprinkle and stir in pounds of portland cement. if two coats are to be applied, add more gallon of water. strain for work on smooth surface. buttermilk paint how is paint made with buttermilk for farm buildings? one gallon buttermilk, pounds of portland cement, and sufficient coloring matter to give the desired shade. apply as soon as made, and stir a great deal while being applied. it is said to dry in about hours and to be a good preservative for fences, barns and other outbuildings. trespassing live stock. is there a fence law in this state? in other words, do i have to fence against my neighbors' stock, or does the law require him to care for his stock and keep it off my property? the old "no-fence law" which was enacted during the troubles between wheat growers and stock rangers has been put out of commission by more recent legislation. the trespassing live stock is liable for damage, but just how to proceed to protect yourself you should learn from a local lawyer who knows statutes and your county ordinances also. rat-proof granary. how can i make a rat-proof granary for alfalfa meal and barley? omit all boarding of the sides below the floor level and place a heavy inverted pan, milk pan, between the top of each of the supporting posts and the floor beams. care should be taken that the diagonal bracing of the underpinning or posts does not allow a rat to secure a foot hold near enough the floor to permit of gnawing through. concrete stable floor. is a concrete floor good for a horse stable? concrete floors are satisfactorily used for horse stables, provided the floor is ribbed or otherwise roughened in a way to reduce the danger of slipping. some stablemen have stall floors made that way. some use a wooden grating over the concrete in places where the horses have to stand for any length of time. others soften the standing by free use of bedding. silo-heating not dangerous. is there any danger of a barn burning from spontaneous combustion due to a silo being built in the barn? there is no danger of the silo overheating and setting fire to a barn. when the ensilage is curing, it often gets warm, but never anywhere near the point of combustion. to make shingles durable. what is the best material with which to coat the shingles on my barn roof? the best coating is a wood preservative, the principal ingredient of which is creosote. there are several reliable brands of preservatives and stains that may be had at a cost of about half that of paint. we must remark also the natural durability of redwood shingles in this climate if the roof has a good pitch. we reshingled our house roof after years of use and found the shingles so sound that we turned them and shingled the sides and roof of a shed with them where they promise to be good for another score of years. best breed of hogs. what is the best breed of hogs for pen feeding, shutting them up in small pens from the time they are little pigs and feeding them mostly on skim milk and slops? there is no best breed. it is a matter of personal preference. any of the breeds are all right to pen up and feed. the principal thing is to see that the hogs are all pure bred and have not been crossed too often to cause deterioration. choose one breed of hogs and keep them as pure as possible and you will have no trouble in raising them. all the breeds are good; but some are fancied more than others. dark-colored hogs are preferred in california because less liable to sunburn. part vi. feeding farm animals feed for plow-horses. while doing heavy plowing, how many pounds of rolled barley per day should i feed to keep -pound horses in good condition? if i feed part oat hay and part alfalfa hay, together with rolled barley, what ration would be ample? a ration used by the california experiment station was pounds of alfalfa hay, pounds of wheat hay and pounds of crushed barley for pounds of horse at hard work. the larger the horse the less food for the amount of work he does in proportion to his size, so multiplying these figures by . would bring a person somewhere near the ration for a -pound horse, and an approximation is as close as one can come to any general ration. probably more alfalfa and less of the other feeds could well be given, since many farmers are succeeding in feeding alfalfa exclusively. vetch for horses. does vetch make good feed for horses? will vetch produce a heavier crop than grain? when is the best time to sow vetch for hay, and what is the best variety? vetch makes excellent stock feed whether used as hay or as pasturage. vetch falls to the ground so badly that it is very difficult to cut hay from it unless some grain is planted to hold it up. oats make an excellent hold-up crop and is more generally used. a half a bushel of vetch seed is mixed with a bushel of oats and this is enough to plant an acre. some growers, however, prefer a bushel of vetch as that makes the stand much heavier. sorghum feeding. can i allow milk cows to pasture on growing kaffir and egyptian corn during the summer? which one is the best for pasture and milk? there is no difference between kaffir corn and egyptian corn so far as feeding goes. they are both sorghums. there is a danger in pasturing on young sorghums, because stock is often killed from overeating it, and they are quite apt to do this when they come upon it from dry feed. if you cut and wilt the young sorghum, or if it is fed sparingly with hay, etc., it becomes innocent of injury. after the sorghum has obtained considerable growth, it also loses its dangerous character. salting hay. what kind of salt is used for salting hay, how much to use and how to apply it? any good commercial salt such as is used for pork or beef packing is satisfactory for salting hay. a good handful to the ton, scattering it as the hay is stocked is as good a formula as can be had. stover. what is stover? how is it cut and handled? stover is corn fodder after the ears are taken off. the best time to cut the corn for stover is immediately after the kernel becomes dented and the leaves or blades commence to dry. immediately after the ears are taken off, the stalks should be cut and stacked. the size of the shock depends upon the climate. if it is a foggly climate and stalks are green, it is better to make a smaller shock, but in the interior valley where the weather is warm it is best to make large shocks, so that the stacks will not dry up very rapidly. feed for cows. what shall i feed cows when they are fresh and when they are dry! when they commence to freshen, give some green feed, such as alfalfa or corn; if possible, also give, say, two or three pounds of barley or bran, and gradually increase this for two or three weeks until six or seven pounds of bran or barley is being fed. also give a small amount of hay. bran may be rather expensive feeding and a substitute is being used. take four parts of barley to one of bran and mix. with barley at its low price, this makes rather inexpensive feeding. another substitute is to take the chopped alfalfa hay and barley. these are mixed thoroughly together and moistened. after the cow freshens and gives her full flow of milk, let her eat all the alfalfa hay she wants. a good ration is about to pounds of hay, or pounds of barley or bran and about pounds of roots such as beets or mangels. when the cow is dry, pasture is the best food, supplemented with some green food. sorghum silage. will egyptian corn make good ensilage and at what time should it be cut to make the best feed for dairy cows? sorghum makes good silage. it must be cut while surely juicy enough, for it is a little more apt to dry out than indian corn. barley for hay feeding. should the barley for hog feeding be rolled, ground or fed whole, dry or wet? also, how much should be fed and how often to get best results? to obtain the best results, the barley should be ground into a meal (not too fine) and have the hulls screened or floated out. this is best fed when made into a thick slop. some good feeders believe in letting it stand until fermentation sets up, that is, gets a little sour. we prefer a sweet to a sour feed. however, hogs will do well on either, provided there is no change from sour to sweet. the change is the bad part. hogs should be fed just the amount that they will clean up well, and no more. a hog should always be ready for his feed at feeding time. we would not feed oftener than twice a day: night and morning. - chas. goodman. sugar beets and silage. will sugar beets keep in a silo and how sugar beets rank as a hog feed? sugar beets would probably keep all right if stored in a silo just as they might if kept in any other receptacle, but it is not necessary to store beets for stock-feeding in this state. they can be taken from the field, or from piles made under open sheds in which the beets may be put because more convenient for feeding than to take them from the field in the rainy season. beets put whole into a silo would not make silage. for that purpose they would need to be reduced to a pulp, but there is no object in going to the expense of that operation where beets will keep so well in their natural condition and where there is no hard freezing to injure them. beet pulp silage is made from beets which are put through a pulping process for the purpose of extraction of the sugar and, therefore, best pulp silage is only made in connection with beet-sugar factories and is a by-product thereof which is proving of large value for feeding purposes. feeding value of spelt. what is the food value of spelt? it is a russian variety of wheat, and yet, i am informed, it has about the same value as a stock food that barley has. we have no analysis of spelt at hand. it is presumably like that of barley, as you suggest, because the spelt has an adhering chaff as barley has. this fact makes it better for feeding than wheat, not in nutritive content, but because the chaff tends to distribute the starchy material, making it more easily digestible; just as barley and oats are better than ordinary wheat for stock feeding. concentrates and corn stalks. is it necessary to feed mulch cows any hay or concentrated feed in addition to green corn stalks? it is necessary. green corn is an excellent thing for milch cows, but it is a very unbalanced ration and needs alfalfa or something else to balance it up. green corn, for example, contains only about one per cent of digestible protein and . per cent of digestible carbohydrates and . per cent fat, or a nutritive ratio of about to / . a proper ration would be about to or , or less. to balance this up alfalfa can be fed better than anything else in california, for that is very rich in protein and the cheapest supply of protein that there is. if you give the cows a good supply of alfalfa hay with the green corn, you will have an ideal combination. dry sorghum fodder. is egyptian corn fodder good for cows? i have been told it would dry up the milk. i have several acres and would like to feed it if it is not harmful. dry sorghum fodder is counted about the poorest roughage that one would think of harvesting. it is much less valuable than indian corn fodder. egyptian corn is one of the non-saccharine sorghums which are valuable both for grain or for green feeding. we never heard of direct milk-drying effect, though such a result might be expected from feeding such innutritive material, which is also difficult of digestion. if fed for roughness it should be in connection with concentrated foods like bran or oil meal or with green alfalfa. no cow can give much milk when the feed is hardly nutritive enough to keep her alive. there seems to be, however, much difference in the dry fodders from different varieties of sorghum. one grower writes: "kaffir corn is the only variety within our knowledge of which the fodder is of much value. we consider the fodder much more preferable than that of the ordinary indian corn, and our stock eat it much more readily than the sweet sorghum. however, it requires a much longer season in which to ripen than does any of the other varieties, for which reason it is less desirable to plant in midsummer." steers on alfalfa. how much alfalfa hay will a two or three-year-old steer eat per day, and about what is the gain in weight per day? a steer will clean up about pounds per day. steers will make about / pounds gain in weight per day. concentrates with alfalfa. i have a good supply of alfalfa hay and have been feeding this as a straight feed for my dairy cows. they are not, however, doing as well as they should and i am looking for some good feed to go with it. you could probably get better returns by feeding about a pound of cocoanut meal and three of dried beet pulp than by any other combination of concentrates with straight alfalfa. if you are producing market milk or butter prices justify it, more concentrates could profitably be fed. it is an expensive proposition to build up a properly balanced ration with alfalfa and concentrates alone, and unless market milk is being sold, it usually does not pay. the cheapest way to provide a balanced ration is not by concentrates, but by wheat or other grain straw, and let the cows eat all they care for. this is very cheap and helps to balance a ration with green or dry alfalfa hay, is usually cheap, and is fine for cows. both are much less expensive than concentrates. chopping hay for horses. what saving may be made by chopping all oat hay when fed to horses? there is no particular saving in chopping hay unless the horses are worked very hard and for very long hours, as is often the case with express horses in the cities, or unless the power for cutting is very cheap and feed high. the idea is that, except in unusual cases as above mentioned, the horses can do their own grinding cheaper than it can be done by power. somewhat less hay is wasted when fed cut than when fed long, but if they are not fed too much long hay they will waste very little. grain for horses. what is the best formula for feeding work horses with oat hay, alfalfa, barley (crushed) and corn as rations? feed one-half oat hay and one-half alfalfa hay, about to / pounds per day for each pounds live weight of the horse. add to this from / to pound of rolled barley or corn for each pounds live weight. if the corn is on the cob, four-fifths of its weight is corn; that is to say, pounds of corn on the cob has pounds of grain. feeding cut alfalfa hay. would alfalfa hay, cut, say, from one-half to three inches in length be better than whole hay for hogs, cattle and horses, and if it is better, should it be fed wet or dry? cattle and horses do much better when fed chopped alfalfa hay than when fed whole hay. they can eat the required amount in much less time and with less exertion. for cattle and horses the hay should be cut about one inch long and fed dry. there is no advantage in chopping alfalfa hay for hogs unless it is mixed with ground grain and made into slop. - l. p. denny. storing cut alfalfa hay. we are planning on cutting our next season's crop of alfalfa with a feed cutter and storing it in a barn for winter feeding. the hay must, of course, be thoroughly cured, because of the great danger of heating in a tight mass. a. balfour says: "i have been cutting alfalfa into a barn for wo seasons. it is absolutely necessary to have the sides and floor tight, and it is easier to feed it if it is in a loft. the hay is best stacked first, and must be thoroughly cured." alfalfa grinding. is the curing of alfalfa for grinding different from ordinary; has it to be chopped before grinding, and what is the cost of grinding? alfalfa hay should be cut when the very first blossoms commence to appear. at this point the plant contains the greatest amount of protein; from that time on until seed time, the protein diminishes and fiber increases. to make meal, hay should be well cured, have gone through the sweat, and should be dry, or as near dry as possible. it mills easier when dry and makes a finer product. it should be cured so as to retain the green color. to grind it, it is not necessary to cut it before grinding, it mills better if ground just as it comes from the stack. the cost of milling hay varies with the size of the machine, condition of hay, whether dry or damp, or whether tough or tender. with larger plants of a capacity of four to five tons per hour, it costs about cents a ton to put it in the sack, exclusive of the cost of sacks; and with smaller, it runs from that on up to $ to $ per ton. feeding calves. how soon can calves be weaned and not hinder their growth? after weaning, what would you advise to feed them? after the calf has once nursed, it should be taken away from its mother, but fed its mother's milk for a few days, depending on the vigor of the calf. commence to add skim-milk after a week or ten days, adding a small amount at first and increasing it daily until the calf is on an entirely skim-milk diet. the milk must be sweet, it must be as warm as its mother's milk and the calf must not have too much of it. four quarts at a feed twice a day is sufficient for the average sized calf for the first month, then increase it accordingly. add a spoonful of ground flaxseed to each feed and teach the calf to eat a little grain as soon as possible. ground barley is the most economical feed to balance a ration containing so much skim-milk. if calves show a tendency to looseness of the bowels, feed less milk, and when this does not remedy the trouble, heat some skim-milk to boiling and when it is cooled to a proper temperature feed this to the calf. a good grain ration to feed calves along with skim-milk is ground barley with green alfalfa hay. when the milk is cut off, feed barley and bran soaked with molasses water. put a pint of molasses in a pail of water and dampen feed with it. this amount will dampen three bushels of feed. - w. m. carruthers. winter feed for sheep. what would be the best to sow for sheep pasture - barley, oats, rye, vetch or rape? of the grains, rye is usually found to be best for quick winter growth, and rye and vetches sown together are very satisfactory, because the rye holds the vetches up so that the whole growth can be more successfully handled with the mower, and if grown that way and fed green in a corral, a very large amount of good feed can be secured. sufficient experiments have not yet been made with rape to fully demonstrate its value. even if it grew well, it would be inferior in nutritive value to vetches and rye. balanced rations. what is a balanced ration for milk cows and brood sows? when plenty of alfalfa is available many dairymen feed that alone. it is better to feed a little corn, grain hay, beet pulp or the beets themselves to balance up the ration. some of the best concentrates to feed to offset alfalfa hay are ground barley and dried beet pulp. the same thing can be said about the sows. they will consume about pounds of chopped alfalfa per day and all the skim-milk that is likely to be given them. not more than eight pounds of concentrates need be fed, of which one-fifth may be bran, the same amount, or more, of cocoanut oil cake, and the rest corn or barley. with plenty of skim-milk and alfalfa, but little grain or other concentrates will be needed. a few beets will also go well with alfalfa. pasture and cover crop. i am thinking of sowing burr clover with rye to be plowed under in the spring. is it good policy to sow rye with clover? burr clover and rye would be very satisfactory for sowing, after the rains, to secure a winter growth for plowing under in march or april, or earlier if the growth should be large enough to warrant. such a cover crop can be pastured lightly to advantage. cutting corn for silage. what is the best time to cut corn for the silo? what length is it cut? is water put on it when it is put in the silo? the best time to cut corn for the silo is just as the kernels are beginning to glaze. it is cut with a proper ensilage cutter into half or three-quarter inch lengths. no water is used, unless the corn should be unusually dry, with shriveled leaves; in that case, the use of water to compensate for the loss of moisture in the stalks and leaves is desirable. fall and winter pasturage. what do you advise for planting in the fall for winter pasture in the sacramento valley? are field peas suitable? the common california field pea, called niles pea, the canadian pea, the common vetch (which is sometimes called the oregon vetch because the seed is largely grown in that state) are all suitable for fall planting and winter growth because they are not injured by ordinary valley frosts. aside from legumes, you can get winter feed from fall-sown rye, essex rape or kale. summer pasture for hogs. i want to pasture hogs in the san joaquin valley this spring and summer. have water for irrigation, but will not have time to get alfalfa started sufficient to pasture. sorghum can be planted with pumpkins or some root crop between the rows. the root crop or the pumpkins could be used in the later summer, while the sorghums could come between the natural grasses of the early spring and the root crops. a strictly pasturage scheme is to sow wheat or barley and turn the hogs on this, so that they will eat within certain prescribed limits. in order to do this, the field needs a shifting fence, so that the hogs can be driven from one section to another - never letting the hogs eat too closely, as they will kill off the stand. size of a silo. i am planning to build a silo feet high and feet across. will ensilage (corn, oats) keep well in a silo of those dimensions? the silo you are intending to build is too shallow, and would hold only a very small amount of silage. there would be several inches loss of silage before you could start feeding, and you would have to feed at least two and probably three inches off per day in order to keep the food from spoiling. sixty inches of silage would thus only last about twenty days. also, the deeper a silo is, the tighter the ensilage is packed and the more will be contained in a cubic foot. the following table will give suggestions as to dimensions: diameter. height. capacity. diameter. height. capacity. feet feet tons feet feet tons " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " a cow can consume four tons of silage in days and more or less as you care to feed, so by figuring out how long you will probably feed, you can see the size of silo to build at once. soiling crops in california. what are the dates for planting crops to be used for soiling in your state? we are using indian corn and sorghums of various kinds for soiling to a certain extent. there is also some cutting and carrying of alfalfa, although most of the alfalfa is pastured. dates of planting depend upon the frost-free period; sometimes beginning in april, and successive planting for later growth as water may be available for irrigation. there are places where one can see standing corn and sorghum untouched by frost as late as december . in other locations the growth of these plants have to be made between may and september. we have also winter-soiling practiced to a small extent in this state and for that purpose rye and barley sown at the beginning of the rainy season are used to some extent. brewer's grains for cows. are sprouted barley grains that may be had from breweries good for milch cows? will it increase the milk, or will it dry up the cows? professor henry, in his standard work on "feeds and feedings," says: "fresh brewer's grains constitute one of the best feeds for the dairy cow. she is fond of them and they influence most favorably the flow of milk. fed while fresh in reasonable quantities, supplemented by bright hay or corn fodder for dry feed, the grains being kept in tight feed-boxes which can be kept clean, and with other conditions favorable to the healthfulness of the cow, no valid objection can be raised against this form of feed. from to pounds of wet grains should constitute a day's allowance." feeding pumpkins. what is the proper way to feed pumpkins to cows? some say to cut them in halves; while others say they must be chopped fine enough so that the cows cannot choke on them. some tell me the seeds tend to dry the cows up, and should not be fed with pumpkins. pumpkins should be either cut in halves or broken in large fragments so that the stock can get a bite at them or else should be chopped fine, and we could never see the advantage of going to that trouble. cutting into medium-sized pieces is dangerous because of the temptation to swallow them whole and thus getting choked. it is not necessary to remove the seeds. feeding a family cow. what shall i feed family jersey cow in addition to alfalfa hay to insure a good supply of milk? one of the best things to feed in addition to alfalfa hay is a couple of quarts of middling or bran twice a day, with which is mixed a cup of molasses with enough water to make a nice paste. dried beet pulp is exceptionally good with alfalfa, if it is available, this also to be moistened before feeding. rolled barley for cows. will rolled barley hurt milk cows, say two light feeds a day? will it not do about as much good as the same amount of bran? certainly not and otherwise will be good if not used in excess to encourage fattening. bran is a better feed for milk because it has a higher protein content. horse beans and pie-melons. would it pay me to raise horse beans for fattening hogs? horse beans do well. would citrons do well there without irrigation, and would they be better than stock-beets for hog feed? we do not promise anyone that anything will pay. horsebeans are good with other feeds for hogs. theoretically, they will balance well with pie-melons and beets, and both the latter will produce well on good land with proper cultivation in the valley you mention. theoretically, also, we would rather have beets than pie-melons. the hogs will tell you the rest. horse beans. are "horse beans" a leguminous crop and how does their feeding value for hogs compare to cowpeas and canadian field peas? they surely are legumes, and they resemble so closely in composition the other legumes which you mention that their feeding value would be practically the same. storing stock beets. what is the best method of storing stock beets and stock carrots in this climate? we can let them remain in the ground and grow until february or march and would like to preserve them for feeding as long as possible. stock beets and carrots can be stored in california without recourse to covering with ground or use of a cellar. they keep very well during the winter if piled under cover in such a way as to keep cool and dry. kale for cow feed. what is kale worth for cow feed as compared with alfalfa, also can it be cut and cured the same as alfalfa and what variety is the best? kale is very similar to cabbage in growth, and for feeding purposes. for cow feed it would have about three-fourths the amount of digestible nutrients as green alfalfa, but would have an added value on account of its succulency. it would go especially well with alfalfa hay. the jersey or thousand-headed kale is considered the standard for stock or poultry feed. it is always fed fresh and is not made into hay. what kind of beet for stock? which would be most valuable to plant on river-bottom land for cattle and hog feed, sugar beets or mangels? grow a large stock of beet by all means - either a mangel or a tankard. usually you will get more weight than with sugar beets; the cost of harvesting is far less, and the nutritive contents high enough. keeping pumpkins. what is the best way of storing pumpkins, under ordinary farm conditions, in a climate such as we have here in northern california? i have no facilities for cold storage. all you have to do in this climate to keep pumpkins is to keep them out of reach of the stock. they do not need storage of any kind, but will keep in good condition during the late autumn and winter months in any open-air place where they may be convenient for feeding purposes. in parts of california where there is hard ground freezing, protection must be given by covering with boards or straw or any other material available. we have no need for root cellars or cold storage, for our winter temperatures are neither high nor low enough to hurt them. grape pomace as hog feed. what is the value of grape pomace as a hog feed? it has been sold for cents a ton as it comes from the press at the winery and when a person has not got any surplus of other feeds, it is evidently worth that and then some. the only way to feed it is to put it up in a big pile and let the hogs take it as they want it. it will help keep them growing through the winter provided they have other feed with it that might not be sufficient without the pomace. proper feeding of young pigs. if i put two -pound shoats to an acre of barley that will yield or sacks of grain, how many months could they be kept there to advantage, and what gain could i expect them to make in that time? if the pigs have been properly fed and were of good stock, they should have attained a weight of pounds at three or four months of age. pigs in this condition would be more likely to lose than gain turned on a dry barley field, even if the yield were double what you state. barley is an excellent fattener for mature hogs, but is a poor food for young growing pigs. young pigs should have a balanced ration, which may be defined as a little of almost all kinds of feed and not all of any one kind. we have pigs running on a barley field such as you describe, and in addition to the barley we feed them once a day a slop composed of wheat middling and bran in equal parts by measurement, to which we add about per cent tankage, and they seem to be moving along nicely. without the slop we don't think they would hold their own. - chas. goodman. pie-melons and pigs. i have sows which were fed almost entirely on pie-melons and milk, not much of the latter. out of the , only sows have saved any pigs; the rest lost all the young they had. four or five sows that for the last three weeks have had no melons, nothing but green grass and a little whole barley each day, are saving their pigs all right. pie-melons are poor feed and pigs which are not given anything better ought to fail. "green grass and a little whole barley" is much better feed than pie-melons. pie-melons are useful fed with alfalfa hay or some richer food. wheat or barley for hogs. which would be the better grain for me to buy for hog feed; wheat at $ . per hundred, or barley at $ ? would it be worth paying cents a hundred for rolling, and then haul the grain miles by wagon? wheat is only considered about per cent more valuable as a hog feed than barley, so that in your case, barley at $ is the cheaper. in bulletin of the oregon station it was found that crushed wheat was per cent more efficient than the whole grain, and it is safe to say that barley will run about the same, enough so at any rate to pay the extra cents a hundred for crushing and the hauling. grain and pasture for pigs. what is the most profitable amount of grain to feed to spring pigs while on alfalfa pasture, from the time of weaning to the time of marketing? we doubt the profit of feeding whole grain to hogs of any age while on green pasture. on almost all kinds of land they will get enough grit to keep their teeth sore, hence they will not masticate the grain thoroughly. perfect mastication is very essential. we would feed the pigs all the slop that they would clean up good twice a day. the slop to be composed of equal parts of corn, barley meal ground fine, and wheat middlings mixed with milk. there is nothing in all the world like milk for growing pigs. if milk is not to be had, we would add from to per cent meat meal, which we consider next to milk. if whole grain is to be used, it should be thoroughly cooked on account of the pigs' teeth not being in condition to chew the hard grain. - chas. goodman. growing pigs on roots and barley. we can raise all kinds of root crops, such as carrots, sugar beets, rutabagas, etc., and cow peas and pumpkins do wonderfully well. will hogs do well an that kind of diet, especially if given a little barley with it? the plants that you mention are good for hog feeding and can be used to advantage with a little barley as you suggest. none of these plants are, however, rich in protein as alfalfa and the other clovers are. the reason why we get such a rapid and satisfactory growth of young hogs in california is due to the fact that they are largely kept on alfalfa and rapid growth is the product of a sufficient protein content in the fodder. both common field peas and cowpeas do not possess this element, and if you can grow them they will serve as a substitute for the other legumes, such as alfalfa. if you are feeding skim-milk, which is rich in protein, roots and grain will go well with that. wheat and barley for feeding. what is the difference in the feeding value of wheat and barley for hogs and horses? there is very little difference in the chemical composition of wheat and barley. in their physical condition there is much difference, chiefly because of the adhering chaff of the barley, which makes it more digestible because it separates the starchy mass and enables the gastric juice to work upon the particles more readily and quickly. oats also have this character. this is very important in the case of horses, which can quickly be put out of condition by feeding wheat. for hogs and chickens it makes much less difference, and the absence of the chaff gives a greater amount of nutritive matter to the ton, so that wheat is worth more at the same ton price. but look out about giving horses too much wheat. part vii. diseases of animals this division is largely compiled from the writings of dr. e. j. creely of the san francisco veterinary college. abscess of parotid gland. my horse has had a bad cold and it has a large lump on its neck which keeps running and does not seem to get any better; it has been running for two weeks. this horse has an abscess of the parotid gland and the abscess should be opened large enough so that the finger can be introduced to break down adhesions, so that proper drainage can be established, after which wash out with a per cent solution of permanganate of potash. as this is a dangerous location for a layman to interfere with, owing to the branching of the carotid artery, pneumogastric nerve and jugular vein, it should be done by a qualified veterinarian. forage poisoning. last fall one of our horses was taken ill and had a swollen jaw. he died soon and we supposed that he had been kicked and died of lockjaw. this spring another was taken ill. he began dragging around, making an effort to eat and drink, but not being able to swallow much. something seemed wrong with his throat and his hind legs. in two or three days he got down, seeming to have no strength in his back. he kept struggling for two days, not being able to swallow much; so we put him out of his misery. since then two others have gone off the same way. the trouble is due to forage poisoning, caused by the eating food infested with poisonous moulds. the symptoms are inability to swallow (paralysis of the muscles of deglutition) and paresis of the hind and forequarters. when the symptoms become advanced, treatment is of little avail. however, further troubles can be prevented by ascertaining the food which is infested with this mould. ofttimes, however, such food may be apparently clean to the eye. make a complete change of food and a thorough cleaning of your stable and corrals of all old fodder which might be in the mangers, or in any accessible place. very frequently old food which is left in the bottom of mangers becomes mouldy, and horses picking for grain which might be left in it, eat considerable quantities of this spoiled fodder, get poisoned. for a scabby swelling. one of my cows has a swelling on her hind leg with little scabs on it, first it was on the front leg. it is as big as your hand. use the following, applied once daily: olive oil, pint; turpentine, ounces; oil cedar, ounces; lysol, ounce; mix and apply. an easement in bloat. what can be done for bloating? it does not seem to be generally known that to put a bridle on a cow or put a stick in her mouth and tie tightly with a string or strap up over her head, so as to keep her jaws working, will relieve bloat. we have given common soda and salt with good results to our milk cows. take a whip and run her around the corral, after giving the soda. this treatment causes the wind to pass off. fatal skin disease. about two months ago a horse was turned out in pasture. several of the horses in the pasture started to lose their hair. it seemed to fall away from the hide, and leave the skin exposed. the horse that was newly turned to pasture got the same disease and died. the other horses did not die. the hair on the horse that had died had fallen off from the sides and hind legs. this is gangrenous dermatis, a gangrenout inflammation of the skin. it is due to mould, must or vegetable fungi. remove to a new pasture, give food free from the fungi, and apply the following ointment to the skin: lanoline, ounces; zinc oxide, ounce; pearson's creoline, / ounce; tannin, drachms; mix and apply once daily. shoulder injury on mare. a young mare that bruised her shoulder on the point with collar. it was lanced and now has a hard lump or callous, about three inches in diameter. what is best to do? she is not lame, but it would interfere with the collar. get a qualified veterinarian to operate and entirely remove the growth or you may use the following mixture to see if it will not cause it to partly absorb and then use a dutch collar or a specially padded collar: compound tinct. iodine, ounces; sulphuric ether, ounces; oil cedar, ounces; turpentine, ounces; mix and apply once daily until blistered. horse with worms. what is the best remedy for a horse that has worms? i would like to know, as i have a horse that is getting poor with this trouble. mix / pound pulverized and dried iron sulphate and / pound bicarbonate of soda, and give one teaspoonful each morning until the medicine is gone. after the last dose give the following: turpentine, ounces; fluid extract male fern, / ounce; pearson's creolins, ounce; raw linseed oil, pint. mix and give all at one dose. to improve the general condition one may give artificial carlsbad salts, tablespoonful in each feed, and each dose to have added to it to grains arsenious acid. if plenty rock salt is allowed for horses to lick, they will be protected against intestinal parasites to a slight but useful degree. is it mange? we have a horse five years old that is always scratching and biting himself as if he had mange or lice. he seems to itch more on his shoulders and front legs than any other place. we have washed him with a carbolic wash, also with a tea made from tobacco, but so far have been unable to stop it. he often bites his legs below the knees until he takes off all the hair and part of the skin. none of the other horses are, troubled, although this horse has been troubled for three years. apply the following: lysol, ounce; kerosene, ounces; formalin, drachms; cotton seed oil, ounces. mix and apply once daily after washing with hot sheep dip solution to . horse with itch. for about a year my horse has been itching so badly that he has rubbed off all the hair on certain parts of his body. lately he bites his tail. whitewash the stall once weekly, scrub the harness, brushes, combs and every stable appliance that he has come in contact with. don't use the same appliance on other animals that you use on this horse. use the following mixture once daily on affected spots: milk of sulphur, ounces; tincture of iodine, ounces; turpentine, ounces; kerosene, ounces; cottonseed oil, ounces. for a bowel trouble. what can i do to relieve a horse that balls up on alfalfa at the time of the first symptoms? i have been bothered considerably with this, and although i know the symptoms, i can never seem to relieve the pain before the veterinary is called. give the following prescription: fluid extract cannabis indica, ounces; sulphuric ether, ounces; spirits turpentine, ounces; oil peppermint, drops; raw linseed oil, ounces. mix. give one-half at once, balance in one hour. if not relieved give several hotwater soap-sud injections. abnormal thirst of horse. i have a horse with an abnormal desire for water. i notice that in drinking she always wants more than the others. i also notice she perspires more freely in the harness and even will sweat in the barn at night. your horse has kidney affection, probably due to feeding hay rich in alkalines. treatment: change the feed and give quart of thick flaxseed tea three times daily. scours. kindly recommend a treatment for a horse troubled with scours. he is on dry feed, but the trouble continues. give very little water mornings and while worked, but give plenty at night. feed dry rolled oats, oat hay, one handful of whole flaxseed at night, and the following powder: bismuth subgalate, ounces; iron sulphate, dessicated, ounces; bismuth subnitrate, ounces. mix, and give a heaping teaspoonful each morning. depraved appetite. i have a colt about one year old that continually delights in chewing up harness, ropes, chews on the manger and, in fact, anything it can get a hold of. this is a condition caused by something being lacking in the system (lime, salts, etc.). give plenty of salt, good food, grain, etc. get this prescription: iron sulphate, ounces; soda syposulphate, ounces; gentian root pulv., ounces; ginger, ounce. mix and give teaspoonful daily. good dentist needed. i have an old horse which has always been fat and quite full of life until right lately. now he is getting thin and looks bad. he eats his food all right. i had his teeth fixed a few weeks ago. the man said they were bad and he fixed them as well as he could. there is probably an excessively long molar projecting into a cavity and the projecting molar should be cut off by a qualified veterinarian. the horse will begin to pick up and grow fat almost as soon as the condition is relieved. most horse owners will permit every person with a float to ruin a horse's mouth without inquiring whether the dentist possesses proper qualifications as certified by a state license and diploma. kidney trouble. my horse has some trouble in passing water. what can i give him that may be put in the mash? i don't think his trouble is due all to old age, for it didn't come on gradually. give gran. sal nitre: a teaspoonful daily in water is good to stimulate the kidneys. for chronic indigestion. i have given my horse condition powders for indigestion, but her hair is rough still. do you advise feeding on the road when a horse leaves the stable at a. m., traveling continually for thirty miles, returning : p. m., being fed at a. m.? a great majority of condition powders contain resin and antimony. while a slight amount may be beneficial, continued use results in affection of the kidneys by over-stimulation. give the following for indigestion: bismuth subintrate, ounce; powdered pepsine, ounce; soda bi carbonate, ounces; carbonate iron, ounces. mix and give a heaping teaspoon twice daily. by all means feed your horse three times daily and water as often as you can. it is unnecessary to warn you that the horse must not be overheated when you give the noonday feed. wound sore. my colt got its hind leg cut on barbed wire some weeks ago. there is a hole about an inch and one-half deep in the center of the sore which will not heal. the inside of the sore does not seem very tender, but the leg stays swollen all of the time and is somewhat feverish. this is probably a fistulous track that should be curetted by a veterinarian, after which the following formula could be used to heal: acetanilide, / ounce; zinc oxide, / ounce; bismuth subgalate, / ounce. mix and apply on cotton and bandage once daily after washing. warts on horse. how can warts be removed from a horse's hide? we use sulphuric acid. the results were favorable from the very start. the warts rapidly shrunk away and finally disappeared entirely. the acid is applied to the crown of the wart with a small swab or similar instrument, and only in sufficient quantities to wet the crown surface of the wart. it should be applied about three times a week until the wart is well reduced. don't use too much acid, and don't keep up the application too long - a. f. etter. kidney trouble in horse. what is the remedy for a horse that stops often to urinate while working? the horse is affected by an irritation of the kidneys. give quart of flaxseed tea daily, change the food and give drachm of c. p. hydro-chloric acid in one bucket of drinking water. castration of colt. which is the correct and best way to castrate a yearling colt, with an emasculator or a blade, and when is the proper time? an emasculator is the only instrument to use in castrating. the object in using any instrument is to prevent a hemorrhage, and nothing works with so much certainty and quickness. the a. hausman and dunn emasculator is recommended. the proper time is when the weather is mild, the grass at its best and the colt in good condition. for a chronic cough. we have a mare seven years old that is troubled with a chronic cough, and at times shows symptoms of heaves, and also has occasionally a white foamy discharge from the nostrils. she is a greedy eater and drinker and her excreta is often very offensive. if she expels flatus when she coughs, this would indicate a predisposition to heaves. wet all food, as dry or dusty food aggravates the cough. give the following: spirits camphor, ounces; fl. ext. belladonna, ounces; neutral oil, ounces; oil eucalyptus, ounces. mix and give tablespoonful three times daily. chronic indigestion. i have a mare eleven years old. give her plenty of oats, hay, grain and a little alfalfa hay three nights per week and leave salt where she can get at it, but she is falling off and her hair does not lie down properly. she eats well and her system seems to be in good condition. have had her teeth attended to so she chews her food well. this condition is caused by the animal not being able to properly masticate the food. have your dentist examine the mouth again, or you can carefully examine the feces and see if it shows whole grain, or long pieces of hay. for short-wind or heaves. i have a mare that has something wrong with her wind. about six months ago i noticed her wind was not good and she had a slight cough, and about a week later, while working her, she seemed to choke down and almost died before she got her wind, and since then she sometimes takes those spells should she trot off briskly for a short distance. give two / -ounce doses of fowler's solution arsenic daily. dusty or musty hay will aggravate the symptoms. thoroughly shake out the dust and wet the hay. feed hay only at night. give the animal as little feed and water as possible before being put to work. continue this treatment one month if necessary. the following is a case of experience with this treatment: for a remedial agent we began to use fowler's solution of arsenic, in two teaspoonful doses at first. once a day, put in the water with which the hay was moistened. these doses were given for a few days, then skipped for a day, then continued for five or six days again. this treatment has been continued. at times when the trouble was most severe, giving a great spoonful at a dose, twice a day for two days, then stopping for a day or two, always being sure to mix it with the water which the hay is moistened, so that it shall be taken into the stomach very slowly. this course of treatment has served to so relieve the disease that nature has nearly or quite overcome it. side-bone. i have a -pound -year-old colt with small brittle feet that has side bone coming on left front foot caused by driving him barefoot on the road two or three months ago. a good blister of the following once every six weeks for three times will stop the side-bones from growing. side-bones on a draft horse are not considered an unsoundness; in light fast drivers it is an incurable blemish causing lameness. side-bones cannot be removed. use this blister: simple cerate, ounces; cantharides, drachms; bin iodide mercury, drachms. mix thoroughly and apply after clipping hair. fungus poisoning. one of my mares, every evening after a full day's work harrowing, stands for an hour or so with her head to the ground, shaking it frequently and not touching the feed till the spell was over. she does not seem to be any worse off, and in the morning seems to be in good shape. this is due to a mold or fungus in the earth or hay. let them have access to plenty of water during the day. in the morning feed give a handful of sodium hyposulphate. treatment for horse's feet. the soles of the fore feet of a fine -year-old horse, weight , are rather spongy and grow down faster than the hoof, sometimes causing slight lameness. he is not on soft pasture, but is stabled all the time. now have bar shoes on him. what treatment do you recommend? use leather, tar and okum and a dish-shoe. for a cleft hoof. i have a horse with a cracked hoof. one hind foot has been in a bad condition, the other seems to be beginning to crack. can anything be done by feeding or otherwise to toughen the hoofs and render them less liable to crack? apply the following: honey, ounces; yellow wax, ounces; tar, ounces; olive oil, ounces. melt, mix and apply once daily. stiff joints. i have a horse that was bruised on the ankle about two years ago. this is now producing an enlargement of the bone and stiffness of the joint. apply the following liniment: sulphuric ether, ounce; tinct. iodine, ounce; pulv. camphor, ounce; alcohol, ounces; turpentine, ounces; oil of cedar, ounces. treatment for nail puncture. our horse got a nail in his foot. it was a wire nail, rusty, entering about one inch from the point of the frog, and just puncturing far enough to reach a sensitive part of the hoof. it occurred six days ago; the nail was pulled at once, the hoof cut open, and thoroughly cleaned with turpentine (the first thing we could get), then later filled with iodine. since then i have kept on a flaxseed poultice. the treatment with turpentine and iodine was proper and should prove a success. if the foot becomes tender and inflamed, it will be because all dirt was not removed from the wound, and the poultice should be taken off, all foreign matter removed from the wound, and the treatment repeated. in case of similar accidents, other disinfectants could be used in place of turpentine or iodine. pregnancy of mare. is there any way to tell when a mare is in foal? i have had a veterinarian and he could not tell me. there is no very good way to tell whether a mare is in foal for some time. practically speaking, the safest way to do is to have her bred every time she comes in heat until she takes the stallion no longer. even then some mares will come in heat a couple of times after getting in foal. if the sexual excitement speedily subsides and the mare persistently refuses the stallion for a month, she is probably pregnant, though not surely so. also if a vicious mare becomes gentle after service it is an excellent indication of pregnancy; likewise pregnant mares will very often put on fat rapidly after conception and will be unable and unwilling to do as hard work as before. enlargement of the abdomen, especially in its lower third, with slight falling in beneath the loins and hollowness of the back are significant symptoms, though they may be entirely absent. swelling and firmness of the udder, with the smoothing out of its wrinkles, is a suggestive sign, even though it appears only at intervals during gestation. a steady increase of weight ( / pounds daily) about the fourth or fifth month is a useful indication of pregnancy. the further along the mare is in gestation the more pronounced the symptoms become. in the early stages it is naturally much more difficult to detect, especially with the great differences in different mares. cessation of heat and changes of disposition are about the best signs in early stages. diseased uterus of mare. i have a brood mare that has given me two fine colts, but for the last two years i have not been able to get her with foal. she takes service and then refuses service for three or four months, and about the time i come to the conclusion that she is safe with foal she will pass off great quantities of mattery substance. i have had her thoroughly washed out with lysol previous to breeding, but so far she has repeated this performance each time about three or four months after service. this is a disease of the ovaries or uterus; perhaps mumification of a foetus. irrigate with a normal salt solution (teaspoon salt to each pint of warm water) only daily. insert the solution through the neck of the womb into the uterus. give internally / ounce daily of fowler's solution of arsenic. deep-seated abscess. i have a mule which has a swelling on the throat about where the throatlatch touches. it just seems to be swollen hard and not sore. i am using caustic liniment to fester it so it will come to a head and i can open it, but the liniment does not seem to do much good. the mule is losing flesh and does not eat much. this mule should be operated upon at once by a qualified veterinarian. the application of liniments or blisters are useless; the knife only will effect a cure. the fact that the mule is losing flesh makes the case serious. cure for cocked ankles. i have a -year-old mare that has cocked ankles, and would like to know what treatment to give her. cocked ankles are due to an inflammation of the tendons back of the ankle and a drawing up or contraction in consequence. put on heel calks one inch, no toe, to rest and relieve the back tendons from strain. apply the following liniment at night, after which put on cold-water swabs and let them remain all night: soap liniment, ounces; tincture iodine, ounces; oil cedar, ounces; sulphuric ether, ounces. mix and apply once daily. dehorning. which is the best way to dehorn cows and calves? the best time to dehorn cows is in the spring, before the fly season starts. it is best not to have a cow too far along in calf before dehorning, as she is very apt to lose her calf. it is also better to dehorn before your cows freshen, because when cows are milking and are dehorned they will go back in their milk a great deal for the first month after the dehorning has taken place. calves can be dehorned by blistering the little buttons before they adhere to the skull. this is very simple and not painful. first clip the hair about the horns and wet the little loose button and apply caustic potash, in stick form, by rubbing it on the damp horn. remember, this must be done before the horn adheres to the skull. also remember not to use water enough to run the lye away from the button and rub until the skin reddens. also, look out to keep your end of the potash stick dry or you may dehorn the tips of your fingers. paralysis during pregnancy. i have a cow that will freshen in a few days. about six days ago she seemed weak in her hind legs and on going downhill would drag or stumble for or feet, then catch herself and go on rather wobbly. pregnant animals about to bring forth their young sometimes show a paralysis or loss of power in their hind parts due to pressure of foetus. nature corrects this after birth. bloody milk. what can be done to stop bloody milk? milk each teat in a separate glass jar, let stand to ascertain which teat the red specks are coming from, then milk the teats clean and inject the infected teat with equal parts of hydrogen dioxide and water. after a few hours inject drachms of ferric chloride in ounce of water. then milk clean. to cleanse cows. my cows are healthy and calves all right, but seem to have trouble throwing the afterbirth. wash out twice daily with about gallon of normal salt solution (teaspoonful of salt to each pint of warm water). give internally the following powder: pulv. gentian, ounces; puv. slippery elm, ounce; puv. charcoal, ounce; pulv. hyposulphate of soda. ounces. mix and give a heaping teaspoonful twice daily. treatment for caked bag. i have a cow whose udder is caked hard and has been swollen from the udder to the forelegs. this latter swelling has gone down by applying equal mixture of turpentine and lard, but the udder itself still remains hard. when first noticed, one teat caked, then another, until all four are caked alike. insert a milk tube and inject the following: hydrogen dioxide, ounces; tincture iron chloride, ounce; water, ounces. inject into each affected teat. apply the following externally: camphorated oil, ounces; tincture belladonna, ounces; oil eucalyptus, ounces. mix and apply twice daily. garget. i have a cow which gave rich milk all the time, but now every time i milk her some yellow, hard substance will come out instead of milk. first from one teat, then the next, and when i strain the milk the strainer will be full of hard yellow specks. your cow has undoubtedly been affected with garget. this milk should not be used. the condition is best treated by massaging the udder every day with camphorated oil. it will also be necessary for you to continue to milk her regularly until about six weeks before she is due to freshen, at which time you should proceed to dry her up. infectious mastitis. we have a -year-old heifer, which, two weeks before she was due to freshen, had a large udder slightly caked. upon pressing the teat a discharge of blood issues from each teat. this is infectious mastitis. it may be due to a bruise or blow or infection introduced through the milk duct. the first is most likely. apply camphorated oil externally and inject into the affected udder some hydrogen dioxide (peroxide of hydrogen. - editor.). after ten minutes, milk out again. repeat once daily. a mangy cow. i have a milk cow with some trouble about her head, neck and shoulders, which causes her to rub herself enough to make raw spots and take off most all of the hair from the parts affected. the trouble has been standing for months, but i have been using medicine at different times, which stops the rubbing, and the part will cover with hair nicely again, but in due time the trouble shows up again. this cow seems to have mange or scabbies, which is caused by a parasite and is easily spread by contact to other cattle. it should be treated by two or three applications, ten days apart, of a hot solution of creolin, well scrubbed into the skin. the solution is made by mixing five tablespoonfuls of creolin in a gallon of hot water. the treatment should be applied pretty well over the body to cover all the affected parts, and needs to be repeated in ten days to destroy the younger generation. the sheds should be cleaned and whitewashed. irritation on back of udder. i have a yearling heifer which has sore teats and blotches just back of her bag which seem to itch. her mother had a sort of eczema on her neck. i fear her sore teats will spoil her for milking when she comes in next year. the following treatment is advised: drench with pound of epsom salts dissolved in a couple quarts of water. the sores may be treated by washing them with a per cent solution of one of the coaltar disinfectants, such as creolin. after the sores have been allowed to dry naturally, a very little powdered calomel may be dusted thereon. do this every other day for a few days. enlarged gland on neck. i have a calf that has a lump on her neck, which appeared when she was two days old. the lump is getting larger. this is probably an enlarged thyroid gland. apply the following once daily for several weeks and let it alone unless it becomes too large or gets very soft, which is unlikely. churchill's tincture iodine, ounces; turpentine, ounce; sulphuric ether, ounces; oil aniseed, / ounce. mix and apply once daily. lumpy jaw. some of my cows have hard lumps on their jaws, or lumpy jaw. can that be cured, and how? this is actinomycosis (lumpy jaw) and is due to ray fungi (actinomyces) which are found originally on plants which enter the body in various ways. the trouble usually appears in the upper or lower jaws of cattle, where it generally produces tumors of bone or soft tissues. for treatment give / drachms of iodide of potash in / pint of water daily for days. increase to drachms for more days, and then gradually decrease. divide the tumor and insert gauze saturated with tincture of iodine for days. in days a visible improvement will be noticed, a neck-swelling. my cow has a swelling under her neck between her jaw bones about the size of a baseball and almost as hard. it is not attached to anything apparently, but largely suspended by the skin at the entrance to the throat. cut directly through the center of the enlargement, clean to the bottom, splitting it wide open. clean it out with peroxide of hydrogen, after which saturate absorbent cotton with tincture iodine, pack in tight and sew the skin to hold it in place. remove the dressing in hours and wash with sheep dip (tablespoon to quart of warm water) twice daily. this may be tubercular, or the result of foxtail, etc. cow chewing bones. one of my cows is continually chewing bones. what can i do to prevent it? give the cow good clean hay; some root crop, cocoanut meal, bran or soy-bean meal. if the cow does not stop mix in the drinking water twice daily a little dilute hydrochloric acid. also, have boxes arranged near feeding stalls which contain wood ashes, slaked lime and salt. swelling on the dewlap. i have a cow that has a large lump at the point of the breastbone, the dewlap. this lump is as large as a cocoanut, and was caused, i think, by friction against a low manger in eating. get equal parts of tincture of iodine and soap liniment and rub onto the swelling twice daily for a week. barren heifers. i have three heifers, years old, which have run with the bull right along and have failed with calf; have had three different bulls to them; what can be done? there is a possibility of contagious abortion causing these heifers to fail to breed. if this has occurred in the herd, the heifers are very apt to be affected. if apparently healthy, reduce me feed and make the heifers take considerable exercise to reduce flesh. give each a dram of powdered nux vomica and one-half dram of dried sulphate of iron once daily in a little feed. breed to a healthy bull when the heifers come in heat. a sterile cow. i have a very fine jersey cow. i have had her to the bull every month, and can't get her with calf. in an isolated case of this kind there is probably some disease of the generative organs or some condition whereby the impregnation cannot occur even when the animal is bred. the ovaries may be cystic; there may be chronic inflammation of the womb and possibly the mouth of the womb was injured at last calf birth and the scar prevents its admitting the fertilizing cells. if possible, a veterinarian should make a careful examination of this cow in order to determine what the trouble is. however, this treatment may be tried: about the time of coming in heat, give the cow a large dose of glaubers salts (one pound) and the nux vomica and iron treatment advised for "barren heifers" in another paragraph. before breeding the cow, apply a little extract of belladonna and glycerine to the mouth of the womb and breed a few hours after. supernumerary teat. on the upper part of one of the hind teats of a young jersey cow that freshened recently for the first time, there is a small growth from which the milk comes more plentifully than from the natural opening below. how, if at all, can this opening be closed without drying the cow? the milk from it runs all over the milker's hand and makes milking very disagreeable. the only thing that can be done until the cow is dry is to tie the small teat up before milking. this can be done with a string, rubber band, or an ordinary clamp. if it is so small that the opening cannot be tied, there is nothing to do, except, perhaps to use, her as a nurse for calves. two of these might run with her at a time, making way for others as soon as they are able to look after themselves. quite a number of calves can sometimes be handled in a single year by a cow affected this way and the benefit to the calves might be nearly as much as by using the cow for butter production. when the cow is dry the teat can be amputated and the opening will close when the sore heals, or a stick of lunar caustic can be inserted into it, causing a wound that will heal solid. infection of udder. last year one of my cows had milk fever which affected her udder. this year after freshening she milked two months when she suddenly went dry on one side of her udder. she is now badly stiffened up in her hind quarters and off her feed. the cow has infectious mastitis due to introduction of some infection. give a saline purge ( pound. glauber salt), inject peroxide of hydrogen, after which pump in, sterile air. apply externally camphorated oil once daily. camphorated oil has a tendency to dry up the secretion of the gland and is used advisedly. lumps in teats. my cow has hard lumps in, her teats and lower part of the bag. these cause pain to her on milking, but there are no other symptoms of disorder. this condition has prevailed several months. give drachm. iodide potash daily for one week; drachms the second week drachms the third week, add reduce as you began. if tumors are small and interfere with the flow of milk they can be removed. wound in teat. i have a cow with an open slit about one-fourth to one-third of an inch in the side of one teat. i have lacerated the edges and stitched the slit well together many times but the milk will ooze out and prevent healing together. i have used numberless milk tubes to no avail, as the flange on the tubes loose out. when i remove the flange the tubes creep up into the udder and it is a trouble to get them out again. wounds of a quiescent udder usually heal, but if the cow is in milk and the lesions involve the teats it is exceedingly difficult to heal the wound, as the irritation delays or interrupts the healing process. the following lotion is one of the very best to use for teat wound: tinct. iodine, ounces; tinct. arnica, ounces; glycerine, ounces; comp. tinct. benzoine, ounces. mix and apply twice daily after washing with per cent solution carbolic acid and castile soap. your milk tube must be an ancient one as all milk tubes of today are self-retainers and could not slip into the udder. care must be taken to boil the tube previous to each using as you may cause an infection of the udder by a filthy tube. injury to udder. i have a cow which has a gathering in the back of her udder which seems to be some sort of injury. it has been there but a few days. this injury was caused by a blow or traumatism. thoroughly scrape out the diseased tissue and after washing with sheep-dip water (tablespoon to one quart) apply the following powder: mix the following powder and apply it to the wound: iodoform, drachm; boric acid, ounce; alum, / ounce; zinc oxide, / ounce. be sure and insert this powder into the bottom of the wound, so that it will reach all diseased parts. blind teat. what can i do for a "blind teat"? the cow has just freshened and that quarter of her udder is very full, but there is no milk in the teat. i have been rubbing and greasing the udder. the blind quarter is slightly inflamed. an artificial opening should be made in the teat at once. call in the nearest physician unless you have a regular graduate veterinarian near. cow pox. i have a yearling heifer which is in fine condition and making good growth. but all four of her teats have sores on them and are mostly covered with scabs. it is probably cow pox. give a physic of glauber and epsom salts mixed ounces of each to the heifer and double the dose to the cow. apply externally, once daily, after washing, the following prescription: zinc ointment, ounces; iodoform, / ounce; glycerine, ounces; carbolic acid, drachms. mix thoroughly and apply. to sores. cause of "loss of cud." about three months ago a pure-bred jersey commenced to fail on her milk and soon went dry, although on good feed. did not seem to be sick, but did not eat ravenously as she generally did, and little was thought of it. during the past six weeks she has failed rapidly. does not chew her cud, froths at the mouth, runs at the eyes, and when she eats anything much it bloats her. in fact, she seems bloated all the time. she is lifeless and will hardly move around, getting very thin, and hair standing the wrong way. is there such a thing as a cow losing her cud? most people imagine a cow's cud is something material. as a matter of fact, in a certain sense the words appetite and cud are synonymous. you can say a cow has lost her appetite or a cow has lost her cud. now, any sickness severe enough will cause a cow to lose her appetite. the bloating is caused from indigestion secondary to some organic disease, probably tuberculosis. keep up the cow's strength by giving condensed floods or drenches of egg-nogg, gruel or greens. give warm salt-water injections twice daily and give the following mixture: quinine sulphate, ounces; antipyrine, ounce; ammonia muriate, ounces; alcohol, quart; water quart. mix; give ounces every four hours. calf dysentery. i would like to know the reason for bloody discharges from the bowels of a young six-day-old calf. there is a looseness of the bowels and the blood is intermingled with the excrement. there is not a profuse amount of blood, nor is it very dark in color, and it seems to be accompanied with mucus or light, thick substance. this is dysentery, due to scours so prevalent in calves. give ounces olive oil, drachms bismuth subnitrate and drachm pearson's creoline. the discharge is very dangerous to other animals. bovine rheumatism. our jersey cow got somewhat lame one year ago in one hip or leg after calving but soon got better. last june when she came in one leg was lame. it seems to be in the stiffle joint and the first one above. when she walks she gets real lame. rheumatism is the trouble here. give the following powder: soda salicylate, ounces; salol, ounces; pulv. gentian root, ounces. mix and make powders. give four daily. apply pratt's, a good veterinary liniment. bleeding for blackleg. i have read several articles on blackleg, and it seems strange to me that no mention is made of an operation that is an absolute preventive, namely, bleeding in the feet. the reason that no special mention of bleeding is made is that it is not now considered the preventive that it once was. some people appear to have fair success with it, and others no success at all. the bureau of animal industry states that the evidence indicates that bleeding, nerving, roweling or setoning have neither curative nor protective value and, therefore, should be discarded for vaccination which is now widely used as a preventive. poor feeding, depraved appetite. i have three cows. they have been fed alfalfa hay all winter and are in very good condition and seem otherwise in good health, and have salt to run to. every time they chance to come to the yard they will pick up on old bone and chew it for perhaps a half hour. i always take the bone away from them when i discover it. these cows have a depraved appetite, owing to the fact the tissues of the body are crying out for something lacking that is required in the system. administer the following powder; also put a lump of lime in the watering trough: pulv. gentian, ounce; pulv. elm bark, ounces; pulv. iron sulphate, ounce; pulv. bicarb. soda, ounces; pulv. aniseed, ounces; pulv. red pepper / ounce; pulv. oilcake meal pounds. mix thoroughly and give a tablespoonful in scalded grain once daily. cows swallowing foreign substances. we recently lost a valuable cow, and when we opened her we found a large tumor or abscess at the top of the heart as large as a gallon jar. what caused it, or is there any danger of other cows taking it, and if so, what can we do? this is a common disease among cows and is called traumatic pericarditis. the trouble arises from the habit of the cows picking up foreign substances such as wire, nails, or hairpins, and swallowing them. they are taken into the paunch and the digestive movements of this organ cause the foreign body to penetrate the lining and enter the heart, where it gradually causes death as it enters deeper. it is very common to find nails, etc., in the stomachs of old dairy cows which are killed at the slaughter-houses. if you had examined the animal carefully, you would find that some foreign body had penetrated the heart and caused death. there is no danger of any contagion arising from your cow. defective urination. i have a cow that seems to be in good health and gives plenty of milk. nearly every morning when she is being milked she seems to want to urinate and will stand letting the water drip from her. this trouble often results from the cows eating alkaline hay. give her two quarts of flaxseed tea daily. mix it with her food in which there has been placed one-half teaspoon of powdered buchu. infectious conjunctivitis (sore eyes). i have several cows and heifers that are affected with sore eyes. the disease first makes its appearance by excessive watering of the eyes; then the center or pupil becomes white and later turns red of bloodshot. bathe thoroughly with the normal salt solution (teaspoon salt to pint warm water), after which place in the eye and all around the mucuous membrane of the eye the following: twenty-five per cent solution of argyrol, one-half ounce; apply thoroughly once daily and keep out of the sunlight if possible. another treatment is: bathe the eyes once daily with boracic acid teaspoon, water pint, after which thoroughly saturate the eyelids and eyes with to , solution of bichloride of mercury. you are dealing with a disease that will spread throughout your herd if you do not take proper means to separate the affected from the well ones. what to do against tuberculous milk. i should like to know what could be done with a dairy where cows are dying with tuberculosis and the owner knows, but is selling the milk. the case should be reported to f. w. andreason, secretary of the state dairy bureau, at san francisco, for investigation by an inspector. if conditions are found as represented, the sale of milk will be prevented, as it is contrary to state law to sell milk from sick cows. county boards of health have also authority to prevent the sale of such milk in the county on the ground that this is a menace to the public health. effects of ill-feeding pigs. i have a couple of pigs, out of about head farrowed last spring, which seem to have the staggers. they are looking fairly well, feed well on pasture and at feeding time are right there making as much noise as the others. they run around as if they had a shot too much. your pigs are suffering from acute indigestion, undoubtedly due to improper feeding. cut down the rations, especially if they are getting grain. give sick pigs two tablespoonfuls of castor oil each. sore eyes in pigs. what is the matter with young pigs when their eyes swell shut? before they shut they look as if there was a white milky scum over them. there is some infection present, and a good cleaning up in needed. the sows and pigs should be dipped in a warm solution of some coal-tar disinfectant, and the quarters thoroughly cleaned and disinfected or changed to a dry warm place. the pigs' eyes should be washed with warm water and a few drops of the following solution dropped into eyes once a day for a few days: have druggist prepare a per cent solution of silver nitrate. after applying this the eyes had better be washed a few minutes later with water to which a little common salt has been added. hog cholera. i have a number of pigs which have been ailing for three weeks or so. they discharge a yellowish kind of manure at times, running of the bowels. the most striking symptom seems to be a partial paralysis of the hindquarters. the hogs will be walking along and seem to lose control of their hing legs. it seems to be spreading to the other hogs and a number have already died. their appetite is poor. this is undoubtedly hog cholera. the owner should appeal to the experiment station at berkeley for serum and treat all well hogs and clean up as thoroughly as possible. the matter should also be reported to the state veterinarian at sacramento. pneumonia in pigs. what is the disease which may be said to confine itself, with few exceptions, to young pigs weighing pounds or less? its symptoms are at first sneezing and a mild cough. these quickly change to hard coughing and labored breathing, which as the disease progresses shows evidence of much pain. the appetite is lost and the eyes become gummed and inflamed. in some cases the pig lingers on for weeks, while in others death occurs almost immediately. vomiting sometimes occurs. it is pneumonia and in its treatment "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." once pneumonia gets a foothold in a hog, the chances are so strongly in favor of death that recovery may be considered out of the question. since remedies are not certain in the cure of pneumonia, it will be found that the prevention of the disease is the only real way to combat it. the main causes of the disease are exposure to draughts, sudden changes in temperature, damp beds, manure heaps as sleeping quarters, and exposure to the disease itself. pigs in thin condition or weak constitutionally are more liable to contract the trouble than pigs in good flesh and healthy specimens. good, dry, warm, comfortable sleeping houses, well ventilated and so arranged as to prevent crowding and piling up, will, i think, do more to prevent pneumonia than any other one thing. some such preparation as advocated by the government for the prevention of hog cholera will help keep the stock in a good healthy condition, the better to combat exposure. it is the little attentions that keep the herd healthy and in a vigorous condition, and by using simple preventatives, remedies will he found unnecessary. - h. b. wintringham. general prescription for hog sickness. my hogs seem to be mangy and scabby, but am unable to find any lice on them. they eat well, but vomit a good deal and are falling off in flesh. they may be affected with a chronic type of cholera, and this should be determined by some one who can see the hogs. make a general cleaning up of the hogs and quarters, using a dip and repeating in ten days. hogs have a true mange as well as other animals. a change of feed may also be needed, depending on what is being fed and how the hogs are managed. green alfalfa pasture with a moderate feed of shorts or middlings of wheat and ground barley made into a slop would be a good ration. evidently there is some digestive trouble here, and a dose of croton oil ( drops) mixed in a teaspoonful of raw linseed oil for each hog would be beneficial. charcoal, ashes, salt and a little epsom salts would be of benefit to tone the digestion. the oil should be carefully mixed in the slop. pigs out of condition. of a litter of pigs weaned about a month several of them have itchy scabs on their legs, ears and noses, and those having white feet show reddish spots through the hoofs. they did not get it until after they were weaned. they are fed on soaked whole barley and have alfalfa pasture. put the pigs on a slop composed of wheat middlings and barley ground fine, with the hulls removed, and milk, or, in the absence of milk about or per cent of meat meal to which add some good stock food. dip them with some standard brand of dip or apply crude oil to be sure that they were free from lice, fleas, etc. give them good, clean, comfortable sleeping quarters and trust to nature to do the rest. paralysis of sow. during the last few days one of my sows appears to be paralyzed in her hind quarters and now cannot use her hind legs at all. she is about a year old and is due to farrow her first litter in and about six weeks. it is paralysis due to advanced pregnancy. give ounces castor oil and ounces olive oil. she will recover after parturition. rickets in hogs. a fine boar, months old, weight about pounds, well built, with little surplus fat, until lately has been very thrifty, but appears to be losing control over his legs. can't step over the smallest stick without falling forward and acts like a foundered animal. he carries his back rather arching since this trouble came on. during my absence from home a hired man gave this boar a good beating with a pick handle, and it appears to have been the beginning of his troubles. this disease is osteo rachitis (rickets). the abuse has probably aggravated the symptoms: this condition is due to a lack of hardening principles in the bones. give ounces of cod liver oil daily and plenty of lime water to drink. it will be all right to use him for breeding when he recovers. in addition to good food and pure water give daily a handful of a mixture of principally ashes and burned barley (charcoal) with the usual addition of salt, sulphur and soda. this mixture is good: pulv. dried, iron sulphate, ounces; soda bi-carbonate, ounces; soda salicylate, drachms; pulv. aniseed, ounces. mix and give one-half teaspoonful twice daily. pigs losing tails. we have five pigs, days old, and when they were farrowed they had rings around the roots of their tails, and now their tails are dropping off. this is caused by interference with circulation before birth. apply tinct. iodine around the affected parts once daily and if it shows no signs of improvement after one week amputate. over-fat sow. my brood sow is awfully fat; how should i feed her so that she don't get too fat? she is bred and it will be her third litter. she was running in the vineyard all winter, and i fed her a handful of barley every day or a few potatoes. now she has free access to my growing barley field, and i give her half a dozen potatoes every day. you need not worry about getting her thin. she simply requires less food. an animal excessively fat brings forth an inferior offspring. musty corn for pigs. would egyptian corn that has been musty and then dried in the sun be fit for pigs? it heated and musted quite a good deal, but is dried well. the idea is, to grind it and then feed it in milk if good. it is very dangerous to feed any stock moldy or musty food, especially pregnant animals. it is this kind of food which causes a majority of the abortions. mold or smut in food is poisonous both to man and beast. it is usually almost impossible to get out of feed because it runs throughout the structure of the hay or grain. wounds and wound swellings. what is the proper treatment for a fresh wire cut on a horse? how should saddle galls be treated? is there any way to make the hair come in its natural color where saddle galls have been? how can an enlargement of a colt's leg, caused from a wire cut, be reduced? after all foreign matter has been removed from a lacerated wound, like that made in a wire cut, the wound should be carefully fomented with warm water, to which has been added carbolic acid in the proportion of part to of water. it should then be bandaged to prevent infection. zinc ointment would be a good thing to use under the bandage. for a simple saddle, or harness gall, some ointment like the following should be applied and the wound rested up: one pint alcohol in which are shaken the whites of eggs; a solution of nitrate of silver, grains to the ounce of water; sugar of lead or sulphate of zinc, grains to an ounce of water; and so on. or advertised gall cures may be applied. if a sitfest has developed, the dead hornlike slough must be cut out and the wound treated with antiseptics. there is no way we know of to make hair come in with natural color after a wound. the swelling on the colt's leg may he reduced by rubbing it well several times a day and at night rub in some per cent iodine petrogen. fly repellants. can you tell me what to use as a spray to kill the flies in my stable? in the early, morning the ceiling and sides are thickly covered with the pests partly dormant but not enough so that they can be swept down and killed. what spray can i use that will destroy them? it is difficult to kill flies by spraying them. you can, however, spray the sides and ceiling of the barn with a spray of epsom salts (sulphate of magnesia) using about a cupful to the gallon, which will prevent them from gathering there. and since prevention is better than cure, flies can be kept from gathering around by, destroying their breeding places, if those are under one's control, by having all manure and litter removed before the flies have a chance to develop. the following may be found useful to readers as a spray to keep away flies: fish oil, quarts; kerosene, quart; crude carbolic acid, pint; oil of pennyroyal, ounce; oil of tar; ounces. mix thoroughly and apply in a fine spray. the following has been successfully used to repel flies from cows: nitro benzine, ounces; carbolic acid, ounces; kerosene oil, ounces; sol. formaldehyde, ounce; fish oil, / quarts. mix and just touch the hair with the mixture. to destroy fleas. my barn, is full, of fleas i tried to destroy them by using creso-dip, but did not kill them, all. fleas can only be permanently checked by destroying their breeding places which are in the dust! and dirt that accumulate in cracks and corners around barns, sheds and dwellings. follow the cleaning up with a thorough distribution of flake naphthalene. this is most effective where the stable or room can be closed tight for half a day, or even hours; an ingenious suggestion is made that if a sheep can be let run in and around the buildings where the fleas breed, they will soon be less numerous and as new batches hatch out the sheep will soon get them picked up, and after a while the place will be entirely free of them. but the sheep must be allowed to run all around the sheds and breeding places, as the flea jumps up, gets into the wool, and can never get out again. a hog can also be used as a flea trap. one reader says: pour a little of the crude oil on the hogs' heads and along their backs, about a gill on each hog; this would run down the sides of the hogs and kill all the fleas on them. the oil also remains on the hogs for several days, and all the fleas that jump on the hogs from the ground stick fast and never jump off again. in about three weeks the fleas all disappear and the hogs look fine and sleek from the use of the oil. part viii. poultry keeping largely compiled from the writings of mrs. w. russell james and mrs. susan swapgood. teaching chicks to perch. what is a good method of breaking in young brooder chicks to use the roosts? at from six to eight weeks old the chicks should be taken from the brooder quarters to the colony houses and range, or wherever they are to be located, and at this time they should be taught to perch. have the new quarters arranged with low wide perches ( by -inch scantlings); also make slatted frames by nailing lath or other such narrow strips two inches apart. set these frames against the wall so that they will extend slant-wise under the perches, and have the corners on the other side of the room cut off by nailing boards across them. the chicks will run up on the frame to find a huddling corner and land on the perches, as they cannot rest on the open slanting frame. a little care for a few evenings in putting up those that remain on the floor and straightening them out on the perches will teach them the ropes. where there are but a few to be taught, all that is necessary is to provide the low wide perches and shut out the corners, and a few of the smart ones will soon take to the perches, and gradually others will follow until all will be roosting. liver disease. i have hens which seem well in every respect up to the time of their combs changing color, when they die within three days. the combs turn a faint yellow, almost white; they are heavy, have their usual appetite up to the lost hours. i have treated by giving small doses of castor oil and douglas mixture in the drinking water, feeding on dry mash with plenty of green feed. there is no tendency to lameness nor limp neck. the droppings are loose and very white. the fowls were victims of jaundice, which is a form of liver disease and caused by over-feeding on rich starchy foods that also cause fowls to become overfat. however, at the end of the laying season and the beginning of the molt the poultry keeper will lose some hens, even when kept under the best conditions, and especially hens of that age. in doctoring such cases in the way described, if the fowl does not improve in a couple of days, the hatchet cure is the most profitable. rupture of oviduct. i have had two other hens die suddenly when on the nest. the second one - we opened and found one egg broken near the vent and another with shell formed ready to be laid. rupture of the oviduct was probably the cause of the hens dying on the nest and is due to the same condition in the hens; that is, the straining to expel the egg necessary in the engorged condition of the internal organs from overfatness. melons for fowls. have "stock melons" or "citrons" any merit as a green food for laying hens? are the seeds of the above injurious to hens or cows? stock melons are desirable for chicken feeding if other succulent materials are scarce, but they are inferior to alfalfa and other clovers. seeds are not injurious to stock unless possibly one should feed to excess by separating them from the other tissues. if melons are fed as they grow, no apprehension need be had from injury by seed. rape and vetch for chickens. what time do you sow rape and vetch and are they good for chickens? they surely are good for chickens or for any other stock that likes greens. they are winter growers in california valleys and should be sown in the fall as soon as the land is moist enough to keep them growing, or just as soon as you can get it moist either by rainfall or irrigation. neither plant likes dry heat or dry soil. preserving eggs. what is a good way to preserve eggs for home use? in a cool cellar, eggs will keep very well in a mixture of common salt and bran. use equal parts, mix well, and as you gather the eggs from day to day pack with big end down in the mixture and see that the eggs are covered. waterglass eggs are good enough for cooking purposes, but when boiled anyone that knows the taste of a strictly fresh egg can tell the difference in an instant; when fried the taste is not so pronounced, but it is there just the same; besides, when broken, they are a little watery. this watery condition passes off if left to stand for a few minutes. the best way is to use the waterglass method, is one quart of waterglass to ten quarts of water. boil the water and put away to cool, when cold add the waterglass, mixing well, and store in or -gallon crocks in a cool place. they will keep six months if good when put in. in all cases the eggs must be gathered very fresh, for one stale egg will spoil the whole lot, so great care is needed. dipping fowls. how do you dip hens to kill lice? to dip fowls you must have a very warm day, or a warm room where you can turn them in to dry. i have know people to use tobacco stems, but it requires good judgment as to the right strength to use. the dips usually sold already prepared are safer, in my opinion, because they give directions as to quantity. get a can of "zenoleum" or "creolium" - either is good - and have the water a little over blood-heat to commence; be very careful that the liquid does not get in the fowl's throat. if there are no directions with the cans, put enough in to make the water quite milky and strong smelling. it is best to make the hen sit down and with a sponge wet the back and head thoroughly, then under the wings and breast; if there are nits, don't be in a hurry to take the hen out, but let the dip get to the nits and skin on the abdomen. if the water is too warm it will be dangerous, as some fowls have weak hearts; that is the only danger, providing you dry them quickly. cure for feather-eating. what is the cure for feather-eating? feather eating is the result of idleness or a shortage of green feed. the best way to cure it is to furnish the fowls with exercise. boil some oats until soft, and when cooked stir in salt enough to taste and about a quart of good beef scrap; feed this for breakfast several mornings together. make them scratch for the rest of their food in deep litter and give them sour milk to drink if you have it. if sour milk is not available, put a tablespoonful of flowers of sulphur in the boiled oats. the object is to cool the blood and furnish exercise. see that the fowls are supplied with mineral matter, such ash shells, bone meal and some, sand if it can be had. it is surprising the amount of sand that chickens will eat when carried to them in yards, so there must be a necessity for it, and if they cannot get to it, it pays to carry a good box full once in a while. cannibal chicks. what can i do to cure my chicks of eating each other? some kind of animal food is necessary when the chicks begin to pick toes, wings and vents. but the meat must always be cooked, the least bit of raw meat drives them wild as does the blood they can bring on each other. for that reason a strict watch must be kept to detect any case before blood is brought. remove all weak chicks as they always go for the weakest, and as soon as one chick is picked on for a victim, remove it at once. some people paint the toes with tar or liquid lice paint, but i have had the best success with bitter aloes mixed with water. a nickel's worth covers a lot of toes. it is best to buy a powder, then dissolve in a little water and paint wings, vent and toes. they won't take many pecks at them when they find they are so bitter. sunflower seeds for poultry. what is the food value of sunflower seed as a ration for fowls, mostly laying hens? should it be fed whole or crushed? sunflower seed is rich in oil, having the same proportion as flaxseed; otherwise it rates in value the same as grain. a little, not too much, fed whole is well relished by fowls and is said to give luster to the plumage in fitting birds for shows. sunflower is greatly overrated for poultry purposes. it is an ungainly plant of no use for forage and its seed is so well liked by the sparrows that the only way to keep them till ripe is to cover the heads with netting. clipping hens for cleanliness. my hens foul all the feathers below the vent; they appear healthy, but do not look nice. what can i do? take a pair of scissors and clip the fluff away from that part of the abdomen, give a teaspoonful of olive oil, and notice of they have any discharge that is of an offensive color or odor. sometimes it is nothing but pure laziness with hens of the large breeds that causes this matting together of the fluff below the vent. we rarely see hens of the small breeds so affected. whenever a hen soils her feathers clip her at once, and, in fact, it is a good custom to follow in any case. when hens are very heavily fluffed it interferes with the fertility of the eggs. in such cases there is not anything for it but the scissors. bowel trouble in chicks. what is the cause of bowel trouble in young chicks, and what to do for it? bowel trouble in very young chicks is usually caused by a chill. it is very hard for us here to believe chicks get chilled because, not feeling the cold ourselves, we forget that chicks have really undergone a violent change from incubator to the outside atmosphere. in the eastern states, great care is exercised in moving chicks from incubator to brooder oven, and also in seeing that the brooder itself is warm and fit to receive the chicks. but we are, as a rule, very careless in these little matters and the chicks feel the change and suffer from bowel trouble. sometimes, of course, the trouble may be traced to the food, but more often it comes from a chill. the best way to cure it is to remove the chicks to new ground at once, or if in a brooder, clean it out well and spray with some disinfectant. boil all the water that is given to the chicks and feed boiled rice once or twice a day in which a little cinnamon is mixed. do not put in too much or they will not eat it, keep all meat away and just feed dry chick feed and boiled rice. no oatmeal or any other cereal but the rice; if chicks won't eat it, feed dry chick feed and boiled water and a little lettuce. quick roosters and laying hens. how can i get the young roosters off quick and the hens to lay in winter? these two happy results come from correct methods of poultry keeping from the ground up. to get the cockerels off quick, they must be hatched from strong-germed eggs, incubated properly and kept growing from the first jump out of the shell. to get eggs in winter the pullets must come from the same conditions. very few hens will lay in the early winter under any conditions. the pullets must be depended upon for that season and the hens kept properly will drop in some time in january. poultry tonic. what is a good poultry tonic? the following is a very good tonic for general purposes: tincture of red cinchona, fluid ounce; tincture of chloride of iron, fluid drachm; tincture of flux vomica, fluid drachms; glycerine ounces; water, ounces. mix and give one teaspoonful to a quart of water, allowing no other drink. poultry in the orchard. kindly advise me about keeping hens in an orchard. i would like to know if they will injure the trees in any way if kept in large numbers. in what way would they benefit the trees? from the point of view of the trees there is no doubt that they would be advantaged by the presence of the poultry, providing the coops are not allowed to interfere with the proper irrigation and cultivation. if it is practicable to handle the fowls in coops without causing the soil around the coops to become compacted by continual tramping, and if they are not kept upon the ground long enough to cause an excessive application of hen manure, which is very concentrated and stimulating, the result would unquestionably be beneficial. from the point of view of the tree, this benefit of injury would depend upon how long the fowls were kept around the tree and the maintenance of them in such a way that the soil should not become out of condition physically or too rich chemically for the satisfactory performance of the tree. if they can be moved frequently, and if they are only put in place when the soil is in such condition that tramping around the coops will not seriously compact it, the presence of fowls would be an advantage. on the other hand, if the coops are to be kept in place for a long time and all the ground outside of them crusted and hardened by tramping and the soil under the coops overloaded with droppings, the thrift and value of the trees will be seriously interfered with. caponizing. can three to four month old cockerels be caponized successfully in summer, and if so, what care, feed, etc., do they require afterwards? the birds should be between two to three months, not over four, unless some very large variety that matures slowly. size is equally important as age, and a bird to be caponized should not weigh more than one and a half pounds. the work can be successfully done in the summer season, but the fowl must be kept without food or drink for at least hours, longer is better and keep in shady place. after caponizing, feed the bird what soft feed he will eat up and let him have plenty of water. then leave him to himself as he will be his own doctor. in two or three days look them over and if there are any wind-balls, simply prick with a needle to let the air out; this may have to be done two or three times before the wound heals up, but after it has healed, treat just as you would other chickens and feed them about twice a day. there is nothing made by trying to rush nature; it takes fifteen months to grow a good capon of the large breeds. roup treatment. up to a week ago the chickens had been exceptionally well in every way. now they seem to have a cold and a running at the nose and with it a bad odor. it was suggested that this might be the beginning of roup, but i see no swell-head. the distinguishing characteristic of roup is not so-called "swell head" or other form of cold, but the offensive roupy odor. when the cold has reached this stage it is a pronounced case of roup, and highly contagious. separate all the ailing fowls and segregate them in comfortable hospital quarters, warm but with one side partly open for fresh air. disinfect the quarters of the well fowls by spraying with distillate or cheap-grade coal oil and sprinkling the floors and about the houses with air-slaked lime. use some simple remedy like coal oil or permanganate of potash to cleanse the throat and nostrils. with coal oil, first wipe the eyes and bill with a clean cloth dipped in the coal oil, then inject with a sewing-machine oil can enough coal oil to open and thoroughly clean out the nostrils. if the throat is affected, give a tablespoonful of sweet oil and coal oil, half and half, two or three times a day until relieved. one of our correspondents has sent us the following treatment with permanganate of potash which he has found the best roup remedy he has ever tried: dissolve ounce of permanganate of potash in pints of water, hold the fowl's head in this for a second, then open the beak and rinse out the mouth in the solution. wipe with a clean, soft cloth and apply a very little witch hazel or carbolated salve to the eyes, nostrils and head. repeat the operation as often as the throat and head become clogged with mucus. until the disease is eliminated from the premises, keep permanganate of potash in the drinking water of all the fowls, both sick and well. about ounce to each gallons of water or enough to give the water a claret color. the sick fowls should be allowed no other feed but a little stimulating mash three times a day. where the fowls do not show a decided improvement in the course of a few days, or where the disease has assumed a violent form, all such birds should be killed and the bodies burned at once. bad food for chickens. my chicks are about three weeks old and have always been strong and sturdy, but when taken sick first appear a little dumpish, then the head seems a little heavy and the neck lengthens out. as the disease advances they become staggery. your chicks have eaten soured food, decayed vegetables or tainted meat. baby chicks are just like other babies and the same care should be used that their food be always sweet and fresh. wet food should never be given chicks, nor raw meat nor anything the least bit tainted or stale. put a teaspoon of coal oil in each pint of drinking water and see to it that the latter is kept pure and cool. mix a teacup of sulphur with enough bran or shorts for each chicks, moisten with sweet milk and feed it on clean boards, what the chicks will eat up clean in some, twenty minutes. give them one feed of this each day for three days if the weather is dry. clean the brooders and runs daily, then dust white with air-slacked lime and cover the lime with a sprinkling of clean sand. rake and clean up the yards where they range and never let them eat any of their grain or food out of dirt and filth. you cannot doctor such small chicks and must depend upon the coal oil in the drinking water. keep the water fresh, but add the coal oil until the chicks are relieved. open-front chicken houses. in what direction shall i face open-front poultry houses? north or northeast is the proper direction to face the open fronts of poultry houses and coops in the pacific coast climate. the prevailing winds are from the south and southeast in the winter, and from the west and southwest in the summer. the occasional north winds or "northers," may be called dry winds, in fact, are an indication of dry weather, and so do not harm the fowls even when cold. we like the upper half of the north-end or slide of our poultry houses open with inch-mesh covering the open space and the eaves extending several inches as a protection. in case of an unusual storm from that direction, one thickness of burlap may be tacked to the edge of the extending eaves, and to the lower part of the opening. this will admit plenty of fresh air while breaking the force of the wind. we also have a large trap door for the use of the fowls, in the solid lower part of the open end, and the large door, for cleaning and sunning the house, in the west side. a point on mating. i have fine roosters a year old this april; would you advise keeping them for mating with the same hens next season, or do you advise selling each year and getting fresh stock? the young males will be all right to mate with the same hens next season - that is, if they come through the molt with vigor. they will be just two years old and at their best. the molt is the test for both, hens and cocks. if they show no signs of ailing or weakness during that period, it is proof of the proper stamina and vigor. age for mating. at what age may a cockerel be mated with hens? from nine months to a year is the proper age to mate a leghorn cockerel. cockerels of the larger breeds should not be mated before a year old. white-yolk eggs. why are eggs watery and light-colored? the trouble is in the feed somewhere. too much green feed, especially green feed that springs from wet, soggy ground, will sometimes make the eggs watery. or if you are feeding more mash feed than dry grain, it will have that tendency. some people claim that the feed a hen eats does not affect the egg at all; but if it does not, why do eggs differ in color and quality? eggs that are laid by hens fed wholly on wheat, or the by-products of wheat, such as bran, shorts or middlings, all have a pale yolk. now feed the hens some green feed - any kind will do - and the eggs from the same hens will have a yolk several degrees or shades darker. poultry diarrhea. will you kindly tell me the cause and cure for bowel trouble among hens? the "quick cure" for chick diarrhea has not yet been found. prevention is the only sure remedy. the first treatment in diarrhea (which must not be confused with simple looseness of the bowels) should be a mild physic to clean out the digestive tract. epsom salts is probably best for this purpose where a number of fowls are to be treated. this is usually given in the drinking water, but dr. morse, who has charge of the investigation of poultry diseases in the bureau of animal industry, gives the following directions for administering the salts: "clean out by giving epsom salts in an evening mash, estimating one-third to one-half teaspoonful to each adult bird, or a teaspoonful to each six half-grown chicks, carefully proportioning the amount of mash to the appetite of the birds, so that the whole will be eaten up quickly." for a few days afterward, feed only lightly with dry grain and tender greens, such as fresh-cut mustard and lettuce leaves. keep plenty of pure, cool water, with just a thin skim of coal oil - one drop to each pint - for drinking; also plenty of sharp grit and fresh charcoal broken to the size of grains of wheat. limber-neck. a very peculiar disease is taking off my fowls. the head of the fowl bends down to the breast and the fowl looks like dead, there is also a slight discharge from the mouth. the head and tail droop and if the fowl could stand up they would almost touch. when a fowl loses partial or entire control of the muscles of the neck the common name of the affection is limber-neck. in medical science limber-neck is regarded as a symptom rather than a disease, and may be due to a number of causes, such as derangement of the digestive organs, intestinal worms and ptomaine poisoning. the affected fowls should be given immediately a full tablespoon of fresh melted lard or sweet oil, to which has been added a scant teaspoonful, of coal oil. in an hour repeat the dose. for a few days the fowls should be fed on some light food, such as shorts scalded with sweet milk in which has been dissolved a level teaspoonful of baking soda to every pint of milk, and also allowed plenty of crisp, tender lettuce or similar greens. a little epsom salts should be added to the drinking water for a few days. this treatment, if resorted to at the start, will be effectual, but if the poisoning has had its course long, nothing will save the bird. chicken pox. my one and two-year-old fowls are getting scabby combs. it starts with a round blackish spot and swells into many spots, finally nearly covering one side of the comb. sometimes accompanying this is the closing of one eye, and later both eyes. the trouble is chicken pox, which is a very contagious disease. a treatment which has been successful consists in bathing the sores with strong salt and water and giving the fowls a mash containing one teaspoonful of calcium sulphide for each hens. with a large flock of hens the method successfully employed by one of the large coast ranches in stamping out an epidemic of the disease was to place a sulphur smudge, to which had been added a little carbolic acid, in the poultry house after the fowls had gone to roost. this was allowed to remain till the fowls began to sneeze, when it was instantly removed. the affected fowls were also treated by dipping the heads in a solution of permanganate of potash. roup in turkeys. my turkeys have a disease that is spreading rapidly. they commence with a running at the nose, have swelling under the eyes which are filled with pus. this is clearly a case of cold developing into roup. get one ounce of permanganate of potash and pour a quart of boiling water over; after it is cold, bottle for use. now take an old tin can, three parts full of warm, not hot water, and drop in enough of the permanganate of potash to make it dark red. hold the turk's head under in this can until it needs breath then give it time to breathe, and dip again. press the fingers along the swollen parts towards the nostrils and get out all the pus you can, then take a sewing-machine oil can and fill it with a little of the mixture, and part olive oil, inject the liquid up the nostrils and in the cleft of the mouth. put a little of the permanganate in the drinking water for all the flock. make the water a light red, later it will turn to a dirty brown, but don't mind that. disinfectants. what can i use to disinfect poultry belongings? sulphuric acid spray is good, but you will need to be very careful that you do not get it on the hands or clothing. get ounces sulphuric acid ( per cent solution), water gallons. have the water in a wooden tub or barrel and add the sulphuric acid to the water very slowly, in order not to splash it on the flesh or clothes. but mind: nothing but wooden vessels to mix it in. when made according to directions, and of this strength it is a very valuable disinfectant, but is dangerous to use of any stronger mixing. after mixing, it can be stored in glass bottles or earthenware jugs. another very good disinfectant for poultry houses and runs is the formaldehyde disinfectant. formaldehyde pint ( per cent), water gallons. this is fine for houses that you can shut up. turn the fowls out of the building, close all windows, and spray thoroughly, then close the door and leave it do the work. air well by opening windows and door several hours before the fowls go to roost. cloth for brooding houses. would some good grade of white cloth on a frame do as well, or would it be better than glass, for a brooder house, or would it keep out too much sun-heat? cheesecloth, not heavy cloth, would be better than glass, so far as the sun is concerned. there would be none of the overheating during the middle of the day followed by the chilling at night which are caused by a large expanse of glass. on the other hand, there should not be openings on opposite sides of the house to create a draft. also, the rat and vermin question must be considered. it might be necessary to have wire screens made to fit firmly over the cloth at night. grains for chickens. what variety of grain adopted for poultry food will be the best to grow, with and also without irrigation? wheat is a standard grain for poultry feeding, and egyptian corn is also largely used. indian corn is also satisfactory, under the general roles for compounding poultry rations which are laid down by all authorities on the subject. egyptian corn is very successful in the interior parts of the state, and, on lands which are winter-plowed and harrow to retain moisture, very satisfactory results can be secured by summer growth without irrigation from planting as soon as frost danger is over. plucking ducks and geese. i would like to know about how, when and how often to pick old ducks so as to get the feathers for pillows and not kill the ducks, either. will they lay any eggs while growing new feathers? neither ducks nor geese should be plucked until after the laying season is over, which will be in july. just before the moult, when the feathers begin to loosen, they may be plucked again. those most considerate of their birds make only this latter plucking, which does not greatly inconvenience the fowls. at no time must they be plucked unless the feathers are "ripe"; that is, dry at the root, so that no bleeding or injury to the skin is caused. an old stocking is drawn over the head of the victim, and the bird held in the plucker's lap on a burlap apron; then the soft feathers on the body are quickly and very gently removed; but those on the side of the body which support the wings should not be taken. great care should be exercised not to injure the skin or pinfeathers or pull the down. to grow new feathers quickly and resume laying are matters which depend largely upon the condition of the bird and the feed. the latter should consist of some per cent of animal food. feeding hens for hatching eggs. should soft feed be given to the mothers of chicks intended for broilers? how about dry mash? how would you advise feeding animal protein? cut out all ground feed, except perhaps a little wheat bran. while you may not get quite as many eggs, they will all have good strong germs and the chicks will stand forcing to the limit, while if you force the egg output you reduce the vitality of the germs and livability of chicks hatched. the only way to feed hens whose eggs are intended for hatching chicks for broilers is to feed whole grain and make them exercise for it, good green feed, or, better still, sprouted oats, and feed beef scrap in a hopper all the time. at first, while it is new, they may eat more than you would give them but don't mind that they will regulate the quantity in a few days better than you can. get a good grade of beef scrap and keep it in a hopper that will not let rain in or keep it under cover and feed all the wheat and oats they require; if you are short on green feed give them a bale of alfalfa hay to work on. a dry mash. will you give a formula for a dry mash? wheat bran, pounds; middlings, pounds; cracked corn, pounds; charcoal, pounds; alfalfa meal pounds; bone meal, pounds; blood-meal pounds; meat cracklings, if ground, pounds; ground oats or barley, pounds. give oyster shell separately and supply fowls with good sharp grit. depluming mites. my chickens are losing the feathers from their necks, some three inches down the front and then extending around the neck. the loss of feathers is probably due to the depluming mite. dust well with buhach through the feathered portion of the bird and apply carbolated vaseline to the bare skin and the edges of the feathers where the insects work. do this daily as long as needed. when vaseline is not on hand, a mixture of coal oil and sweet oil applied with a soft sponge squeezed nearly dry does as well. we would advise that you make a general cleaning and spraying of your poultry quarters, nest boxes, etc. part ix. pests and diseases of plants control of grasshoppers. this county is having trouble with the grasshoppers as are other counties. would you kindly inform me what i could do to exterminate them on my young orchard? the best thing for grasshoppers is to fix up a lot of poison. this is made in the proportion of pounds of bran, pounds of molasses and of arsenic, mixed together as a mash. they will take this wherever they find it, even when nice green leaves are close by, but it has to be kept moist. grasshoppers can also be reduced by driving a "hopper doser" over ground where they are. this is made somewhat like a fresno scraper, but is much longer and the bottom is covered with crude oil. when disturbed the hoppers jump up and fall into the oil. besides the poison, you should also protect the trunk of the tree to prevent the hoppers from climbing up it. this can be done by applying tree tanglefoot, or putting on one of the tree guards that prevent climbing insects from passing up to the leaves. the combination of poison and tree guards will give you about all the protection you need. sunburn and borers. please state the best remedy for keeping the borer out of young fruit trees. sunburn can be prevented in many ways. the manufactured tree-protectors are good if they are light colored and are kept in place so that the sun does not scald above or below them. wrapping spirally with narrow strips of burlap, torn from old grain sacks, from the base to the forking of the branches, is also good. a very effective and widely used method is to apply a good durable whitewash which may be made of pounds of lime, pounds of tallow and pounds of salt, adding the salt to the water used in slaking the lime, stirring in the tallow while the slaking is in progress and hot, and then adding water to thin the wash so that it will work well with pump or brush. gumming of prune trees. i write to ask for information concerning my prune trees. they are from two to six years old and the gum is exuding from them. as i notice the branches dying i cut them out, but this doesn't seem to save the tree. i would appreciate any information you can give me. this is a pretty hard matter to diagnose from a distance. there is a good probability that the trouble is caused by sunburn, a point you could determine on inspection. whitewash would be a protection against this and more or less of a cure also. furthermore, borers may be the cause, which can be determined by examining the points where the gum exudes, seeing if any wood grains are present. these borers should be dug out and whitewash applied, which latter also protects against this trouble. lastly, your ground may be drying out, which also you can determine and remedy. borers in olive twigs. there are quite a number of olive trees in this locality that have something wrong with them. they make a growth of five or six inches and the center twig dies back, then it sprouts out at the sides and makes another growth in the same way. this makes a thick bush instead of the tree coming up as it should. the dying back is caused by a beetle which bores into the twigs. the twigs above the point where the beetle enters dies and then, of course, buds come out from healthy wood below. no treatment has been devised against it, though its breeding ground is limited if all dead wood and brush and litter is cleaned up and twigs are cut off below the point of injury whenever the work of the insect is seen. raspberry cane borer. can you tell me what to do for my loganberries and raspberries? a small worm got into them in the new growth of wood lost summer, right in the tips of the new growth of wood, and then worked down through the pith of the wood, and as fast as they worked down the can wilted. this is the raspberry horn-tail, or the cane-borer. the adults are wasp-like insects about a half-inch long and very active. they come out of the canes in spring and the females soon lay eggs in the tender tips of the young shoots. these eggs soon hatch and the larvae eat their way up toward the tip, which causes it to wither and die. it is this injury that causes much notice. as the tip dies, the larvae turn and go down into the canes, as in the sample sent, also injuring them greatly, though possibly not killing them for some time. the only way to attack them is to pinch the spots where the eggs were laid; then those that escape and cause the tips to wilt should be destroyed by cutting off the tips below the point of injury or cutting off the canes when they show damage. likewise, the insects work on the wild rose, and cutting all those out around a place will prevent enough adults from developing to permit little damage to be done, always provided the berries are well looked after. control of red spider. can you give directions for the prevention of injury by the red spider to almond and other trees in the sacramento volley? the red spider on almond and prune trees is usually controlled by the thorough application of dry sulphur to the foliage. on almonds the first sulphuring should be done as soon as the leaves appear in march. a second application is advised from the st to the th of may. a third application should be made from the st to the th of june. prune trees should be treated as soon as the spider appears. in the sacramento valley this usually occurs about the first week of july. full-grown trees require about a pound of sulphur which should be thoroughly distributed throughout the foliage. the old method of throwing a handful of sulphur in the branches of the tree or on the ground under the tree is valueless. the use of a blower is economical in large orchards, but a can with perforated bottom is frequently used on young trees or small orchards with good results. in normal seasons the spider is easily, controlled by dry sulphuring. when the pest does not yield to this treatment, a spray is recommended. liquid spray for red spider. is there any liquid spray i can use in my spraying that will kill the red spider without injuring the foliage of the almond? a liquid spray for red spider is made by taking sulphur pounds; lime (reduced to milk form by water), pounds; water, gallons; or use commercial lime-sulphur, or gallons to gallons of water. these sprays can be applied without injuring the foliage. they are more expensive in labor cost than dry sulphuring, but are more effective. apple-leaf aphis. i am sending herewith a small piece from one of my young apple trees. if you can, will you kindly tell me what the insects are an it, and what i had better do for them? the apple twig which you send is infested with the eggs of the leaf aphis or leaf louse. these eggs are very difficult to kill. a good thorough spraying with lime-sulphur might, however, get rid of many of them and would be good for the trees otherwise - diluting according to condition of tree growth. the chief campaign against the leaf aphis, however, must be made early in the growing season, just as these pests are beginning to hatch out and to accumulate under the leaves of the new growth. they should then be attacked with properly made kerosene emulsion or tobacco extract with a nozzle suited to land the spray on the under side of the leaves. unless these pests are attacked early in the season and repeated if necessary, your apples on bearing trees will be ruined so far as they attack them, being small, misshaped and worthless. on young trees the destruction of the foliage is fatal to good growth. woolly aphis. will you kindly inform me what you consider the best treatment for apple trees affected by woolly aphis? the best way to kill the woolly aphis on the roots is to remove the earth from around the tree to a distance of one or two feet, according to the size of the tree, digging away a few inches of the surface soil, then soak the soil around the tree with kerosene emulsion, properly made, of per cent strength, and replace the earth. be sure you get a good emulsion, for free oil is dangerous. for the insects above ground on the twigs, a good spraying while the tree is out of leaf will kill many, but some will survive for summer spraying, and for this a tobacco spray may be most convenient. blister mite on walnuts. i am sending you some walnut leaves with some swellings an them. they are very plentiful on some trees here. is the trouble serious and will it spread? this is merely erinose, or blister mite, which is a very common trouble on walnuts, but does not do enough damage to call for methods of control. these swellings are caused by numerous, very small insects which live within the blisters on the under side of the leaf amongst a felt-like, heavy growth which develops there. while this effect is very common, it produces no appreciable injury and needs no treatment for its control. scale on apricots. i would like to know how to check the scale on apricot trees. the most common scale on apricots, the brown apricot scale, is usually held in check by the comys fusca, which is as widely distributed as the scale itself. if it gets beyond the parasite, you should spray in winter with crude oil emulsion. if some scales are punctured or have a black spot on top, the comys fusca is busy and you probably will be safe enough without doing anything. fumigating for black scale. i would like to know the best method of eradicating the black scale from my orange trees, whether by spraying or fumigation? spraying has been given up as a suitable method for controlling the black scale on citrus trees, and the only recognized method of merit where the scale is bad is by fumigation with hydrocyanic acid gas. you should communicate with your county horticultural commissioner, who, through inspectors, will see that you have a good job done, at the right time and at as moderate price as is compatible with good work. it is impossible to 'eradicate' the black scale, but there is a great difference in the amount that can be killed, and it pays to have a job done as near perfectly as possible. similar methods of attacking other scale insects on citrus trees are used. finding thrips. how can the presence of pear thrips be detected in a prune orchard? will the distillate emulsion-nicotine spray control brown scale as well as thrips? you can find thrips by shaking a cluster of blossoms, as soon as they open, over a sheet of paper or in the palm of your hand. the thrips are very minute, transparent, somewhat louse-like insects. the spray you mention would probably have little effect on the brown scale which would still be in the egg state and under cover, at the time the early spring spraying for the thrips. control of pear slug. i am sending, under separate cover, some samples of cherry tree leaves that have been attacked by a small snail or slug. kindly let me know what they are, and how to rid the trees of them. the creatures you speak of are the pear slugs, or the cherry slugs, as they are sometimes known. although slimy, like the big yellow slug that is a pest in vegetable gardens, it is no relation thereto, but is the larva of an insect. its olive green color, slimy appearance and the way it eats the surface of the leaves make it about the easiest of all insects to identify. parasites and predacious insects usually keep it in fair control. whenever artificial methods of control are needed the slugs can best be destroyed by sprinkling dust of any kind upon them. if you can get a machine for sulphuring a vineyard and use some air slaked lime or other fine dust, it will fix them quickly and inexpensively, though any way of applying dust may be used. cutworms and young trees. what method should be used to protect young fruit trees from cutworms? hoe around the trees or vines and kill the fat, greasy grubs which you will find near the foliage. put out a poisoned bait which the worms like better than the foliage, viz. bran, pounds; white arsenic, / pound; molasses, / gallon; water, gallons. mix the arsenic with the bran dry. add the molasses to the water and mix into the bran, making a moist paste. put a tablespoonful near the base of the tree or vine and lock up the chickens. control of squash bugs. we are troubled with pumpkin bugs. please tell us what to do for them. when the bugs first make their appearance in the field they can be easily disposed of by hand picking and dropping into a bucket containing about two inches of water with about one-fourth inch of kerosene on top to kill the bugs. the picking should be done in the morning, as the bugs are apt to fly in the warm part of the day and scatter where already picked. two persons can pick over an acre in one and a half hours, and two pickings are usually sufficient for a season, as after the vines begin to run over the ground pretty well the bugs will not be able to hurt them much. a pair of thin old gloves will help to keep off one's hands some of the perfume from the bugs. the sooner the work starts the fewer bugs to pick. cleaning up of all old vines in the fall and removing litter in which the mature bugs hide for the winter will permit less eggs to be laid in the spring and there will be fewer bugs to pick as a result. the corn worm. last year all my ears of corn were infested with maggot, growing fat thereon. can you help me scare them away? you have to do with the so-called corn worm which is very abundant in this state and one of the greatest pests to corn growing. it is the same insect which is known as the boll worm of the cotton in the southern states. no satisfactory method of controlling this has been found, although a great deal of experimentation has been done. nearly everything that could be thought of has been tried without very satisfactory results. a late planted corn has sometimes been free, for the insect is not in the laying stage then. if it were not for this insect the canning of corn would be an important industry in this state. melon lice. i have in about four acres of watermelons, and there seem to be lice and a small gnat or fly, and also some small green bugs and white worms on the under part of the leaves, which seem to be stopping the growth of the vines, making them wilt and die. they seem to be more in patches, although a few on all the vines. can you please tell me what to do for them? melon lice are very hard to catch up with after you have let them get a start. spraying with oil emulsions, tobacco extracts, soap solutions, etc., will all kill the lice if you get it onto them with a good spray pump and suitable nozzles for reaching the under sides of the leaves. the gnats you speak of are the winged forms of the lice; the white worms may be eating the lice; the "small green bugs" may be diabroticas. if you had started in lively as soon as you saw the first lice you could have destroyed them in the places where they started. now your chance lies largely in the natural multiplication of ladybirds and the occurrence of hot winds which will burn up the lice. it is too late probably, to undertake spraying the whole field. wire worms. is there any way to destroy or overcome the destructive work of the wireworm, which i find in some spots takes the lion's share of crops, such as beans, potatoes, onions, etc.? we do not know any easy way with wire worms. nitrate of soda is believed to kill or repel them, but you have to be careful with it, for too much will either over-stimulate or kill the kill; about pounds per acre, well distributed, is the usual prescription for the good of the plants. wire worms can probably be killed with carbon bisulphide, using a tablespoonful poured into holes about a foot deep, three or four feet apart. the vapor would permeate the soil and kill all ground insects, but the acre-cost of such treatment must be measured in its relation to the value of the crop. the most promising policy with wire worms is rotation of crops, starving them out with a grain or grass crop and not growing such crops as you mention continually on the same land. bean weevil. how can i keep certain insects from getting into my dry beans? i have finished picking the crop. every year a little, short, stubby beetle gets in them before spring and makes them unfit for use. you have to do with the bean weevil. the eggs are inserted by the insect while the beans are still green in the pods; subsequently the eggs hatch and the worm excavates the interior of the ripened beans. the beans can be protected after ripening by heating carefully to ° fahrenheit, which will destroy the egg, or the larva if already hatched. of course, this heating must be done cautiously and with the aid of a good thermometer for fear of destroying the germinating power. the work of the insect can also be stopped by putting the beans in a barrel or other close receptacle, with a saucer containing about an ounce of carbon bi-sulfid to vaporize. be careful not to approach the vapor with a light. after treatment for one-half hour, the cover can be removed and the vapor will entirely dissipate. this is a safer treatment than the heating. similar methods of control can be used on other pea and bean weevils. slugs in garden. can you advise me how i can get rid of slugs in my garden? when barriers of lime, ashes, etc., are ineffective, traps consisting of pieces of board sacking and similar materials placed about the field prove inviting to the slugs. they collect under these and by going over the field in the early morning they may be put into a salt-water solution or otherwise destroyed. arsenical sprays applied with an underspray nozzle to the lower surface of the leaves will help control the slugs. poison bran mash consisting of pounds of coarse bran, quarts of cheap syrup, and enough warm water to make a coarse mash, is very good for cutworms and should be equally effective for slugs. it should be placed in small heaps about the plants to be protected. cabbage leaves dipped in grease drippings and placed about the fields also prove attractive bait for the slugs, which may then be collected there. if a person has a taste for poultry, the keeping of a few ducks may solve the slug problem without further bother. cultivation or irrigation methods that give a dry surface most of the time also discourage these pests. cause of mottle leaf. what is the cause and cure of mottle leaf of citrus trees? there are apparently a number of causes of this trouble, all more or less obscure and hard to overcome. it is generally thought that it is due to poor nutrition, whatever the reason for poor nutrition might be. the presence of a nematode or eel worm on the roots has found to be a cause of mottle leaf in many cases. poor drainage, too sandy soil and a number of other things frequently cause it. whatever the cause, no one good method of cure has been found. potato scab. i think most of my potatoes will have some scab. will you please tell me if my next crop would be apt to have scab, provided i got good clean seed and planted in the same ground? it seems demonstrated that a treatment of the seed will practically insure against potato scab. one method is dipping the potatoes in a solution of corrosive sublimate. dissolve one ounce in eight gallons of water and soak the seed potatoes in this solution for one and one-half hours before cutting. gopher poison. i have some alfalfa, some hogs and some gophers, also some strychnine and carrots. if i put the strychnine on the carrots, and endeavor to poison the gophers, and the hogs get hold of the poison will it kill them? you will find that hogs are liable to poison like any other animal, and the safest way to poison the gophers, while the hogs are running in the field is to bury the poisoned carrots very deeply in the gopher hole and then put a row of sticks or branches over the mouth of the hole so that the hogs cannot root around and get at the poisoned carrots. how to make bordeaux. use copper sulphate (bluestone) pounds; quick-lime (good stone lime), pounds; water, gallons. put the bluestone in a sack and hang it so it will be suspended just under the surface of a barrel of water over night, or dissolve in hot water. use one gallon of water to one pound of bluestone. slake the lime in a separate barrel, using just enough water to make a smooth, clean, thin whitewash. stir this vigorously. use wooden vessels only. fill the spray tank half full of water, add one gallon of bluestone solution for each pound required, then strain in the lime and the remainder of the water and stir thoroughly. the formula may be varied according to conditions, using from to pounds of bluestone to gallons of water and an equal or slight excess of lime. use the stronger mixture in rainy weather. keep the mixture constantly agitated while applying. formula for lime-sulphur. to make lime-sulphur take quick-lime, pounds; ground sulphur, pounds and water gallons. slake the lime with hot water in a large kettle, add the sulphur and stir well together. after the violent slaking subsides add more water and boil the mixture over a fire for at least one hour. after boiling sufficiently strain into the spray tank and dilute with water to the proper strength. if a steam boiler is available, this mixture may be prepared more easily on a large scale by cooking in barrels into which steam pipes are introduced. this mixture cannot be applied safely except during the winter when the trees are dormant. a large proportion of the lime-sulphur used in the state is purchased already prepared in more concentrated form. index fruit growing. almond grafting on peach pruning 	 budding and grafting 	 planting 	 pollination roots for 	 longevity of 	 seedlings 	 do not plant in place 	 stick-tights 	 and peach apples shy-bearing not on quince 	 stock for 	 and alfalfa top grafting 	 mildew on seedlings 	 pruning 	 will they be same kind places for 	 grafting in place 	 resistant roots 	 for hot place 	 die-back of 	 storage of 	 root-grafts apricots pruning 	 shy-bearing 	 propagation 	 renewing old 	 summer pruning bananas in california berries pruning himalayas 	 hardiness of hybrids 	 with perfect flowers 	 pruning loganberries 	 strawberry planting 	 blackberries for drying 	 planting bush fruits 	 strawberry plants 	 strawberries in succession 	 gooseberries, limitations of carobs in california cherries for hot place 	 wild pruning 	 training grafts 	 restoring tress pollination citron curing citrus fruit temperatures 	 filbert roots filbert growing figs stickers 	 no gopher-proof roots 	 trays, cleaning fruit trees depth of soil 	 what slopes 	 and overflow 	 roots for 	 and sunburn 	 budding 	 starting from seed 	 square or triangular planting 	 planting on clearings 	 dipping roots of 	 preparing for planting 	 depth of planting 	 in wet place 	 cutting back at planting 	 branching young 	 coal tar and asphaltum 	 regular bearing of 	 avoiding crotches 	 crotch-splitting 	 strengthening 	 covering wounds 	 covering sunburned bark 	 gravel streak transplanting old dwarfing 	 seedling 	 filling holes in 	 deferring bloom 	 repairing rabbit injuries 	 crops between 	 scions for mailing 	 scions from young trees 	 whitewashing 	 deciduous planting 	 on coast sands 	 over underflow grapefruit and nuts grapes dry farming cutting frosted canes 	 dipping seedless 	 zante currant 	 vines for arbor 	 pruning old vines 	 bleeding vines 	 scant moisture 	 sulphuring for mildew 	 sugar in canned 	 planting grafting wax june drop killing moss on tree interplanting, wrong idea lemons citrus budding 	 no citrus fruits on roots mulberries pruning and grafting nursery stock in young orchard orchard replanting 	 plowing in young 	 pigs in 	 forage under sprayed trees oranges water and frost 	 thinning 	 wind-blown trees 	 handling balled trees 	 navel not thornless 	 over-size budding or grafting in orchard under-pruning trees 	 keeping trees too low 	 dying back of trees 	 young trees dropping fruit 	 training 	 crops between trees 	 navels and valencias 	 seedlings 	 acres to one man 	 roots for trees 	 soil and situation 	 transplanting 	 protecting young trees 	 not on osage 	 no pollenizer for navels 	 water and frost 	 frosted, what to do 	 pruning frosted trees 	 pruning olives cultivating 	 moving old trees 	 darkening pickled seedlings must be grafted 	 oranges and peppers 	 budding seedlings budding old 	 from small cuttings 	 from large cuttings 	 trimming up 	 canning 	 renewing trees 	 growing from seed 	 neglected trees peaches lye-peeling 	 aged trees 	 renewing orchard 	 will he have 	 fillers in apple orchard 	 grafting on almond 	 on apricot replanting after root knot 	 buds in bearing trees 	 pollen must be same kind 	 grafting on 	 young trees fail to start 	 planting in alfalfa sod 	 pecan growing pears pollination of bartletts 	 comics 	 not on peach 	 dwarf pears 	 yield in drying 	 problems 	 blight and bees 	 on quince plowing, young orchard plums - pollenizing prunes on almond 	 re-grafting silver 	 french or italian 	 myrobalan seedlings 	 drying 	 sugar 	 glossing dried 	 price on size basis pruning times shaping a young tree 	 late 	 too much 	 in frosty places 	 low growth are tap-roots essential 	 for a bark wound 	 bridging gopher girdles roots, whole or piece soil, binding plant for winter spineless cactus fruit stumps, medication to kill sucker, what will it be walnuts early bearing 	 handling seedlings 	 how to start 	 planting 	 pruning 	 grafting 	 on oaks 	 eastern or california blacks 	 ripening 	 cutting below dead wood 	 in alfalfa 	 in the hills 	 increase bearing 	 temperature and moisture 	 from seed 	 high-grafted vegetable growing. artichokes jerusalem 	 globe 	 growing asparagus growing beets leases for sugar 	 topping mangel wurzels brussels sprouts - blooming bean growing hoeing 	 as nitrogen gatherer 	 yard-long 	 why waiting 	 blackeye 	 are cow-peas 	 horse-bean growing 	 growing castor 	 inoculation 	 on irrigated mesas california grown seed cloth for hotbeds celery, blanching chili peppers corn in sacramento valley 	 in warm ground 	 sweet, in california cucumbers forcing 	 growing continuous cropping ginger in california in cold, dark, draft licorice in california lentils, growing lettuce, transplanting melons winter 	 ripe onions seeds and sets 	 ripening 	 from sets 	 crops from seed peas canada for seed 	 growing niles peanuts harvesting 	 and adobe potatoes cutting planting northern seed 	 planted early 	 balls 	 seed-ends 	 and the moon 	 planting whole how to cut seed scab 	 double-cropping 	 keeping 	 yield 	 new for seed 	 growing 	 after alfalfa 	 flat or hill bad conditions for 	 on heavy land 	 storage for seed 	 and frosts 	 sweet, plant growing 	 growing 	 between trees less water, more heat radish, giant japanese rhubarb, rotting soil for vegetables squashes dislike hardship sunflowers, harvesting tomatoes irrigating 	 big worms 	 loss of bloom grain and forage crops alfalfa improving land cultivating 	 suburban patch 	 and bermuda 	 and salt grass 	 and alkali 	 on adobe 	 and soil depth 	 irrigating 	 curing preparation of land 	 where grown 	 sowing and foxtail which is best and dry land 	 inoculating 	 unirrigated 	 time to cut 	 and overflow 	 no nurse crop 	 re-seeding 	 taking bloat from 	 what crop for seed 	 siloing first crop 	 soil for 	 handling young 	 with gypsum alfileria, winter pasture barley california varieties 	 chevalier 	 on moist land 	 and alfalfa beet sugar, home-made beets and potatoes 	 for stock 	 stock, summer start berseem bermuda grass objectionable black medic broom corn buckwheat growing clover and drought 	 for wet lands 	 crimson 	 for shallow land 	 for high ground-water 	 not an alfalfa 	 sweet, cover crop corn for silage 	 irrigation for 	 eastern seed 	 suckering 	 and cow peas cover crop for hop yard cow peas in san joaquin cowpeas growing 	 and canadian peas crop rotation dry plowing for grain fall feed forage plants in foothills winter 	 poultry flax, new zealand grasses, for bank-holding grass seeds, scattering hay midsummer sowing 	 loose by measure 	 oat, when to cut 	 rye for 	 frosted grain 	 summer crop heating and fermentation insect powder johnson grass jersey kale kafir and egyptian corn lawns, mossy moonshine farming oats and rust pasturing young grain 	 hurry-up 	 california winter rape and milo rye in california rye grass, italian 	 better than speltz spurry, giant soil light, scant moisture sunflowers and soy beans russian spineless cactus sorghum smutty 	 late sown sorghums for seed 	 for planting sacaline special crops teosinte vetches for san joaquin 	 for hay wheat, seven-headed soils, fertilizing and irrigation. alkali soil and trees treatment of 	 and gypsum distribution 	 plants will tell 	 and litmus alfalfa over hardpan ashes and tomatoes in garden 	 and poultry manure blasting or tiling 	 effects of barnyard manure and alkali bones for grape vines can a man farm charcoal, medicine, not food cover crop, best legume cowpeas, best cover crop cementing soils, improvement cultivation, depth of draining wet spot dry plowing treatment 	 and sowing dynamite, more needed electro-agriculture fenugreek as cover crop fertilizer in tree holes 	 best for sand 	 prunings as 	 suburban wastes 	 composting garden wastes for sweet potatoes 	 pear orchard olives consult trees 	 nursery 	 almond hulls and sawdust 	 fruit trees 	 oranges 	 seed farm refuse 	 slow stuff 	 alfalfa 	 corn 	 scrap iron 	 kelp as 	 nitrate of soda 	 strawberries ground water gypsum on grain land 	 and alfalfa 	 what it does 	 how much garden peas for green manure grape pomace handling 	 abuse of hardpan and low water humus burning out 	 straw for irrigating palms 	 condensation for 	 winter 	 young trees alfalfa how much for crops 	 sewage 	 creamery wastes 	 house waste intensive cultivation irrigate or cultivate irrigation underground 	 of potatoes 	 of apples 	 of walnuts 	 summer and fall 	 and fertilizers liming chicken yard legumes, two in year lime caustic not absorbent 	 on sandy soil 	 alfalfa 	 sugar factory fertilizer manure water, cultivation 	 ashes 	 poultry 	 too much 	 stable and bean straw 	 pit roofing 	 value of animals 	 fresh and dry 	 and shavings 	 sheep, and goat 	 hog and potatoes 	 vineyard 	 and nitrate 	 with clover nitrate, late applications of oranges over ground water organic matter, needs oranges how much water 	 damping off planting in mud potash or water reviving blighted trees soils and oranges crop changes 	 moisture defects 	 refractory 	 suitable for fruits 	 blowing 	 improving heavy 	 reclaimed swamp improving uncovered 	 sand for clay 	 sour 	 and old plaster 	 handling orchard 	 depth for citrus summer fallow sub-soil, plow for stable drainage for fruit seeds, soaking trees over high-water 	 plowing toward or from 	 irrigated or not 	 too much water 	 too little water thomas phosphate, applying water artesian 	 from wells or streams live stock and dairy. buttermilk paint butter going white fat, what it is 	 why not come 	 fat in cream breeding young mare 	 in purple 	 line cream that won't whip cows in hill country concrete stable floor drying persistent milker foot-hill dairy free martin grade, what it is granary, rat-proof hogs, best breed jersey short-horn cross 	 bad tempered legal milk house milk strong 	 separator as purifier 	 certified self-milker, cure for silos, heating not dangerous shingles, make durable trespassing live stock whitewashes for buildings government for spray feeding farm animals alfalfa and concentrates barley, rolled for cows 	 for hay feeding brewers' grains for cows balanced rations corn stalks and concentrates 	 cut for silage calves, feeding feed for cows family cow 	 young pigs grape pomace as hog feed grain for horses horses, vetch for horse beans and melons hay salting 	 chopping for horses 	 cut alfalfa 	 storing cut alfalfa 	 grinding kale for cow feed plow horses, feed for pumpkins feeding 	 keeping pasture and cover crop fall and winter summer for hogs pigs and pie-melons 	 grain or pasture for 	 growing on roots sheep, winter feeding sorghum, feeding silage dry fodder sugar beets and silage stover stock beets storing 	 kind of spelt, value of steers on alfalfa silo, size of soiling crops wheat or barley for hogs 	 for feeding diseases of animals. abscess of gland abnormal thirst bloat, easement bowel trouble bloody milk barren heifers blind teat bovine rheumatism bleeding for blackleg chronic indigestion castration of colt chronic cough cowpox calf dysentery cleft hoof cocked ankles cleanse cows caked bag cow chewing bones depraved appetite dentist needed dehorning forage poisoning fungus poisoning fly repellants flea destroyers garget gland enlarged heaves horse with itch horses feet, treatment hog cholera hog sickness infectious mastitis irritation of udder injury to udder kidney trouble lumpy jaw lumps in teat loss of cud mange, is it mangy cow musty corn for pigs nail puncture neck swelling pregnancy of mare paralysis pneumonia in pigs paralysis of sow rickets in hogs scabby swelling skin disease, fatal scours side-bone shoulder injury stiff joints swelling in dewlap sterile cow supernumerary teat sore eyes in pigs sow, over-fat tuberculous milk uterus, diseased urination defective warts on horse worms in horses wound sore 	 in teat 	 swellings poultry keeping. bowel trouble in chicks cure for feather-eating cannibal chicks caponizing chicken pox clipping hens dipping fowls disinfectants dry mash feeding for eggs grain for chickens liver disease limber neck melons for fowls open front houses roup treatment in turkeys quick roosters and laying hens preserving eggs poultry tonic in orchard point on mating poultry diarrhea rupture of oviduct rape for chickens sunflower seeds for chicks teaching chicks to perch pests and diseases of plants. apple-leaf aphis bordeaux mixture bean weevil borers on olive twigs blister mite on walnuts black scale, fumigation cutworms in young trees control of pear slug 	 of grasshoppers 	 of red spider of squash bugs corn worm gumming prune trees gopher poison lime-sulphate formula melon lice mottle leaf, cause of potato scab raspberry cane borer sunburn and borers scale on apricots spray for red spider slugs in garden thrips, finding wooly aphis wire worms http://www.archive.org/details/cottageeconomyco cobb cottage economy; containing information relative to the brewing of beer, making of bread, keeping of cows, pigs, bees, ewes, goats, poultry, and rabbits, and relative to other matters deemed useful in the conducting of the affairs of a labourer's family; to which are added, instructions relative to the selecting, the cutting and the bleaching of the plants of english grass and grain, for the purpose of making hats and bonnets; and also instructions for erecting and using ice-houses, after the virginian manner. to which is added the poor man's friend; or, a defence of the rights of those who do the work, and fight the battles. by william cobbett. new york: published by john doyle, , liberty-st. stereotyped by conner & cooke. . entered according to act of congress, in the year of our lord , by john doyle, in the clerk's office of the district court of the southern district of new-york. contents. no. i.--introduction. to the labouring classes of this kingdom--brewing beer, ii.--brewing beer, continued, iii.--making bread, iv.--making bread, continued--brewing beer--keeping cows, v.--keeping cows, continued,--keeping pigs, vi.--keeping pigs, continued--salting mutton, and beef, vii.--bees, geese, ducks, turkeys, fowls, pigeons, rabbits, goats, and ewes, candles and rushes, mustard, dress and household goods, and fuel, hops, and yeast, viii.--selecting, cutting and bleaching the plants of english grass and grain, for the purpose of making hats and bonnets--constructing and using ice-houses, addition.--mangel wurzel--cobbett's corn, index, cottage economy. no. i. introduction. to the labouring classes of this kingdom. . throughout this little work, i shall _number_ the paragraphs, in order to be able, at some stages of the work, to refer, with the more facility, to parts that have gone before. the last number will contain an _index_, by the means of which the several matters may be turned to without loss of time; for, when _economy_ is the subject, _time_ is a thing which ought by no means to be overlooked. . the word _economy_, like a great many others, has, in its application, been very much abused. it is generally used as if it meant parsimony, stinginess, or niggardliness; and, at best, merely the refraining from expending money. hence misers and close-fisted men disguise their propensity and conduct under the name of _economy_; whereas the most liberal disposition, a disposition precisely the contrary of that of the miser, is perfectly consistent with economy. . economy means _management_, and nothing more; and it is generally applied to the affairs of a house and family, which affairs are an object of the greatest importance, whether as relating to individuals or to a nation. a nation is made powerful and to be honoured in the world, not so much by the number of its people as by the ability and character of that people; and the ability and character of a people depend, in a great measure, upon the _economy_ of the several families, which, all taken together, make up the nation. there never yet was, and never will be, a nation _permanently great_, consisting, for the greater part, of wretched and miserable families. . in every view of the matter, therefore, it is desirable; that the families of which a nation consists should be happily off: and as this depends, in a great degree, upon the _management_ of their concerns, the present work is intended to convey, to the families of the _labouring classes_ in particular, such information as i think may be useful with regard to that management. . i lay it down as a maxim, that for a family to be happy, they must be well supplied with _food_ and _raiment_. it is a sorry effort that people make to persuade others, or to persuade themselves, that they can be happy in a state of _want_ of the necessaries of life. the doctrines which fanaticism preaches, and which teach men to be _content_ with _poverty_, have a very pernicious tendency, and are calculated to favour tyrants by giving them passive slaves. to live well, to enjoy all things that make life pleasant, is the right of every man who constantly uses his strength judiciously and lawfully. it is to blaspheme god to suppose, that he created man to be miserable, to hunger, thirst, and perish with cold, in the midst of that abundance which is the fruit of their own labour. instead, therefore, of applauding "_happy_ poverty," which applause is so much the fashion of the present day, i despise the man that is _poor_ and _contented_; for, such content is a certain proof of a base disposition, a disposition which is the enemy of all industry, all exertion, all love of independence. . let it be understood, however, that, by _poverty_, i mean _real want_, a real insufficiency of the food and raiment and lodging necessary to health and decency; and not that imaginary poverty, of which some persons complain. the man who, by his own and his family's labour, can provide a sufficiency of food and raiment, and a comfortable dwelling-place, is not a _poor man_. there must be different ranks and degrees in every civil society, and, indeed, so it is even amongst the savage tribes. there must be different degrees of wealth; some must have more than others; and the richest must be a great deal richer than the least rich. but it is necessary to the very existence of a people, that nine out of ten should live wholly by the sweat of their brow; and, is it not degrading to human nature, that all the nine-tenths should be called _poor_; and, what is still worse, _call themselves poor_, and be _contented_ in that degraded state? . the laws, the economy, or management, of a state may be such as to render it impossible for the labourer, however skilful and industrious, to maintain his family in health and decency; and such has, for many years past, been the management of the affairs of this once truly great and happy land. a system of paper-money, the effect of which was to take from the labourer the half of his earnings, was what no industry and care could make head against. i do not pretend that this system was adopted _by design_. but, no matter for the _cause_; such was the effect. . better times, however, are approaching. the labourer now appears likely to obtain that hire of which he is worthy; and, therefore, this appears to me to be the time to press upon him the _duty_ of using his best exertions for the rearing of his family in a manner that must give him the best security for happiness to himself, his wife and children, and to make him, in all respects, what his forefathers were. the people of england have been famed, in all ages, for their _good living_; for the _abundance of their food_ and _goodness of their attire_. the old sayings about english roast beef and plum-pudding, and about english hospitality, had not their foundation in _nothing_. and, in spite of all refinements of sickly minds, it is _abundant living_ amongst the people at large, which is the great test of good government, and the surest basis of national greatness and security. . if the labourer have his fair wages; if there be no false weights and measures, whether of money or of goods, by which he is defrauded; if the laws be equal in their effect upon all men: if he be called upon for no more than his due share of the expenses necessary to support the government and defend the country, he has no reason to complain. if the largeness of his family demand extraordinary labour and care, these are due from him to it. he is the cause of the existence of that family; and, therefore, he is not, except in cases of accidental calamity, to throw upon others the burden of supporting it. besides, "little children are as arrows in the hands of the giant, and blessed is the man that hath his quiver full of them." that is to say, children, if they bring their _cares_, bring also their _pleasures_ and _solid advantages_. they become, very soon, so many assistants and props to the parents, who, when old age comes on, are amply repaid for all the toils and all the cares that children have occasioned in their infancy. to be without sure and safe friends in the world makes life not worth having; and whom can we be so sure of as of our children? brothers and sisters are a mutual support. we see them, in almost every case, grow up into prosperity, when they act the part that the impulses of nature prescribe. when cordially united, a father and sons, or a family of brothers and sisters, may, in almost any state of life, set what is called misfortune at defiance. . these considerations are much more than enough to sweeten the toils and cares of parents, and to make them regard every additional child as an additional blessing. but, that children may be a blessing and not a curse, care must be taken of their _education_. this word has, of late years, been so perverted, so corrupted; so abused, in its application, that i am almost afraid to use it here. yet i must not suffer it to be usurped by cant and tyranny. i must use it: but not without clearly saying what i mean. . _education_ means _breeding up_, _bringing up_, or _rearing up_; and nothing more. this includes every thing with regard to the _mind_ as well as the _body_ of a child; but, of late years, it has been so used as to have no sense applied to it but that of _book-learning_, with which, nine times out of ten, it has nothing at all to do. it is, indeed, proper, and it is the duty of all parents, to teach, or cause to be taught, their children as much as they can of books, _after_, and not before, all the measures are safely taken for enabling them to get their living by labour, or for _providing them a living without labour_, and that, too, out of the means obtained and secured by the parents out of their own income. the taste of the times is, unhappily, to give to children something of _book-learning_, with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, _upon the labour of other people_. very seldom, comparatively speaking, has this succeeded, even during the wasteful public expenditure of the last thirty years; and, in the times that are approaching, it cannot, i thank god, succeed at all. when the project has failed, what disappointment, mortification and misery, to both parent and child! the latter is spoiled as a labourer: his book-learning has only made him conceited: into some course of desperation he falls; and the end is but too often not only wretched but ignominious. . understand me clearly here, however; for it is the duty of parents to give, if they be able, book-learning to their children, having _first_ taken care to make them capable of earning their living by _bodily labour_. when that object has once been secured, the other may, if the ability remain, be attended to. but i am wholly against children wasting their time in the idleness of what is called _education_; and particularly in schools over which the parents have no control, and where nothing is taught but the rudiments of servility, pauperism and slavery. . the _education_ that i have in view is, therefore, of a very different kind. you should bear constantly in mind, that nine-tenths of us are, from the very nature and necessities of the world, born to gain our livelihood by the sweat of our brow. what reason have we, then, to presume, that our children are not to do the same? if they be, as now and then one will be, endued with extraordinary powers of mind, those powers may have an opportunity of developing themselves; and if they never have that opportunity, the harm is not very great to us or to them. nor does it hence follow that the descendants of labourers are _always_ to be labourers. the path upwards is steep and long, to be sure. industry, care, skill, excellence, in the present parent, lay the foundation of _a rise_, under more favourable circumstances, for his children. the children of these take _another rise_; and, by-and-by, the descendants of the present labourer become gentlemen. . this is the natural progress. it is by attempting to reach the top at a _single leap_ that so much misery is produced in the world; and the propensity to make such attempts has been cherished and encouraged by the strange projects that we have witnessed of late years for making the labourers _virtuous_ and _happy_ by giving them what is called _education_. the education which i speak of consists in bringing children up to labour with _steadiness_, with _care_, and with _skill_; to show them how to do as many useful things as possible; to teach them to do them all in the best manner; to set them an example in industry, sobriety, cleanliness, and neatness; to make all these _habitual_ to them, so that they never shall be liable to fall into the contrary; to let them always see a _good living_ proceeding from _labour_, and thus to remove from them the temptation to get at the goods of others by violent or fraudulent means; and to keep far from their minds all the inducements to hypocrisy and deceit. . and, bear in mind, that if the state of the labourer has its disadvantages when compared with other callings and conditions of life, it has also its advantages. it is free from the torments of ambition, and from a great part of the causes of ill-health, for which not all the riches in the world and all the circumstances of high rank are a compensation. the able and prudent labourer is always _safe_, at the least; and that is what few men are who are lifted above him. they have losses and crosses to fear, the very thought of which never enters his mind, if he act well his part towards himself, his family and his neighbour. . but, the basis of good to him, is _steady and skilful labour_. to assist him in the pursuit of this labour, and in the turning of it to the best account, are the principal objects of the present little work. i propose to treat of brewing beer, making bread, keeping cows and pigs, rearing poultry, and of other matters; and to show, that, while, from a very small piece of ground a large part of the food of a considerable family may be raised, the very act of raising it will be the best possible foundation of _education_ of the children of the labourer; that it will teach them a great number of useful things, _add greatly to their value when they go forth from_ their father's home, make them start in life with all possible advantages, and give them the best chance of leading happy lives. and is it not much more rational for parents to be employed in teaching their children how to cultivate a garden, to feed and rear animals, to make bread, beer, bacon, butter and cheese, and to be able to do these things for themselves, or for others, than to leave them to prowl about the lanes and commons, or to mope at the heels of some crafty, sleekheaded pretended saint, who while he extracts the last penny from their pockets, bids them be contented with their misery, and promises them, in exchange for their pence, everlasting glory in the world to come? it is upon the hungry and the wretched that the fanatic works. the dejected and forlorn are his prey. as an ailing carcass engenders vermin, a pauperized community engenders teachers of fanaticism, the very foundation of whose doctrines is, that we are to care nothing about this world, and that all our labours and exertions are in vain. . the man, who is doing well, who is in good health, who has a blooming and dutiful and cheerful and happy family about him, and who passes his day of rest amongst them, is not to be made to believe, that he was born to be miserable, and that poverty, the natural and just reward of laziness, is to secure him a crown of glory. far be it from me to recommend a disregard of even outward observances as to matters of religion; but, can it be _religion_ to believe that god hath made us to be wretched and dejected? can it be _religion_ to regard, as marks of his grace, the poverty and misery that almost invariably attend our neglect to use the means of obtaining a competence in worldly things? can it be _religion_ to regard as blessings those things, those very things, which god expressly numbers amongst his curses? poverty never finds a place amongst the _blessings_ promised by god. his blessings are of a directly opposite description; flocks, herds, corn, wine and oil; a smiling land; a rejoicing people; abundance for the body and gladness of the heart: these are the blessings which god promises to the industrious, the sober, the careful, and the upright. let no man, then, believe that, to be poor and wretched is a mark of god's favour; and let no man remain in that state, if he, by any honest means, can rescue himself from it. . poverty leads to all sorts of evil consequences. _want_, horrid want, is the great parent of crime. to have a dutiful family, the father's principle of rule must be _love_ not _fear_. his sway must be gentle, or he will have only an unwilling and short-lived obedience. but it is given to but few men to be gentle and good-humoured amidst the various torments attendant on pinching poverty. a competence is, therefore, the first thing to be thought of; it is the foundation of all good in the labourer's dwelling; without it little but misery can be expected. "_health_, _peace_, and _competence_," one of the wisest of men regards as the only things needful to man: but the two former are scarcely to be had without the latter. _competence_ is the foundation of happiness and of exertion. beset with wants, having a mind continually harassed with fears of starvation, who can act with energy, who can calmly think? to provide a _good living_, therefore, for himself and family, is the _very first duty_ of every man. "two things," says agur, "have i asked; deny me them not before i die: remove far from me vanity and lies; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: lest i be full and deny thee; or lest i be poor and steal." . a _good living_ therefore, a _competence_, is the first thing to be desired and to be sought after; and, if this little work should have the effect of aiding only a small portion of the labouring classes in securing that competence, it will afford great gratification to their friend wm. cobbett. _kensington, th july, ._ brewing beer. . before i proceed to give any directions about brewing, let me mention some of the inducements to do the thing. in former times, to set about to show to englishmen that it was good for them to brew beer in their houses would have been as impertinent as gravely to insist, that they ought to endeavour not to lose their breath; for, in those times, (only forty years ago,) to have a _house_ and not to brew was a rare thing indeed. mr. ellman, an old man and a large farmer, in sussex, has recently given in evidence, before a committee of the house of commons, this fact; that, _forty years ago_, there was not a labourer in his parish that did not _brew his own beer_; and that _now_ there is _not one that does it_, except by chance the malt be given him. the causes of this change have been the lowering of the wages of labour, compared with the price of provisions, by the means of the paper-money; the enormous tax upon the barley when made into _malt_; and the increased tax upon _hops_. these have quite changed the customs of the english people as to their drink. they still drink _beer_, but, in general, it is of the brewing of _common brewers_, and in public-houses, of which the common brewers have become the owners, and have thus, by the aid of paper-money, obtained a _monopoly_ in the supplying of the great body of the people with one of those things which, to the hard-working man, is almost a necessary of life. . these things will be altered. they must be altered. the nation must be sunk into nothingness, or a new system must be adopted; and the nation will not sink into nothingness. the malt now pays a tax of _s._ _d._[ ] a bushel, and the barley costs only _s._ this brings the bushel of malt to _s._ including the maltster's charge for malting. if the tax were taken off the malt, malt would be sold, at the present price of barley, for about _s._ _d._ a bushel; because a bushel of barley makes more than a bushel of malt, and the tax, besides its amount, causes great expenses of various sorts to the maltster. the hops pay a tax of _d._[ ] a pound; and a bushel of malt requires, in general, a pound of hops; if these two taxes were taken off, therefore, the consumption of barley and of hops would be exceedingly increased; for double the present quantity would be demanded, and the land is always ready to send it forth. . it appears impossible that the landlords should much longer submit to these intolerable burdens on their estates. in short, they must get off the malt tax, or lose those estates. they must do a great _deal more_, indeed; but that they must do at any rate. the paper-money is fast losing its destructive power; and things are, with regard to the labourers, coming back to what they were _forty years ago_, and therefore we may prepare for the making of beer in our own houses, and take leave of the poisonous stuff served out to us by common brewers. we may begin _immediately_; for, even at _present prices_, home-brewed beer is the _cheapest_ drink that a family can use, except _milk_, and milk can be applicable only in certain cases. . the drink which has come to supply the place of beer has, in general, been _tea_. it is notorious that tea has no _useful strength_ in it; that it contains nothing _nutritious_; that it, besides being _good_ for nothing, has _badness_ in it, because it is well known to produce want of sleep in many cases, and in all cases, to shake and weaken the nerves. it is, in fact, a weaker kind of laudanum, which enlivens for the moment and deadens afterwards. at any rate it communicates no strength to the body; it does not, in any degree, assist in affording what labour demands. it is, then, of no _use_. and, now, as to its _cost_, compared with that of _beer_. i shall make my comparison applicable to a year, or three hundred and sixty-five days. i shall suppose the tea to be only five shillings the pound; the sugar only sevenpence; the milk only twopence a quart. the prices are at the very lowest. i shall suppose a tea-pot to cost a shilling, six cups and saucers two shillings and sixpence, and six pewter spoons eighteen-pence. how to estimate the firing i hardly know; but certainly there must be in the course of the year, two hundred fires made that would not be made, were it not for tea drinking. then comes the great article of all, the _time_ employed in this tea-making affair. it is impossible to make a fire, boil water, make the tea, drink it, wash up the things, sweep up the fire-place, and put all to rights again, in a less space of time, upon an average, than _two hours_. however, let us allow _one hour_; and here we have a woman occupied no less than three hundred and sixty-five hours in the year, or thirty whole days, at twelve hours in the day; that is to say, one month out of the twelve in the year, besides the waste of the man's time in hanging about waiting for the tea! needs there any thing more to make us cease to wonder at seeing labourers' children with dirty linen and holes in the heels of their stockings? observe, too, that the time thus spent is, one half of it, the best time of the day. it is the top of the morning, which, in every calling of life, contains an hour worth two or three hours of the afternoon. by the time that the clattering tea tackle is out of the way, the morning is spoiled; its prime is gone; and any work that is to be done afterwards lags heavily along. if the mother have to go out to work, the tea affair must all first be over. she comes into the field, in summer time, when the sun has gone a third part of his course. she has the heat of the day to encounter, instead of having her work done and being ready to return home at any early hour. yet early she must go, too: for, there is the fire again to be made, the clattering tea-tackle again to come forward; and even in the longest day she must have _candle light_, which never ought to be seen in a cottage (except in case of illness) from march to september. . now, then, let us take the bare cost of the use of tea. i suppose a pound of tea to last twenty days; which is not nearly half an ounce every morning and evening. i allow for each mess half a pint of milk. and i allow three pounds of the red dirty sugar to each pound of tea. the account of expenditure would then stand very high; but to these must be added the amount of the tea tackle, one set of which will, upon an average, be demolished every year. to these outgoings must be added the cost of beer at the public-house; for some the man will have, after all, and the woman too, unless they be upon the point of actual starvation. two pots a week is as little as will serve in this way; and here is a dead loss of ninepence a week, seeing that two pots of beer, full as strong, and a great deal better, can be brewed at home for threepence. the account of the year's tea drinking will then stand thus: _l._ _s._ _d._ lb. of tea lb. of sugar pints of milk tea tackle fires days' work loss by going to public-house ------------ _l._ [ ] . i have here estimated every thing at its very lowest. the entertainment which i have here provided is as poor, as mean, as miserable as any thing short of starvation can set forth; and yet the wretched thing amounts to a good third part of a good and able labourer's wages! for this money, he and his family may drink good and wholesome beer; in a short time, out of the mere savings from this waste, may drink it out of silver cups and tankards. in a labourer's family, _wholesome_ beer, that has a little life in it, is all that is wanted in _general_. little children, that do not work, should not have beer. broth, porridge, or something in that way, is the thing for them. however, i shall suppose, in order to make my comparison as little complicated as possible, that he brews nothing but beer as strong as the generality of beer to be had at the public-house, and divested of the poisonous drugs which that beer but too often contains; and i shall further suppose that he uses in his family two quarts of this beer every day from the first of october to the last day of march inclusive: three quarts a day during the months of april and may; four quarts a day during the months of june and september; and five quarts a day during the months of july and august; and if this be not enough, it must be a family of drunkards. here are quarts, or gallons. now, a bushel of malt will make eighteen gallons of better beer than that which is sold at the public-houses. and this is precisely a gallon for the price of a quart. people should bear in mind, that the beer bought at the public-house is loaded with a _beer tax_, with the tax on the public-house keeper, in the shape of license, with all the taxes and expenses of the brewer, with all the taxes, rent, and other expenses of the publican, and with all the _profits_ of both brewer and publican; so that when a man swallows a pot of beer at a public-house, he has all these expenses to help to defray, besides the mere tax on the malt and on the hops. . well, then, to brew this ample supply of good beer for a labourer's family, these gallons, requires _fifteen_ bushels of malt and (for let us do the thing well) _fifteen pounds of hops_. the malt is now eight shillings a bushel, and very good hops may be bought for less than a shilling a pound. the _grains_ and yeast will amply pay for the labour and fuel employed in the brewing; seeing that there will be pigs to eat the grains, and bread to be baked with the yeast. the account will then stand thus: _l._ _s._ _d._ bushels of malt pounds of hops wear of utensils ----------- _l._ [ ] . here, then, is the sum of four pounds two shillings and twopence saved every year. the utensils for brewing are, a brass kettle, a mashing tub, coolers, (for which washing tubs may serve,) a half hogshead, with one end taken out, for a tun tub, about four nine-gallon casks, and a couple of eighteen-gallon casks. this is an ample supply of utensils, each of which will last, with proper care, a good long lifetime or two, and the whole of which, even if purchased new from the shop, will only exceed by a few shillings, if they exceed at all, the amount of the saving, arising _the very first year_, from quitting the troublesome and pernicious practice of drinking tea. the saving of each succeeding year would, if you chose it, purchase a silver mug to hold half a pint at least. however, the saving would naturally be applied to purposes more conducive to the well-being and happiness of a family. . it is not, however, the _mere saving_ to which i look. this is, indeed, a matter of great importance, whether we look at the amount itself, or at the ultimate consequences of a judicious application of it; for _four pounds_ make a great _hole_ in a man's wages for the year; and when we consider all the advantages that would arise to a family of children from having these four pounds, now so miserably wasted, laid out upon their backs, in the shape of a decent dress, it is impossible to look at this waste without feelings of sorrow not wholly unmixed with those of a harsher description. . but, i look upon the thing in a still more serious light. i view the tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth, and a maker of misery for old age. in the fifteen bushels of malt there are pounds weight of _sweet_; that is to say, of nutricious matter, unmixed with any thing injurious to health. in the tea messes of the year there are pounds of sweet in the sugar, and about pounds of matter equal to sugar in the milk. here are pounds instead of , and even the good effect of these pounds is more than over-balanced by the corrosive, gnawing and poisonous powers of the tea. . it is impossible for any one to deny the truth of this statement. put it to the test with a lean hog: give him the fifteen bushels of malt, and he will repay you in ten score of bacon or thereabouts. but give him the tea messes, or rather begin to give them to him, and give him nothing else, and he is dead with hunger, and bequeaths you his skeleton, at the end of about seven days. it is impossible to doubt in such a case. the tea drinking has done a great deal in bringing this nation into the state of misery in which it now is; and the tea drinking, which is carried on by "dribs" and "drabs;" by pence and farthings going out at a time; this miserable practice has been gradually introduced by the growing weight of the taxes on malt and on hops, and by the everlasting penury amongst the labourers, occasioned by the paper-money. . we see better prospects however, and therefore let us now rouse ourselves, and shake from us the degrading curse, the effects of which have been much more extensive and infinitely more mischievous than men in general seem to imagine. . it must be evident to every one, that the practice of tea drinking must render the frame feeble and unfit to encounter hard labour or severe weather, while, as i have shown, it deducts from the means of replenishing the belly and covering the back. hence succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fire-side, a lurking in the bed, and, in short, all the characteristics of idleness, for which, in this case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. the tea drinking fills the public-house, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon as they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. at the very least, it teaches them idleness. the everlasting dawdling about with the slops of the tea tackle, gives them a relish for nothing that requires strength and activity. when they go from home, they know how to do nothing that is useful. to brew, to bake, to make butter, to milk, to rear poultry; to do any earthly thing of use they are wholly unqualified. to shut poor young creatures up in manufactories is bad enough; but there, at any rate, they do something that is useful; whereas, the girl that has been brought up merely to boil the tea-kettle, and to assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to fix his affections upon her. . but is it in the power of any man, any good labourer, who has attained the age of fifty, to look back upon the last thirty years of his life, without cursing the day in which tea was introduced into england? where is there such a man, who cannot trace to this cause a very considerable part of all the mortifications and sufferings of his life? when was he ever _too late_ at his labour; when did he ever meet with a frown, with a turning off, and pauperism on that account, without being able to trace it to the tea-kettle? when reproached with lagging in the morning, the poor wretch tells you that he will make up for it by _working during his breakfast time_! i have heard this a hundred and a hundred times over. he was up time enough; but the tea-kettle kept him lolling and lounging at home; and now, instead of sitting down to a breakfast upon bread, bacon, and beer, which is to carry him on to the hour of dinner, he has to force his limbs along under the sweat of feebleness, and at dinner time to swallow his dry bread, or slake his half-feverish thirst at the pump or the brook. to the wretched tea-kettle he has to return at night, with legs hardly sufficient to maintain him; and thus he makes his miserable progress towards that death, which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it had he made his wife brew beer instead of making tea. if he now and then gladdens his heart with the drugs of the public house, some quarrel, some accident, some illness, is the probable consequence; to the affray abroad succeeds an affray at home; the mischievous example reaches the children, corrupts them or scatters them, and misery for life is the consequence. . i should now proceed to the _details_ of brewing; but these, though they will not occupy a large space, must be put off to the _second number_. the custom of brewing at home has so long ceased amongst labourers, and, in many cases, amongst tradesmen, that it was necessary for me fully to state my reasons for wishing to see the custom revived. i shall, in my next, clearly explain how the operation is performed; and it will be found to be so _easy a thing_, that i am not without hope, that many _tradesmen_, who now spend their evenings at the public house, amidst tobacco smoke and empty _noise_, may be induced, by the finding of better drink at home, at a quarter part of the price, to perceive that home is by far the pleasantest place wherein to pass their hours of relaxation. . my work is intended chiefly for the benefit of _cottagers_, who must, of course, have some _land_; for, i purpose to show, that a large part of the food of even a large family may be raised, without any diminution of the labourer's earnings abroad, from forty rod, or a quarter of an acre, of ground; but at the same time, what i have to say will be applicable to larger establishments, in all the branches of domestic economy: and especially to that of providing a family with _beer_. . the _kind of beer_, for a labourer's family, that is to say, the _degree of strength_, must depend on circumstances; on the numerousness of the family; on the season of the year, and various other things. but, generally speaking, beer _half_ the strength of that mentioned in paragraph will be quite strong enough; for that is, at least, one-third stronger than the farm-house "_small beer_," which, however, as long experience has proved, is best suited to the purpose. a judicious labourer would probably always have some _ale_ in his house, and have small beer for the general drink. there is no reason why he should not keep _christmas_ as well as the farmer; and when he is _mowing_, _reaping_, or is at any other hard work, a quart, or three pints, of _really good fat ale_ a-day is by no means too much. however, circumstances vary so much with different labourers, that as to the _sort_ of beer, and the number of brewings, and the times of brewing, no general rule can be laid down. . before i proceed to explain the uses of the several brewing utensils, i must speak of the _quality_ of the materials of which beer is made; that is to say, the _malt_, _hops_, and _water_. malt varies very much in quality, as, indeed, it must, with the quality of the barley. when good, it is full of flour, and in biting a grain asunder, you find it bite easily, and see the _shell thin_ and filled up well with flour. if it bite _hard_ and _steely_, the malt is bad. there is _pale_ malt and _brown_ malt; but the difference in the two arises merely from the different degrees of heat employed in the drying. the main thing to attend to is, the _quantity of flour_. if the barley was bad; _thin_, or _steely_, whether from unripeness or blight, or any other cause, it will not _malt_ so well; that is to say, it will not send out its roots in due time; and a part of it will still be barley. then, the world is wicked enough to think, and even to say, that there are maltsters who, when they send you a bushel of malt, _put a little barley amongst it_, the malt being _taxed_ and the barley _not_! let us hope that this is seldom the case; yet, when we _do know_ that this terrible system of taxation induces the beer-selling gentry to supply their customers with stuff little better than poison, it is not very uncharitable to suppose it possible for some maltsters to yield to the temptations of the devil so far as to play the trick above mentioned. to detect this trick, and to discover what portion of the barley is in an unmalted state, take a handful of the _unground_ malt, and put it into a bowl of cold water. mix it about with the water a little; that is, let every grain be _just wet all over_; and whatever part of them _sink_ are not good. if you have your malt _ground_, there is not, as i know of, any means of detection. therefore, if your brewing be considerable in amount, _grind your own malt_, the means of doing which is very easy, and neither expensive nor troublesome, as will appear, when i come to speak of _flour_. if the barley be _well malted_, there is still a variety in the quality of the malt; that is to say, a bushel of malt from fine, plump, heavy barley, will be better than the same quantity from thin and light barley. in this case, as in the case of wheat, the _weight_ is the criterion of the quality. only bear in mind, that as a bushel of wheat, weighing _sixty-two_ pounds, is better worth _six_ shillings, than a bushel weighing _fifty-two_ is worth _four_ shillings, so a bushel of malt weighing _forty-five_ pounds is better worth _nine_ shillings, than a bushel weighing _thirty-five_ is worth _six_ shillings. in malt, therefore, as in every thing else, the word _cheap_ is a deception, unless the quality be taken into view. but, bear in mind, that in the case of _unmalted_ barley, mixed with the malt, the _weight_ can be no rule; for barley is _heavier_ than malt. no. ii. brewing beer--(_continued._) . as to using _barley_ in the making of beer, i have given it a full and fair trial twice over, and i would recommend it to neither rich nor poor. the barley produces _strength_, though nothing like the malt; but the beer is _flat_, even though you use half malt and half barley; and flat beer lies heavy on the stomach, and of course, besides the bad taste, is unwholesome. to pay _s._ _d._ tax upon every bushel of our own barley, turned into malt, when the barley itself is not worth _s._ a bushel, is a horrid thing; but, as long as the owners of the land shall be so dastardly as to suffer themselves to be thus deprived of the use of their estates to favour the slave-drivers and plunderers of the east and west indies, we must submit to the thing, incomprehensible to foreigners, and even to ourselves, as the submission may be. . with regard to _hops_, the quality is very various. at times when some sell for _s._ a pound, others sell for _sixpence_. provided the purchaser understand the article, the quality is, of course, in proportion to the price. there are two things to be considered in hops: the _power of preserving beer_, and that of giving it a _pleasant flavour_. hops may be _strong_; and yet not _good_. they should be _bright_, have no _leaves_ or bits of branches amongst them. the hop is the _husk_, or _seed-pod_, of the hop-vine, as the _cone_ is that of the fir-tree; and the _seeds_ themselves are deposited, like those of the fir, round a little soft stalk, enveloped by the several folds of this pod, or cone. if, in the gathering, leaves of the vine or bits of the branches are mixed with the hops, these not only help to make up the _weight_, but they give a _bad taste_ to the beer; and indeed, if they abound much, they spoil the beer. great attention is therefore necessary in this respect. there are, too, numerous _sorts_ of hops, varying in size, form, and quality, quite as much as _apples_. however, when they are in a state to be used in brewing, the marks of goodness are an absence of _brown colour_, (for that indicates perished hops;) a colour _between green_ and _yellow_; a great _quantity of the yellow farina_; seeds _not too large nor too hard_; a _clammy feel_ when rubbed between the fingers; and a _lively_, pleasant smell. as to the _age_ of hops, they retain for twenty years, probably, their _power of preserving beer_; but not of giving it a pleasant flavour. i have used them at _ten years old_, and should have no fear of using them at twenty. they lose none of their _bitterness_; none of their power of preserving beer; but they lose the other quality; and therefore, in the making of fine ale, or beer, new hops are to be preferred. as to the _quantity_ of hops, it is clear, from what has been said, that that must, in some degree depend upon their _quality_; but, supposing them to be good in quality, a pound of hops to a bushel of malt is about the quantity. a good deal, however, depends upon the length of time that the beer is intended to be kept, and upon the season of the year in which it is brewed. beer intended to be kept a long while should have the full pound, also beer brewed in warmer weather, though for present use: half the quantity may do under an opposite state of circumstances. . the _water_ should be soft by all means. that of brooks, or rivers, is best. that of a _pond_, fed by a rivulet, or spring, will do very well. _rain-water_, if just fallen, may do; but stale rain-water, or stagnant pond-water, makes the beer _flat_ and difficult to keep; and _hard water_, from wells, is very bad; it does not get the sweetness out of the malt, nor the bitterness out of the hops, like soft water; and the wort of it does not ferment well, which is a certain proof of its unfitness for the purpose. . there are two descriptions of persons whom i am desirous to see brewing their own beer; namely, _tradesmen_, and _labourers_ and _journeymen_. there must, therefore, be two _distinct scales_ treated of. in the former editions of this work, i spoke of a _machine_ for brewing, and stated the advantages of using it in a family of any considerable consumption of beer; but, while, from my desire to promote _private brewing_, i strongly recommended the _machine_, i stated that, "if any of my readers could point out any method by which we should be more likely to restore the practice of private brewing, and especially to the _cottage_, i should be greatly obliged to them to communicate it to me." such communications have been made, and i am very happy to be able, in this new edition of my little work, to avail myself of them. there was, in the _patent machine_, always, an objection on account of the _expense_; for, even the machine for _one bushel of malt_ cost, at the reduced price, _eight pounds_; a sum far above the reach of _a cottager_, and even above that of a small tradesman. its _convenience_, especially in _towns_, where room is so valuable, was an object of great importance; but there were _disadvantages_ attending it which, until after some experience, i did not ascertain. it will be remembered that the method by the brewing machine requires the malt to be put into _the cold water_, and for the water to make the malt _swim_, or, at least, to be in such proportion as to prevent the fire beneath from burning the malt. we found that our beer was _flat_, and that it did _not keep_. and this arose, i have every reason to believe, from this process. the malt should be put _into hot water_, and the water, at first, should be but just sufficient in quantity to _stir the malt in_, and _separate it well_. nevertheless, when it is merely to make _small beer_; beer _not wanted to keep_; in such cases the brewing machine may be of use; and, as will be seen by-and-by, a moveable _boiler_ (which has nothing to do with the _patent_) may, in many cases, be of great convenience and utility. . the two _scales_ of which i have spoken above, are now to be spoken of; and, that i may explain my meaning the more clearly, i shall suppose, that, for the tradesman's family, it will be requisite to brew eighteen gallons of ale and thirty-six of small beer, to fill three casks of eighteen gallons each. it will be observed, of course, that, for larger quantities, larger utensils of all sorts will be wanted. i take this quantity as the one to give directions on. the utensils wanted here will be, first, a _copper_ that will contain _forty gallons_, at least; for, though there be to be but thirty-six gallons of small beer, there must be space for the hops, and for the liquor that goes off in steam. second, a _mashing-tub_ to contain sixty gallons; for the malt is to be in this along with the water. third, an _underbuck_, or shallow tub to go under the mash-tub, for the wort to run into when drawn from the grains. fourth, a _tun-tub_, that will contain thirty gallons, to put the ale into to work, the mash-tub, as we shall see, serving as a tun-tub for the small beer. besides these, a couple of _coolers_, shallow tubs, which may be the heads of wine buts, or some such things, about a foot deep; or if you have _four_ it may be as well, in order to effect the cooling more quickly. . you begin by filling the copper with water, and next by making the water _boil_. you then put into the mashing-tub water sufficient _to stir and separate the malt in_. but now let me say more particularly what this mashing-tub is. it is, you know, to contain _sixty gallons_. it is to be a little broader at top than at bottom, and not quite so deep as it is wide across the bottom. into the middle of the bottom there is a hole about two inches over, to draw the wort off through. in this hole goes a stick, a foot or two longer than the tub is high. this stick is to be about two inches through, and _tapered_ for about eight inches upwards at the end that goes into the hole, which at last it fills up closely as a cork. upon the hole, before any thing else be put into the tub, you lay a little bundle of _fine birch_, (heath or straw _may_ do,) about half the bulk of a birch broom, and well tied at both ends. this being laid over the hole (to keep back the grains as the wort goes out,) you put the tapered end of the stick down through into the hole, and thus _cork_ the hole up. you must then have something of weight sufficient to keep the birch steady at the bottom of the tub, with a hole through it to slip down the stick; otherwise when the stick is raised it will be apt to raise the birch with it, and when you are stirring the mash you would move it from its place. the best thing for this purpose will be a _leaden collar_ for the stick, with the hole in the collar plenty large enough, and it should weigh three or four pounds. the thing they use in some farm-houses is the iron box of a wheel. any thing will do that will slide down the stick, and lie with weight enough on the birch to keep it from moving. now, then, you are ready to begin brewing. i allow _two bushels_ of malt for the brewing i have supposed. you must now put into the mashing-tub as much boiling water as will be sufficient to _stir the malt in_ and _separate it well_. but here occur some of the nicest points of all; namely, the _degree of heat_ that the water is to be at, before you put in the malt. this heat is _one hundred and seventy degrees_ by the thermometer. if you have a thermometer, this is ascertained easily; but, without one, take this rule, by which so much good beer has been made in england for hundreds of years: when you can, by looking down into the tub, _see your face clearly in the water_, the water is become cool enough; and you must not put the malt in before. now put in the malt and _stir it well in the water_. to perform this stirring, which is very necessary, you have a stick, somewhat bigger than a broom-stick, with two or three smaller sticks, eight or ten inches long, put through the lower end of it at about three or four inches asunder, and sticking out on each side of the long stick. these small cross sticks serve to search the malt and separate it well in the stirring or _mashing_. thus, then, the _malt is in_; and in this state it should continue for about a quarter of an hour. in the mean while you will have filled up your copper, and made it _boil_; and now (at the end of the quarter of an hour) you put in boiling water sufficient to give you your eighteen gallons of _ale_. but, perhaps, you must have thirty gallons of water in the whole; for the grains will retain at least ten gallons of water; and it is better to have rather too much wort than too little. when your proper quantity of water is in, stir the malt again well. cover the mashing-tub over with _sacks_, or something that will answer the same purpose; and there let the mash stand for _two hours_. when it has stood the two hours, you draw off the wort. and now, mind, the mashing-tub is placed on a _couple of stools_, or on something, that will enable you to put the _underbuck_ under it, so as to receive the wort as it comes out of the hole before-mentioned. when you have put the underbuck in its place, you let out the wort by pulling up the stick that corks the whole. but, observe, this stick (which goes six or eight inches through the hole) must be raised by degrees, and the wort must be let out _slowly_, in order to keep back the _sediment_. so that it is necessary to have something to _keep the stick up_ at the point where you are to raise it, and wish to fix it at for the time. to do this, the simplest, cheapest and best thing in the world is a _cleft stick_. take a _rod_ of ash, hazel, birch, or almost any wood; let it be a foot or two longer than your mashing-tub is wide over the top; _split_ it, as if for making hoops; tie it round with a string at each end; lay it across your mashing-tub; pull it open in the middle, and let the upper part of the wort-stick through it, and when you raise that stick, by degrees as before directed, the cleft stick _will hold it up_ at whatever height you please. . when you have drawn off the _ale-wort_, you proceed to put into the mashing tub water for the _small beer_. but, i shall go on with my directions about the _ale_ till i have got it into the _cask_ and _cellar_; and shall then return to the small-beer. . as you draw off the ale-wort into the underbuck, you must lade it out of that into the tun-tub, for which work, as well as for various other purposes in the brewing, you must have a _bowl-dish_ with a handle to it. the underbuck will not hold the whole of the wort. it is, as before described, a shallow tub, to go _under_ the mashing-tub to draw off the wort into. out of this underbuck you must lade the ale-wort into the _tun-tub_; and there it must remain till your _copper_ be emptied and ready to receive it. . the copper being empty, you put the wort into it, and put in after the wort, or before it, _a pound and a half of good hops_, well rubbed and separated as you put them in. you now make the copper boil, and keep it, with the lid off, at a good _brisk_ boil, for a _full hour_, and if it be an hour and a half it is none the worse. . when the boiling is done, put out your fire, and put the liquor into the _coolers_. but it must be put into the coolers _without the hops_. therefore, in order to get the hops out of the liquor, you must have a _strainer_. the best for your purpose is a small _clothes-basket_, or any other wicker-basket. you set your coolers in the most convenient place. it may be in-doors or out of doors, as most convenient. you lay a couple of sticks across one of the coolers, and put the basket upon them. put your liquor, hops and all, into the basket, which will _keep back the hops_. when you have got liquor enough in one cooler, you go to another with your sticks and basket, till you have got all your liquor out. if you find your liquor deeper in one cooler than the other, you can make an alteration in that respect, till you have the liquor so distributed as to cool equally fast in both, or all, the coolers. . the next stage of the liquor is in the _tun-tub_, where it is _set to work_. now, a very great point is, the _degree of heat_ that the liquor is to be at when it is set to working. the proper heat is seventy degrees; so that a thermometer makes this matter sure. in the country they determine the degree of heat by merely putting a finger into the liquor. seventy degrees is but _just warm_, a gentle _luke-warmth_. nothing like _heat_. a little experience makes perfectness in such a matter. when at the proper heat, or nearly, (for the liquor will cool a little in being removed,) put it into the _tun-tub_. and now, before i speak of the act of setting the beer to work, i must describe this _tun-tub_, which i first mentioned in paragraph . it is to hold _thirty gallons_, as you have seen; and nothing is better than an old _cask_ of that size, or somewhat larger, with the head taken out, or cut off. but, indeed, any tub of sufficient dimensions, and of about the same depth proportioned to the width as a cask or barrel has, will do for the purpose. having put the liquor into the tun-tub, you put in the _yeast_. about _half a pint_ of good yeast is sufficient. this should first be put into a thing of some sort that will hold about a gallon of your liquor; the thing should then be nearly filled with liquor, and with a stick or spoon you should mix the yeast well with the liquor in this bowl, or other thing, and stir in along with the yeast a handful of _wheat or rye flour_. this mixture is then to be poured out clean into the tun-tub, and the whole mass of the liquor is then to be agitated well by lading up and pouring down again with your bowl-dish, till the yeast be well mixed with the liquor. some people do the thing in another manner. they mix up the yeast and flour with some liquor (as just mentioned) taken out of the coolers; and then they set the little vessel that contains this mixture down _on the bottom of the tun-tub_; and, leaving it there, put the liquor out of the coolers into the tun-tub. being placed at the bottom, and having the liquor poured on it, the mixture is, perhaps, more perfectly effected in this way than in any way. the _flour_ may not be necessary; but, as the country people use it, it is, doubtless, of some use; for their hereditary experience has not been for nothing. when your liquor is thus properly put into the tun-tub and set a working, cover over the top of the tub by laying across it a sack or two, or something that will answer the purpose. . we now come to the _last stage_; the _cask_ or _barrel_. but i must first speak of the place for the tun-tub to stand in. the place should be such as to avoid too much warmth or cold. the air should, if possible, be at about degrees. any cool place in summer and any _warmish_ place in winter. if the weather be _very cold_, some cloths or sacks should be put round the tun-tub while the beer is working. in about six or eight hours, a _frothy_ head will rise upon the liquor; and it will keep rising, more or less slowly, for about forty-eight hours. but, the _length of time_ required for the working depends on various circumstances; so that no precise time can be fixed. the best way is, to take off the froth (which is indeed _yeast_) at the end of about twenty-four hours, with a common skimmer, and put it into a pan or vessel of some sort; then, in twelve hours' time, take it off again in the same way; and so on till the liquor has _done working_, and sends up no more yeast. then it is _beer_; and when it is _quite cold_ (for _ale_ or _strong beer_) put it into the _cask_ by means of a _funnel_. it must be cold before you do this, or it will be what the country-people call _foxed_; that is to say, have a rank and disagreeable taste. now, as to the _cask_, it must be _sound_ and _sweet_. i thought, when writing the former edition of this work, that the _bell-shaped_ were the best casks. i am now convinced that that was an error. the bell-shaped, by contracting the width of the top of the beer, as that top descends, in consequence of the draft for use, certainly prevents the _head_ (which always gathers on beer as soon as you begin to draw it off) from breaking and mixing in amongst the beer. this is an advantage in the bell-shape; but then the bell-shape, which places the widest end of the cask uppermost, exposes the cask to the admission of _external air_ much more than the other shape. this danger approaches from the _ends_ of the cask; and, in the bell-shape, you have the _broadest_ end wholly exposed the moment you have drawn out the first gallon of beer, which is not the case with the casks of the common shape. directions are given, in the case of the bell-casks, to put _damp sand_ on the top to keep out the air. but, it is very difficult to make this effectual; and yet, if you do not keep out the air, your beer will be _flat_; and when flat, it really is good for nothing but the pigs. it is very difficult to _fill_ the bell-cask, which you will easily see if you consider its shape. it must be placed on the _level_ with the greatest possible _truth_, or there will be a space left; and to place it with such truth is, perhaps, as difficult a thing as a mason or bricklayer ever had to perform. and yet, if this be not done, there will be an _empty space_ in the cask, though it may, at the same time, run over. with the common casks there are none of these difficulties. a common eye will see when it is well placed; and, at any rate, any little vacant space that may be left is not at an _end_ of the cask, and will, without great carelessness, be so small as to be of no consequence. we now come to the act of putting in the beer. the cask should be placed on a stand with legs about a foot long. the cask, being round, must have a little wedge, or block, on each side to keep it steady. _bricks_ do very well. bring your beer down into the cellar in buckets, and pour it in through the funnel, until the cask be full. the cask should _lean a little on one side_, when you fill it; because the beer will _work again_ here, and send more yeast out of the bung-hole; and, if the cask were not a little on one side, the yeast would flow over both sides of the cask, and would not descend in _one stream_ into a pan, put underneath to receive it. here the bell-cask is extremely inconvenient; for the yeast works up all _over the head_, and _cannot run off_, and makes a very nasty affair. this _alone_, to say nothing of the other disadvantages, would decide the question against the bell-casks. something will _go off in this working_, which may continue for two or three days. when you put the beer in the cask, you should have a _gallon or two left_, to keep filling up with as the working produces emptiness. at last, when the working is completely over, _right_ the cask. that is to say, block it up to its level. put in a handful of _fresh hops_. fill the cask quite full. put in the bung, with a bit of _coarse linen_ stuff round it; hammer it down tight; and, if you like, fill a coarse bag with sand, and lay it, well pressed down, over the bung. . as to the length of time that you are to keep the beer before you begin to use it, that must, in some measure, depend on taste. _such beer_ as this _ale_ will keep almost any length of time. as to the mode of _tapping_, that is as easy almost as _drinking_. when the cask is _empty_, great care must be taken to cork it _tightly up_, so that no air get in; for, if it do, the cask is _moulded_, and when once moulded, it is _spoiled for ever_. it is never again fit to be used about beer. before the cask be used again, the grounds must be poured out, and the cask cleaned by several times scalding; by putting in _stones_ (or a _chain_,) and rolling and shaking about till it be quite clean. here again the round casks have the decided advantage; it being almost impossible to make the bell-casks thoroughly clean, without _taking the head out_, which is both troublesome and expensive; as it cannot be well done by any one but a _cooper_, who is not always at hand, and who, when he is, must be _paid_. . i have now done with the _ale_, and it remains for me to speak of the _small beer_. in paragraph (which now see) i left you drawing off the _ale-wort_, and with your copper full of boiling water. thirty-six gallons of that boiling water are, as soon as you have got your ale-wort out, and have put down your mash-tub stick to close up the hole at the bottom; as soon as you have done this, thirty-six gallons of the boiling water are to go into the mashing-tub; the grains are to be well stirred up, as before; the mashing-tub is to be covered over again, as mentioned in paragraph ; and the mash is to stand in that state for _an hour_, and not two hours, as for the ale-wort. . when the small beer mash has stood its hour, draw it off as in paragraph , and put it into the tun-tub as you did the ale-wort. . by this time your copper will be _empty_ again, by putting your ale-liquor to cool, as mentioned in paragraph . and you now put the small beer wort _into the copper_, with the hops that you used before, and with _half a pound of fresh hops_ added to them; and this liquor you boil briskly for _an hour_. . by this time you will have taken the grains and the sediment clean out of the mashing-tub, and taken out the bunch of birch twigs, and made all clean. now put in the birch twigs again, and put down your stick as before. lay your two or three sticks across the mashing-tub, put your basket on them, and take your liquor from the copper (putting the fire out first) and pour it into the mashing-tub through the basket. take the basket away, throw the hops to the dunghill, and leave the small beer liquid _to cool in the mashing-tub_. . here it is to remain to be _set to working_ as mentioned for the ale, in paragraph ; only, in this case, you will want _more yeast in proportion_; and should have for your thirty-six gallons of small beer, three half pints of good yeast. . proceed, as to all the rest of the business, as with the ale, only, in the case of the small beer, it should be put into the cask, not _quite cold_, but a _little warm_; or else it will not work at all in the barrel, which it ought to do. it will not work so strongly or so long as the ale; and may be put in the barrel much sooner; in general the next day after it is brewed. . all the utensils should be well cleaned and put away as soon as they are done with; the _little_ things as well as the great things; for it is _loss of time_ to make new ones. and, now, let us see the _expense_ of these utensils. the copper, _new_, _l._; the mashing-tub, _new_, _s._; the tun-tub, not new, _s._; the underbuck and three coolers, not new, _s._ the whole cost is _l._ _s._ which is ten shillings less than the _one bushel machine_. i am now in a farm-house, where the _same set_ of utensils has been used for _forty years_; and the owner tells me, that, with the same use, they may last for _forty years longer_. the machine will not, i think, last _four years_, if in any thing like regular use. it is of sheet-iron, _tinned on the inside_, and this tin _rusts_ exceedingly, and is not to be kept clean without such _rubbing_ as must soon take off the tin. the great advantage of the machine is, that it can be _removed_. you can brew without a _brew-house_.--you can set the boiler up against any fire-place, or any window. you can brew under a cart-shed, and even out of doors. but all this may be done with _these utensils_, if your _copper_ be moveable. make the boiler of _copper_, and not of sheet-iron, and fix it on a stand with a fire-place and stove-pipe; and then you have the whole to brew out of doors with as well as in-doors, which is a very great convenience. . now with regard to the _other_ scale of brewing, little need be said; because, all the principles being the same, the utensils only are to be proportioned to the _quantity_. if only one sort of beer be to be brewed at a time, all the difference is, that, in order to extract the whole of the goodness of the malt, the mashing ought to be at _twice_. the two worts are then put together, and then you boil them together with the hops. . a correspondent at _morpeth_ says, the whole of the utensils used by him are a twenty-gallon _pot_, a mashing-tub, that also answers for a tun-tub, and a shallow tub for a cooler; and that these are plenty for a person who is any thing of a contriver. this is very true; and these things will cost no more, perhaps, than _forty shillings_. a nine gallon cask of beer can be brewed very well with such utensils. indeed, it is what used to be done by almost every labouring man in the kingdom, until the high price of malt and comparatively low price of wages rendered the people too poor and miserable to be able to brew at all. a correspondent at bristol has obligingly sent me the model of utensils for _brewing on a small scale_; but as they consist chiefly of _brittle ware_, i am of opinion that they would not so well answer the purpose. . indeed, as to the country labourers, all they want is the ability to _get the malt_. mr. ellman, in his evidence before the agricultural committee, said, that, when he began farming, forty-five years ago, there was not a labourer's family in the parish that did not brew their own beer and enjoy it by their own fire-sides; and that, _now, not one single family did it, from want of ability to get the malt_. it is the _tax_ that prevents their getting the malt; for, the barley is cheap enough. the tax causes a monopoly in the hands of the maltsters, who, when the tax is _two_ and _sixpence_, make the malt, cost _s._ _d._, though the barley cost but _s._ _d._; and though the malt, tax and all, ought to cost him about _s._ _d._ if the tax were taken off, this _pernicious monopoly_ would be destroyed. . the reader will easily see, that, in proportion to the quantity wanted to be brewed must be the size of the utensils; but, i may observe here, that the above utensils are sufficient for three, or even four, bushels of malt, if stronger beer be wanted. . when it is necessary, in case of falling short in the quantity wanted to fill up the ale cask, some may be taken from the small beer. but, upon the _whole brewing_, there ought to be no falling short; because, if the casks be not _filled up_, the beer will not be good, and certainly will not _keep_. great care should be taken as to the _cleansing_ of the _casks_. they should be made perfectly _sweet_; or it is impossible to have good beer. . the cellar, for beer to keep any length of time, should be cool. under _a hill_ is the best place for a cellar; but, at any rate, a cellar of good depth, and _dry_. at certain times of the year, beer that is kept long will ferment. the vent-pegs must, in such cases, be loosened a little, and afterwards fastened. . small beer may be tapped almost directly. it is a sort of joke that it should _see a sunday_; but, that it may do before it be two days old. in short, any beer is better than water; but it should have some strength and some _weeks_ of age at any rate. . i cannot conclude this essay without expressing my pleasure, that a law has been recently passed to authorize the general retail of beer. this really seems necessary to prevent the king's subjects from being _poisoned_. the brewers and porter quacks have carried their tricks to such an extent, that there is _no safety_ for those who drink brewer's beer. . the best and most effectual thing is, however, for people to _brew their own beer_, to enable them and induce them to do which, i have done all that lies in my power. a longer treatise on the subject would have been of no use. these few plain directions will suffice for those who have a disposition to do the thing, and those who have not would remain unmoved by any thing that i could say. . there seems to be a _great number of things to do_ in brewing, but the greater part of them require only about a _minute_ each. a brewing, such as i have given the detail of above, may be completed in _a day_; but, by the word _day_, i mean to include the _morning_, beginning at four o'clock. . the putting of the beer into barrel is not more than an hour's work for a servant woman, or a tradesman's or a farmer's wife. there is no _heavy_ work, no work too heavy for a woman in any part of the business, otherwise i would not recommend it to be performed by the women, who, though so amiable in themselves, are never quite so amiable as when they are _useful_; and as to beauty, though men may fall in love with girls at _play_, there is nothing to make them stand to their love like seeing them at _work_. in conclusion of these remarks on beer brewing, i once more express my most anxious desire to see abolished for ever the accursed tax on _malt_, which, i verily believe, has done more harm to the people of england than was ever done to any people by plague, pestilence, famine, and civil war. . in paragraph , in paragraph , and perhaps in another place or two (of the last edition,) i spoke of the _machine_ for brewing. the work being _stereotyped_, it would have been troublesome to alter those paragraphs; but, of course, the public, in reading them, will bear in mind what has been _now_ said relative to the _machine_. the inventor of that machine deserves great praise for his efforts to promote private brewing; and, as i said before, in certain confined situations, and where the beer is to be merely _small beer_, and for _immediate use_, and where _time_ and _room_ are of such importance as to make the _cost_ of the machine comparatively of trifling consideration, the machine may possibly be found to be an useful utensil. . having stated the inducements to the brewing of beer, and given the plainest directions that i was able to give for the doing of the thing, i shall, next, proceed to the subject of _bread_. but this subject is too large and of too much moment to be treated with brevity, and must, therefore, be put off till my next number. i cannot, in the mean while, dismiss the subject of _brewing beer_ without once more adverting to its many advantages, as set forth in the foregoing number of this work. . the following instructions for the making of _porter_, will clearly show what sort of stuff is sold at _public-houses_ in london; and we may pretty fairly suppose that the public-house beer in the country is not superior to it in quality, "a quarter of malt, with these ingredients, will make _five barrels of good porter_. take one quarter of high-coloured malt, eight pounds of hops, nine pounds of _treacle_, eight pounds of _colour_, eight pounds of sliced _liquorice-root_, two drams of _salt of tartar_, two ounces of _spanish-liquorice_, and half an ounce of _capsicum_." the author says, that he merely gives the ingredients, as _used by many persons_. . this extract is taken from a _book on brewing_, recently published in london. what a curious composition! what a mess of drugs! but, if the brewers _openly avow_ this, what have we to expect from the _secret practices_ of them, and the _retailers_ of the article! when we know, that _beer-doctor_ and _brewers'-druggist_ are professions, practised as openly as those of _bug-man_ and _rat-killer_, are we simple enough to suppose that the above-named are the _only_ drugs that people swallow in those potions, which they call _pots of beer_? indeed, we know the contrary; for scarcely a week passes without witnessing the detection of some greedy wretch, who has used, in making or in _doctoring_ his beer, drugs, forbidden by the law. and, it is not many weeks since one of these was convicted, in the court of excise, for using potent and dangerous drugs, by the means of which, and a suitable quantity of water, he made _two buts of beer into three_. upon this occasion, it appeared that no less than _ninety_ of these worthies were in the habit of pursuing the same practices. the drugs are not unpleasant to the taste; they sting the palate: they give a present relish: they communicate a momentary exhilaration: but, they give no force to the body, which, on the contrary, they enfeeble, and, in many instances, with time, destroy; producing diseases from which the drinker would otherwise have been free to the end of his days. . but, look again at the receipt for making porter. here are _eight_ bushels of malt to gallons of beer; that is to say, twenty-fire gallons from the bushel. now the malt is eight shillings a bushel, and eight pounds of the very _best hops_ will cost but a shilling a pound. the malt and hops, then, for the gallons, cost but _seventy-two shillings_; that is to say, only a little more than _fourpence three farthings a gallon_, for stuff which is now retailed for _sixteen pence a gallon_! if this be not an abomination, i should be glad to know what is. even if the treacle, colour, and the drugs, be included, the cost is not _fivepence a gallon_; and yet, not content with this enormous extortion, there are wretches who resort to the use of other and pernicious drugs, in order to increase their gains! . to provide against this dreadful evil there is, and there can be, no _law_; for, it is _created by the law_. the _law_ it is that imposes the enormous tax on the _malt_ and _hops_; the _law_ it is that imposes the _license tax_, and places the power of granting the license at the discretion of persons appointed by the government; the _law_ it is that checks, in this way, the private brewing, and that prevents _free and fair competition_ in the selling of beer, and as long as the _law_ does these, it will in vain endeavour to prevent the people from being destroyed by slow poison. . innumerable are the benefits that would arise from a repeal of the taxes on malt and on hops. tippling-houses might then be shut up with justice and propriety. the labourer, the artisan, the tradesman, the landlord, all would instantly feel the benefit. but the _landlord_ more, perhaps, in this case, than any other member of the community. the four or five pounds a year which the day-labourer now drizzles away in tea-messes, he would divide with the farmer, if he had untaxed beer. his wages would _fall_, and fall to his _advantage_ too. the fall of wages would be not less than _l._ upon a hundred acres. thus _l._ would go, in the end, a fourth, perhaps to the farmer, and three-fourths to the landlord. this is the kind of work to _reduce poor-rates_, and to restore _husbandry to prosperity_. undertaken this work _must_ be, and _performed too_; but whether we shall see this until the estates have passed away from the _present race_ of landlords, is a question which must be referred to _time_. . surely we may hope, that, when the american farmers shall see this little essay, they will begin seriously to think of leaving off the use of the liver-burning and palsy-producing _spirits_. their _climate_, indeed, is something: _extremely hot_ in one part of the year, and _extremely cold_ in the other part of it. nevertheless, they may have, and do have, very good beer if they will. _negligence_ is the greatest impediment in their way. i like the americans very much; and that, if there were no other, would be a reason for my not hiding their faults. no. iii. making bread. . little time need be spent in dwelling on the necessity of _this_ article to all families; though, on account of the modern custom of using _potatoes_ to supply the place of _bread_, it seems necessary to say a few words here on the subject, which, in another work i have so amply, and, i think, so triumphantly discussed. i am the more disposed to revive the subject for a moment, in this place, from having read, in the evidence recently given before the agricultural committee, that many labourers, especially in the west of england, use potatoes _instead_ of bread to a very great extent. and i find, from the same evidence, that it is the custom to allot to labourers "_a potatoe ground_" in part payment of their wages! this has a tendency to bring english labourers down to the state of the irish, whose mode of living, as to food, is but one remove from that of the pig, and of the ill-fed pig too. . i was, in reading the above-mentioned evidence, glad to find, that mr. edward wakefield, the best informed and most candid of all the witnesses, gave it as his opinion, that the increase which had taken place in the cultivation of potatoes was "_injurious to the country_;" an opinion which must, i think, be adopted by every one who takes the trouble to reflect a little upon the subject. for leaving out of the question the slovenly and beastly habits engendered amongst the labouring classes by constantly lifting their principal food at once out of the earth to their mouths, by eating without the necessity of any implements other than the hands and the teeth, and by dispensing with everything requiring skill in the preparation of the food, and requiring cleanliness in its consumption or preservation; leaving these out of the question, though they are all matters of great moment, when we consider their effects in the rearing of a family, we shall find, that, in mere quantity of food, that is to say of _nourishment_, bread is the preferable diet. . an acre of land that will produce bushels of potatoes, will produce bushels of wheat. i state this as an average fact, and am not at all afraid of being contradicted by any one well acquainted with husbandry. the potatoes are supposed to be of a _good sort_, as it is called, and the wheat may be supposed to weigh pounds a bushel. it is a fact clearly established, that, after the _water_, the _stringy_ substance, and the _earth_, are taken from the potatoe, there remains only one _tenth_ of the rough raw weight of nutritious matter, or matter which is deemed equally nutritious with bread, and, as the raw potatoes weigh lb. a bushel, the acre will yield , lb. of nutritious matter. now mind, a bushel of wheat, weighing lb. will make of _household bread_ (that is to say, taking out only the _bran_) lb. thus, the acre yields , lb. of bread. as to the _expenses_, the seed and act of planting are about equal in the two cases. but, while the potatoes _must_ have cultivation during their growth, the wheat needs none; and while the wheat straw is worth from three to five pounds an acre, the haulm of the potatoes is not worth one single truss of that straw. then, as to the expense of gathering, housing, and keeping the potatoe crop, it is enormous, besides the risk of loss by frost, which may be safely taken, on an average, at a tenth of the crop. then comes the expense of _cooking_. the thirty-two bushels of wheat, supposing a bushel to be baked at a time, (which would be the case in a large family,) would demand _thirty-two heatings of the oven_. suppose a bushel of potatoes to be cooked every day in order to supply the place of this bread, then we have _nine hundred boilings of the pot_, unless _cold potatoes_ be eaten at some of the meals; and, in that case, the diet must be _cheering_ indeed! think of the _labour_; think of the _time_; think of all the peelings and scrapings and washings and messings attending these _nine hundred boilings of the pot_! for it must be a considerable time before english people can be brought to eat potatoes in the irish style; that is to say, scratch them out of the earth with their paws, toss them into a pot without washing, and when boiled, turn them out upon a dirty board, and then sit round that board, peel the skin and dirt from one at a time and eat the inside. mr. curwen was delighted with "_irish hospitality_," because the people there receive no parish relief; upon which i can only say, that i wish him the exclusive benefit of such hospitality. . i have here spoken of a large quantity of each of the sorts of food. i will now come to a comparative view, more immediately applicable to a labourer's family. when wheat is _ten_ shillings the bushel, potatoes, bought at best hand, (i am speaking of the country generally,) are about _two_ shillings (english) a bushel. last spring the average price of wheat might be _six and sixpence_, (english;) and the average price of potatoes (in small quantities) was about _eighteen-pence_; though, by the wagon-load, i saw potatoes bought at a _shilling_ (english) a bushel, to give to sheep; then, observe, these were of the coarsest kind, and the farmer had to fetch them at a considerable expense. i think, therefore, that i give the advantage to the potatoes when i say that they sell, upon an average, for full a _fifth_ part as much as the wheat sells for, per bushel, while they contain four pounds less weight than the bushel of wheat; while they yield only five pounds and a half of nutritious matter equal to bread; and while the bushel of wheat will yield _sixty-five pounds of bread_, besides the ten pounds of bran. hence it is clear, that, instead of that _saving_, which is everlastingly dinned in our ears, from the use of potatoes, there is a _waste of more than one half_; seeing that, when wheat is _ten shillings_ (english) the bushel, you can have _sixty-five pounds of bread for the ten shillings_; and can have out of potatoes only five pounds and a half of nutritious matter equal to bread for _two shillings_! (english.) this being the case, i trust that we shall soon hear no more of those _savings_ which the labourer makes by the use of potatoes; i hope we shall, in the words of dr. drennan, "leave ireland to her _lazy_ root," if she choose still to adhere to it. it is the root, also, of slovenliness, filth, misery, and slavery; its cultivation has increased in england with the increase of the paupers: both, i thank god, are upon the decline. englishmen seem to be upon the return to beer and bread, from water and potatoes: and, therefore, i shall now proceed to offer some observations to the cottager, calculated to induce him to bake his own bread. . as i have before stated, sixty pounds of wheat, that is to say, where the winchester bushel weighs sixty pounds, will make sixty-five pounds of bread, besides the leaving of about ten pounds of bran. this is household bread, made of flour from which the bran only is taken. if you make fine flour, you take out pollard, as they call it, as well as bran, and then you have a smaller quantity of bread and a greater quantity of offal; but, even of this finer bread, bread equal in fineness to the baker's bread, you get from _fifty-eight to fifty-nine_ pounds out of the bushel of wheat. now, then, let us see how many quartern loaves you get out of the bushel of wheat, supposing it to be fine flour, in the first place. you get thirteen quartern loaves and a half; these cost you, at the present average price of wheat (seven and sixpence a bushel,) in the first place _s_. _d._;[ ] then _d._ for yeast; then not more than _d._ for grinding; because you have about thirteen pounds of offal, which is worth more than a / _d._ a pound, while the grinding is _d._ a bushel. thus, then, the bushel of bread of fifty-nine pounds costs you _eight shillings_; and it yields you the weight of thirteen and a half quartern loaves: these quartern loaves _now_ (dec. ) sell at kensington, at the baker's shop, at _s._ / _d._; that is to say, the thirteen quartern loaves and a half cost _s._ - / _d._ i omitted to mention the salt, which would cost you _d._ more. so that, here is _s._ - / _d._ saved upon the baking of a bushel of bread. the baker's quartern loaf is indeed cheaper in the country than at kensington, by, probably, a penny in the loaf; which would still, however, leave a saving of _s._ upon the bushel of bread. but, besides this, pray think a little of the materials of which the baker's loaf is composed. the _alum_, the _ground potatoes_, and other materials; it being a notorious fact, that the bakers, in london at least, have _mills_ wherein to grind their potatoes; so large is the scale upon which they use that material. it is probable, that, out of a bushel of wheat, they make between _sixty_ and _seventy_ pounds of bread, though they have no more _flour_, and, of course, no more nutritious matter, than you have in your fifty-nine pounds of bread. but, at the least, supposing their bread to be as good as yours in quality, you have, allowing a shilling for the heating of the oven, a clear _s._ saved upon every bushel of bread. if you consume half a bushel a week, that is to say about a quartern loaf a day, this is a saving of _l._ _s._ a year, or full a sixth part, if not a fifth part, of the earnings of a labourer in husbandry. . how wasteful, then, and, indeed, how shameful, for a labourer's wife to go to the baker's shop; and how negligent, how criminally careless of the welfare of his family, must the labourer be, who permits so scandalous a use of the proceeds of his labour! but i have hitherto taken a view of the matter the least possibly advantageous to the home-baked bread. for, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the fuel for heating the oven costs very little. the hedgers, the copsers, the woodmen of all descriptions, have fuel for little or nothing. at any rate, to heat the oven cannot, upon an average, take the country through, cost the labourer more than _d._ a bushel. then, again, fine flour need not ever be used, and ought not to be used. this adds six pounds of bread to the bushel, or nearly another quartern loaf and a half, making nearly fifteen quartern loaves out of the bushel of wheat. the finest flour is by no means the most wholesome; and, at any rate, there is more nutritious matter in a pound of household bread than in a pound of baker's bread. besides this, rye, and even barley, especially when mixed with wheat, make very good bread. few people upon the face of the earth live better than the long islanders. yet nine families out of ten seldom eat wheaten-bread. rye is the flour that they principally make use of. now, rye is seldom more than two-thirds the price of wheat, and barley is seldom more than half the price of wheat. half rye and half wheat, taking out a little more of the offal, make very good bread. half wheat, a quarter rye and a quarter barley, nay, one-third of each, make bread that i could be very well content to live upon all my lifetime; and, even barley alone, if the barley be good, and none but the finest flour taken out of it, has in it, measure for measure, ten times the nutrition of potatoes. indeed the fact is well known, that our forefathers used barley bread to a very great extent. its only fault, with those who dislike it, is its sweetness, a fault which we certainly have not to find with the baker's loaf, which has in it little more of the _sweetness_ of grain than is to be found in the offal which comes from the sawings of deal boards. the nutritious nature of barley is amply proved by the effect, and very rapid effect, of its meal, in the fatting of hogs and of poultry of all descriptions. they will fatten quicker upon meal of barley than upon any other thing. the flesh, too, is sweeter than that proceeding from any other food, with the exception of that which proceeds from _buck wheat_, a grain little used in england. that proceeding from indian corn is, indeed, still sweeter and finer; but this is wholly out of the question with us. . i am, by-and-by, to speak of the _cow_ to be kept by the labourer in husbandry. then there will be _milk_ to wet the bread with, an exceedingly great improvement in its taste as well as in its quality! this, of all the ways of using skim milk, is the most advantageous: and this great advantage must be wholly thrown away, if the bread of the family be bought at the shop. with milk, bread with very little wheat in it may be made far better than baker's bread; and, leaving the milk out of the question, taking a third of each sort of grain, you would get bread weighing as much as fourteen quartern loaves, for about _s._ _d._ at present prices of grain; that is to say, you would get it for about _d._ the quartern loaf, all expenses included; thus you have nine pounds and ten ounces of bread a day for about _s._ _d._ a week. here is enough for a very large family. very few labourers' families can want so much as this, unless indeed there be several persons in it capable of earning something by their daily labour. here is cut and come again. here is bread always for the table. bread to carry a field; always a hunch of bread ready to put into the hand of a hungry child. we hear a great deal about "_children crying for bread_," and objects of compassion they and their parents are, when the latter have not the means of obtaining a sufficiency of bread. but i should be glad to be informed, how it is possible for a labouring man, who earns, upon an average, _s._ a week, who has not more than four children (and if he have more, some ought to be doing something;) who has a garden of a quarter of an acre of land (for that makes part of my plan;) who has a wife as industrious as she ought to be; who does not waste his earnings at the ale-house or the tea shop: i should be glad to know how such a man, while wheat shall be at the price of about _s._ a bushel, _can possibly have children crying for bread_! . cry, indeed, they must, if he will persist in giving _s._ for a bushel of bread instead of _s._ _d._ such a man is not to say that the bread which i have described is _not good enough_. it was good enough for his forefathers, who were too proud to be paupers, that is to say, abject and willing slaves. "hogs eat barley." and hogs will eat wheat, too, when they can get at it. convicts in condemned cells eat wheaten bread; but we think it no degradation to eat wheaten bread, too. i am for depriving the labourer of none of his rights; i would have him oppressed in no manner or shape; i would have him bold and free; but to have him such, he must have bread in his house, sufficient for all his family, and whether that bread be fine or coarse must depend upon the different circumstances which present themselves in the cases of different individuals. . the married man has no right to expect the same plenty of food and of raiment that the single man has. the time before marriage is the time to lay by, or, if the party choose, to indulge himself in the absence of labour. to marry is a voluntary act, and it is attended in the result with great pleasures and advantages. if, therefore, the laws be fair and equal; if the state of things be such that a labouring man can, with the usual ability of labourers, and with constant industry, care and sobriety; with decency of deportment towards all his neighbours, cheerful obedience to his employer, and a due subordination to the laws; if the state of things be such, that such a man's earnings be sufficient to maintain himself and family with food, raiment, and lodging needful for them; such a man has no reason to complain; and no labouring man has reason to complain, if the numerousness of his family should call upon him for extraordinary exertion, or for frugality uncommonly rigid. the man with a large family has, if it be not in a great measure his own fault, a greater number of pleasures and of blessings than other men. if he be wise, and _just_ as well as wise, he will see that it is reasonable for him to expect less delicate fare than his neighbours, who have a less number of children, or no children at all. he will see the justice as well as the necessity of his resorting to the use of coarser bread, and thus endeavour to make up that, or at least a part of that, which he loses in comparison with his neighbours. the quality of the bread ought, in every case, to be proportioned to the number of the family and the means of the head of that family. here is no injury to health proposed; but, on the contrary, the best security for its preservation. without bread, all is misery. the scripture truly calls it the staff of life; and it may be called, too, the pledge of peace and happiness in the labourer's dwelling. . as to the act of making bread, it would be shocking indeed if that had to be taught by the means of books. every woman, high or low, ought to know how to make bread. if she do not, she is unworthy of trust and confidence; and, indeed, a mere burden upon the community. yet, it is but too true, that many women, even amongst those who have to get their living by their labour, know nothing of the making of bread; and seem to understand little more about it than the part which belongs to its consumption. a frenchman, a mr. cusar, who had been born in the west indies, told me, that till he came to long island, he never knew _how the flour came_: that he was surprised when he learnt that it was squeezed out of little grains that grew at the tops of straw; for that he had always had an idea that it was got out of some large substances, like the yams that grow in tropical climates. he was a very sincere and good man, and i am sure he told me truth. and this may be the more readily believed, when we see so many women in england, who seem to know no more of the constituent parts of a loaf than they know of those of the moon. servant women in abundance appear to think that loaves are made by the baker, as knights are made by the king; things of their pure creation, a creation, too, in which no one else can participate. now, is not this an enormous evil? and whence does it come? servant women are the children of the labouring classes; and they would all know how to make bread, and know well how to make it too, if they had been fed on bread of their mother's and their own making. . how serious a matter, then, is this, even in this point of view! a servant that cannot make bread is not entitled to the same wages as one that can. if she can neither bake nor brew; if she be ignorant of the nature of flour, yeast, malt, and hops, what is she good for? if she understand these matters well; if she be able to supply her employer with bread and with beer, she is really _valuable_; she is entitled to good wages, and to consideration and respect into the bargain; but if she be wholly deficient in these particulars, and can merely dawdle about with a bucket and a broom, she can be of very little consequence; to lose her, is merely to lose a consumer of food, and she can expect very little indeed in the way of desire to make her life easy and pleasant. why should any one have such desire? she is not a child of the family. she is not a relation. any one as well as she can take in a loaf from the baker, or a barrel of beer from the brewer. she has nothing whereby to bind her employer to her. to sweep a room any thing is capable of that has got two hands. in short, she has no useful skill, no useful ability; she is an ordinary drudge, and she is treated accordingly. . but, if such be her state in the house of an employer, what is her state in the house of a _husband_? the lover is blind; but the husband has eyes to see with. he soon discovers that there is something wanted besides dimples and cherry cheeks; and i would have fathers seriously reflect, and to be well assured, that the way to make their daughters to be long admired, beloved and respected by their husbands, is to make them skilful, able and active in the most necessary concerns of a family. eating and drinking come three times every day; the preparations for these, and all the ministry necessary to them, belong to the wife; and i hold it to be impossible, that at the end of two years, a really ignorant, sluttish wife should possess any thing worthy of the name of love from her husband. this, therefore, is a matter of far greater moment to the father of a family, than, whether the parson of the parish, or the methodist priest, be the most "_evangelical_" of the two; for it is here a question of the daughter's happiness or misery for life. and i have no hesitation to say, that if i were a labouring man, i should prefer teaching my daughters to bake, brew, milk, make butter and cheese, to teaching them to read the bible till they had got every word of it by heart; and i should think, too, nay i should know, that i was in the former case doing my duty towards god as well as towards my children. . when we see a family of dirty, ragged little creatures, let us inquire into the cause; and ninety-nine times out of every hundred we shall find that the parents themselves have been brought up in the same way. but a consideration which ought of itself to be sufficient, is the contempt in which a husband will naturally hold a wife that is ignorant of the matters necessary to the conducting of a family. a woman who understands all the things above mentioned, is really a skilful person; a person worthy of respect, and that will be treated with respect too, by all but brutish employers or brutish husbands; and such, though sometimes, are not very frequently found. besides, if natural justice and our own interest had not the weight which they have, such valuable persons will be treated with respect. they know their own worth; and, accordingly, they are more careful of their character, more careful not to lessen by misconduct the value which they possess from their skill and ability. . thus, then, the interest of the labourer; his health; the health of his family; the peace and happiness of his home; the prospects of his children through life; their skill, their ability, their habits of cleanliness, and even their moral deportment; all combine to press upon him the adoption and the constant practice of this branch of domestic economy. "can she _bake_?" is the question that i always put. if she can, she is _worth a pound or two a year more_. is that nothing? is it nothing for a labouring man to make his four or five daughters worth eight or ten pounds a year more; and that too while he is by the same means providing the more plentifully for himself and the rest of his family? the reasons on the side of the thing that i contend for are endless; but if this one motive be not sufficient, i am sure, all that i have said, and all that i could say, must be wholly unavailing. . before, however, i dismiss this subject, let me say a word or two to those persons who do not come under the denomination of labourers. in london, or in any very large town where the space is so confined, and where the proper fuel is not handily to be come at and stored for use, to bake your own bread may be attended with too much difficulty; but in all other situations there appears to me to be hardly any excuse for not baking bread at home. if the family consist of twelve or fourteen persons, the money actually saved in this way (even at present prices) would be little short of from twenty to thirty pounds a year. at the utmost here is only the time of one woman occupied one day in the week. now mind, here are twenty-five pounds to be employed in some way different from that of giving it to the baker. if you add five of these pounds to a woman's wages, is not that full as well employed as giving it in wages to the baker's men? is it not better employed for you? and is it not better employed for the community? it is very certain, that if the practice were as prevalent as i could wish, there would be a large deduction from the regular baking population; but would there be any harm if less alum were imported into england, and if some of those youths were left at the plough, who are now bound in apprenticeships to learn the art and mystery of doing that which every girl in the kingdom ought to be taught to do by her mother? it ought to be a maxim with every master and every mistress, never to employ another to do that which can be done as well by their own servants. the more of their money that is retained in the hands of their own people, the better it is for them altogether. besides, a man of a right mind must be pleased with the reflection, that there is a great mass of skill and ability under his own roof. he feels stronger and more independent on this account, all pecuniary advantage out of the question. it is impossible to conceive any thing more contemptible than a crowd of men and women living together in a house, and constantly looking out of it for people to bring them food and drink, and to fetch their garments to and fro. such a crowd resemble a nest of unfledged birds, absolutely dependent for their very existence on the activity and success of the old ones. . yet, on men go, from year to year, in this state of wretched dependence, even when they have all the means of living within themselves, which is certainly the happiest state of life that any one can enjoy. it may be asked, where is the mill to be found? where is the wheat to be got? the answer is, where is there not a mill? where is there not a market? they are every where, and the difficulty is to discover what can be the particular attractions contained in that long and luminous manuscript, a baker's half-yearly bill. . with regard to the mill, in speaking of families of any considerable number of persons, the mill has, with me, been more than once a subject of observation in print. i for a good while experienced the great inconvenience and expense of sending my wheat and other grain to be ground at a mill. this expense, in case of a considerable family, living at only a mile from a mill, is something; but the inconveniency and uncertainty are great. in my "year's residence in america," from paragraphs and onwards, i give an account of a horse-mill which i had in my farm yard; and i showed, i think very clearly, that corn could be ground cheaper in this way than by wind or water, and that it would answer well to grind for sale in this way as well as for home use. since my return to england i have seen a mill, erected in consequence of what the owner had read in my book. this mill belongs to a small farmer, who, when he cannot work on his land with his horses, or in the season when he has little for them to do, grinds wheat, sells the flour; and he takes in grists to grind, as other millers do. this mill goes with three small horses; but what i would recommend to gentlemen with considerable families, or to farmers, is a mill such as i myself have at present. . with this mill, turned by a man and a stout boy, i can grind six bushels of wheat in a day and dress the flour. the grinding of six bushels of wheat at ninepence a bushel comes to four and sixpence, which pays the man and the boy, supposing them (which is not and seldom can be the case) to be hired for the express purpose out of the street. with the same mill you grind meat for your pigs; and of this you will get eight or ten bushels ground in a day. you have no trouble about sending to the mill; you are sure to have your _own wheat_; for strange as it may seem, i used sometimes to find that i sent white essex wheat to the mill, and that it brought me flour from very coarse red wheat. there is no accounting for this, except by supposing that wind and water power has something in it to change the very nature of the grain; as, when i came to grind by horses, such as the wheat went into the hopper, so the flour came out into the bin. . but mine now is only on the petty scale of providing for a dozen of persons and a small lot of pigs. for a farm-house, or a gentleman's house in the country, where there would be _room_ to have a walk for a horse, you might take the labour from the men, clap any little horse, pony, or even ass to the wheel; and he would grind you off eight or ten bushels of wheat in a day, and both he and you would have the thanks of your men into the bargain. . the cost of this mill is twenty pounds. the dresser is four more; the horse-path and wheel might, possibly, be four or five more; and, i am very certain, that to any farmer living at a mile from a mill, (and that is less than the average distance perhaps;) having twelve persons in family, having forty pigs to feed, and twenty hogs to fatten, the savings of such a mill would pay the whole expenses of it the very first year. such a farmer cannot send less than _fifty times_ a year to the mill. think of that, in the first place! the elements are not always propitious: sometimes the water fails, and sometimes the wind. many a farmer's wife has been tempted to vent her spleen on both. at best, there must be horse and man, or boy, and, perhaps, cart, to go to the mill; and that, too, observe, in all weathers, and in the harvest as well as at other times of the year. the case is one of imperious necessity: neither floods nor droughts, nor storms nor calms, will allay the cravings of the kitchen, nor quiet the clamorous uproar of the stye. go, somebody must, to some place or other, and back they must come with flour and with meal. one summer many persons came down the country more than fifty miles to a mill that i knew in pennsylvania; and i have known farmers in england carry their grists more than fifteen miles to be ground. it is surprising, that, under these circumstances, hand-mills and horse-mills should not, long ago, have become of more general use; especially when one considers that the labour, in this case, would cost the farmer next to nothing. to grind would be the work of a wet day. there is no farmer who does not at least fifty days in every year exclaim, when he gets up in the morning, "what shall i set _them_ at to-day?" if he had a mill, he would make them pull off their shoes, sweep all out clean, winnow up some corn, if he had it not already done, and grind and dress, and have every thing in order. no scolding within doors about the grist; no squeaking in the stye; no boy sent off in the rain to the mill. . but there is one advantage which i have not yet mentioned; and which is the greatest of all; namely, that you would have the power of supplying your married labourers; your blacksmith's men sometimes; your wheelwright's men at other times; and, indeed, the greater part of the persons that you employed, with good flour, instead of their going to purchase their flour, after it had passed through the hands of a corn merchant, a miller, a flour merchant, and a huckster, every one of whom does and must have a profit out of the flour, arising from wheat grown upon, and sent away from, your very farm! i used to let all my people have flour at the same price that they would otherwise have been compelled to give for worse flour. _every farmer_ will understand me when i say, that he ought to pay for nothing in _money_, which he can pay for in any thing but money. his maxim is to keep the money that he takes as long as he can. now here is a most effectual way of putting that maxim in practice to a very great extent. farmers know well that it is the saturday night which empties their pockets; and here is the means of cutting off a good half of the saturday night. the men have better flour for the same money, and still the farmer keeps at home those profits which would go to the maintaining of the dealers in wheat and in flour. . the maker of my little mill is mr. hill, of oxford-street. the expense is what i have stated it to be. i, with my small establishment, find the thing convenient and advantageous; what then must it be to a gentleman in the country who has room and horses, and a considerable family to provide for? the dresser is so contrived as to give you at once, meal, of four degrees of fineness; so that, for certain purposes, you may take the very finest; and, indeed, you may have your flour, and your bread of course, of what degree of fineness you please. but there is also a _steel mill_, much less _expensive_, requiring _less labour_, and yet quite sufficient for a _family_. mills of this sort, very good, and at a reasonable price, are to be had of mr. parkes, in _fenchurch-street_, london. these are very complete things of their kind. mr. parkes has, also, excellent malt-mills. . in concluding this part of my treatise, i cannot help expressing my hope of being instrumental in inducing a part of the labourers, at any rate, to bake their own bread; and, above all things, to abandon the use of "ireland's _lazy_ root." nevertheless, so extensive is the erroneous opinion relative to this villanous root, that i really began to despair of checking its cultivation and use, till i saw the declaration which mr. wakefield had the good sense and the spirit to make before the "agricultural committee." be it observed, too, that mr. wakefield had himself made a survey of the state of ireland. what he saw there did not encourage him, doubtless, to be an advocate for the growing of this root of wretchedness. it is an undeniable fact, that, in the proportion that this root is in use, as a _substitute for bread_, the people are wretched; the reasons for which i have explained and enforced a hundred times over. mr. william hanning told the committee that the labourers in his part of somersetshire were "almost wholly supplied with potatoes, _breakfast_ and _dinner_, brought them _in the fields_, and nothing but potatoes; and that they used, in better times, to get a certain portion of bacon and cheese, which, on account of their "poverty, they do not eat now." it is impossible that men can be _contented_ in such a state of things: it is unjust to desire them to be contented: it is a state of misery and degradation to which no part of any community can have any show of right to reduce another part: men so degraded have no protection; and it is a disgrace to form part of a community to which they belong. this degradation has been occasioned by a silent change in the value of the money of the country. this has purloined the wages of the labourer; it has reduced him by degrees to housel with the spider and the bat, and to feed with the pig. it has changed the habits, and, in a great measure, the character of the people. the sins of this system are enormous and undescribable; but, thank god! they seem to be approaching to their end! money is resuming its value, labour is recovering its price: let us hope that the wretched potatoe is disappearing, and that we shall, once more, see the knife in the labourer's hand and the loaf upon his board. [this was written in . _now_ ( ) we have had the experience of , when, for the first time, the world saw a considerable part of a people, plunged into all the horrors of _famine_, at a moment when the government of that nation declared _food to be abundant_! yes, the year saw ireland in this state; saw the people of whole parishes receiving the _extreme unction_ preparatory to yielding up their breath for want of food; and this while large exports of meat and flour were taking place in that country! but horrible as this was, disgraceful as it was to the name of ireland, it was attended with this good effect: it brought out, from many members of parliament (in their places,) and from the public in general, the acknowledgment, that the _misery_ and _degradation_ of the irish were chiefly owing to the _use of the potatoe as the almost sole food of the people_.] . in my next number i shall treat of the _keeping of cows_. i have said that i will teach the cottager how to keep a cow all the year round upon the produce of a quarter of an acre, or, in other words, _forty rods_, of land; and, in my next, i will make good my promise. no. iv making bread--(continued.) . in the last number, at paragraph , i observed that i hoped it was unnecessary for me to give any directions as to the mere _act_ of making bread. but several correspondents inform me that, without these directions, a conviction of the utility of baking bread at home is of _no use to them_. therefore, i shall here give those directions, receiving my instructions here from one, who, i thank god, does know how to perform this act. . suppose the quantity be a bushel of flour. put this flour into a _trough_ that people have for the purpose, or it may be in a clean smooth tub of any shape, if not too deep, and if sufficiently large. make a pretty deep hole in the middle of this heap of flour. take (for a bushel) a pint of good fresh yeast, mix it and stir it well up in a pint of _soft_ water milk-warm. pour this into the hole in the heap of flour. then take a spoon and work it round the outside of this body of moisture so as to bring into that body, by degrees, flour enough to make it form a _thin batter_, which you must stir about well for a minute or two. then take a handful of flour and scatter it thinly over the head of this batter, so as to _hide_ it. then cover the whole over with a cloth to keep it _warm_; and this covering, as well as the situation of the trough, as to distance from the fire, must depend on the nature of the place and state of the weather as to heat and cold. when you perceive that the batter has risen enough to make _cracks_ in the flour that you covered it over with, you begin to form the whole mass into _dough_, thus: you begin round the hole containing the batter, working the flour into the batter, and pouring in, as it is wanted to make the flour mix with the batter, soft water milk-warm, or milk, as hereafter to be mentioned. before you begin this, you scatter the _salt_ over the heap at the rate of _half a pound_ to a bushel of flour. when you have got the whole _sufficiently moist_, you _knead it well_. this is a grand part of the business; for, unless the dough be _well worked_, there will be _little round lumps of flour in the loaves_; and, besides, the original batter, which is to give fermentation to the whole, will not be duly mixed. the dough must, therefore, be well worked. the _fists_ must go heartily into it. it must be rolled over; pressed out; folded up and pressed out again, until it be completely mixed, and formed into a _stiff_ and _tough dough_. this is _labour_, mind. i have never quite liked baker's bread since i saw a great heavy fellow, in a bakehouse in france, kneading bread with his _naked feet_! his feet looked very _white_, to be sure: whether they were of that colour _before he got into the trough_ i could not tell. god forbid, that i should suspect that this is ever done _in england_! it is _labour_; but, what is _exercise_ other than labour? let a young woman bake a bushel once a week, and she will do very well without phials and gallipots. . thus, then, the dough is made. and, when made, it is to be formed into a lump in the middle of the trough, and, with a little dry flour thinly scattered over it, covered over again to be kept warm and to ferment; and in this state, if all be done rightly, it will not have to remain more than about or minutes. . in the mean while _the oven is to be heated_; and this is much more than half the art of the operation. when an oven is properly heated, can be known only by _actual observation_. women who understand the matter, know when the heat is right the moment they put their faces within a yard of the oven-mouth; and once or twice observing is enough for any person of common capacity. but this much may be said in the way of _rule_: that the fuel (i am supposing a brick oven) should be _dry_ (not _rotten_) wood, and not mere _brush-wood_, but rather _fagot-sticks_. if larger wood, it ought to be split up into sticks not more than two, or two and a half inches through. bush-wood that is _strong_, not green and not too old, if it be hard in its nature and has some _sticks_ in it, may do. the _woody_ parts of furze, or ling, will heat an oven very well. but the thing is, to have a _lively_ and yet _somewhat strong_ fire; so that the oven may be heated in about minutes, and retain its heat sufficiently long. . the oven should be hot by the time that the dough, as mentioned in paragraph , has remained in the lump about minutes. when both are ready, take out the fire, and wipe the oven out clean, and, at nearly about the same moment, take the dough out upon the lid of the baking trough, or some proper place, cut it up into pieces, and make it up into loaves, kneading it again into these separate parcels; and, as you go on, shaking a little flour over your board, to prevent the dough from adhering to it. the loaves should be put into the oven as _quickly_ as possible after they are formed; when in, the oven-lid, or door, should be fastened up _very closely_; and, if all be properly managed, loaves of about the size of quartern loaves will be sufficiently baked in about _two hours_. but they usually take down the _lid_, and _look_ at the bread, in order to see how it is going on. . and what is there worthy of the name of _plague_, or _trouble_, in all this? here is no dirt, no filth, no rubbish, no _litter_, no _slop_. and, pray, what can be pleasanter to _behold_? talk, indeed, of your pantomimes and gaudy shows; your processions and installations and coronations! give me, for a beautiful sight, a neat and smart woman, heating her oven and setting in her bread! and, if the bustle does make the sign of labour glisten on her brow, where is the man that would not kiss that off, rather than lick the plaster from the cheek of a duchess. . and what is the _result_? why, good, wholesome food, sufficient for a considerable family for a week, prepared in three or four hours. to get this quantity of food, fit to be _eaten_, in the shape of potatoes, _how many fires_! what a washing, what a boiling, what a peeling, what a slopping, and what a messing! the cottage everlastingly in a litter; the woman's hands everlastingly wet and dirty; the children grimed up to the eyes with dust fixed on by potato-starch; and ragged as colts, the poor mother's time all being devoted to the everlasting boilings of the pot! can any man, who knows any thing of the labourer's life, deny this? and will, then, any body, except the old shuffle-breeches band of the quarterly review, who have all their lives been moving from garret to garret, who have seldom seen the sun, and never the dew except in print; will any body except these men say, that the people ought to be taught to use potatoes as a _substitute for bread_? brewing beer. . this matter has been fully treated of in the two last numbers. but several correspondents wishing to fall upon some means of rendering the practice beneficial to those who are _unable to purchase_ brewing utensils, have recommended the _lending_ of them, or letting out, round a neighbourhood. another correspondent has, therefore, pointed out to me _an act of parliament_ which touches upon this subject; and, indeed, what of excise laws and custom laws and combination laws and libel laws, a human being in this country scarcely knows what he dares do or what he dares say. what father, for instance, would have imagined, that, having brewing utensils, which two men carry from house to house as easily as they can a basket, _he dared not lend them to his son, living in the next street, or at the next door_? yet such really is the law; for, according to the act th of the and of that honest and sincere gentleman charles ii., there is a penalty of _l._ for lending or letting brewing utensils. however, it has this limit; that the penalty is confined to _cities_, _corporate towns_, and _market towns_, where there is a public brewhouse. so that, in the first place, you may let, or lend, in _any_ place where there is _no public brewhouse_; and in all towns not _corporate or market_, and in all villages, hamlets, and scattered places. . another thing is, can a man who has brewed beer at his own house in the country, bring that beer into town to his own house, and for the use of his family there? this has been asked of me. i cannot give a positive answer without reading about _seven large volumes in quarto of taxing laws_. the best way would be to _try it_; and, if any penalty, pay it by _subscription_, if that would not come under the law of _conspiracy_! however, i _think_, there can be no danger here. so monstrous a thing as this can, surely, not exist. if there be such a law, it is daily violated; for nothing is more common than for country gentlemen, who have a dislike to die by poison, bringing their home-brewed beer to london. . another correspondent recommends _parishes to make their own malt_. but, surely, the landlords mean to get rid of the _malt and salt tax_! many dairies, i dare say, pay _l._ a year each in salt tax. how, then, are they to contend against irish butter and dutch butter and cheese? and as to the malt tax, it is a dreadful drain from the land. i have heard of labourers, living "in _unkent places_," making their _own malt_, even now! nothing is so easy as to make your own malt, if you were permitted. you soak the barley about three days (according to the state of the weather.) and then you put it upon stones or bricks _and keep it turned_, till the root _shoots out_; and then to know when to _stop_, and to put it to dry, take up a corn (which you will find nearly transparent) and look through the skin of it. you will see the _spear_, that is to say, the shoot that would come out of the ground, pushing on towards the _point_ of the barley-corn. it starts from the bottom, where the root comes out; and it goes on towards the other end; and would, if _kept moist_, come out at that other end when the root was about an inch long. so that, when you have got the _root to start_, by soaking and turning in heap, the spear is _on its way_. if you look in through the skin, you will see it; and now observe; when the _point of the spear_ has got along as far as the _middle of the barley-corn_, you should take your barley and _dry it_. how easy would every family, and especially every farmer, do this, if it were not for the punishment attached to it! the persons in the "unkent places" before mentioned, dry the malt in their _oven_! but let us hope that the labourer will soon be able to get malt without exposing himself to punishment as a _violater of the law_. keeping cows. . as to the _use_ of _milk_ and of that which proceeds from milk, in a family, very little need be said. at a certain age bread and milk are _all_ that a child wants. at a later age they furnish one meal a day for children. milk is, at all seasons, good to _drink_. in the making of puddings, and in the making of _bread_ too, how useful is it! let any one who has eaten none but baker's bread for a good while, taste bread home-baked, mixed with milk instead of with water; and he will find what the difference is. there is this only to be observed, that in _hot weather_, bread mixed with milk will not _keep so long_ as that mixed with water. it will of course turn _sour_ sooner. . whether the milk of a cow be to be consumed by a cottage family in the shape of milk, or whether it be to be made to yield butter, skim-milk, and buttermilk, must depend on circumstances. a woman that has no child, or only one, would, perhaps, find it best to make _some butter_ at any rate. besides, skim-milk and bread (the milk being boiled) is quite strong food enough for any children's breakfast, even when they begin to go to work; a fact which i state upon the most ample and satisfactory experience, very seldom having ever had any other sort of breakfast myself till i was more than ten years old, and i was in the fields at work full four years before that. i will here mention that it gave me singular pleasure to see a boy, just turned of _six_, helping his father to _reap_, in sussex, this last summer. he did little, to be sure; but it was _something_. his father set him into the ridge at a great distance before him; and when he came up to the place, he found a _sheaf_ cut; and, those who know what it is to reap, know how pleasant it is to find now and then a sheaf cut ready to their hand. it was no small thing to see a boy fit to be trusted with so dangerous a thing as a reap-hook in his hands, at an age when "young masters" have nursery-maids to cut their victuals for them, and to see that they do not fall out of the window, tumble down stairs, or run under carriage-wheels or horses' bellies. was not this father discharging his duty by this boy much better than he would have been by sending him to a place called a _school_? the boy is in a school here; and an excellent school too: the school of useful labour. i must hear a great deal more than i ever have heard, to convince me, that teaching children to _read_ tends so much to their happiness, their independence of spirit, their manliness of character, as teaching them to _reap_. the creature that is in _want_ must be a _slave_; and to be habituated _to labour cheerfully_ is the only means of preventing nineteen-twentieths of mankind from being in want. i have digressed here; but observations of this sort can, in my opinion, never be too often repeated; especially at a time when all sorts of mad projects are on foot, for what is falsely called _educating_ the people, and when some would do this by a _tax_ that would compel the single man to give part of his earnings to teach the married man's children to read and write. . before i quit the _uses_ to which milk may be put, let me mention, that, as mere _drink_, it is, unless perhaps in case of heavy labour, better, in my opinion, than any beer, however good. i have drinked little else for the last five years, at any time of the day. skim-milk i mean. if you have not milk enough to wet up your bread with (for a bushel of flour requires about to pints,) you make up the quantity with water, of course; or, which is a very good way, with water that has been put, boiling hot, upon _bran_, and then drained off. this takes the goodness out of the bran to be sure; but _really good bread_ is a thing of so much importance, that it always ought to be the very first object in domestic economy. . the cases vary so much, that it is impossible to lay down rules for the application of the produce of a cow, which rules shall fit all cases. i content myself, therefore, with what has already been said on this subject; and shall only make an observation on the _act of milking_, before i come to the chief matter; namely, the _getting of the food for the cow_. a cow should be milked _clean_. not a drop, if it can be avoided, should be left in the udder. it has been proved that the half pint that comes out _last_ has _twelve times_, i think it is, as much butter in it, as the half pint that comes out _first_. i tried the milk of ten alderney cows, and, as nearly as i, without being very nice about the matter, could ascertain, i found the difference to be about what i have stated. the udder would seem to be a sort of milk-pan in which the cream is uppermost, and, of course, comes out last, seeing that the outlet is at the bottom. but, besides this, if you do not milk clean, the cow will give less and less milk, and will become dry much sooner than she ought. the _cause_ of this i do not know, but experience has long established the fact. . in providing food for a cow we must look, first, at the _sort of cow_; seeing that a cow of one sort will certainly require more than twice as much food as a cow of another sort. for a cottage, a cow of the smallest sort common in england is, on every account, the best; and such a cow will not require above or pounds of good moist food in the twenty-four hours. . now, how to raise this food on rods of ground is what we want to know. it frequently happens that a labourer has _more_ than rods of ground. it more frequently happens, that he has some _common_, some _lane_, some little out-let or other, for a part of the year, at least. in such cases he may make a different disposition of his ground; or may do with less than the rods. i am here, for simplicity's sake, to suppose, that he have rods of clear, unshaded land, besides what his house and sheds stand upon; and that he have nothing further in the way of means to keep his cow. . i suppose the rods to be _clean_ and _unshaded_; for i am to suppose, that when a man thinks of quarts _of milk a day_, on an average, all the year round, he will not suffer his ground to be encumbered by apple-trees that give him only the means of treating his children to fits of the belly-ache, or with currant and gooseberry bushes, which, though their fruit do very well to _amuse_, really give nothing worthy of the name of _food_, except to the blackbirds and thrushes. the ground is to be _clear_ of trees; and, in the spring, we will suppose it to be _clean_. then, dig it up _deeply_, or, which is better, _trench_ it, keeping, however, the top _spit_ of the soil _at the top_. lay it in _ridges_ in april or may about two feet apart, and made high and sharp. when the weeds appear about three inches high, turn the ridges into the furrows (_never moving the ground but in dry weather_,) and bury all the weeds. do this as often as the weeds get three inches high; and by the fall, you will have really clean ground, and not poor ground. . there is the ground then, ready. about the th of august, but _not earlier_, prepare a rod of your ground; and put some _manure_ in it (for _some_ you must have,) and sow one half of it with early york cabbage seed, and the other half with sugar-loaf cabbage seed, both of the _true_ sort, in little drills at inches apart, and the seeds thin in the drill. if the plants come up at two inches apart (and they should be thinned if thicker,) you will have a plenty. as soon as fairly out of ground, hoe the ground nicely, and pretty deeply, and again in a few days. when the plants have six leaves, which will be very soon, dig up, make fine, and manure another rod or two, and prick out the plants, of each in rows at eight inches apart and three inches in the row. hoe the ground between them often, and they will grow fast and be _straight_ and strong. i suppose that these beds for plants take rods of your ground. early in november, or, as the weather may serve, a little earlier or later, lay some manure (of which i shall say more hereafter) between the ridges, in the other rods, and turn the ridges over on this manure, and then transplant your plants on the ridges at inches apart. here they will stand the winter; and you must see that the slugs do not eat them. if any plants fail, you have plenty in the bed where you prick them out; for your rods will not require more than plants. if the winter be very hard, and bad for plants, you cannot _cover_ rods; but you may the _bed_ where the rest of your plants are. a little litter, or straw, or dead grass, or fern, laid along between the rows and the plants, not to cover the leaves, will preserve them completely. when people complain of _all_ their plants being "_cut off_," they have, in fact nothing to _complain_ of but their own extreme carelessness. if i had a gardener who complained of _all_ his plants being cut off, i should cut him off pretty quickly. if those in the rods fail, or fail in part, fill up their places, later in the winter, by plants from the bed. . if you find the ground dry at the top during the winter, hoe it, and particularly near the plants, and rout out all slugs and insects. and when march comes, and the ground _is dry_, hoe deep and well, and earth the plants up close to the lower leaves. as soon as the plants begin to _grow_, dig the ground with a spade clean and well, and let the spade go as near to the plants as you can without actually _displacing the plants_. give them another digging in a month; and, if weeds come in the mean-while, _hoe_, and let not one live a week. oh! "what a deal of _work_!" well! but it is for _yourself_, and, besides, it is not all to be done in a day; and we shall by-and-by see what it is altogether. . by the first of june; i speak of the south of england, and there is also some difference in seasons and soils; but, generally speaking, by the first of june you will have _turned-in cabbages_, and soon you will have the early yorks _solid_. and by the first of june you may get your cow, one that is about to calve, or that has just calved, and at this time such a cow as you will want will not, thank god, cost above five pounds. . i shall speak of the place to keep her in, and of the manure and litter, by-and-by. at present i confine myself to her mere food. the rods, if the cabbages all stood till they got _solid_, would give her food for days, at pounds weight per day, which is more than she would eat. but you must use some, at first, that are not solid; and, then, some of them will split before you can use them. but you will have pigs to help off with them, and to gnaw the heads of the stumps. some of the sugar-loaves may have been planted out in the spring; and thus these rods will get you along to some time in september. . now mind, in march, and again in april, sow more _early yorks_, and get them to be fine stout plants, as you did those in the fall. dig up the ground and manure it, and, as fast as you cut cabbages, plant cabbages; and in the same manner and with the same cultivation as before. your last planting will be about the middle of august, with _stout plants_, and these will serve you into the month of november. . now we have to provide from _december to may inclusive_; and that, too, out of this same piece of ground. in november there must be, arrived at perfection, turnip plants. these, _without the greens_, must weigh, on an average, pounds, and this, at pounds a day, will keep the cow days; and there are but days in these six months. the greens will have helped put the latest cabbages to carry you through november, and perhaps into december. but for these six months, you must _depend_ on nothing but the swedish turnips. . and now, how are these to be had _upon the same ground that bears_ the cabbages? that we are now going to see. when you plant out your cabbages at the out-set, put first a row of early yorks, then a row of sugar-loaves, and so on throughout the piece. of course, as you are to use the early yorks first, you will cut every other row; and the early yorks that you are to plant in summer will go into the intervals. by-and-by the sugar-loaves are cut away, and in their place will come swedish turnips, you digging and manuring the ground as in the case of the cabbages: and, at last, you will find about rods where you will have found it too late, and _unnecessary_ besides, to plant any second crop of cabbages. here the swedish turnips will stand in rows at two feet apart, (and always a foot apart in the row,) and thus you will have three thousand turnips; and if these do not weigh five pounds each on an average, the fault must be in the _seed_ or in the management. . the swedish turnips are raised in this manner. you will bear in mind the _four rods_ of ground in which you have sowed and pricked out your cabbage plants. the plants that will be left there will, in april, serve you for _greens_, if you ever eat any, though bread and bacon are very good without greens, and rather better than with. at any rate, the pig, which has strong powers of digestion, will consume this herbage. in a part of these four rods you will, in march and april, as before directed, have sown and raised your early yorks for the summer planting. now, in the _last week of may_, prepare a quarter of a rod of this ground, and sow it, precisely as directed for the cabbage-seed, with swedish turnip-seed; and sow a quarter of a rod _every three days_, till you have sowed _two rods_. if the _fly appear_, cover the rows over in the _day-time_ with cabbage leaves, and take the leaves off at night; hoe well between the plants; and when they are safe from the fly, _thin_ them to four inches apart in the row. the two rods will give you nearly _five thousand plants_, which is more than you will want. from this bed you draw your plants to transplant in the ground where the cabbages have stood, as before directed. you should transplant none much _before_ the middle of july, and not much _later_ than the middle of august. in the two rods, whence you take your turnip plants, you may leave plants to come to perfection, at two feet distances each way; and this will give you _over and above_, pounds weight of turnips. for the other two rods will be ground enough for you to sow your cabbage plants in at the end of august, as directed for last year. . i should now proceed to speak of the manner of harvesting, preserving, and using the crops; of the manner of feeding the cow; of the shed for her; of the managing of the manure, and several other less important things; but these, for want of room here, must be reserved for the beginning of my next number. after, therefore, observing that the turnip plants must be transplanted in the same way that cabbage plants are; and that both ought to be transplanted in _dry_ weather and in ground just _fresh digged_, i shall close this number with the notice of two points which i am most anxious to impress upon the mind of every reader. . the first is, whether these crops give an _ill taste_ to milk and butter. it is very certain, that the taste and smell of certain sorts of cattle-food will do this; for, in some parts of america, where the wild _garlick_, of which the cows are very fond, and which, like other bulbous-rooted plants, springs before the grass, not only the milk and butter have a strong taste of garlick, but even the _veal_, when the calves suck milk from such sources. none can be more common expressions, than, in philadelphia market, are those of _garlicky butter_ and _garlicky veal_, i have distinctly tasted the _whiskey_ in milk of cows fed on distiller's wash. it is also certain, that, if the cow eat _putrid_ leaves of cabbages and turnips, the butter will be offensive. and the white-turnip, which is at best but a poor thing, and often half putrid, makes miserable butter. the large _cattle-cabbage_, which, when loaved hard, has a strong and even an offensive smell, will give a bad taste and smell to milk and butter, whether there be putrid leaves or not. if you boil one of these rank cabbages, the water is extremely offensive to the smell. but i state upon positive and recent experience, that early york and sugar-loaf cabbages will yield as sweet milk and butter _as any food that can be given to a cow_. during this last summer, i have, with the exception about to be noticed, kept, from the st of may to the d of october, _five cows_ upon the grass _of two acres and a quarter of ground, the grass_ being generally _cut up for them_ and given to them in the stall. i had in the spring cabbage plants, intended for my pigs, eleven in number. but the pigs could not eat _half_ their allowance, though they were not very small when they began upon it. we were compelled to resort to the aid of the cows; and, in order to see _the effect on the milk and butter_, we did not _mix_ the food; but gave the cows two _distinct spells_ at the cabbages, each spell about _days in duration_. the cabbages were cut off the stump with little or no care about _dead leaves_. and sweeter, finer butter, butter of a finer colour, than these cabbages made, never was made in this world. i never had better from cows feeding in the sweetest pasture. now, as to _swedish turnips_, they do give a little taste, especially if boiling of the milk pans be neglected, and if the greatest care be not taken about _all_ the dairy tackle. yet we have, for months together, had the butter so fine from swedish turnips, that nobody could well distinguish it from grass-butter. but to secure this, there must be no _sluttishness_. churn, pans, pail, shelves, wall, floor, and all about the dairy, must be clean; and, above all things, the pans must be _boiled_. however, after all, it is not here a case of delicacy of smell so refined as to faint at any thing that meets it except the stink of perfumes. if the butter do taste a little of the swedish turnip, it will do very well where there is plenty of that sweet sauce which early rising and bodily labour are ever sure to bring. . the _other point_ (about which i am still more anxious) is the _seed_; for if the seed be not _sound_, and especially if it be not _true to its kind_, all your labour _is in vain_. it is best, if you can do it, to get your seed from some friend, or some one that you know and can trust. if you save seed, observe all the precautions mentioned in my book on _gardening_. this very year i have some swedish turnips, _so called_, about in number, and should, if my seed had been _true_, have had about _twenty tons_ weight; instead of which i have about _three_! indeed, they are not _swedish turnips_, but a sort of mixture between that plant and _rape_. i am sure the seedsman did not wilfully deceive me. he was deceived himself. the truth is, that seedsmen are compelled to _buy_ their seeds of this plant. _farmers_ save it; and they but too often pay very little attention to the manner of doing it. the best way is to get a dozen of fine turnip plants, perfect in all respects, and plant them in a situation where the smell of the blossoms of nothing of the cabbage or rape or turnip or even _charlock_ kind, can reach them. the seed will keep perfectly good for _four years_. no. v keeping cows--(_continued._) . i have now, in the conclusion of this article, to speak of the manner of _harvesting_ and _preserving_ the _swedes_; of the place _to keep the cow in_; of the _manure_ for the land; and of the _quantity of labour_ that the cultivation of the land and the harvesting of the crop will require. . _harvesting and preserving the swedes._ when they are ready to take up, the tops must be cut off, if not cut off before, and also the _roots_; but neither tops nor roots should be cut off _very close_. you will have room for ten bushels of the _bulbs_ in the house, or shed. put the rest into ten-bushel heaps. make the heap _upon_ the ground in a _round form_, and let it rise up to a point. lay over it a little litter, straw, or dead grass, about three inches thick, and then earth upon that about six inches thick. then cut a thin round _green turf_, about eighteen inches over, and put it upon the crown of the heap to prevent the earth from being washed off. thus these heaps will remain till wanted for use. when given to the cow, it will be best to _wash_ the swedes and cut each into two or three pieces with a spade or some other tool. you can take in ten bushels at a time. if you find them _sprouting_ in the spring, open the remaining heaps, and expose them to the sun and wind; and cover them again slightly with straw or litter of some sort.[ ] . _as to the place to keep the cow in_, much will depend upon _situation_ and circumstances. i am always supposing that the cottage is a real _cottage_, and not a house in a town or village street; though, wherever there is the quarter of an acre of ground, the cow _may_ be kept. let me, however, suppose that which will generally happen; namely, that the cottage stands by the side of a road, or lane, and amongst fields and woods, if not on the side of a common. to pretend to tell a country labourer how to build a shed for a cow, how to stick it up against the end of his house, or to make it an independent erection; or to dwell on the materials, where poles, rods, wattles, rushes, furze, heath, and cooper-chips, are all to be gotten by him for nothing or next to nothing, would be useless; because a man who, thus situated, can be at any loss for a shed for his cow, is not only unfit to keep a cow, but unfit to keep a cat. the warmer the shed is the better it is. the floor should _slope_, but not too much. there are _stones_, of some sort or other, every-where, and about six wheel-barrow-fulls will _pave_ the shed, a thing to be by no means neglected. a broad trough, or box, fixed up at the head of the cow, is the thing to give her food in; and she should be fed three times a day, at least; always at _day-light_ and at _sun-set_. it is not _absolutely necessary_ that a cow ever quit her shed, except just at calving time, or when taken to the bull. in the former case the time is, nine times out of ten, known to within forty-eight hours. any enclosed field or place will do for her during a day or two; and for such purpose, if there be not room at home, no man will refuse place for her in a fallow field. it will, however, be good, where there is no _common_ to turn her out upon, to have her led by a string, two or three times a week, which may be done by a child only five years old, to graze, or pick, along the sides of roads and lanes. where there is a _common_, she will, of course, be turned out in the day time, except in very wet or severe weather; and in a case like this, a smaller quantity of ground will suffice for the keeping of her. according to the present practice, a miserable "_tallet_" of bad hay is, in such cases, the winter provision for the cow. it can scarcely be called food; and the consequence is, the cow is both _dry_ and _lousy_ nearly half the year; instead of being dry only about fifteen days before calving, and being sleek and lusty at the end of the winter, to which a _warm lodging_ greatly contributes. for, observe, if you keep a cow, any time between september and june, out in a field or yard, to endure the chances of the weather, she will not, though she have food precisely the same in quantity and quality, yield above _two-thirds_ as much as if she were lodged in house; and in _wet_ weather she will not yield _half_ so much. it is not so much the _cold_ as the _wet_ that is injurious to all our stock in england. . _the manure._ at the _beginning_ this must be provided by collections made on the road; by the results of the residence in a cottage. let any man clean out _every place_ about his dwelling; rake and scrape and sweep all into a heap; and he will find that he has a _great deal_. earth of almost any sort that has long lain on the surface, and has been trodden on, is a species of manure. every act that tends to neatness round a dwelling, tends to the creating of a mass of manure. and i have very seldom seen a cottage, with a plat of ground of a quarter of an acre belonging to it, round about which i could not have collected a very large heap of manure. every thing of animal or vegetable substance that comes into a house, must _go out of it again_, in one shape or another. the very emptying of vessels of various kinds, on a heap of common earth, makes it a heap of the best of manure. thus goes on the work of _reproduction_; and thus is verified the words of the scripture, "_flesh is grass_, and there is _nothing new under the sun_." thus far as to the _outset_. when you have _got the cow_, there is no more care about manure; for, and especially if you have a _pig_ also, you must have enough annually for _an acre_ of ground. and let it be observed, that, after a time, it will be unnecessary, and would be injurious, to manure _for every crop_; for that would produce more stalk and green than substantial part; as it is well known, that wheat plants, standing in ground too full of manure, will yield very thick and long _straws_, but grains of little or no substance. you ought to depend more on the spade and the hoe than on the dung-heap. nevertheless, the greatest care should be taken to preserve the manure; because you will want _straw_, unless you be by the side of a common which gives you rushes, grassy furze, or fern; and to get straw you must give a part of your dung from the cow-stall and pig-sty. the best way to preserve manure, is to have a pit of sufficient dimensions close behind the cow-shed and pig-sty, for the run from these to go into, and from which all runs of _rain water_ should be kept. into this pit would go the emptying of the shed and of the sty, and the produce of all sweepings and cleanings round the house; and thus a large mass of manure would soon grow together. much too large a quantity for a quarter of an acre of ground. one good load of wheat or rye straw is all that you would want for the winter, and half of one for the summer; and you would have more than enough dung to exchange against this straw. . now, as to _the quantity of labour_ that the cultivation of the land will demand in _a year_. we will suppose the whole to have _five complete diggings_, and say nothing about the little matters of sowing and planting and hoeing and harvesting, all which are a mere trifle. we are supposing the owner to be _an able labouring man_; and such a man will dig rods of ground in a day. here are rods to be digged, and here are little less than days of work at hours in the day; or _hours'_ work, to be done in the course of the long days of spring and summer, while it is light long before _six_ in the morning, and long after six at night. what _is it_, then? is it not better than time spent in the ale-house, or in creeping about after a miserable hare? frequently, and most frequently, there will be a _boy_, if not two, big enough to help. and (i only give this as a _hint_) i saw, on the th of november last ( ,) _a very pretty woman_, in the village of _hannington, in wiltshire, digging_ a piece of ground and planting it with early cabbages, which she did as handily and as neatly as any gardener that ever i saw. the ground was _wet_, and therefore, _to avoid treading the digged ground in that state_, she had her line extended, and put in the rows as she advanced in her digging, standing _in the trench_ while she performed the act of planting, which she did with great nimbleness and precision. nothing could be more skilfully or beautifully done. her clothes were neat, clean, and tight about her. she had turned her handkerchief down from her neck, which, with the glow that the work had brought into her cheeks, formed an object which i do not say would have made me _actually stop my chaise_, had it not been for the occupation in which she was engaged; but, all taken together, the temptation was too strong to be resisted. but there is the _sunday_; and i know of no law, human or divine, that forbids a labouring man to dig or plant his garden on sunday, if the good of his family demand it; and if he cannot, without injury to that family, find other time to do it in. shepherds, carters, pigfeeders, drovers, coachmen, cooks, footmen, printers, and numerous others, work on the sundays. theirs are deemed by the law _works of necessity_. harvesting and haymaking are allowed to be carried on on the sunday, in certain cases; when they are always carried on by _provident farmers_. and i should be glad to know the case which is more a _case of necessity_ than that now under our view. in fact, the labouring people _do work on the sunday_ morning in particular, all over the country, at something or other, or they are engaged in pursuits a good deal less religious than that of digging and planting. so that, as to _the hours_, they are easily found, without the loss of any of the time required for constant daily labour. . and what a _produce_ is that of a cow! i suppose only an average of _quarts of milk a day_. if made into butter, it will be _equal every week to two days of the man's wages_, besides the value of the skim milk: and this can hardly be of less value than another day's wages. what a thing, then, is this cow, if she earn half as much as the man! i am greatly under-rating her produce; but i wish to put all the advantages at the lowest. to be sure, there is work for the wife, or daughter, to milk and make butter. but the former is done at the two ends of the day, and the latter only about once in the week. and, whatever these may subtract from the _labours of the field_, which all country women ought to be engaged in whenever they conveniently can; whatever the cares created by the cow may subtract from these, is amply compensated for by the _education_ that these cares will give to the children. they will _all_ learn to milk,[ ] and the girls to make butter. and which is a thing of the very first importance, they will all learn, from their infancy, to _set a just value upon dumb animals_, and will grow up in the _habit_ of treating them with gentleness and feeding them with care. to those who have not been brought up in the midst of rural affairs, it is hardly possible to give an adequate idea of the importance of this part of _education_. i should be very loth to intrust the care of my horses, cattle, sheep, or pigs, to any one whose father never had cow or pig of his _own_. it is a general complaint, that servants, and especially farm-servants, are not _so good as they used to be_. how should they? they were formerly the sons and daughters of _small farmers_; they are now the progeny of miserable property-less labourers. they have never seen an animal in which they had any interest. they are careless by habit. this monstrous evil has arisen from causes which i have a thousand times described; and which causes must now be speedily removed; or, they will produce a dissolution of society, and give us a _beginning afresh_. . the circumstances vary so much, that it is impossible to lay down precise rules suited to all cases. the cottage may be on the side of a forest or common; it may be on the side of a lane or of a great road, distant from town or village; it may be on the skirts of one of these latter: and then, again, the family may be few or great in number, the children small or big, according to all which circumstances, the extent and application of the cow-food, and also the application of the produce, will naturally be regulated. under some circumstances, half the above crop may be enough; especially where good commons are at hand. sometimes it may be the best way to sell the calf as soon as calved; at others, to fat it; and, at others, if you cannot sell it, which sometimes happens, to knock it on the head as soon as calved; for, where there is a family of small children, the price of a calf of two months old cannot be equal to the half of the value of the two months' milk. it is pure weakness to call it "_a pity_." it is a much greater pity to see hungry children crying for the milk that a calf is sucking to no useful purpose; and as to the cow and the calf, the one must lose her young, and the other its life, after all; and the respite only makes an addition to the sufferings of both. . as to the pretended _unwholesomeness_ of milk in certain cases; as to its not being adapted to _some constitutions_, i do not believe one word of the matter. when we talk of the _fruits_, indeed, which were formerly the chief food of a great part of mankind, we should recollect, that those fruits grew in countries that had a _sun to ripen_ the fruits, and to put nutritious matter into them. but as to _milk_, england yields to no country upon the face of the earth. neat cattle will touch nothing that is not wholesome in its nature; nothing that is not wholly innoxious. out of a pail that has ever had grease in it, they will not drink a drop, though they be raging with thirst. their very breath is fragrance. and how, then, is it possible, that unwholesomeness should distil from the udder of a cow? the milk varies, indeed, in its quality and taste according to the variations in the nature of the food; but no food will a cow touch that is any way hostile to health. feed young puppies upon _milk from the cow_, and they will never die with that ravaging disease called "_the distemper_." in short, to suppose that milk contains any thing essentially unwholesome is monstrous. when, indeed, the appetite becomes vitiated: when the organs have been long accustomed to food of a more stimulating nature; when it has been resolved to eat ragouts at dinner, and drink wine, and to swallow "a devil," and a glass of strong grog at night; then milk for breakfast may be "_heavy_" and disgusting, and the feeder may stand in need of tea or laudanum, which differ only as to degrees of strength. but, and i speak from the most ample experience, milk is not "_heavy_," and much less is it _unwholesome_, when he who uses it rises early, never swallows strong drink, and never _stuffs_ himself with flesh of any kind. many and many a day i scarcely taste of meat, and then chiefly at _breakfast_, and that, too, at an early hour. milk is the natural food of _young people_; if it be too rich, _skim_ it again and again till it be not too rich. this is an evil easily cured. if you have now to _begin_ with a family of children, they may not like it at first. but _persevere_; and the parent who does not do this, having the means in his hands, shamefully neglects his duty. a son who prefers a "devil" and a glass of grog to a hunch of bread and a bowl of cold milk, i regard as a pest; and for this pest the father has to thank himself. . before i dismiss this article, let me offer an observation or two to those persons who live in the vicinity of towns, or in towns, and who, though they have _large gardens_, have "_no land to keep a cow_," a circumstance which they "_exceedingly regret_." i have, i dare say, witnessed this case at least a thousand times. now, how much garden ground does it require to supply even a large family with _garden vegetables_? the market gardeners round the metropolis of this wen-headed country; round this wen of all wens;[ ] round this prodigious and monstrous collection of human beings; these market gardeners have about _three hundred thousand families to supply with vegetables_, and these they supply well too, and with summer fruits into the bargain. now, if it demanded _ten rods to a family_, the whole would demand, all but a fraction, _nineteen thousand acres of garden ground_. we have only to cast our eyes over what there is to know that there is not a _fourth_ of that quantity. a _square mile_ contains, leaving out parts of a hundred, acres of land; and , acres occupy more than _twenty-two square miles_. are there twenty-two square miles covered with the wen's market gardens? the very question is absurd. the whole of the market gardens from brompton to hammersmith, extending to battersea rise on the one side, and to the bayswater road on the other side, and leaving out loads, lanes, nurseries; pastures, corn-fields, and pleasure-grounds, do not, in my opinion, cover _one square mile_. to the north and south of the wen there is very little in the way of market garden; and if, on both sides of the thames, to the eastward of the wen, there be _three square miles_ actually covered with market gardens, that is the full extent. how, then, could the wen be supplied, if it required _ten rods_ to each family? to be sure, potatoes, carrots, and turnips, and especially the first of these, are brought, for the use of the wen, from a great distance, in many cases. but, so they are for the use of the persons i am speaking of; for a gentleman thinks no more of raising a large quantity of these things in his _garden_, than he thinks of _raising wheat there_. how is it, then, that it requires half an acre, or eighty rods, in a _private_ garden to supply a family, while these market gardeners supply all these families (and so amply too) from ten, or more likely, five rods of ground to a family? i have shown, in the last number, that nearly fifteen tons of vegetables can be raised in a year upon forty rods of ground; that is to say, _ten loads for a wagon and four good horses_. and is not a fourth, or even an eighth, part of this weight, sufficient to go down the throats of a family in a year? nay, allow that only _a ton_ goes to a family in a year, it is more than _six pound weight a day_; and what sort of a family must that be that really _swallows_ six pounds weight a day? and this a market gardener will raise for them upon less than _three rods_ of ground; for he will raise, in the course of the year, even more than fifteen tons upon forty rods of ground. what is it, then, that they _do_ with the eighty rods of ground in a private garden? why, in the first place, they have _one crop_ where they ought to have _three_. then they do not half _till_ the ground. then they grow things that are _not wanted_. plant cabbages and other things, let them stand till they be good for nothing, and then wheel them to the rubbish heap. raise as many radishes, lettuces, and as much endive, and as many kidney-beans, as would serve for ten families; and finally throw nine-tenths of them away. i once saw not less than three rods of ground, in a garden of this sort, with lettuces all bearing _seed_. seed enough for half a county. they cut a cabbage _here_ and a cabbage _there_, and so let the whole of the piece of ground remain undug, till the _last_ cabbage be cut. but, after all, the produce, even in this way, is so great, that it never could be gotten rid of, if the main part were not _thrown away_. the rubbish heap always receives four-fifths even of the _eatable_ part of the produce. . it is not thus that the market gardeners proceed. their rubbish heap consists of little besides mere cabbage stumps. no sooner is one crop _on_ the ground than they settle in their minds what is to follow it. they _clear as they go_ in taking off a crop, and, as they clear they dig and plant. the ground is never without seed in it or plants on it. and thus, in the course of the year, they raise a prodigious bulk of vegetables from eighty rods of ground. such vigilance and industry are not to be expected in a _servant_; for it is foolish to expect that a man will exert himself for another as much as he will for himself. but if i was situated as one of the persons is that i have spoken of in paragraph ; that is to say, if i had a garden of eighty rods, or even of sixty rods of ground, i would out of that garden, draw a sufficiency of vegetables for my family, and would make it yield enough for a _cow_ besides. i should go a short way to work with my gardener. i should put _cottage economy_ into his hands, and tell him, that if he could furnish me with vegetables, and my cow with food, he was my man; and that if he could not, i must get one that could and would. i am not for making a man toil like a slave; but what would become of the world, if a well-fed healthy man could exhaust himself in tilling and cropping and clearing half an acre of ground? i have known many men _dig_ thirty rods of garden ground in a day; i have, before i was fourteen, digged twenty rods in a day, for more than ten days successively; and i have heard, and believe the fact, of a man at portsea, who digged forty rods in one single day, between daylight and dark. so that it is no slavish toil that i am here recommending. keeping pigs. . next after the _cow_ comes the _pig_; and, in many cases, where a cow cannot be kept, a pig or pigs may be kept. but these are animals not to be ventured on without due consideration as to the means of _feeding_ them; for a starved pig is a great deal worse than none at all. you cannot make bacon as you can milk, merely out of the garden. there must be _something more_. a couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand methodist sermons and religious tracts. the sight of them upon the rack tends more to keep a man from poaching and stealing than whole volumes of penal statutes, though assisted by the terrors of the hulks and the gibbet. they are great softeners of the temper, and promoters of domestic harmony. they are a great blessing; but they are not to be had from _herbage_ or _roots_ of any kind; and, therefore, before a _pig_ be attempted, the means ought to be considered. . _breeding sows_ are great favourites with cottagers in general; but i have seldom known them to answer their purpose. where there is an outlet, the sow will, indeed, keep herself by grazing in summer, with a little _wash_ to help her out: and when her pigs come, they are many in number; but they are a heavy expense. the sow must live as well as a _fatting hog_, or the pigs will be good for little. it is a great mistake, too, to suppose that the condition of the sow _previous to pigging_ is of no consequence; and, indeed, some suppose, that she ought to be rather _bare of flesh_ at the pigging time. never was a greater mistake; for if she be in this state, she presently becomes a mere rack of bones; and then, do what you will, the pigs will be poor things. however fat she may be before she farrow, the pigs will make her lean in a week. all her fat goes away in her milk, and unless the pigs have a _store_ to draw upon, they pull her down directly; and, by the time they are three weeks old, they are starving for want; and then they never come to good. . now, a cottager's sow cannot, without great expense, be kept in a way to enable her to meet the demands of her farrow. she may _look_ pretty well; but the flesh she has upon her is not of the same nature as that which the _farm-yard_ sow carries about her. it is the result of grass, and of poor grass, too, or other weak food; and not made partly out of corn and whey and strong wash, as in the case of the farmer's sow. no food short of that of a fatting hog will enable her to keep her pigs _alive_; and this she must have for _ten weeks_, and that at a great expense. then comes the operation, upon the principle of _parson malthus_, in order to _check population_; and there is some risk here, though not very great. but there is the _weaning_; and who, that knows any thing about the matter, will think lightly of the weaning of a farrow of pigs! by having nice food given them, they seem, for a few days, not to miss their mother. but their appearance soon shows the want of her. nothing but the very best food, and that given in the most judicious manner, will keep them up to any thing like good condition; and, indeed, there is nothing short of _milk_ that will effect the thing well. how should it be otherwise? the very richest cow's milk is poor, compared with that of the sow; and, to be taken from this and put upon food, one ingredient of which is _water_, is quite sufficient to reduce the poor little things to bare bones and staring hair, a state to which cottagers' pigs very soon come in general; and, at last, he frequently drives them to market, and sells them for less than the cost of the food which they and the sow have devoured since they were farrowed. it was, doubtless, pigs of this description that were sold the other day at newbury market, for _fifteen pence a piece_, and which were, i dare say, dear even as a gift. to get such a pig to _begin_ to grow will require _three months_, and with good feeding too in winter time. to be sure it does come to be a hog at last; but, do what you can, it is a dear hog. . the _cottager_, then, can hold no competition with the _farmer_ in the _breeding_ of pigs, to do which, with advantage, there must be _milk_, and milk, too, that can be advantageously applied to no other use. the cottager's pig must be bought ready weaned to his hand, and, indeed, at _four months old_, at which age, if he be in good condition, he will eat any-thing that an old hog will eat. he will graze, eat cabbage leaves, and almost the stumps. swedish turnip tops or roots, and such things, with a little wash, will keep him along in very good growing order. i have now to speak of the time of purchasing, the manner of keeping, of fatting, killing, and curing; but these i must reserve till my next number. no. vi. keeping pigs--(_continued._) . as in the case of cows so in that of pigs, much must depend upon the situation of the cottage; because all pigs will _graze_; and therefore, on the skirts of forests or commons, a couple or three pigs may be kept, if the family be considerable; and especially if the cottager brew his own beer, which will give him grains to assist the wash. even in _lanes_, or on the sides of great roads, a pig will find a good part of his food from may to november; and if he be _yoked_, the occupiers of the neighbourhood must be churlish and brutish indeed, if they give the owner any annoyance. . let me break off here for a moment to point out to my readers the truly excellent conduct of lord winchilsea and lord stanhope, who, as i read, have taken great pains to make the labourers on their estates comfortable, by allotting to each a piece of ground sufficient for the keeping of a cow. i once, when i lived at botley, proposed to the copyholders and other farmers in my neighbourhood, that we should petition the bishop of winchester, who was lord of the manors thereabouts, to grant titles to all the numerous persons called _trespassers on the wastes_; and also to give titles to others of the poor parishioners, who were willing to make, on the skirts of the wastes, enclosures not exceeding an acre each. this i am convinced, would have done a great deal towards relieving the parishes, then greatly burdened by men out of work. this would have been better than digging holes one day to fill them up the next. not a single man would agree to my proposal! one, a bullfrog farmer (now, i hear, pretty well sweated down,) said it would only make them _saucy_! and one, a true disciple of _malthus_, said, that to facilitate their rearing of children _was a harm_! this man had, at the time, in his own occupation, land that had formerly been _six farms_, and he had, too, ten or a dozen children. i will not mention names; but this farmer will _now_, perhaps, have occasion to call to mind what i told him on that day, when his opposition, and particularly the ground of it, gave me the more pain, as he was a very industrious, civil, and honest man. never was there a greater mistake than to suppose that men are made saucy and idle by just and kind treatment. _slaves_ are always lazy and saucy; nothing but the lash will extort from them either labour or respectful deportment. i never met with a _saucy_ yankee (new englander) in my life. never servile; always civil. this must necessarily be the character of _freemen living in a state of competence_. they have nobody to envy; nobody to complain of; they are in good humour with mankind. it must, however, be confessed, that very little, comparatively speaking, is to be accomplished by the individual efforts even of benevolent men like the two noblemen before mentioned. they have a strife to maintain against the _general tendency of the national state of things_. it is by general and indirect means, and not by partial and direct and positive regulations, that so great a good as that which they generously aim at can be accomplished. when we are to see such means adopted, god only knows; but, if much longer delayed, i am of opinion, that they will come too late to prevent something very much resembling a dissolution of society. . the cottager's pig should be bought in the spring, or late in winter; and being then four months old, he will be a year old before killing time; for it should always be borne in mind, that this age is required in order to insure the greatest quantity of meat from a given quantity of food. if a hog be more than a year old, he is the better for it. the flesh is more solid and more nutritious than that of a young hog, much in the same degree that the mutton of a full-mouthed wether is better than that of a younger wether. the pork or bacon of young hogs, even if fatted on corn, is very apt to _boil out_, as they call it; that is to say, come out of the pot smaller in bulk than it goes in. when you begin to fat, do it by degrees, especially in the case of hogs under a year old. if you feed _high_ all at once, the hog is apt to _surfeit_, and then a great loss of food takes place. peas, or barley-meal is the food; the latter rather the best, and does the work quicker. make him _quite fat_ by all means. the last bushel, even if he sit as he eat, is the most profitable. if he can walk two hundred yards at a time, he is not well fatted. lean bacon is the most wasteful thing that any family can use. in short, it is uneatable, except by drunkards, who want something to stimulate their sickly appetite. the man who cannot live on _solid fat_ bacon, well-fed and well-cured, wants the sweet sauce of labour, or is fit for the hospital. but, then, it must be _bacon_, the effect of barley or peas, (not beans,) and not of whey, potatoes, or _messes_ of any kind. it is frequently said, and i know that even farmers say it, that bacon, made from corn, _costs more than it is worth_! why do they take care to have it then? they know better. they know well, that it is the very _cheapest_ they can have; and they, who look at both ends and both sides of every cost, would as soon think of shooting their hogs as of fatting them on _messes_; that is to say, for _their own use_, however willing they might now-and-then be to regale the londoners with a bit of potato-pork. . about _christmas_, if the weather be coldish, is a good time to kill. if the weather be very mild, you may wait a little longer; for the hog cannot be too fat. the day before killing he should have no food. to kill a hog nicely is so much of a profession, that it is better to pay a shilling for having it done, than to stab and hack and tear the carcass about. i shall not speak of _pork_; for i would by no means recommend it. there are two ways of going to work to make bacon; in the one you take off the hair by _scalding_. this is the practice in most parts of england, and all over america. but the _hampshire_ way, and the best way, is to _burn the hair off_. there is a great deal of difference in the consequences. the first method slackens the skin, opens all the pores of it, makes it loose and flabby by drawing out the roots of the hair. the second tightens the skin in every part, contracts all the sinews and veins in the skin, makes the flitch a solider thing, and the skin a better protection to the meat. the taste of the meat is very different from that of a scalded hog; and to this chiefly it was that hampshire bacon owed its reputation for excellence. as the hair is to be _burnt_ off it must be _dry_, and care must be taken, that the hog be kept on dry litter of some sort the day previous to killing. when killed he is laid upon a narrow bed of straw, not wider than his carcass, and only two or three inches thick. he is then covered all over thinly with straw, to which, according as the wind may be, the fire is put at one end. as the straw burns, it burns the hair. it requires two or three coverings and burnings, and care is taken, that the skin be not in any part burnt, or parched. when the hair is all burnt off close, the hog is _scraped_ clean, but never touched with _water_. the upper side being finished, the hog is turned over, and the other side is treated in like manner. this work should always be done _before day-light_; for in the day-light you cannot so nicely discover whether the hair be sufficiently burnt off. the light of the fire is weakened by that of the day. besides, it makes the boys get up very early for once at any rate, and that is something; for boys always like a bonfire. . the _inwards_ are next taken out, and if the wife be not a slattern, here, in the mere offal, in the mere garbage, there is food, and delicate food too, for a large family for a week; and hog's puddings for the children, and some for neighbours' children, who come to play with them; for these things are by no means to be overlooked, seeing that they tend to the keeping alive of that affection in children for their parents, which, later in life, will be found absolutely necessary to give effect to wholesome precept, especially when opposed to the boisterous passions of youth. . the butcher, the next day, cuts the hog up; and then the house is _filled with meat_! souse, griskins, blade-bones, thigh-bones, spare-ribs, chines, belly-pieces, cheeks, all coming into use one after the other, and the last of the latter not before the end of about four or five weeks. but about this time, it is more than possible that the methodist parson will pay you a visit. it is remarked in america, that these gentry are attracted by the squeaking of the pigs, as the fox is by the cackling of the hen. this may be called slander; but i will tell you what i did know to happen. a good honest careful fellow had a spare-rib, on which he intended to sup with his family after a long and hard day's work at coppice-cutting. home he came at dark with his two little boys, each with a nitch of wood that they had carried four miles, cheered with the thought of the repast that awaited them. in he went, found his wife, the methodist parson, and a whole troop of the sisterhood, engaged in prayer, and on the table lay scattered the clean-polished bones of the spare-rib! can any reasonable creature believe, that, to save the soul, god requires us to give up the food necessary to sustain the body? did saint paul preach this? he, who, while he spread the gospel abroad, _worked himself_, in order to have it to give to those who were unable to work? upon what, then, do these modern saints; these evangelical gentlemen, found their claim to live on the labour of others. . all the other parts taken away, the two sides that remain, and that are called _flitches_, are to be cured for _bacon_. they are first rubbed with salt on their insides, or flesh sides, then placed, one on the other, the flesh sides uppermost, in a salting trough which has a gutter round its edges to drain away the _brine_; for, to have sweet and fine bacon, the flitches must not lie sopping in brine; which gives it that sort of taste which barrel-pork and sea-jonk have, and than which nothing is more villanous. every one knows how different is the taste of fresh, dry salt, from that of salt in a dissolved state. the one is savoury, the other nauseous. therefore, _change the salt often_. once in four or five days. let it melt, and sink in; but let it not lie too long. change the flitches. put that at bottom which was first put on the top. do this a couple of times. this mode will cost you a great deal more in salt, or rather in _taxes_, than the _sopping mode_; but without it, your bacon will not be sweet and fine, and _will not keep so well_. as to the _time_ required for making the flitches sufficiently salt, it depends on circumstances; the thickness of the flitch, the state of the weather, the place wherein the salting is going on. it takes a longer time for a thick than for a thin flitch; it takes longer in dry, than in damp weather; it takes longer in a dry than in a damp place. but for the flitches of a hog of twelve score, in weather not very dry or very damp, about six weeks may do; and as yours is to be _fat_, which receives little injury from over-salting, give time enough; for you are to have bacon till christmas comes again. the place for salting should, like a dairy, always be cool, but always admit of a _free circulation of air_: _confined_ air, though _cool_, will taint meat sooner than the mid-day sun accompanied with a breeze. ice will not melt in the hottest sun so soon as in a close and damp cellar. put a lump of ice in _cold water_, and one of the same size before a _hot fire_, and the former will dissolve in half the time that the latter will. let me take this occasion of observing, that an ice-house should never be _under ground_, or _under the shade of trees_. that the bed of it ought to be three feet above the level of the ground; that this bed ought to consist of something that will admit the drippings to go instantly off; and that the house should stand in a place _open to the sun and air_. this is the way they have the ice-houses under the burning sun of virginia; and here they keep their fish and meat as fresh and sweet as in winter, when at the same time neither will keep for twelve hours, though let down to the depth of a hundred feet in a well. a virginian, with some poles and straw, will stick up an ice-house for ten dollars, worth a dozen of those ice-houses, each of which costs our men of taste as many scores of pounds. it is very hard to imagine, indeed, what any one should want ice _for_, in a country like this, except for clodpole boys to slide upon, and to drown cockneys in skaiting-time; but if people must have ice in summer, they may as well go a right way as a wrong way to get it. . however, the patient that i have at this time under my hands wants nothing to cool his blood, but something to warm it, and, therefore, i will get back to the flitches of bacon, which are now to be _smoked_; for smoking is a great deal better than merely _drying_, as is the fashion in the dairy countries in the west of england. when there were plenty of _farm_-houses there were plenty of places to smoke bacon in; since farmers have lived in gentleman's houses, and the main part of the farm-houses have been knocked down, these places are not so plenty. however, there is scarcely any neighbourhood without a chimney left to hang bacon up in. two precautions are necessary: first, to hang the flitches where no _rain_ comes down upon them: second, not to let them be so near the fire as to _melt_. these precautions taken, the next is, that the smoke must proceed from _wood_, not turf, peat, or coal. stubble or litter might do; but the trouble would be great. _fir_, or _deal_, smoke is not fit for the purpose. i take it, that the absence of wood, as fuel, in the dairy countries, and in the north, has led to the making of pork and dried bacon. as to the _time_ that it requires to smoke a flitch, it must depend a good deal upon whether there be a _constant fire beneath_, and whether the fire be large or small. a month may do, if the fire be pretty constant, and such as a farm-house fire usually is. but over smoking, or, rather, too long hanging in the air, makes the bacon _rust_. great attention should, therefore, be paid to this matter. the flitch ought not be dried up to the hardness of a board, and yet it ought to be perfectly dry. before you hang it up, lay it on the floor, scatter the flesh-side pretty thickly over with bran, or with some fine saw-dust other than that of deal or fir. rub it on the flesh, or pat it well down upon it. this keeps the smoke from getting into the little openings, and makes a sort of crust to be dried on; and, in short, keeps the flesh cleaner than it would otherwise be. . to keep the bacon sweet and good, and free from nasty things that they call _hoppers_; that is to say, a sort of skipping maggots, engendered by a fly which has a great relish for bacon: to provide against this mischief, and also to keep the bacon from becoming rusty, the americans, whose country is so hot in summer, have two methods. they smoke no part of the hog except the hams, or gammons. they cover these with coarse linen cloth such as the finest hop-bags are made of, which they sew neatly on. they then _white-wash_ the cloth all over with _lime_ white-wash, such as we put on walls, their lime being excellent stone-lime. they give the ham four or five washings, the one succeeding as the former gets dry; and in the sun, all these washings are put on in a few hours. the flies cannot get through this; and thus the meat is preserved from them. the _other_ mode, and that is the mode for you, is, to sift _fine_ some clean and dry _wood-ashes_. put some at the bottom of a box, or chest, which is long enough to hold a flitch of bacon. lay in one flitch; then put in more ashes; then the _other flitch_; and then cover this with six or eight inches of the ashes. this will effectually keep away all flies; and will keep the bacon as fresh and good as when it came out of the chimney, which it will not be for any great length of time, if put on a rack, or kept hung up in the open air. _dust_, or even _sand_, very, very _dry_, would, perhaps, do as well. the object is not only to keep out the flies, but the _air_. the place where the chest, or box, is kept, ought to be _dry_; and, if the ashes should get damp (as they are apt to do from the salts they contain,) they should be put in the fire-place to dry, and then be put back again. peat-ashes, or turf-ashes, might do very well for this purpose. with these precautions, the bacon will be as good at the end of the year as on the first day; and it will keep two, and even three years, perfectly good, for which, however, there can be no necessity. . now, then, this hog is altogether a capital thing. the other parts will be meat for about four or five weeks. the _lard_, nicely put down, will last a long while for all the purposes for which it is wanted. to make it keep well there should be some salt put into it. country children are badly brought up if they do not like sweet lard spread upon bread, as we spread butter. many a score hunches of this sort have i eaten, and i never knew what poverty was. i have eaten it for luncheon at the houses of good substantial farmers in france and flanders. i am not now frequently so hungry as i ought to be; but i should think it no hardship to eat _sweet_ lard instead of butter. but, now-a-days, the labourers, and especially the female part of them, have fallen into the taste of _niceness_ in food and _finery in dress_; a quarter of a bellyful and rags are the consequence. the food of their choice is high-priced, so that, for the greater part of their time, they are half-starved. the dress of their choice is _showy_ and _flimsy_, so that, to-day, they are _ladies_, and to-morrow ragged as sheep with the scab. but has not nature made the country girls as pretty as ladies? oh, yes! (bless their rosy cheeks and white teeth!) and a great deal prettier too! but are they _less_ pretty, when their dress is plain and substantial, and when the natural presumption is, that they have smocks as well as gowns, than they are when drawn off in the frail fabric of sir robert peel,[ ] "where tawdry colours strive with dirty white," exciting violent suspicions that all is not as it ought to be nearer the skin, and calling up a train of ideas extremely hostile to that sort of feeling which every lass innocently and commendably wishes to awaken in her male beholders? are they prettiest when they come through the wet and dirt safe and neat; or when their draggled dress is plastered to their backs by a shower of rain? however, the fault has not been theirs, nor that of their parents. it is _the system_ of managing the affairs of the nation. this system has made all _flashy_ and _false_, and has put all things out of their place. pomposity, bombast, hyperbole, redundancy, and obscurity, both in speaking and in writing; mock-delicacy in manners; mock-liberality, mock-humanity, and mock-religion. pitt's false money, peel's flimsy dresses, wilberforce's potatoe diet, castlereagh's and mackintosh's oratory, walter scott's poems, walter's and stoddart's[ ] paragraphs, with all the bad taste and baseness and hypocrisy which they spread over this country; all have arisen, grown, branched out, bloomed, and borne together; and we are now beginning to taste of their fruit. but, as the fat of the adder is, as is said, the antidote to its sting; so in the son of the great worker of spinning-jennies, we have, thanks to the proctors and doctors of oxford, the author of that _bill_, before which this false, this flashy, this flimsy, this rotten system will dissolve as one of his father's pasted calicoes does at the sight of the washing-tub. . "what," says the cottager, "has all this to do with hogs and bacon?" not directly with hogs and bacon, indeed; but it has a great deal to do, my good fellow with your affairs, as i shall, probably, hereafter more fully show, though i shall now leave you to the enjoyment of your flitches of bacon, which, as i before observed, will do ten thousand times more than any methodist parson, or any other parson (except, of course, those of _our_ church) to make you happy, not only in this world, but in the world to come. _meat in the house_ is a great source of _harmony_, a great preventer of the temptation to commit those things, which, from small beginnings, lead, finally, to the most fatal and atrocious results; and i hold that doctrine to be _truly damnable_, which teaches that god has made any selection, any condition relative to belief, which is to save from punishment those who violate the principles of _natural justice_. . _some_ other meat you may have; but, bacon is the great thing. it is always ready; as good cold as hot; goes to the field or the coppice conveniently; in harvest, and other busy times, demands the pot to be boiled only on a sunday; has twice as much strength in it as any other thing of the same weight; and in short, has in it every quality that tends to make a labourer's family able to work and well off. one pound of bacon, such as that which i have described, is, in a labourer's family, worth four or five of ordinary mutton or beef, which are great part _bone_, and which, in short, are gone in a moment. but always observe, it is _fat bacon_ that i am talking about. there will, in spite of all that can be done, be _some_ lean in the gammons, though comparatively very little; and therefore you ought to begin at that end of the flitches; for, _old lean bacon_ is not good. . now, as to the _cost_. a pig (a _spayed sow_ is best) bought in march four months old, can be had now for fifteen shillings. the cost till fatting time is next to nothing to a cottager; and then the cost, at the present price of corn, would, for a hog of twelve score, not exceed _three pounds_; in the whole _four pounds five_; a pot of poison a week bought at the public-house comes to _twenty-six shillings_ of the money; and more than _three times the remainder_ is generally flung away upon the miserable _tea_, as i have clearly shown in the first number, at paragraph . i have, indeed, there shown, that if the tea were laid aside, the labourer might supply his family well with beer all the year round, and have a fat hog of even _fifteen score_ for the _cost of the tea_, which does him and can do him _no good at all_. . the feet, the cheeks, and other bone, being considered, the _bacon and lard_, taken together, would not exceed _sixpence a pound_. irish bacon is "_cheaper_." yes, _lower-priced_. but, i will engage that a pound of mine, when it comes _out_ of the pot (to say nothing of the _taste_,) shall weigh as much as a _pound and a half_ of irish, or any dairy or slop-fed bacon, when that comes out of the pot. no, no: the farmers joke when they say, that their bacon _costs them more than_ they could buy bacon for. they know well what it is they are doing; and besides, they always forget, or, rather, remember not to say, that the fatting of a large hog yields them three or four load of dung, really worth more than ten or fifteen of common yard dung. in short, without hogs, farming _could not go on_; and it never has gone on in any country in the world. the hogs are the great _stay_ of the whole concern. they are _much in small space_; they make no _show_, as flocks and herds do; but with out them, the cultivation of the land would be a poor, a miserably barren concern. salting mutton and beef. . _very fat_ mutton may be salted to great advantage, and also smoked, and may be kept thus a long while. not the shoulders and legs, but the _back_ of the sheep. i have never made any flitch of _sheep-bacon_; but i will; for there is nothing like having a _store_ of meat in a house. the running to the butchers daily is a ridiculous thing. the very idea of being fed, of a _family_ being fed, by daily supplies, has something in it perfectly _tormenting_. one half of the time of a mistress of a house, the affairs of which are carried on in this way, is taken up in talking about what is to be got for dinner, and in negotiations with the butcher. one single moment spent at table beyond what is absolutely necessary, is a moment very shamefully spent; but, to suffer a system of domestic economy, which unnecessarily wastes daily an hour or two of the mistress's time in hunting for the provision for the repast, is a shame indeed; and when we consider how much time is generally spent in this and in equally absurd ways, it is no wonder that we see so little performed by numerous individuals as they do perform during the course of their lives. . _very fat parts of beef_ may be salted and smoked in a like manner. not the _lean_; for that is a great waste, and is, in short, good for nothing. poor fellows on board of ships are compelled to eat it, but it is a very bad thing. no. vii. bees, fowls, &c. &c. . i now proceed to treat of objects of less importance than the foregoing, but still such as may be worthy of great attention. if all of them cannot be expected to come within the scope of a labourer's family, some of them must, and others may: and it is always of great consequence, that children be brought up to set a just value upon all useful things, and especially upon all _living things_; to know the _utility_ of them: for, without this, they never, when grown up, are worthy of being entrusted with the _care_ of them. one of the greatest, and, perhaps, the very commonest, fault of servants, is their inadequate care of animals committed to their charge. it is a well-known saying that "the _master's eye_ makes the horse fat," and the remissness to which this alludes, is generally owing to the servant not having been brought up to feel _an interest_ in the well-being of animals. bees. . it is not my intention to enter into a history of this insect about which so much has been written, especially by the french naturalists. it is the _useful_ that i shall treat of, and that is done in not many words. the best _hives_ are those made of clean unblighted _rye-straw_. boards are too cold in england. a swarm should always be put into a _new_ hive, and the sticks should be _new_ that are put into the hive for the bees to work on; for, if the hive be old, it is not so _wholesome_, and a thousand to one but it contain the embryos of _moths_ and other insects injurious to bees. over the hive itself there should be a cap of thatch, made also of clean rye straw; and it should not only be _new_ when first put on the hive; but a new one should be made to supply the place of the former one every three or four months; for when the straw begins to get rotten, as it soon does, insects breed in it, its smell is bad, and its effect on the bees is dangerous. . the hive should be placed on a bench, the legs of which mice and rats cannot creep up. tin round the legs is best. but even this will not keep down _ants_, which are mortal enemies of bees. to keep these away, if you find them infest the hive, take a green stick and twist it round in the shape of a ring to lay on the ground round the leg of the bench, and at a few inches from it; and cover this stick with _tar_. this will keep away the ants. if the ants come from one home, you may easily _trace them to it_; and when you have found it, pour _boiling water_ on it in the night, when all the family are at home. this is the only effectual way of destroying ants, which are frequently so troublesome. it would be cruel to cause this destruction, if it were not necessary to do it, in order to preserve the honey, and indeed the bees too. . besides the hive and its cap, there should be a sort of shed, with top, back, and ends, to give additional protection in winter; though in summer hives may be kept _too hot_, and in that case the bees become sickly and the produce becomes light. the _situation_ of the hive is to face the south-east; or, at any rate, to be sheltered from the _north_ and the _west_. from the north always, and from the west in winter. if it be a very dry season in summer, it contributes greatly to the success of the bees, to place clear water near their home, in a thing that they can conveniently drink out of; for if they have to go a great way for drink, they have not much time for work. . it is supposed that bees live only a year; at any rate it is best never to keep the same stall, or family, over two years, except you want to increase your number of hives. the swarm of _this summer_ should always be taken in the autumn of next year. it is whimsical to _save_ the bees when you take the honey. you must _feed_ them; and, if saved, they will die of old age before the next fall; and though young ones will supply the place of the dead, this is nothing like a good swarm put up during the summer. . as to the things that bees make their collections from, we do not, perhaps, know a thousandth part of them; but of all the blossoms that they seek eagerly that of the _buck-wheat_ stands foremost. go round a piece of this grain just towards sunset, when the buck-wheat is in bloom, and you will see the air filled with bees going home from it in all directions. the buck-wheat, too, continues in bloom a long while; for the grain is dead ripe on one part of the plant, while there are fresh blossoms coming out on the other part. . a good stall of bees, that is to say, the produce of one, is always worth about _two bushels of good wheat_. the _cost_ is nothing to the labourer. he must be a stupid countryman indeed who cannot make a bee-hive; and a lazy one indeed if he _will_ not, if he can. in short, there is nothing but _care_ demanded; and there are very few situations in the country, especially in the south of england, where a labouring man may not have half a dozen stalls of bees to take every year. the main things are to keep away insects, mice, and birds, and especially a little bird called the bee-bird; and to keep all clean and fresh as to the hives and coverings. never put a swarm into an _old hive_. if wasps, or hornets, annoy you, watch them home in the day time; and in the night kill them by fire, or by boiling water. fowls should not go where bees are, for they eat them. . suppose a man get three stalls of bees in a year. six bushels of wheat give him bread for an _eighth part of the year_. scarcely any thing is a greater misfortune than _shiftlessness_. it is an evil little short of the loss of eyes or of limbs. geese. . they can be kept to advantage only where there are _green commons_, and there they are easily kept; live to a very great age; and are amongst the hardiest animals in the world. if _well kept_, a goose will lay a hundred eggs in a year. the french put their eggs under large hens of common fowls, to each of which they give four or five eggs; or under turkies, to which they give nine or ten goose-eggs. if the goose herself sit, she must be well and _regularly fed_, at, or near to, her nest. when the young ones are hatched, they should be kept in a warm place for about four days, and fed on barley-meal, mixed, if possible, with milk; and then they will begin to _graze_. water for them, or for the old ones to _swim_ in, is by no means _necessary_, nor, perhaps, ever even _useful_. or, how is it, that you see such fine flocks of fine geese all over long island (in america) where there is scarcely such a thing as a pond or a run of water? . geese are raised by _grazing_; but to _fat_ them something more is required. corn of some sort, or boiled swedish turnips. some corn and some raw swedish turnips, or carrots, or white cabbages, or lettuces, make the best fatting. the modes that are resorted to by the french for fatting geese, _nailing_ them down by their webs, and other acts of cruelty, are, i hope, such as englishmen will never think of. they will get fat enough without the use of any of these unfeeling means being employed. he who can deliberately inflict _torture_ upon an animal, in order to heighten the pleasure his palate is to receive in eating it, is an abuser of the authority which god has given him, and is, indeed, a tyrant in his heart. who would think himself safe, if at the _mercy_ of such a man? since the first edition of this work was published, i have had a good deal of experience with regard to geese. it is a very great error to suppose that what is called a michaelmas goose is _the thing_. geese are, in general, eaten at the age when they are called green geese; or after they have got their full and entire growth, which is not until the latter part of october. green geese are tasteless squabs; loose flabby things; no rich taste in them; and, in short, a very indifferent sort of dish. the full-grown goose has solidity in it; but it is _hard_, as well as solid; and in place of being _rich_, it is strong. now, there is a middle course to take; and if you take this course, you produce the finest birds of which we can know any thing in england. for three years, including the present year, i have had the finest geese that i ever saw, or ever heard of. i have bought from twenty to thirty every one of these years. i buy them off the common late in june, or very early in july. they have cost me from two shillings to three shillings each, first purchase. i bring the flock home, and put them in a pen, about twenty feet square, where i keep them well littered with straw, so as for them not to get filthy. they have one trough in which i give them dry oats, and they have another trough where they have constantly plenty of clean water. besides these, we give them, two or three times a day, a parcel of lettuces out of the garden. we give them such as are going to seed generally; but the better the lettuces are, the better the geese. if we have no lettuces to spare, we give them cabbages, either loaved or not loaved; though, observe, the white cabbage as well as the white lettuce, that is to say, the loaved cabbage and lettuce, are a great deal better than those that are not loaved. this is the food of my geese. they thrive exceedingly upon this food. after we have had the flock about ten days, we begin to kill, and we proceed once or twice a week till about the middle of october, sometimes later. a great number of persons who have eaten of these geese have all declared that they did not imagine that a goose could be brought to be so good a bird. these geese are altogether different from the hard, strong things that come out of the stubble fields, and equally different from the flabby things called a green goose. i should think that the cabbages or lettuces perform half the work of keeping and fatting my geese; and these are things that really cost nothing. i should think that the geese, upon an average, do not consume more than a shilling's worth of oats each. so that we have these beautiful geese for about four shillings each. no money will buy me such a goose in london; but the thing that i can get nearest to it, will cost me _seven_ shillings. every gentleman has a garden. that garden has, in the month of july, a wagon-load, at least, of lettuces and cabbages to throw away. nothing is attended with so little trouble as these geese. there is hardly any body near london that has not room for the purposes here mentioned. the reader will be apt to exclaim, as my friends very often do, "cobbett's geese are all _swans_." well, better that way than not to be pleased with what one has. however, let gentlemen try this method of fatting geese. it saves money, mind, at the same time. let them try it; and if any one, who shall try it, shall find the effect not to be that which i say it is, let him reproach me publicly with being a deceiver. the thing is no _invention_ of mine. while i could buy a goose off the common for half-a-crown, i did not like to give seven shillings for one in london, and yet i wished that geese should not be excluded from my house. therefore i bought a flock of geese, and brought them home to kensington. they could not be eaten all at once. it was necessary, therefore, to fix upon a mode of feeding them. the above mode was adopted by my servant, as far as i know, without any knowledge of mine; but the very agreeable result made me look into the matter; and my opinion, that the information will be useful to many persons, at any rate, is sufficient to induce me to communicate it to my readers. ducks. . no water, to _swim_ in, is necessary to the old, and is _injurious_ to the very young. they never should be suffered to swim (if water be near) till _more than a month old_. the old duck will lay, in the year, if _well kept_, ten dozen of eggs; and that is her best employment; for common hens are the best mothers. it is not good to let young ducks out in the morning to eat _slugs_ and _worms_; for, though they like them, these things kill them if they eat a great quantity. grass, corn, white cabbages, and lettuces, and especially buck-wheat, cut, when half ripe, and flung down in the haulm. this makes fine ducks. ducks will feed on garbage and all sorts of filthy things; but their flesh is _strong_, and bad in proportion. they are, in long island, fatted upon a coarse sort of _crab_, called a horse-foot fish, prodigious quantities of which are cast on the shores. the young ducks grow very fast upon this, and very fat; but wo unto him that has to _smell_ them when they come from the spit; and, as for _eating_ them, a man must have a stomach indeed to do that! . when young, they should be fed upon barley-meal, or _curds_, and kept in a warm place in the night-time, and not let out _early_ in the morning. they should, if possible, be kept from water to _swim_ in. it always does them harm; and, if intended to be sold to be killed _young_, they should never go near ponds, ditches, or streams. when you come to fat ducks, you must take care that they get at _no filth_ whatever. they will eat garbage of all sorts; they will suck down the most nauseous particles of all those substances which go for manure. a dead rat three parts rotten is a feast to them. for these reasons i should never eat any ducks, unless there were some mode of keeping them from this horrible food. i treat them precisely as i do my geese. i buy a troop when they are young, and put them in a pen, and feed them upon oats, cabbages, lettuces, and water, and have the place kept very clean. my ducks are, in consequence of this, a great deal more fine and delicate than any others that i know any-thing of. turkeys. . these are _flying_ things, and so are _common fowls_. but it may happen that a few hints respecting them may be of use. to raise turkeys in this chilly climate, is a matter of much greater difficulty than in the climates that give great warmth. but the great enemy to young turkeys (for old ones are hardy enough) _is the wet_. this they will endure in _no climate_; and so true is this, that, in america, where there is always "_a wet spell_" in april, the farmers' wives take care never to have a brood come out until that spell is passed. in england, where the wet spells come at haphazard, the first thing is to take care that young turkeys never go out, on any account, except in dry weather, till the _dew be quite off the ground_; and this should be adhered to till they get to be of the size of an old partridge, and have their backs well covered with feathers. and, in wet weather, they should be kept under cover all day long. . as to the _feeding_ of them, when young, various nice things are recommended. hard eggs chopped fine, with crumbs of bread, and a great many other things; but that which i have seen used, and always with success, and for all sorts of young poultry, is milk _turned into curds_. this is the food for young poultry of all sorts. some should be made _fresh every_ day; and if this be done, and the young turkeys kept warm, and especially _from wet_, not one out of a score will die. when they get to be strong, they may have meal and grain, but still they always love the curds. . when they get their _head feathers_ they are hardy enough; and what they then want is _room_ to prowl about. it is best to breed them under a _common hen_; because she does not _ramble_ like a hen-turkey; and it is a very curious thing that the turkeys bred up by a hen of the common fowl, _do not themselves ramble much when they get old_; and for this reason, when they buy turkeys for _stock_, in america, (where there are such large woods, and where the distant rambling of turkeys is inconvenient,) they always buy such as have been bred under the hens of the common fowl; than which a more complete proof of the great powers of _habit_ is, perhaps, not to be found. and ought not this to be a lesson to fathers and mothers of families? ought not they to consider that the habits which they give their children are to stick by those children during their whole lives? . the _hen_ should be fed _exceedingly well_, too, while she is _sitting_ and _after_ she has hatched; for though she does not give _milk_, she gives _heat_; and, let it be observed, that as no man ever yet saw healthy pigs with a poor sow, so no man ever saw healthy chickens with a poor hen. this is a matter much too little thought of in the rearing of poultry; but it is a matter of the greatest consequence. never let a poor hen sit; feed the hen well while she is sitting, and feed her most abundantly when she has young ones; for then her _labour_ is very great; she is making exertions of some sort or other during the whole twenty-four hours; she has no rest; is constantly doing something or other to provide food or safety for her young ones. . as to _fatting_ turkeys, the best way is, never to let them be poor. _cramming_ is a nasty thing, and quite unnecessary. barley-meal, mixed with skim-milk, given to them, fresh and fresh, will make them fat in a short time, either in a coop, in a house, or running about. boiled carrots and swedish turnips will help, and it is a change of sweet food. in france they sometimes _pick turkeys alive_, to make them _tender_; of which i shall only say, that the man that can do this, or order it to be done, ought to be skinned alive himself. fowls. . these are kept for two objects; their _flesh_ and their _eggs_. as to _rearing them_, every thing said about rearing turkeys is applicable here. they are best _fatted_, too, in the same manner. but, as to _laying-hens_, there are some means to be used to secure the use of them in _winter_. they ought not to be _old hens_. pullets, that is, birds hatched in the foregoing spring, are, perhaps, the best. at any rate, let them not be more than _two years old_. they should be kept in a _warm_ place, and not let out, even in the day-time, in _wet_ weather; for one good sound wetting will keep them back for a fortnight. the dry cold, even in the severest cold, if _dry_, is less injurious than even a little _wet_ in winter-time. if the feathers get wet, in our climate, in winter, or in short days, they do not get dry for a long time; and this it is that spoils and kills many of our fowls. . the french, who are great egg-eaters, take singular pains as to the _food_ of laying-hens in winter. they let them out very little, even in their fine climate, and give them very stimulating food; barley boiled, and given them warm; curds, _buck-wheat_, (which, i believe, is the best thing of all except curds;) parsley and other herbs chopped fine; leeks chopped in the same way; also apples and pears chopped very fine; oats and wheat cribbled; and sometimes they give them hemp-seed, and the seed of nettles; or dried nettles, harvested in summer, and boiled in the winter. some give them ordinary food, and, once a day, toasted bread sopped in wine. white cabbages chopped up are very good in winter for all sorts of poultry. . this is taking a great deal of pains; but the produce is also great and very valuable in winter; for, as to _preserved_ eggs, they are things to run _from_ and not after. all this supposes, however, a proper _hen-house_, about which we, in england, take very little pains. the _vermin_, that is to say, the _lice_, that poultry breed, are the greatest annoyance. and as our wet climate furnishes them, for a great part of the year, with no _dust_ by which to get rid of these vermin, we should be very careful about _cleanliness_ in the hen-houses. many a hen, when sitting, is compelled to quit her nest to get rid of the lice. they torment the young chickens. and, in short, are a great injury. the fowl-house should, therefore, be very often cleaned out; and sand, or fresh earth, should be thrown on the floor. the nest should not be on _shelves_, or on any-thing fixed; but little flat baskets, something like those that the gardeners have in the markets in london, and which they call _sieves_, should be placed against the sides of the house upon pieces of wood nailed up for the purpose. by this means the nests are kept perfectly clean, because the baskets are, when necessary, taken down, the hay thrown out, and the baskets washed; which cannot be done, if the nest be made in any-thing forming a part of the building. besides this, the roosts ought to be cleaned every week, and the hay changed in the nests of laying-hens. it is good to _fumigate_ the house frequently by burning dry herbs, juniper wood, cedar wood, or with brimstone; for nothing stands so much in need of cleanliness as a fowl-house, in order to have fine fowls and plenty of eggs. . the _ailments_ of fowls are numerous, but they would seldom be seen, if the proper care were taken. it is useless to talk of _remedies_ in a case where you have complete power to prevent the evil. if well fed, and kept perfectly clean, fowls will seldom be sick; and, as to old age, they never ought to be kept more than a couple or three years; for they get to be good for little as layers, and no _teeth_ can face them as food. . it is, perhaps, seldom that fowls can be kept conveniently about a cottage; but when they can, three, four, or half a dozen hens to lay in _winter_, when the wife is at _home_ the greater part of the time, are worth attention. they would require but little room, might be bought in november and sold in april, and six of them, with proper care, might be made to clear every week the price of a gallon of flour. if the labour were great, i should not think of it; but it is _none_; and i am for neglecting nothing in the way of pains in order to ensure a hot dinner every day in winter, when the man comes home from work. as to the _fatting_ of fowls, information can be of no use to those who live in a cottage all their lives; but it may be of some use to those who are born in cottages, and go to have the care of poultry at richer persons' houses. fowls should be put to fat about a fortnight before they are wanted to be killed. the best food is barley-meal wetted with milk, but not wetted too much. they should have clear water to drink, and it should be frequently changed. crammed fowls are very nasty things: but "_barn-door_" fowls, as they are called, are sometimes a great deal more nasty. _barn_-door would, indeed, do exceedingly well; but it unfortunately happens that the _stable_ is generally pretty near to the barn. and now let any gentleman who talks about sweet barn-door fowls, have one caught in the yard, where the stable is also. let him have it brought in, killed, and the craw taken out and cut open. then let him take a ball of horse-dung from the stable-door; and let his nose tell him how very small is the difference between the smell of the horse-dung, and the smell of the craw of his fowl. in short, roast the fowl, and then pull aside the skin at the neck, put your nose to the place, and you will almost think that you are at the stable door. hence the necessity of taking them away from the barn-door a fortnight, at least, before they are killed. we know very well that ducks that have been fed upon fish, either wild ducks, or tame ducks, will scent a whole room, and drive out of it all those who have not pretty good constitutions. it must be so. solomon says that all flesh is grass; and those who know any-thing about beef, know the difference between the effect of the grass in herefordshire and lincolnshire, and the effect of turnips and oil cake. in america they always take the fowls from the farm-yard, and shut them up a fortnight or three weeks before they be killed. one thing, however, about fowls ought always to be borne in mind. they are never good for any-thing when they have attained their full growth, unless they be _capons_ or _poullards_. if the poulets be old enough to have little eggs in them, they are not worth one farthing; and as to the cocks of the same age, they are fit for nothing but to make soup for soldiers on their march, and they ought to be taken for that purpose. pigeons. . a few of these may be kept about any cottage, for they are kept even in towns by labourers and artizans. they cause but little trouble. they take care of their own young ones; and they do not scratch, or do any other mischief in gardens. they want feeding with tares, peas, or small beans; and buck-wheat is very good for them. to _begin_ keeping them, they must not have _flown at large_ before you get them. you must keep them for two or three days, shut into the place which is to be their home; and then they may be let out, and will never leave you, as long as they can get proper food, and are undisturbed by vermin, or unannoyed exceedingly by lice. . the common dove-house pigeons are the best to keep. they breed oftenest, and feed their young ones best. they begin to breed at about _nine months old_, and if well kept, they will give you eight or nine pair in the year. any little place, a shelf in the cow shed; a board or two under the eaves of the house; or, in short, any place under cover, even on the ground floor, they will sit and hatch and breed up their young ones in. . it is not supposed that there could be much _profit_ attached to them; but they are of this use; they are very pretty creatures; very interesting in their manners; they are an object to delight _children_, and to give them the _early habit_ of fondness for animals and of _setting a value_ on them, which, as i have often had to observe before, is a very great thing. a considerable part of all the _property_ of a nation consists of animals. of course a proportionate part of the cares and labours of a people appertain to the breeding and bringing to perfection those animals; and, if you consult your experience, you will find that a labourer is, generally speaking, of value in proportion as he is worthy of being intrusted with the care of animals. the most careless fellow cannot _hurt_ a hedge or ditch; but to trust him with the _team_, or the _flock_, is another matter. and, mind, for the _man_ to be trust-worthy in this respect, the _boy_ must have been in the _habit_ of being kind and considerate towards animals; and nothing is so likely to give him that excellent habit as his seeing, from his very birth, animals taken great care of, and treated with great kindness by his parents, and now-and-then having a little thing to _call his own_. rabbits. . in this case, too, the chief use, perhaps, is to give children those habits of which i have been just speaking. nevertheless, rabbits are really profitable. three does and a buck will give you a rabbit to eat for _every three days in the year_, which is a much larger quantity of food than any man will get by spending half his time in the pursuit of _wild_ animals, to say nothing of the toil, the tearing of clothes, and the danger of pursuing the latter. . every-body knows how to knock up a rabbit hutch. the does should not be allowed to have more than _seven litters_ in a year. six young ones to a doe is all that ought to be kept; and then they will be fine. _abundant food_ is the main thing; and what is there that a rabbit will _not eat_? i know of nothing _green_ that they will not eat; and if hard pushed, they will eat bark, and even wood. the best thing to feed the young ones on when taken from the mother, is the _carrot_, wild or garden. parsnips, swedish turnips, roots of dandelion; for too much green or _watery_ stuff is not good for _weaning_ rabbits. they should remain as long as possible with the mother. they should have oats once a-day; and, after a time, they may eat any-thing with safety. but if you give them too much _green_ at first when they are weaned, they _rot_ as sheep do. a _variety_ of food is a great thing; and, surely, the fields and gardens and hedges furnish this variety! all sorts of grasses, strawberry-leaves, ivy, dandelions, the _hog-weed_ or _wild parsnip_, in root, stem, and leaves. i have fed working horses, six or eight in number, upon this plant for weeks together. it is a tall bold plant that grows in prodigious quantities in the hedges and coppices in some parts of england. it is the _perennial parsnip_. it has flower and seed precisely like those of the parsnip; and hogs, cows, and horses, are equally fond of it. many a half-starved pig have i seen within a few yards of cart-loads of this pig-meat! this arises from want of the early habit of attention to such matters. i, who used to get hog-weed for pigs and for rabbits when a little chap, have never forgotten that the wild parsnip is good food for pigs and rabbits. . when the doe has young ones, feed her most abundantly with all sorts of greens and herbage and with carrots and the other things mentioned before, besides giving her a few oats once a-day. that is the way to have fine healthy young ones, which, if they come from the mother in good case, will very seldom die. but do not think, that because she is a small animal, a little feeding is sufficient! rabbits eat a great deal more than cows or sheep in proportion to their bulk. . of all animals rabbits are those that _boys_ are most fond of. they are extremely pretty, nimble in their movements, engaging in their attitudes, and always completely under immediate control. the produce has not long to be waited for. in short, they keep an interest constantly alive in a little chap's mind; and they really _cost nothing_; for as to the _oats_, where is the boy that cannot, in harvest-time, pick up enough along the _lanes_ to serve his rabbits for a year? the _care_ is all; and the habit of taking care of things is, of itself, a most valuable possession. . to those gentlemen who keep rabbits for the use of their family (and a very useful and convenient article they are,) i would observe, that when they find their rabbits die, they may depend on it, that ninety-nine times out of the hundred _starvation_ is the malady. and particularly short feeding of the doe, while, and before she has young ones; that is to say, short feeding of her _at all times_; for, if she be poor, the young ones will be good for nothing. she will _live_ being poor, but she will not, and cannot breed up fine young ones. goats and ewes. . in some places where a cow cannot be kept, a goat may. a correspondent points out to me, that a dorset ewe or two might be kept on a common near a cottage to give milk; and certainly this might be done very well; but i should prefer a goat, which is hardier and much more domestic. when i was in the army, in new brunswick, where, be it observed, the snow lies on the ground seven months in the year, there were many goats that _belonged to the regiment_, and that went about with it on shipboard and every-where else. some of them had gone through nearly the whole of the _american war_. we _never fed_ them. in summer they picked about wherever they could find grass; and in winter they lived on cabbage-leaves, turnip-peelings, potatoe-peelings, and other things flung out of the soldiers' rooms and huts. one of these goats belonged to me, and, on an average throughout the year, she gave me more than three half-pints of milk a day. i used to have the kid killed when a few days old; and, for some time, the goat would give nearly or quite, two quarts of milk a day. she was seldom dry more than three weeks in the year. . there is one great inconvenience belonging to goats; that is, they bark all young trees that they come near; so that, if they get into a _garden_, they destroy every thing. but there are seldom trees on commons, except such as are too large to be injured by goats; and i can see no reason against keeping a goat where a cow cannot be kept. nothing is so hardy; nothing is so little nice as to its food. goats will pick peelings out of the kennel and eat them. they will eat mouldy bread or biscuit; fusty hay, and almost rotten straw; furze-bushes, heath-thistles; and, indeed, what will they not eat, when they will make a hearty meal on _paper_, brown or white, printed on or not printed on, and give milk all the while! they will lie in any dog-hole. they do very well clogged, or stumped out. and, then, they are very _healthy_ things into the bargain, however closely they may be confined. when sea voyages are so stormy as to kill geese, ducks, fowls, and almost pigs, the goats are well and lively; and when a dog of no kind can keep the deck for a minute, a goat will skip about upon it as bold as brass. . goats do not _ramble_ from home. they come in regularly in the evening, and if called, they come like dogs. now, though ewes, when taken great care of, will be very gentle, and though their milk may be rather more delicate than that of the goat, the ewes must be fed with nice and clean food, and they will not do much in the milk-giving way upon a common; and, as to _feeding them_, provision must be made pretty nearly as for a cow. they will not endure _confinement_ like goats; and they are subject to numerous ailments that goats know nothing of. then the ewes are done by the time they are about six years old; for they then lose their teeth; whereas a goat will continue to breed and to give milk in abundance for a great many years. the sheep is _frightened_ at everything, and especially at the least sound of a dog. a goat, on the contrary, will _face a dog_, and if he be not a big and courageous one, beat him off. . i have often wondered how it happened that none of our labourers kept goats; and i really should be glad to see the thing tried. they are pretty creatures, domestic as a dog, will stand and watch, as a dog does, for a crumb of bread, as you are eating; give you no trouble in the milking; and i cannot help being of opinion, that it might be of great use to introduce them amongst our labourers. candles and rushes. . we are not permitted to make candles ourselves, and if we were, they ought seldom to be used in a labourer's family. i was bred and brought up mostly by _rush-light_, and i do not find that i see less clearly than other people. candles certainly were not much used in english labourers' dwellings in the days when they had meat dinners and sunday coats. potatoes and taxed candles seem to have grown into fashion together; and, perhaps, for this reason: that when the pot ceased to afford _grease_ for the rushes, the potatoe-gorger was compelled to go to the chandler's shop for light to swallow the potatoes by, else he might have devoured peeling and all! . my grandmother, who lived to be pretty nearly ninety, never, i believe, burnt a candle in her house in her life. i know that i never saw one there, and she, in a great measure, brought me up. she used to get the meadow-rushes, such as they tie the hop-shoots to the poles with. she cut them when they had attained their full substance, but were still _green_. the rush at this age, consists of a body of _pith_ with a green _skin_ on it. you cut off both ends of the rush, and leave the prime part, which, on an average, may be about a foot and a half long. then you take off all the green skin, except for about a fifth part of the way round the pith. thus it is a piece of pith all but a little strip of skin in one part all the way up, which, observe, is necessary to hold the pith together all the way along. . the rushes being thus prepared, the _grease_ is melted, and put in a melted state into something that is as _long_ as the rushes are. the rushes are put into the grease; soaked in it sufficiently; then taken out and laid in a bit of bark taken from a young tree, so as not to be too large. this bark is fixed up against the wall by a couple of straps put round it; and there it hangs for the purpose of holding the rushes. . the rushes are carried about _in the hand_; but to sit by, to work by, or to go to bed by, they are fixed in _stands_ made for the purpose, some of which are high to stand on the ground, and some low, to stand on a table. these stands have an iron port something like a pair of _pliers_ to hold the rush in, and the rush is shifted forward from time to time, as it burns down to the thing that holds it. . now these rushes give a _better light_ than a common small dip-candle; and they cost next to nothing, though the labourer may with them have as much light as he pleases, and though, without them he must sit the far greater part of the winter evenings _in the dark_, even if he expend _fifteen shillings_ a year in candles. you may do any sort of work by this light; and, if reading be your taste, you may read the foul libels, the lies and abuse, which are circulated gratis about _me_ by the "society for promoting _christian knowledge_," as well by rush-light, as you can by the light of taxed candles; and, at any rate, you would have one evil less; for to be deceived and to pay a tax for the deception are a little too much for even modern loyalty openly to demand. mustard. . why _buy_ this, when you can _grow_ it in your garden? the stuff you buy is half _drugs_; and is injurious to health. a _yard square_ of ground, sown with common mustard, the crop of which you would grind for use, in a little mustard-mill, as you wanted it, would save you _some money_, and probably save your _life_. your mustard would look _brown_ instead of _yellow_; but the former colour is as good as the latter: and, as to the _taste_, the _real_ mustard has certainly a much better than that of the _drugs_ and flour which go under the name of mustard. let any one _try_ it, and i am sure he will never use the drugs again. the drugs, if you take them freely, leave _a burning at the pit of your stomach_, which the real mustard does not. dress, household goods, and fuel. . in paragraph , i said, i think, enough to caution you, the english labourer, against the taste, now too prevalent, for _fine_ and _flimsy_ dress. it was, for hundreds of years, amongst the characteristics of the english people, that their taste was, in all matters, for things solid, sound, and good; for the _useful_, and _decent_, the _cleanly_ in dress, and not for the _showy_. let us hope that this may be the taste again; and let us, my friends, fear no troubles, no perils, that may be necessary to produce a return of that taste, accompanied with full bellies and warm backs to the labouring classes. . in _household goods_, the _warm_, the _strong_, the _durable_, ought always to be kept in view. oak tables, bedsteads and stools, chairs of oak or of yew tree, and never a bit of miserable deal board. things of this sort ought to last several lifetimes. a labourer ought to inherit from his great grandfather something besides his toil. as to bedding, and other things of that sort, all ought to be good in their nature, of a durable quality, and plain in their colour and form. the plates, dishes, mugs, and things of that kind, should be of _pewter_, or even of wood. any-thing is better than crockery-ware. bottles to carry a-field should be of wood. formerly, nobody but the gypsies and mumpers, that went a hop-picking in the season, carried glass or earthen bottles. as to _glass_ of any sort, i do not know what business it has in any man's house, unless he be rich enough to live on his means. it pays a tax, in many cases, to the amount of two-thirds of its cost. in short, when a house is once furnished with sufficient goods, there ought to be no renewal of hardly any part of them wanted for half an age, except in case of destruction by fire. good management in this way leaves the man's wages to provide an _abundance of good food and good raiment_; and these are the things that make happy families; these are the things that make a good, kind, sincere, and brave people; not little pamphlets about "loyalty" and "content." a good man will be contented fast enough, if he be fed and clad sufficiently; but if a man be not well fed and clad, he is a base wretch to be contented. . _fuel_ should be, if possible, provided in summer, or at least some of it. turf and peat must be got in summer, and some _wood_ may. in the woodland countries, the next winter ought to be thought of in _june_, when people hardly know what to do with the fuelwood; and something should, if possible, be saved in the bark-harvest to get a part of the fuel for the next winter. fire is a capital article. to have no fire, or a bad fire, to sit by, is a most dismal thing. in such a state man and wife must be something out of the common way to be in good humour with each other, to say nothing of colds and other ailments which are the natural consequence of such misery. if we suppose the great creator to condescend to survey his works in detail, what object can be so pleasing to him as that of the labourer, after his return from the toils of a cold winter day, sitting with his wife and children round a cheerful fire, while the wind whistles in the chimney and the rain pelts the roof? but, of all god's creation, what is so miserable to behold or to think of as a wretched, half-starved family creeping to their nest of flocks or straw, there to lie shivering, till sent forth by the fear of absolutely expiring from want? hops. . i treated of them before; but before i conclude this little work, it is necessary to speak of them again. i made a mistake as to the _tax_ on the hops. the positive tax is _d._ a pound, and i (in former editions) stated it at _d._ however, in all such cases, there falls upon the _consumer_ the _expenses_ attending the paying of the tax. that is to say, the cost of interest of capital in the grower who pays the tax, and who must pay for it, whether his hops be cheap or dear. then the _trouble_ it gives him, and the rules he is compelled to obey in the drying and bagging, and which cause him great _expense_. so that the tax on hops of our own english growth, may _now be reckoned_ to cost the _consumer_ about - / _d._ a pound. yeast. . yeast is a great thing in domestic management. i have once before published a receipt for making _yeast-cakes_, i will do it again here. . in long island they make _yeast-cakes_. a parcel of these cakes is made _once a year_. that is often enough. and, when you bake, you take one of these cakes (or more according to the bulk of the batch) and with them raise your bread. the very best bread i ever ate in my life was lightened with these cakes. . the materials for a good batch of cakes are as follows:-- ounces of good fresh hops; - / pounds of rye flour; pounds of indian corn meal; and one gallon of water.--rub the hops, so as to separate them. put them into the water, which is to be boiling at the time. let them boil half an hour. then strain the liquor through a fine sieve into an earthen vessel. while the liquor is hot, put in the rye-flour; stirring the liquor well, and quickly, as the rye-flour goes into it. the day after, when it is working, put in the indian meal, stirring it well as it goes in. before the indian meal be all in, the mess will be very stiff; and it will, in fact, be _dough_, very much of the consistence of the dough that bread is made of.--take this dough; knead it well, as you would for _pie-crust_. roll it out with a rolling-pin, as you roll out pie-crust, to the thickness of about a third of an inch. when you have it (or a part of it at a time) rolled out, cut it up into cakes with a tumbler glass turned upside down, or with something else that will answer the same purpose. take a clean board (a _tin_ may be better) and put the cakes _to dry in the sun_. turn them every day; let them receive _no wet_; and they will become as hard as ship biscuit. put them into a bag, or box, and keep them in a place _perfectly free from damp_. when you bake, take two cakes, of the thickness above-mentioned, and about inches in diameter; put them into hot water, _over-night_, having cracked them first. let the vessel containing them stand near the fire-place all night. they will dissolve by the morning, and then you use them in setting your sponge (as it is called) precisely as you would use the yeast of beer. . there are _two things_ which may be considered by the reader as obstacles. first, where are _we_ to get the _indian meal_? indian meal is used merely because it is of a _less adhesive_ nature than that of wheat. white pea-meal, or even barley-meal, would do just as well. but second, to _dry_ the cakes, to make them (and _quickly_ too, mind) _as hard as ship biscuit_ (which is much harder than the timber of scotch firs or canada firs;) and to do this _in the sun_ (for it must not be _fire_,) where are we, in this climate, to _get the sun_? in we could not; for, that year, melons rotted in the _glazed frames_ and never ripened. but, in every nine summers out of ten, we have in june, in july, or in august, _a fortnight of hot sun_, and that is enough. nature has not given us a _peach-climate_; but we _get peaches_. the cakes, when put in the sun, may have a _glass sash_, or a _hand-light_, put over them. this would make their birth _hotter_ than that of the hottest open-air situation in america. in short to a farmer's wife, or any good housewife, all the little difficulties to the attainment of such an object would appear as nothing. the _will_ only is required; and, if there be not that, it is useless to think of the attempt. sowing swedish turnip seed. . it is necessary to be a little more full than i have been before as to the _manner of sowing_ this seed; and i shall make my directions such as to be applied on a small or a large scale.--those that want to transplant on a large scale will, of course, as to the other parts of the business, refer to my larger work.--it is to get plants for _transplanting_ that i mean to sow the swedish turnip seed. the _time_ for sowing must depend a little upon the nature of the situation and soil. in the north of england, perhaps early in april may be best; but, in any of these southern counties, any time after the _middle of april and before the th of may_, is quite early enough. the ground which is to receive the seed should be made very _fine_, and manured with wood-ashes, or with good compost well mixed with the earth. dung is not so good; for it breeds the fly more; or, at least, i think so. the seed should be sown in drills _an inch deep_, made as pointed out under the head of _sowing_ in my book on _gardening_. when deposited in the drills _evenly_ but _not thickly_, the ground should be raked across the drills, so as to fill them up; and then the whole of the ground should be _trodden hard_, with shoes not nailed, and not very thick in the sole. the ground should be laid out in four-feet _beds_ for the reasons mentioned in the "_gardener_." when the seeds come up, thin the plants to two inches apart as soon as you think them clear from the fly; for, if left thicker, they injure each other even in this infant state. hoe frequently between the rows even before thinning the plants; and when they are thinned, hoe well and frequently between them; for this has a tendency to make them strong; and the hoeing _before thinning_ helps to keep off the fly. a rod of ground, the rows being eight inches apart, and plants two inches apart in the row, will contain about _two thousand two hundred_ plants. an acre in rows four feet apart and the plants a foot apart in the row, will take about ten thousand four hundred and sixty plants. so that to transplant an acre, you must sow about _five rods of ground_. the plants should be kept very clean; and, by the last week in june, or first in july, you put them out. i have put them out (in england) at all times between th of june and middle of august. the first is certainly earlier than i like; and the very finest i ever grew in england, and the finest i ever saw for a large piece, were transplanted on the th of july. but one year with another, the last week in june is the best time. for size of plants, manner of transplanting, intercultivation, preparing the land, and the rest, see "_year's residence in america_." no. viii. _on the converting of english grass, and grain plants cut green, into straw, for the purpose of making plat for hats and bonnets._ kensington, may , . . the foregoing numbers have treated, chiefly, of the management of the affairs of a labourer's family, and more particularly of the mode of disposing of the money earned by the labour of the family. the present number will point out what i hope may become _an advantageous kind of labour_. all along i have proceeded upon the supposition, that the wife and children of the labourer be, as constantly as possible, employed _in work of some sort or other_. the cutting, the bleaching, the sorting, and the platting of straw, seem to be, of all employments, the best suited to the wives and children of country labourers; and the discovery which i have made, as to the means of obtaining the necessary materials, will enable them to enter at once upon that employment. . before i proceed to give my directions relative to the performance of this sort of labour, i shall give a sort of history of the discovery to which i have just alluded. . the practice of making hats, bonnets, and other things, of _straw_, is perhaps of very ancient date; but not to waste time in fruitless inquiries, it is very well known that, for many years past, straw coverings for the head have been greatly in use in england, in america, and, indeed, in almost all the countries that we know much of. in this country the manufacture was, only a few years ago, _very flourishing_; but it has now greatly declined, and has left in poverty and misery those whom it once well fed and clothed. . the cause of this change has been, the importation of the straw hats and bonnets from _italy_, greatly superior, in durability and beauty, to those made in england. the plat made in england was made of the straw of _ripened grain_. it was, in general, _split_; but the main circumstance was, that it was made of the straw of _ripened grain_; while the italian plat was made of the straw of grain, or grass, _cut green_. now, the straw of ripened grain or grass is brittle; or, rather, rotten. it _dies_ while standing, and, in point of toughness, the difference between it and straw from plants cut green is much about the same as the difference between a stick that has _died on the tree_, and one that has been _cut from the tree_. but besides the difference in point of toughness, strength, and durability, there was the difference in beauty. the colour of the italian plat was better; the plat was brighter; and the indian straws, being _small whole_ straws, instead of small straws made by the splitting of large ones, here was a _roundness_ in them, that gave _light and shade_ to the plat, which could not be given by our flat bits of straw. . it seems odd, that nobody should have set to work to find out how the italians _came_ by this fine straw. the importation of these italian articles was chiefly from the port of leghorn; and therefore the bonnets imported were called _leghorn bonnets_. the straw manufacturers in this country seem to have made no effort to resist this invasion from leghorn. and, which is very curious, the leghorn _straw_ has now began to be imported, and to be _platted in this country_. so that we had _hands_ to plat as well as the italians. all that we wanted was the _same kind of straw_ that the italians had: and it is truly wonderful that these importations from leghorn should have gone on increasing year after year, and our domestic manufacture dwindling away at a like pace, without there having been any inquiry relative to the way in which the italians _got their straw_! strange, that we should have imported even _straw_ from italy, without inquiring whether similar straw could not be got in england! there really seems to have been an opinion, that england could no more produce this straw than it could produce the sugar-cane. . things were in this state, when in , a miss woodhouse, a farmer's daughter in connecticut, sent a straw-bonnet of her own making to the _society of arts_ in london. this bonnet, superior in fineness and beauty to anything of the kind that had come from leghorn, the maker stated to consist of a sort of grass of which she sent along with the bonnet some of the _seeds_. the question was, then, would these precious seeds _grow and produce plants in perfection in england_? a large quantity of the seed had not been sent: and it was therefore, by a member of the society, thought desirable to get, with as little delay as possible, a considerable quantity of the seed. . it was in this stage of the affair that my attention was called to it. the member just alluded to applied to me to get the seed from america. i was of opinion that there could be no sort of grass in connecticut that would not, and that _did not_, grow and flourish in england. my son james, who was then at new-york, had instructions from me, in june , to go to miss woodhouse, and to send me home an account of the matter. in september, the same year, i heard from him, who sent me an account of the cutting and bleaching, and also a specimen of the plat and grass of connecticut. miss woodhouse had told the society of arts, that the grass used was the _poa pratensis_. this is the _smooth-stalked meadow-grass_. so that it was quite useless to send for _seed_. it was clear, that we had _grass enough_ in england, if we could but make it into straw as handsome as that of italy. . upon my publishing an account of what had taken place with regard to the american bonnet, _an importer of italian straw_ applied to me to know whether i would _undertake to import american straw_. he was in the habit of importing italian straw, and of having it platted in this country; but having seen the bonnet of miss woodhouse, he was anxious to get the american straw. this gentleman showed me some italian straw which he had imported, and as the seed heads were not on, i could not see what plant it was. the gentleman who showed the straw to me, told me (and, doubtless, he believed) that the plant was one that _would not grow in england_. i however, who looked at the straw with the eyes of a farmer, perceived that it consisted of dry _oat_, _wheat_, and _rye_ plants, and of _bennet_ and other _common grass_ plants. . this quite settled the point of _growth in england_. it was now certain that we had the plants in abundance; and the only question that remained to be determined was, had we sun to give to those plants the beautiful colour which the american and italian straw had? if that colour were to be obtained by _art_, by any chemical applications, we could obtain it as easily as the americans or the italians; but, if it were the gift of the sun solely, here might be a difficulty impossible for us to overcome. my experiments have proved that the fear of such difficulty was wholly groundless. . it was late in september that i obtained this knowledge, as to the kind of plants that produced the foreign straw. i could, at that time of the year, do nothing in the way of removing my doubts as to the _powers of our sun_ in the bleaching of grass; but i resolved to do this when the proper season for bleaching should return. accordingly, when the next month of _june_ came, i went into the country for the purpose. i made my experiments, and, in short, i proved to demonstration, that we had not only the _plants_, but the _sun_ also, necessary for the making of straw, yielding in no respect to that of america or of italy. i think that, upon the whole, we have greatly the advantage of those countries; for grass is more abundant in this country than in any other. it flourishes here more than in any other country. it is here in a greater variety of sorts; and for _fineness_ in point of size, there is no part of the world which can equal what might be obtained from some of our _downs_, merely by keeping the land ungrazed till the month of july. . when i had obtained the straw, i got some of it made into plat. one piece of this plat was equal in point of colour, and superior in point of fineness, even to the plat of the bonnet, of miss woodhouse. it seemed, therefore, now to be necessary to do nothing more than to _make all this well known to the country_. as the society of arts had interested itself in the matter, and as i heard that, through its laudable zeal, several _sowings of the foreign grass-seed_ had been made in england, i communicated an account of my experiments to that society. the first communication was made by me on the th of february last, when i sent to the society, specimens of my straw and also of the plat. some time after this i attended a committee of the society on the subject, and gave them a verbal account of the way in which i had gone to work. . the committee had, before this, given some of my straw to certain _manufacturers_ of plat, in order to see what it would produce. these manufacturers, with the exception of one, brought _such_ specimens of plat as to induce, at first sight, any one to believe that it was nonsense to think of bringing the thing to any degree of perfection! but, was it _possible_ to believe this? was it possible to believe that it could _answer_ to import straw from italy, to pay a twenty per cent. duty on that straw, and to have it platted here; and that it would _not answer_ to turn into plat straw of just the same sort grown in england? it was impossible to believe _this_; but possible enough to believe, that persons now making profit by italian straw, or plat, or bonnets, would rather that english straw should come to shut out the italian and to put an end to the leghorn trade. . in order to show the character of the reports of those manufacturers, i sent some parcels of straw into hertfordshire, and got back, in the course of five days, _fifteen specimens of plat_. these i sent to the society of arts on the d of april; and i here insert a copy of the letter which accompanied them. to the secretary of the society of arts. kensington, april , . sir,--with this letter i send you sixteen specimens of plat, and also eight parcels of straw, in order to show the sorts that the plat is made out of. the numbers of the plat correspond with those of the straw; but each parcel of straw has two numbers attached to it, except in the case of the first number, which is the _wheat straw_. of each kind of straw a parcel of the _stoutest_ and a parcel of the _smallest_ were sent to be platted; so that each parcel of the straw now sent, except that of the wheat, refers to _two of the pieces of plat_. for instance, and of the plat is of the sort of straw marked and ; and of the plat is of the sort of straw marked and ; and so on. these parcels of straw are sent in order that you may know the _kind_ of straw, or rather, of grass, from which the several pieces of plat have been made. this is very _material_; because it is by those parcels of straw that the _kinds of grass_ are to be known. the piece of plat no. is _american_; all the rest are from my straw. you will see, that is the _finest plat of all_. no. is from the _stout_ straws of the same _kind_ as no. . by looking at the parcel of straw nos. and , you will see what sort of grass this is. the next, in point of beauty and fineness combined, are the pieces nos. and ; and by looking at the parcel of straw, nos. and , you will see what sort of grass that is. next comes and , which are very beautiful too; and the sort of grass, you will see, is the _common bennet_. the wheat, you see, is too coarse; and the rest of the sorts are either _too hard_ or _too brittle_. i beg you to look at nos. and . those appear to me to be the thing to supplant the leghorn. the colour is good, the straws _work well_, they afford a great _variety of sizes_, and they come from the common _bennet grass_, which grows all over the kingdom, which is cultivated in all our fields, which is in bloom in the fair month of june, which may be grown as fine or as coarse as we please, and ten acres of which would, i dare say, make ten thousand bonnets. however, and , and and , are very good; and they are to be got in every part of the kingdom. as to _platters_, it is to be too childish to believe that they are not to be got, when i could send off these straws, and get back the plat, in the course of five days. far _better work_ than this would have been obtained if i could have gone on the errand myself. what then will people not do, who regularly undertake the business for their livelihood? i will, as soon as possible, send you an account of the manner in which i went to work with the grass. the card or plat, which i sent you some time ago, you will be so good as to give me back again some time; because i have now not a bit of the american plat left. i am, sir, your most humble and most obedient servant, wm. cobbett. . i should observe, that these written communications, of mine to the society, _belong_, in fact, to it, and will be published in its proceedings, a volume of which comes out every year; but, in this case, there would have been _a year lost_ to those who may act in consequence of these communications being made public. the grass is to be got, in great quantities and of the best sorts, only in _june_ and _july_; and the society's volume does not come out till _december_. the society has, therefore, given its consent to the making of the communications public through the means of this little work of mine. . having shown what sort of plat could be produced from english grass-straw, i next communicated to the society an account of the method which i pursued in the cutting and bleaching of the grass. the letter in which i did this i shall here insert a copy of, before i proceed further. in the original the paragraphs were _numbered_ from _one_ to _seventeen_: they are here marked by _letters_, in order to avoid confusion, the paragraphs of the work itself being marked by _numbers_. to the secretary of the society of arts. kensington, april , . a.--sir,--agreeably to your request, i now communicate to you a statement of those particulars which you wished to possess, relative to the specimens of straw and of plat which i have at different times sent to you for the inspection of the society. b.--that my statement may not come too abruptly upon those members of the society who have not had an opportunity of witnessing the progress of this interesting inquiry, i will take a short review of the circumstances which led to the making of my experiments. c.--in the month of june, , a gentleman, a member of the society, informed me, by letter, that a miss woodhouse, a farmer's daughter, of weathersfield, in connecticut, had transmitted to the society a straw-bonnet of very fine materials and manufacture; that this bonnet (according to her account) was made from the straw of a sort of grass called _poa pratensis_; that it seemed to be unknown whether the same grass would grow in england; that it was desirable to ascertain whether this grass would grow in england; that, at all events, it was desirable to get from america some of the seed of this grass; and that, for this purpose, my informant, knowing that i had a son in america; addressed himself to me, it being his opinion that, if materials similar to those used by miss woodhouse could by any means be _grown in england_, the benefit to the nation must be considerable. d.--in consequence of this application, i wrote to my son james, (then at new york,) directing him to do what he was able in order to cause success to the undertaking. on the receipt of my letter, in july, he went from new york to weathersfield, (about a hundred and twenty miles;) saw miss woodhouse; made the necessary inquiries; obtained a specimen of the grass, and also of the plat, which other persons at weathersfield, as well as miss woodhouse, were in the habit of making; and having acquired the necessary information as to cutting the grass and bleaching the straw, he transmitted to me an account of the matter; which account, together with his specimens of grass and plat, i received in the month of september. e.--i was now, when i came to see the specimen of grass, convinced that miss woodhouse's materials could be _grown in england_; a conviction which, if it had not been complete at once, would have been made complete immediately afterwards by the sight of a bunch of bonnet-straw _imported from leghorn_, which straw was shown to me by the importer, and which i found to be that of two or three sorts of our common grass, and of oats, wheat, and rye. f.--that the grass, or plants, could be _grown in england_ was, therefore, now certain, and indeed that they were, in point of commonness, next to the earth itself. but before the grass could, with propriety, be called materials for bonnet-making, there was the _bleaching_ to be performed; and it was by no means certain that this could be accomplished by means of an _english sun_, the difference between which and that of italy or connecticut was well known to be very great. g.--my experiments have, i presume, completely removed this doubt. i think that the straw produced by me to the society, and also some of the pieces of plat, are of a colour which no straw or plat can surpass. all that remains, therefore, is for me to give an account of the manner in which i cut and bleached the grass which i have submitted to the society in the state of straw. h.--first, as to the _season_ of the year, all the straw, except that of one sort of couch-grass, and the long coppice-grass, which two were got in sussex, were got from grass cut in hertfordshire on the st of june. a grass head-land, in a wheat-field, had been mowed during the forepart of the day, and in the afternoon i went and took a handful here and a handful there out of the swaths. when i had collected as much as i could well carry, i took it to my friend's house, and proceeded to prepare it for bleaching, according to the information sent me from america by my son; that is to say, i put my grass into a shallow tub, put boiling water upon it until it was covered by the water, let it remain in that state for ten minutes, then took it out, and laid it very thinly on a closely-mowed lawn in a garden. but i should observe, that, before i put the grass into the tub, i tied it up in small bundles, or sheaves, each bundle being about six inches through at the butt-end. this was necessary, in order to be able to take the grass, at the end of ten minutes, out of the water, without throwing it into a confused mixture as to tops and tails. being tied up in little bundles, i could easily, with a prong, take it out of the hot water. the bundles were put into a large wicker basket, carried to the lawn in the garden, and there taken out, one by one, and laid in swaths as before-mentioned. i.--it was laid _very thinly_; almost might i say, that no stalk of grass covered another. the swaths were _turned_ once a day. the bleaching was completed at the end of _seven days_ from time of scalding and laying out. june is a fine month. the grass was, as it happened, cut on the _longest day in the year_; and the weather was remarkably fine and clear. but the grass which i afterwards cut in sussex, was cut in the first week in august; and as to the weather my journal speaks thus:-- august, . d.--thunder and rain.--_began cutting grass._ d.--beautiful day. th.--fine day. th.--cloudy day--_began scalding grass, and laying it out._ th.--cloudy greater part of the day. th.--same weather. th.--cloudy and rather misty.--_finished cutting grass._ th.--dry but cloudy. th.--very close and hot.--_packed up part of the grass._ th, th, th, and th.--same weather. th.--hot and clear.--_finished packing the grass._ k.--the grass cut in sussex was as _well bleached_ as that cut in hertfordshire; so that it is evident that we never can have a summer that will not afford sun sufficient for this business. l.--the part of the straw used for platting; that part of the stalk which is _above the upper joint_; that part which is between the _upper joint_ and the seed-branches. this part is taken out, and the rest of the straw thrown away. but the _whole plant must be cut and bleached_; because, if you were to take off, _when green_, the part above described, that part would wither up next to nothing. this part must die in company with the whole plants, and be separated from the other parts after the bleaching has been performed. m.--the time of cutting must vary with the seasons, the situation, and the sort of grass. the grass which i got in hertfordshire, than which nothing can, i think, be more beautiful, was, when cut, generally in _bloom_; just in bloom. the _wheat_ was in full bloom; so that a good time for getting grass may be considered to be that when the _wheat is in bloom_. when i cut the grass in sussex, the _wheat was ripe_, for reaping had begun; but that grass is of a very backward sort, and, besides, grew in the _shade_ amongst coppice-wood and under trees, which stood pretty thick. n.--as to the sorts of grass, i have to observe generally, that in proportion as the colour of the grass is _deep_; that is to say, getting further from the _yellow_, and nearer to the _blue_, it is of a deep and _dead yellow_ when it becomes straw. those kinds of grass are best which are, in point of colour, nearest to that of wheat, which is a fresh pale green. another thing is, the quality of the straw as to _pliancy_ and _toughness_. experience must be our guide here. i had not time to make a large collection of sorts; but those which i have sent to you contain three sorts which are proved to be good. in my letter of the d instant i sent you _sixteen_ pieces of plat and _eight_ bunches of straw, having the seed heads on, in order to show the sorts of grass. the sixteenth piece of plat was american. the first piece was from _wheat_ cut and bleached by me; the rest from _grass_ cut and bleached by me. i will here, for fear of mistake, give a list of the names of the several sorts of grass, the straw of which was sent with my letter of the d instant, referring to the numbers, as placed on the plat and on the bunches of straw. pieces bunches sorts of plat. of straw. of grass. no .-- no. . --wheat. .} { melica cærulea; or, purple melica .} and { grass. .} { agrostis stolonifera; or, fiorin grass; .} and { that is to say, one sort of couch-grass. .} .} and lolium perenne; or ray-grass. .} { avena flavescens; or, yellow oat .} and { grass. .} { cynosurus cristatus; or crested .} and { dog's-tail grass. .} { anthoxanthum odoratum; or, sweet .} and { scented vernal grass. .} { agrostis canina; or, brown bent .} and { grass. o.--these names are those given at the botanical garden _at kew_. but the same english names are not in the country given to these sorts of grass. the _fiorin grass_, the _yellow oat-grass_, and the _brown-bent_, are all called _couch-grass_; except that the latter is, in sussex, called _red robin_. it is the native grass of the _plains_ of long island; and they call it _red top_. the _ray-grass_ is the common field grass, which is, all over the kingdom, sown with clover. the farmers, in a great part of the kingdom, call it _bent_, or _bennett_, grass; and sometimes it is galled _darnel-grass_. the _crested dog's-tail_ goes, in sussex, by the name of _hendonbent_; for what reason i know not. the _sweet-scented vernal-grass_ i have never, amongst the farmers, heard any name for. miss woodhouse's grass appears, from the _plants_ that i saw in the adelphi, to be one of the sorts of couch-grass. indeed, i am sure that it is a couch-grass, if the plants i there saw came from her seed. my son, who went into connecticut, who saw the grass growing, and who sent me home a specimen of it, is now in england: he was with me when i cut the grass in sussex; and he says that miss woodhouse's was a couch-grass. however, it is impossible to look at the specimens of straw and of plat which i have sent you, without being convinced that there is no want of the raw material in england. i was, after my first hearing of the subject, very soon convinced that the grass grew in england; but i had great doubts as to the capacity of our _sun_. those doubts my own experiments have completely removed; but then i was not aware of the great effect of the _scalding_, of which, by the way, miss woodhouse had said nothing, and the knowledge of which we owe entirely to my son james' journey into connecticut. p.--having thus given you an account of the time and manner of cutting the grass, of the mode of cutting and bleaching; having given you the best account i am able, as to the sorts of grass to be employed in this business; and having, in my former communications, given you specimens of the plat wrought from the several sorts of straw, i might here close my letter; but as it may be useful to speak of _the expense_ of cutting and bleaching, i shall trouble you with a few words relating to it. if there were a field of _ray-grass_, or of _crested dog's-tail_, or any other good sort, and nothing else growing with it, the expense of _cutting_ would be very little indeed, seeing that the _scythe_ or _reap-hook_ would do the business at a great rate. doubtless there _will be_ such fields; but even if the grass have to be cut by the handful, my opinion is, that the expense of cutting and bleaching would not exceed _fourpence_ for straw enough to make a large bonnet. i should be willing to contract to supply straw, at this rate, for half a million of bonnets. the _scalding_ must constitute a considerable part of the expense; because there must be _fresh water_ for every parcel of grass that you put in the tub. when water has scalded one parcel of cold grass, it will not scald another parcel. besides, the scalding draws out the _sweet matter_ of the grass, and makes the water the colour of that horrible stuff called london porter. it would be very good, by-the-by, to give to pigs. many people give _hay-tea_ to pigs and calves; and this is _grass-tea_. to scald a large quantity, therefore would require means not usually at hand, and the scalding is an essential part of the business. perhaps, in a large and convenient farm-house, with a good brewing copper, good fuel and water handy, four or five women might scald a wagon load in a day; and a wagon would, i think, carry straw enough (in the rough) to furnish the means of making a thousand bonnets. however, the scalding _might_ take place _in the field itself_, by means of a portable boiler, especially if water were at hand; and perhaps it would be better to carry the water to the field than to carry the grass to the farm-house, for there must be _ground to lay it out upon the moment it has been scalded_, and no ground can be so proper as the newly-mowed ground where the grass has stood. the _space_, too, must be _large_, for any considerable quantity of grass. as to all these things, however, the best and cheapest methods will soon be discovered when people set about the work with a view to profit. q.--the society will want nothing from me, nor from any-body else, to convince it of the importance of this matter; but i cannot, in concluding these communications to you, sir, refrain from making an observation or two on the consequences likely to arise out of these inquiries. the manufacture is alone of considerable magnitude. not less than about _five millions_ of persons in this kingdom have a dress which consists partly of manufactured straw; and a large part, and all the most expensive part, of the articles thus used, now come from abroad. in cases where you can get from abroad any article at _less expense than you can get it at home_, the wisdom of fabricating that article at home may be doubted. but, in this case, you get the raw material by labour performed at home, and the cost of that labour is not nearly so great as would be the cost of the mere carriage of the straw from a foreign country to this. if our own people had all plenty of employment, and that too more profitable to them and to the country than the turning of a part of our own grass into articles of dress, then it would be advisable still to import leghorn bonnets; but the facts being the reverse, it is clear, that whatever money, or money's worth things, be sent out of the country, in exchange for leghorn bonnets, is, while we have the raw material here for next to nothing, just so much thrown away. the italians, it may be said, take some of our manufactures in exchange; and let us suppose, for the purpose of illustration, that they take cloth from yorkshire. stop the exchange between leghorn and yorkshire, and, does yorkshire _lose part of its custom_? no: for though those who make the bonnets out of english grass, prevent the leghorners from buying yorkshire cloth, they, with the money which they now get, instead of its being got by the leghorners, buy the yorkshire cloth themselves; and they wear this cloth too, instead of its being worn by the people of italy; ay, sir, and many, now in rags, will be well clad, if the laudable object of the society be effected. besides this, however, why should we not _export_ the articles of this manufacture? to america we certainly should; and i should not be at all surprised if we were to export them to leghorn itself. r.--notwithstanding all this, however, if the manufacture were of a description to require, in order to give it success, the _collecting of the manufacturers together in great numbers_, i should, however great the wealth that it might promise, never have done any thing to promote its establishment. the contrary is happily the case: here all is not only performed _by hand_, but by hand _singly_, without any combination of hands. here there is no power of machinery or of chemistry wanted. all is performed out in the open fields, or sitting in the cottage. there wants no coal mines and no rivers to assist; no water-powers nor powers of fire. no part of the kingdom is unfit for the business. every-where there are grass, water, sun, and women and children's fingers; and these are all that are wanted. but, the great thing of all is this; that, to obtain the materials for the making of this article of dress, at once so gay, so useful, and in some cases so expensive, there requires not _a penny of capital_. many of the labourers now make their own straw hats to wear in summer. poor rotten things, made out of straw of ripened grain. with what satisfaction will they learn that straw, twenty times as durable, to say nothing of the beauty, is to be got from every hedge? in short when the people are well and clearly informed of the facts, which i have through you, sir, had the honour to lay before the society, it is next to impossible that the manufacture should not become general throughout the country. in every labourer's house a pot of water can be boiled. what labourer's wife cannot, in the summer months, find time to cut and bleach grass enough to give her and her children work for a part of the winter? there is no necessity for all to be _platters_. some may cut and bleach only. others may prepare the straw, as mentioned in paragraph l. of this letter. and doubtless, as the farmers in hertfordshire now sell their straw to the platters, grass collectors and bleachers and preparers would do the same. so that there is scarcely any country labourer's family that might not derive some advantage from this discovery; and, while i am convinced that this consideration has been by no means over-looked by the society, it has been, i assure you, the great consideration of all with, sir, your most obedient and most humble servant, wm. cobbett. . in the last edition, this closing part of the work, relative to the straw plat, was not presented to the public as a thing which admitted of no alteration; but, on the contrary, it was presented to the public with the following concluding remark: "in conclusion i have to observe, that i by no means send forth this essay as containing opinions and instructions that are to undergo no alteration. i am, indeed, endeavouring to teach others; but i am myself only a learner. experience will, doubtless, make me much more perfect in a knowledge of the several parts of the subject; and the fruit of this experience i shall be careful to communicate to the public." i now proceed to make good this promise. experience has proved that very beautiful and very fine plat can be made of the straw of divers kinds of _grass_. but the most ample experience has also proved to us that it is to the straw of _wheat_, that we are to look for a manufacture to supplant the leghorn. this was mentioned as a strong suspicion in my former edition of this work. and i urged my readers to sow wheat for the purpose. the fact is now proved beyond all contradiction, that the straw of wheat or rye, but particularly of wheat, is the straw for this purpose. _finer_ plat may be made from the straw of grass than can possibly be made from the straw of wheat or rye: but the grass plat is, all of it, more or less _brittle_; and none of it has the beautiful and uniform colour of the straw of wheat. since the last edition of this work, i have received packets of the straw _from tuscany_, all of _wheat_; and, indeed, i am _convinced_ that no other straw is any-thing like so well calculated for the purpose. wheat straw bleaches better than any other. it has that fine, pale, golden colour which no other straw has; it is much more simple, more pliant than any other straw; and, in short, this is the material. i did not urge in vain. a good quantity of wheat was sowed for this purpose. a great deal of it has been well harvested; and i have the pleasure to know that several hundreds of persons are now employed in the platting of straw. one more year; one more crop of wheat; and another leghorn bonnet will never be imported in england. some great errors have been committed in the sowing of the wheat, and in the cutting of it. i shall now, therefore, availing myself of the experience which i have gained, offer to the public some observations on the _sort of wheat_ to be sowed for this purpose; on the _season_ for sowing; on the _land_ to be used for the purpose; on the _quantity of seed_, and the _manner_ of sowing: on the _season_ for cutting; on the manner of _cutting_, _bleaching_, and _housing_; on the _platting_; on the _knitting_, and on the _pressing_. . the sort of wheat. the leghorn plat is all made of the straw of the spring wheat. this spring wheat is so called by us, because it is sowed in the spring, at the same time that barley is sowed. the botanical name of it is triticum Ã�stivum. it is a small-grained bearded wheat. it has very fine straw; but experience has convinced me, that the little brown-grained winter wheat is just as good for the purpose. in short, any wheat will do. i have now in my possession specimens of plat made of both winter and spring wheat, and i see no difference at all. i am decidedly of opinion that the winter wheat is as good as the spring wheat for the purpose. i have plat, and i have straw both now before me, and the above is the result of my experience. . the land proper for the growing of wheat. the object is to have the straw as small as we can get it. the land must not, therefore, be too rich; yet it ought not to be _very poor_. if it be, you get the straw of no length. i saw an acre this year, as beautiful as possible, sowed upon a light loam, which bore last year a fine crop of potatoes. the land ought to be perfectly clean, at any rate; so that, when the crop is taken off, the wheat straw may not be mixed with weeds and grass. . season for sowing. this will be more conveniently stated in paragraph . . quantity of seed and manner of sowing. when first this subject was started in , i said, in the register, that i would engage to grow as fine straw in england as the italians could grow. i recommended then, as a first guess, _fifteen_ bushels of wheat to the acre. since that, reflection told me that that was not quite enough. i therefore recommended _twenty_ bushels to the acre. upon the beautiful acre which i have mentioned above, eighteen bushels, i am told, were sowed; fine and beautiful as it was, i think it would have been better if it had had twenty bushels; twenty bushels, therefore, is what i recommend. you must sow broad cast, of course, and you must take great pains to cover the seed well. it must be a good even-handed seedsman, and there must be very nice covering. . season for cutting. now, mind, it is fit to cut in just about one week _after the bloom has dropped_. if you examine the ear at that time, you will find the grain just beginning to be formed, and that is precisely the time to cut the wheat: the straw has then got its full substance in it. but i must now point out a very material thing. it is by no means desirable to have _all_ your wheat _fit to cut at the same time_. it is a great misfortune, indeed, so to have it. if fit to cut altogether, it ought to be cut all at the same time; for supposing you to have an acre, it will require a fortnight or three weeks to cut it and bleach it, unless you have a very great number of hands, and very great vessels to prepare water in. therefore, if i were to have an acre of wheat for this, purpose, and were to sow all spring wheat, i would sow a twelfth part of the acre every week from the first week in march to the last week in may. if i relied partly upon winter wheat, i would sow some every month, from the latter end of september to march. if i employed the two sorts of wheat, or indeed if i employed only the spring wheat, the triticum Ã�stivum, i should have some wheat fit to cut in june, and some not fit to cut till september. i should be sure to have a fair chance as to the weather. and, in short, it would be next to impossible for me to fail of securing a considerable part of my crop. i beg the reader's particular attention to the contents of this paragraph. . manner of cutting the wheat. it is cut by a little reap-hook, close to the ground as possible. it is then tied in little sheaves, with two pieces of string, one near the butt, and the other about half-way up. this little bundle or sheaf ought to be six inches through at the butt, and no more. it ought not to be tied too tightly, lest the scalding should not be perfect. . manner of bleaching. the little sheaves mentioned in the last paragraph are carried to a brewing mash, vat, or other tub. you must not put them into the tub in too large a quantity, lest the water get chilled before it get to the bottom. pour on scalding water till you cover the whole of the little sheaves, and let the water be a foot above the top sheaves. when the sheaves have remained thus a full quarter of an hour, take them out with a prong, lay them in a clothes-basket, or upon a hurdle, and carry them to the ground where the bleaching is to be finished. this should be, if possible, a piece of grass land, where the grass is very short. take the sheaves, and lay some of them along in a row; untie them, and lay the straw along in that row as thin as it can possibly be laid. if it were possible, no one straw ought to have another lying upon it, or across it. if the sun be clear, it will require to lie twenty-four hours thus, then to be turned, and lie twenty-four hours on the other side. if the sun be not very clear, it must lie longer. but the numerous sowings which i have mentioned will afford you so many chances, so many opportunities of having fine weather, that the risk about weather would necessarily be very small. if wet weather should come, and if your straw remain out in it any length of time, it will be spoiled; but, according to the mode of sowing above pointed out, you really could stand very little chance of losing straw by bad weather. if you had some straw out bleaching, and the weather were to appear suddenly to be about to change, the quantity that you would have out would not be large enough to prevent you from putting it under cover, and keeping it there till the weather changed. . housing the straw. when your straw is nicely bleached, gather it up, and with the same string that you used to tie it when green, tie it up again into little sheaves. put it by in some room where there is no _damp_, and where mice and rats are not suffered to inhabit. here it is always ready for use, and it will keep, i dare say, four or five years very well. . the platting. this is now so well understood that nothing need be said about the manner of doing the work. but much might be said about the measures to be pursued by land-owners, by parish officers, by farmers, and more especially by gentlemen and ladies of sense, public spirit, and benevolence of disposition. the thing will be done; the manufacture will spread itself all over this kingdom; but the exertions of those whom i have here pointed out might hasten the period of its being brought to perfection. and i beg such gentlemen and ladies to reflect on the vast importance of such manufacture, which it is impossible to cause to produce any-thing but good. one of the great misfortunes of england at this day is, that the land has had _taken away from it those employments for its women and children which were so necessary to the well-being of the agricultural labourer_. the spinning, the carding, the reeling, the knitting; these have been all taken away from the land, and given to the lords of the loom, the haughty lords of bands of abject slaves. but let the landholder mark how the change has operated to produce his ruin. he must have the labouring man and the labouring boy; but, alas! he cannot have these, without having the man's wife, and the boy's mother, and little sisters and brothers. even nature herself says, that he shall have the wife and little children, or that he shall not have the man and the boy. but the lords of the loom, the crabbed-voiced, hard-favoured, hard-hearted, puffed-up, insolent, savage and bloody wretches of the north have, assisted by a blind and greedy government, taken all the employment away from the agricultural women and children. this manufacture of straw will form one little article of employment for these persons. it sets at defiance all the hatching and scheming of all the tyrannical wretches who cause the poor little creatures to die in their factories, heated to eighty-four degrees. there will need no inventions of watt; none of your horse powers, nor water powers; no murdering of one set of wretches in the coal mines, to bring up the means of murdering another set of wretches in the factories, by the heat produced from those coals; none of these are wanted to carry on this manufactory. it wants no _combination_ laws; none of the inventions of the hard-hearted wretches of the north. . the knitting. upon this subject, i have only to congratulate my readers that there are great numbers of english women who can now knit, plat together, better than those famous jewesses of whom we were told. . the pressing. bonnets and hats are pressed after they are made. i am told that a proper press costs pretty nearly a hundred pounds; but, then, that it will do prodigious deal of business. i would recommend to our friends in the country to teach as many children as they can to make the plat. the plat will be knitted in london, and in other considerable towns, by persons to whom it will be sold. it appears to me, at least, that this will be the course that the thing will take. however, we must leave this to time; and here i conclude my observations upon a subject which is deeply interesting to myself, and which the public in general deem to be of great importance. . postscript on _brewing_.--i think it right to say here, that, ever since i published the instructions for brewing by copper and by wooden utensils, the beer at _my own house_ has always been brewed precisely agreeable to the instructions contained in this book; and i have to add, that i never have had such good beer in my house in all my lifetime, as since i have followed that mode of brewing. my table-beer, as well as my ale, is always as clear as wine. i have had hundreds and hundreds of quarters of malt brewed into beer in my house. my people could always make it strong enough and sweet enough; but never, except by accident, could they make it clear. now i never have any that is not clear. and yet my utensils are all very small; and my brewers are sometimes one labouring man, and sometimes another. a man wants showing how to brew the first time. i should suppose that we use, in my house, about seven hundred gallons of beer every year, taking both sorts together; and i can positively assert, that there has not been one drop of bad beer, and indeed none which has not been most excellent, in my house, during the last two years, i think it is, since i began using the utensils, and in the manner named in this book. ice-houses. . first begging the reader to read again paragraph , i proceed here, in compliance with numerous requests to that effect, to describe, as clearly as i can, the manner of constructing the sort of ice-houses therein mentioned. in england, these receptacles of frozen water are, generally, _under ground_, and always, if possible, under the _shade of trees_, the opinion being, that the _main_ thing, if not the _only_ thing, is to keep away _the heat_. the heat is to be kept away certainly; but _moisture_ is the great enemy of _ice_; and how is this to be kept away either _under ground_, or under the shade of trees? abundant experience has proved, that no thickness of _wall_, that no cement of any kind, will effectually resist _moisture_. drops will, at times, be seen hanging on the under side of an arch of any thickness, and made of any materials, if it have earth over it, and even when it has the floor of a house over it; and wherever the moisture enters, the ice will quickly melt. . ice-houses should therefore be, in all their parts, _as dry_ as possible: and they should be so constructed, and the ice so deposited in them, as to ensure _the running away of the meltings_ as quickly as possible, whenever such meltings come. any-thing in way of drains or gutters, is too slow in its effect; and therefore there must be something that will not suffer the water proceeding from any melting, to remain an instant. . in the first place, then, the ice-house should stand in a place quite open to the _sun and air_; for whoever has travelled even but a few miles (having eyes in his head) need not be told how long that part of a road from which the sun and wind are excluded by trees, or hedges, or by any-thing else, will remain wet, or at least damp, after the rest of the road is even in a state to send up dust. . the next thing is to protect the ice against wet, or damp, from _beneath_. it should, therefore, stand on some spot _from which water would run in every direction_; and if the natural ground presents no such spot, it is no very great job to _make it_. . then come the _materials_ of which the house is to consist. these, for the reasons before-mentioned, must not be bricks, stones, mortar, nor earth; for these are all affected by the atmosphere; they will become _damp_ at certain times, and _dampness_ is the great destroyer of ice. the materials are _wood_ and _straw_. wood will not do; for, though not liable to become damp, it imbibes _heat_ fast enough; and, besides, it cannot be so put together as to shut out air sufficiently. straw is wholly free from the quality of becoming damp, except from water actually put upon it; and it can, at the same time, be placed on a roof, and on sides, to such a degree of thickness as to exclude the air in a manner the most perfect. the ice-house ought, therefore, to be made of _posts, plates, rafters, laths, and straw_. the best form is the _circular_; and the house, when made, appears as i have endeavoured to describe it in _fig. _ of the plate. . fig. , _a_, is the centre of a circle, the diameter of which is ten feet, and at this centre you put up a post to stand fifteen feet above the level of the ground, which post ought to be about nine inches through at the bottom, and not a great deal smaller at the top. great care must be taken that this post be _perfectly perpendicular_; for, if it be not, the whole building will be awry. . _b b b_ are fifteen posts, nine feet high, and six inches through at the bottom, without much tapering towards the top. these posts stand about two feet apart, reckoning from centre of post to centre of post, which leaves between each two a space of eighteen inches, _c c c c_ are fifty-four posts, five feet high, and five inches through at the bottom, without much tapering towards the top. these posts stand about two feet apart, from centre of post to centre of post, which leaves between each two a space of nineteen inches. the space between these two rows of posts is four feet in width, and, as will be presently seen, is to contain _a wall of straw_. . _e_ is a passage through this wall; _d_ is the outside door of the passage; _f_ is the inside door; and the inner circle, of which _a_ is the centre, is the place in which the ice is to be deposited. . well, then, we have now got _the posts_ up; and, before we talk of the _roof_ of the house, or of the _bed_ for the ice, it will be best to speak about the making of the _wall_. it is to be made of _straw_, wheat-straw, or rye-straw, with no rubbish in it, and made very smooth by the hand as it is put in. you lay it _in very closely_ and very smoothly, so that if the wall were cut across, as at _g g_, in fig. (which fig. represents _the whole building cut down through the middle_, omitting the centre post,) the ends of the straws would present a compact face as they do after a cut of a chaff-cutter. but there requires something _to keep the straw from bulging out between the posts_. little stakes as big as your _wrist_ will answer this purpose. drive them into the ground, and fasten, at top, to the _plates_, of which i am now to speak. the plates are pieces of wood which go all round both the circles, and are _nailed on upon the tops of the posts_. their main business is to receive and sustain the _lower ends of the rafters_, as at _m m_ and _n n_ in fig. . but to the plates also the _stakes_ just mentioned must be fastened at top. thus, then, there will be this space of four feet wide, having, on each side of it, a row of posts and stakes, not more than about six inches from each other, to hold up, and to keep in its place, this wall of straw. [illustration: _fig. _, _fig. _, _fig. _] . next come the _rafters_, as from _s_ to _n_, fig. . carpenters best know what is the _number_ and what the _size_ of the rafters; but from _s_ to _m_ there need be only about half as many as from _m_ to _n_. however, carpenters know all about this. it is their every-day work. the roof is forty-five _degrees pitch_, as the carpenters call it. if it were even _sharper_, it would be none the worse. there will be about _thirty_ ends of rafters to lodge on the plate, as at _m_; and these cannot _all_ be fastened to the top of the centre-post rising up from _a_; but carpenters know how to manage this matter, so as to make all strong and safe. the _plate_ which goes along on the tops of the row of posts, _b b b_, must, of course, be put on in a somewhat sloping form; otherwise there would be a sort of _hip_ formed by the rafters. however, the thatch is to be so deep, that this may not be of much consequence. before the thatching begins, there are _laths_ to put upon the rafters. thatchers know all about this, and all that you have to do is, to take care that the thatcher _tie the straw on well_. the best way, in a case of such deep thatch, is to have _a strong man to tie for the thatcher_. . the roof is now _raftered_, and it is to receive a thatch of _clean_, _sound_, and well-prepared wheat or rye straw, four _feet thick_, as at _h h_ in fig. . . the house having now got _walls_ and _roof_, the next thing is to make the _bed_ to receive the ice. this bed is the area of the circle of which _a_ is the centre. you begin by laying on the ground _round logs_, eight inches through, or thereabouts, and placing them across the area, leaving spaces between them of about a foot. then, _crossways on them_, poles about four inches through, placed at six inches apart. then, _crossways on them_, other poles, about two inches through, placed at three inches apart. then, _crossways on them_, rods as thick as your finger, placed at an inch apart. then upon these, small, clean, dry, last-winter-cut _twigs_, to the thickness of about two inches; or, instead of these twigs, good, clean, strong _heath_, free from grass and moss, and from rubbish of all sorts. . this is the _bed_ for the ice to lie on; and as you see, the top of the bed will be seventeen inches from the ground. the pressure of the ice may, perhaps, bring it to fourteen, or to thirteen. upon this bed the ice is put, broken and pummelled, and beaten down together in the usual manner. . having got the bed filled with ice, we have next to _shut it safely up_. as we have seen, there is a passage (_e_). two feet wide is enough for this passage; and, being as long as the wall is thick, it is of course, four feet long. the use of the passage is this: that you may have _two doors_, so that you may, in hot or damp weather, shut the outer door, while you have the inner door open. this inner door may be of hurdle-work, and straw, and covered, on one of the sides, with sheep-skins with the _wool on_, so as to keep out the external air. the outer-door, which must lock, must be of wood, made to shut very closely, and, besides, covered with skins like the other. at times of great danger from heat, or from wet, the whole of the passage may be filled with straw. the door (_p._ fig. ) should face the north, or between north and east. . as to the _size_ of the ice-house, that must, of course, depend upon the _quantity_ of ice that you may choose to have. a house on the above scale, is from _w_ to _x_ (fig. ) twenty-nine feet; from _y_ to _z_ (fig. ) nineteen feet. the area of the circle, of which _a_ is the centre, is ten feet in diameter, and as this area contains seventy-five superficial feet, you will, if you put ice on the bed to the height of only five feet, (and you _may_ put it on to the height of seven feet from the top of the bed,) you will have _three hundred and seventy-five cubic feet of ice_; and, observe, a cubic foot of ice will, when broken up, fill much more than a _winchester bushel_: what it may do as to an "imperial bushel," engendered like greek loan commissioners, by the unnatural heat of "prosperity," god only knows! however, i do suppose, that, without making any allowance for the "_cold_ fit," as dr. baring calls it, into which "_late_ panic" has brought us; i do suppose, that even the scorching, the burning dog-star of "imperial prosperity;" nay, that even dives himself, would hardly call for more than two bushels of ice in a day; for more than two bushels a day it would be, unless it were used in cold as well as in hot weather. . as to the _expense_ of such a house, it could, in the country, not be much. none of the posts, except the main or centre-post, need be _very straight_. the other posts might be easily culled from tree-lops, destined for fire-wood. the straw would _make all straight_. the _plates_ must of necessity be short pieces of wood; and, as to the _stakes_, the _laths_, and the _logs_, _poles_, _rods_, _twigs_, and _heath_, they would not all cost _twenty shillings_. the straw is the principal article; and, in most places, even that would not cost more than two or three pounds. if it last many years, the price could not be an object; and if but a little while, it would still be nearly as good for litter as it was before it was applied to this purpose. how often the _bottom of the straw walls_ might want renewing i cannot say, but i know that the roof would with few and small repairs, last well for ten years. . i have said that the interior row of posts is to be nine feet high, and the exterior row five feet high. i, in each case, mean, _with the plate inclusive_. i have only to add, that by way of superabundant precaution against bottom wet, it will be well to make a sort of _gutter_, to receive the drip from the roof, and to carry it away as soon as it falls. . now, after expressing a hope that i shall have made myself clearly understood by every reader, it is necessary that i remind him, that i do not pretend to pledge myself for the complete success, nor for any success at all, of this mode of making ice-houses. but, at the same time, i express my firm belief, that complete success would attend it; because it not only corresponds with what i have seen of such matters; but i had the details from a gentleman who had ample experience to guide him, and who was a man on whose word and judgment i placed a perfect reliance. he advised me to erect an ice-house; but not caring enough about _fresh meat_ and _fish_ in summer, or at least not setting them enough above "_prime pork_" to induce me to take any trouble to secure the former, i never built an ice-house. thus, then, i only communicate that in which i believe; there is, however, in all cases, this comfort, that if the thing fail as an ice-house, it will serve all generations to come as a model for a pig-bed. addition. _kensington, nov. th, ._ mangel wurzel. . this last summer, i have proved that, as keep for cows, mangel wurzel is preferable to swedish turnips, whether as to quantity or quality. but there needs no other alteration in the book, than merely to read _mangel wurzel_ wherever you find _swedish turnip_; the time of sowing, the mode and time of transplanting, the distances, and the cultivation, all being the same; and the only difference being in the _application of the leaves_, and in _the time of harvesting_ the roots. . the leaves of the mangel wurzel are of great value, especially in dry summers. you begin, about the third week in august, to take off by a _downward pull_, the leaves of the plants; and they are excellent food for pigs and cows; only observe this, that, if given to cows, there must be, for each cow, _six pounds of hay a day_, which is not necessary in the case of the swedish turnips. these leaves last till the crop is taken up, which ought to be in the _first week of november_. the taking off of the leaves does good to the plants: new leaves succeed higher up; and the plant becomes _longer_ than it otherwise would be, and, of course, _heavier_. but, in taking off the leaves, you must not approach too near to the top. . when you take the plants up in november, you must cut off the _crowns_ and the remaining leaves; and they, again, are for cows and pigs. then you put the roots into some place to keep them from the frost; and, if you have no place under cover, put them in _pies_, in the same manner as directed for the swedish turnips. the roots will average in weight _lbs. each_. they may be given to cows _whole_, or to pigs either, and they are better than the swedish turnip for both animals; and they do not give any bad or strong taste to the milk and butter. but, besides this use of the mangel wurzel, there is another, with regard to pigs at least, of very great importance. the _juice_ of this plant has so much of _sweetness_ in it, that, in france, they make _sugar_ of it; and have used the sugar, and found it equal in goodness to west india sugar. many persons in england make _beer_ of this juice, and i have drunk of this beer, and found it very good. in short, the juice is most excellent for the mixing of moist food for pigs. i am now ( th nov. ) boiling it for this purpose. my copper holds seven strike-bushels; i put in three bushels of mangel wurzel cut into pieces two inches thick, and then fill the copper with water. i draw off as much of the liquor as i want to wet pollard, or meal, for little pigs or fatting-pigs, and the rest, roots and all, i feed the _yard-hogs_ with; and this i shall follow on till about the middle of may. . if you give boiled, or steamed, _potatoes_ to pigs, there wants some liquor to mix with the potatoes; for the water in which potatoes have been boiled is _hurtful_ to any animal that drinks it. but mix the potatoes with juice of mangel wurzel, and they make very good food for hogs of all ages. the mangel wurzel produces _a larger_ crop than the swedish turnip. cobbett's corn. . if you prefer _bread_ and _pudding_ to milk, butter, and meat, this corn will produce, on your forty rods, forty bushels, each weighing _lbs. at the least_; and more flour, in proportion, than the best white wheat. to make _bread_ with it you must use _two-thirds_ wheaten, or rye, flour; but in puddings this is not necessary. the puddings at my house are all made with this flour, except meat and fruit pudding; for the corn flour is not adhesive or _clinging_ enough to make paste, or crust. this corn is the very best for hog-fatting in the whole world. i, last april, sent parcels of the seed into several counties, to be given away to working men: and i sent them instructions for the cultivation, which i shall repeat here. . i will first describe this _corn_ to you. it is that which is sometimes called _indian corn_; and sometimes people call it indian wheat. it is that sort of corn which the disciples ate as they were going up to jerusalem on the sabbath-day. they gathered it in the fields as they went along and ate it green, they being "an hungered," for which you know they were reproved by the pharisees. i have written a treatise on this corn in a book which i sell for four shillings, giving a minute account of the qualities, the culture, the harvesting, and the various uses of this corn; but i shall here confine myself to what is necessary for a labourer to know about it, so that he may be induced to raise and may be enabled to raise enough of it in his garden to fat a pig of ten score. . there are a great many sorts of this corn. they all come from countries which are hotter than england. this sort, which my eldest son brought into england, is a dwarf kind, and is the only kind that i have known to ripen in this country: and i know that it will ripen in this country in any summer; for i had a large field of it in and ; and last year (my lease at my farm being out at michaelmas, and this corn not ripening till late in october) i had about two acres in my garden at kensington. within the memory of man there have not been three summers so cold as the last, one after another; and no one so cold as the last. yet my corn ripened perfectly well, and this you will be satisfied of if you be amongst the men to whom this corn is given from me. you will see that it is in the shape of the cone of a spruce fir; you will see that the grains are fixed round a stalk which is called the _cob_. these _stalks_ or _ears_ come out of the side of the plant, which has leaves like a flag, which plant grows to about three feet high, and has two or three and sometimes more, of these ears or bunches of grain. out of the top of the plant comes the tassel, which resembles the plumes of feathers upon a hearse; and this is the flower of the plant. . the grain is, as you will see, about the size of a large pea, and there are from two to three hundred of these grains upon the ear, or cob. in my treatise, i have shown that, in america, all the hogs and pigs, all the poultry of every sort, the greater part of the oxen, and a considerable part of the sheep, are fatted upon this corn; that it is the best food for horses; and that, when ground and dressed in various ways, it is used in bread, in puddings, in several other ways in families; and that, in short, it is the real staff of life, in all the countries where it is in common culture, and where the climate is hot. when used for poultry, the grain is rubbed off the cob. horses, sheep, and pigs, bite the grain off, and leave the cob; but horned cattle eat cob and all. . i am to speak of it to you, however, only as a thing to make you some bacon, for which use it surpasses all other grain whatsoever. when the grain is in the whole ear, it is called corn in the ear; when it is rubbed off the cob, it is called shelled corn. now, observe, ten bushels of shelled corn are equal, in the fatting of a pig, to fifteen bushels of barley; and fifteen bushels of barley, if properly ground and managed, will make a pig of ten score, if he be not too poor when you begin to fat him. observe that everybody who has been in america knows, that the finest hogs in the world are fatted in that country; and no man ever saw a hog fatted in that country in any other way than tossing the ears of corn over to him in the sty, leaving him to bite it off the ear, and deal with it according to his pleasure. the finest and solidest bacon in the world is produced in this way. . now, then, i know, that a bushel of shelled corn may be grown upon one single rod of ground sixteen feet and a half each way; i have grown more than that this last summer; and any of you may do the same if you will strictly follow the instructions which i am now about to give you. . late in march (i am doing it now,) or in the first fortnight of april, dig your ground up _very deep_, and let it lie rough till between the seventh and fifteenth of may. . then (in dry weather if possible) dig up the ground again, and make it smooth at top. draw drills with a line two feet apart, just as you do drills for peas; rub the grains off the cob; put a little very rotten and fine manure along the bottom of the drill; lay the grains along upon that six inches apart; cover the grain over with fine earth, so that there be about an inch and a half on the top of the grain; pat the earth down a little with the back of a hoe to make it lie solid on the grain. . if there be any danger of slugs, you must kill them before the corn comes up if possible: and the best way to do this is to put a little hot lime in a bag, and go very early in the morning, and shake the bag all round the edges of the ground and over the ground. doing this three or four times very early in a dewy morning, or just after a shower, will destroy all the slugs; and this ought to be done for all other crops as well as for that of corn. . when the corn comes up, you must take care to keep all birds off till it is two or three inches high; for the spear is so sweet, that the birds of all sorts are very apt to peck it off, particularly the doves and the larks and pigeons. as soon as it is fairly above ground, give the whole of the ground (in dry weather) a flat hoeing, and be sure to move all the ground close round the plants. when the weeds begin to appear again, give the ground another hoeing, but always in dry weather. when the plants get to be about a foot high or a little more, dig the ground between the rows, and work the earth up a little against the stems of the plants. . about the middle of august you will see the tassel springing up out of the middle of the plant, and the ears coming out of the sides. if weeds appear in the ground, hoe it again to kill the weeds, so that the ground may be always kept clean. about the middle of september you will find the grains of the ears to be full of milk, just in the state that the ears were at jerusalem when the disciples cropped them to eat. from this milky state, they, like the grains of wheat, grow hard; and as soon as the grains begin to be hard, you should cut off the tops of the corn and the long flaggy leaves, and leave the ears to ripen upon the stalk or stem. if it be a warm summer, they will be fit to harvest by the last of october; but it does not signify if they remain out until the middle of november or even later. the longer they stay out, the harder the grain will be. . each ear is covered in a very curious manner with a husk. the best way for you will be, when you gather in your crop to strip off the husks, to tie the ears in bunches of six or eight or ten, and to hang them up to nails in the walls, or against the beams of your house; for there is so much moisture in the cob that the ears are apt to heat if put together in great parcels. the room in which i write in london is now hung all round with bunches of this corn. the bunches may be hung up in a shed or stable for a while, and, when perfectly dry, they may be put into bags. . now, as to the mode of _using_ the corn; if for poultry, you must rub the grains off the cob; but if for pigs, give them the whole ears. you will find some of the ears in which the grain is still soft. give these to your pig first; and keep the hardest to the last. you will soon see how much the pig will require in a day, because pigs, more decent than many rich men, never eat any more than is necessary to them. you will thus have a pig; you will have two flitches of bacon, two pig's cheeks, one set of souse, two griskins, two spare-ribs, from both which i trust in god you will keep the jaws of the methodist parson; and if, while you are drinking a mug of your own ale, after having dined upon one of these, you drink my health, you may be sure that it will give you more merit in the sight of god as well as of man, than you would acquire by groaning the soul out of your body in responses to the blasphemous cant of the sleekheaded methodist thief that would persuade you to live upon potatoes. . you must be quite sensible that i cannot have any motive but your good in giving you this advice, other than the delight which i take and the pleasure which i derive from doing that good. you are all personally unknown to me: in all human probability not one man in a thousand will ever see me. you have no more power to show your gratitude to me than you have to cause me to live for a hundred years. i do not desire that you should deem this a favour received from me. the thing is worth your trying, at any rate. . the corn is off by the middle of november. the ground should then be well manured, and deeply dug, and planted with early york, or early dwarf cabbages, which will be _loaved_ in the _latter end of april_, and may be either sold or given to pigs, or cows, _before the time to plant the corn again_. thus you have two very large crops on the same ground in the same year. index. paragraph agur bees bread, making of brewing beer , _see also_ "postscript." brewing-machine brougham, mr. candles and rushes castlereagh's and mackintosh's oratory combination laws corn, cobbett cows, keeping cusar, mr. custom laws drennen, dr. dress, household goods, and fuel ducks economy, meaning of the term , education ellman, mr. , excise laws fowls geese goats and ewes hanning, mr. wm. hill, mr. hops ice-houses leghorn libel laws malthus, parson mangel wurzel mustard parks, mr. paul, saint peel's flimsy dresses pigeons pigs, keeping pitt's false money plat, english straw porter, how to make potatoes rabbits salting mutton and beef stanhope, lord swedish turnips turkeys walter's and stoddart's paragraphs walter scott's poems want, the parent of crime wakefield, mr. edward , wilberforce's potatoe-diet winchelsea, lord. woodhouse, miss yeast cobbett's poor man's friend; a defence of the rights of those who do the work, and fight the battles. cobbett's poor man's friend. number i. to the working classes of preston. _burghclere, hampshire, d august, ._ my excellent friends, . amongst all the new, the strange, the unnatural, the monstrous things that mark the present times, or, rather, that have grown out of the present system of governing this country, there is, in my opinion, hardly any thing more monstrous, or even so monstrous, as the language that is now become fashionable, relative to the condition and the treatment of that part of the community which are usually denominated the poor; by which word i mean to designate the persons who, from age, infirmity, helplessness, or from want of the means of gaining anything by labour, become destitute of a sufficiency of food or of raiment, and are in danger of perishing if they be not relieved. such are the persons that we mean when we talk of the poor; and, i repeat, that amongst all the monstrous things of these monstrous days, nothing is, in my opinion, so monstrous as the language which we now constantly hear relative to the condition and treatment of this part of the community. . nothing can be more common than to read, in the newspapers, descriptions the most horrible of the sufferings of _the poor_, in various parts of england, but particularly in the north. it is related of them, that they eat horse-flesh, grains, and have been detected in eating out of pig-troughs. in short, they are represented as being far worse fed and worse lodged than the greater part of the pigs. these statements of the _newspapers_ may be false, or, at least, only partially true; but, at a public meeting of rate-payers, at manchester, on the th of august, mr. baxter, the chairman, said, that some of the poor had been _starved to death_, and that _tens of thousands were upon the point of starving_; and, at the same meeting, mr. potter gave a detail, which showed that mr. baxter's general description was true. other accounts, very nearly official, and, at any rate, being of unquestionable authenticity, concur so fully with the statements made at the manchester meeting, that it is impossible not to believe, that a great number of thousands of persons are now on the point of perishing for want of food, and _that many have actually perished from that cause_; and that this has taken place, and is taking place, in england. . there is, then, no doubt of the existence of the disgraceful and horrid facts; but that which is as horrid as are the facts themselves, and even more horrid than those facts, is the cool and _unresentful_ language and manner in which the facts are usually spoken of. those who write about the misery and starvation in lancashire and yorkshire, never appear to think _that any body is to blame_, even when the poor die with hunger. the ministers ascribe the calamity to "_over-trading_;" the cotton and cloth and other master-manufacturers ascribe it to "_a want of paper-money_," or to the _corn-bill_; others ascribe the calamity to the _taxes_. these last are right; but what have these things to do with the treatment of the poor? what have these things to do with the horrid facts relative to the condition and starvation of english people? it is very true, that the enormous taxes which we pay on account of loans made to carry on the late unjust wars, on account of a great standing army in time of peace, on account of pensions, sinecures and grants, and on account of _a church_, which, besides, swallows up so large a part of the produce of the land and the labour; it is very true, that these enormous taxes, co-operating with the paper-money and its innumerable monopolies; it is very true, that _these enormous taxes_, thus associated, have produced the ruin in trade, manufactures and commerce, and have, of course, produced the _low wages_ and the _want of employment_; this is very true; but it is not less true, that, be wages or employment as they may, the poor are not to perish with hunger, or with cold, while the rest of the community have food and raiment more than the latter want for their own sustenance. the law of england says, that there shall be no person to suffer from want of food and raiment. it has placed _officers_ in every parish to see that no person suffer from this sort of want; and lest these officers should not do their duty, _it commands all the magistrates_ to hear the complaints of the poor, and to compel the officers to do their duty. the law of england has provided ample means of relief for the poor; for, it has authorized the officers, or overseers, to get from the rich inhabitants of the parish as much money as _is wanted_ for the purpose, without any limit as to amount; and, in order that the overseers may have no excuse of inability to make people pay, the law has armed them with powers of a nature the most efficacious and the most efficient and most prompt in their operation. in short, the language of the law, to the overseer, is this: "take care that no person suffer from hunger, or from cold; and that you may be sure not to fail of the means of obeying this my command, i give you, as far as shall be necessary for this purpose, full power over all the lands, all the houses, all the goods, and all the cattle, in your parish." to the justices of the peace the law says: "lest the overseer should neglect his duty; lest, in spite of my command to him, any one should suffer from hunger or cold, i command you to be ready to hear the complaint of every sufferer from such neglect; i command you to summon the offending overseer, and to compel him to do his duty." . such being the language of the law, is it not a monstrous state of things, when we hear it commonly and coolly stated, that many thousands of persons in england are _upon the point of starvation_; that _thousands will die of hunger and cold next winter_; that many have _already died of hunger_; and when we hear all this, unaccompanied with one word of _complaint against any overseer_, or any _justice of the peace_! is not this state of things perfectly monstrous? a state of things in which it appears to be taken for granted, that the law is nothing, when it is intended to operate as a protection to the poor! law is always law: if one part of the law may be, with impunity, set at defiance, why not another and every other part of the law? if the law which provides for the succour of the poor, for the preservation of their lives, may be, with impunity, set at defiance, why should there not be impunity for setting at defiance the law which provides for the security of the property and the lives of the rich? if you, in lancashire, were to read, in an account of a meeting in hampshire, that, here, the farmers and gentlemen were constantly and openly robbed; that the poor were daily breaking into their houses, and knocking their brains out; and that it was expected that great part of them would be killed very soon: if you, in lancashire were to hear this said of the state of hampshire, what would you say? say! why, you would say, to be sure, "where is the law; where are the constables, the justices, the juries, the judges, the sheriffs, and the hangmen? where can that _hampshire_ be? it, surely, never can be in old england. it must be some savage country, where such enormities can be committed, and where even those, who talk and who _lament_ the evils, never utter one word in the way of _blame_ of the perpetrators." and if you were called upon to pay taxes, or to make subscriptions in money, to furnish the means of protection to the unfortunate rich people in hampshire, would you not say, and with good reason, "no: what should we do this for? the people of hampshire have the same law that we have; they are under the same government; _let them duly enforce that law_; and then they will stand in no need of money from us to provide for their protection." . this is what common sense says would be _your_ language in such a case; and does not common sense say, that the people of hampshire, and of every other part of england, will thus think, when they are told of the sufferings, and the starvation, in lancashire and yorkshire! the report of the manchester ley-payers, which took place on the th of august, reached me in a friend's house in this little village; and when another friend, who was present, read, in the speeches of mr. baxter and mr. potter, that tens of thousands of lancashire people were _on the point of starvation_, and that many had already _actually died from starvation_; and when he perceived, that even those gentlemen uttered not a word of _complaint_ against either overseer or justices of the peace, he exclaimed: "what! are there _no poor-laws_ in lancashire? where, amidst all this starvation, is the overseer? where is the justice of the peace? surely that lancashire can never be _in england_?" . the observations of this gentleman are those which occur to every man of sense; when he hears the horrid accounts of the sufferings in the manufacturing districts; for, though we are all well aware, that the burden of the poor-rates presses, at this time, with peculiar weight on the land-owners and occupiers, and on owners and occupiers of other real property, in those districts, we are equally well aware, that those owners and occupiers _have derived great benefits_ from that vast population that now presses upon them. there is _land_ in the parish in which i am now writing, and belonging to the farm in the house of which i am, which land would not let for _s._ a statute acre; while land, not so good, would let, in any part of lancashire, near to the manufactories, at _s._ or _s._ a statute acre. the same may be said with regard to _houses_. and, pray, are the owners and occupiers, who have gained so largely by the manufacturing works being near their lands and houses; are they, _now_, to complain, if the vicinage of these same works causes a charge of rates _there_, heavier than exists _here_? are the owners and occupiers of lancashire to enjoy _an age of advantages_ from the labours of the spinners and the weavers; and are they, when a reverse comes, _to bear none of the disadvantages_? are they to make no sacrifices, in order to save from perishing those industrious and ever-toiling creatures, by the labours of whom their land and houses have been augmented in value, three, five, or perhaps tenfold? none but the most unjust of mankind can answer these questions in the affirmative. . but as _greediness_ is never at a loss for excuses for the hard-heartedness that it is always ready to practise, it is said, that _the whole of the rents_ of the land and the houses would not suffice for the purpose; that is to say, that if the poor rates were to be made so high as to leave the tenant no means of paying rent, even then some of the poor must go without a sufficiency of food. i have no doubt that, in particular instances, this would be the case. but for cases like this the law has amply provided; for, in every case of this sort, _adjoining parishes_ may be made to _assist_ the hard pressed parish; and if the pressure becomes severe on these adjoining parishes, those _next adjoining them_ may be made to assist; and thus the call upon adjoining parishes maybe extended till it reach _all over the county_. so good, so benignant, so wise, so foreseeing, and so effectual, is this, the very best of all our good old laws! this law or rather code of laws, distinguishes england from all the other countries in the world, _except the united states of america_, where, while hundreds of other english statutes have been abolished, this law has always remained in full force, this great law of mercy and humanity, which says, that _no human being that treads english ground shall perish for want of food and raiment_. for such poor persons as are _unable to work_, the law provides food and clothing; and it commands that _work_ shall be provided for such as are able to work, and _cannot otherwise get employment_. this law was passed more than _two hundred years_ ago. many attempts have been made to _chip it away_, and some have been made to destroy it altogether; but it still exists, and every man who does not wish to see general desolation take place, will do his best to cause it to be duly and conscientiously executed. . having now, my friends of preston, stated what the law is, and also the reasons for its honest enforcement in the particular case immediately before us, i will next endeavour to show you that it is founded in the law of nature, and that, were it not for the provisions of this law, people would, according to the opinions of the greatest lawyers, have _a right_ to _take_ food and raiment sufficient to preserve them from perishing; and that _such taking_ would be neither _felony_ nor _larceny_. this is a matter of the greatest importance; it is a most momentous question; for if it be settled in the affirmative--if it be settled that it is _not felony, nor larceny,_ to take other men's goods without their assent, and even against their will, when such taking is absolutely necessary to the preservation of life, how great, how imperative, is the duty of affording, if possible, _that relief which will prevent such necessity_! in other words, how imperative it is on all overseers and justices to obey the law with alacrity; and how weak are those persons who look to "_grants_" and "_subscriptions_," to supply the place of the execution of this, the most important of all the laws that constitute the basis of english society! and if this question be settled in the affirmative; if we find the most learned of lawyers and most wise of men, maintaining the affirmative of this proposition; if we find them maintaining, that it is neither _felony_ nor _larceny_ to take food, in case of _extreme necessity_, though without the assent, and even against the will of the owner, what are we to think of those (and they are not few in number nor weak in power) who, animated with the savage soul of the scotch _feelosophers_, would wholly abolish the poor-laws, or, at least, render them of little effect, and thereby constantly keep thousands exposed to this dire necessity! . in order to do justice to this great subject; in order to treat it with perfect fairness, and in a manner becoming of me and of you, i must take the authorities _on both sides_. there are some great lawyers who have contended that the starving man is still guilty of felony or larceny, if he take food to satisfy his hunger; but there are a greater number of other, and still greater, lawyers, who maintain the contrary. the general doctrine of those who maintain the right to take, is founded on the law of nature; and it is a saying as old as the hills, a saying in every language in the world, that "_self-preservation_ is the _first law_ of nature." the law of nature teaches every creature to prefer the preservation of its own life to all other things. but, in order to have a fair view of the matter before us, we ought to inquire how it came to pass, that the laws were ever made to punish men as criminals, for taking the victuals, drink, or clothing, that they might stand in need of. we must recollect, then, that there was a time when no such laws existed; when men, like the wild animals in the fields, took what they were able to take, if they wanted it. in this state of things, all the land and all the produce belonged to all the people _in common_. thus were men situated, when they lived under what is called the _law of nature_; when every one provided, as he could, for his self-preservation. . at length this state of things became changed: men entered into society; they made laws to restrain individuals from following, in certain cases, the dictates of their own will; they protected the weak against the strong; the laws secured men in possession of lands, houses, and goods, that were called theirs; the words mine and thine, which mean _my own_ and _thy own_, were invented to designate what we now call _a property_ in things. the law necessarily made it criminal in one man to take away, or to injure, the property of another man. it was, you will observe, even in this state of nature, always _a crime_ to do certain things against our neighbour. to kill him, to wound him, to slander him, to expose him to suffer from the want of food or raiment, or shelter. these, and many others, were crimes in the eye of the law of nature; but, to take share of a man's victuals or clothing; to go and insist upon sharing a part of any of the good things that he happened to have in his possession, could be _no crime_, because there was _no property_ in anything, except in man's body itself. now, civil society was formed for the _benefit_ of the whole. the whole gave up their natural rights, in order that every one might, for the future, enjoy his life in greater security. this civil society was intended to change the state of man _for the better_. before this state of civil society, the starving, the hungry, the naked man, had a right to go and provide himself with necessaries wherever he could find them. there would be sure to be some such necessitous persons in a state of civil society. therefore, when civil society was established, it is impossible to believe that it _had not in view some provision for these destitute persons_. it would be monstrous to suppose the contrary. the contrary supposition would argue, that fraud was committed upon the mass of the people in forming this civil society; for, as the sparks fly upwards, so will there always be destitute persons to some extent or other, in _every community_, and such there are to now a considerable extent, even in the united states of america; therefore, the formation of the civil society must have been fraudulent or tyrannical upon any other supposition than that it made provision, in some way or other, for destitute persons; that is to say, for persons unable, from some cause or other, to provide for themselves the food and raiment sufficient to preserve them from perishing. indeed, a provision for the destitute seems _essential to the lawfulness_ of civil society; and this appears to have been the opinion of blackstone, when, in the first book and first chapter of his commentaries on the laws of england, he says, "the law not only regards _life_ and _member_, and protects every man in the enjoyment of them, but also _furnishes him with every thing necessary for their support_. for there is no man so indigent or wretched, but he may _demand_ a supply _sufficient for all the necessaries of life_ from the more opulent part of the community, by means of the several statutes enacted for the relief of the poor; a humane provision _dictated_ by the _principles of society_." . no man will contend, that the main body of the people in any country upon earth, and of course in england, would have consented to abandon the rights of nature; to give up their right to enjoy all things in common; no man will believe, that the main body of the people would ever have given their assent to the establishing of a state of things which should make all the lands, and all the trees, and all the goods and cattle of every sort, private property; which should have shut out a large part of the people from having such property, and which should, at the same time, not have provided the means of preventing those of them, who might fall into indigence, from being _actually starved to death_! it is impossible to believe this. men never gave their assent to enter into society on terms like these. one part of the condition upon which men entered into society was, that care should be taken that no human being should perish from want. when they agreed to enter into that state of things, which would necessarily cause some men to be rich and some men to be poor; when they gave up that right, which god had given them, to live as well as they could, and to take the means wherever they found them, the condition clearly was, the "_principle of society_;" clearly was, as blackstone defines it, that the indigent and wretched should have a right to "_demand_ from the rich a supply _sufficient_ for all the _necessities_ of life." . if the society did not take care to act upon this principle; if it neglected to secure the legal means, of preserving the life of the indigent and wretched; then the society itself, in so far as that wretched person was concerned, ceased to have a legal existence. it had, as far as related to him, forfeited its character of legality. it had no longer any claim to his submission to its laws. his rights of nature returned: as far as related to him, the law of nature revived in all its force: that state of things in which all men enjoyed all things _in common_ was revived with regard to him; and he took, and he had a right to take, food and raiment, or, as blackstone expresses it, "a supply sufficient for all the necessities of life." for, if it be true, as laid down by this english lawyer, that the _principles_ of society; if it be true, that the very principles, or _foundations_ of society dictate, that the destitute person shall have a legal demand for a supply from the rich, sufficient for all the necessities of life; if this be true, and true it certainly is, it follows of course that the principles, that is, the base, or _foundation_, of society, is subverted, is gone; and that society is, in fact, no longer what it was intended to be, when the indigent, when the person in a state of extreme necessity, cannot, at once, obtain from the rich such sufficient supply: in short, we need go no further than this passage of blackstone, to show, that civil society is subverted, and that there is, in fact, nothing legitimate in it, when the destitute and wretched have no certain and legal resource. . but this is so important a matter, and there have been such monstrous doctrines and projects put forth by malthus, by the edinburgh reviewers, by lawyer scarlett, by lawyer nolan, by sturges bourne, and by an innumerable swarm of persons who have been giving before the house of commons what they call "_evidence_:" there have been such monstrous doctrines and projects put forward by these and other persons; and there seems to be such a lurking desire to carry the hostility to the working classes still further, that i think it necessary in order to show, that these english poor-laws, which have been so much calumniated by so many greedy proprietors of land; i think it necessary to show, that these poor-laws are the things which men of property, above all others, _ought to wish to see maintained_, seeing that, according to the opinions of the greatest and the wisest of men, they must suffer most in consequence of the abolition of those laws; because, by the abolition of those laws, the right given by the laws of nature would revive, and the destitute would _take_, where they now simply _demand_ (as blackstone expresses it) in the name of the law. there has been some difference of opinion, as to the question, whether it be _theft_ or _no theft_; or, rather, whether it be a _criminal act_, or _not a criminal act_, for a person, in a case of extreme necessity from want of food, to take food without the assent and even against the will, of the owner. we have, amongst our great lawyers, sir matthew hale and sir william blackstone, who contend (though as we shall see, with much feebleness, hesitation, and reservation,) that it _is theft_, notwithstanding the extremity of the want; but there are many, and much higher authorities, foreign as well as english, on the other side. before, however, i proceed to the hearing of these authorities, let me take a short view of _the origin of the poor laws in england_; for that view will convince us, that, though the present law was passed but a little more than two hundred years ago, there had been something to effect the same purpose ever since england had been called england. . according to the common law of england, as recorded in the mirrour of justices, a book which was written before the norman conquest; a book in as high reputation, as a law-book, as any one in england; according to this book, chapter st, section d, which treats of the "first constitutions made by the antient kings;" according to this work, provision was made for the sustenance of the poor. the words are these: "it was ordained, that the poor should be sustained by _parsons_, by _rectors_ of the church, and by the _parishioners_, so that _none of them die for want of sustenance_." several hundred years later, the canons of the church show, that when the church had become rich, it took upon itself the whole of the care and expense attending the relieving of the poor. these canons, in setting forth the manner in which the tithes should be disposed of, say, "let the priests set apart the first share for the building and ornaments of the church; let them distribute the _second to the poor and strangers, with their own hands, in mercy and humility_; and let them reserve the third part for themselves." this passage is taken from the canons of elfric, canon th. at a later period, when the tithes had, in some places, been appropriated to convents, acts of parliament were passed, compelling the impropriators to leave, in the hands of their vicar, a sufficiency for the maintenance of the poor. there were two or three acts of this sort passed, one particularly in the twelfth year of richard the second, chapter th. so that here we have the most ancient book on the common law; we have the canons of the church at a later period; we have acts of parliament at a time when the power and glory of england were at their very highest point; we have all these to tell us, that in england, from the very time that the country took the name, _there was always a legal and secure provision for the poor, so that no person, however aged, infirm, unfortunate, or destitute, should suffer from want_. . but, my friends, a time came when the provision made by the common law, by the canons of the church, and by the acts of the parliament coming in aid of those canons; a time arrived, when all these were rendered null by what is called the protestant reformation. this "reformation," as it is called, sweeped away the convents, gave a large part of the tithes to greedy courtiers, put parsons with wives and children into the livings, and left the poor without any resource whatsoever. this terrible event, which deprived england of the last of her possessions on the continent of europe, reduced the people of england to the most horrible misery; from the happiest and best fed and best clad people in the world, it made them the most miserable, the most wretched and ragged of creatures. at last it was seen that, in spite of the most horrible tyranny that ever was exercised in the world, in spite of the racks and the gibbets and the martial law of queen elizabeth, those who had amassed to themselves the property out of which the poor had been formerly fed, were compelled to _pass a law to raise money, by way of tax, for relieving the necessities of the poor_. they had passed many acts before the forty-third year of the reign of this queen elizabeth; but these acts were all found to be ineffectual, till, at last, in the forty-third year of the reign: of this tyrannical queen, and in the year of our lord , that famous act was passed, which has been in force until this day; and which, as i said before, is still in force, notwithstanding all the various attempts of folly and cruelty to get rid of it. . thus, then, the present poor-laws are _no new thing_. they are no _gift_ to the working people. you hear the greedy landowners everlastingly complaining against this law of queen elizabeth. they pretend that it was _an unfortunate_ law. they affect to regard it as a great innovation, seeing that no such law existed before; but, as i have shown, a better law existed before, having the same object in view. i have shown, that the "reformation," as it is called, had sweeped away that which had been secured to the poor by the common law, by the canons of the church, and by ancient acts of parliament. there was _nothing new_, then, in the way of benevolence towards the people, in this celebrated act of parliament of the reign of queen elizabeth; and the landowners would act wisely by holding their tongues upon the subject; or, if they be too noisy, one may look into their grants, and see if we cannot find something there to keep out the present parochial assessments. . having now seen _the origin_ of the present poor-laws, and the justice of their due execution, let us return to those authorities of which i was speaking but now, and an examination into which will show the extreme danger of listening to those projectors who would abolish the poor-laws; that is to say, who would sweep away that provision which was established in the reign of queen elizabeth, from a conviction that it was absolutely necessary to preserve the peace of the country and the lives of the people. i observed before that there has been some difference of opinion amongst lawyers as to the question, whether it be, or be not, _theft_, to take without his consent and against his will, the victuals of another, in order to prevent the taker from starving. sir matthew hale and sir william blackstone say that it _is theft_. i am now going to quote the several authorities on both sides, and it will be necessary for me to indicate the works which i quote from by the words, letters, and figures which are usually made use of in quoting from these works. some part of what i shall quote will be in latin: but i shall put nothing in that language of which i will not give you the translation. i beg you to read these quotations with the greatest attention; for you will find, at the end of your reading, that you have obtained great knowledge upon the subject, and knowledge, too, which will not soon depart from your minds. . i begin with sir matthew hale, (a chief justice of the court of king's bench in the reign of charles the second,) who, in his pleas of the crown, chap. ix., has the following passage, which i put in distinct paragraphs, and mark a, b, and c. . a. "some of the casuists, and particularly covarruvius, tom. i. _de furti et rapinæ restitutione_, § , , p. ; and grotius, _de jure belli, ac pacis_; lib. ii. cap. . § , tell us, that in case of extreme necessity, either of hunger or clothing, the _civil distributions of property cease_, and by a kind of tacit condition the _first community doth return_, and upon this those common assertions are grounded: '_quicquid necessitas cogit, defendit._' [whatever necessity calls for, it justifies.] '_necessitas est lex temporis et loci._' [necessity is the law of time and place.] '_in casu extremæ necessitatis omnia sunt communia._' [in case of extreme necessity, all things are _in common_;] and, therefore, in such case _theft is no theft_, or at least not punishable as theft; and some even of our own lawyers have asserted the same; and very bad use hath been made of this concession by some of the _jesuitical_ casuists of _france_, who have thereupon advised apprentices and servants to rob their masters, where they have been indeed themselves in want of necessaries, of clothes or victuals; whereof, they tell them, they themselves are the competent judges; and by this means let loose, as much as they can, by their doctrine of probability, all the ligaments of property and civil society." . b. "i do, therefore, _take it_, that, where persons live under the same civil government, _as here in england_, that rule, at least by the laws of _england_, is false; and, therefore, if a person being _under necessity for want of victuals_, or clothes, shall, upon that account, clandestinely, and '_animo furandi_,' [with intent to steal,] steal another man's goods, it is felony, and a crime, by the laws of _england_, punishable with death; although, the judge before whom the trial is, in this case (as in other cases of extremity) be by the laws of _england_ intrusted with a power to reprieve the offender, before or after judgment, in order to the obtaining the king's mercy. for, st, men's properties would be under a strange insecurity, being laid open to other men's necessities, whereof no man can possibly judge, but the party himself. and, nd, because by the laws of this kingdom [here he refers to the eliz. cap. ] sufficient provision is made for the supply of such necessities by collections for the poor, and by the power of the civil magistrate. consonant hereunto seems to be the law even among the jews; if we may believe the wisest of kings. proverbs vi. , . '_men do not despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry, but if he be found, he shall restore seven-fold, he shall give all the substance of his house._' it is true, _death_ among them was not the penalty of theft, yet his necessity gave him _no exception_ from the ordinary punishment inflicted by their law upon that offence." . c. "indeed this rule, '_in casu extremæ necessitatis omnia sunt communia_,' does hold, in some measure, in some particular cases, where, by the tacit consent of nations, or of some particular countries or societies, it hath obtained. first, among the _jews_, it was lawful in case of hunger to pull ears of standing corn, and eat, (matt. xii. ;) and for one to pass through a vineyard, or olive-yard, to gather and eat without carrying away. deut. xxiii. , . second, by the _rhodian_ law, and the common-maritime custom, if the common provision for the ship's company fail, the master may, under certain temperaments, _break open the private chests of the mariners or passengers_, and _make a distribution_ of that particular and private provision for the _preservation of the ship's company_." vide consolato del mare, cap. . le customes de la mere, p. . . sir william blackstone agrees, in substance, with hale; but he is, as we shall presently see, much more eager to establish his doctrine; and, we shall see besides, that he has not scrupled to be guilty of misquoting, and of very shamefully _garbling_, _the scripture_, in order to establish his point. we shall find him flatly contradicting the laws of england; but, he might have spared the holy scriptures, which, however, he has not done. . to return to hale, you see he is compelled to begin with acknowledging that there are great authorities against him; and he could not say that grotius was not one of the most virtuous as well as one of the most learned of mankind. hale does not know very well what to do with those old sayings about the justification which hard necessity gives: he does not know what to do with the maxim, that, "in case of extreme necessity all things _are owned in common_." he is exceedingly puzzled with these ancient authorities, and flies off into prattle rather than argument, and tells us a story about "_jesuitical_" casuists in france, who advised apprentices and servants to rob their masters, and that they thus "let loose the ligaments of property and civil society." i fancy that it would require a pretty large portion of that sort of faith which induced this protestant judge to send witches and wizards to the gallows; a pretty large portion of this sort of faith, to make us believe, that the "_casuists_ of france," who, doubtless, _had servants of their own_, would teach servants to rob their masters! in short, this prattle of the judge seems to have been nothing more than one of those protestant effusions which were too much in fashion at the time when he wrote. . he begins his second paragraph, or paragraph b., by saying, that he "_takes it_" to be so and so; and then comes another qualified expression; he talks of civil government "_as here in england_." then he says, that the rule of grotius and others, against which he has been contending, "he takes _to be false_, at _least_," says he, "_by the laws of england_." after he has made all these qualifications, he then proceeds to say that _such taking is theft_; that it is _felony_; and it is a crime which the laws of england punish with _death_! but, as if stricken with remorse at putting the frightful words upon paper; as if feeling shame for the law and for england itself, he instantly begins to tell us, that the judge who presides at the trial is intrusted, "_by the laws of england_," with power to _reprieve_ the offender, in order to the obtaining of the _king's mercy_! thus he softens it down. he will have it to be law to put a man to death in such a case; but he is ashamed to leave his readers to believe, that an english judge and an english king would obey this law! . let us now hear the reasons which he gives for this which he pretends to be law. his first reason is, that there would be no security for property, if it were laid open to the necessities of the indigent, of which necessities _no man but the takers themselves could be the judge_. he talks of a "strange insecurity;" but, upon my word, no insecurity could be half so strange as this assertion of his own. blackstone has just the same argument. "nobody," says he, "would be a judge of the wants of the taker, but the taker himself;" and blackstone, copying the very words of hale, talks of the "strange insecurity" arising from this cause. now, then, suppose a man to come into my house, and to take away a bit of bacon. suppose me to pursue him and seize him. he would tell me that he was starving for want of food. i hope that the bare statement would induce me, or any man in the world that i do call or ever have called my friend, to let him go without further inquiry; but, if i chose to push the matter further, there would be _the magistrate_. if he chose to commit the man, would there not be a _jury_ and a _judge_ to receive evidence and to ascertain _whether the extreme necessity existed or not_? . aye, says judge hale; but i have another reason, a devilish deal better than this, "and that is, the act of the d year of the reign of queen elizabeth!" aye, my old boy, that is a thumping reason! "_sufficient provision_ is made for the supply of such necessities by _collections for the poor_, and by the _power of the civil magistrate_." aye, aye! that is the reason; and, mr. sir matthew hale, there is _no other reason_, say what you will about the matter. there stand the overseer and the civil magistrate to take care that such necessities be provided for; and if they did not stand there for that purpose, the law of nature would be revived in behalf of the suffering creature. . hale, not content however with this act of queen elizabeth, and still hankering after this hard doctrine, furbishes up a bit of scripture, and calls solomon the _wisest of kings_ on account of these two verses which he has taken. hale observes, indeed, that the jews did not put thieves to _death_; but, to restore seven-fold was the _ordinary punishment_, inflicted by their law, for theft; and here, says he, we see, that the extreme necessity _gave no exemption_. this was a piece of such flagrant sophistry on the part of hale, that he could not find in his heart to send it forth to the world without a qualifying observation; but even this qualifying observation left the sophistry still so shameful, that his editor, mr. emlyn, who published the work under authority of the house of commons, did not think it consistent with his reputation to suffer this passage to go forth unaccompanied with the following remark: "but their (the jews') ordinary punishment being entirely _pecuniary_, could affect him _only when he was found in a condition to answer it_; and therefore the same reasons which could justify that, can, by no means, be extended to a _corporal_, much less to a _capital_ punishment." certainly: and this is the fair interpretation of these two verses of the proverbs. puffendorf, one of the greatest authorities that the world knows anything of, observes, upon the argument built upon this text of scripture, "it may be objected, that, in proverbs, chap. vi. verses , , he is called a _thief_, and pronounced obnoxious to the penalty of theft, who steals to satisfy his hunger; but whoever closely views and considers that text will find that the thief there censured is neither in such _extreme necessity_ as we are now supposing, nor seems to have fallen into his needy condition merely by ill fortune, without his own idleness or default: for the context implies, that he had _a house and goods sufficient_ to make seven-fold restitution; which he might have either sold or pawned; a chapman or creditor being easily to be met with in times of plenty and peace; for we have no grounds to think that the fact there mentioned is supposed to be committed, either in time of war, or upon account of the extraordinary price of provisions." . besides this, i think it is clear that these two verses of the proverbs do not apply to _one and the same person_; for in the first verse it is said, that men _do not despise_ a thief if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry. how, then, are we to reconcile this with _morality_? are we not to despise a _thief_? it is clear that the word _thief_ does not apply to the first case; but to the second case only; and that the distinction was here made for the express purpose of preventing the man who took food to relieve his hunger _from being confounded with the thief_. upon any other interpretation, it makes the passage contain nonsense and immorality; and, indeed, grotius says that the latter text does not apply to the person mentioned in the former. the latter text could not mean a man taking food from necessity. it is _impossible_ that it can mean that; because the man who was starving for want of food _could not have_ seven-fold; _could not have_ any substance in his house. but what are we to think of judge blackstone, who, in his book iv., chap. , really _garbles_ these texts of scripture. he clearly saw the effect of the expression, "men do not despise;" he saw what an awkward figure these words made, coming before the words "a thief;" he saw that, with these words in the text, he could never succeed in making his readers believe that a man ought to be _hanged_ for taking food to save his life. he clearly saw that he could not make men believe that _god had said this_, unless he could, somehow or other, get rid of those words about not despising the thief that took victuals when he was hungry. being, therefore, very much pestered and annoyed by these words about not despising, what does he do but fairly _leave them out_! and not only leave them out, but leave out a part of both the verses, keeping in that part of each that suited him, and no more; nay, further, leaving out one word, and putting in another, giving a sense to the whole which he knew well never was intended. he states the passage to be this: "if a thief steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry, _he_ shall restore seven-fold, _and_ shall give all the substance of his house." no broomstick that ever was handled would have been too heavy or too rough for the shoulders of this dirty-souled man. hale, with all his desire to make out a case in favour of severity, has given us the words fairly: but this shuffling fellow; this smooth-spoken and mean wretch, who is himself _thief_ enough, god knows, if stealing other men's thoughts and words constitute theft; this intolerably mean reptile has, in the first place, left out the words "_men do not despise_:" then he has left out the words at the beginning of the next text, "_but if he be found_." then in place of the "_he_," which comes before the words "_shall give_" he puts the word "_and_;" and thus he makes the whole apply to the poor creature that takes to satisfy his soul when he is hungry! he leaves out every mitigating word of the scripture; and, in his reference, he represents the passage to be in _one_ verse! perhaps, even in the history of the conduct of crown-lawyers, there is not to be found mention of an act so coolly bloody-minded as this. it has often been said of this blackstone, that he not only _lied_ himself, but _made others lie_; he has here made, as far as he was able, a liar of king solomon himself: he has wilfully garbled the holy scripture; and that, too, for the manifest purpose of justifying cruelty in courts and judges; for the manifest purpose of justifying the most savage oppression of the poor. . after all, hale has not the courage to send forth this doctrine of his, without allowing that the case of extreme necessity does, "in _some measure_," and "in _particular cases_," and, "by the _tacit_ or _silent_ consent of nations," _hold good_! what a crowd of qualifications is here! with what reluctance he confesses that which all the world knows to be true, that the disciples of jesus christ pulled off, without leave, the ears of standing corn, and ate them "_being an hungered_." and here are two things to observe upon. in the first place this _corn_ was not what _we call corn_ here in england, or else it would have been very droll sort of stuff to crop off and eat. it was what the americans call _indian corn_, what the french call _turkish corn_; and what is called _corn_ (as being far surpassing all other in excellence) in the eastern countries where the scriptures were written. about four or five ears of this corn, of which you strip all the husk off in a minute, are enough for a man's breakfast or dinner; and by about the middle of august this corn is just as wholesome and as efficient as bread. so that, this was _something_ to take and eat without the owner's leave; it was something of value; and observe, that the pharisees, though so strongly disposed to find fault with everything that was done by jesus christ and his disciples, did not find fault of their _taking_ the corn to eat; did not call them _thieves_; did not propose to punish them for _theft_; but found fault of them only for having _plucked the corn on the sabbath-day_! to pluck the corn was _to do work_, and these severe critics found fault of this working on the sabbath-day. then, out comes another fact, which hale might have noticed if he had chosen it; namely, that our saviour reminds the pharisees that "david and his companions, _being an hungered_, entered into the house of god, and did eat the show-bread, to eat which was unlawful in any-body but the priests." thus, that which would have been _sacrilege_ under any other circumstances; that which would have been one of the most _horrible of crimes against the law of god_, became no crime at all when committed by a person _pressed by hunger_. . nor has judge hale fairly interpreted the two verses of deuteronomy. he represents the matter thus: that, if you be _passing through_ a vineyard or an olive-yard you may gather and eat, without being deemed a thief. this interpretation would make an englishman believe that the scripture allowed of this taking and eating, only where there was a _lawful foot-way_ through the vineyard. this is a very gross misrepresentation of the matter; for if you look at the two texts, you will find, that they say that, "when thou _comest into_;" that is to say, when thou _enterest_ or _goest into_, "thy neighbour's vineyard, then thou mayest eat grapes thy fill at thine own pleasure, but thou shalt not put any in thy vessel;" that is to say, that you should not go and make wine in his vineyard and carry it away. then in case of the corn, precisely the same law is laid down. you may pluck with your _hand_; but not use the _hook_ or a _sickle_. nothing can be plainer than this: no distinction can be wiser, nor more just. hale saw the force of it; and therefore, as these texts made very strongly against him, he does not give them at full length, but gives us a misrepresenting abbreviation. . he had, however, too much regard for his reputation to conclude without acknowledging the right of seizing on the provisions of others _at sea_. he allows that private chests may be _broken open_ to prevent men from dying with hunger at sea. he does not stop to tell us why men's lives are _more precious_ on sea than on land. he does not attempt to reconcile these liberties given by the scripture, and by the maritime laws, with his own hard doctrine. in short, he brings us to this at last: that he will _not acknowledge_, that it is _not theft_ to take another man's goods, without his consent, under any circumstances; but, while he will not acknowledge this, he plainly leaves us to conclude, that no english judge and no english king will _ever punish_ a poor creature that takes victuals to save himself from perishing; and he plainly leaves us to conclude, that it is the _poor-laws_ of england; that it is their existence and _their due execution_, which deprive everybody in england of the right to take food and raiment in case of extreme necessity. . here i agree with him most cordially; and it is because i agree with him in this, that i deprecate the abominable projects of those who would annihilate the poor-laws, seeing that it is those very poor-laws which give, under all circumstances, really legal security _to property_. without them, cases must frequently arise, which would, according to the law of nature, according to the law of god, and as we shall see before we have done, according to the law of england, bring us into a state, or, at least, bring particular persons into a state, which as far as related to them, would cause the law of nature to _revive_, and to make _all things to be owned in common_. to adhere, then, to these poor-laws; to cause them to be duly executed, to prevent every encroachment upon them, to preserve them as the apple of our eye, are the duty of every englishman, as far as he has capacity so to do. . i have, my friends, cited, as yet, authorities only _on one side_ of this great subject, which it was my wish to discuss in this one number. i find that to be impossible without leaving undone much more than half my work. i am extremely anxious to cause this matter to be well understood, not only by the working classes, but by the owners of the land and the magistrates. i deem it to be of the greatest possible importance; and, while writing on it, i address myself to you, because i most sincerely declare that i have a greater respect for you than for any other body of persons that i know any thing of. the next number will conclude the discussion of the subject. the whole will lie in a very small compass. _sixpence_ only will be the cost of it. it will creep about, by degrees, over the whole of this kingdom. all the authorities, all the arguments, will be brought into this small compass; and i do flatter myself that many months will not pass over our heads, before all but misers and madmen will be ashamed to talk of abolishing the poor-rates and of supporting the needy by grants and subscriptions. i am, your faithful friend and most obedient servant, wm. cobbett. number ii. _bollitree castle, herefordshire, d sept. ._ my excellent friends, . in the last number, paragraph , i told you, that i would, in the present number, conclude the discussion of the great question of _theft, or no theft_, in a case of taking another's goods without his consent, or against his will, the taker being pressed by extreme necessity. i laid before you; in the last number, judge hale's doctrine upon the subject; and i there mentioned the foul conduct of blackstone, the author of the "commentaries on the laws of england." i will not treat this unprincipled lawyer, this shocking court sycophant; i will not treat him as he has treated king solomon and the holy scriptures; i will not garble, misquote, and belie him, as he garbled, misquoted, and belied them; i will give the whole of the passage to which i allude, and which my readers may find in the fourth book of his commentaries. i request you to read it with great attention; and to compare it, very carefully, with the passage that i have quoted from sir matthew hale, which you will find in paragraphs from to inclusive. the passage from blackstone is as follows: . "there is yet another case of necessity, which has occasioned great speculation among the writers upon general law; viz., whether a man in extreme want of food or clothing may justify stealing either, to relieve his present necessities. and this both grotius and puffendorf, together with _many other_ of the foreign jurists, hold in the affirmative; maintaining by many ingenious, humane, and plausible reasons, that in such cases the community of goods by a kind of tacit concession of society is revived. and some even of our own lawyers have held the same; though it seems to be an unwarranted doctrine, borrowed from the notions of some civilians: at least it is now antiquated, the law of england admitting no such excuse at present. and this its doctrine is agreeable not only to the sentiments of many of the wisest ancients, particularly cicero, who holds that 'suum cuique incommodum ferendum est, potius quam de alterius commodis detrahendum;' but also to the jewish law, as certified by king solomon himself: 'if a thief steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry, he shall restore seven-fold, and shall give all the substance of his house:' which was the ordinary punishment for theft in that kingdom. and this is founded upon the highest reason: for men's properties would be under a strange insecurity, if liable to be invaded according to the wants of others; of which wants no man can possibly be an adequate judge, but the party himself who pleads them. in this country especially, there would be a peculiar impropriety in admitting so dubious an excuse; for by our laws such a sufficient provision is made for the poor by the power of the civil magistrate, that it is impossible that the most needy stranger should ever be reduced to the necessity of thieving to support nature. this case of a stranger is, by the way, the strongest instance put by baron puffendorf, and whereon he builds his principal arguments; which, however they may hold upon the continent, where the parsimonious industry of the natives orders every one to work or starve, yet must lose all their weight and efficacy in england, where _charity is reduced to a system, and interwoven in our very constitution_. therefore, our laws ought by no means to be taxed with being _unmerciful_, for denying this privilege to the necessitous; especially when we consider, that the king, on the representation of his ministers of justice, hath a power to soften the law, and to extend mercy in cases of peculiar hardship. an advantage which is wanting in many states, particularly those which are democratical: and these have in its stead introduced and adopted, in the body of the law itself, a multitude of circumstances tending to alleviate its rigour. but the founders of our constitution thought it better to vest in the crown the power of pardoning peculiar objects of compassion, than to countenance and establish theft by one general undistinguishing law." . first of all, i beg you to observe, that this passage is merely _a flagrant act of theft_, committed upon judge hale; next, you perceive, that which i noticed in paragraph , a most base and impudent garbling of the scriptures. next, you see, that blackstone, like hale, comes, at last, to the _poor-laws_; and tells us that to take other men's goods without leave, is theft, _because_ "charity is here reduced to a system, and interwoven in our very constitution." that is to say, to relieve the necessitous; to prevent their suffering from want; completely to render starvation impossible, makes a part of our very constitution. "therefore, our laws ought by no means to be taxed with being _unmerciful_ for denying this privilege to the necessitous." pray mark the word _therefore_. you see, our laws, he says, are not to be taxed with being unmerciful in deeming the necessitous taker _a thief_. and _why_ are they not to be deemed unmerciful? because the laws provide effectual relief for the necessitous. it follows, then, of course, even according to blackstone himself, that if the constitution _had not_ provided this effectual relief for the necessitous, then the laws _would have been unmerciful_ in deeming the necessitous taker a thief. . but now let us hear what that grotius and that puffendorf say; let us hear what these great writers on the law of nature and of nations say upon this subject. blackstone has mentioned the names of them both; but he has not thought proper to notice their arguments, much less has he attempted to answer them. they are two of the most celebrated men that ever wrote; and their writings are referred to as high authority, with regard to all the subjects of which they have treated. the following is a passage from grotius, on war and peace, book ii., chap. . . "let us see, further, what common right there appertains to men in those things which have already become the property of individuals. some persons, perchance, may consider it strange to question this, as proprietorship seems to have absorbed all that right which arose out of a state of things in common. but it is not so. for, it is to be considered, _what was the intention of those who first introduced private property_, which we may suppose to have been such, as to deviate as little as possible from _natural equity_. for if even _written laws_ are to be construed in that sense, as far as it is practicable, much more so are _customs_, which are not fettered by the chains of writers.--hence it follows, first, that, in case of _extreme necessity_, the _pristine right of using things revives_, as much as if they had remained in common; because, in all human laws, as well as in the law of private property, _this case of extreme necessity appears to have been excepted_.--so, if the means of sustenance, as in case of a sea-voyage, should chance to fail, that which any individual may have, should be shared in common. and thus, a fire having broken out, i am justified in destroying the house of my neighbour, in order to preserve my own house; and i may cut in two the ropes or cords amongst which any ship is driven, if it cannot be otherwise disentangled. all which exceptions are not made in the written law, but are presumed.--for the opinion has been acknowledged amongst divines, that, if any one, in such case of necessity, take from another person what is requisite for the preservation of his life, _he does not commit a theft_. the meaning of which definition is not, as many contend, that the proprietor of the thing be bound to give to the needy upon the principle of _charity_; but, that all things distinctly vested in proprietors ought to be regarded as such _with a certain benign acknowledgment of the primitive right_. for if the original distributors of things were questioned, as to what they thought about this matter, they would reply what i have said. _necessity_, says father seneca, _the great excuse for human weakness, breaks every law_; that is to say, _human law_, or law made after the manner of man." . "but cautions ought to be had, for fear this license should be abused: of which the principal is, to try, in every way, whether the necessity can be avoided by any other means; for instance, by making application to the magistrate, or even by trying whether the use of the thing can, by entreaties, be obtained from the proprietor. plato permits water to be fetched from the well of a neighbour upon this condition alone, that the person asking for such permission shall dig in his own well in search of water as far as the chalk: and solon, that he shall dig in his own well as far as forty cubits. upon which plutarch adds, _that he judged that necessity was to be relieved, not laziness to be encouraged_." . such is the doctrine of this celebrated civilian. let us now hear puffendorf; and you will please to bear in mind, that both these writers are of the greatest authority upon all subjects connected with the laws of nature and of nations. we read in their works the result of an age of study: they have been two of the great guides of mankind ever since they wrote: and, we are not to throw them aside, in order to listen exclusively to parson hay, to hulton of hulton, or to nicholas grimshaw. they tell us what they, and what other wise men, deemed to be right; and, as we shall by and by see, the laws of england, so justly boasted of by our ancestors, hold precisely the same language with these celebrated men. after the following passage from puffendorf, i shall show you what our own lawyers say upon the subject; but i request you to read the following passage with the greatest attention. . "let us inquire, in the next place, whether the necessity of preserving our life can give us any right over other men's goods, so as to make it allowable for us to seize on them for our relief, either secretly, or by open force, against the owner's consent. for the more clear and solid determination of which point, we think it necessary to hint in short on the causes upon which distinct _properties_ were first introduced in the world; designing to examine them more at large in their proper place. now the main reasons on which _properties_ are founded, we take to be these two; that the feuds and quarrels might be appeased which arose in the _primitive communion_ of things, and that men might be put under a kind of necessity of being industrious, every one being to get his maintenance by his own application and labour. this division, therefore, of goods, was not made, that every person should sit idly brooding over the share of wealth he had got, without assisting or serving his fellows; but that any one might dispose of his things how he pleased; and if he thought fit to communicate them to others, he might, at least, be thus furnished with an opportunity of laying obligations on the rest of mankind. hence, when properties were once established, men obtained a power, not only of exercising commerce to their mutual advantage and gain, but likewise of dispensing more largely in the works of humanity and beneficence; whence their diligence had procured them a greater share of goods than others: whereas before, when all things lay in common, men could lend one another no assistance but what was supplied by their corporeal ability, and could be charitable of nothing but of their _strength_. further, such is the force of _property_, that the _proprietor_ hath a right of delivering his goods with his own hands; even such as he is obliged to give to others. whence it follows, that when one man has anything owing from another, he is not presently to seize on it at a venture, but ought to apply himself to the owner, desiring to receive it from his disposal. yet in case the other party refuse thus to make good his obligation, the power and privilege of _property_ doth not reach so far as that the things may not be taken away without the owner's consent, either by the authority of the magistrate in _civil communities_, or in a _state of nature_, by violence and hostile force. and though in regard to bare natural right, for a man to relieve another in extremity with his goods, for which he himself hath not so much occasion, be a duty obliging only _imperfectly_, and not in the manner of a _debt_, since it arises wholly from the virtue of _humanity_; yet there seems to be no reason why, by the additional force of a civil ordinance, it may not be turned into a strict and perfect obligation. and this _seldon_ observes to have been done among the _jews_; who, upon a man's refusing to give such alms as were proper for him, _could force him to it by an action at law_. it is no wonder, therefore, that they should forbid _their poor_, on any account, to seize on the goods of others, enjoining them to take only what private persons, or the public officers, or stewards of alms, should give them on their petition. whence the stealing of what was another's, though upon extreme necessity, passed in that state for theft or rapine. but now supposing _under another government the like good provision is not made for persons in want_, supposing likewise that the covetous temper of men of substance cannot be prevailed on to give relief, and that the needy creature is not able, either by his work or service, or by making sale of anything that he possesses, to assist his present necessity, _must_ he, _therefore, perish with famine_? or _can any human institution bind me_ with such a force that, in case another man neglects his duty towards me, _i must rather die, than recede a little from the ordinary and regular way of acting_? we conceive, therefore, that such a person doth _not contract the guilt of theft_, who happening, not through his own fault, to be in extreme want, either of necessary food, or of clothes to preserve him from the violence of the weather, and cannot obtain them from the voluntary gift of the rich, either by urgent entreaties, or by offering somewhat equivalent in price, or by engaging _to work it out, shall either forcibly or privily relieve himself out of their abundance_; especially if he do it with full intention to pay the value of them whenever his better fortune gives him ability. some men deny that such a case of _necessity_, as we speak of, can possibly happen. but what if a man should wander in a foreign land, unknown, friendless, and in want, spoiled of all he had by shipwreck, or by robbers, or having lost by some casualty whatever he was worth in his own country; should none be found willing either to relieve his distress, or to hire his service, or should they rather (as it commonly happens,) seeing him in a good garb, suspect him to beg without reason, must the poor creature starve in this miserable condition?" . many other great foreign authorities might be referred to, and i cannot help mentioning covarruvius, who is spoken of by judge hale, and who expresses himself upon the subject in these words: "the reason why a man in extreme necessity may, _without incurring the guilt of theft or rapine_, forcibly take the goods of others for his present relief, is because his condition _renders all things common_. for it is the ordinance and institution of nature itself, that inferior things should be designed and directed to serve the necessities of men. wherefore the division of goods afterwards introduced into the world doth not derogate from that precept of natural reason, which suggests, that the _extreme wants of mankind may be in any manner removed by the use of temporal possessions_." puffendorf tells us, that peresius maintains, that, in case of extreme necessity, a man is compelled to the action, by a force which he cannot resist; and then, that the owner's consent may be presumed on, because humanity obliges him to succour those who are in distress. the same writer cites a passage from st. ambrose, one of the fathers of the church, which alleges that (in case of refusing to give to persons in extreme necessity) it is the person who retains the goods who is guilty of the act of wrong doing, for st. ambrose says; "it is the _bread of the hungry_ which you detain; it is the _raiment of the naked_ which you lock up." . before i come to the english authorities on the same side, let me again notice the foul dealing of blackstone; let me point out another instance or two of the insincerity of this english court-sycophant, who was, let it be noted, solicitor-general to the queen of the "good old king." you have seen, in paragraph , a most flagrant instance of his perversion of the scriptures. he garbles the word of god, and prefaces the garbling by calling it a thing "_certified_ by king solomon himself;" and this word _certified_ he makes use of just when he is about to begin the scandalous falsification of the text which he is referring to. never was anything more base. but, the whole extent of the baseness we have not yet seen; for, blackstone had read hale, who had quoted the two verses fairly; but besides this, he had read puffendorf, who had noticed very fully this text of scripture, and who had shown very clearly that it did not at all make in favour of the doctrine of blackstone. blackstone ought to have given the argument of puffendorf; he ought to have given the whole of his argument; but particularly he ought to have given this explanation of the passage in the proverbs, which explanation i have inserted in paragraph . it was also the height of insincerity in blackstone, to pretend that the passage from cicero had anything at all to do with the matter. he knew well that it had not; he knew that cicero contemplated no case of extreme necessity for want of food or clothing; but, he had read puffendorf, and puffendorf had told him, that cicero's was a question of the mere _conveniences_ and _inconveniences_ of life in general; and not a question of pinching hunger or shivering nakedness. blackstone had seen his fallacy exposed by puffendorf; he had seen the misapplication of this passage of cicero fully exposed by puffendorf; and yet the base court-sycophant trumped it up again, without mentioning puffendorf's exposure of the fallacy! in short this blackstone, upon this occasion, as upon almost all others, has gone all lengths; has set detection and reproof at defiance, for the sake of making his court to the government by inculcating harshness in the application of the law, and by giving to the law such an interpretation as would naturally tend to justify that harshness. . let us now cast away from us this insincere sycophant, and turn to other law authorities of our own country. the _mirrour of justices_, (quoted by me in paragraph ,) chap. , section , on the subject of arrest of judgment of death, has this passage. judgment is to be staid in seven cases here specified: and the seventh is this: "in poverty, in which case you are to distinguish of the poverty of the offender, or of things; for if poor people, _to avoid famine, take victuals to sustain their lives, or clothes that they die not of cold_, (so that they perish if they keep not themselves from cold,) _they are not to be adjudged to death, if it were not in their power to have bought their victuals or clothes_; for as much as _they are warranted so to do by the law of nature_." now, my friends, you will observe, that i take this from a book which may almost be called the bible of the law. there is no lawyer who will deny the goodness of this authority; or who will attempt to say that this was not always the law of england. . our next authority is one quite as authentic, and almost as ancient. the book goes by the name of britton, which was the name of a bishop of hereford, who edited it, in the famous reign of edward the first. the book does, in fact, contain the laws of the kingdom as they existed at that time. it may be called the record of the laws of edward the first. it begins thus, "edward by the grace of god, king of england and lord of ireland, to all his liege subjects, peace, and grace of salvation." the preamble goes on to state, that people cannot be happy without good laws; that even good laws are of no use unless they be known and understood; and that, therefore, the king has ordered the laws of england thus to be written and recorded. this book is very well known to be of the greatest authority, amongst lawyers, and in chap. of this book, in which the law describes what constitutes a burglar, or house-breaker, and the punishment that he shall suffer (which is that of death,) there is this passage: "those are to be deemed burglars who feloniously, in time of peace, break into churches or houses, or through walls or doors of our cities, or our boroughs; with _exception_ of children under age, and of _poor people who for hunger, enter to take any sort of victuals of less value than twelve pence_; and except idiots and mad people, and others that cannot commit felony." thus, you see, this agrees with the mirrour of justices, and with all that we have read before from these numerous high authorities. but this, taken in its full latitude, goes a great length indeed; for a burglar is a _breaker-in by night_. so that this is not only _a taking_; but a breaking into a house in order to take! and observe, it is taking to the value of _twelve pence_; and twelve pence then was the price of _a couple of sheep_, and of fine fat sheep too; nay, twelve pence was the price of _an ox_, in this very reign of edward the first. so that, a hungry man might have a pretty good belly-full in those days without running the risk of punishment. observe, by-the-by, how time has hardened the law. we are told of the _dark ages_, of the _barbarous customs_, of our forefathers: and we have a sir james mackintosh to receive and to present petitions innumerable, from the most tender hearted creatures in the world, about "_softening the criminal code_;" but, not a word do they ever say about a softening of _this law_, which now hangs a man for stealing the value of a rabbit, and which formerly did not hang him till he stole the value of an ox! curious enough, but still more scandalous, that we should have the impudence to talk of our _humanity_, and our _civilization_, and of the barbarousness of our forefathers. but, if a _part_ of the ancient law remain, shall not the _whole_ of it remain? if we hang the thief, still hang the thief for stealing to the value of _twelve pence_; though the twelve pence now represents a rabbit instead of an ox; if we still do this, would blackstone take away the benefit of the ancient law from the starving man? the passage that i have quoted is of such great importance as to this question, that i think it necessary to add, here, a copy of the original, which is in the old _norman-french_, of which i give the translation above. "sunt tenus burgessours trestous ceux, que felonisement en temps de pees debrusent esglises ou auter mesons, ou murs, ou portes de nos cytes, ou de nos burghes; hors pris enfauntz dedans age, et poures, que, pur feyn, entrêt pur ascun vitaille de meindre value q'de xii deners, et hors pris fous nastres, et gens arrages, et autres que seuent nule felonie faire." . after this, _lawyers_, at any rate, will not attempt to gainsay. if there should, however, remain any one to affect to doubt of the soundness of this doctrine, let them take the following from him who is always called the "_pride of philosophy_," the "_pride of english learning_," and whom the poet pope calls "_greatest_ and _wisest_ of mankind." it is lord bacon of whom i am speaking. he was lord high chancellor in the reign of james the first; and, let it be observed, that he wrote those "_law tracts_," from which i am about to quote, long after the present poor-laws had been established. he says (law tracts, page ,) "the law chargeth no man with default where the act is compulsory and not voluntary, and where there is not consent and election; and, therefore, if either there be an impossibility for a man to do otherwise, or so great a perturbation of the judgment and reason, as in presumption of law a man's nature cannot overcome, such necessity carrieth a privilege in itself.--necessity is of three sorts: necessity of conservation of life; necessity of obedience; and necessity of the act of god or of a stranger.--first, of conservation of life; _if a man steal viands (victuals) to satisfy his present hunger_, this is _no felony_ nor _larceny_." . if any man want more authority, his heart must be hard indeed; he must have an uncommonly anxious desire to take away by the halter the life that sought to preserve itself against hunger. but, after all, what need had we of any _authorities_? what need had we even of _reason_ upon the subject? who is there upon the face of the earth, except the monsters that come from across the channel of st. george; who is there upon the face of the earth, except those monsters, that have the brass, the hard hearts and the brazen faces, which enable them coolly to talk of the "merit" of the degraded creatures, who, amidst an abundance of food, amidst a "_superabundance of food_," lie quietly down and receive the extreme unction, and expire with hunger? who, upon the face of the whole earth, except these monsters, these ruffians by way of excellence; who, except these, the most insolent and hard-hearted ruffians that ever lived, will contend, or will dare to think, that there ought to be any force under heaven to compel a man to lie down at the door of a baker's and butcher's shop, and expire with hunger! the very nature of man makes him shudder at the thought. there want no authorities; no appeal to law books; no arguments; no questions of right or wrong: that same human nature that tells me that i am not to cut my neighbour's throat, and drink his blood, tells me that i am not to make him die at my feet by keeping from him food or raiment of which i have more than i want for my own preservation. . talk of barbarians, indeed; talk of "_the dark_ and _barbarous ages_." why, even in the days of the druids, such barbarity as that of putting men to death, or of punishing them for taking to relieve their hunger, was never thought of. in the year , the rev. peter roberts, a. m. published a book, entitled collectanea cambrica. in the first volume of that book, there is an account of the laws of the ancient britons. hume, and other scotchmen, would make us believe, that the ancient inhabitants of this country were a set of savages, clothed in skins and the like. the laws of this people were collected and put into writing, in the year _before christ_. the following extract from these laws shows, that the moment civil society began to exist, that moment the law _took care that people should not be starved to death_. that moment it took care, that provision should be made for the destitute, or that, in cases of extreme necessity, men were to preserve themselves from death by taking from those who had to spare. the words of these laws (as applicable to our case) given by mr. roberts, are as follows:--"there are three distinct kinds of personal individual property, which cannot be shared with another, or surrendered in payment of fine; viz., a wife, a child, and argyfrew. by the word _argyfrew_ is meant, clothes, arms, or the implements of a lawful calling. for without these a man has not the means of support, and it would be _unjust_ in the law to _unman_ a man, or to _uncall_ a man as to his calling." triad d.--"three kinds of thieves are not to be punished with death. . a wife, who joins with her husband in theft. . a youth under age. and . one who, after he has _asked, in vain_, for support, in _three towns_, and at _nine houses_ in each town." triad . . there were, then, _houses_ and _towns_, it seems; and the towns were pretty thickly spread too; and, as to "_civilization_" and "_refinement_," let this law relative to a _youth under age_, be compared with the new _orchard and garden law_, and with the tread-mill affair, and new trespass law! . we have a law, called the vagrant act, to _punish men for begging_. we have a law to punish men for _not working to keep their families_. now, with what show of justice can these laws be maintained? they are founded upon this; the first, that begging is disgraceful to the country; that it is degrading to the character of man, and, of course, to the character of an englishman; and, that there is no necessity for begging, _because the law has made ample provision for every person in distress_. the law for punishing men for not working to maintain their families is founded on this, that they are _doing wrong to their neighbours_; their neighbours, that is to say, the parish, being _bound to keep the family_, if they be not kept by the man's labour; and, therefore, his not labouring is _a wrong done to the parish_. the same may be said with regard to the punishment for not maintaining bastard children. there is some reason for these laws, as long as the poor-laws are duly executed; as long as the poor are duly relieved, according to law; but, unless the poor-laws exist; unless they be in full force; unless they be duly executed; unless efficient and prompt relief be given to necessitous persons, these acts, and many others approaching to a similar description, are acts of barefaced and most abominable tyranny. i should say that they _would be_ acts of such tyranny; for generally speaking, the poor-laws are, as yet, fairly executed, and efficient as to their object. . the law of this country is, that every man, able to carry arms, is liable to be called on, to serve in the militia, or to serve as a soldier in some way or other, _in order to defend the country_. what, then, the man has _no land_; he has _no property_ beyond his mere body, and clothes, and tools; he has nothing that an enemy can take away from him. what _justice_ is there, then, in calling upon this man to take up arms and _risk his life_ in the _defence of the land_: what is the land to him? i _say_, that it is something to him; i _say_, that he ought to be called forth to assist to defend the land; because, however poor he may be, _he has a share in the land_, through the poor-rates; and if he be liable to be called forth to defend the land, _the land is always liable to be taxed for his support_. this is what _i say_: my opinions are consistent with reason, with justice, and with the law of the land; but, how can malthus and his silly and _nasty_ disciples; how can those who want to abolish the poor-rates or to prevent the poor from marrying; how can this at once stupid and conceited tribe look the labouring man in the face, while they call upon him to take up arms, to risk his life, in defence of the land? grant that the poor-laws are just; grant that every necessitous creature has a right to demand relief from some parish or other; grant that the law has most effectually provided that every man shall be protected against the effects of hunger and of cold; grant these, and then the law which compels the man without house or land to take up arms and risk his life in defence of the country, is a perfectly just law; but, deny to the necessitous that legal and certain relief of which i have been speaking; abolish the poor laws; and then this military-service law becomes an act of a character such as i defy any pen or tongue to describe. . to say another word upon the subject is certainly unnecessary; but we live in days when "_stern necessity_" has so often been pleaded for most flagrant departures from the law of the land, that one cannot help asking, whether there were any greater necessity to justify addington for his deeds of than there would be to justify a starving man in taking a loaf? addington pleaded _necessity_, and he got a bill of _indemnity_. and, shall a starving man be hanged, then, if he take a loaf to save himself from dying? when six acts were before the parliament, the proposers and supporters of them never pretended that they did not embrace a most dreadful departure from the ancient laws of the land. in answer to lord holland, who had dwelt forcibly on this departure from the ancient law, the lord chancellor, unable to contradict lord holland, exclaimed, "_salus populi suprema lex_," that is to say "_the salvation of the people is the first law_." well, then, if the salvation of the people be the first law, the _salvation of life_ is really and bona fide the salvation of the people; and, if the ordinary laws may be dispensed with, in order to obviate a possible and speculative danger, surely they may be dispensed with, in cases where to dispense with them is visibly, demonstrably, notoriously, necessary to the salvation of _the lives_ of the people: surely, bread is as necessary to the lips of the starving man, as a new law could be necessary to prevent either house of parliament from being brought into _contempt_; and surely, therefore, _salus populi suprema lex_ may come from the lips of the famishing people with as much propriety as they came from those of the lord chancellor! . again, however, i observe, and with this i conclude, that we have nothing to do but to adhere to the poor-laws which we have; that the poor have nothing to do, but to apply to the overseer, or to appeal from him to the magistrate; that the magistrate has nothing to do but duly to enforce the law; and that the government has nothing to do, in order to secure the peace of the country, amidst all the difficulties that are approaching, great and numerous as they are; that it has nothing to do, but to enjoin on the magistrates to do their duty according to our excellent law; and, at the same time, the government ought to discourage, by all the means in their power, all projects for maintaining the poor _by any other than legal means_; to discourage all begging-box affairs; all miserable expedients; and also to discourage, and, where it is possible, fix its mark of reprobation upon all those detestable projectors, who are hatching schemes for what is called, in the blasphemous slang of the day, "_checking the surplus population_" who are hatching schemes for _preventing the labouring people from having children_: who are about spreading their nasty beastly publications; who are hatching schemes of _emigration_; and who, in short, seem to be doing every-thing in their power to widen the fearful breach that has already been made between the poor and the rich. the government has nothing to do but to cause the law to be honestly enforced; and then we shall see no starvation, and none of those dreadful conflicts which the fear of want, as well as actual want, never fail to produce. the bare thought of _forced emigration_ to a foreign state, including, as it must, a _transfer of all allegiance_, which is contrary to the fundamental laws of england; or, exposing every emigrating person to the danger of committing _high treason_; the very thought of such a measure, _having become necessary in england_, is enough to make an englishman mad. but, of these projects, these scandalous nasty beastly and shameless projects, we shall have time to speak hereafter; and in the mean while, i take my leave of you, for the present, by expressing my admiration of the sensible and spirited conduct of the people of stockport, when an attempt was, on the th of september, made to cheat them into an address, _applauding the conduct of the ministers_! what! had the people of stockport so soon forgotten _ th of august_! had they so soon forgotten their townsman, joseph swan! if they had, they would have deserved to perish to all eternity. oh, no! it was a proposition _very premature_: it will be quite soon enough for the good and sensible and spirited fellows of stockport; quite soon enough to address the ministers, when the ministers shall have proposed a repeal of the several jubilee measures, called ellenborough's law; the poacher-transporting law; the sun-set and sun-rise transportation law; the tread-mill law; the select-vestry law; the sunday-toll laws; the new trespass law; the new treason law; the seducing-soldier-hanging law; the new apple-felony law; the six acts; and a great number of others, passed in the reign of jubilee. quite soon enough to applaud, that is, for the sensible people of stockport to applaud, the ministers, when those ministers have proposed to repeal these laws, and, also, to repeal the _malt tax_, and _those other taxes_, which take, even from the pauper, one half of what the parish gives him to keep the breath warm in his body. quite soon enough to applaud the ministers, when they have done these things; and when in addition to all these, they shall have openly proposed _a radical reform of the commons house of parliament_. leaving them to do this as soon as they like, and trusting, that you will never, on any account, applaud them until they do it, i, expressing here my best thanks to mr. blackshaw, who defeated the slavish scheme at stockport, remain, your faithful friend, and most obedient servant, wm. cobbett. number iii. _hurstbourne tarrant (called uphusband,)_ _hants, th october, ._ my excellent friends, . in the foregoing numbers, i have shown, that men can never be so poor as to have no rights at all: and that, in england, they have a legal, as well as a natural, _right_ to be maintained, if they be destitute of other means, out of the lands, or other property, of the rich. but, it is an interesting question, how there came to be so much poverty and misery in england. this is a very interesting question; for, though it is the doom of man, that he shall never be certain of any-thing, and that he shall never be beyond the reach of calamity; though there always has been, and always will be, poor people in every nation; though this circumstance of poverty is inseparable from the means which uphold communities of men; though, without poverty, there could be _no charity_, and none of those feelings, those offices, those acts, and those relationships, which are connected with charity, and which form a considerable portion of the cement of civil society: yet, notwithstanding these things, there are bounds beyond which the poverty of the people cannot go, without becoming a thing to complain of, and to trace to the government as a fault. those bounds have been passed, in england, long and long ago. england was always famed for many things; but especially for its _good living_; that is to say, for the _plenty_ in which the whole of the people lived; for the abundance of good clothing and good food which they had. it was always, ever since it _bore the name of england_, the richest and most powerful and most admired country in europe; but, its _good living_, its superiority in this particular respect, was proverbial amongst all who knew, or who had heard talk of, the english nation. good god! how changed! now, the very worst fed and worst clad people upon the face of the earth, those of ireland only excepted. _how, then, did this horrible, this disgraceful, this cruel poverty come upon this once happy nation?_ this, my good friends of preston, is, to us all, a most important question; and, now let us endeavour to obtain a full and complete answer to it. . poverty is, after all, the great badge, the never-failing badge, of slavery. bare bones and rags are the true marks of the real slave. what is the object of government? to cause men to live _happily_. they cannot be happy without a sufficiency of _food_ and of _raiment_. good government means a state of things in which the main body are well fed and well clothed. it is the chief business of a government to take care, that one part of the people do not cause the other part to lead miserable lives. there can be no morality, no virtue, no sincerity, no honesty, amongst a people continually suffering from want; and, it is cruel, in the last degree, to punish such people for almost any sort of crime, which is, in fact, not crime of the heart, not crime of the perpetrator, but the crime of his all-controlling necessities.--to what degree the main body of the people, in england, _are now_ poor and miserable; how deplorably wretched they now are; this we know but too well; and now, we will see what was their state before this vaunted "reformation." i shall be very particular to cite my _authorities_ here. i will _infer_ nothing; i will give no "_estimate_;" but refer to authorities, such as no man can call in question, such as no man can deny to be proofs _more_ complete than if founded on oaths of credible witnesses, taken before a judge and jury. i shall begin with the account which fortescue gives of the state and manner of living of the english, in the reign of henry vi.; that is, in the th century, when the catholic church was in the height of its glory. fortescue was lord chief justice of england for nearly twenty years; he was appointed lord high chancellor by henry vi. being in exile, in france, in consequence of the wars between the houses of york and lancaster, and the king's son, prince edward, being also in exile with him, the chancellor wrote a series of letters, addressed to the prince, to explain to him the nature and effects of the laws of england, and to induce him to study them and uphold them. this work, which was written in latin, is called _de laudibus legum angliæ_; or, praise of the laws of england. this book was, many years ago, translated into english, and it is a book of law-authority, quoted frequently in our courts of this day. no man can doubt the truth of _facts_ related in such a work. it was a work written by a famous lawyer for a prince; it was intended to be read by other contemporary lawyers, and also by all lawyers in future. the passage that i am about to quote, relating to the state of the english, was _purely incidental_; it was not intended to answer any temporary purpose. it _must have been a true account_.--the chancellor, after speaking generally of the nature of the laws of england, and of the difference between them and the laws of france, proceeds to show the difference in their effects, by a description of the state of the french people, and then by a description of the state of the english. his words, words that, as i transcribe them, make my cheeks burn with shame, are as follows: "besides all this, the inhabitants of france give every year to their king the _fourth part_ of all their _wines_, the growth of that year, every vintner gives the fourth penny of what he makes of his wine by sale. and all the towns and boroughs pay to the king yearly great sums of money, which are assessed upon them, for the expenses of his men at arms. so that the king's troops, which are always considerable, are substituted and paid yearly by those common people, who live in the villages, boroughs, and cities. another grievance is, every village constantly finds and maintains two _cross-bow-men_, at the least; some find more, well arrayed in all their accoutrements, to serve the king in his wars, as often as he pleaseth to call them out, which is frequently done. without any consideration had of these things, other very heavy taxes are assessed yearly upon every village within the kingdom, for the king's service; _neither is there ever any intermission or abatement of taxes_. exposed to these and other calamities, the peasants live in great hardship and misery. their _constant drink is water_, neither do they taste, throughout the year, any other liquor, unless upon some extraordinary times, or festival days. their clothing consists of _frocks_, or little short _jerkins_, made of canvass, no better than common _sackcloth_; they _do not wear any woollens_, except of the _coarsest sort_; and that only in the garment under their frocks; nor do they wear any trowse, but from the knees upwards; their legs being exposed and naked. the women go barefoot, except on holidays. they do _not eat flesh_, except it be the fat of bacon, and _that in very small quantities_, with which they make _a soup_. of other sorts, either boiled or roasted, _they do not so much as taste_, unless it be of the inwards and offals of sheep and bullocks, and the like which are killed, for the use of the better sort of people, _and the merchants_; for whom also quails, _partridges_, _hares_, and the like, _are reserved, upon pain of the gallies_; as for their poultry, _the soldiers consume them_, so that scarce the eggs, slight as they are, are indulged them, by way of a dainty. and if it happen that a man is observed to thrive in the world, and become rich, he is _presently assessed to the king's tax_, proportionably more than his poorer neighbours, _whereby he is soon reduced to a level with the rest_." then comes his description of the english, at the same time; those "priest-ridden" english, whom chalmers and hume, and the rest of that tribe, would fain have us believe, were a mere band of wretched beggars.--"the king of england cannot alter the laws, or make new ones, without the express consent of _the whole kingdom in parliament assembled_. every inhabitant is at his liberty fully to use and enjoy whatever his farm produceth, the fruits of the earth, the increase of his flock, and the like: all the improvements he makes, whether by his own proper industry, or of those he retains in his service, are his own, to use and enjoy, without the let, interruption, or denial of any. if he be in anywise injured or oppressed, he shall have his amends and satisfactions against the party offending. hence it is that the inhabitants are _rich in gold, silver_, and in all the necessaries and conveniences of life. _they drink no water_, unless at certain times, upon _a religious score_, and by way of doing penance. they _are fed, in great abundance_, with _all sorts of flesh_ and _fish_, of which _they have plenty every-where_; they are _clothed throughout in good woollens_; their bedding and other furniture in their houses _are of wool_, and that _in great store_. they are also well provided with all other sorts of household goods and necessary implements for husbandry. every one, according to his rank, hath _all things which conduce to make life easy and happy_."--go, and read this to the poor souls, who are now eating sea-weed in ireland; who are detected in robbing the pig-troughs in yorkshire; who are eating horse-flesh and grains (draff) in lancashire and cheshire; who are harnessed like horses, and drawing gravel in hampshire and sussex; who have _d._ a day allowed them by the magistrates in norfolk; who are, all over england, worse fed than the _felons_ in the jails. go, and tell them, when they raise their hands from the pig-trough, or from the grains-tub, and, with their dirty tongues, cry "_no popery_;" go, read to the degraded and deluded wretches, this account of the state of their _catholic_ forefathers, who lived under what is impudently called "_popish superstition and tyranny_," and in those times which we have the audacity to call "_the dark ages_."--look at the _then_ picture of the french; and, protestant englishmen, if you have the capacity of blushing left, blush at the thought of how precisely that picture fits the english _now_! look at _all the parts_ of the picture; the _food_, the _raiment_, the _game_! good god! if any one had told the old chancellor, that the day would come, when this picture, and even a picture more degrading to human nature, would fit his own boasted country, what would he have said? what would he have said, if he had been told, that the time was to come, when the soldier, in england, would have more than twice, nay, more than thrice, the sum allowed to the day-labouring man; when potatoes would be carried to the field as the only food of the ploughman; when soup-shops would be open to feed the english; and when the judges, sitting on that very bench on which he himself had sitten for twenty years, would (as in the case of last year of the complaints against magistrates at northallerton) declare that bread and water were the general food of working people in england? what would he have said? why, if he had been told, that there was to be a "reformation," accompanied by a total devastation of church and poor property, upheld by wars, creating an enormous debt and enormous taxes, and requiring a constantly standing army; if he had been told this, he would have foreseen our present state, and would have wept for his country; but, if he had, in addition, been told, that, even in the midst of all this suffering, we should still have the ingratitude and the baseness to cry "_no popery_," and the injustice and the cruelty to persecute those englishmen and irishmen, who adhered to the faith of their pious, moral, brave, free and happy fathers, he would have said, "god's will be done: let them suffer."--but, it may be said, that it was not, then, the _catholic church_, but the _laws_, that made the english so happy; for, the french had that church as well as the english. aye! but, in england, the church was the very _basis of the laws_. the very first clause of magna charta provided for the stability of its property and rights. _a provision for the indigent_, an effectual provision, was made _by the laws_ that related to the church and its property; and this was not the case in france; and never was the case in any country but this: so that the english people lost more by a "reformation" than any other people could have lost.--fortescue's authority would, of itself, be enough; but, i am not to stop with it. white, the late rector of selbourne, in hampshire, gives, in his history of that once-famous village, an extract from a record, stating that for disorderly conduct, men were _punished_ by being "compelled to _fast_ a fortnight on _bread and beer_!" this was about the year , in the reign of richard ii. oh! miserable "_dark ages_!" this fact _must be true_. white had no purpose to answer. his mention of the fact, or rather his transcript from the record, is purely _incidental_; and trifling as the fact is, it is conclusive as to the general mode of living in those happy days. go, tell the harnessed gravel-drawers, in hampshire, to cry "_no popery_;" for, that, if the pope be not put down, he may, in time, compel them to _fast_ on _bread and beer_, instead of suffering them to continue to regale themselves on nice potatoes and pure water.--but, let us come to _acts of parliament_, and, first, to the act above mentioned of king edward iii. that act fixes the _price of meat_. after naming the four sorts of meat, _beef_, _pork_, _mutton_, and _veal_, the preamble has these words: "these being the food of the poorer sort." this is conclusive. it is an _incidental_ mention of a fact. it is an act of parliament. it _must have been true_; and, it is a fact that we know well, that even the judges have declared from the bench, that _bread alone_ is _now the food of the poorer sort_. what do we want more than this to convince us, that the main body of the people have been _impoverished_ by the "reformation?"--but i will _prove_, by other acts of parliament, this act of parliament to have spoken truth. these acts declare what the _wages_ of workmen shall be. there are several such acts, but one or two may suffice. the act of d of edw. iii. fixes the wages, without food, as follows. there are many other things mentioned, but the following will be enough for our purpose. _s._ _d._ a woman hay-making, or weeding corn, for the day a man filling dung-cart - / a reaper mowing an acre of grass thrashing a quarter of wheat the price of _shoes_, _cloth_, and of _provisions_, throughout the time that this law continued in force, was as follows:-- _l._ _s._ _d._ a pair of shoes russet broad-cloth the yard a stall-fed ox a grass-fed ox a fat sheep unshorn a fat sheep shorn a fat hog years old a fat goose - / ale, the gallon, by proclamation wheat the quarter white wine the gallon red wine these prices are taken from the preciosum of bishop fleetwood, who took them from the accounts kept by the bursers of convents. all the world knows, that fleetwood's book is of undoubted authority.--we may then easily believe, that "beef, pork, mutton, and veal," were "the food of the _poorer sort_," when a _dung-cart filler_ had more than the price of _a fat goose and a half for a day's work_, and when a woman was allowed, for _a day's weeding_, the price of a _quart of red wine_! two yards of the cloth made a coat for the _shepherd_; and, as it cost _s._ _d._, the reaper would earn it _in - / days_; and, the dung-cart man would earn very nearly a _pair of shoes every day_! this dung-cart filler would earn a _fat shorn sheep_ in four days; he would earn a _fat hog_, two years old, in twelve days; he would earn a _grass-fed ox_ in twenty days; so that we may easily believe, that "beef, pork, and mutton," were "the food of the _poorer sort_." and, mind, this was "a _priest-ridden people_;" a people "buried in _popish superstition_!" in our days of "_protestant light_" and of "_mental enjoyment_," the "poorer sort" are allowed by the magistrates of norfolk, _d._ a day for a _single man_ able to work. that is to say, a half-penny _less_ than the catholic dung-cart man had; and that _d._ will get the "_no popery_" gentleman about _six ounces_ of old ewe-mutton, while the popish dung-cart man got, for his day, rather more than _the quarter of a fat sheep_.--but, the popish people might work _harder_ than "_enlightened_ protestants." they might do _more work in a day_. this is contrary to all the assertions of the _feelosophers_; for they insist, that the catholic religion made people _idle_. but, to set this matter at rest, let us look at the price of the _job-labour_; at the _mowing_ by _the acre_, and at the _thrashing_ of wheat by _the quarter_; and let us see how these _wages are now_, compared with the price of food. i have no _parliamentary_ authority since the year , when a report was printed by order of the house of commons, containing the evidence of mr. ellman, of sussex, as to wages, and of mr. george, of norfolk, as to price of wheat. the report was dated th june, . the accounts are for years, on an average, from inclusive. we will now proceed to see how the "popish, priest-ridden" englishman stands in comparison with the "_no popery_" englishman. popish man. no popery man. _s._ _d._ _s._ _d._ mowing an acre of grass - / thrashing a quarter of wheat here are "_waust_ improvements, mau'm!" but, now let us look at the relative _price of the wheat_, which the labourer had to purchase with his wages. we have seen, that the "popish _superstition slave_" had to give _fivepence_ a bushel for his wheat, and the evidence of mr. george states, that the "_enlightened_ protestant" had to give _shillings_ a bushel for his wheat; that is _times_ as much as the "popish _fool_," who suffered himself to be "priest-ridden." so that the "_enlightened_" man, in order to make him as well off as the "_dark_-ages" man was, ought to receive _twelve shillings_, instead of _s._ - / _d._ for mowing an acre of grass; and he, in like manner, ought to receive, for thrashing a quarter of wheat, _eight shillings_, instead of the _four shillings_ which he does receive. if we had the _records_, we should doubtless find, that ireland was in the same state. . there! that settles the matter as to _ancient_ good living. now, as to the progress of poverty and misery, amongst the working people, during the last half century, take these facts; in the year , that is, years ago, arthur young, who was afterwards secretary to the board of agriculture, published a work on the state of the agriculture of the country, in which he gave the allowance for the keeping of _a farm-labourer, his wife and three children_, which allowance, reckoning according to the present money-price of the articles which he allows amounted to _s._ _d._ he put the sum, at what he deemed the _lowest possible sum_, on which the people could _exist_. alas! we shall find, that they can be made to exist upon little more than _one-half_ of this sum! . this allowance of mr. arthur young was made, observe, in , which was before the old american war took place. that war made some famous fortunes for admirals and commodores and contractors and pursers and generals and commissaries; but, it was not the americans, the french, nor the dutch, that gave the money to make these fortunes. they came out of _english taxes_; and the heaviest part of those taxes fell upon the _working people_, who, when they were boasting of "_victories_," and rejoicing that the "jack tars" had got "prize-money," little dreamed that these victories were purchased by them, and that they paid fifty pounds for every crown that sailors got in prize-money! in short, this american war caused a great mass of new taxes to be laid on, and the people of england became _a great deal poorer than they ever had been before_. during that war, they began to eat potatoes, as something to "_save bread_." the poorest of the people, the very poorest of them, refused, for a long while, to use them in this way; and even when i was ten years old, which was just about _fifty years ago_; the poor people would not eat potatoes, except _with meat_, as they would cabbages, or carrots, or any other moist vegetable. but, by the end of the american war, their stomachs had come to! by slow degrees they had been reduced to swallow this pig-meat, (and bad pig-meat too,) not, indeed, without grumbling; but to swallow it; to be reduced, thus, many degrees in the scale of animals. . at the end of _twenty-four years_ from the date of arthur young's allowance, the poverty and degradation of the english people had made great strides. we were now in the year , and a new war, and a new series of "_victories_ and _prizes_" had begun. but who it was that _suffered_ for these, out of whose blood and flesh and bones they came, the allowance now (in ) made to the poor labourers and their families will tell. there was, in that year, a table, or scale, of allowance, framed by the magistrates of berkshire. this is, by no means, a _hard_ county; and therefore it is reasonable to suppose, that the _scale_ was as good a one for the poor as any in england. according to this scale, which was printed and published, and also acted upon for years, the weekly allowance, for _a man, his wife and three children_, was, according to present money-prices, _s._ _d._ thus it had, in the space of twenty-four years, fell from _s._ _d._ to _s._ _d._ thus were the people brought to the _pig-meat_! food, fit for men, they could not have with _s._ _d._ a week for five persons. . one would have thought, that to make a human being _live_ upon _d._ _a day_, and find _fuel_, _clothing_, _rent_, _washing_, and _bedding_, out of the _d._, besides eating and drinking, was impossible; and one would have thought it impossible for any-thing not of hellish birth and breeding, to entertain a wish to make poor creatures, and our _neighbours_ too, exist in such a state of horrible misery and degradation as the labourers of england were condemned to by this scale of . alas! this was happiness and honour; this was famous living; this _s._ _d._ a week was _luxury_ and _feasting_, compared to what we now behold! for now the allowance, according to present money-prices, is _s._ a week for the man, his wife, and three children; that is to say - / _d._ in words, two pence and five sevenths of another penny, for a day! there, that is england now! that is what the base wretches, who are fattening upon the people's labour, call "the _envy_ of surrounding nations and the _admiration_ of the world." this is what sir francis burdett applauds; and he applauds the mean and cruel and dastardly ruffians, whom he calls, "the _country gentlemen_ of england," and whose _generosity_ he cries up; while he well knows, _that it is they_ (and he amongst the rest) who are the real and only cause of this devil-like barbarity, which (and he well knows that too) could not possibly be practised without the constant existence and occasional employment of that species of force, which is so abhorrent to the laws of england, and of which this burdett's son forms a part. the poor creatures, _if they complain_; if their hunger make them _cry out_, are either punished by even harder measures, or are _slapped into prison_. alas! the jail is really become a place of _relief_, a scene of comparative _good living_: hence the invention of the _tread-mill_! what shall we see next? _workhouses, badges, hundred-houses, select-vestries, tread-mills, gravel-carts, and harness!_ what shall we see next! and what should we see at last, if this infernal thing could continue for only a few years longer? . in order to form a judgment of the cruelty of making our working neighbours live upon - / _d._ a day; that is to say _d._ and rather more than a halfpenny, let us see what the surgeons allow in the hospitals, to patients with _broken limbs_, who, of course, have no _work_ to do, and who cannot even take any _exercise_. in guy's hospital, london, the _daily_ allowance to patients, having _simple fractures_, is this: ounces of meat; ounces of bread; pint of broth; quarts of good beer. this is the _daily_ allowance. then, in addition to this, the same patient has ounces of butter _a week_. these articles, for a week, amount to not less at present retail prices (and those are the poor man's prices,) than _s._ _d._ a week; while the working man is allowed _s._ _d._ a week! for, he cannot and he will not see his wife and children actually drop down dead with hunger before his face; and this is what he must see, if he take to himself more than a _fifth_ of the allowance for the family. . now, pray, observe, that _surgeons_, and particularly those eminent surgeons who frame rules and regulations for great establishments like that of guy's hospital, _are competent judges_ of what nature requires in the way of food and of drink. they are, indeed, not only competent judges, but they are the best of judges: they know precisely what is necessary; and having the power to order the proper allowance, they order it. if, then, they make an allowance like that, which we have seen, to a person who is under a regimen for a broken limb; to a person who does _no work_, and who is, nine times out of ten, unable to take any exercise at all, even that of walking about, at least in the open air; if the eminent surgeons of london deem _six shillings and ninepence worth_ of victuals and drink, a week, necessary to such a patient; if they think that _nature calls_ for so much in such a case; what must that man be made of, who can allow to a _working man_, a man fourteen hours every day in the open air, _one shilling and seven pence worth_ of victuals and drink for the week! let me not however ask what "that _man_" can be made of; for it is a monster and not a man: it is a murderer of men: not a murderer with the knife or the pistol, but with the more cruel instrument of starvation. and yet, such monsters go to _church_ and to _meeting_; aye, and _subscribe_, the base hypocrites, to circulate that bible which commands _to do as they would be done by_, and which, from the first chapter to the last, menaces them with punishment, if they be hard to the poor, the fatherless, the widow, or the stranger! . but, not only is the patient, in a hospital, thus so much more amply fed than the working man; the _prisoners in the jails_; aye, even the _convicted felons_, are fed better, and much better, than the working men now are! here is a fine "_old england_;" that country of "roast beef and plumb pudding:" that, as the tax-eaters say it is, "envy of surrounding nations and admiration of the world." aye; the country was all these; but, it is now precisely the reverse of them all. we have just seen that the _honest labouring man_ is allowed - / _d._ a day; and that will buy him _a pound and a half of good bread a day_, and no more, not a single crumb more. this is all he has. well enough might the hampshire baronet, sir john pollen, lately, at a meeting at andover, call the labourers "_poor devils_," and say, that they had "_scarcely a rag to cover them_!" a pound and a half of bread a day, and nothing more, and that, too, _to work upon_! now, then, how fare the prisoners in the jails? why, if they be convicted felons, they are, say the berkshire jail-regulations, "to have only bread and water, _with vegetables_ occasionally from the garden." here, then, they are already better fed than the honest labouring man. aye, and this is not all; for, this is only the _week-day_ fare; for, they are to have, "on sundays, some meat _and broth_!" good god! and the honest working man can never, never smell the smell of meat! this is "envy of surrounding nations" with the devil to it! this is a state of things for burdett to applaud. . but we are not even yet come to a sight of the depth of our degradation. these berkshire jail-regulations make provision for setting the convicted prisoners, in certain cases, to work, and, they say, "if the surgeon think it necessary, the working prisoners may be allowed meat and broth on week-days;" and on sundays, of course! there it is! there is the "envy and admiration!" there is the state to which mr. prosperity and mr. canning's best parliament has brought us. there is the result of "_victories_" and prize-money and battles of waterloo and of english ladies kissing, "old blucher." there is the fruit, the natural fruit, of anti-jacobinism and battles on the serpentine river and jubilees and heaven-born ministers and sinking-funds and "public credit" and army and navy contracts. there is the fruit, the natural, the nearly (but _not quite_) ripe fruit of it all: the convicted felon is, if he do not work at all, allowed, on week-days, some vegetables in addition to his bread, and, on sundays, both _meat and broth_; and, if the convicted felon work, if he be a working convicted felon, he is allowed _meat and broth all the week round_; while, hear it burdett, thou berkshire magistrate! hear it, all ye base miscreants who have persecuted men because they sought a reform! the working convicted felon is allowed _meat and broth every day in the year_, while the working honest man is allowed _nothing but dry bread_, and of that not half a belly-full! and yet you see the people that seem _surprised_ that _crimes_ increase! very strange, to be sure; that men should like to _work_ upon meat and broth better than they like to work upon dry bread! no wonder that _new jails_ arise. no wonder that there are now two or three or four or five jails to one county, and that as much is now written upon "_prison discipline_" as upon almost any subject that is going. but, why so good, so generous, to felons? the truth is, that they are _not fed too well_; for, to be _starved_ is no part of their sentence; and, here are surgeons who have something to say! they know very well that a man may be _murdered_ by keeping necessary food from him. felons are not apt to lie down and _die quietly_ for want of food. the jails are in _large towns_, where the news of any cruelty soon gets about. so that the felons have many circumstances in their favour. it is in the villages, the recluse villages, where the greatest cruelties are committed. . here, then, in this contrast between the treatment of the working felon and that of the working honest man, we have a complete picture of the present state of england; that horrible state, to which, by slow degrees, this once happy country has been brought; and, i should now proceed to show, as i proposed in the first paragraph of this present number, how there came to be so much poverty and misery in england; for, this is the main thing, it being clear, that, if we do not see the real causes of our misery, we shall be very unlikely to adopt any effectual remedy. but, before i enter on this part of my subject, let me _prove_, beyond all possibility of doubt, that what i say relatively to the situation of, and the allowances to, the labourers and their families, is true. the _cause_ of such situation and allowances i shall show hereafter; but let me first show, by a reference to indubitable facts, that the situation and allowances are such as, or worse than, i have described them. to do this, no way seems to me to be so fair, so likely to be free from error, so likely to produce a suitable impression on the minds of my readers, and so likely to lead to some useful practical result; no way seems to me so well calculated to answer these purposes, as that of taking _the very village, in which, i, at this moment, happen to be_, and to describe, with names and dates, the actual state of its labouring people, as far as that state is connected with steps taken under the poor-laws. . this village was in former times a very considerable place, as is manifest from the size of the church as well as from various other circumstances. it is now, as a _church living_, united with an adjoining parish, called vernon dean, which also has its church, at a distance of about three miles from the church of this parish. both parishes put together now contain only _eleven hundred_, and a few odd, inhabitants, men, women, children, and all; and yet, the _great tithes_ are supposed to be worth _two or three thousand pounds a year_, and the _small tithes_ about _six hundred pounds a year_. formerly, before the event which is called "the reformation," there were _two roman catholic priests_ living at the parsonage houses in these two parishes. they could not marry, and could, therefore have no wives and families to keep out of the tithes; and, with part of those tithes, they, as the law provided, maintained the poor of these two parishes; and, the canons of the church commanded them to distribute the portion to the poor and the stranger, "_with their own hands_, in _humility_ and _mercy_." . this, as to church and poor, was the state of these villages, in the "_dark ages_" of "_romish superstition_." what! no poor-laws? no poor-rates? what horribly _unenlightened_ times! no _select vestries_? dark ages indeed! but, how stands these matters now? why, the two parishes are moulded into _one church living_. then the great tithes (amounting to two or three thousand a year) belong to some part of the _chapter_ (as they call it) of salisbury. the chapter leases them out, as they would a house or a farm, and they are now rented by john king, who is one of this happy nation's greatest and oldest _pensioners_. so that, _away go_ the great tithes, not leaving a single wheat-ear to be spent in the parish. the small tithes belong to a vicar, who is one fisher, a _nephew of the late bishop of salisbury_, who has not resided here for a long while; and who has a curate, named john gale, who being the son of a little farmer and shop-keeper at burbage in wiltshire, was, by a parson of the name of bailey (very _well known and remembered_ in these parts), put to school; and, in the fulness of time, became a _curate_. so that, _away go_ also the small tithes (amounting to about _l._ or _l._ a year); and, out of the large church revenues; or, rather, large church-_and-poor_ revenues, of these two parishes; out of the whole of them, there remains only the amount of the curate, mr. john gale's, salary, which does not, perhaps, exceed seventy or a hundred pounds, and a part of which, at any rate, i dare say, he does not expend in these parishes: _away goes_, i say, all the rest of the small tithes, leaving not so much as a mess of milk or a dozen of eggs, much less a tithe-pig, to be consumed in the parish. . as to _the poor_, the parishes continue to be _in two_; so that i am to be considered as speaking of the parish of uphusband only. you are aware, that, amongst the last of the acts of the famous jubilee-reign, was an act to enable parishes to establish select vestries; and one of these vestries now exists in this parish. and now, let me explain to you the nature and tendency of this jubilee-act. before this act was passed, _overseers of the poor had full authority to grant relief at their discretion_. pray mark that. then again, before this act was passed, _any one justice of the peace might, on complaint of any poor person, order relief_. mark that. a select vestry is _to consist of the most considerable rate-payers_. mark that. then, mark these things: this jubilee-act _forbids the overseer to grant any relief other than such as shall be ordered by the select vestry_: it forbids one _justice_ to order relief, in any case, except in a case of _emergency:_ it forbids more than one to order relief, except _on oath_ that the complainant has _applied to the select vestry_ (where there is one,) and has been refused relief by it; and that, in no case, the justice's order _shall be for more than a month_; and, moreover, that when a poor person shall appeal to justices from a select vestry, the justices, in ordering relief, or refusing, shall have "_regard to the conduct and_ character _of the applicant_!" . from this act, one would imagine, that _overseers_ and _justices_ were looked upon as being too _soft_ and _yielding_ a nature; _too good, too charitable, too liberal_ to the poor! in order that the select vestry may have an agent suited to the purposes that the act _manifestly has in view_, the act authorizes the select vestry to appoint what is called an "_assistant overseer_," and to _give him a salary out of the poor-rates_. such is this jubilee-act, one of the last acts of the jubilee-reign, that reign, which gave birth to the american war, to pitt, to perceval, ellenborough, sidmouth, and castlereagh, to a thousand millions of taxes and another thousand millions of debt: such is the select vestry act; and this now little trifling village of uphusband _has a select-vestry_! aye, and an "assistant overseer," too, with a _salary_ of fifty pounds a year, being, as you will presently see, about a seventh part of the whole of the expenditure on the poor! . the overseers make out and cause to be _printed_ and _published_, at the end of every _four weeks_, an account of the disbursements. i have one of these accounts now before me; and i insert it here, word for word, as follows:-- . "the disbursements of mr. t. child and mr. c. church, bread at _s._ _d._ per gallon. sept. th, . widows. £. s. d. £. s. d. blake, ann bray, mary cook, ann clark, mary gilbert, hannah marshall, sarah smith, mary westrip, jane withers, ann dance, susan --------- bastards. ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- children ---- ---- children ---- ---- - ---- ---- - ---- ---- - ---- ---- - ---- ---- - ---- ---- - ---- ---- - ---- ---- - ---------- old men. blake, john cannon, john cummins, peter hopgood, john holden, william marshall, charles nutley, george --------- families. bowley, mary baverstock, elizabeth, children cook, levi children kingston, john ditto knight, john ditto newman, david ditto pain, robert ditto synea, william ditto smith, sarah (moses) ditto studman, sarah ditto white, joseph ditto wise, william ditto waldren, job ditto noyce, m. batt, do. weeks' pay --------- extra in this month. thomas farmer, ill days levi cook, ill weeks and day joseph white's child, weeks jane westrip's rent william fisher, month ill paid boy, days ill james orchard, ill james orchard's daughter, ill adders and sparrows - / wicks for carriage paid mary hinton joseph farmer, ill days thomas cummins samuel day, and son, ill --------- total amount for the weeks - / . under the head of "widows" are, generally, old women wholly unable to work; and that of "old men" are men past all labour: in some of the instances _lodging places_, in very poor and wretched houses, are found these old people, and, in other instances, they have the bare money; and, observe, that money is for four weeks! gracious god! have we had no mothers ourselves! were we not born of woman! shall we not feel then for the poor widow who, in her old age, is doomed to exist on two shillings a week, or threepence halfpenny a day, and to find herself _clothes_ and washing and fuel and bedding out of that! and, the poor old men, the very happiest of whom gets, you see, less than _d._ a day, at the end of or years of a life, all but six of which have been years of labour! i have thought it right to put _blanks_ instead of the names, under the _second head_. men of less rigid morality, and less free from all illicit intercourse, than the members of the select vestry of uphusband, would, instead of the word "_bastard_," have used the more amiable one of "_love-child_;" and, it may not be wholly improper to ask these rigid moralists, whether they be aware, that they are guilty of libel, aye, of real criminal libel, in causing these poor girls' names to be _printed_ and _published_ in this way. let them remember, that the greater the truth the greater the libel; and, let them remember, that the mothers and the children too, may have _memories_! but, it is under the head of "families" that we see that which is most worthy of our attention. observe, that _eight shillings a week_ is _the wages_ for a day labourer in the village. and, you see, it is only when there are _more than four children_ that the family is allowed anything at all. "levi cook," for instance, has _five children_, and he receives allowance for _one_ child. "joseph white" has _eight children_, and he receives allowance for _four_. there are three widows under this head; but, it is where there is _a man_, the father of the family, that we ought to look with attention; and here we find, that nothing at all is allowed to a family of a man, a wife, and _four children_, beyond the bare eight shillings a week of wages; and this is even worse than the allowance which i contrasted with that of the hospital patients and convicted felons; for there i supposed the family to consist of a man, his wife and _three children_. if i am told, that the farmers, that the occupiers of houses and land, are _so poor_ that they cannot do more for their wretched work-people and neighbours; then i answer and say, what a selfish, what a dastardly wretch is he, who is not ready to do all he can to change this disgraceful, this horrible state of things! . but, at any rate, is the salary of the "assistant overseer" necessary? cannot that be dispensed with? must he have as much as _all the widows_, or _all the old men_? and his salary, together with the charge for _printing_ and other his various expenses, will come to a great deal more _than go to all the widows and old men too_! why not, then, do without him, and double the allowance to these poor old women, or poor old men, who have spent their strength in raising crops in the parish? i went to see with my own eyes some of the "_parish houses_," as they are called; that is to say, the places where the select vestry put the poor people into to live. never did my eyes before alight on such scenes of wretchedness! there was one place, about feet long and wide, in which i found the wife of isaac holden, which, when all were at home, had to contain _nineteen persons_; and into which, i solemnly declare, i would not put pigs, even if well-bedded with straw. another place was shown me by job waldron's daughter; another by thomas carey's wife. the _bare ground_, and that in holes too, was the floor in both these places. the windows broken, and the holes stuffed with rags, or covered with rotten bits of board. great openings in the walls, parts of which were fallen down, and the places stopped with hurdles and straw. the thatch rotten, the chimneys leaning, the doors but bits of doors, the sleeping holes shocking both to sight and smell; and, indeed, every-thing seeming to say: "_these_ are the abodes of wretchedness, which, to be believed possible, must be seen and felt: _these_ are the abodes of the descendants of those amongst whom _beef_, _pork_, _mutton_ and _veal_ were the food of the poorer sort; to _this are come, at last_, the descendants of those common people of england, who, fortescue tells us, were clothed throughout in good woollens, whose bedding, and other furniture in their houses, were of wool, and that in great store, and who were well provided with all sorts of household goods, every one having all things that conduce to make life easy and happy!" . i have now, my friends of preston, amply proved, that what i have stated relative to the present state of, and allowances to, the labourers is true. and now we are to do all we can to remove the evil; for, removed the evil must be, or england must be sunk for ages; and, never will the evil be removed, until its causes, remote as well as near, be all clearly ascertained. with my best wishes for the health and happiness of you all, i remain, your faithful friend, and most obedient servant, wm. cobbett. the end. footnotes: [ ] s. d. english, equal to one dollar. [ ] d. english, equal to four cents, nearly. [ ] the above items may be converted into united states' money by reckoning s. d. to the dollar: thus as _s._ _d._ : dollar :: _l._ _s._ _d._ : dollars cents. [ ] to convert these sums into united states' money, see page . [ ] all the calculations in this work, it must be remembered, are in english money but may be turned into united states' money as before directed, page . [ ] be sure, now, _before you go any further_, to go to the end of the book, and there read about mangle wurzle. be _sure_ to do this. and there read also about cobbett's corn. be sure to do this before you go any further. [ ] to me the following has happened within the last year. a young man, in the country, had agreed to be my servant; but it was found _that he could not milk_; and the bargain was set aside. about a month afterwards a young man, who said he was _a farmer's son_, and who came from herefordshire, offered himself to me at kensington. "_can you milk?_" he could not; but _would learn_! ay, but in the learning, he might _dry up my cows_! what a shame to the _parents_ of these young men! both of them were in _want of employment_. the latter had come more than a hundred miles in _search of work_; and here he was left to hunger still, and to be exposed to all sorts of ills, because he _could not milk_. [ ] london [ ] the father of the present sir robert peel, who gained his fortune as a cotton weaver by the help of machinery. [ ] editors of the london times newspaper. * * * * * transcriber's note: text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). footnote marker is not in the original text. some quotation marks are not matched in the original. obvious errors have been silently matched, while those requiring interpretation have been left unmatched. the following misprints have been corrected: "it" corrected to "is" (page ) "whorthy" corrected to "worthy" (page ) "bady" corrected to "bad" (page ) "buln of the hatch" corrected to "bulk of the batch" (page ) "the the" corrected to "the" (page ) "abuudant" corrected to "abundant" (page ) "pig's" corrected to "pigs" (index) "chancollor" corrected to "chancellor" (part , page ) "chanceller" corrected to "chancellor" (part , page ) "amecan" corrected to "american" (part , page ) other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation usage have been retained. [transcriber's note: the following suspected errors have been changed in this text: page : "highdays" changed to "highways" page : "abbatoirs" changed to "abattoirs" page : added missing "." to "fig. ."] page : added missing "." to "fig. ."] house rats and mice david e. lantz assistant biologist [illustration] farmers' bulletin united states department of agriculture * * * * * contribution from the bureau of biological survey e. w. nelson, chief washington, d. c. october, show this bulletin to a neighbor. additional copies may be obtained free from the division of publications, united states department of agriculture washington: government printing office: the rat is the worst animal pest in the world. from its home among filth it visits dwellings and storerooms to pollute and destroy human food. it carries bubonic plague and many other diseases fatal to man and has been responsible for more untimely deaths among human beings than all the wars of history. in the united states rats and mice each year destroy crops and other property valued at over $ , , . this destruction is equivalent to the gross earnings of an army of over , men. on many a farm, if the grain eaten and wasted by rats and mice could be sold, the proceeds would more than pay all the farmer's taxes. the common brown rat breeds to times a year and produces an average of young at a litter. young females breed when only three or four months old. at this rate a pair of rats, breeding uninterruptedly and without deaths, would at the end of three years ( generations) be increased to , , individuals. for centuries the world has been fighting rats without organization and at the same time has been feeding them and building for them fortresses for concealment. if we are to fight them on equal terms we must deny them food and hiding places. we must organize and unite to rid communities of these pests. the time to begin is now. house rats and mice. contents. page. destructive habits protection of food and other stores rat-proof building keeping food from rats and mice destroying rats and mice traps poisons domestic animals fumigation rat viruses natural enemies organized efforts to destroy rats community efforts state and national aid important repressive measures destructive habits of house rats and mice. losses from depredations of house rats amount to many millions of dollars yearly--to more, in fact, than those from all other injurious mammals combined. the common house mouse[ ] and the brown rat[ ] (fig. ), too familiar to need description, are pests in nearly all parts of the country; while two other kinds of house rats, known as the black rat[ ] and the roof rat,[ ] are found within our borders. [illustration: fig. .--brown rat.] of these four introduced species--for none is native to america--the brown rat is the most destructive, and, except the mouse, the most numerous and most widely distributed. brought to america just before the revolution, it has supplanted and nearly exterminated its less robust relative the black rat; and in spite of the constant warfare of man has extended its range and steadily increased in numbers. its dominance is due to its great fecundity and its ability to adapt itself to all sorts of surroundings. it breeds (in the middle part of the united states) six or more times a year and produces from to young (average ) in a litter. females breed when only or months old. thus a pair, breeding uninterruptedly and without deaths, could in three years ( generations) produce a posterity of , , individuals. mice and the black and roof rats produce smaller litters, but the period of gestation, about days, and the number of litters are the same for all. rats and mice are practically omnivorous, feeding upon all kinds of animal and vegetable matter. the brown rat makes its home in the open field, the hedge row, and the river bank, as well as in stone walls, piers, and all kinds of buildings. it destroys grains when newly planted, while growing, and in the shock, stack, mow, crib, granary, mill, elevator, or ship's hold, and also in the bin and feed trough. it invades store and warehouse and destroys furs, laces, silks, carpets, leather goods, and groceries. it attacks fruits, vegetables, and meats in the markets, and destroys by pollution ten times as much as it actually eats. it destroys eggs and young poultry, and eats the eggs and young of song and game birds. it carries disease germs from house to house and bubonic plague from city to city. it causes disastrous conflagrations; floods houses by gnawing lead water pipes; ruins artificial ponds and embankments by burrowing; and damages foundations, floors, doors, and furnishings of dwellings. unlike the brown rat the black rat rarely migrates to the fields. it has disappeared from most parts of the northern states, but is occasionally found in remote villages or farms. at our seaports it frequently arrives on ships from abroad, but seldom becomes very numerous. the roof rat is common in many parts of the south, where it is a persistent pest in cane and rice fields. it maintains itself against the brown rat partly because of its habit of living in trees. the common house mouse by no means confines its activities to the inside of buildings, but is often found in open fields, where its depredations in shock and stack are well known. not only are mice and rats, especially the brown rat, a cause of destruction and damage to property, but they are also a constant menace to the health of man. it has been proved that they are the chief means of perpetuating and transmitting bubonic plague and that they play important rôles in conveying other diseases to human beings. they are parasites, without redeeming characteristics, and should everywhere be routed and destroyed. protection of food and other stores from rats and mice. past attempts to exterminate rats and mice have failed, not so much because of lack of effective means as because of the neglect of necessary precautions and the absence of concerted endeavors. we have rendered our work abortive by continuing to provide subsistence and hiding places for the animals. if these advantages are denied, persistent and general use of the usual methods of destruction will prove far more successful. rat-proof building. first in importance, as a measure of rat repression, is the exclusion of the animals from places where they find food and safe retreats for rearing their young. the best way to keep rats from buildings, whether in city or in country, is to use cement in construction. as the advantages of this material are coming to be generally understood, its use is rapidly extending to all kinds of buildings. the processes of mixing and laying this material require little skill or special knowledge, and workmen of ordinary intelligence can successfully follow the plain directions contained in handbooks of cement construction.[ ] many modern public buildings are so constructed that rats can find no lodgment in the walls or foundations, and yet in a few years, through negligence, such buildings often become infested with the pests. sometimes drain pipes are left uncovered for hours at a time. often outer doors, especially those opening on alleys, are left ajar. a common mistake is failure to screen basement windows which must be opened for ventilation. however the intruders are admitted, when once inside they intrench themselves behind furniture or stores, and are difficult to dislodge. the addition of inner doors to vestibules is an important precaution against rats. the lower edge of outer doors to public buildings, especially markets, should be reinforced with light metal plates to prevent the animals from gnawing through. any opening left around water, steam, or gas pipes, where they go through walls, should be closed carefully with concrete to the full depth of the wall. =dwellings.=--in constructing dwelling houses the additional cost of making the foundations rat-proof is slight compared with the advantages. the cellar walls should have concrete footings, and the walls themselves should be laid in cement mortar. the cellar floor should be of medium rather than lean concrete. even old cellars may be made rat-proof at comparatively small expense. rat holes may be permanently closed with a mixture of cement, sand, and broken glass, or sharp bits of crockery or stone. on a foundation like the one described above, the walls of a wooden dwelling also may be made rat-proof. the space between the sheathing and lath, to the height of about a foot, should be filled with concrete. rats can not then gain access to the walls, and can enter the dwelling only through doors or windows. screening all basement and cellar windows with wire netting is a most necessary precaution. =old buildings in cities.=--aside from old dwellings, the chief refuges for rats in cities are sewers, wharves, stables, and outbuildings. modern sewers are used by the animals merely as highways and not as abodes, but old-fashioned brick sewers often afford nesting crannies. [illustration: fig. .--rat-proofing a frame dwelling by concrete side wall (united states public health service, new orleans, la., ).] wharves, stables, and outbuildings in cities should be so built as to exclude rats. cement is the chief means to this end. old tumble-down buildings and wharves should not be tolerated in any city. (see fig. .) in both city and country, wooden floors of sidewalks, areas, and porches are commonly laid upon timbers resting on the ground. under such floors rats have a safe retreat from nearly all enemies. the conditions can be remedied in towns by municipal action requiring that these floors be replaced by others made of cement. areas or walks made of brick are often undermined by rats and may become as objectionable as those of wood. wooden floors of porches should always be well above the ground. =farm buildings.=--granaries, corncribs, and poultry houses may be made rat-proof by a liberal use of cement in the foundations and floors; or the floors may be of wood resting upon concrete. objection has been urged against concrete floors for horses, cattle, and poultry, because the material is too good a conductor of heat, and the health of the animals suffers from contact with these floors. in poultry houses, dry soil or sand may be used as a covering for the cement floor, and in stables a wooden floor resting on concrete is just as satisfactory so far as the exclusion of rats is concerned. the common practice of setting corncribs on posts with inverted pans at the top often fails to exclude rats, because the posts are not high enough to place the lower cracks of the structure beyond reach of the animals. as rats are excellent jumpers, the posts should be tall enough to prevent the animals from obtaining a foothold at any place within feet of the ground. a crib built in this way, however, is not very satisfactory. for a rat-proof crib a well-drained site should be chosen. the outer walls, laid in cement, should be sunk about inches into the ground. the space within the walls should be grouted thoroughly with cement and broken stone and finished with rich concrete for a floor. upon this the structure may be built. even the walls of the crib may be of concrete. corn will not mold in contact with them, provided there is good ventilation and the roof is water-tight. however, there are cheaper ways of excluding rats from either new or old corncribs. rats, mice, and sparrows may be kept out effectually by the use of either an inner or an outer covering of galvanized-wire netting of half-inch mesh and heavy enough to resist the teeth of the rats. the netting in common use in screening cellar windows is suitable for covering or lining cribs. as rats can climb the netting, the entire structure must be screened, or, if sparrows are not to be excluded, the wire netting may be carried up about feet from the ground, and above this a belt of sheet metal about a foot in width may be tacked to the outside of the building. complete working drawings for the practical rat-proof corncrib shown in figures and may be obtained from the office of public roads and rural engineering of the department. =buildings for storing foodstuffs.=--whenever possible, stores of food for man or beast should be placed only in buildings of rat-proof construction, guarded against rodents by having all windows near the ground and all other possible means of entrance screened with netting made of no. or no. wire and of / -inch mesh. entrance doors should fit closely, should have the lower edges protected by wide strips of metal, and should have springs attached, to insure that they shall not be left open. before being used for housing stores, the building should be inspected as to the manner in which water, steam, or gas pipes go through the walls, and any openings found around such pipes should be closed with concrete. [illustration: fig. .--perspective of rat-proof corncrib, showing concrete foundation by dotted lines; also belt of metal.] if rat-proof buildings are not available, it is possible, by the use of concrete in basements and the other precautions just mentioned, to make an ordinary building practically safe for food storage. when it is necessary to erect temporary wooden structures to hold forage, grain, or food supplies for army camps, the floors of such buildings should not be in contact with the ground, but elevated, the sills having a foot or more of clear space below them. smooth posts rising or feet above the ground may be used for foundations, and the floor itself may be protected below by wire netting or sheet metal at all places where rats could gain a foothold. care should be taken to have the floors as tight as possible, for it is chiefly scattered grain and fragments of food about a camp that attract rats. =rat-proofing by elevation.=--the united states public health service reports that in its campaigns against bubonic plague in san francisco ( ) and new orleans ( ) many plague rats were found under the floors of wooden houses resting on the ground. these buildings were made rat-proof by elevation, and no case of either human or rodent plague occurred in any house after the change. placing them on smooth posts inches above the ground, with the space beneath the floor entirely open, left no hiding place for rats. this plan is adapted to small dwellings throughout the south, and to small summer homes, temporary structures, and small farm buildings everywhere. wherever rats might obtain a foothold on the top of the post they may be prevented from gnawing the adjacent wood by tacking metal plates or pieces of wire netting to floor or sill. keeping food from rats and mice. the effect of an abundance of food on the breeding of rodents should be kept in mind. well-fed rats mature quickly, breed often, and have large litters. poorly fed rats, on the contrary, reproduce less frequently and have smaller litters. in addition, scarcity of food makes measures for destroying the animals far more effective. =merchandise in stores.=--in all parts of the country there is a serious economic drain in the destruction by rats and mice of merchandise held for sale by dealers. not only foodstuffs and forage, but textiles, clothing, and leather goods are often ruined. this loss is due mainly to the faulty buildings in which the stores are kept. often it would be a measure of economy to tear down the old structures and replace them by new ones. however, even the old buildings may often be repaired so as to make them practically rat-proof; and foodstuffs, as flour, seeds, and meats, may always be protected in wire cages at slight expense. the public should be protected from insanitary stores by a system of rigid inspection. [illustration: fig. .--floor plan of rat-proof corncrib shown in figure .] =household supplies.=--similar care should be exercised in the home to protect household supplies from mice and rats. little progress in ridding the premises of these animals can be made so long as they have access to supplies of food. cellars, kitchens, and pantries often furnish subsistence not only to rats that inhabit the dwelling, but to many that come from outside. food supplies may always be kept from rats and mice if placed in inexpensive rat-proof containers covered with wire netting. sometimes all that is needed to prevent serious waste is the application of concrete to holes in the basement wall or the slight repair of a defective part of the building. =produce in transit.=--much loss of fruits, vegetables, and other produce occurs in transit by rail and on ships. most of the damage is done at wharves and in railway stations, but there is also considerable in ships' holds, especially to perishable produce brought from warm latitudes. much of this may be prevented by the use of rat-proof cages at the docks, by the careful fumigation of seagoing vessels at the end of each voyage, and by the frequent fumigation of vessels in coastwise trade; but still more by replacing old and decrepit wharves and station platforms with modern ones built of concrete. where cargoes are being loaded or unloaded at wharves or depots, food liable to attack by rats may be temporarily safeguarded by being placed in rat-proof cages, or pounds, constructed of wire netting. wooden boxes containing reserve food held in depots for a considerable time or intended for shipment by sea may be made rat-proof by light coverings of metal along the angles. this plan has long been in use to protect naval stores on ships and in warehouses. it is based on the fact that rats do not gnaw the plane surfaces of hard materials, but attack doors, furniture, and boxes at the angles only. =packing houses.=--packing houses and abattoirs are often sources from which rats secure subsistence, especially where meats are prepared for market in old buildings. in old-style cooling rooms with double walls of wood and sawdust insulation, always a source of annoyance because of rat infestation, the utmost vigilance is required to prevent serious loss of meat products. on the other hand, packing houses with modern construction and sanitary devices have no trouble from rats or mice. =garbage and waste.=--since much of the food of rats consists of garbage and other waste materials, it is not enough to bar the animals from markets, granaries, warehouses, and private food stores. garbage and offal of all kinds must be so disposed of that rats can not obtain them. in cities and towns an efficient system of garbage collection and disposal should be established by ordinances. waste from markets, hotels, cafés and households should be collected in covered metal receptacles and frequently emptied. garbage should never be dumped in or near towns, but should be utilized or promptly destroyed by fire. rats find abundant food in country slaughterhouses; reform in the management of these is badly needed. such places are centers of rat propagation. it is a common practice to leave offal of slaughtered animals to be eaten by rats and swine, and this is the chief means of perpetuating trichinæ in pork. the law should require that offal be promptly cremated or otherwise disposed of. country slaughterhouses should be as cleanly and as constantly inspected as abattoirs. another important source of rat food is found in remnants of lunches left by employees in factories, stores, and public buildings. this food, which alone is sufficient to attract and sustain a small army of rats, is commonly left in waste baskets or other open receptacles. strictly enforced rules requiring all remnants of food to be deposited in covered metal vessels would make trapping far more effective. [illustration: fig. .--guillotine trap made entirely of metal.] military training camps, unless subjected to rigid discipline in the matter of disposal of garbage and waste, soon become centers of rat infestation. waste from camps, deposited in covered metal cans and collected daily, should be removed far from the camp itself and either burned or utilized in approved modern ways. destroying rats and mice. the biological survey has made numerous laboratory and field experiments with various agencies for destroying rats and mice. the results form the chief basis for the following recommendations: traps. owing to their cunning, it is not always easy to clear rats from premises by trapping; if food is abundant, it is impossible. a few adults refuse to enter the most innocent-looking trap. and yet trapping, if persistently followed, is one of the most effective ways of destroying the animals. =guillotine trap.=--for general use the improved modern traps with a wire fall released by a baited trigger and driven by a coiled spring have marked advantages over the old forms, and many of them may be used at the same time. these traps, sometimes called "guillotine" traps, are of many designs, but the more simply constructed are preferable. probably those made entirely of metal are the best, as they are more durable. traps with tin or sheet-metal bases are not recommended. guillotine traps of the type shown in figure should be baited with small pieces of vienna sausage (wienerwurst) or fried bacon. a small section of an ear of corn is an excellent bait if other grain is not present. the trigger wire should be bent inward to bring the bait into proper position for the fall to strike the rat in the neck, as shown in figure . other excellent baits for rats and mice are oatmeal, toasted cheese, toasted bread (buttered), fish, fish offal, fresh liver, raw meat, pine nuts, apples, carrots, and corn, and sunflower, squash, or pumpkin seeds. broken fresh eggs are good bait at all seasons, and ripe tomatoes, green cucumbers, and other fresh vegetables are very tempting to the animals in winter. when seed, grain, or meal is used with a guillotine trap, it is put on the trigger plate, or the trigger wire may be bent outward and the bait placed directly under it. oatmeal (rolled oats) is recommended as a bait for guillotine traps made with wooden base and trigger plate (fig. ). these traps are especially convenient to use on ledges or other narrow rat runs or at the openings of rat burrows. they are often used without bait. [illustration: fig. .--method of baiting guillotine trap.] a common mistake in trapping for rats and mice is to use only one or two traps when dozens are needed. for a large establishment hundreds of traps may be used to advantage, and a dozen is none too many for an ordinary barn or dwelling infested with rats. house mice are less suspicious than rats and are much more easily trapped. small guillotine traps baited with oatmeal will soon rid an ordinary dwelling of the smaller pests. =cage trap.=--when rats are abundant, the large french wire cage traps may be used to advantage. they should be made of stiff wire, well reinforced. many of those sold in stores are useless, because a full-grown rat can bend the light wires apart and so escape. [illustration: fig. .--guillotine trap with wooden base and trigger plate.] cage traps may be baited and left open for several nights until the rats are accustomed to enter them to obtain food. they should then be closed and freshly baited, when a larger catch may be expected, especially of young rats (fig. ). as many as , and even more, partly grown rats have been taken at a time in one of these traps. it is better to cover the trap than to leave it exposed. a short board should be laid on the trap and an old cloth or bag or a bunch of hay or straw thrown carelessly over the top. often the trap may be placed with the entrance opposite a rat hole and fitting it so closely that rats can not pass through without entering the trap. if a single rat is caught it may be left in the trap as a decoy to others. notwithstanding the fact that sometimes a large number of rats may be taken at a time in cage traps, a few good guillotine traps intelligently used will prove more effective in the long run. [illustration: fig. .--cage trap with catch of rats.] =figure- trigger trap.=--the old-fashioned box trap set with a figure- trigger is sometimes useful to secure a wise old rat that refuses to be enticed into a modern trap. better still is a simple deadfall--a flat stone or a heavy plank--supported by a figure- trigger. an old rat will go under such a contrivance to feed without fear. =steel trap.=--the ordinary steel trap (no. or ) may sometimes be satisfactorily employed to capture a rat. the animal is usually caught by the foot, and its squealing has a tendency to frighten other rats. the trap may be set in a shallow pan or box and covered with bran or oats, care being taken to have the space under the trigger pan free of grain. this may be done by placing a very little cotton under the trigger and setting as lightly as possible. in a narrow run or at the mouth of a burrow a steel trap unbaited and covered with very light cloth or tissue paper is often effective. [illustration: fig. .--barrel trap: , with stiff paper cover; , with hinged barrel cover; _a_, stop; _b_, baits.] the best bait usually is food of a kind that the rats and mice do not get in the vicinity. in a meat market, vegetables or grain should be used; in a feed store, meat. as far as possible food other than the bait should be inaccessible while trapping is in progress. the bait should be kept fresh and attractive, and the kind changed when necessary. baits and traps should be handled as little as possible. [illustration: fig. --pit trap. _aa_, rat run; _bb_, cover; _cc_, position of weights; _dd_, rods on which covers turn.] =barrel trap.=--about years ago a writer in the cornhill magazine gave details of a trap, by means of which it was claimed that , rats were caught in a warehouse in a single night. the plan involved tolling the rats to the place and feeding them for several nights on the tops of barrels covered with coarse brown paper. afterwards a cross was cut in the paper, so that the rats fell into the barrel (fig. ( )). many variations of the plan, but few improvements upon it, have been suggested by agricultural writers since that time. reports are frequently made of large catches of rats by means of a barrel fitted with a light cover of wood, hinged on a rod so as to turn with the weight of a rat (fig. ( )). =pit trap.=--a modification of the barrel trap is the pit trap (fig. ). this consists of a stout narrow box sunk in the ground so that the top is level with the rat run. it is fixed with a cover of light wood or metal in two sections, the sections fitting nicely inside the box and working independently. they turn on rods, to which they are fastened. they are weighted near the ends of the box and so adjusted that they swing easily. an animal stepping upon the cover beyond the rods is precipitated into the box, while the cover immediately swings back to its place. besides rats, the trap is well adapted to capture larger animals, as minks, raccoons, opossums, and cats. it is especially useful to protect poultry yards, game preserves, and the like. the trap should be placed along the fence outside the yard, and behind a shelter of boards or brush that leans against the fence. =fence and battue.=--in the rice fields of the far east the natives build numerous piles of brush and rice straw, and leave them for several days until many rats have taken shelter in them. a portable bamboo inclosure several feet in height is then set up around each pile in succession and the straw and brush are thrown out over the top, while dogs and men kill the trapped rodents. large numbers are destroyed in this way, and the plan with modifications may be utilized in america with satisfactory results. a wire netting of fine mesh may be used for the inclosure. the scheme is applicable at the removal of grain, straw, or haystacks, as well as brush piles. in a large barn near washington, a few years ago, piles of unhusked corn were left in the loft and were soon infested with rats. a wooden pen was set down surrounding the piles in turn and the corn thrown out until dogs were able to get at the rats. in this way several men and dogs killed rats in a single day. poisons. while the use of poison is the best and quickest way to get rid of rats and mice, the odor from the dead animals makes the method impracticable in occupied houses. poisons may be effectively used in barns, stables, sheds, cribs, and other outbuildings. =caution.=--in the united states there are few laws which prohibit the laying of poisons on lands owned or controlled by the poisoner. hence it is all the more necessary to exercise extreme caution to prevent accidents. in several states notice of intention to lay poison must be given to persons living in the neighborhood. poison for rats should never be placed in open or unsheltered places. this applies particularly to strychnin or arsenic on meat. _packages containing poisons should always bear a warning label and should not be kept where children might reach them._ among the principal poisons that have been recommended for killing rats and mice are barium carbonate, strychnin, arsenic, phosphorus, and squills. =barium carbonate.=--one of the cheapest and most effective poisons for rats and mice is barium carbonate. this mineral has the advantage of being without taste or smell. it has a corrosive action on the mucous lining of the stomach and is dangerous to larger animals if taken in sufficient quantity. in the small doses fed to rats and mice it would be harmless to domestic animals. its action upon rats is slow, and if exit is possible the animals usually leave the premises in search of water. for this reason the poison may frequently, though not always, be used in houses without disagreeable consequences. barium carbonate may be fed in the form of dough composed of four parts of meal or flour and one part of the mineral. a more convenient bait is ordinary oatmeal with about one-eighth of its bulk of the mineral, mixed with water into a stiff dough. a third plan is to spread the barium carbonate upon fish, toasted bread (moistened), or ordinary bread and butter. the prepared bait should be placed in rat runs, about a teaspoonful at a place. if a single application of the poison fails to kill or drive away all rats from the premises, it should be repeated with a change of bait. =strychnin.=--strychnin is too rapid in action to make its use for rats desirable in houses, but elsewhere it may be employed effectively. strychnia sulphate is the best form to use. the dry crystals may be inserted in small pieces of raw meat, vienna sausage, or toasted cheese, and these placed in rat runs or burrows; or oatmeal may be moistened with a strychnin sirup and small quantities laid in the same way. strychnin sirup is prepared as follows: dissolve a half ounce of strychnia sulphate in a pint of boiling water; add a pint of thick sugar sirup and stir thoroughly. a smaller quantity may be prepared with a proportional quantity of water and sirup. in preparing the bait it is necessary to moisten all the oatmeal with the sirup. wheat and corn are excellent alternative baits. the grain should be soaked overnight in the strychnin sirup. =arsenic.=--arsenic is probably the most popular of the rat poisons, owing to its cheapness, yet our experiments prove that, measured by the results obtained, arsenic is dearer than strychnin. besides, arsenic is extremely variable in its effect upon rats, and if the animals survive a first dose it is very difficult to induce them to take another. powdered white arsenic (arsenious acid) may be fed to rats in almost any of the baits mentioned under barium carbonate and strychnin. it has been used successfully when rubbed into fresh fish or spread on buttered toast. another method is to mix twelve parts by weight of corn meal and one part of arsenic with whites of eggs into a stiff dough. an old formula for poisoning rats and mice with arsenic is the following, adapted from an english source: take a pound of oatmeal, a pound of coarse brown sugar, and a spoonful of arsenic. mix well together and put the composition into an earthen jar. put a tablespoonful at a place in runs frequented by rats. =phosphorus.=--for poisoning rats and mice, phosphorus is used almost as commonly as arsenic, and undoubtedly it is effective when given in an attractive bait. the phosphorus paste of the drug stores is usually dissolved yellow phosphorus, mixed with glucose or other substances. the proportion of phosphorus varies from one-fourth of per cent to per cent. the first amount is too small to be always effective and the last is dangerously inflammable. when homemade preparations of phosphorus are used there is much danger of burning the person or of setting fire to crops or buildings. in the western states many fires have resulted from putting out homemade phosphorus poisons for ground squirrels, and entire fields of ripe grain have been destroyed in this way. even with commercial pastes the action of sun and rain changes the phosphorus and leaches out the glucose until a highly inflammable residue is left. it is often claimed that phosphorus eaten by rats or mice dries up or mummifies the body so that no odor results. the statement has no foundation in fact. no known poison will prevent decomposition of the body of an animal that died from its effects. equally misleading is the statement that rats poisoned with phosphorus do not die on the premises. owing to its slower operation, no doubt a larger portion escape into the open before dying than when strychnin is used. the biological survey does not recommend the use of phosphorus as a poison for rodents. =squills.=--the squill, or sea leek,[ ] is a favorite rat poison in many parts of europe and is well worthy of trial in america. it is rapid and very deadly in its action, and rats seem to eat it readily. the poison is used in several ways. two ounces of dry squills, powdered, may be thoroughly mixed with eight ounces of toasted cheese or of butter and meal and put out in runs of rats or mice. another formula recommends two parts of squills to three parts of finely chopped bacon, mixed with meal enough to make it cohere. this is baked in small cakes. =poison in poultry houses.=--for poisoning rats in buildings and yards occupied by poultry the following method is recommended: two wooden boxes should be used, one considerably larger than the other and each having one or more holes in the sides large enough to admit rats. the poisoned bait should be placed on the bottom and near the middle of the smaller box, and the larger box should then be inverted over it. rats thus have free access to the bait, but fowls are excluded. domestic animals. among domestic animals employed to kill rats are the dog, the cat, and the ferret. =dogs.=--the value of dogs as ratters can not be appreciated by persons who have had no experience with a trained animal. the ordinary cur and the larger breeds of dogs seldom develop the necessary qualities for ratters. small irish, scotch, and fox terriers, when properly trained, are superior to other breeds and under favorable circumstances may be relied upon to keep the farm premises reasonably free from rats. =cats.=--however valuable cats may be as mousers, few learn to catch rats. the ordinary house cat is too well fed and consequently too lazy to undertake the capture of an animal as formidable as the brown rat. birds and mice are much more to its liking. cats that are fearless of rats, however, and have learned to hunt and destroy them are often very useful about stables and warehouses. they should be lightly fed, chiefly on milk. a little sulphur in the milk at intervals is a corrective against the bad effects of a constant rat or mouse diet. cats often die from eating these rodents. =ferrets.=--tame ferrets, like weasels, are inveterate foes of rats, and can follow the rodents into their retreats. under favorable circumstances they are useful aids to the rat catcher, but their value is greatly overestimated. for effective work they require experienced handling and the additional services of a dog or two. dogs and ferrets must be thoroughly accustomed to each other, and the former must be quiet and steady instead of noisy and excitable. the ferret is used only to bolt the rats, which are killed by the dogs. if unmuzzled ferrets are sent into rat retreats, they are apt to make a kill and then lie up after sucking the blood of their victim. sometimes they remain for hours in the burrows or escape by other exits and are lost. there is danger that these lost ferrets may adapt themselves to wild conditions and become a pest by preying upon poultry and birds. fumigation. rats may be destroyed in their burrows in the fields and along river banks, levees, and dikes by carbon bisulphid.[ ] a wad of cotton or other absorbent material is saturated with the liquid and then pushed into the burrow, the opening being packed with earth to prevent the escape of the gas. all animals in the burrow are asphyxiated. fumigation in buildings is not so satisfactory, because it is difficult to confine the gases. moreover, when effective, the odor from the dead rats is highly objectionable in occupied buildings. chlorin, carbon monoxid, sulphur dioxid, and hydrocyanic acid are the gases most used for destroying rats and mice in sheds, warehouses, and stores. each is effective if the gas can be confined and made to reach the retreats of the animals. owing to the great danger from fire incident to burning charcoal or sulphur in open pans, a special furnace provided with means for forcing the gas into the compartments of vessels or buildings is generally employed. hydrocyanic-acid gas is effective in destroying all animal life in buildings. it has been successfully used to free elevators and warehouses of rats, mice, and insects. however, it is so dangerous to human life that the novice should not attempt fumigation with it, except under careful instructions. directions for preparing and using the gas may be found in a publication entitled hydrocyanic-acid gas against household insects, by dr. l. o. howard and charles h. popenoe.[ ] carbon monoxid is rather dangerous, as its presence in the hold of a vessel or other compartment is not manifest to the senses, and fatal accidents have occurred during its employment to fumigate vessels. chlorin gas has a strong bleaching action upon textile fabrics, and for this reason can not be used in many situations. sulphur dioxid also has a bleaching effect upon textiles, but less marked than that of chlorin, and ordinarily it is not noticeable with the small percentage of the gas it is necessary to use. on the whole, this gas has many advantages as a fumigator and disinfectant. it is used also as a fire extinguisher on board vessels. special furnaces for generating the gas and forcing it into the compartments of ships and buildings are on the market, and many steamships and docks are now fitted with the necessary apparatus. rat viruses. several microorganisms, or bacteria, found originally in diseased rats or mice, have been exploited for destroying rats. a number of these so-called rat viruses are on the american market. the biological survey, the bureau of animal industry, and the united states public health service have made careful investigations and practical tests of these viruses, mostly with negative results. the cultures tested by the biological survey have not proved satisfactory. the chief defects to be overcome before the cultures can be recommended for general use are: . the virulence is not great enough to kill a sufficiently high percentage of rats that eat food containing the microorganisms. . the virulence decreases with the age of the cultures. they deteriorate in warm weather and in bright sunlight. . the diseases resulting from the microorganisms are not contagious and do not spread by contact of diseased with healthy animals. . the comparative cost of the cultures is too great for general use. since they have no advantages over the common poisons, except that they are usually harmless to man and other animals, they should be equally cheap; but their actual cost is much greater. moreover, considering the skill and care necessary in their preparation, it is doubtful if the cost can be greatly reduced. the department of agriculture, therefore, does not prepare, use, or recommend the use of rat viruses. natural enemies of rats and mice. among the natural enemies of rats and mice are the larger hawks and owls, skunks, foxes, coyotes, weasels, minks, dogs, cats, and ferrets. probably the greatest factor in the increase of rats, mice, and other destructive rodents in the united states has been the persistent killing off of the birds and mammals that prey upon them. animals that on the whole are decidedly beneficial, since they subsist upon harmful insects and rodents, are habitually destroyed by some farmers and sportsmen because they occasionally kill a chicken or a game bird. the value of carnivorous mammals and the larger birds of prey in destroying rats and mice should be more fully recognized, especially by the farmer and the game preserver. rats actually destroy more poultry and game, both eggs and young chicks, than all the birds and wild mammals combined; yet some of their enemies among our most useful birds of prey and carnivorous mammals are persecuted almost to the point of extinction. an enlightened public sentiment should cause the repeal of all bounties on these animals and afford protection to the majority of them. organized efforts to destroy rats. the necessity of cooperation and organization in the work of rat destruction is of the utmost importance. to destroy all the animals on the premises of a single farmer in a community has little permanent value, since they are soon replaced from near-by farms. if, however, the farmers of an entire township or county unite in efforts to get rid of rats, much more lasting results may be attained. if continued from year to year, such organized efforts are very effective. community efforts. cooperative efforts to destroy rats have taken various forms in different localities. in cities, municipal employees have occasionally been set at work hunting rats from their retreats, with at least temporary benefit to the community. thus, in , at folkestone, england, a town of about , inhabitants, the corporation employees, helped by dogs, in three days killed , rats. side hunts in which rats are the only animals that count in the contest have sometimes been organized and successfully carried out. at new burlington, ohio, a rat hunt took place some years ago in which each of the two sides killed over , rats, the beaten party serving a banquet to the winners. there is danger that organized rat hunts will be followed by long intervals of indifference and inaction. this may be prevented by offering prizes covering a definite period of effort. such prizes accomplish more than municipal bounties, because they secure a friendly rivalry which stimulates the contestants to do their utmost to win. in england and some of its colonies contests for prizes have been organized to promote the destruction of the english, or house, sparrow, but many of the so-called sparrow clubs are really sparrow and rat clubs, for the destruction of both pests is the avowed object of the organizations. a sparrow club in kent, england, accomplished the destruction of , sparrows and , rats in three seasons by the annual expenditure of but £ ($ . ) in prize money. had ordinary bounties been paid for this destruction, the tax on the community would have been about £ (over $ , ). many organizations already formed should be interested in destroying rats. boards of trade, civic societies, and citizens' associations in towns and farmers' and women's clubs in rural communities will find the subject of great importance. women's municipal leagues in several large cities already have taken up the matter. the league in baltimore recently secured appropriations of funds for expenditure in fighting mosquitoes, flies, and rats. the league in boston during the past year, supported by voluntary contributions for the purpose, made a highly creditable educational campaign against rats. boys' corn clubs, the troops of boy scouts, and similar organizations could do excellent work in rat campaigns. state and national aid. to secure permanent results any general campaign for the elimination of rats must aim at _building the animals out of shelter and food_. building reforms depend on municipal ordinances and legislative enactments. the recent plague eradication work of the united states public health service in san francisco, seattle, new orleans, and at various places in hawaii and porto rico required such ordinances and laws as well as financial aid in prosecuting the work. the campaign of danish and swedish organizations for the destruction of rats had the help of governmental appropriations. the legislatures of california, texas, indiana, and hawaii have in recent years passed laws or made appropriations to aid in rat riddance. it is probable that well-organized efforts of communities would soon win legislative support everywhere. communities should not postpone efforts, however, while waiting for legislative cooperation, but should at once organize and begin repressive operations. wherever health is threatened the public health service of the united states can cooperate, and where crops and other products are endangered the bureau of biological survey of the department of agriculture is ready to assist by advice and in demonstration of methods. important repressive measures. the measures needed for repressing and eliminating rats and mice include the following: . the requirement that all new buildings erected shall be made rat-proof under competent inspection. . that all existing rat-proof buildings shall be closed against rats and mice by having all openings accessible to the animals, from foundation to roof, closed or screened by door, window, grating, or meshed wire netting. . that all buildings not of rat-proof construction shall be made so by remodeling, by the use of materials that may not be pierced by rats, or by elevation. . the protection of our native hawks, owls, and smaller predatory mammals--the natural enemies of rats. . greater cleanliness about markets, grocery stores, warehouses, courts, alleys, stables, and vacant lots in cities and villages, and like care on farms and suburban premises. this includes the storage of waste and garbage in tightly covered vessels and the prompt disposal of it each day. . care in the construction of drains and sewers, so as not to provide entrance and retreat for rats. old brick sewers in cities should be replaced by concrete or tile. . the early threshing and marketing of grains on farms, so that stacks and mows shall not furnish harborage and food for rats. . removal of outlying straw stacks and piles of trash or lumber that harbor rats in fields and vacant lots. . the keeping of provisions, seed grain, and foodstuffs in rat-proof containers. . keeping effective rat dogs, especially on farms and in city warehouses. . the systematic destruction of rats, whenever and wherever possible, by (_a_) trapping, (_b_) poisoning, and (_c_) organized hunts. . the organization of clubs and other societies for systematic warfare against rats. footnotes: [ ] _mus musculus._ [ ] _rattus norvegicus._ [ ] _rattus rattus rattus._ [ ] _rattus rattus alexandrinus._ [ ] farmers' bulletin , use of concrete on the farm, will prove useful to city and village dwellers as well as to the farmer. [ ] _scilla maritima._ [ ] caution.--carbon disulphid is very inflammable and can be ignited by a match, lantern, cigar, or pipe. [ ] farmers' bulletin . publications of the united states department of agriculture relating to noxious mammals. available for free distribution. how to destroy rats. (farmers' bulletin .) the common mole of eastern united states. (farmers' bulletin .) field mice as farm and orchard pests. (farmers' bulletin .) cottontail rabbits in relation to trees and farm crops. (farmers' bulletin .) trapping moles and utilizing their skins. (farmers' bulletin .) destroying rodent pests on the farm. (separate , yearbook for .) for sale by the superintendent of documents, government printing office, washington, d. c. harmful and beneficial mammals of the arid interior, with special reference to the carson and humboldt valleys, nevada. (farmers' bulletin .) price cents. the nevada mouse plague of - . (farmers' bulletin .) price cents. some common mammals of western montana in relation to agriculture and spotted fever. (farmers' bulletin .) price cents. danger of introducing noxious animals and birds. (separate , yearbook .) price cents. meadow mice in relation to agriculture and horticulture. (separate , yearbook .) price cents. mouse plagues, their control and prevention. (separate , yearbook .) price--cents. use of poisons for destroying noxious mammals. (separate , yearbook .) price cents. pocket gophers as enemies of trees. (separate , yearbook .) price cents. the jack rabbits of the united states. (biological survey bulletin .) price cents. economic study of field mice, genus _microtus_. (biological survey bulletin .) price cents. the brown rat in the united states. (biological survey bulletin .) price cents. directions for the destruction of wolves and coyotes. (biological survey circular .) price cents. the california ground squirrel. (biological survey circular .) price cents. seed-eating mammals in relation to reforestation. (biological survey circular .) price cents. mammals of bitterroot valley, montana, in their relation to spotted fever. (biological survey circular .) price cents. by usda through the internet archive. all resultant materials are placed in the public domain. transcriber note text emphasis denoted as _italics_ and =bold=. farmers' bulletin united states department of agriculture growing crimson clover crimson clover is a handsome fall-planted annual, widely cultivated in the middle atlantic and southeastern states for forage, a cover crop, and green manure. crimson clover is commonly sown in corn at the last cultivation. if the soil is heavy, a better practice is to sow after a crop of small grain or on other land which can be specially prepared. crimson clover will grow on poorer soil than most clovers and is not particularly dependent upon lime. for this reason it has been widely used for restoring the productivity of soils which have been abused. a more important function is to maintain crop yields on soils which are already moderately rich. the most common difficulty in growing crimson clover is the killing of the young stands by drought. this is best prevented by the preparation of a fine, moist, and firmly compacted seed bed. august and september are the best months for sowing crimson clover, the exact date depending upon the condition of the soil. either hulled or unhulled seed may be used, the latter giving somewhat greater certainty of a stand. crimson clover is often sown with a nurse crop of buckwheat or cowpeas, to protect it from the sun. a light covering of straw is also effective. combinations of crimson clover with oats, hairy vetch, or other fall-sown forage crops give somewhat higher yields and a surer stand than crimson clover alone. no insects trouble crimson clover seriously, and the only severe disease is the stem-rot, or wilt. contribution from the bureau of plant industry wm. a. taylor, chief washington, d. c. august, =growing crimson clover.=[ ] l. w. kephart, _scientific assistant, office of forage-crop investigations._ [ ] this bulletin is a revision of farmers' bulletin , entitled "crimson clover: growing the crop," by j. m. westgate, formerly agronomist in charge of clover investigations, office of forage-crop investigations. the illustrations and some of the subject matter of the old bulletin are retained in the present issue. =contents.= page. history and adaptations varieties use in the rotation seeding in intertilled crops seeding after an early-maturing crop requirements for obtaining a stand soils preparation of the seed bed fertilizers lime inoculation seeding time of seeding rate of seeding methods of seeding choice of seed unhulled seed use of a nurse crop seed mixtures treatment of the stand maladies [dropcap: crimson] clover is an annual or winter annual true clover, resembling common red clover in size and general appearance, the most noticeable difference being the flower heads, which are long, narrow, and pointed instead of short, spherical, and compact (fig. ). the individual flowers of this clover are commonly of a rich scarlet color, and as the heads are borne mostly on the ends of the stems, a field of crimson clover in full bloom presents a strikingly brilliant appearance. because of the color of the flowers, crimson clover is often termed "scarlet clover," although it is also known, less commonly, as "french clover," "italian clover," "german clover," "incarnate clover," and "annual clover." it is the only annual true clover that is of more than incidental agricultural importance in the eastern united states. probably the most important characteristic of crimson clover is its ability to grow and make its crop during the fall and early spring, when the land is not occupied by the ordinary summer-grown crops. in sections where it succeeds, it can be sown following a grain crop or in an intertilled crop in late summer and is ready to harvest for hay, to pasture, or to turn under as green manure in time to plow the land for spring-seeded crops, such as corn or cotton. south of central delaware it may even be cut for seed and the stubble plowed under in time for seeding a quick-maturing strain of corn. because it can be grown during the offseason of the year, crimson clover is one of the most economical legumes for green manuring, and it has been largely used for that purpose in the regions to which it is adapted. the many uses to which this crop may be put merit a careful study of the best methods of establishing a stand of this clover on the farm. [illustration: fig. .--a single plant of crimson clover.] =history and adaptations.= crimson clover is a native of europe, where it is cultivated as a forage and green-manuring crop in italy, france, spain, germany, austria, and great britain. large quantities of crimson-clover seed are exported from europe to the united states, especially from the districts of central france, where crimson clover is the premier leguminous forage plant. crimson clover was introduced into this country as early as , and the seed was widely distributed by the united states patent office in . the plant was at first regarded more for its ornamental value than as a forage plant, however, and it was not until about that its value for agricultural purposes began to be appreciated. [illustration: fig. .--map of a part of the united states, showing the region where crimson clover is most widely grown.] at present crimson clover is grown most widely in the lighter sandy areas of the atlantic coastal plain, where the soil is not very rich and the winters are not severe. (fig. .) the plant does not withstand either extreme cold or extreme heat, and its culture is therefore limited to regions which enjoy at some time during the year a long period of relatively mild, moist weather. ordinarily, this clover does not survive the winter in latitudes north of southern pennsylvania, while in some of the southern states it is frequently killed by dry, hot weather in the fall or spring. it succeeds well in the humid regions near the gulf of mexico and in the pacific northwest, but in these areas it is not widely grown. normally, crimson clover is a winter annual comparable to winter wheat; that is, it is planted in the fall, lies more or less dormant over winter, grows rapidly in the spring, and dies, after going to seed, early in the summer. where the summers are not too hot it can be planted in the spring and grown as a summer crop, but for this purpose other clovers are usually preferred. =varieties.= crimson clover is exceedingly variable both in color of flower and in time of maturity. these variations are particularly noticeable in fields planted from a mixed lot of seed, the flowers presenting a range in color from nearly pure white to a deep purplish red and the seeds a difference in date of ripening of more than a month. since crimson clover is thought to be mainly self-pollinated, it is easy to fix these qualities by selection and to establish definite varieties. in europe six or seven different varieties of crimson clover are recognized and sold by seedsmen, varying from extra early crimson flowered to, extra late white flowered and from very hardy to non-hardy. by the use of a succession of these varieties the european farmer is able to spread his harvest over six or seven weeks instead of having it concentrated within a few days, as in america. similarly, the culture of the plant has been extended northward from italy to sweden by means of hardy strains. a wild form of crimson clover having yellowish flowers and hairy foliage occurs in southern and eastern europe and in england, but it is not of economic value. in america no sharply defined varieties of crimson clover are recognized, except a white-blooming variety which is sold in the south and is two weeks later than the ordinary crimson-flowered sort. hardy strains have been developed and used in a small way in massachusetts and ohio, but these are not commercially available. =use in the rotation.= =seeding in intertilled crops.= in former years a large percentage of the crimson-clover acreage was seeded in corn or other intertilled crops at or shortly after the time of the last cultivation. in most of the crimson-clover area it is possible to make such a seeding, obtain a good growth during the fall and early spring, and mow or plow under the clover in time, for breaking up the land for another crop of corn. this has been the standard method of growing this clover, and it is still the leading practice in many of the older sections. corn in the summer with crimson clover in the winter is a cheap and convenient method of growing a cash crop and a restorative crop the same year, and the reputation of crimson clover as a crop increaser is largely based on this simple rotation. instances are by no means rare where the yield of corn has been gradually increased from bushels per acre to as high as bushels by this means. the difficulty with this method is the possibility of the stand of young clover failing through drought. the growing corn makes a heavy demand on the soil moisture, and if there is not enough moisture for both clover and corn the latter gets the larger share and the tender clover plants are likely to succumb. because of the risk involved, farmers in the upland sections are seeking other and more reliable methods of seeding, and the sowing of crimson clover in corn is gradually decreasing. where the danger from fall drought is not serious, crimson clover may be sown in corn at the time of the last cultivation or when the corn leaves have just begun to wither. south of central virginia there is likely to be much hot weather after the corn is laid by, in which case it is best to delay the seeding of the clover until after the first rain. the appearance of a field of crimson clover seeded in corn the previous summer is shown in figure . south of southern virginia crimson clover can be seeded in cotton, provided the field is free from crab-grass and other weeds and the soil is not too dry. in the extreme north of the cotton belt the seed may be sown at the last working of the cotton; farther south this occurs too early and it is necessary to wait for a rain, which often comes at about the time of the first picking. [illustration: fig. .--crimson clover in an old cornfield. the clover was seeded in the corn at the last cultivation. a fodder stack is to be observed in the middle foreground. the cornstalks have been removed to avoid difficulty in mowing the clover.] crimson clover may be seeded in practically any of the cultivated truck crops which receive their last cultivation from to weeks before the first frost. it is not practicable to seed the clover in late potatoes, sweet potatoes, or other root crops, as the digging in the fall practically destroys the clover. ordinarily, crimson clover does not succeed when sown in cowpeas, sorghum, or watermelons, owing to the heavy shade cast by these crops. it can, however, be seeded in tobacco, tomatoes, cultivated soy beans, and cantaloupes. =seeding after an early-maturing crop.= seeding crimson clover in an intertilled crop is successful mostly on sandy soils, which can easily be prepared for seeding even in mid-summer. on clay soils and in weedy fields this method of seeding is likely to be unsatisfactory. such soils are usually hard and dry in august and can with difficulty be brought into condition for a seed bed, with the result that a large percentage of such seedings fail. a better plan on clay soils, and on sandy soils in many cases, is to seed the crimson clover on specially prepared ground from which all other crops have been removed. such ground can be made as fine and firm as desired. furthermore, the clover after planting does not have to compete with another crop for the soil moisture. this method is somewhat more troublesome than planting in intertilled crops, but the greater certainty of getting a stand more than offsets the greater cost. planting crimson clover on specially prepared ground has extended the culture of the plant to regions where it was not hitherto grown and is increasing the reliability of the crop in sections where it has been long established. in the ordinary rotation, crimson clover follows a crop of small grain. however, it may follow any crop that is removed to weeks before frost, or it may be seeded on fallow ground. ground from which early potatoes have been removed is especially favorable for the establishment of a stand of this clover. the residual effect of the fertilizers used on potatoes is partially responsible for this, while the well-settled seed bed, which requires only leveling and harrowing, also presents favorable conditions for the crimson-clover seedlings. in many parts of the south crimson clover can be seeded in corn stubble if an early variety of corn has been used. although there is some risk that the clover may not make enough growth before winter if seeding is delayed until the corn is harvested, the danger of losing the stand is not as great as if the clover were seeded earlier, while the corn was standing. crimson clover is sometimes seeded after a grass or clover crop if the rainfall in july is sufficient to cause the sod to decay. in the far south it can be planted after peanuts, while in all sections it can be sown as a catch crop on land where cotton or other crops have died early in the season. =requirements for obtaining a stand.= probably the difficulty most commonly experienced in growing crimson clover is failure to obtain a satisfactory stand. sometimes the seed does not germinate well; more commonly good germination is secured, but the seedlings wither and die before they can become established. frequently not more than per cent of the plants survive the first three weeks, while a complete failure of the crop is a common risk even in the sections where crimson clover is most widely grown. the most common cause of failure to obtain a stand is hot, dry weather after planting. the seedlings of crimson clover are tender, succulent, and shallow rooted and are easily killed by lack of moisture. unfortunately, in most of the crimson-clover area the weather during late august and early september is very likely to be hot and droughty, making the planting of the clover at that time rather hazardous. some farmers attempt to avoid this difficulty by planting either in early summer or in october, after the fall rains; there is danger, however, that the plants will make too much or too little growth to survive the winter. in the long run it is probably better to plant at the regular time and depend upon thorough preparation of the seed bed to offset any deficiency in the rainfall. =soils.= crimson clover can be grown successfully on almost any type of soil if it is reasonably rich, well drained, and supplied with organic matter and the proper inoculating bacteria. probably two-thirds of the crimson-clover acreage is found on the sandy soils of the atlantic coastal plain, but the crop is not necessarily restricted to sandy soils and is in fact increasing in importance on the red-clay soils of the piedmont region and in the limestone valleys of virginia and tennessee. [illustration: fig. .--a crimson-clover failure on ground too poor in humus.] crimson clover has been an important factor in increasing yields on soils that have been abused, but it is not a crop for land which is naturally very poor. it does not do well on rough, newly cleared areas, raw subsoil, hard, dry clay, or sterile sand. (fig. .) for such soils soy beans, cowpeas, and velvet beans are better suited and should be used for the first three or four years until crimson clover can be successfully grown. crimson clover can be made to grow on poor soils, provided they are specially prepared by liming, manuring, and inoculating. in general, however, crimson clover is a crop for maintaining soils which are already fairly productive rather than one for inducing productivity in soils where it is quite lacking. if there is any doubt whether the soil is suitable for crimson clover, a small plat should be prepared under field conditions and planted one year for trial. =preparation of the seed bed.= to secure a full, even stand of crimson clover with any degree of regularity the seed bed should be well and thoroughly prepared. the soil should be firm, moist, well settled, and fine on top. only indifferent success can possibly be expected if the seed is scattered on land which is loose, dry, and full of hard lumps and trash. a loose seed bed dries out quickly, heaves during the winter, and on some soils blows and washes badly. [illustration: fig. .--a corrugated roller or pulverizer, an excellent implement for preparing the seed bed for crimson clover.] on the other hand, the seed bed should not be too hard, for although this clover often grows successfully on soil which would be too solid for corn, there must be at| least enough loose soil on the surface to cover the seed. thorough preparation is the very best insurance against failure of the stand through drought or winterkilling, and the most successful growers sow crimson clover on land as well prepared as that for wheat. to secure a fine, firm seed bed without drying out the surface soil, the land should be prepared with as few operations as possible. a single working when the soil is in a moist, crumbly condition is better than half a dozen workings when the soil is too wet or too dry. in very sandy soils, or soils which do not form a crust, the only preparation needed is to keep down the weeds. an excellent tool for making the seed bed is the corrugated roller or pulverizer (fig. ). this implement is an improvement over the old plain roller for breaking clods and is unexcelled for keeping the surface soil moist. it can be used after plowing and again before planting, and even after planting if the soil needs to be compacted. rolling of some kind to firm the soil is especially important on sandy soils, but it is equally beneficial on clay soils if they are cloddy. when clover is seeded in an intertilled crop, such as corn, cotton, or tomatoes, the customary cultivation received by these crops is ordinarily sufficient preparation for crimson clover. in sandy soil the clover is often seeded without any immediate preparation, but a light stirring with a harrow-toothed cultivator is desirable if the ground is hard. if the clover is to be used for hay or seed, the preceding crop should be laid by level rather than in ridges. this will facilitate cutting the clover. where crimson clover is seeded after a crop of small grain, the stubble should be plowed or disked as soon as possible after the grain is cut. stubble land dries out quickly, partly because the soil is suddenly left bare and partly because of the drain on the soil moisture by the crops of ragweed and other coarse-growing weeds which always follow a grain crop. unless the soil is cultivated at once it becomes very difficult to obtain anything like an ideal seed bed for crimson clover. this difficulty is usually more pronounced after oats and barley than after rye and wheat. ordinarily the best practice is to disk the grain stubble within a week after harvest and harrow every week, or at least after every rain, in order to settle the ground, destroy the weeds, and assist in holding the moisture pending the time of seeding the clover. plowing the stubble is more expensive than disking and requires that the ground be allowed to settle for a month or six weeks in order to secure a firm seed bed. plowing is an advantage in a wet season, because plowed ground dries readily; it is a disadvantage in a dry season for the same reason. =fertilizers.= on moderately rich soil the fertilizer applied to the preceding crop is sufficient to produce a good crop of crimson clover. this is especially true where the clover follows such crops as potatoes or tomatoes, which ordinarily are heavily treated with fertilizers. it is important to realize, however, that crimson clover has a very short period of growth, and that to make a vigorous growth it must have a good supply of plant food. on sandy soils where fertilizers have not recently been applied it is often the practice to apply from to pounds of acid phosphate, with some potash fertilizer if it can be afforded. on clay soils or pounds per acre of acid phosphate ordinarily are sufficient. on many soils a light application of nitrate of soda will assist materially in giving the young clover plants a good start and often will enable them to withstand the effects of a late drought or severe winter which otherwise might have injured the stand. if the seeding has been delayed, as by waiting for suitable rains, an application of not more than pounds of nitrate of soda per acre will stimulate the young plants and enable them to make a better growth before winter. fertilizer is usually applied at seeding time, but a few farmers have been found who apply it as a top-dressing very early the following summer, giving as a reason that there is then no loss from winter leaching and that by this method the plants are nourished at the time they are making their most vigorous growth. such top-dressings of fertilizer should not be made while the leaves are wet with rain or dew. where stable manure is applied to crimson clover very marked results follow. it may be spread just before seeding when the clover is not grown in an intertilled crop, or it may be applied as a top-dressing in winter or very early spring. the more vigorous the growth that can be induced by the application of suitable fertilizers the more marked will be the increase in the yield of the succeeding crops. on soil in a low state of productivity the use of a reasonable amount of fertilizer will often enable a successful crop of clover and succeeding crops to be produced, where had not the fertilizers been applied the clover would have failed. furthermore, the following crop, particularly if it be corn, would also fail to give the increased yield which follows a successful stand of crimson clover. an application of barnyard manure will be found to be especially effective in obtaining a stand of crimson clover on any thin, galled spots in the field. the manure should be worked into the ground before seeding, and, if possible, a second application as a top-dressing should be given a day or two after planting. the top-dressing stimulates the seedlings and if strawy helps to protect them from the august sun. =lime.= crimson clover is not as dependent on lime as red clover and alfalfa, being more like alsike clover in this respect. it does not thrive on soils which are very "sour," but on well-drained soils in a productive condition crimson clover frequently makes a vigorous growth, even though the soil may show a high lime requirement. the stands are usually more uniformly good over the limed parts of such fields than on the unlimed parts, although it is sometimes questionable whether the benefit derived from liming is profitable. liming is more often desirable on clay soils than on sandy soils, and usually gives better results when used in conjunction with fertilizers than when used alone. on light sandy soils deficient in humus burnt lime may be actually injurious. in considering the advisability of applying lime one must not lose sight of the need of lime on the part of such other crops as corn, cantaloupes, or peaches, which are either grown with or follow the clover. inasmuch as the effect of liming varies greatly in different localities, it is suggested that small plats be treated experimentally at different rates before any considerable areas are limed. =inoculation.= a large part of the value of all clovers lies in their ability to utilize the nitrogen of the air and add it to the soil. when grown on rich land, the clovers, like many other plants, use the nitrogen already present in the soil and are not stimulated to contribute any to their own support or to the support of other crops. to enable the clover to use the nitrogen in the air the presence of the proper nodule-forming bacteria in the soil is necessary. fortunately, most of the soils in the crimson-clover sections appear to be already inoculated, and artificial inoculation is not often necessary, except on soils new to the crop. crimson clover is inoculated by the same strain of bacteria which occurs on the roots of the other true clovers; consequently, a field which has produced a good stand of red, mammoth, alsike, white, hop, carolina, rabbit's-foot, or buffalo clover is usually inoculated sufficiently for crimson clover. sweet clover, japan clover, and bur clover are not true clovers and are inoculated by a different strain of bacteria. the importance of inoculation is well shown by an experiment conducted by the alabama agricultural experiment station. in this experiment yields of , and , pounds of crimson-clover hay were secured on inoculated soils, while on corresponding areas which were not inoculated the yields were pounds on one area and nothing on the other. the soil can be inoculated artificially by means of pure cultures of the bacteria or by the transfer of a small quantity of soil from another clover field.[ ] the latter method is the more certain, but is open to the danger of introducing noxious weeds, insects, and plant diseases, especially if the soil is brought from a distance. the presence of stem-rot in many sections makes the use of soil especially dangerous. this disease can, be carried with the soil from field to field. [ ] sufficient pure culture for inoculating seed for acre can be secured free from the united states department of agriculture. full directions for using the culture accompany each bottle. directions for inoculating by the soil-transfer method can also be obtained from this department. =seeding.= =time of seeding.= crimson clover is usually sown between august and october , the general rule being to plant about days before the first killing frost is expected. south of virginia crimson clover can be seeded as late as november , although if planted late more seed should be used and a light dressing of nitrate of soda applied, in order to stimulate the young plants. seeding earlier than august is seldom advisable unless the crop is sown with some other crop the shade of which will hold it back. the exact date of planting depends almost entirely upon the moisture content of the soil. the principal condition to avoid is planting when the soil contains just enough moisture to germinate the seeds, but not enough to keep the plants growing. usually it is better to plant when the soil is quite dry than when it is slightly moist, for in dry soil the seeds, if properly buried, lie without germinating and are ready to grow vigorously at the first rainfall. the most favorable time for seeding is just before or just after a good rain, when the soil is moist enough to form a ball in the hand. =rate of seeding.= the ordinary rate of seeding crimson clover is pounds per acre, although the rate varies according to conditions. from to pounds per acre are usually sufficient when growing the crop for seed or when the soil is unusually rich. on poor soil, dry soil, or on soil which has not previously produced crimson clover to pounds of seed give better assurance of a stand. heavy seeding is also desirable when planting late in the season or when a heavy crop is wanted for green manure early in the spring. theoretically, pounds of seed per acre would provide six plants for every square foot, which is a satisfactory stand. under ordinary circumstances, however, it is necessary to allow for some of the seed being too deep, or too shallow, or failing to germinate, and for a certain percentage of winterkilling. it is also well to have a fairly thick stand of the young plants, so that the ground may be well covered during the early fall and thus prevent soil washing and the growth of winter weeds. =methods of seeding.= the most common method of seeding crimson clover in intertilled crops is to scatter the seed broadcast with a rotary seeder or by hand. (fig. .) in order to place the seed on a fresh, moist seed bed it is commonly broadcasted immediately behind the cultivator at the last cultivation and is covered 'at once by a second cultivator. in tall corn the seed may be sown from horseback, the ears of the horse being covered with small bags to prevent the entrance of the flying seed. slightly more seed is required when seeding in tall corn, as some seed catches in the corn plants. when seeding in cotton care must be taken to avoid injury to the opening bolls, which are easily knocked off or torn. this is best done by seeding by hand, covering the seed with a piece of brush dragged down the rows. in low-growing truck crops and on fallow ground crimson clover can be seeded with a wheelbarrow seeder. this implement distributes the seed more evenly than can be done by hand or with the rotary seeder, especially when planting a mixture of crops. the wheelbarrow seeder being somewhat awkward to handle is better adapted to smooth, level fields than to hillsides. probably the very best method of seeding crimson clover is with the special clover or alfalfa drill. where enough clover is grown to warrant its use this implement is to be highly recommended. the seed is sown in -inch rows at just the proper depth and with the right pressure, and the fertilizer is placed exactly under each row, where it will be immediately available to the seedlings. drilled clover requires less seed than broadcasted clover and produces a more even and certain stand. in place of the special clover drill an ordinary grain drill equipped with a clover-seed attachment can be used with good results. special spouts should be arranged to lead from the clover-seed box back of the shoes or disks, in order to deposit the seed directly in the furrow. chain furrow closers are best for covering the seed, as they leave the furrows broad and flat instead of =v= shaped and lessen the danger of the seedlings being covered with soil during a hard rain. [illustration: fig. .--seeding crimson clover in corn at the last cultivation.] for use in intertilled crops there are several types of -row drills, the best for this purpose being the -hoe drill equipped with press wheels. crimson-clover seed must be covered, but not too deeply. in most soils it is not enough to depend on rain to effect a covering. an inch in sandy soils and half an inch in clay soils appear to be about the right depth. shallow planting gives the best results in wet seasons and deep planting in time of drought. broadcasted seed should be covered with a spike-tooth harrow or a weeder rather than a heavy harrow or a shovel cultivator. a harrow made of fairly stiff brush is often useful in loose soil. =choice of seed.= as a rule, fresh crimson-clover seed is of good viability, and failure to secure a stand is not often caused by failure of the seed to grow. unlike most clovers, crimson-clover seed absorbs water readily and sprouts quickly. there are practically none of the hard seeds which are so frequent in red clover and sweet clover, and a germination of per cent in hour's is not uncommon. the seed deteriorates rapidly, however, and when more than years old rarely shows a germination in excess of per cent. sometimes, when stocks of commercial seed are low, old seed finds its way to the market, and this, when planted, gives poor results. old seed can usually be detected by the dull-brown appearance of the seed coat as contrasted with the bright, shiny, pinkish or greenish yellow color of fresh seed. brown seed, however, is sometimes caused by weathering during harvest, and such seed is not objectionable unless the weathering has been excessive. a common impurity in crimson-clover seed is green, shrunken, and immature seed, caused by harvesting the crop before it is ripe. crimson-clover seed does not germinate readily until it takes on a yellowish tinge; therefore, green seed should be rejected. crimson-clover seed is larger and plumper than red-clover seed and if properly cleaned should not contain seeds of dodder or the smaller seeded weeds. frequently, however, it does contain the seeds of field peppergrass, yellow trefoil, evening primrose, sheep sorrel, wild geranium, buttercups, mustards, and other weeds which blossom in early summer. =unhulled seed.= there is a growing belief among farmers that they are less likely to lose a stand of crimson clover through drought if they sow the seed in the hull rather than use the hulled seed as it ordinarily appears on the market. it is claimed that the hulls hold the moisture to some extent and carry the seedlings over the critical day or two following germination, while some farmers assert that the unhulled seeds require more moisture for germination, and the seeds therefore do not sprout until there is enough moisture in the soil to keep the plants growing. unhulled seed is bulky and is not often handled by commercial seedsmen, although one large grower sells the unhulled seed in compressed, bales similar to small cotton bales. it usually can be secured from neighboring farmers, however, or is easily saved at home. the seed can be harvested with a stripper from the standing crop in the field or the mature crop can be cut and thrashed like an ordinary grain crop. for local planting on a small scale unhulled seed is the cheapest and most accessible form of crimson-clover seed. unhulled seed is somewhat difficult to sow, because the hairy hulls stick together in masses and can not be scattered uniformly. to avoid this trouble the seed may be mixed with moistened earth or with lime, or may be sown with a blower similar to those used on small forges. a better plan is to sow on a windy day, throwing the seed vertically into the air and allowing the wind to scatter it. of unhulled seed of the best quality, pounds contains about bushel ( pounds) of clean seed. the common grades, however, are usually more chaffy and require to pounds to make a bushel. from to pounds of unhulled seed are therefore regarded as equivalent to pound of hulled seed. a bushel of unhulled seed, even when well packed down, weighs only to pounds and contains about pounds of seed. the appearance of both hulled and unhulled crimson-clover seed is shown in figure . [illustration: fig. .--hulled seed of crimson clover of a common commercial grade and unhulled seed gathered with a homemade stripper. (natural size.)] =use of a nurse crop.= in order to protect the crimson-clover seedlings from the hot sun of late august it is a common practice in some sections to plant with the clover a small quantity of some quick-growing crop like buckwheat, cowpeas, rape, or turnips. a thin stand of these heavier leaved plants furnishes an ideal shade for the young clover, and on soils which are inclined to bake it prevents the formation of a crust. the nurse crop must be seeded lightly, usually not more than half the regular rate, as the ordinary stand shades the ground so completely as to destroy the crimson clover. on hot clay soil in the piedmont region the chances of obtaining a stand of clover are about twice as good with a nurse crop as without one. buckwheat is the principal nurse crop northward from washington, d. c. a common rate of seeding is to pecks of buckwheat in pounds of crimson clover. if the planting can be made in july the buckwheat usually has time to ripen before frost and thus pay the cost of starting both stands. in the cotton belt cowpeas have been used successfully, especially when seeding on fallow ground. they are seeded broadcast at the rate of one-half bushel per acre. there is ordinarily not enough time for the cowpeas to mature, but they add to the value of the stand for fall pasturage and protect the clover from severe weather in the winter. both cowpeas and buckwheat have the merit of being able to grow on poor soil. dwarf essex rape has been used as a nurse crop in a few cases where the clover was to be pastured by hogs or sheep in the fall. from to pounds of rape, sown in august, furnishes sufficient cover for a nurse crop. cowhorn turnips, winter kale, and mustard are also satisfactory nurse crops if planted at a rate not exceeding pound of seed per acre. if the clover is to be saved for seed these latter crops are objectionable, as a few plants will live over winter and ripen at the same time as the clover. where a nurse crop can not be grown conveniently, the crimson-clover seedlings can be protected from the sun by a light top-dressing of straw, spread just after the seed is sown. seed mixtures. crimson clover is frequently grown in combination with winter grain, hairy vetch, or other forage crops having a similar period of growth. the mixed crop is less liable to lodge than the single crop, cures more readily in damp weather, and usually furnishes a heavier yield. another advantage of the mixed crop is that if either should fail the other will serve as a cover crop during the winter and bring some return the following spring. mixed crops are not desirable if the clover is to be saved for seed. south of central virginia crimson clover is usually grown in combination with winter oats. an early variety of oats, such as the fulghum, or a late variety of clover, such as the white blooming, is usually the best, as the oat crop matures somewhat later than the ordinary crimson clover. the customary rate of seeding is pounds of the clover and ½ bushels of oats per acre. in delaware and eastern maryland the most popular companion crop for crimson clover is winter wheat, although barley makes a desirable hay crop and is sometimes used. eye is not desirable for hay, but it is probably the best of the grains for green manure, as it is hardy, vigorous, and starts growth early in the spring. rye and wheat are seeded at the rate of bushel per acre with the customary quantity of crimson clover. the accompanying illustration (fig. ) shows a field seeded to a mixture of crimson clover and wheat. usually the grain is well headed, but in the milk or soft-dough stage, when the clover is ready to cut, the yield of the mixed crimson clover and grain is often to per cent greater than that of the clover alone. [illustration: fig. .--crimson clover and wheat in mixture. in the foreground the crop has been cut and fed green to stock. the remainder was cut the next day for hay. the grain prevents the crimson clover from lodging.] hairy vetch and crimson clover are sometimes grown together, seeding at the rate of pounds and pounds per acre, respectively. as both these plants are likely to lodge in good soil, however, one of the grains is usually included, a common seeding mixture being oats bushels, hairy vetch to pounds, and crimson clover pounds. bur clover, black medic, and other winter-growing legumes are sometimes found in mixtures with crimson clover, although such mixtures generally occur by accident rather than intent. black medic and crimson clover make' a particularly good combination on rich soil. in most of the crimson-clover area the cultivated grasses, such as timothy, redtop, and orchard grass, are not commonly grown. however, where these grasses flourish they may well be seeded at the same time as the crimson clover, provided the latter is planted not earlier than september . in some sections johnson grass and bermuda grass make useful combinations with crimson clover, the grasses making most of their growth in the summer and the clover in the fall and spring. =treatment of the stand.= ordinarily no special treatment is required after seeding and the clover goes into the winter without any further handling. if the growth is so rank that there is danger of the plants being too succulent to survive the winter, the tops can be reduced by light grazing with small animals, such as calves, sheep, or chickens, or by mowing with the cutter bar of the mowing machine set high. if the stand is backward, it may be stimulated by a light application of nitrate of soda. it is said that a thin stand can be thickened by grazing lightly with sheep, as the grazing induces heavier stooling. the aim should be to carry the clover into the winter with well-hardened leafy stems and with a well-established root system to withstand heaving out in the spring. in fields which are to be saved for seed a wise precaution is to go over them early in the spring and chop out the weeds. if wild onion and other weeds are chopped off in april, they do not make enough growth by may to contaminate the seed crop. =maladies.= the only disease seriously affecting crimson clover is the clover stem-rot, root-rot, or wilt, a disease resembling the stem-rot, or wilt, of lettuce and other plants. this disease is prevalent in nearly all the crimson-clover states and sometimes does considerable damage. the stem-rot affects the clover at all seasons, but is more noticeable in the spring, when it sometimes causes large spots of clover suddenly to wilt and fall. occasionally an entire field is affected, but the disease is most prevalent in low, rich spots. examination of the plants discloses a rotting off or decay of the stems close to the ground, followed immediately by the appearance on the stems of small black lumps, or sclerotia, about the size of clover seed. these sclerotia are a means of spreading the disease and are often harvested in the hay or in the seed crop. the only known remedy for the stem-rot is to cease growing clover or alfalfa on an infested field for three or four years, substituting cowpeas or soy beans. seed from fields known to be infested should, of course, be avoided. no insects are known to affect crimson clover seriously, nor are weeds of great importance in clover planted on clean fields. when planted in cultivated crops or in poorly prepared ground crimson clover is often seriously damaged by a rank growth of chickweed, knawel (moss weed), winter cress, and other winter-growing annuals. washington : government printing office : * * * * * =transcriber note= minor typos have been corrected. illustrations were moved to prevent splitting paragraphs. produced from files generously made available by usda through the internet archive. all resultant materials are placed in the public domain. by usda through the internet archive. all resultant materials are placed in the public domain. =transcriber note= text emphasis denoted by _italics_ and =bold=. issued july , . u. s. department of agriculture. farmers' bulletin crimson clover: growing the crop. by j. m. westgate _agronomist in charge of clover investigations. office of forage-crop investigations, bureau of plant industry._ washington: government printing office, . letter of transmittal. u. s. department of agriculture, bureau or plant industry, office or the chief, _washington, d. c., june , _. sir: i have the honor to transmit herewith and to recommend for publication as a farmers' bulletin the accompanying manuscript entitled "crimson clover: growing the crop." this has been prepared by mr. j. m. westgate, agronomist in charge of clover investigations, and has been submitted by prof. c. v. piper, agrostologist in charge of forage-crop investigations, with a view to publication. it is expected that this bulletin will be followed soon by other bulletins, each treating of some particular phase of this important crop. respectfully, wm. a. taylor, _chief of bureau_. hon. d. f. houston, _secretary of agriculture_. contents. page. introduction history and present distribution of crimson clover requirements for obtaining and maintaining a stand of crimson clover preparation of the seed bed fertilizers for crimson clover liming soils for crimson clover inoculation for crimson clover seeding crimson clover various methods of seeding crimson clover seeding crimson clover in intertilled crops seeding crimson clover after early-maturing crops seeding crimson clover with late summer-seeded annual crops crimson clover in mixtures with other legumes and grain seeding crimson clover alone treatment of crimson clover stands after seeding illustrations. page. fig. . a single plant of crimson clover. . a crimson-clover failure on ground too poor in humus . seeding crimson clover in corn at the last cultivation . crimson clover in an old cornfield . crimson clover and wheat in mixture crimson clover: growing the crop. =introduction.= probably the most important characteristic of crimson clover is its ability to grow and make its crop during the season when the land is not occupied by the ordinary summer-growth crops. in sections where it succeeds, crimson clover can be sown following a grain crop or in an intertilled crop in late summer and will mature a hay crop the following spring in time to plow the land for spring-seeded crops, such as corn or cotton. it may even be held for seed as far north as central delaware and the stubble be plowed under in time for seeding the quick-maturing strains of corn. it may be turned under for soil improvement when only inches high if it is desired to fit the land for early spring-seeded crops even if only the stubble be turned under, the effect upon the succeeding crop will be marked, especially if the soil be deficient in nitrogenous fertilizers. the plowing under of the entire plant, however, will more rapidly correct any deficiency of nitrates or humus in the soil. it is one of the best cover crops for use in orchards and, in fact, under any conditions where the soil is likely to wash during the winter months. the many uses to which this crop may be put merit a careful study of the best methods of establishing ii stand of crimson clover upon a farm. =history and present distribution of crimson clover.= crimson clover (fig. ) is frequently called "scarlet clover" and, somewhat loss commonly, "german clover," "italian clover," "french clover," "incarnate clover," "annual clover," etc. it occurs wild in england and in eastern and southern europe and is grown as a forage and soil-improving crop in italy, france, germany, austria, and great britain. it was introduced into this country as early as , but was grown only to a very limited extent until about . it has proved especially adapted to the lighter, sandy soils of the eastern part of the united states where the winters are not too severe. in the middle atlantic states it is also grown to a considerable extent on the clay soils of the piedmont section. in michigan it is sometimes used on the sandy soils as a cover crop in peach orchards, although it frequently winterkills. it can not ordinarily survive the severe winters of the northern states.[ ] [ ] in such northern sections where a fall-seeded legume is desired it is suggested that hairy vetch seeded with rye be used instead. see farmers' bulletin , entitled "vetches." [illustration: fig. .--a single plant of crimson clover.] crimson clover is a "winter annual," that is, it ordinarily makes its early growth in the autumn, passes the winter in a somewhat dormant but green state, makes a very early spring growth, and matures its seed and dies before summer. it makes little or no growth in very hot weather and therefore should not be sown in the spring, except in the extreme north, where it may make a satisfactory growth by autumn, so that & hay crop may be taken from it at that time. =requirements for obtaining and maintaining a stand of crimson clover.= unless the conditions of soil and moisture are exactly right it is not an easy matter to establish a satisfactory stand of crimson clover, even in the sections where it is most extensively produced. (fig. .) the lack of timely rains in late summer is responsible for most of the failures to obtain a satisfactory stand. the young seedlings are very easily killed by the hot sun or lack of moisture. on the other hand, if the seeding be delayed too long, as, for instance, in waiting for the proper conditions of soil moisture, the plants will be unable to make sufficient growth to withstand the winter. briefly speaking, crimson clover should be seeded shallow on a moist, reasonably fertile, well-drained, well-settled seed bed. inoculation in some form should be provided, especially when seeding it for the first time on any fields in sections comparatively new to this crop. [illustration: fig. .--a crimson-clover failure on ground too poor in humus.] crimson clover is not adapted to the white-clay lands in their present condition in some portions of the atlantic coastal plain. such fields should be seeded to soy beans or cowpeas when a leguminous crop is desired for soil improvement or other purposes.[ ] crimson clover does not do well on rough, newly cleared land and it ordinarily requires the production of two or three crops or a special preparation by liming, manuring, and inoculating before such land presents conditions satisfactory for seeding. it is usually better to sow rye for a winter cover and cowpeas for a summer crop if a cover crop is thought to be needed. in any section where crimson clover has not been previously grown the first seeding should be on a small scale to determine whether or not it is a practicable crop for the locality in question. [ ] these white-clay soils are nearly always sour, deficient in humus, and poorly drained. if limed, subsoiled, drained, and supplied with humus, such soils are said to grow crimson clover satisfactorily. =preparation of the seed bed.= the seed bed for crimson clover should be firm, moist, well settled, and fine on top. any efforts that may be expended to conserve the soil moisture previous to seeding are usually justified, especially if there be any lack of rainfall during the month previous or the month following seeding. where the clover is seeded in an intertilled crop, such as corn, cotton, or tomatoes, the customary cultivation received by these crops is ordinarily sufficient for the needs of crimson clover. where grain-stubble land is plowed in preparation for the clover a month or six weeks are ordinarily required for the soil to settle sufficiently to make a proper seed bed, since after plowing at least one soaking rain, which compacts the soil and fills it with moisture, is essential to the proper preparation of the seed bed for crimson clover. if the ground be disked, a much shorter time and less rain are required for the proper settling of the seed bed. the best method of retaining the moisture in the seed bed is to harrow or give shallow cultivation shortly after each rain. a fine soil mulch on the surface will largely prevent the soil just beneath the surface from losing its moisture through evaporation. such surface tillage should, of course, be given before seeding the crimson clover. =fertilizers for crimson clover.= under the ordinary conditions of soil fertility the fertilizer applied to the preceding crop is sufficient for the needs of crimson clover. this is especially true where the clover follows such crops as potatoes or tomatoes, which are ordinarily heavily treated with fertilizers that are not entirely used up by these crops. it is important to realize, however, that crimson clover has a very short period of growth and that to make a vigorous growth it must have a good supply of plant food. on sandy soils where there has been no recent application of fertilizers it is often the practice to apply from to pounds of a mixture of equal parts of acid phosphate and kainite. on clay soils or pounds per acre of acid phosphate are ordinarily sufficient. if the soil be low in nitrates a light application of nitrate of soda will assist materially in giving the young clover plants a good start and winter which otherwise might have proved fatal to the stand. if the seeding has been delayed, as by waiting for suitable rains, an application of nitrate fertilizer will stimulate the young plants and enable them to make an increased growth before winter. any direct application of fertilizer is usually made at seeding time, but some few farmers have been found who apply it as a top dressing very early the following spring, giving as a reason that there is no loss from winter leaching and that the plants are by this method nourished at the time they are making their most vigorous growth. such top dressings of fertilizer should not be made while the leaves are wet with rain or dew. where stable manure is applied to crimson clover very marked results follow. it may be spread just before seeding, when the clover is not grown in an intertilled crop, or it may be applied as a top dressing in winter or very early spring. the more vigorous the growth that can be induced by the application of suitable fertilizers the more marked will be the increase in the yield of the succeeding crops. on soil not well supplied with humus or plant food the use of a reasonable amount of fertilizer will often enable a successful crop of clover and succeeding crops to be produced where, had not the fertilizers been applied, the clover would have failed. furthermore, the following crop, particularly if it be corn, would also fail to give the increased yield which follows a successful stand of crimson clover. an application of barnyard manure will be found to be especially effective in obtaining a stand of crimson clover on any thin, galled spots in the field. the manure should be worked into the ground and, if possible, a second application as a top dressing should be given such thin places to partially shade the ground from the august sun while the seedlings are establishing themselves. =liming soils for crimson clover.= most of the soils in the crimson-clover sections will be found to be benefited by liming. crimson clover, however, does not appear to require lime to the extent that red clover does. frequently on well-drained soils in a good state of fertility the crimson clover makes a vigorous growth without the use of lime. the stands are, however, usually more uniformly good over the limed parts of such fields than on the parts that have received no line. the opinion among individual farmers appears to be about equally divided as to whether or not it pays them to lime their soils for crimson clover. in considering the advisability of applying lime one must not lose sight of the need of lime on the part of such other crops as cantaloupes or peaches, which require lime and which are either grown with the clover or follow it. inasmuch as the extent of the benefit is somewhat uncertain it is suggested that the particular requirements of the farm in question be determined by liming small plats at different rates before any considerable areas are limed. the most profitable rate of application can then be adopted for the whole acreage. =inoculation for crimson clover.= fortunately most of the soils in the crimson-clover sections appear to be already inoculated. this is especially true in sandy soil areas where crimson clover has been grown for a number of seasons. in sections new to this crop inoculation in some form is usually necessary. on clay soils inoculation is not always present, even though crimson clover may have been grown, for a number of successive seasons on other fields of the farm. an experiment conducted by the alabama state agricultural experiment station shows how essential inoculation is on soils which have not previously grown crimson clover. in this experiment a yield of , pounds of crimson clover hay was secured where the plants were inoculated, as compared with only pounds where no inoculation was provided. in another test by the same station the inoculated plat of crimson clover yielded at the rate of , pounds of cured hay per acre, while the uninoculated plat was a total failure. inoculation by the use of soil from a crimson-clover field is considerably more certain than is inoculation by the use of pure cultures, but soil inoculation is open to the danger of introducing noxious weeds, insects, and plant diseases, especially if the soil is brought from a distance. there is much less danger in this respect if soil from inoculated plants can be obtained in the same neighborhood. one very practicable method is to apply a bottle of pure culture[ ] to a pound or two of the seed and sow this in the corner of some field, or even in the garden. the resulting plants will be quite sure to be inoculated and will furnish an abundant supply of soil for inoculating much larger areas at the next seeding. care must be taken not to allow the sun to shine upon either the pure cultures or the soil, or even on the seed after it is broadcasted. for this reason it is safest to seed on a cloudy day or after sundown. one very satisfactory method of soil inoculation consists merely in mixing together equal parts of the proper soil and seed and sowing immediately in front of the covering harrow. [ ] pure cultures are sent free by the u. s. department of agriculture. full instructions for using them accompany each bottle. =seeding crimson clover.= crimson clover may be sown broadcast, by hand, with a wheel-barrow "sheep-trough" seeder, or with any of the familiar types of rotary seeders. it is sometimes drilled in and there are a number of specially constructed drills designed for this purpose. the consensus of opinion among farmers is that shallow seeding is generally best, especially upon the clay soils. an inch in sandy soils and half an inch in clay soils appears to be about the right depth except in times of drought. the ordinary rate of seeding is pounds per acre, although some use pounds, while others are able to obtain satisfactory stands with only pounds per acre. one pound of seed per acre provides for three seeds for every square foot; hence, if every seed produced a plant, pounds per acre would be theoretically sufficient to secure a satisfactory stand. under ordinary circumstances, however, it is necessary to allow for some of the seed being covered too deep, while a considerable proportion may prove to be covered too shallow for successful growth. the principal justification of seeding such a quantity and at varying depths lies in the fact that in case a dry season develops after seeding the more deeply covered seeds will be able to withstand the drought better than those covered to a medium depth. if an unusually wet season develops, the shallow-planted seeds will give the best results. moreover, some of the seed will fail to germinate. it is also well to have a fairly thick stand of the young plants, so that the ground may be well covered even during early fall, and thus prevent the winter-growing weeds from establishing themselves. it is held by many farmers that they are more certain of getting a stand of crimson clover if they sow the seed in the hull rather than use the hulled seed as it ordinarily appears on the market. it is claimed that the hulls hold the moisture to some extent. seed in the hull can easily be obtained by flailing out a load of crimson clover which has been left uncut in the field until the seed is mature. many farmers run the clover through an ordinary grain thrasher, which delivers the seed in the hull. =various methods of seeding crimson clover.= crimson clover may be seeded in late summer in any of the ordinary intertilled crops. it may be seeded alone following any farm crop which can be removed from the land by early summer, so that the seed can be sown in late summer or very early fall. it may also be seeded for hay in mixture with grain, such as wheat, rye, barley, or winter oats, which are ready to cut for hay at about the same time as the clover the following spring. a very light seeding of an animal catch crop, such as buckwheat, may be made with crimson clover in time for the catch crop to make its growth before winter. =seeding crimson clover in intertilled crops.= although crimson clover may be seeded in almost any of the intertilled crops, in this country probably half of it is sown in corn at or shortly after the time of the last cultivation. (fig. .) it is usually possible to make such a seeding, obtain a good growth during the fall and early spring, and mature a crop of hay in time for breaking up the land for another crop of corn. south of the latitude of central delaware it is even possible to mature a crop of clover seed in time for corn planting. in this way it is possible to grow a crop of corn each year and at the same time steadily increase the fertility of the soil for a series of years. treated in this manner each succeeding crop of corn can ordinarily be materially increased. instances are reported where the yield of corn has been gradually increased by this means from bushels per acre at the start until as high as bushels per acre were secured. [illustration: fig. .--seeding crimson clover in corn at the last cultivation.] the newly seeded stands of clover in corn are likely to perish if drought occurs at or after seeding time. tho growing corn makes heavy demands on the soil moisture, and if there is not enough moisture for both clover and corn the latter gets the larger share and the tender clover plants are likely to succumb. it sometimes happens that a very light rain shortly after seeding the clover will cause the seeds to germinate, only to perish during the succeeding days of dry weather. on account of the competition for moisture between the corn and clover it is best to cover the clover seed a little deeper than is necessary when it is sown on fallow land. north, of the potomac river the last cultivation of the corn comes at about the right time for the best results with clover seeded at the same time. farther south, however, there is too much hot weather after the corn is laid by, and as a consequence it is best to delay the seeding of the crimson clover until about or weeks before the first frost may be expected. a light furrow-toothed cultivator or harrow may be run shallow between the rows to cover the seed. the seed may be sown broadcast by hand or even from horseback with a rotary seeder. in such an event, however, it is necessary to cover the ears of the horse with small bags or socks to prevent the entrance of the flying seed. a much more even stand is made possible if the corn is given level tillage rather than the ridged tillage incident to plowing with a -horse corn plow and ridging the land. the appearance of a field of crimson clover seeded the summer previous in corn is indicated in figure . [illustration: fig. .--crimson clover in an old cornfield. the clover was seeded in the corn at the last cultivation. a fodder stack is to be observed in the middle foreground. the cornstalks have been removed to avoid difficulty in mowing the clover.] in north carolina and southern virginia it has been found possible under favorable conditions to obtain a satisfactory stand of clover by seeding in cotton. the clover should not be sown until or weeks before frost and the last working of the cotton comes ordinarily at an earlier date than this. it is necessary that the cotton be given very clean culture, as well as special attention paid to conserving the moisture in the prospective clover-seed bed. unless the first show of cotton is picked early it is difficult to cover the clover seed without unduly injuring the opened cotton bolls. in the higher and more northern parts of the cotton belt it is possible to make the clover seeding before the bolls begin to burst. crimson clover may be seeded in practically any of the cultivated truck crops which receive their last cultivation from to weeks before the first frost. it is not practicable to seed the clover in late potatoes, as the digging of the potatoes in the fall practically destroys the stand of clover. the heavy application of fertilizers necessary for the truck crop makes possible a vigorous growth of the clover. the result is that the soil is materially built up in both nitrogen and humus. the clover makes its growth at a season of the year when the land is not ordinarily occupied by any of the regular truck crops. when timely rains follow the seeding it is possible to seed the clover on the surface of the ground among cantaloupe vines and allow the first rain to cover the seed. the shade is apparently too dense under watermelon vines for the clover seedlings to survive. the writer has obtained a good stand by seeding the clover seed, without covering, in sweet potatoes the first week in august on sandy land near washington, d. c. by hand-digging the potatoes with a spade a fair stand of the clover plants was left unharmed. =seeding crimson clover after early-maturing crops.= it is possible to seed crimson clover after practically any of the ordinary farm crops which can be removed from the land three months before frost. it is somewhat difficult to obtain anything like an ideal seed bed for crimson clover where a field of grain stubble has been plowed under. the soil in a stubble field is apt to be dry and cloddy when plowed, while the stubble tends to form a dry mat at the bottom of each furrow. such a condition is likely to continue for a number of weeks after plowing and to result disastrously to the clover seedlings unless there be abundant and frequent rains. it is ordinarily a better practice to disk the grain stubble and harrow every week, or at least after every rain, in order to settle the ground and assist in holding the moisture pending the time of seeding. such frequent harrowings will also kill the successive crops of germinating weed seeds, which might otherwise injure the young stand of clover. on the other hand, the ground from which early potatoes have been removed is very favorable for the establishment of a stand of crimson clover. the residual effect of the fertilizers used on the potatoes is partially responsible for this, while the well-settled seed bed, which requires only leveling and harrowing, also presents favorable conditions for the crimson-clover seedlings. =seeding crimson clover with late summer-seeded annual crops.= crimson clover may be seeded in midsummer or in late summer with a very light seeding of buckwheat. the buckwheat soon forms an ideal shade for the young clover plants and unless frosts occur very early a crop of buckwheat may usually be harvested. this method has been suggested as being applicable when seeding the clover in cotton. if the buckwheat is not seeded until august it will not ordinarily produce seed in the latitude of washington, d. c. wherever possible, the seeding of buckwheat and crimson clover should be made so early that there will be time for the buckwheat to mature its seed crop, as in this way the buckwheat itself will pay for the expense of starting both stands. a light seeding of the buckwheat must be made, as an ordinary stand of buckwheat shades the ground so completely as to destroy the crimson clover. another method of preventing the injurious effect of the hot sun of late summer is to make a light seeding of cowpeas at the same time that the crimson clover is seeded. the cowpeas germinate promptly, and being rather thin on the ground do not injure the stand of clover, but on the contrary afford sufficient shade to prevent the soil from becoming as hot as it otherwise would. in addition, the clover plants receive some protection from the direct rays of the sun. there is ordinarily not enough time for the cowpeas to mature, so they are either mown for hay or left standing to catch the snow during the winter and protect the stand of clover. in seedlings made by the writer half a bushel of cowpeas per acre, broadcasted, gave vary satisfactory results, the seeding being made august on sandy ground near washington, d. c. the clover and cowpeas were sown broadcast on early-potato ground and covered from one-half to inch deep. if a light seeding of turnips be made with the clover, the turnip plants will afford some protection to the young clover plants and at the same time will ordinarily yield a fair crop of turnips. about pound of turnip seed and pounds of clover seed should be sown to the acre. if the seeding of turnips be at all heavy the coarse-growing turnip plants will choke out too many of the clover plants. the cow horn turnips appear to be especially adapted for seeding with crimson clover. =crimson clover in mixtures with other legumes and grain.= when crimson clover is seeded alone on good soil it is likely to make so rank a growth as to lodge. to overcome this difficulty it is a common practice to seed some small-grain crop with the clover at seeding time. south of the potomac river winter oats are ordinarily very satisfactory, especially when seeded with the late white-blooming strain of crimson clover. in delaware and eastern maryland wheat is commonly used. in addition to wheat and oats, rye or barley is sometimes used. the customary rate of seeding is about pounds of clover seed and pounds of grain per acre. the accompanying illustration (fig. ) indicates the appearance of a field seeded to a mixture of crimson clover and wheat. the grain prevents the clover from lodging, facilitates the curing of the clover hay, and, in addition, forms a valuable constituent of the resulting hay crop. the yield of the mixture is ordinarily somewhat more than when the clover is seeded alone. the alabama state agricultural experiment station secured as the average for two years' experiments the following yields of hay: yield per acre. crimson clover seeded alone , pounds. crimson clover seeded in mixtures: barley and crimson clover , pounds. wheat and crimson clover , pounds. oats and crimson clover , pounds. [illustration: fig. .--crimson clover and wheat in mixture. in the foreground the crop has been cut and fed green to stock. the remainder was cut the next day for hay. the grain prevents the crimson clover from lodging.] the grain is usually well headed but is in the milk or soft-dough stage when the clover is ready to cut. the presence of the grain hay makes the clover hay more easily cured. with winter oats it is usually best to seed the late white-blooming variety of crimson clover, as the oat crop matures somewhat later than the ordinary crimson clover. another advantage of this mixture is that if either should fail the other will be present to serve as a cover crop during winter and bring some return the following spring. crimson clover may be seeded in mixtures with vetch, shaftal clover, trefoil, or, in fact, any winter-growing legume which has a growing season similar to crimson clover. since most of these legumes are not upright in their growth it is usually necessary to seed some grain crop with them to serve as a support and to prevent the plants from lodging. the grain is ordinarily a surer crop than the legumes and practically insures the ground being covered with some crop during the winter and spring months. =seeding crimson clover alone.= if a good seed bed can be prepared by august in the latitude of washington, d. c., crimson clover will ordinarily produce a satisfactory stand if seeded entirely alone. this is especially true on the clay soils, where it is often difficult to obtain a successful catch in corn at the last working. the seed is sown at the same rate as when seeded in corn, namely, about pounds per acre. it is the common practice to broadcast the seed and to cover with a very light barrow or weeder. unless the august sun be unduly hot and a drought develops, such seeding will ordinarily produce very satisfactory results if the soil be reasonably fertile. =treatment of crimson clover stands after seeding.= ordinarily no special treatment is required after seeding, and before winter comes on some fall pasturage may be obtained if the growth be sufficiently rank. a light pasturing with sheep has been noted to induce heavier stooling on the part of the crimson clover. only a light pasturing with small animals, such as sheep, calves, or chickens, should be made in either the fall or spring before the early spring growth is well under way. if the time of seeding has been delayed, or if for any reason it is feared that the plants will be unable to make sufficient growth before cold weather, it has been found that a top dressing of nitrate of soda alone or in mixture with muriato of potash will greatly hasten the fall growth. this reduces the danger from winterkilling and heaving out in the early spring. * * * * * =transcriber note= minor typos have been corrected. illustrations were moved to prevent splitting paragraphs. produced from files generously made available by usda through the internet archive. all resultant materials are placed in the public domain. the rural magazine, and literary _evening fire-side_. [illustration: "venerate the plough."] philadelphia: published by richards & caleb johnson, _no._ , _market street_. index. address, preliminary ---- tilghman's to the philadelphia agricultural society adams, john, original letter from agriculture, treatise on , , , , , arabian horse, account of ants of valencia agricultural education antediluvian oak antique nugea ib. anecdote ---- ib. air jacket ib. africa agriculture, essay on ---- letters on , agricultural memoranda , , , appraisement act agricultural discourse almanacks, origin of american ginseng ---- saltpetre anecdote of lycurgus ib. agriculture, honour paid to, in china agricultural school at hofwyl ---- hints abstracts from philadelphia agricultural society's memoirs absence of mind american plants and minerals anecdote , african people, the ants, natural history of ---- wars of advice and caution antidotes to poison, vegetable anecdote boerhaave, notice of barrett, starr, decease of backster, george, decease of ib. botany 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[illustration: "venerate the plough."] vol. i. philadelphia, _first month_, . _no._ . it is not without feelings of anxiety that the editors of the rural magazine issue forth their first number to the public; for they are aware of the lasting effect of a first impression, and that they have now fairly embarked in an adventure, the success and the termination of which are alike uncertain. diffident however as they are of their own abilities, they have full confidence in the excellence of their plan, and the kindness and assistance of their friends. of the value of this assistance, the work itself will testify; of the plan which they have marked out, it is but fair that the reader should be informed. a leading object of the _rural magazine_ will be to furnish correct views of the science of agriculture, and the various improvements which are daily made or suggested in it. for this purpose the best and most recent european works on the subject will be consulted, and selections made from the american newspapers that are devoted or friendly to the cause. the best information on the subject will thus be condensed in a form less unwieldy than a newspaper, and more popular than in scientific books. we also expect original papers from our agricultural friends, being confident that there is much in the farming of our neighbouring counties, well worthy of being widely known and imitated. yet, as we wish our magazine to have an extensive circulation, and to be interesting not merely to the farmer, but to the citizen and the general reader, a considerable part of every number will be occupied with topics of general literature, selections from approved new publications, particularly biography and travels, essays, and information on scientific subjects; and original miscellaneous communications. to original and well written essays, our pages will always be accessible; and we particularly solicit such as will throw light on the history, antiquities, geography, curiosities, and productions of our own country. with the genuine productions of the muse we shall always be glad to adorn our pages; but we have no desire to patronize the unfledged attempts at versifying, the lamentable ditties with which the public is weekly besieged, for we hold that in poetry there is no tolerable medium. but to an american and a philanthropist, there are still higher objects to be gained by the circulation of such a paper, than the mere diffusion of agricultural intelligence or general literature. he lives under a system of government which is ideally perfect; and he sees it distorted by the vices and the passions of its subjects. he is the disciple of a religion which breathes good-will to mankind; and on whichsoever side he turns, are to be seen oppression, the darkness of ignorance, self-inflicted wretchedness, and amalgamating corruption. he sees a large portion of the human family held in chains by the very nation that has pronounced all men to be free and equal. the condition of that unhappy race, even when emancipated, excites his deepest commiseration and most anxious fears. he sees the aborigines of our country, a noble race of men, perishing like the beasts of the forest before our approach; and that under every circumstance of wretchedness and degeneracy.--above all, the great and fatal delusion of war, more bloody than the superstitions of moloch, still overspreads the world, and renders man the destroyer of man. to all these subjects will the _rural magazine_ be watchful and alive; for the editors believe them to be subjects of the deepest interest, and having relation to our highest duties. he who tills his field, or pursues his occupation with diligence and skill, is a deserving and honourable citizen. he who, in addition to this, cultivates his mind, and stores it with useful and ornamental knowledge, raises himself in the scale of being, and adds to his capacities both for happiness and usefulness. but when he adds to this industry, and to these talents and accomplishments, the benevolence of a christian philanthropist, and renders them subservient to the welfare of his species, he attains to the highest dignity of his nature, and fulfils all the obligations which devolve on him as a citizen and a man. such are the general outlines of our plan; and as we feel no local or political prejudices, they shall never have place in the discussion of any subject which may appear in our columns. combining in this manner an agricultural, a literary, and philanthropic journal, we look with confidence to the support of our enlightened fellow citizens; and assure them, that no exertions on our part shall be wanting to fill up the measure which we have meted out, and render the _rural magazine_ deserving of their patronage. for the rural magazine. _to the editors._ you are about embarking in a literary voyage, calculated, if ably and prudently conducted, to subserve the best interests of society. previously, however, to your taking a final leave of terra firma, and before its shores shall recede from your view, it may be the part of wisdom to contemplate the nature and object of your journey, by the steady lights of experience. the legitimate end of every enterprise of the kind, is to enlighten the understanding, and improve the heart. to produce a result so important, no exertion should be omitted, and no means neglected, to impart a useful interest to your miscellany. of the truth of these preliminary observations, you are no doubt sufficiently impressed. to please every taste, however fastidious, or to gratify in all respects, the wishes of the million, would be a task altogether hopeless; and which a temperament the most sanguine, would scarcely indulge. however transcendent may be the merit of any periodical journal, and however brilliant its success, should the editor listen at all the avenues of public opinion, his ear will notwithstanding be saluted by many an ungrateful sound. some readers will complain of what they are pleased to call its dull monotony; while others will lament the sacrifice of what they conceive to be matters of importance, in the pursuit of endless variety.--those who seek for novelty alone, will sometimes be disappointed; while others will start objections, because sufficient respect is not accorded to the venerated opinions of the olden time. the gay may sometimes meet with nothing to excite the smile of merriment, and the grave and reflecting may regret to find so little solid food for the mind. he, however versatile his talents, who would be a favourite with them all, must first be successful in his chase of the ignis fatuus; or obtain from that fairy region in which the rainbow reposes its brilliant arch upon the earth, its treasures of gold. but if your labours should happily tend to give "energy to virtue, and confidence to truth," you will not fail to gratify the wishes of those whose approbation alone is worth desiring--_the well principled_ of all parties. it has been said, and repeated times without number, that to call a rose by any other name, its odour would be equally delightful. although the fact may be so, the inference that a name is altogether unimportant, cannot be supported on just principles of deduction. authors, who have reflected the brightest honours on the cause of literature and virtue by their writings, have encountered a difficulty at the very threshold, in selecting for them an appropriate name. it was after some time anxiously devoted to the subject, by which it would appear _they_ considered it a matter of no trifling consequence, that the pious and elegant _addison_ adopted that of a spectator, and the _sage_ of litchfield that of a rambler; under which, with such signal effect, to inculcate the lessons of moral truth. it has been observed by one who knew something of the world, that few circumstances contribute more essentially to general success in life, than an engaging first appearance. so, likewise, the garb in which it appears, as well as the name by which it is distinguished, is more intimately connected with the extensive popularity of a work, intended for the general reader, than at first may be supposed. it is gratifying therefore to find, that both these considerations have had with you their due weight. the _rural magazine_ will not only be a repository for articles of miscellaneous interest, but peculiarly so for every thing connected with agriculture, and a country residence. it is to rural scenes, and rural innocence, and rural employments, that man is principally indebted for many of those blessings and enjoyments, which impart a charm to human existence, and lighten its load of cares and sorrows. the man, whoever he is, that has long been confined to a populous city, will at length with _shenstone_ sicken with the unceasing recurrence of artificial life, and long to breathe the pure atmosphere of the country. he will hail with delight the blue bird, earliest harbinger of spring, and welcome the primrose, eldest daughter of flora, and contemplate with rapture the vernal season, in which youth, and beauty, and melody, walk hand in hand, over verdant lawns, variegated with flowers, inhaling the zephyrs of health. then he will witness summer, with brown, vigorous, and manly aspects; and autumn, groaning with her ripe and mellow fruits; succeeded by winter, clothed in storms and glittering with pendent icicles; who notwithstanding a sternness of mood, and a manner somewhat uncourteous, is in the hands of a beneficent creator the minister of great good to man. the fury of the tempest may rage, and the clattering hail beat against the windows; the driving snows may deform the face of day, and nature assume the appearance of old age and decay: notwithstanding all this, that portion of the circling year, of which we are speaking, will continue to have its positive pleasures. these will be closely and intimately united in the domestic circle, where in charmful confederacy they will be found clustering round the _evening fire-side_. who does not associate with this delightful scene his earliest images of innocent gayety and exquisite enjoyment; in which garrulous old age and lisping infancy mingle their voices, and where carking care never intrudes? but as the hours are hastening on with feathery footsteps, they should likewise minister to the cause of mental and moral improvement. the _farmer_ should cultivate a taste for reading, and store his mind with useful knowledge; and thus become qualified to assume the dignified station to which, in this happy country, he is fairly entitled. he should remember, that the plough has been guided and venerated by the "awful fathers of mankind;" and that a profession, to which _cincinnatus_ and _washington_ were zealously and practically devoted, and for which the emperor _charles_ v. exchanged his sceptre and his crown, must be intrinsically elevated and respectable. it is among the yeomanry of our country that the love of literature, by whom it is already cherished to a creditable degree, should be more widely and universally disseminated. in order to promote an object so desirable, may you succeed in assembling at your _evening fire-side_ a cheerful happy group, who, bidding defiance to the rude clamours of the storm without, shall entertain topics of public utility, while cultivating and improving the domestic virtues; and with warm and expansive gratitude ascribe their blessings to a benignant providence, _from whom alone they are all derived_. e. for the rural magazine. _letters of a citizen to his friends in the country_. no . the establishment of a periodical work, designed in part for circulation among my agricultural fellow citizens, furnishes an opportunity which i have often desired, to address you. in contemplating the dignity and utility which are combined in the occupations of an american husbandman, in estimating the extent of influence which belongs to his character, and regarding his elevated independence, i have long since been led to the conclusion, that the _farmers_ of the soil form the basis of the nation's strength, and ought largely to contribute to its ornament. in the occasional communications which i propose to make to you through this medium, i shall adopt a plain, familiar, and candid manner; and endeavour to point not only at those errors which certainly exist, but also attempt to suggest how they can be most effectually removed. "what!" methinks i hear some hardy son of the field exclaim--"who is this that promises to improve our mode of farming?" _a citizen, forsooth._ now let us at the threshold understand each other. i do not intend to meddle much, if at all, with your system of agriculture, though i conceive it quite possible for a man who has been born and educated in a _city_, to furnish important hints for the improvement of rural affairs. my purpose is to interest your attention with subjects which may tend to enlarge and elevate your _minds_. it is a lamentable fact, that too little regard is paid to _intellectual cultivation_, among those who till the earth. a well managed farm, supplied with substantial buildings, and under good fence, is creditable to its possessor, and forms a part of the public wealth. every individual who thus improves his land, not only enriches himself, but should be considered as a benefactor of the commonwealth. here, unhappily, the energies of the farmer are limited. this is a radical error. with the pecuniary means which his industry has accumulated, he should increase his own intelligence, and confer upon his children the benefits of _substantial education_. i do not admit as truth, what is frequently asserted, that the best examples of morality and virtue are to be met with in the country; for whereever the improvement of the mind is neglected, those ennobling qualities will be rarely found. it is idle to suppose that our intellectual capacities will yield fruits which dignify and adorn our nature, if they be solely devoted to increase our worldly possessions. the plough turns up from the soil no nourishment for the mind, neither do the scythe and sickle prostrate the vices of the heart. abstractedly, therefore, a man may be as destitute of good principles who lives amidst rural scenes, as he whose pursuits confine him to the busy haunts and contagious influences of the multitude. but i am beginning to lecture before i have an audience. i took up the pen merely to introduce my proposals to your notice. you have a specimen of my way of thinking. if you like it, so much the better; if not, i cannot promise to serve a more palatable dish--but am always your friend, civis. [the subject of the missouri state bill, involves, in our opinion, an agricultural question, important to the last degree to the farmers of america:--whether that great country west of the mississippi, compared with which all the united states are small, shall, in future ages, be dotted over with pleasant villages and comfortable farm houses, and cultivated by the industrious owners of the soil, each vieing with his neighbour in beautifying the face of nature: or be blotted and defaced by innumerable wretched habitations of miserable slaves, with here and there, on distant eminences, the _lone_ mansions of their masters. whether that great country, now left rich by nature, shall be converted into barren wastes by continued exhausting crops of tobacco and indian corn, without one shovel-ful of manure to invigorate the expiring soil, as has been the case in some of the fine districts of virginia and maryland; or whether it shall be covered with luxuriant fields of wheat, rich meadows and innumerable herds.--viewing this great national question, so intimately connected with our favourite subject, we feel the more interest by giving an insertion to the following communication of our correspondent sandiford.]--_ed._ for the rural magazine. _extension of slavery._ it is the great and distinguishing feature of our free government, that it is built upon the eternal principles of justice and rectitude. the passions and the interests of its subjects or administrators may pervert its original design, and wield the power it confers to the purposes of oppression or licentiousness. so long, however, as we have access to the charter of our constitution, the great original fountain of our laws, we may renew or purify those streams which have become choked up or polluted. it forms a perpetual and unerring standard by which to judge of principles and policy; and whatever measures are found wanting in its scale, may safely be pronounced to be unwise and unsound. the flux and change of opinions and interests, the perpetual encroachments of wealth and power, the decay of old prejudices and jealousies, and the rise of new ones, wear away continually the old landmarks, and imperceptibly give to our institutions a new aspect and new bearings. while we admit this flexibility to be in a certain measure necessary for the conservation of peace and union, we must steadily insist upon its being limited by the great leading features of the constitution, and that reference should constantly be had to first principles, as to a fountain of life and strength. never, surely, has there been a question agitated, in which those principles were so deeply at issue, as in the one which is now before the american people. i need scarcely say, that i allude to the missouri state bill, and to the introduction of slaves beyond the mississippi. this subject has been ably and repeatedly discussed. a universal expression of sentiment has gone forth from the people of the northern and middle states, and it has awakened powers of eloquence and argument that have seldom been surpassed. that first burst of emotion has subsided; and now that the question is upon the point of being settled, it may not be altogether useless to recall the attention of the public to the subject. that slavery is a crime against god and nature, and that its existence in our free country is a most dangerous and lamentable evil, cannot be doubted. our only apology as a nation for its existence, is, that we found it among us, and that an overruling necessity obliged us to leave its extirpation to the hand of time and experience. the august founders of our republic have not once named it in the constitution, as if they were unwilling that so foul a name should stain the purity of our escutcheon, as if it were a crime against humanity too execrable to be uttered. they looked forward to a period when it should cease and be forgotten, and made ample provision for its future annihilation. their solemn declaration to the world, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain _unalienable_ rights, and that among these are life, _liberty_, and the pursuit of happiness," had otherwise been the worst of mockeries. the words of the constitution, "the migration or importation of such persons as any of the states _now existing_ shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the congress, prior to the year ; but a tax may be imposed on such person not exceeding ten dollars for each person,"--clearly show, beyond the possibility of a cavil, that the right to legislate concerning slaves is vested in the general government, and that the convention was fearful that the attempt to exercise it might be made, before the southern states were prepared for any laws upon the subject. the congress has, in fact, uniformly exercised this right in all its laws for the government of the new states and territories. it prohibited the importation of slaves and their migration into the northwestern territory. the states which ceded the territory south of the ohio, and east of the mississippi, were fully aware of this power of congress; and they ceded it with certain stipulations in favour of the slave holder. yet even over the states which were formed in this region, has congress exercised its power, and secured to the slave the right of trial by jury and of the habeas corpus. all these laws were passed without exciting any suspicion that congress was transcending its powers in thus clogging the constitutions of the new states. they were regarded as decent and becoming in a government founded in justice and freedom, "as extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty." that northwestern territory offered no inducement to the slave holder, or to a slave agriculture. now, however, the case is altered. a province adapted to the cultivation of cotton and tobacco, and in obtaining which the government made no stipulations in favour of slavery, claims to be elevated to the rank of a state. it is a desirable situation for the planters, and holds out from its situation and fertility a golden prospect. they claim accordingly to be admitted there, with their slaves; and a clamour is raised because the people of the united states are unwilling further to extend slavery--to sacrifice the principles of our republic upon the altar of avarice. the pretence--it scarcely deserves the name of argument--is, that such restriction would be _unconstitutional_, _oppressive_, and _inexpedient_. it is unconstitutional!--the refutation is a part of our history, and is written in the pages of our statute book. it is oppressive! it would exclude the southern states from sharing in the benefits of these new settlements. are not the lands open to all, and disposed of at public sale? they can only be made valuable, it is true, by incessant labour, under severe privations. but this the hardy yeomanry of the eastern and middle states are willing to endure for the sake of independence and an establishment for their families. we see them accordingly in the van of our empire, subduing the forest and filling the wilderness with the busy sounds of industry and contentment. are the slave holders of the south a privileged order, that these labours would demean them? are they oppressed by being placed on an equality with their brethren of the north, who leave behind them all the artificial distinctions and luxurious indulgences of society? are not their arms and limbs as capable of labour, and their bodies of fatigue? where then is the inequality and the oppression? a citizen of a slave holding state, at home, and under his state laws, may be a petty monarch; and he is apt to fancy that he derives the power from an inherent birth-right. but out of his state, and from under its laws, he is an individual unit, a mere citizen of the united states; and can claim no privilege which is not granted to every american, or which is opposed to the spirit and intent of the constitution. that constitution pays no respect to persons. it does not recognise the existence of slavery; and the petition to admit it in the new states, is a glaring mockery of its character. it has been contended, that after the state was organized, the inhabitants might assemble in convention, and alter the constitution in this respect. such an assertion betrays the grossest ignorance of the true principles of the union. our government is emphatically a _compact_, originally between the people; and since then, between congress as their representative, and the new members. it is binding on both sides, and the terms of admission are, that congress approves of the constitution which the state has formed. its power of rejection, it is true, is limited to certain points. but upon those points that power is absolute; and amongst them, without a shadow of doubt, is _slavery._ the state which, having accepted of a limitation to its power in this respect, should presume to alter it, would set that power at defiance. but the restriction is inexpedient! and what is the amount of inexpediency? some thousands of dollars less to the public revenue--some hundreds of thousands less in the sale of public lands! forbid it, justice! forbid it, the genius of the constitution! that we should barter our free inheritance for a mess of pottage; that the countrymen of washington should coolly calculate the profits of a desertion of principle. but not only is the restriction not inexpedient, it is called for by the clearest dictates of sound policy. we are now entering upon a region of almost boundless extent and fertility, destined at some future day to be the abode of millions of human beings. upon the decision of the present question, in all probability, will it depend, whether that population will be a free and industrious race, or whether the great majority will be bound in the chains of slavery, stinting the growth and paralyzing the energies of the community. if it be fairly decided that slavery shall not exist to the west of the mississippi, we shall soon see the rich vallies of that territory occupied by industrious farmers, proving what is no doubt the fact, that freemen can cultivate the staple commodities of that country more advantageously than slaves. let us for a moment contrast the opposite pictures which are here presented. the privileged order of the southern states have, it is true, every temporal blessing they can desire, save that of security. but their hordes of slaves--a million of labourers, chained down to cheerless and incessant toil, shrouded in utter intellectual darkness, cut off from all that ennobles and adorns existence, stationary amidst the general march of improvement, and sold and driven about like herds of cattle;--is there not in this picture, retouch it and soften it as you may, subject for bitter regret? and is there nothing to cheer the heart of the patriot in the reverse? a country studded with villages and farms; a smiling and contented population; intelligent, virtuous, and industrious, and the strength and the pride of the nation, and becoming in its turn the hive for fresh swarms of emigrants. this is no exaggerated or romantic representation. these opposite conditions exist in our country; and congress have now to decide which of them shall give its features to the western valley of the mississippi. but it is from motives of humanity and security, say some, that we plead the extension of slavery. the evil will thus be diluted and lessened. admirable politicians! profound economists! a poisonous plant has overgrown one of your fields, and you seek to extirpate it by spreading the seeds throughout your possessions! a concealed fire is smouldering in your house, and you would prevent its conflagration by scattering the embers upon your neighbours' dwellings! it is not thus that slavery is to be mitigated or done away. confine slavery within its present limits, and we may then hope to see it extinguished. we are young, and may outgrow it. there is a great body of active and enlightened philanthropy in the southern states; and it may yet devise means for its extinction. build around it a circumvallation of freemen, and you render impotent its fearful threatenings. but give to it that principle of indefinite increase which our white population derives from the inexhaustible extent of our country, and you spread it over the face of the union; you clothe it a hundred fold with terrors; you render it coeval with our empire. but not only this. the slave trade from africa to the united states will never be abolished, if we allow of slavery to the west of the mississippi. so great will be the value of slaves along the rich bottoms of that territory, that no laws, however severe, can put a stop to their importation. that accursed traffic is even now carried on with impunity, and to an incredible extent. fifteen thousand victims have been worse than immolated at its shrine within a single year. with greater temptations to engage in it, in more remote situations, and along an unguarded frontier, no human power can altogether check it. nor will it be merely a foreign slave trade that this extension will encourage. an internal traffic will take place. the poorer and more healthy states will become the breeders for the new and unhealthy districts; and it will happen as it has ever done, that the pursuit of a trade, wicked and cruel in itself, will entail the commission of crimes, the violation of every moral law, _the begetting of offspring for the purposes of an unholy traffic_. a deadly taint will spread over the morals and character of our country, which not all our professions of liberty can purify; and if there be any prophecy in history, the rights of these long degraded beings will one day be vindicated with awful retribution. i have treated this subject with warmth; with more warmth, perhaps, than has served my cause. but i cannot think without indignation of the attempt which is now making to extend the empire of slavery--a despotism in the bosom of a republic; and which i believe to be pregnant with the most disastrous consequences. it is necessary that the public mind should be kept awake on the subject; and i cannot refrain from lifting up my feeble voice on the occasion. one word more, and i have done. the division in congress upon this subject, has been truly called a geographical division. the members from the south, with scarcely an exception, voted for the introduction of slaves. yet from the same quarter do we hear of splendid schemes for colonization and emancipation, for eradicating slavery, and pouring the light of civilization and religion upon ravaged and benighted africa. many of the most conspicuous actors in this great scheme of benevolence, are the men who have exerted all their talents upon the floor of congress to increase the evils over which in another place they mourn; to sink us still deeper in the dangers into which they have confessed we are plunged. what are we to think, gentlemen, of the purity of your motives, or the sincerity of your professions? is it that your fears, and not your benevolence, impel you; that you wish to rid yourselves of the free blacks, and rivet and extend your dominion over the slaves? if these imputations are false, show yourselves at least to be consistent. do not by your own act extend the evils you so eloquently regret. give us that proof of the sincerity of your benevolence (the only one we can believe) that it is stronger than your sense of private interest. prove to us that you are honestly bent upon exterminating slavery, and there are thousands who now stand aloof, that will join you with all their strength in any scheme that can effect it; thousands, whose daily prayer is, that the mercy of an all-just providence may avert from our country the calamities of a servile war and a divided empire. we ask of you no extravagant or impracticable scheme of emancipation; we do not wish to see your helots invested suddenly with privileges which they would only abuse; nor do we look _for your relief and theirs_, to any other means than those which time and cautious experience may suggest. but we beseech you, as you are sincere in your plans of colonization, as you value the fair fame of our common country, as you regard the security and prosperity of all future generations--to stay the plague of slavery from spreading, and to give to the inhabitants of the missouri a charter which shall not disgrace the great principles of our revolution, nor _allow man to be the tyrant of his fellow man_. sandiford. familiar letters _from an englishman in this country to his friend at home_. (communicated for the rural magazine.) no. i. philadelphia, _sept_. , . my dear g.--you will perhaps be surprised at my dating this letter from this place, but i shall shortly explain to you the reason. we arrived in perfect safety at baltimore on the th inst., after a very pleasant passage; not unusually short, but rendered exceedingly _comfortable_ (that dear english word, although they have here naturalised it, as they do almost everything that comes from us,) by the kind, social, and attentive manners of capt. ----. to give you a detail of all the circumstances of our voyage would be unnecessary. i do not wish to nauseate you with the revolting particulars of a landsman's initiation to the ocean. we had not that humiliation to undergo which would have been our lot if the equinoctial had unfortunately crossed our path; but we had enough to inspire us with a perfect sense of our own inferiority to, and dependence on that power that can rule the winds and the waves. however, our dear mrs. and miss ---- were so much affected by the motion of the ship, and other associations, that we enjoyed very little of their company. the first appearance of land, even that land, which since my recollection has been supposed to be inhabited by spirits, hostile in late, although similar in early habits to ourselves, was greeted with most sincere satisfaction. that land was inhabited by christians, by men like ourselves, derived from the same origin, boasting of equal laws adopted from our code in general principles, and operating like our own upon freemen. we were landed in consequence of an unfavourable wind, at norfolk; where, although we staid but a few minutes, i was sorrowfully convinced that all the inhabitants of the land i was visiting were not freemen. a public sale of blacks was about to take place, and my first introduction to the country i had so joyfully pictured, was associated with feelings to which i had till then been a stranger. poor wretches, thought i, as they passed badly clothed and manacled through the streets, you give an alien a strange idea of the consistency of your rulers, and a lamentable evidence of the truth of the political axiom, that those who feel power, forget right. as i shall probably visit norfolk in common with the other maritime towns of virginia, before i return, sufficient interest has been excited in my mind to enable me to assure you, that i shall give you further details of the situation of that unfortunate class of human beings. from norfolk our voyage to baltimore surpassed all my former ideas of rapidity. we passed up to baltimore in so short a space of time, and in _such_ a steam-boat, that i dread your incredulity were i to give you particulars. let it suffice that _but a few hours_ brought us to baltimore, reputed to be in commercial importance the fourth city in the union. you know it was my first object to visit the respectable gentlemen in this place to to whom i have letters, and most of whom have at one time or another done business with our house. but on the instant of my arrival i was utterly confounded by the intelligence that the yellow fever, that scourge of america, and so justly dreaded by all europeans, but more particularly by the inhabitants of northern climates, had made its appearance at a place called fell's point, either in the vicinity of the city, or forming one of the suburbs; i was in too much consternation to learn which. indeed i was so much annoyed by the continual reports of the _yellow fever_ at _the point_, and what they called the _bank fever_ in the city, that i could hardly tell where i was, or what i was to do.--luckily, a very good looking gentleman, seeing my perplexity, and imagining--for i cannot tell how else he happened to fix upon me--that i was an englishman, told me that i could not get out of the city of baltimore too soon, because it had had the curse of cain upon it ever since the celebrated mob business (that we heard our maryland friend r. speak about) some years ago, that it had the plague at the point, and the yellow or white fever, he did not care which, at the other end of the town. this would have been news almost enough to frighten our lamented friend general r. (if he ever could have known fear;) and instead of visiting the spot where he terminated his brief career in this world, which i intended to have done on the moment of my landing, as performing the last pious act of duty to his memory that affection demanded, i determined to fly from this new enemy with almost as much precipitation as the yankees (by _our_ official accounts) fled from our departed hero in his various incursions in the states, adjoining the waters of the chesapeake. i ordered a post chaise _instanter_. the servant replied, "it went before day, sir." is it possible, said i, that at a house frequented as this is, (mr. g's.) there is but one post chaise. get me one at any rate, i returned in a pretty quick tone, and have my baggage put to it immediately. "why, master," rejoined george, (i thought the better of him for his name, and perhaps, novice as i am, because he was black) "there is no other post chaise till to-morrow; but the steam-boat will go at five o'clock, master, if that will suit you." it wanted but a few minutes of that hour. i leaped into a hackney coach, (which by the way i was surprised to see in such a new country, unless it had been moved by steam) and ere the hour had struck, was safe on board a very commodious vessel, furnished with every thing to make a night passage pleasant. it is upwards of one hundred miles from baltimore to philadelphia, by land, even by their lately improved roads; yet, with no interruption except being transported some sixteen or twenty miles over good roads, in very bad stage coaches, we enjoyed ourselves in our births till i was awakened before nine the next morning, by the steward, who informed me we were at the wharf, in the place of our destination. i forthwith repaired, as my previous instructions directed, to the large and commodious hotel of mr. r.; where i met with several of my old friends, and some quondam fellow-voyagers, who, influenced by business, or perhaps the same instinctive dread of yellow fever with myself, had found their way to this city.--here, my dear w., i still remain. in the twenty-four hours that have scarcely elapsed since my arrival, i have seen nothing distinctly; for after the monotony of a sea voyage, and the dizziness consequent on an exchange from the ocean to _terra firma_, some few days must be allotted to repose. _treatise on agriculture_. sect. i. on the rise and progress of agriculture. the origin of this art is lost among the fables of antiquity, and we have to regret, that in the present state of knowledge, we are even ignorant of the _time_, when the plough was invented, and of the _name_ and _condition_ of the inventor. when therefore we speak of the beginning of the art, we but allude to certain appearances which indicate its existence, and the employment given by it to the minds, as well as to the hands, of mankind. such were the artificial canals and lakes of egypt. menaced at one time by a redundancy of water, and at another by its scarcity or want, the genius of that extraordinary people could not but employ itself, promptly and strenuously, in remedying these evils, and eventually, in converting them into benefits; and hence it was, that when other parts of the world exhibited little more of agricultural knowledge than appertains to the state of nature, imagined by philosophers, the egyptians thoroughly understood and skilfully practised _irrigation_, that most scientific and profitable branch of the art.[ ] like their own nile, their population had its overflow, which colonized carthage and greece, and carried with it the talent and intelligence of the mother country. the former of these states, though essentially commercial, had its _plantations_, and so highly prized were the agricultural works of mago, that when carthage was captured, they alone, of the many books found in it, were retained and translated by the romans. a similar inference may be drawn from the history of greece; for assuredly that art could not have been either unknown or neglected, which so long employed the pen and the tongue of the great xenophon.[ ] it must however be admitted, that of the ancient nations, it is only among the romans, that we find real and multiplied evidences of the progress of the art; _facts_, substituted for _conjectures_ and _inferences_. cato, varro, columella, virgil and pliny, wrote on the subject, and it is from their works we derive the following brief exposition of roman husbandry. [ ] the best practical illustration of this opinion is found in the valley of the po--where "every rood of earth maintains its man." [ ] xenophon wrote several treatises on husbandry, and gave public lectures on it at scillonte, whither a weak and wicked government had banished him. the plough, the great instrument of agricultural labour, was well known and generally used among them; it was drawn exclusively by horned cattle. of fossile _manures_, we know that they used _lime_, and probably _marle_,[ ] and that those of animal and vegetable basis, were carefully collected. attention to this subject, even made part of the national religion; the dunghill had its god, and stercutus, his temple and worshippers. their corn crops were abundant; besides _barley_ and _far_,[ ] they had three species of _wheat_; the _robus_ or red--the _siligo_ or white--and the _triticum trimestre_, or summer wheat; they had besides millet, panis, zea (indian corn) and rye, all of which producing a flour convertible into bread, were known by the common name of _frumentum_. leguminous crops were frequent; the lupin in particular was raised in abundance, and besides being employed as a manure,[ ] entered extensively into the subsistence of men, cattle and poultry. the cultivation of garden vegetables was well understood and employed many hands; and meadows, natural and artificial, were brought to great perfection. lucern and fenugrec were the basis of the latter, and peas, rye and a mixture of barley, beans and peas, called _farrago_, were occasionally used in the stables as green food. their flocks were abundant, and formed their first representatives of wealth, as is sufficiently indicated by their word _pecunia_. vines and olives, and their products (wine and oil) had a full share of attention and use. the rearing of poultry made an important part of domestic economy, nor were apiaries and fish ponds forgotten or neglected. [ ] for the first part of this assertion we have the authority of pliny; for the latter, the practice of their colonies both in gaul and britain. [ ] of this last, there were three kinds, neither of which is now cultivated. [ ] the lupinus albus of linneus: "many other vegetables are used for this purpose, particularly the _bean_, but do not answer as well as the _lupin_; when this is heated in an oven and then buried, it forms the most powerful of all manures." t. c. l. simonde. _tableau de l'agriculture toscane_. if we pause for a moment, to glance at the civil institutions of this wonderful people, we discover how soon and how deeply it entered into their policy, not merely to promote, but to dignify agriculture and its professors.[ ] when cicero said, that "nothing in this world was better, more useful, more agreeable, more worthy of a free man, than agriculture;"[ ] he pronounced, not merely his own opinion, but the public judgment of his age and nation. were troops to be raised for the defence of the republic? the _tribus rusticus_ was the privileged nursery of the legions![ ] did exigencies of state require a general or dictator? he was taken from the _plough_! were his services rewarded? this was done not with ribbands or gold, but by a donation of _land_.[ ] [ ] tanus and numa were deified for services rendered to agriculture. [ ] cicero de officiis. l. . [ ] this continued till the time of marius. [ ] as much as he could plough in a day. with such support from public opinion, it was not to be supposed that the laws would be either adverse or indifferent to this branch of industry. we accordingly find the utmost security given to the labours of the husbandman;[ ] no legislative interposition between the seller and buyer, neither forced sales--nor limitation of prices--and a sacredness of boundaries never disturbed;[ ] fairs and markets multiplied and protected against invasion or interruption,[ ] and highways leading to these every where established, and of a character to call forth benedictions and admiration.[ ] [ ] to cut or destroy in the night the crop of his neighbour, subjected the roman to death. [ ] terminus was among their gods. [ ] assemblies of the people on days designated for fairs, and on subjects other than those of trade, were not lawful. [ ] the appian way, yet remains the wonder and reproach of modern times. nor were these regulations confined to the proper territory of rome. what of her own policy was good, she communicated to her neighbours; what of theirs was better, she adopted and practised herself. her arts and arms were therefore constant companions. wherever her legions marched, her knowledge, practices, and implements followed; and it is to these we are to look for the foundation of modern agriculture in italy, france, spain, &c. _[albany argus_. (to be continued.) _the moral plough boy_. "in the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand." the words of our motto were probably addressed by an eastern monarch to those of his subjects, who followed husbandry, and to whom the importance of early rising was the greater, as the climate was excessively warm, and the stoutest labourer found the noon-tide heat too powerful for the energies of his frame to encounter.--this is the case in most of the oriental climes, where the morning and the evening are improved by the cultivator of the soil, as well as the man of business of every class, cast or profession.--the middle or hottest part of the day is, in those countries, given to ease and relaxation; and the charms of conversation, and the sweets of refreshment, are then the substitutes for toil and care. but the time thus spent is not lost, because they attend strictly to the advice of the sacred moralist, and make it up by the fidelity of their morning and evening labours in the field, the workship or the counting-room. besides the earth is there more prolific than in colder climes, like ours, and to less labour yields a greater supply, a more abundant harvest. but abundantly as the earth yields her products, beneath an oriental sky, still it was there that man was first taught by his maker, that she would not yield them without the sweat of the human brow. implicit obedience was the first law given to our progenitors in eden, as the condition of enjoying life without labour, of being surrounded by the perpetual verdure of spring, and regaled by the never-dying fragrance of its odours: but this fair condition violated, and they were doomed to know, that fruitful as the earth had come from the hands of its creator, they should cultivate it with toil, and care, and anxiety, before it should yield them the means of enjoyment and subsistence. but for one fatal mistake, they would never have been called upon to sow their seed in the morning, and at evening to watch over it with a careful hand. we have seen then, that the first plough boys were obliged to work early and late; and their successors in the same climes, are still subjected to the same diurnal labour. but the american plough boy enjoys a milder clime, and may perhaps think himself less obliged to rise with the dawn of day, or pursue his labours with the declining sun. he may perhaps flatter himself that the morning may be spent at a neighbouring bar-room, and the evening at a shooting-match or a horse-race, and the day still afford time enough for all the labour that he may have to perform. but this is, indeed, an error the most fatal to his present, as well as future happiness. the mid-day beams of the sun are not so fierce on the hills or vales of america, as on the plains of asia, where our first parents were doomed to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. but they are still fierce enough to make the plough boy feel their enervating effects, and to impress upon his physical as well as mental frame the necessity and importance of _sowing his seed in the morning_, and of extending to it the _vigilance of his hand in the evening_. if our american plough boys would, one and all, adopt with energy and perseverance this injunction of oriental wisdom, how different would be the face of our country, in many places, from what it now is! how many orchards would be planted; how many fruit trees, of every kind, would be seen growing in beauty and luxuriance, where now the eye of the traveller, or sojourner, is obliged to rest upon nought but wilds and weeds? how many fields would be ploughed and sown, and cultivated with success, which now lie waste, and barren as the deserts of arabia. how many cattle, and domestic animals of every description, fit for the use of man, would be seen thriving and healthy, awaiting a profitable market, where now there are none, or those whose sickly and squalid appearance, bespeaks the indolence and neglect of their owners! how many substantial rail fences would be erected, where there is now scarcely a brush bulwark against the encroachments of man or beast? how many neat stone walls would take the place of rail fences, and remain as lasting monuments of the virtue of their owners--for _industry_ and _virtue_ are synonimous in agricultural life! how many ditches would be seen running through our swamps, and yielding or restoring to wholesome vegetation, those nurseries of wild, unprofitable, and poisonous plants; whose dark, damp shades are not only lost to agriculture; but send forth daily their pestilential vapours, spreading disease and death among the plough boys! it is not the industrious plough boy who will feel the application of these remarks. he will take care that his fields and his fences, his flourishing fruit-trees, his overflowing cribs and barns, and his fat cattle, plump and smooth as a turtle-fed alderman, shall prove to the world that he never fails to attend to the admonition of our motto. but it is to the slothful that this short essay is addressed. pluck up the weeds, and the useful plants will take care of themselves. reform the indolent, and the industrious will find a new spur to exertion. ye careless and slothful plough boys, then, be advised by a friend. cast off the sin of idleness, which so easily besets you, and imitate your industrious neighbours. resolve for the future, _in the morning to sow your seed, and in the evening to withhold not your hand_; and you will soon find, that the blessings of heaven await those who deserve them; and that health, prosperity, and a quiet conscience, are the never-failing rewards of virtuous industry. h. h. jr. _[plough boy_. mr. nicholson's prize essay. _on a rotation of crops, and the most profitable mode of collecting, preserving, and applying manures_. (communicated to the albany county agricultural society.) some soils are peculiarly adapted for the growth of particular plants, and in such case many successive yearly growths of them may be raised, without manure, and without material diminution of product. we have known an instance of good crops of wheat raised successively on the same ground; another of crops of oats; others of at least of barley, and nearly of rye: but these were peculiar soils; and although this sameness of culture was found successful, no inference is therefore to be drawn that it was the most profitable, or that such soils would not eventually tire of their favourite crops, and then be found exhausted and unfit for others. generally speaking, we conceive that one of the most important points in husbandry is a judicious rotation of such crops as are most profitable for culture, and at the same time best adapted for the particular soils which are to be cultivated. lands seem naturally to require a change of growths. where the oak has disappeared, after it had lifted its head to the springs of ages, another oak will not naturally rise, but some other tree. instances have been known of lands covered solely with trees of deciduous growth, where the knots of the pitch pine were still to be found; a proof that pine was once a tenant of the soil. in the southern states, where lands have been exhausted with injudicious cropping, and then thrown out to common, they soon become covered with growths of trees different from those they originally bore. some plants are so unfit for long continuance in any particular place that they are endowed with migratory powers, either by their winged seeds, which are wafted abroad by the winds; by their roots, by which they change their places of growth beneath the surface; or by their vines, by which they travel above ground, and thus locate themselves in different situations. of the first description are the varieties of the thistle, the milk-weed, and the fire-weed; of the second, the potato and some other bulbous rooted plants; of the third, the straw-berry, the black-berry, the different species of the gourd tribe. the stalks of erect plants fall when they ripen, and thus the seed reaches the ground at a distance from the roots which produced them. there seems, indeed, to be generally a disposition in the earth to require changes in the plants it nourishes, in order that it may impart the food that is best adapted for each; and providence, in his infinite wisdom, has endowed these while growing in a state of nature, with such properties as are best calculated to effect the changes. let the cultivator, therefore, study nature, and follow her dictates, if he wishes either success or applause in his employment. in regard to changes of crops, a general rule has been recommended of alternate growths of leguminous and culmiferous kinds, and of green crops and grain crops; but perhaps it would be quite as philosophical to insist upon alternate growths of fibrous, and tap-rooted plants; the former deriving their food from the surface of the earth, the latter from greater depths. but the value of crops, and the expense of raising each, should be duly estimated in making selections for rotations. let us say, for instance, that the average crops of wheat, barley, and indian corn, at their greatest extent, may average dollars in value to the acre, after the grain is ready for market; crops of rye, oats and peas, not more than two thirds of this amount; buck-wheat, considerably less. from lands suitable for ruta baga, or mangel wurzel, it would seem that from five to six hundred bushels to the acre may be expected with good culture; which at cents per bushel, a price certainly not beyond the proportionate value we have just given to the grain crops, will average about a hundred dollars to the value of an acre. the entire expense of either of these crops of roots, when ready for use, is not essentially greater than the expense incurred in producing grain crops; of course, it must be evident that these afford from to dollars an acre less of clear profit than a crop of either of the roots first mentioned. with a proper application of the requisite quantity of manure to ruta baga, it may be successfully grown on almost any dry soil, when well and deeply mellowed, from the sandy to the deep rich loams. soils of the latter description are best adapted for mangle wurzel. either of these roots, when steam boiled, and especially with the addition of some meal, will answer all the purposes for which grain is used for feeding cattle of all sorts, from the horse down to the hog. even stage horses, which, from the severity of their labour, require the most nourishing food, have been kept in england on hay and steam-boiled ruta baga. mr. cobbett says, "a hog of a good sort may be sufficiently fatted with this root when steam-boiled." allowing, what we believe can hardly be admitted, that a bushel of oats contains as much nutriment as three of this root, still it is evident that the usual product of one acre of it will go as far in keeping horses as four of oats. neither of these root crops require any considerable expenditure in seed, and on this account, if on no other, they are preferable to crops of the potato and of the jerusalem artichoke, which in the article of seed are perhaps the most expensive of any whatever. we however consider crops even of these roots more profitable than those of grain, and particularly the potato, when judiciously cultivated in climates most suitable for its growth. for the various uses of this root for culinary purposes it stands indeed without a rival. in point of profit we would also give to the carrot, the parsnip, and the onion, a preference to crops of grain; but the soils well adapted for them is more limited, and their culture is more expensive; and although they should form a part of the products of the farm we cannot recommend them as being in all instances proper for a judicious rotation of crops. the common turnip, and the cabbage, are also entitled to attention. the pumpkin is as nutritious as the same weight of any root or vegetable whatever, and its culture is cheap; but whether its product, in weight, can be made to compete with that of roots, is a matter of which we are not informed. if tons to the acre could be usually obtained of this species of gourd, we should be induced to pronounce the crop, in point of profit and use, unrivalled as a preparative for a crop of winter grain. the crop would be found among those which are least expensive in seed, in culture and in gathering; none would occasion less exhaustion of soil, nor require less for manure, as a little gypsum to the hills, or drills, will be found to have a powerful effect on its growth, but of its more complete cultivation we shall presently speak. in pennsylvania, and farther to the south, a successful mode of culture has been put in practice of growing indian corn and potatoes in alternate rows or drills, and in this way about a sixth more of product in the aggregate, is obtained from the ground, than if these two sorts of crops were cultivated separately. such is found to be the fact, and the reason for it seems to be that each crop has, in this way, more space given for the extension of its roots in search of its favourite food, and each has the like room above ground for deriving from the air the nutriment that is most suitable. corn, in particular, it is well known, is liable to much injury, if planted too closely. there is, indeed, a variety of cases where this mingling of growths is found very advantageous, and whenever we shall venture to recommend the practice, it will be founded on a conviction of its utility. there are also some instances, even in this northern latitude, in which two crops may be had in a season from the same ground, and any case where it may be advisable shall be duly noted. it should farther be observed that in suggesting what may be deemed the most suitable changes of crops, no reference will be had to the actual state of farming among us, but merely what the state of farming ought to be; and in pursuance of this course, we shall, in a great measure, discard the idea, too long prevalent in this country, that we should make the most of our labour, not the most of our land; we shall, on the contrary, insist that, generally speaking, making the most of our lands, under a proper course of husbandry, is the right way to realize the most from our labour. we shall therefore begin with the most usual soil of this country, the dry, arable lands, which are usually suited for a variety of crops. of the stiff clays, the hard gravels, and light sands, soils which abound but little here, we shall speak in particular. in ploughing we shall advise that the usual depth be about six inches, or about a third deeper than our farmers commonly plough: but that the depth should sometimes be greater than this, and sometimes less. we shall also insist on the ploughing being done in the most perfect manner, and not in the slight way too often practised; and we shall farther premise that the plan of culture we recommend is necessarily connected with the business of the dairy, to greater or less extent, and with that of the grazier, in feeding and fatting cattle of every description. such we conceive to be the only true and profitable course to conduct farming in this country, but deviations from this may in some cases be found equally profitable. in general, however, we advise to this course of farming, for in this way the greatest quantity of manure is afforded, and for most lands manure is essential for obtaining the greatest crops, and of course for realizing the greatest profits. we shall begin with the ground in wheat or rye stubble, as at the end of our course we propose to leave it. let the stubble ground be well turned over in the fall, to the depth of, say, six inches. it should not be turned over until a sward of white clover has covered the ground, which is to be produced by giving it a top-dressing of gypsum, in the spring. under the subject of manures the reasons for this will be explained, when treating of gypsum. in the spring give the ground one or two ploughings more, as the nature of the soil may require, and of the same depth, and let the last ploughing be just before the proper time for planting indian corn; for this crop, with an intermixture of other plants, is what we propose to begin with. say, for instance, that the intermixture shall consist of the potato, of the pumpkin, and of the common pumpkin, a third part of each. we propose planting these crops in drills, in preference to hills, from a well founded conviction that in the former method considerably more may be obtained from the ground. let furrows be run, at a good depth, for the drills, at the distance of about every three and a half feet. in these furrows lay off the shortest and best of the fresh barn dung, at the rate of about wagon loads to the acre. for the drills intended for potatoes the longer sort of barn dung is as good as any other. if the different sorts of barn dung can be applied to the soils most suitable for each, as is mentioned in speaking of manures; this should always be attended to; that is, sheep and horse dung for the moister parts of the land, and cow dung for the drier. as fast as the dung is laid, it should be well covered, by a furrow, moderately deep, thrown over it from each side; but where potatoes are to form the alternate drills, let the seed for these be laid on the dung, previous to covering; and for this purpose, let the potatoes be cut in halves, lengthways, so as to give each about an equal number of eyes, and then wet them and roll them in gypsum before laying them down, which should be at the distances of about inches. the potato drills being thus covered, by the furrows thrown from each side, the same process serves to cover the dung in the other furrows, and thus the beds are formed for planting the other crops in the drill method. indian corn may be drilled in at one operation by a drill machine for the purpose; the same may be observed of the turnip crop, and probably of the pumpkin; but though attended with more labour, it may usually be expected that they will be drilled in by manual operation. we should advise that the seed in the turnip drills be liberally strewn, in order that if part of the plants be destroyed by the flies, enough may still be left. the corn and pumpkin seed may be dropped at the distances of six inches, and thinned at the first hoeing, so as to have the growing plants of the former about a foot apart, and the latter about inches. if any vacant places should happen in any of these drills, such vacancies may readily be supplied by transplanting sets, taken from parts where more plants are standing than are necessary. any young plants may be transplanted after they have attained a suitable size, which is usually in from two to four weeks growth. the vacancies may be quickly filled by transplanting, and it is a matter well worthy of attention. the practice, lately introduced, of laying barn dung at a good depth, and then covering it with mould to the depth of about three or four inches, and planting the seeds over the manure thus covered, seems to answer the best purpose for every drilled crop except potatoes, and we would therefore recommend this method of using barn dung in preference to every other, as far as it may be wanted for drilled crops. in this way this manure may be profitably applied while fresh; but in many instances we consider it more efficacious when applied after the process of rotting or fermentation has commenced. such is the theory of sir humphrey davy, and we have full confidence in its correctness. when thus buried in the earth, the growing plants, placed above the manure, have the utmost means of absorbing all its garious and soluble parts, while the process of its decomposition is going on. in preparing seeds we would, as a general rule, advise to their being soaked about hours in a strong solution of saltpetre, or of common salt, and then rolled in gypsum before being committed to the earth. the effect of this mode of preparing the seed seems to be, that the young plants start with more vigour, and grow larger than they do where this treatment of the seed is neglected; and the solution of saltpetre has the further effect of bringing plants to maturity from one to two weeks sooner than they otherwise would ripen. in selecting seed for the corn crop, take such stalks as bear two ears, and select the best ear from each of such stalks, the grains on each end to be rejected. in all cases where it is practicable, the seeds should be taken from the largest and most perfect plants, or roots, as the case may be. by attending to this mode of selecting seed the product of the corn crop in particular will soon be found greatly augmented; a discovery, the honour of which is due to mr. cooper, of new jersey. it is said that sprinkling a little gypsum on the silk of the ears of corn, will make them fill to the ends. nipping off the blossoms of the potato crop, as fast as they appear, is found, by accurate experiment, to increase the growth of the roots about one sixth part. salt and gypsum have each a powerful effect on their growth, though by applying too much of the latter it may cause them to run too much to vines. to the corn and pumpkin crop apply some of this latter manure after the plants are up. what effect it has on turnips we have never understood. in ploughing between the drills let it be to a good depth, first turning the furrows from the plants, running about four inches from them, and then turning the furrows back, when the hoeing and hand weeding are to follow. the second ploughing should be similar to the first, but farther from the plants; and in general, we believe, it will be found advantageous to plough and hoe the crops the third time. we have seen it highly recommended to plough among indian corn as late as in august. frequent deep ploughing is certainly the best means of keeping the ground moist, and should never be omitted in case of drought. ground that has become quite dry will be found moist after a thorough deep ploughing. at all events, the ground should be so cultivated as to prevent any weeds from going to seed in the fall, for if this be suffered, the ground will remain constantly stocked with the seeds of weeds. we advise to the cultivation of the common turnip, the potato, and the pumpkin, in the manner we have mentioned, for the purpose of affording the early supply of food for feeding and fatting cattle in the fall and the forepart of the winter, before the ruta baga crop should be used, of which we shall presently speak. we also advise to this variety of crops, in order that the cattle may have a greater variety of food, a matter of considerable importance in feeding and fatting cattle. for this purpose also the culture of the cabbage is worthy of attention. horses, and all sorts of cattle, fatten well on pumpkins, but for swine they should be steam boiled, and the seeds taken out, as these prove injurious to those animals, by causing too great a secretion of urine. the seeds afford an oil equal to that of the olive, and are well worth preserving for this purpose. as soon as the ears of the corn crop have somewhat hardened, the crop may be cut up and set in shocks, with the tops tied closely together to keep out the rains, in which way the grain will harden as well as in any other, and a great addition of fodder may thus be acquired. during the next season we propose to take two crops from the ground, to wit, a crop of ruta baga, preceded by such spring crop as ripens sufficiently early to be harvested in time for preparing the ground for a full growth of this root. in the meridian of new york, mr. cobbett says that from the th of july until some of the first days in august, is the proper time to transplant this crop, the plants for the purpose being previously grown. the method of cultivating the crop by transplanting, he insists, is the preferable way, and from our own experience we are fully disposed to agree with him. advancing to the northward, from new york, the seasons are shorter, and of course the crop should be transplanted earlier, while at the same time the spring crops are later in ripening. at new york, barley could be taken from the ground in time sufficient for preparing for ruta baga; farther to the north this could not be the case. in the more northerly parts of this state, it would, perhaps, be difficult to find any crop, now raised in this country, with the exception of flax, that would be sufficiently early. the fact is, we want a particular crop for this purpose; and that would seem to be the new sort of spring wheat lately introduced into france, which is there called _le ble de mai_, in english, the wheat of may. it is said to be a very productive species of wheat, affording a grain from which flour is made of about a medium whiteness between that of rye and wheat, and in that country it is fit to harvest in the latter end of may. in this state it would probably ripen no where later than the first of july, which would be in time sufficient for the crop of ruta baga. until we can procure this wheat, we can only recommend that the preceding crop be such only as will ripen sufficiently early, and where none can be had for the purpose, to be content with raising the crop of ruta baga only in the course of the season. where previous spring crops can however be obtained, let them be taken from the ground as quick as possible, and the ground deeply turned over, and mellowed by three deep ploughings, then furrowed at the distances of about inches, the manure laid in, and covered by furrows thrown over it from each side, and the plants of ruta baga immediately set on the ridges, by transplanting, at the distance of about a foot from each other. from our own experience we are fully convinced that the plan of transplanting is, in the end, much the cheapest, and most advisable. we would, however, recommend not to transplant before the appearance of a heavy shower, but at any time afterwards; that the plants be of good size, say of five or six weeks growth, and that in setting, special care be taken to have the lower parts of the roots well enclosed with earth. for further particulars in regard to the culture of this crop, the time and manner of using it, and of saving it, we refer the reader to mr. cobbett's book on the subject, from a conviction that it is the best essay that has ever been published on the culture and use of this valuable plant. it will be seen, however, that we differ from mr. c. in the distances in which the plants are to be set, and in the manner of forming the ridges. he forms his ridges by four gathering furrows, by which the ridges are each about feet in breadth. we propose to form the ridges by two gathering furrows, and at the distances of inches. in england, the plan we recommend is generally pursued, and the ridges are usually but inches wide. (to be continued.) from niles' weekly register. _cotton, rice, tobacco, sugar, wine._ the national intelligencer informs us that in new york bushels of indian corn have been gathered this year from _one acre_; and bushels of potatoes from one acre. this has led to the following statistical facts. cotton.--in the export of cotton from the united states was ( , , _lbs._) more than eighty-five million. one acre yields, at a moderate estimate, lbs. of clean cotton. the whole export, therefore, is the product of only square miles: this is less than the th part of georgia, and less than the th part of the cotton regions of the u. states. rice.--the maximum export of rice was , tierces, (in ,) or ( , , _lbs._) nearly forty-four million pounds. this, on an average crop, is the produce of only sixty-five square miles, which is less than the th part of south carolina, and less than two-thirds of the district of columbia. tobacco.--the maximum export of tobacco was , hogsheads, in . a hogshead is about one thousand weight; and, on average, one acre will yield one hogshead. the export, therefore, was the product of about square miles, which is less than the d part of virginia. each of the counties of that state contains, on an average, more than square miles, viz: more than three times the quantity of land which furnished the above export. sugar.--such is, generally, the fertility of the equinoctial regions of america, that all the sugar consumed in france, estimated at twenty million kilogrammes, (about , , pounds,) may be produced on an extent of square leagues, which is not equal to one-thirtieth part of the smallest department of france. wine.--about , , arpents, or , , acres, are in france employed in the culture of the vine. the value of the annual product is about , , dollars, at about twenty cents a gallon. in bordeaux alone exported more than fifteen million gallons of wine. the , , arpents are less than one th part of france, and less than one th part of pennsylvania. the value of the annual produce of these five interesting articles, may be thus estimated: cotton, at cents, $ , , rice, $ a tierce, , , tobacco, $ a hogshead, , , wine, cents a gallon, , , sugar consumed in france, at cents a pound, , , ------------- $ , , for the product of these articles the following quantities of land are cultivated, viz. square miles. for cotton rice tobacco sugar wine ---- this is little less than three-fourths of the state of connecticut. the authority for cotton, rice, and tobacco, is seybert's statistical annals, and the personal information of gentlemen of experience in the culture of those articles. for sugar i have the authority of humboldt's _essai politique_. for wine i depend on chaptal: his "treatise, theoretical and practical, on the culture of the vine, and the art of making wine, brandy, spirits of wine, and vinegars, simple and compound," is a truly classic work, in which he had the aid of rozier, parmentier, and dussieux. it contains all that the chemist, or botanist, or vine cultivator, or enlightened statesman can reasonably ask or wish to know. it is in two octavo volumes, of about pages each, with plates. this admirable treatise should be translated for the use of our fellow citizens who occupy our wine-yielding regions. for, in a few years, the united states will produce wine for their domestic consumption and exportation. a revolution of our planet on its axis would present to the eye of an observer, at the distance of a few thousand miles, a few spots or specks (china or holland) fully cultivated. the rest would be as a desert. pauperism in england, now so extensive and so dangerous, is fulfilling the prophecies of goldsmith's deserted village. "political economy (says jean baptiste say,) is founded on statistical knowledge, or (what is the same thing) history;" and that "the american confederacy will have the glory of proving that the loftiest policy is in accordance with moderation and humanity." the most active mind has not yet conceived an adequate idea of the vast resources of the united states. _washington city_. notes and remarks--by the editor of the register. the _general_ average value of the products of the united states exported, may be estimated as amounting to , , dollars, at fair prices; the cotton, tobacco, and rice, included in which, may be valued at , , --the balance is made up of bread stuffs and meats, the product of the forest and of the sea, and , , in manufactures. the chief things that we have for _export_ bear about the following proportions to their respective quantities _consumed_ in the united states--assuming millions as the amount of value exported, and taking our products at their average quantities. _val. or am't val. or am't exported. consumed_. bread stuffs, meats & drinks, d. , , , , provender for horses, &c. (say) , , , manufactures, (in general) , , , , product of the fisheries , , , , -------------- forest , , , , cotton, lbs. , , , , tobacco, hhds. , , rice, tierces , , the value of the cotton, tobacco, and rice consumed in the united states, being considered as included in the aggregate values of the manufactures used, or other stuffs consumed, will give a value to the consumption equal to , say millions of dollars per annum; and assuming our population at , , , the average for each individual is dollars a-year. this amount includes all sorts of disbursements needful to the subsistence, convenience and comfort of the people, except the product of the value of labour directly applied to the _erection_ of buildings or other permanent works. the amount, though it appears enormous, i am satisfied is less than the actual value consumed. it brings out the general result, that our exports stand to our consumption as is to --or as _one_ is to _fourteen_, at the present time. when the price of commodities was higher, the rate was as _one_ to _seventeen_. the ratio of each of the preceding items are about as follows: _exported. consumed._ bread stuffs, meats & drinks, as is to provender, -- manufactured articles, -- product of the fisheries, -- ---- forest, -- cotton, -- (nearly.) tobacco, -- rice, -- it would be excessively tedious to attempt to detail the multitude of items that affect these general conclusions. accuracy is not pretended in either of them. probabilities only are aimed at. from these facts assumed as being pretty near the truth, we may estimate the importance of the home trade, or internal commerce and consumption of the people, and arrive at a multitude of highly interesting considerations. take the following for an example: the sudden introduction of less than , persons, would leave us no surplus of _present_ products of food for men. but it is a demand for this surplus, no matter how created, that assesses the value of the whole product. such products, let the fact be recollected, were at as high prices during the late war, when there was very little export of them, as they are now, the difference in the value of our circulating medium being also considered. this was caused by a partial want of agricultural labourers; but more by the waste of provisions that belong to a belligerent state. foreign commerce, nevertheless, has a powerful bearing on the consideration of value in a state of peace, to the growers of grain, meats, &c. the amount beyond their own _immediate_ consumption and that of their families, may be about two fifths of the whole, besides the foreign export, or nearly millions,--the _price_ of which is fixed by the small amount of , , dollars' worth sent abroad! and, this little surplus remaining unconsumed, or without being wasted, at home, would depreciate the general value of the whole surplus at least per cent. hence, it would seem of greater interest to the farmers even to _destroy_ a portion of their products, than to cast them into a glutted market, according to the principles acted upon by the dutch in regard to spices. a policy not to be recommended on the score of morality, but as according with the spirit of trade. it cannot, therefore, be advantageous to the agriculturist to depend upon a foreign market to assess the value of his articles, for it is, and ever must be uncertain and unsteady. it is his interest to have a market at home, for this may be depended upon, and the product will be regulated by the demand, so as to leave a fair profit. a gentleman of observation, on a certain occasion, when i was speaking on this subject, related the following case in point. at an interval of about years, he had stopped for a short time at a certain village in connecticut--when first there, it contained two first rate taverns, and one other respectable establishment of the same kind. two lines of stages made it their halting place every night, and all seemed flourishing and lively. when there again, the three taverns were shut up, or at least not occupied as such, and he had to apply at a private house to be accommodated during his stay, and every thing appeared dull and desolate. he asked the reason.--it was the establishment of steam-boats which had destroyed the lines of stages, and driven off the persons and horses that they had given employment to, and of course the market they created, which hitherto took off all the surplus products of the neighbourhood, had ceased to be. a thousand instances of this sort might be noted to prove that a _ready market_ is the prosperity of a neighbourhood, country, state, or nation. on the different items, especially those of _cotton_ and _sugar_, as mentioned by the writer in the national intelligencer, we intend to speak particularly hereafter, in the essays we have promised to write under the head of "political economics," the introduction to which appeared in the register of the th ult. page . _vine dressing near vevay._ vevay, (indiana) oct. . the season for making wine is just over; and notwithstanding the uncommon dry season, the vine dressers near vevay have made four thousand eight hundred and ninety-two gallons. [we copy the following from niles' weekly register, with an intention, as his proposed essays appear, of giving them a place in the _rural magazine_,--having no doubt, from our knowledge of the editor, but they will be instructive as well as interesting to our readers.--_ed._] _political economics._ introductory. though so much has been said on political economy as applicable to the national prosperity, by profits derived from national industry, that we despair of offering any new thing on the subject, we have so far yielded to the wishes of many friends as to resolve upon the publication of a new series of essays, to elucidate some of the facts that belong to this deeply interesting concern--a concern that presses itself into every man's business, which invades our fire-sides and accompanies us to our bed-chambers: yet, so beset with it, and feeling it in all that we have to sell or want to buy, and in whatsoever business we do that requires the aid of money or use of credit--still we shrink from the trouble of ascertaining its operation and extent. the mind, by repeated mortifications and disappointments, loses its tone; and we seem rather disposed to trust to the chapter of accidents for redress, than rouse ourselves to an exertion to put an end to our wrongs, through the means afforded; forgetting that effects flow from causes. it has pleased providence to bless us with a "goodly land," and we are favoured with the best system of government ever devised--but the seat of ancient paradise is a howling waste, and greece and rome are tenanted by slaves. a nation's prosperity is the happiness of the individuals composing it. the freeman cannot be a happy man unless private industry secures private independence; and freedom itself must pass into despotism. the power of a government rests in the moral and physical force of the governed, and its wealth is constituted by personal acquisitions of property. governments were made for the good of the people, not the people for governments; and their object fails when private happiness ceases to be respected. emancipation from political tyranny, without the means of preserving personal liberty, is a nullity. the gift of life without the means of living, is destitute of value. production is the only source of national wealth that can be depended upon. the home market, even to the most commercial nations, is of many times the amount of the foreign one. the former is not easily effected, except by a self-mistaken policy; but the latter is as capricious as the winds, and beyond our control. speculation does not create value--the purchase and sale of a million's worth of goods does not improve their quality or add to their quantity, to the amount of a cent. a change of commodities between different countries, may increase their value to the extent of the labour expended in transporting them; and it is generally convenient, if not advantageous, when exchanges are made on equal terms. but poverty must be the lot of every society which barters the labour of two or more of its members for that of one person in another society. employment is the best preservative of health and morals. things should be so that every person willing to labour for his living, should find labour to do, and live plentifully. if it is otherwise, an error has been committed that ought to be corrected immediately, for it is pregnant with the greatest evils. it is the chief check to population, and more powerful than the sword to destroy the liberties of nations. nations and individuals are spendthrifts of the worst description when they purchase that which they can make from the spare labour at home. who will give away a hundred dollars and their interest for ever, for the sake of receiving twenty dollars of his own money as a premium? yet thus a nation acts when, for the sake of the duties on imports, it accepts of another nation any commodity which it might supply itself with, without detriment to its other branches of industry. agriculture is the noblest and best occupation of man; and in a country like the united states, where land is plenty and labour scarce, it will always be pushed to the extent which a profitable market demands. yet if none worked but those who laboured in the field, society could not exist long. we should perish with cold and hunger. it is by an association of the arts that we live--and our comfort materially depends on their respective perfections. only about one fifth of a population are fitted for agricultural labours, in general. the other four fifths, if idle would consume the whole amount of value produced, and send the labourers supperless to bed. it is the capacity of production in the most numerous body that must be brought into action, if families and nations would prosper and be happy. if they purchase any thing which their lost time might be applied to the fabrication of--they might as well throw its cost into the sea. in the course of our essays, which we expect to commence in two or three weeks, we shall endeavour to point out some of the chief things that require the protection of government, just as those of a well regulated family are managed; and shew that the well being of a nation depends upon a fair exchange of labour for labour, substantials for substantials, and even luxuries for luxuries. the man who exchanges wheat for _ear-rings_, unless those rings are manufactured in his country, wastes to the country the whole amount of the _intrinsic_ value of the wheat over that of the _ear-rings_, which latter is only that of the metal composing them. a nation cannot be independent, if it looks to another for necessaries--it cannot be rich, if it exchanges necessaries for luxuries. and luxuries, especially, should not be received at all, unless things of the same class are remitted in payment for them. the effect of these on population and manners, will also be considered, and illustrated by many statistical facts--as leisure is allowed to arrange them. from humboldt's personal narrative. _the coffee plant._ the coffee tree flowers only the second year, and the flowering lasts only twenty-four hours. at this time the shrub has a charming aspect; seen from afar, it seems covered with snow. the produce of the third year becomes very abundant. in plantations well weeded and watered, and recently cultivated, we find trees bearing sixteen, eighteen, and even twenty pounds of coffee. in general, however, a produce of more than a pound and a half or two pounds cannot be expected from each plant; and even this is superior to the mean produce of the west india islands. rains at the time of the flowering, the want of water for artificial irrigations, and a patastic plant, a new species of coranthus, which clings to the branches, are extremely injurious to the coffee trees. _sugar cane._ three species of sugar cane can be distinguished even at a distance, by the colour of their leaves; the ancient creole sugar cane, the otaheite cane, and the batavia cane. the first has a leaf of a deeper green, the stem less thick, and the knots nearer together.--this sugar cane was the first introduced from india into sicily, the canary islands and the west indies. the second is of a lighter green; and its stem is higher, thicker, and more succulent. the whole plant displays a more luxuriant vegetation. we owe this plant to the voyages of bougainville, cook, and bligh. bougainville carried it to the isle of france, whence it passed to cayenne, martinique, and since , to the rest of the west india islands. the sugar cane of otaheite, the _to_ of those islanders, is one of the most important acquisitions, for which colonial agriculture is indebted to the travels of naturalists. it yields not only one third more of juice than the creolian cane on the same space of land; but from the thickness of its stem, and the tenacity of its ligneous fibres, it furnishes much more fuel. the last advantage is important to the west indies, where the destruction of the forests has for a long time obliged the planters to use the canes deprived of their juice, to keep up the fire under their boilers. but from the knowledge of this new plant, the progress of agriculture on the continent of spanish america, and the introduction of the east india and java sugars, the revolutions of st. domingo, and the destruction of the great sugar plantations of that island, would have had a more sensible effect on the prices of colonial produce in europe. the otaheite sugar cane was carried from the isle of trinidad to caraccas. from caraccas it passed to cicuta and san gil in the kingdom of new grenada. in our days its cultivation during twenty-five years almost entirely removed the apprehension, which was at first entirely entertained, that, transplanted to america, the plant would by degrees degenerate, and become as slender as the creole cane. if it be a variety, it is a very constant one. the third species, the violet sugar cane, called _cana de batavia_, or _de guinea_, is entirely indigenous in the island of java, where it is cultivated in preference in the districts of jupara and pasuruan. its foliage is purple, and very broad; and it is preferred in the province of caraccas for rum. the _tablones_, or grounds planted with sugar canes, are divided by hedges of a collossal gramen; the latta, or gynesium with distich leaves. _american fig tree_. the trunks of these trees are covered with very odoriferous plants of vanilla, which, in general, flower only in the month of april.--we were here again struck with those ligneous excrescenses, which in the form of ridges, or ribs, augment, in so extraordinary a manner, and as far as twenty feet above the ground, the thickness of the trunk of the fig trees of america. i found trees twenty-two feet and a half in diameter near the roots.--these ligneous ridges sometimes separate from the trunk at a height of eight feet, and are transformed into cylindrical roots two feet thick. the tree looks as if it were supported by buttresses. this scaffolding, however, does not penetrate very deep into the earth. the lateral roots wind at the surface of the ground, and when at twenty feet distance from the trunk, they are cut with the hatchet, we see the milky juice of the fig tree gush out, which, when deprived of the vital influence of the organs of the tree, is altered and coagulates. what a wonderful combination of cells and vessels exist in these vegetable masses; in these gigantic trees of the torrid zone, which, without interruption, perhaps during a thousand years, prepare nutritious fluids, raise them to the height of feet, convey them down again to the ground, and conceal beneath a rough and hard bark, under the inanimate layers of ligneous matter, all the movements of organic life! _the cow tree._ "amid the great number of curious phenomena which have presented themselves to me in the course of my travels, i confess there are few that have so powerfully affected my imagination, as the aspect of the cow tree. "whatever relates to milk, whatever regards corn, inspires an interest, which is not merely that of the physical knowledge of things, but is connected with another order of ideas and sentiments. we can scarcely conceive how the human race could exist without farinaceous substances, and without that nourishing juice which the breast of the mother contains, and which is appropriated to the long feebleness of the infant. the amylaceous matter of corn, the object of religious veneration among so many nations, ancient and modern, is diffused in the seeds and deposited in the roots of vegetables; milk, which serves us as an aliment, appears to us exclusively the produce of animal organization.--such are the impressions we have received in our earliest infancy; such is also the source of that astonishment which seizes us at the aspect of the tree just described. it has not here the solemn shades of forests, the majestic course of rivers, the mountains wrapped in eternal frosts, that excite our emotion.--a few drops of vegetable juice recal to our minds all the powerfulness and fecundity of nature. on the barren flank of rock grows a tree with coriaceous and dry leaves. its large woody roots can scarcely penetrate into the stone. for several months of the year not a single shower moistens its foliage. its branches appear dead and dried; but when its trunk is pierced, there flows from it a sweet and nourishing milk. it is at the rising of the sun that this vegetable fountain is most abundant. the blacks and natives are then seen hastening from all quarters, furnished with large bowls to receive the milk, which grows yellow, and thickens at its surface. some employ their bowls under the tree itself, others carry the juice home to their children. we seem to see the family of a shepherd, who distributes the milk to his flock. "i have described the sensation which the cow tree awakens in the mind of the traveller, at the first view. in examining the physical properties of animal and vegetable products, science displays them as closely linked together; but it strips them of what is marvellous, and perhaps also a part of their charms, of what excited our astonishment.--nothing appears insolated; the chemical principles that were believed to be peculiar to animals are found in plants; a common chain links together all organic nature." _singular effect of peruvian bark._ a french merchant, at guayra, named delpech, in , had occasion to receive several travellers, inhabitants of those countries. the apartments destined for visitors being filled, and the number of his guests increasing, he was under the necessity of putting several of them in rooms occupied by _cinchona_. each of them contained from to thousand pounds of that bark. one of his guests was ill of a very malignant fever. after the first day he found himself much better, though he had taken no medicine; but he was surrounded with an atmosphere of cinchona which appeared very agreeable to him. in a few days he felt himself quite recovered without any medical treatment whatever. this unexpected success led m. delpech to make some other trials. several persons, ill of fever, were placed successively in his magazine of cinchona, and they were all speedily cured, simply by the effluvia of the bark. in the same place with the cinchona, he kept a bale of coffee, and some bottles of common french brandy. in some time m. delpech, when visiting his magazine, observed one of the large bottles uncorked. he suspected at first the fidelity of a servant, and determined to examine the quality of the brandy. what was his astonishment to find it infinitely superior to what it had been!--a slightly aromatic taste added to its strength, and rendered it more tonic and more agreeable. curious to know if the coffee had likewise changed its properties, he opened the bale, and roasted a portion of it. it was more bitter and left in the mouth a taste similar to that of the effluvia of bark.--the bark which produced these singular effects was fresh. would the cinchona of commerce have the same efficacy? _oil of pumpkin seed._ c. s. kapinesque, esq. to doct. samuel mitchell. _new york, th feb. ._ while i was at harmony, on the banks of the wabash, in the state of indiana, last summer, i was told by the industrious german society of the harmonites, that instead of throwing away or giving to the pigs the seeds of their pumpkins, as is usually done all over the country, they collected them and made an oil from them which they use for all the purposes of lamp oil and olive oil. it is well known, that all the different species and varieties of pumpkins (genus _cuburbita_ linnæus) afford an oil which has valuable medical properties, possessing in the highest degree the refrigerative quality; but i had never heard before of its being made on a large scale, and for economical uses. it will be sufficient to mention this fact to some of our enlightened farmers, to induce them to imitate the worthy harmonites, and i recommend highly the practice, as likely to become eminently beneficial. the pumpkin seeds afford their oil with the greatest facility and abundance. one gallon of seeds will give about half a gallon of oil. they may be pressed like rape and flax seed.--their oil is clear, limpid pale, scentless, and when used for salad instead of sweet oil, has merely a faint insipid taste; it burns well, and without smoke. those advantages entitle it to our attention, as an indigenous production of first necessity. pumpkins grow all over the united states, from maine to louisiana, and with such luxuriance, as to produce sometimes as much as , _lbs._ weight of fruits, and about _lbs._ weight of seeds, in one acre of indian corn without injuring the crop of corn. those _lbs._ of seeds might produce about gallons of oil, worth about dollars. i calculate that about two millions of gallons of such oil could be made annually in the united states, from the seeds that are wasted or given to cattle and pigs. this is worth saving--and in addition to the bread, pies, soups, dishes, feed, &c. afforded by pumpkins, we shall have a good and wholesome home-made vegetable oil for lamps and food. _disease among horses._ mifflintown, (penn.) nov. . a disease prevails among the horses in this part of the country, by some called the burnt tongue. we understand that it originated in the western section of this state, and has extended along this route from pittsburg to philadelphia. it has in a few instances proved fatal: but we understand that the stages west of the alleghany have been stopped, and numbers of wagonners are obliged to lie by in consequence of it. it affects the tongue and prevents the creature from eating, and is very catching, so much so, that it is said a beast will take it in consequence of its having been _hitched_ at the same place that the one has stood which was affected. lancaster, (penn.) nov. . the following method of practice and recipe for the care of the prevailing disease among horses, called _sore mouth_, was obtained from mr. tomlinson, (one of the proprietors of the western mail stages) on his return from visiting the sick horses in the line, and i am authorized to say, will, if strictly attended to, succeed in curing in _cases in_ --by inserting it you will oblige many. recipe. on the commencement of the disease, bleed moderately. if the blood, after cooling, appears to have much buff on it, repeat the bleeding; give a pint of castor oil; if it does not operate in hours, give two thirds of a pint. nitre may be given at the rate of _oz_. a day, or salts two or three times a week; / _lb._ at a time. these may be given in a thin mash, or rather slop of bran, it being the best food for the animal while diseased. take half a pint of honey, one table spoonful of borax, and one quart of strong sage tea. mix them well together; then take a stick and tie a soft rag to the end of it, dip it in the mixture, and wash the tongue, gums and mouth well; the more frequent the better, at least every two hours. sweet milk in the tea will do no harm, or a little nitre may occasionally be put in it with good effect. be particular in keeping the mouth clean and nursing the horse with care. the pulse and appearance of the blood must govern as to the necessity of bleeding more than once. _the arabian horse_. this noble animal, which lately arrived in the ship horatio, has been sold for _four thousand dollars_, to messrs. allison and van ranst, and has been conveyed to long island. _wild horse of the west._ the horse of the columbia river will rank with the finest of his species in the known world. his size is fifteen or sixteen hands, even in a state of nature, unprovided with food or shelter by the hands of man. his form exhibits much bone and muscle, but not the mass of flesh which is found on the fat european horse.--his limbs are clean and slender; the neck arched and rising; the hoofs round and hard; and the nostrils wide and thin. he is equally distinguished for speed and bottom. he runs rapidly, and for a long time; rivalling, in this respect, all that we have heard of the english hunting horses. in other respects--in the docility of his nature, in his capacity to sustain hunger and hardship, in his powers to provide food for himself and his master, he is wholly unrivalled. he is readily trained to the business of his master's life, that of hunting, and pursues the game with all the keenness of the dog, and with equal sagacity and more success. he will run down the deer in the _prairies_, with or without his master on his back, and, when overtaken, will hold it with his teeth. when rode after game he needs no guiding of the bridle to direct him. he will pursue a drove of buffaloes, and, coming up with them, will stop one by biting him with his teeth. the animal bitten, immediately wheels to defend himself with his horns; the horse wheels at the same instant to avoid it; and at this moment, when the side of the buffalo is presented, the indian lets fly an arrow, which often passes entirely through his body. the wounded animal always turns out of the drove to lay down and die. the horse and his rider pursue the gang to make fresh slaughter. another horse trained to a second part of the game, with other indians, take the trail of the wounded buffalo, which is butchered and carried into camp. these things seem incredibel; but we have them upon the authority of lewis and clarke, and a great number of traders who have been upon the columbia river since the time of their discovery; some of whom are now in this town. the capacity of this horse to sustain fatigue, and to provide food for himself, is equally astonishing. he is galloped all day, sometimes or miles in the space of or hours, and is then left to shift for himself during the night. in the spring, summer and autumn, he finds no difficulty; the short and sweet grass of that country gives him an abundant and nutricious repast. in the winter, and towards the mountains, where the snow is several feet deep, his unerring instinct tells him where to search; he scrapes away the snow with his hoof till he comes to the ground, and rooting there with his nose, finds wherewith of moss and grass to sustain his life. on the borders of creeks and rivers he feeds on the boughs of willows, and other soft wood, which his master has sometimes the kindness to fell for him with a hatchet. this fine animal is found on the banks of the columbia, in latitude , in the great plain which lies on the borders of this river, between the upper and lower range of mountains. his origin is traced to mexico, thence to spain, thence to the north of africa, where the arabian barb is found in all the perfection of his species. his fine form, his generous spirit, and his noble qualities, are preserved upon the columbia river; and certainly it is worthy the experiment to endeavour to transplant him into other parts of the united states. many citizens have attempted to do so; but have always been robbed by the indians of the rocky mountains. lewis and clarke procured , said by gov. clark to be the most beautiful collection of horses that he has ever seen together before or since; but the whole number was stolen from them by indians, who followed their trail, and never ceased their operations until they had carried off the last. [_st. louis inquirer._ james watt. (ascribed to an eminent writer.) death is still busy in our high places; and it is with great pain that we find ourselves called upon, so soon after the loss of mr. playfair, to record the decease of another of our illustrious countrymen, and one to whom mankind has been still more largely indebted. mr. james watt, the great improver of the steam-engine, died on the th ult. at his seat of heathfield, near birmingham, in the th year of his age. this name, fortunately, needs no commemoration of ours; for he that bore it survived to see it crowned with undisputable and unenvied honours; and many generations will probably pass away before it shall have "gathered all its fame." we have said that mr. watt was the great _improver_ of the steam-engine; but, in truth, as to all that is admirable in its structure, or vast in its utility, he should rather be described as its _inventor_. it was by his inventions that its action was so regulated as to make it capable of being applied to the finest and most delicate manufactures, and its power so increased as to set weight and solidity at defiance. by his admirable contrivances, it has become a thing stupendous alike for its force and its flexibility; for the prodigious power which it can exert, and the ease and precision, and ductility, with which they can be varied, distributed, and applied. the trunk of an elephant that can pick up a pin or rend an oak is nothing to it. it can engrave a seal, and crush masses of obdurate metal like wax before it, draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as a gossamer, and lift up a ship of war like a bauble in the air. it can embroider muslin and forge anchors, cut steel into ribbands, and impel loaded vessels against the fury of the winds and waves. it would be difficult to estimate the value of the benefits which these inventions have conferred upon the country. there is no branch of industry that has not been indebted to them; and in all the most material, they have not only widened most magnificently the field of its exertions, but multiplied a thousand fold the amount of its productions. it is our improved steam-engine which now enables us to pay the interest of our debt, and to maintain the arduous struggle in which we are still engaged, with the skill and capital of countries less oppressed with taxation. but these are poor and narrow views of its importance. it has increased indefinitely the mass of human comforts and enjoyments, and rendered cheap and accessible all over the world the materials of wealth and prosperity. it has armed the feeble hand of man, in short, with a power to which no limits can be assigned, completed the dominion of mind over the most refractory qualities of matter, and laid a sure foundation for all those future miracles of mechanic power, which are to aid and reward the labours of after generations. it is to the genius of one man too that all this is mainly owing; and certainly no man ever before bestowed such a gift on his kind. the blessing is not only universal, but unbounded; and the fabled inventors of the plough and the loom, who were deified by the erring gratitude of their rude contemporaries, conferred less important benefits on mankind than the inventor of our present steam-engine. this will be the fame of watt with future generations; and it is sufficient for his race and his country. but to those to whom he more immediately belonged, who lived in his society and enjoyed his conversation, it is not, perhaps, the character in which he will be most frequently recalled--most deeply lamented--or even most highly admired. independently of his great attainments in mechanics, mr. watt was an extraordinary, and in many respects, a wonderful man. perhaps no individual in his age possessed so much and such varied and exact information--had read so much, or remembered what he had read so accurately and so well. he had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodising power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. his stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense--and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. it seemed as if every subject that was casually started in conversation with him, had been that which he had been last occupied in studying and exhausting; such was the copiousness, the precision, and the admirable clearness of the information which he poured out upon it without effort or hesitation. nor was this promptitude and compass of knowledge confined in any degree to the studies connected with his ordinary pursuits. that he should have been minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of physical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, metaphysics, medicine, and etymology, and perfectly at home in all the details of architecture, music, and law. he was well acquainted too with most of the modern languages, and familiar with their most recent literature. nor was it at all extraordinary to hear the great mechanician and engineer detailing and expounding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the german logicians, or criticising the measures or the matter of the german poetry. his astonishing memory was aided, no doubt, in a great measure, by a still higher and rarer faculty--by his power of digesting and arranging in its proper place all the information he received, and of casting aside and rejecting, as it were instinctively, whatever was worthless or immaterial. every conception that was suggested to his mind seemed instantly to take its place among its other rich furniture, and to be condensed into the smallest and most convenient form. he never appeared, therefore, to be at all incumbered or perplexed with the verbiage of the dull books he perused, or the idle talk to which he listened; but to have at once extracted, by a kind of intellectual alchemy, all that was worthy of attention, and to have reduced it to his own use, to its true value and to its simplest form. and thus it often happened, that a great deal more was learned from his brief and vigorous account of the theories and arguments of tedious writers, than an ordinary student could ever have derived from the most faithful study of the originals; and that errors and absurdities became manifest from the mere clearness and plainness of his statement of them, which might have deluded and perplexed most of his hearers without that invaluable assistance. it is needless to say, that with those vast resources, his conversation was at all times rich and instructive in no ordinary degree; but it was, if possible, still more pleasing than wise, and had all the charms of familiarity, with all the substantial treasures of knowledge. no man could be more social in his spirit, less assuming or fastidious in his manners, or more kind and indulgent towards all who approached him. he rather liked to talk, at least in his latter years; but though he took a considerable share of the conversation, he rarely suggested the topics on which it was to turn, but readily and quickly took whatever was presented by those around him, and astonished the idle and barren propounders of an ordinary theme, by the treasures which he drew from the mine which they had unconsciously opened. he generally seemed, indeed, to have no choice or predilection for one subject of discourse rather than another, but allowed his mind, like a great cyclopædia, to be opened at any letter his associates might choose to turn up, and only endeavoured to select from his inexhaustible stores what might be best adapted to the taste of his present hearers. as to their capacity, he gave himself no trouble; and, indeed, such was his singular talent for making all things plain, clear, and intelligible, that scarcely any one could be aware of such a deficiency in his presence. his talk, too, though overflowing with information, had no resemblance to lecturing or solemn discoursing, but, on the contrary, was full of colloquial spirit and pleasure. he had a certain quiet and grave humour, which ran through most of his conversation, and a vein of temperate jocularity, which gave infinite zest and effect to the condensed and inexhaustible information which formed its main staple and characteristic. there was a little air of affected testiness, and a tone of pretended rebuke and contradiction, with which he used to address his younger friends, that was always felt by them as an endearing mark of his kindness and familiarity, and prized accordingly far beyond all the solemn compliments that ever proceeded from the lips of authority. his voice was deep and powerful, though he commonly spoke in a low and somewhat monotonous tone, which harmonized admirably with the weight and brevity of his observations, and set off to the greatest advantage the pleasant anecdotes which he delivered with the same grave brow and the same calm smile playing soberly on his lips. there was nothing of effort indeed, or impatience, any more than of pride or levity, in his demeanour; and there was a finer expression of reposing strength, and mild self-possession in his manner, than we ever recollect to have met with in any other person. he had in his character the utmost abhorrence for all sorts of forwardness, parade and pretensions; and, indeed, never failed to put all such impostors out of countenance, by the manly plainness and honest intrepidity of his language and deportment. in his temper and dispositions he was not only kind and affectionate, but generous and considerate of the feelings of all around him, and gave the most liberal assistance and encouragement to all young persons who showed any indications of talent, or applied to him for patronage or advice. his health, which was delicate from his youth upwards, seemed to become firmer as he advanced in years; and he preserved, up almost to the last moment of his existence, not only the full command of his extraordinary intellect, but all the alacrity of spirit, and the social gaiety which had illuminated his happiest days. his friends in this part of the country never saw him more full of intellectual vigour and colloquial animation, never more delightful or instructive, than in his last visit to scotland, in autumn, . indeed, it was after that time that he applied himself, with all the ardour of early life, to the invention of a machine for mechanically copying all sorts of sculpture and statuary, and distributed among his friends some of its earliest performances, as the productions of a young artist just entering on his d year. this happy and useful life came at last to a gentle close. he had suffered some inconveniences through the summer; but was not seriously indisposed till within a few weeks from his death. he then became perfectly aware of the event which was approaching; and with his usual tranquillity and benevolence of nature, seemed only anxious to point out to the friends around him the many sources of consolation, which were afforded by the circumstances under which it was about to take place. he expressed his sincere gratitude to providence for the length of days with which he had been blessed, and his exemption from most of the infirmities of age, as well as for the calm and cheerful evening of life that he had been permitted to enjoy, after the honourable labours of the day had been concluded. and thus, full of years and honours, in all calmness and tranquillity he yielded up his soul, without pang or struggle, and passed from the bosom of his family to that of his god! he was twice married, but has left no issue but one son, long associated with him in his business and studies, and two grand-children by a daughter who predeceased him. he was a fellow of the royal societies both of london and edinburgh, and of the few englishmen who were elected members of the national institute of france. all men of learning and science were his cordial friends; and such was the influence of his mild character and perfect fairness and liberality, even upon the pretenders to these accomplishments, that he lived to disarm even envy itself, and died, we verily believe, without a single enemy. [_london times_. at the recent sale of the late mr. b. tompkins' prime herefordshire cattle, one cow and her calf (a two years old bull) sold for the sum of nine hundred and fifty pounds: four bulls for one thousand and seventy-one pounds; and two bull calves, for three hundred and sixty-two pounds five shillings! the king of england is now in the th year of his _reign_--a reign longer in its duration, by nearly four years, than that of any sovereign of england, that of henry the d being only years. a mr. wright, of london, proposes, in an english paper, to institute a cottage society, in shares of ten pounds sterling each, for the purpose of procuring lands, either waste or by purchase, to be divided into lots, from four to twelve acres each, whereon to erect cottages, for the accommodation of the poor. mr. wright considers the monopoly of small farms by the great landholders, as the principal cause of the prevailing pauperism in england, by having thrown too great a mass of the population into the towns. he computes that, from the enclosure of commons and waste lands, within the last fifty years, there have been , small farms and cottages annihilated, which, at five souls each, gives , persons who have been driven from the pursuits of agriculture. _light without heat or combustion._ extract of a letter. "i have lately seen an account of a discovery of a singular and highly important character, announced in the latter part of august, at paris, by a professor _meinike_, (a german probably) viz. an artificial _gas_, confined in _glass_, assuming, by the electric shock, a permanent, steady light, without _heat_ or _combustion_! "here is a grand desideratum, indeed--a candle which can be thrust into _carded cotton_ innoxious, or into a cistern of water unextinguished; which can be placed under one's pillow while we sleep, and taken out at pleasure. our houses may be built with it in such a manner as to avoid the necessity of those cold holes of winter--windows. "the whale may keep his _blubber_, and the shark his _liver_; the coasts of the ocean may be lined with those newly discovered (_pharoi_) light bearers; they may be sunk on reefs, and _shine_ up _information_ through the deep; and, by anchoring them in lines through oceans, we may mark the _ship road_, and have _guide posts_ which tell the best path, for each month in the year, across the parallels of this ball. extravagant as this may seem, i assure you that i have often entertained the idea that an insulated mass of _electron_, (according to augustus b. woodward,) or some _phosphorus_, might be produced in a permanently useful form. we now _bottle_ up _lightning_--we _cork_ up the enemy of the _small pox_, and let him out at pleasure; we see our way by peeping at the skies, or into a box, (mariner's compass,) where we keep a little modicum of _polar essence_, to steer by, &c. you recollect that, in , a hearty laugh was raised against the democrats, by comparing them to the philosopher of lugghagg, extracting _sunbeams from cucumbers_. dean swift would have put into his philosophical _whim-whams_ the bottling of lightning, together with the extracting of sun-beams from cucumbers, had he thought of it, or known that it was ever dreamed of. may congress soon be supplied, every man of them, with a _pocket light_ upon this new plan!" the ingenious writer of this letter, adds the correspondent who communicated it, might have added, that this invention will be of excellent service to captain symmes and his fellow travellers, among the _concentric spheres_ in the interior of our planet. [_nat. int._ _whale fisheries._ our whale fisheries are, perhaps, more flourishing now than at any former period. i have formed an estimate of the probable amount thus employed from nantucket, martha's vineyard, and this port, which would be at risk in case of a war with spain, which may awaken the attention of those whom it may concern. from new bedford, there are round cape horn or on their passage, ships and brig, whose tonnage is tons; and they with their outfits cost $ , their return cargoes would probably amount in value to , from the vineyard there are two ships which cost , their return cargoes would probably amount to , from nantucket fifty ships, which probably cost , , their return cargoes would probably amount to , , from new bedford, on this side cape horn, there are eleven ships and eight brigs, which probably cost , their return cargoes probably will amount to , from nantucket ten ships, which probably cost , and their return cargoes will probably amount to , ---------- amounting in all to $ , , ---------- _new bedford paper_.] _fire-places_. from the downingston republican. _fire-places_, for warming rooms, have been for a long time in use; and the best plan for constructing them continues to be an interesting subject of investigation. whether or not fire-places and chimneys are of very ancient date, and mentioned by virgil appian, and aristophanes, or whether they are of more modern invention, is not of much practical importance; and may be left to philosophers to determine. but as the proper construction of a chimney and fire-place is one of the greatest comforts of domestic life, i cannot doubt but that government will grant me a handsome premium for making public an unerring rule by which they can be so built as never to fail of drawing well, without emitting any smoke into the apartment. when the principle was first discovered by me, i wondered how it could so happen, that we had any defective chimnies amongst us; for i remembered to have heard that dr. franklin and count rumford had devoted much attention to this subject, and must, of course, as i thought, have discovered a principle so plain and self-evident; and consequently, every mechanic must have learnt it, as not they only were interested in it, but every one of the civilized world.--after thinking of it in this way, i took an opportunity of inquiring into their opinions, and i find that the principle was never new to either of them; and as far as i know, i am the first and only discoverer of it. the principle consists simply in making the size of the flue bear a certain proportion to the size of the fire-place in front. to ascertain what would be the smallest proportion which the flue would bear to the front of the fire-place, would require some experiments. but it is probable that a fire-place - / feet square in front, would draw well enough to carry up all the smoke, by a flue by inches, and probably by a one foot square: or even less may probably do. if one foot square, would carry all the smoke of such a fire-place, the proportion would be to , or a little more than / , and a little less than / . but for greater certainty, we will say / is the proper proportion, and that a flue to a fire-place - / feet square, shall be by inches. if the front be twice that size, ( feet and near a half square) then the flue or chimney must be by inches, or near inches square. if it be three times the first size, or near feet inches square, then the flue must be by -- by , or nearly - / inches square. or if it be four times the size of the first, or feet square, the flue must be equal to nearly inches square, and so accordingly, whatever may be the dimensions of the fire-place in front. i do not know that a lesser proportion would not do: and whatever experience may establish, as that best adapted to answer the end proposed, it will not invalidate the principle laid down, but confirm it. one thing, however, is true, that the smaller the fire-place is in proportion to the flue, the harder it will draw, and by being thus proportioned, it may have any degree of draught given to it at pleasure, from that of an air furnace to that which will scarcely draw up the smoke. any one may convince himself of the truth of this doctrine, by taking a board and closing up the fire-place, downwards from the mantle, and in proportion as it diminishes by the board moving downwards, the power of its draught will be increased. franklin was aware of this fact, but was ignorant of the principle on which it depended, as he supposed the height of the chimney, and not its dimensions governed the fact itself,--and hence mentions that the higher the chimney, the larger the opening may be: and that - / feet square may be risked on a lower floor and - / on the upper, &c. the common ten plate stove furnishes an example of the truth of this principle: when the large fire door is open, the stove will smoke, because the large door is an over proportion in size to the size of the pipe--but shut the large door and leave the small one open, the stove immediately draws like a furnace, because its area is smaller than the area of a section of the pipe. if it were true that - / feet square was the largest size which could be made to draw well, it would indeed be an unfortunate fact, as we could never have a comfortable kitchen fire-place--but if the principle here laid down be true, we can, with equal certainty, build a fire-place ten feet wide and five high, or of greater dimensions if we choose. the height of the chimney i believe to be a matter of no importance to the draught, and that a low one will draw as well as a high one. the worst smoking chimney that i ever saw was about feet high, in my own house: it smoked because it was too small, and was cured by adding to it the flue of a fire-place directly above it; on account of which i had to lose a fire-place on the d floor. in this case the size of both chimneys was barely sufficient to vent the smoke of the lower one. the height is a subject which i have not investigated, but it strikes me that a low chimney is most favourable to drawing well: if any one want an explanation on it, i will give it again; but it cannot be of much practical importance. the fashion of a fire-place is of no importance to the draught: it may be made to please the fancy of the builder. i, however, should prefer one something near count rumford's plan. the throat of the chimney may be contracted or not at pleasure; but for beauty and advantage of heat, i should prefer having the back drawn forward and the throat narrowed, more especially in a low fire-place. there may be local contingent circumstances connected with chimneys, which cause them to smoke, and must have appropriate remedies: but such do not effect the general principles here laid down. smoke, from fires, is naturally carried upward by the heated air, which is specifically lighter than the surrounding atmosphere, and consequently ascends, carrying the smoke with it, and if it meet with no resistance, will pass up the chimney; but if that be too small to vent it, it regurgitates, as it were, into the apartment; which can only be remedied on the principle heretofore laid down. it might be asked, why will not a small chimney vent all the smoke of a small fire, in a large fire-place? two reasons may be assigned: first, the heat of such fire cannot produce a brisk enough current of rarified air to carry the smoke, and that which is heated, not having free vent, it whirls in eddies into the apartment. secondly, smoke, in itself, is specifically heavier than atmospheric air; consisting of aqueous vapour, carbonic acid, and oxid of carbon, and coming in contact with air not much heated, and parting with a portion of its own heat, it has then no disposition, in itself, to ascend. but this would lead to a discussion foreign to my present subject. yours, &c. n. * * * * * samuel sprigg, esq. has been elected by the legislature, governor of maryland; and thomas mane randolph governor of virginia, in the room of mr. preston, whose constitutional term of office has expired. _list of the members_ of the s i x t e e n t h c o n g r e s s. senate. _new hampshire._ david l. morrill, terms end in john f. parrott,[ ] _massachusetts._ prentiss mellen, harrison g. otis, _rhode island._ william hunter, james burrill, jr. _connecticut._ samuel w. dana, james lanman,[ ] _vermont._ isaac tichenor, william a. palmer, _new york._ nathan sandford, ---- ---- _new jersey._ james j. wilson, mahlon dickerson, _pennsylvania._ johnathan roberts, walter lowrie,[ ] _delaware._ outterbridge horsey, nicholas vandyke, _maryland._ william pinkney, edward lloyd, _virginia._ james barbour, john w. eppes, _north carolina._ montfort stokes, nathaniel macon, _south carolina._ william smith, john gaillard, _georgia._ freeman walker,[ ] john elliot,[ ] _kentucky._ john j. crittenden, william logan,[ ] _tennessee._ john h. eaton, john williams, _ohio._ benjamin ruggles, william a. trimble,[ ] _louisiana._ henry johnson, james brown,[ ] _indiana._ james noble, waller taylor, _mississippi._ walter leake, thomas h. williams, _illinois._ jesse b. thomas, ninian edwards, _alabama._ john w. walker,[ ] william r. king.[ ] house of representatives. _new hampshire_-- . joseph buffum, jr.[ ] josiah bartlett, clifton clagget, arthur livermore, william plumer, jr.[ ] nathianiel upham. _massachusetts_-- . benjamin adams samuel c. allen joshua cushman edward dowse walter folger jr. timothy fuller john holmes mark l. hill[ ] martin kingsley[ ] jonas kendall[ ] enoch lincoln samuel lathrop[ ] jonathan mason marcus morton jeremiah nelson james parker[ ] henry shaw zabdiel sampson nathaniel silsbee ezekiel whitman. _vermont_-- . samuel c. crafts, ezra meech,[ ] orsamus c. merrill, charles rich, mark richards, william strong.[ ] _rhode island_-- . samuel eddy,[ ] nathaniel hazard.[ ] _connecticut_-- . henry w. edwards,[ ] samuel a. foote,[ ] jonathan o. mosely, elisha phelps,[ ] john russ,[ ] james stevens,[ ] gideon tomlinson.[ ] _new york_-- . nathaniel allen,[ ] caleb baker,[ ] walter case,[ ] robert clark, jacob h. de witt,[ ] john d. dickenson, john fay,[ ] william d. ford,[ ] ezra c. gross,[ ] aaron hackley, jr.[ ] george hall,[ ] joseph s. lyman,[ ] henry meigs,[ ] robert monell,[ ] harmanus peek,[ ] nathaniel pitcher,[ ] jona richmond.[ ] ebenezer sage,[ ] henry r. stoors, randall s. street,[ ] james strong,[ ] john w. taylor, caleb tompkins, albert h. tracy,[ ] sol. van renselaer,[ ] peter h. wendover, silas wood.[ ] _new jersey_-- . ephraim bateman, joseph bloomfield, john condit,[ ] john linn, bernard smith,[ ] henry southard. _pennsylvania_-- . henry baldwin, andrew boden, wm. darlington,[ ] george dennison,[ ] samuel edwards,[ ] thomas forest,[ ] david fullerton,[ ] samuel gross,[ ] joseph heister, joseph hemphill,[ ] jacob hibsliman,[ ] jacob hostetter, jacob humphreys,[ ] wm p. maclay, david marchand, robert moore, samuel moore, john murray, thomas patterson, robert philson,[ ] thomas j. rogers, john seargeant, james wallace. _delaware_-- . willard hall, louis mc lane. _maryland_-- . stephenson archer,[ ] thomas bayly, thomas culbreth, joseph kent,[ ] peter little, ralph neale,[ ] samuel ringgold, samuel smith, henry r. warfield.[ ] _virginia_-- . mark alexander,[ ] wm. lee ball, philip p. barbour, wm. a. burwell, john floyd, robert s. garnett, james johnson, james jones,[ ] william m'coy, charles f. mercer, hugh nelson, thomas newton, severn e. parker,[ ] james pindall, james pleasants, john randolph,[ ] ballard smith, alexander smyth, george f. strother, t. van swearengen, george tucker,[ ] john tyler, jared williams.[ ] _north carolina_-- . h. g. burton,[ ] john culpepper,[ ] william davidson, welden n. edwards, charles fisher, thomas h. hall, charles hook,[ ] lemuel sawyer, thomas settle, jesse slocumb, james s. smith, felix walker, lewis williams. _south carolina_-- . joseph brevard,[ ] elias earle, james ervin, william lowndes, john m'creary, james overstreet,[ ] charles pinckney,[ ] eldred simkins, sterling tucker. _georgia_-- . joel abbott, thomas w. cobb, joel crawford, john a. cuthbert,[ ] robert r. reid, william terrell. _kentucky_-- . r. c. anderson, jr. william brown, henry clay, benjamin hardin,[ ] alney m'lean,[ ] thomas metcalfe,[ ] tunstall quarles, george robertson, david trimble, david walker. _tennessee_-- . robert allen,[ ] henry h. bryan,[ ] newton cannon,[ ] john cocke,[ ] francis jones, john rhea. _ohio_-- . philemon beecher, henry brush,[ ] john w. campbell, samuel herrick, thomas r. ross,[ ] john sloane.[ ] _louisiana_--thomas butler. _indiana_--william hendricks. _mississippi_--christopher rankin.[ ] _illinois_--daniel p. cook.[ ] _alabama_--john crowell. delegates from territories. _michigan_--william woodbridge. _missouri_--john scott. [ ] _not members of the last congress._ state of the thermometer at philadelphia, _during the year_ . (communicated for the rural magazine.) --------+------------------------------------------------------------ | average. | sun sun months. | sun ris. | o'clo. | sun set. | ris. o'cl. s't. --------+------------------------------------------------------------ _ st._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ d._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ d._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ th._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ th._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ th._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ th._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ th._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ th._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ th._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ th._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- _ th._ | . | . | . {[ ] | | | {[ ] ---------------------------------------------------------- [ ] coldest. [ ] warmest. * * * * * philadelphia, published by richards & caleb johnson, _no. , market street_, at $ . per annum. * * * * * griggs & dickinson--_printers, whitehall._ * * * * * transcriber's note: text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). small capital text has been replaced with all capitals. minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected without noe. irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed. the cover for the ebook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. by the internet archive. transcriber note text emphasis is denoted by _italics_ and =bold=. whole and fractional parts of numbers as - / . u. s. department of agriculture farmers' bulletin no. farmhouse plans [illustration] the farmhouse plans presented in this bulletin were developed in connection with the farm housing survey made in the spring of by the united states department of agriculture and the agricultural colleges of states, with funds provided by the civil works administration. these plans were selected from more than prepared under the cooperation of the following agencies and persons: united states department of agriculture: bureau of agricultural engineering, s. h. mccrory, chief; bureau of home economics, louise stanley, chief, and director of the rural housing survey. alabama polytechnic institute: j. b. wilson, extension engineer, department of agricultural engineering. university of arkansas: deane g. carter, head, department of agricultural engineering. university of california: h. b. walker, head, division of agricultural engineering. university of georgia: r. h. driftmier, professor of agricultural engineering. university of illinois: e. w. lehmann, head, and w. a. foster, assistant chief in rural architecture, department of agricultural engineering. purdue university (indiana): william aitkenhead, head, department of agricultural engineering. iowa state college: henry giese, professor, department of agricultural engineering. kansas state agricultural college: h. e. wichers, rural architect, department of architecture. massachusetts agricultural college: c. i. gunness, head, department of agricultural engineering. university of minnesota: h. b. white, assistant professor, division of agricultural engineering. university of missouri: j. c. wooley, chairman, department of agricultural engineering. ohio state university: r. c. miller, professor, department of agricultural engineering. agricultural and mechanical college of texas: d. scoates, head, department of agricultural engineering. virginia polytechnic institute: c. e. seitz, head, department of agricultural engineering. state college of washington: l. j. smith, head, department of agricultural engineering. university of wisconsin: s. a. witzel, extension instructor, department of agricultural engineering. at each of the cooperating institutions, home economics specialists were consulted by the designers in regard to the arrangement of the kitchen and other parts of the home. working drawings for building the houses shown in this bulletin are available from the extension services of the state agricultural colleges. in most cases a small charge is made for the drawings. washington, d.c. october, farmhouse plans by wallace ashby, _chief, division of structures, bureau of agricultural engineering_[ ] [ ] acknowledgment is made of the extended collaboration of louise stanley, chief. bureau of home economics, in selecting and reviewing the plans presented herein; and of the helpful assistance of w. h. nash, architect, bureau of agricultural engineering, in the preparation of both the manuscript and illustrations for publication. mary rokahr, senior home-management specialist, extension service, and eloise davidson, director of domestic electric service program, electric home and farm authority, made valuable suggestions regarding arrangement of kitchens and other equipment. helpful comments and suggestions have been received from many other persons. many of the perspective sketches illustrating the house plans shown in this bulletin were drawn by c. w. mead, bureau of agricultural engineering, contents page farmhouse requirements size comfort and convenience relation to other buildings and highway appearance safety construction materials costs cellars superstructures and porches estimating by unit costs working drawings caution regarding changes plans for houses one-story growing houses moderate-sized one-story houses houses of more than one story very small houses the principal purpose of this bulletin is to supply plans a for low-cost farm dwellings designed to meet the requirements of the farm operator and his family. some of the plans may be useful in eases where, in addition to the main dwelling, smaller homes are needed for relatives, tenants, or unmarried farm hands. still others will be found useful in the construction of low-cost houses for temporary use. a well-built farmhouse should last for years or more. in the ordinary course of events at least two generations of children will be brought up in it. during these years the family operating the farm probably will have no other choice of dwelling. the builder should, therefore, think both of present needs and possible future requirements when selecting a plan for a new farmhouse. farmhouse requirements size the first requirement of a satisfactory farmhouse is adequate size to provide needed working area, storage space, and living and sleeping quarters. for the average family at least three sleeping rooms are needed,[ ] one for the parents, one for the boys, and one for the girls. [ ] sometimes the living room must serve as one of the sleeping rooms. all the space may not be needed at the time the house is built, but the chances are that it will be needed before many years. on the other hand, many families find that after the children have grown up and left home it is not necessary to use the entire house. for this reason it is desirable to have it arranged so that part of the rooms may be closed off or may be rented to tourists. comfort and convenience adequate, well-used space for both the family and the furniture is a large factor in farmhouse comfort. the proper number, size, and placement of windows, doors, and stairs, and good construction are important. these matters have been carefully worked out in the plans shown in this bulletin. comfort also depends to a large extent on good heating, plumbing, lighting, and screening. information on some of these subjects is given in farmers' bulletin , heating the farm home; , farmstead water supply; , farm plumbing; , sewage and sewerage of farm homes; department circular , the domestic oil burner; and in u.s. department of commerce bulletin, insulation on the farm, price cents. the convenient arrangement of the farmhouse begins with its relationship to the other farm buildings and to the highway. unlike the city house, the farmhouse has its main line of communication through the back or side door. therefore outside doors and porches should be located so as to give convenient entrance from the farm driveway and the path to the barn, and wherever possible should be on the sheltered side of the house. if possible, there should be a convenient place near the rear entrance for men to leave their outer wraps and to wash before going into the house. these facilities are often provided in a washroom or in one corner of the workroom, but if there is no washroom or workroom in the house, there should at least be clothes hooks and a bench and washbasin for summer use on the back porch. it is also desirable that the work portions of the house, where the housewife spends much of her time, look out over the farm buildings and the entrance roadway. most farm women like also a glimpse of the highway from the kitchen window. preferably the traffic way from the rear entrance to the main portion of the house should not lead through the kitchen. if the kitchen must be used as a passageway, the doors should be so arranged that the traffic does not cross the work area. this not only decreases the possibility of interference with household activities but also makes possible a more compact and convenient arrangement of work equipment. an important factor is a workroom or porch, on about the same level as the kitchen, for laundry, canning, care of milk, and other farm activities and for supplementary food storage. this saves much clutter in the kitchen itself and contributes to more efficient arrangement. at least one bedroom should be provided on the first-floor of the farmhouse, not too far from the kitchen, so that small children or sick persons may be cared for conveniently. the bathroom should be convenient to both downstairs and upstairs bedrooms, but preferably on the first-floor. a space for a bathroom is very desirable even if the fixtures cannot be put in at once. ample storage space should be provided for clothing, bedding and linen, wraps, food, dishes and utensils, cleaning equipment, toys, and fuel. in general, these needs have been met in the plans given in this bulletin by closets in halls and bedrooms, kitchen cabinets, shelves or pantries, and cellar storage. closet, cabinet, and shelf space adds greatly to the convenience and comfort of a house and should not be omitted.[ ] [ ] plans for closets and storage spaces can be obtained from the bureau of home economics. in the smaller plans shown here, an alcove or an end of the kitchen is indicated for use as a dining area. in the larger plans, either a dining room or a space for dining in the living room is provided, and in most cases there is also space in the kitchen for "hurry-up" meals. the following points have been kept in mind in planning the kitchens. a sink in every house is recommended. even when water must be carried into the house, the sink and drain add much to the convenience of the kitchen and may be installed very cheaply. where running water is not available, a pump may be installed beside the sink. however, running water, hot and cold, adds more to the convenience of the farm-home than almost any other factor. the sink should be well-lighted, with windows over or at one end of it. windows over the sink should have the sills higher than the back of the sink. such windows will need to be shielded from sun glare unless on the north side of the house. the sink should have a drain board at the left end, at the right a flat shelf for stacking dishes if there is no drain board there. dish storage should be near enough the left end of the sink for the dishes to be put away without unnecessary steps. the cookstove should be conveniently near the sink, preferably against the side wall, or across from it if the kitchen is narrow. a small food-preparation surface, table or shelf, should be placed next to the stove at the same height as the cooking surface. there should be cupboard space near the stove for the storage of cooking utensils. a worktable should be provided for long mixing jobs; it should have knee space and toe space. staple supplies should be stored near this table and, if possible, should be near the refrigerator and not too far from the stove. the refrigerator should, for convenient use, be as near as possible to the worktable and stove; however, the higher the surrounding temperature the greater the cost of operating the refrigerator. if an ice refrigerator is used, a location near the outside door lessens the tracking of dirt into the house. a ventilated cupboard near the worktable is convenient for storing the less perishable foods and reduces the season during which ice is needed. relation to other buildings and highway a house designed for the south or west side of the highway should be reversed if it is to be built on the north or east. for example, plan (p. ) would fit nicely on either the south or the west side of the main road. if it were south of the highway, with the drive as shown, the kitchen would be on the east where it would have the advantage of the morning sunlight and in most localities the screened porch would be sheltered from the coldest winds. if the house were on the west side of the road, the kitchen would still get morning sunlight, and the porch would protect it from the afternoon sun. on the other hand, if the house were to be built on the north or east side of the road, the kitchen would be badly sheltered and lighted, but reversing the plan so that the kitchen would be on the right instead of the left side of the house would remedy these conditions. before deciding to build any house the plan should be studied carefully to see how it will best fit the location and the arrangement of the rest of the farmstead. appearance attractive appearance of a farmhouse is to be obtained by: good taste in its proportions and exterior design. materials chosen to suit the local environment and type of house, effectively employed. a pleasing color scheme for the house, in harmony with its surroundings. proper planning with relation to the natural features of the site, the other farm buildings, and the highway. grading the site and planting trees, shrubs, and flowers. if the homes shown in this bulletin are carefully built according to the drawings, they will be satisfactory with respect to the first two points. proper location of the house is exceedingly important and must be worked out on the ground. farmers' bulletin , planning the farmstead, and . beautifying the farmstead, will be found helpful in this and in the planting of trees and shrubs around the house. farmers' bulletin , painting on the farm, discusses kinds and uses of paints. other bulletins on these subjects are available from several of the state agricultural colleges. safety safety in the farmhouse depends first on good construction for protection from damage by wind, fire, decay, and termites. safety is promoted also by planning to avoid hazards from low beams, steep or unguarded stairways, or badly placed doors and windows. the working drawings for the houses illustrated herein embody good practice in these matters. the welfare and convenience of the occupants will be further permanently safeguarded through rat-proof construction, which eliminates "rat harbors", and denies easy entrance of the rodents to the building. additional safety may be secured at slight cost by following the recommendations in farmers' bulletins , fire protective construction on the farm; , rat proofing buildings and premises; and , construction of chimneys and fireplaces; leaflet , wind-resistant construction for farm buildings, and leaflet , injury to buildings by termites. construction materials the houses shown in this bulletin may, with slight changes, be built of wood, stone, concrete, brick, tile, earth, steel, or other materials. the choice depends largely on owner's preference, local availability and price, and the skill of local builders in using one or another. many new materials for various purposes such as roofing, flooring, and insulation are on the market and deserve consideration. the practice common among farmers of hauling their own stone or concrete materials, cutting their own logs where possible, having their lumber sawed at local mills, and doing part of the actual construction work, aid in reducing the cash outlay and in making possible a better house for the same money expenditure. this is especially true where lumber is sawed long enough before building starts to allow thorough seasoning. this seasoning of lumber is important and is too often disregarded. costs the most satisfactory way to learn the probable cost of a house is to obtain estimates from one or more local builders. approximate costs may, of course, be obtained by comparing the proposed house with one built recently in the same community, or rough estimates may be based on the size of the house and typical unit costs for the locality. unit costs based on prices and wages prevailing in the spring of for houses suitable for the localities were obtained for about counties by the farm housing survey, a summary of the figures is as follows: cellars costs for ordinary cellars were reported for most sections as varying from cents to $ per square foot of floor space. the cost per square foot is, of course, less for a large than for a small cellar, other things being equal. easy excavation and low-cost materials also make for low unit cost. costs of nearly $ per square foot were reported in some sections where the ground-water level is high and cellar walls and floor must be carefully waterproofed. in sections where cellars are not ordinarily used the cost of the foundation was reported as part of the cost of the house superstructure. superstructures and porches reported costs of one-story frame superstructures, including heating, plumbing, and lighting equipment ordinarily used in the locality, ranged from $ . to $ . per square foot of floor space in the south, from $ . to $ . in the west and southwest, from $ . to $ in the north, and from $ to $ . in new england. costs in maryland, virginia, and west virginia and in a narrow belt along the east coast, including florida, were reported from $ to $ . , and in the timber-producing sections of the northwest at about $ per square foot. costs in any locality are influenced by local factors, generally being relatively high near cities and in thickly settled sections and relatively low in places where there are local supplies of lumber or other materials. differences in cost between the various sections are due to differences in the kinds of houses built, as well as to differences in material costs and wages. the typical house in the north is much more compact and substantial and provided with more expensive heating equipment than the typical house in the south. the cost per square foot of floor area of two-story frame houses was reported as being to percent less than that of one-story houses in the same locality. the costs of typical masonry superstructures were generally reported at $ to $ per square foot of floor area in the southern third of the united states, from $ to $ per square foot in the central third, and more than $ per square foot in the northern third of the country. there were many variations from these general levels, however, costs of about $ per square foot being reported in many localities in the states bordering on or south of the ohio river. costs reported for counties along the atlantic and gulf coasts were generally higher than for those in the interior. little difference in cost per square foot of floor area in one-story and in two-story masonry houses was reported. the higher costs reported for masonry houses as compared with frame are probably due in part to better grades of finish and equipment used in the masonry houses. the costs per square foot of floor space of open porches were reported as being about half the costs per square foot of floor space in one-story houses of similar materials. estimating by unit costs the floor areas of the cellar, the porches, and the house itself (the superstructure) are shown with each plan. they do not include unexcavated cellar space nor unfinished space in attics. the areas were figured from the working drawings (see p. ) because in some cases the dimensions given in the plans herein are approximate only. the superstructure area of a house of more than one story is given here as the area of the first-floor plus the usable area of the second-floor. stairways, halls, and closets are included. to estimate very roughly what a house might cost, multiply the number of square feet of cellar floor space by a cost per square foot based on the costs stated above. do the same for the house superstructure and the porches, and add the figures together. this, with allowance for price changes since the spring of , will give a rough estimate of total cost of the house. the actual cost will, of course, be affected by the materials and home equipment which the owner selects and by the skill and efficiency of the builders. if the owner can furnish part of the material or labor, or if interior finish or equipment is omitted, the initial cash outlay may be reduced. estimates based on local prices and wage rates are to be preferred to those based on the cost figures given above. little study has been given to what amounts farm people are justified in spending for their houses, but several investigations have been made of expenditures for housing by people with fixed incomes. it is generally agreed that the house ordinarily should not cost more than two and one-half times the average annual net income of the family. in the case of the farm family the value of the living furnished by the farm should be considered as part of the income. another generally accepted rule, which perhaps is more nearly applicable to farm conditions, is that not more than percent--usually not more than percent--of the average annual net income of the family should be required for housing, including principal payments, interest, taxes, insurance, repairs, and miscellaneous costs. working drawings working drawings have been prepared giving all necessary dimensions and details for building these homes. farmers may obtain copies of these drawings from the agricultural extension services of the state agricultural colleges. the state extension services will supply only those plans which are suitable in their respective states, and usually will make a small charge to cover printing and mailing. caution regarding changes these plans have been carefully prepared by competent architects in consultation with home-management specialists and agricultural engineers familiar with farm conditions in all parts of the united states. it is urged that the plans be studied carefully before making a selection, but that no changes be made in them except for alternate arrangements indicated by the drawings or descriptions. changing the size of a room or the location of a door or window may spoil some other valuable feature, and is almost certain to harm the appearance of the house. doors and windows should be selected according to the descriptive material on the drawings. sizes should be closely adhered to for best appearance. the prospective builder should not try to obtain too much originality, but rather should base his selection on those features of the plan which will give the utmost satisfaction in the long run. differences in slope of ground, location of the drive and farm buildings, and position and amount of trees and shrubbery, all will contribute to the distinctive appearance of the home. for homes of the type offered in this bulletin, the surroundings should be kept free from distracting adornments. as a general rule, a few trees to provide shade, some flowering shrubs of native growth grouped close to the building to break harsh lines, and a bed or two of flowers selected for their color value, will be sufficient decorative relief. plans for houses the house plans shown in this bulletin have been arranged in four groups representing, respectively, ( ) -story growing houses; ( ) -story houses originally built with two or more separate bedrooms; ( ) houses of - / or stories; and ( ) very small houses. some of the plans might have been placed in another group about as well as in that in which they are shown. one-story growing houses there are many arguments in favor of the growing house for the farm. the first unit can be erected at a moderate cost, yet the finished house may have all the features considered important. as more space is needed the owner often can build the additions himself, taking advantage of slack times to cut lumber from his own land, haul sand and gravel for concrete, and in other ways reduce the cost of the additions. the chief difficulty with the growing house is that it is likely to grow very slowly. by the time additions are made the house is considered old by its occupants, and the additions are likely not to receive as careful attention as the original house. the growing houses in this bulletin have been carefully planned so that both the first units and the final structure are satisfactory in usefulness and in appearance. the additions fit into the original units with a minimum of ripping out and rearrangement. plan ,[ ] for the southwest floor areas: superstructure, first unit square feet; with -bedroom addition square feet; with -bedroom addition square feet. [illustration: original house] this plan is for a permanent dwelling of frame, stucco, stone, adobe, or other construction. if desired, the first unit may be built without bedrooms, as shown, and the living room used for sleeping quarters until the house is completed. the two large closets of this living room add much to its value, and the arrangement with all doors at one end of the room permits efficient use of the space. [illustration: floor plan] if the first unit is to be used for several years before the bedrooms are added, the small bathroom with shower will be especially desirable. that space must be used for other purposes, however, and the bathroom fixtures moved when one or both bedrooms are added. an alternate kitchen arrangement suggested by the bureau of home economics for houses in which only an oil, gas, or electric stove is needed and meals will usually be eaten in the living-dining room is shown on page . [illustration: floor plan] [illustration: completed houses] [illustration: floor plans] [ ] prepared by w. k. bartges and earl barnett for the department of agricultural engineering, university of california. plan ,[ ] for the south floor areas: superstructure, first stage square feet; second stage with one bedroom , square feet; third stage , square feet. porch, square feet. [illustration: view of original house] plan is designed for southern conditions, to afford ample shade from a glaring summer sun. the arrangement of rooms permits the building to face toward the south, thus taking advantage of the summer breezes from that direction. the glazed porch on the north side offers a cool spot for summer meals, while the meals served during cold weather would naturally be more enjoyable in front of a blazing fire at the west end of the living room. [illustration: floor plan] the second stage of the house adds the center bedroom of the three shown in the third stage. the partitions for the hall and the closets near the south porch are not needed until the third stage. if at all possible, the center bedroom should be built with the original unit to provide more sleeping space; but if it is necessary to watch the budget closely, the large living room or the glazed porch can be pressed into temporary service as sleeping quarters. [illustration: floor plan with added bedroom] [illustration: view of completed house] [illustration: floor plan with two added bedrooms] [ ] prepared by j. b. atkinson and j. e. hudson for the department of agricultural engineering, agricultural and mechanical college of texas. plan ,[ ] for the south floor areas: superstructure, first unit square feet; with first addition square feet; completed house , square feet. porches, first unit square feet; with first addition square feet. the first unit of house is modest, and yet provides complete kitchen equipment, toilet facilities, a workroom or laundry, and g bedroom of comfortable size. the first addition increases the living accommodations and, with its front and rear porches, offers a cool retreat in hot weather. the second addition provides two more bedrooms and an adjoining bath, thus completing the six-room house. if desired, these two bedrooms may be made larger than shown in the plans. [illustration: view of interior] the interior view shows the compact arrangement of kitchen cabinets and sink, and indicates the bright work area that is planned to lighten the duties of the housewife. an alternate arrangement of the kitchen, with no workroom, is shown on page . during the first two stages of development adequate space will be found in the kitchen for dining; but when two bedrooms are added in the final wing, the original bedroom (adjoining the kitchen) might be converted into a dining room. on the other hand, if at times the entire house is not needed by the family, the last wing of the house will make very desirable rooms for renting to tourists or summer boarders, or may be closed. in some parts of the south the fireplace will not provide sufficient heat in cold weather, but a circulator heater may be set in front of the fireplace and connected to the chimney through a metal shield. if the plan is used in the north, a cellar may be constructed under the second unit, with stairs leading down from the rear porch, which should be enclosed. [illustration: view of completed house] [illustration: floor plans] [ ] prepared by w. h. nash for the bureaus of agricultural engineering and home economics, u.s. department of agriculture. plan ,[ ] for the middle west floor areas: superstructure, original house square feet; with addition square feet. cellar, square feet. porches, square feet. house , with basement and furnace, is well adapted to northern or mid-western conditions. the steps to the basement may be outside the building as shown, or the washroom may be extended so as to include the steps and provide greater protection during stormy weather. the original house, in order to come in the class of low-cost houses, does not contain a bath. a pump at the kitchen sink provides water until funds permit of the installation of a modern plumbing system. the first unit of the house may be heated either by a circulator heater in the living room or by a furnace. the furnace will be especially desirable after the second unit is added. the added bedroom wing is recessed from the main building line to permit cross ventilation through the bedroom in the original house. [illustration: view of complete house] [illustration: floor plan] [ ] prepared by w. e. pettit and fred riebel for the department of agricultural engineering, ohio state university. plan ,[ ] for the south floor areas: superstructure, first unit square feet; with first addition square feet; completed house , square feet. porches, square feet. this begins as a three-room house but is planned so that eventually three bedrooms and a bath may be added. the kitchen in the original house is nicely arranged, as shown in the plan. when the house is completed, the first bedroom may be used as a dining room, with a door cut through from the kitchen. the range should then be placed against the living room wall. the fireplace and range will heat the first three rooms. hall space for a circulator heater is provided in the first addition. [illustration: floor plan] [illustration: view of complete house] [ ] prepared by c. w. heery, fred j. orr, and b. g. danner for the department of agricultural engineering, university of georgia. plan ,[ ] for the south floor areas: superstructure, original unit square feet; with first addition , square feet; completed house , square feet. porches, original square feet; completed house square feet. the original unit of house is a two-room structure of ample size. the dining room and kitchen are combined in one room, while the other room is temporarily both bedroom and living room. a porch leading directly into the kitchen affords entrance during the initial stage. in the center of the first unit are an unusually large storage closet and a chimney reminiscent of colonial virginia. in localities where firewood is not readily available the fireplace may be omitted and a stove used for heating the bedroom. [illustration: plan showing future additions] additions to the house are indicated on both sides of the original; the first addition undoubtedly would be that with the bedroom and bath. the rear porch can be enclosed if needed, and will then serve for laundering and other work that is more convenient not to do in the kitchen. the second addition will complete the house with a living room and front porch. the addition of the living room and front porch requires considerable change in the arrangement of the kitchen to keep traffic from the back door to the living room from passing directly in front of the range. it will be best to set the range against the end wall, and preferably to use an electric or oil range so that no new chimney will be required. after the living room is added, less dining space will be needed in the kitchen. [illustration: view of original unit] [illustration: view of completed unit] [ ] prepared by h. b. boynton and j. m. thompson for the department of agricultural engineering, virginia polytechnic institute. plan ,[ ] for the south floor areas: superstructure, original house square feet; completed house , square feet. porches, square feet. in plan a large amount of space is provided at low-cost by using the cheapest type of construction and omitting the interior finish at the time of building, for when a large family must be housed and funds are limited space is often more desirable than good finish and ease of heating. the exterior walls are of vertical boards and battens, and the roof is of galvanized corrugated metal. the house may be improved at any time by lining the walls and ceiling. the kitchen arrangement shows a treatment recommended by home economists, the sink and worktable at right angles to the wall, with shelves above them. this scheme has the advantage of separating the working and dining areas, yet it does not hamper easy communication between the rooms at meal hours. if desired, a bed may be placed in the living room, yet the house is so arranged that each sleeping room will have complete privacy. the side wall of the small bedroom next to the kitchen is intended to be made of -inch boards with battens on both sides. the addition of bedrooms with closets and a bathroom is suggested. this addition will provide space for a circulator heater, which is a convenience when no cellar is planned. [illustration: floor plan and completed house] [ ] prepared by the bureaus of agricultural engineering and home economics, u.s. department of agriculture. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, first stage square feet; with addition , square feet. porches, square feet. several novel features about this small dwelling will appeal to the farm-home builder. a heater room on the main floor near the rear entrance and the kitchen avoids the need for a cellar. a kitchen like this, with three outside walls to give light and cross ventilation and a better view of the farmstead and highway, is often desirable. the end of the living room next the kitchen is narrowed to a dining alcove, and when more space is needed the dining table may be extended into the living room. the completed bungalow has three bedrooms, with ample closet space. the rear porch will provide a comfortable, shady place to work outside during the warm summer days. [illustration: floor plan] in the first stage of construction the two bedrooms at the rear may be omitted. this would still leave one bedroom and the bathroom and temporary closet space in the original bungalow. then the two other bedrooms can be added later, when funds become available, or a screened and glazed sleeping porch with outside entrance could be built instead. a porch off the living room could also be added. [illustration: completed house] [ ] prepared by l. j. smith for the department of agricultural engineering, state college of washington. plan ,[ ] for the southwest floor areas: superstructure, original house square feet; with addition , square feet. porches, square feet. the plans and perspectives on these pages show two methods of roofing this house. in each plan the original unit of the house is complete, and pleasing in appearance, and the additions fit the house gracefully with very little tearing out or rearrangement. as in some other plans, the kitchen is designed for the use of an oil, gas, or electric cookstove. the house may be heated by a circulator hot-air heater, by a hot-water system with a radiator boiler in the living room, or possibly by radiant gas or electric heaters in the bedrooms. [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan] [illustration: completed house] the type of design favors keeping the house close to the ground. if floor-joist construction is used, the topsoil should be removed from under the house so that joists will not come too close to the ground surface. a concrete subfloor could be placed directly on the ground, supporting wood sleepers and wood floors. [illustration: floor plan] [ ] prepared by h. e. wichers, o. s. ekdahl, and n. f. resch for the department of architecture, kansas state agricultural college. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, first unit square feet; with first addition square feet; completed house square feet. porches, square feet. [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan] with their low-pitched roofs, and modest design both inside and out, plans and represent very desirable types of farmhouses. such buildings blend with their surroundings to produce a real homey atmosphere. originally planned for southern conditions, where a circulator heater placed in the hall should be adequate, these plans are adapted to colder regions if the houses are well constructed and are provided with basements and central heating plants as indicated on the working drawings. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, first unit square feet; with first addition square feet; completed house , square feet. porches, square feet. [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan] in both designs the development from two large rooms progresses logically, the main difference being that in plan the additions are made at the side, while in plan the new rooms are added at the rear of the first unit. although all the rooms of a r e shown as larger than those of , by slight alterations either size of house may be built from either plan. the choice should be determined largely by the slope of the building site. [illustration: floor plan] in each original house a temporary partition provides bedrooms in place of a living room. the first addition adds other bedrooms, and the removal of the partition between the temporary bedrooms provides a large living room. the second addition increases the total number of bedrooms to by adding and refitting in the first addition as a bathroom. each kitchen is ideally located to command a view of the driveway, highway, and farm buildings. closets, pantry, and other equipment utilize the darker part of the room, leaving the lighter portions for working area and dining table. these arrangements are complete in the original house. on the screened back porch, which is equipped with laundry trays and closet, men coming from the fields may hang their outside work garments and, except in cold weather, wash before entering the house. here a great deal of the dirty and messy work in preparing fruits and vegetables for canning may be done. entrance from the screened porch to the bath or bedrooms reduces to a minimum the traffic through the kitchen and living room. in plan the screened porch might be divided by a lattice into work and living spaces. [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan] [ ] prepared by eldred mowery and c. e. cope for the bureaus of agricultural engineering and home economics, u.s. department of agriculture. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, original house square feet; with addition _a_. square feet; with addition _b_ square feet. porch, addition _b_, square feet. on account of its compact arrangement, this low-cost house furnishes a very satisfactory amount of usable space for the small family and may be enlarged to three-bedroom size, as indicated on the plans. the kitchen is well-arranged, with moderate storage space, and a wood box filled from outside, with a ventilated cupboard or cooler above it. the workroom, unusually large for a small house, is a good place for laundry or canning and for men to clean up before coming in to meals. dining space is provided at the rear of the living room. this house should be compared with no. (p. ). board and batten construction is very suitable for a low-cost house, but any other type of construction may be used for plan if preferred. if the house is built in a cold climate, probably it will be desirable to omit the fireplace and heat the living and bedrooms with a circulator heater. [illustration: floor plan with addition a] [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan with addition d] [ ] prepared by the bureaus of agricultural engineering and home economics, u.s. department of agriculture. plan ,[ ] for the south floor areas: superstructure, first unit square feet; with addition _a_ , square feet; with addition _b_ , square feet. cellar, square feet. porches, square feet. communication between rooms is an important consideration in modern house planning. this has been provided in house by a small hall, which permits access not only from one room to another but also to the outside, the basement stairs, the washroom, the bathroom, and the linen closet, thus eliminating the necessity of using any room as a passageway. alternate extensions are shown, the choice probably depending upon the surrounding ground contour. addition _b_ should receive first consideration, because it brings the two new bedrooms into closer relation with the bathroom and does not destroy the washroom adjoining the rear entrance. it does, however, reduce the size of one of the first bedrooms. if addition _a_ is contemplated, the window at _x_ should be located at _y_ when the first unit is built. the steps in the hall of addition a may be omitted if the ground slopes down at the rear so that the floor of the addition can be built at a lower level than the floor of the original house. if addition _b_ is to be used, the window at _z_ should be located so as to come in the hall of the addition. [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan with additions] [ ] prepared by c. w. heery and b. g. banner for the department of agricultural engineering, university of georgia, plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, first unit , square feet; with addition , square feet. porches, square feet. cellar, square feet. the charm of house lies in its informality and simplicity. it is built for comfort and service. the broad expanse of roof, relieved by a gable, gives it a substantial yet homelike appearance. this is an easy house to move around in, and the kitchen is very nicely arranged. the screened porch, in addition to providing a cool and inviting summer dining and work space, affords ready access to all the rooms of the house. if the future addition of bedrooms is contemplated, the hall window in the first unit should be replaced with a door. this will not only provide an extra exit from the house but obviate unnecessary cutting and tearing out when the addition is built. the cellar provides space for a central heating plant, it desired. [illustration: view completed house] [illustration: floor plan] [illustration: view of kitchen] [ ] prepared by c. w. heery, fred j. orr and b. g. banner for the department agricultural engineering, university of georgia. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, first unit square feet; with bedroom addition , square feet; with both additions , square feet. porches, square feet. cellar, square feet. this simple farmhouse develops into a home of dignity and charm. the original unit furnishes all modern conveniences and an ample basement. future bedrooms may be added as required, while the extended living room might be built as the final touch of growing prosperity. it will be of interest to the reader to note the similarity of arrangement of this house and no. (p. ). these plans were developed independently, but the coincidence emphasizes the practicability of having the work and living areas on the side of the building next to the driveway and the bedrooms toward the rear, with the bathroom located as centrally as possible. the design of a small house for farm use is greatly influenced by the rather fixed location of the kitchen. [illustration: main floor plan showing future additions] [illustration: basement plan] [illustration: view of original unit] [illustration: view of complete house] [ ] prepared by h. b. boynton and j. m. thompson for the department of agricultural engineering, virginia polytechnic institute. moderate-sized one-story houses houses of this group can best be built complete at one time, though in several cases it is noted that rooms may be omitted from the original building or extra rooms added. the larger houses of this group provide about the same features as the completed growing houses. the more compact two-bedroom houses are well adapted to farms where two or more separate dwellings are needed. plan ,[ ] for timbered sections floor areas; superstructure, square feet. porches, square feet. in spite of present-day improvements in building materials, there is something about the rugged appearance of a log cabin that harmonizes with rural settings. log construction blends into wooded surroundings more intimately than boards, bricks, or stucco. house will accommodate persons comfortably, or even or persons if a couch is placed in a corner of the living room. the location of the bathroom not only serves the bedrooms but is convenient to the kitchen and the rear porch. [illustration: floor plan] the central chimney serves the kitchen range, circulator heater, and fireplace. the ample size of the kitchen, and its built-in cupboards, dish cabinets, and other conveniences add greatly to the desirability of the design. if a pass cupboard between kitchen and living room is desired, it may be arranged in the cabinet next to the outer wall. [illustration: view of completed house] [ ] prepared by n. g. napier for the department of agricultural engineering, university of arkansas. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, main house, square feet; with storage addition , square feet. cellar, square feet. porches, square feet. this house is similar in many respects to the first unit of (p. ), but is enlarged to provide for the bathroom. a shallow root cellar with room above is added at the rear of the house to provide extra storage if needed in localities where a cellar is not practicable. as in the case of plan , two more bedrooms may be added to the left side of the house by taking space from the rear bedroom for a hallway. [illustration: floor plan] the house is planned to be heated by a jacketed heater in the workroom with a cold-air return duct under the floor and cold-air registers in the living room and bedrooms. this arrangement will keep all handling of coal and ashes out of the living parts of the house. [illustration: view of completed house] [ ] prepared by o. r. s. trabor for the department of agricultural engineering, university of missouri. plan ,[ ] for the north floor areas: superstructure, square feet. cellar, square feet. house is intended for use in cold, snowy regions, where farmers need cellars for storing fuel and vegetables. the hip roof helps to brace the house against the wind and is economical of material. a well-insulated ceiling is recommended to help keep the house comfortable. the substantial chimney in the center of the house, with separate flues for furnace, kitchen range, and fireplace, insures good draft and no wasted heat. the vestibule at the front and the hall arrangement at the side door also aid in keeping the house warm. both doors are convenient to the driveway and the path to the barn. [illustration: floor plan] the washroom and laundry of this house are in the cellar. this is a satisfactory and economical arrangement where there is good drainage for both the cellar and the plumbing fixtures, and is particularly advantageous on rolling ground. but one should beware of putting a deep cellar in a poorly drained location. (see farmers' bulletin , making cellars dry.) [illustration: view of completed house] [ ] prepared by s. a. witzel for the department of agricultural engineering, university of wisconsin. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, square feet. porches, square feet. this house was designed to meet the needs of a family of to people. the porch faces the highway, and paths from the front and side porches lead to the farm drive. the kitchen is complete and compact. the extra space found in many farm kitchens has been omitted and a workroom added to provide for laundry and other rough work. this also provides a place for men to leave their outer wraps and wash before entering the living room. storage space can be obtained in the attic by the use of a disappearing stair in the workroom ceiling. no wood or coal range is provided for in this plan, because the use of an oil, gas, or electric stove saves space in the kitchen and correspondingly reduces the cost of the house. this saving and the convenience of a small, compact cooking unit deserve careful consideration in localities where these fuels are cheaply available. heating is accomplished by means of a circulator heater in the living room. the designer of this plan states: the bedrooms are small. they are little used during waking hours, thus they can be reduced with less injury to family comfort than any other room. the large living room more than compensates for this. when funds are limited it is always debatable, in a great portion of the united states, whether spending money for a porch is wise, because the same money could be used instead to increase the area of the house proper. in this particular case the porch could be left off without harm. [illustration: view of completed home and floor plan] [ ] prepared by h. e. wichers and o. s. ekdahl for the department of architecture, kansas state agricultural college. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, , square feet. porches, square feet. the well-known economy of square house construction is illustrated by this plan. a choice of heating methods without a cellar is indicated. if a circulator heater is used in the hall, as shown, the chimney between the bedrooms will not be needed, and if extra bedrooms are wanted they may be added as in plan (p. ). a fireplace in the back bedroom would, of course, interfere with taking a hall off this room. [illustration: floor plan] kitchen doors are located to permit easy communication between the screened porch and the hall without interference with the work area while the screened porch is useful as both work and dining area. this latter feature, together with the ample size of the bedrooms, living room kitchen, makes the dwelling especially suitable for the small family in the south. the addition of a cellar under one-half of the house and of a central heating plant would adapt this plan to other sections of the country, though the rooms are rather larger than is common in the north. [illustration: view of completed home] [ ] prepared by w. c. breithaupt and h. w. dearing for the department of agricultural engineering, alabama polytechnic institute. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, , square feet. porches, square feet. house should be compared with no. . the two plans were developed independently, but are very similar and illustrate a logical grouping of rooms for a farmhouse. in some respects the arrangement of works out more satisfactorily because it is not restricted by the structural details of framing a pitched roof. this house is a model of compactness and efficiency. note the simple but effective way in which the kitchen and heater room are located back to back. the floor of the heater room is a concrete slab, two steps below the main floor level. a pass cupboard between the kitchen and dining room is handy for serving meals. it also provides storage space beneath its counter. the entire bedroom side may be omitted from the original house, in which case the workroom would serve for dining and the dining room for a bedroom. all dimensions of this house are multiples of - / feet. wall, door, and window sections might be prefabricated so that erection would consist merely of bolting the sections together, or the house can be built in the ordinary way. the sketch at the top of page illustrates the use of sheet metal as an exterior covering, the one in the center shows concrete blocks, and the bottom view shows the walls covered with a combination of lap siding and shingles or wide boards. the flat roof should be covered with good roofing and well-insulated for comfort in both summer and winter as described in the working drawings. the cost of the insulated flat roof should not be greater than that of an ordinary pitched roof without insulation. the accumulation of snow will help to keep the building warm. [illustration: floor plan] [illustration: view of completed home] [illustration: view of completed home] [illustration: view of completed home] [ ] prepared by albert frey for the bureaus of agricultural engineering and home economies, u.s. department of agriculture. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, , square feet porches, square feet. this is a new type of low-cost house designed to provide five small single bedrooms or sleeping compartments and one bedroom of average size. the sleeping compartments are not very large, but to secure privacy and yet maintain economy of construction, something must be sacrificed. in this case it is unnecessary space. [illustration: view of completed home and floor plan] the sketch showing the arrangement of bunks illustrates an interesting feature of this house. in the right-hand room the bunk is near the floor, and wardrobe and dresser space is obtained in the partition between the two rooms. in the left-hand room the bunk is feet above the floor and projects over the one on the other side of the partition. wardrobe space is arranged under the bunk. this room is especially suitable for a boy. a folding study table is provided under the window in each room. on warm nights air circulation would be obtained by opening the bedroom doors to the hall, which is ventilated by the windows above the lower roof. by omitting all but one of the partitions forming the five small bedrooms two good-sized rooms can be obtained. [illustration: cross section of bedrooms and wardrobe at b-b] [illustration: side view of bunk at a-a] the exterior appearance may seem, at first glance, unusually severe, but by omitting a pitched roof and the ornamental features of cornice moldings and trim decorations, the cost of construction is materially lowered. here everything has been reduced to the simplest form possible. with the heater room adjoining the kitchen, there is little need for a basement, thus an important item of expense is eliminated. the kitchen and workroom form a compact and very convenient unit along the driveway side of the house, while the large living room commands a good view of the highway. the living room and halls are lighted and ventilated by the small windows above the lower roofs. closet space is provided in every room. as in plan (p. ), all dimensions are multiples of - / feet so that the house can be either prefabricated or built in the ordinary way. [ ] prepared by albert frey and r. g. allen for the bureaus of agricultural engineering and home economics, u.s. department of agriculture. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, , square feet. porch, square feet. cellar, square feet. house is one of the few designs in which a separate dining space was allotted. many people do not consider a separate dining room essential in the small farmhouse, and additional space adds to the cost, but in this case the arrangement adds to the spaciousness of the interior without greatly increasing the cost. the rear entry is large enough to serve as laundry and washroom, and constitutes a back way from the kitchen to the bedrooms and bathroom without passing through the living room. the kitchen, with cross ventilation and ample cupboard and counter space, is a pleasant workshop for the housewife, and is so arranged that easy service to the dining alcove is possible. the bedrooms and adjoining bath are grouped together, allowing that portion of the house to be closed off from the living portion. in the cellar is the heating plant, with fuel bin. the house is kept low to give it an appearance of hugging the ground, but in no case should the joists be below the ground level. shingles, beveled siding, or clapboards may be used for the exterior surface. [illustration: floor plan] [ ] prepared by max uhlig for the department of agricultural engineering, massachusetts agricultural college. [illustration: view of completed house] * * * * * houses of more than one story in many respects houses of more than one story are better suited for farm use in the northern states than single-story buildings. they are more economical in foundation and roof construction, and are easier to heat. they should be arranged with one bedroom and a bath, or at least a toilet, on the ground floor. a cellar for fuel and vegetable storage and a central heating plant are usually needed with this type of house. the laundry may also be located in the cellar if suitable drainage and a grade door to the outside can be obtained, but in a poorly drained location it is best to keep the laundry above-ground. in building a cellar advantage should be taken of the slope of the ground to obtain good lighting and an easy entrance on the low side of the slope. to avoid uncomfortably warm second-floor bedrooms in summer cross ventilation should be provided in each room. insulation of the ceiling is valuable both in summer and in winter. it is very convenient to have a bathroom on the second-floor as well as one on the first-floor, especially if rooms are to be rented to tourists when the family does not need the whole house. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, original house, , square feet; with living room addition, , square feet. cellar, square feet. porches, square feet. [illustration: main floor plan] [illustration: second floor plan] the first-floor and cellar plans of house are almost the same as the original unit of no. (p. ), but there are comfortable bedrooms, a bath, and closet space on the second-floor. if funds are available to build the living room wing indicated, the entire dwelling will breathe the traditional southern spirit of hospitable spaciousness. the hall and stair arrangements of this house are very good. persons coming in at the back door can leave wraps in the vestibule at the head of the cellar stairs and go directly to any downstairs room or to the cellar, yet there is little lost space. if the house should at some time be occupied by a small family, the entire upstairs could be shut off. persons wishing rooms for tourists will find either the upstairs bedrooms or the downstairs bedroom and bath very suitable for this purpose. [illustration: view of original unit] [illustration: view of completed house] [ ] prepared by h. b. boynton and j. m. thompson for the department of agricultural engineering, virginia polytechnic institute. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, square feet. porch, square feet. this might well be considered the smallest story-and-a-half farmhouse that could be practicably built. the designer has utilized the space to good advantage, omitting a bath in the original structure for the sake of economy. the working drawings show a future addition to the house which provides a bedroom and bath on the first-floor. the alternate floor plan shows a dormer in the rear like the one on the front, to make room for a second-floor bath. a distinctive feature of this compact design is the =l=-shaped kitchen with its well-grouped and well-lighted working surfaces and dining table. the arrangement of an =l=-shaped room is often a problem when enlarging or remodeling. the living room is arranged for both day and night use, with a folding bed in a closet. [illustration: view of completed house] [illustration: first floor plan] [illustration: alternate first floor plan] [illustration: second floor plan] [illustration: alternate second floor plan] [ ] prepared by c. t bridgman for the department of agricultural engineering, iowa state college. plan ,[ ] for the north floor areas: superstructure, square feet. cellar, square feet. porch, square feet. this design illustrates a type of farmhouse frequently built in recent years because of its simple lines and economy of construction. it illustrates the pleasing possibility of fitting the farmhouse to sloping ground, with ample light in the basement and easy flights of steps between the house proper, the large workroom at the rear, and the cellar. [illustration: first floor plan] the partition between the main rooms downstairs is carried up to divide the second-floor, giving these bedrooms ample size and good cross ventilation and making a strong construction that will not sag in years to come. a second bathroom may be provided in the storage space by the chimney, thus adding to the comfort of the home and making the upstairs rooms suitable for rental to tourists if desired. the roof should be insulated to give comfort both in summer and in winter. [illustration: interior view of kitchen] [illustration: view of completed house] [illustration: second floor plan] the downstairs hall, lighted by the windows on the stairs, is compact and provides easy communication between all rooms. the living room is well-lighted and has good wall spaces for furniture. the combined kitchen and dining room, with the sink at right angles to the outside wall, as shown in the interior view, gives the housewife three walls of continuous work surfaces and in addition light and the view from all the windows of the room. children can play or older members visit in the dining end with slight interference to the housewife's work. this is especially helpful on chilly days in the fall and spring when the kitchen stove provides the only heat in the house. the part basement furnishes space for a furnace and for storage of fruits and vegetables. [ ] prepared by c. j. poiesz and eldred mowery for the bureaus of agricultural engineering and home economics, u.s. department of agriculture. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure (including enclosed porch) , square feet. cellar, square feet. terrace and steps, square feet. house is similar in many respects to no. , and has much the same advantages, though the rooms are somewhat smaller. a second downstairs bedroom can be added beside the bathroom, if needed, or the two bedrooms on the second-floor can be left unfinished if funds are not on hand to complete the building in the beginning. the sketch indicates the roof line sweeping down snug over the window of the first-floor bedroom, a feature which is carried out with similar success in plan . designs of this type help to keep a two-story home from appearing too tall and make it a more harmonious unit in the farmstead scheme. [illustration: first floor plan] [illustration: view of completed house] [illustration: second floor plan] [ ] prepared by t. a. zink for the department of agricultural engineering, purdue university. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, , square feet. cellar, square feet. stoops, square feet. house may be roofed in a number of ways, with slight alterations in the arrangement of the second-floor. the appearance is, of course, greatly altered; but in each case is pleasing. with the modernistic flat roof, any waste spaces caused by the sloping roofs in the other designs are eliminated. the storage room on the second-floor then becomes suitable for a child's bedroom, a sewing room, or an office, and the flat-deck porch roof will serve as a sleeping porch. [illustration: view of completed house] the plan is simple and well proportioned. since the arrangement of the entrance is a little unusual, the location of the driveway and the path to the barn should be given careful study before deciding upon the site and placing of the house. [illustration: first floor plan] [illustration: view of completed houses] construction should be simple. in the case of the modernistic house, concrete or stucco is suggested for the first story and boards and battens for the second. [illustration: second floor plan] [ ] prepared by w. k. bartges and earl barnett for the department of agricultural engineering. university of california.. plan ,[ ] for the north [illustration: view of first stage] floor areas: superstructure, original house, , square feet; with kitchen addition, , square feet; with all additions shown, , square feet. porches, original house, square feet; completed house, square feet. cellar, square feet. [illustration: first floor plan] thousands of farmhouses in all parts of the north and middle west have begun like house , and the development illustrated for this one should offer helpful suggestions both to farmers who plan to build new and those who expect to remodel present houses. it is a very practical design, expressing honest dignity. [illustration: second floor plan] the plans on this page show the original unit, which would supply a comfortable yet economical dwelling, with a basement for fuel and storage. the first addition might be either the new kitchen and porch or the downstairs bedroom, bath, and laundry. if needed, a third upstairs bedroom and a bathroom can be added over those in the first-floor addition, as shown in the working drawings, with little loss of material or work, because the downstairs bedroom has a flat-deck roof. this would increase the floor area of the superstructure to , square feet. [illustration: view of completed house] [illustration: first floor plan with additions] [ ] prepared by j. m. deibert for the bureaus of agricultural engineering and home economics, u.s. department of agriculture. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, , square feet. porch, square feet. cellar, square feet. this plan is intended for use in the north, where the compact floor plan with cellar and inside chimney and the front vestibule will simplify the heating problem. the first-floor level is above the ordinary height of packed snow in winter, but the grade entrance gives easy communication with both the cellar and the main part of the house. this permits convenient use of the cellar as a washroom and laundry, if in a well-drained location, as well as for storage purposes. the house is roomy and well-arranged, with a downstairs bedroom and bathroom. by a slight change to make the second-floor like the first, a bathroom or toilet could be arranged in the large closet by the stairs. storage space is provided in the attic. all second-floor partitions are directly above those of the first floor, thus making a strong, rigid house with the least framing material. [illustration: first floor plan] [illustration: second floor plan] [illustration: completed house] [ ] prepared by h. w. orth and r. a. gmeinder for the division of agricultural engineering, university of minnesota. very small houses the dimensions of the houses in the very-small-house group are kept to the minimum by using the living rooms for sleeping rooms at night. these houses cannot be considered adequate for the typical farm family, but will serve for young married couples or for tenants with small families. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, square feet. stoop, square feet. in plan , sleeping space is provided in double-deck beds screened from the living room by draw curtains. if more space is wanted later, a bedroom wing can be added at the end of the living room. to save space, the kitchen is planned for an oil, gas, or electric stove. with a house of this size, part of the housework would have to be done outdoors, and a paved or graveled space under a tree near the house would be a convenience. [illustration: floor plan] [illustration: completed house] [ ] prepared by h. e. wichers, n. f. resell, and o. s. ekdahl, for kansas state college. plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, square feet. stoop, square feet. the special feature of plan is the well-arranged kitchen, with good storage space and a compact work area at one side of the direct line of travel from the back door. some privacy at night is afforded by the double wardrobes and folding screen between the two beds in the living room. the side porch will serve the double purpose of workroom and sleeping porch. it should be screened and have curtains to keep out the rain. by adding feet to the living room and an additional partition, a third room could be provided. a shower bath may be installed in the large closet as shown. [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan] [ ] prepared by a. l. matthews and n. g. napier for the department of agricultural engineering, university of arkansas, plan [ ] floor areas: superstructure, original house square feet; with addition, square feet. small homes are often cut up into several rooms, with the result that in them a person has a "boxed-in" feeling. in plan the rooms are few, and each is used for more than one purpose. if the cost must be kept to a minimum, the bedroom and sleeping porch may be omitted in the original construction. the kitchen-dining room is unusually large for a house of this size, and the equipment is grouped in the front part of the room where the housewife can have a good view of the highway. when the bedroom and sleeping porch are built, the bunk in the kitchen-dining room may be taken out to provide more dining space; or if one desires a cellar under part of the house, the cellar stairway may replace the bunk space. a large window and high-beamed ceiling are features of the living room. the chimney must not be too small; it is a feature of the house. [illustration: floor plan] [illustration: completed house] [ ] prepared by r. a. deal and w. w. deneff for the department of agricultural engineering, state college of washington. plan ,[ ] for the southwest floor areas: superstructure, square feet. porches, square feet. plans and were designed for the central valleys of california, where outdoor sleeping is invited, by the mild nights. these were designed for temporary homes to be used later as shops, bunk houses, storage buildings, or for other uses, so concrete floors are recommended. low-cost "frameless" construction is shown in the working drawings. there are no ceilings. the shower baths shown in the plans can be installed cheaply. the kitchens and work porches are large enough for the needs of a good-sized family. plenty of windows are provided for ventilation. the kitchen arrangement shows a wood-burning stove, and a large refrigerator placed against an inside wall for protection from the outdoor heat. it is expected that meals will ordinarily be eaten in the kitchen or outdoors. [illustration: floor plan] [illustration: completed house] plan ,[ ] for the southwest floor areas: superstructure, square feet. porches, square feet. [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan] [ ] prepared by w. k. bartges and earl barnett for the department of agricultural engineering, university of california. plan ,[ ] for new england floor areas: superstructure, square feet. porches, square feet. though the rooms in plan have been kept as small as possible in order to reduce cost, good use of space is realized in the arrangement. additions to the house would enable it to accommodate an average-sized family. a work-porch addition beside the kitchen and living room, between the windows, would provide a place for laundry work and for hanging outer wraps. a bathroom might be built by enclosing a portion of the front porch and enlarging the window to make a doorway from the hall. if desired, a third bedroom could be added at the end of the living room. [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan] [ ] prepared by bernhard dirks for the department of agricultural engineering, massachusetts state college. plan ,[ ] for the north floor areas: superstructure, original house, square feet; with first addition square feet. porches and entrances, square feet. cellar, first unit square feet; with addition square feet. plan is intended for snowy sections, and the first-floor is purposely raised above the winter snow level. the house can be built in either one or two stages. no partition divides the kitchen and living room, which permits heating the house with the kitchen range in mild weather. it also aids ventilation in summer and facilitates serving of meals in the living room. the steps to the cellar are outside the house, protected by a storm door. there is ample space in the cellar for laundry and storage. a cistern under the kitchen provides soft water. [illustration: floor plan and completed house] [ ] prepared by s. a. witzel for the department of agricultural engineering, university of wisconsin. [illustration: completed house] plan ,[ ] for the northwest floor areas: superstructure, first stage square feet; second stage square feet; third stage square feet. porches and steps, first stage square feet; second and third stages square feet. this house is designed for the minimum requirements of beginners on the land, the first portion being by feet outside. it may either be enlarged for a permanent dwelling or later used as a service building. the bedroom is ample in size, but the living room, because it must also be used temporarily as a kitchen and dining room, will be crowded. this unit may be made feet instead of feet wide. later the kitchen and a small bedroom may be added at the rear of the first unit, with a side porch off the kitchen. the door between the kitchen and living room will then be changed to the right of the chimney, and a narrow hall taken off the rear of the front bedroom. [illustration: floor plan] if an additional bedroom is desired, it can be added to the left of the bathroom, making the third stage for this house. the closet in the kitchen should be removed and a door cut through to allow easy access from the kitchen to the bath and bedrooms. the bedroom closets must be rearranged to allow for these changes. [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan] [ ] prepared by r. a. deal and w. w. deneff for the department of agricultural engineering, state college of washington. plan ,[ ] for the south floor areas: superstructure, square feet. porches and steps, square feet. [illustration: completed house] [illustration: floor plan] plans and , for the south and the middle west, respectively, are low-cost houses for families that need only one bedroom. the kitchens are well-arranged and have good storage space. closet space also is ample for houses of this size. a storage and workroom, as shown in plan , is a good feature for the north but is not so much needed in the south, where mild weather permits doing much housework outdoors. the living room fireplace and kitchen range should heat house comfortably under ordinary southern conditions, but in the north arrangements should be made for a stove or circulator heater as in plan . [ ] prepared by w. c. breithaupt and h. w. dearing for the department of agricultural engineering, alabama polytechnic institute. plan ,[ ] for the middle west floor areas: superstructure, square feet. porches and steps, square feet. [illustration: floor plan and completed house] [ ] prepared by h. j. mckee and arthur wupper for the department of agricultural engineering, university of illinois. * * * * * u.s. government printing office: for sale by the superintendent of documents, washington, d.c. price cents * * * * * transcriber notes all illustration were move so that paragraphs were not split. all plan footnotes were moved to the end of that plan. all plan illustrations were captioned and standardized to all caps. by the internet archive. transcriber note text emphasis denote by _italics_. whole and fractional parts of numbers as - / . [illustration: the preparation of bees for outdoor wintering] one of the most vital parts of the beekeeper's work is the preparation of bees for outdoor wintering. no other phase of beekeeping has so direct an influence on the honey crop of the following season. the apiary should be located in a protected place and the colonies should not be moved at the time of packing. directions are given in this bulletin for the proper arrangement of the apiary to prevent confusion due to the shifting of hives. the amount and character of the packing materials and the most economical type of packing cases are discussed. a schedule of dates for packing and unpacking the hives is presented for all parts of the united states, and the amount and character of winter stores are indicated. it is important that none of the factors of good wintering be omitted, and several tests are given so that the beekeeper may determine whether his bees are wintering properly. contribution from the bureau of entomology l. o. howard, chief washington, d. c. september, the preparation of bees for outdoor wintering. e. f. phillips, _apiculturist_, and george s. demuth, _apicultural assistant_. contents. page. the essentials to success necessity for strong colonies in the fall arrangement of the apiary insulation of the hive arrangement within the hive winter schedule winter stores all the factors of good wintering are needed measures of success in wintering no problem confronting the beekeeper in most parts of the united states is of more importance than the proper wintering of bees, yet it is one which is sadly neglected. it is urged that before attempting to make packing cases for the wintering of bees the beekeeper study department bulletin , temperature of the honeybee cluster in winter, and farmers' bulletin , outdoor wintering of bees. the essentials to success. the essentials to success in caring for a normal colony of bees from the end of one season's honey-flow to the beginning of the next lie in providing three things in abundance: ( ) stores of good quality, ( ) protection from wind and cold, and ( ) room for the rearing of brood at appropriate times. these factors are all of the greatest importance, and an omission of any one of them may prevent completely the gathering of the honey crop of the following year, and if any of the factors are given in less degree the honey crop invariably is reduced. the importance of these essentials does not apply equally at all times from the end of one season to the beginning of the next, but at some time they are all vitally essential; and it is the purpose of this bulletin to show how all three may be given in the early fall, so that, without further handling, the colonies will come through the spring with the maximum population. if, for example, the room for breeding is not provided in the fall, it becomes necessary to handle the colony early in the spring, and this may be detrimental. similarly, it is the practice of some beekeepers to add to the stores of the colony in the spring, rather than to leave enough in the fall to last until new honey comes in. this is dangerous for two reasons: too often the stores are not given on time or in adequate quantity, and frequently they can not be given without exposing the colony too greatly. it is therefore the best practice by far to provide all of these factors in the fall, and no other methods are so safe and certain of success. by practicing the methods here given the enormous annual loss of colonies in winter may be almost entirely eliminated, and, what is more important, much stronger colonies may be obtained for the early sources of honey. necessity for strong colonies in the fall. a common cause of loss is through attempting to winter colonies that are too small. it is somewhat difficult to set a standard for colony strength at this season, but in general it may be stated that it is unwise to attempt to winter colonies that are not strong enough to have brood sufficient to fill three to four langstroth frames two months before the packing is applied. if the colonies in the apiary are not of the proper strength it is wise to unite until the proper strength is reached. any uniting should be done at least two weeks before packing. there is a tendency in some localities for colonies to weaken rapidly in early fall, due to the nature of the honey-flow from fall flowers. to some degree this may be offset by putting on the packing earlier than otherwise would be necessary. it is highly important that each colony have a vigorous queen in order that brood-rearing may continue in the fall and may proceed rapidly in the spring. with colonies such as are obtained by the methods here described it is not desirable to keep queens more than two years and it is preferable to requeen the entire apiary every season. to get the best results in requeening all young queens should be introduced so that they will begin laying two months before packing. it will be found that queens wear out more rapidly in the unusually strong colonies obtained by the methods of wintering here described, but every good beekeeper realizes that it is these enormous colonies which get the greatest crops. arrangement of the apiary. wind protection. it is of the greatest importance that the apiary be located where the wind in winter is virtually eliminated. a grove of trees or an adjacent hill usually offers the best protection, or it is possible to make an artificial windbreak such as a high fence. a natural windbreak usually is better, for it is more extensive in most cases. it has been found by the authors that if a wind of miles an hour blows on the winter packing cases for a few hours the temperature of the inside of the packed hive may be greatly reduced and may even fall as low as that of an unpacked hive. too much reliance should not be placed in buildings as windbreaks, for they often serve simply to divert the wind slightly and may even make conditions worse. a fence made of close boards usually is unsatisfactory for it causes whirls that may destroy many colonies. a heavy blanket of snow serves to reduce the effect of the wind. [illustration: fig. .--colonies of bees in summer position in groups of four. this arrangement is advantageous whether or not the bees are wintered in four-colony packing cases.] arrangement of the hives. in arranging the hives in an apiary it is necessary to take into account the method of wintering to be followed. if the bees are to be wintered in the four-colony cases to be described later the hives should be kept in groups of four all the season (fig. ), for if colonies are moved more than a foot just before packing and then moved again as they are unpacked there is a considerable amount of "drifting"--that is, bees from some colonies join other colonies during flight, and the result is an actual reduction of the number of colonies and of bees in the apiary. a failure to keep the colonies properly arranged for their winter stands during the entire summer is a common cause of failure in using the four-colony cases. whatever type of case is used for outdoor wintering, the bees should occupy the same place during the entire year. since the outside of the winter case is quite different an appearance from the hives the bees often are somewhat confused. to prevent drifting from this cause it is a good plan to set a large stake between the two entrances on each end of the four-colony winter cases; this will serve to help the bees in orienting themselves during flights in winter and especially in spring. if it is possible to plant some shrubbery among the hives it is a good plan to have the plants arranged so that they will act as markers for the bees during these early flights (fig. ). they will not be amiss during the summer, and, if properly placed, they need not interfere with movement through the apiary during the summer's work, while they add to its attractiveness. insulation of the hive. amount of packing needed. it is impossible to insulate bees too heavily during the winter. it is obvious, however, that the beekeeper will not want to put on more packing than is practically necessary. for a climate such as that of washington, d. c., it is found desirable to provide inches of packing underneath the hives, inches on all sides, and or more inches on top. in warmer climates less will be needed, but the beekeeper must not think that simply because he lives south of washington he can be safe with less packing or none at all. there are many places farther south than washington where more packing is needed, and there are, indeed, few places except along the gulf or in southern california where less may be used if the best results are to be obtained. for more northern localities more protection is needed. the amount indicated for washington has been used with success in places as cold as northern ohio and even in canada, but in these places the insulation during the coldest seasons is usually augmented by heavy snows. these are not at hand every winter, or may be lacking during the coldest part of the winter, and it is, therefore, wise to provide more packing, especially on the sides and top. for a climate such as that of new york or wisconsin, inches of good packing on the sides and foot on the top probably will be enough for good wintering every year. the amounts recommended for the different zones of the united states are given in table i (p. ). a belief is current among many amateur beekeepers that good results may be obtained by using hives which have inches of packing built in the sides and somewhat more on top. this amount is insufficient in winter in all parts of the country except the southern portions of the gulf states. a common practice is to wrap some straw or corn fodder around the hives, but this may do more harm than good if the wind can blow directly through it. a covering of roofing paper with perhaps a little paper packing underneath is practically worthless in insulating value. types of packing material. there is little difference in the insulating value of the various materials which may be obtained easily for the packing of hives in winter. exaggerated claims have been made by some beekeepers for such materials as broken cork or certain commercial insulating materials, but it is safe to say that there is not per cent difference between the poorest and the best of the available insulating materials, provided, of course, that obviously poor things such as corn fodder and straw be eliminated. sawdust, fine planer shavings, forest leaves, chaff, broken cork, and such materials may be used, the choice depending chiefly on the availability of the materials. in general it may be stated that the smaller and the more numerous the dead air spaces confined in the packing, the greater will be its efficiency in insulation. if forest leaves are used they must be gathered the year before and stored, as the leaves fall some time after the bees should be packed. if sawdust is used it is best not to pack it down tight, but if forest leaves or planer shavings are employed it is essential that they be packed in closely and that the containers be completely filled. broken cork, such as is used in the shipping of certain types of grapes, is good and has the advantage that it does not hold moisture as does sawdust. in all cases the packing should be placed in some sort of box which will be rain-proof and thus protect the insulation from rains and snow, for all insulating materials lose part of their efficiency when wet. bottom packing. there has been considerable discussion among beekeepers as to the value of placing packing material below the bottom boards of the hives. this is usually provided by placing the hives on by inch supports or on racks of -inch material. those who have opposed this have pointed out that "heat rises," overlooking the fact that while warm air attempts to rise, if this is impossible other avenues of escape of warm-air currents may be set up. furthermore, and more important, they have overlooked the important fact that heat escapes from the hive not only by convection currents but by conduction and radiation as well. in an extensive series of experiments performed by the writers it was found that in hives packed at the top and sides most of the heat escapes through the bottom boards; in fact, this was so noticeable that the packing at the top and sides never served its full purpose so long as heat was escaping rapidly at the bottoms. it may be stated, therefore, that so long as the bottoms are unprotected there is little insulating value in materials piled on the top and sides beyond about inches. this amount is insufficient for most parts of the united states, therefore bottom packing should be considered as absolutely essential wherever bees are packed. to get the value of bottom packing it is absolutely essential that the entrance be reduced, but it need not be closed. in a long series of temperature readings on hives packed for several winters, the authors were able to keep a temperature of ° f. on the bottom boards of packed hives directly behind the entrance openings. those who have condemned bottom packing have labored under the mistaken notion that it is impossible to prevent currents of cold air through the entrance. this is entirely possible if the entrances are adequately reduced. the conclusion to be drawn from the experiments performed is that unless the bottoms of hives are well packed, the beekeeper ought not to imagine that he has packed his hives at all well. [illustration: fig. .--the winter packing cases used in the bureau of entomology apiary: _a_, detail of tunnel to hives. in the specifications given in this bulletin (p. ) provision is made for room for a third hive body to be added in the spring.] the packing case. there is no virtue in any special type of case, but in all types there are a few points which must be observed. there must be provision for abundant packing on the top, bottom, and sides, the entrances must be small, the case must be rain-proof, and the construction of the case should be such that it may be taken apart and put together easily. the parts of various cases used in one series of apiaries should be interchangeable. the authors have refrained in the past from giving explicit directions for making a winter packing case for fear that some beekeepers might think that there may be peculiar virtue in the case used and recommended by the department (fig. ). so many beekeepers, however, have written for exact dimensions for making the case used in the apiary of the bureau of entomology that it is considered best to give these in this bulletin. in order that protection adequate for bees in a climate such as that of washington may be provided, inches of packing below the bottom board, inches on all sides, and at least inches on top are desired. there is advantage in packing several colonies together, in order that they may warm each other and to reduce the cost of the case and the labor of putting it on. the bureau, therefore, has adopted the four-colony type of case which has been much used for years in all parts of the country. in this case, two colonies face east and two west. provision is made for wintering all colonies in two full-depth hive bodies. in the following dimensions it is assumed that / -inch tongued-and-grooved lumber is used, that the -frame langstroth hive is in use, and that two hive bodies are employed for each colony, with adequate space above the hive so that, if needed, a third hive body may be put on before time for the removal of the packing. in this packing case the sides overlap the ends. for hives of other sizes the lumber must be cut so as to provide the packing specified in table i (p. ). for zones f and g (fig. ) provision should be made for additional packing by increasing the length of all parts inches, and for zone c a correspondingly smaller case may be made. bottom of case inches (exact) by inches (exact). sides of case - / inches (exact) by - / inches (minimum). ends of case inches (exact) by - / inches (minimum). telescope cover of case inches by inches (minimum). if -inch boards (laying - / inches) are used, it is desirable to use boards for the height of the case; if -inch boards (laying - / inches) are used, will be sufficient. in figure only boards, laying - / inches, are shown, but in this case no allowance is made for a third hive body in the spring. for the telescoping part of the cover, -inch boards are used. as was pointed out earlier, the hives should rest throughout the summer on the floor of the winter case (fig. ). the plan of putting them in groups of four, two facing east and two west, has much to commend it during the entire year. the bottom therefore should be made strong enough to stand the weight of four colonies without getting out of shape. since this weight may be over , pounds in a good year, it is advised that the cleats on the bottom of the case be of by inch material. the supports of the bottom and the position of the cleats should be arranged so that the weight will not rest too largely on the boards, and the stones or bricks used should be directly under the center of the hives when they are in their summer position. obviously the hives will be moved to the outer corners of the bottom during the summer to facilitate handling. the sides of the case should be so constructed that the cleats which hold the boards together will serve to support the overlapping sides on the bottom. this is clearly shown in figure . there should also be a central cleat on the sides to prevent warping, for the cases must be rain-proof. if cleats are properly placed as shown in the illustration, they make the equivalent of a halved joint at the corners. the sides may be held in place and together by nails or by any sort of special hook. the entrances for the colonies during winter should be in the ends of the case, as shown. these will be discussed later. the top of the case may be made to telescope over the sides, as shown in figure , or it may be made in any other way desired so that it is adequate to keep the packing absolutely dry throughout the winter. the telescope cover has much to commend it, especially in the case with which the covers may be stored in summer. the top of the wooden cover should be covered with a roofing paper of first quality in order that the protection will last for years. if the telescope type of cover is used, no cleats other than the sides and ends of the telescoping portion will be needed. [illustration: fig. .--an apiary packed for winter in four-colony cases such as are used in the bureau of entomology apiary.] a tunnel (fig. , a) is also needed through which the bees may pass on warm days and to permit ventilation. this is best made of two boards, one the width of the packing (e. g., inches) and the other this width loss the extension of the bottom board. in most cases this extension is inches, so the lower board will be inches wide. these are held apart by strips three-eighths of an inch thick. this is the height of the usual hive entrance in winter, and the passage between the boards is therefore the same height as the hive entrance. in order that the tunnel may not get out of alignment, these strips are continued back, as shown in the figure, and these projections extend into the hive entrances at the corners. the arrangement for keeping alignment at the outer edge is discussed under "the entrance" (p. ). single or double cases. for those having only a few colonies, it is not always convenient to build cases for colonies in groups of four. it is not necessary to give dimensions in detail for those having a few colonies, however, for they will usually wish to use whatever they have at hand. it is often possible to arrange a heavy wooden box, such as those used for shipping dry goods (fig. ), so as to make a winter case for one colony which will answer every purpose. it is, of course, necessary that the salient feature of a good winter case be preserved. if the arrangement of the apiary makes it inconvenient to have the colonies in groups of four throughout the year, it is quite possible to make good cases for two colonies. anything other than the four-colony case, however, will probably cost more per colony, or if too many colonies are put into larger cases there may be trouble from other causes, as from drifting. [illustration: fig. .--an improvised winter case for one colony.] arrangement within the hive. capacity of the winter hive. as has been pointed out, bees need room for breeding in the fall and again in the spring. during the winter season there is no brood-rearing in normal colonies which are adequately protected, and room for breeding therefore is not essential during the winter. if the bees are to have room for the proper development of colony strength, however, they should have two hive bodies each of -frame langstroth size by about the beginning of april in most parts of the country, and earlier in the south. in order that it may be unnecessary to open colonies during a period of such unsettled weather as obtains at this season, it is advised that the room for breeding be provided in the fall and left with the bees all winter. to make this a safe procedure, it is necessary to provide more packing than would be necessary if the colony were provided with only enough room for the cluster and winter stores during the winter. it has been found desirable also to leave more stores with the bees than have been left by many beekeepers, and this is additional reason for the giving of more room during the winter. it is recommended, therefore, that in all parts of the united states colonies of full strength be wintered in two hive-bodies of -frame langstroth size. they should, of course, be provided with abundant protection and the entrances should be reduced. space above the frames. formerly it was commonly recommended that corn cobs, or other objects designed for the purpose, be placed above the top bars of the frames, and then that quilts be placed over these. the purpose of these objects, was to lift the quilts so that the bees could pass over the tops of the frames. in former years it was advised that holes be bored through the combs to permit passage from one space to the other. of late years these things have been abandoned, to a large degree, for it is known now that if bees are packed as they should be they may pass easily at all times to any part of the hive as need arises. it is often stated that bees die of starvation in the hives when there is abundant honey not many inches away from the cluster. this, of course, never happens in colonies that are well packed. in colonies that are adequately protected there is no better plan than simply to leave the regular wooden cover in place and sealed down by the bees. quilts directly over the frames are a nuisance at any time, and during the winter they are of no value for upward ventilation in well packed colonies and should be used only as a poor makeshift for good packing. upward ventilation. a common practice has been to remove the hive cover when the bees are packed for winter and to cover the frames with burlap or some such porous material, the object being to allow the escape of any moisture which may be generated within the hive during the winter. moisture is being generated constantly as the bees consume the honey stores, but if the bees are adequately packed the amount of moisture will be reduced to the minimum. the chief dancer, of course, is from moisture which condenses, and in an adequately packed hive there is no condensation. the temperature never goes low enough for water vapor to condense. therefore it is obvious that upward ventilation for the escape of moisture is never needed in hives that are packed as they should be. any beekeeper who has had trouble in the past with condensed moisture in the hives, or with wet packing over the porous tops, may be sure that he has not provided enough packing material. another thing is to be considered in connection with the subject of upward ventilation. the entrances to the hives must be greatly reduced in order that there may not be excessive loss of heat at that point. if upward ventilation is provided, there is opportunity for the wind to blow through even the small entrance, through the hive and out through the porous cover. this current of air will be slight but nevertheless it exists, and serves as an avenue for the escape of considerable heat. if insufficient packing is provided, upward ventilation becomes almost necessary, unless a large entrance is left. the beekeeper must see to it that he is providing adequate packing material before he gives up the upward ventilation, but he should not count his bees well packed for winter so long as he must provide for the escape of condensed moisture. the entrance. as has been pointed out, the entrances of hives must be greatly reduced during the winter in order that the efficacy of the bottom packing may be preserved. it is desirable, however, that provision be made for larger entrances during the early fall and again in the spring. to provide conditions suitable at all times while the packing cases are on, the bureau of entomology has adopted a type of entrance which to some extent has been used previously in the north. five / -inch anger holes are bored in the ends of the packing case at a height that will allow for the thickness of the case floor, the bottom packing, and the thickness of the bottom of the hive. this usually is a little over inches from the lower edge of the case ends. no alighting board should be placed at the outer entrance holes, as it is not needed and serves only to collect snow and ice. to prevent the tunnels from getting out of alignment at the outer edge, a peg of the diameter of the holes is inserted through the outer hole for each hive and into the tunnel (see fig. ). this peg is usually about - / inches long. this leaves four auger holes, each three-eighths of an inch in diameter, for the bees to use as an entrance during the fall and spring, and during the colder weather a piece of section material or a small board is tacked over three of the holes. (see fig. .) this gives in winter a single hole for an entrance, three-eighths of an inch in diameter. this provides a place for the bees to remove their dead, a place for flight on moderately warm days, and also provides adequate ventilation for the hive while the bees are confined without an opportunity for flight. however, the size of entrance should not be discussed without warning beekeepers that unless adequate packing is provided, such a small entrance may result in the death of the colony. furthermore, a poorly packed colony will not be able to carry out the bees as they die, and the death rate will be higher; and these things combined may result in an accumulation of dead bees at the entrance, which will serve to suffocate the remaining bees. a colony that is well packed, however, is able to remove all dead bees as fast as they die, and there will never be an accumulation on the floor of the hive. furthermore, a well-packed colony does not need so large an entrance for ventilation as does one that is not packed or which has not enough packing. if snow drifts over the small entrance here described, the beekeeper need have no anxiety, for the bees can still receive adequate ventilation. if a crust of ice closes the entrance it will be well to break it, but usually the escaping heat will melt this ice before any damage is done. [illustration: fig. .--map of the eastern united states indicating average date of first killing frost in autumn. on this the zones for winter packing are based. no packing is recommended in zones a and b.] winter schedule. great confusion has existed among beekeepers as to the right time to pack the bees for winter, and especially as to the right time to remove the packing in the spring. it is quite possible to give definite directions for both procedures and to place the recommendations on a firm foundation by basing them on weather phenomena. the maps (figs. and ), showing the time of the first average killing frost in the fall, serve as a basis for the recommendations for each of the zones into which the map of the eastern united states is divided. perhaps it will be a matter of surprise to beekeepers in parts of the south to see that, so far as the wintering of the bees is concerned, they are as far north as beekeepers who live many miles farther toward the pole. the lines on figure indicate the average dates of the first killing frost in the fall, and these dates, given at the ends of the heavy lines, are of direct value to the beekeeper as giving the proper time for putting on the winter cases. the average dates of the last killing frost in the spring do not show exactly the same lines on the maps, but the differences are not sufficiently great to justify the use of a separate map for this purpose. the authors have chosen therefore to divide the country into the zones indicated, and the recommendations given below apply to each of the zones shown. on account of the variations in elevation, it is impossible to carry these lines into the rocky mountain region, but as packing is just as necessary in the west as in the east, figure is inserted to indicate roughly the time for the putting on of the packing in the fall. the dates in this map are the average dates of the first killing frost. by consulting table i the beekeeper of the west may learn the time advised for the removal of the packing, by placing his locality in its proper zone, on the basis of the first killing frost. table i.--_dates for the packing and unpacking of been in the various parts of the united states, board on data furnished by the weather bureau for the average dates of the first and last killing frosts. the amount of packing recommended for each zone is included._ ------+-------------+-----------+----------------+----------------- | date for | date for | packing | zone.| packing. | unpacking.| recommended.[ ]| remarks. ------+-------------+-----------+----------------+----------------- a | ..... | ..... | ..... | none needed. b | ..... | ..... | ..... | do. c | november | march | - - | d | november | april | - - | e | october | may | - - | f | october | may | - - | g | september | june | - - | cellar wintering | | | | much safer. ------+-------------+-----------+----------------+----------------- [ ] in this column the first figure represents in inches the amount of packing needed below the bottom boards, the second the amount of side packing, and the last the amount needed on top. time for putting on the winter packing. frequently great loss of colony strength is due to delay in putting on the packing. perhaps this is the most common source of loss in outdoor wintering aside from that due to a failure to pack the bees at all. packing should not be deferred after the flowers furnishing the last honey are killed by frost. in case the late fall flowers furnish honey that is to be removed, then it is necessary to wait until nectar is no longer coming in before applying the packing, but it is indeed rare that the last honey should be taken away, and it is good beekeeping to apply the packing even before there is any frost at all. the determining factor is the necessity for handling the bees. if more stores must be given them or if some of the late honey is to be removed in order that it may be replaced by better honey or by sugar sirup, then handling of the bees after frost may be needed, but after the last essential handling it is much the best plan to pack the bees. in pints of the country where bees are wintered outdoors it is quite customary to delay packing until thanksgiving day, but this is too late by far except in the extreme south (zone c). it is safe, therefore, for the beekeeper to use the dates shown in figures and and the data given in table i as a guide to the time of packing. he may be assured that if he delays packing later than the dates shown therein the bees will suffer by a loss of colony strength and vitality at a season of the year when they can ill afford to be weakened by neglect. under no circumstances should packing be delayed more, than two weeks after the date given for each zone. further, if packing is delayed until after cold weather begins, the disturbance of the colony may induce the beginning of brood-rearing, find this in turn may result in the death of the colony. if by chance a colony has been left unpacked until after the bees have been confined by cold weather for three or four weeks, the packing may do more harm than good. time for the removal of packing. if bees are given the right amount of room, stores, and protection early in the fall, nothing that the beekeeper can do will benefit them until it is necessary to handle them because of preparations for swarming or because of the incoming nectar. of course if bees are well packed they get so strong in the spring that if crowded they begin preparations for swarming earlier than do colonies which have been neglected during the winter. by following the methods here described the season for swarm control is advanced, so that usually it is entirely passed before the honey-flow begins. in the region of washington it has been found best not to remove the packing until at least may . further south or in warmer regions it may be well to remove the packing earlier, but in localities such as new york or wisconsin (zone f) the packing should be left in place until at least may , and usually until june . obviously this will be impossible unless two hive bodies are left on the bees all winter, or unless more room is given in the early spring, before unpacking. it has been found that if the bees are allowed to remain in the cases until the dates named they may then be taken out ready for whatever nectar may come. by that time they should have frames of brood--far more than is found in the average colony throughout the country oven in the midst of the honey-flow. such colonies are so strong that if cooler weather comes after they are unpacked, as it sometimes does, they are not injured by it. of course the bees would be as well of even better off if the packing could be left on throughout the year, but as yet no practicable way has been devised for giving the bees enough packing during the winter and then leaving it on throughout the summer. the commercial double-walled hives which have been devised for this purpose are all too scant in packing material for good results, and none of them can be recommended. [illustration: fig. .--map of the western united states, showing variation in average date of first killing frost. for each locality the recommendations for packing and unpacking are the same as in corresponding zones in figure . the dryer atmosphere of most of the west does not diminish the need of packing. for localities where the first frost occurs after november no packing is recommended.] the dates given for the removal of packing in the spring follow approximately the average dates of the last killing frost in the spring for each locality. in case local conditions make the removal of the packing unnecessary as early as the dates indicated, it is entirely safe to leave the packing on until some manipulation makes it desirable to handle the combs, as this can not well be done while the hives are heavily packed. winter stores. in packing bees for winter two things require attention so far as stores are concerned, and one is as important as the other: ( ) there must be plenty of honey in the hive to last until the spring honey-flow, and ( ) the stores which will be used by the bees during the period of confinement in winter must be of the best quality and well ripened. it is, of course, possible to give the bees more honey or sugar sirup after spring opens, but this means that the colonies will need to be handled during this period, and this is not the best plan. it is commonly said among the best beekeepers that "the best time to do spring feeding is the fall before." the safest plan by all means is to allow each colony to have at least pounds of honey at the time the bees are packed. they should then be allowed to keep any honey which may come in later, and it will be adequately ripened if the colony is well packed. this will be small in extent if they are packed at the right time, and the bees will also have their stores replenished by small amounts of honey which come in during the early spring before they are unpacked. this amount of stores for winter will seem large to many beekeepers who have been in the habit of leaving loss, but the object of the plans herein set forth is to have much stronger colonies than are found in the average apiary in the spring, and the amount of stores mentioned may be needed. the only places where beekeepers might have some reason to reduce the amount of stores are locations where the honey granulates quickly, in which event it can not be extracted later. such honey, however, usually is as good for winter stores as if it were not granulated, and it may then be saved for stores the following winter. forty-five pounds of honey on the hive is a better investment for the beekeeper than money in the bank, and more beekeepers make mistakes in this regard than anywhere else in the work of the year. honey that is high in gums, as many of the honeys which come from various trees, is not good for winter stores. honeydew honey is still less desirable. when either is present it is best to remove it and either to give frames of good honey to take its place or to feed about pounds of good honey or sirup made of granulated sugar after all brood-rearing has ceased. honey or sugar sirup which is fed late is stored in the place where the last brood emerged; it is therefore the first of the stores that the bees use. as long as they are having good honey or sugar stores for winter use the condition known as dysentery will be warded off. then, later, when they have used up the good stores, the weather will permit frequent flights, and then the less satisfactory stores will do no harm. honeydew honeys usually may be detected by their bad taste, accompanied ordinarily by a dark, muddy appearance. in case of doubt as to the stores it is always safe to give good honey or sugar sirup. unfortunately it is true that many of the fall honeys are not of the best quality for winter use, and this, in part, accounts for the heavy losses of bees occurring regularly in some parts of the country. all the factors of good wintering are needed. one frequently encounters beekeepers who condemn winter packing, stating that they have tried it without success. the writers have met many such beekeepers, and many of them are good beekeepers in other respects. on careful inquiry it is learned that in all cases they have omitted some vitally important factor. the most common fault in winter packing is to leave the entrances of the hives wide open. this, of course, nullifies the benefit of the packing to a large degree, and one need not be surprised that these men do not find virtue in packing heavily. another common fault in packing is to omit the packing from the bottom. snow acts as an excellent insulation, but one can not be sure that there will be snow at just the right times, and it is therefore necessary, to insure good wintering, that good packing be placed on the bottoms. it is also common to face the hives to the south and then leave the fronts without packing, under the erroneous impression that since the heat from the sun will enter more readily, the colonies will be benefited more than they would be if they were heavily packed in front. to combat this view it should be necessary only to point out that the sun shines only a small fraction of the hours during winter. furthermore, any place through which heat may enter easily serves also as a place through which heat escapes. in certain well-known cases the other factors of good wintering, strong colonies and good stores, are so well provided that the loss from this lack of protection is not detected, yet it is certain that in any such method of wintering there is a great loss of bee vitality, and the bees are compelled to do more work in heat generation than would be the case were they well packed. it can not be stated too strongly that the right way to winter bees is to provide all the factors needed, and not to omit any of them simply because in most years the bees can get through without all dying when less help is given. the three things necessary for successful earing for bees from the time they are packed until they are unpacked in the late spring are ( ) plenty of protection, ( ) plenty of stores of good quality, and ( ) plenty of room for the building up of the colony strength in the spring. none of these may be omitted without reducing the colony strength in the spring, and, as every good beekeeper knows, it is the strong colonies which get the maximum crop. measures of success in wintering. it is often difficult for a beekeeper to know whether he is wintering his bees as well as he should, for he may not have been able to learn from reading or visiting other apiaries how well colonies may be brought through the winter. the writers therefore have attempted to give here a few measures which the beekeeper may apply to his apiary, that he may be able to decide whether his methods of wintering should be improved. . when bees are adequately packed and protected from the wind, they are able to push out the dead bees as they die in winter. there should never be an accumulation of dead bees on the bottom board. . a colony of full strength will have langstroth frames filled with brood by the time that the bees should be unpacked. the bees should not be taken from their cases until it is necessary to handle them, and if two hive bodies have been given each colony, unpacking may be deferred until time for the control of swarming or until the new honey is coming in freely. sometimes it even happens that colonies need a third hive as a swarm prevention measure before it is time to remove the packing, in which case it can be given and the packing replaced, at least around the sides of the third hive body. space for this is indicated in the dimensions given on page . . a colony is not of proper strength for winter unless it has between three and four frames of brood two months before the time for putting on packing. usually this will be six weeks before brood-rearing ceases. if there is less brood at that time it indicates either that the queen is not good or that the colony has been weakened from some other cause. if taken in time this condition may be remedied by adding brood or honey or by uniting. it is extravagant to attempt to winter weak colonies. . if a thermometer is inserted into the hive through the auger hole entrance at the time of the coldest weather in winter it should show a temperature above the freezing point. at no time should the temperature of any part of the hive go below freezing, and the point just within the entrance is the most convenient one at which to take the temperature readings. the lowest temperature obviously will be at this point. the president to the farmers of america. [extracts from president wilson's message to the farmers' conference at urbana, ill., january , .] the forces that fight for freedom, the freedom of men all over the world as well as our own, depend upon us in an extraordinary and unexpected degree for sustenance, for the supply of the materials by which men are to live and to fight, and it will be our glory when the war is over that we have supplied those materials and supplied them abundantly, and it will be all the more glory because in supplying them we have made our supreme effort and sacrifice. in the field of agriculture we have agencies and instrumentalities, fortunately, such as no other government in the world can show. the department of agriculture is undoubtedly the greatest practical and scientific agricultural organization in the world. its total annual budget of $ , , has been increased during the last four years more than per cent. it has a staff of , , including a large number of highly trained experts, and alongside of it stand the unique land-grant colleges, which are without example elsewhere, and the state and federal experiment stations. these colleges and experiment stations have a total endowment of plant and equipment of $ , , and an income or more than $ , , with , teachers, a resident student body of , , and a vast additional number receiving instructions at their homes. county agents, joint officers of the department of agriculture and of the colleges, are everywhere cooperating with the farmers and assisting them. the number of extension workers under the smith-lever act and under the recent emergency legislation has grown to , men and women working regularly in the various communities and taking to the farmer the latest scientific and practical information. alongside these great public agencies stand the very effective voluntary organizations among the farmers themselves which are more and more learning the best methods of cooperation and the best methods of putting to practical use the assistance derived from governmental sources. the banking legislation of the last two or three years has given the farmers access to the great lendable capital of the country, and it has become the duly both of the men in charge of the federal reserve banking system and of the farm loan banking system to see to it that the farmers obtain the credit, both short term and long term, to which they are entitled not only, but which it is imperatively necessary should be extended to them if the present tasks of the country are to be adequately performed. both by direct purchase of nitrates and by the establishment of plants to produce nitrates, the government is doing its utmost to assist in the problem of fertilization. the department of agriculture and other agencies are actively assisting the farmers to locate, safeguard, and secure at cost an adequate supply of sound seed. the farmers of this country are as efficient as any other farmers in the world. they do not produce more per acre than the farmers in europe. it is not necessary that they should do so. it would perhaps be bad economy for them to attempt it. but they do produce by two to three or four times more per man, per unit of labor and capital, than the farmers of any european country. they are more alert and use more labor-saving devices than any other farmers, in the world. and their response to the demands of the present emergency has been in every way remarkable. last spring their planting exceeded by , , acres the largest planting of any previous year, and the yields from the crops were record-breaking yields. in the fall of a wheat acreage of , , was planted, which was , , larger than for any preceding year, , , greater than the next largest, and , , greater than the preceding five-year average. but i ought to say to you that it is not only necessary that these achievements should be repeated, but that they should be exceeded. i know what this advice involves. it involves not only labor but sacrifice, the painstaking application of every hit of scientific knowledge and every tested practice that is available. it means the utmost economy, even to the point where the pinch comes. it means the kind of concentration and self-sacrifice which is involved in the field of battle itself, where the object always looms greater than the individual. and yet the government will help and help in every way that it is possible. it was farmers from whom came the first shots at lexington, that set aflame the revolution that made america free. i hope and believe that the farmers of america will willingly and conspicuously stand by to win this war also. the toil, the intelligence, the energy, the foresight, the self-sacrifice and devotion of the farmers of america will, i believe, bring to a triumphant conclusion this great last war for the emancipation of men from the control of arbitrary government and the selfishness of class legislation and control, and then, when the end has come, we may look each other in the face and be glad that we are americans and have had the privilege to play such a part. the business of agriculture. [extracts from addresses.] the next great factor to enlist for the betterment of agriculture and rural life in this nation is the business man of the town and the city. he has not always been alive to his obligations. he has contented himself, in too many instances, with plans to secure profit in agricultural trade, instead of sympathetically and eagerly planning constructive assistance. this duty, pressing in peace time, is of the most urgent and impelling character in this crisis; and i appeal to the bankers and business men to see that they omit no effort to familiarize themselves with the agencies serving to aid the farmers and to promote wise plans to secure the necessary results. d. f. houston, secretary of agriculture. in the interest of our national development at all times and in the interest of war efficiency just now our agriculture must be well maintained. it should be remembered that the agricultural unit is a small unit. there are , , farms in this country, each an individual unit. it is to the interest of persons who do not live on farms, even more than to the interest of those who do live on farms, that production shall be kept up. this means that all people, not farmers alone, but those who live in cities as well as the farmers, are interested in experimental and educational activities along agricultural lines as conducted by the federal government and the states. these efforts should be liberally supported. r. a. pearson, assistant secretary of agriculture. in a time like this no man has a moral right, whatever his fortune may be, to employ another man to render any service, of mere comfort or convenience. when the finest young men of the united states are in france digging ditches, sawing lumber, laying rails, and playing with death, and when the finest young women of the united states are scrubbing floors in hospitals, it is a sin that almost approaches the unpardonable offense against civilization for any man or women in the united states to engage in a wasteful or unnecessary service. clarence ousley, assistant secretary of agriculture. beekeeping in wartimes. it is imperative that the sugar crop of the united states be increased, and every supply of supplemental sweet should be augmented to the greatest possible extent. honey is one of the best of these and its production may be increased without great effort. the supply of nectar from which the bees make honey is bountiful and the only limitation to honey production is whether the price obtainable for the honey justifies the labor of the beekeeper. there is no question of this in wartimes. the recent demand for honey for export has been greater than ever before and the home demand has also greatly increased. because of the shortage of sugar, all forms of supplemental sweets are being utilized and none of these appeals to the tastes of the consuming public more strongly than does honey. this increased demand has raised the price of honey and it is therefore a paying business to produce it to meet this need, in addition to the fact that the beekeeper may feel that he is materially assisting in the food crisis of the nation. it is to be expected that even after the war is over this demand for honey will not cease, for many people are eating honey now who were not familiar with its delicious qualities, and they will not forget how good it is. in the production of honey, it is of the first importance that the colonies of bees be kept strong, especially that they be strong before the beginning of the main honey-flows of the early summer. to bring about this essential condition, the most important step is the proper wintering of the bees, and this bulletin has been prepared that beekeepers throughout the country may be able to get their bees through the winter without the great loss of colonies and reduction in strength of those which still live which have been so common in the past. the proper preparation of the bees for winter now becomes not only a patriotic duty, but it is good business. keep more bees. keep bees better * * * * * transcriber notes illustrations moved so as to prevent splitting paragraphs. by the internet archive. transcriber note text emphasis is denoted as: _italics_ and =bold=. poison-_ivy_ poison-_oak_ and poison _sumac_ identification precautions eradication farmers' bulletin no. u. s. department of agriculture poison-ivy, poison-oak, and poison sumac remind most people of painful experiences to be avoided, yet many do not know any one of the offending plants or their equally poisonous relatives. learning to recognize them on sight is relatively easy, especially by examining the distinctive identifying characters described in the pictures and legends of this bulletin. there is then a good chance to avoid them or, if one must work among them, to take preventive measures to escape poisoning. these plants are very common throughout the united states. they are found in fields and woods, along fence rows, rock walls, and hedges, in lawns and gardens, and even sometimes vining on houses. usually in any one locality it is necessary to be certain of the identity of only two or three of them. maps show at a glance where they are likely to be found. frequent observation and recognition of the plants as they are encountered almost daily is the best way to become poison-oak or poison-ivy conscious. nonpoisonous sumacs are easily distinguished from the poisonous species by the seed heads and leaves. the old proverb, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," is good advice to everyone, particularly as regards ivy-poisoning. previous escape is not proof of immunity when conditions are right, and after poisoning occurs there is no quick cure known. some relief may be obtained and recovery hastened by use of some of the tested remedies. in case of severe poisoning a physician should be consulted. poison-ivy and other poisonous plants growing in grounds frequented by people should be eradicated. in some places this can be done by careful grubbing. in others weed-killing chemicals may be better and more certainly would avert poisoning for most of us. this bulletin supersedes farmers' bulletin , poison ivy and poison sumac and their eradication. washington, d. c. issued august poison-ivy, poison-oak, and poison sumac: identification, precautions, eradication by donald m. crooks, _principal horticulturist, division of tobacco, medicinal, and special crops_, and leonard w. kephart, _senior agronomist, division of cereal crops and diseases, bureau of plant industry, soils and agricultural engineering, agricultural research administration_ contents page a widespread menace to health forms of poison-ivy and poison-oak common poison-ivy oakleaf poison-ivy western poison-oak poison sumac confusion of poisonous and harmless sumacs introduced poisonous sumac and related species poisoning precautions against poisoning treatment for poisoning eradication of plants chemical weed killers eradication by mechanical means a widespread menace to health every year sees many adults, and especially children, accidentally poisoned from contact with plants that they did not know were harmful. had the sufferers known how to detect poisonous plants they could have avoided them and escaped the painful experience of severe skin inflammations and water blisters. very few persons have a sufficient degree of immunity to protect them from poisonous plants, and many do not recognize them in the various forms that they assume in different parts of the country. one or more kinds of poison-ivy--common poison-ivy, oakleaf poison-ivy, and western poison-oak--occur in abundance in almost every part of the united states. poison sumac is of more limited distribution and occurs chiefly east of the mississippi river, usually in swampy regions. poisoning by these plants is largely preventable. a knowledge sufficient to identify them in their various forms is easily gained by anyone who will make a study of pictures and general descriptions and train himself by a little diligent practice to observe the plants in his locality. it is important to become poison-oak or poison-ivy conscious. this can be accomplished only by learning to know the plants by repeated experience in observing them in their various forms. persons who learn both to know and to avoid the plants can save themselves much inconvenience and discomfort. the simple means of learning to recognize them will pay big dividends. it is the first step to the prevention of poisoning and to the eradication of the pests from private grounds and public places. the most effective method of prevention is to eradicate the plants, and wherever possible this should be done. they should not be allowed to grow in lawns or gardens, with ornamental shrubbery, or on houses. communities should not countenance the growth of poison-ivy or poison-oak in school grounds, on public roadways, or in parks, especially those frequented by children. the cost of medical aid for one season in treating pupils using an ivy-infested schoolyard is likely to be more than that of eradicating the plants, to say nothing of the suffering and inconvenience they may cause. forms of poison-ivy and poison-oak poison-ivy and poison-oak are known by a number of local names, and several different kinds of plants are called by these names. the plants exhibit a good deal of variation throughout the united states, so much so that even technical botanists cannot agree on the number of species and names that should be applied to them. they grow in the form of ( ) woody vines attached to trees or objects for support, ( ) trailing shrubs mostly on the ground, or ( ) erect woody shrubs entirely without support. they may flourish in the deep woods, where soil moisture is plentiful, or they may be found in very dry soil on the most exposed hillsides. the plants are most frequently abundant along old fence rows and edges of paths and roadways, and they ramble over rock walls and climb posts or trees to considerable heights. they often grow with other shrubs or vines in such ways as to escape notice. the leaf forms among plants or even on the same plant are as variable as the habit of growth; however, the leaves always consist of three leaflets. the old saying, "leaflets three, let it be," is a reminder of this consistent leaf character but may lead to undue suspicion of some harmless plant. only one three-parted leaf leads off from each node on the stem. the leaves never occur in pairs along the stem. the wide range in habit of growth of plants and leaf types may be noted from a glance at the several pictures of plants and leaves. the flowers and fruit are always in clusters on slender stems that originate in the axis of the leaves along the side of the smaller branches. the fruits usually have a white, waxy appearance and ordinarily are not hairy, but may be so in some forms. the plants do not always flower and bear fruit. the white or cream-colored clusters of fruit, when they occur, are significant identifying characters, especially at the season after the leaves have fallen. for convenience, these plants are discussed in this bulletin under three divisions: ( ) common poison-ivy, ( ) oakleaf poison-ivy, and ( ) western poison-oak. a technical botanist would recognize many species of plants in what are included as the common poison-ivy, and anyone will recognize that various forms occur within this grouping. common poison-ivy some form of the common poison-ivy may be found in almost every part of the country but the extreme west. the shaded area on the map in figure shows the extensive range where some form of poison-ivy is likely to be found. the plant is known by various local names--poison-ivy, threeleaf ivy, poison creeper, climbing sumac, poison-oak, markweed, piery, and mercury. the most widespread form is classified by botanists under the botanical name of _rhus radicans_ or varieties of it; however, many of the variations are sometimes given other botanical names. the common poison-ivy may be considered as a vine in its most typical growth habit. _figure ._--the shaded part shows the extensive area where some form of the common poison-ivy is likely to be found. other forms also may occur in parts of the same region. _figure ._--large poison-ivy vine growing on a tree for support. this is the usual form of the common poison-ivy in wooded areas. _figure ._--_a_, common poison-ivy growing in a hedge and on a shade tree on the edge of a lawn. _b_, typical vine, showing leaves and the roots that attach it to the tree. the vining type most often occurs in wooded areas (fig. ), where it depends upon trees for support. vines often grow for many years, becoming several inches in diameter and quite woody. slender vines may run along the ground, mixed with shrubbery, or take support from a large or small tree. that a plant growing along the edge of a lawn and into the shrubbery may be quite inconspicuous as compared with a vine climbing on a lawn tree is shown in figure . the vine readily develops roots when in contact with the ground or with any object that will support it. when the vines grow on trees these aerial roots attach the vine securely ( fig. . b). a rank growth of these roots often causes the vines on trees to have the general appearance of a "fuzzy" rope, which sometimes serves a good purpose for identification. the vines and roots apparently do not cause injury to the tree except where growth may be sufficient to cover the supporting plant and exclude sunlight or break the plant from excessive weight. the vining nature of the plant makes it well adapted to climbing over stone walls or on brick and stone houses. the fact that poison-ivy often becomes mixed in with ornamental shrubbery and vines often results in its cultivation as an ornamental vine by people who do not recognize the plant. an ivy plant growing on a house, as is shown in figure , is often prized by an unsuspecting owner. the vine is attractive and quite effective as an ornamental, but such use should not be tolerated, as it most certainly will result in cases of accidental poisoning and serve as propagating stock for more poison-ivy in the vicinity. _figure ._--common poison-ivy growing on side of house with ornamental shrubs. this accidental or intentional use of the attractive vine may lead to many cases of accidental poisoning. _figure ._--common poison-ivy growing along fence row. in open sunlight and over some large areas it is more of a shrub than a vine. _figure ._--common poison-ivy growing on side of house with ornamental shrubs. this accidental or intentional use of the attractive vine may lead to many cases of accidental poisoning. when poison-ivy becomes mixed in with other vines it is quite difficult to detect except by one who has carefully trained himself in observing and recognizing the plant. also, some other vines and young plants resemble poison-ivy in many respects. the virginia creeper and some forms of the boston ivy are often confused with it. the virginia creeper can always be recognized by its five leaflets radiating from one point of attachment, as compared with the three leaflets of poison-ivy arranged in the same manner. the boston ivy with three leaflets is sometimes difficult to detect; however, as a rule not all the leaves on the plant will be divided into three leaflets. by studying a large number of the leaves it is usually possible to detect on every boston ivy plant some leaves that have only one deeply lobed blade or leaflet, while the poison-ivy always has the three leaflets. a number of other plants are easily confused with poison-ivy. no specific rule can be observed that will easily rule out all possibility of confusion. the best policy is to learn through practiced observation to know poison-ivy on sight and then to make the determination from observation of all parts of the plant, and never to judge from a single leaf or part. _figure ._--leaves of common poison-ivy, about half natural size. these may occur on the same or different plants: _a_, _b_, _c_ and _f_, less common; _d_, with even margins, the most common and generally recognized form; _e_, with lobed margins, nearly nearly as often seen as the shape in _d_. _figure ._--common poison-ivy vine with clusters of flowers in the axis of each leaf. common poison-ivy in full sunlight along fence rows or in open fields grows more in the form of a shrub than a vine. in some localities the common form is a low-growing shrub from to inches in height. this form, as well as the vining type, usually has a rather extensive horizontal system of rootstocks or stems at or just below the ground level. the vining form under some conditions later becomes a shrub. plants of this type are shown in figure , where the vine, supported on the fence, has extended upright stems that are shrublike. in some localities the growth form over a wide range is consistently either a vine or a shrub type, while in others what seems to be the same species may produce either vines or shrubs. the leaves of the common poison-ivy are extremely variable, the three leaflets being the only constant character. it is impossible to describe the great range of variation in the shape or lobing of the leaflets. a study of the leaf patterns, especially the six shown in figure , will give a fair range of types, although other forms may be found. one plant may have a large variety of forms of leaves or it may have all leaves of about the same general character. the most common type of leaf having leaflets with even margins is shown in figure , _d_, and one with leaflets having slightly lobed margins is shown in figure , _e_. the other forms shown in figure are not quite so widespread, but may be the usual type throughout some areas. _figure ._--common poison-ivy, about natural size: _a_, flowers; _b_, mature fruit. most of the vines or shrubs of poison-ivy produce some flowers that are always in clusters arising on the side of the stem immediately above a leaf. the flowers are rather inconspicuous among the leaves, as may be noted in figure , but they are in quite distinct clusters, as shown in figure , _a_. frequently the flowers do not develop or are abortive and no fruit is produced. when fruits do develop they serve as a positive way of identifying the plant. the berries are not easily confused with the fruits of other plants. they are white and waxy in appearance and have rather distinct lines marking the outer surface, as the segments appear in a peeled orange. these lines may be noted in figure , _b_, which shows dense clusters of mature fruit about natural size. some forms of the poison-ivy have the fruit covered with fine hair, giving it a kind of downy appearance; however, in the more common form the fruits are entirely smooth. the fruit is especially helpful in identifying plants late in fall, in winter, and early in spring, when the leaves are not present. _figure ._--the shaded area is the region where the eastern oakleaf form of poison-ivy is likely to occur. other forms also may be in the same region. oakleaf poison-ivy of the several kinds of poison-ivy, the oakleaf form occurring in the eastern and southern states is more distinctive than some other types. some people know it as oakleaf ivy while others call it poison-oak, a name more commonly used for the western species discussed later. botanists have not always agreed upon the scientific name to be applied to this form; however, they now use the name _rhus toxicodendron_. some botanists have used the latin names _r. quercifolia_, while others used the name _toxicodendron quercifolium_, both of which are more descriptive of the oakleaf form, as the generic name of the oak is _quercus_. the area where the oakleaf form may occur, from new jersey to texas, is outlined in the map shown in figure . the common poison-ivy also occurs in some form throughout many parts of this same area. the oakleaf poison-ivy usually does not climb as a vine, but occurs as a low-growing shrub. stems are usually upright in their general growth habit, as they appear in figure . the shrubs usually have rather slender branches, often covered with a fine pubescence that gives the plant a kind of downy appearance. the leaflets occur in threes, as in other ivy, but are lobed, somewhat on the general plan of the leaves of some kinds of oak. the middle leaflet usually is lobed somewhat alike on both margins and very much resembles a small oak leaf, while the two lateral leaflets are often irregularly lobed. the leaves shown in figure are a common form. the lighter color on the under side of one of the leaves (fig. , _a_) is due to the pubescence, or fine hairs, on the surface. the range in size of leaves varies considerably, even on the same plant; the leaf shown in figure , _b_, however, is about natural size. the fruit of oakleaf poison-ivy has the same general appearance as the fruit of common poison-ivy shown in figure , although the individual fruits and stems are often pubescent, while most of the other forms have a waxy, smooth, cream-colored fruit. _figure ._--eastern oakleaf poison-ivy shrub. the upright growth as a low shrub is common. the three parts of each leaf somewhat resembles an oak leaf. the gall formations that cause wartlike protuberances are common on all species. _figure ._--eastern oakleaf poison-ivy: _a_, leaves, showing upper deep green surface and lower lighter colored surface. _b_, single leaf, about natural size. the terminal leaflet more nearly resembles an oak leaf than the two lateral leaflets. western poison-oak the western poison-oak (_rhus diversiloba_) of the pacific coast states is usually known as poison-oak, but is occasionally referred to as poison-ivy or yeara. it is likely to be found in the region designated by shading in figure , and from central oregon northward through washington may be growing intermixed with common poison-ivy. the term "poison-oak" is a misnomer, as this species is in no way related to the oak but is related to poison-ivy. anyone familiar with either of these plants in their several forms will likely recognize the other, both as plants to be avoided. _figure ._--the shaded area is the region where the western poison-oak is likely to occur. other forms may also be in the same region. the most common growth habit of the western poison-oak is in the form of a rank upright shrub with many small woody stems rising from the ground. it frequently grows in great abundance along roadsides (see fig. ) and in uncultivated fields or on abandoned land. sometimes western poison-oak attaches itself to upright objects for support and takes more or less the form of a vine. a plant of this type is shown in figure , where it is growing on a telephone pole by the roadside. it may be noted even in this case that the tendency is for individual branches to continue an upright growth rather than become entirely dependent upon other objects for support. in some areas, especially in woodland, poison-oak may grow principally as a vine. areas have been noted where to percent of the trees leaves and flowers. in a wooded area support vines running more than or feet in height, although the most common form of the plant is the shrub. _figure ._--western poison-oak on a telephone pole. this vine form is not uncommon, especially on trees in woods. _figure ._--western poison-oak: upright shrub, with fruit, growing in open pasture field. _figure ._--western poison-oak, showing common leaf types: _a_, the more common leaves with irregular margins; _b_, less typical, although not uncommon, leaves with even margins. _figure ._--western poison-oak growing alongside roadside. this rank shrubby growth is typical for most localities. _figure ._--western poison-oak, showing common leaf types: _a_, leaves with thick leathery appearance; _b_, leaves irregular in shape with much-curled or distorted surfaces; _c_, branch, with leaves and flowers. in open pasture fields western poison-oak usually grows in spreading clumps from a few feet to several feet tall (figs. and ). where it develops extensively it greatly reduces the area for grazing and becomes a serious menace to most people who frequent the area or attend cattle that come in contact with the plants while grazing. _figure ._--western poison-oak: _a_, top of shrub, with leaves and fruit; _b_, clusters of fruit after leaves have fallen. low-growing plants, especially those exposed to full sunlight, are often quite woody and show no tendency for vining. low-growing plants with woody stems are common in pasture areas or along roadsides. livestock in grazing do not invade the poison-ivy shrub, and as a rule these plants continue to spread both by root-stock and seed. as in other ivy the leaves consist of three leaflets with much irregularity in the manner of lobing, especially of the two lateral leaflets. the latin name _dirersiloba_ refers to the irregularity occurring in the shapes of the leaves on different plants and on the same plant or even irregularity in the lobing of leaflets of the same leaf. sometimes lobes occur on both sides of a leaflet, thus giving it somewhat the semblance of an oak leaf. the middle or terminal leaflet is more likely to be lobed on both sides and resembles an oak leaf more than the other two. a study of the leaves shown in figures and shows the variation in lobing. some plants may have leaflets with an even margin and no lobing whatsoever, as those in figure , _b_. the surface of the leaves is usually glossy and uneven, so that they have a thick leathery appearance. _figure ._--a large poison sumac shrub about feet tall, growing on the edge of a swamp. the flowers are borne in clusters on slender stems diverging from the axis of the leaf, as may be noted in figure , _c_. the individual flowers are greenish white and about one-fourth inch across. the cluster of flowers matures into greenish or creamy-white berrylike fruits about mid-october. these are about the size of small currants and are much like other poison-ivy fruits, having a smooth greenish-white glossy surface striped somewhat like the segments of a peeled orange. many plants bear no fruit, although others produce it in abundance, as shown in figure , _a_. the fruits are not always spherical, but sometimes have a somewhat flattened appearance, as is shown in figure , _b_. they remain on the plants throughout fall and winter and are quite helpful in identifying poison-oak in seasons after the leaves have fallen. _figure ._--the shaded area shows the region where poison sumac is likely to occur in bogs or swamps, although isolated plants are sometimes found in dry soil. poison sumac poison sumac grows as a coarse woody shrub or small tree (fig. ) and never in the vinelike form of its poison-ivy relatives. this plant is known also as swamp sumac, poison elder, poison ash, poison dogwood, and thunderwood. it does not have variable forms, such as occur in poison-oak or poison-ivy, and botanists agree to call it _rhus vernix_. the area in the eastern states where it is likely to be found is chiefly eastward from eastern minnesota, northeastern illinois, indiana, central kentucky and tennessee, and southeastern texas, as shown on the shaded area of the map, figure . this shrub is usually associated with swamps and bogs, and the most typical growth occurs along the margin of an area of wet acid soil. _figure ._--small branch of poison sumac with six compound leaves. _figure ._--fruit of poison sumac, one-third natural size. these fruits somewhat resemble those of poison-ivy. they are always on drooping slender stems attached at the side of the small branches and are never terminal as in the species of sumac that are not poisonous. the plants range in height from or feet to small trees that may attain a height of feet. the poison sumac shrub shown in figure is growing on the edge of a swamp and is quite typical of the general appearance of the larger shrubs, which approach a treelike form. as a rule the shrubs do not have a symmetrical upright treelike appearance. they are more or less inclined to lean and have branched stems with about the same diameter from the ground level to the middle height of the shrub. occasional isolated plants are found outside of swampy regions. apparently these plants are started from seed distributed by birds. the plants in dry soil usually do not become more than a few feet tall. they are likely to cause poisoning to unsuspecting individuals, as single isolated plants are not readily recognized, especially out of their usual region. the leaves of the poison sumac are divided into to leaflets, arranged in pairs with a single leaflet at the end of the midrib (fig. ). _figure ._--_a_, smooth sumac and dwarf sumac growing in a mixed stand. these plants are not poisonous. _b_, terminal fruiting spike of smooth sumac, about one-seventh natural size. this form of terminal fruiting spike is typical of all the species of sumac that are not poisonous. the leaflets are an elongated oval shape without teeth or serrations on the margins. they are to inches long and to inches wide, with a smooth velvetlike texture and bright orange color when they first appear in spring. later they become dark green and glossy on the upper surface and pale green on the lower and have scarlet midribs. early in fall they turn to a brilliant red-orange or russet shade. the small yellowish-green flowers are borne in clusters in slender stems arising from the axis of leaves along the smaller branches. the slender clusters of flowers have much the general appearance of the poison-ivy flower, but hang in much longer clusters. the flowers mature into ivory-white or green-colored fruits resembling those of poison-oak or poison-ivy, except that they are usually less compact and hang in loose clusters that may be to inches in length (fig. ). confusion of poisonous and harmless sumacs because of the same general appearance of several common species of sumac and the poison sumac, considerable confusion has occurred as to which one is poisonous. throughout most of the range where poison sumac grows, three other species are the only ones that are likely to be confused. these are the smooth sumac (_rhus glabra_), staghorn sumac (_r. typhina_), and dwarf sumac (_r. copallina_). all the nonpoisonous species have red fruits that together form a distinctive terminal seed head, as shown in figure . these are easily distinguished from the slender hanging clusters of white fruit of the poison sumac, as shown in figure . sometimes more than one species of the harmless sumac grow together, as shown in figure , _a_. when seed heads or flower heads occur on the plants it is easy to distinguish the poisonous from the harmless plants; however, in many clumps of either kind, flowers or fruit may not develop. fortunately, the leaves have some rather distinct characteristics, which can be easily observed. figure shows leaves of the three harmless species as compared with poison sumac. the leaves of the smooth sumac (fig. , _a_) and of the staghorn sumac (fig. , _b_) have many leaflets, which are slender lance-shaped with a toothed margin. in these species there are usually more than leaflets. the leaves of the dwarf sumac (fig. , _c_) and the poison sumac (fig. , _d_) have fewer leaflets, and these are more oval-shaped, with smooth or even margins. the dwarf sumac, however, may be readily distinguished from the poisonous sumac by the winged midrib of the leaf (fig. , _e_). there is considerable variation in the size of the wing margin along the midrib, which in some cases may be reduced almost to a line between the leaflets. the winged midrib is more prominent near the terminal leaflet and can always be detected. the midrib of the poison sumac is never winged. a little study of the fruit and the leaf characteristics of the poisonous and harmless species will make it possible to avoid the poisonous one and utilize the other, which has considerable value as an ornamental plant, as a source of commercial tannin, and for controlling erosion on waste hillsides. _figure ._--leaves of species of sumac that are often confused: _a_, smooth sumac; _b_, staghorn sumac; _c_, dwarf sumac; _d_, poison sumac; _e_, enlarged portion of dwarf sumac leaf from _c_, showing the wing margin of the midrib. poison sumac does not have the winged midrib. introduced poisonous sumac and related species the small japanese lacquer-tree, although uncommon in the united states, is an introduced species of sumac (_rhus verniciflua_) that is quite similar to the native poison sumac. it is native to japan and china and is the source of japanese black lacquer. cases of poisoning hare been traced to contact with lacquered articles. because of its poisonous properties, this tree should never be planted. a native shrub or small tree called poison-wood, doctor gum, or coral sumac is commonly found in the pinelands and hummocks of extreme southern florida, the keys, and the west indies. it is much like the poison sumac and closely related to it. most botanists name it _metopium toxiferum_, although previously it was named _rhus metopium_, and sometimes metopium is used as its common name. the small tree, or shrub, has the same general appearance as poison sumac. the leaves have the same general appearance, except that there are usually only three to seven leaflets, which are more rounded. the fruits are borne in clusters in the same manner as those of poison sumac (fig. ), but individual fruits are two or three times as large and orange-colored. all parts of the plant are exceedingly poisonous to the touch and cause the same kind of skin irritation as poison-ivy or poison sumac. poisoning through experience, many people know that they are susceptible to poisoning by poison-ivy, poison-oak, or poison sumac, while some others either have escaped contamination or have a certain degree of immunity. the extent of immunity appears only relative, and absolute immunity to the toxic principle apparently does not exist. persons who have shown a degree of immunity upon repeated contact with the plants may develop poisoning on subsequent exposure. the skin irritant of poison-ivy, poison-oak, and poison sumac is the same toxic agent. it is a nonvolatile phenolic substance called urushiol and is found in all parts of the plant, including roots and fruit. it occurs in great abundance in the plant sap. the danger of poisoning is greatest in spring and summer, when the sap is abundant, and least late in fall or in winter. poisoning is usually caused by contact with some part of the plant. a very small quantity of the poisonous substance is capable of producing severe inflammation of the skin and can easily be transferred from one object to another. clothing may become contaminated and is often a source of such prolonged infection that it is likely to be judged as a case of poisoning difficult to cure. dogs and cats frequently touch the plants and transmit the poison to unsuspecting persons. the poison may remain on the fur of animals for a considerable period after they have walked or run through poison-ivy plants. smoke from burning plants will carry the toxin and has been reported to cause severe cases of poisoning. cases of poisoning of children from eating the fruit have been reported. a local belief that eating a few leaves of these plants will develop immunity in the individual is unfounded. it never should be attempted. no part of the plant should ever be taken internally, as it is a violent irritant and poisonous to man. cattle, horses, sheep, hogs, and other livestock apparently do not suffer from skin irritation caused by these plants, although they have been observed to graze upon the foliage occasionally. bees collect honey from the flowers, though no reports are on record of any ill effects from the use of the honey. the time between contamination of the skin and the first symptoms varies greatly with individuals and probably with conditions. the first symptoms of itching or burning sensation may develop in a few hours or after days or even more. the delay in development of symptoms is often confusing in attempting to determine the time or location when contamination occurred. the itching sensation and subsequent inflammation, which usually develops into water blisters under the skin, may continue for several days from a single contamination. persistence of symptoms over a long period is likely to be due to new contacts with plants or with previously contaminated clothing or animals. severe infection may produce more serious symptoms, which result in much pain through abscesses, enlarged glands, fever, or complicated constitutional malfunction. secondary infections are always a possibility in any break in the skin, such as is produced by breaking vesicles that have formed as large water blisters. precautions against poisoning the most effective way to prevent poisoning from the plants is to avoid contact with them. if it is necessary to work among them, some measure of prevention can be gained by wearing protective clothing, but it is necessary to remember that the active poisonous principle can easily be transferred. some protection also may be obtained in advance by the use of protective creams or lotions. they prevent the poison from touching the skin, or make the active principle easily removed, or neutralize it to a certain degree. various formulas containing ferric chloride and glycerin have been used more or less effectively as a preventive measure, although there may be some danger of pigmentation of the skin from the ferric chloride. a common formula is ferric chloride, parts; glycerin, parts; alcohol, parts; water. parts. a lotion of this formula applied to the exposed skin prior to contact with poisonous plants gives effective protection for many people. it is especially effective if followed by thorough washing with soap and water. such washing, even if no protective lotion has been used, is often effective in preventing poisoning. proper precaution should be taken by repeated lathering with a strong alkali soap, followed by thorough rinsing and repeating the process several times. the water should be frequently changed, and a shower or flowing water bath is preferable. the soap probably only emulsifies the active principle, and thorough rinsing is necessary to avoid spreading the poison to other parts of the body. the united states public health service reports successful chemical protection against ivy poisoning by use of an oxidizing agent--sodium perborate prepared and used fresh as an ointment. following is a formula given for the ointment: cetyl alcohol, . percent; stearyl alcohol, . ; ceresin, . ; castor oil. . ; mineral oil, . ; duponol wa pure, . ; sodium perborate. . ; and boric acid, . percent. a more recent less oily formula recommended for both mechanical and chemical protection is given as follows: shellac, parts; isopropanol, ; linseed oil, ; titanium oxide, ; sodium perborate, ; talcum, ; and carbitol, parts. sometimes cottonseed oil, olive oil, or petrolatum is applied as a protective ointment when contamination is anticipated. later the oil must be completely removed by repeated washing. clothing, wearing apparel, and tools that have been contaminated are often difficult to handle without further danger of poisoning. some who are more or less immune to poisoning often contaminate others by carelessness. contamination on automobile door handles or on a steering wheel after a trip to the woods often causes prolonged cases of poisoning of persons who have not been near the plants. one of the most effective ways for decontaminating articles is by thorough washing through several changes of strong soap and water. contaminated clothing should not be worn again until thoroughly washed. it should not be washed with other clothes, and care should be taken to rinse thoroughly any implements used in washing. dogs and cats can be decontaminated in the same manner; precaution should be taken, however, to avoid being poisoned in doing the washing. it is likely that most "dry cleaning" processes will remove any contaminant; but there is always danger that clothing sent to commercial cleaners may cause poisoning to unsuspecting employees. certain prophylactic inoculations for the prevention of ivy poisoning have been developed and used with limited success; such treatment, however, should be administered by a physician only. the theory that eating a few leaves of these poisonous plants will confer immunity is without foundation; it should not be attempted even as an experiment, because very serious poisoning is likely to result. treatment for poisoning[ ] [ ] for a fuller description of treatments for poisoning see: united states public health service, ivy and sumac poisoning. pub. health rpts. sup. (rev.), pp., . for sale by the superintendent of documents, government printing office, washington , d. c. price, cents. there seems to be no absolute quick cure for ivy poisoning for all individuals, even though many studies have been made to devise effective remedies. remedies may be helpful in removing the poisonous principle or rendering it inactive and for giving some relief from the irritation. mild poisoning usually subsides within a few days, but if the inflammation is severe or extensive a physician should be consulted. self-treatment also has other dangers, as the symptoms of ivy poisoning may be confused with those of other conditions and harm may be done by improper treatment. in all cases the safest procedure is to consult a physician. some tried remedies are effective on certain individuals and ineffective on others. sometimes a person will find one remedy effective and later, to his surprise, get very little relief from it. a large number of patent medicine remedies of doubtful value are commonly offered for sale. the following are more or less standard measures that have been advocated by different individuals and found helpful in certain cases. the united states public health service recommends a percent alcoholic solution of tannic acid applied as a lotion. it is stated that in using it the tops of the blisters should be rubbed off with sterile gauze saturated with the solution and that any large blisters should be opened with a sterile instrument. the treatment should be repeated three or four times at -hour intervals. a modified form of this treatment recommends vigorous rubbing of the lesions with alcohol-soaked gauze to remove the tops of blisters, followed by application of a percent aqueous solution of tannic acid as a lotion. any treatment involving opening of blisters and the application of alcohol is severe, and many cases requiring such treatment should be handled by physicians. one of the oldest well-established remedies is a fresh solution of one -grain tablet of potassium permanganate dissolved in quart of water; concentrations as much as percent, however, have been used. the potassium permanganate is apparently active in neutralizing any poison that may remain on the surface of the skin and it has some therapeutic properties. this solution may be applied freely to the irritated or contaminated skin, but the skin should be rinsed with water a few minutes after the stronger solutions are used. applications should be repeated every hour or two. the brown stain it causes on the skin will in time wear off, or it may be removed with lemon juice. it more or less permanently stains clothing. ferric chloride in combination with several other substances has been used effectively by many people. one of the most common formulas is that given under the discussion of precautions against poisoning (p. ). to this formula to percent of phenol is frequently added to reduce the itching; however, not more than percent of phenol should ever be used without the advice of a physician, on account of the danger of systemic absorption and poisoning. the solution should be freely applied to the irritated or contaminated skin every hour or two. some instances of persistence of the brown discoloration of the skin have been reported. for this reason its use is limited, but for most individuals the discoloration completely disappears after a few days. stain on clothing is usually permanent. photographer's hypo solution has been used with good results in many cases. this is a -percent solution of sodium thiosulfate in water. the irritated or contaminated skin should be bathed in it every hour or two. it does not stain skin or clothing. a calamine lotion with the addition of about percent of phenol is often used and in many cases is effective. frequent applications are necessary. for some people it is effective in relieving the itching. the pink stain is not permanent. it is better to leave inflamed areas exposed to the air rather than cover them with dressings. if poisoning is so severe that dressings appear necessary, a physician should be consulted before any home remedies are applied. eradication of plants poison-ivy[ ] can be killed either by mechanical means, such as digging, or by applying chemical herbicides. the best modern herbicides are so deadly to plants that a single treatment kills all the leaves and percent or more of the roots. this is the easiest and least dangerous way to destroy these poisonous pests. there are places, however, where chemicals cannot be used, as in hedges and shrubbery where the poison-ivy is closely mixed with the valuable plants. in such situations, hand-pulling is the only satisfactory method. at times also chemicals and spraying equipment are not available, and then the mattock, scythe, or plow must be resorted to. even with these simple tools some timing and handling methods are better than others. [ ] for brevity, the single designation poison-ivy is used under this heading to apply equally to all poison-ivies and to poison sumac. chemical weed killers by using care poison-ivy can be destroyed with chemicals without danger of poisoning to the operator. except in very heavy growth, one may stand at a distance from the plants and apply the herbicide without touching the leaves. most chemicals are applied as a spray solution, and many sprayers can be equipped with extension nozzles feet or more in length. the greatest danger of ivy poisoning occurs from careless handling of gloves, shoes, and clothing after finishing the work. garments should be worn that can either be destroyed after use or washed thoroughly in hot soda solution and soapsuds. the chemicals thus far found most satisfactory on poison-ivy are, in approximate order of effectiveness, ammonium sulfamate, , -d ( , -dichlorophenoxyacetic acid), ammonium thiocyanate, borax, carbon disulfide, coal-tar creosote oil, fuel oil and similar petroleum distillates, sodium chlorate, and sodium arsenite. less effective chemicals include common salt, kerosene, gasoline, calcium cyanamide, ammonium sulfate, and iron sulfate. chemicals other than borax are best applied as a spray to the foliage. borax is scattered dry on the soil around the plants. any field or garden spray machine or even a sprinkling can is useful for applying the liquids, but a common knapsack sprayer holding about gallons is convenient and does not waste the solution, application should be as a fine spray under moderate pressure rather than a driving mist, since the object is to wet the leaves of the poison-ivy and avoid wetting the leaves of desirable plants. most chemicals used on poison-ivy are injurious to the foliage of all kinds of plants and must be applied with caution if the surrounding vegetation is valuable. during the early part of the growing season the leaves of the poisonous plants usually tend to stand conspicuously apart from those of adjacent plants and can be treated separately if sprayed with care. later the leaves become intermingled and injury to adjacent species is unavoidable. chemicals other than oil are not injurious to the thick bark of an old tree, and poison-ivy clinging to the trunk can be safely sprayed with them. chemical sprays can be used at any time when poison-ivy is in full leaf, june and july being perhaps the best months. ordinarily treatments should begin not later than august , as poison-ivy then begins to go dormant and sprays are ineffective. best results are obtained both with sprays and with dry chemicals when the soil is moist but not wet at time of treatment. borax can well be applied just before a rain, but sprayed chemicals are likely to be washed off if rain falls within hours. one gallon of spray solution is sufficient to cover all the leaves on square rod ( square feet) of dense poison-ivy, or to square rods of a scattered stand. sprays give best results when applied in early morning or late afternoon when the air is cool and moist. spraying in the middle of a dry, hot day is likely to be disappointing unless the plants are in deep shade. no method of chemical eradication can be depended upon to kill all the plants in a stand of poison-ivy with one application. three to four light retreatments made as soon as the new leaves are fully expanded are always necessary ( ) to destroy plants missed the first time, ( ) to treat new growth from the old roots, and ( ) to destroy seedlings. at least three and sometimes four treatments at intervals of to weeks are necessary before all plants are dead. these followup treatments do not require much time or material, but neglect of them may easily lead to serious reinfestation. poison-ivy has an annoying habit of "playing possum." plants believed dead sometimes revive after many months. thus an area under treatment must be watched closely for at least a year if complete eradication is to be assured. dead foliage and steins remaining after the plants have been killed with chemicals are only slightly poisonous, but to avoid difficulty the dead stems should be cut off and burned. =ammonium sulfamate.=--this chemical, under a proprietory name, has come on the market recently as a weed killer and has proved especially useful against poison-ivy. ammonium sulfamate is not dangerous to use under ordinary conditions, is not harmful to the soil, and is not flammable. it is slowly corrosive to metals, and spray equipment should be washed thoroughly with a solution of lime or soda immediately after use. like salt, ammonium sulfamate absorbs moisture from the air and must be stored in a dry place. ammonium sulfamate is dissolved in water at the rate of ounces per gallon and sprayed on the leaves until they are wet but not dripping. the foliage begins to wilt within hours, but the action is slow, and a week or more may elapse before the leaves die. some new growth may be expected after to weeks, and this should be sprayed as soon as the new leaves are fully expanded. two or occasionally three such retreatments are needed before the kill is complete. = , -d ( , -dichlorophenoxyacetic acid).=--this chemical under the abbreviated name , -d, or dcp, is a recent addition to the list of effective weed killers and may become an important weapon for use against poison-ivy. it should not be confused with ddt or dd, two other new agricultural chemicals, the first an insecticide and the second used as a soil fumigant. under wartime restrictions the use of , -d was very limited, but its prospective value is so great that those interested in the control of poison-ivy should be informed about it. the chemical , -d is one of the so-called "plant hormones," or "growth regulators." in minute quantities it stimulates some of the plant functions, but in slightly larger dosage it is toxic. a solution consisting of one-seventh ounce in gallon of water sprayed on poison-ivy foliage kills all leaves hit and may kill the roots. in the concentration used in weed killing , -d is not believed to be harmful to animal life, but until this point can be thoroughly clarified the chemical should be used with reasonable caution to avoid poisoning. , -d is not flammable and is not corrosive to spray machinery. if the sprayer is used also for insecticides and fungicides it must be washed very thoroughly to remove the slightest trace of the , -d. this is very difficult, however; it is safer to use another sprayer. to make a spray solution , -d must be combined with other chemicals, as it is not soluble in water. a number of substances, including polyethelene glycols and naphthenic soaps, have been used for this purpose, but the best solvent has not yet been determined. commercial weed killers containing , -d are of varying composition. =ammonium thiocyanate.=--this byproduct of the coal-gas industry is one of the newer herbicides. the crude commercial chemical is a pink or reddish salt, very soluble in water. it does not keep well, tends to disintegrate into a red, sludgy mass, and is difficult and disagreeable to handle. a purer form in clean white crystals is available and is well worth the slight extra cost. in either form ammonium thiocyanate is injurious to the skin and to leather articles, and in time it corrodes metals. the spray solution is made by dissolving to ½ pounds of ammonium thiocyanate in gallon of water. most annual, plants and some perennials are killed by a single application of ammonium thiocyanate. poison-ivy usually requires three or four treatments. ammonium thiocyanate has a high content of nitrogen, much of which remains in the soil and eventually becomes a fertilizer. thus an area treated with this chemical is likely to produce a profuse growth of annual weeds a month or two after treatment. =borax.=--common borax scattered on the soil is deadly to the roots of many plants. spread dry at the rate of to pounds per square rod, it kills poison-ivy slowly over a period of to weeks. a second somewhat lighter treatment to months later is usually necessary to kill all plants completely. borax is easy to handle, nonpoisonous, and nonflammable, readily obtainable, and not expensive. it is one of the best chemicals to use around stone walls, rocky ledges, fences, and other inaccessible places. plants differ greatly in their resistance to borax. some species, as virginia creeper and deep-rooted trees, do not seem to be injured, but others, notably dogwood, are very sensitive to it. until more complete information is available as to the effect of borax on other plants, it should be employed on poison-ivy only where possible damage to surrounding vegetation is not objectionable. =carbon disulfide.=--the fumes of this pungent, volatile liquid are very poisonous to plants, and the chemical is widely used in the west to kill deep-rooted perennial weeds. when poison-oak, particularly, is growing in a mixture with wild morning-glory (bind-weed) or similar noxious weeds, both plants may often be killed at one operation by treating the soil with carbon disulfide. holes ordinarily inches deep and inches apart in all directions are punched in the soil with a -inch iron bar, and ounces of carbon disulfide are poured in each hole. the openings are closed immediately with a wooden club. this dosage equals pounds of the chemical per square rod. carbon disulfide is likely to be less effective on shallow-rooted than on deep-rooted plants and is therefore of limited value against poison-ivy, which is surface-rooted. =carbon disulfide is poisonous, and as it is also highly flammable it should be handled as carefully as gasoline.= =coal-tar creosote oil.=--in the fractional distillation of coal, many oils and oillike substances are obtained, some of which are very toxic to plants. the most common and usually the cheapest is the creosote used for wood preservation. this substance has great penetrating power and is an excellent herbicide on woody plants like poison-ivy. ordinarily creosote oil is too expensive to use alone and is therefore mixed with some kind of petroleum oil. a mixture of percent fuel oil and percent creosote oil is almost as effective as straight creosote and is made at one-third the cost. two applications of this mixture at an interval of about weeks usually kill a high percentage of poison-ivy. creosote is not selective and kills all plants alike. _fuel oil (diesel and similar oils)._--crude petroleum is refined into many kinds of oil, and those corresponding to fuel oil. diesel oil, stovetop oil, and orchard-heating oil are more injurious to plants than crude oil itself or the higher distillates, such as gasoline and kerosene. fuel oils are widely used for destroying vegetation, particularly by highway departments in states having oil resources. when sprayed on poison-ivy, fuel oil brings about a slow but fairly sure death of the plants. two or three applications may be necessary before the roots are killed. fuel oil, like creosote, must be used with care around valuable trees and shrubs because it penetrates the bark and kills or injures all species. as used for poison-ivy spraying there is no injury to the soil. the oil-soaked vegetation is flammable. =sodium chlorate.=--sodium chlorate is the standard herbicide for killing deep-rooted perennial weeds like bindweed, but when used as a spray, it is a dangerous fire hazard, and when applied dry, it sterilizes the soil for to years. where sterilization of the soil is desirable or not objectionable, one application of the dry chemical, evenly at the rate of to pounds per square rod, is sufficient for a complete kill. if used as a foliage spray on poison-ivy, the chemical is dissolved in water at the rate of to ounces per gallon. the leaves are killed within a few hours, but the plants are likely to make a strong new growth and may require as many as six treatments before they cease to produce new leaves. =sodium chlorate mixed with wood, cloth, or other organic materials is highly combustible and easily ignited. shoes and clothing on which chlorate solution has been allowed to dry are especially dangerous, for they will ignite and burn with explosive fury. contaminated clothing should be kept wet until thoroughly washed in a large volume of water. chlorate should be stored only in original metal containers, as any admixture of chlorate, wet or dry, with straw, wood, dust, cloth, or leather has properties similar to those of gunpowder or matches.= =sodium arsenite.=--sodium arsenite is one of the most powerful plant poisons known and is widely used for sterilizing soil on railroads, roadways, and other places where no vegetation of any kind is desired. it is relatively inexpensive. in normal times sodium arsenite is obtainable in both powder and liquid form. in weak solution ( to ounces per gallon of water) the chemical can be used as a spray to destroy poison-ivy. like sodium chlorate spray, it kills the leaves but not the roots, and five or six treatments may be required. the solution kills the leaves of all plants impartially and will also kill the young tender bark of shrubs and trees. this may be either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending upon circumstances. =all compounds containing arsenic are deadly poisons if taken internally. arsenical sprays and chemicals should not be used where there is any possibility that materials sprayed with them will be eaten by animals or man. in some communities special permission must be obtained before arsenical weed killers may be used.= eradication by mechanical means poison-ivy can be grubbed out by hand quite readily early in spring and late in fall. when the ground is soft after rains the roots come out in long pieces. grubbing when the soil is dry and hard is almost futile, since the roots break off in the ground, leaving large pieces that later sprout vigorously. eradication by grubbing is permanent if well done. because of his close contact with the plants, the person doing the grubbing should have a high degree of immunity to ivy-poisoning. many people are not so immune as they believe, and it is common sense to wear leather gloves with gauntlets and a shirt with long sleeves. if care is taken to prevent the poison-ivy from touching the face, and if the clothes, including the gloves, are burned or thoroughly washed after use, severe poisoning may be avoided. poison-ivy vines climbing on trees should be severed at the base and as much of the vine as possible pulled away from the tree. often the roots of the tree and weed are so intertwined that grubbing is impossible without injury to the tree. close mowing of the poison-ivy shoots at frequent intervals is the only remedy. roots and stems removed in grubbing should be burned or otherwise destroyed, since the dry material is almost as poisonous as the fresh. care must be taken to keep out of the smoke. old plants of poison-ivy produce an abundance of seeds, and these are freely disseminated, especially by birds. a poison-ivy seedling months old usually has a root that one mowing will not kill. seedling plants at the end of the first year have well-established underground runners that only grubbing or chemicals will kill. seedlings are a constant threat as long as old poison-ivy is in the neighborhood. plowing is of little value in combating poison-ivy unless followed by persistent stirring with a cultivator or harrow, to keep all roots loosened from the soil. otherwise plowing merely propagates the weed. mowing with a scythe or sickle is a common method of attacking poison-ivy, but it has little effect on the roots unless frequently repeated. the number of cuttings required to kill depends upon the age of the plants and the size of the roots, but is seldom less than four. new shoots should be cut as soon as the first leaf on each stem is full size. cutting either earlier or later delays eradication. weed burners are implements resembling oversize blowtorches. two types are manufactured, one producing a short, hot, blue flame and the other a long smoky-yellow flame. both are useful for destroying foliage. neither is likely to kill perennial plants like poison-ivy at one operation, even though the flame is held on the weeds for a minute or more until leaves and stems are completely incinerated. the roots are not injured by this, and new leafy shoots soon develop. a better plan is to "sear" the plants by passing the flame slowly over the vines just long enough to sear or wilt the leaves, but not long enough to burn them. the roots appear to be injured more by "searing" than completely burning the leaves, and the operation is quicker and cheaper. three to four searings when the leaves reach full size usually kill the roots. u. s. government printing office: -- for sale by the superintendent of documents, u. s. government printing office, washington , d. c. * * * * * transcriber notes all illustrations were moved so as to not split paragraphs. none by the internet archive. wintering bees in cellars e. f. phillips, apiculturist and george s. demuth, apicultural assistant bureau of entomology [illustration] farmers' bulletin united states department of agriculture contribution from the bureau of entomology l. o. howard. chief washington, d. c. september, show this bulletin to a neighbor. additional copies may be obtained free from the division of publications, united states department of agriculture washington government printing office : results from wintering bees in a cellar are excellent when conditions in the cellar are such as to keep the bees from wearing themselves out by excessive activity. cellar wintering is practicable where the average outdoor temperature during the winter months is as low as ° f. a map is given (p. ) so that the beekeeper may know whether this method is advisable in his locality. the cellar should be arranged so that the ceiling is below the frost line, and so that the ceiling and side walls are thoroughly protected at all points. the cellar should be kept so that the lowest temperature within the hives is at least ° f. at this temperature there will be little need of special ventilating arrangements. there should be no condensation of moisture within the hives, and the cellar should be well drained. bees should be put into the cellar after a good flight in late november, or earlier in the more northern localities. they should be removed when fresh pollen and nectar are available, usually about the last of march. soon after the hives are placed on their summer stands, each colony should be given additional stores and room for the development of a large quantity of brood. it is important that none of the factors of good wintering be omitted. several tests are given in this bulletin so that the beekeeper may determine whether his cellar is a satisfactory place for wintering bees. wintering bees in cellars. contents. page. cellar wintering versus outdoor wintering where is cellar wintering advisable essentials to success necessity of strong colonies in the fall winter stores arrangement of the apiary the bee cellar putting the bees into the cellar maintenance of the cellar during the winter removal of the bees from the cellar providing breeding room and stores in the spring measures of success in cellar wintering cellar wintering versus outdoor wintering. bees in the more northern parts of the united states for many years have been placed by some of the best beekeepers in cellars or special repositories during the coldest parts of the winter. there has been a growing feeling, however, that if outdoor wintering is practicable, in most cases it gives better results, and there has been a decided change from cellar wintering to outdoor wintering within the past decade. the difficulty seems to be that the methods of cellar wintering practiced have not been satisfactory and it seems probable that if as much attention had been given, to the perfection of the methods of cellar wintering as has been given to an improvement of the methods of outdoor wintering, there would not have been as great a change to the outdoor methods as has taken place. [illustration: fig. .--map of the united states showing regions where cellar wintering is practicable, based on the average temperature of january. from data furnished by the united states weather bureau.] the placing of bees in a cellar is only another way of putting insulation about the hives, the only difference being that in the cellar all of the hives are protected alike and the protection is placed about the apiary instead of around hives in groups or singly. it follows that the principles which apply to successful outdoor wintering apply equally to the protection of the bees in the cellar. it is urged, therefore, that before attempting to winter bees in the cellar, the beekeeper study the bulletins[ ] of the department in which these principles are set forth. [ ] department bulletin , the temperature of the honeybee cluster in winter. farmers' bulletin , outdoor wintering of bees. where is cellar wintering advisable? before deciding whether or not the bees are to be wintered in a cellar, several factors should be considered, the chief of these being ( ) the winter climate, ( ) the kind of winter stores, and ( ) the location of the apiary as regards wind protection. winter climate. in any locality where the average temperature of the winter months falls below ° f. (zone ) cellar wintering may be practiced with profit, and in localities where the average temperature of these months falls as low as ° f. (zone ) cellar wintering is much to be preferred. figure shows the boundaries of these zones for the united states for the month of january, which may be taken as typical of the winter months. it will be noted that these zones do not follow parallels of latitude. as was pointed out in the bulletin of the department on outdoor wintering,[ ] it is quite possible to protect bees in zone sufficiently to winter them outdoors, but if a proper cellar is provided, if conditions within the cellar are correct, and if the stores are good and the colonies are strong, just as good results may be obtained from cellar wintering. [ ] farmers' bulletin , preparation of bees for outdoor wintering. in zone the average temperature of the outside air during the mouth of january is ° f., or lower in the more northern parts of the zone. this means that in colonies wintered outdoors the bees are compelled to overcome this degree of cold at all times during the coldest part of the winter. if they are so well packed that the heat which they generate is lost slowly, they are able to generate sufficient heat to make the interior of the hive warm enough to allow them to break their cluster as is necessary. in zone , however, the bees will be compelled to generate heat sufficient to overcome the more severe cold of that zone, and this calls for the expenditure by the bees of so much more food and vitality that it is more economical to put them in a good cellar during the months of the most severe cold, and cellar wintering is therefore preferable. character of winter stores. in localities where the stores for the bees gathered during the latter part of the summer are not of the first quality, it is safer to winter the bees outdoors. this is a large factor in the placing of the zones shown in figure , for it is quite common in the region south of zone for the full honey to be of inferior quality. it is extremely fortunate that in both of the zones shown the stores available in winter are usually of the finest quality. as will be shown later, it is highly important that the beekeeper pay special attention to the character of the stores in the hive at the beginning of the winter, and if they are not as good as they should be, this deficiency should be corrected. location as regards wind protection. in zone , if the apiary is so badly located that the winter winds are severe, the beekeeper will do well to winter in a cellar, although, as will be shown later, it is not best to choose such a site for the apiary even during the rest of the year. essentials to success. as in the case of outdoor wintering, the essentials to success in caring for a normal colony of bees from the end of one season's honey-flow to the beginning of the next lie in providing three things in abundance: ( ) stores of good quality, ( ) protection from wind and cold, and ( ) room for the rearing of brood at appropriate times. these factors must not be lacking at the right times, and if any one is omitted it may prevent the bees from gathering the crop of the following season. these three factors do not apply equally throughout the period of relative inactivity, but as certainly as any one of them is decreased, just so certainly will the crop of the following year be reduced. in practicing cellar wintering it is unnecessary to leave so much honey with the bees during the time that they are in the cellar, and it is not necessary during that period to leave room for the rearing of brood. during the coldest part of the winter the bees need especially protection from cold and wind, although enough good stores must be in the hive to keep them through that period in good condition. probably a large part of the failure of beekeepers in practicing cellar wintering comes from the fact that before and after the bees are in the cellar the important factors of stores and breeding room have not been adequately supplied. before the bees are put into the cellar they must have room for breeding and stores in abundance, and after they are taken out these two factors must be present in greatly increased abundance. necessity of strong colonies in the fall. as in the case of wintering outdoors, it is wasteful to attempt to winter weak colonies. it is difficult to set standards of colony strength at this season, but it is unwise to attempt to winter colonies that are not strong enough to have brood sufficient to fill three or four langstroth frames two months before the first killing frost. if the colonies in the apiary are not of the proper strength, it is wise to unite until the proper strength is reached. any uniting should be done before the close of brood-rearing. it is of the greatest importance that every colony have a good queen in order that brood-rearing may continue in the fall and may then again proceed rapidly in the spring. usually it is best to requeen at least every two years, but if good wintering is practiced the colonies will come out of winter quarters so strong and will build up so rapidly in the spring that the queens will soon wear out, making it safer to requeen every year. to get the best results from requeening, all young queens should be introduced so that they begin to lay about two months before the first killing frost. winter stores. the stores given to the bees from the end of one season to the beginning of the next are of the first importance. it is necessary to consider both the quality and the quantity of these stores. quality of stores. as has been stated, it is fortunate that in both of the zones where cellar wintering is or might be practiced the natural stores usually are good. honeys such as those from white and alsike clovers, sweet clover, alfalfa, wild raspberry, buckwheat, and willowherb are fine stores for winter, while honeys from basswood, heartsease (smart-weed), asters, goldenrod, and most of the other fall flowers are less desirable. it is especially important during the period when the bees are in the cellar that the stores shall be of the very finest quality, and it is therefore the practice of many good beekeepers to feed each colony pounds or more of sirup made of granulated sugar into in the fall, after all brood-rearing has ceased. this insures that the bees will have for their use, during the period of confinement in the cellar, stores which will not bring about the condition known as dysentery. in general it may be stated that honeys from mixed sources and dark honeys, except buckwheat, are to be avoided. honeydew honeys are highly injurious and in all cases where such stores are present granulated sugar sirup should be fed. quantity of stores. from the end of one honey season to the beginning of the next a good colony of bees will need fully pounds of honey. when the bees are wintered in the cellar, it is usual not to have all of this honey in the one hive body in which they are wintered. it is a good practice to have at least pounds within this hive, although pounds will be safe. it is absolutely imperative, however, that the remainder of the pounds shall be available to be given to the bees soon after, they are taken from the cellar. the most common cause of poor colonies in the spring is poverty, directly due to neglect on the part of the beekeeper. a good beekeeper sees to it that at no time when brood is being reared do his bees have less than pounds of stores in the hive, and the full amount of pounds often will all be used, and is always needed if the colonies are to come to full strength on time for the gathering of the full crop. this amount is always augmented by honey from spring flowers, for pounds of honey is not enough to bring a colony to full strength in time for the main honey-flow. arrangement of the apiary. where bees are wintered in cellars the particular arrangement of the hives in the apiary is not so important a problem as where they are wintered on their summer stands, yet there are certain important considerations in the arrangement of the entire apiary which should be kept in mind. wind protection. it is important that a place be chosen where the bees will be protected from cold winds in the spring after they are taken from the cellar and again in the fall before they are taken to the cellar. a grove of trees or an adjacent hill usually offers the best protection, or it is possible to make an artificial windbreak such as a high fence. a natural windbreak usually is better, for it is more extensive in most cases. too much reliance should not be placed in buildings, for often they merely divert the wind slightly and may make conditions worse. a fence made of close boards usually is unsatisfactory, for it causes whirls. distance of the apiary from the cellar. to carry colonies of bees a long distance from the apiary to the cellar is not an easy task, even though the hives be light at that time of the year. it is best, therefore, that the apiary be located not more than yards from the cellar, and even this distance is objectionable. if a special cellar is built for the bees, the apiary should be so located that the cellar may be built immediately adjacent. if the bees are to be wintered in the cellar under the beekeeper's residence, the apiary should be located as near as possible to the cellar door. the bee cellar. in order that the beekeeper may have reason to expect success in cellar wintering, it is imperative that he give careful consideration to the construction of the bee cellar. there has been a tendency among beekeepers greatly to overestimate the value of their own cellars, and especially to assume that the conditions which they are able to get in their cellars are exactly correct. cellar under the residence. some of the best bee cellars are those under the residences of beekeepers, and in general such a cellar is better than one built especially for cellar wintering. this is because the temperature of such a cellar usually is quite a little higher than that in a specially constructed repository. the best results in cellar wintering have been obtained in cellars under residences which are heated by furnaces, thus having a higher cellar temperature. in such a cellar provision must be made for partitioning off a space where the bees will be located so that there is no light or other disturbing factor during the time of their confinement. since a cellar temperature about ° f. is desirable, it is well to choose a part of the cellar through which some of the furnace pipes run, and if this results in too high a temperature these pipes may be insulated somewhat. it is best to choose a part of the cellar where there are no windows and where the outside walls are thoroughly protected to the top, either by a bank of soil or in some other fashion. this will result in a more equable temperature than is possible in a cellar exposed to sudden changes of temperature on the outside walls, for even a stone wall inches thick will allow a considerable amount of heat to escape. in a cellar under a residence there will be abundant ventilation without any special provision being made for this. a test of the value of such a cellar is the even temperature which may be obtained, as will be discussed later. special winter repository. if properly constructed and protected, a special cellar or cave for the bees gives the best possible results in wintering, yet few such cellars have been built, for the reason that most beekeepers have omitted some vitally important factors. the usual fault is in having too great a variation in temperature and in giving excessive ventilation, which in turn causes fluctuations in temperature. soil and contour of the surface of the ground. to provide good drainage and adequate ventilation for the bee cellar without making any special ventilators, it is desirable to build it in a sandy hillside. if it is possible to choose a place for the cellar where the snow drifts deeply, this will afford a valuable addition to the insulation of the cellar. if the cellar is on level ground, drifting of snow may be increased by the proper building of open fences, such as are used to prevent drifting over railway tracks. if it is impossible to utilize a sandy hillside, it will be necessary to build walls and a floor for the cellar and to make adequate provision for the drainage of the cellar. the hillside cellar has, the great advantage of having easy drainage. capacity of the cellar. if the bees are kept in apiaries of perhaps colonies and if a cellar is built for each apiary, then it is possible to build a cellar of just the right capacity. if a central cellar is built for all the apiaries and the bees in outapiaries are brought into the home apiary for winter, the beekeeper will wish to build the cellar sufficiently large for future expansion of his business, and beekeepers are finding out, that they can keep many more colonies of bees than they formerly thought possible. perhaps the better plan is to have a cellar in each apiary. [illustration: fig. .--interior of bee cellar with hives in piles of four. insulation above the ceiling is not shown.] the usual practice is to allow - / to square feet of floor surface for each colony, on the assumption that the colonies will be placed in piles of four (fig. ). it is not desirable to pile hives higher than this, if the cellar roof is - / feet high in the clear, and it is difficult to lift heavy hives any higher than the number specified. for an apiary of colonies, it will be found desirable to have a cellar feet wide and from to feet long, clear of the inner walls. if one is just getting a start in beekeeping he should build his cellar on the assumption that later he will increase the number of his colonies, and should allow for this, for it is better to have the cellar too large than too small. walls and floor. it has been claimed by many beekeepers that concrete walls and floor are not desirable, yet if the cellar is properly insulated there is no better material. if the cellar is built in a hillside of sandy soil, wooden sides will be satisfactory and no floor other than the soil need be provided. in such soil the drainage is good and the only function of the side walls is to hold the sides up to prevent caving in. in a moist soil a concrete floor and walls should be built, and the concrete should be waterproof. under no circumstances should any of the side walls below the ceiling be exposed above ground. [illustration: fig. .--diagram of bee cellar. clearance - / feet, ceiling - / feet below ground level, packed with about feet of sawdust.] roof. the ceiling of the cellar should be below ground level sufficiently to bring it below the level of frost. for the regions where bees should be wintered in cellars this usually will be at least - / feet below the level of the ground (fig. ). the ceiling should be - / feet above the floor, just sufficiently high to permit a tall man to work with comfort. if the ceiling is higher it will result usually in too low a temperature at the floor. the ceiling then should be covered completely on top with some insulating material, such as sawdust, and if sawdust is used it should be piled on about - / feet thick. unless about this amount of protection is given on the ceiling it will be impossible to get the right cellar temperature during the coldest part of the winter. if the cellar is built in a sandy soil, it is possible to use the soil as a cover for the ceiling, in which event about feet of soil should be placed over the inner roof of the cellar. the entire insulating material, of whatever kind used, should then be protected from rain and snow by having a roof over it. this roof should project at least feet, preferably more, beyond the outside of the cellar wall, and provision should be made for currying off the water from the roof. in case the beekeeper desires to build an apiary house over the bee, cellar, as is done frequently, he must provide a floor for this house at least at ground level, and he can not successfully use the ceiling of the cellar as the floor of the upper house. there is no objection to building a house above the cellar if adequate protection is given the cellar, but it must not be assumed that the house offers any material insulation to the cellar, for in most cases these houses are not heated in the winter. the relation of the house floor to the ceiling of the cellar is shown in figure . entrance to the cellar. frequently the entrance is a weak spot in the insulation of the cellar, and it is useless to protect the roof and sides unless care is used in the building of the entrance. if the entrance is at the end or one side of the cellar, it will be necessary to build a sort of vestibule with double doors so that the heat of the cellar will not be lost rapidly. the heavier and thicker these doors, the better for the bees. the best type of vestibule is a long, narrow passage lending into the hillside, and it should be closed by doors at both the inside and outside ends. if possible the vestibule should be built and protected so that the temperature within the vestibule will never fall below freezing. in the building of the vestibule, also, the beekeeper should consider the ease with which the bees may be carried in and out of the cellar. drainage. as has been mentioned previously, the cellar must be well drained, either by natural or by artificial means. no stagnant water should be allowed to remain in the cellar, although at the higher temperatures of the best cellars this does less harm than it does in cellars that are too cold. some beekeepers have advocated having a stream of water flowing through the cellar, and this will do no harm in warm cellars, and it may serve to assist somewhat in maintaining an even temperature. ventilation. one of the most serious faults of bee cellars is in providing for too much ventilation, resulting in great fluctuations in temperature. in a cellar which maintains a temperature of ° f. or more there is little need for ventilation, for the was then need little oxygen and only a small amount of carbon dioxide is given off. other things being equal, the colder the cellar, the greater the need of ventilation. if poor stores are in the hives, the bees will need more ventilation than will be desirable when good stores are used. in a warm cellar in a sandy hillside no ventilating shaft need be built. in any event, one shaft inches square running through the ceiling of the cellar to the outside will be sufficient for any cellar that is fit for the wintering of bees. during the coldest part of the winter the interchange of air between the inside of the cellar and the outside will be materially increased by the great difference in temperature and this one ventilator may be entirely or nearly closed. during the milder weather of the fall and spring this amount of ventilation will do no harm. the top of the ventilating shaft, which should extend at least feet above the outer roof, may be painted black in order to induce greater movement of air when the sun shines. the shaft should be so arranged that it does not admit light to the cellar. putting the bees into the cellar. before the bees are carried into the cellar it should be well aired and cleaned, and it will be well to keep it open for several days beforehand. no debris or refuse should be left in the cellar when the bees are taken in. time. for zone (fig. ) it is usually desirable to wait until about the middle of november before putting the bees into winter quarters. if one could know exactly when the bees would have the last opportunity for a cleansing flight, they would be put into the cellar just after that, but we can not always be sure that there will be suitable weather for such flight in late november, and there is, therefore, considerable doubt every year as to just the right time to put the bees away. frequently it happens that the weather is suitable for a flight about november , and it is best to wait until then before attempting to put the bees in the cellar. the flight of only a few bees from the hive should not be construed as a cleansing flight. in this connection it is highly desirable that the beekeeper keep a careful watch of the weather maps daily, so that he may know at all times about what weather may be expected for a few days in advance. for the beekeeper's purpose the daily forecasts published in newspapers are scarcely enough; and if no daily weather maps are convenient near by, it will repay the beekeeper well to subscribe for them. they are valuable not only at the time of putting the bees into the cellar but at many other times of the year. soon after a period when the barometric pressure has been low, bringing high temperatures suitable for flights (at least ° f.), there usually will be a period when the barometric pressure is high, bringing lower, temperatures. at the shifting from low to high barometric pressure there is frequently a time when it is cloudy. this is a fine time to put the bees into the cellar. these periods of high and low barometric pressure follow each other with rather marked regularity in the fall, and it is rather safe to assume that just at the end of the well-defined low pressure which next follows after november is the best time to put the bees into the cellar. it is better to put the bees in the cellar a week or so before the last opportunity for flight than to put them in after exposure to cold which is not followed by a cleansing flight. for zone it will be desirable to put the bees away a little earlier, although the oncoming of winter is not so much earlier in the north as one might imagine. how to carry the bees. when one person carries the bees into the cellar the best method is to stand at the back of the hive and grasp the bottom of the hive with both hands. the hive is then lifted and the cover brought up against the chest firmly, permitting the operator to walk without interference and with a minimum of stooping. if there are cleats on the ends of the hive bodies, those may be rested on the forearms, although with this method there is some danger that the bottoms will drop off unless they are stapled. if the temperature is sufficiently low (slightly above freezing), there will be no need of closing the entrances when the bees are being carried in. every care should be taken not to jar the hives more than is absolutely necessary from the time that they are lifted until they are in their final place in the cellar. if more than one person is engaged in carrying in the hives, the hives may be placed carefully on carriers with handles, and two or more of them may be carried at one time. how to stack the hives. the bottom hive in a pile should rest on an empty hive body or some other such support of about that size (figs. and ). the hives then should be placed one on top of the other until they are four high. it is best by far to put each pile of four hives about inches from adjacent piles, so that in handling the hives on one pile there is no disturbance of bees in other piles. allowance is made for this space between the piles of hives in the estimate of the floor space needed for each colony (p. ). maintenance of the cellar during the winter. if the cellar is properly constructed it will need little if any care during the time that the bees are inside. it is only the poor bee cellar which requires constant attention to prevent changes in temperature. temperature of the cellar. there has been much discussion as to the best temperature of the cellar during the winter. commonly it is stated that a temperature of ° to ° f. is best, but this is colder than usually is best for the finest results. a temperature below ° f. is invariably bad for the bees, and a cellar in which the temperature goes as low as freezing is not a fit place for bees. it has been found by the authors that bees do the least amount of work when the temperature of the air immediately surrounding them (inside the hive) stands at ° f. this is, therefore, the temperature which the beekeeper should bear in mind, rather than to lay too much stress on the temperature of the cellar itself. the place for a thermometer in the bee cellar is inside the entrance of a good colony where it may be read easily by simply pulling it out. a chemical thermometer is best for this purpose, and it should register ° f. or more inside the hive entrance. in order to have the right temperature within the hive it usually will be best to have the temperature of the cellar at about ° f. or slightly higher. as will be shown later, however, it is quite possible to have the right temperature within the hive when the temperature of the cellar is a few degrees lower than that stated. if the beekeeper will pay attention to the temperature of the interior of the hive he will find that in colder cellars it is desirable to give the hives some insulation to conserve the heat generated by the bees in much the same way that this heat is conserved when bees are packed outdoors, although the amount of protection will be much less. in a cellar where the temperature falls to ° f. it will be found best to have the covers of the hives sealed on tightly and the entrances reduced to / inch by inches. in a cellar with a temperature of ° f. or more the entrances may be left open the full width of the hive. if there is a tendency for the temperature to fall to ° f. or less, the tops of the hives may be protected by cushions of chaff or other materials placed at least on the top of the uppermost hives, for each of the lower three hives is protected somewhat by the one above it. it will be impossible to maintain the temperatures recommended unless the cellar is built in the way described, or in some other way by which the cellar is equally well insulated. it is impossible to maintain an equable and high temperature in a cellar the walls and ceiling of which are exposed to the outside air. ventilation of the cellar. if the proper temperature is maintained in the cellar there will be little need of ventilation, for in almost all cases there will be sufficient interchange of air to keep the bees in good condition. if the temperature is as low as ° f., a little ventilation will be needed, although most of the bee cellars that have been built have had too much ventilation, and as a result it has been impossible to maintain a correct temperature within them. in cold weather the tendency toward an interchange of air is greatest, and at such times the ventilators may be entirely closed. in mild weather it makes no difference if large ventilators are open, unless this results in too great a rise in temperature. in a well-insulated cellar it should not be necessary to ventilate at night at the approach of spring to cool the air inside, for the bees will not get so warm from their own activity as will bees in a cellar that is or has been too cold. the greatest problem in most cellars is to maintain the right temperature during the spring just before the bees are to be removed. the trouble is that in most cellars--those which are too cold in winter--the bees generate heat constantly during the winter and as a result have an accumulation of feces in the intestines, resulting in a condition known as dysentery. for this reason they become excited easily, and beekeepers have thought it necessary to ventilate the cellar at night freely in order to remedy this trouble. the proper method, of course, is to prevent it by keeping the temperature higher during the winter, but if the temperature has fallen too low during the winter ventilation at night seems to help somewhat. it is safe, however, to say that a cellar in which this happens is not satisfactory as a place to keep bees during the winter, and steps should be taken to insulate it more completely before bees are put into it again. if the bees are wintering on stores that are not of the best quality the tendency to accumulate feces will be far greater, even with the right temperatures inside the hives, and if there is dysentery it may be relieved somewhat by ventilation, although this is simply reducing a symptom and is not removing the cause of the trouble. ventilation of the hive. since bees in a good cellar require little ventilation, practically no attention need be paid to this subject if the cellar has been built in the way advised. if the temperature of the cellar tends to fall too low, it is advisable to reduce the entrances of the hives, for with a greater difference between the temperatures within and outside the hive the tendency for interchange of air will be correspondingly greater. in any cellar fit for the wintering of bees it will be neither necessary nor desirable to ventilate the hives at the top, as sometimes has been recommended. the ventilation of the hive within the cellar is not so much for the elimination of foul air as for the escape of moisture, and therefore the amount of ventilation needed for the hive depends upon the humidity of the air within the cellar. if the temperature of the cellar is kept high enough there will be no condensation of moisture within the hive, and if water is ever observed on the covers of the hives it is conclusive proof that the cellar is too cold for the bees. in a cellar so cold that condensed moisture shows on the bottoms of the hives stops should be taken at once to raise the temperature. various attempts have been made in the past to provide for the cellar fresh air which has been warmed somewhat before entry. the most common method is to have the air pass through tiles under ground for perhaps feet before it enters the cellar. in general, it may be said that none of these devices has been worth the trouble and expense involved and none of them has served the purpose for which it was intended. it has been proposed also to ventilate the bee cellar by wind pressure. the devices which have been made for such ventilation will function only when there is considerable wind and then only when the wind is in the right quarter; therefore they are not at all to be recommended. by far the best plan is simply to build the bee cellar correctly, for, then little ventilation will be needed. cleaning the cellar. in even the best of cellars there will be some dead bees on the floor, and those may be cleaned up once or twice during the winter. in a cellar with proper temperature there will be few dead bees until after the middle of the winter, but the death rate increases toward the close of the winter. if the cellar is cleaned, it should be done with as little disturbance as possible. no bright light should be admitted at this time, although a moderate amount seems to do little harm until after the bees have an accumulation of feces in the intestines. removing the bees for flight during the winter. some beekeepers have advocated removing the colonies toward the end of the winter for a flight on some warm day and then replacing them, on the supposition that the flight would enable the bees to stand a longer period of confinement. it is found, however, that if bees are disturbed, as by carrying them out, they begin brood-rearing almost invariably, and this does more harm than the flight does good. disturbance during the winter. work in or about the bee cellar while the bees are confined should be done with the least possible disturbance of the bees, for often a little handling or jarring of the hive causes sufficient excitement to increase the temperature of the cluster to the point where brood-rearing begins. this is true especially in late winter. it is by far the wisest plan, therefore, to stay out of the cellar during the winter, except on the few occasions when a little work, such as cleaning out, makes a visit seem needed. care should be taken not to jar the hives or to allow light to strike the entrance. of course, if bees are being wintered in a cellar which has the right temperature, a little disturbance does little or no harm, but there is no reason why bees should be disturbed in winter and the beekeeper should not run any risk of starting brood-rearing. removal of the bees from the cellar. time. the old rule of many beekeepers is to take the bees from the cellar when the soft maples are in bloom. this is an excellent rule in localities where there are trees of this species. in general, in zone the right time to take the bees out of the cellar is about the time of the spring equinox (march ). in choosing a time for the removal of the bees, the beekeeper again should watch the weather maps closely. he should choose a time when a high-pressure area is just passing and at the approach of a well-defined low-pressure area. at such a time the weather will be cool, not permitting the bees to fly, but at the time of the low-pressure area the weather will become warmer, allowing the good flights, which are then badly needed. if the bees are taken out at a time when they can fly at once--and some beekeepers prefer this--they should be taken out in the early morning, so that they can have a good flight before night. bees should not be taken from the cellar at a time when they can fly only a little, but they should either be taken out when they can not fly at all or at a time when they can fly freely almost at once. bees in good condition rarely fly freely unless the outside temperature is as high as ° f. prevention of drifting. when the bees are taken from the cellar and placed on their summer positions they sometimes tend to leave the weaker, colonies and on their return to collect in those with greater populations. this is known as "drifting." in general, the bees tend to drift toward the windward side of the apiary. most frequently they join the hives that were first set out and which have established a strong flight by the time the neighboring colonies have first taken wing. the tendencies, therefore, are to join flying colonies, stronger colonies, and the end colonies in a row. the condition of the bees plays a large part in drifting, for if the bees are badly in need of a flight because of dysentery they go at once into the air without properly marking the location of their hive, and therefore are not able to find it when they return. to prevent drifting, it is best to set the bees out when it is too cold for them to fly, so that as the weather warms, permitting flight, this will take place more naturally. it is also well to reduce the entrances so that as the bees leave the hive their tendency to orient themselves will be greater. it is claimed by some beekeepers that if the cellar is well aired the night before the bees are to be removed, they will be in better condition and will drift less, but it is not clear what difference this can make unless the clusters are made tighter because of lower temperatures. beekeepers have discussed the question whether, after removal, the bees should be placed on the same stands occupied by them the fall before. if the bees could remember their old location so that they would return to it, even after an interval of four months, it would be necessary, or at least desirable, to place each colony on the same stand which it occupied previously. there is no evidence, however, that the memory of the bees is so good, and it is usually the ease that the bees of a colony will lose the memory of location within a week; therefore no attention need be paid to this feature. protection of the hives in the spring. the greatest objection to wintering bees in cellars is that after they are removed they are exposed to low temperatures. the ideal practice would be to pack the bees after taking them out in much the same way that bees are packed for outdoor wintering, but the work involved makes this impracticable. there can be no doubt that protection at this time would be beneficial. as has been pointed out, the apiary site should be one in which the hives are well protected from wind, and it is advantageous if the apiary grounds slope toward the south in order that the bees may have the fullest advantage of heat from the sun. if the bees have been wintered in the cellar in double-walled hives they will have the advantage of some protection when they are taken from the cellar. the beekeeper may feel safe in giving the bees all the protection possible at the time that they are taken from the cellar, knowing that it is impossible at this time or any other to insulate the hive too well. in deciding whether the hives should be packed in the spring the beekeeper should be governed largely by the condition of the bees. if they have wintered well they will be able to stand greater extremes of temperature in the spring without loss, but if they have been wintered in a cold cellar they will be greatly injured by cold weather after they have been set out. of course, the need of protection is determined chiefly by the kind of weather prevailing during the first few weeks after the bees have been taken from the cellar. in some seasons the weather is so fine that the bees would be little benefited by packing or other protection, but the beekeeper can not influence the weather, and the only safe plan is so to place the bees that if the weather does turn cold they will still be safe. here, as everywhere else in beekeeping, it pays to be on the safe side, so far as protecting the bees is concerned. providing breeding room and stores in the spring. after the main honey-flow is past it is usually desirable that each colony be kept in two hive bodies of full depth. most producers of extracted honey do this, but too many producers of comb-honey are not adequately supplied with hive bodies and do not give the second body. these two hive bodies should be left with the bees at least until brood-rearing ceases, and at this time one of them should be removed if the bees are to be wintered in the cellar. as has been pointed out in other bulletins of the department, if the bees are wintered outdoors they will do better in the two hive bodies throughout the winter. in the upper hive body will be found a considerable amount of the honey to be used by the bees up to the time of the next honey-flow. usually there will be enough in the lower hive body for the bees while they are in the cellar, especially where comb-honey is produced, but if the lower hive body is not adequately supplied with winter stores (perhaps to pounds) the beekeeper should move some of the stores. it is also a good practice to winter the bees in the cellar in a hive containing the full stores, except that this makes it necessary to carry in hives weighing perhaps pounds. after the second hive bodies have been removed, if they contain honey they should be stored in a warm, dry place, where the honey will not be injured. if it is possible to place such hive bodies in the furnace room of the residence, this will be found to be ideal. if no such place is available, the beekeeper may keep these in a dry cellar or other location where the honey will not be exposed to rapid changes in temperature. for this purpose a place suitable for the storage of comb-honey is desirable. it should be pointed out that the honey in these combs should not be extracted. it will be needed for the building up of the colonies the next spring, and to remove it is simply to reduce the crop of the next season. some time within two weeks after the bees have been taken from the cellar, depending on the weather, each colony should be provided with its second hive body. preferably, this should be placed underneath the hive body in which the bees were wintered in order that the propolis at the top of the hive may not be broken. at this time an examination of the colonies may be made from below to see whether any of them are queenless or require immediate attention for other reasons, but at this season there is little that the beekeeper can do that will help the bees other than to provide them with room for the brood and with adequate supplies of stores. queens should not be clipped at this time, and usually not until settled weather has arrived. further spring manipulation is not necessary and the bees are better off if the beekeeper lets them alone. if the bees have been requeened at the proper time and if the total amount of stores is given as indicated, it will not be worth while to go through the bees to look for queenless colonies. the beekeeper should see to it that at least pounds of honey are provided for each colony from the time of the last honey-flow in the fall to the beginning of the first main honey-flow of the following season. if this is not given in full, the beekeeper may be sure that the crop of the following year will be reduced. this amount of honey left for the use of the bees is a better investment for the beekeeper than money in the bank. it should be pointed out that the giving of a second hive body in the spring is not simply a means of supplying additional stores, but more than one hive body will be needed for the development of the brood. a single -frame langstroth hive is not large enough for the development of a good colony of bees, which, before the beginning of the main honey flow, should have brood to fill at least frames. as was stated earlier in this bulletin, a colony of bees from one season to the next needs three things in abundance--room for the development of the brood, stores of good quality, and protection from wind and cold. in cellar wintering the protection is given by putting the bees in the cellar; the room and stores must be supplied later or the population of the colony will be reduced at the critical time of the honey-flow. if the early sources of honey are abundant, the amount of honey advised will not be consumed. the wise beekeeper, however, does not gamble on the early honey-flows, but invests this honey as life insurance for his bees. measures of success in cellar wintering. it is often difficult for the beekeeper to know whether his bee cellar is giving the best results, for he may not have been able to determine from reading or the observation of other cellars whether it is satisfactory. the writers, therefore, have attempted below to give a few measures which the beekeeper may apply to his apiary and his cellar, so that he may be able to decide whether his methods of cellar wintering should be improved. ( ) during the winter a thermometer inserted in the entrance of the hive should show a temperature of at least ° f. ( ) there should never be any condensed moisture on the covers of the hives, and certainly never any on the bottoms. ( ) while, the cellar should be kept dark at all times, if a candle is held at the entrance of a hive at the end of january it should be several seconds before any of the bees break cluster. frequently the cellar doors may be opened in march without disturbing the bees. ( ) there should never be many dead bees on the bottom of the hives. the live bees should be able to push them out as they die during the winter. the bees thus carried out will be found on the cellar floor just below the entrances. if there are bees all over the floor, it shows that these bees have flown from the hives--an indication of poor wintering. ( ) the bees should be quiet during the late winter. noise at this time indicates that the bees are disturbed by an accumulation of feces, caused by low temperatures or poor food. ( ) if the bees were in good condition in the fall and have been wintered well, the loss during the winter will never be more than one-sixth of the total population of the hive. such a loss is excessive, however, and in a well-wintered colony it may be as low as a hundred bees. this probably depends to a large extent on the age of the bees which go into winter, and if the temperature is right and the stores good there will be almost no loss of vigorous bees. ( ) the bees should not leave the hive while they are being carried from the cellar. if they do, it indicates that they are excited by an accumulation of feces. ( ) before removal from the cellar there should be no spotting of the hives from dysentery. there may be a little spotting after the bees have had a free flight outside, but if this is small in amount it does not indicate a serious condition. ( ) when the bees are taken from the cellar there should be no moldy combs, for the cellar at the right temperature will be too dry for the growth of molds. ( ) there should be no brood when the colonies are taken from the cellar. brood-rearing in the cellar is proof that the cellar is too cold or that the food used by the bees is inferior. ( ) enough brood should be in each colony at the opening of the main honey-flow to fill completely langstroth frames. ( ) the population of the hive should not decrease appreciably after the bees are removed from the cellar. such a condition, known as spring dwindling, is an indication of poor wintering. for three weeks after the hives are set out no new bees will be emerging, but the loss of bees during this time should be so small as not to be noticeable. the president to the farmers of america. [extracts from president wilson's message to the farmers' conference at urbana, ill., january , .] the forces that fight for freedom, the freedom of men all over the world as well as our own, depend upon us in an extraordinary and unexpected degree for sustenance, for the supply of the materials by which men are to live and to fight, and it will be our glory when the war is over that we have supplied those materials and supplied them abundantly, and it will be all the more glory because in supplying them we have made our supreme effort and sacrifice. in the field of agriculture we have agencies and instrumentalities, fortunately, such as no other government in the world can show. the department of agriculture is undoubtedly the greatest practical and scientific agricultural organization in the world. its total annual budget of $ , , has been increased during the last four years more than per cent. it has a staff of , , including a large number, of highly trained experts, and alongside of it stands the unique land grant colleges, which are without example elsewhere, and the state and federal experiment stations. these colleges and experiment stations have a total endowment of plant and equipment of $ , , and an income of more than $ , , with , teachers, a resident student body of , , and a vast additional number receiving instructions at their homes. county agents, joint officers of the department of agriculture and of the colleges, are everywhere cooperating with the farmers and assisting them. the number of extension workers under the smith-lever act and under the recent emergency legislation has grown to , men and women working regularly in the various communities and taking to the farmer the latest scientific and practical information. alongside these great public agencies stand the very effective voluntary organizations among the farmers themselves which are more and more learning the best methods of cooperation and the best methods of putting to practical use the assistance derived from governmental sources. the banking legislation of the last two or three years has given the farmers access to the great lendable capital of the country, and it has become the duty both of the men in charge of the federal reserve banking system and of the farm loan banking system to see to it that the farmers obtain the credit, both short term and long term, to which they are entitled not only, but which it is imperatively necessary should be extended to them if the present tasks of the country are to be adequately performed. both by direct purchase of nitrates and by the establishment of plants to produce nitrates, the government is doing its utmost to assist in the problem of fertilization. the department of agriculture and other agencies are actively assisting the farmers to locate, safeguard, and secure at cost an adequate supply of sound seed. the farmers of this country are as efficient as any other farmers in the world. they do not produce more per acre than the farmers in europe. it is not necessary that they should do so. it would perhaps be bad economy for them to attempt it. but they do produce by two to three or four times more per man, per unit of labor and capital, than the farmers of any european country. they are more alert and use more labor-saving devices than any other farmers in the world. and their response to the demands of the present emergency has been in every way remarkable. last spring their planting exceeded by , , acres the largest planting of any previous year, and the yields from the crops were record-breaking yields. in the fall of a wheat acreage of , , was planted, which was , , larger than for any preceding year, , , greater than the next largest, and , , greater than the preceding five-year average. but i ought to say to you that it is not only necessary that these achievements should be repeated, but that they should be exceeded. i know what this advice involves. it involves not only labor but sacrifice, the painstaking application of every bit of scientific knowledge and every tested practice that is available. it means the utmost economy, even to the point where the pinch comes. it means the kind of concentration and self-sacrifice which is involved in the field of battle itself, where the object always looms greater than the individual. and yet the government will help and help in every way that it is possible. it was farmers from whom came the first shots at lexington, that set aflame the revolution that made america free. i hope and believe that the farmers of america will willingly and conspicuously stand by to win this war also. the toil, the intelligence, the energy, the foresight, the self-sacrifice, and devotion of the farmers of america will, i believe, bring to a triumphant conclusion this great last war for the emancipation of men from the control of arbitrary government and the selfishness of class legislation and control, and then, when the end has come, we may look each other in the face and be glad that we are americans and have had the privilege to play such a part. the business of agriculture. [extracts from addresses.] the next great factor to enlist for the betterment of agriculture and rural life in this nation is the business man of the town and the city. he has not always been alive to his obligations. he has contented himself, in too many instances, with plans to secure profit in agricultural trade, instead of sympathetically and eagerly planning constructive assistance. this duty, pressing in peace time, is of the most urgent and impelling character in this crisis; and i appeal to the bankers and business men to see that they omit no effort to familiarize themselves with the agencies serving to aid the farmers and to promote wise plans to secure the necessary results. d. f. houston, secretary of agriculture. in the interest of our national development at all times and in the interest of war efficiency just now our agriculture must be well maintained. it should be remembered that the agricultural unit is a small unit. there are , , farms in this country, each an individual unit. it is to the interest of persons who do not live on farms, even more than to the interest of those who do live on farms, that production shall be kept up. this means that all people, not farmers alone, but those who live in cities as well as the farmers, are interested in experimental and educational activities along agricultural lines as conducted by the federal government and the states. these efforts should be liberally supported. r. a. pearson, assistant secretary of agriculture. in a time like this no man has a moral right, whatever his fortune may he, to employ another man to render any service of mere comfort or convenience. when the finest young men of the united states are in france digging ditches, sawing lumber, laying rails, and playing with death, and when the finest young women of the united states are scrubbing floors in hospitals, it is a sin that almost approaches the unpardonable offense against civilization for any man or women in the united states to engage in a wasteful or unnecessary service. clarence ousley, assistant secretary of agriculture. * * * * * transcriber note by the internet archive. transcriber notes text emphasis displayed as _italics_ and =bold=. issued july , . u. s. department of agriculture. farmers' bulletin . house flies. by l. o. howard, _chief of the bureau of entomology_. [illustration] washington: government printing office. . letter of transmittal u. s. department of agriculture, bureau of entomology, _washington, d. c, may , _. sir: i have the honor to transmit for publication a paper dealing with the subject of the house fly or typhoid fly. previous publications of this department concerning this insect have been in circular form, but it is desired to make this information more widely available through the medium of a farmers' bulletin. with this intention this manuscript has been prepared, being modified and amplified from circular no. of this bureau, and i respectfully recommend its publication as a farmers' bulletin. respectfully, l. o. howard, _entomologist and chief of bureau_. hon. james wilson, _secretary of agriculture_. [a list giving the titles of all farmers' bulletins available for distribution will be sent free upon application to a member of congress or the secretary of agriculture.] contents. page. introduction life history of the true house fly carriage of disease remedies and preventives natural enemies what cities and towns can do illustrations. page. . the common house fly (_musca domestica_); puparium, adult, larva, and details . the biting house fly (_stomoxys calcitrans_): adult, larva, puparium, and details . a stable fly (_muscina stabulans_): adult, larva, and details . one of the blue-bottle flies (_phormia terrænovæ_): adult . the green-bottle fly (_lucilia cæsar_): adult . the little house fly (_homalomyia brevis_): adults and larva . the fruit fly (_drosophila ampelophila_): adult, larva, puparium, and details. . the dung fly (_sepsis violacea_): adult, puparium, and details . the house centipede (_scutigera forceps_): adult house flies. introduction. there are several species of flies which are commonly found in houses, although but one of these should be called the house fly proper. this is the _musca domestica_ l. (fig. ) and is a medium-sized, grayish fly, with its mouth parts spread out at the tip for sucking up liquid substances. it is found in nearly all parts of the world. on account of the conformation of its mouth parts, the house fly can not bite, yet no impression is stronger in the minds of most people than that this insect does occasionally bite. this impression is due to the frequent occurrence in houses of another fly (_stomoxys calcitrans_ l.) (fig. ), which is called the stable fly, and which, while closely resembling the house fly (so closely, in fact, as to deceive anyone but an entomologist), differs from it in the important particular that its mouth parts are formed for piercing the skin. it is perhaps second in point of abundance to the house fly in most portions of the northeastern states. it breeds in horse manure, cow manure, and in warm decaying vegetation like old straw and grass heaps. [illustration: fig. .--the common house fly (_musca domestica_): puparium at left; adult next; larva and enlarged parts at right. all enlarged. (author's illustration.)] a third species, commonly called the cluster fly (_pollenia rudis_ fab.), is a very frequent visitant of houses, particularly in the spring and fall. this fly is somewhat larger than the house fly, with a dark-colored, smooth abdomen and a sprinkling of yellowish hairs. it is not so active as the house fly and, particularly in the fall, is very sluggish. at such times it may be picked up readily and is very subject to the attacks of a fungous disease which causes it to die upon window panes, surrounded by a whitish efflorescence. occasionally this fly occurs in houses in such numbers as to cause great annoyance, but such occurrences are comparatively rare. it is said in its earlier stages to be parasitic on certain angleworms. a fourth species is another stable fly, known as _muscina stabulans_ fall. (fig. ), a form which almost exactly resembles the house fly in general appearance, and which does not bite as does the biting stable fly. it breeds in decaying vegetable matter and in excrement. [illustration: fig. .--the stable fly or biting house fly (_stomoxys calcitrans_): adult, larva, puparium, and details. all enlarged. (author's illustration.)] several species of metallic greenish or bluish flies are also occasionally found in houses, the most abundant of which is the so-called blue-bottle fly (_calliphora erythrocephala_ meig.). this insect is also called the blow-fly or meat-fly and breeds in decaying animal material. a smaller species, which may be called the small blue-bottle fly, is _phormia terrænovæ_ desv. (fig. ); and a third, which is green or blue in color and a trifle smaller than the large blue-bottle, is _lucilia cæsar_ l. (fig. ). there is still another species, smaller than any of those so far mentioned, which is known to entomologists as _homalomyia canicularis_ l., sometimes called the small house fly. a related species, _h. brevis_ rond., is shown in figure . _h. canicularis_ is distinguished from the ordinary house fly by its paler and more pointed body and conical shape. the male, which is much commoner than 'the female, has large pale patches at the base of the abdomen, which are translucent when the fly is seen on a window pane. it is this species that is largely responsible for the prevalent idea that flies grow after gaining wings. most people think that these little homalomyias are the young of the larger flies, which, of course, is distinctly not the case. they breed in decaying vegetable material, in the excreta of animals, and in dead insects. still another fly, and this one is still smaller, is a jet-black species known as the window fly (_scenopinus fenestralis_ l.), which in fact has become more abundant of later years. its larva is a white, very slender, almost thread-like creature, and is found in cracks of the floor in buildings, where it feeds on other small insects. in the autumn, when fruit appears on the sideboard, many specimens of a small fruit-fly (_drosophila ampelophila_ loew) (fig. ) make their appearance, attracted by the odor of overripe fruit. a small, slender fly is not infrequently seen in houses, especially upon window panes. this is _sepsis violacea_ meig., shown enlarged in figure . [illustration: fig. .--a stable fly (_muscina stabulans_): adult, larva, and details. all enlarged. (author's illustration.)] all of these species, however, are greatly dwarfed in numbers by the common house fly. in the writer made collections of the flies in dining rooms in different parts of the country, and out of a total of , flies , were _musca domestica_--that is, . per cent of the whole number captured. the remainder, consisting of . per cent of the whole, comprised various species, including those mentioned above. life history of the true house fly. _musca domestica_ commonly lays its eggs upon horse manure. this substance seems to be its favorite larval food. it will oviposit on cow manure, but we have not been able to rear it in this substance. it will also breed in human excrement, and from this habit it becomes very dangerous to the health of human beings, carrying, as it does, the germs of intestinal diseases such as typhoid fever and cholera from excreta to food supplies. it will also lay its eggs upon other decaying vegetable and animal material, but of the flies that infest dwelling houses, both in cities and on farms, a vast proportion comes from horse manure. [illustration: fig. .--one of the blue-bottle flies (_phormia terrænovæ_): adult, enlarged. ( author's illustration.)] it often happens, however, that this fly is very abundant in localities where there is little or no horse manure, and in such cases it will be found breeding in other manure or in slops or fermenting vegetable material, such as spent hops, or bran, or ensilage. at salem, mass., packard states that he reared a generation in days in horse manure. the duration of the egg state was hours, the larval state from to days, and the pupal state from to days. at washington the writer has found in midsummer that each female lays at one time about eggs, which hatch in hours, the larval period lasting days and the pupal days, making the total time for the development of the generation days. this was at the end of june. the periods of development vary with the climate and with the season, and the insect hibernates in the puparium condition in manure or at the surface of the ground under a manure heap. it also hibernates in houses as adult, hiding in crevices. the washington observations indicate that the larvæ molt twice, and that there are thus three distinct larval stages. the periods of development were found to be about as follows: egg from deposition to hatching, one-third of a day; hatching of larva to first molt, day; first to second molt, day; second molt to pupation, days; pupation to issuing of adult, days; total life round, approximately days. there is thus abundance of time for the development of or generations in the climate of washington every summer. [illustration: fig. .--the green-bottle fly (_lucilia cæsar_): adult, enlarged. (author's illustration.)] the number of eggs laid by an individual fly at one time is undoubtedly large, averaging about , and a single female may lay such batches, so that the enormous numbers in which the insects occur is thus plainly accounted for, especially when the abundance and universal occurrence of appropriate larval food is considered. in order to ascertain the numbers in which house-fly larvæ occur in horse-manure piles, a quarter of a pound of rather well-infested horse manure was taken on august , and in it were counted larvæ and puparia. this would make about , house flies to the pound of manure. this, however, can not be taken as an average, since no larvæ are found in perhaps the greater part of ordinary horse-manure piles. neither, however, does it show the limit of what can be found, since about puparia were found in less than cubic inch of manure taken from a spot inches below the surface of the pile where the larvæ had congregated in immense numbers. the different stages of the insect are well illustrated in figure and need no description. [illustration: fig. .--the little house fly (_homalomyia brevis_): female at left; male next, with enlarged antenna; larva at right. all enlarged. (author's illustration.)] carriage of disease. in army camps, in mining camps, and in great public works, bringing together large numbers of men for a longer or shorter time, there is seldom the proper care of excreta, and the carriage of typhoid germs from the latrines and privies to food by flies is common and often results in epidemics of typhoid fever. and such carriage of typhoid by flies is by no means confined to these great temporary camps. in farmhouses in small communities and even in the badly cared-for portions of large cities typhoid germs are carried from excrement to food by flies, and the proper supervision and treatment of the breeding places of the house fly become most important elements in the prevention of typhoid. in the same way other intestinal germ diseases are carried by flies. the asiatic cholera, dysentery, and infantile diarrhea are all so carried. nor are the disease-bearing possibilities of the house fly limited to intestinal germ diseases. there is strong circumstantial evidence that tuberculosis, anthrax, yaws, ophthalmia, smallpox, tropical sore, and parasitic worms may be and are so carried. actual laboratory proof exists in the cases of a number of these diseases, and where lacking is replaced by circumstantial evidence amounting almost to certainty. remedies and preventives. a careful screening of windows and doors during the summer months, with the supplementary use of sticky fly papers, is a preventive measure against house flies known to everyone, and there seems to be little hope in the near future of much relief by doing away with the breeding places. a single stable in which a horse is kept will supply house flies for an extended neighborhood. people living in agricultural communities will probably never be rid of the pest, but in cities, with better methods of disposal of garbage and with the lessening of the number of horses and horse stables consequent upon electric street railways, bicycles, and automobiles, the time may come, and before very long, when window screens may be discarded. the prompt gathering of horse manure, which may be variously treated or kept in a specially prepared receptacle, would greatly abate the fly nuisance, and city ordinances compelling horse owners to follow some such course are desirable. absolute cleanliness, even under existing circumstances, will always result in a diminution of the numbers of the house fly, and, in fact, most household insects are less attracted to the premises of what is known as the old-fashioned house-keeper than to those of the other kind. [illustration: fig. .--the fruit fly (_drosophila ampelophila_): _a_, adult; _b_, antenna of same; _c_, base of tibia and first tarsal joint of same; _d_, puparium, side view; _e_, puparium from above; _f_, full-grown larva; _g_, anal spiracles of same. all enlarged. (author's illustration.)] not only must all horse stables be cared for, but chicken yards, piggeries, and garbage receptacles as well, and absolutely sanitary privies are prime necessities. directions for building and caring for such privies will be found in farmers' bulletin no. . the dry-earth treatment of privy vaults is unsatisfactory. kerosene should be used. [illustration: fig. .--the dung fly (_sepsis violacea_): adult, puparium, and details. all enlarged. (author's illustration.)] during the summer of a series of experiments was carried out with the intention of showing whether it would be possible to treat a manure pile in such a way as to stop the breeding of flies. the writer's experience with the use of air-slaked lime on cow manure to prevent the breeding of the horn fly (_hæmatobia serrata_ rob.-desv.) suggested experimentation with different lime compounds. it was found to be perfectly impracticable to use air-slaked lime, land plaster, or gas lime with good results. few or no larvæ were killed by a thorough mixing of the manure with any of these three substances. chlorid of lime, however, was found to be an excellent maggot killer. where pound of chlorid of lime was mixed with quarts of horse manure, per cent of the maggots were killed in less than hours. at the rate of one-fourth of a pound of chlorid of lime to quarts of manure, however, the substance was found not to be sufficiently strong. chlorid of lime, though cheap in europe, costs at least - / cents a pound in large quantities in this country, so that the frequent treatment of a large manure pile with this substance would be out of the question in actual practice. experiments were therefore carried on with kerosene. it was found that quarts of fresh horse manure sprayed with pint of kerosene, which was afterwards washed down with quart of water, was thoroughly rid of irving maggots. every individual was killed by the treatment. this experiment and others of a similar nature on a small scale were so satisfactory that it was considered at the close of the season that a practical conclusion had been reached, and that it was perfectly possible to treat any manure pile economically and in such a way as to prevent the breeding of flies. practical work in the summer of , however, demonstrated that this was simply another case where an experiment on a small scale has failed to develop points which in practical work would vitiate the results. the stable of the united states department of agriculture, in which about horses were kept, was situated about yards behind the main building of the department and about yards from the building in which the bureau of entomology is situated. this stable was always very carefully kept. the manure was thoroughly swept up every morning, carried outside of the stable, and deposited in a pile behind the building. this pile, after accumulating for a week or days, or sometimes weeks, was carried off by the gardeners and spread upon distant portions of the grounds. at all times in the summer this manure pile swarmed with the maggots of the house fly. it is safe to say that on an average many thousands of perfect flies issued from it every day, and that at least a large share of the flies which constantly bothered the employees in the two buildings mentioned came from this source. on the basis of the experiments of , an attempt was made, beginning early in april, , to prevent the breeding of house flies about the department by the treatment of this manure pile with kerosene. the attempt was begun early in april and was carried on for some weeks. while undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of flies were destroyed in the course of this work, it was found by the end of may that it was far from perfect, since if used at an economical rate the kerosene could not be made to penetrate throughout the whole pile of manure, even when copiously washed down with water. a considerable proportion of house-fly larvæ escaped injury from this treatment, which at the same time was found, even at an economical cost, to be laborious, and such a measure, in fact, as almost no one could be induced to adopt. there remained, however, another measure which had been suggested by the writer in an article on the house fly published in , namely, the preparation of an especial receptacle for the manure; and this was very readily accomplished. a closet by feet had been built in the corner of the stable nearest the manure pile. it had a door opening into the stable proper, and also a window. a door was built in the outside wall of this closet, and the stablemen were directed to place no more manure outside the building; in other words, to abolish the outside manure pile, and in the future to throw all of the manure collected each morning into this closet, the window of which in the meantime had been furnished with a wire screen. the preparations were completed by the middle of june, and a barrel of chlorid of lime was put in the corner of the closet. since that time every morning the manure of the stable is thrown into the closet, and a small shovelful of chlorid of lime is scattered over it. at the expiration of days or weeks the gardeners open the outside door, shovel the manure into a cart, and carry if off to be thrown upon the grounds. judging from actual examination of the manure pile, the measure is eminently successful. very few flies are breeding in the product of the stable which formerly gave birth to many thousands daily. after this measure had been carried on for two weeks, employees of the department who had no knowledge of the work that was going on were asked whether they had noticed any diminution in the number of flies in their offices. persons in all of the offices on the first floor of the two buildings were asked this question. in every office except one the answer was that a marked decrease had been noticed, so that the work must be considered to have been successful. the account of this remedial work has been given with some detail, since it shows so plainly that care and cleanliness combined with such an arrangement as that described will in an individual stable measurably affect the fly nuisance in neighboring buildings. with the combined efforts of the persons owning stables in a given community, much more effective results can undoubtedly be gained. in the consideration of these measures we have not touched upon the remedies for house flies breeding in human excrement. on account of the danger of the carriage of typhoid fever, the dropping of human excrement in the open in cities or towns, either on vacant lots or in dark alleyways, should be made a misdemeanor, and the same care should be taken by the sanitary authorities to remove or cover up such depositions as is taken in the removal of the bodies of dead animals. the box privy is always a nuisance from many points of view, and is undoubtedly dangerous as a breeder of flies which may carry the germs of intestinal disease. no box privies should be permitted to exist unless they are conducted on the kerosene principle. with a proper vault or other receptacle, closed except from above, and a free use of kerosene and water, the breeding of house flies can be prevented. [illustration: fig. .--the house centipede (_scutigera forceps_) adult natural size (after marlatt.)] a parisian journal, the matin, during the winter of - , established a prize of , francs for the best essay on the destruction of the house fly. the jury of competent scientific men awarded the prize to the author of a memoir in which it was proposed to use residuum oil in the destruction of the eggs and larvæ of the fly. this oil is to be used in privies and cesspools. two liters per superficial meter of the pit is mixed with water, stirred with a stick of wood, and then thrown into the receptacle. it is said to form a covering of oil which kills all the larvæ, preventing the entrance of flies into the pit and, at the same time, the hatching of eggs. it makes a protective covering for the excrement, and this is said to hasten the development of anærobic bacteria as in a true septic pit, leading in this way to the rapid liquefaction of solid matters and rendering them much more unfit for the development of other bacteria. for manure it is recommended to mix this residuum oil with earth, with lime, and with phosphates, and to spread it at different times, in the spring by preference, upon the manure of farms and stables and so on. there seems to be a definite period of perhaps days between the issuing of the adult flies and the laying of eggs. during this period, and especially in the early spring, it becomes important to trap as many flies as possible. with this end in view, prof. c. f hodge, of clark university, worcester, mass., has devised certain flytraps which he attaches to garbage cans and to screened stable windows, and which he places in the neighborhood of possible fly-breeding places. so many cheap flytraps are on the market that it is unnecessary and undesirable to specify any particular kind. many of them are good. natural enemies. the house fly has a number of natural enemies. the common house centipede (fig. ) destroys it in considerable numbers, there is a small reddish mite which frequently covers its body and gradually destroys it, it is subject to the attacks of hymenopterous parasites in its larval condition, and it is destroyed by predatory beetles at the same time. the most effective enemy, however, is a fungous disease known as _empusa muscæ_, which carries off flies in large numbers, particularly toward the close of the season. the epidemic ceases in december, and although many thousands are killed by it, the remarkable rapidity of development in the early summer months soon more than replaces the thousands thus destroyed. what cities and towns can do. it would appear, from what we know of the life history of the common house fly and from what remedial experimentation has already been carried on, that it is perfectly feasible for cities and towns to reduce the numbers of these annoying and dangerous insects so greatly as to render them of comparatively slight account. the health departments of most of our cities have the authority to abate nuisances dangerous to health, and it is easy for the health authorities of any city to formulate rules concerning the construction and care of stables and the keeping and disposal of manure which, if enforced, will do away with the house-fly nuisance. such a series of rules was formulated in the spring of by the health department of the city of asheville, n. c, and an effort is being made during this summer to see that they are enforced. on the d of may, , the health department of the district of columbia also issued a series of orders of this nature, on the authority of the commissioners of the district, and these orders, which may well serve as a model to other communities desiring to undertake similar measures, may be briefly condensed as follows: all stalls in which animals are kept shall have the surface of the ground covered with a water-tight floor. every person occupying a building where domestic animals are kept shall maintain, in connection therewith, a bin or pit for the reception of manure, and, pending the removal from the premises of the manure from the animal or animals, shall place such manure in said bin or pit. this bin shall be so constructed as to exclude rain water, and shall in all other respects be water tight except as it may be connected with the public sewer. it shall be provided with a suitable cover and constructed so as to prevent the ingress and egress of flies. no person owning a stable shall keep any manure or permit any manure to be kept in or upon any portion of the premises other than the bin or pit described, nor shall he allow any such bin or pit to be overfilled or needlessly uncovered. horse manure may be kept tightly rammed into well-covered barrels for the purpose of removal in such barrels. every person keeping manure in any of the more densely populated parts of the district shall cause all such manure to be removed from the premises at least twice every week between june and october , and at least once every week between november and may of the following year. no person shall remove or transport any manure over any public highway in any of the more densely populated parts of the district except in a tight vehicle which, if not inclosed, must be effectually covered with canvas, so as to prevent the manure from being dropped. no person shall deposit manure removed from the bins or pits within any of the more densely populated parts of the district without a permit from the health officer. any person violating any of the provisions shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by a fine of not more than $ for each offense. as with all such measures, the test comes with the enforcement, and these regulations have not been well enforced, owing to the extremely small corps of inspectors allowed to the health department, and to other more pressing work. they can be made effective, however, and it is earnestly hoped that not only washington but other communities as well will very soon be brought to a realization of the ease of house-fly eradication and its very great desirability. * * * * * =the insect we now call the "house fly" should in the future be termed the "typhoid fly," in order to call direct attention to the danger of allowing it to continue to breed unchecked.--l. o. howard.= * * * * * transcriber notes all illustrations moved to avoid splitting paragraphs. transcriber note text emphasis denoted as _italic_ and =bold=. farmers' bulletin united states department of agriculture drug plants under cultivation [illustration] this bulletin gives general suggestions relative to the culture, harvesting, distillation, yield, marketing, and commercial prospects for drug plants. specific information is also given concerning the cultivation, handling, and yield of individual species and the demand and prices paid for the product. the market demand for many cultivated plant drugs is not large enough to justify growing them except as small minor crops. the haphazard production of crude drugs in small lots of a few pounds usually means a dissatisfied producer. a special knowledge of trade requirements is necessary in collecting, curing, preserving, and packing drugs for market. most farm products find a ready local market; a special market must be sought for plant drugs. high prices for plant drugs do not insure large profits in producing them. not the price received, but the difference between the cost of production and the selling price is the important point. contribution from the bureau of plant industry wm. a. taylor, chief issued, june, washington, d. c. revised, august, show this bulletin to a neighbor. additional copies may be obtained free from the division of publications, united states department of agriculture. drug plants under cultivation. w. w. stockberger, _physiologist in charge, drug, poisonous, and oil plant investigations_. contents. page. production of crude drugs some drug plants suitable for cultivation in the united states general cultural suggestions harvesting distillation yield marketing commercial prospects the cultivation and handling of drug plants production of crude drugs. interest in the possibility of deriving profit from the growing of drug plants is increasing yearly. the clearing of forests, the extension of the areas of land under tillage, and the activities of drug collectors threaten the extermination of a number of valuable native drug plants. annually, large sums of money are expended for crude drugs imported from countries where they are grown under conditions of soil and climate resembling those of many localities in the united states. as a means of guaranteeing the future supply of crude drugs and of lessening the dependence on importations, attention is now being turned to the cultivation of drug plants with a view to increasing domestic production. the problems presented by the cultivation of drug plants are not less difficult than those encountered in the production of many other crops. drug plants are subject to the same diseases and risks as other crops and are similarly affected by variations in soil and climatic conditions. they require a considerable outlay of labor, the same as other crops, and likewise require intelligent care and handling. they are subject to the same laws of supply and demand, and, like other products, must conform to the consumer's fancy and to definite trade requirements. a number of common medicinal plants have long been cultivated in gardens in this country, either as ornamentals or as a source of herbs used in cookery and as domestic remedies. a few of these plants, such as goldenseal, wormwood, wormseed, and peppermint, have been grown commercially for sale as crude drugs; but the acreage devoted to their production has been relatively small and for the most part restricted to certain localities. other drug plants which occur as common weeds in many places may prove to respond to cultivation; experiments should then be undertaken to determine whether it is profitable to grow them. in this connection it should be remembered that the soil type very often is an important limiting factor in propagating different kinds of plants. some plants grow best in well-drained loam, some prefer a marsh, some require soils rich in lime, while others thrive only in acid soil. the soil requirements of all plants are not understood; in fact it is not improbable that better comprehension of the soil, climatic, and cultural conditions adapted to the different kinds of plants will enable the successful propagation of species now regarded as unsuited to cultivation. in undertaking the growing of medicinal plants, therefore, it is essential to know that the species selected for cultivation will do well under the conditions of soil and climate existing where the planting is to be made. when necessary, this should be determined on small experimental plats before undertaking commercial plantings. assuming that the soil and climate of the situation selected are suitable for the growing of drug plants, it does not necessarily follow that they can be produced at a profit. the cost of production and marketing may be greater than the amount received for the crop when it is sold. some drug plants not well suited for cultivation on a large scale may be found profitable when grown on small areas as a side line. on the other hand, some may be produced more cheaply when cultivated on a scale large enough to warrant the use of labor-saving devices than when grown on small areas with the aid of hand labor alone. the value of land, the cost and availability of labor, and the possible returns from other crops are all factors to be considered carefully. on account of the variation in these factors according to locality, the same crop might prove to be profitable in one location and unprofitable in another. it is for these reasons that unqualified statements concerning the ease and profitableness of drug plant growing should not be taken too seriously. some drug plants suitable for cultivation in the united states. the number of drug plants which may be grown in the united states is large, although the same plants are not equally adapted to the conditions of soil and climate prevailing in different sections. often the most suitable plants for a particular locality can not be foretold, especially in those situations where no attempts have yet been made to grow them. in such cases it is well to select for cultivation plants which thrive elsewhere under conditions most closely resembling those of the new situation in which it is proposed to grow them. the success with which ordinary field or garden crops can be grown will in general indicate the possible suitability of a given location for growing many medicinal plants. since a number of native medicinal plants which in their wild state are restricted to certain localities have been successfully cultivated in situations far beyond their natural range, there are good reasons for believing that many such plants will thrive in sections where they are not now grown. however, good results can scarcely be expected unless the plants are placed under conditions similar to those in which they normally thrive. in suitable soil and under favorable weather conditions the following drug plants have been found to thrive well under cultivation in numerous places in the central and eastern states and will probably be found suitable for cultivation in many other situations if the difference in climatic conditions is not too great: anise. conium. elecampane. sage. belladonna. coriander. fennel. stramonium. camomile. digitalis. henbane. tansy. caraway. dill. horehound. thyme. some perennials, such as belladonna and digitalis, are only partly hardy and would be subject to winterkilling in the colder sections. such plants as aconite, arnica, lovage, poppy, seneca, valerian, and wormwood seem to thrive best in the northern half of the united states in situations where the rainfall is well distributed throughout the growing season. on the other hand, cannabis, licorice, and wormseed are better suited to the warmer climate of the southern half of the united states. aletris, althaea, angelica, calamus, orris, pinkroot, peppermint, serpentaria, and spearmint are adapted generally for situations in which the soil is rich and moist, but lavender and larkspur are partial to well-drained sandy soil. ginseng and goldenseal occur naturally on rich soil in the partial shade of forest trees and can be cultivated successfully only when planted in woodlands or in specially prepared soil under artificial shade (fig. ). general cultural suggestions. the special details of cultivation for each of the medicinal plants mentioned are given under the discussion of the individual species. suggestions which are of general application, however, are here brought together, in order to avoid unnecessary duplication. _propagation._--a number of the species considered later can be grown easily from seed, but others are best propagated from cuttings or by division. many wild medicinal plants are much more difficult to propagate from seeds than the species commonly grown in gardens. likewise, some of the species now grown abroad and suitable for cultivation in this country are not easily propagated and require special conditions if good results are to be realized. [illustration: fig. .--lath shed affording partial shade, especially well suited for growing woodland plants.] seeds of the better-known varieties of medicinal plants are regularly listed in the catalogues of numerous seed houses, and those which are less common can usually be obtained from dealers who make a specialty of one or more of these species. plants can frequently be obtained from nurseries or from dealers in hardy ornamentals. the catalogues of a number of dealers should be consulted and the varieties for propagation carefully selected. in ordering, the medicinal variety should always be called for, since many of the related ornamental forms which are listed are of doubtful, if any, medicinal value. _sowing the seed._--a relatively small number of medicinal plants can be satisfactorily grown from seed sown in the field. in many cases this method is quite uncertain and with some plants wholly inadvisable. in order to insure a good stand of thrifty plants it is frequently necessary to make the sowings in a greenhouse, hotbed, or coldframe and at a suitable time transplant the seedlings to the field. much information on seed germination, hotbeds, and coldframes can be gained by consulting farmers' bulletins , , and , entitled, respectively, "home gardening in the south," "the farm garden, in the north," and "the city home garden."[ ] [ ] these publications can be obtained free of charge upon application to the secretary of agriculture, washington, d. c. the preparation of the soil is of prime importance, whether the sowing of the seed is made in the open or under cover. many seeds, especially those which are very small, do not germinate well in heavy soils or in those which are cloddy and coarse in texture. a seed bed prepared by thoroughly mixing equal parts of garden soil, leaf mold, well-rotted manure, and clean sand will be suitable for the germination of most seeds. the depth of sowing is largely governed by the size of the seeds and the character of the soil. in general, the smaller the seed the less the depth of sowing. seed should be covered more deeply in light sandy soil than in heavy clay soil. fall-sown seeds also require a greater depth of covering than those sown in the spring. the exact quantity of seed which should be used for sowing a given area can not be definitely stated. the same kind of seed will be found to vary widely in its power to germinate; hence, the percentage of germination should be ascertained in advance of sowing and the quantity regulated accordingly. in general, the heavier the soil the larger the quantity of seed required. if the plants are to be thinned out or transplanted, or if they are especially subject to the attacks of insects, the free use of seed is usually advisable. when plantings are made in open ground it is preferable to sow the seed in rows or drills, in order that cultivation of the soil may be possible. a shallow furrow may be opened with a rake or hand hoe and the seed sown by hand. the rake or hoe may then be used to cover the seed with the required depth of soil. it is much more satisfactory to use seed drills, such as are commonly used by market gardeners, than to sow by hand, since with the drill the depth of sowing is more uniform and the soil is compacted over the seeds, thus favoring good germination. the distance between the rows is determined in part by the size which the plants attain at maturity, but depends chiefly upon the method of cultivation to be used. a spacing of to inches between the rows will readily permit hand cultivation, but the rows should be about feet apart if horse-drawn implements are employed. _cultivation._--there are no set rules for the cultivation of medicinal plants, and the grower's experience with other plants must be relied upon as a guide in many of the details of cultivation. as a general rule, the soil should be worked with the hoe or cultivator at frequent intervals and kept free from weeds. it is a good practice to cultivate after a hard rain as soon as the ground is sufficiently dry. during dry, hot weather loss of moisture from the soil will be diminished by frequent shallow cultivations. harvesting. drug roots are usually harvested in the fall or at the end of the growing season of the plant, but they may also be harvested early in the spring while still dormant. roots collected during the growing season often shrink excessively in drying and so do not form the most desirable product. on small areas either a spade or a potato fork is a suitable tool for digging most roots; but if the area is large, labor will be saved by using a plow to turn out the roots, especially with such crops as belladonna or burdock. most roots require thorough washing, and when the quantity is large this may be easily done if the roots are placed on a frame covered with wire mesh and water is applied by means of a garden hose. all roots must be thoroughly dried. large or fleshy roots are usually split or sliced, spread in thin layers on clean floors, and stirred or turned frequently. good ventilation is essential, as several weeks usually elapse before the roots are dry enough to be stored with safety. the proper point of dryness is indicated when the roots break readily on being bent. the time of drying may be reduced to a few days by the use of artificial heat. for this purpose the walls of a well-inclosed room are fitted with racks or shelves to receive the roots, or large trays with bottoms made of slats or wire screen are suspended one above the other from the ceiling. the room is heated by a stove, and the temperature maintained between ° and ° f. ventilators must be provided at the top of the room to carry away the moisture which is driven off from the roots. ordinary fruit driers have been used successfully in drying roots on, a small scale, but special drying houses or kilns will be necessary for successfully handling crops grown on an acreage basis. leaves and herbs are usually harvested when the plants are in flower. picking the leaves by hand in the field is a slow process, and time may be saved by cutting the entire plant and stripping the leaves after the plants have been brought in from the field. if the entire herb is wanted, it is preferable to top the plants, for if they are cut too close to the ground the herb will have to be picked over by hand and all the coarse stems removed. as a rule, leaves and herbs may be dried in the same manner as roots, but almost without exception they are dried without exposure to the sun, in order that the green color may be retained so far as possible. some flowers are gathered while scarcely open and others as soon after opening as possible, and in general they should be carefully dried in the shade to prevent discoloration. hand picking is very laborious, and mechanical devices similar to a cranberry scoop (fig. ) or seed stripper (fig. ) may often be used to good advantage. a homemade picker may be constructed as follows: from a stout wooden box, about inches wide, inches long, and inches deep, remove one end and connect the opposite remaining sides at the top with a stout strip, which will serve as a handle. drive long, slender wire nails through an inch strip of wood at quarter-inch intervals, thus forming a "comb" the teeth of which should be about inches long. this comb is fastened to the bottom of the box in such a manner that the teeth will project outward through the opening left by the removed end. on swinging this device, teeth forward, through the flowers, the heads will be snapped off by the comb and will fall into the box, from which they may be emptied into suitable containers. [illustration: fig. .--a berry scoop suitable for harvesting flower heads of large size.] [illustration: fig. .--a seed stripper which may be used for gathering flower heads.] seeds are harvested as soon as most of them have ripened and before the pods or seed capsules have opened. seedlike fruits, such as anise, coriander, fennel, and wormseed r are harvested a little before they are fully ripe, in order that they may retain a bright, fresh appearance, which adds to their market value. the machinery used for thrashing and cleaning ordinary seed crops will frequently serve a similar purpose for seeds of medicinal plants, provided the proper adjustments have been made. most seeds must be spread out to dry and turned at intervals until thoroughly dried before they can be stored in quantity. distillation. the volatile oil obtained from many aromatic plants by steam distillation is often their most valuable product. the equipment necessary for distilling volatile oils consists essentially of a steam boiler, a retort, and a condenser. a constant supply of cold water must also be available. a common type of retort consists of a circular wooden vat, about feet in diameter and to feet deep (fig. ), fitted with a removable cover, which can be made steam tight. metal retorts made of boiler iron three-sixteenths of an inch thick and jacketed with wood to prevent the radiation of heat are also used. a pipe leads from the steam boiler to the bottom of the retort and another from the top of the retort to the condenser, one form of which consists of a coil of tin-lined or galvanized-iron pipe inclosed in a jacket through which cold water is kept flowing when the still is in operation. [illustration: fig. .--a still used in the production of wormwood oil.] when the retort is filled with aromatic plants and steam is admitted through the pipe from the boiler, the volatile oil is extracted in the form of a vapor, which is carried over with the steam to the condenser, where both are condensed to liquid form. the oil and water together flow from the condenser into the receiver, one type of which is constructed like an ordinary milk can and is fitted with a siphon leading from the bottom, through which the water is drawn off to prevent the receiver from overflowing. many volatile oils will float on the water and may be drawn off from the top of the receiver at will. other oils, such as sassafras and wintergreen, are heavier than water, and should be collected in a receiver provided at the bottom with an outlet tap through which the oil may be drawn off. the cost of setting up a still will depend upon what facilities are already at hand and upon the size and efficiency of the apparatus installed. it may easily range from a small sum to several thousand dollars. yield. the yield that can be obtained from drug plants in different localities will naturally vary according to the suitability of the situation for the plants selected for cultivation. even in the same locality wide variations in yield will result from differences in the lay of the land and in soil, drainage, and seasonal conditions. the skill of the grower and the degree of care and attention which he bestows upon his crop are also factors affecting yield. many of the drug plants mentioned in this bulletin have not been grown on a scale large enough to give a very satisfactory basis for calculating yields. acreage yields calculated from the product of small garden plats are generally untrustworthy, since in such plats the plants are usually more favorably situated with respect to soil and are given better culture than when under field conditions. moreover, as the area increases, it becomes more difficult to maintain an approximately perfect stand and to protect the crop from the ravages of insects or other destructive agencies. the returns from small experimental areas can at most be regarded as only an indication of the yield that may be expected under favorable conditions, and the prospective grower will do well to proceed cautiously until he has determined for himself the possibilities of yield in his particular location. marketing. the commercial grower of drug plants can not give too much attention to the problem of securing a satisfactory market for his product. growers who live near the cities in which dealers in crude drugs are located or in sections where wild medicinal plants are collected may be able to find a local market, but in many situations the local marketing of crude drugs in quantity will not be possible. in such cases the grower should send samples of his product to dealers in crude drugs or to manufacturers of pharmaceutical preparations and request them to name a price at which they would purchase his crop. the material for the samples should not be specially selected or so prepared as to represent a quality higher than that of the whole lot, since this would give the purchaser just cause for making a reduction in price on delivery or for rejecting the whole shipment. it is well to send samples to a number of dealers, since their prices will be found to vary with the stock on hand and trade prospects. before selling, the state of the wholesale drug market should be learned. the prices to producers are, of course, always lower than the wholesale price; nevertheless, the grower who is informed in respect to the wholesale market will be in a position to judge of the fairness of the prices offered for his crop by dealers. under special conditions some crude drugs can be sold at a material advance over the prevailing market price. by always supplying a well-prepared, carefully selected drug of high quality some growers have built up a trade in their particular product for which they secure extra good prices. dealers and manufacturers also sometimes make contracts with reliable growers to take the entire crop of a particular drug, thus insuring to the grower a definite market and good prices for the product. commercial prospects. at the close of the year there existed a general and widespread shortage in botanical crude drugs, and prices in consequence had reached unusually high levels. the demand in other lines for unskilled labor at high wages has attracted elsewhere many persons who were formerly engaged in the collection or production of botanic drugs in this country. it is therefore probable that prices for most crude drugs will remain at a high level until the prices of other commodities undergo a general reduction and the present supply of labor greatly increases. although the average value of crude drugs, expressed in terms of money, has more than doubled since , it does not follow that their production offers a corresponding increase in profit to the producer. the prices of food and clothing, labor, and supplies of all kinds have for the most part more than doubled in the same time and the prospective producer of crude drugs will do well to consider carefully the comparative prices of the necessities of life which he must purchase before he engages in this enterprise. the unusually high prices now offered for many crude drugs are due to the underproduction, which has resulted largely from labor conditions and do not necessarily indicate any large increase in the demand for consumption. in view of the present disturbed economic conditions and the uncertainty as to the future course of prices, the general stimulation of drug growing in this country does not appear to be the best policy at this time. however desirable it may be to increase the available supply of crude drugs or to diminish the amount of money now sent to foreign countries for these products, the most important consideration for the american farmer who would grow drug plants is the probable profit to be derived from such an enterprise. many statements to the contrary notwithstanding, the commercial production of crude drugs does not normally present unusual opportunities for quick returns and large profits. knowledge respecting the cultivation and handling of medicinal-plant crops is far less widespread than in the case of such generally distributed crops as fruits, vegetables, and cereals, and certain individuals have taken advantage of this lack of information to lead the public to believe that extraordinary profits may be realized from growing medicinal plants, even in a situation no more promising than the average city back yard. such persons are interested usually only in the sale of the plants and seeds for propagation or the questionable directions for their cultivation, and the extravagant claims often set forth in their alluring advertisements are not only misleading, but frequently have little basis in fact. the market demand for any given crude drug is naturally a large factor in determining the prospects for its commercial production under cultivation. the demand for a number of drugs is quite variable or exceedingly limited, and hence insufficient to make it advisable to raise them on a large scale. in the case of other drugs, although the demand is fairly constant and steady, it could probably be fully satisfied by the product of a very few acres of good land. it is evident that the cultivation of any considerable acreage might easily result in overproduction, with a consequent decline in market price to a point where production would not be profitable. the cultivation of drug plants, to be successful in this country, will probably require the introduction of improved methods and the extensive use of machinery to replace hand labor so far as possible. growers of mints and numerous other plants yielding essential oils will find it desirable to equip themselves with a suitable distilling plant, although the latter can not be operated most economically when only a small quantity of material is available for distillation. the natural tendency will be to increase the acreage in the interest of more efficient operation, but here again there is danger of overproduction, and prospective growers should thoroughly acquaint themselves with market conditions before bringing very large areas under cultivation. very few, if any, drug plants are used in quantities sufficient to make them a promising crop for general cultivation. many of the common ones, which can be grown and prepared for market with little difficulty, bring but a few cents a pound, and their cultivation offers little prospect of profit. a number of the high-priced drug plants must be given care for two or more years before a crop can be harvested, and, since expensive equipment is usually required for their successful culture, the production of such crops offers little encouragement to inexperienced growers who are looking for quick returns and large profits from a small investment. the production of drugs of high quality requires skilled management, experience in special methods of plant culture, acquaintance with trade requirements, and a knowledge of the influence of time of collection and manner of preparation on the constituents of the drug which determine its value. small quantities of drugs produced without regard to these conditions are apt to be poor in quality and so unattractive to dealers and manufacturers that the product will not be salable at a price sufficient to make their production profitable. in general, the conditions in this country seem far more favorable to the growing of drug plants as a special industry for well-equipped cultivators than as a side crop for general farmers or those whose chief interest lies in the production of other crops. although a number of plants which yield products used as crude drugs are common farm weeds, they usually occur in scattered situations and in such small quantities that their collection would scarcely prove profitable for the farmer. even when relatively abundant it is a matter for careful consideration whether the time and labor necessary for their collection might not be otherwise employed to better advantage. moreover, it is not always easy to distinguish medicinal plants from others of similar appearance, and collectors not infrequently find that they have spent their time in gathering plants practically worthless as crude drugs. in proportion to the labor required in their collection, relatively low prices are paid for most crude drugs obtained from wild plants, and the farmer who turns to drug collecting as a source of additional revenue will probably meet with disappointment. the cultivation and handling of drug plants. the following cultural directions and suggestions regarding the handling of a number of drug plants have been compiled in part from the records of the office of drug, poisonous, and oil plant investigations and include data secured by various members of the staff of that office connected with testing gardens in several widely separated localities. the probable yields per acre are in many cases estimates calculated from smaller areas, and considerable variation from the figures given must be expected in actual practice. the prices mentioned are given merely to indicate the comparative value of the products concerned and not to fix the actual price which the grower of drug plants may expect to receive. this will depend very largely upon the state of the market at the time the crop is offered for sale. the plants mentioned in the following pages were selected for discussion because information regarding their cultivation is in constant demand. the purpose of this bulletin is not to recommend these plants for cultivation, but to give information concerning their culture which may be helpful to persons who are considering the production of drug plants on a commercial scale.[ ] [ ] for information in regard to weeds used in medicine not herein considered, see farmers' bulletin no. , which may be obtained from the superintendent of documents, government printing office, for cents. aletris. aletris, star-grass, or true unicorn root (_aletris farinosa_, fig. ) is a native perennial herb of the lily family, found occasionally on sandy soil throughout the eastern half of the united states; also frequently occurring in the pine and oak barrens of alabama and tennessee and elsewhere in the south. the root is used medicinally. [illustration: fig. .--aletris (_aletris farinosa_).] aletris is a slow-growing plant which seems to thrive best on a moist and sandy soil. it may be propagated either by division of the root stocks or from seeds. the seeds mature late in the summer, and should be sown soon after ripening, in a well-prepared and protected seed bed. in the following spring the seedlings may be transplanted to their permanent situation and set about a foot apart in rows inches or more apart. the soil about the plants should be stirred frequently and kept free from weeds. the root, consisting of a short horizontal rootstock bearing numerous small rootlets, may be harvested in the fall of the second or third year. in preparing the root for market the stem and leaves are broken off and the dirt is removed by shaking (or washing, if necessary), after which it is well dried. there are no available data on the probable yield. the prewar prices paid to collectors for aletris usually ranged from to cents a pound. the prices in june, , were about cents a pound. aconite. aconite (_aconitum napellus_) is a hardy perennial, introduced from europe and sparingly grown in this country as an ornamental garden plant. both leaves and roots are very poisonous, the latter forming the official drug. other varieties than _aconitum napellus_ are also grown in flower gardens, and several species occur wild in the united states. since the official species readily hybridizes with related varieties, often to the detriment of its medicinal properties, it is frequently difficult to secure seed which will come true to name. aconite seems to thrive best in a rather cool climate and will grow in any rich garden soil, but a well-drained gravelly loam in an elevated situation appears most suited for the cultivation of this plant. it may be grown from seed sown in the open late in the fall or early in the spring, or plants may be started in a seed bed and the seedlings later transplanted and set about a foot apart in rows feet apart. the preferable method of propagation is by division of the roots after the stems have died down in the fall, since thereby hybridization may be avoided. the plants usually flower in the second year from seed, when the roots may be harvested. it is preferable, however, to defer harvesting until the stems have died down in the fall, when all the roots should be dug, the smaller reserved for planting and the larger ones washed, sliced lengthwise, and dried. the leaves are also harvested, but are not in much demand. reliable data on yield are not available, although some estimates place the yield at about pounds of dry root per acre. the american market is supplied with imported aconite root, for which the prewar price ranged from about to cents a pound. the price in june, , ranged from to cents a pound. the quantity imported in was about , pounds. the demand for this drug is limited, and this fact, together with the probable low yield, makes its profitable cultivation in this country very doubtful. althaea. althaea, or marshmallow (_althaea officinalis_), is a perennial herb introduced from europe which now grows wild in marshy places near the sea in massachusetts and along tidal rivers in new york and pennsylvania. the root forms the official drug, but the leaves and flowers also are sometimes used medicinally. althaea will grow well in almost any loose garden soil of moderate fertility, but tends to winterkill in situations where the ground freezes to a considerable depth. the plants may be propagated from seeds or from divisions of the old roots made early in the spring. the seed may be sown in the open in shallow drills at least feet apart, and the seedlings should be thinned to stand inches apart in the row. under good conditions the plants attain a height of or feet; therefore, close planting does not give sufficient room for full development. in the second year of growth the roots are harvested, washed, peeled, cut into short lengths, and thoroughly dried. yields at the rate of to , pounds of dry root per acre have been obtained. the prewar wholesale price usually ranged from to cents a pound. the price in june, , was to cents a pound. the annual importation of this root averages about , pounds. in view of the amount of hand labor required in preparing the root, the relatively low price, and the rather limited demand, the cultivation of this plant for profit is not very attractive. angelica. angelica (_angelica officinalis_) is a european biennial plant of the parsley family, sometimes grown in this country as a culinary herb and known commonly as garden angelica. the fresh stems and leafstalks are used as a garnish and for making a candied confection. the seeds and the oil distilled from them are employed in flavoring, and the aromatic roots are sometimes used in medicine. angelica thrives best in a moderately cool climate and may be grown in any good soil, although a deep, fairly rich loam which is moist but well drained will give the best results. the soil should be deeply plowed and well prepared before planting. the plant is most readily propagated from divisions of old roots, which may be set either in the fall or spring about inches apart in rows. the seeds germinate very poorly if more than one year old, and it is best to sow them as soon as they are ripe in a seed bed, which should be kept moist by frequent watering if necessary. early in the following spring the seedlings are transplanted and set about feet apart each way in their permanent location. plants may also be obtained from seeds sown in march in a spent hotbed or in a cold frame. in order to increase the root development, the plants are often transplanted a second time, at the end of the first year's growth, and set or feet apart. for the same reason the tops are often cut back to prevent the formation of seed. during the growing seasons the soil should be kept mellow and free from weeds by frequent cultivation. the roots are usually harvested in the fall of the second year, but sometimes those of the first-year plants are marketed. after being dug, the roots are washed and dried in the open air. in order to keep out insects and to preserve the aroma it is best to store the dried root in tin containers which can be tightly closed. the root of the european or garden angelica found in our drug markets is imported largely from germany. during the past few years the wholesale price has averaged about cents a pound. the root of a native species of angelica (_angelica atropurpurea_), commonly called american angelica, also occurs in the drug markets of this country. it is collected from wild plants, and the price to collectors in former years usually ranged from to cents a pound. the prices in june, , were for the seed cents and for the root cents a pound. anise. anise (_pimpinella anisum_) is an annual herb of the parsley family, widely cultivated in europe and to a limited extent in this country, chiefly in rhode island. although this plant may be grown quite generally throughout the united states, it has been found difficult to bring the crop to maturity in northerly situations where the growing season is short or in the south where the climate is hot and dry. it is grown chiefly for its aromatic seeds (fruits), which are used medicinally, and also in baking and for flavoring confectionery. the oil distilled from the seeds is used medicinally in cordials, and also for flavoring various beverages. anise thrives best in a light, moderately rich, and well-drained loam which has been carefully prepared before planting. it is grown from seeds, which are usually sown early in the spring directly in the field, since the seedlings are unfavorably affected by transplanting. the seeds, which should not be more than years old, are sown thickly, about two to the inch, and covered one-half inch deep. since the plants develop very slowly, seed should not be sown in weedy soil. when the seedlings are to inches high they are thinned to stand inches apart in the row. the rows may be inches or feet apart, depending on the cultivation intended. an ounce of seed should sow a row feet long, and about pounds will plant an acre when the rows are feet apart. the plants should receive frequent and thorough cultivation throughout the growing season. about three months from the time of planting the plants will blossom, and a month later the seed should be matured sufficiently for harvesting. as soon as the tips of the seeds turn a grayish green color they should be harvested, for if allowed to remain exposed to the weather they quickly turn brown or blacken. the plants may be pulled by hand and stacked, tops inward, in heaps about feet high, or they may be mowed and at once built up into cocks of the same height. in about four or five days the seed will have ripened, after which it should be thrashed out and thoroughly cleaned. yields of anise seed are quite variable, since the plant is very sensitive to unfavorable weather conditions. in a good season from to pounds per acre may be reasonably expected. the prewar wholesale price usually ranged from to cents a pound. the prices in june, , ranged from to cents a pound. during the war the average annual importation of tons was reduced to about tons. arnica. arnica (_arnica montana_) is a herbaceous perennial plant of the aster family, native in northern and central europe, where it thrives in the cool climate of the mountain meadows and upland moors. the flowers, leaves, and roots are employed in medicine. arnica requires a marshy soil, abundant rainfall, and a cool climate for its best development. it is propagated by divisions of the roots or from seeds sown either in the fall or the spring. seed may also be sown in august in a seed bed and the plants transplanted the following spring to stand about inches apart in the row. the flowers may be harvested the second year and the roots after three or four years. arnica is not produced commercially in the united states, and the small quantity imported annually is apparently sufficient to meet the market demands. its cultivation presents many difficulties, and efforts to grow it in the milder portions of this country have generally proved unsuccessful. belladonna. belladonna, or deadly nightshade (_atropa belladonna_), is a large, poisonous perennial which occurs wild in europe, where it is also cultivated. both the leaves and the roots are important crude drugs. in recent years it has been cultivated to some extent in this country, but is likely to winterkill in the colder sections. belladonna may be propagated in a small way from cuttings of the young shoots rooted in moist sand in the usual manner or from divisions of the fleshy rootstocks made early in the spring, but it is most readily grown from seeds which may be thinly sown in pots or well-drained boxes in a cool greenhouse in midwinter or in a sheltered place in a garden early in the spring. when the seedlings are large enough to handle they should be transplanted singly to small pots or pricked out in flats or shallow boxes of light, rich soil, placing them about inches apart each way, as with tomato or other vegetable plants intended for field planting. in the spring, as soon as danger from frost is over, they should be transplanted to the field and set about inches apart in rows or more inches apart sowing seeds in the field or transplanting directly from the seed bed to the field has rarely given good results in this country. belladonna seeds are small, and if well handled under glass or in protected seed beds ounce should produce , or more plants, sufficient to set an acre. belladonna thrives best in deep, moist, well-drained loam containing lime, such as will under proper fertilization produce good garden vegetables. the preparation of the soil should be very thorough and consists of deep plowing, either in the fall or early spring, and repeated working with the disk or spring-tooth and smoothing harrows. weeds should be kept under control at all times and the soil stirred with a hoe or cultivator at intervals of about days, particularly after each hard rain, and shallow cultivation given in hot, dry weather to conserve the natural moisture of the soil. good commercial fertilizers, such as are commonly used in truck gardens, are beneficial. those containing per cent of phosphoric acid, per cent of nitrogen, and per cent of potash are the most desirable and should be applied at the rate of about pounds per acre. stable manure at the rate of to tons to the acre may be used if plowed under when the ground is prepared. belladonna is sometimes affected by a wilt disease, which is aggravated by wet soils and fresh animal manures, and the foliage is greedily attacked by the potato beetle. dusting with lime, spot, or road dust in the morning when the leaves are wet with dew is occasionally effective. the destructive attacks of these pests are usually confined to the seed bed or to first-year plantings, but the insects may be controlled by the careful use of insecticides. the leaves are picked when the plants are in full bloom. they should be carefully handled, to avoid bruising, and dried in the shade in order to retain their green color. a hundred pounds of fresh leaves yield about pounds when well dried. one crop only can be collected the year of planting, but two crops are gathered in each of the next two or three years, after which it appears better to market the roots and make new plantings. while only the leaves should be collected for the best pharmaceutical trade, the young growth, including the smaller sappy twigs, has medicinal value and may be sheared from the plants and dried in the same manner as the leaves. the ease of collection and increased weight of material may render the latter method more profitable. the roots alone are not as profitable as the leaves. the best roots are those of the second and third year's growth. they are harvested in the fall after frost, the tops being mowed and raked off and the roots turned out with a deep-running plow, or with a potato fork if the area be small. they are carefully washed and cut into about -inch lengths, the larger pieces being split lengthwise to aid in drying. thorough drying either in the sun or with mild artificial heat is essential; otherwise, the roots will mold when stored. the high prices paid for belladonna during the war greatly stimulated the cultivation of this crop, which had previously been grown with some success in california, michigan, indiana, pennsylvania, new jersey, and some other states. in , acres of belladonna were harvested, the total production being about tons of herb (including leaves and stems), an average of pounds per acre. from acres tons of root were harvested, an average of pounds per acre. the marketing of this crop was followed by a decline in prices, the quotations in june, , being to cents a pound for the herb and cents a pound for the root. blue flag. blue flag (_iris versicolor_) is a native perennial plant of common occurrence in swamps and marshy situations throughout the eastern half of the united states. the underground stem (rhizome) and roots are the parts of the plant used medicinally. blue flag responds readily to cultivation when placed in a rich, moist, and rather heavy soil. it is readily propagated from divisions of old plants, which may be set foot apart in rows spaced conveniently for cultivation. if the plants are set in august or september, the crop may be harvested about, the last of october in the following year. the roots may be turned out with a deep-running plow, and after being thoroughly washed and the larger clusters broken up they should be thoroughly dried. artificial drying at low heat is usually desirable. yields at the rate of or tons of dried root per acre have been obtained from small plats. the prewar price paid to collectors varied from year to year and usually ranged from to cents a pound. the price in june, , was cents a pound. this crop does not appear to be very promising, owing to the relatively small demand for the root boneset. boneset (_eupatorium perfoliatum_) is a hardy, rather long-lived perennial plant commonly found growing in low grounds throughout the eastern half of the united states. the dried leaves and flowering tops form the official drug. divisions of clumps of wild plants collected early in the fall will serve for propagation. these may be set about a foot apart in rows in well-prepared soil. during the first winter the newly set divisions should be protected with a light mulch of straw or manure. plants may also be grown from seeds, which should be collected as soon as ripe and sown in shallow drills about inches apart in a rich, moist seed bed, preferably in partial shade. when of sufficient size they may be set in the field at about the same distance as the divided clumps. the plants are cut late in the summer when in full bloom and the leaves and flowering tops stripped from the stem by hand and carefully dried without exposure to the sun. yields of well-cultivated boneset are quite large and , pounds or more per acre of dry herb may be obtained under favorable conditions. the prewar price for boneset rarely exceeded to cents a pound. the price in june, , was to cents a pound. since the demand is limited and the wild supply fairly available, the cultivation of boneset does not offer much prospect of profit. burdock. burdock (_arctium lappa_) is a large biennial plant well known as a common and troublesome weed in the eastern and central states and in some western localities. the dried root from plants of the first year's growth forms the official drug, but the seeds and leaves are also used medicinally. burdock will grow in almost any soil, but the best root development is favored by a light well-drained soil rich in humus. the seeds germinate readily and may be sown directly in the field, either late in the fall or early in the spring. the seed may be sown in drills inches or feet apart, as desired, and should be sown inch deep if in the fall, but less deeply if sown in the spring. when the seedlings are well up they should be thinned to stand about inches apart in the row. cultivation should continue as long as the size of the plants will permit. the roots are harvested at the end of the first year's growth in order to secure the most acceptable drug and also to prevent the plants from bearing seed and spreading as a weed. the tops of the plants may be cut with a mower and raked off, after which the roots can usually be turned out with a deep-running plow or with a beet lifter. in a dry and very sandy soil the roots frequently extend to a depth of or feet, making it necessary to dig them by hand. after digging, any remaining tops are removed and the roots are washed and dried, the drying being preferably by the use of low artificial heat. the roots are usually split lengthwise into two or more pieces in order to facilitate drying, although whole roots are marketable. yields at the rate of , to , pounds of dry roots per acre have been obtained. the prewar prices offered by dealers ranged from to cents a pound. the prices for the root and seed in june, , were cents a pound each. calamus. calamus, or sweet flag (_acorus calamus_), is a native perennial plant, occurring frequently along streams and in the edges of swamps throughout the eastern half of the united states. the dried root (rhizome or rootstock) is the part used as a drug. although calamus in a wild state is usually found growing in water, it may be cultivated in almost any good soil which is fairly moist. it usually does well on moderately dry upland soils which will produce fair crops of corn or potatoes. the plants are readily propagated from divisions of old roots, which should be set early in the fall foot apart in rows and well covered. during the following growing season the plants should receive frequent and thorough cultivation. the roots are harvested in the fall and may be readily dug with a spade or turned out with a plow. the tops, together with about an inch of the rootstock, are next cut off and used to make new plantings. the roots are washed and dried artificially at a moderately low degree of heat. the marketable product consists of the thick rootstocks deprived of their small rootlets often called "fibers." these may be removed before drying, but more easily afterwards, since when dry and brittle they break off readily with a little handling. roots thus treated are often called "stripped" and are more aromatic than those which have been peeled. yields at the rate of , pounds of dry roots per acre have been obtained. the prewar price for the unpeeled root usually ranged from to cents a pound. the prices in june, , were to cents a pound. the annual importation of calamus root ranges from to tons. calendula. calendula, or pot marigold (_calendula officinalis_), is a hardy annual plant native to southern europe, but frequently grown in flower gardens in this country. the dried flower heads are sometimes used in soups and stews, and the so-called petals (ligulate florets) are employed in medicine. calendula grows well on a variety of soils, but a moderately rich garden loam will give the best results. the seed may be sown in open ground early in the spring in drills inches apart. as soon as the seedlings are well established they should be thinned to stand about a foot apart in the row. in the north it is desirable to sow the seed about the first of april in coldframes or spent hotbeds and transplant the young seedlings as soon as the danger of frost is past. the plants blossom early and continue to bloom throughout the summer. the flowers are gathered at intervals of a few days and carefully dried. the petals (florets) which form the drug may be removed either before or after the flower heads are dried. the petals are removed by hand, but this process requires so much time that when the cost of the necessary labor is taken into account it is doubtful whether the price received for the drug would cover the cost of production. the dried whole flowers produced in this country were quoted in the wholesale markets in june, , at cents to $ a pound, according to quality; the petals, at $ . to $ . a pound. camomile, german. german camomile (_matricaria chamomilla_) is a european annual herb of the aster family, cultivated in this country in gardens, from which it has escaped in some localities. the dried flower heads are used in medicine. this species of camomile does well on moderately heavy soil which is rich in humus and rather moist. since the plants bloom about eight weeks after sowing the seed, a crop of camomile may be grown from seed sown either early in the spring or late in the summer, following early vegetable crops. the seed may be sown in drills and barely covered or may be broadcast, since the plants will soon occupy the ground and exclude the weeds. when the plants are in full bloom the flower heads are gathered and may be spread thinly on canvas sheets and dried in the sun. all leaves and stems should be removed, and when the flowers are thoroughly dry they should be packed for market in boxes or bales rather than in bags, since in the latter the flowers are likely to be badly broken in handling. returns from experimental areas indicate that a yield of about pounds of dry flowers per acre may be expected under favorable conditions. prewar wholesale prices usually ranged from about to cents a pound. the prices in june, , were to cents a pound. camomile, roman. roman camomile (also called english camomile, _anthemis nobilis_) is a european perennial herb of the aster family, frequently cultivated in gardens in this country and sometimes found growing wild. in america, camomile is grown chiefly as an ornamental plant, especially for use in borders, since the plants blossom from midsummer until killed by frost. the dried flower heads from cultivated plants are used in medicine. camomile grows well in almost any good, rather dry soil which has full exposure to the sun. the plants may be grown from seeds or propagated by dividing the roots early in the spring. the divisions of the root may be planted inches apart in rows spaced according to the method of cultivation to be used. when planted on a small scale the divisions, or offsets, may be set inches apart each way in carefully prepared soil. hand weeding is necessary, but since the plants soon spread and fully shade the ground, weeds usually have small chance of becoming troublesome. the flower heads are gathered just as they open, either by hand or by means of a flower picker, and are dried in the open in bright weather or, when necessary, on canvas trays in a heated room. rapid drying is essential, as it is desirable to retain the white color as far as possible. the yield is variable, but from to pounds of dried flowers per acre may be expected. the prices for roman camomile quoted in the wholesale drug markets of this country prior to the war usually ranged from about to cents a pound. the prices in june, , were to cents a pound. since this crop requires much hand labor, its cultivation in this country on a commercial scale does not promise to be very profitable. camphor. the camphor tree (_camphora officinalis_) is a large evergreen, native to asia. it is hardy in situations where the winter temperature does not fall below ° f., and for many years has been grown as an ornamental in the southern and southwestern united states. young trees suitable for planting as ornamentals may usually be obtained from the nurseries in florida and other parts of the south, or they can be easily grown from fresh seed. for culture on a commercial scale the climatic requirements of camphor are practically the same as those of citrus fruits. the tree can be grown in almost any soil, but the maximum growth is secured in soils which are rich and well drained. when planted for commercial cultivation new land is preferable. the following statements are based upon actual experiments and observations on the growing and production of camphor under conditions found in florida. camphor seeds ripen about the middle of october and should be planted while fresh, a better germination being obtained when the pulp is removed. the seed bed should be selected with care and the precaution taken to have one that will give sufficient moisture during the dry season and yet be well drained. for small seed beds of or acres or less it may be practicable to provide irrigation. excellent stands of seedlings have been obtained on slightly rolling land which originally was covered with "blackjack" oak. about the first of september, or somewhat earlier if conditions permit, the land should be well plowed and thoroughly worked down with a disk harrow. just before the seeds are planted it should again be worked over and all roots of bermuda grass or other weeds removed, since rapidly growing grasses or weeds will absorb so much moisture from the soil that the seeds can not germinate. the seeds begin to ripen during the first part of october and are usually in a fairly well ripened stage by the last of that month. from this time until the heavy frosts they can be gathered and planted with safety. seeds gathered after heavy frosts have been planted successfully, but it is not advisable to take the risk of too hard a freeze. in determining the time to gather seed a simple test is sufficient. seeds that fall into the hand when the cluster is slightly twisted are ripe enough to plant. in planting, a cotton-dropping machine, modified somewhat to meet the new requirements, may be used. the machine is set to plant the seeds or inches apart and cover them inch deep in rows far enough apart to permit horse cultivation. the plants begin to come up in about three months, but four or five months are often required for a full stand. as soon as the plants can be distinguished in the rows cultivation is begun, which at first is done by hand with either a wheel or hand hoe. later, as the plants attain size, a horse cultivator can be used, but a certain amount of handwork is necessary throughout the time the plants remain in the seed bed. when the plants are well started they should receive a good application of sheep or goat manure or of high-grade fertilizer. the first season a growth of from to inches may be expected, the irregularity of development depending on the vitality of the seed, variation in the soil, and numerous other factors. the plants are allowed to grow in the seed bed usually for a year and are then transplanted to the field. in transplanting it is customary to separate the plants into two grades, "sturdy" and "weak," planting each grade in a field by itself. by doing this the replanting is simplified, since the sturdy stock requires but few trees for replanting and the weak stock, which will require considerable replanting, is all in one section. previous to transplanting, the land is well prepared by deep plowing and thorough harrowing, and rows are laid off feet apart. the young trees are set in these rows feet apart, either by hand or with a tree-setting machine. this machine is simply a tobacco-setting machine fitted with a trench opener set to open a furrow inches deep, in which the trees are placed. the trees used for transplanting are headed back to within inch of the crown, and the lower end of the taproot and all large laterals are removed. the taproot of the tree as planted is thus reduced in length to or inches and varies in diameter according to the vitality and previous growth of the seedling. transplanting should be done in the winter months, when the trees are dormant. cultivation is begun as soon as the trees put forth shoots in the spring and continued until the rainy season of each year. after the rainy season the plants are again cultivated and all grass and weeds removed. at times cultivation is necessary during the rainy season in order to keep the trees from becoming smothered and killed by the fast-growing weeds. one-horse cultivators drawn by mules or a gang cultivator drawn by a light tractor may be used. in three or four years, after transplanting, the trees should be from to feet high. they are then trimmed by means of a special machine[ ] to form an =a=-shaped hedge and the trimmings distilled for the oil and camphor gum. trimming is carried on when the trees are in the dormant stage, which is twice each year, usually november to january and may to june. the summer dormant season is somewhat irregular and governed entirely by local conditions. [ ] a detailed description of this machine is given in u. s. dept. of agr. cir. , entitled "a machine for trimming camphor trees." . the cuttings are hauled from the field to the distilling plant, and if many large branches are present they are run through a heavy ensilage cutter. for distillation they are packed in large iron retorts, to which steam is admitted at the bottom. the outlet pipe of the retort is connected with a specially constructed condensing apparatus in which the oil and camphor carried over by the steam are condensed and partly collected. portions of oil and camphor not collected in the condenser are caught in a tub fitted with an outlet siphon which carries away the excess condensed steam but leaves the oil and camphor behind. when removed from the condenser the product is very crude, consisting of a mixture of oil, water, and camphor. this mixture is either thrown into a centrifuge and the oil and water removed or it is placed in large cylindrical vats and the oil and water allowed to drain out. the oil is then separated from the water by means of a siphon. the camphor and oil are marketed separately. the annual yield of cuttings has varied from to tons per acre, which should give approximately to pounds of marketable camphor. at present the planting of small areas does not seem advisable, in view of the heavy outlay required for the machinery necessary to produce camphor gum at a profit. an area of less than acres would probably not warrant the installation of the machinery necessary for the commercial production of camphor, and , acres or more will doubtless give a greater net return per acre. although the crop is a low-priced one, under favorable conditions it is estimated that a fair return per acre may be expected, but the data so far accumulated are not sufficient to warrant specific statements concerning the profitableness of the industry. camphor oil, or the oil from which camphor has been removed, is used in japan for illuminating purposes, and as a solvent for resins in the manufacture of lacquer. it is used in europe for its safrol content, and may probably be utilized for the same purpose in this country. there exists already in the american market a demand for the japanese oil at prices ranging from to cents per pound. camphor imports into the united states usually exceed , , pounds annually; hence, it does not seem probable that there is any danger of overproduction in the southern states. however, it is possible that at times camphor may be imported at a price so low as to render production in this country financially unprofitable. cannabis. the drug cannabis or indian hemp (_cannabis sativa_), consists of the dried flowering tops of the female plants. it grows well over a considerable portion of the united states, but the production of the active principle of this plant is believed to be favored by a warm climate. for drug purposes, therefore, this crop appears to be adapted to the southern rather than to the northern states. cannabis is propagated from seeds, which should be planted in the spring as soon as conditions are suitable, in well-prepared sandy of clayey loam at a depth of about an inch in rows or feet apart. the seeds may be dropped every two or three inches in the row or planted in hills about a foot apart in the row, to seeds being dropped into each hill. two or three pounds of seed per acre should give a good stand. about half the seeds will produce male plants, which must be removed before their flowers mature; otherwise, the female plants will set seed, thereby diminishing their value as a drug. the male plants can be recognized with certainty only by the presence of stamens in their flowers. ordinary stable or barnyard manure plowed in deeply is better for use as a fertilizer than commercial preparations and may be safely applied at the rate of tons per acre. however, good results may be obtained with commercial fertilizers, such as are used for truck crops and potatoes, when cultivated in between the rows at the rate of or pounds per acre. when the female plants reach maturity, a sticky resin forms on the heavy, compact flower clusters, and harvesting may then be begun. the tops of the plants comprising the flower clusters are cut and carefully dried in the shade to preserve the green color as far as possible. drying can best be done, especially in damp weather, by the use of artificial heat, not to exceed ° f. for several years cannabis of standard (u. s. p.) quality has been grown on a commercial scale in this country, chiefly in south carolina and virginia. after the flowering tops are harvested they are thoroughly dried under cover, then worked over by hand, and all the stems and large foliage leaves removed. this process gives a drug of high quality but greatly reduces the net or marketable yield per acre, which usually ranges from to pounds. some growers do not remove the stems and leaves, thus increasing the acreage yield but reducing the market value of their product. the quality of cannabis can be determined only by special laboratory tests, which most dealers are not equipped to make; consequently, they are usually unwilling to pay growers as high prices as they would if the low-grade cannabis were kept off the market. the market price in june, , for tested (u. s. p.) domestic cannabis was to cents; for nontested, to cents a pound. caraway. caraway (_carum carvi_) is a european biennial herb of the parsley family. it grows and fruits well over a considerable portion of the united states, especially in the north and northwest, but its cultivation in this country seems never to have assumed commercial proportions. the seeds are used medicinally, but are mainly utilized for flavoring cakes, confectionery, and similar products. on distillation with steam, the seeds yield an aromatic oil, which is more used in medicine than the seed itself. soil of a somewhat clayey nature and containing a fair proportion of humus and available plant food is particularly suited to caraway, but the plant generally grows well in any good upland soil which will produce fair crops of corn or potatoes. seeds should be sown in early spring in drills about inches apart, and from to pounds of seed are sown to the acre. frequent shallow cultivation throughout both growing seasons is desirable in order to keep the soil mellow and free from weeds, as a weedy crop at harvest time usually means a product inferior in quality. as soon as the oldest seeds ripen, which is usually in june of the second year, the crop should be harvested. the plants may be cut with a mower and should be left in the swath until they have lost most of their moisture, when they may be built up into small cocks, or they may be brought in from the field and the curing finished in a barn loft. if on handling in the field the seeds shatter extensively, the crop should be brought in in tight wagons. when drying is finished the seeds are thrashed out, cleaned, and stored in bags which contain about pounds each. returns from experimental areas indicate that a yield of about , pounds of seed per acre may be expected. one hundred pounds of seed will usually yield to pounds of oil. the average annual importation of caraway seed for several years has been about , , pounds, valued at about cents a pound. the war reduced the annual importations of oil of caraway from , to , pounds and increased the value from cents to about $ . a pound. cascara sagrada. cascara, or cascara sagrada (_rhamnus purshiana_), is a small tree to feet high, native to the western part of the united states, and found most abundantly in a narrow belt along the pacific slope from northern california to southern british columbia. the bark from the trunk and branches is the source of the drug, for which there is a constant and steady demand. plantings which have been made in the eastern states indicate that this tree may probably be grown along the atlantic slope in the piedmont or foothill belt from pennsylvania to georgia. the trees have been found to grow better in clay loam than in either sand or clay. propagation from seed is easy, but the seeds should be planted in the fall soon after they ripen or stratified in sand until used, since germination is very poor if the seeds are allowed to become dry. the seeds are sown in a seed bed under shade in drills inches apart and covered about inch deep. the seedlings reach a height of to inches the first year, and in the following spring before the leaves appear they are set in the field feet apart each way. it is advisable to cultivate frequently, in order to keep the weeds down and to maintain a shallow surface mulch. if the trees are pruned properly, a crop of bark may be harvested each year without killing the whole tree, as is done in collecting the bark from wild trees. at the time of transplanting, the trees are cut back to a straight stem about a foot high, from which all except the four uppermost buds are removed. the branches which afterwards develop from these buds are later deprived of their lower side shoots, thus causing the tree to grow a head of four long, stout branches instead of a single straight trunk. when the trees are large enough to yield a crop of bark, the longest of the four branches is cut off early in the spring flush with the trunk and a new branch is allowed to grow in its place. this process may be repeated yearly, removing only the largest branches of each tree in any one season. the bark on the cut-off branches is divided with a sharp knife into lengthwise strips of about an inch or two in width, which may be readily pulled off. it is then dried carefully at a low temperature in the shade and broken into small pieces to facilitate packing and handling. the price paid to collectors for cascara bark, which before the war usually varied from to cents a pound, in june, , was about cents a pound. so long as a supply of the wild bark continues to be available it is doubtful whether cascara can be cultivated at a profit. castor beans. the castor-oil plant or palma christi (_ricinus communis_) is a robust perennial in tropical countries which becomes an annual in regions subject to frost. the seeds of this plant, called "castor beans" or "mole beans," yield the castor oil of commerce. between and , the castor bean was an important crop in certain sections of oklahoma, kansas, missouri, and illinois, but during recent years its culture has been practically abandoned in favor of crops which are easier to handle and more profitable. for the commercial production of castor beans a warm climate and long growing season are necessary. if planted much farther north than st. louis, mo., or washington, d. c, the crop is very likely to be caught by frost. in general, any fertile soil which produces good crops of cotton or corn is suitable for castor beans, but a very fertile soil favors the growth of the plant at the expense of seed production and early maturity. the land is prepared in much the same manner as for cotton or corn; that is, plowed, disked, and harrowed level before planting, which may be done by hand or with a corn planter with specially prepared plates. the seed should be planted early in the spring, as soon as the soil is warm but still moderately moist. the time of planting varies according to locality, but in general corresponds to that of cotton. the seed is planted in hills at a depth of to inches. toward the north, the rows are usually made feet apart and the hills spaced feet apart in the row. farther south the rows should usually be made about to feet apart. on very light land the hills may be feet apart in the row; on heavier land, to feet apart. as a general rule three seeds are planted to the hill, and not less than two should be planted. one bushel of medium-sized seed should plant from to acres. when the plants are from to inches tall, the weaker ones should be removed, leaving one plant in a hill. the crop is cultivated similar to corn until the plants are large enough to shade the ground. in case the field becomes foul with weeds and grass, some hoeing may be necessary, but practically all the cultivation required can be done with a horse-drawn weeder. some varieties in which the beans pop out when the hull is fully ripe are known locally as "poppers," and after the beans begin to ripen, the field must be gone over every few days and the ripe beans collected in order to avoid loss. other varieties tend to retain the beans in the hull after they are ripe. the climate affects the popping of the beans, and a variety which shatters badly in one region may shatter very little when grown in another. in harvesting, a common method is to cut off the spikes with a knife and collect them in large sacks. they are then hauled to a shelter of some kind and allowed to dry until the pods will crush easily. various methods are used in thrashing castor beans. if the variety grown is one which "pops" or drops its seeds when they are ripe, the spikes are sometimes piled on a hard ground or plank floor fully exposed to the sun and furnished with sides of boards or cloth to feet high to catch the beans as they pop out. in some varieties mere drying does not cause the pods to open, and specially constructed machines have been used to remove the beans from the pods. after the beans have been thrashed or popped out, a fanning mill is used to separate the hulls, chaff, and dirt from the beans, which are then sacked and stored for market. the yield varies greatly and will depend much upon cultural conditions, the season, the variety grown, and the care exercised in harvesting and thrashing the seeds. in oklahoma the average yield of the popping varieties is said to be to bushels per acre. yields up to bushels per acre have been reported for favorable conditions. for some years prior to the war the farm price for castor beans was about $ a bushel. early in the war the increased demand for castor oil caused a sharp advance in the price of the beans, which has gradually declined. in june, , the wholesale market quotation was about $ a bushel. the normal market requirement in the united states for castor beans is about , , bushels annually, but during the last year of the war nearly , , bushels were imported. in the united states castor beans are used in quantity only by manufacturers of castor oil. in general, the equipment and operation of a castor-oil mill resembles that of a cottonseed-oil mill or linseed-oil mill, but special and expensive equipment is necessary for the proper extraction of the oil from castor beans. the best grade of oil is obtained from the beans by hydraulic pressure. an additional quantity of oil of lower grade is obtained by treating the press cake with naphtha or some other volatile solvent. the pomace resulting from the second extraction is used as a fertilizer for tobacco, corn, and other crops, but because of a poisonous principle can not be used for cattle feeding unless specially treated. owing to the heavy outlay required for the necessary machinery and the high cost of manufacture on a small scale, it has not been found profitable for the growers of castor beans to undertake the extraction of the oil. the castor-oil plant is not known to be poisonous, and although the leaves are not relished by farm animals they are said to be used as fodder for cattle in india. castor beans, however, contain a poisonous principle, and though harmless when handled, may cause serious if not fatal effects when eaten, especially in the case of small children. care should be taken to prevent these beans from being accidentally mixed with the grain fed to animals, since many cases have been reported in which the death of horses has been due to eating feed in which they have become mixed. catnip. catnip (_nepeta cataria_) is a european perennial plant of the mint family, which frequently occurs in this country as a weed in gardens and about dwellings. it has long had a popular use as a domestic remedy. both leaves and flowering tops find some demand in the crude-drug trade. catnip does well on almost any good soil, but thrives best on a well-drained and moderately rich garden loam. however, a more fragrant and attractive herb can be grown in sandy situations than in heavy soils. the plant may be propagated from seeds or by root division. the seed may be sown in rows either late in the fall or in early spring and covered lightly. fall-sown seed usually gives a more even stand and a heavier growth of herb. when the plants have reached a height of to inches they should be thinned to stand from to inches apart in the rows. in some localities the field sowing of seed does not give good results, in which case plants may be started in a coldframe and later transplanted to the field. shallow cultivation will favor a vigorous growth of the herb. the flowering tops are harvested when the plants are in full bloom and are dried in the shade to preserve their green color. in case the herb is grown in large quantity, it may be cut with a mowing machine, the cutter bar of which should be set high. the plants should lie in the swath until partially dry, and the curing may then be finished either in small cocks in the field or in the barn, care being taken to preserve the natural green color as far as possible. returns from experimental areas indicate that a yield of about , pounds of dried flowering tops per acre may be expected under good conditions. the herb must be carefully sorted and all the large or coarse stems removed, after which it may be made up for the market in bales of to pounds each. prewar prices to collectors ranged from to cents a pound. the prices in june, , for the herb were cents; for the leaves, cents; and for the leaves and flowers, cents a pound. chamomile. (see camomile.) conium. conium, or poison hemlock (_conium maculatum_), is a large, poisonous european biennial plant of the parsley family, naturalized in the northeastern states and in california. the full-grown but unripe seeds (fruits) and the leaves are used medicinally. conium is easily grown, and has been found to thrive in both comparatively moist clay soil and in dry sandy loam. in rich, moist land it may easily become a troublesome weed. conium grows readily from seed, which may be sown either in the fall or early in the spring in drills or more feet apart. as soon as the seedlings can be distinguished in the row, cultivation similar to that given ordinary garden crops is begun. the plants usually blossom in the second year, and when the oldest seeds are full grown but still green in color the plants are harvested and the seed at once thrashed out and dried with the least possible exposure to the light. the small and undeveloped seed should be screened out and rejected and the good seed stored in containers that will exclude light and air. the leaves are collected when the plant is in flower, quickly dried in the sun, and stored in the same manner as the seed. estimated yields at the rate of to pounds of seed per acre have been obtained, but the yield is very uncertain, since the flowering plants are especially subject to the attacks of insects which destroy the crop of seed. the prewar prices as quoted in the wholesale drug markets ranged from to cents a pound for the seed and to cents for the leaves. the prices in june, , for the seed were to cents, and for the leaves to cents a pound. coriander. coriander (_coriandrum sativum_) is an old world annual of the parsley family. for years the plant has been cultivated in gardens in the united states, and it is now reported as growing wild in many places. the aromatic seeds and the oil distilled from them have long been used medicinally. both the seed and the oil are also used for flavoring confectionery and cordials and as a condiment in bread and cake. coriander grows well on almost any good soil, but thrives best on deep and fertile garden loam. the soil should be well prepared before planting, which should be done moderately early in the spring. for field cultivation the seed is sown in rows feet apart, but if the cultivation is done by hand the distance between the rows may be reduced to inches. the seed should be sown thickly in order to insure a good stand. when well up, the plants are thinned to stand or inches apart in the row. cultivation should continue until the plants flower, which will be about two months from the time of planting. when most of the seeds are ripe the plants are cut with a scythe or mower, preferably early in the morning while moist with dew, in order to avoid shattering the seed. the plants are partially cured in small cocks in the field, the drying being finished in a barn loft or under other suitable shelter, after which the seeds are thrashed out and cleaned. the yield of seed is quite variable, but returns from experimental areas indicate that from to pounds per acre may be expected. five hundred pounds of seed will usually yield from to pounds of oil, according to the localities where grown. the annual importation of coriander seed is about , , pounds. the prewar price of the seed was about cents a pound; in june, , to cents. the wholesale price of the oil of coriander, which was $ to $ a pound before the war, in june, , ranged from $ to $ a pound. dandelion. dandelion (_taraxacum officinale_) is a well-known and troublesome perennial weed, occurring abundantly almost everywhere in this country except in the southern states. it is frequently cultivated in market gardens for the leaves, which are used for greens or salads, but the root alone is used in medicine. this plant will grow well in any good soil and has been successfully cultivated in the south, but in the colder parts of the country it may require slight mulching during the winter if the roots tend to heave out of the soil. the seeds, which are sown in the spring, are drilled in rows inches apart and covered one-half inch deep. about pounds of seeds should sow an acre. the seedlings are thinned to stand a foot apart in the row, and the crop should be well cultivated and kept free from weeds. the roots are dug in the fall of the second season after planting the seed. they should be washed and may be dried whole, or, to facilitate handling and drying, they may be cut into pierces to inches long and the larger, portions sliced. under favorable conditions, yields at the rate of , to , pounds of dry roots per acre have been obtained from second-year plants. the prices usually offered collectors for the dry root before the war ranged from to cents a pound. the price in june, , was about cents. the quantity annually imported into this country varies from year to year, but averages about tons. a serious disadvantage attending the cultivation of this crop is the danger of seeding adjacent land with a very undesirable weed. digitalis. digitalis, or foxglove (_digitalis purpurea_), is a fairly hardy european perennial, which has long been grown in flower gardens in this country as an ornamental plant. the leaves are used in medicine, those from plants of the second year's growth being required for the official drug. digitalis thrives in ordinary well-drained garden soils of open texture and reasonable fertility. sowing the seed directly in the field occasionally gives good results, but is so often unsuccessful that it can not be recommended. the seeds are exceedingly small and do not germinate well except under the most favorable conditions. they should be mixed with sand, to insure even distribution in seeding, and sown as early as february in seed pans or flats in the greenhouses or in well-protected frames. when danger of frost is past the plants should be hardened off and transplanted to the field, where they may be set about a foot apart in rows spaced conveniently for cultivation. the plants do not flower until the second year, and it is necessary to cultivate them frequently during the growing seasons of both the first and second year. in localities where the cold weather is severe it may be desirable to protect the plants during the first winter with a light mulch of straw or coarse farmyard manure. the plants usually flower in june of the second year, and the leaves may then be collected. they are carefully dried in the shade and should be stored in such a manner that they will not be exposed to light and moisture. the results of experiments indicate that yields of to pounds of dry leaves per acre may be obtained under favorable conditions. in considering digitalis culture it should be borne in mind that the crop occupies the soil for the greater part of two seasons and demands even closer attention than many truck or garden crops. in small areas of cultivated digitalis, ranging from one-half to acre in extent, were harvested in pennsylvania, south carolina, washington, california, and some other states. several tons of digitalis leaves were also collected from plants of wild growth in the general region of the coast range of mountains on the pacific coast. digitalis is of great medicinal importance, but on account of its potency is administered in very small quantities; consequently, a few thousand pounds is sufficient to meet the annual market requirements. before the war the price for digitalis leaves averaged about cents a pound; in june, , it was about cents a pound. dill. dill (_anethum graveolens_) is an old world annual or biennial herb of the parsley family. although it is a native of southern europe, it is hardy plant and may be grown in a much cooler climate if given a warm situation and a well-drained soil. the leaves are used for seasoning, and the seeds (fruits), which are greatly valued for flavoring pickles, are used as a condiment and occasionally in medicine. a volatile oil distilled from the seeds is used chiefly for perfuming soap. dill is preferably grown as an annual plant, in which case the seed should be sown about one-half inch deep very early in the spring in drills a foot apart. a half ounce of seed is sufficient to sow feet of drill, and at this rate a pound should sow an acre. when sown in the field the rows may be to inches apart, and the seedlings should be thinned to stand about a foot apart in the row. the most favorable soil is a well-prepared loam, but the plants grow well in any good garden soil. frequent cultivation and freedom from weeds are essential for good results. early in the fall, as soon as some of the older seeds are ripe, the plants are mowed and built up; into small cocks in the field, or, if sufficiently dry, the seeds may be thrashed out at once. in very dry weather it is preferable to mow the plants early in the morning while they are moist with dew, in order to avoid shattering the seed. in case the seed is very ripe, it is well to cut the plants high and to place the tops directly on large canvas sheets, in which they may be brought from the field. after thrashing, the seeds should be spread out in a thin layer and turned frequently until thoroughly dry, since they tend to become musty if closely stored before all the moisture has been removed. the yield of dill seed is quite variable and is much influenced by climatic conditions. from to pounds of seed per acre is considered a good yield. the wholesale price in june, , ranged from to cents a pound. echinacea. echinacea (_brauneria angustifolia_, fig. ) is a native perennial plant of the aster family found on the prairies of the middle west, occurring most abundantly in nebraska and kansas. the roots of the plant are used medicinally. this plant has been found to do well under, cultivation in moderately rich and well-drained loam. it grows fairly well from seeds, which may be collected when ripe and kept dry until ready for use. plants should be started in a well-prepared seed bed by sowing the seeds thinly in drills about inches apart. the plants develop slowly and may be left in the seed bed for two years and then transplanted to the field in the spring and set about inches apart in rows. thorough cultivation is essential for the best results. the roots do not reach a marketable size under three or four years from the time of sowing the seed. they are harvested in the fall, freed from any adhering soil, and dried either in the open air or by means of low artificial heat. echinacea has not been cultivated on a scale large enough to give satisfactory data on the probable yield. the prewar wholesale price ranged from to cents a pound; in june, , it was to cents a pound. [illustration: fig. .--echinacea (_brauneria angustifolia_).] elecampane. elecampane (_inula helenium_) is a european perennial plant of the aster family, now growing wild along roadsides and in fields throughout the northeastern part of the united states. the root is used in medicine. elecampane will grow in almost any soil, but thrives best in deep clay loam well supplied with moisture. the ground on which this plant is to be grown should be deeply plowed and thoroughly prepared before planting. it is preferable to use divisions of old roots for propagation, and these should be set in the fall about inches apart in rows feet apart. plants may also be grown from seeds, which may be sown in the spring in seeds beds and the seedlings transplanted later to the field and set in the same manner as the root divisions. plants grown from seed do not flower the first year. cultivation should be sufficient to keep the soil in good condition and free from weeds. the roots are dug in the fall of the second year, thoroughly cleaned, sliced, and dried in the shade. the available data on yield indicate that a ton or more of dry root per acre may be expected. the price to producers usually ranges from to cents a pound. upward of , pounds of elecampane root were annually imported into this country prior to the war. fennel. fennel (_foeniculum vulgare_) is an old world perennial plant of the parsley family, occasionally cultivated as a garden herb in the united states. the aromatic seeds (fruits) are used in medicine and for flavoring. the oil distilled from the seeds is used in perfumery and for scenting soaps. fennel grows wild in mild climates in almost any good soil and thrives in rich, well-drained loams containing lime. it is propagated from seeds, which may be sown in the open as soon as the ground is ready for planting in the spring. the seed is sown thickly in drills to feet apart and covered lightly. from to pounds of seed should sow an acre. when well established the plants may be thinned to stand to inches apart in the row. plants may also be started in a seed bed from seed sown either in drills inches apart or broadcast. when the seedlings are three or four inches high they are transplanted to the field and set to inches apart in rows. the cultivation is the same as for ordinary garden crops. frequently, very little seed is formed the first year, but full crops may be expected for one or two succeeding years. the seed is gathered in the fall before it is fully ripe and may be harvested like anise or coriander. a yield of to pounds of seed, per acre may be expected. during recent years about , pounds of seed have been imported annually. owing to the war, prices for the seed and oil have about doubled. the prices in june, , for the seed were to cents a pound; for the oil, $ . to $ a pound. gentian. the common or yellow gentian (_gentiana lutea_) is the only species recognized in american medicine, although the roots of several other species are found in the drug trade. the plant grows wild in the mountains of central and southern europe, but it has proved very poorly adapted for cultivation in situations beyond its natural range. for its best development under cultivation, partial shade, similar to that required by ginseng and goldenseal, seems necessary. the plants are said to flower when about years old; hence, several years must elapse after sowing the seed before the roots reach a marketable size. apparently there have been no attempts to cultivate gentian commercially in this country. the prewar wholesale price of imported gentian root ranged from ½ to cents a pound. the price in june. , was to cents a pound. ginseng. ginseng (_panax quinquefolium_) is a fleshy-rooted herbaceous plant native to this country and formerly of frequent occurrence in shady, well-drained situations in hardwood forests from maine to minnesota and southward to the mountains of georgia and the carolinas. it has long been valued by the chinese for medicinal use, though rarely credited with curative properties by natives of other countries. when placed under cultural conditions, ginseng should be shielded from direct sunlight by the shade of trees or by lath sheds. the soil should be fairly light and well fertilized with woods earth, rotted leaves, or fine raw bone meal, the latter applied at the rate of pound to each square yard. seed should be planted in the spring as early as the soil can be worked to advantage, placed inches apart each way in the permanent beds or by inches in seed beds, and the seedlings transplanted to stand to inches apart when years old. only cracked or partially germinated seed should be used. ginseng needs little cultivation, but the beds should at all times be kept free from weeds and grass and the surface of the soil slightly stirred whenever it shows signs of caking. a winter mulch over the crowns is usually essential, but it should not be applied until freezing weather is imminent and should be removed in the spring before the first shoots come through the soil. the roots do not reach marketable size until about the fifth or sixth year from seed. when dug they should be carefully washed or shaken free from all adhering soil, but not scraped. curing is best; effected in a well-ventilated room heated to about ° f. nearly a month is required to properly cure the larger roots, and great care must be taken in order to prevent molding or souring. overheating must also be avoided. when well cured the roots should be stored in a dry, airy place until ready for sale. a market may be found with the wholesale drug dealers, some of whom make a specialty of buying ginseng root for export. the price of cultivated ginseng roots, as quoted in wholesale drug lists, ranges from $ . to $ a pound, according to quality and freedom from disease. further details respecting the culture of ginseng are given in a farmers' bulletin now in press, entitled "ginseng culture," and in farmers' bulletin , entitled "ginseng diseases and their control." goldenseal. goldenseal (_hydrastis canadensis_) is a native perennial, formerly quite abundant in open woodlands having ample shade, natural drainage, and an abundance of leaf mold. its range is from southern new york and ontario west to minnesota and south to georgia and kentucky. when grown under cultivation the soil should be well fertilized, preferably by decaying vegetable matter, such as woods soil and rotting forest leaves, which should be well worked in to a depth of inches or more. raw bone meal and cottonseed meal are also favorable in their action. seed may be sown in october in a well-prepared seed bed. it may be scattered broadcast or dropped one-half inch apart and covered with fine leaf mold to the depth of inch. during the winter the seed bed should be protected with burlap or fertilizer sacks, and should also be guarded against encroachment of moles or mice. plants may be set to inches apart each way and the rootstocks covered to a depth of about inches. for satisfactory growth goldenseal requires about per cent of shade during the summer, which should be provided by a lath shade or by cloth, brush, or vines. the soil should be kept free from weeds and the plants liberally watered throughout the growing season, but good drainage is necessary, since goldenseal does not thrive in boggy ground. under favorable conditions goldenseal reaches its best development in about, five years from seed, or, in a year or two less when grown from root buds or by divisions of the rootstocks. the root is dug in the autumn after the tops have withered. they are washed clean of all soil, sticks, etc., and dried on lath screens in an airy place in mild sunlight or partial shade, or indoors on a clean, dry floor. when dried in the open they should be protected from rain and dew. the cured root is kept in loose masses until marketed, since close packing may cause attacks of mold. the dried leaves and stems of goldenseal, commonly known as "seal herb," are also a marketable product. the prices in june, , ranged from $ to $ a pound for the roots and from to cents a pound for the herb. henbane. henbane (_hyoscyamus niger_) is a poisonous annual or biennial herb of the nightshade family, introduced into this country from europe and occasionally found as a weed in a number of the northern states. the leaves, flowering tops, and sometimes the seeds are used medicinally. henbane is propagated from seeds, but when these are sown in the open field germination is uncertain, and a very poor stand or total failure is a frequent result. germination is usually much more certain when the seeds are sown under glass, but the plants do not readily stand transplanting and often die after they are set in the open. very good results have been secured by sowing the seed in small pots under glass in january, transferring the seedlings to -inch pots in march, and transplanting in may to the field, where the plants may be set at least inches apart in rows. in handling the plants care should be taken to disturb the soil about the roots as little as possible. the soil requirements and method of cultivation are practically the same as for belladonna. the leaves of henbane usually suffer severely from attacks of the potato beetle, especially during the first year, and the crop is very likely to be destroyed if grown within the range of this insect. ordinarily the plants blossom about august of the second year and die after ripening their seed, but individual plants started early frequently bloom and set seed the first year. the leaves and flowing tops are collected when the plants are in full bloom and are carefully dried in the shade. the american crop of henbane has never much exceeded acres. the yield under favorable conditions is estimated at about , pounds per acre. the wholesale price in june, , was to cents a pound. horehound. horehound (_marrubium vulgare_) is a hardy perennial herb of the mint family, which occurs as a common weed in many places in the united states, especially on the pacific coast, where it threatens to become a pest. the leaves and flowering tops find some demand as a crude drug. their greatest use, however, is in the manufacture of candy, although they are sometimes employed for seasoning. horehound grows well in almost any soil and thrives in light, dry soils lacking in fertility. it grows readily from seeds, which are usually sown in drills early in the spring and covered with about an inch of soil. plants may also be started in coldframes, either from seed or cuttings, and later transplanted to the field. propagation may also be effected by division of old plants. plants may stand , , or inches apart in the row; those which stand close together will have small stems, and hence will yield a crop of finer quality. the plants are harvested just before flowering and should be cured in the shade in order to preserve the green color. if the stems are small, the plants may be cut close to the ground with a scythe, or with a mower if the area is large. in case the plants are tall and large they must be cut some distance above the ground and all coarse stems removed to make the herb suitable for marketing. yields at the rate of , pounds of dry herb per acre have been obtained. the prewar wholesale prices for the herb ranged from to cents a pound. the price in june, , was to cents. the annual importation of horehound varies from year to year, sometimes reaching to tons. insect-powder flowers. insect flowers, from which pyrethrum or insect powder is prepared, are produced by several species of plants of the aster family which occur wild in the eastern mediterranean region, where they are also cultivated. the species here considered (_chrysanthemum_ [_pyrethrum_] _cinerariaefolium_) has been cultivated commercially in california for the production of insect powder. this species seems to thrive best in warm situations and should grow well in any good soil which is well drained and not too heavy. the seeds may be sown directly in the field, either early in the spring or in the fall, but it is preferable to start the plants in coldframes or well-prepared seed beds and transplant them to the field. the seed is mixed with sand and sown broadcast on the surface of the bed and lightly covered with a rake. water should be used sparingly on the seed bed, since the young seedlings and even mature plants are easily killed by a wet soil. when the seedlings are about a month old they are transplanted, during damp weather if possible, and set to inches apart in rows to feet apart. old plants may also be divided and used for propagation. the plants should be well cultivated during the growing season and will yield flowers for several years if they are well cared for. the fertility of the soil is maintained by the application of fertilizers. the time of harvesting varies from june to september, according to locality. the flower heads are gathered just as they open and may be collected by hand or by means of a flower picker. they are dried, preferably in the shade, on canvas sheets about feet square, on which they are spread in a thin layer and turned two or three times a day until dry. the average yield of dried flowers appears to be about pounds per acre. the wholesale price for these flowers in june, , was to cents a pound, which is from three to four times the prewar price. larkspur. the larkspur of the crude-drug trade is an annual plant (_delphinium consolida_), native of southern europe, which has long been cultivated in this country as an ornamental and is now occasionally found growing wild. another species of larkspur (_delphinium urceolatum_) is native to this country and is said to have properties very similar to those of the european species. larkspur seed is now used chiefly in remedies for external parasites. these larkspurs thrive best in a rich sandy or gravelly soil. in heavy soils they are likely to suffer from root-rot, which materially reduces the yield. a rather dry climate is suitable for plants of this character. they do not bear transplanting well and seeds should be sown in the fall or very early in the spring where the plants are to stand. the soil should be well fined and the seed thinly sown in drills spaced according to the method of cultivation to be used. when up, the plants should be thinned to stand inches or more apart in the rows. the necessary cultivation consists in keeping the soil between the rows and about the plants mellow and free from weeds during the growing season. when the seed capsules are fairly ripe, the seed is harvested by collecting the tops, which should be cut before the seed capsules have become so brittle as to risk the loss of seed by shattering and which can be handled best in the early morning while damp and pliable. they should be cured in a well-ventilated place, sheltered from rain, and when thoroughly dry may be thrashed out and cleaned. the wholesale price now quoted for larkspur seed is between and cents a pound. the seed of a european species of larkspur (_delphinium staphisagria_), commonly-called stavesacre, possesses medicinal properties and is recognized as an official drug. the wholesale price for stavesacre seed in june, , was about cents a pound. lavender. the true lavender (_lavandula vera_) is a small shrubby plant of the mint family, native to southern europe, and widely cultivated for its fragrant flowers and for the oil distilled from the fresh flowering tops. lavender thrives best in light and rather dry soils well supplied with lime, but may be grown in almost any well-drained loam. on low or wet land it is almost certain to winterkill. the plant is not easily grown from seed, but may be readily propagated from cuttings or by division. in cold climates the plants must be well protected during the winter, or they may be carried over in a greenhouse or coldframe. early in the spring the plants or rooted cuttings are set in well-prepared soil, to inches apart in rows spaced to suit the cultivation intended. frequent and thorough cultivation is desirable. not many blooms can be cut the first year, but full crops may be expected for each of the three following years, after which it will be best to start new plantings. the flowering tops are harvested when they are in full bloom, and if used for the production of oil are distilled at once without drying. if the dry flowers are wanted, the tops are carefully dried in the shade and the flowers later stripped from the stems by hand. on ordinary soil, yields of to , pounds per acre of fresh flowering tops have been obtained. the dry weight is about four-fifths of the green weight. the yield of oil varies widely, but from to pounds per acre may be expected under good conditions. the wholesale prices in june, , were about as follows: for "ordinary" flowers, from to cents a pound; for "select" flowers, from to cents a pound; for oil of lavender flowers, $ to $ a pound. licorice. licorice (_glycyrrhiza glabra_) is an old world plant, the culture of which has not succeeded commercially in this country, although the plant grows well in the arid southwest and in california, where in some localities it threatens to become a weed. licorice is used to some extent in medicine, and is said to be much in demand by manufacturers of tobacco. licorice is a fairly hardy plant, but it thrives best in warm regions, where the season is sufficiently long to promote strong growth. plants may be grown from seed, but propagation by means of cuttings made from the younger parts of the rhizome, or so-called root, usually gives best results. the cuttings are set perpendicularly in deep, moist, sandy, or loamy soil, and should stand about inches apart in rows so spaced as to allow for the cultivation necessary to keep the soil mellow and free from weeds. the yield under good culture is said to average about , pounds of dry root per acre at the end of every third year. the relatively low price at which, the imported root can usually be obtained has so far prevented the development of commercial licorice growing in this country. nearly , , pounds of licorice root and an average of about , pounds of licorice paste are annually imported into the united states when trade conditions are normal. prewar prices for the imported root usually ranged from to ½ cents a pound in bales. the price in june, , was to cents. lobelia. lobelia (_lobelia inflata_) is a native poisonous annual plant, occurring generally in open woods and pastures, but is most abundant in the states east of the mississippi river. the leaves, tops, and seeds are used medicinally. this plant thrives under cultivation in a rather rich, moist loam, and grows well either in the open or in partial shade. it grows readily from seeds, which are very small and must be sown on soil which has been well fined and exceptionally well prepared. the seeds are sown either in the fall or spring in rows feet apart. it is best not to cover the seeds but to sow them on the surface of the soil, which is then firmed with a float or by resting a board over the row and walking upon it. fall planting usually gives a better stand and a heavier crop. shallow cultivation should be given until the plants begin to flower. lobelia is harvested when in full flower or as soon as some of the older seed pods are full grown. the plants may be cut with a mower if the cutter bar is set high enough to avoid including the large stems. the herb should be dried in the shade, in order to preserve the green color. small areas have given yields at the rate of , pounds of dry herb per acre. the prewar price paid to collectors for the dried herb was about cents a pound. the prices in june, , were, for the herb, cents; for the seed, cents a pound. lovage. lovage (_levisticum officinale_) is a perennial plant of the parsley family, introduced into this country from europe as a garden plant and now grown as a crop in certain localities in new england and the west. the root has long been supposed to have medicinal properties and is in some demand in the drug trade. the flowering tops yield a volatile oil, for which, however, there is little demand. the seeds are used for flavoring confectionery and the leaf stems are sometimes blanched, like celery, and eaten as a salad. lovage is propagated by division or from seeds. the seeds may be planted in the fall in drills inches apart or sown in early spring in a hotbed, greenhouse, or well-prepared seed bed in a sheltered portion of the garden. they should be covered very lightly with sand or fine sifted soil, and in order to prevent the soil from drying out before the seeds germinate it is advisable to spread old burlap or sacking over the bed. the sacking may be sprinkled occasionally if the weather is dry and should be removed when the first seedlings break the soil. the plants should reach a size suitable for transplanting by the end of may, when they may be set at intervals of inches in rows far enough apart for convenient cultivation. lovage grows well in almost any deep, well-drained soil, such as will produce a fair crop of corn or potatoes, and is benefited by the liberal use of fertilizer, although heavy applications of manure tend to produce excessive top growth. the roots may be dug in october of the second or third year after setting the plants. numerous offsets will generally be found, and if these have good roots they may be used to renew the plantation without recourse to seed. such shoots should at once be reset at the usual distances apart. the freshly dug roots should be well washed, cut into slices about one-half inch thick, and carefully dried. if necessary, artificial heat, not to exceed ° f., may be used to hasten drying. returns from experimental areas indicate that a yield of about , pounds of dried root to the acre may be expected under good conditions every third year. the prices quoted for american lovage root in the wholesale drug markets range from cents to $ a pound, according to demand and quality. producers, however, usually receive much less than the wholesale price. melissa. melissa, balm, or lemon balm (_melissa officinalis_), is a perennial herb of the mint family, native to southern europe. in this country it has long been cultivated in gardens, from which it has escaped and now grows wild in many places in the eastern united states. the leaves of balm are widely used for culinary flavoring, and the leaves and flowering tops are used in medicine. the volatile oil distilled from the plant is said to be used in perfumery and also for flavoring. balm grows readily on any good garden soil and is easily propagated from seeds, cuttings, or by division. the seeds may be sown in the open early in the spring, but owing to their small size it is best to sow them in shallow flats in a greenhouse or in a hotbed. the soil should be well fined and the seeds sown thinly on the surface of the soil, which is then firmed with a float or a small board. when well up, the seedlings should be transferred to deeper flats, and when or inches high they may be transplanted to the open and set about a foot apart in rows spaced to suit the cultivation to be given. cultivation should be frequent and sufficient to keep the soil about the plants mellow and free from weeds. when the plants are in full flower the crop can be cut with a scythe, or with a mower if the herb is to be used for distillation. for preparing the crude drug only the flowering tops are collected, the coarse, stemmy portions of the herb being rejected. the leaves and tops are dried in the shade in order to preserve the green color. yields at the rate of about , pounds of dry herb per acre have been obtained, but if only the flowering tops are collected the yield will be very materially less. the prewar price paid to collectors for the leaves and tops ranged from to cents a pound. in june, , the price for the leaves was cents a pound. orris. orris (_iris florentina_) is a perennial, native to southern europe, and is cultivated chiefly in italy for its fragrant rootstocks, which yield the orris of commerce. the plant grows well in a variety of soils and flourishes in a rich, moist loam, but roots which are grown in rather dry, gravelly soil appear to be the most fragrant. orris is readily propagated by division of the old plants, which may be set either in the spring or fall about a foot apart in rows spaced conveniently for cultivation. since harvesting usually takes place only once in three years, the use of the land is required for that length of time in order to obtain one crop. after the roots are dug they are peeled and dried in the open air. the desired fragrance does not develop until after the dry roots have been stored for a number of months, during which time they are especially liable to the attacks of insects. the yield is from to tons of dry root per acre. the average annual importation of orris is normally about , pounds. the wholesale prices, which before the war ranged from to cents, in june, , were to cents a pound. the outlook for a profitable orris industry in this country does not appear promising, and it does not seem advisable for any considerable number of persons to undertake the growing of this crop. parsley. parsley (_petroselinum sativum_) is a biennial herb grown everywhere in gardens for use in garnishing and seasoning. all parts of the plant contain a volatile oil, that from the seed being especially rich in a constituent known as apiol, or "parsley camphor," which is still used to some extent in medicine. in the crude-drug trade there is a small demand for the root, leaves, and seed. a rich and rather moist soil is desirable for the growing of parsley. the seeds germinate slowly and are frequently sown early in the spring in cold frames or seed beds, from which the young plants may be removed later and set in the open in rows or more inches apart and about inches apart in the row. when the leaves are fully grown they may be collected and dried in the usual manner. the plants flower in the second year, and as soon as the seed is ripe it is harvested and carefully dried. at the end of the second growing season, late in october, the root may be dug and should be well washed and carefully dried. artificial heat may be used in drying if necessary. on small areas yields of seed at the rate of about pounds per acre have been obtained. during the past few years the wholesale price of the seed has varied from to cents a pound, according to demand and season. from to pounds of seed are required to yield pound of the oil, which in june, , was quoted at $ . to $ a pound. pennyroyal. pennyroyal (_hedeoma pulegioides_) is an annual plant, flowering from june to october, and is found in dry soils from nova scotia and quebec to dakota and southward. both the dry herb and the oil obtained therefrom by steam distillation form marketable products. pennyroyal grows well on average upland soils and is frequently abundant on sandy or gravelly slopes. in field planting the seeds should be sown in rows in the fall and covered not to exceed one-quarter of an inch, since they rarely germinate if planted at a greater depth. the plants come up early in the spring, and to secure the best results clean cultivation and freedom from weeds are essential, as with all cultivated crops. early in the summer, when the plants are in full flower, they may be mowed. to prepare the herb for market the plants are dried, preferably in the shade, and carefully packed immediately after drying. all the large stems should be removed in order to improve the quality of the product. the herb should be marketed promptly, since it deteriorates with age. for the production of the volatile oil, the plants should be harvested when in full flower and distilled without drying. returns from experimental areas indicate that a yield of about , pounds of dry herb per acre may be expected. the yield of oil varies from to pounds per acre. the price paid for the dry herb usually ranges from to cents a pound. the wholesale price of the oil ranges from about $ to $ a pound. peppermint. peppermint (_mentha piperita_) is a perennial of the mint family, frequently found growing wild in moist situations throughout the eastern half of the united states. it is cultivated on a commercial scale, chiefly on the muck lands of southern michigan and northern indiana. the volatile oil forms the principal marketable product, but there is some demand in the crude-drug trade for the dried leaves and flowering tops. peppermint is propagated from "roots," or runners, which should be set in an almost continuous row in furrows about feet apart and covered to a depth of about inches. it can be grown on any land that will produce good crops of corn, but is most successful on the muck lands of reclaimed swamps. on uplands it soon exhausts the soil and will not do well for more than two or three seasons without the rotation of crops. on rich muck lands it will grow for a number of years, the soil being plowed after the crop is harvested and the runners turned in to form a new growth the succeeding year. it is essential that the ground be kept free from weeds, since their presence in the crop at harvest would seriously injure the quality of the oil. when peppermint is grown on reclaimed swamps or muck lands fertilizers are rarely needed, but on uplands it is well to plow in or more tons per acre of rotted stable manure before planting. similar applications may be made between the rows in early spring and plowed in as the land shows signs of exhaustion. commercial truck or potato fertilizers cultivated in between the rows at the rate of pounds to the acre have proved useful in keeping up fertility, but manure is to be preferred, as it provides humus or vegetable matter as well as increases the fertility. harvesting is begun in july or august, when the plants are in full bloom. the herb is cut and cured like hay, and when fairly well dried is placed in large vats or stills having a capacity of from to tons of dry herb and distilled with steam to obtain the volatile oil. the yield of oil is exceedingly variable, but on lands well suited for the production of peppermint the average yield is not far from pounds per acre. the annual production of peppermint oil in the united states is about , pounds. for many years before the war the price of the oil varied from year to year, but averaged about $ . a pound. there is some demand for the dried leaves and tops, for which to cents a pound was paid to collectors in june, . for further information on the growing of peppermint, see farmers' bulletin , entitled "the cultivation of peppermint and spearmint." pinkroot. [illustration: fig. .--pinkroot (_spigelia marilandica_).] pinkroot (_spigelia marilandica_, fig. ) is a native perennial herb occurring in rich open woods from new jersey to wisconsin and south to florida and texas. the root is an official drug, the use of which has declined in recent years, apparently on account of the extent to which pinkroot has been adulterated with the worthless roots of another plant known as east tennessee pinkroot. prospective growers of pinkroot should obtain seeds or roots for planting from thoroughly reliable sources only. pinkroot makes a vigorous growth under conditions suitable for growing ginseng or goldenseal, and partial shade is usually necessary, although if given a rich, moist, loamy soil it may be grown without shade in situations not too hot and dry. it is propagated either from seeds or from divisions of old roots. it is best to sow the seeds as soon as they are ripe, but if mixed with moist sand and kept in a cool place sowing may be deferred until fall or the following spring. the seeds are sown in drills inches apart in well-prepared seed beds, and in the spring, when the young plants are a few inches high, they are set about a foot apart each way in the permanent beds. the old roots are divided when dormant, and each division should consist of a portion of the root with one or more buds and a number of the small rootlets. they are set in the same manner as the seedlings. thorough cultivation and freedom from weeds are essential for good results. the roots usually attain a marketable size in three years, but will give a heavier yield at the end of the fourth or fifth year. they are harvested in the fall, and after the tops are cut off the roots are well washed and thoroughly dried. little can be said regarding yield, but returns from small areas indicate that a bed by feet will yield from to pounds of dry root in four years. the prices paid to collectors of pinkroot before the war ranged from to cents a pound. the price in june, , was about cents a pound. pokeweed. pokeweed (_phytolacca americana_) is a native plant of frequent occurrence in moist, rich soil along fences and in uncultivated land throughout the eastern half of the united states. the root, which is perennial, sends up large annual stems, sometimes attaining a height of or feet. this plant bears numerous long clusters of smooth, shining purple berries, very attractive in appearance, but the seeds are said to be poisonous. both the root and the berries are used in medicine. pokeweed thrives in deep, rich soils well supplied with moisture and may be readily grown from seed sown early in the spring in rows feet apart and barely covered. the seedlings may be thinned to stand about feet apart in the rows. cultivation should be shallow, though frequent. the plant develops a long, thick, and fleshy root, which when old is not easily harvested and may have to be dug by hand. if the roots of plants grown from seed are harvested at the end of the first year, they may be turned out by means of a deep-running plow without great difficulty. as soon as they are dug the roots are cleaned by washing and are usually cut into lengthwise or transverse slices for drying. they should be thoroughly dried, and if a large quantity is to be handled the use of artificial heat will be found desirable. a yield of about pounds of dry root per acre may be expected at the end of the first year, or three or four times as much from plants of the second year's growth. in the second year several hundred pounds of berries may also be obtained from acre. before the war, collectors received from to cents a pound for the roots and berries. the price in june, , for the dry, cut root was about cents and for the dry berries cents a pound. apparently there is but a small demand for either of these products. safflower. safflower, american saffron, or false saffron (_carthamus tinctorius_) is a hardy old world annual of the aster family, cultivated in gardens in this country for its flowers, which are used in coloring or for flavoring, and sometimes as a substitute for the true saffron. safflower grows well on moist soils and may be readily propagated from seeds sown in the open early in the spring. the soil should be fine and mellow, and the seeds sown an inch or more apart in drills and well covered. about three weeks from the time of sowing the seed the plants will be well started, and cultivation should begin at once and be continued until the flower buds form. the plants bloom in july or august, when harvesting may begin. only the florets are collected, and, since these must be removed by hand, harvesting is slow and expensive. the plants continue to blossom for several weeks, and the florets must be harvested almost daily. it is best to collect them early in the morning and to dry them in the shade on trays having muslin bottoms. the florets should be turned daily until thoroughly dry and then stored in tin containers. the yield is estimated at to pounds of dry florets per acre. the price for safflower is variable and ranges from to cents a pound. saffron. the true saffron (_crocus sativus_) is a low-growing, fall-blooming, bulbous plant of the iris family, native to southern europe, where it is cultivated commercially. it was formerly grown as a small garden crop in some localities in this country, chiefly in lancaster and lebanon counties, pa. the stigmas of the flowers form the saffron of commerce. saffron is used in cookery and for coloring confectionery, and was formerly widely used in medicine. a rich, well-drained garden soil favors a vigorous growth of the plant, but a better quality of saffron is secured on land of medium fertility. it is propagated from bulbs (corms), which may be planted in august about inches apart each way and inches deep in well-prepared soil. when grown on a large scale the bulbs are often set late in the spring. the ground is laid off in rows about inches apart, and a furrow to inches deep is opened for each row. in this furrow the bulbs are set in two parallel rows about inches apart and about inches apart in the row. the furrows are then filled and the surface of the soil brought to a uniform level. thorough cultivation and freedom from weeds are essential for good results. the purplish blossoms usually appear about october, but the main leaf growth of the plant is made in the following spring. the bulbs may remain undisturbed for three or four years, or they may be taken up yearly and the clusters divided. all unsound bulbs should be rejected, as they are often attacked by a fungus which readily spreads to the sound bulbs, causing them to rot. during the blossoming period, which frequently lasts from two to three weeks, the flowers are collected daily just as they open. the orange-colored stigmas are then removed from the flowers, either by pulling them out or by cutting them off with the finger nail, after which the flowers are thrown away. the stigmas are dried immediately, a common method being to spread them in a thin layer on a sieve which is suspended over a low fire. when fully dry they are placed in linen bags and stored in a dry place. the yield of saffron is variously estimated at from to pounds per acre, according to the situation where it is grown. about , flowers are required to produce a pound of dry saffron; consequently, the amount of hand labor involved in removing the stigmas is quite large. the price usually received for saffron in normal times is not far from $ a pound, but the prices in june, , ranged from $ to $ a pound. owing to the high cost of production, it is not thought probable that saffron culture would prove profitable in the united states. sage. the common sage plant (_salvia officinalis_) is a hardy perennial of the mint family, widely cultivated in gardens, and when once established it persists for several years. the leaves are used extensively for seasoning meats and soups, and a tea made from them is an old household remedy. sage is easily cultivated and will grow in any well-drained fertile soil, but seems to thrive best in a rich clayey loam. for cultivation on a large scale the seeds are sown in early spring in rows from to feet apart, and when the plants are well up they are thinned to stand about inches apart in the row. seedling plants have a tendency to produce narrow leaves; hence, the broad-leaved varieties which do not flower readily are the most desirable, since they give a larger yield of leaves. as the plants rarely set seed, they are usually grown from cuttings, which may be obtained from seed houses having their own propagating gardens. cuttings set as early in the spring as weather conditions will permit usually give a large crop. in the north the plants should be protected in winter by a mulch of manure. sage may also be grown as a second crop after early vegetables. a fair crop of leaves may be harvested the first season and a much larger one for five or six years following. only one picking should be made the first year, after which two or three pickings may be made in a season. if a product of fine quality is desired, the leaves are picked by hand and dried in the shade. sage leaves are apt to turn black while drying unless the removal of moisture proceeds continually until they are fully dry. a cheap grade may be obtained at a smaller harvest cost by cutting the plants with a mower, the cutter bar of which is set at such a height as not to include the woody stems. the dry herb should be marketed promptly, since it loses its strength rapidly with age. returns from experimental areas indicate that on good soil a yield of , pounds or more of dried tops per acre may be expected. in case the leaves only are harvested, the yield will be proportionately less. american leaf sage usually brings a considerably higher price than that imported from europe. during the last three years the price has ranged from to cents a pound, according to supply and demand. [illustration: fig. .--seneca snakeroot (_polygala senega_).] seneca snakeroot. seneca snakeroot, known also as senega or seneca root (_polygala senega_, fig. ), is a small native perennial, occurring in rocky woods in the eastern united states and canada. seneca is not yet grown on a commercial scale, although cultivated experimentally in a number of places. the root is used in medicine. seneca can be grown in good garden soil or in rather firm, stony soil, provided it contains a fair proportion of leaf mold or very well rotted manure. shade is not essential, although the plant thrives in partial shade or under modified forest conditions. roots for propagation may be obtained from dealers or may be collected from the wild in autumn or early spring. if set inches apart in rows, the plants may be readily cultivated until they reach a marketable size. the seeds ripen in june and may then be planted, or they may be stratified by mixing with sand and buried in boxes or flower pots in moist soil until the following spring, when they may be sown in seed beds or shallow boxes of loam and leaf mold. the seedlings when old enough to be handled safely may be transplanted to the permanent beds and set in rows to facilitate cultivation. in cold situations they will probably need to be protected during the first winter after transplanting. a light covering of straw or pine needles will be sufficient to protect them from severe frost. the plant is slow in growth, but experiments thus far indicate that about four years are required to obtain marketable roots. the roots should be dug in the fall, thoroughly cleaned, and dried. there are no reliable data on the probable yield. seneca root is in constant demand, and collectors formerly received from to cents a pound. the price to collectors in june, , was cents a pound. serpentaria. serpentaria, or virginia snakeroot (_aristolochia serpentaria_), is a native perennial plant occurring in rich woods in the eastern part of the united states, and most abundantly along the allegheny mountains. the roots of this plant are used in medicine. like many other woodland plants, serpentaria requires a rich, moist loam and partial shade for its best development. it may be readily propagated from seeds, which, however, require several months for germination. the seeds are best sown in a well-prepared seed bed as soon as they are ripe. they may also be sown broadcast or in drills inches apart and lightly covered with leaf mold. a thin mulch of straw or leaves will afford the necessary winter protection. in the spring the plants may be set inches apart each way in the permanent beds. plantings have been made in the open, in which case the plants were set inches apart in rows inches apart, but the results have been less satisfactory than with plantings made under shade. the roots are collected in the fall, thoroughly cleaned, and carefully dried. satisfactory data on probable yields under cultivation are not available. the price usually ranges from to cents a pound. spearmint. spearmint (_mentha spicata_) is a well-known perennial of the mint family which is very frequently found growing wild in moist situations throughout the eastern half of the united states. it is widely used for seasoning meats, and the leaves and flowering tops, as well as the volatile oil distilled from the whole herb, form marketable drug products. spearmint is easily grown in any fertile soil which is fairly moist. its culture and the method of distilling the volatile oil are the same as for peppermint. to prepare the dry herb for market the leaves and flowering tops are collected when the first flowers appear and before the leaves begin to fall and are carefully dried in the shade. the demand for the dry herb is small, but the annual market requirement for the oil is about , pounds. on ordinary soils the yield of oil varies from to pounds per acre, according to stand and season, but on muck lands the yield is usually only a little less than that of peppermint. before the war the wholesale prices for the oil ranged from $ . to $ , averaging about $ . a pound. the price in june, , was $ a pound. the dry herb, which formerly brought from to cents, is now quoted at to cents a pound. for further information on the growing of spearmint, see farmers' bulletin , entitled "the cultivation of peppermint and spearmint." stramonium. stramonium, jamestown weed, or jimson weed (_datura stramonium_), is a poisonous annual of the nightshade family, which occurs as a common weed in almost all parts of this country except the west and north. the leaves and seeds are used medicinally. although stramonium grows wild on a variety of soils, it thrives best under cultivation in rich and rather heavy soils which are fairly well supplied with lime. it grows readily from seed, which may be sown in the open early in the spring in drills feet apart and barely covered. when the plants are well established they are thinned to stand to inches apart in the row. the plants can be readily transplanted, and gaps occurring in the rows may be filled in with the plants removed in thinning. cultivation sufficient to keep the soil free from weeds is necessary for good growth. cultivated plants are frequently attacked by leaf-eating insects, especially in the early stages of growth, and it is often necessary to use lime or other insect repellents to prevent the destruction of the crop. the leaves, which are collected when the plant is in full bloom, may be picked in the field, but time will be saved if the entire plant is cut and dried in an artificially heated curing room at a temperature of ° to ° f. when the leaves are dry they can be readily stripped from the stems, and should be baled for shipment. such seed as is ripe may be easily thrashed out of the capsules after the leaves have been removed from the stems. yields of dry leaf at the rate of , to , pounds per acre have been obtained. the yield of seed is much more variable, and is estimated to range from to , pounds per acre. the prewar price for the leaves varied from to cents and for the seed from to cents a pound. the price in june, , for the leaves was cents and for the seed cents a pound. tansy. tansy (_tanacetum vulgare_) is a european perennial plant, long cultivated in this country in gardens, from which it has escaped, and it now occurs as a weed along fence rows and roadsides. the leaves and flowering tops are in some demand for medicinal purposes. the herb also yields a volatile oil, for which there is a small market. tansy grows well on almost any good soil, but rich and rather heavy soils well supplied with moisture favor a heavy growth of herb. it may be propagated from seed, but is more readily propagated by division of the roots early in spring. the divisions are set inches apart in rows feet apart. seed may be sown very early in the spring in the open or in seed beds, and the seedlings later transplanted to the field. such cultivation as is usually given to garden crops will be sufficient. the plants are cut late in the summer when in full flower, the leaves and tops being separated from the stems and dried without exposure to the sun, as the trade desires a bright-green color. for the volatile oil the plants are allowed to lie in the field after cutting until they have lost a considerable portion of their moisture. they are then brought to the still and the oil removed by the usual method of steam distillation. a yield of about , pounds of dry leaves and flowering tops per acre may be obtained under good conditions. the yield of oil varies, but about pounds per acre is a fair average. in the united states the center of production of oil of tansy is michigan, where about , pounds are distilled annually. the price of the oil in june, , was about $ a pound. the price of the leaves and tops usually ranges from to cents a pound. thyme. thyme (_thymus vulgaris_) is a shrublike perennial plant of the mint family, native to southwestern europe. it is a common garden plant, which lives for many years under good culture. the herb, often used for seasoning and flavoring, yields the oil of thyme, which has well-recognized medicinal properties. thyme grows well from seed, which may be sown early in the spring in drills feet apart, or the plants may be started in a greenhouse or in seed beds outside and later set at intervals of about inches in rows to feet apart. thyme may also be propagated, like geraniums, from cuttings rooted in sand under glass. the plants grow well in mellow upland soil of good quality, and should be well cultivated and kept free from weeds throughout the growing season. for preparing the dry herb only the flowering tops are used, and these are cut when the plant is in full bloom and carefully dried in the shade in order to preserve the natural color. the volatile oil is obtained from the entire herb, which is preferably cut when in full flower and subjected to steam distillation without previous drying. returns from experimental areas have shown great variations in the yield, which has averaged about a ton of green herb per acre. normally the yield from a planting increases for several years, as the plants become better established, and yields at the rate of about a ton of dry herb per acre have been reported. the wholesale price in june, , for the dry herb ranged from to cents a pound; for the imported oil, from $ . to $ . a pound, according to quality. valerian. valerian (_valeriana officinalis_) is a hardy herbaceous perennial, well known under the name "garden heliotrope" and often grown as an ornamental plant. it has also been cultivated as a drug plant in new york and in parts of new england. the dried roots (rhizome and roots) form the marketable drug. valerian grows well in all ordinary soils, but thrives in a rich and rather heavy loam which is well supplied with moisture. it may be readily propagated by dividing the old roots, either in the fall or in the spring, and setting the divisions about a foot apart in rows to feet apart. if the divisions are set very early in the fall in time to become well established before frost, a good crop may usually be harvested the following autumn. plants may also be grown from seed, which are preferably sown as soon as they are ripe in well-protected seed beds in the garden. early in the spring the seedlings may be transplanted to the field and set at the same distances apart as the divisions of the root. growth will be favored by a liberal application of farmyard manure, which should be well worked into the soil before the plants are set out. thorough cultivation is essential. the roots of the plants propagated by division may be dug in the fall of the first year's growth, although the yield will probably be small. those of seedling plants do not usually reach a size suitable for harvesting before the end of the second growing season. after digging, the roots are washed, preferably in running water, until all adhering soil is removed. washing and drying will be facilitated if the thick portion of the roots is sliced lengthwise. the drying should be very thorough, and the use of artificial heat will be found advisable. under good conditions a yield of , pounds or more of dried roots per acre may reasonably be expected. the prewar price ranged from to cents a pound, depending upon the place where grown, that from england usually commanding the highest price. the wholesale price in june, , was about cents a pound. vetiver. vetiver, or cuscus grass (_vetiveria zizanioides_), is a perennial of the grass family, native to southern asia. it is occasionally cultivated in this country in the warmer portions of the gulf coast states as an ornamental and also for its aromatic roots, which are often used to impart a fragrance to clothing. in other countries an oil is distilled from the roots and used in the manufacture of perfumes. vetiver will grow in almost any soil, but light, sandy soil enriched by farmyard manure is to be preferred. propagation is effected by dividing old clumps, which may be set in the field, either in the fall or spring, about or feet apart each way. during the growing season the plants are given sufficient cultivation to keep them free from weeds. vetiver grows in close bunches from to feet high, the numerous roots spreading horizontally about feet on all sides of the plant. harvesting the roots, which usually takes place in november, is a laborious operation. the soil about the plants is opened with a stout, sharp spade in a circle large enough to include most of the roots. the earth is then dug from beneath the center of the plant and the entire clump lifted. the roots are first beaten or shaken to free them from adhering soil, then cut off close to the root crown and thoroughly washed. they may be dried in the open air, but it is preferable to dry them in a closed room at a low temperature, since they lose in fragrance if exposed to the hot sun or to a free circulation of air. yields at the rate of to , pounds of dry roots per acre have been obtained. the prices in the markets of new orleans are said to range from cents to $ a pound. the oil is not produced commercially in this country. the demand for both roots and oil is quite small, and it has not yet been shown that vetiver would be a profitable crop in the united states. wintergreen. wintergreen (_gaultheria procumbens_) is a low-growing, broad-leaved, evergreen plant with a creeping stem. the shoots from this stem grow to a height of to inches and bear solitary white flowers, which are followed by red berries. these berries are edible and are widely known as teaberries or checkerberries. wintergreen is a common plant in woods and clearings from eastern canada southward to the gulf states, but its collection in quantity is somewhat difficult. both the dry herb and the oil form marketable products. like other woodland plants, wintergreen thrives only in partial shade, and plantings should be made in a grove or under a specially constructed shade, such as is used for ginseng or goldenseal. a fairly good growth may be expected in soil which is thoroughly mixed with leaf mold to a depth of inches or more. wild plants may be used for propagation. divisions of these may be set in the fall or spring, about inches apart each way, in permanent beds. wintergreen is usually gathered in october or at the end of the growing season. the plants are carefully dried and packed in bags or boxes for marketing. for the production of the volatile oil the plants are soaked in water for about hours and then distilled with steam. over , pounds of wintergreen oil were produced in this country in and , pounds in . the prewar price of the oil distilled from the wintergreen plant as quoted in the wholesale drug markets generally ranged from $ to $ a pound. recently the lack of labor has reduced the output of oil, and in consequence the price has advanced. the oil became practically unobtainable on the markets in october, , at which time it had reached a price of $ a pound. collectors usually receive from to cents a pound for the dry herb. the results of numerous trials indicate that, on account of the small yield, wintergreen production under cultivation is not likely to be profitable at the prices quoted. wormseed, american. american wormseed, or jerusalem oak (_chenopodium ambrosioides anthelminticum_), is a coarse weed, occurring commonly in waste places and often in cultivated ground throughout the eastern and southern parts of the united states. the seeds (fruits) and the volatile oil distilled from the tops of the plant are employed in medicine. this plant grows well under cultivation in almost any soil, but a good sandy loam is preferred. it is now cultivated for oil production only in a small area in carroll county, md. the seed is sown in well-prepared beds about march , and between may and june , when the seedlings are to inches tall, they are transplanted and set about inches apart in rows about feet apart. the soil is kept entirely free from weeds by shallow cultivation throughout the growing season. harvesting is usually begun early in september or as soon as the seeds have taken on a black color, but before the plants have turned brown. if harvesting is delayed until the plants are fully mature there will be considerable loss through shattering and a diminution in the yield of oil when they are distilled. the crop is harvested with large knives or sickles, either by cutting off the entire plant at the ground or by cutting the branches separately. the latter method saves the labor of handling a quantity of useless woody material and also requires a smaller still capacity to handle the crop. after cutting, the plants are laid out on the ground in rows and allowed to cure for about three days before they are distilled. in the south wormseed has been grown successfully as a seed crop. the ground is prepared in february and laid off in rows about feet apart. a furrow is opened in each row, in which a complete fertilizer is applied at the rate of to pounds per acre. the soil on each side of the row is thrown in with a turnplow, forming a low ridge, which is then flattened with a light roller. the seeds are sown on this ridge with a drill. the plants are thinned to stand inches apart in the row and are given frequent shallow cultivation. the crop should be ready for harvesting late in july or early in august and should be cut before the tops begin to take on a brown color. the plants are cut either with a mower or old-style grain reaper and are left in the field until thoroughly dry. they may be housed and the seed thrashed out when convenient, but, since the seeds shatter easily, waste will be avoided if the plants are thrown upon large canvas sheets and the seed thrashed out in the field. the seed is light and not easily cleaned, but wire sieves of suitable mesh have proved very satisfactory for this purpose. the yield of seed per acre averages about , pounds. the yield of oil varies, but under favorable conditions about pounds per acre is regarded as a fair average. the area planted varies according to the price of the oil and may range from to acres. the average annual production of oil is estimated by producers to be , to , pounds. the prewar price of wormseed ranged from to cents a pound. the price in june, , was about cents a pound. the prewar price of the oil ranged from $ . to $ . a pound. the price in june, , was $ to $ . a pound. wormwood. wormwood (_artemisia absinthium_) is a hardy herbaceous old world perennial of the aster family, which has escaped from cultivation in this country and now occurs as a weed in many localities in the southern part of the united states. for many years it has been grown commercially on a small scale, chiefly in michigan and wisconsin. the dried leaves and tops have long been used medicinally, but the volatile oil distilled from the plant now forms the principal marketable product. wormwood will grow in almost any soil, but the best results are to be expected in deep, rich, moderately moist loams. the seeds are frequently sown broadcast early in the fall, following a grain crop; but if the plants are to be cultivated, it is best to start them from seeds sown in seed beds early in the spring or from cuttings of the young shoots taken in the spring and rooted in sand under glass or in the shade of a lath shed. the seeds are very small and should be sown on the surface of the soil in coldframes or seed beds and lightly covered with very fine sandy soil. the plants are easily handled and may be transplanted in moist weather with good results at almost any time during the growing season. they are set about inches apart in rows or feet apart and are well cultivated. the soil should be kept absolutely free from weeds, since their presence in the crop at harvest time seriously damages the quality of the oil. a fair cutting of the herb may be expected the first year after planting and full crops for two or three successive, seasons, after which new plantings will be found more satisfactory. the plants are harvested when in full bloom and may be cut with a scythe, or a reaper may be used if the area is large. while still fresh, the plants are distilled with steam to obtain the volatile oil. to prepare the leaves and flowering tops for market they are stripped from the stems by hand after the plants are cut and carefully dried in the shade without the use of artificial heat. experimental plantings have given yields at the rate of , pounds of dry tops or pounds of oil per acre. when grown on a commercial scale the yield of oil appears to average about pounds per acre. the prewar price of the dry tops was about or cents a pound. its price in june, , was to cents a pound. the oil was once used extensively in the manufacture of absinth, but when the use of this product was restricted in the demand for the oil fell off and the price declined, until in the early part of it reached the low level of $ a pound. the price in june, , was about $ a pound. the average annual production of oil of wormwood is about , pounds. owing to the limited use of this oil, there appears to be little room for further profitable expansion of this industry. additional copies of this publication may be procured from the superintendent of documents government printing office washington, d. c. at cents per copy * * * * * transcriber note illustrations relocated to avoid splitting paragraphs. minor typos may have been corrected. by the internet archive. transcribers note text emphasis denoted as _italics_ and =bold=. simple plumbing repairs for the home and farmstead [illustration] [illustration] farmers' bulletin no. u.s. department of agriculture contents page repairing water faucets and valves frostproof hydrants repairing leaks in pipes and tanks pipes tanks water hammer frozen water pipes preventing freezing thawing repairing water closets flushing mechanism bowl removal tank "sweating" clearing clogged drains fixture and floor drains outside drains tools and spare parts emergencies =prepared by northeastern region agricultural research service= this bulletin supersedes farmers' bulletin , "simple plumbing repairs in the home." =washington, d.c.= =revised december = =for sale by the superintendent of documents, u.s. government printing: office, washington, d.c. - price cents stock number - = simple plumbing repairs for the home and farmstead you can save money and avoid delays by making minor plumbing repairs yourself. jobs that a farmer or homeowner can do with a few basic tools include: repairing water faucets and valves. repairing leaks in pipes and tanks. thawing frozen pipes. repairing water closets. cleaning clogged drains. extensive plumbing repairs or alterations in the plumbing system usually require authorization from local authorities and possibly inspection of the completed work. therefore such work should be done by a qualified or licensed plumber. repairing water faucets and valves faucets and globe valves, the type of shutoff valves commonly used in home water systems, are very similar in construction (fig. ) and repair instructions given below apply to both. your faucets or valves may differ somewhat in general design from the one shown in figure , because both faucets and valves come in a wide variety of styles. mixing faucets, which are found on sinks, laundry trays, and bathtubs, are actually two separate units with a common spout. each unit is independently repaired. dripping faucets are the most common plumbing problem. normally a new washer is all that is required. if water leaks around the stem, either the packing is loose or needs replacing. to repair the faucet, first shut off the water at the shutoff valve nearest the particular faucet. disassemble the faucet by removing the handle, packing nut, packing, and stem in that order. you may have to set the handle back on the stem and use it to unscrew and remove the stem. remove the screw and worn washer from the stem. clean the washer cup and install a new washer of the proper size and type. reassemble the faucet. handles of mixing faucets should be in matched positions. if a washer requires frequent replacement, it may be the wrong type or the seat may be rough and scoring the washer. flat washers are used on seats having a crown or round ridge for the washer seat. tapered or rounded washers are used with tapered seats. these seats may be replaced if worn or damaged. replaceable seats have either a square or hex shaped water passage for the seat removal tool. seat dressing tools are available for non-replaceable seats. occasionally a faucet will be noisy when water is flowing. this may be due to a loose washer or worn threads on the stem and receiver, permitting the stem to vibrate or chatter. pressing down on the handle will stop stem vibration but will not affect a loose washer. [illustration: _figure ._--globe type angle valve. faucets are similar in construction.] replacement stems are available; however, if the receiving threads are worn excessively a new stem would not eliminate the problem completely. in some faucets it is possible to replace the stem receiver, the stem, and the seat, thus restoring all normal wearing parts within the faucet. several new faucet designs aimed at easier operation, eliminating drip, and promoting long service life, are on the market. instructions for repair may be obtained from dealers. if a shower head drips, the supply valve has not been fully closed, or the valve needs repair. after extended use and several repairs, some valves will no longer give tight shutoff and must be replaced. when this becomes necessary, it may be advisable to upgrade the quality with equipment having better flow characteristics and longer-life design and materials. in some cases, ball valves will deliver more water than globe valves. some globe valves deliver more flow than others for identical pipe sizes. y-pattern globe valves, in straight runs of pipe, have better flow characteristics than straight stop valves. figure shows the features of different types of valves. [illustration: _figure ._--different types of valves: _a_, glove valve; note large passages of water. _b_, y-pattern globe valve; the flow is almost straight. _c_, ball valve, straight flow; some makes are available with the port in the ball the same diameter as the pipe.] precautions polluted water or sewage may carry such diseases as typhoid fever and amoebic dysentery. if you do your own plumbing work, be sure that-- there are no leaks in drainpipes through which sewage or sewage gases can escape. there are no cross connections between piping carrying water from different sources unless there can be reasonable certainty that all sources are safe and will remain safe. there can be no back siphonage of water from plumbing fixtures or other containers into the water-supply system. once a pipe has become polluted, it may be difficult to free it of the pollution. for this reason, building codes do not permit the use of second-hand pipe. all initial piping and parts and subsequent replacements should be new. since a plumbing system will require service from time to time, shutoff valves should be installed at strategic locations so that an affected portion can be isolated (water flow to it cut off) with minimum disturbance to service in the rest of the system. shutoff valves are usually provided on the water closet supply line, on the hot- and cold-water supply line to each sink, tub, and lavatory, and on the water heater supply line. drain valves are usually installed for water-supply piping systems and for hot-water storage tanks. a pressure-relief valve should be installed for the water heater storage tank to relieve pressure buildup in case of overheating. [illustration: _figure ._--frostproof hydrant; _a_, closed; _b_, opened. as soon as the hydrant is closed, water left in the riser drains out the drain tube as shown in _a_. this prevents water from freezing in the hydrant in cold weather.] frostproof hydrants frostproof hydrants are basically faucets, although they may differ somewhat in design from ordinary faucets. two important features of a frostproof hydrant are: ( ) the valve is installed under ground--below the frostline--to prevent freezing, and ( ) the valve is designed to drain the water from the hydrant when the valve is closed. figure shows one type of frostproof hydrant. it works as follows: when the handle is raised, the piston rises, opening the valve. water flows from the supply pipe into the cylinder, up through the riser, and out the spout. when the handle is pushed down, the piston goes down, closing the valve and stopping the flow of water. water left in the hydrant flows out the drain tube into a small gravel-filled dry well or drain pit. [illustration: _figure ._--vacuum breaker arrangement for outside hose hydrant.] as with ordinary faucets, leakage will probably be the most common trouble encountered with frostproof hydrants. worn packing, gaskets, and washers can cause leakage. disassemble the hydrant as necessary to replace or repair these and other parts. frostproof yard hydrants having buried drains can be health hazards. the vacuum created by water flowing from the hydrant may draw in contaminated water standing above the hydrant drain level. such hydrants should be used only where positive drainage can be provided. frostproof wall hydrants (fig. ) are the preferred type. for servicing sprayers using hazardous chemicals, hydrants having backflow protection should be used (fig. ). repairing leaks in pipes and tanks pipes leaks in pipes usually result from corrosion or from damage to the pipe. pipes may be damaged by freezing, by vibration caused by machinery operating nearby, by water hammer, or by animals bumping into the pipe. (water hammer is discussed on p. ) [illustration: _figure ._--protected wall hydrant suitable for filling agricultural sprayers.] _corrosion_ occasionally waters are encountered that corrode metal pipe and tubing. (some acid soils also corrode metal pipe and tubing.) the corrosion usually occurs, in varying degrees, along the entire length of pipe rather than at some particular point. an exception would be where dissimilar metals, such as copper and steel, are joined. treatment of the water may solve the problem of corrosion.[ ] otherwise, you may have to replace the piping with a type made of material that will be less subject to the corrosive action of the water. [footnote : for information about water treatment, see fb , "treating farmstead and rural home water systems." you can get a free copy from your county agricultural agent or write the office of information, u.s. department of agriculture, washington, d.c. . include your zip code in your return address.] it is good practice to get a chemical analysis of the water before selecting materials for a plumbing system. your state college or university may be equipped to make an analysis; if not, you can have it done by a private laboratory. _repairing leaks_ pipes that are split by hard freezing must be replaced. a leak at a threaded connection can often be stopped by unscrewing the fitting and applying a pipe joint compound that will seal the joint when the fitting is screwed back together. small leaks in a pipe can often be repaired with a rubber patch and metal clamp or sleeve. this must be considered as an emergency repair job and should be followed by permanent repair as soon as practicable. large leaks in a pipe may require cutting out the damaged section and installing a new piece of pipe. at least one union will be required unless the leak is near the end of the pipe. you can make a temporary repair with plastic or rubber tubing. the tubing must be strong enough to withstand the normal water pressure in the pipe. it should be slipped over the open ends of the piping and fastened with pipe clamps or several turns of wire. vibration sometimes breaks solder joints in copper tubing, causing leaks. if the joint is accessible, clean and resolder it. the tubing must be dry before it can be heated to soldering temperature. leaks in places not readily accessible usually require the services of a plumber and sometimes of both a plumber and a carpenter. tanks leaks in tanks are usually caused by corrosion. sometimes, a safety valve may fail to open and the pressure developed will spring a leak. while a leak may occur at only one place in the tank wall, the wall may also be corroded thin in other places. therefore, any repair should be considered as temporary, and the tank should be replaced as soon as possible. a leak can be temporarily repaired with a toggle bolt, rubber gasket, and brass washer, as shown in figure . you may have to drill or ream the hole larger to insert the toggle bolt. draw the bolt up tight to compress the rubber gasket against the tank wall. [illustration: _figure ._--closing a hole in a tank: _a_, the link of the toggle bolt is passed through the hole in the tank (hole is enlarged if necessary). _b_, side view of tank edge (nut is drawn up tightly to compress washer and gasket against tank). _c_, outside view of completed repair.] water hammer water hammer sometimes occurs when a faucet is suddenly closed. when the flow of water is suddenly stopped, its kinetic energy is expended against the walls of the piping. this causes the piping to vibrate, and leaks or other damage may result. water hammer may be prevented or its severity reduced by installing an air chamber just ahead of the faucet. the air chamber may be a piece of air-filled pipe or tubing, about feet long, extending vertically from the pipe. it must be airtight. commercial devices designed to prevent water hammer are also available. an air chamber requires occasional replenishing of the air to prevent it from becoming water-logged--that is, full of water instead of air. a properly operating hydropneumatic tank, such as the type used in individual water systems, serves as an air chamber, preventing or reducing water hammer. frozen water pipes in cold weather, water may freeze in underground pipes laid above the frostline or in pipes in unheated buildings, in open crawl spaces under buildings, or in outside walls. when water freezes it expands. unless a pipe can also expand, it may rupture when the water freezes. iron pipe and steel pipe do not expand appreciably. copper pipe will stretch some, but does not resume its original dimensions when thawed out; repeated freezings will cause it to fail eventually. flexible plastic tubing can stand repeated freezes, but it is good practice to prevent it from freezing. preventing freezing pipes may be insulated to prevent freezing, but this is not a completely dependable method. insulation does not stop the loss of heat from the pipe--merely slows it down--and the water may freeze if it stands in the pipe long enough at below-freezing temperature. also, if the insulation becomes wet, it may lose its effectiveness. electric heating cable can be used to prevent pipes from freezing. the cable should be wrapped around the pipe and covered with insulation. thawing use of electric heating cable is a good method of thawing frozen pipe, because the entire heated length of the pipe is thawed at one time. thawing pipe with a blowtorch can be dangerous. the water may get hot enough at the point where the torch is applied to generate sufficient steam under pressure to rupture the pipe. steam from the break could severely scald you. thawing pipe with hot water is safer than thawing with a blowtorch. one method is to cover the pipe with rags and then pour the hot water over the rags. when thawing pipe with a blowtorch, hot water, or similar methods, open a faucet and start thawing at that point. the open faucet will permit steam to escape, thus reducing the chance of the buildup of dangerous pressure. do not allow the steam to condense and refreeze before it reaches the faucet. underground metal pipes can be thawed by passing a low-voltage electric current through them. the current will heat the entire length of pipe through which it passes. both ends of the pipe must be open to prevent the buildup of steam pressure. caution: this method of thawing frozen pipe can be dangerous and should be done by an experienced person only. it cannot be used to thaw plastic tubing or other non-electricity-conducting pipe or tubing. repairing water closets water closets (commonly called toilets) vary in general design and in the design of the flushing mechanism. but they are enough alike that general repair instructions can suffice for all designs. flushing mechanism figure shows a common type of flushing mechanism. parts that usually require repair are the flush valve, the intake (float) valve, and the float ball. in areas of corrosive water, the usual copper flushing mechanism may deteriorate in a comparatively short time. in such cases, it may be advisable to replace the corroded parts with plastic parts. you can even buy plastic float balls. _flush valve_ the rubber ball of the flush valve may get soft or out of shape and fail to seat properly. this causes the valve to leak. unscrew the ball from the lift wire and install a new one. the trip lever or lift wire may corrode and fail to work smoothly, or the lift wire may bind in the guides. disassemble and clean off corrosion or replace parts as necessary. most plumbing codes require a cutoff valve in the supply line to the flush tank, which makes it unnecessary to close down the whole system (fig. ). if this valve was not installed, you can stop the flow of water by propping up the float with a piece of wood. be careful not to bend the float rod out of alignment. _intake (float) valve_ a worn plunger washer in the supply valve will cause the valve to leak. to replace the washer-- shut off the water and drain the tank. unscrew the two thumb-screws that hold the levers and push out the levers. lift out the plunger, unscrew the cup on the bottom, and insert a new washer. the washer is made of material such as rubber or leather. examine the washer seat. if nicked or rough, it may need refacing. if the float-valve assembly is badly corroded, replace it. [illustration: _figure ._--water closet (toilet) flush tank.] _float ball_ the float ball may develop a leak and fail to rise to the proper position. (correct water level is about inch below the top of the overflow tube or enough to give a good flush.) if the ball fails to rise, the intake valve will remain open and water will continue to flow. brass float balls can sometimes be drained and the leak soldered. other types must be replaced. when working on the float ball, be careful to keep the rod aliened so that the ball will float freely and close the valve properly. bowl removal an obstruction in the water closet trap or leakage around the bottom of the water-closet bowl may require removal of the bowl. follow this procedure: shut off the water. empty the tank and bowl by siphoning or sponging out the water. disconnect the water pipes to the tank (see fig. ). disconnect the tank from the bowl if the water closet is a two-piece unit. set the tank where it cannot be damaged. handle tank and bowl carefully; they are made of vitreous china or porcelain and are easily chipped or broken. remove the seat and cover from the bowl. carefully pry loose the bolt covers and remove the bolts holding the bowl to the floor flange (fig. ). jar the bowl enough to break the seal at the bottom. set the bowl upside down on something that will not chip or break it. remove the obstruction from the discharge opening. place a new wax seal around the bowl horn and press it into place. a wax seal (or gasket) may be obtained from hardware or plumbing-supply stores. set the bowl in place and press it down firmly. install the bolts that hold it to the floor flange. draw the bolts up snugly, but not too tight because the bowl may break. the bowl must be level. keep a carpenter's level on it while drawing up the bolts. if the house has settled, leaving the floor sloping, it may be necessary to use shims to make the bowl set level. replace the bolt covers. install the tank and connect the water pipes to it. it is advisable to replace all gaskets, after first cleaning the surfaces thoroughly. test for leaks by flushing a few times. install the seat and cover. [illustration: _figure ._--connection of water closet to floor and soil pipe.] tank "sweating" when cold water enters a water closet tank, it may chill the tank enough to cause "sweating" (condensation of atmospheric moisture on the outer surface of the tank). this can be prevented by insulating the tank to keep the temperature of the outer surface above the dew point temperature of surrounding air. insulating jackets or liners that fit inside water-closet tanks and serve to keep the outer surface warm are available from plumbing-supply dealers. clearing clogged drains drains may become clogged by objects dropped into them or by accumulations of grease, dirt, or other matter. fixture and floor drains if the obstruction is in a fixture trap, usually the trap can be removed and cleared. if the obstruction is elsewhere in the pipe other means must be used. cleanout augers--long, flexible, steel cables commonly called "snakes"--may be run down drainpipes to break up obstructions or to hook onto and pull out objects. augers are made in various lengths and diameters and are available at hardware and plumbing-supply stores. (in some cases, you may have to call a plumber, who will probably have a power-driven auger.) small obstructions can sometimes be forced down or drawn up by use of an ordinary rubber force cup (plunger or "plumber's friend"). grease and soap clinging to a pipe can sometimes be removed by flushing with hot water. lye or lye mixed with a small amount of aluminum shavings may also be used. when water is added to the mixture, the violent gas-forming reaction and production of heat that takes place loosens the grease and soap so that they can be flushed away. use cold water only. chemical cleaners should not be used in pipes that are completely stopped up, because they must be brought into direct contact with the stoppage to be effective. handle the material with extreme care and follow directions on the container. if lye spills on the hands or clothing, wash with cold water immediately. if any gets into the eyes, flush with cold water and call a doctor. sand, dirt, or clothing lint sometimes clogs floor drains. remove the strainer and ladle out as much of the sediment as possible. you may have to carefully chip away the concrete around the strainer to free it. flush the drain with clean water. when drains have become partially clogged due to lack of water to transport all solids through them, large buckets or other containers should be used to flush them. water should be poured fast enough to nearly fill the drain. occasional flushing of floor drains may prevent clogging. =caution: augers, rubber force cups, and other tools used in direct contact with sewage are subject to contamination. do not later use them for work on your potable water supply system unless they have been properly sterilized.= outside drains roots growing through cracks or defective joints sometimes clog outside drains or sewers. you can clear the stoppage temporarily by using a root-cutting tool. however, to prevent future trouble, you should re-lay the defective portion of the line, using sound pipe and making sure that all joints are watertight.[ ] [footnote : for information on laying sewers, see agriculture information bulletin , "farmstead sewage and refuse disposal." for a free copy, send a post card to the office of information, u.s. department of agriculture, washington, d.c. . include your zip code in your return address.] if possible, sewer lines should be laid out of the reach of roots. but if this is impossible or impracticable, consider using impregnated fiber pipe which tends to repel roots. tools and spare parts basic tools that you should have on hand to make simple plumbing repairs include: wrenches, including pipe wrenches, in a range of sizes to fit the pipe, fittings, fixtures, equipment, and appliances in the system. screwdrivers in a range of sizes to fit the faucets, valves, and other parts of the system. ball peen hammer or a - or -ounce clawhammer. rubber force cup (plunger or "plumber's friend"). cold chisel and center punch. cleanout auger ("snake"). friction tape. adjustable pliers. additional tools required for more extensive plumbing repairs include: pipe vise. set of pipe threading dies and stocks. hacksaw and blades (blades should have teeth per inch). pipe cutter, roller type. tapered reamer or half-round file. carpenter's brace. set of wood bits. gasoline blowtorch. lead pot and ladle. calking tools. copper tube cutter with reamer (if you have copper tubing). always use the proper size wrench or screwdriver. do not use pipe wrenches on nuts with flat surfaces; use an adjustable or open-end wrench. do not use pipe wrenches on polished-surface tubings or fittings, such as found on plumbing fixtures; use a strap wrench. tight nuts or fittings can sometimes be loosened by tapping lightly with a hammer or mallet. it should not be necessary to stock a large number of spare parts. past plumbing troubles may give some indication as to the kind of parts most likely to be needed. spare parts should include: faucet washers and packing. one or two lengths of the most common type and size of piping in the plumbing system. several unions and gaskets or unions with ground surfaces. several couplings and elbows. a few feet of pipe strap. an extra hose connection. emergencies grouped below are emergencies that may occur and the action to take. the name, address, and phone number of a plumber who offers -hour service should be posted in a conspicuous place. _burst pipe or tank._--immediately cut off the flow of water by closing the shutoff valve nearest to the break. then arrange for repair. _water closet overflow._--do not use water closet until back in working order. check for and remove stoppage in closet bowl outlet, drain line from closet to sewer, or sewer or septic tank. if stoppage is due to root entry into pipe, repair of pipe at that point is recommended. _rumbling noise in hot water tank._--this is likely a sign of overheating which could lead to the development of explosive pressure (another indication of overheating is hot water backing up in the cold-water supply pipe.) cut off the burner immediately. be sure that the pressure-relief valve is operative. then check (with a thermometer) the temperature of the water at the nearest outlet. if above that for which the gage is set, check the thermostat that controls burner cutoff. if you cannot correct the trouble, call a plumber. _cold house._--if the heating system fails (or if you close the house and turn off the heat) when there is a chance of subfreezing weather, completely drain the plumbing system. a drain valve is usually provided at the low point of the water supply piping for this purpose. a pump, storage tank, hot-water tank, water closet tank, water-treatment apparatus, and other water-system appliances or accessories should also be drained. put antifreeze in all fixture and drain traps. hot-water and steam heating systems should also be drained when the house temperature may drop below freezing. u.s. government printing office: o- - transcriber note produced from material made available from the internet archive and is placed in the public domain. by usda through the internet archive. all resultant materials are placed in the public domain. transcriber note emphasis is denoted as _italics_ and =bold=. =crimson clover= leaflet no. u.s.department of agriculture issued june . revised january =crimson clover= by e. a. hollowell, senior agronomist, division of forage crops and diseases, bureau of plant industry, soils, and agricultural engineering, agricultural research administration =contents= page adaptation seedbed preparation fertilizers seed sources and varieties dixie crimson clover rate and time of seeding inoculation unhulled seed companion crops diseases and insects utilization seed production [illustration: figure .--principal crimson clover regions of the united states. the dotted area shows where crimson clover was generally grown before . the cross-hatched area shows where production can be extended by using favorable cultural and fertilizer treatments and adapted varieties.] crimson clover (_trifolium incarnatum_) is the most important winter annual legume of the central section of the eastern states. this crop can be grown over a much larger area by using seed of adapted varieties for each section, by using better cultural methods, and by fertilizing the soil (fig. ). besides being an excellent pasture plant and furnishing plenty of hay, it protects the soil during fall, winter, and spring, prevents soil washing, and provides green manure for soil improvement. this legume has the distinct advantage of producing large quantities of seed that can be easily harvested and sown without the use of expensive machinery. crimson clover is a native of europe and is widely grown in france, hungary, and other central and southern european countries. seed was introduced into this country as early as , but it was not until that the plant became important. the acreage has been steadily increasing. during the -year period - the annual purchase of seed through markets in the united states has ranged from to million pounds. in about million pounds were used. in addition, large quantities of home-grown seed are handled from farm to farm. the common name of this clover is derived from the bright crimson color of the blossoms. other such common names as german clover and scarlet clover are frequently used. in general the leaves and stems resemble those of red clover, but are distinguished by the rounded tips of the leaves and more hair on both leaves and stems. when crimson clover is planted in fall the leaves develop from the crown and form a rosette, which enlarges whenever weather conditions are favorable. in spring, flower stems develop rapidly and end their growth with long pointed flower heads. seed forms and the plant dies with the coming of hot summer weather. the seed is yellow and is about twice as large as red clover seed and more rounded. =adaptation= crimson clover does well in cool, humid weather and is tolerant of winter conditions where the temperature does not become severe or too changeable. it may be planted from midsummer to late fall. in the northern part of the region early seeding and growth are necessary for the seedlings to survive the winter. it will thrive both on sandy and clay soils and is tolerant of ordinary soil acidity. on very poor soils, stands are difficult to obtain and the growth is stunted. the use of phosphate and potash fertilizers and manure on such soils will help to obtain good stands. crimson clover may also be grown successfully as a summer annual in northern maine, michigan, and minnesota. winter culture can be extended into kentucky, southern missouri, southern indiana, and ohio, provided varieties are grown that are adapted to these sections and the seed is sown in fertile soils early in august. =seedbed preparation= the most important and difficult part of producing a large crop is getting a stand. enough soil moisture to sprout the seed and establish the seedlings is the greatest factor in obtaining a stand. when established, common crimson clover usually produces a good crop. seedings may be made alone or combined with winter grains, ryegrass, or grass sod. it is possible also to seed between the rows of cultivated crops, but it is difficult to make an ideal seedbed. furthermore, the crop plants in the row shade the clover seedlings and use some of the available moisture. if the row crop is planted in wider rows and seeded more thinly, the clover will become better established. when planted between the rows of other crops, the seed is usually broadcast on the surface and covered by cultivating or harrowing. drilling the seed after the soil surface has been stirred usually gives more complete stands than broadcasting, and it may be done with a small one-horse drill. the seed should not be planted more than one-half to three-fourths of an inch deep, respectively, in clay and sandy soils. crimson clover is often seeded following a grain crop. this is a surer method of establishing a stand than planting between the rows of cultivated crops, provided the seedbed is well prepared. after the grain crop is harvested the soil is plowed or disked and allowed to settle. this is followed by light harrowing or disking to kill weed seedlings. before the clover is seeded the sod should be firmly packed, because a loose cloddy seedbed will not produce good stands. the seed may be either drilled or broadcast, but drilling will give more uniform stands. =fertilizers= good stands and growth cannot be expected on very poor soils. soil conditions can be improved by adding phosphate and potash fertilizers and manure or by turning under such crops as cowpeas, soybeans, or lespedeza. in many soils of low fertility the use of a complete fertilizer will encourage early seedling growth and establishment. on fertile sods crimson clover may be successfully grown without fertilizer, but on most sods applications of to pounds per acre of phosphate and to pounds of potash pay in obtaining good stands and vigorous growth (fig. ). [illustration: figure .--effect of phosphate application on good soil: treated (left); untreated (right).] frequently a single large application of phosphate and potash fertilizer is sufficient to produce two crops of crimson clover before it becomes necessary to make another application. in some soils the addition of such minor elements as boron may improve growth and increase seed yields. since the need for minor elements varies from place to place, their use should be based on the recommendations of the agricultural experiment station of the state in which the clover is planted. =seed sources and varieties= before world war ii more than half the crimson clover seed used in the united states was imported, principally from hungary and france. since domestic production has rapidly increased, reaching more than million pounds in . tennessee produced more than half the home supply. nearly all the crimson clover may be called common crimson clover, since it does not represent strains or varieties having special characteristics. white-flower strains and several others that differ slightly in maturity have been selected but have not been used. =dixie crimson clover= dixie crimson clover is a new hard-seeded variety that has given promising results in extensive trials. it is more widely adapted than common crimson clover, as it grows well in the gulf coast section and appears to be slightly more winter-hardy than common crimson. dixie has successfully volunteered to good stands when grown in pastures with bermuda grass, with small grains for grazing, and in rotation with such cultivated crops as sorghum or late-planted corn. seed of dixie shattered in harvesting operations has successfully produced good volunteer stands in fall. when used in rotations with cultivated crops, the seed must be matured before the seedbed is prepared for the following crop. when dixie is used in pasture, care should be taken to prevent close grazing at the time of blooming, since it may limit the quantity of seed produced and cause thin fall stands. summer-growing grasses must be either closely grazed or clipped in fall to give the clover seedlings a chance to become established. the seed and plants of dixie cannot be distinguished from common crimson clover, and the variety may be readily contaminated by either cross-pollination or mechanical mixtures. for these reasons the farmer buying dixie should buy only certified seed. =rate and time of seeding= under ordinary conditions to pounds of hulled seed to the acre will give good stands unless there is lack of soil moisture. depending upon the quantity of chaff and pieces of stems, to pounds of unhulled seed is comparable with pounds of hulled seed. crimson clover may be sown from the middle of july until november, depending upon the location, with the expectation of obtaining a good stand. the later it is seeded the less growth can be expected and the more readily winterkilling occurs. early establishment becomes more important as plantings are extended northward. seeding crimson clover either immediately before or following heavy rains, if possible, increases its chances of making a stand. spring planting in or south of the corn belt usually results in a short, stunted growth followed by little blossoming and low yield. =inoculation= in many areas where crimson clover has been grown successfully for several years it is not necessary to inoculate the seed with bacterial cultures for the production of nodules. but either the seed or the soil must be inoculated if crimson clover has not been grown. if the plants are not inoculated they will develop slowly, become yellow, and die. inoculated plants are able to obtain about two-thirds of then nitrogen from the air through then root nodules. the plants may be artificially inoculated by applying cultures of the bacteria to the seed or by scattering soil from a field where inoculated crimson clover has been grown. two hundred to three hundred pounds per acre of such soil evenly distributed at seeding time is usually sufficient. when crimson clover is grown for the first time an additional inoculation treatment is recommended if weather conditions are dry and hot after seeding. this supplemental inoculation consists in mixing commercial cultures with sand, soil, or cottonseed meal and broadcasting the mixture over the soil surface during cloudy, rainy weather as the young seedlings are emerging. a bushel-size culture mixed with pounds of the above-mentioned material is sufficient for an acre if distributed evenly. soil from a field where inoculated crimson clover has been grown may also be used for the supplemental treatment. =unhulled seed= using unhulled common seed increases the chance of obtaining thick stands. when the soil is dry, light rainfall does not cause the unhulled seed to sprout, but hulled seed germinates readily and the seedlings may die from lack of moisture before they can become established. its bulky nature makes unhulled seed more difficult to distribute uniformly than hulled seed. it must be broadcast and may be harrowed in. it is also difficult to market and is not generally handled by the seed trade. but farmers can harvest seed for their own use and save the expense of having it hulled. =companion crops= rye, vetch, ryegrass, and fall-sown grain crops are often seeded with crimson clover. such crops are seeded at half to a third the normal rate, and the crimson clover is seeded at half to two-thirds the normal rate. seeding is done at the same time, but, as a greater depth is required for most of the seed of the companion crops, two seeding operations are necessary. farmers often use a mixture of pounds of red clover and pounds of crimson clover per acre with excellent results. the first growth of the mixture may be grazed or harvested for hay or for crimson clover seed, while the second crop is wholly red clover. dixie crimson clover has given good results when planted with johnson and bermuda grasses. =diseases and insects= the most serious disease that affects crimson clover is crown rot. the effect of this disease is seen early in spring and is characterized by the plants dying in patches. the stems rot at the surface of the soil or where they join the crown. continued damp, cool weather during winter and early spring favors the development of the disease. this disease can be controlled by not growing clover or other legumes in rotation for to years. sandy soils in the southern part of the crimson clover belt are often infested with nematodes. nematode injury stunts and yellows the plants. while the clover-seed chalcid, the pea aphid, and other insects sometimes become numerous in crimson clover, insects do not ordinarily cause appreciable damage. =utilization= crimson clover grows rapidly in fall and spring and furnishes an abundance of grazing (fig. ). if planted early and good fall growth is made, the clover may also be grazed during the fall and winter months. such a practice has been successfully followed in many states where crimson clover is providing winter pasture. crimson clover combined with small grains or ryegrass has been most widely used for winter grazing. crimson clover makes little growth during cold periods in winter. under such conditions, to prevent close grazing, it is necessary to remove the animals or shift them to other fields that have not been grazed. [illustration: figure .--crimson clover provides an abundance of early spring grazing.] animals grazing on crimson clover seldom bloat; however, it is advisable not to turn them into clover fields for the first time when they are hungry. bloat is less likely to occur on a mixture of clover and grass or grain then when the clover alone is grazed. as crimson clover reaches maturity the hairs of the heads and stems become hard and tough. when it is grazed continuously or when it is fed as hay at this stage large masses of the hairs are liable to form into hair balls in stomachs of horses and mules, occasionally with fatal results. if small quantities of other feeds, particularly roughages, are fed along with the clover, the formation of these balls will be reduced. cattle, sheep, and swine do not seem to be affected. crimson clover makes excellent hay when cut at the early-bloom stage, although the yield may be slightly reduced. for best yields it should be harvested in full bloom. the hay is easily cured either in the swath or in the windrow. fewer leaves are lost and less bleaching occurs in windrowed hay. although yields as high as ½ tons per acre are not uncommon on fertile soil, ½ to tons is the usual harvest. crimson clover is an ideal green-manure crop. for best results it should be plowed under to weeks before the succeeding crop is planted. this gives enough time for decomposition, which is rapid unless the crop is ripe when turned under. occasionally strips are plowed in which row crops are to be planted, allowing the clover between the plowed strips to mature. seed may be harvested by hand from the clover between the row crops, and the remaining clover straw allowed to mat and serve as a mulch, or the entire plant may be permitted to form a mulch. crimson clover may be made into silage by the same methods as are used for other legumes and grasses. in orchards it is often allowed to mature, after which it is disked into the soil. a volunteer stand from shattered seed may be obtained in fall by using the dixie variety. =seed production= crimson clover is a heavy seed-producing plant, and yields of to bushels per acre are common, depending upon the thickness of the stand, the extent of growth produced, and the care used in harvesting the seed. the florets are self-fertile, but bees increase the number of seed per head by tripping and transferring the pollen. placing colonies of honeybees next to blooming fields will increase pollination. more seed is usually produced on soils of medium fertility than on rich soils, since fertile soils seem to stimulate the growth of stems and leaves rather than develop flower heads. large yields and ease of harvesting seed are two important reasons why crimson clover is such an ideal legume crop. farmers can save seed with very little expense other than their own labor. when the seed heads are mature they readily shatter and are easily harvested either by hand stripping or by using horse-drawn home-made strippers. one bushel of unhulled seed contains about pounds of hulled seed, and although bulky, it can be easily stored on the farm until fall. [illustration: figure .--crimson clover seed crop cut with a mower equipped with a bunching attachment.] when the seed is mature the crop is cut with a mower (fig. ), which may be equipped with a bunching or windrowing attachment, or it can be harvested with a combine. during wet seasons it is sometimes difficult to combine the seed from standing plants. under such conditions the plants can be cut and windrowed and than threshed by the combine from the windrow. as crimson clover shatters easily when ripe, cutting with the mower when the heads are damp with dew or rain is recommended. if it is allowed to stand too long after ripening a beating rain will shatter much of the seed. after a few days of curing, the seed is hulled with an ordinary clover huller, with a grain separator equipped with hulling attachments, or by a combine equipped with pick-up attachments or used as a stationary machine. the less the clover is handled the less seed will be lost by shattering. many troublesome weeds are difficult to separate from crimson clover seed, including field peppergrass (_lepidium campestre_), wintercress (_barbarea praecox_), and the bulblets of wild onion (_allium_ spp.), which are probably the worst. seed of the mustards, rapes, and turnips (_brassica_ spp.), dock (_rumex crispus_), wild geranium (_geranium dissectum_), sorrel (_rumex acetosella_), and catchweed (_galium aparine_) are also found in the seed. little barley (_hordeum pusillum_) is a pest in unhulled seed, and the use of such seed will naturally increase the prevalence of this weed. u. s. government printing office: for sale by the superintendent of documents, u. s. government printing office washington , d. c. -- price cents * * * * * =transcriber note= illustrations moved to avoid splitting paragraphs and closer to references in the text. minor typos may have been corrected. table of contents added to facilitate searching for topics. transcriber's note: italic text is denoted by _underscores_. small capital text has been replaced with all capitals. minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected without note. irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed. mismatched quotes are not fixed if it's not sufficiently clear where the missing quote should be placed. the cover for the ebook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. * * * * * the rural magazine, and literary evening fire-side. vol. i. philadelphia, _fifth month, . no. _. for the rural magazine. the desultory remarker. no. iv. spring, that delightful visiter, to whom beauty and melody, zephyrus and flora, pay their opulent but willing tribute, has once more arrived. let us welcome the enchanting stranger with joyful hearts, and let feelings of gratitude ascend to the bountiful source of all our enjoyments. nature is now all beauty to the eye, and all music to the ear. it is said by an eminent historian, in his memoirs of his own life, that the disposition to "see the favourable rather than the unfavourable side of things, is a turn of mind which it is more happy to possess, than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year." such a temper is not only a prolific source of complacency to the individual who cherishes it, but by all who move within the circle of its influence, its amiable and excellent effect is felt and acknowledged. what a fortunate circumstance would it be for the luckless wight, denominated by that pure and fascinating writer dr. goldsmith, a _magaziner_, as well as for his correspondents, should none but critics, under the influence of this temper, undertake to adjust their humble claims to merit. they are frequently selected, by those who have not even read what they undertake to condemn, as the objects of illiberal and unmeaning censure. the right to criticise, is unquestionably perfectly valid; but, like other rights, it is liable to abuse. by accustoming himself to indulge a querulous, fault-finding propensity, on all occasions, even the most distinguished orator may descend from the high station claimed for him by his friends, to that of an inconsistent, petulant declaimer. and notwithstanding the alternate epigrammatic point of his wit, and the brilliant coruscations of his fancy, his speeches may at length scarcely be heard with patience. courteous reader! if thou desirest to make the most of human life, and to realize its positive blessings which are placed within thy reach, listen to the counsels of experience, and pursue an opposite course of conduct. sedulously avoid the indulgence of a splenetic humour, consult thy own gratification, and the happiness of those by whom thou art surrounded, in contemplating the gayest, happiest attitude of things. if thou art now scanning our present number, with no other object than to detect errors and expose omissions; if thou art pre-determined to censure, be pleased to defer a further examination, until thou art more disposed to view the "_favourable side of things_:" when this is the case, the editors will be delighted to pay the most respectful attention to any judicious suggestions, promotive of improvement, either in the plan or conduct of this miscellany. if thou art placed in the truly responsible situation of head of a family, thy children and domestics, if thy deportment convey to them the beautiful moral lesson, afforded by a uniform contemplation of the "_favourable side of things_," will derive from it the most substantial advantages. domestic happiness is of such an exquisite and sensitive organization, that it cannot endure, no not for a moment, the scowling visage of harshness or discord. in the ordinary daily intercourse of life, nothing conduces more to smooth the rugged path of existence, than urbanity and mutual indulgence. we are so constituted, that the influence of our conduct, whether exemplary or otherwise, is powerful on that of those with whom we associate. it should, therefore, be our object to cultivate the habit of viewing, on all occasions, the most "_favourable side of things_." opinion is so much the child of education, of association, and of other adventitious causes, that it is next to impossible to find two individuals, whose sentiments on all subjects are perfectly coincident. in politics, and on a subject which is infinitely more important, religion itself, different sentiments as to minor points are no doubt _honestly_ entertained. let us, therefore, avoid impugning the motives of those from whom we differ, particularly where no conclusive evidence appears as to the absence of integrity of intention, with an eye of charity. let us in this instance, also, contemplate the most "_favourable side of things_." when overtaken by adverse circumstances, we are too prone, without hesitation, to assume the privilege of complaint and to infer that we are indeed peculiarly unfortunate. but how frequently have incidents of this character been subsequently ascertained to be blessings, although disguised in the most repulsive form.--when they occur, instead of being overwhelmed with despondency, it is wise to dwell on the more "_favourable side of things_." when public measures receive the sanction of the civil government, which are deemed destructive to the best interests of the nation, and in utter hostility to every principle of morality and religion,--disheartening as the fact may be, this consolation still remains to the humble and sincere believer in the superintendence of an overruling providence, that truth and virtue will eventually be signally triumphant. this cheering conviction, where there is a consciousness of duty faithfully performed, will gild with radiance the most gloomy prospect. the present is emphatically the season of genial feelings, and nothing imparts a livelier relish for its beauties, than that amiable temper of mind which on all occasions delights to dwell on the most "_favourable side of things_." for the rural magazine. the village teacher. the three great periods of life have each their natural and appropriate characteristic. the eager expectation, the buoyant hope and elastic energy, which lend their own joyous brilliancy to every object around them, and build in the unknown future so fair and beautiful a fabric of happiness, last not beyond the period of youth. the anxious brow, the cold and untrusting prudence, which succeed, but too surely indicate how many of our fairy visions have become dim in the reality; while the steady industry and calculating foresight with which manhood pursues more practical and perhaps grovelling objects, stamp upon it a peculiar character of strength, and seriousness, and sternness. as this relaxes in the course of years, our ability and inclination for active pursuits give way; and as the termination of our journey is approached, the hope of future distinction ceases, and we naturally fill up the void which is thus left in the mind, by a retrospect of our past actions.--thus it is that the seasons of life, like those of the year, are each most beautiful in its own proper adornings, and that there is none more delightful or endearing than reverend age. the long experience which has tried the worthlessness of so many empty and vanishing hopes, and which can pronounce with certainty respecting that which remaineth; the knowledge of those past events, that form the link as it were between us and history, and which not only aids us in deciphering the past, but is endued with a prophetic gift; the attempered zeal, the tranquil repose of the passions, so finely and happily compared to the decline of day--impart their pure and elevated feelings to the mind of the beholder. it is in such society that youth may best learn to prune the luxuriance of its hopes, and manhood to elevate its views beyond the narrow scene of action where they now expatiate. it is in age that the noble instinct of immortality is most conspicuous, that we feel most surely that the horizon of this life cannot bound our mental vision. the consolations of youth and manhood may have no higher source than in surrounding objects--in love, or friendship, or ambition; but age is dead to these impulses, and must be reanimated and warmed by the influences of the life which is to come. such an old age is that of my friend parmenio. he has survived nearly all the companions of his childhood, and seen successive generations swept away before him. after a life of useful and honourable enterprise, he has retired to end his days in our little hamlet amidst the scenes of his earliest youth. he has dandled on his knee the fathers of many who now look up to him for counsel and friendship, yet is there no supercilious air of dignity or reserve about him. his placid eye bespeaks the serenity of his soul, and the hope which abideth there; and though you see in his sprightliness and activity the energy of his earlier life, it is most happily blended with the meekness and tranquillity of age. he wears away his remaining years in the social converse of his children and their friends, and looks forward to his close without fear or anxiety. i often meet him in my solitary evening walks, and we usually finish them together. we were loitering one evening on the brow of the hill which overlooks the course of a beautiful stream that flows at a small distance from the village, and marking the glories of an autumnal sunset.--"the sands," said he, "are fast ebbing in my glass, and i feel that my allotted days are but few. i have past a life of bustling activity, and seen a thousand forms of hope and happiness rise and vanish before me. they have all vanished--all, but that which is centered in heaven. i am not a votary of that vain philosophy which would pronounce all things to be vanity; yet could my voice be heard by the myriads of human beings who are wasting the sinews of life in the pursuit of wealth and power, i would warn them, from my own experience, that happiness is not in these things. were i to guide the course of a young person, i would bid him extend this view, from the first, beyond the horizon of this world. i would tell him of the utter emptiness of all human distinctions. i would bid him pursue his avocations as a means only of health and support, and of invigorating his mind. i would turn his feet from the paths of fame and wealth, to those of retirement and privacy, and would there feed his soul with immortal contemplations. thus would i fit him to ennoble his youth, to preserve his manhood unspotted, and to enjoy his age. how many events are there in the course of my own life, which i would now give the world to have prevented--duties undone, labour misapplied, talents wasted, feelings perverted; and all from sharing in the delusions to which the world around me is a victim. in how many events which i once thought were accidents or misfortunes, do i now trace an invisible hand, guiding me against my will, and pointing to that path of unostentatious virtue which he delights to bless. these things, however, cannot be recalled; and as yonder sun, after a cold and cloudy career, is setting at last in serene and tranquil beauty, and throwing his own glorious hues upon the clouds which darkened his mid-day splendour; so do i feel that my latter days are peaceful, and that the lights of experience and wisdom, though late, are yet illuminating my past errors, and enabling me to point them out as beacons and waymarks to those that surround me." _extract of a letter from william coxe, esq. on the cultivation of the sugar maple._ burlington, march th, . dear sir--i understand that you have been directing your attention to the sugar maple, in the belief that it will be found an advantageous substitute for the several varieties of poplars, as a useful as well as ornamental tree; and that you are desirous of obtaining any information respecting its culture, or properties, that i may be able to communicate. i have for some time been convinced that none of the poplars would prove a beneficial kind of timber to our farmers, from their disposition to extend their roots, and propagate suckers at a great distance, and from the offensive cotton which is produced by the athenian and georgia varieties--and i have made many experiments in the hope of discovering a tree, valuable for its timber, and clean and ornamental in its foliage, which could be propagated by seedlings. among others, i planted the sugar maple and am happy to find it one of the hardiest and handsomest trees, even on the light sandy soil around my house; capable of withstanding the severity of the drought of the last and preceding summers, the most intense that are recollected in our country. of eighteen trees i lost but two, while the native chesnuts, raised from the nut, all perished; and little better success was experienced in a variety of trees planted on the same ground, such as the pine, sycamore, larch, spruce, &c. the american elm is thought to be a hardy tree, but with me it proved less so than the sugar maple. it is generally believed that all the varieties of the maple require a damp soil: this is the case with several of them, but the _acer saccharum_ flourishes in a loamy wheat soil, in many districts of our western and northern country. the facility by which it may be propagated from the seed, renders its diffusion through our country, to any extent, very easy and cheap. few of our native trees are more useful for fuel, and the manufacture of potash; and as the means of affording a great and almost inexhaustible supply of sugar, it becomes an object of great importance, even to the farmer, who is desirous of transmitting a valuable inheritance to his children. it is my intention to plant this tree in the place of a line of the athenian poplars, which i have been obliged to cut down after eight years luxuriant growth, from their injurious effect on the adjoining fields, by the extension of their roots to sixty and seventy feet, throwing up a little forest of suckers. _treatise on agriculture._ sect. iii. theory of vegetation. d. of _air_, and its agency in vegetation: a seed deprived of air will not germinate; and a plant placed under an exhausted receiver, will soon perish. even in a close and badly ventilated garden, vegetables indicate their situation; they are sickly in appearance, and vapid in taste.--these facts sufficiently shew the general utility of air to vegetation: but this _air_ is not now the simple and elementary body, that the ancient chymist described it to be. priestly first,[ ] and lavoisier after him, analyzed it, and found, that when pure, it consisted of about parts of azote, of oxygen, and of carbonic acid. in its ordinary (or impure) state, it is loaded with foreign and light bodies; such as mineral, animal and vegetable vapours, the seeds of plants, and the eggs of insects, &c. is it to this _aggregate_, that vegetation owes the services rendered to it by air? and if not, to _how many_, and to _which_, of its regular constituents, are we to ascribe them? this inquiry will form the subject of the present article. [ ] see priestly's experiments and observations on different kinds of air, begun in . all vegetables in a state of decomposition, give _azote_; and some of them (cabbages, radishes, &c.) give it in great quantity. this abundance, combined with the fact, that vegetation is always vigorous in the neighbourhood of dead animal matter, led to the opinion, that azote contributed largely to the growth of plants: but experiments, more exactly made and often repeated, disprove this opinion, and shew that in any quantity it is unnecessary, and that in a certain proportion it is fatal to vegetation. in _hydrogen gas_, plants are found to be variously affected, according to their local situation; if inhabitants of mountains, they soon perish--if of plains, they shew a constant debility--but if of marshy grounds, their growth is not impeded. _carbonic acid_ is formed and given out during the process of fermentation, putrefaction, respiration, &c. and makes parts out of of atmospheric air. it is composed (according to davy) of oxygen and carbon, in the proportion of of the former to of the latter. it combines freely with many different bodies; animals and vegetables are almost entirely composed of it; for the _coal_ which they give, on combustion, is but _carbon_ united to a little oxygen, &c.--priestly was the first to discover, that plants _absorbed carbonic acid_; and ingenhouse, sennebier, and de sausure have proved, that _it_ is their _principal aliment_. indeed the great consumption made of it, cannot be explained by any natural process, excepting that of vegetation. on this head, we cannot do better than digest the experiments of these chymists into a few distinct propositions:[ ] [ ] recherches chemiques sur la vegetation, chap. ii. . in pure carbonic acid gas, seeds will swell, but not germinate. . united with water, this gas hastens vegetation. . air containing more than one twelfth part of its volume of carbonic acid, is most favourable to vegetation. . turf, or other carbonaceous earth, which contains much carbonic acid, is unfavourable to vegetation until it has been exposed to the action of atmospheric air, or of lime, &c. . if slacked lime be applied to a plant, its growth will be impaired, until the lime shall have recovered the carbonic acid it lost by calcination. . plants kept in an artificial atmosphere, and charged with carbonic acid, yield, on combustion, more of that acid than plants of the same kind and weight growing in atmospheric air. . when plants are exposed to air and sunshine, the carbonic acid of the atmosphere is consumed, and a portion of oxygen left in its place. if new supplies of carbonic acid be given to the air, the same result follows; whence it has been concluded, that air furnishes carbonic acid to the plant, and the plant furnishes oxygen to the air.--this double function of absorption and respiration, is performed by the green leaves of plants.[ ] . carbon is to vegetation, what oxygen is to animal life; it gives support by purifying the liquids, and rendering the solids more compact. [ ] this was a discovery of sennebier. th. of _light_, _heat_, and _electricity_, and their agency in vegetation: when deprived of light, plants are pale, lax and dropsical; restored to it, they recover their colour, consistency and odour. if a plant be placed in a cellar, into which is admitted a small portion of light through a window or cranny, thither the plant directs its growth, and even acquires an unnatural length in its attempt to reach it.[ ] these facts admitted, no one can doubt the agency of light in vegetation; but in relation to this agency, various opinions exist; one, that light enters vegetable matter, and combines with it; another, that it makes no part either of the vegetable or of its aliment, but directly influences substances which are alimentary;[ ] and a third, that besides the last effect, it stimulates the organs of plants to the exercise of their natural functions.[ ] [ ] it is by a knowledge of this fact, that gardeners bleach chicony and cellery, &c. [ ] see fourcroy, vol. viii. [ ] see chaptal on vegetation. without doing more than state these opinions, we proceed to offer the results of many experiments on this subject. st. that _in the dark_, no oxygen is produced, nor any carbonic acid absorbed; on the contrary, oxygen is absorbed and carbonic acid produced. d. that plants exposed to _light_, produce oxygen gas in water. d. that _light_ is essential to vegetable transpiration; as this process never takes place during the _night_, but is copious during the _day_; and, th. that plants raised _in the dark_, abound in watery and saccharine juices--but are deficient in woody fibre, oil, and resins; whence it is concluded, that saccharine compounds are formed in the _night_, and oil, resins, &c. in the _day_. when the weather is at or below the freezing point, the sap of plants remains suspended and hardened in the albumum;[ ] but on the application of _heat_, whether naturally or artificially excited, this sap is rendered fluid, is put into motion, and the buds begin to swell. under the same impulse, through the medium of the earth, the roots open their pores, receive nutritive juices, and carry them to the heart of the plant. the leaves, being now developed, begin and continue the exercise of their functions, till winter again, in the economy of nature, suspends the operations of the machine. nor is its action confined to the circulation of vegetable juices. without vapour (its legitimate offspring) the fountain and the shower would be unknown--nor would the great processes of animal and vegetable fermentation and decomposition go on. without rain or other means ameliorating the soil, what would be the aspect of the globe? what the state of vegetation? what the situation of man? [ ] knight's observations, &c. the diffusion of _electrical_ matter, found in the air and in all other substances, furnishes a presumption, that it is an efficient agent in vegetation. nollet and others have thought that, artificially employed, it favoured the germination of seeds and the growth of plants; and mr. davy "found, that corn sprouted more rapidly in water, _positively_ electrified by the voltaic battery, than in water _negatively_ electrified."[ ] these opinions have not escaped contradiction, and _we_ do not profess to decide where doctors disagree. [ ] davy's elements. th. of _stable yard manures_, _lime_, _marl_, and _gypsum_, and their agency in vegetation: we have already said, that vegetables in the last stage of decomposition, yield a black or brown powder, which mr. davy calls "_a peculiar extractive matter, of fertilizing quality_," and which the chymists of france have denominated _terreau_. this vegetable residuum is the simple mean employed by nature to re-establish that principle of fertility in the soil, which the wants of man and other animals are constantly drawing from it. it was first analyzed by hassenfratz, who found it to contain an oily, extractive and carbonaceous matter, charged with hydrogen; the acetates and benzoates of potash, lime and ammoniac; the sulphates and muriates of potash, and a soupy substance, previously noticed by bergman.--among other properties (and which shows its combustible character) is that of absorbing, from atmospheric air, its oxygen, and leaving it only azote. this was discovered by ingenhouse, who, with de sausure and bracconnet, pursued the subject by many new and interesting experiments, the result of which is-- . that the oxygen thus absorbed, deprives the terreau of part of its carbon, which it renders soluble and converts into mucilage; and . that the carbonic acid, formed in the process, combines with the mucilage, and with it is absorbed by the roots of plants. if we put a plant and a quantity of slacked lime under the same receiver, the plant will perish; because the lime will take from the atmospheric air all the carbonic acid it contains, and thus _starve_ the plant. vegetables, placed near heaps of lime in the open air, suffer from the same cause and in the same way; but though lime, in _large_ quantities, destroys vegetation, in _small_ quantities it renders vegetation more vigorous. its action is of two kinds--mechanical and chymical; the first is a mere division of the soil by an interposition between its parts; the second, the faculty of rendering soluble vegetable matter, and reducing it to the condition of terreau. the _mechanical_ agency ascribed to lime, belongs also to _marle_ and to _ashes_, and in an equal degree--but their _chymical_ operation, though similar, is less.[ ] [ ] vegetable ashes are _lime_, combined with an earthy saline matter. _gypsum_ is composed of lime and sulphuric acid. mayer was the first to present to the public a series of experiments upon it, in its relation to agriculture. many chymists have followed him, and a great variety of opinion yet exists with regard to its mode of operation. yvart thinks that the action of gypsum is exclusively the effect of the sulphuric acid, which enters into its composition; and founds this opinion upon the fact, that the ashes of turf, which contain sulphate of iron and sulphate of alumina, have the same action upon vegetation as gypsum. laysterie, observing that plants, whose roots were nearest the surface of the soil, were most acted upon by plaster, concludes, that gypsum takes from the atmosphere the elements of vegetable life and transmits them directly to plants. bose intimates, that the _septic_ quality of gypsum (which he takes for granted) best explains its action on vegetation; but this opinion is subverted by the experiments of mr. davy, who found, that of two parcels of minced veal, the one mixed with gypsum, the other left by itself, and both exposed to the action of the sun, the _latter_ was the first to exhibit symptoms of putrefaction. mr. davy's own belief on this subject is, that it makes part of the food of vegetables, is received into the plant and combined with it. the last opinion we shall offer on this head, is that of the celebrated chaptal. "of all substances, gypsum is that of whose action we know the least. the prodigious effect it has on the whole race of trefoils, (clover, &c.) cannot be explained by any _mechanical_ agency--the quantity applied being so small--or by any _stimulating_ power--since gypsum, raw or roasted, has nearly the same effect; nor by any _absorbent_ quality, as it only acts when applied to the leaves. if permitted to conjecture its mode of operation, we should say, that its effect being greatest when applied to the _wet_ leaves of vegetables, it may have the faculty of absorbing and giving out water and carbonic acid, little by little, to the growing plant. it may also be considered as an _aliment in itself_--an idea much supported by mr. davy's experiments, which shew, that the ashes of clover yield gypsum, though the clover be raised on soils not naturally containing that substance." [_alb. argus._ (to be continued.) manures of green crops. all _green succulent plants_ contain saccharine or mucilaginous matter, with woody fibre, and readily ferment. they cannot, therefore, if intended for manure, be used too soon after their death. when _green crops_ are to be employed for enriching a soil, they should be ploughed in, if it be possible, when in flower, or at the time the flower is beginning to appear, for it is at this period that they contain the largest quantity of easily soluble matter, and that their leaves are most active in forming nutritive matter. green crops, pond weeds, the paring of hedges or ditches, or any kind of fresh vegetable matter, requires no preparation to fit them for manure. the decomposition slowly proceeds beneath the soil; the soluble matters are gradually dissolved, and the slight fermentation that goes on, checked by the want of a free communication of air, tends to render the woody fibre soluble without occasioning the rapid dissipation of elastic matter. when old pastures are broken up, and made arable, not only has the soil been enriched by the death and slow decay of the plants which have left soluble matters in the soil; but the leaves and roots of the grasses living at the time, and occupying so large a part of the surface, afford saccharine, mucilaginous, and extractive matters, which become immediately the food of the crop, and the gradual decomposition affords a supply for successive years. [_davy's agric. chem._ essay on agriculture. the judicious and increasing attention of our citizens to agricultural pursuits, must be regarded, by every enlightened friend of his country, as among the happiest presages of its future prosperity. agriculture, the most ancient and useful of the arts, the inseparable companion, if not the parent, of civilization, is rapidly obtaining that rank in public estimation, to which its intimate connexion with the cardinal interests of every well regulated community gives it so unquestionable a claim. the absurd prejudice, which has associated the cultivation of the soil with the idea of an ignoble servitude, is fast disappearing under the influence of milder systems of government, and has already ceased to operate on minds having the least pretensions to discrimination or enlargement of view.--the patriarch of the human race was commanded by his creator to "_replenish the earth, and to subdue it_;" we may, therefore, infer, that a limited attention to agriculture was among the happy employments of adam, in the days of primeval innocence. but, in the language of a distinguished prelate, that original transgression which banished man from paradise, banished paradise from the earth. the primal curse is still in unmitigated operation, and, without "_the sweat of the brow_," the least reluctant soils will yield but scanty fruits for the sustenance and the comfort of man. toil is an indispensable pre-requisite in every department of life, where wealth, or honour, or even _daily bread_, is sought with a reasonable prospect of success. the scholar, amid the lofty abstractions of the closet, when fatigued by incessant vigils, realizes the painful truth, that "_much study is a weariness of the flesh_." the merchant, though stimulated by the incitements of enterprise and the bustle of occupation, must occasionally feel the energies of his body and mind relax under the pressure of business, without variety and without remission. and how grievous are the toils of those _choice spirits_ who discover no enterprise but in the pursuit of pleasure--who disdain to "_eat the bread of carefulness_," and seek, amid the fugitive joys of sensuality, a temporary refuge from the torpor of dejection, or the oppressive listlessness of voluntary inaction. let not the unobtrusive husbandman fear to compare his lot with that of those whose proud externals and apparent exemption from toil are extremely fallacious indications of their just rank on the scale of human happiness. living in a land of promise and of plenty, and under the government of mild equal laws, the american farmer must exult in the consciousness that "_the lines are fallen to him in pleasant places_"--that his is, in truth, a goodly heritage. he loves the soil, because it is the legacy of his fathers, and because he derives from its fruitful bosom the means of sustaining life, and protecting his feelings and opinions from the dictation of arrogance and the various temptations of penury. his quiet and unsophisticated modes of thinking and living, indispose him to listen with eagerness to the solicitations of intrigue or sedition, and it is proverbial that the contagious frenzy of revolution, extends not without difficulty, to the cautious, reflective, and well balanced mind of the farmer. [_r. i. american._ on dressing flax. _extract of a letter from r. h. harrison, esq. to j. wood, corresponding secretary of the cayuga agricultural society, n. y. dated_ new york, march , . dear sir--every farmer is acquainted with the method of raising flax, and also of _rotting_ it; or, as it is generally called, water and dew _retting_, and the method of separating the boon, or woody matter, from the harle, or useful fibre. flax has deservedly the character of being one of the most impoverishing crops, in the present method of treating it: it makes no return, either as animal food, or as manure, to the land; it is therefore surprising that a discovery which was to obviate all these disadvantages should only have been brought into practice within a few years. a mr. james lee, in england, discovered that the process of steeping and dew retting flax, or hemp, was not necessary; and that if treated and dressed dry, it will be superior in every respect, produce more, and make considerable return to the land, as fodder for cattle and as manure. a patent was granted to him in ; and of such importance was it considered, that he obtained an act of parliament to keep his specification secret for seven years. this may be a reason why so little has been known of it in this country. i have, however, one of his machines in my possession, and have dressed flax with it. it consists of a break, or as he called it, a scraper, to separate the boon out of the stem, &c.--it is then passed through a pair of finely fluted rollers, and is finished and ready for the hackle. the flax plants, when ripe, are to be pulled, to be spread and dried the same as hay, laying the roots in one direction; when dry, to be carried into the barn: and from the report of a committee of the house of commons on the petition of james lee, and also on petition of lee and bundy, respecting their new machine for this purpose, it appears that the following are the results of mr. lee's discovery: st. that preparing flax and hemp, in a dry state, for spinning, answered most completely; the cost of preparing is less, it avoids the risk of steeping, and saves _time_ and _material_. d. the _strength_ and quality of the cloth is much superior to that from flax, water steeped or dew rotted. d. the great advantage from the quantity of food for cattle, and also manure obtained by this new method, the boon, or outer coat of the flax, containing a sixth of the gluten of oats, the woody part being excellent for manure. it also appeared in evidence before the committee, that _lbs._ flax, in a dry state, produced one fourth, lbs. fibre _lbs._ flax, dew retted, produced one eleventh, - / ________ excess, _lbs._ - / or a saving in proportion as to . in confirmation of this i can only say, i procured some flax, in its dry state, which had been thrown away as not worth _retting_-- lbs. of dry flax produced _lb._ of fibre fit for the hackle: when dressed in lee's machine, the samples of flax, tow, and thread, though, from the poor quality of the flax, inferior to some samples of english flax dressed in the same manner, were greatly superior to any that had been retted. i have, however, never made the experiment of weighing the flax, and then ascertaining its produce when retted; but from the knowledge of those who gave evidence to this point, have no doubt of its correctness. there is another advantage; the flax dressed in a dry state becomes much whiter, and is easier bleached--merely washing it in soap and water makes it white: the finest particles of flax are also saved, which are essential to the manufacture of lace, or very fine linen: the seed is also all preserved. mr. brande, professor of chymistry at the royal institution, made some experiments on the nutritious quality of the chaff: the result was, an eighth of nutritious matter. mr. lee says, it is equal to a crop of oats for feeding cattle; and it appeared also, that horses, when accustomed to it, prefer it to clover chaff. having thus briefly stated the advantages of the dry method of dressing flax, i will proceed to give some account of the machines for preparing it, which have been invented since mr. lee's. the best appears to be hill and bundy's, for which mr. bundy obtained a patent, in england. it consists of two machines, a breaker and a rubber; the first for separating the harle from the boon; the second cleanses it from small particles of wood and bark, left by the breaker. the breaker consists of fine fluted rollers, so disposed as to draw the flax through them, at the same time to take off the woody parts from it; once passing through is generally sufficient. it is a machine combining great mechanical skill, and on an entirely different principle from mr. lee's, and is not liable to get out of order. the rubber is made to have the same effect as rubbing by hand would, to cleanse the fibre, and open and subdivide it, to produce the finest thread. mr. lee has invented a new machine, consisting of fluted rollers, to work by water or horse power: it is different from hill and bundy's, which is worked by hand; and the rollers work differently. from experiments made by the different machines, it appears by the report of the committee of the house of commons, that in hill and bundy's, one breaker and two rubbers would produce _lbs._ of prepared flax in a day, and would require one man or woman and three children: the work is light--a man can turn two breakers and two rubbers. lee's machine would produce about _lbs._ a day; his new machine, worked by water, will product _lbs._ in a day, and requires three men or women to attend it. having never made any of the machines, i can only state the probable cost. hill and bundy's one breaker and two rubbers, could be furnished for about $ . lee's machine, at from to $ . his new machine i have never seen a draft of, and could not tell the cost. the high cost of hill and bundy's machine will prevent our farmers generally from obtaining it. but what better business can be done, than purchasing the flax, in its dry state, from the farmer, to manufacture it in this way; and every town might employ its paupers in dressing flax by these machines: they might also be introduced into our state prisons and penitentiaries with good effect. having given you this hasty sketch of the recent improvement in dressing flax, i would suggest to our agricultural societies generally, to procure one of the machines, as there can be no doubt of their answering. the general introduction of them would not only promote greatly our agricultural prosperity, but also the domestic manufactures of this state. _to dress flax to look like silk._--take one part lime and between two or three parts of wood ashes; pour over them a due proportion of water to make a strong ley, after they have stood together all night, which must be poured off when quite clear. tie handfuls of flax at both ends, to prevent its entangling, but let the middle of each be spread open, and put it in a kettle, on the bottom of which has been first placed a little straw, with a cloth over it, then put another cloth over the flax, and so continue covering each layer of flax with a cloth, till the kettle is nearly full. pour over the whole the clear ley, and after boiling it for some hours, take it out, and throw it in cold water: this boiling, &c. may be repeated, if requisite. the flax must be each time dried, hackled, beaten and rubbed fine; and, at last, dressed through a large comb, and through a very fine one. by this process the flax acquires a bright and soft thread. the tow which is off, when papered up and combed like cotton, is not only used for many of the same purposes, but makes lint for veterinary surgeons, &c. [_am. farmer._ agricultural memoranda. _caterpillars._--hemp is a great enemy to caterpillars. by surrounding a bed of cabbages with a row of hemp, the cabbages will be preserved. _churning._--after churning some time, throw into the churn one spoonful of distilled vinegar for every gallon of cream. when churning proves tedious, this will greatly hasten the separation of the butter. _to cure hams westphalia fashion._--sprinkle your ham with common salt for one day; then wipe it dry. take _lb._ brown sugar, / _lb._ saltpetre, / pint bay salt, and pints common salt. stir these well together in an iron pan over the fire till moderately hot. the ham to lie in this pickle for three weeks. _rue._--the growth of this plant ought to be cherished in every stock yard; nothing being more salutary or even pleasant to fowls. _guinea corn._--the stalks of this grain, if pressed, are said to yield a juice sweeter and of greater body than the sugar cane. _carrots._--according to some agricultural reports, carrots will yield or even bushels per acre. at the last meeting of _the columbian institute_, some valuable specimens of _american plants_, beautifully preserved, were presented by dr. _darlington_, a representative in congress from pennsylvania; and several fine specimens of _american minerals_, chiefly collected in the valley of the mississippi, by mr. _schoolcraft_, the ingenious author of a work which has lately appeared on the lead mines of missouri, and natural history, &c. of the western country. _to make fat lamb._--"to make or fatten lamb for the market, let your ewes be well attended to, and fed upon a patch of rye; upon turnips, or other corresponding food; affording abundant milk. as fast as your lambs fall, and can run well alone, all you have are to be shut up together in a dark pen or stall, of proportionate size to the number of lambs you expect, having a narrow trough, breast high to them, to be daily supplied with indian corn meal; with the bran in it; and hanging up within their reach one or more wisps or small bundles of fine hay for them to nibble, at. this stall must communicate with, or adjoin, a larger apartment, into which you are to turn ewes twice or thrice a day, to suckle their lambs, and to sleep all night with them.--before turning the ewes out to pasture, each time, the lambs must be lifted into their small dark pen, or stall, (one six or eight feet square, is sufficiently large for thirty lambs or more,) where they will have no room to skip or play their fat away; here they will nibble so much of the fine hay, and eat so much of the dry indian corn meal, from want of other employment, as to render themselves voraciously thirsty against the next meal of milk from their dams; which, with the other causes mentioned, makes them grow surprisingly large and fat in a short time. lambs thus educated, will often promiscuously suck the ewes, without knowing or being attached to their own dams.--hence a very great advantage: for when all grow large and strong, they become capable of consuming more milk than a single ewe can afford; and more especially those ewes which have two or more lambs each. for upon killing off all the lambs of a ewe, that ewe continues to give suck to the other lambs promiscuously as before, to the great advantage of the surviving lambs, now requiring additional nourishment. this is not the case when lambs run out at large with their dams." _new method of inoculating trees._--a common method of inoculating is by making a transverse section in the back of the stock and a perpendicular slit below it; the bud is then pushed down to give it the position which it is to have. this method is not always successful; it is better to reverse it, by making the verticle slit above the transverse section, and pushing the bud upwards into its position--a method which rarely fails of success; because as the sap descends by the bark, as has been ascertained, and does not ascend, the bud thus placed above the transverse section, receives abundance, but when placed below, the sap cannot reach it. _grape vines._--about one month since, i trimmed a very luxurious grape vine, calculating that i was early enough to allow the wound made by the cutting to heal before the sap began to rise; but to my surprise i found, three days since, the sap issuing from every part where the knife had been used, the ground was completely wet with it: i tried rosin and other things to stop it, without avail. in conversation with a neighbour he informed me, that to stick a potato on the part would stop the sap. i tried it and found it to succeed completely. apprehending that many persons may, at this season, have vines similarly situated with mine, i thought communicating the above might give them an opportunity of benefiting by the information. a. b. [_n. y. daily adv._ _to dry peaches._--the following mode of drying peaches is adopted by thomas belanjee, of egg harbour, new jersey:--he has a small house with a stove in it, and drawers in the sides of the house, lathed at their bottoms. each drawer will hold nearly half a bushel of peaches, which should be ripe, and not peeled, but cut in two, and laid on the laths with their skins downwards, so as to save the juice. on shoving the drawer in they are soon dried by the hot air of the stove and laid up. peaches thus dried are clear from fly dirt, excellently flavoured, and command a high price in market. pears thus dried eat like raisins. with a paring machine, which may be had for a dollar or two, apples or pears may be pared, and a sufficient quantity dried, to keep a family in pies, and apple bread and milk, till apples come again. with a paring machine, one person can pare for five or six cutters. canker on plum trees. _lansingburg, april , ._ s. southwick, esq. _sir_--i observe in your _plough boy_ of the st inst. some observations on the disease in plum trees, called _canker_, wherein the writer states that the disease is probably caused by the trees being bark-bound. i have had sufficient proof to convince me that it is caused by insects only. from a variety of observations and experiments, i find that when young shoots are throwing out of the trees, they are stung by a species of fly, and a number of eggs or nits are deposited through the tender bark, where they remain until the tree commences growing the next season; those places then begin to swell, and after a few weeks, small worms can be distinctly observed by the naked eye, which, after about one month more is elapsed, eat out of the protuberances, then become black, take to themselves wings, and commence operations as before stated. the only remedy that i can discover, is to cut off every limb affected, on its first appearance; and if the tree be so much affected as to be past cure, it should be totally cut down, in order to destroy the whole race of insects which cause the disease. the first discovery of this complaint was on the sea-board: and it has advanced north about twenty miles a year. at present nearly all the bearing trees on the sea coast to the southeast, are totally destroyed, and it pervades all this part of the country. the poorest natural blue plums are first attacked--the dark coloured grafts, next--and lastly, the light coloured fruit fall victims. some few kinds as yet withstand their attacks. by observing the above caution, my trees are entirely free from them, and bear abundantly. i am, sir, yours, &c. arboreum. on domestic manufactures. sir--the montgomery agricultural society have announced the following premiums to be awarded to ladies in october, . as some of them are novel, their publication in the plough boy, i am persuaded, will have an excellent effect, as an example. w. * * * * * to the lady who shall produce the best piece of cloth, made of merino wool, spun in the family, not less than yards, $ d best do. for the best piece of cloth made of common wool, spun in the family, not less than yards, d best do. for the best piece of flannel, spun in the family, of merino wool, not less than yards, d best do. for the best piece of flannel made of common wool, spun in the family, not less than yards, d best do. for the best pair of rose blankets, spun and made in the county, d best do. for the best piece of carpeting, spun in the family, d best do. for the best external covering for beds, spun in the county, d best do. for the best hearth rug, spun and made in the family, d best do. for the best pair of worsted stockings, made and knit in the family, d best do. cents for the best pair of woollen stockings, spun and knit in the family, d best do. cents for the best pair of cotton stockings, knit in the family, d best do. cents for the best pair of linen stockings, spun and knit in the family, d best do. cents for the best half pound of sewing linen thread, spun in the family, d best do. for the best pair half stockings, knit by a girl not over years of age, d best do. cents for the best runs of linen yarn, spun by a girl not over years of age, d best do. d best do. for the best pair of double mittens, spun and knit by a girl not over years of age, $ d best do. cents for the best table linen, not less than yards, d best do. for the best piece of linen, not less than yards, spun in the family, d best do. for the best lady's straw or grass bonnet, made in the county, of materials of the growth of the state, d best do. d best do. to the lady who shall attend the next annual fair in the best homespun dress, d best do. d best do. th best do. th best do. th best do. wooden soaled shoes. mr. custis of arlington, near alexandria in a letter to the editor dated st feb. last, observes--"wooden soaled shoes are the very best for labourers that i ever met with. they keep the feet warm and dry in ditching, and in all kinds of labour, to be performed out of doors in winter, and are a saving in expense of fully per cent. my people are all shod in this way, and themselves declare that they never were so comfortable in their feet before, while my leather bill from $ , has been reduced to scarce $ . you form the soal, after the appearance of the leather soal and heel, the wood about half or three fourths of an inch in thickness, around the upper edge, is cut a rabbit, into which is nailed (with ordinary sized tacks) the upper leather.--not a particle of thread is needed, except to close the two parts of upper leather.--every man may be his own shoemaker, and a man would put together a dozen pair a day. in slippery weather, small plates of iron are nailed around the toes and heels, and frost nails driven in them, which also protects tects the soal from wear. gum, ash, or dogwood, are best for the soals, and about two sets will last the winter.--the feet are never cold, or wet, and hence will be remedied those chronic pains and evils, to which labourers are subject, from exposure to cold and wet. for any purpose but a foot race, these are the very best shoes, and i doubt whether even sir humphrey davy has made a more useful discovery in the last twenty years." [_am. farmer._ _republican manners._--a gentleman, who lately visited the atheneum at boston, told us, that he saw a book there, on the title page of which was written these words, by the hand of mr. jefferson-- "_from thomas jefferson to his friend john adams._" now, to my way of thinking, all the flowers of rhetoric might be culled, and yet be wanting of the "sublime and beautiful" that irresistibly attaches itself to this little sentence--"thomas jefferson to his friend john adams." it affords a practical result of our glorious system of government, more "precious than rubies." it is a diamond of the finest water, which the republican should hug to his bosom as a rich legacy to his children and his children's children "to the thousandth generation"--an evidence in favour of the simplicity of the truth never to be parted with, while the mighty mississippi rolls her floods to the ocean! it is worthy of the best days of greek or roman history; and there is, doubtless, a sincerity in it that greece or rome hardly knew to exist between men so illustrious. the time has passed away in which either of those venerable men can be regarded as at the head of a party in the state, however much they were once opposed. they are preparing "for another and a better world;" but, like the patriarchs of old, with joyous hearts, survey the rich fruits of independence, planted by their toil and nurtured by their care. passion has long ceased to influence either; oblivion has passed over their political differences of opinion; ancient friendships are renewed, and a spirit of harmony and reciprocal esteem prevails in each bosom. what a magnificent sentence--"from thomas jefferson to his friend john adams!" let us consider how great a space those men have filled in the world. each has been the rallying point of simultaneously contending parties--each filled the highest office in the gift of the only free people existing, to relieve the sombre despotism of the civilized world.--each has lived to see his early vows to the republic fulfilled; and their present good understanding affords us a delightful proof of the inestimable aphorism, that "a difference of opinion is not a difference of principle." what are now john adams and thomas jefferson, so recently the leading politicians of the day, the heads of mighty parties?--private citizens, wholly abstracted from the bustle of the times, and leaning on their good intentions, like jacob on his staff, to offer up thanksgivings to the most high for the benefits which he has been pleased to bestow upon their beloved country! neither holds a court, or is courted with sinister views; for it is well understood that both have retired from the influence that might have attached itself to them;--but the trace of their footsteps are as blessed by a grateful people, and a good old age has come upon them in peace! may we imitate the plainness and sincerity of this little sentence! what could ten thousand high-sounding titles add to the reputation, or contribute to the internal satisfaction of these sages? yet we practise them and there are hundreds of little things among us, creatures of the moment--here to-day and gone to-morrow, and forgotten, who feel insulted if they are not called of men _honourable_, written at full length, as if the title made them so. i believe i never wrote this word, as prefixed to a man's name, but once, and think that, while i preserve my reason and sense of moral _honesty_, i never will write it again, to a fellow citizen. it would not do any _harm_ if there was much more of this magnificent simplicity at the seat of government, where comfort is often sacrificed to form, and chilling etiquette keeps back from those in office the very persons that they ought to have familiar communication with. it is the yeomanry of the country, who are to carry to the chiefs of the government, the feelings and wishes of the nation: but they are frozen by the ceremony of their introduction to men in power--congressmen and others. it is hateful even to some who _seemingly_ exact it--because _it is "the rule."_ why not abrogate the rule, and while impertinent intrusion is kept at a distance, receive honest worth on the level, as man should receive man? a little anecdote, which i have recently heard, may illustrate this remark--a certain gentleman, who now is a quaker, or at least conforms to many of their manners, a veteran of the revolution, and one of mr. monroe's earliest friends, having business at washington, was specially sent for by the president, who had not seen him for more than forty years. the old man went to the president's house; he was met in the hall by the servants, who separately asked him for his cane, his coat, and his hat. the latter he would not part with, and it was intimated to him that he could not go into the president's room unless he dispossessed himself of it; but he observed, 'if he couldn't go in, he could go out,' and began to prepare for his departure. then it was said, he might go in with his hat on, if he was willing in risk it! he was willing, and entered, and was received by the president as a true friend ought to be received; and they had a very interesting interview, grateful to one another. how much pleasure was nearly denied to mr. monroe for a matter of form!--for, if the sturdy old republican had once left the house, they never could have prevailed upon him to enter it again! all _mere_ ceremonies are easy, and even in matters of the highest import, become mechanical to those accustomed to perform them daily--but are always irksome to those who never went through them--nor do they form any part of our habits of thinking and acting, as conformable to the nature of our institutions. i am apprehensive that they are on the increase, though well convinced that they are not desired by the president himself, and others that i could name. but they are _fashionable_; and it is easier to correct a positive vice than to do away an idle fashion. this fashion keeps no one from the presence of influential persons who has sinister designs to accomplish, but checks the warm flow of the blood with which an honest farmer or mechanic would meet his own elected rulers, and prevents that freedom of discussion by which truth is manifested. let us all endeavour to imitate the simplicity and frankness of jefferson--under this solemn assurance, that the further we are removed from this plainness, the greater is the danger of despotism. i am very far from being an enemy to what are called the elegancies of life, and am quite willing that, if a couple of dancing masters meet, they should bow to each other, "according to rule," for half an hour before they approached near enough to touch the tip of each other's finger, as the _sign_ of shaking hands! let those enjoy it who can, and practice it who may--but it is not the _manner_ in which sincerity is shown, or good fellowship promoted. the homage of the heart, such as the republican will feel in reading the _text_ of this article, is worth more than all the forms of etiquette ever devised. it is as a rock in the midst of the sea--faction assails it in vain; it is _principle_ only that takes effect upon it. the tide of popularity may rise and fall, but the foundation is not to be shaken. [_niles' reg._ _on the importance of manner._ to exasperate is not the way to convince: nor does asperity of language or of manner necessarily belong to the duty of plain dealing. so far otherwise, a scolding preacher, or a snarling reprover, betrays alike a gross ignorance of the philosophy of the human mind, and the absence of christian meekness; and how zealous soever be his aim to do good, the provokingness of his manner will defeat the benevolence of his intentions. the following remarks are from the pen of a man as distinguished for christian piety as for superiour genius--the immortal cowper. "no man" (says that _evangelical_ poet) "was ever scolded out of his sins. the heart, corrupt as it is, and because it is so, grows angry if it be not treated with some management and good manners, and scolds again. a surly mastiff will bear perhaps to be stroked, though he will growl under that operation, but if you touch him roughly, he will bite. there is no grace that the spirit of self can counterfeit with more success than that of zeal. a man thinks he is fighting for christ, when he is fighting for his own notions. he thinks that he is skillfully searching the hearts of others, when he is only gratifying the malignity of his own, and charitably supposes his hearers destitute of all grace, that he may shine the more in his own eyes by comparison." nor is scolding, or ridicule either, the proper way to cure men of their religious prejudices: for, by inflaming their anger, it renders their prejudices the more stubborn and inveterate. it is no matter how absurd or even how monstrous their errors and prejudices; if you offend them by the grossness of your manner, there is little hope of your convincing them afterwards by the cogency of your reasoning. the baptist missionaries in india, at the first insulted, as we are told, the superstition which they attacked, and ridiculed and reviled the bramins in the streets, and at their festivals, when the passions of the blinded and besotted populace were most likely to be influenced. but experience taught those pious and apostolical men, that this was not the right way to make converts: for which reason, in , they made a declaration of the great principles upon which they thought it their duty to act. "it is necessary," say they, "in our intercourse with the hindoos, that, as far as we are able, we abstain from those things which would increase their prejudices against the gospel. those parts of english manners which are most offensive to them should be kept out of sight; nor is it advisable at once to attack their prejudices, by exhibiting with acrimony, the sins of their gods; neither should we do violence to their images, nor interrupt their worship." now if this forbearance from every thing provoking, whether in language or manner, was expedient in dealing with the errors of the grossly idolatrous pagans, it is assuredly not less expedient for fellow christians, in their treatment of the real or supposed religious errors of one another. bitter revilings and contumelious denouncements always provoke, but never convince. if they are used instead of argument, they betray a conscious weakness; for it is much easier to revile and denounce than to argue. and furthermore, we are quite as apt to be furiously in the wrong, as to be furiously in the right: or even if we know ourselves to be right as to matter, we put ourselves in the wrong as to manner, if we make use of foul weapons rather than those which the armoury of reason supplies. _manner_ is to be carefully studied by every one, whether in a public or a private station, who undertakes to reclaim the vicious, or to convince the erring: for what would be beneficial if done in one manner, would be worse than labour lost, if done in another. a haughty, supercilious manner never wins, seldom convinces, and always disgusts; whereas that which indicates meekness and unmingled benevolence and compassion, rarely fails of some salutary impression; especially if suavity of manner be accompanied with force of reasoning, and a due regard be had to time, place, and circumstances. no very long while ago, mr. ----, an american clergyman, as distinguished for pious zeal as for eminent parts, was passing a river in a ferry boat, along with company of some distinction, among which was a military officer who repeatedly made use of profane language: mr. ---- continued silent till they had landed, when taking him aside, he expostulated with him in such a moving manner, that the officer expressed his thanks, and his deep sorrow for the offence; but added withal: "_sir, if you had reproved me before the company, i should have drawn my sword upon you._" there are some who glory in it, that by their plain dealing they wound the pride of those they deal with. peradventure with greater pride they do it. often, we are so little aware of the obliquities of our own hearts, that we may be feeding and nourishing pride within ourselves whilst we are zealously aiming our blows at the pride of others. our love of chiding, our coarse bluntness, which we fondly term an honest plain heartedness, or a warmth of zeal, may possibly spring from other motives than those of pure christian benevolence. extract from wilkinson's memoirs. _sentiments of an old soldier._ let those parents who are now training their children for the military profession, let those misguided patriots, who are inculcating principles of education subversive of the foundations of the republic, look at this picture of distress, taken from the life of a youth in a strange land, far removed from friends and relations, comingled with the dying and the dead, himself wounded, helpless, and expiring with agony, and then should political considerations fail of effect, i hope the feelings of affection, and the obligations of humanity, may induce them to discountenance the pursuits of war, and save their offspring from the seductions of the plume and the sword, for the more solid and useful avocations of civil life; by which alone peace and virtue, and the republic, can be preserved and perpetuated. a dupe during my whole life, to the prejudices i now reprobate, i speak from experience, and discharge a conscientious duty, when i warn my country against military enthusiasm, and the pride of arms; and against the arts and intrigues by which the yeomanry, the palladium of the republic, are depreciated, and standing armies and navies are encouraged. for what would it avail the citizens of the united states, if in a political frenzy, they should barter their rights and liberties for national renown? and who would exchange the blessings of freedom, for the repute of having eclipsed the whole human race in feats of valour and deeds of arms? this is a serious question! it affects the vital interests of every freeman; and the course of the government makes it proper and necessary, that these states should pause and reflect, before it be too late. we have escaped from one war with a crippled constitution; the next will probably destroy it; therefore let the motto of the state be--peace. dr. franklin. _extracts from a letter of mr. jefferson, dated december th, , respecting dr. franklin._ "dr. franklin had many political enemies, as every character must, which, with decision enough to have opinions, has energy and talent to give them effect on the feelings of the adversary opinion. these enmities were chiefly in pennsylvania and massachusetts. in the former they were merely of the proprietary party: in the latter they did not commence till the revolution, and then sprung chiefly from personal animosities, which spreading by little and little, became at length of some extent. dr. ---- was his principal calumniator; a man of much malignity, who, besides enlisting his whole family in the same hostility, was enabled, as the agent of massachusetts with the british government, to infuse it into that state with considerable effect. mr. jay, silas deane, mr. laurens, his colleagues also, ever maintained towards him unlimited confidence and respect. that he would have waived the formal recognition of our independence, i never heard on any authority worthy notice. as to the fisheries, england was urgent to retain them exclusively, france neutral, and i believe that had they been ultimately made a _sine qua non_, our commissioners (mr. adams excepted) would have relinquished them rather than have broken off the treaty. to mr. adams' perseverance alone on that point, i have always understood we were indebted for their reservation. as to the charge of subservience to france, besides the evidence of his friendly colleagues before named, two years of my own service with him at paris, daily visits, and the most friendly and confidential conversations, convince me it had not a shadow of foundation. he possessed the confidence of that government in the highest degree, insomuch that it may truly be said that they were more under his influence, than he under theirs. the fact is, that his temper was so amiable and conciliatory, his conduct so rational, never urging impossibilities, or even things unreasonably inconvenient to them; in short, so moderate and attentive to their difficulties, as well as our own, that what his enemies called subserviency, i saw was only that reasonable disposition, which, sensible that advantages are not all to be on one side, yielding what is just and liberal, is the more certain of obtaining liberality and justice.--mutual confidence produces of course mutual influence, and this was all which subsisted between dr. franklin and the government of france. "i subjoin a few anecdotes of dr. franklin, within my own knowledge. "our revolutionary process, as is well known, commenced by petitions, memorials, remonstrances, &c. from the old congress. these were followed by a non-importation agreement, as a pacific instrument of coercion. while that was before us, and sundry exceptions, as of arms, ammunition &c. were moved from different quarters of the house, i was sitting by dr. franklin, and observed to him that i thought we should except books: that we ought not to exclude science, even coming from an enemy. he thought so too, and i proposed the exception, which was agreed to. soon after it occurred that medicine should be excepted, and i suggested that also to the doctor. 'as to that,' said he, 'i will tell you a story. when i was in london, in such a year, there was a weekly club of physicians, of which sir john pringle was president, and i was invited by my friend dr. fothergill, to attend when convenient. their rule was to propose a thesis one week, and discuss it the next. i happened there when the question to be considered was, whether physicians had on the whole, done most good or harm? the young members, particularly, having discussed it very learnedly and eloquently till the subject was exhausted, one of them observed to sir john pringle, that, although it was not usual for the president to take part in a debate, yet they were desirous to know his opinion on the question. he said, they must first tell him whether, under the appellation of physicians, they meant to include _old women_; if they did, he thought they had done more good than harm; otherwise more harm than good.' "the confederation of the states, while on the carpet before the old congress, was strenuously opposed by the smaller states, under the apprehension that they would be swallowed up by the larger ones. we were long engaged in the discussion; it produced great heats, much ill humour, and intemperate declarations from some members. dr. franklin at length brought the debate to a close with one of his little apologues. he observed, that 'at the time of the union of england and scotland, the duke of argyle was most violently opposed to that measure, and among other things predicted that, as the whale had swallowed jonas, so scotland would be swallowed by england. however,' said the doctor, 'when lord bute came into the government, he soon brought into its administration so many of his countrymen, that it was found, in the event, that jonas swallowed the whale.' this little story produced a general laugh, restored good humour, and the article of difficulty was passed. "when dr. franklin went to france on his revolutionary mission, his eminence as a philosopher, his venerable appearance, and the cause on which he was sent, rendered him extremely popular; for all ranks and conditions of men there, entered warmly into the american interest. he was therefore feasted and invited to all the court parties. at these he sometimes met the old duchess of bourbon, who being a chess-player of about his force, they very generally played together. happening once to put her king into _prise_, the doctor took it. 'ah,' says she, 'we do not take kings so.' 'we do in america,' said the doctor. "at one of these parties, the emperor joseph ii., then at paris, _incog._ under the title of count falkenstein, was overlooking the game, in silence, while the company was engaged in animated conversations on the american question. 'how happens it, m. le comte,' said the duchess 'that while we all feel so much interest in the cause of the americans, you say nothing for them?' 'i am a king by trade,' said he. "when the declaration of independence was under the consideration of congress, there were two or three unlucky expressions in it, which gave offence to some members. the words 'scotch and other auxiliaries,' excited the ire of a gentleman or two of that country. severe strictures on the conduct of the british king, in negativing our repeated repeals of the law which permitted the importation of slaves, were disapproved by some southern gentlemen, whose reflections were not yet matured to the full abhorrence of that traffic. although the offensive expressions were immediately yielded, these gentlemen continued their depredations on other parts of the instrument. i was sitting by dr. franklin, who perceived that i was not insensible to those mutilations. 'i have made it a rule,' said he, 'whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body. i took my lesson from an incident which i will relate to you. when i was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself. his first concern was to have a handsome sign-board, with a proper inscription. he composed it in these words:--'john thompson, _hatter_, _makes_ and _sells hats for ready money_,' with a figure of a hat subjoined. but he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. the first he showed it to, thought the word '_hatter_' tautologous, because followed by the words 'makes hats,' which shew he was a hatter. it was struck out. the next observed that the word '_makes_' might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats; if good and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made. he struck it out. a third said, he thought the words '_for ready money_,' were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit: every one who purchased expected to pay. they were parted with, and the inscription now stood, 'john thompson sells hats.' '_sells_ hats?' says his next friend; 'why nobody will expect you to give them away. what then is the use of that word?' it was stricken out, and '_hats_' followed it, the rather, as there was one painted on the board; so his inscription was reduced ultimately to 'john thompson,' with the figure of a hat subjoined.' "the doctor told me, at paris, the following anecdote of the abbé raynal.--he had a party to dine with him one day, at passy, of whom one half were americans, the other half french; among the last was the abbé. during the dinner he got on his favourite theory of the degeneracy of animals, and even of man, in america, and urged it with his usual eloquence. the doctor at length noticing the accidental stature and position of his guests, at table, 'come,' said he, 'm. l'abbé, let us try this question by the fact before us. we are here one half americans, and one half french; and it happens that the americans have placed themselves on one side of the table, and our french friends are on the other. let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature has degenerated.' it happened that his american guests were carmichael, harmer, humphreys, and others of the finest stature and form; while those of the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the abbé himself, particularly, was a mere shrimp. he parried the appeal however, by a complimentary admission of exceptions, among which the doctor himself was a conspicuous one." _an act for the appraisement of estates taken in execution._ sect. . _be it enacted by the senate and house of representatives of the commonwealth of pennsylvania in general assembly met, and it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same_, that in all cases where lands, tenements or hereditaments, have been or hereafter shall be levied on, by virtue of any writ of _fieri facias_ or other writ of execution, and an inquest of twelve men summoned by the sheriff or coroner of any of the cities or counties agreeably to the existing laws of this commonwealth, shall find that the rents, issue, and profits of such property, are not sufficient, beyond all reprises, within the space of seven years to satisfy the damages and costs or the debt, interest and cost in such writ mentioned, it shall be the duty of the same inquest to value and appraise the said property. and in all cases where the defendant or defendants shall consent to a condemnation agreeable to an act entitled "a supplement to the act, entitled, an act for taking lands in execution for the payment of debts," passed on the sixth day of march, one thousand eight hundred and twenty, and in any case where an inquisition and condemnation of such estate as aforesaid shall not be deemed necessary in law, it shall be the duty of the sheriff or coroner of the proper county to summon an inquest of twelve good and lawful men of his bailiwick, who shall be under oath or affirmation, and shall receive the same pay as jurors are entitled to in similar cases, to value and appraise the same; and the sheriff or coroner shall make return of such valuation or appraisement, with the writ aforesaid, to the court from which the same issued, and which valuation or appraisement shall be conclusive in any future execution which may be levied on the same property; and in case any writ of _venditioni exponas_ or other writ shall issue for the sale of said lands, tenements or hereditaments, and the same cannot be sold at public vendue or outcry for two-thirds or more of such valuation or appraisement: that then and in such case the sheriff or coroner shall not make sale of the premises, but shall make return of the same accordingly to the court from which the execution process issued, and that thereupon all further proceedings for the sale of such lands, tenements or hereditaments, shall be stayed for one year from and after the return day of the _venditioni exponas_, or other writ for the sale of the premises: _provided_, that the sheriff or coroner, shall not be entitled to poundage unless in those cases where a sale of the property shall take place. sect. . _and be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid_, that in all cases where lands, tenements or hereditaments, have been heretofore levied on and condemned in virtue of any writ of _fieri facias_, and in all cases where any lands, tenements or hereditaments, have been or hereafter shall be seized or levied on by virtue of any writ of _levari facias_, it shall be the duty of the sheriff or coroner, before exposing the said property to sale pursuant to any writ for that purpose issued, or in pursuance of such writ of _levari facias_, to summon twelve good and lawful men of his bailiwick, who, being first sworn or affirmed, shall make a true valuation or appraisement of the property aforesaid, and the same proceedings shall be had as is directed by the first section of this act. sect. . _and be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid_, that in all cases where a life estate, or for a term of years, in any lands, tenements, or hereditaments, have been or shall be seized and levied on by virtue of any writ of execution, it shall be the duty of the sheriff or coroner, before he shall proceed to advertise and sell the premises aforesaid, to summon an inquest of twelve good and lawful men of his bailiwick, who, being first duly sworn or affirmed, shall make a true valuation and appraisement of the same. and if such life estate, or for term of years as aforesaid, after having been advertised and offered for sale by public vendue or outcry, according to the laws of this commonwealth, cannot be sold for two thirds or more of the amount of the valuation and appraisement aforesaid, the sheriff or coroner shall make return accordingly; and thereupon all further proceedings for the sale of the said premises shall be stayed for one year from the return day of the said execution process. sect. . _and be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid_, that in all cases where personal property shall be taken in execution by virtue of any writ of _fieri facias_ issued out of any court of common pleas in this commonwealth, or by virtue of any execution issued by a justice of the peace, it shall be the duty of the sheriff, coroner, constable or other person, to whom such writ shall be directed, respectively, when it shall be requested by the debtor, to summon three respectable freeholders or citizens of the vicinage, who, being first duly sworn or affirmed by the said officer, shall value and appraise the personal property aforesaid, for which service they each shall be entitled to receive fifty cents per day; which valuation or appraisement, signed by the appraisers, together with a schedule of the property taken in execution, shall be annexed to the return of said writ. and in case said personal property, or any part thereof, cannot be sold for two thirds of the amount of said valuation or appraisement, at a public vendue of the same, of which notice shall be given to the plaintiff or plaintiffs, his, her or their agent or attorney, agreeably to the direction of the first section of this act, that then the sale of such property shall be stayed for the term of twelve months from that date: _provided_, that the said defendant or defendants shall execute and deliver to the sheriff, coroner or constable, as the case may be, a bond, with one or more sufficient sureties, in a penalty double the amount of the said valuation or appraisement, conditioned for the faithful forthcoming and delivery of all and every part of the said personal property, upon the expiration of the said stay of execution, to the proper sheriff, coroner or constable, or his successor in office, in like good order and condition as when the same was so as aforesaid offered for sale, or other personal property equal in value and like good order, to be ascertained in the manner aforesaid; or in default thereof, for the payment of the amount of the appraisement or valuation, with interest and costs, or the amount of the debt, interest and cost, for which the levy was made. and upon the execution and delivery of such bond, the said personal property shall be returned and redelivered into the possession of the said defendant or defendants: _provided also_, that nothing in this act contained, shall be construed to prevent any judgment creditor or creditors from having the property of any debtor or debtors exposed to sale, in the usual manner, at any time, and as often as he, she or they may think proper, after it may have once been exposed to sale as aforesaid, by paying all the costs which may accrue in consequence thereof, except the time which a sale may be effected, which cost shall be paid out of the proceeds of the sale as in other cases. sect. . _and be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid_, that this act shall be and continue in force for the term of one year and no longer. mortgages. the legislature of pennsylvania, at their late session, passed the following act relative to mortgages. sect. . _be it enacted by the senate and house of representatives of the commonwealth of pennsylvania, in general assembly met, and it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same_, that from and after the first day of october next, all mortgages, or defeasible deeds in the nature of mortgages, made or to be made or executed for any lands, tenements or hereditaments within this commonwealth, shall have a priority according to the date of recording the same, without regard to the time of making or executing such deeds. and it shall be the duty of the recorder to endorse the time upon the mortgages or defeasible deeds when left for record, and to number the same according to the time they are left for record, and if two or more are left upon the same day, they shall have priority according to the time they are left at the office for record. and that no mortgage, or defeasible deed in the nature of a mortgage, shall be a lien until such mortgage or defeasible deed shall have been recorded, or left for record as aforesaid. _provided_, that no mortgage given for the purchase money of the land so mortgaged shall be affected by the passage of this act, if the same be recorded within sixty days from the execution thereof. sect. . _and be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid_, that the governor be, and he is hereby requested to cause this act to be published immediately after the passage of the same, in such newspapers and for such a length of time as he may think most proper for the information of the citizens of this commonwealth. _whimsical conflict._--it would be well for society, if all duellists were to find themselves in the same predicament as did the celebrated poet, dr. akenside, and a gentleman of the bar by the name of ballow. a challenge had passed from the former--but they did not get into the field; for one would not consent to fight in the morning, and the other was equally determined not to do so in the evening! the one wished to fall in a blaze of glory, mingled with the brilliant rays of the rising sun, a very fanciful and poetic notion; and the other, with perhaps an equal degree of poetic feeling and imagination, thought the shades of eve more congenial with the work of death and the hour of dissolution. whether serious or affected, the difference was perhaps a happy one for the lovers of literature, who might otherwise have lost the keen and inexpressible delight which ever flows from the perusal of akenside's pleasures of imagination--a work which will charm and instruct mankind through every age, so long as learning, taste, and genius, shall have a votary or a favourite to relish so rich a banquet. the hand of blood, that had deprived the republic of letters of that incomparable poem, would have well deserved everlasting execration. [_plough boy._ law-suit. the longest law-suit ever heard of in england, or perhaps in the world, was between the heirs of sir t. talbot; viscount lisle, on the one part, and the heirs of lord berkeley on the other, respecting certain possessions not far from wotton-under-edge, in the county of gloucester. the suit was commenced at the end of edward iv. and was depending till the reign of james i. when a compromise took place, it having lasted above a hundred and twenty years. the cameronians. from blackwood's edinburgh magazine, nov. . for the cameronians, those relicks of the stern enthusiastic covenanters--those resolute maintainers of the unblemished purity and rights of the reformed church--those dwellers on the misty mountain tops--i entertain the greatest respect and reverence. it was my lot to pass the early part of my life in the neighbourhood of their hill of worship--often in the company of their leading men, and most admired professors--and at all times in the society of a portion of their number. they had hovered for many years about the mountainous regions of the parish of kirkmahoe, in dumfries-shire; and as they began to confide in the kindness of their less rigid brethren, they commenced descending, step by step, from a large hill to a less, till they finally _swarmed_ on a small sterile mount, with a broomy glen at its foot, beside a little village, which one of their number named "graceless quarrelwood." quarrelwood is a long straggling village, built in open hostility to regular lines, or the graceful curves of imaginary beauty. the cottages which compose it are scattered as if some wizard had dropt them down by random; and through the whole a streamlet winds, and a kind of road infinitely more crooked than the stream. this lane is fringed chiefly by old plum-trees, and seeks its way to the eastern extremity of the village, with a difficulty which a stranger will soon be sensible of, should he be so hardy as to endeavour to thread this cameronian labyrinth. there is also a wide wilderness of gardens, hemmed in by strong walls of rough free-stone. it is a very defensible position; and, in case of retreat, the deep channels of two scanty streams present direct openings to the upland holds; and these are covered ways--for the brooks contrive to maintain as many stately trees and flourishing bushes on their steep and impassable banks, as would do honour to mightier streams. to this rural encampment several hundreds resorted weekly to hear their pastor's instructions; and at their great midsummer festival of the sacrament, several thousands usually assembled, many of them from distant parts, even from fife and banff. all around were objects to cherish their ancient spirit, and remind them of other days. the seat of their bitter persecutor, general dalzell, was within two short miles--the grave of the cruel laird of lagg was visible from their mount; and in the church-yard of dumfries, in the moors of irongray, and the moorlands of nithsdale, were buried, under broad and inscribed stones, some of the most renowned of the martyrs. with two of their preachers i had the pleasure of being acquainted; and i have also heard several of the western professors preach during the continuance of the sacramental holydays. of their professors i shall endeavour to render some account. i still remember, with reverence, the thin long snowy hair and bald shining crown, and primitive look of the patriarchal farely; and it is impossible i should ever forget the familiar and fervent eloquence of that delightful old pastor. towards the close of his life, which was unusually long, he was accused of cheering his decaying spirits with other beverage than what cold brooks afforded. of this infirmity i have heard some of the sternest of his flock speak with unlooked-for gentleness; and i believe none of his fellow-preachers chose to rebuke him for this indulgence, from a just dread of his powers for keen dry sarcasm. he was a great favourite with the cameronian ladies, old and young, and his reputation with them was not at all diminished, by the renown he acquired by his ability in inflicting the discipline of his sect on fair trespassers. of john curtis, the regular pastor of the flock, i do not remember so much as i do of mr. farely. he was a man unaffectedly pious, rather than eloquent, and was deservedly and warmly beloved. he adorned his discourses with that melodious tone which some call the cameronian drawl, and which the pious cowper complained of in the conventicles. each sentence has a kind of starting note; and i can discover remains of this old puritanical fashion in the eloquence of wilberforce and also lord milton. it would require some constraint in a pious stranger to listen, without an inward smile at least, to this continually recurring chorus.--with a gifted preacher it is less ungraceful, for he contrives to make it tell in better time than an ordinary man--still it might be spared; but a very sensible divine told me, he dared as soon renounce predestination as part with the "twang;" it was as dear to his flock as the memory of richard cameron. john curtis, for he abominated the prelatical designation of "master," was not an unfrequent, or unwelcome guest at my father's house. his coming was a visitation, for it came over our mirth as a cloud. he invariably was invited on week days; sunday was a day that had higher duties. his coming was the signal for seven children, i was one of them, to cease their play and pranks, and mix trembling with their mirth. we became as quiet as a brood of chickens, over which the hawk is hovering. even the nuts or raisins which filled the pockets of this primitive person, and which he divided among us with many a clap on the head and benediction, failed to inspire confidence. the chief revolution in the affairs of the cameronians of dumfriesshire, was effected at the death of john curtis. they had been driven by persecution to preach on the mountains, and though persecution had ceased, on the mountains they remained. it was certainly a beautiful and impressive sight to see a congregation worshipping god on a mountain side or a wild glen; to see the upright pulpit-rows of bared, and white, and bald heads decently ranged around--and more extended ranks of beautiful women and active men drawn up in a regular confusion--the whole listening to the eloquence of my old friend farely. this, with a clear day and a bright sun, must make an impression of devotion on the most obtuse intellect. but as the mason said of the wise man who sung, "snow is beautiful in its season," "my certes," said he, "it was easy for him, with his lasses and his wine to sing so; had he been a poor free-stone mason, he would have sung another sang." for the weather seemed sometimes to inherit the rancour of the bloody claverhouse, or the renowned chieftain of lagg, to this persecuted race; and, instead of june giving one of her brightest and balmmiest days for the sacrament, i have witnessed the heavy rain come down sans intermission for four stricken hours, as if ambitious to measure its mercies by the length of the "action sermon." by some this circumstance was hailed as a divine acknowledgment of their presence and influence; and after some very dry weather i have heard mr. farely turn a timely thunder shower to good account, by apostrophizing the deity for his kindness to "this dry barren land." on another occasion--the morning was serene during the introductory discourse, and just as my friend farely began to administer the sacrament, a huge black cloud sailed from the westward, and hung heavy and ominous over the congregation. ere the ladies could raise their plaids, it descended perpendicular plump down, and the huge drops splashed off the bald crown of the preacher, in a manner that kemble would have envied in acting king lear. a cameronian with an umbrella, at that time an unusual thing in the country, arose and stretched it over the professor's head, regardless of himself. at this visible interposition between him and heaven, the preacher was wroth, and said audibly, "take the pope's cap off me," and his conduct was highly applauded. to such a congregation, after the decease of john curtis, my friend of the umbrella made a proposition to have a chapel erected. and i question much if a proposal to go to mass would have excited a stronger commotion--particularly among those whom the measure meant to protect--the old and infirm. he of the umbrella offered to subscribe largely himself, and promote the subscription among others, hinting that many of the members of the kirk favoured the cause, and would be glad of an opportunity to display it. the motion was well timed too, namely, at the close of one of those four-hours benedictions from a thunder cloud, which had urged its way through the broad bonnets and thick plaids of the most obstinate believers. i cannot enumerate to you all the bitter and brief exclamations of dismay and indignation which this proposal excited. the decided wrath of one old moorland dame i shall long remember, "foul fall ye," said she, starting up and hurling her heavy clasped black print bible at the proposer's head, "foul fall ye, ye deserve to be brained with the word ye hae abused;" and had he of the umbrella not caught this religious missile, as the curtal fryar's dogs caught the outlaw's arrows, namely, as it flew, he might have been numbered with the martyrs. "shall _we_," said she, "who were hounded like deer to the mountains, there to worship god in fear of evil men, shall _we_, whom he marvellously protected there, doubt his providence, and descend to keep yer coupled timber--yer covered cushions--and yer canopied, fringed, and painted prelatical pulpits--and yer walls of hewn stane--far frae me--fit places are they, not for the word, but for ye ken what;"--and so she sat down. the more sensible part reflecting, however, that the showers of spring were cold--that the winds of autumn were not always gentle--and that winter indulged them with various and dubious blessings, under the resemblance of snows and sleets, and sudden thaws, resolved, that the erection of a house of worship was a justifiable measure; and a house was accordingly built. but the eloquent dame of the moorlands introduced a salvo, by which the sacrament was directed to be administered in the open air, and so it still continues. the religious festival of the sacrament is commenced after due private preparation by prayers of unwonted length, and the lonely broomy hollow where it is held, exhibits on sabbath morn to a stranger a grand and solemn spectacle. the last time i was present at this meeting i was invited to breakfast at the house of a respectable and recently converted member of the "broken remnant," a warm-hearted weaver, a man of rare conversation--ready wit, and cutting dry sarcasm. he was also as much celebrated for his poetry as the unrivalled productions of his loom. his birds-eye, his barley-pickle, his lowland plaiden, and fine linen, were the theme of praise among the young maids in danger of being married--and to their praise i add mine. i have proved his hospitality, and proved the labours of his loom. i sat down to an ample breakfast with this cameronian worthy--his wife lively always, and once handsome--his two sons, inheriting their father's powers even to overflowing, and a solemn browed cameronian from the borders of the moorlands. this family auxiliary undertook to pronounce a blessing on our good cheer; a serious trial of my patience and appetite. i endured his sermon for many minutes; it was in its nature controversial. he touched on the adventure at drumclog, and addressed providence in strong and familiar term anent the disaster at bothwell brig. i looked piteous but resigned, and the good housewife poured forth the tea. but then there came headings and hangings, and finings and confinings, and sad travels and sore tortures. the goodwife placed a plate of smoking savoury cake before him, but he was not to be tempted; he threw a passing curse or two on patronage, still he was distant from our day half a century at least. i looked with an imploring eye, and my entertainer closed his; but i could see by the sarcastic curl at the corners of his mouth that he was inwardly enjoying my misery. once i stretched my hand, for i had half a mind, like the renowned and impatient good man of drumbreg, on a time of similar trial, to seize my cup with a cry of "ye have done brawly man," and cut short all explanation by falling to. i endured it to an end however, and an excellent breakfast enabled me to endure the infliction of a "return thanks," eminently curious and controversial. we then sallied forth to the preaching--the pastor had already commenced; it might be half past o'clock. i was struck with the magnitude and repose of the congregation. besides the sodded seats which held the oldest and most respectable members, the broom then, i think, in full bloom, with all its perfume about it, was bent down for many acres to form rural seats to cameronian dames, and dames indeed of all persuasions.--there were many dressed in the latest fashion; the old simple mode of dress however prevailed. though all shewed deep symptoms of devotion, and many of awe, the young women by no means confined their eyes, and many had bright ones, to the contemplation of the preacher. this festival always attracts an immense multitude, and though the cameronians are the only communicants, all sects and denominations of presbyterians crowd to the place, and occupy the vacant ground. i saw many of the cameronians with whom i had a personal acquaintance, and a silent squeeze of the hand, or an acknowledgment, an austere one, of the eye, was all the recognition to be obtained. the list of offences and sects excluded from communication is extensive and curious--they call it "debarring"--socinians, arminians, unitarians, episcopalians, false teachers, promiscuous dancers, and playhouse frequenters. i cannot inflict the whole of this tremendous catalogue upon you. one prudent and warning exclusion i cannot omit to mention, namely, that of all wives who disobey their husbands. in the green hedge-row lane, leading to the tent of the preacher, various stalls were established by persons who thought--as godliness was great gain, great gain was godliness. here refreshments of all kinds, particularly liquid consolation, abounded, and one tent, rivalling in dimensions the tabernacle of the preacher, looked presumptuously down from the very crest of the hill on its more devout neighbour below. here the owner of a neighbouring public house had established himself, and into this canvass mansion, in a moment of weakness, i was tempted to enter. i had sundry reasons for this piece of backsliding;--first, i had become wearied with the unexampled length and tediousness of the before-mentioned four hour's sermon; secondly, i was desirous to partake of either ram-jam, mid-row, or pinkie, three denominations of ale, for which the landlord was become deservedly famous, and in the brewing of which, weak nerves, as well as a good head, had been doubtlessly consulted--and; thirdly and lastly, a dark-eyed damsel from the mountains wished for my private opinion anent the sinfulness of dancing, and to instruct me in a near road over the hills to her father's house, which stood in a remote glen on the stream of ae. while deeply employed in taking a chart of this desart path, i could not avoid remarking with what particular gravity all were drinking, and many getting drunk. consolation had been poured forth in no stinted tide, for a huge wall of empty vessels flanked the entrance. the proprietor of this house of call for the thirsty, was a ruddy carroty-headed rustic, who had contrived to draw down his cheeks for the occasion, in a manner unusually solemn. he sat apart busied, or apparently busied, with that chief of all sage books, the young man's best companion; while his daughter, as active a girl as ever chalked a score to a thirsty man, managed the business. but his mind had wandered into a long and studious calculation of the probable profit in his fermentations, and the book, which was only put there as a decoy to the godly, was neglected. i contrived to withdraw it unperceived from before him, and for this feat i was rewarded by a grim smile from a broad bonneted son of cameron, and a snuff from a tuphorn with a silver lid. on returning to the meeting, the stars were beginning to glimmer, amongst the thin mist of the summer evening, and i could see groupes, already at some distance, of the spectators retiring home. far differently demeaned themselves the pious remnant. they crowded round their preacher's tent after the repose of a brief intermission, and i left them enjoying a mysterious lecture on permission, predestination, free grace, the elect, and effectual calling. i am now, and i say it with sorrow, far removed from the society of those exemplary and pious people; and i heard, i confess, with something of an old cameronian spirit and regret, that a proposition has been made to remove the meeting house into the neighbouring town of dumfries. of my old favourites, few i understand survive, and year after year lessens the number of those devout men who regularly passed my father's window on the sabbath morn. mr. farely has long since been numbered with the blessed--and jean robson, a very singular and devout character, has also rested from her labour of instructing the youth of the cameronians. she taught the writer of this imperfect account to read--the bible, and the famed prophecies of alexander peden. she tore the leaf from the bible which said, "james, by the grace of god, defender of the faith," and denounced the name of _sunday_ as popish, or what was worse, prelatical, and caused us all to call it the sabbath. she died years old. she used to flog her scholars, and exclaim,--"thou art an evil one--a worker of iniquity," while the tawse and tongue kept time and told sharply. the cameronians make few converts--few people are fond of inflicting on themselves willingly the penance of controversial prayers and interminable sermons. there is a falling off in the amount of the flock.--my friend, the weaver, became a convert from conviction. another of the converts joined the cause in the decline of life, not without suspicion of discontent, because his gifts had been overlooked by the minister of the parish kirk, in a recent nomination of elders. he was fond of argument, and seemed not unwilling to admit the potent auxiliaries of sword and gun on behalf of the cause. on one occasion, he grew wroth with the ready wit of a neighbouring peasant, on the great litigated point of patronage--and seizing the readiest weapon of his wrath, a hazel hoop--for he was a cooper--exclaimed, "reviler--retire--else i'll make your head saft with this rung." on another time, he became exasperated at the irreverent termination of an epigram on a tippling blacksmith, which was attributed to burns, who then resided within sight--at elisland. on the last day, when sober men to judgment rise, go drunken dog, lie still incog. and dinna stir if ye be wise. the honest covenanter, after three days and three nights meditation, brought forth his expostulation with the mighty bard of caledonia. it commenced thus-- robert burns ye were nae wise to gie to rodds sic an advice. it has lost all its attraction since the voice of its author is mute, for who can repeat it as he did--the pithy preliminary remarks on the great poet's morals--the short cameronian cough--the melodious trail of the tongue--and the frequent intrusion of explanatory notes, which the uninspired could not always distinguish from the poem itself, all these things are departed and passed away, and the verses sleep as quietly as the dust of the poet. two other occasional converts scarcely deserve notice--one of them was saved from thorough conviction by the well-timed exaltation to a neighbouring precentorship, and the other has returned to his seat in the kirk, since the dark-eyed daughter of an adjacent cameronian gave her hand, and it was a white one, to one of the chosen who was laird of an acre of peat-moss--and i have not heard of any other damsel of the covenant having caused him to relapse. shepherd's dog. (from the london sportsman's cabinet.) this dog is the most timid, obedient, placid, serene and grateful in the creation. he seems studiously conscious of the purposes for which he was formed, and is never so perceptibly gratified, as when affording the most incessant proofs of his unsullied integrity.--instinctively prone to industry, he is alive to the slightest sensation of his employer, and would rather double and treble the watch line of circumspection, than be seen indulging in a state of neglectful indolence.--the breed is propagated and preserved with the greatest respect to purity in the northern parts of the kingdom of england, as well as in the highlands of scotland, where, in the extensive tracts and uncultivated wilds, their services exceed description. constitutionally calm, patient, and philosophic, the sheep dog seems totally lost to every appearance of novelty, and insensible to every attraction beyond the protection and indefatigable preservation of the flock committed to his charge.--in the most sequestered and remote spots, dreary wilds and lofty mountains, almost inaccessible to man, this dog becomes an incredible and trusty substitute; for once initiated in the ground-work of his office, he soon acquires a perfect knowledge of the extent of his walk, as well as every individual of his flock: and will as regularly select his own, and disperse intruders, as the most faithful and attentive shepherd in existence. this becomes the more extraordinary to the contemplative mind, when it is recollected what immense flocks are seen to cover the downy hills of hants and wilts, as far as the eye can reach, without control; and to know that by a single signal from the shepherd, this faithful, sagacious animal, replete with energy, vigilance, and activity, will make his circle, so as to surround a flock of hundreds, and bring them within any compass that may be required. the sheep dog is so completely absorbed in what seems to be the sole business and employment of his life, that he does not bestow a look, or indulge a wish, beyond the constant protection of the trust reposed in him, and to execute the commands of his master; which he is always incessantly anxious to receive, and in fact is invariably looking for by every solicitous attention it is possible to conceive.--inured to all weathers, fatigue and hunger, he is the least voracious of the species, subsists upon little, and may be justly considered truly emblematic of content. though there is the appearance of a somniferous indolence in the exterior, it is by no means a constitutional mark of habitual inability; on the contrary, the sagacity, fidelity, and comprehensive penetration of this kind of dog, is equal to any other, but that there is a thoughtful or expressive gravity annexed to this particular race, as if they were absolutely conscious of their own utility in business of importance, and the value of the stock so confidently committed to their care. amidst the infinity of cases so constantly issuing from the press, in which proofs almost incredible are authentically adduced of the courage, sagacity, fidelity, gratitude, and self-denial of different kinds of dogs, many are to be found appertaining to this particular race; if they are not so numerous as some other sorts, it may be fairly attributed to the little proportional chance they have (from their remote and sequestered employment) of displaying those powers in an equal degree with dogs more engaged in the bustle of human society. dr. anderson (in his translation from dr. pallas) introduces the following instance of sagacity in a shepherd's dog, which he considers truly astonishing; and it will create no surprise with those who are in the least acquainted with their perfections. "the owner himself having been hanged some years ago for sheep stealing, the following fact, among others, respecting the dog, was authenticated by evidence upon his trial. when the man intended to steal any sheep, he did not do it himself, but detached his dog to perform the business. with this view, under pretence of looking at the sheep with an intention to purchase them, he went through the flock with the dog at his feet, to whom he secretly gave a signal, so as to let him know the individuals he wanted, to the number of ten or twenty, out of a flock of some hundreds; he then went away, and at a distance of several miles sent back the dog by himself in the night time, who picked out the individual sheep that had been pointed out to him, separated them from the flock, and drove them before him by himself, till overtaking his master, to whom he relinquished them." the shepherd's dog rather shuns than seems anxious to obtain the caresses of strangers, of whom he always appears to be shy and suspicious; it being remarkable, that when refreshing upon a journey with the flock, he seldom reposes but close to the feet or body of his master; who well knows if he but deposits his coat or his wallet, and gives the animal the accustomed signal; when the sheep are at pasture, he may absent himself for hours, and at his return find the whole as safe and regular as if it had been under his own inspection. although it is already observed, these dogs afford no evident external proof of quick conception, or rapid execution (except in all matters relative to the flock, to which their every faculty appertains) yet their sagacity and fidelity is found equal to every other branch of the species, when necessarily brought into useful action. "in the month of february, , as mr. boulstead's son, of great salkeld, in cumberland, was attending the sheep of his father upon great salkeld's common, he had the misfortune to fall and break his leg.--he was then at the distance of three miles from home, no chance of any person's coming, in so unfrequented a place, within call, and evening very fast approaching: in this dreadful dilemma, suffering extreme pain from the fracture, and laying upon the damp ground at so dreary a season of the year, his agitated spirit suggested to him the following expedient: folding one of his gloves in his pocket handkerchief, he fastened it round the neck of the dog, and rather emphatically ordered him "home."--these dogs, trained so admirably to orders and signals during their attendance upon the flock, are well known to be under the most minute subjection, and to execute the commands of their masters with an alacrity scarcely to be conceived. perfectly convinced of some inexplicable disquietude from the situation in which his master lay, he set off at a pace, which soon brought him to the house, where he scratched with great violence at the door for immediate admittance. this obtained, the parents were in the utmost alarm and consternation at his appearance, but more particularly when they had examined the handkerchief and its contents. instantly concluding beyond a doubt, that some accident had befallen their son, they did not delay a moment going in search of him; and the dog, apparently conscious the principal part of his duty was yet to be performed, anxiously led the way and conducted the agitated parents to the spot where their son lay overwhelmed with pain, increased by the awful uncertainty of his situation.--happily this was effected just at the close of day, when being immediately removed, and the necessary assistance procured, he soon recovered, and was never more pleasingly engaged than when reciting the sagacity and gratitude of his faithful follower, who then became his constant companion." * * * * * the instances of intelligence in the shepherd's dog are recorded in all books treating of the manners and habits of the dog tribe. one more may be mentioned from a recent publication. it is given for the purpose of stimulating the american farmer to possess himself of one of the breed as soon as possible.--speaking of the "currack of kildare," the author says, "the commonage is stocked by a prescriptive proportion, attached to the adjacent farms: every sheep owner has a particular raddled mark; the shepherd's dogs are so trained, that if a sheep, with a strange mark, comes on his master's front, the dog will single him out and worry him off."--see statistical survey of the county of kildare, by t. j. rawson, dublin, . p. . j. m. _the new steam ship robert fulton._--this ship is intended to ply as a regular packet between new york and new orleans. she is said to be, in every respect, one of the finest vessels ever built in that city. a communication in the gazette gives the following description of this beautiful vessel: "this ship is a splendid piece of naval architecture--the most perfect model i ever beheld, and does great credit to her builder, mr. eckford. she is upwards of tons, of a very great length, rigged with lug sails; has three kelsons, (the centre one large enough for a ship of the line,) together with bilge ways, and the whole secured and bolted in a very extraordinary manner, perhaps the most so of any vessel ever built. her frame timber and plank are of live oak, locust, cedar, and southern pine, copper bolted and coppered. "she will afford accommodation for more than persons, is fitted up with high and airy state rooms, thoroughly ventilated by means of sky lights the whole length of the cabin, which is very extensive. her after cabin is neatly arranged for the accommodation of ladies, and separated by means of folding doors, in the modern style. she has also a range of births fore and aft, together with a commodious fore cabin. and what adds to the greatest comfort and security of all, her engine and other machinery are completely insulated and unconnected, as it were, with the other part of the ship. in the centre, lengthwise, is a kind of well-hole, or square trunk, made both fire and water proof; no possible accident, therefore, by the bursting of the boiler, can reach either of the cabins. this trunk or well-hole being enclosed by very thick plank, caulked and leaded, may be inundated with water at pleasure, without any inconvenience to the passengers. "the furnace is also completely surrounded by the continuation of the boiler, so that no part of the fire can ever come in contact with the wood. there is a space of about or inches filled in with materials, non-conductors of heat, which answer the double purpose of excluding the heat from the cabin, and at the same time deadening the disagreeable noise of the engine. she is also provided with a leather hose, similar to those used by our fire engine companies in this city, which will enable the hot or cold water to be conveyed to any part of the ship, and furnishing at the same time the great conveniency to the passengers of a warm or cold bath, at pleasure. her engine was constructed by mr. allaire, and is supposed to be the most powerful and most exact piece of workmanship ever turned out in this country; and her boiler is said to be the largest ever known to have been made in this or any other country. take her all in all, she certainly presents a spectacle altogether _unique_." miscellany. _public lands._--the highly important bill, for changing the mode of disposing of public lands, so that hereafter they shall be offered for sale in half quarter sections, the minimum price to be one dollar and twenty-five cents, and all to be paid in cash, has _passed both houses of congress_, by great majorities, and now wants only the signature of the president to become a law.--this bill is to take effect from the st of june next. from a late london paper it appears, that a new and easy method has lately been discovered, in england, of preventing the destruction of the young turnip plants by the fly, and for which the discoverer was rewarded with guineas. it is merely to sow about _lbs._ of radish seed on every acre of turnip land, with the turnip seed; the fly, preferring to feed on the radish plants, will, in such case, leave the turnip plants unmolested. one of the most effectual methods of preventing the ascent of insects on fruit trees, in the spring, is to draw a streak of tar round the body of the tree; but the surface of this soon becomes incrusted by the warmth of the atmosphere, and then the insects are enabled to pass this barrier. to remedy this, mix a proportion of oil with the tar, which will prevent the hardening of the exterior for a considerable length of time; and when the effects of the oil are dissipated, let the exterior be again softened with oil.--this plan is certainly one of the most efficacious for preventing insects from ascending the bodies of fruit trees. _the scab in sheep._--the shepherds, in spain, cure this disease with an ointment made of the trunk and roots of the juniper, by breaking them in small pieces, and infusing them in water. the sheep of this country are, however, but little liable to the scab. it is a fact well ascertained, that when apple trees are in bloom, if the _farina_ be gathered from the blossoms of a tree bearing sour fruit, and scattered on those of a tree bearing sweet, the apples produced from these blossoms will partake of the flavour of both trees. in this way the flavour of fruit may be changed for the better--a matter worthy of note, though perhaps not very profitable in practice. from munich, germany, we learn that dr vogel has announced the important discovery, that sulphuric acid, diluted with a certain proportion of water, and then applied to saw dust, to old linen, to paper, &c. will change these substances into gum and saccharine matter. m. chaptal, somewhere in his book on chymistry, has ventured to offer his opinion, very modestly however, that even the chemical art of making gold (the great secret of the philosopher's stone) will yet be discovered--that chymists will yet be convinced that all matter is the same, only different modifications. _calculation of the period of a second deluge._--according to the calculations of the learned astronomer of bremen, m. olbers, after a lapse of , years, a comet will approach to the earth in the same proximity as the moon; after , , years it will approach to the distance of , geographical miles, and then, if its attraction equals that of the earth, the waters of the ocean will be elevated , feet, and a deluge will necessarily ensue! after a lapse of , , years, it will clash with the earth. during the late inundation of the rhine, a hare, dislodged by the water took refuge in a tree. one of the boatmen who were traversing the inundated country, in canoes, to pick up the sufferers, observed the hare, steered for the tree, and without making his boat fast, climbed hastily up to seize the poor animal. the hare perceiving his danger, sprang from the tree into the boat, which was put in motion by the leap of the hare, and floated down the stream, leaving the boatman in his place upon the tree, in the disagreeable necessity of watching the rise of the waters. the rhetorical society at cortryk, in the netherlands, has lately offered a gold, and a silver medal, as a prize for a poem of lines, and an epitaph of lines, upon kotzebue. from a london paper we have the following advertisement--a _new species of man_. among the wonders of nature none have exceeded this extraordinary phenomenon--a man covered with scales, that rattle at the touch, is now in exhibition at the public rooms, , bond street. physicians and natural philosophers will find an extensive field open for their inquiries. by another of a late date it appears, that in dublin a _steam coach_ is advertised to commence running between that city and belfast, on the st feb. and is to run from one city to the other, and return every day. it is calculated to run at the rate of about irish (equal to about english) miles an hour. it is to carry the mail between the two cities. it is calculated that it will be found a safer mode of conveyance for passengers than carriages drawn by horses. the whole weight of the carnage and apparatus is estimated at about tons. _fires._--a letter from st. thomas, of the d march, mentions that the whole city of ponce, in porto rico, with the exception of one church, was destroyed by fire on the th of the preceding month. on the st of january last, a fire broke out at smyrna, which consumed buildings. on the night of the d march, a spacious hotel in lexington, (ken) was consumed--loss estimated at , dollars. from pittsburg, it appears that a part of the vast beds of coal in the hills surrounding that place, has been on fire for about years past; that the fire has, until lately, remained in a smouldering state, but has at length got vent, and that during the night it now exhibits the appearance of flame like a volcano. it is apprehended that much of the valuable material of coal, in the vicinity of that place, will probably be consumed before the fire will become extinguished. at canton, the imports from the u. states, for the last season, are stated at , , dollars, in specie, and , , dollars, in merchandize; exceeding that of the english company three or four millions. congress have passed a law for taking another census of the united states. the enumeration to commence on the first monday of august next, and to be completed in six months thereafter. accounts of manufacturing establishments, and of the numbers is employed therein, are to be duly noted. _a check to intemperance._--the select men in bedford, (mass.) have posted up, at the tavern in the town, a list of the names of persons notoriously addicted to drunkenness, and forbidden the sale of liquor to them, under penalty of the laws of that state against intemperate drinking. the steam-boat swift, rigged as a brig, is to depart from new york, _for rio de janeiro_, on the th of may--is now advertising for freight and passengers. the grand jury of putnam county, (geo.) lately presented, as a grievance existing there, (and probably not less there than in many places elsewhere) the practice, indulged in by the bar of villifying, without sufficient cause, the characters of suitors and witnesses. they request the aid of the court in discountenancing insolence of this kind. from a late petersburgh, (va.) paper, we have the following account of part of the remains of the formidable confederate tribes of indians, found in virginia when sir walter raleigh first ascended st. james' river, at the head of which confederacy was powhattan, the father of the celebrated pocahontas. these remains are a few of the tribes of the nottoways, to which tribe powhattan belonged, the panunkies and a few of the mattahonies. of the nottoways, says the account, only now remain, at the head of which is a woman, styled their queen, of the name of edie turner, of the age of about , and said to be quite intelligent, though illiterate. she is comfortably situated in a cottage, with the necessaries of life about her, and her share of the lands, (about acres, on nottoway river,) tolerably well cultivated. the language of her tribe is only spoken by her and two others. it is said to be of celtic origin, and as harmonious and expressive as the erse, irish, or welch. _'benefit of clergy.'_--paper was not made earlier than the fourteenth century--and printing in the century following. the art of reading made a very slow progress. to encourage it in england, the capital punishment of death was remitted if the criminal could read, which is termed 'benefit of clergy.' yet so small an edition of the bible as copies translated into english in the time of henry viii. was not wholly sold off in three years. _nugæ antiquæ._--before a. d. , ships of war in england had no port-holes for guns; they had only a few cannon placed on the deck. there is no mention of writing in the time of homer. ciphers, invented in hindoostan, were brought into france from arabia about the end of the tenth century. _respiration in frogs._--it appears from a series of curious experiments, performed by m. edwards, that frogs, toads, and lizards, are preserved alive and in health under water for weeks, by means of the air contained in the water, which they abstract, not by the lungs but by the skin. _chinese alphabet._--the chinese have , letters in use, and in maters of science they employ , , but their articulate sounds do not exceed thirty. _method of rendering glass less brittle._--let the glass vessel be put into a vessel of cold water, and let this water be heated boiling hot, and then allowed to cool slowly of itself, without taking out the glass. glasses treated in this way may, while cold, be suddenly filled with boiling hot water without any risk of their cracking. the gentleman who communicates the method, says, that he has often cooled such glasses to the temperature of °, and poured boiling water in them without experiencing any inconvenience from the suddenness of the change. if the glasses are to be exposed to a higher temperature than that of boiling water, boil them in oil. poultry. from the european magazine. sir--as the following account, together with the few observations i have made on the management and feeding of fowls, may prove acceptable, and afford some useful hints to many among the numerous readers of your entertaining and widely-circulated miscellany, you will oblige me by giving them a place in your work. i procured two pullets of the black spanish kind, which were hatched in june, , and fed them constantly myself twice a day, alternating their food, that is, i gave them corn in the morning, and in the afternoon boiled potatoes mixed with _fresh_ bran, but i never allowed them to take a _full meal_ of corn. they had a small orchard to range in, where, in the course of the day, they occasionally picked up worms and other insects; and, i have observed that poultry of all kinds eagerly seek for animal food even after they have satiated themselves with corn: indeed, i conceive a portion of animal food essentially requisite to preserve them in a healthy state. the above-mentioned pullets began to lay about the middle of november, and continued to do so till within the last ten days, when they began to moult their feathers, having produced _three hundred and sixty-seven eggs much larger and finer than those of the common fowl_. seven eggs weigh pound avoirdupois, so that i have been furnished with the astonishing weight of more than pounds of nutritious and wholesome food from _two hens_. they were never _broody_, nor shewed a disposition to sit at any time during the whole season, and i understand this property is peculiar to this species of fowl: it is, however, an advantage than otherwise, as the common kinds can incubate their eggs, and foster their young. g. c. jenner. _october th, ._ _ancient advice to parents._ teach children obedience, } and they shall {bless thee. modesty, } {not be ashamed. gratitude, } { receive benefits. charity, } {gain love. temperance,} {have wealth. prudence, } and {fortune will attend {them. justice, } {they will be honoured {by the world. sincerity, } {own hearts will not {reproach them. diligence, } and their {wealth will increase. benevolence, } {minds will be exalted. science, } {lives will be useful. religion, } {death will be happy. _comfortable discovery._--"laugh and grow fat" was the grand ancient specific for long life--"every sigh and groan drove a nail into our coffins," whilst a contrary excitation of the risible organs drew one out.--truly every generation groweth wiser, and we may live to witness ocular proofs that pain is merely an alleviator of indigestion, and the repudiation of a limb, under the doctor's saw, a pleasant and exhilarating morning exercise; in short, what may we not expect after reading the following: a french surgeon has published a long dissertation on the beneficial influence of groaning and crying on the nervous system. he contends that groaning and crying are the two grand operations by which nature allays anguish; and that he has uniformly observed, that those patients who give way to their natural feelings, more speedily recover from accidents and operations, than those who suppose that it is unworthy a man to betray such symptoms of cowardice as either to groan or to cry. he is always pleased by the crying and violent roaring of a patient during the time he is undergoing a surgical operation, because he is satisfied that he will thereby so sooth his nervous system, as to prevent fever and ensure a favourable termination.--from the benefit hysterical and other nervous patients derive from crying or groaning, he supposes that "by these processes of nature," the superabundant nervous power is exhausted, and that the system is in consequence rendered calm, and even the circulation of the blood diminished. he relates a case of a man, who, by means of crying and bawling, reduced his pulse from to in the course of two hours. that some patients often have a great satisfaction in groaning, and that hysterical patients often experience great relief from crying, are facts which no person will deny. as to the restless hypochondriacal subjects, or those who are never happy but when they are under some course of medical or dietetic treatment, the french surgeon assures them that they cannot do better than groan all night and cry all day. by following this rule, and observing an abstemious diet, a person will effectually escape disease, and may prolong life to an incredible extent. _oats years old._--in the highest point of a field, a mile south from forfar, scotland, there was a druids' place of worship, consisting of a circle of large stones, with one (the largest) in the middle. the field was fallowed last year, and this temple trenched, from which a very great quantity of stones were turned up. nothing particular, however, appeared, except a few bones that went to dust. the field this year was sown with barley, and this trenched part with the rest: so far as this trench extended, there are considerable quantities of oats, of various kinds, sprung up among the barley, the seeds of which must have remained there more than years. without the trenched ground there is not a head of oats to be seen. orders have been given to preserve these oat plants. _state of the rain guage in philadelphia._ january, inch - / february, march, _longevity._--in the parish of acton, middlesex, still exist the lineal posterity of the famous bishop cranmer, who was burnt at the stake by order of queen mary, nearly years ago. one of them, an old lady, named whytell, has completed her th year, and retains her intellectual and bodily faculties to a surprising extent. _west's painting._--the earl of egremont has purchased the celebrated easel study of "_death upon the pale horse_;" painted by mr. west; one of the most sublime productions of modern art. married, in hebron, connecticut, the celebrated lorenzo dow, to miss lucy doalbear, of montville. at harrisburg, dr. phineas jenks, a member of the house of representatives, from bucks county, to miss amelia, only daughter of the late governor snyder. _deaf and dumb marriage._--nov. , , a singular marriage was solemnized at kirkheaton, near huddersfield, between joshua barker and mary moorehouse. the man being deaf and dumb, could not repeat the necessary forms of the marriage ceremony; but this difficulty was obviated in an ingenious manner; as he was able to read, the book was presented to him, and he traced the words over with his finger. died, on the th instant, in tewksbury, near new germantown, (n. j.) frederick pickle, aged years. when he was years of age, he cut with a cradle sheaves of rye in a day. at he went into the woods and split chesnut rails in less than a day. he was regular and temperate in his habits, and enjoyed good health until within about a year before his death. his widow is , and they have lived in the marriage state years. time. i saw him hasting on his way, and mark'd his lightning flight, where'er he mov'd, there stern decay spread its destructive blight. rapid the gloomy phantom hied, envelop'd in the storm-- his eyes shone out in sullen pride, and fearful was his form. i saw him grasp the warrior's wreath, won in the gory fray-- the laurel withering sunk in death, its beauty fled away, that wreath was stained with bloody dew, unhallowed was its bloom-- it met the phantom's chilling view, and bow'd beneath its gloom. i saw him pass by beauty's bower, and listen to her lay; around the spot was many a flower blooming its summer day; with icy heart the spectre came, her lovely form compress'd; she met his lurid eye of flame-- the tombstone tells the rest. on youth's warm brow his hand he prest, 'twas cold as mouldering clay-- he laid his hand on manhood's breast, the life-pulse ceas'd to play. his fell siroc o'er nature passed, and low she drooped her head-- her blossoms withered in the blast, and all her verdure fled. florio. [_hudson whig._ winter evening's amusement for jane and me. in summer days i till the ground, and tug and toil and get my bread-- no interval can there be found, between my labour and my bed, my wife declines to knit by night, and i to read by candle-light. but when the south receives the sun beyond the equinoctial line-- when all my summer work is done substantial pleasures then are mine, then jane begins to knit at night, and i to read by candle-light. i'm then content, and never sigh, nor fly from home some bliss to find; and jane is pleased as well as i, it so completely feasts her mind, to sit her down to knit by night, and hear me read by candle-light. for when i read she always hears, and what she hears, she tries to scan; when ought to her obscure appears, then i explain it if i can, o how she loves to knit by night and hear me read by candle-light! but when she drops a stitch, and gapes, soon gapes again, and nods her head, i close my book, and say, perhaps 'tis time, my dear, to go to bed-- so knit again to-morrow night, and hear me read by candle-light. [_olive branch._ youth and old age. days of my youth! ye have glided away; hairs of my youth! ye are frosted and gray; eyes of my youth! your keen sight is no more cheeks of my youth! ye are furrow'd all o'er; strength of my youth! all your vigour is gone; thoughts of my youth! your gay visions are flown. days of my youth! i wish not your recal; hairs of my youth! i'm content you should fall; eyes of my youth! ye much evil have seen; cheeks of my youth! bathed in tears have ye been; strength of my youth! why lament your decay; thoughts of my youth! ye have led me astray; days of my age! ye will shortly be past; pains of my age! yet awhile ye can last; joys of my age! in true wisdom delight; eyes of my age! be religion your light; thoughts of my age! dread ye not the cold sod; hopes of my age! be ye fixed on your god! cure for trouble. by s. osborne. ben brisk a philosopher was, in the genuine sense of the word; and he held that repining, whatever the cause, was unmanly, and weak, and absurd. tom tipple, when trouble intruded, and his fortune and credit were sunk, by a too common error deluded, drown'd trouble, and made himself drunk. but ben had a way of his own, when grievances made him uneasy; he bade the blue devils begone! brav'd trouble, and made himself--_busy_. when sorrow imbitters our days, and poisons each source of enjoyment, the surest specific, he says, for trouble and grief, is--_employment_. lines, inscribed to william willtshire, esq. heaven's noblest attribute! a richer gem than ever deck'd the monarch's diadem, art thou sweet mercy! yet alas, how rare, amid this world of crime, thy triumphs are! how dimly burns thy pure etherial fire! how seldom does its warmth the clay wrapt heart inspire! yet, now and then, upon the path of time, it blazes forth with dazzling ray sublime; sheds o'er this vale of tears it's heaven lit flame; and throws a halo round the human name. see! on the desert's verge, those wasted forms, which life's expiring spark but feebly warms; wore down by pain, toil, care, and wretchedness, and clad in squalid misery's abject dress: and mark the hectic flush, the broken sigh, and the wild glance that lights each sunken eye-- the thrilling pulse of hope--the withering fear that checks the quick throb in its full career-- the eager, half form'd question, and the start, as if the accents shook the bursting heart-- "oh! heavens! and will he come, and shall we be restor'd once more to life, and liberty? or must we in our galling bonds remain?-- but hush!--hark!--lo a horseman on the plain!" 'tis he! he comes, he pities, succours, saves the captives from their chains, the dying from their graves. thine, willtshire, was the deed; and oh! to thee is due the tribute of the brave and free!-- noble, and generous! round thy brow shall twine a fairer wreath, a laurel more divine, than that which e'er the blood stain'd hero wore: or science' sons in proudest moment wore. and when the sculptur'd bust, the burnish'd urn, the victor's trophies shall to dust return: when gone are all that wealth and power bestow; thy fame, undimm'd, shall shine--thy worth shall brighter glow. n. [_n. y. evening post._ on intemperance. ----"but, at last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder."--prov. o, take the maddening bowl away! remove the poisonous cup! my soul is sick--its burning ray hath drunk my spirit up: take--take it from my loathing lip ere madness fires my brain; take--take it hence! nor let me sip its liquid death again. o dash it on the thirsty earth, for i will drink no more: it cannot cheer the heart with mirth that grief hath wounded sore; for serpents wreath its sparkling brim, and adders lurk below: it hath no soothing charms for him who sinks oppress'd with wo. say not, "behold its ruddy hue-- o press it to thy lips!" for 'tis more deadly than the dew that from the upas drips; it is more poisonous than the stream which deadly nightshade leaves: its joys are transient as the beam that lights its ruddy waves. say not "it hath a powerful spell to sooth the soul of care;" say not, "it calms the bosom's swell and drives away despair!" art thou its votary?--ask thy soul-- thy soul in misery deep-- yea, ask thy conscience if the bowl can give _eternal sleep_! then, hence, away! thou deadly foe of happiness the whole; away--away!--i feel thy blow, thou _palsy_ of the soul! henceforth i ask no more of thee, thou bane of adam's race, but to a heavenly fountain flee, and drink the _dews of grace_. for the rural magazine. hope. for we have not a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities: but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. heb. iv. . when gathering clouds around i view, and days are dark, and friends are few, on him i lean, who, not in vain, experienc'd every human pain, he sees my wants, allays my fears, and counts and treasures up my tears. if aught should tempt my soul to stray, from heavenly virtue's narrow way, to fly the good i would pursue, or do the sin i would not do, still he who felt temptation's power, shall guard me in that dangerous hour. if wounded love my bosom swell, deceiv'd by those i priz'd too well, he shall his pitying aid bestow, who felt on earth severer wo; at once betrayed, denied, or fled, by all that shar'd his daily bread. when vexing thoughts within me rise, and, sore dismay'd my spirit dies, yet he who once vouchsaf'd to bear, the sickening anguish of despair, shall sweetly sooth; shall gently dry, the throbbing heart, the streaming eye. when sorrowing o'er some stone i bend, which covers all that was a friend, and from his voice, his hand, his smile, divides me--for a little while-- thou, saviour see'st the tears i shed, for thou didst weep o'er lazarus dead. and o, when i have safely past, through every conflict--but the last, still, still unchanging, watch beside, my painful bed--for thou hast died; then point to realms of cloudless day, and wipe the latest tear away. a. b. c. to my wife, _on the anniversary of her wedding-day which was also her birth-day._ by samuel bishop. "thee, mary, with this ring i wed"-- so, fourteen years ago, i said.-- behold another ring!--"for what?" "to wed thee o'er again?"--why not? with that first ring i married youth, grace, beauty, innocence, and truth; taste long admir'd, sense long rever'd, and all my molly then appear'd. if she, by merit since disclos'd, prove twice the woman i suppos'd, i plead that double merit now, to justify a double vow. here then to-day, (with faith as sure, with ardour as intense, as pure, as when, amidst the rites divine, i took thy troth, and plighted mine,) to thee, sweet girl, my second ring a token and a pledge i bring: with this i wed, till death us part, thy riper virtues to my heart; those virtues, which before untried the wife has added to the bride: those virtues, whose progressive claim, endearing wedlock's very name, my soul enjoys, my song approves, for conscience' sake, as well as love's. and why?--they shew me every hour, honour's high thought, affection's power, discretion's deed, sound judgment's sentence, and teach me all things--but repentance. the icelander's song. from a ms. volume of poems, by mr. g. rathbone. the southern may talk of his meads crown'd with flow'rs, where the gale, breathing incense, unceasingly flies; he may vaunt the rich hue of his rose-tangled bowers or the sapphire and gold of his bright sunny skies; but it is not a theme that will light up emotion in an icelander's breast; since his pride and his boast are his hoar-cover'd mountains, that frown on the ocean, lit up with the ice-blink that girdles the coast. when the winter of night darkles round him all dreary, and his snow-bosom'd hills mourn the absence of day, with a heart void of care, and with limbs seldom weary, he launches his bark in pursuit of his prey; rough is his bed, and uneasy his pillow, when far off in ocean he rambles from home; blithe scuds his boat, as her prow cleaves the billow of the gem-spangled brine, with its ridges of foam. dear is the dawn of the fork'd northern light, that illumines old hecla's broad cone with its rays; and dearer its splendour, increasingly bright, when the peaks of the ice-bergs appear in the blaze: brightly it plays on his dart's glossy pride, when it flies, steep'd in spray, on the snake's scaly crest, to bury its point in the whale's finny hide, or flesh its curv'd barb in the sea-lion's chest. dear is the summer of day, when the fountains, unfetter'd and free, pour the bright crystal stream; dear is the cataract's leap in the mountains, when sparkling at night in the moon's silver beam; dear are the shoals where the sea-horse is bounding, with his icicled mane and his eyeballs of fire; but dearer than all, is the comfort surrounding the wife of his choice, and the hearth of his sire. to the snow-drop. joyous herald of the spring, pretty snow-drop, hail! with thee, modest trembler, bring summer's balmy gale. com'st to tell us winter's fled? bright informer, hail! welcome guest, why hang thy head. why thy cheek so pale? dost thou droop thy head in wo, poor glory of an hour? since not the summer's heat shall glow for thee, thou short-liv'd flow'r thou art only come, alas! to tell us spring is near; like a fleeting shade to pass, droop, and disappear. thus some son of virtue may, tread his bright career, guide by mild religion's ray, erring mortals here: ere his winter toils are done, or summer hopes arise, sinks he, youth and vigour gone, points to heav'n--and dies.--helen. * * * * * philadelphia, published monthly by richards & caleb johnson, _no. , market street_, at $ . per annum. * * * * * griggs & dickinson--_printers, whitehall_. station amusements in new zealand by lady barker preface. the interest shown by the public in the simple and true account of every-day life in new zealand, published by the author three years ago, has encouraged her to enlarge upon the theme. this volume is but a continuation of "station life," with this difference: that whereas that little book dwelt somewhat upon practical matters, these pages are entirely devoted to reminiscences of the idler hours of a settler's life. many readers have friends and relations out in those beautiful distant islands, and though her book should possess no wider interest, the author hopes that these at least will care to know exactly what sort of life their absent dear ones are leading. one thing is certain: that few books can ever have afforded so much pleasure to their authors, or can have appeared more completely to write themselves, than "station life," and this, its sequel. m. a. b. chapter i: a bush picnic. since my return to england, two years ago, i have been frequently asked by my friends and acquaintances, "how did you amuse yourself up at the station?" i am generally tempted to reply, "we were all too busy to need amusement;" but when i come to think the matter over calmly and dispassionately, i find that a great many of our occupations may be classed under the head of play rather than work. but that would hardly give a fair idea of our lives there, either. it would be more correct to say perhaps, that most of our simple pleasures were composed of a solid layer of usefulness underneath the froth of fun and frolic. i purpose therefore in these sketches to describe some of the pursuits which afforded us a keen enjoyment at the time,--an enjoyment arising from perfect health, simple tastes, and an exquisite climate. it will be as well to begin with the description of one of the picnics, which were favourite amusements in our home, nestled in a valley of the malvern hills of canterbury. these hills are of a very respectable height, and constitute in fact the lowest slopes of the great southern alps, which rise to snow-clad peaks behind them. our little wooden homestead stood at the head of a sunny, sheltered valley, and around it we could see the hills gradually rolling into downs, which in their turn were smoothed out, some ten or twelve miles off, into the dead level of the plains. the only drawback to the picturesque beauty of these lower ranges is the absence of forest, or as it is called there, bush. behind the malvern hills, where they begin to rise into steeper ascents, lies many and many a mile of bush-clad mountain, making deep blue shadows when the setting sun brings the grand alpine range into sharp white outline against the background of dazzling italian sky. but just here, where my beloved antipodean home stood, we had no trees whatever, except those which we had planted ourselves, and whose growth we watched with eager interest. i dwell a little upon this point, to try to convey to any one who may glance at these pages, how we all,--dwellers among tree-less hills as we were,--longed and pined for the sights and sounds of a "bush." quite out of view from the house or garden, and about seven miles away, lay a mountain pass, or saddle, over a range, which was densely wooded, and from whose highest peak we could see a wide extent of timbered country. often in our evening rides we have gone round by that saddle, in spite of a break-neck track and quicksands and bogs, just to satisfy our constant longing for green leaves, waving branches, and the twitter of birds. whenever any wood was wanted for building a stockyard, or slabbing a well, or making a post-and-rail fence around a new paddock, we were obliged to take out a government license to cut wood in this splendid bush. armed with the necessary document the next step was to engage "bushmen," or woodcutters by profession, who felled and cut the timber into the proper lengths, and stacked it neatly in a clearing, where it could get dry and seasoned. these stacks were often placed in such inaccessible and rocky parts of the steep mountain side, that they had to be brought down to the flat in rude little sledges, drawn by a bullock, who required to be trained to the work, and to possess so steady and equable a disposition as to be indifferent to the annoyance of great logs of heavy wood dangling and bumping against his heels as the sledge pursued its uneven way down the bed of a mountain torrent, in default of a better road. imagine, then, a beautiful day in our early new zealand autumn. for a week past, a furious north-westerly gale had been blowing down the gorges of the rakaia and the selwyn, as if it had come out of a funnel, and sweeping across the great shelterless plains with irresistible force. we had been close prisoners to the house all those days, dreading to open a door to go out for wood or water, lest a terrific blast should rush in and whip the light shingle roof off. not an animal could be seen out of doors; they had all taken shelter on the lee-side of the gorse hedges, which are always planted round a garden to give the vegetables a chance of coming up. on the sky-line of the hills could be perceived towards evening, mobs of sheep feeding with their heads _up_-wind, and travelling to the high camping-grounds which they always select in preference to a valley. the yellow tussocks were bending all one way, perfectly flat to the ground, and the shingle on the gravel walk outside rattled like hail against the low latticed windows. the uproar from the gale was indescribable, and the little fragile house swayed and shook as the furious gusts hurled themselves against it. inside its shelter, the pictures were blowing out from the walls, until i expected them to be shaken off their hooks even in those rooms which had plank walls lined with papered canvas; whilst in the kitchen, store-room, etc., whose sides were made of cob, the dust blew in fine clouds from the pulverized walls, penetrating even to the dairy, and settling half an inch thick on my precious cream. at last, when our skin felt like tightly drawn parchment, and our ears and eyes had long been filled with powdered earth, the wind dropped at sunset as suddenly as it had risen five days before. we ventured out to breathe the dust-laden atmosphere, and to look if the swollen creeks (swollen because snow-fed) had done or threatened to do any mischief, and saw on the south-west horizon great fleecy masses of cloud driving rapidly up before a chill icy breeze. hurrah, here comes a sou'-wester! the parched-up earth, the shrivelled leaves, the dusty grass, all needed the blessed damp air. in an hour it was upon us. we had barely time to house the cows and horses, to feed the fowls, and secure them in their own shed, and to light a roaring coal (or rather lignite, for it is not true coal) fire in the drawing-room, when, with a few warning splashes, the deluge of cold rain came steadily down, and we went to sleep to the welcome sound of its refreshing patter. all that i have been describing was the weather of the past week. disagreeable as it might have been, it was needed in both its hot and cold, dry and wet extremes, to make a true new zealand day. the furious nor'-wester had blown every fleck of cloud below the horizon, and dried the air until it was as light as ether. the "s'utherly buster," on the other hand, had cooled and refreshed everything in the most delicious way, and a perfect day had come at last. what words can describe the pleasure it is to inhale such an atmosphere? one feels as if old age or sickness or even sorrow, could hardly exist beneath such a spotless vault of blue as stretched out above our happy heads. i have often been told that this feeling of intense pleasure on a fine day, which is peculiar to new zealand, is really a very low form of animal enjoyment. it may be so, but i only know that i never stood in the verandah early in the morning of such a day as i am trying to sketch in pen and ink now, without feeling the highest spiritual joy, the deepest thankfulness to the loving father who had made his beautiful world so fair, and who would fain lead us through its paths of pleasantness to a still more glorious, home, which will be free from the shadows brooding from beneath sin's out-stretched wings over this one. as i stood in the porch i have often fancied i could seethe animals and even the poultry expressing in dumb brute fashion, their joy and gratitude to the god from whom all blessings flow. but to return to the verandah, although we have never left it. presently f---- came out, and i said with a sigh, born of deep content and happiness, "what a day!" "yes," answered f----: "a heavenly day indeed: well worth waiting for. i want to go and see how the men are getting on in the bush. will you like to come too?" "of course i will. what can be more enchanting than the prospect of spending such sunny hours in that glorious bush?" so after breakfast i give my few simple orders to the cook, and prepare, to pack a "maori kit," or flat basket made of flax, which could be fastened to my side-saddle, with the preparations for our luncheon. first some mutton chops had to be trimmed and prepared, all ready to be cooked when we got there. these were neatly folded up in clean paper; and a little packet of tea, a few lumps of white sugar, a tiny wooden contrivance for holding salt and pepper, and a couple of knives and forks, were added to the parcel. so much for the contents of the basket. they needed to be carefully packed so as not to rattle in any way, or helen, my pretty bay mare, would soon have got rid of the luncheon--and me. i wrapped up three or four large raw potatoes in separate bits of paper, and slipped them into f----'s pockets when he was looking another way, and then began the real difficulty of my picnic: how was the little tin tea-pot and an odd delf cup to be carried? f---- objected to put them also in his pocket, assuring me that i could make very good tea by putting my packet of the fragrant leaves into the bushmen's kettle, and drinking it afterwards out of one of their pannikins. he tried to bribe me to this latter piece of simplicity by promising to wash the tin pannikin out for me first. now i was not dainty or over particular; i could not have enjoyed my new zealand life so thoroughly if i had been either; but i did not like the idea of using the bushmen's tea equipage. in the first place, the tea never tastes the same when made in their way, and allowed to boil for a moment or two after the leaves have been thrown in, before the kettle is taken off the fire; and in the next place, it is very difficult to drink tea out of a pannikin; for it becomes so hot directly we put the scalding liquid into it, that long after the tea is cool enough to drink, the pannikin still continues too hot to touch. but i said so pathetically, "you know how wretched i am without my tea," that f----'s heart relented, and he managed to stow away the little teapot and the cup. that cup bore a charmed life. it accompanied me on all my excursions, escaping unbroken; and is, i believe, in existence now, spending its honoured old age in the recesses of a cupboard. after the luncheon, the next question to be decided is, which of the dogs are to join the expedition. hector, of course; he is the master's colley, and would no more look at a sheep, except in the way of business, than he would fly. rose, a little short-haired terrier, was the most fascinating of dog companions, and i pleaded hard for her, as she was an especial pet; though there were too many lambs belonging to a summer lambing (in new zealand the winter is the usual lambing season) in the sheltered paddocks beneath the bush, to make it quite safe for her to be one of the party. she would not kill or hurt a lamb on any account, but she always appeared anxious to play with the little creatures; and as her own spotless coat was as white as theirs, she often managed to get quite close to a flock of sheep before they perceived that she belonged to the dreaded race of dogs. when the timid animals found out their mistake, a regular stampede used to ensue; and it was not supposed to be good for the health of the old or young sheep to hurry up the hill-sides in such wild fashion as that in which they rushed away from rose's attempts to intrude on their society. nettle may come, for he is but a tiny terrier, and so fond of his mistress that he never strays a yard away from her horse's heels. brisk, my beautiful, stupid water-spaniel, is also allowed an outing. he is perfect to look at, but not having had any educational advantages in his youth, is an utter fool; amiable, indeed, but not the less a fool. garibaldi, another colley, is suffering a long penal sentence of being tied up to his barrel, on account of divers unlawful chases after sheep which were not wanted; and dear old jip, though she pretends to be very anxious to accompany us; is far too fat and too rheumatic to keep pace with our long stretching gallop up the valley. at last we were fairly off about eleven o'clock, and an hour's easy canter, intersected by many "flat-jumps," or rather "water-jumps," across the numerous creeks, brought unto the foot of the bush-clad mountain. after that our pace became a very sober one, as the track resembled a broken rocky staircase more than a bridle-path. but such as it was, our sure-footed horses carried us safely up and down its rugged steeps, without making a single false step. no mule can be more sure-footed than a new zealand horse. he will carry his rider anywhere, if only that rider trusts entirely to him, nor attempts to guide him in any way. during the last half-hour of our slow and cat-like climb, we could hear the ring of the bushmen's axes, and the warning shouts preceding the crashing fall of a black birch. fallen logs and deep ruts made by the sledges in their descent, added to the difficulties of the track; and i was so faint-hearted as to entreat piteously, on more than one occasion, when helen paused and shook her head preparatory to climbing over a barricade, to be "taken off." but f---- had been used to these dreadful roads for too many years to regard them in the same light as i did, and would answer carelessly, "nonsense: you're as safe as if you were sitting in an arm-chair." all i can say is, it might have been so, but i did not feel at all like it. however, the event proved him to have been right, and we reached the clearing in safety. here we dismounted, and led the horses to a place where they could nibble some grass, and rest in the cool shade. the saddles and bridles were soon removed, and halters improvised out of the new zealand flax, which can be turned to so many uses. having provided for the comfort of our faithful animals, our next step was to look for the bushmen. the spot which we had reached was their temporary home in the heart of the forest, but their work was being carried on elsewhere. i could not have told from which side the regular ringing axe-strokes proceeded, so confusing were the echoes from the cliffs around us; but after a moment's silent pause f---- said, "if we follow that track (pointing to a slightly cleared passage among the trees) we shall come upon them." so i kilted up my linsey skirt, and hung up my little jacket, necessary for protection against the evening air, on a bough out of the wekas' reach, whilst i followed f---- through tangled creepers, "over brake, over brier," towards the place from whence the noise of falling trees proceeded. by the time we reached it, our scratched hands and faces bore traces of the thorny undergrowth which had barred our way; but all minor discomforts were forgotten in the picturesque beauty of the spot. around us lay the forest-kings, majestic still in their overthrow, whilst substantial stacks of cut-up and split timber witnessed to the skill and industry of the stalwart figures before us, who reddened through their sunburn with surprise and shyness at seeing a lady. they need not have been afraid of me, for i had long ago made friends with them, and during the preceeding winter had established a sort of night-school in my dining-room, for all the hands employed on the station, and these two men had been amongst my most constant pupils. one of them, a big yorkshire-man, was very backward in his "larning," and though he plodded on diligently, never got beyond the simplest words in the largest type. small print puzzled him at once, and he had a habit of standing or sitting with his back to me whilst repeating his lessons. nothing would induce him to face me. the moment it became his turn to go on with the chapter out of the bible, with which we commenced our studies, that instant he turned his broad shoulders towards me, and i could only, hear the faintest murmurs issuing from the depths of a great beard. remonstrance would have scared my shy pupil away, so i was fain to put up with his own method of instruction. but this is a digression, and i want to make you see with my eyes the beautiful glimpses of distant country lying around the bold wooded cliff on which we were standing. the ground fell away from our feet so completely in some places, that we could see over the tops of the high trees around us, whilst in others the landscape appeared framed in an arch of quivering foliage. a noisy little creek chattered and babbled as it hurried along to join its big brother down below, and kept a fringe of exquisite ferns, which grew along its banks, brightly green by its moisture. each tree, if taken by itself, was more like an umbrella than anything else to english eyes, for in these primitive forests, where no kind pruning hand has ever touched them, they shoot up, straight and branchless, into the free air above, where they spread a leafy crown out to the sunbeams. beneath the dense shade of these matted branches grew a luxuriant shrubbery, whose every leaf was a marvel of delicate beauty, and ferns found here a home such as they might seek elsewhere in vain. flowers were very rare, and i did not observe many berries, but these conditions vary in different parts of the beautiful middle island. that was a fair and fertile land stretching out before us, intersected by the deep banks of the rakaia, with here and there a tiny patch of emerald green and a white dot, representing the house and english grass paddock of a new settler. in the background the bush-covered mountains rose ever higher and higher in bolder outline, till they shook off their leafy clothing, and stood out in steep cliffs and scaurs from the snow-clad glacier region of the mountain range running from north to south, and forming the back bone of the island. i may perhaps make you see the yellow, river-furrowed plains, and the great confusion of rising ground behind them, but cannot make you see, still less feel, the atmosphere around, quivering in a summer haze in the valley beneath, and stirred to the faintest summer wind-sighs as it moved among the pines and birches overhead. its lightness was its most striking peculiarity. you felt as if your lungs could never weary of inhaling deep breaths of such an air. warm without oppression, cool without a chill. i can find nothing but paradoxes to describe it. as for fatigue, one's muscles might get tired, and need rest, but the usual depression and weariness attending over-exertion could not exist in such an atmosphere. one felt like a happy child; pleased at nothing, content to exist where existence was a pleasure. you could not find more favourable specimens of new zealand colonists than the two men, trew and domville, who stood before us in their working dress of red flannel shirts and moleskin trousers, "cookham" boots and digger's plush hats. three years before this day they had landed at port lyttleton, with no other capital than their strong, willing arms, and their sober, sensible heads. very different is their appearance to-day from what it was on their arrival; and the change in their position and circumstances is as great. their bodily frames have filled out and developed under the influence of the healthy climate and abundance of mutton, until they look ten years younger and twice as strong, and each man owns a cottage and twenty acres of freehold land, at which he works in spare time, as well as having more pounds than he ever possessed pence in the old country, put safely away in the bank. there can be no doubt about the future of any working man or woman in our new zealand colonies. it rests in their own hands, under god's blessing, and the history of the whole human race shows us that he always has blessed honest labour and rightly directed efforts to do our duty in this world. sobriety and industry are the first essentials to success. possessing these moral qualifications, and a pair of hands, a man may rear up his children in those beautiful distant lands in ignorance of what hunger; or thirst, or grinding poverty means. hitherto the want of places of worship, and schools for the children, have been a sad drawback to the material advantages of colonization at the antipodes; but these blessings are increasing every day, and the need of them creates the supply. the great mistake made in england, next to that of sending out worthless idle paupers, who have never done a hand's turn for themselves here, and are still less likely to do it elsewhere, is for parents and guardians to ship off to new zealand young men who have received the up-bringing and education of gentlemen, without a shilling in their pockets, under the vague idea that something will turn up for them in a new place. there is nothing which can turn up, for the machinery of civilization is reduced to the most primitive scale in these countries; and i have known pounds per annum regarded as a monstrous salary to be drawn by a hard-worked official of some twenty years standing and great experience in the colony. from this we may judge of the chances of remunerative employment for a raw unfledged youth, with a smattering of classical learning. at first they simply "loaf" (as it is called there) on their acquaintances and friends. at the end of six months their clothes are beginning to look shabby; they feel they _ought_ to do something, and they make day by day the terrible discovery that there is nothing for them to do in their own rank of life. many a poor clergyman's son, sooner than return to the home which has been so pinched to furnish forth his passage money and outfit, takes a shepherd's billet, though he generally makes a very bad shepherd for the first year or two; or drives bullocks, or perhaps wanders vaguely over the country, looking for work, and getting food and lodging indeed, for inhospitality is unknown, but no pay. sometimes they go to the diggings, only to find that money is as necessary there as anywhere, and that they are not fitted to dig in wet holes for eight or ten hours a day. often these poor young men go home again, and it is the best thing they can do, for at least they have gained some knowledge of life, on its dark as well as its brighter side. but still oftener, alas, they go hopelessly to the bad, degenerating into billiard markers, piano players at dancing saloons, cattle drivers, and their friends probably lose sight of them. once i was riding with my husband up a lovely gulley, when we heard the crack of a stockwhip, sounding strangely through the deep eternal silence of a new zealand valley, and a turn of the track showed us a heavy, timber-laden bullock-waggon labouring slowly along. at the head of the long team sauntered the driver, in the usual rough-and-ready costume, with his soft plush hat pulled low over his face, and pulling vigorously at a clay pipe. in spite of all the outer surroundings, something in the man's walk and dejected attitude struck my imagination, and i made some remark to my companion. the sound of my voice reached the bullock-driver's ears; he looked up, and on seeing a lady, took his pipe out of his mouth, his hat off his head, and forcing his beasts a little aside, stood at their head to let us pass. i smiled and nodded, receiving in return a perfect and profound bow, and the most melancholy glance i have ever seen in human eyes. "good gracious, f----," i cried, when we had passed, "who is that man?" "that is sir so-and-so's third son," he replied: "they sent him out here without a shilling, five years ago, and that is what he has come to: a working man, living with working men. he looks heart-broken, poor fellow, doesn't he?" i, acting upon impulse, as any woman would have done, turning back and rode up to him, finding it very difficult to frame my pity and sympathy in coherent words. "no thank you, ma'am," was all the answer i could get, in the most refined, gentlemanly tone of voice: "i'm very well as i am. i should only have the struggle all over again if i made any change now. it is the truest kindness to leave me alone." he would not even shake hands with me; so i rode back; discomfited, to hear from f---- that he had made many attempts to befriend him, but without success. "in fact," concluded f----, with some embarrassment, "he drinks dreadfully, poor fellow. of course that is the secret of all his wretchedness, but i believe despair drove him to it in the first instance." i have also known an ex-dragoon officer working as a clerk in an attorney's office at fifteen shillings a week, who lived like a mechanic, and yet spake and stepped like his old self; one listened involuntarily for the clink of the sabre and spur whenever he moved across the room. this has been a terrible digression, almost a social essay in fact; but i have it so much at heart to dissuade fathers and mothers from sending their sons so far away without any certainty of employment. capitalists, even small ones, do well in new zealand: the labouring classes still better; but there is no place yet for the educated gentleman without money, and with hands unused to and unfit for manual labour and the downward path is just as smooth and pleasant at first there, as anywhere else. trew and domville soon got over their momentary shyness, and answered my inquiries about their families. then i had a short talk with them, but on the principle that it is "ill speaking to a fasting man," we agreed to adjourn to the clearing, where they had built a rough log hut for temporary shelter, and have our dinner. they had provided themselves with some bacon; but were very glad to accept of f----'s offer of mutton, to be had for the trouble of fetching it. when we reached the little shanty, trew produced some capital bread, he had baked the evening before in a camp-oven; f----'s pockets were emptied of their load of potatoes, which were put to roast in the wood embers; rashers of bacon and mutton chops spluttered and fizzed side-by-side on a monster gridiron with tall feet, so as to allow it to stand by itself over the clear fire, and we turned our chops from time to time by means of a fork extemporized out of a pronged stick. over another fire, a little way to leeward, hung the bushmen's kettle on an iron tripod, and, so soon as it boiled, my little teapot was filled before domville threw in his great fist-full of tea. i had brought a tiny phial of cream in the pocket of my saddle, but the men thought it spoiled the flavour of the tea, which they always drink "_neat_," as they call it. the temperance society could draw many interesting statistics from the amount of hard work which is done in new zealand on tea. now, i am sorry to say, beer is creeping up to the stations, and is served out at shearing time and so on; but in the old days all the hard work used to be done on tea, and tea alone, the men always declaring they worked far better on it than on beer. "when we have as much good bread and mutton as we can eat," they would say, "we don't feel to miss the beer we used to drink in england;" and at the end of a year or two of tea and water-drinking, their bright eyes and splendid physical condition showed plainly enough which was the best kind of beverage to work, and work hard too, upon. so there we sat round the fire: f---- with the men, and i, a little way off, out of the smoke, with the dogs. overhead, the sunlight streamed down on the grass which had sprung up, as it always does in a clearing; the rustle among the lofty tree tops made a delicious murmur high up in the air; a waft of cool breeze flitted past us laden with the scent of newly-cut wood (and who does not know that nice, _clean_ perfume?); innumerable paroquets almost brushed us with their emerald-green wings, whilst the tamer robin or the dingy but melodious bell-bird came near to watch the intruders. the sweet clear whistle of the tui or parson-bird--so called from his glossy black suit and white wattles curling exactly where a clergy-man's bands would be,--could be heard at a distance; whilst overhead the soft cooing of the wild pigeons, and the hoarse croak of the ka-ka or native parrot, made up the music of the birds' orchestra. ah, how delicious it all was,--the robinson crusoe feel of the whole thing; the heavenly air, the fluttering leaves, the birds' chirrups and whistle, and the foreground of happy, healthy men! rose and i had enough to do, even with nettle's assistance, in acting as police to keep off those bold thieves, the wekas, who are as impudent as they are tame and fearless. in appearance they resemble exactly a stout hen pheasant, without its long tail; but they belong to the apterix family, and have no wings, only a tiny useless pinion at each shoulder, furnished with a claw like a small fish-hook: what is the use of this claw i was never able to discover. when startled or hunted, the weka glides, for it can scarcely be called running, with incredible swiftness and in perfect silence, to the nearest cover. a tussock, a clump of flax, a tuft of tall tohi grass, all serve as hiding-places; and, wingless as she is, the weka can hold her own very well against her enemies, the dogs. i really believe the great desire of brisk's life was to catch a weka. he started many, but used to go sniffing and barking round the flax bush where it had taken refuge at first, long after the clever, cunning bird had glided from its shelter to another cover further off. after dinner was over and domville had brought back the tin plates and pannikins from the creek where he had washed them up, pipes were lighted, and a few minutes smoking served to rest and refresh the men, who had been working since their six o'clock breakfast. the daylight hours were too precious however to be wasted in smoking. trew and domville would not have had that comfortable nest-egg standing in their name at the bank in christchurch, if they had spent much time over their pipes; so after a very short "spell" they got up from the fallen log of wood which had served them for a bench, and suggested that f---- should accompany them back to where their work lay. "you don't mind being left?" asked f----. "certainly not," replied i. "i have got the dogs for company, and a book in my pocket. i daresay i shall not read much, however, for it is so beautiful to sit here and watch the changing lights and shadows." and so it was, most beautiful and thoroughly delightful. i sat on the short sweet grass, which springs upon the rich loam of fallen leaves the moment sunlight is admitted into the heart of a bush. no one plants it; probably the birds carry the seeds; yet it grows freely after a clearing has been made. nature lays down a green sward directly on the rich virgin mould, and sets to work besides to cover up the unsightly stems and holes of the fallen timber with luxuriant tufts of a species of hart's-tongue fern, which grows almost as freely as an orchid on decayed timber. i was so still and silent that innumerable forest birds came about me. a wood pigeon alighted on a branch close by, and sat preening her radiant plumage in a bath of golden sunlight. the profound stillness was stirred now and then by a soft sighing breeze which passed over the tree tops, and made the delicate foliage of the undergrowth around me quiver and rustle. i had purposely scattered the remains of our meal in a spot where the birds could see the crumbs, and it was not long before the clever little creatures availed themselves of the unexpected feast. so perfectly tame and friendly were they, that i felt as if i were the intruder, and bound by all the laws of aerial chivalry to keep the peace. but this was no easy matter where rose and nettle were concerned, for when an imprudent weka appeared on the sylvan scene, looking around-as if to say, "who's afraid?" it was more than i could do to keep the little terriers from giving chase. brisk, too, blundered after them, but i had no fear of his destroying the charm of the day by taking even a weka's life. thus the delicious afternoon wore on, until it was time to boil the kettle once more, and make a cup of tea before setting out homewards. the lengthening shadows added fresh tenderness and beauty to the peaceful scene, and the sky began to paint itself in its exquisite sunset hues. it has been usual to praise the tints of tropic skies when the day is declining; but never, in any of my wanderings to east and west indies, have i seen such gorgeous evening colours as those which glorify new zealand skies. a loud coo-ee summoned f---- to tea, and directly afterwards the horses were re-saddled, the now empty flax basket filled with the obnoxious teapot and cup, wrapped in many layers of flax leaves, to prevent their rattling, and we bade good night to the tired bushmen. we left them at their tea, and i was much struck to observe that though they looked like men who had done a hard day's work, there was none of the exhaustion we often see in england depicted on the labouring man's face. instead of a hot crowded room, these bushmen were going to sleep in their log hut, where the fresh pure air could circulate through every nook and cranny. they had each their pair of red blankets, one to spread over a heap of freshly cut tussocks, which formed a delicious elastic mattrass, and the other to serve as a coverlet. during the day these blankets were always hung outside on a tree, out of the reach of the most investigating weka. you may be sure i had not come empty-handed in the way of books and papers, and my last glance as i rode away rested on trew opening a number of _good words_ [note: _evening hours_ was not in existence at that time, or else its pages are just what those simple god-fearing men would have appreciated and enjoyed. _good words_ and the _leisure hour_ used to be their favourite periodicals, and the kindness of english friends kept me also well supplied with copies of miss marsh's little books, which were read with the deepest and most eager interest.] with the pleased-expression of a child examining a packet of toys. and so we rode slowly home through the delicious gloaming, with the evening air cooled to freshness so soon as the sun had sunk below the great mountains to the west, from behind which he shot up glorious rays of gold and crimson against the blue ethereal sky, causing the snowy peaks to look more exquisitely pure from the background of gorgeous colour. during the flood of sunlight all day, we had not perceived a single fleck of cloud; but now lovely pink wreaths, floating in mid-air, betrayed that here and there a "nursling of the sky" lingered behind the cloud-masses which we thought had all been blown away yesterday. the short twilight hour was over, and the stars were filtering their soft radiance on our heads by the time we heard the welcoming barks of the homestead, and saw the glimmer of the lighted lamp in our sitting-room, shining out of the distant gloom. and so ended, in supper and a night of deep dreamless sleep, one of the many happy picnic days of my new zealand life. chapter ii: eel-fishing. one of the greatest drawbacks in an english gentleman's eyes to living in new zealand is the want of sport. there is absolutely none. there used to be a few quails, but they are almost extinct now; and during four years' residence in very sequestered regions i only saw one. wild ducks abound on some of the rivers, but they are becoming fewer and shyer every year. the beautiful paradise duck is gradually retreating to those inland lakes lying at the foot of the southern alps, amid glaciers and boulders which serve as a barrier to keep back his ruthless foe. even the heron, once so plentiful on the lowland rivers, is now seldom seen. as i write these lines a remorseful recollection comes back upon me of overhanging cliffs, and of a bend in a swirling river, on whose rapid current a beautiful wounded heron--its right wing shattered--drifts helplessly round and round with the eddying water, each circle bringing it nearer in-shore to our feet. i can see now its bright fearless eye, full of suffering, but yet unconquered: its slender neck proudly arched, and bearing up the small graceful head with its coronal or top-knot raised in defiance, as if to protest to the last against the cruel shot which had just been fired. i was but a spectator, having merely wandered that far to look at my eel-lines, yet i felt as guilty as though my hand had pulled the trigger. just as the noble bird drifted to our feet,--for i could not help going down to the river's edge, where pepper (our head shepherd) stood, looking very contrite,--it reared itself half out of the water, with a hissing noise and threatening bill, resolved to sell its liberty as dearly as it could; but the effort only spread a brighter shade of crimson on the waters surface for a brief moment, and then, with glazing eye and drooping crest, the dying creature turned over on its side and was borne helpless to our feet. by the time pepper extended his arm and drew it in, with the quaint apology, "i'm sorry i shot yer, old feller! i, am, indeed," the heron was dead; and that happened to be the only one i ever came across during my mountain life. once i saw some beautiful red-shanks flying down the gorge of the selwyn, and f---- nearly broke his neck in climbing the crag from whence one of them rose in alarm at the noise of our horses' feet on the shingle. there were three eggs in the inaccessible cliff-nest, and he brought me one, which i tried in vain to hatch under a sitting duck. betty would not admit the intruder among her own eggs, but resolutely pushed it out of her nest twenty times a day, until at last i was obliged to blow it and send it home to figure in a little boy's collection far away in kent. i have seen very good blue duck shooting on the waimakiriri river, but per cent. of the birds were lost for want of a retriever bold enough to face that formidable river. wide as was the beautiful reach, on whose shore the sportsmen stood, and calmly as the deep stream seemed to glide beneath its high banks, the wounded birds, flying low on the water, had hardly dropped when they disappeared, sucked beneath by the strong current, and whirled past us in less time than it takes one to write a line. we had retrievers with us who would face the waves of an inland lake during a nor'-wester,--which is giving a dog very high praise indeed; but there was no canine bayard at hand to brave those treacherous depths, and bring out our game, so the sport soon ceased; for what was the good of shooting the beautiful, harmless creatures when we could not make use of them as food? i often accompanied f---- on his eel-fishing expeditions, but more for the sake of companionship than from any amusement i found in the sport. i may here confess frankly that i cannot understand anyone being an inveterate eel-fisher, for of all monotonous pursuits, it is the most self-repeating in its forms. even the first time i went out i found it delightful only in anticipation; and this is the one midnight excursion which i shall attempt to re-produce for you. it had been a broiling midsummer day, too hot to sit in the verandah, too hot to stroll about the garden, or go for a ride, or do anything in fact, except bask like a lizard in the warm air. new zealand summer weather, however high the thermometer, is quite different from either tropical or english heat. it is intensely hot in the sun, but always cool in the shade. i never heard of an instance of sun-stroke from exposure to the mid-day sun, for there always was a light air--often scarcely perceptible until you were well out in the open,--to temper the fierce vertical rays. it sometimes happened that i found myself obliged, either for business or pleasure, to take a long ride in the middle of a summer's day, and my invariable reflection used to be, "it is not nearly so hot out of doors as one fancies it would be." then there is none of the stuffiness so often an accompaniment to our brief summers, bringing lassitude and debility in its train. the only disadvantage of an unusually hot season with us was, that our already embrowned complexions took a deeper shade of bronze; but as we were all equally sun-burnt there was no one to throw critical stones. what surprised me most was the utter absence of damp or miasma. after a blazing day, instead of hurrying in out of reach of poisonous vapours as the tropic-dweller must needs do, we could linger bare-headed, lightly clad, out of doors, listening to the distant roar of a river, or watching the exquisite tints of the evening sky. i dwell on this to explain that in almost any other country there would have been risk in remaining out at night after such still, hot days. on this particular evening, during my first summer in the new zealand malvern hills, after we had watered my pet flowers near the house, and speculated a good deal as to whether the mignonette seed had all been blown out of the ground by the last nor'-wester or not, f---- said, "i shall go eel-fishing to-night to the creek, down the flat. why don't you come too? i am sure you would like it." now, i am sorry to say that i am such a thorough gipsy in my tastes that any pursuit which serves as an excuse for spending hours in the open air, is full of attraction for me; consequently, i embraced the proposal with ardour, and set about gathering, under f----'s directions, what seemed to bid fair to rival the collection of an old rag-and-bottle merchant. first of all, there was a muster of every empty tin match-box in the little house; these were to hold the bait-bits of mutton and worms. then i was desired to hunt up all the odds and ends of worsted which lurked in the scrap-basket. a forage next took place in search of string, but as no parcels were ever delivered in that sequestered valley, twine became a precious and rare treasure. in default of any large supply being obtainable, my lamp and candle-wick material was requisitioned by f---- (who, by the way, is a perfect uhlan for getting what he wants, when bent on a sporting expedition); and lastly, one or two empty flour-sacks were called for. you will see the use of this heterogeneous collection presently. it was of no use starting until the twilight had darkened into a cloudy, moonless night; so, after our seven o'clock supper, we adjourned into the verandah to watch f---- make a large round ball, such as children play with, out of the scraps of worsted with which i had furnished him. instead of cutting the wool into lengths, however, it was left in loops; and i learned that this is done to afford a firm hold for the sharp needle-like teeth of an inquisitive eel, who might be tempted to find out if this strange round thing, floating near his hole, would be good to eat. i was impatient as a child,--remember it was my first eel-fishing expedition,--and i thought nine o'clock would never come, for i had been told to go and dress at that hour; that is to say, i was to change my usual station-costume, a pretty print gown, for a short linsey skirt, strong boots and kangaroo-skin gaiters. f----, and our cadet, mr. u----, soon appeared, clad in shooting coats instead of their alpaca costumes, and their trousers stuffed into enormous boots, the upper leathers of which came beyond their knees. "are we going into the water?" i timidly inquired. "oh, no,--not at all: it is on account of the spaniards." no doubt this sounds very unintelligible to an english reader; but every colonist who may chance to see my pages will shiver at the recollection of those vegetable defenders of an unexplored region in new zealand. imagine a gigantic artichoke with slender instead of broad leaves, set round in dense compact order. they vary, of course, in size, but in our part of the world four or six feet in circumference and a couple of feet high was the usual growth to which they attained, though at the back of the run they were much larger. spaniards grow in clusters, or patches, among the tussocks on the plains, and constitute a most unpleasant feature of the vegetation of the country. their leaves are as firm as bayonets, and taper at the point to the fineness of a needle, but are not nearly so easily broken as a needle would be. no horse will face them, preferring a jump at the cost of any exertion, to the risk of a stab from the cruel points. the least touch of this green bayonet draws blood, and a fall _into_ a spaniard is a thing to be remembered all one's life. interspersed with the spaniards are generally clumps of "wild irishman," a straggling sturdy bramble, ready to receive and scratch you well if you attempt to avoid the spaniard's weapons. especially detrimental to riding habits are wild irishmen; and there are fragments of mine, of all sorts of materials and colours, fluttering now on their thorny branches in out-of-the-way places on our run. it is not surprising, therefore, that we guarded our legs as well as we could against these foes to flesh and blood. "we are rather early," said the gentlemen, as i appeared, ready and eager to start; "but perhaps it is all the better to enable you to see the track." they each flung an empty sack over their shoulders, felt in their pockets to ascertain whether the matches, hooks, boxes of bait, etc., were all there, and then we set forth. at first it appeared as if we had stepped from the brightness of the drawing-room into utter and pitchy blackness; but after we had groped for a few steps down the familiar garden path, our eyes became accustomed to the subdued light of the soft summer night. although heavy banks of cloud,--the general precursors of wind,--were moving slowly between us and the heavens, the stars shone down through their rifts, and on the western horizon a faint yellowish tinge told us that daylight was in no hurry to leave our quiet valley. the mountain streams or creeks, which water so well the grassy plains among the malvern hills, are not affected to any considerable extent by dry summer weather. they are snow-fed from the high ranges, and each nor'-wester restores many a glacier or avalanche to its original form, and sends it flowing down the steep sides of yonder distant beautiful mountains to join the creeks, which, like a tangled skein of silver threads, ensure a good water supply to the new zealand sheep-farmer. in the holes, under steep overhanging banks, the eels love to lurk, hiding from the sun's rays in cool depths, and coming out at night to feed. there are no fish whatever in the rivers, and i fear that the labours of the acclimatization society will be thrown away until they can persuade the streams themselves to remain in their beds like more civilised waters. at present not a month passes that one does not hear of some eccentric proceeding on the part of either rivers or creeks. unless the fish are prepared to shift their liquid quarters at a moment's notice they will find themselves often left high and dry on the deserted shingle-bed. but eels are proverbially accustomed to adapt themselves to circumstances, and a fisherman may always count on getting some if he be patient. about a mile down the flat, between very high banks, our principal creek ran, and to a quiet spot among the flax-bushes we directed our steps. by the fast-fading light the gentlemen set their lines in very primitive fashion. on the crumbling, rotten earth the new zealand flax, the _phormium tenax_, loves to grow, and to its long, ribbon-like leaves the eel-fishers fastened their lines securely, baiting each alternate hook with mutton and worms. i declared this was too cockney a method of fishing, and selected a tall slender flax-stick, the stalk of last year's spike of red honey-filled blossoms, and to this extempore rod i fastened my line and bait. when one considers that the old whalers were accustomed to use ropes made in the rudest fashion, from the fibre of this very plant, in their deep-sea fishing for very big prey, it is not surprising that we found it sufficiently strong for our purpose. i picked out, therefore, a comfortable spot,--that is to say, well in the centre of a young flax-bush, whose satiny leaves made the most elastic cushions around me; with my flax-stick held out over what was supposed to be a favourite haunt of the eels, and with nettle asleep at my feet and a warm shawl close to my hand, prepared for my vigil. "don't speak or move," were the gentlemen's last words: "the eels are all eyes and ears at this hour; they can almost hear you breathe." each man then took up his position a few hundred yards away from me, so that i felt, to all intents and purposes, absolutely alone. i am "free to confess," as our american cousins say, that it was a very eerie sensation. it was now past ten o'clock; the darkness was intense, and the silence as deep as the darkness. hot as the day had been, the night air felt chill, and a heavy dew began to fall, showing me the wisdom of substituting woollen for cotton garments. i could see the dim outlines of the high hills, which shut in our happy valley on all sides, and the smell of the freshly-turned earth of a paddock near the house, which was in process of being broken up for english grass, came stealing towards me on the silent air. the melancholy cry of a bittern, or the shrill wail of the weka, startled me from time to time, but there was no other sound to break the eternal silence. as i waited and watched, i thought, as every one must surely think, with strange paradoxical feelings, of one's own utter insignificance in creation, mingled with the delightful consciousness of our individual importance in the eyes of the maker and father of all. an atom among worlds, as one feels, sitting there at such an hour and in such a spot, still we remember with love and pride, that not a hair of our head falls to the ground unnoticed by an infinite love and an eternal providence. the soul tries to fly into the boundless regions of space and eternity, and to gaze upon other worlds, and other beings equally the object of the great creator's care; but her mortal wing soon droops and tires, and she is fain to nestle home again to her saviour's arms, with the thought, "i am my beloved's, and he is mine." that is the only safe beginning and end of all speculation. it was very solemn and beautiful, that long dark night,--a pause amid the bustle of every day cares and duties,--hours in which one takes counsel with one's own heart, and is still. midnight had come and gone, when the sputter and snap of striking a match, which sounded almost like a pistol shot amid the profound silence, told me that one of the sportsmen had been successful. i got up as softly as possible, wrapped my damp shawl round my still damper shoulders, and, fastening the flax-stick securely in the ground, stole along the bank of the creek towards the place where a blazing tussock, serving as a torch, showed the successful eel-fisher struggling with his prize. through the gloom i saw another weird-looking figure running silently in the same direction; for the fact was, we were all so cramped and cold, and, weary of sitting waiting for bites which never came, that we hailed with delight a break in the monotony of our watch. it did not matter now how much noise we made (within moderate limits), for the peace of that portion of the creek was destroyed for the night. half-a-dozen eels must have banded themselves together, and made a sudden and furious dash at the worsted ball, which mr. u---- had been dangling in front of their mud hall-door for the last two hours. just as he had intended, their long sharp teeth became entangled in the worsted loops, and although he declared some had broken away and escaped, three or four good-sized ones remained, struggling frantically. it would have been almost impossible for one man to lift such a weight straight out of the water by a string; and as we came up and saw mr. u----'s agitated face in the fantastic flickering light of the blazing tussock, which he had set on fire as a signal of distress, i involuntarily thought of the old joe miller about the tartar: "why don't you let him go?" "because he has caught _me._" it looked just like that. the furious splashing in the water below, and mr. u---- grasping his line with desperate valour, but being gradually drawn nearer to the edge of the steep bank each instant. "keep up a good light, but not too much," cried f---- to me, in a regular stage-whisper, as he rushed to the rescue. so i pulled up one tussock after another by its roots,--an exertion which resulted in upsetting me each time,--and lighted one as fast as its predecessor burned out. they were all rather damp, so they did not flare away too quickly. by the blaze of my grassy torches i saw f----first seize mr. u---- round the waist and drag him further from the bank; but the latter called out, "it's my hands,--they have no skin left: do catch hold, there's a good fellow." so the "good fellow" did catch hold, but he was too experienced an eel-fisher to try to lift a couple of dozen pounds weight of eels out of the water by a perpendicular string; so he tied it to a flax-bush near, and, stooping down in order to get some leverage over the bank, very soon drew the ball, with its slimy, wriggling captives, out of the water. just as he jerked it far on shore, one or two of the creatures broke loose and escaped, leaving quite enough to afford a most disgusting and horrible sight as they were shuffled and poked into the empty flour-sack. the sportsmen were delighted however, and departed to a fresh bend of the creek, leaving me to find my way back to my original post. this would have been difficult indeed, had not nettle remained behind to guard my gloves, which i had left in his custody. as i passed, not knowing i was so near the spot, the little dog gave a low whimper of greeting, sufficient to attract my attention and guide me to where he was keeping his faithful watch and ward. i felt for my flax-stick and moved it ever so gently. a sudden jerk and splash startled me horribly, and warned me that i had disturbed an eel who was in the act of supping off my bait. in the momentary surprise i suppose i let go, for certain it is that the next instant my flax-stick was rapidly towed down the stream. instead of feeling provoked or mortified, it was the greatest relief to know that my eel-fishing was over for the night, and that now i had nothing to do except "wait till called for." so i took nettle on my lap and tried to abide patiently, but i had not been long enough in new zealand to have any confidence in the climate, and as i felt how damp my clothes were, and recollected with horror my west indian experiences of the consequences of exposure to night air and heavy dew, my mind _would_ dwell gloomily on the prospect of a fever, at least. it seemed a long and weary while before i perceived a figure coming towards me; and i am afraid i was both cross and cold and sleepy by the time we set our faces homewards. "i have only caught three," said f----. "how many have you got?" "none, i am happy to say," i answered peevishly, "what could nettle and i have done with the horrible things if we had caught any?" the walk, or rather the stumble home, proved to be the worst part of the expedition. not a ray of starlight had we to guide us,--nothing but inky blackness around and over us. we tried to make nettle go first, intending to follow his lead, and trusting to his keeping the track; but nettle's place was at my heels, and neither coaxing nor scolding would induce him to forego it. a forlorn hope was nothing to the dangers of each footstep. first one and then the other volunteered to lead the way, declaring they could find the track. all this time we were trying to strike the indistinct road among the tussocks, made by occasional wheels to our house, but the marks, never very distinct in daylight, became perfect will-o'-the-wisps at night. if we crossed a sheep-track we joyfully announced that we had found the way, but only to be undeceived the next moment by discovering that we were returning to the creek. from time to time we fell into and over spaniards, and what was left of our clothes and our flesh the wild irishmen devoured. we must have got home somehow, or i should not be writing an account of it, at this moment, but really i hardly know how we reached the house. i recollect that the next day there was a great demand for gold-beater's skin, and court-plaster, and that whenever f---- and mr. u---- had a spare moment during the ensuing week, they devoted themselves to performing surgical operations on each other with a needle; and that i felt very subdued and tired for a day or two. but there was no question of fever or cold, and i was stared at when i inquired whether it was not dangerous to be out all night in heavy dew after a broiling day. we had the eels made into a pie by our shepherd, who assured me that if i entrusted them to my cook she would send me up such an oily dish that i should never be able to endure an eel again. he declared that the maoris, who seem to have rather a horror of grease, had taught him how to cook both eels and wekas in such a way as to eliminate every particle of fat from both. i had no experience of the latter dish, but he certainly kept his word about the eels, for they were excellent. chapter iii: pig-stalking. it was much too hot in summer to go after wild pigs. that was our winter's amusement, and very good sport it afforded us, besides the pleasure of knowing that we were really doing good service to the pastoral interest, by ridding the hills around us of almost the only enemies which the sheep have. if the squatter goes to look after his mob of ewes and lambs in the sheltered slopes at the back of his run, he is pretty nearly certain to find them attended by an old sow with a dozen babies at her heels. she will follow the sheep patiently from one camping ground to another, watching for a new-born and weakly lamb to linger behind the rest, and then she will seize and devour it. besides this danger, the presence of pigs on the run keeps the sheep in an excited state. they have an uneasy consciousness that their foes are looking after them, and they move restlessly up and down the hills, not stopping to feed sufficiently to get fat. if a sheep-farmer thinks his sheep are not in good condition, one of the first questions he asks his shepherd is, "are there any pigs about?" our run had a good many of these troublesome visitors on it, especially in the winter, when they would travel down from the back country to grub up acres on acres of splendid sheep pasture in search of roots. the only good they do is to dig up the spaniards for the sake of their delicious white fibres, and the fact of their being able to do this will give a better idea of the toughness of a wild pig's snout than anything else i can say. it may be strange to english ears to hear a woman of tolerably peaceful disposition, and as the advertisements in the _times_ so often state, "thoroughly domesticated," aver that she found great pleasure in going after wild pigs; but the circumstances of the ease must be taken into consideration before i am condemned. first of all, it seemed terribly lonely at home if f---- was out with his rifle all day. next, there was the temptation to spend those delicious hours of a new zealand winter's day, between ten and four, out of doors, wandering over hills and exploring new gullies. and lastly, i had a firm idea that i was taking care of f----. and so i was in a certain sense, for if his rifle had burst, or any accident had happened to him, and he had been unable to reach the homestead, we should never have known where to find him, and days would probably have passed before every nook and corner of a run extending over many thousand acres could have been thoroughly searched. i had heard terrible stories of shepherds slipping down and injuring themselves so that they could not move, and of their dead bodies being only found after weeks of careful seeking. f---- himself delighted to terrify me by descriptions of narrow escapes; and, as the pigs had to be killed, i resolved to follow in the hunter's train. the sport is conducted exactly like deer stalking, only it is much harder work, and a huge boar is not so picturesque an object as a stag of many tines, when you do catch sight of him. there is just the same accurate knowledge needed of the animal's habits and customs, and the same untiring patience. it is quite as necessary to be a good shot, for a grey pig standing under the lee of a boulder of exactly his own colour is a much more difficult object to hit from the opposite side of a ravine than a stag; and a wild boar is every whit as keen of scent and sharp of eye and ear as any antlered "monarch of the glen." imagine then a beautiful winter's morning without wind or rain. there has been perhaps a sharp frost over-night, but after a couple of hours of sunshine the air is as warm and bright as midsummer. we used to be glad enough of a wood fire at breakfast; but after that meal had been eaten we went into the verandah, open to the north-east (our warm quarter), which made a delicious winter parlour, and basked in the blazing sunshine. i used often to bring out a chair and a table, and work and read there all the morning, without either hat or jacket. but it sometimes happened that once or twice a week, on just such a lovely morning, f---- would proclaim his intention of going out to look for pigs, and, sooner than be left behind, i nearly always begged to be allowed to come too. there was no fear of my getting tired or lagging behind; and as i was willing to make myself generally useful, by carrying the telescope, a revolver for close quarters, and eke a few sandwiches, the offer of my company used to be graciously accepted. we could seldom procure the loan of a good pig-dog, and after one excursion with a certain dog of the name of "pincher," i preferred going out by ourselves. on that occasion f---- did not take his rifle, as there was no chance of getting a long shot at our game; for the dog would surely bring the pig to bay, and then the hunter must trust to a revolver or the colonial boar-spear, half a pair of shears (i suppose it should be called _a shear_) bound firmly on a flax stick by green flax-leaves. we had heard of pigs having been seen by our out-station shepherd at the back of the run, and as we were not encumbered by the heavy rifle, we mounted our horses and rode as far as we could towards the range where the pigs had been grubbing up the hill sides in unmolested security for some time past. five miles from home the ground became so rough that our horses could go no further; we therefore jumped off, tied them to a flax-bush, taking off the saddles in case they broke loose, and proceeded on foot over the jungly, over-grown saddle. on the other side we came upon a beautiful gully, with a creek running through it, whose banks were so densely fringed with scrub that we could not get through to the stream, which we heard rippling amid the tangled shrubs. if we could only have reached the water our best plan would have been to get into it and follow its windings up the ravine; but even pincher could hardly squeeze and burrow through the impenetrable fence of matapo and goi, which were woven together by fibres of a thorny creeper called "a lawyer" by the shepherds. it was very tantalising, for in less than five minutes we heard trusty pincher "speaking" to a boar, and knew that he had baled it up against a tree, and was calling to us to come and help him. f----ran about like a lunatic, calling out; "coming pincher: round him up, good dog!" and so forth; but they were all vain promises, for he could not get in. i did my best in searching for an opening, and gave many false hopes of having found one. at last i said, "if i run up the mountain side, and look down on that mass of scrub, perhaps i may see some way into it from above." "no: do you stay here, and see, if the pig breaks cover, which way he goes." up the steep hill, therefore, f---- rushed, as swiftly and lightly as one of his own mountain sheep; and in a minute or two i saw him standing, revolver in hand, on an overhanging rock, peering anxiously down on the leafy mass below. pincher and the creek made such a noise between them that i could not hear what f---- said, and only guessed from his despairing gestures that there was no trap door visible in the green roof. i signalled as well as i could that he was to come down directly, for his-standing-place looked most insecure. insecure indeed it proved. as i spoke the great fragment of rock loosely embedded in earth on the mountain side gave way with a crash, and came tumbling majestically down on the top of the scrub. as for f----, he described a series of somersaults in the air, which however agreeable in themselves, were very trying to the nerves of the spectatrix below. my first dread was least the rock should crush him, but to my great joy i saw at once that it was rolling slowly down the hill, whilst f----'s vigorous bound off it as it gave way, had carried him well into the middle of the leafy cushion beneath him, where he presently landed flat on his back! i expected every moment to hear the revolver go off, but mercifully it did not do so; and as his thorny bed was hardly to be endured, f---- soon kicked himself off it, and before i could realize that he was unhurt, had scrambled to his feet, and was rushing off, crying in school-boy glee, "that will fetch him out" that (the rock) certainly did fetch him (the pig) out in a moment, and pincher availed himself of the general confusion to seize hold of his enemy's hind leg, which he never afterwards let go. the boar kept snapping and champing his great tusks; but pincher, even with the leg in his mouth, was too active to be caught: so as the boar found that it was both futile and undignified to try to run away with a dog hanging on his hind-quarters, he tried another plan. making for a clump of ti-ti palms he went to bay, and contrived to take up a very good defensive position. pincher would have never given up his mouthful of leg if f---- had not called him off, for it seemed impossible to fire the revolver whilst the dog held on. this change of tactics was much against pincher's judgment, and he kept rushing furiously in between f---- and the boar. as for me, i prudently retired behind a big boulder, on which i could climb if the worst came to the worst, and called out from time to time, to both dog and man, "oh, don't!" they did not even hear me, for the din of battle was loud. the pig dodged about so fast, that although f----'s bullets lodged in the palm tree at his back, not one struck a vulnerable part, and at last f----, casting his revolver behind him for me to pick up and reload, closed with his foe, armed only with the shear-spear. pincher considered this too dangerous, and rushed in between them to distract the boar's attention. just as f---- aimed a thrust at his chest,--for it was of no use trying to penetrate his hide,--the boar lowered his head, caught poor faithful pincher's exposed flank, and tore it open with his razor-like tusk; but in the meantime the spear had gone well home into his brawny chest, exactly beneath the left shoulder, and his life-blood came gushing out. i was so infuriated at the sight of pincher's frightful wound that i felt none of my usual pity for the victim; and rushing up to f---- with the revolver, of which only a couple of chambers were loaded, thrust it into his hand with an entreaty to "kill him quickly." this f---- was quite willing to do for his own sake, as a wounded boar is about the most dangerous beast on earth; and although the poor brute kept snapping at the broken flax-stick sticking in his heart, he fired a steady shot which brought the pig on his knees, only to roll over dead the next moment. i cannot help pausing to say that i sewed up pincher's wound then and there, with some of the contents of my cambusmore house-wife; which always accompanied me on my sporting expeditions, and we carried him between us down to where the horses were fastened. there i mounted; and f---- lifting the faithful creature on my lap, we rode slowly home, dipping our handkerchiefs in cold water at every creek we crossed, and laying them on his poor flank. he was as patient and brave as possible, and bore his sufferings and weakness for days afterwards in a way which was a lesson to one, so grateful and gentle was he. his brave and sensible behaviour met its due reward in a complete though slow recovery. i have only left myself space for one little sketch more; but it comes so vividly before me that i cannot shut it out. after a long day's walking, over the hills and vallies, so beautiful beneath our azure winter-sky, walking which was delightful as an expedition, but unsuccessful as to sport, we crossed the track of a large boar. we knew he was old by his being alone, and it was therefore very certain that he would show fight if we came up with him. patiently we followed the track over a low saddle, through a clump of brushwood menuka, the broken twigs of which showed how large an animal had just passed by. here and there a freshly grubbed-up spaniard showed where he had paused for a snack; but at length we dropped down on the river bed, with its wide expanse of shingle, and there we lost all clue to our game. after a little hesitation, f---- decided on climbing a high cliff on the right bank of the river, and trying to catch a glimpse of him. the opposite hill-side was gaunt and bare; a southern aspect shut out the sun in winter, and for all its rich traces of copper ore, "holkam's head" found no favour in the eyes of either shepherds or master. grass would not grow there except in summer, and its gray, shingly sides were an eye-sore to its owner. we sat down on the cliff, and looked around carefully. presently f---- said, in a breathless whisper of intense delight, "i see him." in vain i looked and looked, but nothing could my stupid eyes discover. "lie down," said f---- to me, just as if i had been a dog. i crouched as low as possible, whilst f----settled himself comfortably flat on his stomach, and prepared to take a careful aim at the opposite side of the hill. after what seemed a long time, he pulled his rifle's trigger, and the flash and crack was followed apparently by one of the gray boulders opposite leaping up, and then rolling heavily down the hill. f---- jumped up in triumph crying, "come along, and don't forget the revolver." when we had crossed the river, reckless of getting wet to our waists in icy-cold water, f---- took the revolver from me and went first; but, after an instant's examination, he called out, "dead as a door-nail! come and look at him." so i came, with great caution, and a more repulsive and disgusting sight cannot be imagined than the huge carcass of our victim already stiffening in death. the shot had been a fortunate one, for only an inch away from the hole the bullet had made his shoulders were regularly plated with thick horny scales, off which a revolver bullet would have glanced harmlessly, and he bore marks of having fought many and many a battle with younger rivals. his huge tusks were notched and broken, and he had evidently been driven out from among his fellows as a quarrelsome member of their society. already the keen-eyed hawks were hovering above the great monster, and we left him to his fate in the solitary river gorge, where all was bleak and cold and gloomy,--a fitting death-place for the fierce old warrior. chapter iv: skating in the back country. i do not believe that even in canada the skating can be better than that which was within our reach in the malvern hills. among our sheltered valleys an sunny slopes the hardest frost only lasted a few hour after dawn; but twenty-five miles further back, on the border of the glacier region, the mountain tarns could boast of ice several feet thick all the winter. we heard rumours of far-inland lakes, across which heavily-laden bullock-teams could pass in perfect safety for three months of the year, and we grumbled at the light film over our own large ponds, which would not bear even my little terrier's weight after mid-day: and yet it was cold enough at night, during our short bright winters, to satisfy the most icy-minded person. i think i have mentioned before that the wooden houses in new zealand, especially those roughly put together up-country, are by no means weather-tight. disagreeable as this may be, it is doubtless the reason of the extraordinary immunity from colds and coughs which we hill-dwellers enjoyed. living between walls formed by inch-boards over-lapping each other, and which can only be made to resemble english rooms by being canvassed and papered inside, the pure fresh air finds its way in on all sides. a hot room in winter is an impossibility, in spite of drawn curtains and blazing fires, therefore the risk of sudden changes of temperature is avoided. some such theory as this is absolutely necessary to account for the wonderfully good health enjoyed by all, in the most capricious and trying climate i have ever come across. when a strong nor'-wester was howling down the glen, i have seen the pictures on my drawing-room walls blowing out to an angle of degrees, although every door and window in the little low wooden structure had been carefully closed for hours. it has happened to me more than once, on getting up in the morning, to find my clothes, which had been laid on a chair beneath my bedroom window overnight, completely covered by powdered snow, drifting in through the ill-fitting casement. this same window was within a couple of feet of my bed, and between me and it was neither curtain nor shelter of any sort. of a winter's evening i have often been obliged to wrap myself up in a big scotch maud, as i sat, dressed in a high linsey gown, by a blazing fire, so hard was the frost outside; but by ten o'clock next morning i would be loitering about the verandah, basking in the sunshine, and watching the light flecks of cloud-wreaths and veils floating against an italian-blue sky. yet such is the inherent discontent of the human heart, that instead of rejoicing in this lovely mid-day sunshine, we actually mourned over the vanished ice which at daylight had been found, by a much-envied early riser, strong enough to slide on for half an hour. it seemed almost impossible to believe that any one had been sliding that morning within a few feet of where i sat working in a blaze of sunshine, with my pretty grey and pink australian parrot pluming itself on the branch of a silver wattle close by, and "joey," the tiny monkey from panama, sitting on the skirt of my gown, with a piece of its folds arranged by himself shawl-wise over his glossy black shoulders. if either of these tropical pets had been left out after four o'clock that sunny day, they, would have been frozen to death before our supper time. it was just on such a day as this, and in just such a bright mid-day hour, that a distant neighbour of ours rode up to the garden gate, leading a pack horse. outside the saddle-bags, with which this animal was somewhat heavily laden, could be plainly seen a beautiful new pair of oxford skates, glinting in the sunshine; and it must have been the sight of these beloved implements which called forth the half-envious remark from one of the gentlemen, "i suppose you have lots of skating up at your place?" "well, not exactly at my station, but there is a capital lake ten miles from my house where i am sure of a good day's skating any time between june and august," answered mr. c. h----, our newly arrived guest. we all looked at each other. i believe i heaved a deep sigh, and dropped my thimble, which "joey" instantly seized, and with a low chirrup of intense delight, commenced to poke down between the boards of the verandah. it was too bad of us to give such broad hints by looks if not by words. poor mr. c. h---- was a bachelor in those days: he had not been at his little out-of-the-way homestead for some weeks, and was ignorant of its resources in the way of firing (always an important matter at a station), or even of tea and mutton. he had no woman-servant, and was totally unprepared for an incursion of skaters; and yet,--new zealand fashion,--no sooner did he perceive that we were all longing and pining for some skating, than he invited us all most cordially to go up to his back-country run the very next day, with him, and skate as long as we liked. this was indeed a delightful prospect, the more especially as it happened to be only monday, which gave us plenty of time to be back again by sunday, for our weekly service. we made it a rule never to be away from home on that day, lest any of our distant congregation should ride their twenty miles or so across country and find us absent. when the host is willing and the guests eager, it does not take long to arrange a plan, so the next morning found three of us, besides mr. c. h---- mounted and ready to start directly after breakfast. i have often been asked how i managed in those days about toilette arrangements, when it was impossible to carry any luggage except a small "swag," closely packed in a waterproof case and fastened on the same side as the saddle-pocket. first of all i must assure my lady readers that i prided myself on turning out as neat and natty as possible at the end of the journey, and yet i rode not only in my every-day linsey gown, which could be made long or short at pleasure, but in my crinoline. this was artfully looped up on the right side and tied by a ribbon, in such a way that when i came out ready dressed to mount, no one in the world could have guessed that i had on any _cage_ beneath my short riding habit with a loose tweed jacket over the body of the dress. within the "swag" was stowed a brush and comb, collar, cuffs and handkerchiefs, a little necessary linen, a pair of shoes, and perhaps a ribbon for my hair if i meant to be very smart. on this occasion we all found that our skates occupied a terribly large proportion both of weight and space in our modest kits, but still we were much too happy to grumble. where could you find a gayer quartette than started at an easy canter up the valley that fresh bracing morning? from the very first our faces were turned to the south-west, and before us rose the magnificent chain of the southern alps, with their bold snowy peaks standing out in a glorious dazzle against the cobalt sky. a stranger, or colonially speaking, a "new chum," would have thought we must needs cross that barrier-range before we could penetrate any distance into the back country, but we knew of long winding vallies and gullies running up between the giant slopes, which would lead us, almost without our knowing how high we had climbed, up to the elevated but sheltered plateau among the back country ranges where mr. c. h----'s homestead stood. there was only one steep saddle to be crossed, and that lay between us and rockwood, six miles off. it was the worst part of the journey for the horses, so we had easy consciences in dismounting and waiting an hour when we reached that most charming and hospitable of houses. i had just time for one turn round the beautiful garden, where the flowers and shrubs of old england grew side by side with the wild and lovely blossoms of our new island home, when the expected coo-e rang out shrill and clear from the rose-covered porch. it was but little past mid-day when we made our second start, and set seriously to work over fifteen miles of fairly good galloping ground. this distance brought us well up to the foot of a high range, and the last six miles of the journey had to be accomplished in single file, and with great care and discretion, for the track led through bleak desolate vallies, round the shoulder of abutting spurs, through swamps, and up and down rocky staircases. mr. c. h---- and his cob both knew the way well however, and my bay mare helen had the cleverest legs and the wisest as well as prettiest head of her race. if left to herself she seldom made a mistake, and the few tumbles she and i ever had together, took place only when she found herself obliged to go my way instead of her own. we entered the gorges of the high mountains between us and the west, and soon lost the sun; even the brief winter twilight faded away more swiftly than usual amid those dark defiles; and it was pitch dark, though only five o'clock, when we heard a sudden and welcome clamour of dog voices. these deep-mouthed tones invariably constitute the first notes of a sheep-station's welcome; and a delightful sound it is to the belated and bewildered traveller, for besides guiding his horse to the right spot, the noise serves to bring out some one to see who the traveller may be. on this occasion we heard one man say to the other, "it's the boss:" so almost before we had time to dismount from our tired horses (remember they had each carried a heavy "swag" besides their riders), lights gleamed from the windows of the little house, and a wood fire sparkled and sputtered on the open hearth. mr. c. h---- only just guided me to the door of the sitting-room, making an apology and injunction together,--"its very rough i am afraid: but you can do what you like;"--before he hastened back to assist his guests in settling their horses comfortably for the night. labour used to be so dear and wages so high, especially in the back country of new zealand, that the couple of men,--one for indoor work, to saw wood, milk, cook, sweep, _wash_, etc., and the other to act as gardener, groom, ploughman, and do all the numerous odd jobs about a place a hundred miles and more from the nearest shop,--represented a wage-expenditure of at least pounds a year. every gentleman therefore as a matter of course sees to his own horse when he arrives unexpectedly at a station, and i knew i should have at least half an hour to myself. the first thing to do was to let down my crinoline, for i could only walk like a crab in it when it was fastened up for riding, kilt up my linsey gown, take off my hat and jacket, and set to work the curtains must be drawn close, and the chairs moved out from their symmetrical positions against the wall; then i made an expedition into the kitchen, and won the heart of the stalwart cook, who was already frying chops over the fire, by saying in my best german, "i have come to help you with the tea." poor man! it was very unfair, for mr. c. h---- had told me during our ride that his servitor was a german, and i had employed the last long hour of the journey in rubbing up my exceedingly rusty knowledge of that language, and arranging one or two effective sentences. poor karl's surprise and delight knew no bounds, and he burst forth into a long monologue, to which i could find no readier answers than smiles and nods, hiding my inability to follow up my brilliant beginning under the pretence of being very busy. by the time the gentlemen had stabled and fed the horses and were ready, karl and i between us had arranged a bright cosy little apartment with a capital tea-dinner on the table. after this meal there were pipes and toddy, and as i could not retire, like mrs. micawber at david copperfield's supper party, into the adjoining bedroom and sit by myself in the cold, i made the best of the somewhat dense clouds of smoke with which i was soon surrounded, and listened to the fragmentary plans for the next day. then we all separated for the night, and in two minutes i was fast asleep in a little room no bigger than the cabin of a ship, with an opossum rug on a sofa for my bed and bedding. it was cold enough the next morning, i assure you: so cold that it was difficult to believe the statement that all the gentlemen had been down at daybreak to bathe in the great lake which spread like an inland sea before the bay-window of the little sitting room. this lake, the largest of the mountain chain, never freezes, on account partly of its great depth, and also because of its sunny aspect. our destination lay far inland, and if we meant to have a good long day's skating we must start at once. such a perfect day as it was! i felt half inclined to beg off the first day on the ice, and to spend my morning wandering along the rata-fringed shores of lake coleridge, with its glorious enclosing of hills which might fairly be called mountains; but i feared to seem capricious or lazy, when really my only difficulty was in selecting a pleasure. the sun had climbed well over the high barriers which lay eastwards, and was shining brightly down through the quivering blue ether overhead; the frost sparkled on every broad flax-blade or slender tussock-spine, as if the silver side of earth were turned outwards that winter morning. no sooner had we mounted (with no "swag" except our skates this time) than mr. c. h---- set spurs to his horse, and bounded over the slip-rail of the paddock before karl could get it down. we were too primitive for gates in those parts: they only belonged to the civilization nearer christchurch; and i had much ado to prevent my pony from following his lead, especially as the other gentlemen were only too delighted to get rid of some of their high spirits by a jump. however karl got the top rail down for me, and "mouse" hopped over the lower one gaily, overtaking the leader of the expedition in a very few strides. we could not keep up our rapid pace long; for the ground became terribly broken and cut up by swamps, quicksands, blind creeks, and all sorts of snares and pit-falls. every moment added to the desolate grandeur of the scene. bleak hills rose up on either hand, with still bleaker and higher peaks appearing beyond them again. an awful silence, unbroken by the familiar cheerful sound of the sheep calling to each other,--for even the hardy merino cannot live in these ranges during the winter months,--brooded around us, and the dark mass of a splendid "bush," extending over many hundred acres, only added to the lonely grandeur of the scene. we rode almost the whole time in a deep cold shade, for between us and the warm sun-rays were such lofty mountains that it was only for a few brief noontide moments he could peep over their steep sides. after two hour's riding, at the best pace which we could keep up through these terrible gorges, a sharp turn of the track brought us full in view of our destination. i can never forget that first glimpse of lake ida. in the cleft of a huge, gaunt, bare hill, divided as if by a giant hand, lay a large _black_ sheet of ice. no ray of sunshine ever struck it from autumn until spring, and it seemed impossible to imagine our venturing to skate merrily in such a sombre looking spot. but new-zealand sheep farmers are not sentimental i am afraid. beyond a rapid thought of self-congratulation that such "cold country" was not on _their_ run, they did not feel affected by its eternal silence and gloom. the ice would bear, and what more could skater's heart desire? at the end of the dark tarn, nearest to the track by which we had approached it, stood a neat little hut; and judge of my amazement when, as we rode up to it, a young gentleman, looking as if he was just going out for a day's deer-stalking, opened the low door and came out to greet us. yes, here was one of those strange anomalies peculiar to the colonies. a young man, fresh from his university, of refined tastes and cultivated intellect, was leading here the life of a boor, without companionship or appreciation of any sort. his "mate" seemed to be a rough west countryman, honest and well meaning enough, but utterly unsuited to mr. k----. it was the old story, of wild unpractical ideas hastily carried out. mr. k---- had arrived in new zealand a couple of years before, with all his worldly wealth,-- , pounds. finding this would not go very far in the purchase of a good sheep-run, and hearing some calculations about the profit to be derived from breeding cattle, based upon somebody's lucky speculation, he eagerly caught at one of the many offers showered upon unfortunate "new chums," and bought the worst and bleakest bit of one of the worst and bleakest runs in the province. the remainder of his money was laid out in purchasing stock; and now he had sat down patiently to await, in his little hut, until such time as his brilliant expectations would be realized. i may say here they became fainter and fainter year by year, and at last faded away altogether; leaving him at the end of three lonely, dreadful years with exactly half his capital, but double his experience. however this has nothing to do with my story, except that i can never think of our skating expedition to that lonely lake, far back among those terrible hills, without a thrill of compassion for the only living human being, who dwelt among them. it was too cold to dawdle about, however, that day. the frost lay white and hard upon the ground, and we felt that we were cruel in leaving our poor horses standing to get chilled whilst we amused ourselves. although my beloved helen was not there, having been exchanged for the day in favour of master mouse, a shaggy pony, whose paces were as rough as its coat, i begged a red blanket from mr. k----, and covered up helen's stable companion, whose sleek skin spoke of a milder temperature than that on lake ida's "gloomy shore." our simple arrangements were soon made. mr. k---- left directions to his mate to prepare a repast consisting of tea, bread, and mutton for us, and, each carrying our skates, we made the best of our way across the frozen tussocks to the lake. mr. k---- proved an admirable guide over its surface, for he was in the habit during the winter of getting all his firewood out of the opposite "bush," and bringing it across the lake on sledges drawn by bullocks. we accused him of having cut up our ice dreadfully by these means; but he took us to a part of the vast expanse where an unbroken field of at least ten acres of ice stretched smoothly before us. here were no boards marked "dangerous," nor any intimation of the depth of water beneath. the most timid person could feel no apprehension on ice which seemed more solid than the earth; so accordingly in a few moments we had buckled and strapped on our skates, and were skimming and gliding--and i must add, falling--in all directions. we were very much out of practice at first, except mr. k----, who skated every day, taking short cuts across the lake to track a stray heifer or explore a blind gully. i despair of making my readers see the scene as i saw it, or of conveying any adequate idea of the intense, the appalling loneliness of the spot. it really seemed to me as if our voices and laughter, so far from breaking the deep eternal silence, only brought it out into stronger relief. on either hand rose up, shear from the waters edge, a great, barren, shingly mountain; before us loomed a dark pine forest, whose black shadows crept up until they merged in the deep _crevasses_ and fissures of the snowy range. behind us stretched the winding gullies by which we had climbed to this mountain tarn, and mr. k----'s little hut and scrap of a garden and paddock gave the one touch of life, or possibility of life, to this desolate region. in spite of all scenic wet blankets we tried hard to be gay, and no one but myself would acknowledge that we found the lonely grandeur of our "rink" too much for us. we skated away perseveringly until we were both tired and hungry, when we returned to mr. k----'s hut, took a hasty meal, and mounted our chilled steeds. mr. c. h---- insisted on bringing poor mr. k---- back with us, though he was somewhat reluctant to come, alleging that a few days spent in the society of his kind made the solitude of his weather-board hut all the more dreary. the next day and yet the next we returned to our gloomy skating ground, and when i turned round in my saddle as we rode away on friday evening, for a last look at lake ida lying behind us in her winter black numbness, her aspect seemed more forbidding than ever, for only the bare steep hill-sides could be seen; the pine forest and white distant mountains were all blotted and blurred out of sight by a heavy pall of cloud creeping slowly up. "let us ride fast," cried mr. k----, "or we shall have a sou'-wester upon us;" so we galloped home as quickly as we could, over ground that i don't really believe i could summon courage to walk across, ever so slowly, to-day,--but then one's nerves and courage are in very different order out in new zealand to the low standard which rules for ladies in england, who "live at home in ease!" long before we reached home the storm was pelting us: my little jacket was like a white board when i took it off, for the sleet and snow had frozen as it fell. i was wet to the skin, and so numb with cold i could hardly stand when we reached home at last in the dark and down-pour. i could only get my things very imperfectly dried, and had to manage as best i could, but yet no one even thought of making the inquiry next morning when i came out to breakfast, "have you caught cold?" it would have seemed a ridiculous question. chapter v: toboggon-ing. i cannot resist the temptation to touch upon one of the winter amusements which came to us two years later. yet the word "amusement" seems out of place, no one in the province having much heart to amuse themselves, for the great snow storm of august, , had just taken place, and we were in the first days of bewilderment at the calamity which had befallen us all. a week's incessant snow-fall, accompanied by a fierce and freezing south-west wind, had not only covered the whole of the mountains from base to brow with shining white, through which not a single dark rock jutted, but had drifted on the plains for many feet deep. gullies had been filled up by the soft, driving flakes, creeks were bridged over, and for three weeks and more all communication between the stations and the various townships was cut off. the full extent of our losses was unknown to us, and dreary as were our forebodings of misfortune, none of us guessed that snow to be the winding sheet of half a million of sheep. the magnificent semi-circle of the southern alps stood out, for a hundred miles from north to south, in appalling white distinctness, and no one in the whole colony had ever seen the splendid range thus free from fleck or flaw. we had done all we could within working distance, but what was, the use of digging in drifts thirty feet deep? amidst, and almost above, the terrible anxiety about our own individual safety,--for the snow was over the roof of many of the station-houses,--came the pressing question, "where are the sheep?" a profound silence unbroken by bleat of lamb, or bark of dog, or any sound of life, had reigned for many days, when a merciful north-westerly gale sprung, up, and releasing the heavily-laden earth from its white bondage, freed the miserable remnant of our flocks and herds. at least, i should say, it freed those sheep which had travelled down to the vallies, driven before the first pitiless gusts, but we knew that many hundreds, if not thousands, of wethers must have been surprised and imprisoned far back among the hills. such knowledge could not be acted upon, however, for no human being could hope to plunge through the drifts around us. old shepherds who had lived on the run for fifteen years, confessed that they did not know their way fifty yards from the homestead. the vallies were filled up, so that one gully looked precisely like its fellow; rocks, scrub, ti-ti palms, all our local land-marks had disappeared; not a fence or gate could be seen in all the country side. here and there a long wave-like line in the smooth mass would lead us to suppose that a wire fence lay buried beneath its curves, but we had no means of knowing for certain. near the house every shrub and out-building, every hay-stack or wood-heap, had all been covered up, and no man might even guess where they lay. this had been the terrible state of things, and although the blessed warm wind had removed our immediate and pressing fear of starvation, we could not hope to employ ourselves in searching for our missing sheep for many days to come. none of us had been able to take any exercise for more than a fortnight, and having done all that could possibly be done near at hand, f---- set to work to manufacture some sledges out of old packing-cases. quite close to the house, a hill sloped smoothly for about yards, at an angle of degrees; along its side lay a perfectly level and deep drift, which did not show any signs of thawing for more than a month, and we resolved to use this as a natural _montagne russe_. the construction of a suitable sledge was the first difficulty to be surmounted, and many were the dismal failures and break-neck catastrophes which preceded what we considered a safe and successful vehicle. not only was it immensely difficult to make, without either proper materials or tools, a sledge which could hold two people (for f---- declared it was no fun sleighing alone), but his "patent brakes" proved the most broken of reeds to lean upon when the sledge was dashing down the steep incline at the rate of a thousand miles an hour. we nearly broke our necks more than once, and i look back now with amazement to our fool-hardiness. how well i remember one expedition, when f----, who had been hammering away in a shed all the morning, came to find me sitting in the sun in the verandah, and to inform me that at last he had perfected a conveyance which would combine speed with safety. undaunted by previous mishaps, i sallied forth, and in company with mr. u---- and f----, climbed painfully up the high hill i have mentioned, by some steps which they had cut in the frozen snow. without some such help we could not have kept our footing for a moment, and as long as i live i shall never forget the sensation of leaving my friendly alpenstock planted in the snow, and of seating myself on that frail sledge. perhaps i ought to describe it here. a board, about six feet long by one foot broad, with sheet-iron nailed beneath it, and curved upwards in front; on its upper surface a couple of battens were fixed, one quite at the foremost end, and one half-way. that was f----'s new patent sledge, warranted to go faster down an incline than any other conveyance on the surface of the earth. i was the wretched "passenger," as he called me, on more than one occasion, and i will briefly describe my experiences. "why did you go?" is a very natural question to arise in my reader's mind; and sitting here at my writing-table, i feel as if i must have been a lunatic to venture. but in those delicious wild days, no enterprise seemed too rash or dangerous to engage in, from mounting a horse which had never seen or felt the fluttering of a habit, to embarking on the conveyance i have described above, and starting down a mountain-side at the risk of a broken neck. well, to return to that terrible moment. i see the whole scene now. the frail, rude sledge, with its breaks made out of a couple of standards from a wire fence, connected by a strong iron chain; f----seated at the back of the precious contrivance, firmly grasping a standard in each hand; mr. u---- clinging desperately to his alpen-stock with one hand, whilst with the other he helps me on to the board; and nettle, my dear little terrier, standing shivering on three legs, sniffing distrustfully at the sledge. it is extremely difficult even to take one's place on a board a dozen inches wide. my petticoats have to be firmly wrapped around me, and care taken that no fold projects beyond the sledge, or i should be soon dragged out of my frail seat. i fix my feet firmly against the batten, and f---- cries, "are you ready?" "oh, not yet!" i gasp, clinging to mr. u----'s hand as if i never meant to let it go. "hold tight!" he shouts. now what a mockery this injunction was. i had nothing to hold on to except my own knees, and i clasped them convulsively. mr. u---- says, "you're all right now," and before i can realize that he has let go my hand, before my courage is half-way up to the necessary height, we are off. the breaks are slightly depressed for the first few yards, in order to regulate our pace, and because there is a tremendously steep pitch just at first. once we have safely passed that he tilts up the standards, and our sledge shoots like a meteor down the perfectly smooth incline. i cannot draw my breath, we are going at such a pace through the keen air; i give myself up for lost. we come to another steep pitch near the bottom of the hill; f---- is laughing to such a degree at me that he does not put down his breaks soon enough, and loses control of the sledge. we appear to leap down the dip, and then the sledge turns first one way and then the other, its zinc prow being sometimes up-hill and some-times down. it seems wonderful that we keep on the sledge, for we have no means of holding on except by pressing our feet against the battens; yet in the grand and final upset at the bottom of the hill, the sledge is there too, and we find we have never parted company from it. will any one believe that after such a perilous journey, i could actually be persuaded to try again? but so it was. at first the fright (for i was really terrified) used to make me very cross, and i declared that i was severely hurt, if not "kilt entirely;" but after i had shaken the snow out of my linsey skirt, and discovered that beyond the damage to my nerves i was uninjured, f---- was quite sure to try to persuade me to make another attempt, and i was equally sure to yield to the temptation. as well as my memory serves me, we only made one really successful journey, and that was on an occasion when we kept the breaks down the whole way. but i never could insure similar precautions being taken again, and we consequently experienced every variety of mishaps possible to sledge travellers. i persevered however for some days until the north-westerly wind, which was blowing softly all the time, began to lay bare the sharpest points of the rocks, and then i gave in at once, and would not be a "passenger" any more. it was rather too much to strike one's head against a jagged fragment of rock, or to dislocate one's thumb against a concealed stump of a palm tree. then the sharp points of the spaniards began to stick up through the softening snow, and nothing would induce me to run the risk of touching their green bayonets. besides which, the fast-thawing snow made it very difficult to climb up to the top of our hill, for the carefully-cut steps had disappeared long ago. so i gave up sledge journeys on my own account, and used only to look at f---- and mr. u---- taking them. these two persevered so long as an inch of snow remained on the hill-side. some of their adventures were very alarming, and certainly rather dangerous. one afternoon i had been watching them for more than an hour, and had seen them go through every variety of disaster, and capsize with no further effect than increasing their desire for "one more" trial. on the blind-side of the hill,--that is to say the side which gets scarcely any sun in winter,--a deep drift of snow still lingered, filling up a furrow made in former years by a shingle-slip. thither the two adventurous climbers dragged their sledge, and down the steep incline they performed their perilous descent many a time. i became tired of watching the board shoot swiftly over the white streak; and i strolled round the shoulder of the hill, to see if there was any appearance of the snow-fall lessening in the back country. i must have been away about half an hour, and had made the circuit of the little knoll which projected from the mountain side, returning to where i expected to find sleigh and sleighers starting perhaps on just "one more" journey. but no one was there, and a dozen yards or so from the usual starting-point, the snow was a good deal ploughed up and stained in large patches by blood. here was an alarming spectacle, though the only wonder was that a bad accident had not occurred before. i saw the sledge, deserted and broken, near the end of the drift: of the passengers there was neither sign nor token. i must say i was terribly frightened, but it is useless in new zealand to scream or faint; the only thing to do in an emergency is to _coo-e_; and so, although my heart was thumping loudly in my ears, and at first i could not produce a sound, i managed at last, after many attempts, to muster up a loud clear _coo-e_. there was the usual pause, whilst the last sharp note rang back from the hill-sides, and vibrated through the clear silent air; and then, oh, welcome sound! i heard a vigorous answer from our own flat where the homestead stood. i set off down-hill as fast as i could, and had the joy, when i turned the slope which had hidden our little house from my view, to see f---- and mr. u---- walking about; but even from that distance i could see that poor mr. u----'s head was bandaged up, and as soon as i got near enough to hear, f----shouted "i have broken my neck!" adding, "i am very hungry: let us go in to supper." under the circumstances these words were consolatory; and when i came to hear the story, this was the way the accident happened. as i mentioned before, even this drift had thawed till it was soft at the surface and worn away almost to the rocks. during a rapid descent the nose of the sledge dipped through the snow, and stopped dead against a rock. mr. u---- was instantly buried in the snow, falling into a young but prickly spaniard, which assaulted him grievously; but f---- shot over his head some ten yards, turned a somersault, and alit on his feet. this sounds a harmless performance enough, but it requires practice; and f---- declared that for weeks afterwards his neck felt twisted. the accident must have looked very ridiculous: the sledge one moment gliding smoothly along at the rate of forty miles an hour,--the next a dead stop, and f----flying through the air over his passenger's head, finishing feet first plump down in the soft snow. looking back on that time, i can remember how curiously soon the external traces of the great snow-storm disappeared. for some weeks after the friendly nor-wester, the air of the whole neighbourhood was tainted by dead and decaying sheep and lambs; and the wire fences, stock-yard rails, and every "coign of vantage," had to be made useful but ghastly by a tapestry of sheep-skins. the only wonder was that a single sheep had survived a storm severe enough to kill wild pigs. great boars, cased in hides an inch thick, had perished through sheer stress of weather; while thin-skinned animals, with only a few months growth of fine merino wool on their backs, had endured it all. it was well known that the actual destruction of sheep was mainly owing to the two days of heavy rain which succeeded the snow. out of a flock of , of all ages, we lost, on the lowest calculation, , grown sheep and nearly , lambs; and yet our loss was small by comparison with that of our neighbours, whose runs were further back among the hill, and less sheltered than our own. long before midsummer our cloud-shadowed hills were green once more; and i think i see again their beautiful outlines, their steep sides planted with semi-tropical palms and grasses, whilst the more distant peaks are veiled in a sultry haze. during that peculiarly bright and lovely summer we often ask each other, could it have been true that no one knew one mountain from the other, and that hills had been apparently levelled and vallies filled up by the heaviest snow-fall ever known. but whilst the words were on our lips, we could see a group of palm-trees, ten feet high, with their topmost leaves gnawed to the stump by starving sheep, that must have been standing on at least seven feet of snow to reach them; and there was scarcely a creek on the run whose banks were not strewn, for many a long day, by bare and bleaching bones. chapter vi: buying a run. like many other people in the world, i have occasionally built castles in the air, and equally of course they have invariably tumbled down in due time with a crash this particular castle however, not only attained to a great elevation in the visionary builder's eyes, but it covered so vast an area of land, that the story of its rise and fall deserves to be placed on record, as a warning to aerial architects and also as a beacon-light to young colonists. this was exactly the way it all happened. the new year of -found us living very quietly and happily on a small compact sheep-farm, at the foot of the malvern hills, in the province of canterbury, new zealand. as runs went, its dimensions were small indeed; for we only measured it at , acres, all told. the great tidal wave of prosperity, which sets once in a while towards the shores of all colonies, had that year swelled and risen to its full force; but this we did not know. borne aloft upon its unsubstantial crest we could not, from that giddy height, discern any water-valleys of adversity or clouds of change and storm along the shining horizon of the new world around us. all our calculations were based on the assumption that the existing prices for sheep, wool, cattle, and all farm-produce, would rule for many a long day; and the delightful part of this royal road to wealth was, that its travellers need not exert themselves in any way: they had only to sit still with folded hands whilst their sheep increased, and it was well known that a flock doubled itself in three short years. the obvious deduction from this agreeable numerical fact was, that in an equally short period your agent's payments to your bank account would also be doubled. in the meantime the drays were busy carting the wool to the seaports as fast as they could be loaded, whilst speculative drovers rode all about the country buying up the fat cattle and wethers from every run. these were wanted to supply the west coast diggings which had just "broken out" (as the curious phrase goes there), and so was every description of grain and dairy produce. we squatters were not the only inhabitants of this fool's paradise. the local government began planning extensive works: railways were laid out in every direction, bridges planned across rivers, which proved the despair of engineers; whilst a tunnel, the wonder of the southern hemisphere, was commenced through a range of hills lying between port lyttleton and christchurch. all this work was undertaken on a scale of pay which made the poor immigrants who thronged to the place by every ship, rub their eyes and believe they must be dreaming, and that they would presently wake up and find themselves back again in the old country, at the old starvation rate of wages. small capitalists, with perhaps only one or two hundred pounds in the world, bid against each other as purchasers of quarter-acre sections in the fast-springing townships, or of fifty-acre lots of arable land in the projected suburbs. subscriptions were raised for building a cathedral in christchurch; but so dear was both labour and material, that , pounds barely sufficed to lay its foundations. the paramount anxiety in men's minds seemed to be to secure land. sheep-runs in sheltered accessible parts of the country commanded enormous prices, and were bought in the most complicated way. the first comers had taken up vast tracts of land in all directions from the government, at an almost nominal rental. this had happened quite in the dark and remote ages of the history of the colony, at least ten or twelve years before the date of which i write. as speculators with plenty of hard cash came down from australia, these original tenants sold, as it were, the good-will and stock of their run at enormous prices; but what always seemed to me so hard was, that after you had paid any number of thousand pounds for your run, you might have to buy it all, or at any rate, some portion of it, over again. land could only be purchased freehold from the government, for pounds an acre; and if a "cockatoo" (i.e., a small farmer), or a speculator in mines, fancied any part of your property, he had only to go to the land office, and challenge your pre-emptive rights. the officials gave you notice of the challenge, and six weeks' grace in which to raise the money, and buy it freehold yourself; but few sheep-farmers could afford to pay a good many hundred pounds unexpectedly to secure even their best "flats" or vallies. hence it often happened that large runs in the most favourable situations were cut up by small investors, "free selectors" as they are called in australia, and it used to be rather absurd the way one grew to distrust any stranger who was descried riding about the run. the poor man might be looking for a stray horse, or have lost his way, but we always fancied he must be "prospecting" for either gold or coals, or else be a "cockatoo" disguised as a traveller. such was the state of things when my story opens. shearing was just over, and we knew to a lamb how rapidly our flocks and herds were increasing. a succession of mild winters and early genial springs had got the flock into capital order. the wool had all been sent off to christchurch by drays, the sheep were turned out on the beautiful green hills for ten months of perfect rest and peace; whilst the dogs, who had barked themselves quite hoarse, were enabled to desist from their labours in mustering and watching the yet unshorn mobs on the vallies. although our run was as well grassed and watered as any in the province, still it could not possibly carry more than a certain number of sheep, and to that total our returns showed that we were rapidly approaching. the most careful calculations warned us that by next shearing we should hardly know what to do with our sheep. it is always better to be under than overstocked, for the merino gets out of condition immediately, and even the staple of the wool deteriorates if its wearer be at all crowded on his feeding-grounds. "you must take up more country directly," was the invariable formula of the advice we, comparatively "new chums," received on all sides. this was easier to say than to do. turn which ever way we would, far back beyond our own lovely vallies and green hills, back up to the bleak region of glaciers, where miles of bush and hundreds of acres of steep hill-side, formed the _back-est_ of "back country," every inch of land was taken up. no fear had those distant squatters of "cockatoos," or even of miners; for no one came their way who could possibly help it. still we should have been comparatively glad to buy such a run fifty or sixty miles further back,--at the foot, in fact of the great southern alps,--just as a summer feeding-ground for the least valuable portion of our flock. but no one was inclined to part with a single acre, and we were forced to turn our eyes in a totally different direction. if my readers will refer to the accompanying map of new zealand, and look at the middle or south island, they will notice a long seaboard on the eastern side of the island, stretching ss.w. for many hundred leagues. it extends beyond the province of canterbury to that of otago, and embraces some of the most magnificent pastoral land in the settlement. not only is the soil rich and productive, but the climate is rather less windy than with us in the northern portion of the island; and the capital of otago (dunedin) had risen into comparative position and importance before christchurch,--was in short an elder sister of that pretty little town. most of the settlers in otago were scotchmen, and as there are no better colonists anywhere, its prosperity had attained to a very flourishing height. gold-digging had also broken out at the foot of the dunstan range, so that otago held her head quite as high, if not higher, than her neighbour canterbury. of course all the first-class pasture-land "down south," as it was called, had been taken up long before; but we heard rumours of splendid sheep country, yet unappropriated, far back towards the west coast of otago, just where its boundary joined canterbury. with our minds in this state of desire for what poor mazzini used to denounce as "territorial aggrandisement," we paid our usual post-shearing visit to christchurch. f---- had his agent's accounts to examine, a nice little surplus of wool-money to receive, and many other squatting interests to attend to; whilst i had to lay in chests of tea, barrels of sugar and rice, hundreds of yards of candle-wick, flower-seeds, reels of cotton, and many other miscellaneous articles. but through all our pleasant, happy little bustle ran the constant thought: "what shall we do for more country?" a day or two before the expiration of the week's leave of absence which we always gave ourselves, f---- came into my sitting-room at the hotel, flung down his hat on the table with an air of triumph, and cried, "i've heard of such a splendid run! one hundred thousand acres of beautiful sheep-country, and going for a mere song!" now i had lived long enough in the world to discover that one sometimes danced on the wrong foot to the tune of these "mere songs," so i cautiously inquired, "where is it?" f---- seemed a little dashed that the only question which he could not answer favourably should be the first i asked, and he replied vaguely, "well, it is rather a long way off, but i am sure we can manage it." a little more sifting elicited the fact that this "desirable investment" stretched along the shores of lake wanaka, famous for its beautiful scenery, and was to be had for what certainly seemed a ridiculously small sum;--only a few hundred pounds. "of course it has no sheep on it," added f----; "but that is all the better. i'll burn it this year, and then turn some cattle on it, and after next shearing we'll have a good mob of sheep to draft out and stock it." he further added, that he had invited his man of business and the individual who owned this magnificent property to dine with us that evening, and that then i should hear all about it and i may truly say that i _did_ hear about it, for my brain reeled with figures and calculations. by bedtime i was wondering if we could possibly spend the enormous fortune which would be quite certain to accrue to us in a few years if only we could make up our minds to invest the modest balance at our bankers in this tempting bargain. i remember well that i found myself wishing we were not going to be _quite_ so rich; half our promised income would have been ample, i thought. my anxieties on that score turned out to have been, to say the least, premature. not to make my story too long, i may briefly say that after making due allowance for the natural exaggeration of the owner, the run on lake wanaka's shores seemed certainly to offer many attractions. besides thousands of acres of beautiful sheltered sheep country, it was said to possess a magnificent bush, in which sawyers were already hard at work. of course all this timber would become our own, and we were to make so much a year by selling it. "how about the carriage?" inquired f---- cautiously, having visions of costly bullock-drays, and teams and drivers at fabulous wages. "oh, the lake is your highway," replied the would-be seller, airily; "you have nothing to do but lash your felled trees together, as they do in the mahogany-growing countries, and set them afloat on the lake, they will thus form a natural raft, and cost you little or nothing to get down to a good market. you know the dunstan diggings are just at the foot of the lake, and they haven't a stick there; timber is very badly wanted in those parts, not only for fuel and building, but also for slabbing the shafts which the miners sink." by the time the coffee was served f---- had made up his mind to buy the lake wanaka run; his business agent urging him strongly not to hesitate for a moment in securing such a chance. the negotiations reached thus far without the least hitch, but at this point f----said, "well, i'll tell you what i'll do: we will start in a day or two and go straight up to this run and look round it, and if i find it anything like so good as you both make it out, i'll buy it on the spot." never did that sociable little word "we" sound so delightful to my ears! "then i am to come too," i thought to myself, but i prudently concealed from the company that i had ever had any misgivings on that point. however, the company did not concern themselves with my doubts and fears, for our two guests seemed much taken aback at this very matter-of-fact proposal of f----'s. "that won't do at all, my dear fellow," said the owner of the run; "i am going to england by the next mail steamer, which you know sails next week, and the reason i am literally giving away my property is that i don't want any suspense or bother. take it or leave it, just as you like. there's wilkinson and fairwright and a lot of others all clamouring for the refusal of it, and i've only waited to see if you really wanted it before closing with fairwright. he is walking about with a cheque all ready filled up in his pocket, and only begging and praying me to let him have the run on my own terms. why you might be weather-bound or kept there for a month, and what shall i do then? no, its all just as i've told you, and you can call it your own to-morrow, but i can't possibly wait for you to go and look at it." no words of mine can give any idea of the tone of scorn in which our guest pronounced these last three words; as if looking at an intended purchase was at once the meanest and most absurd thing in-the world. f---- seemed half ashamed of himself for his proposal, but still he urged that he never liked to take a leap in the dark, backing up his opinion by several world-revered adages. "that's all very fine," chimed in our precious business adviser," but this transaction can hardly be said to be in the dark; here are the plans and the government lease and the transfer deeds, all regular and ready." with this he produced the plans, and then it was all up with us. who does not know the peculiar _smell_ of tracing-paper, with its suggestions of ownership? when these fresh and crackling drawings were opened before us they resembled nothing so much as a veritable paradise. there shone the lake--a brilliant patch of cobalt blue, bordered by outlines of vivid green pasture and belts of timber. here and there, on the outskirts, we read the words, "proposed township," "building lots," "probable gold fields," "saw mills." f---- laid his hand down over a large wash of light green paint and asked," now what sort of country is this; really and truly, you know?" "first class sheep country, i give you my word," replied the owner eagerly, "only wants to be stocked for a year or two." why need i go on? it was the old, old story of misplaced confidence. neither f---- nor i could believe that our friends would wilfully over-reach us, so it was settled that the first thing next morning the money should be handed over and the government lease transferred to us. we decided that as we were so far on the way to our new property, we would go and look at it before returning to the malvern hills, and the next few days were very busy ones, as we had to arrange our small domestic affairs, send up the dray, etc., etc. i felt rather anxious at the postponement of our return home, for i had left several "clutches" of eggs on the point of being hatched, and i had grave misgivings as to the care my expected ducklings and chickens would receive at the lands of my scatter-brained maid servants, to say nothing of the dangers besetting them from hawks and rats. however, small interests must give way to great ones, and f---- and i were already tasting the cares of proprietorship. our friend, the former owner of our new property, sailed for england in the mail steamer, in high spirits, saying cordially as he shook f----'s hand at parting, "well you _have_ got your fortune cut out for you, and no mistake; i feel half sorry already to think that i've parted with that run." about two days after his departure, f---- who had registered his name at the land office as the present tenant of , acres in the lake wanaka district, received a polite request from official quarters to pay up the annual rent, just due, amounting to pounds or so. we had effected our brilliant negotiations about a week too soon it seemed, but that was our own fault, so we had nothing to do but pay the money with as good a grace as possible. i am "free to confess" that this second cheque ran our banker's account very fine indeed, but still in those palmy days of the past this was no subject of uneasiness to a squatter. his credit was almost unlimited, and he could always raise as much money as he liked on an hypothecation of next year's wool. but we had not come to that yet. the weather was delightful; the customary week of heavy rain just after our midsummer christmas, had cooled the air and laid the dust, besides bringing out a fresh spring-like green tint over the willows and poplars, and causing even the leaves of the gums to lose their leather-like look for a few days. after much consultation we decided to go by coach as far as timaru, and then trust to circumstances to decide our future means of transport. not only were we obliged to pay a large sum for our places but our luggage was charged for by the pound, so we found it necessary to reduce our kit to the most modest dimensions, and only to take what was absolutely necessary. the journey was a long and weary one, the only variety being caused by a strong spice of danger at each river. at some streams we were transferred bodily to a large raft-like ferry boat, and so taken across. at others the passengers and luggage only were put into the boat, the lumbering coach with its leathern springs left behind, whilst the horses swam in our wake across the wide and rushing river, to be re-harnessed to another coach on the opposite shore. the rakaia, ashburton, and rangitata had been crossed in this way, and we had reached the otaio, a smaller river, when we found a new mode of transport awaiting us. a large dray with a couple of powerful horses was in readiness, and into this springless vehicle we were unceremoniously bundled. the empty coach and horses was driven over at another part of the stream. i shall never forget the jolting: the river must have been at least a quarter of a mile wide at that reach, and over its bed of boulders and rocks we bumped in the middle stretched a long strip of shingle, which seemed as smooth as turf by contrast with the first half of the river-bed. when we charged into the water again our driver removed his pipe from his mouth, looked over his shoulder and remarked, "river's come down since mornin'; best tuck up your feet, marms all." i can answer for this "marm" tucking up her feet with great agility, and not a moment too soon either, for as a light wind was blowing, a playful wave came rippling over and through the planked floor of the dray, floating all the smaller parcels about. but no one could speak, we were so jolted: it literally seemed as if our spines _must_ come through the crown of our heads, and i expected all my teeth to tumble out. in the midst of my fright and suffering, a laugh was jolted out of me by the absurd behaviour of one of our fellow-passengers. he was what is called a bush carpenter: i.e., a wandering carpenter, who travels from station to station, doing any little odd rough jobs wanted. this man had been working for us some time before, and had often amused me with his quaint ways. on this occasion he was on his oppressively good behaviour, and sat quite silent and solemn on the opposite ledge of the dray. but when for the second time the water came swirling through our rude conveyance with a force which threatened to upset it altogether, dale fumbled in his pocket, as if he were seeking for a life-belt, produced an enormous pair of green goggle spectacles, which might have made part of moses primrose's purchases at the fair, and adjusting them on his nose as steadily as he could, said gravely, "this must be looked to!" he continued to stare at the wash of water during the remainder of our perilous and rough transit without vouchsafing any explanation of his meaning, but after we had safely landed he replaced his spectacles, first in their huge shagreen case, and next in his pocket, with an air which seemed to say, "the danger is now over: thanks to my precautions." timaru was reached very late, and the best accommodation at the inn placed at our disposal. still, in those distant days there was no such thing as a private sitting room, and we had all to eat our supper in the same rough-boarded little apartment. but in all my varied wanderings in different parts of the world, when the accidents of travel have thrown me for a time among the class whom we foolishly speak of as the lower orders, i have never yet had to complain of the slightest inconvenience or disagreeableness from my fellow-travellers. on the contrary, i have always received the most chivalrous politeness at their hands, and have noticed how ready they were to forego their usual tastes and habits lest they should cause me any annoyance. i wonder whether fine gentlemen in their splendid clubs would be quite so willing to spoil the pleasure of their evening if any accident were to throw an unwelcome lady amongst them? at all events, they could not be _more_ self-sacrificing than my friends in fustian jackets have always proved themselves, and on this particular evening the landlord of the inn was so amazed at the orders for tea and coffee instead of the usual "nips" of spirits, that he was constrained to inquire the reason. a stalwart drover who was sitting opposite to me at the rude table, murmured from the depths of his great beard, in an oracular whisper, "the smell of speerits might'nt be agreeble like to the lady." in vain i protested that i did not mind it in the least; tea and coffee was the order of the evening, and solemn silence and good behaviour. no smoking, no songs, no conviviality of any sort. i would fain have shown my appreciation of their courtesy by talking to them; but alas, i was one vast ache all over! although the road had been a dead level, sixteen hours of jolting and bumping had reduced me to a limp, black-and-blue creature, with out a word or a smile. of course i retired to what was literally a pallet, and a very hard pallet too, as early as possible, but even after i had vanished behind the thin wooden partition which formed my bedroom, the greatest silence and decorum continued to reign among my fellow-travellers. chapter vii: "buying a run."--continued. early the next morning we all breakfasted together, and then separated with most polite adieux. we sallied forth to look for a couple of riding horses. there were none to be hired, so we had to buy two good-looking nags for pounds a-piece. now-a-days the same horses would not fetch more than pounds and i have been told that in australia you can buy a horse for a shilling, but ours in new zealand have never sunk lower than a couple of pounds, if they had any legs at all. it seemed to the horse-dealer quite a superfluous question when i timidly inquired if my horse had ever carried a lady. "no: i can't just say as he has, mum, as you see there aint no ladies in these parts for him to carry. but," he added magnanimously, "i'll try him with a blanket fust, if you're at all oneasy about him." we did not start until the next day, as we had to hunt up side-saddles, and i had to sew a few yards of grey linsey into a riding-skirt; but by the following day we were all ready, and our "swags" packed and strapped to the saddles by nine o'clock. f----'s horse looked a very nice one in every respect; mine was evidently uneasy in his mind at the strange shape of his saddle, and i was recommended to mount outside the little enclosure, on a patch of open ground, where my steed would not be able to brush me off. the moment i mounted, the "hermit" as he was called, made for a dry ditch and tried to lie down, but a sharp cut from a stock-whip brought him out of it, and then he laid his ears well back and started for a good gallop, to endeavour to get rid of his strange rider. however, his head was turned in the right direction; there were no obstacles in the way, and before he got tired of his pace we had left timaru a good many miles behind us. f---- looked complacently at the "hermit," and observed, "he'll carry you very nicely, i think." i could only breathe a sincere hope that he might. it was a beautiful day, warm but not oppressive, and delightfully calm. our road lay at first along the sea-shore. ever since we had left christchurch the ground had been almost level, and the road consisted merely of a track cleared from tussocks. on our left extended the vast strip known as the ninety-miles beach, whilst far on our right, between us and the west coast, the southern alps, rose in all their might and beauty, sometimes lightly veiled by a summer haze, at others cutting our italian-blue sky sharp and clear with their grand outlines. our horses were a trifle too fat for good condition, and we feared to hurry them the first day, so we made an early halt at mahiki, only a twenty miles stage; but the next day they took us on to waitaki ferry, past a splendid bush, and so into the heart of the hill country. between the ranges, beautiful fertile valleys extended; when i say fertile, i mean that the soil was excellent, and the land well-grassed. but there was no cultivation. not a sod had ever been turned there since the creation of the world, and the whole country wore the peculiar yellow tinge caught from the tall waving tussocks, which is the prevailing feature of new zealand scenery _au naturel_. every acre had been "taken up," but as yet the runs were rather understocked. our fourth day's ride was the longest,--fifty-five miles in all, though we halted for a couple of hours at a miserable accommodation house. our bivouac that night was close to lake wanaka, at the molyneux ferry-house, and there i was kept awake all night by the attentions of a cat. i never saw such a ridiculous animal. prince, for that was his name, took the greatest fancy to me, or rather to my woollen skirt i suppose, and found a linsey lap much more comfortable than the corduroy knees on which he took his usual evening nap. at all events he followed me into my room, which only boasted of a mattress, stuffed with tussock-grass by the way, on the floor. here i should have slept very well after my long journey, if prince would have permitted it. in vain i put him out of the window, not always very gently; he returned in five minutes, bringing a palpitating, just-caught bird or mouse, which he softly dropped on my face, and purred loudly with delight at his own gallantry. twenty times did i strike a match that night and try to restore the victims to life; only one recovered sufficiently to be released, and prince brought it in again, quite dead, five minutes later. i shut the little casement window, but the room became so hot and stuffy, and suspicious fumes of stale beer and tobacco began to assert their presence, so that i found myself obliged to open it again. sometimes the victim's bones were crunched close to my ear, and i found more than one feather in my hair in the morning. never was any one so persecuted by a cat as i was by prince that weary night. the next day we got to a station known as "johnson's." it was just at the head of the lake, and as we arrived tolerably early in the forenoon we embarked, after the usual station dinner of mutton, tea, and damper, on lake wanaka. alas for those treacherous blue waters! we had only a little pair-oared boat, in which i took my place as coxwain, and after pulling for a mile or two under a blazing sun, over short chopping waves, with a head-wind, we all became so deadly sea-sick that we had to turn back! as soon as we had rested and recovered, a council of war was held as to our movements, and we decided, in spite of our recent experiences, to turn our horses, who had done quite enough for the present, out on the run, and so make our way down the lake by boat. already f---- was beginning to look anxious, for he perceived that, even after the head of the lake had been reached, the wool would cost an enormous sum to cart down to either oamaru or timaru, from whence alone it could be shipped. the mile or two of the run which lay along the shore of the lake showed us frightfully rough country. a dense jungle of tussocks and thorny bushes choked up the feed, and made it impossible to drive any animals through it, even supposing that good pasturage lay beyond. still we hoped that we might be looking at the worst portion of our purchase, and deter mined to persevere in the attempt to penetrate to the furthest end of our new property. accordingly we hired a safe old tub of a boat which, though too heavy to pull, was warranted to sail steadily, and with a couple of men, some cold mutton, bread, tea, and sugar, started valiantly on our cruise. but the "blue, unclouded weather," in which we had hitherto basked, was at an end for the present. we had already enjoyed a longer succession of calm days than usually falls to the lot of the travellers in that windy middle island, and it was now quite time for the imprisoned "nor'-wester" to have his turn over the surface of the domain. accordingly the first day's sail was against a light, ominously warm head-wind, and we only made any way at all by keeping up a complicated system of tacking. the start had not been an early one, so darkness found us but little advanced on our voyage, and we passed the night in a rough shanty, on beds of fern-leaves, wrapped in our red blankets. tired as we were, none of us could sleep much. the air was dry and parched; every now and then a sough of the rising hot gale swept through our crazy shelter without cooling us, and warned us to prepare for what was coming. our only chance of getting on was to make an early start, for fortunately a true "nor'-wester" is somewhat of a sluggard. the skies wore their peculiar chrysoprase green tint, except towards the weather quarter, where heavy banks of lurid cloud showed that the enemy was collecting in force. even the hour of dawn, usually so crisp and cool, brought no sense of refreshment to our languid limbs, and we embarked with the direst forebodings. a few miles further up the lake we reached an out-station hut, built by our host mr. johnson when he first "took up" his country and intended to push his boundary as far as this. he soon drew in his lines however on account of the rough nature of the ground. the hut was in a most picturesque spot, and although deserted, remained still in good repair. the little scrap of garden ground was a tangle of gooseberry and currant bushes among which potatoes flourished at their own sweet will. we had only time to beach the boat, that is to say f---- and the two men did so, whilst i ran backwards and forwards with the blankets and provisions, before the hurricane was upon us. henceforth there was no stirring out of doors until the gale had blown itself out. we dragged in some driftwood, barricaded the door, and prepared to pass the time as well as we could. oh, the fleas in the hut! the ground was literally alive with them, and their audacity and appetite was unparalleled. our boatmen sat tranquilly by the tiny window and played cribbage incessantly with very dirty cards and a board made out of a small bar of soap. as for me, i turned an empty box up on its end, so as to get out of the way of the fleas, and perched myself on it, finding ample occupation in defending my position from the attacks of the active little wretches. sometimes i felt as if i must rush out into the lake and drown myself and my tormentors together. it was very bad for everybody. the poor boatmen doubtless wished to smoke, but were too polite to do anything of the sort. f---- had nothing whatever to read, except a torn piece of an old _times_, at least two years old, which we had brought to wrap up some of our provisions; whilst i was still more idle and wretched. two weary interminable days dragged, or perhaps i should say, blew, themselves along in this miserable fashion, but at sundown on the evening of the third day the wind dropped suddenly, and we did not lose a moment in darting out of our prison and embarking once more. for the first time since we started we could perceive the grandeur of the surrounding country; but grand scenery is not necessary nor indeed desirable in a sheep run. splendid mountains ran down in steep spurs to the very shore of the enormous lake. behind them, piled in snowy steeps, rose the distant alps of the antipodes; great masses of native bush made dark purple shadows among the clefts of the hills, whilst the lake rippled in and out of many a graceful bay and quiet harbour. not a fleck or film of cloud floated between us and the serene and darkening sky; a profound, delightful calm brooded over land and water. although there was no moon, the stars served us as lights and compass until two o'clock in the morning, by which time we had reached the head of the lake (which is thirty-five miles in length), where we landed, extemporized a tent out of the boat sail, and turned in for a refreshing flea-less sleep. the next day was beautifully still, with a light air from the opposite point, just sufficient to cool the parched atmosphere; and we made our way along the head of the lake to a place were a couple of sawyers were at work. one of them had brought his wife with him, and her welcome to me was the most touching thing in the world. she took me entirely under her care, and would hardly let me out of her sight. i must say it was very nice to be waited on so faithfully, and i gave myself up to the unaccustomed luxury. all she required of me in exchange for her incessant toil on my behalf was "news." it did not matter of what kind, every scrap of intelligence was welcome to her, and she refused to tell me to what date her "latest advices" extended. during the three days of our stay in that clearing among the great pines of the wanaka bush, i gave my hostess a complete abridgment of the history of england--political, social, and moral, beginning from my earliest recollections. then we ran over contemporary foreign affairs, dwelt minutely on every scrap of colonial news, and finally wound up with a full, true, and particular account of myself and all my relations and friends. when i paused for breath she would cease her washing and cooking on my behalf, and say entreatingly, "go on now, do!" until i felt quite desperate. all this time whilst i was being "interviewed" nearly to death, f----employed himself in making excursions to different parts of the run. one of the sawyers lent him a miserable half-starved little pony; and he penetrated to another sawyer's hut, seven miles distant up the matukituki river. but no matter whether he turned his steps to north or south, east or west, he met with the same disheartening report. there was the ground indeed, but it was perfectly useless. not only was there was _no_ pasturage, but if there had been, the nature of the country would have rendered it valueless, on account of the way it was overgrown. it would be tedious to explain more minutely why this was the case. sufficient must it be to say that whilst f---- was only too anxious to keep his eyes shut as to the ground he had alighted on after his leap in the dark, and the sawyers were equally anxious to induce settlers to come there, and so bring a market for their labour close to their hand nothing could make our purchase appear anything except a dead loss. as for the plans, they were purely imaginary. the blue lake was about the only part true to nature; and even that should have had a foot-note to state that it was generally lashed into high, unnavigable waves, by a chronic nor'-wester. no: there was nothing for it but to go home again to the little run which had seemed such a mere paddock in our eyes, whilst we indulged in castle-building over , acres of country. it was of no use lingering amid such disappointment and discomfort; besides which my listener, the sawyer's wife, had turned her husband and herself out of their hut, and were sleeping under a red blanket tent. poor woman, she was most anxious to get away; and the lovely sylvan scene, with the tall trees standing like sentinels over their prostrate brethren, the wealth of beauteous greenery, springing through fronds of fern and ground creepers, the bright-winged flight of paroquets and other bush birds, even the vast expanse of the lake which stretched almost from their threshold for so many miles, all would have been gladly exchanged for a dusty high street in any country town-ship. her last words were, "can't you send me a paper or hany thing printed, mam?" i faithfully promised to do my best, and carried out my share of the bargain by despatching to her a large packet of miscellaneous periodicals and newspapers; but whether she ever received them is more than i can say. we were afraid of lingering too long, lest another nor'-wester should become due; and we therefore started as soon as f---- had decided that it was of no use exploring our wretched purchase any further. we had a stiff breeze from the north-west all the way down the lake; but as it was right a-stern it helped us along to such good purpose, that one day's sailing before it brought us back to mr. johnson's homestead and comparative civilization. the little parlour and the tiny bed-room beyond, into which i could only get access by climbing through a window (for the architect had forgotten to put a door), appeared like apartments in a spacious palace, so great was the contrast between their snug comfort and the desolate misery of our hut life. of course nothing else was talked of except our disappointment at our new run; and although mr. johnson had indulged in forebodings, which were only too literally fulfilled, he had the good taste never to remind us of his prophecies. "of all the forms of human woe, defend me from that dread, 'i told you so.'" after a day's halt and rest we mounted our much refreshed horses, and set our faces straight across country for dunedin. this is very easy to write, but it was not quite so easy to do. we could only ride for the first fifty-two miles, which we accomplished in two days. these stages brought us to the foot of the dunstan range, and near the gold-diggings of that name. i would fain have turned aside to see them, but we had not time. however, we felt the auriferous influence of the locality; for a perfect stranger came up to us, whilst we were baiting at another place, called the kaiwarara diggings, and offered to buy our horses from us for pounds each, and also to purchase our saddles and bridles at a fair price. this was exactly what we wanted, as we had intended to sell them at dunedin; and i was no ways disinclined to part with the hermit; who retained the sulky, misanthropical temper which had earned him his name. he was now pronounced "fit to carry a lady," and purchased to be sold again at the diggings. whether there were any ladies there or not i cannot tell. of course, before parting with our nags we ascertained that the ubiquitous "cobb's coach" started from our resting place for dunedin next day, and we made the rest of our journey in one of that well-known line. its leathern springs, whilst not so liable to break by sudden jolts, impart a swinging rocking motion to the body of the vehicle, which is most disagreeable; but rough and rude as they are, they deserve to be looked upon with respect as the pioneers of civilization. all over america, australia, and now new zealand, the moment half-a-dozen passengers are forthcoming, that moment the enterprising firm starts a coach, and the vehicle runs until it is ousted by a railway. all previous tracks which i had journeyed over seemed smooth turnpike roads, compared to that terrible tussocky track which led to dunedin. but that bright little town was reached at last, the hotel welcomed us, tired and bruised travellers that we were, and next evening we started in the _geelong_ for port lyttleton. this little coasting steamer seemed to touch at every hamlet along the coast, and after each pause i had to begin afresh my agonies of sea-sickness. there was no such thing as getting one's sea-legs; for we were seldom more than a few hours outside, and had no chance of getting used to the horrible motion. timaru was reached next day, but we had suffered so frightfully during the night from a chopping sea and an open roadstead, that we went on shore, and entrusted ourselves once more to the old coach. it seemed better to endure the miseries we knew of, than to make experiments in wretchedness. so we went through the old jolting and jumbling until we were dropped at an accommodation house, fifteen miles from christchurch, where we slept that night, and at daylight despatched a messenger to the next station for our own horses. he had only thirty-five miles to ride, and about mid-day we started to meet him on hired horses, which we were very glad to exchange for better nags a stage further on. and so we rode quietly home in the gloaming, winding up the lovely, tranquil valley, at whose head stood our own snug little homestead. at first we were so glad to be safely at hone again that we scarcely gave a thought to our fruitless enterprise; but as our bruised bodies became rested and restored, our hearts began to ache when we thought of the money we had so rashly flung away in buying a run. chapter viii: looking for a congregation. it is to be hoped and expected that such a good understanding has been established between my readers and myself by this time, that they will not find the general title of these papers unsuitable to the heading of this particular chapter. indeed, i may truly say, that, looking back upon the many happy memories of my three years life in that lovely and beloved middle island, no pleasures stand out more vividly than my evening rides up winding gullies or across low hill-ranges in search of a shepherd's hut, or a _cockatoo's_ nest. a peculiar brightness seems to rest on those sun-lit peaks of memory's landscape; and it is but fitting that it should be so, for other excursions or expeditions used to be undertaken merely for business or pleasure, but these delicious wanderings were in search of scattered dwellings whose lonely inhabitants--far removed from church privileges for many a long year past--might be bidden, nay, entreated, to come to us on sunday afternoons, and attend the service we held at home weekly. and here i feel constrained to say a word to those whose eyes may haply rest on my pages, and who may find themselves in the coming years in perhaps the same position as i did a short time ago. a new comer to a new country is sure to be discouraged if he or she (particularly _she_, i fancy) should attempt to revive or introduce any custom which has been neglected or overlooked. this is especially the case with religious observances. at every turn one is met by disheartening warnings. "oh, the people here are very different to those in the old country; they would look upon it as impertinence if you suggested they should come to church." "you will find a few may come just at first, and then when the novelty wears off and they have seen all the pretty things in your drawing room, not a soul will ever come near the place." "if even the men don't say something very free and easy to you when you invite them to your house on sunday afternoons, you may depend upon it that after two or three weeks you will not know how to keep them in order." such, and many more, were the discouraging remarks made when i consulted my neighbours about my plan for collecting the shepherds from the surrounding runs, and holding a church of england service every sunday afternoon at our own little homestead. to my mind, the distances seemed the greatest obstacle, as many of the men i wanted to reach lived twenty-five or even thirty miles away, with very rough country between. i had no fear of impertinence, for it is unknown to me, and seldom comes, i fancy, unprovoked; whilst with regard to the novelty wearing off and the men ceasing to attend, that must be left in god's hands. we could only endeavour to plant the good seed, and trust to him to give the increase. it was a great comfort to me in those early days that f----, who had been many years in the colony, never joined in the disheartening prophecies i have alluded to. although as naturally averse to reading aloud before strangers as a man who had lived a solitary life would be sure to be, he promised at once, with a good grace, to read the evening service and a sermon afterwards, and thus smoothed one difficulty over directly. his advice to me was precisely what i would fain repeat: "try, by all means: if you fail you will at least feel you have made the attempt." may all who try succeed, as we did! i believe firmly they will, for it is an undertaking on which god's blessing is sure to rest, and there are no such fertilizing dews as those which fall from heaven. the mists arising from earth are only miasmic vapours after all! but i fear to linger too long on the end, instead of telling you about the means. it was may when we were fairly settled in our new home at the head of a hill-encircled valley. with us that month answers to your november, but fogs are unknown in that breezy middle island, and my first winter in canterbury was a beautiful season, heralded in by an exquisite autumn. how crisp the mornings and evenings were, with ever so light a film of hoar frost, making a splendid sparkle on every blade of waving tussock-grass! then in the middle of the day the delicious warmth of the sun tempted one to linger all day in the open air, and i never wearied of gazing at the strange purple shadows cast by a passing cloud; or up, beyond the floating vapourous wreath, to the heaven of brilliant blue which smiled upon us. and yet, when i come to think of it, i don't know that i had much time to spare for glancing at either hills or skies, for we were just settling ourselves in a new place, and no one knows what _that_ means unless they have tried it, fifty miles away from the nearest shop. the yeast alone was a perpetual anxiety to me,--it would not keep beyond a certain time, and had a tendency to explode its confining bottles in the middle of the night, so it became necessary to make it in smaller quantities every ten days or so. if by any chance i forgot to remind my scatter-brained damsels to replenish the yeast bottles, they used up the last drop, and then would come smilingly to me with the remark, "there aint not a drop o' yeast, about, anywhere, mum." this entailed flap-jacks, or scones, or soda bread, or some indigestible compound for at least three days, as it was of no use attempting to make proper bread until the yeast had worked. then the well needed to be deepened, a kitchen garden had to be made, shelter to be provided for the fowls and pigs; a shed to be put up for coals; a thousand things which entailed thought and trouble, had to be done. it is true these rough jobs were not exactly in my line, but indoors i was just as busy trying to make big things fit into little spaces and _vice versa_. we could not afford to take things coolly and do a little every day, for at that time of year an hour's change in the wind might have brought a heavy fall of snow, or a sharp frost, or a; deluge of rain down upon the uncovered and defenceless heads of our live stock. the poor dear sheep, the source of our income, were after all the least well-cared for creatures on the station. a well grassed and watered run, with sunny vallies for winter feeding, and green hills for summer pasturage, had been provided by antipodean nature for them, and to these advantages we only added some twenty or twenty-five miles of wire fencing, and then they were left to themselves, with a couple of shepherds to look after fifteen thousand sheep all the year round. but yet, busy as we were, we found time to look up a congregation. the very first sunday afternoon, whilst we were still in the midst of a chaos of chips and big boxes and straw and empty china-barrels, our own shepherds came over, by invitation, and the only very near neighbours we had--a scotch head-shepherd and his charming young wife,--and we held a service in the half-furnished drawing room. after it was ended we had a long talk with the men, and they confessed that they had enjoyed it very much, and would like to come regularly. when questioned as to the feasibility of inducing others to join, they said that it might be suggested to more than one distant, lonely hill-shepherd, but his uncontrollable shyness would probably prevent his attendance. "jim salter, and joe bennett, and a lot more on 'em, would be glad enow to come, if so be they could feel as how they was truly wellcombe," said our shepherd, pepper, who prided himself on the elegance and correctness of his phraseology. he added, after a reflective pause, turning bashfully away, "if so be as the lady would just look round and give 'em a call, they'd be to be persuaded belike." so the scheme was pepper's after all, you see. but this "looking round," to which he alluded so airily, meant scrambling rides, varying from ten to twenty-eight miles in length, over break-neck country, and this on the slender chance of finding the men in-doors. now a new zealand shepherd almost lives out on the hills, so the prospect of finding any of our congregation at home was slight indeed. however, as i said before, f---- stood by me, and although we neither of us could well spare the time, we agreed to devote two afternoons every week, so long as the fine open autumn weather, lasted, to making excursions in search of back-country huts. there are no roads or finger posts or guides of any sort in those distant places. when we inquired what was the name of "mills" shepherd (the masters are always plain smith or jones, and the shepherds mr.----, in the colonies) the answer was generally very vague. "wiry bill, we mostly calls 'im; but i think i've heerd say his rightful name was mr. pellet, mum. he's a little chap, as strong as the 'ouse," explained pepper, who was an incorrigible cockney, "and he lives over there," pointing with his thumb to a mountain range behind us. "he's in one of them blind gullies. you go along the gorge of the river till you come to a saddle all over fern, and you drop down that, and follow the best o' three or four tracts till you come to a swamp." here pepper paused, in consideration of my face of horror; for if there was one thing i dreaded more than another in those early days, it was a swamp. steep hill sides, wide creeks, honey-combed flats, all came in, the day's ride,--but a swamp! ugh! the horrible treacherous thing, so green and innocent looking, with here and there a quicksand or a peaty morass, in which, without a moment's warning, your horse sank up to his withers! it was dreadful, and when we came to such a place helen used to stop dead short, prick her pretty ears well forward, and, trembling with fear and excitement, put her nose close to the ground, smelling every inch, before she would place her fore foot down on it, jumping off it like a goat if it proved insecure. generally she crossed a swamp, by a series of bounds in and out of flax bushes; and hopeless indeed would a morass be without those green cities of refuge! horrible as a large swamp is however to a timid horsewoman, it is dear to the heart of a cockatoo. he gladly buys a freehold of fifty acres in the midst of one, burns it, makes a sod fence, sown with gorse seed a-top, all round his section, drains it in a rough and ready fashion, and then the splendid fertile soil which has been waiting for so many thousand years, "brings forth fruit abundantly." such enormous fields of wheat and oats and barley as you come upon sometimes,--with, alas, never a market near enough to enable the plenteous crop to return sevenfold into its master's bosom! i shall not inflict upon you a description of all our rides in search of members for our congregation. two, in widely differing directions, will serve as specimens of such excursions. in consideration of my new-chumishness, f---- selected a comparatively easy track for our first ride. and yet, "bad was the best," might surely be said of that breakneck path. what would an english horse, or an english lady say, to riding for miles over a slippery winding ledge on a rocky hill side, where a wall of solid mountain rose up perpendicularly on the right hand, and on the left a very respectable sized river hurried over its boulders far beneath the aerial path; yet this was comparatively a safe track, and presented but one serious obstacle, over which i was ruthlessly taken. it is perhaps needless to say we were riding in single file, and equally unnecessary to state that i was the last; for certainly we should never have made much progress otherwise. helen, my bay mare, would follow her stable companion, on which f---- was mounted, so that was the way we got on at all. a sudden sharp turn showed me what appeared to be a low stone wall running own the spur of the mountain, right across our track, and i had already begun to disquiet myself about the possibility of turning back on such a narrow ledge, when i saw f----'s powerful black horse, with his ears well forward, and his reins, lying loose on his neck, make a sort of rush at the obstacle, climb up it as a cat would, stand for an instant, exactly like a performing goat, with all four legs drawn closely together under him, and then with a spring disappear on the other side. "this wall", i thought, "must be but loosely built, for _leo_ has displaced some of the stones from its coping." helen, pretty dear, hurried after her friend and leader; and before i had time to realize what she was going to do, she was balancing herself on the crumbling summit of this stone wall (which was only the freak of a landslip), and as it proved impossible to remain there, perched like a bird on a very insecure branch, nothing remained except to gather herself well together and jump off. but what a jump! the ground fell sheer away at the foot of the wall, and left a chasm many feet wide, which the horse could not see until it had climbed to the top of the wall, and as turning back was out of the question, the only alternative was to give a vigorous bound on to the narrow ledge beyond. terrified as i felt, i luckily refrained from jerking helen's head, or attempting to guide her in any way. the only chance of safety over new zealand tracks, or new zealand creeks, is to leave your horse _entirely_ to itself. i have seen men who were reckoned good riders in england, get the most ignominious tumbles from a disregard of this advice. an up-country horse knows perfectly well the only sound spots in a swamp; or the only sound part of a creek's banks. if his rider persists in taking him over the latter, where he himself thinks it narrowest and safest, he is pretty sure to find the earth rotten and crumbling, and to pay for his obstinacy by a wetting; whilst in the case of a swamp the consequences are even more serious, and the horse often gets badly strained in floundering out of a quagmire. but it was not all danger and difficulty, and the many varieties of scene in the course of a long ride constituted some of its chief charms. at first, perhaps, after we had left our own fair valley behind, the track would wind through the gorge of a river, with lofty mountains rising sheer up from the water side. all here was sad and grey, and very solemn in its eternal silence, only made more intense by the ceaseless monotonous roar of the ever-rushing water. then we would emerge on acres and acres of softly rolling downs, higher than the hillocks we call by that name at home, but still marvellously beautiful in their swelling curves all folding so softly into each other, and dotted with mobs of sheep, making pastoral music to a flock-owner's ear. over this sort of ground we could canter gaily along, with "hector," f----'s pet colley, keeping close to the heels of his master's horse,--for it is the worst of bad manners in a colley to look at a neighbour's sheep. the etiquette in passing through a strange run is for the dog to go on the off side of his master's horse, so that the sheep shall not even see him; and this piece of courtly politeness hector always practised of his own accord. a wire fence always proved a very tiresome obstacle, for horses have a great dread of them, and will not be induced to jump them on any account. if we could find out where the gate was, well and good; but as it might be half a dozen miles off, on one side or the other, we seldom lost time or patience in seeking it. when there was no help for it, and such a fence had to be crossed, the proceedings were, always the same. f----dismounted, and unfastened one of his stirrup leathers; with this he strapped the wires as firmly as possible together, but if the fence had been lately fresh-strained, it was sometimes a difficult task. still he generally made one spot lower than the rest, and over this he proceeded to adjust his coat very carefully; he then vaulted lightly over himself, and calling upon me to aid by sundry flicks on leo's flank, the horse would be induced to jump over it. this was always a work of time and trouble, for leo hated doing it, and would rather have leaped the widest winter creek, than jumped the lowest coat-covered wire fence. helen had to jump with me on her back, and without any friendly whip to urge her, but except once, when she caught her hind leg in the sleeve of the coat which was hanging over the fence, and tore it completely out, she got over very well. upon that occasion f---- had to carry his sleeve in his pocket until we reached the neat little out-station hut, where jim salter lived, and where we were pretty sure to find a housewife, for shepherds are as handy as sailors with a needle and thread. i shall always believe that some bird of the air had "carried the matter" to salter, because not only was he at home, and in his sunday clothes, but he had made a cake the evening before, and that was a very suspicious circumstance. however we pretended not to imagine that we were expected, and jim pretended with equal success to be much surprised at our visit, so both sides were satisfied. nothing could be neater than the inside of the little hut; its cob walls papered with, old illustrated london news,--not only pictures but letter-press,--its tiny window as clean as possible, a new sheep-skin rug laid down before the open fireplace, where a bright wood fire was sputtering and cracking cheerily, and the inevitable kettle suspended from a hook half-way up the low chimney. outside, the dog-kennels had been newly thatched with tohi grass, the garden weeded and freshly dug, the chopping-block and camp-oven as clean as scrubbing could make them. it was too late in the year for fruit, but salter's currant, raspberry, and gooseberry bushes gave us a good idea of how well he must have fared in the summer. the fowls were just devouring the last of the green-pea shoots, and the potatoes had been blackened by our first frosts. it was all very nice and trim and comfortable, except the loneliness; that must have been simply awful. it is difficult to realise how completely cut off from the society of his kind a new zealand up-country shepherd is, especially at an out-station like this. once in every three months he goes down to the homestead, borrows the pack horse, and leads it up to his hut, with a quarter's rations of flour, tea, sugar and salt; of course he provides himself with mutton and firewood, and his simple wants are thus supplied. after shearing, about january, his wages are paid, varying from pounds to pounds a year, according to the locality, and then he gets a week's leave to go down to the nearest town. if he be a prudent steady man, as our friend salter was, he puts his money in the bank, or lends it out on a freehold mortgage at ten per cent., only deducting a few pounds from his capital for a suit of clothes, a couple of pair of cookham boots for hill walking, and above all, some new books. without any exception, the shepherds i came across in new zealand were all passionately fond of reading; and they were also well-informed men, who often expressed themselves in excellent, through superfine, language. their libraries chiefly consisted of yellow-covered novels, and out of my visits in search of a congregation grew a scheme for a book-club to supply something better in the way of literature, which was afterwards most successfully carried out. but of this i need not speak here, for we are still seated inside salter's hut,--so small in its dimensions that it could hardly have held another guest. womanlike, my eyes were everywhere, and i presently spied out an empty bottle, labelled "worcestershire sauce." "dear me, salter," i cried, "i had no idea you were so grand as to have sauces up here: why we hardly ever use them." "well, mum," replied salter, bashfully, and stroking his long black beard to gain time to select the grandest words he could think of, "it is hardly to be regarded in the light of happetite, that there bottle, it is more in the nature of remedies." then, seeing that i still looked mystified, he added, "you see, mum, although we gets our 'elth uncommon well in these salubrious mountings, still a drop of physic is often handy-like, and in a general way i always purchase myself a box of holloway's pills (of which you do get such a lot for your money), and also a bottle of pain-killer; but last shearing they was out o' pain-killer, they said, so they put me up a bottle o' cain pepper, and likewise that 'ere condiment, which was werry efficacious, 'specially towards the end o' the bottle!" "and do you really mean to say you drank it, salter?" i inquired with horror. "certainly i do, mum, whenever i felt out o' sorts. it always took my mind off the loneliness, and cheered me up wonderful, especial if i hadded a little red pepper to it," said salter, getting up from his log of wood and making me a low bow. all this time f---- and i were seated amicably side by side on poor salter's red blanket-covered "bunk," or wooden bedstead, made of empty flour-sacks nailed between rough poles, and other sacks filled with tussock grass for a mattress and pillow. the word loneliness gave me a good opening to broach the subject of our sunday gatherings, and my suspicions of jim's having been told of our visit were confirmed by the alacrity with which he said, "i have much pleasure in accepting your kind invitation, mum, if so be as i am not intruding." "no, indeed salter," f---- said; "you'd be very welcome, and you could always turn judy into the paddock whilst we were having service." now if there was one thing dearer to salter's heart than another, it was his little roan mare judy: her excellent condition, and jaunty little hog-mane and tail, testified to her master's loving care. so it was all happily settled, and after paying a most unfashionably long visit to the lonely man, we rode away with many a farewell nod and smile. i may say here that salter was one of the most regular of our congregation for more than two years, besides being a member of the book club. in time, its more sensible volumes utterly displaced the yellow paper rubbish in his but library, and i never can forget the poor man's emotion when he came to bid me good-bye. at my request he made the rough little pen and ink sketches which are here given, and as he held my offered hand (not knowing quite what else to do with it) when i took leave of him after our last home-service, when my face was set towards england, he could not say a word. the great burly creature's heart must have been nearly as big as his body, and he seemed hardly to know that large tears were rolling down his sunburnt face and losing themselves in his bushy beard. i tried to be cheerful myself, but he kept repeating, "it is only natural you should be glad to go, yet it is very rough upon us." in vain i assured him i was not at all glad to go,--very, very sorry, in fact: all he would say was, "to england, home and beauty, in course any one would be pleased to return." i can't tell you what he meant, and he had no voice to waste on explanations; i only give poor dear jim's valedictory sentences as they fell from his white and trembling lips. very different was ned palmer, the most diminutive and wiry of hill shepherds, with a tongue which seemed never tired, and a good humoured smile for every one. ned used to try my gravity sorely by stepping up to me half a dozen times during the service, to find his place for him in his prayer-book, and always saying aloud, "thank you kindly, m'm." chapter ix: another shepherd's hut. to get to ned's hut--which was not nearly so trim or comfortable as salter's, and stood out in the midst of a vast plain covered with waving yellow tussocks,--we had to cross a low range of hills, and pick our way through nearly a mile of swampy ground on the other side. the sure-footed horses zig-zagged their way up the steep hill-side with astonishing ease, availing themselves here and there of a sheep track, for sheep are the best engineers in the world, and always hit off the safest and easiest line of country. i did not feel nervous going _up_ the hill, although we must have appeared, had there been any one to look at us, more like flies on a wall than a couple of people on horse back, but when we came to the ridge and looked down on the descent beneath us, my heart fairly gave way. not a blade of grass, or a leaf of a shrub, was to be seen on all the steep slope, or rather precipice, for there was very little slope about it; nothing but grey loose shingle, which the first hoof-fall of the leading horse invariably sent slipping and sliding, in a perfect avalanche of rubble, down into the soft bright green morass beneath. of all the bad "tracks" i encountered in my primitive rides, i really believe i suffered more real terror and anguish on that particular hill-side than on any other. my companion's conduct too, used to be heartless in the extreme. he let the reins fall loosely on his horse's neck, merely holding their extreme ends, settled himself comfortably in his saddle, leaning well back, and turning round laughingly to me, observed, "aren't you coming?" "oh, not there," i cried in true melo-dramatic tones of horror; but it was all in vain, f---- merely remarked "you have nothing to do but fancy you are sitting in an arm-chair at home, you are quite as safe." "what nonsense," i gasped. "i only wish i _was_ at home: never, never will i come out riding again." all this time the leading horse was slowly and carefully edging himself down hill a few steps to the right, then a few to the left, just as he thought best, displacing tons of loose stone and even small rocks at every movement. helen, nothing daunted, was eager to follow, and although she quivered with excitement at the noise, echoed back from the opposite hills, lost no time in preparing to descend. her first movement sent such showers of rubble down upon f---- and his horse, that i really thought the latter would have been knocked off his legs. "if you _could_ keep a little more to the right, so as to send the stones clear of me, i should be very grateful," shouted f----, who was actually near the bottom of the hill already, so sharp had been the angles of his horse's descent. i felt afraid of attempting to guide helen, lest the least check should send us both head over heels into the quagmire below, and yet it seemed dreadful to cause the death of one's husband by rolling down cart loads of stones upon him. it could not have been more than five minutes before helen and i stood side by side with leo, on the only bit of firm ground at the edge of the morass. i believe i was as white as my pocket handkerchief; and if fright could turn a person's hair grey, i had been sufficiently alarmed to make myself eligible for any quantity of walnut pomade. fortunately the summer had proved rather a dry one, and the swamp was not so wet as it would have been after a heavy rain-fall. the horses stepped carefully from flax bushes to "nigger heads" (as the very old blackened grass stumps are called), resting hardly a moment anywhere, and avoiding all the most seductive looking spots. i thought my companion must have gone suddenly mad, when, a hawk rising up almost from beneath our horses' feet, he flung himself off his saddle and cried out, "a late hawk's nest, i declare!" and so it proved, for a little searching in a sheltered and tolerably dry spot revealed a couple of eggs, precisely like hens' eggs, until broken, when their delicate pale green inner membrane betrayed their dangerous origin. it is chiefly owing to this practice of laying in swamps that the various kinds of hawk increase and thrive as they do, for if it were possible to get at them, the shepherds would soon exterminate the sworn foe of their chickens and pigeons. they are also the great drawback to the introduction of pheasants and partridges, for the young birds have not a chance in the open against even a sparrow-hawk. although it is a digression, i must tell you here how, one beautiful early winter's day, i was standing in the verandah at my own home, when one of our pigeons, chased by a hawk, flew right into my face and its pursuer was so close and so heated by the chase, that it flung itself also with great violence against my head, with a scream of rage and triumph, hurting me a good deal as it dug its cruel, armed heel into my cheek. the pigeon had fluttered, stunned and exhausted to the ground, and, quick as lightning i stooped to pick it up; so great had been the impetus of the hawk's final charge that he had never perceived his victim had escaped him. the cunning of these birds must be seen to be believed. i have often watched a wary old hawk perched most impudently on the stock-yard rails, waiting until a rash chicken or duckling should, in spite of its mother's warning clucks of terror, insist on coming out from under her sheltering wings. if i took an umbrella, or a croquet mallet, or a walking stick, and went out, the bird would remain quite unmoved, even if i held my weapon pointed gun-wise towards him. but let anyone take a real gun and hold it ever so well hidden behind their back, and emerge ever so cautiously from the shelter of the shrubs, my fine gentleman was off directly, mounting out of sight with a few strokes of his powerful wings, and uttering a shriek of derision as he departed. nothing is so rare as a successful shot at a hawk. we consoled ourselves however on this occasion, by reflecting that we had annihilated two young hawks before they had commenced their lives of rapine and robbery, and rode on our way rejoicing, to find ned palmer sitting outside his but door on a log of drift wood, making, candles. in the more primitive days of the settlement, the early settlers must have been as badly off for light, during the long dark winter evenings, as are even now the poorer inhabitants of greenland or of iceland, for their sole substitute for candles consisted of a pannikin half filled with melted tallow, in which a piece of cork and an apology for a wick floated. but by my time all this had long been past and over, and even a back-country shepherd had a nice tin mould in which he could make a dozen candles of the purest tallow at a time. ned was just running a slender piece of wood through the loops of his twisted cotton wicks, so as to keep them above the rim of the mould, and the strong odour of melted mutton fat was tainting the lovely fresh air. but new zealand run-holders have often to put up with queer smells as well as sights and sounds, therefore we only complimented ned on being provident enough to make a good stock of candles before-hand, for home consumption, during the coming dark days. after we had dismounted and hobbled our horses with the stirrup leathers, so that they could move about and nibble the sweet blue grass growing under each sheltering tussock, i sat down on a large stone near, and began to tell ned how often i had watched the negroes in jamaica making candles after a similar fashion, only they use the wax from the wild bee nests instead of tallow, which was a rare and scarce thing in that part of the world. i described to him the thick orange-coloured wax candles which used to be the delight of my childhood, giving out a peculiar perfuming odour after they had been burning for an hour or two,--an odour made up of honey and the scent of heavy tropic flowers. ned listened to my little story with much politeness, and then, feeling it incumbent on him to contribute to the conversation, remarked, "i never makes candles ma'am without i thinks of frost-bites." "how is that, palmer?" i asked, laughingly. "what in the world have they to do with each other?" "well, ma'am, you see it was just in this way. it was afore i come here, which is quite a lively, sociable place compared to dodson's back country out-station, at the foot o' those there ranges beyond. i give you my word, ma'am, it used always to make me feel as if i was dead, and living in a lonely eternity. them clear, bright-blue _glassers_ (glaciers, he meant, i presume) was awful lonesome, and as for a human being they never come a-nigh the place. well as i was saying, ma'am, one day i finds i had run out o' candles, and as the long dark evenings (for it was the height o' winter) was bad enough, even with a dip burning, to show me old spot's face for company, i set to work, hot haste, to make some more. it was bitter, biting cold, you bet, ma'am; and i was hard at work--just after i had had my bit o' breakfast, before i went out for to look round my boundary--melting and making my dips, so that they might be fine and hard for night. i ought praps to mention that spot used to get so close to the fire-place, that as often as not, i dropped a mossel of the hot grease on the dog; and if it touched a thin place in his coat, he would jump up howling. well, ma'am, i was pouring a pannikin full o' biling tallow into the mould, when poor old spot he gives a sudden howl and yell, and runs to the door. i paid no attention to him at the time, for i was so busy; but he went on leaping up and howling as if he had gone mad. as soon as i could put down the pannikin out o' my hand, i went to the door meaning to open it and,--sorry am i to say it,--kick the poor beast out for making such a row about a drop o' hot grease. but the dog turned his face round on me, and gave me a look as much as to say, 'make haste, do; there's a good chap: i ought to be outside there.' and what with the sense shinin' in his eyes, and a curious kind o' sound outside, i takes down the bar (for the door wouldn't stay shut otherwise), and looks out. never until my dyin' day, and not even then, i expect, shall i forget what the dog and i saw lying on the ground, which was all white and hard with frost, the sun not having got over the east range yet. the dog he had more sense and a deal more pluck than i had, for he knows there aint a moment to be lost; and he runs up to the flat, tumbled-down heap o' clothes, gets on its back (for no face could i see), so as to be doing something, and not losing time, and begins licking. not very far off there was a lean horse standing, but he didn't seem to like to come through the slip-rail o' the paddock fence. "in coorse i couldn't stand gaping there all day, so i went and stooped down to the man, who was lying flat on his face, with his arms straight out. he wasn't sensibleless (palmer's favourite word for senseless), for he opened his eyes, and said, "for god's sake, mate, take me in." "so i will, mate," i makes reply "and welcome you are. can you get on your legs, think you?" with that he groans awful, and says, "my legs is friz." well, i looks at his legs, and sees he was dressed in what had been good moleskins, and high jack riding-boots, coming up to his knees; but sure enough they was as hard as a board, and actially, if you'll believe me, ma'am, there was a rim o' solid hice round the tops of his boots. as for standing, he couldn't do it: his legs was no more use to him than they was to me, and he was a tall, high fellow besides. cold as it was, i felt hot enough by the time i had lugged that poor man inside my place, and got him up on my bunk. he could speak, though his voice was weak as weak could be, and he helped me as well as he could by catching hold with his arms, but his legs was stone dead. i had to get the tommy (_anglice_-tomahawk), and _chop_ his boots off, and that's the gospel truth, ma'am. i broke my knife, first try, and the axe was too big. he told me, poor fellow, that two days before, as he was returning from prospecting up towards the back ranges, his horse got away, and he _couldn't_ catch him. no: he tried with all his might and main, for in his swag, which was strapped to the d's of his saddle, was not only his blanket, but his baccy, and tea, and damper, and a glass o' grog. the curious thing, too, was that the horse didn't bolt right away, as they generally do: he jest walked a-head, knowing his master was bound to follow wherever he led, for in coorse he had hopes to catch him every moment. that ere brute, he never laid down nor rested,--jest kep slowly moving on, as if he was a lunnon street-boy, with a bobby at his heels. through creeks and rivers and swamps he led that poor fellow. his boots got chuck full o' cold water, and when the sun went down it friz into solid hice; and that misfortnit man he felt his legs--which was his life, you see, ma'am--gradially dyin' under him. yet he was a well-plucked one, if ever there was such a party on this airth. he told me he had took _five_ mortial hours to come the last mile, the horse walkin' slowly afore him, and guiding him like. and how do you think he did it, with two pillars of hice for legs? why he lifted up just one leg and then the other with both his hands, and put them afore him, and took his steps that way." here honest ned, his eyes glistening, and his ugly little face glowing with emotion through its coating of sunburn, paused, as if he did not like to go on. i was more touched and interested than i could avoid showing, and cried, "oh, _do_ tell me, palmer, what became of the poor fellow! did he die?" ned cleared his throat, and moved so as to get between me and the light from the door, as he said huskily, "he came very nigh to it, ma'am. i never did set eyes on such a decent patient chap as that man was. i did the very wust thing i could a' done, the town doctors told me, for i brought him into the hut, instead o' keeping him outdoors and rubbing his poor black legs with snow. 'stead o' that, i wrapped him up warm in my own blankets, after i had chipped his boots and the hice off of 'em, and i made up a roarin' fire. good lord, how the poor fellow groaned when he begun to get warm! i gave him a pannikin full o' hot tea, with a drop o' grog in it, and that seemed to make him awful bad. at last he said, with the sweat from sheer agony pouring down his face, "look here, matey: couldn't you hump me out in the snow again? for it aint nigh so bad to bear it cold as it is to bear it hot." not a bad word did he say, ma'am, and he tried not to give in more nor he could help; but he was clean druv wild with the hanguish in his legs. "presently i remembers, quite sudden like, that a bush doctor, name of tomkins, was likely to be round by simmons, cos' o' his missus. so i got on my 'oss in a minnit, and i rides off and fetches him, for sure enough he was there; and though simmons' missis wasn't to say over her troubles, she spoke up from behind the curtain of red blanket she had put up in her tidy little hut, and bade old tomkins go with me. may god bless her and hers for that same, say i! well, ma'am, when tomkins come back with me and saw the poor fellow (he was fair shoutin' with the pain in his legs by then), he said nothin' could be done. "they'll mortify by morrow mornin'," says he, "and then he'll die easy." so with that he goes back with the first light next day, to simmons. sure enough, the poor fellow did get a bit easier next day, and i felt clear mad to think he was goin' to die before my very eyes. "not if i can help it!" i cries, quite savage like. but he only smiled a patient smile, and said, "god's will be done, mate. he knows best, and i aint in any pain to speak of, now." "by and bye i hears a rumbling and a creaking, and cracking of whips; and when i looks out, what do i see but the bullock-dray from simmons' coming up the flat. it was the only thing on wheels within forty mile, and simmons had brought it his own self to see if we couldn't manage to get the poor fellow down to the nighest town. i won't make my yarn no longer than i can help, ma'am, so i'll only mention that we made a lot o' the strongest mutton broth you ever tasted; we slung a hammock of red blankets in the dray, and we got the poor fellow down by evening to a gentleman's station. there they made us kindly welcome, did all they could for him, and transhipped the hammock into a pair-horse dray, which went quicker and was easier. we got on as fast as we could every step of the way, and by midnight that poor fellow was tucked into a clean bed in the hospital at christchurch, with both his legs neatly cut off just above the knee, for there wasn't a minute to lose." i was almost afraid to inquire how the sufferer fared, for ned's eyes were fairly swimming with unshed tears; but he smiled brightly, and said, "the ladies and gentlemen in the town, they set up a _subscribetion_, and bought the poor chap a first-rate pair o' wooden legs, and he could even manage to ride about after a bit; and instead o' wandering about looking for country, or gold, or what not, he settled down as a carrier, and throve and did well. and i was thinking, ma'am, as how i'd like to return thanks for that poor fellow's wonderful recovery, for i've never had a chance of going to church since, and its nigh upon two years ago that it happened." "so you shall, ned: so you shall!" we said with one voice. and so at our first church gathering at our dear little antipodean home, f----, who acted as our minister, paused in the beautiful thanksgiving service, after he had read solemnly and slowly the simple words, "especially for thy late mercies vouchsafed to ----," and ned palmer chimed in with an "amen,"--misplaced, indeed, but none the less hearty, and delightful to hear. chapter x: swaggers. dr. johnson did not know the somewhat vulgar word which heads this paper. at least he did not know it as a noun, but gives "swagger: v.n., to bluster, bully, brag;" but the slang dictionary admits it as a word, springing indeed from the thieves' vocabulary: "one who carries a swag." neither of these books however give the least idea of the true meaning of the expression, which is as fully recognised as an honest word in both australia and new zealand as any other combination of letters in the english language. a swagger is the very antithesis then of a swaggerer, for, whereas, the one is full of pretension and abounds in unjust claims on our notice, the swagger is humility and civility itself. he knows, poor weary tramp, that on the favourable impression he makes upon the "boss," depends his night's lodging and food, as well as a job of work in the future. we will leave then the ideal swaggerer to some other biographer who may draw glowing word-pictures of him in all his jay's splendour, and we will confine ourselves to describing the real swagger, clad in flannel shirt, moleskin trowsers, and what were once thick boots, but might now be used as sieves. nothing astonished me so much in my new zealand station life as these visitors. even sir roger de coverley himself would have looked with distrust upon most of our swagger-guests, and yet i never heard of an instance in our part of the country where the unhesitating, ungrudging hospitality extended by the rich squatters to their poorer compatriots was ever abused. i say "in our part," because unfortunately, wherever gold is discovered, either in quartz or riverbed, the good old primitive customs and ways die out of themselves in a few weeks, and each mammon-seeker looks with distrust on a stranger. only fifty or sixty miles from us, as the crow might fly across the snowy range, where an immense bush clothes the banks of the hokitika river right down to its sand-filled mouth on the west coast, the great gold diggings broke out seven or eight years ago, and changed the face of society in that district in a few days. _there_ a swagger meant a man who might rob or murder you in your sleep after you had fed and lodged him; or--under the most favourable circumstances supposing him to be a "milder mannered man,"--a "fossicker," who would not hesitate to "jump your claim," or hang about when you are prospecting, to watch how much of the colour you found, and then go off stealthily to return next day at the head of a "rush" of a thousand diggers. even before the famous maungatapu murders in , swaggers were looked upon with distrust on the west coast, and after that date hardly any one travelled in those parts without carrying a small revolver in his breast-pocket. nothing is more tantalising than an allusion to a circumstance which is not well-known; and as i feel certain that very few of my readers have ever heard of what may be called the first great crime committed in the middle island, a brief account of that terrible tragedy may not be out of place. gold of course was at the bottom of it, but the canvas-bags full of the glittering flakes were red with blood by the time they reached the bank at nelson. the diggings on the west coast were only two years old at that date, and although it was not uncommon for prospecting parties cutting their way, axe in hand, through the thick bush, to come upon skeletons of men in lonely places, still it might be taken for granted that these were the remains of early explorers or travellers who had got lost and starved to death within the green tangled walls of this impenetrable forest. the scenery of that part of the middle island is far more beautiful than in the agricultural or pastoral districts. giant alps clothed half up their steep sides with evergreen pines,--whose dark forms end abruptly where snow and ice begin,--stand out against a pure sky of more than italian blue, and only when a cleared saddle is reached can the traveller look down over the wooded hills and vallies rolling away inland before him, or turn his eyes sea-ward to the bold coast with its many rivers, whose wide mouths foam right out to where the great pacific waves are heaving under the bright winter sun. such, and yet still more fair must have been the prospect on which burgess, kelly, levy, and sullivan's eyes rested one june morning in the mid-winter of . they were, one and all, originally london thieves, and had been transported years before to the early penal settlements of australia. from thence they had managed, by fair means and foul, to work their way to other places, and had latterly been living in the middle island, earning what they could by horse-breaking and divers odd jobs. but your true convict hates work with a curiously deadly hatred, and these four men agreed to go and look round them at the new west coast diggings. they found, however, that there, as elsewhere, it would be necessary to work hard, so in disgust at seeing the nuggets and dust which rewarded the toil of more industrious men, they left hokitika and reached nelson on their way to picton, the chief town of the adjoining province of marlborough. most of the gold found its way under a strongly armed escort to the banks in both these towns, but it was well-known that fortunate diggers occasionally travelled together, unarmed, and laden with "dust." so safe had been the roads hitherto, that the commonest precautions were not taken, nor the least secrecy observed about travellers' movements. it was therefore no mystery that four unarmed diggers, carrying a considerable number of ounces of gold-dust with them, were going to start from the canvas-town diggings for nelson on a certain day, and the men i have mentioned set out to meet them. one part of their long journey led them over the maungatapu range by a saddle, which in its lowest part is , feet above the sea-level. the night before the murder, the victims and their assassins camped out with only ten miles between them. so lonely and deserted was the rough mountain track, that the appearance of a poor old man named battle alarmed burgess and his gang dreadfully, and they immediately murdered him, in order that he should not report having passed them on the road. between the commission of this act of precaution and the arrival of the little band of travellers, no one else was seen. burgess appears to have shown some of the qualities of a good general; for he selected a spot where the only path wound along a steep side-cutting, less than six feet wide, with an unbroken forest on the upper, and a mass of tangled bush on the lower side. as the doomed men approached the murderers sprang out, and each thrusting a revolver close to their faces, called on them "to hold up their hands." this is an old bushranger challenge, and is meant to ensure perfect quiescence on the part of the victim. the travellers mechanically complied, and in this way were instantly separated, led to different spots, and ruthlessly shot dead. it was all over in a moment: burgess and his men flung the bodies down among the tangled bush, and returned to nelson rejoicing exceedingly over the simple and easy means by which they had possessed themselves of several hundred pounds. of course they calculated on the usual supine indifference to other people's affairs, which prevails in busy gold-seeking communities; but in this instance the public seemed to be suddenly seized by a violent and inconvenient curiosity to find out what had become of the four men who were known to have started from canvas-town two or three days before. no one ever dreamed of a murder having been committed, not even when another "swagger" reached nelson and stated that he had followed the diggers on the road, only a mile or so behind, had suddenly lost sight of them at the spot i have mentioned, and had never been able to overtake them. instead of leaving the now excited little town, or keeping quiet, burgess, kelly, levy, and sullivan, may truly be said to have become "swaggerers;" for they loitered about the place, ostentatiously displaying their bags of gold dust. unsuspicious as the nelson people were, they acted upon a sort of instinct,--that instinct within us which answers so mysteriously to the cry of blood from the earth,--and arrested these four men. still, the matter might have ended there for lack of a clue, if one of the party, sullivan, had not suddenly turned informer, and led the horrified town's-people to the jungle which concealed the bodies. here my dreadful story may end; for we need not follow the course of the trial, which resulted in the complete conviction of the three other men. i have only dwelt on so horrible a theme in order to make my readers understand how natural it was that i should feel nervous, when it became apparent to my understanding that the custom of the country demanded that you should ask no questions, but simply tell any travellers who claimed your hospitality where they were to sleep, and send them in large supplies of mutton, flour, and tea. on one occasion it chanced that f----, our stalwart cadet mr. a----, and the man who did odd jobs about the place, were all on the point of setting out upon some expedition, when a party of four swaggers made their appearance just at sundown. no true swagger ever appears earlier, lest he might be politely requested to "move on" to the next station; whereas if he times his arrival exactly when "the shades of night are falling fast," no boss could be hard-hearted enough to point to mist-covered hills and valleys, which are a net-work of deep creeks and swamps, and desire the wayfarer to go on further. once, and only once, did i know of such a thing being done; but i will not say more about that unfortunate at this moment, for i want to claim the pity of all my lady readers for the very unprotected position i am trying to depict. f---- could not understand my nervousness, and did not reassure me by saying, as he mounted his horse, "i've told them to sleep in the stable. i am pretty sure they are run-away sailors, they seem so footsore. good-bye! don't expect me until you see me!" now i was a very new chum in those days, and had just heard of the maungatapu murders. these guests of mine looked most disreputable, and were all powerful young men. i do not believe there was a single lock or bolt or bar on any door in the whole of the little wooden house: the large plate-chest stood outside in the verandah, and my dressing-case could have been carried off through the ever-open bedroom window by an enterprising thief of ten years old. as for my two maids,--the only human beings within reach,--they were as perfectly useless on any emergency as if they had been wax dolls. one of them had the habit of fainting if anything happened, and the other used to tend her until she revived, when they both sat still and shrieked. their nerves had once been tested by a carpenter, who was employed about the house, and cut his hand badly; on another occasion by the kitchen chimney which took fire; and that was the way they behaved each time. so it was useless to look upon their presence as any safeguard; indeed one of them speedily detected a fancied likeness to burgess in one of the poor swaggers, and shrieked every time she saw him. we were indeed three "lone, 'lorn women," all through that weary night. i could not close my eyes; but laid awake listening to the weka's shrill call, or the melancholy cry of the bitterns down in the swamp. with the morning light came hope and courage; and i must say i felt ashamed of my suspicions when my cook came to announce that the "swaggers was just agoin' off, and wishful to say good-bye. they've been and washed up the tin plates and pannikins and spoons as clean as clean can be; and the one i thought favoured burgess so much, mum, he's been and draw'd water from the well, all that we shall want to-day; and they're very civil, well-spoken chaps, if you please, mum!" f---- was right in his surmise, i fancy; for there were plenty of tattooed pictures of anchors and ships on the brawny bare arms of my departing guests. they seemed much disappointed to find there was no work to be had on our station; but departed, with many thanks and blessings, "over the hills and far away." latterly, with increasing civilization and corresponding social economy, there have been many attempts made by new-fangled managers of runs, more than by the run-holders themselves, to induce these swaggers to work for their tucker,--to use pure colonial phraseology. several devices have been tried, such as taking away their swags (_i.e._, their red blankets rolled tightly into a sort of pack, which they carry on their backs, and derive their name from), and locking them up until they had chopped a small quantity of wood, or performed some other trifling domestic duty. but the swagger will be led, though not driven, and what he often did of his own accord for the sake of a nod or a smile of thanks from my pretty maid-servants, he would not do for the hardest words which ever came out of a boss's mouth. there are also strict rules of honesty observed among these men, and if one swagger were to purloin the smallest article from a station which had fed and sheltered him, every other swagger in all the country side would immediately become an amateur detective to make the thief give up his spoil. a pair of old boots was once missing from a neighbouring station, and suspicion fell upon a swagger. justice was perhaps somewhat tardy in this instance, as it rested entirely in the hands of every tramp who passed that way; but at the end of some months the boots were found at home, and the innocence of the swaggers, individually and collectively, triumphantly established. the only instance of harshness to a swagger which came under my notice during three years residence in new zealand, is the one i have alluded to above, and contains so much dramatic interest in its details, that it may not be out of place here. although i have naturally dwelt in these papers more upon our bright sunny weather, our clear, bracing winter days, and our balmy spring and autumn evenings, let no intending traveller think that he will not meet with bad weather at the antipodes! i can only repeat what i have said with pen and voice a hundred times before. new zealand possesses a very capricious and disagreeable climate: disagreeable from its constant high winds: but it is perhaps the most singularly and remarkably healthy place in the world. this must surely arise from the very gales which i found so trying to my temper, for damp is a word without meaning; as for mildew or miasma, the generation who are growing up there will not know the meaning of the words; and in spite of a warm, bright day often turning at five minutes warning into a snowy or wet afternoon, colds and coughs are almost unknown. people who go out there with delicate lungs recover in the most surprising manner; surprising, because one expects the sudden changes of temperature, the unavoidable exposure to rain and even snow, to kill instead of curing invalids. but the practice is very unlike the theory in this case, and people thrive where they ought to die. during my first winter in canterbury we had only one week of _really_ bad weather, but i felt at that time as if i had never realized before what bad weather meant. a true "sou'-wester" was blowing from the first to the second monday in that july, without one moment's lull. the bitter, furious blast swept down the mountain gorges, driving sheets of blinding rain in a dense wall before it. now and then the rain turned into large snow-flakes, or the wind rose into such a hurricane that the falling water appeared to be flashing over the drenched earth without actually touching it. indoors we could hardly hear ourselves speak for the noise of the wind and rain against the shingle roof. it became a service of danger, almost resembling a forlorn hope, to go out and drag in logs of wet wood, or draw water from the well,--for, alas, there were no convenient taps or snug coal-holes in our newly-erected little wooden house. we husbanded every scrap of mutton, in very different fashion to our usual reckless consumption, the consumption of a household which has no butcher's bill to pay; for we knew not when the shepherd might be able to fight his way through the storm, with half a sheep packed before him, on sturdy little "judy's" back. the creeks rose and poured over their banks in angry yellow floods. every morning casualties in the poultry yard had to be reported, and that week cost me almost as many fowls and ducks as my great christening party did. the first thing every morning when i opened my eyes i used to jump up and look out of the different windows with eager curiosity, to see if there were any signs of a break in the weather, for i was quite unaccustomed to be pent up like a besieged prisoner for so many succeeding days. we did not boast of shutters in those regions, and even blinds were a luxury which were not wasted in the little hall. consequently, when my unsatisfactory wanderings about the silent house--for no one else was up--led me that dreadful stormy morning into the narrow passage called the back-hall, i easily saw through its glass-door what seemed to me one of the most pathetic sights my eyes had ever rested upon. just outside the verandah, which is the invariable addition to new zealand houses, stood, bareheaded, a tall, gaunt figure, whose rain-sodden garments clung closely to its tottering limbs. a more dismal morning could not well be imagined: the early dawn struggling to make itself apparent through a downpour of sleet and rain, the howling wind (which one could almost see as it drove the vapour wall before it), and the profound solitude and silence of all except the raging storm. at first i thought i must be dreaming, so silent and hopeless stood that weird figure. my next impulse, without staying to consider my dishevelled hair and loose wrapper, was to open the door and beckon the poor man within the shelter of the verandah. when once i had got him there i did not exactly know what to do with my guest, for neither fire nor food could be procured quite so early. he crouched like a stray dog down on the dripping mat outside the door, and murmured some unintelligible words. in this dilemma i hastened to wake up poor f----, who found it difficult to understand why i wanted him to get up at daylight during a "sou'-wester." but i entreated him to go to the hall door, whilst i flew off to get my lazy maids out of their warm beds. with all their faults, they did not need much rousing on that occasion. i suppose i used very forcible words to convey the misery of the object standing outside, for i know that mary was in floods of tears, and had fastened her gown on over her night-gear, whilst i was still speaking; and the cook had tumbled out of bed, and was kneeling before the kitchen fire with her eyes shut, kindling a blaze, apparently, in her sleep. as soon as things were in this forward state, i returned to the verandah, and found our swagger guest drawing a very long breath after a good nip of pure whisky which f---- had promptly administered to him. "i'm fair clemmed wi' cold and wet," the swagger said, still bundled up in his comparatively sheltered corner. "i've been out on the hills the whole night, and i am deadbeat. might i stop here for a bit?" he asked this very doubtfully, for it is quite against swagger etiquette to demand shelter in the morning. for all answer he was taken by the shoulder, and helped up. i never shall forget the poor tramp's deprecating face, as he looked back at me, whilst he was being led through the pretty little dining-room, with its bright carpet, on which his clay-clogged boots and dripping garments left a muddy, as well as a watery track. "all right," i said, with colonial brevity; and so we escorted our strange guest through the house into the kitchen, where the ever-ready kettle and gridiron were busy preparing tea and chops over a blazing fire. of course the maids screamed when they saw us, and i do not wonder at their doing so, for neither f---- nor i looked very respectable, with huddled on dressing-gowns and towzled hair; whilst our foot-sore, drenched guest subsided into a chair by the door, covered his wretched pinched face with two bony hands, and burst into tears. i certainly never expected to see a swagger cry, and f---- declared the sight was quite as new to him as to me. however, the poor man's tears and helplessness gave fresh energy to my maids' treacherous nerves, and they even suggested dry clothes. our good-natured cadet, who at this moment appeared on the scene, was only too happy to find some outlet for _his_ superfluous benevolence, and hastened off, to return in a moment or two with an old flannel shirt, dry and whole, in spite of its faded stripes, a pair of moleskin trousers, and a huge pair of canvas cricketing shoes. it was no time for ceremony, so we women retreated for a few minutes into the store-room, whilst f---- and mr. a---- made the swagger's toilette, getting so interested in their task as even to part his dripping hair out of his eyes. he had no swag, poor fellow, having lost his roll of red blankets in one of the treacherous bog-holes across the range. that man was exactly like a lost, starving dog. he ate an enormous breakfast, curled himself upon some empty flour-sacks in a dry corner of the kitchen, and slept till dinner time; then another sleep until the supper hour, and so on, the round of he clock. all this time he never spoke, though we were dying to hear how he had come into such a plight. the "sou'-wester" still raged furiously out of doors without a moment's cessation, and we were obliged to have recourse to the tins of meat kept in the store-room for such an emergency. the shepherd told us afterwards he had ventured out to look for some wethers, his own supply being exhausted, but the whole mob had hidden themselves so cleverly that neither man nor dog could discover their place of shelter. on the monday night, exactly a week after the outbreak of bad weather; the skies showed signs of having exhausted themselves, and nature began to wear a sulky air, as if her temper were but slowly recovering herself. the learned in such matters, however, took a cheerful view of affairs, and declared the worst to be over,--"for this bout,"--as they cautiously added. whether it was the three days of rest, warmth, and good food which unlocked the swagger's heart, or not, i do not pretend to decide; but that evening, over a pipe in the kitchen, he confided to mr. a----that he had been working his way down to the sea-coast from a station where he had been employed, very far back in the hill ranges. the "sou'-wester" had overtaken him about twenty miles from us, but only five from another station, where he had applied towards the evening for shelter, being even then drenched with rain, and worn out by struggling through such a tremendous storm. there, for some reason which i confess did not seem very clear, he had been refused the unvarying hospitality extended in new zealand to all travellers, rich or poor, squatter or swagger, and had been directed to take a short cut across the hills to our station, which he was assured could easily be reached in an hour or two more. the track, a difficult one enough to strike in summer weather, became, indeed, impossible to discover amid rushing torrents and driving wind and rain; besides which, as the poor fellow repeated more than once during his story, "i was fair done up when i set out, for i'd been travelling all day." mr. a---- told us what the man had been saying, before we all went to bed, adding, "he seems an odd, surly kind of creature, for although he declares he is going away the first thing to-morrow, if the rain be over, i noticed he never said a word approaching to thanks." the rain was indeed over next morning, and a flood of brilliant sunshine awoke me "bright and early," as the country people say. it seemed impossible to stop in bed, so i jumped up, thrust my feet into slippers, and my arms into a warm dressing-gown, and sallied forth, opening window after window, so as to let the sunshine into rooms which not even a week's steady down-pour could render damp. what a morning it was, and for mid-winter too! no haze, or fog, or vapour on all the green hills, whose well-washed sides were glistening in a bright glow of sunlight. for the first time, too, since the bad weather had set in, was to be heard the incessant bleat which is music to the ears of a new zealand sheep-farmer. white, moving, calling patches on the hillsides told that the sheep were returning to their favourite pastures, and a mob of horses could be descried quietly feeding on the sunny flat. but i had no eyes for beauties of mountain or sky. i could do nothing but gaze on the strange figure of the silent swagger, who knelt yes, positively knelt, on the still wet and shining shingle which formed an apology for a gravel path up to the back-door of the little wooden homestead. his appearance was very different to what it had been three days before. now his clothes were dry and clean and mended,--my irish maids doing; bless their warm hearts! he had cobbled up his boots himself, and his felt hat, which had quite recovered from its drenching, lay at his side. the perfect rest and warmth and good food had filled up his hollow cheeks, but still his countenance was a curious one; and never, until my dying day, can i forget the rapture of entreaty on that man's upturned face. it brings the tears into my own eyes now to recollect its beseeching expression. i do not think i ever _saw_ prayer before or since. he did not perceive me, for i had hidden behind a sheltering curtain, to listen to his strange, earnest petitions; so he could not know that anybody in the house was stirring, for he knelt at the back, and all my fussings had taken place in the front, and he could not, therefore, have been doing anything for effect. there, exactly where he had crouched a wretched, way-worn tramp in pouring rain, he knelt now with the flood of sunshine streaming down on his uplifted face, whilst he prayed for the welfare and happiness, individually and collectively, of every living creature within the house. then he stood up and lifted his hat from the ground; but before he replaced it on his head, he turned, with a gesture which would have made the fortune of any orator,--a gesture of mingled love and farewell, and solemnly blessed the roof-tree which had sheltered him in his hour of need. i could not help being struck by the extraordinarily good language in which he expressed his fervent desires, and his whole bearing seemed quite different to that of the silent, half-starved man we had kept in the kitchen these last three days. i watched him turn and go, noiselessly closing the garden gate after him, and--shall i confess it?--my heart has always felt light whenever i think of that swagger's blessing. when we all met at breakfast i had to take his part, and tell of the scene i had witnessed; for everybody was inclined to blame him for having stolen away, scarcely without saying good-bye, or expressing a word of thanks for the kindness he had received. but i knew better. from the sublime to the ridiculous we all know the step is but short, especially in the human mind; and to my tender mood succeeds the recollection of an absurd panic we once suffered from, about swaggers. exaggerated stories had reached us, brought by timid fat men on horseback, with bulky pocket-books, who came to buy our wethers for the hokitika market, of "sticking up" having broken out on the west land. i fear my expressions are often unintelligible to an english reader, but in this instance i will explain. "sticking up" is merely a concise colonial rendering of "your money or your life," and was originally employed by australian bushrangers, those terrible freebooters whose ranks used to be always recruited from escaped convicts. fortunately we had no community of that class, only a few prisoners kept in a little ricketty wooden house in christchurch, from which an enterprising baby might easily have escaped. i dare say as we get more civilized out there, we shall build ourselves handsome prisons and penitentiaries; but in those early days a story was current of a certain jailor who let all his captives out on some festal occasion, using the tremendous threat, that whoever had not returned by eight o'clock should be "_locked out!_" but to return to that particular winter evening. we had been telling each other stories which we had heard or read of bushranging exploits, until we were all as nervous as possible. ghosts, or even burglar stories, are nothing to the horror of a true bushranger story, and f---- had made himself particularly ghastly and disagreeable by giving a minute account of an adventure which had been told to him by one of the survivors. we listened, with the wind howling outside, to f----'s horrid second-hand story, of how one fine day up country, eight or ten men,--station hands,--were "stuck up" by one solitary bushranger, armed to the teeth. he tied them up one by one, and seated them all on a bench in the sun, and deliberately fired at and wounded the youngest of the party; then, seized with compunction, he unbound one of the captives, and stood over him, revolver in hand, whilst he saddled and mounted a horse, to go for a doctor to set the poor boy's broken leg. before the messenger had gone "a league, a league, but barely twa',"--the freebooter recollected that he might bring somebody else back with him besides the doctor, and flinging himself across his horse, rode after the affrighted man, and coolly shot him dead. i really don't know how the story ended: i believe everybody perished; but at this juncture i declared it to be impossible to sit up any longer to listen to such tragedies, and went to bed. exactly at midnight,--the proper hour for ghosts; burglars, and bushrangers, and such "small deer" to be about, everybody was awakened simultaneously by a loud irregular knocking, which sounded with hollow reverberations all through the wooden house. "bushrangers!" we all thought, every one of us; for although burglars may not usually knock at hall-doors in england, it is by no means uncommon for their bolder brethren to do so at the other end of the world. it is such a comfort to me now, looking back on that scene to remember that our stalwart cadet was as frightened as anybody. _he_ stood six feet one in his stockings, and was a match for any two in the country side, and yet, i am happy to think, he was as bad as any one. as for me, to say that my heart became like water and my knees like soft wax, is to express in mild words my state of abject terror. there was no need to inquire what the maids thought, for smothered shrieks, louder and louder as each peal of knocks vibrated through the little house, proclaimed sufficiently their sentiments on the subject. dear me, how ridiculous it all must have been! in one corner of the ceiling of our bedroom was a little trap-door which opened into an attic adjoining that where the big cadet slept. now whilst f---- was hurriedly taking down his double-barrelled gun from its bracket just below this aperture, and i held the candlestick with so shaky a hand that the extinguisher clattered like a castanet, this door was slowly lifted up, and a large white face, with dishevelled stubbly hair and wide-open blue eyes, looked down through the cobwebs, saying in a husky whisper, "could you let me have a rifle, or any thing?" this was our gallant cadet, who had no idea of presenting himself at a disadvantage before the foe. i had desperately seized a revolver, but f---- declared that if i persisted in carrying it i certainly should go first, as he did not wish to be shot in the back. we held a hurried council of war,--mr. a---- assisting through the trap door, and the maids breathing suggestions through the partition-planks,--but the difficulty consisted in determining at which door the knocking was going on. some said one, and some another (for there were many modes of egress from the tiny dwelling); but at last f---- cried decidedly, "we must try them all in succession," and shouldering his gun, with the revolver sticking in the girdle of his dressing-gown, sallied valiantly forth. i don't know what became of mr. a----: i believe he took up a position with the rifle pointing downwards; the maids retreated beneath their blankets, and i (too frightened to stay behind) followed closely, armed with an indian boar-spear. f---- flung the hall door wide open, and called out, "who's there?" but no one answered. the silence was intense, and so was the cold; therefore we returned speedily indoors to consult. "it must be at the back door," i urged; adding, "that is the short cut down the valley, where bushrangers would be most likely to come." "bushrangers, you silly child!" laughed f----. "it's most likely a belated swagger, or else somebody who is playing us a trick." however as he spoke a succession of fierce and loud knocks resounded through the whole house. "it must be at the kitchen door," f---- said. "come along, and stand well behind me when i open the door." but we never opened the door; for on our way through the kitchen, with its high-pitched and unceiled roof,--a very cavern for echoes,--we discovered the source of the noise, and of our fright. within a large wooden packing-case lay a poor little lamb, and its dying throes had wakened us all up, as it kicked expiring kicks violently against the side of the box. it was my doing bringing it indoors, for i never _could_ find it in my heart to leave a lamb out on the hills if we came across a dead ewe with her baby bleating desolately and running round her body. f---- always said, "you cannot rear a merino lamb indoors; the poor little thing will only die all the same in a day or two;" and then i am sorry to say he added in an unfeeling manner, "they are not worth much now," as if that could make any difference! i had brought this, as i had brought scores of others, home in my arms from a long distance off; fed it out of a baby's bottle, rubbed it dry, and put it to sleep in a warm bed of hay at the bottom of this very box. they had all died quietly, after a day or two, in spite of my devotion and nursing, but this little foundling kicked herself out of the world with as much noise as would have sufficed to summon a garrison to surrender. it is all very well to laugh at it now, but we were, five valiant souls in all, as thoroughly frightened at the time as we could well be. the only real harm a swagger did me was to carry off one of my best maidservants as his wife, but as he had pounds in the bank at christchurch, and was only travelling about looking for work, and they have lived in great peace and prosperity ever since, i suppose i ought not to complain. this swagger was employed in deepening our well, and mary was always going to see how he was getting on, so he used to make love to her, looking up from the bottom of a deep shaft, and shouting compliments to her from a depth of sixty feet. what really won her irish heart, though, was his calmly putting a rival, a shepherd, into a water-butt. she could not resist that, so they were married, and are doing well. let no one despise swaggers. they are merely travelling workmen, and would pay for their lodging if it was the custom to do so. i am told that even now they are fast becoming things of the past; for one could not "swagger" by railroad, and most of our beautiful happy vallies will soon have a line of rails laid down throughout its green and peaceful length. chapter x: changing servants. to the eyes of an english housewife the title of this chapter must appear a very bad joke indeed, and the amusement what the immortal mrs. poyser would call "a poor tale." far be it from me to make light of the misery of a tolerably good servant coming to you after three months' service, just as you were beginning to feel settled and comfortable, and announcing with a smile that she was going to be married; or, with a flood of tears, that she found it "lonesome." either of these two contingencies was pretty sure to arise at least four times a year on a station. at first i determined to do all i could to make their new home so attractive to my two handmaidens that they would not wish to leave it directly. in one of wilkie collins' books an upholsterer is represented as saying that if you want to domesticate a woman, you should surround her with bird's-eye maple and chintz. that must have been exactly my idea, for the two rooms which i prepared for my maidservants were small, indeed, yet exquisitely pretty. of course i should not have been so foolish as to buy any of the unnecessary and dainty fittings with which they were decorated, but as all the furniture and belongings of an english house, a good deal larger than our station home, had been taken out to it, there were sundry toilet tables, etc., whose destination would have been a loft over the stable, if i had not used them for my maids. i had seen and chosen two very respectable young women in christchurch, one as a cook, and the other as a housemaid. the cook, euphemia by name, was a tall, fat, flabby woman, with a pasty complexion, but a nice expression of face, and better manners than usual. she turned out to be very good natured, perfectly ignorant though willing to learn, and was much admired by the neighbouring _cockatoos_, or small farmers. lois the housemaid, was the smallest and skimpiest and most angular girl i ever beheld. at first i regarded her with deep compassion, imagining that she was about fifteen years of age, and had been cruelly ill-treated and starved. how she divined what was passing in my mind i cannot tell, but during our first interview she suddenly fired up, and informed me that she was twenty-two years old, that she was the seventh child of a seventh child, and therefore absolutely certain to achieve some wonderful piece of good luck; and furthermore, that she had been much admired in her own part of the country, and was universally allowed to be "the flower of the province." this statement, delivered with great volubility and defiant jerkiness of manner, rather took my breath away; but it was a case of "hobson's choice" just then about servants, and as i was assured she was a respectable girl, i closed with her terms ( pounds a year and all found) on the spot. the fat pale cook was to get pounds. now-a-days i hear that wages are somewhat lower, but the sums i have named were the average figures of six or seven years ago, especially "up-country." here i feel impelled to repeat the substance of what i have stated elsewhere,--that these rough, queer servants were, as a general rule, perfectly honest, and of irreproachable morals, besides working, in their own curious fashion, desperately hard. our family was an exceptionally small one, and the "place" was considered "light, you bet," but even then it seemed to me as if both my domestics worked very hard. in the first place there was the washing; two days severe work, under difficulties which they thought nothing of. all the clothes had to be taken to a boiler fixed in the side of a hill, for the convenience of the creek, and washed and rinsed under a blazing sun (for of course it never was attempted on a wet day) and amid clouds of sand-flies. not until evening was this really hard day's work over, and the various garments fluttering in the breeze up a valley behind the house. the chances were strongly in favour of a tremendous nor'-wester coming down this said valley during the night, and in that case there would not be a sign next morning of any of the clothes. heavy things, such as sheets or table cloths, might be safely looked for under lee of the nearest gorse hedge, but it would be impossible even to guess where the lighter and more diaphanous articles had been whisked to. a week afterwards the shepherds used to bring in stray cuffs and collars, and upon one occasion "judy," the calf, was discovered in a paddock hard by, breakfasting off my best pocket handkerchiefs with an excellent appetite. of course everything was dirty, and needed to be washed over again. we had a mangle, which greatly simplified matters on the second day, but it used not to be uncommon on back-country stations to get up the fine things with a flat stone, heated in the wood ashes, for an iron. after the washing operations had been brought to a more or less successful ending, there came the yeast making and the baking, followed by the brewing of sugar beer, preserves had to be made, bacon cured, all sorts of things to be done, besides the daily duties of scrubbing and cleaning, and cooking at all hours for stray visitors or "swaggers." but i am overcome with contrition at perceiving into what a digression i have wandered; having strayed from my maids' rooms to their duties. they arrived as usual on a dray late in the evening, tired and wearied enough, poor souls. in those early days i had not yet plucked up courage to try my hand in the kitchen, and our meals had been left to the charge of f----, who, whatever he may be in other relations of life, is a vile cook; and our good-natured cadet mr. u----, who was exceedingly willing, but profoundly ignorant of the elements of cookery. for fear of being tempted into another digression, i will briefly state that during that week i lived in a chronic state of hunger and heartburn, and sought forgetfulness from repeated attacks of indigestion, by decorating my servants' rooms. they opened into each other, and it would have been hard to find two prettier little nests. each had its shining brass bedstead with chintz hangings, its muslin-draped toilette table, and its daintily curtained window, besides a pretty carpet. i can remember now the sort of dazed look with which euphemia regarded a room such as she had never seen; whilst lois considered it to be an instalment of her good luck, and proceeded to contemplate her sharp and elfish countenance in her looking-glass, pronouncing it as her opinion that she wanted more colour. that she certainly did, and she might have added, more flesh and youthfulness, while she was about it. however, they were greatly delighted, and euphemia who was of a grateful and affectionate disposition, actually thanked me, for having with my own hands arranged such pretty rooms for them. this was a very good beginning. they were both hard-working, civil girls, and got on very well together, leaving me plenty of leisure to attend to the quantities of necessary arrangements which have to be made when you are settling yourself for good, fifty miles from a shop, and on a spot where no other human being has ever lived before. f---- congratulated myself in private on my exceptional good luck, and attributed it partly to my having followed the upholsterer's advice in that book of mr. wilkie collins. but as it turned out, f---- was dwelling in a fool's paradise. in vain had it been pointed out to me that a certain stalwart north countryman, whose shyness could only be equalled by his appetite, had been a most regular attendant for some weeks past at our sunday evening services, accepting the offer of tea in the kitchen, afterwards, with great alacrity. i scouted these insinuations, appealing to the general sense of the public as to whether moffatt had _ever_ been known to refuse a meal anywhere, or under any circumstances, and declaring that, if he was "courting," it was being done in solemn silence, for never a sound filtered through the thin wooden planks between the kitchen and the dining room, except the clatter of a vigorously plied knife and fork, for moffatt's teas always included a shoulder of mutton. but i was wrong and others were right. early in october, our second spring month, i chanced to get up betimes one delicious, calm morning, a morning when it seemed a new and exquisite pleasure to open each window in succession, and fill one's lungs with a deep, deep breath of that heavenly atmosphere, at once so fresh and so pure. quiet as the little homestead lay, nestled among the hills, there were too many morning noises stirring among the animals for any one to feel lonely or dull, i should have thought. from a distance came a regular, monotonous, lowing sound. that was "hetty," the pretty little yellow alderney, announcing from the swamps that she and her two female friends were quite ready to be milked. their calves answered them dutifully from the english grass paddock, and between the two i could see mr. u----'s tall figure stalking down the flat with his cattle dog at his heels, and hear his merry whistle shrilling through the silent air. then all the ducks and fowls about the place were inquiring, in noisy cackle, how long it would be before breakfast was ready, whilst "helen's" whinneying made me turn my head to see her, with a mob of horses at her heels, coming over the nearest ridge on the chance of a stray carrot or two going begging. all the chained-up dogs were pulling at the staples of their fastenings, and entreating by short, joyous barks, to be allowed just one good frisk and roll in the sparkling dewy grass around. but even i, universal spoiler of animals that i am, was obliged to harden my heart against their noisy appeals; for quite close to the stable, on the nearest hill-side, an immense mob of sheep and young lambs were feeding. that steep incline had been burnt six weeks before, and was now as green as the clover field at its base, affording a delicious pasturage to these nursing mothers and their frisky infants. i think i see and hear it all now. the moving white patches on the hill-side, the incessant calling and answering, the racing and chasing among the curly little merino lambs, and above all the fair earth the clear vault of an almost cloudless sky bent itself in a deep blue dome. just over the eastern hills the first long lances of the sun lay in bright shafts of silver sheen on the dew-laden tussocks, and that peculiar morning fragrance rose up from the moist ground, which is as much the reward of the early riser as the early worm is of the bird. was it a morning for low spirits or sobs and sighs? surely not; and yet as i turned the handle of the kitchen door those melancholy sounds struck my ear. i had intended to make my entrance with a propitiatory smile, suitable to such a glorious morning, proceed to pay my damsels a graceful compliment on their somewhat unusual early rising, and wind up with a request for a cup of tea. but all these friendly purposes went out of my head when i beheld euphemia seated on the rude wooden settle, with its chopped tussock mattrass, which had been covered with a bright cotton damask, and was now called respectfully, "the kitchen sofa." her arm was round lois's waist, and she had drawn that young lady's shock head of red curls down on her capacious bosom. both were crying as if their hearts would break, and startled as i felt to see these floods of tears, it struck me how incongruous their attitude looked against the background of the large window through which all nature looked so smiling and sparkling. the kettle was singing on the fire, everything seemed bright and snug and comfortable indoors. "what in the world has happened?" i gasped, really frightened. "nothing, mem: its only them sheep," sobbed euphemia, "calling like. they always makes me cry. your tea 'll be ready directly, mem" (this last with a deep sigh.) "is it possible you are crying about that?" i inquired. "yes, mem, yes," said euphemia, in heart-broken accents, clasping lois, who was positively howling, closer to her sympathetic heart. "its terrible to hear 'em. they keeps calling and answering each other, and that makes us think of our home and friends." now both these women had starved as factory "hands" all their lives, and i used to feel much more inclined to cry when they told me, all unconscious of the pathos, stories of their baby work and hardships. certainly they had never seen a sheep until they came to new zealand, and as they had particularly mentioned the silence which used to reign supreme at the manufactory during work hours, i could not trace the connection between a dingy, smoky, factory, and a bright spring morning in this delightful valley. "what nonsense!" i cried, half laughing and half angry. "you can't be in earnest. why you must both be ill: let me give you each a good dose of medicine." i said this encouragingly, for there was nothing in the world euphemia liked so much as good substantial physic, and the only thing i ever needed to keep locked up from her was the medicine drawer. euphemia seemed touched and grateful, and her face brightened up directly, but lois looked up with her frightful little face more ugly than usual, as she said, spitefully, "physic won't make them nasty sheep hold their tongues. i'm sure _this_ isn't the place for me to find my luck, so i'd rather go, if you please, mem. i've prospected-up every one o' them gullies and never seen the colour yet, so it ain't any good my stopping." this was quite a fresh light thrown upon the purpose of lois's long lonely rambles. she used to be off and away, over the hills whenever she had finished her daily work, and i encouraged her rambles, thinking the fresh air and exercise must do her a world of good. never had i guessed that the sordid little puss was turning over every stone in the creek in her search for the shining flakes. "why did you think you should find gold here?" i asked. "because they do say it lies in all these mountain streams," she answered sullenly; "and i'm always dreaming of nuggets. not that a girl with my face and figure wants 'dust' to set her off, however. but if its all the same to you, mem, i'd rather leave when euphemia does." "are _you_ going, then?" i inquired, turning reproachfully to my pale-faced cook, who actually coloured a little as she answered, "well, mem, you see moffatt says he's got his window frames in now, and he'll glass them the very first chance, and i think it'll be more company for me on saddler's flat. so if you'll please to send me down in the dray, i should be obliged." here was a pretty upset, and i went about my poultry-feeding with a heavy heart. how was i to get fresh servants, and above all, what was i to do for cooking during the week they were away? these questions fortunately settled themselves in rather an unexpected manner. i heard of a very nice willing girl who was particularly anxious to come up as housemaid, to my part of the world, on condition that i should also engage as cook her sister, who was leaving a place on the opposite side of a range of high hills to the south. i shall only briefly say that all inquiries about these damsels proved satisfactory, and i could see euphemia and lois depart, with tolerable equanimity. the former wept, and begged for a box of cockles' pills; but lois tossed her elfish head, and gave me to understand that she had never been properly admired or appreciated whilst in my service. chapter xii: culinary troubles. i want to lodge a formal complaint against all cookery books. they are not the least use in the world, until you know how to cook! and then you can do without them. somebody ought to write a cookery book which would tell an unhappy beginner whether the water in which she proposes to put her potatoes is to be hot or cold; how long such water is to boil; how she is to know whether the potatoes are done enough; how to dry them after they have boiled, and similar things, which make all the difference in the world. to speak like mr. brooke for a moment. "rice now: i have dabbled in that a good deal myself, and found it wouldn't do at all." of course in time, and after many failures, i did learn to boil a potato which would not disgrace me, and to bake bread, besides in time attaining to puddings and cakes, of which i don't mind confessing i was modestly proud. it used to be a study, i am told, to watch my face when a cake had turned out as it ought. gratified vanity at the lavish encomiums bestowed on it, and horrified dismay at the rapidity with which a good sized cake disappeared down the throats of the company, warred together in the most artless fashion. the reflection would arise that it was almost a pity it should be eaten up so very fast; yet was it not a fine thing to be able to make such a cake! and oh, would the next be equally good? one lesson i leaned in my new zealand kitchen,--and that was not to be too hard on the point of breakages; for no one knows, unless from personal experience, how true was the irish cook's apology for breaking a dish, when she said that it let go of her hand. i declare that i used, at last, to regard my plates and dishes, cups and saucers, yea, even the pudding basons, not as so much china and delf, but as troublesome imps, possessed with an insane desire to dash themselves madly on the kitchen floor upon the least provocation. every woman knows what a slippery thing to hold is a baby in its tub. i am in a position to pronounce that wet plates and dishes are far more difficult to keep hold of. they have a way of leaping out of your fingers, which must be felt to be believed. after my first week in my kitchen i used to wonder, not at the breakages, but at anything remaining unbroken. my maids had a very ingenious method of disposing of the fragments of their pottery misfortunes. at the back of the house an open patch of ground, thickly covered with an under-growth of native grass, and the usual large proportion of sheltering tussocks stretched away to the foot of the nearest hill. this was burned every second year or so, and when the fire had passed away the sight it revealed was certainly very curious. beneath each tussock had lain concealed a small heap of broken china, which must have been placed there in the dead of the night. the delinquents had evidently been at the pains to perfect their work of destruction by reducing the china articles in question, to the smallest imaginable fragments, for fear of a protruding corner betraying the clever _cache_; and the contrast afforded to the blackened ground on which they lay, by the gay patches of tiny fragments huddled together, was droll indeed. that was the moment for recognising the remains of a favourite jug or plate, or even a beloved tea-cup. there they were all laid in neat little heaps, and the best of it was that the existing cook always declared loudly her astonishment at the base ingenuity of such conduct, although i could not fail to recognise many a plate or dish which had disappeared from the land of the living during her reign. all housekeepers will sympathise with my feelings at seeing an amateur scullion, who had distinguished himself greatly in the balaklava charge, but who appeared to have no idea that boiling water would scald his fingers,--drop the top plate of a pile which he had placed in a tub before him. in spite of my entreaties to be allowed to "wash-up" myself, he gallantly declared that he could do it beautifully, and that the great thing was to have the water very hot. in pursuance of this theory he poured the contents of a kettle of boiling water over his plates, plunged his hand in, and dropped the top plate, with a shriek of dismay, on those beneath it. out of consideration for that well-meaning emigrant's feelings, i abstain from publishing the list of the killed and wounded, briefly stating that he might almost as well have fired a shot among my poor plates. a perfect fountain of water and chips and bits of china flew up into the air, and i really believe that hardly one plate remained uncracked. so much for one's friends. i must candidly state that although the servants broke a good deal, we destroyed twice as much amongst us during the week which must needs elapse between their departure and, the arrival of the new ones. shall i ever forget the guilty pallor which overspread the bronzed and bearded countenance of one of my guests, who particularly wished to dust the drawing-room ornaments, when on hearing a slight crash i came into the room and found him picking up the remains of a china shepherdess? considering everything, i kept my temper remarkably well, merely observing that he had better go into the verandah and sit down with a book and his pipe, and send joey in to help me. joey was a little black monkey from panama, who had to be provided with broken bits of delf or china in order that he might amuse himself by breaking them ingeniously into smaller fragments. but the real object of this chapter was to relate some of my own private misfortunes in the cooking line. once, when alice s---- was staying with me and we had no servants, she and i undertook to bake a very infantine and unweaned pig. it was all properly arranged for us, and, making up a good fire, we proceeded to cook the little monster. hours passed by; all the rest of the dinner got itself properly cooked at the right time, but the pig presented exactly the same appearance at dewy eve as it had done in the early morn. we looked rather crest-fallen at its pale condition when one o'clock struck, but i said cheerfully, "oh, i daresay it will be ready by supper!" but it was not: not a bit of it. of course we searched in those delusive cookery books, but they only told us what sauces to serve with a roasted pig, or how to garnish it, entering minutely into a disquisition upon whether a lemon or an orange had better be stuck into its mouth. we wanted to know how to cook it, and why it would not get itself baked. about an hour before supper-time i grew desperate at the anticipation of the "chaff" alice and i would certainly have to undergo if this detestable animal could not be produced in a sufficiently cooked state by evening. we took it out of the oven and contemplated it with silence and dismay. fair as ever did that pig appear, and as if it had no present intention of being cooked at all. a sudden idea came into our heads at the same moment, but it was alice who first whispered, "let us cut off its head." "yes," i cried; "i am sure that prevents its roasting or baking, or whatever it is." so we got out the big carving knife and cut off the piggy's head. far be it from me to offer any solution of the theory why the head should have interfered with the baking process, but all i know is, that, like the old woman in the nursery song, everything began to go right, and we got our supper that night. has anybody ever reflected on how difficult it must be to get a chimney swept without ever a sweep or even a brush? luckily our chimneys were short and wide, and we used a good deal of wood; so in three years the kitchen chimney only needed to be cleansed twice. the first time it was cleared of soot by the simple process of being set on fire, but as a light nor'-wester was blowing, the risk to the wooden roof became very great and could only be met by spreading wet blankets over the shingles. we had a very narrow escape of losing our little wooden house, and it was fortunate it happened just at the men's dinner hour when there was plenty of help close at hand. however great my satisfaction at feeling that at last my chimney had been thoroughly swept, there was evidently too much risk about the performance to admit of its being repeated, so about a year afterwards i asked an "old chum" what i was to do with my chimney. "sweep it with a furze-bush, to be sure," she replied. i mentioned this primitive receipt at home, and the idea was carried out a day or two later by one man mounting on the roof of the house whilst another remained in the kitchen; the individual on the roof threw down a rope to the one below, who fastened a large furze-bush in the middle, they each held an end of this rope, and so pulled it up and down the chimney until the man below was as black as any veritable sweep, and had to betake himself, clothes and all, to a neighbouring creek. as for the kitchen, its state cannot be better described than in my irish cook's words, who cried, "did mortial man ever see sich a ridiklous mess? arrah, why couldn't ye let it be thin?" but for all that she set bravely to work and got everything clean and nice once more, merely stipulating that the next time we were going to sweep chimney we should let her know beforehand, that she might go somewhere "right away." i feel, however, that in all these reminiscences i am straying widely from the point which was before my mind when i began this chapter, and that is the delusiveness of a cookery book. no book which i have ever seen tells you, for instance, how to boil rice properly. they all insist that the grains must be white and dry and separate, but they omit to describe the process by which these results can be attained. they tell you what you are to do with your rice after it is boiled, but not how to boil it. the fact is, i suppose, that the people who write such books began so early to be cooks themselves, that they forget there ever was a time when such simple things were unknown to them. even when i had, after many failures, mastered the art of boiling rice, and also of making an excellent curry,--for which accomplishment i was indebted to the practical teaching of a neighbour,--there used still to be misfortunes in store for me. one of these caused me such a bitter disappointment that i have never quite forgotten it. this was the manner of it. we were without servants. my readers must not suppose that such was our chronic condition, but when you come to change your servants three or four times a year, and have to "do" for yourself each time during the week which must elapse before the arrival of new ones, there is an ample margin for every possible domestic misadventure. if any doubt me, let them try for themselves. on this special occasion, which proved to be nearly the last, my mind was easy, for the simple reason that i was now independent of cookery books. i had puzzled out all the elementary parts of the science for myself, and had no misgivings on the subject of potatoes or even peas. so confident was i, and vain, that i volunteered to make a curry for breakfast. such a savoury curry as it was, and it turned out to be all that the heart of a hungry man could desire; so did the rice: i really felt proud of that rice; each grain kept itself duly apart from its fellow, and was as soft and white and plump as possible. everything went well, and i had plenty of assistants to carry in the substantial breakfast as fast as it was ready: the coffee, toast, all the other things had gone in; even the curry had been borne off amid many compliments, and now it only remained for me to dish up the rice. imagine the scene. the bright pretty kitchen, with its large window through which you could see the green hills around dotted with sheep; the creek chattering along just outside, whilst close to the back door loitered a crowd of fowls and ducks on the chance of fate sending them something extra to eat. beneath the large window, and just in front of it, stood a large deal table, and it used to be my custom to transfer the contents of the saucepans to the dishes at that convenient place. well, i emptied the rice into its dish, and gazed fondly at it for a moment: any cook might have been proud of that beautiful heap of snow-white grains. i had boiled a great quantity, more than necessary it seemed, for although the dish was piled up almost as high as it would hold, some rice yet remained in the saucepan. oh, that i had been content to leave it there! but no: with a certain spasmodic frugality which has often been my bane, i shook the saucepan vehemently, in order to dislodge some more of its contents into my already full dish. as i did so, my treacherous wrist, strained by the weight of the saucepan, gave way, and with the rapidity of a conjurer's trick i found the great black saucepan seated,--yes, that is the only word for it,--seated in the midst of my heap of rice, which was now covered by fine black powder from its sooty outside. all the rice was utterly and completely spoiled. i don't believe that five clean grains were left in the dish there was nothing for it but to leave it to get cold and then throw it all out for the fowls, who don't mind _riz au noir_ it seems. although i feel more than half ashamed to confess it, i am by no means sure i did not retire into the store-room and shed a tear over the fate of that rice. everybody else laughed, but i was dreadfully mortified and vexed. chapter xiii: amateur servants. i flattered myself on a certain occasion that i had made some very artful arrangements to provide the family with something to eat during the servants' absence. i had been lamenting the week of experiments in food which would be sure to ensue so soon as the dray should leave, in the hearing of a gallant young ex-dragoon, who had come out to new zealand to try and see if one could gratify tastes, requiring, say a thousand a year to provide for, on an income of pounds. he was just finding out that it was quite as difficult to manage this in the southern as in the northern hemisphere, but his hearty cheery manner, and enormous stock of hope, kept him up for some time. "i'll come and cook for you," he cried. "i can cook like a bird. but i can't wash up. no, no: it burns too much. if you can get somebody to wash up, i'll cook. and just look here: it would be very nice if we could have some music after dinner. you've got a piano, haven't you? that's right. well, now, don't you ask that pretty miss a----, who has just come out from england, to come and stop with you, and then we could have some music?" "where did you learn to cook?" i inquired, suspiciously; for f----had also assured me _he_ could cook, and this had upset my confidence. "on the west coast; to be sure! ask vere, and williams and taylor, and everybody, if they _ever_ tasted such pies as i used to make them." my countenance must have still looked rather doubtful, because i well remember sundry verbal testimonials of capability being produced; and as i was still very ignorant of the rudiments of the science of cookery, i shrank from assuming the whole responsibility of the family meals. so the household was arranged in this way:--captain george, head cook; mr. u----, scullery-maid; miss a----, housemaid; myself, lady-superintendent; mr. forsyth (a young naval officer), butler. on the principle of giving honour to whom honour is due, this gallant lieutenant deserves special mention for the way he cleaned glass. he did not pay much attention to his silver, but his glass would have passed muster at a club. the only drawback was the immense time he took over each glass, and the way he followed either miss a---- or me all about the house, holding a tumbler in one hand, and a long, clean glass-cloth in the other, calling upon us to admire the polish of the crystal. to clean two tumblers would be a good day's work for him. from monday to saturday (when the dray returned), this state of things went on. of course i had taken the precaution of having a good supply of bread made beforehand, besides cakes and biscuits, tarts and pies; everything to save trouble. but it was not of much use, for, alleging that they were working so hard, the young men, f---- at their head, though i was always telling him he was married and ought to know better, set to work and ate up everything immediately, as completely as if they had been locusts. and then, they were all so dreadfully wild and unmanageable! mine was by far the hardest task of all, the keeping them in any sort of order. for instance, captain george declared one day, that if there was one thing he did better than another, it was to make jam. consequently a fatigue party was ordered out to gather strawberries, and, after more than half had been eaten on the way to the house, a stewpan was filled. i had to do most of the skimming, as captain george wanted to practice a duet with miss a----. i may as well mention here that we never had any opportunity of seeing how the jam kept, because the smell pervaded the whole house to such an extent, that, declaring they felt like schoolboys again, the gentlemen fell on my half dozen pots of preserves in a body, carried them off, and ate them all up then and there, announcing afterwards, there had just been a pot a-piece. it was really a dreadful time, although we got well cooked _plats_, for captain george wasted quite as much as he used. the pigs fed sumptuously that week on his failures, in sauces, minces; puddings, and what not. he had insisted on our making him a paper cap and a linen apron, or rather a dozen linen aprons, for he was perpetually blackening his apron and casting it aside. then, he used suddenly to cease to take any interest in his occupation, and, seating himself sideways on the kitchen dresser, begin to whistle through a whole opera, or repeat pages of poetry. i tried the experiment of banishing miss a---- from the kitchen during cooking hours, but a few bars played on the piano were quite enough to distract my cook from his work. my only quiet time was the afternoon, when about four o'clock, my amateur servants all went out for a ride, and left me in peace for a couple of hours. i had enough to do during that short time to tidy up; to collect the scattered books and music, and prepare the tea-supper, for which they came back in tearing spirits, and frantically hungry, between seven and eight o'clock. after this meal had been cleared away, and mr. u---- and i had washed up (the others declaring they were too tired to stir), we all used to adjourn to the verandah. it happened to be an exceptionally _still_ week, no dry, hot nor'-westers, nor cold, wet sou'-westers, and it was perfectly delicious to sit out in the verandah and rest, after the labours of the day, in our cane easy-chairs. the balmy air was so soft and fresh, and the intense silence all around so profound. unfortunately there was a full moon. i say "unfortunately," because the flood of pale light suggested to these dreadful young men the feasibility of having what they called a "servant's ball." in vain i declared that the housekeeper was never expected to dance. "oh, yes!" laughed captain george. "i've often danced with a housekeeper, and very jolly it was too. come along! f----, _make_ her dance." and i was forced to gallopade up and down that verandah till i felt half dead with fatigue. the boards had a tremendous spring, and the verandah (built by f----, by the way), was very wide and roomy, so it made an excellent ball-room. as for the trifling difficulty about music, that was supplied by captain george and mr. u---- whistling in turn, time being kept by clapping the top and bottom of my silver butter dish together, cymbal-wise. oh, dear! it takes my breath away now even to think of those evenings! i see alice a---- flitting about in her white dress and fern-leaf wreath, dancing like the slender sylph she really was, but never can i forget the odd effect of the gentlemen's feet! no one had their dress boots up at the station, and as alice and i firmly declined to dance with anybody who wore "cookham" boots (great heavy things with nails in the soles), they had no other course open to them except to wear their smart slippers. there were slippers of purple velvet, embroidered with gold; others of blue kid, delicately traced in crimson lines; foxes heads stared at us in startling perspective from a scarlet ground; or black jim-crow figures disported themselves on orange tent-stitch. then these slippers were all more or less of an easy fit, and had a way of flying out on the lawn suddenly, startling my dear dog nettle out of his first sleep. ah, well! that may be an absurd bit of one's life to look back upon, but its days were bright and innocent enough. health was so perfect that the mere sensation of being alive became happiness, and all the noise of the eager, bustling, pushing world, seemed shut away by those steep hills which folded our quiet valley in their green arms. people have often said to me since, "surely you would not like to have lived there for ever?" perhaps not. i can only say that three years of that calm, idyllic life, held no weary hour for me, and i am quite sure that quiet time was a great blessing to me in many ways. first of all, in health, for a person must be in a very bad way indeed for new zealand air not to do them a world of good; next, in teaching me, amid a great deal of fun and laughter, sundry useful accomplishments, not easily learned in our luxurious civilization; and, lastly, those few years of seclusion from the turmoil of life brought leisure to think out one's own thoughts, and to sift them from other peoples' ideas. under such circumstances, it is hard if "the unregarded river of our life," as matthew arnold so finely call it be not perceived, for one then "---- becomes aware of his life's flow and bears its winding murmur, and he sees the meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze; and there arrives a lull in the hot race, wherein he doth for ever chase that flying and elusive shadow, rest." one good effect of my sufferings with a house full of unruly volunteers, was that during the brief stay (only two months), of my next cook, i set to work assiduously to learn as many kitchen mysteries as she could teach me, and so became independent of captain george or f----, or any other amateur, good, bad, or indifferent. nothing could be more extraordinary than the way in which the two affectionate sisters, mentioned [earlier] and who succeeded euphemia and lois, quarrelled. they were very unlike each other in appearance, and one fruitful source of bickering arose from their respective styles of beauty. not only did they wrangle and rave at each other all the day long, during every moment of their spare time, but after they had gone to bed, we could hear them quite plainly calling out to each other from their different rooms. if i begged them to be quiet, there might be silence for a moment, but it would shortly be broken by maria, calling out, "i say, dinah, don't you go for to wear green, my girl. i only tell you friendly, but you're a deal too yellow for that. it suits _me_, 'cause i'm so fresh and rosy, but you never _will_ have my 'plexion, not if you live to be eighty. good night. i thought i'd just mention it while i remembered." this used to aggravate dinah dreadfully, and she would retaliate by repeating some complimentary speech of old ben's, or long tom's, the stockman, and then there would be no peace for an hour. their successors were clarissa and eunice. eunice wept sore for a whole month, over her sweeping and cleaning. to this day i have not the dimmest idea _why_. she gave me warning, amid floods of tears, directly she arrived, though i could not make out any other tangible complaint than that "the dray had jolted as never was;" and to clarissa, i gave warning the first day i came into the kitchen. she received me seated on the kitchen table, swinging her legs, which did not nearly touch the floor. she had carefully arranged her position so as to turn her back towards me, and she went on picking her teeth with a hair-pin. i stood aghast at this specimen of colonial manners, which was the more astonishing as i knew the girl had lived in the service of a gentleman's family in the north of england for some time before she sailed. "dear me, clarissa," i cried, "is that the way you behaved at colonel st. john's?" clarissa looked at me very coolly over her shoulder (i must mention she was a very pretty girl, blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, but with _such_ a temper!) and, giving her plump shoulders a little shrug, said, "no, in course not: _they_ was gentlefolks, they was." i confess i felt rather nettled at this, and yet it was difficult to be angry with a girl who looked like a grown up and very pretty baby. i restrained my feelings and said, "well, i should like you to behave here as you did there. suppose you get off the table and come and look what we can find in the store room." "i _have_ looked round," she declared: "there 'aint much to be seen." my patience began to run short, and i said very firmly, "you must get off the table directly, clarissa, and stand and speak properly; or i shall send you down to christchurch again." i suppose that was exactly what the damsel wished, for she made no movement; whereat i said in great wrath, "very well, then you shall leave at the end of a month." and so she did, having bullied everybody out of their lives during that time. whilst we are on the subject of manners, it may not be out of place to relate a little episode of my early days "up country." i think i have alluded [in "station life in new zealand"] to our book club; but i don't know that it has been explained that i used to change the books on sunday afternoon, after our little evening service. it would have been impossible to induce the men to come from an immense distance twice a week, and it was therefore necessary that they should be able to get a fresh book after service. nothing could have been better than the behaviour of my little congregation: they made it a point of giving no trouble whatever with their horses or dogs, and they were so afraid of being supposed to come for what they could get, that i had some difficulty in inducing those who travelled from a distance to have a cup of tea in the kitchen before they mounted, to set off on their long solitary ride homewards. they were also exceedingly quiet and well-behaved; for if even a dozen men or more were standing outside in fine weather, or waiting within the kitchen if it were wet or windy, not a sound could be heard. if they spoke to each other, it was in the lowest whisper, and they would no more have thought of lighting their pipes anywhere near the house than they would of flying. this innate tact and true gentlemanly feeling which struck me so much in the labouring man as he appears in new zealand, made the lapse of good manners, to which i am coming, all the more remarkable. of course they never touched their hats to me: they would make me a bow or take their hats _off_, but they never touched them. i have often seen a hand raised involuntarily to the soft felt hat, which every one wears there, but the mechanical action would be arrested by the recollection of the first article of the old colonial creed, "jack is as good as his master." i never minded this in the least, and got so completely out of the habit of expecting any salutations, that it seemed quite odd to me to receive them again on my return. no, what i objected to was, that when i used to go into my kitchen, about ten minutes or so after the service had been concluded, with the list of club books in my hand, not a single man rose from his seat. they seemed to make it a point to sit down somewhere; on a table or window seat if all the chairs were occupied, but at all events not to be found standing. they would bend their heads and blush, and glance shyly at each other for encouragement as i came in, but no one got up, or took his hat off. this went on for a few weeks, until i felt sure that this curious behaviour did not spring from forgetfulness, or inattention. when i mentioned my grievance in the drawing-room to the gentlemen, i only got laughed at for my pains, and i was asked what else i expected? to this question used to be added sundry anecdotes of earlier colonial life, intended to reconcile me to the manners of these later days. i remember particularly a legend of a man cook, who was said to have walked into the sitting-room of the station where the master was practising tunes on an accordion, and exclaimed, "now, look here, boss, if you don't leave off that there noise, which perwents me gettin' a wink o' sleep, i'll clear out o' this, sharp, to-morrow mornin'. so now yer know," and with that remark he returned to his bunk. at last i was goaded to declare i felt sure that the men only behaved in that way from crass ignorance, and that if they knew how much my feelings were hurt, they would alter their manners directly. this opinion was received with such incredulity that i felt roused to declare i should try the experiment next sunday afternoon. the only warning which at all daunted me was the assurance that i should affront my congregation and scare them away. it was the dread of this which made my heart beat so fast, and my hands turn so cold as i opened the kitchen-door the next sunday afternoon. there were exactly the same attitudes, every body perfectly civil and respectful, but every body seated. luckily my courage rose at the right moment, and i came forward as usual with a smile, and said, "look here, my men, there is one little thing i want to ask you. do you know that it is not the custom anywhere, in any civilized country, for gentlemen to remain seated and covered when a lady comes into the room? if i were to go into a room in england, where the prince of wales, or any of the finest gentlemen of the land were sitting, just as you are now, they would all get up, the prince first, most likely, and they would certainly take off their hats! now why can't you all do the same, here?" the effect of my little speech was magical. pepper glanced at mcquhair, moffatt crimsoned and nudged mckenzie, wiry ben slipped off the window-seat and shyed his hat across the kitchen, whilst long tom, the bullock-driver, "thanked me kindly for mentioning of it;" and every body got up directly and took their hats off. i felt immensely proud of my success, and hastened the moment of my return to the drawing room, where i announced my triumph. i repeated my little speech as concisely as possible; but, alas, it was not nearly so well received as it had been in the kitchen! "have you ever gone to see a london club?" one person inquired. "ah: i thought not! i don't know about the prince, because he always _does_ do the prettiest things at the right moment, but i doubt very much about all the others. i fear you have made a very wild assertion to get your own way." i need hardly say i sulked at that incredulous individual for many days but he always stuck firmly to his own opinion. however, my men never required another hint. they came just as regularly as usual to church, and we all lived happily ever after. i feel that my chapter should end here; but any record of my new zealand servants would be incomplete without mention of my "bearded cook." every body thinks, when i say this, that i am going to tell them about a man, but it is nothing of the sort. isabella lyon, in spite of her pronounced beard, was a very fine woman; exceedingly good-humoured looking and fresh-coloured, with most amiable prepossessing manners. she had not long arrived, and had been at once snapped up for an hotel, but she applied for my place, saying she wished for quiet and a country life. could any thing be more propitious? i thought, like lois, that my luck, so long in turning, was improving, and that at last i was to have a cook who knew her business. and so she did, thoroughly and delightfully. for one brief fortnight we lived on dainties. never could i have believed that such a variety of dishes could have been produced out of mutton. in fact we seemed to have everything at table except the staple dish. unlike the cook who actually sent me in a roast shoulder of mutton for breakfast one morning, isabella prided herself on eliminating the monotonous animal from her bills of fare. certainly she was rather heavy on the sauces, etc., and i was trying to pluck up courage to remonstrate, as it would not be easy or cheap to replace them before a certain time of year. and then she was so clean, so smiling, and so good-tempered. she seemed to treat us all as if we were a parcel of children for whom she was never weary of preparing surprises. as for me, i felt miserable if any shepherd or well-to-do handsome young bachelor cockatoo came near the place, dreading lest the wretch should have designs on my cook's heart and hand. i rejoiced in her beard, and would not have had her without it for worlds, as i selfishly hoped it might stand in her matrimonial path. this arcadian state of kitchen affairs went on for exactly a fortnight. one evening, at the end of that time, we had been out riding, and returned as usual very hungry. "what are we going to have for supper?" inquired f----. i told him what had been ordered; but when that meal made its appearance, lo, there was not a single dish which i had named! the things were not exactly nasty, but they were queer. for instance, pears are not usually stewed in gravy; but they were by no means bad, and we took it for granted it was something quite new. the housemaid, sarah, looked very nervous and scared, and glanced at me from time to time with a very wistful look; but i was so delightfully tired and sleepy--one never seemed to get beyond the pleasant stage of those sensations--that i did not ask any questions. next morning, when we came out to breakfast, imagine my astonishment at seeing a tureen of half cold soup on the table, and nothing else! i could hardly believe my eyes, and hastened to the kitchen to explain that this was rather too much of a novelty in the gastronomic line. if i live to be a hundred years old, i shall never forget the sight--at once terrible and absurd--which met my eyes. before the kitchen fire stood isabella, having evidently slept in her clothes all night. she looked wretched and bloated, and quite curiously dirty, as black as if she had been up the chimney; and even i could see that, early as was the hour, she was hopelessly drunk. between both of her nerveless, black hands, she held a poker, with which she struck, from time to time, a feeble blow on a piled-up heap of plates, which she persisted in considering a lump of coal. the fire was nearly out, but she hastened to assure me that if she could only break this lump of coal it would soon burn up. need i say that i rescued my plates at once, and marched the bearded one off to her own apartment. oh, how dimmed its dainty freshness had become since even yesterday! sarah was summoned, and confessed that she had known last night that "hisabella" had gone on the "burst," having bought, for some fabulous sum, a bottle of rum from a passing swagger. it was all very dreadful, and worst of all was the scene of tears and penitence i had to endure when the rum was finished. the dray, however, relieved me of the incubus of her presence; and that was the only instance of drunkenness i came across among my domestic changes and chances. chapter xiv: our pets. one of the first things which struck me when i came to know a little more about the feelings and ways of my neighbours in the malvern hills, was the good understanding which existed between man and beast. i am afraid i must except the poor sheep, for i never heard them spoken of with affection, nor do i consider that they were the objects of any special humanity even on their owners' parts. this must surely arise from their enormous numbers. "how can you be fond of thousands of anything?" said a shepherd once to me, in answer to some sentimental inquiry of mine respecting his feelings towards his flock. that is the fact. there were too many sheep in our "happy arcadia" for any body to value or pet them. on a large scale they were looked after carefully. water, and sheltered feed, and undisturbed camping grounds, all these good things were provided for them, and in return they were expected to yield a large percentage of lambs and a good "clip." even the touching patience of the poor animals beneath the shears, or amid the dust and noise of the yards, was generally despised as stupidity. far different is the feeling of the new zealander, whether he be squatter or cockatoo, towards his horse and his dog. they are the faithful friends, and often the only companions of the lonely man. of course there will soon be no "lonely men" anywhere, but a few years ago there were plenty of unwilling robinson crusoes in the middle island; and whenever i came upon one of these pastoral hermits, i was sure to find a dog or a horse, a cat, or even a hen, established as "mate" to some poor solitary, from whom all human companionship was shut out by mountain, rock, or river. "are you not _very_ lonely here?" was often my first instinctive question, as i have dismounted at the door of a shepherd's hut in the back country, and listened to the eternal roar of the river which formed his boundary, or the still more oppressive silence which seemed to have reigned ever since the creation. "well, mum, it aint very lively; but i've got topsy (producing a black kitten from his pocket), and there's the dogs, and i shall have some fowls next year, p'raps." but my object in beginning this chapter was not to enter into a disquisition on other people's pets, with which after all one can have but a distant acquaintance, but to introduce some of my own especial favourites to those kind and sympathetic readers who take pleasure in hearing of my own somewhat solitary existence in that distant land. i am quite ready to acknowledge that i never thoroughly comprehended the individuality of animals, even of fowls and ducks, until i lived up at the station. perhaps, like their masters, they really get to possess more independence of character under those free and easy skies; for where would you meet with such a worldly and selfish cat as "sandy," or so fastidious and intelligent a smooth terrier as "rose"? sandy was an old bachelor of a sleek appearance, red in colour, but with a good deal of white shirt-front and wristbands, as to the get-up of which he was most particular. it was easy to imagine sandy sitting in a club window; and i am _sure_ he had a slight tendency to gout and reading french novels. sandy's selfishness was quite open and above-board. he liked you very much until somebody else came whom he liked better, and then he would desert his oldest friend without hesitation. i don't suppose the wildest young colley-pup ever dreamed of chasing or worrying sandy, who would not have stirred from his warm corner by the fire for snarleyow himself. every now and then sandy must have felt alarmed about his health or his figure, for he ate less, and walked gravely and sulkily up and down the verandah for hours, but as soon as he considered himself out of danger, he relapsed into all his self-indulgent ways. no one ventured to offer sandy anything but the choicest meats, and he was wont to sit up and beg like a dog for a savoury tit-bit. but he would revenge himself on you afterwards for the humiliation, you might be sure. what always appeared to me so odd, was that in spite of his known and unblushing selfishness, sandy used to be a great favourite, and we all vied with each other for the honour of his notice. now why was this? if boundless time and space were at our disposal, we might go deeply into the question and work it out, but as the dimensions of this volume are not elastic, the impending social essay shall be postponed, and we will confine ourselves to a brief description of sandy's outer cat. he was of a pure breed, far removed from the long-legged, lanky race of ordinary station-cats, who from time to time disappeared into the bush and contracted alliances with the still more degraded specimens of their class who had long been wild among the scrub. no: sandy came of "pur sang," and held his small square head erect, with a haughty carriage as beseemed his ancestry. his fur was really beautiful, a sort of tortoiseshell red, the lighter stripes repeating exactly the different golden tints of a fashionable chignon. in early youth, though it is difficult to imagine sandy ever a playful kitten, his tail had been curtailed to the length of three inches, and this short, flexible stump gave an air of great decision to sandy's movements. but his chief peculiarity, and i must add, attraction, in my opinion, was the perfume of his sleek coat. when sandy condescended to take his evening doze on my linsey lap, i never smelt anything so strange and so agreeable as the odour of his fur, specially that on the top of his head. it was like the most delicate musk, but without any of the sickly smell common to that scent. i believe sandy knew of this personal peculiarity, and felt proud of it. a far more unselfish and agreeable personage was rose, the white terrier, whose name often finds a loving place in these pages. she and sandy dwelt together in peace and amity, although the little doggie never could have felt any affection for her selfish companion. rose's nerves were of a delicate and high-strung order, and there was nothing she hated so much as uproarious noise. every now and then it chanced that during a few days of wet or windy weather, our little house had been filled by passing guests: gentlemen who had called in to ask for supper and a bed, intending to go on next day. in a country where inns or accommodation-houses are fifty miles apart, this is a common incident, and it sometimes happens that the resources of station hospitality are taxed to the utmost in this way. i have known our own little wooden box to be so closely packed, that besides a guest on each sofa in the drawing-room, there would be another on a sort of portable couch in the dining-room. this was after the spare room had been filled to the utmost. a delicate "new chum," who required to be pampered, had retired to rest on the hard kitchen sofa described elsewhere; whilst a couple of sturdy travellers were sleeping soundly in the saddle room. after that, there could be nothing for the last comer except a shake-down in red blankets. it _always_ happened i observed that everybody arrived together. for weeks we would be alone. i lived once for eight months without seeing a lady; and then, some fine evening, half a dozen acquaintances would "turn up,"--there really is no other word for it. well, on these occasions, when, instead of departing next morning, our impromptu guests have sometimes been forced to wait until such time as the rain or the wind should cease; their pent-up animal spirits became often too much for them, and they would feel an irresistible impulse to get rid of some of their superfluous health and strength by violent exercise. i set my face at once against "athletic sports" or "feats of strength" being performed in my little drawing-room, although they were always very anxious to secure me for the solitary spectator; and i forget who hit upon the happy thought of turning the empty wool-shed into a temporary gymnasium. there these wild boys--for, in spite of stalwart frames and bushy beards, the southern colonist's heart keeps very fresh and young--used to adjourn, and hop and leap, wrestle and box, fence and spar, to their active young limbs' content. they seemed very happy, and loud were the joyous shouts and peals of laughter over the failures; but after seeing the performance once or twice, i generally became tired and bored, and used to slip away to the house and my quiet corner by the fire. rose considered it her duty to remain at her master's heels as long as possible, but after a time she too would creep back to silence and warmth, though she never deserted her post until the noise grew altogether too much for her nerves; and then, with a despairing whimper, sometimes swelling to a howl, poor little rose would tuck her tail between her legs, and dash out, through the storm, to seek shelter and quiet with me. whenever rose appeared thus suddenly in my quiet retreat, i felt sure some greater uproar than usual was going on down at the wool-shed, and, more than once, on inquiry, i found rose's nerves must have been tried to the utmost before she turned and fled. as for the intelligence of sheep-dogs, a volume could be written on the facts concerning them, and a still more entertaining book on the fictions, for a new zealand shepherd will always consider it a point of honour to cap his neighbour's anecdote of _his_ dog's sagacity, by a yet stronger proof of canine intelligence. i shall only, briefly allude to one dog, whose history will probably be placed in the colonial archives,--a colley, who knows his master's brand; and who will, when the sheep get boxed, that is mixed together, pick out; with unfailing accuracy, all the bleating members of his own flock from amid the confused, terrified mass. as for the patience of a good dog in crossing sheep over a river, i have witnessed that myself, and been forced to draw conclusions very much in favour of the dog over the human beings who were directing the operation. some dogs again, who are perfectly helpless with sheep, are unrivalled with cattle, and i have stood on the edge of a swamp more than once, and seen a dog go after a couple of milch cows, and fetch them out of a herd of bullocks, returning for the second "milky mother" after the first had been brought right up within reach of the stockman's lash. then among my horse friends was a certain suffolk "punch," who had been christened the "artful dodger," from his trick of counterfeiting lameness the moment he was put in the shafts of a dray. that is to say if the dray was loaded; so long as it was empty, or the load was light, the "dodger" stepped out gaily, but if he found the dray at all heavy, he affected to fall dead lame. the old strain of staunch blood was too strong in his veins to allow him to refuse or jib, or stand still. oh, no! the "dodger" arranged a compromise with his conscience, and though he pulled manfully, he resorted to this lazy subterfuge. more than once with a "new chum" it had succeeded to perfection, and the "dodger" found himself back again in his stable with a rack of hay before him, whilst his deluded owner or driver was running all over the place to find a substitute in the shafts. if i had not seen it myself, i could not have believed it. in order to induce the "dodger" to act his part thoroughly, a drayman was appointed whom the horse had never seen, and therefore imagined could be easily imposed upon. the moment the signal was given to start, the "dodger," after a glance round, which plainly said, "i wonder if i may try it upon you," took a step forward and almost fell down, so desperate was his lameness. the driver, who was well instructed in his part, ran round, and lifted up one sturdy bay leg after the other, with every appearance of the deepest concern. this encouraged the "dodger," who uttered a groan, but still seemed determined to do his best, and limped and stumbled a yard or two further on. i confess it seemed impossible to believe the horse to be quite sound, and if it had depended on me, the "dodger" would instantly have been unharnessed and put back in his stable. but the moment had come to unmask him. his master stepped forward, and pulling first one cunning ear, on the alert for every word, and then the other; cried, "it wont do, sir! step out directly, and don't let us have any nonsense." the "dodger" groaned again, this time from his heart probably, shook himself, and, leaning well forward in his big collar, stepped out without a murmur. the lameness had disappeared by magic, nor was there even the slightest return of it until he saw a new driver, and considered it safe to try his oft-successful "dodge" once more. very different was "star," poor, wilful, beauty, whose name and fate will long be remembered among the green hills, where her short life was passed. born and bred on the station, she was the pride and joy of her owner's heart. slender without being weedy, compact without clumsiness, her small head well set on her graceful neck, and her fine legs, with their sinews like steel, she attracted the envy of all the neighbouring squatters. "what will you take for that little grey filly when she is broken?" was a constant question. "she's not for sale," her owner used to answer. "i'll break her myself, and make her as gentle as a dog, and she'll do for my wife when i get one." but this proved a castle in the air, so far as star was concerned. the wife was not so mythical. in due time _she_ appeared in that sheltered valley, and, standing at the head of a mound marked by a stake whereon a star was rudely carved, heard the story of the poor creature's fate. from the first week of her life, star (so-called from a black, five-pointed mark on her forehead), showed signs of possessing a strange wild nature. unlike her sire or dam, she evidently had a violent temper,--and not to put too fine a point on it,--was as vicious a grey mare as ever flung up her heels in a new zealand valley. when her second birthday was passed, star's education commenced. the process called "gentling," was a complete misnomer for the series of buck jumps, of bites and kicks, with which the young lady received the slightest attempt to touch her. she had a horrible habit also of shrieking, really almost like a human being in a frantic rage; she would rush at you with a wild scream of fury, and after striking at you with her front hoofs, would wheel round like lightning, and dash her hind legs in your face. the stoutest stockman declined to have anything whatever to do with star; the most experienced breaker "declined her, with thanks;" generally adding a long bill for repairs of rack and manger, and breaking tackle, and not unfrequently a hospital report of maimed and wounded stablemen. amateur horsemen of celebrity arrived at the station to look at the beautiful fiend, and departed, saying they would rather not have anything to say to her. at last, she was given over in despair, to lead her own free life, never having endured the indignity of bit or bridle for more than two minutes. months passed away, and star and her tantrums had been nearly forgotten, when one mild winter evening the stockman came in to report that,--wonder of wonders,--star was standing meekly outside, whinnying, and as "quiet as a dog." her master went out to find the man's report exact: star walked straight up to him, and rubbed her soft nose confidingly against his sleeve. the mystery explained itself at a glance: she was on the point of having her first foal, and, with some strange and pathetic instinct, she bethought herself of the kind hands whose caresses she had so often rejected, and came straight to them for help and succour. her shy and touching advances were warmly responded to, and in a few minutes the poor beast was safely housed in the warm shed which then represented the present row of neat stables long since on that very spot. a warm mash was eagerly swallowed, and the good-hearted stockman volunteered to remain up until all should be happily over; but his courage failed him at the sight of her horrible sufferings, and in the early dawn he came to rouse up his master, and beg him to come and see if anything more could be done. there lay star, all her fierce spirit quenched, with an appealing look in her large black eyes, which seemed positively human in their capacity for expressing suffering. it was many hours before a dead foal was born, and there is no doubt that if she had been out on the bleak hills, the poor exhausted young mother must have perished from weakness. she appeared to understand thoroughly the motive of all that was being done for her, and submitted with patience to all the remedies. gradually, but slowly, her strength returned; and, alas, her evil nature, tamed by anguish, returned also! day by day she became shyer of even the hand which had fed and succoured her; and, as this is a true chronicle, it must be stated that the very first use mrs. star made of her convalescence was, to kick her nurse on the leg, break her halter into fragments, and gallop off to the hills with a loud neigh of defiance. whenever the topic of feminine ingratitude came on the carpet at that station, this, which star had done, used always to be told as an instance in point. two years later, exactly the same thing happened again. the dreaded hour of suffering found the wayward beauty once more under the roof which had sheltered her in her former time of trial, and once more she rested her head in penitence and appeal against her owner's shoulder. who could bear malice in the presence of such dreadful pain? not star's owner, certainly. besides the home resources, a man on horseback was sent off to fetch a famous veterinary who chanced to be staying at a neighbouring station, and they both returned before star's worst sufferings began. all that skill and experience could do was done that night; but the morning light found the poor little grey mare dying from exhaustion, with another dead foal lying by her side. she only lived a few hours later, in spite of stimulants and the utmost care, and died gently and peacefully, with those human hands whose lightest touch she had so flouted, ministering tenderly to her great needs. the stockman had become so fond of the wayward beauty, in spite of her ingratitude, that the only solace he could find for his regret at her early death, lay in digging a deep grave for her, and carving the emblem of her pretty name on the rude stake which still marks the spot. no account of station pets would be complete without a brief allusion to my numerous and unsuccessful attempts to rear merino lambs in the house. it never was of any use advising me to leave the poor little creatures out on the bleak hill-side, if, in the course of my rambles after ferns or creepers, i came upon a dead ewe with her half-starved baby running round and round her. how could i turn my back on the little orphan, who, instead of bounding off up the steep hill, used to run confidingly up to me, and poke its black muzzle into my hand, as if it would say, "here is a friend at last"? and then merino lambs are so much prettier than any i have seen in england. their snow-white wool is as tightly screwed up in small curls as any astracan fleece, and from being of so much more active a race, they are smaller and more compact than english lambs, and not so awkward and leggy. a merino lamb of a couple of hours old is far better fitted to take care of itself up a mountain than a civilized and helpless lamb of a month old, besides these latter being so weak about the knees always. i only mention this, not out of any desire to "blow" about our sheep, but because i want to account for my tender-heartedness on the subject of desolate orphans. the ewes scarcely ever died of disease, unless by a rare chance it happened to be a very old lady whose constitution gave way at last before a severe winter. we oftenest found that the dead mother was a fine fat young ewe; who had slipped up on a hill-side and could not recover herself, but had died of exhaustion and fatigue from her violent efforts to kick herself up again. if we chanced to be in time to rescue her by the simple process of setting her on her legs again, it would be all right, but sometimes the poor creature had been cold and stiff for hours before we found her, and her lamb had bleated itself hoarse and hungry, and was as tame as a pet dog. now _who_ could turn away from a little helpless thing like that, who positively leaped into your arms and cuddled itself up in delight, sucking vigorously away at your glove, or anything handy? not i, for one,--though i might as well have left it alone, so far as its ultimate fate was concerned; but i always hoped for better luck next time, and carried it off in my arms. the first thing to be do be on arrival at home, was to give the starving little creature a good meal out of a tea-pot, and the next, to put it to sleep in a box of hay in a warm corner of the kitchen. what always seemed to me so extraordinary, was that the lambs, one and all, preserved the most cheerful demeanour, ate and drank and slept well,--and yet died within a month. some lingered until quite four weeks had passed, others succumbed to my treatment in a week. i varied their food, mixing oatmeal with the milk; some i fed often, others seldom; to some i gave sugar in the milk, others had new milk. there was abundance of grass just outside the house for them to eat, if they could. some did mumble feebly at it, i remember, but the mortality continued uninterrupted. it must have been very ridiculous to a visitor, to see my dear little snowy pets going down on their front knees before me, and wagging their long tails furiously the moment the tea-pot was brought out. they were far too sensible to do this if my hands were empty. gentle, affectionate little creatures, they used to be wonderfully well-behaved, though now and then they would wander through the verandah, and so into my bedroom, where the drapery of my dressing-table afforded them endless amusement and occupation. they gnawed and sucked all my "daisy" fringe, until the first thing that had to be done when a lamb arrived at the house, was to take off muslins and fringes from that, the only trimmed table in the house. often and often, of a cold night (for we must remember that new zealand lambing used always to come off in winter), we would all become suddenly aware of a strong smell of burning pervading the whole house; which, on being traced to its source, was often found to proceed from the rosette of wool on the forehead of a chilly lamb. the creature drew nearer and nearer to the genial warmth of the kitchen fire, until at last it used to lean its brow pensively against the red hot bars. hence arose the powerful odour gradually filling the whole of the little wooden house. of course i used to rush to the rescue, and draw my bewildered pet away from the fatal warmth, but not until it had usually singed the wool off down to the bone, and there was often a bad burn on its forehead as well. but still, in spite of stupidity and an insatiable appetite, i always grieved very sincerely for each of my orphan lambs as it in turn sank into its early grave. i used to be well laughed at for attaching any sentiment to an animal which had sunk so disgracefully low in the money-market as a new zealand lamb, but the abundant supply of my little pets never made it easier for me to lose the particular one which i had set my heart on rearing. it certainly did afford me some comfort to hear that merino lambs had always been difficult, if not impossible to bring up, like so many "pups," by hand; and among all the statistics i carefully collected, i could only find one well-authenticated instance of a foundling having been reared indoors. my informant tried to comfort me by tales of the tyranny that stout and tame sheep exercised over the household which had sheltered it, but i fear that the stories of its delightful impudence only made me more anxious to succeed in my own baby-farming experiments among the lambs. chapter xv: a feathered pet. no record of those dear, distant days would be complete without a short memoir of "kitty." she was only a grey dorking hen, but no heroine in fact or fiction, no lady rachel russell or _fleurange,_ ever exceeded kitty in unswerving devotion to a beloved object, or rather objects. to see kitty was to admire her, at least as i saw her one beautiful spring evening in a grassy paddock on the banks of the horarata. we had ridden over there to visit our kind and friendly neighbours, the c----'s; we had enjoyed a delicious cup of tea in the passion-flower-covered verandah, which looked on the whole range, from east to west, of the glorious southern alps, their shining white summits sharply cut against our own peculiarly beautiful sky; we had strolled round the charming, unformal garden, on either sloping side of a wide creek, and had admired, with just a tinge of envy, the fruits and flowers, the standard apple and rose trees, the tangle of fern and creepers, the wealth of the old and new worlds heaped together in floral profusion; we had done all this, i say, and very pleasant we had found it. now we were trying to say goodbye: not so easy a task, let me tell you, when there are so many temptations to linger, and when you are greatly pressed to stay. the last device of our hospitable hostess to keep us consisted in offering to show me her poultry-yard. now i was a young beginner in that line myself, and tormented my ducks and fowls to death by my incessant care: at least that is the conclusion i have arrived at since; but at that time, i considered it as necessary to look after them as if they had been so many children. the consequence was,--as i pathetically complained to mrs. c----, that my hens sat furiously for a week, and then took to lingering outside, where perpetual feeding was going on, until their eggs grew cold; that my ducks neglected their offspring and allowed the rats to decimate them, and that every variety of epidemic and misfortune assailed in turns my unhappy poultry yard. kind mrs. c---- listened as gravely as she could, hinting _very_ gently, that perhaps i took too much trouble about them; then, fearing least she might have wounded my feelings, she hastened to suggest that i should try the introduction of a different breed. as a preliminary step to this reformation, she offered to bestow upon me one of her best dorking hens. it was too tempting an offer to be refused, and i forthwith bestowed my affections on a beautiful grey pullet, whose dignified carriage and speckled exterior bespoke her high lineage. "that's kitty," said mrs. c----. "i am so glad you fancy her; she is one of my nicest young hens. we'll catch her for you in a moment." i must pause to mention here, that it struck me as being very odd in new zealand the way in which _every_ creature has a name, excepting always the poor sheep. if one sees a cock strutting proudly outside a shepherd's door; you are sure to hear it is either nelson or wellington; every hen has a pet name, and answers to it; so have the ducks and geese,--at least, up-country; of course, dogs, horses, cows and bullocks, each rejoice in the most inflated appellations, but i don't remember ever hearing ducks and fowls answer to their names in any other country. but this is only by the way. i gratefully and gladly accepted the transfer of the fair kitty, and only wondered how i was to convey her to her new home, fifteen miles away. kitty was soon caught, and carried off into the house to be packed up for her first ride. accustomed as i am to ridiculous things happening to me, still i never felt in so absurd a position as when, having mounted "helen," who seemed in a particularly playful mood after a good feed of oats, kitty was handed to me neatly tied up in a pillow-case with her tufted head protruding from a hole in the seam at the side. although very anxious to carry her home immediately, my heart died within me at the prospect of a long gallop on a skittish mare with a plump dorking hen tied up in a bag on my lap. there was no help for it, however, and i tried to put my bravest face on the matter. the difficulties commenced at the very point of departure, for it is not easy to say farewell cordially with your hands full of reins, whip, and poultry. but it proved comparatively easy going whilst we only cantered over the plains. it was not until the first creek had been reached, that i really perceived what lay before me. helen distrusted the contents of the bag, and kept trying to look round and see what it contained; and her fears of something uncanny might well have been confirmed when she took off at her first flat jump. kitty screamed, or shrieked, or whatever name best expresses her discordant and piercing yells. i more than suspect i shrieked too, partly at the difficulty of keeping both kitty and helen in any sort of order, and partly at my own insecurity. no sooner had helen landed on the other side, than she fled homewards as if a tin kettle were tied to her tail. the speed at which we dashed through the fragrant summer air completely took away kitty's breath, and the poor creature appeared more dead than alive by the time i dismounted, trembling myself in every limb for her safety as well as my own, at the garden gate. however, next morning brought a renewed delight in existence to both kitty and me, and our night's sleep had made us forget our agitation and peril. after breakfast i introduced her to the poultry yard, and she adapted herself to her new home with a tact and good humour most edifying to behold. months passed away. kitty had made herself a nest in a place, the selection of which did equal honour to her head and heart, and she gladdened my eyes one fine morning by appearing with a lovely brood of chicks around her. who so proud as the young mother? she exhibited them to me, and after i had duly admired them, used to carry them off to a nursery of her own, which she had established among the tussocks just outside the stable door. mrs. c---- had impressed upon me that kitty could be safely trusted to manage her own affairs. no fear of her dragging her fluffy babies out among the wet grass too early in the morning, or losing them among the flax bushes on the hill-side. no: kitty came of a race who were model mothers, and was to be left to take care of herself and her chickens. about a week after kitty had first shown me her large, small family, a friend of ours arrived unexpectedly to stop the night. next morning, when he was going away, he apologised for asking leave to mount at the stables, saying his led horse was so vicious, and the one he was riding so gay, that it was quite possible their legs might find themselves within the verandah, or do some mischief to the young shrubs which were the pride and joy of my heart. this gentleman rode beautifully, and i used to like to see the courage and patience with which he always conquered the most unruly horse. "we will come up to the stable and see you mount," i cried, seizing my hat. of course every one followed my lead, and it was to the sound of mingled jeers and compliments that poor mr. t---- mounted his fiery steed, and seized hold of the leading rein of his pack-horse. but this animal had no intention of taking his departure with propriety or tranquillity: he pranced and shied, flinging out his heels as he wildly danced round to every point of the compass, in a circle. gradually he drew mr. t---- and his chestnut a dozen yards away from the stable, and it was just then that i perceived poor kitty sitting close under a tussock. it chanced to be the hour for the chickens' siesta, and they were all folded away beneath her ample brooding wings. perhaps the danger had come too near to be avoided before i perceived it, but at all events my loud shriek of warning was too late to save the pretty crouching head from the flourish of the pack-horse's glancing heels. swift indeed was the blow; for scarcely ten seconds could have passed between my first glimpse of poor kitty's bright black eye looking out, with such mortal terror in its expression, from beneath the yellow tuft of grass, and my seeing the horse's heel lay her head right open. the brave little mother never dreamed of saving herself at the cost of her nestlings. she crouched as low as possible, and when the horse had jumped over her i flew to see if she had escaped. no. there lay my pretty pet, with her wings still outspread and her chickens unhurt. but she seemed dead: her head had been actually cut clean open, and i never expected that she would have lived a moment. yet she did. i took her at once to the well hard by, and bound up her split head with my pocket handkerchief, keeping it well wetted with cold water. later on i put forth all the surgical art i possessed, and dressed the wound in the most scientific manner, nursing poor kitty tenderly in the kitchen, and feeding her with my own hands every two hours. she was for a long time incapable of feeding herself and; even when all danger was over, required most careful nursing. however, the end of the story is that, she recovered entirely her bodily health, but her poor little brain remained clouded for ever. she never took any more notice of her chickens, who had to be brought up by hand, and she never mixed again with the society of the poultry-yard. at night she roosted apart in the coalshed, and she never seemed to hear my voice or distinguish me from others, though she was perfectly tame to everybody. kitty's end was very tragical. she grew exceedingly fat, and at last, one time when we were all snowed up and could not afford to be sentimental, my cook laid hold of poor kitty, who was moping in her usual corner, and converted her into a savoury stew without telling me, until i had actually dined off her. i was very angry; but eliza only repeated by way of consolation, "she had no wits, only flesh, consequently she was better in my stew-pot nor anywhere else, mum, if you'll only look at it calm like." but it was very hard to be made to eat one's patient, especially when i was so proud of the way her poor head had healed. if anybody wanted to teaze me, they suggested that i had omitted to replace my dear kitty's brains before closing that cruel wound in her skull. chapter xvi: doctoring without a diploma. so many reminiscences come crowding into my mind,--some grave and others gay,--as i sit down to write these final chapters, that i hardly know where to begin. the most clamorous of the fast-thronging memories, the one which pushes its way most vividly to the front, is of a little amateur doctoring of mine; and as my patient luckily did not die of my remedies, i need not fear that i shall be asked for my diploma. shearing was just over; over only that very evening in fact. we had been leading a sort of uncomfortable picnic life at the home station for more than ten days, and had returned to our own pretty little home up the valley, late on saturday night, in time for the supper-dinner i have so often described. it was my doing, that fortnight's picnic at the home station, and i may as well candidly confess it was a mistake; although, made, like most mistakes in life, with good intentions. our partner had gone to england, our manager had just left us to set up sheep-farming on his own account, and all the responsibility of shearing a good many thousand sheep devolved on f----. and not only the shearing; the flock had to be carefully draughted, the ewes, wethers, and hoggets, to be branded, ear-marked, and turned out on their several ranges; the wethers for home consumption, which consisted of a good-sized flock of many hundred sheep, turned into the home-paddock,--an enclosure of some five or six hundred acres,--and various other minute details to be seen to; the wool to be sent down to christchurch, and the stores brought up by the return drays. my motives for the plan i formed for us to go over, bag and baggage, to the home station, the evening before the shearing began, and live there till it was over, were varied. we will put the most unselfish first, for the sake of appearances. i knew it would be very hard work for poor f---- all that time, and i thought it would add to his fatigue if he had to go backwards and forwards to his own house every day, getting up at five in the morning and returning late at night, besides having no comfortable meals. the next motive was that i wanted very much to see the whole process of shearing, and all the rest of it, myself; and as it turned out, though i little dreamed of it at the time, this proved to be my only chance. every body tried to dissuade me from carrying out the scheme, by urging that i should be very uncomfortable; but i did not care in the least for that, and insisted on being allowed at all events to see how i liked it. accordingly one evening we set forth: such a ridiculous cavalcade. i would not hear of riding, for it was only a short two miles walk; and as we did not start until after our last meal, the sun had dipped behind flag-pole's tall peak, and nearly the whole of our happy valley lay in deep, cool shadow. besides which, it looked more like the real thing to walk, and that was half the battle with me. the "real thing" in this case, though i did not stop to explain it to myself, must have meant emigrants, mormons, soldiers on the march, what you will; any thing which expresses all one's belongings being packed into a little cart, with a huge tin bath secured on the top of all. such a miscellaneous assortment of dry goods as that cart held! a couple of mattresses (for my courage failed me at the idea of sleeping on chopped tussocks for a fortnight), a couple of folding-up arm-chairs, though, as it turned out, one would have been enough, for poor f---- never sat down from the time he got up until he went to bed again; a large hamper of provisions, some books, our clothes, and various little matters which were indispensable if one had to live in an empty house for a fortnight. i had sent my two maids over one morning a few days before, with pails and mops and brushes, and they had given the couple of rooms which we were to inhabit, a thorough good cleaning and scouring, so my mind was easy on that point. it would not have answered, for many reasons, to have encumbered ourselves with these damsels during our stay at the home station. in the first place, there was really no accommodation for them; in the next, it would have entailed more luggage than the little cart could hold; and, finally, we should have been obliged to leave them behind at the last moment: for only the evening before we started, a couple of friends arrived, in true new zealand fashion, from christchurch, to pay us a month's visit. it was too late to alter our plans then, so we told them to, make themselves thoroughly at home, and took our departure next day in the way i have alluded to. we had plenty of escort as far as the first swamp. when that treacherous and well-known spot had been reached, everybody suddenly remembered that they had forgotten something or the other which obliged them to return directly, so our farewells had to be exchanged from the centre of a flax bush. the cart meanwhile was nearly out of sight, so wide a _detour_ had its driver been forced to make in order to find a place sound enough to bear its weight. but we caught it up again after we had happily crossed the quagmire which used always to be my bug-bear, and in due time we made our appearance, in the gloaming, at the tiny house belonging to the home station. early as was the hour, not later than half-past eight, the place lay silent and still under the balmy summer haze. all the shearers were fast asleep in the men's hut, whilst every available nook and corner was filled with the spare hands; the musterers, branders, yard-keepers, and many others, whose duties were less-defined. far down the flat we could dimly discern a white patch,--the fleecy outlines of the large mob destined to fill the skillions at day-break to-morrow morning; and, although we could not see them distinctly, close by, watchful and vigilant all through that and many subsequent summer nights, pepper and his two beautiful colleys kept watch and ward over the sheep. writing in the heavy atmosphere of this vast london world, i look back upon that, and such evenings as that, with a desperate craving to breathe once more he delicious air unsoiled by human lungs, and stirred into fresh fragrance by every summer sigh of those distant new zealand valleys. no wonder people were always well in such a pure, clear, light atmosphere. i try to feel again in fancy the exquisite enjoyment of merely drawing a deep breath, the thrilling sensation of health and strength it sent tingling down to your finger ends. no fleck or film of vapour or miasma could be seen or smelt, though the day had been burning hot, and, as i have said, there were plenty of creeks and swamps hard by. damp is unknown in those valleys, and we might have lingered bareheaded even after the heavy dew began to fall, without risk of cold, or fever, or any other ailment. but we could not afford to linger a moment out of doors that lovely tempting evening. f---- and the driver of the cart, who had some important part to take in the morrow's proceedings (i forget exactly what), soon tossed out my little stores, which looked very insignificant as they lay in a heap in the verandah, and departed to see that all was in train for next day's work. i had no time to enjoy the evening's soft beauty: the beds had to be made; clothes to be unpacked and hung up; stores must be arranged on the shelves in the sitting-room,--for the house only consisted of two small rooms in front, with a wide verandah, and a sort of lean-to at the back, which was divided into a small kitchen and store-room. this last was empty. i confess i thought rather regretfully of my pretty, comfortable, english-looking bed-room at the other house, with its curtains and carpet, its wardrobes and looking-glasses, when i found myself surveying the scene of my completed labours. two station _bunks_,--i.e., wooden bed-frames of the simplest and rudest construction, with a sacking bottom,--a couple of empty boxes, one for a dressing-table and the other for a wash-stand, a tin basin and a bucket of water, being the paraphernalia of the latter, whilst some nails behind the door served to hang our clothes on, such was my station bedroom and all my own doing too! certainly it looked uncomfortable enough to satisfy any one, but i would not have complained of it for the world, lest i might have been ordered home directly. hard as was my bed that night, i slept soundly, and it appeared only five minutes before i heard a tremendous noise outside the verandah. the bleating of hundreds of sheep announced that the mob were slowly advancing, before a perfect army of men and dogs, up to the sheep yards. what a din they all made! f---- was wide awake, and up in a moment. i, anxious to show _why_ i had insisted on coming over, got up too, and made my way into the little kitchen, where i found a charming surprise awaiting me in the shape of some faggots of neatly-stacked wood, cut into exactly, the right lengths for the american stove; and also a heap of dry menuka bushes, which make the best touchwood for lighting fires in the whole world. the tiny kitchen and stove were both scrupulously clean, and so were my three saucepans and kettle. this had been, of course, my maids' doing, but the fuel was a delicate little attention on pepper's part. how he blushed and grinned with delight when i thanked him before all his mates! this was indeed station-life made easy! it did not take two minutes to light my fire, and in five more i had a delicious cup of tea and some bread-and-butter all ready for f----. it was nearly cold, however, by the time i could catch him and make him drink it. of course, being a man, instead of saying, "thank you," or anything of that sort, he merely remarked, "what nonsense!" but equally of course, he was very glad to get it, and ate and drank it all up, returning instantly to his shed. after this little episode, i set to work to unpack a little, and make the sitting-room look the least bit more home-like; then i laid the cloth for breakfast, put out the pie and potted meat, etc. (no words can say how heartily tired of pies we both were before the week was over), and arranged everything for breakfast. then i waylaid one of the numerous stray "hands" which hang about a station at shearing time, and got him to fetch me a couple of buckets of water as far as the verandah. these i conveyed myself into the little sleeping-room, and finished my toilette at my leisure: tidying it all up afterwards. i wonder if any one has any idea what hot work it is making a bed? so hot, in fact, that i resolved in future to be wise enough to finish all these domestic occupations before i had my bath. the worst of getting up so early proved to be that by nine o'clock i was very tired, and had nothing else to do for the remainder of the long, noisy day. as for the meals, they were wretchedly unsociable; for f---- only came in to snatch a mouthful or two, standing, and it was of little use trying to make things comfortable for him. i must confess here, what i would not acknowledge at the time, that i found it a very long and dull visit. my husband never had time to speak to me, and when he did, it was only about sheep. i grew weary of living on cold meat, for it was really too hot to cook; and my servants used to send me over, every second day, cold fowls or pies; besides, one seemed to live in a whirl and confusion of dust, and bleating, and barking. after the day's work was fairly over, f---- used to rush in, seize a big bath-towel, cry "i am off for a bathe in the creek," and only return in time for supper and bed. the weather was all that a sheep-farmer could desire. bright, sunny, and clear, one lovely summer day followed another; hot, almost to tropical warmth, without any risk or fear of sun-stroke or head-ache, and a delicious lightness in the atmosphere all the time, which merged into a cool bracing air the moment the sun had slowly travelled behind the high hills to the westward. but all these details, though necessary to make you understand what i had been doing, are not the story itself, so to that we will hurry on. the shearing was over; saturday evening had come, as welcome to poor imprisoned me as to any one, and the great work of the new zealand year had been most successfully accomplished. f---- was in such good humour that he even deigned to admit that his own comfort had been somewhat increased by my living at the home station, so i felt quite rewarded for my many dreary hours. the shearers had been paid, and were even then picking their way over the hills in little groups of two and three; some, i grieve to say, bound for the nearest accommodation-house or wayside inn, and others for the next station, across the river, where the skillions were full, and waiting for them to begin on monday morning. only half-a-dozen people, instead of thirty, were left at our place, and there would not even have been so many if it had not been thought well to keep a few there until the bale-loft was empty. generally it was arranged for the wool-drays to follow each other every two days with a load down to christchurch; for the greatest risk a sheep-farmer runs is from his shed taking fire whilst it is full of bales of wool. this had happened often enough in the colony, and even in our neighbourhood, to make us more and more careful every year; and, as i have said, amongst our precautions, was that of keeping as little wool as possible in the shed. most flock-owners waited until the shearing should be quite over before they carted the wool away; but in that case, a spark from a pipe, a match carelessly dropped in a tussock outside, when a nor'-wester was blowing,--and the slight wooden building would be blazing like a torch, and your year's income vanishing in the smoke! even at the last moment, when the cart had already started homewards, with the tin bath balanced once more on the top of the mattresses and boxes; when the house was empty, and i was waiting, my hat and jacket on, and flax-stick in hand, eager to set out, a doubt arose about the expediency of our return home. some accidental delay had prevented the dray from arriving in time to start for christchurch with the last load, and between two and three hundred pounds worth of wool still remained in the shed,--packed and labelled indeed, but neither insured nor protected from the risk of fire in any way. f---- was very loath to leave them there; but, yielding to my entreaties, he called pepper, the head shepherd, and solemnly gave the wool-shed and its contents over into his charge, with many and many a caution about fire. pepper was as trustworthy and steady a shepherd as any in the colony, and promised to "keep his weather-eye open," as he phrased it, in nautical slang picked up from some run-away sailor. all the way home f---- said from time to time, anxiously, "i wish the shed was empty;" but i cheered him up, and told him he was over-tired and unreasonably nervous, and so forth, but with a great longing myself for monday morning to come, and for the dray to take its load and start. i need not dwell on how delicious it was to return home, where everything seemed so comfortable and nice, and the bed felt especially soft and welcome to tired limbs. early were our hours, you may be sure, and we slept the sleep of the hard-worked until between two and three o'clock the next morning. then we were roused up by some one knocking loudly against our wide-open latticed window. i was the first to hear the noise, and cried, "who's there? what is it?" all in a breath. "the wool-shed on fire," murmured f----, in a tone of agonized conviction. "it's you that's wanted, please mum, this moment, over at the home station!" i heard pepper say, in impatient tones. "it's the wool-shed," repeated f----, more than half asleep, and with only room for that one idea in his dreamy mind. "nonsense!" i cried, jumping out of bed. "i should not be wanted if the wool-shed were on fire. don't you hear pepper say he wants me?" "all right, then," said f----, actually turning over and proposing to go to sleep again. but there was no more sleep for either of us that night. whilst i hastily put on my riding-habit, pepper told me, through the window; an incoherent tale of some one being at the point of death, and wanting me to cure him, and the master to bring over pen and ink, to make a will, and dying speeches and cold shivers, all mixed up together in a tangle of words. f---- took some minutes to understand that it was fenwick, a gigantic yorkshireman, who had been seized with what pepper would call the "choleraics," and who, in spite of having swallowed all the mustard and rum and "pain-killer" left on the premises, grew worse and worse every moment. "he's dying, safe enough," concluded pepper, "but he's main anxious to see you, mum, and the master; and he wants a bible brought to swear him, and he's powerful uneasy to make his will." i knew quite as little of medicine as my husband did of law, but of course we decided instantly that we ought both to go and see what could be done in any way to relieve either the body or mind of the sufferer. we said to each other while we were hastily dressing, "how shall we ever catch the horses? they have all been turned out, of course, as no one thought they would be wanted until monday; and who knows where they have gone to?--miles away, perhaps; and it's pitch dark." judge, then, of our delighted surprise, when, on going out into the verandah, preparatory to starting off to look for our steeds, we found them standing at the gate, ready saddled and bridled. it seemed like magic, but the good fairies in this case had been the two guests to whom i have alluded as having arrived just as we were starting for our picnic life. they were both "old chums," and understood the situation instantly. whilst we were questioning pepper (you can hear every word all over a new zealand house), they had jumped up, huddled on their clothes, and gone over the brow of the hill to look for the horses. by great good fortune the whole mob was found quietly camping in the sheltered valley full of sweet grass, on its further side. to walk up to my pretty bay mare helen, and lay hold of her mane, and then, vaulting on her back, ride the rest of the mob back into the stockyard, was, even in the deep darkness of a midsummer night, no difficult task for eyes so practised to catching horses under all circumstances. so here was one obstacle suddenly smoothed, and as i hastily collected my few simple remedies, consisting chiefly of flannel, chlorodyne, and brandy, i could only trust and pray that poor fenwick's case might not be so desperate as pepper represented it. to our impatience, the difficult track, with its swamps and holes, its creeks to be jumped, and morasses to be avoided, seemed long indeed; but to judge from the continued profound darkness,--that inky blackness of the sky which is the immediate forerunner of daylight,--the dawn could not be far off. how well i remember the whole scene! f---- tied his white handkerchief on his arm, that helen and i might have a faint speck of light by which to guide ourselves. pepper rode close to me, pouring into my ears dismal predictions of fenwick's end; whilst i, amid all my anxiety, could only think of the dangers of the track, and whether, in the pitchy darkness, we should ever get to the home station. the dew fell so heavily that more than once i thought it must be raining, but those were only wind-clouds brooding in the great dark vault above us. more welcome than ever sounded the bark of the dogs, which told us we had reached the end of our stumbling ride; and the moment their tongues woke up the silence, a lantern showed a ray of light to guide us to the hut door. i jumped off my horse instantly, and went in. at first i thought my patient was dead, for he lay, rigid and grey, in his bunk. at a glance i perceived that nothing could really be done to help him whilst he was lying on a high shelf, almost out of my reach, in a small hut filled with bewildered men, who kept offering him from time to time a "pull" at a particularly good pipe, having previously poured all the grog they could muster down his throat, or rather over his pillow (his saddle performed that duty by night), for he had been unable to swallow for some hours. i remembered that there were the bedsteads we had used at the house, and also some firewood still left in the kitchen. explaining to pepper how he was to wrap poor fenwick in every available blanket in the place, and carry him across the open space into the parlour, i hastily ran on before, got some one to help me to drag one of the light frames into the sitting-room, laced it before the fireplace, and then made up a good blazing fire on the open hearth. by the time the dry wood was crackling and sparkling out its cheery welcome, my patient arrived, and was laid down, blankets and all, on the rude little bedstead, before the blaze. by its fitful and uncertain light i proceeded to examine the enormous frame stretched so helplessly before me, feeling half afraid to touch him at all. f---- was very trying as an assistant, for he looked on without making any suggestions, and only said from time to time, "take care: the man is dead." to my inexperienced eyes he indeed seemed past all human help. his skin was icy cold, and as wet as if he had been lying out in the dew. no flutter of pulse, nor sign of breath, could my trembling efforts discover; but i fancied there was the least little sign of pulsation about his heart. of course i had not the vaguest notion of what was the matter with the man, for all pepper could tell me was that "fenwick's been powerful bad, you bet." this does not sound a minute diagnosis to go on, and the only remedies which presented themselves to my mind were those i had studied as being useful for the recovery of drowned persons. so to work i set, as if the poor fellow had just been fished out of the creek; and whenever any one wanted to teaze me afterwards they would declare i had insisted on fenwick's being held up by his heels. but of course that was all nonsense. what i did really do was this, and a doctor in christchurch, whom i afterwards consulted as to my treatment, assured me, laughingly, that it was "capital." i made pepper and another man both rub the cold clammy body, as hard as they could with mustard and hot flannel. i got some bottles filled with hot water (for it did not take five minutes to boil the kettle) and placed to his icy-cold feet and under his arms, then i mixed a little very strong and hot brandy and water, to which i added a few drops of chlorodyne, and gave him a teaspoonful every five minutes. for the first half-hour there was no sign of life to be detected, and the same horrible bluish pallor made poor fenwick's really handsome face look ghastly in the flickering light. my two assistants were getting exhausted, and pepper had more than once murmured, with the recollection of the past fortnight's work strong upon him, "spell, oh!" or else "shears!" [note: the shearer's demand for a few minutes rest] whilst his companion inquired pathetically, "what was the use of flaying a dead man?" to these hints i paid no attention, though my damp riding habit was steaming from the heat of the fire and i felt dreadfully tired; for certainly there seemed to my eyes a healthier tinge stealing over the rigid features, and it could not be my fancy which detected a stronger effort to swallow the last spoonful of brandy. i need not go into the details of my jumbled-up remedies; probably i should bring upon myself serious remonstrances from the royal humane society, if my treatment of that unhappy man were made public. it is enough to say that i "exhibited" mustard by the pound and brandy by the quart, that i roasted him first on one side and then on the other, that his true skin was rubbed off, that i chlorodyned him until he slept for nearly a week, and that when he finally recovered he declared he felt "as if he'd been dead:" "and no wonder," as pepper always remarked. the only clue i could get to the cause of his illness was a shy confession, about a week afterwards, that he had eaten a few mushrooms. fenwick's idea of a few of anything was generally a liberal notion. i questioned him narrowly as to what he had had for supper the night he was taken ill, and this was his bill of fare:-- "well, you see, mum, i wasn't rightly hungry: it must have been them gripses coming on. so i only had a shoulder (of mutton, _bien entendu_; when fenwick had really a good appetite he regarded anything less than a whole leg of a sheep as an insult) that night, half-a-dozen slap jacks, and a trifle of mushrooms." "how big were the mushrooms?" i asked. "oh, they was rather fine ones, mum, i won't deny: they might have been the bigness of a plate." now even supposing them to have been perfectly wholesome, a few dozen mushrooms of that size, eaten half raw with a whole shoulder of mutton, are quite enough to my ignorant mind to account for so severe a fit of the "choleraics." chapter xvii: odds and ends. my nerves had hardly recovered the shock of having the care of such a huge patient thrust on me; for, seriously speaking, fenwick took a good deal of nursing and attention before he got well again, when we had another night alarm. our beautiful summer weather was breaking up; high nor'-westers had blown down the gorges for days, and now a cold wet gale was coming up in heavy banks of fleecy clouds from the sou'-west. everything looked cold and wretched out of doors, but the sheep-farmers were thankful and pleased. their "mobs" could find excellent shelter for themselves, for it takes _very_ bad weather to hurt a merino sheep, and the creeks had been running rather low. "we shall have a splendid autumn after this is over," said all the squatters gleefully, "with lots of feed: there's tyler's creek coming down beautifully." so i was fain to be content, though my fowls looked draggled and wretched, and my pet patch of mignonette became a miniature desert, its fragrance being all blown and rain-beaten away. good fires of lignite and wood made the house cheery, and we went to bed, hoping for fine weather next day. in the middle of the night everyone was awakened by a tremendous, echoing noise outside, whilst the frail wooden house vibrated perceptibly. it could not be caused by the wind: for, although the rain kept pouring steadily down, the furious sou'-west gusts had long ago been beaten into a sullen silence by the descending torrents. for a moment, and half-awake, an old tropical reminiscence floated through my sleepy, startled mind: "can it be an earthquake?" i dreamily wondered. but, no earthquake of my acquaintance was ever yet so resounding and noisy, for all its crumbling horror: yet, the house was certainly shaking. "what is it? what are you doing?" rang in shouts through the little dwelling, as its dwellers came thronging, one after another, to our door. frightened as i was, i can perfectly remember how indignant i felt, when it became clear to my mind that they all thought _we_ were making such an uproar. how could we do it, if even we had wished to get out of our warm beds, and create a disturbance on such a wild night. "good gracious! the house is coming down," i cried, as a fresh shudder ran through the slight framework of, our little wooden home. "pray go out, and see what is the matter." thus urged, f---- opened a casement on the sheltered side,--if any side could be said to be sheltered in such weather,--and cautiously put his head out. i peered over his shoulder, and never can i forget the ridiculous sight which met our eyes. there, dripping and forlorn, huddled together under the wide roof of our summer parlour, as the verandah used to be often called, the whole mob of horses had gathered themselves. the garden gate chanced to have been left open, and, evidently under old jack's' guidance, they had all walked into the verandah, wandered disconsolately up and down its boarded floor, and after partaking of a slight refreshment in the shape of my best creepers, had proceeded to make themselves at home by rubbing their wet sides against the pillars and the wooden sides of the house itself. no wonder the noise had aroused us all. ironshod hoofs clattering up and down a boarded verandah is riot a silent performance; and jack was so cool and impudent about it, positively refusing to stir from the sheltered corner by the silver-pheasants' aviary, which he had chosen for himself. the other horses evidently felt they were intruders, and were glad enough, on the flapping of a handkerchief, to hurry out of their impromptu stables, making the best of their way through the narrow garden gate, and so out upon the bleak hills again. but jack's conduct was very trying; he found himself perfectly comfortable, and evidently intended to remain so; neither for wishing nor coaxing, for fair words nor foul, would he stir. it seemed so horrid to have to dress and go out in such a downpour of rain, that we weakly deliberated on the expediency of letting the cunning old stock-horse remain; but fortunately, at that moment he began to scratch his ear with his hind foot, waking up a thousand echoes against the side of the house as he did so, and making the pictures dance again on the canvas and paper walls. "this will never do," cried we all, desperately: "he sure must be taken to the stable or he'll come back again." that was exactly what jack meant and wanted: so to the stable he went, under poor shivering mr. u----'s guidance, and the old rogue spent a dry, warm night under its roof. it was the more absurd jack pretending to be afraid of a wet night, when he had walked many and many a weary mile over the rough mountain passes towards the west-coast, with a heavy pack on his back and in all sorts of weather. a tradition existed in our neighbourhood that jack had once been met crossing the amuri downs with a small barrel-organ, an american cooking stove, and a sow with a litter of young ones, all packed on his back, "and stepping out bravely under them all," as my informant added. but i cannot vouch for the truth of the items of this load. jack's fame as a stock-horse, as well as a pack-horse, stood high in the malvern hills, but his conduct in the shafts was eccentric, to say the least of it. he could not bear to be guided by his driver, and was always squinting over his blinkers in the most ridiculous manner. if he perceived a mob of cattle or horses on a distant flat, he would set off to have a look at them and determine whether they were strangers or friends, dragging the gig after him "over bank, bush, and scaur." once when we were in great despair for a cart-horse, jack was elected to the post, but long before we had come to the journey's end we regretted our choice. it was during the first summer of my life in the malvern hills, and whilst the nor'-westers were still steadily setting their breezy faces against such a new fangled idea as a lawn. i had wearied of sowing grass seed at, a guinea a bag, long before those extremely rude zephyrs got tired of blowing it all out of the ground. there was my beautiful set of croquet, fresh from jacques, lying idle in its box in the verandah, and there was my charming friend, alice s----, longing for a game of croquet. when pretty young ladies wish for anything very much, and the house is full of gentlemen, it goes hard, but that they get the desire of their innocent hearts. so it was in this case. one fine afternoon alice wandered into the verandah and peeped for the hundredth time into the box. "what beautiful things," she sighed, "and how hard it is we can't have a game." "i know a patch of self-sown grass," sang one of the party, "whereon we might play a game." "where: oh, where?" we asked, in eager chorus. "about two miles from this, near a deserted shepherd's hut; it is as thick and soft as green velvet, and the sheep keep it quite short." "is the ground level?" we inquired. "as flat as this table," was the satisfactory answer. of course we wanted to start immediately, but how were we to get the croquet things there, to say nothing of the delightful excuse for tea out of doors which immediately presented itself to my ever-thirsty mind. a dray was suggested (carriages we had none; there being no roads for them if we had possessed such vehicles); but alas, and alas! the proper dray and driver and horse were all away, on an expedition up a distant gulley getting out some brush-wood for fires. "there's jack," some one said, doubtfully. he had never even drawn a dray in his life, so far as we knew, but at the same time we felt sure that when once jack understood what was required of him, he would do his best to help us to get to our croquet ground. so we flew off to our different duties. alice to see that the balls, hoops, and mallets were all right in numbers and colours, &c.; i to pack a large open basket with the materials for my favourite form of dissipation--an out-door tea; and the gentlemen to catch jack and harness him into the cart. peals of laughter announced the setting forth of the expedition; and no wonder! inside the dray, which was a very light and crazy old affair, was seated alice on an empty flour-sack; by her side i crouched on an old sugar bag, one of my arms keeping tight hold of my beloved tea-basket with its jingling contents, whilst the other was desperately clutching at the side of the dray. on a board across the front three gentlemen were perched, each wanting to drive, exactly like so many small children in a goat carriage, and like them, one holding the reins, the other the whip, and the third giving good advice. in the shafts stood poor shaggy old jack, looking over his blinkers as much as to say, "what do you want me to do now?" our good humoured and stalwart cadet mr. u----, walked backwards, holding out a carrot and calling jack to come and eat it. in this extraordinary fashion we proceeded down the flat for two or three hundred yards, one carrot succeeding the other in jack's jaws rapidly. mr. u---- was just beginning to say "look here: don't you think we ought to take turns at this?" when jack caught sight of a creek right before him. he only knew of one way of crossing such obstacles, and that was to jump them. no one calculated on the sudden rush and high bound into the air with which he triumphantly cleared the water; knocking mr. u---- over, and scattering his three drivers like summer leaves on the track. as for alice and me, the inside passengers, we found the sensation of jumping a creek in a dray most unpleasant. all the croquet balls leapt wildly up into the air to fall like a wooden hailstorm around us. the mallets and hoops bruised us from our head to our feet; and the contents of my basket were utterly ruined. not only had my tea-cups and saucers come together in one grand smash, but the kettle broke the bottle of cream, which in its turn absorbed all the sugar. jack looked coolly round at us with an air of mild satisfaction, as if he thought he had done something very clever, whilst our shrieks were rending the air. what a merry, light-hearted time of one's life was that! we all had to work hard, and our amusements were so simple and arcadian that i often wonder if they really did amuse us so much as we thought they did at the moment. let all new zealanders who doubt this, look into those perhaps closed chapters of their lives, and as memory turns over the leaves one by one, and pictures like the sketches i try to reproduce in pen and ink, grow into distinctness out of the dim past, it will indeed "surprise me very much," if they do not say, as i do,--my pleasant task ended,--"ah, those were happy days indeed!" transcriber note text emphasis is denoted as _italics_ and =bold=. whole and fractional parts of numbers as - / . u. s. department of agriculture farmers' bulletin no. simple plumbing repairs in the home plumbing often gets out of order, and upon prompt attention to the little repair jobs depends its smooth, satisfactory operation. this bulletin describes simple ways of doing little things, with the aid of a few simple tools, to keep home plumbing in good working order. washington, d. c. issued september revised october simple plumbing repairs in the home by george m. warren, _associate hydraulic engineer, division of structures, bureau of agricultural engineering_ contents page faucets stop and waste cocks ball cocks flush valves for low tanks clogged pipes thawing pipes removing scale from water hacks and coils leaks in pipes and tanks cracked laundry tubs hose menders or splicers how best to make small plumbing repairs is a problem that comes to most householders, as it is sometimes difficult to secure the services of a plumber. in such situations a little knowledge on the part of the householder often saves much delay, trouble, and expense. where local or state plumbing regulations are in force, and extensive repairs or alterations are contemplated, the householder should make sure that the work is duly authorized and is done by a properly qualified plumber. few persons realize the potential danger lurking in leaky waste pipes, drains, and sewers, or in piping between systems, whereby sewage or an impure water supply may even in the slightest degree gain access to a potable water supply. in making repairs it is often necessary to tighten or to loosen a screw or nut, and the householder is sometimes uncertain in which direction it should be turned. to screw or tighten an ordinary right-hand screw, nut, or bolt, first think of the head of the part to be turned as being the face of a clock and the screw driver or wrench as being the shaft which turns the clock hands, and then rotate the tool from left to right, in the same direction that the clock hands move. conversely, to unscrew or loosen, rotate the tool from right to left, in the direction opposite to clockwise. small brass screws and stems are easily twisted off and rendered useless, especially if a large tool is used to turn them. undue strain should be avoided, as it may result in the part or parts being broken at an unfortunate time. faucets seat washers badly worn washers make faucets noisy, hard to operate, and wasteful of water. moderate force on the handle of a faucet in good repair should stop all flow and drip. figure shows an ordinary half-inch =t=-handle compression faucet which closes against the pressure of the water. to replace the seat washer, shut off the water to the faucet. unscrew the cap nut with a monkey wrench. (placing cloth or thick paper between the jaws of the wrench saves marring the cap nut.) take hold of the faucet handle and unscrew the stem from the body of the faucet. with a screw driver remove the washer screw at the bottom of the stem. this screw is often hard to start. applying one or two drops of kerosene and lightly tapping the head of the screw may help to loosen it in the stem. use strong, even force on the screw driver, the blade of which should have a good square edge to fit the slot. the head of the screw often splits before the shank of the screw turns in the stem, because it is already corroded and weakened. if it splits, deepen the slot in the head with a hacksaw, cutting a little into the shank of the screw. no harm is done if the saw cuts slightly into the stem of the faucet. the washer screw may now be turned with a small screw driver. replace the old washer with a new one, replace the washer screw, screw the stem into the faucet, and screw down the cap nut. rubber and fiber composition washers for hot- or cold-water faucets cost to cents a dozen. a "floating" washer, costing cents, is very serviceable. a few washers of the needed sizes should be kept in the home. if none are at hand, a temporary washer may be cut from a piece of leather, rubber, or sheet packing. leather is preferable on cold-water faucets and rubber on hot-water faucets. [illustration: figure .--compression faucet.] [illustration: figure .--compression faucet for a washstand.] figure shows an ordinary / -inch, -ball-handle compression faucet for a washstand. to replace the seat washer, shut off the water to the faucet and open the faucet one or two turns of the handle. with a monkey wrench on the hexagonal part of the stuffing box unscrew the stuffing box from the body of the faucet. lift out the stem, replace the old washer with a new one, as previously described, and screw the stuffing box into the body. a worn washer with constant leakage over the seat of a compression faucet, together with grit lodging there, often causes the seat to become cut, nicked, and grooved. the trouble occurs more often in hot-water than in cold-water faucets. such seats can easily be reground or squared with a simple seat dressing tool, two types of which are shown in figure , _a_ and _b_. a seat dresser with four cutters for different-sized faucets costs about $ , and its use saves buying new faucets. to dress the seat of a faucet, unscrew the stem from the body to the faucet, as above described. screw the adjustable, threaded cone of the tool (see fig. , _a_) down into the body of the faucet, as shown in figure , _c_, thus centering it over the seat. with the hand, as shown in figure , _d_, gently rotate the wheel handle at the top of the tool several times, and the cutter on the bottom of the stem squares the seat. turn the faucet bottom side up and shake out the cuttings. reassemble the faucet and turn on the water to wash out any remaining cuttings. [illustration: figure .--faucet seat dressers: _a_, dresser with inside adjustable cone; _b_, dresser with outside adjustable cone; _c_, dresser a screwed into a compression faucet; _d_, rotating the wheel handle and cutter.] seat washers are subject to damage from metal filings left in newly installed water pipes. a good plumber, before screwing up a piece of pipe, always stands the pipe on end and raps it with a hammer to clear the bore. figure , _a_, shows an ordinary half-inch lever-handle fuller faucet which closes with the pressure. as shown in figure , _b_, the bottom of the spindle is eccentric, so that slight turning of the handle moves the rubber ball to and from the beveled seat. to replace the ball shut off the water to the faucet. unscrew the body from the tailpiece with the hands or with a monkey wrench on the hexagonal part of the body of the faucet. it may be necessary to apply a wrench to the hexagonal nut on the tailpiece and press the wrench downward to prevent unscrewing the tailpiece. unscrew the stem nut, which holds the brass cap and rubber ball on the stem. put on a new ball and replace cap and nut. red rubber balls are considered to be better than black balls for hot-water faucets. avoid using too large a ball, as swelling of the rubber may hinder the flow. screw the faucet into the tailpiece. just before the joint closes or "makes up", wrap a little string packing or candle wicking around the thread on the faucet to make the joint water-tight. [illustration: figure .--fuller faucet: _a_, body unscrewed from tailpiece; _b_, spindle and stem removed from body.] top washers and packings a top washer or packing; snugly fitting the stem is necessary to prevent leakage upward through the cap nut when a faucet is opened. if the space is too tightly packed, the stem binds, nudging it hard to operate the faucet; if too loosely packed, water spurts from the top of the cap nut. figure , _a_, shows a soft rubber-and-fabric top washer suitable for the compression faucet shown in figure . this washer is one-eighth of an inch thick and rests on the top of the body of the faucet, making a water-tight joint when the cap nut is screwed down. just below the soft washer and inside the top of the body a thin brass washer is placed to take the wear when the faucet is fully opened. these washers are separated in the illustration but are together when placed in a faucet. [illustration: figure .--top washers and packings: _a_, top washers commonly used in ordinary compression faucets (fig. ); _b_, top washers which fill the space beneath the cap nut (fig. ) _c_, candle wick packing and brass washer for washstand faucet (fig. ); _d_, spindle packing for fuller faucet (fig. ).] new faucets of the kind shown in figure usually have the top washers shown in figure , _b_. the rubber washer fills the space beneath the cap nut, and the thin fiber and brass washers are for the purposes described above. if no top washer is available, the space may be packed with candle wicking or soft twine, to which a little mutton or beef tallow should be applied to lubricate the stem, to preserve the packing, and to make it more impervious to water. when placing the top washer or washers on a compression faucet of the kind shown in figure , it is unnecessary to shut off the water provided the faucet is closed. with the right hand keep the faucet closed and with a monkey wrench in the left hand unscrew the cap nut. unscrew the handle screw and remove handle and cap nut. put on new washers as shown in figure , _a_, or , _b_, and reassemble the parts. figure , _c_, shows the stem packing for the washstand faucet shown in figure . the packing space is very small and is filled with candle wicking lubricated with tallow. there is a thin brass friction washer in the bottom of the stuffing box, and a hexagonal packing nut screws into the top of the box. to renew the candle wicking, keep the faucet closed. unscrew the packing nut with a monkey wrench, wrap a little wicking around the stem, and screw the packing nut down against the wicking and into the stuffing box. spindle packing for a fuller faucet (see fig. ) is shown in figure , _d_, and consists of three collars or rings obtainable from plumbing dealers for a few cents. a lead ring or packing about one-eighth of an inch long goes first (lowest) on the spindle; then a rubber-and-fabric composition packing about one-fourth of an inch long; then a brass packing about one-fourth of an inch long. screwing down the cap nut compresses the composition packing, and the metal packings take up friction and wear. to put in new packings, shut off the water from the faucet and remove the handle and cap nut, as described in connection with compression faucets. [illustration: figure .--stop and waste cock; _a_, parts assembled; _b_, parts unassembled.] stop and waste cocks figure , _a_, shows an adjustable socket-lever handle, ground key, flat way, stop and waste cock to shut off water to part or all of a piping system and to drain the higher situated pipes from which the flow is cut off. a stop and waste should always be placed on the house supply pipe just inside the house or the cellar wall. they are very useful on branch pipes from a cellar or kitchen to upstairs or back rooms subject to freezing temperatures or other temporary discontinuance of the supply. figure , _b_, shows the disassembled parts, all of which except the handle are brass. the key or plug is ground to a water-tight fit in the body of the cock, and water is turned on or off by giving the handle a quarter turn. turning the handle crosswise of the pipe shuts off the supply, and the dead water drains back through the small round hole in the side of the plug and out the waste tube. many stop and waste cocks have broken or bent handles or are otherwise rendered useless, because people do not understand them. as received from dealers, the nut on the bottom of the plug is generally screwed up tight, making it difficult or impossible to turn the handle and plug. long periods of disuse frequently cause the plug to stick fast in the body. the plug is easily loosened by slightly unscrewing the bottom nut and striking the lower end of the plug a few light blows with a hammer. slight leakage caused by wear of the plug or dirt around it may be prevented by cleaning the plug and tightening the bottom nut. a plug badly worn from long or continual use can be reground, but it is usually better and cheaper to get a new plug or a complete new cock. ball cocks figure , _a_, shows an ordinary compound-lever ball cock to control the water supply in a flush tank. the float ball and the seat washer on the bottom of the plunger are the only parts likely to need repairs. the buoyancy of the float is the force which lowers the plunger, shutting off the water as the tank fills. a leaky, water-logged float holds the plunger up, permitting constant flow and waste of water. a small leak in a copper float can be soldered; but if in bad condition, the float should be replaced by a new one. a good copper, bakelite, or hard-rubber float by inches costs to cents. [illustration: figure .--ball cock; _a_, parts assembled; _b_, plunger, washer, and cap.] figure , _b_, shows the plunger and washer-holder cap which screws on the bottom of the plunger. the washer should be of soft rubber or leather, because the force which holds it to its seat is not heavy. the cap is thin brass. to replace the washer, shut off the water and drain the tank. unscrew the two thumbscrews which pivot the float-rod lever and plunger lever. push the two levers to the left, drawing the plunger lever through the head of the plunger. lift out the plunger, unscrew the cap on the bottom of the plunger, insert a soft, new washer, and reassemble the parts. the cap may be so corroded and weakened that it breaks during removal from the plunger. a new cap is then necessary, and it is well to have one or two on hand. when putting a washer on a ball cock, examine the seat to see that it is free of nicks and grit. the seat may need regrinding, as explained under compression faucets. flush valves for low tanks figure shows a common type of flush valve for a low tank. probably no other plumbing in the home needs attention so often. it is under water and subject to fouling and neglect. the hollow rubber ball gets out of shape and fails to drop squarely into the hollowed seat. the handle and lever fail to work smoothly or the lift wires get out of plumb, causing the ball to remain up when it should drop to its seat. to remove these difficulties, stop inflow to the tank by holding up the float of the ball cock or supporting it with a stick. drain the tank by raising the rubber ball. if the ball is worn, out of shape, or has lost its elasticity, unscrew the lower lift wire from the ball and replace it with a new one. a - / -inch rubber ball costs about cents, and a new one should always be kept in the house. the lift wires should be straight and plumb. the lower lift wire is readily centered over the center of the valve by means of the adjustable guide holder. by loosening the thumbscrew, the holder is raised, lowered, or rotated about the overflow tube! by loosening the lock nut and turning the guide screw, the horizontal position of the guide is fixed exactly over the center of the valve, these adjustments are very important. the upper lift wire should loop into the lever armhole nearest to a vertical from the center of the valve. a tank should empty within seconds. owing to lengthening of the rubber ball and insufficient rise from its seat, the time may be longer than seconds and the flush correspondingly weak. this trouble may be overcome by shortening the loop in the upper lift wire. a drop or two of lubricating oil on the lever mechanism makes it work more smoothly. [illustration: figure .--flush valve for low tank.] clogged pipes rust and dirt in water pipes are more or less successfully removed as follows: tie a piece of small, stout cord to each end of a -foot length of small chain. each piece of cord should be a little longer than the length of pipe to be cleaned. attach the free end of one of the cords to a stiff steel wire and push the wire and cord through the pipe. by means of the cords pull the chain back and forth through the pipe, and then thoroughly flush the pipe with clean water under strong pressure. long lines may be opened at intervals and cleaned section by section. other methods are: using a swab or wire brush attached to a small steel or brass rod; flushing with a powerful hand pump; or filling the pipe with diluted muriatic acid and allowing it to stand in the pipe long enough for the acid to act. if the treatment is unsuccessful it should be repeated. a mixture of part of acid and parts of water allowed to stand overnight in , feet of badly rusted -inch pipe has given good results. after the acid treatment the pipe should be flushed long and thoroughly with clean water to remove as fully as possible all dirt, rust, and traces of acid. when new piping is put in, abrupt turns are sometimes made with =t= branches instead of elbows. the unused leg of the branch can be closed with a screw plug, thus permitting easy access to the interior of the pipe. =caution:= when a stop and waste (or valve) on a water service is closed to permit cleaning or repairs, care should be taken to prevent the formation of a vacuum in the high parts of the water piping and the connections to plumbing fixtures; otherwise siphon action may draw pollution from water closets having water-controlled or seat-operated flush valves and from bathtubs, washbasins, laundry tubs, or other fixtures in which the spout (discharge end of the water line) is lower than the fixture rim, or worse, below the fixture overflow. vacuum and siphon action may be destroyed by opening the highest connected faucet or an air cock in the top of the water line or by equipping the system with suitable automatic vacuum breakers. [illustration: figure .--cleaning out a sink trap.] all waste pipes and traps are subject to fouling. dirt collects in the bottom and grease adheres to the sides. the usual way of clearing ordinary fixtures traps is to unscrew the clean-out ping, as shown in figure , and wash out the obstructing matter or pull it out with a wire bent to form a hook. small obstructions are often forced down or drawn up by the use of a simple rubber force cup (sometimes called "the plumber's friend") costing to cents. this device is shown in figure . the cup is placed over the fixture outlet and the fixture is partially filled with water. the wood handle of the cup is then worked rapidly down and up, causing alternate expulsion of the water from beneath the cup and suction upward through the waste pipe and trap. if a trap and the waste pipe from it are clogged with grease, hair, or lint, it is best to open or disconnect the trap and dig out the greasy matter with a stick. the use of chemical solvents in waste pipes is explained in farmers' bulletin , "farm plumbing." [illustration: figure .--rubber force cup.] a variety of inexpensive flexible coil wire augers and sewer rods are available for removing obstructions--mainly newspapers, rags, toilet articles, grease, garbage, or other solids--from traps, waste pipes, sewers, and drains. the growth of roots in sewers and drains causes much trouble which better workmanship in making the joints would have avoided. augers and rods come in various sizes and lengths. stock lengths for clean-out augers for closet bowls are , , and feet and cost from $ upward. figure shows two kinds of flexible augers for general purposes. the upper is feet long and has a small steel cable from the handle to the wire hooks. the hooks can be drawn into the coil, thus facilitating entry into a trap. the lower auger is feet long, has a crank handle and corkscrew point generally preferred for closet-bowl work. placing a few sheets of toilet paper in the bowl and then flushing usually indicates whether the obstruction has been dislodged. flexible coil steel waste-pipe cleaners commonly come in diameters of / , / , / , / , and / inch and in lengths of , , , , , and feet. the / -inch size in -foot length without handle or corkscrew point costs about $ . the / -inch size in -foot length with automatic grip handle costs slightly more. the small sizes are very useful in sink, lavatory, and bathtub traps and waste pipes. flat steel sewer rods, equipped with either an oval or a revolving spear point and an automatic grip handle, come in stock lengths of , , , and feet, in widths of / to - / inches, and in thicknesses of / and / inch. a rod / by / inch and feet long costs $ to $ ; a rod / -inch thick, costing $ to $ , is desirable for ordinary sewer-cleaning purposes. round sewer rods of / -inch hickory or ash in - or -foot lengths with hook couplings and simple sewer brushes and root cutters are described in farmers' bulletin , sewage and sewerage of farm homes. [illustration: figure .--coil spring augers.] thawing pipes the middle of a frozen pipe should never be thawed first, because expansion of the water confined by ice on both sides may burst the pipe. when thawing a water pipe, work toward the supply, opening a faucet to show when the flow starts. when thawing a waste or sewer pipe, work upward from the lower end to permit the water to drain away. applying boiling water or hot cloths to a frozen pipe is simple and effective. where there is no danger of fire a torch or burning news-paper run back and forth along the frozen pipe gives quick results. underground or otherwise inaccessible pipes may be thawed as follows: open the frozen water pipe on the house end. insert one end of a small pipe or tube. with the aid of a funnel at the other end of the small pipe pour boiling water into it and push it forward as the ice melts. a piece of rubber tubing may be used to connect the funnel to the thaw pipe. hold the funnel higher than the frozen pipe, so that the hot water has head and forces the cooled water back to the opening, where it may be caught in a pail. the head may be increased and the funnel may be more conveniently used if an elbow and a piece of vertical pipe are added to the outer end of the thaw pipe, as shown in figure . add more thaw pipe at the outer end until a passage is made through the ice. withdraw the thaw pipe quickly after the flow starts. do not stop the flow until the thaw pipe is fully removed and the frozen pipe is cleared of ice. a small force pump is often used instead of a funnel and is much to be preferred for opening a long piece of pipe. if available, a jet of steam may be used instead of hot water; being hotter, it is more rapid. [illustration: figure .--thawing a frozen pipe.] frozen traps and waste pipes are sometimes thawed by pouring in caustic soda or lye, obtainable at grocery stores for about cents per pound. chemicals of this character should be labeled "poison" and should be kept where children cannot get them. to prevent freezing, the water in the traps of a vacant house should be removed during cold weather, and the traps should be filled with kerosene, crude glycerin, or a very strong brine made of common salt and water, or other substance mentioned in farmers' bulletin , farm plumbing. removing scale from water backs and coils hard water causes a limy deposit or scale on the inside of water backs and heating coils. if allowed to accumulate the scale retards the circulation and heating of the water and, by closure of the bore, may prove dangerous. moreover, continued neglect makes it increasingly difficult to remove the scale. the water back or coil should be removed from the fire box. at the union or other joints nearest the fire box disconnect all pipes and unscrew them from the water back. if there is a clamp which holds the fire-brick lining against the oven, loosen it and remove side and end linings. lift out the water back and take it out on the ground. soft scale or sludge may be removed by pounding the water back with a mallet or hammer and then flushing with a strong jet of water. a long gouge or chisel is used on those surfaces that can be reached. sometimes the water back is heated in a blacksmith's forge and then pounded, but unless carefully done this treatment may break it. some householders keep a spare water back for use while the other is being cleaned. waters of varying chemical composition cause scale differing in composition and hardness. ordinary limestone (calcium carbonate) scale, if not of excessive thickness, may readily be removed with muriatic acid. gypsum (calcium sulphate) scale is hard and resistant and with other constituents in their more compact forms is little affected by muriatic acid. the water back should be laid on the ground and filled with a strong solution of the acid in water. the strength of the solution should vary with the amount of deposit, the ordinary mixture being part of acid and to parts of water. if the deposit is very thick, the acid needs little dilution. commercial muriatic acid in bottles containing pounds (about - / quarts) costs to cents a pound. the bottle should be labeled "muriatic acid--poison"; and, like the chemicals previously mentioned, it should be kept where children cannot get it. heating the water back hastens the action of the acid. at the end of an hour or two, or sooner if the deposit is dissolved, pour the solution from the water back and flush it thoroughly with hot water to remove the acid. if all the deposit has not been removed, repeat the operation, making sure that the acid is completely washed out before replacing the water back. in replacing the water back it is important to have it level, using a spirit level for this purpose. similar methods may be used with copper coils. place the coil (or heater) on two sticks over a large bowl. with the aid of a lead funnel pour the acid solution down through the coil. dip from the bowl and continue to circulate the solution through the coil until the deposit is dissolved. the coil should then be thoroughly washed out with hot water. the hot-water flow pipe close to a water back or coil frequently becomes thickly covered with scale. if the pipe is brass, it may be disconnected and treated with acid and then washed out with hot water. if the pipe is galvanized iron and in bad condition, it will probably be more satisfactory to replace it with new pipe. leaks in pipes and tanks a small leak in a water pipe can be stopped in an emergency as follows: place a flat rubber or leather gasket over the leak and hammer a piece of sheet metal to fit over the gasket; secure both to the pipe with a clamp obtainable at hardware or -and- -cent stores. a small leak under low pressure is sometimes stopped by shutting off the water and then embedding the pipe in richly mixed portland-cement mortar or concrete. broken sewer pipe can be repaired in like manner, and a wrapping of wire netting embedded in the mortar or concrete increases its strength. however, it is better to relay the sewer and make all joints water-tight and root-proof as described in farmers bulletin , sewage and sewerage of farm homes. a small hole in cast-iron pipe may be tapped for a screw plug. where a leaky screw joint cannot be tightened with a pipe wrench, the leak is sometimes stopped with a blunt, chisel or calking tool and hammer. sometimes a crack or hole is cleaned out and then plugged and calked with lead, or a commercial iron cement mixed to the consistency of stiff putty. sometimes a pipe band, a clamp with two bolts (similar to but stronger than the one shown in fig. ), or a split sleeve is employed to hold a thin coating of iron cement or a gasket over a leak. if the leak is at a screw joint, the band is usually coated inside with one-eighth of an inch of iron cement and then slipped over the pipe. keeping the bolt farthest from the coupling or fitting a little tighter than the other, both bolts, are tightened. during the tightening, the band should be driven with a hammer snugly against the coupling or fitting. in addition to these methods and devices, there are several kinds of good, inexpensive, ready-made pipe and joint repairers obtainable of manufacturers and dealers. a corroded and leaky spot in a steel tank or range boiler can be closed with an inexpensive repair bolt or plug obtainable from dealers. figure shows a home-made repairer consisting of a three-sixteenths by -inch toggle bolt costing cents and a flat rubber gasket, brass washer, and nut. the link of the bolt, after being passed through the hole, takes an upright position, and screwing up the nut forces the gasket tightly against the outside of the boiler. [illustration: figure .--home-made repairer; _a_, passing the link of the toggle bolt through the hole (enlarged) in the tank; _b_, side view of edge of tank with bolt, washers, and nut after being tightened; _c_, outside view of completed job.] a small hole must be reamed or enlarged with a round file to a diameter of about five-eighths inch. the metal beneath the gasket should be firm and clean. a little candlewick packing may be wrapped around the bolt to prevent leakage along the bolt. sometimes a hole is closed by driving in a tapered steel pin to turn the metal inward, forming a surface which can be tapped for an ordinary screw plug. a hole in the wall of a tank or pipe having considerable thickness can be easily and quickly closed by screwing in a tapered steel tap plug which cuts and threads its way through the wall. these plugs in different sizes are obtainable of dealers and a monkey wrench is the only tool required to insert them; it is unnecessary to shut off or drain the water from the tank or pipe. a small leak at a seam or rivet can often be closed by merely rubbing a cold chisel along the beveled edge of the joint. do not attempt to calk a seam unless the plates have considerable thickness and the rivets are closely spaced and are close to the calking edge, and then use extreme caution. run a regular calking tool or blunt chisel along the beveled edge, tapping the tool very lightly with a light hammer to force the edge of the upper plate against and into the lower plate. cracked laundry tubs cracks in slate, soapstone, or cement laundry tubs are made water-tight with a mixture of litharge and glycerin or a specially prepared commercial cement. the litharge and glycerin are mixed and stirred to form a smooth heavy paste free from lumps. the crack should be cleaned out to remove all grease and dirt and the paste should be worked into the crack with a case knife. a paste of portland cement and water, or of the white of an egg and fresh lump lime, has been used successfully for this purpose. [illustration: figure .--hose menders: above, hose mender and hose coupling; below, two pieces of hose joined with a mender. the left-hand piece is fastened with wire twisted with a pair of pliers, and the right-hand piece is clamped.] hose menders or splicers a break in garden hose can be quickly repaired or two pieces of hose can be joined with a - or -cent iron or brass hose mender or splicer shown in figure (upper left). cut off the defective piece of hose, insert the mender in the good ends of the hose, and wire or clamp the hose as shown in figure (below). menders come to slip inside of / -, / -, or -inch hose. the regular brass hose coupling shown in figure (upper right), which costs to cents, can be used for this purpose. u. s. government printing office: for sale by the superintendent of documents, u. s. government printing office washington d. c. -- price cents * * * * * transcriber note illustrations were repositioned so as to not split paragraphs. http://www.archive.org/details/notesonagricultu bevarich notes on agriculture in cyprus and its products by w. bevan director of agriculture, cyprus all rights reserved contents introduction i. general geographical features, ; climate and rainfall, ; administration, ; weights, measures and currency, ii. agricultural conditions general, ; land tenure and labour, ; tithes and taxation, ; credit and agricultural societies, ; irrigation, ; agricultural implements, ; the agricultural department, ; fungoid diseases and insect pests, iii. live stock cattle, ; sheep, ; goats, ; pigs, ; camels, ; horses, ; donkeys, ; jennets and mules, ; poultry, ; preserved meats, etc., iv. dairy produce milk, ; cheese, ; butter, ; xynogala or yaourti, ; trachanas, ; kaimaki or tsippa, v. crops and other produce of the land cereals wheat, ; barley, ; oats, ; rye, ; maize (indian corn), ; dari or millet (sorghum vulgare), fruits vines and wines, ; citrus fruits, ; fig (_ficus carica_), ; cherries, ; banana, ; azarol hawthorn, ; melons, ; date palm, nuts hazelnuts and cobnuts or filberts, ; walnuts, ; almonds, ; spanish chestnut, ; pistacia spp., vegetables beans and peas, ; potatoes, ; kolakas (_colocasia antiquorum_), ; onions, fodders and feeding stuffs carob tree, ; lucerne (_medicago sativa_), ; vetch (_vicia ervilia_), ; chickling vetch (_lathyrus sativus_), ; vetch (_vicia sativa_), ; tares (_vicia tenuifolia var. stenophylla_), ; milk vetch (_astragalus_), ; moha, sulla (_hedysarum_), ; teosinte (_reana luxurians_), ; sudan-grass, ; teff-grass (_eragrostis abyssinica_), ; mangold wurzel, ; prickly pear (_opuntia_), spices coriander seed, ; aniseed, ; white cumin seed, ; black cumin seed, essential oils and perfumes origanum oil, ; marjoram oil, ; laurel oil, ; otto of roses, ; _acacia farnesiana_, oils and oil seeds olives, ; sesame seed, ; ground nut, peanut or monkey nut (_arachis hypogæa_), ,; castor-oil seed, fibres cotton, ; flax and linseed, ; wool, ; hemp, ; silk, ; mulberry, ; agaves and aloes, ; broom corn, tobacco tanning materials and dye-stuffs sumach, ; valonea, ; acacia barks, ; madder, drugs and other products liquorice root, ; pyrethrum, ; squill, ; colocynth, ; asphodel, vi. minor agricultural industries bee-keeping, ; basket-making, ; fruit and vegetable preserving, list of illustrations page sketch map of cyprus, showing distribution of crops and forests plate i. fig. . ploughing on a mountain-side with native plough i. fig. . newly-prepared beds in experimental gardens ii. agricultural implements iii. fig. . native bull iii. " . native ram iv. " . cyprus pony iv. " . cyprus donkeys v. " . carting corn v. " . threshing corn with native threshing board vi. pruned olive-trees at metochi of kykos vii. fig. . cypriot earthenware beehives vii. " . shipping fruit at larnaca notes on agriculture in cyprus and its products[ ] by w. bevan _director of agriculture, cyprus_ the intention of these notes is to make available to those interested in the agriculture of cyprus some of the information scattered in various reports, leaflets and correspondence not readily accessible to the general public. it has long been a matter of regret to the writer that the valuable stores of information collected with so much care and ability by the late mr. panayiotis gennadius, formerly director of agriculture in cyprus, through having been published in greek only, have remained beyond the reach of many who might otherwise have derived benefit from a study of his works. his writings on the general agriculture of the "near east" are voluminous and comprehensive, and show an intimate knowledge of the subject as well as of the practices and customs of agriculturists in these regions. the results of his labours are mainly embodied in his _helleniki georgia_ and his _phytologikon lexicon_, both of which are works of recognised authority. during his eight years ( - ) spent in cyprus mr. gennadius devoted himself specially to a study of the agricultural conditions and needs of the island, and the notes and reports made by him have been, to a large extent, taken as the basis of the present notes. during the sixteen years since he left the island many changes have taken place, and the more receptive and enlightened attitude of the rising generation of farmers has helped to bring about various improvements, and a greater readiness has been shown to adopt modern methods. in compiling the present notes i have drawn freely from the articles which have appeared for many years in the _cyprus agricultural journal_ (formerly _cyprus journal_), the official publication of the agricultural department, and which i have edited; i have also taken advantage of the very admirable and reliable information contained in the _handbook of cyprus_, edited by messrs. lukach and jardine. [illustration: sketch map of cyprus showing distribution of crops & forests] i am greatly indebted to the willing assistance of mr. procopios symeonides, inspector of agriculture, whose thorough acquaintance with local conditions and usages has enabled him to contribute much useful and informative material. i have also to offer my acknowledgments to messrs. m. g. dervishian, c. pelaghias, z. solomides, g. frangos, a. klokaris, a. panaretos and others who have kindly supplied me with data of various kinds. it will scarcely be necessary to add that little more than a summary of the agricultural practice and resources of the island has here been attempted, and in no sense does it pretend to be anything more. the aim has been to give the reader a general idea of what cypriot agriculture is and, to some extent, what it is capable of doing. footnotes: [footnote : reprinted from the bulletin of the imperial institute, .] i. general _geographical features_ the island of cyprus is situated in the innermost basin of the mediterranean sea; about miles distant from the asia minor coast on the north, and about miles from syria on the east, and miles from port said to the south. it is the third largest island in the mediterranean, ranking next to sicily and sardinia. the larger part of the island is in the form of an irregular parallelogram, miles long and from to miles broad; while on the north the eastern extremity runs out beyond this into a peninsula miles long by to miles broad. the total area is , sq. miles. the main topographical features are the northern and southern mountain ranges running east and west and enclosing the great plain of the messaoria. the mountains of the northern range are of an altitude ranging from , ft. to over , ft., the highest point being buffavento, , ft.; those of the southern range are more lofty and culminate in mt. olympus, , ft. above sea-level. the rivers are nearly all mountain torrents, and are dry from about july to november or december. the area of cultivated land is approximately , , acres, and that of the uncultivated land , , acres, of which about , are forest land and , are susceptible of cultivation. the messaoria plain is the great corn-growing area. _climate and rainfall_ there are considerable extremes of temperature in the plains. in summer it is very hot and dry with temperature ranging during june to september from ° to ° fahr., while in winter slight frosts not infrequently occur. the climate is more equable, but also more humid, along the coasts. in the plains there is, during the greater part of the year, a marked variation between the day and night temperatures. official records show that for a period of thirty-two years up to the average rainfall for hill and plain for the whole island approximated to inches. up to records were kept only in the six district towns, but since then there have been some fifty recording stations. the mean rainfall during the winter months for the twelve years ended was . inches. that for the whole year during the latter period was . inches. the incidence of rainfall, apart from its volume, is of importance. it is on the rainfall of the six winter months, october to march, that the prosperity of the island depends, and any shortage during this period cannot be balanced by heavier summer rains, which are more liable to cause harm than good, by damaging the corn lying on the threshing-floors and by causing sudden floods. much importance attaches to the rains in march, without which the grain crop, however ample the earlier rains may have been, will not be satisfactory, as described in a maxim which i have attempted to render in english. if twice in march it chance to rain, in april once, a shower in may, in weight in gold of man and wain, the farmer's crops are sure to pay. if roads are dry at christmas time, but epiphany finds both mud and slime, and at carnival they still hold many a pool, the farmer finds his barns quite full. _administration_ the island is administered by a high commissioner. there is an executive council and a legislative council consisting of six official members and twelve elected members, of whom three are elected by the moslem and nine by the non-moslem inhabitants. the island is divided into six districts, in each of which the executive government is represented by a commissioner. _weights, measures and currency_ nearly everything except corn, wine, oil, carobs, cotton and wool is sold by the oke. an oke, dry measure, equals drams, or - / lb. the liquid oke is reckoned as equivalent to a quart. grain is measured by the kilé, regarded as equal to a bushel. wool, cotton and oil are sold by the litre of - / okes, but commonly reckoned as - / okes. carobs are sold by the aleppo cantar of okes. this cantar is further divided into litres of oke and drams each. wine is sold by the kartos = okes, the kouza = okes, and the gomari = okes. kilé of wheat weighs to okes. kilé of barley weighs to okes. kilé of oats weighs to okes. kilé of vetches weighs to okes. sack of straw weighs about okes. camel-load of straw weighs about okes, consisting of sacks, each weighing about okes. _measures of length_ metron or metre. yarda or yard. pic = ft. or two-thirds of a yard. inch = english measure. the land measure is the donum (called by the villagers "scala"), but it is very uncertain, and varies in different parts of the island. as recognised by law, donum, called "tappoo donum," equals pics = yards square = , square yards, or , sq. ft.; . of these donums go to the acre. there is also a farmer's, or "reshper" donum, which is commonly used by agriculturists and is equal to about - / government donums. for general purposes a legal donum is about one-third and a cypriot farmer's donum about one-half of an acre. "stremma" is also a synonym for the farmer's donum, or scala, although its actual measure is very much less. _currency_ £ = shillings or copper piastres. shilling = copper piastres. cp. (copper piastre) = paras. ii. agricultural conditions _general_ agriculture is the main industry of the island, which is favourably situated for the markets of egypt, syria and asia minor, although the former is practically the only buyer of its perishable produce. during recent years the cypriot agriculturist has come to realise more and more the value of the egyptian market and a considerable trade with that country has grown up. _land tenure and labour_ the small farmer mostly cultivates his own land, whereas the large landowner rarely does. the metayer, or metairie, system is fairly common, and has much to recommend it when honourably carried out by both parties, but it is open to very serious abuse. under this system the one party, or contractor, gives the seed and often lends the cattle. a valuation of the latter is made at the time of entering into the agreement, and a re-valuation is made on termination, any depreciation being made good by the other party, or metayer. the latter finds the necessary labour and feeds the animals and pays an agreed rate for their hire. the crops, after deduction of government tithe, are usually divided equally between both parties, but the conditions vary according to circumstances and the nature of the crops grown. if cultivated land be given to the partner, such land must be returned to the contractor in the same state of cultivation as received, or the contractor, at his option, may claim the return of the seed his partner received with it. there are also a considerable number of leaseholders paying a fixed rent. the monasteries are the largest landowners, and both cultivate their own land and let out portions to the monks or to private farmers. much land is also held by the church, and this is frequently let out on a yearly lease, with the result that it is badly farmed and speedily worked out. the country is rather sparsely populated by about , inhabitants, and although the cultivators are laborious when working for themselves and when free from the hands of the usurers, they are still very backward in their methods and appliances. a less conservative attitude has of late been observed, and a greater readiness has been manifested in seeking and following the advice of the agricultural department. there is a great amount of indebtedness among the peasantry and usurious practices abound. this undoubtedly checks progress, as few of the smaller farmers are free agents. the matter has lately been the subject of a special commission appointed by government. laws have this year ( ) been passed by the legislative council dealing with usury and indebtedness. _tithes and taxation_ the tithe, which forms the principal source of government revenue, is one-tenth of the produce of the land on wheat, barley, oats, vetches, rye and favetta, measured on the threshing-floors and delivered in kind at the government grain stores. certain allowances are made to the tithe-payers for transport. in the case of carobs, which are also subject to this tax, the tithe is taken in money from exporters at the custom house at the rate of cp. ( s.) per cantar from the districts of nicosia, larnaca and limassol, and cp. per cantar from the other three districts. there are certain export dues, in lieu of tithe, payable on the following commodities: aniseed cp., cotton cp., linseed cp., mavrokokko (black cummin) cp., and raisins cp. per okes; silk cocoons - / cp., wound silk cp., silk manufactured by other than hand looms cp. per oke. an annual tax is levied of - / cp. per head on every sheep and of cp. per head on every goat one year old and upwards, and of - / cp. per head on every pig over three months old. _credit and agricultural societies_ the spirit of co-operation has hitherto been singularly lacking, but there are signs that a change is in progress and that, with proper guidance, the cultivators will ere long come to realise the advantages of combined effort in the production and distribution of their crops. the establishment of village co-operative credit societies has long been advocated, but although a law was passed in for this purpose, there has so far been little practical outcome. co-operation in its full modern significance is not yet understood; but one or two little village co-operative banks have nevertheless been started and show encouraging results. there are also a few small village agricultural societies springing up, which, if properly conducted, may prove the pioneers of a general movement in this direction. the existence of such societies would greatly facilitate the work of the agricultural department, which would be able to influence and assist farmers through their societies, whereas now it is often not possible to reach them individually. _irrigation_ the most common method of raising water is by means of primitive water-wheels or "alakatia," often described as "persian wheels" and resembling the "sakia" of egypt. by these the water is carried in earthenware cups attached to the rim of a large vertical wooden wheel fixed in the mouth of a well and made to revolve by a mule or donkey by means of a horizontal wheel and beam, or by modern air-motor. myrtle branches are mostly employed for attaching the cups to the wheels, as these are pliable and resist the action of water. these "alakatia" were formerly made entirely of wood, but in the nineties, iron ones ("noria") were introduced from greece, and these have become fairly general, and are gradually supplanting the older types. they have the advantage of being more durable and lighter to work. good iron wheel wells are now locally made. water-wheels of this description cannot be used for raising water from a depth of more than ten fathoms below the surface of the ground. of late years a large number of air-motors of canadian pattern have been introduced and are found satisfactory. there is abundant evidence in the remains of old disused venetian wells and cisterns that in pre-turkish times, when the country was far more densely populated than at present, a larger quantity of underground water was utilised than now. abundant subterranean water for agricultural and gardening purposes is to be found in almost all the coast lands as well as in many parts of the interior. such waters are either brought to the surface along subterranean channels or by means of wells, and, for the most part, have their origin in the mountain ranges, specially in the southern range, which is the rainy region of the island. artesian well-boring experiments have been made in recent years in different parts of the island, but without substantial results. in the famagusta district large reservoirs were constructed several years ago for impounding the surplus water of the rivers of pedias and ialias, but these have only been very partially successful as the water is mostly lost before it reaches them. a satisfactory solution of the water problem is of supreme importance to the island. there are large fertile areas which every year remain fallow, but which, if capable of irrigation, would grow excellent cotton and other summer crops, thus providing a better system of rotation. vegetable growing and fruit culture could then also be very greatly extended. _agricultural implements_ _ploughs._--the old wooden plough of the east is still the common plough of the country (see plate i, fig. ). efforts were made from to years ago to introduce iron ploughs by selling them through the agricultural department at half the cost price and even less. high-water mark was reached in when of these ploughs were so sold. these were much approved of, and the further sale was then left in the hands of merchants. the demand at once fell off and since then only a few have been introduced. for a year or two a certain number of iron ploughs of russian make were imported and sold through the jewish settlement at margo. there is now a considerable demand which it may be possible to satisfy when normal conditions are resumed. there is some prejudice against english-made ploughs on the score of weight, as they are mostly heavier than those of french, russian, greek and american make. _harrow._--the native harrow, "saraclo," is a wooden beam about ft. long by to in. broad and in. thick, on which the labourer stands as it is drawn over the newly sown land. it is ineffective inasmuch as it does not break the clods, but merely presses them into the ground. iron-toothed harrows and spring-toothed harrows have been lent by the department for demonstration purposes to different persons, and these, particularly the second kind, have found favour and are likely to be in demand for covering the sown seed. the usual method is to cover the seed with the native plough, but the european harrow is seen to do the work more effectively and with a great economy of time. among the more common agricultural tools of native pattern are the following (see plate ii): _tsappa_ (hoe).--the wider tool, in. to in., is mostly for garden use; the narrow tsappa, about in. wide, is for field work. _skalistiri._--a kind of small tsappa, in. wide, having two prongs in. to in. long at the opposite end. it is mostly used for hoeing vegetables. [illustration: plate i. fig. .--ploughing on a mountain-side with native plough. fig. .--newly-prepared beds in experimental gardens.] _xinari_ (axe or hatchet).--one end of the implement is a sort of hoe, and the other end is shaped like a mattock. used for cleaning off weeds, shrubs, etc., from the fields; also for cutting or splitting wood. _kouspos._--these are of two kinds. the larger is used like a tsappa, but in stony or rocky places; the smaller is the tool used by well-sinkers. it can be conveniently handled in a confined space. _karetta_ or _cart_.--this has almost entirely superseded the old cypriot type of cart, but the latter may yet be seen very occasionally in the karpas and possibly in the paphos district. it is still in use in some parts of anatolia. in its construction no iron nails are needed. _doukani._--the common threshing-board (see under "cereals," p. ). this is the primitive implement handed down from classic times and generally seen throughout the east (see plate v, fig. ). _thernatchin._--a wooden shovel used for winnowing grain. it is deeply serrated, or divided, into or triangular-shaped teeth. _arvalin._--a corn sieve. a goat's or sheep's skin, perforated with holes, is stretched across a round wooden frame, in. to in. in diameter. instead of a skin, leather thongs or gut are stretched, crosswise on the frame. perforated tin is now sometimes employed. these sieves are used for cleaning grain after winnowing. _arkon._--another kind of sieve, similar to the above, but with smaller holes for sifting fine seeds, dust, etc. mostly made of skin, but now tin is being used. _patourin._--a similar sieve, used for still finer work. _skala._--an iron dibber, fitted with two wooden handles, used for planting vine cuttings. some advance has been made of late in cleaning the land, but foul land is pretty general. squills, thistles, thorny bushes, and so forth abound; these are mostly deeply rooted, drought-resistant plants, and the labour required for uprooting them is not forthcoming. there are a fair number of reaping machines now in use, but little care is bestowed on them, and when slightly out of order they are often put aside as useless. more enlightened ideas are now prevailing, and the abundant crops of the last few years have created a strong desire for more reapers and also for threshing machines, of which there are at present barely half a dozen in the island. _the agricultural department_ the agricultural department was established on a small scale in , under the direction of mr. p. gennadius. it continued much on its original lines until , when its establishment was enlarged, and the government farm and the veterinary branch were attached to the department, and again in it underwent a further slight extension which was necessarily checked by the war. there is now a staff of inspectors, district overseers and agricultural demonstrators who are occupied in continually travelling in the country, advising and giving practical assistance to cultivators, lecturing on village wine-making, poultry-keeping, bee-keeping, on the action to be taken against various pests and so forth. there are some eight government nursery gardens in the districts from which large numbers of trees, plants and seeds are issued. a system of model orchards and vineyards, newly started, is giving satisfactory results. these are intended to assist those engaged in the production of fruit and vegetables, for which an unlimited market is close at hand in egypt. seventy school gardens are in existence throughout the island under the guidance and control of the department. by their means many young fruit trees and other plants and seeds are annually distributed at low rates, better methods of cultivation and new kinds of vegetable and fodder plants are being made known, and the village boys are being taught something about the work on which they will later depend for their livelihood. [illustration: plate ii. _agricultural implements._ , arvalin for barley and oats. , arvalin for wheat and vetches. , shovel for winnowing. , thernatchin. , arkon. , patourin. , tsappa, narrow, for field use. , tsappa, wide, for garden use. , xinari. , kouspos. , skalistiri.] an agricultural school for the sons of farmers was opened at nicosia in under the direction of the agricultural department. some twenty to twenty-five lads between sixteen and twenty years of age, both greeks and moslems, receive a two-year course of instruction with a view to fitting them to cultivate their own properties later. a few of the more promising students have been retained as student-labourers in the department, after the termination of their school course, and of these again a few have been given minor appointments in the department. a scheme for training young cypriots abroad, which was in abeyance during the war, makes it possible to give the more capable of these some further training in europe in the higher branches of agriculture. it is hoped, by this means, to form a group of native experts from among whom the technical staff of the department can be recruited. the government farm, athalassa, though somewhat ill-placed for purposes of education and demonstration, has done good work in improving the live stock of the country, as evidenced at the animal shows held every year. periodical auction sales of athalassa stock take place in the different districts. during the three years - , there were reared at the farm and distributed cattle, sheep, donkeys, pigs and mules, besides a considerable head of poultry. the total value of the live and dead stock was estimated on march , , at £ , . for breeding purposes there were stallion horses, jack donkeys, bulls and boars in - stationed either at athalassa or at the stud stables which have been established in the districts. some cast army mares have been obtained free of cost from the remount department, egypt, and have been lent out on contract to farmers for mule breeding. during - the farm produced cheeses and , - / lb. of butter. in the winter of - some donums of land were under cultivation, the chief crops being barley, oats, wheat and gavetta (_lathyrus sativus_). the veterinary establishment provides for veterinary surgeon, stock inspectors and veterinary compounder. there is a good deal of endemic contagious disease among the flocks and herds of the island, mainly anthrax and goat- and sheep-pox, and the veterinary staff is kept busy. cattle plague is unknown in the island. cattle breeding should become a paying industry when once the lesson of proper feeding and management has been learnt (hitherto sadly neglected by the cypriot farmer), since egypt provides a ready and remunerative market. perhaps no work is of more importance than that of combating the numerous insect and other pests which every year cause heavy loss to the agricultural community. the addition of an entomological laboratory and the appointment of an entomologist have enabled the department to afford relief to many cultivators, and a small but active entomological staff are constantly engaged on various pest campaigns. the department possesses a small but well-equipped chemical laboratory under the charge of an agricultural chemist. in the absence of any law, the department has, in the interests of importers and agriculturists alike, offered its services for analysing and reporting upon samples, sealing bags and giving advice as to the use of the different types, and this action has been readily availed of. this in itself, however, is not enough to check malpractices or safeguard the cultivators. for the last four years the department has had trial plots in which new varieties of cereals and fodder plants have been experimentally grown (see plate i, fig. ). the seed has been obtained from england, south africa, india and australia, but so far none of the varieties have been found in any marked degree superior to the native kinds. one or two varieties introduced two years ago are promising, and when fully acclimatised may be worth the attention of farmers. experimental sowings are often made in the villages when it is desired to bring any particular crop to the notice of the agricultural classes. the _cyprus agricultural journal_, published quarterly in english, greek and turkish, is the official organ of the agricultural department. _fungoid diseases and insect pests_ the cypriot agriculturist has to contend against the attacks of many species of insects and a number of fungoid pests. little could be done to bring these under control until, in , an entomological branch of the agricultural department was established. much valuable research and descriptive work had been carried out by mr. gennadius, but no organised field work could be undertaken until the last three or four years. a detailed description of the numerous pests cannot here be given, but the more important ones are enumerated below. happily cyprus is one of the few mediterranean countries which has not been invaded by phylloxera. _cereals._--_Æcophora temperatella_ (limassol district only), smut and rust, hessian fly (occasionally), grain weevils (_calandra granaria_), grain moth (_sitotroga cerealella_). _carobs._--_cecidomyia ceratoniæ_, scale (_aspidiotus ceratoniæ_) _myelois ceratoniæ,_ borer (_cossus liniperda_), _oidium ceratoniæ_. _olives._--_capnodium_, scale (_lecanium oleæ_ and _aspidiotus oleæ_), aphis (_psylla oleæ_), olive fly (_dacus_ sp.), _tinea oleela_ and various borers. _citrus and other fruit trees._--gummosis (citrus and all stone fruits); scale (all); ermin moth (apples, pears and plums); downy plant louse, _schizoneura lanigera_ (apples); aphides (almond, peach, plum and apricot); _tingis pyri_ (pears and apples); codlin moth, _carpocapsa pomonella_ (apples, pears, quinces and walnuts); peach leaf curl, _exoascus deformans_ (peaches); black aphis (peaches); mediterranean fruit fly, _ceratitis capitata_ (all); mites, _acarus_ sp. (all); various borers, thrips, and barkbeetle (_scolytids_). _vines._--_oidium tuckeri_, _peronospora_, anthracnose, _cladosporium,_ root rot, _zygæna ampelophaga_, thrips, _cochylis_, _lita solanella_. _vegetables.--peronospora infestans_ (potatoes), _cladosporium_, _altica_, aphides, mole crickets. much damage is done to carobs by the large rat, _mus alexandrinus_. the large fruit-eating bat is a great pest. hornets attack all kinds of fruits and cause much loss. the chief cotton enemies are the cotton boll worm (_earias insulana_), aphides and _capnodium_. locusts are no longer the formidable plague they were in the eighties. they are limited almost to the famagusta district, where they annually breed and do a certain amount of damage to early cotton and to vegetable crops. if not vigilantly kept under control they would quickly multiply and become a serious danger. iii. live stock _cattle_ the cattle of the country have been bred, until the last two or three years, exclusively for draught purposes. cattle breeding as a business is unknown. farmers, as a rule, aim only at raising a calf or two every year in order to maintain one or more yokes of oxen. some of the draught animals are very fine (see plate iii, fig. , and plate v, fig. ). these belong mostly to the monasteries; one animal exhibited at a recent show measured over hands. the race is presumably the result of many crossings with imported breeds, but has acquired a definite type. the cows are in colour and conformation not unlike jerseys, but larger and without the udder development of that breed. the oxen have mostly a more or less pronounced hump, possibly acquired through many generations of progenitors used exclusively for draught purposes. in some of the best bulls this hump is particularly marked. in some devon bulls and cows were imported and a herd of this breed was started at the government farm, athalassa. an impetus was thus given to breeding dairy cows, and a number of half- and three-quarter-bred cows are now to be found, which command high prices for milking purposes. the devon bulls, however, have never come into favour among farmers for raising draught cattle. there was a fair export of cattle to egypt before the war, a good proportion of the animals being consigned to the serum institute, cairo, as cyprus cattle, alone among the cattle in this part of the levant, have so far been free from plague. the number of horned cattle in is officially given as , . the exports for the five years preceding the war were: year. number. value. £ , , , , , , , , , , [illustration: plate iii. fig. .--native bull. fig. .--native ram.] there can be no question that if more attention were paid to growing fodder crops, cattle breeding could be greatly increased, and a good trade with egypt might be done. the establishment of the athalassa stock farm has had a most useful influence on the improvement of the live stock of the island. beef has only lately become an article of food for the country people, and is still so only on a small scale. the townspeople, having become europeanised to a greater degree than formerly, are now becoming beef consumers, and the high price of beef has had a stimulating effect upon breeding for the butchers. before the british occupation the killing of an ox for eating purposes was considered by many villagers an act of sacrilege. _sheep_ sheep rearing is an important industry in cyprus. the sheep are of the fat-tailed species and are allied, though superior to, the afrikander sheep. the total number of sheep in the island in was , . they feed almost entirely by grazing, and wander, under the charge of shepherds, over considerable areas in search of food, frequently in company with goats. they are valued chiefly for their milk and meat; their wool, though of moderate quality, is small in quantity. (see also under "dairy produce," p. .) large numbers of sheep are killed annually for local consumption, and there is a regular export to egypt, as shown by the following pre-war figures: year. number. value. £ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , sheep-folding is practically unknown, and no crops are specially grown as food for sheep. occasionally they may get a little rovi (vetch), rovi straw, lentil straw, favetta, pea-haulm or (in the hills) mavrachero (tares). they suffer in years of drought, but on the whole thrive wonderfully well on very scanty pasturage. good work has been done of late years in the improvement of cyprus sheep at the government athalassa farm, and ewes and rams from the farm flock are much sought after by sheep-owners, many of whom are making efforts to ameliorate the breed. the question of providing suitable forage also is not being lost sight of. _goats_ the goat has been a cause of much controversy for many years and a source of discord between farmer and shepherd. owing to the absence of farm boundaries the herds of goats (and sheep) continually trespass on the cultivated areas, and the shepherds are at little pains to restrain them when there is a chance of the animals getting a good meal. large sums in the aggregate are paid by way of fines and damages, but the shepherds evidently find that even so it is profitable to continue such practices. in consequence of the serious harm done every year in the state forests by these animals, a law "for the gradual exclusion of goats from the island" was passed in and came into operation on august that year. as the subjoined table shows, the number of goats has decreased, but it is doubtful how far this is due to the law, and how far to the losses from goat-pox, which is very prevalent, and to the shipments for military purposes during the war: year. head. , , , , (when the law was passed) , , the goat is in many respects well suited to the island, and provides the villager with milk, cheese, meat, boots and manure. the animals cost very little to keep--even apart from their depredations--and thrive, especially in the hills, under conditions unsuited to sheep and cattle. they are, however, great enemies to agriculture and forestry, and if they are to be preserved in the island, it is essential that both they and the shepherds be brought under strict control. in cyprus most of the goats have very short hair, which cannot be shorn. from this fact, and from the external shape of the animal, one may infer that it is either a variety of the anatolian breed modified by local influences, or a hybrid of the numidic and anatolian breeds (see plate iii, fig. ). the anatolian goat has long and more or less thick hair, especially on the shoulders, sides and thighs, which, clipped in the spring, yields a not insignificant income for the goat-breeder (gennadius). the cyprus goat gives on an average drams of milk per day during a period of say days, or say, to okes per annum. a good proportion have kids twice a year, and many give birth to twins. the price of a goat varies considerably in different districts, and before the war was from about _s._ to _s._ or _s._ _pigs_ the paphos district and the karpas end of the famagusta district are specially given to pig raising; but this animal is to be found fairly well distributed all over the island. the native pig is of inferior quality, but a noticeable improvement, not only in pig breeding but in pig rearing, has resulted from the introduction by government of the large black breed from england in . this breed has become well established at the government farm, athalassa, and the progeny is now well spread over the island. the improvement resulting from crossing with government stock has been so unmistakable that there is now great competition for them at all auction sales and high prices are given. this increase in outlay on the part of farmers has led to greater care in the feeding and management. they find that well-bred pigs come more quickly to maturity, and that it pays to feed them well and not leave them to forage for themselves as formerly. excellent pork and bacon are now procurable during the winter, and it may be hoped that pig breeding in cyprus has a good future before it. the number of pigs counted in the spring of was , , the third highest number on record. since then, owing to the prohibition of export, breeding has been checked and the number declined, but now it appears to be again on the upward grade. before the war there was an average annual export of about , animals; but there is now a better local market than formerly. _camels_ camels are still used to a fair extent, and the breed is good, but owing to the improvement in the roads and increased facilities for more rapid transport, these animals are less in demand than formerly. _horses_ the native breed of horse is best seen in the paphos pony, which though small, about hands, is remarkably strong and hardy (see plate iv, fig. ). it is said that some eighty years or so ago the breed was improved by the introduction of two arab stallions from turkey. a useful stamp of pony mare is also to be found in the karpas. a marked improvement in the quality of the local horses took place from the importation, some years ago, of english pony stallions; and more recently a further advance has resulted from the addition to the government stud of the two famous english thoroughbred stallions "téméraire," by greyleg out of tereska by isonomy out of violetta by hermit, and "huckle-my-buff," by isinglass out of snip by donovan out of isabel (dam of st. frusquin). _donkeys_ the cyprian donkey at its best is a fine animal (see plate iv, fig. ). it is the common beast of burden of the villager, and is capable of carrying a load of from to lb. a large number of donkey stallions have been exported to india, uganda, south africa, syria and egypt from time to time, and the local breed has no doubt suffered owing to the best jacks having left the country. although the villagers depend so much upon these animals, very little care is taken by them, either in the matter of breeding, feeding or proper management. the animals are mostly worked far too early, and underfed, and the majority are consequently undersized and of poor quality. where good jacks are used, the progeny is generally satisfactory, and at shows and fairs some fine specimens are usually brought in. owing to the increasing demand for jennets, the village breeder is inclined to put his she-donkey to a pony stallion rather than to a jack-donkey. the donkey mares range from to . hands, with girth measurement of in. to in. and shank - / in. they have great room, and are well shaped with a straight back and good quarters. [illustration: plate iv. fig. .--cyprus pony. fig. .--cyprus donkeys.] it has been recommended that every encouragement should be given to the production of good donkeys, from which the best mares could be selected for mating with suitable pony stallions, such as the exmoor and welsh cob, for the breeding of jennets; and at the same time an improvement in the jacks would naturally follow. _jennets and mules_ "owing to the excellence of the cyprus donkeys and the poor class of cyprus horses, the superiority of the 'jennet' (the result of mating the pony stallion with the donkey mare) is very patent over the 'mule' (the product of the donkey jack and the pony mare). the jennet of from . hands to . is doubtless the most paying animal that the cyprus villager or landowner can produce, and its excellence for army or general pack purposes cannot be surpassed in any country in the world. therefore, in my opinion, it is to this class of animal that the most encouragement in breeding should be given. to maintain the excellence of the cyprus jennet every help should be given to the breeding of big donkeys, so that the plentiful supply of donkey mares of from . to . hands is available for mating with suitable imported pony stallions, which should be placed by the government at the breeders' disposal."[ ] both jennets and mules, indiscriminately called "mularia," are largely used for transport purposes throughout the island, and perform practically all the carting work of the country, but, as explained, the jennet is regarded as greatly the superior animal. _poultry_ the ordinary barn-door fowl is met with in cyprus, as everywhere else. the local breed is a mixture of all the various races which have been imported by private persons for many years past. the most general types met with resemble the leghorn and ancona breeds. the island, owing to its climate and its corn production, is admirably suited to the poultry industry, and a sure and profitable market in egypt can always be relied on. something has been done of late years by the introduction of wyandottes, langshans and orpingtons which have been bred by the agricultural department. proper poultry management among the villagers is practically unknown, and until regulations can be made enforceable by law for the control of poultry diseases and for the disposal of diseased carcases, poultry keepers will continue to suffer heavy losses and the industry will not prosper.[ ] lectures on poultry-keeping have been instituted in the districts by the agricultural department, and it is hoped that these may arouse some interest and lead to improvement. given the necessary guidance and control, the industry should have a good future before it. turkeys are very plentiful and, except in the hills, are seen in nearly every village. there are three varieties--the bronze, by far the most general, the white, and a dark brown kind which is not common. ducks and geese do well at kythrea, but elsewhere are little seen. at this village, however, they are largely bred. pigeons also are fairly abundant, and as they mostly feed on a neighbour's corn, they are considered profitable birds to keep. _preserved meats, etc._ a good deal of meat and fat is pickled, dried and smoked for consumption by the native population. hams and sausages are much eaten, the latter especially in the karpas. among the various kinds of preserved meats may be specially mentioned that known as "apokti." this is the salted and dried flesh of the he-goat, which, when cooked, is much appreciated by the villagers. the meat is sometimes minced, and after the addition of ground origanum leaves and spearmint, is placed in jars and slowly cooked. it is said that from , to , he-goats are annually slaughtered for making "apokti." footnotes: [footnote : report by captain goodchild, remount department, e.e.f., when visiting cyprus in and to purchase mules and donkeys for army purposes.] [footnote : legislation in this direction has been effected during the session of the legislative council just ended. (law no. vii of .)] iv. dairy produce _milk_ sheep and goats' milk is principally used for cheese and butter making. fresh milk of any kind is not much consumed by the native population, although within the last few years the more well-to-do townspeople have taken to drinking cows' milk, when obtainable, and it is in growing demand in some country parts for invalids when prescribed by the local doctor. the flavour of sheep and goats' milk is a good deal affected by the herbage or shrubs on which they feed, and thus varies according to locality. a characteristic odour is imparted, for instance, by the alnifolia oak (_quercus alnifolia_) and the cistus, which are common in many parts of the island, and the cheese and butter produced from such milk are in better demand in the local markets. the places in which this quality of milk is chiefly produced are the paphos district, the neighbourhood of kykko and troöditissa in the troödos mountains, and akanthou to the north-east of the island. a considerable impetus has been given to the production and consumption of fresh cows' milk by the establishment of a herd of devon dairy cows at the government farm, athalassa. cows of athalassa strain fetch high prices, as much as £ having been given recently for a cow and several others have changed hands at £ to £ . _cheese_ the cypriot is a great cheese eater. the most popular and commonly made cheese in cyprus is that known as halloumi; the next in order being the paphos and akanthou cheeses, and then, in imitation of the greek cheeses, the agrafa, kefalotyri and kaskaval, all of which are of a hard kind, while there is a small production of the greek soft cheeses fetta and telemés. there are no statistics as to production; the export figures in recent years as given in the official trade returns are as follows: year. quantity. value. _cwts._ £ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _halloumi._--this cheese, though rather insipid, is very popular, and forms a large part of the dietary of every household. it is easy to make, needs no special appliances, and is almost entirely made by the shepherds themselves. it is made either from sheep's milk only, or, in the hills where goats are numerous, from sheep and goats' milk mixed, or in some places from goats' milk only; especially is this so in the mountains where sheep are not found. the two kinds of cheese, _i.e._ that made from sheep's milk and that from goats' milk, are easily distinguished, as the former is rather soft and crumbly, while the other is hard and separates out into flakes. this cheese as it comes from the mould is in the form of a slab called "kefali." this is then divided into four or more pieces. there are two kinds of halloumi: one called "mona" (single), the other "dipla" (double). the latter is most in demand. it differs from the first in being finished off by being well hand-pressed, and then doubled or folded over, salt and spearmint being sprinkled between the fold. "myzithra," or, as it is more commonly called, "anari," is a soft cheese produced by boiling the whey, whereby all albuminoid substances not previously coagulated are now coagulated and rise to the surface together with any pieces of curd still remaining in the whey. a good quantity of fat is also enclosed in the coagulated mass, which is placed in rush moulds or in cloths and pressed so as to squeeze out the whey. "anari" thus made is specially known as "bastard," and is an excellent soft cheese, very popular among the european residents as well as among the native inhabitants. a rather finer "anari" with slightly different flavour is made by adding to per cent. of pure milk. this added milk is known as "prosgalo." both kinds are dried in the sun. from "anari" is made a kind of fat used as cooking butter, by crushing and rubbing it between the hands in warm water. a thin paste is thus formed from which a fat separates, which rises to the surface, and is then collected. _paphos and akanthou cheeses._--these are prepared in much the same way as "halloumi," but are made in smaller, barrel-shaped moulds, and are steeped longer in the whey, which produces a rind and renders them tougher and less liable to crack. they are well rubbed with salt. their characteristic flavour is doubtless due to some extent to the milk of those districts, as explained above. owing to their small size they become very hard. _kefalotyri._--the best cheeses of this type are made with sheep's milk, which is coagulated at its natural temperature immediately after milking. rennet is added so as to produce coagulation within an hour. the cheeses are placed in moulds, pressed and salted. they are turned and salted every day for a week; and this continues for two or three weeks, until the cheeses cannot absorb more salt. _fetta._--the process for making this cheese is much the same as for paphos cheeses, but differs in regard to temperature. it is placed in bags and hung up, or left in cheese cloths on the table to drain. it is made up in or dram pieces, and turned and lightly salted for three days; then placed in barrels filled with brine. this cheese ripens in a few days. it is soft, and has a sharp, pungent flavour. it is the first to come on the market. it is not consumed in cyprus, but made entirely for the egyptian market, where it is much liked. being soft, it does not keep well, and should always be kept covered in brine. for these reasons it is exported in small barrels of a gross weight of to okes. if care is taken in this respect, if all leaky barrels are kept refilled and cool storage provided, it may be preserved for a year; but these conditions are rarely fulfilled in cyprus. _telemés._--this is another soft cheese, prepared in a similar manner to "fetta," but it is cut into square blocks and placed not in barrels or vats, but in tins which, when completely filled with cheese and brine, are soldered down. this cheese is also made entirely for the egyptian market. _kaskaval or kaskavalli._--this is mostly made by cheese-makers who come over from greece or turkey during the cheese-making season. the curd, after the whey is drained off, is called "phlongos," and it is almost always bought from the shepherds, each shepherd preparing it in his own way. it is transported in baskets, sometimes a good distance, to the cheese factory, or "kassaria," and these drawbacks, added to lack of cleanliness, are the cause of much cheese of inferior quality being produced which has no keeping properties and must be quickly consumed. having reached a pasty condition, the cheese is placed in reed or willow baskets and immersed in either boiling whey or clean water and stirred until the whole mass is transformed into "kossimari"; it is then cut into pieces weighing one or two okes, and moulded by hand into a globular form, leaving one slight depression called the "omphalos" or navel. if not properly stored, this cheese soon dries and becomes rancid or tasteless. _agrafa cheese._--this is made entirely from sheep's milk. coagulation should be completed in to minutes. the cheese remains hours in the press. salting lasts from to days, and the cheeses ripen in four months. if well stored, the cheese may keep for two years. _butter_ butter making is carried on to only a limited extent in cyprus, and with two or three exceptions is in the hands of shepherds, who use a primitive conical-shaped churn, something after the danish pattern. churning consists in beating up the contents of the churn with a stick, to the end of which is fixed a round wooden disc to in. in diameter, not unlike a piston in its action. sheep's milk is mostly used and, with a modern churn, this will yield to per cent. of fresh butter. goats' milk gives about to per cent. about half the above quantities may be obtained with the older, native churn. in the near east (greece, turkey, etc.) fresh butter is not used in cooking, as almost all cooked food is fried and butter containing the least water and casein cannot serve the purpose. the pure fat must therefore be extracted. two methods are applied. the best is that of plunging the tins containing the fresh butter into hot water which heats the butter and sends the fat to the surface. it is then collected and slightly salted. this has a good flavour and keeps well. the second method is to place the fresh butter, or the residue from the former process, into tin pans and boil until the water is evaporated, when the albuminoids solidify at the bottom of the pans. the fat which is then on the surface is ladled out. this is inferior in quality, and has a disagreeable smell imparted by the albuminoids which come in contact with the hot pan. _xynogala or yaourti_ the former is the greek, the latter the turkish name for this preparation of sour milk. unlike fresh butter, it forms, in season, part of the diet of almost every cypriot household. it is now made in england and sold as "bulgarian milk" or "yaourti." it is in the form of clotted cream, but if placed in a bag of fine cloth and if the whey is left to drain off, it forms a thick paste, and has an excellent creamy flavour, and is eaten in both cases either alone or, like devonshire cream, with stewed fruits, etc. _trachanas_ this is another favourite milk preparation, being a mixture of "yaourti" and ground wheat made into a thick paste. this is sun-dried and makes an excellent soup. _kaimaki or tsippa_ this much resembles devonshire clotted cream. it is the natural cream formed after boiling the milk overnight and setting it in shallow pans to cool. if the boiled milk is poured into the pans from a height, so as to make a foam, a better result is obtained. v. crops and other produce of the land cereals the messaoria plain is the principal corn-producing area of the island. wheat, barley and oats are the chief cereals grown, and they are sown more or less throughout the whole of cyprus, nearly up to the summit of troödos, to an altitude of about , ft. indian corn has been cultivated for ten years or so, and is becoming more general both for green food and for seed, and rye has begun to make its appearance during the last few years. dari is becoming more known. the preparation of the land for cereals is as follows: about the middle of january, when the land is soaked with rain, the fallow field ([greek: neasma] or [greek: neatos]) is broken up, and in some cases sown with a green fallow, and in march or april it is cross ploughed ([greek: dibolo]). if the autumn rains are early, the field is ploughed for a third time ([greek: anakomma]), after which the crop is sown; but if the rains are late, the sowing is done on fields which have been cross ploughed only. as a rule sowing begins after the autumn rains, and may go on until january. but if rain does not come before the end of october, many sow before the rain; and in many places farmers sow regularly before, _i.e._ without waiting for the autumn rains. this sowing is called [greek: xerobola]. lands flooded by a river or other running water are called [greek: potima] (_handbook of cyprus_, p. ). the sowing is done broadcast; the drill is not used. [illustration: plate v. fig. .--carting corn. fig. .--threshing corn with native threshing board.] often, owing to want of sufficient hands and shortness of time or other reasons, land which has been fallowed is sown without being first ploughed up. this is called [greek: eis to prosôpon], _i.e._ on the surface, or face of the field. again, a field which has had a corn crop is sown the next autumn without ploughing; and this is locally called "on the stubble." it is not uncommon for the same land to be sown year after year with a corn crop, with no rotation. this is especially the case with the deep soils in the plains, known as "kambos," as contrasted with the shallow, rocky soils called "trachonas." at the time of harvest numbers of labourers, men and women, usually arrive from anatolia and syria and find employment in the fields. the threshing-floors are practically identical with those of biblical times. they are frequently paved with flag-stones, but as often as not are merely levelled pieces of ground. on these the sheaves are opened and spread out for the threshing. the threshing-board ([greek: doukani] or [greek: doukanais]) is that referred to by virgil as _tribulum_ (georg. bk. ) and is merely a stout board, studded on the underside with sharp flint stones (see plate v, fig. ). this is drawn round and round over the spread-out sheaves by mules, donkeys or oxen, and affords a pastime to old and young during the summer months. during the process the grain is separated from the straw, and the latter is bruised and partly shredded, and it is the rooted belief of the cypriot farmer that only in that condition will it be relished by and benefit the animals which feed on it. the straw is then gradually cleared away and the grain is winnowed by being thrown up in the wind with wooden shovels. the grain is then heaped up and left until measured by the tithe official. with the grain is also collected the sweepings of the threshing-floor, and the percentage of the foreign substances mixed with the grain varies from to per cent. there are a few winnowing machines and it is hoped that they will come into more general use as soon as they can be imported. at athalassa all cereal crops are reaped and threshed by machinery. a good many reaping machines were imported by the agricultural department some years ago for resale to the farmers, and there is a very fair demand. this procedure has not been permitted for some years, and the work fell into the hands of an english merchant who has succeeded in placing a few machines every year. the country is ready to employ these and other agricultural machines, but the farmers need guidance in the choice of a machine and are reluctant to place orders through native merchants, who may not know the best types to supply and whose profits they fear to be exorbitant. if they could procure these through the medium of the agricultural department they would be encouraged to make considerable purchases. the loss of grain on the "aloni" alone may be gauged by the current opinion that each pair of oxen consumes, while threshing, one kilé of grain per day. much damage is often caused by hot westerly winds at the time when the grain is just forming. in the absence of any law to prevent the adulteration of cereals, dishonest practices are very frequent. a common method of adulteration is to mix with the grain the joints of the straw which are cut during the process of threshing and separated when winnowing. these are often sprayed with water in order to increase both bulk and weight. the moisture is absorbed by the grain, which thereby swells and is made to look bigger. under the seed corn law of the government make advances of seed wheat, barley, oats and vetches to cultivators under an agreement to repay in kind after harvest a quantity of grain equivalent to the amount of seed so advanced, together with an addition of one-fourth of the quantity so advanced, by way of interest. this benefit is very generally availed of by smaller cultivators. it has not, however, been found possible for government to keep separately the various kinds and qualities of tithe corn, from which these advances are made, and farmers frequently complain that the seed, so issued promiscuously, is unsuitable to the land, aspect, or special conditions on individual farms. weevilled grain also is a source of trouble, and farmers obtaining such seed advances must be prepared to run risk of failure from this cause. it is a well-known fact that cultivators often sell their seed corn so advanced them, in order to buy some other corn known to them as more suited to their land, and they are often justified, perhaps, in so doing. the issues are made by district commissioners to selected applicants who are believed to be unable to buy seed for cash. the average annual issues, for the last five years, have been: wheat, , kilés; barley, , kilés. _wheat_ in ancient times, when the population numbered about , , , the island was said to be self-supporting in the matter of wheat. taking the annual consumption of wheat per head of population at bushels (gennadius's _report on the agriculture of cyprus_, part i, p. ) and after making an allowance for seed, the annual production would then have been about , , bushels. from british consular reports it appears that in the average produce was reckoned at , bushels. the average annual production of wheat for the ten years ended , as shown in blue book returns, was , , kilés. for later years the figures are: year. kilés. , , , , , , , , , , wheat is sown at the rate of kilé per donum. the average yield per donum is to kilés, and varies between to kilés on dry land in a poor year, to to on the best lands in a good year. when rains are very late and spring weather is unfavourable, a farmer often fails to recover even the seed. much might be done to increase the yield by better methods of husbandry, by the use of improved implements for cultivating and reaping, and by the use of threshing machines. an immense quantity of grain is consumed by birds (larks, sparrows, doves, etc.), which at times literally strip the fields and continue their depredations on the threshing-floors. wheat is sown from october to december; a field which has had a winter crop is pastured after the harvest until january; in january and february it is broken up and cross ploughed and sown immediately after with a spring or summer crop. the crop is cut about may-june. it is cut with a sickle ([greek: drepani]), tied into sheaves, and carried on donkeys or small carts to the threshing-floors. the sickle is larger than the european one, and is often provided with bells ("koudounia" or "sousounaria") to frighten the snakes, and the handles are ornamented with leather tassels. several varieties of wheat are grown in the island, mostly of the hard kinds, these being preferred by millers. the following english varieties have been imported and tried during the last four years: improved treasure, white stand up, and improved red fife. the two former failed, being too late in maturing; the latter is still under trial, but it is not very attractive, being a late variety, and it gives a smaller yield than the native kinds. the same remarks apply to several wheats obtained from india and south africa and which are still under trial. _barley_ this crop is sown about the same time as wheat, if anything slightly earlier; and it is ready for the sickle three or four weeks before wheat. when the straw is short the plant is uprooted, not cut. it is sown at the rate of to - / kilés to the donum, and may be expected to yield from to kilés; but kilés is not uncommon in the plains, and even much larger yields have been recorded from time to time. there are three native varieties, viz. the common -row, the ordinary -row and the paphos -row barley, also grown around davlos in the north-east of the island. the last-named is heavier than the two former kinds. little success has attended the introduction by the agricultural department of "prize prolific," "gold thorpe" and "chevalier," which have been experimentally grown for the last three years. they mature late and have not resisted severe drought. their yield is small compared with native barleys, although this may improve when they are fully acclimatised. barley is the staple food for all kinds of animals, pigs and poultry in cyprus, and it is often used for bread-making in years of wheat shortage. the tithe is mainly exported to england, where it has a good name for malting purposes, especially that produced in the paphos district. it has failed to attain the place it deserves on the english market owing to the high percentage of dirt, etc., it mostly contains. a sample of cyprus barley examined at the imperial institute in proved to be of good malting quality, and similar material if marketed in commercial quantities would be readily saleable in the united kingdom (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xii. , p. ). a sample of naked or skinless barley from cyprus has also been reported on by the imperial institute. this type of barley cannot be employed for malting for ordinary brewing purposes, but it was considered that the cyprus material might be used by distillers (who only require a partially malted barley), and in any case the sample would rank as a good class feeding barley (_ibid._ vol. xiv, , p. ). the average annual production of barley, as shown by the blue book returns, for the ten years ended was , , kilés. for later years the figures are: year. kilés. , , , , , , , , , , these figures should be contrasted with british consular estimated average in the sixties of , bushels. _oats_ in cyprus, oats are used on a far smaller scale than barley as food for cattle, and they are unknown, except to a few townsfolk, as a food for human beings. the cultivation of this crop is restricted, partly because it ripens late and needs late rains, and partly because it sheds its ripe grain too quickly for the ordinary easy-going farmer, who frequently finds his next year's crop smothered with self-sown oats. it is also commonly held that the crop exhausts the soil. there are two native varieties, both white. the one is grown much more than the other, called "anoyira," which, although incomparably superior, is little cultivated outside the limassol district. the seed is sown at the rate of to - / kilés to the donum, and a yield of from to kilés is obtained. the average annual production for the ten years ended , as shown by blue book returns, was , kilés. for later years the figures are: year. kilés. , , , , , besides "black tartar," which has been regularly grown at athalassa for several years, the agricultural department has introduced of late years "black cluster," "white cluster" and "supreme." all these ripen late and need late rains, and they have not given any promise of success. a black variety imported from greece some years ago has proved much superior to the two native varieties, but its cultivation is still limited. reports on oats from cyprus and on oat, straw and kyko oat plant (_avena sativa_ var. _obtusata_) are given in the bulletin of the imperial institute (vol. xv. , pp. - ). _rye_ rye has only lately been introduced by the agricultural department, but already its cultivation, though very small, is extending. the dark colour of the rye loaf creates some prejudice against it, but its value in cases of diabetes, a common complaint in cyprus, is greatly in its favour. the seed is sown and cultivated here in the same manner as wheat, but at the same time or even earlier than barley. it is harvested by being cut and is threshed on the threshing-floor. the straw is fed to animals, but when threshing machines become more general the long straw will become available for other purposes than cattle food, _e.g._ in the manufacture of the native saddles ("stratura"), native straw trays and native straw hats. rye is also grown for green food, in the same way as barley grass. _maize_ (_indian corn_) this crop was first introduced by the agricultural department in . its cultivation is governed by the water-supply. it is grown mostly for green food, and is met with very generally throughout the island, being sown among the growing crops, _e.g._ louvi, sesame, cotton, etc., as a wind-break or to afford shade. there was a good demand for the grain for grinding during the war and the meal is found to be a useful ingredient in the ordinary loaf. the stems and leaves provide a welcome change of food for cattle when exhausted from threshing and during the dry season of the year. at the government farm at athalassa the stems and leaves are made into ensilage. _dari or millet_ (_sorghum vulgare_) this crop is little grown, and is mostly found in the messaria and also at paleochori, almost exclusively in places irrigated by river floods. the grain is used for making flour and the fresh stalks are fed to cattle. fruits cyprus produces a considerable variety of fruits, the chief ones exported being raisins, pomegranates, oranges and lemons, and grapes. there is a considerable and expanding export trade in the fruits enumerated, as shown by blue book returns as under: year. £. , , , , , , , , , , the pomegranate of famagusta is famous, and the annual export of this fruit alone during the five years ended averaged £ , . among the mountain villages apples, pears, and plums are extensively grown; the latter specially being in good demand in egypt. apricots and kaisha trees are grown generally throughout the island, and their fruits are particularly good and plentiful. the last-named is a delicious variety with a delicate flavour and externally somewhat resembles the nectarine. peaches are mostly grafted on almond stocks, as these are hardy and good drought-resisters, but there are a fair number of european varieties. almond trees abound in all parts and do extremely well if properly cultivated. other fairly common fruit trees are the quince and loquat, or japanese medlar. for several years choice kinds of fruit trees have been imported from england, and many thousands of trees of different kinds throughout the island have been grafted and are now beginning to produce fruit of excellent quality. good work has been done by the perapedhi wine association, whose garden has been a centre for the dissemination of choice grafts. unhappily the village growers have been very reluctant to apply proper cultivation or to carry out advice in treating their trees, which have become the hosts of all kinds of diseases and insect pests. a better spirit is now being shown in this direction. _vines and wines_ writing in , gennadius described the industry and perseverance of the peasants, who with most imperfect implements, by breaking up the hard rock and building up the scanty soil, formed vineyards on the steep mountain sides, and often up to their very summits. these vineyards, he says, having been mostly planted in haste in the happy days of the demand for wines (when french vineyards were destroyed by phylloxera), were formed by the personal labour of the peasant eked out by the help of loans. since then the wine trade has passed through critical times and prices have often been greatly depreciated. the small vine-growers, who are also for the most part wine-producers, fell on evil times and became heavily indebted. they have remained so until the last year or two, when, owing to the large demand and the high prices of wines in egypt, they have been able to free themselves. gennadius regarded the cultivation of the vine in cyprus as indisputably unprofitable, and was in favour of checking its extension, and even advocated the imposition of a special tax on new plantations. at the time he wrote there was an overproduction, and the value of wine had greatly fallen, and the revenue which cypriot wine-makers could gain therefrom would hardly suffice to cover the expenses of its transport to the market, the annual interest on their debts, and the taxes they had to meet. the village-made wine is usually clarified by means of gypsum. it is carried down from the mountain villages in goat-skins (askos or ashia) on pack animals, and then sold to the limassol merchants, who ship the greater part to egypt. the production of wine as carried out in cyprus leaves much to be desired. m. mouillefert, who visited cyprus in to report on the wine industry, says: "the vintage is often gathered too late. insufficient care is given to the picking of the grapes and diseased, rotten, mildewy or unripe grapes are often used which detract from the quality of the wine. "the grapes are trodden and the fermentation takes place in jars and chatties of porous earth, of a capacity of or hectolitres, which are tarred inside to counteract their porosity. the houses in which the fermentation takes place are of almost the same temperature as the surrounding air, with the result that in the warmer parts of the island fermentation at first is generally rapid or disturbed, and the temperature of the must becomes excessive. in the colder parts, on the contrary, the opposite takes place and the resulting wine is rough and sharp. the use of gypsum as a preservative is unfortunately very common. the tarring of the goat-skins and jars imparts a flavour which is very unsuited to the european taste." m. mouillefert made the following recommendations: "tarred jars for fermentation should be replaced by wooden vats, or, in the warmer parts of the island, by tuns similar to those used throughout the south of france and in algeria. presses less primitive than those in use should be employed since these leave in the lees a very large quantity of wine. the wine when drawn off from the lees should be kept in tuns or in small wooden casks." "in short," he says, "to speak quite plainly, no good wine destined for ordinary consumption can be obtained with jars." some twenty years ago an english wine company was established at perapedhi and, until the war, carried on a successful trade and produced some good wines manufactured on modern lines. the factory was well equipped with up-to-date plant, and its wine of port type was especially popular. it was throughout the greater part of this time owned by the firm of w. h. chaplin & co., london, but since the war it has been closed down. the excellent brandy of messrs. hadji pavlo & co. has found for some time a steady market in england, and there are other well-equipped wine and spirit factories at limassol, notably those of the limassol wine & spirit co., ltd., of mr. m. michaelides and of mr. n. joannides. the firm of messrs. hadji pavlo & co. has carried out since the manufacture of spirits, and for twenty-five years they have been engaged in producing their "zanatzin" brand of wines. their v.o. cognac and three-star brandy are both excellent. various liqueurs, made from local products, aniseed, kernels of apricots and other stone fruit, etc., are made by this and other firms, and sold under the name "zucki." the principal wines, spirits, liqueurs and other alcoholic liquors produced are: the ordinary black wine of the country, or "krasi." the ordinary white wine of the country, or "asprokrasi." commandaria. brandy. first and second quality sold in barrels; one-star, two-star, three-star and v.o. sold in bottles. mastic, sold in four qualities; zucki, sold in two qualities. rum and amer pigon. alcohol. c. and c. various spirits, liqueurs and syrups: whisky, vermuth, amathus, banana, mentha, mandarini, triantaphyllo, kitro, pergamotto, vanilla, violetta, anana, benedictine. eau de cologne. commandaria is one of the oldest and most famous sweet dessert wines. it is held indeed to have been the "nectar of the gods." in the time of the knights templar it acquired great fame. existing stocks are annually added to, the original vintage having in some cases a great age, so much so that, through evaporation, the wine becomes a syrup or pulp, which imparts a bouquet to the fresh commandaria which is added to it. in making commandaria the grapes are left on the vines until overripe and, after picking, are spread out in the sun for further evaporation, when they undergo the usual process of wine-making. in this way a sweet wine, rich in sugar and alcohol, and having a characteristic flavour, is produced. a limited quantity only is made every year, and of this a certain quantity is exported and fetches a high price, as a speciality, in england and on the continent. a red mastic is made at the kykko monastery which has acquired local fame. the situation at the present time is generally improved, and although cyprus wines can never form more than an insignificant proportion of the world's supply, and could not create any special market without considerable change of system and large expenditure in advertising, they may yet, by simple improved methods, by means of co-operative storage and the application of sound elementary principles, be able to secure a more recognised position and a remunerative, though perhaps limited, demand, at any rate for some of the special brands. for the benefit of village producers practical lectures, with the help of special apparatus, are now being given in the wine villages during the vintage season, by officials of the agricultural department. the export of wines (including commandaria) and spirits during the ten years ended were of a total value of £ , and £ , respectively. the lowest and highest figures were £ , in and £ , in for wines and £ , in and £ , in for spirits. for the last four years the exports have been: year. wines (including spirits. commandaria). £ £ , , , , , , , , there is an export duty on wine at the rate of paras per gallon, on all spirit of paras per gallon and on all vinegar of paras per gallon. some seventeen varieties of _vitis vinifera_ have for a long time been grown in cyprus; the most largely cultivated being the following: mavro (black). the commonest variety, medium-sized bunch, with dark, large, oval-shaped grapes. xinisteri (white). common variety, with medium-sized bunch, white roundish grapes, thin skin. these are suited to a rich moist soil. voophthalmo (ox-eye). equally common variety. rather small bunch, with black, round and rather small grapes. suited to a dry, calcareous soil. the muscat comes next, being mostly grown at omodhos. it is the common early muscatel of the east. the remaining kinds are locally known as bastardico (bastard), maratheftico or kraseti, morokanali or spourta (flabby-berried), promari or glycopromo (early or early-sweet), xantho, axanthi or phinikoto, kouphorrhovo or katin-parmak, verico, sultana, razaki, corinthiaki (currant), malaga (alexandria muscatel), rhodities. of these, several are only to be found here and there in private gardens. five years ago several thousand sultana vines were imported by the agricultural department from crete, and these have now become fairly well distributed over the island and the produce is beginning to appear in the market. these dried sultanas in sold for as much as _s._ per oke. three years ago the following varieties of table vines were imported from england by the agricultural department: black hamburg alicante or black tokay canon hall muscat lady hastings royal muscadine muscat of alexandria these are now being acclimatised, and it is hoped gradually to distribute a large number of grafts. vine cultivation covers an area of about , donums and is in the hands of some , vine growers. owing to defects of planting the vines of cyprus do not in most cases begin to bear fruit before the third or fourth year, while, if modern methods were adopted, they would bear fruit in their second year and attain their full growth in their fourth year. what is known as the "willow-head" system of pruning has been very general, with consequently poor results. better methods have long been inculcated and are now being more and more adopted. manuring is but rarely practised and ploughing is confined to lightly turning the surface soil with a wooden plough, and this not every year. on the higher slopes of the mountains terracing is common and necessary. grape mildew (_oidium tuckeri_) is prevalent in nearly all the vine areas. other diseases and pests of the vine met with are anthracnose, pourridié, _septosporium fuckelii_, cuscute, _cochylis_, _zygæna ampelophaga_ and _pyralis_. happily the stringent regulations which for many years have been in force prohibiting the importation of any kind of living plant have resulted in keeping the cypriot vineyards free from the scourge of phylloxera. sulphuring has become more general of late years. the government has done much to bring this about, and for fifteen years or more has imported sufficient sulphur from sicily, which has been placed in the hands of village store-keepers and sold at a fixed price by the agricultural department. this has never more than exceeded the bare cost and more often has been issued at half cost and in times of distress even gratis. the vine-owners have been stimulated by the recent high prices for wines to expend more time and money on this operation. the ignorant prejudice against the effectiveness of sulphur as a cure for grape mildew has to a great extent died out. false ideas of economy alone prevent its general use. fresh grapes are largely consumed locally, and considerable quantities are exported to egypt, as shown by the following table: year. quantity. value. _cwts._ £ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , the average annual export of raisins for the ten years ended was , cwts. valued at £ , . the lowest price was _s._ _cp._ per cwt. in and the highest _s._ - / _cp._ in . during the war the exports have been: , , cwts., £ , ; , , cwts., £ , ; , , cwts., £ , ; and , , cwts., £ , . the annual prices in these years were respectively _s._, _s._ - / _cp._, _s._ _cp._ and _s._ - / _cp._ per cwt. up to , inclusive, by far the greatest quantity of raisins had been shipped every year to austria; rumania, turkey and egypt coming next in order. since that date rumania has easily taken the first place, being followed at a distance by austria, turkey and egypt. since the war the bulk has been shipped for military requirements and to france, egypt, malta and england for eating and for use in confectionery, and the industry has grown. a marked improvement has taken place in the preparation of the raisins; and specially qualified officials of the agricultural department every year give practical instruction on this subject in the vine villages. _citrus fruits_ oranges and lemons are very extensively grown in cyprus, whilst mandarines, citrons ("kitria") and sweet limes ("glykolemonia") are also found in every part of the island. in addition, the shaddock ("phrappa") and the bergamot orange are cultivated in the island. the best and most common variety of the sweet orange is the oval (sometimes round) jaffa, grown everywhere, but specially at famagusta, where there are numerous orange groves. another variety of good quality is grown at lefka. the trees of both varieties produce large, firm, thick-fleshed fruit. bitter oranges are largely grown from seed for stock on which the better kinds are grafted. many thousands of these, and also of the grafted plants, are annually issued from the government nurseries. much loss has been sustained from time to time through disease, and in whole orange groves at famagusta, lefka and kythrea were uprooted or cut right back. with the expansion of the agricultural department and a small qualified staff it has become possible to bring these diseases somewhat under control, and the orange and lemon production has much increased, though gummosis and scale disease still play much havoc. in the varosha orange groves the trees are grown in light, sandy soil, which is banked up round the trunk. they are irrigated by means of the native alakati, or noria, or more often by air-motors, which in this locality are much in vogue. the two most common causes of failure are the persistent planting of trees too close together and over-watering. growers turn a deaf ear to all advice aimed at changing these two bad habits. the native agriculturist is convinced, beyond the reach of argument, that the greater the number of trees on a given area the greater will be the profit. in a land where water is so precious the deep-rooted opinion is held that the more water a plant receives the better it will thrive, and too frequent irrigation accounts to a large extent for the widespread damage caused by gummosis. until lately pruning was scarcely practised at all. thanks to a system of model orchards lately instituted by the agricultural department, better methods are at last being introduced, and fruit-growers are able to model their practice upon the work carried out on the specimen trees, alongside their own, reserved by the department for such demonstrations. lemons are largely consumed by natives with their food. the produce is of large size, thick-skinned and juicy. until some twelve years or so ago the fruit was largely sold on the trees for shipment to russia and rumania, but those markets failed, owing to the prevalence in cyprus of scale disease and partly to loss through rotting in transport. the export of oranges and lemons has of late years been confined almost entirely to egypt. _fig_ (_ficus carica_) this tree thrives everywhere, and is particularly cultivated at livadhia and lefkara (larnaca district), in paphos and at the tylliria, where the small, sweet, white variety, locally called "antelounika," is grown. there are but few true smyrna figs, but this variety is being multiplied by cuttings and also by grafting. other good kinds are the "sarilop" and "bardajik," of which there are a few private specimens only, and the "vardika" which is more or less common, particularly at morphou. the lefkara figs somewhat resemble those of tylliria and, like the latter, mature naturally; they are considered very good and are divided into two varieties, the "malantzana" and the "kourtziatika." the figs of ktema in paphos are the common violet-coloured variety, but are larger, and are mostly ripened artificially. cyprus figs are only of moderate quality, though doubtless susceptible of improvement. they resist drought and generally yield good crops every year. the native dried fig is much eaten, and is also used as an adulterant of, if not a substitute for, coffee, and makes a good beverage, like the well-known austrian "feigen café." dried figs are also made into a paste and mixed with flour to make fig pies ("sykopitæ"). the method of oiling, that is, smearing with oil the orifice on the top of the fig while still unripe, is applied to those varieties which ripen slowly. it is these varieties which are especially grown in cyprus. the fruit so treated is rather tasteless and insipid, but as it comes early to market it fetches a good price. the reason for hastening the ripening process by oiling is that the fruit may become ready for picking before sparrows and hornets get it, as they would otherwise do at that season. the later crop is more or less immune from their attacks, as ripe corn is then abundant in the field or on the threshing-floor. figs first appear on the market in may. this early fruit is called "magiles" (possibly from maios-gilia = may production). the fruit is produced on the wood of the preceding year, from a bud which has remained dormant. the next crop appears about mid-july, and then the fruit is called by its proper name "syka." _cherries_ the principal and almost the only cherry-growing village in the island is pedoulas, in the marathassa valley. this village is about , ft. above the sea-level. the trees at that village do remarkably well, and they bring in a good revenue. they are mostly wild trees which have been grafted; but there are also a small number which have been raised from imported malaheb seed. from time to time good kinds of young grafted cherry trees have been imported from england by the agricultural department and grafts from these have been freely supplied to the village. there are two native varieties, one ("kerasi") which is almost exclusively grown at pedoulas, the other ("vysino") which is found fairly well distributed over the island. the former is pale yellow and pink, the latter is slightly smaller and less sweet and of a darkish-red colour, and is used mostly in making jam and preserves, while the "kerasi" is more for table purposes. more grafted trees are now coming into bearing and "white-hearts" are now sold in the bazaar at about cps. per oke. "black-hearts" are also beginning to make an appearance. efforts are being made to introduce the cherry tree to other hill villages, and there seems no reason why its cultivation should not become general in the higher parts of the island. this fruit travels well and a fine market awaits it in egypt. owing to the prohibition of fruit exports during the war, a small industry has grown up for drying the "kerasi." _banana_ the local name of the banana is sykiton adam (adam's fig), from the belief that adam made an apron of the leaves. there is some hope that the cultivation of this delicious fruit may become more taken up in cyprus than has hitherto been thought possible. paphos has for several years had the reputation of possessing fruit-yielding trees of good quality. offshoots from some of these have been transplanted to larnaca, and there are now several gardens in which a fair quantity of fruit ripens each year. at kyrenia and lapithos there are also a good number of trees. the fruit is of a different variety from that of paphos and larnaca, the shape being longitudinally angular, whereas the latter kind is longitudinally round and larger. five years ago the agricultural department obtained some special varieties from zanzibar. these are now beginning to yield fruit, and offshoots are being distributed in the island. _azarol hawthorn_ this hawthorn (_cratægus azarolus_), known locally as "mosphilia," grows wild scattered about over the country. the fruit makes an excellent jelly. the tree is an excellent stock on which to graft the pear tree. in the higher regions another species, _c. monogyna_, is found. _melons_ the western end of the messaoria plain is noted for its water-melons and sweet-melons. these are grown in "postania," a corruption of the persian word "bustan," a garden. they are cultivated only on irrigable land. at asha, where, perhaps, the best fruits are grown, the land is flooded by the river and no later watering, as a rule, takes place. through a well-grounded fear of theft, the grower and his family live in their "postania" during the season of marketing. reed shelters are erected, and the rolled-up beds and bedding with their white coverlets present a strange appearance. there is always a big local demand and a good yield is generally obtained from these "postania." high prices are paid for suitable melonland. the local names for the water-melons are "karpousia" or "paticha," and for the sweet-melons "piponia" or "tamboures." the cultivation of this fruit is general throughout the island. _date palm_ this tree grows promiscuously throughout the plains, produced mostly by accidental seeding. very little actual sowing takes place. the best groves are round about nicosia. the trunk-wood, being very hard and fibrous, is used in the construction of the old type of waterwheel ("alakati") and for beams in houses. it is also utilised as fuel in turkish baths as it burns slowly and gives out great heat. palm leaves are in demand for making various native baskets, specially the "zimpilia" for holding seed when sowing broadcast. hats are made from them in a few villages. the native varieties of date palm are not of high quality. they are: "baltchik," the fruit of which ripens on the tree; "phountouk" (hazelnut); "kourmouzou" (red); and "saraih" (yellow). the last three are artificially ripened when picked, by spraying them with a mixture of syrup and vinegar. the "baltchik" produces fruits suitable for fresh consumption. the "phountouk" is somewhat inferior. the other two have large fruits which are specially suited for preserving. two years ago the agricultural department imported from sudan the following varieties: "condeila," "bertamouta" and "barakawi." they suffered much on the journey and it is doubtful if more than two or three specimens will survive. as a rule dates ripen well in cyprus; gathering takes place from october to december. the clusters must generally be covered with sacking to protect them from birds. nuts _hazelnuts and cobnuts or filberts_ these nuts are collectively known in commerce as "small nuts." they are all, however, the produce of a species of _corylus_, the different kinds being distinguished by trade names according to their country of origin (see an article on "sources of supply of hazelnuts" in bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xiv. , pp. - ). in cyprus these are grown almost exclusively around a well-defined group of villages of the pitsillia, notably alona, palæchori, askas, platanistassa, phterikoudi, livadhia, agros, alithinou, saranti, polystipos. in this locality the plantations are thickly grown and good yields are obtained. it is doubtful whether there are other parts of the island equally well suited to this tree. hazelnuts, besides their use for dessert purposes and in the preparation of various nut foods, are employed largely as a cheap substitute for almonds, and in years when the latter are scarce, hazelnuts are in especially good demand. the cyprus nuts are outwardly of good size and appearance and are very attractive in the english market, but unfortunately they are usually picked before reaching full maturity, and consequently the kernels are frequently small and soon become rancid. being gathered when unripe they lose greatly in weight, which means loss of money to the exporters. the flavour is also impaired by premature picking and on this account cyprus nuts compare unfavourably in this respect with those from spain, and trebizond and other parts on the black sea, with which they have to compete. if growers would pay more attention to this point, cyprus hazelnuts would, owing to their size, hold a much better place than they do in the english market. the export of hazelnuts is not separately recorded, but the annual average production is stated to be approximately , okes. _walnuts_ some fine specimens of walnut trees are to be seen in the marathassa valley and in the neighbourhood of palæochori, and near mountain streams in several places among the slopes of the hills. these yield excellent fruit and are profitable to their owners, but unfortunately many trees have succumbed to the attacks of the codlin moth. special action has been taken during the last two years to deal with this pest. there has been a marked increase of late in the planting of young walnut trees. _almonds_ the cultivation of this tree has greatly extended of late. its drought-resisting properties enable it to withstand the climate of the plains and on the level slopes of both ranges it grows well. there are several large plantations, notably at psevdhas, larnaca district, where the famous jordan variety is found, and as the tree seems indifferent to soil, and thrives particularly well on the limestone which is so general throughout the island, it may be hoped that it will be greatly multiplied. both the soft- and the hard-shelled varieties are grown. much good work has lately been done in school gardens, under expert advice, in germinating the seed in damp sand. the villagers, finding the seedlings already to hand for planting, have been induced to plant them out. almonds are used as stocks on which to graft peaches, kaishas, apricots and plums ("mirabelles"). _spanish chestnut_ some years ago good numbers of the edible chestnut were raised at pedoulas by the agricultural department and distributed to villagers for growing in the hills. it is feared that the greater part of these trees, through want of attention, unsuitability of soil or climate, lack of moisture, and especially damage by goats, have been lost, but some remain and well-grown young trees may be found in certain localities and in moderate numbers among the mountains. as soon as adequate protection from goats can be given, this tree might be well worth more extensive cultivation. it prospers well when properly cared for, but will not thrive in soils containing more than about per cent. of lime or at an elevation below about , ft. the tree has been propagated almost entirely from seed, which must be as fresh as possible. no doubt one reason for the lack of interest hitherto shown in this tree by villagers is that it does not begin to fruit, as a rule, until about its twentieth year. _pistacia_ several species of _pistacia_ occur in cyprus, and although they yield products of different kinds, it will be convenient to deal with them together in the present section. the pistachio nut (_pistacia vera_), locally called "aleppo pistachio," is a native of persia and arabia and it was thought, until a few years ago, that it would not thrive in cyprus. that is, however, a fallacy, which is rather confirmed by the fact that the _p. terebinthus_ and the _p. lentiscus_ are indigenous to the island. it is considered that the best method of cultivation is to bud _p. vera_ on _p. terebinthus_. though they grow more slowly, these budded trees are more robust and better resist drought, cold and moisture. the trees should yield fruit in five years from the time of grafting. a fair number of these trees have now been distributed from the government nursery gardens. this tree provides the pistachio nuts which are now imported from syria and chios. male trees do not usually flower at the same time as female; consequently there has been difficulty in getting fruit with seeds, and recourse must in that case be had to artificial fertilisation. * * * * * the palestine or turpentine tree (_p. palæstina_), local name "trémithos," grows in certain parts of the island, but is seen at its best in the paphos district, especially in and around the town of ktima. the fruit is eaten fresh or salted and dried. it yields to per cent. of edible oil which has a certain local demand. a medium-sized tree may produce up to to okes of fruit. after crushing and expression, the residue together with the seed is found to be a good food for pigs. a small consignment of both the dried and salted fruit and of the residue was sold in egypt in and realised to cp. per oke for the former, and _s._ to _s._ per kilé for the latter. by making incisions in the trunks of both the male and the female trees a gum or turpentine known as "paphos tar" is obtained, which fetches as much as _s._ to _s._ per oke. it is used locally for chewing. this is one of the largest trees in the island and is of handsome shape. it is deciduous and some fine specimens are met with. * * * * * _pistacia lentiscus_, locally known as shinia, or shinia bush, abounds all along the coasts of the island. from the seeds of this shrub an oil is expressed which is used for culinary purposes, particularly for frying fish. the oil is also in good local demand for soap making, and a very fair soap is produced, especially at akanthou, in which the oil is the chief ingredient. the leaves of this shrub are largely used for tanning purposes and were at one time regularly exported to england, though in small quantities. the principal market for shinia leaves is palermo. they are employed to no small extent for the adulteration of sumach, for which palermo is also the leading market. shinia leaves were also in demand at lyons as a dyeing material for silk stuffs. there are also a few specimens of a variety of _p. lentiscus_ (mastic tree) from which in the island of chios the famous chios mastic is obtained by incisions made in the trunks of the male stocks. * * * * * the terebinth tree (_p. terebinthus_), locally called "tremithia," is a bush very widely grown throughout the higher regions. it is used as a stock on which to graft _p. vera_. the berries are used for extraction of oil which has a value for culinary purposes. they are also made into a cake called "tremithopites." the berries are much smaller than those of the _p. palæstina_. vegetables the cultivation of vegetables has considerably extended of late. good market gardens have existed in and around the principal towns for many years, but more attention is now being paid to this industry in the villages, wherever water is available, and a considerable amount of skill is shown in production. among the best and most generally grown vegetables are spinach, cauliflowers, cabbages, egg-plants, lady's fingers, leeks, artichokes, broad beans (also grown as a field crop), radishes, celery, beet-root, pumpkins, marrows, cucumbers, lettuces, tomatoes, lentils, kohl-rabi ("kouloumbra"), kidney beans ("phasoulia"), peas, kolokas, onions and potatoes. there is a considerable demand in egypt for fresh vegetables, and to meet this the land around the "ports" of famagusta, larnaca and limassol has been for some years specially devoted to their cultivation. in the mountain valleys a continuous series of small vegetable gardens may be seen flanking the sides of the river-banks. the exports of vegetables to egypt in recent years are given in the following table: beans and other year. onions. peas. vegetables. _cwts._ _cwts._ _cwts._ , , , , , , , , , _beans and peas_ beans are grown for market mainly at marathassa and pitsillia and generally in the higher regions, but only to a small extent in the plains. before the war there was a comparatively large importation of beans from anatolia. this having stopped, local prices rose and stimulated production in the island. the cypriot is a lover of dried vegetables, and there might well be an extension in the cultivation of beans, similar to that which has lately taken place in the case of green peas. except in one or two places, these were not sown by the villagers until about four years ago, but so valuable have they been found, especially in recent years of scarcity and high cost of other foodstuffs, that now whole districts are being devoted to their cultivation. the french or kidney bean (_phaseolus vulgaris_) is locally known under the general term "louvia." this name is applied both to _phaseolus vulgaris_ and to _dolichos melanophthalmus_ (_vigna catjang_ var. _sinensis_). to distinguish the two kinds the cypriot describes the _p. vulgaris_ as "louvia gliastra" (_i.e._ lustrous, owing to its shiny appearance), or "louvia peratica" (_i.e._ foreign), as _d. melanophthalmus_ was introduced and had become acclimatised some time before. gennadius, however, describes the "louvia peratica" as _dolichos lablab_ or lablab bean. both the dwarf ("koutsoulia") and the climbing ("makrya" or "anarichomena") varieties of _p. vulgaris_ are grown. there are two white kinds, the large ("adra") and the small ("psintra"). beans of various colours are grown here and there, and one spotted variety ("patsaloudhia") merits greater attention than it receives at present, both on account of its greater productiveness and for its excellent flavour. two of these are stringless, but a drawback to them is that they discolour the water in which they are boiled. there are several newly imported kinds which are privately grown, and these are gradually coming into the local markets. the lubia or cow-pea (_dolichos melanophthalmus_ = _vigna catjang_ var. _sinensis_), being a good drought-resister, is grown more or less throughout the island. it is frequently sown in mixed crop with cotton, sesame, indian corn, etc. two kinds are cultivated--the larger, "lubia melissomatia" (having the eye like a bee), and the smaller, "lubia mavromatoudhia" (dark-eyed). the dried pods of _phaseolus_ and _dolichos_ are fed to animals and are also used for stuffing mattresses. the broad bean (_vicia faba_) has been grown for some years on irrigated land in the plains, where it takes a recognised place in the rotation. its cultivation is now spreading to the higher parts. the soy bean was introduced a few years ago by the agricultural department, but has failed hitherto to attract attention. villagers find it requires different cooking from what they are accustomed to, and local dealers are not yet prepared to deal in it. it has been found resistant to disease, and further efforts are being made to bring it into popular favour. the ochrus vetch (_lathyrus ochrus_), locally known as "louvana," is a fairly common spring crop, being grown for the sake of the seed which provides a favourite cypriot dish. the leaves are also used as a salad. this crop is sown in the plains in january, but in the karpas and some other parts it is sown in the autumn. chick-peas (_cicer arietinum_), locally called "revithia," grow well and are cultivated to a moderate extent. samples examined at the imperial institute proved to be of normal composition. two firms of produce brokers in london stated that if quantities of about tons at a time could be delivered in england in as good a condition as the sample they could be sold for human consumption and would be worth ( ) £ to £ per ton c.i.f., united kingdom ports. if of inferior quality to the sample they would be fit only for cattle food and fetch considerably less (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xv. , p. ). chick-peas when roasted are locally called "koudames" and are eaten in the same way as ground-nuts, which they much resemble in flavour. they are little, if at all, used in cyprus as a cattle food. _potatoes_ the potato-growing industry in cyprus has developed considerably in recent years, as will be seen from the subjoined table of exports: year. quantity. value. _cwts._ £ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , these figures, however, are a very inadequate indication of the actual increase of production, inasmuch as the local consumption of this vegetable before the war was confined almost entirely to the well-to-do residents in the towns, whereas now it is rapidly becoming a staple food of the people. this unascertainable but large local consumption must be added to the latest export returns in order to arrive at an estimate of present production. the most favoured variety was at first, and with many growers still is, what is known as the french potato, the original seed having been brought from france. irish potatoes (locally called "pittakoura") have now largely displaced these, partly, no doubt, on account of the greater facility of obtaining the latter seed during the war. a native variety of potato, believed to have been imported by syrian arabs in the sixteenth century, is still grown on a small scale in the marathassa valley. this potato has deep-set eyes and a luxuriant growth above ground and possesses a characteristic sweet taste. great progress has been made within the last few years in the matter of cultivation, and the old practice of planting broadcast on the flat has given way to ridge planting at proper distances apart. the practice formerly was to drop the potatoes into the plough furrow. these were covered over by the return plough; every third furrow was sown. the egyptian demand and the purchases made for military purposes have greatly stimulated production. the good prices obtained have led, particularly in the famagusta district and in what are called the "red earth" villages, to much activity and no small outlay in the matter of water-supply and distribution, and in the use of chemical manures. the custom has grown up for importers to send their seed potatoes for planting in the higher parts of the island. the produce therefrom is exchanged with growers in the plains, who send up their plain-grown tubers as seed to the cultivators in the hills. merchants often stipulate with the hill-growers that they shall have their crop at an agreed, and generally a fairly high, figure. in this manner degeneration of the seed has been retarded; but owing to the difficulty of obtaining seed from outside during the war a certain amount of degeneration has taken place. only one crop can be grown in the hills during the year, but in the plains two crops are obtained. the one is planted in january and is dug in may-june; the other is planted in july and dug in november. it is found that the tubers lifted in the summer suffer greatly from the heat, and heavy losses occur from rot, whether the tubers remain in the ground or if they are dug and stored; and it is a question whether, when these losses are taken into account, the summer crop is really profitable. the average yield is sometimes put at , okes per donum, but , okes, or tons, is probably a more accurate figure. _kolokas_ (_colocasia antiquorum_) this is a favourite food of the villager, but can only be grown where there is an ample water-supply and on heavy land that holds the water. it is an exhausting crop. the root only is eaten. it is sown in march-april and dug about october-november. _onions_ these are generally grown, especially in the paphos district; famagusta and limassol following in the order named. the paphos onions are supposed to have particularly good keeping qualities. both round ("strongyla") and long varieties ("tolmalikia") are grown; the latter have less fleshy scales than the former. onions are grown either in irrigated gardens or in "livadhia," or low-lying lands which retain their moisture, no irrigation being needed. they are propagated by means of "konari" or bulblets. lapithos in the kyrenia district makes a speciality of producing these from seed and supplying them to the whole island, although onions are grown for market only on a limited scale in that area. the method is to plant out the full-grown onions (locally called "mammes") and leave them to ripen their seed. the seed is sown in february-march, at the rate of - okes per donum, from which some , okes of "konari" are raised. these are then sold for planting out in october-november-december at the rate of - okes per donum. onions are grown either in rows or broadcast. the native variety has the outer scales of a reddish colour, but these have largely given way to superior imported kinds. fodders and feeding stuffs _carob tree_ the carob (_ceratonia siliqua_) is indigenous in syria, and probably also in the northern countries of africa, whence it presumably spread to certain parts of asia minor, to greece, the greek islands and southern italy. at the time of christ, and for some centuries later, this tree was known to the greeks by the name of keronia or keratea, being the greek for horns, and is given to the locust or carob bean from its supposed resemblance to goats' horns. it is also known in different parts of cyprus under the following names; teratsia (a corruption of keratea), xylokeratea, kountouroudia, koutsoupia and charoupia. the last named is of arabic origin (kharroub) and the same root of the word is common all over europe. moreover, the fruit varies slightly according to locality, and develops local characteristics which have acquired for it distinctive local names; thus in kyrenia district we have templiotiké and kyrionitiké, in the karpas there is the sarakine (introduced by saracens?) and elsewhere the vaklitiké and komboté. this bean or pod, which when ripe is of a chocolate colour, contains from to hard seeds, embedded in a sweet, pithy, honey-like substance which imparts the flavour so much appreciated by animals. the carob tree belongs to the natural order leguminosæ, sub-order caesalpinæ, and is the only species of the genus _ceratonia_. it is an evergreen, long-lived tree, growing to a height of ft. and sometimes even to and ft. it thrives in most kinds of soil, especially in porous, marly and even volcanic soils, but not in marshy lands. owing to its long tap root it resists drought well, and is to be found growing well in rocky land such as is common in many of the carob areas of cyprus. it is very generally found intermixed with the olive tree and up to about the same altitude. a succession of flowers is produced from july to september or october, and in favourable years up to december and even later, and in july-august the tree bears both flowers and ripe fruit. the collection of the latter commences about mid-august, the exact date being annually fixed separately in each district by the commissioner. this is done in order to prevent the fruit from being stolen. recent investigations made by the agricultural department go to prove that the fruit-producing carob tree of cyprus is really hermaphrodite, though there yet remains much room for investigation and the point is not finally settled. the others are true male trees. the hermaphrodite carob trees which form practically the whole of the fruit-producing trees of the island are cleistogamous (_i.e._ self-fertilised before the calyx opens) and short-stamened. there are also certain trees self-produced from seed which are superior to the ordinary so-called wild tree. these bear fruit which is straight and short but more or less marketable, and these are known as "kountoura" (short) or "apostoliki," as though sent by chance or by providence. the word "apostoliki" is applied in cyprus to other kinds of trees or fruit showing similar phenomena. there are several millions of these trees in the state forests, and yet more privately owned. it frequently happens that, owing to the wide powers of testamentary disposition, a single tree passes by inheritance to several heirs. many thousands of carob plants are annually raised in the government gardens and issued at a trifling charge. the common method of propagation has been to sow the seeds in pots, and when the plant is from in. to ft. high it is ready for transplanting. the seed, which is very hard, is softened by placing it in a cauldron or saucepan of cold water. the water is then brought to the boil. on arriving at boiling-point the water is cooled and should then be changed and the seed left to steep for twenty-four hours. owing to the long tap root, sowing in ordinary nursery beds has not been satisfactory, as the plants, which certainly make better growth than in pots, do not transplant well. the foregoing methods have to a great extent been superseded by that of germinating the seed in damp sand and sowing direct in the field in properly prepared holes. little watering is needed if the holes are deep and the soil kept friable. a top mulch is useful to conserve the moisture. transplanting from pots or beds is best done when the plants are twelve months old and about in. high, after that it is precarious. grafting may be done as soon as the stem is thick enough to take a graft, either before or after transplanting. the tree is liable to attack by insects and other pests. scale (_aspidiotus ceratoniæ_) is very common; but the greatest damage of late years has been caused by the fly _cecidomyia ceratoniæ_, which lays its eggs on the flowers or newly-set fruit, and the grub feeds on the bean, causing it to become stunted and of no commercial value. this stunted condition is locally known as "brachycarpia" and has been the subject of careful scientific study and practical treatment by the agricultural department during the last few years. very satisfactory results have been recorded from the campaigns, which have so far been limited to the kyrenia district, and these have justified the extension of compulsory treatment to other infected areas. this and other pests, such as _myelois ceratoniæ_, _cossus liniperda_ (a lepidopterous boring insect), a species of _mycetiasis_, and a small hymenopterous fly which has lately appeared and is now under investigation, have, no doubt, checked production. the attacks of _cecidomyia_, when serious, reduce the yield by per cent. or over, and normally may lessen it by to per cent. much damage is also caused by rats (_mus alexandrinus_), which gnaw the bark of the branches, causing them to dry up. their destruction is encouraged by government by the payment of cp. per tail. carob gathering commences about mid-august and lasts for about a month. the beans are knocked down with long sticks, put into sacks and brought into store, or heaped up in the open air, where they often remain for several weeks. this is a safe procedure, as there is little rainfall at that season, and what might fall would not harm the beans, which would quickly dry again. it is not easy to estimate the yield per donum of carob trees, but assuming that the trees were planted ft. apart, and there were medium-sized trees to the donum, the yield would average somewhere about , okes to the donum. the yield varies from year to year, a good year generally being followed by a moderate year. the fruit may be destroyed by frost in january and february, knocked off by hail-stones in march and april or scorched by hot winds in may or june. a full-sized, well-cultivated tree can give up to okes. taking good and bad years, the value of the annual produce of a medium-sized tree is _s_. carobs are sold by the aleppo cantar of okes, and the normal price may be put at from _s._ to _s._ per cantar delivered into store. carobs are weighed on export and the tithe is taken in money from exporters at the customs house. the following table shows the export of carobs during the ten years ending - : year. quantity. value. _tons._ £ - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , - , , the falling-off in - was mainly due to the losses caused by the fly _cecidomyia ceratoniæ_. the fruit of the carob is exported mostly to england, but also to france and egypt, and more recently, before the war, to germany. gaudry mentions that about the middle of last century it was exported to russia, sardinia and austria. some is used, in egypt and the levant especially, as food for the poorer classes and for making sweets and sherbets. its chief use in western europe is as food for animals, bovine and equine, for which purpose it is ground up and made into either meal or cattle cakes. it is also said to be employed in the manufacture of chocolate and spirit, and there is a demand for the seed for use in the manufacture of certain gums. the juice of the bean, "carob honey," locally called "mavromelos," "teratsomelo" or "betmezi," is consumed as a substitute for bee-honey or jam and also as a flavouring for culinary purposes. from the carob honey is also made the sweetmeat "pastelli." at one time carobs were used in cyprus for fattening mules and other animals, but, unfortunately, this practice died out. efforts are now being made to revive it, and the advantages of this local product are again becoming recognised. the carob contains some per cent. of saccharine matter and the interesting question has been raised in recent years as to whether the bean might not become a new source of sugar production. _lucerne_ (_medicago sativa_) this plant was introduced about eighteen years ago, but in spite of its undoubted success when properly grown on suitable soil, the cypriot farmer was for many years very slow to make use of it. every effort has been made of late years to encourage its cultivation and during the last three or four years there has been a steadily increased demand for seed. irrigation is necessary in order to obtain a satisfactory yield, but there are many farms where it might be grown with great advantage. its value for cattle food is generally recognised, and now that greater attention is being given to dairy cattle, lucerne would seem to have an assured future. _vetch_ (_vicia ervilia_) this plant, known locally as "rovi," is undoubtedly the most widely grown of the fodder crops. being a leguminous plant, it has a restorative action on the soil, although the average cypriot farmer still considers it to be exhaustive. in the plains sowing begins in january, whereas in the pitsillia, and even in the morphou, solea and tylliria districts which are only at the foothills, it is sown in october-november, _i.e._ before the cereals. rovi is almost the only food in the form of seed given to ploughing oxen throughout the east. it is regarded as heat-giving and strengthening, and is therefore fed specially in winter. it is sometimes given unthreshed with the straw. it is harvested in may, when it is uprooted, made into little bundles, which are stacked together in small heaps in the field, until they turn yellow, when they are removed to the native threshing-floor and threshed in the customary manner. the dry stems, etc., are eagerly eaten by cattle and sheep. the average yield is very little, from to or kilés per donum. it is subject to tithe. _chickling vetch_ (_lathyrus sativus_) the chickling vetch, known locally as "favetta" or "chavetta," has come rather more into prominence of late years, displacing the vetch (_vicia ervilia_) to some extent, as it gives a heavier yield. it is subject to tithe. _vetch_ (_vicia sativa_) this crop, called locally "vicos," was introduced from crete in and has been found excellently suited to this country. it is most useful in any rotation, and has to some extent supplanted rovi (_vicia ervilia_) as it gives a larger yield. it is a most nutritious cattle food, for which purpose it is grown. when crushed and mixed with chopped straw it is readily eaten by cattle and sheep. the plant seeds itself very freely. it is sown about november-december and is ready for harvesting in about april. seed is sown at the rate of to okes per donum and the yield is normally from to kilés per donum. it is a good drought-resister and needs no irrigation, and being a leguminous plant should be cut and not pulled up, as the roots left in the soil serve to increase the amount of nitrogenous salts. being a vetch it is subject to tithe. _tares_ (_vicia tenuifolia_ var. _stenophylla_) this plant, locally called "mavracheron" or "phakacheron," grows wild in the pitsillia district among the vineyards and other cultivated as well as uncultivated lands. it is of value in those remote localities where grain and straw are little grown and difficult to procure, as it provides a wholesome fodder for cattle. the villagers have now taken to cultivating the plant. it is cut before the seeds are fully matured to prevent loss of seed through shedding. the seeds and chaff are mixed together when fed to cattle. _milk vetch_ (_astragalus_) this plant, locally called "arkokoutsia," grows wild in some abundance among the hills. when it appears above ground it is readily eaten by animals, especially sheep; but at this stage it is apt to cause hoven. as the plant hardens the animals do not touch it, except when fully ripe, and then it is greedily eaten. as soon as it blossoms, but before the fruit is set, the plant is gathered and tied into bundles or small sheaves and stored in a heap. when, after a few months, it is quite dry, and at a time when other foods are scarce, it forms an important part of an animal's ration. the plants are sometimes allowed to mature their seeds, and these, after being steeped in water for two or three days to remove acidity, are given to pigs, and are considered a nourishing and palatable food. _moha, sulla_ (_hedysarum_) these have been tried for some years with success and are gradually becoming known and experimentally grown by farmers. _teosinte_ (_reana luxurians_) this grass is one of the most valuable fodder plants with which the new world has enriched the old. it is a native of guatemala and is also largely grown in australia. seed was first imported into cyprus by the agricultural department in , and since then the plant has been continuously grown in the government gardens with marked success. it is sown in march-april in the same manner as indian corn, to which it is allied. if irrigated, three or four cuttings may be obtained during the summer, yielding to tons of green food per scala. it is greedily eaten by cattle. some plants grown by the department attained a height of ft. in. and of others which were left to ripen their seed, one had stems and weighed okes, though the leaves had begun to shrivel and had lost weight. this plant is gradually becoming known and may be found growing on some of the more progressive farms. _sudan-grass_ seed of this fodder grass was imported in and very satisfactory crops have been obtained each year since then from the experimental plots. the grass seems well suited to cyprus and gives a useful yield even when unirrigated. occasional irrigation produces a valuable crop. trial sowings are now being made on a few private farms. _teff-grass_ (_eragrostis abyssinica_) this has also been tried experimentally with good results and it is hoped that its cultivation will extend as it becomes more known. _mangold wurzel_ this crop has been grown for several years at the government farm, athalassa, where it has done well and forms an important part of the cows' rations. it has been grown successfully on a small scale in some of the nursery gardens. as irrigation, deep ploughing, thorough cultivation of the soil and special cultural operations are needed, this crop cannot be generally recommended to farmers, but it is being grown by a few progressive stock owners under departmental advice. the wild beet (_beta vulgaris_) is a native of the seacoasts of south-eastern europe, and the garden beet-root is much grown in cyprus in certain localities, so, if carefully cultivated, mangold wurzel, which is a variety of _b. vulgaris_, might also do well in many parts and be of great advantage to stock owners. _prickly pear_ (_opuntia_) the prickly pear grows wild as a hedge plant in cyprus. the fruit is eaten to some extent by villagers, but no attempt has yet been made to use the stems as food for animals. in sicily very large quantities are so utilised, and now that milch cows are coming more into demand in cyprus the value of the plant for fodder may become recognised. successful experiments have been made by the agricultural department in mixing the juice of the stems with lime for giving brilliance and permanence to ordinary whitewash. there has been an occasional export of the fruit to egypt for consumption by arabs. spices _coriander seed_ coriander seed is the product of _coriandrum sativum_, linn., an annual herb belonging to the natural order umbelliferæ. the "seed," or more strictly fruit, of the plant is employed in confectionery in making bonbons, in the preparation of certain liqueurs and as an ingredient for disguising the taste of medicines. in cyprus it is commonly used as a flavouring in cooking. a sample sent to the imperial institute in was examined as a source of volatile oil, and the residue remaining after distillation was analysed as a feeding-stuff. on steam distillation the ground seed yielded . per cent. of an almost colourless volatile oil with the characteristic and pleasant odour of coriander. this yield is below that furnished by russian and german coriander, but is about equal to that obtained from morocco seed. the results of the examination indicate that the residue has a fairly high feeding-value, and it would be quite suitable for the ordinary use of coriander residue, _i.e._ as a cattle food. a sample of the seeds was submitted to brokers in london, who reported that they were very stalky, but that their value would be from _s._ to _s._ per cwt. (january ) as compared with _s._ to _s._ per cwt. before the war. (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xv. , p. ). _aniseed_ aniseed, the fruit of an umbelliferous herb (_pimpinella anisum_, linn.), is grown on a comparatively small scale in cyprus, the exports in recent years varying from , to , cwts. per annum. in , , cwts., valued at £ , , were exported, all of which went to egypt. seed sent for examination to the imperial institute was reported to consist of aniseed in good condition and practically free from extraneous matter. a sample of the seed was submitted to brokers in london, who stated that at that time (january ) stocks of aniseed were quite exhausted, and the prices therefore much inflated, small stocks of spanish aniseed having changed hands in london at _s._ per cwt. such price could not be secured if any quantity of aniseed were placed on the market. the value of the cyprus sample before the war would have been about _s._ _d._ per cwt. (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xv. , p. ). white cumin seed white cumin is also an umbelliferous herb (_cuminum cyminum_, linn.); an account of the cultivation and uses of this and other spices is given in the bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xi. , pp. - . a sample of the seed sent to the imperial institute was submitted to brokers in london, who stated that it was rather small and stalky, but that it would probably be worth between _s._ and _s._ per cwt. (january ), although they were of opinion that its pre-war value would not have been much over _s._ per cwt. (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xv. , p. ). _black cumin seed_ these seeds, sometimes known as fennel-flower seeds, are the product of _nigella sativa_, linn. (nat. ord. ranunculaceæ). the plant is an annual, native to the mediterranean region, and the seeds, which are used in the east for flavouring curries, etc., and in egypt as comfits on cakes, have an aromatic fennel-like odour when fresh and a slightly acrid taste. there is a small export of black cumin seed from cyprus. there is, however, but little demand for this seed (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xv. , p. ). essential oils and perfumes _origanum oil_ different opinions have been held as to the botanical identification of the plant from which the cyprus origanum oil is produced. an interesting series of articles on this subject by e. m. holmes appears in the _perfumery and essential oil record_, , from which it would seem that this oil is derived from _origanum majoranoides_, wild.; while dr. stapf, of kew, regards the plant as _o. dubium_, boiss. (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xi. , p. ). other varieties growing wild in cyprus are _o. onites_, _o. hirtum_, both of which are locally called "rigani," _o. bevani_ (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xv. , p. ) and _o. majorana_. in its wild state the plant from which origanum oil is distilled is a small perennial shrub, but, if cultivated, its size may be doubled or even trebled. the first crop, consisting of shoots and flowers, may give from to okes per donum; in subsequent years up to , - , okes per donum. the latter quantity would produce to okes of origanum oil, which is largely used in england for perfuming soap and other purposes. for twenty years the distillation of origanum oil has been made under government control. the industry was started in and, though not large, has steadily grown. it has been found that the cyprus origanum oil is exceptionally rich in carvacrol (over per cent.), a powerful antiseptic, and to this substance the oil owes mainly its characteristic thyme-like odour. frequent analyses have shown that the cyprus origanum oil is remarkably constant in character. this oil has the slight disadvantage of darkening considerably on exposure to light and air, which renders it unsuitable for use in light-coloured soaps, but a method has been worked out at the imperial institute of refining the oil so as to yield a product which will remain practically colourless for long periods. a report furnished by the imperial institute (bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. iv. , p. ), after giving a detailed description of the oil, states: "the foregoing results show that this oil sells readily in this country at prices which should be fairly remunerative to producers in cyprus. it should, however, be borne in mind that the demand for this oil is somewhat limited, and that it competes with the thyme oil produced in france and spain, and with the 'origanum oil' produced in smyrna, and that consequently a sudden increase in production in cyprus might lead to a considerable fall in price. the cyprus oil has, however, the advantage that it is very rich in the odorous and antiseptic constituent carvacrol, and it is probably due to its richness in this constituent, as revealed by the analyses made at the imperial institute, that the comparatively high prices realised for these consignments were obtained at a time when 'red thyme oils' were selling at lower rates. it would be advantageous if a refined white oil could be prepared by some simple method from this material, as this probably would fetch an enhanced price, and be applicable to other purposes for which the 'red oil' is unsuitable." until the distillation was made by the department, but since then it has been undertaken by private contract, permission being given to collect the wild plant from the forest. the annual production is now about , lb., and the price has steadily risen from about _s._ per lb. to _s._ _d._ per lb. at the present time. but whereas the cost of transport to london before the war was £ per ton, it has risen to the prohibitive rate of £ per ton, and the oil still remains in store at alexandria. the supply of the wild plant is limited and its cultivation is under consideration. the following table shows the exports of origanum _oil_ in recent years: year. quantity. _lb._ , no distillation , , , , , , [ ] , , , , , , , , , _marjoram oil_ this is not yet a regular product, but samples of locally produced oil have been examined at the imperial institute and pronounced to be superior to european marjoram oil and about equal in value to sweet fennel oil (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xi. , p. ). it is distilled from a plant which is abundant in the forests of kyrenia and paphos, and which has been referred by dr. stapf to _o. majoranoides_, wild., and by mr. holmes to _o. maru_, linn. the market is, however, restricted. _laurel oil_ samples of oil distilled from the leaves of _laurus nobilis_ which were examined at the imperial institute were found to have an aroma inferior to that of the oils usually met with in commerce (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xi. , p. ). the demand for the oil is said to be small. _otto of roses_ this has been prepared since in a very small way with native stills at the village of milikouri, where the damask rose is abundant. the cultivation of this rose has now spread to other hill villages. the closing of the market for bulgarian otto of roses owing to the war has given an impetus to the industry in cyprus. the agricultural department has for two years sent qualified officers to superintend the work at milikouri and to carry out an experimental distillation. a report from the director, imperial institute, upon samples of the distillation states that "the constants of the cyprus oil agree closely with those recorded for bulgarian otto of roses." it was found that the odour of the cyprus oil was fairly good, but rather weak. the otto sold at _s._ per ounce, less - / per cent., which "in view of the very small quantity must be considered satisfactory." at the time of sale french otto was quoted at _s._ to _s._ per ounce. _acacia farnesiana_ this tree is but sparsely represented in cyprus, but wherever found it is vigorous and healthy. it belongs to the mimosa tribe of the order leguminosæ and, as other species are common in the island and thrive remarkably well, there would seem no reason why this species also should not become more general. it is known elsewhere under different names; that of "sweet briar" (in barbados) on account of its numerous thorns and the exquisite scent of its flowers, and "stinking cossie" (in antigua) owing to the highly disagreeable smell of its wood. the word "cossie" may be a corruption of acacia. its flowers are largely used in perfumery, and the annual crop of the flowers of this plant in france is stated to be worth thousands of francs, and a particularly delicate fragrant perfume is extracted from them. the pods are said to yield a fair amount of tannin, while from the cracks in the bark of the trunk and branches there exudes a gum very like the true gum arabic and is utilised for the same purpose. the wood makes good charcoal. it is locally known as "skouroupathos" or "skouroupathia," and is closely allied to the extremely common weed of that name which is found abundantly in nearly every field in the plains during summer, but which, owing to its deep-rooted system, the natives do not trouble to eradicate. it is also allied to _prosopis juliflora_ or algaroba tree, of which there are a few specimens in the island. oils and oil seeds _olives_ the olive tree grows wild in cyprus, but the wild fruit is small and bitter and yields an inferior oil. the cultivated trees are those which have been grafted. owing to the stringent regulations which have prohibited the introduction of living plants from abroad, it has not been possible to obtain from elsewhere good grafts of new varieties. these regulations have lately been modified to allow of importations by the agricultural department under special restrictions, and now that the war has ended it is hoped to obtain these much-needed olive grafts. this tree thrives well, almost all over the island, up to an altitude of about , ft., and numbers of vigorous wild olive trees are to be met with, which only need cleaning and grafting in order to bear fruit. cyprus olives are divided into two classes, locally known as (_a_) "adrouppes" or "drouppes," which are eaten in the green or black stage, and (_b_) "ladoelies," which are suitable both for eating and for oil extraction. of the former, or "adrouppes," one kind is rather large, with rough skin, having a rough, big stone, the other is longer but of less diameter, and has a very thin, smooth skin and the stone is smooth, curved and smaller. the latter has a better taste and resembles the well-known greek olive of calamata. both these "adrouppes" are prepared for the table while still green, and are known as "kolymbates," or sometimes they are called "tsakkistes," owing to the stone being slightly crushed in the process of preparation. the "ladoelies" are of two distinct varieties, the larger of which is mostly regarded as an edible olive, and contains a less percentage of oil, while the other, or smaller kind, is richer in oil contents, and is mainly used for oil production, though it is sometimes eaten. a few imported varieties, including one or two specimens of spanish and greek olive trees, are to be found here and there in private gardens. if the land were manured and ploughed the trees would, especially on the chalky soils, yield abundant fruit and oil of excellent quality. unfortunately this is not done, and it has been found very difficult to induce the peasants to adopt any kind of cultivation. they plough the land only when they intend to sow corn or other crops between the trees, a procedure which tends to lessen the productiveness of the trees. the system of irrigation applied is also very defective. irrigation, while improving the quality and quantity of edible olives, is not desirable in the case of press olives. as to pruning, cypriots would have none of it until within the last five years. by dint of patient and constant persuasion, some few of the larger owners were induced to let their trees be pruned by a staff of pruners under the direction of the agricultural department (see plate vi). much ridicule--and at times threats--was hurled at both the pruners and the tree owners, who were assured by the villagers that for their folly they would undoubtedly lose their trees. the results belied all these fears, and now within the space of some four to five years the practice of pruning has become fairly general, and a good number of villagers have qualified themselves as expert pruners and are kept regularly employed by private persons. as a consequence of this a great amelioration is noticeable in the olive trees in many parts and the yield and quality of olives have been improved. the method of gathering olives by beating, however, continues. the fruit so knocked to the ground becomes dirty and bruised, and quickly ferments, when stored, to the detriment of the oil. this mode of gathering by beating damages the young twigs and branches, whose bearing capacity the following year is thus impaired. little care is taken in selecting the olives for oil. not only are they dirty and bruised, but unripe or diseased fruit, as well as overripe fruit that has fallen from the tree, is collected together indiscriminately. [illustration: plate vi. pruned olive-trees at metochi of kykos.] the usual practice is to spread out the olives as received, and unsalted, on the mud roofs of houses in order to give off a part of their water before grinding. the procedure is then as follows: they are first of all taken to the crusher or grinding mill. this consists not of two stones, as in greece, but of one stone, drawn by pony, mule or donkey. for the first quality of oil the olive stones should not be broken, but generally speaking, insufficient care is paid to this and the stones are, for the most part, crushed. the crushed olives (zimari, paste) are then removed to the press, which is worked by hand, with one exception of an hydraulic press at akanthou. at this village, where the best olive oil is produced, the olives are brought direct from the trees to the mill, whereas elsewhere the practice is to leave them in a heap to ferment and they often become foul and covered with dust and dirt. in pressing with wooden presses, the zimari or crushed olives are placed in round bags made of plaited rushes. seven to ten of these are placed one on top of another in the press and the oil obtained is virgin oil (huile vierge). the bags are then removed and squeezed so as to change the position of the contents. they are then replaced in the press and hot water is poured into each bag. the oil obtained is of second quality. a third pressing is sometimes given. the yield is calculated at the rate of oke of oil to okes of olives. in the paphos district is produced a black oil with a very distinct flavour. this is due to the custom of boiling the olives before grinding. the demand for this inferior oil is confined to that district. in former days it was usual for the mills and presses to be worked in the open. this is now rarely the case, but may still be occasionally seen in parts of the paphos district and elsewhere. whether outdoors or indoors these mills and presses are soon allowed to become very unclean, and the rancid flavour which clings to the wood is quickly imparted to the oil, which possesses, for any but cypriots, a strong and unpleasant smell and flavour. there is a considerable residue or waste, which, if it could be utilised, would go far to meet the deficiency in the requirements for local consumption. there are a few good iron presses now in use. their superiority is generally recognised and, no doubt, now that the war is over, they will be imported in greater numbers. small inexpensive, cottage filters have been designed by the agricultural department and these are being adopted, though very gradually. the oil so filtered is greatly superior, but having acquired a more delicate flavour, it is not so much appreciated by the native consumers. large numbers of young wild olive trees are issued on permit from the state forests for private cultivation and many thousands of two- and three-year-old plants raised in the government nurseries are also distributed every year. with the gradual improvement in cultivation and in the preparation of the oil, the production should increase enormously. the local production of olive oil is insufficient for the requirements of the island, but there is no reason why, in the course of time, when the large number of trees newly planted and annually on the increase, come into bearing, a valuable export trade should not result. the figures of production, given in the table below, are strikingly fluctuating, and indicate the irregularity of the annual yield and the marked variation in price: year. quantity. value. _cwts._ £ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _sesame seed_ the annual production in cyprus of sesame seed (_sesamum indicum_) is said to be about , okes. it is one of the recognised summer crops in the plains, and is frequently sown together in the same field with cotton, maize, etc., and in the vine villages it is sown in the newly planted vineyards, where it does well. in such cases the preparation of the soil is done on the same lines as for cotton, maize, vines, etc. the seed is used mainly for the extraction of the oil, which is largely employed in cooking, and it is also used in the preparation of sweetmeats; it is added sometimes as a condiment in bread-making. there is a small export, principally through egypt. the percentage of oil extracted varies according to the locality where the seed has been produced. of the local product, that from paphos gives the highest yield, viz. to per cent.; but this is inferior to the egyptian product, which is to some extent imported and yields to per cent. of oil, this being probably due to the thinner skin. the crop is uncertain. the plant is readily affected by the hot west wind ([greek: libas]) which not infrequently blows during its period of growth. the development of the seed is thereby checked and it remains thin and small ([greek: psalios]), and naturally the oil yield is diminished. _ground nut, peanut or monkey nut_ (_arachis hypogæa_) this nut is fairly popular among all classes and is imported through egypt in moderate quantities. there is no reason why in certain localities this plant should not be grown successfully, more especially in the light sandy soils around varosha and at syrianochori. efforts have been made to induce cultivators to grow this crop, but so far it has not commended itself. it calls for something a little out of the ordinary in the way of cultivation, as the plants mature their fruits under the soil; the profit to be derived from the crop is uncertain, and is thought, though without sufficient proof, to compare unfavourably with rival crops. growers have been somewhat deterred by the ease with which the fruit can be stolen. as this is hidden under the soil, a theft is not at once detected. these drawbacks probably explain its restricted cultivation. should oil-extracting machinery be introduced, these nuts might well be grown for their oil, both for culinary purposes and for use in soap-making. the residuum, after extraction of the oil, and the haulm are nutritious cattle foods. the importation of these nuts was recently prohibited except in a roasted condition, owing to the risk of their introducing plant pests when in the raw, earth-encrusted condition. this has tended to check importation, and may perhaps give an impetus to local production. ground nuts can be grown, of course, only where irrigation is possible. the quantity of ground nuts imported in was , cwts., valued at _£_ , . previous to that year they were not separately enumerated. _castor-oil seed_ the castor-oil plant (_ricinus communis_) is only grown to a small extent, but the tree usually thrives well and its cultivation might be extended with advantage. according to gennadius, dioscorides claimed that it used to be called seseli of cyprus, from which the inference may be drawn that the plant has long been among the flora of the island, where it is now known as a perennial. it grows very freely from seed and rapidly attains a height of or ft.; but it quickly dies back after a slight frost, though it recovers again the following year. it appears to do well in most soils, but thrives best in light loam with moderate moisture. owing to the demand for the oil, one or two plantations have lately been made by the agricultural department. the varieties locally grown include plants producing large, medium and small-sized seed. trial cultivations are being made to ascertain their relative values. it is found that a heavier yield of better quality is usually obtained where the plant is treated as an annual and not as a perennial. four samples of castor seed examined at the imperial institute were found to contain normal amounts of oil, and similar seed would be readily saleable in the united kingdom if offered in commercial quantities (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xvii. , p. ). fibres _cotton_ during the time of the venetian occupation ( - ) cyprus exported annually from seven to fifteen million pounds of raw cotton. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the english levant company sent large quantities from cyprus to england. when the scarcity of cotton occasioned by the american civil war gave a stimulus to its growth cyprus took part in meeting the demand, and in over , , lb. were exported. since then the production has declined. in former times, then, the production of cyprus cotton must have been very large, as cotton manufactures in the island were, as in most cotton-producing countries in the east at that period, both considerable and of choice quality. cyprus was always distinguished for its cotton spinning. gennadius suggests that the karpas, which is one of the centres of the cyprus cotton manufacture, derived its name from the ancient "karpasos," a fine cotton cloth which came from india. there is an old hebrew word "karpas" found in the old testament, and derived from the sanscrit "karpasa," cotton, or "karpasum," cotton cloth. during the turkish administration cotton cultivation declined, owing to the destruction of aqueducts, venetian wells, etc., and to the practice of taxing the cotton crop in the field before it was picked--a cause of considerable delay and detriment to the crop. careless cultivation and consequent deterioration of the fibre as well as the general fall in value contributed to the decay of the industry. taxing the crop in the field was abandoned in , and a tithe was levied on exported cotton only (_handbook of cyprus_). the species of cotton principally cultivated in the island is _gossypium herbaceum_. american "new orleans" seed was introduced some twenty years or so ago, and this has now largely displaced the original native kind; in fact the native kind has almost entirely disappeared, and what little is grown is mostly used for stuffing the native bed-quilt or "paploma." cotton grown without irrigation is known as "dry" cotton. it is grown chiefly in the messaorian plain and in the karpas; it is harsh to the touch and short in staple, but of satisfactory colour. "wet" cotton is grown on irrigated land; it is usually of larger staple and of finer quality than the "dry" cotton and commands a higher price. this is grown mainly round about kythrea, nisou, dali, lapithos and in the solea valley. native cotton is always grown "dry"; the ordinary american variety is grown both "wet" and "dry." the karpas cotton, which is "dry" grown, is inferior not only on account of its shorter staple, but on account of the method of picking. in some places of messaoria, at dali, nisou, etc., the "dry" and sometimes the "wet" cotton is picked in the morning before the dew has quite evaporated, and it is picked direct from the growing plant. but the most general practice is for the villagers to cut the bolls early in the morning before the dew is evaporated ([greek: pornê]), transport them to the houses and then remove the lint at their leisure. in this way the bolls are more or less crushed and the lint when removed contains a mixture of husk, leaves, etc. in the case of native and other varieties the lint of which adheres to the boll, the husks, leaves, etc., are removed from the bolls in the following way: the bolls are spread out on mats to dry in the sun; when sufficiently dry the bolls are put in a rotary sieve made of reeds and sticks, similar in make to the ordinary reed baskets of the country. each end of the sieve is closed, but it has an opening in the middle, about by - / to ft., which is closed by a small reed mat. the sieve is about to ft. long and to - / ft. in diameter. the bolls are dropped into the sieve through the opening and it is then revolved by hand by means of an axle which passes through it longitudinally. by this means most of the crushed husks and leaves fall through the interstices of the sieve. the native seed is usually grown on dry lands as it withstands drought. the "wet" cotton is mostly of the american variety. professor wyndham dunstan, f.r.s., in his _report on the agricultural resources of cyprus_ ( ), referred to the successful trials made with "sea island," "peterkin," "truitt's big boll," "culpepper big boll," and "allen's long staple." since then other varieties have been tried by the agricultural department, and while "allen's" and "truitt's" have continued to do well, good results have been obtained from "triumph" and "durango," both of which are early kinds and are therefore very suitable to the island. a report by the imperial institute on samples of "allen's improved," "mebane's early triumph" and "sakellaridis" cottons grown experimentally in cyprus in will be found in the bulletin of the imperial institute (vol. xv. , p. ). owing to fear of locusts, late sowing (about may-june) became rather general. this is a dangerous practice as the bolls ripen late and much cotton is spoilt by the early autumn rains. it is mostly sown broadcast or in trenches; on irrigated land it is mostly sown in the ridges, but the older practice of sowing broadcast still, unfortunately, continues. "dry" cotton is usually sown either on land which can be irrigated by a river when in flood, or in "livadhia" or low-lying lands which retain their moisture a long time. in the former case the seed is sown about march-april, while the soil is still damp from rain water or from river overflow. it is generally expected that when the young plants are fairly established a second irrigation from flood-water may occur. in the "livadhia" the seed is sown later. "wet" cotton is watered about every fortnight. the crop begins to be collected in mid-september and continues up till the end of october. "dry" cotton is rarely manured; "wet" cotton occasionally. the use of chemical manures is coming into practice. there are several ginning machines in the island, but baling by hydraulic presses is done almost exclusively at larnaca. in the island the cotton seed is used for sowing and for feeding cattle. the exports of cotton seed have been: year. quantity. value. _cwts._ £ , , , , , , , the exports represent about three-fourths of the total production. there should be a good opening for machinery for extracting the oil. the cotton is locally graded into ( ) best, ( ) medium, and ( ) poor, all being american varieties. the first quality is the "wet" or irrigated cotton. the second quality is grown mostly in the messaoria plain and at dali, nisou, potamia, kythrea, where it is partly irrigated by river floods. the third quality is "dry" and comes principally from the karpas. on the marseilles market the second quality has a value to per cent., and the third quality to per cent. less than the first quality. the first quality ranks in price at marseilles on about a level with american cotton. for some ten years greece has taken the leading place as an importer. before the war, cyprus cotton went chiefly to marseilles and greece, some also to trieste. only a very insignificant quantity goes to england. the freight to marseilles was about _s._ per ton, to trieste about _s._ per ton, while to england it averaged _s._ per ton. the market prices at marseilles and trieste were approximately the same, but at marseilles they were subject to a discount of - / per cent., whereas at trieste a discount of to per cent. was made. the trieste market, being small, was subject to sudden fluctuations and was therefore risky and less favoured by cypriot exporters. for several reasons the liverpool market has not been so attractive as that of marseilles. at liverpool and manchester quantities of not less than, say, bales are preferred, whereas marseilles would take smaller consignments of or bales. uniformity of type is required by manchester spinners, whereas the french factories are more ready to handle different types, including the shorter staples. cyprus merchants make no distinction as regards the varieties of cotton, whether "orleans," "sea island" or other kinds, and indeed they are scarcely competent to do so, as this requires special knowledge and experience. they buy in small quantities from many peasant growers and mix the produce in order to make up a fair consignment. in normal times there was always the further difficulty of obtaining direct transport to england, whereas to marseilles, trieste and also to greece the opportunities were more frequent. since the war greece has become much the largest buyer. owing to shortage of cotton on the greek market this commodity was purchased from cyprus rather than from liverpool, as the freight was lower and war risks much less; apart from the almost impossibility of obtaining tonnage. it was the practice before the war for cypriot merchants to sell c.i.f. piræus, but they could not continue this under recent conditions and now sell f.o.b. cyprus, and this practice is likely to continue. this f.o.b. cyprus price has lately been about the same as would ordinarily be obtained for c.i.f. liverpool. greece has many small filatures willing to take consignments of even bales, and the shipment direct or via alexandria is easier. a cyprus bale weighs about okes. the following figures, showing average annual exports of raw cotton at various pre-war periods, indicate the course of the cultivation: period. average quantity. average value. _cwts._ £ - . . . , , - . . . , , - . . . , , - . . . , , prices have varied, as is shown by the values of the following record years: quantity. value. average price. _cwts._ £ £ (highest export on record) , , ( nd ditto) . . . , , ( rd ditto) . . . , , ( th ditto) . . . , , ( th ditto) . . . , , in there were , donums under cotton cultivation. it is usual in some parts of the island, especially in the kyrenia district, to leave the crop in the ground for two or three years. this method of cropping is locally known as "palia" or old. it is found profitable to leave the cotton plants two or three years on irrigated land. the second-year crop usually gives the heaviest yield. the average yield of unginned cotton on irrigated land is about okes ( cwts.) per scala; but as much as okes can be obtained. "wet" cotton, best quality, yields oke of lint from okes of unginned cotton, and "dry" cotton yields about oke of lint from - / okes of unginned cotton. there is much land well suited to cotton which for lack of water cannot be utilised. if artesian water could be found, there would be a very considerable extension of this cultivation. there is a well-equipped little cotton factory at famagusta, and excellent cotton fabrics are made, especially in nicosia neighbourhood, lapithos and karavas, lefkonico and gypsos and in the karpas. these are known under the names of "alaja" and "dimita." they are mostly of good patterns, the material is strong and wears well, and is being largely used, not only by the peasantry, but also for making men's suits and ladies' skirts and cloths. an interesting article on the cyprus cotton industry is to be found in the bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. iii. , pp. - . _flax and linseed_ the cultivation of flax (_linum usitatissimum_), which began to develop some twenty years ago, has declined during the last ten years or so. the reasons for this are that it is considered to exhaust the soil, the later handling of the crop for fibre is troublesome and the market is liable to rather violent fluctuations. it grows well in the messaoria plain, and when chemical manures are more generally used it may come more into favour. attempts have been made to improve the quality by the introduction of riga flax seed, but so far without success. there is a small export of linseed, but owing to the primitive methods of winnowing and cleaning it does not fetch the best price. the quality of the cleaned seed is excellent. knowledge and care are needed in picking the crop at exactly the right time. the imperfect methods of general cultivation prevent the uniform ripening of the seed, and this means an uneven and unsatisfactory sample. defective screening accounts for the presence in excess of foreign substances, weed seeds, etc. these difficulties are capable of remedy, and it may reasonably be hoped that when once overcome the cultivation will be extended. in cyprus the cultivation is the same whether intended for seed or fibre, and consequently the latter is of an inferior quality, as is indicated in a report on cyprus flax published in the bulletin of the imperial institute (vol. vi. , p. ). seed is sown in november-december at the rate of to okes per donum. retting is done by steeping in the large stone irrigation tanks which are a feature on most farms. in the messaoria, about ano and kato zodia, where flax is commonly grown, the plant is retted in the river ovgos, which retains sufficient water usually until august. the yield per donum varies from to okes of seed, to okes of fibre and to okes of tow. _wool_ the exports of wool for the three last pre-war years were as follows: year. quantity. value. _cwts._ £ . . . . , , . . . . , , . . . . , , this went chiefly to france, and next, though in much smaller quantities, to italy. the wool is of moderate quality; this is partly due to the breed of sheep and partly to the conditions under which they are kept. attempts have been made by the agricultural department to impress on the native breeders the necessity of keeping the sheep well fed, and experiments have been carried out at the athalassa experimental farm for the purpose of demonstrating the advantages of careful rearing. two fleeces from the athalassa farm were sent to the imperial institute in may , for examination and commercial valuation. one was the fleece of a yearling ram. this was clean, fairly soft and almost white. the other was the fleece of a yearling ewe. this was clean, slightly harsh and almost white, but was slightly coarser than that of the ram. these fleeces were considered by a firm of london brokers as an excellent class of carpet wool and likely to meet always with a ready sale in the london market (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. x. , p. ). a similar opinion was expressed immediately before the war (july ) by a london firm to whom two bales of cyprus wool had been sent, of which a part had been purchased in the bazaar and washed and trimmed by the department and part came from the athalassa (government) flock. it was considered as "an ideal wool for carpet making or for blankets, but deficient in lustre for braids." the actual yield per sheep, viz. to - / lb., compares unfavourably with that of lincolns, which they most closely resemble. this is due partly to breed, but largely also to the conditions under which the sheep are kept (see p. ). _hemp_ the cultivation of hemp (_cannabis sativa_) is practically confined to the southern part of the paphos district, and there only in places where the water-supply is ample. the plant is grown only for fibre, which is exclusively used for rope-making, which is carried out by hand by the villagers round about ktima. it would be of advantage to have a rope-making machine at work at a spot centrally situated in the area of production. a simple hand-worked machine is now being experimentally used and will, it is believed, turn out a better class of rope. the plant grows well on fertile and irrigated lands. farmyard manure, and specially sheep manure, are generally applied, and chemical fertilisers are now also coming into use. harvesting takes place when the plants begin to turn pale. the plants are uprooted, not cut, and are made up into sheaves tied together at the butt end only. the bundles are not more than - / spans round, and of equal size. when first uprooted the sheaves are placed flat on the field in rows to dry and in such zig-zag fashion that the top end of one sheaf is always made to rest on the butt end of another, and thus does not come into contact with the ground: this ensures the circulation of air and hastens the drying process. the sheaves are taken later to the threshing-floors, where they are stood upright until they are dry. the seed is separated by beating. the sheaves are exposed to the sun until the leaves are shed, and when the stems are entirely dry the bundles are tied up at both ends and are taken to the retting-place, which is usually the common stone tank or cistern of the country. there they are steeped in water for six to nine days. the bundles are generally covered by about one foot of water. on the sixth day the fibre is tested. if it separates easily the bundles are removed, if not they remain for another two or three days. this requires much care and experience, as the quality depends largely upon effective retting. then they are taken out of the water and sun-dried, being piled up into pointed shooks, left hollow in the centre. the fibre is separated by means of a wooden implement locally called "melidjia." this consists of a wooden trough placed on two legs which are fixed in the ground. a wedge-shaped piece of wood which is hinged to the trough at one end is used as the beater. the hemp stalks, after the butts are cut off, are placed in the trough and the beater worked up and down so as to split the stalks and lay bare the fibre. the average production of fibre per scala is to okes, but where conditions are all favourable it may reach to okes and the seed yield may be anything from to okes per scala. _silk_ the silkworm (_bombyx mori_) finds in cyprus a climate exceptionally favourable to its development, and cyprus silks have been famous for their quality throughout the middle ages and as far back as the sixth century a.d., when greek monks first introduced silkworms from china. in the fateful year , when the disease pebrine nearly destroyed the silk industry of europe, the anxious search for healthy silkworm eggs that then ensued led arabs from syria to visit cyprus and buy large quantities of silk cocoons from which they raised and exported the eggs. at that time, therefore, it is evident that cypriot moths were well thought of. pebrine soon reached cyprus and almost brought the island breed to an end. thanks, however, to the pasteur system, whereby pebrine and other silkworm diseases have been brought under complete control, the industry both here and elsewhere was not only saved but has been considerably developed. writing in mr. p. gennadius, late director of agriculture, cyprus, stated that the local production of silkworm eggs was so small that it could not be taken into consideration, and from the figures then given the total average annual production at that time is estimated to have been , okes of dry cocoons. this represented an average yield of only - / okes of dry cocoons, equal to - / kilograms of fresh cocoons, per ounce of silkworm eggs. this compared very unfavourably with the average annual production of fresh cocoons in france and italy at that time, which was kilograms and kilograms respectively per ounce of silkworm eggs. moreover, this ratio had been, up to that period, on a descending scale. in a report published in mr. gennadius attributed this unsatisfactory state of things to the following causes: . the importation of cheap silkworm eggs of inferior quality; the average price paid by merchants was to - / francs per ounce, while the price in france ranged from to francs. . the action of merchants who imported larger quantities of eggs than they could properly dispose of. . the ignorance and folly of rearers who undertook to rear far more worms than they could properly "educate," having regard to space, leaves and labour. in the department of agriculture set to work, with some success, to improve the methods of rearing up to that time in vogue, and during the six years ending (inclusive) the average annual quantity of eggs hatched out was , oz., the average annual export of "dry" cocoons was , okes, and the average annual estimated local consumption , okes, making a total annual production of , okes, as against , okes in . the former total represents an average yield of about okes of "dry" cocoons, equal to about kilograms of fresh cocoons per ounce of seed, and marks a slight improvement upon the ratio of eighteen years previously. since this branch of work has received a larger share of attention from the department. five sericultural stations have been established, regulations have been issued, inspections by qualified persons have been systematically made, practical advice has been given to rearers in the matter of cleanliness, disinfection and so forth, the granting of licences to egg-raisers has been put on a better footing and the whole industry has been brought more under observation and control. numerous suggestions have been made from time to time for insuring that only a good quality of egg shall be imported. as an effective--perhaps the most effective--means to this end, the department of agriculture has set itself to improve the production of local eggs and thus indirectly discourage their importation: holders of licences to raise eggs are required to pass periodical examinations; several have in consequence had their licences cancelled, new licensees have been added, and many unlicensed persons have been prosecuted and convicted for illegally raising eggs. the common method of hatching practised by villagers, by placing the eggs tied in cloth with a little cotton-wool in their beds or by carrying them on their persons, still prevails, but it is gradually yielding to a better system of incubation. the department has designed a simple, inexpensive hatching-box, and these are now being used with good results. until about three years ago probably per cent. of the local rearers were producing their own seed without any microscopical examination at all. bad feeding, bad ventilation, ill-adapted premises were general. as a consequence pebrine and flacherie played such havoc that many people were beginning to abandon silkworm rearing and uproot their mulberry trees. the expansion and increased resources of the agricultural department happily came just in time to check this backward move. silk reeling is unfortunately done in the most primitive manner with wooden appliances and hot water by village hand labour. the locally reeled silk is used only for island consumption and the great bulk of cocoons is exported in the raw state, mostly to lyons and milan. the burden of freight on this bulky cargo is naturally a heavy handicap and the local silkworm rearers have consequently to be content with very low and inadequate prices for their cocoons. during the reeling process to per cent. of the silk is lost, and a further loss is incurred during weaving owing to the numerous knots having to be cut away and the silk threads rejoined. a considerable loss is said to take place in selling cocoons in the european markets. the cocoons on arrival at marseilles are subjected to official tests and sold according to the reports made by the official testers. it is of advantage to the buyers that the report should be made as unfavourable as possible as the price is lowered proportionately, and it is felt that the cocoons exported are thus placed too much at the mercy of the testing officials. these cyprus cocoons are reeled in france and italy and the silk is largely sold to england. it would be to the mutual benefit of england and cyprus if a direct demand for cyprus reeled silk could be created and modern reeling plant introduced into the island. a large sum of money, now annually paid for freight, would thus be saved to the cypriot producers, which would stimulate the local industry and tend to increase greatly the annual production and improve the local weaving of silk stuffs, an industry which has already gained considerable fame and at which the cypriot women are adepts. as the following table shows, the amount of raw silk exported is a negligible quantity, but a fairly large quantity is locally reeled and is used in making the silk stuffs which are so much sought after in the local bazaars: ___________________________________________________________________ export of cocoons. | export of | export of raw silk | cocoons waste. | ------------------------------------------------------------------- _year._|_okes._|_country._|_okes._|_country._|_okes._|_country._ ------------------------------------------------------------------- | , |france | , |france | |turkey | , | " | , | " | | " | | | | | |egypt | , | " | , | " | |turkey | | | | | |egypt | , | " | , | " | |turkey | | | |turkey | |greece | , | " | , |france | |turkey ___________________________________________________________________ efforts have been made by the agricultural department to improve the cypriot race of silkworms. two races of white colour, the japanese and the baghdad, have been separately crossed with the yellow race of baghdad. these crossings began in - and have been continued up to the present. the objects aimed at are to establish a new cypriot race (_a_) giving good cocoons of a fine structure and larger in size than the french variety and yielding a maximum quantity of silk; (_b_) producing cocoons of a uniform colour and in demand in the european market and (_c_) with these characteristics constant. the results obtained so far are promising, but uniformity of colour has not yet been attained, though it is hoped that, by careful selection, this will become more fixed every year. it may here be mentioned that the famous french cream-coloured race took seventy-five years to become fully established owing to the widespread damage caused by pebrine and, to a lesser extent, by flacherie. it has been observed that silkworm eggs locally produced by qualified licensees are decidedly more immune to disease and less affected by adverse atmospheric conditions than imported seed. the local conditions of sericulture in cyprus have undergone a change of late years. formerly nicosia and famagusta were the districts where this industry was chiefly carried on; but latterly whole mulberry groves have been uprooted and replaced by fruit trees which are considered to be more profitable. this was the inevitable result of the ignorant methods under which the silkworm-rearing industry was conducted and the use of bad seed permitted, whereby disease was spread and annual loss incurred. it is hoped that the industry is now again on the upward grade. one indication of this is that whereas a few years ago , to , cocoons went to an oke, now the figure may be put at to , . again, the waste due to excess of floss is much less than formerly, and if only reeling by machinery can be introduced a very much better return will result to the cocoon producer. in the karpas and in and around nicosia a bi-voltine race is reared. the results are poor, but the two rearings are made because in these localities there is an ample supply of leaves. from this race are produced small cocoons locally called "confetti." they are only used for local silk manufacture. an inferior silk called "koukoularika" is made from the cocoons of the ordinary or univoltine race, both those which have been stoved and those which have been badly stained when the moths emerged. these cocoons, which, during the process of boiling in lye, have been bleached, are turned inside-out and the excrement of the larva removed. the silk is then spun by hand with the "atrachtos." these cocoons are mostly from laggard worms and of inferior quality. the silk industry has suffered greatly from unscrupulous dealing on the part of the dealers in eggs. it is a common custom for these persons to sell imported seed at _s._ and even less per ounce, although the law requires all such seed to be accompanied by a consular certificate and affidavit showing that the price paid was not less than _s._ per ounce, exclusive of freight, carriage or insurance. secret discounts, presumably, render this practice possible. the dealer does not ask for payment in cash, but requires it in kind at the rate of oke in every okes of cocoons raised. if okes of cocoons are obtained from ounce of seed the dealer would get okes, valued at say _s._ _d._ per oke = _s._ _d._ for each ounce of seed. the dealer mostly gives a cash advance of _s._ or £ with the seed, stipulating that the crop is to be sold exclusively to him, the price being left open. the unfortunate producer is therefore in his toils. the establishment of small sericultural societies would do much, both to encourage and cheapen the cost of growing mulberry trees and assist the industry. a few such societies have lately been formed. _mulberry_ this tree (_morus alba_) is grown extensively for silkworm feeding and is mostly found in those parts of the island in which the silk industry is centred, viz. in the marathassa valley and in the karpas, fairly generally in and around nicosia, kyrenia and in the southern parts of the paphos district. little care is given to its cultivation. for the most part, in all the older plantations, the trees are set too close together. this is less noticeable in the newer plantations. pruning, where given, is defective and so is the method of gathering the leaves. the usual method is to cut off, every year, the shoots with the leaves on them, from about one foot above the main branches. two reasons are given for this by villagers. ( ) it is quicker and easier to cut off these shoots than to pick off the leaves while still on the tree. the shoots are brought into the "magnanerie" and there placed upright in water and the leaves can then be removed more conveniently and at leisure. in this way the leaves remain fresh two days. ( ) by cutting these shoots in the spring, _i.e._ during the silkworm-rearing season, which begins in early april, fresh shoots are formed which bear leaves in late summer and autumn. the latter afford very welcome green food for cattle and sheep. these leaves are stripped direct from the growing tree. the effect of this second gathering is prejudicial to the tree, which is thereby exhausted. the leaves produced the following spring are fleshy and watery and in the uncertain weather of spring are apt to induce flacherie. _agaves and aloes_ _agave americana_, _a. rigida_ var. _sisalana_, _furcræa gigantea_, _aloe ciliata_ and _a. frutescens_ all grow well and, if properly cultivated and handled, might be worth more attention than they at present receive. in a cypriot from german east africa who had been engaged in the production of sisal hemp there was struck by the few excellent plants he found growing in cyprus, and, had sufficient suitable land been then obtainable, with transport facilities, was desirous of undertaking cultivation on a commercial basis. samples of fibre prepared from the leaves of the abovementioned plants were reported on by the imperial institute in , but as the leaves had been retted, and not scraped or scutched, their value was depreciated, and this was estimated at from £ to £ per ton with best mexican sisal hemp at £ per ton. the outlay for fencing against wandering flocks of goats and for decorticating machinery and other expenses would deter the ordinary cultivator from planting, and this could only be profitably undertaken if ample capital were forthcoming. _broom corn_ until the end of last century all brooms of european type were imported. seed of broom corn (_sorghum vulgare_), known locally as "tchihri" or "skoupa," was then introduced, and gradually the cultivation has extended and a good number of brooms of very fair quality are now locally made. the process of broom-making is very simple and the high price of the imported article during the war has led to a marked extension of the industry. the plant grows well, especially on irrigated land. the seed provides a good food for chickens and the stalks and leaves can be used as fodder. it is a profitable crop, especially when the cultivator makes and sells the brooms himself, and is principally grown in the karpas and at athienou. tobacco in turkish times tobacco was grown in several parts of the island, though not to any large extent. "for centuries it was produced in many districts of the island, and particularly in the karpas, near kilani, omodhos and paphos, but from the time it became an article of monopoly its production was subjected to rigorous restrictions, and its cultivation has been entirely abandoned." (reports, pt. ii. ( ), p. gennadius). the quantity grown before the occupation appears to have been very fluctuating and to have averaged about , lb. annually, and the government revenue, according to british consular reports, would not have been more than £ to £ per annum. the régie was introduced in , but owing to the hampering restrictions the industry had been pretty well crushed out by the time of british occupation in . meanwhile the revenue from tobacco, imported mainly from volo and salonica, increased greatly. the monopoly ceased at the british occupation, but the regulations and imposts remained. those responsible for controlling the industry, collecting dues, and checking illicit consumption had a troublesome task, while on the other hand the cultivator became averse to engaging in a cultivation which was hedged round with so many restrictions and formalities. these exist at the present time and may here be quoted: the grower has to notify the customs authorities of his intention to sow, giving the locality and area. before picking he must again notify the customs, so that a customs officer may be present at the picking and weigh the freshly picked leaves. after storing, but before delivering the tobacco to the factory, the customs officer must again weigh the now dry leaves. the excise duties leviable are: tobacco leaf, - / _cp._ per oke, payable on transfer of leaf from grower to wholesale dealer. tobacco manufactured in cyprus, whether made into cigarettes or otherwise, in addition to the import duty or transport duty, pays a banderolle duty of _s._ - / _cp._ per oke. these regulations are a relic of the turkish times, as in those days the state received a definite due called "city toll" by charging the tobacco cutters and tobacco sellers with a trade tax. they appear to have been administered with more laxity in turkish than in post-occupation times, and it is said that the abandonment of tobacco cultivation was mainly due to the severity with which these rather vexatious and irritating regulations were enforced. for many years the tobacco imported by local cigarette manufacturers came almost entirely from macedonia. this tobacco was of very superior quality and cheap, and locally grown tobacco could not compete with it. of late years the price of macedonian tobacco has risen considerably and the manufacturers have therefore been induced to import thessalian tobacco instead, which is not of so fine a flavour and approximates more closely to cyprus produce. cypriot smokers have thus had their palates prepared for the flavour of the locally grown tobacco. about the year , when houry's cyprus tobacco association, ltd., was formed, a revival in the industry set in. this has since received considerable impetus from the war, which, temporarily, has thrust macedonian tobacco out of the market. the primary object of the association was to manufacture tobacco and cigarettes from cyprus-grown tobacco, although foreign tobacco could also be used. tobacco then began to be regularly grown by the association at a chiftlik near limassol and elsewhere, and cigarettes made therefrom have had a fair local sale. the arrival of well-to-do refugees from latakia and other parts of syria, skilled in tobacco cultivation, led to great extension of this crop. a large part of the produce was at first converted into latakia tobacco. owing possibly to the lack of care and skill on the part of native labour, partly perhaps to the unsuitability of the herbs and brushwood used in the fuming, the market was not found sufficiently encouraging and the latakia, for which at best there is a very restricted market, has almost ceased to be produced. tobacco for cigarettes, however, continues to be grown on a fairly large scale, but in order that land suitable for corn and other foodstuffs should not be sacrificed to tobacco, the cultivation of the latter is permitted only by special licence. in and the industry fell almost entirely into the hands of the richer refugees, who were expert growers, and they contracted with the small farmers and peasants. a number of speculative growers, professional men, merchants, etc., were tempted by the prevailing high prices to embark in the industry, but the licensing system has tended to throw it more into the hands of the _bona-fide_ farmers, who are allowed only to cultivate small areas which can be looked after mainly by their own families. in the total production was , okes, and the estimated yield for is , okes. the agricultural department has for some five years carried out experimental growings in various districts, and samples of tobacco so grown have been submitted to the imperial institute (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xiii. , pp. - ). the two best samples reported on were grown in the nicosia plain. they were said to conform with the turkish tobacco as regards size of leaf, but contained too much moisture for the english market. the tobacco was found to smoke rather hot and was only mildly aromatic, but it was believed that these defects would probably disappear with more experience in the curing. the samples referred to were incompletely cured, having been submitted quickly in order to roughly ascertain their quality. the report on the whole was moderately encouraging, and it is hoped that later samples which have been better cured will be found superior. the tobacco grown in cyprus is mostly of the samsoun, trebizond, kavalla and hassan keff varieties. the normal importation of tobacco into cyprus is about , okes, which produces an import duty of £ , a year, at the rate of - / _cp._ per oke. the average amount paid for banderolles on tobacco when issued from factories for consumption is about £ , a year, which at the rate of _s._ - / _cp._ per oke equals a banderolle duty on , okes; the difference of about , okes would be cigarettes exported on which no banderolle duty is paid. if, then, no tobacco were grown and none imported the government would lose £ , revenue annually. it would appear to be immaterial from a revenue point of view whether tobacco were imported or grown in the island, since the imposts are the same, viz. on imports - / _cp._ per oke import duty and _s._ - / _cp._ per oke banderolle duty; on locally grown tobacco - / _cp._ per oke transport duty and _s._ - / _cp._ per oke banderolle duty. there is, however, this difference, that the money leaves the island when the tobacco is imported and remains and fructifies when it is locally grown. tobacco cultivation is in many ways well suited to this island, as a great part of its cultivation as well as the gathering may be done by women and children. it need not therefore make any serious demand upon man labour, which is already insufficient, and much of the work can be performed by those who are unfit for heavy field work. it is a summer crop, which is greatly in its favour, the quality when grown "dry" being much finer than when irrigated. its introduction broadens the basis of cultivation, provides a revenue from land that would otherwise lie fallow and is a useful element in any system of rotation. as it calls for careful preparation and thorough cultivation of the soil it has a great educative influence on a people prone to slovenly, primitive husbandry, and corn crops following tobacco have frequently given a larger, more uniform yield. at the same time it is an open question whether the crop can be grown and the leaf cured by the cypriot farmer to produce a tobacco which, under normal conditions, will successfully compete in quality and price with the macedonian tobacco. tanning materials and dye-stuffs tanneries are fairly numerous and large quantities of skins are tanned and sold to native boot-makers. before the war, goat- and sheep-skins and ox-hides were practically the only kinds handled, the two former being mainly used for the uppers of boots. the top-boots worn by villagers are nearly all made from goat-skin, locally called "totmaria." since the war pig-skins and dog-skins have been also used. camel-skins are often employed for making soles. pine bark and sumach are the native tanning substances chiefly used in the local tanneries. the pine is one of the commonest forest trees of the island. shinia leaves (_pistacia lentiscus_) are also used (see p. ). _sumach_ the sicilian, elm-leaved or tanner's sumach (_rhus coriaria_) is a shrub which grows wild throughout a large part of the island, being principally found among the vineyards on the slopes of the southern range of hills. the leaves are largely used in the leather tanning industry, and a considerable export might have been established to the united kingdom had it not been for dissatisfaction caused by the excessive presence of impurities, such as lentisc leaves and dust, which were usually found in the consignments sent. one sample was sent by the agricultural department to the imperial institute in . this was found to consist wholly of sumach and no lentisc or other leaves, and gave on examination the following results: moisture, . ; ash, . ; tannin (by hide-power method), . ; extractive matter (non-tannin), . per cent. the report showed that the leaves produced a good leather, similar in texture and colour to that obtained with sicilian sumach, and was considered likely to fetch about the same price as a medium quality of sicilian sumach, which contains from to per cent. of tannin (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. x. , p. ). two further samples were sent in . the first sample "consisted of a finely-ground yellowish-green powder, containing a quantity of sand, small stones and iron dust." the second sample consisted of a "coarsely-ground, yellowish-green powder, containing a quantity of pinkish unground twigs, sand and small stones, together with some iron dust." the results of examination were as follows: no. . no. . _per cent._ _per cent._ moisture . . insoluble matters . . extractive matters (non-tannin) . . tannin . . ash . . --------------------------------------------------------- tintometer readings--red . . yellow . . both samples were low in tannin, compared with the sicilian percentage of to . sample no. was valued at £ , and no. at £ , per ton, with sicilian sumach at £ per ton; the lower value being due to the lower tannin contents, owing to the presence of sand, dirt, etc. it may be assumed that if more care in preparing clean samples were taken, cyprus sumach would greatly improve its market value. _valonea_ there are a few well-grown specimens of valonea oak (_quercus Ægilops_) to be seen, but being a slow grower and as it takes many years to reach the stage when it yields a profit, it does not commend itself to the cypriot tree planter. it prefers deep soil and requires artificial irrigation or a greater rainfall than we have in cyprus. it has been tried at salamis and failed, and also at machaera with the same result. it has been grown also on troödos, but after six years' growth attained a height of only foot. only an insignificant quantity of valonea cups are locally produced. these come from the paphos district and are said to be rather poor in tannin. the bulk comes from anatolia. the pre-war price for the latter was _s._ per cantar of okes, that for the locally grown was paras per oke on the spot, transport charges bringing up the price to about copper piastre per oke delivered. _acacia barks_ _acacia pycnantha_ has been grown in cyprus, but does not acclimatise well, and neither the soil nor climate seems favourable. _a. mollissima_ also has not shown any very successful growth. _a. cyanophylla_ and _a. longifolia_, on the other hand, thrive excellently. they are great drought-resisters and grow on almost any soil. they have been very extensively grown by the forest department in every district for fuel and along the coast upon sand dunes. they have not been utilised so far for the extraction of tanning, except experimentally. samples of the barks of the two last-named species were found on examination at the imperial institute to be too poor in tannin to be worth exporting, but they should be quite suitable for use in cyprus (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xi. , pp. - ). _madder_ in former years, and within the period of the british occupation, the cultivation of madder (_rubia tinctorum_) was fairly flourishing in cyprus. the old madder grounds can still be distinguished, and are mostly to be seen near morphou, ayia irini, sotira, ayios serghios, famagusta and larnaca. these madder grounds were excavations made in order to expose the soil lying beneath to ft. of drift-sand; and they form, as it were, a series of tanks along the shore. the red dye obtained from the dried and ground madder roots constituted at one time one of the most valued of dye-stuffs, and was in special demand for military uniforms; but this has been entirely superseded by artificial coal-tar derivatives and, as gennadius says: "the happy days of the cultivation of this plant are past, never to return." it is propagated mostly by root cuttings. the leaf begins to dry at about the sixth month. there is no further growth above ground, but the roots continue to increase and shoot downwards till moisture affects them. "when they get too wet, they become black or rot. in cyprus this rotting would often begin after about eighteen months, while in superior soils the roots would continue to improve during thirty-six months, and they would be known in the trade as eighteen months and thirty-six months roots. in famagusta district they remain mostly eighteen months, while at morphou they would continue fully thirty-six months, during the whole of which time the surface ground should be kept free of weeds." after the root is lifted it is generally dried; if packed before quite dry, it ferments and deteriorates. two and a half tons of dried roots would be produced from an acre of good ground, and the madder grounds used to fetch a very high price. drugs and other products _liquorice root_ the liquorice plant (_glycyrrhiza glabra_, linn.) grows mainly in the famagusta and kyrenia districts, and the roots are collected and exported from time to time. two samples were reported upon in by the imperial institute (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xv. , p. ) and the following opinions of two london firms of brokers were elicited. (_a_) one firm described the lapithos (kyrenia district) roots as medium to bold unpeeled roots of good flavour, fairly well cleaned and very well dried; and valued them at from _s._ to _s._ per cwt. ex wharf, london (february ). the firm described the famagusta roots as thinner than the lapithos sample and not so well freed from smooth valueless pieces, but mentioned that they had apparently been washed. they valued these roots at _s._ per cwt. ex wharf, london (february ). the firm added that both samples were exceptionally dry, and that it seemed doubtful if the material in the bulk would be as dry. (_b_) a second firm considered the roots to be rather mixed, inferior quality, and worth at that time about _s._ per cwt. in london (february ). _pyrethrum_ _pyrethrum (chrysanthemum) cinerariæfolium_ grows well from seed and is an attractive garden plant with pretty, marguerite-like flowers. these yield the pyrethrum of commerce so largely used as an insecticide, and which is said to form the chief ingredients in various flea powders. these flowers, when dried and ground to dust, are employed for this purpose by the natives. the original pyrethrum powder came from plants growing in dalmatia. the plant was introduced into the cyprus government gardens some twenty years ago and has since spread more or less throughout the island. it is perennial and drought-resistant, and will also stand several degrees of frost and seems indifferent to soil, provided it is not too damp. the seed is sown in september and the seedlings are transplanted in april or may, but it multiplies itself readily by suckers. the flowers, which are about three times the size of the chamomile (_matricaria chamomilla_), which they closely resemble, are gathered as soon as they are fully open, and are then dried in a well-ventilated room. they are usually sold in bales of to kilogrammes. one donum may produce about okes of flowers annually. _squill_ bulbs of the local squill were submitted in to kew and provisionally identified as _urginea scilla._ like the asphodel, this root is found everywhere. if sliced and placed about the house they are said to drive away mice. it was intended by the agricultural department to make an attempt to find a market for these roots, in the hope that if they could obtain a small payment for them farmers might be induced to collect them off their lands, but the project had to be abandoned for the time owing to the war. there is a small demand for these roots, if sliced and dried, in europe for medicinal purposes. squill bulbs from cyprus were examined at the imperial institute in (see bulletin of the imperial institute, vol. xv. , p. ). the samples, which were submitted to a firm of drug manufacturers, were objected to on account of their dark colour, and were valued at about _d._ per lb. as against a pre-war value of _d._ per lb. according to the report by the imperial institute there are two varieties of _urginea scilla,_ white and red, the scales of the former being yellowish-white and those of the latter having a reddish tint, and there are also many intermediate forms. though the red and the white varieties have been stated to possess equal medicinal value, the white variety is preferred in england. in making stone irrigation channels which are lined with a coating of lime and sand or earth, local masons sometimes rub over this lining with a sliced squill which has been dipped in oil. it is found that this tends to harden and glaze the lining and prevent it from cracking. _colocynth or bitter apple_ the colocynth (_citrullus colocynthis_), locally called "pikrankoura" or "petrankoura," grows wild in some parts of the plains. the round yellowish-green fruit, about the size of an orange or small melon, ripens in july to september and, after being gathered, is skinned and dried in the sun. it is used by druggists as a purgative. until about ten years ago it was cultivated on a small scale and an annual export of about £ in value took place, chiefly to england and austria. it was then in demand, it is said, as an adulterant of quinine. the fruit is locally thought to be a remedy for rheumatism. for this purpose the fruits are picked and put in a saucepan and covered with olive oil. after cooking for six hours the pulp or ointment is rubbed into the affected part. the european demand having ceased, the plant is now only found in a wild state. _asphodel_ the asphodel (_asphodelus ramosus_), locally known as "spourdellos" or "spourtoulla," is a troublesome and abundant weed in many parts of the island, up to an altitude of about , ft. the peasant farmer rarely attempts to remove it, though it occupies a large proportion of his land to the detriment of the crops. in the hills the villagers dry the bulbs and feed them to their sheep, cattle and donkeys. a paste is also made from the roots which is used by boot-makers to stick the leathers together. to make this paste the roots are dried in the oven and ground, and then mixed with ground vetches or maize and made into the gum or paste locally known as "tsirichi." footnotes: [footnote : _a quantity of stored plant was destroyed by fire, reducing the output._] vi. minor agricultural industries _bee-keeping_ although cyprus bees are world-famed, bee-keeping in the island is still in its infancy. the native hive is generally an earthenware cylinder or pipe about ft. in. long and in. in diameter (see plate vii, fig. ). hives are also made of a mixture of earth and chopped straw, similar to native mud-bricks. these hives are also cylindrical, about in. long and to in. in diameter with a -in. thickness of wall. these are cooler in summer and warmer in winter, and produce stronger colonies than the earthenware ones. [illustration: plate vii. fig. .--cypriot earthenware beehives. fig. .--shipping fruit at larnaca.] of late years the agricultural department has introduced modern hives with movable frames, and had it not been for the high cost of timber since the war, the number of these would have increased rapidly. the difficulty is to get the local carpenters to construct them properly and with finish. practical hive construction is taught at the agricultural school. cyprian bees are, par excellence, the yellow race of the world. they are of uniform colour, size and character, slightly smaller than the italians and the blacks. they have great power of flight, are very prolific and vigorous and good honey-gatherers. they are by many considered vicious and ill-tempered. this is possibly due to the constant war they have to wage against hornets, which in this country are a real plague and frequently exterminate whole colonies and sometimes whole apiaries. various devices are employed for the protection of bees in or near the hives. a good number of cyprian queen bees have been imported into europe and america, and are very highly regarded wherever they have been established. in the eighties cyprian queens were sold in the united states of america at £ each. this high price checked the importation and the crossing of cyprians with italians and blacks took place, the hybrid offspring being sold by dealers as cyprians. these, however, did not possess the best characteristics of cyprians, and for a time they brought about a reaction in favour of other breeds. cyprus possesses excellent honey-producing plants in the eucalyptus trees, orange groves, "throumbia" or wild thyme, and other aromatic plants. in the neighbourhood of orange groves a competent bee-keeper can obtain an average of lb. of honey per colony; although unfortunately the ordinary village bee-keeper gets little more than to lb. locally produced beeswax is of fine quality with delicious aroma and of a bright yellow colour, said to be superior to that imported from asia minor and egypt. the industry is susceptible of considerable development and, when brought under more complete control, should be capable of establishing a good export trade of honey and possibly of beeswax. _basket-making_ basket-making is a considerable industry, as all fruit and much other produce is transported in baskets mostly designed for the backs of donkeys or mules. the export trade of fruit and vegetables creates a constant demand (see plate vii, fig. ). the bulk of these baskets are made of reeds (_arundo_) which grow luxuriantly by the side of water channels or wherever moist soil is found. this material is not an ideal one for the purpose, as the baskets are easily crushed and lose shape, to the detriment of the contents. the reeds are therefore often stiffened by the introduction of an occasional breadth of some other material, _e.g._ shinia (_pistacia lentiscus_), tremithia or myrtle. all these are much used in basket-making, though the latter is heavy. there is a native willow (_salix alba_) and also the weeping willow (_s. babylonica_). these have not been used until recently when, by the efforts of the agricultural department, a number of these trees have been pollarded and the new shoots have been found quite satisfactory for the purpose. six years ago a number of osier cuttings were imported from england, but unfortunately they have not succeeded so far owing to a succession of dry years. the surviving plants were this autumn removed to a more suitable site, but after suffering from drought they have now been almost destroyed by heavy floods. in order to encourage the manufacture of better baskets for the fruit trade between cyprus and egypt the agricultural department provides practical instruction in basket-making, and a qualified teacher pays occasional visits to basket-making villages and demonstrates the work and teaches improved patterns to the villagers and school boys. _fruit and vegetable preserving_ there is little doubt that the establishment of small factories for canning or bottling fruits and vegetables would be a profitable undertaking. owing to the suddenness with which, in the heat of summer, the fruits ripen in cyprus, and the consequent glut that often ensues, market prices fall to a point at which it does not pay to pick and handle. transport difficulties also make it precarious, in the case of soft fruits, to attempt a sale outside the immediate place of production. increased cultivation is thus discouraged. in growing fruits or vegetables for canning or bottling a man is independent of market fluctuations, whereas at present both producers and consumers are in the hands of the local shopkeepers, who have the former entirely at their mercy. the egyptian fruit and vegetable trade is very well worth cultivating, but until better measures can be enforced in the matter of transport by sea as well as land, shippers run the risk of heavy losses, which, no doubt, recoil upon the unlucky producers. * * * * * specimens of most of the products referred to in these notes may be seen in the cyprus court in the public exhibition galleries of the imperial institute. _printed by hazell, watson & viney, ld., london and aylesbury, england._ * * * * * transcriber's note: in the original, illustrations were marked as 'facing page.' that has not been reproduced in this e-book. internet archive. united states department of agriculture miscellaneous publication no. washington, d. c. april, information for the guidance of field men and cooperators of the bureau of biological survey engaged in the control of injurious rodents and predatory animals prepared under the direction of paul g. redington, _chief, bureau of biological survey_, in the division of predatory-animal and rodent-control, stanley p. young, _principal biologist, in charge_ contents page introduction necessity for control of wild-animal pests. control functions of the bureau of biological survey legal authorization for control work instructions previously issued animals on the control program the injurious rodents the predatory animals other forms subject to control instructions regarding field practices the objective conservation, state laws, and cooperation precautions in handling poisons rodent-control operations predatory-animal control introduction necessity for control of wild-animal pests the demands made upon the federal government some years ago for aid in suppressing those wild animals of the public domain that continually spread out into areas that had been placed under cultivation or used for grazing purposes produced the first federal cooperative efforts toward the control of predatory animals and injurious rodents. the settler who saw the profits of his early work wiped out by the incursions of wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, and bobcats from the public domain into his stock ranges, and of prairie dogs, ground squirrels, pocket gophers, jack rabbits, and other rodents into his cultivated fields, had no recourse other than to ask the aid of the government whose lands served as breeding reservoirs from which these predators and rodents came. otherwise they would reinfest his stocked and cultivated acres in spite of all that he could do to prevent them, either single handed or with the aid of his neighbors. control functions of the bureau of biological survey the administration of wild life by the bureau of biological survey involves not only research into the habits, distribution, and requirements of the varieties, and the conservation of fur, game, insectivorous, and other valuable animals, but also the regulation of activities of a limited number of certain species that seriously interfere with the economic interests of man, and, in the case of some of the larger predators, prey upon valuable game species. the leadership of the biological survey in control operations during the years since has been requested and encouraged by state and other cooperating agencies. the funds made available from these sources for expenditure under the direction of the district leaders of the bureau have been far in excess of those provided for the purpose from the national treasury. the investigations of the food and other habits, the geographic distribution, and the relationships of the wild birds and mammals of the country (including rodents and predators) have been carried on for almost half a century and provide the basis for the control work recommended and prosecuted. research along these lines is being continued by scientifically trained men and will be expanded as funds permit. it is well for the conservation of the wild life of the country that leadership in the control of injurious species has been delegated to a governmental organization that is concerned with the welfare of the various forms and with the administration of wild-life refuges, one that is charged with the enforcement of wild-life conservation laws, and one that recognizes the desirability of preserving representatives of all forms of wild life on suitable areas. legal authorization for control work the legal sanction for control work by the federal government is contained in congressional direction in annual appropriation acts for the department of agriculture and in a special enactment authorizing a definite control program. the appropriation acts making funds available for the use of the bureau of biological survey since the year have provided for investigations, experiments, demonstrations, and cooperation for the control of wild animals injurious to agriculture, horticulture, forestry, animal husbandry, and wild game, and for the suppression of rabies in predatory wild animals. the special program of control, which was called for by the seventieth congress, was drawn up by the department of agriculture to cover a -year period, and was approved by the seventy-first congress (public act no. , of march , ). instructions previously issued information regarding new developments and improved practices in control procedure has been made available to the field personnel and to cooperators of the bureau from time to time since the inception of the cooperative work in , in mimeographed and printed form, as well as by individual written instructions and personal contact. it is now desirable to compile the more important of the statements as to policy and specific directions in one publication. all control methods are based on fundamental research and give due consideration to safeguarding the useful and harmless forms of wild life and the public interests in general. field methods have been adapted to meet varying local conditions as called for by research and the experience of field forces. investigations and experiments are being continued, and as additional information becomes available, field practices will be subject to such modifications and improvements as the conditions warrant. animals on the control program the injurious rodents certain species of the rodents that in large numbers infest lands of value for crop or forage production must be eradicated locally to meet the requirements of agriculture and forestry. those that figure most largely in the cooperative control operations in one part or another of their ranges are the prairie dogs, ground squirrels, pocket gophers, jack rabbits, porcupines, and native and introduced rats and mice. other groups that locally become unduly numerous and destructive may also on occasion come within the control program. it would be impossible to eradicate everywhere the ground squirrels, prairie dogs, and other rodents that range over vast areas of relatively worthless lands, and such action is not desirable, even on the public domain. in areas of economic importance, however, definite tracts are established where the rodents can be kept under thorough control, and operations are extended sufficiently to prevent reinfestation. the predatory animals the control of such predatory wild animals as coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, and bobcats is concentrated on areas where serious damage is being done to domestic stock, poultry, and game. bears are not subject to control except when individually injurious to livestock or property. other forms subject to control though the chief control work directed by the biological survey is concerned with injurious rodents and predatory mammals, it sometimes becomes necessary to investigate cases of damage by other classes of animal life, including moles, crawfishes, and land crabs, and to recommend measures for their control. instructions regarding field practices the objective the underlying policy of the biological survey with regard to injurious species of wild animals has been and will continue to be one of control rather than complete eradication. the bureau is not embarked upon a general extermination program, but with every proper consideration for conservation interests, it has as its objective in this field the adequate local control of injurious mammals, so that the burdensome losses suffered by farmers and stock raisers may be reduced to the minimum and beneficial forms of wild life protected from undue destruction by their natural enemies. though in some cases this may mean local eradication of harmful forms, it will not result in the general extermination of any species. conservation, state laws, and cooperation the bureau of biological survey is an organization primarily and vitally interested in the conservation and protection of all forms of wild life, particularly where they are more beneficial than harmful. those engaged under its direction in the control of predatory animals and injurious rodents are instructed to cooperate closely with federal, state, and local officials intrusted with the administration of wild-life protective laws. they must also observe state and local laws regarding the protection of life and property, the exposing of poisons, and the trapping or otherwise endangering of valuable species. control operations on state and private lands must be conducted in close cooperation with state officials and with property owners and tenants. precautions in handling poisons since poison may be dangerous in the hands of inexperienced and incompetent persons, every possible precaution must be taken when it is used in control operations, to safeguard persons, domestic stock, and harmless and beneficial wild life. poisons should not be exposed on private lands without the consent of the owners. control workers should familiarize themselves with appropriate antidotes for poisons used and be in a position to administer them promptly should the necessity arise. rodent-control operations extreme care should be exercised in handling poisons in rodent-control work. prepared poisons should be placed in strong, properly labeled containers and should be distributed only to assistants working under the direct supervision of bureau leaders or to responsible cooperators. strychnine (in the alkaloid form) is the poison most largely used in rodent-control, its speedy action making it one of the most humane. moreover, numerous tests have shown that in the quantities employed in control operations strychnine is relatively harmless to such gallinaceous birds as quail, pheasants, grouse, and domestic chickens. the smaller birds also are safeguarded because of the fact that the grains used in poisoned baits are of the large-kerneled kinds, such as oats, and contain a minimum of weed seeds and cracked kernels. furthermore, in a large portion of the baits used the kernels are steamed, rolled, and flattened so that their increased size lessens their attractiveness to the smaller birds. the use of red squill in the control of house rats and mice is recommended, as it is an effective and specific poison for these rodents and relatively harmless to other forms of animal life. the use of thallium in rodent-control will in some places succeed where strychnine alone fails. it should not be used, however, except to a very limited extent in follow-up operations against ground squirrels, prairie dogs, and rats. such limited use of thallium should be guarded with the greatest care under close and fully competent supervision, as it is extremely dangerous to all life. though thallium is highly effective in destroying rodents, it can not be overemphasized that this poison is not to be recommended for general use, except to supplement strychnine in follow-up work. it should never be handled without careful consideration in each particular case of all the potential dangers involved. arsenic, cyanides, and phosphorus should not be used or recommended for rodent-control, as they are not now known to have any special advantages, and furthermore they may be a menace to other forms of animal life. not only is phosphorus dangerous to beneficial wild life, but it is particularly unsafe because it sometimes causes fire. poisonous gases, which are efficient in the fumigation of burrows, grain bins, and garbage dumps, should be used only by trained and experienced workers in rodent-control. predatory-animal control poisoning operations for the control of predatory animals should be limited strictly to areas where there is urgent need. they will not be undertaken under the direction of the biological survey where trapping or other means of control are practicable and the cost is not prohibitive. the handling of poisons should be intrusted only to properly trained men working under the supervision of the bureau of biological survey. poison stations set for coyotes and wolves should be placed away from the timbered and well-watered areas that are frequented by foxes, raccoons, skunks, minks, and other valuable forms of carnivorous animals. in many agricultural sections poisons should not be used at all because of the obvious risks. the methods of handling poisons developed and used by the biological survey can be employed most effectively and economically in controlling predatory animals at proper seasons in regions where conditions are favorable. poison is especially suitable for winter use against predators on some of the great stock ranges of the west, as it can then be employed with little or no danger to useful life. the cost of the same measure of control by any other known means would be practically prohibitive. the control of predatory animals is an exceedingly difficult and costly task, and the use of poisons in this work, particularly under experienced supervision, materially reduces the expense. when properly used, poison should not be more destructive to other species than the use of traps, and in some cases it has been found to be even less harmful and more humane. hunters should take every precaution to protect harmless and valuable mammals and birds and should be familiar with the antidotes for each poison used. only strychnine as processed by the biological survey should be used in operations against predatory mammals, because it can be handled safely, is constant in effect, and, since it kills quickly, its action is humane. baits made of small pieces of perishable fat should be used almost to the exclusion of others by field men and cooperators of the bureau. they should be systematically placed about "decoy stations" consisting of carcasses of worn-out horses or other useless animals or pieces of meat. wherever possible they should be placed in slight depressions and covered with thin flat stones, pieces of hide, or other light material, as coyotes and wolves can easily detect them under such cover, but they are thus made inaccessible to birds. stations where poison is placed should be posted to warn owners of stock or valuable dogs of the danger. conspicuous warning signs such as those furnished by the bureau of biological survey in its cooperative work should be used for the purpose. in dispensing poisons for the use of cooperators in predatory-animal control, biological survey field leaders are instructed to exercise the greatest care to make sure of the integrity, honesty, and cooperative spirit of those requesting supplies. when the leader has satisfied himself as to the intent of the cooperator, he should keep in close touch with him and observe his methods, to make sure that the poison is being properly used and that no supplies are left in his possession after cooperative work has been terminated. studded stations, or those in which the poison is placed in parts of the carcass instead of about it, are to be used only under especially favorable conditions. their use is sometimes justified along the known runways of predatory animals on high barren mountain ridges, high benches, or stock driveways that can not be visited by the hunter after the first heavy snowfall. such stations should be at some distance from timber, to make remote the danger of poisoning fur bearers. as soon as trails are open in spring, the hunter is directed to revisit such stations and bury or burn all the baits. all predatory-animal hunters must visit their poison stations as frequently as possible, and except under extraordinary conditions should avoid making long poison lines. baits that have become rancid should be destroyed, and on completion of the poisoning work a general clean-up must be made, and all baits possible destroyed. the use of perishable fat baits is particularly recommended for the reason that they are readily disposed of naturally, for those that can not be located usually disintegrate in warm weather and become harmless after they have melted and soaked into the ground. bears are ordinarily classed as game animals and are protected as such. only when they are doing material damage should they be taken, and then by traps or by aid of dogs, and not by poison. state laws on the subject must be observed. field men and cooperators must exercise the greatest possible care to kill only those individuals responsible for damage, and must remove no more bears from a locality than it is absolutely necessary to take in order to stop the destruction of livestock. in placing traps for the capture of injurious wild animals every possible precaution is to be taken to avoid the accidental capture of valuable game and fur-bearing animals and other harmless or beneficial forms of wild life. hunters working under the supervision of the biological survey are instructed to visit their trap lines as frequently as possible and to liberate game animals and foxes, badgers, skunks, martens, minks, raccoons, and other animals accidentally caught, unless they are so injured that they can not survive. in occasional individual cases, however, where fur bearers do serious injury to livestock or poultry, it is permissible to trap and kill them if in accordance with state laws. the most nearly humane traps available should be used, and trap lines should be so placed that they can be visited at frequent intervals, to avoid any unnecessary suffering, injury, or loss of trapped animals. u. s. government printing office: for sale by the superintendent of documents, washington, d. c. price cents _farming with_ dynamite _a few hints to_ farmers [illustration: du pont] established farming with dynamite _saves_ money time labor _removes_ stumps boulders hard-pan _ensures_ new, rich soil increased acreage easy plowing bigger yields [illustration: du pont] e. i. du pont de nemours powder co. established wilmington, del. copyrighted by e. i. du pont de nemours powder co. wilmington, del. printed by the lord baltimore press baltimore, md. what is dynamite? some farmers have a wrong idea about dynamite. they know it is a powerful explosive, and believe it is dangerous to handle. dynamite _is_ very powerful, much more so than gunpowder, but is actually safer to handle. after more than a hundred years' experience in making and using explosives, we can truthfully state that by following simple directions with ordinary care, anyone can use our "red cross" dynamite without harm. the purpose of this booklet is to tell you the wonderful value of the use of "red cross" dynamite on the farm. if it interests you, as it surely will, and if you are progressive and ambitious, write for a copy of our "handbook of explosives for farmers, planters and ranchers," which will be sent free of charge and which tells just how to use "red cross" dynamite safely and easily, and make it the greatest aid to profitable farming. we will be glad to correspond with you about any special requirements of your farm, or give you any information you want. write our nearest office (see last page) and your letter will receive prompt, personal attention. chief uses of dynamite on the farm. as farmers all over the country begin to understand the value of "red cross" dynamite in their work, they are constantly reporting new uses for this powerful assistant. the chief uses are mentioned below and are explained in detail further on. complete instructions are furnished in the "handbook of explosives for farmers, planters and ranchers." =clearing land of stumps, trees and boulders,= =breaking up hard-pan, shale, or clay subsoils,= =plowing,= =planting and cultivating orchards,= =digging ditches, post holes, wells and reservoirs,= =road-making and grading,= =excavating cellars and foundation trenches,= =regenerating old, worn-out farms.= clearing land of stumps, boulders and trees. it is needless to tell you the advantages of clearing land. the stump covered site of a former piece of woods, is, as you know, new, rich soil that needs no fertilizer. you also know that pulling stumps with a machine is the hardest kind of work--liable to injure seriously your horses, and certain to require a lot of work to get rid of the stump after pulling. then too, it leaves the field full of holes, that must be filled; and plowing the hard packed soil around old roots is no joke. if instead of pulling the stumps, you burn them out, the intense heat required destroys the chief fertile elements of the soil all around the fire. after all your hard work you will leave a burned field instead of new, fertile soil. you can dynamite all those stumps for about one-third the cost of pulling and chopping them up. the blast splits up the stump into firewood, removes all the dirt, breaks all the main roots, and loosens the soil for yards around. you can blast fifty stumps in the time it would take to pull and chop up one or two. one man can do all the work, if necessary. after the stumps are all blasted out, you will have a new, rich field, and easy to cultivate, requiring no fertilizer to yield bumper crops. if you want to remove a whole tree, "red cross" dynamite will lift it bodily out of the ground, and it will usually fall with the wind. when this is done, _there is no stump left to remove_. boulders, which you are now obliged to plow around, can be broken up into easily handled blocks by a single blast. what it costs to blast out stumps. at the latest "farming with dynamite" demonstration, held under the auspices of the norfolk and western railroad, at ivor, va., on august , , one and one-half acres, containing forty-six stumps were cleared in one day, at an expense of $ . , including labor, or an average of cents per stump. records kept by the long island railroad, covering operations on their experimental farm, showed that, including the wages of the men who did the work, the cost of blasting out stumps averaged about cents per stump. records kept of the cost of this work in different sections of the country show as follows: locality and kind of stump. average average cost diameter. per stump. =southern=-- pine stumps inches $ . =pennsylvania=-- apple, ash and chestnut - / inches . =michigan=-- white pine, maple and birch inches . =minnesota=-- birch, ash, spruce and pine inches . =illinois=-- oak, walnut and gum inches . =western=-- fir, pine and cedar inches . redwood feet and over . and over records kept by prof. a. j. mcguire, superintendent experimental farm of the university of minnesota, show even lower costs. breaking up hard-pan, shale or clay soils. this is probably the most important use of "red cross" dynamite. it is possible, although difficult and expensive, to clear land of stumps and boulders in other ways, but it is not possible to break up hard-pan, or clay subsoils, without the use of "red cross" dynamite. land that has a waterproof subsoil is practically worthless, as it holds the surface water in such quantities on level ground, that the roots of trees and plants are rotted away; on hilly ground, it allows the surface water to run off, thus preventing the storage of moisture, with the result that vegetation dies quickly in hot weather. such land can be rendered fertile at once by blasting with "red cross" dynamite. the subsoil is completely broken up and the dry, dead top soil converted into a rich loam for less than the amount of the taxes for a year or two. the following extract from the topeka, kansas, "mail and breeze" proves the wonderful results of this use of dynamite:-- "a few years ago m. t. williams bought a quarter section of land near medicine lodge in barber county, and, conceiving the same idea that ex-governor crawford and others have, used dynamite in dealing with a hard subsoil. the land was overgrown with sunflowers and cockleburs and would have been considered dear at $ per acre. it was underlaid with a hard subsoil that was almost impervious to water. mr. williams' idea was to loosen this subsoil with dynamite. he bored holes in the earth some feet deep and about feet apart, and in each hole placed a part of a stick of dynamite. the explosion of the dynamite loosened the hard subsoil, and made a reservoir for the rains, which had formerly run off the land nearly as fast as they fell. on this quarter there is now acres of, perhaps, as fine alfalfa as can be found in the state. mr. williams has refused $ , for the quarter and gathers a net income from his alfalfa of from $ to $ per acre every year. "last season mr. williams proposed to the ladies of the baptist church that he would give them a load of hay, provided they would come out to the place, shock the hay, load it on wagons and haul it to town. they took him at his word and shocked and hauled to town two tons which sold for $ . when the second crop was ready the ladies came again, and 'touched' mr. williams for a little more than two tons which sold as well as the first load." plowing with dynamite. ordinarily plowing merely turns over the same old soil year after year, and constant decrease in crops is only prevented by rotation or expensive fertilizing. with "red cross" dynamite you can break up the ground all over the field to a depth of two or three feet, for less than the cost of adequate fertilizing, and with better results. fertilizing only improves the top soil. dynamiting renders available all the moisture and elements of growth throughout the entire depth of the blast. in an article by j. h. caldwell, of spartanburg, s. c., in the september, , technical world magazine, he states that before the ground was broken up with dynamite, he planted his corn with stalks inches apart in rows feet apart and raised bushels to the acre. after the ground was blasted, it was able to nourish stalks inches apart in rows the same distance apart, and to produce over bushels to the acre. this means an increase of about _ bushels to the acre_, every year, for an original expense of $ an acre for labor and explosives. f. g. moughon, of walton county, georgia, reports that he has been raising crops of watermelons, weighing from to pounds each, on land blasted by exploding charges of about ounces of dynamite in holes - / to feet deep, spaced to feet apart. planting and cultivating orchards. in the orchard "red cross" dynamite not only saves much labor and time in planting the trees, but ensures the best growth and large yields. a man will spend an hour digging a tree hole that dynamite will excavate in an instant. the spaded hole will be hard all the way down, making it difficult for the transplanted roots to take hold. this is one of the chief reasons why transplanted trees so often die. "red cross" dynamite not only excavates the required hole, but also loosens the ground for yards around, killing all grubs, and forming a spongy reservoir for moisture. that is why trees planted in dynamited holes live and thrive. a whole row of tree holes can be excavated in one instant when charged with "red cross" dynamite. old trees are benefited by exploding small charges under them, or between the rows. this keeps the ground loose, and free from grubs. a well known fruit grower reports that he planted peach trees some years ago to determine whether anything was to be gained by using dynamite. a number of trees were planted in holes by detonating a charge of explosives to make the holes, and others were planted in holes of the regulation size, dug by hand. three years later the trees planted in the blasted holes were strong and healthy, each producing between five and six bushels of very fine peaches. the other trees planted on the same ground without blasting, bore no peaches, both fruit and leaves having shriveled up and dropped off during the dry season. digging ditches, post holes, wells and reservoirs. excavating of any kind is slow, hard work when done with pick and shovel, especially in mixed ground containing large stones, roots, streaks of gravel or shale. several rods of ditch can be excavated in an instant with dynamite, varying the size of each charge according to the nature of the ground at that point. most of the dirt is thrown out by the blast and the remainder is broken up ready for the shovel. a missourian advises us of a ditch he has just blasted through a swamp for $ , which he says would have cost him $ if dug in the usual way. on august , , at the demonstration at ivor, va., above referred to, a ditch feet in length, feet deep and - / feet wide at the top, was blasted with dynamite, at a cost not exceeding cents per yard, or about $ . for the entire work. "red cross" dynamite is especially useful in excavating wells and reservoirs, as it opens up all the springs in nearby ground. road-making and grading. "red cross" dynamite is a big saver of time and labor in making new roads, or leveling grades on old roads. rock, shale, clay, gravel or sand, can all be broken up with ease, simply by varying the charge according to the nature of the ground and the depth of excavation desired. excavating cellars and foundation trenches. this work can be done with "red cross" dynamite in one-tenth the time required for hand and team shoveling, and the cost of the dynamite is but a fraction of the value of the labor saved. regenerating old, worn-out farms. all over the eastern and southern sections of the united states are farms and plantations, once rich, fertile and profitable, but now either abandoned, or so unproductive as to be almost worthless. the chief trouble with these farms is that the top soil is worked out. "red cross" dynamite can be used with complete success to turn up an entirely fresh, fertile soil, and convert a $ an acre "worked-out farm" into land worth $ to $ an acre. the cost in dynamite for this conversion would be about $ to $ an acre according to the nature of the soil. this matter is worthy of as much consideration on the part of farmers, and all others concerned with national resources, as the reclamation of desert areas in the west. surely it is as important to restore the productiveness of established farms in the east, as it is to open up new, fertile fields in the west and southwest. if any portion of your farm is not productive, it is probable that "red cross" dynamite can make it productive. the leading railroads of the country are taking the greatest interest in the increasing use of dynamite on the farm, because they know by actual results that it means more and better crops, bigger shipments and greater prosperity all along their lines. mr. h. b. fullerton, director agricultural development of the long island railroad, is one of the pioneers in this movement, and in an article entitled "reclaiming waste land on long island," his wife, edith loring fullerton, graphically describes the use of dynamite in the preparation of waste land for cultivation. how can we help you? for more than a hundred years we have been making and selling explosives. we maintain a highly skilled corps of chemists, explosive specialists, and field representatives, whose sole duties are to study conditions and devise means for handling them. if there is any soil condition on your farm that we have not mentioned, and which you think might be remedied or improved by dynamite, please write us all about it. there will be no charge for the information we will send you; in fact, we will be much obliged to you for giving us the opportunity to study any peculiar condition. bear in mind that the age, reputation and high standing of this company are ample assurance that any statements made by us are conservative, and based on long and varied experience. in any case we want you to write for our "handbook of explosives for farmers, planters and ranchers," which we send out only on request, as it is too valuable to send to anyone not interested enough to ask for it. asking for it puts you under no obligation to us except to read it. we believe that when you have read it you will understand how simple, safe and economical the use of "red cross" dynamite is, and that you will find many ways to save and make money with its aid. e. i. du pont de nemours powder co. wilmington, delaware november, e. i. du pont de nemours powder company home office: wilmington, del. established _branch offices_ boston, mass. birmingham, ala. buffalo, n.y. chicago, ill. cincinnati, o. city of mexico denver, colo. duluth, minn. hazleton, pa. houghton, mich. huntington, w. va. joplin, mo. kansas city, mo. memphis, tenn. nashville, tenn. new orleans, la. new york, n.y. philadelphia, pa. pittsburg, kas. pittsburgh, pa. portland, ore. salt lake city, utah san francisco, cal. scranton, pa. seattle, wash. shreveport, la. spokane, wash. springfield, ill. st. louis, mo. terre haute, ind. station life in new zealand by lady barker. preface. these letters, their writer is aware, justly incur the reproach of egotism and triviality; at the same time she did not see how this was to be avoided, without lessening their value as the exact account of a lady's experience of the brighter and less practical side of colonization. they are published as no guide or handbook for "the intending emigrant;" that person has already a literature to himself, and will scarcely find here so much as a single statistic. they simply record the expeditions, adventures, and emergencies diversifying the daily life of the wife of a new zealand sheep-farmer; and, as each was written while the novelty and excitement of the scenes it describes were fresh upon her, they may succeed in giving here in england an adequate impression of the delight and freedom of an existence so far removed from our own highly-wrought civilization: not failing in this, the writer will gladly bear the burden of any critical rebuke the letters deserve. one thing she hopes will plainly appear,--that, however hard it was to part, by the width of the whole earth, from dear friends and spots scarcely less dear, yet she soon found in that new country new friends and a new home; costing her in their turn almost as many parting regrets as the old. f. n. b. letter i: two months at sea--melbourne. port phillip hotel, melbourne. september d, . .... now i must give you an account of our voyage: it has been a very quick one for the immense distance traversed, sometimes under canvas, but generally steaming. we saw no land between the lizard and cape otway light--that is, for fifty-seven days: and oh, the monotony of that time!--the monotony of it! our decks were so crowded that we divided our walking hours, in order that each set of passengers might have space to move about; for if every one had taken it into their heads to exercise themselves at the same time, we could hardly have exceeded the fisherman's definition of a walk, "two steps and overboard." i am ashamed to say i was more or less ill all the way, but, fortunately, f---- was not, and i rejoiced at this from the most selfish motives, as he was able to take care of me. i find that sea-sickness develops the worst part of one's character with startling rapidity, and, as far as i am concerned, i look back with self-abasement upon my callous indifference to the sufferings of others, and apathetic absorption in my individual misery. until we had fairly embarked, the well-meaning but ignorant among our friends constantly assured us, with an air of conviction as to the truth and wisdom of their words, that we were going at the very best season of the year; but as soon as we could gather the opinions of those in authority on board, it gradually leaked out that we really had fallen upon quite a wrong time for such a voyage, for we very soon found ourselves in the tropics during their hottest month (early in august), and after having been nearly roasted for three weeks, we plunged abruptly into mid-winter, or at all events very early spring, off the cape of good hope, and went through a season of bitterly cold weather, with three heavy gales. i pitied the poor sailors from the bottom of my heart, at their work all night on decks slippery with ice, and pulling at ropes so frozen that it was almost impossible to bend them; but, thank god, there were no casualties among the men. the last gale was the most severe; they said it was the tail of a cyclone. one is apt on land to regard such phrases as the "shriek of the storm," or "the roar of the waves," as poetical hyperboles; whereas they are very literal and expressive renderings of the sounds of horror incessant throughout a gale at sea. our cabin, though very nice and comfortable in other respects, possessed an extraordinary attraction for any stray wave which might be wandering about the saloon: once or twice i have been in the cuddy when a sea found its way down the companion, and i have watched with horrible anxiety a ton or so of water hesitating which cabin it should enter and deluge, and it always seemed to choose ours. all these miseries appear now, after even a few days of the blessed land, to belong to a distant past; but i feel inclined to lay my pen down and have a hearty laugh at the recollection of one cold night, when a heavy "thud" burst open our cabin door, and washed out all the stray parcels, boots, etc., from the corners in which the rolling of the ship had previously bestowed them. i was high and dry in the top berth, but poor f---- in the lower recess was awakened by the douche, and no words of mine can convey to you the utter absurdity of his appearance, as he nimbly mounted on the top of a chest of drawers close by, and crouched there, wet and shivering, handing me up a most miscellaneous assortment of goods to take care of in my little dry nest. some of our fellow-passengers were very good-natured, and devoted themselves to cheering and enlivening us by getting up concerts, little burlesques and other amusements; and very grateful we were for their efforts: they say that "anything is fun in the country," but on board ship a little wit goes a very long way indeed, for all are only too ready and anxious to be amused. the whole dramatic strength of the company was called into force for the performance of "the rivals," which was given a week or so before the end of the voyage. it went off wonderfully well; but i confess i enjoyed the preparations more than the play itself: the ingenuity displayed was very amusing at the time. you on shore cannot imagine how difficult it was to find a snuff-box for "sir anthony absolute," or with what joy and admiration we welcomed a clever substitute for it in the shape of a match-box covered with the lead out of a tea-chest most ingeniously modelled into an embossed wreath round the lid, with a bunch of leaves and buds in the centre, the whole being brightly burnished: at the performance the effect of this little "property" was really excellent. then, at the last moment, poor "bob acres" had to give in, and acknowledge that he could not speak for coughing; he had been suffering from bronchitis for some days past, but had gallantly striven to make himself heard at rehearsals; so on the day of the play f---- had the part forced on him. there was no time to learn his "words," so he wrote out all of them in large letters on slips of paper and fastened them on the beams. this device was invisible to the audience, but he was obliged to go through his scenes with his head as high up as if he had on a martingale; however, we were all so indulgent that at any little _contretemps_, such as one of the actresses forgetting her part or being seized by stage-fright, the applause was much greater than when things went smoothly. i can hardly believe that it is only two days since we steamed into hobson's bay, on a lovely bright spring morning. at dinner, the evening before, our dear old captain had said that we should see the revolving light on the nearest headland about eight o'clock that evening, and so we did. you will not think me childish, if i acknowledge that my eyes were so full of tears i could hardly see it after the first glimpse; it is impossible to express in a letter all the joy and thankfulness of such a moment. feelings like these are forgotten only too quickly in the jar and bustle of daily life, and we are always ready to take as a matter of course those mercies which are new every morning; but when i realized that all the tosses and tumbles of so many weary days and nights were over, and that at last we had reached the haven where we would be, my first thought was one of deep gratitude. it was easy to see that it was a good moment with everyone; squabbles were made up with surprising quickness; shy people grew suddenly sociable; some who had comfortable homes to go to on landing gave kind and welcome invitations to others, who felt themselves sadly strange in a new country; and it was with really a lingering feeling of regret that we all separated at last, though a very short time before we should have thought it quite impossible to be anything but delighted to leave the ship. we have not seen much of melbourne yet, as there has been a great deal to do in looking after the luggage, and at first one is capable of nothing but a delightful idleness. the keenest enjoyment is a fresh-water bath, and next to that is the new and agreeable luxury of the ample space for dressing; and then it is so pleasant to suffer no anxiety as to the brushes and combs tumbling about. i should think that even the vainest woman in the world would find her toilet and its duties a daily trouble and a sorrow at sea, on account of the unsteadiness of all things. the next delight is standing at the window, and seeing horses, and trees, and dogs--in fact, all the "treasures of the land;" as for flowers--beautiful as they are at all times--you cannot learn to appreciate them enough until you have been deprived of them for two months. you know that i have travelled a good deal in various parts of the world, but i have never seen anything at all like melbourne. in other countries, it is generally the antiquity of the cities, and their historical reminiscences, which appeal to the imagination; but _here_, the interest is as great from exactly the opposite cause. it is most wonderful to walk through a splendid town, with magnificent public buildings, churches, shops, clubs, theatres, with the streets well paved and lighted, and to think that less than forty years ago it was a desolate swamp without even a hut upon it. how little an english country town progresses in forty years, and here is a splendid city created in that time! i have no hesitation in saying, that any fashionable novelty which comes out in either london or paris finds its way to melbourne by the next steamer; for instance, i broke my parasol on board ship, and the first thing i did on landing was to go to one of the best shops in collins street to replace it. on learning what i wanted, the shopman showed me some of those new parasols which had just come out in london before i sailed, and which i had vainly tried to procure in s----, only four hours from london. the only public place we have yet visited is the acclimatization garden; which is very beautifully laid out, and full of aviaries, though it looks strange to see common english birds treated as distinguished visitors and sumptuously lodged and cared for. naturally, the australian ones interest me most, and they are certainly prettier than yours at home, though they do not sing. i have been already to a shop where they sell skins of birds, and have half ruined myself in purchases for hats. you are to have a "diamond sparrow," a dear little fellow with reddish brown plumage, and white spots over its body (in this respect a miniature copy of the argus pheasant i brought from india), and a triangular patch of bright yellow under its throat. i saw some of them alive in a cage in the market with many other kinds of small birds, and several pairs of those pretty grass or zebra paroquets, which are called here by the very inharmonious name of "budgerighars." i admired the blue wren so much--a tiny _birdeen_ with tail and body of dust-coloured feathers, and head and throat of a most lovely turquoise blue; it has also a little wattle of these blue feathers standing straight out on each side of its head, which gives it a very pert appearance. then there is the emu-wren, all sad-coloured, but quaint, with the tail-feathers sticking up on end, and exactly like those of an emu; on the very smallest scale, even to the peculiarity of two feathers growing out of the same little quill. i was much amused by the varieties of cockatoos, parrots, and lories of every kind and colour, shrieking and jabbering in the part of the market devoted to them; but i am told that i have seen very few of the varieties of birds, as it is early in the spring, and the young ones have not yet been brought in: they appear to sell as fast as they can be procured. but before i end my letter i must tell you about the cockatoo belonging to this hotel. it is a famous bird in its way, having had its portrait taken several times, descriptions written for newspapers of its talents, and its owner boasts of enormous sums offered and refused for it. knowing my fondness for pets, f---- took me downstairs to see it very soon after our arrival. i thought it hideous: it belongs to a kind not very well known in england, of a dirtyish white colour, a very ugly-shaped head and bill, and large bluish rings round the eyes; the beak is huge and curved. if it knew of this last objection on my part, it would probably answer, like the wolf in red riding hood's story, "the better to talk with, my dear"--for it is a weird and knowing bird. at first it flatly refused to show off any of its accomplishments, but one of the hotel servants good-naturedly came forward, and cocky condescended to go through his performances. i cannot possibly-tell you of all its antics: it pretended to have a violent toothache, and nursed its beak in its claw, rocking itself backwards and forwards as if in the greatest agony, and in answer to all the remedies which were proposed, croaking out, "oh, it ain't a bit of good," and finally sidling up, to the edge of its perch, and saying in hoarse but confidential whisper, "give us a drop of whisky, _do_." its voice was extraordinarily distinct, and when it sang several snatches of songs the words were capitally given, with the most absurdly comic intonation, all the _roulades_ being executed in perfect tune. i liked its sewing performance so much--to see it hold a little piece of stuff underneath the claw which rested on the perch, and pretend to sew with the other, getting into difficulties with its thread, and finally setting up a loud song in praise of sewing-machines just as if it were an advertisement. by the next time i write i shall have seen more of melbourne; there will, however, be no time for another letter by this mail; but i will leave one to be posted after we sail for new zealand. letter ii: sight-seeing in melbourne. melbourne, october st, . i have left my letter to the last moment before starting for lyttleton; everything is re-packed and ready, and we sail to-morrow morning in the _albion_. she is a mail-steamer--very small after our large vessel, but she looks clean and tidy; at all events, we hope to be only on board her for ten days. in england one fancies that new zealand is quite close to australia, so i was rather disgusted to find we had another thousand miles of steaming to do before we could reach our new home; and one of the many job's comforters who are scattered up and down the world assures me that the navigation is the most dangerous and difficult of the whole voyage. we have seen a good deal of melbourne this week; and not only of the town, for we have had many drives in the exceedingly pretty suburbs, owing to the kindness of the d----s, who have been most hospitable and made our visit here delightful. we drove out to their house at toorak three or four times; and spent a long afternoon with them; and there i began to make acquaintance with the antipodean trees and flowers. i hope you will not think it a very sweeping assertion if i say that all the leaves look as if they were made of leather, but it really is so; the hot winds appear to parch up everything, at all events, round melbourne, till the greatest charm of foliage is more or less lost; the flowers also look withered and burnt up, as yours do at the end of a long, dry summer, only they assume this appearance after the first hot wind in spring. the suburb called heidelberg is the prettiest, to my taste--an undulating country with vineyards, and a park-like appearance which, is very charming. all round melbourne there are nice, comfortable, english-looking villas. at one of these we called to return a visit and found a very handsome house, luxuriously furnished, with beautiful garden and grounds. one afternoon we went by rail to st. kilda's, a flourishing bathing-place on the sea-coast, about six miles from melbourne. everywhere building is going on with great rapidity, and you do not see any poor people in the streets. if i wanted to be critical and find fault, i might object to the deep gutters on each side of the road; after a shower of rain they are raging torrents for a short time, through which you are obliged to splash without regard to the muddy consequences; and even when they are dry, they entail sudden and prodigious jolts. there are plenty of hansoms and all sorts of other conveyances, but i gave f---- no peace until he took me for a drive in a vehicle which was quite new to me--a sort of light car with a canopy and curtains, holding four, two on each seat, _dos-a-dos_, and called a "jingle,"--of american parentage, i fancy. one drive in this carriage was quite enough, however, and i contented myself with hansoms afterwards; but walking is really more enjoyable than anything else, after having been so long cooped up on board ship. we admired the fine statue, at the top of collins street, to the memory of the two most famous of australian explorers, burke and wills, and made many visits to the museum, and the glorious free library; we also went all over the houses of legislature--very new and grand. but you must not despise me if i confess to having enjoyed the shops exceedingly: it was so unlike a jeweller's shop in england to see on the counter gold in its raw state, in nuggets and dust and flakes; in this stage of its existence it certainly deserves its name of "filthy lucre," for it is often only half washed. there were quantities of emus' eggs in the silversmiths' shops, mounted in every conceivable way as cups and vases, and even as work-boxes: some designs consisted of three or five eggs grouped together as a centre-piece. i cannot honestly say i admired any of them; they were generally too elaborate, comprising often a native (spear in hand), a kangaroo, palms, ferns, cockatoos, and sometimes an emu or two in addition, as a pedestal--all this in frosted silver or gold. i was given a pair of these eggs before leaving england: they were mounted in london as little flower-vases in a setting consisting only of a few bulrushes and leaves, yet far better than any of these florid designs; but he emu-eggs are very popular in sydney or melbourne, and i am told sell rapidly to people going home, who take them as a memento of their australian life, and probably think that the greater the number of reminiscences suggested by the ornament the more satisfactory it is as a purchase. i must finish my letter by a description of a dinner-party which about a dozen of our fellow-passengers joined with us in giving our dear old captain before we all separated. whilst we were on board, it very often happened that the food was not very choice or good: at all events we used sometimes to grumble at it, and we generally wound up our lamentations by agreeing that when we reached melbourne we would have a good dinner together. looking back on it, i must say i think we were all rather greedy, but we tried to give a better colouring to our gourmandism by inviting the captain, who was universally popular, and by making it as elegant and pretty a repast as possible. three or four of the gentlemen formed themselves into a committee, and they must really have worked very hard; at all events they collected everything rare and strange in the way of fish, flesh, and fowl peculiar to australia, the arrangement of the table was charming, and the delicacies were all cooked and served to perfection. the ladies' tastes were considered in the profusion of flowers, and we each found an exquisite bouquet by our plate. i cannot possibly give you a minute account of the whole menu; in fact, as it is, i feel rather like froissart, who, after chronicling a long list of sumptuous dishes, is not ashamed to confess, "of all which good things i, the chronicler of this narration, did partake!" the soups comprised kangaroo-tail--a clear soup not unlike ox-tail, but with a flavour of game. i wish i could recollect the names of the fish: the fresh-water ones came a long distance by rail from the river murray, but were excellent nevertheless. the last thing which i can remember tasting (for one really could do little else) was a most exquisite morsel of pigeon--more like a quail than anything else in flavour. i am not a judge of wine, as you may imagine, therefore it is no unkindness to the owners of the beautiful vineyards which we saw the other day, to say that i do not like the australian wines. some of the gentlemen pronounced them to be excellent, especially the equivalent to sauterne, which has a wonderful native name impossible to write down; but, as i said before, i do not like the rather rough flavour. we had not a great variety of fruit at dessert: indeed, sydney oranges constituted its main feature, as it is too late for winter fruits, and too early for summer ones: but we were not inclined to be over-fastidious, and thought everything delicious. letter iii: on to new zealand. christchurch, canterbury, n. z. october th, . as you so particularly desired me when we parted to tell you _everything_, i must resume my story where in my last letter i left it off. if i remember rightly, i ended with an attempt at describing our great feast. we embarked the next day, and as soon as we were out of the bay the little _albion_ plunged into heavy seas. the motion was much worse in her than on board the large vessel we had been so glad to leave, and all my previous sufferings seemed insignificant compared with what i endured in my small and wretchedly hard berth. i have a dim recollection of f---- helping me to dress, wrapping me up in various shawls, and half carrying me up the companion ladder; i crawled into a sunny corner among the boxes of oranges with which the deck was crowded, and there i lay helpless and utterly miserable. one well-meaning and good-natured fellow-passenger asked f---- if i was fond of birds, and on his saying "yes," went off for a large wicker cage of hideous "laughing jackasses," which he was taking as a great treasure to canterbury. why they should be called "jackasses" i never could discover; but the creatures certainly do utter by fits and starts a sound which may fairly be described as laughter. these paroxysms arise from no cause that one can perceive; one bird begins, and all the others join in, and a more doleful and depressing chorus i never heard: early in the morning seemed the favourite time for this discordant mirth. their owner also possessed a cockatoo with a great musical reputation, but i never heard it get beyond the first bar of "come into the garden, maud." ill as i was, i remember being roused to something like a flicker of animation when i was shown an exceedingly seedy and shabby-looking blackbird with a broken leg in splints, which its master (the same bird-fancying gentleman) assured me he had bought in melbourne as a great bargain for only pounds shillings! after five days' steaming we arrived in the open roadstead of hokitika, on the west coast of the middle island of new zealand, and five minutes after the anchor was down a little tug came alongside to take away our steerage passengers--three hundred diggers. the gold-fields on this coast were only discovered eight months ago, and already several canvas towns have sprung up; there are thirty thousand diggers at work, and every vessel brings a fresh cargo of stalwart, sun-burnt men. it was rather late, and getting dark, but still i could distinctly see the picturesque tents in the deep mountain gorge, their white shapes dotted here and there as far back from the shore as my sight could follow, and the wreaths of smoke curling up in all directions from the evening fires: it is still bitterly cold at night, being very early spring. the river hokitika washes down with every fresh such quantities of sand, that a bar is continually forming in this roadstead, and though only vessels of the least possible draught are engaged in the coasting-trade, still wrecks are of frequent occurrence. we ought to have landed our thousands of oranges here, but this work was necessarily deferred till the morning, for it was as much as they could do to get all the diggers and their belongings safely ashore before dark; in the middle of the night one of the sudden and furious gales common to these seas sprang up, and would soon have driven us on the rocks if we had not got our steam up quickly and struggled out to sea, oranges and all, and away to nelson, on the north coast of the same island. here we landed the seventh day after leaving melbourne, and spent a few hours wandering about on shore. it is a lovely little town, as i saw it that spring morning, with hills running down almost to the water's edge, and small wooden houses with gables and verandahs, half buried in creepers, built up the sides of the steep slopes. it was a true new zealand day, still and bright, a delicious invigorating freshness in the air, without the least chill, the sky of a more than italian blue, the ranges of mountains in the distance covered with snow, and standing out, sharp and clear against this lovely glowing heaven. the town itself, i must say, seemed very dull and stagnant, with little sign of life or activity about it; but nothing can be prettier or more picturesque than its situation--not unlike that of a swiss village. our day came to an end all too soon, and we re-embarked for wellington, the most southern town of the north island. the seat of government is there, and it is supposed to be a very thriving place, but is not nearly so well situated as nelson nor so attractive to strangers. we landed and walked about a good deal, and saw what little there was to see. at first i thought the shops very handsome, but i found, rather to my disgust, that generally the fine, imposing frontage was all a sham; the actual building was only a little but at the back, looking all the meaner for the contrast to the cornices and show windows in front. you cannot think how odd it was to turn a corner and see that the building was only one board in thickness, and scarcely more substantial than the scenes at a theatre. we lunched at the principal hotel, where f---- was much amused at my astonishment at colonial prices. we had two dozen very nice little oysters, and he had a glass of porter: for this modest repast we paid eleven shillings! we slept on board, had another walk on shore after breakfast the following morning, and about twelve o'clock set off for lyttleton, the final end of our voyaging, which we reached in about twenty hours. the scenery is very beautiful all along the coast, but the navigation is both dangerous and difficult. it was exceedingly cold, and lyttleton did not look very inviting; we could not get in at all near the landing-place, and had to pay pounds to be rowed ashore in an open boat with our luggage. i assure you it was a very "bad quarter of an hour" we passed in that boat; getting into it was difficult enough. the spray dashed over us every minute, and by the time we landed we were quite drenched, but a good fire at the hotel and a capital lunch soon made us all right again; besides, in the delight of being actually at the end of our voyage no annoyance or discomfort was worth a moment's thought. f---- had a couple of hours' work rushing backwards and forwards to the custom house, clearing our luggage, and arranging for some sort of conveyance to take us over the hills. the great tunnel through these "port hills" (which divide lyttleton from christchurch, the capital of canterbury) is only half finished, but it seems wonderful that so expensive and difficult an engineering work could be undertaken by such an infant colony. at last a sort of shabby waggonette was forthcoming, and about three o'clock we started from lyttleton, and almost immediately began to ascend the zig-zag. it was a tremendous pull for the poor horses, who however never flinched; at the steepest pinch the gentlemen were requested to get out and walk, which they did, and at length we reached the top. it was worth all the bad road to look down on the land-locked bay, with the little patches of cultivation, a few houses nestling in pretty recesses. the town of lyttleton seemed much more imposing and important as we rose above it: fifteen years ago a few sheds received the "pilgrims," as the first comers are always called. i like the name; it is so pretty and suggestive. by the way, i am told that these four ships, sent out with the pilgrims by the canterbury association, sailed together from england, parted company almost directly, and arrived in lyttleton (then called port cooper) four months afterwards, on the same day, having all experienced fine weather, but never having sighted each other once. as soon as we reached the top of the hill the driver looked to the harness of his horses, put on a very powerful double break, and we began the descent, which, i must say, i thought we took much too quickly, especially as at every turn of the road some little anecdote was forthcoming of an upset or accident; however, i would not show the least alarm, and we were soon rattling along the sumner road, by the sea-shore, passing every now and then under tremendous overhanging crags. in half an hour we reached sumner itself, where we stopped for a few moments to change horses. there is an inn and a village here, where people from christchurch come in the warm weather for sea-air and bathing. it began to rain hard, and the rest of the journey, some seven or eight miles, was disagreeable enough; but it was the _end_, and that one thought was sufficient to keep us radiantly good-humoured, in spite of all little trials. when we reached christchurch, we drove at once to a sort of boarding-house where we had engaged apartments, and thought of nothing but supper and bed. the next day people began calling, and certainly i cannot complain of any coldness or want of welcome to my new home. i like what i have seen of my future acquaintances very much. of course there is a very practical style and tone over everything, though outwardly the place is as civilized as if it were a hundred years old; well-paved streets, gas lamps, and even drinking fountains and pillar post-offices! i often find myself wondering whether the ladies here are at all like what our great grandmothers were. i suspect they are, for they appear to possess an amount of useful practical knowledge which is quite astonishing, and yet know how to surround themselves, according to their means and opportunities, with the refinements and elegancies of life. i feel quite ashamed of my own utter ignorance on every subject, and am determined to set to work directly and learn: at all events i shall have plenty of instructresses. christchurch is a very pretty little town, still primitive enough to be picturesque, and yet very thriving: capital shops, where everything may be bought; churches, public buildings, a very handsome club-house, etc. most of the houses are of wood, but when they are burned down (which is often the case) they are now rebuilt of brick or stone, so that the new ones are nearly all of these more solid materials. i am disappointed to find that, the cathedral, of which i had heard so much, has not progressed beyond the foundations, which cost , pounds: all the works have been stopped, and certainly there is not much to show for so large a sum, but labour is very dear. christchurch is a great deal more lively and bustling than most english country towns, and i am much struck by the healthy appearance of the people. there are no paupers to be seen; every one seems well fed and well clothed; the children are really splendid. of course, as might be expected, there is a great deal of independence in bearing and manner, especially among the servants, and i hear astounding stories concerning them on all sides. my next letter will be from the country, as we have accepted an invitation to pay a visit of six weeks or so to a station in the north of the province. letter iv: first introduction to "station life." heathstock, canterbury, november th, . i have just had the happiness of receiving my first budget of english letters; and no one can imagine how a satisfactory home letter satisfies the hunger of the heart after its loved and left ones. your letter was particularly pleasant, because i could perceive, as i held the paper in my hands, that you were writing as you really felt, and that you were indeed happy. may you long continue so, dearest. f---- says that this beautiful place will give me a very erroneous impression of station life, and that i shall probably expect to find its comforts and luxuries the rule, whereas they are the exception; in the mean time, however, i am enjoying them thoroughly. the house is only sixty-five miles from christchurch, nearly due north (which you must not forget answers to your south in point of warmth). our kind friends and hosts, the l----s, called for us in their comfortable and large break, with four horses. mr. l---- drove, f---- sat on the box, and inside were the ladies, children, and a nurse. our first stage was to kaiapoi, a little town on the river waimakiriri, where we had a good luncheon of whitebait, and rested and fed the horses. from the window of the hotel i saw a few groups of maories; they looked very ugly and peaceable, with a rude sort of basket made of flax fibres, or buckets filled with whitebait, which they wanted us to buy. there are some reserved lands near kaiapoi where they have a very thriving settlement, living in perfect peace and good-will with their white neighbours. when we set off again on our journey, we passed a little school-house for their children. we reached leathfield that evening, only twenty-five miles from christchurch; found a nice inn, or accommodation-house, as roadside inns are called here; had a capital supper and comfortable beds, and were up and off again at daylight the next morning. as far as the weka pass, where we stopped for dinner, the roads were very good, but after that we got more among the hills and off the usual track, and there were many sharp turns and steep pinches; but mr. l---- is an excellent whip, and took great care of us. we all got very weary towards the end of this second day's journey, and the last two hours of it were in heavy rain; it was growing very dark when we reached the gate, and heard the welcome sound of gravel under the wheels. i could just perceive that we had entered a plantation, the first trees since we left christchurch. nothing seems so wonderful to me as the utter treelessness of the vast canterbury plains; occasionally you pass a few ti-ti palms (ordinarily called cabbage-trees), or a large prickly bush which goes by the name of "wild irishman," but for miles and miles you see nothing but flat ground or slightly undulating downs of yellow tussocks, the tall native grass. it has the colour and appearance of hay, but serves as shelter for a delicious undergrowth of short sweet herbage, upon which the sheep live, and horses also do very well on it, keeping in good working condition, quite unlike their puffy, fat state on english pasture. we drove through the plantation and another gate, and drew up at the door of a very large, handsome, brick house, with projecting gables and a verandah. the older i grow the more convinced i am that contrast is everything in this world; and nothing i can write can give you any idea of the delightful change from the bleak country we had been slowly travelling through in pouring rain, to the warmth and brightness of this charming house. there were blazing fires ready to welcome us, and i feel sure you will sufficiently appreciate this fact when i tell you that by the time the coal reaches this, it costs nine pounds per ton. it is possible to get australian coal at about half the price, but it is not nearly as good. we were so tired that we were only fit for the lowest phase of human enjoyment--warmth, food, and sleep; but the next morning was bright and lovely, and i was up and out in the verandah as early as possible. i found myself saying constantly, in a sort of ecstasy, "how i wish they could see this in england!" and not only see but feel it, for the very breath one draws on such a morning is a happiness; the air is so light and yet balmy, it seems to heal the lungs as you inhale it. the verandah is covered with honeysuckles and other creepers, and the gable end of the house where the bow-window of the drawing-room projects, is one mass of yellow banksia roses in full blossom. a stream runs through the grounds, fringed with weeping willows, which are in their greatest beauty at this time of year, with their soft, feathery foliage of the tenderest green. the flower beds are dotted about the lawn, which surrounds the house and slopes away from it, and they are brilliant patches of colour, gay with verbenas, geraniums, and petunias. here and there clumps of tall trees rise above the shrubs, and as a background there is a thick plantation of red and blue gums, to shelter the garden from the strong n.w. winds. then, in front, the country stretches away in undulating downs to a chain of high hills in the distance: every now and then there is a deep gap in these, through which you see magnificent snow-covered mountains. the inside of the house is as charming as the outside, and the perfection of comfort; but i am perpetually wondering how all the furniture--especially the fragile part of it--got here. when i remember the jolts, and ruts, and roughnesses of the road, i find myself looking at the pier-glass and glass shades, picture-frames, etc., with a sort of respect, due to them for having survived so many dangers. the first two or three days we enjoyed ourselves in a thoroughly lazy manner; the garden was a never-ending source of delight, and there were all the animals to make friends with, "mobs" of horses to look at, rabbits, poultry, and pets of all sorts. about a week after our arrival, some more gentlemen came, and then we had a series of picnics. as these are quite unlike your highly civilized entertainments which go by the same name, i must describe one to you. the first thing after breakfast was to collect all the provisions, and pack them in a sort of washing-basket, and then we started in an american waggon drawn by a pair of stout cobs. we drove for some miles till we came to the edge of one of the high terraces common to new zealand scenery: here we all got out; the gentlemen unharnessed and tethered the horses, so that they could feed about comfortably, and then we scrambled down the deep slope, at the bottom of which ran a wide shallow creek. it was no easy matter to get the basket down here, i assure you; we ladies were only permitted to load ourselves, one with a little kettle, and the other with a tea-pot, but this was quite enough, as crossing the creek by a series of jumps from one wet stone to another is not easy for a beginner. mr. l---- brought a large dog with him, a kangaroo-hound (not unlike a lurcher in appearance), to hunt the wekas. i had heard at night the peculiar cry or call of these birds, but had not seen one until to-day. "fly" put up several, one after another, and soon ran them down. at first i thought it very cruel to destroy such a tame and apparently harmless creature, but i am assured that they are most mischievous, and that it would be useless to turn out the pheasants and partridges which mr. l---- has brought from england, until the numbers of the wekas are considerably reduced. they are very like a hen pheasant without the long tail feathers, and until you examine them you cannot tell they have no wings, though there is a sort of small pinion among the feathers, with a claw at the end of it. they run very swiftly, availing themselves cleverly of the least bit of cover; but when you hear a short sharp cry, it is a sign that the poor weka is nearly done, and the next thing you see is fly shaking a bundle of brown feathers vehemently. all the dogs are trained to hunt these birds, as they are a great torment, sucking eggs and killing chickens; but still i could not help feeling sorry when fly, having disposed of the mother, returned to the flax-bush out of which he had started her, and killed several baby-wekas by successive taps of his paw. i have wandered away from my account of the picnic in the most unjustifiable manner. the gentlemen were toiling up the hill, after we had crossed the creek, carrying the big basket by turns between them; it was really hard work, and i must tell you in confidence, that i don't believe they liked it--at least i can answer for one. i laughed at them for not enjoying their task, and assured them that i was looking forward with pleasure to washing up the plates and dishes after our luncheon; but i found that they had all been obliged, in the early days of the colony, to work at domestic drudgery in grim and grimy earnest, so it had lost the charm of novelty which it still possessed for me. as soon as we reached a pretty sheltered spot half-way up the hill among some trees and ferns, and by the side of the creek, we unpacked the basket, and began collecting dry wood for a fire: we soon had a splendid blaze under the lee of a fine rock, and there we boiled our kettle and our potatoes. the next thing was to find a deep hole in the creek, so over-shadowed by rocks and trees that the water would be icy cold: in this we put the champagne to cool. the result of all our preparations was a capital luncheon, eaten in a most romantic spot, with a lovely view before us, and the creek just like a scotch burn, hurrying and tumbling down the hill-side to join the broader stream in the valley. after luncheon, the gentlemen considered themselves entitled to rest, lying lazily back among the fern and smoking, whilst we ladies sat a little apart and chatted: i was busy learning to knit. then, about five, we had the most delicious cup of tea i ever tasted, and we repacked the basket (it was very light now, i assure you), and made our way back to the top of the terrace, put the horses in again, and so home. it was a long, bright, summer holiday, and we enjoyed it thoroughly. after a voyage, such an expedition as this is full of delight; every tree and bird is a source of pleasure. letter v: a pastoral letter. heathstock, december st, . all i can find to tell you this month is that i have seen one of the finest and best wool-sheds in the country in full work. anything about sheep is as new to you as it is to me, so i shall begin my story at the very beginning. i am afraid you will think us a very greedy set of people in this part of the world, for eating seems to enter so largely into my letters; but the fact is--and i may as well confess it at once--i am in a chronic state of hunger; it is the fault of the fine air and the outdoor life: and then how one sleeps at night! i don't believe you really know in england what it is to be sleepy as we feel sleepy here; and it is delightful to wake up in the morning with the sort of joyous light-heartedness which only young children have. the expedition i am going to relate may fairly be said to have begun with eating, for although we started for our twelve miles' drive over the downs immediately after an excellent and somewhat late breakfast, yet by the time we reached the home station we were quite ready for luncheon. all the work connected with the sheep is carried on here. the manager has a nice house; and the wool-shed, men's huts, dip, etc., are near each other. it is the busiest season of the year, and no time could be spared to prepare for us; we therefore contented ourselves with what was described to me as ordinary station fare, and i must tell you what they gave us: first, a tureen of real mutton-broth, not hot water and chopped parsley, but excel-lent thick soup, with plenty of barley and meat in it; this had much the same effect on our appetites as the famous treacle and brimstone before breakfast in "nicholas nickleby," so that we were only able to manage a few little sheeps' tongues, slightly pickled; and very nice _they_ were; then we finished with a devonshire junket, with clotted cream _a discretion_. do you think we were much to be pitied? after this repast we were obliged to rest a little before we set out for the wool-shed, which has only been lately finished, and has all the newest improvements. at first i am "free to confess" that i did not like either its sounds or sights; the other two ladies turned very pale, but i was determined to make myself bear it, and after a moment or two i found it quite possible to proceed with mr. l----round the "floor." there were about twenty-five shearers at work, and everything seemed to be very systematically and well arranged. each shearer has a trap-door close to him, out of which he pushes his sheep as soon as the fleece is off, and there are little pens outside, so that the manager can notice whether the poor animal has been too much cut with the shears, or badly shorn in any other respect, and can tell exactly which shearer is to blame. before this plan was adopted it was hopeless to try to find out who was the delinquent, for no one would acknowledge to the least snip. a good shearer can take off fleeces in a day, but the average is about to each man. they get one pound per hundred, and are found in everything, having as much tea and sugar, bread and mutton, as they can consume, and a cook entirely to themselves; they work at least fourteen hours out of the twenty-four, and with such a large flock as this--about , --must make a good deal. we next inspected the wool tables, to which two boys were incessantly bringing armfuls of rolled-up fleeces; these were laid on the tables before the wool-sorters, who opened them out, and pronounced in a moment to which _bin_ they belonged; two or three men standing behind rolled them up again rapidly, and put them on a sort of shelf divided into compartments, which were each labelled, so that the quality and kind of wool could be told at a glance. there was a constant emptying of these bins into trucks to be carried off to the press, where we followed to see the bales packed. the fleeces are tumbled in, and a heavy screw-press forces them down till the bale--which is kept open in a large square frame--is as full as it can hold. the top of canvas is then put on, tightly sewn, four iron pins are removed and the sides of the frame fall away, disclosing a most symmetrical bale ready to be hoisted by a crane into the loft above, where it has the brand of the sheep painted on it, its weight, and to what class the wool belongs. of course everything has to be done with great speed and system. i was much impressed by the silence in the shed; not a sound was to be heard except the click of the shears, and the wool-sorter's decision as he flings the fleece behind him, given in one, or at most two words. i was reminded how touchingly true is that phrase, "like as a sheep before her shearers is dumb." all the noise is _outside_; there the hubbub, and dust, and apparent confusion are great,--a constant succession of woolly sheep being brought up to fill the "skillions" (from whence the shearers take them as they want them), and the newly-shorn ones, white, clean, and bewildered-looking, being turned out after they have passed through a narrow passage, called a "race," where each sheep is branded, and has its mouth examined in order to tell its age, which is marked in a book. it was a comfort to think all their troubles were over, for a year. you can hear nothing but barking and bleating, and this goes on from early morning till dark. we peeped in at the men's huts--a long, low wooden building, with two rows of "bunks" (berths, i should call their) in one compartment, and a table with forms round it in the other, and piles of tin plates and pannikins all about. the kitchen was near, and we were just in time to see an enormous batch of bread withdrawn from a huge brick oven: the other commissariat arrangements were on the same scale. cold tea is supplied all day long to the shearers, and they appear to consume great quantities of it. our last visit was to the dip, and it was only a short one, for it seemed a cruel process; unfortunately, this fine station is in technical parlance "scabby," and although of course great precautions are taken, still some , sheep had an ominous large s on them. these poor sufferers are dragged down a plank into a great pit filled with hot water, tobacco, and sulphur, and soused over head and ears two or three times. this torture is repeated more than once. i was very glad to get away from the dip, and back to the manager's house, where we refreshed ourselves by a delicious cup of tea, and soon after started for a nice long drive home in the cool, clear evening air. the days are very hot, but never oppressive; and the mornings and evenings are deliciously fresh and invigorating. you can remain out late without the least danger. malaria is unknown, and, in spite of the heavy rains, there is no such thing as damp. our way lay through very pretty country--a series of terraces, with a range of mountains before us, with beautiful changing and softening evening tints creeping over the whole. i am sorry to say, we leave this next week. i should like to explore a great deal more. letter vi: society.--houses and servants. christchurch, january . i am beginning to get tired of christchurch already: but the truth is, i am not in a fair position to judge of it as a place of residence; for, living temporarily, as we do, in a sort of boarding-house, i miss the usual duties and occupations of home, and the town itself has no place of public amusement except a little theatre, to which it is much too hot to go. the last two weeks have been _the_ gay ones of the whole year; the races have been going on for three days, and there have been a few balls; but as a general rule, the society may be said to be extremely stagnant. no dinner-parties are ever given--i imagine, on account of the smallness of the houses and the inefficiency of the servants; but every now and then there is an assembly ball arranged, in the same way, i believe, as at watering-places in england only, of course, on a much smaller scale. i have been at two or three of these, and noticed at each a most undue preponderance of black coats. nearly all the ladies were married, there were very few young girls; and it would be a great improvement to the christchurch parties if some of the pretty and partnerless groups of a london ball-room, in all their freshness of toilette, could be transferred to them. what a sensation they would make, and what terrible heart-aches among the young gentlemen would be the result of such an importation! there were the same knots of men standing together as at a london party, but i must say that, except so far as their tailor is concerned, i think we have the advantage of you, for the gentlemen lead such healthy lives that they all look more or less bronzed and stalwart--in splendid condition, not like your pale dwellers in cities; and then they come to a ball to dance, arriving early so as to secure good partners, and their great ambition appears to be to dance every dance from the first to the last. this makes it hard work for the few ladies, who are not allowed to sit down for a moment, and i have often seen a young and pretty partner obliged to divide her dances between two gentlemen. although it tells only against myself, i must make you laugh at an account of a snub i received at one of these balls. early in the evening i had danced with a young gentleman whose station was a long way "up country," and who worked so hard on it that he very seldom found time for even the mild dissipations of christchurch; he was good-looking and gentlemanly, and seemed clever and sensible, a little _brusque_, perhaps, but one soon gets used to that here. during our quadrille he confided to me that he hardly knew any ladies in the room, and that his prospects of getting any dancing were in consequence very blank. i did all i could to find partners for him, introducing him to every lady whom i knew, but it was in vain; they would have been delighted to dance with him, but their cards were filled. at the end of the evening, when i was feeling thoroughly done up, and could hardly stand up for fatigue, my poor friend came up and begged for another dance. i assured him i could scarcely stand, but when he said in a _larmoyante_ voice, "i have only danced once this evening, that quadrille with you," my heart softened, and i thought i would make a great effort and try to get through one more set of lancers; my partner seemed so grateful, that the demon of vanity, or coquetry, or whatever it is that prompts one to say absurd things induced me to fish for a compliment, and to observe, "it was not worth while taking all the trouble of riding such a distance to dance only with me, was it?" whereupon my poor, doleful friend answered, with a deep sigh, and an accent of profound conviction, "no, indeed it was _not_!" i leave you to imagine my discomfiture; but luckily he never observed it, and i felt all the time that i richly deserved what i got, for asking such a stupid question. the music at these balls is very bad, and though the principal room in which they are given, at the town hall, is large and handsome, it is poorly lighted, and the decorations are desolate in the extreme. i am afraid this is not a very inviting picture of what is almost our only opportunity of meeting together, but it is tolerably correct. visiting appears to be the business of some people's lives, but the acquaintance does not seem to progress beyond incessant afternoon calls; we are never asked inside a house, nor, as far as i can make out, is there any private society whatever, and the public society consists, as i have said, of a ball every now and then. my greatest interest and occupation consist in going to look at my house, which is being cut out in christchurch, and will be drayed to our station next month, a journey of fifty miles. it is, of course, only of wood, and seems about as solid as a band-box; but i am assured by the builder that it will be a "most superior article" when it is all put together. f---- and i made the little plan of it ourselves, regulating the size of the drawing-room by the dimensions of the carpet we brought out, and i petitioned for a little bay-window, which is to be added; so on my last visit to his timber-yard, the builder said, with an air of great dignity, "would you wish to see the _h_oriel, mum?" the doors all come ready-made from america, and most of the wood used in building is the kauri pine from the north island. one advantage, at all events, in having wooden houses is the extreme rapidity with which they are run up, and there are no plastered walls to need drying. for a long time we were very uncertain where, and what, we should build on our station; but only six weeks after we made up our minds, a house is almost ready for us. the boards are sawn into the requisite lengths by machinery; and all the carpentering done down here; the frame will only require to be fitted together when it reaches its destination, and it is a very good time of year for building, as the wool drays are all going back empty, and we can get them to take the loads at reduced prices; but even with this help, it is enormously expensive to move a small house fifty miles, the last fifteen over bad roads; it is collar-work for the poor horses all the way, christchurch being only nine feet above the sea-level, while our future home in the malvern hills is twelve hundred. you know we brought all our furniture out with us, and even papers for the rooms, just because we happened to have everything; but i should not recommend any one to do so, for the expense of carriage, though moderate enough by sea (in a wool ship), is enormous as soon as it reaches lyttleton, and goods have to be dragged up country by horses or bullocks. there are very good shops where you can buy everything, and besides these there are constant sales by auction where, i am told, furniture fetches a price sometimes under its english value. house rent about christchurch is very high. we looked at some small houses in and about the suburbs of the town, when we were undecided about our plans, and were offered the most inconvenient little dwellings, with rooms which were scarcely bigger than cupboards, for pounds a year; we saw nothing at a lower price than this, and any house of a better class, standing in a nicely arranged shrubbery, is at least pounds per annum. cab-hire is another thing which seems to me disproportionately dear, as horses are very cheap; there are no small fares, half-a-crown being the lowest "legal tender" to a cabman; and i soon gave up returning visits when i found that to make a call in a hansom three or four miles out of the little town cost one pound or one pound ten shillings, even remaining only a few minutes at the house. all food (except mutton) appears to be as nearly as possible at london prices; but yet every one looks perfectly well-fed, and actual want is unknown. wages of all sorts are high, and employment, a certainty. the look and bearing of the immigrants appear to alter soon after they reach the colony. some people object to the independence of their manner, but i do not; on the contrary, i like to see the upright gait, the well-fed, healthy look, the decent clothes (even if no one touches his hat to you), instead of the half-starved, depressed appearance, and too often cringing servility of the mass of our english population. scotchmen do particularly well out here; frugal and thrifty, hard-working and sober, it is easy to predict the future of a man of this type in a new country. naturally, the whole tone of thought and feeling is almost exclusively practical; even in a morning visit there is no small-talk. i find no difficulty in obtaining the useful information upon domestic subjects which i so much need; for it is sad to discover, after all my house-keeping experience, that i am still perfectly ignorant. here it is necessary to know _how_ everything should be done; it is not sufficient to give an order, you must also be in a position to explain how it is to be carried out i felt quite guilty when i saw the picture in _punch_ the other day, of a young and inexperienced matron requesting her cook "not to put any lumps into the melted butter," and reflected that i did not know how lumps should be kept out; so, as i am fortunate enough to number among my new friends a lady who is as clever in these culinary details as she is bright and charming in society, i immediately went to her for a lesson in the art of making melted butter without putting lumps into it. the great complaint, the never-ending subject of comparison and lamentation among ladies, is the utter ignorance and inefficiency of their female servants. as soon as a ship comes in it is besieged with people who want servants, but it is very rare to get one who knows how to do anything as it ought to be done. their lack of all knowledge of the commonest domestic duties is most surprising, and makes one wonder who in england did the necessary things of daily cottage life for them, for they appear to have done nothing for themselves hitherto. as for a woman knowing how to cook, that seems the very last accomplishment they acquire; a girl will come to you as a housemaid at pounds per annum, and you will find that she literally does not know how to hold her broom, and has never handled a duster. when you ask a nurse her qualifications for the care of perhaps two or three young children, you may find, on close cross-examination, that she can recollect having once or twice "held mother's baby," and that she is very firm in her determination that "you'll keep baby yourself o' nights; mem!" a perfectly inexperienced girl of this sort will ask, and get, pounds or pounds per annum, a cook from pounds to pounds; and when they go "up country," they hint plainly they shall not stay long with you, and ask higher wages, stipulating with great exactness how they are to be conveyed free of all expense to and from their place. then, on the other hand, i must say they work desperately hard, and very cheerfully: i am amazed how few servants are kept even in the large and better class of houses. as a general rule, they, appear willing enough to learn, and i hear no complaints of dishonesty or immorality, though many moans are made of the rapidity with which a nice tidy young woman is snapped up as a wife; but that is a complaint no one can sympathise with. on most stations a married couple is kept; the man either to act as shepherd, or to work in the garden and look after the cows, and the woman is supposed to attend to the indoor comforts of the wretched bachelor-master: but she generally requires to be taught how to bake a loaf of bread, and boil a potato, as well as how to cook mutton in the simplest form. in her own cottage at home, who did all these things for her? these incapables are generally perfectly helpless and awkward at the wash-tub; no one seems to expect servants to know their business, and it is very fortunate if they show any capability of learning. i must end my long letter by telling you a little story of my own personal experience in the odd ways of these girls. the housemaid at the boarding-house where we have stayed since we left heathstock is a fat, sonsy, good-natured girl, perfectly ignorant and stupid, but she has not been long in the colony, and seems willing to learn. she came to me the other day, and, without the least circumlocution or hesitation, asked me if i would lend her my riding-habit as a pattern to give the tailor; adding that she wanted my best and newest. as soon as i could speak for amazement, i naturally asked why; she said she had been given a riding-horse, that she had loaned a saddle, and bought a hat, so now she had nothing on her mind except the habit; and further added, that she intended to leave her situation the day before the races, and that it was "her fixed intent" to appear on horseback each day, and all day long, at these said races. i inquired if she knew how to ride? no; she had never mounted any animal in her life. i suggested that she had better take some lessons before her appearance in public; but she said her mistress did not like to spare her to "practise," and she stuck steadily to her point of wanting my habit as a pattern. i could not lend it to her, fortunately, for it had been sent up to the station with my saddle, etc.; so had she been killed, as i thought not at all unlikely, at least my conscience would not have reproached me for aiding and abetting her equestrian freak. i inquired from every one who went to the races if they saw or heard of any accident to a woman on horseback, and i most anxiously watched the newspapers to see if they contained any notice of the sort, but as there has been no mention of any catastrophe, i suppose she has escaped safely. her horse must have been quieter and better broken than they generally are. f---- says that probably it was a very old "station screw." i trust so, for her sake! letter vii: a young colonist.--the town and its neighbourhood. christchurch, march . i must begin my letter this mail with a piece of domestic news, and tell you of the appearance of your small nephew, now three weeks old. the youth seems inclined to adapt himself to circumstances, and to be as sturdy and independent as colonial children generally are. all my new friends and neighbours proved most kind and friendly, and were full of good offices. once i happened to say that i did not like the food as it was cooked at the boarding-house; and the next day, and for many days after, all sorts of dainties were sent to me, prepared by hands which were as skilful on the piano, or with a pencil, as they were in handling a saucepan. new books were lent to me, and i was never allowed to be without a beautiful bouquet. one young lady used constantly to walk in to town, some two or three miles along a hot and dusty road, laden with flowers for me, just because she saw how thoroughly i enjoyed her roses and carnations. was it not good of her? christchurch has relapsed into the quietude, to call it by no harsher name. the shearing is finished all over the country, and the "squatters" (as owners of sheep-stations are called) have returned to their stations to vegetate, or work, as their tastes and circumstances may dictate. very few people live in the town except the tradespeople; the professional men prefer little villas two or three miles off. these houses stand in grounds of their own, and form a very pretty approach to christchurch, extending a few miles on all sides: there are large trees bordering most of the streets, which give a very necessary shade in summer; they are nearly all english sorts, and have only been planted within a few years. poplars, willows, and the blue gum grow quickest, are least affected by the high winds, and are therefore the most popular. the banks of the pretty little river avon, upon which christchurch is built, are thickly fringed with weeping willows, interspersed with a few other trees, and with clumps of tohi, which is exactly like the pampas grass you know so well in english shrubberies. i don't think i have ever told you that it has been found necessary here to legislate against water-cress. it was introduced a few years since, and has spread so rapidly as to become a perfect nuisance, choking every ditch in the neighbourhood of christchurch, blocking up mill-streams, causing meadows to be flooded, and doing all kinds of mischief. towards riccarton, about four miles out of town, the avon shows like a slender stream a few inches wide, moving sluggishly between thick beds of water-cress, which at this time of year are a mass of white blossom. it looks so perfectly solid that whenever i am at ilam, an insane desire to step on it comes over me, much to f----'s alarm, who says he is afraid to let me out of his sight, lest i should attempt to do so. i have only seen one native "bush" or forest yet, and that is at riccarton. this patch of tall, gaunt pines serves as a landmark for miles. riccarton is one of the oldest farms in the colony, and i am told it possesses a beautiful garden. i can only see the gable-end of a house peeping out from among the trees as i pass. this bush is most carefully preserved, but i believe that every high wind injures it. christchurch is very prettily situated; for although it stands on a perfectly flat plain, towards the sea there are the port hills, and the town itself is picturesque, owing to the quantities of trees and the irregular form of the wooden houses; and as a background we have the most magnificent chain of mountains--the back-bone of the island--running from north to south, the highest peaks nearly always covered with snow, even after such a hot summer as this has been. the climate is now delicious, answering in time of year to your september; but we have far more enjoyable weather than your autumns can boast of. if the atmosphere were no older than the date of the settlement of the colony, it could not feel more _youthful_, it is so light and bright, and exhilarating! the one drawback, and the only one, is the north-west wind; and the worst of it is, that it blows very often from this point. however, i am assured that i have not yet seen either a "howling nor'-wester," nor its exact antithesis, "a sutherly buster." we have lately been deprived of the amusement of going to see our house during the process of cutting it out, as it has passed that stage, and has been packed on drays and sent to the station, with two or three men to put it up. it was preceded by two dray-loads of small rough-hewn stone piles, which are first let into the ground six or eight feet apart: the foundation joists rest on these, so as just to keep the flooring from touching the earth. i did not like this plan (which is the usual one) at all, as it seemed to me so insecure for the house to rest only on these stones. i told the builder that i feared a strong "nor'-wester" (and i hear they are particularly strong in the malvern hills) would blow the whole affair away. he did not scout the idea as much as i could have wished, but held out hopes to me that the roof would "kep it down." i shall never dare to trust the baby out of my sight, lest he should be blown away; and i have a plan for securing his cradle, by putting large heavy stones in it, somewhere out of his way, so that he need not be hurt by them. some of the houses are built of "cob," especially those erected in the very early days, when sawn timber was rare and valuable: this material is simply wet clay with chopped tussocks stamped in. it makes very thick walls, and they possess the great advantage of being cool in summer and warm in winter. whilst the house is new nothing can be nicer; but, in a few years, the hot winds dry up the clay so much, that it becomes quite pulverized; and a lady who lives in one of these houses told me, that during a high wind she had often seen the dust from the walls blowing in clouds about the rooms, despite of the canvas and paper, and with all the windows carefully closed. next week f---- is going up to the station, to unpack and arrange a little, and baby and i are going to be taken care of at ilam, the most charming place i have yet seen. i am looking forward to my visit there with great pleasure. letter viii: pleasant days at ilam. ilam, april . we leave this to-morrow for the station in the most extraordinary conveyance you ever saw. imagine a flat tray with two low seats in it, perched on four very high wheels, quite innocent of any step or means of clambering in and out, and drawn, tandem-fashion, by two stout mares; one of which has a little foal by her side. the advantage of this vehicle is that it is very light, and holds a good deal of luggage. we hope to accomplish the distance--fifty miles--in a day, easily. although this is not my first visit to ilam, i don't think i have ever described it to you. the house is of wood, two storeys high, and came out from england! it is built on a brick foundation, which is quite unusual here. inside, it is exactly like a most charming english house, and when i first stood in the drawing-room it was difficult to believe: that i was at the other end of the world. all the newest books, papers, and periodicals covered the tables, the newest music lay on the piano, whilst a profusion of english greenhouse flowers in minton's loveliest vases added to the illusion. the avon winds through the grounds, which are very pretty, and are laid out in the english fashion; but in spite of the lawn with its croquet-hoops and sticks, and the beds of flowers in all their late summer beauty, there is a certain absence of the stiffness and trimness of english pleasure-grounds, which shows that you have escaped from the region of conventionalities. there are thick clumps of plantations, which have grown luxuriantly, and look as if they had always been there. a curve of the opposite bank is a dense mass of native flax bushes, with their tall spikes of red blossom filling the air with a scent of honey, and attracting all the bees in the neighbourhood. ti-ti palms are dotted here and there, and give a foreign and tropical appearance to the whole. there is a large kitchen garden and orchard, with none of the restrictions of high walls and locked gates which fence your english peaches and apricots. the following is our receipt for killing time at ilam:--after breakfast, take the last _cornhill_ or _macmillan_, put on a shady hat, and sit or saunter by the river-side under the trees, gathering any very tempting peach or apricot or plum or pear, until luncheon; same thing until five o'clock tea; then cross the river by a rustic bridge, ascend some turf steps to a large terrace-like meadow, sheltered from the north-west winds by a thick belt of firs, blue gums, and poplars, and play croquet on turf as level as a billiard-table until dinner. at these games the cockatoo always assists, making himself very busy, waddling after his mistress all over the field, and climbing up her mallet whenever he has an opportunity. "dr. lindley"--so called from his taste for pulling flowers to pieces--apparently for botanical purposes--is the tamest and most affectionate of birds, and i do not believe he ever bit any one in his life; he will allow himself to be pulled about, turned upside down, scratched under his wings, all with the greatest indifference, or rather with the most positive enjoyment. one evening i could not play croquet for laughing at his antics. he took a sudden dislike to a little rough terrier, and hunted him fairly off the ground at last, chasing him all about, barking at him, and digging his beak into the poor dog's paw. but the "doctor's" best performance is when he imitates a hawk. he reserves this fine piece of acting until his mistress is feeding her poultry; then, when all the hens and chickens, turkeys, and pigeons are in the quiet enjoyment of their breakfast or supper, the peculiar shrill cry of a hawk is heard overhead, and the doctor is seen circling in the air, uttering a scream occasionally. the fowls never find out that it is a hoax, but run to shelter, cackling in the greatest alarm--hens clucking loudly for their chicks, turkeys crouching under the bushes, the pigeons taking refuge in their house; as soon as the ground is quite clear, cocky changes his wild note for peals of laughter from a high tree, and finally alighting on the top of a hen-coop filled with trembling chickens, remarks in a suffocated voice, "you'll be the death of me." i must reverse the proverb about the ridiculous and the sublime, and finish my letter by telling you of ilam's chief outdoor charm: from all parts of the garden and grounds i can feast my eyes on the glorious chain of mountains which i have before told you of, and my bedroom window has a perfect panoramic view of them. i watch them under all their changes of tint, and find each new phase the most beautiful. in the very early morning i have often stood shivering at my window to see the noble outline gradually assuming shape, and finally standing out sharp and clear against a dazzling sky; then, as the sun rises, the softest rose-coloured and golden tints touch the highest peaks, the shadows deepening by the contrast. before a "nor'-wester" the colours over these mountains and in the sky are quite indescribable; no one but turner could venture upon such a mixture of pale sea-green with deep turquoise blue, purple with crimson and orange. one morning an arch-like appearance in the clouds over the furthest ranges was pointed out to me as the sure forerunner of a violent gale from the north-west, and the prognostic was fulfilled. it was formed of clouds of the deepest and richest colours; within its curve lay a bare expanse of a wonderful green tint, crossed by the snowy _silhouette_ of the southern alps. a few hours afterwards the mountains were quite hidden by mist, and a furious gale of hot wind was shaking the house as if it must carry it off into the sky; it blew so continuously that the trees and shrubs never seemed to rise for a moment against it. these hot winds affect infants and children a good deal, and my baby is not at all well. however, his doctor thinks the change to the station will set him all right again, so we are hurrying off much sooner than our kind friends here wish, and long before the little house in the hills can possibly be made comfortable, though f---- is working very hard to get things settled for us. letter ix: death in our new home--new zealand children. broomielaw, malvern hills, may . i do not like to allow the first panama steamer to go without a line from me: this is the only letter i shall attempt, and it will be but a short and sad one, for we are still in the first bitterness of grief for the loss of our dear little baby. after i last wrote to you he became very ill, but we hoped that his malady was only caused by the unhealthiness of christchurch during the autumn, and that he would soon revive and get on well in this pure, beautiful mountain air. we consequently hurried here as soon as ever we could get into the house, and whilst the carpenters were still in it. indeed, there was only one bedroom ready for us when i arrived. the poor little man rallied at first amazingly; the weather was exquisitely bright and sunny, and yet bracing. baby was to be kept in the open air as much as possible, so f---- and i spent our days out on the downs near the house, carrying our little treasure by turns: but all our care was fruitless: he got another and more violent attack about a fortnight ago, and after a few hours of suffering he was taken to the land where pain is unknown. during the last twelve hours of his life, as i sat before the fire with him on my lap, poor f----kneeling in a perfect agony of grief by my side, my greatest comfort was in looking at that exquisite photograph from kehren's picture of the "good shepherd," which hangs over my bedroom mantelpiece, and thinking that our sweet little lamb would soon be folded in those divine, all-embracing arms. it is not a common picture; and the expression of the saviour's face is most beautiful, full of such immense feminine compassion and tenderness that it makes me feel more vividly, "in all our sorrows he is afflicted." in such a grief as this i find the conviction of the reality and depth of the divine sympathy is my only true comfort; the tenderest human love falls short of the feeling that, without any words to express our sorrow, god knows all about it; that he would not willingly afflict or grieve us, and that therefore the anguish which wrings our hearts is absolutely necessary in some mysterious way for our highest good. i fear i have often thought lightly of others' trouble in the loss of so young a child; but now i know what it is. does it not seem strange and sad, that this little house in a distant, lonely spot, no sooner becomes a home than it is baptized, as it were, with tears? no doubt there are bright and happy days in store for us yet, but these first ones here have been sadly darkened by this shadow of death. inanimate things have such a terrible power to wound one: though everything which would remind me of baby has been carefully removed and hidden away by f----'s orders, still now and then i come across some trifle belonging to him, and, as miss ingelow says-- "my old sorrow wakes and cries." our loss is one too common out here, i am told: infants born in christchurch during the autumn very often die. owing to the flatness of the site of the town, it is almost impossible to get a proper system of drainage; and the arrangements seem very bad, if you are to judge from the evil smells which are abroad in the evening. children who are born on a station, or taken there as soon as possible, almost invariably thrive, but babies are very difficult to rear in the towns. if they get over the first year, they do well; and i cannot really call to mind a single sickly, or even delicate-looking child among the swarms which one sees everywhere. i cannot say that i think colonial children prepossessing in either manners or appearance, in spite of their ruddy cheeks and sturdy limbs. even quite little things are pert and independent, and give me the idea of being very much spoiled. when you reflect on the utter absence of any one who can really be called a nurse, this is not to be wondered at. the mothers are thoroughly domestic and devoted to their home duties, far more so than the generality of the same class at home. an english lady, with even an extremely moderate income, would look upon her colonial sister as very hard-worked indeed. the children cannot be entrusted entirely to the care of an ignorant girl, and the poor mother has them with her all day long; if she goes out to pay visits (the only recognized social duty here), she has to take the elder children with her, but this early introduction into society does not appear to polish the young visitors' manners in the least. there is not much rest at night for the mater-familias with the inevitable baby, and it is of course very difficult for her to be correcting small delinquents all day long; so they grow up with what manners nature gives them. there seems to me, however, to be a greater amount of real domestic happiness out here than at home: perhaps the want of places of public amusement may have something to do with this desirable state of affairs, but the homes seem to be thoroughly happy ones. a married man is an object of envy to his less fortunate brethren, and he appears anxious to show that he appreciates his good fortune. as for scandal, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, it is unknown; gossip there is in plenty, but it generally refers to each other's pecuniary arrangements or trifling peculiarities, and is all harmless enough. i really believe that the life most people lead here is as simple and innocent as can well be imagined. each family is occupied in providing for its own little daily wants and cares, which supplies the mind and body with healthy and legitimate employment, and yet, as my experience tells me, they have plenty of leisure to do a kind turn for a neighbour. this is the bright side of colonial life, and there is more to be said in its praise; but the counterbalancing drawback is, that the people seem gradually to lose the sense of larger and wider interests; they have little time to keep pace with the general questions of the day, and anything like sympathy or intellectual appreciation is very rare. i meet accomplished people, but seldom well-read ones; there is also too much talk about money: "where the treasure is, there will the heart be also;" and the incessant financial discussions are wearisome, at least to me. letter x: our station home. broomielaw, july . we are now in mid-winter, and a more delicious season cannot well be imagined; the early mornings and evenings and the nights are very cold, but the hours from a.m. till p.m. are exquisitely bright, and quite warm. we are glad of a fire at breakfast, which is tolerably early, but we let it out and never think of relighting it until dark. above all, it is calm: i congratulate myself daily on the stillness of the atmosphere, but f---- laughs and says, "wait until the spring." i bask all day in the verandah, carrying my books and work there soon after breakfast; as soon as the sun goes down, however, it becomes very cold. in an english house you would hardly feel it, but with only one plank an inch thick, a lining-board and canvas and paper, between you and a hard frost, a good fire is wanted. we burn coal found twelve miles from this; it is not very good, being only what is called "lignite." i don't know if that conveys to you a distinct impression of what it really is. i should say it was a better sort of turf: it smoulders just in the same way, and if not disturbed will remain many hours alight; it requires a log of dry wood with it to make a really good blaze. fuel is most difficult to get here, and very expensive, as we have no available "bush" on the run; so we have first to take out a licence for cutting wood in the government bush, then to employ men to cut it, and hire a drayman who possesses a team of bullocks and a dray of his own, to fetch it to us: he can only take two journeys a day, as he has four miles to travel each way, so that by the time the wood is stacked it costs us at least thirty shillings a cord, and then there is the labour of sawing and cutting it up. the coal costs us one pound a ton at the mouth of the pit, and the carriage exactly doubles its price; besides which it is impossible to get more, than a small quantity at a time, on account of the effect of the atmosphere on it. exposure to the air causes it to crumble into dust, and although we keep our supply in a little shed for the purpose, it is wasted to the extent of at least a quarter of each load. we are unusually unfortunate in the matter of firing; most stations have a bush near to the homestead, or greater facilities for draying than we possess. you tell me to describe my little house to you, so i must try to make you see it, only prefacing my attempt by warning you not to be disgusted or disappointed at any shortcomings. the house has not been built in a pretty situation, as many other things had to be considered before a picturesque site: first it was necessary to build on a flat (as the valleys here are called), not too far off the main track, on account of having to make the road to it ourselves; the next thing to be thought of was shelter from the north-west wind; then the soil must be fit for a garden, and a good creek, or brook, which would not go dry in the summer, close at hand. at present, everything out of doors is so unfinished that the place looks rather desolate, and it will be some years before our plantations can attain a respectable size, even allowing for the rapid growth in this climate. the first step is to obtain shelter from our enemy the "nor'-wester," and for this purpose we have planted quantities of broom in all directions; even the large beds for vegetables in the garden have a hedge of cape broom on the exposed side; fortunately, the broom grows very quickly in spite of the wind, and attains to a luxuriant beauty rarely seen in england. we have put in many other trees, such as oaks, maples, etc., but not one is higher than this table, except a few poplars; the ground immediately outside the house has been dug up, and is awaiting the spring to be sown with english grass; we have no attempt at a flower-garden yet, but have devoted our energies to the vegetable one,--putting in fruit trees, preparing strawberry and asparagus beds, and other useful things. out of doors matters would not even be as far advanced towards a garden and plantation as they are if we had commenced operations ourselves, but the ground has been worked since last year. i am glad we have chosen to build our house here instead of at the homestead two miles off; for i like to be removed from the immediate neighbourhood of all the work of the station, especially from that of the "gallows,"--a high wooden frame from which the carcases of the butchered sheep dangle; under the present arrangement the shepherd brings us over our mutton as we want it. inside the house everything is comfortable and pretty, and, above all things, looks thoroughly home-like. out of the verandah you pass through a little hall hung with whips and sticks, spurs and hats, and with a bookcase full of novels at one end of it, into a dining-room, large enough for us, with more books in every available corner, the prints you know so well on the walls, and a trophy of indian swords and hunting-spears over the fireplace: this leads into the drawing-room, a bright, cheery little room--more books and pictures, and a writing-table in the "_h_oriel." in that tall, white, classical-shaped vase of minton's which you helped me to choose is the most beautiful bouquet, made entirely of ferns; it is a constant object for my walks up the gullies, exploring little patches of bush to search for the ferns, which grow abundantly under their shelter by the creek. i have a small but comfortable bedroom, and there is a little dressing-room for f---- and the tiniest spare room you ever saw; it really is not bigger than the cabin of a ship. i think the kitchen is the chief glory of the house, boasting a "leamington range" a luxury quite unknown in these parts, where all the cooking is done on an american stove,--a very good thing in its way, but requiring to be constantly attended to. there is a good-sized storeroom, in which f---- has just finished putting me up some cupboards, and a servants' room. it is not a palace is it? but it is quite large enough to hold a great deal of happiness. outside, the premises are still more diminutive; a little wash-house stands near the kitchen door, and further up the enclosure is a stable, and a small room next it for saddles, and a fowl-house and pig-stye, and a coal-shed. now you know everything about my surroundings; but--there is always a _but_ in everything--i have one great grievance, and i hope you will appreciate its magnitude. it was impossible for f---- to come up here when the house was first commenced, and the wretch of a builder deliberately put the drawing-and dining-room fireplaces in the corner, right up against the partition wall, of course utterly destroying the comfort as well as the symmetry of the rooms. i am convinced some economy of bricks is at the bottom of this arrangement, especially as the house was built by contract; but the builder pretends to be surprised that i don't admire it, and says, "why, it's so oncommon, mum!" i assure you, when i first saw the ridiculous appearance of the drawing-room pier-glass in the corner, i should liked to have screamed out at the builder (like the queen in "alice in wonderland"), "cut off his head!" when we were packing up the things to come here, our friends expressed their astonishment at our taking so many of the little elegancies of life, such as drawing-room ornaments, pictures, etc. now it is a great mistake not to bring such things, at all events a few of them, for they are not to be bought here, and they give the new home a certain likeness to the old one which is always delightful. i do not advise people to make large purchases of elegancies for a colonial life, but a few pretty little trifles will greatly improve the look of even a new zealand up-country drawing-room. you have asked me also about our wardrobes. gentlemen wear just what they would on a scotch or english farm; in summer they require perhaps a lighter hat, and long rides are always taken in boots and breeches. a lady wears exactly what would be suitable in the country in england, except that i should advise her to eschew muslin; the country outside the home paddock is too rough for thin material; she also wants thick boots if she is a good walker, and i find nails or little screws in the soles a great help for hill-walking. a hat is my only difficulty: you really want a shady hat for a protection against the sun, but there are very few days in the year on which you can ride in anything but a close, small hat, with hardly any brim at all, and even this must have capabilities of being firmly fastened on the head. my nice, wide-brimmed leghorn hangs idly in the hall: there is hardly a morning still enough to induce me to put it on even to go and feed my chickens or potter about the garden. this being winter, i live in a short linsey dress, which is just right as to warmth, and not heavy. it is a mistake to bring too much: a year's supply will be quite enough; fresh material can easily be procured in christchurch or any of the large towns, or sent out by friends. i find my sewing-machine the greatest possible comfort, and as time passes on and my clothes need remodelling it will be still more use ful. hitherto i have used it chiefly for my friends' benefit; whilst i was in town i constantly had little frocks brought to me to tuck, and here i employ it in making quilted cloth hats for my gentlemen neighbours. letter xi: housekeeping, and other matters. broomielaw, september . i am writing to you at the end of a fortnight of very hard work, for i have just gone through my first experience in changing servants; those i brought up with me four months ago were nice, tidy girls and as a natural consequence of these attractive qualities they have both left me to be married. i sent them down to christchurch in the dray, and made arrangements for two more servants to return in the same conveyance at the end of a week. in the meantime we had to do everything for ourselves, and on the whole we found this picnic life great fun. the household consists, besides f---- and me, of a cadet, as they are called--he is a clergyman's son learning sheep-farming under our auspices--and a boy who milks the cows and does odd jobs out of doors. we were all equally ignorant of practical cookery, so the chief responsibility rested on my shoulders, and cost me some very anxious moments, i assure you, for a cookery-book is after all but a broken reed to lean on in a real emergency; it starts by assuming that its unhappy student possesses a knowledge of at least the rudiments of the art, whereas it ought not to disdain to tell you whether the water in which potatoes are to be boiled should be hot or cold. i must confess that some of my earliest efforts were both curious and nasty, but e ate my numerous failures with the greatest good-humour; the only thing at which he made a wry face was some soup into which a large lump of washing-soda had mysteriously conveyed itself; and i also had to undergo a good deal of "chaff" about my first omelette, which was of the size and consistency of a roly-poly pudding. next to these failures i think the bread was my greatest misfortune; it went wrong from the first. one night i had prepared the tin dish full of flour, made a hole in the midst of the soft white heap, and was about to pour in a cupful of yeast to be mixed with warm water (you see i know all about it in theory), when a sudden panic seized me, and i was afraid to draw the cork of the large champagne bottle full of yeast, which appeared to be very much "up." in this dilemma i went for f----. you must know that he possesses such extraordinary and revolutionary theories on the subject of cooking, that i am obliged to banish him from the kitchen altogether, but on this occasion i thought i should be glad of his assistance. he came with the greatest alacrity; assured me he knew all about it, seized the big bottle, shook it violently, and twitched out the cork: there was a report like a pistol-shot, and all my beautiful yeast flew up to the ceiling of the kitchen, descending in a shower on my head; and f---- turned the bottle upside down over the flour, emptying the dregs of the hops and potatoes into my unfortunate bread. however, i did not despair, but mixed it up according to the directions given, and placed it on the stove; but, as it turned out, in too warm a situation, for when i went early the next morning to look at it, i found a very dry and crusty mass. still, nothing daunted, i persevered in the attempt, added more flour and water, and finally made it up into loaves, which i deposited in the oven. that bread _never_ baked! i tried it with a knife in the orthodox manner, always to find that it was raw inside. the crust gradually became several inches thick, but the inside remained damp, and turned quite black at last; i baked it until midnight, and then i gave it up and retired to bed in deep disgust. i had no more yeast and could not try again, so we lived on biscuits and potatoes till the dray returned at the end of the week, bringing, however, only one servant. owing to some confusion in the drayman's arrangements, the cook had been left behind, and "meary," the new arrival, professed her willingness to supply her place; but on trial being made of her abilities, she proved to be quite as inexperienced as i was; and to each dish i proposed she should attempt, the unvarying answer was, "the missis did all that where i come from." during the first few days after her arrival her chief employment was examining the various knick-knacks about the drawing-room; in her own department she was greatly taken with the little cottage mangle. she mangled her own apron about twenty times a day, and after each attempt i found her contemplating it with her head on one side, and saying to herself, "'deed, thin, it's as smooth as smooth; how iver does it do it?" a few days later the cook arrived. she is not all i could wish, being also irish, and having the most extraordinary notions of the use, or rather the abuse, of the various kitchen implements: for instance, she will poke the fire with the toasting fork, and disregards my gentle hints about the poker; but at all events she can both roast mutton and bake bread. "meary" has been induced to wash her face and braid up her beautiful hair, and now shines forth as a very pretty good-humoured girl. she is as clever and quick as possible, and will in time be a capital housemaid. she has taken it into her head that she would like to be a "first-rater," as she calls it, and works desperately hard in the prosecution of her new fancy. i have never told you of the sunday services we established here from the first week of our arrival. there is no church nearer than those in christchurch, nor--i may mention parenthetically--is there a doctor within the same distance. as soon as our chairs and tables were in their proper places, we invited our shepherds and those neighbours immediately around us to attend service on sunday afternoon at three o'clock. f---- officiates as clergyman; _my_ duties resemble those of a beadle, as i have to arrange the congregation in their places, see that they have prayer-books, etc. whenever we go out for a ride, we turn our horses' heads up some beautiful valley, or deep gorge of a river, in search of the huts of our neighbours' shepherds, that we may tell the men of these services and invite them to attend. as yet, we have met with no refusals, but it will give you an idea of the scantiness of our population when i tell you that, after all our exertions, the "outsiders" only amount to fourteen, and of these at least half are gentlemen from neighbouring stations. with this number, in addition to our own small group, we consider that we form quite a respectable gathering. the congregation all arrive on horseback, each attended by at least two big colley dogs; the horses are turned into the paddock, the saddles deposited in the back verandah, and the dogs lie quietly down by their respective masters' equipments until they are ready to start homewards. there is something very wild and touching in these sunday services. if the weather is quite clear and warm, they are held in the verandah; but unless it is a very sunny afternoon, it is too early in the year yet for this. the shepherds are a very fine class of men as a rule, and i find them most intelligent; they lead solitary lives, and are fond of reading; and as i am anxious to substitute a better sort of literature in their huts than the tattered yellow volumes which generally form their scanty library, i lend them books from my own small collection. but, as i foresee that this supply will soon be exhausted, we have started a book club, and sent to london for twenty pounds' worth of books as a first instalment. we shall get them second-hand from a large library, so i hope to receive a good boxful. the club consists of twenty-eight members now, and will probably amount to thirty-two, which is wonderful for this district. at the close of a year from the first distribution of the books they are to be divided into lots as near as possible in value to a pound each, the parcels to be numbered, and corresponding figures written on slips of paper, which are to be shaken up in a hat and drawn at random, each member claiming the parcel of which the number answers to that on his ticket. this is the fairest way i can think of for the distribution, and every one seems satisfied with the scheme. the most popular books are those of travel or adventure; unless a novel is really very good indeed, they do not care about it. the last little item of home news with which i must close this month's budget is, that f---- has been away for a few days on a skating excursion. a rather distant neighbour of ours called on his way up to the station far back among the hills, and gave such a glowing account of the condition of the ice in that part of the country, that f----, who is very fond of the amusement, was persuaded to accompany him. our friend is the son of the bishop, and owns a large station about twenty-six miles from this. at the back of his run the hills rise to a great height, and nestled among them lie a chain of lakes, after the largest of which (lake coleridge) mr. h----'s station is named. on one of the smaller lakes, called by the classical name of "ida," the ice attains to a great thickness; for it is surrounded by such lofty hills that during the winter months the sun hardly touches it, and it is commonly reported that a heavily-laden bullock-dray could cross it in perfect safety. f----was away nearly a week, and appears to have enjoyed himself thoroughly, though it will seem to you more of hard work than amusement; for he and mr. h----, and some other gentlemen who were staying there, used to mount directly after breakfast, with their skates tied to their saddle-bow, and ride twelve miles to lake ida, skate all through the short winter's day, lunching at the solitary hut of a gentleman-farmer close by the lake, and when it grew dusk riding home again. the gentlemen in this country are in such good training through constant exercise, that they appear able to stand any amount of fatigue without minding it. letter xii: my first expedition. broomielaw, october . this ought to be early spring, but the weather is really colder and more disagreeable than any which winter brought us; and, proverbially fickle as spring sunshine and showers are in england, ours is a far more capricious and trying season. twice during this month have i been a victim to these sudden changes of climate; on the first occasion it was most fortunate that we had reached the shelter of a friendly and hospitable roof, for it was three days before we could re-cross the mountain-pass which lay between us and home. one beautiful spring morning f---- asked me if i would like to ride across the hills, and pay my first visit to some kind and old friends of his, who were among the earliest arrivals in the province, and who have made a lovely home for themselves at the foot of a great bush on the other side of our range. i was delighted at the idea, for i have had very little opportunity of going about since we came here, owing to the short winter days and the amount of occupation at home consequent on a new establishment. directly after breakfast, the horses were caught and saddled, and we started in high spirits. as we rode up the long, sunny valley stretching away for miles at the back of the house, f---- pointed out to me, with all a sheep-farmer's pride, the hundreds of pretty little curly-fleeced lambs skipping about the low hill-sides. after we passed our own boundary fence we came upon a very bad track,--this is the name by which all roads are called, and they do not deserve a better,--but it was the only path to our destination. the air was mild and balmy, and the sun shone brightly as we slowly picked our way across bogs and creeks, and up and down steep, slippery hill-sides; but just as we reached the lowest saddle of the range and prepared to descend, a cold wind met us. in an instant the sunshine was overclouded, and f----, pointing to a grey bank of cloud moving quickly towards us, said, "there is a tremendous sou'-wester coming up; we had better push on for shelter, or you'll be drowned:" but, alas! at each step the road grew worse and worse; where it was level the ground was literally honeycombed with deep holes half full of water, and at last we came to a place where the horse had to descend a flight of stone steps, each step being extremely slippery and some way below the other; and at the bottom of this horrible staircase there was a wide jump to be taken, the spring being off the lowest step, and the jump upwards alighting on a steep bank up which the horses scrambled like cats. getting wet through appeared to me a very minor evil compared to the dangers of such a road, but f---- urged me forward, with assurances that the horse knew the path perfectly well and could carry me at a gallop quite safely; but it was impossible to infuse sufficient courage into my drooping heart to induce me to go faster than a walk. all this time the storm drew rapidly nearer, the wind blew in icy cold gusts, the hail came down in large stones, pelting our faces till they tingled again; it was nearly an hour before we rode up to the hospitable, ever-open porch door of rockwood. i was immediately lifted off my saddle by kind and strong arms, and carried with frozen limbs and streaming habit into the kitchen, for i was as unfit for the drawing-room as my own water-spaniel. a blazing wood fire was hastily lighted in one of the bed-rooms, and thither the good hostess conveyed me. i emerged from that apartment the most extraordinary figure you ever saw. imagine me arrayed in a short and very wide crinoline, over which was a bright-coloured linsey petticoat; an old pilot-coat for a jacket, huge carpet slippers on my feet, and my dripping hair hanging loose over my shoulders! i assure you, i looked like the portraits in books of travel, of the tahitian women when they first assumed clothes; and the worst of it was, that i had to remain in this costume for three whole days. to return was impossible, the storm from the s.w. raged all that evening. when we opened our eyes next morning, snow was lying some inches deep, and still falling fast; there was no cessation for forty-eight hours, and then we had to give it time to thaw a little, so that it was sunday morning before we started on our homeward ride. in the meantime, nothing could afford a greater contrast to the wild weather out of doors than the snug brightness within. blazing logs of pine and black birch made every room warm and cheery; all day we chatted and amused ourselves in different ways (i learned to make a capital pudding, and acquainted myself with the mysteries of "junket"); in the evenings we had whist for an hour, and then either round games or songs. the young men of the house have nice voices and a great feeling for music, and some of the trios and glees went very well indeed. the only thing which spoilt my enjoyment was the constantly recurring remembrance of that terrible road. f---- tried to comfort me by assurances that the snow would have filled up the worst places so much that i should not see them, but, strange to say, i failed to derive any consolation from that idea; however, we accomplished the journey back safely, but with many slips and slides. as soon as we came on our own run, f----began to look out for dead lambs, but fortunately there were not many for him to mourn over; they must have taken shelter under the low hills, to leeward of the storm. the second ride was much longer, and if possible a more disagreeable one. it began just in the same way; we were again decoyed out by sunshine and soft air for a ride round the run, starting about half-past ten. the scenery was beautiful, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. the track lay along our own boundary fence most of the way, and we had ridden about ten miles, when we stopped at one of our shepherds' huts, technically called an out station, and accepted his offer of luncheon. he gave us capital tea, with an egg beaten up in it as a substitute for milk, cold mutton, bread, and a cake; the reason of these unwonted luxuries was that he kept fowls, and i was very jealous at seeing two broods of chickens out, whilst mine are still in the shell. this man is quite an artist, and the walls of his but were covered with bold pen-and-ink sketches, chiefly reminiscences of the hunting-field in england, or his own adventures "getting out" wild cattle on the black hills in the north of the province: he leads an extremely-solitary existence, his dogs being his only companions; his duties consist in riding daily a boundary down the gorge of the river, which he has to cross and re-cross many times: and he has to supply the home station and our house with mutton, killing four or five sheep a week. he is employed out of doors all day, but has plenty of time in the evenings for reading i found him well-informed and intelligent, and he expresses himself exceedingly well. we rested here an hour, and as we went outside and prepared to mount, f---- said, "i really believe there is _another_ sou'-wester coming up," and so there was: we could not go fast, for we were riding over a dry river-bed, composed entirely of loose large stones. every few hundred yards we had to cross the river selwyn, which was rising rapidly, as the storm had been raging in the mountains long before it reached us; on each side were high, steep hills, and in some places the river filled up the gorge entirely, and we had to ride in the water up to our saddle-girths. all this time the rain was coming down in sheets, but the wind grew colder and colder; at last the rain turned into snow, which speedily changed us and our horses into white moving figures. eight long weary miles of this had we, only able to trot the last two, and those over very swampy ground. in your country a severe cold would probably have been the least evil of this escapade, but here no such consequence follow a good wetting; the houses are so little real protection from the weather, that you are forced to live as it were in the open air, whether you like it or not, and this hardens the constitution so much, that it is not easy to take cold from a little extra exposure. men are apt to be careless and remain in their wet things, or stand before a fire till their clothes dry on them; and whenever i scold any one for being foolish, he always acknowledges that if he does but change when he comes into a house, he _never_ catches cold from any amount of exposure to the severest weather. letter xiii: bachelor hospitality.--a gale on shore. broomielaw, november . we have lately made a much longer excursion than those i told you of last, month, and this time have been fortunate in meeting with fine weather above all, our expedition has been over perfectly level ground, and on a good "track," which has greatly increased its charms in my eyes. a fortnight ago early summer set fairly in, and some bachelor neighbours took advantage of the change to ride over to see us, and arrange a plan for the following week. it all fitted in nicely, for f---- was obliged to go to christchurch at that time, and the first idea of the expedition originated in my saying how dull i was at the station when he was away. i can get on very well all day; with my various employments--feeding the chickens, taking the big dogs out for a walk, and so on: but after the house is quiet and silent for the night, and the servants have gone to bed, a horrible lonely eerie feeling comes over me; the solitude is so dreary, and the silence so intense, only broken occasionally by the wild, melancholy cry of the weka. however, i am very rarely tried in this way, and when i am it can't be helped, if that is any consolation. i forget whether i told you that we left all "evening things," and other toilette necessaries which would not be wanted up country, behind us in christchurch, so as to avoid the trouble of sending any luggage backwards or forwards. it is necessary to mention this, to account for the very light marching order in which we travelled. it was a lovely summer morning on which we left home, meaning to be away nearly a week, from monday till saturday. we were well mounted, and all our luggage consisted of my little travelling-bag fastened to the pommel of my saddle, containing our brushes and combs, and what is termed a "swag" in front of f----'s saddle; that is, a long narrow bundle, in this instance enclosed in a neat waterproof case, and fastened with two straps to the "d's," which are steel loops let in in four places to all colonial saddles, for the purpose of carrying blankets, etc.; they derive their name apparently from their resemblance to the letter. in this parcel our most indispensable garments were tightly packed. we cantered gaily along on the way to christchurch, the horses appearing to enjoy the delicious air and soft springy turf as much as we did. there was a river and half-a-dozen creeks to be crossed; but they are all quite low at this time of year. as we stood in one of them to let the horses drink and cool their legs, i saw a huge eel hidden under the shadow of a high overhanging bank, waiting till the evening to come out and feed upon the myriads of flies and little white moths that skim over the surface of the water. it is considered a great advantage to our station that there is only the river selwyn (of which the maori name is the wai-kiri-kiri) between us and town, not only for our own convenience, but because it is easy to take sheep across it, and it offers no difficulties to the wool drays. this river has a very good reputation, and is very rarely dangerous to cross; whereas the rakaia and the rangitata towards the south, and the waimakiriri towards the north, of christchurch, are most difficult, and always liable to sudden freshes. the general mode of crossing the larger rivers is by a boat, with the horse swimming behind; but accidents constantly occur from the foolhardiness of people attempting to ford them alone on horseback: they are lost in quicksands, or carried down by the current, before they can even realize that they are in danger. the common saying in new zealand is, that people only die from drowning and drunkenness. i am afraid the former is generally the result of the latter. from the first our road lay with our backs to the hills; but as we cantered along the plains, i was often obliged to turn round and admire their grand outlines. the highest ranges were still snow-white, and made a magnificent background against the summer sky. an easy twelve miles' ride brought us to a charming little station, called by the pretty native name of waireka; here lived our three bachelor hosts, and a nicer or more comfortable home in a distant land could not be desired. the house has been built for some years, consequently the plantations about it and the garden have grown up well, and the willows, gum-trees, and poplars shelter it perfectly, besides giving it such a snug home look. it stands on a vast plain, without even an undulation of the ground near it; but the mountains form a grand panoramic view. there is a large wide verandah round two sides of the house, with french windows opening into it; and i could not help feeling impatient to see my own creepers in such luxuriant, beauty as these roses and honeysuckles were. it was half amusing and half pathetic to notice the preparations which had been made to receive a lady guest, and the great anxiety of my hosts to ensure my being quite as comfortable as i am at home. much had been said beforehand about the necessity of making up my mind to rough it in bachelor quarters, so i was surprised to find all sorts of luxuries in my room, especially a dainty little toilette-table, draped with white cloths (a big wooden packing-case was its foundation). its ornaments were all sorts of nondescript treasures, placed in boxes at the last moment of leaving the english hall or rectory by careful loving hands of mothers and sisters, and lying unused for years until now. there was a little china tray, which had been slipped into some corner by a child-sister anxious to send some possession of her "very own" out to the other end of the world; there was a vase with flowers; a parti-coloured pin-cushion of very gay silks, probably the parting gift of an old nurse; and a curious old-fashioned essence bottle, with eau-de-cologne; the surrounding country had been ransacked to procure a piece of scented soap. the only thing to remind me that i was not in an english cottage was the opossum rug with which the neat little bed was covered. the sitting-room looked the picture of cosy comfort, with its well-filled book-shelves, arm-chairs, sofa with another opossum rug thrown over it, and the open fireplace filled with ferns and tufts of the white feathery tohi grass in front of the green background. we enjoyed our luncheon, or rather early dinner, immensely after our ride; and in the afternoon went out to see the nice large garden (such a contrast to our wretched little beginnings), and finally strolled on to the inevitable wool-shed, where the gentlemen had an animated "sheep talk." i rather enjoy these discussions, though they are prefaced by an apology for "talking shop;" but it amuses me, and i like to see the samples of wool, which are generally handed about in the heat of a great argument, the long white locks are so glistening, and soft, and crinkly. my five-o'clock tea was duly remembered, and then, as there was nothing more to see out of doors within a short distance, i proposed that i should make a cake. the necessary ingredients were quickly collected. i had relays of volunteers to beat up the eggs, and though i suffered great anxiety until it was cut at supper, it turned out satisfactorily. the worst of my cookery is, that while i always follow the same directions most carefully, there is great uncertainty and variety about the result. in the evening we played round games. but we all went early to bed, as, we had to be up betimes, and in the saddle by seven o'clock, to catch the - train at rolleston; twenty miles off. we had a beautiful, still morning for our ride, and reached the station--a shed standing out on the plain--in time to see our horses safely paddocked before the train started for christchurch. the distance by rail was only fifteen miles, so we were not long about it; and we walked to the hotel from the railway-station in the town. a bath and breakfast were both very enjoyable, and then f---- went out to transact his business, and i employed myself in unpacking and _ironing_ a ball-dress for a party, to which we were engaged that evening. there was also another ball the following night. the second was a very late one, and we had scarcely an hour's sleep before we were obliged to get up and start by the a.m. train back to rolleston, where we remounted our horses and rode to dear little waireka in time for breakfast. by the evening i was sufficiently rested to make another cake, which also, happily, turned out well. we intended to return home the next day (friday), but a terrific "nor'-wester" came on in the night, and it was impossible to stir out of the house; it was the severest gale since our arrival, and it is hardly possible to give you a correct idea of the force and fury of the wind. not a glimpse of the mountains was to be seen; a haze of dust, as thick as any fog, shut everything out. the sheep had all taken refuge under the high banks of the creeks. it is curious that sheep always feed head to wind in a nor'-west gale, whereas they will drift for miles before a sou'-wester. the trees bent almost flat before the hot breath of this hurricane, and although the house was built of cob, and its walls were very thick and solid, the creaking and swaying of the shingled roof kept me in perpetual alarm. the verandah was a great protection; and yet the small river-pebbles, of which the garden-walk was made, were dashed against the windows like hailstones by each gust. we amused ourselves indoors by the study and composition of acrostics, and so got through an imprisonment of two days, without a moment's cessation of the wind; but towards sunset on saturday there were signs of a lull, and about midnight the gale dropped; and we heard the grateful, refreshing sound of soft and continuous rain, and when we came out to breakfast on sunday morning everything looked revived again. it is a most fortunate meteorological fact that these very high winds are generally succeeded by heavy rain; everything is so parched and shrivelled up by them that i do not know what would become of the vegetation otherwise. we held a council, to determine what had better be done about returning home, and finally decided to risk a wet ride sooner than disappoint the little congregation; for should it prove a fine afternoon, those who lived near would certainly come; so we mounted after breakfast. i was wrapped in one of the gentlemen's macintoshes, and found the ride far from disagreeable. as we neared our own station we began to look out for signs of disaster; and about half a mile from the house saw some of the vanes from the chimneys on the track; a little nearer home, across the path lay a large zinc chimney-pot; then another; and when we came close enough to see the house distinctly, it looked very much dwarfed without its chimneys. there had been a large pile of empty boxes at the back of the stable; these were all blown away in the gale. one huge packing-case was sailing tranquilly about on the pond, and planks and fragments of zinc were strewn over the paddock. the moment we reached the house, mr. u----, the gentleman-cadet of whom i have told you, came out, with a melancholy face, to tell me that a large wooden cage, full of the canaries which i had brought from england with me, had been blown out of the verandah, though it was on the most sheltered side of the house. it really seemed incredible at first, but the cage was lying in ruins in the middle of the paddock, and all my birds except one had disappeared. it happened in the middle of the night, and mr. u----described, very amusingly, that when he was awakened by the noise which the cage made against a wire fence (which it just "topped" in passing), he sprang out of his bed in the attic, and clambered out of the window, expecting to find the very heavy sort of staircase-ladder in its place; but it was "over the hills and far away," so he had a drop of about twelve feet to the ground, which thoroughly aroused him. he went into the verandah to see if the cage was safe, and was nearly knocked down by a big tin bath, ordinarily kept there, which was just starting across country. as soon as he missed the cage he very pluckily went after it, being able to keep sight of it by the fitful gleams of moon-light, and he was just in time to rescue the poor little surviving canary. we could not help laughing at the recital of all the mischief which had been done, but still it is very tiresome, and the garden looks, if possible, more wretched than ever. there is no shelter for it yet, and my poor green-peas are blown nearly out of the ground. it rained hard all the evening, so our congregation was confined to the home party. letter xiv: a christmas picnic, and other doings. broomielaw, december . it is too late to wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year in this letter. in order to allow them to reach you in time i should have sent my good wishes in october's letter; i must remember to do so next year. i am writing on the last days of the month, so i shall be able to tell you of our own christmas doings; though, first, i must describe the festivities attending a "coming of age in the bush," to which we were invited about the middle of this month. how strange christmas picnics and balls will appear in your eyes, before which still dangle probably the dear old traditional holly and ivy! i am obliged to preface all my descriptions with an account of a ride, if i am to begin, according to your repeated injunctions, at the very beginning; for a ride is quite certain to be both the beginning and end of each excursion, simply because we have no other means of going about, except on our feet. the ride upon this occasion was to rockwood, where the birthday party was to assemble, but the road had not now so many terrors for me. in consequence of the fine dry weather, most of the bad places were safer and firmer, and the numerous creeks were only shallow sparkling streamlets over which a child could jump, instead of the muddy noisy wide brooks of three months ago. the day on which we started, this time, was a great contrast to the former one. when we reached the saddle i have before told you of, instead of being met and nearly driven back by a violent "sutherly buster," we stopped before beginning the steep descent to admire the exquisite view before us. close on our right hand rose the government bush out of which we get our firewood, standing grand and gloomy amid huge cliffs and crags; even the summer sunshine could not enliven it, nor the twitter and chirrup of countless birds. in front, the chain of hills we were crossing rolled down in gradually decreasing hillocks, till they merged in the vast plains before us, stretching away as far as the eye could reach towards the south, all quivering in the haze and glare of the bright sunlight. the background, extending along the horizon, was formed of lofty mountains still glistening white against the dazzling blue sky. just at our feet the rockwood paddocks looked like carpets of emerald velvet, spread out among the yellowish tussocks; the fences which enclose them were either golden with broom and gorse, or gay with wild roses and honeysuckle. beyond these we saw the bright patches of flowers in the garden, and nothing could be more effective than the white gable of the house standing out against the vast black birch forest which clothed the steep hill-sides for miles--the contrast was so picturesque between the little bit of civilization and culture and the great extent of wild, savage scenery around it. after the utter treelessness of our own immediate neighbourhood, the sight of such a mass of foliage is a joy to my eyes. the day following our arrival was _the_ birthday, and we prepared to enjoy every hour of it. the party assembled was a very large one, consisting, however, chiefly of gentlemen, for the utmost exertions in the district could not produce more than five ladies altogether, and two of those had come an immense way. directly after breakfast we all sallied forth, the ladies equipped in light cotton dresses (muslin is too thin for the bush) and little sailor hats,--we did not want shady ones, for never a gleam of sun can penetrate into a real new zealand bush, unless in a spot which has been very much cleared. strong boots with nails in the soles, to help us to keep on our feet up the steep clay hill-sides, and a stout stick, completed our equipment; perhaps we were not very smart, but we looked like going at all events. i can answer for myself that i enjoyed every moment of that long midsummer holiday most intensely, though i fear i must have wearied our dear, charming host, by my incessant questions about the names of the trees and shrubs, and of the habits and ways of the thousands of birds. it was all so new and so delightful to me,--the green gloom, the hoarse croak of the ka-ka, as it alighted almost at our feet and prepared, quite careless of our vicinity, to tear up the loose soil at the root of a tall tree, in search of grubs. it is a species of parrot, but with very dingy reddish-brown plumage, only slightly enlivened by a few, scarlet feathers in the wing. the air was gay with bright green parroquets flitting about, very mischievous they are, i am told, taking large tithe of the fruit, especially of the cherries. every now and then we stood, by common consent, silent and almost breathless to listen to the bell-bird, a dingy little fellow, nearly as large as a thrush with the plumage of a chaffinch, but with such a note!--how can i make you hear its wild, sweet, plaintive tone, as a little girl of the party said, "just as if it had a bell in its throat;" but indeed it would require a whole peal of silver bells to ring such an exquisite chime. then we crept softly up to a low branch, to have a good look at the tui, or parson-bird, most respectable and clerical-looking in its glossy black suit, with a singularly trim and dapper air, and white wattles of very slender feathers--indeed they are as fine as hair-curled coquettishly at each side of his throat, exactly like bands. all the birds were quite tame, and, instead of avoiding us, seemed inclined to examine us minutely. many of them have english names, which i found very tantalising, especially when, the new zealand robin was announced, and i could only see a fat little ball of a bird, with a yellowish-white breast. animals there are none. no quadruped is indigenous to new zealand, except a rat; but then, on the other hand, we are as free from snakes and all vermin as if st. patrick himself had lived here. our host has turned several pheasants into this forest, but they increase very slowly on account of the wekas. however, the happiness of this morning was made complete by our putting up two splendid rocketers. we could only make our way by the paths which have been cut through the bush; a yard off the track it is impossible to stir for the dense undergrowth. in the ravines and steep gullies formed by the creeks grow masses of ferns of all sorts, spreading like large shrubs, and contrasting by their light bright green with the black stems of the birch-trees around them. there are a few pines in this bush, but not many. i can give you no idea of the variety among the shrubs: the koromika, like an alpine rose, a compact ball of foliage; the lance-wood, a tall, slender stem, straight as a line, with a few long leaves at the top, turned downwards like the barb of a spear, and looking exactly like a lance stuck into the ground; the varieties of matapo, a beautiful shrub, each leaf a study, with its delicate tracery of black veins on a yellow-green ground; the mappo, the gohi, and many others, any of which would be the glory of an english shrubbery: but they seem to require the deep shelter of their native bush, for they never flourish when transplanted. i noticed the slender the large trees have of the ground, and it is not at all surprising, after such a gale as we had three weeks ago, to see many of the finest blown down in the clearings where the wind could reach them. they do not seem to have any tap-root at all, merely a very insufficient network of fibres, seldom of any size, which spreads a short way along the surface of the ground as long as a bush is undisturbed by civilization, it appears to be impervious to wind or weather; but as soon as it is opened and cleared a little, it begins to diminish rapidly. there are traces all over the hills of vast forests having once existed; chiefly of totara, a sort of red pine, and those about us are scattered with huge logs of this valuable wood, all bearing traces of the action of fire; but shepherds, and explorers on expeditions, looking for country, have gradually consumed them for fuel, till not many pieces remain except on the highest and most inaccessible ranges. it was a delightful, and by no means unacceptable surprise which awaited us on the other side, when, on emerging from a very thick part of the bush, we came on a lovely spot, a true "meeting of the waters." three broad, bright creeks came rushing and tumbling down from the densely wooded hills about to join and flow on in quite a good-sized river, amid boulders and a great deal of hurry and fuss,--a contrast to the profound quiet of our ramble hitherto, the silence of which was only broken by the twitter and whistle of the birds. never a song can you hear, only a sweet chirrup, or two or three melodious notes. on the opposite bank of the river there was the welcome sight of several hampers more or less unpacked, and the gleam of a white tablecloth on the moss. half-a-dozen gentlemen had formed themselves into a commissariat, and were arranging luncheon. we could see the champagne cooling in a sort of little bay, protected by a dam of big stones from being carried down the stream. it all looked very charming and inviting, but the next question was how to get across the river to these good things. twelve or fourteen feet separated us, hungry and tired wanderers as we were, from food and rest; the only crossing-place was some miles lower down, near the house in fact; so even the most timid amongst us scouted the idea of retracing our steps. the only alternative was to make a bridge: one of the gentlemen who were with us carried an axe in case of emergency, and in a moment we heard the sharp ringing sounds foretelling the fall of a tree. in the mean-time, others of the party were dragging out fallen logs--of course small and manageable ones--and laying them from one huge boulder to another, working up to their knees in water. so many of these prostrate trunks were "convenient," that a cry soon arose to the woodman to "spare the trees," for there were quite enough on the ground. however, two substantial poles had been felled, and these were laid over the deepest and most dangerous part of the current. the bridge was soon declared passable, and loud shouts from the opposite side proclaimed that luncheon was quite ready. i was called, as having a most undeserved reputation for "pluck," to make trial of the aerial-looking fabric. i did not like it at all, and entreated some one else to lead the forlorn hope; so a very quiet young lady, who really possessed more courage in her little finger than i do in my whole body, volunteered to go first. the effect from the bank was something like tight-rope dancing, and it was very difficult to keep one's balance. miss kate, our pioneer, walked on very steadily, amid great applause, till she reached the middle of the stream, where fortunately the water was shallow, but strewed with masses of boulders. she paused an instant on the large rock on which the ends of the saplings rested, and then started afresh for the last half of her journey. the instant she put her foot on the second part of the bridge, it gave way with a loud crash; and the poor girl, with great presence of mind, caught at the tree she, had just crossed, and so saved herself from a ducking. of course, she had plenty of help in an instant, but the difficulty was to regain any sort of footing. she could not drop into the water, and there was apparently no way of dragging herself up again; but one of the gentlemen crept on hands and knees along the unbroken part of the bridge, and eventually helped her up the sides of the large boulder which acted as a pier, and from which the log had slipped. from the other side they now pushed across tall, slim trees, freshly cut, and the rest of the passage was safe enough. i did not like the mode of transit at all, though i got over without a slip, but it requires a steady head to cross a noisy stream on two slippery round poles--for really the trees were little thicker--laid side by side, bending with every step. it was a great comfort to me all luncheon-time to know that we were not to return by the same path through the bush. we had a good rest after lunch: i lay back on a bed of fern, watching the numbers of little birds around us; they boldly picked up our crumbs, without a thought of possible danger. presently i felt a tug at the shawl on which i was lying: i was too lazy and dreamy to turn my head, so the next thing was a sharp dig on my arm, which hurt me dreadfully. i looked round, and there was a weka bent on thoroughly investigating the intruder into its domain. the bird looked so cool and unconcerned, that i had not the heart to follow my first impulse and throw my stick at it; but my forbearance was presently rewarded by a stab on the ankle, which fairly made me jump up with a scream, when my persecutor glided gracefully away among the bushes, leaving me, like lord ullin, "lamenting." we sauntered home slowly, gathering armfuls of, fern and a large variety of a stag's-head moss so common on the west coast of scotland; and as soon as we had had some tea, the gentlemen went off with their towels to bathe in the creek, and the five ladies set to work at the decorations for the ball-room, weaving wreaths and arranging enormous bouquets very rapidly: we had such a wealth of flowers to work with that our task was not difficult. the most amusing part of the story is, however, that the ball took place in my bed-room! a very pompous lady of my acquaintance always prefaces the slenderest anecdote with these words, "and it happened in this wise," so i think i shall avail myself of the _tour de phrase_. it happened in this wise, then:-a large well-proportioned room had been added to the house lately; it was intended for a drawing-room, but for some reason has only been used as a spare bed-room, but as it may possibly return to its original destination, very little bed-room furniture has been put in it, and many of its belongings are appropriate to a sitting-room. we called in the servants, the light cane bedstead was soon deposited under the shade of a tree in the garden, the washing-stand was similarly disposed of, and an hour's work with hammer and nails and a ball of string turned the room into a perfect bower of ferns and flowers: great ingenuity was displayed in the arrangement of lights, and the result was a very pretty ball-room. we are always eating in this country, so you will not be surprised to hear that there was yet another meal to be disposed of before we separated to dress in all sorts of nooks and corners. white muslin was the universal costume, as it can be packed flat and smooth. my gown had been carried over by f---- in front of his saddle in a very small parcel: i covered it almost entirely with sprays of the light-green stag's-head, moss, and made a wreath of it also for my hair. i think that with the other ladies roses were the most popular decoration, and they looked very fresh and nice. i was the universal _coiffeuse_, and i dressed all the girls' heads with flowers, as i was supposed to be best up in the latest fashions. in the meantime, the piano had been moved to the bay-window of the ball-room, and at ten o'clock dancing commenced, and may be truly said to have been kept up with great spirit until four o'clock: it only ceased then on account of the state of exhaustion of the unfortunate five ladies, who had been nearly killed with incessant dancing. i threw a shawl over my head, and sauntered alone up one of the many paths close to the house which led into the bush. tired as i was, i shall never forget the beauty and romance of that hour,--the delicious crisp _new_ feeling of the morning air; the very roses, growing like a red fringe on the skirts of the great bush, seemed awaking to fresh life and perfume; the numbers of gay lizards and flies coming out for their morning meal, and, above all, the first awakening of the myriads of bush-birds; every conceivable twitter and chatter and chirrup; the last cry of a very pretty little owl, called, from its distinctly uttered words, the "more-pork," as it flitted away before the dawn to the highest trees: all made up a jubilant uproar compared to which one of the crystal palace choruses is silence. i sat down on a fallen tree, and listened and waited: every moment added to the lovely dawn around me, and i enjoyed to the full the fragrant smells and joyous sounds of another day in this fresh young land. all too soon came a loud "coo-ee" from the house, which i allowed them to repeat before i answered; this was to tell me that the ball-room was deserted, and had been again turned into a bed-room. when i opened my eyes later, after a six hours' nap, the room looked like a fairy bower, the flowers still unfaded. we had another picnic the next day up the gorge of a river, amid very wild and beautiful scenery; but everything had been arranged so as to make the expedition an easy one, out of consideration to the weary five. the day after this we rode home again, and i had to set to work directly to prepare for my own christmas party to the shepherds and shearers,--for we have just commenced to muster the sheep, and the shearing will be in full force by christmas day. one great object i have in view in giving this party is to prevent the shearers from going over to the nearest accommodation-house and getting tipsy, as they otherwise would; so i have taken care to issue my invitations early. i found great difficulty in persuading some of the men to accept, as they had not brought any tidy clothes with them; and as the others would be decently, indeed well dressed, they did not like putting in a shabby appearance. this difficulty was obviated by f---- hunting up some of the things he had worn on the voyage, and rigging-out the invited guests. for two days before the great day i had been working hard, studying recipes for pies and puddings, and scouring the country in search of delicacies. every lady was most kind, knowing that our poor, exposed garden was backward; i had sacks of green peas, bushels of young potatoes, and baskets of strawberries and cherries sent to me from all round the country; i made poor f---- ride twenty miles to get me a sirloin of beef, and, to my great joy, two beautiful young geese arrived as a present only the day before. it is a point of honour to have as little mutton as possible on these occasions, as the great treat is the complete change of fare. i only ventured to introduce it very much disguised as curry, or in pies. we were all up at daylight on christmas morning, and off to the nearest little copse in one of the gullies, where a few shrubs and small trees and ferns grow, to gather boughs for the decoration of the washhouse. marvels were done in the carpentering line to arrange tables around its walls. the copper, which at first presented such an obstacle to the symmetry of the adornments, became their chief glory; it was boarded over, its sides completely hidden by flags and ferns, and the dessert placed on it peeped out from a bower of greenery. i don't know how we got our own breakfast; from eleven o'clock there was the constant announcement "a horseman coming up the flat;" and by twelve, when i as beadle announced that all was ready, a large congregation of thirty-six came trooping into my little drawing-room. as soon as it was filled the others clustered round the door; but all could hear, i think. f---- began the service; and as the notes of the christmas anthem swelled up, i found the tears trembling in my eyes. my overwhelming thought was that it actually was the very first time those words had ever been sung or said in that valley--you in england can hardly realize the immensity of such a thought--"the first time since the world was made." i think the next sensation was one of extreme happiness; it seemed such a privilege to be allowed to hold the initial christmas service. i had to grasp this idea very tight to keep down the terrible home-sickness which i felt all day for almost the first time. there are moments when no advantages or privileges can repress what aytoun calls "the deep, unutterable woe which none save exiles feel." the service only lasted half an hour, beginning and ending with a hymn; there were three women present besides me--my two servants, and the nice young wife of a neighbouring shepherd. it was a sultry day, not a breath of air; but still it is never oppressive at this elevation. we wound up a big musical-box, set it going in the banqueting-hall (late washhouse), and marshalled the guests in they were extremely shy as a rule, and so we soon went away and left them to themselves. they ate incessantly for two hours--and i hope they enjoyed themselves; then the men lounged about the stables and smoked, and the three women cleared away a little. f---- and our gentlemen guests got up athletic sports in the shade which seemed very popular, though it appeared a great deal of trouble to take on such a hot day. as the sun sank below the hills it grew much cooler, and my two maids came with a shamefaced request to be allowed to dance in the kitchen. i inquired about the music?--that was provided for by a fiddle and some pipes; so i consented, but i found they wanted me to start them. i selected as my partner a very decent young farmer who lives near, but has left his farm and is at work branding our sheep all shearing-time. the pride and delight of his mate was much greater than my partner's; he stood near his friend, prompting him through the mazes of the most extraordinary quadrille you ever saw, with two extra figures. then there was an endless polka, in which everybody danced, like queen elizabeth, "high and disposedly;" but the ball ended at nine o'clock, and we were given some cold dinner, for which we were all very ready. the next morning saw the remains of the festivity cleared away, and every one hard at work again; for this is our very busiest season. the work of the station, however, is carried on at the homestead two miles off. f---- is there all day long, but i see nothing of it. while the shearers' hearts were tender, i asked them to come over to church on sunday, and they have promised to do so: i lend them quantities of books and papers also, so as to keep them amused and away from the accommodation-house. letter xv: everyday station life. broomielaw, january . you tell me to describe our daily home-life and domestic surroundings. i dare say it: will appear to be a monotonous and insignificant existence enough when put on paper, but it suits me exactly; and, for the first time in my life, i have enough to do, and also the satisfaction of feeling that i am of some little use to my fellow-creatures. a lady's influence out here appears to be very great, and capable of indefinite expansion. she represents refinement and culture (in mr. arnold's sense of the words), and her footsteps on a new soil such as this should be marked by a trail of light. of course every improvement must be the work of time, but i find my neighbours very willing to help me in my attempts. a few lines will be sufficient to sketch a day's routine. the first of my duties is one i especially delight in. i am out very early with a large tin dish of scraps mixed with a few handfuls of wheat, and my appearance is the signal for a great commotion among all my fowls and ducks and pigeons. such waddling and flying and running with outstretched wings to me: in fact, i receive a morning greeting from all the live-stock about the place. i am nearly knocked down by the big sheep-dogs; the calves come rushing with awkward gambols towards me for a bit of the fowls' bread, whilst the dogs look out for a bone; but, in the midst of the confusion, the poultry hold their own; indeed, an anxious hen eager to secure a breakfast for her chicks will fly at a big dog, and beat him away from a savoury morsel. i think i ought not to omit mentioning the devotion of a small pig; it is an exact illustration of the french proverb which speaks of the inequality of love, for i am quite passive and do not respond in the least to the little beastie's affection, which is the most absurd thing you ever saw, especially as it proceeds from so unromantic an animal. late in the spring (that is to say, about november last) we were all returning from a great pig-hunting expedition, when i saw one of the party coming down a steep hill near the house with a small and glossy-black wild pig under each arm; he was very proud of his captives, placed them in a box with some straw, and fed them like babies out of a bottle. we laughed at him very much; but when he went away he begged so earnestly that the pigs should be reared that we promised to keep them. in a few days they became perfectly tame, and were very handsome little creatures; and one of them attached itself to me, following me all about, even into the house (but _that_ i really could not stand), accompanying me in all my walks, and, as far as it could, in my rides. many a time have i seen poor little piggy carried down a creek by the current, squealing piteously, but it was evidently a case of "many waters cannot quench love," for a little further on piggy would appear, very much baked, but holding out gallantly, till sheer exhaustion compelled him to give in, when he would lie down under a tussock, apparently dying; but, as we were coming home in the dusk, helen, my pretty bay mare, has given many a shy at piggy starting up from his shelter with gambols and squeals of joy. it is always a great temptation to loiter about in the lovely fresh morning air, but i have to be dressed in time for prayers and breakfast at nine; directly after breakfast i go into the kitchen; sometimes, it is only necessary to give orders or instructions, but generally i find that practice is much better than precept, and i see to the soup myself, and make the pudding--the joint can take care of itself. you have often asked me what we have to eat, so this will be a good opportunity of introducing our daily bill of fare, prefacing it with my recorded opinion that here is no place in the world where you can live so cheaply and so well as on a new zealand sheep station, when once you get a start. of course, it is expensive at first, setting everything going, but that would be the case in any country. i will begin at the very beginning:--porridge for breakfast, with new milk and cream _a discretion_; to follow--mutton chops, mutton ham, or mutton curry, or broiled mutton and mushrooms, not shabby little fragments of meat broiled, but beautiful tender steaks off a leg; tea or coffee, and bread and butter, with as many new-laid eggs as we choose to consume. then, for dinner, at half-past one, we have soup, a joint, vegetables, and a pudding; in summer, we have fresh fruit stewed, instead of a pudding, with whipped cream. i was a proud and happy woman the first day my cream remained cream, and did not turn into butter; for generally my zeal outran my discretion, and i did not know when to leave off whipping. we have supper about seven; but this is a moveable feast, consisting of tea again, mutton cooked in some form of entree, eggs, bread and butter, and a cake of my manufacture. i must, however, acknowledge, that at almost every other station you would get more dainties, such as jam and preserves of all sorts, than we can boast of yet; for, as littimer says to david copperfield, "we are very young, exceedingly young, sir," our fruit-trees, have not come into full bearing, and our other resources are still quite undeveloped. however, i have wandered away terribly from my first intention of telling you of the daily occupations to a description of our daily food. after i have finished all my little fussings about the house, i join f---- who has probably been for some time quietly settled down at his writing-table, and we work together at books and writing till dinner; after that meal, f---- like mr. tootes, "resumes his studies," but i go and feed my fowls again, and if i am very idly disposed i sit on a hencoop in the shade and watch the various tempers of my chickens and ducklings. a little later f---- and i go out for some hours: if it is not too hot, he takes his rifle and we go over the hills pig-stalking, but this is really only suitable exercise for a fine winter's day; at this time of year we either go for a walk or a ride, generally the latter--not a little shabby canter, but a long stretching gallop for miles and miles; perhaps stopping to have a cup of tea with a neighbour twelve or fifteen miles off, and then coming slowly home in the delicious gloaming, with the peculiar fresh crisp feeling which the atmosphere always has here the moment the sun sets, no matter how hot the day has been. i can hardly hope to make you understand how enjoyable our twilight hours are, with no fear of damp or malaria to spoil them; every turn of the track as we slowly wind up the valley showing us some beautiful glimpse of distant mountain peaks, and, above all, such sunset splendours, gradually fading away into the deep, pure beauty of a summer night. in one of our rides the other day, after crossing a low range of hills, we suddenly dropped down on what would be called in england a hamlet, but here it is designated by the extraordinary name of a "nest of cockatoos." this expression puzzled me so much when i first heard it, that i must give you as minute an explanation as i myself found necessary to the comprehension of the subject. when a shepherd has saved a hundred pounds, or the better class of immigrant arrives with a little capital, the favourite investment is in freehold land, which they can purchase, in sections of twenty acres and upwards, at pounds the acre. the next step is to build a sod but with two rooms on their property, thatching it with tohi, or swamp grass; a door and a couple of window-frames all ready glazed are brought from christchurch in the dray with the family and the household goods. after this rough and ready shelter is provided, the father and sons begin fencing their land and gradually it all assumes a cultivated appearance. pig-sties and fowl-houses are added; a little garden, gay with common english flowers, is made in front of the house, whose ugly walls are gradually hidden by creepers, and the homestead looks both picturesque and prosperous. these small farmers are called cockatoos in australia by the squatters or sheep-farmers, who dislike them for buying up the best bits of land on their runs; and say that, like a cockatoo, the small freeholder alights on good ground, extracts all he can from it, and then flies away to "fresh fields and pastures new." but the real fact is, that the poor farmer perhaps finds his section is too far from a market, so he is forced to abandon it and move nearer a town, where the best and most productive land has been bought up already; and he has to begin again at a disadvantage. however, whether the name is just or not, it is a recognized one here; and i have heard a man say in answer to a question about his usual occupation, "i'm a cockatoo." this particular "nest" appeared to me very well off, comparatively speaking; for though the men complained sadly of the low price of their wheat and oats, still there was nothing like poverty to be seen. ready money was doubtless scarce, and an extensive system of barter appeared to prevail; but still they all looked well fed and well clothed; sickness was unknown among them, and it did one's heart good to see the children--such sturdy limbs, bright fearless eyes, and glowing faces. they have abundance of excellent food. each cottager has one or two cows, and the little ones take these out to pasture on the hills, so they are in the open air nearly all day: but their ignorance is appalling! many of them had never even been christened; there was no school or church within thirty miles or more, and although the parents seemed all tidy, decent people, and deplored the state of things, they were powerless to help it. the father and elder sons work hard all day; the mother has to do everything, even to making the candles, for the family; there is no time or possibility of teaching the children. the neighbouring squatters do not like to encourage settlers to buy up their land, therefore they carefully avoid making things pleasant for a new "nest," and the cockatoos are "nobody's business;" so, as far as educational advantages go, they are perfectly destitute. when i mentioned my discovery of this hamlet, and my dismay at the state of neglect in which so many fine intelligent-looking children were growing up, every one warned me not to interfere, assuring me the cockatoo was a very independent bird, that he considered he had left all the ladies bountiful and blanket and coal charities behind him in the old country; that, in short, as it is generally put, "jack is as good as his master" out here, and any attempt at patronage would be deeply resented. but i determined to try the effect of a little visiting among the cottages, and was most agreeably surprised at the kind and cordial welcome i received. the women liked to have some one to chat to about their domestic affairs, and were most hospitable in offers of tea, etc., and everywhere invitations to "come again" were given; so the next week i ventured to invite the men over to our sunday services. those who were fond of reading eagerly accepted the offer to join the book-club, and at last we started the educational subject. many plans were discussed, and finally we arranged for one woman, who had received an excellent education and was quite fitted for the post, to commence a day-school; but this entailed so much loss of her valuable time that the terms she is obliged to ask seem disproportionately high to the people's means. she wants shillings and pence a week with each child, and this is terrible heavy on the head of a family who is anxious and willing to give them some "schooling." however, the plan is to be tried, and i have promised to start them with books, slates, copybooks, etc. it was quite touching to hear their earnest entreaties that f---- would come over on sunday sometimes and hold a service there, but i tried to show them this could not be managed. the tears actually came into their eyes when i talked of the happiness it would be to see a little church and school in their midst; and the almost invariable remark was, "ah, but it'll be a far day first." and so i fear it will--a very far day; but i have often heard it said, that if you propose one definite object to yourself as the serious purpose of your life, you will accomplish it some day. well, the purpose of my life henceforward is to raise money somehow or somewhere to build a little wooden school-room (licensed for service, to be held whenever a missionary clergyman comes by), and to pay the salary of a schoolmaster and mistress, so that the poor cockatoo need not be charged more than threepence a week for each child. the board of education will give a third of the sum required, when two-thirds have been already raised; but it is difficult to collect subscriptions, or indeed to induce the squatters to listen to any plan for improving the condition of the small farmers, and every year which slips away and leaves these swarms of children in ignorance adds to the difficulty of training them. [note: since this was written, a school-house, also used as a church, has been built in this district by private subscription and government aid. a clergyman, who lives some twenty-five miles away, rides over and holds service once a month.] letter xvi: a sailing excursion on lake coleridge. lake coleridge, february . a violent storm of wind and rain from the south-west keeps us all indoors to-day, and gives me time to write my letter for the panama mail, which will be made up to-morrow. the post-office is ten miles off, and rejoices in the appropriate name of "wind-whistle;" it stands at the mouth of a deep mountain gorge, and there never was such a temple of the winds. this bad weather comes after a long spell of lovely bright summer days, and is very welcome to fill up the failing creeks in the lower ranges of hills. i must tell you how much we have been enjoying our visit here. f---- knows this part of the country well, but it is quite new to me, and a great contrast to the other scenery i have described to you we had long talked of paying mr. c. h---- a visit at his bachelor cottage on his station far back among the high ranges of hills, but no time was fixed, so i was rather taken by surprise when last week he drove up to broomielaw in a light american waggon with a pair of stout horses, and announced that he had come to take us to his place next day. there was no reason against this plan, and we agreed at once; the next morning saw us on the road, after an early breakfast. we had to drive about thirty-five miles round, whereas it would have been only twenty miles riding across the hills; but our kind host thought that it would be much more comfortable for me to be able to take a carpet-bag in the carriage instead of the usual system of saddle-bags one is obliged to adopt travelling on horseback. we made our first stage at the ever-hospitable station of the c----'s, on the horarata, but we could not remain to luncheon, as they wished, having to push on further; and, as it turned out, it was most fortunate we took advantage of the first part of the day to get over the ground between us and our destination, for the gentle breeze which had been blowing since we started gradually freshened into a tremendous "nor'-wester," right in our teeth all the rest of our way. the poor horses bent their heads as low as possible and pulled bravely at their collars, up hill the whole time. among the mountains the wind rushed with redoubled fury down the narrow gorges, and became icily cold as we neared the snowy ranges. it was impossible to see the hills for the thick mist, though i knew we must have a magnificent view before us. we took refuge for an hour just to rest the horses, at windwhistle, and i certainly expected the house to come down whilst we were there. i can hardly tell you anything of the rest of the drive, for i was really frightened at my first experience of a "howling nor'-wester" out of doors, and mr. h---- made me sit down at the bottom of the carriage and heaped over me all the cloaks and shawls we had brought. it was delightful to find ourselves under shelter at last in a pretty bright snug room, with lots of books and arm-chairs, and a blazing fire; _this_, you must remember, in midsummer. the next morning was perfectly calm, and the lake as serene as if no storm had been dashing its water in huge breakers against the beach only a few hours before. the view from the sitting-room was lovely: just beneath the window there was a little lawn, as green as possible from the spray with which the lake had washed it yesterday; beyond this a low hedge, an open meadow, a fringe of white pebbly beach, and then a wide expanse of water within one little wooded island, and shut in gradually from our view by spurs of hills running down to the shore, sometimes in bold steep cliffs, and again in gentle declivities, with little strips of bush or scrub growing in the steep gullies between them. the lake extends some way beyond where we lose sight of it, being twelve miles long and four miles broad. a few yards from the beach it is over six hundred feet deep. nothing but a painting could give you any idea of the blue of sky and water that morning; the violent wind of yesterday seemed to have blown every cloud below the horizon, for i could not see the least white film anywhere. behind the lower hills which surround the lake rises a splendid snowy range; altogether, you cannot imagine a more enchanting prospect than the one i stood and looked at; it made me think of miss procter's lines-- "my eyes grow dim, as still i gaze and gaze upon that mountain pass, that leads--or so it seems-- to some far happy land known in a world of dreams." all this time, whilst i was looking out of the window in most unusual idleness, mr. h---- and f---- were making constant journeys between the boat-house and the store-room, and at last i was entreated to go and put on my hat. while doing this i heard cupboards being opened, and a great bustle; so when i reached the shore i was not so much surprised as they expected, to see in the pretty little sailing-boat (which was moored to a primitive sort of jetty made out of a broken old punt) the materials for at least two substantial meals, in case of being kept out by a sudden head-wind. i was especially glad to notice a little kettle among the _impedimenta_, and there were cloaks and wraps of all kinds to provide against the worst. four gentlemen and i made up the crew and passengers, and a very merry set we were, behaving extremely like children out for a holiday. the wind was a trifle light for sailing, so the gentlemen pulled, but very lazily and not at all in good "form," as the object of each oarsman seemed to be to do as little work as possible. however, we got on somehow, a light puff helping us now and then, but our progress was hardly perceptible. i had been for a long time gazing down into the clear blue depth of water, every now and then seeing a flash of the white sand shining at the bottom, when i was half startled by our host standing suddenly up in the bow of the boat; and then i found that we were a couple of miles away from our starting-point, and that we had turned a corner formed by a steep spur, and were running right into what appeared a grove of rata-trees growing at the water's edge. the rata only grows in the hills and near water; it is a species of broad-leaf myrtle, with a flower exactly like a myrtle in character, but of a brilliant deep scarlet colour, and twice as large. when the bowsprit touched the rata-branches, which drooped like a curtain into the water, mr. h---- made a signal to lower the mast, and parting the thick, blossom-covered foliage before us, with both hands, the way the boat had on her sent us gently through the screen of scarlet flowers and glossy green leaves into such a lovely fairy cove! before us was a little white beach of fine sparkling sand, against which the water broke in tiny wavelets, and all around a perfect bower of every variety of fern and moss, kept green by streams no thicker than a silver thread trickling down here and there with a subdued tinkling sound. we all sat quite silent, the boat kept back just inside the entrance by the steersman holding on to a branch. it was a sudden contrast from the sparkling sunshine and brightness outside, all life and colour and warmth, to the tender, green, profound shade and quiet in this "mossy hum," as the people about here call it. do not fancy anything damp or chilly. no; it was like a natural temple--perfect repose and refreshment to the eyes dazzled with the brilliant outside colouring. centuries ago there must have been a great landslip here, for the side of the mountain is quite hollowed out, and nature has gradually covered the ugly brown rent with the thickest tapestry of her most delicate handiwork. i noticed two varieties of the maiden-hair, its slender black stem making the most exquisite tracery among the vivid greens. there was no tint of colour except green when once we passed the red-fringed curtain of rata-branches, only the white and shining fairy beach and the gleaming threads of water. as we sat there, perfectly still, and entranced, a sort of delicious mesmeric feeling stole over me; i thought of the lotus-eater's chant, "there is no joy but calm," with, for, the first time in my life, a dim perception of what they meant, perhaps; but it was over all too quickly: prosaic words of direction to back water called us from shade to light, and in a moment more we were in front of the rata-trees, admiring their splendid colouring, and our little boat was dancing away over the bright waves, with her white wings set and her bows pointed towards the little toy island in the middle of the lake; it was no question now of rowing, a nice fresh breeze from the south (the _cold_ point here) sent us swiftly and steadily through the water. what a morning it was! the air was positively intoxicating, making you feel that the mere fact of being a living creature with lungs to inhale such an atmosphere was a great boon. we have a good deal of disagreeable weather, and a small proportion of bad weather, but in no other part of the world, i believe, does nature so thoroughly understand how to make a fine day as in new zealand. a little after mid-day we ran our boat to the lee of the island, and: whilst she was steadied by the same primitive method of holding on to branches of manuka and other scrub, i scrambled out and up a little cliff, where a goat could hardly have found footing, till i reached a spot big enough to stand on, from whence i anxiously watched the disembarkation of some of the provisions, and of the gridiron and kettle. in a few moments we were all safely ashore, and busy collecting dry fern and brushwood for a fire; it was rather a trial of patience to wait till the great blaze had subsided before we attempted to cook our chops, which were all neatly prepared ready for us. some large potatoes were put to bake in the ashes; the tin plates were warmed (it is a great art not to overheat them when you have to keep them on your lap whilst you eat your chop). we were all so terribly hungry that we were obliged to have a course of bread and cheese and sardines _first_; it was really quite impossible to wait patiently for the chops. the officiating cook scolded us well for our vandalism, and the next moment we detected him in the act of devouring a half-raw potato. the fragments of our meal must have been a great boon to the colony of wekas who inhabit the island, for as they increase and multiply prodigiously their provisions must often fall short in so small a space. no one can imagine how these birds originally came here, for the island is at least two miles from the nearest point of land; they can neither swim nor fly; and as every man's hand is against them, no one would have thought it worth while to bring them over: but here they are, in spite of all the apparent impossibilities attending their arrival, more tame and impudent than ever. it was dangerous to leave your bread unwatched for an instant, and indeed i saw one gliding off with an empty sardine tin in its beak; i wonder how it liked oil and little scales. they considered a cork a great prize, and carried several off triumphantly. after luncheon there was the usual interval of rest, and pipes on the part of the gentlemen. i explored a little, but there is nothing very pretty or abundant in the way of wild flowers in the parts of new zealand which i have seen. white violets and a ground clematis are the only ones i have come across in any quantity. the manuka, a sort of scrub, has a pretty blossom like a diminutive michaelmas daisy, white petals and a brown centre, with a very aromatic odour; and this little flower is succeeded by a berry with the same strong smell and taste of spice. the shepherds sometimes make an infusion of these when they are very hard-up for tea; but it must be like drinking a decoction of cloves. about three o'clock we re-embarked, and sailed a little higher up the lake beyond the point where we lose sight of it from mr. h----'s house, every moment opening out fresh and more beautiful glimpses. quite the opposite end of the shore is fringed with a thick deep forest, and another station has been built there, at which, i am told, the scenery is still more magnificent. at first i was inclined to wonder where the sheep live amid all this picturesque but mountainous country: however, i find that between and among these hills stretch immense valleys (or "flats," as they are called here), which are warm and sheltered in winter, and afford plenty of food for them; then, in summer, they go up to the mountains: but it is very difficult to "muster" these ranges. i am almost ashamed to confess to another meal before we returned home, but there was a lovely tempting spot in a little harbour, and so we landed and boiled some water and had a capital cup of tea. you require to be out as we were from morning till night in such an air as this to know what it is to feel either hungry or sleepy in perfection! the next day we made a similar excursion, exploring the opposite shore of the lake; but, before we started, our host distrusted the appearance of certain clouds, and sent round horses to meet us at the point where we were going to lunch; and it was just as well he did so, for a stiff breeze sprang up from the south-west, which would have kept us out all night. so we mounted the horses instead of re-embarking, having first secured the boat, and cantered home. we passed several smaller lakes; there is a perfect chain of them among these hills, and i was much amused at the names bestowed on them, according to the tastes or caprice of the station-owners whose runs happen to include them: for instance, two are called respectively "geraldine" and "ida," whilst three, which lie close together, rejoice in the somewhat extraordinary names of "the world," "the flesh," and "the devil." letter xvii: my first and last experience of "camping out." broomielaw, april . i have nothing to tell you this mail, except of a rather ridiculous expedition which we made last week, and which involved our spending the whole night on the top of the highest hill on our run. you will probably wonder what put such an idea into our heads, so i must preface my account by a little explanation. whenever i meet any people who came here in the very early days of the colony--only sixteen years ago, after all!--i delight in persuading them to tell me about their adventures and hardships during those primitive times, and these narratives have the greatest fascination for me, as they always end happily. no one ever seems to have died of his miseries, or even to have suffered seriously in any way from them, so i find the greatest delight in listening to the stories of the pilgrims. i envy them dreadfully for having gone through so much with such spirit and cheerfulness, and ever since i came here i have regretted that the rapid advance of civilization in new zealand precludes the possibility of being really uncomfortable; this makes me feel like an impostor, for i am convinced that my english friends think of me with the deepest pity, as of one cut off from the refinements and comforts of life, whereas i really am surrounded by every necessary, and many of its luxuries, and there is no reason but that of expense why one should not have all of these. one class of narratives is peculiarly attractive to me. i like to hear of benighted or belated travellers when they have had to "camp out," as it is technically called; and have lived in constant hope of meeting with an adventure which would give me a similar experience. but i am gradually becoming convinced that this is almost impossible by fair means, so i have been trying for some time past to excite in the breasts of our home party and of our nearest neighbours an ardent desire to see the sun rise from the top of "flagpole," a hill , feet above the level of the sea, and only a: couple of miles from the house. as soon as they were sufficiently enthusiastic on the subject, i broached my favourite project of our all going up there over-night, and camping out on the highest peak. strange to say, the plan did not meet with any opposition, even from f----, who has had to camp out many a winter's night, and with whom, therefore, the novelty may be said to have worn off. two gentlemen of the proposed party were "new chums" like myself, and were strongly in favour of a little roughing; new-chums always are, i observe. f---- hesitated a little about giving a final consent on the score of its being rather too late in the year, and talked of a postponement till next summer, but we would not listen to such an idea; so he ended by entering so heartily into it, that when at last the happy day and hour came, an untoward shower had not the least effect in discouraging him. there was a great bustle about the little homestead on that eventful tuesday afternoon. two very steady old horses were saddled, one for me and the other for one of the "new chums," who was not supposed to be in good form for a long walk, owing to a weak knee. everything which we thought we could possibly want was heaped on and around us after we had mounted; the rest of the gentlemen, four in number, walked, and we reached the first stage of our expedition in about an hour. here we dismounted, as the horses could go no further in safety. the first thing done was to see to their comfort and security; the saddles were carefully deposited under a large flax-bush in case of rain, and the long tether ropes were arranged so as to ensure plenty of good feed and water for both horses, without the possibility of the ropes becoming entangled in each other or in anything else. then came a time of great excitement and laughing and talking, for all the "swags" had to be packed and apportioned for the very long and steep ascent before us. and now i must tell you exactly what we took up. a pair of large double blankets to make the tent of,--that was one swag, and a very unwieldy one it was, strapped knapsack fashion, with straps of flax-leaves, on the back, and the bearer's coat and waistcoat fastened on the top of the whole. the next load consisted of one small single blanket for my sole use, inside of which was packed a cold leg of lamb. i carried the luncheon basket, also strapped on my shoulders, filled with two large bottles of cream, some tea and sugar, and, i think, teaspoons. it looked a very insignificant load by the side of the others, but i assure you i found it frightfully heavy long before i had gone half-way up the hill. the rest distributed among them a couple of large heavy axes, a small coil of rope, some bread, a cake, tin plates and pannikins, knives and forks, and a fine pigeon-pie. concerning this pie there were two abominable propositions; one was to leave it behind, and the other was to eat it then and there: both of these suggestions were, however, indignantly rejected. i must not forget to say we included in the commissariat department two bottles of whisky, and a tiny bottle of essence of lemon, for the manufacture of toddy. we never see a real lemon, except two or three times a year when a ship arrives from the fiji islands, and then they are sixpence or a shilling apiece. all these things were divided into two large heavy "swags," and to poor f---- was assigned the heaviest and most difficult load of all--the water. he must have suffered great anxiety all the way, for if any accident had happened to his load, he would have had to go back again to refill his big kettle; this he carried in his hand, whilst a large tin vessel with a screw lid over its mouth was strapped on his back also full of water, but he was particularly charged not to let a drop escape from the spout of the kettle; and i may mention here, that though he took a long time about it, for he could not go as straight up the hill as we did, he reached the top with the kettle full to the brim--the other vessel was of course quite safe. all these packings and repackings, and the comfortable adjustment of the "swags," occupied a long time, so it was past five when we began our climb, and half-past six when we reached the top of the hill, and getting so rapidly dark that we had to hurry our preparations for the night, though we were all so breathless that a "spell" (do you know that means _rest_?) would have been most acceptable. the ascent was very steep, and there were no sheep-tracks to guide us; our way lay through thick high flax-bushes, and we never could have got on without their help. i started with a stick, but soon threw it aside and pulled myself up by the flax, hand over hand. of course i had to stop every now and then to rest, and once i chose the same flax-bush where three young wild pigs had retired for the night, having first made themselves the most beautiful bed of tussock grass bitten into short lengths; the tussocks are very much scattered here, so it must have been an afternoon's work for them; but the shepherds say these wild pigs make themselves a fresh bed every night. the first thing to be done was to pitch the tent on the little flat at the very top of the hill: it was a very primitive affair; two of the thinnest and longest pieces of totara, with which flagpole is strewed, we used for poles, fastening another piece lengthwise to these upright sticks as a roof-tree: this frame was then covered with the large double blanket, whose ends were kept down on the ground by a row of the heaviest stones to be found. the rope we had brought up served to tie the poles together at the top, and to fasten the blanket on them; but as soon as the tent had reached this stage, it was discovered that the wind blew through it from end to end, and that it afforded very little protection. we also found it much colder at the top of this hill than in our valley; so under these circumstances it became necessary to appropriate my solitary blanket to block up one end of the tent and make it more comfortable for the whole party. it was very little shelter before this was done. the next step was to collect wood for a fire, which was not difficult, for at some distant time the whole of the hill must have been covered by a forest of totara trees; it has apparently been destroyed by fire, for the huge trunks and branches which still strew the steep sides are charred and half burnt. it is a beautiful wood, with a strong aromatic odour, and blazed and crackled splendidly in the clear, cool evening air, as we piled up a huge bonfire, and put the kettle on to boil. it was quite dusk by this time, so the gentlemen worked hard at collecting a great supply of wood, as the night promised to be a very cold one, whilst i remained to watch the kettle, full of that precious liquid poor f---- had carried up with such care, and to prevent the wekas from carrying off our supper, which i had arranged just inside the tent. in this latter task i was nobly assisted by my little black terrier dick, of whose sad fate i must tell you later. by eight o'clock a noble pile of firewood had been collected, and we were very tired and hungry; so we all crept inside the tent, which did not afford very spacious accommodation, and began our supper. at this point of the entertainment everybody voted it a great success; although the wind was slowly rising and blowing from a cold point, and our blanket-tent did not afford the perfect warmth and shelter we had fondly credited it with. the gentlemen began to button up their coats. i had only a light serge jacket on, so i coaxed dick to sit at my back and keep it warm; for, whilst our faces were roasted by the huge beacon-fire, there was a keen and icy draught behind us. the hot tea was a great comfort, and we enjoyed it thoroughly, and after it was over the gentlemen lit their pipes, and i told them a story: presently we had glees, but by ten o'clock there was no concealing the fact that we were all very sleepy indeed; however, we still loudly declared that camping out was the most delightful experiment. f---- and another gentleman (that kind and most good-natured mr. u----, who lives with us) went outside the tent, armed with knives, and cut all the tussocks they could feel in the darkness, to make me a bed after the fashion of the pigs; they brought in several armfuls, and the warmest corner in the tent was heaped with them; i had my luncheon-basket for a pillow, and announced that i had turned in and was very comfortable, and that camping out was charming; the gentlemen were still cheery, though sleepy; and the last thing i remember was seeing preparations being made for what a frenchman of my acquaintance always will call a "grogs." when i awoke, i thought i must have slept several hours. though the fire was blazing grandly, the cold was intense: i was so stiff i could hardly move; all my limbs ached dreadfully, and my sensations altogether were new and very disagreeable. i sat up with great difficulty and many groans, and looked round: two figures were coiled up, like huge dogs, near me; two more, moody and sulky, were smoking by the fire; with their knees drawn up to their noses and their hands in their pockets, collars well up round their throats--statues of cold and disgust. to my inquiries about the hour, the answer, given in tones of the deepest despondency, was "only eleven o'clock, and the sun doesn't rise till six, and its going to be the coldest night we've had this year." the speaker added, "if it wasn't so dark that we'd break our necks on the way, we might go home." here was a pretty end to our amusement. i slowly let myself down again, and tried to go to sleep, but that relief was at an end for the night; the ground seemed to grow harder every moment, or, at all events, i ached more, and the wind certainly blew higher and keener. dick proved himself a most selfish doggie; he would creep round to leeward of _me_, whilst i wanted him to let me get leeward of him, but he would not consent to this arrangement. whenever i heard a deeper moan or sigh than usual, i whispered an inquiry as to the hour, but the usual reply, in the most cynical voice, was, "oh, you need not whisper, nobody is asleep." i heard one plaintive murmur "think of all our warm beds, and of our coming up here from choice." i must say i felt dreadfully ashamed of myself for my plan; it was impossible to express my contrition and remorse, for, always excepting mr. u----, they were all too cross to be spoken to. it certainly was a weary, long night. about one o'clock i pretended to want some hot tea, and the preparation for that got through half an hour, and it warmed us a little; but everybody still was deeply dejected, not to say morose. after an interval of only two hours more of thorough and intense wretchedness we had a "grogs," but there was no attempt at conviviality--subdued savageness was the prevailing state of mind. i tried to infuse a little hope into the party, by suggestions of a speedy termination to our misery, but my own private opinion was that we should all be laid up for weeks to come with illness. i allotted to myself in this imaginary distribution of ills a severe rheumatic fever; oh! how i ached, and i felt as if i never could be warm again. the fire was no use; except to afford occupation in putting on wood; it roasted a little bit of you at a time, and that bit suffered doubly from the cold when it was obliged to take its share of exposure to the wind. i cannot say whether the proverb is true of other nights, but this particular night, certainly, was both darkest and coldest just before dawn. at last, to our deep joy, and after many false alarms, we really all agreed that there was a faint streak of grey in the east. my first impulse was to set off home, and i believe i tried to get up expressing some such intention, but f---- recalled me to myself by saying, in great surprise, "are you not going to stop and see the sun rise?" i had quite forgotten that this was the avowed object of the expedition, but i was far too stiff to walk a yard, so i was obliged to wait to see what effect the sunrise would have on my frozen limbs, for i could not think of any higher motive. presently some one called out "there's the sea," and so it was, as distinct as though it were not fifty miles off; none of us had seen it since we landed; to all of us it is associated with the idea of going home some day: whilst we were feasting our eyes on it a golden line seemed drawn on its horizon; it spread and spread, and as all the water became flooded with a light and glory which hardly seemed to belong to this world, the blessed sun came up to restore us all to life and warmth again. in a moment, in less than a moment, all our little privations and sufferings vanished as if they had never existed, or existed only to be laughed at. who could think of their "ego" in such a glorious presence, and with such a panorama before them? i did not know which side to turn to first. behind me rose a giant forest in the far hills to the west--a deep shadow for miles, till the dark outline of the pines stood out against the dazzling snow of the mountains behind it; here the sky was still sheltering the flying night, and the white outlines looked ghostly against the dull neutral tints, though every peak was sharply and clearly defined; then i turned round to see before me such a glow of light and beauty! for an immense distance i could see the vast canterbury plains; to the left the waimakiriri river, flowing in many streams, "like a tangled bunch of silver ribbons" (as mr. butler calls it in his charming book on new zealand), down to the sea; beyond its banks the sun shone on the windows of the houses at oxford, thirty miles off as the crow would fly, and threw its dense bush into strong relief against the yellow plains. the port hills took the most lovely lights and shadows as we gazed on them; beyond them lay the hills of akaroa, beautiful beyond the power of words to describe. christchurch looked quite a large place from the great extent of ground it appeared to cover. we looked onto the south: there was a slight haze over the great ellesmere lake, the water of which is quite fresh, though only separated from the sea by a slight bar of sand; the high banks of the rakaia made a deep dark line extending right back into the mountains, and beyond it we could see the rangitata faintly gleaming in the distance; between us and the coast were green patches and tiny homesteads, but still few and far between; close under our feet, and looking like a thread beneath the shadow of the mountain, ran the selwyn in a narrow gorge, and on its bank stood the shepherd's hut that i have told you once afforded us such a good luncheon; it looked a mere toy, as if it came out of a child's box of playthings, and yet so snug for all its lonely position. on the other hand lay our own little home, with the faint wreath of smoke stealing up through the calm air (for the wind had dropped at sunrise). here and there we saw strings of sheep going down from their high camping-grounds to feed on the sunny slopes and in the warm valleys. every moment added to our delight and enjoyment; but unfortunately it was a sort of happiness which one can neither speak of at the time, nor write about afterwards: silence is its most expressive language. whilst i was drinking in all the glory and beauty before me, some of the others had been busy striking the tent, repacking the loads, very much lighter without the provisions; and we had one more excellent cup of tea before abandoning the encampment to the wekas, who must have breakfasted splendidly that morning. our last act was to collect all the stones we could move into a huge cairn, which was built round a tall pole of totara; on the summit of this we tied securely, with flax, the largest and strongest pocket-handkerchief, and then, after one look round to the west--now as glowing and bright as the radiant east--we set off homewards about seven o'clock; but it was long before we reached the place where we left the horses, for the gentlemen began rolling huge rocks down the sides of the hills and watching them crashing and thundering into the valleys, sometimes striking another rock and then bounding high into the air. they were all as eager and excited as schoolboys, and i could not go on and leave them, lest i should get below them and be crushed under a small stone of twenty tons or so. i was therefore forced to keep well _above_ them all the time. at last we reached the spur where the horses were tethered, re-saddled and loaded them, and arrived quite safely at home, just in time for baths and breakfast. i was amused to see that no one seemed to remember or allude to the miseries and aches of that long cold night; all were full of professions of enjoyment. but i noticed that the day was unusually quiet; the gentlemen preferred a bask in the verandah to any other amusement, and i have reason to believe they indulged in a good many naps. letter xviii: a journey "down south." waimate, may . in one of my early letters from heathstock i told you that the hurunui, which is the boundary of that run, marks the extreme north of the province of canterbury; and now i am writing to you from the extreme south. i hope you do not forget to reverse in your own mind the ordinary ideas of heat and cold, as connected with those points of the compass. the distance from our house to this is about miles, and we actually took two days and a half to get here!--besides, into these miles was compressed the fatigue of a dozen english railway journeys of the same length. but, i suppose, as usual, you will not be satisfied unless i begin at the very beginning. the first difficulty was to reach the point where we were to join the coach on the great south road. it was less than thirty miles, so we could easily have ridden the distance; but the difficulty was to get our clothes all that way. they could not be carried on horseback, and just then the station-dray was particularly employed; besides which it would have taken three days to come and go,--rather a useless expenditure of the man's time, as well as of the horses' legs, where only two little portmanteaus were concerned. fortunately for us, however, this is a country where each man is ready and willing to help his neighbour, without any inquiry as to who he is; so the moment our dilemma was known various plans were suggested for our assistance, of which this was the one selected:-- on a certain bright but cold wednesday afternoon, f---- and i and our modest luggage started in a neighbour's "trap" for the station i have already mentioned on the horarata, where mr. c. h---- and i stopped on our way to lake coleridge. it is on the plains at the foot of a low range of downs, and about twelve miles from us. you cannot imagine a more charming little cottage _ornee_ than the house is, capable of holding, apparently, an indefinite number of people, and with owners whose hospitality always prompts them to try its capabilities to the utmost. a creek runs near the house, and on its banks, sloping to the sun, lies a lovely garden, as trim as any english parterre, and a mass of fruit and flowers. nothing can be more picturesque than the mixture of both. for instance, on the wall of the house is a peach-tree laden every autumn with rosy, velvet-cheeked fruit; and jasmine and passion-flowers growing luxuriantly near it. inside all is bright neatness and such a welcome! as for our supper, on this particular day it comprised every dainty you can imagine, and made me think of my housekeeping with shame and confusion of face. we had a very merry evening, with round games; but there was a strong prejudice in favour of going to bed early, as we all had to be up by three o'clock: and so we were, to find a delicious breakfast prepared for us, which our kind hostess was quite disappointed to see we could not eat much of. coffee and toast was all i could manage at that hour. we started in the dark, and the first thing we had to cross was a dry river-bed, in which one of the horses lay deliberately down, and refused to move. this eccentricity delayed us very much; but we got him into a better frame of mind, and accomplished our early drive of sixteen miles in safety, reaching the accommodation-house, or inn, where the coach from christchurch to timaru changes horses for its first stage, by six o'clock. there we had a good breakfast, and were in great "form" by the time the coach was ready to start. these conveyances have a world-wide celebrity as "cobb's coaches," both in america and australia, where they are invariably the pioneers of all wheeled vehicles, being better adapted to travel on a bad road, or no road at all, than any other four-wheeled "trap." they are both strong and light, with leathern springs and a powerful break; but i cannot conscientiously say they are at all handsome carriages; indeed i think them extremely ugly and not very comfortable except on the box-seat next the driver. fortunately, this is made to hold three, so f---- and i scrambled up, and off we started with four good strong horses, bearing less harness about them than any quadrupeds i ever saw; a small collar, slender traces, and very thin reins comprised all their accoutrements. the first half of the journey was slow, but there was no jolting. the road was level, though it had not been made at all, only the tussocks removed from it; but it was naturally good--a great exception to new zealand roads. the driver was a steady, respectable man, very intelligent; and when f----could make him talk of his experiences in australia in the early coaching days, i was much interested. we crossed the rakaia and the rangitata in ferry-boats, and stopped on the banks of the ashburton, to dine about one o'clock, having changed horses twice since we started from "gigg's," as our place of junction was elegantly called. here all my troubles began. when we came out of the little inn, much comforted and refreshed by a good dinner, i found to my regret that we were to change drivers as well as horses, and that a very popular and well known individual was to be the new coachman. as our former driver very politely assisted me to clamber up on the box-seat, he recommended f---- to sit on the outside part of the seat, and to put me next the driver, "where," he added, "the lady won't be so likely to tumble out." as i had shown no disposition to fall off the coach hitherto, i was much astonished by this precaution, but said nothing. so he was emboldened to whisper, after looking round furtively, "and you jest take and don't be afraid, marm; _he_ handles the ribbings jest as well when he's had a drop too much as when he's sober, which ain't often, however." this last caution alarmed me extremely. the horses were not yet put in, nor the driver put _up_, so i begged f---- to get down and see if i could not go inside. but, after a hasty survey, he, said it was quite impossible: men smoking, children crying, and, in addition, a policeman with a lunatic in his charge, made the inside worse than the outside, especially in point of atmosphere; so he repeated the substance of our ex-driver's farewell speech; and when i saw our new charioteer emerge at last from the bar, looking only very jovial and tolerably steady as to gait, i thought perhaps my panic was premature. but, oh, what a time i had of it for nine hours afterwards! the moment the grooms let go the horses' heads he stood up on his seat, shook the reins, flourished his long whip, and with one wild yell from him we dashed down a steep cutting into the ashburton. the water flew in spray far over our heads, and the plunge wetted me as effectually as if i had fallen into the river. i expected the front part of the coach to part from the back, on account of the enormous strain caused by dragging it over the boulders. we lurched like a boat in a heavy sea; the "insides" screamed; "jim" (that was the driver's name) swore and yelled; the horses reared and plunged. all this time i was holding on like grim death to a light iron railing above my head, and one glance to my left showed me f---- thrown off the very small portion of cushion which fell to his share, and clinging desperately to a rude sort of lamp-frame. i speculated for an instant whether this would break; and, if so, what would become of him. but it took all my ideas to keep myself from being jerked off among the horses' heels. we dashed through the river; jim gathered up the reins, and with a different set of oaths swore he would punish the horses for jibbing in the water. and he did punish them; he put the break hard down for some way, flogged them with all his strength, dancing about the coach-box and yelling like a madman. every now and then, in the course of his bounds from place to place, he would come plump down on my lap; but i was too much frightened to remonstrate; indeed, we were going at such a pace against the wind, i had very little breath to spare. we got over the first stage of twenty miles at this rate very quickly, as you may imagine; but, unfortunately, there was an accommodation-house close to the stables, and jim had a good deal more refreshment. strange to say, this did not make him any wilder in manner--that he could not be; but after we started again he became extremely friendly with me, addressing me invariably as "my dear," and offering to "treat me" at every inn from that to timaru. i declined, as briefly as i could, whereupon he became extremely angry, at my doubting his pecuniary resources apparently, for, holding the reins carelessly with one hand, though we were still tearing recklessly along, he searched his pockets with the other hand, and produced from them a quantity of greasy, dirty one-pound notes, all of which he laid on my lap, saying, "there, and there, and there, if you think i'm a beggar!" i fully expected them to blow away, for i could not spare a hand to hold them; but i watched my opportunity when he was punishing the unfortunate fresh team, and pounced on them, thrusting the dirty heap back into his great-coat pocket. at the next stage a very tidy woman came out, with a rather large bundle, containing fresh linen, she said, for her son, who was ill in the hospital at timaru. she booked this, and paid her half-crown for its carriage, entreating the drunken wretch to see that it reached her son that night. he wildly promised he should have it in half-an-hour, and we set off as if he meant to keep his word, though we were some forty miles off yet; but he soon changed his mind, and took a hatred to the parcel, saying it would "sink the ship," and finally tried to kick it over the splash-board. i seized it at the risk of losing my balance, and hugged it tight all the way to timaru, carrying it off to the hotel, where i induced a waiter to take it up to the hospital. after we had changed horses for the last time, and i was comforting myself by the reflection that the journey was nearly over, we heard shouts and screams from the inside passengers. f---- persuaded jim with much trouble to pull up, and jumped down to see what was the matter. a strong smell of burning and a good deal of smoke arose from inside the coach, caused by the lunatic having taken off both his boots and lighted a fire in them. it was getting dark and chilly; the other passengers, including the policeman, had dozed off and the madman thought that as his feet were very cold, he would "try and warm them a bit;" so he collected all the newspapers with which his fellow-travellers had been solacing the tedium of their journey, tore, them up into shreds, with the addition of the contents of a poor woman's bundle, and made quite a cheerful blaze out of these materials. it was some time before the terrified women could be induced to get into the coach again; and it was only by jims asseverations, couched in the strongest language, that if they were not "all aboard" in half a minute, he would drive on and leave them in the middle of the plains, that they were persuaded to clamber in to their places once more. how thankful i was when we saw the lights of timaru! i was stunned and bewildered, tired beyond the power of words to describe, and black and blue all over from being jolted about. the road had been an excellent one, all the way level and wide, with telegraph-poles by its side. we shaved these very closely often enough, but certainly, amid all his tipsiness, jim bore out his predecessors remark. whenever we came to a little dip in the road, or a sharp turn, as we were nearing timaru, he would get the horses under control as if by magic, and take us over as safely as the soberest driver could have done; the moment the obstacle was passed, off we were again like a whirlwind! i was not at all surprised to hear that upsets and accidents were common on the road, and that the horses lasted but a very short time. we found our host had driven in from his station forty-five miles distant from timaru, to meet us, and had ordered nice rooms and a good dinner; so the next morning i was quite rested, and ready to laugh over my miseries of the day before. nothing could be a greater contrast than this day's journeying to yesterday's. a low, comfortable phaeton, and one of the most agreeable companions in the world to drive us, beautiful scenery and a nice luncheon half-way, at which meal f---- ate something like half a hundred cheese-cakes! the last part of the road for a dozen miles or so was rather rough; we had to cross a little river, the waio, every few hundred yards; and a new zealand river has so much shingle about it! the water can never quite make up its mind where it would like to go, and has half-a-dozen channels ready to choose from, and then in a heavy fresh the chances are it will select and make quite a different course after all. this is late autumn with us, remember, so the evenings close in early and, are very cold indeed. it was quite dark when we reached the house, and the blazing fires in every room were most welcome. the house is very unlike the conventional station pattern, being built of stone, large, very well arranged, and the perfection of comfort inside. there is no hostess at present; three bachelor brothers do the honours, and, as far as my experience goes, do them most efficiently. our visit has lasted three weeks already, and we really must bring it to a termination soon. the weather has been beautiful, and we have made many delightful excursions, all on horseback, to neighbouring stations, to a fine bush where we had a picnic, or to some point of view. i can truly say i have enjoyed every moment of the time, indoors as well as out; i was the only lady, and was petted and made much of to my heart's content. there were several other guests, and they were all nice and amusing. one wet day we had, and only one. i must tell you an incident of it, to show you what babies grown-up men can be at the antipodes. we worked hard all the morning at acrostics, and after my five o'clock tea i went upstairs to a charming little boudoir prepared for me, to rest and read; in a short time i heard something like music and stamping, and, though i was _en peignoir_, i stole softly down to see what was going on; when i opened the door of the general sitting-room a most unusual sight presented itself,--eight bearded men, none of them very young, were dancing a set of quadrilles with the utmost gravity and decorum to the tunes played by a large musical-box, which was going at the most prodigious pace, consequently the dancers were flying through the figures in silence and breathless haste. they could not stop or speak when i came in, and seemed quite surprised at my laughing at them; but you have no idea how ridiculous they looked, especially as their gravity and earnestness were profound. this is one of the very few stations where pheasants have been introduced, but then, every arrangement has been made for their comfort, and a beautiful house and yard built for their reception on a flat, just beneath the high terrace on which the house stands. more than a hundred young birds were turned out last spring, and there will probably be three times that number at the end of this year. we actually had pheasant twice at dinner; the first, and probably the last time we shall taste game in new zealand. there is a good deal of thick scrub in the clefts of the home-terrace, and this affords excellent shelter for the young. their greatest enemies are the hawks, and every variety of trap and cunning device for the destruction of these latter are in use, but as yet without doing much execution among them, they are so wonderfully clever and discerning. letter xix: a christening gathering.--the fate of dick. broomielaw, june . we reached home quite safely the first week of this month, and i immediately set to work to prepare for the bishop's visit. we met him at a friend's house one day, just as we were starting homewards, and something led to my telling him about the destitute spiritual condition of my favourite "nest of cockatoos." with his usual energy, as well as goodness, he immediately volunteered to come up to our little place, hold a service, and christen all the children. we were only too thankful to accept such an offer, as we well knew what an inducement it would be to the people, who would take a great deal of trouble and come from far and near to hear our dear bishop, who is universally beloved and respected. for a week beforehand the house smelt all day long like a baker's shop about noon on sunday, for pies, tarts, cakes, etc., were perpetually being "drawn" from the oven. i borrowed every pie-dish for miles round, and, as on another occasion i have mentioned, plenty of good things which our own resources could not furnish forth came pouring in on all sides with offers to help. f---- and i scoured the country for thirty miles round to invite everybody to come over to us that sunday; and i think i may truly say everybody came. when i rode over to my "nest" and made the announcement of the bishop's visit, the people were very much delighted; but a great difficulty arose from the sudden demand for white frocks for all the babies and older children. i rashly promised each child should find a clean white garment awaiting it on its arrival at my house, and took away a memorandum of all the different ages and sizes; the "order" never could have been accomplished without the aid of my sewing-machine. i had a few little frocks by me as patterns, and cut up some very smart white embroidered petticoats which were quite useless to me, to make into little skirts. in spite of all that was going on in the kitchen my maids found time to get these up most beautifully, and by the saturday night the little bed in the spare room was a heap of snowy small garments, with a name written on paper and pinned to each. the bishop also arrived quite safely, late that evening, having driven himself up from christchurch in a little gig. it is impossible for you to imagine a more beautiful winter's morning than dawned on us that sunday. a sharp frost over-night only made the air deliciously crisp, for the sun shone so brightly, that by nine o'clock the light film of ice over the ponds had disappeared, and i found the bishop basking in the verandah when i came out to breakfast, instead of sitting over the blazing wood-fire in the dining-room. we got our meal finished as quickly as possible, and then f---- and mr. u---- set to work to fill the verandah with forms extemporised out of empty boxes placed at each end, and planks laid across them; every red blanket in the house was pressed into service to cover these rough devices, and the effect at last was quite tidy. by eleven o'clock the drays began to arrive in almost a continual stream; as each came up, its occupants were taken into the kitchen, and given as much as they could eat of cold pies made of either pork or mutton, bread and hot potatoes, and tea. as for teapots, they were discarded, and the tea was made in huge kettles, whilst the milk stood in buckets, into which quart jugs were dipped every five minutes. i took care of all the women and children whilst f---- and mr. u---- looked after the men, showed them where to put the horses, etc. all this time several gentlemen and two or three ladies had arrived, but there was no one to attend to them, so they all very kindly came out and helped. we insisted on the bishop keeping quiet in the drawing-room, or he would have worked as hard as any one. i never could have got the children into their white frocks by two o'clock if it had not been for the help of the other ladies; but at last they were all dressed, and the congregation--not much under a hundred people--fed, and arranged in their places. there had been a difficulty about finding sufficient godmothers and godfathers, so f---- and i were sponsors for every child, and each parent wished me to hand the child to the bishop; but i could not lift up many of the bigger ones, and they roared piteously when i touched their hands. i felt it quite a beautiful and thrilling scene; the sunburnt faces all around, the chubby, pretty little group of white-clad children, every one well fed and comfortably clothed, the dogs lying at their masters feet, the bright winter sunshine and dazzling sky, and our dear bishops commanding figure and clear, penetrating voice! he gave us a most excellent sermon, short and simple, but so perfectly appropriate; and after the service was over he went about, talking to all the various groups such nice, helpful words. the truest kindness was now to "speed the parting guest," so each dray load, beginning with those whose homes were the most distant, was collected. they were first taken into the kitchen and given a good meal of hot tea, cake, and bread and butter, for many had four hours' jolting before them; the red blankets were again called into requisition to act as wraps, besides every cloak and shawl i possessed, for the moment the sun sunk, which would be about four o'clock, the cold was sure to become intense. we lived that day in the most scrambling fashion ourselves; there was plenty of cold meat, etc., on the dining-room table, and piles of plates, and whenever any of the party were hungry they went and helped themselves, as my two servants were entirely occupied with looking after the comfort of the congregation; it was such a treat to them to have, even for a few hours, the society of other women. they have only one female neighbour, and she is generally too busy to see much of them; besides which, i think the real reason of the want of intimacy is that mrs. m---- is a very superior person, and when she comes up i generally like to have a chat with her myself. it does me good to see her bonny scotch face, and hear the sweet kindly "scot's tongue;" besides which she is my great instructress in the mysteries of knitting socks and stockings, spinning, making really good butter (not an easy thing, madam), and in all sorts of useful accomplishments; her husband is the head shepherd on the next station. they are both very fond of reading, and it was quite pretty to see the delight they took in the queen's book about the highlands. to return, however, to that sunday. we were all dreadfully tired by the time the last guest had departed, but we had a delightfully quiet evening, and a long talk with the bishop about our favourite scheme of the church and school among the cockatoos, and we may feel certain of his hearty cooperation in any feasible plan for carrying it out. the next morning, much to our regret, the bishop left us for christchurch, but he had to hold a confirmation service there, and could not give us even a few more hours. we were so very fortunate in our weather. the following sunday was a pouring wet day, and we have had wind and rain almost ever since; it is unusually wet, so i have nothing more to tell you of our doings, which must seem very eccentric to you, by the way, but i assure you i enjoy the gipsy unconventional life immensely. you must not be critical about a jumble of subjects if i record poor dick's tragical fate here; it will serve to fill up my letter, and if ever you have mourned for a pet dog you will sympathise with me. i must first explain to you that on a sheep station strange dogs are regarded with a most unfriendly eye by both master and shepherds. there are the proper colleys,--generally each shepherd has two,--but no other dogs are allowed, and i had great trouble to coax f---- to allow me to accept two. one is a beautiful water-spaniel, jet black, brisk by name, but his character is stainless in the matter of sheep, and though very handsome he is only an amiable idiot, his one amusement being to chase a weka, which he never catches. the other dog was, alas! dick, a small black-and-tan terrier, very well bred, and full of tricks and play. we never even suspected him of any wickedness, but as it turned out he must have been a hardened offender. a few weeks after he came to us, when the lambing season was at its height, and the low sunny hills near the house were covered with hundreds of the pretty little white creatures, f----used sometimes to come and ask me where dick was, and, strange to say, dick constantly did not answer to my call. an evening or two later, just as we were starting for our walk, dick appeared in a great hurry from the back of the stable. f---- went up immediately to him, and stooped down to examine his mouth, calling me to see. oh, horror! it was all covered with blood and wool. i pleaded all sorts of extenuating circumstances, but f---- said, with: judicial sternness, "this cannot be allowed." dick was more fascinating than usual, never looking at a sheep whilst we were out walking with him, and behaving in the most exemplary manner. f---- watched him all the next day, and at last caught him in the act of killing a new-born lamb a little way from the house; the culprit was brought to me hanging his tail with the most guilty air, and f---- said, "i ought to shoot him, but if you like i will try if a beating can cure him, but it must be a tremendous one." i was obliged to accept this alternative, and retreated where i could not hear dick's howls under the lash, over the body of his victim. a few hours after i went to the spot, lifted dick up, and carried him into my room to nurse him; for he could not move, he had been beaten so severely. for two whole days he lay on the soft mat i gave him, only able to lap a little warm milk; on the third morning he tried to get up, and crawled into the verandah; i followed to watch him. imagine my dismay at seeing him limp to the place where the body of his last victim lay, and deliberately begin tearing it to pieces. i followed him with my little horsewhip and gave him a slight beating. i could not find it in my heart to hit him very hard. i carefully concealed this incident from f----, and for some days i never let dick out of my sight for a moment; but early one fine morning a knock came to our bed-room door, and a voice said, "please, sir, come and see what's the matter with the sheep? there's a large mob of them at the back of the house being driven, like." oh, my prophetic soul! i felt it was dick. whilst f---- was huddling on some clothes i implored him to temper justice with mercy, but never a word did he say, and sternly took his gun in his hand and went out. i buried my head in the pillows, but for all my precautions i heard the report of a shot in the clear morning air, and the echo ringing back from all the hills; five minutes afterwards f---- came in with a little blue collar in his hand, and said briefly, "he has worried more than a dozen lambs this morning alone." what could i say? f----'s only attempt at consolation was, "he died instantly; i shot him through the head." but for many days afterwards i felt quite lonely and sad without my poor little pet--yet what could have been done? no one would have accepted him as a present, and it flashed on me afterwards that perhaps this vice of his was the reason of dick's former owner being so anxious to give him to me. i have had two offers of successors to dick since, but i shall never have another dog on a sheep station, unless i know what mr. dickens' little dressmaker calls "its tricks and its manners." letter xx: the new zealand snowstorm of . broomielaw, august . i have had my first experience of real hardships since i last wrote to you. yes, we have all had to endure positive hunger and cold, and, what i found much harder to bear, great anxiety of mind. i think i mentioned that the weather towards the end of july had been unusually disagreeable, but not very cold this wet fortnight had a great deal to do with our sufferings afterwards, for it came exactly at the time we were accustomed to send our dray down to christchurch for supplies of flour and groceries, and to lay in a good stock of coals for the winter; these latter had been ordered, and were expected every day. just the last few days of july the weather cleared up, and became like our usual most beautiful winter climate; so, after waiting a day or two, to allow the roads to dry a little, the dray was despatched to town, bearing a long list of orders, and with many injunctions to the driver to return as quickly as possible, for all the stores were at the lowest ebb. i am obliged to tell you these domestic details, in order that you may understand the reason of our privations. i acknowledge, humbly, that it was not good management, but sometimes accidents _will_ occur. it was also necessary for f---- to make a journey to christchurch on business, and as he probably would be detained there for nearly a week, it was arranged that one of the young gentlemen from rockwood should ride over and escort me back there, to remain during f----'s absence. i am going to give you all the exact dates, for this snow-storm will be a matter of history, during the present generation at all events: there is no tradition among the maoris of such a severe one ever having occurred; and what made it more fatal in its financial consequences to every one was, that the lambing season had only just commenced or terminated on most of the runs. only a few days before he left, f---- had taken me for a ride in the sheltered valleys, that he might see the state of the lambs, and pronounced it most satisfactory; thousands of the pretty little creatures were skipping about by their mothers' side. i find, by my diary, july th marked, as the beginning of a "sou'-wester." f---- had arranged to start that morning, and as his business was urgent, he did not like to delay his departure, though the day was most unpromising, a steady, fine drizzle, and raw atmosphere; however, we hurried breakfast, and he set off, determining to push on to town as quickly as possible. i never spent such a dismal day in my life: my mind was disturbed by secret anxieties about the possibility of the dray being detained by wet weather, and there was such an extraordinary weight in the air, the dense mist seemed pressing everything down to the ground; however, i drew the sofa to the fire, made up a good blaze (the last i saw for some time), and prepared to pass a lazy day with a book; but i felt so restless and miserable i did not know what was the matter with me. i wandered from window to window, and still the same unusual sight met my eyes; a long procession of ewes and lambs, all travelling steadily down from the hills towards the large flat in front of the house; the bleating was incessant, and added to the intense melancholy of the whole affair. when mr. u---- came in to dinner; at one o'clock, he agreed with me that it was most unusual weather, and said, that on the other ranges the sheep were drifting before the cold mist and rain just in the same way. our only anxiety arose from the certainty that the dray would be delayed at least a day, and perhaps two; this was a dreadful idea: for some time past we had been economising our resources to make them last, and we knew that there was absolutely nothing at the home-station, nor at our nearest neighbour's, for they had sent to borrow tea and sugar from us. just at dusk that evening, two gentlemen rode up, not knowing f---- was from home, and asked if they might remain for the night. i knew them both very well; in fact, one was our cousin t----, and the other an old friend; so they put up their horses, and housed their dogs (for each had a valuable sheep-dog with him) in a barrel full of clean straw, and we all tried to spend a cheerful evening, but everybody confessed to the same extraordinary depression of spirits that i felt. when i awoke the next morning, i was not much surprised to see the snow falling thick and fast: no sheep were now visible, there was a great silence, and the oppression in the atmosphere had if possible increased. we had a very poor breakfast,--no porridge, very little mutton (for in expectation of the house being nearly empty, the shepherd had not brought any over the preceding day), and _very_ weak tea; coffee and cocoa all finished, and about an ounce of tea in the chest. i don't know how the gentlemen amused themselves that day; i believe they smoked a good deal; i could only afford a small fire in the drawing-room, over which i shivered. the snow continued to fall in dense fine clouds, quite unlike any snow i ever saw before, and towards night i fancied the garden fence was becoming very much dwarfed. still the consolation was, "oh, it won't last; new zealand snow never: does." however, on wednesday morning things began to look very serious indeed: the snow covered the ground to a depth of four feet in the shallowest places, and still continued to fall steadily; the cows we knew _must_ be in the paddock were not to be seen anywhere; the fowl-house and pig-styes which stood towards the weather quarter had entirely disappeared; every scrap of wood (and several logs were lying about at the back) was quite covered up; both the verandahs were impassable; in one the snow was six feet deep, and the only door which could be opened was the back-kitchen door, as that opened inwards; but here the snow was half-way over the roof, so it took a good deal of work with the kitchen-shovel, for no spades could be found, to dig out a passage. indoors, we were approaching our last mouthful very rapidly, the tea at breakfast was merely coloured hot water, and we had some picnic biscuits with it. for dinner we had the last tin of sardines, the last pot of apricot jam, and a tin of ratifia biscuits a most extraordinary mixture, i admit, but there was nothing else. there were six people to be fed every day, and nothing to feed them with. thursday's breakfast was a discovered crust of dry bread, very stale, and our dinner that day was rice and salt--the last rice in the store-room. the snow still never ceased falling, and only one window in the house afforded us any light; every box was broken up and used for fuel. the gentlemen used to go all together and cut, or rather dig, a passage through the huge drift in front of the stable, and with much difficulty get some food for the seven starving horses outside, who were keeping a few yards clear by incessantly moving about, the snow making high walls all around them. it was wonderful to see how completely the whole aspect of the surrounding scenery was changed; the gullies were all filled up, and nearly level with the downs; sharp-pointed cliffs were now round bluffs; there was no vestige of a fence or gate or shrub to be seen, and still the snow came down as if it had only just begun to fall; out of doors the silence was like death, i was told, for i could only peep down the tunnel dug every few hours at the back-kitchen door. my two maids now gave way, and sat clasped in each other's arms all day, crying piteously, and bewailing their fate, asking me whenever i came into the kitchen, which was about every half-hour, for there was no fire elsewhere, "and oh, when do you think we'll be found, mum?" of course this only referred to the ultimate discovery of our bodies. there was a great search to-day for the cows, but it was useless, the gentlemen sank up to their shoulders in snow. friday, the same state of things: a little flour had been discovered in a discarded flour-bag, and we had a sort of girdle-cake and water. the only thing remaining in the store-room was some blacklead, and i was considering seriously how that could be cooked, or whether it would be better raw: we were all more than half starved, and quite frozen: very little fire in the kitchen, and none in any other room. of course, the constant thought was, "where are the sheep?" not a sign or sound could be heard. the dogs' kennels were covered several feet deep; so we could not get at them at all. saturday morning: the first good news i heard was that the cows had been found, and dragged by ropes down to the enclosure the horses had made for them-selves: they were half dead, poor beasts; but after struggling for four hours to and from a haystack two hundred yards off, one end of which was unburied, some oaten hay was procured for them. there was now not a particle of food in the house. the servants remained in their beds, declining to get up, and alleging that they might as well "die warm." in the middle of the day a sort of forlorn-hope was organized by the gentlemen to try to find the fowl-house, but they could not get through the drift: however, they dug a passage to the wash-house, and returned in triumph with about a pound of very rusty bacon they had found hanging up there; this was useless without fuel, so they dug for a little gate leading to the garden, fortunately hit its whereabouts, and soon had it broken up and in the kitchen grate. by dint of taking all the lead out of the tea-chests, shaking it, and collecting every pinch of tea-dust, we got enough to make a teapot of the weakest tea, a cup of which i took to my poor crying maids in their beds, having first put a spoonful of the last bottle of whisky which the house possessed into it, for there was neither, sugar nor milk to be had. at midnight the snow ceased for a few hours, and a hard sharp frost set in; this made our position worse, for they could now make no impression on the snow, and only broke the shovels in trying. i began to think seriously of following the maids example, in order to "die warm." we could do nothing but wait patiently. i went up to a sort of attic where odds and ends were stowed away, in search of something to eat, but could find nothing more tempting than a supply of wax matches. we knew there was a cat under the house, for we heard her mewing; and it was suggested to take up the carpets first, then the boards, and have a hunt for the poor old pussy but we agreed to bear our hunger a little longer, chiefly, i am afraid, because she was known to be both thin and aged. towards noon on sunday the weather suddenly changed, and rain began to come down heavily and steadily; this cheered us all immensely, as it would wash the snow away probably, and so it did to some degree; the highest drifts near the house lessened considerably in a few hours, and the gentlemen, who by this time were desperately hungry, made a final attempt in the direction of the fowl-house, found the roof, tore off some shingles, and returned with a few aged hens, which were mere bundles of feathers after their week's starvation. the servants consented to rise and pluck them, whilst the gentlemen sallied forth once more to the stock-yard, and with great difficulty got off two of the cap or top rails, so we had a splendid though transitory blaze, and some hot stewed fowl; it was more of a soup than anything else, but still we thought it delicious: and then everybody went to bed again, for the house was quite dark still, and the oil and candles were running very low. on monday morning the snow was washed off the roof a good deal by the deluge of rain which had never ceased to come steadily down, and the windows were cleared a little, just at the top; but we were delighted with the improvement, and some cold weak fowl-soup for breakfast, which we thought excellent. on getting out of doors, the gentlemen reported the creeks to be much swollen and rushing in yellow streams down the sides of the hills over the snow, which was apparently as thick as ever; but it was now easier to get through at the surface, though quite solid for many feet from the ground. a window was scraped clear, through which i could see the desolate landscape out of doors, and some hay was carried with much trouble to the starving cows and horses, but this was a work of almost incredible difficulty. some more fowls were procured to-day, nearly the last, for a large hole in the roof showed most of them dead of cold and hunger. we were all in much better spirits on this night, for there were signs of the wind shifting from south to north-west; and, for the first time in our lives i suppose, we were anxiously watching and desiring this change, as it was the only chance of saving the thousands of sheep and lambs we now knew lay buried under the smooth white winding-sheet of snow. before bedtime we heard the fitful gusts we knew so well, and had never before hailed with such deep joy and thankfulness. every time i woke the same welcome sound of the roaring warm gale met my ears; and we were prepared for the pleasant sight, on tuesday morning, of the highest rocks on the hill-tops standing out gaunt and bare once more. the wind was blowing the snow off the hills in clouds like spray, and melting it everywhere so rapidly that we began to have a new anxiety, for the creeks were rising fast, and running in wide, angry-looking rivers over the frozen snow on the banks. all immediate apprehension of starvation, however, was removed, for the gentlemen dug a pig out of his stye, where he had been warm and comfortable with plenty of straw, and slaughtered him; and in the loft of the stable was found a bag of indian meal for fattening poultry, which made excellent cakes of bread. it was very nasty having only ice-cold water to drink at every meal. i especially missed my tea for breakfast; but felt ashamed to grumble, for my disagreeables were very light compared to those of the three gentlemen. from morning to night they were wet through, as the snow of course melted the moment they came indoors. all the first part of the last week they used to work out of doors, trying to get food and fuel, or feeding the horses, in the teeth of a bitter wind, with the snow driving like powdered glass against their smarting hands and faces; and they were as cheery and merry as possible through it all, trying hard to pretend they were neither hungry nor cold, when they must have been both. going out of doors at this stage of affairs simply meant plunging up to their middle in a slush of half-melted snow which wet them thoroughly in a moment; and they never had dry clothes on again till they changed after dark, when there was no more possibility of outdoor work. wednesday morning broke bright and clear for the first time since sunday week; we actually saw the sun. although the "nor-wester" had done so much good for us, and a light wind still blew softly from that quarter, the snow was yet very deep; but i felt in such high spirits that i determined to venture out, and equipped myself in a huge pair of f----'s riding-boots made of kangaroo-skin, well greased with weka-oil to keep the wet out, these i put on over my own thick boots, but my precautions "did nought avail," for the first step i took sank me deep in the snow over the tops of my enormous boots. they filled immediately, and then merely served to keep the snow securely packed round my ankles; however, i struggled bravely on, every now and then sinking up to my shoulders, and having to be hauled out by main force. the first thing done was to dig out the dogs, who assisted the process by vigorously scratching away inside and tunnelling towards us. poor things! how thin they looked, but they were quite warm; and after indulging in a long drink at the nearest creek, they bounded about, like mad creatures. the only casualties in the kennels were two little puppies, who were lying cuddled up as if they were asleep, but proved to be stiff and cold; and a very old but still valuable collie called "gipsy." she was enduring such agonies from rheumatism that it was terrible to hear her howls; and after trying to relieve her by rubbing, taking her into the stable-and in fact doing all we could for her--it seemed better and kinder to shoot her two days afterwards. we now agreed to venture into the paddock and see what had happened to the bathing-place about three hundred yards from the house. i don't think i have told you that the creek had been here dammed up with a sod wall twelve feet high, and a fine deep and broad pond made, which was cleared of weeds and grass, and kept entirely for the gentlemen to have a plunge and swim at daylight of a summer's morning; there had been a wide trench cut about two feet from the top, so as to carry off the water, and hitherto this had answered perfectly. the first thing we had to do was to walk over the high five-barred gate leading into the paddock just the topmost bar was sticking up, but there was not a trace of the little garden-gate or of the fence, which was quite a low one. we were, however, rejoiced to see that on the ridges of the sunny downs there were patches, or rather streaks, of tussocks visible, and they spread in size every moment, for the sun was quite warm, and the "nor'-wester," had done much towards softening the snow. it took us a long time to get down to where the bathing-place _had been_, for the sod wall was quite carried away, and there was now only a heap of ruin, with a muddy torrent pouring through the large gap and washing it still more away. close to this was a very sunny sheltered down, or rather hill; and as the snow was rapidly melting off its warm sloping sides we agreed to climb it and see if any sheep could be discovered, for up to this time there had been none seen or heard, though we knew several thousands must be on this flat and the adjoining ones. as soon as we got to the top the first glance showed us a small dusky patch close to the edge of one of the deepest and widest creeks at the bottom of the pad-dock; experienced eyes saw they were sheep, but to me they had not the shape of animals at all, though they were quite near enough to be seen distinctly. i observed the gentlemen exchange looks of alarm, and they said to each other some low words, from which i gathered that they feared the worst. before we went down to the flat we took a long, careful look round, and made out another patch, dark by comparison with the snow, some two hundred yards lower down the creek, but apparently in the water. on the other side of the little hill the snow seemed to have drifted even more deeply, for the long narrow valley which lay there presented, as far as we could see, one smooth, level snow-field. on the dazzling white surface the least fleck shows, and i can never forget how beautiful some swamp-hens, with their dark blue plumage, short, pert, white tails, and long bright legs, looked, as they searched slowly along the banks of the swollen creek for some traces of their former haunts; but every tuft of tohi-grass lay bent and buried deep beneath its heavy covering. the gentlemen wanted me to go home before they attempted to see the extent of the disaster, which we all felt must be very great; but i found it impossible to do anything but accompany them. i am half glad and half sorry now that i was obstinate; glad because i helped a little at a time when the least help was precious, and sorry because it was really such a horrible sight. even the first glance showed us that, as soon as we got near the spot we had observed, we were walking on frozen sheep embedded in the snow one over the other; but at all events their misery had been over some time. it was more horrible to see the drowning, or just drowned, huddled-up "mob" (as sheep _en masse_ are technically called) which had made the dusky patch we had noticed from the hill. no one can ever tell how many hundred ewes and lambs had taken refuge under the high terrace which forms the bank of the creek. the snow had soon covered them up, but they probably were quite warm and dry at first. the terrible mischief was caused by the creek rising so rapidly, and, filtering through the snow which it gradually dissolved, drowned them as they stood huddled together. those nearest the edge of the water of course went first, but we were fortunately in time to save a good many, though the living seemed as nothing compared to the heaps of dead. we did not waste a moment in regrets or idleness; the most experienced of the gentlemen said briefly what was to be done, and took his coat off; the other coats and my little astrachan jacket were lying by its side in an instant, and we all set to work, sometimes up to our knees in icy water, digging at the bank of snow above us--if you can call it digging when we had nothing but our hands to dig, or rather scratch, with. oh, how hot we were in five minutes! the sun beating on us, and the reflection from the snow making its rays almost blinding. it was of no use my attempting to rescue the sheep, for i could not move them, even when i had _scrattled_ the snow away from one. a sheep, especially with its fleece full of snow, is beyond my small powers: even the lambs i found a tremendous weight, and it must have been very absurd, if an idler had been by, to see me, with a little lamb in my arms, tumbling down at every second step, but still struggling manfully towards the dry oasis where we put each animal as it was dug out. the dear doggies helped us beautifully, working so eagerly and yet so wisely under their master's eye, as patient and gentle with the poor stiffened creatures as if they could feel for them. i was astonished at the vitality of some of the survivors; if they had been very far back and not chilled by the water, they were quite lively. the strongest sheep were put across the stream by the dogs, who were obedient to their master's finger, and not to be induced on any terms to allow the sheep to land a yard to one side of the place on the opposite bank, but just where they were to go. a good many were swept away, but after six hours' work we counted , rescued ones slowly "trailing" up the low sunny hill i have mentioned, and nibbling at the tussocks as they went. the proportion of lambs was, of course, very small, but the only wonder to me is that there were any alive at all. if i had been able to stop my scratching but for a moment, i would have had what the servants call a "good cry" over one little group i laid bare. two fine young ewes were standing leaning against each other in a sloping position, like a tent, frozen and immoveable: between them, quite dry, and as lively as a kitten, was a dear little lamb of about a month old belonging to one; the lamb of the other lay curled up at her feet, dead and cold; i really believe they had hit upon this way of keeping the other alive. a more pathetic sight i never beheld. it is needless to say that we were all most dreadfully exhausted by the time the sun went down, and it began to freeze; nothing but the sheer impossibility of doing anything more in the hardening snow and approaching darkness made us leave off even then, though we had not tasted food all day. the gentlemen took an old ewe, who could not stand, though it was not actually dead, up to the stable and killed it, to give the poor dogs a good meal, and then they had to get some more rails off the stock-yard to cook our own supper of pork and maize. the next morning was again bright with a warm wind; so the effect of the night's frost soon disappeared, and we were hard at work directly after breakfast. nothing would induce me to stay at home, but i armed myself with a coal-scoop to dig, and we made our way to the other "mob;" but, alas! there was nothing to do in the way of saving life, for all the sheep were dead. there was a large island formed at a bend in the creek, where the water had swept with such fury round a point as to wash the snow and sheep all away together, till at some little obstacle they began to accumulate in a heap. i counted ninety-two dead ewes in one spot, but i did not stay to count the lambs. we returned to the place where we had been digging the day before, and set the dogs to hunt in the drifts; wherever they began to scratch we shovelled the snow away, and were sure to find sheep either dead or nearly so: however, we liberated a good many more. this sort of work continued till the following saturday, when f---- returned, having had a most dangerous journey, as the roads are still blocked up in places with snow-drifts; but he was anxious to get back, knowing i must have been going through "hard times." he was terribly shocked at the state of things among the sheep; in christchurch no definite news had reached them from any quarter: all the coaches were stopped and the telegraph wires broken down by the snow. he arrived about mid-day, and, directly after the meal we still called dinner, started off over the hills to my "nest of cockatoos," and brought back some of the men with him to help to search for the sheep, and to skin those that were dead as fast as possible. he worked himself all day at the skinning,--a horrible job; but the fleeces were worth something, and soon all the fences, as they began to emerge from the snow, were tapestried with these ghastly skins, and walking became most disagreeable, on account of the evil odours arising every few yards. we forgot all our personal sufferings in anxiety about the surviving sheep, and when the long-expected dray arrived it seemed a small boon compared to the discovery of a nice little "mob" feeding tranquilly on a sunny spur. it is impossible to estimate our loss until the grand muster at shearing, but we may set it down at half our flock, and _all_ our lambs, or at least per cent. of them. our neighbours are all as busy as we are, so no accurate accounts of their sufferings or losses have reached us; but, to judge by appearances, the distant "back-country" ranges must have felt the storm more severely even than we have; and although the snow did not drift to such a depth on the plains as with us, or lie so long on the ground, they suffered just as much,--for the sheep took shelter under the high river-banks, and the tragedy of the creeks was enacted on a still larger scale; or they drifted along before the first day's gale till they came to a wire fence, and there they were soon covered up, and trampled each other to death. not only were sheep, but cattle, found dead in hundreds along the fences on the plains. the newspapers give half a million as a rough estimate of the loss among the flocks in this province alone. we have no reliable news from other parts of the island, only vague rumours of the storm having been still more severe in the province of otago, which lies to the south, and would be right in its track; the only thing which all are agreed in saying is, that there never has been such a storm before, for the maories are strong in weather traditions, and though they prophesied this one, it is said they have no legend of anything like it ever having happened. letter xxi: wild cattle hunting in the kowai bush. mount torlesse, october . we are staying for a week at a charming little white cottage covered with roses and honeysuckles, nestled under the shadow of this grand mountain, to make some expeditions after wild cattle in the great kowai bush. i am afraid that it does not sound a very orderly and feminine occupation, but i enjoy it thoroughly, and have covered myself with glory and honour by my powers of walking all day. we have already spent three long happy days in the bush, and although they have not resulted in much slaughter of our big game, still i for one am quite as well pleased as if we had returned laden with as many beeves as used to come in from a border foray. i am not going to inflict an account of each expedition on you; one will serve to give an idea of all, for though there is no monotony in nature, it may chance that frequent descriptions of her become so, and this i will not risk. our ride over here was a sufficiently ridiculous affair, owing to the misbehaviour of the pack-horse, for it was impossible upon this occasion to manage with as little luggage as usual, so we arranged to take a good-sized carpet-bag (a most unheard-of luxury), and on each side of it was to be slung a rifle and a gun, and smaller bags of bullets, shot, and powder-flasks, disposed to the best advantage on the pack-saddle. this was all very well in theory, but when it came to the point, the proper steady old horse who was to bear the pack was not forthcoming! he had taken it into his head to go on a visit to a neighbouring run, so the only available beast was a young chestnut of most uncertain temper. the process of saddling him was a long one, as he objected to each item of his load as soon as it was put on, especially to the guns; but f---- was very patient, and took good care to tie and otherwise fasten everything so that it was impossible for "master tucker" (called, i suppose, after the immortal tommy) to get rid of his load by either kicking or plunging. at last we mounted and rode by a bridle-path among the hills for some twelve miles or so, then across half-a-dozen miles of plain, and finally we forded a river. the hill-track was about as bad as a path could be, with several wide jumps across creeks at the bottom of the numerous deep ravines, or gullies as we call them. f---- rode first--for we could only go in single file--with the detestable tucker's bridle over his arm; then came the chestnut, with his ears well back, and his eyes all whites, in his efforts to look at his especial aversion, the guns; he kicked all the way down the many hills, and pulled back in the most aggravating manner at each ascent, and when we came to a creek sat down on his tail, refusing to stir. my position was a most trying one; the track was so bad that i would fain have given my mind entirely to my own safety, but instead of this all my attention was centred on tucker the odious. when we first started i expressed to f---- my fear that tucker would fairly drag him off his own saddle, and he admitted that it was very likely, adding, "you must flog him." this made me feel that it entirely depended on my efforts whether f---- was to be killed or not, so i provided myself with a small stock-whip in addition to my own little riding-whip, and we set off. from the first yard tucker objected to go, but there were friendly sticks to urge him on; however, we soon got beyond the reasonable limits of help, and i tried desperately to impress upon tucker that i was going to be very severe: for this purpose i flourished my stock-whip in a way that drove my own skittish mare nearly frantic, and never touched tucker, whom f---- was dragging along by main force. at last i gave up the stock-whip, with its unmanageable three yards of lash, and dropped it on the track, to be picked up as we came home. i now tried to hit tucker with my horse-whip, but he flung his heels up in helen's face the moment i touched him. i was in perfect despair, very much afraid of a sudden swerve on my mare's part sending us both down the precipice, and in equal dread of seeing f---- pulled off his saddle by tucker's suddenly planting his fore-feet firmly together: f---- himself, with the expression of a martyr, looking round every now and then to say, "can't you make him come on?" and i hitting wildly and vainly, feeling all the time that i was worse than useless. at last the bright idea occurred to me to ride nearly alongside of the fiendish tucker, but a little above him on the hill, so as to be able to strike him fairly without fear of his heels. as far as tucker was concerned this plan answered perfectly, for he soon found out he had to go; but helen objected most decidedly to being taken off the comparative safety of the track and made to walk on a slippery, sloping hill, where she could hardly keep her feet; however, we got on much faster this way. oh, how tired i was of striking tucker! i don't believe i hurt him much, but i felt quite cruel. when we came to the plain, i begged f---- to let me lead him; so we changed, and there was no holding back on the chestnut's part then; it must have been like the grass and the stones in the fable. i never was more thankful than when that ride was over, though its disagreeables were soon forgotten in the warm welcome we received from our bachelor hosts, and the incessant discussions about the next day's excursion. we had finished breakfast by seven o'clock the following morning, and were ready to start. of course the gentlemen were very fussy about their equipments, and hung themselves all over with cartridges and bags of bullets and powder-flasks; then they had to take care that their tobacco-pouches and match-boxes were filled; and lastly, each carried a little flask of brandy or sherry, in case of being lost and having to camp out. i felt quite unconcerned, having only my flask with cold tea in it to see about, and a good walking-stick was easily chosen. my costume may be described as uncompromising, for it had been explained to me that there were no paths but real rough bush walking; so i dispensed with all little feminine adornments even to the dearly-loved chignon, tucked my hair away as if i was going to put on a bathing-cap, and covered it with a scotch bonnet. the rest of my toilette must have been equally shocking to the eyes of taste, and i have reason to believe the general effect most hideous; but one great comfort was, no one looked at me, they were all too much absorbed in preparations for a great slaughter, and i only came at all upon sufferance; the unexpressed but prevailing dread, i could plainly see, was that i should knock up and become a bore, necessitating an early return home; but i knew better! an american waggon and some ponies were waiting to take the whole party to the entrance of the bush, about four miles off, and, in spite of having to cross a rough river-bed, which is always a slow process, it did not take us very long to reach our first point. here we dismounted, just at the edge of the great dense forest, and, with as little delay as possible in fine arrangements, struck into a path or bullock-track, made for about three miles into the bush for the convenience of dragging out the felled trees by ropes or chains attached to bullocks; they are not placed upon a waggon, so you may easily imagine the state the track was in, ploughed up by huge logs of timber dragged on the ground, and by the bullocks' hoofs besides. it was a mere slough with deep holes of mud in it, and we scrambled along its extreme edge, chiefly trusting to the trees on each side, which still lay as they had been felled, the men not considering them good enough to remove. at last we came to a clearing, and i quite despair of making you understand how romantic and lovely this open space in the midst of the tall trees looked that beautiful spring morning. i involuntarily thought of the descriptions in "paul and virginia," for the luxuriance of the growth was quite tropical. for about two acres the trees had been nearly all felled, only one or two giants remaining; their stumps were already hidden by clematis and wild creepers of other kinds, or by a sort of fern very like the hart's-tongue, which will only grow on the bark of trees, and its glossy leaves made an exquisite contrast to the rough old root. the "bushmen"--as the men who have bought twenty-acre sections and settled in the bush are called--had scattered english grass-seed all over the rich leafy mould, and the ground was covered with bright green grass, kept short and thick by a few tame goats browsing about. before us was the steep bank of the river waimakiriri, and a few yards from its edge stood a picturesque gable-ended little cottage surrounded by a rustic fence, which enclosed a strip of garden gay with common english spring flowers, besides more useful things, potatoes, etc. the river was about two hundred yards broad just here, and though it foamed below us, we could also see it stretching away in the distance almost like a lake, till a great bluff hid it from our eyes. overhead the trees were alive with flocks of wild pigeons, ka-kas, parroquets, and other birds, chattering and twittering incessantly and as we stood on the steep bank and looked down, i don't think a minute passed without a brace of wild ducks flying past, grey, blue, and paradise. these latter are the most beautiful plumaged birds i ever saw belonging to the duck tribe, and, when young, are very good eating, quite as delicate as the famous canvas-back. this sight so excited our younger sportsmen that they scrambled down the high precipice, followed by a water-spaniel, and in five minutes had bagged as many brace. we could not give them any more time, for it was past nine o'clock, and we were all eager to start on the serious business of the day; but before we left, the mistress of this charming "bush-hut" insisted on our having some hot coffee and scones and wild honey, a most delicious second breakfast. there was a pretty little girl growing up, and a younger child, both the picture of health; the only drawback seemed to be the mosquitoes; it was not very lonely, for one or two other huts stood in clearings adjoining, and furnished us with three bushmen as guides and assistants. i must say, they were the most picturesque of the party, being all handsome men, dressed in red flannel shirts and leathern knickerbockers and gaiters; they had fine beards, and wore "diggers' hats," a head-dress of american origin--a sort of wide-awake made of plush, capable of being crushed into any shape, and very becoming. all were armed with either rifle or gun, and one carried an axe and a coil of rope; another had a gun such as is seldom seen out of an arsenal; it was an old flint lock, but had been altered to a percussion; its owner was very proud of it, not so much for its intrinsic beauty, though it once had been a costly and splendid weapon and was elaborately inlaid with mother-of-pearl, but because it had belonged to a former duke of devonshire. in spite of its claims to consideration on this head as well as its own beauty, we all eyed it with extreme disfavour on account of a peculiarity it possessed of not going off when it was intended to do so, but about five minutes afterwards. it was suggested to me very politely that i might possibly prefer to remain behind and spend the day in this picturesque spot, but this offer i declined steadily; i think the bushmen objected to my presence more than any one else, as they really meant work, and dreaded having to turn back for a tired "female" (they never spoke of me by any other term). at last all the information was collected about the probable whereabouts of the wild cattle--it was so contradictory, that it must have been difficult to arrange any plan by it,--and we started. a few hundred yards took us past the clearings and into the very heart of the forest. we had left the sun shining brightly overhead; here it was all a "great green gloom." i must describe to you the order in which we marched. first came two of the most experienced "bush-hands," who carried a tomahawk or light axe with which to clear the most cruel of the brambles away, and to notch the trees as a guide to us on our return; and also a compass, for we had to steer for a certain point, the bearings of which we knew--of course the procession was in indian file: next to these pioneers walked, very cautiously, almost on tiptoe, four of our sportsmen; then i came; and four or five others, less keen or less well armed, brought up the rear. i may here confess that i endured in silence agonies of apprehension for my personal safety all day. it was so dreadful to see a bramble or wild creeper catch in the lock of the rifle before me, and to reflect that, unless its owner was very careful, it might "go off of its own accord," and to know that i was exposed to a similar danger from those behind. we soon got on the fresh tracks of some cows, and proceeded most cautiously and silently; but it could hardly be called walking, it was alternately pushing through dense undergrowth, crawling beneath, or climbing over, high barricades made by fallen trees. these latter obstacles i found the most difficult, for the bark was so slippery; and once, when with much difficulty i had scrambled up a pile of _debris_ at least ten feet high, i incautiously stepped on some rotten wood at the top, and went through it into a sort of deep pit, out of which it was very hard to climb. on comparing notes afterwards, we found, that although we had walked without a moment's cessation for eleven hours during the day, a pedometer only gave twenty-two miles as the distance accomplished. before we had been in the bush half an hour our faces were terribly scratched and bleeding, and so were the gentlemen's hands; my wrists also suffered, as my gauntlets would not do their duty and lie flat. there were myriads of birds around us, all perfectly tame; many flew from twig to twig, accompanying us with their little pert heads on one side full of curiosity; the only animals we saw were some wild sheep looking very disreputable with their long tails and torn, trailing fleeces of six or seven years' growth. there are supposed to be some hundreds of these in the bush who have strayed into it years ago, when they were lambs, from neighbouring runs. the last man in the silent procession put a match into a dead tree every here and there, to serve as a torch to guide us back in the dark; but this required great judgment for fear of setting the whole forest on fire: the tree required to be full of damp decay, which would only smoulder and not blaze. we intended to steer for a station on the other side of a narrow neck of the great bush, ten miles off, as nearly as we could guess, but we made many detours after fresh tracks. once these hoof-marks led us to the brink of such a pretty creek, exactly like a scotch burn, wide and noisy, tumbling down from rock to rock, but not very deep. after a whispered consultation, it was determined to follow up this creek to a well-known favourite drinking-place of the cattle, but it was easier walking in the water than on the densely-grown banks, so all the gentlemen stepped in one after another. i hesitated a moment with one's usual cat-like antipathy to wet feet, when a stalwart bushman approached, with rather a victimised air and the remark: "ye're heavy, nae doot, to carry." i was partly affronted at this prejudgment of the case, and partly determined to show that i was equal to the emergency, for i immediately jumped into the water, frightening myself a good deal by the tremendous splash i made, and meeting reproving glances; and nine heads were shaken violently at me. nothing could be more beautiful than the winding banks of this creek, fringed with large ferns in endless variety; it was delightful to see the sun and sky once more overhead, but i cannot say that it was the easiest possible walking, and i soon found out that the cleverest thing to do was to wade a little way behind the shortest gentleman of the party, for when he disappeared in a hole i knew it in time to avoid a similar fate; whereas, as long as i persisted in stalking solemnly after my own tall natural protector, i found that i was always getting into difficulties in unexpectedly deep places. i saw the bushmen whispering together, and examining the rocks in some places, but i found on inquiry that their thoughts were occupied at the moment by other ideas than sport; one of them had been a digger, and was pronouncing an opinion that this creek was very likely to prove a "home of the gold" some day. there is a strong feeling prevalent that gold will be found in great quantities all over the island. at this time of the year the water is very shallow, but the stream evidently comes down with tremendous force in the winter; and they talk of having "found the colour" (of gold) in some places. we proceeded in this way for about three miles, till we reached a beautiful, clear, deep pool, into which the water fell from a height in a little cascade; the banks here were well trodden, and the hoof-prints quite recent; great excitement was caused by hearing a distant lowing, but after much listening, in true indian fashion, with the ear to the ground, everybody was of a different opinion as to the side from whence the sound proceeded, so we determined to keep on our original course; the compass was once more produced, and we struck into a dense wood of black birch. ever since we left the clearing from which the start was made, we had turned our backs on the river, but about three o'clock in the afternoon we came suddenly on it again, and stood on the most beautiful spot i ever saw in my life. we were on the top of a high precipice, densely wooded to the water's edge. some explorers in bygone days must have camped here, for half-a-dozen trees were felled, and the thick brush-wood had been burnt for a few yards, just enough to let us take in the magnificent view before and around us. below roared and foamed, among great boulders washed down from the cliff, the waimakiriri; in the middle of it lay a long narrow strip of white shingle, covered with water in the winter floods, but now shining like snow in the bright sunlight. beyond this the river flowed as placidly as a lake, in cool green depths, reflecting every leaf of the forest on the high bank or cliff opposite. to our right it stretched away, with round headlands covered with timber running down in soft curves to the water. but on our left was the most perfect composition for a picture in the foreground a great reach of smooth water, except just under the bank we stood on, where the current was strong and rapid; a little sparkling beach, and a vast forest rising up from its narrow border, extending over chain after chain of hills, till they rose to the glacial region, and then the splendid peaks of the snowy range broke the deep blue sky line with their grand outlines. all this beauty would have been almost too oppressive, it was on such a large scale and the solitude was so intense, if it had not been for the pretty little touch of life and movement afforded by the hut belonging to the station we were bound for. it was only a rough building, made of slabs of wood with cob between; but there was a bit of fence and the corner of a garden and an english grass paddock, which looked about as big as a pocket-handkerchief from where we stood. a horse or two and a couple of cows were tethered near, and we could hear the bark of a dog. a more complete hermitage could not have been desired by diogenes himself, and for the first time we felt ashamed of invading the recluse in such a formidable body, but ungrudging, open-handed hospitality is so universal in new zealand that we took courage and began our descent. it really was like walking down the side of a house, and no one could stir a step without at least one arm round a tree. i had no gun to carry, so i clung frantically with both arms to each stem in succession. the steepness of the cliff was the reason we could take in all the beauty of the scene before us, for the forest was as thick as ever; but we could see over the tops of the trees, as the ground dropped sheer down, almost in a straight line from the plateau we had been travelling on all day. as soon as we reached the shingle, on which we had to walk for a few hundred yards, we bethought ourselves of our toilettes; the needle and thread i had brought did good service in making us more presentable. we discovered, however, that our faces were a perfect network of fine scratches, some of which _would_ go on bleeding, in spite of cold-water applications. our boots were nearly dry; and my petticoat, short as it was, proved to be the only damp garment: this was the fault of my first jump into the water. we put the least scratched and most respectable-looking member of the party in the van, and followed him, amid much barking of dogs, to the low porch; and after hearing a cheery "come in," answering our modest tap at the door, we trooped in one after the other till the little room was quite full. i never saw such astonishment on any human face as on that of the poor master of the house, who could not stir from his chair by the fire, on account of a bad wound in his leg from an axe. there he sat quite helpless, a moment ago so solitary, arid now finding himself the centre of a large, odd-looking crowd of strangers. he was a middle-aged scotchman, probably of not a very elevated position in life, and had passed many years in this lonely spot, and yet he showed himself quite equal to the occasion. after that first uncontrollable look of amazement he did the honours of his poor hut with the utmost courtesy and true good-breeding. his only apology was for being unable to rise from his arm-chair (made out of half a barrel and an old flour-sack by the way); he made us perfectly welcome, took it for granted we were hungry--hunger is a very mild word to express my appetite, for one--called by a loud coo-ee to his man sandy, to whom he gave orders that the best in the house should be put before us, and then began to inquire by what road we had come, what sport we had, etc., all in the nicest way possible. i never felt more awkward in my life than when i stooped to enter that low doorway, and yet in a minute i was quite at my ease again; but of the whole party i was naturally the one who puzzled him the most. in the first place, i strongly suspect that he had doubts as to my being anything but a boy in a rather long kilt; and when this point was explained, he could not understand what a "female," as he also called me, was doing on a rough hunting expedition. he particularly inquired more than once if i had come of my own free will, and could not understand what pleasure i found in walking so far. indeed he took it so completely for granted that i must be exhausted, that he immediately began to make plans for f---- and me to stop there all night, offering to give up his "bunk" (some slabs of wood made into a shelf, with a tussock mattress and a blanket), and to sleep himself in his arm-chair. in the meantime, sandy was preparing our meal. there was an open hearth with a fine fire, and a big black kettle hanging over it by a hook fastened somewhere up the chimney. as soon as this boiled he went to a chest, or rather locker, and brought a double-handful of tea, which he threw into the kettle; then he took from a cupboard the biggest loaf, of bread i ever saw--a huge thing, which had been baked in a camp-oven--and flapped it down on the table with a bang; next he produced a tin milk-pan, and returned to the cupboard to fetch out by the shank-bone a mutton-ham, which he placed in the milk-dish: a bottle of capital whisky was forthcoming from the same place; a little salt on one newspaper, and brown, or rather _black_, sugar on another, completed the arrangements, and we were politely told by sandy to "wire in,"--digger's phraseology for an invitation to commence, which we did immediately, as soon as we could make an arrangement about the four tin plates and three pannikins. i had one all to myself, but the others managed by twos and threes to each plate. i never had a better luncheon in my life; everything was excellent in its way, and we all possessed what we are told is the best sauce. large as the supplies were, we left hardly anything, and the more we devoured the more pleased our host seemed. there were no chairs; we sat on logs of trees rudely chopped into something like horse-blocks, but to tired limbs which had known no rest from six hours' walking they seemed delightful. after we had finished our meal, the gentlemen went outside to have half a pipe before setting off again; they dared not smoke whilst we were after the cattle, for fear of their perceiving some unusual smell; and i remained for ten minutes with mr----. i found that he was very fond of reading; his few books were all of a good stamp, but he was terribly hard-up for anything which he had not read a hundred times over. i hastily ran over the names of some books of my own, which i offered to lend him for as long a time as he liked: and we made elaborate plans for sending them, of my share in which i took a memorandum. he seemed very grateful at the prospect of having anything new, especially now that he was likely to be laid up for some weeks, and i intend to make every effort to give him this great pleasure as soon as possible. we exchanged the most hearty farewells when the time of parting came, and our host was most earnest in his entreaties to us to remain; but it was a question of getting out of the bush before dusk, so we could not delay. he sent sandy to guide us by a rather longer but easier way than climbing up the steep cliff to the place where the little clearing at its edge which i have mentioned had been made; and we dismissed our guide quite happy with contributions from all the tobacco-pouches, for no one had any money with him. we found our way back again by the notches on the trees as long as the light lasted, and when it got too dark to see them easily, the smouldering trunks guided us, and we reached the clearing from which we started in perfect safety. good mrs. d---- had a bountiful tea ready; she was much concerned at our having yet some three miles of bad walking before we could reach the hut on the outskirts of the bush, where we had left the trap and the ponies. when we got to this point there was actually another and still more sumptuous meal set out for us, to which, alas! we were unable to do any justice; and then we found our way to the station across the flat, down a steep cutting, and through the river-bed, all in the dark and cold. we had supper as soon as we reached home, tumbling into bed as early as might be afterwards for such a sleep as you londoners don't know anything about. i have only described one expedition to you, and that the most unsuccessful, as far as killing anything goes; but my hunting instincts only lead me to the point of reaching the game; when it comes to that, i always try to save its life, and if this can't be done, i retire to a distance and stop my ears; indeed, if very much over-excited, i can't help crying. consequently, i enjoy myself much more when we don't kill anything; and, on the other occasions, i never could stop and see even the shot fired which was to bring a fine cow or a dear little calf down, but crept away as far as ever i could, and muffled my head in my jacket. the bushmen liked this part of the performance the best, i believe, and acted as butchers very readily, taking home a large joint each to their huts, a welcome change after the eternal pigeons, ka-kas, and wild ducks on which they live. letter xxii: the exceeding joy of "burning." broomielaw, december . i am quite sorry that the season for setting fire to the long grass, or, as it is technically called, "burning the run," is fairly over at last. it has been later than usual this year, on account of the snow having lain such an unusual time on the ground and kept the grass damp. generally september is the earliest month in which it begins, and november the latest for it to end; but this year the shady side of "flagpole" was too moist to take fire until december. it is useless to think of setting out on a burning expedition unless there is a pretty strong nor'-wester blowing; but it must not be _too_ violent, or the flames will fly over the grass, just scorching it instead of making "a clean burn." but when f---- pronounces the wind to be just right, and proposes that we should go to some place where the grass is of two, or, still better, three years' growth, then i am indeed happy. i am obliged to be careful not to have on any inflammable petticoats, even if it is quite a warm day, as they are very dangerous; the wind will shift suddenly perhaps as, i am in the very act of setting a tussock a-blaze, and for half a second i find myself in the middle of the flames. f---- generally gets his beard well singed, and i have nearly lost my eyelashes more than once. we each provide ourselves with a good supply of matches, and on the way we look out for the last year's tall blossom of those horrid prickly bushes called "spaniards," or a bundle of flax-sticks, or, better than all, the top of a dead and dry ti-ti palm. as soon as we come to the proper spot, and f---- has ascertained that no sheep are in danger of being made into roast mutton before their time, we begin to light our line of fire, setting one large tussock blazing, lighting our impromptu torches at it, and then starting from this "head-centre," one to the right and the other to the left, dragging the blazing sticks along the grass. it is a very exciting amusement, i assure you, and the effect is beautiful, especially as it grows dusk and the fires are racing up the hills all around us. every now and then they meet with a puff of wind, which will perhaps strike a great wall of fire rushing up-hill as straight as a line, and divide it into two fiery horns like a crescent; then as the breeze changes again, the tips of flame will gradually approach each other till they meet, and go on again in a solid mass of fire. if the weather has been very dry for some time and the wind is high, we attempt to burn a great flax swamp, perhaps, in some of the flats. this makes a magnificent bonfire when once it is fairly started, but it is more difficult to light in the first instance, as you have to collect the dead flax-leaves and make a little fire of them under the big green bush in order to coax it to blaze up: but it crackles splendidly; indeed it sounds as if small explosions were going on sometimes. but another disadvantage of burning a swamp is, that there are deep holes every yard or two, into which i always tumble in my excitement, or in getting out of the way of a flax-bush which has flared up just at the wrong moment, and is threatening to set me on fire also. these holes are quite full of water in the winter, but now they contain just enough thin mud to come in over the tops of my boots; so i do not like stepping into one every moment. we start numerous wild ducks and swamp-hens, and perhaps a bittern or two, by these conflagrations. on the whole, i like burning the hill-sides better than the swamp--you get a more satisfactory blaze with less trouble; but i sigh over these degenerate days when the grass is kept short and a third part of a run is burned regularly ever spring, and long for the good old times of a dozen years ago, when the tussocks were six feet high. what a blaze they must have made! the immediate results of our expeditions are vast tracts of perfectly black and barren country, looking desolate and hideous to a degree hardly to be imagined; but after the first spring showers a beautiful tender green tint steals over the bare hill-sides, and by and by they are a mass of delicious young grass, and the especial favourite feeding-place of the ewes and lambs. the day after a good burn thousands of sea-gulls flock to the black ground. where they spring from i cannot tell, as i never see one at any other time, and their hoarse, incessant cry is the first sign you have of their arrival. they hover over the ground, every moment darting down, for some insect. they cannot find much else but roasted lizards and, grasshoppers, for i have never seen a caterpillar in new zealand. in the height of the burning season last month i had alice s---- to stay with me for two or three weeks, and to my great delight i found our tastes about fires agreed exactly, and we both had the same grievance--that we never were allowed to have half enough of it; so we organized the most delightful expeditions together. we used to have a quiet old station-horse saddled, fasten the luncheon-basket to the pommel with materials for a five o'clock tea, and start off miles away to the back of the run, about three o'clock in the afternoon, having previously bribed the shepherd to tell us where the longest grass was to be found--and this he did very readily, as our going saved him the trouble of a journey thither, and he was not at all anxious for more work than he could help. we used to ride alternately, till we got to a deserted shepherd's hut in such a lovely gully, quite at the far end of the run! here we tied up dear quiet old jack to the remnants of the fence, leaving him at liberty to nibble a little grass. we never took off the saddle after the first time, for upon that occasion we found that our united strength was insufficient to girth it on again properly, and we made our appearance at home in the most ignominious fashion--alice leading jack, and i walking by his side holding the saddle _on_. whenever we attempted to buckle the girths, this artful old screw swelled himself out with such a long breath that it was impossible to pull the strap to the proper hole; we could not even get it tight enough to stay steady, without slipping under him at every step. however, this is a digression, and i must take you back to the scene of the fire, and try to make you understand how delightful it was. alice said that what made it so fascinating to her was a certain sense of its being mischief, and a dim feeling that we might get into a scrape. i don't think i ever stopped to analyse my sensations; fright was the only one i was conscious of, and yet i liked it so much. when after much consultation--in which i always deferred to alice's superior wisdom and experience--we determined on our line of fire, we set to work vigorously, and the great thing was to see who could make the finest blaze. i used to feel very envious if my fire got into a bare patch, where there were more rocks than tussocks, and languished, whilst alice's was roaring and rushing up a hill. we always avoided burning where a grove of the pretty ti-ti palms grew; but sometimes there would be one or two on a hill-side growing by themselves, and then it was most beautiful to see them burn. even before the flames reached them their long delicate leaves felt the wind of the fire and shivered piteously; then the dry old ones at the base of the stem caught the first spark like tinder, and in a second the whole palm was in a blaze, making a sort of heart to the furnace, as it had so much more substance than the grass. for a moment or two the poor palm would bend and sway, tossing its leaves like fiery plumes in the air, and then it was reduced to a black stump, and the fire swept on up the hill. the worst of it all was that we never knew when to leave off and come home. we would pause for half an hour and boil our little kettle, and have some tea and cake, and then go on again till quite late, getting well scolded when we reached home at last dead-tired and as black as little chimney-sweeps. one evening f---- was away on a visit of two nights to a distant friend, and alice and i determined on having splendid burns in his absence; so we made our plans, and everything was favourable, wind and all. we enjoyed ourselves very much, but if mr. u---- had not come out to look for us at ten o'clock at night, and traced us by our blazing track, we should have had to camp out, for we had no idea where we were, or that we had wandered so many miles from home; nor had we any intention of returning just yet. we were very much ashamed of ourselves upon that occasion, and took care to soften the story considerably before it reached f----'s ears the next day. however much i may rejoice at nor'-westers in the early spring as aids to burning the run, i find them a great hindrance to my attempts at a lawn. twice have we had the ground carefully dug up and prepared; twice has it been sown with the best english seed for the purpose, at some considerable expense; then has come much toil on the part of f---- and mr. u---- with a heavy garden-roller; and the end of all the trouble has been that a strong nor'-wester has blown both seed and soil away, leaving only the hard un-dug (i wonder whether there is such a word) ground. i could scarcely believe that it really was all "clean gone," as children say, until a month or two after the first venture, when i had been straining my eyes and exercising my imagination all in vain to discover a blade where it ought to have been, but had remarked in one of my walks an irregular patch of nice english grass about half a mile from the house down the flat. i speculated for some time as to how it got there, and at last f---- was roused from his reverie, and said coolly, "oh, that's your lawn!" when this happens twice, it really becomes very aggravating: there are the croquet things lying idle in the verandah year after year, and, as far as i can see, they are likely to remain unused for ever. before i close my letter i must tell you of an adventure i have had with a wild boar, which was really dangerous. f---- and another gentleman were riding with me one afternoon in a very lonely gully at the back of the run, when the dogs (who always accompany us) put up a large, fierce, black, boar out of some thick flax-bushes. of course the hunting instinct, which all young englishmen possess, was in full force instantly; and in default of any weapon these two jumped off their horses and picked up, out of the creek close by, the largest and heaviest stones they could lift. i disapproved of the chase under the circumstances, but my timid remonstrances were not even heard. the light riding-whips which each gentleman carried were hastily given to me to hold, and in addition f---- thrust an enormous boulder into my lap, saying, "now, this is to be my second gun; so keep close to me." imagine poor me, therefore, with all three whips tucked under my left arm, whilst with my right i tried to keep the big stone on my knee, miss helen all the time capering about, as she always does when there is any excitement; and i feeling very unequal to holding her back from joining in the chase too ardently, for she always likes to be first everywhere, which is not at all my "sentiments." the ground was as rough as possible; the creek winding about necessitated a good jump every few yards; and the grass was so long and thick that it was difficult to get through it, or to see any blind creeks or other pitfalls. _mem_. to burn this next spring. the pig first turned to bay against a palm-tree, and soon disabled the dogs. you cannot think what a formidable weapon a wild boar's tusk is--the least touch of it cuts like a razor; and they are so swift in their jerks of the head when at bay that in a second they will rip up both dogs and horses: nor are they the least afraid of attacking a man on foot in self-defence; but they seldom or ever strike the first blow. as soon as he had disposed of both the dogs, who lay howling piteously and bleeding on the ground, the boar made at full speed for the spur of a hill close by. the pace was too good to last, especially up-hill; so the gentlemen soon caught him up, and flung their stones at him, but they dared not bring their valuable horses too near for fear of a wound which probably would have lamed them for life; and a heavy, rock or stone is a very unmanageable weapon. i was not therefore at all surprised to see that both shots missed, or only very slightly grazed the pig; but what i confess to being perfectly unprepared for was the boar charging violently down-hill on poor unoffending me, with his head on one side ready for the fatal backward jerk, champing and foaming as he came, with what mr. weller would call his "vicked old eye" twinkling with rage. helen could not realize the situation at all. i tried to turn her, and so get out of the infuriated brute's way; but no, she would press on to meet him and join the other horses at the top of the hill. i had very little control over her, for i was so laden with whips and stones that my hands were useless for the reins. i knew i was in great danger, but at the moment i could only think of my poor pretty mare lamed for life, or even perhaps killed on the spot. i heard one wild shout of warning from above, and i knew the others were galloping to my rescue; but in certainly less than half a minute from the time the boar turned, he had reached me. i slipped the reins over my left elbow, so as to leave my hands free, took my whip in my teeth (i had to drop the others), and lifting the heavy stone with both my hands waited a second till the boar was near enough, leaning well over on the right-hand side of the saddle so as to see what he did. he made for poor helen's near fore-leg with his head well down, and i could hear his teeth gnashing. just as he touched her with a prick from his tusk like a stiletto and before he could jerk his head back so as to rip the leg up, i flung my small rock with all the strength i possessed crash on his head: but i could not take a good aim; for the moment helen felt the stab, she reared straight up on her hind-legs, and as we were going up-hill, i had some trouble to keep myself from slipping off over her tail. however, my rock took some effect, for the pig was so stunned that he dropped on his knees, and before he could recover himself helen had turned round, still on her hind-legs, as on a pivot, and was plunging and jumping madly down the hill. i could not get back properly into my saddle, nor could i arrange the reins; so i had to stick on anyhow. it was not a case of fine riding at all; i merely clung like a monkey, and f----, who was coming as fast as he could to me, said he expected to see me on the ground every moment; but, however, i did not come off upon that occasion. helen was nearly beside herself with terror. i tried to pat her neck and soothe her, but the moment she felt my hand she bounded as if i had struck her, and shivered so much that i thought she must be injured; so the moment f---- could get near her i begged him to look at her fetlock. he led her down to the creek, and washed the place, and examined it carefully, pronouncing, to my great joy, that the tusk had hardly gone in at all--in fact had merely pricked her--and that she was not in the least hurt. i could hardly get the gentlemen to go to the assistance of the poor dogs, one of which was very much hurt. both f---- and mr. b---- evidently thought i must have been "kilt intirely," for my situation looked so critical at one moment that they could scarcely be persuaded that neither helen nor i were in the least hurt. i coaxed f---- that evening to write me a doggerel version of the story for the little boys, which i send you to show them:-- st. anne and the pig. you've heard of st. george and the dragon, or seen them; and what can be finer, in silver or gold on a flagon, with garrard or hancock designer? though we know very little about him (saints mostly are shrouded in mystery), britannia can't well do without him, he sets off her shillings and history. and from truth let such tales be defended, bards at least should bestow them their blessing, as a rich sort of jewel suspended on history when she's done dressing. some would have her downstairs to the present, in plain facts fresh from critical mangle; but let the nymph make herself pleasant, here a bracelet, and there with a bangle such as bold robin hood or red riding, who peasant and prince have delighted, despite of all social dividing, and the times of their childhood united. shall new zealand have never a fable, a rhyme to be sung by the nurses, a romance of a famous round table, a "death of cock robin" in verses? or shall not a scribe be found gracious with pen and with parchment, inditing and setting a-sail down the spacious deep day stream some suitable writing; some action, some name so heroic that its sound shall be death to her foemen, and make her militia as stoic as st. george made the cressy crossbowmen; a royal device for her banners, a reverse for her coinage as splendid, an example of primitive manners when all their simplicity's ended? here it is, ye isles antipodean! leave britain her great cappadocian; i'll chant you a latter-day paean, and sing you a saint for devotion, who on horseback slew also a monster, though armed with no sharp lance to stab it, though no helmet or hauberk ensconced her, but only a hat and a habit. this dame, for her bravery sainted, set up for all times' adoration, with her picture in poetry painted, was a lady who lived on a station. her days--to proceed with the story in duties domestic dividing, but, or else she had never won glory, she now and then went out a-riding. it chanced, with two knights at her stirrup, she swept o'er the grass of the valleys, heard the brooks run; and heard the birds chirrup, when a boar from the flax-bushes sallies. the cavaliers leaped from their horses; as for weapons, that day neither bore them; so they chose from the swift watercourses heavy boulders, and held them before them. they gave one as well to the lady: she took it, and placed it undaunted on the pommel, and balanced it steady, while they searched where the animal haunted. a bowshot beyond her were riding the knights, each alert with his missile, but in doubt where the pig went a-hiding, for they had not kept sight of his bristle. when--the tale needs but little enlarging one turned round by chance on his courser; to his horror, the monster was charging at the lady, as if to unhorse her. but his fears for her safety were idle, no heart of a hero beat stouter: she poised the stone, gathered her bridle-- a halo, 'tis said, shone about her. with his jaws all extended and horrid, fierce and foaming, the brute leapt to gore her, when she dropped the rock full on his forehead, and lo! he fell dying before her. there he lay, bristling, tusky, and savage; such a mouth, as was long ago written; made calydon lonely with ravage, by such teeth young adonis was bitten. then praise to our new atalanta, of the chase and of song spoils be brought her, whose skill and whose strength did not want a meleager to finish the slaughter. she is sung, and new zealand shall take her, thrice blest to possess such a matron, and give thanks to its first ballad-maker, who found it a saint for a patron. letter xxiii: concerning a great flood. broomielaw, february . since i last wrote to you we have been nearly washed away, by all the creeks and rivers in the country overflowing their banks! christchurch particularly was in great danger from the chance of the waimakiriri returning to its old channel, in which case it would sweep away the town. for several hours half the streets were under water, the people going about in boats, and the avon was spread out like a lake over its banks for miles. the weather had been unusually sultry for some weeks, and during the last five days the heat had been far greater, even in the hills, than anyone could remember. it is often very hot indeed during the mid-day hours in summer, but a hot night is almost unknown; and, at the elevation we live, there are few evenings in the year when a wood-fire is not acceptable after sunset; as for a blanket at night, that is seldom left off even in the plains, and is certainly necessary in the hills. every one was anxiously looking for rain, as the grass was getting very dry and the creeks low, and people were beginning to talk of an australian summer and to prophesy dismal things of a drought. on a sunday night about eleven o'clock we were all sauntering about out of doors, finding it too hot to remain in the verandah; it was useless to think of going to bed; and f---- and mr. u---- agreed that some great change in the weather was near. there was a strange stillness and oppression in the air; the very animals had not gone to sleep, but all seemed as restless and wakeful as we were. i remember we discussed the probability of a severe earthquake, for the recent wave at st. thomas's was in everybody's mind. f---- and i had spent a few days in christchurch the week before. there was a regular low-fever epidemic there, and, he had returned to the station feeling very unwell; but in this country illness is so rare that one almost forgets that such a thing exists, and we both attributed his seediness to the extraordinary heat. when we were out of doors that sunday evening, we noticed immense banks and masses of clouds, but they were not in the quarter from whence our usual heavy rain comes; and besides, in new zealand clouds are more frequently a sign of high wind than of rain. however, about midnight f---- felt so ill that he went in to bed, and we had scarcely got under shelter when, after a very few premonitory drops, the rain came down literally in sheets. almost from the first f---- spoke of the peculiar and different sound on the roof, but as he had a great deal of fever that night, i was too anxious to notice anything but the welcome fact that the rain had come at last, and too glad to hear it to be critical about the sound it made in falling. i came out to breakfast alone, leaving f---- still ill, but the fever going off. the atmosphere was much lightened, but the rain seemed like a solid wall of water falling fast and furiously; the noise on the wooden roof was so great that we had to shout to each other to make ourselves heard; and when i looked out i was astonished to see the dimensions to which the ponds had. swollen. down all the hill-sides new creeks and waterfalls had sprung into existence during the night. as soon as i had taken f---- his tea and settled down comfortably to breakfast, i noticed that instead of mr. u---- looking the picture of bright good-humour, he wore a troubled and anxious countenance. i immediately inquired if he had been out of doors that morning? yes, he had been to look at the horses in the stable. well, i did not feel much interest in them, for they were big enough to take care of themselves: so i proceeded to ask if he had chanced to see anything of my fifty young ducks or my numerous broods of chickens. upon this question mr. u---- looked still more unhappy and tried to turn the conversation, but my suspicions were aroused and i persisted; so at last he broke to me, with much precaution, that i was absolutely without a duckling or a chicken in the world! they had been drowned in the night, and nothing was to be seen but countless draggled little corpses, what mr. mantilini called "moist unpleasant bodies," floating on the pond or whirling in the eddies of the creek. that was not even the worst. every one of my sitting hens was drowned also, their nests washed away; so were the half-dozen beautiful ducks, with some twelve or fourteen eggs under each. i felt angry with the ducks, and thought they might have at any rate saved their own lives; but nothing could alter the melancholy returns of the missing and dead. my poultry-yard was, for all practical purposes, annihilated, just as it was at its greatest perfection and the pride and joy of my heart. all that day the rain descended steadily in torrents; there was not the slightest break or variation in the downpour: it was as heavy as that of the jamaica _seasons_ of may and october. f----'s fever left him at the end of twelve hours, and he got up and came into the drawing-room; his first glance out of the window, which commanded a view of the flat for two or three miles, showed him how much the waters had risen since midnight; and he said that in all the years he had known those particular creeks he had never seen them so high: still i thought nothing of it. there was no cessation in the rain for exactly twenty-four hours; but at midnight on monday, just as poor f---- was getting another attack of fever, it changed into heavy, broken showers, with little pauses of fine drizzle between, and by morning it showed signs of clearing, but continued at intervals till midday. the effect was extraordinary, considering the comparatively short time the real downpour had lasted. the whole flat was under water, the creeks were flooded beyond their banks for half a mile or so on each side, and the river selwyn, which ran under some hills, bounding our view, was spread out, forming an enormous lake. a very conspicuous object on these opposite hills, which are between three and four miles distant, was a bold cliff known by the name of the "white rocks," and serving as a landmark to all the countryside: we could hardly believe our eyes when we missed the most prominent of these and could see only a great bare rent in the mountain. the house was quite surrounded by water and stood on a small island; it was impossible even to wade for more than a few yards beyond the dry ground, for the water became quite deep and the current was running fast. f----'s fever lasted its twelve hours; but i began to be fidgety at the state of prostration it left him in, and when tuesday night brought a third and sharper attack, i determined to make him go to town and see a doctor during his next interval of freedom from it. wednesday morning was bright and sunny, but the waters had not much diminished: however, we knew every hour must lessen them, and i only waited for f----'s paroxysm of fever to subside about mid-day to send him off to christchurch. i had exhausted my simple remedies, consisting of a spoonful of sweet spirits of nitre and a little weak brandy and water and did not think it right to let things go on in this way without advice: he was so weak he could hardly mount his horse; indeed he had to be fairly lifted on the old quiet station hack i have before mentioned with such deep affection, dear old jack. it was impossible for him to go alone; so the ever-kind and considerate mr. u---- offered to accompany him. this was the greatest comfort to me, though i and my two maids would be left all alone during their absence: however, that was much better than poor f---- going by himself in his weak state. six hours of sunshine had greatly abated the floods, and as far as we could see the water was quite shallow now where it had overflowed. i saw them set off therefore with a good hope of their accomplishing the journey safely. judge of my astonishment and horror when, on going to see what the dogs were barking at, about two hours later, i beheld f---- and mr. u---- at the garden gate, dripping wet up to their shoulders, but laughing very much. of course i immediately thought of f----'s fever, and made him come in and change; and have some hot tea directly; but he would not go to bed as i suggested, declaring that the shock of his unexpected cold bath, and the excitement of a swim for his life, had done him all the good in the world; and i may tell you at once; that it had completely cured him: he ate well that evening, slept well, and had no return of his fever, regaining his strength completely in a few days. so much for kill-or-cure remedies! it seems that as soon as they neared the first creek, with very high banks, about a mile from the house, the water came up to the horses' fetlocks, then to their knees, but still it was impossible to tell exactly where the creek began, or rather, where its bank ended; they went very cautiously, steering as well as they could for where they imagined the cutting in the steep bank to be; but i suppose they did not hit it off exactly, for suddenly they went plump into deep water and found themselves whirling along like straws down a tremendous current. jack was, however, quite equal to the occasion; he never allows himself to be flurried or put out by anything, and has, i imagine, been in nearly every difficulty incident to new zealand travelling. instead, therefore, of losing his head as helen did (mr. u---- was riding her), and striking out wildly with her forelegs to the great danger of the other horse, jack took it all as a matter of course, and set himself to swim steadily down the stream, avoiding the eddies as much as possible: he knew every yard of the bank, and did not therefore waste his strength by trying to land in impossible places, but kept a watchful eye for the easiest spot. f---- knew the old horse so well that he let him have his head and guide himself, only trying to avoid helen's forelegs, which were often unpleasantly near; his only fear was lest they should have to go so far before a landing was possible that poor old jack's strength might not hold out, for there is nothing so fatiguing to a horse as swimming in a strong current with a rider on his back, especially a heavy man. they were swept down for a long distance, though it was impossible to guess exactly how far they had gone, and f---- was getting very uneasy about a certain wire fence which had been carried across the creek; they were rapidly approaching it, and the danger was that the horses might suddenly find themselves entangled in it, in which case the riders would very likely have been drowned. f---- called to mr. u----to get his feet free from the stirrups and loosened his own; but he told me he was afraid lest mr. u---- should not hear him above the roaring of the water, and so perhaps be dragged under water when the fence was reached. however, jack, knew all about it, and was not going to be drowned ignominiously in a creek which would not have wet his hoofs to cross three days before. a few yards from the fence he made one rush and a bound towards what seemed only a clump of tohi bushes, but they broke the force of the current and gave him the chance he wanted, and he struggled up the high crumbling bank more like a cat than a steady old screw. helen would not be left behind, and, with a good spur from mr. u----, she followed jack's example, and they stood dripping and shivering in shallow water. both the horses were so _done_ that f---- and mr. u---- had to jump off instantly and loose the girths, turning them with their nostrils to the wind. it was a very narrow escape, and the disagreeable part of it was that they had scrambled out on the wrong side of the creek and had to recross it to get home: however, they rode on to the next stream, which looked so much more swollen and angry, that they gave up the idea of going on to christchurch that night, especially as they were wet through to their chins, for both horses swam very low in the water, with only their heads to be seen above it. the next thing to be considered was how to get back to the house. it never would do to risk taking the horses into danger again when they were so exhausted; so they rode round by the homestead, crossed the creek higher up, where it was much wider but comparatively shallow (if anything could be called shallow just now), and came home over the hills. good old jack had an extra feed of oats that evening, a reward to which he is by no means insensible; and indeed it probably is the only one he cares for. the fates had determined, apparently, that i also should come in for my share of watery adventures, for we had an engagement of rather long standing to ride across the hills, and visit a friend's station about twelve miles distant, and the day we had promised to go was rather more than a week after f----'s attempted journey. in the meantime, the waters had of course gone down considerably, and there was quite an excitement in riding and walking about our own run, and seeing the changes the flood had made, and the mischief it had done to the fencing;--this was in process of being repaired. we lost very few sheep; they were all up at the tops of the high hills, their favourite summer pasture. i think i have told you that between us and christchurch there is but one river, a most peaceable and orderly stream, a perfect pattern to the eccentric new zealand rivers, which are so changeable and restless. upon this occasion, however, the selwyn behaved quite as badly as any of its fellows; it was not only flooded for miles, carrying away quantities of fencing near its banks, and drowning confiding sheep suddenly, but at one spot about four miles from us, just under the white rocks, it came down suddenly, like what miss ingelow calls "a mighty eygre," and deserted its old timeworn bed for two new ones: and the worst of the story is that it has taken a fancy to our road, swept away a good deal of it, breaking a course for itself in quite a different place; so now, instead of one nice, wide, generally shallow river to cross, about which there never has been an evil report, we have two horrid mountain torrents of which we know nothing: no one has been in yet to try their depth, or to find out the best place at which to ford them, and it unfortunately happened that f---- and i were the pioneers. when we came to the first new channel, f----with much care picked out what seemed the best place, and though it was a most disagreeable bit of water to go through, still we managed it all right; but when we came to the next curve, it was far worse. here the river took a sharp turn, and came tearing round a corner, the colour and consistency of pea-soup, and making such a noise we could hardly hear ourselves speak standing close together on the bank; once in the stream, of course it would be hopeless to try to catch a word. i am ashamed to say that my fixed idea was to turn back, and this i proposed without hesitation; but f---- has the greatest dislike to retracing his steps, and is disagreeably like excelsior in this respect; so he merely looked astonished at my want of spirit, and proceeded very calmly to give me my directions, and the more he impressed the necessity of coolness and caution upon me, the more i quaked. he was to go over first, alone; i was to follow, having first tucked my habit well up under my arm, and taken care that i was quite free so as not to be entangled in any way _if_ helen should be swept away, or if a boulder should come down with the stream, and knock her feet from under her: i was not to be at all frightened (!), and i was to keep my eyes fixed on him, and guide helen's head exactly by the motion of his hand. he plunged into the water as soon as he had issued these encouraging directions; i saw him floundering in and out of several deep holes, and presently he got safe to land, dripping wet; then he dismounted, tied leo to a flax bush, and took off his coat and big riding-boots,--i thought, very naturally to dry them, but i should have been still more alarmed, if possible, had i known that this was to prepare to be ready to swim to my help in case of danger. as it was, my only hope was that helen might not like the look of the angry flood, and would refuse to go in;--how i should have blessed her for such obstinacy!--but no, she was eager to rejoin her stable companion, and plunged in without hesitation. i found it much worse even than i dreaded; the water felt so resistless, as if it _must_ sweep me right out of the saddle; i should like to have clutched helen's mane or anything to have kept me on, but both hands were wanted to hold the reins quite low down, one on each side of her withers, so as to guide her exactly according to f----'s pilot-hand on the opposite bank: steering implicitly by this i escaped the holes and rocks which he had come against, and got over safely, but trembling, and with chattering teeth. f----said, quite disdainfully, "you don't mean to say you're really frightened?" so then i scolded him, rather incoherently, and demanded to be praised for coming at all! i wrung my habit out as well as i could, f---- poured the water out of his boots, and we proceeded, first over a plain, and then to climb a high steep hill. i wonder if you have any idea how disagreeable and dangerous it is to go zigzag up the side of a mountain after such rain as we have had. the soil was just like soap, nothing for the horses' hoofs to take hold of, not a pebble or a tuft of grass; all had been washed away, and only the slippery clay remained. as usual, f---- went first and i followed, taking care not to keep below him, lest he and leo should come "slithering" (that is the only word for it) down upon me; but, alas, it was helen and i who slithered! poor dear, all her legs seemed to fly from under her at once, and she came down on her side and on my legs. i felt the leaping-crutch snap, and found my left shoulder against the ground; i let go the reins, and thought we had better part company, but found i could not move for her weight; _she_ struggled to get up, and we both slipped down, down--down: there was no reason why we should not have gone on to the bottom of the hill, when a friendly tussock afforded her an instant's resting-place for her hind hoofs, and she scrambled to her feet like a cat. i found myself still on her back; so i picked up my reins and tried to pretend that i had never thought of getting off. f---- dared not stir from his "bad eminence;" so helen and i wended our slippery way up to him, and in answer to his horrified "where is your habit?" i found i was torn to ribbons; in fact, my skirt was little more than a kilt, and a very short one too! what was to be done? we were only three or four miles from our destination, so we pushed on, and at the last i lingered behind, and made f---- go first and borrow a cloak or shawl. you would have laughed if you had heard my pathetic adjurations to him to be sure to bring it by himself. i was so afraid that some one else would politely insist on accompanying him. but it was all right, though even with this assistance it was very difficult to arrange matters so as to be tolerably respectable. my hostess was shocked at my tattered, wet plight, and dried me, and dressed me up till i was quite smart, and then we had a very pleasant day, and, best of all, came home by a different road, so as to avoid the slippery descent and the rivers in the dark; but i still mourn for my habit!-it was my last. three have disappeared, owing to unfortunate accidents, this year, and now i am reduced to what can be contrived out of a linsey dress. letter xxiv: my only fall from horseback. broomielaw, june . the autumn has passed away so quickly that i can hardly believe the winter has reached us so soon--the last winter we shall spend in new zealand. i should like to have been able to boast, on my return to england, that in three years' constant riding, on all sorts of horses, good, bad, and indifferent, and over abominable roads, i had escaped a fall; but not only have i had a very severe one, but it was from my own favourite helen, which is very trying to reflect upon. however, it was not in the least her fault, or mine either; so she and i are still perfectly good friends. we had been spending two days up at lake coleridge, as a sort of farewell visit, and on our way down again to rockwood, a distance of about twenty miles, we stopped to lunch, by invitation, at a station midway. there was so much to be seen at this place that we loitered much longer than was prudent in the short days, and by the time we had thoroughly inspected a beautiful new wool-shed with all the latest improvements (from which f---- could hardly tear himself away), the fish-ponds elaborately arranged for the reception of the young trout expected from tasmania and the charming garden well sheltered by a grove of large wattle-trees, it was growing dusk, and we prepared to push on as fast as possible; for nothing is more disagreeable than being caught in the dark on a new zealand track, with its creeks and swamps and wire fences: the last are the most dangerous obstacles, if you get off the track, or if the gate through the fence has been placed for convenience a few yards on one side of it; the horses cannot see the slender wires in the dark, and so fall over them, injuring themselves and their riders most seriously sometimes. having still about eight miles to go, we were galloping gaily over a wide open plain, our only anxiety arising from the fast failing daylight; but the horses were still quite fresh, and, as the french idiom would have it, devoured the ground at a fine pace; when, in an instant, the ground appeared to rise up to meet me, and i found myself dragged along on the extreme point of my right shoulder, still grasping both reins and whip. i was almost under the feet of the other horse, and i saw helen's heels describing frantic circles in the air. f---- shouted to me to let go, which it had never occurred to me to do previously. i did so, and jumped up instantly, feeling quite unhurt, and rather relieved to find that a fall was not so dreadful after all. i then saw the cause of the accident: the handle of a little travelling-bag which had been hung over the pommel of my saddle had slipped over the slight projection, and as it was still further secured by a strap through the girth, it was dangling under poor helen, whose frantic bounds and leaps only increased the liveliness of her tormentor. i never saw such bucks and jumps high into the air as she performed receiving a severe blow from the bag at each; it was impossible to help laughing, though i did not see how it was all to end. she would not allow f---- to approach her, and was perfectly mad with terror. at last the girths gave way, and the saddle came off, with the bag still fastened to it; the moment she found herself free, she trotted up to me in the most engaging manner, and stood rubbing her nose against my arm, though she was still trembling all over, and covered with foam. by this time i had made the discovery that i could not raise my right arm; but still a careful investigation did not tell me it was broken, for it gave me no pain to touch anywhere, except a very little just on the point of the shoulder. f---- now went to pick up the saddle and the reins; it was difficult to find these latter in the fast gathering darkness and i held his horse for him. to my horror i found after standing for a moment or two, that i was going to faint; i could not utter a word; i knew that if my fast-relaxing fingers let go their hold of the bridle the horse would set off towards home at a gallop, helen would assuredly follow him, and we should be left eight miles from the nearest shelter to find our way to it, with a deep creek to cross. f---- was fifty yards off, with his back to me, searching for some indispensable buckle; so there was no help to be got from him at the moment. i exerted every atom of my remaining strength to slip the bridle over my left arm, which i pressed against my waist; then i sat down as quietly as i could, not to alarm the horse, bent forward so as to keep my left arm under me lest the bridle should slip off, and fainted away in great peace and comfort. the cold was becoming so intense that it soon revived me, and f----, suspecting something was wrong, came to relieve me of the care of the horse, and contrived to get the girths repaired with the ever-ready flax, and the bag secured in a very short time. but when it came to mounting again, that was not so easy: every time i tried to spring, something jarred horribly in the socket where the arm fits into the shoulder, and the pain was so great that i had to lie down on the ground. it was now nearly seven o'clock, quite dark, and freezing hard; we were most anxious to get on, and yet what was to be done? i could not mount, apparently, and there was no stone or bank to stand on and get up by for an immense way. at last f---- put me up by sheer strength. i found myself so deadly sick and faint when i was fairly in the saddle that it was some time before i could allow helen to move; and never shall i forget the torture of her first step, for my shoulder was now stiffening in a most unpleasant way. f---- said it would be easier to canter; so we set off at full speed, and the cold air against my face kept me from fainting as we went along, though i fully expected to fall off every moment; if helen had shied, or stumbled, or even capered a little, i should have been on the ground again. in my torture and despair, i proposed to be left behind, and for f---- to ride on and get help; but he would not hear of this, declaring that i should die of cold before he could get back with a cart, and that it was very doubtful if he should find me again on the vast plain, with nothing to guide him, and in the midnight darkness. whenever we came to a little creek which we were obliged to jump, helen's safe arrival on the opposite bank was announced by a loud yell from me, caused by agony hardly to be described. the cold appeared to get _into_ the broken joint, and make it so much worse. at last we reached rockwood, and never was its friendly shelter more welcome. everything that could be thought of was done to alleviate my sufferings; but i resembled punch with his head on one side, for i had a well-defined and gigantic hump on my back, and my shoulder was swollen up to my ear. the habit-body was unpicked, as it was impossible to get it off any other way. of course, the night was one of great agony; but i thought often, as i paced the room, how much better it was to have a blazing fire to cheer me up, and some delicious tea to put my lips to "when so dispoged" (like the immortal mrs. gamp), than to be lying on the open plain in a hard frost, wondering when f---- and his cart would arrive. the next day we returned home, much against our host's wish; and i walked all the way, some six miles of mountain road, for i could not bear the idea of riding. f---- led the horses, and we arrived quite safely. his first idea was to take me down to a doctor, but the motion of driving was greater agony than riding, as the road was rough; so after the first mile, i entreated to be taken back, and we turned the horses' heads towards home again; and when we reached it, i got out all my little books on surgery, medicine, etc., and from them made out how to set my shoulder in some sort of fashion, with f----'s help. of course it is still useless to me, but i think it is mending itself; and after a week i could do everything with my left hand, even to writing, after a fashion. the only thing i could _not_ do was to arrange my hair, or even to brush it; and though f---- was "willing," he was so exceedingly awkward, that at last, after going through great anguish and having it pulled out by handfuls, i got him to cut it off, and it is now cropped like a small boy's. he cuts up my dinner, etc. for me; but it is a very trying process, and i don't wonder at children often leaving the nasty cold mess half eaten. i shall be very glad to be able to use my own knife again. letter xxv: how we lost our horses and had to walk home. broomielaw, november . this will actually be my last letter from the malvern hills; and, in spite of the joy i feel at the hope of seeing all my beloved ones in england, i am _so_ sorry to leave my dear little happy valley. we have done nothing but pay farewell visits lately; and i turn for a final look at each station or cottage as we ride away with a great tightness at my heart, and moisture in my eyes, to think i shall never see them again. you must not be jealous at the lingering regrets i feel, for unless you had been with me here you can never understand how kind and friendly all our neighbours, high and low, have been to us from the very first, or how dearly i have grown to love them. i don't at all know how i am to say good-bye to my dear mrs. m----, the shepherd's wife i told you of. i believe she will miss me more than any one; and i cannot bear to think of her left to pass her days without the help of books and papers, which i was always so glad to lend her. i often walk down the valley to take tea with her of an afternoon and to say good-bye, but i have not said it yet. i wish you could see her parlour as i saw it yesterday afternoon--her books in a bookcase of her husband's manufacture, very nice and pretty; her spinning-wheel in the comer; the large "beau-pot" of flowers in the window; and such a tea on the table!--cream like clots of gold, scones, oat-cakes, all sorts of delicacies! she herself is quite charming--one of nature's ladies. i have given her, as a parting gift, a couple of scotch views framed; and they hang on the wall as a memento of places equally dear to both of us. it is a sorrow to me to leave the horses and dogs and my pet calves and poultry; even the trees and creepers i go round to look at, with the melancholy feeling of other owners not loving them so much as i have done. however, i must not make my last letter too dismal, or you will feel that i am not glad enough to return to you all. my only apology is, i have been so _very_ happy here. now for our latest adventure, as absurd as any, in its way. have i ever told you that our post-office is ten miles off, with an atrocious road between us and it? i know you will throw down this letter and feel rather disgusted with me for being sorry to leave such a place, but we don't mind trifles here. lately, since our own establishment has been broken up, we have been living in great discomfort; and among other things we generally, if not always, have to go for our own letters twice a week. upon this occasion f---- and i had ridden together up the gorge of the selwyn rather late in the afternoon, to avoid the extreme heat of the day. when we reached the shepherd's hut i have before mentioned, and which is now deserted, i proposed to f---- to go on over the hills alone and leave me there, as i was very hot and tired, and he could travel much quicker without me--for i am ashamed to say that i still object to riding fast up and down slippery hills. i cannot get rid of the idea that i shall break my neck if i attempt it, whereas f---- goes on over the worst road just as if it was perfectly level. excuse this digression, for it is a relief to me to be a little spiteful about his pace whenever i have an opportunity, and it will probably be my last chance of expressing my entire disapproval of it. helen was tied up to a post, and f----, after helping me to dismount, set off at a canter over the adjoining swamp on his way to cross the chain of hills between the river and the flat where the great coach-road to the west coast runs. i had brought the ingredients for my five o'clock tea (without which i am always a lost and miserable creature), and i amused myself, during my solitude, by picking up dry bits of scrub for my fire; but i had to go down the river-bank for some driftwood to make the old kettle, belonging to the hut, boil. i could not help wondering how any human being could endure such solitude for years, as the occupant of a hut like this is necessarily condemned to. in itself it was as snug and comfortable as possible, with a little paddock for the shepherd's horse, an acre or so of garden, now overgrown with self-sown potatoes, peas, strawberry, raspberry, and gooseberry plants, the little thatched fowl-house near, and the dog-kennels; all giving it a thoroughly home-like look. the hoarse roar of the river over its rocky bed was the only sound; now and then a flock of wild ducks would come flying down to their roosting-place or nests among the tohi grass; and as the evening closed in the melancholy cry of the bittern and the weka's loud call broke the stillness, but only to make it appear more profound. on each side of the ravine in which the hut stands rise lofty hills so steeply from the water's edge that in places we can find no footing for our horses, and have to ride in the river. at this time of the year the sheep are all upon the hills; so you do not hear even a bleat: but in winter, they come down to the sunny, sheltered flats. it appeared to me as if i was alone there for hours, though it really was less than one hour, when f---- returned with a large bundle of letters and papers tied to his saddle-bow. tea was quite ready now; so he tied up his horse next helen, and we had tea and looked at our letters. one of the first i opened told me that some friends from christchurch, whom i expected to pay us a visit soon, were on their way up that very day, and in fact might be expected to arrive just about that hour. i was filled with blank dismay, for not only did the party consist of three grown-up people--nay, four--but three little children. i had made elaborate plans in my head as to how and where they should all be stowed away for a fortnight, but had naturally deferred till the last moment to carry out my arrangements, for they entailed giving up our own bedroom, and "camping" in the dining-room, besides wonderful substitutes of big packing-cases for cribs, etc. etc. but, alas! here we were eight miles from home and nothing done, not even any extra food ordered or prepared. the obvious thing was to mount our horses and return as fast as ever we could, and we hastened out of the hut to the spot where we had left them both securely tied to the only available post, through which unfortunately five wires ran, as it was one of the "standards" of a fence which extended for miles. just as we came out of the hut in a great bustle, our evil destiny induced f----'s horse to rub its nose against the top wire of the fence; and in this process it caught the bar of its snaffle-bit, and immediately pulled back: this made all the wires jingle. helen instantly took alarm, and pulled back too: fresh and increased vibration, extending up the hill-side and echoing back an appalling sound, was the result of this movement. in an instant there were both the horses pulling with all their force against the fence, terrified to death; and no wonder, for the more they pulled the more the wires jingled. f---- did all he could to soothe them with blandishments. i tried to coax helen, but the nearer we drew the more frantically they backed and plunged, and the more the noise increased--till it was a case of "one struggle more and i am free;" and leaving their bridles still fastened to the fatal fence by the reins, we had the satisfaction of seeing both our horses careering wildly about--first celebrating their escape from danger by joyous and frantic bounds and kicks, and then setting off down the gorge of the river as hard as they could go. i fairly sat down and whimpered a little, not only at the thought of our eight miles' walk over shingle with a deep river to be crossed nine times, but at the idea of my poor little guests arriving to find no supper, no beds, "no nothing." f---- tried to cheer me up, and said the only thing was to get home as quick as possible; but he did not expect to find that our friends had arrived, for it had been very hazy over the plains all day, and probably had rained hard in christchurch; so he thought they would not have started on their journey at all. but i refused to accept any comfort from this idea, and bemoaned myself, entirely on their account, incessantly. when we came to the first crossing, f---- picked me up and carried me over dry-shod, and this he did at all the fords; but in one we very nearly came to grief, for i was tilted like a sack over his shoulder, and when we were quite in the middle, and the water was very deep, up to his waist, he kept hoisting my feet higher and higher, quite forgetting that there was plenty more of me on the other side of his shoulder; so it ended in my arms getting very wet, which he did not seem to think mattered at all so long as my feet were dry; whereas i rather preferred having my feet than my head plunged into a surging, deafening yellow current. at the entrance of the gorge is a large stockyard, and near to it, at least a mile or two off, a large mob of horses is generally to be found feeding. we heard great neighing and galloping about amongst them as we came out of the gorge; it was much too dark to distinguish anything, but we guessed that our horses had joined these, and the sounds we heard were probably those of welcome. but the whole mob set off the moment we came near, and crossed the river again, entailing a tenth wetting upon poor f----. i was posted at the entrance of the gorge, with instructions to shout and otherwise keep them from going up by the route we had just come; but it was more than an hour before f----could get round the wary brutes, so as to turn them with their heads towards the stockyard. of course, he had to bring up the whole mob. my talents in the shouting line were not called out upon this occasion, for they all trotted into the stockyard of their own accord, and i had nothing to do but put up the slip-rail as fast as i could with only one available arm, for though it is better, i cannot use the other yet. when f---- came up we both went into the yard, and could soon make out the two horses which had their saddles on--that was the only way we could distinguish them in the dark. it was now nearly eleven o'clock, and though warm enough it was very cloudy, not a star to be seen. we fastened on the patched up bridles as well as we could by feeling, and mounted, and rode home, about three miles more, as fast as we could. when we entered the flat near our own house, we heard loud and prolonged "coo-ees" from all sides. the servants had made up their minds that some terrible misfortune had happened to us, and were setting out to look for us, "coo-eeing" as they came along. f---- pointed out to me, with a sort of "i-told-you-so" air, that there was no light in the drawing-room--so it was evident our friends had not arrived; and when we dismounted i found, to my great joy, that the house was empty. all our fatigue was forgotten in thankfulness that the poor travellers had not been exposed to such a cold, comfortless reception as would have awaited them if they had made their journey that day. i must tell you, they arrived quite safely the next evening, but very tired, especially the poor children; however, everything was ready, and the little boys were particularly pleased with their box beds, greatly preferring the difficulties of getting in and out of them to their own pretty little cribs at home. such are boys all over the world! next month we leave this for ever, and go down to christchurch to make our final arrangements for the long voyage of a hundred days before us. as the time draws near i realize how strong is the tie which has grown, even in these few short years, around my heart, connecting it with this lovely land, and the kind friends i have found in it. f---- feels the parting more deeply than i do, if possible, though for different reasons; he has lived so long among these beautiful hills, and is so accustomed to have before his eyes their grand outlines. he was telling me this the other day, and has put the same feelings into the following verses, which i now send you. a farewell. the seamen shout once and together, the anchor breaks up from the ground, and the ship's head swings to the weather, to the wind and the sea swings round; with a clamour the great sail steadies, in extreme of a storm scarce furled; already a short wake eddies, and a furrow is cleft and curled to the right and left. float out from the harbour and highland that hides all the region i know, let me look a last time on the island well seen from the sea to the snow. the lines of the ranges i follow, i travel the hills with my eyes, for i know where they make a deep hollow, a valley of grass and the rise of streams clearer than glass. that haunt is too far for me wingless, and the hills of it sink out of sight, yet my thought were but broken and stringless, and the daylight of song were but night. if i could not at will a winged dream let lift me and take me and set me again by the trees and the streamlet; these leagues make a wide water, yet the whole world shall not hide. now my days leave the soft silent byway, and clothed in a various sort, in iron or gold, on life's highway new feet shall succeed, or stop short shod hard these maybe, or made splendid, fair and many, or evil and few, but the going of bare feet has ended, of naked feet set in the new meadow grass sweet and wet. i will long for the ways of soft walking, grown tired of the dust and the glare, and mute in the midst of much talking will pine for the silences rare; streets of peril and speech full of malice will recall me the pastures and peace which gardened and guarded those valleys with grasses as high as the knees, calm as high as the sky: while the island secure in my spirit at ease on its own ocean rides, and memory, a ship sailing near it, shall float in with favouring tides, shall enter the harbours and land me to visit the gorges and heights whose aspects seemed once to command me, as queens by their charms command knights to achievements of arms. and as knights have caught sight of queens' faces through the dust of the lists and the din, so, remembering these holiest places in the days when i lose or i win, i will yearn to them, all being over, triumphant or trampled beneath, to this beautiful isle like a lover, to her evergreen brakes for a wreath, for a tear to her lakes. the last of her now is a brightening far fire in the forested hills, the breeze as the night nears is heightening, the cordage draws tighter and thrills, like a horse that is spurred by the rider the great vessel quivers and quails, and passes the billows beside her, the fair wind is strong in her sails, she is lifted along. the end. by the internet archive. transcriber note text emphasis denoted as _italics_ and =bold=. whole numbers and fractional parts denoted as - / . +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | u. s. department of | | agriculture | | | | farmers' bulletin no. | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | turkey raising | | | | | | [illustration] | | | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ turkey raising is usually carried on as a side line on general farms, though in some parts of the united states it constitutes the chief source of revenue from farming. the number of turkeys in this country decreased for a time after the census, but during recent years the industry has been growing, largely because of improved methods of controlling turkey diseases and better methods of management. this bulletin has been prepared primarily to inform those interested in turkey raising on modern methods of management. most of the recommendations are adaptable to both small and large scale production. washington, d. c. issued april slightly revised february turkey raising _by stanley j. marsden and alfred r. lee_, _associate poultry husbandmen, animal husbandry division, bureau of animal industry_[ ] [ ] this publication is a revision of former editions prepared by m. a. jull, senior poultry husbandman, and a. r. lee. contents page the turkey industry of the united states varieties the bronze the white holland the bourbon red the narragansett the black the slate standard weights of turkeys selecting breeding stock managing breeding stock breeding pens or enclosures mating egg production care of hatching eggs feeding combating diseases and pests incubating turkey eggs natural incubation artificial incubation raising poults brooding sanitation litter early development marking feeding growing turkeys feed consumption and cost of growing equipment for raising turkeys containers for feed and water houses and fences protection against dogs devices that prevent tail-feather picking range management of growing turkeys fattening turkeys for market marketing turkeys when to market selecting birds for market withholding feed before slaughter killing and picking cooling packing dressed-turkey grades the turkey industry of the united states turkey raising has long been an important enterprise in the united states because great quantities of turkey meat are required annually and its use throughout the year is becoming more popular. producers should endeavor to make turkey raising more profitable by overcoming heavy losses from diseases that heretofore have been a serious handicap. the enterprise is very adaptable, extending to practically all parts of the united states. the more important areas of production are the middle western, northwestern, and southwestern states, where large numbers of small flocks are raised annually on farms and ranches and where there are also many large commercial flocks. the number of turkeys in this country began to decrease about , but by interest in turkey raising revived, and in recent years the industry has been growing, largely because of increased knowledge of blackhead disease and its control. according to the census there were , , turkeys on farms in the united states in and about the same number in . the census showed , , turkeys, but this was the number raised to market age instead of the number of breeding turkeys kept. this new census figure provides a much better measure of the industry's actual size. the figure indicates a moderate increase between and in the number of breeding turkeys kept. the nine states leading in turkey production, as shown by the census, are texas, north dakota, minnesota, california, oklahoma, oregon, colorado, virginia, and idaho. where conditions are suitable and proper methods of management are followed turkeys can be raised successfully with very simple equipment; therefore the capital outlay in the enterprise may be quite small. except during the growing season managing the flock is fairly simple. of course, constitutional vigor must be maintained in the breeding stock; the flock must be kept relatively free from disease; and the soil, especially where the poults are fed, must be kept sanitary. moreover, turkeys, even when veil fed, will make good use of at least a limited range and in doing so will destroy many injurious insects, eat great quantities of succulent green feed, and pick up much waste grain, weed seeds, and other sources of nutriment. this fact reduces the cost of production and increases the profits. [illustration: figure .--bronze turkey, male.] varieties all domestic varieties of turkeys have descended from the north american wild stock, comprising the eastern wild turkey, which ranged over the eastern part of the united states from maine to florida; the florida wild turkey, which ranged over southern florida; the rio grande wild turkey, which ranged over southern texas and northwestern mexico; and the mexican wild turkey, which ranged over arizona, western new mexico, southern colorado, and mexico. it is probable, however, that these four wild turkeys were of common origin and that most of our domesticated varieties, especially the bronze, have descended from the mexican wild turkey. six standard varieties of domestic turkeys are recognized by the american poultry association, an organization having as its primary function the promotion of standard qualities in all breeds and varieties of poultry in north america. the association publishes the standard of perfection, which contains concise descriptions of breeds and varieties of poultry, with illustrations of the most important ones. the following is a brief description of each of the six varieties, namely, the bronze, white holland, bourbon red, narragansett, black, and slate. [illustration: figure .--bronze turkey, female.] the bronze the bronze, often called the mammoth bronze, is the heaviest and also the most popular variety. the male (fig. ) is distinguished by ( ) the rich, iridescent, red-green sheen of the plumage on the neck, wing bows, wing fronts, wing coverts, breast, front half of the back, and lower thighs; and ( ) the lighter, brilliant, copper-colored bronzing of the rear half of the back, tail coverts, tail itself, and body. the bronzing in the tail, tail coverts, and body is bordered by a distinct narrow black band, which in turn is bordered by a wide edging of pure white. the rear portion of the back has the broad bronze bar with the narrow edging of black but does not have the white tips. the plumage of the female (fig. ) is similar to that of the male, except for an edging of white on the black bars on the back, wing bows, wing coverts, breast, and body. this white edging is narrow in the front of the body and gradually widens toward the rear. both sexes have the same color pattern in the large wing feathers and in the main tail feathers and coverts. the main tail feathers and coverts have brown penciling (narrow bars) on a dull black background; the large wing feathers are evenly barred with black and white, the bars of the secondaries becoming indistinct as the back is approached. creaminess, yellow, or yellowish brown in the pure white edging of the main tail feathers and coverts of the bronze indicates an admixture of wild-turkey blood and is a serious defect in the standardbred bronze. lack of the copper-colored bronzing or a tendency for it to be greenish is also a serious color defect. the white holland the white holland (fig. ) probably originated as a "sport" from the bronze or the wild turkey. its plumage should be pure white in color and free in all sections from black flecking or ticking. the shanks and toes in this variety should be pinkish white. the bourbon red the bourbon red male (fig. ) is of a rich, deep brownish-red color in all sections except the wings, tail, and breast. the primaries and secondaries of the wings are pure white, and the main tail feathers are pure white except for an indistinct bar of red crossing each feather near the end. the breast feathers are red with a very narrow edging of black. the color of the female is similar to that of the male, but there is a very narrow edging of white on the tips of the breast feathers. more than one-third of any other color except white showing in the large feathers of the wing or tail constitutes a standard disqualification in this variety. the rich reddish color, without some black, is rather difficult to obtain and this black ticking or flecking is a rather common fault. a faded red, approaching buff, is also undesirable. [illustration: figure .--white holland turkey, male.] the narragansett the narragansett (fig. ) generally resembles the bronze in color pattern, but has no iridescent red-green sheen and no bronzing. the narragansett colors are metallic black with light steel-gray edging and barring bordered, in certain sections, by a narrow black band on the end of the feathers. the plumage, as a whole, has a dark background of metallic black with a broad, light steel-gray edging, showing more of the light color in this edging as the body is approached. in the male, the colors of the wing fronts, wing bows, and wing coverts are the reverse of the colors found elsewhere, being light steel gray, ending in a narrow band of black. the wing coverts form a broad silvery bar across the folded wings. the neck and saddle are black, ending in a broad steel-gray band. the back is rich metallic black, free from bronzing. the breast, body, and fluff are black, the feathers ending in a broad silvery-gray band edged with black. the large wing and tail feathers and the primary coverts are barred with black and white similarly to those of the bronze, the barring of the upper secondaries becoming indistinct as the back is approached. the plumage of the female is similar to that of the male in this variety, except that an extra edging of silvery gray is added to the ends of the feathers on the back, wing bows, wing coverts, breast, and body. the light edging should be narrow toward the front of the bird and broader toward the rear. the female in general presents a lighter appearance than the male. there should be a rich metallic black but no bronze barring in either sex. the offspring of a narragansett mating sometimes have a bronze color, but such birds should not be kept for breeders. [illustration: figure .--bourbon red turkey, male.] the black the black (fig. ), known in england as the norfolk turkey, is lustrous greenish black in all sections of the plumage. objectionable white tipping in the feathers of young turkeys of this variety often disappears after the first molt. any variation from the solid black color should be carefully avoided in breeding this variety. the shanks and toes should be pink in mature birds and almost black in young birds. the slate the slate (fig. ) has an ashy-blue or slate-colored plumage, sometimes dotted with tiny black spots, which are undesirable. feathers of any other color, such as white, buff, or red, constitute a standard disqualification. this variety does not breed true to color, and many of the offspring have both solid white and solid black as well as black-and-white ticking and splashing. the shanks and toes should be pink. standard weights of turkeys the standard weights of the different varieties of turkeys as given in the standard of perfection are given in table . table .--standard weights of turkeys at various ages ---------------+-----------+----------+-----------+---------+---------- | | yearling | | | | adult | cock ( | cockerel | hen | pullet variety | cock ( | year old | (less | ( year | (less | years old | and less | than | old or | than | or over) | than ) | year old) | over) | year old) ---------------+-----------+----------+-----------+---------+---------- | _pounds_ | _pounds_ | _pounds_ |_pounds_ | _pounds_ bronze | | | | | white holland | | | | | bourbon red | | | | | narragansett | | | | | black | | | | | slate | | | | | ---------------+-----------+----------+-----------+---------+---------- [illustration: figure .--narragansett turkey, female.] selecting breeding stock the breeding stock is the foundation of the turkey industry, and the greatest care must be used in selecting both male and female breeders. failure in this respect has undoubtedly been one of the principal reasons why satisfactory results have not been obtained on many farms and commercial plants. one of the first steps in improving conditions, therefore, is more careful selection of the breeding stock. the most satisfactory time of the year to select breeding stock is in november or december, especially before large numbers of turkeys are sold for the thanksgiving and christmas markets. selecting birds early in the season makes possible a choice from a larger number and, what is more important, saves the best-developed and most vigorous birds for breeding instead of marketing them. new blood may be introduced into the flock or a beginning with turkeys may be made by obtaining hatching eggs, day-old poults, or breeding stock, but the purchase of eggs or poults is recommended. new breeding stock should be treated for worms and lice and should be quarantined for or weeks to detect any disease. [illustration: figure .--black turkey, male.] turkeys are raised for meat rather than for egg production. the breeders, therefore, should have compact, meaty bodies. the breastbone should be straight, the back broad, especially at the shoulders, and the breadth carried well back toward the tail. the body should be deep, with the breast so broad, full, and well rounded that the breastbone does not protrude prominently. other important points are full, bright eyes, a broad head, and stout legs set well apart and rather short. above all else, the birds should be vigorous. when, pedigrees and performance records of the birds' ancestors are available, selection should be based on fertility, hatchability, livability, early maturity, and other desirable factors, as well as on the physical points mentioned above. it is wise to select or build up a flock of purebred turkeys. it costs no more to raise purebred stock than mongrels and the purebreds are usually heavier and command higher market prices. also, if good standard qualities of shape and color are maintained, some of the birds can be sold for breeding purposes at increased prices. managing breeding stock results in turkey raising depend to a large extent on the kind of breeding stock used each year and the manner in which it is managed. breeding pens or enclosures until a few years ago breeding flocks were ordinarily allowed free range throughout the breeding and laying season (fig. ). this practice often gives unsatisfactory results because the nests cannot be found readily and therefore the eggs cannot be gathered daily. many breeding flocks are now kept in good-sized breeding pens or enclosures with nests conveniently located inside or outside the roosting shed (fig. ). for a pen of to birds a yard of to square rods is large enough. frequently an orchard is very satisfactory. a hog-proof fence about feet high will confine the turkeys; they are not likely to fly over the fence, because they cannot rest on the top wire. fences should be tightly stretched and should be dog-proof, because dogs and coyotes are very destructive in turkey flocks. solid-top fences, gates, and buildings less than feet high should be topped with strips of poultry fence feet wide to prevent turkeys from perching on them. if turkey hens persist in flying over the fence the flight feathers of one wing may be cut, but the wing of a breeding male should never be clipped, as the clipping may interfere with mating. sanitation in the breeding yards must not be neglected. either the fences and shelters should be made portable and moved each year to clean ground, or double yards should be constructed for use only in the breeding season, during which time one yard is occupied for successive weeks and then the other, which in the meantime has been kept free of all poultry. [illustration: figure .--slate turkey, male.] if two or more breeding pens are maintained, they must be isolated from each other. this can be done with double fences, feet or more apart, or with single fences built solid for about feet above the ground, so that the turkeys cannot see those in other pens. mating best results in mating are obtained when from to females are mated to male, although as many as hens can be mated to young tom under favorable conditions. as a rule good fertility will result when several toms are kept with a flock of hens. however, if the toms are quarrelsome and mating is seriously interfered with the males must be alternated, tom being allowed to run with the hens day and another tom the next day. surplus toms should be penned out of sight of the breeding birds. [illustration: figure .--breeding flock of bronze turkeys on free range.] the soundest breeding program is one of using yearlings and -year-old hens which have been selected as breeders alter they have passed through one full breeding season successfully. however, if pedigreeing can be done, it is practicable to use well-matured pullets selected from parents that lived through their first breeding season and showed good production, fertility, hatchability, and poult livability. the breeding males may be young or old but, in general, well-matured young toms give better results. proved sires, of course, are valuable and can well be used so long as they will breed. reserve breeding toms should always be kept, especially when older toms are used, as the latter are sometimes sterile. the spurs of a yearling or older tom should be trimmed smooth, as should the toe-nails of all breeding males, regardless of age, to avoid needless tearing of the backs of the females. all breeding hens and toms that are not to be used for another breeding season should be marketed about june . if older hens are used in breeding, it is advisable to replace -year-old females with young birds, since egg production decreases rapidly after that age. immature stock should never be used but, as mentioned before, well-matured young toms and pullets make good breeders especially if trap nesting and pedigreeing can be carried on, thus enabling the breeder to cull properly and sell as market birds the offspring of all hens that die during their first laying season. it is not advisable for the average producer to inbreed turkeys, as this practice has been found to lower the vitality of the stock. when only one breeding pen or flock is kept, it is advisable to obtain new blood every season from a reliable outside source. egg production the time of year at which turkeys naturally lay depends largely on the climate of the region in which they are raised, being earliest in the south. however, climate need not be permitted to hold back egg production as artificial light can be used to obtain early eggs, as with chickens. soon after mating begins, the female looks for a nesting place, and about days after the first mating she begins to lay. one nest should be provided for every or hens. the number of eggs produced per bird depends on the breeding of the stock as well as on management. under ordinary circumstances in the northern states, young turkey hens should average to eggs and yearling hens to eggs each during the normal breeding season if they are broken up whenever broodiness occurs. by normal breeding season is meant the time between the date the first egg is laid (late in the winter or early in the spring) and june . if artificial lights are used, starting about february , the breeders should average to eggs each, or an increase of about eggs by june , due to the lighting. a few turkey raisers have used lights in december or january, thereby securing very early hatched turkeys and further increasing turkey-egg production. turkeys are not extensively trap-nested, but the practice is carried on by producers who wish to pedigree the poults and carry on selective breeding. one trap nest is needed for each two hens. the hens should have free access to the trap nests before they start to lay, and they should be carefully watched to see that they do not lay their eggs anywhere except in the trap nests. secluded places in the house or yard should be eliminated. a simple form of trap nest is illustrated in figure . the turkey enters at the front, through the trap door, which closes automatically when the turkey is inside. the door at the top of the coop is opened to release the bird from the nest. when incubators or chicken hens are used to hatch the eggs, the turkey hens may be broken of their broodiness so that they will continue laying. breaking the hens of broodiness by confining them to a wire-floored coop is very desirable because it permits the hatching of a relatively large number of early turkeys and a larger number from each hen. the birds hatched no later than june are the ones that grow and mature most satisfactorily and therefore attain the best size for the thanksgiving and christmas markets. early hatched birds should be marketed at thanksgiving or before, and those of later hatches can be used to supply the christmas and new year demand. there is some demand for freshly dressed turkeys at all times of the year. to meet this demand turkeys may be hatched from eggs laid during summer and fall. by the use of artificial light and proper feeds, hatchable eggs can be produced in the winter and early in the spring. it is natural for turkey hens to seek secluded places to lay their eggs. yards that have comparatively short vegetation and are free from bushes or other places of concealment are best, because such conditions discourage the birds from laying outside the nests provided for them. a lookout for hidden nests must be maintained, otherwise eggs may not be collected regularly and may be frozen, partly incubated, or destroyed by animals. sometimes the hidden nests can be found by watching the turkey hens carefully as they make their way to them, but an easier and quicker method is to confine the hens early some morning soon after they come from the roosts and then let them out about p. m.; the laying hens will make straight for their nests in order to lay the eggs they have been holding. nests are easily made of boxes or barrels placed inside the shelter or outside in the yards. some turkey growers prefer to build nesting batteries with nests about by inches. [illustration: figure .--turkey trap nests. the dimensions of this nest are as follows: width, inches; depth, inches; height in front, inches; and height in hack, inches. the trap-nest fronts may be home-made, or commercial fronts may be used.] care of hatching eggs hatchability can be seriously damaged by holding eggs at temperatures above ° or below ° f. it is most important to hold eggs in a room that can be kept below °, preferably between ° and °. eggs should be collected several times daily and held on their sides or on the small end. it is best to turn eggs gently once daily while they are being held for hatching, but this is probably not necessary unless they are to be kept longer than a week. for best results they should not be held longer than days but if they are held at a suitable temperature and are turned once a day, fair hatchability will be retained for as long as weeks. feeding feeding young breeding turkeys is a matter of supplying a growing ration in the fall and early in the winter, a laying ration late in the winter and in the spring, and a maintenance ration during the summer. unless breeders are to be kept over for another year, they should be marketed, if possible, about june in order to reduce feed costs and to aid in preventing the spread of blackhead and other diseases that may affect adult turkeys during the summer. if breeders are to be held over for the next season or until fall and if a good summer and fall range is available well away from the growing stock, the breeders are best carried through the summer on a daily feeding of whole grain such as a mixture of equal parts of corn, oats, and wheat. this mixture should be fed at the rate of one-fifth pound per hen daily as a supplement to feed obtained from the range. the toms, if ranged with the hens, should have access to grain in a feeder too high for the hens to reach. a better method is to pen the toms in a separate range lot and give them each one-half pound of grain daily in troughs. breeding stock so managed during the summer respond economically to a fattening diet offered in the fall. beginning about weeks before they are to be marketed, usually early in october, the birds may be offered all they will eat daily of the grain mixture. within weeks they will acquire a fine finish and make a gain in weight of - / pounds or more per hen and pounds or more per tom. about - / pounds of grain per pound of gain is required for the -week fattening period. a little better finish is acquired in weeks; but the grade is not improved, and the gains are more expensive. breeding stock that are to be kept over should be held in the range lots as long as possible and should also be fed liberally in the fall, in order to put them in good condition for the winter. later in the fall and through the winter the rations for breeders, especially young breeders, may be the same as the growing rations normally fed to young stock. scratch grain and a simple mash, such as that suggested for growing poults, make a good feed for carrying the breeders through the winter, since they meet the demands of the birds for continued growth or for maintenance. if the climate is such that green feed and sunshine are not available, as in the northern states, add percent of alfalfa-leaf meal and percent of cod-liver oil to the mash. the birds should have all the mash and scratch they will eat during the fall and winter. breeders will not become too fat if fed in accordance with this method. they will be fat, but this is desirable if heavy egg production is expected. for the production of large numbers of hatchable eggs turkeys require a ration containing the various nutrients and vitamins. good results can be obtained with a simple laying ration, such as laying mixture no. , if the birds get an abundance of fresh green feed and have range. when ground oats or ground barley is included in any mixture it should be finely ground. alfalfa leaf meal should be bright green in color. the cod-liver oil should be a standard good-quality product, or the equivalent in fortified cod-liver oil may be used if thoroughly mixed. _laying mixture no. _ mash _parts by | scratch weight_ | | yellow corn or barley (ground) | mixture of equal parts of wheat middlings or ground wheat | yellow corn, wheat, and oats or barley (ground) | heavy oats. (grain sorghum meat scrap ( - to -percent | may be used in place of the protein) | corn.) fish meal ( - to -percent protein) | wheat bran | ground oystershell or limestone | dried milk | salt (fine, sifted) | --- | total | laying mash should be kept before the birds at all times beginning about a month before eggs are expected. scratch mixture should be fed in troughs, at the rate of one-fifth of a pound per day per bird, so that the consumption during laying will be about equal parts of the mash and scratch. the birds must have access to growing green feed, direct sunshine, and water. if the birds cannot obtain fresh succulent green feed and direct sunshine in abundance, as in the case of those kept in confinement or in cold climates, the ration must be more inclusive. such a ration may be compounded as follows: _laying mixture no. _ mash _parts by | scratch _parts by weight_ | weight_ | yellow corn or barley (ground) | yellow corn or grain wheat middlings or ground wheat | sorghum wheat bran | heavy oats - / alfalfa leaf meal | wheat meat scrap ( - to -percent | cod-liver oil - / protein) | ------- dried milk | total fish meal ( - to -percent | protein) | ground oystershell or limestone | salt (fine, sifted) | --- | total | as with the simpler ration, the mash should be kept before the birds at all times, and the scratch can be hand-fed in troughs at the rate of one-fifth of a pound per bird per day. clean water should be provided at all times. the same ingredients can be mixed and fed as an all-mash ration with good results. the all-mash formula is as follows: _laying mixture no. (all-mash feed)_ _parts by | _parts by weight_ | weight_ | yellow corn (coarsely ground) | dried milk oats (finely ground) | fish meal ( - to wheat middlings (standard or brown) | -percent protein) wheat bran | ground oystershell or alfalfa leaf meal | limestone meat scrap ( - to -percent | cod-liver oil - / protein) | salt (fine, sifted) / | ------- | total this all-mash mixture is kept before the breeders at all times. just enough to carry the birds through each day should be given. in this way its freshness is assured, an important consideration in all-mash feeding. if desired, the oyster shell or limestone may be fed separately in hoppers, but mixing it in the mash saves labor and prevents excessive consumption. gravel or granite grit should be provided to furnish grinding material. clean water, placed in contamination-proof vessels, should be provided at all times. alfalfa hay probably cannot be depended upon to supply adequate amounts of green-feed substitute for hatching-egg production. only by fresh green feed or green-feed substitutes and fish oils can those requirements be met. the oil should be freshly mixed in the feed every week or two. all feed should be fed in feeders, never on the ground or in the litter. feeders should be constructed so as to prevent waste and contamination with droppings. turkey hens consume a little less than one-half pound of mash and scratch grain per day when practically all of their feed is furnished. toms consume about . pound daily; eating mostly scratch grains. combating diseases and pests turkey raisers, to be permanently successful, must follow some system of sanitation. many growers have prevented disease and the attacks of parasites in their flocks by providing range on clean soil; that is, soil on which no poultry manure has been spread; feeding their birds from feeders that cannot be contaminated by droppings; and keeping the quarters sanitary at all times. _separation of the turkeys from chickens and other poultry at all times is essential._ diseases and parasites of turkeys are discussed in detail in farmers' bulletin , diseases and parasites of poultry. coccidiosis often causes heavy losses in young turkeys. it is best combated by carefully cleaning the brooder house and changing the litter once a week during the brooding period, keeping the litter dry, and using wire-covered feeding platforms. turkeys are subject also to the attacks of various species of worms, but treatment for worms should not be undertaken until the presence of worms has been determined by examining the droppings or by post-mortem examination. blackhead although other infectious diseases sometimes affect turkeys, blackhead is by far the most destructive ailment. it is caused by one of the protozoa and is primarily a disease of the caeca (the blind pouches of the intestines) and the liver, but the fact that the head of the affected bird often becomes discolored has given the disease its common name, blackhead. it attacks turkeys most frequently, but chicks are often affected by it without showing symptoms; thus the chickens carry and spread the infection to turkeys when allowed to range with them. a combination of spotted liver and ulcerated caeca indicates that the birds have blackhead infection. although blackhead affects adult turkeys, it occurs principally among poults between the ages of weeks and months. it is found to a greater or lesser extent throughout the united states. the turkeys affected by blackhead, like all birds having infectious diseases, should be removed immediately from the flock to prevent the spread of the disease. the best procedure is to kill the sick birds and burn or bury the bodies, as no treatment has been found satisfactory. move the flock to clean ground, if possible; but if this cannot be done, clean out and disinfect the roosting place, plow the ground in the yards, and install a system of yard sanitation. keep chickens and all other poultry away from turkey yards at all times in order to prevent infection from this source. the organisms which cause the disease may be carried by flies, blown with dust, conveyed in contaminated soil on the feet of the caretaker, or spread for considerable distances in other ways. several measures for preventing blackhead are practiced, the chief of which are: ( ) obtaining eggs or stock from flocks known to be healthy; ( ) quarantining and worming all new stock; ( ) cleaning and changing the litter at least weekly during the brooding period; ( ) keeping both young and mature turkeys on clean ground at a considerable distance from chickens; ( ) excluding, so far as possible, pigeons, sparrows, and persons from the turkey houses and yards; ( ) frequently cleaning and occasionally disinfecting growing houses, feed troughs, and all other equipment; ( ) feeding only in clean feeders, never on the ground; ( ) immediately killing and deeply burying or completely burning all diseased birds; and ( ) eliminating all stagnant water pools where the turkeys range. clean range, clean quarters, clean feed, and clean water are most important. lice and mites lice may cause high mortality among young poults, those badly infested gradually becoming weaker until they die. head lice are the most troublesome and are found close to the skin near the top of the head, above and in front of the eyes, and under the throat. applying an insect powder, preferably sodium fluoride, when the hen is set, is an easy method of preventing lice from getting a start among poults. apply the sodium fluoride among the leathers, working it well down next to the skin, pinch on the head, on the neck, on the back, on the breast, below the vent, at the base of the tail, on each thigh, and scattered on the underside of each wing when spread. if this treatment is not applied, hen-hatched poults are almost certain to have lice. if the hen has been treated in this manner before being set and the poults are not exposed to infested stock or premises, they will remain free from lice indefinitely. it is well, however, to examine the poults occasionally and, if lice are found, to apply sodium fluoride sparingly. it should not be applied until the poults are at least a week old, and then only two very small pinches should be used. distribute one of these on the neck, the top of the head, and the throat, and the other on the back and below the vent. after the poults are old enough to roost, control lice by applying nicotine sulphate solution in a thin line on the top surface of the roosts. repeat as often as necessary to keep down the lice and be sure that each bird is exposed to the treatment. sodium fluoride applied as directed for delousing setting hens or as a dip will completely eliminate all species of lice from mature stock. the dipping method consists in immersing mature fowls in a large tub of solution made by mixing ounce or sodium fluoride to each gallon of tepid water. immerse the birds for only a few seconds, raising the feathers at the same time to allow the dip to penetrate to the skin. dip the birds on a warm day, preferably in the morning, so as to give them time to dry before night. destroy red mites in the roosting quarters by painting the under side of the roosts and the roost supports with anthracene oil, crude oil, crank-case oil, or any coal-tar disinfectant. make the application light but thorough, and do it preferably in the morning. the fowl tick or blue bug is one of the worst pests of turkeys in the southwest. it can be controlled by the methods advised for controlling red mites. protection from cold, dampness, and enemies protection from adverse weather conditions and enemies is required if turkeys are to be raised successfully. an open-front shed with a reasonably tight roof and dry floor, so arranged that the north, west, and east sides can be closed against storms, will give ample protection for full-grown turkeys. boosts may be made from good-sized poles or by 's nailed flat to supports which should be slightly higher at the rear than at the front, where they should be about - / feet above the floor. the space between the roosts should be about feet and the space underneath enclosed with poultry wire. in the southern part of the united states there is little need for well-built turkey houses, but during damp, cold, or stormy weather the turkeys should have protection of some kind. they should not be exposed to dampness, but they can stand a considerable amount of dry cold. in many localities protection from dogs must be provided in some way. high roosts or well-built shelters provide this at night. keeping the birds confined to high roosts or in dog-proof shelters at night and during the early morning hours gives a good protection. an attendant or a good watchdog is needed to protect the turkeys when they are off their roosts or out of their shelters. incubating turkey eggs the vigor of the breeding stock, the manner in which it has been fed and managed, and the care given the eggs will determine to a high degree the hatchability of the eggs. an important measure of success in turkey raising is the number of fully matured turkeys raised in proportion to the number of hens in the breeding flock. an average of mature birds raised per hen is considered very good in well-managed turkey flocks, whereas in most general-farm flocks to mature birds per hen would be a good average. the period of incubation of turkey eggs is days, and the method is much the same as that used with chicken eggs. turkey eggs can be successfully hatched by turkey hens or chicken hens, or in incubators. hatching in incubators is best and is coming into more general use, especially on farms and ranches where turkeys are raised in large numbers. turkeys hatched and reared by hens, especially chicken hens, are likely to contract disease and become infested with parasites at an early age. sitting turkey hens can cover from to eggs; chicken hens, from to eggs. natural incubation hatching the eggs under turkey hens is widely practiced and is often the most practical method. when the turkey hen becomes broody and has remained consistently on the nest for or days, she should be given her eggs. if several turkey hens are sitting at the same time, care should be taken that each gets back into her own nest. nests are most conveniently arranged on the ground, in boxes about feet square or in barrels. if rats are a menace, the nest should furnish protection against them and should always be made proof against larger animals so that the turkey hens will not be disturbed or the eggs destroyed. the nests should be flat and shallow, as deep nests may result in crushed eggs or crushed baby poults. nests with damp sod bottoms and only a little straw to keep the eggs from rolling into the corners are generally satisfactory. nesting batteries in which each hen is provided with a small individual run so that she can get off and on the nest at will are very good. with this method the only care necessary is to see that feed and water are always before the hens and that each one remains broody. if individual runs are not provided, the hens should be taken off daily, allowed to exercise and eat, and then returned to their own nests. plenty of water to drink and clean, wholesome grain feed, such as a mixture of wheat, oats, and corn, should be provided, and fresh green feed or good alfalfa hay should be made available. turkey or chicken hens, before being set on turkey eggs, should be treated with sodium fluoride, as previously directed. artificial incubation correct incubator temperatures are much the same for turkey eggs as for chicken eggs, but the greater size of the turkey eggs may necessitate some adjustment of the apparatus used in measuring the temperature. this is true in nearly all kinds of incubators except those of the forced-draft type. the relative position of the thermometer in the egg chamber is important in the accuracy with which it records the temperature. for hatching turkey eggs the proper position of the thermometer is usually indicated in the directions that are furnished by the manufacturer of the incubator. as a general rule, with the bottom of the bulb - / inches above the egg tray, the thermometer should read . ° f. for the first week, . ° the second, . ° the third, and ° the last week. forced-draft incubators are usually run at about . °. temperature can best be regulated, however, by using the thermometer that goes with the machine, placing it in the position recommended by the manufacturer, and then following the manufacturer's instructions for hatching turkey eggs, making sure that the egg trays do not sag. turkey eggs lose about . percent less moisture during incubation than do chicken eggs, notwithstanding the fact that turkey eggs require about days longer to hatch. excellent hatches have been obtained when the loss of moisture based on the weight of the eggs just before they were set, ranged within the following limits: after days of incubation, to percent; after days of incubation. . to percent; after days of incubation, . to percent; and after days of incubation, to percent. on this basis, a dozen turkey eggs of normal size should lose about ounce for every days of incubation. the air cells of turkey eggs are smaller in proportion to the size of the eggs than are those of chicken eggs because normal evaporation in turkey eggs during incubation is considerably less than that in chicken eggs. when more moisture is needed in the incubator it can be provided by putting in water pans, or by placing burlap wicks in the pans. when less moisture is needed the water pans may be removed or the ventilation increased. as a rule the eggs should be turned at least and preferably to times daily. four times daily, every hours, day and night, is an excellent plan. they should be tested preferably on the eighth or ninth and again on the twentieth to twenty-second days, and all infertile eggs and those having dead germs should be removed. cooling the eggs once or twice a day until they feel slightly cool to the face may be of value in small incubators. turning and cooling should be discontinued about the twenty-third day, and the incubator door should be darkened and kept closed until hatching is completed. the poults may then be left in the incubators for about hours or else put in the brooder and fed as soon as hatching is completed and the poults thoroughly dried off. poults held in the incubator should be kept at about ° f. and should have a rough surface such as / -inch-mesh hardware cloth to stand on. keeping the incubator dark helps to keep the poults quiet and tends to prevent spraddle legs. there is no good reason for withholding feed longer than hours. if feed is withheld for a much longer period when the poults are in the brooder, they may eat the litter. therefore, poults should be fed when they are put in the brooder house. shipping day-old poults in specially built strawboard boxes has been found to be satisfactory. the container is larger than that ordinarily used for baby chicks, poults commonly being placed in each box. raising poults there are few turkey-raising problems so important as brooding and rearing the poults, because the greatest losses in turkey raising usually occur in the first few weeks of the birds' lives. heavy mortality among the poults may indicate that the breeding stock used was low in vitality or was poorly managed, but it more often indicates poor feeding or management of the poults. the importance of keeping both the poults and the breeding turkeys on ground free from infection and away from chickens cannot be overemphasized. improper brooding methods cause great losses, because turkey poults are very susceptible to cold, dampness, overcrowding, overheating, unsuitable feeds, and unsuitable litter, and they succumb readily to attacks of diseases and parasites. brooding the poults may be brooded naturally by turkey hens or artificially by brooders. brooding by turkey hens provides a never-failing source of heat, allows the poults to be raised in small flocks, and permits taking advantage of free-range conditions. its disadvantages are that the young turkeys may contract disease or become infected with parasites from the hens and they may wander too far and be killed by storms or predatory animals. artificial brooding makes it easier to maintain proper sanitation, keeps down costs, puts the poults more directly under the control of the operator, and is more adaptable to large-scale production. natural brooding brooding poults by turkey hens is not difficult, although several details should receive careful attention. as soon as the hatch is completed and the poults begin to run out from under the sitting hen, transfer the hen and her brood to a coop. a coop of simple design, such as the =a=-shaped type (fig. ), large enough to accommodate a turkey hen comfortably, and well built to protect the brood from rains and natural enemies, is all that is required. it should be about feet long, feet wide, and feet high, with a raised, rat-proof floor. provide good-sized screened openings for ventilation in hot weather. these openings should be so fixed that rain will not beat into the coop. have a separate coop for each hen, and if there are several broods, place the coops some distance apart on well-drained soil where the grass is fairly short. [illustration: figure .--a well-built brood coop which can be used either for setting a turkey hen or for raising a brood of poults.] for the first day or so it is well to confine the poults in the coop with the mother hen. then make a small yard, using boards or wire around the front of the coop, and allow the poults to run in and out at will. however, they should not be allowed to run in long, wet grass, and during heavy rains they should be confined to the coop. move the coop and yard to fresh ground every few days, clean it once a week or more frequently, and disinfect it occasionally. when the poults are about a week old the mother hen may be allowed to roam with her brood, but care should be taken to see that the entire brood returns in the evening and is protected at night from predatory animals. good results may be obtained by keeping the mother hens confined and allowing the poults to range, but the brood should be properly sheltered during rainstorms or damp weather, which are likely to cause high mortality. the poults may be kept with the mother hen for months or more, but better results are usually obtained by moving them to a separate rearing field on clean ground when they are from to weeks old. if they have shelter and will roost, they are better off without the hens after that age. a turkey hen will raise up to poults successfully, but more than can sometimes be placed with a hen in warm weather. artificial brooding the practice of brooding poults artificially is becoming more popular and is usually more successful than brooding with turkey hens. the methods used in artificial brooding are very similar to those used in raising chicks, which are discussed in farmers' bulletin , incubation and brooding of chickens. however, one point of great importance in brooding poults artificially is to make sure that they do not crowd together while in the brooder house. this can be avoided by frequent attention, by providing an even temperature, and by having good ventilation in the brooder house. a colony house or permanent brooder house that is suitable for brooding chicks is equally suitable for turkeys, but fewer birds should be put in the house, as turkey poults are larger than chicks. between and poults should be placed under one -inch hover in the average colony brooder house. larger hovers and larger brooding rooms will accommodate poults or more, but only an experienced operator should attempt; to raise groups larger than . the prevailing custom is to use brooder stoves in portable colony houses or permanent brooding quarters. the colony houses may be moved several times each season, thereby giving the poults plenty of free range on clean soil. since blackhead is closely associated with insanitary conditions, special effort must be made to keep the houses, runs, and yards clean. if permanent brooder houses are used, a floor of concrete from to feet wide or a small gravel or cinder-floored yard is often used in front of the house. a skeleton framework covered with to -inch-mesh wire may also be used to floor the outside run either with the permanent brooder houses or with the colony houses (fig. ). poults are regularly confined to this small yard for the first weeks and in some cases have been successfully reared to market age in it. however, a clean yard containing growing green feed is an advantage in brooding. if it is used only for about weeks each year, there seems little danger of contamination. the brooder and brooder house should be operated to keep the young turkeys comfortable. a dim light under or above the hover at night has a quieting effect on the poults. the temperature should be high enough to keep the poults comfortable but not high enough to be detrimental to their health. when the poults are first put into the colony house with the brooder stove, the temperature inches above the floor under the hover should be from, ° to ° f. this temperature should be lowered gradually as the poults get larger until they are or weeks old, when they require little or no heat, especially in the daytime. it is a common practice in cold weather to keep the general room temperature at the floor rather high, about °, to prevent crowding. the exact temperature, however, is of minor importance provided the poults are kept comfortable and good ventilation is maintained. the poults, if comfortable, will be active and contented. this is the real test of temperature. all warm points and surfaces except those at the brooder itself should be eliminated. free access from all parts of the brooder room to the hover must be provided. all corners in the brooding room, especially back of the hover, should be rounded, preferably by using / -inch-mesh poultry wire. a fence of the same material should be set up around the hover for the first or days until the poults become accustomed to their surroundings and learn to return to the source of heat. flat roosts to - / inches wide and slightly tilted up at the rear may be placed at graduated levels in the brooder house when the poults are from to weeks old, to encourage them to begin roosting at an early age. this provision lessens the danger of night crowding. the front roost should be inches above the floor and each of the others a few inches higher than the one in front of it and about - / inches apart, center to center. [illustration: figure .--young turkeys in a colony house equipped with wire-floored sun porch.] sanitation the brooder house should be thoroughly cleaned and the litter changed once every days, or oftener if disease occurs, regardless of the type of litter used. this cleaning schedule must be adhered to rigidly if blackhead, coccidiosis, and other diseases are to be prevented. thoroughly clean and disinfect brooder houses and equipment used for turkeys at the end of each brooding season or oftener if disease occurs. first clean the house thoroughly and burn all litter and droppings or haul them to land that is not to be used for poultry and from which there will be no drainage into the turkey range. then scrub the floor and sides of the house, if it is of board construction, with boiling hot lye solution (one-third of a can to a pail of water) and allow them to dry out. next, thoroughly spray the entire inside of the building with a - or -percent solution of cresol compound or any other approved disinfectant. give the same treatment once a year to the quarters occupied by the breeding stock. the "fire gun", a large kerosene torch which involves the blow-torch principle, has proved to be valuable in disinfecting, if it is properly used and the house has been thoroughly cleaned. litter sand or gravel is recommended for litter for the first or weeks; after that, clean wheat straw is advised as a means of saving labor. gravel or sand makes the best litter; but with large flocks, using it for more than or weeks may require too much labor. straw or hay, if used during the first weeks, may cause a stunting of growth and a high mortality. many growers have been successful in using, as a substitute for litter, / -inch wire mesh stretched tightly a few inches above the floor of the house, but it requires much labor to clean this, and it seems to have no advantage over clean litter. a wire-floored sun porch makes a good substitute, for an outside yard during the brooding period although, as previously stated, a clean yard in grass is preferable. early development the poults, when first hatched, are covered with soft down. when they are about days old, feathers begin to appear where the wings join the body, and in about weeks the tail feathers begin to appear. from then on feather growth is rapid, and when the poults are months old they are well feathered. about the fifth week fleshy protuberances called caruncles begin to appear, and by the seventh week they begin to extend down the neck. the appearance of caruncles in the poults is termed "shooting the red." on the top of the head of both males and females a fleshy protuberance develops into what is called the "dew bill" or "snood"; on males it is larger and more elastic than on females. the sex of young turkeys can be distinguished by the appearance of a tuft of hairs on the breast of males between and months old. the tuft usually does not appear on the breasts of the females until they are much older, and the hairs of the tuft are shorter and finer than those on males. the hock joints on the males are much broader and heavier than on the females. the sex of well-grown bronze turkey poults can be distinguished by examining the mature breast feathers which appear at to weeks. those of the males are bronze black with no white, whereas the tip of those of the females have a narrow white edge. day-old poults may be sexed as is done with baby chicks by examining that part of the sex organs that can be seen at the vent. marking when large numbers of turkeys are raised it is advisable to adopt some system of marking the poults that enables the grower to keep a record of the age and breeding of the different broods, as this is of assistance in selecting early hatched birds for breeding and slaughter purposes. such a system also makes it possible to separate the poults out of special matings from the rest of the flock or from neighboring flocks. the poults may be marked by punching holes in the webs between the toes or slitting these webs. different webs may be punched or slit for different broods, and thus provide a record of all turkeys raised. heavy, aluminum, clinch pigeon-wing bands are well adapted for marking young turkeys. the bands can be applied in two ways: according to the first, the band is first made round and clinched, then slipped over the baby poult's toes and flattened so that it will not come off but at the same time will allow for some growth of the leg. when the poult is about weeks old the band is transferred to the wing by unclinching and inserting it in a hole made in the middle of the web between the first and second joints of the wing and about one-fourth inch from the edge. the band is again clinched and made round so that it is not easily flattened and its lettering can be read easily. according to the second method of application the band is put directly into the wing at hatching time, a thin knife blade being used to make the hole for the band, near the edge of the web and midway between the joints of the wing. turkey poults, when good sized, may be tattooed on the wing for identification. when the breeding turkeys are selected as they approach maturity, heavy wing bands or heavy permanent leg bands may be used if the birds were not marked at an earlier age. feeding growing turkeys success in turkey raising depends mainly upon the combination of feeds given the young poults. poor-quality feeds, lack of vitamins, and shortage of proteins, especially if the poults are closely confined, are the more common causes or failures. some difficulty may be experienced in getting artificially brooded poults to eat, as a young poult is much less active than a chick; but if several small troughs are provided there should be no serious trouble from this cause. dipping the beaks of backward poults in milk or water, or feeding oatmeal flakes may induce them to eat. poults brooded with hens, of course, do not need this special attention. after the poults are from to weeks old they may get some of their living from a good range, but the use of additional feed, preferably a balanced ration of mash and scratch grain, will give better growth and result in early maturity and greater returns above feed cost. in natural brooding the turkey hen, while confined to the coop, should be fed mash and given some tender green feed. water and gravel or grit should, of course, be kept before her all the time. in feeding the hen and her brood it is advisable to feed the poults outside the coop and the hen inside in order to prevent the hen from wasting the feed intended for the poults. for the first to hours after hatching, poults can live without feed, the yolk of the egg which they absorb before hatching being sufficient to maintain them for that length of time. as soon as they are put into the brooder house or with the hen they should be fed. if they are not fed for the first day or two they should be kept in a darkened coop or incubator. however, leaving the poults in a darkened incubator for only to hours and feeding them as soon as they are removed to the brooder seems to be better and is now becoming a general practice. [illustration: figure .--cross section of trough feeders for turkey poults of various ages; _a_, lath feeder for first week; _b_, feeder for second to fourth weeks; _c_, feeder for fifth to twelfth weeks. feeder _c_ will give better results if equipped with a reel, at the top, similar to that shown in figure .] the first feed may be a mixture of finely chopped, tender green feed, and dry starting mash. hard-boiled eggs, ground or crumbled, may also be added if desired. this feed should be placed on clean boards or in little feeders made of laths as illustrated in figure . it is a good plan to keep the feed before the poults at all times from the very beginning so that the backward poults will learn to eat and their growth rate will not be retarded. milk, if not too high priced, may be kept before them in easily cleaned crockery, tin, wooden, or graniteware receptacles which the poults cannot get into or contaminate. after the first few days the green feed, unless it is available in the yards, may be spread on top of the mash in the feeders. turkey poults appear to be easily harmed by eating large quantities of tough, fibrous litter or green feed; hence the selection of a tender green feed is most important. feeding during the first to weeks the use of a well-balanced, all-mash ration is the simplest and most practical method of feeding poults during the first few weeks of their lives. many commercial starting mashes are available or good home-mixed mashes may be used with excellent success. the protein, mineral, and vitamin contents are the main points to be considered. milk in some form is very desirable, dried milk being preferable. liquid milk is a fair feed, but the dried form is preferable at least for starting rations. the following starting mashes are recommended for feeding turkey poults during the first to weeks. mash no. , fed without liquid milk, is preferable. starting mash no. _parts by weight_ yellow corn (ground) whole oats (pulverized) meat scrap ( - to -percent protein) wheat bran wheat middlings or shorts dried milk alfalfa leaf meal fish meal ( -percent protein) cod-liver oil - / salt (fine, sifted) / ------- total (crude protein percent; crude fiber percent) starting mash no. _parts by weight_ yellow corn (ground) wheat middlings or shorts wheat bran whole oats (pulverized) meat scrap ( - to -percent protein) alfalfa leaf meal fish meal ( -percent protein) cod-liver oil - / salt (fine, sifted) / ------- total (crude protein percent; crude fiber percent) starting mash no. is advised for feeding when liquid skim milk or buttermilk is kept before the poults at all times. some water is furnished, allowing one dish of water to several of milk. these starting mashes are fed without scratch grain; but water, green feed, and hard grit such as fine gravel, coarse sand, or commercial granite grit should be supplied. the green feed should be chopped fine and scattered on top of the mash in the feeders once or twice daily, allowing all the poults will consume in about half an hour. tender alfalfa tops, onion tops, lettuce, and tender, short lawn clippings, preferably those containing clover, are all good feeds. tough green feed should be avoided as it may cause impaction. green feed as picked by the birds from the yards is most desirable. in that case hand feeding is not necessary. the mash in dry form should be kept before the poults at all times, but only enough mash to last for a day or two should be supplied at one time. about inch of feeder space per poult (including both sides of the feeders) is desirable. this should be increased to or inches after about or weeks. plans for feeders are shown in figure . feeding from to weeks to marketing time rations for growing the poults after the age of to weeks may include mash and whole grain or liquid milk and whole grain. many turkeys are grown and fattened on grain supplemented with whatever insects and green feed can be obtained from the range. a better plan is to provide sufficient protein and minerals to give normal growth. the minimum feeding advised is to allow each day one liberal feeding of a -percent protein mash, or to furnish all the milk the birds will drink with a feeding of whole grain. either the mash or the liquid milk should be used with liberal feedings of whole grain for fattening in the fall. good growing mashes suitable for different conditions may be made as follows: growing mash no. _parts by weight_ yellow corn or barley (ground) oats or grain sorghum (ground) wheat middlings or shorts meat scrap ( - to -percent protein) wheat bran salt (fine, sifted) ------- total (crude protein to percent) growing mash no. _parts by weight_ yellow corn or barley (ground) soybean oil meal wheat middlings or shorts wheat bran oats or grain sorghum (ground) steamed bonemeal ground oystershell or limestone salt (fine, sifted) ------- total (crude protein - / percent) growing mash no. _parts by weight_ yellow corn (ground) meat scrap ( - to -percent protein) wheat bran wheat middlings or shorts oats or barley (ground) alfalfa leaf meal dried milk salt (fine, sifted) ------- total (crude protein to percent) growing mash no. _parts by weight_ yellow corn (ground) wheat middlings (standard or brown) oats (finely ground) wheat bran alfalfa leaf meal yellow corn gluten meal dried milk meat scrap ( - to -percent protein) steamed bonemeal ground oystershell or limestone salt (fine, sifted) ------- total (crude protein percent; crude fiber percent) these growing mashes are all fed with scratch grains consisting of such grains as corn, wheat, barley, and oats. corn, wheat, or barley may be used as the only scratch grain except with growing mash no. , which should contain from to percent of oats. a good grain mixture may be made of parts of corn, parts of wheat, and parts of oats. mashes and are for flocks having access to a good green range. in mash no. soybean oil meal, which has proved to be a good source of protein and is also good for fattening, is substituted for meat scrap. mash no. is a more complete ration and is advised for all conditions where the turkeys do not have an abundance of growing green feed. other combinations of grains and byproducts may be used successfully, the exact selection depending largely on availability and cost of feeds. it is best to use at least two grains, and preferably three or four, in the ration. corn is the grain most commonly used in feeding turkeys. not more than percent of the entire growing ration should consist of oats or barley or a combination of the two. yellow corn tends to produce a deep-yellow skin color while white corn, barley, and wheat produce turkeys with light-colored skins. if the birds have all the milk they will drink along with whole grains, they will consume enough milk to make good growth, if no water is fed. a mixture of percent of corn, percent of oats, percent of wheat, and percent of barley is satisfactory; so is a free choice of several grains. however, the whole-grain and liquid-milk method works well only when the birds are on a good, green range and is practical to use only when milk products are cheap. some loss from pendulous crops is to be expected when liquid milk is consumed liberally and this is one of the chief objections to its use. the milk receptacles should be set on a wire screen and covered to protect them from the weather and from contamination with droppings. sanitation is especially important when milk is used. general suggestions for feeding feed should be kept before the birds constantly from hatching to market age. during the first weeks feed starting mash. during the seventh and eighth weeks feed a mixture of equal parts of the starting and growing mashes. from to weeks feed the growing mash. from weeks to marketing feed growing mash and scratch grain. no scratch grain is fed during the first weeks. if a change is made from mash to the whole-grain and liquid-milk method, cut down the mash gradually until the poults learn to drink the milk and to eat the whole grain freely. cod-liver oil is necessary in starting rations, but as a rule it is not necessary in a growing ration unless the birds are confined. in that case, about percent should be added to the mash. a good grade of plain cod-liver oil is advised for use in turkey feeds. fish meal, though an excellent feed, may impart an undesirable flavor to turkey meat. fish meal and cod-liver oil should be omitted from the fattening ration during the last weeks before the birds are marketed. birds should not be moved, or feeding arrangements radically changed in the last weeks before marketing. feeding the growing mash wet is a common practice in some localities. like the dry-mash and scratch-grain system, it produces fine-quality turkeys although the labor in feeding may be greater. with this method the turkeys are fed all they will eat of a moist, crumbly mash placed in troughs with sufficient trough space provided to accommodate all the flock at one time. only as much mash as the birds will clean up in to minutes is fed twice daily. tail picking seldom occurs during moist-mash feeding if the ration is complete. grit may be furnished in the form of commercial granite grit or coarse sand for little poults and fine gravel for the larger birds. limestone grit does not serve well as grinding material and is unnecessary with the rations as listed. the poults may be put on the rearing ground when they are from to weeks old. an alfalfa field is an ideal rearing ground and may be used as a permanent, fenced, rearing range divided into or sections. when the rearing range is divided into sections, may be used for seasons in succession while the other is rested for seasons. a better plan is to divide it into parts, allowing season's use followed by seasons' rest for each of the sections. with portable houses and fences a method known as the "minnesota plan" (p. ) permits the turkey poults to be moved to a new section once a week and to an entirely new plot each year. land on which no poultry of any kind have run for years and on which no poultry manure has been spread, may be considered clean ground. the feed should not be put on the ground but in hoppers or troughs which should be moved frequently or set on wire-covered framework to prevent contamination with droppings. it is very important that the drinking water be fresh and clean and that the growing turkeys should not have access to stagnant water pools. watering dishes should be placed on wire-covered platforms with a device to prevent contamination from the birds' perching on the top or sides. the limited-range method with full feeding, as described, is recommended in preference to free range with limited feeding. however, conditions sometimes demand that free range be permitted, and limited feeding practiced. in such cases, when natural feed is abundant, good results can be obtained by feeding the poults, after they are from to weeks old, only once daily, as previously suggested. any of the growing mashes previously listed should make a good supplement to range feeds. this extra feed will tend to keep the birds nearer home and keep them growing at a reasonably good rate. scratch grains should also be fed and as marketing time approaches, will be eaten more liberally by the birds. for turkeys on free range, plenty of water in convenient locations should be provided. water helps to maintain good health and may help to prevent the condition known as "crop bound." turkeys which are well fed should make increases in weight comparable to those given in table , which gives the average weights, at various ages, ox bronze turkeys raised in an experiment conducted at the united states range livestock experiment station at miles city, mont. these birds were fed starting and growing mashes containing about percent of protein. table .--_average weights of bronze turkey poults from hatching time to market age_ ---------------+--------------------- | average live weight +----------+---------- age | males | females ---------------+----------+---------- | _pounds_ | _pounds_ newly hatched | . | . weeks | . | . weeks | . | . weeks | . | . weeks | . | . weeks | . | . weeks | . | . weeks | . | . weeks | . | . weeks | . | . ---------------+----------+---------- feed consumption and cost of growing the quantity and cost of feed used in raising a flock of bronze turkeys in montana in are shown in tables and . these poults ( males and females) had well-balanced dry mashes (containing percent of protein) before them at all times and scratch grain beginning with the second week. the birds were allowed to range on -acre nonirrigated lots after they were weeks of age. the costs were based on local feed prices in miles city, mont., in . by using the data in tables and , the feed consumption and cost for an average turkey can be estimated for any period of growth. table .--average feed consumption and cost per pound of gain in -week periods for male and female bronze turkeys in at miles city, mont. ---------------+----------------------------+--------------- | | cost of feed | feed consumed per pound | for each | of gain in live weight | pound of age +--------+---------+---------+ gain in | mash | scratch | total | live weight | | grain | | ---------------+--------+---------+---------+--------------- |_pounds_|_pounds_ |_pounds_ | _cents_ to weeks | . | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . | . ---------------+--------+---------+---------+--------------- table .--average feed consumption per bird in periods for male and female bronze turkeys in at miles city, mont. ---------------+--------+---------+---------- age | mash | scratch | total | | grain | ---------------+--------+---------+---------- |_pounds_| _pounds_| _pounds_ to weeks | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . to weeks | . | . | . ---------------+--------+---------+---------- using the data contained in tables and , it will be found that it took approximately pounds of mash and scratch feed to raise a -pound tom to weeks of age, and about - / pounds of mash and grain to raise a - / -pound hen to that age, or about . pounds of feed for each pound of live weight, when practically all feed was furnished. it took about pounds of feed for each pound of live weight up to weeks of age. the birds had access to a moderate sized range lot containing native grasses, but very little feed was obtained from it during the season. deformed breastbones crooked and dented breastbones in turkeys are common and sometimes cause a considerable loss to growers when the birds are marketed, since a severely crooked or very deeply dented breastbone causes the carcass to be graded as no. . it is generally believed that faulty nutrition causes most of the deformed breastbones, although level roosts narrower than - / inches have been known to cause deformities of this kind. if turkeys are supplied with green feed, fed liberally on one of the rations suggested, provided with tilted by roosts or medium-sized poles (see page ), and have plenty of direct sunlight, there will be few crooked breastbones among them. a small number (from to percent) is to be expected as it seems to be impossible to eliminate them entirely. the addition to the ration of steamed bone meal and limestone grit or oyster shell as a mineral reinforcement is recommended by some poultrymen. however, the various rations, as listed, supply adequate quantities of the bone-building ingredients. further additions are unnecessary and may even be harmful. [illustration: figure .--mash hopper for feeding young turkeys weeks old or older. the end plan of the same hopper is shown in figure .] equipment for raising turkeys containers for feed and water during the first or weeks after the poults hatch, two-piece crockery fountains are excellent milk containers. for water, galvanized metal containers are more convenient. when the poults are from to weeks old, water pails, metal troughs, or shallow tin or graniteware pans provided with wire or wooden guards are more satisfactory than fountains. a good method is to place the water or milk outside the wall of the brooder room so that the poults can drink it through a wire screen. from the age of weeks until market age, a supply of running water is preferable, although ordinary water pails set inside the range house on the wire floor or nails or tubs set outside the fence, with openings in the wire for the birds' heads, are satisfactory. changing the position of the watering devices every few days or setting them on wire-covered platforms will aid in providing sanitary conditions near the watering places where filth is likely to accumulate rapidly. a watertight barrel provided with a drip faucet and a trough also makes a good watering device. shade should be provided to prevent the drinking water from getting hot. suitable equipment for feeding mash and scratch feed is shown in figure . [illustration: figure .--diagram of end of mash hopper for feeding young turkeys. side view of same hopper shown in figure .] [illustration: figure .--a waste-proof, portable, outdoor shelter for feeder. the wire floor helps to prevent contamination from the soil and the roof provides shelter when the birds are eating.] [illustration: figure .--large range house for turkeys. this type is equipped with a wire-floored alleyway, as shown in figures and . the antiflies on the roof prevent turkeys from roosting there.] small trough feeders made of lath (fig. , _a_) may be used from the first day in the brooder and until the poults are a week old. such feeders are made with lath for the bottom, for the sides, small sections for end pieces, and another lath for a guard to keep poults out of the trough. for poults from days to weeks old it is better to use large trough feeders made of / - by - / -inch boards for the sides with a top guard consisting of a free-turning reel. baling wire stretched inside the troughs (fig. , _c_) aid in preventing waste of feed and also serve as beak cleaners for the birds. to prevent waste, it is better not to fill most trough feeders more than two-thirds full. in the brooder house it is important to place feeders on a wire platform made of -inch mesh, -gage wire, and - by - or - by -inch boards. poults to weeks old should have trough feeders made of / - by -inch boards for the sides, with a free-turning reel at the top. for poults from weeks old to market age the feeders should be even larger, as illustrated in figures and . [illustration: figure .--end elevation of turkey range house with alleyway.] [illustration: figure .--floor plan of turkey range house with alleyway.] after the age of about weeks, and when feeding is done under shelter, use a flat-bottomed trough from to feet long or several short feeders made with a - by -inch board as a bottom, - by -inch boards as sides, and with a guard of - by -inch center piece topped with a free-turning roller or reel (fig. ). for outside feeding a similar trough is advisable. it should be divided into two sections each to feet long, set on - by - or - by -inch skids covered with -inch hexagonal mesh, -gage wire or heavy gage -inch-mesh hardware cloth, and provided with a gable roof and side boards to protect the feed and the birds from sun, wind, and rain (fig. ). the troughs can be removed to be used as inside feeders and for replenishing the feed. two -foot feeders are sufficient for to birds. inside feeding is preferred whenever possible to provide it. [illustration: figure .--interior of - by -foot ran so house showing wire floor and wire under roosts. figure shows the wire nailed on the underside of the roost supports.] [illustration: figure .--this shed-roof range house will accommodate from to growing turkeys to market age. the plan of this house is shown in figure .] houses and fences a verminproof, weatherproof roosting shelter for growing poults is an important piece of equipment. a square or rectangular structure with a shed or gable roof makes a satisfactory range house. a shed roof is more easily constructed. the use of wire guards called "antiflies" will keep turkeys off the roof. allowing for a -foot wire-floored alleyway to hold the feeders and waterers, a house about feet wide and feet long (figs. , , , and ) will accommodate to growing turkeys to market age; a similar house about by feet is large enough for birds. feeding and watering can be done inside. for a permanent house, a height of or - / feet at the caves and about feet at the front (or the peak, if gable-roofed) is sufficient. if no alleyway is used, a house by feet containing roosts only should care for to turkeys to market age (figs. and ). [illustration: figure .--end elevation of range shelter for turkeys. this type is built without an alleyway and measures by feet.] with the latter type of house, feeding and watering must be done outside, preferably with a covered feeder, as shown in figure . a cheaper portable coop, not so high and with framework of lighter material, is shown in figure . this coop is built on - by -inch skids and is equipped with raised wire floor and with roosts. [illustration: figure .--portable turkey range houses equipped with wire floors and antiflies. the house on the left is by feet and has a feed storage room at one end.] a permanent house should face south or in a southerly direction so that the front is not exposed to storms. board sides on the north and west are desirable. practically open-air conditions, combined with good protection, may be obtained by leaving wire-covered openings about or - / feet wide across the north, west, and east sides at about the level of the roosts. these openings should be made closable by shiplap doors that may be partly opened in warm weather and closed during cold weather and storms. the south side may be left entirely open except for -inch hexagonal mesh of - or -gage wire and enough boards to give strength to the building and protect the birds from rainstorms. as mentioned on page , desirable roosts may be made of by 's with edges beveled and laid flatwise but slightly titled up at about the angle of a quarter-pitch roof in the direction toward which the birds are likely to face. roosts made of by 's or other sawed lumber may cause dents in the breastbones if they are laid perfectly flat. smooth poles - / to inches in diameter also make good roosts. material less than - / inches wide is not recommended for turkeys half grown or older. roosts should be placed preferably to inches apart (center to center), about inches from the wall and lengthwise or the building. those nearest the back wall of the shelter should be the highest, and each of the others should be about inches lower than the one back of it. this arrangement insures an even distribution of the birds on the roosts without crowding. allow about foot of roost space per bird as they require as much space as this when approaching market age. the space beneath the roosts should be fenced off and covered with - / -inch, -gage wire mesh to prevent the birds from getting at the droppings. this wire should be placed either on the under side of the roost supports (fig. ) or on special wire supports (fig. ), and it should be to inches below the top of the roosts. when a wire-floored alleyway is used, removable vertical panels made of - by -inch boards covered with the - / -inch hexagonal, -gage wire mesh should be placed directly under the roosts which border the alleyways in such a way as to close the opening underneath the roosts (fig. ). in very dry regions, it the space underneath the roosts and wire floors is entirely enclosed, the droppings may be allowed to accumulate throughout the entire growing season to save labor. in damp climates, however, the droppings should be removed frequently. wire floors may be used, as described, in the alleyways of roosting shelters to provide a place for inside feeding and watering and may also be used in the outside yards when close-confinement rearing is practiced. a practical method of construction is to make the floor in removable sections, each about feet square. the framework should be made of by 's placed on edge, with the top edge beveled to present about three-fourths inch of surface; the center supports may be of by 's, also placed on edge, spaced to inches apart, and laid lengthwise of the alleyway (fig. ). this frame should be covered with -inch hexagonal, -gage wire mesh or chain-link fabric wire. hardware cloth in a -inch mesh made of -gage wire is perhaps more satisfactory and will last longer, but the first cost would be greater. the wire may be fastened with eight-penny nails and -inch staples alternated, one for each strand of wire, but fastened only to the top or sides of the - by -inch framework, not to the center supports. the sections should be set loosely in the alleyway and held inch apart by nails driven into the sides of the framework. supports made of either by or by inch material should be placed on both sides of the alleyway, directly under the outer framework of the floor panels, and blocked up so as to hold the floor frames foot above the ground. since hen turkeys fly well, it is sometimes difficult to keep them in their runways. clipping the large outer feathers (called primaries) of one wing will do much to prevent the turkeys from flying, but it is usually necessary to put a - or -foot guard made of by or by inch material and lightweight poultry wire around the edge of the roof of the roosting shelters, on gates, and on the fences themselves for or rods out from the buildings. whenever practicable, these "antiflies" should be slanted in toward the yard (figs. and ). clipping the wings of the toms is undesirable and is usually unnecessary when antiflies are properly constructed. a -foot fence is usually high enough to confine turkeys, except near buildings and over gates, where the fence should be or feet high. even a -foot fence has been reported as satisfactory by some growers. steel posts and square-mesh poultry fencing of full standard weight make good turkey fences. protection against dogs dogs cause heavy losses among turkeys in many localities. turkey houses must be well constructed to exclude dogs. wire of -gage to -gage weight is necessary, and it must be very tightly nailed. the -gage weight should be used for the outside of buildings where it comes close to the ground. confining the turkeys to their shelters all night and through the early morning hours is frequently a necessary precaution unless an attendant is present or protection is afforded by a good watchdog. fences for confining poultry are not always entirely dog-proof. high roosts, provided by some growers, give protection at night, but in the early morning hours when the turkeys are off the roosts, an attendant should be in the vicinity. feeding the flock inside the shelter is advantageous when turkeys must be confined during the early morning hours as this greatly increases the feeding period. devices that prevent tail-feather picking tail-feather picking seems to begin by the birds' using each others' tail feathers to clean their beaks of mash. although it does not ordinarily damage the birds for market, the habit ruins their appearance and decreases their salability as breeding stock. it is not always possible to prevent tail-feather picking entirely, especially in flocks raised in confinement or in small range lots, but it may be prevented partially by providing tightly stretched wire in or over the mash feeders. baling wire stretched tightly or strips of ordinary light-weight poultry wire may be used. feeding the mash moist will also aid in preventing tail-feather picking. the kind of mash may also be a factor. a rather coarse mash containing considerable ground corn, some bran, and some coarsely ground oats or barley, including the hulls, seems to be more palatable than a fine mash and is not so likely to clog the beaks of the birds. range management of growing turkeys in minnesota a successful system of moving poults around the colony brooder house has been devised and is giving excellent results. the house is built with a small opening in each side, and a portable frame is so placed that the ground on each side of the house can be used as a small outside run. the birds are allowed to range to the south for from to days; then the house is thoroughly cleaned and the range changed to the west; and so on until the land on all four sides of the house has been utilized. the house is then moved to a clean spot, and the rotation is repeated. after the birds are from to weeks old the house is again moved to a clean place. turkeys may be raised successfully on a small acreage if they are moved to a clean area each week or two and to an entirely different, clean area each year. other systems of yarding have been devised, but the value of most of them has not been proved experimentally. some system of rotation is necessary on a farm where turkeys are raised regularly. for fenced ranges where the semiconfinement method is to be used, the minnesota plan is entirely satisfactory for small flocks. for large flocks the use of large yards in the double or triple yarding system has given good results. under this system, after or weeks of brooding, the poults are put on range, which may be divided into or equal parts. the range used is changed yearly or biennially either by moving the equipment or by having permanent equipment for each range. in the absence of fences, turkeys may be herded so that they are protected from enemies and kept within the clean area allotted to them each season. the use of portable fences and portable roosting shelters enables the grower to move the entire flock to clean range each season or several times each season. this method is practical where large areas of suitable range are available, so that the birds can be reared each season on land that has not been used, or on which no droppings have been spread, for the preceding years. in wet climates it is probably safer to allow a rest of or years. enough range should be provided so that plenty of growing green feed is available in each yard at all times during the season. when the same ground is used for a whole season, and rainfall or irrigation is adequate, an acre of grass pasture should provide range and green feed for about growing turkeys. an acre of alfalfa or clover would probably provide feed for birds, under favorable conditions. in arid or semiarid sections, during very dry seasons, it may be advisable to provide fresh, green feed, or legume hay in abundance to discourage the turkeys from eating undesirable green feed on the range. a complete ration must be provided for such conditions. where the range is limited to small areas of fenced land, the use of a number of permanent range houses set in a row, preferably feet or more apart, in the middle of the range and along the dividing fence is a practical method of range utilization. the dividing fence should be double so as to provide a neutral area between the two ranges. under this plan the birds can use one-half of the range for years in succession and the other half for years without the buildings being moved. if individual range lots are desired for each flock of birds, permanent range shelters arranged on either side of a service lane, each with double or triple yards, are a solution to the clean-range problem. if double yards are used for each house or if the range as a whole is divided into sections, a rotation of seasons of use, followed by seasons of rest may be the best plan. where yards for each house can be arranged or where the whole range is divided into large yards, each yard can be used for season and allowed seasons of rest. under any system of permanent yards, certain sanitary precautions are essential. among these are the following: ( ) select such a location or modify the one available in such a way that there is as little drainage as possible from the yards that are being used to those that are being rested; ( ) each season, or several times each season, remove the accumulations of droppings from the ground around the houses, feeders, and water vessels; ( ) grade up around each house with fresh earth each season or whenever it is necessary, to prevent water from standing near the buildings; ( ) fill in or drain all depressions so that water does not stand for any length of time anywhere on the range; ( ) use antiflies and, if necessary, clip one wing of each bird to keep it from flying into and contaminating the yards that are being rested; ( ) prevent birds or persons from going in and out of yards that are being rested; ( ) move feeders and water vessels frequently, feed and water the birds inside the range shelters on the wire floors, or place the feeders and water vessels outside on roofed wire platforms so that the droppings that accumulate near them will not become sources of infection; ( ) use contamination-proof feeders and water vessels; ( ) see that flies do not breed extensively in or near the houses and feeders; ( ) place wide boards set into the ground, an inch or two at the bottom of the fences and extending for about yards out from the buildings to prevent refuse spreading to the adjoining yards. when birds are herded on free range some growers move the roosts, feeders, and water vessels to clean ground several times each season, whereas others use permanent roosting and feeding quarters and bring the birds back each night. in either case excessive contamination at any one point should be prevented so far as possible. fattening turkeys for market in general, the best method of raising turkeys is to keep them growing at a normal rate so that at the age of about months they are in prime market condition, no special fattening period being necessary. such a method calls for liberal feeding of balanced rations throughout the growing period. a good range will supply a large quantity of feed at a very reasonable cost, but not even the best range will furnish enough of the right kinds of feed to produce large numbers of prime turkeys without supplementary feeding. in many instances, however, turkey growers believe that it is more profitable to force the birds to forage for most of their livelihood until a few weeks before marketing time. a good plan for fattening these range-grown birds is to begin early in the fall to feed the birds mash and scratch, allowing them all they will eat of both. as they approach maturity they will eat mostly scratch grain. the mash may be fed moist or dry. milk is an excellent fattening feed, and if plenty of liquid milk is available it may be fed with scratch grain only and no mash. some turkey raisers feed equal parts of corn, wheat, and oats during the first part of the fattening season and gradually change to all corn as the weather becomes cooler. this system is satisfactory if plenty of milk can be fed in addition. without milk or some other high-protein feed, the results are likely to be unsatisfactory. if too heavy feeding of corn alone is begun before the range turkeys become accustomed to it, the disease known as scours often results, especially if new corn is used. old corn is a much better feed than new corn, but the new crop is safe after it is well matured and dry. as a general rule, turkeys that have been raised on free range cannot be successfully fattened in close confinement. they may be successfully fattened, however, if they are confined to moderate-sized yards containing growing alfalfa or other green crops or stacks of alfalfa or clover hay. there is no advantage in confining turkeys which have been raised in semiconfinement to smaller quarters for fattening. marketing turkeys the marketing season for the bulk of the turkey crop is usually comparatively short, extending from the middle of november to the latter part of december. there is an increasing demand in the fall and winter and even in late summer for young turkeys. many turkey raisers sell their birds alive to poultry dealers, who either dress them or ship them alive to city dealers. in sections where turkeys are grown in large numbers, as in texas, dressing plants have been built by cooperative associations and poultry dealers who collect the live birds and dress them for the various city markets. as soon as possible after reaching the dressing plant, the turkeys are killed, dry-picked, cooled, and packed in barrels or boxes for shipment. farmers near the city markets often dress their turkeys and sell them direct either to the consumer or to the city dealer. in territory adjacent to large cities marketing both live and dressed birds at roadside stands has become common. when to market experiments with bronze turkeys have indicated that well-fed, young birds of this popular variety are marketed to best advantage at from to weeks of age, if they are in good flesh and reasonably free from short pinfeathers. if they are kept longer than weeks, the cost of maintenance and gains and the extra labor of their care cause the costs of production to rise rapidly. under ordinary conditions to weeks is the best age for marketing full-fed bronze turkey toms. for turkeys fed for rapid growth weeks is a more profitable age if the birds are ready for market then, as is often the case with young hens which mature more quickly than the toms. data obtained on more than birds at the united states range livestock experiment station at miles city, mont., show that at weeks of age the feed cost of producing live turkeys was cent per pound lower than at weeks of age, and . cents per pound lower than at weeks. these figures, of course, will vary in different years, depending on the price of feeds. besides this cost for feed the extra labor in caring for the birds, often during unfavorable weather, must be considered. with the expansion of the turkey industry, the chain stores have become one of the large wholesale buyers of turkeys. they desire various sizes, according to the nature of the patronage in different localities, and as a result create a considerable market demand for hens and small toms. this is particularly true of their thanksgiving and christmas trade. other channels of trade, such as restaurants, hotels, steamships, and railroad lines, prefer large toms. as turkeys become more generally used throughout the year an increase in the trade for small birds may be expected. selecting birds for market practically all turkeys that are full fed are ready for market at from to weeks of age, and in many cases at weeks, depending on sex, breeding, feeding, and weather. however, with range birds on limited feed, the grower can probably afford to hold his turkeys longer than or weeks, if necessary, because the feed costs were low during the growing period. it is, of course, very important to market only turkeys that are fat and free from small pinfeathers. sufficient protein and minerals in the feed during the fall months are essential to proper growth and economical gains as well as to proper feather development. a prime turkey, especially a young one, is not expected to be excessively fat, but it must have an even covering of fat so that the skin appears white or yellowish white rather than dark or bluish. the breast must be meaty and the whole body free from small pinfeathers, bruises, and abrasions. great care should be taken, therefore, not to allow the birds to bruise themselves by flying or running against obstructions; they should be handled gently and not frightened. withholding feed before slaughter birds with feed in their crops are usually graded as no. and sold at a lower price because feed in the crop spoils readily, and also detracts from the appearance of the carcass. mash feed passes out of the crop quickly so that crops will be empty if the mash is removed at dusk on the day before slaughter and no scratch grain fed on that day. if the birds are kept without feed for more than or hours they may eat soil, litter, droppings, or feathers, and thus defeat the main purpose of withholding feed. this applies especially to old hens. if the birds are not to be killed until late afternoon or evening, give them a light feed of mash early in the morning. scratch grain should be fed only until about hours before slaughter. feeding should always be planned so that feed is not withheld more than hours. all birds being held for slaughter should have free access to water up to killing time. killing and picking when the bird is to be killed, hang it up by the feet, holding its head in one hand and taking care not to compress the veins in the neck. open the mouth and cut the jugular vein far back in the throat, just below the base of the skull. for this purpose use the point of a sharp, narrow-bladed knife. as soon as profuse bleeding begins, thrust the knife up through the groove in the roof of the mouth and into the rear lobe of the brain at the back of the skull so as to render the bird unconscious. when the correct "stick" is obtained, the bird usually gives a peculiar squawk, the tail feathers spread, and all the feathers are loosened by a quivering of the muscles. after sticking, continue to hold the bird's head and attach a blood cup to the lower jaw. the bird's wings should never be locked, as this often results in their being broken, which usually reduces the bird to a low grade. likewise, no attempt should be made to hold the bird's wings tightly. blood cups weighing pounds are needed for large birds, whereas cups weighing to pounds are best for small and medium-sized birds. in dry picking it is essential that the feathers be plucked immediately after the bird is killed. if the bird has been properly stuck, they come out very easily. first remove the tail and large wing feathers and then the body feathers, leaving the small wing feathers and neck and upper breast feathers until last. pull out all feathers a few at a time, but do not rub them off as this injures the skin and often lowers the grade. dry picking can be learned best by personal instructions. the semiscald method of picking turkeys is used in some sections at commercial dressing plants, but nearly all home-dressed turkeys are dry-picked.[ ] [ ] detailed information on killing, grading, and marketing turkeys is given in farmers' bulletins . dressing and packing turkeys, and , grading dressed turkeys. clean-picked turkeys are now preferred, but a single row of short fan feathers on the last joint of each wing may be left. leave no feathers on any other part of the body. remove all pinfeathers, especially from the breast, but do not attempt to dig out pinfeathers too short to be pulled. after picking, snap the blood from the bird's mouth with a quick motion and squeeze the vent to remove any droppings that may be there. the feet, if dirty, should be washed and dried. these methods make for clean carcasses, good grades, and good keeping quality. after picking and chilling the birds, cover the heads with head wraps made of heavy waxed paper, to prevent blood soaking through and smearing the carcasses. whenever the skin is torn, sew it neatly with white thread. when birds have been killed with feed in their crops, remove the entire crop. through a - or -inch slit in the neck, beginning where the neck joins the body, the crop can be completely loosened and withdrawn, the gullet being cut well below the crop. then sew the opening with no. white thread. turn in the edges of the skin so as to make a neat job that will not be noticeable when the bird is put on the market. according to data on bronze turkeys, killing and picking after the birds had been starved overnight resulted in a loss of about percent of weight for large birds and percent for small birds. the turkeys were weighed both before and after they were killed and picked and again after they had cooled overnight. the larger birds had the lower percentages of loss in weight and therefore the higher dressing percentages. the weight loss of dressed turkeys while chilling overnight is very small, only about one-sixth of percent. therefore, practically all the loss in weight that occurs during picking and chilling results from the loss of blood and feathers. the weight loss of turkeys overnight just before slaughter when they received no feed was about percent, on an average, making the total loss from their normal weight, due to withholding feed, picking, and chilling, about percent. when dressed turkeys are drawn, with head and feet removed and giblets replaced, there is a further loss of about percent of the dressed weight. [illustration: figure .--single-layer box of turkey hens.] cooling hanging the birds indoors by the legs for hours or more, or laying them on their backs on a clean surface where the temperature of the air ranges from ° to ° f. will properly chill the carcasses. they should be thoroughly chilled but not frozen, since frozen birds sweat and, because of their rigid condition, cannot be packed without great waste of space. in mild weather it is often impossible to cool the carcasses properly without the use of refrigeration or ice water. cooling in water spoils the appearance of dry-picked carcasses and should be done only as a last resort. a suitable thermometer is an indispensable part of the chilling equipment. packing boxes and barrels are generally used for packing dressed turkeys. packing in clean barrels, while easier and slightly cheaper, is not so satisfactory as box packing, although barrels are often more readily available. boxes are greatly preferred by the trade and by organized pools. in box packing, the single-layer pack of to birds, depending on their size, is preferred. the boxes are usually large enough to hold from to medium-sized birds (fig. ). when barrels are used, a large size is necessary for large toms. smaller barrels are suitable for hens and small toms. line the barrel with white wrapping paper or common white parchment paper. lay the birds with their backs against the sides of the barrel, and if it is necessary to pack larger birds in the same barrel, place them in the center. when the barrel is full, turn down the paper, take off the top hoop, place a piece of clean burlap over the top, and replace and renail the hoop over the burlap. boxes, barrels, or any other containers used should be free from objectionable odor, as the turkey meat may absorb it. there is considerable risk for the producer who does not have access to proper refrigerating facilities in shipping dressed turkeys during mild weather. if the birds are to be sold in mild weather, it is safest to market them alive or else sell them dressed to local purchasers as losses from improper cooling of dressed turkeys and from exposure to warm weather during transit are likely to occur. when turkeys are to be shipped only a short distance it may be feasible to chill the dressed birds in ice water and then to pack them in barrels with cracked ice between layers and at each end of the barrel. a top layer of ice placed between two layers of burlap tacked securely over the top of the barrel is desirable. the internal temperature of the turkeys should be reduced to ° f. before they are shipped. dressed-turkey grades grading systems for dressed turkeys differ somewhat in different markets but, in general, are similar. greatest uniformity is provided where the united states grades are used. the united states grading system is more comprehensive than other systems and is intended to satisfy the demands of the consumers more fully and to promote more uniform grading. the united states government grading system was developed and is sponsored by the bureau of agricultural economics, united states department of agriculture. under this system as now used there are four grades: u. s. special or u. s. grade aa; u. s. prime or u. s. grade a; u. s. choice or u. s. grade b; and u. s. commercial or u. s. grade c. each grade is subdivided into four classes according to the age and sex of the birds. these classes are: young hen, young tom, old hen, and old tom. the quality specifications for individual birds apply to each class with due allowance for fleshing condition characteristic of its sex and age. detailed descriptions are provided for each grade. for the u. s. special grade it is required that turkeys have broad, full-fleshed breasts and that the carcasses be fully covered with fat. the birds must also have been well bled, carefully dry-picked or semiscalded, and must be free from bruises, skin tears, and broken joints. the breastbone must be straight or only slightly dented (not more than one-fourth inch in depth). for the u. . prime grade it is required that birds be well fleshed, well fattened, and well bled, but they may have slight imperfections such as scattered pinfeathers, slight flesh or skin abrasions, and one disjointed but not broken wing or leg. slightly curved and slightly dented breastbones, not to exceed one-half inch in depth, are permitted. to grade u. s. choice, turkeys must have fairly well-fleshed breasts and carcasses fairly well covered with fat. these birds need be only fairly well bled and dressed and may have slight flesh or skin bruises, small skin tears, or larger sewn-up tears, and one broken leg or wing. turkeys not meeting these grade requirements, including birds poorly fleshed, poorly bled, or slightly deformed, but suitable for food, make up the lowest or u. s. commercial grade. another system of grading in common use in buying dressed turkeys is to make only or grades, except that sometimes the birds within the top grades are divided into classes based on weight and sex. the no. grade usually consists of young toms weighing pounds or more and young and old hens weighing pounds or more, dressed. for this grade the birds must be well finished and free from serious tears, bruises, and severely crooked breastbones. the crops must be empty and the carcasses reasonably free from pinfeathers and reasonably well bled. the no. grade includes all old toms and such young toms, young hens, and old hens as are too light for the no. grade. the no. grade also includes turkeys with severely crooked breastbones, broken wings, bad blemishes, bad tears, bad abrasions, feed in crops, numerous pinfeathers, and birds that have been poorly bled or poorly fleshed. the no. grade includes birds not good enough for the no. grade but still fit for food. these are culls that never should have been marketed. the no. grade is not always used, since turkeys of this kind are often rejected by the buyers. on some markets a medium grade of birds--between the no. and the no. grades--is used. when graded and packed for market turkeys are further graded as to size, birds of similar weight being placed in the same container, which is labeled according to the grade. * * * * * organization of the united states department of agriculture when this publication was last printed _secretary of agriculture_ henry a. wallace. _undersecretary_ m. l. wilson. _assistant secretary_ harry l. brown. coordinator of land use planning and m. s. eisenhower. director of information. _director of extension work_ c. w. warburton. _director of finance_ w. a. jump. _director of personnel_ roy f. hendrickson. _director of research_ james t. jardine. _solicitor_ mastin g. white. _agricultural adjustment h. r. tolley, _administrator_. administration_ _bureau of agricultural economics_ a. g. black, _chief_. _bureau of agricultural engineering_ s. h. mccrory, _chief_. _bureau of animal industry_ john r. mohler, _chief_. _bureau of biological survey_ ira n. gabrielson, _chief_. _bureau of chemistry and soils_ henry g. knight, _chief_. _commodity exchange administration_ j. w. t. duvel, _chief_. _bureau of dairy industry_ o. e. reed, _chief_. _bureau of entomology and plant lee a. strong, _chief_. quarantine_ _office of experiment stations_ james t. jardine, _chief_. _farm security administration_ w. w. alexander, _administrator_. _food and drug administration_ walter g. campbell, _chief_. _forest service_ ferdinand a. silcox, _chief_. _bureau of home economics_ louise stanley, _chief_. _library_ claribel r. barnett, _librarian_. _bureau of plant industry_ e. c. auchter, _chief_. _bureau of public roads_ thomas h. macdonald, _chief_. _soil conservation service_ h. h. bennett, _chief_. _weather bureau_ francis w. reichelderfer, _chief_. u. s. government printing office: for sale by the superintendent of documents, washington, d. c. price cents * * * * * transcriber note illustrations were moved to avoid splitting paragraphs. display of numbers was standardized in the tables to show leading zeros. transcriber's note: italic text is denoted by _underscores_. small capital text has been replaced with all capitals. minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected without note. irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed. mismatched quotes are not fixed if it's not sufficiently clear where the missing quote should be placed. the cover for the ebook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. * * * * * the rural magazine, and literary evening fire-side. vol. i. philadelphia, _fourth month_, . _no_. . for the rural magazine. the desultory remarker. no. iii. he whose object is to make an impression on the public mind, must first, as an indispensable preliminary, secure the public attention. much that is said or written, partakes in so great a degree of an unimpressive and a common-place character, as to be utterly disregarded. to succeed in obtaining the public ear, is as difficult as it is important. this success is perhaps most efficiently promoted, by listening with attention to every remark of criticism, whether good-natured or severe;--by then adopting the counsels of wisdom, and leaning on the solid column of experience. if these papers should fail to acquire popularity, and, like many of their predecessors, sink into _undeserved_ oblivion; it shall not be from the want of a disposition to please, but from the absence of higher powers. it is the peculiar province of genius to render prolific the most sterile soil, to invest with interest the most intractable topic, and to mould into the form of beauty the most unpromising materials. for this rare and brilliant endowment, no adequate substitute can be found. should every public speaker, or public writer, be required to confine themselves to what is absolutely original, or strictly relevant to their subject; what would become of a vast majority of the tribe of authors, and ninety-nine out of a hundred of our orators in congress? of a speech of three or five hours in length, one effect may be confidently predicted; that those of the audience who do not fall asleep, will be fatigued and justly irritated, by such an unwarrantable trespass on their time and patience. our national character is not yet completely formed; but some features of it are assuming a permanent shape. among these, there is one, by no means calculated to elevate us in the estimation of the rest of the world. instead of that simplicity and spartan brevity, by which republicans should be distinguished, we habituate ourselves to the unnecessary use of a multitude of words. we are giants in profession, but pigmies in action. it has been confidently asserted, that the speeches of one of the members of our federal legislature, from tennessee, have actually cost the united states more money, than would defray the entire expense of completing the delaware and chesapeake canal. now that the missouri discussion is terminated, how _honourable_ to the nation, it is not my present purpose to inquire; it would be desirable to ascertain whether the vote of a solitary member was changed, by the endless speeches which were delivered on the subject. if not, i should presume it was a pretty clear point, that they cost the people much more than they were worth; and that such a prodigal waste of the time and treasure of the nation, is highly reprehensible. but instead of arraigning the conduct of others, and exposing their weakness and defects, it may perhaps be the part of prudence to spare our censure for errors to be met with much nearer home. by giving publicity to the following communication, i trust i shall not trespass on the indulgence of my readers; while at the same time i shall evince a spirit of no fictitious candour, by which i wish at all times to be actuated. "harrisburg, _march ._ "_to the desultory remarker._ "sir--you will pardon the liberty which, as a perfect stranger, i take of addressing you. i have long cultivated a taste for literature; not that which abounds in circulating libraries, but that which is met with in those "_founts of english undefiled_," the classical poets and essayists of great britain. of the latter, i have a decided preference for addison; because his humour is as innocent as it is exquisite; and because his sincere and fervid piety is diametrically opposed to every thing like monastic gloom and austerity. he was a benefactor to mankind during the course of his life; and left them his example in the hour of death--"_see how a christian can die!_" i have not trimmed the midnight lamp, in perusing the pages of sentimental and mischievous nonsense; but derive the highest gratification from those books which have long enjoyed the united suffrages of virtue. but to my purpose. you have embarked in an honourable undertaking, and one in which very few have been successful. you should profit, not merely by the wisdom of those that have gone before you, but also by their mistakes. i have read your two first numbers; and unless some improvement shall take place, either in your matter or manner, you will never be a favourite of mine.--there is too much unvaried gravity, and studied elaboration, in them.--when we take up a newspaper, or magazine, we do not expect to meet with a sermon, however well disposed we might be to welcome it on a proper occasion. permit me to observe, that a long, prosing, lifeless essay, _will never be read_; and, if frequently met with, will create a distaste for the journal itself, in which it may appear. being friendly to your success, you will indulge me in repeating, that should you fail to impart a greater degree of vanity and interest, to your future numbers; if you do not more frequently smooth the wrinkled brow of care, and assume the aspect of cheerfulness, you will lose many of the female readers you have at present, and among the rest, "your humble servant, "stella." this is a sensible, well written letter; and, if it would not be indecorous to express an opinion as to another feature of it, not overburthened with compliment. i am aware of the force and truth of some of stella's observations; and will endeavour _occasionally_ to profit by them. though considerably advanced in the vale of years, i hope never to be insensible to the good opinion of that sex, which can successfully prefer claims to excellence, in every department of virtue; and whose influence on the well-being of society, is so incalculably important. what if my temples be encircled with the frosts of many winters, and the wings of my fancy be enfeebled, by that incurable malady, old age; i still shall be delighted to minister to the pleasure of those, whose approbation is worth desiring-- the wise and the learned, the witty and the fair. an outline of the female character has been thus happily and accurately sketched, by the pencil of a poet.--the last couplet is descriptive of a trait in this character, which is as amiable as it is true. oh! woman, in our hours of ease uncertain, coy, and hard to please, and variable as the shade by the light, quivering aspen made; _when pain and anguish wring the brow, a ministering angel thou_. for the rural magazine. the village teacher. in my younger days, i passed a considerable time in the pleasant village of g----. the society was lively and agreeable; and, as it consisted chiefly of ladies, our usual place of meeting was at the tea table and the evening circle. literature, the news of the day, and our little amusements, furnished the principal subjects of conversation; and although the society was elegant and well educated, yet the frequency of our meetings often drove us, for variety, to the intrigues and petty scandal of the neighbourhood. the disposition for this kind of entertainment became at last so strong, that we grew ashamed of it; and resolved one evening to create a "court of scandal," by which all offences against the good breeding and charity of speech should be tried, and whose decisions we bound ourselves to obey. when i observe how strong is our propensity for scandal, and with what greediness evil-speaking is listened to, i cannot help wishing that there were such a tribunal in every one's bosom. did it exist, or rather did we suffer the voice which there speaks, to be heard; we should often be humbled at its decisions. if we unmask our actions and our motives, we shall find this propensity at the bottom of much of what is called--virtuous indignation. at one time, it assumes the mock appearance of charity; at another, it tries to hide itself in sallies of wit, or lurks beneath a half whispered insinuation, or a kind doubt, or a malicious inquiry. its seeds are deeply sown, and take still deeper root in the human breast; and it requires the strictest self-examination, and the greatest candour, to avoid being overrun, if i may so express myself, with this nightshade. i know of nothing more despicable, than the little mincing scandal which buzzes about in our polite circles. always on the wing, with honey in its mouth, and poison and bitterness in its trail, it spreads the injurious aspersion, and the doubtful insinuation; and fastens them, like mildew, upon the fairest and purest characters. it is a vice essentially grovelling, and low-minded, and which grows upon us at unawares. it advances imperceptibly through all its various degrees; from idle curiosity to the deep and settled malignity, which has no pleasure but in the weaknesses, the errors, and misfortunes, of those around it. beware, reader! lest while giving to my description a local habitation in the person of thy neighbours, thou indulgest the disposition thyself, and turnest my counsel into food for thy propensity.--but i have wandered from my original plan, which was, to give some account of our court of scandal, and of the decisions which it pronounced. the first cause that came before it, was, a complaint from julia manners against miss busy, who had circulated a report that julia was about to be married. miss busy lived opposite to julia's father's; and generally took her morning and afternoon station at the parlour window. she one day espied from thence, a well dressed young man escorting julia home. her curiosity was immediately excited; and she sallied out to the next neighbour's, to inquire who the stranger was, and to wonder if he was not a suitor. the answer, _it is like enough_, was sufficient. she continued her walk, discovered his name at the next place where she inquired, and received some trivial confirmation of her conjecture at a third. from that time forward, she asked all whom she visited, or received, if they had seen miss manners' suitor. conjecture was built upon conjecture, till at last poor julia was to be married and sent off in the space of a fortnight. after a patient hearing of an hour, the court decreed, that miss busy should be interdicted any of our circle for two weeks, and that her parlour windows should be kept closed for as many months. miss lively happening to mention at the tea table, one afternoon, that maria harwood had jilted captain jones, was immediately called to an account. she blushed, and said it was common rumour, and that she knew nothing but what she had heard. the court decided that this circumstance would not excuse her, for that she thus lent the authority of her name to an idle story which she confessed she had no reason to believe was true. it was declared, that the person who assisted in circulating what was mere rumour, shared in the guilt of the fabricator; and that as miss lively was maria harwood's particular friend, she had in this instance doubly offended. miss lively was therefore examined again as to her authority for what she had said. after much inquiry and prevarication, it turned out, that her mother's chamber-maid had heard mr. harwood's cook say, that it would serve such a proud thing right, if miss maria would turn him off. the court ordered the fair offender to be reprimanded. the punishment had the proper effect; and for six weeks she could not mention an article of doubtful intelligence, without being asked if it came from mr. harwood's cook. the next cause which i recollect, was of rather a more intricate nature. julia manners and emma harwood were near neighbours, and lived on terms of close intimacy. julia was unconcealing, generous, and frank; free in her expressions, and warm in all her feelings. emma was amiable and correct, but jealous of her dignity; and rather eager in listening to the opinions of others respecting her. such a disposition always finds some one ready to gratify it; and emma heard much to excite her jealousy, and alarm her pride. a young lady, _a mutual friend_, wondered to emma that she should be so intimate with miss manners, and was sure she did not know all that julia said about her. _what?_ eagerly exclaimed emma. "she could not say: it was told in confidence, and she did not like to hurt any one's feelings." this only excited more curiosity, and emma at last forced her half willing friend to confess, that julia had called her proud and touchy; and said she did not like her half so well as she did her sister. miss harwood felt much hurt; and behaved very coolly to her old friend for several weeks. julia at last complained to the court, and the affair was investigated. we found out, upon examining the witnesses, that julia had only tacitly assented to these opinions, which had been expressed by the fair informer herself; and had never suffered them to influence her conduct. emma was thereupon ordered to kiss her old companion, and make an acknowledgment before the company of the injustice she had committed; and we unanimously agreed to banish their mutual friend from our circle. i had intended to give some further decisions of our court, in which the gentlemen are particularly interested; but my good friends, the editors, are already looking askance for the end of my paper. _in publica commoda peccem_--if i longer take up the room devoted to my worthy neighbours, the farmers. i shall only add, that we found our court of scandal so efficacious, that it restored our conversation in a few weeks to its former tone, and entirely banished the spirit of which i have complained. for the rural magazine. "the story of ruth." "and, behold, boaz came from beth-lehem, and said unto the reapers, the lord be with you. and they answered him, the lord bless thee." there are moments in the life of every virtuous man, when the vices and the enormities by which he is surrounded, and above all, the glaring deficiencies which he is compelled to remark, even in those "whom he hath delighted to honour," come back upon the mind with an overpowering force, and spread their disheartening influence over the whole train of his reflections. at such moments, when we have turned with disgust from the corruptions of human nature, and have almost been tempted to seek in "some boundless contiguity of shade," a retreat from their contaminating influence; it is peculiarly delightful to recur to some scene of virtuous enjoyment, or to disperse the gloom which has gathered around us by a reference to the simplicity of other times. while dwelling upon the records of ancient purity, we become conscious of a joyous complacency; the mind is elated in the contemplation of its own capability of happiness, and reposes with delight upon the recollection of those peaceful pleasures, which can only exist among a virtuous people. there is, perhaps, no narrative to be found among the works of ancient or modern authors, upon which the man who has become weary of the follies of the world, can dwell with more soothing sensations, than upon the story of ruth. it is not to the unrivalled beauty of its style, nor to the pathetic eloquence which it contains, nor to the affecting nature of its incidents, that it is indebted for its principal attractions. but it is in the delineations of the peculiar practices of a people, who, as yet, had not forgotten the characteristic simplicity of their fathers; and in the striking allusions to their habits of social intercourse, that we feel ourselves most deeply interested. many have delighted to paint the pleasures of rural life in all their most glowing colours; they have dilated upon its real and its fancied enjoyments; and have laboured to represent it as divested of all that shall darken the lustre of native purity, or detract from the reverence of virtue. but it may well be doubted whether they have ever presented us with so engaging, and yet so perfectly natural a picture, as that which is to be found in the simple and unlaboured narrative of inspiration. in the very salutations between boaz and his reapers, we seem to have an evidence of that happy equality, and that habitual piety, which are alike the concomitants of untainted simplicity, and the victims of luxury and corruption. "the lord be with you," was the address of "a mighty man of wealth" to his reapers; "and they answered him, the lord bless thee." these are doubtless to be considered as the accustomed salutations of the people; and they may frequently have carried with them nothing more than the idea of mere ceremony. but they were salutations which must have originated among a religious people; and it was a ceremony which must have been associated with all that is helpless and dependant in man, and all that is merciful and omnipotent in his creator. c. most of our readers will probably recollect the amiable and enterprising elizabeth fry, who has been for some time past, like the celebrated howard, engaged in visiting the prisons of england. the peculiarity of the undertaking, for a female, and her unexpected success in drawing the attention of the wretched objects of her care, to something like their native dignity, have excited much interest in the public mind. a copy of the following letter, giving some account of her proceedings in glasgow, was handed to us, with the privilege of publishing it.--ed. communicated for the rural magazine. _letter to mrs. fletcher, from a friend in glasgow._ mrs. fry's manner and voice are delightful; her communications, free and unembarrassed.--she met, by appointment, several of the magistrates, mr. erving, and a number of ladies, at bridewell. she told them, with much simplicity, what had been done at newgate; and proposed something similar, if practicable, in glasgow. she entered into very pleasant conversation with every one. all were delighted when she offered to speak a little to the poor women: but the keeper of bridewell said he feared it was a dangerous experiment; for that they never, but by compulsion, listened to reading, and were generally disposed to turn all into ridicule. she said she was not without fear of this happening; but she thought it would give pleasure to some, and would serve to show the ladies what she meant. the women, about a hundred, were then assembled in a large room; and when she went in, seemed astonished, misdoubting, and lowering. she took off her little bonnet, and sat down on a low seat, fronting the women; and looking round with a kind and conciliating manner, but with an eye that met every one, she said--"i had better just tell you what we are come about." she said "she had had to do with a great many poor women, sadly wicked; more wicked than any now present, and how they had recovered from evil." her language was often biblical, always referring to our saviour's promises, and cheering with holy hope those desolate beings. "would you like to turn from that which is wrong? would you like if ladies would visit you, and speak comfort to you, and help you to be better? would you tell them your griefs? for they who have done wrong have many sorrows." as she read them the rules, asking them always if they approved, they were to hold up their hands if they acceeded. at first we saw them down, and many hands were unraised; but as she spoke, tears began to fall. one beautiful girl near me, had her eyes swimming in tears; and her lips moved as if following mrs. fry's. an older woman, who had her bible, we saw pressing upon it involuntarily, as she became more and more engrossed. the hands were now almost all ready to rise at every pause; and these callous and obdurate offenders were, with one consent, bowed before her. at this moment, she took the bible, and read the parables of the _lost sheep_, and the _pieces of silver_, and the _prodigal son_.--it is not in my power to express the effect of her saintly voice, speaking such blessed words. she often paused, and looked at the "poor women," as she named them, with such sweetness, as won all their confidence, and she applied with a beauty and taste such as i had never before witnessed, the parts of the story--_his father saw him when he was afar off_, &c.--a solemn pause succeeded the reading. then, resting the large bible on the ground, we saw her on her knees before the women. her prayer was soothing and elevating; and her musical voice, in the peculiar recitative tone of her sect. i felt it like a mother's song to a suffering child. communicated for the rural magazine. brandywine, _ d mo. , ._ reuben haines, _esteemed friend_--i avail myself of a leisure hour to communicate my opinion on the subject on which we had some conversation when thou wast at my house. i allude to the importance of a more general use of mill feed for cattle in the neighbourhood of cities and towns, where hay almost always commands a high price. we will, in the first place, view the subject at the cost of the respective articles in your market at this time.--shorts can now be had at cents per double bushel, weighing about lbs. bushels of shorts, weighing lbs. neat, will cost d. wt. of hay, at dolls. per ton, will cost ______ difference, d. here there is a difference of $ , cents, in favour of shorts, in a given weight of each; but i am quite confident, in my own opinion, that, taking an equal weight of each, there is _double the sustenance_ in the shorts; and if this opinion be correct, it shows the following important result: lbs. of hay, at dls. per ton, would cost d. while lbs. of shorts, in which there is equal if not greater nutriment, would cost only ______ gain in favour of shorts, d. but it appears to me there is another important saving would result to the farmer, from the introduction of mill feed. it would enable him to keep his stock of horses at a great deal less expense than he now keeps them. they would be more healthy, and _all his hay_ might be saved for the horned cattle. by a very slight mixture of shorts with cut straw, or cut corn-stalks, it would make very palatable food; and the result in this method, compared with foddering on hay, would be as follows. one hundred bushels of shorts would be ample to mix with two tons of straw, and two tons of stalks. the shorts, as heretofore stated, would cost d. tons of wheat, barley, or oat straw, at dolls. per ton, the corn-stalks are now generally put in the barn-yard: allow what paid for hauling them, say d. per ton, allow also for trouble in cutting the straw and stalks, ______ _the weight of the foregoing as follows_, viz. the shorts, lbs. tons of straw, tons of stalks, ______ , lbs. an equal weight of hay, at the present price, dolls. would cost ______ difference, d. thou wilt readily perceive, without my dwelling on it, that the above method would answer equally well for store cattle as for horses. by the present mode the corn stalks are almost wholly lost, and a great proportion of the straw trodden under foot in the barn-yards. one benefit that would result from the change of feeding, and which must be obvious to every one, would be its enabling every farmer to keep a larger stock; and thus _increase his manure_,--the grand secret, after all is said, in farming well, and doing it to advantage. if it is alleged that my calculation of hay is too high, it may be observed, that the shorts are also estimated at a price higher than they often command in the philadelphia market. i have known them as low as cents; and cents is a very common price in the fall of the year. they may safely be put in bulk in the th mo. and will keep sweet until the ensuing spring.--i have thus hastily thrown my ideas together on this subject. if thou canst glean from them any thing of importance, i shall be glad. thy assured friend, james canby. _treatise on agriculture_. sect. ii. of the actual state of agriculture in europe. . the climate and soil of _great britain_ and _ireland_, are particularly favourable to husbandry; nor is her geographical position less auspicious--placed, as she is, on the longest line, and amidst the most important markets of the continent of europe. if to these advantages be added the laborious, enlightened, and enterprising character of the nation, we cannot but expect results the most favourable to agriculture: yet is the fact notoriously otherwise. to show that this opinion is neither hasty nor unfounded, we must enter into details, which may not be unprofitable. the surface of england is estimated at , , acres, which are distributed as follows: in pasturage, , , in tillage, , , in cities, roads & canals, , , lands fit for pasturage or tillage not cultivated, , , lands unfit for cultivation, , , of the arable land the following annual disposition is made: lands unfit for cultivation, , , in wheat and rye, , , in peas, beans, and buckwheat, , , in barley and oats, , , in fallow, or in turnips or cabbages, , , the lands, in wheat and rye, yield on an average of ten years, _three quarters_ per acre, or , , quarters; yet there is an annual deficit in england of , , quarters, which must be drawn from foreign markets.[ ] [ ] a _quarter_ is equal to six bushels, and the average produce in wheat and rye bushels per acre. for the whole kingdom the deficit is , , quarters. see geographic mathematic, art. great britain. there is certainly nothing very flattering in this view of english agriculture; but it may be said to be one of statists and politicians, and probably underrated. let us then see what their own most eminent agriculturists, their young and sinclair, and dickson and marshall, say on this subject--"_a very small portion of the cultivated parts of great britain, is to this day, submitted to a judicious and well conducted system of husbandry; not in fact more than four counties_, (norfolk, sussex, essex, and kent:) _while many large tracts of excellent soil are managed in a way the most imperfect and disadvantageous_."[ ] [ ] see the introduction to dickson's practical agriculture, d vol. quarto. nor is her management of cattle better. "considering the domestic animals in a general way, we find each species, and almost every race, capable of great improvement, and, with a few exceptions, the sheep much neglected. in some districts are whole races of cattle incapable of improvement (within a reasonable time) in the three great objects which they are expected to yield, viz. milk, flesh, and labour."[ ] we now add _some_ of the causes to which this defective husbandry has been ascribed: "to enumerate all would be impossible, from their number and complication."[ ] [ ] marshal, vol. iv. p. . [ ] dickson's practical agriculture. " st. the _commons_, or unenclosed grounds, which in many places amount to near one half of the whole arable land, and which are submitted to the most absurd and ruinous system of culture."[ ] [ ] idem. " d. the _terms_ (amounting to personal servitude) under which many of the lands are held." " d. the _shortness of leases_ given by corporations (civil and religious) and by individuals, and which seldom exceed _three_, _five_, or _seven_ years, excepting in the counties of norfolk, sussex, essex, and kent, where (with great advantage to both landlord and tenant) they are frequently extended to twenty-one years." " th. the _tithes in kind_, paid by the farmers to the church; a tax highly vexatious in its character, and oppressive in its effects: and " th. the _poor tax_, which has become enormous, and of which the yeomanry pay three fourths. of this tax it has been truly said, that it is a powerful instrument of depopulation--a barbarous contrivance for checking all national industry."[ ] [ ] young's tour through ireland, vol. ii. p. . to these causes, assigned by british writers, may be added the _increase_ of _population_, common to every nation of europe, and which in great britain is beyond all proportion greater than the progress of agriculture; the _augmentation_ of _cattle_, which occasions that of pasturage, and the diminution of tillage;[ ] the _establishment_ of _great farms_ at the expense of _small_ ones, and the _multiplication_ of _parks_ and _pleasure grounds_; and lastly, the _attraction of great cities_, and the _continual drafts_ made upon the agricultural population, for the army and navy, and for commerce and manufactures. [ ] mr. hume quotes with approbation an author, who complains of the decay of tillage in the reign of elizabeth, and who ascribes it to the increase of pasturage, in consequence of the restraints imposed on the exportation of grain, while that of butter, cheese, &c. was free. the history of europe, if read with an eye to public economy, furnishes an abundant proof, that the greatest obstructions to agriculture have arisen from the interference of government. we have here no sly allusion to our own projects of a state board of agriculture, of a chymico agricultural professorship, nor even of an agricultural college, if the treasury in its wealth, and the legislature in its wisdom, should deem such institutions useful or necessary. sect. iii. theory of vegetation. vegetables may be regarded as the intermediate link in the great chain of creation, between animals and minerals. the latter grow by mere chymical affinity, and by additions, sometimes analogous and sometimes foreign from their own nature; while plants, like animals, have an organization that enables them to receive their food, digest and assimilate it to their own substance, reproduce their species, and maintain an existence of longer or shorter duration. thus far the learned are agreed, but at the next step they differ. what is this food that gives to plants their developement, and maturity, and powers of reproduction? lord bacon believed that _water_ was the source of vegetable life, and that the earth was merely its home, its habitation, serving to keep plants upright, and to guard them against the extremes of heat and cold. tull, on the other hand, (and after him du hamel) pronounced _pulverized earth_ the only pabulum of plants, and on this opinion built his system of husbandry. van helmont and boyle opposed this doctrine by experiments: the former planted and reared a cutting of willow in a bed of dry earth, carefully weighed and protected against accretion by a tin plate, so perforated as to admit only rain and distilled water, with which it was occasionally moistened. at the end of five years the plant was found to have increased _one hundred and sixty-four pounds_, and the bed of earth to have lost, of its original weight, only _two ounces_. boyle pursued a similar process with gourds, and with a similar result. notwithstanding the apparent conclusiveness of these experiments, their authority was shaken, if not subverted, by others made by margraff, bergman, hales, kirwan, &c. &c. the first of these showed, that the rain water employed by van helmont, was itself charged with saline and other earthy matter; bergman demonstrated this by analysis, while kirwan and hales proved that the earth in which the willow cutting was planted, could absorb these matters through the pores of the wooden box which contained it, and that a glass case could alone have prevented such absorption. hunter, finding that oil and salt entered into the composition of plants, concluded that these formed their principal food, and accordingly recommended, as the great desideratum in agriculture, an _oil compost_. lord kaimes attempted to revive the expiring creed of lord bacon, but finding from hales' statics, that one third of the weight of a green pea was made up of carbonic acid, he added _air_ to the watery aliment of the english philosopher--but entirely rejected _oil_ and _earth_, as too gross to enter the mouths of plants, and _salt_ as too acrid to afford them nourishment. quackery, which at one time or other, has made its way into all arts and sciences, could not easily be excluded from agriculture. hence it was, that the abbe de valemont's _prolific liquor_, and de hare's and de vallier's _powders_, &c. &c. were believed to be all that was necessary to vegetation, and found the more advocates, as they promised much and cost little. but before the march of modern chymistry, quackery could not long maintain itself; and from the labours of bennet, priestly, saussure, ingenhouz, sennebier, schæder, chaptal, davy, &c. &c. few doubts remain on this important subject.--these will be presented in the course of the following inquiry. st. of _earths_, and their relation to vegetation. of six or eight substances, which chymists have denominated _earths_, four are widely and abundantly diffused, and form the crust of our globe. these are _silica_, _alumina_, _lime_, and _magnesia_.--the first is the basis of quartz, sand and gravel; the second, of clay; the third, of bones, river and marine shells, alabaster, marble, limestone and chalk; and the fourth, of that medicinal article known by the name of calcined magnesia.--in a pure or isolated state,[ ] these earths are wholly unproductive; but when decomposed and mixed,[ ] and to this mixture is added the residuum of dead animal or vegetable matter,[ ] they become fertile, take the general name of _soils_, and are again specially denominated, after the earth that most abounds in their compositions respectively. if this be silica, they are called _sandy_; if alumina, _argillaceous_; if lime, _calcareous_; and if magnesia, _magnesian_. their properties are well known: a _sandy_ soil is loose, easily moved, little retentive of moisture, and subject to extreme dryness; an _argillaceous_ soil is hard and compact when dry, tough and paste-like when wet, greedy and tenacious of moisture; turns up, when ploughed, into massive clods, and admits the entrance of roots with great difficulty. a _calcareous_ soil is dry, friable and porous; water enters and leaves it with facility; roots penetrate it without difficulty, and (being already greatly divided) less labour is necessary for it than for clay. _magnesian_, like calcareous earth, is light, porous and friable; but, like clay when wet, takes the consistency of paste, and is very tenaceous of water. it refuses to combine with oxygen, or with the alkalies; is generally found associated with granite, gneiss, and schiste, and is probably among the causes of their comparative barrenness.[ ] [ ] see gisbert's experiments on _pure earths_ and _their mixtures_. see also davy's elements of agricultural chemistry, p. . [ ] in this respect nature has been neither negligent or niggardly, if (as fourcroy asserts) the purest sand be a mixture of quartz, alumina, and sometimes of calcareous matter. _speculative geology_ is romance, and does not merit the name of science; yet is science obliged to borrow her theory of soils. the alternation of heat and cold, moisture and dryness, decomposed the mountains of primitive, secondary and tertiary formation; rains, and the laws of gravity, brought these from places of more, to places of less elevation--where, by mechanical mixture and chymical combination, the present substrata were formed. but these were yet naked and unproductive, when the cryptogamia family (mopes and lichens) took possession of them, and in _due time_ produced that vegetable matter, which made the earth productive and the globe habitable! [ ] dead animal and vegetable matter, in the last stage of decomposition, give a black or brown powder, which the french chymists call _terreau_ or _humus_, and which mr. davy calls an _extractive matter_; _this_ is the fertilizing principle of soils and manures. [ ] the opinion is general among the chymists of europe, that magnesian earth is not only barren itself, but the cause of barrenness in other soils in which it may abound, unless saturated with carbonic acid. see base, tennant, and davy. in these qualities are found the _mechanical relations_ between earths and vegetables. to the divisibility of the former it is owing, that the latter are enabled to push their roots into the earth; to their _density_, that plants maintain themselves in an erect posture, rise into the air, and resist the action of the winds and rains; and to their _power_ of _absorbing_ and _holding_ water, the advantage of a prolonged application of moisture, necessary or useful to vegetable life. but besides performing these important offices, there is reason to believe that they contribute to the _food_ of vegetables. this opinion rests on the following considerations and experiments: . if earths do not contribute directly to the food of plants, then would be all soils alike productive; or in other words, if air and water _exclusively_ supply this food, then would a soil of pure sand be as productive as one of the richest alluvion. . though plants may be made to grow in pounded glass, or in metallic oxides, yet is the growth, in these, neither healthy nor vigorous; and, . all plants, on analysis, yield an earthy product;[ ] and this product is found to partake most of the earth that predominates in the soil producing the analyzed plant; if _silica_ be the dominant earth, then is the product obtained from the plant _silicious_; if _lime_ prevail, then is the product _calcareous_, &c. &c. this important fact is proved by de saussure. [ ] davy says this never exceeds one fiftieth of the whole product. _ st experiment._ two plants (the pinus abies) were selected, the one from a calcareous, the other from a granitic soil, the ashes of which gave the following products; granitic calcareous soil. soil. potash alk. and mu. sul carbonate of lime carbonate of magnesia silica alumina metallic oxides _ d experiment._ two rhododendrons were taken, one from the calcareous soil of mount de la salle, the other from the granitic soils of mount bevern. of a _hundred_ parts, the former gave fifty-seven of carbonate of lime and five of silica; the latter, thirty of carbonate of lime, and fourteen of silica. _ d experiment._ this was made to determine whether vegetables, the product of a soil having in it no silica, would, notwithstanding, partake of that earth.--plants were accordingly taken from reculey de thoiry, (a soil altogether calcareous) and the result was a very small portion of silica. these experiments, says chaptal, leave little if any doubt, but that vegetables derive the earthy matter they contain from the soil in which they grow.[ ] [ ] shæder maintains the doctrine, that the earths found in plants are created there by the process of vegetation. his essay on this subject was crowned by the academy of berlin, in . his experiments were the first to determine the different quantities of silica found in different kinds of grain. . of _water_, as an agent in vegetation. seeds placed in the earth, and in a temperature above the freezing point, and _watered_, will develope; that is, their lobes[ ] will swell, their roots descend into the earth, and their stems rise into the air. but without humidity, they will not germinate; or deprived of humidity after germinating, they will perish. when germination is complete, and the plant formed, its roots and leaves are so organized as to _absorb water_. the experiments of hales prove, that the weight of plants is increased in wet and diminished in dry weather; and that in the latter, they draw from the atmosphere (by means of their leaves)[ ] the moisture necessary to their well being.--du hamel (and after him sennebier) has shown, that the filaments that surround the roots of plants, and which has been called their hair, perform for them in the _earth_, the office that leaves perform in the atmosphere, and that if deprived of these filaments the plants die. [ ] moisten a bean in warm water, and detach the skin that covers it, and it readily divides into two parts; these are called _lobes_. [ ] bonnet's experiments show, that it is the under surface of the leaf that performs this function, the upper surface has a different office. it would be easy, but useless, to multiply facts of this kind tending to establish a doctrine not contested, but which after all does not assert, that water makes part of the food of plants. on this point two opinions exist--the one, that this liquid is a solvent and conductor of alimentary juices: the other, that is itself an aliment and purveyor of vegetable food at the same time. the first opinion is abundantly established. water when charged with oxygen, supplies to germinating seeds the want of atmospheric air, and saturated with animal or vegetable matter in a state of decomposition, or slightly impregnated with carbonic acid, very perceptibly quickens and invigorates vegetation. the second opinion is favoured by some of de saussure's experiments. on these, chaptal makes the following remark, which expresses very distinctly an approbation of the doctrine they suggest:--"the enormous quantity of hydrogen (which makes so large a part of vegetable matter) cannot be accounted for but by admitting (in the process of vegetation) the _decomposition_ of _water_, of which hydrogen is the principal constituent; and that though there is nothing in the present state of our experience that directly establishes this doctrine, yet that its truth ought to be presumed, from the analysis of plants and the necessary and well-known action of water on vegetation. (to be continued.) _correction._--in copying the second section, page , an error escaped in relation to the _tuscan_ plough; the passage should have read thus--"the plough of the north of europe, like that of this country, has the power of a wedge, and acts horizontally--that that of tuscany has the same direction, but very different form. with the outline of a shovel, it consists of two inclined planes, sloping from the centre, and forms a gutter and two ridges. review for the rural magazine. _an expose of the causes of intemperate drinking, and the means by which it may be obviated. by thomas herttell of the city of new york. published by order of the new york society for the promotion of internal improvement_.--new york, .--pp. . this is an ingenious and interesting pamphlet. it is written with much force and originality; and we think we shall do the public a service by laying before our readers some of the author's remarks. there is no vice which steals upon us in so many attractive and deceitful shapes as that of intemperate drinking. in this country it is a national sin and infects every class of society. we meet its temptations in our social intercourse, at our public festivals--in the resorts of business; we see it indulged in by men of eminent character; spirituous liquors are kept in every sideboard, and brought forth upon almost every occasion. one class of society imitates the practice of another, and habitual drunkenness has become the stigma and disgrace of our country. the pamphlet before us, remarks (page ) that "the existence of this vice is now generally acknowledged, its progress marked, and its effects deplored. it is traced to the grog-shop where many of its most degrading _effects_ are discovered, and _mis_taken for _causes_, and the remedy attempted to be applied." "though i am not disposed to become the advocate of grog-shops, or to avert from them any portion of merited animadversion--or inclined to become the apologist of those who, under colour of keeping a tavern, follow the business of dram-selling; i am not willing that these places should be considered either as the _primary_ or _principal cause_ of the evil under review. the current opinion that such is the case, is incorrect, as i shall endeavour to shew. and i am induced to do this, from the conviction that the mistake is calculated to stop investigation short of the true source, and thus prevent the remedies from reaching the fountain-head of the evil. it happens in this, as in too many other instances, that the little sinners become the subjects of censure, while those whose crimes differ from them only in magnitude, are overlooked, or treated with complaisance. is it _wrong_ to sell liquor by the _glass_, to those who drink it--and is it _not wrong to sell it by the hogshead_, for the purpose of being so disposed of? are both these culpable, and shall those who import and sell it by the cargo, escape obloquy? and does the distiller differ from all those, in any other respect, than that he makes while they sell the poison for the purpose of its being drank? it is not my intention to censure the latter any more than the former class of dealers in ardent drink; and justice forbids that blame should attach itself exclusively to either. they are all _particepes criminis_, inasmuch as they all contribute facilities to the practice of intemperate drinking, and thus aid the continuance and increase of the evil. but its most prolific sources are not to be found among those classes of our fellow-citizens, considered in the _business character_. they only conform to the _customs_ and _habits_ of the community in which they live. they find their neighbours in the practice of using ardent drink, and profit by their folly. no one would be so weak as to invest his money in ardent liquor with the expectation of _learning_ people to drink. it is the _already acquired habit_, which constitutes the basis of his calculations of profit. so far, therefore, from grog-shops being the _primary_ or _principal cause_ of intemperate habits, the reverse of the position approaches nearer the truth. the habit of _intemperance is the cause of grog-shops_. "as the vice under consideration did not originate at those places, it is not limited to the class of people who drink there. the customers of coffee houses, hotels, and other taverns, and the sideboards and wine-cellars of private houses, prove the truth of this position. the landlords of those establishments would take it in dudgeon, to be told that their customers were of the lowest grade of society; and the proprietors of well stored sideboards and wine-cellars, would be highly offended at the imputation of drinking, or learning to drink, at grog-shops. if the practice of tippling was confined to the lower order of society, it could not with any propriety be regarded as a national sin. the character and habits of that class of the community can never alone constitute national character. admitting, therefore, that intemperate drinking is justly attributed to us as a feature of our national character, it follows irrefutably, that the _causes_ which produce that _effect_ are not confined to the purlieus of bar or tap-rooms. the upper classes of society never follow the examples of the lower: but the latter do, as far as they are able, imitate the customs of the former. had the habit of intemperance originated in the lower class, it would not, in all probability, have extended beyond it. as its prevalence is so general as to become a reproach to the nation, the inference is conclusive, that it is the progeny of higher parentage than grog-shops." "the radical sources of the evil" says judge herttell, "are _in the fashions, customs, and examples, of what are called the upper or wealthy classes of the community_." after remarking the common practice that intoxicating liquors are universally used as a table drink, he proceeds, "such being the practice, the parents of a family must, of necessity, adopt one of the two following measures:--the children must be permitted to partake of the common table beverage, or they must not. in the first case they are reared from their childhood to the _habitual use of ardent drink_. if the other course is pursued, and the use of the liquor interdicted to the children, while the parents daily drink it in their presence, he is very little acquainted with human nature, who does not know, that the value of the article is thereby arbitrarily enhanced--the disposition to enjoy it increased,--and, that as soon as the restraints of the parents are removed, and an opportunity presents, the forbidden fruit will be tasted, with as much avidity as if both conscience and justice demanded satisfaction for lost time and pleasures. under such circumstances, how vain is it to hope that children will not acquire the habit of intemperance--and how weak is it to wonder at their becoming drunkards! parents can hardly be said to have arrived to years of discretion, who shall expect that their admonitions against intemperance will be heeded, while their daily example is counteracting their influence. how ridiculous is it for them, while drinking wine and brandy in the presence of their children, to attempt to persuade them, that it is not good for them! should it happen, that in a family of half a dozen sons, there should be a sober man, the merit is his, and not his parents'; nor are they to be pitied, except for their folly, should they all be drunkards; and such is frequently the result. thus, almost every family becomes a school for intemperance, and a nursery of customers for taverns and grog-shops. "again; inebriating liquors have become the medium _universally adopted by society for manifesting friendship and good will, one to another_. it need only to be mentioned to be admitted, that it is the common practice, when friends or even strangers visit each other, they have scarcely time after being seated, to make the usual inquiries about health, and the common place remarks on the weather, before they are invited to drink intoxicating liquors. the welcome is deemed kind and sincere, in proportion to the frequency, and earnestness of the importunities to drink--liberal in proportion to the variety of the liquors; and their richness and profusion add to the other temptations to drink. not to offer them would be deemed unfriendly, mean, or unmannerly. not to accept them, would be attributed to ill-nature, or a want of politeness. hence, the visitor drinks to reciprocate good will for the proffered kindness, or in self-defence against the imputation of ill-breeding. and the visited, takes a glass for the company's sake, as it is called; and to evince his satisfaction on seeing his hospitality accepted _in the spirit_ in which it is offered. in this way do the laws of _fashion_ and _custom constrain people to drink_, who otherwise would have no inclination, or who have acquired that inclination, from the frequent if not daily occasions which occur, for tendering and reciprocating through the customary channel, sentiments of hospitality and good will to their associates, friends, and strangers. _thus is the vice of intemperate drinking ingrafted on the virtue of hospitality_; and so long as that virtue is cherished, and ardent liquors continue to be tendered as evidence of its existence, so long will the use of that article as a drink continue, and the vice of intemperance grow out of it. _this unnatural blending of virtue and vice, together with the practice of using inebriating drink as a table beverage, are the radical sources of that intemperance, which is said to be "the crying and increasing sin of the nation."_ it is at the family table, the first rudiments of intemperance are taught; the first examples set, and the first essays at tippling attempted. the practice is continued by the frequent display of hospitality and politeness, through the medium of ardent drink. the _acquired habit_, shows itself on holy-days, at dining and other parties, and on all convivial occasions--is pursued at taverns, and at last, descends to, and terminates its career at grog-shops. look at the catalogue of family misfortunes, and few will be found to have escaped the direful disease of intemperance; few which have not had their prosperity and happiness blighted by the extreme of that vice, in some one or more of their members." no doubt it is in the opulent that many of the vices of society originate. their weaknesses and errors are palliated; their example imitated and their indulgences eagerly craved by the poor. while therefore, the general practice of using ardent spirit continues among them, our author reasons that the popular remedy of curtailing the number of grog-shops, though it would lessen the _practice_ would not _destroy_ the habit of intemperance. should there remain a solitary place where liquor can be procured, the sin of intemperance will continue to be committed, and its associate vices and immorality entailed on society. "what!" says he, "it may be asked by the reader, are we required to relinquish the use of wine and ardent spirits, in order to prevent their abuse by others? shall we deny ourselves the _reasonable enjoyment_ of them, because others become _intemperate_? are we to be interdicted the _moderate_ use of them, because others drink to excess and get drunk? as well say the querists, might it be expected that we should extract our tongues, because others back-bite their neighbours! "in the first place, permit me to remark, that i have not uttered a word against the _moderate_ or _reasonable_ use of ardent liquors. but before we go farther, it may be proper to analyze the terms, _moderation_ and _intemperance_, as they relate to the use of inebriating drink. there can be no objection to its _reasonable_, _necessary_, and _moderate_ use. but i do contend, that the use of it by any person _in a full state of health, is at all times unnecessary_. the effect of strong drink, is to excite the animal spirits to a preternatural action.--when taken by a person in full health, it raises the animal spirits above the healthy standard. this is _unnecessary_--and inasmuch as it creates a deviation from a state of real health, it produces _disease_, and hence its use is _immoderate_, _intemperate_. the _indirect debility_ which succeeds the exhausted stimulant, is another and a worse state of _disorder_, which goes to confirm the truth, that the _first_ draught of ardent drink taken by those in full health, is _unnecessary_, _unreasonable_, and _excessive_. nor is this all--this indirect debility prompts a repetition of the draught--and now the _practice_ of drinking has commenced. the animal spirits having sunk as far below as they have been raised above the healthy standard, an _increased_ quantity is required to raise them as high as before. thus the habit of intemperance _progresses_. the spirits, now ebbing lower than before, demand increased support, the yielding to which demand, _confirms the habit of intemperance_. but it unfortunately happens, that the term _moderate_, when applied to intoxicating drink, by those who use it, is as unmeaning as the word _enough_ in the mouth of a miser, when speaking of his money. each drinks according to his taste and strength of habit, and calls it _moderate_. thus every grade of drinking, from the single glass of the novice, to the full bottle of the initiated, is termed _moderate_. and every degree of excitement, from _moderately merry_ to _moderately drunk_, is honoured with the same name. the real truth is, it is a poor apology for a bad practice; and a _moderate_ degree of reflection would lead those not slaves to the habit, to view it in that light." "i have the authority of distinguished physicians for remarking, that next to _intemperate eating_, intemperate _drinking_ engenders more bodily diseases, than any other single cause. that _more die_ of disorders occasioned by drinking, _before they become drunkards_, than _live to extend their intemperance to that extreme_. that the constant exercise of the labouring class, _procrastinates_, while the want of exercise tends to _facilitate_ the fatal effects of intemperance in the other class of society--and hence it is, that the _moderate drinking_, as it is modestly termed, of the _latter_, destroys at least as many as the _drunkenness of the former_, and in that ratio is as injurious to the community. the reason these facts are not subjects of general observation, is, that when people who are not reputed drunkards, die of complaints brought on by drinking, their death is imputed to the disorder, while that escapes being attributed to its true cause--whereas, reputed drunkards stand little or no chance of dying by any other means; for be they drowned by accident or hanged for murder, their end is generally, and perhaps too often, correctly ascribed to intemperate drinking." "it is really wonderful to witness how fertile is the love of ardent liquor, in excuses and pretences for its gratification. it is drank at one time, _because the weather is warm_--at another, _because it is cold_. it is drank with enemies "to _reconcile them_"--with friends, "_because they don't meet every day_"--on all festive, anniversary and other holydays, "_because they only come once a year_." and if at any or on all those times, the bounds of _moderation_ are exceeded, it is allowed to be _excusable_, "_because they are all extraordinary occasions!_" real or _pretended_ disorders are also often plead as an apology for drinking ardent liquor; and instances are not rare where, though it may have been regularly prescribed for medical purposes, and may have cured the disorder, it has finally killed the patient. it is doubtless for this reason, that distinguished gentlemen of the faculty have admitted, that the internal use of ardent liquor, even in cases in which it is indicated as a medical remedy, is often productive of far more hurt than good. "the most common pretence, however, is, that _the water is bad_, and requires a _little spirits to qualify it_; and hence it is infused with a poison of a more deleterious quality than any it naturally possessed. this _qualifying_ of the water, has been the means of _disqualifying_ many a valuable man, for nearly every purpose, except to bring disgrace, ruin, and misery on himself, his family and connexions." "i have taken no pains to ascertain the authority by which retailers of ardent drink are permitted to fix stands and booths at the park and other places, on days of public parade and festivity. the concentrating of so many grog-shops at times and places of the greatest collection of people, tends rather to produce tumult and confusion, than to preserve good order. these places not only tempt men to indulge to excess, but boys are often seen in them following the example--and it has been remarked, that more of this youthful class are seen disguised with liquor on those days, than in all the year beside. indeed, it very rarely occurs that a boy is seen thus degraded on any other occasion. should these travelling taverns be permitted only on condition that ardent spirits should not be carried to them, or sold, or given gratis there, it would remove the greatest objection which can be urged against them. the public would then be accommodated with every necessary refreshment, without jeopardizing their peace by means of intemperate drinking. "it would essentially benefit the community, should the _inducements to frequent taverns be lessened_. this may be done in a variety of instances. it is usual in the country towns, to muster the militia at or in the immediate vicinity of taverns. this practice tends neither to improve the morality or discipline of the men--and if they must continue as now to be mustered at those places or _not mustered at all_, i have no hesitation in saying, that the public would sustain no material injury, should the latter course be adopted; for it is certainly true, and the reason is obvious, that many of the men, at the close of their exercise on those parade days, are not so well qualified to serve their country, as when they come to the rendezvous. much of the evil of the present practice would be obviated, should military officers, vested with power to muster any corps of militia, in the country towns, for the ordinary purposes of exercise or inspection, be bound by law to locate the parade ground at least a mile from any tavern or retail grocery. the carrying of ardent liquor to the rendezvous, and the selling it there, or giving it gratis to any person, especially the soldiers, should be interdicted, under proper penalties, and provision made for due execution of the law. other refreshments than ardent drink, being as usual permitted, all the reasonable conveniences of taverns would be enjoyed, and many of those disgusting instances of riot and disturbance, occasioned by intemperate drinking, and which often convert our militia parades in the country, into scenes of disorder and insubordination, rather than schools for military instruction and discipline, would be done away. "the legislature should prohibit justices' courts being held at taverns. the disgraceful scenes which are too often the consequences of trials at those places, would thereby be prevented, and the cause of _morality_, and not unfrequently, that of _justice_, essentially benefited. the same objection lies, though perhaps not with equal force, against sheriff's courts being held at those places. if the court house is not at hand, it must be a beggarly office which would not afford the appropriating of a room for the performance of its duties in the dwelling of its incumbent, or pay for the use of a convenient place elsewhere for the purpose. the practice of holding trials at taverns, before referees, appointed by order of the court, is not exempt from serious objections.--these, however, being less frequent, are not so productive of evil, and, perhaps, are more difficult to be obviated. "the holding of auction sales at taverns, as is frequently the case in the country, is pregnant with mischief sufficient to justify legislative interposition.--those who have witnessed, can best describe them--i only know them by description. on these occasions, the number who go to buy, is but small, compared to those who attend from other motives. the owner of the property for sale, is seldom backward in circulating the glass freely at his own expense, because he is like to receive more than cent. per cent. profit from the consequent indiscretion of those who become affected with the _spirit of bidding_. many are thus led on to buy unnecessarily and dear; and frequent instances occur, where people bid off more than they have means to pay for--and thence law-suits, trials, at taverns, family distress, the insolvent act, and perhaps poverty and pauperism close the account. these are only the outlines of the picture, which those who have seen the original, are best qualified to fill up with neglect of _domestic concerns_--_horse-racing_ and _jockeying_--_profane swearing_--_drunkenness_--_quarrelling_, and sometimes _fighting_, and a variety of other _amusements_, not unusual on such occasions. "the lamentable consequences of holding the polls of our political elections at public houses, are too generally known to require particular description. suffice it to say, that the noise and tumult--the heated, irritating and useless discussions which frequently occur, and which go to impair the respectability of the electors, and the credit of the elective franchise, are oftner the result of the _spirit of liquor_ than the _spirit of patriotism_. as far as legislative provisions can obviate the evil, it ought to be done. the expense would be small and the benefit great, should each ward in the cities, and each town in the country, build a house or room for the purpose of elections. the profit which might accrue from its use on other occasions, would, in many instances, more than pay the interest on its cost. it is a little remarkable, that the sagacity which prompted the interdiction of military parades on the days of election, as dangerous to the freedom of the elective franchise, did not foresee and guard against the evils consequent on locating the election polls at public houses. "it is hoped that the good sense of the community will operate to abolish the custom of giving extravagant entertainments, on any occasion, in honour of distinguished characters. this practice, by leading many to taverns, and tempting them to indulge freely, is productive of more mischief than benefit to society. as an example, it is bad. people, in the lower walks of life, cannot be taught, that it is wrong to get drunk in company with, and out of mere good humour to their friends, while they see too many of the upper circles retire from those feasts, not exactly sober. i humbly conceive it would be manifesting far higher respect for a great man, to compliment him with a written address, approbating his character and conduct, accompanied with a medal, a piece of plate, or other present, embellished with appropriate insignia and inscriptions.--these would be lasting testimonials of character and worth. being always visible, they would act continually as a stimuli to urge others to emulate the honourable course by which they were acquired;--whereas, those public entertainments are scarcely noticed beyond the day they are _puffed_ in the newspapers--and if they were, the honoured guest could derive no great satisfaction in the reflection, that his friends had _eaten_ and _drank immoderately_, in _honour of his virtues_. there is a strong family likeness between these dinners and those _eaten ex-officio_ by our city corporation. "the meetings of self-created societies at taverns, cannot, perhaps, at all times, be well avoided. there doubtless are many of those institutions which are useful--but that there are many which do more hurt than good, is equally true. they ought, indeed, to be productive of great benefit, to counterbalance the evil tendency they have, to draw their members to taverns at night. many a good citizen has, in this way, unwarily contracted irregular habits--and many a deserving wife, and family of innocent babes, have had reason to lament the truth of this remark. it will be a great pity, if those societies cannot be prevailed on, to procure places at which to hold their meetings.--this might easily be effected, unless too strong a predeliction for tavern meetings should counteract so reasonable a proposition." "in the year , admiral vernon commanded the british fleet in the west indies. his undress coat was made of _grogram_, a cloth fabricated of silk and worsted. he was very unpopular in the fleet, and the sailors, in allusion to his coat, nick-named him _old grogram_; and afterwards, by way of shortening it, they called him _old grog_. when ardent liquor was first given to sailors, and until the time above-mentioned, it was drank _raw_--but being found to produce many fatal bodily diseases, and the naval service thereby much injured, the admiral directed that the rum should be weakened with water. the men were highly displeased at having their drink thus _spoiled_, and in derision of the admiral, called it by his abbreviated nick-name, "_grog._" this is the reason that rum, mixed with water, bears that name. let it be observed, _because_ the _raw_ rum was found to produce deleterious effects on the health of the sailors, the admiral ordered that it should be mixed with water. now, as it probably could not require many years to make that discovery, it is fair to conclude, that the first use of ardent spirits, as a daily drink on ship-board, could not have been a very great length of time anterior to the year ." "on another occasion, i have mentioned, and will here repeat, that the baleful practice of giving ardent liquor to labourers, ought to be exploded. this custom has so powerfully aided other causes of intemperance, that there is scarcely to be found among the labouring class, any who do not drink, and drink too much. it is unquestionably owing, in a great measure, to this, that the apprentices to many mechanical branches, are initiated into the habit of intemperance, before they acquire a knowledge of their trade; and it is certainly owing to the same cause, that many do not gain a perfect knowledge of their business. here, too, we see a powerful objection operating, to prevent many respectable parents from putting their sons to mechanical occupations. hence, many a promising mechanical genius is smothered in the warehouse, or doomed to add a useless member to the already over-run and over-rated learned professions. this serves to degrade the honourable calling of mechanics, which suffers another depression from the necessity which these circumstance create, of taking apprentices from the lower circles of society, whose want of the requisite education disqualifies them for attaining an adequate knowledge of their trade. in addition to this, the master mechanic, growing wealthy by his business, too often becomes infected with the follies and _fashions_ of upper life--in which sphere some are fitted only to appear ridiculous. their sons, forsooth, must be _above_ their fathers' business. they must be brought up gentlemen--and, of course, reared in idleness and extravagance, or become _professionable_ men or _merchants_.--thus, by their conduct, they give countenance to those whose weakness may dispose them to undervalue mechanical occupations. "the great number of public holy-days (as they are termed) which are generally observed, are not without their pernicious influence on the morals of society.--was the manner of their celebration such as to honour the events they are intended to commemorate, their observance, if not useful, would at least be innocent in their consequences. but were we to judge their objects solely by the manner in which they are kept, and the effects they produce, we might be led to the erroneous conclusion, that they were instituted to subserve the causes of vice and immorality. the general suspension of useful employment on those days, is followed by an increased indulgence in drinking; and this accounts for there being more crimes committed on those days, than in any other equal period of time. on the authority of a gentleman who was on the grand jury which sat in the present year, i state, that far the greatest portion of the business of that jury, grew out of crimes and disorders committed during the christmas and new-year holy-days. when it is observed, that the court for the trial of criminals is held once a month, and crowded with business, it would be superfluous to add arguments to such facts. "the custom of giving wine and other liquors at funerals, is not at all calculated to increase the solemnity of those occasions. the practice is bad, and ought to be discountenanced by those whose example may influence others to follow it. instances have happened, where the _effects_ of this _ill-timed hospitality_, have been very justly lamented. how such an absurd custom was first introduced, is not, perhaps, so evident as the impropriety of its continuance. "to conclude--'to what purpose,' an inconsiderate though well-intentioned friend, has said, and others as thoughtless, may say, 'do you attempt to write down the use of ardent drink? notwithstanding all you have said, or may say, people will continue to drink as usual.' in the first place, i answer, _i am not sure of that_--and in the next place, _i am sure_, that if they will continue to use spirituous liquor as _a daily table drink_, and give and receive it as the _token_ of _friendship_ and _good will_, thereby associating the _vice_ of _drinking_ with the _virtue_ of _hospitality_--if they will _accustom their children to the use_ or _witness_ the use of ardent drink, and rear them in _idleness_ and _extravagance_, with the mistaken idea of thus making them _ladies_ and _gentlemen_--if they will continue to 'have wine in their (public) feasts,' and license taverns by thousands, and create a thousand temptations to frequent them--if they will persist in the practice of giving strong drink to the working class of society, and _thereby contribute to degrade their character, and bring useful industry_ into contempt--if they will continue to celebrate their anniversaries by a course of unrestrained intemperance--then, i again repeat, _i am sure_, that notwithstanding all their professions of patriotism, morality, philanthropy and religion, they cannot escape the imputation of loving ardent spirits more than the work of reformation: and moreover, cannot avert, and will merit all the ills which are flowing, and must continue to flow, from the demoralizing influence of intoxicating drink. intemperance, the reigning sin of the nation, will go on 'increasing to increase,' till immorality, spreading far and wide, shall debase the people, corrupt their rulers, and destroy the liberties of our country. then dark illimited despotism, with its genial concomitant, blind superstition, weak-minded bigotry, and black-hearted fanaticism; while forging the chains, preparing the wheel, and igniting the faggots of unholy and merciless persecution, will rear its head, and impiously exult in the downfall of the only government on earth, the existence of which, is not a reproach to the common sense of mankind." "_new york, january, ._" _a view of botany bay._ in the d number of the edinburgh review, for july last, we find an interesting account of the settlement called botany bay in new south wales, discovered by the dutch in , and taken possession of by the british in . on the close of the war by which the united states obtained their independence, the government of great britain, at a loss for a receptacle for convicts sentenced to banishment, at last selected this remote country, and made the first settlement there in . this colony, now a very flourishing one, was thus planted with the rogues of england, ireland and scotland, sent thither, in exile, as a punishment for their crimes--transportation to that distant and savage land being more dreaded there, perhaps, than our penitentiary is here, from which escapes are made with so much facility--the _certainty_ of punishment deterring from the commission of crime more than its _severity_. the criminals landed in this southern clime, finding themselves placed in a new situation, where little could be got by theft, and having a better chance than in the mother country of earning a comfortable subsistence, often changed their habits, and became industrious, if not honest men. they are probably destined to be a great nation, having an abundant scope of territory, , miles in length, and , in breadth, (three-fourths the extent of europe,) and will, at a future day, in imitation of america, cast off the shackles of colonial subjection, and assert the prerogative of self-government. the climate of botany bay is represented to be equal to any in europe, but rather asiatic than european--favourable on the whole to health and longevity. december, january, and february, are the summer months of that country, and then the heat, which at noon is at deg. is tempered by a strong sea-breeze. the winter months, june, july, and august, have very cold nights, and fire through the day is comfortable. the reviewer humorously calls this colony "a land of convicts and kangaroos," and sportively observes, that, "in this remote part of the earth nature (having made horses, oxen, ducks, geese, oaks, elms, and all regular and useful productions, for the rest of the world) seems determined to have a bit of play, and to amuse herself as she pleases. accordingly, she makes cherries with the stone on the outside; and a monstrous animal, as tall as a granadier, with the head of a rabbit, a tail as big as a bed-post, hopping at the rate of five hops to a mile, with three or four young kangaroos looking out of its false uterus to see what is passing. then comes a quadruped as big as a large cat, with the eyes, colour, and skin of a mole, and the bill and web-feet of a duck--'puzzling dr. shaw' and rendering the latter half of his life miserable, from his utter inability to determine whether it was a bird or a beast. add to this a parrot, with the legs of a sea-gull; a skate with the head of a shark, and a bird of such monstrous dimensions that a side bone of it will dine three real carnivorous englishmen; together with many other productions that agitate sir joseph, and fill him with mingled emotions of distress and delight." the colony has made the following progress: in . . horned cattle , horses , sheep , hogs , land cultivated _none_ acres, , inhabitants , , sydney, the principal town and seat of government, has a population of souls; it has a newspaper, a bank, and many public and private buildings, that would not disgrace the best parts of london--so says mr. wentworth, a native of botany bay, who has lately published a statistical, historical, and political description of the country. the attention paid to the education of the children, by their "larcenous forefathers," is worthy of commendation and of imitation in other parts of the world, where the morals of the parent stock are less depraved. "the town of sydney contains good public schools, for the education of children of both sexes. there are establishments also for the diffusion of education in every populous district throughout the colony: the masters of these schools are allowed stipulated salaries from the orphans' fund. mr. wentworth states, that one-eighth part of the whole revenue of the colony is appropriated to the purposes of education: this eighth he computes at _l._ independent of these institutions, there is an auxiliary bible society, a sunday school, and several good private schools. this is all as it should he: the education of the poor, important every where, is indispensable at botany bay. nothing but the earliest attention to the habits of children can restrain the erratic finger from the contiguous scrip, to prevent the hereditary tendency of larcenous abstraction. the american arrangements respecting the education of the lower orders, is excellent. their unsold lands are surveyed, and divided into districts. in the centre of every district, an ample and well selected lot is provided for the support of future schools. we wish this had been imitated in new holland; for we are of opinion that the elevated nobleman, lord sidmouth, should intimate what is good and wise, even if the americans are his teachers. mr. wentworth talks of , acres set apart for the support of the female orphan schools; which certainly does sound a little extravagant; but then or acres of this reserve are given as a portion to each female orphan; so that all this pious tract of ground will be soon married away. this donation of women, in a place where they are scarce, is amiable and foolish enough. there is a school also for the education and civilization of the natives, we hope not to the exclusion of the children of convicts, who have clearly a prior claim upon public charity." great exertions have been made in public roads and bridges. toll gates have been established on all the principal roads. the general average of unimproved land in the neighbourhood of the town is _l._ sterling per acre. the inhabitants of new south wales have suffered greatly from the tyranny and caprice of the rulers placed over them by britain. there is no sufficient check on the governor of the colony--far from the parent country, there is no council to restrain his excesses, nor any colonial legislature to assert the rights of the people. there is no trial by jury. the governor imposes what taxes he pleases. [_geo. journal._ intelligence. died, at windsor castle, george william frederic guelph on the th of january. his majesty george the third, was born on the th of may, , which since the alteration of the style, has become the th of june. at his death, therefore, he had reached the advanced age of eighty-one years seven months and twenty-six days. he was proclaimed king on the th of october, .--on september th, , he was married to her late majesty, and had issue seven sons and five daughters, of whom six of the former and four of the latter survive him. his royal highness the prince of wales was appointed regent on the th of feb. , and from that time he has been virtual sovereign, acting in the name and on the behalf of his majesty. his majesty, from the appointment of the regent, remained in retirement at windsor castle, under the guardianship of a council, who met every month, or more frequently as occasions might require, and issued a report of the state of his indisposition. after the death of his late majesty had been formally announced, the following instrument was prepared and signed. "whereas, it hath pleased the almighty god, to call to his mercy our late sovereign lord, king george the d. of blessed memory, by whose decease the imperial crown of the united kingdom of great britain and ireland, is solely and rightfully come to the high and mighty prince, george prince of wales: we, therefore, the lords spiritual and temporal of this realm, being here assisted with those of his late majesty's privy council, with numbers of other principal gentlemen of quality, with the lord mayor, aldermen and citizens of london, do now hereby, with one voice and consent, of tongue and heart, publish and proclaim, that the high and mighty prince, george, prince of wales, is now, by the death of the late sovereign, of happy memory, become our only lawful and rightful liege, lord george the th. by the grace of god, king of great britain and ireland, defender of the faith, &c. to whom we do acknowledge all faith and constant obedience, with all hearty and humble affection; beseeching god, by whom kings and queens do reign, to bless the royal prince, george the th with long and happy years, to reign over us. given at the court at carlton-house, this th day of january, . god save the king." then follows the signature of the privy councillors, &c. present. the king's fourth son, edward guelph, duke of kent, &c. died at sidmouth, after a short but very severe illness on the d of january. he was born november , . the interment of the king of england, took place on the th of february; and on the following day, both houses of parliament convened according to adjournment. a message from the new king was received and read, and _an address of condolence and congratulation_ was adopted in the house of lords. a new parliament is to be summoned; and great activity every where prevails in preparing for the approaching general election. _ancient custom._--on the day that the present king was to be proclaimed as george the fourth, a procession was formed fronting the palace of carlton-house, and proceeded for the city, when, on the cavalcade arriving at temple-bar they found the gates, according to ancient custom, closed. "the city marshall was sent forward to the gate, intimation having been given to the lord mayor that there was a loud knocking at the gate, and a demand of admittance from some persons outside. the marshall went to the gate, and asked, 'who knocks,' and was answered, 'the herald king at arms. i attend with a warrant to proclaim king george the fourth. open your gates.' the city marshall answered, 'i shall inform the lord mayor that you are waiting at the gate.' the marshall then rode back to the lord mayor, and having informed him that the herald king at arms was in waiting for admission, to proclaim george the fourth, king of england, was directed by his lordship to give the admission required, which was to be limited to the herald king at arms. the marshall upon going to the gates, said to the officers, 'open one side of the gates and admit the herald king at arms, and him alone.' the herald then rode in, supported by his guards, and was accompanied by the city marshall to the lord mayor. the herald king at arms presented the warrant.--the lord mayor immediately said, 'admit the whole procession into our city of london.'" sir isaac heard, the garter-king-at-arms, is years of age. george the th was proclaimed as king, at liverpool, without parade, on the st of jan. but was proclaimed there again on the th of feb. with much pomp and ceremony.--there was a grand military and civil procession; and among the latter, all the mechanic professions, each with appropriate standards. the late king is said to have given between and $ , a year in charities. _london_, feb. . we have received this morning the paris papers of tuesday. they are, of course, painfully interesting, for they communicate a variety of facts connected with the assassination of his royal highness the duke de berri. among the most important of these is the undeniable one, that the atrocious crime was committed from political motives. this alarming truth was distinctly admitted, not only by the members of the two chambers, who met to address his majesty, upon the mournful occasion but it is recognized by the king himself, in the concluding sentence of his answer to the address of the deputies.--"the chamber cannot doubt," said his majesty, "that, feeling as a man, and acting as a king, i shall adopt every necessary measure to preserve the _state from dangers, of which i am but too forcibly forewarned by the crime of this day_." the assassin himself, indeed, according to the letter of our private correspondent, upon being interrogated, avowed that he had exterminated the duke, as the youngest of the royal family, "knowing that nature would soon relieve him from the necessity of abridging the days of the king." the duke of berri was in his d year, and was, next to his aged father, count d'artois, heir to the throne. "the assassin is about years of age; his name is louvel. it appears he was one of those who went and returned with bonaparte from elba, and has since been employed, up to the very time of the fatal deed, in his majesty's hunting establishment. a vessel has arrived at portsmouth from st. helena, which place she left on the th of december. bonaparte, at that time, was well, and continued his out-door exercise, in the grounds attached to longwood. "his new house was nearly ready for his reception, and it is in every respect a most spacious and commodious mansion; containing, with a ball room, excellent rooms." miscellany. from a late report of the secretary of the treasury it appears that the banking capital of the united states, including the united states' bank, and excluding all banks incorporated since , amounts to $ , , . a curious circumstance occurred on monday week at market levington, wilts. a person named jane webb attended divine service attired precisely in the same suit of mourning for our late sovereign george iii. as was worn by her for king george ii. the singularity of its make, attracted much notice. this venerable and frugal spinster has attained her th year. an oil spring has been discovered in the county of morgan, ohio, which is stated to yield an inexhaustible quantity of this liquid. it sells for fifty cents a gallon. it is used for lamps, for currying leather, for mixing in medicines, &c. whether it is calculated for mixing in paints had not been ascertained. _worm in a horse's eye._--dr. william scott, of madras, has extracted a worm from the aqueous humour of a horse's eye to which he gave the name of _accaris pellucidus_. the legislature of new jersey has passed a law for incorporating a company for the purpose of embanking and draining the salt marsh on barbadoes neck in that state. in the british quarterly review, mention is made of a british statute now in force, in which the punishment of a certain offence is _transportation_ for years; and on conviction, one half thereof is to go to the _informer_, and the other half to the _king_! did ever an irish parliament make such a blunder as this? _virginia_ is much engaged in laying out works of internal improvement; especially with a project of uniting the waters of james river with those of kenawha. _the bordeaux ship of discovery_, (says a new york paper) has arrived at bordeaux, after an absence of three years and a half. this ship has traversed the pacific ocean, and collected at the sandwich islands, some interesting accounts of the fate of _la peyrouse_ and his companions. a london paper states, that the account will soon be published. _shawneetown, illinois, feb. ._ _arrival from new york!_--the steam boat manhattan, from new york, arrived here this day, days from new orleans. she brings consignments for two houses in this place, from the city of new york. freight three dollars only. _imports at liverpool from the united states._ _flour, bbls._ _rice, casks._ _tobacco, hds._ _cotton, bags._ , , , , , , , , , , , , the maine and missouri questions are at length settled. both districts of country are admitted into the union, as states; the former, from its population, requiring no restriction of slavery; and the latter admitted on the same terms-- majority in the house of representatives in favour of the bill as it has passed. the bill, however, excludes slavery from all the territory north of - / deg. of n. latitude, missouri excepted. from a respectable correspondent in pauling, duchess county, we have the following singular case. mr. luther brownwell of beekman, in that county having, in the month of april , a sow with a litter of five pigs, and she dying when they were only two days old, he appropriated the milk of one of his new milch cows for their support. the cow was milked four or five times a day for this purpose, and the pigs were learned to drink the milk. when pasturing time came, they were put in the field where the cow with nine others was kept. at the age of two months, the pigs had the sagacity to single out this cow from the rest, and when hungry would come round her, root at her legs, squeak, and exhibit the usual signs of their wants. the cow at length learned to lay down, and let them suck what they wanted. in this way they grew very rapidly until some time in september, when they were put up to fatten, and were killed the november following. their average weight was _ lbs._ or _ lbs._ of pork, which he sold for $ , a hundred. aside from the singularity of this case, the inquiry naturally presents itself, could the milk of the cow have been put to a more profitable use? is it not probable that her milk made an addition of at least _ lbs._ to the quantity of pork? [_plough boy._ an apprentices' library is about to be established in new york, on the same plan as the one in this city and in boston. the library in boston consists of about volumes, principally of books on the mechanic arts, of history, travels, and other useful knowledge, and on moral and religious subjects. _steam boats._--among many interesting articles in the second number of the german correspondent, published in new york, we find the following: "the steam boat blucher was lately launched at potsdam. several members of the royal family were present, and prince albseeth conferred the name. this is probably the largest steam boat in europe, the whole length being feet. it draws but - / inches of water. the boat contains _two_ engines, which perform exceedingly well. the utmost precaution is used against accidents by fire. as this vessel will carry merchandize of great value, and in large quantities, the hold has been divided into nine compartments by water proof partitions, so that, in case it should spring a leak, there is every probability that the vessel would not fill--besides, by means of tubes there is a communication between these chambers and the locations of the engines, which are so arranged as to pump any quantity of water out of the divisions where the leak may exist. this improvement appears to be well calculated for the steam boats on the mississippi." _sagacity of a bear._--a bear which had stolen a sheep, being closely persued by several dogs, promptly resorted to a most ingenious expedient. he tore the sheep in pieces, and threw the dogs one of the hinder legs; and while they were partaking of this repast, had full time to escape. this fact is formally certified, by a game-keeper in transylvania, where there are a great many bears. the most remarkable circumstance was, that from that time the dogs would never attack any of these animals, but on the contrary, received them in the most friendly manner, as if they expected a dinner. the owner of the flock was obliged to have the dogs shot, that he might not have those hungry guests always about him. [_german paper._ phenomenon. _to the editor of the literary gazette._ sir, i lately read an account of the figure, which, under some peculiar state of the atmosphere, appears on the hartz mountain, in germany. it reminds me of an extraordinary illusion to which i was once exposed; if it have interest enough for publication, it is at your service. about seven years since, i was one evening, in the month of october, returning late from a friend's house in the country, where i had dined, to the neighbouring town, about a mile distant: the night was exceedingly dark, and i had been requested to take with me a lantern; a pocket one could not be found, and i was provided with that which the servants generally carried swung in the hand. i had to pass through some fields over high ground: soon after i had entered the second of these, i observed something large moving along with me. i placed the lantern on the ground, and walking toward it, saw a gigantic figure retiring with astonishing speed. i immediately perceived it was my own shadow on a fog, which i had not before observed. the appearance of retiring was phantasmagoric, and arose from my interruption of the rays of light from the lantern, at a lesser angle, as my distance from the light increased. my return to the light was terrific; the figure appeared to advance upon me with frightful rapidity, till it seemed forty feet high. if i had been ignorant of the cause of this appearance, the effects might have much alarmed me, and led to my telling such stories as i should not have gained credit by relating: but aware of the cause, i was delighted with the singularity of my situation; and might have been thought mad by an observer, for every fantastic attitude and action i could assume i did, to be mimicked by my new and shadowy acquaintance. i am, sir, your obedient servant, w. _english vegetables._--in the former part of the reign of king henry viii. there did not grow in england a cabbage, carrot, turnip, or other edible root--and even queen catherine could not command a sallad for dinner, till the king brought over a gardener from the netherlands.--the artichoke, apricot, and damask rose, then made their first appearance in england. _coaches._--coaches were introduced in ; before which time, queen elizabeth rode, on public occasions, behind her lord chamberlain. _ladies' charity._--in the letters of madame d. upon england, which have just been published, we find the following passage, which shows how little a woman used to the coteries of paris can appreciate the purest of our christian charities.--"the most elegant women in london have a certain day, upon which they go to a large room surrounded with counters, at the end of argyle street; they go in person, to sell, for the profit of the poor, the trifles, which they amuse themselves in making during the course of the year. you may imagine that a young gentleman who pays his court to a young lady, is not permitted to hesitate at the price of the work of her fair hands. in fact, i saw several who were really foolishly extravagant, and the bank-notes were showered down on the counters of these ladies. "i observed in this assembly the prettiest young women i ever saw in my life; all the men loiter delighted before her counter, and it was she whose stock was the soonest disposed of. the last man who stopped at it took a handful of bank-notes, and exchanged them for a watch-ribbon. i departed, enchanted with this scene." _chimnies._--in the age next preceding queen elizabeth, there were few chimnies, even in capital towns: the fire was laid to the wall, and the smoke issued at the roof, or door, or window. the houses were wattled, and plastered over with clay; and all the furniture and utensils were of wood. the people slept on straw pallets, with a log of wood for a pillow. "_the wisdom of catwg_--the seven questions proposed by catwg the wise to seven wise men in his college at llanfeithin, with their answers. " . what constitutes supreme goodness in a man? equity. " what shews transcendent wisdom in a man? to refrain from injuring another when he has the ability. " . what is the most headstrong vice in a man? incontinence. " . who is the poorest man? he who has not resolution to take of his own. " . who is the richest man? he who coveteth nothing belonging to another. " . what is the fairest quality in a man? sincerity. " . what is the greatest folly in a man? the wish to injure another without having the power to effect it." _antediluvian oak._--in digging the capacious drain in bilsby parish, connected with the new work of sewers near alford, at the depth of thirty feet some oak trees have been found, which are at this time the subject of examination by the curious. they are as black as ebony, but the heart is firm wood, notwithstanding the trees are believed to have been deposited for several thousand years. the conjecture formed by those best qualified for considering the subject of similar discoveries in other situations is, that they existed before noah's flood. _nugæ antiquæ._--from a household book of the earl of northumberland in the reign of henry viii. it appears, that his family, during winter, fed mostly on salt fish and salt meat, and with that view there was an appointment of gallons of mustard. the earl had two cooks, and more than domestics. holinshed says, that merchants, when they gave a feast, rejected butchers' meat as unworthy of their table: having jellies of all colours, and in all figures, representing flowers, trees, beasts, fish, fowl and fruit. the streets of paris, not being paved, was covered with mud; and yet for a woman to travel those streets in a cart was held an article of luxury, and prohibited by philip the fair. an old tenure in england binds the vassal to find straw for the king's bed, and hay for his horse. it was a luxurious change of wood platters for pewter plates, and from wooden spoons to those of tin. holinshed says, "when our houses were built of willow, then had we oaken men? but now that our houses are made of oak, our men are not only become willow but, many, through persian delicacy, crept in among us, altogether of straw, which is a sore alteration." _reproof._--a person was remonstrating with a friend, inclined too much to dandyism, on the absurdity of following such foppish fashions. "they are really contemptible, (said he,) and i am sure all who see you must think you ridiculous." "i don't value the opinion of the world, (answered he,) i laugh at all those who think me ridiculous." "then you can never give over laughing," drily observed his mentor. _anecdote._--when the english court interfered in favour of the protestant subjects of louis xiv. and requested his majesty to release some who had been sent to the gallies, the king asked angrily, "what would the king of great britain say were i to demand the prisoners of newgate from him?" sir, (replied the ambassador,) my master would give every one of them up to your majesty, if, as we do, _you reclaim them as brothers_. if you think this little anecdote worth a place in the _rural magazine_, you may be assured of its authenticity. a. b. "a guilty conscience needs no accuser." a singular instance of the truth of this saying occurred a few days ago, in market street. a sharper, under pretence of buying some small article in a store, managed to take from a countryman present, his pocket book, and having secured, as he supposed, his booty, paid his little bill and retired. the honest storekeeper discovering he had given him too little change, immediately went to the door and called him to stop. the fellow supposing himself detected, took, to his heels. the croud in the street observing the circumstances cried stop thief! stop thief! he was soon overtaken and brought back, when the pocket book, which had not been missed by the owner, was found on him, and he taken before the proper authority. communicated for the rural magazine. _a newly discovered, cheap and durable paint._ i send you for publication in the rural magazine, a receipt for a newly discovered paint, it is cheap and will no doubt be useful to some of your readers. d. to a common gallon pail of whitewash, add pint of cheap molasses and pint of white table salt. the best store lime should be selected and boiling water used in slaking it. it should be frequently stirred as you put it on. two thin coats will be sufficient to cover the weatherboards of out-buildings. it will not wash or scale off like common whitewash and is beautifully white. for other colours mix ochres of various kinds. _air jacket._--mr. charles kendal lately made an experiment on the thames, of the efficacy of his jacket, or life-preserver, which completely succeeded. he went from the southwark bridge through london bridge with great ease and on to the london docks in minutes, walking upright in the water accompanied by his man all the way. _a new and cheap conductor of lightning and fluid._--mr. capostolle, professor of chemistry in the departments of the somme, affirms that a rope of straw supplies the place of the expensive metal conductors. the experiments, which he has made in the presence of many learned men and which have been repeated by them, confirms as he says that the lightning enters a rope of straw placed in its way and passes through it into the ground so gently that the hand of a person holding the rope at the time does not perceive it. mr. capostolle brings the following proof of this assertion. it is well known says he that a severe shock is received by a person who immediately touches the leyden vial. but if a person takes a rope of straw, only seven or eight inches long, in his hand, and touches, with the end of this rope a leyden vial, so strongly charged that an ox might be killed by it, he will neither see a spark, or feel the slightest shock. according to mr. capostolle's opinion, such conductor made of straw, which would not cost alone three francs, would be able to protect an extent of sixty acres of ground from hail; and if the houses and fields were protected in this manner, neither hail nor lightning could do any damage to them. _economy of nature._--in the sunshine vegetables decompose the _carbonic acid gas_ of the atmosphere, the _carbon_ of which is absorbed, and becomes a part of their organized matter, but the _oxygen gas_, the other constituent is given off; thus the economy of vegetation is made subservient to the general order of the system of nature. again, _carbonic acid gas_ is formed in the respiration of animals, and as yet no process is known in nature by which it can be consumed, except vegetation. animals thus produce a substance which appears to be a necessary food for vegetables;--vegetables evolve a principle necessary to the existence of animals: the two kingdoms seem to be thus connected together in the exercise of their functions, and, to a certain extent, made to depend upon each other for their existence. _legible writing._--the grand duke of baden has issued an ordinance, enjoining all public functionaries in his dominions, who sign their names in an illegible manner, through _affectation_, to write them in future so that they can be read, under the pain of having any document illegibly signed, thrown back on their hands. while mr. samuel chandler was boring for salt near zanesville, ohio, he found a metallic substance six feet three inches thick, which being analysed, was found to be silver, nearly as pure as the common coin. this singular account is attested in the national intelligencer by a member of congress. _square mile._--it may be thought wonderful that the whole population of this country could stand on considerably less than a square mile. allowing six men to a square yard, the mile would accommodate _eighteen millions five hundred and eighty five thousand six hundred men!_ _latitude of trees in sweden._--from the researches made in sweden on the different kinds of wood indigenous to the country, it has been ascertained that the birch reaches the farthest north, growing beyond the th degree; the pine reaches to the th; the fir tree to the th; the ozier, willow, aspen and quince, to the th; the cherry and apple tree to the d; the oak to the th; and the beech to the th; while the lime tree, ash, elm, poplar and walnut, are only to be found in scavia. [_lond. journ. of science._ _singular anecdote of the spider, by capt. bagnold._--desirous of ascertaining the natural food of the scorpion, i enclosed one (which measured three fourths of an inch from the head to the insertion of the tail) in a wide mouthed phial, together with one of those large spiders so common in the west indies, and closed it with a cork, perforated by a quill, for the admission of air: the insects seemed carefully to avoid each other, retiring to opposite ends of the bottle, which was placed horizontally. by giving it a gradual inclination, the scorpion was forced into contact with the spider, when a sharp encounter took place, the latter receiving repeated stings from his venomous adversary, apparently without the least injury, and with his web, soon lashed the scorpion's tail to his back, subsequently securing his legs and claws with the materials. in this state i left them some time, in order to observe what effect would be produced on the spider by the wounds he had received. on my return, however, i was disappointed, the ants having entered and destroyed them both. [_ibid._ _spontaneous combustion._--_from the baltimore morning chronicle._--at my mills there was an iron kettle used for holding ashes--it had remained with ashes in from the th to the th month at which time flaxseed oil was by accident spilled into the ashes; in about hours the ashes were found to be on fire, and wishing to have it fully ascertained, whether it was the oil which occasioned the ashes to take fire, i filled a kettle with cold dry ashes, in which i poured a pint of flaxseed oil, and in hours i examined it, and found that, as far as the oil had penetrated the ashes were in a state of combustion, and, applying some shavings and chips of wood, it immediately caused them to blaze. from an apprehension that many buildings have been consumed by fires from the foregoing cause, i have been induced to give publicity to the fact. joseph atkinson. _ellicot patapsco mills_, } _ mo. d. ._ } _spontaneous combustion._--sir i observe, in your paper of yesterday that your correspondent _davyana_ has made an _unsuccessful_ experiment, to verify the account given by mr. atkinson of a _spontaneous combustion_, produced some time ago, at his mills near baltimore, by the accidental mixture of linseed oil and wood ashes. an experiment has also been made, with a similar view, at the _mint_ of the united states. the ashes employed were chiefly from hickery wood, well sifted, and cold; and the quantity of linseed oil, one pint. no change of temperature was perceived, till about hours after the oil had been poured on the ashes, when the mixture was fairly ignited, and in a short time emitted flame, which continued upwards of an hour. after the flame had ceased, the ignition continued for about hours, and the ashes were then poured out of the vessel. r. p. [_poulson's am. daily adv._ _gas lights._--the number of gas lights already in use in the metropolis of london amounts to upwards of , . the total length of mains in the streets through which the gas is conveyed from the gas light manufactories into the houses now measure miles. _seed potatoes._--it has been recently ascertained from the most decisive experiments, that late potatoes, or such as are not ripe, were the best seed, and that planting such restores a degenerated variety to its original qualities. the discoverer of this fact recommends the planting of seed from cold and late situations, and to plant so late as june and july, taking up those unripe, and preserving them as seed for the following year. [_vermont intelligencer._. _london._--the consumption of sheep and lambs in london, during the last twelve months, amounted in number to one million, sixty-two thousand, seven hundred. the number of horned cattle slaughtered, was one hundred and sixty-four thousand--and by the inspector's return, it appears, that the number of horse hides produced at leadenhall market, amounted to twelve thousand nine hundred. boring _legalized_.--last week we mentioned that a silver mine was said to have been discovered near zanesville, in ohio. by the last columbus papers we are informed that the bill incorporating the "muskingum silver mining company" has passed the legislature. it is said that the rock about twenty feet below the surface of the earth, extends under nearly the whole territory of ohio; that the silver was found after penetrating the rock about feet; and that, therefore, there is an even chance that this stratum of silver, near feet in thickness, is as extensive as the state. verily, should this prove to be the case, what an alteration would it make in our affairs! neighbouring states would supply ohio with corn and whiskey--her keen speculators would become lazy nabobs--yankee pedlars might venture to drive their trade there, without danger of being _bitten_--her rag banks, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, would prove to have had at all times, a _specie foundation_: and owl creek and cincinnati bank notes command a premium over eastern funds. capt. symmes has long expressed great anxiety _to get into the earth_, and, as it is a long journey to the north pole, (where there is certainly a hole big enough for capt. symmes to get in) and the captain says he cannot undertake the journey for the want of "disposable means,"--now, therefore, this may be entirely a manoevre of the captain's, or of his friends, to get a cheap passage into the earth, whereby he may embark near home, and without expense in the outfit. at any rate, we hope the company will persevere in _boring_--it is a good subject--for should they either find silver or provide a passage for capt. symmes, they will silence the hungry complaints of many speculators--both in real estate and in the learned and fashionable _ologies_ of the day. [_detroit gazette._ state of missouri. _boundaries._--beginning in the middle of the mississippi river, on the parallel of ° n. lat.--thence west to the st. francois river--thence up the middle of the st. francois, to ° ' n. lat.--thence west till it intersects a meridian line, passing through the middle of the mouth of the kansas river, where it empties into the missouri--thence, from said point of intersection, due north to the intersection of the parallel of latitude which passes through the rapids of the river des moines, (making this line correspond with the indian boundary)--thence east from the point of intersection last mentioned, to the middle of the main fork of the des moines--thence down the middle of that river to the mississippi--thence, down the middle of the mississippi to the beginning. by the th section of the law authorising the people of missouri to form a state government, slavery is for ever prohibited in all the territories of the united states, west of the mississippi, north of ° ' except so much as is included in missouri. the convention to form the constitution is to consist of representatives, from the respective counties, as follows: howard , cooper , montgomery , pike , lincoln , st. charles , franklin , st. louis , jefferson , washington , st. genevieve , madison , cape girardeau , new madrid , wayne and lawrence . _red snow._--mr. francis bauer from a number of accurate observations, with microscopes of great power on the red snow, in a melted state, from baffin's bay pronounces the colouring matter to be a new species of uredo (a minute fungus) to which he proposes to give the name nivalis. _lapland._--the greatest water-fall in europe has been recently discovered in lapland. it is on the river latting; it is half a mile broad, and falls in a perpendicular descent of _four hundred feet_. _portugal._--the weather has been so severe at lisbon, that in one night, thirty-five fishermen and three sentinels were frozen to death. the ice formed three inches thick in one night, a circumstance unprecedented at that place. _russia._--it has been so cold in russia, the past season, that all the public places of amusement had been closed. the thermometer at st. petersburg, stood at - / below zero. the frost has been severe in france and england. at paris on the th, the thermometer of the engineer chevalier, stood at below . the seine was frozen over. petitions are getting up in ireland, in favour of a dissolution of the union with great britain! it had been colder in the month of january in england, than was ever known before in that country. in the city of london the thermometer stood twenty-three degrees below the freezing point. at islington, the silver in the barometer on the th, was down into the bowl. upwards of , , eggs were imported into england from france the last three months. _extraordinary produce of a potato._--a single potato was cut into eyes, and planted in the garden of c. moore, esq. at woodbridge, suffolk; and the produce was the surprising quantity of a bushel skep without being heaped, and it weighed _ lbs._--the potatoes are remarkably fine and clean. brownsville, (penn.) march . _accident._--on thursday last, the chain bridge over dunlap's creek, between brownsville and bridgeport broke down with a wagon and six horses upon it. the wagon fell on the bank, this side of the stream, the horses in the water. the driver, who was on the saddle horse, was pitched between the two middle horses, where he was held entangled in the gears, until relieved by the citizens. he received no material injury, but two of the horses were killed. the team, we understand, was the property of a person named hackney, near winchester, (va.) the distance from the floor of this bridge to the surface of the water, must have been at least feet. _leeches._--the montrose (english) review of january st, states that a gentleman examining two bottles containing leeches each, found the water a complete mass of ice, with the leeches frozen. he dissolved the ice gradually before the fire, when he found the whole alive, and very animated. _annual consumption of the necessaries of life in london._ consumption of bullocks, , sheep and lambs, , calves, , hogs, , sucking pigs, , gallons of milk--the produce of cows, , quarters of wheat, , chaldrons of coal, , barrels ( galls.) of ale and porter , , gallons of spirituous liquors, , , pipes of wines, , pounds of butter, , , cheese, , , acres of land cultivated in the vicinity of london for vegetables, , ditto for fruit, , the sum paid annually for vegetables amounts to, _l._ , abstract of the exports of cotton and tobacco from new orleans from the st of october, , until the st of the same month, . _cotton._ england , bales. france , holland , coastwise , ______ total , bales. _tobacco._ england , hhds. france , holland and germany, , coastwise , ______ total , hhds. _fall of rain._--an account of the water that fell in rain and snow, in lancaster, pennsylvania, from to , inclusive, and the number of days, in each year, in which there was falling weather. . _years._ _inches._ _days._ _months._ _inches._ _days._ , - / january, / , - / feb'ry, - / , - / march, - / , - / april, - / , - / may, - / , - / june, , - / july, - / august, - / sept. - / october, nov. - / dec. - / ______ __ - / _london breweries._--the breweries of london, (says a late traveller over the british island,) "may justly be ranked amongst its greatest curiosities, and the establishment of messrs. barclay &. co. is one of the most considerable. a steam engine, of the power of horses, does the greatest part of the work; for although there are nearly two hundred men employed, and a great number of horses, these are mostly for the out-door work; the interior appears quite solitary. large rakes with chains moved by an invisible power, stir to the very bottom the immense mass of malt in boilers feet deep; elevators which nobody touches, carry up to the summit of the building bushels of malt a day, thence distributed through wooden channels to the different places where the process is carried on.--casks of truly gigantic sizes are ready to receive the liquors. one of them contains barrels. now, at barrels to a ton, this is equal to a ship of tons. by the side of this are other enormous vessels, the smallest of which, containing about barrels, are worth when full pounds sterling each. all this immense apparatus is so arranged that every part is accessible, and the whole is contained under one roof. the stock of liquor is estimated at , pounds; the barrels alone in which it is carried about to customers cost , pounds; and the whole capital is not less than half a million sterling; , barrels of beer are sold annually, which would load a fleet of merchantmen, of the burden of tons each. the building is incombustible--walls of brick, and floors of iron. _africa._--several attempts are now making to explore the interior of this country, and a scheme for opening a grand commercial intercourse with tumbuctoo and sudan, has been planned, which promises success through the protection of the emperor of morocco. _london nov. ._--we learn by a letter from the celebrated italian traveller, _m. belzoni_, that he has recently performed a journey into the deserts of lybia, to examine there the environs and ruins of the temple jupiter ammon. this journey lasted days, during which time he saw different ruins, several temples and other remarkable objects. after having traversed the desert, he arrived at the place where the temple is supposed to have existed. the country was fertile, and he found some villages, but the inhabitants of the country, where, perhaps, for several centuries a european had not been seen, were very savage, and would not suffer him to pass, because they imagined that he was looking for treasures in their country. the ruins of the temple he discovered had been employed in the construction of another temple, which is already in part destroyed, and in forming the foundation of the cabins of a village. the most remarkable thing, however, discovered by _m. belzoni_ in those environs is a spring of living water, of which _herodotus_ makes mention, warm in the morning and evening, cold at noon, and boiling hot at midnight. _m. belzoni_ has brought away some of this water for the purpose of analysing it. _a hint to smokers._--the city of new york, is said to contain , inhabitants. let , of them smoke only three spanish segars a day, and it will amount in the year to the enormous sum of $ , , ; a sum sufficient to pay the salary of the president and vice-president of the united states, the secretaries of state, of the treasury, of war, and of the navy, and of the attorney, general, for years, months, and days. [_n. y. gazette._ _extraordinary longevity._--dr. knott martin, of marblehead, who died at the age of , left seven children by his first wife, who are now living, at the following ages, viz:-- thomas, aged --knott, aged --eleanor, aged --hannah, aged --richard, aged --arnold, aged --and mary, aged . the aggregate of the seven being , and the average years. also, by his second wife, betsey, aged , and bartholomew, aged . he had three other children, one of whom died in infancy, and the other two at an advanced age. eight of the nine now living reside at marblehead, the other at beverly, and all of them have a numerous posterity. [_salem register._ _an effectual method of preserving poultry houses free from vermin._ sir--as i do not know that you have positively interdicted all communications from farmer-_esses_, i must ask you to record a grand discovery, which i consider myself to have made, in the noble art of--_raising poultry_. it may save much trouble to my sister housewives, to whom, according to the order prescribed by the _lords of the creation_, this department of domestic economy has been assigned. it is well known, that in this branch of our humble duties, the greatest difficulty arises from our poultry houses being so much infested with _vermin_; or, to be more plain, in the slang of the poultry yard, with _chicken lice_. now, i have proved, by long experience, that they will not resort to houses wherein the roots, nest boxes, &c. &c. are made of _sassafras wood_. you may smile, and ask me, the _reason of it_: i am no philosopher, but i tell you, _sassafras wood_ will keep lice out of hen houses: i know it to be a fact, and when you will tell me _why it is_ that chips of cedar wood or tobacco will keep woollen free from _moth_, then i will endeavour to tell you _why_ it is, that sassafras wood will keep away chicken lice--one is universally known to be true, the other no less true, though less known. a spinster. [_am. farmer._ the london globe, of jan. , says--"we understand that the lords of the treasury have given directions to allow mechanics, artificers, &c. to emigrate from great britain to any country and in any ship. at brighton, the wildest of the feathered tribe have been so punished with the frost, that they have left the woods, for warmer shelter in the habitations of men. black birds, starlings, larks and thrushes have been pursued by boys, at mid-day, and easily taken by the hand. married. on the th of march, rubens peale, of philadelphia, to eliza patterson, of chesnut-hill. at washington city, samuel lawrence gouverneur, esq. of new york, to maria hester munroe, youngest daughter of james munroe, president of the united states. on the d ult. at the friends' meeting house, alexandria, d. c. j. ellicott carey, of baltimore, to ann h. irwin, daughter of thomas irwin, esq. thomas h. b. jacobs, to jane bowen, both of chester county, pennsylvania. david stuckert, of germantown, to margaret taylor, of this city. in december last, at new-castle, (england) mr. silvertop to mrs. pearson. this lady has been married three times. her first husband was a quaker, the second a roman catholic, and the third is of the established church. every husband was twice her own age; at she married a man of , at she took one of , and now at , she is united to a man of . in england, on the th of jan. last, william wilberforce, esq. eldest son of the honourable and philanthropic william wilberforce, m.p. to miss mary owen, second daughter of john owen, a. m. rector of pagelsham. died. on monday afternoon, the th of march, after a lingering and painful illness, mrs. margaret webb, being in her ninetieth year. on monday night, between and o'clock, after a confinement of two months, william wayne, sen. in the ninetieth year of his age. in england, d nov. aged , john spooner, who had been for more than thirty years successively the stranger's attendant at brimham rocks, in the county of york. at perth, scotland, st feb. widow m'lean, aged years. although infirm, she had the complete enjoyment of sight, and never required the use of spectacles. at inverfolla, scotland, th of november, donald m'intyre, aged . he was the last of the followers of prince charles, in that district to whose interests he was ardently devoted, so much so, that amidst the infirmities of old age he seemed "strong with the vigour of youth" at the mention of his favourite's name, and the remembrance of his misfortunes. in curracoa, a. d. m. senior, aged , the oldest member of the hebrew community, and one of the oldest inhabitants of the island. at new orleans, th of feb. don felipe fatio, consul of spain, formerly secretary of the spanish legation at washington. near new orleans, mr. etienne borrie, the first person that succeeded in cultivating the sugar cane on the mississippi. in the city of trenton, (n. j.) on the th of march, samuel leake, esq. in the d year of his age, formerly one of the most distinguished advocates at the new jersey bar. in vincent township, chester county, on the d of march mr. james evans, in the th year of his age. at boston, on tuesday, the d of feb. the rev. james m. winchell, pastor of the first baptist church of that city. in january, at grant's braes, near haddington, the venerable mother of the scottish bard, robert burns, in her th year. in hesse, hamburg, frederick louis william christian, landgrave of hesse hamburg, aged , leaving a very numerous offspring, one of whom is married to princess elizabeth, of england. in hesse, wilhelmina caroline, wife of the elector of hesse cassel, aged . she was a daughter of frederick v. king of denmark. in germany, count stolberg, a celebrated german poet. for the rural magazine. whether the result of education and early associations, or derived immediately from nature herself, there is excited in every bosom possessed of sensibility, a sensation of awe and veneration, when approaching the mansions of the dead. here the storm of passion subsides into peace; and even savage ferocity, when contemplating the house appointed for all living, is moulded into mildness and mercy. who does not delight to behold the verdant hillock, which designates the spot, where the remains of a dear friend or relative are deposited, decorated with vernal beauty, and alike protected from the withering inroads of neglect, and the rude approach of violence? there is a chord in every feeling heart, which vibrates in unison with the magic touch of memory when delineating in vivid colours, some departed object of our love and affection. the grave-yard furnishes a scene, in which memory is necessarily a prominent actor. the graves of my fathers. evergreen be the spot where in silence reposing, the bones of my fathers so tranquilly sleep, let no hostile foot-step with rudeness imposing, disturb the fond vigils affection shall keep. leave to monarchs their pageants of pomp and of glory, to heroes their laurels all dripping with tears, give to jackson his fame in the pages of story, where the wrong of the indian abhorrent appears; let the relics of princes whose names are enshrouded, in the gloom and the darkness of egypt's long night, be distinguish'd by tombs on whose summits beclouded, the eagle seeks rest in her towering flight: but spare, oh but spare me, that hallow'd enclosure, which spring will soon visit with aspect serene, where the earliest sunbeam to april's exposure, shall bespangle with flow'rets her favourite scene. while the songsters of nature with voices in chorus, attuned to those feelings which nature inspires, and that moss-cover'd temple arising before us, will quell all those rebels--our vicious desires: where the pure gospel fount so transparent in beauty, oft in silence refreshes with gladness the soul, which in humble devotion to heaven and duty, seeks through faith and repentance a glorious goal. evergreen be the spot where in silence reposing, the bones of my fathers so tranquilly sleep, every tye of affection their virtues disclosing, while the dew drops of eve shall in sympathy weep. e. auld age is that auld age that's tirling at the pin? i trow it is, then haste to let him in: ye're kindly welcome, friend; na dinna fear to shaw yoursel', ye'll cause na trouble here. i ken there are wha tremble at your name, as tho' ye brought wi' ye reproach or shame; and wha, "a thousond lies wad bear the sin," rather than own ye for their kith or kin; but far frae shirking ye as a disgrace, thankfu' i am t' have lived to see thy face; nor s'all i ere disown ye, nor tak pride, to think how long i might your visit bide, doing my best to mak ye well respecked, i'll no fear for your sake to be neglecked; but now ye're come, and through a' kind of weather we're doomed frae this time forth to jog the-gither, i'd fain mak compact wi' ye firm and strang, on terms of fair giff gaff to haud out lang; gin thou'lt be civil, i s'all lib'ral be, witness the lang lang list o' what i'll gie; first, then, i here mak owre for gude and ay, a' youthfu' fancies, whether bright or gay, beauties and graces, too, i wad resign them, but sair i fear 'twad cost ye fash to find them; for 'gainst your dady, time, they cou'd na stand, nor bear the grip o' his unsonsy hand; but there's my skin, whilk ye may further crunkle, and write your name at length in ilka wrunkle. on my brown locks ye're leave to lay your paw and bleach them to your fancy white as snaw. but look na, age, sae wistfu' at my mouth, as gin ye lang'd to pu' out ilka tooth! let them, i do beseech, still keep their places, though, gin ye wish't ye're free to paint their faces. my limbs i yield ye; and if ye see meet, to clap your icy shackles on my feet, ise no refuse; but if ye drive out gout, will bless you for't, and offer thanks devout. sae muckle was i gi' wi' right good will, but och! i fear that maer ye look for still, i ken by that fell glow'r and meaning shrug, ye't slap your skinny fingers on each lug; and unca fain ye are i trow, and keen, to cast your misty powders in my een; but o in mercy, spare my poor wee twinkers, and i for ay s'all wear your chrystal blinkers! then 'bout my lugs i'd fain a bargain mak, and gi' my hand, that i shall ne'er draw back. well then, wad ye consent their use to share, twad serve us baith, and be a bargain rare-- thus i wad ha't when babbling fools intrude, gabbling their noisy nonsense, lang and loud; or when ill-nature well brush'd up by wit, wi' sneer sarcastic takes its aim to hit; or when detraction, meanest slave o' pride, spies out wee fau'ts and seeks great worth to hide; then mak me deaf as deaf as deaf can be; at a' sic times my lugs i lend to thee. but when in social hour ye see combin'd genius and wisdom--fruits of heart and mind, good sense, good humour, wit in playfu' mood, and candour e'en frae ill extracting good; oh, then, auld friend, i maun ha' back myhearing, to want it then wad be an ill past bearing. better to lonely sit i' the douf spence than catch the sough o' words without the sense.-- ye winna promise? och ye're unco dour, sae ill to manage, and sae cauld and sour. nae matter, hale and sound i'll keep my heart, nor frae a crum o't s'all i ever part: it's kindly warmth will ne'er be chilled by a' the cauldest breath your frozen lips can blaw. ye need na' fash your thumb, auld carle, nor fret, for there affection shall preserve its seat; and though to tak my hearing ye rejoice, yet spite o' you i'll still hear friendship's voice. thus, though, ye tak the rest, it shan'na grieve me, for ae blythe spunk o' spirits ye maun leave me; and let me tell you in your lug auld age, i'm bound to travel wi' ye but ae stage: be't long or short, ye canna keep me back; and, when we reach the end o't, ye maun pack. for there we part for ever; late or air. another guess companion meets me there: to whom ye--nill ye will ye, maun me bring; nor think that i'll be wae or laith to spring fra your poor dosen'd side, ye carle uncouth, to the blest arms of everlasting youth. by him, whate'er ye ye've rifl'd sto'wn, or ta'en, will a' be gi'en wi' interest back again: froze by a' gifts and graces, thousands moe than heart can think of, freely he'll bestoe. ye need na wonder, then, nor swell wi' pride, because i kindly welcome ye, as guide, to one sae far your better. now as tauld, let us set out upo' our journey cauld; wi' nae vain boasts, nor vain regrets tormented, we'll e'en jog on the gate, quiet and contented. [taken from "memoirs of eliza hamilton," by miss benger. "dreadful hard times." yesterday i walked down, to that part of the town, where people collect at the sign of the tun, to discuss and debate the great matters of state, and show how things that go wrong should be done: there was ragged sam bent, who is not worth a cent, there was idle dick lawless, and noisy jack grimes, and swaggering jim bell, who has nothing to sell, all cursing the banks, and these dreadful hard times. there was old daddy slop, who has lost his last crop, by neglecting to mend up some gaps in his fence; there was shabby ned thorn, who had planted his corn, but had never put hoe, no, nor plough to it since; there was dashing bill sutton, with his fine dandy coat on, who was ne'er out of debt, nor was worth twenty dimes: they too join'd the throng, and still kept up the song, a curse on the banks, and these dreadful hard times. next came in dick short, who was summon'd to court, for some hundreds of half pints of whiskey and rum; he had brought the last sack of his grain on his back; tho' his children were crying with hunger at home; here, landlord, said short, come, bring me a quart; i must treat these, my friends, sir, and merry jack grimes; i've the corn, sir, to pay, there's no booking to-day; then he fell to cursing the banks, and hard times. next came in tom sargent who had lately turn'd merchant, and bought a full store, i can scarcely tell how! but this much i know, about twelve months ago, that the constable sold at the post, his last cow; yet tom dash'd away, spending hundreds each day, till his merchants brought suits for their dry goods and wines; so tom join'd the throng, and assisted the song, with a curse on these banks, and these dreadful hard times. next appear'd madam pride, (and a beau at her side) with her silks, spread with laces, quite down to her trail; her husband that day, unable to pay for the dress she then wore, had been lock'd up in jail; she turn'd to the throng, as she tripped it along, and she "hop'd that the merchants would swing for such crimes "as to make people pay their old debts, in this way;" and she curs'd all the banks, and these dreadful hard times. now said i, mr. short, you are summon'd to court, and must soon go to jail for these long whiskey scores; and you, mr drew, aye, and you sir, and you, who are hanging round taverns, and running to stores; and you madam pride, must your silks lay aside, and you, mr. idle and you, mr. grimes, must all to your labours, like some of your neighbours, and you'll soon put an end to these dreadful hard times. [_gallia gazette._ winter. though now no more the musing ear delights to listen to the breeze that lingers o'er the greenwood shade, i love thee, winter! well. sweet are the harmonies of spring, sweet is the summer's evening gale, pleasant the autumnal winds that shake the many coloured grove; and pleasant to the sobered soul the silence of a wintry scene, when nature shrouds her in her trance, in deep tranquillity. not undelightful now to roam the wild-heath sparkling on the sight; not undelightful now to pace the forest's ample rounds; and see the spangled branches shine, and snatch the moss of many a hue that varies the old tree's brown bark, or o'er the grey stone spreads. the clustered berries claim the eye, o'er the bright holly's gay green leaves; the ivy round the leafless oak clasps its full foliage close. robert southey. to ----. when the bloom on thy cheek shall have faded away, when thine eye shall be closed in the grave, thou shalt dwell in my heart like the last gleam of day. that purples with twilight the wave. and if souls are allowed in a happier sphere to watch o'er the spirits they love, be the guardian--the friend that thou wert to me here, be my guide--my protector above. i know thou must die, and the cold earth will hide the form i shall ever adore; but in death, as in life, it will still be my pride such virtue as thine to deplore. and, oh! when i gaze in the stillness of night on those orbs that bespangle the sky, i will think there thou dwellest an angel of light, and hearest thy sorrower's sigh. it will sooth me to feel, though a wilderness grows, this lone world all unpeopled for me; that, though drooping and withering, there still is one rose in this wilderness blossoms for thee. though it will not be thine its last blushes to greet, to weep o'er its bloom to decay; if worthy such bliss, in a world we shall meet where thou'lt chase every dew-drop away. the following versification was from the pen of a very young, and interesting woman, in reply to the solicitations of her family not to accompany her unfortunate husband into exile. the lovely author of these lines, whose beauty can only be exceeded by her retiring modesty, is wholly unconscious of their publication, and we well know will blush at celebrity which the accomplishments of her mind, the graces of her person, and the misfortunes of her destiny, have rendered inevitable. _versification from the book of "ruth."_ inscribed to ---- where'er thou goest, i will go, o'er egypt's sands, or zembla's snow! where'er thy weary eyelids close. there will thy charlotte seek repose; though on the naked earth we lie, while tempests rule the darkning sky, still, still undaunted will i be, and find the holiest calm with thee. that people whom thou call'st thy own, shall only to my heart be known, and our great father, god, above, with equal warmth we both will love. where'er thy last expiring breath, is yielded to relentless death, on that same spot will charlotte die, and in the tomb, thy charlotte lie. the lord do this, and more to me, if more than this, part thee from me, as living, but one heart we own. so dying we will still be one. [_port folio._ _the peasant and his wife._ he. the long, long day, again has pass'd in sorrow and distress: i strive my best--but strive in vain, i labour hard--but still remain poor, and in wretchedness. she. nay, we have health--you love your wife-- and she returns its flame; want still is absent from our cot, god gives us breath to sooth our lot, what more can you desire? he. i wish'd to earn a little sum, my dearest wife for thee; i wish'd, by toiling day and night, to gain some wealth that might requite thy fond fidelity. she. no wealth repays fidelity, nor gold nor monarch's crown; my heart which doth to thee incline, finds all its love repaid by thine, and smiles at fortune's frown. he. but ah! to see thee live in want, it fills my soul with care. that thou so noble just and good, must slave and toil for daily food, that drives me to despair. she. i gaily work [god knows my heart] contented at your side: more joys than wealth can give i prove, to share thy sorrows and thy love; thy faithful heart's my pride. he. but who, when i am snatch'd from thee will hush thy trembling sighs? and when our babe shall weeping say, "oh mother! give me bread i pray!" who then will heed its cries; she. god! whom the worm and sparrow shields, man in his need can aid; he'll be my comfort when thou'rt fled-- the orphan's sire will give him bread-- o! be his will obey'd. he. wife of my heart, how great thou art! thy love is all my weal; i feel so proud of one like thee-- thy love and thy fidelity inspire me with fresh zeal. agriculture. thou first of arts, source of domestic ease, pride of the land, and patron of the seas, _thrift agriculture!_ lend thy potent aid; spread thy green fields where dreary forest's shade; where savage men pursue their savage prey, let the white flocks in verdant pastures play; from the bloom'd orchard and the showery vale give the rich fragrance to the gentle gale: reward with ample boon the labourer's hand, and poor thy gladdening bounties o'er our land. columbia's sons, spurn not the rugged toil; _your nation's glory is a cultur'd soil._ rome's cincinnatus, of illustrious birth, increas'd his laurels while he tilled the earth: e'en china's monarch lays his sceptre down, nor deems the task unworthy of the crown. to correspondents. "amicus" wishes to know why his communications have not appeared in the _rural magazine_. this kind of request is sometimes very difficult for an editor to comply with. in the present instance, we feel much obliged to our correspondent for his intention of serving us, and did we know him personally, would give him our reasons for omitting his pieces. we have anticipated the request of "agricola" of susquehannah county, by inserting in our last number the address of _judge tilghman_. "agricola's" remarks upon, and large quotations from it, could not with so much propriety be now admitted. philadelphia, published monthly by richards & caleb johnson, _no. , market street_, at $ . per annum. griggs & dickinson--_printers_, _whitehall_. transcriber note: text emphasis is denoted as =bold= and _italics_. fractions are represented as - / . sewage and garbage disposal on the farm [illustration] farmers' bulletin no. u.s. department of agriculture this bulletin is a guide to up to-date methods for the sanitary disposal of sewage and other household and farm wastes. it tells how to construct satisfactory sanitary facilities and how to maintain them and gives special attention to the questions on sanitation asked most frequently by farm people. solutions to all problems cannot be given here, and often advice must be sought from local sanitary officials. many county and state health departments furnish advice and copies of local regulations and sometimes provide inspection service. where there are no specific local requirements, this bulletin may be accepted as a guide to safe practice. issued march washington, d. c. revised june sewage and garbage disposal on the farm by j. w. rockey, _assistant agricultural engineer_,[ ] and j. w. simons, _associate agricultural engineer_, _division of farm buildings and rural housing, bureau of plant industry, soils, and agricultural engineering, agricultural research administration_ [ ] the senior author prepared the preliminary draft, and the junior author completed the bulletin. contents page characteristics of sewage protection of water sources from household wastes septic-tank systems operation of a septic tank system selecting the site the house sewer the septic tank building a concrete tank the effluent sewer the disposal field disposal methods in tight or wet soils care and maintenance of septic tanks effect of drain solvents and other materials protection against freezing septic-tank troubles grease traps disposal of drainage from fixtures other than toilets cesspools privies care, and maintenance chemical closets disposal of garbage and trash to insure healthful living, domestic wastes must be disposed of. primitive wanderers and too often present-day tourists deposit their wastes promiscuously and move on when the surroundings become foul. this is impractical in built-up communities. therefore, in most cities and in some rural areas sanitary codes regulate the disposal of wastes. characteristics of sewage household sewage ordinarily consists principally of human excrement, toilet paper, garbage, dish water, and other wash water from the various plumbing fixtures and floor drains. many kinds of bacteria, at times disease-producing ones, are contained in the discharges from the human body. epidemics of typhoid fever, dysentery, diarrhea, cholera, and other water-borne diseases may result from the pollution of the water supply with sewage. pollution is carried by water moving underground, as well as by water flowing on the surface. this is especially true in limestone regions, where underground channels and rock crevices permit water to flow for considerable distances with little filtering action. sewage used for fertilizing or irrigating crops[ ] may contaminate vegetables or the udders of cows and thus spread disease. anthrax, cholera, and parasitic worms may be present in the surface drainage from fields and barn lots. it is wise to regard all sewage as dangerous and to dispose of it promptly in a sanitary manner, so that disease germs will not pollute the water supplies or be spread by flies, animals, or man. [ ] this subject is discussed at length in technical bulletin , sewage irrigation as practiced in the western states. protection of water sources from household wastes under most farm conditions a safe place for the disposal of wastes is in the upper -foot layer of soil, where the action of bacteria tends to render it harmless. tile disposal fields, such as are used with septic tanks, and earth-pit privies accomplish this if the water table remains several feet below the surface and if the location is remote from water supplies. cesspools and other types of pits do not ordinarily confine contamination to their immediate vicinity and are not recommended except for special conditions. sewage or other wastes discharged into abandoned wells or other pits that reach to the water table or below it are almost certain to contaminate the ground water. it is generally poor practice, and often illegal, to discharge wastes into surface streams. streams do not necessarily purify themselves in feet, feet, or some other stated distance, as is commonly believed. they do tend to purify themselves over long distances through the action of sunlight, aeration, and other factors but may not be safe for domestic use for many miles below the source of pollution. clear, sparkling water is not always safe drinking water. streams in agricultural communities are subject to many sources of pollution and they are likely to become more contaminated as they merge into larger streams. septic-tank systems septic-tank systems, if installed and maintained properly, provide the most sanitary method of sewage disposal for farmhouses equipped with running water. ground water or rock close to the surface, lack of sufficient fall for the sewage to flow by gravity, and too small an absorption area for the effluent limit the satisfactory operation of a septic tank. when these conditions exist, special advice should be sought from a competent local sanitary authority. adverse soil conditions can be overcome if sufficient fall and space are available. the five essential parts (fig. ) of a septic-tank system are ( ) the house sewer; ( ) the septic tank; ( ) the effluent sewer; ( ) the distribution box; and ( ) the disposal field. in special cases a grease trap (see fig. , p. ) is added. to facilitate inspection and repairs it is good practice to keep in the house a chart showing the location of the tank and other parts of the system. a septic tank does not necessarily purify the sewage, eliminate odor, or destroy all solid matter. its purpose is to condition the sewage or domestic waste by bacterial action, so that it can be disposed of in a more satisfactory manner. [illustration: figure .--a septic-tank system.] operation of a septic-tank system in a septic-tank system the sewage flows by gravity from the farmhouse through the sewer into the tank, where it should remain at least hours. while passing through the tank the solids are acted upon by anaerobic bacteria, which work only in the dark and where there is little air. the heavy particles settle to the bottom as sludge, the lighter particles float as scum, and the remainder passes out of the tank through the effluent sewer to the disposal field. the gas released in the process escapes through a vent provided either in the =t= to the house sewer or the effluent sewer. a tank that is too small may fill up with solids in a short while, because sufficient time is not allowed for breaking them down by fermentation, or the sewage may be pushed right through into the disposal field and clog it. the effluent may contain even more disease germs than the original sewage, and though it may be as clear as spring water it is far from pure and may cause foul odors if discharged or allowed to pool on the surface of the ground. the final disposition of the effluent into the upper layer of the soil exposes it to the action of aerobic bacteria. these bacteria, unlike those in the tank, need air and cannot work in saturated soil or live much more than feet below the surface of the ground. the "living earth," or upper stratum, teems with these bacteria, which convert the dangerous sewage and disease germs into harmless matter and thus tend to purify the effluent if it remains long enough in the top layers of soil before seeping into the subsoil and thence to the ground water. effluent discharged deep in the soil does not receive the benefit of this purifying action. several types of septic tanks are in common use. the one described in this bulletin is the single-chamber type, which can be built with or without siphon. this should meet all average farm needs where there are not more than members in the household. it would be advisable to consult the authorities of the state agricultural college or local health department as to their recommendations because frequently local conditions and larger establishments require special installations. selecting the site first install the tile disposal field where there will be least danger of polluting water supplies, at least feet from water sources if possible and always at a lower surface elevation. this is of greatest importance. even though selecting a more distant location would result in greater initial cost, it would be a good investment as protection against diseases that might result from pollution of water sources. the site should slope away from the house and away from the source of water. gentle unshaded slopes free of trees or shrubbery are best. root-free locations are important because the open-jointed tile cannot be "rootproofed." porous, well-drained, gravelly, or sandy soil allows greater purification. do not have the disposal field in vegetable gardens, under roadways, in swampy land, in muck soils, or in areas having rock substrata sloping toward the water supply. allow sufficient area, where available, to enlarge the field later if needed. the septic tank may be close to the house, but a more distant site would reduce the likelihood of odors if leakage occurs. the tank should also be kept feet or more from any source of water supply and at a lower elevation. it should not be placed under driveways, pavements, or flower beds, as these would make it not readily accessible for periodic inspection. care should be taken to insure that surface drainage from the area around the tank will not reach the vicinity of the water supply. the house sewer material vitrified salt-glazed clay or well-made concrete sewer pipe and cast-iron soil pipe are the standard materials for house sewers on farms. asphalt-impregnated fiber pipe, of a type designed especially for house sewers, appears to be satisfactory for this purpose. cast-iron soil pipe with leaded joints should be used when the sewer is within feet of a well or suction line from a well, within feet of any drinking-water supply line under pressure, within feet of basement foundations, or when laid beneath driveways with less than feet of earth covering the pipes. when within feet of large trees or shrubs, the sewers should have root-tight joints. size for house sewers, - and -inch pipes are generally used. where a -inch pipe is used, cast-iron is commonly recommended. grades with little fall require larger pipes. the large sizes are also less liable to become clogged. clay pipe is made in pieces or - / feet long, whereas fiber-pipe sections are feet long and cast-iron pipe feet long, so that there are fewer joints. the minimum number of joints is desirable, as there is less danger of stoppage. alinement run the house sewer in a straight line and avoid bends whenever possible. slight changes in direction may be made with one-sixteenth or one-eighth bend fittings. for sharper changes of direction a manhole or distribution box may be used. changes in direction of more than are not recommended unless a manhole is provided. clean-outs are desirable within feet of the septic tank where tanks are placed more than feet from the building and the sewer line is not buried deeper than feet. establishing line and grade the trench for laying the sewer is usually dug after the septic-tank excavation has been completed and the elevation of the tank inlet determined. a simple method of setting guides for the excavation is illustrated in figure . digging the trench start digging the trench at the tank end, so that rain or seepage will have an outlet. rounding the bottom of the trench to the shape of the pipe and hollowing out basins for the "bell" ends allows the pipe to rest firmly throughout its full length, permits full calking of joints, and relieves the strain on them. laying the pipe begin laying the pipe at the tank with the bell end uphill. joints in clay-tile pipe are commonly made with portland cement mortar or grout. where root-proof joints are essential, sulfur-sand compounds may be used or copper rings provided and used with cement-mortar joints. asphalt-mastic compounds, however, are more satisfactory. for cast-iron soil pipe, lead is the standard joint material. after the hub is pushed into the bell, oakum (or old hemp rope) is packed with a calking iron or a piece of wood (fig. , _a_.) solidly and evenly in the joint to a depth of about half an inch to center the hub end in the bell and to keep the joint filler from getting inside the pipe. oil, grease, or dirt on the joint surfaces should be removed, as it will prevent joint material from sticking. figure shows the different jointing methods. [illustration: figure .--establishing grade for sewer. _a_, - by -inch stakes are set each side of the trench at convenient distances _a_, _b_, _c_, and _d_. then a board is nailed horizontally on the stakes at _d_ at a convenient height above the bottom of the trench, that is, the bottom of the sewer leaving the house. a board is nailed likewise to the stakes at a the same height above the inlet to the tank that _d_ is above the bottom of the trench. similarly, boards are set at _b_ and _c_ by sighting from _a_ to _d_ so the tops of the intermediate boards will be in line. _b_, the exact grade of the sewer is obtained by measuring from the grade cord with the - by -inch stick, shown in detail. the length of the stick must equal the height of the board above sewer at _d_.] bituminous, sulfur-sand, lead, and other commercial joint compounds are poured while hot into the joint from a ladle (fig. , _f_), and when the work is well done they form a joint that is practically root-proof. they are more expensive than cement mortar. for molding hot compounds, a clay dike, or funnel, built about inches high around the triangular opening at the top of the jointer greatly aids in the rapid and complete filling of the joint space. a hot joint must be poured continuously, otherwise a seam may develop between successive pourings. bituminous compounds make a slightly elastic joint. a joint in -inch pipe requires about / to / pound of compound and in -inch pipe about to - / pounds. sulfur-sand joints are hard and inelastic. the compound is made by mixing together equal volumes of ordinary powdered sulfur and very fine clean sand, preferably the finest quicksand, and then heating the mixture until the sulfur melts. a -inch joint takes about / pound and a -inch joint about - / pounds of the mixture. commercial sulfur-joint compounds also are available. [illustration: figure .--jointing sewer pipe. _a_, using calking iron to force packing into joint. _b_, making joint with : portland cement mortar. use only enough water to dampen the mix. recalk after half an hour, to close shrinkage cracks. _c_, the completed joint. wrap finished joint with cloth and keep dampened, to aid curing. _d_, joint made by pouring : portland cement grout of creamy consistency into a form. this type of joint is not feasible unless the metal forms shown are available. _e_, use of asbestos runner clamped around pipe, for pouring hot joint. _f_, clay roll used in place of asbestos runner. _g_, a completed bituminous joint. _h_, use of swab, to remove any joint material forced through to inside of pipe.] soft pig lead or old scrap lead is suitable for lead joints on cast-iron pipe. about / pound per inch of pipe diameter is generally required for each joint. the lead is hot enough to pour when it begins to char the paddle used to skim off the impurities. when it cools it must be calked tightly to take up shrinkage. the calking should be uniform around the entire joint and should stop when the lead is tight. heavy pounding or continued calking may crack the bell of the pipe. it is easier to get good, joints when the pipe is in a vertical position. therefore, two lengths of pipe are frequently joined and are then laid as a single unit in the trench. in using terra cotta pipe, this procedure may be followed only when the joint is made with a mastic compound. cement-mortar joints cannot be used in such cases. before filling the trench, the sewer should be tested to detect possible leaks. earth free from rubbish and large stones should then be tamped around and about foot above the pipe. the septic tank flow through the tank slow, undisturbed flow through the tank is necessary for the separation of solids and liquids and for bacterial action. submerged inlets and outlets or baffle boards reduce disturbance. a submerged outlet prevents scum from passing out with the effluent. the single-chamber tank without a siphon, shown in figure , is easy to build, inexpensive, and entirely satisfactory in most instances. in very tight soils or for large installations a siphon and sometimes two chambers are advisable. size the tank should be large enough to retain the sewage at least hours. the size should be determined by the largest number of persons that may live in the house, rather than by the number actually living there at the time the tank is built. the additional cost of a large tank over a small one is relatively little. if there is any question as to which of two sizes should be built, it is wise to choose the larger. the dimensions recommended in the table in figure are based on an average production of gallons of sewage per person per day. unusually large quantities of sewage call for a tank of large capacity. in village and suburban homes where there is less food preparation than on farms and where the number of persons is more or less fixed, slightly smaller sizes will serve. in no case should the capacity of the tank below the flow line be less than gallons. a tank length of two to three times the width should be maintained, and it is advisable to provide a depth of at least feet below the flow line. allow about foot of "freeboard," or air space, above the flow line for the accumulation of gases. this space is generally vented through the soil stack of the house. a siphon (fig. ) with a dosing chamber is not considered necessary for a farm septic tank except for large installations ( , gallons or more), for those in tight soils, and where the disposal field is limited. [illustration] +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | capacities, dimensions, and concrete materials | | for septic tanks serving individual dwellings | +---------+--------+--------------------------------+-----------------------+ |_maximum |_liquid |_recommended inside dimensions_ |_materials for concrete| |number of|capacity+-------+--------+-------+-------+ : - / : mix_ | |persons |of tank |_width_|_length_|_liquid|_total +-------+-------+-------+ |served_ | in | | | depth_| depth_|_cement|_sand |_gravel| | |gallons_| | | | | sacks_| cubic | cubic | | | | | | | | | yards_| yards_| +---------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ | or less| | '- " | '- " | '- " | '- " | | - / | - / | +---------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ | | | '- " | '- " | '- " | '- " | | - / | - / | +---------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ | | | '- " | '- " | '- " | '- " | | | | +---------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ | | | '- " | '- " | '- " | '- " | | - / | - / | +---------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ | | | '- " | '- " | '- " | '- " | | - / | - / | +---------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ | | | '- " | '- " | '- " | '- " | | - / | - / | +---------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ | | | '- " | '- " | '- " | '- " | | - / | - / | +---------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ figure .--single-chamber septic tank. note alternate use of baffle boards where sanitary tees are omitted at inlet and outlet. the siphon provides intermittent discharge of effluent, which allows time for the disposal area to rest and aerate between discharges. this is more important where the discharge is nearly continuous than in small installations. the frequency and volume of the discharge into the tile field are controlled by the sizes of the siphon and the dosage chamber. the dealer should be informed of the size of the tank and the number of persons in the household, in order that he may furnish the proper unit. a - or -inch siphon will be adequate for almost any farmhouse installation. construction most septic tanks are built of concrete cast in place, since in this way there is a minimum possibility of cracks developing. concrete blocks, however (not cinder blocks), stone, brick, or structural tile are sometimes used. prefabricated commercial tanks of concrete and various other materials also are available. [illustration] +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | siphon | +--------------------------+-----------------------------------+ |_diameter of siphon |_clearance under bell | | a - " or "_ | e - "_ | +--------------------------+-----------------------------------+ |_diameter of bell |_distance across u-trap | | b - "or "_ | f - " or "_ | +--------------------------+-----------------------------------+ |_bottom of outlet |_bottom of outlet | | to discharge line | to bottom of u-trap | | c - - / " to - / "_| g - " or "_ | +--------------------------+-----------------------------------+ |_drawing depth |_height above floor | | d - " to "_ | h - - / "to - / "_ | +--------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | dimensions of dosing chamber | +-----------------+-------------------+------------+-----------+ | _number of |_depth below | | | | persons served_ | discharge line_[ ]| _width_[ ] | _length_ | +-----------------+-------------------+------------+-----------+ | or less | - / " to - / "| '- " | '- " | +-----------------+-------------------+------------+-----------+ | | " | '- " | '- " | +-----------------+-------------------+------------+-----------+ | | " | '- " | '- " | +-----------------+-------------------+------------+-----------+ | | " | '- " | '- " | +-----------------+-------------------+------------+-----------+ | | " | '- " | '- " | +-----------------+-------------------+------------+-----------+ | | " | '- " | '- " | +-----------------+-------------------+------------+-----------+ | | " | '- " | '- " | +-----------------+-------------------+------------+-----------+ [ ] depending upon depth c of siphon. [ ] same as single chamber tank fig. . figure .--typical design for a concrete septic tank with a dosing chamber and a siphon. masonry units should be laid in full beds of : cement mortar and the walls and floor plastered with at least a / -inch coat of : mortar. cells of concrete blocks and tile must be filled with concrete. masonry walls are generally inches thick, and care must be taken to follow _inside_ dimensions given for concrete tanks. directions for laying structural tile, brick, and concrete blocks can be obtained from dealers or trade associations. commercial tanks are suitable if they embody the essential features given in this bulletin. capacities should be as recommended in figure for concrete tanks. proper installation and periodic servicing also are essential. tanks badly damaged in handling should not be used. rapid corrosion of steel tanks will result if the asphalt coating is impaired. minor defects in precast masonry tanks may often be overcome by plastering the interior with cement mortar. building a concrete tank[ ] [ ] for information on making and placing concrete, see farmers' bulletin , use of concrete on the farm. a convenient method of assuring correct location of the tank is to build a frame as shown in figure . care is necessary to aline it with the center line of the inlet and outlet and to level it so that the distance from the bottom of the by 's on the form to the lower edge of the inlet hole in the form will permit it to be set at the grade of the house sewer. this frame is used to support the form for the tank. to avoid caving the edges, drive the stakes supporting the frame before beginning the excavation. the lumber in the frame can be used later to make part of the tank baffles. [illustration: figure .--method of outlining a septic-tank excavation on the ground surface.] figure shows how an inside form can be built and hung in place. the inlet and outlet tees should be carefully set and tied in place before the concrete is poured. a single length of pipe should be joined to the tee, so that the two can be set in the form as one unit. in most cases the earth walls of the excavations will serve as the outside forms unless the soil is sandy or gravelly and the excavation is deeper than feet. if outside forms are used, space must also be provided for them. forms should be constructed before the excavation is made and the tank built as soon as practical, to avoid warping of forms and caving of earth walls. [illustration: figure .--inside form hung in place for single-chamber septic tank, also a form for casting concrete-slab cover in sections.] county agricultural agents, local health departments, building-material dealers, and other agencies often have forms that may be borrowed or rented. the effluent sewer the effluent sewer should be constructed in similar manner and of the same materials as the house sewer and on a slope of / inch to foot. this line, however, may be laid of terra-cotta pipe, as cast-iron is not considered necessary except in unusual cases. this line should always terminate in a distribution box from which the tile lines of the disposal field lead away. for steep slopes the arrangement shown in figure (p. ) is practical. joints must be of root-tight construction if the sewer is in the vicinity of trees or shrubs. the length of the sewer depends upon the distance from the tank to a safe site for the disposal field. the disposal field correct installation of the disposal field is of great importance for proper functioning of the septic tank. therefore, the width, depth, and spacing of the tile trenches must be carefully selected. line of -inch, open- jointed, agricultural drain tile laid in shallow trenches are ordinarily used. perforated fiber drain pipes also may be used and are obtainable in -foot lengths. a distribution box with an inlet for the effluent sewer and an outlet for each individual run of disposal tile is the best means of dividing the flow. the outlet serving a large or double disposal field may be alternately opened and closed by means of a sewage switch that permits half the disposal field to work and rest alternately several weeks. a switch is especially helpful in tight soils but should not be provided unless proper maintenance is assured, so that a portion of the disposal field will not be left to handle the entire load of the system for an indefinite period. there are many variations of boxes, but figure shows a practical type. [illustration: figure .--typical distribution box.] shallow tile lines the disposal tile should not be more than to inches below the surface, and where the ground-water level rises to the bottom of the trench special underdrains, described on page , are necessary. special provisions must also be made where tight soils are encountered. these methods are described in the section entitled "disposal methods in tight or wet soils." the table in figure , together with the information given in table , below, may be used for estimating the number of tiles needed in any particular soil type. if there is any doubt about this requirement, a percolation test should be made in the disposal field, as follows: dig a hole -foot square and to the depth at which the tile is to be laid. this depth in most instances will be about inches and should not exceed inches. fill the hole with water to a depth of inches and observe the time required for the water to seep away; divide by to get the average time for the water to fall inch. the test should be repeated at three or four different points in the disposal field and the average time noted for all tests used. the data in table can then be used to determine the number of tiles needed. where hour is required for the water to fall inch the soil is totally unsuitable, and another site should be selected. soil conditions at the time of the test may vary from year-round average conditions, and this factor must be taken into account. if the soil appears exceptionally dry, greater depths of water may be used or the test repeated in the same hole. in no case should tests be made in filled or frozen ground. where fissured rock formations are encountered, advice should be sought from sanitation specialists. table .--_determining tile-disposal field requirements from percolation tests_[ ] ------------+----------------------++------------+--------------------- minutes | effective absorption|| minutes | effective absorption required | area required, per || required | area required, per for water to| person, in bottom ||for water to| person, in bottom fall inch | of disposal trenches ||fall inch | of disposal trenches ------------+----------------------++------------+--------------------- | _square feet_ || | _square feet_ | || | or less | || | | || | | || | | || [ ] | ------------+----------------------++------------+--------------------- [ ] a minimum of square feet should be provided, equal to feet of -inch trench. [ ] if more than minutes, use special design with seepage pits or sand-filter trenches. figure suggests methods of arranging the tiles in disposal fields under varying conditions and the length of tiles needed. [illustration: figure .--arrangements for tile-disposal fields, method of laying tile, and length of tiles needed.] size and minimum spacing requirements for disposal trenches +---------+----------+----------------------+-------------+ | trench | trench | effective absorption | tile lines | | width-w | depth-d | area in square feet | spacing-s | |in inches| in inches| per lineal foot | in feet | +---------+----------+----------------------+-------------+ | | to | . | . | | | to | . | . | | | to | . | . | | | to | . | . | +---------+----------+----------------------+-------------+ wider spacing of the lines desirable where available area permits disposal-tile trench disposal-tile lines--maximum length for each line feet. all lines to be equal in length. disposal-tile lines to slope " to " per feet, not over ". sewer-tile lines to slope / " to / " per foot. disposal methods in tight or wet soils if the soil is heavy clay or has tight formation, yet shows some porosity from percolation tests, the efficiency of the field may be increased by placing below the tile lines to inches of additional filter material (washed gravel, crushed stone, slag, clean cinders, or clean bank-run gravel / to - / inches in size). when the surface soil is tight and is underlain by porous soil, sufficient drainage is sometimes obtained for the smaller installations by omitting the tile field and providing a dry well at the end of the effluent sewer, provided the water table will not be contaminated. larger systems under such soil conditions should have a tile field, and absorption can be increased by boring - or -inch holes down to the porous stratum and filling them with gravel or sand; the holes should be to feet apart. another and perhaps the best practice is to excavate the tile trenches to feet and install a lower tile line, as shown in figure . this latter method is especially desirable if the upper tight stratum is especially thick, or if there is no porous lower stratum, or if in irrigated regions and where the disposal field is limited in area. where the underdrain tile is not used, the absorption capacity of the field can be increased by providing a rock-filled trench across the lower end of the tiles for the full width of the field. the depth should be not less than feet and the width not less than feet. on account of the beneficial action of bacteria in the upper soil layers it is highly desirable to confine the effluent near the surface rather than to use underdrains. purification becomes slower and less effective, the deeper the drains. in situations where the soil contains considerable moisture or is even saturated, the field may be improved by partially encircling it with a tile line laid to serve as a drain. such a line should be on the high side and have surface outlets for removing the water from the soil. it should not be laid so close to a disposal tile line that it will drain the sewage effluent from the disposal field onto the surface of the ground. [illustration: slope of disposal tile to inches per feet. slope of underdrain tile not less than above. plug upper end of underdrain tile lines, lower end to discharge into rock-filled seepage pit or into other approved outlet. figure .--filter trench with underdrains.] when the tile field is underlain by stratified rock or where under-drainage is necessary, advice should be sought from the public health authorities, as regulations in some states may not permit the use of certain methods. care and maintenance of septic tanks a septic tank when first used does not need starters, such as yeast, to promote bacterial action. a good septic tank normally requires no maintenance other than a yearly inspection and an occasional cleaning. frequency of cleaning depends on the capacity of the tank and the quantity and composition of the sewage. tanks of the size recommended in this bulletin may require cleaning at intervals of to years. the tank should be cleaned when to inches of sludge and scum has accumulated. if a drain has not been provided, sludge may be removed by bailing or by pumping with a sludge or bilge pump. it is not necessary to remove the entire liquid contents. burial in a shallow pit or trench with at least to inches of earth cover at a point remote from water sources is the most practical method for disposing of these wastes. a septic tank is intended to handle sewage only. coffee grounds and ground garbage may be included if there is an ample supply of water for flushing and the tank is cleaned more frequently than would otherwise be done. the size of the tank should be increased at least percent if these materials are included in the sewage. =_do not use matches or an open flame to inspect a septic tank, as the gasses produced by decomposing sewage may explode and cause serious injury._= effect of drain solvents and other materials soap, drain solvents, and other mild cleaning or disinfecting solutions used for normal household purposes cause no trouble in the tank. constant use in large quantities, however, and disinfected wastes from the sickroom may prove harmful. wastes from milk rooms, strong chemicals used in sterilizing equipment or in photographic work, and the wastes from filters or water softeners not only reduce bacterial action but also cause abnormally rapid accumulations of sludge and clogging of the tile lines. protection against freezing septic-tank systems seldom freeze when in constant use. warm water and the decomposition of the sewage usually maintain above-freezing temperatures. in cold regions there is trouble from freezing if various parts of the system are not covered adequately. if the system is to be out of service for a period of time or if exposure is severe, it may be advisable to mound over the poorly protected parts of the system with earth, hay, straw, brush, leaves, manure, snow, or the like. in cold regions it is not advisable to install the entire system below frost depth, as this will remove the effluent from the action of the aerobic bacteria in the upper layers of the soil and make the system generally less accessible. new systems put into operation during very cold weather may freeze unless large quantities of hot water are discharged during the first few weeks. septic-tank troubles in sewage disposal, clogging of the disposal field is the most common trouble. this may be caused ( ) by a tank too small for the volume of sewage, ( ) by failure to clean the tank regularly, ( ) by interior arrangement that does not provide slow flow through the tank or that allows scum or sludge to pass out with the effluent, or ( ) by a disposal field that is too small or is incorrectly built. the remedy for a clogged disposal field is to dig up and clean the tiles and re-lay them or feet to one side or the other of their former position. sometimes a tile line can be cleaned by opening up the line at each end and flushing it thoroughly with a hose. with this method provision must be made to drain off and safely dispose of the water used for flushing. tile lines laid with improper slope allow the effluent to collect in a limited area and saturate the soil, causing odors. bacteria cannot work in such areas, where the soil becomes sour, or "sewage-sick." these lines must be relaid on the correct slope. odors or a water-logged soil may also indicate that the disposal field is too small. house sewers frequently clog. this is due, in most cases, to roots and less frequently to trash, garbage, or other foreign materials discharged with the sewage. greases in the sewer may cause trouble, especially when the slope is insufficient to give the sewage a cleansing velocity. drain solvents will sometimes remove the obstruction, but more often it is necessary to clean the sewer by rodding. in some cases it may be necessary to dig up the line to reach the obstruction or, at least, to open the line so that it can be rodded from two directions. when it has been cleaned, a manhole could be built for use in case of future trouble. if stoppage is due to roots it may be necessary to re-lay the sewer with root-tight joints, or to move either the sewer or the vegetation so that roots cannot reach the line. grease traps grease traps (fig. ) are not recommended for the average farm, because they clog easily and require frequent cleaning, but they are desirable for boarding houses and tourist camps where large quantities of grease are produced. the septic tank if of proper design and size will take care of the normal grease from most farm kitchens. the traps must be several times larger than the quantity of greasy water discharged into them at any one time, in order to allow the greases to rise, but they should not be of less than gallons' capacity. the trap is best located in an accessible place in the basement or under the house close to the source of grease and safe from frost. outdoor locations at shallow depths require a covering for insulation against freezing. grease traps should be connected to the kitchen sink only and not to laundry, shower, or water-closet wastes. they must be cleaned periodically for satisfactory operation, and the outlet should be properly trapped. [illustration: figure .--typical grease trap.] disposal of drainage from fixtures other than toilets when the farmhouse does not have an indoor toilet but does have a kitchen sink or other similar fixtures, the drainage can be disposed of as shown in figure . even where septic tanks have been installed, it is sometimes advisable to have a second disposal field for other fixtures than the toilet, to avoid overloading the tank, especially where large quantities of laundry water are discharged at one time. [illustration: figure .--disposal of drainage from kitchen fixtures, using a line of terra cotta or fiber drain tile surrounded with gravel. one or two rock-filled pits at the end of the line increase the absorption area and are desirable where there are several fixtures or the soil is nonporous. the pits may be lined with boards or masonry laid without mortar and provided with a tight cover.] these wastes are not likely to create serious health hazards, but they become nuisances if discharged promiscuously on the ground surface. such drainage should never be permitted on the watershed of a spring. coarse sand and gravel, to inches deep, may be placed on the bottom of the pit, to strain out small particles of solids, which might clog the pores of the soil. if, after a few years, the sand or gravel becomes clogged with solids, it should be replaced with clean materials. if excessive quantities of grease are permitted to enter the sink drain, a grease trap may be advisable. cesspools cesspools are cheap in first cost but high in maintenance costs and often become nuisances. they should be located at least feet from wells, feet from seepage pits and property lines, and feet from dwelling foundations. they should never be used in the vicinity of shallow wells and, in any case, only where permitted by state regulations. the cesspool depends for its action upon seepage into the surrounding soil and consequently is particularly unsatisfactory in tight clay soils. in more open sand and gravel soils the seepage is reduced as the pores of the soil become clogged with particles of solids, until it stops entirely, and overflowing occurs. emptying and then cleaning the walls and floor of a cesspool do not fully open up the clogged soil pores, and overflowing can be expected to occur soon again. solids in cesspools must be removed from time to time by bailing or pumping and should then be buried to inches deep in a trench where the water supply will not be endangered. caustic potash (lye) will to some extent liquefy solids in a cesspool. this treatment does not eliminate the necessity of removing the contents when periodic inspection shows that the cesspool is nearly full. caustic potash converts the greases into soft soap, whereas caustic soda forms a hard soap that does not readily dissolve. the chemical treatment is not effective in liquefying solids in the pores of the soil surrounding the cesspool. [illustration: figure .--a neat, whitewashed lattice along the paved walkway provides protection from cold wind and rain and gives added privacy.] when clogging continues and cannot be corrected, in most cases the best solution to the problem would be to abandon the cesspool and install a septic-tank system with tile disposal field. the cesspool should be completely filled with stones, earth, or other solid materials to avoid possible cave-ins.[ ] [ ] see the septic tank, p. . privies a privy when safely located and properly built and maintained is satisfactory for its purpose on the farm. privies should be built to feet from the farmhouse, preferably on the opposite side of the house from prevailing winds, and at least feet from the well. a site downhill from the well is generally safest. in some cases, however, the ground water may flow in a direction opposite to the slope of the surface, in which case the privy should be built on the other side of the well. direction of flow may sometimes be learned from soil surveys, well-driller's data, or other similar sources. a distance of at least feet from fences or other buildings allows for proper mounding of the privy and keeps it away from roof drainage from adjacent buildings. good, tight construction with screened ventilators keeps insects and birds from entering, prevents rapid deterioration of the building, and provides greater comfort for the user. certain features, while not essential to sanitation and satisfactory service, add to personal convenience. a paved walkway, well protected from cold winds and rain, is desirable. a neat, whitewashed lattice, as shown in figure , an arbor covered with vines, or a hedge screen adds to privacy. the earth-pit privy is the simplest to build and the one most widely used. it is not generally recommended in localities where underground rock has crevices. for a sanitary type of privy with reinforced concrete[ ] floor, riser, and supporting sills see figure . because privy units are commonly used as urinals, the use of impervious materials for risers and floors facilitates cleanliness. in the colder climates, wood treated with a preservative is durable and reduces the problem of moisture condensation. therefore, wood could be used if approved by the state department of health. [ ] for information on making concrete see farmers' bulletin , use of concrete on the farm. when it is considered impracticable to build the slab and riser of concrete, these parts may be of wood, as shown in figure . the building itself may be as shown in either illustration. a wood structure is easy to move to a new location. a pit with a minimum capacity of cubic feet[ ] will usually serve five people over a period of to years. the privy should be moved when the pit is filled to within or inches of the top and a strong disinfectant spread in the old pit before covering it with earth. [ ] recommended by the committee on promotion of rural sanitation, public health engineering section of the american public health association, . [illustration: figure .--sanitary type of privy. detailed plans and a bill of materials for this design can be had from the united states public health service, washington , d. c.] it is important to have the earth-pit privy more than feet from the well even where the water table is not near the surface. the ground water should flow from the well toward the privy, and it is important that this direction of flow be determined in advance. wood is most commonly employed for the main part of the building. the ground outside should be sloped as shown, to shed water away from the building, and the roof should extend beyond the walls to shed water away from the pit. care and maintenance all privies require periodic attention. seats and covers should be washed weekly with soap and water or with disinfectants, such as cresol, pine oil, and hypochlorite or chloride of lime. these have deodorant properties and are available at most grocery or drug stores. druggists generally carry a more refined product and consequently the price is higher. during the fly season fly and mosquito eggs will be destroyed by pouring half a pint of crude oil, crankcase oil, fuel oil, kerosene, or borax solution ( pound powdered borax dissolved in about gallons of water) over the contents of the pit about once a week. [illustration: figure .--pit privy of all-wood construction. the sills and riser of this type should either be treated or made of cypress, redwood, cedar, locust, fir, or other decay-resistant wood.] odors from privy pits and vaults can be reduced by covering the contents with dry earth, ashes, manure, or sawdust. these materials fill up the pit rather quickly, but can be used where other deodorants are not available. sometimes two cakes of yeast dissolved in gallons of water are effective in reducing odors. commercial deodorants are available from suppliers of disinfectants. if a person in the family has typhoid fever or is a carrier of that disease or has dysentery, it is advisable to disinfect the excreta. fire, live steam, boiling water, and such chemicals as caustic soda (sodium hydroxide), caustic potash (potassium hydroxide), or hypochlorite or chloride of lime may be used. the heat generated by the slacking of quicklime is also effective. best results are obtained if the infected material is treated prior to depositing it in the privy. further advice may be obtained from physicians, local health officers, or state health departments. chemical closets in general, chemical closets should be used only where there are elderly or infirm people unable to get outdoors, particularly in winter-time. in some localities their use is forbidden by law because of improper maintenance. strict adherence to the manufacturer's directions for making the installation is necessary to obtain satisfactory service. the chief advantage of chemical closets is that they may be within or adjoining the house and used without regard to soil or ground-water conditions. the caustic chemicals required, if used properly, reduce the quantity of solid matter by liquefying action, disinfect and deodorize the contents, and lessen danger from flies. disadvantages are the cost of the chemicals and necessity for careful and constant maintenance. the chemical-tank closet is generally recommended rather than the dry-type chemical closet. three variations of tanks are available commercially. one type contains a clean-out opening in the top of the tank, through which the contents are removed by pumping or bailing. the second type has, in addition to a clean-out opening, a drain valve at the bottom, which is operated by a handle extending to a clean-out opening, so that gravity drainage of the tank is possible. the third type is self-draining; as the excreta are added an equal volume of liquid is spilled out the overflow. the solid matter must be removed manually or through the sludge drain. the last-mentioned type requires frequent addition of chemicals, and the others are recharged after each emptying. the presence of odor is an indication of insufficient chemical or of the need for emptying and recharging. the same precautions apply to selecting an area for disposing of the tank wastes as to disposing of the materials removed from cesspools.[ ] since the contents of chemical closets are caustic, they may kill vegetation with which they come in contact. [ ] for disposal methods in tight soils, see p. . the dry-type chemical closet is cheap, simple, and easy to install but requires frequent emptying. pine tar and coal tar will accomplish only partial disinfection and deodorization, but caustic disinfectants produce liquefication in addition if used in sufficient quantities. the caustic chemicals may cause burns if the receptacle is too full or if spilled where they come in contact with the body. this form of closet is more of an expedient than a permanent installation, and daily care is necessary to prevent the development of insanitary conditions. disposal of garbage and trash domestic garbage and trash on farms can be divided into four classes--( ) waste of plant or animal origin suitable for animal feed, ( ) unpalatable plant or animal waste, ( ) combustible trash, and ( ) noncombustible material. the disposal of these wastes is simplified if the four classes are kept separate. trash to be burned should be kept dry. coffee grounds, tea leaves, citrus rinds, fish heads, entrails, eggshells, and similar material are most readily handled if drained and put in paper sacks. cans should be placed where they will not collect water and become breeding places for mosquitoes. cans will corrode faster if heated sufficiently to burn off all grease. when the trash accumulates it should be hauled to some out-of-the-way place, such as a gully, or buried. neat-appearing garbage containers are desirable for kitchen use and should be small enough to require daily emptying. large containers may be placed within easy reach outside the house and screened with a lattice fence or shrubbery. substantial containers of rust-resistant metal will not quickly become an eyesore and a nuisance. tight covers should be used to keep out prowling animals and to eliminate the habit of tossing wastes from the back door. open or wooden containers are not recommended. a good way to protect the garbage pail is to place it in a small pit that has a manhole frame and a lid that can be raised by foot pedal. a gravel bottom in the pit will assist in draining water away. outdoor receptacles, if emptied and cleaned once a week, generally do not become foul. grease, coffee grounds, and other similar materials that adhere to the sides of containers can be removed by scraping with a little sand prior to scalding. electrically operated units grind garbage and bones and discharge the material through the kitchen-sink drain. they will not handle tin cans, glass, and the like. they may be used on farms if the septic tank is larger than normal and if sufficient water is available for flushing the drain to prevent clogging. garbage to be fed to animals should be preserved as carefully as is human food. to prevent the spread of trichinosis and other diseases, it should be cooked before it is fed to hogs. garbage left uneaten by the animals should be disposed of by one of the methods described above. incineration is the most sanitary method of disposing of farm wastes. garbage, however, is not easily burned. figure shows a type of incinerator[ ] suitable for farm homes. details of construction for a brick incinerator are given in figure . brick, stone, concrete, or other fire-resistant material may be used. commercial incinerators, some of which are designed to be built into the house, also are available, although these cost considerably more than the home-made type shown. [ ] blueprints of this design may be obtained from the extension agricultural engineers at most of the state colleges. a limited quantity of refuse may be burned in a kitchen range or a furnace, but it may cause accumulations of grease in the flue and require frequent cleaning to prevent fire. next to burning, burial is the most desirable method of waste disposal. waste material may be deposited in a trench or feet wide, or feet long, and or feet deep and covered with earth when filled to within inches of the top. if there is no fire hazard, the contents of the trench may be burned. garbage may be included in a compost heap with leaves, peat, manure, and similar materials. the compost pile should be in an inconspicuous place, built up to the desired height with materials that will rot, and then covered with or inches of earth. the top should be level and the sides steep sloping. it is necessary that the material being composted be kept moist; otherwise it will not rot. frequently commercial fertilizer is added to increase the fertilizing value of the compost. ashes and clinkers removed from furnaces should be placed in metal containers to eliminate fire hazard. wood ashes may be spread on the lawn or garden, as they have some fertilizing value. [illustration: figure .--a satisfactory incinerator for household use.] [illustration: figure .--details of construction of the household incinerator pictured in figure .] trash burners of various designs suitable for burning small quantities of paper and rags are available or may be improvised. the main requirements are provision for adequate draft and for preventing the escape of burning paper or live embers. u. s. government printing office: for sale by the superintendent of documents, u. s. government printing office washington . d. c. -- price cents * * * * * transcriber note illustrations were repositioned so as to not split paragraphs. transcriber's note: italic text is denoted by _underscores_. small capital text has been replaced with all capitals. minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected without note. irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed. mismatched quotes are not fixed if it's not sufficiently clear where the missing quote should be placed. the cover for the ebook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. page : after the following line there is a hand symbol pointing to the right: "with firm, undazzled eye behold!" * * * * * the rural magazine, and literary evening fire-side. vol. i. philadelphia, _sixth month, ._ _no. ._ for the rural magazine. the desultory remarker. no. v. this mournful truth is every where confess'd, _slow rises worth, by poverty depress'd._ dr. johnson. numerous and important are the boasted advantages of our free government. men and things are professedly estimated, in this region of sturdy republicanism, in exact accordance with their true character. our just and beautiful theories inculcate the doctrine, that virtue and talent are the only proper grounds of distinction in society; and if this were faithfully illustrated in practice, merit would not be opposed by serious obstacles, in emerging from obscurity. if such a desirable state of things were realized, how rapidly would our country advance in prosperity! monarchical institutions, which sanction the hereditary descent of rank and distinction, would contrast very unpleasantly with those which are bottomed on the cardinal principle, that all men are by nature created equal. it becomes us therefore to inquire, whether the fancied superiority, which in relation to this subject, we arrogate to ourselves, be in reality any thing but in name. in prosecuting this inquiry, let personal observation, and personal experience, be candidly consulted. if we have voluntarily substituted, for what in other countries results from the exercise of despotic power, an idol of our own creation, and bow to it with the same deference and fealty, what becomes of our claim to the title of independence? the effect of such a deception will be no less productive of mental and moral degradation, than if the laws of the land had authorized the establishment of privileged orders. the real republican character is particularly distinguished by its simplicity. the inroads of luxury, and the inordinate influence of wealth, are anxiously to be deprecated, as destructive to rational liberty. titles of nobility are not within our reach; but the glitter of wealth may equally awaken our ambition, and monopolize our attention. here there is danger, against the approach of which it is the part of prudence and of wisdom to be vigilant. when an individual is supposed to be affluent, have we ever known his merit to be unjustly overlooked or disregarded? are not riches uniformly invested with the magic power of extenuating the faults, and magnifying the good qualities of their possessor? the answers to these questions will at once be given without hesitation, for virtue, glory, beauty, all divine and human powers, immortal gold! are thine. the complexion of society in philadelphia, is considered, in many respects, of that chastened and respectable character, which is well becoming the nature of our institutions. our metropolis has always been distinguished for _benevolence_, of which, as well as of other good qualities, honourable mention might be made. but indiscriminate approbation must be withheld, if we maintain our allegiance to truth. there is in this city an aristocracy of wealth, which has a withering and destructive effect on the best interests of social life.--wealth, in certain circles, is considered an indispensable recommendation; and perhaps in some instances, the only one its possessor is required to prefer! it is not pretended, that this golden qualification should be contemned in the abstract; for, when not abused, it furnishes the means not only of procuring many valuable and rational gratifications, but of extensive utility to others. but we err egregiously, in permitting it to supplant, in our estimation, the only distinctions of real value;--those which have been indicated above. such a blind devotion to its charms, casts a reflection upon our character for good sense, equally just and severe with that which properly belongs to a retailer of the stale and pointless bon-mots of monarchs, for wit, merely because they issue from the fountain of royalty. this slavish subserviency, is altogether unworthy of freemen; they must, if true to themselves, discard the influence of privileged orders, and view things as they really are.--many an individual, who now fills a large space in the public eye, would, if overtaken by adversity, scarcely be discerned at all without the aid of a microscope. he would, when deserted by prosperity, return to his native insignificance, and assume his proper station in life. our conduct to all men should be friendly and decorous, but to those who are struggling with adverse circumstances, and who possess sterling recommendations to our notice, it should be zealously and liberally extended. the great man, to whom we are indebted for our motto, knew what it was to be beset by those potent adversaries,--griping poverty, and chilling neglect. he concluded one of his letters to cave, the editor of the gentleman's magazine, in these remarkable words, "i am yours impransus." if by this he intended to convey the idea, that he was fasting because he had not the means of procuring a dinner, what a melancholy reflection does it suggest to the mind. even lord chesterfield himself, whose delicate nerves were so dreadfully shocked by the "_savageness_" of johnson, had he been acquainted with the circumstance, and foreseen his future celebrity, would have hastened to his relief. who that beheld dr. franklin, in the garb of a printer's boy, walking up market street, eating one of his rolls of bread, and carrying the other under his arm, could have believed, that at a future period he would become one of the most celebrated men of the age. so deceptive are external appearances, and so irresistible must be the conclusion, that virtue and talent are not excluded from the humblest walks of life.--hence the folly and injustice of establishing privileged orders. so long ago as the days of horace, the seductive power of gold was considered as directly hostile to the cause of virtue. the following lines are extracted from his ode to his friend sallust, as translated by dr. francis. virtue, to crowds a foe profest, disdains to number with the blest, phraates, by his slaves ador'd, and to the parthian crown restor'd, and gives the diadem, the throne, and laurel wreath, to him alone, _who can a treasur'd mass of gold with firm, undazzled eye behold!_ the village teacher. it was finely remarked by an indian, that the white man has not so deep and intimate a sense of his dependence upon god as the indian. he owes more, apparently, to himself and his fellows. entrenched in his palaces of stone, he can smile at the pitiless storm, and defy the blasts of winter. the great business of his early life, is to provide against its decline. he has artisans to administer to every want, and to alleviate every pain. hence his own importance is magnified in his view; and he thinks less frequently of the great being, from whom all his comforts spring. the indian, on the other hand, leads a life of privation and adventure. he wanders alone through the forest; and seeks companionship and communion with nature. he looks abroad on the majesty of creation, and feels that there must be a deity. in the uncertainty of his supplies of food, he knows that he is at the mercy of an invisible protector; and the feeling of gratitude for unexpected relief, is more vivid than can enter into the heart of the civilized man. without stopping to inquire into the justice of the indian's remark, i shall go on to observe, that there is a like difference between the occupations of the city and country. every thing in a great metropolis is artificial. as the division of labour is the great secret of national wealth, so it is carried to its greatest extent in the capital. the members of the community are there more interlocked with each other, more helpless by themselves, than is the case with us. accordingly they look to each other for the principal part of their enjoyments. to begin with the most necessary things of life, a citizen is dependant upon a dozen tradesmen, perhaps, for those articles of food and clothing, which a farmer works up at home. he accomplishes himself for one object of pursuit; and although profoundly ignorant of all others, is enabled thereby to fill his station, to keep his place as a key-stone in the arch of society. it never occurs to him how helpless and impotent he would be by himself. he is accommodated to things around--the artificial creature of an artificial system. nor is it only in this dependence upon his fellows, that, the citizen differs from the countryman. his contrivances against the unavoidable evils and calamities of life, are more numerous, and cast a veil, in some degree, between him and his creator. the overruling of that hand, which dispenses and withholds the rain and the harvest, affect him, as it were, but at a distance.--his merchandise is the product of art. his system of credit equalizes, if i may use the expression, the dispensations of providence. the tempest may bury his wealth in the bosom of the deep; but an insurance office repairs the ravage of the elements. every means in his power is used to thwart the original decree, "by the sweat of thy brow," &c.--he looks into futurity, and calculates the unfruitfulness of the seasons--not as a motive to humble dependence--not as an incentive to prayer and repentance--but that he may build his fortune upon the wants and the casualties of his fellow creatures. he even grapples with death itself--calculates with unfeeling selfishness the days and the infirmities of his neighbours, and wagers upon the length of his life. all his arrangements are predicated upon this artificial system. the thought, if it ever occur to him, of the great god of nature, is as much shut out by it, as the fair face of creation from the alleys and courts of the city. and in proportion as he becomes impressed with a deep sense of that overruling providence, will these things become hateful in his eyes. no doubt the mind is, as milton has it, "its own place," and can transform the natural aliment of vice into a medicament of virtue. the noblest examples of active goodness are generally to be found in a large metropolis; for it must be virtue of a superior cast that can resist the temptations which are there presented.--but minds of a contemplative turn may be allowed to shun the combat which they find it so hard to sustain, and to seek for aids to their good resolutions in external circumstances. to all such i may venture to recommend the pursuits of a country life as eminently salutary. every month and week has there its appropriate labours, which cannot be neglected; and it is from this cause a life of activity and variety. the events of the season are full of interest, and it is peculiarly delightful to observe how providence still delights to bless. shortsighted and presumptuous that we are, we are constantly auguring this or that misfortune--lamenting the unpropitiousness in some respect or another of the year; and yet from harvest to harvest are our barns filled, and our granaries laden. the labours of the country do not, like those of the city, deform the body, and undermine the constitution; and there is in its clear atmosphere, and silent serenity, an influence as invigorating to the soul as the touch of earth to antæus. in the country, the silent and manifest workings of the deity are constantly before us, and meet our eyes in every phase of organized life: the mind must be worse than insensible that does not feel and respond to the voice of praise, which seems to be constantly ascending, as from one great altar. some philosophers have placed virtue in a state of lofty contemplation; and others, of continued activity. the truth seems to be, that they are both essential to the perfect character.--he who gives himself up to indolent meditation, will become a prey to the enemies of his own household, and will fall by a servile foe. he who never retires to "plume his feathers, and let grow his wings," will find himself less and less able to sustain his flight; and discover, perhaps, when it is too late, that he has lost the energy of virtue, and the love of moral beauty. but as the temptations of the more selfish passions are the strongest, that state of society in which we are the most exposed to them, is the most dangerous; and we have more need of having our eyes and our hearts fixed upon pure and lofty objects, than of having excessive stimulants applied to that activity, of which every condition in life requires a steady and vigorous application. to reflecting minds, therefore, the labour and the relaxation which the country holds out, are both more salutary and invigorating, than that which is required amid the smoke, and bustle, and jarring interests of a great metropolis. an account _of the agricultural school at hofwyl, in switzerland._ (from the edinburgh review.) mr. de fellenberg was first known merely as an agriculturist, and still keeps up his original establishment of husbandry at buchsie, an old chateau near hofwyl; but agriculture was always with him a secondary object, and subservient to that system of education to which his thoughts were very early directed. he is a man of an unusually ardent as well as persevering turn of mind, and conceals a character of deep and steady enthusiasm, under a very calm exterior and manners. although born to patrician rank in his own country, he early imbibed those political doctrines of which such tremendous misapplication was so soon to be made in his neighbourhood: and the disappointment filled his mind with melancholy views of the moral state and future prospects of mankind. it appeared to him, that the world was blindly hurrying on to irretrievable ruin; and that a sounder system of education for the great body of the people, could alone stop the progress of error and corruption. he has sometimes mentioned in conversation the particular circumstances, which finally determined him to the course he has since pursued. in the year or , he happened to be at paris as one of the commission sent by the provisional government established in switzerland after the french invasion; and in that capacity he had an official conversation with the director reubel, at his country-house near paris,--in the course of which he laid before him, in glowing colours, a picture of the miserable state to which his country was reduced, and which might soon lead to a _vendean_ war, destructive to both parties. the director appeared for some time to listen with profound attention, and mr. de fellenberg ascribed his silence to conviction of the truths he urged, and something like a feeling of compunction,--when, all at once, the worthy republican throwing open a window, called aloud to one of his servants--'_jacques! apportez moi finette!_' a little spaniel was brought accordingly with its litter of young ones in a basket--and there was no chance of his hearing another word about switzerland or liberty! after this rebuff, he gave up the idea of serving his country as a politician; and, asking for his passport the next day, made the best of his way home, determined to set about the slow work of elementary reformation, by a better mode of education, and to persevere in it for the rest of his life! it is now upwards of twelve years since mr. de fellenberg undertook to systematize domestic education, and to show on a large scale how the children of the poor might be best taught, and their labour at the same time most profitably applied: in short, how the first twenty years of a poor man's life might be so employed as to provide for his support and his education. the peasants in his neighbourhood were at first rather shy of trusting their children for a new experiment; and being thus obliged to take his pupils where he could find them, many of the earliest were the sons of vagrants, and literally picked up on the highways; and this is the case with one or two of the most distinguished. he had very soon, however, the good fortune of finding an excellent co-operator in the person of a young man of the name of vehrli, the son of a schoolmaster of thurgovia, who, coming to hofwyl in , to see the establishment and inform himself of the mode of teaching, was so struck with the plan of the _school of industry_, that he offered his son, then about , as an assistant. this young man devoted himself from that moment to the undertaking.----although admitted at first to mr. de fellenberg's table, he soon left it for that of his pupils, with whom he has ever since lived night and day. working with them in the fields, their playfellow in their hours of relaxation,--and, learning himself what he is to teach as a master, his zeal has not cooled a moment during a trial of more than ten years' unremitting exertions, under the guidance of his patron, and assisted now by four other masters. the number of his pupils has increased successively to : they obey him as well as mr. de fellenberg, entirely from love and a sense of duty:--punishment has been inflicted only twice since the beginning; and their treatment is nearly that of children under the paternal roof. they go out every morning to their work soon after sunrise--having first breakfasted and received a lesson of about half an hour. they return at noon. dinner takes them half an hour,--a lesson of one hour follows; then to work again till six in the evening. on sunday, the different lessons take six hours instead of two; and they have butcher's meat on that day only. they are divided into three classes, according to age and strength; an entry is made in a book, every night, of the number of hours each class has worked, specifying the sort of labour done, in order that it may be charged to the proper account, each particular crop having an account opened for it, as well as every new building, the live stock, the machines, the schools themselves, &c. &c. in winter, and whenever there is no out-of-doors' work, the boys plait straw for chairs; make baskets; saw logs with the cross saw, and split them; thrash and winnow corn, grind colours, knit stockings, or assist the wheel-wright and other artificers, of whom there are many employed on the establishment. for all which different sorts of labour an adequate salary is credited each boy's class. mr. de fellenberg indeed observes, that the boys being most of them only just come to the age of productive labour, it is presumed the establishment will not only support itself in future, but repay past expenses; particularly as certain outfits charged to the first years will not recur again.--he observes also, that several grown boys have been suffered to go away, and have been replaced by young children, to the great injury of the establishment. it may be added, that the pupils have been indulged of late with better clothes than formerly, or than is strictly necessary, as well as a better table; and that, from attention to their feelings, the cast-off clothes of the _school of the rich_ are not turned to their use, but given away to the poor of the neighbourhood, that they may not appear in the light of dependants on any but their adoptive father and their own labour. it is undoubtedly a very striking circumstance, that only one, out of the whole number of boys admitted into this school since the beginning, has been dismissed as irrecoverably vicious; all the others have got rid of their former habits;--and, when final sentence was passed upon the unfortunate boy, the others begged leave to contribute each one _batz_ towards a present to him, that he might remember them with kindness. the labours of the field, their various sports, their lessons, their choral songs, the necessary rest, fill the whole circle of the twenty-four hours; and judging from their open, cheerful, contented countenances, nothing seems wanting to their happiness.--but it is a great point gained, to have brought young men to the age of or , uncontaminated by the general licentiousness which prevails in the country. when their time is out, and they mix with other people, they will no doubt marry; but the probability is, they will be more difficult in their choice than other men of the same rank, and will shrink from vulgarity and abject poverty. long habits of self-restraint, too, will enable them to look out with comparative patience for a suitable establishment, before they burden themselves with a family. in short, if the only check of the mild kind to an excessive increase of population is self-restraint, from motives of prudence and morality, where may we look for it with better hopes than among the pupils of mr. de fellenberg? we shall now proceed, however, to lay before our readers a more detailed account of the internal management of the school of industry. the lessons are given mostly _viva voce_, and various questions continually interposed, respecting measures of capacity, length and weight, and their fractional parts; the cubic contents of a piece of timber, or a stack of hay; the time necessary to perform any particular task, under such or such circumstances; the effects of gravitation; the laws of mechanics; rules of grammar and different parts of speech, &c. &c. the boys endeavour to find the solution of arithmetical and mathematical problems without writing, and at the same time to proceed with the mechanical processes in which they may happen to be engaged. aware of the difficulties with which they are thus made to grapple, as it were, without assistance, they are the more sensible of the value of those scientific short cuts, which carry you in the dark indeed, but safely and speedily, to your journey's end, and the more delighted with their beauty as well as their use. they acquire the _rationale_ of the thing, together with the practice; their understandings are exercised, and their attention kept awake. none of them are ever seen to look inattentive or tired, although just returned from their day's labour in the fields. contrivance, and some degree of difficulty to overcome, is a necessary condition, it would seem, of our enjoyments. the pupils are not always questioned, but, in their turn, propose questions to the masters, and difficulties to be solved, which they do sometimes with considerable ingenuity.--they draw outlines of maps, from memory, exhibiting the principal towns, rivers, and chains of mountains; they draw correctly from nature, and in perspective, all sorts of machines for agriculture; and are very fond of trying chymically the different sorts of soil, and have tables of them very well arranged. various gymnastic games are also practised occasionally; but mental exercises find their place better after hard labour: they do indeed in the fields full as well as on the benches of the school. for instance, when the boys are employed in digging trenches to irrigate a meadow, and while directing the water along artificial ridges, and round hills, so as to regulate the fall and distribute the moisture equally, they put each other in mind of what they have heard about the laws of hydraulics. when they clear a field of the stones turned up by the plough, and are directed to separate those which are calcareous, in order to be burned into lime, they know and practise the different tests by which their nature is ascertained, and can point out in the horizon, the particular mountains which have furnished these various fragments. in order to encourage the attachment to property acquired by our own industry, the pupils are allowed certain emoluments, such as the proceeds of the seeds they collect, some part of their gleanings, and what they raise in a small garden of their own; all which accumulates, and forms a fund for the time of their going away. no ambitious views are fostered by this mode of training the poorest class, beyond that of being good husbandmen. the pupils of the _school of industry_ are not raised above their station; but their station, dignified and improved, is raised to them. it has been remarked before, that men born in the poorest class of society, constituted as it is at present, especially those who subsist in part on public charity, find it almost as difficult to get out of their dependant situation as a hindoo to leave his cast,--kept down as they are by a sort of inbred ignorance and improvidence, and, above all, by their multitude; which is one of the worst consequences of that improvidence. the higher and middling ranks scarcely keep up their numbers any where; while multiplication goes on, unrestrained by any consideration of prudence, precisely among those who are least able to support a family. the poor may, in the bitterness of want, exclaim against taxes and ill government, and certainly not always without reason;--but the worst government is their own of themselves. _agricultural labour_ is not the only occupation which can be made the base of such an education. _manufactures_, with all their disadvantages, might answer the purpose, provided the children were not collected together in vast numbers in the same rooms--provided they were under the care of intelligent and kind masters and overseers, and were allowed gardens of their own, and a certain number of hours each day to work in them, or take exercise in the open air--all which must abridge necessarily the time allotted to productive labour, or to learning. one of the great advantages of husbandry is, that it affords sufficient exercise, and leaves more time for mental improvement. such of vehrli's pupils as have a turn for any of the trades in demand at hofwyl--wheelwright, carpenter, smith, &c. tailor or shoemaker--are allowed to apply to them. these boys will leave the institution at the age of one-and-twenty, understanding agriculture better than any peasants ever did before, besides being practically acquainted with a trade, and with a share of learning quite unprecedented among the same class of people; and yet as hard-working and abstemious as any of them, and with the best moral habits and principles. it seems impossible to desire or imagine a better condition of the peasantry. public education, mr. de fellenberg observes, is too generally a uniform process, imposed indiscriminately, and by force, upon every variety of disposition, talents, and character. his object, on the other hand, is to suit the education to the pupil, and not the pupil to the education.--a good preceptor should be an experienced friend, who guides,--not a master who commands, and, above all, not an irascible master. punishments and rewards he considers as equally objectionable: for fear makes slaves, and the love of distinction unfolds, in the end, most of the bad passions. _do as you would be done by_ is, he maintains, the only safe rule of conduct to inculcate; a lively feeling of right and wrong, goodwill and kindness to all men, the only sentiments fit to be encouraged. emulation, perhaps, is too powerful and universal a stimulant to be altogether excluded; but it needs more frequently to be repressed than excited. such a vigilant and cautious system of training would be best carried on certainly under the parental roof, in a well regulated and united family; and therefore he wishes a school to resemble as nearly as possible such a family, and to be as unlike as possible to a mere manufactory of learning. the whole course of studies may be considered as divided into three periods, of three years each. in the first, they study greek and the grecian history, the knowledge of animals, plants, and minerals. in the second, latin, roman history, and the geography of the roman world. and in the third, modern languages and literature, modern history to the last century, and geography--the physical sciences, and chymistry. during the whole nine years, they apply to mathematics, drawing, music, and gymnastic exercises. the geometrical representation of near objects--the house, the garden, the course of the river, the surrounding country, the mountains beyond it, taken by approximation in the shape of a map--is the natural introduction to geography. when the pupils feel a curiosity to know more of the world than they can see, maps are then laid before them, and the globe and its uses are explained. they are made to delineate correctly, from memory, the shape of continents and seas; and to place and name the principal chains of mountains, the course of rivers, the boundaries of states, their provinces and capitals;--and this leads to an inquiry into the particular history of each, and their natural productions. drawing is early cultivated, from natural objects first, then by copying, and finally by composing characteristic heads, or rather endeavouring to imitate the effect of passions on the human countenance. the execution is generally correct, but hard and dry--in the style of perugino certainly, rather than of rembrandt. music likewise is much practised; not however with a view to execution, but for the sake of the poetry of music, and its piety--as an elevated language, in which certain ideas and feelings are expressed, which no other human means can reach or convey. the gymnastic exercises have for their object, health, and the dexterous use of the bodily faculties; but they never are exhibited in public, and made an occasion of show and display. it is the endeavour of the master to encourage his pupils to express freely, both in writing and conversation, the opinions and feelings which have been suggested by their reading; and thus to enable them to rectify their mistakes, either as to facts or inferences; never dictating to them what they should think, and yet restraining and directing the flights of a young imagination. the pupils do not read the history of the last century before their twentieth year, when judgment is sufficiently matured; and even then, all reference to the politics of the day is avoided, that they may enter the world with minds wholly free from party spirit, and able to form unprejudiced opinions. common newspapers and political pamphlets are never seen at hofwyl. the study of mathematics continues during the whole period of education, to an extent determined entirely by the individual capacity and disposition of each pupil, who is not hurried on or retarded for the sake of keeping pace with others. every problem is analyzed and explained thoroughly before passing to another. the interest and attention of those of ordinary abilities, is kept up by practical applications of the science; and none but those properly qualified apply to the pure mathematics: in doing so, they are carefully guarded against the pride of successful calculation, which is apt to overlook divine power in the consideration of its own. at the same time that mr. de fellenberg dwells with delight and confidence on the natural proofs of the existence of the supreme being, he admits fully, and establishes the necessity of a revelation to supply the insufficiency of human reason. socrates himself, he observes, did not know how to establish the dogma of the unity of god. his pupils, brought up in purity and simplicity of heart, under the influence of reason and kindness, are in a great degree christians before they are taught christianity,--and best prepared, therefore, to understand and receive the divine doctrine; but all dogmatic points are reserved for the ministers of their respective communions, who are to instruct them; and controversial disputes are unknown and interdicted. it has been said also that mr. de fellenberg's husbandry is ruinous. this would only add to the wonder of his being able to do what he does by his own slender means; but, in point of fact, his farm affords a very considerable profit. we have, upon this point, the evidence of a gentleman well versed in those matters, mr. crud of genthod, one of the commissioners appointed by the swiss diet to inquire into the agricultural establishment at hofwyl, the result of whose statements is, that the farm ( - / poses, equal to about english acres) has produced _net_ in years from to , , _l._ swiss money, and for one year , _l._ which, deducting interest at per cent. on , _l._ the average value of stock on the farm, or _l._, leaves a clear profit of , _l._, equal to _l._ s. d. sterling a pose (nearly equal to / ths of an english acre;)[ ] and, valuing the farm at the high price of _l._ a pose, ( _l._ sterling,) gives something more than - / per cent. interest, net of all charges. the farm is undoubtedly benefited by the institution, which affords a ready market for its produce, and perhaps by the low price at which the labour of vehrli's boys is charged: but the farm, on the other hand, affords regular employment to the boys; and also enables mr. de fellenberg to receive his richer pupils at a lower price than he could otherwise do. hofwyl, in short, is a great whole; where or pupils, more than masters and professors, as many servants, and a number of day-labourers, six or eight families of artificers and tradesmen, altogether about persons, find a plentiful, and in many respects a luxurious subsistence, exclusive of education, out of the produce of acres, and a money income of six or seven thousand pounds, reduced more than half by salaries, affords a very considerable surplus to lay out in additional buildings. [ ] the pose is , square feet of berne, equal to , of paris, and about , english feet, that is, equal to about / ths of an english acre. not satisfied with what we had ourselves learned and thought on this subject, we have been anxious to learn what was thought of it in the neighbourhood, and by persons not particularly friendly to the institution. we have scarcely heard an objection against the _school of industry_. the opinion is _universally_ favourable to it; and though there is more difference of sentiment as to the _higher school_, the worst we have heard is, that the pupils are not so advanced in any one science as some young men brought up in other schools are. it is admitted that they are eminently moral and amiable in their deportment; that they are very intelligent; and that their ideas have a wide range. in short, the objection, as it appears to us, is, that they are likely to become liberal-minded gentlemen, but not professors. hofwyl is not a college where the only object is learning;--still less a monastery, where an austere and uniform rule prevails;--it is a little world, composed of different ranks and professions, and where individuality of character is preserved, and a variety of talents unfolded. the patricians of berne have been generally, from the beginning, unfavourable to the institution; yet several of them have their sons in it, and many more are now endeavouring to procure admittance. we have learned very lately, that a decided and active enemy, many years first magistrate of the district where hofwyl is situated, and lately dead, enjoined expressly in his last-will, that his sons should, if possible, be educated exclusively at hofwyl! _treatise on agriculture._ sect. iv. of the analysis of soils, and of the agricultural relations between soils and plants. we have seen that the earths have a threefold capacity; that they receive and lodge the roots of plants and support their stems; that they absorb and hold air, water and mucilage--aliments necessary to vegetable life; and that they even yield a portion of themselves to these aliments. but we have also seen, that they are not equally adapted to these offices; that their parts, texture and qualities are different; that they are cold or warm, wet or dry, porous or compact, barren or productive, in proportion as one or other may predominate in the soil; and that to fit them for discharging the various functions to which they are destined, each must contribute its share, and all be minutely divided and intimately mixed. in this great work nature has performed her part, but as is usual with her, she has wisely and benevolently left something for man to do. this necessary march of human industry, obviously begins by ascertaining the _nature of the soil_. but neither the touch, nor the eye, however practised or acute, can in all cases determine this. _clay_, when wet, is cold and tenacious--a description that belongs also to magnesian earths: _sand_ and _gravel_ are hard and granular; but so also are some of the modifications of lime: _vegetable mould_ is black and friable, but not exclusively so; for schistous and carbonaceous earths have the same properties. it is here, then, that chemistry offers herself to obviate difficulties, and remove doubts; but neither the apparatus nor process of this science, are within the reach of all who are interested in the inquiry, and we accordingly subjoin a method, less comprehensive, but more simple and sufficiently exact, for agricultural purposes, and which calls only for two vases, a pair of scales, clean water and a little sulphuric acid. " st. take a small quantity of earth from different parts of the field, the soil of which you wish to ascertain, mix them well together and weigh them; put them in an oven, heated for baking bread, and after they are dried, weigh them again; the difference will show the _absorbent power of the earth_. when the loss of weight in grains, amounts to , this power is great, and indicates the presence of much animal or vegetable matter; but when it does not exceed twenty, the absorbent power is small, and the vegetable matter deficient.[ ] [ ] see davy's elements. " d. put the dried mass into a vase with one fourth of its own weight of clear water; mix them well together: pour off the dirty water into a second vase, and pour on as much clean water as before; stir the contents, and continue this process until the water poured off, is as clear as that poured on the earth. what remains in the first employed vase is _sand_, _silicious_ or _calcareous_. " d. the dirty water, collected in the second vase, will form a deposit, which (after pouring off the wa-ter) must be dried, weighed and _calcined_. on weighing it _after_ this process, the quantity lost will show the portion of _animal_ and _vegetable mould contained in the soil_; and, " th. this calcined matter must then be carefully pulverised and weighed, as also the first deposit of sand, but without mixing them. to these, apply (separately) sulphuric acid, and what they respectively lose in weight, is the portion of _calcareous_ or _aluminous earths_ contained in them. these last may be separated from the mass by soap lie, which dissolves them."[ ] [ ] this manner of analysing soils is that described by m. rose, member of the institute of france, &c. and recommended to french agriculturists. here is the light we wanted. in knowing the disease, we find the cure. clay and sand qualify each other; either of these will correct an excess of lime; and magnesian earth, when saturated with _carbonic acid_, becomes fertile. but entirely to alter the constitution of a soil, whether by mechanical or other means, is a work of time, labour and expense, and little adapted to the pecuniary circumstances of farmers in general. fortunately, a remedy, cheaper, more accessible and less difficult, is found in that _great diversity_ of habits and character, which mark the vegetable races. we shall, therefore, in what remains of this section, indicate the principal of these, as furnishing the basis of all rational agriculture. st. _plants have different systems of roots, stems and leaves, and adapt themselves accordingly to different kinds of soils:_ the tussilago prefers clay, the spergula sand; asparagus will not flourish on a bed of granite nor musus islandicus on one of alluvion. it is obvious, that _fibrous rooted_ plants, which occupy only the surface of the earth, can subsist on comparatively stiff and compact soils in which those of the leguminous and cruciform families would perish, from inability to penetrate and divide. d. _plans of the same, or of a similar kind, do not follow each other advantageously in the same soil._ every careful observer must have seen how grasses alternate in meadows or pastures, where nature is left to herself. at one time, timothy, at another clover, at a third red-top, and at a fourth blue grass prevails. the same remark applies to forest trees; the original growth of wood, is rarely succeeded by a second of the same kind; pine is followed by oak, oak by chesnut, chesnut by hickory. a young apple tree will not live in a place where an old one has died; even the pear tree does not thrive in succession to an apple tree, but stone fruit will follow either with advantage. "in the gautinois (says bosc,) saffron is not resumed but after a lapse of twenty years; and in the netherlands, flax and colzat require an interval of six years. peas, when they follow beans, give a lighter crop than when they succeed plants of another family."[ ] [ ] the ill effect of a succession of crops of the same kind was not unknown to the romans. we have proof of this in the following passage of festus: "resistilibus ager fit qui continuo biennio seseritur farreo spico id est aristato, quad ne fiat _solent, qui pradia locant, excipere_." d. _vegetables, whether of the name family or not, having a similar structure of roots, should not succeed each other._ it has been observed, that trees suffer considerably by the neighbourhood of sainfoin and lucern, on account of the great depth to which the roots of these plants penetrate--whereas culmiferous grasses do them no harm. th. _annual or biennial trefoils, prevent the escape of moisture by evaporation, or filtration, from sandy and arid soils_, and should constantly cover them in the absence of other plants;[ ] while _drying and dividing crops_, as beans, cabbages, chickory, &c. &c. _are best fitted to correct the faults of stiff and wet clays_. [ ] the "sterilis tellus medio versatur in æstu" of virgil, shows the opinion he entertained of a husbandry that left the fields without vegetation. th. _when plants, are cultivated in rows or hills, and the ground between them is thoroughly worked, the earth is kept open, divided and permeable to air, heat and water, and accordingly receives from the atmosphere nearly as much alimentary provision as it gives to the plant._ this principle is the basis of the drill husbandry. th. _all plants permitted to go through the phases of vegetation (and of course to give their seeds) exhaust the ground in a greater or less degree; but if cut green, and before seeding, they take little from the principle of fertility._ th. _plants are exhausters in proportion to the length of time they occupy the soil._ those of the culmiferous kinds (wheat, rye, &c.) do not ripen under ten months, and during this period, forbid the earth from being stirred: while, on the other hand, leguminous plants occupy it but six months, and permit frequent ploughings. this is one reason why culmiferous crops are greater exhausters than leguminous; another is, that the stems of culmiferous plants become hard and flinty, and their leaves dry and yellow, from the time of flowering till the ripening of the seed--losing their inhaling or absorbing faculties--circulating no juices, and living altogether in their roots, and on aliments exclusively derived from the earth, whereas leguminous or cruciferous plants, as cabbages, turnips, &c. &c. have succulent stems, and broad and porous leaves, and draw their principal nourishment from the atmosphere. the remains of culmiferous crops, also are fewer, and less easily decomposed, than those of the leguminous family. th. _meadows, natural and artificial, yield the food necessary to cattle, and, in proportion as these are multiplied, manures are increased and the soil made better._ another circumstance that recommends them is, that so long as they last, they exact but little labour, and leave the whole force of the farmer to be directed to his arable grounds.[ ] [ ] the good effect of these mixtures was known to the ancients, from whom the practice has descended to us. th. _grasses are either fibrous or tap-rooted, or both. the remarks already made in articles , and , apply also to them._ timothy, red-top, oat-grass and rye-grass, succeed best in stiff, wet soils. sainfoin does well on soils the most bare, mountainous and arid; lucern and the trefoils, (or clovers,) only attain the perfection of which they are susceptible, in warm, dry, calcareous earth. th. _the ameliorating quality of tap-rooted plants is supposed to be in proportion to their natural duration_; annual clover, (lupinella) has less of this property than biennial, (dutch clover,) biennial less than sainfoin, and sainfoin less than lucern. th. _any green crop, ploughed into the soil, has an effect highly improving_; but for this purpose, lupins and buckwheat (cut when in flower) are most proper. . _mixed crops_ (as indian corn, pumpkins, and peas and oats,) _are much and profitably employed_, and _with less injury to the soil than either corn or oats alone_. section v. of practical agriculture, and its necessary instruments. we begin this part of our subject with a few remarks on the instruments necessary to agriculture, which may be comprised under the well known names of the plough, the harrow, the roller, the threshing-machine, and the fanning mill. i. of the plough: it is among the inscrutable dispensations of providence, that the arts most useful to man, have been of later discovery--of slower growth, and of less marked improvement, than those that aimed only at his destruction.--at a time, when the phalanx and the legions were invented and perfected, and when the instruments they employed were various and powerful, those of agriculture continued to be few, and simple, and inefficient. of the greek plough, we know nothing; and the general disuse of that described by virgil and pliny, furnishes a degree of evidence, that experience has found it incompetent to its objects.--with even the boasted lights of modern knowledge, scientific men are not agreed upon the form and proportion, most proper for this instrument. as in other cases, so in this, there may be no _abstract perfection_; what is best in one description of soil, may not be so in another; yet, as in all soils, the office of the plough is the same, viz. to _cleave_ and _turn over the earth_, there cannot but be some definite shape and proportions, better fitted for these purposes, and at the same time less susceptible of resistance, than any other. this beau ideal, this suppositious excellence, in the mechanism of a plough, has been the object of great national, as well as individual research. in great britain, high prizes have been established for its attainment; and in france, under the ministry of chaptal, , francs, or $ , were offered for this object, by the agricultural society of the seine. in both countries, the subject has employed many able pens; those of lord kaimes, of mr. young, of mr. arbuthnot, of lord somerville, and of messieurs duhamel, chateauvieux, bosc, guillaume, &c. it is not for us, therefore, to do more than assemble and present such rules for the construction of this instrument, as have most attained the authority of maxims. st. the beam, or that part of the plough which carries the coulter, and furnishes the point of draft, should be as near that of resistance as possible; because the more these are approached, the less is the moving power required. even the shape of the beam is not a matter of indifference. in the old ploughs, it was generally straight, but a small curve is now preferred; because it has the effect of strengthening the coulter, by shortening it. d. the _head_ of the plough, is the plain on which it moves. this should be concave, because that form offers fewer points of friction, and, of course, less resistance. between the beam and the head, is an angle, on which depends the principal office of the plough; the making, at will, a deep or a shallow furrow. if you wish a deep furrow, diminish the angle, and vice versa: but this angle should, in no case, exceed from to degrees. the resistance made to the plough being produced less by the weight of the earth, than by the cohesion of its parts, it is evident, that the head should be shod with iron, and rendered as smooth as possible. this remark applies equally to the soc and to the mould board. d. the soc, in its widest part, should be larger than the head. it has different shapes in different countries. in some is given to it that of an isosceles triangle; in others, that of the head of a lance; in biscay, that of a crescent; and in poland, of a two pronged fork. but, whatever be its shape, it should be well pointed and polished--enter the earth with facility, and cut it easily. th. to the _mould board_, some workmen give the shape of a prismatic wedge; others make the upper part convex, and the lower concave; while many make it entirely flat. in stiff soils, the _semi cycloid_ is the form to be preferred, and in loose friable soils the _semi-ellipsis_.[ ] the iron mould boards have great advantages over the wooden, particularly when they, the shear and the soc, form one piece, as in the plough of mr. cook. [ ] see arbuthnot on ploughs. it is a general opinion, that a heavy plough is more disadvantageous than a light one; because the draft of the former, being greater, will be more fatiguing to the cattle: but the experiments of the agricultural society in london, establish a contrary doctrine, and show, that in light grounds, the labour is more easily and better performed, with a heavy, than with a light plough. th. the _coulter_ is a species of knife inserted in the beam, and so placed before the soc, as to cut the sod. it is susceptible of being raised or depressed at will. th. the handles of the plough ought to be made of some kind of heavy wood, that they may operate as a counter-weight to the head, the soc and the mould-board. to these remarks we subjoin two sets of experiments made with the most approved french and english ploughs; that of guillaume, and small's _rotheram plough improved_, which furnish a means of comparison between the best ploughs of europe and those of this country. the resistance (stated in these tables) was measured and ascertained by a _dynonometer_, a machine, indispensable to those who would make correct observations on the relative advantages of different ploughs. _the french plough._ _the english plough._ resistance in pounds. resistance in pounds. st experiment st experiment d do. d do. d do. d do. th do. th do. th do. th do. ---- th do. divided by ) th do. ---- th do. average, th do. ---- divided by ) ---- average, ii. _the harrow._ this is of different kinds--the triangular and the square, the single and the double. but of whatever form, its uses are the same; to smooth the field after ploughing, to break and pulverize the clods, and to cover the seed.--these uses sufficiently indicate the propriety of employing two in succession; one of heavy frame, with few and long teeth, like the scotch brake; the other, of lighter constitution, with more and shorter teeth. our own experience leads us to believe, that the common harrow covers the seed too much, because small seeds will not vegetate at a depth greater than three inches. iii. _the roller_ is a cylinder of heavy wood, turning on gudgeons, or on an axle, and placed in a frame, to which is attached a shaft; it is of different dimensions, but need not exceed that which may be drawn by one, or at most by two horses or oxen. this instrument is indispensable in good husbandry, yet is rarely used in ours. its offices are three-fold--to render loose soils more compact; to break the clod on stiff ones, and on both, to compress the earth, (after seeding) so that it be every where brought in contact with the grain. it is also usefully employed in reinstating the roots of meadow grasses, loosened and raised by the alternate freezing and thawing of the ground, and, with similar view, may be passed over winter crops early in the spring. its clod-breaking and pulverizing property is much increased, by surrounding the roller with narrow bands of iron, two inches broad, three inches thick, and six inches asunder; or by studding it with iron points, resembling harrow teeth, and projecting three or four inches. iv. _the threshing machine_ is of english invention, and may be well enough adapted to the taste and circumstances of rich amateurs, but not at all to those of farmers in general. our objections to it are three--the first cost, which is great; the quantum of moving power employed, which is equal to that of six horses, and the number of hands required to attend it, which is not less than four. we have seen, in france, a machine for the same purpose, but of much simpler structure--called the "_rouleau de depiquer_" which is only a _fluted cylinder_; yet simple and cheap as this was, it could not maintain itself against the more ancient instruments--the flail and the horse. still it is to be hoped, that new experiments may succeed better and abridge the manual labour usually given to this branch of husbandry, and, that the mechanical genius of our own country (which is not inferior to that of any other) may be the first to combine _power_ and _cheapness_ in this machine. this hope is probably suggested, by the description of a new invented threshing machine, now before me, and which i may be permitted to transcribe from the letter of the inventor. "the machine i have built, is three feet wide. one horse will thresh with much ease, as much wheat as can be laid on it, by one man, (the straw to be taken away by another,) say, from _fifty_ to _one hundred bushels in a day_, and the saving of grain will pay for the labour; for, i think, that with good attendance, not a particle of grain can escape with the straw.--the expense of the machine will be from _fifty_ to _seventy dollars_, exclusive of the moving power, which is a wheel, about ten feet diameter, on an upright shaft, to which a lever is fixed to hitch the horse. into this main wheel, a small one should be made to work, about two feet diameter, on a shaft carrying a drum, four feet wide. with this simple gearing, and drawn by a horse that walks well, the machine will give about eighteen hundred strokes in a minute, and if fully attended, will, without hard labour for the horse, thresh a _bushel every three_ or _four minutes_. it stands in my barn, and may be seen and examined by any one."[ ] [ ] mr. levi m'keen, of poughkeepsie. v. _the fanning mill_. other things being equal, the cleanest wheat is most easily preserved, and, on manufacture, gives the best flour, and in the largest quantity. these considerations offer inducement enough for the employment of this machine, which, however, besides doing its business well, saves a great deal of time. it is too well known to require description. on bones, &c. as manure. the carbon and hydrogen abounding in oily substances fully account for their effects; and their durability is explained from the gradual manner in which they change by the action of air and water. _bones_ are much used as a manure in the neighbourhood of london.--after being broken and boiled for grease, they are sold to the farmer. the more divided they are, the more powerful are their effects. the expense of grinding them in a mill would probably be repaid by the increase of their fertilizing powers; and in the state of powder they might be used in the drill husbandry, and delivered with the seed in the same manner as rape cake. bone dust, and bone shavings, the refuse of the turning manufacture, may be advantageously employed in the same way. the basis of bone is constituted by earthy salts, principally phosphate of lime, with some carbonate of lime and phosphate of magnesia; the easily decomposed substances in bone are fat, gelatine and cartilage, which seems of the same nature as coagulated albumen. according to the analysis of fourcroy and vauquelin ox bones are composed of decomposable animal matter, phosphate of lime, . carbonate of lime, phosphate of magnesia, . ----- . ----- m. merat guillot has given the following estimate of the composition of the bones of different animals. phosphate of lime. carbonate of lime. bone of calf, horse, . . sheep, elk, hog, hare, pullet, . pike, carp, horses' teeth, . ivory, hartshorn, ---- ---- the remaining parts of the must be considered as decomposable animal matter. _horn_ is a still more powerful manure than bone, as it contains a larger quantity of decomposable animal matter. from grains of ox-horn, mr. hatchett obtained only - grains of earthy residuum, and not quite half of this was phosphate of lime. the shaving or turnings of horn form an excellent manure, though they are not sufficiently abundant to be in common use. the animal matter in them seems to be of the nature of coagulated albumen, and it is slowly rendered soluble by the action of water. the earthy matter in horn and still more that in bones, prevents the too rapid decomposition of the animal matter, and renders it very durable in its effects. --[_davy's ag. chem._ french agriculture. the moniteur contains a very long report by decaze, which is published, as having been approved of by the king on the state of agriculture in france. it appears from this document that the fostering care of the government is steadily, and in most instances, successfully, exercised in promoting every branch of cultivation adapted to the french soil and climate. one branch, that of the culture of the beet root, which it was supposed would have languished on the restoration of the sugar colonies, is stated to be gradually but firmly extending itself, and its encouragement is recommended to the government, among other considerations, on the special ground on which it was originally introduced, that of rendering france independent of foreign supplies of sugar in a period of war. it has been affirmed, that those who manufacture into sugar beet root, raised on their own farms, realized a profit of per cent.; and on the supposition that a quantity were raised adequate to supply the total consumption of sugar in france, it is said that the refuse of the beet root would of itself suffice to fatten for the market annually , head of cattle.--there are now about twenty beet root sugar refineries in full activity. georgetown, (s.c.) april . _an agricultural prize worth winning._--we are informed by a gentleman from stateburg, that fourteen or more members of the claremont agricultural society, of that neighbourhood, have agreed to plant, each an acre of ground in corn, to be manured and cultivated at pleasure.--the planter producing the most neat corn to the acre, (as a reward for his superiour farming) is to receive the produce of every other acre. the land to be planted must be high land, and have been cleared at least five years. a committee of five members were appointed to approve of the land, to superintend the gathering and measuring the corn, and to report to the society at its meeting in the fall, when we will be able to inform our readers of the successful planter, and the neat product of each acre. on the culture of the sugar maple. this valuable tree seems to be equally well adapted for ornament and for profit. no tree, of the deciduous class, is more elegant in appearance, and but few grow more rapidly, or live to a greater length of years. its shade is but little injurious to the growths of grain, and still less to those of grass. for fuel it is inferiour to no wood whatever. it may be cultivated in mowing and pasture lands, probably as closely as at the rate of trees on an acre, without any essential injury to the pasture, or growth of the meadow. the quantity of sugar to be made yearly from the sap of the tree must, however, depend on its size, and on the rapidity of its growth. the quicker its growth, the more sap may be extracted from it, because the alburnum (sap wood) is always in the greatest proportion where the tree is most flourishing. the rapidity of the growth of young trees, when transplanted, depends very essentially on the manner of performing that operation. the greater the depth and superficial extent, to which the ground is loosened, round where a young tree is to be set, the more rapid will be its growth when placed in this bed of loosened earth. let one young tree, for instance, be set in a hole dug only inches in diameter, and a foot in depth, and let another be set in a hole dug feet wide, and feet deep, and the latter will, for a number of succeeding years, grow with more than double the rapidity of the former. in order, then, to give the young maples a rapid start, so as to have them soon fitted for affording considerable supplies of sap, let due attention be paid to this particular. let the holes for the trees be dug, say, a foot in depth, and five in diameter, and then spade or loosen the ground at the bottoms to the depth of or inches more before the young trees are to be set in. in addition to planting maples in grounds intended as permanent pastures, and mowing grounds, each side of the highway, leading through any farm, might be profitably occupied and adorned with these trees, set at the distance of about every two rods. suppose also that the farm house were placed in a spacious court yard, say of an acre in extent, and this planted with a suitable number of maples, could any thing confer more of an air of pleasantness and elegance to the mansion? i shall not attempt any computation of the probable profits to be derived from this proposed improvement in rural affairs, but doubtless the gain would be very considerable. every farmer might, in this way, stock his lands with a permanent growth that would afford him a plentiful supply of sugar, that would at times afford him additions of fuel, and that would eminently serve as an embellishment of his domain, and all these essential advantages would be derived without any essential diminution of the usual products of his lands. it is probable that if the young trees be planted in the manner just mentioned, they would attain a size fit for tapping in about years, after which they would probably afford yearly supplies of sap for more than a century, if tapped in the manner least calculated to injure them. this is to be performed, not by cutting large gashes in them with an axe, but by boring one or more holes in them, with a small auger, to the depth of about inches, or at all events not beyond the extent of the sap wood. the holes should be made every year in different parts of the trees, sometimes higher and sometimes lower, and after the sap has ceased running for the season, they should be filled with pieces of durable wood, drove in, in order that the wounds may be soon healed over by the subsequent growth of the trees. j. n. [_plough boy_. flemish husbandry. from the plough boy. sir--much has been said in praise of english husbandry, though it is a well known fact, that this vaunted system is surpassed in many countries which do not possess equal natural advantages. in scotland, agriculture has progressed at least half a century beyond that of england, where the soil and climate is far more congenial to the productions of the earth than the "bleak mountains of caledonia." but no where in the world is the contrast so marked as that between the flemish and english mode of cultivation. the average produce of a crop of wheat, in england, is bushels per acre. in flanders, it is bushels. in england, the system of _fallows_ almost universally prevails. in flanders, it has been unknown from time immemorial; two crops, in many cases three, being uniformly raised annually upon the same field. the following comparative tables, as exhibited in "vanderstracten's sketch of the flemish system," shew clearly and correctly its superior advantages over that of england. _produce of the flemish farmer | _produce of the english farmer, from one acre, for | according to the norfolk years._ | course, for the same period._ | wheat, bush. per | wheat, bush. per acre crops | acre, crops barley, do. do. do. | barley, do. do. do. flax, hemp, coleseed | turnips, do. & potatoes, do. | clover, do. roots and vegetables | for the food | of cattle, do. | -------- | -------- | in years, crops | in years, crops this immense difference in favour of the produce of flanders, does not arise, as might be supposed, from its possessing a better natural soil, or a milder climate, than england; but entirely from the different mode of cultivation pursued in these two countries. at no very distant period, the fields of flanders, now so productive, were little else but loose sand and gravel, whereas the soil of england, was always naturally fertile, and in part, lies under a more southerly parallel than flanders. the rich, abundant, and healthy crops obtained by the flemish farmers, may be traced to the following causes: i. the abundance and judicious application of manure. ii. digging all the lands on their farms with the spade, every six or every three years. iii. the complete extirpation of weeds and noxious roots. iv. regular and repeated hoeing. v. a careful choice, and alternation, of grain and seeds for sowing. vi. an improved rotation of crops. "the whole secret (observes vanderstracten) respecting the superiority of flemish agriculture, consists in this; the farmers procure plenty of food for their cattle--food which, excepting clover, is raised from the same lands which have already yielded their crops of grain, &c. they keep the greatest possible number of cattle, feed them in the stables plentifully, and render their food palatable. they collect the greatest possible quantity of manure, of which they preserve the fertilizing salts by a suitable process of fermentation.--they weed their grounds thoroughly and repeatedly. they totally extirpate noxious plants and roots, every six or every three years, by digging all the lands on their respective farms--an operation by which they revert to the surface a stratum of fresh soil, that for three or for six years has been absorbing the salts of manure as they filtrated to the bottom of the roots: a stratum of soil which has produced no crop during the same period. they, moreover, dress their grounds to the precise point of perfect pulverization. these are inestimable advantages, which cannot be obtained by any plough whatever; hence the drift of the flemish adage--"never to let the naked ground lie open to the sun in summer for more than three days." "in truth, to say that there exists a vast province, in which the price of lands has been quadrupled within fifty years, and which is neither placed under a more favourable climate, nor enjoys a greater fertility of soil, than england; from which fallows in general have been banished from time immemorial; in which the greater part of the lands produce in years at least harvests, of which those of grain yield, one year with another, as high as bushels of wheat per acre; those of barley, bushels; and those of oats, bushels; and where the borders of the fields are planted with trees, in such numbers, that by their sale the proprietors acquire, every years, a sum of money equal to the soil; to say this, appears, to other than english readers, to repeat a tissue of fables.[ ] the less informed attribute this uninterrupted succession of harvests to the inexhaustible fertility of the soil; but intelligent and well-informed travellers attribute it, on the contrary, and with the best reason, to the indefatigable industry of the inhabitants, and to a highly improved mode of culture, of the details of which they themselves are ignorant, and which beside, from their complication, and the great variety of the productions of the soil, require a profound study, of many years duration, to which few of them have either the inclination or the leisure to apply." [ ] in flanders, wheat yields ; rye, ; barley, ; and oats, , for one.--wheat holds only the fifth rank in value in the harvest of flanders. in england, wheat never yields more, on an average, than or for one; barley, something less than to ; and oats only between and for one. in some highly ameliorated farms in the county of suffolk, arthur young reports a produce of bushels of wheat, and bushels of barley to the acre; and that in the county of kent, soils of middling quality, equally ameliorated, yield per acre bushels of wheat, and the same quantity of barley. but in flanders, there are soils which yield much more than this--namely, bushels of wheat, of barley, of beans, and of coleseed.--these, however, are extreme cases, which do not affect the general question of comparative growths; while, however, they shew that the amelioration of land, in any country, is calculated greatly to increase its productiveness. this correct, though "bird's eye" view, of flemish husbandry, merits farther amplification, in order to furnish distinct data to the intelligent and enterprising agriculturist. my subsequent communications will be directed to that subject. respectfully, yours, geo. houston. _new york, april , ._ _from the raleigh star._ lincoln corn pounder. the usual mode of feeding indian corn to cattle and hogs, is wasteful in the extreme. the cob is not eaten, and the corn is neither ground nor boiled. it is a well established physiological fact, that the good health of animals requires, that the aliments for the stomach should afford both nutriment and mechanical distention in due proportions. in the usual method of feeding, these proportions do not exist, and besides the nutritious quality is only partially extracted. the grinding of corn is sometimes practised by those who have mills, and boiling by those who have not. meal is sometimes mixed with hot water and fermented. all these are improvements in feeding, but these are not sufficient. lately, a mill of cast iron has been invented, which converts both corn and cob into meal, and is used also by tanners in grinding their bark. this improvement is valuable. the cob, while it affords in itself much nutriment, furnishes a degree of distension to the stomach, which is necessary to its proper action. if to this grinding of the cob and grain is superadded fermentation, or boiling, the economical process is nearly complete. i have not time to say what the subject requires in regard to fermentation. boiling not only renders the articles acted on soluble in the stomach, but it does more--it adds nutriment furnished by the water itself. the experiments of count rumford are full and satisfactory on this head. let those who doubt the nutritive qualities of water be reminded that many kinds of fish live, grow and fatten in pure water, without any other food whatever.---every one has seen the gold fish, which have lived for years in globes of pure water, that are sometimes put by the curious into cages of canary birds. water and air constitute the entire aliment of vegetables, and give them bulk without diminishing at all the quantity of soil in which they grow. the perfection of feeding corn consists in preserving the cob, grinding the whole into meal, and in the cookery. the iron mill is excellent, but too expensive for most farmers. what is wanting, then, is to have the corn, with its cob, powdered by some cheap and simple method, that every one may avail themselves of. such a one, accident lately made me acquainted with; and i think it is so valuable that i am desirous of seeing it introduced into general use, and shall attempt a description of the machine by which the process was effected. this machine i saw last summer in operation, on the road between lincolnton and morgantown. it was a horizontal shaft with a beater at one end, poised by the weight of water falling into an excavation at the other. the shaft or helve was about fourteen, possibly sixteen feet long. at two thirds of its length from the beater, it rested by a notch across the sharpened edge of a piece of timber lying in a transverse direction, serving as a pivot or fulcrum for the shaft to move on. the beater was a piece of wood two feet, or rather more, in length, fixed by a mortice and tennon to the end of the shaft; its face was about two inches and a half in diameter, and plated with iron. the mortar which received this pestal, or beater, was the hollowed end of a log, wide at top, narrower at bottom, and would contain nearly a bushel. the other, or shorter end of the shaft, was excavated into a trough about three feet long, eight inches wide, and the same in depth. the extreme inner end of the trough formed an angle of ascent from the line of the bottom of about degrees, affording thereby an easy exit to the water when depressed by its weight. this very simple machine, for i have described the whole of it, was placed upon the small run of a spring branch, where there was a descent of about two feet. the water was conveyed into the trough by a spout which approached it at right angles, and the trough was filled and discharged about twice in a minute. every morning, and again at evening, this mortar was filled with ears of corn, which in twelve hours were found reduced to a very fine meal. it was capable of converting to meal three or four mortars full in a day, but two were sufficient for the use of the plantation, and the mortar was attended to only when it could be done with convenience. in a wet season, when the spring run afforded more water, it moved with increased celerity, and was capable of increased work. the machine was without cover, and i observed barn-door fowls around it, but afraid of the motion of the shaft, they never ventured to purloin from the mortar. the whole expense of this, i think, could not have exceeded four or five dollars. i know not the inventor of this machine. there were a few others, i was told, in lincoln and burke. its extreme simplicity, cheapness and utility, and the means afforded to almost every one of putting it in motion, ought to recommend it to general use. i am persuaded this method of pounding corn, united to boiling or fermentation, would double the value of crops for feeding. no rule is necessary to be observed with regard to the dimensions, or proportions of the machine. it must duly be noticed that the trough filled with water is heavy enough to raise the bearer; and this can be ascertained, and the proportions duly adjusted by experiment.----if mr. henderson think but half as favourably of this machine as i do, he will give the foregoing a place in his useful paper. calvin jones. _raleigh, dec. , ._ transactions of the horticultural society of london. _an improved method of cultivating the alpine strawberry._----the strawberry is a fruit which is agreeable to the palate of so many persons, and which disagrees with the constitution of so few, that any means of improving the culture of it, and of prolonging the season of its maturity and perfection, will be acceptable to the horticultural society: i am therefore induced to send an account of an improved method of cultivating the _alpine strawberry_, that is, i believe, little if at all known, and that i have practised with the best possible success. though the flavour of the alpine varieties is generally approved, they are not much thought of while the larger varieties continue in perfection, and are valued only as an autumnal crop. i was therefore led to try several different methods of culture, with a view to obtain plants that would just begin to blossom when the other varieties cease; conceiving that such plants, not having expended either themselves, or the virtue of the soil, in a previous crop of fruit, would afford the best and most abundant autumnal produce. under this impression, i sowed the seeds of the best alpine variety that i had ever been able to obtain, in pots of mould, in the beginning of august, the seeds of the preceding year having been preserved to that period; and the plants these afforded were placed, in the end of march, in beds to produce fruit. this experiment succeeded tolerably well; but i was not quite satisfied with it; for though my plants produced an abundant autumnal crop of fruit, they began to blossom somewhat earlier than i wished, and before they were perfectly well rooted in the soil. i therefore tried the experiment of sowing some seeds of the same variety early in the spring, in pots which i placed in a hotbed of moderate strength in the beginning of april, and the plants thus raised were removed to the beds in which they were to remain in the open ground as soon as they had acquired a sufficient size. they began to blossom soon after midsummer, and to ripen their fruit towards the end of july, affording a most abundant crop of very fine fruit. the powers of life in plants thus raised, being young and energetic, operate much more powerfully than in the runners of older plants, or even in plants raised from seeds in the preceding year; and therefore i think the alpine strawberry ought always to be treated as an annual plant. oiling fruit trees. sir george m'kenzie has discovered that oil rubbed upon the stems and branches of fruit trees destroys insects, and increases the fruit buds. mr. john linning has added to the discovery, by using it successfully upon the stems of carnations, to guard them against the depredations of the ear-wig. the coarsest oil will suit, and only a small quantity is required. culture of forest trees. sir watkin williams wynn has planted within the last years, in the mountainous lands in the vicinity of langollen, situated from , to , feet above the level of the sea, , oaks, , spanish chesnuts, , spruce firs, , scotch firs, , larches, , wych elms, , mountain elms, , ash, and , sycamores, all of which are at this time, in a healthy and thriving condition. to prevent decay in trees. when old chesnut or other trees are rotted within the trunk, and threaten with speedy destruction by the progress of the carious taint, it may be stopped by applying fire to the decayed part, so as to _char_ the whole of the neighbouring surfaces. by this management the life of a favourite tree may often be preserved. [_chaptal's chemistry_. on plaster. i have just received my _plaster_ from the mill. i remarked to the man who brought it, that it was too coarse. he replied that all our farmers preferred it coarse, and assigned this reason--that in grinding it fine, _it becomes so heated as to injure it_. i delay not a moment in expostulating against a doctrine so unphilosophical, and so injurious to the interests of agriculture. every farmer knows that _grain_, as _food_ for _animals_ cannot be made too fine. upon the same principle, _plaster_, which is _food_ for _vegetables_, affords the most nutriment when reduced to the finest powder. _heat_ so far from injuring the properties of plaster, is the best agent for bringing them into action. this theory is the result of repeated experiment. calcined plaster, which is produced by a process of _intense heat_, is found much more invigorating, and more permanently beneficial, than plaster in its simple state. while on this subject, i will suggest for consideration, whether our farmers, generally spread a sufficient quantity of plaster particularly on their grass land. mr. silas gates, a well known farmer in marlborough, informed me, that he directed one of his men to spread on a certain piece of mowing land, the usual quantity, (if i mistake not, at the rate of one bushel to the acre.) he had gone over about half the ground, at this rate, when other calls prevented his finishing it. soon after the business of plastering was consigned to another, who, not knowing that any had been spread, went over the ground, giving one half a double portion.--the result was nearly a double portion of hay, which continued until the surface was changed by a rotation of crops. your obed't, o fiske. worcester, april , . [_mass. spy._ caterpillars. farmers who are in the habit of _rearing_ caterpillars, for _ornament_ and _use_, will doubtless be gratified to learn, that the late favourable weather has produced a goodly show of their favourite vermin. they are already basking in the sun, and expanding by the nutricious aliment of foliage and fruit buds; and if not prematurely molested, (which there is little reason to apprehend) we may, in due time, taste from our kneading troughs the former repasts of egypt. judging from the produce of last year, it may be fairly calculated that many of our farmers, (and some who _do not belong to the agricultural society_) will, this year, raise double as many bushels of _caterpillars_ as of _apples_. those (and there are some,) who prefer the appearance and flavour of the latter, will do well to look to their trees immediately. a thimble full of these reptiles, which can now be destroyed in an instant, would fill a hat a month hence, and would require tenfold the labour to subdue them. every farmer's common sense will suggest the best method of extirpation.--_ibid._ _a method of taking the honey without destroying the bees._--the common practice of killing the bees, in order to obtain the honey, few can witness without some little compunction; and as there is a very simple method of effecting the object without any injury to this most interesting little animal, (which, on the score of interest, as well as humanity, claims regard,) i beg leave to communicate it through your paper, should you deem it worthy a place in it. in the evening, when the bees have retired, take the hive gently from the stand; spread a table cloth on the ground; set the hive on it, placing something under to raise it three or four inches; then draw up the corners of the cloth, and fasten them tight around the middle of the hive, leaving it so loose below, that the bees will have sufficient room between it and the hive--then raise the lid of the hive a little, and blow in the smoke from a segar; a few puffs of which, as it is very disagreeable, will drive them down: continue raising the lid gradually, blowing in the smoke all around, and in a few minutes it will be found that they have all gone out of the hive. you may then take off the lid, and cut away as much of the honey as you may think proper. if the operation be performed the beginning of july, you may take nearly all, as there will be time enough to provide a sufficiency for their support during the winter. as soon as you have taken the honey, put on the lid, loosen the cloth, and spread it out, and in an hour or two the bees will have returned into the hive. it may then be replaced on the stand, and on the following day they will be found at work as usual. this method is very simple, and preferable to that sometimes practised, of driving the bees into another hive; as you get all the honey, and moreover the new comb, which is still empty; and the young bees, not yet out of the cells, are preserved. there is also danger in driving, of their not liking their new habitation, and, in that case, of their sallying out and making war on their neighbours. the above method has frequently been practised by myself and others, and we have always found it to do well. amator mellis. _washington, june, ._ [_am. farm._ _conversion of rags into sugar._--we find this is no joke. there is in the _annales de chemie_ a long and very circumstantial account, from the pen of m. henry braconnot, of geneva, of the whole process of this singular discovery; and are now so well satisfied there is nothing of "pleasantry" in the matter, as at first sight appeared to many, that, should we be told to-morrow that, as linen may be converted into its constituent principle, sugar--(a piece of fine irish linen into a loaf of double refined!)--so may wool be converted into its constituent principle, fat--(an old threadbare coat into a basin of fine gravy soup!)--we shall be prepared to look quite grave at the announcement. "the conversion of wood into sugar (says m. braconnot) will, no doubt, appear remarkable; and when persons not familiar with chemical speculations are told that a pound weight of rags can be converted into _more_ than a pound of sugar, they may regard the statement as a piece of pleasantry, though nothing can be more real." the agent in making this wonderful conversion is sulphuric acid, and those to whom it may not be enough to know that the thing can be done, will find ample directions as to the _modus operandi_ in m. braconnot's memoir. we shall content ourselves here with one extract: "i made these . gr. of sugary matter (obtained from old cloth well dried) into the consistency of sirup; at the end of twenty-four hours it began to crystallize; and some days after, the whole was solidified into a single mass of crystallized sugar, which was pressed strongly between several folds of old cloth; crystallized a second time, this sugar was passably pure; but, treated with _animal_ charcoal, it became of a shining whiteness.--the crystals were in spherical groupes, which appear to be formed by the union of small diverging and unequal plates. they are fusible at the temperature of boiling water. this sugar, of a fresh and agreeable flavour, produced in the mouth a slight sensation of coolness. it dissolves in hot alcohol, and crystallizes by cooling. dissolved in water, and mixed with a little yeast, it fermented; the vinous liquor which resulted, furnished alcohol by distillation. burned with potash, and its charcoal washed with diluted nitric acid, it yielded a fluid not troubled by nitrate or barytes. it would be useless to insist farther on the properties of this sugar: it is evident that it is perfectly identical with the sugar of grapes or of starch." ruta baga experiments. , july --sowed three fourths of an acre of ruta baga, in ground prepared as follows, viz.--stubble turned in deep--harrowed fine--furrowed deep at four feet distance--filled the furrows with _earth burnt ashes_, (burnt according to the plan prescribed by mr. cobbett, in his "year's residence,") which i covered by turning a furrow over them on each side; this formed a ridge about eighteen inches broad at top, which being smoothed a little with a hoe, and a drill made along the middle of it with the same instrument; i then sowed the seed and covered it with a hoe, from one to two inches deep; it came up on the th of august. when the roots were nearly a fourth of an inch thick, i thinned them to about a foot distance in the rows, and kept them free from weeds by two good ploughings and hoeings, (they would have been the better for a third) notwithstanding the unexpected dry season;--the last of november, many of them would measure fifteen inches in circumference--i left them to stand in the ground all winter. i was off the state, from the middle of december to the middle of february; on my return at the latter period, the snow had just disappeared, when i found my turnips had grown at least one fifth larger, since i saw them in december; many of them measuring six to seven inches diameter. the latter part of february was unusually warm for the season. the tops began to grow rapidly, but the severe cold nights of the early part of march, first freezing, and the warmth of the middle of the day, as often thawing them; many rotted in the ground--had they been pulled when the warm weather _commenced_, this would have been prevented. they are the cheapest, and with the exception of corn, they are the best food for milch cows and hogs, i ever met with--i have been feeding mine upon them for the last weeks. within a week past, i had them all pulled, (except those left for seed,) and thrown in heaps. should the weather prove too warm, i shall spread them, in which way they will keep good until midsummer. having repeatedly heard it asserted, that horses would not eat them, i determined to ascertain the truth of the assertion; accordingly, a parcel of them were washed and cut in pieces, and each horse served with about galls. of them, when two out of five eat them greedily, two others eat them, but with less appetite, and the fifth refused. they had no other food allowed them for the night, and the next morning not the smallest piece was to be found in their trough. [_am. far._ the fruit garden. mr. southwick, the art of inoculating or budding fruit trees, (although the simplest and easiest of all things,) appears to be deemed a mystery by most of our farmers, and is too generally neglected, under a belief that it is a difficult or expensive operation. if the following short directions should prove the means of changing even one thorn bush into a pear or quince tree, i shall be fully paid for the trouble of scribbling them down. in the month of august and fore part of september, cut from the tree you wish to increase some of the young wood of the last summer's growth, (the cuttings should be thrifty and healthy) cut the leaves off, leaving about half an inch of the foot stalk on the cutting; at the foot, and immediately above the foot stalk, _lies the bud_; with a keen knife begin to cut half an inch above the bud, and bring out the knife a little below, taking about half the woody substance with it; then separate the bark from the wood, carefully observing that the bud be not injured in the operation. if the operation be properly performed, the bud will be separated from the wood, and remain unbroken and entire in the bark: this bark and bud is now to be speedily inserted into the tree you wish to change. choose a smooth spot in some young and healthy branch, or sprout, and with a keen knife cut gently through the bark, about one inch in length, and a small cross cut near the upper end; separate the bark gently from the wood at this cross cut, being careful not to wound the bark or wood, and immediately insert the bud, laying it smooth and even under the bark of the tree; with a string of bass wood bark, or woollen yarn, tie it in so as to hold it close to the wood, being careful not to injure the bud nor foot stock--and the operation is done.--in two or three weeks after, the bud will have united to the wood, and the tyings should be loosened or taken away. the bud will remain dormant until the next spring. in april following, they should be examined, and if the buds then appear healthy and vigorous, the branch should be cut off immediately above the bud, and removed: in a few weeks this bud will take place of the old branch, and in two years produce fruit of the kind you wish. by this simple operation, the ordinary sour peach tree, which is an incumberer of the ground, may be made to yield the delicious rare ripe, the early ann, or other favourite peaches; or may be converted into a plum tree: and the ordinary _wild plum tree_ may be made to yield the richest and most delicious of our cultivated plums and peaches; our thorn bushes may be made to yield the rich and luscious pear; and our crab apple stalks be loaded with the finest varieties of our cultivated apples and cherries; apricots and nectarines are equally susceptible of improvement by the same easy means; nay, our wild gooseberry bushes may be converted into the best varieties, and our native grape may be made to yield an elegant dessert fruit.--all which i know by experience. [_plough boy_. the pear tree. a pear tree, brought from holland, and planted in the year , is now in full bloom, standing in the third avenue at the intersection of thirteenth street, new york. this is probably the oldest fruit tree in america. about years ago the branches of the tree decayed and fell off, and at that time it was supposed the tree was dying; but without any artificial means being resorted to, new shoots germinated and gradually supplied the room of their predecessors. the tree now is in full health and vigour, and appears to be not more than years old; the fruit ripens the latter part of august, has a rich succulent flavour, and has been known by the name of the spice pear. [_evening post._ _on raising young potatoes in the winter months._--in the beginning of may, lay a quantity of the largest ox-noble potatoes, on a dry cellar floor, two or three deep, and turn them over once in about three weeks, rubbing off all the white sprouts as they appear, but not the spawn or rudiments of the young potatoes. at the end of september, have ready a few boxes; at the bottom of each put six inches of decayed leaves, dried to a vegetable mould, and place upon it a single layer of potatoes, close to each other; then put another layer of the same mould, six inches deep, then another of potatoes, and so on till the boxes are full.--set the boxes in a dry covered place, free from frost, never giving them any water.--they will produce good fine young potatoes in december; and those which are ready may be taken off, and the old potatoes replaced until the remainder of the produce shall be ready. _cure for foundered horses, by a surgical operation._--"the operation has succeeded admirably and will probably lead to a similar practice in the human subject. it has hitherto failed frequently in the _tic doloureux_ and other diseases, either from the regeneration of the divided nerve producing a union and restoration of sensation, or from the effect being produced by the swelling of the ends of the cut nerve sufficient to effect the union. but the excision of two inches in length effectually prevents such a restoration of feeling. mr. sewell, the well known assistant professor at the veterinary college, who has the exclusive claim to this improvement, in the course of the last eighteen months, performed this operation on above horses, with uniform success, except perhaps two or three cases, in which there was great organical disease of the foot. although the operation requires the skill of mr. sewell, it is very simple. it consists in cutting down upon the trunks of the nerves which enter the foot in contact with the arteries, on each side of either the small or large pastern joint, and then removing a piece of the nerve. a few minutes after the operation, the animal walks and trots like a sound horse, which just before could scarcely move at all, and then in extreme pain. the principle is obvious--it is that of removing the conductors of sensation from the seat in the disease to the brain. the division of the arteries accompanying the nerves is carefully avoided."--_journ. arts and science._ _to destroy insects which infest fruit trees._--take a small quantity of unslackened lime, mix it with soft water, to the consistency of very thin whitewash--apply this mixture with a brush, to the trees, as soon as the sap begins to rise, and wash the stems and large boughs with it, taking care to have it done in dry weather, that it may adhere and withstand rain. in the course of the ensuing summer, this will be found to have removed all the moss and insects, and give to the bark a fresh and green appearance. the trial is simple, and not attended with much trouble, expense, or danger. agricultural memoranda. _oranges, &c._--if the cuttings of _lemons_ or _oranges_ are placed in a pot, or box, so as to _touch_ the bottom of it, it will considerably facilitate their growth. _to preserve peaches from frost._--after a cold night when there is any appearance of frost on the _bloom_, or _young fruit_ of peach trees--wet it thoroughly with cold water. even if the blossoms are discoloured, this operation recovers them, provided it is done in the morning before the sun shines upon them.[ ] [ ] this seems to be analogous to the condition of a frost bitten joint or limb, which is recovered by the application of cold water; but injured, sometimes destroyed, by being brought near a fire, or the influence of sudden warmth. _method of forcing fruit trees to bear fruit._--with a sharp knife make a cut in the bark of the branch, which you mean to force to bear, and not far from the place where it is connected with the stem; or if it be a small branch, or shoot, near where it is joined to the larger bough. the cut is to go round the branch, or to encircle it, and to penetrate to the wood. a _quarter of an inch_ from this cut, you make a second cut, like the first, round the branch, so that by both encircling the branch, you have marked a ring upon the branch a quarter of an inch broad, between the two cuts. the bark between these two cuts you take clean away, with the knife, down to the wood, removing even the fine inner bark which lies upon the wood; so that no connection whatever remains between the two parts of the bark, but the bare and naked wood appears white and smooth. but this bark ring, which is to compel the tree to bear, must be made at the right time, that is, when in all nature the buds are strongly swelling, or are breaking out into blossom. in the same year a callus is formed at the edge of the ring, on both sides, and the connexion of the bark that had been interrupted, is restored again without any detriment to the tree, or the branch operated upon, in which the artificial wound soon again grows over. _new mode of preparing indian corn._--take the corn in its green state, when it is fit to eat; boil it; then cut it off the cob--spread it on a cloth in the sun to dry--put it in bags, and when boiled again, it is as sweet and good as when first pulled. the great lakes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- a table, shewing the quantity of water contained in the st. lawrence, and all its tributary lakes and rivers. (from darby's tour.) ---------------------+-------+-------------------+-------------------- |_medium| | lakes |depth._|_superficial area._| _solid contents._ ---------------------+-------+-------------------+-------------------- | feet. | feet. | feet. ---------------------+-------+-------------------+-------------------- superior, | | , , , | , , , , huron, | | , , , | , , , , michigan, | | , , , | , , , , erie, | | , , , | , , , , ontario, | | , , , | , , , , st. lawrence, and } | | | other rivers and } | " | , , , | , , , smaller lakes, } | | | ---------------------+-------+-------------------+--------------------- | | , , , , | , , , , , ---------------------+-------+-------------------+--------------------- lake superior, in its greatest length, is miles; its breadth is ; and its circumference is little less than miles--it is as remarkable for the transparency of its waters as for its extraordinary depth. lake huron, from west to east, is statute miles long; at its western extremity it is less than one hundred miles broad; and, at about one hundred miles from its eastern shore, it is barely miles broad; but near the centre it suddenly bends away to the southward, and is a hundred miles in breadth; making a circumference of little less than miles. lake michigan deepens into a bay of miles in length, by sixty-five in breadth; and its entire circumference is miles. _slave trade._--a letter from sierra leone, dated dec. , states, that there was more slave-dealing carried on at that period in the neighbouring rivers, than when it was allowed by the british government. from the boston gazette. historical sketches, &c. the first americans who are known to have visited the western country, were james m'bride, and several others, who in the year descended the ohio river, as far as the mouth of kentucky river. in , colonel daniel boon, and a few others, undertook to explore this vast wilderness, then so little known. after many hardships and fatigues, they reached the neighbourhood of lexington, where they remained until . in , colonel boon, with a party of soldiers and emigrants, built fort boonsborough, which was the first settlement made in the state of kentucky. notwithstanding many obstacles, the inhabitants of kentucky were estimated, in , at , souls.--no settlements were made north of the ohio, until three or four years afterwards. on the st of march, , the "ohio company" was formed at boston, consisting of officers and soldiers of the revolution, who, by an act of congress, were entitled to a military grant of land, in the territory northwest of the ohio. this company completed a contract with congress for one million five hundred thousand acres, on the th of nov. . an association of men, under gen. rufus putnam, proceeded to take possession of the purchase; and on the th april following, they pitched their camp and cleared the ground where marietta now stands. in , congress passed an ordinance establishing a colonial government over the northwest territory. arthur st. clair was appointed governor. cincinnati was first called losantiville, but governor st. clair, in , altered its name. in , the population of this place consisted of only eleven families. in , a presbyterian church was erected at cincinnati; and the citizens were compelled by law, to take their fire arms with them, when they attended church. the first school was also established this year, and consisted of about scholars. in , the small pox broke out among the soldiers at fort washington, and one third of the citizens and soldiers fell victims to its ravages.--[this was the same year it spread throughout boston.] since the above period, the western country has increased in a ratio "truly astonishing." in , the population of cincinnati was estimated at ; in , at about ; and in , at more than , ; "an increase truly astonishing." the greatest part of the population are stated to be from the middle and northern states; but there is also a mixed assemblage of emigrants, "from almost every part of christendom; and it is not uncommon to hear three or four different languages spoken in the streets at the same time." in , in cincinnati, there were buildings, many of brick and stone, of two stories and upwards; places of public worship, a college, five banks, court-house, jail, two market houses, several manufactories, &c. some of the religious societies were formed in cincinnati, with only ten members; and all have been created within years. there are also several bible societies, sabbath school societies, a medical society, humane society, &c. since the introduction of steam-boats, considerable attention has been paid at cincinnati to exportation; and from october, , to march, , it amounted to $ , , , and consisted of flour, pork, bacon, lard, tobacco, &c.; while the amount of imports, for the same period, amounted to only $ , . in , the imports amounted to $ , , , and in , to $ , , ! they seem to be convinced that the only way to relieve the western states from their "present embarrassments," is to _export more and import less_, which will soon effect a rapid change in their affairs. about steam-boats, from to tons, and many of them finished in a style of elegance and taste, are now in successful operation, and most of them have been built within two or three years. there are three auctioneers in cincinnati, attorneys, physicians, companies of "independent military," handsomely uniformed, whose appearance is "nowise inferior to the eastern military." three newspapers are now printed at cincinnati, all upon an imperial sheet. it is estimated, that , bushels of salt are sold annually at cincinnati, which at $ . amounts to $ , . the various kinds of lumber sold are estimated at $ , a year. we might enlarge these items, and several other articles worthy of record, but our limits will not permit. the robber disappointed. a few months ago, a farmer living a few miles from easton, sent his daughter on horseback to that town, to procure from the bank smaller notes in exchange for one of one hundred dollars. when she arrived there the bank was shut, and she endeavoured to effect her object by offering it at several stores, but could not get her note changed. she had not gone far on her return, when a stranger rode up to the side of her horse, and accosted her with so much politeness that she had not the slightest suspicion of any evil intention on his part. after a ride of a mile or two, employed in very social conversation, they came to a retired part of the road, and the gentleman commanded her to give him the bank note. it was with some difficulty that she could be made to believe him in earnest, as his demeanour had been so friendly; but the presentation of a pistol placed the matter beyond a doubt, and she yielded to necessity. just as she held the note to him, a sudden puff of wind blew it into the road, and carried it gently several yards from them. the discourteous knight alighted to overtake it, and the lady whipped her horse to get out of his power, and the other horse who had been left standing by her side, started off with her. his owner fired a pistol, which only tended to increase the speed of all parties, and the young lady arrived safely at home with the horse of the robber, on which was a pair of saddlebags. when these were opened, they were found to contain, besides a quantity of counterfeit bank notes, _fifteen hundred dollars in good money_! the horse was a good one, and when saddled and bridled, was thought to be worth at least as much as the bank note that was stolen. as this story is somewhat wonderful, i enclose you my name as a voucher for the truth of it, and am yours, &c. [_nat. recorder_. marivaux. the following anecdotes from _esprit de marivaux_, a book, probably, not known to many of your readers, may serve to amuse some of them. marivaux was scarcely less remarkable for his indolence than his wit.--he was said to be "by nature the laziest creature in the world;" but his goodness appeared on the most trifling circumstances. he was one day setting out for the country with mad. lallemand de bez. marivaux and the lady's sister were already in the coach; she staid behind to give some orders to her domestics. in this interval, a sturdy young fellow, about eighteen or twenty, plump and fresh coloured, came to the coach door begging. marivaux, struck with the contrast between the appearance and profession of the man, looked out, and reproved him. "are you not ashamed," said he, "a young fellow in perfect health and vigour, to have the meanness to beg your bread, when you might procure it by honest labour?" the fellow, struck with this rebuke, was, at first, confounded and silent; but presently afterwards, scratching his head, exclaimed with a shrug and a sigh, "_ah! sir, if you did but know--i am so lazy!_" marivaux, who was himself sensible of the pain of labour, was so pleased with the fellow's confession, that he gave him a crown. fontenelle having heard that marivaux was sick, and having just reason to fear that he, who never laid by any money, might be in want of it at such an exigence, went to him, and when they were alone, told him his suspicions. "perhaps," says he, "more money may be convenient to you than you have by you.--friends should never wait to be solicited; here is a purse with a hundred louis d'ors, which you must permit me to leave at your disposal."--"i consider them (said marivaux) as received and used; permit me now to return them with the gratitude that such a favour ought to excite."--"what benevolence and generosity, in one of these friends," says the author, "what delicacy and greatness of mind in the other!" [_nat. gaz._ _a curious phenomenon._--extract of a letter dated may th, , from a respectable physician of northumberland, pennsylvania, to an eminent member of the faculty in this city. "about twelve years ago the wife of the parish minister had twins. she was a debilitated nervous woman. her mother a healthy old lady of seventy-five, who firmly believed the prayers of the faithful could remove mountains, began to think what a comfortable thing it would be, if she could nurse one of the twins. the consequence was, that her breasts filled with milk, and she nursed it for twelve months, affording all that time an abundant supply, to the great relief of the mother. "this story cannot be contradicted; for the most respectable persons in northumberland have related it to me, persons who could not be deceived, and would not deceive me. they say that she often carried the child abroad in the course of her visiting, telling the wonder wherever she went, and giving her friends ocular demonstration of the lactiferous miracle." [_ibid_. _works of fiction._--hannah more, in her last work, remarking on the subject of "unprofitable reading," observes, "many works of fiction may be read with safety, some even with profit; but the constant familiarity even with such as are not exceptionable in themselves, relaxes the mind that wants hardening, dissolves the heart which wants fortifying, stirs the imagination which wants quieting, irritates the passions which want calming, and, above all, disinclines and disqualifies for active virtues, and for spiritual exercises. the habitual indulgence in such reading is a silent, mining mischief. though there is no act, and no moment, in which any open assault on the mind is made, yet the constant habit performs the work of a mental atrophy; it produces all the symptoms of decay, and the danger is not less for being more gradual, and, therefore, less suspected." greensborough, _(pa.) may , _. _law case._--jack vs. mauns.--the plaintiff brought suit against defendant for a rifle gun, which defendant had exchanged for a horse. the defendant insisted on the bargain being annulled, on the ground of a special agreement, that if he did not like the horse, he should be returned within a stipulated time. the cause was referred to arbitrators, who awarded, that the plaintiff should take back the horse, and the defendant his gun, the spectators pay the drink, and the justice the cost of arbitrators. judgment on the award--_parties satisfied_. the spanish inquisition. during the reign of ferdinand and isabella, and in the pontificate of innocent viii. the inquisition was established for the prosecution of heretics. it was originally intended to take cognizance of only the jews and moors--but so rapidly did it extend its influence, that during the sway of torquemada, the first inquisitor-general, it was calculated that persons were burnt by his order; and upwards of , fell victims in various other ways. from the above period to the present time, it is impossible to calculate the number of persons who have fallen victims to its horrid cruelties. the late revolutions in spain have abolished the inquisition, opened the doors of its prisons, and set the captives free. this measure alone is a subject of the highest congratulation to the friends of freedom throughout the world. [_n. y. d. adv._ _mr. ellery._--the venerable mr. ellery, the subject of the extract which we give below, was one of the signers of the declaration of independence, and upwards of ninety years old when he died. the writer of the letter is a gentleman of rhode island, of much distinction, who was intimately acquainted with the deceased. _extract of a letter, dated newport, (r. i.) march , _. "old mr. ellery died like a philosopher. in truth death, in its common form, never came near him. his strength wasted gradually for the last year, until he had not enough left to draw in his breath, and so he ceased to breathe. the day on which he died, he got up and dressed himself, took his old flag-bottomed chair, without arms, in which he had sat for more than half a century, and was reading tully's offices in the latin without glasses, though the print was as fine as that of the smallest pocket bible. dr. w. stopped in on his way to the hospital, as he usually did; and on perceiving the old gentlemen could scarcely raise his eyelids to look at him, took his hand, and found that his pulse was gone. after drinking a little wine and water, dr. w. told him his pulse beat stronger. "o yes, doctor, i have a charming pulse. but," he continued, "it is idle to talk to me in this way. i am going off the stage of life, and it is a great blessing that i go free from sickness, pain and sorrow." some time after, his daughter, finding him become extremely weak, wished him to be put to bed, which he at first objected to, saying he felt no pain, and there was no occasion for his going to bed. presently after, however, fearing he might possibly fall out of his chair, he told them they might get him upright in the bed, so that he could continue to read. they did so, and he continued reading cicero very quietly for some time; presently they looked at him and found him dead, sitting in the same posture, with the book under his chin, as a man who becomes drowsy and goes to sleep." _[national gazette_. _benjamin west._--this distinguished american artist died in london at the advanced age of , being born on the th of october, , in chester county, pennsylvania. his genius and industry as a painter have never been surpassed, and his productions will long be admired for their great and unrivalled merit. he was much attached to his native country, and took great pleasure in conversing with his fellow citizens, and giving every facility to american artists--he viewed our progress in arts and in science, with deep interest, and his long absence did not alienate his affections from his native land. "yesterday," said he to an american, "was fifty years since i first arrived in london--i remember travelling on the top of the canterbury coach, and stopping about two miles from london, at a mean tavern, and taking a dinner before i entered the metropolis to seek my fortune; and i could not avoid yesterday going to the same tavern, calling for a dinner alone in the same room, looking back on the fifty years i had spent, the progress i had made in my profession, the friends i possessed, and the adventures i had met with." this was a singular epoch in the life of an individual. [_nat. advocate._ miscellany. _other people's eyes the cause of ruin._--almost all the parts of the body, says dr. franklin, require some expense. the feet demand shoes; the legs stockings; the rest of the body, clothing; and the stomach a good deal of victuals. our eyes, though exceedingly useful, ask, when reasonable, only the cheap assistance of spectacles, which would not much impair our finances. but the eyes of _other people_ are the eyes that ruin us. if all but myself were blind, i should want neither fine clothes, fine house nor fine furniture. _enormous bird._--mr. henderson has discovered, in new siberia, the claws of a bird, measuring each a yard in length; and the yaknts assured him they had frequently in their hunting excursions, met with skeletons, and even feathers of this bird, the quills of which were large enough to admit a man's arm. this is a fact in support of the tradition, that the earth was formerly inhabited by giants, for men, not exceeding ourselves in stature, would have been helpless against birds of prey of this magnitude. _martial glory._--in the edinburgh review of dr. seybert's "statistical annals of the united states," there is an admonition to the americans to abstain from martial glory. "we can inform them," (says the reviewer) "what are the inevitable consequences of being too fond of glory. taxes upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot--taxes upon every thing which is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste--taxes upon warmth, light, or locomotion--taxes on every thing on earth, and the waters under the earth--of every thing that comes from abroad, or is grown at home--taxes on the raw material--taxes on every fresh value that is added to it by the industry of men--taxes on the sauce which pampers man's appetite, and the drug that restores him to health--on the ermine which decorate the judge, and the rope which hangs the criminal--on the poor man's salt, and the rich man's spice--on the brass nails of the coffin, and the ribands of the bride--at bed or at board, couchant or levant, we must pay! the school boy whips his taxed top--the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying englishman, pouring his medicine which has paid seven per cent., into a spoon which has paid fifteen per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent.--makes his will on an l. stamp, and expires in the arms of an apothecary, who has paid l. for the privilege of putting him to death.--his whole property is then taxed from to per cent., besides the probate. large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble; and he is then gathered to his fathers to be taxed no more." _law intelligence.--r. & c. rhodes, vs. peleg congdon._ the court are of opinion that the legal mode of computing interest, where there have been partial payments, is, to cast the interest on the principal, up to the time of the first payment, which add to the principal; and from this sum deduct the payment, and so on through all the endorsements when one year or more intervenes between the payments, provided the sum paid is greater than the sum due for interest, when the payment is made; if less than such sum is paid, to be applied towards the payment of interest; and where the note or mortgage has not run one year, then, cast the interest tin the payment, as well as the principal, up to the end of the year.--the above decision was made by the supreme court, at their late april term, in kent, maryland. _on books._--dr. aikin in his valuable letters from a father to a son, thus elucidates the value of a library:--"imagine (says he) that we had it in our power to call up the shades of the greatest and wisest men that ever existed, and obliged them to converse with us on the most interesting topics--what an inestimable privilege should we think it!--how superior to all common enjoyments! but in a well furnished library we, in fact, possess this power. we can question xenophon and cæsar on their campaigns--make demosthenes and cicero plead before us--join in the audiences of socrates and plato, and receive demonstrations from euclid and newton. in books we have the choicest thoughts of the ablest men in their best dress. we can, at pleasure, exclude dulness and impertinence, and open our doors to wit and good sense alone. without books, i have never been able to pass a single day to my entire satisfaction; with them, no day has been so dark as not to have had its pleasure. even pain and sickness have for a time been charmed away by them. by the easy provision of a book in my pocket, i have frequently worn through long nights and days in the most disagreeable parts of my profession, with all the difference in my feelings between calm content and fretful impatience." _european literature._---the catalogue of the fair of leipsic, for , contains one thousand two hundred and sixteen new works, in greek, latin, and german; thirty-eight novels, thirty dramatic pieces, twenty-seven geographical maps, fifty-nine pieces of music; and seventy-seven works in foreign languages, the french, italian, polish, bohemian, danish, and spanish. _egypt._--the last news from this country, of inexhaustible curiosity, contains information respecting the labours of that magnificent undertaking, the grand canal of alexandria. already the primary effects of it have given an impulse to agriculture and industry, such as might be expected from it. the culture of cotton, of the sugar cane, of the mulberry tree, is beginning to assume a degree of activity, as also the rearing of silkworms; and some important new manufactories are already at work, holding out the promise of future commercial prosperity. _lakes in new holland._--it appears that two large seas or sheets of water have been discovered in the interior of new holland, supplied chiefly by two considerable rivers, whose sources are on the western side of the blue mountains. _missions in india._--the reverend james bryce, in a sermon preached in calcutta, march, , said, "zeal the most active and disinterested, and diligence the most assiduous, have not been spared by the christian missionary, in his pious attempts to convert the natives of india. but, alas! it may be doubted, if at this day he boasts a single proselyte to his creed, over whom he is warranted to rejoice." _increase of taxes in england._--a meeting of the magistrates, and other owners and occupiers of land in monmouthshire, was held lately at abergavenny, for the purpose of petitioning parliament for relief. the st clause of the petition states, "that the farmer at this time can obtain but little more for his corn than in the year , although the taxes are increased _four fold_, and the poors' rates above trebled, since that period." _british exports._--the exports of white and plain calicoes from great britain, were--in , , , yards; in , , ; in , , , ; and in , , , . _scull of king robert the bruce._--lately in the church of dumfermline, the grave of the celebrated warrior king robert the bruce was opened, in presence of a numerous assemblage of men of rank and science. the scull, and various parts of the skeleton, were in a state of preservation: now that the opinions of gall and spurzheim are not passed over as mere pieces of quackery, the curiosity of anatomists, and even of the public in general, was excited by this invaluable opportunity of inspecting and examining such a scull as that of king robert the bruce. we are told, that several of the propensities of this great man, were strongly expressed in the eminences of the scull--in particular, that the organ of _combativeness_ was the most prominent of the whole. _power of ice._--the following singular account of the power of ice, is taken from an english periodical publication, of january . "huyghens, in order to try the force with which ice would expand itself when confined, filled a cannon, the sides of which were an inch thick, with water, and then closed the mouth and touch hole so that none could escape. the instrument, thus filled was exposed in a strong freezing air. in less than twelve hours the water within was frozen, and began to dilate itself with such force, that it actually burst the piece in two different places. mathematicians have calculated the force of the ice on this occasion; such a force, they say, would raise a weight of , pounds. from hence, therefore, we need not be surprised at the effects of ice destroying the substance of vegetables, trees, and even splitting rocks, when the frost is carried to excess. "the late frost produced quite a phenomenon at the back of the cold-bath-fields prison, where the new river water company's leading iron pipes cross the fleet ditch. the pipes not having been properly cemented, or the cement having worn away, the water had spouted up high in the air: and when the very severe weather was, it commenced freezing, and continued to freeze till a large cascade or fountain of ice was actually formed, as white as snow, about ten feet above the pipe, and reaching in large icicles concocted together nearly to the water in the ditch below. the bank was covered with a thick coat of ice from the spray, which blew from the water-fall. the circumference of the frozen pile could not be less than eight or ten feet, at half that height from the pipe. at a distance it was not possible to distinguish it from water spouting and falling down; and when close to it the ice looked so clear and beautiful, and the rarity of such an object being considered, made every one behold it with wonder and admiration." _ingenious machine._--the national fire and life insurance association, (london) have introduced a newly invented machine, which possesses the following properties: in case of fire, it instantly awakens the party in whose sleeping room it is placed--immediately lights a lamp--makes known the hour of the night, and not only that a fire has commenced, but in what room. _chinese superstition._--the following article, which gives some idea of chinese superstition, is taken from a peking gazette:--"the st of may, , there arose suddenly at peking, a tempest, that obscured the heavens and filled the air with sand and dust. the emperor, thinking it was a judgment from heaven, was very much alarmed, and very anxious to know what it meant: he assembled his ministers of state, and commanded them to endeavour to discover the cause of it: he then reprimanded his astronomers for not having foretold it to him. 'you announced to me,' said he to them, 'three days ago, the happy influence the stars had over me, foretelling a long and prosperous life; this was mere flattery, while you either would not or could not tell me of this impending misfortune.' three of those _sages_ gave their opinion, that the cause of this tempest was the dismissal of the late chief minister, _sung tajin_, and advised him to recall him; but his majesty, far from approving their proposal, reprimanded them for having the presumption to meddle with the royal prerogative. the body of mathematicians gave in their opinion, assuring him that if this whirlwind, accompanied with dust, continued during the whole day, it indicated a perverse conduct and variance of opinion between the sovereign and his ministers, as well as a great drought and famine. if the wind disturbed the sand, moved the stones, and made much noise, inundations were to be expected; and if the dust continued to fall one hour more, the plague would rage in the southern regions, and half the inhabitants to the southeast would be sick." the gazette expresses his majesty's uneasiness at this long drought. his majesty has ordered his sons to fast, to pray, and offer sacrifices to heaven, to earth, and to the god of wind. there was to be a solemn festival on the th of may, , at which all the princes, ministers, and nobles, were to appear in procession, wearing mourning as a mark of their contrition! _to farmers' wives._--a most excellent method of making butter, is now practised in england, which effectually prevents its changing and becoming rancid.--the day before churning, scald the cream in a clean iron kettle, over a clear fire, taking care that it does not boil over. as soon as it begins to boil, or is fully scalded, strain it, when the particles of milk, which tended to sour and change the butter, are separated and left behind. put the vessel into a tub of water, in a cellar, till the next morning, when it will be ready for churning, and become butter in less than quarter of the time required in the common method. it will also be hard, with peculiar additional sweetness, and will not change. the labour in this way is less than the other, as the butter comes so much sooner, and saves so much time in working out the buttermilk.--by this method good butter may be made in the hottest weather. died, in the parish of aiglish, in the vicinity of killarney, ireland, at the very advanced age of _one hundred and fifteen years_, theodore o'sullivan, the celebrated irish bard.--this extraordinary man, who was a great composer in his native language, expired suddenly, in april last, whilst sowing oats in the field of his great grand children, and retaining his faculties to the last moment! he is said to have sung to the plough one of his favourite lyrics, and actually breathed his last at the final stanza of his national melody. the deceased also followed the occupation of a cooper, and is said to have made a churn, from which butter was taken for the christening of his th great grand child. lately, at the hospital at bourges, france, aged years, and days, etienne delametaire. he was born blind, and employed for upwards of years in turning a grindstone. for the rural magazine. the more disinterested our benevolence, the nearer we approach to the gods, was the sentiment of a reflecting heathen, who lived at a remote period of antiquity. disinterested benevolence, though of rare occurrence, is nevertheless, to the honour of human nature, sometimes witnessed. 'when it is, the effect, like that produced by beholding an island of verdure in a sandy desert, or a retiring evergreen in the wintry waste, is in the highest degree cheering and delightful. david g. seixas, a young man of this city, of limited pecuniary resources, but of truly philanthropic and elevated views, has for some time past gratuitously instructed a number of deaf and dumb children, with singular success. his unobtrusive merit has at length in some measure become cognisant to the public; and as it is ascertained that there is a considerable number of unfortunate individuals, of this description, in the city _and its vicinity_, an association has been formed, under the most respectable auspices, for establishing an institution for their instruction.[ ] it is hoped and believed, that exertions to promote so excellent an object, will be aided with ample and willing patronage. [ ] this truly laudable enterprise, as well as many others of a similar character, (without derogating from the important services of others,) is most essentially indebted to the enlightened zeal, and public spirited benevolence of one of the vice-presidents, roberts vaux, esq.--the justice of this small tribute to distinguished worth, although dictated by friendship, will be cheerfully acknowledged by his fellow citizens generally. the deaf and dumb boy! when smiles play around thee, why sad and forlorn, amid all the transports thy fellows enjoy; in life's cheerful morning what prompts thee to mourn?-- alas! he is silent--poor sad-fated boy! when nature is robed in her mantle of green, and winter has fled with his vapours & snows, every bough has its vocalist gladd'ning the scene, he naught of this soul-cheering melody knows! his ear never welcom'd the music of sound, his tongue never utter'd the wonders of thought, his duties and end wrapt in darkness profound, have ne'er to this child of misfortune been taught. perchance ere the period when heart-rending woes, to a premature grave had a fond mother brought, as maternal affection more fervidly glows, when our path through existence with sorrows is fraught! life's gath'ring ills were dispell'd by her smiles, for love an inaudible language can speak; but bereft of that friend who all suffering beguiles, the tear of affliction now traces his cheek. his wants disregarded, his wishes unknown, yet generous bosoms with sympathy feel, when they make his condition--a moment their own, his eloquent, silent, resistless appeal. though drear be his prospects, we view with delight, his sorrowing features now bright'ning with joy, for mercy descending in vesture of white, will solace the speechless and destitute boy. e. to the editors of the rural magazine. the following is a copy of verses which i took from a manuscript above forty years ago. i think them good, and as i have never seen them in any printed book, i infer they are very rarely to be met with. from your friend and well-wisher, _may_ , . c. e. on man's dependance on his creator. through all the various shifting scenes of life's mistaken ill or good, the hand of god conducts, unseen, the beautiful vicissitude. he portions with paternal care, howe'er unjustly we complain, to each his necessary share of joy and sorrow, health and pain. trust we to youth, or friends, or power, fix we our foot on fortune's ball; when most secure, the coming hour, if he sees fit, can blast them all. when lowest sunk with grief or shame, gorged with affliction's deepest cup, lost to relations, friends, or fame, his powerful hand can raise thee up. before his throne the poor, opprest with slanderous rage, acquitted stand; he guides the exile to his rest, and country, in a foreign land. his powerful consolations cheer, his smiles erect the afflicted head; his hand can wipe away the tear that secret wets the widow'd bed. all things on earth, and all in heaven, on his eternal will depend; and all for greater good were given, would man pursue th' appointed end. this be my care. to all beside, indifferent let my wishes be; passions be calm, and dumb be pride, and fix'd my soul, my god, on thee. to the editors of the rural magazine. my leisure hours are mostly employed in holding a sort of literary _chit-chat_ with some favourite author or editor; but i am never more agreeably entertained than at your _evening fire-side_, by the various topics there introduced and discussed. the essayist _remarks_ the pride, extravagance, and vices, which at present prevail, and _teaches_ us that these are unworthy of rational beings, and that their opposites, humility, prudence, and virtue, with the exercise of charity and forbearance, can alone ensure us felicity. the agriculturist descants on the improvement of the soil, the rearing of flocks and herds, and the enviable pleasures of rural occupations. the mechanic sets forth the superior advantages of some new invention; while the man of science communicates the result of ingenious experiments in the particular branches of knowledge which have engaged his attention. and last, though not less a favourite than the rest, is the bard, whose title to poetic inspiration is not unfrequently evinced by his giving ----"_to airy nothing "a local habitation and a name_." while thus highly amused and instructed myself, i am unable, being of humble capacity, to contribute in return to the edification of others, unless by occasionally communicating what i may chance to glean in the course of some of my _literary_ peregrinations. as this may not be unacceptable, i send you, as a token of my good will, and desire for the prosperity of your interesting miscellany, a _scrap_ of american poesy, which, though published a few years since in some of the public journals, it is believed will be new to many of your readers. the writer is a young lady of virginia, by the name of henning, who thus modestly speaks of a production, which, it must be admitted, is alike creditable to herself, her sex and country:--"the subject which i have selected, has already employed the talents of an eminent poet, (_akenside_,) and as he has gathered in the rich harvest which it presented to the sickle of his genius, i must, like ruth of old, be content to collect the scattered ears, not however expecting the same result to my employment as that which attended my fair-famed predecessor."--your friend, x. ode to imagination. oh thou! whose power inspires the minstrel's song. and pours the tide of tuneful verse along, whose rapid wings through ether speed their flight, while earth extended lies beneath thy sight, send one bright beam of that celestial blaze, that round thy brow in dazzling lustre plays, one ray, to gild the gloom of mental night, and burst its shroud with thy refulgent light! by thee each scene, that meets the gazing view, is cloth'd in beauty's bright attractive hue: 'tis thine to wake the bold exalted thought, with splendour graced, with mental ardour fraught; the lofty strain of eloquence is thine, by thee its torrent rolls, its beauties shine; thy power directs the mind's adventurous flight, and guides its course to grandeur's lofty height. 'tis thine fair beauty's brightest forms to trace, adorned with charms and rich in every grace, by thee the painter's mimic canvas shows a youthful form where each attraction glows; by thee the eye its seeming lustre sheds, by thee the rose the snowy cheek o'erspreads, till to the sight the lovely semblance seems a living goddess, sung in fabled themes. nor does the strain whose headlong torrent falls, while sounding echoes strike the lofty walls, nor venus robed in heavenly charms alone, the potent magic of thine influence own. oft have thy visions cheered the drooping breast, by anguish pierced, by gloomy cares opprest, a while suppressed the deep complaining sigh, and wiped the tear from sorrow's streaming eye. the lonely exile, forced afar to roam, and leave for ever his lamented home, though foreign scenes to meet his view arise, by thee transported, sees his native skies. each scene, that gave his youthful heart delight, again salutes his fond enraptured sight, and friendship's voice, which once he loved to hear, in tender accents meets his listening ear. but who can tell how wide thine influence reigns? the weary captive, bound in galling chains, cheered by thy light, forgets his dungeon's gloom, and seems to gaze on nature's vernal bloom, the leafy grove, the blue ethereal sky, the flowery field, delight his wondering eye, while nature's music breathes its thrilling notes, and on his ear in melting softness floats. fair queen of visions! i invoke thine aid, whose wondrous force, what strain has e'er display'd? for who can trace thy wild eccentric course, or paint of mental light the lovely source? as well might art with feeble skill essay to paint the warm enlivening orb of day, with mimic hues its sparkling beams to light, and pour its radiance on the aching sight! e'en though i gained that mountain's fabled height, where music breathes the soul of warm delight, i'd ask not power thy wondrous might to sing, so far beyond my thought's sublimest spring, but send one beam of that celestial blaze, that round thy brow in dazzling lustre plays, one ray to gild the gloom of mental night, and burst its shroud with thy refulgent light. an invocation to poverty. by charles james fox, esq. oh, poverty! of pale, consumptive hue, if thou delight'st to haunt me still in view; if still thy presence must my steps attend, at least continue as thou art--my friend! whene'er example bids me be unjust, false to my word--or faithless to my trust; bid me the baneful error quickly see, and shun the world, to find repose in thee: when vice to wealth would turn my partial eye, or interest shut my ear to sorrow's cry, or courtiers' custom would my reason bend, my foe to flatter--or desert my friend; oppose, kind poverty, thy tempered shield, and bear me off unvanquished from the field. if giddy fortune e'er return again, with all her idle, restless, wanton train; her magic glass should false ambition hold; or avarice bid me put my trust in gold; to my relief, thou virtuous goddess, haste, and with thee bring thy daughters ever chaste, health! liberty! and wisdom! sisters bright! whose charms can make the worst condition light, beneath the hardest fate the mind can cheer, can heal affliction, and disarm despair! in chains, in torments, pleasure can bequeath, and dress in smiles the tyrant hour of death! glory to god. to thee, protective god, i owe, all that i have, or hope, or know, each ray of mind that seems to shine is but a clouded gleam from thine. the lust'red heavens present thy zone, the peopled earth thy living throne, the globe, which nature holds of thee, is bound by thy infinity. poor, and unbless'd, not mine the power to shield from want one frugal hour, yet from thy rich regard i drew, the bread of peace, and promise too. how vain the pride of man appears, how weak the vigour of his years; but thou one _vital spark_ has given to light, and lead _his hope_ to heaven. prayer and praise to god. o thou, who ere the lapse of time wert glorious, with unfading prime. enduring god! thy pity give to me who but a moment live. thy strength the elements controls, and rest the axis of the poles, to me in sinful suffering weak, the words of pardoning mercy speak. thou light of worlds! whose quenchless ray blooms in the brilliant blush of day, on me, in darkest error blind, pervading pour the all-seeing mind. parent of life to thee we owe the nerves that thrill, the veins that glow; me, who descend the oblivious grave, may thy absolving goodness save. immortal being! god alone, all-giving nature is thy own, to thee her wandered race restore, and bid her breathing world adore. [_p. folio._ prices current, _at philadelphia, may , ._ d. c. d. c. beef, philad. mess,} (plenty,) } _bbl._ . to . butter, fresh _lb._ . " . - / cotton yarn, no. , " . flax, clean (scarce) " . " . flour, wheat superfine } (dull,) } _bbl._ . " . firewood--hickory, _cord,_ . oak, " . " . grain--wheat, _bush._ . rye, " . " . corn, penn. " . " . barley, " . " . oats, " . " . hams, _lb._ . " . hemp, kentucky, _ton._ . plaster of paris, " . leather, soal _lb._ . " . pork, jersey and } penn. mess } _bbl._ . " . shingles, cedar . " . molasses, s. h. _gal._ . " . nails of all sizes, _lb._ . - / " . seed, clover _bush._ . " . wool--merino, clean _lb._ . } do. in grease " . }rising. common " . } it is generally believed, we have not had a rain for several years so beneficial in its consequences as the late one, taking into consideration the season, the dry state of the ground and the quantity fallen. an accurate rain guage is kept at the office of the board of health, in philadelphia, from which the following is extracted. in. hun may , shower, . " , do. . " , do. . " , do. . " - , rain, . " - , do. . " - , do. . " - , do. . " - , do. . " - , shower, . --------- . _state of the_ thermometer at philadelphia, _for the last month._ days. o'cl. o'cl. o'cl. bank note exchange, _at philadelphia, may , ._ disc't. u. s. branch bank notes, / rhode island--generally, connecticut--generally, massachusetts--boston, country generally, - new york--city bank notes, par. country generally, - new jersey--generally, par. pennsylvania--farmer's bank, of } lancaster; easton; montgomery } county; farmer's }par. bank, buck's county; delaware } bank, at chester, } northampton, - / new hope bridge co. susquehanna, farmer's bank at reading, - / lancaster bank; york bank; } gettysburg, } northumberland; union, greensburg; brownsville, - / farmers & mechanics' bank } at pittsburg, } delaware--generally, par. excepting the commercial } bank of delaware; } and branch bank, do. at } wilmington, } laurel bank, maryland--baltimore banks, / baltimore city bank; annapolis; } - hagerstown, } cumberland bank of allegany; } snowhill, } elkton, - / virginia--richmond and branches, - / country generally, - / - n. w. bank, at wheeling, - - / columbia district--mech. bank } of alexandria, } country generally, north carolina--generally, south carolina--state banks, generally, } georgia--state banks, generally, augusta bridge company, kentucky--no sales. ohio--marietta; stubenville, bank of chillicothe, country generally, - to our subscribers. we present you with the sixth number of the rural magazine. you will recollect the terms of subscription. we were now to receive the first year's payment--three dollars; and annually, from this time, the same sum. your punctuality will confer on us an additional favour, and afford a criterion by which we may, in part, judge of our future support. we contemplate no material alteration in our plan. in the first part of each number we shall present you, as heretofore, with essays of different kinds; in the second, with agricultural subjects; and in the third, or last division, with a miscellany made up of every variety that presents. our present list of subscribers is about what we had anticipated, but is not yet sufficiently large. we calculate, however, before the close of the year, to see it so increased as to support us in our hope of success. this will, in some measure, depend on those who have seen and desire the continuance of the work. could each of you procure among your neighbours two or three, or even one additional subscriber, our purpose would be answered. we therefore request your assistance in this way, and enclose a subscription paper. subscribers will be expected to take the numbers from the beginning of the year. a complete index and title-page will be furnished for each volume. richards & caleb johnson. philadelphia, published monthly by richards & caleb johnson, _no. , market street_, at $ . per annum. * * * * * griggs & dickenson, _printers--whitehall_. [illustration: jethro wood.] jethro wood, inventor of the modern plow. a brief account of his life, services, and trials; together with facts subsequent to his death, and incident to his great invention. "no citizen of the united states has conferred greater economical benefits on his country than jethro wood--none of her benefactors have been more inadequately rewarded."--_wm. h. seward._ by frank gilbert. chicago: rhodes & mcclure. . entered according to act of congress, in the year . by i. u. kirtland, in the office of the librarian of congress, at washington. stereotyped and printed by the chicago legal news co. [illustration: fac-simile of the original wood plow.] explanation of the foregoing fac-simile. side view of plough. _a_ mould-board, the form of which is claimed as new. _b_ share claimed. _c_ standard claimed. _dd_ screw-bolt, and not confining the beam to the standard. _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, _e_, the st, d, d, th and th sides mentioned in the specification. _g_, _g_. excavation at the fore part of the mould-board to receive the share which fills it up and forms an even surface. _h_ hole to receive the knob or head cast on the under side of the share, which, on being shoved up to its place, nooks under the mould-board at the upper side of the hole, and is held in its place by a wooden wedge driven between the knob and the lower side of the hole. _f_ notches in the standard to receive the latch i in elevating or depressing the beam. _s_, _t_, _v_. straight diagonal lines touching the mould-board the whole distance. _u_ vertical or plumb line touching the mould-board from top to bottom. _h_ reverse side of the share. _x_ knob to hold it fast to the mould-board. _y_ side view of knob. _zz_ shiplaps fitting under the point and edge of the mould-board. _k_ another form of standard keyed on top of beam. fig. d, landside view: _e_ the "landside". _f_ part of landside cast with mould-board. _mm_ cast loops to hold the handles claimed. _n_ head of screw-bolt held by a shoulder made by a projection from the mould-board and standard, through which the bolt passes up to the beam. _o_ share claimed. _p_ shiplap claimed. _g_ inside view of landside. _r_ tennon at forward end to fit into a dovetailed mortice on the inside of that part which is cast with the mould-board. preface. the immediate occasion of this little volume was a malignant misrepresentation from the pen of ben: perley poore. with slight variation from the original text, the words of thomas jefferson about benjamin franklin and his maligners, quoted in the body of this monograph, apply to this case: i have seen with extreme indignation the blasphemies lately vended against the memory of the father of the american plow. but his memory will be venerated as long as furrows are turned and soil tilled. the present object, however, is not so much to refute falsehood as to establish the truth, and make it a part of the permanent knowledge of the public. to the extent that this object shall be attained, will these labors be rewarded. it is not the design of this publication to disparage any one; on the contrary, it is desired to give ample credit to all who contributed to the solution of the plow problem. if only brief mention is made of others, it is because they really deserved but little credit, or their merits are forever buried in obscurity. it is proposed to set forth without exaggeration, the claims of the supreme inventor in this line to the grateful remembrance of the public. and by the public is meant not only the american people, but all who are fed from the ample granaries of this country, or share the benefits of the improved tillage, whether on this continent or in europe, made possible and actual by the inventive genius of jethro wood. jethro wood; inventor of the modern plow. the last words ever penned by john quincy adams were these, written in the peculiarly tremulous hand of "the old man eloquent:" "mr. j. q. adams presents his compliments to the misses wood, and will be happy to see them at his house, at their convenience, any morning between and o'clock." this note was found upon his desk when he was stricken down with paralysis, february , , in his seat in the house of representatives. the misses wood here referred to were the daughters of jethro wood, then deceased. they were at that time engaged in a labor of love, and the venerable ex-president was their friend therein. prompted more by filial affection than by hope of gain, they were making a final effort to secure from congress a proper recognition of their father's claim as an inventor. it is entirely safe to say that if mr. adams had been spared to the end of the congress then in session, that claim would have been then duly recognized, and the name, services and genius of jethro wood become familiar to the american public. jethro wood was born at dartmouth, massachusetts, on the sixteenth day of the third month of . his parents were members of the society of friends. his mother, dinah hussey wood, was a niece of ann starbuck, a woman of remarkable ability and high standing in colonial annals. ann starbuck was virtually governor of nantucket. the niece was a woman of excellent intellect, and most winsome character. her conversation sparkled with genial wit and good cheer. her husband, john wood, was a man of sterling worth, calm, self-poised, strong willed, and eminently influential. jethro was their only son. on new years day, , he was married to sylvia howland, at white creek, washington county, new york. the fruit of this marriage, every way a happy one, was a family of six children, namely: benjamin; john; maria, wife of jeremiah foote; phoebe; sarah, wife of robert r. underhill; sylvia ann, wife of benjamin gould. of these children the only survivor is mrs. gould, who with her sister, phoebe, were the misses wood of the adams note. so much for the domestic setting of this diamond of inventive genius. even as a boy, jethro wood showed plainly the drift and trend of his mind. the child was indeed "father of the man," and almost from the cradle to the grave, he was an inventor. in his childish plays he seemed busied with the idea which he ultimately perfected. many curious incidents and memories are treasured among the traditions of his neighbors and friends. "when only a few years old," writes a venerable man whose recollection spans two generations, "he moulded a little plow from metal, which he obtained by melting a pewter cup. then, cutting the buckles from a set of braces, he made a miniature harness with which he fastened the family cat to his tiny plow, and endeavored to drive her about the flower-garden. the good old-fashioned whipping he received for this 'mischief,' was such as to drive all desire for repeating the experiment out of his juvenile head." such innate and ruling passion might be suppressed, but could not be subdued. as his mind matured, his thoughts took definite shape. his home was always upon a farm, but he was never a farmer, in the sense of poor richard's homely couplet: "he who by the plow would thrive, himself must either hold or drive." born in comparative affluence, blessed with a good education, an ample library and a well equipped workshop, enjoying the correspondence of such men as thomas jefferson and david thomas, he was unremitting in his endeavor to realize his ideal. "his chief desire," to quote further from our venerable correspondent, "was to invent a new mold-board, which, from its form, should meet the least resistance from the soil, and which could be made with share and standard, entirely of cast iron." to hit upon the exact shape for the mold-board he whittled away, day after day, until his neighbors, who thought him mad on the subject, gave him the soubriquet of the "whittling yankee." his custom was to take a large oblong potato which was easy for the knife, and cut it till he obtained what he fancied was the exact curve. the manhood home of jethro wood was at scipio, cayuga county, new york, a purely agricultural town, with nothing in its later history to distinguish it; but in its palmier early days of the present century, it must have been a nursery of invention. roswell toulsby, horace pease, and john swan, of that town, each took out letters patent for improvements in plows, and that prior to the issuance of any patent to mr. wood. their improvements were of no practical value, and played no part in the development of this branch of mechanism, but their efforts serve to show the state of the intellectual atmosphere breathed by the man who was destined to solve the knotty problem which underlies the very foundation of scientific agriculture. of the cotemporaries of mr. wood, who wrought at the solution of this problem, the most illustrious was thomas jefferson, statesman, philosopher and farmer. in one of his letters to jethro wood, mr. jefferson spoke of his own labors in that direction, as the experiments of one whiling away a few idle hours, but herein he did himself injustice. his efforts, however, were far from exhaustive in their results, and it was with good reason that he urged mr. wood to go forward in his undertaking, and no doubt he was perfectly sincere in wishing him success. his correspondence, as published in nine large volumes, attests his long and deep interest in the problem, which it was reserved for jethro wood to solve. having carefully examined those volumes, to glean all there is in them on this subject, i herewith append the observations found, for besides being in themselves interesting, in view of their authorship, they throw important light upon the general subject. under date of july , , mr. jefferson wrote to jonathan williams: "you wish me to present to the philosophical society the result of my philosophical researches since my retirement. but, my good sir, i have made researches into nothing but what is connected with agriculture. in this way i have a little matter to communicate, and will do it ere long. it is the form of a mould-board of _least resistance_. i had some years ago conceived the principle of it, and i explained it then to mr. rittenhouse. i have since reduced the thing to practice, and have reason to believe the theory fully confirmed. i only wish for one of those instruments used in england for measuring force exerted in the drafts of different ploughs, etc., that i might compare the resistance of my mould-board with that of others. but these instruments are not to be had here. in a letter of this date to mr. rittenhouse i mention a discovery in animal history, very signal indeed, of which i shall lay before the society the best account i can, as soon as i shall have received some other materials collecting for me. "i have seen, with extreme indignation, the blasphemies lately vended against the memory of the father of american philosophy. but his memory will be venerated as long as the thunder of heaven shall be heard or feared." march , , jefferson wrote to mr. patterson: "in the life time of mr. rittenhouse, i communicated to him the description of a mould-board of a plough, which i had constructed, and supposed to be what we might term the _mould-board of least resistance_. i asked not only his opinion, but that he would submit it to you also. after he had considered it he gave me his own opinion that it was demonstratively what i had supposed, and i think he said he had communicated it to you. of that however, i am not sure, and therefore, now take the liberty of sending you a description of it, and a model which i have prepared for the board of agriculture of england, at their request. mr. strickland, one of their members, had seen the model, also the thing itself in use on my farm, and thinking favorably of it, had mentioned it to them. my purpose in troubling you with it is to ask you to examine the description rigorously, and suggest to me any corrections or alterations which you may think necessary. i would wish to have the idea go as correctly as possible out of my hands. i had sometimes thought of giving it into the philosophical society, but i doubted whether it was worthy of their notice, and supposed it not exactly in the line of their publications. i had therefore contemplated sending it to some of our agricultural societies, in whose way it was more particularly, when i received the request of the english board. the papers i enclose you are the latter part of a letter to sir john sinclair, their president. it is to go off by packett, wherefore i wish to ask the favor of you to return them with the model in the course of the present week, with any observations you will be so good as to favor me with." writing from washington, july , , to mr. sylvestre, in acknowledgment of a plow received from the agricultural society of the seine (france), he adds: "i shall with great pleasure attend to the construction and transmission to the society of a plough with my mould-board. this is the only part of that useful instrument to which i have paid any particular attention. but knowing how much the perfection of the plough must depend, st, on the line of traction; d, on the direction of the share; d, on the angle of the wing; th, on the form of the mould-board; and persuaded that i shall find the three first advantages eminently exemplified in that which the society sends me, i am anxious to see combined with these a mould-board of my form, in the hope it will still advance the perfection of that machine. but for this i must ask time till i am relieved from the cares which have more right to all my time--that is to say, till next spring;" _i. e._ until after the expiration of his second term as president of the united states. the importance of any step in civilization can be understood only in its relations, antecedent causes and actual results. the _scientific american_, which is certainly good authority in such matters, ranks jethro wood with benjamin franklin, eli whitney, robert fulton, charles goodyear, samuel b. morse, elias howe, and cyrus h. mccormick, and these are certainly the great names and this a just classification. each in his way laid the foundation on which all inventors in his respective line have built, and must continue to build, and none of them all came so near perfecting his grand idea as mr. wood. his now venerable daughter stated the exact truth when she remarked in a letter not designed for publication: "my father patented the shape and construction of the plow. he took the iron and shaped the plow that turns the furrow for every product of the soil in america. his plow has never been improved. it came from his hand simple and perfect, as it now is, and there is no other plow now in use." it was not the use of cast iron that he invented, although the use of "pot metal" by him occasioned a great deal of hostility to the original wood plow. jethro wood took out two plow patents, and those who wish to belittle his work, descant upon the first as if it were his only claim to credit. that first patent was issued in . it fell far short of satisfying the patentee's ambition. the plows made under it must have been a great improvement on any then in use, for although he abandoned it almost from the first, a great many of them were sold during the period between the first and the second patents. the second patent dates from . the natal day of the modern plow may be fairly set down as september , . the original specifications in this plow deserve to be given in full, and may well be inserted in this connection. the document was the handiwork of mr. wood himself, and runs thus: "the schedule referred to in these letters patent, and making part of the same, containing a description in the words of the said jethro wood himself of his improvement in the construction of ploughs. "considering the manifold errors and defects in the construction of ploughs, and the inconveniences experienced in the use of them, the petitioner and inventor hath applied the powers of his mind to the improvement of this noble utensil, and produced a plough so far superior to those in common use, that he asks an exclusive privilege for the same from the government of his country. "the principal matters for which he solicits letters patent, he now reduces to writing, and explains in words and sentences as appropriate and significant as he possibly can. but, being perfectly aware of the feebleness and insufficiency of language to convey precise and adequate ideas of complicated forms and proportions, the said jethro wood annexes to these presents, a delineation upon paper of his said new and improved plough, with full and explanatory notes; urging with earnestness and respect that the delineation and notes may be considered as a part of this communication. the said petitioner and inventor also, being perfectly convinced, as a practical man, that a model of his inventions and improvements will convey and preserve the most exact and durable impressions of the matters to which he lays claim, he sends herewith a model of the due form and proportion of each, as a just exhibition of his principle and of its application to the construction and improvement of the plough, requesting that the same may be kept in the patent office, as a perpetual memorial of the invention and its use. "in the first place, the said jethro wood claims an exclusive privilege for constructing the part of the plough, heretofore, and to this day, generally called the mould-board, _in the manner hereinafter mentioned_. this mould-board may be termed a plano-curvilinear figure, not defined nor described in any of the elementary books of geometry or mathematics. but an idea may be conceived of it thus: "the land-side of the plough, measuring from the point of the mould-board, is two feet and two inches long. it is a strait-lined surface, from four to five and one-half inches wide, and half an inch thick. its more particular description will be hereinafterwards given. it is sufficient to observe here, that of the twenty-six inches of length on the land-side, eighteen inches belong to the part of the plough strictly called the land-side, and eight inches to the mould-board. the part of the mould-board comprehended by this space of eight inches is very important, affording weight and strength and substance to the plough; enabling it the better to sustain the cutting-edge for separating and elevating the soil or sward, and likewise the standard for connecting the mould-board with the beam, as will hereinafter be described more at large. "the figure of the mould-board, as observed from the furrow-side, is a sort of irregular pentagon, or five-sided plane, though curved and inclined in a peculiar manner. its two lower sides touch the ground, or are intended to do so, while the three other sides enter into the composition of the oblique, or slanting mould-board, over-hanging behind, vertical midway, and projecting forward. the angle of the mould-board, as it departs from the foremost point of, or at, the land-side, is about forty-two degrees, and the length of it, or, in other words, of the first side, is eleven inches. the line of the next, or the second side, is nearly, but not exactly parallel with the before-mentioned right-lined land-side, for it widens or diverges from the angle at which the first and second sides join towards its posterior or hindermost point, as much as one inch. hence, the distance from the hindermost point of the mould-board, at the angle of the second and third sides, directly across to the land-side, is one inch more than it is from the angle of the first and second sides, directly across. the length of this, the second side, is eight inches. the next side, or what is here denominated the third side, leaves the ground or furrow in a slanting direction backward, and with an over-hanging curve, exceeding the perpendicular outwards from three to six inches, according to the size of the plough. the length of this third side is fourteen inches and one-half. the fourth side of this mould-board is horizontal, or nearly so, extending from the uppermost point of the third side, to the fore part, or pitch, eighteen inches. the fifth, or last side, descends or slopes from the last mentioned mark, spot, or pitch, to the place of beginning at the low and fore point of the mould-board, where it joins the land-side. its length is thirteen inches. "besides these properties and proportions of his mould-board, the said jethro wood now explains other properties which it possesses, and by which it may be and is distinguished from every other invented thing. the peculiar curve has been compared to that of the screw auger; and it has been likened to the prow of a ship. neither of these similitudes conveys the fair and proper notion of the invention. "the mould-board, which the said jethro wood claims as his own, and which is the result of profound reflection and of numberless experiments, is a sort of plano-curvilinear surface, as herein-before stated, having the following bearings and relations: a right line, drawn by a chalked string or cord, or by a straight rule, diagonally or obliquely upwards and backwards from a point two inches and a half inch above the tip or extremity of the mould-board to the angle where the third and fourth sides of the mould-board join, touches the surface the whole distance, in an even and uniform application, and leaves no sinking, depression, hole, cavity, rising, lump, or protuberance, in any part of the distance. so, at a distance half way between the diagonal line just described, and the angle between the first and second sides, a line drawn parallel to the diagonal line already mentioned will receive the chalked string or cord, or the straight rule, as on an uniform and even surface without the smallest bend, sinuosity, or bunch, whereby earth might adhere to the mould-board, and impede the motion and progress of the plough, under, through and along the soil. "in like manner, if a point be taken one inch behind the angle connecting the second and third sides, and a perpendicular be raised upon it, that perpendicular will coincide with the vertical portion of the mould-board in that place; or, in other words, if a plumb line be let fall so as to reach a point one inch behind the last mentioned angle, then such a plumb line will hang parallel with the mould-board the whole way; the line of the mould-board there, neither projecting nor receding but being both a right line and a perpendicular line. "moreover, if a right line be drawn from a point on the just described perpendicular, an inch, or thereabouts, above the upper margin of the fourth side, and from the point to which the said perpendicular, if continued, would reach; if, the said jethro wood repeats, a right line be drawn downward and forward, not exactly parallel to the diagonal herein already described, but so diverging from the same that it is one inch more distant or further apart, at its termination on the fifth side of the mould-board, than at its origin or place of beginning; such line, so beginning, continued, and ended, is a right line parallel to the mould-board along its whole course and direction, and the space over which it passes has no inequality, hill, or hollow thereabout. "furthermore, an additional property of his mould-board is, that, if it be measured and proved various ways, vertically and obliquely, by the saw in fashioning it, by the rule in meeting it, and by the chalk-line in determining it, the capital and distinguishing character of right lines existing on, over and along the peculiar curve which his mould-board describes, is always and inseparably present. this grand and discriminating feature of his mould-board, he considers as of the utmost importance. "he therefore craves the aid and elucidation of his drawing, and of his model, in their totality and in their several parts, to render plain and sure whatever there may be, from the abstruse and recondite nature of the subject, uncertain or dubious in the language of his specification. "in the second place, the said jethro wood claims an exclusive right and privilege in the construction of a standard of cast iron, like the rest of the work already described, for connecting the mould-board with the beam. this standard is broad, stout, strong; and rises from the fore and upper part of the mould-board, being cast with it, and being a projection or continuation of the same from where the fourth and fifth sides meet. its figure, strength, and arrangement are such as best to secure the connexion, and to enable the standard thus associated with the beam, to bear the pull, tug, and brunt of service. by a screw bolt and nut properly adjusted above the top of the standard and acting along its side, assisted, if need require, by a wedge for tightening and loosening, the beam may be raised and lowered; and the mould-board, with its cutting edge, enabled to make a furrow of greater or smaller depth, as the ploughman may desire, and a latch and key fixed to the beam, and capable of being turned into notches, grooves, or depressions on one edge or narrow side of the standard, serves to keep the beam from settling or descending. by means of these screw bolts, wedges, latches, and keys, with their appropriate notches, teeth, and joggles, the plough may be deepened or shallowed most exactly. "in the third place, the said jethro wood claims an exclusive privilege in the inventions and improvements made by him in the construction of the cutting edge of the mould-board, or what may be called, in plain language, the plough-share. the cutting edge consists of cast iron, as do the mould-board and land-side themselves. it is about twelve inches and one half of one inch long, four inches and one half of one inch broad, and in the thickest part three quarters of an inch thick. it is so fashioned and cast, that it fits snugly and nicely into a corresponding excavation or depression at the low and fore edge of the mould-board, along the side herein before termed the first side. when properly adapted, the cutting edge seems, by its uniformity of surface and evenness of connextion, to be an elongation of the mould-board, or, as it were, an extension or continuation of the same. to give the cutting edge firm coherence and connexion, it is secured to the mould-board by one or more knobs, pins or heads in the inner and higher side, which are received into one or more holes in the fore and lower part of the mould-board. by this mechanism, the edge is lapped on and kept fast and true, without the employment of screws. that the cutting edge may be the more securely and immovably kept in its place, it has a groove, or ship-lap of one inch in length, below, or at its under side, near the angle between the first and second sides, for the purpose of holding it, and for the further accomplishment of the same object, another groove or ship-lap, stouter and stronger than the preceding, is also cast in the iron, at or near the point of the mould-board, so as to cover, encase, and protect it effectually, on the upper and lower sides, but not on the land side. "after the cutting edge is thus adapted and adjusted to the mould-board by means of the indentations, pins, holes, ship-laps, and fastenings, it is fixed to its place and prevented from slipping back, or working off, by wedges or pins of wood, or other material, driven into the holes from the inner and under side, and forced tight home by a hammer. "in the fourth place, the said jethro wood claims the exclusive right of securing the handles of his plough to the mould-board and land-side of the plough by means of notches, ears, loops, or holders, cast with the mould-board and land-side respectively, and serving to receive and contain the handles, without the use of nuts and screws. for this purpose one or more ears or loops, or one or more pairs of notches or holders are cast on the inner side of the mould-board and land side, toward their hinder or back parts, or near their after margins, for the reception of the handles of the plough. and these, when duly entered and fitted, are wedged in, instead of being fastened by screws. "in the fifth place, the said jethro wood claims an exclusive right to his invention and improvement in the mode of fitting, adapting and adjusting the cast iron landside to the cast iron mould-board. their junction is after the manner of tenon and mortice; the tenon being at the fore end of the land-side and the mortice being at the inside of the mould-board and near its point. the tenon and mortice are joggled, or dove-tailed together in the casting operation, so as to make them hold fast. the fore end of the tendon is additionally secured by a cast projection from the inside of the mould-board for its reception; and if any other tightening or bracing should be requisite, a wooden wedge, well driven in, will bind every part effectually, and all this is accomplished without the assistance or instrumentality of screws. "the said inventor and petitioner wishes it to be understood, that the principal metallic material of his plough is cast iron. he has very little use for wrought iron, and by adapting the former to the extent he has done, and by discontinuing the latter, he is enabled to make the plough stronger and better, as well as more lasting and cheap. "he also claims, and hereby asserts the right, of varying the dimensions and proportions of his plough, and of its several sections and parts, in the relations of somewhat more and somewhat less of length, breadth, thickness, and composition, according to his judgment or fancy, so that all the while he adheres to his principle and departs not from it. "regarding each and every of the matters submitted as very conducive to the reputation and emolument of the said jethro wood, he relies confidently upon a benign and favorable construction of his petition and specification, by the constituted authorities of his country. "given under his hand, at the city of new york, this fourteenth day of august, one thousand eight hundred and nineteen ( ), in the presence of two witnesses, to wit: "sam'l l. mitchell, } "j. g. bogert. } jethro wood." this patent expired by its own limitation in fourteen years, when it was renewed or continued for another term of fourteen years. in view of the comparative ease and speediness with which the inventors of the present day, or their assigns, utilize really valuable patents, it would be inferred, in the absence of specific knowledge to the contrary, that twenty-eight years constituted a sufficiently long period for the enjoyment by mr. wood, of "the full and exclusive right and liberty of making, constructing, using and vending to others to be used," the plow which he had invented. no doubt some members of congress in refusing to continue the patent for a third term, acted from conscientious motives. but in point of fact, the period was occupied in a series of struggles calamitous to the inventor, to the history of which we must now turn. these struggles were unlike those in the lives of some other great inventors, notably, goodyear and howe. it was not a warfare for existence, the wolf of poverty staring him in the face. the broad fields which he had inherited from his father were adequate immunity from the sad fate too frequently allotted to inventors. but no benefactor of mankind in the domain of mechanism ever experienced more iniquitous treatment than jethro wood did. before the year closed, his mission as an inventor was an accomplished fact. the popular name given his implement, "the cast iron plow," from its entire abandonment of wrought iron in its construction, needed no change to be the noblest gift ever made to agriculture. in the ideal, hope had ripened into full fruition. and now, at this day, looking at the matter in the light of the past, seeing the absolutely incalculable benefits of the invention, it seems almost incredible that the american people, then even more than now, a nation of farmers, should not have hailed the new plow as an unspeakable boon, especially the community in which he dwelt, for cayuga county then, as now, under a high state of cultivation, was and is peopled by a population of much more than average intelligence. but an inventor, like "a prophet, is not without honor save in his own country." his neighbors gravely shook their heads at "jethro's folly." with almost entire unanimity they agreed that the new contrivance would never work. his trials and difficulties at this stage of progress are told as follows, by one who wrote largely from personal recollection: "he immediately began to manufacture his plows, and introduce them to the farmers in his neighborhood. the difficulties which he now encountered would have daunted any man without extraordinary perseverance and a firm belief in the inestimable benefit to agriculture sure to result from his invention. he was obliged to manufacture all the patterns, and to have the plow cast under the disadvantages usual with new machinery. the nearest furnace was thirty miles from his home, and, baffled by obstacles which unskillful and disobliging workmen threw in his way, he visited it, day after day, directing the making of his patterns, standing by the furnaces while the metal was melting, and often with his own hands aiding in the casting. "when, at length, samples of his plow were ready for use, he met with another difficulty in the unwillingness of the farmers to accept them. 'what,' they cried, in contempt, 'a plow made of pot metal? you might as well attempt to turn up the earth with a glass plowshare. it would hardly be more brittle.' "one day he induced one of the most skeptical neighbors to make a public trial of the plow. a large concourse gathered to see how it would work. the field selected for the test was thickly strewn with stones, many of them firmly imbedded in the soil, and jutting up from the surface. all predicted that the plow would break at the outset. to their astonishment and wood's satisfaction, it went around the field, running easily and smoothly, and turning up the most perfect furrow which had ever been seen. the small stones against which the farmer maliciously guided it, to test the 'brittle' metal, moved out of the way as if they were grains of sand, and it slid around the immovable rocks as if they were icebergs. incensed at the non-fulfillment of his prophecy, the farmer finally drove the plow with all force upon a large bowlder, and found to his amazement that it was uninjured by the collision. it proved a day of triumph for jethro wood, and from that time he heard few taunts about the pot-metal. "it was soon discovered that his plow turned up the soil with so much ease that two horses could do the work for which a yoke of oxen and a span of horses had sometimes been insufficient before; that it made a better furrow, and that it could be bought for seven or eight dollars; no more running to the blacksmith, either, to have it sharpened. it was proved a thorough and valuable success. thomas jefferson, from his retirement at monticello, wrote wood a letter of congratulation, and although his theory of the construction of mould-boards had differed entirely from the inventor's, gave his most hearty appreciation to the merits of the new plow." in this connection may be told a curious episode, one in itself worthy of record, and strikingly illustrative of the perversities of fortune to mr. wood in those gloomy days. it is the story of a czar and a citizen. all uncertainty as to the feasibility of the new plow having been removed, and actuated by that broad philanthropy which was one of the peculiar charms in the character of mr. wood, he desired to extend as widely as possible the area of his usefulness, and concluded to make the czar of russia, so long the chief grain exporting country of the world, the present of one of his plows. during the revolutionary war, then fresh in the american mind, that great sovereign, catherine of russia, had been the staunch friend of this country, and that, too, without being impelled by jealousy of great britain. it seems to be a peculiar trait in the romanoff family to admire liberty in the abstract, however absolute in practice. sharing the prevailing good will toward russia, mr. wood conceived this happy thought of making a truly substantial contribution to cossack civilization, a civilization ever ready, with all its crudeness, to adopt foreign improvements. that gift, in one point of view slight, proved of great benefit to russian agriculture. it is impossible to state the extent of actual advantage derived by russia from that truly imperial gift. it was in effect giving to that country, second only to the united states in area of tillage, in proportion to population, the free use of the perfected plow. in an old copy of the new york _tribune_, in its palmy days of horace greeley and solon robinson, the tale of the plow and the ring is unfolded. it runs thus: "during the year, , jethro wood sent one of his plows to alexander i, emperor of russia, and the peculiar circumstances attending the gift and its reception formed a large part of the newspaper gossip of the day. wood, though a man of cultivation, intellectually as well as agriculturally, was not familiar with french, which was then as now the diplomatic language. so he requested his personal friend, dr. samuel mitchill, president of the new york society of natural history and sciences, to write a letter in french to accompany the gift. "the autocrat of all the russias received the plow and the letter, and sent back a diamond ring--which the newspapers declared to be worth from $ , to $ , --in token of his appreciation. by some indirection, the ring was not delivered to the donor of the plow, but to the writer of the letter, and dr. mitchill instantly appropriated it to his own use. wood appealed to the russian minister at washington for redress. the minister sent to his emperor and asked to whom the ring belonged, and alexander replied that it was intended for the inventor of the plow. armed with this authority, wood again demanded the ring of mitchill. but there were no steamships or telegraphs in those days, and mitchill declared that in the long interval in which they had been waiting to hear from russia, he had given it to the cause of the greeks, who were then rising to throw off the yoke of their turkish oppressors. a newspaper of the time calls mitchill's course 'an ingenious mode of quartering on the enemy,' and the inventor's friends seem to have believed that the ring had been privately sold for his benefit. at all events it never came to light again, and wood, a peaceful man, a quaker by profession, did not push the matter further." perhaps another and quite as potent a reason why friend wood did not follow up this matter was that weightier affairs demanded his immediate and entire attention. one difficulty was overcome only to develop another. no sooner had he silenced the cavils of the farmers and demonstrated the value of his patent, than infringements upon his rights threatened to, and actually did, rob him of the fruits of his invention. "uneasy rests the head that wears a crown" of genius. the patent laws of that day were very imperfect, and there was a strong prejudice against their enforcement. the cry of "no monopoly" was raised. mr. wood had expended many thousands of dollars in perfecting his patterns and getting ready to supply the demand which he felt sure would arise for his plows, many of which, during the first few years, he gave away, that their value might be established to the satisfaction of the public. the stage of probation over, the plow makers of the country, defiant of patent law, engaged in their manufacture. his patent had fourteen years to run. in an incredibly short time their use by the farmers in all parts of the land became almost universal, and had he been allowed a royalty, however small, he would have realized a vast fortune. instead of that he very nearly exhausted all his property in unavailing endeavors to establish through the courts his rights as inventor and patentee. in , when his patent expired, congress granted a renewal for fourteen years. he was now bowed with the burden of years, and debts incurred in trying to protect himself against infringers. his remaining days were spent in vain efforts to maintain his rights. his broad and kindly nature had conceived noble plans for the use of the wealth which at one time seemed so nearly within his reach. he had always been deeply interested in education, and had fortune smiled upon him it is not too much to say that in spirit, however different in detail, jethro wood would have anticipated stephen girard, ezra cornell and john s. hopkins, in nobly founding a great institution of learning. in private life jethro wood was a model man. if he had faults it is impossible to ascertain them, for it would seem, from the concurrent testimony of all who were acquainted with him, that "none knew him but to love him, none name him but to praise." although a consistent member of the society of friends, mr. wood was extremely liberal in his religious views, and did not conform to the peculiar dress of the sect. he had that truly catholic spirit so admirably characteristic of the great quaker-poet, john g. whittier. not even the cruel wrongs he sustained at the hands of dishonest infringers could turn the sweetness of his kindly temper. nature had endowed him richly in every way, and no gift had been abused. physically, his was the highest type of manly beauty. six feet and two inches in height, perfect in proportion, courtly in manner, his presence was worthy his character. we will not linger over the closing scene of his eventful life. that belongs to the sacred secrecy of private grief. his death occurred at the very threshold of a new conflict, and upon it his son and executor, benjamin wood, entered with intelligent zeal. the closing of it being reserved for two of his daughters. the story of these new labors was well told several years ago by a journalist familiar with the facts, and we cannot do better than to unearth the record from its musty file, and by transcribing it to these pages, give it a kind of resurrection worthy its importance. "after the death of jethro wood, his son benjamin, who received the invention as a legacy, continued his efforts to wrest justice from the unwilling hand of the law. nearly all his father's failures had proceeded from the inadequacy of the patent laws, which were almost worthless to protect the rights of the inventor. even now a patent is worth little until it has been fought through the supreme court of the united states. in those days so many obstacles were thrown in the way of inventors, and the combinations against them were so formidable, that eli whitney, in trying to establish his right to the cotton-gin in a georgia court, while his machine was doubling and trebling the value of lands through the state, had this experience, which is given in his own words: i had great difficulty in proving that the machine had been used in georgia, _although at the same moment there were three separate sets of this machinery in motion within fifty yards of the building in which the court sat, and all so near that the rattling of the wheels was distinctly heard on the steps of the court house_. "similar difficulties had met jethro wood in _his_ suits; so his son resolved to strike at the root of the evil by securing a reform in the laws. he accordingly went to washington, where he remained through several sessions, always working to this end. clay, webster, and john quincy adams, all of whom had known jethro wood and his invention, aided his son powerfully with their votes and counsel, and he succeeded in securing several important changes in the patent laws. "then he returned to new york, and commenced suit to resist encroachments on his right, and the wholesale manufacture of his plow by those who refused to pay the premium to the inventor. the 'cast-iron plow' was now used all over the country, and formidable combinations of its manufacturers united their capital and influence against benjamin wood. william h. seward, then practicing law, was retained as wood's counsel, and the plow-makers engaged all the talent they could muster to oppose him. "heretofore it had never been contradicted that jethro wood was the originator of the plow in use, but now his right to the invention was denied, and it was alleged that his improvements had been forestalled by other makers. again and again the case was adjourned, and europe and america were ransacked for specimens of the different plows which were declared to include his patent. "mr. wood also obtained from england samples of the plows of james small and robert ransom. he searched new-jersey to find the peacock plow which was said to have a cast-iron mould-board of exactly similar shape to his father's. everywhere in that state he found 'wood's plow' in use, but he could hear nothing of the one he sought. at length riding near a farm-house he discovered one of the old 'newbold-peacock plows' lying under a fence, dilapidated and rust-eaten. 'we don't use it any more,' the farmer replied to his inquiries, 'we've got one a good deal better.' 'will you sell this?' asked wood. 'well, yes.' and wood, glad to get it at almost any price, paid the keen farmer, who took advantage of his evident anxiety, two or three times the price of a new plow, and added the old one to his specimens. "this motley collection of implements was brought into court and exhibited to the judges. at last, after the case had dragged its slow length along, through many terms, and the plaintiff was nearly worn out with the law's delay, the time for final trial and decision arrived. the combination of plow-makers feared that the case would go in wood's favor, and made every effort to keep him out of court, that he might lose it by default. during his long entanglement in the law, he had contracted many debts, and one of his opponents had managed to purchase several of these accounts. just before the case was to be heard for the last time, this worthy plow manufacturer, attended by a sheriff, and armed with a warrant to arrest wood for debt, appeared at the front door of his house. fortunately wood had had a few minutes warning, and slipping out at the back door, he made his way under cover of approaching darkness to a house of a friendly neighbor. there he procured a horse and started for albany, miles distant, hearing every moment in fancy the clattering of hoofs at his heels. "as if fortune could not be sufficiently ill-natured, his horse proved vicious and unmanageable, and thrice in the tedious journey threw the rider from his saddle upon the frozen earth, so injuring him, that he was barely able to go on. "on arriving at albany he found himself not a moment too soon. the case had an immediate hearing, and after three days' trial the circuit court decided unequivocally that the plow now in general use over the country was unlike any other which had been produced; that the improvements which rendered it so effective were due to jethro wood, and that all manufacturers must pay his heirs for the privilege of making it. "this was a great triumph; but it was now the late autumn of , and the last grant of the patent had little more than a year to run. wood again repaired to washington to apply for a new extension, but the excitements of so long a contest had been too much for him. just as he had recommenced his efforts they were forever ended. while talking with one of his friends, he suddenly fell dead from heart disease, and the patent expired without renewal. "the last male heir to the invention was no more. on settling the estate, it was found that while not a vestige remained of the large fortune owned by jethro wood when he began his career, _less than five hundred and fifty dollars had ever been received from his invention_. "the after history of the case is a brief one. four daughters of jethro wood alone remained to represent the family. in the winter of the two younger sisters went to washington to petition congress that a bill might be passed for their relief, in view of the inestimable services of their father to the agricultural interests of the country. webster declared that he regarded their father as a 'public benefactor,' and gave them his most efficient aid; clay warmly espoused their cause, and the venerable john quincy adams, with his trembling hand--then so enfeebled by age that he rarely used the pen--wrote them kind notes, heartily sympathizing with them. on one memorable day, while they were in the house gallery, mr. adams, at his desk on the floor, wrote them briefly in relation to their case. a few minutes later he was struck with the fatal attack under which he exclaimed, 'this is the last of earth; i am content,' and was borne dying to the speaker's room. the tremulous lines, the last his hand ever traced, were found on his desk and delivered to miss wood. "a bill providing that in these four heirs should rest for seven years the exclusive right of making and vending the improvements in the construction of the cast-iron plow; and that twenty-five cents on each plow might be exacted from all who manufactured it, passed the senate unanimously. but washington already swarmed with plow manufacturers. the city of pittsburgh alone sent five to look after their interests. money was freely used, and the members of the house committee who were to report on the bill were assured that during the years of the patent, wood's family had reaped immense wealth, and wished to keep up a monopoly. the two quiet ladies, fresh from the retirement of a quaker home, where they had learned little of the world, were even accused of attempting to secure its extention through bribery. it was the wolf charging the lamb with roiling the water. so ignorant were they of such means, that, though the chairman of the committee plainly told the younger lady in a few words of private conversation that a very few thousand dollars would give her a favorable verdict, she did not understand the suggestion till after an unfavorable report was presented, and the bill killed in the house. "when they were about to leave washington, some friendly members of congress advised them to deposit the valuable documents which had been used in their suit, including the letter from thomas jefferson to jethro wood, in the archives of the house, where they could only be withdrawn on the motion of some member. they did so, and left them for some years uncalled for. when at last they applied for them they could not be found. nor from that time to the present has any trace of them been discovered by any of the family. thus perished the last vestige of proof relating to this ill-fated invention." this is a fair and candid statement, one fully sustained by unimpeachable documentary evidence. especially by the somewhat voluminous pamphlet entitled "documents relating to the improvements of jethro wood in the construction of the plough." a careful examination of the testimony therein embodied, and of the congressional reports on the subject, warrant the foregoing statements. it is not strange that in an early annual report of the united states commissioner of agriculture, that official should have remarked with some bitterness that "although wood was one of the greatest benefactors to mankind by this admirable invention, he never received, for all his thought, anxiety and expense, a sum of money sufficient to defray the expenses of his decent burial." the time long since passed forever to seek pecuniary indemnity; but a debt of gratitude never outlaws, and it is due to the great inventor that his countrymen should gratefully cherish his memory. every year adds to the debt we all owe him. as the area of cultivation widens, the obligation deepens. already america is the foremost nation of all the earth in the production of wheat and provisions, the latter being in reality corn in meat form. in exchange for our food supplies, the united states is draining europe of its gold at an enormous rate, and the fundamental element in the production of american wealth, is our great implement of tillage. american prosperity is the monumental glory of jethro wood and his plow. "the balance sheet of the world" shows that the united states can boast more acres of tillage, in proportion to population, than any other country on the globe; and in grain production, outstrips all competitors. of such a record every american citizen may well be proud, and it should be remembered that without the genius of wood such a record could not have been made, even approximately. but in order to a just appreciation of the importance of the modern plow and the usefulness of the inventor of it, one should take a retrospective glance, tracing, as best we may without tedious details, the steps which led from the use of a forked stick to the present implement for fallowing the ground. the _scientific american_, which ought to be good authority on such a subject, in speaking of the wood patent, says: "previously the plow was a stick of wood plated with iron." if this does sound like an exaggeration, but is really a plain statement of fact, consider for a moment what the plow really is in its relation to civilization. the savage lives by the chase and upon the bounty of untilled nature. the first steps toward civilization are to domesticate animals, and cultivate the soil with a rude kind of hoe. both are alike primitive. the next step is to press the beast into service by supplementing the hoe with a plow. in that implement we see what might be called the original strand in the mighty cord which binds in co-operation man, brute and earth. by means of this agency of agriculture the beast of the field is made to toil, and purchases the benefits of human kindness at the expense of idleness and industry. it is not too much, then, to say that the plow is at once "the tie that binds," and the tap-root which nourishes the world. if by some miraculous calamity this one implement were forever swept away, universal and unappeasable famine would be inevitable. and that occasional famines of a local character are disappearing from the civilized world, is very largely, if not chiefly, due to the improved tillage resulting from improved plows. we might well say, in paraphrase of a familiar saying attributed to napoleon: let me make the plows of a nation, and i care not who makes their laws. the primitive plow was and is (for the barbarian of to-day is substantially the same in his agricultural methods as the barbarian of antiquity) simply a forked stick, to which is attached by a strip of rawhide or a wisp of grass, a beast, often the patient cow. as the prong passes over the ground, held down by the bowed form of the poor tiller, it barely scratches the face of the earth. the first improvement was to reverse the stick and notch the forward end. by that means the animal could be more securely fastened to the plow, the thong being tied around the crotch of the stick. the shorter limb ran along the surface of the ground, the notch in front being the only reliance for stirring the soil. in the absence of a compact turf, such plowing would do a little good in rendering the ground fallow, and would at least have the merit of not being so difficult to operate as its predecessor. the third plow had three parts. it consisted of a beam, a handle and a share, all constructed by simply trimming the natural wood selected for that purpose. in the first plow the prong which served as a share was slanting, while in the third it rested flatly upon the ground, projecting forward, instead of backward, as in the second plow. it could have required no very difficult search to have found small trees and broken limbs, needing no mechanical skill in fashioning, to render them serviceable for such crude uses. they may be termed nature's contribution to the art of plow-making. without going further into details, it may be stated that a standard authority on the history of mechanism asserts that "the ancient egyptian, etruscan, syrian, and greek plows, were equal to the modern plows of the south of france, part of austria, poland, sweden, spain, turkey, persia, arabia, india, ceylon and china; at least such was the case until the middle of the present century." the roman and gallic plows were better than those of the modern countries named. the gauls had mould-board plows. pliny is our authority for this statement. that eminent latin author of eighteen centuries ago, in speaking on the general subject, says: "plows are of various kinds. the colter is the iron part which cuts the thick sod before it is broken into pieces and traces beforehand by its incision the future furrows, which the share, reversed, is to open with its teeth. another kind, the common plowshare, is nothing more than a lever furnished with a pointed beak; while another variety, which is used in light, easy soils, does not present an edge projecting from the share-beam throughout, but only a small point at the extremity. in a fourth kind, again, this point is larger and formed with a cutting edge by the agency of which it cleaves the ground, and by the sharp edges at the side cuts up the weeds by the roots." pliny adds that the broader the plowshare the better it is for turning up the soil. these excerpts from the great roman may serve to show the utmost reach of invention in that line, until a new impulse, begun in the netherlands in the eighteenth century, was brought to perfect development in the next century by an american citizen who died the poorer for his invention. the highest of all authorities upon this and cognate subjects is "knight's american mechanical dictionary," and knight says of jethro wood, "he made the best plows up to date." he adds, "he met with great opposition, and then with much injustice, losing a competency in introducing his plow and fighting infringers." the same writer defines the peculiarities of the wood plow with remarkable clearness and brevity: "it consisted in the mode of securing the cast-iron portions together by lugs and locking pieces, doing away with screw-bolts, and much weight, complexity and expense. it was the first plow in which the parts most exposed to wear could be renewed in the field by the substitution of cast pieces." considering the source of this passage, it may be said that literature could hardly pay a nobler tribute to the memory of jethro wood than this. it is doubly significant, from the fact that knight's publishers, houghton, osgood & co., are also the publishers of the _atlantic monthly_, in the may number of which magazine a _habitue_ of the national capital tried to belittle the invention of jethro wood, and malign as iniquitous the attempt of his daughters, championed by john quincy adams, to secure for that invention proper recognition. it would be quite superfluous to follow this maligner in the details of this, and a subsequent attack in an agricultural journal. he disclaims any design to defame the claimants, but insists that other and earlier inventors deserve the credit for the modern plow. the opinion of knight's dictionary upon the wood patent has just been given, and the following extract from the same great work sets forth in their proper relations to the modern plow the inventions of those for whom this _habitue_ makes preposterous claims: "the modern plow," says knight, "originated in the low countries, so-called. flanders and holland gave to england much of her husbandry and gardening knowledge, field, kitchen and ornamental. blythe's 'improver improved,' published in , has allusions to the subject. lummis, in , imported plows from holland. james small, of berwickshire, scotland, made plows and wrote treatises on the subject, . he made cast-iron mold-boards and wrought-iron shares, and introduced the draft-chain. he made shares of cast-iron in . the importation of what was known as the 'rotherham' plow was the immediate cause of the improvement in plows which dates from the middle of the last century. whether the name is derived from rotterdam cannot be determined. "the american plow, during the colonial period, was of wood, the mold-board being covered with sheet-iron, or plates made by hammering out old horseshoes. jefferson studied and wrote on the subject, to determine the proper shape of the mold-board. he treated it as consisting of a lifting and an upsetting wedge, with an easy connecting curve. newbold, of new jersey, in , patented a plow with a mold-board, share and land side all cast together. peacock, in his patent of , cast his plow in three pieces, the point of the colter entering a notch in the breast of the share." it will be observed that the credit given these improvers of the plow is very considerable, without at all trenching upon the exceptional credit due to jethro wood. with such an authoritative refutation, the slander may well be dismissed as beneath further notice. in no way more appropriately can final leave be taken of the subject in hand than by presenting the apostrophe to jethro wood from the pen of edward webster, formerly associated editor of the _rural new yorker_: no jeweled diadem or crown e'er glittered on thy manly brow-- no slave would tremble at thy frown, nor at thy footstool bow; for thou wert pure in heart and mind, and strove to _raise_--not crush mankind! as famed prometheus of yore, in aid of our lost, wretched sires, stole from the flaming-sun, and bore down to the earth those fires that fill with light and life all space, and mark the day god's glorious race-- so thy inventive genius found for man the bright and polished share, that bids the willing fields abound with fruits beyond compare; and from the seed that falls like rain crowds full our barns with bearded grain! eternal may the honors shine, we yield with grateful hearts to thee; may children's children round thy shrine-- sons of the brave and free-- with reverent lips pronounce thy name, and build for thee a deathless fame! by the internet archive. transcriber note text emphasis denoted as _italics_ and =bold=. issued august , . u. s. department of agriculture. farmers' bulletin . comb honey. by geo. s. demuth. _apicultural assistant, bureau of entomology._ [illustration] washington: government printing office . letter of transmittal u.s. department of agriculture, bureau of entomology, _washington, d. c., april , _. sir: i have the honor to transmit herewith a manuscript entitled "comb honey," by geo. s. demuth, apicultural assistant in this bureau. in view of the increasing demand for the finest grade of comb honey and a decrease in the amount of comb honey produced, it seems timely to present to professional beekeepers an analysis of the best practice as well as to point out some essentials to the production of maximum crops of the best grade. i recommend the publication of this paper as a farmers' bulletin. respectfully, l. o. howard, _entomologist and chief of bureau_. hon. james wilson, _secretary of agriculture_. contents. page introduction apparatus for comb-honey production shop and honey house hives sectional hives sections and supers bee way v. plain sections dimensions of sections supers the method of support protection free communication within the super the use of separators shallow extracting supers combination supers other apparatus preparing supers folding sections fastening foundation in sections manipulation of the bees securing workers for the honey flow building up the colony in the early spring the production of gathering bees providing sufficient stores providing available brood-rearing space summary using available workers to best advantage during the honey flow swarming preventive measures control measures control of natural swarms using the removed brood to best advantage what to use in the brood chamber when hiving swarms extreme contraction of the brood chamber when hiving swarms swarm control by manipulation taking the queen from the hive removing the brood from the hive separating the queen and brood within the hive manipulation of the supers caring for the crop removing the honey from the hives care of comb honey scraping propolis from sections grading comb honey packages for comb honey marketing illustrations. page fig. . a -frame hive with comb-honey super and perforated zinc queen excluder . perforated zinc queen excluder . beeway and plain sections, unfolded . plain section in super, showing method of spacing . beeway section in super, showing method of spacing . square and oblong sections . the t super . super with section holder for beeway sections . super with section holder for square plain section . super with section holder for oblong plain sections . combination super with wide frames for oblong plain sections . bee-escape board for removing bees from supers . drone and queen trap on hive entrance . colony before swarming; supers in place . brood placed in hive turned degrees from old entrance . hive with brood turned back to degrees from old entrance . hive with brood turned parallel to old entrance . hive with brood placed on other side of old entrance . arrangement of supers . shipping cases for comb honey comb honey. =introduction.= the present tendency in beekeeping is decidedly toward the production of extracted honey rather than of comb honey. the recent activity among beekeepers toward specialization, which necessitates the establishing of out-apiaries, and the rapidly increasing demand for extracted honey are among the factors bringing about this condition. enormous quantities of honey are now used for manufacturing purposes, and this demand is, of course, solely for extracted honey. if the general public finally becomes convinced of the purity and wholesomeness of extracted honey, this will become a staple article of food. comb honey to command the higher price--proportionate to the greater cost of production--must justify the extra cost to the consumer by its finer appearance. the consumer of extracted honey is not concerned as to the straightness or finish of the combs in which it was originally stored, but by virtue of its appearance there will probably always be a good demand for the finest grade of comb honey where appearance is the chief consideration. present tendencies therefore emphasize the desirability of producing comb honey of the most attractive appearance possible. well-filled sections of comb honey with delicate white comb and perfect cappings are obtainable only during a rapid honey flow of sufficient duration to insure their completion. the production of comb honey, the appearance of which is sufficient to justify its extra cost, requires a combination of conditions that are peculiar to rather limited areas, outside of which the beekeeper will find it decidedly advantageous to produce extracted honey. comb-honey production should not be attempted in localities where the honey flow is very slow or intermittent, where the character of the honey is such that it granulates quickly in the comb while it is on the market, where the honey is dark or "off color," or where honeys from various sources are mixed if these different sources produce honey of different colors and flavors. local market conditions may of course in some instances be such as to make it seem advisable to produce comb honey in limited quantities in a locality that is not well suited to comb-honey production, but the beekeeper who produces comb honey for the general market should first be sure that his is a comb-honey locality. even in the best localities during an occasional season conditions are such that it is not possible to produce comb-honey of fine appearance. some comb-honey specialists find it profitable to provide an equipment for extracted honey for such an emergency. in some cases comb honey is produced only during the height of the season, when conditions are most favorable, extracting supers being used both at the beginning and close of the honey flow. while the professional beekeeper is thus curtailing the production of indifferent grades of comb honey, bee diseases are rapidly eliminating the careless producers. from the present indications, therefore, it would seem certain that there must be a gradual elimination from the markets of all inferior and indifferent comb honey--grades that must compete directly with extracted honey. this should mark a new era in the production of the beat grades of comb honey in the localities that are peculiarly adapted to comb-honey production. the beekeeper who is thus favorably located will do well to consider the possibilities of future market conditions for a fancy grade of comb honey. tho following discussion is necessarily but a brief outline of modern apparatus and methods and of course can not in any sense take the place of the broad experience necessary in profitable comb-honey production. it is assumed that the reader is more or less familiar with the more general phases of beekeeping. (see farmers' bulletin no. . this bulletin also contains a complete list of publications of the department of agriculture on beekeeping.) =apparatus for comb-honey production.= =shop and honey house.= a building containing storage space for apparatus, a well-lighted and ventilated workshop as well as a honey room, is a necessity in comb-honey production. the arrangement and location of the shop and honey house will depend upon local conditions and circumstances. tho usual mistake is in constructing those too small. in the north the shop and honey house is usually built over the wintering repository or collar. since rats or mice would do great damage to the contents of such a storehouse, the construction should be such as to exclude them. if a concrete foundation is used and the sills are embedded in a layer of "green" mortar, no trouble of this kind should be experienced. if a series of out-apiaries are operated for comb honey, the supers, extra hives, etc, are usually kept in one building located near the home of the beekeeper. this serves as a central station and storehouse, the supplies being hauled to and from the apiaries as needed. this building may be supplemented by a very small building at each apiary, though in comb-honey production this is not really necessary. the honey room should be so located that it will receive the heat from the sun, preferably an upstairs room immediately under the roof. when so located a small hand elevator should be installed for taking the honey up and down. the room should be papered or ceiled inside to keep out insects and to permit fumigation if necessary and should contain facilities for artificially heating in case continued damp or freezing weather should occur before the honey is marketed. the honey room should be provided with ample floor support for the great weight that may be placed upon it. =hives.= a beehive must serve the dual purpose of being a home for a colony of bees and at the same time a tool for the beekeeper. its main requirements are along the line of its adaptation to the various manipulations of the apiary in so far as these do not materially interfere with the protection and comfort it affords the colony of bees. since rapid manipulation is greatly facilitated by simple and uniform apparatus, one of the fundamental requirements of the equipment in hives is that they be of the same style and size, with all parts exactly alike and interchangeable throughout the apiary. while the hives and equipment should be as simple and inexpensive as possible, consistent with their various functions, a cheap and poorly constructed beehive is, all things considered, an expensive piece of apparatus. in this country the langstroth (or l) frame ( - / by - / inches) (fig. ) is the standard frame and throughout this paper frames of brood will be discussed in terms of this size of frame. the advantages of standard frames and hives are so great that the beekeeper can not afford to ignore them for the sake of some slight advantage of another size. there is, however, a wide difference of opinion as to the number of frames that should be used in a single hive body. the wide variation in the building up of colonies previous to the honey flow in different localities and seasons, the race of bees, and the skill of the beekeeper are all factors entering into this problem, which make it improbable that beekeepers will ever fully agree on this point. the races that build up more rapidly in the spring are, of course, other things being equal, able to use to advantage a larger brood chamber than the races that are more conservative in brood rearing. it is also noticeable that within certain limits as the beekeeper's skill in building up his colonies for the flow increases, so the size of the brood chamber best adapted to his purpose increases. in other words, while the careful and skillful beekeeper may succeed in having large brood chambers well filled with brood at the beginning of the honey flow, the less skillful beekeeper under similar conditions may be doing well to approximate this condition with a much smaller brood chamber. [illustration: fig. .--a -frame hive with comb-honey super and perforated zinc queen excluder. (from phillips.)] for comb-honey production the brood chamber should be of such a size that by proper management it may be well filled with brood at the beginning of the honey flow, so that the brood and surplus apartments maybe definitely separated. a brood chamber may be considered too large if by proper management it is not on an average fairly well filled with brood at the beginning of the honey flow, and too small if it provides an average of less room than the colony is able to occupy with brood previous to the honey flow. unless the beekeeper practices feeding, a brood chamber that does not contain sufficient room for both winter stores and brood rearing during late summer and autumn may also be considered too small. it may be well to note that by this standard if the brood chamber seems to be too large the fault may lie in the management during the previous autumn, winter, or spring. of course the brood chamber that is barely large enough for one colony will be too large for another in the same apiary or the character of the season may be such that all brood chambers may be too large for best results one season and too small the next, so an average must be sought. while by manipulation good results may be secured by the use of any of the sizes in common use, any great departure in either direction from the size best suited to conditions of a given locality necessitates an excessive increase in labor to give best results. there is at the present time a strong tendency toward the use of the -frame hive body as a medium-sized brood chamber which may be used as a unit of a larger elastic brood chamber when necessary. [illustration: fig. .--perforated zinc queen excluder. (from phillips.)] the comb-honey producer is more exacting as to certain details of construction of hives than is the producer of extracted honey since it is more necessary for him to handle individual brood frames during the honey flow. the spaces[ ] above and between the top bars of the brood frames must be accurate or they will be bridged with burr and brace combs and these filled with honey. burr and brace combs make the removal and readjustment of the super and the manipulation of frames a slow and disagreeable task, to say nothing of the waste of material, which should have been placed in the sections in the beginning. the use of the slatted honey board (fig. ), while preventing brace combs between itself and the super, does not prevent the building of burr and brace combs between and above the top bars of the frames. this trouble is largely eliminated by proper spacing. most hive manufacturers are at present making the top bars of the brood frames of such a width that the spaces between them is from one-fourth to five-sixteenths inch with the same spacing above them. the difficulty, however, is in maintaining this spacing with any great degree of accuracy. self-spacing frames[ ] are a partial solution of this difficulty. in some localities, however, the ordinary self-spacing frames are so badly propolized as to render their removal from the brood chamber difficult as well as materially to interfere with the proper spacing. the advantages of such frames are then nullified, while their disadvantages are retained or even intensified. in such localities metal spacers having but small surfaces of contact are sometimes used. some beekeepers prefer omitting the spacers entirely. however, some of the difficulties arising from the use of self-spacing frames are the result of carelessness on the part of the operator in not crowding the frames together properly when closing the hive after having handled the frames. [ ] a bee space, or that space to which bees are least inclined to put comb or propolis, is perhaps a scant one-fourth inch. in hive construction one-fourth or five-sixteenths inch is usually used. [ ] these are so constructed that the end bars are one-fourth or five-sixteenths inch wider than the top bars throughout a portion of their length or furnished with projections of metal fitted to the edges of the frame. in either case the adjustment is such that when the frames are crowded together in the hive the spaces between the top bars will be correct. =sectional hives.= the sectional hive in which the brood chamber is composed of two or more shallow hive bodies, making it horizontally divisible, offers some advantages, especially to the comb-honey specialist. most of the ordinary manipulations can be performed readily with such hives without removing the frames. one of their greatest advantages in comb-honey production is the rapidity with which the apiarist can examine the colonies for queen cells if natural swarming is to be controlled by manipulation. they are also very elastic, the units or sections usually being of -l frame capacity, permitting a brood chamber capacity of or any multiple of -l frames. among the disadvantages of these hives are the extra cost owing to the greater number of parts necessary in their construction and the difficulty in maintaining proper spacing without the use of top bars on the frames heavier than would seem advisable in the middle of the brood nest. =sections and supers.= there is a wide variation in the style of sections and the supers designed to contain them. this, whole to some extent brought about by different local conditions, is largely due merely to the notions of individual beekeepers. comb-honey apparatus could probably be standardized without sacrificing any really vital features. =beeway _v._ plain sections.= there are two general styles of sections in common use differing in the method of spacing--the beeway section in which the spacer is a part of the section itself (fig. ), and the plain in which the spacer is a permanent part of the separator (fig. ). each style has its advocates and each offers some advantages. [illustration: fig. .--beeway and plain sections, unfolded. (original.) ] some of the advantages of the plain (fig. ) over the beeway sections are: ( ) they are simpler in construction, therefore costing less. ( ) the edges being plain with no insets, the plain sections are more easily cleaned of propolis when being prepared for market and are especially adapted to cleaning by machinery. ( ) by leaving the spacers in the super, sections of the same honey content occupy less space in the shipping case, thus reducing the cost of packages. ( ) the plain section is adapted to an arrangement permitting freer communication lengthwise of the row of sections, especially at the corners (p. ). [illustration: fig. .--plain section in super, showing method of spacing. (original.)] some of the advantages of the beeway sections (fig. ) are: ( ) the honey is somewhat less liable to injury by handling. ( ) being wider at the corners where folded, they are stronger. ( ) some markets, being accustomed to the larger cases necessary to contain a given number of beeway sections, object to the smaller package containing the same number of plain sections, simply because it is smaller. [illustration: fig. .--beeway section in super, showing method of spacing. (original.)] =dimensions of sections.= sections of various dimensions are in use by beekeepers, but the sizes in general use are the - / inches square and the by inches. some producers prefer the by sections because of the more pleasing appearance of the oblong package (fig. ). the standard widths of the - / by - / inches section are - / inches in the beeway style and - / inches in the plain section. the extra width in the beeway style is for the purpose of spacing and does not add to the thickness of the comb. the by is - / or - / inches wide in the plain style and not much used in the beeway style. the - / width of the by section contains practically the same amount of honey when filled as the - / by - / by - / plain or the - / by - / by - / beeway, assuming of course that all are used with separators and filled under like conditions. since there are well-defined limits as to the thickness of the combs most profitable to produce, the area of one comb surface in a section weighing about a pound is usually from to square inches, the exact size and shape being an adaptation to given space in the super. the thinner combs, showing more comb surface, have the appearance of being larger and a greater number can be accommodated on a given hive. honey in such combs may also be ripened sooner and possibly better than in thicker combs. they, however, require more foundation for each pound of honey produced and a slightly greater amount of wax, in proportion to the honey, to complete them. also the thinner the comb, the greater the difficulty with the sheets of foundation swinging to one side on account of uneven work on the two sides or because the hives do not stand level. [illustration: fig. .--square and oblong sections. (original.)] =supers.= the main points of difference between the various types of comb-honey supers are in ( ) the method of supporting the sections, ( ) the amount of protection afforded to the outside of the section and ( ) the degree of free communication from section to section within the super. =the method of support.= sections are supported either by means of cross supports under the ends of the sections or by a slat of proper width supporting each row of sections. the t super (fig. ), so called from the shape of a cross section of the strip of tin used to support the sections is illustrative of the first, while the supporting slats, section holders (figs. , and ), and wide frames (fig. ) are illustrative of the second type of support. [illustration: fig. .--the t super. (original.)] =protection.= the t super and others of this type offer no protection against propolizing to either the top or bottom of the sections, the section holder or slat (figs. , , and ) protects the bottom, while in the wide frame (fig. ) the entire outer surface of the sections is protected except at the edges. the greater the protection afforded the section, the more complicated and expensive the super, and the more complicated supers require more labor in cleaning of propolis and filling with sections. on the other hand, sections of honey produced in properly constructed wide-frame supers are much more easily cleaned of propolis, and ordinarily present a neater appearance when packed for market. [illustration: fig. .--super with section holder for beeway sections. (original.)] =free communication within the super.= the use of closed-top sections ( -beeway) and solid separators, making each section a separate compartment with openings for the bees at the bottom only, illustrates one extreme; while the sections with openings on all four sides ( -beeway) used without separators illustrate the other extreme as to free communication; and between these extremes are various intermediate types. [illustration: fig. .--super with section holder for square plain sections. (original.)] [illustration: fig. .--super with section holder for oblong plain sections. (original.)] it would be desirable so to adjust the sections that when filled with honey a row of them would, so far as the bees are concerned, be equivalent to a single comb, that the bees might have the same free access to the outside row of cells from all sides as they do the other cells and might pass up or down from any section and the full length of the row, as well as around the ends. while, under the same conditions, such free access to the outside row of cells from all sides would result in the sections being slightly better filled than with the ordinary adjustments, such an arrangement presents some mechanical difficulties and would add considerable to the first cost of the supers. if separators were not necessary, such an adjustment of sections could be readily accomplished. in europe a type of separator having transverse openings corresponding to the upright edges of the sections is used to give free communication lengthwise of the row of sections. in this country some such separators are used as well as a separator made of wire cloth so spaced between the rows of sections as to give free communication along the rows, as well as from one row to another. these, however, are not widely used in the united states. [illustration: fig. .--combination super with wide frames for oblong plain sections. (original.)] the plain section, when used in connection with the "fence" separator (fig. ), having the upright posts considerably shorter than the height of the section, offers a fair compromise as to free communication within the super. most of the comb honey produced in this country, however, is produced in sections which offer no communication from section to section lengthwise of the super, being produced in the regular -beeway section, having openings at the top and bottom only (figs. and ). =the use of separators.= separators are made of strips of tin or wood and are used between the rows of sections to compel the tees to build the combs straight and all within the section. the thicker the combs the greater becomes the necessity for separators. while an expert can produce very uniform comb honey without separators during a heavy honey flow by using very narrow sections, it is usually not advisable to do so on account of the resulting large percentage of imperfect combs, especially during poor and indifferent seasons and at the close of any season. the use of separators results in a much more uniform product. =shallow extracting supers.= some comb-honey producers add to their equipment one shallow extracting super for each colony. these are a great convenience in a comb-honey apiary and may be used for the following purposes: ( ) to keep the brood chamber free of honey before the beginning of the main honey flow; ( ) to use at the beginning of the honey flow to induce the bees to begin work promptly in the supers; ( ) to use at the close of the honey flow instead of the last comb-honey super; ( ) to use during any flow of inferior honey or honeydew; ( ) to use during very poor seasons when first-class comb honey can not be produced. =combination supers.= other comb-honey producers provide each comb-honey super with two shallow extracting combs. these are placed one on each side of the super with the sections between them (fig. ). the purpose of this arrangement is to induce the bees to begin work in the super promptly without the use of "bait sections" (sections containing comb previously drawn) or an extracting super and also to do away with the usual poorly finished sections in the corners and outside rows. one great advantage of this system over the use of an extracting super to start early super work is that the combs are not removed. when shallow extracting supers are used for this purpose, they are removed as soon as the bees have started well in them and a comb-honey super substituted. this brings back much the same conditions existing before giving the extracting super, and while some colonies will begin work in the sections promptly when the change is made, many colonies hesitate about beginning the new work almost as though the extracting super had not been used. such colonies are thus thrown out of "condition", (p. ) and may begin preparations to swarm. the use of these combs in supers that are added subsequently allows the apiarist to place the empty super over the one already on the hive until the bees begin work therein without seriously crowding the super room, because each super thus added contains room in the form of empty comb into which the new nectar may be stored at once (see p. ). =other apparatus.= among the other apparatus needed in commercial comb-honey production are a honey extractor, wax press, bee-escapes, and escape boards (fig. ), queen-excluding honey boards (fig. ), feeders, tools, etc. it is not necessary to provide queen-excluding honey boards for each colony unless some special system is followed, yet a few excluders are very desirable for various special manipulations. good feeders may be had by using tin pans in connection with an empty super. a handful of grass should be placed on the sirup to prevent the bees from drowning. in addition to these appliances in the northern states, if the hives are single walled, some means of protection is necessary if the colonies are wintered out of doors. [illustration: fig. .--bee-escape board for removing bees from supers. (from phillips.)] =preparing supers.= =folding sections.= section presses and foundation fasteners are sometimes combined in one machine by which the section is pressed together square and the foundation is fastened by a single operation. usually, however, they are separate machines requiring that each section be handled twice before it is ready to be placed into the super. ordinarily the one-piece sections must be dampened before folding, as otherwise the breakage is considerable and the sections are greatly weakened by folding. a crate of sections as it comes from the factory may be dampened by removing one side so as to expose the v-shaped grooves, then directing a small stream of hot water into these grooves. care should be taken that only the thin portion where the section is folded be dampened. another very satisfactory method of dampening sections is to wrap the crates containing them in a wet blanket the day before they are to be folded. =fastening foundation in sections.= the use of comb foundation in full sheets filling each section as nearly as possible is considered a necessity in the production of fancy comb honey. this foundation should be as thin as can be used without being gnawed or torn down by the bees. the sheet of foundation is usually fastened centrally at the top of the section, leaving only enough space at the sides to allow it to swing freely without binding and about three-sixteenths to one-fourth inch at the bottom to allow for stretching while being drawn out. to secure better attachment of the comb to the bottom of the section, a bottom starter about five-eighths inch wide may be used. in this case the top starter should reach to within three-sixteenths to one-fourth inch of the bottom starter. in some localities the character of the flow is such that but little is gained by the use of the bottom starter, while in other localities it is difficult to produce honey that will stand shipment well without it. the various types of apparatus usually used for fastening foundation in the sections make use of a heated metal plate which, after melting the edge of the sheet of foundation, is withdrawn, allowing the melted edge to be brought quickly in contact with the section. this fastens one edge of the sheet of foundation firmly to the wood. foundation fasteners employing this principle may be simply a hand apparatus consisting of a metal plate of proper size provided with a handle, the operator transferring the tool from the source of heat to the edge of the foundation. or the principle may be incorporated in a more or less complex machine which provides for the maintenance of the proper temperature of the heated plate, its movement to melt the edge of the foundation and a proper support for the section and foundation during the process. for the purpose of securing better filled sections of honey various methods of attaching the sheet of foundation to the sides as well as the top of the section have been devised, but are not extensively used by producers. among these methods are fitting the sheet of foundation in place, then directing a fine stream of melted wax along its edges, or the use of split sections in which a sheet of foundation is continuous through a row of sections, extending through their sides and top. some super construction is such that the sections may be placed directly into the super by the operator who puts in the foundation. this work is usually done during the winter months when the bees require no special attention. enough supers should be provided to take care of the largest possible crop, even though it is not often that all are used the same season. the beekeeper who is operating several apiaries can not afford to take time to prepare supers for the bees during a good honey flow. supers of sections thus prepared in advance should be kept clean by storing them in piles and keeping the piles covered from dust. =manipulation of the bees.= it is important to note that there are four essential factors entering into the securing of a crop of honey: ( ) a sufficient amount of bloom of healthy and well-nourished nectar-secreting plants growing in sou to which they are adapted and within range of the apiary. ( ) weather conditions favorable to nectar secretion and bee flight. ( ) a large number of workers in excess of those needed for the routine work of the colony. ( ) conditions of the colony making the storing instinct dominant. if any one of these factors is absent, the effect of the other three is immediately nullified, and the amount of honey secured will vary as these factors are present at the same time in greater or less degree or as the time during which they are all present is longer or shorter. it is therefore possible to have each of these factors present at some time during the season without securing a crop of honey and the period of time during which they are all present at the same time is usually quite short. grouping the first and second factors we have a combination usually spoken of as the locality and season. these factors are largely beyond the control of the beekeeper except as he may choose a location in which both are usually present at some time or times during the season, may take advantage of the plants of several locations by practising migratory beekeeping, or may improve a given locality by directly or indirectly increasing the amount of nectar-secreting plants, such as buckwheat, alsike clover, sweet clover, or alfalfa. grouping the third and fourth factors we have conditions capable of being brought about by manipulation and for which the beekeeper is more directly responsible. the beekeeper's skill therefore lies in supplying and maintaining these factors throughout the short period during which the bees may store more than they consume. he should know which plants may be expected to furnish the nectar for his crop of honey, that his various manipulations may be properly timed. it should be noted that the shorter the duration of the honey flow, the greater becomes the necessity of having the colonies in proper condition at its beginning and keeping them so until its close. however lavish nature may be with the secretion of nectar and fine weather, it is of little avail if the beekeeper fails to secure a large force of workers to gather and store his crop or, even having provided workers, if he fails to keep his forces together and contented, bending all their energy in the one direction of gathering and storing honey. it is a common occurrence among inexperienced beekeepers to have the colonies become strong enough to work in the supers only after the flowers have ceased blooming or to see strong colonies during a good honey flow doing nothing in the supers simply because conditions are not such as to make the storing instinct dominant. so far as the skill of the beekeeper is concerned in the production of the crop of honey in a given location, every manipulation of the season should be directed ( ) toward securing the greatest possible number of vigorous workers at the proper time, and ( ) keeping the entire working force of each colony together and contentedly at work throughout the given honey flow. =securing workers for the honey flow.= of course, the shorter the period for brood rearing previous to the honey flow, the more serious the problem of getting the colonies strong enough. adverse weather conditions greatly retard brood rearing and thus have the effect of shortening this period. on the other hand, in some localities the main honey flow comes so late in the season that the colonies may even be divided and both divisions built up. in most comb-honey localities the season is short and there is usually during the season only one honey flow that furnishes any considerable surplus suitable for comb honey, with perhaps other honey flows either very meager or furnishing honey unsuitable in color. the early minor flows are in such localities utilized in brood rearing in preparation for the main flow, and those occurring after the main flow may be utilized for winter stores, or if sufficient in quantity some surplus may be secured. in localities where the season is made up of a series of honey flows of almost equal importance and with sometimes a long interval between, the problem of securing workers for the harvest is rendered more complex, since the process must be repeated for each crop or the colonies kept very strong throughout the season. as a rule such localities are not the best for comb-honey production. the workers that gather and store the crop of honey are those that emerge during the few weeks preceding and during the first part of the honey flow. unless it is of unusual duration, the eggs that produce these workers are all laid before the honey flow begins, since those which develop from eggs laid later are not ready for work until after the close of the flow. on the other hand, the workers that emerge six weeks or more before the honey flow will have died of old age or be too old to be of much value during the flow. their services, however, are of great value provided they expend their energy to the best possible advantage in rearing brood. if brood rearing ceases or is greatly restricted during this period, a colony that has been strong earlier in the season is rendered almost worthless as gatherers, since it begins the harvest with old and worn-out workers. this is exactly what often happens unless the beekeeper is alert and provides conditions such that brood rearing is not restricted during this period. in the clover belt, for example, it frequently happens that there is a scarcity of nectar during the period when the workers for the harvest should be reared and, unless the colonies are abundantly supplied with stores, brood rearing is greatly restricted. this may to some extent justify the saying among beekeepers that if the early flowers yield well the season will be good. the progressive beekeeper, however, provides conditions favorable to brood rearing even though the early flowers fail to yield nectar. it is therefore highly important ( ) that each colony be in a normal condition at a period six or eight weeks previous to the honey flow, and ( ) that brood rearing be at its maximum for the entire period of six or eight weeks during which the brood is reared to produce workers available for the honey flow. =building up the colony in the early spring.= the condition of the colonies in the early spring depends upon many factors not all of which are under the control of the beekeeper. in the white-clover belt for instance, where the honey flow comes early, a large percentage of strong colonies in early spring means of course that they have wintered well, which in turn is largely dependent upon proper conditions the previous late summer and autumn. the manipulations having for their purpose the rapid upbuilding of the colony may therefore have their beginning at or even before the close of the honey flow of the previous year, including late summer and fall management and wintering. good queens, preferably young, with enough room for breeding purposes and a supply of stores during the previous late summer and autumn are among the factors favoring good wintering. during the winter the central idea is the conservation of the energy of the bees, the complex details of which can not be presented in this paper. the rapidity with which the colonies build up in early spring depends upon a number of conditions, some of which are: ( ) the number and vitality of the workers; ( ) the age and fecundity of the queen; ( ) the supply and location of stores within the hive; ( ) weather conditions; ( ) the supply of new pollen, nectar, and water; ( ) the conservation of heat within the brood nest; ( ) the race of bees; ( ) the character of the brood combs, etc. most of these conditions are to a great extent within the control of the beekeeper. by supplying each colony with a young queen the previous autumn, or at least supplanting all undesirable ones, a greater number of young and vigorous workers are reared late in the season, which usually means greater vitality and numbers the next spring. young queens reared the previous summer or autumn should be in prime condition the next spring. if to this combination is added an abundance of stores within the hives, brood rearing should progress rapidly, even in spite of adverse weather conditions. it is now the general practice among beekeepers to supply enough stores the previous autumn not only for winter stores but for brood-rearing purposes the next spring. since the amount consumed during the winter varies considerably with different colonies, an early examination to determine the amount of stores may be necessary. under some conditions it may be found profitable to stimulate brood rearing early in the spring by slowly feeding diluted sugar sirup to each colony, by spreading brood, or by doing both, but any very early stimulation of this kind should be used with caution. among extensive beekeepers the tendency is decidedly toward letting the bees alone until the weather is more settled, simply making sure that they have sufficient stores. the apiary should, if possible, be so located that the bees may have access to water without the necessity of exposure of a long flight during bad weather. in localities that do not furnish natural pollen, it may be necessary to feed an artificial substitute, such as rye meal. a good hive that will conserve the heat of the cluster is also a great help in early brood rearing. some beekeepers who winter their colonies in the cellar in single-walled hives find it profitable to give them some additional protection after they have been removed from the cellar. in the northern states double-walled hives are especially advantageous during the spring. a protected location for the apiary in some instances makes a great difference in early brood rearing. some races breed up more rapidly in the spring than others. the italians are somewhat conservative in this respect, but have so many excellent traits that they are generally used in this country. in localities having intermittent honey flows italian bees may not give the best results because of their tendency to restrict brood rearing during the honey flow by crowding the queen and to curtail the production of brood during a scarcity of nectar. drone comb within the brood nest in early spring is a decided barrier to rapid brood rearing. many brood combs considered by the average beekeeper to be perfect contain, especially in the upper portion, a large percentage of cells which can not be used for rearing worker brood because of imperfections in shape and size due to the stretching of this portion of the combs during hot weather. this suggests the advisability of the use of a heavier grade of foundation or some method of using vertical wires or wooden splints in the upper half of the sheet of foundation. =the production of gathering bees.= during the six or eight weeks just preceding the honey flow every colony should be encouraged to rear the greatest possible amount of brood. brood rearing during this period is often restricted by insufficient stores or by insufficient room. it is therefore of great importance that both stores and available brood-rearing space be supplied in abundance. if stimulative feeding or spreading the brood is practiced, this is the time it should be done. =providing sufficient stores.= if feeding is not practiced during this critical period, the beekeeper should see that each colony is at all times supplied with a reserve of stores, for surprisingly large quantities are consumed when brood rearing is going on rapidly. if any colonies should run short, brood rearing will be carried on sparingly and the colony so severely crippled that it may not recover its strength until after the honey flow is over. whether stimulative feeding or supplying each colony with an abundance of reserve stores is the more profitable depends upon circumstances and must be decided by each beekeeper for his own conditions. stimulative feeding, if properly done, will undoubtedly result in the rearing of more bees for the harvest. when the beekeeper is operating several apiaries and must travel some distance to reach them the labor involved is considerable, and the question to be decided is whether this labor would yield greater returns if expended in stimulative feeding or in operating a larger number of colonies. if the brood chamber is large and well provisioned or if the flowers furnish some nectar in early spring the colonies may have sufficient stores for this period of heavy brood rearing. some beekeepers save combs of honey of the previous year to supply food for this period. this is one of the most convenient and satisfactory methods of feeding. =providing available brood-rearing space.= there should be no restriction whatever in the room for brood rearing up to the time of putting on the supers, just previous to the honey flow, for a crowded brood nest at this time tends to diminish the number of workers available for the honey flow as well as to encourage swarming. if the space for brood rearing should be restricted by too much early honey in the brood chamber some of the heaviest combs should be removed and empty ones given instead, or an extra brood chamber containing empty combs may be given. in localities where considerable early honey is gathered the brood chamber may be kept almost free of honey by placing an extracting super over each colony at the beginning of such a flow. this super should not be removed until the comb-honey supers are given, for the honey may be needed later in brood rearing. should the brood nest be restricted by a small brood chamber the colonies may be equalized by removing some frames of brood from the stronger colonies, exchanging them for empty combs taken from weaker colonies, or another brood chamber filled with empty combs may be given, thus building the colonies up individually. the former method has the following advantages: ( ) after being built up to approximately the same strength, most of the colonies will be ready for a given manipulation at the same time, thus facilitating the work. ( ) it requires a smaller stock of extra brood chambers and combs, at least previous to the honey flow. ( ) the brood is in a more compact form, which is a very desirable condition in comb-honey production. ( ) when properly done, the total number of young bees reared in a given time is probably considerably greater, owing to the fact that none of the colonies is strong beyond the capacity of the queen, the workers of the entire apiary being so distributed that all the queens are utilized to the best possible advantage. ( ) when the honey flow begins the colonies are ready for the supers without additional manipulation, such as removing extra brood chambers, sorting combs of brood, etc. in equalizing colonies combs of hatching brood with the adhering workers, _without the queen_, are usually drawn from the strongest colonies and given to colonies less strong, but _never to very weak colonies_. the weakest colonies are left until the last, then built up quickly, provided there is time enough to have all the hives well filled with brood. if this is not possible the very weak colonies can more profitably be used for purposes other than comb-honey production. another plan of equalizing is that of shaking bees from combs taken from strong colonies at the entrance of colonies less strong. the older bees at once take wing and return to their hives, while the younger bees enter the weaker colony. the operator must, of course, be sure that the queen is not on the comb thus shaken. some of the advantages of building up the colonies as individuals are: ( ) the labor required is considerably less, fewer visits being required, so that this method is particularly adapted to out-apiary conditions. ( ) it is possible to determine with much greater accuracy which colonies show the most desirable traits for breeding purposes. ( ) it can be more safely practiced if brood diseases are imminent. =summary.= ( ) the workers that take part in storing a crop of honey from any given honey flow are usually those reared within the period of six or eight weeks just preceding the honey flow. the workers reared previous to this period are too old to be of much value as gatherers while those reared after this period mature after the flow has ceased. ( ) it is necessary that the beekeeper know what plants are likely to furnish the surplus honey and their approximate period of bloom so that he can determine the limits of the heavy brood-rearing period in order to secure the largest possible working force for the honey flow. ( ) colonies should be in a normal condition at the beginning of this period. (_a_) if the surplus is from an early flow, this normal condition can be obtained only by proper management the previous late summer and autumn, together with good wintering. good queens, preferably young, together with sufficient room for brood rearing and winter stores, are important conditions during late summer and autumn. (_b_) stores and protection are important factors in early brood rearing. (_c_) the character of the brood combs and the race of bees each have some influence upon brood rearing. ( ) during the time that workers for the harvest should be reared brood rearing should be constantly accelerated. ( ) brood rearing is often restricted during this period (_a_) because of limited stores and (_b_) because of limited room in the brood chamber. =using available workers to best advantage during the honey flow.= brood rearing, which is of primary importance during the preceding period, becomes of secondary consideration at about the beginning of the honey flow, because this is nearing the limit beyond which time the resulting bees develop too late to take part in gathering and storing the crop of honey. at this time, therefore, there is a radical change in purpose of the manipulations. instead of continuing the expansion of the brood chamber, the policy of the beekeeper should now be rather a concentration of the workers and brood. there is perhaps a limit to the number of workers that can be profitably kept in a single hive and set of supers, but this limit is seldom reached, the usual mistake being in having too few. each colony should have its brood chamber well filled with brood in a compact form and be so crowded with young and vigorous workers that they will immediately occupy the supers when the honey flow actually begins. the brood chamber of colonies occupying more than one hive body should at this time be reduced to one, any extra brood being used in colonies having less than one brood chamber full of brood. after this operation, should there still be some colonies left with the brood chamber but partly filled with brood, they should be filled with combs of brood and adhering bees (without the queen) drawn from some colony or colonies too weak to work well in comb-honey supers. it may be advisable to unite the weaker colonies in order to secure the proper strength for the best work. this massing of the workers in strong colonies, so essential to the production of a fancy grade of comb honey, renders necessary extremely careful and skillful management, since the efforts of the beekeeper may still be nullified in either of two ways: ( ) the bees may divide their forces by swarming into two or more parts, neither of which would be ready to work in the supers until the season is much advanced or perhaps closed entirely, or ( ) being balked in their desire to swarm or from lack of convenient storage space, etc., they may do very poor work even during a good honey flow simply because the conditions of the colony are such that the storing instinct is not dominant. _to bring about the best results in comb honey, the entire working force of each colony must be kept undivided and the means employed in doing so must be such that the storing instinct remains dominant throughout any given honey flow._ any increase made before or during the flow[ ] is made at the expense of the surplus honey unless it be made with brood that would emerge too late for the young bees to be of use during the honey flow (p. ). in general, however, increase may be made at much less expense by setting aside some of the colonies for that purpose. to keep the forces together and satisfied, with the storing instinct dominant during a good flow, is the most difficult problem with which the producer of comb honey must deal. [ ] in localities where the main honey flow is so late that colonies may be divided long enough before the flow so that both colonies may be built up to proper strength in time to take advantage of it, of course increase previous to the flow would be advisable. this condition is rare in comb-honey localities. =swarming.= all colonies do not behave alike as to swarming. ( ) there are certain colonies that go through the season with apparently no thought of swarming. such colonies do the very best work in the supers, and their number can be increased by skillful management. ( ) other colonies start queen cells preparatory to swarming, but can be persuaded to give it up by such mild measures as destroying the queen cells and perhaps removing a few frames of brood. ( ) certain colonies are determined to swarm and, unless the flow ceases, nothing short of swarming or some radical manipulation will satisfy them. ( ) a certain percentage of queens fail during the honey flow and swarming may occur in connection with the supersedure. such colonies usually do very poor work in comb-honey supers. the beekeeper can do much ( ) toward increasing the percentage in the first group and discouraging those of the second--_preventive measures_, and ( ) toward making the most of the colonies under the third and fourth groups--_control measures_. =preventive measures.= some effort has been made toward the final elimination of swarming by breeding from colonies showing the least disposition to swarm. although after years of selection bees continue to swarm when conditions are favorable, many practical beekeepers testify to having greatly reduced the percentage of swarming colonies by years of careful selection and breeding. it would certainly seem advisable to replace the queens of all colonies which persist in swarming with young queens reared from colonies less inclined to swarm. the swarming problem has also been attacked from the standpoint of the hive and mechanical attachments, finally resulting in the invention of a "nonswarming" hive. more attention has, however, been paid to the prevention and control of swarming by manipulation than along either of the other fines, probably because proper manipulation gives immediate results and is now available as a means of preventing the losses due to swarming. the success in swarm control attained by the best beekeepers is a result of some effort along all three of the above fines at the same time. among the manipulations that tend to discourage swarming are ( ) the introduction of young queens (preferably reared from selected stock); ( ) an abundance of empty comb in the brood chamber at all times previous to the honey flow; ( ) prompt work in the supers at the beginning of the flow induced by using "bait sections" or extracting combs in the first super given, thus tiding the colony over one of the critical periods; ( ) a judicious manipulation of the supers during the honey flow (p. ); ( ) the use of more nearly perfect worker combs in the brood chamber, since drone comb and imperfect cells (p. ) have the effect of contracting the brood chamber, thus bringing about a crowded condition; ( ) an abundance of ventilation during the honey flow, obtained by means of a large entrance or by raising the hive above the bottom board by means of small blocks; ( ) protection of the hive from direct rays of the sun during the hottest portion of the day by some such means as a double cover or shade board; ( ) the removal of one or two frames of brood and the substitution therefor of empty combs or sheets of foundation; ( ) the destruction of all queen cells provided they contain only eggs or very small larvæ. if queen cells are well advanced, their destruction usually has little or no effect as a swarm preventive measure. while destroying queen cells in their early stages can not be relied upon as a preventive of swarming, beekeepers who practice examining the brood chambers once a week for queen cells during the swarming season are usually surprised at the number of colonies that can be induced to give up swarming and turn their attention to storing in this way. such a result at least partly compensates for the large amount of labor required for these weekly examinations. =control measures.= after having taken all precautions as to preventive measures there win still be some colonies that will attempt to swarm when producing comb honey. during poor seasons of course the percentage may be quite low, but during good seasons the conditions are sometimes such that a majority of the colonies may make an effort to swarm. swarming colonies, however, may be controlled in such a manner that practically as much surplus honey is secured as if the colony made no attempt to swarm. if but a single apiary is being operated and the beekeeper is present during the swarming season, the bees may be permitted to swarm naturally without loss to the beekeeper; but if several apiaries are being operated, it is more economical to employ some method by which swarming may be controlled by visiting each apiary at given intervals during the swarming season, rather than to have an attendant at each. =control of natural swarms.= natural swarms may be managed ( ) by allowing them to cluster naturally, then hiving them in the ordinary manner; ( ) by the clipped queen method; ( ) by the use of queen traps (fig. ; see farmers' bulletin no. , pp. - ); or ( ) by use of the swarm catcher.[ ] [ ] this is simply a wire-cloth cage large enough to be set over the hive or be fitted over the entrance. if the attendant is provided with a number of these catchers he can avoid the usual confusion ordinarily occurring when several swarms issue at about the same time. after being caught in this manner the swarms may be hived at the convenience of the beekeeper. [illustration: fig. .--drone and queen trap on hive entrance. (from phillips.)] to keep the forces together ( ) the swarm without the queen may be returned to its hive, the queen cells destroyed a week later, and the colony afterwards requeened (p. ); or ( ) the brood may be removed from the hive while the swarm is out, after which the swarm with the queen is returned. the former method is useful under some conditions (p. ), but the latter is the one usually preferred. when the swarm is hived back without the brood on its old location in this manner, the colony does not lose any of its flying bees and is back at work with renewed energy in the same set of supers it was but a few minutes before so eagerly deserting. instead of removing the combs from the brood chamber the usual practice is the removal of the entire brood chamber and the substitution of another whose external appearance is the same. this method of swarm management keeps the bees, queen, and supers together and is one of the most satisfactory known. it is not, however, adapted to out-apiaries or any apiaries not having an attendant, and requires considerable time in watching for and hiving swarms. [illustration: fig. .--colony before swarming; supers in place. (original.)] =using the removed brood to best advantage.= the disposition of the brood that is left when a swarm issues should be such that ( ) no "after-swarms" (swarms resulting from the emergence of a plurality of virgin queens) are permitted to issue and ( ) that the emerging workers may be used to the best advantage. "after-swarming" may be prevented by ( ) breaking up the parent colony before any of the young queens emerge, using the unhatched brood elsewhere, ( ) by destroying all queen cells but one before any young queens emerge, or ( ) by greatly reducing the population of the parent colony[ ] just before the young queens emerge. [ ] the term "parent colony" applies to the one in the hive from which the swarm issues and is in common use, though the correctness of the term is questionable. [illustration: fig. .--brood placed in hive turned degrees from old entrance. (original.)] if swarming occurs at a time when the resulting young bees can take part in gathering and storing the crop of honey, the usual practice is to allow the brood to emerge in a separate hive and later to add these young bees to the colony from which it was taken. under such circumstances this reenforcement of the swarm is especially desirable, since otherwise its forces are constantly diminishing during the days (the time required for worker brood to develop) immediately following the removal of all its brood. the brood, however, may be used anywhere in the apiary and should be placed where the resulting bees will be most needed. the plans given below make use of at least a part of the emerging bees in reenforcing the swarm from which the brood was taken. when hiving natural swarms on the old location as suggested above, the old brood chamber is provided with a bottom and cover and set aside, usually with its entrance turned away about ° from its former position (figs. , ). this is to prevent any field bees returning to the parent colony. a day or so later it is turned about ° toward its former position (fig. ) and as soon as the bees have this location of the entrance well marked the hive is placed parallel to the hive on the old stand (fig. ). so far as the bees returning from the field are concerned, these two colonies are now on the same stand. [illustration: fig. .--hive with brood turned back to degrees from old entrance. (original.)] [illustration: fig. .--hive with brood turned parallel to old entrance. (original.)] the further disposition of the remnant of the brood and young bees may be by any one of the following methods: ( ) one week after the swarm issues, or just before the parent colony would cast a second or "after-swarm," it may, when the bees are well at work in the fields, be removed and given a new location. this throws the entire flying force into the colony having the supers, where they are of greatest service, and so depletes the other colony of its flying bees just when the young queens are emerging that "after-swarming" is usually prevented. ( ) before moving it, away the parent colony may be more thoroughly depleted of its young bees by shaking most of them from their combs, adding them of course to the colony with the supers. the comb containing the finest queen cells should not be shaken, since to do so will probably injure the immature queens. two or three frames should be left with their adhering bees in order that the parent colony will still contain enough workers to care for the remaining unemerged brood. ( ) instead of moving the parent colony away as in ( ) above, the bees may all be added to the swarm by shaking them from their combs, and the combs then distributed among nuclei previously prepared. by successive additions of frames of brood these nuclei are finally built up into full colonies and "after-swarming" is prevented. ( ) instead of giving the parent colony a new location, as in ( ) above, it may be shifted to the opposite side of the swarm on the old stand (fig. ) and by thus shifting it from one side to the other at intervals of several days the young bees as they hatch and learn to fly will finally all be added to the colony with the supers. few beekeepers, however, go to this extreme, as the season usually closes before the latest emerging young bees are thus transferred to the colony with the supers and these later-emerging bees may be used for increase at little if any expense in surplus honey. ( ) if increase is not desired, the bees may be added to the swarm on the old stand as before, and after or days the combs of the parent colony still containing some unhatched brood may be used on which to hive another swarm. before being used for this purpose the bees are of course shaken from these combs and added as before to the swarm on the old stand. ( ) if the honey flow is of long duration or conditions otherwise such that the storing colony may prepare to swarm again, the brood chamber of the parent colony may be left by the side of the swarm (fig. ) until the young queen begins to lay, then restored to its original position on the old stand and the supers transferred to it. the brood chamber containing the old queen is moved to one side, its flying bees thus induced to enter the hive containing the young queen. the two colonies may afterwards be united or the one containing the old queen may finally be moved to a new location for increase. if, when using this plan, a virgin queen or a ripe queen cell is given the parent colony just after the swarm issues, this colony is ready to be restored to its original position on the old stand about a week earlier than if left to requeen itself. [illustration: fig. .--hive with brood placed on other side of old entrance. (original.)] in case the emerging bees are not to be added to the storing colony the brood and young bees may be used in one of the following ways: ( ) they may be used immediately after the swarm issues to build up such colonies as are not strong enough to work in the supers or to build up previously prepared nuclei, as in ( ) above. before being used in these ways the adhering bees are usually added to the swarm. ( ) the parent colony may be placed at once on a new stand and given a laying or virgin queen. to allow such a colony to requeen itself usually results in its casting an "after-swarm," since it becomes quite populous again before the young queens emerge. this plan does not make immediate use of the emerging bees but may be useful under some conditions. ( ) if the honey flow is of long duration or is followed closely by a second, two parent colonies, as in ( ) above, may be placed upon the same stand, one of which is given a queen but with the queen cells destroyed in the other. after two or three weeks the bees may be shaken from the queenless colony in with the queen-right one. such colonies are in excellent condition for rapid work in the supers. =what to use in the brood chamber when hiving swarms.= ( ) the use of narrow strips of foundation inch or less in width in the brood chamber offers some advantages. (_a_) when the brood chamber contains only these narrow "starters" and supers of partly filled sections are transferred from the parent colony to the new swarm at the time of hiving, there being no cells below in which to store the honey, it is taken to the supers. under these conditions work in the brood chamber goes on slowly, the work of the colony being largely in the supers. (_b_) colonies that are thus required to construct a set of new combs in the brood chamber and that are supplied with sufficient storage room seldom attempt to swarm again during the same season, even though the flow be of long duration. (_c_) the treatment of brood diseases may be combined with swarm control. (see farmers' bulletin no. , p. .) the greatest objection to their use is in the excessive amount of drone comb usually built when anything less than full sheets of foundation are used, especially if the queen is old or the brood chamber large in proportion to the size of the swarm. ( ) the use of full sheets of foundation in the brood frames has the decided advantage of resulting in straight combs having the maximum number of cells of the worker size, but is more expensive than the narrow strips and allows a more rapid building of comb in the brood chamber, which under some conditions is considered a disadvantage. ( ) the exclusive use of either narrow strips or full sheets of foundation in the brood chamber when hiving swarms necessitates the use for a short time of a queen excluder (fig. ) if the supers are transferred from the parent colony to the swarm at the time of hiving, since otherwise the queen would probably enter the sections and a brood nest be established there. to avoid the use of queen excluders for this purpose, one or more empty combs maybe used in each brood chamber, the remaining frames containing full sheets of foundation. this empty comb also serves as a storage place for pollen that may be gathered before the other combs of the brood chamber are constructed. otherwise this pollen may be stored in the sections (p. ). it is also probable that fewer colonies will "swarm out" or desert their hives if hived in a brood chamber containing one or more empty combs than if foundation only is used. a disadvantage of this plan is that the cells near the top bar of the comb may be so elongated as to interfere with the complete drawing out of the foundation in the adjacent frame. empty combs can not well be used in connection with narrow strips of foundation, since their use favors the construction of drone comb. ( ) empty combs are sometimes used with the idea of saving the bees the work of constructing a new set of combs. under same conditions this is false economy and gives poorer results than starters or foundation. with very strong colonies, or with the brood chamber contracted to five or six frames, empty combs in the brood chamber may give good results. medium colonies on a full set of empty combs are included to store the honey in the brood chamber and neglect the supers. ( ) combs of honey are sometimes used on which to hive swarms. in some instances the beekeeper uses frames of foundation or empty combs above the brood chamber previous to and during the first few days of the honey, flow for the purpose of discouraging swarming and afterwards uses these partly filled combs on which to hive swarms. in order to make room for the queen, this honey is rapidly carried above, and stored in the sections. ( ) combs of sealed brood in which no eggs have been laid during the previous days or weeks may be used. such combs are usually available toward the close of the swarming season from colonies that have swarmed days or weeks before. this plan is especially desirable when the beekeeper runs short of hives during the swarming season. in some localities, however, the character of the flow is such that the colonies may later again prepare to swarm when hived on either empty combs or combs of sealed brood. =extreme contraction of the brood chamber when hiving swarms.= some beekeepers contract the brood chamber, when hiving swarms, to five or six frames, the remaining space being filled by means of division boards or "dummies." this reduction in the capacity of the brood chamber results in practically all the honey being stored in the supers and also restricts brood rearing at a time when the resulting bees develop too late to become gatherers. this is especially adaptable to locations furnishing an early flow of white honey followed by a later flow of darker honey. the white or more marketable honey is stored in the supers and later the brood chamber is expanded and provisioned for winter with the less desirable honey. some beekeepers accomplish a somewhat similar result by hiving two swarms together in a single hive body. when practicing contraction it is best to give the full amount of room at the time of hiving the swarm and to reduce the space three or four days later, as otherwise the bees are apt to "swarm out" because of their cramped quarters. since contraction of the brood chamber is but a temporary expedient, it should not be continued beyond the time that its use is of advantage. if there should be a later honey flow, the brood chamber should be expanded in time to rear the bees for it. in any event, contraction should not continue so long as to interfere with securing the proper conditions of the colonies for winter (p. ). frames of foundation, empty combs, frames of brood or honey may be used to complete the set of combs when expanding the brood chamber, and these are usually given just before or at the close of the honey flow. contraction of the brood chamber to less than one hive body, except in hiving swarms, is not usually advisable. =swarm control by manipulation.= swarm control by manipulation enables the beekeeper to operate a series of apiaries by visiting each at certain intervals, thus eliminating the necessity of an attendant in each apiary during the swarming season. the fact that bees usually, by the construction of queen cells, indicate about a week in advance their intention to swarm, enables the beekeeper to control swarming by examining each colony once a week during the swarming period and forestalling the colonies that are making preparations to swarm. it is also possible to manipulate all the colonies before any swarming occurs so that most of them go through the honey flow without swarming, thus eliminating the weekly examinations. any manipulation for swarm control, whether applied after the colony has acquired the "swarming fever" or applied to all colonies alike previous to the swarming season, is based upon the single principle--_a temporary disturbance in the continuity of the daily emergence of brood_. this disturbance should occur just previous to or during the swarming season. in natural swarming the brood and the swarm are separated, the swarm being without hatching brood during a period of three weeks. the brood from which the swarm came may be allowed to emerge in a separate hive and the resulting bees may then be returned to the swarm (p. ). in this way the swarming instinct is satisfied, at least temporarily, without materially decreasing the population of the colony. the beekeeper may anticipate swarming by removing the brood from the hive, allowing it to emerge in a separate hive and finally returning these young bees to the colony in the same manner as is done with the natural swarm. under the same conditions the subsequent behavior of a colony treated in this way is similar to that of a natural swarm. in either case there has been a break in the continuity of the emergence of young bees in the hive during a period of three weeks. instead of hiving a natural swarm upon empty combs or frames of foundation, combs of emerging brood (without queen cells) taken from a colony that has been queenless during a period of to days may be used (p. ) and a similar condition may be had without swarming by removing all of the brood and substituting such combs of emerging brood, thus at least temporarily avoiding swarming. in these cases there is a break of to days in the continuity of the daily emergence of bees. a similar interruption of brood rearing may be accomplished by removing the queen from the hive or caging her within the hive during a period of days or weeks, then returning her to the combs. in this case no queen cells must of course be allowed to mature. a condition similar to this may be obtained without removing the queen by dividing the brood chamber into two parts with queen-excluding metal, for a period of to days. the brood from the division containing the queen is then removed and the bees, together with the queen, shaken into the other (queenless) division, the queen cells if any being first destroyed. the brood thus removed may later be returned to the colony in the form of young bees in the usual manner (p. ). even the destruction of the sealed brood by uncapping it has been advised as a means of swarm control. this gives a period of about days during which few or no young bees emerge. these methods are illustrative of the principle employed in the various methods of control by manipulation, which may be classified under three general headings: ( ) taking the queen from the hive. ( ) taking the brood from the hive. ( ) separating the queen and brood within the hive. the following methods of swarm control are given for the purpose of illustrating the various types of control by manipulation. it is not to be understood that all the methods given are equally adaptable to any locality or season, but it is hoped that, presented in this way, the beekeeper may more readily see the principle underlying each plan as well as the basic principle underlying all the plans and thereby be better enabled to elaborate a system of control to meet his particular requirements. =taking the queen from the hive.= the temporary removal of the queen from the colony for the required time (p. ) and the return of the same queen is a method which has been used in swarm control. of course, no queen cells should be permitted to develop in the meantime. such colonies may prepare to swarm again, especially if the period of queenlessness is not more than days. the method is a valuable one, however, and may be used at any time during the season on colonies making preparations to swarm. =dequeening in connection with requeening.=--requeening each colony with a young queen early in the season may greatly reduce the percentage of colonies that attempt to swarm but can not be relied upon as a method of complete control since during a good and prolonged honey flow quite a number of such colonies prepare to swarm. if each colony is requeened with a young queen at the beginning of the honey flow, _after having been queenless for or days_, there will probably be very little if any swarming during an ordinary season. this method is not in general use among beekeepers, largely because of the difficulty in so timing the operation that there will be no loss. the following are illustrative of the various adaptations of requeening in connection with a period of no brood rearing. ( ) just previous to the honey flow and at about the time that heavy brood rearing is no longer desirable, remove the queen from each colony, (_a_) eight or ten days later destroy all queen cells but one and allow the colony to requeen itself, or (_b_) destroy _all_ queen cells or days after removing the queen, then after to days supply each colony with a "ripe" queen cell (one in which the queen is ready to emerge), a virgin queen, or a young laying queen. it is usually desirable that the interval of queenlessness be as short as possible without defeating its purpose. some beekeepers give a young laying queen days after removing the old one, or a virgin or ripe cell considerably earlier, sometimes even at the time the old queen is removed, while others prefer a period of at least days before giving either a laying or a virgin queen. however, colonies with virgin queens sometimes swarm even though no other queen cells or larvæ from which to rear a queen are present. another objection to the use of queen cells or virgin queens for this purpose is that some of the queens fail to emerge and some virgin queens fail to mate, thus leaving the colony hopelessly queenless. for these reasons, some prefer to have the young queens mate and begin to lay in "nuclei" (very small colonies) before introducing[ ] them in the strong colonies. this method may be used for the entire apiary at the beginning of the honey flow or it may be applied only to those colonies making preparations to swarm. [ ] the young laying queens may be introduced into the colony by the ordinary indirect or caging method (farmers' bulletin no. , p. ) or together with a comb of brood and adhering from the nucleus from which she was mated. ( ) use two hive bodies as a brood chamber before the honey flow, uniting if necessary to secure strong colonies. at the beginning of the honey flow divide each colony, leaving the field bees and most of the brood on the old stand in one hive body, placing the queen, remaining brood, and enough bees to care for it in the other hive body which is set beside the first. the supers are of course given to the queenless colony on the old stand, which after the proper interval of queenlessness is allowed to requeen itself or is requeened by the beekeeper as in ( ) above. the colony containing the old queen may be used to strengthen the storing colony by shifting its position from one side of it to the other (p. ), or used for increase. ( ) ten days before the honey flow is expected to begin, put most of the brood into a single hive body, on this a queen excluder, and over this a second hive body with a frame of brood and the queen, the other combs of this set being empty except perhaps a little brood and honey. nine or ten days later remove the upper story, supply it with a bottom board, and place it close beside the original hive. destroy queen cells if any are present in the queenless portion which remains on the old stand, give a ripe queen cell, virgin queen, or a young laying queen, and put on the supers. the brood chamber containing the old queen may be used to make increase or its flying bees may be united with the storing colony (p. ). by any of these methods there is a break of to days in the continuity of brood emergence in the brood chamber left on the old stand and the colonies are requeened with young queens--each a strong factor in swarm control and when combined should with rare exceptions result in no swarming. =removing the brood from the hive.= since removing the brood brings about conditions quite similar to that of natural swarming (p. ), such a management of the colonies is practically identical with that of natural swarming. the use of the brood that is removed (p. ), the question of what should be used in the brood chamber instead of the removed brood (p. ), the contraction of the brood chamber (p. ), etc., have been discussed under natural swarming and need not be repeated here. while some of the plans using this principle may be applied to all the colonies in the apiary before swarming actually begins, the usual practice is to apply them only to such colonies as are making preparations to swarm. it should not be used on weak colonies, on colonies having a small percentage of sealed and emerging brood and few young bees, on colonies in which the queen is failing, or on any colonies during a very poor season. under any of these conditions it is usually better to discourage swarming by destroying queen cells (p. ), by removing one or two frames of brood, or, if some control measure is finally necessary, by requeening such colonies after an interval of queenlessness. on the other hand, for strong colonies having a high percentage of sealed and emerging brood and a good queen the method usually gives excellent results, since by its use the workers, queen, and supers are kept together during the flow. the following are some of the various plans employing this principle of swarm control: ( ) find the queen and put the comb on which she is found to one side, then shake the bees from most of the other combs into or in front of their hive. as the combs of brood are removed put frames containing either narrow strips or full sheets of foundation or combs into the hive and replace the supers. when most of the shaken bees are in the hive, place the queen among them. put all the brood and the few bees remaining thereon into another hive close beside the shaken colony (fig. ). enough bees should be left on the combs of brood to care for it; usually two combs are not shaken at all, but placed in the other hive with all the adhering bees. for further disposition of the brood see page . ( ) in order to avoid the trouble of finding the queen, the above plan may be varied by shaking and brushing _all_ the bees from the combs so as to be sure that the queen is among them. in this case the brood may be utilized by one of the following plans: (_a_) use it to build up weaker colonies (p. ) or (_b_) place it in a hive body over a queen excluder on top of the forced swarm or some colony not being used for comb-honey production that can spare enough bees to care for it. in a short time bees will pass through the excluder and cover the brood, after which the hive body containing it is removed, supplied with a cover and bottom board, and placed at one side of the forced swarm so that the emerging bees may later be added to the swarm. or (_c_) after the shaking is complete, remove the forced swarm and put the hive body containing the brood temporarily back on the original stand to induce field bees to enter it. then in the evening set it aside and restore the swarm to its position on the old stand. these field bees will be able to prevent the brood being chilled during the night but in returning from the fields the next day will enter the hive on the old stand. in the meantime enough young bees will have emerged to care for the brood. ( ) removing all the brood and substituting frames containing narrow strips or full sheets of foundation sometimes results in the colony swarming out the next day. this may be avoided by removing the brood in two installments with an interval of a few days between the two operations. when the brood is not all removed, full sheets of foundation or empty combs should be used or an excessive amount of drone comb will be built. with sectional hives, stand the brood chamber on end, smoke the bees out of the lower section, and remove it. destroy queen cells in the upper hive section. these will almost universally be found projecting into the space between the two sections of the brood chamber. substitute a new hive section containing empty combs or foundation for the removed section. after, a few days remove the supers, smoke the bees out of the upper section, remove it, and add it to the section that was removed before, which at the time of its removal was given the usual position beside the colony (fig. ). ( ) use two hive bodies as a brood chamber throughout the year except during the honey flow. have both as well filled with brood as possible previous to the flow. about days before the honey flow is expected to begin, insert a queen-excluding honey board (fig. ) between the two hive bodies. the queen is now confined to a single one of the hive bodies. after days transfer the queen[ ] to the other hive body placed on the old stand and put on the supers. remove the hive body in which the queen has been confined to one side of the colony on the old stand and supply it with a ripe queen cell (in a protector) or a virgin queen. when the young queen begins to lay, exchange places with the two hive bodies so that the one containing the young queen now becomes the storing colony, giving it the supers and field bees. shift the hive containing the old queen from one side to the other of the colony on the old stand about once a week, so that the entire flying force of both are at work in the hive with the supers (p. ). at the close of the honey flow the old queen may be killed unless she is especially valuable and the two divisions may be reunited. the period of days during which no eggs are laid in the hive body used by the storing colony at the beginning of the honey flow should delay swarming at least until the young queen begins to lay. when the other hive body with the young queen is substituted, it has had a similar period of no egg laying in addition to having a young laying queen, making a desirable combination. [ ] it is not necessary to find the queen, since the presence of unsealed brood indicates in which hive body she is confined. she may be transferred to the other hive body by shaking all the bees from the combs she is known to occupy in with the bees of the other hive body. in this case some bees are returned to the shaken combs (p. ) before this brood is set aside, to prevent its being chilled. =mechanical devices.=--a number of mechanical devices have been described for shifting bees from one brood chamber to another. these permit the bees to leave the hive when going to the fields and are so arranged that the returning bees are led to enter the new brood chamber. this is accomplished by means of switches in the bottom board or by a chute or tube so attached that the entrance to the old brood chamber is closed, allowing exit only through the tube which opens near the entrance of the new brood chamber. in either case the hives are so arranged that the bees returning from the field readily enter the new brood chamber. the queen is found and together with a comb of brood and adhering bees is put into the new brood chamber, and the supers are transferred from the old to the new brood chamber. the young bees as they learn to fly are added to the swarm by the same device. otherwise the manipulation is the same as the other methods described. =separating the queen and brood within the hive.= in some swarm-control methods neither the queen nor the brood is removed from the hive, but these are temporarily separated within the hive. these methods are ordinarily used only on colonies making preparations to swarm and are practically equivalent to the dequeening plan. the following methods make use of this principle of swarm control: ( ) the queen may be placed in a wire-cloth cage within the hive or may be confined to a small comb surface within the brood chamber by means of queen-excluding zinc. no queen cells are permitted to mature, and the queen is liberated after to days. ( ) the queen together with a comb containing a small amount of brood is placed in a lower hive body containing no other frames or combs. after destroying all queen cells the brood is placed in a second hive body, the two hive bodies being separated by a queen-excluding honey board and the supers adjusted above the brood as before. the queen, being separated from the brood by means of the excluder, lays few eggs in the comb on which she is confined during this period of separation. after a week or days the queen cells are again destroyed, and the brood and queen are put back into a single hive body as before. this method gives results quite similar to the dequeening method (p. ). if every season were alike in a given locality the beekeeper could work out a manipulation to be applied to each colony just before or at the beginning of the honey flow, which would result in practically no swarming. the wide variation in the seasons, however, renders it next to impossible to adopt a swarm-control measure that will prove most profitable every year. the means of control adopted must be such as to favor the domination of the storing instinct. probably the plan of making weekly visits is the most widely used system of swarm control by manipulation. when a colony is found preparing to swarm, the brood is removed if conditions are such as to justify doing so (p. ). otherwise the removal of the queen is resorted to. with any of these methods of control the colony may rapidly restore former conditions, and even though it has been diverted from swarming may later again prepare to swarm and require a second manipulation. generally speaking, when the honey flow is short, less radical measures are required. colonies that have been supplied with young queens after a period of queenlessness have one factor (the queen) changed with at least some degree of permanency. colonies that have been compelled to construct a new set of brood combs from narrow strips of foundation have the most radical change of conditions as to brood rearing. either of these changes alone is usually sufficient to insure no further preparations to swarm. =manipulation of the supers.= proper manipulation of the comb-honey supers is not only a strong factor in the prevention of swarming but is also a stimulus to storing. the amount of room the colonies should have in the surplus apartment varies so much that the ordinary standard super is simply a unit in a large and flexible surplus apartment. if enough surplus room is given at the beginning of the season for the storage of the entire crop of honey, the space so given is too great for best results at the beginning of the honey flow, and little of it is needed at all if the season is poor. if, on the other hand, a single super is given and no other added until the first is completed, the room in the surplus apartment decreases from the time the super is given until the combs are completely drawn out, when there is little space left between the combs, the bees being practically crowded out. thus while the population of the colony is increasing their room is being diminished--a condition highly conducive to swarming and less energetic work. after the super is filled, it is some time before the honey is ripened and sealed, ready to be removed. during this interval, if no other supers are given, there is no place for storage of the incoming nectar, and the comb builders must remain idle or waste their wax in building burr and brace combs. to avoid loss in this way, empty supers are added as they are needed, and the comb builders move from one super to another as their work in each is completed. the surplus apartment, whether consisting of a single super or several supers, should at all times contain some space for the comb builders. if the honey flow is heavy and promises to continue, it is desirable to furnish not only sufficient room but to induce the bees to begin work in as many sections as possible, giving large comb surface for the storage and evaporation of the thin nectar, thus in a measure approximating extracted honey conditions. there is a danger, however, that if the bees are induced to extend their work through too many supers, the sections when completed will be less well filled and therefore lighter in weight. also, if the honey flow should not continue as expected a rapid expansion of the surplus apartment results in a large number of unfinished sections. the rapidity of the expansion of work in the supers may to some extent be regulated by the position of each newly added super. if a rapid expansion is desirable, the empty super is placed below the supers already on the hive, while if it seems best to crowd the bees somewhat the empty super is placed above those already on the hive. when the empty super is placed above the partly finished ones, the bees do not begin work therein unless they need the room. this practice is always desirable during a slow honey flow or toward the close of any honey flow, but when nectar is coming in rapidly does not result in a rapid expansion of comb building sufficient to avoid a more or less crowded condition, which in turn causes a loss of honey and increases the probability of swarming. if each super is supplied with one or two extracting combs (p. ), this disadvantage of the practice of placing the empty super on top largely disappears, since the extracting combs are immediately available for the storage of nectar. [illustration: fig. .--arrangement of supers. (original.)] when the empty supers are placed under the partly filled ones, work in them is commenced promptly, but this may be at the expense of the nearly completed sections, which by this plan are moved farther from the brood chamber as each empty super is added. in the case of the super in which the honey is being sealed this distance is an advantage in so far as the whiteness of the cappings is concerned, but it may retard the completion of the work. an arrangement of the supers that to some extent avoids this difficulty is as follows: except toward the close of the season, place each newly added super next to the brood chamber and keep the one nearest completion just above it with all others arranged above these two, the one in which least progress has been made being on top (fig. ). thus super no. is raised up and no. placed beneath it. when no. is given, it is placed next to the brood chamber, while above it is no. with no. on top. if no. is given, it is placed next to the brood chamber with nos. , , and in order above it. by this arrangement, if conditions justify doing so, strong colonies may be induced to expand their surplus apartment with great rapidity, since as soon as the foundation is well drawn in each newly added super it may be transposed to the top and an empty one put in its place. such rapid expansion of work in the supers should not be attempted, however, except during a heavy honey flow. if early in the honey flow the bees are storing rapidly, strong colonies should be given a second super as soon as work has been fairly begun in the first. colonies of medium strength may of course be allowed to do considerable work in the first super before the second is given, while a weak colony may have sufficient room for comb building until the first super is almost completed. the first super should contain some empty comb when given to the colony, and each succeeding super should be given in advance of the time when the bees would be in any way crowded without it. at no time should all the sections be removed and new supers containing only foundation be given, but the surplus apartment should contain sections in all the various stages of development. in this way there is no break in the work in the supers, and the critical periods, so far as the super room bears upon the problems of swarming and energetic work, are largely eliminated. during the latter part of the honey flow the reasons for further expansion of the surplus apartment in excess of the immediate needs of the colonies (p. ) no longer exist. at the beginning of a good honey flow the maximum of new work consistent with well-filled sections is desirable, while toward the close of the flow the beekeeper desires the minimum of new work consistent with sufficient room. the precise period when further expansion of the surplus apartment is no longer desirable and a concentration of the work already begun should take place is sometimes difficult to determine, and to do so requires a thorough knowledge of the locality and good judgment on the part of the beekeeper. it is usually desirable to remove the honey as soon after it is finished as can well be done. if it is left on the hives too long after it is finished, it is likely to become discolored or "travel stained," while if it is taken off too soon some of the sections are not completed. it is desirable that the honey be removed by entire supers instead of by individual sections, therefore conditions should be made as favorable as possible for the completion of all the sections in a super without the more advanced ones becoming "travel stained." the bees are more inclined to stain the white surface of the combs toward the close of the honey flow or during very slow flows. trouble from this source is at such time intensified because of the uneven progress of work in the different sections, the more advanced sections therefore being sealed some time before the super is sufficiently advanced to justify its removal. another form of discoloration is brought about by the honey being sealed in close proximity to old and dark brood combs, in which case some of the darker wax from the old combs is sometimes apparently used for capping the honey. during a good honey flow all except the last supers may be left upon the hives until all or nearly all of the sections of honey are sealed, since ( ) there is little trouble from "travel stain" when work is progressing rapidly, ( ) all the sections in the super are ready to be sealed at about the same time, and ( ) when there are several supers on each hive the one in which the honey is being sealed is at least one super removed from the brood combs. toward the close of the honey flow all supers having most of their sections finished should be removed and the sections sorted. the unfinished sections should be graded according to the degree of completion, the various grades placed in supers and given to such colonies as are most likely to finish them. every effort should be made at this time to contract the surplus apartment, concentrating the work upon the sections nearest completion. all supers in which work has not yet been started should be removed and as soon as possible the surplus apartment of each colony should be reduced to one super. though little room is necessary during the close of the honey flow, there should always be some room for the storage of new nectar until it is ripened. for such conditions extracting combs are valuable, since, instead of giving the last comb-honey super in which little work would be done, a set of extracting combs may be placed over the sections to afford room for the incoming nectar and comb surface for its ripening. =caring for the crop.= =removing the honey from the hives.= if the honey flow is of considerable duration the major portion of the crop is removed before the flow ceases. at this time the removal of the finished supers is comparatively easy because the bees can readily be driven from them and also because the operator is not hindered in his work by robbing bees. at the close of the honey flow all the supers remaining upon the hives should be removed promptly, since to leave them on would result not only in some of the honey being carried down into the brood chamber but also in badly propolized sections. after the honey flow has ceased, great care should be exercised to keep bees from robbing. the use of bee-escapes (fig. ) greatly facilitates the removal of the honey at any time, but their use is especially desirable in removing the honey remaining on the hives at the close of the honey flow. by their use the honey may be removed and stored in the honey house with little disturbance or excitement among the bees. the supers of honey should of course be taken directly to the honey house or kept well covered[ ] from robbers. [ ] honey from out-apiaries should be loaded for transportation in such a manner that the bees can not get at it, then before the horse is hitched to the wagon the load of honey should be drawn by hand some distance from the apiary if the slope of the ground will permit doing so. if this is not possible the horse may be attached by means of a long rope and the load drawn to a safe distance before the horse is hitched to the wagon. before finally storing the supers of honey in the honey room those that are but partly filled may have their sections removed and sorted. the unfinished sections that can not be disposed of at a profit locally are usually put back into supers and the honey they contain is fed to the bees. this feeding is done by simply exposing the supers where the flying bees can have access to them. if there are few supers compared with the number of colonies they should be placed in piles and only a small entrance allowed, since if free access were given to a large number of bees they would tear the combs to pieces. when the bees have finished removing the honey from these unfinished sections the latter may be stored for future use as "bait" sections. =care of comb honey.= in the honey room the supers of honey should be placed in piles in such a manner as to allow a free circulation of air between them. this may be done by "sticking them up" as lumber is piled to dry or by placing alternate supers crosswise. the air in the honey room should be kept as dry as possible. this is usually accomplished by means of a high temperature, the honey room being located on the sunny side of the building or directly under the roof. the windows should be opened only during dry weather. ventilation of the honey room is of no value except when the air that is admitted contains less moisture than that already present. otherwise ventilation may be a positive detriment. if a protracted period of rainy or damp weather should occur while the honey is in this storage it may be necessary to use artificial heat to dry the air in the honey room. any great variation in temperature should be avoided, since it may cause a condensation of moisture on the surface of the cappings which will be absorbed by the honey. some beekeepers find it necessary to fumigate comb honey to prevent damage by the larvæ of the wax moth. for this purpose sulphur fumes or bisulphid of carbon may be used. if bisulphid of carbon is used, great care should be taken not to bring it near a flame, as it is highly inflammable. =scraping propolis from sections.= before being packed for market the sections of honey should be removed from the supers and the wood scraped free of propolis. a convenient bench should be provided for this work, with a large shallow box or tray to catch the propolis as it is scraped from the sections. this work is usually done by hand, though a few producers have designed and are using machines for this purpose. =grading comb honey.= the importance of properly grading and packing comb honey does not seem to be well understood by the average beekeeper. some extensive buyers of comb honey find it profitable to regrade and repack practically all the comb honey they receive before sending it out to their trade. the producer of this honey of course bears this extra expense by receiving a lower price for his honey. the lack of uniformity of grading is to some extent a result of differences of opinion as to what should be the standard for the various grades. grading rules have been of material aid toward greater uniformity, but various producers may use the same set of grading rules with very different results. it would be well if a single set of rules were in use, since honey from various localities may be sent to the same market. the grading rules in most common use are given in farmers' bulletin , page . after scraping the propolis from the wood, each section of honey may be placed in a pile with others of its grade. some put the sections directly into the shipping cases as fast as they are scraped, but better grading can be done if each grade is put in a separate pile and the final grading all done by one person. by thus having a large number of sections in each grade from which to select there is greater opportunity for making the sections of honey in each case more nearly uniform as to weight and the various shades of finish. such uniformity is especially desirable from the standpoint of the retailer. sections containing only a few cells of pollen should be placed in a lower grade or sold as culls, while those containing a considerable amount of pollen should not be marketed in the form of comb honey. an excessive amount of pollen in the sections is usually caused by the use of very shallow brood combs, extreme contraction of the brood chamber, or hiving swarms on narrow strips of foundation in the brood frames with partly drawn comb in the sections (p. ). =packages for comb honey.= comb honey is usually packed in cases holding sections (fig. ). other sizes are sometimes used to meet special market requirements. the markets have become accustomed to cases with glass fronts, by means of which the contents are displayed to advantage. however, in keeping with present practice in other package goods, considerable comb honey is now placed on the market having each section inclosed in a carton. this practice, while losing the advantage of displaying the honey, has a decided advantage in insuring security from dust and insects while in the markets as well as greater safety to the fragile comb when the package is finally delivered to the consumer. [illustration: fig. .--shipping cases for comb honey. (from phillips.)] =marketing.= many beekeepers are able to dispose of their entire output of honey in their local markets, sometimes, creating quite a demand for their product by advertising and demonstrating. comb honey that is to be sent to a distant market should be shipped before cold weather, since the combs become extremely fragile when cold. small lots should be crated in "carriers" holding several cases to prevent breakage by rough handling of individual cases, while in larger shipments the cases are simply packed in the car in such a manner that the individual cases can not be thrown about by the movement of the car. * * * * * transcriber notes all illustrations were moved so as to not split paragraphs. irregularity in hyphenation (for comb-honey vs. comb honey and some others) has been retained. transcriber note emphasis denoted as _italics_. u. s. department of agriculture. farmers' bulletin · no. . sewage disposal on the farm, and the protection of drinking water. by theobald smith, m. d., _professor in harvard university, pathologist to the massachusetts state board of health, etc._ [illustration] washington: government printing office. . contents. page. introduction disposal of sewage night soil the privy the cesspool the dry-earth closet the water-closet liquid sewage vaults irrigation kitchen and chamber slops waste and garbage protection of drinking water ways of contamination construction of wells conclusion illustrations. fig. . shallow barnyard well . portable earth closet . old form of earth closet . earth closet and dry catch . self-acting peat dust closet . settling chamber and flush tank for irrigation . subsurface irrigation of sewage . garbage cremator sewage disposal on the farm and the protection of drinking water. introduction. the conditions under which homes and their surroundings are kept healthful in the city and in the country differ in many respects, although the principles underlying them are essentially the same. in the city the sanitary condition of homes is maintained chiefly by a system of cooperation and centralization which brings into existence extensive sewerage systems, water supplies, and the collection of house waste by public authority. regulations are prescribed and enforced under which the individual household must avoid all conditions which are likely to prove dangerous to the health of the immediate neighborhood and of the entire community. in the country districts, and more particularly in isolated homesteads, the conditions affecting the health of the household are largely in its own hands, and more individual effort is required to maintain healthful surroundings than in cities. the farmer must supply himself with his drinking water and must get rid of the waste of the household as best he can. on the other hand, the inhabitant of the country is in many ways better off than the dweller in large cities. not only has he pure air to draw upon at all times, but he can supply himself often with purer food than is possible in large communities. though he must procure for himself drinking water, he is, in most cases, able to get a purer water from the ground than the sewage-polluted fluid which is the only water accessible in many cities. while he must get rid of night soil himself rather than have it disposed of by a water-carriage system conveniently located within the house, he may avoid the annoying complications of plumbing, bringing with it the leakages of sewer gas, the plugging up of soil pipes by the roots of trees or by articles carelessly thrown into them. moreover, he has it often within his power to acquire sufficient land around his house to take charge of all sewage and waste and to utilize it as a manure for enriching the soil. nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that when the circumstances under which healthful surroundings are procurable are under the immediate control of each individual household they are apt to be perverted through ignorance and neglect. conditions may then arise which are not only unfavorable to health, but which are likely to lead to severe sickness at any time when the opportunity presents itself. standing between the fortunate inhabitant of a large city whose water-supply and sewerage systems are above reproach and the farmer who bas it within his power to make them so with reference to his own wants, is the half-developed village or town, with its chiefly unsanitary conditions. here the leaky cesspool still exists, close by the family well, or by the neighbor's well. the absence of any system of collecting garbage and miscellaneous waste shows itself by the littering of the yards, the alleys, streets, and even stream beds with all kinds of refuse. in some towns the premature introduction of a water-supply system causes the ground to become still more thoroughly saturated with diluted sewage, so that the wells of those households not yet connected with the water-supply are a continual source of danger. in such communities, appreciation of the necessity for a public control of sanitation has not yet made much headway. the acts of each family violating the laws of health not only react upon itself but upon the immediate neighborhood, often with disastrous results. when typhoid fever has once gained a foothold in such communities it is apt to develop into an epidemic. the tendency of our population to concentrate in villages and towns makes the sanitary improvement of such communities a most important and vital condition of national health and prosperity. the following pages are not intended for these communities, for they need, in most cases, the advice of sanitarians and sanitary engineers, acquainted with local conditions. still, they may be of service in pointing out the dangers which may and do actually beset the population that neglects to dispose of refuse and waste in a manner which does not clash with the laws of health. the chief dangers which threaten rural inhabitants are those arising from polluted drinking water. this is infected from the household excrement and barnyard drainage, as will be described farther on, and its use leads in the main to bowel disturbances, typhoid-fever, and dysenteric affections. it might be claimed that in an isolated homestead the danger is absent because the night soil from the healthy household can not contain the germs of typhoid-fever, and, therefore, the well water can not receive them from leaky cesspools and surface drainage. this would be true if the family lived secluded from other human beings. as the case stands, there is much more communication than is at first thought supposed. there is more or less coming and going of farm hands and other hired help, of tramps, peddlers, etc. the farmer travels more than formerly. he frequently visits neighboring communities. the children go to school. as it has been shown that there may be mild cases of typhoid-fever passing unnoticed, in a farm hand, for example, who leaves on account of ill health, perhaps, and who has meanwhile, in his discharges, deposited the germs of this disease on the premises, it is evident that isolation nowadays does not exist except in remote, thinly settled regions, and that disease germs may make themselves suddenly felt in an unexpected manner in any farmhouse. there are other important reasons, however, why rural sanitation should not be neglected. the health of the large communities of people who draw their food supply from the country is in a measure dependent on the health of the farming community. there is scarcely a city child who is not, in a degree, dependent for its health on the sanitary conditions prevailing in the house of the dairyman. milk has been repeatedly shown to be the means of distributing typhoid-fever and other diseases. any vegetable foods from the farm eaten raw are liable to become carriers of infection under unsanitary conditions. in many parts of our country other causes operate in making the health of many people depend on the proprieties of country homes. the thousands of city people, who flock every summer to the country and bring to the farming community considerable sums of money, should be properly protected against the dangers of polluted water and infected milk by the adoption of suitable methods of sewage disposal. too frequently those who left the city for the purpose of gaining strength by breathing pure air, drinking pure water, and eating pure food, only return with the germs of an often fatal disease within them to swell the typhoid statistics of our large cities. disposal of sewage. the vital thing which thus presents itself is the disposal of fecal matter and other refuse so that the wells, upon which most rural families depend for their drinking water, may remain pure. to this matter we will first turn our attention. every person who tills the soil is acquainted with the remarkable transforming power of the superficial layers of the earth upon manure and excrement. out of these offensive wastes harmless substances are produced which are essential to the growth of vegetation. this power, known as decay, is now generally attributed to very minute organisms (bacteria) which are found in immense numbers in the superficial layers of the soil, which diminish in number as we go deeper, and which completely disappear below a depth of to feet, according to the physical condition of the soil. bacteria are more numerous where waste and excrement are most abundant. when night soil and manure are deposited in excavations or so-called cesspools in the earth, from which the fluid matter may enter the ground at some depth below the surface, where the air or certain kinds of bacteria can penetrate only to a slight extent, the substances, which under the influence of the air (oxygen) and of bacteria near the surface, would have decayed, now undergo partial putrefaction with the setting free of disagreeable gases and odors. the deeper layers of the earth slowly become saturated with organic matter, which is carried by the ground-water into the wells or springs near by. there is also some reason to believe that disease germs live longer in the oxygen-free depths of the soil than at or near the surface. the extent to which the filling up of the soil with excrementitious matter may go on in densely populated cities has been shown by fodor for the hungarian city budapest. by analyzing the soil at different levels from the surface to a depth of about feet, he found, over an area comprising acres, about , , , pounds organic matter, equivalent to the excrement of , people voided during thirty-seven years. [illustration: fig. .--the shallow barnyard well, with privy vault and manure heaps near by. the water is likely to receive fluid from these at any time.] to the surface of the earth we owe thus a purifying influence whose activity furnishes us vegetation and food on the one hand and preservation from disease on the other. this purifying power is not possessed by the deeper layers, and therefore the percolation of organic refuse into them from deep cesspools is wasteful to agriculture and dangerous to our storehouse of drinking water. even the surface of the soil when overloaded with sewage loses partially its power of purifying the organic matter. after sufficient rest, such an overloaded soil regains its original power. the purifying activity of the soil from a sanitary aspect is the same as that governing fertility from an agricultural standpoint, hence any further discussion of this subject is unnecessary. a hint as to the proper disposition of waste, excrement, etc., is furnished by what is stated above concerning the purifying capacities of the earth's surface. waste, night soil, etc., should be deposited with proper precautions on or immediately below the surface of the soil, where it may perform the double function of ridding the household of a nuisance and of enriching the soil itself. this leads us to a consideration of the best means of taking care of the household wastes. these are, in general, of three classes: first, fecal matter; second, kitchen and chamber slops; and third, miscellaneous rubbish and ashes. night soil. the proper disposition of fecal matter or night soil in the country has been one of the most pressing and vexatious problems of modern sanitation. many plans have been suggested, much apparatus has been invented to meet the difficulty, but opinions not only differ but change from year to year and have led to different practices in different countries. moreover, different climatic conditions and the divergent tendencies of rural populations in the various sections of our own country make it impossible to apply the same scheme to the whole country. different degrees of prosperity and wealth, even in the same locality, will bring into use widely different schemes to accomplish the same end. there are in use several systems-- _the privy._--the old-fashioned privy, at present still quite a common thing even in cities, is, perhaps, the most favored method of disposing of fecal matter in the country. a pit is dug and a small building set over it. the excrement deposited in it slowly fills it up. the fluids and the solids dissolved by them penetrate the subsoil and diffuse themselves in the ground. rarely is such a pit cleaned out. another is dug and the old one covered up. in this way the ground becomes overloaded with refuse organic matter. it is even stated on good authority that such collections of fecal matter have been found under the dwelling; also, that the privy vaults have been dug until the current of ground-water was reached which was to facilitate the removal of the excrement. it is difficult to conceive a more pernicious custom, or one more certain to pollute the drinking water. the privy vault is the most rudimentary way of getting rid of night soil, and its dangerous features are too plain to be referred to. _the cesspool._--next comes the cesspool, which is usually connected with a water-closet, and may also receive the slops from the kitchen. these are constructed in two ways, either as water-tight receptacles or as simple pervious pits differing in no way from the privy vault excepting, perhaps, in their more dangerous tendencies. all sanitary authorities agree in condemning the leaky cesspool as a most shiftless and dangerous method of getting rid of sewage. in most countries they are prohibited by law in populous communities. in exceptional cases, leaky cesspools may do no harm, as in an isolated house in the country whose cesspool is built at a considerable distance both from the house and the well. the safe distance from any well it would be difficult to state, because that would depend on the character of the subsoil and the general slope of the land. in any case, the cesspool should be on lower ground than the well, as the current of the ground water feeding the latter, usually but not always, conforms to the slope of the surface. a fair estimate of the least allowable distance between well and cesspool would be feet. soluble salts from sewage might still find their way into the well water, but it is quite improbable that disease germs could penetrate the soil for such a distance except where fissures and cracks may be present. [illustration: fig. .--portable earth closet. a, the pail to receive the excrement; b, the urine-separating receptacle hanging on the open door; c, mouth of the hopper conveying the dry-earth or ashes from reservoir d upon the night soil in a.] in villages, leaky cesspools are still of frequent occurrence. if the drinking water is taken from wells, such cesspools are a constant menace, and all that is needed in many such towns is a spark in the shape of some disease germ to kindle an epidemic. it is true that years may pass by without the occurrence of more than the usual amount of illness, but even then we have good reason to suppose that in many villages using cesspools the average amount of sickness and mortality is far too high, not to mention the occasional epidemics of typhoid-fever. we may sum up the matter of leaky cesspools by the statement that they may do no harm near isolated houses on farms, provided they are sufficiently far away from the source of water-supply. in small towns cesspools should be prohibited, or only very thoroughly constructed water-tight ones permitted, according to circumstances. the same holds true for the well-known privies. _the dry-earth closet._--the dry conservancy system is a much better method of disposal of excrement, and is extensively in use to-day even in certain large cities on the continent of europe where sewers have not yet been introduced. this consists in the main of the frequent removal of excreta in the country by some man servant or member of the family; in villages and towns according to some cooperative plan. this system has taken various directions, according to circumstances. thus there are what is called the pail system, which consists in the daily or less frequent removal of a pail receiving the excreta; and the earth closet invented by the rev. henry moule, of england, the chief feature of which consists in the covering of the excreta with some absorbent substance like dry-earth or ashes. in some places the excreta are received into a well-built brick or stone receptacle and covered with earth, from which they may be removed from time to time. of these systems the dry-earth closet has received the greatest amount of attention and discussion. it consists, essentially, of a pail to receive night soil, which is covered either automatically or with a scoop with dry-earth (fig. ). the earth absorbs the fluids and the odors and keeps the closet inoffensive. [illustration: fig. .--the old form of earth closet with frame and pail removed to show the mechanism. the handle on the left when raised throws into the pail a certain quantity of dry-earth or ashes from the reservoir or hopper in the rear.] the earth to be used should be a rather fine loam, sifted to remove coarse particles, thoroughly dried by spreading out in the sun or under a shed, and then stored in barrels. the drier the earth the better it is. the finer the particles of earth the greater the capacity for absorbing fluids. for this reason sand is not satisfactory. goal or wood ashes are quite satisfactory, as they are, after proper sifting, of the requisite fineness and are thoroughly dry. the mixture of earth or ashes and night soil should be removed at certain times, depending on the location of the closet, the season of the year, and other conditions. the more frequent the removal the better. the mixture of soil and excrement is so unobjectionable that it has been used over a number of times after being dried each time. this can not be recommended, however, as it is generally accepted nowadays that disease germs may remain alive in such a mixture for some time. in place of the movable earth closets, a water-tight, concreted area may be built in an annex to the house, which is to receive the night soil from a closet on the floor above with the necessary quantity of dry soil (see fig. ). poore, from whose book the illustration is taken, recommends, in addition, the construction of the floor of such a pit with an inclination sufficient to carry away the urine into some gutter outside filled with absorbent soil. the area should have suitable openings for inspection and for removal of contents, as well as for ventilation. waring recommended a similar system many years ago. the closet described by him discharges into a water-tight vault in the cellar, which requires emptying only occasionally. the contents remain inoffensive, provided sufficient thoroughly dry earth is used. [illustration: fig. .--earth closet and dry catch (from poore's "rural hygiene," scale, / inch equals foot). to prevent drafts the earth closet is closed below by a hinged flap which opens and shuts automatically by means of a counterpoise. the catch below is provided with air bricks and an air shaft leading to a ventilator.] in cold climates, indoor closets are especially desirable to obviate the exposure which can not be avoided when closets are out of doors. for invalids there should be a carefully managed earth closet kept in a well-aired room set apart for this purpose. in warm climates, earth closets should be frequently cleaned. to prevent the attraction of flies and insects and the too rapid decomposition of the contents a little unslacked lime added with the earth to the excrement will be of value. the discharges of persons suffering from typhoid-fever and bowel troubles should be mixed with thin slacked lime[ ] (milk of lime). one-half to one hour after the mixing, such discharges may be put upon the soil, always at some distance from a well or spring, a stream, or a field under cultivation. [ ] lime, to be used for disinfection, should not be air-slacked, but kept in tightly covered receptacles to prevent this from taking place. in europe, the use of earth and ashes has been superseded by peat dust. the upper layer of peat is dried in the air and ground in a suitable machine. the coarser particles are removed by sifting and used for bedding in stables. the fine portion, which has a very high absorbing power for fluids and is also capable of preventing odors, is used in dry closets. in germany there are at present about thirty factories engaged in the preparation of peat moss for the purposes mentioned. its great advantages over dry earth should bring it into use in our country. (see fig. .) it does not matter from a sanitary standpoint which one of the dry-earth systems is adopted, provided the necessary attention be given to it. every system which can be recommended is bad if not properly attended to. the conditions to be observed are: the night soil should be received in water-tight receptacles. it should be frequently removed. it should be utilized in the garden or field by being placed under a thin layer of soil. to excreta from the sick, milk of lime or unslacked lime should be added before disposal in the soil. [illustration: fig. .--self-acting peat dust closet. the lid is replaced by a hinged reservoir containing the peat dust. whenever this is let down a certain quantity of peat dust is discharged automatically and thrown, upon the night soil. (from weyl's handbuch der hygiene. ii, p. .)] _the water-closet._--there can be no doubt that to-day the water-carriage system, as it is called, or, in simpler language, the indoor water-closet, is preferred to all other contrivances. this is true for the open country as well as for villages and the suburban territories of cities. there is much to be said in favor of the present-day perfect contrivance for the rapid removal of excreta and the exposure thereby prevented. but for all rural inhabitants the cost should be carefully weighed before a water-carriage system is introduced into a house, for none but the best will answer, as all others are likely to become nuisances. the supply of water must be sufficient to flush the water-closet thoroughly and keep all the pipes clean; the plumbing must conform to that in vogue in cities, with its traps and ventilating pipes to prevent the odors of the pipes from escaping into the house; and the disposal of the large quantity of liquid sewage, the most difficult problem, must be properly attended to or it is likely to prove more dangerous to the water-supply than the old dry privy pits. liquid sewage. the methods available to dispose of liquid sewage in the country are water-tight cesspools and irrigation. _vaults._--water-tight cesspools should be constructed of hard-burned brick, laid in cement, and having a similar brick or a concreted bottom. the inside and outside surfaces of the brick wall should be coated with a thin layer of cement, and clay rammed in around the wall, to increase its imperviousness to water. it should be vaulted above, and topped by a square or round central opening, covered with stone or iron plate. cesspools are also made of cast or wrought iron, the joints being made water-tight. cesspools must be ventilated by two pipes, one rising several feet above ground, the other carried to the roof of the house, barn, or other structure near by. the current will, in most cases, tend down the short and up the long pipe. the latter may be dispensed with and the soil pipe of the house act as a flue, provided all branches are perfectly trapped. [illustration: fig. .--settling chamber and flush tank for surface and subsurface irrigation of sewage. (from gerhard's "the disposal of household wastes," .)] _irrigation._--the disposal of sewage by irrigation is by far the best method now within reach. two methods are in use, viz, surface and subsoil irrigation. the first in its most complete form consists in carrying the liquid sewage to a piece of ground set apart for the purpose and carefully underdrained. the sewage is allowed to flow over the ground in shallow channels. the fluid slowly disappears in the soil and enters the drains as comparatively pure water, which may be allowed to flow into a stream. for villages this is the best means of disposing of sewage. those who as village officials may be interested in this method will find plans of such sewage farms, together with faithful accounts of their operation and the results obtained, in the annual report of the state board of health of massachusetts for , page , and same report for , page . suggestions for its application to country houses are given farther on. for isolated rural homes, or village homes commanding a certain amount of ground around the house, the liquid sewage from water-closets, the kitchen and chamber slops may be disposed of by the simple means of subsoil irrigation, first described by mr. moule and subsequently elaborated by colonel waring. the system as used at present in its most successful form consists, outside of the house, of the following parts (see fig. ): two adjoining water-tight receptacles of brick. one of these receives the sewage from the house and is intended to act as a settling chamber for the coarser particles, paper, etc. this communicates with the second receptacle, which receives from it the fluid sewage. this chamber is called the flush tank and is provided with a siphon. when the fluid has reached a certain level, the siphon is set in operation and discharges the contents of the chamber at one time into the subsoil pipes. [illustration: fig. .--subsurface irrigation of sewage: _a_, absorption tiles (gerhard's "the disposal of household wastes"); _b_ and _c_, lines of absorption tiles showing their relation to flush tank (from waring's "sewerage and land drainage").] from the second cistern a system of subsoil pipes laid over a treeless piece of ground, preferably a lawn, receives and discharges the sewage into the ground. these pipes should consist of porous tiles, inches in diameter and about foot long, laid from to inches beneath the surface of the ground, and with a gentle inclination of or inches for every feet. the tiles should have open joints not less than one-fourth of an inch wide. they are laid upon earthen gutters and the joints are protected above by caps from being clogged with earth. the intermittent discharge of the liquid sewage is quite essential to the successful working of this system. if the sewage is allowed to dribble away into the pipes certain portions of these will become supersaturated with fluid and others will not receive any; the purification of the sewage in the soil is thereby rendered imperfect. the discharge of a large quantity of fluid at one time, besides scouring the system of pipes, fills it more uniformly and distributes the work to all parts of the subsoil system. the successful construction of such a plant requires the services of someone familiar with it, and it is therefore not necessary for me to do more than call attention to it here as a highly recommended system for homes, especially in villages, where the proper amount of land is procurable and where the sewage must be disposed of in a manner both inoffensive and safe. in any case the soil of such land must be porous, not clayey and retentive. those who wish to familiarize themselves with the details will find descriptions in the sanitary engineer for , page , by philbrick; in "the disposal of household wastes," by gerhard, and in "sewerage and land drainage," by waring. the entire plant is said to cost $ to $ , the annual expenditures for cleaning, repairs, etc., about $ . the method of subsurface irrigation just described may be too complex and too expensive where land is abundant and neighboring houses at some distance. the simpler method of surface irrigation may be resorted to by laying out at some distance--at least feet--from the house a small sewage farm where the sewage may flow in shallow trenches over the surface and slowly sink into the ground. such an irrigation field must have the same qualities demanded by subsurface irrigation. its surface should have sufficient slope and the soil should be porous, not retentive. the liquid sewage, including kitchen and chamber slops, is conducted to this field in a water-tight tile drain and then allowed to flow into shallow trenches. to avoid the overloading of the soil with sewage at any one place the main distributing trench should be so arranged that it and the irrigating trenches branching from it may be temporarily blocked at any point to divert the sewage into one or more different trenches every day. in winter the warmth of the sewage will keep it in motion and the filtration will go on although the field may be covered with snow and ice. the use of the flush tank as described above would cause a more uniform distribution of the fluid over the field and make the filtration distinctly intermittent. the ground between the trenches may be cultivated to increase the amount of evaporation. if conveniently situated, an orchard may be used as the irrigation field. it should be distinctly understood, however, that marketable fruits and vegetables should not be carelessly allowed to come in contact with fresh sewage, nor should the irrigation field be near the well unless the latter is fairly deep and tubed or tiled to the surface of the water. kitchen and chamber slops. the removal of kitchen and chamber slops is a matter which also requires proper attention, as this liquid frequently gives rise to unhealthful conditions, annoying alike to sight and smell when carelessly disposed of. the simplest way to utilize kitchen slops is to pour them upon plants about the house in summer, in winter upon the soil, each time in another spot, so as not to supersaturate the surface layers of soil in any one place. a means of less trouble recommended by waring is to partly fill with soil a barrel with leaky bottom and cover this with a layer of stable manure to prevent the puddling of the soil. the slops filter through the soil and leave the barrel below as a clear fluid. the barrel is emptied two or three times a year and the contents used for fertilizer. house slops may be disposed of by surface irrigation or by subsoil pipes, as already described. the originator of this method, mr. moule, may here be profitably quoted as to its simplicity and success: where there is a garden the house slops and sink water may, in most cases, be made of great value and removed from the house without the least annoyance the only requirement is that there shall be a gradual incline from the house to the garden. let all the slops fall into a trapped sink, the drain from which to the garden shall be of glazed socket pipes well jointed, and emptying itself into a small tank, inches deep, about a foot wide, and of such length as may be necessary. the surplus rain water from the roof may also enter this. out of this tank lay -inch common drain pipes, feet apart and inches below the surface. lay mortar at the top and bottom of the joints, leaving the sides open. if these pipes are extended to a considerable length, small tanks about foot square and inches deep must be sunk at about every or feet to allow for subsidence. these can be emptied as often as required, and the deposit may be either mixed with dry-earth or be dug in at once as manure. the liquid oozes into the cultivated soil, and the result is something fabulous. * * * on a wall feet in length and feet high a vine grows. a -inch pipe runs parallel with this at a distance of feet from it for the entire length. the slops flow through this pipe as above described. on this vine year after year had been grown well-ripened bunches of grapes, some of the bunches weighing three-fourths of a pound. during a period of four years, for a certain purpose, the supply was cut off. to the surprise of the gardener scarcely any grapes during those years appeared; but afterwards the supply was restored, and the consequence was an abundant crop, the wood grow fully feet, of good size and well ripened. in place of an indoor sink, an upright tube or hopper may be constructed out of doors in communication with the subsurface pipes into which the waste fluids are poured. waste and garbage. the attractiveness of a rural home depends largely upon the promptness with which all kinds of waste material are disposed of. the abundance of space around the house is a great temptation for the members of the household to use it as a place for storing rubbish and useless, worn-out things. sifted ashes are easily utilized in earth closets and upon walks and roads, to make them compact and firm. other articles of no use, such as broken crockery, bottles, tin cans, etc., can be thrown into depressions and gullies and covered over with earth, or else buried in trenches where subsoil drainage is desirable. the removal of rubbish is a very fruitful theme and might be dealt with at length. its importance as related to health and disease is a subordinate one, and the reformer must appeal to the love of order, propriety, and beauty in and around the home in order to make an impression. garbage is of much less annoyance in the country than in the city, where its collection and destruction is a great expense, and is frequently very unsatisfactorily done. in the country, the household garbage is fed to the swine and poultry, and is in this way profitably used. there are, however, homes where garbage must be taken care of in other ways. it may be buried in the garden or else burned in the kitchen range. recently a device has been patented which enables the housekeeper to place the garbage in a section of the smoke pipe of the range, where it dries out rapidly, burns, and leaves only a little charcoal behind, which may be used for fuel next day. this device has been well recommended by sanitarians (see fig. ). [illustration: fig. .--garbage cremator. the garbage is placed in the perforated frame. the latter is pushed into the smoke pipe, where the garbage becomes slowly carbonized.] protection of drinking; water. the next subject to claim our attention is the protection of the sources of drinking water. in the country water is, as a rule, obtained from wells and springs. the important bearing upon well water of soil purity demands a few explanatory remarks concerning the origin of well water. wells are excavations made into the ground to a variable depth until water is reached. this water is denominated ground or subsoil water. its origin may be better understood if, for the moment, we conceive the surface of the earth as more or less irregular and entirely impervious to water. the rain would collect on this surface and form lakes, ponds, and streams, according to the configuration of the surface. if, now, we conceive this surface covered with sand or other porous earth to a greater or lesser height, and the top of this be considered the earth's actual surface, the water will remain in the same position, but it will be buried within and fill the pores of the overlying soil as subterranean lakes, ponds, and streams. in digging a well we remove this porous layer of earth until we reach these subterranean streams or reservoirs of ground-water. if the above description be thoroughly understood, the condition under which well water may be obtained at different depths will become intelligible, and it will also appear plain why ground-water may flow as any surface stream and pick up on its way various substances which have percolated into the ground. when the bed of porous soil overlying the impervious layers is very deep, wells will have to be dug down to a considerable depth to reach the surface of the ground-water. where this layer of pervious earth is of slight thickness wells will be shallow, and the ground-water may appear on the bottom of gullies, trenches, and wherever the porous layer has been dug or washed away. the movement of the ground-water depends on the inclination or slope of the impervious strata, and has been observed to be quite rapid in some instances. by adding common salt to the water in a well its detection in other wells at a short distance has been found a guide in the determination of the rapidity and direction of the underground current. when the ground-water resting on the uppermost impervious layers is near the surface, and therefore not safe or fit to use as drinking water, it may be possible by digging below this layer to find another porous bed containing water. this source will, in general, be much purer since it is less exposed to pollution from above, and since the water has to travel longer distances underground. such a deep supply must, however, be protected from the superficial supply by a water-tight wall extending to the surface of the deep supply, otherwise the water from the upper layers will simply drain into the well. ways of contamination. wells are exposed to contamination in two ways. the surface water from rain, house slops, and barnyard drainage may find its way into the well at or near the surface of the ground. or the ground-water stream supplying the well with water may in its subterranean movements encounter cesspools or seepings from cesspools, and carry with it soluble and suspended particles, some of which may enter the well. there can be no doubt that a large percentage of the wells are exposed to contamination with refuse matter in the manner described; and it now remains to gauge the danger to health and life which may be carried in the contaminating substance. the danger of typhoid-fever bacteria entering the water has already been mentioned. these may be washed in from the surface or they may pass from cesspools near by through fissures in the ground, passages dug by rats, etc. whether such bacteria can pass through the pores of a compact, unbroken soil from a cesspool to a well near it is a matter not fully settled. since, however, the actual condition of the deeper layers of the soil between cesspool and well can not be known, it becomes imperative to prevent all pollution of the ground-water current supplying wells by either abolishing the cesspools or else placing them at a considerable distance from all sources of water. beside typhoid-fever bacteria, those organisms which cause digestive disturbances, and severer troubles, such as diarrhea, dysentery, and possibly other unknown diseases, may be carried into well water. during cholera epidemics, polluted wells might form centers of infection. eggs of animal parasites may be washed in from the surface. again, the barnyard manure, representing the mixed excrement of various animals, may under certain conditions be bearers of disease germs, and such excrement should, under no conditions, be looked upon as entirely harmless to human beings.[ ] [ ] it is probable that the filth which gets into cow's milk and which appears to be mainly excrement of cows is largely responsible for the severe summer diseases of infants fed on cow's milk. besides the protection of the ground-water near the well from pollution emanating from cesspools, etc., the surface of the ground about the well should be kept free from manure, slops, and other waste water; hence the well should not be dug under or close by the house,[ ] nor should it be located in the barnyard, where the ground is usually saturated with manure. it should be surrounded by turf, and not by richly manured, cultivated, or irrigated soil. the ground immediately around it should slope gently away from it and be paved if possible. the waste water from the well should not be allowed to soak into the ground, but should be collected in water-tight receptacles or else conducted at least feet away in open or closed channels which are water-tight. [ ] the water may be carried into the kitchen by running the pipe from the well, horizontally, under ground. construction of wells. the well itself must be so constructed that impurities can not get into it from above or from the sides. if water can soak into it after passing through a few feet of soil only, it can not be regarded as secure from pollution. to prevent this, the well may be provided with a water-tight wall built of hard-burned brick and cement down to the water level. the outside surface of this wall should be covered with a thin layer of cement, and clay pounded and puddled in around it. or, tile may be used to line the well and the joints made water-tight with cement down to the water level. driven wells, i. e., wells constructed of iron tubing driven into the ground, are, perhaps, the safest where the quantity of water needed is not large and where other conditions are favorable. these different devices are all designed to keep water near the surface of the soil from percolating into the well. to keep impurities from entering the well directly from the top considerable care is necessary. such impurities are likely to prove the most dangerous because there is no earth niter to hold them back and destroy them before they can reach the water. adequate protection above may be provided in several ways. the sides of the tiled wells should project above the surface and be securely covered with a water-tight lid. the ordinary well should also have its sides project above the surface and a water-tight cover of heavy planks provided, which should not be disturbed excepting for repairing or cleansing the well. under no circumstances should objects be let down into the well to cool. a still better method of protecting the water from above is to have the lining wall of the well end feet below the surface of the ground and to be topped there with a vaulted roof, closed in the center with a removable iron or stone plate. the top should be covered with inches of clay or loam; above this there should be a layer of sand, and lastly a pavement sloping away in all directions. too much care can not be bestowed upon the household well. it should be guarded jealously and all means applied to put the water above any suspicion of being impure. this is especially true in dairies where well water is used in cleaning the milk cans, and where steam and boiling water have not yet found their way for this end. polluted wells in such houses not only endanger the health of the inmates but that of a more or less numerous body of city customers. in those regions where rain water is the only safe drinking water, the same care is necessary to protect the stored supply from contamination, and no suggestions beyond those already given are necessary here. conclusion. in the foregoing pages it has been the aim of the writer to give a few facts and supply a certain number of ideas which, in the mind of any person who has thoroughly understood them and who thinks for himself, may be safely left to ripen into schemes adapted to his own wants and surroundings. how many resources a man armed with correct views may find in the simplest appliances the reader may judge for himself by consulting chapters ix, x, and xi of dr. vivian poore's very interesting volume on rural hygiene. whether the means for utilizing household wastes there described and adopted by him would be adequate outside of a limited territory of our own country, i am not prepared to state. for the same reason no definite suggestions can be made in these pages, owing to the wide diversity in the climatic and other conditions obtaining over the vast territory of our country. the writer has, furthermore, omitted all statements of detail which properly belong to the sanitary engineer. the works referred to will, however, supply those more directly interested with the facts and figures desired. the principles to be kept in the foreground are the disposal of sewage in the superficial layers of the soil in not too great quantity, the disinfection of the stools of the sick with lime before such disposition is made, the digging of wells in places kept permanently in grass and at some distance from barnyards, and, above all, their thorough protection from contamination from the surface and from the soil immediately below the surface. in every community there are public-spirited citizens who could do much good by taking hold of the simplest and safest methods of disposing of sewage and refuse, putting them into practice, and showing the rest of the community just what good can be accomplished and what harm avoided by a little continuous attention to sanitary matters. in this way many may be led to undertake improvements who, with no definite knowledge of the expense involved and with misgivings as to the final success of the undertaking, would otherwise hesitate to make a beginning. * * * * * farmers' bulletins. these bulletins fire sent free of charge to any address upon application to the secretary of agriculture, washington, d. c. [only the bulletins named below are available for distribution.] no. . some destructive potato diseases: what they are and how to prevent them. pp. . no. . leguminous plants for green manuring and for feeding. pp. . no. . forage plants for the south. pp. . no. . important insecticides: directions for their preparation and use. pp. . no. . washed soils: how to prevent and reclaim them. pp. . no. . barnyard manure. pp. . no. . feeding farm animals. pp. . no. . foods: nutritive value and cost. pp. . no. . hog cholera and swine plague. pp. . no. . sweet potatoes: culture and uses. pp. . no. . flax for seed and fiber. pp. . no. . weeds; and how to kill them. pp. . no. . souring of milk and other changes in milk products. pp. . no. . grape diseases on the pacific coast. pp. . no. . alfalfa, or lucern. pp. . no. . silos and silage. pp. . no. . peach growing for market. pp. . no. . meats: composition and cooking. pp. . no. . potato culture. pp. . no. . cotton seed and its products. pp. . no. . kafir corn: characteristics, culture, and uses. pp. . no. . spraying for fruit diseases. pp. . no. . onion culture. pp. . no. . farm drainage. pp. . no. . fowls: care and feeding. pp. . no. . facts about milk. pp. . no. . sewage disposal on the farm. pp. . no. . commercial fertilizers. pp. . no. . some insects injurious to stored grain. pp. . no. . irrigation in humid climates. pp. . no. . insects affecting the cotton plant. pp. . no. . the manuring of cotton. pp. . no. . sheep feeding. pp. . no. . sorghum as a forage crop. pp. . no. . standard varieties of chickens. pp. . no. . the sugar beet. pp. . no. . how to grow mushrooms. pp. . no. . some common birds in their relation to agriculture. pp. . no. . the dairy herd: its formation and management. pp. . no. . experiment station work--i. pp. . no. . butter making on the farm. pp. . no. . the soy bean as a forage crop. pg. . no. . bee keeping. pp. . no. . methods of curing tobacco. pp. . no. . asparagus culture. pp. . no. . marketing farm produce. pp. . no. . care of milk on the farm. pp. . no. . ducks and geese. pp. . no. . experiment station work--ii. pp. . no. . meadows and pastures. pp. . no. . forestry for farmers. pp. . no. . the black rot of the cabbage. pp. . * * * * * transcriber note illustrations were moved to prevent splitting paragraphs. transcriber's note: italic text is denoted by _underscores_. small capital text has been replaced with all capitals. minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected without note. irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed. mismatched quotes are not fixed if it's not sufficiently clear where the missing quote should be placed. the cover for the ebook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. * * * * * the rural magazine, and literary evening fire-side. [illustration: "venerate the plough."] vol. i. philadelphia, _second month_, . _no. ._ for the rural magazine. the village teacher. i cannot exactly tell why it was, that i felt particularly interested in the prospectus for the _rural magazine_; but i instantly resolved to become a subscriber, and fell to ruminating upon the benefits it might confer upon the country. whether i conceived at once the idea of writing these essays, and took to myself a full share of its imagined usefulness and celebrity; or whether my satisfaction arose from disinterested motives, i felt a glow of kind feeling towards the editors, which expanded itself upon all around me. i dismissed my little school at an earlier hour than usual, and having simply reprimanded some idle culprits, to whom i should otherwise have administered the _ferule_, i devoted the remainder of the afternoon to writing a letter to a friend in town; in which i concluded a declamation upon the worthlessness of literary fame, by requesting him to place my name in the list of subscribers and contributors. since then, the magazine has frequently been the subject of my reveries; for the design is exactly what i have long desired to see attempted. every man who has travelled half way up the hill of life, and has gained its fortieth milestone, will have amassed stores of thought and observation, which he is apt to think of inestimable value:--at least i find it so with me. there are many topics on which i differ from my friends, and in regard to which i am anxious to develope my opinions. some others to which i attach a greater importance than is usually done; and many upon which my particular station in life has thrown lights which may be new and interesting to the public mind. for these reasons, i have long desired to extend my voice and authority beyond the precincts of my little kingdom, and to try the experiment of schooling the public in some of those great truths, which are too little regarded or understood, and bringing back its taste to the pure and simple enjoyments of rural life. whether i shall succeed in my attempt to gain the public ear, will depend, perhaps, upon accident; for while the greatest merit has often languished in obscurity, folly and incapacity have as often caught the gale of popular favour. if i fail, i shall not be without consolation; for the most unsuccessful author finds it easier to censure the public for want of penetration, than himself for want of talent. i trust that i shall have occasion for no such reflections. it may be an author's vanity, and yet the voice of praise can scarcely reach my secluded abode; but my fancy already paints the bright eyes, and glowing cheeks that will hang over these essays, and the sober approbation with which mature age will perceive that they are devoted to the cause of truth and sound morality. neighbour schemer is welcome to pass over my numbers in search of the newest plans of farming, so long as he allows his blooming emily to pause over them; and what do i care though old lovegain pronounce them to be stupid stuff? i had rather possess the approbation and esteem of his lovely sophia, than half his acres! it is a hopeless task, and may seem full of vanity, to enter the lists where so many have been foiled, and where all the great prizes have been born away by the master spirits of former times. but not to mention that fame is no object of my pursuit; the lofty rewards i speak of, were gained by the finest geniuses in our language, and conferred by the approbation of the world. my humbler attempt is to please villagers and farmers; and my ambition will be attained, if they crown me with the fragrant and perishing wreath that shall resemble their grateful though short-lived recollections. custom and authority have assigned to the essayist a peculiar character. he is privileged at all places and in every family. childhood loves and fondles upon him; and age and fashion, the man of pleasure and the man of business, alike consult and confide in him: above all, he is the particular favourite of the ladies, and is supposed to be knowing in all the labyrinths of the female heart, and all the points of etiquette and gallantry. he has, therefore, from time immemorial, been their faithful adviser, transmitted their billetsdoux, and corrected their letters. he is a notable dreamer, a great traveller, and a universal scholar: he generally passes for a grey headed sage, and yet is a very proteus in his appearance and behaviour. the family is descended from isaac bickerstaff, esq.; a venerable gentleman, who made a considerable figure, and acquired much substance in queen anne's time. some of his descendants have been solemn and pedantic, and others giddy and frolicksome; but the features i have portrayed, run more or less through the whole family. its enemies say that it is no longer what it was; that it has retained its homely peculiarities, without its originality and freshness, its wit and gallantry of character. gentle reader, believe me, this is an unfounded calumny! a branch of the family settled in this country about eighty years since, and some of the american descendants have proved worthy of the original stock. one of them, renouncing the social habits of his kinsmen, went abroad among the fields and the solitudes of nature, and there poured forth his soul in strains, of which a poet might have been emulous. it was he who first made the english muses familiar with the sublimity of our native forests. another, whose natural disposition was checked by the force of circumstances, devoted himself to the education of a favourite niece and nephew; and has given a signal example that an old bachelor is not always a useless being. a third, more merry and more melancholy, more sarcastic and more eccentric than all who went before him, divided his time between laughing at the world, and wandering over the scenes of his youthful and perished enjoyments. he still lives, although in a foreign clime and under an assumed name, to enjoy the love and admiration of his countrymen. reader, i have already told thee how humble are my own pretensions. if i do not attract thy regard from my own merits, love me for the sake of my family; and have a kind eye to my rude speech and rustic manners, in the recollection of those from whom i boast to have descended. for the rural magazine. on the pursuit of pleasure. ----trahit sua quemque voluptas.... virgil. it is a fact which can never be successfully controverted, that man, in every stage of society, is addicted to pleasure; the uncultivated savage, and the sage philosopher are equally devoted to the attainment of felicity; are equally desirous to secure a perpetuity of happiness. the benevolent creator of the universe seems to have endowed the human race with faculties peculiarly susceptible of pleasurable sensations; accordingly it becomes the business of every one, almost from his first entrance into life, to seek after such pleasures as are peculiar to the bent of his disposition, and to avoid every object or pursuit that has a tendency to pain or disappointment. if, however, all pleasures were in their nature innocent, and left behind no sting of remorse and anxiety, still man would inevitably soon feel the approaches of languor, especially whilst indulging in a round of mere sensual gratifications, and would earnestly sigh for some more permanent species of felicity; a felicity which might gently affect his mind, without overpowering his faculties in such a degree as to produce subsequent pain. but as the world is now constituted, it becomes the indispensable duty of the moralist, not only to guard mankind against excess in their pleasures, but also to warn them against such as are accompanied with vice and criminality. he therefore is not the true friend of mankind, who recommends to his fellow beings a continual abstinence from every gratification, or who would lead them to expect pleasure from sensual gratifications alone; but he who points out to their notice, those delights which are most durable, and at the same time, consistent with the strictest virtue. it must, without hesitation, be allowed, that religion is the source of the most exalted happiness that any human being can enjoy. religion alone inspires the soul with a perfect dependance on the goodness and love of the deity, and diffuses over the mind that calmness and serenity, which inevitably proceed from a reception of his mercy and benevolence, ever manifested towards all his creatures. all the pleasures of life are so many poisonous ingredients in our cup, till religion purifies and destroys the noxious qualities with which they are tainted. let religion mingle with our pleasures, and every thing of an evil tendency vanishes before it. religion furnishes genius with its noblest theme, and it affords the fullest employment for all the energies of the human intellect. but another species of pleasure, most grateful, and ennobling to the human mind, arises from the exercise of the understanding in literary pursuits, and in the study and admiration of the various productions of human genius. a life thus devoted will afford more real gratification to an uncorrupted mind, than voluptuousness, with all her allurement, can offer, or than intemperance, with her bacchanalian crew, has power to bestow. we may indeed almost venture to assert, that if pure and rational happiness is any where to be found, except in the temples of religion, she resides in the studies of the learned, and sweetens all their labours. the cultivation of a literary taste is the source of rational and innocent entertainment; it is a powerful preservative from vice, and contributes to exercise in the soul a love of virtue. the pleasures of sense are all transitory in their nature, and have a direct tendency to debase the mind; while on the contrary, intellectual pursuits, delight us the more we are engaged in them, and even when their novelty is worn off, they still retain their charms. from the first period in which man is endowed with the use of his reasoning faculties, there is a constant struggle between the animal and intellectual powers. these endeavour to raise man to a state of immortal felicity, those, to sink and degrade him to a level with the brutes. whatever pleasures, therefore, tend to increase the predominance of reason over the sensual desires, are favourable to the interests of virtue and religion. the pleasures of literature are of this nature; they strengthen and invigorate the faculties of the mind, and render it capable of manly exertion; they inspire cheerfulness and serenity, and produce an exquisite gratification to the mental powers; in short, they are as much superior to any thing of a sensual nature, as the nature of the human soul is superior to that of the body. w. m. jan. th, . for the rural magazine. the following is a copy from the original of a letter written by dr. franklin, and never before published. as the subject is one, invested at the present moment, with considerable interest to the people of this country, and coming from the pen of a celebrated man, whose patriotism, it is believed, was never doubted, it may perhaps be acceptable to your readers, and worthy of preservation in the pages of the _rural magazine_. whether the doctor is right or wrong in his theory, the public will determine. i. _"london, feb. , ._ "dear friend.--i wrote to you a few lines by capt. falconer, and i sent you dr. watson's new piece, of experiments in inoculation, which i hope will be agreeable to you. "the boston people pretending to interfere with the manufactures of this country, make a great clamour here against america in general. i have endeavoured, therefore, to palliate matters a little in several public papers. it would, as you justly observe, give less umbrage if we meddled only with such manufactures as england does not attend to. that of linen might be carried on more or less in every family, (perhaps it can only do in a family way) and silk i think in most of the colonies. but there are many manufactures that we cannot carry on to advantage, though we were at entire liberty. and after all, this country is fond of manufactures beyond their real value: _for the true source of riches is husbandry_. agriculture is truly _productive of new wealth_; manufacturers only change forms; and whatever value they give to the materials they work upon, they in the meantime consume an equal value in provisions, &c.; so that riches are not _increased_ by manufacturing; the only advantage is, that provisions in the shape of manufactures, are more easily carried for sale to foreign markets, and where the provisions cannot be easily carried to market, 'tis well so to transform them for our own use as well as foreign sale. in families also, where the children and servants of farmers have some spare time, 'tis well to employ it in making something; and in spinning, or knitting, &c. to _gather up the fragments_ of time, _that nothing be lost_; for these fragments though small in themselves, amount to something great in the year, and the family must eat whether they work or are idle. but this nation seems to have increased the number of its manufactures beyond reasonable bounds, (for there are bounds to every thing,) whereby provisions are now risen to an exorbitant price by the demand for supplying home mouths; so that there must be an importation from foreign countries: but the expense of bringing provisions from abroad to feed manufacturers here, will so enhance the price of the manufactures, that they may be made cheaper where the provisions grow, and the mouths will go to the meat. "with many thanks for your good wishes, i am, dear friend, affectionately yours, b. franklin. "dr. cadwallader evans." for the rural magazine. the desultory remarker.--no. i. at lucre or renown let others aim, i only wish to please the gentle mind, whom nature's charms inspire, and lore of humankind. _beattie._ perhaps there is no nation existing, amongst whom there is so large a proportion of readers, as may be found in the united states. the freedom of our form of government, and its appropriate concomitant, the freedom of the press, impart the requisite facilities for a wide dissemination of knowledge, and furnish the motives and the means for cultivating it with success. of newspapers, we have, if not a redundant, at least a copious supply. they are introduced into almost every nook and by-place of our extensive territory; and no individual who can read, need deny himself the gratification, of poring over their pages, and learnedly descanting on their contents. the moral influence of these popular vehicles of intelligence, may therefore from these facts, be properly estimated, and the importance of their being judiciously conducted, will at once be acknowledged. it is not the ponderous volume, the learned and elaborate dissertation, the abstruse researches of the ontologist, that moulds the sentiments of the great mass of any people, and implants in their bosoms the every-day principles of action; for to these they are utter strangers, and the laborious student may continue to monopolize them, without exciting in their minds the slightest regret: that however, which is brief, and simple, and practical, in other words, that which will be _generally read_, cannot fail to produce a deep and lasting impression on the public mind. with these convictions on the subject, it is contemplated, as leisure and inclination may suggest, to furnish a series of occasional papers, under the title indicated above. the plan of the writer, like those of his illustrious predecessors, is broad and liberal; unencumbered by systematic restraint; he intends to ramble over hill and dale, to seek for admission, not only at the cottage, but also at the mansion of opulence; and no topic shall be excluded calculated to promote general utility. to liberalise the public sentiment, to enlighten the public mind, in fine, to _make men better_, and by a necessary consequence, to promote public and private happiness, shall be his cardinal and favourite object. human life and its incidents, men and things, literature and morals, will all be kept in view; and facts and illustrations, which may be subservient to his purpose, whether derived from observation or reflection, from society or from books, will not be forgotten or disregarded. of the negative qualities of his proposed papers, he can speak without reserve and with entire confidence; they shall never offend the eye or ear of delicacy or of virtue. immediate and personal observation, is entitled to a decided preference where it is possible to be consulted; but to him, the extent of whose migrations have been merely "from the blue bed to the brown," this is a resource which will often fail. distant countries and former periods of time will therefore be contemplated, to use a significant phrase of dryden, "through the spectacles of books." by thus cultivating an acquaintance with the generations which are past, and by thus holding converse with the mighty dead, we may augment the power of useful information, fortify our good principles, and become better qualified to perform the respective duties assigned us in the world. human nature continues to travel onward with her venerable but untiring companion, time, without the least change of character. every feature, which appertained to her, six thousand years ago, will still be recognized by the discerning observer. it is, therefore, extremely desirable, that experience should not be lost upon us; but that her beacons should serve as a polar star, by which to steer our course with safety, through the dangerous and perplexing labyrinths of life. there is no question, that the very essence of papers, which shall successfully prefer claims to popular favour, or to practical utility, _must be variety_. the strength of johnson himself could not shield his great moral work from the charge of unvaried and monotonous solemnity. he inculcated the doctrine, and exemplified it by his own writings, that even "uniformity of excellence" will at length nauseate the palate, not merely of the fastidious reader, but of him likewise whose only object is truth. a prominent purpose will be attained, if the dominion of fashionable folly shall be narrowed, and the attention of her votaries withdrawn from the frivolous and giddy circles in which they revolve; and steadfastly directed to the great interests of society, the cause of sound morals and unsophisticated virtue. is it not a fact calculated to awaken the most profound regret, that many of our fellow citizens, particularly in the wealthy metropolis of pennsylvania, who are invested with an elevated rank in life, and enjoy in profusion its good things, appear to live only for themselves? men of this description, are really blanks in existence; and mistake most egregiously, the great errand of life. they may appropriately adopt the language of pomfret: custom the world's great idol we adore; and knowing this, we seek to know no more. now education more than truth prevails, and naught is current but what custom seals. thus from the time we first began to know, we live and learn, but not the wiser grow. although sometimes assuming the province of a censor, the _desultory remarker_ will on all proper occasions, delight to unbend the stern and rigid brow of reproof, to mingle in the circles of innocent mirth and cheerfulness. he who increases the stock of "harmless pleasure," makes the public his debtor; but in order to ascertain that such is the character of pleasure, the requisite tests must be faithfully and rigorously applied. cheerfulness uniformly shuns all intercourse with vice, but virtue is her favourite and appropriate companion. the innocent are gay--the lark is gay, that dries his feathers, saturate with dew, beneath the rosy cloud, while yet the beams of day-spring overshoot his humble nest. the _desultory remarker_ having thus in a spirit at once unreserved and candid, introduced himself to the reader will for the present respectfully take his leave; but with the hope of having other opportunities of cultivating a further acquaintance. for the rural magazine. _letters of a citizen to his friends in the country._ no. ii. my own observation, and the opinions of others, induce me to believe, that generally speaking, less attention is given to _education_ among the farmers of pennsylvania than was the case half a century ago. at any rate, the opportunity for instruction within the last fifty years, has not kept pace with the increased ability to furnish it. land has appreciated, and the productions of the soil have yielded great profits to the husbandman; but the intellectual harvest has been of little account. the habits and manners of each successive generation, display the avidity with which foreign customs and fashions are embraced by the yeomanry of the country, but these _outside_ evidences of what is called _refinement_, have added nothing to the stock of our mental resources, and greatness. my purpose however, is to suggest plans of improvement, rather than to find fault with existing errors, for i am convinced that if a liberal and judicious system be adopted for enlarging the minds of our youth, and storing them with sound principles, the follies, (perhaps the vices,) which now so much engross their attention, disfigure their character, and mar their usefulness, would be ultimately corrected. scholastic learning _alone_ will not, i am fully satisfied, mend the heart, or sanctify the understanding; but i am equally sure, that _ignorance as a quality_, never contributed to render the mind over which it held a dark and dreary reign, in a greater degree susceptible of those benign views, and exalted aims, which give to the _accountable being_, a just conception of the design of his creator. if my opinion be worth any thing, of which you must be the judges, i would recommend the establishment of schools in every neighbourhood; but upon a very different foundation from that which generally obtains. instead of an itinerant schoolmaster, who goes forth in the latter part of autumn in search of subsistence through the winter months, often without qualifications for the task he solicits, and not unfrequently of equivocal moral reputation, select a teacher estimable for his private virtues as a man, and respectable for his literary and scientific acquirements; remunerate him with a liberal salary; erect a suitable and comfortable building for the accommodation of the school: supply it with maps, globes, &c., and commence a library of useful books. send your children regularly to school throughout the year, and thus make their education as much a business, and duty, as the cultivation of your farms. short of this, will not fulfil the obligations which every parent owes to his offspring. we are social beings, and our prosperity and happiness depend primarily upon ourselves, and secondarily upon others; so that we are advancing our own interests and comforts, when we promote that of those by whom we are surrounded. in every neighbourhood in the country there are a few individuals whose pecuniary means will not permit them to defray the expenses of education, which the more wealthy can afford, and the condition of the indigent has been seriously affected in this respect, by the institution of _boarding schools_. to those seminaries, the children of the affluent are sent; the common schools are consequently neglected; the poor go uninstructed, and a wide, and fatal distinction is thus created, among the inhabitants of the same vicinage. rather, fellow citizens, than perpetuate this sort of classification in society, direct your attention to the formation of good schools at home, to which every child may be admitted; where all may partake of the same common benefits and blessings. you will thus place all on a par in the advantages of instruction, create in the minds of all, the same respect for those moral obligations which hold the community together in the bond of safety and peace, and confer upon your offspring the most solid security. a youth, the son of one who is competent to defray the expense of his education at a boarding school, or college, is sent from home at the age of sixteen; is absent three or four years; has formed new associations, and contracted new notions; he returns to his birth-place; he has outgrown the recollections, and intimacies of his childhood; he feels a sort of elevation above the children of his neighbourhood, who have been groping in ignorance during his absence; he stands aloof; jealousy takes hold on the minds of those who observe this difference, and every evil passion begins its operation; the consequences are as sad, as they are certain. contemplate the reverse of the picture. behold the youth of adjoining farms for several miles in circumference, collected together in one school; pursuing the same studies; partaking of the same general care, in a moral and religious point of view, which every conscientious teacher will find it his pleasure to extend toward his pupils; participating in the same innocent recreations; growing up together with similar views of private duty, and public obligation; witness such an instance as this, and you may be assured that from hence will proceed much which will dignify and adorn the locality, where it is found to exist. as these reflections have occurred to me, i have taken the freedom of presenting them to your consideration. i am influenced by no other motive than that which would induce me to be the humblest agent in promoting the true interests of our country, and enlarging, if it were in my power, the circle of human happiness. civis. for the rural magazine. history. there is scarcely any thing which is more injurious to the mind, or which will more effectually prevent the acquisition of knowledge, than a habit of reading for amusement only.--for, it will necessarily happen, that impressions, which have not been strengthened by reflection, will be quickly obliterated; and we cannot expect to derive permanent advantage from the mere pursuit of temporary enjoyment. to obviate the effects of a practice so pernicious, and to accustom the mind to the investigation of causes, the study of history is peculiarly adapted, for while it furnishes to the reflecting mind, ample room for the exercise of its powers, it is in itself, sufficiently attractive, to engage the attention of the most careless reader, it is indeed delightful, to --------------------------"steal from all we may be, or have been before; to associate with men, upon whom a world has gazed with fear and wonder, to mingle in the conflicts of nations, and to dwell upon the restlessness of ambition, the fearless perseverence of patriotism: nor is it less instructive to mark the gradual unfoldings of virtuous or vicious propensities, and to observe how frequently the sacrifice of all the enjoyments of life to the attainment of some favourite objects has been rewarded, with the hopeless gloom attendant upon satiety. history may thus be said to convey to us the experience of ages; and he must be an indifferent or a prejudiced observer, who cannot find his own feelings portrayed in the motives which it developes. but, with whatever views we may have undertaken this important study, we shall find it fruitless of permanent benefit, unless we shall have been impressed with the conviction of the absolute necessity of examining into the evidence of facts, and the correctness of deductions. it is thus only that we can be preserved from the danger of imbibing erroneous opinions on subjects affecting the common prejudices of mankind, or the peculiar doctrines of our authors. it is this assumption of popular sentiments which has degraded the human character, and reduced the highest intellectual powers to a dependence upon the lowest; and it is this reliance upon the impartiality of the historian, which has lent its assistance to the speculations of a false philosophy, in leading men into all the wanderings of scepticism. let the student of history who is in pursuit of truth, endeavour to acquaint himself with the private opinions of the author whom he has taken for his guide, and let him beware, lest he admit any conclusion, however unimportant, which may seem to be at variance with the dictates of reason or of experience. two important ends will thus be attained. by establishing a connection between the events detailed in history, and the reasonings founded upon them, they will be more likely to be retained in the memory; and by convincing himself of the fallacies in the arguments of its opponents, the reality of any truth will be more deeply impressed upon the mind. he who is thus habituated to scrutiny, will derive instruction from the errors of those with whom he is conversant; and may be compared (to borrow from the beautiful simile of bishop horne,) to those who visit the country in spring, for whom "the very hedges are in bloom, and every thorn produces a a flower." c. original correspondence. for the rural magazine. the following is an extract of a letter from the late president adams, to a friend of the editors. any thing from the pen of this eminent and venerable man will be read with interest, and ought to be public property. the anecdote is characteristic, and the obvious moral influence to be deduced from it, will strike the mind of every attentive reader. _quincy, january_ th, . dear sir.--i thank you for your new-year's letter, &c. * * * * as agriculture is the nursing mother of us all, it cannot be too assiduously cultivated; nor is it likely to be too much honoured, while mercantile profits are so much greater, and military glory is esteemed the highest glory! the "american"[ ] is an able writer; but i wish he had avoided so many appearances of endeavouring to justify, or at least to apologize for slavery in general. his arguments _ad hominem_ from the bible, reminded me of an anecdote, which as i am an old man, and as old age has a privilege to be talkative and narrative, i will attempt to relate: in the winter of ' , mr. paine's common sense and my thoughts on government, made their appearance in public, the one not long after the other. common sense recommended the thoughts on government; an organization in three distinct departments, as independent of each other as human beings can be;--the legislature to consist of three branches. mr. paine came flying to my apartment, to reproach me for publishing a monarchico, aristicratico, democratico system. he scolded violently, but i soothed him down by laughing at him in my turn. paine, said i, how could you be such an abominable hypocrite, as to pretend to prove in your common sense from the old testament, that monarchy was not lawful by the word of god? this struck him dumb for a moment, but recovering himself, and shrugging his shoulders, and laughing, said, with great contempt; "i believe nothing of the old testament, nor the new neither;" and then pausing, said, "i have had thoughts of publishing my opinions upon religion, but upon the whole i have concluded to put _it_ off till the latter part of my life." this plan he consistently pursued. [ ] the author of a long letter to the "edinburgh reviewers," published in the national intelligencer. i am not sorry his bones are gone to england, to moulder in the soil where they grew; for i claim neither to myself or to my country, any honour from having once supported them. i am, sir, your obliged friend, and humble servant, john adams. familiar letters _from an englishman in this country to his friend at home._ (communicated for the rural magazine.) no. ii. _philada. sept. , ._ my dear g. you know how very apt persons are to form an opinion of other persons with whom accident or design makes them acquainted, either on the _very_ wise principles of lavater, or the _still wiser_ principles of doctor--what's his name--(i wish i could forget as easily the labour i lost in studying him)--who first conceived craniology. you know also that i had every predisposition to the study of both these abstruse sciences, and the consequent deductions; so you will not be much surprised when i tell you that i have employed the time that has elapsed since the date of my last, in observing the physiognomy of philadelphia. i did this, before i trespassed on the good-will, the hospitality, or the politeness of any of its citizens. you will observe i am perfectly distinct in my classification, and i beg of you to remember this, when you peruse any of my rambling epistles hereafter. my letters would, i hope, have commanded the civil attention of any person to whom they were addressed, independent of any particular kindness to which the recommendation of our venerable quaker friend d---- of london would on the principle of reciprocity entitle me. but before i penetrated like asmodeus in "le diable boiteaux," into the domestic circle, the parlour, the halls, the tables, or the toilettes, or (shall i say it) to the counter and the desk. i wished to see the roofs, at least, if i could not see through them. so for the last week i have been studying physiognomies. there can be no need of apology to you my friend, who, (heaven be praised) have never had occasion to leave the precincts of your ancient patrimony for any thing but pleasure, for dilating on a city that so far as it regards myself, has hitherto been on a par with herculaneum or pompeia. some manuscripts and some printed accounts i _have_ seen, but like those saved from the lava of vesuvius, they were hardly worth unfolding. indeed, i always pitied poor sir humphrey for so incomprehensible a task. he had better have staid at home, and made experiments in separating the brick and mortar from the old ruins lord l---- boasts of having been in his family, at the smallest calculation from william rufus. i do wonder what it could have been that the ancients took such care of. well--i have _seen_ philadelphia.--and if it were not for the dull monotony of its right angles--the wide streets that throw such an immense space between your lodgings and any desired object--the want of all the cries i have been used to in all the popular cities i have frequented, except, indeed, the solitary halloo of a _sweep_, (and then only before one gets up in a morning) and the everlasting _gong_ that wakes me from my sweetest slumber, and dreams of home, with all its indefinable attractions, i would say that philadelphia was a very decent, orderly, well arranged, and handsome city. but give me hogarth's line of beauty; i hate your everlasting parallels that run together to infinity, and never unite. by the way i am told that i shall be amply gratified in this respect in new york and boston. there is only one street in this city, called dock street, that is entitled to any claim to my fancy; and that is too broad, and nobody lives in it--all shops and warehouses. the weather is remarkably fine,--every body complains of a want of rain:--for my part i must confess i had enough at home; and if i must find fault with the climate, it is too hot. yet i do not find the lassitude i expected, consequent on exercise in the open air. notwithstanding a mid-day sun, that in england we should have thought intolerable, a young gentleman with whom i formed an acquaintance at our excellent hotel, prevailed upon me to take a promenade along the philadelphia bond street, which here is denominated chesnut street. we saw some mansions that would not have disgraced one of our fashionable squares;--some ladies that would have honoured the very first equipage that sports in hyde park. only a few could boast of our saxon complexion; but their forms were cast in a superior mould;--this i apprehend is aboriginal--and although i cannot learn that any are willing to acknowledge their derivation from the native indians, several circumstances induce me to believe there has been a greater mixture with the first occupants of this vast continent than has been generally supposed. but more of this hereafter--if in my contemplated visit next summer to the falls of niagara, i should meet with some of the _deer_ skinned heroes and heroines of this western hemisphere. i have laid all those of the sock and buskin on the shelf, and am enthusiast enough to expect perfection among the savages of north america. why should i not? through all the obloquy that has been thrown upon them by their ruthless despoilers, "more savage still than they," through all that inveteracy of feeling which those who injure universally entertain--and "they who injure never pardon," you may still find a confession, or rather an admission of their virtues and their talents, of their magnanimity of character, and their elevation of soul. not merely that indifference to privation and bodily suffering which we have been taught, was characteristic of savage life, but in spite of the natural principle of retaliation and revenge, (and i will maintain that it is a natural principle) they have evinced that virtue which the bible has never taught many of us who have had access to it--_forgiveness of our enemies_. do not, however, think that i have lost myself in the interminable forests which still remain to the original proprietors of this continent--or that i have assumed the rifle and the moccasin. i should even prefer taking up my residence in this place which you know we have always considered one of the advanced posts in the march of civilization. it is true i have not yet descended from the roofs as aforesaid, to see what kind of an animal a philadelphian really is in his own family circle, and shall have to defer a picture of this non-descript till opportunity of observation occurs. i have as yet seen only the outside. i have seen the pennsylvania hospital externally; i have seen the figure of old william penn standing like a good old fashioned broad brimmed sentinel before the door of the edifice, like all sentries exposed to the wind and the weather, with his head as it were drooping over the fine hot-house plants that surround him. but a bronze statue of the old gentleman i must confess seemed rather _outre_, although he richly deserved an equipment in that same costume from the perseverance which history tells us he evinced in the strife with the bailiffs that beset him in our old island. but let that pass; i would consent to be surrounded by tipstaves all my life to leave such a character as he did behind.--i have seen the academy of fine arts, most modestly retiring from public view, behind a range of buildings that some of the cits have unconscionably erected on the front of the street, thus clearly evincing their disposition, to use the words of my chesnut street friend, to throw the fine arts in the _back ground_. by the way the good people here are said to be (by the new yorkers at least) most intolerably given to _punning_, and i must admit that some of the gentlemen who attend our excellent ordinary, have put off a few attempts at that vile species of wit, of a most contemptible character. i should, however, be very sorry to pass an opinion on the whole genus by the few specimens i have seen. philadelphia is really a very handsome city; yet to take a panoramic view of it, _you_ would be exceedingly disappointed. there are no steeples, or rather there is _one_, and that a very decent one--the architecture of which is by no means contemptible; but then there is _but one_ steeple in a city of upwards of fifteen thousand houses, principally constructed of brick. if there were only a standard or ensign appended to its spire, which is about feet from the ground, and that standard in proportion to its height, this goodly town would look like one grand encampment. few of the houses exceed three stories, of about ten or twelve feet each. the city is however, flanked by two shot towers, one in the southeast, the other in the northwestern extremity; which afford some relief to the dead uniformity in the general aspect of the town. how successful the proprietors of these said towers may have been in the pursuit of their vocation, i know not; but for ornament to this place, i would not give one steeple, like that which is bottomed in the good old diocesan episcopal church for a thousand of them. you see i have obeyed the injunction laid on me at parting, to express every thing as it presented itself to my observation, but in nothing can you find more sincerity of feeling than when i assure you neither time nor distance has diminished the warmth of affection with which i continue to be your friend. _treatise on agriculture._ sect. ii. of the actual state of agriculture in europe. this is very different in different states, and even in different parts of the same state; its greater or less degree of perfection, depending on causes physical, or political, or both. where a state, or part of a state, from _soil_, _climate_, _manners_, or _geographical position_, draws its principal subsistence from the fishery or the chase, as in the more northern parts of europe, agriculture will not succeed; when a state is from any cause both essentially maritime or manufacturing, as in england, or principally manufacturing, as in prussia; where public opinion has degraded manual labour, as in spain, portugal, and the papal territory; or where laws villainize it, as in russia, prussia, poland, hungary, &c. &c. it is in vain to expect pre-eminent agriculture.--these principles will receive illustration as we go along. . in the campania of rome, where in the time of pliny were counted twenty-three cities, the traveller is now astonished and depressed at the silence and desolation that surround him.--even from rome to trescati, (four leagues of road the most frequented) we find only an arid plain, without trees, without meadows, natural or artificial, and without villages, or other habitation of man! yet is this wretchedness not the fault of soil or climate, which (with little alteration[ ]) continue to be what they were in the days of augustus. "_man is the only growth that dwindles here_," and to his deficient or ill directed industry, are owing all the calamities of the scene.[ ] instead of the hardy and masculine labours of the field; the successors of cato and of pliny employ themselves in fabricating _sacred vases, hair powders and pomatums, artificial pearls, fiddle strings, embroidered gloves, and religious relics_! they are also great collectors of pictures, statues, and medals--"dirty gods and coins," and find an ample reward in the ignorance and credulity of those who buy them. [ ] the climate of italy is now warmer than it was in the augustan age, which buffon ascribes to the draining of great tracts of swampy lands in germany. [ ] "un romain meme le plus indigent rougiroit de cultiver la terre." bosc. . how different from this picture is that of _tuscany_! where the soil, though less fertile,[ ] is covered with grains, with vines, and with cattle; and where a surface of square leagues, subsists a population of nine hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, of whom eighty thousand are agriculturists. it may amuse, if it does not instruct, the reader, to offer a few details of a husbandry, among the most distinguished of the present age. the plough of the north of europe, as of this country, has the powers of a wedge, and acts perpendicularly; but that of tuscany resembles a shovel, is eight or nine inches long, and nearly as broad, and cuts the earth horizontally. this instrument is particularly adapted to the loose and friable texture of the soil. a second plough, of the same shape, but of smaller size, follows that already described, and with the aid of the hoe and the spade,[ ] throws the earth, already broken and pulverised, into four feet ridges, or beds, on which the crop is sown. the furrows answer a threefold purpose; they drain the beds of excessive moisture, ventilate the growing crops, and supply paths for the weeders. [ ] "two thirds of tuscany consist of mountains." vol. viii. p. . _geographic, mathematique et phisique_: see also forsyth's remarks, p. , where are detailed the principal causes of her prosperity. "leopold," says he, "in selling the crown lands, studiously _divided large tracts_ of rich but neglected land, into _small properties_. his favourite plan of encouraging agriculture consisted, not in _boards_, _societies_, and _premiums_, but in giving _the labourer a security and interest in the soil_--in multiplying small freeholders--in extending the livelli, or life leases, &c. &c. [ ] it is among the most important covenants of a tuscan lease, that one third of the ground be annually worked with a spade. the _rotation of crops_, employs two periods of different length; the one of three, the other of five years. in the rotation of _three_ years, the ground is sown five times, and in that of four years, seven times, as follows. first year, wheat, and after wheat lupins. second year wheat, and after wheat turnips. third year, indian corn or millet. first year, wheat, and after wheat beans. second year, wheat, and after wheat lupins. third year, wheat, and after wheat lupinella: (annual clover.) fourth year, indian corn, or millet. in the _syanese maremna_, where the lands want neither repose or manure, the constant alternation is _hemp_ and _wheat_, and the produce of the latter, often twenty-four bushels threshed, for one sown. it will be seen from this course of crops, that the principal object of tuscan agriculture, is wheat, of which they have two species, the one bald, the other bearded; both larger than the corresponding species in other countries of europe; convertible into excellent bread and pastes, and probably but varieties of that _sicilian family_, which pliny describes, as yielding "_most flour_ and _least bran_, and _suffering no degradation from time_." it is harvested about the middle of june and when the grain crop is secured, the ploughing for the second, or forage crop, begins; which besides lupins, lupinella, and beans, often consists of a mixture of lupins, turnips, and flax. the lupins ripen first and are gathered in autumn; the turnips are drawn in the winter and the flax in the spring. besides the application of _ordinary manures_, the lupin is ploughed down, _when in flower_; a practice that began with the romans: columella says, "of all leguminous vegetables, the _lupin_ is that which most merits attention, because it costs least, employs least time and furnishes an _excellent manure_." the culture of this vegetable is different, according to the purposes for which it is raised; if for grain, the ground has two ploughings and twenty-five pounds weight of seed to a square of a hundred toises: if for manure, one ploughing is sufficient. like our buckwheat, its vegetation is quick and its growth rapid; whence the farther advantage of suppressing, and even of destroying the weeds that would have infested any other crop. in the neighbourhood of florence, they are in the practice of _burning the soil_; which they do by digging holes, filling them with faggots and raising the earth into mounds over them.--the faggots are then inflamed and burnt, and with them the incumbent earth, which is afterwards scattered, so as to give the whole field the same preparation. d. "the countries," says arthur young, "the most rich and flourishing of europe, in proportion to their extent, are probably _piedmont_ and the _milanese_. we there meet all the signs of prosperity--an active and well conditioned population, great exportations, considerable interior consumption, superb roads, many opulent towns, a ready and abundant circulation, the interest of money low, the price of labour high; in one word, it is impossible to cite a single fact that shews that manchester, birmingham, rouen, and lyons, are in a condition equally prosperous, as the whole of these dutchies." their population is stated at " , , , and the territory at little more than two millions of arpents, (acres.) wheat, rye, indian corn, flax and hemp, the vine and the olive, the caper and the cotton tree, with all kinds of garden fruits and vegetables, are cultivated here: the soil knows no repose, and much of it yields annually and uniformly two crops of grain, or three of grass."[ ] these are the miracles of irrigation; not a drop of water is lost. besides the permanent supplies furnished from lakes, ponds, rivers, creeks and springs, even the winter torrent and summer shower, are every where intercepted by drains, and led to reservoirs; whence they are distributed at will to the neighbouring grounds. [ ] geographic, mathematique, &c. article italie. in , an agricultural school was established at milan, consisting of boys, who were instructed in theoretical and practical husbandry.--this institution has escaped the notice of travellers; and we are unable to say whether it has or has not, fulfilled the intentions of its projectors. . _switzerland_ has about square leagues of surface, and presents an assemblage of mountains, one rising above another, until the summits are lost in masses of snow and ice, which never melt. this short description sufficiently indicates the character of both the soil and the climate; yet unpropitious as these are, we find a population of inhabitants to each square league! "this is perhaps the country of the world, which presents the most happy effects of an industry always active and persevering. the traveller who climbs her mountains, is struck with admiration when he beholds vineyards and rich pastures in those places, which before appeared naked and barren rocks. the traces of the plough are perceived on the border of precipices, where the most savage animals do not pass without danger; in one word the inhabitants appear to have conquered all obstacles, whether arising from soil, position or climate and to have drawn abundance from territory, condemned by nature to perpetual sterility."[ ] [ ] idem. article helvetia. . the classical reader will remember, that _spain_ was the garden of the hesperides of the roman writers; by which was meant the combinations of a fine climate, a rich soil and an active and intelligent agriculture. to this state of things, even the empire of the goths was not fatal,[ ] and that of the moors rendered it still more distinguished. in their hands, the plains of valentia were cultivated throughout, with the utmost care and skill; and where their wheels, reservoirs, and drains of irrigation, yet remain, the soil continues to yield the richest and most abundant products. in catalonia, navarre, galitia and the austurias, many species of the ancient agriculture are yet in vigour, because "the _leases are long_, and the _landlord cannot capriciously violate them_." the same causes are followed by the same effects, in the three districts of biscaya, guiposcoa and alava. "in running over these, every thing one finds is animated by the presence of liberty and industry; nothing can be more charming than the coasts, nothing more attractive than the culture of the vallies. throughout the thirty leagues that separate bedassod from vittoria, every quarter of an hour we discover some well built village, or comfortable cottage."[ ] [ ] it appears from varro _dere rustica_ and the letters of cassiodorus, that the goths introduced into spain the subterranean granaries, called _siilos_, and the _art of irrigation_. the former are now exclusively used in tuscany, and cato's precept, 'prata irrigua,' &c. shews whence their knowledge of the latter was derived. [ ] burgoing's modern spain, vol. i. how different is the aspect of the other provinces! in these, not more than two thirds of the earth are cultivated; and "it is not uncommon to travel eight and ten leagues together, without finding a trace of human industry. in the district of badejoz alone, is a desert of twenty-six leagues in length and twelve in breadth.[ ] ten of the fourteen leagues that traverse the duchy of medina sidonia, consist altogether of pasturage. there is no where a vestige of man; not an orchard, not a garden, not a ditch, not a cottage to be seen! the great proprietor appears to reign, like the lion in the desert, repulsing by his roaring all who would approach him. but, instead of human colonies, we encounter troops of horned cattle and of _mares_, wandering, self directed, over plains, to which the eye can discover no boundary or barrier, and which brings to one's recollection the days when the beasts shared with man the empire of the earth."[ ] [ ] borde's hineraira de l'espagne, vol. iv. p. . [ ] burgoing. spain has been long renowned for its horses. the romans, in settling their pedigree and illustrating their swiftness, called them '_the children of the winds_.' "even when the plough is used, it is little more than a great knife fastened to a stick, that just scratches the surface. the grain is threshed by horses, or mules driven over it, of by means of a plank studded with nails or flint stones and drawn across it. with even this miserable culture, the land in andalusia yields considerable crops; yet are the inhabitants too lazy or too few to gather them together. this is done by galiegos, who are the labourers of spain." we need scarcely remark, that in a state of agriculture like this, the peasantry cannot be either well fed or well clothed. "the mountaineers live principally upon roasted acorns and goats' milk, and those of the plain (from barcelona to malaga) on bread steeped with oil, and occasionally seasoned with vinegar."[ ] [ ] swinburne's travels, vol. i. a spanish peasant, who has earned or begged enough for the wants of the day, will refuse to earn more, even by running an errand. striking as this fact is, it does not so well illustrate spanish indolence as the following anecdote from the same pen. in the great sedition at madrid, which ended in the defeat of the king and the disgrace of his minister, (the marquis des squillas) and in its most fervid moments, both parties retired about dinner time to take their _nap_ or _meridiana_, after which they returned to the combat with new vigour and enraged fury. if _habits_ can thus control the _passions_, to what important uses might not a wise legislation turn them? it is wide of our object to examine the causes of the degradation of character, which marks the agriculture of spain. well informed writers have ascribed it to the expulsion of the moors and jews, to the weight of taxes and imposts, to the _mesta_ or common right of pasturage, to the discovery of america and its consequences, to the effect of climate and the ill judged charity of bishops and convents, but principally to the great _manorial grants_ and _unequal division_ of the soil, which followed the conquest. "we often find six, eight, ten, and even fifteen leagues of extent belonging to one master. the nobility and clergy possess nearly the whole country. one third of spain belongs to the families of medina, celi, d'alva, de l'infatado, d'aceda, and to the archbishops, bishops and chapters of toledo, compostella, valentia, seville and murcia. a great proportion of these lands remain untilled and untenanted, and those which are let in _cortijo_ or farms are double or treble the quantity that can be occupied in tillage."[ ] [ ] le borde's heneraire d'espagne, vol. . . the agriculture of _portugal_, has been subjected to the same evils as that of spain, to which may be superadded, her connexion with great britain; under whose policy she has become a raiser of _fruit_ instead of _grain_. . _france_ is probably the country of europe, which most unites the great desiderata of an extended and profitable agriculture; fertility of soil, mildness of climate, a dense population, an enlightened government, and facility of exportation. within her ancient limits, she boasts of a surface of more than one hundred and fifteen millions of arpents, and a population of twenty-two millions of inhabitants. the following tables will shew, in a compressed form, the nature of her soil, and the use to which it is put.[ ] [ ] see geographique, &c. vol. vi. art. _france_, p. , and young's tour through france. geological table. arpents or acres. alluvial and other rich soil, , , chalky do , , gravelly do , , stony do , , sandy do , , substratum of clay with a slight covering of sand--called _landes_, , , granitic and other mountains , , agricultural tables. arable land , , vineyards, , , woods, , , natural meadows, , , artificial meadows, , , lakes, marshes, wastes, , , ----------- total, , , from the average of a number of statistical tables made by the abbe d'expillyt and others, it appears that in , the agriculture of france was sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants, and had a surplus to spare;[ ] and though it be universally admitted that her condition in this respect is not less prosperous _now_ than it was _then_,[ ] still it cannot be dissembled that her husbandry has many defects. [ ] the products of agricultural labour, were, in these tables, stated at , , l. t. those of manufacturing labour at , , . [ ] the effects of the revolution of on _agriculture_ are no longer doubtful. the suppression of _tythes_--of the _exclusive privilege_--of the _chase_--of every species of _corvee_ (labour performed by tenants for landlords)--of _taxes_ or _rents_, and of _rights_ of _commonage_--was among these effects; and if to these we add the _division_ of the _great landed estates of the nobility and clergy_, there can no longer be any scepticism on this point. no truth is better established than the advantage of _small_ farms over _great_, as far as the _public_ is concerned. the roman latifundia (military grants) destroyed roman agriculture. . a supposed resemblance between the earth and animals, gave rise to _fallows_; because men and horses required repose after _labour_, it was supposed that after _cropping_, the earth also required it. faithful to this absurd analogy, the french landlord binds down his tenent by lease, not to crop the soil more than _three_ years in _four_, which in effect is to consign to barrenness or weeds, one fourth of the whole arable land of france yearly! . there is not a sufficiently fixed, or steady proportion, between _arable_ and _pasture_ land.--the production of grain is the great object of culture--often with too little regard to the nature of the soil, and generally without any to its improvement. "where pasturage is scanty, where natural meadows are bad, where artificial are rare, and root husbandry little extended, cattle cannot be either numerous or well conditioned; and as without these there can be no manure, so without manure there can be no abundance."[ ] [ ] herbin's statistique gen. de la france vol. i. introduc. . the land is generally worked by _farmers, hired for that purpose, or by renters on short leases_; which in neither case betters the condition of the soil; the one having no interest in improvements, and the other too small a one to justify any expense in making them. . a _good rotation system_, adapted to the soil and climate, is not absolutely unknown, and may be found even in whole districts (as in french flanders) but much too rarely. we have seen _wheat_ and _fallows_ alternately for years; and _wheat_, _rye_, _hemp_, and _rye_, and many others equally ridiculous. . to the eye, more than one half of france is a common, without fences of any kind, excepting garden or park walls. can there be order, economy and security, under such circumstances? can the _police_ and the _gens d'armes_ be sufficient substitutes? [_albany argus._ (to be continued.) _the moral plough boy._ in that volume whose morality is as sound, as the religion, it inculcates is celestial; and which is in fact an inexhaustible source of human wisdom, as well as a pure and incorruptible fountain of divine light; we are taught to "_despise not the day of small things_." how much better off than they are, would thousands of their countrymen be at this moment, had this injunction never failed of its proper effect upon their conduct! if they had constantly cherished it in their recollection and carried it into practice in their daily occupations. but to contemplate the past or the present is needless, if it be not with a view to awaken the soul not only to a proper train of reflection, but to a salutary system of practice for the future. if we had not "_despised the day of small things_," and sought too eagerly after brilliant speculations and splendid fortunes, thousands of us might now be blessed with ease and competence, and still animated by a sober and useful spirit of industry, who are, on the contrary, plunged into embarrasment, stripped of our property, and paralyzed in our energies. we began the world with fair prospects, and we thought, at the same time with firm resolutions not to blast them by seeking too eagerly after _fairer_ ones; but man is rarely contented with what is simply good or bright; he must have something _better_ and _brighter_. there is always some tree whose fruit is forbidden, or beyond his reach, but of which he cannot rest easy till he has tasted. he can never think of resting upon the clear declivity, whilst the "cloud-capped" summit is above him, veiling something which he has not seen, and which may be, as he is apt to imagine, a pleasing, a valuable or a wonderful discovery. thus it is that we always reject the good within our grasp, in the delusive hope of grasping something better beyond it; that we lose sight of the content and happiness which are to-day within our reach; and look to the morrow to bring forth that which will satisfy our desires, and cause us to rejoice in our existence. but the morrow comes, our anticipations are not realized, and we vainly regret that we had not enjoyed the day before, as we might have done, without trusting to a deceitful futurity. we aim to inculcate moderation in the desire of wealth, or of any other acquisition which is supposed to contribute to human happiness, combined with a steady, industrious and persevering attention to the means of obtaining what we desire. to this end, we must not "_despise the day of small things_;" but must set out in every undertaking with a determination to take advantage of the most trivial, as well as the most important circumstance, calculated to favour our designs. we must watch with the eyes of an _argus_ for opportunity, never forgetting, that she is bald behind, and must therefore be caught by the forelock, if caught at all. when once she turns her back upon us, she is soon out of sight, and we vainly attempt to overtake her. she mocks at our folly, and leaves us to brood, in hopeless amazement, over our own blindness and imbecility. but who are they that "_despise the day of small things_?" they are too numerous for description in a brief essay; but we shall point out a few, and leave the reader's imagination to enlarge the catalogue. the mechanic who puts off a small job, as unworthy of his attention, because he happens to have a larger one on hand; without stopping to reflect, that small streams are more numerous than large ones; that the former continually supply the latter; and that by a steady succession of small jobs, he may acquire a capital to execute large ones upon his own account. the merchant who will sit behind his counter with a segar in his mouth, and think it derogatory to his dignity to reply to a demand for a shilling's worth of any thing. such "_small things_" are too insignificant for this man of smoke; and consequently when those who call for them, and find themselves neglected, have occasion to make a _large_ purchase, they go to him, who will not only lay down his segar, but leave his dinner, if required to wait upon them in ever so small a way. the physician, who passes by the the poor man's door hardly stopping to give a hasty prescription, although he never fails to loiter in the sick rooms of the rich and the powerful, till his sycophancy becomes as disgusting to the mind, as his medicine is nauseating to the stomach of his patient. the lawyer who turns a deaf ear to an honest client with but _five_ dollars in his pocket; but is quick of hearing when accosted by a party with a _fifty dollar bill_, and not over scrupulous either about the justice of the cause. the clergyman--and what shall we say of the clergyman, who "_despises the day of small things_;" who forsakes and forgets the poor, but pious flock, which first cherished him, to gratify his pride and ambition, and acquire those robes and riches which moths may corrupt and thieves may steal; and who is so eager withal to make converts, that he does not stop to be satisfied that conversion is the offspring of conviction, forgetting how much joy there is in heaven over one sinner that truly repenteth; and that the hope of the hypocrite shall perish for-ever! the farmer who clears more land than he can cultivate to advantage, destroying the present and preventing the future growth of timber to no purpose; who keeps his produce on hand, when he can get a good and saving price, in hopes it may rise; who sells it at last for less than he could have had at first; and who is not as grateful to god for a scanty harvest, as he is for a plentiful one. we might enlarge the catalogue of those, who, by "_despising the day of small things_," never arrive at that of great ones; but we do not wish to tire the reader with a tedious essay, when a light and pleasant one is our aim. there is, however, one precious delinquent, in whose soul we would gladly awaken those moral energies which alone can save it from eventual ruin; from the tortures of self condemnation, the contempt of mankind, and the horrors of despair. we mean the young student of genius, who consumes the vigour of his youth in the haunts of vice and infamy--who despises the minutia of his profession, whatever it may be, and wantonly neglects his daily studies for the _present_, in pursuit of pleasure, intending, perhaps, to make great and rapid strides at a _future_ time--but when that time arrives may find his former neglect and dissipation have destroyed the energies of his mind, and left it like a sieve, incapable of containing any thing but dregs! in this case the ruin is indeed a melancholy one; for instead of being "led, through paths of glory, to the grave," the stews and the state prison are too often the pathways of such a youth to that closing scene; and his _hic jacet_ may be found, if found at all, in the _potter's field_, that last receptacle of the dregs of humanity! think of this, ye giddy, ye thoughtless young men, who are squandering your precious moments in idleness and vice, dishonouring yourselves, disgusting your friends, disappointing the expectations of your country, breaking the hearts of your fond parents, and bringing their "grey hairs with sorrow to the grave!" how bitter will be your feelings, when you are driven to reflect, as you finally must be, and perhaps at the foot of the gallows, that by your folly and wickedness, you have not only sealed your own ruin, but madly "steep'd a mother's couch in tears, "and ting'd a father's glowing cheek with shame!" many of those giddy young men, to whom these remarks apply, may perhaps sneer at the idea of being brought up at last, in their mad career, by the arm of the public executioner. but let them turn, in some hour of solitude, if such hours ever bless them with the sweets of calm reflection, to the pages of the _criminal recorder_! they will there find, that from george barnwell, down to james hamilton, those who have died upon the gallows have not always plunged at once into the depths of depravity; but have gone on, step by step, from slight deviations to serious ones, till they have lost all sense of shame, and become rebels to god as well as man. in this degraded state of their souls, they have not stopt at the brothel, the cock-pit, or the gambling table; but urged by the demons of hell, they have wantonly seized the dagger of assassination, and bathed it in the blood of innocence! thus closing their criminal career by a deed of desperation. h. h. jr. mr. nicholson's prize essay. _on a rotation of crops, and the most profitable mode of collecting, preserving, and applying manures._ (communicated to the albany county agricultural society.) [continued.] in the spring of the third year, we propose to sow the ground with barley, after two or three ploughings--seed, two and a half bushels to the acre. at the same time also, give the ground at least pounds of red clover seed to the acre, which may be carefully mixed with the barley, and sown together. harrow the ground before sowing, and harrow in the seed, after it has been prepared in the manner before directed; then, if the farmer is in possession of the roller, let this be passed over the ground, particularly if it be somewhat dry; for, in such case, barley, being covered with a husk, requires a close envelopement with earth, in order that the progress of its germination be not either partially or wholly retarded. next spring give the ground a top dressing of gypsum, of from one to two bushels to the acre, as circumstances may seem to require.--two clover crops are to be expected this season. the next, either one or two may be taken, according to the climate, but usually one only in more northerly regions; and in this case let the second growth be laid prostrate, by the roller passing over it in the same direction in which the plough is to follow, in order that the growth may be carefully turned under, which will form an excellent lay for winter wheat, or for rye, if the climate is not adapted to the growth of the former crop. in suitable climates, wheat will succeed on a good clover lay even on light sandy lands. it is believed, however, that the species of wheat which is considerably cultivated in pennsylvania, called spelt, (_triticum spelta_) may be successfully cultivated in any part of the northern states where wheat of the common sorts do not flourish.--when the sward has thus been turned under, let the surface be levelled by running the harrow lightly over it, in the same direction in which the plough runs, and then cover the seed with the harrow, run in a similar direction. let the seed wheat be prepared in the manner before described, and let it be free from any mixture of rye, or the seeds of cockle, or other weeds. next spring give the ground another top dressing of gypsum, in order that a growth of white clover may rise after harvest, as this will afford considerable fall feed, and a fresh sward to be turned under in the latter part of the fall, the effect of which will be explained when speaking of manures, &c. thus our rotation requires six seasons for its completion, and is composed of six or more different and successive crops. in exhibiting our plan, we intend it merely as an outline of what we deem at least one of the best and most profitable systems of culture that can be pursued in good arable lands, where all obstructions to the most complete culture have been removed.--other courses may probably be devised which may be as good, but we feel confident there can be none better. we consider this rotation as comprehending a sufficient variety of crops for every purpose of affording the land rest by changes; and although a course of rotation might be made to include a greater variety of crops, still the profits of them in the aggregate, would probably be less than in the plan we propose. we insist much on the culture of root crops for the greatest possible profits. in some instances the growths of roots and vines we propose, as well as of the grain crops, might be substituted for others, and sometimes, for the sake of further variety of growths, particularly of roots, it might be advisable; all this must, however, depend on the soil, and on other circumstances. if the soil be rich and deep, perhaps the mangel wurzel, should have a preference to the common turnip, and the pumpkin, in the first years crop, and perhaps in such soil the cabbage culture should sometimes come in for a share. we should hardly advise that crops of carrots or of parsnips should ever enter the list of a general rotation of crops, as they require peculiar soils, and uncommon preparation. they are very valuable crops for particular purposes, but their uses for feeding and fatting cattle seem to be in a great measure superseded by the less expensive culture of the crops before-mentioned. there are, however some mellow fertile soils, of sandy texture, where these roots, particularly carrots, may be cultivated with great advantage. a very serious objection to the culture of parsnips is, that in the soils most suitable for them they extend so deeply that their extraction from the earth is a matter of no small difficulty. in recommending the alternate culture of the pumpkin with the corn crop, we have been influenced by two considerations; firstly, from an account we have lately seen of a trial made of the culture of the large sort of pumpkin by itself, in which at the rate of tons to the acre were raised; and, secondly we are of opinion that in cultivating the crop in the way we propose, nearly as great a product may be obtained as if the ground were planted entirely with this crop.--growing in drills by itself it will not impede the growth of the corn, nor do we conceive that this crop will be injured by the extension of the pumpkin vines over the ground; whereas if the two crops were planted together in the same hills, or drills, as is commonly practised, the growth of the one must, in a great measure, serve to rob the other of its due share of nutriment. the large sort of pumpkin, to which we have reference, has been raised of the weight of upwards of pounds, but it is probably less nutritious, because less sweet, than pumpkins of the common sorts. another large sort, which we have seen exhibited in this county, of more than four feet in length, is probably entitled to a preference for culture, as it appears to be as sweet as pumpkins of the smaller kinds. in selecting seed for the pumpkin crop, take such plants as bear the greatest weight of pumpkins, and from the largest of these let the seed be preserved. we have next to speak of the rotations proper for clayey lands, or those which have more or less alumin in their composition. lands of this description are various, as well in regard to their natural fertility, as to their being more or less inclined to a superabundance of moisture. some are naturally too wet for cultivating even grain crops with success, and should therefore be kept for mowing and grazing lands. some again may be merely too wet for crops of winter grain, and in such case spring crops should be substituted, while at the same time the lands should be more applied to the business of the dairy, and of the grazier. in the mean time, let the possessor of lands which are naturally too wet, proceed to laying at least a part of them dry, by hollow drains; and then by making his barn dung principally into heaps of compost, in which lime and sand shall be considerably used as additional ingredients, and applying such compost manure to the drilled crops before-mentioned, and in the manner before directed, he will find no difficulty whatever in pursuing the course of crops we have recommended, nor of raising them of luxuriant growth. where clayey lands are naturally dry enough for winter crops, we advise to a similar course of crops, with the manure prepared and used in a similar manner. in all stiff soils, however, an important point in husbandry, is to keep the ground, while under a course of crops, in a mellow crumbly state; and for this purpose nothing is more conducive than frequent deep ploughings, and raising the ground into high narrow ridges, as well to lie in that state during winter, as for the culture of all the drilled crops in particular. the ridges are to be formed by four gathering furrows, and in cleaving the ridges down new ones are formed with the middle or highest part of each where the last furrows were of the former ridges. when, therefore, the manure is to be used for the drilled crop, it is to be laid in the furrows, between the ridges, and then covered over with two gathering furrows run on each side, and thus the beds or ridges for the crop prepared. if, however, it should still be found that some clays, even with this management for the purpose of ameliorating them, should still be found unsuitable for indian corn, and for the turnip and ruta baga crops, we can only advise that, for the former, the windsor bean, and for the two latter the mangle wurzel and the cabbage crop, be made substitutes. the windsor bean is considerably cultivated in the clay lands of great britain; and mr. deane, in his farmer's dictionary, says its growth on such lands in this country is luxuriant. perhaps in place of this species of the bean, another, which is cultivated in the southern states, and is there called the cow pea, should be prefered. it should be further observed, that gypsum, when applied as a top dressing to clay lands, particularly those which are too wet, has but very little effect; but when they are laid dry by hollow drains, and thrown into ridges as before-mentioned, the effect of this manure upon them is nearly the same as in other dry arable lands.--and as we conceive it essentially necessary that all clay lands which are to be cultivated for spring crops, as well as all other soils which are naturally too wet, should lie in ridges during the winter, we advise that, at the beginning of the rotation we have mentioned, such lands have a second ploughing in the fall, for the purpose of being laid in such ridges. when thus laid they are easily reduced to a mellow state in the spring; but if this be neglected, they will usually be found, more or less, in hard baked clods, a state very unfit for good cultivation. in great britain it is found essentially requisite that clay lands should be effectually summer fallowed as often as every sixth year; as well for the purpose of extirpating growths of weeds, as for mellowing the soil, and rendering it more lively. a fallowing there is performed by many repeated ploughings and harrowings during the summer. but it should be remembered that the climate of that country is very different from this. their wheat harvest is in autumn, their summers being wet and cool. here we have time after the harvest is over to cleanse and enliven the soil by repeated ploughings and harrowings. on hard gravelly lands, which are unfit for any crops of roots, except perhaps potatoes, no very extensive rotation can be had to advantage without plentiful manuring. gypsum has a powerful effect on such lands, and with the aid of this manure alone even the poorest of gravels may be made to yield good crops of buckwheat and of red clover; and on a lay of this latter crop turned under, a tolerable good crop of rye may be had. st. foin, and some other tap rooted grasses, flourish in such soils better than might be expected. gravelly lands require very deep and frequent ploughings, in order to make them sufficiently retentive of moisture. they are usually much assisted by compost manures where clay, mud, upland marl, &c. form a considerable share of the ingredients. but as there are different degrees of fertility in gravelly lands, according to the nature of the gravel, and its greater or less predominance in the soil, we can lay down no definite course of crops that in all cases would be found most advisable. say, however, that with effectual deep ploughings, and plenty of suitable manure for the drills, the first crop shall be indian corn, intermixed with the potato and the pumpkin growths, as before-mentioned; next spring, oats, or barley, if the ground will answer for this crop. as soon as this crop comes off, turn the stubble under, and harrow in buckwheat for a green dressing, in the manner mentioned in treating of manures, and on this growth, turned under, sow rye, if the ground is too gravelly for wheat. sow the clover seed the next spring, in the quantity before-mentioned, and then harrow the ground, which will serve the purpose of covering the seed, and also of assisting the growth of the crop of wheat, or rye, as the case may be. the advantage derived from harrowing these crops in the spring has been well ascertained by experiment. after the second year's growth of clover has been fed or mowed off, turn over the ground in the fall to commence the rotation anew. when we speak of gravelly lands, we do not mean to include those which are, properly speaking gravelly loams; for soils of this description are generally well fitted for the rotation first mentioned. by gravelly lands we mean those where gravel is mostly predominant, as we call those lands sandy where silex forms the greatest proportion of the soil, and of these something is now to be said. as a specimen of what may be called light sandy lands we will refer to much of those lying between albany and schenectady. these, like the gravelly lands just mentioned, are not, in their natural state, calculated for the production of many different crops in perfection, nor indeed for any without manure. with the aid of gypsum alone, however, good crops of peas, and of buckwheat, may be had on most of these lands, tolerable of red clover, and on the lay of clover turned under, middling crops of rye may be had. probably, with this manure, valuable crops of pumpkins might be raised on them. lands of this description have, however, very essential properties, which gravelly lands do not possess; they are much easier cultivated than the harder soils, and, in proportion to their natural fertility, no lands are better adapted for root crops of almost every sort, or for the grasses whose roots extend deep into the earth, among which are clover of different kinds, st. foin, lucerne, &c.--such lands are least adapted for crops of wheat and indian corn; but when sufficiently manured with clay, or upland marle, which is better, they will yield tolerable crops of the latter, and also of the former, when raised on a lay of red clover. where little else than the contents of the barn yard and gypsum can be had for manuring sandy lands of the above description, the common turnip and ruta baga culture would not, perhaps, be advisable, but the rotation should be something like the following: first year, potatoes and pumpkins in alternate drills, manured and treated as before described; second, peas, soaked in the solution before-mentioned, and rolled in gypsum before sowing, with a top dressing of that manure; third, buckwheat, treated in the same manner, and clover seed sown with the crop; third and fourth, clover, with a top dressing of gypsum each spring; fifth, rye, on the clover turned under, as before described, which completes the course. but where upland marle, or even clay, can be had, for the purpose of forming compost manures with the barn dung and the addition of some lime, as is described under manures, &c. we should advise to the rotation first described, or something similar, in which the root crops should form a prominent part; and in such case, let the manure be plentifully applied to the drilled crops. at first, perhaps, some of the crops would not be so abundant; but under this management the soil would be constantly improving, and of course the crops increasing. at first, perhaps, rye should be substituted for the wheat crop, but each addition to the soil of the caluminous and calcarious matter, of which the compost is principally composed, would render the land better adapted for grain crops of every description. it is a matter of the first importance to the cultivator to possess an adequate knowledge of the different substances which may be used with advantage for fertilizing his land, of the different soils to which such substances are best adapted, of the proper quantities to be used, and of the most advantageous time and manner of their application. there is but little even of the richest earths that will not become exhausted with constant cropping without manure; and soils are seldom so sterile, but that with a proper application of suitable manures to them, they may be made the residence of plenty. manures are of different kinds: of animal, of vegetable, of fossil, and of mixed; of each of which notice will be taken in their order. the flesh of animals is an excellent manure for all soils, and is used to a considerable extent on the sea coast, where fish are caught in plenty. it is believed that flesh is used to most advantage in composts, and the same may be observed with more certainty in regard to the use of the blood. the shavings of the horney substances of animals, have very desirable effects as a manure, in dry soil, by enduing such with a greater power to retain moisture: and the same may also be observed of the hair and wool. the bones, when calcined, are also valuable, as they are principally phosphate of lime. the miasma, produced by the putrefaction of the flesh and blood of animals, is also food for plants, or at least its presence assists their growth. the urine is a fertilizer principally by reason of the salt it contains, and probably also by its producing miasma. when animals die, it is usual to let them lie above ground, to the annoyance of the public; but, if covered with earth, this together with the flesh, &c. of the animal, would be converted into good manure. of vegetable substances, it may be generally observed, that almost every sort of vegetable, not of woody texture, buried in the soil while green, is more or less efficacious as a manure; and that many sorts of these, when turned under where they grew, and while in a green state, will add much more fertility to the soil than their growth extracted from it; but that the same growth, when suffered to ripen on the ground, and then turned under, after the exhaustion of its juices, will not generally repay the soil the nutriment it extracted from it while growing. it would seem that the ripening of plants is the principal cause of the exhaustion of soils, and, for this reason, green dressings, that is, ploughing of green crops under, has been found advantageous in enriching lands. where green dressings are resorted to, as a manure, such growth should be selected for the purpose as are cheap in the article of seed, and at the same time quick and bulky in their growths. buckwheat has been much used for the purpose, though perhaps some other plants should be preferred. the growth should be turned under when in blossom; and, in order that this be done effectually, it should be laid prostrate, by running the roller over it, in the same direction in which the plough is to follow; after which, the ground should not be stirred again till this manure has sufficiently rotted. generally, we think it would be most advisable to sow on the lay or furrow, by which the green crop is turned under. there may be some instances where manuring with green dressings may be advisable, particularly where it can be done without preventing the growth of any intervening crop: where this is not practicable, we should hardly advise to this method of manuring, unless in cases where other manures were not to be obtained. one case we will however mention, where a green dressing might be given to advantage. suppose, for instance, a crop of rye, oats, or barley, harvested, and the ground cleared of the crop by the th of july; in that case, let the stubble be immediately turned under, and the ground harrowed in with buckwheat; by the th of september this growth would be fit to be turned under, when a crop of wheat might be sown on the lay. it should be understood, that rye is one of the best crops to precede a crop of wheat, or to follow it. in the same manner, therefore, the crop for a green dressing may be raised in the wheat stubble turned under, and the green crop turned under for a crop of rye. but the contents of the barn-yard, and the excrements of cattle, are the principal sources of manure of the vegetable kind; and of these it is necessary to treat particularly, as well of the qualities of the different sorts, as of their most advantageous applications to soils. the sorts of dung or excrement to be noticed, are those of horses, neat cattle, sheep, and swine. the dung of swine is most valuable, where properly applied; that of sheep is the next; that of cows ranges in the third degree, and that of horses in the fourth. the dung of the latter, if suffered to lie in a heap till it becomes thoroughly heated, assumes a white, or mouldy colour, and is then of but little value. it is of a warm nature, and is best adapted for being well buried in moist or clayey soils; cow dung on the contrary, is most suitable for dry soils; sheep dung answers best on the soils for which that of horses is best suited, but is very valuable for almost any soil. hog dung should only be applied to dry arable lands, and is most powerful in those of a sandy or gravelly nature. dung, of all sorts, loses much of its valuable qualities by exposure to frequent rains, particularly when lying at but little depth over a considerable surface. its good qualities are best preserved by lying in large heaps, and if under cover so much the better. the stercorary is the most effectual method for preserving barn dung, and it is believed that every farmer will find his money well expended in the erection of this receptacle for the contents of that part of his barn-yard, which is not used in the spring. the stercorary may serve for a sheep fold during winter, and will thus answer a two fold purpose. it may be, for instance, feet in length, in breadth, and of suitable height. the floor is to be made of a layer of clay, with the surface smoothly paved with small stones, and highest in the middle, so that the juices of the dung may run off to the sides, where a gutter receives this liquid, and carried it into a reservoir, sunk at one end, into which a pump is to be fixed to raise the liquid and throw it back over the heap. the floor, gutter, and reservoir, are on a plan similar to those of a cider press. the liquid that runs from the heap is the most valuable part, and should never be lost: this plan is therefore calculated to preserve it; and, for the purpose of absorbing the whole of it, any dry vegetable matter, or rich earth, may be laid over the heap, and this liquid thrown on that, which will serve to convert the whole into good manure. the juices and the soluble and gaseous parts of the excrements of cattle, together with the stale, are what principally affords nutriment for growing plants; and every means by which these can be saved, by their being absorbed in other substances, of rich earthy or vegetable matter, would seem to be well worthy of attention. we will next designate what is usually considered the methods most proper for the application of dung. where lands are in grasses of the fibrous rooted kinds, it is the generally received opinion of the best cultivators, that barn dung, as well as every other kind, should be applied as a top dressing, that is, by spreading it on the surface; but that for tap rooted grasses, or those whose roots extend deeply, as well as for all grain and root crops, this manure should be buried in the soil, at such depths as are best suited to the nature of the roots of the plants to be cultivated. the operation of barn dung, and of all vegetable and animal substances used in manure, seems to be this: if laid at a certain depth beneath the surface of the soil, in the progress of their decomposition their soluble parts pass into the form of gas, or vapour, and of course rise to the surface, and in their ascent are more or less absorbed by the roots of the plants; on the contrary, if these manures be laid on the surface, these soluble parts, in the progress of decomposition, never become aeriform, but are washed downwards, in their liquid state, where they are in like manner absorbed by the roots of the plants. this is probably as correct an explanation as can be given of the effect of these manures. it is well known, that ground long used as a graveyard, becomes very fertile, notwithstanding the substances which are the cause of such fertility, are laid at a very great depth. it has been held by some english writers that barn dung should be well rotted previous to its application as a manure, but this opinion is rejected by sir humphrey davy, one of the most scientific agriculturists of great britain, and also by arthur young, esq. mr. davy contends that this manure may in most instances be as well applied fresh as in any other way, by its being laid at a proper depth beneath the surface, and that in scarcely any instance it is advisable that it should undergo more than the first stage of decomposition before it is used. when well rotted it is, however, more efficacious for a single crop, but its use is of much shorter duration. it seems, also, to be generally agreed that using this manure for drill crops, burying it at a good depth, and raising the plants over the dung thus buried, is the best possible way in which it can be used. we lately saw an account published of upwards of bushels of indian corn to the acre being raised by this mode of culture. the success of mr. cobbett, and others, in raising great crops of ruta baga by this method of using this manure, seems to demonstrate its utility, if evidence was wanting further than what appears in english publications on the subject. the plan that we would therefore recommend, is, to apply the fresh barn dung to all drill crops which are to be put in the ground in the spring, and for these we refer to what has been said under rotation of crops. the shortest dung should be used for these purposes, except for potatoes, and it should, as far as practicable, be applied to the soils best adapted for each kind of dung, as has before been mentioned. the longer or more strawey parts of the dung we should advise to be laid in the stercorary, if this building has been provided, or else somewhere under cover; or if no cover can be afforded, let it be thrown into a heap about or feet high; and wherever it be laid let it be stirred up from the bottom in the course of about five or six weeks after it has thus been heaped or otherwise stored away, after which it will soon be found well fitted for being used for the crop of ruta baga. it is also advisable to cover the heap with a layer of good earth, which will serve to absorb and retain much of the steam or gaseous matter that rises from the heap, and when saturated with this, and mixed with the mass of dung, will be found a valuable addition. (to be continued.) from the national intelligencer. _on the grape vine, with its wines, brandies, and dried fruits._ no. . no principle of action in the business and industry of the united states has been so beneficial to them as the adoption of _new objects of culture_ by the planters and farmers, whose old objects of culture were likely to become redundant, and to fall in price. _cotton_ and _sugar_ are well known and important examples. there are good grounds for estimating our whole cotton of our best year, (sept. , to sept. ,) at forty-two millions of dollars, according to the price on the wharves of our sea-ports for that which was exported to foreign countries, and the price at our factories, stores, and dwellings, of that which was manufactured at home. it is now manifest that the east indian and south american cotton greatly injure our markets; and as this arises from growing, permanent, and substantial causes, there is reason to expect the continuance of the injury to us from the foreign rival cotton cultivation. a brief and plain view of the history and prospect of cotton, will be found in the philadelphia edition (a.d. ) of _rees' english cyclopædia_, by murray, bradford & co. under the article or head of the "_united states_." the facts there stated, with many known subsequent circumstances, will give rise to serious reflections, in the minds of the landholder and the statesman, upon the subject of the protection of the productions of our own soil. the industry of the landed men of the united states is manifestly and unalterably much greater than any, and than all, the other branches of our domestic or national industry. the mercantile and manufacturing branches result almost entirely from the landed industry. while, therefore, the legislative and executive governments raise revenues of ½ to per cent. on a great quantity of foreign cotton cloths from india and europe, and a greater revenue from the foreign manufactures of tobacco, and a still greater revenue from the foreign manufactures of grain, of fruit, and of the cane, to the great fundamental and convenient support of american manufactures, and while they are free to go further, if they find it right, in the joint encouragement of our agricultural and manufacturing industry it will be found beneficial to the landed interest to inquire into other means of promoting the prosperity of the _colossus of our country_--the agricultural industry. there can be no doubt that, between the sites of the vineyards of the lower schuylkill, southwark, of pennsylvania, butler, of pennsylvania, glasgow, of kentucky, new vevay, of indiana, and harmony, of the same state, on the north, and the coasts of the gulf of mexico, on the south, the united states possess the climates and soils of "_the vine-covered hills and gay regions of france_." the sweet orange grows, in safety, in groves and gardens, in the vicinity of new orleans, at a greater distance from the sea than any place of equally safe growth, in provence or languedoc, of france. as our country shall be cleared and drained, our climate will be still less severe in the states on the mexican gulf. in the north, our climates of new vevay and harmony, in indiana, glasgow, in kentucky, ° to ° ' n. which are the present northern extremes of successful experiments in the vine cultivation, are as favourable and mild as the climates of champagne, tokay, lorraine, burgundy, and hockheim, which are fine northern regions of the vine in france and germany. between our new vevay, in indiana, and the gulf of mexico, the states of louisiana, alabama, mississippi, georgia, south and north carolina, tennessee, indiana, and large parts of virginia and kentucky, must give us _all the vine climates of france_, _germany_, _switzerland_, and _upper italy_. this vine district of the united states is much larger than all those vine countries of france, germany, switzerland, and upper italy. the crop of wine and brandy in the vine country of france alone--though our vine country is more than twice the size--has been estimated at millions of dollars. let us then consider the propriety of a diligent inquiry into the cultivation of the vine, and the preparation of wines, brandies, dried fruits, and cremor tartar, in the united states, in order to maintain the prosperity of the landed interest by the variety and prices of our crops. the present duties on foreign distilled and fermented spirits and liquors, (brandy, gin, rum, arack, wines, beer, ale, and porter,) and on dried fruits, though laid for revenue, afford a great and sure encouragement to the establishment and the manufacture of the grape. the demand will increase with our population, and the facility and certainty of the culture and crop will grow with the clearing and draining of our country. ridges, hills, mountains, rocky lands, any steep ground, gravelly, stony, sandy, and other inferior lands, (if only dry,) will yield profit in large crops or in fine qualities of wine, or both. fresh and dried grapes are both favourable to health and frugality. ripe grapes have been administered to whole regiments of troops in france, who have been ravaged by fluxes and dysentaries.[ ] the quantity of wine computed to be produced in france, is ten millions of casks, of nearly gallons each, on two millions of arpents (not , , acres) of land, often not fit for wheat, rice, or tobacco, valued very low, on a medium at fifty francs the cask or french hogsheads. this is three times the value of the cotton crop of the u. states, on a medium value, produced in or in , and demands our early and serious attention, particularly from the gulf of mexico to the end of the th degree, when the country in that degree shall be cleared and drained in its wet or marshy parts. [ ] see doctor tissot's advice to the people of lusanne. it has been already observed, that ridges and hills are the most suitable shape or form of country for vineyards. the most proper exposure is from south-east to south. it is believed that all southern exposures will do. the propagation may be by seeds, or by cuttings, or by bending and covering a part of an old vine so as to make it grow out in another place at a proper distance. the plough is of much use in the cultivation, so that care must be taken to plant the vines at such distances as to facilitate the use of the plough and the harrow. the best grapes which can be obtained should be used, in order to put the culture forward. these may be foreign or american, native or imported. a harsh grape to the taste may produce a better wine than was expected, and more and better brandy. the finest grapes of europe and the african isles are supposed to be native wildings improved by culture and selection. the region of the plum and peach appears to include the region of the vine. although the south is the proper sphere of the grape, its cultivation there will leave the bread grains, tobacco, hemp, the grasses and cattle, to the more exclusive and profitable culture of the states north of the proper region of fine and abundant crops of wine. we pay annually to foreign nations a sum of money for wines, spirits, and materials to make spirits, and for fresh and dried grapes, as great as our whole specie medium. so important is this subject, in various points of view, to all the states, that it is respectfully recommended to the superintendants of all our public, agricultural, and philosophical libraries, to procure all the treatises on the culture of vines and making of grapes which are to be found in the languages of france, germany, spain, italy, and great britain. the experiments made at harmony in pennsylvania, at vevay, on the ohio, and harmony, on the ouabache, both in indiana, merit the utmost attention of the united states. it appears that in the present uncleared and uncultivated state of the country, harmony, on the ohio, in penn. was probably too far north for making wine, though not for fruit. that vevay and harmony, in indiana, are more suitable climes for the wines, will appear from the following letter from a respectable gentleman at vevay to a very respectable friend of his, lately on a visit to philadelphia. it is dated the th of august, . the intelligent and experienced writer from vevay, thus expresses himself: he "thinks the whole of alabama doubtless better adapted to the culture of vines than the more northern country of the united states;[ ] because the only two species of grapes that succeed in the united states are of the late sort, _having not time at vevay, (ind.) to ripen_. the alabama season, being longer, will give more time, especially the madeira grape, which gives the best wine of the two, where it can ripen and yields most. but it will not do at all at vevay; and does better at glasgow,[ ] ky. the various gardeners at kentucky can furnish some. vine dressers would go to new vineyards from vevay. they have had gallons of wine per acre at vevay; more often ; and is a good crop. the madeira grape would give more than the cape of good hope grape, _where it would prosper_, but must have time to ripen, to be good. of the labour, much may be done by women. they do about half. the men trim, make layers to fill vacancies, plough, harrow, hoe, and carry the grapes, and make the wine. none of those works are heavy. but trimming requires attention and discernment, for the vine-dresser must look two years before him, when he cuts each scion; women never do it, though light work. he has seen many women do it as well as any man. a little work in vineyards is to be done by night with lamps. when the grapes have got their size, the crickets, (not of the house or field) eat, in the night, the bark of the stem of the bunches, and ring or girdle them so that they die. they injure the bunches rapidly. they must be watched and searched for with lamps, by night, and destroyed. he says the native vines will not do to graft good kinds of grapes on: he has tried it often, without success. grape vines grafted on the same kinds do well, yet they are a different tree, being _dioic_, while the vineferous kinds are _hermaphrodites_. i have found the same wild vines in switzerland, and the kind called sour grapes makes pretty good wines; but are a smaller bearer than the grape vines. they are in morerod's vineyard, at glasgow, kentucky. the spanish grapes of mexico and south america should be tried. they have been long cultivated. he is raising grape vines from the seed, to obtain flavour and quantity of wine. _the vine is of long life_, but it is ten or fifteen years before it bears _fully_ from the _seed_. variety, however, is an object. vines planted by cuttings, which have taken root freely in the first year, bear fruit in three years: in five they are in full force. he has considered and inspected the vineyards of europe, and the cultivation by the plough and otherwise. it is to be studied to _save labour_ and make the _greatest crops_. if the _fendant vert_ will grow as well here as in switzerland, gallons per acre might be made. they cultivate by the plough in languedoc, about montpelier and lunel. we make wine here to be like madeira, and sell it at ½ cents per quart, and $ per gallon; but cannot make enough to send abroad, or to keep for ripening. morerod made a cask of gallons, full of wine, of last vintage, to be kept eighteen months or two years. he has seen wine (made of grapes like vevay) at glasgow, (in barren county, kentucky,) better than vevay wine. the grapes were gathered a fortnight before the vevay grapes. it is probable that wine of the banks of tennessee will make - brandy; if of cape of good hope grapes, common proof; vevay yielded - th; the best cider - th; so do the best burgundy wine, and that of the border of the lake of geneva, in good years. the strongest of all the wines that i know of, is that of the south of france and spain, which yields - d brandy. the peculiar mode of vine cultivation at vevay, indiana, is worthy of attention, being a combination of various european modes, and american improvements adapted to the country. some young men, bred at vevay, would be useful in other places. mr. d. thinks the blacks may be taught to cultivate vines." so runs and concludes the letter from the judicious writer, at vevay of the united states, settled by persons from the original vevay of switzerland. it is very instructive and would seem to prove, as so much of our country continues in the wood and forest state, and with many undrained swamps, making a humid atmosphere, and a moist soil. vevay, in ° ', is not yet perfectly so favourable, as the vicinity of glasgow, in kentucky, where a dry, hard soil, occasions the grape to be freer from injury by moisture of the earth, and of the air. glasgow is about one degree and one half more southern than vevay. these indications are distinct, nice, clear, and strong in regard to the vine climate of our country, at present and in prospect. [ ] vevay, on the ohio, is in ° ' n. [ ] glasgow is in °. in the hilly spanish colonial country of north america, about the th degree of north latitude, south of the rio bravo del norte, there is authentic evidence, in a report to the government, that the vine grows well, though its culture was forbidden by the crown, produces good crops of fine wine, and supplies the province and its neighbours. that country being as far south as any part of the floridas, it is ascertained that, where this country has become, or shall be made dry enough and cleared, the vine region runs to the southern limits of the united states, even if we should maintain our right to louisiana _in extenso_, in consequence of the apparent frustration of our offer _to limit ourselves by the sabine_. the most distinguished wine of spain is the true and best _xeres_, or sherry of the district around the city of _xeres_ de la frontera, in andalusia. the vineyards of that district are, in situations corresponding in temperature with the most extreme southern parts of east florida and louisiana. it is interesting to our inquiry, that all the portuguese european wines are produced in situations north of xeres, such as those called by us the lisbon, the careavella, the red and the white port, or oporto. it is observable, also, that the malaga, or sweet and dry mountain wines of spain, long highly esteemed by medical men, those of alicante and catalonia, which three kinds we principally import, and all the spanish brandies we consume, come from districts as far north as that of xeres. the wines of castile, and other interior districts of spain which are consumed at home, and are not exported, are from places also north of xeres. we can have no reason to doubt, then, that, as our country now is, and shall in future be cleared and drained, and if ridges, hills, and mountain sides, with south exposures, shall be carefully selected, the most southern of our states, territories, and districts, will be as suitable for the vine, its wines, and dried fruits, as the most proper and fruitful parts of the peninsula of spain and portugal. the works of travellers, agriculturists, and men of distinction in the arts and sciences, upon the subject of the vine, and wines, and dried grapes of spain and portugal, are therefore strongly recommended, by our best interests, to the attention of our citizens, especially concerning the vineyards of _xeres_, st. lucar, malaga, and oporto. the portuguese send to us no brandy; the spaniards a little of that spirit which is not estimated as good. it seems, from the excellence of the french _cognac_ brandy, the best, and the farthest north of any denomination of brandy which we know, that the extreme south is not the most favourable for the delicacy, though it is for the quantity of that spirit. the _cette_ brandy of france is not liked here, but it has been said that much armagnac brandy is used in paris. the celebrated french chemist[ ] of the grape and of distilled and fermented wine spirits, was a native of montpelier, and took very great pains to improve the vine, and all its liquors, in that southern region. _a friend to the national industry._ philadelphia, nov. , . [ ] _chaptal_, whose writings on the subject should be in every planter's hands, and in every agricultural and public library. the title of mr. chaptal's work is "a theoretical and practical treatise on the culture of the vine, with the art of preparing wine, brandy, &c. by chaptal, parmentier, and dasseux. vols. octavo, paris, a. d. ." in french, chaptal, p. and d. sur la culture de la vigne, &c. paris, , tom. oct. _a wild goose chase._ at the early dawn of thanksgiving day, mr. eliphalet thayer, of dorcester, (massachusetts,) took his gun and went to neponset river for the purpose of getting a shot at gulls. he saw seven wild geese in the river, at which he fired, and hit the gander so as to break his wing. the other geese immediately flew; but the call of the gander brought them down again, so that he had the chance of firing again, and killed the old goose, and one of the young; the four others rose, but the wounded gander by his calls served as a decoy, and they again alighted by him. the third shot crippled another.--mr. t. then took a boat, and from it killed two as they rose to fly; and soon after shot the seventh. he returned home to his breakfast, about nine o'clock, bringing his seven geese, which weighed about eight pounds each, and produced him above _lbs._ of feather. [_salem gazette._ _imports of wool into england._ wool. an account of the quantity of wool, (sheep's) imported into great britain, in ten years; distinguishing each year, and the countries from whence imported.--_from an english paper._ countries from whence imported. . . . . . ------------------------------------------------------ lbs. lbs. lbs. lbs. lbs. denmark & norway -- , , , , heligoland -- -- -- -- -- russia -- -- -- -- , sweden -- -- -- -- -- poland and prussia , , , , germany , , , , , holland , , , , , flanders and france , , -- -- -- portugal & madeira , , , , , spain and canaries , , , , , , , , , , gibraltar and malta , , , , , italy and levant , , , , , ireland, guernsey , , , , , and jersey asia -- -- -- -- africa , , , -- -- america, north , , , , , america, south -- , , , , prize , , , , , ------------------------------------------------------ total , , , , , , , , , , countries from whence imported. . . . . . ------------------------------------------------------ lbs. lbs. lbs. lbs. lbs. denmark & norway , , , , , heligoland -- , , , russia , , -- sweden -- -- , , poland and prussia -- -- , , -- germany , , , , , holland , -- , , -- flanders and france , -- -- -- -- portugal & madeira , , , , , , , spain and canaries , , , , , , , , , , gibraltar and malta , , , , , italy and levant , -- , , ireland, guernsey , , , , , and jersey asia , -- -- -- africa , , , , , america, north , -- , , america, south , , , , , prize , , , , , ------------------------------------------------------ total , , , , , , , , , , miscellany. the president of the united states transmitted a message to congress on the th of last month, relating to the acts prohibiting the slave trade, in which he stated that a public vessel was to be sent to africa, with two public agents, tools and implements necessary to form a settlement, and thereby give relief and support to the people of colour who may be captured on board of slave ships and returned thither. * * * * * in denmark much confusion is stated to prevail, on account of the jews, particularly at copenhagen. the king had interfered in their behalf, but neither the people nor the army appeared to pay much respect to him in this matter. a vessel, laden with jews, flying from persecution in germany, had arrived at copenhagen, but were not permitted to land. * * * * * it appears by a census lately taken, that the population of the city of new york is , . when the census was taken by order of rep. vandam, then president of the province in the year , the population was . the increase in ninety years is nearly twelve-fold. * * * * * died suddenly on the th ult. at salem, (mass.) the rev. w. bentley, d. d. in the st year of his age, minister at the east meeting house, and the character to whom the public were indebted, during a great many years, for the unparalleled summaries and notices of events, with historical and critical notes, which so distinguished the _salem_, or as it is now denominated, the _essex register_. he was universally respected as a pious and good man. * * * * * great exertions are making, says h. niles, in his register, to introduce the practice of manufacturing sugar and molasses from grain, into the western country; and from the representations made, we apprehend that it must be very beneficial in all parts of our country, distant from a market. it is said, that one bushel of good wheat, rye, or corn, will yield from ½ or gallons of molasses, or about pounds of sugar. the discovery has been patented to james wiseheart. * * * * * the venerable william ellery, one of the signers of the declaration of independence, is now living at newport, (r.i.) in the d year of his age. * * * * * walsh's "appeal from the judgments of great britain," which appeared in this country about the end of september, was republished in london from the american copy, as early as the d of november. the price of the english copy is shillings sterling. * * * * * news has been received from great britain to the d of january. the country continued in a very disturbed state. parliament was opened on the d of november. the regent recommended such strong measures as to manifest how the matter is viewed by government. his speech was echoed from both houses by great majorities. * * * * * the confidential servants of the crown have proposed several bills to parliament, and which were under debate; they are to the following effect. st. a stamp duty upon all publications, except religious tracts, and such works consisting of fewer than a stated number of sheets. d. persons convicted a second time of a political libel are subjected to a long imprisonment, banishment, or transportation, at the discretion of the court. d. all printers and publishers of works comprehended in the first law, are required to enter into securities with two sureties to be answerable for penalties. th. public meetings not convened by regular constituted authorities are prohibited; it is also proposed to make it unlawful for any person to attend a public meeting out of his own parish, or township. th. magistrates, on information or even on suspicion, are empowered to enter any man's house, in search of arms, and to seize them if found, giving the persons suffering such visits, a right of appeal to the quarter sessions. * * * * * generally the accounts from england prove that the country does not yet experience the blessings of repose, nor are there any indications that it speedily will. on the one hand the reformers appear to be uniting and preparing themselves; and on the other, the government is adopting stronger measures to quell and disperse them. * * * * * the reformers have agreed to abstain from all intoxicating liquors, tobacco, and such other exciseable articles as can conveniently be dispensed with, and they strenuously adhere to the principle. this has already had a very severe effect upon the revenue. * * * * * many parts of ireland appear to be equally unsettled and distressed. the county of roscommon, in particular, has been declared by proclamation, in a state of disturbance. * * * * * the king of france, in his speech to the chambers, represents that country as in the most auspicious and flourishing condition. * * * * * the king of spain, on the occasion of his marriage, has granted an amnesty to prisoners and subjects in rebellion, with some few exceptions. * * * * * germany, in general, seems still unsettled, and great anxiety apparently prevails. there is much dread of secret societies, and many reports of bands of robbers. * * * * * standt, the murderer of the celebrated _kotzebue_, is stated to have recovered from his wounds which he inflicted on himself, and is soon to be brought to trial. * * * * * the plague had ceased at algiers, but still continued to rage at tunis, where it is said to have carried off , persons. * * * * * of the number of manuscripts found in the ruins of herculaneum, and which have been there enclosed for years, have been unrolled, and are now legible. the unrolling is effected by means of an expensive chemical operation. * * * * * the whole district and territory of kutch, a country situated on the n. w. of bombay, and including several towns and villages have been destroyed by an earthquake, together with inhabitants. * * * * * a man at montreal has been fined for cruelly beating his dog.--a person in the state of new york has been fined $ , for maliciously and vexatiously hindering with his wagon, other persons in a carriage from passing him on the highway, by turning his horses so as to impede them. * * * * * a fire broke out in savannah on the night of the th ult. which has reduced to ashes the greater and much the most valuable part of that city. scarcely a fire-proof building is left. the town presents a most wretched picture: houses are said to be entirely consumed. not a hardware, saddler, or apothecary's shop, or scarcely a dry-good store to be seen. the loss is estimated at from to , , of dollars. * * * * * _jewish emigrants._ among the memorials presented to the legislature of the state of new york, is one from mordecai m. noah, of the city of n. york, setting forth that he "is desirous of purchasing that tract of land belonging to the state, known by the name of grand island, situated in the niagara river, between lake erie and lake ontario, and bounded by the possessions of great britain in upper canada." the object of the memorialist in this purchase, is to build a town or city, to be inhabited "by a community of jewish emigrants." grand island is stated to contain , acres of land, being about six miles in length, and two in width. * * * * * a pamphlet has been published in europe, recommending the jews to form a colony in the united states. the upper mississippi and missouri is recommended for its soil, situation, and climate, as the most suitable place for purchase and settlement. * * * * * a national vaccine institution is about forming at washington, with the view of affording greater facility and certainty in the distribution of vaccine matter. * * * * * on the th december last, robert de bow, of allentown, (n. j.) killed a hog months old, which, when dressed, weighed pounds. * * * * * _boston, jan. ._ the great ox, fattened by mr. luke fiske of waltham, which gained the first premium at brighton, has been slaughtered, and the beef exhibited for sale in state street. the weight of the parts is as follows: fore quarter, _lbs._ do. hind quarter, do. hide, tallow, ---- total, * * * * * in spain some experiments have lately been made for the purpose of testing the efficacy of inoculating for the plague. the trials were made on some deserters, in number. the virus was taken from plague sores of the most malignant cast. the patients had olive oil administered internally and externally. soon after the inoculation, the patients experienced some slight attacks, and little sores broke out on them; but in a few days they were all restored to health. these experiments are calculated to induce a belief that inoculation for the plague may prove as beneficial as it has for the small pox. * * * * * the mechanics of ontario county, (n. y.) have prepared a memorial to the legislature, which they expect will be supported in other counties, praying that the legislature may pass a law to prevent the sales of mechanical tools and implements by execution or in distress for rent. * * * * * from england many are emigrating to the cape of good hope: , families sailed for that country in november last. upwards of , emigrants arrived at quebec, from great britain, during the last season. * * * * * mr. w. parker, and about others, left england in november last, to establish a colony in africa, between cape town and algoa bay. * * * * * a cast iron pillar, about feet high, is about to be erected in the centre of the town of sheffield, england, at the top of which, a large ball, lighted with gas is to be placed, for the purpose of lighting the whole town, and its environs. * * * * * twenty-five miles up the severn, england, a whale, feet in length, and in breadth, was lately stranded. the visit of his whaleship proved highly welcome, and considerable confusion and contention ensued among the neighbouring people who should have the largest part of him. * * * * * a london paper of november , says, that a new palace is to be begun for the prince regent in the spring, on the same spot where buckingham house now stands. it is to be a superb palace of three fronts, to overlook all pimlico; and the _moderate_ sum of _seven millions_ is the estimate of its cost! but, as the prince regent is reluctant to apply to parliament, the ground of st. james' palace, the king's mews, and warwick house are to be sold, and then but , _l._ will be wanting to complete the new structure. the duke of york is to have carleton house for a _valuable_ consideration. the triumphal arch is to be the grand entrance to london from the new palace. * * * * * wm. ogden niles of baltimore, has issued proposals for publishing a weekly paper, to be entitled, "the domestic economist," to be devoted exclusively to manufacturing industry and political economy, with statistical facts and remarks. price $ per annum. * * * * * _wolf bounty._ the comptroller of the state of new york, has communicated to the legislature a detailed statement of the monies paid out of the state treasury, to the several counties, during the last five years, as bounties for the destruction of wolves. the following exhibits the amount paid to each county. _dolls._ allegany, albany, broome, chautauque, chenango, cayuga, clinton, cortland, delaware, essex, franklin, greene, genesee, herkimer, jefferson, lewis, madison, montgomery, niagara, otsego, oswego, orange, ontario, oneida, onondaga, st. lawrence, saratoga, schenectady, steuben, seneca, schoharie, sullivan, tioga, tompkins, ulster, warren, washington, ------ total, d. , * * * * * the earl of dalhousie is appointed governor of the canadas. sir p. maitland administers the government till spring. * * * * * _boerhaave in his old age._ all peculiarities in the lives of great men are interesting, and much more so when they relate to their latter years. the name of boerhaave is regarded as the most illustrious in the annals of modern medicine. after having courageously withstood the evils of poverty in his youth, his talents and reputation enabled him, it is said, to realize a property of two millions of florins, which he left to an only daughter. let us see whether his wealth had not changed his occupations and taste. in a letter, written in his th year, to his old pupil bassand, then appointed physician to the emperor of germany, he speaks thus of himself: "my health is very good--i sleep at my country house, and return to town at five in the morning; i am engaged till six in the evening in visiting the sick. i know something of chemistry--i amuse myself with reading--i revere, i love, i adore god alone. on my return to the country, i visit my plants--and gratefully acknowledge and admire the liberal presents of my friend bassend. my garden appears proud of the variety and vigour of its trees. i waste my life in contemplating my plants, and grow old with the desire of possessing new ones--pleasing delusion! who will give me the large-leaved linden tree of bohemia, and that of silicia, more extraordinary, with _folio cucullato_. thus riches serve only to increase the thirst for wealth, and the covetous man abuses the liberality of his benefactor. pardon the dotage of an old friend, who wishes to plant trees, the beauty and shade of which can charm only his nephews. thus my years glide on without any chagrin, but that of your absence." how much is there in these few lines! what activity, what zeal for suffering humanity, what piety; what innocence and vivacity in his taste, at an age when they are nearly extinct in most men. [_literary panorama._ * * * * * _mummies._ under the mountains adjoining kiow, on the frontiers of russia and in the deserts of podolia, are several catacombs or subterranean vaults, which the ancients used for burying places, and where a great number of human bodies are still preserved entire, though interred many ages since, having been better embalmed, and become neither so hard nor so black as the egyptian mummies. among them are two princes in the habits they used to wear. it is thought that this preserving quality is owing to the nature of the soil, which is dry and sandy. [_london paper._ * * * * * a correspondent, who observed some time since a publication relative to the extraction of oil from pumpkin seeds, has recently, from curiosity, made an experiment of the same on a very limited scale. he assures us, the extract obtained, is of equal flavour and sweetness with the best of olive oil. our correspondent is of opinion, that the publication alluded to above, originated with the "harmony society," in the state of pennsylvania; and if so, is desirous of knowing the best method in practice for extracting the oil from the seed. [_bost. pat._ * * * * * there are few sentiments stronger, or more natural to the human heart, than that of indignation at oppression. so predominant is it, that it is to be found, not with the good and virtuous only, but even amongst the most unprincipled and vicious. if there is any thing that addresses itself to all that is generous in the heart, it is this sentiment. what is more, it is the solemn duty of every man, to set his face against injustice. * * * * * _new invention._ we understand a patent has lately been taken out, by a gentleman from massachusetts, for an invention which seems to promise extensive, advantage to navigation, if once fairly brought into operation. it consists, principally, in a new method for _sub-marine ploughing_, to any necessary depth, by the power of a steam boat. when the matter is effectually loosened up and pulverized, it cannot reasonably be doubted but the rapidity of ebb-tides, united with the natural current of the rivers, will soon carry it off, and keep the channel open. the inventor is now in this city, giving a perspicuous view of his plan, which appears uncommonly simple and practicable. the advantages of being able to plough open channels through the shoals which so frequently form in many of our immense rivers, would, alone, be an object of very great advantage to our southern and western states; but, when we consider the invention as extending to opening channels for large ships to enter the harbours and rivers throughout our whole sea-board, the advantages presented to view are incalculable. [_nat. int._ * * * * * the agricultural society of fredericksburg, in virginia, have drawn up and transmitted a remonstrance to congress, against the attempts making by our domestic manufacturers, and their friends, to increase the duties upon foreign goods, wares and merchandise. * * * * * in the short space of two years and five months, _one hundred and twenty miles_ of artificial navigation, on two great canals through the interior of the state of new york have been completed, by which the physical practicability of uniting the atlantic ocean, with the great western lakes, is rendered no longer doubtful! * * * * * _straw bonnets._ it is estimated that the value of straw bonnets manufactured in massachusetts, rhode island and connecticut, exceeds , dollars in the , and great improvements have latterly been made,--which, together with the discovery of a vegetable by which the best quality of leghorn bonnets are successfully imitated, is likely to render our fair country-women independent of foreign supplies in this respect, and at the same time furnish a delicate employment to many others of their own sex. there are few things that more properly demand the attention of congress than this manufacture, so far as its amount goes. as, _gentleman_, certainly they will encourage the ladies in their industrious habits. * * * * * _phenomena._ _boston (mass.) jan. th._ saturday about noon two very brilliant parhelia, (or mock suns[ ]) and beautiful corona, attracted the attention of numerous spectators. mock suns were equidistant from the sun (by conjecture about ° east and west of it) with _comas_, or tails, extending in opposite directions from the luminary five or six times their diameter, which appeared to the eye a little less than the apparent diameter of the sun. the corona was estimated to be about ° to the northward of the sun, and nearly in our zenith, and exhibited all the bright colours of the rainbow, the inside next the sun being red. the colour of the parhelia was orange colour of white flame. the corona formed an are of about a quarter of a circle; and between it and the sun was a segment less brilliant and defined. [ ] sailors, we believe, call them _dog suns_. the atmosphere was unusually clear, and the space between the mock suns, and the real sun, was a perfect blue expanse, without the least appearance of the vapour and spicula which must have occasioned the phenomena. we noticed them nearly an hour, when they gradually disappeared, leaving a cloudless sky. the phenomena was observed at salem. * * * * * _a curiosity._--it is stated in an english paper of nov. th, that mr. creswick, of new street, birmingham, has a singular article of cutlery in his possession, viz: a knife which contains _blades_, and which, before it was put together, consisted of _parts_. * * * * * _public libraries of germany._ the royal library of munich contains a collection of , volumes. that of gottingen, which is one of the most celebrated in germany, contains , volumes, , academic dissertations, and manuscripts; the dresden library contains , printed books, , dissertations, and manuscripts. the library of wolfenbuttel is particularly celebrated for its valuable collection of ancient works; it contains , printed volumes, , dissertations, and manuscripts. among the , volumes which compose the library of stutgard, there are , different editions of the bible. there are seven public libraries in berlin; the two principal ones are the royal library and the library of the academy; the former contains , volumes, and the latter , . it may be calculated that the total number of books contained in the public libraries of the german states, amount to upwards of , , , besides the various memoirs, pamphlets, periodical publications, dissertations, and manuscripts. [_english paper._ philadelphia, published monthly by richards & caleb johnson, _no. , market street_, at $ . per annum. griggs & dickinson--_printers, whitehall_.